The Complete Works of

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

(1837-1920)

Contents

The Novels

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE

A FOREGONE CONCLUSION

THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY

DR. BREEN’S PRACTICE

A MODERN INSTANCE

A WOMAN’S REASON

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

INDIAN SUMMER

THE MINISTER’S CHARGE

ANNIE KILBURN

APRIL HOPES

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

THE SHADOW OF A DREAM

A BOY’S TOWN

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

AN IMPERATIVE DUTY

THE WORLD OF CHANCE

THE COAST OF BOHEMIA

A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA

THE DAY OF THEIR WEDDING

THE LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD

THE STORY OF A PLAY

RAGGED LADY

THEIR SILVER WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER

THE KENTONS

QUESTIONABLE SHAPES

LETTERS HOME

LETTERS OF AN ALTRURIAN TRAVELLER

SON OF ROYAL LANGBRITH

MISS BELLARD’S INSPIRATION

BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT

THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

THE WHOLE FAMILY

FENNEL AND RUE

NEW LEAF MILLS: A CHRONICLE

THE LEATHERWOOD GOD

THE VACATION OF THE KELWYNS

The Shorter Fiction

SUBURBAN SKETCHES

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY

EDITHA

STORIES OF OHIO

SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

LITERATURE AND LIFE: SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE AND OTHER THINGS IN PROSE AND VERSE

A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS AND OTHER STORIES

BOY LIFE STORIES AND READINGS SELECTED FROM THE WORKS OF WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

MISCELLANEOUS STORIES

The Short Stories

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Farces

THE PARLOR CAR

OUT OF THE QUESTION

A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT

THE SLEEPING CAR

THE MOUSE-TRAP AND OTHER FARCES

MISCELLANEOUS FARCES

The Poetry Collections

POEMS

STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Travel Writing

VENETIAN LIFE

ITALIAN JOURNEYS

THREE VILLAGES

TUSCAN CITIES

A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN

LONDON FILMS

CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS

ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS

SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES

FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS

The Non-Fiction

LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

MODERN ITALIAN POETS

IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE

LITERATURE AND LIFE

MR. CHARLES W. CHESNUTT’S STORIES

FRANK NORRIS

A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION

IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS

HEROINES OF FICTION

ÉMILE ZOLA

HENRY JAMES, JR.

INTRODUCTIONS TO VARIOUS WORKS

The Autobiographies

MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN

YEARS OF MY YOUTH

© Delphi Classics 2015

Version 1

The Complete Works of

WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

By Delphi Classics, 2015

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The Novels

Martisville, Ohio (now Martin’s Ferry) — Howells’ birthplace

The waterside, Martin’s Ferry — the site of the house in which Howells was born

THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

William Dean Howells’ first novel, Their Wedding Journey, was published in 1872. By this point, Howells had already made a name for himself as a poet, but his novels mark a departure from the Germanic romanticism of his poetry to a new realism, in which he drew on first-hand observations of New York and other locations (as recorded in his diary) as material for the descriptions in the novel. The book was well received by contemporary reviewers, with Henry Adams praising its ‘idealization of the commonplace’. Adams’ comment reflects Howells’ approach to his subject matter, focussing on a faithful record of the early married life of an ordinary newly-wed couple, rather than on tight plotting and sensational events.

An illustration from the 1916 edition of the novel

Howells in 1866

CONTENTS

I. THE OUTSET

II. MIDSUMMER-DAY’S DREAM.

III. THE NIGHT BOAT.

IV. A DAY’S RAILROADING

V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.

VI. NIAGARA.

VII. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

VIII. THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.

IX. QUEBEC.

X. HOMEWARD AND HOME.

XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Another illustration form the 1911 edition

I. THE OUTSET

They first met in Boston, but the match was made in Europe, where they afterwards saw each other; whither, indeed, he followed her; and there the match was also broken off. Why it was broken off, and why it was renewed after a lapse of years, is part of quite a long love-story, which I do not think myself qualified to rehearse, distrusting my fitness for a sustained or involved narration; though I am persuaded that a skillful romancer could turn the courtship of Basil and Isabel March to excellent account. Fortunately for me, however, in attempting to tell the reader of the wedding-journey of a newly married couple, no longer very young, to be sure, but still fresh in the light of their love, I shall have nothing to do but to talk of some ordinary traits of American life as these appeared to them, to speak a little of well-known and easily accessible places, to present now a bit of landscape and now a sketch of character.

They had agreed to make their wedding-journey in the simplest and quietest way, and as it did not take place at once after their marriage, but some weeks later, it had all the desired charm of privacy from the outset.

“How much better,” said Isabel, “to go now, when nobody cares whether you go or stay, than to have started off upon a wretched wedding-breakfast, all tears and trousseau, and had people wanting to see you aboard the cars. Now there will not be a suspicion of honey-moonshine about us; we shall go just like anybody else, — with a difference, dear, with a difference!” and she took Basil’s cheeks between her hands. In order to do this, she had to ran round the table; for they were at dinner, and Isabel’s aunt, with whom they had begun married life, sat substantial between them. It was rather a girlish thing for Isabel, and she added, with a conscious blush, “We are past our first youth, you know; and we shall not strike the public as bridal, shall we? My one horror in life is an evident bride.”

Basil looked at her fondly, as if he did not think her at all too old to be taken for a bride; and for my part I do not object to a woman’s being of Isabel’s age, if she is of a good heart and temper. Life must have been very unkind to her if at that age she have not won more than she has lost. It seemed to Basil that his wife was quite as fair as when they met first, eight years before; but he could not help recurring with an inextinguishable regret to the long interval of their broken engagement, which but for that fatality they might have spent together, he imagined, in just such rapture as this. The regret always haunted him, more or less; it was part of his love; the loss accounted irreparable really enriched the final gain.

“I don’t know,” he said presently, with as much gravity as a man can whose cheeks are clasped between a lady’s hands, “you don’t begin very well for a bride who wishes to keep her secret. If you behave in this way, they will put us into the ‘bridal chambers’ at all the hotels. And the cars — they’re beginning to have them on the palace-cars.”

Just then a shadow fell into the room.

“Wasn’t that thunder, Isabel?” asked her aunt, who had been contentedly surveying the tender spectacle before her. “O dear! you’ll never be able to go by the boat to-night, if it storms. It’s actually raining now!”

In fact, it was the beginning of that terrible storm of June, 1870. All in a moment, out of the hot sunshine of the day it burst upon us before we quite knew that it threatened, even before we had fairly noticed the clouds, and it went on from passion to passion with an inexhaustible violence. In the square upon which our friends looked out of their dining-room windows the trees whitened in the gusts, and darkened in the driving floods of the rainfall, and in some paroxysms of the tempest bent themselves in desperate submission, and then with a great shudder rent away whole branches and flung them far off upon the ground. Hail mingled with the rain, and now the few umbrellas that had braved the storm vanished, and the hurtling ice crackled upon the pavement, where the lightning played like flames burning from the earth, while the thunder roared overhead without ceasing. There was something splendidly theatrical about it all; and when a street-car, laden to the last inch of its capacity, came by, with horses that pranced and leaped under the stinging blows of the hailstones, our friends felt as if it were an effective and very naturalistic bit of pantomime contrived for their admiration. Yet as to themselves they were very sensible of a potent reality in the affair, and at intervals during the storm they debated about going at all that day, and decided to go and not to go, according to the changing complexion of the elements. Basil had said that as this was their first journey together in America, he wished to give it at the beginning as pungent a national character as possible, and that as he could imagine nothing more peculiarly American than a voyage to New York by a Fall River boat, they ought to take that route thither. So much upholstery, so much music, such variety of company, he understood, could not be got in any other way, and it might be that they would even catch a glimpse of the inventor of the combination, who represented the very excess and extremity of a certain kind of Americanism. Isabel had eagerly consented; but these aesthetic motives were paralyzed for her by the thought of passing Point Judith in a storm, and she descended from her high intents first to the Inside Boats, without the magnificence and the orchestra, and then to the idea of going by land in a sleeping-car. Having comfortably accomplished this feat, she treated Basil’s consent as a matter of course, not because she did not regard him, but because as a woman she could not conceive of the steps to her conclusion as unknown to him, and always treated her own decisions as the product of their common reasoning. But her husband held out for the boat, and insisted that if the storm fell before seven o’clock, they could reach it at Newport by the last express; and it was this obstinacy that, in proof of Isabel’s wisdom, obliged them to wait two hours in the station before going by the land route. The storm abated at five o’clock, and though the rain continued, it seemed well by a quarter of seven to set out for the Old Colony Depot, in sight of which a sudden and vivid flash of lightning caused Isabel to seize her husband’s arm, and to implore him, “O don’t go by the boat!” On this, Basil had the incredible weakness to yield; and bade the driver take them to the Worcester Depot. It was the first swerving from the ideal in their wedding journey, but it was by no means the last; though it must be confessed that it was early to begin.

They both felt more tranquil when they were irretrievably committed by the purchase of their tickets, and when they sat down in the waiting-room of the station, with all the time between seven and nine o’clock before them. Basil would have eked out the business of checking the trunks into an affair of some length, but the baggage-master did his duty with pitiless celerity; and so Basil, in the mere excess of his disoccupation, bought an accident-insurance ticket. This employed him half a minute, and then he gave up the unequal contest, and went and took his place beside Isabel, who sat prettily wrapped in her shawl, perfectly content.

“Isn’t it charming,” she said gayly, “having to wait so long? It puts me in mind of some of those other journeys we took together. But I can’t think of those times with any patience, when we might really have had each other, and didn’t! Do you remember how long we had to wait at Chambery? and the numbers of military gentlemen that waited too, with their little waists, and their kisses when they met? and that poor married military gentleman, with the plain wife and the two children, and a tarnished uniform? He seemed to be somehow in misfortune, and his mustache hung down in such a spiritless way, while all the other military mustaches about curled and bristled with so much boldness. I think ‘salles d’attente’ everywhere are delightful, and there is such a community of interest in them all, that when I come here only to go out to Brookline, I feel myself a traveller once more, — a blessed stranger in a strange land. O dear, Basil, those were happy times after all, when we might have had each other and didn’t! And now we’re the more precious for having been so long lost.”

She drew closer and closer to him, and looked at him in a way that threatened betrayal of her bridal character.

“Isabel, you will be having your head on my shoulder, next,” said he.

“Never!” she answered fiercely, recovering her distance with a start. “But, dearest, if you do see me going to — act absurdly, you know, do stop me.”

“I’m very sorry, but I’ve got myself to stop. Besides, I didn’t undertake to preserve the incognito of this bridal party.”

If any accident of the sort dreaded had really happened, it would not have mattered so much, for as yet they were the sole occupants of the waiting room. To be sure, the ticket-seller was there, and the lady who checked packages left in her charge, but these must have seen so many endearments pass between passengers, — that a fleeting caress or so would scarcely have drawn their notice to our pair. Yet Isabel did not so much even as put her hand into her husband’s; and as Basil afterwards said, it was very good practice.

Our temporary state, whatever it is, is often mirrored in all that come near us, and our friends were fated to meet frequent parodies of their happiness from first to last on this journey. The travesty began with the very first people who entered the waiting-room after themselves, and who were a very young couple starting like themselves upon a pleasure tour, which also was evidently one of the first tours of any kind that they had made. It was of modest extent, and comprised going to New York and back; but they talked of it with a fluttered and joyful expectation as if it were a voyage to Europe. Presently there appeared a burlesque of their happiness (but with a touch of tragedy) in that kind of young man who is called by the females of his class a fellow, and two young women of that kind known to him as girls. He took a place between these, and presently began a robust flirtation with one of them. He possessed himself, after a brief struggle, of her parasol, and twirled it about, as he uttered, with a sort of tender rudeness inconceivable vapidities, such as you would expect from none but a man of the highest fashion. The girl thus courted became selfishly unconscious of everything but her own joy, and made no attempt to bring the other girl within its warmth, but left her to languish forgotten on the other side. The latter sometimes leaned forward, and tried to divert a little of the flirtation to herself, but the flirters snubbed her with short answers, and presently she gave up and sat still in the sad patience of uncourted women. In this attitude she became a burden to Isabel, who was glad when the three took themselves away, and were succeeded by a very stylish couple — from New York, she knew as well as if they had given her their address on West 999th Street. The lady was not pretty, and she was not, Isabel thought, dressed in the perfect taste of Boston; but she owned frankly to herself that the New-Yorkeress was stylish, undeniably effective. The gentleman bought a ticket for New York, and remained at the window of the office talking quite easily with the seller.

“You couldn’t do that, my poor Basil,” said Isabel, “you’d be afraid.”

“O dear, yes; I’m only too glad to get off without browbeating; though I must say that this officer looks affable enough. Really,” he added, as an acquaintance of the ticket-seller came in and nodded to him and said “Hot, to-day!” “this is very strange. I always felt as if these men had no private life, no friendships like the rest of us. On duty they seem so like sovereigns, set apart from mankind, and above us all, that it’s quite incredible they should have the common personal relations.”

At intervals of their talk and silence there came vivid flashes of lightning and quite heavy shocks of thunder, very consoling to our friends, who took them as so many compliments to their prudence in not going by the boat, and who had secret doubts of their wisdom whenever these acknowledgments were withheld. Isabel went so far as to say that she hoped nothing would happen to the boat, but I think she would cheerfully have learnt that the vessel had been obliged to put back to Newport, on account of the storm, or even that it had been driven ashore at a perfectly safe place.

People constantly came and went in the waiting-room, which was sometimes quite full, and again empty of all but themselves. In the course of their observations they formed many cordial friendships and bitter enmities upon the ground of personal appearance, or particulars of dress, with people whom they saw for half a minute upon an average; and they took such a keen interest in every one, that it would be hard to say whether they were more concerned in an old gentleman with vigorously upright iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, and reading all the evening papers, or a young man who hurled himself through the door, bought a ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and then ran down a departing train before it got out of the station: they loved the old gentleman for a certain stubborn benevolence of expression, and if they had been friends of the young man and his family for generations and felt bound if any harm befell him to go and break the news gently to his parents, their nerves could not have been more intimately wrought upon by his hazardous behavior. Still, as they had their tickets for New York, and he was going out on a merely local train, — to Brookline, I believe, they could not, even in their anxiety, repress a feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination.

They were already as completely cut off from local associations and sympathies as if they were a thousand miles and many months away from Boston. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-jets as a gust of wind drew through the station; they shared the gloom and isolation of a man who took a seat in the darkest corner of the room, and sat there with folded arms, the genius of absence. In the patronizing spirit of travellers in a foreign country they noted and approved the vases of cut-flowers in the booth of the lady who checked packages, and the pots of ivy in her windows. “These poor Bostonians,” they said; “have some love of the beautiful in their rugged natures.”

But after all was said and thought, it was only eight o’clock, and they still had an hour to wait.

Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a subtile interpretation of his uneasiness, “I don’t want anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know the weaknesses of men; and you had better go and pass the next half-hour over a plate of something indigestible.”

This was said ‘con stizza’, the least little suggestion of it; but Basil rose with shameful alacrity. “Darling, if it’s your wish—”

“It’s my fate, Basil,” said Isabel.

“I’ll go,” he exclaimed, “because it isn’t bridal, and will help us to pass for old married people.”

“No, no, Basil, be honest; fibbing isn’t your forte: I wonder you went into the insurance business; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps, or think you may be so before we get to New York.

“I shall amuse myself well enough here!”

I suppose it is always a little shocking and grievous to a wife when she recognizes a rival in butchers’-meat and the vegetables of the season. With her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery and her dainty habits of lunching, she cannot reconcile with the idea (of) her husband’s capacity for breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at all hours of the day and night — as they write it on the sign-boards of barbaric eating-houses. But Isabel would have only herself to blame if she had not perceived this trait of Basil’s before marriage. She recurred now, as his figure disappeared down the station, to memorable instances of his appetite in their European travels during their first engagement. “Yes, he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too full of the notion of getting into Italy to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I thought I must break with him on account of the wild-boar; and at Heidelberg, the sausage and the ham! — how could he, in my presence? But I took him with all his faults, — and was glad to get him,” she added, ending her meditation with a little burst of candor; and she did not even think of Basil’s appetite when he reappeared.

With the thronging of many sorts of people, in parties and singly, into the waiting room, they became once again mere observers of their kind, more or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so that individual traits were merged in the character of multitude. Even then, they could catch glimpses of faces so sweet or fine that they made themselves felt like moments of repose in the tumult, and here and there was something so grotesque in dress of manner that it showed distinct from the rest. The ticket-seller’s stamp clicked incessantly as he sold tickets to all points South and West: to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston; to New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha; to St. Paul, Duluth, St. Louis; and it would not have been hard to find in that anxious bustle, that unsmiling eagerness, an image of the whole busy affair of life. It was not a particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future — to which no line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there. Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?

In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last an old woman, so very infirm that she had to be upheld on either hand by her husband and the hackman who had brought them, while a young girl went before with shawls and pillows which she arranged upon the seat. There the invalid lay down, and turned towards the crowd a white, suffering face, which was yet so heavenly meek and peaceful that it comforted whoever looked at it.

In spirit our happy friends bowed themselves before it and owned that there was something better than happiness in it.

“What is it like, Isabel?”

“O, I don’t know, darling,” she said; but she thought, “Perhaps it is like some blessed sorrow that takes us out of this prison of a world, and sets us free of our every-day hates and desires, our aims, our fears, ourselves. Maybe a long and mortal sickness might come to wear such a face in one of us two, and the other could see it, and not regret the poor mask of youth and pretty looks that had fallen away.”

She rose and went over to the sick woman, on whose face beamed a tender smile, as Isabel spoke to her. A chord thrilled in two lives hitherto unknown to each other; but what was said Basil would not ask when the invalid had taken Isabel’s hand between her own, as for adieu, and she came back to his side with swimming eyes. Perhaps his wife could have given no good reason for her emotion, if he had asked it. But it made her very sweet and dear to him; and I suppose that when a tolerably unselfish man is once secure of a woman’s love, he is ordinarily more affected by her compassion and tenderness for other objects than by her feelings towards himself. He likes well enough to think, “She loves me,” but still better, “How kind and good she is!”

They lost sight of the invalid in the hurry of getting places on the cars, and they never saw her again. The man at the wicket-gate leading to the train had thrown it up, and the people were pressing furiously through as if their lives hung upon the chance of instant passage. Basil had secured his ticket for the sleeping-car, and so he and Isabel stood aside and watched the tumult. When the rash was over they passed through, and as they walked up and down the platform beside the train, “I was thinking,” said Isabel, “after I spoke to that poor old lady, of what Clara Williams says: that she wonders the happiest women in the world can look each other in the face without bursting into tears, their happiness is so unreasonable, and so built upon and hedged about with misery. She declares that there’s nothing so sad to her as a bride, unless it’s a young mother, or a little girl growing up in the innocent gayety of her heart. She wonders they can live through it.”

“Clara is very much of a reformer, and would make an end of all of us men, I suppose, — except her father, who supports her in the leisure that enables her to do her deep thinking. She little knows what we poor fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours, and sob upon one another’s necks. Did that old lady talk to you in the same strain?”

“O no! she spoke very calmly of her sickness, and said she had lived a blessed life. Perhaps it was that made me shed those few small tears. She seemed a very religious person.”

“Yes,” said Basil, “it is almost a pity that religion is going out. But then you are to have the franchise.”

“All aboard!”

This warning cry saved him from whatever heresy he might have been about to utter; and presently the train carried them out into the gas-sprinkled darkness, with an ever-growing speed that soon left the city lamps far behind. It is a phenomenon whose commonness alone prevents it from being most impressive, that departure of the night-express. The two hundred miles it is to travel stretch before it, traced by those slender clews, to lose which is ruin, and about which hang so many dangers. The draw bridges that gape upon the way, the trains that stand smoking and steaming on the track, the rail that has borne the wear so long that it must soon snap under it, the deep cut where the overhanging mass of rock trembles to its fall, the obstruction that a pitiless malice may have placed in your path, — you think of these after the journey is done, but they seldom haunt your fancy while it lasts. The knowledge of your helplessness in any circumstances is so perfect that it begets a sense of irresponsibility, almost of security; and as you drowse upon the pallet of the sleeping car, and feel yourself hurled forward through the obscurity, you are almost thankful that you can do nothing, for it is upon this condition only that you can endure it; and some such condition as this, I suppose, accounts for many heroic facts in the world. To the fantastic mood which possesses you equally, sleeping or waking, the stoppages of the train have a weird character; and Worcester, Springfield, New Haven, and Stamford are rather points in dream-land than well-known towns of New England. As the train stops you drowse if you have been waking, and wake if you have been in a doze; but in any case you are aware of the locomotive hissing and coughing beyond the station, of flaring gas-jets, of clattering feet of passengers getting on and off; then of some one, conductor or station-master, walking the whole length of the train; and then you are aware of an insane satisfaction in renewed flight through the darkness. You think hazily of the folk in their beds in the town left behind, who stir uneasily at the sound of your train’s departing whistle; and so all is a blank vigil or a blank slumber.

By daylight Basil and Isabel found themselves at opposite ends of the car, struggling severally with the problem of the morning’s toilet. When the combat was ended, they were surprised at the decency of their appearance, and Isabel said, “I think I’m presentable to an early Broadway public, and I’ve a fancy for not going to a hotel. Lucy will be expecting us out there before noon; and we can pass the time pleasantly enough for a few hours just wandering about.”

She was a woman who loved any cheap defiance of custom, and she had an agreeable sense of adventure in what she proposed. Besides, she felt that nothing could be more in the unconventional spirit in which they meant to make their whole journey than a stroll about New York at half-past six in the morning.

“Delightful!” answered Basil, who was always charmed with these small originalities. “You look well enough for an evening party; and besides, you won’t meet one of your own critical class on Broadway at this hour. We will breakfast at one of those gilded metropolitan restaurants, and then go round to Leonard’s, who will be able to give us just three unhurried seconds. After that we’ll push on out to his place.”

At that early hour there were not many people astir on the wide avenue down which our friends strolled when they left the station; but in the aspect of those they saw there was something that told of a greater heat than they had yet known in Boston, and they were sensible of having reached a more southern latitude. The air, though freshened by the over-night’s storm, still wanted the briskness and sparkle and pungency of the Boston air, which is as delicious in summer as it is terrible in winter; and the faces that showed themselves were sodden from the yesterday’s heat and perspiration. A corner-grocer, seated in a sort of fierce despondency upon a keg near his shop door, had lightly equipped himself for the struggle of the day in the battered armor of the day before, and in a pair of roomy pantaloons, and a baggy shirt of neutral tint — perhaps he had made a vow not to change it whilst the siege of the hot weather lasted, — now confronted the advancing sunlight, before which the long shadows of the buildings were slowly retiring. A marketing mother of a family paused at a provision-store, and looking weakly in at the white-aproned butcher among his meats and flies, passes without an effort to purchase. Hurried and wearied shop-girls tripped by in the draperies that betrayed their sad necessity to be both fine and shabby; from a boarding-house door issued briskly one of those cool young New Yorkers whom no circumstances can oppress: breezy-coated, white-livened, clean, with a good cigar in the mouth, a light cane caught upon the elbow of one of the arms holding up the paper from which the morning’s news is snatched, whilst the person sways lightly with the walk; in the street-cars that slowly tinkled up and down were rows of people with baskets between their legs and papers before their faces; and all showed by some peculiarity of air or dress the excess of heat which they had already borne, and to which they seemed to look forward, and gave by the scantiness of their number a vivid impression of the uncounted thousands within doors prolonging, before the day’s terror began, the oblivion of sleep.

As they turned into one of the numerical streets to cross to Broadway, and found themselves in a yet deeper seclusion, Basil-began to utter in a musing tone:

       ”A city against the world’s gray Prime,
        Lost in some desert, far from Time,
        Where noiseless Ages gliding through,
        Have only sifted sands and dew,
        Yet still a marble head of man
        Lying on all the haunted plan;
        The passions of the human heart
        Beating the marble breast of Art,
        Were not more lone to one who first
        Upon its giant silence burst,
        Than this strange quiet, where the tide
        Of life, upheaved on either aide,
        Hangs trembling, ready soon to beat
        With human waves the Morning Street.”

“How lovely!” said Isabel, swiftly catching at her skirt, and deftly escaping contact with one of a long row of ash-barrels posted sentinel-like on the edge of the pavement. “Whose is it, Basil?”

“Ah! a poet’s,” answered her husband, “a man of whom we shall one day any of us be glad to say that we liked him before he was famous. What a nebulous sweetness the first lines have, and what a clear, cool light of day-break in the last!”

“You could have been as good a poet as that, Basil,” said the ever-personal and concretely-speaking Isabel, who could not look at a mountain without thinking what Basil might have done in that way, if he had tried.

“O no, I couldn’t, dear. It’s very difficult being any poet at all, though it’s easy to be like one. But I’ve done with it; I broke with the Muse the day you accepted me. She came into my office, looking so shabby, — not unlike one of those poor shop-girls; and as I was very well dressed from having just been to see you, why, you know, I felt the difference. ‘Well, my dear?’ said I, not quite liking the look of reproach she was giving me. ‘You are going to leave me,’ she answered sadly. ‘Well, yes; I suppose I must. You see the insurance business is very absorbing; and besides, it has a bad appearance, your coming about so in office hours, and in those clothes.’ ‘O,’ she moaned out, ‘you used to welcome me at all times, out in the country, and thought me prettily dressed.’ ‘Yes, yes; but this is Boston; and Boston makes a great difference in one’s ideas; and I’m going to be married, too. Come, I don’t want to seem ungrateful; we have had many pleasant times together, I own it; and I’ve no objections to your being present at Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays, but really I must draw the line there.’ She gave me a look that made my heart ache, and went straight to my desk and took out of a pigeon hole a lot of papers, — odes upon your cruelty, Isabel; songs to you; sonnets, — the sonnet, a mighty poor one, I’d made the day before, — and threw them all into the grate. Then she turned to me again, signed adieu with mute lips, and passed out. I could hear the bottom wire of the poor thing’s hoop-skirt clicking against each step of the stairway, as she went slowly and heavily down to the street.” “O don’t — don’t, Basil,” said his wife, “it seems like something wrong. I think you ought to have been ashamed.”

“Ashamed! I was heart broken. But it had to come to that. As I got hopeful about you, the Muse became a sad bore; and more than once I found myself smiling at her when her back was turned. The Muse doesn’t like being laughed at any more than another woman would, and she would have left me shortly. No, I couldn’t be a poet like our Morning-Street friend. But see! the human wave is beginning to sprinkle the pavement with cooks and second-girls.”

They were frowzy serving-maids and silent; each swept down her own door steps and the pavement in front of her own house, and then knocked her broom on the curbstone and vanished into the house, on which the hand of change had already fallen. It was no longer a street solely devoted to the domestic gods, but had been invaded at more than one point by the bustling deities of business in such streets the irregular, inspired doctors and doctresses come first with inordinate door-plates, then a milliner filling the parlor window with new bonnets; here even a publisher had hung his sign beside a door, through which the feet of young ladies used to trip, and the feet of little children to patter. Here and there stood groups of dwellings unmolested as yet outwardly; but even these had a certain careworn and guilty air, as if they knew themselves to be cheapish boarding-houses or furnished lodgings for gentlemen, and were trying to hide it. To these belonged the frowzy serving-women; to these the rows of ash-barrels, in which the decrepit children and mothers of the streets were clawing for bits of coal.

By the time Basil and Isabel reached Broadway there were already some omnibuses beginning their long day’s travel up and down the handsome, tiresome length of that avenue; but for the most part it was empty. There was, of course, a hurry of foot-passengers upon the sidewalks, but these were sparse and uncharacteristic, for New York proper was still fast asleep. The waiter at the restaurant into which our friends stepped was so well aware of this, and so perfectly assured they were not of the city, that he could not forbear a little patronage of them, which they did not resent. He brought Basil what he had ordered in barbaric abundance, and charged for it with barbaric splendor. It is all but impossible not to wish to stand well with your waiter: I have myself been often treated with conspicuous rudeness by the tribe, yet I have never been able to withhold the ‘douceur’ that marked me for a gentleman in their eyes, and entitled me to their dishonorable esteem. Basil was not superior to this folly, and left the waiter with the conviction that, if he was not a New Yorker, he was a high-bred man of the world at any rate.

Vexed by a sense of his own pitifulness, this man of the world continued his pilgrimage down Broadway, which even in that desert state was full of a certain interest. Troops of laborers straggled along the pavements, each with his dinner-pail in hand; and in many places the eternal building up and pulling down was already going on; carts were struggling up the slopes of vast cellars, with loads of distracting rubbish; here stood the half-demolished walls of a house, with a sad variety of wall-paper showing in the different rooms; there clinked the trowel upon the brick, yonder the hammer on the stone; overhead swung and threatened the marble block that the derrick was lifting to its place. As yet these forces of demolition and construction had the business of the street almost to themselves.

“Why, how shabby the street is!” said Isabel, at last.

“When I landed, after being abroad, I remember that Broadway impressed me with its splendor.”

“Ah! but you were merely coming from Europe then; and now you arrive from Burton, and are contrasting this poor Broadway with Washington Street. Don’t be hard upon it, Isabel; every street can’t be a Boston street, you know,” said Basil. Isabel, herself a Bostonian of great intensity both by birth and conviction, believed her husband the only man able to have thoroughly baffled the malignity of the stars in causing him to be born out of Boston; yet he sometimes trifled with his hardly achieved triumph, and even showed an indifference to it, with an insincerity of which there can be no doubt whatever.

“O stuff!” she retorted, “as if I had any of that silly local pride!
Though you know well enough that Boston is the best place in the world.
But Basil! I suppose Broadway strikes us as so fine, on coming ashore
from Europe, because we hardly expect anything of America then.”

“Well, I don’t know. Perhaps the street has some positive grandeur of its own, though it needs a multitude of people in it to bring out its best effects. I’ll allow its disheartening shabbiness and meanness in many ways; but to stand in front of Grace Church, on a clear day, — a day of late September, say, — and look down the swarming length of Broadway, on the movement and the numbers, while the Niagara roar swelled and swelled from those human rapids, was always like strong new wine to me. I don’t think the world affords such another sight; and for one moment, at such times, I’d have been willing to be an Irish councilman, that I might have some right to the pride I felt in the capital of the Irish Republic. What a fine thing it must be for each victim of six centuries of oppression to reflect that he owns at least a dozen Americans, and that, with his fellows, he rules a hundred helpless millionaires!”

Like all daughters of a free country, Isabel knew nothing about politics, and she felt that she was getting into deep water; she answered buoyantly, but she was glad to make her weariness the occasion of hailing a stage, and changing the conversation. The farther down town they went the busier the street grew; and about the Astor House, where they alighted, there was already a bustle that nothing but a fire could have created at the same hour in Boston. A little farther on the steeple of Trinity rose high into the scorching sunlight, while below, in the shadow that was darker than it was cool, slumbered the old graves among their flowers.

“How still they lie!” mused the happy wife, peering through the iron fence in passing.

“Yes, their wedding-journeys are ended, poor things!” said Basil; and through both their minds flashed the wonder if they should ever come to something like that; but it appeared so impossible that they both smiled at the absurdity.

“It’s too early yet for Leonard,” continued Basil; “what a pity the church-yard is locked up. We could spend the time so delightfully in it. But, never mind; let us go down to the Battery, — it’s not a very pleasant place, but it’s near, and it’s historical, and it’s open, — where these drowsy friends of ours used to take the air when they were in the fashion, and had some occasion for the element in its freshness. You can imagine — it’s cheap — how they used to see Mr. Burr and Mr. Hamilton down there.”

All places that fashion has once loved and abandoned are very melancholy; but of all such places, I think the Battery is the most forlorn. Are there some sickly locust-trees there that cast a tremulous and decrepit shade upon the mangy grass-plots? I believe so, but I do not make sure; I am certain only of the mangy grass-plots, or rather the spaces between the paths, thinly overgrown with some kind of refuse and opprobrious weed, a stunted and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morning when our friends, with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best drew of some happier child, a gay little garment cut low in the neck and short in the sleeves, which gave her the grotesque effect of having been at a party the night before. Presently came two jaded women, a mother and a grandmother, that appeared, when they had crawled out of their beds, to have put on only so much clothing as the law compelled. They abandoned themselves upon the green stuff, whatever it was, and, with their lean hands clasped outside their knees, sat and stared, silent and hopeless, at the eastern sky, at the heart of the terrible furnace, into which in those days the world seemed cast to be burnt up, while the child which the younger woman had brought with her feebly wailed unheeded at her side. On one side of these women were the shameless houses out of which they might have crept, and which somehow suggested riotous maritime dissipation; on the other side were those houses in which had once dwelt rich and famous folk, but which were now dropping down the boarding-house scale through various un-homelike occupations to final dishonor and despair. Down nearer the water, and not far from the castle that was once a playhouse and is now the depot of emigration, stood certain express-wagons, and about these lounged a few hard-looking men. Beyond laughed and danced the fresh blue water of the bay, dotted with sails and smokestacks.

“Well,” said Basil, “I think if I could choose, I should like to be a friendless German boy, setting foot for the first time on this happy continent. Fancy his rapture on beholding this lovely spot, and these charming American faces! What a smiling aspect life in the New World must wear to his young eyes, and how his heart must leap within him!”

“Yes, Basil; it’s all very pleasing, and thank you for bringing me. But if you don’t think of any other New York delights to show me, do let us go and sit in Leonard’s office till he comes, and then get out into the country as soon as possible.”

Basil defended himself against the imputation that he had been trying to show New York to his wife, or that he had any thought but of whiling away the long morning hours, until it should be time to go to Leonard. He protested that a knowledge of Europe made New York the most uninteresting town in America, and that it was the last place in the world where he should think of amusing himself or any one else; and then they both upbraided the city’s bigness and dullness with an enjoyment that none but Bostonians can know. They particularly derided the notion of New York’s being loved by any one. It was immense, it was grand in some ways, parts of it were exceedingly handsome; but it was too vast, too coarse, too restless. They could imagine its being liked by a successful young man of business, or by a rich young girl, ignorant of life and with not too nice a taste in her pleasures; but that it should be dear to any poet or scholar, or any woman of wisdom and refinement, that they could not imagine. They could not think of any one’s loving New York as Dante loved Florence, or as Madame de Stael loved Paris, or as Johnson loved black, homely, home-like London. And as they twittered their little dispraises, the giant Mother of Commerce was growing more and more conscious of herself, waking from her night’s sleep and becoming aware of her fleets and trains, and the myriad hands and wheels that throughout the whole sea and land move for her, and do her will even while she sleeps. All about the wedding-journeyers swelled the deep tide of life back from its night-long ebb. Broadway had filled her length with people; not yet the most characteristic New York crowd, but the not less interesting multitude of strangers arrived by the early boats and trams, and that easily distinguishable class of lately New-Yorkized people from other places, about whom in the metropolis still hung the provincial traditions of early rising; and over all, from moment to moment, the eager, audacious, well-dressed, proper life of the mighty city was beginning to prevail, — though this was not so notable where Basil and Isabel had paused at a certain window. It was the office of one of the English steamers, and he was saying, “It was by this line I sailed, you know,” — and she was interrupting him with, “When who could have dreamed that you would ever be telling me of it here?” So the old marvel was wondered over anew, till it filled the world in which there was room for nothing but the strangeness that they should have loved each other so long and not made it known, that they should ever have uttered it, and that, being uttered, it should be so much more and better than ever could have been dreamed. The broken engagement was a fable of disaster that only made their present fortune more prosperous. The city ceased about them, and they walked on up the street, the first man and first woman in the garden of the new-made earth. As they were both very conscious people, they recognized in themselves some sense of this, and presently drolled it away, in the opulence of a time when every moment brought some beautiful dream, and the soul could be prodigal of its bliss.

“I think if I had the naming of the animals over again, this morning, I shouldn’t call snakes ‘snakes’; should you, Eve?” laughed Basil in intricate acknowledgment of his happiness.

“O no, Adam; we’d look out all the most graceful euphemisms in the newspapers, and we wouldn’t hurt the feelings of a spider.”

II. MIDSUMMER-DAY’S DREAM.

They had waited to see Leonard, in order that they might learn better how to find his house in the country; and now, when they came in upon him at nine o’clock, he welcomed them with all his friendly heart. He rose from the pile of morning’s letters to which he had but just sat down; he placed them the easiest chairs; he made a feint of its not being a busy hour with him, and would have had them look upon his office, which was still damp and odorous from the porter’s broom, as a kind of down-town parlor; but after they had briefly accounted to his amazement for their appearance then and there, and Isabel had boasted of the original fashion in which they had that morning seen New York, they took pity on him, and bade him adieu till evening.

They crossed from Broadway to the noisome street by the ferry, and in a little while had taken their places in the train on the other side of the water.

“Don’t tell me, Basil,” said Isabel, “that Leonard travels fifty miles every day by rail going to and from his work!”

“I must, dearest, if I would be truthful.”

“Then, darling, there are worse things in this world than living up at the South End, aren’t there?” And in agreement upon Boston as a place of the greatest natural advantages, as well as all acquirable merits, with after talk that need not be recorded, they arrived in the best humor at the little country station near which the Leonards dwelt.

I must inevitably follow Mrs. Isabel thither, though I do it at the cost of the reader, who suspects the excitements which a long description of the movement would delay. The ladies were very old friends, and they had not met since Isabel’s return from Europe and renewal of her engagement. Upon the news of this, Mrs. Leonard had swallowed with surprising ease all that she had said in blame of Basil’s conduct during the rupture, and exacted a promise from her friend that she should pay her the first visit after their marriage. And now that they had come together, their only talk was of husbands, whom they viewed in every light to which husbands could be turned, and still found an inexhaustible novelty in the theme. Mrs. Leonard beheld in her friend’s joy the sweet reflection of her own honeymoon, and Isabel was pleased to look upon the prosperous marriage of the former as the image of her future. Thus, with immense profit and comfort, they reassured one another by every question and answer, and in their weak content lapsed far behind the representative women of our age, when husbands are at best a necessary evil, and the relation of wives to them is known to be one of pitiable subjection. When these two pretty, fogies put their heads of false hair together, they were as silly and benighted as their great-grandmothers could have been in the same circumstances, and, as I say, shamefully encouraged each other, in their absurdity. The absurdity appeared too good and blessed to be true. “Do you really suppose, Basil,” Isabel would say to her oppressor, after having given him some elegant extract from the last conversation upon husbands, “that we shall get on as smoothly as the Leonards when we have been married ten years? Lucy says that things go more hitchily the first year than ever they do afterwards, and that people love each other better and better just because they’ve got used to it. Well, our bliss does seem a little crude and garish compared with their happiness; and yet” — she put up both her palms against his, and gave a vehement little push— “there is something agreeable about it, even at this stage of the proceedings.”

“Isabel,” said her husband, with severity, “this is bridal!”

“No matter! I only want to seem an old married woman to the general public. But the application of it is that you must be careful not to contradict me, or cross me in anything, so that we can be like the Leonards very much sooner than they became so. The great object is not to have any hitchiness; and you know you ARE provoking — at times.”

They both educated themselves for continued and tranquil happiness by the example and precept of their friends; and the time passed swiftly in the pleasant learning, and in the novelty of the life led by the Leonards. This indeed merits a closer study than can be given here, for it is the life led by vast numbers of prosperous New Yorkers who love both the excitement of the city and the repose of the country, and who aspire to unite the enjoyment of both in their daily existence. The suburbs of the metropolis stretch landward fifty miles in every direction; and everywhere are handsome villas like Leonard’s, inhabited by men like himself, whom strict study of the time-table enables to spend all their working hours in the city and all their smoking and sleeping hours in the country.

The home and the neighborhood of the Leonards put on their best looks for our bridal pair, and they were charmed. They all enjoyed the visit, said guests and hosts, they were all sorry to have it come to an end; yet they all resigned themselves to this conclusion. Practically, it had no other result than to detain the travellers into the very heart of the hot weather. In that weather it was easy to do anything that did not require an active effort, and resignation was so natural with the mercury at ninety, that I aan not sure but there was something sinful in it.

They had given up their cherished purpose of going to Albany by the day boat, which was represented to them in every impossible phase. It would be dreadfully crowded, and whenever it stopped the heat would be insupportable. Besides it would bring them to Albany at an hour when they must either spend the night there, or push on to Niagara by the night train. “You had better go by the evening boat. It will be light almost till you reach West Point, and you’ll see all the best scenery. Then you can get a good night’s rest, and start fresh in the morning.” So they were counseled, and they assented, as they would have done if they had been advised: “You had better go by the morning boat. It’s deliciously cool, travelling; you see the whole of the river, you reach Albany for supper, and you push through to Niagara that night and are done with it.”

They took leave of Leonard at breakfast and of his wife at noon, and fifteen minutes later they were rushing from the heat of the country into the heat of the city, where some affairs and pleasures were to employ them till the evening boat should start.

Their spirits were low, for the terrible spell of the great heat brooded upon them. All abroad burned the fierce white light of the sun, in which not only the earth seemed to parch and thirst, but the very air withered, and was faint and thin to the troubled respiration. Their train was full of people who had come long journeys from broiling cities of the West, and who were dusty and ashen and reeking in the slumbers at which some of them still vainly caught. On every one lay an awful languor. Here and there stirred a fan, like the broken wing of a dying bird; now and then a sweltering young mother shifted her hot baby from one arm to another; after every station the desperate conductor swung through the long aisle and punched the ticket, which each passenger seemed to yield him with a tacit malediction; a suffering child hung about the empty tank, which could only gasp out a cindery drop or two of ice-water. The wind buffeted faintly at the windows; when the door was opened, the clatter of the rails struck through and through the car like a demoniac yell.

Yet when they arrived at the station by the ferry-side, they seemed to have entered its stifling darkness from fresh and vigorous atmosphere, so close and dead and mined with the carbonic breath of the locomotives was the air of the place. The thin old wooden walls that shut out the glare of the sun transmitted an intensified warmth; the roof seemed to hover lower and lower, and in its coal-smoked, raftery hollow to generate a heat deadlier than that poured upon it from the skies.

In a convenient place in the station hung a thermometer, before which every passenger, on going aboard the ferry-boat, paused as at a shrine, and mutely paid his devotions. At the altar of this fetich our friends also paused, and saw that the mercury was above ninety, and exulting with the pride that savages take in the cruel might of their idols, bowed their souls to the great god Heat.

On the boat they found a place where the breath of the sea struck cool across their faces, and made them forget the thermometer for the brief time of the transit. But presently they drew near that strange, irregular row of wooden buildings and jutting piers which skirts the river on the New York aide, and before the boat’s motion ceased the air grew thick and warm again, and tainted with the foulness of the street on which the buildings front. Upon this the boat’s passengers issued, passing up through a gangway, on one side of which a throng of return-passengers was pent by a gate of iron barn, like a herd of wild animals. They were streaming with perspiration, and, according to their different temperaments, had faces of deep crimson or deadly pallor.

“Now the question is, my dear,” said Basil when, free of the press, they lingered for a moment in the shade outside, “whether we had better walk up to Broadway, at an immediate sacrifice of fibre, and get a stage there, or take one of these cars here, and be landed a little nearer, with half the exertion. By this route we shall have sights end smells which the other can’t offer us, but whichever we take we shall be sorry.”

“Then I say take this,” decided Isabel. “I want to be sorry upon the easiest possible terms, this weather.”

They hailed the first car that passed, and got into it. Well for them both if she could have exercised this philosophy with regard to the whole day’s business, or if she could have given up her plans for it, with the same resignation she had practiced in regard to the day boat! It seems to me a proof of the small advance our race has made in true wisdom, that we find it so hard to give up doing anything we have meant to do. It matters very little whether the affair is one of enjoyment or of business, we feel the same bitter need of pursuing it to the end. The mere fact of intention gives it a flavor of duty, and dutiolatry, as one may call the devotion, has passed so deeply into our life that we have scarcely a sense any more of the sweetness of even a neglected pleasure. We will not taste the fine, guilty rapture of a deliberate dereliction; the gentle sin of omission is all but blotted from the calendar of our crimes. If I had been Columbus, I should have thought twice before setting sail, when I was quite ready to do so; and as for Plymouth Rock, I should have sternly resisted the blandishments of those twin sirens, Starvation and Cold, who beckoned the Puritans shoreward, and as soon as ever I came in sight of their granite perch should have turned back to England. But it is now too late to repair these errors, and so, on one of the hottest days of last year, behold my obdurate bridal pair, in a Tenth or Twentieth Avenue horse-car, setting forth upon the fulfillment of a series of intentions, any of which had wiselier been left unaccomplished. Isabel had said they would call upon certain people in Fiftieth Street, and then shop slowly down, ice-creaming and staging and variously cooling and calming by the way, until they reached the ticket-office on Broadway, whence they could indefinitely betake themselves to the steamboat an hour or two before her departure. She felt that they had yielded sufficiently to circumstances and conditions already on this journey, and she was resolved that the present half-day in New York should be the half-day of her original design.

It was not the most advisable thing, as I have allowed, but it was inevitable, and it afforded them a spectacle which is by no means wanting in sublimity, and which is certainly unique, — the spectacle of that great city on a hot day, defiant of the elements, and prospering on with every form of labor, and at a terrible cost of life. The man carrying the hod to the top of the walls that rankly grow and grow as from his life’s blood, will only lay down his load when he feels the mortal glare of the sun blaze in upon heart and brain; the plethoric millionaire for whom he toils will plot and plan in his office till he swoons at the desk; the trembling beast must stagger forward while the flame-faced tormentor on the box has strength to lash him on; in all those vast palaces of commerce there are ceaseless sale and purchase, packing and unpacking, lifting up and laying down, arriving and departing loads; in thousands of shops is the unspared and unsparing weariness of selling; in the street, filled by the hurry and suffering of tens of thousands, is the weariness of buying.

Their afternoon’s experience was something that Basil and Isabel could, when it was past, look upon only as a kind of vision, magnificent at times, and at other times full of indignity and pain. They seemed to have dreamed of a long horse-car pilgrimage through that squalid street by the river-side, where presently they came to a market, opening upon the view hideous vistas of carnage, and then into a wide avenue, with processions of cars like their own coming and going up and down the centre of a foolish and useless breadth, which made even the tall buildings (rising gauntly up among the older houses of one or two stories) on either hand look low, and let in the sun to bake the dust that the hot breaths of wind caught up and sent swirling into the shabby shops. Here they dreamed of the eternal demolition and construction of the city, and farther on of vacant lots full of granite boulders, clambered over by goats. In their dream they had fellow-passengers, whose sufferings made them odious and whom they were glad to leave behind when they alighted from the car, and running out of the blaze of the avenue, quenched themselves in the shade of the cross-street. A little strip of shadow lay along the row of brown-stone fronts, but there were intervals where the vacant lots cast no shadow. With great bestowal of thought they studied hopelessly how to avoid these spaces as if they had been difficult torrents or vast expanses of desert sand; they crept slowly along till they came to such a place, and dashed swiftly across it, and then, fainter than before, moved on. They seemed now and then to stand at doors, and to be told that people were out and again that they were in; and they had a sense of cool dark parlors, and the airy rustling of light-muslined ladies, of chat and of fans and ice-water, and then they came forth again; and evermore

“The day increased from heat to heat.”

At last they were aware of an end of their visits, and of a purpose to go down town again, and of seeking the nearest car by endless blocks of brown-stone fronts, which with their eternal brownstone flights of steps, and their handsome, intolerable uniformity, oppressed them like a procession of houses trying to pass a given point and never getting by. Upon these streets there was, seldom a soul to be seen, so that when their ringing at a door had evoked answer, it had startled them with a vague, sad surprise. In the distance on either hand they could see cars and carts and wagons toiling up and down the avenues, and on the next intersecting pavement sometimes a laborer with his jacket slung across his shoulder, or a dog that had plainly made up his mind to go mad. Up to the time of their getting into one of those phantasmal cars for the return down-townwards they had kept up a show of talk in their wretched dream; they had spoken of other hot days that they had known elsewhere; and they had wondered that the tragical character of heat had been so little recognized. They said that the daily New York murder might even at that moment be somewhere taking place; and that no murder of the whole homicidal year could have such proper circumstance; they morbidly wondered what that day’s murder would be, and in what swarming tenement-house, or den of the assassin streets by the river-sides, — if indeed it did not befall in some such high, close-shuttered, handsome dwelling as those they passed, in whose twilight it would be so easy to strike down the master and leave him undiscovered and unmourned by the family ignorantly absent at the mountains or the seaside. They conjectured of the horror of midsummer battles, and pictured the anguish of shipwrecked men upon a tropical coast, and the grimy misery of stevedores unloading shiny cargoes of anthracite coal at city docks. But now at last, as they took seats opposite one another in the crowded car, they seemed to have drifted infinite distances and long epochs asunder. They looked hopelessly across the intervening gulf, and mutely questioned when it was and from what far city they or some remote ancestors of theirs had set forth upon a wedding journey. They bade each other a tacit farewell, and with patient, pathetic faces awaited the end of the world.

When they alighted, they took their way up through one of the streets of the great wholesale businesses, to Broadway. On this street was a throng of trucks and wagons lading and unlading; bales and boxes rose and sank by pulleys overhead; the footway was a labyrinth of packages of every shape and size: there was no flagging of the pitiless energy that moved all forward, no sign of how heavy a weight lay on it, save in the reeking faces of its helpless instruments. But when the wedding-journeyers emerged upon Broadway, the other passages and incidents of their dream faded before the superior fantasticality of the spectacle. It was four o’clock, the deadliest hour of the deadly summer day. The spiritless air seemed to have a quality of blackness in it, as if filled with the gloom of low-hovering wings. One half the street lay in shadow, and one half in sun; but the sunshine itself was dim, as if a heat greater than its own had smitten it with languor. Little gusts of sick, warm wind blew across the great avenue at the corners of the intersecting streets. In the upward distance, at which the journeyers looked, the loftier roofs and steeples lifted themselves dim out of the livid atmosphere, and far up and down the length of the street swept a stream of tormented life. All sorts of wheeled things thronged it, conspicuous among which rolled and jarred the gaudily painted Stages, with quivering horses driven each by a man who sat in the shade of a branching white umbrella, and suffered with a moody truculence of aspect, and as if he harbored the bitterness of death in his heart for the crowding passengers within, when one of them pulled the strap about his legs, and summoned him to halt. Most of the foot-passengers kept to the shady side, and to the unaccustomed eyes of the strangers they were not less in number than at any other time, though there were fewer women among them. Indomitably resolute of soul, they held their course with the swift pace of custom, and only here and there they showed the effect of the heat. One man, collarless, with waistcoat unbuttoned, and hat set far back from his forehead, waved a fan before his death-white flabby face, and set down one foot after the other with the heaviness of a somnambulist. Another, as they passed him, was saying huskily to the friend at his side, “I can’t stand this much longer. My hands tingle as if they had gone to sleep; my heart—” But still the multitude hurried on, passing, repassing, encountering, evading, vanishing into shop-doors and emerging from them, dispersing down the side streets, and swarming out of them. It was a scene that possessed the beholder with singular fascination, and in its effect of universal lunacy, it might well have seemed the last phase of a world presently to be destroyed. They who were in it but not of it, as they fancied, though there was no reason for this, — looked on it amazed, and at last their own errands being accomplished, and themselves so far cured of the madness of purpose, they cried with one voice, that it was a hideous sight, and strove to take refuge from it in the nearest place where the soda-fountain sparkled.

It was a vain desire. At the front door of the apothecary’s hung a thermometer, and as they entered they heard the next comer cry out with a maniacal pride in the affliction laid upon mankind, “Ninety-seven degrees!” Behind them at the door there poured in a ceaseless stream of people, each pausing at the shrine of heat; before he tossed off the hissing draught that two pale, close-clipped boys served them from either side of the fountain. Then in the order of their coming they issued through another door upon the side street, each, as he disappeared, turning his face half round, and casting a casual glance upon a little group near another counter. The group was of a very patient, half-frightened, half-puzzled looking gentleman who sat perfectly still on a stool, and of a lady who stood beside him, rubbing all over his head a handkerchief full of pounded ice, and easing one hand with the other when the first became tired. Basil drank his soda and paused to look upon this group, which he felt would commend itself to realistic sculpture as eminently characteristic of the local life, and as “The Sunstroke” would sell enormously in the hot season. “Better take a little more of that,” the apothecary said, looking up from his prescription, and, as the organized sympathy of the seemingly indifferent crowd, smiling very kindly at his patient, who thereupon tasted something in the glass he held. “Do you still feel like fainting?” asked the humane authority. “Slightly, now and then,” answered the other, “but I’m hanging on hard to the bottom curve of that icicled S on your soda-fountain, and I feel that I’m all right as long as I can see that. The people get rather hazy, occasionally, and have no features to speak of. But I don’t know that I look very impressive myself,” he added in the jesting mood which seems the natural condition of Americans in the face of all embarrassments.

“O, you’ll do!” the apothecary answered, with a laugh; but he said, in answer to an anxious question from the lady, “He mustn’t be moved for an hour yet,” and gayly pestled away at a prescription, while she resumed her office of grinding the pounded ice round and round upon her husband’s skull. Isabel offered her the commiseration of friendly words, and of looks kinder yet, and then seeing that they could do nothing, she and Basil fell into the endless procession, and passed out of the side door. “What a shocking thing!” she whispered. “Did you see how all the people looked, one after another, so indifferently at that couple, and evidently forgot them the next instant? It was dreadful. I shouldn’t like to have you sun-struck in New York.”

“That’s very considerate of you; but place for place, if any accident must happen to me among strangers, I think I should prefer to have it in New York. The biggest place is always the kindest as well as the cruelest place. Amongst the thousands of spectators the good Samaritan as well as the Levite would be sure to be. As for a sun-stroke, it requires peculiar gifts. But if you compel me to a choice in the matter, then I say, give me the busiest part of Broadway for a sun-stroke. There is such experience of calamity there that you could hardly fall the first victim to any misfortune. Probably the gentleman at the apothecary’s was merely exhausted by the heat, and ran in there for revival. The apothecary has a case of the kind on his hands every blazing afternoon, and knows just what to do. The crowd may be a little ‘ennuye’ of sun-strokes, and to that degree indifferent, but they most likely know that they can only do harm by an expression of sympathy, and so they delegate their pity as they have delegated their helpfulness to the proper authority, and go about their business. If a man was overcome in the middle of a village street, the blundering country druggist wouldn’t know what to do, and the tender-hearted people would crowd about so that no breath of air could reach the victim.”

“May be so, dear,” said the wife, pensively; “but if anything did happen to you in New York, I should like to have the spectators look as if they saw a human being in trouble. Perhaps I’m a little exacting.”

“I think you are. Nothing is so hard as to understand that there are human beings in this world besides one’s self and one’s set. But let us be selfishly thankful that it isn’t you and I there in the apothecary’s shop, as it might very well be; and let us get to the boat as soon as we can, and end this horrible midsummer-day’s dream. We must have a carriage,” he added with tardy wisdom, hailing an empty hack, “as we ought to have had all day; though I’m not sorry, now the worst’s over, to have seen the worst.”

III. THE NIGHT BOAT.

There is little proportion about either pain or pleasure: a headache darkens the universe while it lasts, a cup of tea really lightens the spirit bereft of all reasonable consolations. Therefore I do not think it trivial or untrue to say that there is for the moment nothing more satisfactory in life than to have bought your ticket on the night boat up the Hudson and secured your state-room key an hour or two before departure, and some time even before the pressure at the clerk’s office has begun. In the transaction with this castellated baron, you have of course been treated with haughtiness, but not with ferocity, and your self-respect swells with a sense of having escaped positive insult; your key clicks cheerfully in your pocket against its gutta-percha number, and you walk up and down the gorgeously carpeted, single-columned, two-story cabin, amid a multitude of plush sofas and chairs, a glitter of glass, and a tinkle of prismatic chandeliers overhead, unawed even by the aristocratic gloom of the yellow waiters. Your own stateroom as you enter it from time to time is an ever-new surprise of splendors, a magnificent effect of amplitude, of mahogany bedstead, of lace curtains, and of marble topped wash-stand. In the mere wantonness of an unalloyed prosperity you say to the saffron nobleman nearest your door, “Bring me a pitcher of ice-water, quick, please!” and you do not find the half-hour that he is gone very long.

If the ordinary wayfarer experiences so much pleasure from these things, then imagine the infinite comfort of our wedding-journeyers, transported from Broadway on that pitiless afternoon to the shelter and the quiet of that absurdly palatial steamboat. It was not yet crowded, and by the river-side there was almost a freshness in the air. They disposed of their troubling bags and packages; they complimented the ridiculous princeliness of their stateroom, and then they betook themselves to the sheltered space aft of the saloon, where they sat down for the tranquiller observance of the wharf and whatever should come to be seen by them. Like all people who have just escaped with their lives from some menacing calamity, they were very philosophical in spirit; and having got aboard of their own motion, and being neither of them apparently the worse for the ordeal they had passed through, were of a light, conversational temper.

“What an amusingly superb affair!” Basil cried as they glanced through an open window down the long vista of the saloon. “Good heavens! Isabel, does it take all this to get us plain republicans to Albany in comfort and safety, or are we really a nation of princes in disguise? Well, I shall never be satisfied with less hereafter,” he added. “I am spoilt for ordinary paint and upholstery from this hour; I am a ruinous spendthrift, and a humble three-story swell-front up at the South End is no longer the place for me. Dearest,

‘Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,’

never to leave this Aladdin’s-palace-like steamboat, but spend our lives in perpetual trips up and down the Hudson.”

To which not very costly banter Isabel responded in kind, and rapidly sketched the life they could lead aboard. Since they could not help it, they mocked the public provision which, leaving no interval between disgraceful squalor and ludicrous splendor, accommodates our democratic ‘menage’ to the taste of the richest and most extravagant plebeian amongst us. He, unhappily, minds danger and oppression as little as he minds money, so long as he has a spectacle and a sensation, and it is this ruthless imbecile who will have lace curtains to the steamboat berth into which he gets with his pantaloons on, and out of which he may be blown by an exploding boiler at any moment; it is he who will have for supper that overgrown and shapeless dinner in the lower saloon, and will not let any one else buy tea or toast for a less sum than he pays for his surfeit; it is he who perpetuates the insolence of the clerk and the reluctance of the waiters; it is he, in fact, who now comes out of the saloon, with his womenkind, and takes chairs under the awning where Basil and Isabel sit. Personally, he is not so bad; he is good-looking, like all of us; he is better dressed than most of us; he behaves himself quietly, if not easily; and no lord so loathes a scene. Next year he is going to Europe, where he will not show to so much advantage as here; but for the present it would be hard to say in what way he is vulgar, and perhaps vulgarity is not so common a thing after all.

It was something besides the river that made the air so much more sufferable than it had been. Over the city, since our friends had come aboard the boat, a black cloud had gathered and now hung low upon it, while the wind from the face of the water took the dust in the neighboring streets, and frolicked it about the house-tops, and in the faces of the arriving passengers, who, as the moment of departure drew near, appeared in constantly increasing numbers and in greater variety, with not only the trepidation of going upon them, but also with the electrical excitement people feel before a tempest.

The breast of the black cloud was now zigzagged from moment to moment by lightning, and claps of deafening thunder broke from it. At last the long endurance of the day was spent, and out of its convulsion burst floods of rain, again and again sweeping the promenade-deck where the people sat, and driving them disconsolate into the saloon. The air was darkened as by night, and with many regrets for the vanishing prospect, mingled with a sense of relief from the heat, our friends felt the boat tremble away from her moorings and set forth upon her trip.

“Ah! if we had only taken the day boat!” moaned Isabel. “Now, we shall see nothing of the river landscape, and we shall never be able to put ourselves down when we long for Europe, by declaring that the scenery of the Hudson is much finer than that of the Rhine.”

Yet they resolved, this indomitably good-natured couple, that they would be just even to the elements, which had by no means been generous to them; and they owned that if so noble a storm had celebrated their departure upon some storied river from some more romantic port than New York, they would have thought it an admirable thing. Even whilst they contented themselves, the storm passed, and left a veiled and humid sky overhead, that gave a charming softness to the scene on which their eyes fell when they came out of the saloon again, and took their places with a largely increased companionship on the deck.

They had already reached that part of the river where the uplands begin, and their course was between stately walls of rocky steepness, or wooded slopes, or grassy hollows, the scene forever losing and taking grand and lovely shape. Wreaths of mist hung about the tops of the loftier headlands, and long shadows draped their sides. As the night grew, lights twinkled from a lonely house here and there in the valleys; a swarm of lamps showed a town where it lay upon the lap or at the foot of the hills. Behind them stretched the great gray river, haunted with many sails; now a group of canal-boats grappled together, and having an air of coziness in their adventure upon this strange current out of their own sluggish waters, drifted out of sight; and now a smaller and slower steamer, making a laborious show of keeping up was passed, and reluctantly fell behind; along the water’s edge rattled and hooted the frequent trains. They could not tell at any time what part of the river they were on, and they could not, if they would, have made its beauty a matter of conscientious observation; but all the more, therefore, they deeply enjoyed it without reference to time or place. They felt some natural pain when they thought that they might unwittingly pass the scenes that Irving has made part of the common dream-land, and they would fair have seen the lighted windows of the house out of which a cheerful ray has penetrated to so many hearts; but being sure of nothing, as they were, they had the comfort of finding the Tappan Zee in every expanse of the river, and of discovering Sunny-Side on every pleasant slope. By virtue of this helplessness, the Hudson, without ceasing to be the Hudson, became from moment to moment all fair and stately streams upon which they had voyaged or read of voyaging, from the Nile to the Mississippi. There is no other travel like river travel; it is the perfection of movement, and one might well desire never to arrive at one’s destination. The abundance of room, the free, pure air, the constant delight of the eyes in the changing landscape, the soft tremor of the boat, so steady upon her keel, the variety of the little world on board, — all form a charm which no good heart in a sound body can resist. So, whilst the twilight held, well content, in contiguous chairs, they purred in flattery of their kindly fate, imagining different pleasures, certainly, but none greater, and tasting to its subtlest flavor the happiness conscious of itself.

Their own satisfaction, indeed, was so interesting to them in this objective light, that they had little desire to turn from its contemplation to the people around them; and when at last they did so, it was still with lingering glances of self-recognition and enjoyment. They divined rightly that one of the main conditions of their present felicity was the fact that they had seen so much of time and of the world, that they had no longer any desire to take beholding eyes, or to make any sort of impressive figure, and they understood that their prosperous love accounted as much as years and travel for this result. If they had had a loftier opinion of themselves, their indifference to others might have made them offensive; but with their modest estimate of their own value in the world, they could have all the comfort of self-sufficiency, without its vulgarity.

“O yes!” said Basil, in answer to some apostrophe to their bliss from Isabel, “it’s the greatest imaginable satisfaction to have lived past certain things. I always knew that I was not a very handsome or otherwise captivating person, but I can remember years — now blessedly remote — when I never could see a young girl without hoping she would mistake me for something of that sort. I couldn’t help desiring that some fascination of mine, which had escaped my own analysis, would have an effect upon her. I dare say all young men are so. I used to live for the possible interest I might inspire in your sex, Isabel. They controlled my movements, my attitudes; they forbade me repose; and yet I believe I was no ass, but a tolerably sensible fellow. Blessed be marriage, I am free at last! All the loveliness that exists outside of you, dearest, — and it’s mighty little, — is mere pageant to me; and I thank Heaven that I can meet the most stylish girl now upon the broad level of our common humanity. Besides, it seems to me that our experience of life has quieted us in many other ways. What a luxury it is to sit here, and reflect that we do not want any of these people to suppose us rich, or distinguished, or beautiful, or well dressed, and do not care to show off in any sort of way before them!”

This content was heightened, no doubt, by a just sense of their contrast to the group of people nearest there, — a young man of the second or third quality — and two young girls. The eldest of these was carrying on a vivacious flirtation with the young man, who was apparently an acquaintance of brief standing; the other was scarcely more than a child, and sat somewhat abashed at the sparkle of the colloquy. They were conjecturally sisters going home from some visit, and not skilled in the world, but of a certain repute in their country neighborhood for beauty and wit. The young man presently gave himself out as one who, in pursuit of trade for the dry-goods house he represented, had travelled many thousands of miles in all parts of the country. The encounter was visibly that kind of adventure which both would treasure up for future celebration to their different friends; and it had a brilliancy and interest which they could not even now consent to keep to themselves. They talked to each other and at all the company within hearing, and exchanged curt speeches which had for them all the sensation of repartee.

Young Man. They say that beauty unadorned is adorned the most.

Young Woman (bridling, and twitching her head from side to side, in the high excitement of the dialogue). Flattery is out of place.

Young Man. Well, never mind. If you don’t believe me, you ask your mother when you get home.

(Titter from the younger sister.)

Young Woman (scornfully). Umph! my mother has no control over me!

Young Man. Nobody else has, either, I should say. (Admiringly.)

Young Woman. Yes, you’ve told the truth for once, for a wonder. I’m able to take care of myself, — perfectly. (Almost hoarse with a sense of sarcastic performance.)

Young Man. “Whole team and big dog under the wagon,” as they say out
West.

Young Woman. Better a big dog than a puppy, any day.

Giggles and horror from the younger sister, sensation in the young man, and so much rapture in the young woman that she drops the key of her state-room from her hand. They both stoop, and a jocose scuffle for it ensues, after which the talk takes an autobiographical turn on the part of the young man, and drops into an unintelligible murmur. “Ah! poor Real Life, which I love, can I make others share the delight I find in thy foolish and insipid face?”

Not far from this group sat two Hebrews, one young and the other old, talking of some business out of which the latter had retired. The younger had been asked his opinion upon some point, and he was expanding with a flattered consciousness of the elder’s perception of his importance, and toadying to him with the pleasure which all young men feel in winning the favor of seniors in their vocation. “Well, as I was a-say’n’, Isaac don’t seem to haf no natcheral pent for the glothing business. Man gomes in and wands a goat,” — he seemed to be speaking of a garment and not a domestic animal,— “Isaac’ll zell him the goat he wands him to puy, and he’ll make him believe it ‘a the goat he was a lookin’ for. Well, now, that’s well enough as far as it goes; but you know and I know, Mr. Rosenthal, that that’s no way to do business. A man gan’t zugzeed that goes upon that brincible. Id’s wrong. Id’s easy enough to make a man puy the goat you want him to, if he wands a goat, but the thing is to make him puy the goat that you wand to zell when he don’t wand no goat at all. You’ve asked me what I thought and I’ve dold you. Isaac’ll never zugzeed in the redail glothing-business in the world!”

“Well,” sighed the elder, who filled his armchair quite full, and quivered with a comfortable jelly-like tremor in it, at every pulsation of the engine, “I was afraid of something of the kind. As you say, Benjamin, he don’t seem to have no pent for it. And yet I proughd him up to the business; I drained him to it, myself.”

Besides these talkers, there were scattered singly, or grouped about in twos and threes and fours, the various people one encounters on a Hudson River boat, who are on the whole different from the passengers on other rivers, though they all have features in common. There was that man of the sudden gains, who has already been typified; and there was also the smoother rich man of inherited wealth, from whom you can somehow know the former so readily. They were each attended by their several retinues of womankind, the daughters all much alike, but the mothers somewhat different. They were going to Saratoga, where perhaps the exigencies of fashion would bring them acquainted, and where the blue blood of a quarter of a century would be kind to the yesterday’s fluid of warmer hue. There was something pleasanter in the face of the hereditary aristocrat, but not so strong, nor, altogether, so admirable; particularly if you reflected that he really represented nothing in the world, no great culture, no political influence, no civic aspiration, not even a pecuniary force, nothing but a social set, an alien club-life, a tradition of dining. We live in a true fairy land after all, where the hoarded treasure turns to a heap of dry leaves. The almighty dollar defeats itself, and finally buys nothing that a man cares to have. The very highest pleasure that such an American’s money can purchase is exile, and to this rich man doubtless Europe is a twice-told tale. Let us clap our empty pockets, dearest reader, and be glad.

We can be as glad, apparently, and with the same reason as the poorly dressed young man standing near beside the guard, whose face Basil and Isabel chose to fancy that of a poet, and concerning whom, they romanced that he was going home, wherever his home was, with the manuscript of a rejected book in his pocket. They imagined him no great things of a poet, to be sure, but his pensive face claimed delicate feeling for him, and a graceful, sombre fancy, and they conjectured unconsciously caught flavors of Tennyson and Browning in his verse, with a moderner tint from Morris: for was it not a story out of mythology, with gods and heroes of the nineteenth century, that he was now carrying back from New York with him? Basil sketched from the colors of his own long-accepted disappointments a moving little picture of this poor imagined poet’s adventures; with what kindness and unkindness he had been put to shame by publishers, and how, descending from his high, hopes of a book, he had tried to sell to the magazines some of the shorter pieces out of the “And other Poems” which were to have filled up the volume. “He’s going back rather stunned and bewildered; but it’s something to have tasted the city, and its bitter may turn to sweet on his palate, at last, till he finds himself longing for the tumult that he abhors now. Poor fellow! one compassionate cut-throat of a publisher even asked him to lunch, being struck, as we are, with something fine in his face. I hope he’s got somebody who believes in him, at home. Otherwise he’d be more comfortable, for the present, if he went over the railing there.”

So the play of which they were both actors and spectators went on about them. Like all passages of life, it seemed now a grotesque mystery, with a bluntly enforced moral, now a farce of the broadest, now a latent tragedy folded in the disguises of comedy. All the elements, indeed, of either were at work there, and this was but one brief scene of the immense complex drama which was to proceed so variously in such different times and places, and to have its denouement only in eternity. The contrasts were sharp: each group had its travesty in some other; the talk of one seemed the rude burlesque, the bitter satire of the next; but of all these parodies none was so terribly effective as the two women, who sat in the midst of the company, yet were somehow distinct from the rest. One wore the deepest black of widowhood, the other was dressed in bridal white, and they were both alike awful in their mockery of guiltless sorrow and guiltless joy. They were not old, but the soul of youth was dead in their pretty, lamentable faces, and ruin ancient as sin looked from their eyes; their talk and laughter seemed the echo of an innumerable multitude of the lost haunting the world in every land and time, each solitary forever, yet all bound together in the unity of an imperishable slavery and shame.

What a stale effect! What hackneyed characters! Let us be glad the night drops her curtain upon the cheap spectacle, and shuts these with the other actors from our view.

Within the cabin, through which Basil and Isabel now slowly moved, there were numbers of people lounging about on the sofas, in various attitudes of talk or vacancy; and at the tables there were others reading “Lothair,” a new book in the remote epoch of which I write, and a very fashionable book indeed. There was in the air that odor of paint and carpet which prevails on steamboats; the glass drops of the chandeliers ticked softly against each other, as the vessel shook with her respiration, like a comfortable sleeper, and imparted a delicious feeling of coziness and security to our travellers.

A few hours later they struggled awake at the sharp sound of the pilot’s bell signaling the engineer to slow the boat. There was a moment of perfect silence; then all the drops of the chandeliers in the saloon clashed musically together; then fell another silence; and at last came wild cries for help, strongly qualified with blasphemies and curses. “Send out a boat!” “There was a woman aboard that steamboat!” “Lower your boats!” “Run a craft right down, with your big boat!” “Send out a boat and pick up the crew!” The cries rose and sank, and finally ceased; through the lattice of the state-room window some lights shone faintly on the water at a distance.

“Wait here, Isabel!” said her husband. “We’ve run down a boat. We don’t seem hurt; but I’ll go see. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Isabel had emerged into a world of dishabille, a world wildly unbuttoned and unlaced, where it was the fashion for ladies to wear their hair down their backs, and to walk about in their stockings, and to speak to each other without introduction. The place with which she had felt so familiar a little while before was now utterly estranged. There was no motion of the boat, and in the momentary suspense a quiet prevailed, in which those grotesque shapes of disarray crept noiselessly round whispering panic-stricken conjectures. There was no rushing to and fro, nor tumult of any kind, and there was not a man to be seen, for apparently they had all gone like Basil to learn the extent of the calamity. A mist of sleep involved the whole, and it was such a topsy-turvy world that it would have seemed only another dream-land, but that it was marked for reality by one signal fact. With the rest appeared the woman in bridal white and the woman in widow’s black, and there, amidst the fright that made all others friends, and for aught that most knew, in the presence of death itself, these two moved together shunned and friendless.

Somehow, even before Basil returned, it had become known to Isabel and the rest that their own steamer had suffered no harm, but that she had struck and sunk another convoying a flotilla of canal boats, from which those alarming cries and curses had come. The steamer was now lying by for the small boats she had sent out to pick up the crew of the sunken vessel.

“Why, I only heard a little tinkling of the chandeliers,” said one of the ladies. “Is it such a very alight matter to run down another boat and sink it?”

She appealed indirectly to Basil, who answered lightly, “I don’t think you ladies ought to have been disturbed at all. In running over a common tow-boat on a perfectly clear night like this there should have been no noise and no perceptible jar. They manage better on the Mississippi, and both boats often go down without waking the lightest sleeper on board.”

The ladies, perhaps from a deficient sense of humor, listened with undisguised displeasure to this speech. It dispersed them, in fact; some turned away to bivouac for the rest of the night upon the arm-chairs and sofas, while others returned to their rooms. With the latter went Isabel. “Lock me in, Basil,” she said, with a bold meekness, “and if anything more happens don’t wake me till the last moment.” It was hard to part from him, but she felt that his vigil would somehow be useful to the boat, and she confidingly fell into a sleep that lasted till daylight.

Meantime, her husband, on whom she had tacitly devolved so great a responsibility, went forward to the promenade in front of the saloon, in hopes of learning something more of the catastrophe from the people whom he had already found gathered there.

A large part of the passengers were still there, seated or standing about in earnest colloquy. They were in that mood which follows great excitement, and in which the feeblest-minded are sure to lead the talk. At such times one feels that a sensible frame of mind is unsympathetic, and if expressed, unpopular, or perhaps not quite safe; and Basil, warned by his fate with the ladies, listened gravely to the voice of the common imbecility and incoherence.

The principal speaker was a tall person, wearing a silk travelling-cap. He had a face of stupid benignity and a self-satisfied smirk; and he was formally trying to put at his ease, and hopelessly confusing the loutish youth before him. “You say you saw the whole accident, and you’re probably the only passenger that did see it. You’ll be the most important witness at the trial,” he added, as if there would ever be any trial about it. “Now, how did the tow-boat hit us?”

“Well, she came bows on.”

“Ah! bows on,” repeated the other, with great satisfaction; and a little murmur of “Bows on!” ran round the listening circle.

“That is,” added the witness, “it seemed as if we struck her amidships, and cut her in two, and sunk her.”

“Just so,” continued the examiner, accepting the explanation, “bows on.
Now I want to ask if you saw our captain or any of the crew about?”

“Not a soul,” said the witness, with the solemnity of a man already on oath.

“That’ll do,” exclaimed the other. “This gentleman’s experience coincides exactly with my own. I didn’t see the collision, but I did see the cloud of steam from the sinking boat, and I saw her go down. There wasn’t an officer to be found anywhere on board our boat. I looked about for the captain and the mate myself, and couldn’t find either of them high or low.”

“The officers ought all to have been sitting here on the promenade deck,” suggested one ironical spirit in the crowd, but no one noticed him.

The gentleman in the silk travelling-cap now took a chair, and a number of sympathetic listeners drew their chairs about him, and then began an interchange of experience, in which each related to the last particular all that he felt, thought, and said, and, if married, what his wife felt, thought, and said, at the moment of the calamity. They turned the disaster over and over in their talk, and rolled it under their tongues. Then they reverted to former accidents in which they had been concerned; and the silk-capped gentleman told, to the common admiration, of a fearful escape of his, on the Erie Road, from being thrown down a steep embankment fifty feet high by a piece of rock that had fallen on the track. “Now just see, gentlemen, what a little thing, humanly speaking, life depends upon. If that old woman had been able to sleep, and hadn’t sent that boy down to warn the train, we should have run into the rock and been dashed to pieces. The passengers made up a purse for the boy, and I wrote a full account of it to the papers.”

“Well,” said one of the group, a man in a hard hat, “I never lie down on a steamboat or a railroad train. I want to be ready for whatever happens.”

The others looked at this speaker with interest, as one who had invented a safe method of travel.

“I happened to be up to-night, but I almost always undress and go to bed, just as if I were in my own house,” said the gentleman of the silk cap.

“I don’t say your way isn’t the best, but that’s my way.”

The champions of the rival systems debated their merits with suavity and mutual respect, but they met with scornful silence a compromising spirit who held that it was better to throw off your coat and boots, but keep your pantaloons on. Meanwhile, the steamer was hanging idle upon the current, against which it now and then stirred a careless wheel, still waiting for the return of the small boats. Thin gray clouds, through rifts of which a star sparkled keenly here and there, veiled the heavens; shadowy bluffs loomed up on either hand; in a hollow on the left twinkled a drowsy little town; a beautiful stillness lay on all.

After an hour’s interval a shout was heard from far down the river; then later the plash of oars; then a cry hailing the approaching boats, and the answer, “All safe!” Presently the boats had come alongside, and the passengers crowded down to the guard to learn the details of the search. Basil heard a hollow, moaning, gurgling sound, regular as that of the machinery, for some note of which he mistook it. “Clear the gangway there!” shouted a gruff voice; “man scalded here!” And a burden was carried by from which fluttered, with its terrible regularity, that utterance of mortal anguish.

Basil went again to the forward promenade, and sat down to see the morning come.

The boat swiftly ascended the current, and presently the steeper shores were left behind and the banks fell away in long upward sloping fields, with farm-houses and with stacks of harvest dimly visible in the generous expanses. By and by they passed a fisherman drawing his nets, and bending from his boat, there near Albany, N. Y., in the picturesque immortal attitudes of Raphael’s Galilean fisherman; and now a flush mounted the pale face of the east, and through the dewy coolness of the dawn there came, more to the sight than any other sense, a vague menace of heat. But as yet the air was deliciously fresh and sweet, and Basil bathed his weariness in it, thinking with a certain luxurious compassion of the scalded man, and how he was to fare that day. This poor wretch seemed of another order of beings, as the calamitous always seem to the happy, and Basil’s pity was quite an abstraction; which, again, amused and shocked him, and he asked his heart of bliss to consider of sorrow a little more earnestly as the lot of all men, and not merely of an alien creature here and there. He dutifully tried to imagine another issue to the disaster of the night, and to realize himself suddenly bereft of her who so filled his life. He bade his soul remember that, in the security of sleep, Death had passed them both so close that his presence might well have chilled their dreams, as the iceberg that grazes the ship in the night freezes all the air about it. But it was quite idle: where love was, life only was; and sense and spirit alike put aside the burden that he would have laid upon them; his revery reflected with delicious caprice the looks, the tones, the movements that he loved, and bore him far away from the sad images that he had invited to mirror themselves in it.

IV. A DAY’S RAILROADING

Happiness has commonly a good appetite; and the thought of the fortunately ended adventures of the night, the fresh morning air, and the content of their own hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the boat reached Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that they debated with spirit the question of breakfast and the best place of breakfasting in a city which neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive and sketchy way.

They decided at last, in view of the early departure of the train, and the probability that they would be more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast at the station, and thither they went and took places at one of the many tables within, where they seemed to have been expected only by the flies. The waitress plainly had not looked for them, and for a time found their presence so incredible that she would not acknowledge the rattling that Basil was obliged to make on his glass. Then it appeared that the cook would not believe in them, and he did not send them, till they were quite faint, the peppery and muddy draught which impudently affected to be coffee, the oily slices of fugacious potatoes slipping about in their shallow dish and skillfully evading pursuit, the pieces of beef that simulated steak, the hot, greasy biscuit, steaming evilly up into the face when opened, and then soddening into masses of condensed dyspepsia.

The wedding-journeyers looked at each other with eyes of sad amaze. They bowed themselves for a moment to the viands, and then by an equal impulse refrained. They were sufficiently young, they were happy, they were hungry; nature is great and strong, but art is greater, and before these triumphs of the cook at the Albany depot appetite succumbed. By a terrible tour de force they swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor in their cups, and then speculated fantastically upon the character and history of the materials of that breakfast.

Presently Isabel paused, played a little with her knife, and, after a moment looked up at her husband with an arch regard and said: “I was just thinking of a small station somewhere in the South of France where our train once stopped for breakfast. I remember the freshness and brightness of everything on the little tables, — the plates, the napkins, the gleaming half-bottles of wine. They seemed to have been preparing that breakfast for us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly seated before they served us with great cups of ‘cafe-au-lait’, and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and potatoes, — such potatoes! Dear me, how little I ate of it! I wish, for once, I’d had your appetite, Basil; I do indeed.”

She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despite the tragical contrast her words had suggested, Basil finally joined. So much amazement had probably never been got before out of the misery inflicted in that place; but their lightness did not at all commend them. The waitress had not liked it from the first, and had served them with reluctance; and the proprietor did not like it, and kept his eye upon them as if he believed them about to escape without payment. Here, then, they had enforced a great fact of travelling, — that people who serve the public are kindly and pleasant in proportion as they serve it well. The unjust and the inefficient have always that consciousness of evil which will not let a man forgive his victim, or like him to be cheerful.

Our friends, however, did not heat themselves over the fact. There was already such heat from without, even at eight o’clock in the morning, that they chose to be as cool as possible in mind, and they placidly took their places in the train, which had been made up for departure. They had deliberately rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel. Now, in reward, they found themselves quite comfortable in the common passenger-car, and disposed to view the scenery, into which they struck an hour after leaving the city, with much complacency. There was sufficient draught through the open window to make the heat tolerable, and the great brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil picturesqueness, and it is in honor of our friends that I say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any considerable hills, but everywhere generous slopes and pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a grazing country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River rippling down through all, and at frequent intervals the life of the canal, now near, now far away, with the lazy boats that seem not to stir, and the horses that the train passes with a whirl, and, leaves slowly stepping forward and swiftly slipping backward. There are farms that had once, or still have, the romance to them of being Dutch farms, — if there is any romance in that, — and one conjectures a Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain. Spaces of woodland here and there dapple the slopes, and the cozy red farm-houses repose by the side of their capacious red barns. Truly, there is no ground on which to defend the idleness, and yet as the train strives furiously onward amid these scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy to loiter behind it, and to saunter at will up and down the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard gates, and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies who have done their morning’s work and have leisure to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old ladies, with decent caps upon their gray hair, then I do not complain if the drink is brought me by some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of Washington Irving’s pages, with no cap on her golden braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes an attitude of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I have done drinking. In the same easily contented spirit as I lounge through the barn-yard, if I find the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do not mind a meadow-lark’s singing in the top of the elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the watch-dogs know me for a harmless person, and will not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in the sun before the gate. At all the places, I have the people keep bees, and, in the garden full of worthy pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable world as hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o’clocks, near a great bed in which the asparagus has gone to sleep for the season with a dream of delicate spray hanging over it. I walk unmolested through the farmer’s tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous seat of his voluble mowing-machine, and learn to my heart’s content that his name begins with Van, and that his family has owned that farm ever since the days of the Patroon; which I dare say is not true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hayfield, and wake up on the tow-path of the canal beside that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you cannot count only, because they are so many. He never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his anatomical interest. The captain hospitably asks me on board, with a twist of the rudder swinging the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can step on. She is laden with flour from the valley of the Genesee, and may have started on her voyage shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a fiery-haired lady of imperfect temper; and the cabin, which I explore, is plainly furnished with a cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but profane language is allowed on board; and so, in a life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide imperceptibly down the canal, unvexed by the far-off future of arrival.

Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental pastimes, but I am aware that less superficial spirits could not be satisfied with them, and I can not pretend that my wedding-journeyers were so.

They cast an absurd poetry over the landscape; they invited themselves to be reminded of passages of European travel by it; and they placed villas and castles and palaces upon all the eligible building-sites. Ashamed of these devices, presently, Basil patriotically tried to reconstruct the Dutch and Indian past of the Mohawk Valley, but here he was foiled by the immense ignorance of his wife, who, as a true American woman, knew nothing of the history of her own country, and less than nothing of the barbarous regions beyond the borders of her native province. She proved a bewildering labyrinth of error concerning the events which Basil mentioned; and she had never even heard of the massacres by the French and Indians at Schenectady, which he in his boyhood had known so vividly that he was scalped every night in his dreams, and woke up in the morning expecting to see marks of the tomahawk on the head-board. So, failing at last to extract any sentiment from the scenes without, they turned their faces from the window, and looked about them for amusement within the car.

It was in all respects an ordinary carful of human beings, and it was perhaps the more worthy to be studied on that account. As in literature the true artist will shun the use even of real events if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere observer of man will not desire to look upon the heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in his habitual moods of vacancy and tiresomeness. To me, at any rate, he is at such times very precious; and I never perceive him to be so much a man and a brother as when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, unaffected dullness. Then I am able to enter confidently into his life and inhabit there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by his stinted inspirations, to share his foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse selfishness. Yes, it is a very amusing world, if you do not refuse to be amused; and our friends were very willing to be entertained. They delighted in the precise, thick-fingered old ladies who bought sweet apples of the boys come aboard with baskets, and who were so long in finding the right change, that our travellers, leaping in thought with the boys from the moving train, felt that they did so at the peril of their lives. Then they were interested in people who went out and found their friends waiting for them, or else did not find them, and wandered disconsolately up and down before the country stations, carpet-bag in hand; in women who came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands with or sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got seats for them, and placed their bags or their babies in their laps, and turned for a nod at the door; in young ladies who were seen to places by young men the latter seemed not to care if the train did go off with them, and then threw up their windows and talked with girl-friends, on the platform without, till the train began to move, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and moist red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it, and could not calm themselves to the dull level of the travel around them; in the conductor, coldly and inaccessibly vigilant, as he went his rounds, reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his head from time, to time, and listened with a faint, sarcastic smile to the questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some information out of him; in the trainboy, who passed through on his many errands with prize candies, gum-drops, pop-corn, papers and magazines, and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impartiality, or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural perception of character in those who received them.

A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as well as the traits common to all railway travel; and our friends decided that this was not a very well-dressed company, and would contrast with the people on an express-train between Boston and New York to no better advantage than these would show beside the average passengers between London and Paris. And it seems true that on a westering’ line, the blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into increasing informality of costume. I speak of the undressful sex alone: woman, wherever she is, appears in the last attainable effects of fashion, which are now all but telegraphic and universal. But most of the passengers here were men, and they mere plainly of the free-and-easy West rather than the dapper East. They wore faces thoughtful with the problem of buying cheap and selling dear, and they could be known by their silence from the loquacious, acquaintance-making way-travellers. In these, the mere coming aboard seemed to beget an aggressively confidential mood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any means of relieving their ennui; or they felt that they might here indulge safely in the pleasures of autobiography, so dear to all of us; or else, in view of the many possible catastrophes, they desired to leave some little memory of themselves behind. At any rate, whenever the train stopped, the wedding-journeyers caught fragments of the personal histories of their fellow-passengers which had been rehearsing to those that sat next the narrators. It was no more than fair that these should somewhat magnify themselves, and put the best complexion on their actions and the worst upon their sufferings; that they should all appear the luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people that ever were, and should all have made or lost the most money. There was a prevailing desire among them to make out that they came from or were going to same very large place; and our friends fancied an actual mortification in the face of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope (or some other insignificant classical station, in the ancient Greek and Roman part of New York State), after having listened to the life of a somewhat rustic-looking person who had described himself as belonging near New York City.

Basil also found diversion in the tender couples, who publicly comported themselves as if in a sylvan solitude, and, as it had been on the bank of some umbrageous stream, far from the ken of envious or unsympathetic eyes, reclined upon each other’s shoulders and slept; but Isabel declared that this behavior was perfectly indecent. She granted, of course, that they were foolish, innocent people, who meant no offense, and did not feel guilty of an impropriety, but she said that this sort of thing was a national reproach. If it were merely rustic lovers, she should not care so much; but you saw people who ought to know better, well-dressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotion in the face of the world, and going to sleep on each other’s shoulders on every railroad train. It was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really infamous. Before she would allow herself to do such a thing she would — well, she hardly knew what she would not do; she would have a divorce, at any rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh at it; and he would make her hate him if he kept on.

From the seat behind their own they were now made listeners to the history of a ten weeks’ typhoid fever, from the moment when the narrator noticed that he had not felt very well for a day or two back, and all at once a kind of shiver took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly insensible, and could eat nothing but a little pounded ice — and his wife — a small woman, too — used to lift him back and forth between the bed and sofa like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half the time whether he was dead or alive. This history, from which not the smallest particular or the least significant symptom of the case was omitted, occupied an hour in recital, and was told, as it seemed, for the entertainment of one who had been five minutes before it began a stranger to the historian.

At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel wailed forth in accents of desperation the words, “O, disgusting!” The monotony of the narrative in the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat of the day, had lulled her into slumbers from which she awoke at the stopping of the train, to find her head resting tenderly upon her husband’s shoulder.

She confronted his merriment with eyes of mournful rebuke; but as she could not find him, or the harshest construction, in the least to blame, she was silent.

“Never mind, dear, never mind,” he coaxed, “you were really not responsible. It was fatigue, destiny, the spite of fortune, — whatever you like. In the case of the others, whom you despise so justly, I dare say it is sheer, disgraceful affection. But see that ravishing placard, swinging from the roof: ‘This train stops twenty minutes for dinner at Utica.’ In a few minutes more we shall be at Utica. If they have anything edible there, it shall never contract my powers. I could dine at the Albany station, even.”

In a little while they found themselves in an airy, comfortable dining-room, eating a dinner, which it seemed to them France in the flush of her prosperity need not have blushed to serve; for if it wanted a little in the last graces of art, it redeemed itself in abundance, variety, and wholesomeness. At the elbow of every famishing passenger stood a beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen apron and jacket, serving him with that alacrity and kindliness and grace which make the negro waiter the master, not the slave of his calling, which disenthrall it of servility, and constitute him your eager host, not your menial, for the moment. From table to table passed a calming influence in the person of the proprietor, who, as he took his richly earned money, checked the rising fears of the guests by repeated proclamations that there was plenty of time, and that he would give them due warning before the train started. Those who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beak and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon everything in reach, remained to eat like Christians; and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman, who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made a good dinner in spite of himself.

“O Basil, Basil!” cried Isabel, when the train was again in motion, “have we really dined once more? It seems too good to be true. Cleanliness, plenty, wholesomeness, civility! Yes, as you say, they cannot be civil where they are not just; honesty and courtesy go together; and wherever they give you outrageous things to eat, they add indigestible insults. Basil, dear, don’t be jealous; I shall never meet him again; but I’m in love with that black waiter at our table. I never saw such perfect manners, such a winning and affectionate politeness. He made me feel that every mouthful I ate was a personal favor to him. What a complete gentleman. There ought never to be a white waiter. None but negroes are able to render their service a pleasure and distinction to you.”

So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness to be satisfied, a homage perhaps beyond its desert to the good dinner and the decent service of it. But here they erred in the right direction, and I find nothing more admirable in their behavior throughout a wedding journey which certainly had its trials, than their willingness to make the very heat of whatever would suffer itself to be made anything at all of. They celebrated its pleasures with magnanimous excess, they passed over its griefs with a wise forbearance. That which they found the most difficult of management was the want of incident for the most part of the time; and I who write their history might also sink under it, but that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical, in this respect. I even imagine that ideal reader for whom one writes as yawning over these barren details with the life-like weariness of an actual travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they fell back upon the story of their love, which they were never tired of hearing as they severally knew it. Let it not be a reproach to human nature or to me if I say that there was something in the comfort of having well dined which now touched the springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that they had never so rejoiced in these tender reminiscences.

They had planned to stop over at Rochester till the morrow, that they might arrive at Niagara by daylight, and at Utica they had suddenly resolved to make the rest of the day’s journey in a drawing-room car. The change gave them an added reason for content; and they realized how much they had previously sacrificed to the idea of travelling in the most American manner, without achieving it after all, for this seemed a touch of Americanism beyond the old-fashioned car. They reclined in luxury upon the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs; they surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of the flying-parlor in which they sat, or turned their contented regard through the broad plate-glass windows upon the landscape without. They said that none but Americans or enchanted princes in the “Arabian Nights” ever travelled in such state; and when the stewards of the car came round successively with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret-punches, they felt a heightened assurance that they were either enchanted princes — or Americans. There were more ladies and more fashion than in the other cars; and prettily dressed children played about on the carpet; but the general appearance of the passengers hardly suggested greater wealth than elsewhere; and they were plainly in that car because they were of the American race, which finds nothing too good for it that its money can buy.

V. THE ENCHANTED CITY, AND BEYOND.

They knew none of the hotels in Rochester, and they had chosen a certain one in reliance upon their handbook. When they named it, there stepped forth a porter of an incredibly cordial and pleasant countenance, who took their travelling-bags, and led them to the omnibus. As they were his only passengers, the porter got inside with them, and seeing their interest in the streets through which they rode, he descanted in a strain of cheerful pride upon the city’s prosperity and character, and gave the names of the people who lived in the finer houses, just as if it had been an Old-World town, and he some eager historian expecting reward for his comment upon it. He cast quite a glamour over Rochester, so that in passing a body of water, bordered by houses, and overlooked by odd balconies and galleries, and crossed in the distance by a bridge upon which other houses were built, they boldly declared, being at their wit’s end for a comparison, and taken with the unhoped-for picturesqueness, that it put them in mind of Verona. Thus they reached their hotel in almost a spirit of foreign travel, and very willing to verify the pleasant porter’s assurance that they would like it, for everybody liked it; and it was with a sudden sinking of the heart that Basil beheld presiding over the register the conventional American hotel clerk. He was young, he had a neat mustache and well-brushed hair; jeweled studs sparkled in his shirt-front, and rings on his white hands; a gentle disdain of the travelling public breathed from his person in the mystical odors of Ihlang ihlang. He did not lift his haughty head to look at the wayfarer who meekly wrote his name in the register; he did not answer him when he begged for a cool room; he turned to the board on which the keys hung, and, plucking one from it, slid it towards Basil on the marble counter, touched a bell for a call-boy, whistled a bar of Offenbach, and as he wrote the number of the room against Basil’s name, said to a friend lounging near him, as if resuming a conversation, “Well, she’s a mighty pooty gul, any way, Chawley!”

When I reflect that this was a type of the hotel clerk throughout the United States, that behind unnumbered registers at this moment he is snubbing travellers into the dust, and that they are suffering and perpetuating him, I am lost in wonder at the national meekness. Not that I am one to refuse the humble pie his jeweled fingers offer me. Abjectly I take my key, and creep off up stairs after the call-boy, and try to give myself the genteel air of one who has not been stepped upon. But I think homicidal things all the same, and I rejoice that in the safety of print I can cry out against the despot, whom I have not the presence to defy. “You vulgar and cruel little soul,” I say, and I imagine myself breathing the words to his teeth, “why do you treat a weary stranger with this ignominy? I am to pay well for what I get, and I shall not complain of that. But look at me, and own my humanity; confess by some civil action, by some decent phrase, that I have rights and that they shall be respected. Answer my proper questions; respond to my fair demands. Do not slide my key at me; do not deny me the poor politeness of a nod as you give it in my hand. I am not your equal; few men are; but I shall not presume upon your clemency. Come, I also am human!”

Basil found that, for his sin in asking for a cool room, the clerk had given them a chamber into which the sun had been shining the whole afternoon; but when his luggage had been put in it seemed useless to protest, and like a true American, like you, like me, he shrank from asserting himself. When the sun went down it would be cool enough; and they turned their thoughts to supper, not venturing to hope that, as it proved, the handsome clerk was the sole blemish of the house.

Isabel viewed with innocent surprise the evidences of luxury afforded by all the appointments of a hotel so far west of Boston, and they both began to feel that natural ease and superiority which an inn always inspires in its guests, and which our great hotels, far from impairing, enhance in flattering degree; in fact, the clerk once forgotten, I protest, for my own part, I am never more conscious of my merits and riches in any other place. One has there the romance of being a stranger and a mystery to every one else, and lives in the alluring possibility of not being found out a most ordinary person.

They were so late in coming to the supper-room, that they found themselves alone in it. At the door they had a bow from the head-waiter, who ran before them and drew out chairs for them at a table, and signaled waiters to serve them, first laying before them with a gracious flourish the bill of fare.

A force of servants flocked about them, as if to contest the honor of ordering their supper; one set upon the table a heaping vase of strawberries, another flanked it with flagons of cream, a third accompanied it with plates of varied flavor and device; a fourth obsequiously smoothed the table-cloth; a fifth, the youngest of the five, with folded arms stood by and admired the satisfaction the rest were giving. When these had been dispatched for steak, for broiled white-fish of the lakes, — noblest and delicatest of the fish that swim, — for broiled chicken, for fried potatoes, for mums, for whatever the lawless fancy, and ravening appetites of the wayfarers could suggest, this fifth waiter remained to tempt them to further excess, and vainly proposed some kind of eggs, — fried eggs, poached eggs, scrambled eggs, boiled eggs, or omelette.

“O, you’re sure, dearest, that this isn’t a vision of fairy-land, which will vanish presently, and leave us empty and forlorn?” plaintively murmured Isabel, as the menial train reappeared, bearing the supper they had ordered and set it smoking down.

Suddenly a look of apprehension dawned upon her face, and she let fall her knife and fork. “You don’t think, Basil,” she faltered, “that they could have found out we’re a bridal party, and that they’re serving us so magnificently because — because — O, I shall be miserable every moment we’re here!” she concluded desperately.

She looked, indeed, extremely wretched for a woman with so much broiled white-fish on her plate, and such a banquet array about her; and her husband made haste to reassure her. “You’re still demoralized, Isabel, by our sufferings at the Albany depot, and you exaggerate the blessings we enjoy, though I should be sorry to undervalue them. I suspect it’s the custom to use people well at this hotel; or if we are singled out for uncommon favor, I think I can explain the cause. It has been discovered by the register that we are from Boston, and we are merely meeting the reverence, affection, and homage which the name everywhere commands!

“It’s our fortune to represent for the time being the intellectual and moral virtue of Boston. This supper is not a tribute to you as a bride, but as a Bostonian.”

It was a cheap kind of raillery, to be sure, but it served. It kindled the local pride of Isabel to self-defense, and in the distraction of the effort she forgot her fears; she returned with renewed appetite to the supper, and in its excellence they both let fall their dispute, — which ended, of course, in Basil’s abject confession that Boston was the best place in the world, and nothing but banishment could make him live elsewhere, — and gave themselves up, as usual, to the delight of being just what and where they were. At last, the natural course brought them to the strawberries, and when the fifth waiter approached from the corner of the table at which he stood, to place the vase near them, he did not retire at once, but presently asked if they were from the West.

Isabel smiled, and Basil answered that they were from the East.

He faltered at this, as if doubtful of the result if he went further, but took heart, then, and asked, “Don’t you think this is a pretty nice hotel” — hastily adding as a concession of the probable existence of much finer things at the East— “for a small hotel?”

They imagined this waiter as new to his station in life, as perhaps just risen to it from some country tavern, and unable to repress his exultation in what seemed their sympathetic presence. They were charmed to have invited his guileless confidence, to have evoked possibly all the simple poetry of his soul; it was what might have happened in Italy, only there so much naivete would have meant money; they looked at each other with rapture and Basil answered warmly while the waiter flushed as at a personal compliment: “Yes, it’s a nice hotel; one of the best I ever saw, East or West, in Europe or America.”

They rose and left the room, and were bowed out by the head-waiter.

“How perfectly idyllic!” cried Isabel. “Is this Rochester, New York, or is it some vale of Arcady? Let’s go out and see.”

They walked out into the moonlit city, up and down streets that seemed very stately and fine, amidst a glitter of shop-window lights; and then, less of their own motion than of mere error, they quitted the business quarter, and found themselves in a quiet avenue of handsome residences, — the Beacon Street of Rochester, whatever it was called. They said it was a night and a place for lovers, for none but lovers, for lovers newly plighted, and they made believe to bemoan themselves that, hold each other dear as they would, the exaltation, the thrill, the glory of their younger love was gone. Some of the houses had gardened spaces about them, from which stole, like breaths of sweetest and saddest regret, the perfume of midsummer flowers, — the despair of the rose for the bud. As they passed a certain house, a song fluttered out of the open window and ceased, the piano warbled at the final rush of fingers over its chords, and they saw her with her fingers resting lightly on the keys, and her graceful head lifted to look into his; they saw him with his arm yet stretched across to the leaves of music he had been turning, and his face lowered to meet her gaze.

“Ah, Basil, I wish it was we, there!”

And if they knew that we, on our wedding journey, stood outside, would not they wish it was they, here?”

“I suppose so, dearest, and yet, once-upon-a-time was sweet. Pass on; and let us see what charm we shall find next in this enchanted city.”

“Yes, it is an enchanted city to us,” mused Basil, aloud, as they wandered on, “and all strange cities are enchanted. What is Rochester to the Rochesterese? A place of a hundred thousand people, as we read in our guide, an immense flour interest, a great railroad entrepot, an unrivaled nursery trade, a university, two commercial colleges, three collegiate institutes, eight or ten newspapers, and a free library. I dare say any respectable resident would laugh at us sentimentalizing over his city. But Rochester is for us, who don’t know it at all, a city of any time or country, moonlit, filled with lovers hovering over piano-fortes, of a palatial hotel with pastoral waiters and porter, — a city of handsome streets wrapt in beautiful quiet and dreaming of the golden age. The only definite association with it in our minds is the tragically romantic thought that here Sam Patch met his fate.”

“And who in the world was Sam Patch?

“Isabel, your ignorance of all that an American woman should be proud of distresses me. Have you really, then, never heard of the man who invented the saying, ‘Some things can be done as well as others,’ and proved it by jumping over Niagara Falls twice? Spurred on by this belief, he attempted the leap of the Genesee Falls. The leap was easy enough, but the coming up again was another matter. He failed in that. It was the one thing that could not be done as well as others.”

“Dreadful!” said Isabel, with the cheerfullest satisfaction. “But what has all that to do with Rochester?”

“Now, my dear, you don’t mean to say you didn’t know that the Genesee Falls were at Rochester? Upon my word, I’m ashamed. Why, we’re within ten minutes’ walk of them now.”

“Then walk to them at once!” cried Isabel, wholly unabashed, and in fact unable to see what he had to be ashamed of. “Actually, I believe you would have allowed me to leave Rochester without telling me the falls were here, if you hadn’t happened to think of Sam Patch.”

Saying this, she persuaded herself that a chief object of their journey had been to visit the scene of Sam Patch’s fatal exploit, and she drew Basil with a nervous swiftness in the direction of the railroad station, beyond which he said were the falls. Presently, after threading their way among a multitude of locomotives, with and without trains attached, that backed and advanced, or stood still, hissing impatiently on every side, they passed through the station to a broad planking above the river on the other side, and thence, after encounter of more locomotives, they found, by dint of much asking, a street winding up the hill-side to the left, and leading to the German Bierhaus that gives access to the best view of the cataract.

The Americans have characteristically bordered the river with manufactures, making every drop work its passage to the brink; while the Germans have as characteristically made use of the beauty left over, and have built a Bierhaus where they may regale both soul and sense in the presence of the cataract. Our travellers might, in another mood and place, have thought it droll to arrive at that sublime spectacle through a Bierhaus, but in this enchanted city it seemed to have a peculiar fitness.

A narrow corridor gave into a wide festival space occupied by many tables, each of which was surrounded by a group of clamorous Germans of either sex and every age, with tall beakers of beaded lager before them, and slim flasks of Rhenish; overhead flamed the gas in globes of varicolored glass; the walls were painted like those of such haunts in the fatherland; and the wedding-journeyers were fair to linger on their way, to dwell upon that scene of honest enjoyment, to inhale the mingling odors of beer and of pipes, and of the pungent cheeses in which the children of the fatherland delight. Amidst the inspiriting clash of plates and glasses, the rattle of knives and forks, and the hoarse rush of gutturals, they could catch the words Franzosen, Kaiser, Konig, and Schlacht, and they knew that festive company to be exulting in the first German triumphs of the war, which were then the day’s news; they saw fists shaken at noses in fierce exchange of joy, arms tossed abroad in wild congratulation, and health-pouring goblets of beer lifted in air. Then they stepped into the moonlight again, and heard only the solemn organ stops of the cataract. Through garden-ground they were led by the little maid, their guide, to a small pavilion that stood on the edge of the precipitous shore, and commanded a perfect view of the falls. As they entered this pavilion, a youth and maiden, clearly lovers, passed out, and they were left alone with that sublime presence. Something of definiteness was to be desired in the spectacle, but there was ample compensation in the mystery with which the broad effulgence and the dense unluminous shadows of the moonshine invested it. The light touched all the tops of the rapids, that seemed to writhe sway from the brink of the cataract, and then desperately breaking and perishing to fall, the white disembodied ghosts of rapids, down to the bottom of the vast and deep ravine through which the river rushed away. Now the waters seemed to mass themselves a hundred feet high in a wall of snowy compactness, now to disperse into their multitudinous particles and hang like some vaporous cloud from the cliff. Every moment renewed the vision of beauty in some rare and fantastic shape; and its loveliness isolated it, in spite of the great town on the other shore, the station with its bridge and its trains, the mills that supplied their feeble little needs from the cataract’s strength.

At last Basil pointed out the table-rock in the middle of the fall, from which Sam Patch had made his fatal leap; but Isabel refused to admit that tragical figure to the honors of her emotions. “I don’t care for him!” she said fiercely. “Patch! What a name to be linked in our thoughts with this superb cataract.”

“Well, Isabel, I think you are very unjust. It’s as good a name as Leander, to my thinking, and it was immortalized in support of a great idea, the feasibility of all things; while Leander’s has come down to us as that of the weak victim of a passion. We shall never have a poetry of our own till we get over this absurd reluctance from facts, till we make the ideal embrace and include the real, till we consent to face the music in our simple common names, and put Smith into a lyric and Jones into a tragedy. The Germans are braver than we, and in them you find facts and dreams continually blended and confronted. Here is a fortunate illustration. The people we met coming out of this pavilion were lovers, and they had been here sentimentalizing on this superb cataract, as you call it, with which my heroic Patch is not worthy to be named. No doubt they had been quoting Uhland or some other of their romantic poets, perhaps singing some of their tender German love-songs, — the tenderest, unearthliest love-songs in the world. At the same time they did not disdain the matter-of-fact corporeity in which their sentiment was enshrined; they fed it heartily and abundantly with the banquet whose relics we see here.”

On a table before them stood a pair of beer-glasses, in the bottoms of which lurked scarce the foam of the generous liquor lately brimming them; some shreds of sausage, some rinds of Swiss cheese, bits of cold ham, crusts of bread, and the ashes of a pipe.

Isabel shuddered at the spectacle, but made no comment, and Basil went on: “Do you suppose they scorned the idea of Sam Patch as they gazed upon the falls? On the contrary, I’ve no doubt that he recalled to her the ballad which a poet of their language made about him. It used to go the rounds of the German newspapers, and I translated it, a long while ago, when I thought that I too was in ‘Arkadien geboren’.

      ’In the Bierhauagarten I linger
        By the Falls of the Geneses:
        From the Table-Rock in the middle
        Leaps a figure bold and free.

       Aloof in the air it rises
        O’er the rush, the plunge, the death;
        On the thronging banks of the river
        There is neither pulse nor breath.

       Forever it hovers and poises
        Aloof in the moonlit air;
        As light as mist from the rapids,
        As heavy as nightmare.

       In anguish I cry to the people,
        The long-since vanished hosts;
        I see them stretch forth in answer,
        The helpless hands of ghosts.’”

“I once met the poet who wrote this. He drank too much beer.”

“I don’t see that he got in the name of Sam Patch, after all,” said
Isabel.

“O yes; he did; but I had to yield to our taste, and where he said, I ‘Springt der Sam Patsch kuhn and frei’,’ I made it ‘Leaps a figure bold and free.’”

As they passed through the house on their way out, they saw the youth and maiden they had met at the pavilion door. They were seated at a table; two glasses of beer towered before them; on their plates were odorous crumbs of Limburger cheese. They both wore a pensive air.

The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the whole earth was gone with the moonlight. By nine o’clock, when the wedding-journeyers resumed their way toward Niagara, the heat had already set in with the effect of ordinary midsummer’s heat at high noon. The car into which they got had come the past night from Albany, and had an air of almost conscious shabbiness, griminess, and over-use. The seats were covered with cinders, which also crackled under foot. Dust was on everything, especially the persons of the crumpled and weary passengers of overnight. Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lighten the spiritual gloom, and presently they sank into the common bodily wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated, and as it drew nearer Buffalo they knew the conductor to have abandoned himself to that blackest of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick lateral motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts caught away the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling, and all the faces on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and damp with apathetic misery.

The incidents were in harmony with the abject physical tone of the company. There was a quarrel between a thin, shrill-voiced, highly dressed, much-bedizened Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old woman, half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparent ears that stood out from his head like the handles of a jar, on the other side, about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept filled with packages on the pretense that it was engaged. It was a loud and fierce quarrel enough, but it won no sort of favor; and when the Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no lady, and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied, “Highly complimentary, I must say,” there was no sign of relief or other acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that there had been a quarrel.

There was a little more interest taken in the misfortune of an old purblind German and his son, who were found by the conductor to be a few hundred miles out of the direct course to their destination, and were with some trouble and the aid of an Americanized fellow-countryman made aware of the fact. The old man then fell back in the prevailing apathy, and the child naturally cared nothing. By and by came the unsparing train-boy on his rounds, bestrewing the passengers successively with papers, magazines, fine-cut tobacco, and packages of candy. He gave the old man a package of candy, and passed on. The German took it as the bounty of the American people, oddly manifested in a situation where he could otherwise have had little proof of their care. He opened it and was sharing it with his son when the train-boy came back, and metallically, like a part of the machinery, demanded, “Ten cents!” The German stared helplessly, and the boy repeated, “Ten cents! ten cents!” with tiresome patience, while the other passengers smiled. When it had passed through the alien’s head that he was to pay for this national gift and he took with his tremulous fingers from the recesses of his pocket-book a ten-cent note and handed it to his tormentor, some of the people laughed. Among the rest, Basil and Isabel laughed, and then looked at each other with eyes of mutual reproach.

“Well, upon my word, my dear,” he said, “I think we’ve fallen pretty low. I’ve never felt such a poor, shabby ruffian before. Good heavens! To think of our immortal souls being moved to mirth by such a thing as this, — so stupid, so barren of all reason of laughter. And then the cruelty of it! What ferocious imbeciles we are! Whom have I married? A woman with neither heart nor brain!”

“O Basil, dear, pay him back the money — do.”

“I can’t. That’s the worst of it. He’s money enough, and might justly take offense. What breaks my heart is that we could have the depravity to smile at the mistake of a friendless stranger, who supposed he had at last met with an act of pure kindness. It’s a thing to weep over. Look at these grinning wretches! What a fiendish effect their smiles have, through their cinders and sweat! O, it’s the terrible weather; the despotism of the dust and heat; the wickedness of the infernal air. What a squalid and loathsome company!”

At Buffalo, where they arrived late, they found themselves with several hours’ time on their hands before the train started for Niagara, and in the first moments of tedium, Isabel forgot herself into saying, “Don’t you think we’d have done better to go directly from Rochester to the Falls, instead of coming this way?”

“Why certainly. I didn’t propose coming this way.”

“I know it, dear. I was only asking,” said Isabel, meekly. “But I should think you’d have generosity enough to take a little of the blame, when I wanted to come out of a romantic feeling for you.”

This romantic feeling referred to the fact that, many years before, when Basil made his first visit to Niagara, he had approached from the west by way of Buffalo; and Isabel, who tenderly begrudged his having existed before she knew him, and longed to ally herself retrospectively with his past, was resolved to draw near the great cataract by no other route.

She fetched a little sigh which might mean the weather or his hard-heartedness. The sigh touched him, and he suggested a carriage-ride through the city; she assented with eagerness, for it was what she had been thinking of. She had never seen a lakeside city before, and she was taken by surprise. “If ever we leave Boston,” she said, “we will not live at Rochester, as I thought last night; we’ll come to Buffalo.” She found that the place had all the picturesqueness of a sea-port, without the ugliness that attends the rising and falling tides. A delicious freshness breathed from the lake, which lying so smooth, faded into the sky at last, with no line between sharper than that which divides drowsing from dreaming. But the color was the most charming thing, that delicate blue of the lake, without the depth of the sea-blue, but infinitely softer and lovelier. The nearer expanses rippled with dainty waves, silver and lucent; the further levels made, with the sun-dimmed summer sky, a vague horizon of turquoise and amethyst, lit by the white sails of ships, and stained by the smoke of steamers.

“Take me away now,” said Isabel, when her eyes had feasted upon all this, “and don’t let me see another thing till I get to Niagara. Nothing less sublime is worthy the eyes that have beheld such beauty.”

However, on the way to Niagara she consented to glimpses of the river which carries the waters of the lake for their mighty plunge, and which shows itself very nobly from time to time as you draw toward the cataract, with wooded or cultivated islands, and rich farms along its low shores, and at last flashes upon the eye the shining white of the rapids, — a hint, no more, of the splendor and awfulness to be revealed.

VI. NIAGARA.

As the train stopped, Isabel’s heart beat with a child-like exultation, as I believe every one’s heart must who is worthy to arrive at Niagara. She had been trying to fancy, from time to time, that she heard the roar of the cataract, and now, when she alighted from the car, she was sure she should have heard it but for the vulgar little noises that attend the arrival of trains at Niagara as well as everywhere else. “Never mind, dearest; you shall be stunned with it before you leave,” promised her husband; and, not wholly disconsolate, she rode through the quaint streets of the village, where it remains a question whether the lowliness of the shops and private houses makes the hotels look so vast, or the bigness of the hotels dwarfs all the other buildings. The immense caravansaries swelling up from among the little bazaars (where they sell feather fans, and miniature bark canoes, and jars and vases and bracelets and brooches carved out of the local rocks), made our friends with their trunks very conscious of their disproportion to the accommodations of the smallest. They were the sole occupants of the omnibus, and they were embarrassed to be received at their hotel with a burst of minstrelsy from a whole band of music. Isabel felt that a single stringed instrument of some timid note would have been enough; and Basil was going to express his own modest preference for a jew’s-harp, when the music ceased with a sudden clash of the cymbals. But the next moment it burst out with fresh sweetness, and in alighting they perceived that another omnibus had turned the corner and was drawing up to the pillared portico of the hotel. A small family dismounted, and the feet of the last had hardly touched the pavement when the music again ended as abruptly as those flourishes of trumpets that usher player-kings upon the stage. Isabel could not help laughing at this melodious parsimony. “I hope they don’t let on the cataract and shut it off in this frugal style; do they, Basil?” she asked, and passed jesting through a pomp of unoccupied porters and tallboys. Apparently there were not many people stopping at this hotel, or else they were all out looking at the Falls or confined to their rooms. However, our travellers took in the almost weird emptiness of the place with their usual gratitude to fortune for all queerness in life, and followed to the pleasant quarters assigned them. There was time before supper for a glance at the cataract, and after a brief toilet they sallied out again upon the holiday street, with its parade of gay little shops, and thence passed into the grove beside the Falls, enjoying at every instant their feeling of arrival at a sublime destination.

In this sense Niagara deserves almost to rank with Rome, the metropolis of history and religion; with Venice, the chief city of sentiment and fantasy. In either you are at once made at home by a perception of its greatness, in which there is no quality of aggression, as there always seems to be in minor places as well as in minor men, and you gratefully accept its sublimity as a fact in no way contrasting with your own insignificance.

Our friends were beset of course by many carriage-drivers, whom they repelled with the kindly firmness of experienced travel. Isabel even felt a compassion for these poor fellows who had seen Niagara so much as to have forgotten that the first time one must see it alone or only with the next of friendship. She was voluble in her pity of Basil that it was not as new to him as to her, till between the trees they saw a white cloud of spray, shot through and through with sunset, rising, rising, and she felt her voice softly and steadily beaten down by the diapason of the cataract.

I am not sure but the first emotion on viewing Niagara is that of familiarity. Ever after, its strangeness increases; but in that earliest moment when you stand by the side of the American fall, and take in so much of the whole as your glance can compass, an impression of having seen it often before is certainly very vivid. This may be an effect of that grandeur which puts you at your ease in its presence; but it also undoubtedly results in part from lifelong acquaintance with every variety of futile picture of the scene. You have its outward form clearly in your memory; the shores, the rapids, the islands, the curve of the Falls, and the stout rainbow with one end resting on their top and the other lost in the mists that rise from the gulf beneath. On the whole I do not account this sort of familiarity a misfortune. The surprise is none the less a surprise because it is kept till the last, and the marvel, making itself finally felt in every nerve, and not at once through a single sense, all the more fully possesses you. It is as if Niagara reserved her magnificence, and preferred to win your heart with her beauty; and so Isabel, who was instinctively prepared for the reverse, suffered a vague disappointment, for a little instant, as she looked along the verge from the water that caressed the shore at her feet before it flung itself down, to the wooded point that divides the American from the Canadian Fall, beyond which showed dimly through its veil of golden and silver mists the emerald wall of the great Horse-Shoe. “How still it is!” she said, amidst the roar that shook the ground under their feet and made the leaves tremble overhead, and “How lonesome!” amidst the people lounging and sauntering about in every direction among the trees. In fact that prodigious presence does make a solitude and silence round every spirit worthy to perceive it, and it gives a kind of dignity to all its belongings, so that the rocks and pebbles in the water’s edge, and the weeds and grasses that nod above it, have a value far beyond that of such common things elsewhere. In all the aspects of Niagara there seems a grave simplicity, which is perhaps a reflection of the spectator’s soul for once utterly dismantled of affectation and convention. In the vulgar reaction from this, you are of course as trivial, if you like, at Niagara, as anywhere.

Slowly Isabel became aware that the sacred grove beside the fall was profaned by some very common presences indeed, that tossed bits of stone and sticks into the consecrated waters, and struggled for handkerchiefs and fans, and here and there put their arms about each other’s waists, and made a show of laughing and joking. They were a picnic party of rude, silly folks of the neighborhood, and she stood pondering them in sad wonder if anything could be worse, when she heard a voice saying to Basil, “Take you next, Sir? Plenty of light yet, and the wind’s down the river, so the spray won’t interfere. Make a capital picture of you; falls in the background.” It was the local photographer urging them to succeed the young couple he had just posed at the brink: the gentleman was sitting down, with his legs crossed and his hands elegantly disposed; the lady was standing at his side, with one arm thrown lightly across his shoulder, while with the other hand she thrust his cane into the ground; you could see it was going to be a splendid photograph.

Basil thanked the artist, and Isabel said, trusting as usual to his sympathy for perception of her train of thought, “Well, I’ll never try to be high-strung again. But shouldn’t you have thought, dearest, that I might expect to be high-strung with success at Niagara if anywhere?” She passively followed him into the long, queer, downward-sloping edifice on the border of the grove, unflinchingly mounted the car that stood ready, and descended the incline. Emerging into the light again, she found herself at the foot of the fall by whose top she had just stood. At first she was glad there were other people down there, as if she and Basil were not enough to bear it alone, and she could almost have spoken to the two hopelessly pretty brides, with parasols and impertinent little boots, whom their attendant husbands were helping over the sharp and slippery rocks, so bare beyond the spray, so green and mossy within the fall of mist. But in another breath she forgot them; as she looked on that dizzied sea, hurling itself from the high summit in huge white knots, and breaks and masses, and plunging into the gulf beside her, while it sent continually up a strong voice of lamentation, and crawled away in vast eddies, with somehow a look of human terror, bewilderment, and pain. It was bathed in snowy vapor to its crest, but now and then heavy currents of air drew this aside, and they saw the outline of the Falls almost as far as the Canada side. They remembered afterwards how they were able to make use of but one sense at a time, and how when they strove to take in the forms of the descending flood, they ceased to hear it; but as soon as they released their eyes from this service, every fibre in them vibrated to the sound, and the spectacle dissolved away in it. They were aware, too, of a strange capriciousness in their senses, and of a tendency of each to palter with the things perceived. The eye could no longer take truthful note of quality, and now beheld the tumbling deluge as a Gothic wall of careen marble, white, motionless, and now as a fall of lightest snow, with movement in all its atoms, and scarce so much cohesion as would hold them together; and again they could not discern if this course were from above or from beneath, whether the water rose from the abyss or dropped from the height. The ear could give the brain no assurance of the sound that felled it, and whether it were great or little; the prevailing softness of the cataract’s tone seemed so much opposed to ideas of prodigious force or of prodigious volume. It was only when the sight, so idle in its own behalf, came to the aid of the other sense, and showed them the mute movement of each other’s lips, that they dimly appreciated the depth of sound that involved them.

“I think you might have been high-strung there, for a second or two,” said Basil, when, ascending the incline; he could make himself heard. “We will try the bridge next.”

Over the river, so still with its oily eddies and delicate wreaths of foam, just below the Falls they have in late years woven a web of wire high in air, and hung a bridge from precipice to precipice. Of all the bridges made with hands it seems the lightest, most ethereal; it is ideally graceful, and droops from its slight towers like a garland. It is worthy to command, as it does, the whole grandeur of Niagara, and to show the traveller the vast spectacle, from the beginning of the American Fall to the farthest limit of the Horse-Shoe, with all the awful pomp of the rapids, the solemn darkness of the wooded islands, the mystery of the vaporous gulf, the indomitable wildness of the shores, as far as the eye can reach up or down the fatal stream.

To this bridge our friends now repaired, by a path that led through another of those groves which keep the village back from the shores of the river on the American side, and greatly help the sight-seer’s pleasure in the place. The exquisite structure, which sways so tremulously from its towers, and seems to lay so slight a hold on earth where its cables sink into the ground, is to other bridges what the blood horse is to the common breed of roadsters; and now they felt its sensitive nerves quiver under them and sympathetically through them as they advanced farther and farther toward the centre. Perhaps their sympathy with the bridge’s trepidation was too great for unalloyed delight, and yet the thrill was a glorious one, to be known only there; and afterwards, at least, they would not have had their airy path seem more secure.

The last hues of sunset lingered in the mists that sprung from the base of the Falls with a mournful, tremulous grace, and a movement weird as the play of the northern lights. They were touched with the most delicate purples and crimsons, that darkened to deep red, and then faded from them at a second look, and they flew upward, swiftly upward, like troops of pale, transparent ghosts; while a perfectly clear radiance, better than any other for local color, dwelt upon the scene. Far under the bridge the river smoothly swam, the undercurrents forever unfolding themselves upon the surface with a vast rose-like evolution, edged all round with faint lines of white, where the air that filled the water freed itself in foam. What had been clear green on the face of the cataract was here more like rich verd-antique, and had a look of firmness almost like that of the stone itself. So it showed beneath the bridge, and down the river till the curving shores hid it. These, springing abruptly from the water’s brink, and shagged with pine and cedar, displayed the tender verdure of grass and bushes intermingled with the dark evergreens that comb from ledge to ledge, till they point their speary tops above the crest of bluffs. In front, where tumbled rocks and expanses of caked clay varied the gloomier and gayer green, sprung those spectral mists; and through them loomed out, in its manifold majesty, Niagara, with the seemingly immovable white Gothic screen of the American Fall, and the green massive curve of the Horseshoe, solid and simple and calm as an Egyptian wall; while behind this, with their white and black expanses broken by dark foliaged little isles, the steep Canadian rapids billowed down between their heavily wooded shores.

The wedding-journeyers hung, they knew not how long, in rapture on the sight; and then, looking back from the shore to the spot where they had stood, they felt relieved that unreality should possess itself of all, and that the bridge should swing there in mid-air like a filmy web, scarce more passable than the rainbow that flings its arch above the mists.

On the portico of the hotel they found half a score of gentlemen smoking, and creating together that collective silence which passes for sociality on our continent. Some carriages stood before the door, and within, around the base of a pillar, sat a circle of idle call-boys. There were a few trunks heaped together in one place, with a porter standing guard over them; a solitary guest was buying a cigar at the newspaper stand in one corner; another friendless creature was writing a letter in the reading-room; the clerk, in a seersucker coat and a lavish shirt-bosom, tried to give the whole an effect of watering-place gayety and bustle, as he provided a newly arrived guest with a room.

Our pair took in these traits of solitude and repose with indifference. If the hotel had been thronged with brilliant company, they would have been no more and no less pleased; and when, after supper, they came into the grand parlor, and found nothing there but a marble-topped centre-table, with a silver-plated ice-pitcher and a small company of goblets, they sat down perfectly content in a secluded window-seat. They were not seen by the three people who entered soon after, and halted in the centre of the room.

“Why, Kitty!” said one of the two ladies who must be in any travelling-party of three, “this is more inappropriate to your gorgeous array than the supper-room, even.”

She who was called Kitty was armed, as for social conquest, in some kind of airy evening-dress, and was looking round with bewilderment upon that forlorn waste of carpeting and upholstery. She owned, with a smile, that she had not seen so much of the world yet as she had been promised; but she liked Niagara very much, and perhaps they should find the world at breakfast.

“No,” said the other lady, who was as unquiet as Kitty was calm, and who seemed resolved to make the most of the worst, “it isn’t probable that the hotel will fill up overnight; and I feel personally responsible for this state of things. Who would ever have supposed that Niagara would be so empty? I thought the place was thronged the whole summer long. How do you account for it, Richard?”

The gentleman looked fatigued, as from a long-continued discussion elsewhere of the matter in hand, and he said that he had not been trying to account for it.

“Then you don’t care for Kitty’s pleasure at all, and you don’t want her to enjoy herself. Why don’t you take some interest in the matter?”

“Why, if I accounted for the emptiness of Niagara in the most satisfactory way, it wouldn’t add a soul to the floating population. Under the circumstances I prefer to leave it unexplained.”

“Do you think it’s because it’s such a hot summer? Do you suppose it’s not exactly the season? Didn’t you expect there’d be more people? Perhaps Niagara isn’t as fashionable as it used to be.”

“It looks something like that.”

“Well, what under the sun do you think is the reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“Perhaps,” interposed Kitty, placidly, “most of the visitors go to the other hotel, now.”

“It’s altogether likely,” said the other lady, eagerly. “There are just such caprices.”

“Well,” said Richard, “I wanted you to go there.”

“But you said that you always heard this was the a most fashionable.”

“I know it. I didn’t want to come here for that reason. But fortune favors the brave.”

“Well, it’s too bad! Here we’ve asked Kitty to come to Niagara with us, just to give her a little peep into the world, and you’ve brought us to a hotel where we’re—”

“Monarchs of all we survey,” suggested Kitty.

“Yes, and start at the sound of our own,” added the other lady, helplessly.

“Come now, Fanny,” said the gentleman, who was but too clearly the husband of the last speaker. “You know you insisted, against all I could say or do, upon coming to this house; I implored you to go to the other, and now you blame me for bringing you here.”

“So I do. If you’d let me have my own way without opposition about coming here, I dare say I should have gone to the other place. But never mind. Kitty knows whom to blame, I hope. She’s your cousin.”

Kitty was sitting with her hands quiescently folded in her lap. She now rose and said that she did not know anything about the other hotel, and perhaps it was just as empty as this.

“It can’t be. There can’t be two hotels so empty,” said Fanny. “It don’t stand to reason.”

“If you wish Kitty to see the world so much,” said the gentleman, “why don’t you take her on to Quebec, with us?”

Kitty had left her seat beside Fanny, and was moving with a listless content about the parlor.

“I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she’s only come for the night, and has nothing with her but a few cuffs and collars! I certainly never heard of anything so absurd before!”

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its charm upon her, for, after a silence, “I could lend her some things,” she said musingly. “But don’t speak of it to-night, please. It’s too ridiculous. Kitty!” she called out, and, as the young lady drew near, she continued, “How would you like to go to Quebec, with us?”

“O Fanny!” cried Kitty, with rapture; and then, with dismay, “How can I?”

“Why, very well, I think. You’ve got this dress, and your travelling-suit; and I can lend you whatever you want. Come!” she added joyously, “let’s go up to your room, and talk it over!”

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and the gentleman followed. To their own relief the guiltless eaves-droppers, who found no moment favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy began, issued from their retiracy.

“What a remarkable little lady!” said Basil, eagerly turning to Isabel for sympathy in his enjoyment of her inconsequence.

“Yes, poor thing!” returned his wife; “it’s no light matter to invite a young lady to take a journey with you, and promise her all sorts of gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find her on your hands in a desolation like this. It’s dreadful, I think.”

Basil stared. “O, certainly,” he said. “But what an amusingly illogical little body!”

“I don’t understand what you mean, Basil. It was the only thing that she could do, to invite the young lady to go on with them. I wonder her husband had the sense to think of it first. Of course she’ll have to lend her things.”

“And you didn’t observe anything peculiar in her way of reaching her conclusions?”

“Peculiar? What do you mean?”

“Why, her blaming her husband for letting her have her own way about the hotel; and her telling him not to mention his proposal to Kitty, and then doing it herself, just — after she’d pronounced it absurd and impossible.” He spoke with heat at being forced to make what he thought a needless explanation.

“O!” said Isabel, after a moment’s reflection. “That! Did you think it so very odd?”

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man must feel when he begins to perceive that he has married the whole mystifying world of womankind in the woman of his choice, and made no answer. But to his own soul he said: “I supposed I had the pleasure of my wife’s acquaintance. It seems I have been flattering myself.”

The next morning they went out as they had planned, for an exploration of Goat Island, after an early breakfast. As they sauntered through the village’s contrasts of pigmy and colossal in architecture, they praisefully took in the unalloyed holiday character of the place, enjoying equally the lounging tourists at the hotel doors, the drivers and their carriages to let, and the little shops, with nothing but mementos of Niagara, and Indian beadwork, and other trumpery, to sell. Shops so useless, they agreed, could not be found outside the Palms Royale, or the Square of St. Mark, or anywhere else in the world but here. They felt themselves once more a part of the tide of mere sight-seeing pleasure-travel, on which they had drifted in other days, and in an eddy of which their love itself had opened its white blossom, and lily-like dreamed upon the wave.

They were now also part of the great circle of newly wedded bliss, which, involving the whole land during the season of bridal-tours, may be said to show richest and fairest at Niagara, like the costly jewel of a precious ring. The place is, in fact, almost abandoned to bridal couples, and any one out of his honey-moon is in some degree an alien there, and must discern a certain immodesty in him intrusion. Is it for his profane eyes to look upon all that blushing and trembling joy? A man of any sensibility must desire to veil his face, and, bowing his excuses to the collective rapture, take the first train for the wicked outside world to which he belongs. Everywhere, he sees brides and brides. Three or four with the benediction still on them, come down in the same car with him; he hands her travelling-shawl after one as she springs from the omnibus into her husband’s arms; there are two or three walking back and forth with their new lords upon the porch of the hotel; at supper they are on every side of him, and he feels himself suffused, as it were, by a roseate atmosphere of youth and love and hope. At breakfast it is the same, and then, in his wanderings about the place he constantly meets them. They are of all manners of beauty, fair and dark, slender and plump, tall and short; but they are all beautiful with the radiance of loving and being loved. Now, if ever in their lives, they are charmingly dressed, and ravishing toilets take the willing eye from the objects of interest. How high the heels of the pretty boots, how small the tender-tinted gloves, how electrical the flutter of the snowy skirts! What is Niagara to these things?

Isabel was not willing to own her bridal sisterhood to these blessed souls; but she secretly rejoiced in it, even while she joined Basil in noting their number and smiling at their innocent abandon. She dropped his arm at encounter of the first couple, and walked carelessly at his side; she made a solemn vow never to take hold of his watch-chain in speaking to him; she trusted that she might be preserved from putting her face very close to his at dinner in studying the bill of fare; getting out of carriages, she forbade him ever to take her by the waist. All ascetic resolutions are modified by experiment; but if Isabel did not rigorously keep these, she is not the less to be praised for having formed them.

Just before they reached the bridge to Goat Island, they passed a little group of the Indians still lingering about Niagara, who make the barbaric wares in which the shops abound, and, like the woods and the wild faces of the cliffs and precipices, help to keep the cataract remote, and to invest it with the charm of primeval loneliness. This group were women, and they sat motionless on the ground, smiling sphinx-like over their laps full of bead-work, and turning their dark liquid eyes of invitation upon the passers. They wore bright kirtles, and red shawls fell from their heads over their plump brown cheeks and down their comfortable persons. A little girl with them was attired in like gayety of color. “What is her name?” asked Isabel, paying for a bead pincushion. “Daisy Smith,” said her mother, in distressingly good English. “But her Indian name?” “She has none,” answered the woman, who told Basil that her village numbered five hundred people, and that they were Protestants. While they talked they were joined by an Indian, whom the women saluted musically in their native tongue. This was somewhat consoling; but he wore trousers and a waistcoat, and it could have been wished that he had not a silk hat on.

“Still,” said Isabel, as they turned away, “I’m glad he hasn’t Lisle-thread gloves, like that chieftain we saw putting his forest queen on board the train at Oneida. But how shocking that they should be Christians, and Protestants! It would have been bad enough to have them Catholics. And that woman said that they were increasing. They ought to be fading away.”

On the bridge, they paused and looked up and down the rapids rushing down the slope in all their wild variety, with the white crests of breaking surf, the dark massiveness of heavy-climbing waves, the fleet, smooth sweep of currents over broad shelves of sunken rock, the dizzy swirl and suck of whirlpools.

Spell-bound, the journeyers pored upon the deathful course beneath their feet, gave a shudder to the horror of being cast upon it, and then hurried over the bridge to the island, in the shadow of whose wildness they sought refuge from the sight and sound.

There had been rain in the night; the air war full of forest fragrance, and the low, sweet voice of twittering birds. Presently they came to a bench set in a corner of the path, and commanding a pleasant vista of sunlit foliage, with a mere gleam of the foaming river beyond. As they sat down here loverwise, Basil, as in the early days of their courtship, began to recite a poem. It was one which had been haunting him since his first sight of the rapids, one of many that he used to learn by heart in his youth — the rhyme of some poor newspaper poet, whom the third or fourth editor copying his verses consigned to oblivion by carelessly clipping his name from the bottom. It had always lingered in Basil’s memory, rather from the interest of the awful fact it recorded, than from any merit of its own; and now he recalled it with a distinctness that surprised him.

AVERY.

                   I.
  All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,
  Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,
  Out of the hell of the rapids as ‘twere a lost soul’s cries
  Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,
  Showing where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran
  Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
  Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
  Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
  Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung
  Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rang.

                   II.
  Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,
  Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound,
  And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon,
  As it had been in some blessed trance, and now it is noon.
  Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it strong and stanch,
  And to the lines and the treacherous rocks look well as you launch
  Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprent sides,
  Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides,
  Onward rushes the raft, with many a lurch and leap, —
  Lord! if it strike him loose from the hold he scarce can keep!
  No! through all peril unharmed, it reaches him harmless at least,
  And to its proven strength he lashes his weakness fast.
  Now, for the shore! But steady, steady, my men, and slow;
  Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so, let her go!
  Thronging the shores around stands the pitying multitude;
  Wan as his own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to brood
  Heavy upon them, and heavy the silence hangs on all,
  Save for the rapids’ plunge, and the thunder of the fall.
  But on a sudden thrills from the people still and pale,
  Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail
  Caught on a lurking point of rock it sways and swings,
  Sport of the pitiless waters, the raft to which he clings.

                   III.
  All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways;
  And on the shore the crowd lifts up its hands and prays:
  Lifts to heaven and wrings the hands so helpless to save,
  Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock and the ways
  Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who amidst their strife
  Straggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life,
  Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon.
  Priceless second by second, so wastes the afternoon.
  And it is sunset now; and another boat and the last
  Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely passed.

                   IV.
  Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay
  Maddening against the gate that is locked athwart his way.
  ”No! we keep the bridge for them that can help him. You,
  Tell us, who are you?” “His brother!” “God help you both! Pass through.”
  Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud to him,
  Unto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim;
  But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering words are lost
  As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed.
  And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope
  Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope;
  Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry,
  Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flying free;
  Sees, then, the form — that, spent with effort and fasting and fear,
  Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near,
  Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and hurled
  Headlong on to the cataract’s brink, and out of the world.

“O Basil!” said Isabel, with a long sigh breaking the hush that best praised the unknown poet’s skill, “it isn’t true, is it?”

“Every word, almost, even to the brother’s coming at the last moment. It’s a very well-known incident,” he added, and I am sure the reader whose memory runs back twenty years cannot have forgotten it.

Niagara, indeed, is an awful homicide; nearly every point of interest about the place has killed its man, and there might well be a deeper stain of crimson than it ever wears in that pretty bow overarching the falls. Its beauty is relieved against an historical background as gloomy as the lightest-hearted tourist could desire. The abominable savages, revering the cataract as a kind of august devil, and leading a life of demoniacal misery and wickedness, whom the first Jesuits found here two hundred years ago; the ferocious Iroquois bloodily driving out these squalid devil-worshippers; the French planting the fort that yet guards the mouth of the river, and therewith the seeds of war that fruited afterwards in murderous strifes throughout the whole Niagara country; the struggle for the military posts on the river, during the wars of France and England; the awful scene in the conspiracy of Pontiac, where a detachment of English troops was driven by the Indians over the precipice near the great Whirlpool; the sorrow and havoc visited upon the American settlements in the Revolution by the savages who prepared their attacks in the shadow of Fort Niagara; the battles of Chippewa and of Lundy’s Lane, that mixed the roar of their cannon with that of the fall; the savage forays with tomahawk and scalping-knife, and the blazing villages on either shore in the War of 1812, — these are the memories of the place, the links in a chain of tragical interest scarcely broken before our time since the white man first beheld the mist-veiled face of Niagara. The facts lost nothing of their due effect as Basil, in the ramble across Goat Island, touched them with the reflected light of Mr. Parkman’s histories, — those precious books that make our meagre past wear something of the rich romance of old European days, and illumine its savage solitudes with the splendor of mediaeval chivalry, and the glory of mediaeval martyrdom, — and then, lacking this light, turned upon them the feeble glimmer of the guide-books. He and Isabel enjoyed the lurid picture with all the zest of sentimentalists dwelling upon the troubles of other times from the shelter of the safe and peaceful present. They were both poets in their quality of bridal couple, and so long as their own nerves were unshaken they could transmute all facts to entertaining fables. They pleasantly exercised their sympathies upon those who every year perish at Niagara in the tradition of its awful power; only they refused their cheap and selfish compassion to the Hermit of Goat Island, who dwelt so many years in its conspicuous seclusion, and was finally carried over the cataract. This public character they suspected of design in his death as in his life, and they would not be moved by his memory; though they gave a sigh to that dream, half pathetic, half ludicrous, yet not ignoble, of Mordecai Noah, who thought to assemble all the Jews of the world, and all the Indians, as remnants of the lost tribes, upon Grand Island, there to rebuild Jerusalem, and who actually laid the corner-stone of the new temple there.

Goat Island is marvelously wild for a place visited by so many thousands every year. The shrubbery and undergrowth remain unravaged, and form a deceitful privacy, in which, even at that early hour of the day, they met many other pairs. It seemed incredible that the village and the hotels should be so full, and that the wilderness should also abound in them; yet on every embowered seat, and going to and from all points of interest and danger, were these new-wedded lovers with their interlacing arms and their fond attitudes, in which each seemed to support and lean upon the other. Such a pair stood prominent before them when Basil and Isabel emerged at last from the cover of the woods at the head of the island, and glanced up the broad swift stream to the point where it ran smooth before breaking into the rapids; and as a soft pastoral feature in the foreground of that magnificent landscape, they found them far from unpleasing. Some such pair is in the foreground of every famous American landscape; and when I think of the amount of public love-making in the season of pleasure-travel, from Mount Desert to the Yosemite, and from the parks of Colorado to the Keys of Florida, I feel that our continent is but a larger Arcady, that the middle of the nineteenth century is the golden age, and that we want very little of being a nation of shepherds and shepherdesses.

Our friends returned by the shore of the Canadian rapids, having traversed the island by a path through the heart of the woods, and now drew slowly near the Falls again. All parts of the prodigious pageant have an eternal novelty, and they beheld the ever-varying effect of that constant sublimity with the sense of discoverers, or rather of people whose great fortune it is to see the marvel in its beginning, and new from the creating hand. The morning hour lent its sunny charm to this illusion, while in the cavernous precipices of the shores, dark with evergreens, a mystery as of primeval night seemed to linger. There was a wild fluttering of their nerves, a rapture with an under-consciousness of pain, the exaltation of peril and escape, when they came to the three little isles that extend from Goat Island, one beyond another far out into the furious channel. Three pretty suspension-bridges connect them now with the larger island, and under each of these flounders a huge rapid, and hurls itself away to mingle with the ruin of the fall. The Three Sisters are mere fragments of wilderness, clumps of vine-tangled woods, planted upon masses of rock; but they are part of the fascination of Niagara which no one resists; nor could Isabel have been persuaded from exploring them. It wants no courage to do this, but merely submission to the local sorcery, and the adventurer has no other reward than the consciousness of having been where but a few years before no human being had perhaps set foot. She crossed from bridge to bridge with a quaking heart, and at last stood upon the outermost isle, whence, through the screen of vines and boughs, she gave fearful glances at the heaving and tossing flood beyond, from every wave of which at every instant she rescued herself with a desperate struggle. The exertion told heavily upon her strength unawares, and she suddenly made Basil another revelation of character. Without the slightest warning she sank down at the root of a tree, and said, with serious composure, that she could never go back on those bridges; they were not safe. He stared at her cowering form in blank amaze, and put his hands in his pockets. Then it occurred to his dull masculine sense that it must be a joke; and he said, “Well, I’ll have you taken off in a boat.”

“O do, Basil, do, have me taken off in a boat!” implored Isabel. “You see yourself the bridges are not safe. Do get a boat.”

“Or a balloon,” he suggested, humoring the pleasantry.

Isabel burst into tears; and now he went on his knees at her side, and took her hands in his. “Isabel! Isabel! Are you crazy?” he cried, as if he meant to go mad himself. She moaned and shuddered in reply; he said, to mend matters, that it was a jest, about the boat; and he was driven to despair when Isabel repeated, “I never can go back by the bridges, never.”

“But what do you propose to do?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!”

He would try sarcasm. “Do you intend to set up a hermitage here, and have your meals sent out from the hotel? It’s a charming spot, and visited pretty constantly; but it’s small, even for a hermitage.”

Isabel moaned again with her hands still on her eyes, and wondered that he was not ashamed to make fun of her.

He would try kindness. “Perhaps, darling, you’ll let me carry you ashore.”

“No, that will bring double the weight on the bridge at once.”

“Couldn’t you shut your eyes, and let me lead you?”

“Why, it isn’t the sight of the rapids,” she said, looking up fiercely.
“The bridges are not safe. I’m not a child, Basil. O, what shall we do?”

“I don’t know,” said Basil, gloomily. “It’s an exigency for which I wasn’t prepared.” Then he silently gave himself to the Evil One, for having probably overwrought Isabel’s nerves by repeating that poem about Avery, and by the ensuing talk about Niagara, which she had seemed to enjoy so much. He asked her if that was it; and she answered, “O no, it’s nothing but the bridges.” He proved to her that the bridges, upon all known principles, were perfectly safe, and that they could not give way. She shook her head, but made no answer, and he lost his patience.

“Isabel,” he cried, “I’m ashamed of you!”

“Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for afterwards, Basil,” she replied, with the forbearance of those who have reason and justice on their side.

The rapids beat and shouted round their little prison-isle, each billow leaping as if possessed by a separate demon. The absurd horror of the situation overwhelmed him. He dared not attempt to carry her ashore, for she might spring from his grasp into the flood. He could not leave her to call for help; and what if nobody came till she lost her mind from terror? Or, what if somebody should come and find them in that ridiculous affliction?

Somebody was coming!

“Isabel!” he shouted in her ear, “here come those people we saw in the parlor last night.”

Isabel dashed her veil over her face, clutched Basil’s with her icy hand, rose, drew her arm convulsively through his, and walked ashore without a word.

In a sheltered nook they sat down, and she quickly “repaired her drooping head and tricked her beams” again. He could see her tearfully smiling through her veil. “My dear,” he said, “I don’t ask an explanation of your fright, for I don’t suppose you could give it. But should you mind telling me why those people were so sovereign against it?”

“Why, dearest! Don’t you understand? That Mrs. Richard — whoever she is — is so much like me.”

She looked at him as if she had made the most satisfying statement, and he thought he had better not ask further then, but wait in hope that the meaning would come to him. They walked on in silence till they came to the Biddle Stairs, at the head of which is a notice that persons have been killed by pieces of rock from the precipice overhanging the shore below, and warning people that they descend at their peril. Isabel declined to visit the Cave of the Winds, to which these stairs lead, but was willing to risk the ascent of Terrapin Tower. “Thanks; no,” said her husband. “You might find it unsafe to come back the way you went up. We can’t count certainly upon the appearance of the lady who is so much like you; and I’ve no fancy for spending my life on Terrapin Tower.” So he found her a seat, and went alone to the top of the audacious little structure standing on the verge of the cataract, between the smooth curve of the Horse-Shoe and the sculptured front of the Central Fall, with the stormy sea of the Rapids behind, and the river, dim seen through the mists, crawling away between its lofty bluffs before. He knew again the awful delight with which so long ago he had watched the changes in the beauty of the Canadian Fall as it hung a mass of translucent green from the brink, and a pearly white seemed to crawl up from the abyss, and penetrate all its substance to the very crest, and then suddenly vanished from it, and perpetually renewed the same effect. The mystery of the rising vapors veiled the gulf into which the cataract swooped; the sun shone, and a rainbow dreamed upon them.

Near the foot of the tower, some loose rocks extend quite to the verge, and here Basil saw an elderly gentleman skipping from one slippery stone to another, and looking down from time to time into the abyss, who, when he had amused himself long enough in this way, clambered up on the plank bridge. Basil, who had descended by this time, made bold to say that he thought the diversion an odd one and rather dangerous. The gentleman took this in good part, and owned it might seem so, but added that a distinguished phrenologist had examined his head, and told him he had equilibrium so large that he could go anywhere.

“On your bridal tour, I presume,” he continued, as they approached the bench where Basil had left Isabel. She had now the company of a plain, middle-aged woman, whose attire hesitatingly expressed some inward festivity, and had a certain reluctant fashionableness. “Well, this is my third bridal tour to Niagara, and my wife’s been here once before on the same business. We see a good many changes. I used to stand on Table Rock with the others. Now that’s all gone. Well, old lady, shall we move on?” he asked; and this bridal pair passed up the path, attended, haply, by the guardian spirits of those who gave the place so many sad yet pleasing associations.

At dinner, Mr. Richard’s party sat at the table next Basil’s, and they were all now talking cheerfully over the emptiness of the spacious dining-hall.

“Well, Kitty,” the married lady was saying, you can tell the girls what you please about the gayeties of Niagara, when you get home. They’ll believe anything sooner than the truth.”

“O yes, indeed,” said Kitty, “I’ve got a good deal of it made up already. I’ll describe a grand hop at the hotel, with fashionable people from all parts of the country, and the gentlemen I danced with the most. I’m going to have had quite a flirtation with the gentleman of the long blond mustache, whom we met on the bridge this morning and he’s got to do duty in accounting for my missing glove. It’ll never do to tell the girls I dropped it from the top of Terrapin Tower. Then you know, Fanny, I really can say something about dining with aristocratic Southerners, waited upon by their black servants.”

This referred to the sad-faced patrician whom Basil and Isabel had noted in the cars from Buffalo as a Southerner probably coming North for the first time since the war. He had an air at once fierce and sad, and a half-barbaric, homicidal gentility of manner fascinating enough in its way. He sat with his wife at a table farther down the room, and their child was served in part by a little tan-colored nurse-maid. The fact did not quite answer to the young lady’s description of it, and yet it certainly afforded her a ground-work. Basil fancied a sort of bewilderment in the Southerner, and explained it upon the theory that he used to come every year to Niagara before the war, and was now puzzled to find it so changed.

“Yes,” he said, “I can’t account for him except as the ghost of Southern travel, and I can’t help feeling a little sorry for him. I suppose that almost any evil commends itself by its ruin; the wrecks of slavery are fast growing a fungus crop of sentiment, and they may yet outflourish the remains of the feudal system in the kind of poetry they produce. The impoverished slave-holder is a pathetic figure, in spite of all justice and reason, the beaten rebel does move us to compassion, and it is of no use to think of Andersonville in his presence. This gentleman, and others like him, used to be the lords of our summer resorts. They spent the money they did not earn like princes; they held their heads high; they trampled upon the Abolitionist in his lair; they received the homage of the doughface in his home. They came up here from their rice-swamps and cotton-fields, and bullied the whole busy civilization of the North. Everybody who had merchandise or principles to sell truckled to them, and travel amongst us was a triumphal progress. Now they’re moneyless and subjugated (as they call it), there’s none so poor to do them reverence, and it’s left for me, an Abolitionist from the cradle, to sigh over their fate. After all, they had noble traits, and it was no great wonder they got, to despise us, seeing what most of us were. It seems to me I should like to know our friend. I can’t help feeling towards him as towards a fallen prince, heaven help my craven spirit! I wonder how our colored waiter feels towards him. I dare say he admires him immensely.”

There were not above a dozen other people in the room, and Basil contrasted the scene with that which the same place formerly presented. “In the old time,” he said, “every table was full, and we dined to the music of a brass band. I can’t say I liked the band, but I miss it. I wonder if our Southern friend misses it? They gave us a very small allowance of brass band when we arrived, Isabel. Upon my word, I wonder what’s come over the place,” he said, as the Southern party, rising from the table, walked out of the dining-room, attended by many treacherous echoes in spite of an ostentatious clatter of dishes that the waiters made.

After dinner they drove on the Canada shore up past the Clifton House, towards the Burning Spring, which is not the least wonder of Niagara. As each bubble breaks upon the troubled surface, and yields its flash of infernal flame and its whiff of sulphurous stench, it seems hardly strange that the Neutral Nation should have revered the cataract as a demon; and another subtle spell (not to be broken even by the business-like composure of the man who shows off the hell-broth) is added to those successive sorceries by which Niagara gradually changes from a thing of beauty to a thing of terror. By all odds, too, the most tremendous view of the Falls is afforded by the point on the drive whence you look down upon the Horse-Shoe, and behold its three massive walls of sea rounding and sweeping into the gulf together, the color gone, and the smooth brink showing black and ridgy.

Would they not go to the battle-field of Lundy’s Lane? asked the driver at a certain point on their return; but Isabel did not care for battle-fields, and Basil preferred to keep intact the reminiscence of his former visit. “They have a sort of tower of observation built on the battle-ground,” he said, as they drove on down by the river, “and it was in charge of an old Canadian militia-man, who had helped his countrymen to be beaten in the fight. This hero gave me a simple and unintelligible account of the battle, asking me first if I had ever heard of General Scott, and adding without flinching that here he got his earliest laurels. He seemed to go just so long to every listener, and nothing could stop him short, so I fell into a revery until he came to an end. It was hard to remember, that sweet summer morning, when the sun shone, and the birds sang, and the music of a piano and a girl’s voice rose from a bowery cottage near, that all the pure air had once been tainted with battle-smoke, that the peaceful fields had been planted with cannon, instead of potatoes and corn, and that where the cows came down the farmer’s lane, with tinkling bells, the shock of armed men had befallen. The blue and tranquil Ontario gleamed far away, and far away rolled the beautiful land, with farm-houses, fields, and woods, and at the foot of the tower lay the pretty village. The battle of the past seemed only a vagary of mine; yet how could I doubt the warrior at my elbow? — grieved though I was to find that a habit of strong drink had the better of his utterance that morning. My driver explained afterwards, that persons visiting the field were commonly so much pleased with the captain’s eloquence, that they kept the noble old soldier in a brandy-and-water rapture throughout the season, thereby greatly refreshing his memory, and making the battle bloodier and bloodier as the season advanced and the number of visitors increased. There my dear,” he suddenly broke off, as they came in sight of a slender stream of water that escaped from the brow of a cliff on the American side below the Falls, and spun itself into a gauze of silvery mist, “that’s the Bridal Veil; and I suppose you think the stream, which is making such a fine display, yonder, is some idle brooklet, ending a long course of error and worthlessness by that spectacular plunge. It’s nothing of the kind; it’s an honest hydraulio canal, of the most straightforward character, a poor but respectable mill-race which has devoted itself strictly to business, and has turned mill-wheels instead of fooling round water-lilies. It can afford that ultimate finery. What you behold in the Bridal Veil, my love, is the apotheosis of industry.”

“What I can’t help thinking of,” said Isabel, who had not paid the smallest attention to the Bridal Veil, or anything about it, “is the awfulness of stepping off these places in the night-time.” She referred to the road which, next the precipice, is unguarded by any sort of parapet. In Europe a strong wall would secure it, but we manage things differently on our continent, and carriages go running over the brink from time to time.

“If your thoughts have that direction,” answered her husband, “we had better go back to the hotel, and leave the Whirlpool for to-morrow morning. It’s late for it to-day, at any rate.” He had treated Isabel since the adventure on the Three Sisters with a superiority which he felt himself to be very odious, but which he could not disuse.

“I’m not afraid,” she sighed, “but in the words of the retreating soldier, I — I’m awfully demoralized;” and added, “You know we must reserve some of the vital forces for shopping this evening.”

Part of their business also was to buy the tickets for their return to Boston by way of Montreal and Quebec, and it was part of their pleasure to get these of the heartiest imaginable ticket-agent. He was a colonel or at least a major, and he made a polite feint of calling Basil by some military title. He commended the trip they were about to make as the most magnificent and beautiful on the whole continent, and he commended them for intending to make it. He said that was Mrs. General Bowdur of Philadelphia who just went out; did they know her? Somehow, the titles affected Basil as of older date than the late war, and as belonging to the militia period; and he imagined for the agent the romance of a life spent at a watering-place, in contact with rich money-spending, pleasure-taking people, who formed his whole jovial world. The Colonel, who included them in this world, and thereby brevetted them rich and fashionable, could not secure a state-room for them on the boat, — a perfectly splendid Lake steamer, which would take them down the rapids of the St. Lawrence, and on to Montreal without change, — but he would give them a letter to the captain, who was a very particular friend of his, and would be happy to show them as his friends every attention; and so he wrote a note ascribing peculiar merits to Basil, and in spite of all reason making him feel for the moment that he was privileged by a document which was no doubt part of every such transaction. He spoke in a loud cheerful voice; he laughed jollily at no apparent joke; he bowed very low and said, “GOOD-evening!” at parting, and they went away as if he had blessed them.

The rest of the evening they spent in wandering through the village, charmed with its bizarre mixture of quaintness and commonplaceness; in hanging about the shop-windows with their monotonous variety of feather fans, — each with a violently red or yellow bird painfully sacrificed in its centre, — moccasons, bead-wrought work-bags, tobacco-pouches, bows and arrows, and whatever else the savage art of the neighboring squaws can invent; in sauntering through these gay booths, pricing many things, and in hanging long and undecidedly over cases full of feldspar crosses, quartz bracelets and necklaces, and every manner of vase, inoperative pitcher, and other vessel that can be fashioned out of the geological formations at Niagara, tormented meantime by the heat of the gas-lights and the persistence of the mosquitoes. There were very few people besides themselves in the shops, and Isabel’s purchases were not lavish. Her husband had made up his mind to get her some little keepsake; and when he had taken her to the hotel he ran back to one of the shops, and hastily bought her a feather fan, — a magnificent thing of deep magenta dye shading into blue, with a whole yellow-bird transfixed in the centre. When he triumphantly displayed it in their room, “Who’s that for, Basil?” demanded his wife; “the cook?” But seeing his ghastly look at this, she fell upon his neck, crying, “O you poor old tasteless darling! You’ve got it for me!” and seemed about to die of laughter.

“Didn’t you start and throw up your hands,” he stammered, “when you came to that case of fans?”

“Yes, — in horror! Did you think I liked the cruel things, with their dead birds and their hideous colors? O Basil, dearest! You are incorrigible. Can’t you learn that magenta is the vilest of all the hues that the perverseness of man has invented in defiance of nature? Now, my love, just promise me one thing,” she said pathetically. “We’re going to do a little shopping in Montreal, you know; and perhaps you’ll be wanting to surprise me with something there. Don’t do it. Or if you must, do tell me all about it beforehand, and what the color of it’s to be; and I can say whether to get it or not, and then there’ll be some taste about it, and I shall be truly surprised and pleased.”

She turned to put the fan into her trunk, and he murmured something about exchanging it. “No,” she said, “we’ll keep it as a — a — monument.” And she deposed him, with another peal of laughter, from the proud height to which he had climbed in pity of her nervous fears of the day. So completely were their places changed, that he doubted if it were not he who had made that scene on the Third Sister; and when Isabel said, “O, why won’t men use their reasoning faculties?” he could not for himself have claimed any, and he could not urge the truth: that he had bought the fan more for its barbaric brightness than for its beauty. She would not let him get angry, and he could say nothing against the half-ironical petting with which she soothed his mortification.

But all troubles passed with the night, and the next morning they spent a charming hour about Prospect Point, and in sauntering over Goat Island, somewhat daintily tasting the flavors of the place on whose wonders they had so hungrily and indiscriminately feasted at first. They had already the feeling of veteran visitors, and they loftily marveled at the greed with which newer-comers plunged at the sensations. They could not conceive why people should want to descend the inclined railway to the foot of the American Fall; they smiled at the idea of going up Terrapin Tower; they derided the vulgar daring of those who went out upon the Three Weird Sisters; for some whom they saw about to go down the Biddle Stairs to the Cave of the Winds, they had no words to express their contempt.

Then they made their excursion to the Whirlpool, mistakenly going down on the American side, for it is much better seen from the other, though seen from any point it is the most impressive feature of the whole prodigious spectacle of Niagara.

Here within the compass of a mile, those inland seas of the North, Superior, Huron, Michigan, Erie, and the multitude of smaller lakes, all pour their floods, where they swirl in dreadful vortices, with resistless under-currents boiling beneath the surface of that mighty eddy. Abruptly from this scene of secret power, so different from the thunderous splendors of the cataract itself, rise lofty cliffs on every side, to a height of two hundred feet, clothed from the water’s edge almost to their create with dark cedars. Noiselessly, so far as your senses perceive, the lakes steal out of the whirlpool, then, drunk and wild, with brawling rapids roar away to Ontario through the narrow channel of the river. Awful as the scene is, you stand so far above it that you do not know the half of its terribleness; for those waters that look so smooth are great ridges and rings, forced, by the impulse of the currents, twelve feet higher in the centre than at the margin. Nothing can live there, and with what is caught in its hold, the maelstrom plays for days, and whirls and tosses round and round in its toils, with a sad, maniacal patience. The guides tell ghastly stories, which even their telling does not wholly rob of ghastliness, about the bodies of drowned men carried into the whirlpool and made to enact upon its dizzy surges a travesty of life, apparently floating there at their pleasure, diving and frolicking amid the waves, or frantically struggling to escape from the death that has long since befallen them.

On the American side, not far below the railway suspension bridge, is an elevator more than a hundred and eighty feet high, which is meant to let people down to the shore below, and to give a view of the rapids on their own level. From the cliff opposite, it looks a terribly frail structure of pine sticks, but is doubtless stronger than it looks; and at any rate, as it has never yet fallen to pieces, it may be pronounced perfectly safe.

In the waiting-room at the top, Basil and Isabel found Mr. Richard and his ladies again, who got into the movable chamber with them, and they all silently descended together. It was not a time for talk of any kind, either when they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the structure, where it was darkened by a rough weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of the elevator.

An abiding distrust of the machinery overhead mingled in Isabel’s heart with a doubt of the value of the scene below, and she could not look forward to escape from her present perils by the conveyance which had brought her into them, with any satisfaction. She wanly smiled, and shrank closer to Basil; while the other matron made nothing of seizing her husband violently by the arm and imploring him to stop it whenever they experienced a rougher jolt than usual.

At the bottom of the cliff they were helped out of their prison by a humid young Englishman, with much clay on him, whose face was red and bathed in perspiration, for it was very hot down there in his little inclosure of baking pine boards, and it was not much cooler out on the rocks upon which the party issued, descending and descending by repeated and desultory flights of steps, till at last they stood upon a huge fragment of stone right abreast of the rapids. Yet it was a magnificent sight, and for a moment none of them were sorry to have come. The surges did not look like the gigantic ripples on a river’s course as they were, but like a procession of ocean billows; they arose far aloft in vast bulks of clear green, and broke heavily into foam at the crest. Great blocks and shapeless fragments of rock strewed the margin of the awful torrent; gloomy walls of dark stone rose naked from these, bearded here and there with cedar, and everywhere frowning with shaggy brows of evergreen. The place is inexpressibly lonely and dreadful, and one feels like an alien presence there, or as if he had intruded upon some mood or haunt of Nature in which she had a right to be forever alone. The slight, impudent structure of the elevator rises through the solitude, like a thing that merits ruin, yet it is better than something more elaborate, for it looks temporary, and since there must be an elevator, it is well to have it of the most transitory aspect. Some such quality of rude impermanence consoles you for the presence of most improvements by which you enjoy Niagara; the suspension bridges for their part being saved from offensiveness by their beauty and unreality.

Ascending, none of the party spoke; Isabel and the other matron blanched in each other’s faces; their husbands maintained a stolid resignation. When they stepped out of their trap into the waiting room at the top, “What I like about these little adventures,” said Mr. Richard to Basil, abruptly, “is getting safely out of them. Good-morning, sir.” He bowed slightly to Isabel, who returned his politeness, and exchanged faint nods, or glances, with the ladies. They got into their separate carriages, and at that safe distance made each other more decided obeisances.

“Well,” observed Basil, “I suppose we’re introduced now. We shall be meeting them from time to time throughout our journey. You know how the same faces and the same trunks used to keep turning up in our travels on the other side. Once meet people in travelling, and you can’t get rid of them.”

“Yes,” said Isabel, as if continuing his train of thought, “I’m glad we’re going to-day.”

“O dearest!”

“Truly. When we first arrived I felt only the loveliness of the place. It seemed more familiar, too, then; but ever since, it’s been growing stranger and dreadfuller. Somehow it’s begun to pervade me and possess me in a very uncomfortable way; I’m tossed upon rapids, and flung from cataract brinks, and dizzied in whirlpools; I’m no longer yours, Basil; I’m most unhappily married to Niagara. Fly with me, save me from my awful lord!”

She lightly burlesqued the woes of a prima donna, with clasped hands and uplifted eyes.

“That’ll do very well,” Basil commented, “and it implies a reality that can’t be quite definitely spoken. We come to Niagara in the patronizing spirit in which we approach everything nowadays, and for a few hours we have it our own way, and pay our little tributes of admiration with as much complacency as we feel in acknowledging the existence of the Supreme Being. But after a while we are aware of some potent influence undermining our self-satisfaction; we begin to conjecture that the great cataract does not exist by virtue of our approval, and to feel that it will not cease when we go away. The second day makes us its abject slaves, and on the third we want to fly from it in terror. I believe some people stay for weeks, however, and hordes of them have written odes to Niagara.”

“I can’t understand it, at all,” said Isabel. “I don’t wonder now that the town should be so empty this season, but that it should ever be full. I wish we’d gone after our first look at the Falls from the suspension bridge. How beautiful that was! I rejoice in everything that I haven’t done. I’m so glad I haven’t been in the Cave of the Winds; I’m so happy that Table Rock fell twenty years ago! Basil, I couldn’t stand another rainbow today. I’m sorry we went out on the Three Weird Sisters. O, I shall dream about it! and the rush, and the whirl, and the dampness in one’s face, and the everlasting chirr-r-r-r of everything!”

She dipped suddenly upon his shoulder for a moment’s oblivion, and then rose radiant with a question: “Why in the world, if Niagara is really what it seems to us now, do so many bridal parties come here?”

“Perhaps they’re the only people who’ve the strength to bear up against it, and are not easily dispersed and subjected by it.”

“But we’re dispersed and subjected.”

“Ah, my dear, we married a little late. Who knows how it would be if you were nineteen instead of twenty-seven, and I twenty-five and not turned of thirty?”

“Basil, you’re very cruel.”

“No, no. But don’t you see how it is? We’ve known too much of life to desire any gloomy background for our happiness. We’re quite contented to have things gay and bright about us. Once we couldn’t have made the circle dark enough. Well, my dear, that’s the effect of age. We’re superannuated.”

“I used to think I was before we were married,” answered Isabel simply; “but now,” she added triumphantly, “I’m rescued from all that. I shall never be old again, dearest; never, as long as you love me!”

They were about to enter the village, and he could not make any open acknowledgment of her tenderness; but her silken mantle (or whatever) slipped from her shoulder, and he embracingly replaced it, flattering himself that he had delicately seized this chance of an unavowed caress and not allowing (O such is the blindness of our sex!) that the opportunity had been yet more subtly afforded him, with the art which women never disuse in this world, and which I hope they will not forget in the next.

They had an early dinner, and looked their last upon the nuptial gayety of the otherwise forlorn hotel. Three brides sat down with them in travelling-dress; two occupied the parlor as they passed out; half a dozen happy pairs arrived (to the music of the band) in the omnibus that was to carry our friends back to the station; they caught sight of several about the shop windows, as that drove through the streets. Thus the place perpetually renews itself in the glow of love as long as the summer lasts. The moon which is elsewhere so often of wormwood, or of the ordinary green cheese at the best, is of lucent honey there from the first of June to the last of October; and this is a great charm in Niagara. I think with tenderness of all the lives that have opened so fairly there; the hopes that have reigned in the glad young hearts; the measureless tide of joy that ebbs and flows with the arriving and departing trains. Elsewhere there are carking cares of business and of fashion, there are age, and sorrow, and heartbreak: but here only youth, faith, rapture. I kiss my hand to Niagara for that reason, and would I were a poet for a quarter of an hour.

Isabel departed in almost a forgiving mood towards the weak sisterhood of evident brides, and both our friends felt a lurking fondness for Niagara at the last moment. I do not know how much of their content was due to the fact that they had suffered no sort of wrong there, from those who are apt to prey upon travellers. In the hotel a placard warned them to have nothing to do with the miscreant hackmen on the streets, but always to order their carriage at the office; on the street the hackmen whispered to them not to trust the exorbitant drivers in league with the landlords; yet their actual experience was great reasonableness and facile contentment with the sum agreed upon.

This may have been because the hackmen so far outnumbered the visitors, that the latter could dictate terms; but they chose to believe it a triumph of civilization; and I will never be the cynic to sneer at their faith. Only at the station was the virtue of the Niagarans put in doubt, by the hotel porter who professed to find Basil’s trunk enfeebled by travel, and advised a strap for it, which a friend of his would sell for a dollar and a half. Yet even he may have been a benevolent nature unjustly suspected.

VII. DOWN THE ST. LAWRENCE.

They were to take the Canadian steamer at Charlotte, the port of Rochester, and they rattled uneventfully down from Niagara by rail. At the broad, low-banked river-mouth the steamer lay beside the railroad station; and while Isabel disposed of herself on board, Basil looked to the transfer of the baggage, novelly comforted in the business by the respectfulness of the young Canadian who took charge of the trunks for the boat. He was slow, and his system was not good, — he did not give checks for the pieces, but marked them with the name of their destination; and there was that indefinable something in his manner which hinted his hope that you would remember the porter; but he was so civil that he did not snub the meekest and most vexatious of the passengers, and Basil mutely blessed his servile soul. Few white Americans, he said to himself, would behave so decently in his place; and he could not conceive of the American steamboat clerk who would use the politeness towards a waiting crowd that the Canadian purser showed when they all wedged themselves in about his window to receive their stateroom keys. He was somewhat awkward, like the porter, but he was patient, and he did not lose his temper even when some of the crowd, finding he would not bully them, made bold to bully him. He was three times as long in serving them as an American would have been, but their time was of no value there, and he served them well. Basil made a point of speaking him fair, when his turn came, and the purser did not trample on him for a base truckler, as an American jack-in-office would have done.

Our tourists felt at home directly on this steamer, which was very comfortable, and in every way sufficient for its purpose, with a visible captain, who answered two or three questions very pleasantly, and bore himself towards his passengers in some sort like a host.

In the saloon Isabel had found among the passengers her semi-acquaintances of the hotel parlor and the Rapids-elevator, and had glanced tentatively towards them. Whereupon the matron of the party had made advances that ended in their all sitting down together and wondering when the boat would start, and what time they would get to Montreal next evening, with other matters that strangers going upon the same journey may properly marvel over in company. The introduction having thus accomplished itself, they exchanged addresses, and it appeared that Richard was Colonel Ellison, of Milwaukee, and that Fanny was his wife. Miss Kitty Ellison was of Western New York, not far from Erie. There was a diversion presently towards the different state-rooms; but the new acquaintances sat vis-a-vis at the table, and after supper the ladies drew their chairs together on the promenade deck, and enjoyed the fresh evening breeze. The sun set magnificent upon the low western shore which they had now left an hour away, and a broad stripe of color stretched behind the steamer. A few thin, luminous clouds darkened momently along the horizon, and then mixed with the land. The stars came out in a clear sky, and a light wind softly buffeted the cheeks, and breathed life into nerves that the day’s heat had wasted. It scarcely wrinkled the tranquil expanse of the lake, on which loomed, far or near, a full-sailed schooner, and presently melted into the twilight, and left the steamer solitary upon the waters. The company was small, and not remarkable enough in any way to take the thoughts of any one off his own comfort. A deep sense of the coziness of the situation possessed them all which was if possible intensified by the spectacle of the captain, seated on the upper deck, and smoking a cigar that flashed and fainted like a stationary fire-fly in the gathering dusk. How very distant, in this mood, were the most recent events! Niagara seemed a fable of antiquity; the ride from Rochester a myth of the Middle Ages. In this cool, happy world of quiet lake, of starry skies, of air that the soul itself seemed to breathe, there was such consciousness of repose as if one were steeped in rest and soaked through and through with calm.

The points of likeness between Isabel and Mrs. Ellison shortly made them mutually uninteresting, and, leaving her husband to the others, Isabel frankly sought the companionship of Miss Kitty, in whom she found a charm of manner which puzzled at first, but which she presently fancied must be perfect trust of others mingling with a peculiar self-reliance.

“Can’t you see, Basil, what a very flattering way it is?” she asked of her husband, when, after parting with their friends for the night, she tried to explain the character to him. “Of course no art could equal such a natural gift; for that kind of belief in your good-nature and sympathy makes you feel worthy of it, don’t you know; and so you can’t help being good-natured and sympathetic. This Miss Ellison, why, I can tell you, I shouldn’t be ashamed of her anywhere.” By anywhere Isabel meant Boston, and she went on to praise the young lady’s intelligence and refinement, with those expressions of surprise at the existence of civilization in a westerner which westerners find it so hard to receive graciously. Happily, Miss Ellison had not to hear them. “The reason she happened to come with only two dresses is, she lives so near Niagara that she could come for one day, and go back the next. The colonel’s her cousin, and he and his wife go East every year, and they asked her this time to see Niagara with them. She told me all over again what we eavesdropped so shamefully in the hotel parlor; — and I don’t know whether she was better pleased with the prospect of what’s before her, or with the notion of making the journey in this original way. She didn’t force her confidence upon me, any more than she tried to withhold it. We got to talking in the most natural manner; and she seemed to tell these things about herself because they amused her and she liked me. I had been saying how my trunk got left behind once on the French side of Mont Cenis, and I had to wear aunt’s things at Turin till it could be sent for.”

“Well, I don’t see but Miss Ellison could describe you to her friends very much as you’ve described her to me,” said Basil. “How did these mutual confidences begin? Whose trustfulness first flattered the other’s? What else did you tell about yourself?”

“I said we were on our wedding journey,” guiltily admitted Isabel.

“O, you did!”

“Why, dearest! I wanted to know, for once, you see, whether we seemed honeymoon-struck.”

“And do we?”

“No,” came the answer, somewhat ruefully. “Perhaps, Basil,” she added,
“we’ve been a little too successful in disguising our bridal character.
Do you know,” she continued, looking him anxiously in the face, “this
Miss Ellison took me at first for — your sister!”

Basil broke forth in outrageous laughter. “One more such victory,” he said, “and we are undone;” and he laughed again, immoderately. “How sad is the fruition of human wishes! There’s nothing, after all, like a good thorough failure for making people happy.”

Isabel did not listen to him. Safe in a dim corner of the deserted saloon, she seized him in a vindictive embrace; then, as if it had been he who suggested the idea of such a loathsome relation, hissed out the hated words, “Your sister!” and released him with a disdainful repulse.

A little after daybreak the steamer stopped at the Canadian city of Kingston, a handsome place, substantial to the water’s edge, and giving a sense of English solidity by the stone of which it is largely built. There was an accession of many passengers here, and they and the people on the wharf were as little like Americans as possible. They were English or Irish or Scotch, with the healthful bloom of the Old World still upon their faces, or if Canadians they looked not less hearty; so that one must wonder if the line between the Dominion and the United States did not also sharply separate good digestion and dyspepsia. These provincials had not our regularity of features, nor the best of them our careworn sensibility of expression; but neither had they our complexions of adobe; and even Isabel was forced to allow that the men were, on the whole, better dressed than the same number of average Americans would have been in a city of that size and remoteness. The stevedores who were putting the freight aboard were men of leisure; they joked in a kindly way with the orange-women and the old women picking up chips on the pier; and our land of hurry seemed beyond the ocean rather than beyond the lake.

Kingston has romantic memories of being Fort Frontenac two hundred years ago; of Count Frontenac’s splendid advent among the Indians; of the brave La Salle, who turned its wooden walls to stone; of wars with the savages and then with the New York colonists, whom the French and their allies harried from this point; of the destruction of La Salle’s fort in the Old French War; and of final surrender a few years later to the English. It is as picturesque as it is historical. All about the city, the shores are beautifully wooded, and there are many lovely islands, — the first indeed of those Thousand Islands with which the head of the St. Lawrence is filled, and among which the steamer was presently threading her way. They are still as charming and still almost as wild as when, in 1673, Frontenac’s flotilla of canoes passed through their labyrinth and issued upon the lake. Save for a light-house upon one of them, there is almost nothing to show that the foot of man has ever pressed the thin grass clinging to their rocky surfaces, and keeping its green in the eternal shadow of their pines and cedars. In the warm morning light they gathered or dispersed before the advancing vessel, which some of them almost touched with the plumage of their evergreens; and where none of them were large, some were so small that it would not have been too bold to figure them as a vaster race of water-birds assembling and separating in her course. It is curiously affecting to find them so unclaimed yet from the solitude of the vanished wilderness, and scarcely touched even by tradition. But for the interest left them by the French, these tiny islands have scarcely any associations, and must be enjoyed for their beauty alone. There is indeed about them a faint light of legend concerning the Canadian rebellion of 1837, for several patriots are said to have taken refuge amidst their lovely multitude; but this episode of modern history is difficult for the imagination to manage, and somehow one does not take sentimentally even to that daughter of a lurking patriot, who long baffled her father’s pursuers by rowing him from one island to another, and supplying him with food by night.

Either the reluctance is from the natural desire that so recent a heroine should be founded on fact, or it is mere perverseness. Perhaps I ought to say; in justice to her, that it was one of her own sex who refused to be interested in her, and forbade Basil to care for her. When he had read of her exploit from the guide-book, Isabel asked him if he had noticed that handsome girl in the blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat, who had come aboard at Kingston. She pointed her out, and courageously made him admire her beauty, which was of the most bewitching Canadian type. The young girl was redeemed by her New World birth from the English heaviness; a more delicate bloom lighted her cheeks; a softer grace dwelt in her movement; yet she was round and full, and she was in the perfect flower of youth. She was not so ethereal in her loveliness as an American girl, but she was not so nervous and had none of the painful fragility of the latter. Her expression was just a little vacant, it must be owned; but so far as she went she was faultless. She looked like the most tractable of daughters, and as if she would be the most obedient of wives. She had a blameless taste in dress, Isabel declared; her costume of blue and white striped Garibaldi and Swiss hat (set upon heavy masses of dark brown hair) being completed by a black silk skirt. “And you can see,” she added, “that it’s an old skirt made over, and that she’s dressed as cheaply as she is prettily.” This surprised Basil, who had imputed the young lady’s personal sumptuousness to her dress, and had thought it enormously rich. When she got off with her chaperone at one of the poorest-looking country landings, she left them in hopeless conjecture about her. Was she visiting there, or was the interior of Canada full of such stylish and exquisite creatures? Where did she get her taste, her fashions, her manners? As she passed from sight towards the shadow of the woods, they felt the poorer for her going; yet they were glad to have seen her, and on second thoughts they felt that they could not justly ask more of her than to have merely existed for a few hours in their presence. They perceived that beauty was not only its own excuse for being, but that it flattered and favored and profited the world by consenting to be.

At Prescott, the boat on which they had come from Charlotte, and on which they had been promised a passage without change to Montreal, stopped, and they were transferred to a smaller steamer with the uncomfortable name of Banshee. She was very old, and very infirm and dirty, and in every way bore out the character of a squalid Irish goblin. Besides, she was already heavily laden with passengers, and, with the addition of the other steamer’s people had now double her complement; and our friends doubted if they were not to pass the Rapids in as much danger as discomfort. Their fellow-passengers were in great variety, however, and thus partly atoned for their numbers. Among them of course there was a full force of brides from Niagara and elsewhere, and some curious forms of the prevailing infatuation appeared. It is well enough, if she likes, and it may even be very noble for a passably good-looking young lady to marry a gentleman of venerable age; but to intensify the idea of self-devotion by furtively caressing his wrinkled front seems too reproachful of the general public; while, on the other hand, if the bride is very young and pretty, it enlists in behalf of the white-haired husband the unwilling sympathies of the spectator to see her the centre of a group of young people, and him only acknowledged from time to time by a Parthian snub. Nothing, however, could have been more satisfactory than the sisterly surrounding of this latter bride. They were of a better class of Irish people; and if it had been any sacrifice for her to marry so old a man, they were doing their best to give the affair at least the liveliness of a wake. There were five or six of those great handsome girls, with their generous curves and wholesome colors, and they were every one attended by a good-looking colonial lover, with whom they joked in slightly brogued voices, and laughed with careless Celtic laughter. One of the young fellows presently lost his hat overboard, and had to wear the handkerchief of his lady about his head; and this appeared to be really one of the best things in the world, and led to endless banter. They were well dressed, and it could be imagined that the ancient bridegroom had come in for the support of the whole good-looking, healthy, light-hearted family. In some degree he looked it, and wore but a rueful countenance for a bridegroom; so that a very young newly married couple, who sat next the jolly sister-and-loverhood could not keep their pitying eyes off his downcast face. “What if he, too, were young at heart!” the kind little wife’s regard seemed to say.

For the sake of the slight air that was stirring, and to have the best view of the Rapids, the Banshee’s whole company was gathered upon the forward promenade, and the throng was almost as dense as in a six-o’clock horse-car out from Boston. The standing and sitting groups were closely packed together, and the expanded parasols and umbrellas formed a nearly unbroken roof. Under this Isabel chatted at intervals with the Ellisons, who sat near; but it was not an atmosphere that provoked social feeling, and she was secretly glad when after a while they shifted their position.

It was deadly hot, and most of the people saddened and silenced in the heat. From time to time the clouds idling about overhead met and sprinkled down a cruel little shower of rain that seemed to make the air less breathable than before. The lonely shores were yellow with drought; the islands grew wilder and barrener; the course of the river was for miles at a stretch through country which gave no signs of human life. The St. Lawrence has none of the bold picturesqueness of the Hudson, and is far more like its far-off cousin the Mississippi. Its banks are low like the Mississippi’s, its current, swift, its way through solitary lands. The same sentiment of early adventure hangs about each: both are haunted by visions of the Jesuit in his priestly robe, and the soldier in his mediaeval steel; the same gay, devout, and dauntless race has touched them both with immortal romance. If the water were of a dusky golden color, instead of translucent green, and the shores and islands were covered with cottonwoods and willows instead of dark cedars, one could with no great effort believe one’s self on the Mississippi between Cairo and St. Louis, so much do the great rivers strike one as kindred in the chief features of their landscape. Only, in tracing this resemblance you do not know just what to do with the purple mountains of Vermont, seen vague against the horizon from the St. Lawrence, or with the quaint little French villages that begin to show themselves as you penetrate farther down into Lower Canada. These look so peaceful, with their dormer-windowed cottages clustering about their church-spires, that it seems impossible they could once have been the homes of the savages and the cruel peasants who, with fire-brand and scalping-knife and tomahawk, harassed the borders of New England for a hundred years. But just after you descend the Long Sault you pass the hamlet of St. Regis, in which was kindled the torch that wrapt Deerfield in flames, waking her people from their sleep to meet instant death or taste the bitterness of a captivity. The bell which was sent out from France for the Indian converts of the Jesuits, and was captured by an English ship and carried into Salem, and thence sold to Deerfield, where it called the Puritans to prayer, till at last it also summoned the priest-led Indians and ‘habitans’ across hundreds of miles of winter and of wilderness to reclaim it from that desecration, — this fateful bell still hangs in the church-tower of St. Regis, and has invited to matins and vespers for nearly two centuries the children of those who fought so pitilessly and dared and endured so much for it. Our friends would fair have heard it as they passed, hoping for some mournful note of history in its sound; but it hung silent over the silent hamlet, which, as it lay in the hot afternoon sun by the river’s side, seemed as lifeless as the Deerfield burnt long ago.

They turned from it to look at a gentleman who had just appeared in a mustard-colored linen duster, and Basil asked, “Shouldn’t you like to know the origin, personal history, and secret feelings of a gentleman who goes about in a duster of that particular tint? Or, that gentleman yonder with his eye tied up in a wet handkerchief, do you suppose he’s travelling for pleasure? Look at those young people from Omaha: they haven’t ceased flirting or cackling since we left Kingston. Do you think everybody has such spirits out at Omaha? But behold a yet more surprising figure than any we have yet seen among this boat-load of nondescripts.”

This was a tall, handsome young man, with a face of somewhat foreign cast, and well dressed, with a certain impressive difference from the rest in the cut of his clothes. But what most drew the eye to him was a large cross, set with brilliants, and surmounted by a heavy double-headed eagle in gold. This ornament dazzled from a conspicuous place on the left lappet of his coat; on his hand shone a magnificent diamond ring, and he bore a stately opera-glass, with which, from time to time, he imperiously, as one may say, surveyed the landscape. As the imposing apparition grew upon Isabel, “O here,” she thought, “is something truly distinguished. Of course, dear,” she added aloud to Basil, “he’s some foreign nobleman travelling here”; and she ran over in her mind the newspaper announcements of patrician visitors from abroad and tried to identify him with some one of them. The cross must be the decoration of a foreign order, and Basil suggested that he was perhaps a member of some legation at Washington, who had ran up there for his summer vacation. The cross puzzled him, but the double-headed eagle, he said, meant either Austria or Russia; probably Austria, for the wearer looked a trifle too civilized for a Russian.

“Yes, indeed! What an air he has. Never tell me. Basil, that there’s nothing in blood!” cried Isabel, who was a bitter aristocrat at heart, like all her sex, though in principle she was democratic enough. As she spoke, the object of her regard looked about him on the different groups, not with pride, not with hauteur, but with a glance of unconscious, unmistakable superiority. “O, that stare!” she added; nothing but high birth and long descent can give it! Dearest, he’s becoming a great affliction to me. I want to know who he is. Couldn’t you invent some pretext for speaking to him?”

“No, I couldn’t do it decently; and no doubt he’d snub me as I deserved if I intruded upon him. Let’s wait for fortune to reveal him.”

“Well, I suppose I must, but it’s dreadful; it’s really dreadful. You can easily see that’s distinction,” she continued, as her hero moved about the promenade and gently but loftily made a way for himself among the other passengers and favored the scenery through his opera-glass from one point and another. He spoke to no one, and she reasonably supposed that he did not know English.

In the mean time it was drawing near the hour of dinner, but no dinner appeared. Twelve, one, two came and went, and then at last came the dinner, which had been delayed, it seemed, till the cook could recruit his energies sufficiently to meet the wants of double the number he had expected to provide for. It was observable of the officers and crew of the Banshee, that while they did not hold themselves aloof from the passengers in the disdainful American manner, they were of feeble mind, and not only did everything very slowly (in the usual Canadian fashion), but with an inefficiency that among us would have justified them in being insolent. The people sat down at several successive tables to the worst dinner that ever was cooked; the ladies first, and the gentlemen afterwards, as they made conquest of places. At the second table, to Basil’s great satisfaction, he found a seat, and on his right hand the distinguished foreigner.

“Naturally, I was somewhat abashed,” he said in the account he was presently called to give Isabel of the interview, “but I remembered that I was an American citizen, and tried to maintain a decent composure. For several minutes we sat silent behind a dish of flabby cucumbers, expecting the dinner, and I was wondering whether I should address him in French or German, — for I knew you’d never forgive me if I let slip such a chance, — when he turned and spoke himself.”

“O what did he say, dearest?”

He said, “Pretty tejious waitin,’ ain’t it? in she best New York State accent.”

“You don’t mean it!” gasped Isabel.

“But I do. After that I took courage to ask what his cross and double-headed eagle meant. He showed the condescension of a true nobleman. ‘O,’ says he, ‘I’m glad you like it, and it’s not the least offense to ask,’ and he told me. Can you imagine what it is? It’s the emblem of the fifty-fourth degree in the secret society he belongs to!”

“I don’t believe it!”

“Well, ask him yourself, then,” returned Basil; “he’s a very good fellow. ‘O, that stare! nothing but high birth and long descent could give it!’” he repeated, abominably implying that he had himself had no share in their common error.

What retort Isabel might have made cannot now be known, for she was arrested at this moment by a rumor amongst the passengers that they were coming to the Long Sault Rapids. Looking forward she saw the tossing and flashing of surges that, to the eye, are certainly as threatening as the rapids above Niagara. The steamer had already passed the Deplau and the Galopes, and they had thus had a foretaste of whatever pleasure or terror there is in the descent of these nine miles of stormy sea. It is purely a matter of taste, about shooting the rapids of the St. Lawrence. The passengers like it better than the captain and the pilot, to guesses by their looks, and the women and children like it better than the men. It is no doubt very thrilling and picturesque and wildly beautiful: the children crow and laugh, the women shout forth their delight, as the boat enters the seething current; great foaming waves strike her bows, and brawl away to the stern, while she dips, and rolls, and shoots onward, light as a bird blown by the wind; the wild shores and islands whirl out of sight; you feel in every fibre the career of the vessel. But the captain sits in front of the pilothouse smoking with a grave face, the pilots tug hard at the wheel; the hoarse roar of the waters fills the air; beneath the smoother sweeps of the current you can see the brown rocks; as you sink from ledge to ledge in the writhing and twisting steamer, you have a vague sense that all this is perhaps an achievement rather than an enjoyment. When, descending the Long Sault, you look back up hill, and behold those billows leaping down the steep slope after you, “No doubt,” you confide to your soul, “it is magnificent; but it is not pleasure.” You greet with silent satisfaction the level river, stretching between the Long Sault and the Coteau, and you admire the delightful tranquillity of that beautiful Lake St. Francis into which it expands. Then the boat shudders into the Coteau Rapids, and down through the Cedars and Cascades. On the rocks of the last lies the skeleton of a steamer wrecked upon them, and gnawed at still by the white-tusked wolfish rapids. No one, they say, was lost from her. “But how,” Basil thought, “would it fare with all these people packed here upon her bow, if the Banshee should swing round upon a ledge?” As to Isabel, she looked upon the wrecked steamer with indifference, as did all the women; but then they could not swim, and would not have to save themselves. “The La Chine’s to come yet,” they exulted, “and that’s the awfullest of all!”

They passed the Lake St. Louis; the La Chin; rapids flashed into sight. The captain rose up from his seat, took his pipe from his mouth, and waved a silence with it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said he, “it’s very important in passing these rapids to keep the boat perfectly trim. Please to remain just as you are.”

It was twilight, for the boat was late. From the Indian village on the shore they signaled to know if he wanted the local pilot; the captain refused; and then the steamer plunged into the leaping waves. From rock to rock she swerved and sank; on the last ledge she scraped with a deadly touch that went to the heart.

Then the danger was passed, and the noble city of Montreal was in full sight, lying at the foot of her dark green mountain, and lifting her many spires into the rosy twilight air: massive and grand showed the sister towers of the French cathedral.

Basil had hoped to approach this famous city with just associations. He had meant to conjure up for Isabel’s sake some reflex, however faint, of that beautiful picture Mr. Parkman has painted of Maisonneuve founding and consecrating Montreal. He flushed with the recollection of the historian’s phrase; but in that moment there came forth from the cabin a pretty young person who gave every token of being a pretty young actress, even to the duenna-like, elderly female companion, to be detected in the remote background of every young actress. She had flirted audaciously during the day with some young Englishmen and Canadians of her acquaintance, and after passing the La Chine Rapids she had taken the hearts of all the men by springing suddenly to her feet, apostrophizing the tumult with a charming attitude, and warbling a delicious bit of song. Now as they drew near the city the Victoria Bridge stretched its long tube athwart the river, and looked so low because of its great length that it seemed to bar the steamer’s passage.

“I wonder,” said one of the actress’s adorers, a Canadian, whose face was exactly that of the beaver on the escutcheon of his native province, and whose heavy gallantries she had constantly received with a gay, impertinent nonchalance,— “I wonder if we can be going right under that bridge?”

“No, sir!” answered the pretty young actress with shocking promptness, “we’re going right over it!”

        ”’Three groans and a guggle,
          And an awful struggle,
          And over we go!’”

At this witless, sweet impudence the Canadian looked very sheepish — for a beaver; and all the other people laughed; but the noble historical shades of Basil’s thought vanished in wounded dignity beyond recall, and left him feeling rather ashamed, — for he had laughed too.

VIII. THE SENTIMENT OF MONTREAL.

The feeling of foreign travel for which our tourists had striven throughout their journey, and which they had known in some degree at Kingston and all the way down the river, was intensified from the first moment in Montreal; and it was so welcome that they were almost glad to lose money on their greenbacks, which the conductor of the omnibus would take only at a discount of twenty cents. At breakfast next morning they could hardly tell on what country they had fallen. The waiters had but a thin varnish of English speech upon their native French, and they spoke their own tongue with each other; but most of the meats were cooked to the English taste, and the whole was a poor imitation of an American hotel. During their stay the same commingling of usages and races bewildered them; the shops were English and the clerks were commonly French; the carriage-drivers were often Irish, and up and down the streets with their pious old-fashioned names, tinkled American horse-cars. Everywhere were churches and convents that recalled the ecclesiastical and feudal origin of the city; the great tubular bridge, the superb water-front with its long array of docks only surpassed by those of Liverpool, the solid blocks of business houses, and the substantial mansions on the quieter streets, proclaimed the succession of Protestant thrift and energy.

Our friends cared far less for the modern splendor of Montreal than for the remnants of its past, and for the features that identified it with another faith and another people than their own. Isabel would almost have confessed to any one of the black-robed priests upon the street; Basil could easily have gone down upon his knees to the white-hooded, pale-faced nuns gliding among the crowd. It was rapture to take a carriage, and drive, not to the cemetery, not to the public library, not to the rooms of the Young Men’s Christian Association, or the grain elevators, or the new park just tricked out with rockwork and sprigs of evergreen, — not to any of the charming resorts of our own cities, but as in Europe to the churches, the churches of a pitiless superstition, the churches with their atrocious pictures and statues, their lingering smell of the morning’s incense, their confessionals, their fee-taking sacristans, their worshippers dropped here and there upon their knees about the aisles and saying their prayers with shut or wandering eyes according as they were old women or young! I do not defend the feeble sentimentality, — call it wickedness if you like, — but I understand it, and I forgive it from my soul.

They went first, of course, to the French cathedral, pausing on their way to alight and walk through the Bonsecours Market, where the habitans have all come in their carts, with their various stores of poultry, fruit, and vegetables, and where every cart is a study. Here is a simple-faced young peasant-couple with butter and eggs and chickens ravishingly displayed; here is a smooth-checked, blackeyed, black-haired young girl, looking as if an infusion of Indian blood had darkened the red of her cheeks, presiding over a stock of onions, potatoes, beets, and turnips; there an old woman with a face carven like a walnut, behind a flattering array of cherries and pears; yonder a whole family trafficking in loaves of brown-bread and maple-sugar in many shapes of pious and grotesque device. There are gay shows of bright scarfs and kerchiefs and vari-colored yarns, and sad shows of old clothes and second-hand merchandise of other sorts; but above all prevails the abundance of orchard and garden, while within the fine edifice are the stalls of the butchers, and in the basement below a world of household utensils, glass-ware, hard-ware, and wooden-ware. As in other Latin countries, each peasant has given a personal interest to his wares, but the bargains are not clamored over as in Latin lands abroad. Whatever protest and concession and invocation of the saints attend the transacting of business at Bonsecours Market are in a subdued tone. The fat huckster-women drowsing beside their wares, scarce send their voices beyond the borders of their broad-brimmed straw hats, as they softly haggle with purchasers, or tranquilly gossip together.

At the cathedral there are, perhaps, the worst paintings in the world, and the massive pine-board pillars are unscrupulously smoked to look like marble; but our tourists enjoyed it as if it had been St. Peter’s; in fact it has something of the barnlike immensity and impressiveness of St. Peter’s. They did not ask it to be beautiful or grand; they desired it only to recall the beloved ugliness, the fondly cherished hideousness and incongruity of the average Catholic churches of their remembrance, and it did this and more: it added an effect of its own; it offered the spectacle of a swarthy old Indian kneeling before the high altar, telling his beads, and saying with many sighs and tears the prayers which it cost so much martyrdom and heroism to teach his race. “O, it is only a savage man,” said the little French boy who was showing them the place, impatient of their interest in a thing so unworthy as this groaning barbarian. He ran swiftly about from object to object, rapidly lecturing their inattention. “It is now time to go up into the tower,” said he, and they gladly made that toilsome ascent, though it is doubtful if the ascent of towers is not too much like the ascent of mountains ever to be compensatory. From the top of Notre Dame is certainly to be had a prospect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves and trembling muscles and troubled respiration, the traveller might well look with delight, and as it is must behold with wonder. So far as the eye reaches it dwells only upon what is magnificent. All the features of that landscape are grand. Below you spreads the city, which has less that is merely mean in it than any other city of our continent, and which is everywhere ennobled by stately civic edifices, adorned by tasteful churches, and skirted by full foliaged avenues of mansions and villas. Behind it rises the beautiful mountain, green with woods and gardens to its crest, and flanked on the east by an endless fertile plain, and on the west by another expanse, through which the Ottawa rushes, turbid and dark, to its confluence with the St. Lawrence. Then these two mighty streams commingled flow past the city, lighting up the vast Champaign country to the south, while upon the utmost southern verge, as on the northern, rise the cloudy summits of far-off mountains.

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur, their hearts were humbled to the tacit admission that the colonial metropolis was not only worthy of its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled by any of the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic. Long before they quitted Montreal they had rallied from this weakness, but they delighted still to honor her superb beauty.

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those who have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life, and the objects of interest thrive upon their bounty. Our friends met them at every turn, and knew them at a glance from the native populations, who are also easily distinguishable from each other. The French Canadians are nearly always of a peasant-like commonness, or where they rise above this have a bourgeois commonness of face and manner, and the English Canadians are to be known from the many English sojourners by the effort to look much more English than the latter. The social heart of the colony clings fast to the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the political tendency may be; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebrate this affectionate union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those whose lives were passed in the joint service of England and her loyal child; and our travellers, whatever their want of sympathy with the sentiment, had to own to a certain beauty in that attitude of proud reverence. Here, at least, was a people not cut off from its past, but holding, unbroken in life and death, the ties which exist for us only in history. It gave a glamour of olden time to the new land; it touched the prosaic democratic present with the waning poetic light of the aristocratic and monarchical tradition. There was here and there a title on the tablets, and there was everywhere the formal language of loyalty and of veneration for things we have tumbled into the dust. It is a beautiful church, of admirable English Gothic; if you are so happy, you are rather curtly told you may enter by a burly English figure in some kind of sombre ecclesiastical drapery, and within its quiet precincts you may feel yourself in England if you like, — which, for my part, I do not. Neither did our friends enjoy it so much as the Church of the Jesuits, with its more than tolerable painting, its coldly frescoed ceiling, its architectural taste of subdued Renaissance, and its black-eyed peasant-girl telling her beads before a side altar, just as in the enviably deplorable countries we all love; nor so much even as the Irish cathedral which they next visited. That is a very gorgeous cathedral indeed, painted and gilded ‘a merveille’, and everywhere stuck about with big and little saints and crucifixes, and pictures incredibly bad — but for those in the French cathedral. There is, of course, a series representing Christ’s progress to Calvary; and there was a very tattered old man, — an old man whose voice had been long ago drowned in whiskey, and who now spoke in a ghostly whisper, — who, when he saw Basil’s eye fall upon the series, made him go the round of them, and tediously explained them.

“Why did you let that old wretch bore you, and then pay him for it?”
Isabel asked.

“O, it reminded me so sweetly of the swindles of other lands and days, that I couldn’t help it,” he answered; and straightway in the eyes of both that poor, whiskeyfied, Irish tatterdemalion stood transfigured to the glorious likeness of an Italian beggar.

They were always doing something of this kind, those absurdly sentimental people, whom yet I cannot find it in my heart to blame for their folly, though I could name ever so many reasons for rebuking it. Why, in fact, should we wish to find America like Europe? Are the ruins and impostures and miseries and superstitions which beset the traveller abroad so precious, that he should desire to imagine them at every step in his own hemisphere? Or have we then of our own no effective shapes of ignorance and want and incredibility, that we must forever seek an alien contrast to our native intelligence and comfort? Some such questions this guilty couple put to each other, and then drove off to visit the convent of the Gray Nuns with a joyful expectation which I suppose the prospect of the finest public-school exhibition in Boston could never have inspired. But, indeed, since there must be Gray Nuns, is it not well that there are sentimentalists to take a mournful pleasure in their sad, pallid existence?

The convent is at a good distance from the Irish cathedral, and in going to it the tourists made their driver carry them through one of the few old French streets which still remain in Montreal. Fires and improvements had made havoc among the quaint houses since Basil’s first visit; but at last they came upon a narrow, ancient Rue Saint Antoine, — or whatever other saint it was called after, — in which there was no English face or house to be seen. The doors of the little one-story dwellings opened from the pavement, and within you saw fat madame the mother moving about her domestic affairs, and spare monsieur the elderly husband smoking beside the open window; French babies crawled about the tidy floors; French martyrs (let us believe Lalement or Brebeuf, who gave up their heroic lives for the conversion of Canada) sifted their eyes in high-colored lithographs on the wall; among the flower-pots in the dormer-window looking from every tin roof sat and sewed a smooth haired young girl, I hope, — the romance of each little mansion. The antique and foreign character of the place was accented by the inscription upon a wall of “Sirop adoucissant de Madame Winslow.”

Ever since 1692 the Gray Nuns have made refuge within the ample borders of their convent for infirm old people and for foundling children, and it is now in the regular course of sight-seeing for the traveller to visit their hospital at noonday, when he beholds the Sisters at their devotions in the chapel. It is a bare, white-walled, cold-looking chapel, with the usual paraphernalia of pictures and crucifixes. Seated upon low benches on either side of the aisle were the curious or the devout; the former in greater number and chiefly Americans, who were now and then whispered silent by an old pauper zealous for the sanctity of the place. At the stroke of twelve the Sisters entered two by two, followed by the lady-superior with a prayerbook in her hand. She clapped the leaves of this together in signal for them to kneel, to rise, to kneel again and rise, while they repeated in rather harsh voices their prayers, and then clattered out of the chapel as they had clattered in, with resounding shoes. The two young girls at the head were very pretty, and all the pale faces had a corpse-like peace. As Basil looked at their pensive sameness, it seemed to him that those prettiest girls might very well be the twain that he had seen here so many years ago, stricken forever young in their joyless beauty. The ungraceful gowns of coarse gray, the blue checked aprons, the black crape caps, were the same; they came and went with the same quick tread, touching their brows with holy water and kneeling and rising now as then with the same constrained and ordered movements. Would it be too cruel if they were really the same persons? or would it be yet more cruel if every year two girls so young and fair were self-doomed to renew the likeness of that youthful death?

The visitors went about the hospital, and saw the old men and the little children to whom these good pure lives were given, and they could only blame the system, not the instruments or their work. Perhaps they did not judge wisely of the amount of self-sacrifice involved, for they judged from hearts to which love was the whole of earth and heaven; but nevertheless they pitied the Gray Nuns amidst the unhomelike comfort of their convent, the unnatural care of those alien little ones. Poor ‘Soeurs Grises’ in their narrow cells; at the bedside of sickness and age and sorrow; kneeling with clasped hands and yearning eyes before the bloody spectacle of the cross! — the power of your Church is shown far more subtly and mightily in such as you, than in her grandest fanes or the sight of her most august ceremonies, with praying priests, swinging censers, tapers and pictures and images, under a gloomy heaven of cathedral arches. There, indeed, the faithful have given their substance; but here the nun has given up the most precious part of her woman’s nature, and all the tenderness that clings about the thought of wife and mother.

“There are some things that always greatly afflict me in the idea of a new country,” said Basil, as they loitered slowly through the grounds of the convent toward the gate. “Of course, it’s absurd to think of men as other than men, as having changed their natures with their skies; but a new land always does seem at first thoughts like a new chance afforded the race for goodness and happiness, for health and life. So I grieve for the earliest dead at Plymouth more than for the multitude that the plague swept away in London; I shudder over the crime of the first guilty man, the sin of the first wicked woman in a new country; the trouble of the first youth or maiden crossed in love there is intolerable. All should be hope and freedom and prosperous life upon that virgin soil. It never was so since Eden; but none the less I feel it ought to be; and I am oppressed by the thought that among the earliest walls which rose upon this broad meadow of Montreal were those built to immure the innocence of such young girls as these and shut them from the life we find so fair. Wouldn’t you like to know who was the first that took the veil in this wild new country? Who was she, poor soul, and what was her deep sorrow or lofty rapture? You can fancy her some Indian maiden lured to the renunciation by the splendor of symbols and promises seen vaguely through the lingering mists of her native superstitions; or some weary soul, sick from the vanities and vices, the bloodshed and the tears of the Old World, and eager for a silence profounder than that of the wilderness into which she had fled. Well, the Church knows and God. She was dust long ago.”

From time to time there had fallen little fitful showers during the morning. Now as the wedding-journeyers passed out of the convent gate the rain dropped soft and thin, and the gray clouds that floated through the sky so swiftly were as far-seen Gray Sisters in flight for heaven.

“We shall have time for the drive round the mountain before dinner,” said Basil, as they got into their carriage again; and he was giving the order to the driver, when Isabel asked how far it was.

“Nine miles.”

“O, then we can’t think of going with one horse. You know,” she added, “that we always intended to have two horses for going round the mountain.”

“No,” said Basil, not yet used to having his decisions reached without his knowledge. “And I don’t see why we should. Everybody goes with one. You don’t suppose we’re too heavy, do you?”

“I had a party from the States, ma’am, yesterday,” interposed the driver; “two ladies, real heavy apes, two gentlemen, weighin’ two hundred apiece, and a stout young man on the box with me. You’d ‘a’ thought the horse was drawin’ an empty carriage, the way she darted along.”

“Then his horse must be perfectly worn out to-day,” said Isabel, refusing to admit the pool fellow directly even to the honors of a defeat. He had proved too much, and was put out of court with no hope of repairing his error.

“Why, it seems a pity,” whispered Basil, dispassionately, “to turn this man adrift, when he had a reasonable hope of being with us all day, and has been so civil and obliging.”

“O yes, Basil, sentimentalize him, do! Why don’t you sentimentalize his helpless, overworked horse? — all in a reek of perspiration.”

“Perspiration! Why, my dear, it’s the rain!”

“Well, rain or shine, darling, I don’t want to go round the mountain with one horse; and it’s very unkind of you to insist now, when you’ve tacitly promised me all along to take two.”

“Now, this is a little too much, Isabel. You know we never mentioned the matter till this moment.”

“It’s the same as a promise, your not saying you wouldn’t. But I don’t ask you to keep your word. I don’t want to go round the mountain. I’d much rather go to the hotel. I’m tired.”

“Very well, then, Isabel, I’ll leave you at the hotel.”

In a moment it had come, the first serious dispute of their wedded life. It had come as all such calamities come, from nothing, and it was on them in full disaster ere they knew. Such a very little while ago, there in the convent garden, their lives had been drawn closer in sympathy than ever before; and now that blessed time seemed ages since, and they were further asunder than those who have never been friends. “I thought,” bitterly mused Isabel, “that he would have done anything for me.” “Who could have dreamed that a woman of her sense would be so unreasonable,” he wondered. Both had tempers, as I know my dearest reader has (if a lady), and neither would yield; and so, presently, they could hardly tell how, for they were aghast at it all, Isabel was alone in her room amidst the ruins of her life, and Basil alone in the one-horse carriage, trying to drive away from the wreck of his happiness. All was over; the dream was past; the charm was broken. The sweetness of their love was turned to gall; whatever had pleased them in their loving moods was loathsome now, and the things they had praised a moment before were hateful. In that baleful light, which seemed to dwell upon all they ever said or did in mutual enjoyment, how poor and stupid and empty looked their wedding-journey! Basil spent five minutes in arraigning his wife and convicting her of every folly and fault. His soul was in a whirl,

    ”For to be wroth with one we love
     Doth work like madness in the brain.”

In the midst of his bitter and furious upbraidings he found himself suddenly become her ardent advocate, and ready to denounce her judge as a heartless monster. “On our wedding journey, too! Good heavens, what an incredible brute I am!” Then he said, “What an ass I am!” And the pathos of the case having yielded to its absurdity, he was helpless. In five minutes more he was at Isabel’s side, the one-horse carriage driver dismissed with a handsome pour-boire, and a pair of lusty bays with a glittering barouche waiting at the door below. He swiftly accounted for his presence, which she seemed to find the most natural thing that could be, and she met his surrender with the openness of a heart that forgives but does not forget, if indeed the most gracious art is the only one unknown to the sex.

She rose with a smile from the ruins of her life, amidst which she had heart-brokenly sat down with all her things on. “I knew you’d come back,” she said.

“So did I,” he answered. “I am much too good and noble to sacrifice my preference to my duty.”

“I didn’t care particularly for the two horses, Basil,” she said, as they descended to the barouche. “It was your refusing them that hurt me.”

“And I didn’t want the one-horse carriage. It was your insisting so that provoked me.”

“Do you think people ever quarreled before on a wedding journey?” asked
Isabel as they drove gayly out of the city.

“Never! I can’t conceive of it. I suppose if this were written down, nobody would believe it.”

“No, nobody could,” said Isabel, musingly, and she added after a pause, “I wish you would tell me just what you thought of me, dearest. Did you feel as you did when our little affair was broken off, long ago? Did you hate me?”

“I did, most cordially; but not half so much as I despised myself the next moment. As to its being like a lover’s quarrel, it wasn’t. It was more bitter, so much more love than lovers ever give had to be taken back. Besides, it had no dignity, and a lover’s quarrel always has. A lover’s quarrel always springs from a more serious cause, and has an air of romantic tragedy. This had no grace of the kind. It was a poor shabby little squabble.”

“O, don’t call it so, Basil! I should like you to respect even a quarrel of ours more than that. It was tragical enough with me, for I didn’t see how it could ever be made up. I knew I couldn’t make the advances. I don’t think it is quite feminine to be the first to forgive, is it?”

“I’m sure I can’t say. Perhaps it would be rather unladylike.”

“Well, you see, dearest, what I am trying to get at is this: whether we shall love each other the more or the less for it. I think we shall get on all the better for a while, on account of it. But I should have said it was totally out of character it’s something you might have expected of a very young bridal couple; but after what we’ve been through, it seems too improbable.”

“Very well,” said Basil, who, having made all the concessions, could not enjoy the quarrel as she did, simply because it was theirs; “let’s behave as if it had never been.”

“O no, we can’t. To me, it’s as if we had just won each other.”

In fact it gave a wonderful zest and freshness to that ride round the mountain, and shed a beneficent glow upon the rest of their journey. The sun came out through the thin clouds, and lighted up the vast plain that swept away north and east, with the purple heights against the eastern sky. The royal mountain lifted its graceful mass beside them, and hid the city wholly from sight. Peasant-villages, in the shade of beautiful elms, dotted the plain in every direction, and at intervals crept up to the side of the road along which they drove. But these had been corrupted by a more ambitious architecture since Basil saw them last, and were no longer purely French in appearance. Then, nearly every house was a tannery in a modest way, and poetically published the fact by the display of a sheep’s tail over the front door, like a bush at a wine-shop. Now, if the tanneries still existed, the poetry of the sheeps’ tails had vanished from the portals. But our friends were consoled by meeting numbers of the peasants jolting home from market in the painted carts, which are doubtless of the pattern of the carts first built there two hundred years ago. They were grateful for the immortal old wooden, crooked and brown with the labor of the fields, who abounded in these vehicles; when a huge girl jumped from the tail of her cart, and showed the thick, clumsy ankles of a true peasant-maid, they could only sigh out their unspeakable satisfaction.

Gardens embowered and perfumed the low cottages, through the open doors of which they could see the exquisite neatness of the life within. One of the doors opened into a school-house, where they beheld with rapture the school-mistress, book in hand, and with a quaint cap on her gray head, and encircled by her flock of little boys and girls.

By and by it began to rain again; and now while their driver stopped to put up the top of the barouche, they entered a country church which had taken their fancy, and walked up the aisle with the steps that blend with silence rather than break it, while they heard only the soft whisper of the shower without. There was no one there but themselves. The urn of holy water seemed not to have been troubled that day, and no penitent knelt at the shrine, before which twinkled so faintly one lighted lamp. The white roof swelled into dim arches over their heads; the pale day like a visible hush stole through the painted windows; they heard themselves breathe as they crept from picture to picture.

A narrow door opened at the side of the high altar, and a slender young priest appeared in a long black robe, and with shaven head. He, too as he moved with noiseless feet, seemed a part of the silence; and when he approached with dreamy black eyes fixed upon them, and bowed courteously, it seemed impossible he should speak. But he spoke, the pale young priest, the dark-robed tradition, the tonsured vision of an age and a church that are passing.

“Do you understand French, monsieur?”

“A very little, monsieur.”

“A very little is more than my English,” he said, yet he politely went the round of the pictures with them, and gave them the names of the painters between his crossings at the different altars. At the high altar there was a very fair Crucifixion; before this the priest bent one knee. “Fine picture, fine altar, fine church,” he said in English. At last they stopped next the poor-box. As their coins clinked against those within, he smiled serenely upon the good heretics. Then he bowed, and, as if he had relapsed into the past, he vanished through the narrow door by which he had entered.

Basil and Isabel stood speechless a moment on the church steps. Then she cried,

“O, why didn’t something happen?”

“Ah, my dear! what could have been half so good as the nothing that did happen? Suppose we knew him to have taken orders because of a disappointment in love: how common it would have made him; everybody has been crossed in love once or twice.” He bade the driver take them back to the hotel. “This is the very bouquet of adventure why should we care for the grosser body? I dare say if we knew all about yonder pale young priest, we should not think him half so interesting as we do now.”

At dinner they spent the intervals of the courses in guessing the nationality of the different persons, and in wondering if the Canadians did not make it a matter of conscientious loyalty to out-English the English even in the matter of pale-ale and sherry, and in rotundity of person and freshness of face, just as they emulated them in the cut of their clothes and whiskers. Must they found even their health upon the health of the mother-country?

Our friends began to detect something servile in it all, and but that they were such amiable persons, the loyally perfect digestion of Montreal would have gone far to impair their own.

The loyalty, which had already appeared to them in the cathedral, suggested itself in many ways upon the street, when they went out after dinner to do that little shopping which Isabel had planned to do in Montreal. The booksellers’ windows were full of Canadian editions of our authors, and English copies of English works, instead of our pirated editions; the dry-goods stores were gay with fabrics in the London taste and garments of the London shape; here was the sign of a photographer to the Queen, there of a hatter to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales; a barber was “under the patronage of H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, H. E. the Duke of Cambridge, and the gentry of Montreal.” ‘Ich dien’ was the motto of a restaurateur; a hosier had gallantly labeled his stock in trade with ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’. Again they noted the English solidity of the civic edifices, and already they had observed in the foreign population a difference from that at home. They saw no German faces on the streets, and the Irish faces had not that truculence which they wear sometimes with us. They had not lost their native simpleness and kindliness; the Irishmen who drove the public carriages were as civil as our own Boston hackmen, and behaved as respectfully under the shadow of England here, as they would have done under it in Ireland. The problem which vexes us seems to have been solved pleasantly enough in Canada. Is it because the Celt cannot brook equality; and where he has not an established and recognized caste above him, longs to trample on those about him; and if he cannot be lowest, will at least be highest?

However, our friends did not suffer this or any other advantage of the colonial relation to divert them from the opinion to which their observation was gradually bringing them, — that its overweening loyalty placed a great country like Canada in a very silly attitude, the attitude of an overgrown, unmanly boy, clinging to the maternal skirts, and though spoilt and willful, without any character of his own. The constant reference of local hopes to that remote centre beyond seas, the test of success by the criterions of a necessarily different civilization, the social and intellectual dependence implied by traits that meet the most hurried glance in the Dominion, give an effect of meanness to the whole fabric. Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks the grandeur which no sum of material prosperity can give; it is ignoble, like all voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis in the New World, and that till it is shaken loose from England it cannot have.

It would be a pity, however, if it should be parted from the parent country merely to be joined to an unsympathetic half-brother like ourselves and nothing, fortunately, seems to be further from the Canadian mind. There are some experiments no longer possible to us which could still be tried there to the advantage of civilization, and we were better two great nations side by side than a union of discordant traditions and ideas. But none the less does the American traveller, swelling with forgetfulness of the shabby despots who govern New York, and the swindling railroad kings whose word is law to the whole land, feel like saying to the hulling young giant beyond St. Lawrence and the Lakes, “Sever the apron-strings of allegiance, and try to be yourself whatever you are.”

Something of this sort Basil said, though of course not in apostrophic phrase, nor with Isabel’s entire concurrence, when he explained to her that it was to the colonial dependence of Canada she owed the ability to buy things so cheaply there.

The fact is that the ladies’ parlor at the hotel had been after dinner no better than a den of smugglers, in which the fair contrabandists had debated the best means of evading the laws of their country. At heart every man is a smuggler, and how much more every woman! She would have no scruple in ruining the silk and woolen interest throughout the United States. She is a free-trader by intuitive perception of right, and is limited in practice by nothing but fear of the statute. What could be taken into the States without detection, was the subject before that wicked conclave; and next, what it would pay to buy in Canada. It seemed that silk umbrellas were most eligible wares; and in the display of such purchases the parlor was given the appearance of a violent thunder-storm. Gloves it was not advisable to get; they were better at home, as were many kinds of fine woolen goods. But laces, which you could carry about you, were excellent; and so was any kind of silk. Could it be carried if simply cut, and not made up? There was a difference about this: the friend of one lady had taken home half a trunkful of cut silks; the friend of another had “run up the breadths” of one lone little silk skirt, and then lost it by the rapacity of the customs officers. It was pretty much luck, and whether the officers happened to be in good-humor or not. You must not try to take in anything out of season, however. One had heard of a Boston lady going home in July, who “had the furs taken off her back,” in that inclement month. Best get everything seasonable, and put it on at once. “And then, you know, if they ask you, you can say it’s been worn.” To this black wisdom came the combined knowledge of those miscreants. Basil could not repress a shudder at the innate depravity of the female heart. Here were virgins nurtured in the most spotless purity of life, here were virtuous mothers of families, here were venerable matrons, patterns in society and the church, — smugglers to a woman, and eager for any guilty subterfuge! He glanced at Isabel to see what effect the evil conversation had upon her. Her eyes sparkled; her cheeks glowed; all the woman was on fire for smuggling. He sighed heavily and went out with her to do the little shopping.

Shall I follow them upon their excursion? Shopping in Montreal is very much what it is in Boston or New York, I imagine, except that the clerks have a more honeyed sweetness of manners towards the ladies of our nation, and are surprisingly generous constructionists of our revenue laws. Isabel had profited by every word that she had heard in the ladies’ parlor, and she would not venture upon unsafe ground; but her tender eyes looked her unutterable longing to believe in the charming possibilities that the clerks suggested. She bemoaned herself before the corded silks, which there was no time to have made up; the piece-velvets and the linens smote her to the heart. But they also stimulated her invention, and she bought and bought of the made-up wares in real or fancied needs, till Basil represented that neither their purses nor their trunks could stand any more. “O, don’t be troubled about the trunks, dearest,” she cried, with that gayety which nothing but shopping can kindle in a woman’s heart; while he faltered on from counter to counter, wondering at which he should finally swoon from fatigue. At last, after she had declared repeatedly, “There, now, I am done,” she briskly led the way back to the hotel to pack up her purchases.

Basil parted with her at the door. He was a man of high principle himself, and that scene in the smugglers’ den, and his wife’s preparation for transgression, were revelations for which nothing could have consoled him but a paragon umbrella for five dollars, and an excellent business suit of Scotch goods for twenty.

When some hours later he sat with Isabel on the forward promenade of the steamboat for Quebec, and summed up the profits of their shopping, they were both in the kindliest mood towards the poor Canadians, who had built the admirable city before them.

For miles the water front of Montreal is superbly faced with quays and locks of solid stone masonry, and thus she is clean and beautiful to the very feet. Stately piles of architecture, instead of the foul old tumble-down warehouses that dishonor the waterside in most cities, rise from the broad wharves; behind these spring the twin towers of Notre Dame, and the steeples of the other churches above the city roofs.

“It’s noble, yes, it’s noble, after the best that Europe can show,” said Isabel, with enthusiasm; “and what a pleasant day we’ve had here! Doesn’t even our quarrel show ‘couleur de rose’ in this light?”

“One side of it,” answered Basil, dreamily, “but all the rest is black.”

“What do you mean, my dear?”

“Why, the Nelson Monument, with the sunset on it at the head of the street there.”

The affect was so fine that Isabel could not be angry with him for failing to heed what she had said, and she mused a moment with him.

“It seems rather far-fetched,” she said presently, “to erect a monument to Nelson in Montreal, doesn’t it? But then, it’s a very absurd monument when you’re near it,” she added, thoughtfully.

Basil did not answer at once, for gazing on this Nelson column in Jacques Cartier Square, his thoughts wandered away, not to the hero of the Nile, but to the doughty old Breton navigator, the first white man who ever set foot upon that shore, and who more than three hundred years ago explored the St. Lawrence as far as Montreal, and in the splendid autumn weather climbed to the top of her green height and named it. The scene that Jacques Cartier then beheld, like a mirage of the fast projected upon the present, floated before him, and he saw at the mountain’s foot the Indian city of Hochelaga, with its vast and populous lodges of bark, its encircling palisades, and its wide outlying fields of yellow maize. He heard with Jacques Cartier’s sense the blare of his followers’ trumpets down in the open square of the barbarous city, where the soldiers of many an Old-World fight, “with mustached lip and bearded chin, with arquebuse and glittering halberd, helmet, and cuirass,” moved among the plumed and painted savages; then he lifted Jacques Cartier’s eyes, and looked out upon the magnificent landscape. “East, west, and north, the mantling forest was over all, and the broad blue ribbon of the great river glistened amid a realm of verdure. Beyond, to the bounds of Mexico, stretched a leafy desert, and the vast hive of industry, the mighty battle-ground of late; centuries, lay sunk in savage torpor, wrapped in illimitable woods.”

A vaguer picture of Champlain, who, seeking a westward route to China and the East, some three quarters of a century later, had fixed the first trading-post at Montreal, and camped upon the spot where the convent of the Gray Nuns now stands, appeared before him, and vanished with all its fleets of fur-traders’ boats and hunters’ birch canoes, and the watch-fires of both; and then in the sweet light of the spring morning, he saw Maisonneuve leaping ashore upon the green meadows, that spread all gay with early flowers where Hochelaga once stood, and with the black-robed Jesuits, the high-born, delicately nurtured, and devoted nuns, and the steel-clad soldiers of his train, kneeling about the altar raised there in the wilderness, and silent amidst the silence of nature at the lifted Host.

He painted a semblance of all this for Isabel, using the colors of the historian who has made these scenes the beautiful inheritance of all dream era, and sketched the battles, the miracles, the sufferings, and the penances through which the pious colony was preserved and prospered, till they both grew impatient of modern Montreal, and would fain have had the ancient Villemarie back in its place.

“Think of Maisonneuve, dearest, climbing in midwinter to the top of the mountain there, under a heavy cross set with the bones of saints, and planting it on the summit, in fulfillment of a vow to do so if Villemarie were saved from the freshet; and then of Madame de la Peltrie romantically receiving the sacrament there, while all Villemarie fell down adoring! Ah, that was a picturesque people! When did ever a Boston governor climb to the top of Beacon hill in fulfillment of a vow? To be sure, we may yet see a New York governor doing something of the kind — if he can find a hill. But this ridiculous column to Nelson, who never had anything to do with Montreal,” he continued; “it really seems to me the perfect expression of snobbish colonial dependence and sentimentality, seeking always to identify itself with the mother-country, and ignoring the local past and its heroic figures. A column to Nelson in Jacques Cartier Square, on the ground that was trodden by Champlain, and won for its present masters by the death of Wolfe.”

The boat departed on her trip to Quebec. During supper they were served by French waiters, who, without apparent English of their own, miraculously understood that of the passengers, except in the case of the furious gentleman who wanted English breakfast tea; to so much English as that their inspiration did not reach, and they forced him to compromise on coffee. It was a French boat, owned by a French company, and seemed to be officered by Frenchmen throughout; certainly, as our tourists in the joy of their good appetites affirmed, the cook was of that culinarily delightful nation.

The boat was almost as large as those of the Hudson, but it was not so lavishly splendid, though it had everything that could minister to the comfort and self-respect of the passengers. These were of all nations, but chiefly Americans, with some French Canadians. The former gathered on the forward promenade, enjoying what little of the landscape the growing night left visible, and the latter made society after their manner in the saloon. They were plain-looking men and women, mostly, and provincial, it was evident, to their inmost hearts; provincial in origin, provincial by inheritance, by all their circumstances, social and political. Their relation with France was not a proud one, but it was not like submersion by the slip-slop of English colonial loyalty; yet they seem to be troubled by no memories of their hundred years’ dominion of the land that they rescued from, the wilderness, and that was wrested from them by war. It is a strange fate for any people thus to have been cut off from the parent-country, and abandoned to whatever destiny their conquerors chose to reserve for them; and if each of the race wore the sadness and strangeness of that fate in his countenance it would not be wonderful. Perhaps it is wonderful that none of them shows anything of the kind. In their desertion they have multiplied and prospered; they may have a national grief, but they hide it well; and probably they have none.

Later, one of them appeared to Isabel in the person of the pale, slender young ecclesiastic who had shown her and Basil the pictures in the country church. She was confessing to the priest, and she was not at all surprised to find that he was Basil in a suit of medieval armor. He had an immense cross on his shoulder.

“To get this cross to the top of the mountain,” thought Isabel, “we must have two horses. Basil,” she added, aloud, “we must have two horses!”

“Ten, if you like, my dear,” answered his voice, cheerfully, “though I think we’d better ride up in the omnibus.”

She opened her eyes, and saw him smiling.

“We’re in sight of Quebec,” he said. “Come out as soon as you can, — come out into the seventeenth century.”

IX. QUEBEC.

Isabel hurried out upon the forward promenade, where all the other passengers seemed to be assembled, and beheld a vast bulk of gray and purple rock, swelling two hundred feet up from the mists of the river, and taking the early morning light warm upon its face and crown. Black-hulked, red-illumined Liverpool steamers, gay river-craft and ships of every sail and flag, filled the stream athwart which the ferries sped their swift traffic-laden shuttles; a lower town hung to the foot of the rock, and crept, populous and picturesque, up its sides; from the massive citadel on its crest flew the red banner of Saint George, and along its brow swept the gray wall of the famous, heroic, beautiful city, overtopped by many a gleaming spire and antique roof.

Slowly out of our work-day, business-suited, modern world the vessel steamed up to this city of an olden time and another ideal, — to her who was a lady from the first, devout and proud and strong, and who still, after two hundred and fifty years, keeps perfect the image and memory of the feudal past from which she sprung. Upon her height she sits unique; and when you say Quebec, having once beheld her, you invoke a sense of medieval strangeness and of beauty which the name of no other city could intensify.

As they drew near the steamboat wharf they saw, swarming over a broad square, a market beside which the Bonsecours Market would have shown as common as the Quincy, and up the odd wooden-sidewalked street stretched an aisle of carriages and those high swung calashes, which are to Quebec what the gondolas are to Venice. But the hand of destiny was upon our tourists, and they rode up town in an omnibus. They were going to the dear old Hotel Musty in Street, wanting which Quebec is not to be thought of without a pang. It is now closed, and Prescott Gate, through which they drove into the Upper Town, has been demolished since the summer of last year. Swiftly whirled along the steep winding road, by those Quebec horses which expect to gallop up hill whatever they do going down, they turned a corner of the towering weed-grown rock, and shot in under the low arch of the gate, pierced with smaller doorways for the foot-passengers. The gloomy masonry dripped with damp, the doors were thickly studded with heavy iron spikes; old cannon, thrust endwise into the ground at the sides of the gate, protected it against passing wheels. Why did not some semi-forbidding commissary of police, struggling hard to overcome his native politeness, appear and demand their passports? The illusion was otherwise perfect, and it needed but this touch. How often in the adored Old World, which we so love and disapprove, had they driven in through such gates at that morning hour! On what perverse pretext, then, was it not some ancient town of Normandy?

“Put a few enterprising Americans in here, and they’d soon rattle this old wall down and let in a little fresh air!” said a patriotic voice at Isabel’s elbow, and continued to find fault with the narrow irregular streets, the huddling gables, the quaint roofs, through which and under which they drove on to the hotel.

As they dashed into a broad open square, “Here is the French Cathedral; there is the Upper Town Market; yonder are the Jesuit Barracks!” cried Basil; and they had a passing glimpse of gray stone towers at one side of the square, and a low, massive yellow building at the other, and, between the two, long ranks of carts, and fruit and vegetable stands, protected by canvas awnings and broad umbrellas. Then they dashed round the corner of a street, and drew up before the hotel door. The low ceilings, the thick walls, the clumsy wood-work, the wandering corridors, gave the hotel all the desired character of age, and its slovenly state bestowed an additional charm. In another place they might have demanded neatness, but in Quebec they would almost have resented it. By a chance they had the best room in the house, but they held it only till certain people who had engaged it by telegraph should arrive in the hourly expected steamer from Liverpool; and, moreover, the best room at Hotel Musty was consolingly bad. The house was very full, and the Ellisons (who had come on with them from Montreal) were bestowed in less state only on like conditions.

The travellers all met at breakfast, which was admirably cooked, and well served, with the attendance of those swarms of flies which infest Quebec, and especially infested the old Musty House, in summer. It had, of course, the attraction of broiled salmon, upon which the traveller breakfasts every day as long as he remains in Lower Canada; and it represented the abundance of wild berries in the Quebec market; and it was otherwise a breakfast worthy of the appetites that honored it.

There were not many other Americans besides themselves at this hotel, which seemed, indeed, to be kept open to oblige such travellers as had been there before, and could not persuade themselves to try the new Hotel St. Louis, whither the vastly greater number resorted. Most of the faces our tourists saw were English or English-Canadian, and the young people from Omaha; who had got here by some chance, were scarcely in harmony with the place. They appeared to be a bridal party, but which of the two sisters, in buff linen ‘clad from head to foot’ was the bride, never became known. Both were equally free with the husband, and he was impartially fond of both: it was quite a family affair.

For a moment Isabel harbored the desire to see the city in company with Miss Ellison; but it was only a passing weakness. She remembered directly the coolness between friends which she had seen caused by objects of interest in Europe, and she wisely deferred a more intimate acquaintance till it could have a purely social basis. After all, nothing is so tiresome as continual exchange of sympathy or so apt to end in mutual dislike, — except gratitude. So the ladies parted friends till dinner, and drove off in separate carriages.

As in other show cities, there is a routine at Quebec for travellers who come on Saturday and go on Monday, and few depart from it. Our friends necessarily, therefore, drove first to the citadel. It was raining one of those cold rains by which the scarce-banished winter reminds the Canadian fields of his nearness even in midsummer, though between the bitter showers the air was sultry and close; and it was just the light in which to see the grim strength of the fortress next strongest to Gibraltar in the world. They passed a heavy iron gateway, and up through a winding lane of masonry to the gate of the citadel, where they were delivered into the care of Private Joseph Drakes, who was to show them such parts of the place as are open to curiosity. But, a citadel which has never stood a siege, or been threatened by any danger more serious than Fenianism, soon becomes, however strong, but a dull piece of masonry to the civilian; and our tourists more rejoiced in the crumbling fragment of the old French wall which the English destroyed than in all they had built; and they valued the latter work chiefly for the glorious prospects of the St. Lawrence and its mighty valleys which it commanded. Advanced into the centre of an amphitheatre inconceivably vast, that enormous beak of rock overlooks the narrow angle of the river, and then, in every direction, immeasurable stretches of gardened vale, and wooded upland, till all melts into the purple of the encircling mountains. Far and near are lovely white villages nestling under elms, in the heart of fields and meadows; and everywhere the long, narrow, accurately divided farms stretch downward to the river-shores. The best roads on the continent make this beauty and richness accessible; each little village boasts some natural wonder in stream, or lake, or cataract: and this landscape, magnificent beyond any in eastern America, is historical and interesting beyond all others. Hither came Jacques Cartier three hundred and fifty years ago, and wintered on the low point there by the St. Charles; here, nearly a century after, but still fourteen years before the landing at Plymouth, Champlain founded the missionary city of Quebec; round this rocky beak came sailing the half-piratical armament of the Calvinist Kirks in 1629, and seized Quebec in the interest of the English, holding it three years; in the Lower Town, yonder, first landed the coldly welcomed Jesuits, who came with the returning French and made Quebec forever eloquent of their zeal, their guile, their heroism; at the foot of this rock lay the fleet of Sir William Phipps, governor of Massachusetts, and vainly assailed it in 1698; in 1759 came Wolfe and embattled all the region, on river and land, till at last the bravely defended city fell into his dying hand on the Plains of Abraham; here Montgomery laid down his life at the head of the boldest and most hopeless effort of our War of Independence.

Private Joseph Drakes, with the generosity of an enemy expecting drink-money, pointed out the sign, board on the face of the crag commemorating ‘Montgomery’s death’; and then showed them the officers’ quarters and those of the common soldiers, not far from which was a line of hang-dog fellows drawn up to receive sentence for divers small misdemeanors, from an officer whose blond whiskers drooped Dundrearily from his fresh English cheeks. There was that immense difference between him and the men in physical grandeur and beauty, which is so notable in the aristocratically ordered military services of Europe, and which makes the rank seem of another race from the file. Private Drakes saluted his superior, and visibly deteriorated in his presence, though his breast was covered with medals, and he had fought England’s battles in every part of the world. It was a gross injustice, the triumph of a thousand years of wrong; and it was touching to have Private Drakes say that he expected in three months to begin life for himself, after twenty years’ service of the Queen; and did they think he could get anything to do in the States? He scarcely knew what he was fit for, but he thought — to so little in him came the victories he had helped to win in the Crimea, in China, and in India — that he could take care of a gentleman’s horse and work about his place. He looked inquiringly at Basil, as if he might be a gentleman with a horse to be taken care of and a place to be worked about, and made him regret that he was not a man of substance enough to provide for Private Drakes and Mrs. Drakes and the brood of Ducklings, who had been shown to him stowed away in one of those cavernous rooms in the earthworks where the married soldiers have their quarters. His regret enriched the reward of Private Drakes’ service, — which perhaps answered one of Private Drakes’ purposes, if not his chief aim. He promised to come to the States upon the pressing advice of Isabel, who, speaking from her own large experience, declared that everybody got on there, — and he bade our friends an affectionate farewell as they drove away to the Plains of Abraham.

The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading northward to the old battle-ground and beyond it; but, these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from the highway; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly meditate whatever emotion he will for the scene of Wolfe’s death as he rides along. His loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who must always stand forth in history a figure of beautiful and singular distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness, and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear. The whole story of the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos. Her fall was a triumph for all the English-speaking race, and to us Americans, long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her walls or sustained by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringing bells and blazing bonfires throughout the Colonies; yet now we cannot think without pity of the hopes extinguished and the labors brought to naught in her overthrow. That strange colony of priests and soldiers, of martyrs and heroes, of which she was the capital, willing to perish for an allegiance to which the mother-country was indifferent, and fighting against the armies with which England was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her. The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which he would “rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;” but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, “So much the better; then I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec.”

In the city for which they perished their fame has never been divided. The English have shown themselves very generous victors; perhaps nothing could be alleged against them, but that they were victors. A shaft common to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in the Governor’s Garden; and in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalm died, by the same conquerors who raised to Wolfe’s memory the column on the battle-field.

A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the fire of the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient, and the simple inscription, “Here died Wolfe victorious,” gives it a dignity which many cubits of added stature could not bestow. Another of those bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning’s sunshine, drove suddenly across the open plain, and our tourists comfortably sentimentalized the scene behind the close-drawn curtains of their carriage. Here a whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded Isabel; and she said, “Only think of it!” and looked to a wandering fold of her skirt, upon which the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.

Do I pitch the pipe too low? We poor honest men are at a sad disadvantage; and now and then I am minded to give a loose to fancy, and attribute something really grand and fine to my people, in order to make them worthier the reader’s respected acquaintance. But again, I forbid myself in a higher interest; and I am afraid that even if I were less virtuous, I could not exalt their mood upon a battle-field; for of all things of the past a battle is the least conceivable. I have heard men who fought in many battles say that the recollection was like a dream to them; and what can the merely civilian imagination do on the Plains of Abraham, with the fact that there, more than a century ago, certain thousands of Frenchmen marched out, on a bright September morning, to kill and maim as many Englishmen? This ground, so green and oft with grass beneath the feet, was it once torn with shot and soaked with the blood of men? Did they lie here in ranks and heaps, the miserable slain, for whom tender hearts away yonder over the sea were to ache and break? Did the wretches that fell wounded stretch themselves here, and writhe beneath the feet of friend and foe, or crawl array for shelter into little hollows, and behind gushes and fallen trees! Did he, whose soul was so full of noble and sublime impulses, die here, shot through like some ravening beast? The loathsome carnage, the shrieks, the hellish din of arms, the cries of victory, — I vainly strive to conjure up some image of it all now; and God be thanked, horrible spectre! that, fill the world with sorrow as thou wilt, thou still remainest incredible in its moments of sanity and peace. Least credible art thou on the old battle-fields, where the mother of the race denies thee with breeze and sun and leaf and bird, and every blade of grass! The red stain in Basil’s thought yielded to the rain sweeping across the pasture-land from which it had long since faded, and the words on the monument, “Here died Wolfe victorious,” did not proclaim his bloody triumph over the French, but his self-conquest, his victory over fear and pain and love of life. Alas! when shall the poor, blind, stupid world honor those who renounce self in the joy of their kind, equally with those who devote themselves through the anguish and loss of thousands? So old a world and groping still!

The tourists were better fitted for the next occasion of sentiment, which was at the Hotel Dieu whither they went after returning from the battlefield. It took all the mal-address of which travellers are masters to secure admittance, and it was not till they had rung various wrong bells, and misunderstood many soft nun-voices speaking French through grated doors, and set divers sympathetic spectators doing ineffectual services, that they at last found the proper entrance, and were answered in English that the porter would ask if they might see the chapel. They hoped to find there the skull of Brebeuf, one of those Jesuit martyrs who perished long ago for the conversion of a race that has perished, and whose relics they had come, fresh from their reading of Parkman, with some vague and patronizing intention to revere. An elderly sister with a pale, kind face led them through a ward of the hospital into the chapel, which they found in the expected taste, and exquisitely neat and cool, but lacking the martyr’s skull. They asked if it were not to be seen. “Ah, yes, poor Pere Brebeuf!” sighed the gentle sister, with the tone and manner of having lost him yesterday; “we had it down only last week, showing it to some Jesuit fathers; but it’s in the convent now, and isn’t to be seen.” And there mingled apparently in her regret for Pere Brebeuf a confusing sense of his actual state as a portable piece of furniture. She would not let them praise the chapel. It was very clean, yes, but there was nothing to see in it. She deprecated their compliments with many shrugs, but she was pleased; for when we renounce the pomps and vanities of this world, we are pretty sure to find them in some other, — if we are women. She, good and pure soul, whose whole life was given to self-denying toil, had yet something angelically coquettish in her manner, a spiritual-worldliness which was the clarified likeness of this-worldliness. O, had they seen the Hotel Dieu at Montreal? Then (with a vivacious wave of the hands) they would not care to look at this, which by comparison was nothing. Yet she invited them to go through the wards if they would, and was clearly proud to have them see the wonderful cleanness and comfort of the place. There were not many patients, but here and there a wan or fevered face looked at them from its pillow, or a weak form drooped beside a bed, or a group of convalescents softly talked together. They came presently to the last hall, at the end of which sat another nun, beside a window that gave a view of the busy port, and beyond it the landscape of village-lit plain and forest-darkened height. On a table at her elbow stood a rose-tree, on which hung two only pale tea-roses, so fair, so perfect, that Isabel cried out in wonder and praise. Ere she could prevent it, the nun, to whom there had been some sort of presentation, gathered one of the roses, and with a shy grace offered it to Isabel, who shrank back a little as from too costly a gift. “Take it,” said the first nun, with her pretty French accent; while the other, who spoke no English at all, beamed a placid smile; and Isabel took it. The flower, lying light in her palm, exhaled a delicate odor, and a thrill of exquisite compassion for it trembled through her heart, as if it had been the white, cloistered life of the silent nun: with its pallid loveliness, it was as a flower that had taken the veil. It could never have uttered the burning passion of a lover for his mistress; the nightingale could have found no thorn on it to press his aching poet’s heart against; but sick and weary eyes had dwelt gratefully upon it; at most it might have expressed, like a prayer, the nun’s stainless love of some favorite saint in paradise. Cold, and pale, and sweet, — was it indeed only a flower, this cloistered rose of the Hotel Dieu?

“Breathe it,” said the gentle Gray Sister; “sometimes the air of the hospital offends. Not us, no; we are used; but you come from the outside.” And she gave her rose for this humble use as lovingly as she devoted herself to her lowly taxes.

“It is very little to see,” she said at the end; “but if you are pleased, I am very glad. Goodby, good-by!” She stood with her arms folded, and watched them out of sight with her kind, coquettish little smile, and then the mute, blank life of the nun resumed her.

From Hotel Dieu to Hotel Musty it was but a step; both were in the same street; but our friends fancied themselves to have come an immense distance when they sat down at an early dinner, amidst the clash of crockery and cutlery, and looked round upon all the profane travelling world assembled. Their regard presently fixed upon one company which monopolized a whole table, and were defined from the other diners by peculiarities as marked as those of the Soeurs Grises themselves. There were only two men among some eight or ten women; one of the former had a bad amiable face, with eyes full of a merry deviltry; the other, clean shaven, and dark, was demure and silent as a priest. The ladies were of various types, but of one effect, with large rolling eyes, and faces that somehow regarded the beholder as from a distance, and with an impartial feeling for him as for an element of publicity. One of them, who caressed a lapdog with one hand while she served herself with the other, was, as she seemed to believe, a blonde; she had pale blue eyes, and her hair was cut in front so as to cover her forehead with a straggling sandy-colored fringe. She had an English look, and three or four others, with dark complexion and black, unsteady eyes, and various abandon of back-hair, looked like Cockney houris of Jewish blood; while two of the lovely company were clearly of our own nation, as was the young man with the reckless laughing face. The ladies were dressed and jeweled with a kind of broad effectiveness, which was to the ordinary style of society what scene-painting is to painting, and might have borne close inspection no better. They seemed the best-humored people in the world, and on the kindliest terms with each other. The waiters shared their pleasant mood, and served them affectionately, and were now and then invited to join in the gay talk which babbled on over dislocated aspirates, and filled the air with a sentiment of vagabond enjoyment, of the romantic freedom of violated convention, of something Gil Blas-like, almost picaresque.

If they had needed explanation it would have been given by the announcement in the office of the hotel that a troupe of British blondes was then appearing in Quebec for one week only.

After dinner they took possession of the parlor, and while one strummed fitfully upon the ailing hotel piano, the rest talked, and talked shop, of course, as all of us do when several of a trade are got together.

“W’at,” said the eldest of the dark-faced, black haired British blondes of Jewish race,— “w’at are we going to give at Montrehal?”

“We’re going to give ‘Pygmalion,’ at Montrehal,” answered the British blonde of American birth, good-humoredly burlesquing the erring h of her sister.

“But we cahn’t, you know,” said the lady with the fringed forehead;
“Hagnes is gone on to New York, and there’s nobody to do Wenus.”

“Yes, you know,” demanded the first speaker, “oo’s to do Wenus?

“Bella’s to do Wenus,” said a third.

There was an outcry at this, and “‘Ow ever would she get herself up for ‘Venus?” and “W’at a guy she’ll look!” and “Nonsense! Bella’s too ‘eavy for Venus!” came from different lively critics; and the debate threatened to become too intimate for the public ear, when one of their gentlemen came in and said, “Charley don’t seem so well this afternoon.” On this the chorus changed its note, and at the proposal, “Poor Charley, let’s go and cheer ‘im hop a bit,” the whole good-tempered company trooped out of the parlor together.

Our tourists meant to give the rest of the afternoon to that sort of aimless wandering to and fro about the streets which seizes a foreign city unawares, and best develops its charm of strangeness. So they went out and took their fill of Quebec with appetites keen through long fasting from the quaint and old, and only sharpened by Montreal, and impartially rejoiced in the crooked up-and-down hill streets; the thoroughly French domestic architecture of a place that thus denied having been English for a hundred years; the porte-cocheres beside every house; the French names upon the doors, and the oddity of the bellpulls; the rough-paved, rattling streets; the shining roofs of tin, and the universal dormer-windows; the littleness of the private houses, and the greatness of the high-walled and garden-girdled convents; the breadths of weather-stained city wall, and the shaggy cliff beneath; the batteries, with their guns peacefully staring through loop-holes of masonry, and the red-coated sergeants flirting with nursery-maids upon the carriages, while the children tumbled about over the pyramids of shot and shell; the sloping market-place before the cathedral, where yet some remnant of the morning’s traffic lingered under canvas canopies, and where Isabel bought a bouquet of marigolds and asters of an old woman peasant enough to have sold it in any market-place of Europe; the small, dark shops beyond the quarter invaded by English retail trade; the movement of all the strange figures of cleric and lay and military life; the sound of a foreign speech prevailing over the English; the encounter of other tourists, the passage back and forth through the different city gates; the public wooden stairways, dropping flight after flight from the Upper to the Lower Town; the bustle of the port, with its commerce and shipping and seafaring life huddled close in under the hill; the many desolate streets of the Lower Town, as black and ruinous as the last great fire left them; and the marshy meadows beyond, memorable of Recollets and Jesuits, of Cartier and Montcalm.

They went to the chapel of the Seminary at Laval University, and admired the Le Brun, and the other paintings of less merit, but equal interest through their suggestion of a whole dim religious world of paintings; and then they spent half an hour in the cathedral, not so much in looking at the Crucifixion by Vandyck which is there, as in reveling amid the familiar rococo splendors of the temple. Every swaggering statue of a saint, every rope-dancing angel, every cherub of those that on the carven and gilded clouds above the high altar float —

“Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,” —

was precious to them; the sacristan dusting the sacred properties with a feather brush, and giving each shrine a business-like nod as he passed, was as a long-lost brother; they had hearts of aggressive tenderness for the young girls and old women who stepped in for a half-hour’s devotion, and for the men with bourgeois or peasant faces, who stole a moment from affairs and crops, and gave it to the saints. There was nothing in the place that need remind them of America, and its taste was exactly that of a thousand other churches of the eighteenth century. They could easily have believed themselves in the farthest Catholic South, but for the two great porcelain stoves that stood on either side of the nave near the entrance, and that too vividly reminded them of the possibility of cold.

In fact, Quebec is a little painful in this and other confusions of the South and North, and one never quite reconciles himself to them. The Frenchmen, who expected to find there the climate of their native land, and ripen her wines in as kindly a sun, have perpetuated the image of home in so many things, that it goes to the heart with a painful emotion to find the sad, oblique light of the North upon them. As you ponder some characteristic aspect of Quebec, — a bit of street with heavy stone houses opening upon a stretch of the city wall, with a Lombardy poplar rising slim against it, — you say, to your satisfied soul, “Yes, it is the real thing!” and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that light of the North is there.

It lay saddest, our travellers thought, upon the little circular garden near Durham Terrace, where every brightness of fall flowers abounded, — marigold, coxcomb, snap-dragon, dahlia, hollyhock, and sunflower. It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that garden, where the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again with a musical shiver. The consciousness of this latent cold, of winter only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the once magnificent, now neglected Governor’s Garden, where there was actually a rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they were strolling for the view from its height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raised there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The sounding Latin inscription celebrates the royal governor-general who erected it almost as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but these spectators did not begrudge the space given to his praise, for so fine a thought merited praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind posthumous friendship between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gives their memory its rare distinction, and unites them, who fell in fight against each other, as closely as if they had both died for the same cause.

Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the city that has once been a capital; and this odor of fallen nobility belongs to Quebec, which was a capital in the European sense, with all the advantages of a small vice-regal court, and its social and political intrigues, in the French times. Under the English, for a hundred years it was the centre of Colonial civilization and refinement, with a governor-general’s residence and a brilliant, easy, and delightful society, to which the large garrison of former days gave gayety and romance. The honors of a capital, first shared with Montreal and Toronto, now rest with half-savage Ottawa; and the garrison has dwindled to a regiment of rifles, whose presence would hardly be known, but for the natty sergeants lounging, stick in hand, about the streets and courting the nurse-maids. But in the days of old there were scenes of carnival pleasure in the Governor’s Garden, and there the garrison band still plays once a week, when it is filled by the fashion and beauty of Quebec, and some semblance of the past is recalled. It is otherwise a lonesome, indifferently tended place, and on this afternoon there was no one there but a few loafing young fellows of low degree, French and English, and children that played screaming from seat to seat and path to path and over the too-heavily shaded grass. In spite of a conspicuous warning that any dog entering the garden would be destroyed, the place was thronged with dogs unmolested and apparently in no danger of the threatened doom. The seal of a disagreeable desolation was given in the legend rudely carved upon one of the benches, “Success to the Irish Republic!”

The morning of the next day our tourists gave to hearing mass at the French cathedral, which was not different, to their heretical senses, from any other mass, except that the ceremony was performed with a very full clerical force, and was attended by an uncommonly devout congregation. With Europe constantly in their minds, they were bewildered to find the worshippers not chiefly old and young women, but men also of all ages and of every degree, from the neat peasant in his Sabbath-day best to the modish young Quebecker, who spread his handkerchief on the floor to save his pantaloons during supplication. There was fashion and education in large degree among the men, and there was in all a pious attention to the function in poetical keeping with the origin and history of a city which the zeal of the Church had founded.

A magnificent beadle, clothed in a gold-laced coat aid bearing a silver staff, bowed to them when they entered, and, leading them to a pew, punched up a kneeling peasant, who mutely resumed his prayers in the aisle outside, while they took his place. It appeared to Isabel very unjust that their curiosity should displace his religion; but she consoled herself by making Basil give a shilling to the man who, preceded by the shining beadle, came round to take up a collection. The peasant could have given nothing but copper, and she felt that this restored the lost balance of righteousness in their favor. There was a sermon, very sweetly and gracefully delivered by a young priest of singular beauty, even among clergy whose good looks are so notable as those of Quebec; and then they followed the orderly crowd of worshippers out, and left the cathedral to the sacristan and the odor of incense.

They thought the type of French-Canadian better here than at Montreal, and they particularly noticed the greater number of pretty young girls. All classes were well dressed; for though the best dressed could not be called stylish according to the American standard, as Isabel decided, and had only a provincial gentility, the poorest wore garments that were clean and whole. Everybody, too, was going to have a hot Sunday dinner, if there was any truth in the odors that steamed out of every door and window; and this dinner was to be abundantly garnished with onions, for the dullest nose could not err concerning that savor.

Numbers of tourists, of a nationality that showed itself superior to every distinction of race, were strolling vaguely and not always quite happily about; but they made no impression on the proper local character, and the air throughout the morning was full of the sentiment of Sunday in a Catholic city. There was the apparently meaningless jangling of bells, with profound hushes between, and then more jubilant jangling, and then deeper silence; there was the devout trooping of the crowds to the churches; and there was the beginning of the long afternoon’s lounging and amusement with which the people of that faith reward their morning’s devotion. Little stands for the sale of knotty apples and choke-cherries and cakes and cider sprang magically into existence after service, and people were already eating and drinking at them. The carriage-drivers resumed their chase of the tourists, and the unvoiceful stir of the new week had begun again. Quebec, in fact, is but a pantomimic reproduction of France; it is as if two centuries in a new land, amidst the primeval silences of nature and the long hush of the Northern winters, had stilled the tongues of the lively folk and made them taciturn as we of a graver race. They have kept the ancestral vivacity of manner; the elegance of the shrug is intact; the talking hands take part in dialogue; the agitated person will have its share of expression. But the loud and eager tone is wanting, and their dumb show mystifies the beholder almost as much as the Southern architecture under the slanting Northern sun. It is not America; if it is not France, what is it?

Of the many beautiful things to see in the neighborhood of Quebec, our wedding-journeyers were in doubt on which to bestow their one precious afternoon. Should it be Lorette, with its cataract and its remnant of bleached and fading Hurons, or the Isle of Orleans with its fertile farms and its primitive peasant life, or Montmorenci, with the unrivaled fall and the long drive through the beautiful village of Beauport? Isabel chose the last, because Basil had been there before, and it had to it the poetry of the wasted years in which she did not know him. She had possessed herself of the journal of his early travels, among the other portions and parcels recoverable from the dreadful past, and from time to time on this journey she had read him passages out of it, with mingled sentiment and irony, and, whether she was mocking or admiring, equally to his confusion. Now, as they smoothly bowled away from the city, she made him listen to what he had written of the same excursion long ago.

It was, to be sure, a sad farrago of sentiment about the village and the rural sights, and especially a girl tossing hay in the field. Yet it had touches of nature and reality, and Basil could not utterly despise himself for having written it. “Yes,” he said, “life was then a thing to be put into pretty periods; now it’s something that has risks and averages, and may be insured.”

There was regret, fancied or expressed, in his tone, that made her sigh, “Ah! if I’d only had a little more money, you might have devoted yourself to literature;” for she was a true Bostonian in her honor of our poor craft.

“O, you’re not greatly to blame,” answered her husband, “and I forgive you the little wrong you’ve done me. I was quits with the Muse, at any rate, you know, before we were married; and I’m very well satisfied to be going back to my applications and policies to-morrow.”

To-morrow? The word struck cold upon her. Then their wedding journey would begin to end tomorrow! So it would, she owned with another sigh; and yet it seemed impossible.

“There, ma’am,” said the driver, rising from his seat and facing round, while he pointed with his whip towards Quebec, “that’s what we call the Silver City.”

They looked back with him at the city, whose thousands of tinned roofs, rising one above the other from the water’s edge to the citadel, were all a splendor of argent light in the afternoon sun. It was indeed as if some magic had clothed that huge rock, base and steepy flank and crest, with a silver city. They gazed upon the marvel with cries of joy that satisfied the driver’s utmost pride in it, and Isabel said, “To live there, there in that Silver City, in perpetual sojourn! To be always going to go on a morrow that never came! To be forever within one day of the end of a wedding journey that never ended!”

From far down the river by which they rode came the sound of a cannon, breaking the Sabbath repose of the air. “That’s the gun of the Liverpool steamer, just coming in,” said the driver.

“O,” cried Isabel, “I’m thankful we’re only to stay one night more, for now we shall be turned out of our nice room by those people who telegraphed for it!”

There is a continuous village along the St. Lawrence from Quebec, almost to Montmorenci; and they met crowds of villagers coming from the church as they passed through Beauport. But Basil was dismayed at the change that had befallen them. They had their Sunday’s best on, and the women, instead of wearing the peasant costume in which he had first seen them, were now dressed as if out of “Harper’s Bazar” of the year before. He anxiously asked the driver if the broad straw hats and the bright sacks and kirtles were no more. “O, you’d see them on weekdays, sir,” was the answer, “but they’re not so plenty any time as they used to be.” He opened his store of facts about the habitans, whom he praised for every virtue, — for thrift, for sobriety, for neatness, for amiability; and his words ought to have had the greater weight, because he was of the Irish race, between which and the Canadians there is no kindness lost. But the looks of the passers-by corroborated him, and as for the little houses, open-doored beside the way, with the pleasant faces at window and portal, they were miracles of picturesqueness and cleanliness. From each the owner’s slim domain, narrowing at every successive division among the abundant generations, runs back to hill or river in well-defined lines, and beside the cottage is a garden of pot-herbs, bordered with a flame of bright autumn flowers; somewhere in decent seclusion grunts the fattening pig, which is to enrich all those peas and onions for the winter’s broth; there is a cheerfulness of poultry about the barns; I dare be sworn there is always a small girl driving a flock of decorous ducks down the middle of the street; and of the priest with a book under his arm, passing a way-side shrine, what possible doubt? The houses, which are of one model, are built by the peasants themselves with the stone which their land yields more abundantly than any other crop, and are furnished with galleries and balconies to catch every ray of the fleeting summer, and perhaps to remember the long-lost ancestral summers of Normandy. At every moment, in passing through this ideally neat and pretty village, our tourists must think of the lovely poem of which all French Canada seems but a reminiscence and illustration. It was Grand Pre, not Beauport; and they paid an eager homage to the beautiful genius which has touched those simple village aspects with an undying charm, and which, whatever the land’s political allegiance, is there perpetual Seigneur.

The village, stretching along the broad interval of the St. Lawrence, grows sparser as you draw near the Falls of Montmorenci, and presently you drive past the grove shutting from the road the country-house in which the Duke of Kent spent some merry days of his jovial youth, and come in sight of two lofty towers of stone, — monuments and witnesses of the tragedy of Montmorenci.

Once a suspension-bridge, built sorely against the will of the neighboring habitans, hung from these towers high over the long plunge of the cataract. But one morning of the fatal spring after the first winter’s frost had tried the hold of the cable on the rocks, an old peasant and his wife with their little grandson set out in their cart to pass the bridge. As they drew near the middle the anchoring wires suddenly lost their grip upon the shore, and whirled into the air; the bridge crashed under the hapless passengers and they were launched from its height, upon the verge of the fall and thence plunged, two hundred and fifty feet, into the ruin of the abyss.

The habitans rebuilt their bridge of wood upon low stone piers, so far up the river from the cataract that whoever fell from it would yet have many a chance for life; and it would have been perilous to offer to replace the fallen structure, which, in the belief of faithful Christians, clearly belonged to the numerous bridges built by the Devil, in times when the Devil did not call himself a civil engineer.

The driver, with just unction, recounted the sad tale as he halted his horses on the bridge; and as his passengers looked down the rock-fretted brown torrent towards the fall, Isabel seized the occasion to shudder that ever she had set foot on that suspension-bridge below Niagara, and to prove to Basil’s confusion that her doubt of the bridges between the Three Sisters was not a case of nerves but an instinctive wisdom concerning the unsafety of all bridges of that design.

From the gate opening into the grounds about the fall two or three little French boys, whom they had not the heart to forbid, ran noisily before them with cries in their sole English, “This way, sir” and led toward a weather-beaten summer-house that tottered upon a projecting rock above the verge of the cataract. But our tourists shook their heads, and turned away for a more distant and less dizzy enjoyment of the spectacle, though any commanding point was sufficiently chasmal and precipitous. The lofty bluff was scooped inward from the St. Lawrence in a vast irregular semicircle, with cavernous hollows, one within another, sinking far into its sides, and naked from foot to crest, or meagrely wooded here and there with evergreen. From the central brink of these gloomy purple chasms the foamy cataract launched itself, and like a cloud,

“Along the cliff to fall and pause and fall did seem.”

I say a cloud, because I find it already said to my hand, as it were, in a pretty verse, and because I must needs liken Montmorenci to something that is soft and light. Yet a cloud does not represent the glinting of the water in its downward swoop; it is like some broad slope of sun-smitten snow; but snow is coldly white and opaque, and this has a creamy warmth in its luminous mass; and so, there hangs the cataract unsaid as before. It is a mystery that anything so grand should be so lovely, that anything so tenderly fair in whatever aspect should yet be so large that one glance fails to comprehend it all. The rugged wildness of the cliffs and hollows about it is softened by its gracious beauty, which half redeems the vulgarity of the timber-merchant’s uses in setting the river at work in his saw-mills and choking its outlet into the St. Lawrence with rafts of lumber and rubbish of slabs and shingles. Nay, rather, it is alone amidst these things, and the eye takes note of them by a separate effort.

Our tourists sank down upon the turf that crept with its white clover to the edge of the precipice, and gazed dreamily upon the fall, filling their vision with its exquisite color and form. Being wiser than I, they did not try to utter its loveliness; they were content to feel it, and the perfection of the afternoon, whose low sun slanting over the landscape gave, under that pale, greenish-blue sky, a pensive sentiment of autumn to the world. The crickets cried amongst the grass; the hesitating chirp of birds came from the tree overhead; a shaggy colt left off grazing in the field and stalked up to stare at them; their little guides, having found that these people had no pleasure in the sight of small boys scuffling on the verge of a precipice, threw themselves also down upon the grass and crooned a long, long ballad in a mournful minor key about some maiden whose name was La Belle Adeline. It was a moment of unmixed enjoyment for every sense, and through all their being they were glad; which considering, they ceased to be so, with a deep sigh, as one reasoning that he dreams must presently awake. They never could have an emotion without desiring to analyze it; but perhaps their rapture would have ceased as swiftly, even if they had not tried to make it a fact of consciousness.

“If there were not dinner after such experiences as these,” said Isabel, as they sat at table that evening, “I don’t know what would become of one. But dinner unites the idea of pleasure and duty, and brings you gently back to earth. You must eat, don’t you see, and there’s nothing disgraceful about what you’re obliged to do; and so — it’s all right.”

“Isabel, Isabel,” cried her husband, “you have a wonderful mind, and its workings always amaze me. But be careful, my dear; be careful. Don’t work it too hard. The human brain, you know: delicate organ.”

“Well, you understand what I mean; and I think it’s one of the great charms of a husband, that you’re not forced to express yourself to him. A husband,” continued Isabel, sententiously, poising a bit of meringue between her thumb and finger, — for they had reached that point in the repast, “a husband is almost as good as another woman!”

In the parlor they found the Ellisons, and exchanged the history of the day with them.

“Certainly,” said Mrs. Ellison, at the end, “it’s been a pleasant day enough, but what of the night? You’ve been turned out, too, by those people who came on the steamer, and who might as well have stayed on board to-night; have you got another room?”

“Not precisely,” said Isabel; “we have a coop in the fifth story, right under the roof.”

Mrs. Ellison turned energetically upon her husband and cried in tones of reproach, “Richard, Mrs. March has a room!”

“A coop, she said,” retorted that amiable Colonel, “and we’re too good for that. The clerk is keeping us in suspense about a room, because he means to surprise us with something palatial at the end. It’s his joking way.”

“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Ellison. “Have you seen him since dinner?”

“I have made life a burden to him for the last half-hour,” returned the
Colonel, with the kindliest smile.

“O Richard,” cried his wife, in despair of his amendment, “you wouldn’t make life a burden to a mouse!” And having nothing else for it, she laughed, half in sorrow, half in fondness.

“Well, Fanny,” the Colonel irrelevantly answered, “put on your hat and things, and let’s all go up to Durham Terrace for a promenade. I know our friends want to go. It’s something worth seeing; and by the time we get back, the clerk will have us a perfectly sumptuous apartment.”

Nothing, I think, more enforces the illusion of Southern Europe in Quebec than the Sunday-night promenading on Durham Terrace. This is the ample space on the brow of the cliff to the left of the citadel, the noblest and most commanding position in the whole city, which was formerly occupied by the old castle of Saint Louis, where dwelt the brave Count Frontenac and his splendid successors of the French regime. The castle went the way of Quebec by fire some forty years ago, and Lord Durham leveled the site and made it a public promenade. A stately arcade of solid masonry supports it on the brink of the rock, and an iron parapet incloses it; there are a few seats to lounge upon, and some idle old guns for the children to clamber over and play with. A soft twilight had followed the day, and there was just enough obscurity to hide from a willing eye the Northern and New World facts of the scene, and to bring into more romantic relief the citadel dark against the mellow evening, and the people gossiping from window to window across the narrow streets of the Lower Town. The Terrace itself was densely thronged, and there was a constant coming and going of the promenaders, who each formally paced back and forth upon the planking for a certain time, and then went quietly home, giving place to the new arrivals. They were nearly all French, and they were not generally, it seemed, of the first fashion, but rather of middling condition in life; the English being represented only by a few young fellows and now and then a redfaced old gentleman with an Indian scarf trailing from his hat. There were some fair American costumes and faces in the crowd, but it was essentially Quebecian. The young girls walking in pairs, or with their lovers, had the true touch of provincial unstylishness, the young men the ineffectual excess of the second-rate Latin dandy, their elders the rich inelegance of a bourgeoisie in their best. A few, better-figured avocats or notaires (their profession was as unmistakable as if they had carried their well-polished brass doorplates upon their breasts) walked and gravely talked with each other. The non-American character of the scene was not less vividly marked in the fact that each person dressed according to his own taste and frankly indulged private preferences in shapes and colors. One of the promenaders was in white, even to his canvas shoes; another, with yet bolder individuality, appeared in perfect purple. It had a strange, almost portentous effect when these two startling figures met as friends and joined each other in the promenade with linked arms; but the evening was already beginning to darken round them, and presently the purple comrade was merely a sombre shadow beside the glimmering white.

The valleys and the heights now vanished; but the river defined itself by the varicolored lights of the ships and steamers that lay, dark, motionless bulks, upon its broad breast; the lights of Point Lewis swarmed upon the other shore; the Lower Town, two hundred feet below them, stretched an alluring mystery of clustering roofs and lamplit windows and dark and shining streets around the mighty rock, mural-crowned. Suddenly a spectacle peculiarly Northern and characteristic of Quebec revealed itself; a long arch brightened over the northern horizon; the tremulous flames of the aurora, pallid violet or faintly tinged with crimson, shot upward from it, and played with a weird apparition and evanescence to the zenith. While the strangers looked, a gun boomed from the citadel, and the wild sweet notes of the bugle sprang out upon the silence.

Then they all said, “How perfectly in keeping everything has been!” and sauntered back to the hotel.

The Colonel went into the office to give the clerk another turn on the rack, and make him confess to a hidden apartment somewhere, while Isabel left her husband to Mrs. Ellison in the parlor, and invited Miss Kitty to look at her coop in the fifth story. As they approached, light and music and laughter stole out of an open door next hers, and Isabel, distinguishing the voices of the theatrical party, divined that this was the sick-chamber, and that they were again cheering up the afflicted member of the troupe. Some one was heard to say, “Well, ‘ow do you feel now, Charley?” and a sound of subdued swearing responded, followed by more laughter, and the twanging of a guitar, and a snatch of song, and a stir of feet and dresses as for departure.

The two listeners shrank together; as women they could not enjoy these proofs of the jolly camaraderie existing among the people of the troupe. They trembled as before the merriment of as many light-hearted, careless, good-natured young men: it was no harm, but it was dismaying; and, “Dear!” cried Isabel, “what shall we do?”

“Go back,” said Miss Ellison, boldly, and back they ran to the parlor, where they found Basil and the Colonel and his wife in earnest conclave. The Colonel, like a shrewd strategist, was making show of a desperation more violent than his wife’s, who was thus naturally forced into the attitude of moderating his fury.

“Well, Fanny, that’s all he can do for us; and I do think it’s the most outrageous thing in the world! It’s real mean!”

Fanny perceived a bold parody of her own denunciatory manner, but just then she was obliged to answer Isabel’s eager inquiry whether they had got a room yet. “Yes, a room,” she said, “with two beds. But what are we to do with one room? That clerk — I don’t know what to call him” — (“Call him a hotel-clerk, my dear; you can’t say anything worse,” interrupted her husband)— “seems to think the matter perfectly settled.”

“You see, Mrs. March,” added the Colonel, “he’s able to bully us in this way because he has the architecture on his side. There isn’t another room in the house.”

“Let me think a moment,” said Isabel not thinking an instant. She had taken a fancy to at least two of these people from the first, and in the last hour they had all become very well acquainted now she said, “I’ll tell you: there are two beds in our room also; we ladies will take one room, and you gentlemen the other!”

“Mrs. March, I bow to the superiority of the Boston mind,” said the Colonel, while his females civilly protested and consented; “and I might almost hail you as our preserver. If ever you come to Milwaukee, — which is the centre of the world, as Boston is, — we — I — shall be happy to have you call at my place of business. — I didn’t commit myself, did I, Fanny? — I am sometimes hospitable to excess, Mrs. March,” he said, to explain his aside. “And now, let us reconnoitre. Lead on, madam, and the gratitude of the houseless stranger will follow you.”

The whole party explored both rooms, and the ladies decided to keep Isabel’s. The Colonel was dispatched to see that the wraps and traps of his party were sent to this number, and Basil went with him. The things came long before the gentlemen returned, but the ladies happily employed the interval in talking over the excitements of the day, and in saying from time to time, “So very kind of you, Mrs. March,” and “I don’t know what we should have done,” and “Don’t speak of it, please,” and “I’m sure it’s a great pleasure to me.”

In the room adjoining theirs, where the invalid actor lay, and where lately there had been minstrelsy and apparently dancing for his solace, there was now comparative silence. Two women’s voices talked together, and now and then a guitar was touched by a wandering hand. Isabel had just put up her handkerchief to conceal her first yawn, when the gentlemen, odorous of cigars, returned to say good-night.

“It’s the second door from this, isn’t it, Isabel?” asked her husband.

“Yes, the second door. Good-night. Good-night.”

The two men walked off together; but in a minute afterwards they had returned and were knocking tremulously at the closed door.

“O, what has happened?” chorused the ladies in woeful tune, seeing a certain wildness in the face that confronted them.

“We don’t know!” answered the others in as fearful a key, and related how they had found the door of their room ajar, and a bright light streaming into the corridor. They did not stop to ponder this fact, but, with the heedlessness of their sex, pushed the door wide open, when they saw seated before the mirror a bewildering figure, with disheveled locks wandering down the back, and in dishabille expressive of being quite at home there, which turned upon them a pair of pale blue eyes, under a forehead remarkable for the straggling fringe of hair that covered it. They professed to have remained transfixed at the sight, and to have noted a like dismay on the visage before the glass, ere they summoned strength to fly. These facts Colonel Ellison gave at the command of his wife, with many protests and insincere delays amidst which the curiosity of his hearers alone prevented them from rending him in pieces.

“And what do you suppose it was?” demanded his wife, with forced calmness, when he had at last made an end of the story and his abominable hypoocisies.

“Well, I think it was a mermaid.”

“A mermaid!” said his wife, scornfully. “How do you know?”

“It had a comb in its hand, for one thing; and besides, my dear, I hope I know a mermaid when I see it.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, “it was no mermaid, it was a mistake; and I’m going to see about it. Will you go with me, Richard?”

“No money could induce me! If it’s a mistake, it isn’t proper for me to go; if it’s a mermaid, it’s dangerous.”

“O you coward!” said the intrepid little woman to a hero of all the fights on Sherman’s march to the sea; and presently they heard her attack the mysterious enemy with a lady-like courage, claiming the invaded chamber. The foe replied with like civility, saying the clerk had given her that room with the understanding that another lady was to be put there with her, and she had left the door unlocked to admit her. The watchers with the sick man next door appeared and confirmed this speech, a feeble voice from the bedclothes swore to it.

“Of course,” added the invader, “if I’d known ‘ow it really was, I never would lave listened to such a thing, never. And there isn’t another ‘ole in the louse to lay me ‘ead,” she concluded.

“Then it’s the clerk’s fault,” said Mrs. Ellison, glad to retreat unharmed; and she made her husband ring for the guilty wretch, a pale, quiet young Frenchman, whom the united party, sallying into the corridor, began to upbraid in one breath, the lady in dishabille vanishing as often as she remembered it, and reappearing whenever some strong point of argument or denunciation occurred to her.

The clerk, who was the Benjamin of his wicked tribe, threw himself upon their mercy and confessed everything: the house was so crowded, and he had been so crazed by the demands upon him, that he had understood Colonel Ellison’s application to be for a bed for the young lady in his party, and he had done the very best he could. If the lady there — she vanished again — would give up the room to the two gentlemen, he would find her a place with the housekeeper. To this the lady consented without difficulty, and the rest dispersing, she kissed one of the sick man’s watchers with “Isn’t it a shame, Bella?” and flitted down the darkness of the corridor. The rooms upon it seemed all, save the two assigned our travellers, to be occupied by ladies of the troupe; their doors successively opened, and she was heard explaining to each as she passed. The momentary displeasure which she had shown at her banishment was over. She detailed the facts with perfect good-nature, and though the others appeared no more than herself to find any humorous cast in the affair, they received her narration with the same amiability. They uttered their sympathy seriously, and each parted from her with some friendly word. Then all was still.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Ellison, when in Isabel’s room the travellers had briefly celebrated these events, “I should think you’d hate to leave us alone up here.”

“I do; but you can’t think how I hate to go off alone. I wish you’d come part of the way with us, Ladies; I do indeed. Leave your door unlocked, at any rate.”

This prayer, uttered at parting outside the room, was answered from within by a sound of turning keys and sliding bolts, and a low thunder as of bureaus and washstands rolled against the door. “The ladies are fortifying their position,” said the Colonel to Basil, and the two returned to their own chamber. “I don’t wish any intrusions,” he said, instantly shutting himself in; “my nerves are too much shaken now. What an awfully mysterious old place this Quebec is, Mr. March! I’ll tell you what: it’s my opinion that this is an enchanted castle, and if my ribs are not walked over by a muleteer in the course of the night, it’s all I ask.”

In this and other discourse recalling the famous adventure of Don Quixote, the Colonel beguiled the labor of disrobing, and had got as far as his boots, when there came a startling knock at the door. With one boot in his hand and the other on his foot, the Colonel limped forward. “I suppose it’s that clerk has sent to say he’s made some other mistake,” and he flung wide the door, and then stood motionless before it, dumbly staring at a figure on the threshold, — a figure with the fringed forehead and pale blue eyes of her whom they had so lately turned out of that room.

Shrinking behind the side of the doorway, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, with a dignity that recalled their scattered senses, “but will you ‘ave the goodness to look if my beads are on your table — O thanks, thanks, thanks!” she continued, showing her face and one hand, as Basil blushingly advanced with a string of heavy black beads, piously adorned with a large cross. “I’m sure, I’m greatly obliged to you, gentlemen, and I hask a thousand pardons for troublin’ you,” she concluded in a somewhat severe tone, that left them abashed and culpable; and vanished as mysteriously as she had appeared.

“Now, see here,” said the Colonel, with a huge sigh as he closed the door again, and this time locked it, “I should like to know how long this sort of thing is to be kept up? Because, if it’s to be regularly repeated during the night, I’m going to dress again.” Nevertheless, he finished undressing and got into bed, where he remained for some time silent. Basil put out the light. “O, I’m sorry you did that, my dear fellow,” said the Colonel; “but never mind, it was an idle curiosity, no doubt. It’s my belief that in the landlord’s extremity of bedlinen, I’ve been put to sleep between a pair of tablecloths; and I thought I’d like to look. It seems to me that I make out a checkered pattern on top and a flowered or arabesque pattern underneath. I wish they had given me mates. It’s pretty hard having to sleep between odd tablecloths. I shall complain to the landlord of this in the morning. I’ve never had to sleep between odd table-cloths at any hotel before.”

The Colonel’s voice seemed scarcely to have died away upon Basil’s drowsy ear, when suddenly the sounds of music and laughter from the invalid’s room startled him wide awake. The sick man’s watchers were coquetting with some one who stood in the little court-yard five stories below. A certain breadth of repartee was naturally allowable at that distance; the lover avowed his passion in ardent terms, and the ladies mocked him with the same freedom, now and then totally neglecting him while they sang a snatch of song to the twanging of the guitar, or talked professional gossip, and then returning to him with some tormenting expression of tenderness.

All this, abstractly speaking, was nothing to Basil; yet he could recollect few things intended for his pleasure that had given him more satisfaction. He thought, as he glanced out into the moonlight on the high-gabled silvery roofs around and on the gardens of the convents and the towers of the quaint city, that the scene wanted nothing of the proper charm of Spanish humor and romance, and he was as grateful to those poor souls as if they had meant him a favor. To us of the hither side of the foot-lights, there is always something fascinating in the life of the strange beings who dwell beyond them, and who are never so unreal as in their own characters. In their shabby bestowal in those mean upper rooms, their tawdry poverty, their merry submission to the errors and caprices of destiny, their mutual kindliness and careless friendship, these unprofitable devotees of the twinkling-footed burlesque seemed to be playing rather than living the life of strolling players; and their love-making was the last touch of a comedy that Basil could hardly accept as reality, it was so much more like something seen upon the stage. He would not have detracted anything from the commonness and cheapness of the ‘mise en scene’, for that, he reflected drowsily and confusedly, helped to give it an air of fact and make it like an episode of fiction. But above all, he was pleased with the natural eventlessness of the whole adventure, which was in perfect agreement with his taste; and just as his reveries began to lose shape in dreams, he was aware of an absurd pride in the fact that all this could have happened to him in our commonplace time and hemisphere. “Why,” he thought, “if I were a student in Alcala, what better could I have asked?” And as at last his soul swung out from its moorings and lapsed down the broad slowly circling tides out in the sea of sleep, he was conscious of one subtle touch of compassion for those poor strollers, — a pity so delicate and fine and tender that it hardly seemed his own but rather a sense of the compassion that pities the whole world.

X. HOMEWARD AND HOME.

The travellers all met at breakfast and duly discussed the adventures of the night; and for the rest, the forenoon passed rapidly and slowly with Basil and Isabel, as regret to leave Quebec, or the natural impatience of travellers to be off, overcame them. Isabel spent part of it in shopping, for she had found some small sums of money and certain odd corners in her trunks still unappropriated, and the handsome stores on the Rue Fabrique were very tempting. She said she would just go in and look; and the wise reader imagines the result. As she knelt over her boxes, trying so to distribute her purchases as to make them look as if they were old, — old things of hers, which she had brought all the way round from Boston with her, — a fleeting touch of conscience stayed her hand.

“Basil,” she said, “perhaps we’d better declare some of these things.
What’s the duty on those?” she asked, pointing to certain articles.

“I don’t know. About a hundred per cent. ad valorem.”

“C’est a dire — ?”

“As much as they cost.”

“O then, dearest,” responded Isabel indignantly, “it can’t be wrong to smuggle! I won’t declare a thread!”

“That’s very well for you, whom they won’t ask. But what if they ask me whether there’s anything to declare?”

Isabel looked at her husband and hesitated. Then she replied in terms that I am proud to record in honor of American womanhood: “You mustn’t fib about — it, Basil” (heroically); “I couldn’t respect you if you did,” (tenderly); “but” (with decision) “you must slip out of it some way!”

The ladies of the Ellison party, to whom she put the case in the parlor, agreed with her perfectly. They also had done a little shopping in Quebec, and they meant to do more at Montreal before they returned to the States. Mrs. Ellison was disposed to look upon Isabel’s compunctions as a kind of treason to the sex, to be forgiven only because so quickly repented.

The Ellisons were going up the Saguenay before coming on to Boston, and urged our friends hard to go with them. “No, that must be for another time,” said Isabel. “Mr. March has to be home by a certain day; and we shall just get back in season.” Then she made them promise to spend a day with her in Boston, and the Colonel coming to say that he had a carriage at the door for their excursion to Lorette, the two parties bade good-by with affection and many explicit hopes of meeting soon again.

“What do you think of them, dearest?” demanded Isabel, as she sallied out with Basil for a final look at Quebec.

“The young lady is the nicest; and the other is well enough, too. She is a good deal like you, but with the sense of humor left out. You’ve only enough to save you.”

“Well, her husband is jolly enough for both of them. He’s funnier than you, Basil, and he hasn’t any of your little languid airs and affectations. I don’t know but I’m a bit disappointed in my choice, darling; but I dare say I shall work out of it. In fact, I don’t know but the Colonel is a little too jolly. This drolling everything is rather fatiguing.” And having begun, they did not stop till they had taken their friends to pieces. Dismayed, then, they hastily reconstructed them, and said that they were among the pleasantest people they ever knew, and they were really very sorry to part with them, and they should do everything to make them have a good time in Boston.

They were sauntering towards Durham Terrace where they leaned long upon the iron parapet and blest themselves with the beauty of the prospect. A tender haze hung upon the landscape and subdued it till the scene was as a dream before them. As in a dream the river lay, and dream-like the shipping moved or rested on its deep, broad bosom. Far off stretched the happy fields with their dim white villages; farther still the mellow heights melted into the low hovering heaven. The tinned roofs of the Lower Town twinkled in the morning sun; around them on every hand, on that Monday forenoon when the States were stirring from ocean to ocean in feverish industry, drowsed the gray city within her walls; from the flag-staff of the citadel hung the red banner of Saint George in sleep.

Their hearts were strangely and deeply moved. It seemed to them that they looked upon the last stronghold of the Past, and that afar off to the southward they could hear the marching hosts of the invading Present; and as no young and loving soul can relinquish old things without a pang, they sighed a long mute farewell to Quebec.

Next summer they would come again, yes; but, ah me’ every one knows what next summer is!

Part of the burlesque troupe rode down in the omnibus to the Grand Trunk Ferry with them, and were good-natured to the last, having shaken hands all round with the waiters, chambermaids, and porters of the hotel. The young fellow with the bad amiable face came in a calash, and refused to overpay the driver with a gay decision that made him Basil’s envy till he saw his tribulation in getting the troupe’s luggage checked. There were forty pieces, and it always remained a mystery, considering the small amount of clothing necessary to those people on the stage, what could have filled their trunks. The young man and the two English blondes of American birth found places in the same car with our tourists, and enlivened the journey with their frolics. When the young man pretended to fall asleep, they wrapped his golden curly head in a shawl, and vexed him with many thumps and thrusts, till he bought a brief truce with a handful of almonds; and the ladies having no other way to eat them, one of them saucily snatched off her shoe, and cracked them hammerwise with the heel. It was all so pleasant that it ought to have been all right; and in their merry world of outlawry perhaps things are not so bad as we like to think them.

The country into which the train plunges as soon as Quebec is out of sight is very stupidly savage, and our friends had little else to do but to watch the gambols of the players, till they came to the river St. Francis, whose wandering loveliness the road follows through an infinite series of soft and beautiful landscapes, and finds everywhere glassing in its smooth current the elms and willows of its gentle shores. At one place, where its calm broke into foamy rapids, there was a huge saw mill, covering the stream with logs and refuse, and the banks with whole cities of lumber; which also they accepted as no mean elements of the picturesque. They clung the most tenderly to traces of the peasant life they were leaving. When some French boys came aboard with wild raspberries to sell in little birch-bark canoes, they thrilled with pleasure, and bought them, but sighed then, and said, “What thing characteristic of the local life will they sell us in Maine when we get there? A section of pie poetically wrapt in a broad leaf of the squash-vine, or pop-corn in its native tissue-paper, and advertising the new Dollar Store in Portland?” They saw the quaintness vanish from the farm-houses; first the dormer-windows, then the curve of the steep roof, then the steep roof itself. By and by they came to a store with a Grecian portico and four square pine pillars. They shuddered and looked no more.

The guiltily dreaded examination of baggage at Island Pond took place at nine o’clock, without costing them a cent of duty or a pang of conscience. At that charming station the trunks are piled higgledy-piggledy into a room beside the track, where a few inspectors with stifling lamps of smoky kerosene await the passengers. There are no porters to arrange the baggage, and each lady and gentleman digs out his box, and opens it before the lordly inspector, who stirs up its contents with an unpleasant hand and passes it. He makes you feel that you are once more in the land of official insolence, and that, whatever you are collectively, you are nothing personally. Isabel, who had sent her husband upon this business with quaking meekness of heart, experienced the bold indignation of virtue at his account of the way people were made their own baggage-smashers, and would not be amused when he painted the vile terrors of each husband as he tremblingly unlocked his wife’s store of contraband.

The morning light showed them the broad elmy meadows of western-looking Maine; and the Grand Trunk brought them, of course, an hour behind time into Portland. All breakfastless they hurried aboard the Boston train on the Eastern Road, and all along that line (which is built to show how uninteresting the earth can be when she is ‘ennuyee’ of both sea and land), Basil’s life became a struggle to construct a meal from the fragmentary opportunities of twenty different stations where they stopped five minutes for refreshments. At one place he achieved two cups of shameless chickory, at another three sardines, at a third a dessert of elderly bananas.

“Home again, home again, from a foreign shore!”

they softly sang as the successive courses of this feast were disposed of.

The drouth and heat, which they had briefly escaped during their sojourn in Canada, brooded sovereign upon the tiresome landscape. The red granite rocks were as if red-hot; the banks of the deep cuts were like ash heaps; over the fields danced the sultry atmosphere; they fancied that they almost heard the grasshoppers sing above the rattle of the train. When they reached Boston at last, they were dustier than most of us would like to be a hundred years hence. The whole city was equally dusty; and they found the trees in the square before their own door gray with dust. The bit of Virginia-creeper planted under the window hung shriveled upon its trellis.

But Isabel’s aunt met them with a refreshing shower of tears and kisses in the hall, throwing a solid arm about each of them. “O you dears!” the good soul cried, “you don’t know how anxious I’ve been about you; so many accidents happening all the time. I’ve never read the ‘Evening Transcript’ till the next morning, for fear I should find your names among the killed and wounded.”

“O aunty, you’re too good, always!” whimpered Isabel; and neither of the women took note of Basil, who said, “Yes, it’s probably the only thing that preserved our lives.”

The little tinge of discontent, which had colored their sentiment of return faded now in the kindly light of home. Their holiday was over, to be sure, but their bliss had but began; they had entered upon that long life of holidays which is happy marriage. By the time dinner was ended they were both enthusiastic at having got back, and taking their aunt between them walked up and down the parlor with their arms round her massive waist, and talked out the gladness of their souls.

Then Basil said he really must run down to the office that afternoon, and he issued all aglow upon the street. He was so full of having been long away and of having just returned, that he unconsciously tried to impart his mood to Boston, and the dusty composure of the street and houses, as he strode along, bewildered him. He longed for some familiar face to welcome him, and in the horse-car into which he stepped he was charmed to see an acquaintance. This was a man for whom ordinarily he cared nothing, and whom he would perhaps rather have gone out upon the platform to avoid than have spoken to; but now he plunged at him with effusion, and wrung his hand, smiling from ear to ear.

The other remained coldly unaffected, after a first start of surprise at his cordiality, and then reviled the dust and heat. “But I’m going to take a little run down to Newport, to-morrow, for a week,” he said. “By the way, you look as if you needed a little change. Aren’t you going anywhere this summer?”

“So you see, my dear,” observed Basil, when he had recounted the fact to Isabel at tea, “our travels are incommunicably our own. We had best say nothing about our little jaunt to other people, and they won’t know we’ve been gone. Even if we tried, we couldn’t make our wedding-journey theirs.”

She gave him a great kiss of recompense and consolation. “Who wants it,” she demanded, “to be Their Wedding Journey?”

XI. NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY.

Life had not used them ill in this time, and the fairish treatment they had received was not wholly unmerited. The twelve years past had made them older, as the years must in passing. Basil was now forty-two, and his moustache was well sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, and the parting of her hair had thinned and retreated; but she managed to give it an effect of youthful abundance by combing it low down upon her forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush. By gaslight she was still very pretty; she believed that she looked more interesting, and she thought Basil’s gray moustache distinguished. He had grown stouter; he filled his double-breasted frock coat compactly, and from time to time he had the buttons set forward; his hands were rounded up on the backs, and he no longer wore his old number of gloves by two sizes; no amount of powder or manipulation from the young lady in the shop would induce them to go on. But this did not matter much now, for he seldom wore gloves at all. He was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare in that direction, for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully after the out-goes. The insurance business was not what it had been, and though Basil had comfortably established himself in it, he had not made money. He sometimes thought that he might have done quite as well if he had gone into literature; but it was now too late. They had not a very large family: they had a boy of eleven, who took after his father, and a girl of nine, who took after the boy; but with the American feeling that their children must have the best of everything, they made it an expensive family, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.

The narrowness of their means, as well as their household cares, had kept them from taking many long journeys. They passed their winters in Boston, and their summers on the South Shore, cheaper than the North Shore, and near enough for Basil to go up and down every day for business; but they promised themselves that some day they would revisit certain points on their wedding journey, and perhaps somewhere find their lost second-youth on the track. It was not that they cared to be young, but they wished the children to see them as they used to be when they thought themselves very old; and one lovely afternoon in June they started for Niagara.

It had been very hot for several days, but that morning the east wind came in, and crisped the air till it seemed to rustle like tinsel, and the sky was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chromoed. They felt that they were really looking up into the roof of the world, when they glanced at it; but when an old gentleman hastily kissed a young woman, and commended her to the conductor as being one who was going all the way to San Francisco alone, and then risked his life by stepping off the moving train, the vastness of the great American fact began to affect Isabel disagreeably. “Isn’t it too big, Basil?” she pleaded, peering timidly out of the little municipal consciousness in which she had been so long housed. — In that seclusion she had suffered certain original tendencies to increase upon her; her nerves were more sensitive and electrical; her apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond the ratio of the dangers that beset her; and Basil had counted upon a tonic effect of the change the journey would make in their daily lives. She looked ruefully out of the window at the familiar suburbs whisking out of sight, and the continental immensity that advanced devouringly upon her. But they had the best section in the very centre of the sleeping-car, — she drew what consolation she could from the fact, — and the children’s premature demand for lunch helped her to forget her anxieties; they began to be hungry as soon as the train started. She found that she had not put up sandwiches enough; and when she told Basil that he would have to get out somewhere and buy some cold chicken, he asked her what in the world had become of that whole ham she had had boiled. It seemed to him, he said, that there was enough of it to subsist them to Niagara and back; and he went on as some men do, while Somerville vanished, and even Tufts College, which assails the Bostonian vision from every point of the compass, was shut out by the curve at the foot of the Belmont hills.

They had chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara, because, as Basil said, their experience of travel had never yet included a very long tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the children would always remember the journey, if nothing else remarkable happened to impress it upon them. Indeed, they were so much concerned in it that they began to ask when they should come to this tunnel, even before they began to ask for lunch; and the long time before they reached it was not perceptibly shortened by Tom’s quarter-hourly consultations of his father’s watch.

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that their fellow-passengers were so interesting as their fellow passengers used to be in their former days of travel. They were soberly dressed, and were all of a middle-aged sobriety of deportment, from which nothing salient offered itself for conjecture or speculation; and there was little within the car to take their minds from the brilliant young world that flashed and sang by them outside. The belated spring had ripened, with its frequent rains, into the perfection of early summer; the grass was thicker and the foliage denser than they had ever seen it before; and when they had run out into the hills beyond Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts among the underbrush, and overflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows, of the railroad embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink. Its shy, wild beauty ceased whenever the train stopped, but the orioles made up for its absence with their singing in the village trees about the stations; and though Fitchburg and Ayer’s Junction and Athol are not names that invoke historical or romantic associations, the hearts of Basil and Isabel began to stir with the joy of travel before they had passed these points. At the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken which had been commanded, and he recognized in the keeper of the railroad restaurant their former conductor, who had been warned by the spirits never to travel without a flower of some sort carried between his lips, and who had preserved his own life and the lives of his passengers for many years by this simple device. His presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie and baked beans a supernatural interest, and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the athletic bird which the mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he justly reflected that if he had heard the story of the restaurateur’s superstition in a foreign land, or another time, he would have found in it a certain poetry. It was this willingness to find poetry in things around them that kept his life and Isabel’s fresh, and they taught their children the secret of their elixir. To be sure, it was only a genre poetry, but it was such as has always inspired English art and song; and now the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith or Wordsworth, the flying sentiment of the railroad side. There was a simple interior at one place, — a small shanty, showing through the open door a cook stove surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy cat outstretched upon the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman standing just outside the threshold to see the train go by, — which had an unrivaled value till they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the woods, in which the railroad workmen boarded — some were lounging on the platform and at the open windows, while others were “washing up” for supper, and the whole scene was full of holiday ease and sylvan comradery that went to the hearts of the sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately been reading aloud the delightful history of Rudder Grange, and the children, who had made their secret vows never to live in anything but an old canal-boat when they grew up, owned that there were fascinating possibilities in a worn-out railroad car.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on either hand, with smooth stretches of the quiet river, and breadths of grassy intervale and tableland; the elms grouped themselves like the trees of a park; here and there the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed hollows, full of golden light and delicious shadow. There were people rowing on the water; and every pretty town had some touch of picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, there were children playing in the new-mown hay along the railroad embankment; at Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going on (among the English operatives of the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked down from their car-window on a young lady swinging in a hammock, in her door-yard, and on an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group of girls waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a boy paused in weeding a garden-bed, — and probably denied that he had paused, later. In the mean time the golden haze along the mountain side changed to a clear, pearly lustre, and the quiet evening possessed the quiet landscape. They confessed to each other that it was all as sweet and beautiful as it used to be; and in fact they had seen palaces, in other days, which did not give them the pleasure they found in a woodcutter’s shanty, losing itself among the shadows in a solitude of the hills. The tunnel, after this, was a gross and material sensation; but they joined the children in trying to hold and keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his watch. “Now,” said Tom, when five minutes were gone, “we are under the very centre of the mountain.” But the tunnel was like all accomplished facts, all hopes fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the sense; and the children emerged at North Adams with but a mean opinion of that great feat of engineering. Basil drew a pretty moral from their experience. “If you rode upon a comet you would be disappointed. Take my advice, and never ride upon a comet. I shouldn’t object to your riding on a little meteor, — you wouldn’t expect much of that; but I warn you against comets; they are as bad as tunnels.”

The children thought this moral was a joke at their expense, and as they were a little sleepy they permitted themselves the luxury of feeling trifled with. But they woke, refreshed and encouraged, from slumbers that had evidently been unbroken, though they both protested that they had not slept a wink the whole night, and gave themselves up to wonder at the interminable levels of Western New York over which the train was running. The longing to come to an edge, somewhere, that the New England traveler experiences on this plain, was inarticulate with the children; but it breathed in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed even the architectural inequalities of a city into which they drew in the early morning. This city showed to their weary eyes a noble stretch of river, from the waters of which lofty piles of buildings rose abruptly; and Isabel, being left to guess where they were, could think of no other place so picturesque as Rochester.

“Yes,” said her husband; “it is our own Enchanted City. I wonder if that unstinted hospitality is still dispensed by the good head waiter at the hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties who have passed the ordeal of the haughty hotel clerk. I wonder what has become of that hotel clerk. Has he fallen, through pride, to some lower level, or has he bowed his arrogant spirit to the demands of advancing civilization, and realized that he is the servant, and not the master, of the public? I think I’ve noticed, since his time, a growing kindness in hotel clerks; or perhaps I have become of a more impressive presence; they certainly unbend to me a little more. I should like to go up to our hotel, and try myself on our old enemy, if he is still there. I can fancy how his shirt front has expanded in these twelve years past; he has grown a little bald, after the fashion of middle-aged hotel clerks, but he parts his hair very much on one side, and brushes it squarely across his forehead to hide his loss; the forefinger that he touches that little snapbell with, when he doesn’t look at you, must be very pudgy now. Come, let us get out and breakfast at Rochester; they will give us broiled whitefish; and we can show the children where Sam Patch jumped over Genesee Falls, and—”

“No, no, Basil,” cried his wife. “It would be sacrilege! All that is sacred to those dear young days of ours; and I wouldn’t think of trying to repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that dining-room to reproach us for our intrusion! Oh, perhaps we have done a wicked thing in coming this journey! We ought to have left the past alone; we shall only mar our memories of all these beautiful places. Do you suppose Buffalo can be as poetical as it was then? Buffalo! The name doesn’t invite the Muse very much. Perhaps it never was very poetical! Oh, Basil, dear, I’m afraid we have only come to find out that we were mistaken about everything! Let’s leave Rochester alone, at any rate!”

I’m not troubled! We won’t disturb our dream of Rochester; but I don’t despair of Buffalo. I’m sure that Buffalo will be all that our fancy ever painted it. I believe in Buffalo.”

“Well, well,” murmured Isabel, “I hope you’re right;” and she put some things together for leaving their car at Buffalo, while they were still two hours away.

When they reached a place where the land mated its level with the level of the lake, they ran into a wilderness of railroad cars, in a world where life seemed to be operated solely by locomotives and their helpless minions. The bellowing and bleating trains were arriving in every direction, not only along the ground floor of the plain, but stately stretches of trestle-work, which curved and extended across the plain, carried them to and fro overhead. The travelers owned that this railroad suburb had its own impressiveness, and they said that the trestle-work was as noble in effect as the lines of aqueduct that stalk across the Roman Campagna. Perhaps this was because they had not seen the Campagna or its aqueducts for a great while; but they were so glad to find themselves in the spirit of their former journey again that they were amiable to everything. When the children first caught sight of the lake’s delicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelier than the sea, they felt quite a local pride in their preference. It was what Isabel had said twelve years before, on first beholding the lake.

But they did not really see the lake till they had taken the train for Niagara Falls, after breakfasting in the depot, where the children, used to the severe native or the patronizing Irish ministrations of Boston restaurants and hotels, reveled for the first time in the affectionate devotion of a black waiter. There was already a ridiculous abundance and variety on the table; but this waiter brought them strawberries and again strawberries, and repeated plates of griddle cakes with maple syrup; and he hung over the back of first one chair and then another with an unselfish joy in the appetites of the breakfasters which gave Basil renewed hopes of his race. “Such rapture in serving argues a largeness of nature which will be recognized hereafter,” he said, feeling about in his waistcoat pocket for a quarter. It seemed a pity to render the waiter’s zeal retroactively interested, but in view of the fact that he possibly expected the quarter, there was nothing else to do; and by a mysterious stroke of gratitude the waiter delivered them into the hands of a friend, who took another quarter from them for carrying their bags and wraps to the train. This second retainer approved their admiration of the aesthetic forms and colors of the depot colonnade; and being asked if that were the depot whose roof had fallen in some years before, proudly replied that it was.

“There were a great many killed, weren’t there?” asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfaction in the disaster. The porter seemed humiliated; he confessed the mortifying truth that the loss of life was small, but he recovered a just self-respect in adding, “If the roof had fallen in five minutes sooner, it would have killed about three hundred people.”

Basil had promised the children a sight of the Rapids before they reached the Falls, and they held him rigidly accountable from the moment they entered the train, and began to run out of the city between the river and the canal. He attempted a diversion with the canal boats, and tried to bring forward the subject of Rudder Grange in that connection. They said that the canal boats were splendid, but they were looking for the Rapids now; and they declined to be interested in a window in one of the boats, which Basil said was just like the window that the Rudder Granger and the boarder had popped Pomona out of when they took her for a burglar.

“You spoil those children, Basil,” said his wife, as they clambered over him, and clamored for the Rapids.

“At present I’m giving them an object-lesson in patience and self-denial; they are experiencing the fact that they can’t have the Rapids till they get to them, and probably they’ll be disappointed in them when they arrive.”

In fact, they valued the Rapids very little more than the Hoosac Tunnel, when they came in sight of them, at last; and Basil had some question in his own mind whether the Rapids had not dwindled since his former visit. He did not breathe this doubt to Isabel, however, and she arrived at the Falls with unabated expectations. They were going to spend only half a day there; and they turned into the station, away from the phalanx of omnibuses, when they dismounted from their train. They seemed, as before, to be the only passengers who had arrived, and they found an abundant choice of carriages waiting in the street, outside the station. The Niagara hackman may once have been a predatory and very rampant animal, but public opinion, long expressed through the public prints, has reduced him to silence and meekness. Apparently, he may not so much as beckon with his whip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that he cannot cross the pavement to the station door; and Basil, inviting one of them to negotiation, was himself required by the attendant policeman to step out to the curbstone, and complete his transaction there. It was an impressive illustration of the power of a free press, but upon the whole Basil found the effect melancholy; it had the saddening quality which inheres in every sort of perfection. The hackman, reduced to entire order, appealed to his compassion, and he had not the heart to beat him down from his moderate first demand, as perhaps he ought to have done. They drove directly to the cataract, and found themselves in the pretty grove beside the American Fall, and in the air whose dampness was as familiar as if they had breathed it all their childhood. It was full now of the fragrance of some sort of wild blossom; and again they had that old, entrancing sense of the mingled awfulness and loveliness of the great spectacle. This sylvan perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, the mildness of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead, and the bird-singing that made itself heard amid the roar of the rapids and the solemn incessant plunge of the cataract, moved their hearts, and made them children with the boy and girl, who stood rapt for a moment and then broke into joyful wonder. They could sympathize with the ardor with which Tom longed to tempt fate at the brink of the river, and over the tops of the parapets which have been built along the edge of the precipice, and they equally entered into the terror with which Bella screamed at his suicidal zeal. They joined her in restraining him; they reduced him to a beggarly account of half a dozen stones, flung into the Rapids at not less than ten paces from the brink; and they would not let him toss the smallest pebble over the parapet, though he laughed to scorn the notion that anybody should be hurt by them below.

It seemed to them that the triviality of man in the surroundings of the Falls had increased with the lapse of time. There were more booths and bazaars, and more colored feather fans with whole birds spitted in the centres; and there was an offensive array of blue and green and yellow glasses on the shore, through which you were expected to look at the Falls gratis. They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indian maids, who used to squat about on the grass, with their laps full of moccasins and pin-cushions. But, as of old, the photographer came out of his saloon, and invited them to pose for a family group; representing that the light and the spray were singularly propitious, and that everything in nature invited them to be taken. Basil put him off gently, for the sake of the time when he had refused to be photographed in a bridal group, and took refuge from him in the long low building from which you descend to the foot of the cataract.

The grove beside the American Fall has been inclosed, and named Prospect Park, by a company which exacts half a dollar for admittance, and then makes you free of all its wonders and conveniences, for which you once had to pay severally. This is well enough; but formerly you could refuse to go down the inclined tramway, and now you cannot, without feeling that you have failed to get your money’s worth. It was in this illogical spirit of economy that Basil invited his family to the descent; but Isabel shook her head. “No, you go with the children,” she said, “and I will stay, here, till you get back;” her agonized countenance added, “and pray for you;” and Basil took his children on either side of him, and rumbled down the terrible descent with much of the excitement that attends travel in an open horse-car. When he stepped out of the car he felt that increase of courage which comes to every man after safely passing through danger. He resolved to brave the mists and slippery-stones at the foot of the Fall; and he would have plunged at once into this fresh peril, if he had not been prevented by the Prospect Park Company. This ingenious association has built a large tunnel-like shed quite to the water’s edge, so that you cannot view the cataract as you once could, at a reasonable remoteness, but must emerge from the building into a storm of spray. The roof of the tunnel is painted with a lively effect in party-colored stripes, and is lettered “The Shadow of the Rock,” so that you take it at first to be an appeal to your aesthetic sense; but the real object of the company is not apparent till you put your head out into the tempest, when you agree with the nearest guide — and one is always very near — that you had better have an oil-skin dress, as Basil did. He told the guide that he did not wish to go under the Fall, and the guide confidentially admitted that there was no fun in that, any way; and in the mean time he equipped him and his children for their foray into the mist. When they issued forth, under their friend’s leadership, Basil felt that, with his children clinging to each hand, he looked like some sort of animal with its young, and, though not unsocial by nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the time. They climbed hither and thither over the rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for the views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift of the spray they really caught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The next instant the spray swirled back, and they were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow, lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and naturally as if that had been the habit of rainbows ever since the flood. This was all there was to be done, and they streamed back into the tunnel, where they disrobed in the face of a menacing placard, which announced that the hire of a guide and a dress for going under the Fall was one dollar.

“Will they make you pay a dollar for each of us, papa?” asked Tom, fearfully.

“Oh, pooh, no!” returned Basil; “we haven’t been under the Fall.” But he sought out the proprietor with a trembling heart. The proprietor was a man of severely logical mind; he said that the charge would be three dollars, for they had had the use of the dresses and the guide just the same as if they had gone under the Fall; and he refused to recognize anything misleading in the dressing-room placard. In fine, he left Basil without a leg to stand upon. It was not so much the three dollars as the sense of having been swindled that vexed him; and he instantly resolved not to share his annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put that burden upon her? If she were none the wiser, she would be none the poorer; and he ought to be willing to deny himself her sympathy for the sake of sparing her needless pain.

He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary unconsciousness, and he listened with her to the tale their coachman told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a Frenchman and his wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a stroll on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent concern that his wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall. It was so natural for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the peculiar circumstances, that every one condoled with the widower; but when a few days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband refused to come back from New York to her funeral, there was a general regret that he had not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed the whole fact to Basil’s guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a moment of remorse and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then Basil looked at the mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from Niagara without being forced to a similar excess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at the very first act of spendthrift profusion she committed. The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery had clung for twenty-four hours before he was carried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband Isabel’s bonnet ribbons seemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He could endure the pretty arbor no longer. “Come, children!” he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety; “let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the Three Sisters, that your mother was afraid to walk back on after she had crossed it.”

“For shame, Basil!” retorted Isabel. “You know it was you who were afraid of that bridge.”

The children, who knew the story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

“What extortion!” cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly unnerved him. He trembled upon the verge of confession; but he had finally the moral force to resist. He suffered her to compute the cost of their stay at Niagara without allowing those three dollars to enter into her calculation; he even began to think what justificative extravagance he could tempt her to. He suggested the purchase of local bric-a-brac; he asked her if she would not like to dine at the International, for old times’ sake. But she answered, with disheartening virtue, that they must not think of such a thing, after what they had spent already. Nothing, perhaps, marked the confirmed husband in Basil more than these hidden fears and reluctances.

In the mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned herself to the charm of the place, which she found unimpaired, in spite of the reported ravages of improvement about Niagara. Goat Island was still the sylvan solitude of twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer nymphs and dryads than of old. The air was full of the perfume that scented it at Prospect Park; the leaves showered them with shade and sun, as they drove along. “If it were not for the children here,” she said, “I should think that our first drive on Goat Island had never ended.”

She sighed a little, and Basil leaned forward and took her hand in his. “It never has ended; it’s the same drive; only we are younger now, and enjoy it more.” It always touched him when Isabel was sentimental about the past, for the years had tended to make her rather more seriously maternal towards him than towards the other children; and he recognized that these fond reminiscences were the expression of the girlhood still lurking deep within her heart.

She shook her head. “No, but I’m willing the children should be young in our place. It’s only fair they should have their turn.”

She remained in the carriage, while Basil visited the various points of view on Luna Island with the boy and girl. A boy is probably of considerable interest to himself, and a man looks back at his own boyhood with some pathos. But in his actuality a boy has very little to commend him to the toleration of other human beings. Tom was very well, as boys go; but now his contribution to the common enjoyment was to venture as near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into the water, and to make as if to throw them over precipices on the people below; to pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes, while he could cut his initials on a band-rail. “You can come back and see ’em on your bridal tower,” said the driver. Isabel gave a little start, as if she had almost thought of something she was trying to think of.

They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered a couple making a tour of the island on foot. But none of these people were young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited only by persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating lunch to the music of the shouting Rapids, on the outer edge of the last Sister, were no younger, apparently.

Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she preferred to refute his story of her former panic on those islands by remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb novelty which nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock has fallen and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in celebrating the display, with the purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather keep her Niagara unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood him, there must be something rather cheap and conscious in the new feature. She approved, however, of the change that had removed that foolish little Terrapin Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she confessed that she could have enjoyed a little variety in the stories the driver told them of the Indian burial-ground on the island: they were exactly the stories she and Basil had heard twelve years before, and the ill-starred goats, from which the island took its name, perished once more in his narrative.

Under the influence of his romances our travelers began to find the whole scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little sooner than they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous village on foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of the local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world so large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill them? They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all these magnificent equipages are waiting about the empty streets for the people who never come to hire them.

“It seems to me that I don’t see so many strangers here as I used,” Basil had suggested to their driver.

“Oh, they haven’t commenced coming yet,” he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended that they were plenty enough in July and August.

They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who advertised a table d’hote dinner on a board at his door; and they put their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended that Niagara was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In fact, they observed that their regret for the supposed decline of the Falls as a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in their offers of sympathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.

Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them there, while he walked down the village street, for a closer inspection of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk’s island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for consolation into the barber’s shop, where he found himself the only customer, and no busy sound of “Next” greeted his ear. But the barber, like all the rest, said that Niagara was not unusually empty; and he came out feeling bewildered and defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats which descend the Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil went to him and pretended that he was going to buy a ticket. But a glance at the agent’s sign showed Basil that the agent, with his brave jollity of manner and his impressive “Good-morning,” had passed away from the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited by his widow, who in turn was absent, and temporarily represented by their son. The boy, in supplying Basil with an advertisement of the line, made a specious show of haste, as if there were a long queue of tourists waiting behind him to be served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a spectral line there, but Basil was the only tourist present in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation, and fled with the advertisement in his hand. Isabel met him at the door of the station with a frightened face.

“Basil,” she cried, “I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the brides?”

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at the news-man’s booth the moccasins and the birchbark bric-a-brac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.

“My dear,” he said, “there are no brides; everybody was married twelve years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and don’t come to Niagara if they are wise.”

“Yes,” she desolately asserted, “that is so! Something has been hanging over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the absence of the brides. But — but — down at the hotels — Didn’t you see anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of minstrelsy? Was there—”

She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat.

“Perhaps,” said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting in his remoter mind the probable consequences, “there were both brides and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time, and we live amid contemporary things. I daresay there were middle-aged people at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them, nor they us. I daresay that the place is now swarming with bridal couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the reason why they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness. Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do anything to bring us en rapport with that lost bridal world again?”

Isabel caught away her hand. “Basil,” she cried, “it would be disgusting! I wouldn’t do it for the world — not even for that world. I saw one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the Cave of the Winds, or somewhere, with the children. They were sitting on some steps, he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put his head on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn’t dare. We should look like them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don’t you think we should look like them?”

“I don’t know,” said Basil. “You are certainly a little wrinkled, my dear.”

“And you are very fat, Basil.”

They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they both laughed. “We couldn’t look young if we quarreled a week,” he said. “We had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall do if we live to be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they don’t see our bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper of cherries, Isabel? The children seem to be enjoying them.”

Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair. “Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall not have a wink of sleep with them to-night. Where is that nux?” She hunted for the medicine in her bag, and the children submitted; for they had eaten all the cherries, and they took their medicine without a murmur. “I wonder at your letting them eat the sour things, Basil,” said their mother, when the children had run off to the newsstand again.

“I wonder that you left me to see what they were doing,” promptly retorted their father.

“It was your nonsense about the brides,” said Isabel; “and I think this has been a lesson to us. Don’t let them get anything else to eat, dearest.”

“They are safe; they have no more money. They are frugally confining themselves to the admiration of the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why have our Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?”

Isabel despised the small pleasantry. “Then you saw nobody at the hotel?” she asked.

“Not even the Ellisons,” said Basil.

“Ah, yes,” said Isabel; “that was where we met them. How long ago it seems! And poor little Kitty! I wonder what has become of them? But I’m glad they’re not here. That’s what makes you realize your age: meeting the same people in the same place a great while after, and seeing how old — they’ve grown. I don’t think I could bear to see Kitty Ellison again. I’m glad she didn’t come to visit us in Boston, though, after what happened, she couldn’t, poor thing! I wonder if she’s ever regretted her breaking with him in the way she did. It’s a very painful thing to think of, — such an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as if they ought to meet again, somewhere.”

“I don’t believe she ever wished it.”

“A man can’t tell what a woman wishes.”

“Well, neither can a woman,” returned Basil, lightly.

His wife remained serious. “It was a very fine point, — a very little thing to reject a man for. I felt that when I first read her letter about it.”

Basil yawned. “I don’t believe I ever knew just what the point was.”

“Oh yes, you did; but you forget everything. You know that they met two Boston ladies just after they were engaged, and she believed that he did n’t introduce her because he was ashamed of her countrified appearance before them.”

“It was a pretty fine point,” said Basil, and he laughed provokingly.

“He might not have meant to ignore her,” answered Isabel thoughtfully; “he might have chosen not to introduce her because he felt too proud of her to subject her to any possible misappreciation from them. You might have looked at it in that way.”

“Why didn’t you look at it in that way? You advised her against giving him another chance. Why did you?”

“Why?” repeated Isabel, absently. “Oh, a woman doesn’t judge a man by what he does, but by what he is! I knew that if she dismissed him it was because she never really had trusted or could trust his love; and I thought she had better not make another trial.”

“Well, very possibly you were right. At any rate, you have the consolation of knowing that it’s too late to help it now.”

“Yes, it’s too late,” said Isabel; and her thoughts went back to her meeting with the young girl whom she had liked so much, and whose after history had interested her so painfully. It seemed to her a hard world that could come to nothing better than that for the girl whom she had seen in her first glimpse of it that night. Where was she now? What had become of her? If she had married that man, would she have been any happier? Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girl imagines it; she herself had found that out. It was a state of trial, of probation; it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken each other’s hearts and parted, would not the fragments of their lives have been on a much finer, much higher plane? Had not the commonplace, every-day experiences of marriage vulgarized them both? To be sure, there were the children; but if they had never had the children, she would never have missed them; and if Basil had, for example, died just before they were married — She started from this wicked reverie, and ran towards her husband, whose broad, honest back, with no visible neck or shirt-collar, was turned towards her, as he stood, with his head thrown up, studying a time-table on the wall; she passed her arm convulsively through his, and pulled him away.

“It’s time to be getting our bags out to the train, Basil! Come, Bella!
Tom, we’re going!”

The children reluctantly turned from the newsman’s trumpery, and they all went out to the track, and took seats on the benches under the colonnade. While they waited; the train for Buffalo drew in, and they remained watching it till it started. In the last car that passed them, when it was fairly under way, a face looked full at Isabel from one of the windows. In that moment of astonishment she forgot to observe whether it was sad or glad; she only saw, or believed she saw, the light of recognition dawn into its eyes, and then it was gone.

“Basil!” she cried, “stop the train! That was Kitty Ellison!”

“Oh no, it wasn’t,” said Basil, easily. “It looked like her; but it looked at least ten years older.”

“Why, of course it was! We’re all ten years older,” returned his wife in such indignation at his stupidity that she neglected to insist upon his stopping the train, which was rapidly diminishing in the perspective.

He declared it was only a fancied resemblance; she contended that this was in the neighborhood of Eriecreek, and it must be Kitty; and thus one of their most inveterate disagreements began.

Their own train drew into the depot, and they disputed upon the fact in question till they entered on the passage of the Suspension Bridge. Then Basil rose and called the children to his side. On the left hand, far up the river, the great Fall shows, with its mists at its foot and its rainbow on its brow, as silent and still as if it were vastly painted there; and below the bridge on the right, leap the Rapids in the narrow gorge, like seas on a rocky shore. “Look on both sides, now,” he said to the children. “Isabel you must see this!”

Isabel had been preparing for the passage of this bridge ever since she left Boston. “Never!” she exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes, and hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanks to this precaution of hers, the train crossed the bridge in perfect safety.

A CHANCE ACQUAINTANCE

This novella, first published in 1873, is a character sketch relating the impressions and experiences of a young New York woman on holiday in Quebec, focussing on her budding relationship with a Bostonian gentleman that she meets there.

Howells photographed in 1870

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

In 1871, Howells became the editor of Atlantic Monthly, a post he occupied for the next decade.

I.

UP THE SAGUENAY.

On the forward promenade of the Saguenay boat which had been advertised to leave Quebec at seven o’clock on Tuesday morning, Miss Kitty Ellison sat tranquilly expectant of the joys which its departure should bring, and tolerantly patient of its delay; for if all the Saguenay had not been in promise, she would have thought it the greatest happiness just to have that prospect of the St. Lawrence and Quebec. The sun shone with a warm yellow light on the Upper Town, with its girdle of gray wall, and on the red flag that drowsed above the citadel, and was a friendly lustre on the tinned roofs of the Lower Town; while away off to the south and east and west wandered the purple hills and the farmlit plains in such dewy shadow and effulgence as would have been enough to make the heaviest heart glad. Near at hand the river was busy with every kind of craft, and in the distance was mysterious with silvery vapors; little breaths of haze, like an ethereal colorless flame, exhaled from its surface, and it all glowed with a lovely inner radiance. In the middle distance a black ship was heaving anchor and setting sail, and the voice of the seamen came soft and sad and yet wildly hopeful to the dreamy ear of the young girl, whose soul at once went round the world before the ship, and then made haste back again to the promenade of the Saguenay boat. She sat leaning forward a little with her hands fallen into her lap, letting her unmastered thoughts play as they would in memories and hopes around the consciousness that she was the happiest girl in the world, and blest beyond desire or desert. To have left home as she had done, equipped for a single day at Niagara, and then to have come adventurously on, by grace of her cousin’s wardrobe, as it were, to Montreal and Quebec; to be now going up the Saguenay, and finally to be destined to return home by way of Boston and New York; — this was more than any one human being had a right to; and, as she had written home to the girls, she felt that her privileges ought to be divided up among all the people of Eriecreek. She was very grateful to Colonel Ellison and Fanny for affording her these advantages; but they being now out of sight in pursuit of state-rooms, she was not thinking of them in relation to her pleasure in the morning scene, but was rather regretting the absence of a lady with whom they had travelled from Niagara, and to whom she imagined she would that moment like to say something in praise of the prospect. This lady was a Mrs. Basil March of Boston; and though it was her wedding journey and her husband’s presence ought to have absorbed her, she and Miss Kitty had sworn a sisterhood, and were pledged to see each other before long at Mrs. March’s home in Boston. In her absence, now, Kitty thought what a very charming person she was, and wondered if all Boston people were really like her, so easy and friendly and hearty. In her letter she had told the girls to tell her Uncle Jack that he had not rated Boston people a bit too high, if she were to judge from Mr. and Mrs. March, and that she was sure they would help her as far as they could to carry out his instructions when she got to Boston.

These instructions were such as might seem preposterous if no more particular statement in regard to her Uncle Jack were made, but will be imaginable enough, I hope, when he is a little described. The Ellisons were a West Virginia family who had wandered up into a corner of Northwestern New York, because Dr. Ellison (unceremoniously known to Kitty as Uncle Jack) was too much an abolitionist to live in a slaveholding State with safety to himself or comfort to his neighbors. Here his family of three boys and two girls had grown up, and hither in time had come Kitty, the only child of his youngest brother, who had gone first to Illinois and thence, from the pretty constant adversity of a country editor, to Kansas, where he joined the Free State party and fell in one of the border feuds. Her mother had died soon after, find Dr. Ellison’s heart bowed itself tenderly over the orphan. She was something not only dear, but sacred to him as the child of a martyr to the highest cause on earth; and the love of the whole family encompassed her. One of the boys had brought her from Kansas when she was yet very little, and she had grown up among them as their youngest sister; but the doctor, from a tender scruple against seeming to usurp the place of his brother in her childish thought, would not let her call him father, and in obedience to the rule which she soon began to give their love, they all turned and called him Uncle Jack with her. Yet the Ellisons, though they loved their little cousin, did not spoil her, — neither the doctor, nor his great grown-up sons whom she knew as the boys, nor his daughters whom she called the girls, though they were wellnigh women when she came to them. She was her uncle’s pet and most intimate friend, riding with him on his professional visits till she became as familiar a feature of his equipage as the doctor’s horse itself; and he educated her in those extreme ideas, tempered by humor, which formed the character of himself and his family. They loved Kitty, and played with her, and laughed at her when she needed ridiculing; they made a jest of their father on the one subject on which he never jested, and even the antislavery cause had its droll points turned to the light. They had seen danger and trouble enough at different times in its service, but no enemy ever got more amusement out of it. Their house was a principal entrepôt of the underground railroad, and they were always helping anxious travellers over the line; but the boys seldom came back from an excursion to Canada without adventures to keep the family laughing for a week; and they made it a serious business to study the comic points of their beneficiaries, who severally lived in the family records by some grotesque mental or physical trait. They had an irreverent name among themselves for each of the humorless abolition lecturers who unfailingly abode with them on their rounds; and these brethren and sisters, as they called them, paid with whatever was laughable in them for the substantial favors they received.

Miss Kitty, having the same natural bent, began even as a child to share in these harmless reprisals, and to look at life with the same wholesomely fantastic vision. But she remembered one abolition visitor of whom none of them made fun, but treated with a serious distinction and regard, — an old man with a high, narrow forehead, and thereon a thick upright growth of gray hair; who looked at her from under bushy brows with eyes as of blue flame, and took her on his knee one night and sang to her “Blow ye the trumpet, blow!” He and her uncle had been talking of some indefinite, far-off place that they called Boston, in terms that commended it to her childish apprehension as very little less holy than Jerusalem, and as the home of all the good and great people outside of Palestine.

In fact, Boston had always been Dr. Ellison’s foible. In the beginning of the great antislavery agitation, he had exchanged letters (corresponded, he used to say) with John Quincy Adams on the subject of Lovejoy’s murder; and he had met several Boston men at the Free Soil Convention in Buffalo in 1848. “A little formal perhaps, a little reserved,” he would say, “but excellent men; polished, and certainly of sterling principle”: which would make his boys and girls laugh, as they grew older, and sometimes provoke them to highly colored dramatizations of the formality of these Bostonians in meeting their father. The years passed and the boys went West, and when the war came, they took service in Iowa and Wisconsin regiments. By and by the President’s Proclamation of freedom to the slaves reached Eriecreek while Dick and Bob happened both to be home on leave. After they had allowed their sire his rapture, “Well, this is a great blow for father,” said Bob; “what are you going to do now, father? Fugitive slavery and all its charms blotted out forever, at one fell swoop. Pretty rough on you, isn’t it? No more men and brothers, no more soulless oligarchy. Dull lookout, father.”

“O no,” insinuated one of the girls, “there’s Boston.”

“Why, yes,” cried Dick, “to be sure there is. The President hasn’t abolished Boston. Live for Boston.”

And the doctor did live for an ideal Boston, thereafter, so far at least as concerned a never-relinquished, never-fulfilled purpose of some day making a journey to Boston. But in the mean time there were other things; and at present, since the Proclamation had given him a country worth living in, he was ready to honor her by studying her antiquities. In his youth, before his mind had been turned so strenuously to the consideration of slavery, he had a pretty taste for the mystery of the Mound Builders, and each of his boys now returned to camp with instructions to note any phenomena that would throw light upon this interesting subject. They would have abundant leisure for research, since the Proclamation, Dr. Ellison insisted, practically ended the war.

The Mound Builders were only a starting-point for the doctor. He advanced from them to historical times in due course, and it happened that when Colonel Ellison and his wife stopped off at Eriecreek on their way East, in 1870, they found him deep in the history of the Old French War. As yet the colonel had not intended to take the Canadian route eastward, and he escaped without the charges which he must otherwise have received to look up the points of interest at Montreal and Quebec connected with that ancient struggle. He and his wife carried Kitty with them to see Niagara (which she had never seen because it was so near); but no sooner had Dr. Ellison got the despatch announcing that they would take Kitty on with them down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and bring her home by way of Boston, than he sat down and wrote her a letter of the most comprehensive character. As far as concerned Canada his mind was purely historical; but when it came to Boston it was strangely re-abolitionized, and amidst an ardor for the antiquities of the place, his old love for its humanitarian pre-eminence blazed up. He would have her visit Faneuil Hall because of its Revolutionary memories, but not less because Wendell Phillips had there made his first antislavery speech. She was to see the collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and if possible certain points of ancient colonial interest which he named; but at any rate she was somehow to catch sight of the author of the “Biglow Papers,” of Senator Sumner, of Mr. Whittier, of Dr. Howe, of Colonel Higginson, and of Mr. Garrison. These people were all Bostonians to the idealizing remoteness of Dr. Ellison, and he could not well conceive of them asunder. He perhaps imagined that Kitty was more likely to see them together than separately; and perhaps indeed they were less actual persons, to his admiration, than so many figures of a grand historical composition. Finally, “I want you to remember, my dear child,” he wrote, “that in Boston you are not only in the birthplace of American liberty, but the yet holier scene of its resurrection. There everything that is noble and grand and liberal and enlightened in the national life has originated, and I cannot doubt that you will find the character of its people marked by every attribute of a magnanimous democracy. If I could envy you anything, my dear girl, I should envy you this privilege of seeing a city where man is valued simply and solely for what he is in himself, and where color, wealth, family, occupation, and other vulgar and meretricious distinctions are wholly lost sight of in the consideration of individual excellence.”

Kitty got her uncle’s letter the night before starting up the Saguenay, and quite too late for compliance with his directions concerning Quebec; but she resolved that as to Boston his wishes should be fulfilled to the utmost limit of possibility. She knew that nice Mr. March must be acquainted with some of those very people. Kitty had her uncle’s letter in her pocket, and she was just going to take it out and read it again, when something else attracted her notice.

The boat had been advertised to leave at seven o’clock, and it was now half past. A party of English people were pacing somewhat impatiently up and down before Kitty, for it had been made known among the passengers (by that subtle process through which matters of public interest transpire in such places) that breakfast would not be served till the boat started, and these English people had the appetites which go before the admirable digestions of their nation. But they had also the good temper which does not so certainly accompany the insular good appetite. The man in his dashing Glengarry cap and his somewhat shabby gray suit took on one arm the plain, jolly woman who seemed to be his wife, and on the other, the amiable, handsome young girl who looked enough like him to be his sister, and strode rapidly back and forth, saying that they must get up an appetite for breakfast. This made the women laugh, and so he said it again, which made them laugh so much that the elder lost her balance, and in regaining it twisted off her high shoe-heel, which she briskly tossed into the river. But she sat down after that, and the three were presently intent upon the Liverpool steamer which was just arrived and was now gliding up to her dock, with her population of passengers thronging her quarter-deck.

“She’s from England!” said the husband, expressively.

“Only fancy!” answered the wife. “Give me the glass, Jenny.” Then, after a long survey of the steamer, she added, “Fancy her being from England!” They all looked and said nothing for two or three minutes, when the wife’s mind turned to the delay of their own boat and of breakfast. “This thing,” she said, with that air of uttering a novelty which the English cast about their commonplaces,— “this this thing doesn’t start at seven, you know.”

“No,” replied the younger woman, “she waits for the Montreal boat.”

“Fancy her being from England!” said the other, whose eyes and thoughts had both wandered back to the Liverpool steamer.

“There’s the Montreal boat now, comin’ round the point,” cried the husband. “Don’t you see the steam?” He pointed with his glass, and then studied the white cloud in the distance. “No, by Jove! it’s a saw-mill on the shore.”

“O Harry!” sighed both the women, reproachfully.

“Why, deuce take it, you know,” he retorted, “I didn’t turn it into a saw-mill. It’s been a saw-mill all along, I fancy.”

Half an hour later, when the Montreal boat came in sight, the women would have her a saw-mill till she stood in full view in mid-channel. Their own vessel paddled out into the stream as she drew near, and the two bumped and rubbed together till a gangway plank could he passed from one to the other. A very well dressed young man stood ready to get upon the Saguenay boat, with a porter beside him bearing his substantial valise. No one else apparently was coming aboard.

The English people looked upon him for an instant with wrathful eyes, as they hung over the rail of the promenade. “Upon my word,” said the elder of the women, “have we been waitin’ all this time for one man?”

“Hush, Edith,” answered the younger, “it’s an Englishman.” And they all three mutely recognized the right of the Englishman to stop, not only the boat, but the whole solar system, if his ticket entitled him to a passage on any particular planet, while Mr. Miles Arbuton of Boston, Massachusetts, passed at his ease from one vessel to the other. He had often been mistaken for an Englishman, and the error of those spectators, if he had known it, would not have surprised him. Perhaps it might have softened his judgment of them as he sat facing them at breakfast; but he did not know it, and he thought them three very common English people with something professional, as of public singing or acting, about them. The young girl wore, instead of a travelling-suit, a vivid light blue dress; and over her sky-blue eyes and fresh cheeks a glory of corn-colored hair lay in great braids and masses. It was magnificent, but it wanted distance; so near, it was almost harsh. Mr. Arbuton’s eyes fell from the face to the vivid blue dress, which was not quite fresh and not quite new, and a glimmer of cold dismissal came into them, as he gave himself entirely to the slender merits of the steamboat breakfast.

He was himself, meantime, an object of interest to a young lady who sat next to the English party, and who glanced at him from time to time, out of tender gray eyes, with a furtive play of feeling upon a sensitive face. To her he was that divine possibility which every young man is to every young maiden; and, besides, he was invested with a halo of romance as the gentleman with the blond mustache, whom she had seen at Niagara the week before, on the Goat Island Bridge. To the pretty matron at her side, he was exceedingly handsome, as a young man may frankly be to a young matron, but not otherwise comparable to her husband, the full-personed good-humored looking gentleman who had just added sausage to the ham and eggs on his plate. He was handsome, too, but his full beard was reddish, whereas Mr. Arbuton’s mustache was flaxen; and his dress was not worn with that scrupulosity with which the Bostonian bore his clothes; there was a touch of slovenliness in him that scarcely consorted with the alert, ex-military air of some of his movements. “Good-looking young John Bull,” he thought concerning Mr. Arbuton, and then thought no more about him, being no more self-judged before the supposed Englishman than he would have been before so much Frenchman or Spaniard. Mr. Arbuton, on the other hand, if he had met an Englishman so well dressed as himself, must at once have arraigned himself, and had himself tacitly tried for his personal and national difference. He looked in his turn at these people, and thought he should have nothing to do with them, in spite of the long-lashed gray eyes.

It was not that they had made the faintest advance towards acquaintance, or that the choice of knowing them or not was with Mr. Arbuton; but he had the habit of thus protecting himself from the chances of life, and a conscience against encouraging people whom he might have to drop for reasons of society. This was sometimes a sacrifice, for he was not past the age when people take a lively interest in most other human beings. When breakfast was over, and he had made the tour of the boat, and seen all his fellow-passengers, he perceived that he could have little in common with any of them, and that probably the journey would require the full exercise of that tolerant spirit in which he had undertaken a branch of summer travel in his native land.

The rush of air against the steamer was very raw and chill, and the forward promenade was left almost entirely to the English professional people, who walked rapidly up and down, with jokes and laughter of their kind, while the wind blew the girl’s hair in loose gold about her fresh face, and twisted her blue drapery tight about her comely shape. When they got out of breath they sat down beside a large American lady, with a great deal of gold filling in her front teeth, and presently rose again and ran races to and from the bow. Mr. Arbuton turned away in displeasure. At the stern he found a much larger company, most of whom had furnished themselves with novels and magazines from the stock on board and were drowsing over them. One gentleman was reading aloud to three ladies the newspaper account of a dreadful shipwreck; other ladies and gentlemen were coming and going forever from their state-rooms, as the wont of some is; others yet sat with closed eyes, as if having come to see the Saguenay they were resolved to see nothing of the St. Lawrence on the way thither, but would keep their vision sacred to the wonders of the former river.

Yet the St. Lawrence was worthy to be seen, as even Mr. Arbuton owned, whose way was to slight American scenery, in distinction from his countrymen who boast it the finest in the world. As you leave Quebec, with its mural-crowned and castled rock, and drop down the stately river, presently the snowy fall of Montmorenci, far back in its purple hollow, leaps perpetual avalanche into the abyss, and then you are abreast of the beautiful Isle of Orleans, whose low shores, with their expanses of farmland, and their groves of pine and oak, are still as lovely as when the wild grape festooned the primitive forests and won from the easy rapture of old Cartier the name of Isle of Bacchus. For two hours farther down the river either shore is bright and populous with the continuous villages of the habitans, each clustering about its slim-spired church, in its shallow vale by the water’s edge, or lifted in more eminent picturesqueness upon some gentle height. The banks, nowhere lofty or abrupt, are such as in a southern land some majestic river might flow between, wide, slumbrous, open to all the heaven and the long day till the very set of sun. But no starry palm glasses its crest in the clear cold green from these low brinks; the pale birch, slender and delicately fair, mirrors here the wintry whiteness of its boughs; and this is the sad great river of the awful North.

Gradually, as the day wore on, the hills which had shrunk almost out of sight on one hand, and on the other were dark purple in the distance, drew near the shore, and at one point on the northern side rose almost from the water’s edge. The river expanded into a lake before them, and in their lap some cottages, and half-way up the hillside, among the stunted pines, a much-galleried hotel, proclaimed a resort of fashion in the heart of what seemed otherwise a wilderness. Indian huts sheathed in birch-bark nestled at the foot of the rocks, which were rich in orange and scarlet stains; out of the tops of the huts curled the blue smoke, and at the door of one stood a squaw in a flame-red petticoat; others in bright shawls squatted about on the rocks, each with a circle of dogs and papooses. But all this warmth of color only served, like a winter sunset, to heighten the chilly and desolate sentiment of the scene. The light dresses of the ladies on the veranda struck cold upon the eye; in the faces of the sojourners who lounged idly to the steamer’s landing-place, the passenger could fancy a sad resolution to repress their tears when the boat should go away and leave them. She put off two or three old peasant-women who were greeted by other such on the pier, as if returned from a long journey; and then the crew discharged the vessel of a prodigious freight of onions which formed the sole luggage these old women had brought from Quebec. Bale after bale of the pungent bulbs were borne ashore in the careful arms of the deck-hands, and counted by the owners; at last order was given to draw in the plank, when a passionate cry burst from one of the old women, who extended both hands with an imploring gesture towards the boat. A bale of onions had been left aboard; a deck-hand seized it and ran quickly ashore with it, and then back again, followed by the benedictions of the tranquillized and comforted beldam. The gay sojourners at Murray Bay controlled their grief, and as Mr. Arbuton turned from them, the boat, pushing out, left them to their fashionable desolation. She struck across to the southern shore, to land passengers for Cacouna, a watering-place greater than Murray Bay. The tide, which rises fifteen feet at Quebec, is the impulse, not the savor of the sea; but at Cacouna the water is salt, and the sea-bathing lacks nothing but the surf; and hither resort in great numbers the Canadians who fly their cities during the fierce, brief fever of the northern summer. The watering-place village and hotel is not in sight from the landing, but, as at Murray Bay, the sojourners thronged the pier, as if the arrival of the steamboat were the great event of their day. That afternoon they were in unusual force, having come on foot and by omnibus and calash; and presently there passed down through their ranks a strange procession with a band of music leading the way to the steamer.

“It’s an Indian wedding,” Mr. Arbuton heard one of the boat’s officers saying to the gentleman with the ex-military air, who stood next him beside the rail; and now, the band having drawn aside, he saw the bride and groom, — the latter a common, stolid-faced savage, and the former pretty and almost white, with a certain modesty and sweetness of mien. Before them went a young American, with a jaunty Scotch cap and a visage of supernatural gravity, as the master of ceremonies which he had probably planned; arm in arm with him walked a portly chieftain in black broadcloth, preposterously adorned on the breast with broad flat disks of silver in two rows. Behind the bridal couple came the whole village in pairs, men and women, and children of all ages, even to brown babies in arms, gay in dress and indescribably serious in demeanor. They were mated in some sort according to years and size; and the last couple were young fellows paired in an equal tipsiness. These reeled and wavered along the pier; and when the other wedding guests crowned the day’s festivity by going aboard the steamer, they followed dizzily down the gangway. Midway they lurched heavily; the spectators gave a cry; but they had happily lurched in opposite directions; their grip upon each other’s arms held, and a forward stagger launched them victoriously aboard in a heap. They had scarcely disappeared from sight, when, having as it were instantly satisfied their curiosity concerning the boat, the other guests began to go ashore in due order. Mr. Arbuton waited in a slight anxiety to see whether the tipsy couple could repeat their maneuver successfully on an upward incline; and they had just appeared on the gangway, when he felt a hand passed carelessly and as if unconsciously through his arm, and at the same moment a voice said, “Those are a pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose.”

He looked round and perceived the young lady of the party he had made up his mind to have nothing to do with resting one hand on the rail, and sustaining herself with the other passed through his arm, while she was altogether intent upon the scene below. The ex-military gentleman, the head of the party, and apparently her kinsman, had stepped aside without her knowing, and she had unwittingly taken Mr. Arbuton’s arm. So much was clear to him, but what he was to do was not so plain. It did not seem quite his place to tell her of her mistake, and yet it seemed a piece of unfairness not to do so. To leave the matter alone, however, was the simplest, safest, and pleasantest; for the pressure of the pretty figure lightly thrown upon his arm had something agreeably confiding and appealing in it. So he waited till the young lady, turning to him for some response, discovered her error, and disengaged herself with a face of mingled horror and amusement. Even then he had no inspiration. To speak of the mistake in tones of compliment would have been grossly out of place; an explanation was needless; and to her murmured excuses, he could only bow silently. She flitted into the cabin, and he walked away, leaving the Indians to stagger ashore as they might. His arm seemed still to sustain that elastic weight, and a voice haunted his ear with the words, “A pair of disappointed lovers, I suppose”; and still more awkward and stupid he felt his own part in the affair to be; though at the same time he was not without some obscure resentment of the young girl’s mistake as an intrusion upon him.

It was late twilight when the boat reached Tadoussac, and ran into a sheltered cove under the shadow of uplands on which a quaint village perched and dispersed itself on a country road in summer cottages; above these in turn rose loftier heights of barren sand or rock, with here and there a rank of sickly pines dying along their sterility. It had been harsh and cold all day when the boat moved, for it was running full in the face of the northeast; the river had widened almost to a sea, growing more and more desolate, with a few lonely islands breaking its expanse, and the shores sinking lower and lower till, near Tadoussac, they rose a little in flat-topped bluffs thickly overgrown with stunted evergreens. Here, into the vast low-walled breadth of the St. Lawrence, a dark stream, narrowly bordered by rounded heights of rock, steals down from the north out of regions of gloomy and ever-during solitude. This is the Saguenay; and in the cold evening light under which the traveller approaches its mouth, no landscape could look more forlorn than that of Tadoussac, where early in the sixteenth century the French traders fixed their first post, and where still the oldest church north of Florida is standing.

The steamer lies here five hours, and supper was no sooner over than the passengers went ashore in the gathering dusk. Mr. Arbuton, guarding his distance as usual, went too, with a feeling of surprise at his own concession to the popular impulse. He was not without a desire to see the old church, wondering in a half-compassionate way what such a bit of American antiquity would look like; and he had perceived since the little embarrassment at Cacouna that he was a discomfort to the young lady involved by it. He had caught no glimpse of her till supper, and then she had briefly supped with an air of such studied unconsciousness of his presence that it was plain she was thinking of her mistake every moment. “Well, I’ll leave her the freedom of the boat while we stay,” thought Mr. Arbuton as he went ashore. He had not the least notion whither the road led, but like the rest he followed it up through the village, and on among the cottages which seemed for the most part empty, and so down a gloomy ravine, in the bottom of which, far beneath the tremulous rustic bridge, he heard the mysterious crash and fall of an unseen torrent. Before him towered the shadowy hills up into the starless night; he thrilled with a sense of the loneliness and remoteness, and he had a formless wish that some one qualified by the proper associations and traditions were there to share the satisfaction he felt in the whole effect. At the same instant he was once more aware of that delicate pressure, that weight so lightly, sweetly borne upon his arm. It startled him, and again he followed the road, which with a sudden turn brought him in sight of a hotel and in sound of a bowling-alley, and therein young ladies’ cackle and laughter, and he wondered a little scornfully who could be spending the summer there. A bay of the river loftily shut in by rugged hills lay before him, and on the shore, just above high-tide, stood what a wandering shadow told him was the ancient church of Tadoussac. The windows were faintly tinged with red as from a single taper burning within, and but that the elements were a little too bare and simple for one so used to the rich effects of the Old World, Mr. Arbuton might have been touched by the vigil which this poor chapel was still keeping after three hundred years in the heart of that gloomy place. While he stood at least tolerating its appeal, he heard voices of people talking in the obscurity near the church door, which they seemed to have been vainly trying for entrance.

“Pity we can’t see the inside, isn’t it?”

“Yes; but I am so glad to see any of it. Just think of its having been built in the seventeenth century!”

“Uncle Jack would enjoy it, wouldn’t he?”

“O yes, poor Uncle Jack! I feel somehow as if I were cheating him out of it. He ought to be here in my place. But I do like it; and, Dick, I don’t know what I can ever say or do to you and Fanny for bringing me.”

“Well, Kitty, postpone the subject till you can think of the right thing. We’re in no hurry.”

Mr. Arbuton heard a shaking of the door, as of a final attempt upon it, before retreat, and then the voices faded into inarticulate sounds in the darkness. They were the voices, he easily recognized, of the young lady who had taken his arm, and of that kinsman of hers, as she seemed to be. He blamed himself for having not only overheard them, but for desiring to hear more of their talk, and he resolved to follow them back to the boat at a discreet distance. But they loitered so at every point, or he unwittingly made such haste, that he had overtaken them as they entered the lane between the outlying cottages, and he could not help being privy to their talk again.

“Well, it may be old, Kitty, but I don’t think it’s lively.”

“It isn’t exactly a whirl of excitement, I must confess.”

“It’s the deadliest place I ever saw. Is that a swing in front of that cottage? No, it’s a gibbet. Why, they’ve all got ‘em! I suppose they’re for the summer tenants at the close of the season. What a rush there would be for them if the boat should happen to go off and leave her passengers!”

Mr. Arbuton thought this rather a coarse kind of drolling, and strengthened himself anew in his resolution to avoid those people.

They now came in sight of the steamer, where in the cove she lay illumined with all her lamps, and through every window and door and crevice was bursting with the ruddy light. Her brilliancy contrasted vividly with the obscurity and loneliness of the shore where a few lights glimmered in the village houses, and under the porch of the village store some desolate idlers — habitans and half-breeds — had clubbed their miserable leisure. Beyond the steamer yawned the wide vacancy of the greater river, and out of this gloomed the course of the Saguenay.

“O, I hate to go on board!” said the young lady. “Do you think he’s got back yet? It’s perfect misery to meet him.”

“Never mind, Kitty. He probably thinks you didn’t mean anything by it. I don’t believe you would have taken his arm if you hadn’t supposed it was mine, any way.”

She made no answer to this, as if too much overcome by the true state of the case to be troubled by its perversion. Mr. Arbuton, following them on board, felt himself in the unpleasant character of persecutor, some one to be shunned and escaped by every maneuver possible to self-respect. He was to be the means, it appeared, of spoiling the enjoyment of the voyage for one who, he inferred, had not often the opportunity of such enjoyment. He had a willingness that she should think well and not ill of him; and then at the bottom of all was a sentiment of superiority, which, if he had given it shape, would have been noblesse oblige. Some action was due to himself as a gentleman.

The young lady went to seek the matron of the party, and left her companion at the door of the saloon, wistfully fingering a cigar in one hand, and feeling for a match with the other. Presently he gave himself a clap on the waistcoat which he had found empty, and was turning away, when Mr. Arbuton said, offering his own lighted cigar, “May I be of use to you?”

The other took it with a hearty, “O yes, thank you!” and, with many inarticulate murmurs of satisfaction, lighted his cigar, and returned Mr. Arbuton’s with a brisk, half-military bow.

Mr. Arbuton looked at him narrowly a moment. “I’m afraid,” he said abruptly, “that I’ve most unluckily been the cause of annoyance to one of the ladies of your party. It isn’t a thing to apologize for, and I hardly know how to say that I hope, if she’s not already forgotten the matter, she’ll do so.” Saying this, Mr. Arbuton, by an impulse which he would have been at a loss to explain, offered his card.

His action had the effect of frankness, and the other took it for cordiality. He drew near a lamp, and looked at the name and street address on the card, and then said, “Ah, of Boston! My name is Ellison; I’m of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.” And he laughed a free, trustful laugh of good companionship. “Why yes, my cousin’s been tormenting herself about her mistake the whole afternoon; but of course it’s all right, you know. Bless my heart! it was the most natural thing in the world. Have you been ashore? There’s a good deal of repose about Tadoussac, now; but it must be a lively place in winter! Such a cheerful lookout from these cottages, or that hotel over yonder! We went over to see if we could get into the little old church; the purser told me there are some lead tablets there, left by Jacques Cartier’s men, you know, and dug up in the neighborhood. I don’t think it’s likely, and I’m bearing up very well under the disappointment of not getting in. I’ve done my duty by the antiquities of the place; and now I don’t care how soon we are off.”

Colonel Ellison was talking in the kindness of his heart to change the subject which the younger gentleman had introduced, in the belief, which would scarcely have pleased the other, that he was much embarrassed. His good-nature went still further; and when his cousin returned presently, with Mrs. Ellison, he presented Mr. Arbuton to the ladies, and then thoughtfully made Mrs. Ellison walk up and down the deck with him for the exercise she would not take ashore, that the others might be left to deal with their vexation alone.

“I am very sorry, Miss Ellison,” said Mr. Arbuton, “to have been the means of a mistake to you to-day.”

“And I was dreadfully ashamed to make you the victim of my blunder,” answered Miss Ellison penitently; and a little silence ensued. Then as if she had suddenly been able to alienate the case, and see it apart from herself in its unmanageable absurdity, she broke into a confiding laugh, very like her cousin’s, and said, “Why, it’s one of the most hopeless things I ever heard of. I don’t see what in the world can be done about it.”

“It is rather a difficult matter, and I’m not prepared to say myself. Before I make up my mind I should like it to happen again.”

Mr. Arbuton had no sooner made this speech, which he thought neat, than he was vexed with himself for having made it, since nothing was further from his purpose than a flirtation. But the dark, vicinity, the young girl’s prettiness, the apparent freshness and reliance on his sympathy from which her frankness came, were too much: he tried to congeal again, and ended in some feebleness about the scenery, which was indeed very lonely and wild, after the boat started up the Saguenay, leaving the few lights of Tadoussac to blink and fail behind her. He had an absurd sense of being alone in the world there with the young lady; and he suffered himself to enjoy the situation, which was as perfectly safe as anything could be. He and Miss Ellison had both come on from Niagara, it seemed, and they talked of that place, she consciously withholding the fact that she had noticed Mr. Arbuton there; they had both come down the Rapids of the St. Lawrence, and they had both stopped a day in Montreal. These common experiences gave them a surprising interest for each other, which was enhanced by the discovery that their experiences differed thereafter, and that whereas she had passed three days at Quebec, he, as we know, had come on directly from Montreal.

“Did you enjoy Quebec very much, Miss Ellison?”

“O yes, indeed! It’s a beautiful old town, with everything in it that I had always read about and never expected to see. You know it’s a walled city.”

“Yes. But I confess I had forgotten it till this morning. Did you find it all that you expected a walled city to be?”

“More, if possible. There were some Boston people with us there, and they said it was exactly like Europe. They fairly sighed over it, and it seemed to remind them of pretty nearly everything they had seen abroad. They were just married.”

“Did that make Quebec look like Europe?”

“No, but I suppose it made them willing to see it in the pleasantest light. Mrs. March — that was their name — wouldn’t allow me to say that I enjoyed Quebec, because if I hadn’t seen Europe, I couldn’t properly enjoy it. ‘You may think you enjoy it,’ she was always saying, ‘but that’s merely fancy.’ Still I cling to my delusion. But I don’t know whether I cared more for Quebec, or the beautiful little villages in the country all about it. The whole landscape looks just like a dream of ‘Evangeline.’”

“Indeed! I must certainly stop at Quebec. I should like to see an American landscape that put one in mind of anything. What can your imagination do for the present scenery?”

“I don’t think it needs any help from me,” replied the young girl, as if the tone of her companion had patronized and piqued her. She turned as she spoke and looked up the sad, lonely river. The moon was making its veiled face seen through the gray heaven, and touching the black stream with hints of melancholy light. On either hand the uninhabitable shore rose in desolate grandeur, friendless heights of rock with a thin covering of pines seen in dim outline along their tops and deepening into the solid dark of hollows and ravines upon their sides. The cry of some wild bird struck through the silence of which the noise of the steamer had grown to be a part, and echoed away to nothing. Then from the saloon there came on a sudden the notes of a song; and Miss Ellison led the way within, where most of the other passengers were grouped about the piano. The English girl with the corn-colored hair sat, in ravishing picture, at the instrument, and the commonish man and his very plain wife were singing with heavenly sweetness together.

“Isn’t it beautiful!” said Miss Ellison. “How nice it must be to be able to do such things!”

“Yes? do you think so? It’s rather public,” answered her companion.

When the English people had ended, a grave, elderly Canadian gentleman sat down to give what he believed a comic song, and sent everybody disconsolate to bed.

“Well, Kitty?” cried Mrs. Ellison, shutting herself inside the young lady’s state-room a moment.

“Well, Fanny?”

“Isn’t he handsome?”

“He is, indeed.”

“Is he nice?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sweet?”

“Ice-cream,” said Kitty, and placidly let herself be kissed an enthusiastic good-night. Before Mrs. Ellison slept she wished to ask her husband one question.

“What is it?”

“Should you want Kitty to marry a Bostonian? They say Bostonians are so cold.”

“What Bostonian has been asking Kitty to marry him?”

“O, how spiteful you are! I didn’t say any had. But if there should?”

“Then it’ll be time to think about it. You’ve married Kitty right and left to everybody who’s looked at her since we left Niagara, and I’ve worried myself to death investigating the character of her husbands. Now I’m not going to do it any longer, — till she has an offer.”

“Very well. You can depreciate your own cousin, if you like. But I know what I shall do. I shall let her wear all my best things. How fortunate it is, Richard, that we’re exactly of a size! O, I am so glad we brought Kitty along! If she should marry and settle down in Boston — no, I hope she could get her husband to live in New York—”

“Go on, go on, my dear!” cried Colonel Ellison, with a groan of despair. “Kitty has talked twenty-five minutes with this young man about the hotels and steamboats, and of course he’ll be round to-morrow morning asking my consent to marry her as soon as we can get to a justice of the peace. My hair is gradually turning gray, and I shall be bald before my time; but I don’t mind that if you find any pleasure in these little hallucinations of yours. Go on!”

II.

MRS. ELLISON’S LITTLE MANEUVRE.

The next morning our tourists found themselves at rest in Ha-Ha Bay, at the head of navigation for the larger steamers. The long line of sullen hills had fallen away, and the morning sun shone warm on what in a friendlier climate would have been a very lovely landscape. The bay was an irregular oval, with shores that rose in bold but not lofty heights on one side, while on the other lay a narrow plain with two villages clinging about the road that followed the crescent beach, and lifting each the slender tin-clad spire of its church to sparkle in the sun.

At the head of the bay was a mountainous top, and along its waters were masses of rocks, gayly painted with lichens and stained with metallic tints of orange and scarlet. The unchanging growth of stunted pines was the only forest in sight, though Ha-Ha Bay is a famous lumbering port, and some schooners now lay there receiving cargoes of odorous pine plank. The steamboat-wharf was all astir with the liveliest toil and leisure. The boat was taking on wood, which was brought in wheelbarrows to the top of the steep, smooth gangway-planking, where the habitant in charge planted his broad feet for the downward slide, and was hurled aboard more or less en masse by the fierce velocity of his heavy-laden wheelbarrow. Amidst the confusion and hazard of this feat a procession of other habitans marched aboard, each one bearing under his arm a coffin-shaped wooden box. The rising fear of Colonel Ellison, that these boxes represented the loss of the whole infant population of Ha-Ha Bay, was checked by the reflection that the region could not have produced so many children, and calmed altogether by the purser, who said that they were full of huckleberries, and that Colonel Ellison could have as many as he liked for fifteen cents a bushel. This gave him a keen sense of the poverty of the land, and he bought of the boys who came aboard such abundance of wild red raspberries, in all manner of birch-bark canoes and goblets and cornucopias, that he was obliged to make presents of them to the very dealers whose stock he had exhausted, and he was in treaty with the local half-wit — very fine, with a hunchback, and a massive wen on one side of his head — to take charity in the wild fruits of his native province, when the crowd about him was gently opened by a person who advanced with a flourishing bow and a sprightly “Good morning, good morning, sir!” “How do you do?” asked Colonel Ellison; but the other, intent on business, answered, “I am the only person at Ha-Ha Bay who speaks English, and I have come to ask if you would not like to make a promenade in my horse and buggy upon the mountain before breakfast. You shall be gone as long as you will for one shilling and sixpence. I will show you all that there is to be seen about the place, and the beautiful view of the bay from the top of the mountain. But it is elegant, you know, I can assure you.”

The speaker was so fluent of his English, he had such an audacious, wide-branching mustache, such a twinkle in his left eye, — which wore its lid in a careless, slouching fashion, — that the heart of man naturally clove to him; and Colonel Ellison agreed on the spot to make the proposed promenade, for himself and both his ladies, of whom he went joyfully in search. He found them at the stern of the boat, admiring the wild scenery, and looking

“Fresh as the morn and as the season fair.”

He was not a close observer, and of his wife’s wardrobe he had the ignorance of a good husband, who, as soon as the pang of paying for her dresses is past, forgets whatever she has; but he could not help seeing that some gayeties of costume which he had dimly associated with his wife now enhanced the charms of his cousin’s nice little face and figure. A scarf of lively hue carelessly tied about the throat to keep off the morning chill, a prettier ribbon, a more stylish jacket than Miss Ellison owned, — what do I know? — an air of preparation for battle, caught the colonel’s eye, and a conscious red stole responsive into Kitty’s cheek.

“Kitty,” said he, “don’t you let yourself be made a goose of.”

“I hope she won’t — by you!” retorted his wife, “and I’ll thank you, Colonel Ellison, not to be a Betty, whatever you are. I don’t think it’s manly to be always noticing ladies’ clothes.”

“Who said anything about clothes?” demanded the colonel, taking his stand upon the letter.

“Well, don’t you, at any rate. Yes, I’d like to ride, of all things; and we’ve time enough, for breakfast isn’t ready till half past eight. Where’s the carriage?”

The only English scholar at Ha-Ha Bay had taken the light wraps of the ladies and was moving off with them. “This way, this way,” he said, waving his hand towards a larger number of vehicles on the shore than could have been reasonably attributed to Ha-Ha Bay. “I hope you won’t object to having another passenger with you? There’s plenty of room for all. He seems a very nice, gentlemanly person,” said he, with a queer, patronizing graciousness which he had no doubt caught from his English patrons.

“The more the merrier,” answered Colonel Ellison, and “Not in the least!” said his wife, not meaning the proverb. Her eye had swept the whole array of vehicles and had found them all empty, save one, in which she detected the blamelessly coated back of Mr. Arbuton. But I ought perhaps to explain Mrs. Ellison’s motives better than they can be made to appear in her conduct. She cared nothing for Mr. Arbuton; and she had no logical wish to see Kitty in love with him. But here were two young people thrown somewhat romantically together; Mrs. Ellison was a born match-maker, and to have refrained from promoting their better acquaintance in the interest of abstract matrimony was what never could have entered into her thought or desire. Her whole being closed for the time about this purpose; her heart, always warm towards Kitty, — whom she admired with a sort of generous frenzy, — expanded with all kinds of lovely designs; in a word, every dress she had she would instantly have bestowed upon that worshipful creature who was capable of adding another marriage to the world. I hope the reader finds nothing vulgar or unbecoming in this, for I do not; it was an enthusiasm, pure and simple, a beautiful and unselfish abandon; and I am sure men ought to be sorry that they are not worthier to be favored by it. Ladies have often to lament in the midst of their finesse that, really, no man is deserving the fate they devote themselves to prepare for him, or, in other words, that women cannot marry women.

I am not going to be so rash as try to depict Mrs. Ellison’s arts, for then, indeed, I should make her appear the clumsy conspirator she was not, and should merely convict myself of ignorance of such matters. Whether Mr. Arbuton was ever aware of them, I am not sure: as a man he was, of course, obtuse and blind; but then, on the other hand, he had seen far more of the world than Mrs. Ellison, and she may have been clear as day to him. Probably, though, he did not detect any design; he could not have conceived of such a thing in a person with whom he had been so irregularly made acquainted, and to whom he felt himself so hopelessly superior. A film of ice such as in autumn you find casing the still pools early in the frosty mornings had gathered upon his manner over night; but it thawed under the greetings of the others, and he jumped actively out of the vehicle to offer the ladies their choice of seats. When all was arranged he found himself at Mrs. Ellison’s side, for Kitty had somewhat eagerly climbed to the front seat with the colonel. In these circumstances it was pure zeal that sustained Mrs. Ellison in the flattering constancy with which she babbled on to Mr. Arbuton and refrained from openly resenting Kitty’s contumacy.

As the wagon began to ascend the hill, the road was so rough that the springs smote together with pitiless jolts, and the ladies uttered some irrepressible moans. “Never mind, my dear,” said the colonel, turning about to his wife, “we’ve got all the English there is at Ha-Ha Bay, any way.” Whereupon the driver gave him a wink of sudden liking and good-fellowship. At the same time his tongue was loosed, and he began to talk of himself. “You see my dog, how he leaps at the horse’s nose? He is a moose-dog, and keeps himself in practice of catching the moose by the nose. You ought to come in the hunting season. I could furnish you with Indians and everything you need to hunt with. I am a dealer in wild beasts, you know, and I must keep prepared to take them.”

“Wild beasts?”

“Yes, for Barnum and the other showmen. I deal in deer, wolf, bear, beaver, moose, cariboo, wild-cat, link—”

“What?”

“Link — link! You say deer for deers, and link for lynx, don’t you?”

“Certainly,” answered the unblushing colonel. “Are there many link about here?”

“Not many, and they are a very expensive animal. I have been shamefully treated in a link that I have sold to a Boston showman. It was a difficult beast to take; bit my Indian awfully; and Mr. Doolittle would not give the price he promised.”

“What an outrage!”

“Yes, but it was not so bad as it might have been. He wanted the money back afterwards; the link died in about two weeks,” said the dealer in wild animals, with a smile that curled his mustache into his ears, and a glance at Colonel Ellison. “He may have been bruised, I suppose. He may have been homesick. Perhaps he was never a very strong link. The link is a curious animal, miss,” he said to Kitty, in conclusion.

They had been slowly climbing the mountain road, from which, on either hand, the pasturelands fell away in long, irregular knolls and hollows. The tops were quite barren, but in the little vales, despite the stones, a short grass grew very thick and tenderly green, and groups of kine tinkled their soft bells in a sweet, desultory assonance as they cropped the herbage. Below, the bay filled the oval of the hills with its sunny expanse, and the white steamer, where she lay beside the busy wharf, and the black lumber-ships, gave their variety to the pretty scene, which was completed by the picturesque villages on the shore. It was a very simple sight, but somehow very touching, as if the soft spectacle were but a respite from desolation and solitude; as indeed it was.

Mr. Arbuton must have been talking of travel elsewhere, for now he said to Mrs. Ellison, “This looks like a bit of Norway; the bay yonder might very well be a fjord of the Northern sea.”

Mrs. Ellison murmured her sense of obligation to the bay, the fjord, and Mr. Arbuton, for their complaisance, and Kitty remembered that he had somewhat snubbed her the night before for attributing any suggestive grace to the native scenery. “Then you’ve really found something in an American landscape. I suppose we ought to congratulate it,” she said, in smiling enjoyment of her triumph.

The colonel looked at her with eyes of humorous question; Mrs. Ellison looked blank; and Mr. Arbuton, having quite forgotten what he had said to provoke this comment now, looked puzzled and answered nothing: for he had this trait also in common with the sort of Englishman for whom he was taken, that he never helped out your conversational venture, but if he failed to respond inwardly, left you with your unaccepted remark upon your hands, as it were. In his silence, Kitty fell a prey to very evil thoughts of him, for it made her harmless sally look like a blundering attack upon him. But just then the driver came to her rescue; he said, “Gentlemen and ladies, this is the end of the mountain promenade,” and, turning his horse’s head, drove rapidly back to the village.

At the foot of the hill they came again to the church, and his passengers wanted to get out and look into it. “O certainly,” said he, “it isn’t finished yet, but you can say as many prayers as you like in it.”

The church was decent and clean, like most Canadian churches, and at this early hour there was a good number of the villagers at their devotions. The lithographic pictures of the stations to Calvary were, of course, on its walls, and there was the ordinary tawdriness of paint and carving about the high altar.

“I don’t like to see these things,” said Mrs. Ellison. “It really seems to savor of idolatry. Don’t you think so, Mr. Arbuton?”

“Well, I don’t know. I doubt if they’re the sort of people to be hurt by it.”

“They need a good stout faith in cold climates, I can tell you,” said the colonel. “It helps to keep them warm. The broad church would be too full of draughts up here. They want something snug and tight. Just imagine one of these poor devils listening to a liberal sermon about birds and fruits and flowers and beautiful sentiments, and then driving home over the hills with the mercury thirty degrees below zero! He couldn’t stand it.”

“Yes, yes, certainly,” said Mr. Arbuton, and looked about him with an eye of cold, uncompassionate inspection, as if he were trying it by a standard of taste, and, on the whole, finding the poor little church vulgar.

When they mounted to their places again, the talk fell entirely to the colonel, who, as his wont was, got what information he could out of the driver. It appeared, in spite of his theory, that they were not all good Catholics at Ha-Ha Bay. “This chap, for example,” said the Frenchman, touching himself on the breast and using the slang he must have picked up from American travellers, “is no Catholic, — not much! He has made too many studies to care for religion. There’s a large French party, sir, in Canada, that’s opposed to the priests and in favor of annexation.”

He satisfied the colonel’s utmost curiosity, discoursing, as he drove by the log-built cottages which were now and then sheathed in birch-bark, upon the local affairs, and the character and history of such of his fellow-villagers as they met. He knew the pretty girls upon the street and saluted them by name, interrupting himself with these courtesies in the lecture he was giving the colonel on life at Ha-Ha Bay. There was only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an unusually long, hard winter.

“And the people,” asked the colonel, “what do they do in the winter to pass the time?”

“Draw the wood, smoke the pipe, court the ladies. — But wouldn’t you like to see the inside of one of our poor cottages? I shall be very proud to have you look at mine, and to have you drink a glass of milk from my cows. I am sorry that I cannot offer you brandy, but there’s none to be bought in the place.”

“Don’t speak of it! For an eye-opener there is nothing like a glass of milk,” gayly answered the colonel.

They entered the best room of the house, — wide, low-ceiled, dimly lit by two small windows, and fortified against the winter by a huge Canada stove of cast-iron. It was rude but neat, and had an air of decent comfort. Through the window appeared a very little vegetable garden with a border of the hardiest flowers. “The large beans there,” explained the host, “are for soup and coffee. My corn,” he said, pointing out some rows of dwarfish maize, “has escaped the early August frosts, and so I expect to have some roasting-ears yet this summer.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly what you’d call an inviting climate, is it?” asked the colonel.

The Canadian seemed a hard little man, but he answered now with a kind of pathos, “It’s cruel! I came here when it was all bush. Twenty years I have lived here, and it has not been worth while. If it was to do over again, I should rather not live anywhere. I was born in Quebec,” he said, as if to explain that he was used to mild climates, and began to tell of some events of his life at Ha-Ha Bay. “I wish you were going to stay here awhile with me. You wouldn’t find it so bad in the summer-time, I can assure you. There are bears in the bush, sir,” he said to the colonel, “and you might easily kill one.”

“But then I should be helping to spoil your trade in wild beasts,” replied the colonel, laughing.

Mr. Arbuton looked like one who might be very tired of this. He made no sign of interest either in the early glooms and privations or the summer bears of Ha-Ha Bay. He sat in the quaint parlor, with his hat on his knee, in the decorous and patient attitude of a gentleman making a call.

He had no feeling, Kitty said to herself; but that is a matter about which we can easily be wrong. It was rather to be said of Mr. Arbuton that he had always shrunk from knowledge of things outside of a very narrow world, and that he had not a ready imagination. Moreover, he had a personal dislike, as I may call it, of poverty; and he did not enjoy this poverty as she did, because it was strange and suggestive, though doubtless he would have done as much to relieve distress.

“Rather too much of his autobiography,” he said to Kitty, as he waited outside the door with her, while the Canadian quieted his dog, which was again keeping himself in practice of catching the moose by making vicious leaps at the horse’s nose. “The egotism of that kind of people is always so aggressive. But I suppose he’s in the habit of throwing himself upon the sympathy of summer visitors in this way. You can’t offer a man so little as shilling and sixpence who’s taken you into his confidence. Did you find enough that was novel in his place to justify him in bringing us here, Miss Ellison?” he asked with an air he had of taking you of course to be of his mind, and which equally offended you whether you were so or not.

Every face that they had seen in their drive had told its pathetic story to Kitty; every cottage that they passed she had entered in thought, and dreamed out its humble drama. What their host had said gave breath and color to her fancies of the struggle of life there, and she was startled and shocked when this cold doubt was cast upon the sympathetic tints of her picture. She did not know what to say at first; she looked at Mr. Arbuton with a sudden glance of embarrassment and trouble; then she answered, “I was very much interested. I don’t agree with you, I believe”; which, when she heard it, seemed a resentful little speech, and made her willing for some occasion to soften its effect. But nothing occurred to her during the brief drive back to the boat, save the fact that the morning air was delicious.

“Yes, but rather cool,” said Mr. Arbuton, whose feelings apparently had not needed any balm; and the talk fell again to the others.

On the pier he helped her down from the wagon, for the colonel was intent on something the driver was saying, and then offered his hand to Mrs. Ellison.

She sprang from her place, but stumbled slightly, and when she touched the ground, “I believe I turned my foot a little,” she said with a laugh. “It’s nothing, of course,” and fainted in his arms.

Kitty gave a cry of alarm, and the next instant the colonel had relieved Mr. Arbuton. It was a scene, and nothing could have annoyed him more than this tumult which poor Mrs. Ellison’s misfortune occasioned among the bystanding habitans and deck-hands, and the passengers eagerly craning forward over the bulwarks, and running ashore to see what the matter was. Few men know just how to offer those little offices of helpfulness which such emergencies demand, and Mr. Arbuton could do nothing after he was rid of his burden; he hovered anxiously and uselessly about, while Mrs. Ellison was carried to an airy position on the bow of the boat, where in a few minutes he had the great satisfaction of seeing her open her eyes. It was not the moment for him to speak, and he walked somewhat guiltily away with the dispersing crowd.

Mrs. Ellison addressed her first words to pale Kitty at her side. “You can have all my things, now,” she said, as if it were a clause in her will, and perhaps it had been her last thought before unconsciousness.

“Why, Fanny,” cried Kitty, with an hysterical laugh, “you’re not going to die! A sprained ankle isn’t fatal!”

“No; but I’ve heard that a person with a sprained ankle can’t put their foot to the ground for weeks; and I shall only want a dressing-gown, you know, to lie on the sofa in.” With that, Mrs. Ellison placed her hand tenderly on Kitty’s head, like a mother wondering what will become of a helpless child during her disability; in fact she was mentally weighing the advantages of her wardrobe, which Kitty would now fully enjoy, against the loss of the friendly strategy which she would now lack. Helpless to decide the matter, she heaved a sigh.

“But, Fanny, you won’t expect to travel in a dressing-gown.”

“Indeed, I wish I knew whether I could travel in anything or not. But the next twenty-four hours will show. If it swells up, I shall have to rest awhile at Quebec; and if it doesn’t, there may be something internal. I’ve read of accidents when the person thought they were perfectly well and comfortable, and the first thing they knew they were in a very dangerous state. That’s the worst of these internal injuries: you never can tell. Not that I think there’s anything of that kind the matter with me. But a few days’ rest won’t do any harm, whatever happens; the stores in Quebec are quite as good and a little cheaper than in Montreal; and I could go about in a carriage, you know, and put in the time as well in one place as the other. I’m sure we could get on very pleasantly there; and the colonel needn’t be home for a month yet. I suppose that I could hobble into the stores on a crutch.”

Whilst Mrs. Ellison’s monologue ran on with scarcely a break from Kitty, her husband was gone to fetch her a cup of tea and such other light refreshment as a lady may take after a swoon. When he returned she bethought herself of Mr. Arbuton, who, having once come back to see if all was going well, had vanished again.

“Why, our friend Boston is bearing up under his share of the morning’s work like a hero — or a lady with a sprained ankle,” said the colonel as he arranged the provision. “To see the havoc he’s making in the ham and eggs and chiccory is to be convinced that there is no appetizer like regret for the sufferings of others.”

“Why, and here’s poor Kitty not had a bite yet!” cried Mrs. Ellison. “Kitty, go off at once and get your breakfast. Put on my—”

“O, don’t, Fanny, or I can’t go; and I’m really very hungry.”

“Well, I won’t then,” said Mrs. Ellison, seeing the rainy cloud in Kitty’s eyes. “Go just as you are, and don’t mind me.” And so Kitty went, gathering courage at every pace, and sitting down opposite Mr. Arbuton with a vivid color to be sure, but otherwise lion-bold. He had been upbraiding the stars that had thrust him further and further at every step into the intimacy of these people, as he called them to himself. It was just twenty-four hours, he reflected, since he had met them, and resolved to have nothing to do with them, and in that time the young lady had brought him under the necessity of apologizing for a blunder of her own; he had played the eavesdropper to her talk; he had sentimentalized the midnight hour with her; they had all taken a morning ride together; and he had ended by having Mrs. Ellison sprain her ankle and faint in his arms. It was outrageous; and what made it worse was that decency obliged him to take henceforth a regretful, deprecatory attitude towards Mrs. Ellison, whom he liked least among these people. So he sat vindictively eating an enormous breakfast, in a sort of angry abstraction, from which Kitty’s coming roused him to say that he hoped Mrs. Ellison was better.

“O, very much! It’s just a sprain.”

“A sprain may be a very annoying thing,” said Mr. Arbuton dismally. “Miss Ellison,” he cried, “I’ve been nothing but an affliction to your party since I came on board this boat!”

“Do you think evil genius of our party would be too harsh a term?” suggested Kitty.

“Not in the least; it would be a mere euphemism, — base flattery, in fact. Call me something worse.”

“I can’t think of anything. I must leave you to your own conscience. It was a pity to end our ride in that way; it would have been such a pleasant ride!” And Kitty took heart from his apparent mood to speak of some facts of the morning that had moved her fancy. “What a strange little nest it is up here among these half-thawed hills! and imagine the winter, the fifteen or twenty months of it, they must have every year. I could almost have shed tears over that patch of corn that had escaped the early August frosts. I suppose this is a sort of Indian summer that we are enjoying now, and that the cold weather will set in after a week or two. My cousin and I thought that Tadoussac was somewhat retired and composed last night, but I’m sure that I shall see it in its true light, as a metropolis, going back. I’m afraid that the turmoil and bustle of Eriecreek, when I get home—”

“Eriecreek? — when you got home? — I thought you lived at Milwaukee.”

“O no! It’s my cousins who live at Milwaukee. I live at Eriecreek, New York State.”

“Oh!” Mr. Arbuton looked blank and not altogether pleased. Milwaukee was bad enough, though he understood that it was largely peopled from New England, and had a great German element, which might account for the fact that these people were not quite barbaric. But this Eriecreek, New York State! “I don’t think I’ve heard of it,” he said.

“It’s a small place,” observed Kitty, “and I believe it isn’t noted for anything in particular; it’s not even on any railroad. It’s in the north-west part of the State.”

“Isn’t it in the oil-regions?” groped Mr. Arbuton.

“Why, the oil-regions are rather migratory, you know. It used to be in the oil-regions; but the oil was pumped out, and then the oil-regions gracefully withdrew and left the cheese-regions and grape-regions to come back and take possession of the old derricks and the rusty boilers. You might suppose from the appearance of the meadows, that all the boilers that ever blew up had come down in the neighborhood of Eriecreek. And every field has its derrick standing just as the last dollar or the last drop of oil left it.”

Mr. Arbuton brought his fancy to bear upon Eriecreek, and wholly failed to conceive of it. He did not like the notion of its being thrust within the range of his knowledge; and he resented its being the home of Miss Ellison, whom he was beginning to accept as a not quite comprehensible yet certainly agreeable fact, though he still had a disposition to cast her off as something incredible. He asked no further about Eriecreek, and presently she rose and went to join her relatives, and he went to smoke his cigar, and to ponder upon the problem presented to him in this young girl from whose locality and conjecturable experiences he was at loss how to infer her as he found her here.

She had a certain self-reliance mingling with an innocent trust of others which Mrs. Isabel March had described to her husband as a charm potent to make everybody sympathetic and good-natured, but which it would not be easy to account for to Mr. Arbuton. In part it was a natural gift, and partly it came from mere ignorance of the world; it was the unsnubbed fearlessness of a heart which did not suspect a sense of social difference in others, or imagine itself misprized for anything but a fault. For such a false conception of her relations to polite society, Kitty’s Uncle Jack was chiefly to blame. In the fierce democracy of his revolt from his Virginian traditions he had taught his family that a belief in any save intellectual and moral distinctions was a mean and cruel superstition; he had contrived to fix this idea so deeply in the education of his children, that it gave a coloring to their lives, and Kitty, when her turn came, had the effect of it in the character of those about her. In fact she accepted his extreme theories of equality to a degree that delighted her uncle, who, having held them many years, was growing perhaps a little languid in their tenure and was glad to have his grasp strengthened by her faith. Socially as well as politically Eriecreek was almost a perfect democracy, and there was little in Kitty’s circumstances to contradict the doctor’s teachings. The brief visits which she had made to Buffalo and Erie, and, since the colonel’s marriage, to Milwaukee, had not sufficed to undeceive her; she had never suffered slight save from the ignorant and uncouth; she innocently expected that in people of culture she should always find community of feeling and ideas; and she had met Mr. Arbuton all the more trustfully because as a Bostonian he must be cultivated.

In the secluded life which she led perforce at Eriecreek there was an abundance of leisure, which she bestowed upon books at an age when most girls are sent to school. The doctor had a good taste of an old-fashioned kind in literature, and he had a library pretty well stocked with the elderly English authors, poets and essayists and novelists, and here and there an historian, and these Kitty read childlike, liking them at the time in a certain way, and storing up in her mind things that she did not understand for the present, but whose beauty and value dawned upon her from time to time, as she grew older. But of far more use and pleasure to her than these now somewhat mouldy classics were the more modern books of her cousin Charles, — that pride and hope of his father’s heart, who had died the year before she came to Eriecreek. He was named after her own father, and it was as if her Uncle Jack found both his son and his brother in her again. When her taste for reading began to show itself in force, the old man one day unlocked a certain bookcase in a little upper room, and gave her the key, saying, with a broken pride and that queer Virginian pomp which still clung to him, “This was my son’s, who would one day have been a great writer; now it is yours.” After that the doctor would pick up the books out of this collection which Kitty was reading and had left lying about the rooms, and look into them a little way. Sometimes he fell asleep over them; sometimes when he opened on a page pencilled with marginal notes, he would put the volume gently down and go very quickly out of the room.

“Kitty, I reckon you’d better not leave poor Charley’s books around where Uncle Jack can get at them,” one of the girls, Virginia or Rachel, would say; “I don’t believe he cares much for those writers, and the sight of the books just tries him.” So Kitty kept the books, and herself for the most part with them, in the upper chamber which had been Charles Ellison’s room, and where, amongst the witnesses of the dead boy’s ambitious dreams, she grew dreamer herself and seemed to inherit with his earthly place his own fine and gentle spirit.

The doctor, as his daughter suggested, did not care much for the modern authors in whom his son had delighted. Like many another simple and pure-hearted man, he thought that since Pope there had been no great poet but Byron, and he could make nothing out of Tennyson and Browning, or the other contemporary English poets. Amongst the Americans he had a great respect for Whittier, but he preferred Lowell to the rest because he had written The Biglow Papers, and he never would allow that the last series was half so good as the first. These and the other principal poets of our nation and language Kitty inherited from her cousin, as well as a full stock of the contemporary novelists and romancers, whom she liked better than the poets on the whole. She had also the advantage of the magazines and reviews which used to come to him, and the house over-flowed with newspapers of every kind, from the Eriecreek Courier to the New York Tribune. What with the coming and going of the eccentric visitors, and this continual reading, and her rides about the country with her Uncle Jack, Kitty’s education, such as it was, went on very actively and with the effect, at least, to give her a great liveliness of mind and several decided opinions. Where it might have warped her out of natural simplicity, and made her conceited, the keen and wholesome airs which breathed continually in the Ellison household came in to restore her. There was such kindness in this discipline, that she never could remember when it wounded her; it was part of the gayety of those times when she would sit down with the girls, and they took up some work together, and rattled on in a free, wild, racy talk, with an edge of satire for whoever came near, a fantastic excess in its drollery, and just a touch of native melancholy tingeing it. The last queer guest, some neighborhood gossip, some youthful folly or pretentiousness of Kitty’s, some trait of their own, some absurdity of the boys if they happened to be at home, and came lounging in, were the themes out of which they contrived such jollity as never was, save when in Uncle Jack’s presence they fell upon some characteristic action or theory of his and turned it into endless ridicule.

But of such people, of such life, Mr. Arbuton could have made nothing if he had known them. In many things he was an excellent person, and greatly to be respected for certain qualities. He was very sincere; his mind had a singular purity and rectitude; he was a scrupulously just person so far as he knew. He had traits that would have fitted him very well for the career he had once contemplated, and he had even made some preliminary studies for the ministry. But the very generosity of his creed perplexed him, his mislikers said; contending that he could never have got on with the mob of the redeemed. “Arbuton,” said a fat young fellow, the supposed wit of the class, “thinks there are persons of low extraction in heaven; but he doesn’t like the idea.” And Mr. Arbuton did not like the speaker very well, either, nor any of his poorer fellow-students, whose gloveless and unfashionable poverty, and meagre board and lodgings, and general hungry dependence upon pious bequests and neighborhood kindnesses, offended his instincts. “So he’s given it up, has he?” moralized the same wit, upon his retirement. “If Arbuton could have been a divinely commissioned apostle to the best society, and been obliged to save none but well-connected, old-established, and cultivated souls, he might have gone into the ministry.” This was a coarse construction of the truth, but it was not altogether a perversion. It was long ago that he had abandoned the thought of the ministry, and he had since travelled, and read law, and become a man of society and of clubs; but he still kept the traits that had seemed to make his vocation clear. On the other hand he kept the prejudices that were imagined to have disqualified him. He was an exclusive by training and by instinct. He gave ordinary humanity credit for a certain measure of sensibility, and it is possible that if he had known more kinds of men, he would have recognized merits and excellences which did not now exist for him; but I do not think he would have liked them. His doubt of these Western people was the most natural, if not the most justifiable thing in the world, and for Kitty, if he could have known all about her, I do not see how he could have believed in her at all. As it was, he went in search of her party, when he had smoked his cigar, and found them on the forward promenade. She had left him in quite a lenient mood, although, as she perceived with amusement, he had done nothing to merit it, except give her cousin a sprained ankle. At the moment of his reappearance, Mrs. Ellison had been telling Kitty that she thought it was beginning to swell a little, and so it could not be anything internal; and Kitty had understood that she meant her ankle as well as if she had said so, and had sorrowed and rejoiced over her, and the colonel had been inculpated for the whole affair. This made Mr. Arbuton’s excuses rather needless, though they were most graciously received.

III.

ON THE WAY BACK TO QUEBEC.

By this time the boat was moving down the river, and every one was alive to the scenery. The procession of the pine-clad, rounded heights on either shore began shortly after Ha-Ha Bay had disappeared behind a curve, and it hardly ceased, save at one point, before the boat re-entered the St. Lawrence. The shores of the stream are almost uninhabited. The hills rise from the water’s edge, and if ever a narrow vale divides them, it is but to open drearier solitudes to the eye. In such a valley would stand a saw-mill, and huddled about it a few poor huts, while a friendless road, scarce discernible from the boat, wound up from the river through the valley, and led to wildernesses all the forlorner for the devastation of their forests. Now and then an island, rugged as the shores, broke the long reaches of the grim river with its massive rock and dark evergreen, and seemed in the distance to forbid escape from those dreary waters, over which no bird flew, and in which it was incredible any fish swam.

Mrs. Ellison, with her foot comfortably and not ungracefully supported on a stool, was in so little pain as to be looking from time to time at one of the guide-books which the colonel had lavished upon his party, and which she was disposed to hold to very strict account for any excesses of description.

“It says here that the water of the Saguenay is as black as ink. Do you think it is, Richard?”

“It looks so.”

“Well, but if you took some up in your hand?”

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be as black as the best Maynard and Noyes, but it would be black enough for all practical purposes.”

“Maybe,” suggested Kitty, “the guide-book means the kind that is light blue at first, but ‘becomes a deep black on exposure to the air,’ as the label says.”

“What do you think, Mr. Arbuton?” asked Mrs. Ellison with unabated anxiety.

“Well, really, I don’t know,” said Mr. Arbuton, who thought it a very trivial kind of talk, “I can’t say, indeed. I haven’t taken any of it up in my hand.”

“That’s true,” said Mrs. Ellison gravely, with an accent of reproval for the others who had not thought of so simple a solution of the problem, “very true.”

The colonel looked into her face with an air of well-feigned alarm. “You don’t think the sprain has gone to your head, Fanny?” he asked, and walked away, leaving Mr. Arbuton to the ladies. Mrs. Ellison did not care for this or any other gibe, if she but served her own purposes; and now, having made everybody laugh and given the conversation a lively turn, she was as perfectly content as if she had not been herself an offering to the cause of cheerfulness. She was, indeed, equal to any sacrifice in the enterprise she had undertaken, and would not only have given Kitty all her worldly goods, but would have quite effaced herself to further her own designs upon Mr. Arbuton. She turned again to her guide-book, and left the young people to continue the talk in unbroken gayety. They at once became serious, as most people do after a hearty laugh, which, if you think, seems always to have something strange and sad in it. But besides, Kitty was oppressed by the coldness that seemed perpetually to hover in Mr. Arbuton’s atmosphere, while she was interested by his fastidious good looks and his blameless manners and his air of a world different from any she had hitherto known. He was one of those men whose perfection makes you feel guilty of misdemeanor whenever they meet you, and whose greeting turns your honest good-day coarse and common; even Kitty’s fearless ignorance and more than Western disregard of dignities were not proof against him. She had found it easy to talk with Mrs. March as she did with her cousin at home: she liked to be frank and gay in her parley, to jest and to laugh and to make harmless fun, and to sentimentalize in a half-earnest way; she liked to be with Mr. Arbuton, but now she did not see how she could take her natural tone with him. She wondered at her daring lightness at the breakfast-table; she waited for him to say something, and he said, with a glance at the gray heaven that always overhangs the Saguenay, that it was beginning to rain, and unfurled the slender silk umbrella which harmonized so perfectly with the London effect of his dress, and held it over her. Mrs. Ellison sat within the shelter of the projecting roof, and diligently perused her book with her eyes, and listened to their talk.

“The great drawback to this sort of thing in America,” continued Mr. Arbuton, “is that there is no human interest about the scenery, fine as it is.”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Kitty, “there was that little settlement round the saw-mill. Can’t you imagine any human interest in the lives of the people there? It seems to me that one might make almost anything out of them. Suppose, for example, that the owner of that mill was a disappointed man who had come here to bury the wreck of his life in — sawdust?”

“O, yes! That sort of thing; certainly. But I didn’t mean that, I meant something historical. There is no past, no atmosphere, no traditions, you know.”

“O, but the Saguenay has a tradition,” said Kitty. “You know that a party of the first explorers left their comrades at Tadoussac, and came up the Saguenay three hundred years ago, and never were seen or heard of again. I think it’s so in keeping with the looks of the river. The Saguenay would never tell a secret.”

“Um!” uttered Mr. Arbuton, as if he were not quite sure that it was the Saguenay’s place to have a legend of this sort, and disposed to snub the legend because the Saguenay had it. After a little silence, he began to speak of famous rivers abroad.

“I suppose,” Kitty said, “the Rhine has traditions enough, hasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he answered, “but I think the Rhine rather overdoes it. You can’t help feeling, you know, that it’s somewhat melodramatic and — common. Have you ever seen the Rhine?”

“O, no! This is almost the first I’ve seen of anything. Perhaps,” she added, demurely, yet with a tremor at finding herself about to make light of Mr. Arbuton, “if I had had too much of tradition on the Rhine I should want more of it on the Saguenay.”

“Why, you must allow there’s a golden mean in everything, Miss Ellison,” said her companion with a lenient laugh, not feeling it disagreeable to be made light of by her.

“Yes; and I’m afraid we’re going to find Cape Trinity and Cape Eternity altogether too big when we come to them. Don’t you think eighteen hundred feet excessively high for a feature of river scenery?”

Mr. Arbuton really did have an objection to the exaggerations of nature on this continent, and secretly thought them in bad taste, but he had never formulated his feeling. He was not sure but it was ridiculous, now that it was suggested, and yet the possibility was too novel to be entertained without suspicion.

However, when after a while the rumor of their approach to the great objects of the Saguenay journey had spread among the passengers, and they began to assemble at points favorable for the enjoyment of the spectacle, he was glad to have secured the place he held with Miss Ellison, and a sympathetic thrill of excitement passed through his loath superiority. The rain ceased as they drew nearer, and the gray clouds that had hung so low upon the hills sullenly lifted from them and let their growing height he seen. The captain bade his sight-seers look at the vast Roman profile that showed itself upon the rock, and then he pointed out the wonderful Gothic arch, the reputed doorway of an unexplored cavern, under which an upright shaft of stone had stood for ages statue-like, till not many winters ago the frost heaved it from its base, and it plunged headlong down through the ice into the unfathomed depths below. The unvarying gloom of the pines was lit now by the pensive glimmer of birch-trees, and this gray tone gave an indescribable sentiment of pathos and of age to the scenery. Suddenly the boat rounded the corner of the three steps, each five hundred feet high, in which Cape Eternity climbs from the river, and crept in under the naked side of the awful cliff. It is sheer rock, springing from the black water, and stretching upward with a weary, effort-like aspect, in long impulses of stone marked by deep seams from space to space, till, fifteen hundred feet in air, its vast brow beetles forward, and frowns with a scattering fringe of pines. There are stains of weather and of oozing springs upon the front of the cliff, but it is height alone that seems to seize the eye, and one remembers afterwards these details, which are indeed so few as not properly to enter into the effect. The rock fully justifies its attributive height to the eye, which follows the upward rush of the mighty acclivity, steep after steep, till it wins the cloud-capt summit, when the measureless mass seems to swing and sway overhead, and the nerves tremble with the same terror that besets him who looks downward from the verge of a lofty precipice. It is wholly grim and stern; no touch of beauty relieves the austere majesty of that presence. At the foot of Cape Eternity the water is of unknown depth, and it spreads, a black expanse, in the rounding hollow of shores of unimaginable wildness and desolation, and issues again in its river’s course around the base of Cape Trinity. This is yet loftier than the sister cliff, but it slopes gently backward from the stream, and from foot to crest it is heavily clothed with a forest of pines. The woods that hitherto have shagged the hills with a stunted and meagre growth, showing long stretches scarred by fire, now assume a stately size, and assemble themselves compactly upon the side of the mountain, setting their serried stems one rank above another, till the summit is crowned with the mass of their dark green plumes, dense and soft and beautiful; so that the spirit perturbed by the spectacle of the other cliff is calmed and assuaged by the serene grandeur of this.

There have been, to be sure, some human agencies at work even under the shadow of Cape Eternity to restore the spirit to self-possession, and perhaps none turns from it wholly dismayed. Kitty, at any rate, took heart from some works of art which the cliff wall displayed near the water’s edge. One of these was a lively fresco portrait of Lieutenant-General Sherman, with the insignia of his rank, and the other was an even more striking effigy of General O’Neil, of the Armies of the Irish Republic, wearing a threatening aspect, and designed in a bold conceit of his presence there as conqueror of Canada in the year 1875. Mr. Arbuton was inclined to resent these intrusions upon the sublimity of nature, and he could not conceive, without disadvantage to them, how Miss Ellison and the colonel should accept them so cheerfully as part of the pleasure of the whole. As he listened blankly to their exchange of jests he found himself awfully beset by a temptation which one of the boat’s crew placed before the passengers. This was a bucket full of pebbles of inviting size; and the man said, “Now, see which can hit the cliff. It’s farther than any of you can throw, though it looks so near.”

The passengers cast themselves upon the store of missiles, Colonel Ellison most actively among them. None struck the cliff, and suddenly Mr. Arbuton felt a blind, stupid, irresistible longing to try his chance. The spirit of his college days, of his boating and ball-playing youth, came upon him. He picked up a pebble, while Kitty opened her eyes in a stare of dumb surprise. Then he wheeled and threw it, and as it struck against the cliff with a shock that seemed to have broken all the windows on the Back Bay, he exulted in a sense of freedom the havoc caused him. It was as if for an instant he had rent away the ties of custom, thrown off the bonds of social allegiance, broken down and trampled upon the conventions which his whole life long he had held so dear and respectable. In that moment of frenzy he feared himself capable of shaking hands with the shabby Englishman in the Glengarry cap, or of asking the whole admiring company of passengers down to the bar. A cry of applause had broken from them at his achievement, and he had for the first time tasted the sweets of popular favor. Of course a revulsion must come, and it must be of a corresponding violence; and the next moment Mr. Arbuton hated them all, and most of all Colonel Ellison, who had been loudest in his praise. Him he thought for that moment everything that was aggressively and intrusively vulgar. But he could not utter these friendly impressions, nor is it so easy to withdraw from any concession, and he found it impossible to repair his broken defences. Destiny had been against him from the beginning, and now why should he not strike hands with it for the brief half-day that he was to continue in these people’s society? In the morning he would part from them forever, and in the mean time why should he not try to please and be pleased? There might, to be sure, have been many reasons why he should not do this; but however the balance stood he now yielded himself passively to his fate. He was polite to Mrs. Ellison, he was attentive to Kitty, and as far as he could he entered into the fantastic spirit of her talk with the colonel. He was not a dull man; he had quite an apt wit of his own, and a neat way of saying things; but humor always seemed to him something not perfectly well bred; of course he helped to praise it in some old-established diner-out, or some woman of good fashion, whose mots it was customary to repeat, and he even tolerated it in books; but he was at a loss with these people, who looked at life in so bizarre a temper, yet without airiness or pretension, nay, with a whimsical readiness to acknowledge kindred in every droll or laughable thing.

The boat stopped at Tadoussac on her return, and among the spectators who came down to the landing was a certain very pretty, conscious-looking, silly, bridal-faced young woman, — imaginably the belle of the season at that forlorn watering-place, — who before coming on board stood awhile attended by a following of those elderly imperial and colonial British who heavily flutter round the fair at such resorts. She had an air of utterly satisfied vanity, in which there was no harm in the world, and when she saw that she had fixed the eyes of the shoreward-gazing passengers, it appeared as if she fell into a happy trepidation too blissful to be passively borne; she moistened her pretty red lips with her tongue, she twitched her mantle, she settled the bow at her lovely throat, she bridled and tossed her graceful head.

“What should you do next, Kitty?” asked the colonel, who had been sympathetically intent upon all this.

“O, I think I should pat my foot,” answered Kitty; and in fact the charming simpleton on shore, having perfected her attitude, was tapping the ground nervously with the toe of her adorable slipper.

After the boat started, a Canadian lady of ripe age, yet of a vivacity not to be reconciled with the notion of the married state, capered briskly about among her somewhat stolid and indifferent friends, saying, “They’re going to fire it as soon as we round the point”; and presently a dull boom, as of a small piece of ordnance discharged in the neighborhood of the hotel, struck through the gathering fog, and this elderly sylph clapped her hands and exulted: “They’ve fired it, they’ve fired it! and now the captain will blow the whistle in answer.” But the captain did nothing of the kind, and the lady, after some more girlish effervescence, upbraided him for an old owl and an old muff, and so sank into such a flat and spiritless calm that she was sorrowful to see.

“Too bad, Mr. Arbuton, isn’t it?” said the colonel; and Mr. Arbuton listened in vague doubt while Kitty built up with her cousin a touching romance for the poor lady, supposed to have spent the one brilliant and successful summer of her life at Tadoussac, where her admirers had agreed to bemoan her loss in this explosion of gunpowder. They asked him if he did not wish the captain had whistled; and “Oh!” shuddered Kitty, “doesn’t it all make you feel just as if you had been doing it yourself?” — a question which he hardly knew how to answer, never having, to his knowledge, done a ridiculous thing in his life, much less been guilty of such behavior as that of the disappointed lady.

At Cacouna, where the boat stopped to take on the horses and carriages of some home-returning sojourners, the pier was a labyrinth of equipages of many sorts and sizes, and a herd of bright-hooded, gayly blanketed horses gave variety to the human crowd that soaked and steamed in the fine, slowly falling rain. A draught-horse was every three minutes driven into their midst with tedious iteration as he slowly drew baskets of coal up from the sloop unloading at the wharf, and each time they closed solidly upon his retreat as if they never expected to see that horse again while the world stood. They were idle ladies and gentlemen under umbrellas, Indians and habitans taking the rain stolidly erect or with shrugged shoulders, and two or three clergymen of the curate type, who might have stepped as they were out of any dull English novel. These were talking in low voices and putting their hands to their ears to catch the replies of the lady-passengers who hung upon the rail, and twaddled back as dryly as if there was no moisture in life. All the while the safety-valves hissed with the escaping steam, and the boat’s crew silently toiled with the grooms of the different horses to get the equipages on board. With the carriages it was an affair of mere muscle, but the horses required to be managed with brain. No sooner had one of them placed his fore feet on the gangway plank than he protested by backing up over a mass of patient Canadians, carrying with him half a dozen grooms and deck-hands. Then his hood was drawn over his eyes, and he was blindly walked up and down the pier, and back to the gangway, which he knew as soon as he touched it. He pulled, he pranced, he shied, he did all that a bad and stubborn horse can do, till at last a groom mounted his back, a clump of deck-hands tugged at his bridle, and other grooms, tenderly embracing him at different points, pushed, and he was thus conveyed on board with mingled affection and ignominy. None of the Canadians seemed amused by this; they regarded it with serious composure as a fitting decorum, and Mr. Arbuton had no comment to make upon it. But at the first embrace bestowed upon the horse by the grooms the colonel said absently, “Ah! long-lost brother,” and Kitty laughed; and as the scruples of each brute were successively overcome, she helped to give some grotesque interpretation to the various scenes of the melodrama, while Mr. Arbuton stood beside her, and sheltered her with his umbrella; and a spice of malice in her heart told her that he viewed this drolling, and especially her part in it, with grave misgiving. That gave the zest of transgression to her excess, mixed with dismay; for the tricksy spirit in her was not a domineering spirit, but was easily abashed by the moods of others. She ought not to have laughed at Dick’s speeches, she soon told herself, much less helped him on. She dreadfully feared that she had done something indecorous, and she was pensive and silent over it as she moved listlessly about after supper; and she sat at last thinking in a dreary sort of perplexity on what had passed during the day, which seemed a long one.

The shabby Englishman with his wife and sister were walking up and down the cabin. By and by they stopped, and sat down at the table facing Kitty; the elder woman, with a civil freedom, addressed her some commonplace, and the four were presently in lively talk; for Kitty had beamed upon the woman in return, having already longed to know something of them. The world was so fresh to her, that she could find delight in those poor singing or acting folk, though she had soon to own to herself that their talk was not very witty nor very wise, and that the best thing about them was their good-nature. The colonel sat at the end of the table with a newspaper; Mrs. Ellison had gone to bed; and Kitty was beginning to tire of her new acquaintance, and to wonder how she could get away from them, when she saw rescue in the eye of Mr. Arbuton as he came down to the cabin. She knew he was looking for her; she saw him check himself with a start of recognition; then he walked rapidly by the group, without glancing at them.

“Brrrr!” said the blond girl, drawing her blue knit shawl about her shoulders, “isn’t it cold?” and she and her friends laughed.

“O dear!” thought Kitty, “I didn’t suppose they were so rude. I’m afraid I must say good night,” she added aloud, after a little, and stole away the most conscience-stricken creature on that boat. She heard those people laugh again after she left them.

IV.

MR. ARBUTON’S INSPIRATION.

The next morning, when Mr. Arbuton awoke, he found a clear light upon the world that he had left wrapped in fog at midnight. A heavy gale was blowing, and the wide river was running in seas that made the boat stagger in her course, and now and then struck her bows with a force that sent the spray from their seething tops into the faces of the people on the promenade. The sun, out of rifts of the breaking clouds, launched broad splendors across the villages and farms of the level landscape and the crests and hollows of the waves; and a certain joy of the air penetrated to the guarded consciousness of Mr. Arbuton. Involuntarily he looked about for the people he meant to have nothing more to do with, that he might appeal to the sympathies of one of them, at least, in his sense of such an admirable morning. But a great many passengers had come on board, during the night, at Murray Bay, where the brief season was ending, and their number hid the Ellisons from him. When he went to breakfast, he found some one had taken his seat near them, and they did not notice him as he passed by in search of another chair. Kitty and the colonel were at table alone, and they both wore preoccupied faces. After breakfast he sought them out and asked for Mrs. Ellison, who had shared in most of the excitements of the day before, helping herself about with a pretty limp, and who certainly had not, as her husband phrased it, kept any of the meals waiting.

“Why,” said the colonel, “I’m afraid her ankle’s worse this morning, and that we’ll have to lie by at Quebec for a few days, at any rate.”

Mr. Arbuton heard this sad news with a cheerful aspect unaccountable in one who was concerned at Mrs. Ellison’s misfortune. He smiled, when he ought to have looked pensive, and he laughed at the colonel’s joke when the latter added, “Of course, this is a great hardship for my cousin, who hates Quebec, and wants to get home to Eriecreek as soon as possible.”

Kitty promised to bear her trials with firmness, and Mr. Arbuton said, not very consequently, as she thought, “I had been planning to spend a few days in Quebec, myself, and I shall have the opportunity of inquiring about Mrs. Ellison’s convalescence. In fact,” he added, turning to the colonel, “I hope you’ll let me be of service to you in getting to a hotel.”

And when the boat landed, Mr. Arbuton actually busied himself in finding a carriage and putting the various Ellison wraps and bags into it. Then he helped to support Mrs. Ellison ashore, and to lift her to the best place. He raised his hat, and had good-morning on his tongue, when the astonished colonel called out, “Why, the deuce! You’re going to ride up with us!”

Mr. Arbuton thought he had better get another carriage; he should incommode Mrs. Ellison; but Mrs. Ellison protested that he would not at all; and, to cut the matter short, he mounted to the colonel’s side. It was another stroke of fate.

At the hotel they found a line of people reaching half-way down the outer steps from the inside of the office.

“Hallo! what’s this?” asked the colonel of the last man in the queue.

“O, it’s a little procession to the hotel register! We’ve been three quarters of an hour in passing a given point,” said the man, who was plainly a fellow-citizen.

“And haven’t got by yet,” said the colonel, taking to the speaker. “Then the house is full?”

“Well, no; they haven’t begun to throw them out of the window.”

“His humor is degenerating, Dick,” said Kitty; and “Hadn’t you better go inside and inquire?” asked Mrs. Ellison. It was part of the Ellison travelling joke for her thus to prompt the colonel in his duty.

“I’m glad you mentioned it, Fanny. I was just going to drive off in despair.” The colonel vanished within doors, and after long delay came out flushed, but not with triumph. “On the express condition that I have ladies with me, one an invalid, I am promised a room on the fifth floor some time during the day. They tell me the other hotel is crammed and it’s no use to go there.”

Mrs. Ellison was ready to weep, and for the first time since her accident she harbored some bitterness against Mr. Arbuton. They all sat silent, and the colonel on the sidewalk silently wiped his brow.

Mr. Arbuton, in the poverty of his invention, wondered if there was not some lodging-house where they could find shelter.

“Of course there is,” cried Mrs. Ellison, beaming upon her hero, and calling Kitty’s attention to his ingenuity by a pressure with her well foot. “Richard, we must look up a boarding-house.”

“Do you know of any good boarding-houses?” asked the colonel of the driver, mechanically.

“Plenty,” answered the man.

“Well, drive us to twenty or thirty first-class ones,” commanded the colonel; and the search began.

The colonel first asked prices and looked at rooms, and if he pronounced any apartment unsuitable, Kitty was despatched by Mrs. Ellison to view it and refute him. As often as she confirmed him, Mrs. Ellison was sure that they were both too fastidious, and they never turned away from a door but they closed the gates of paradise upon that afflicted lady. She began to believe that they should find no place whatever, when at last they stopped before a portal so unboarding-house-like in all outward signs, that she maintained it was of no use to ring, and imparted so much of her distrust to the colonel that, after ringing, he prefaced his demand for rooms with an apology for supposing that there were rooms to let there. Then, after looking at them, he returned to the carriage and reported that the whole affair was perfect, and that he should look no farther. Mrs. Ellison replied that she never could trust his judgment, he was so careless. Kitty inspected the premises, and came back in a transport that alarmed the worst fears of Mrs. Ellison. She was sure that they had better look farther, she knew there were plenty of nicer places. Even if the rooms were nice and the situation pleasant, she was certain that there must be some drawbacks which they did not know of yet. Whereupon her husband lifted her from the carriage, and bore her, without reply or comment of any kind, into the house.

Throughout the search Mr. Arbuton had been making up his mind that he would part with his friends as soon as they found lodgings, give the day to Quebec, and take the evening train for Gorham, thus escaping the annoyances of a crowded hotel, and ending at once an acquaintance which he ought never to have let go so far. As long as the Ellisons were without shelter, he felt that it was due to himself not to abandon them. But even now that they were happily housed, had he done all that nobility obliged? He stood irresolute beside the carriage.

“Won’t you come up and see where we live?” asked Kitty, hospitably.

“I shall be very glad,” said Mr. Arbuton.

“My dear fellow,” said the colonel, in the parlor, “I didn’t engage a room for you. I supposed you’d rather take your chances at the hotel.”

“O, I’m going away to-night.”

“Why, that’s a pity!”

“Yes, I’ve no fancy for a cot-bed in the hotel parlor. But I don’t quite like to leave you here, after bringing this calamity upon you.”

“O, don’t mention that! I was the only one to blame. We shall get on splendidly here.”

Mr. Arbuton suffered a vague disappointment. At the bottom of his heart was a formless hope that he might in some way be necessary to the Ellisons in their adversity; or if not that, then that something might entangle him further and compel his stay. But they seemed quite equal in themselves to the situation; they were in far more comfortable quarters than they could have hoped for, and plainly should want for nothing; Fortune put on a smiling face, and bade him go free of them. He fancied it a mocking smile, though, as he stood an instant silently weighing one thing against another. The colonel was patiently waiting his motion; Mrs. Ellison sat watching him from the sofa; Kitty moved about the room with averted face, — a pretty domestic presence, a household priestess ordering the temporary Penates. Mr. Arbuton opened his lips to say farewell, but a god spoke through them, — inconsequently, as the gods for the most part do, saying, “Besides, I suppose you’ve got all the rooms here.”

“O, as to that I don’t know,” answered the colonel, not recognizing the language of inspiration, “let’s ask.” Kitty knocked a photograph-book off the table, and Mrs. Ellison said, “Why, Kitty!” But nothing more was spoken till the landlady came. She had another room, but doubted if it would answer. It was in the attic, and was a back room, though it had a pleasant outlook. Mr. Arbuton had no doubt that it would do very well for the day or two he was going to stay, and took it hastily, without going to look at it. He had his valise carried up at once, and then he went to the post-office to see if he had any letters, offering to ask also for Colonel Ellison.

Kitty stole off to explore the chamber given her at the rear of the house; that is to say, she opened the window looking out on what their hostess told her was the garden of the Ursuline Convent, and stood there in a mute transport. A black cross rose in the midst, and all about this wandered the paths and alleys of the garden, through clumps of lilac-bushes and among the spires of hollyhocks. The grounds were enclosed by high walls in part, and in part by the group of the convent edifices, built of gray stone, high gabled, and topped by dormer-windowed steep roofs of tin, which, under the high morning sun, lay an expanse of keenest splendor, while many a grateful shadow dappled the full-foliaged garden below. Two slim, tall poplars stood against the gable of the chapel, and shot their tops above its roof, and under a porch near them two nuns sat motionless in the sun, black-robed, with black veils falling over their shoulders, and their white faces lost in the white linen that draped them from breast to crown. Their hands lay quiet in their laps, and they seemed unconscious of the other nuns walking in the garden-paths with little children, their pupils, and answering their laughter from time to time with voices as simple and innocent as their own. Kitty looked down upon them all with a swelling heart. They were but figures in a beautiful picture of something old and poetical; but she loved them, and pitied them, and was most happy in them, the same as if they had been real. It could not be that they and she were in the same world: she must be dreaming over a book in Charley’s room at Eriecreek. She shaded her eyes for a better look, when the noonday gun boomed from the citadel; the bell upon the chapel jangled harshly, and those strange maskers, those quaint black birds with white breasts and faces, flocked indoors. At the same time a small dog under her window howled dolorously at the jangling of the bell; and Kitty, with an impartial joy, turned from the pensive romance of the convent garden to the mild comedy of the scene to which his woeful note attracted her. When he had uttered his anguish, he relapsed into the quietest small French dog that ever was, and lay down near a large, tranquil cat, whom neither the bell nor he had been able to stir from her slumbers in the sun; a peasant-like old man kept on sawing wood, and a little child stood still amidst the larkspurs and marigolds of a tiny garden, while over the flower-pots on the low window-sill of the neighboring house to which it belonged, a young, motherly face gazed peacefully out. The great extent of the convent grounds had left this poor garden scarce breathing-space for its humble blooms; with the low paling fence that separated it from the adjoining house-yards it looked like a toy-garden or the background of a puppet-show, and in its way it was as quaintly unreal to the young girl as the nunnery itself.

When she saw it first, the city’s walls and other warlike ostentations had taken her imagination with the historic grandeur of Quebec; but the fascination deepened now that she was admitted, as it were, to the religious heart and the domestic privacy of the famous old town. She was romantic, as most good young girls are; and she had the same pleasure in the strangeness of the things about her as she would have felt in the keeping of a charming story. To Fanny’s “Well, Kitty, I suppose all this just suits you,” when she had returned to the little parlor where the sufferer lay, she answered with a sigh of irrepressible content, “O yes! could anything be more beautiful?” and her enraptured eye dwelt upon the low ceilings, the deep, wide chimneys eloquent of the mighty fires with which they must roar in winter, the French windows with their curious and clumsy fastenings, and every little detail that made the place alien and precious.

Fanny broke into a laugh at the visionary absence in her face.

“Do you think the place is good enough for your hero and heroine?” asked she, slyly; for Kitty had one of those family reputes, so hard to survive, for childish attempts of her own in the world of fiction where so great part of her life had been passed; and Mrs. Ellison, who was as unliterary a soul as ever breathed, admired her with the heartiness which unimaginative people often feel for their idealizing friends, and believed that she was always deep in the mysteries of some plot.

“O, I don’t know,” Kitty answered with a little color, “about heroes and heroines; but, I’d like to live here, myself. Yes,” she continued, rather to herself than to her listener, “I do believe this is what I was made for. I’ve always wanted to live amongst old things, in a stone house with dormer-windows. Why, there isn’t a single dormer-window in Eriecreek, nor even a brick house, let alone a stone one. O yes, indeed! I was meant for an old country.”

“Well, then, Kitty, I don’t see what you’re to do but to marry East and live East; or else find a rich husband, and get him to take you to Europe to live.”

“Yes; or get him to come and live in Quebec. That’s all I’d ask, and he needn’t be a very rich man, for that.”

“Why, you poor child, what sort of husband could you get to settle down in this dead old place?”

“O, I suppose some kind of artist or literary man.”

This was not Mrs. Ellison’s notion of the kind of husband who was to realize for Kitty her fancy for life in an old country; but she was content to let the matter rest for the present, and, in a serene thankfulness to the power that had brought two marriageable young creatures together beneath the same roof, and under her own observance, she composed herself among the sofa-cushions, from which she meant to conduct the campaign against Mr. Arbuton with relentless vigor.

“Well,” she said, “it won’t be fair if you are not happy in this world, Kitty, you ask so little of it”; while Kitty turned to the window overlooking the street, and lost herself in the drama of the passing figures below. They were new, and yet oddly familiar, for she had long known them in the realm of romance. The peasant-women who went by, in hats of felt or straw, some on foot with baskets, and some in their light market-carts, were all, in their wrinkled and crooked age or their fresh-faced, strong-limbed youth, her friends since childhood in many a tale of France or Germany; and the black-robed priests, who mixed with the passers on the narrow wooden sidewalk, and now and then courteously gave way, or lifted their wide-rimmed hats in a grave, smiling salutation, were more recent acquaintances, but not less intimate. They were out of old romances about Italy and Spain, in which she was very learned; and this butcher’s boy, tilting along through the crowd with a half-staggering run, was from any one of Dickens’s stories, and she divined that the four-armed wooden trough on his shoulder was the butcher’s tray, which figures in every novelist’s description of a London street-crowd. There were many other types, as French mothers of families with market-baskets on their arms; very pretty French school-girls with books under their arms; wild-looking country boys with red raspberries in birch-bark measures; and quiet gliding nuns with white hoods and downcast faces: each of whom she unerringly relegated to an appropriate corner of her world of unreality. A young, mild-faced, spectacled Anglican curate she did not give a moment’s pause, but rushed him instantly through the whole series of Anthony Trollope’s novels, which dull books, I am sorry to say, she had read, and liked, every one; and then she began to find various people astray out of Thackeray. The trig corporal, with the little visorless cap worn so jauntily, the light stick carried in one hand, and the broad-sealed official document in the other, had also, in his breast-pocket, one of those brief, infrequent missives which Lieutenant Osborne used to send to poor Amelia; a tall, awkward officer did duty for Major Dobbin; and when a very pretty lady driving a pony carriage, with a footman in livery on the little perch behind her, drew rein beside the pavement, and a handsome young captain in a splendid uniform saluted her and began talking with her in a languid, affected way, it was Osborne recreant to the thought of his betrothed, one of whose tender letters he kept twirling in his fingers while he talked.

Most of the people whom she saw passing had letters or papers, and, in fact, they were coming from the post-office, where the noonday mails had just been opened. So she went on turning substance into shadow, — unless, indeed, flesh and blood is the illusion, — and, as I am bound to own, catching at very slight pretexts in many cases for the exercise of her sorcery, when her eye fell upon a gentleman at a little distance. At the same moment he raised his eyes from a letter at which he had been glancing, and ran them along the row of houses opposite, till they rested on the window at which she stood. Then he smiled and lifted his hat, and, with a start, she recognized Mr. Arbuton, while a certain chill struck to her heart through the tumult she felt there. Till he saw her there had been such a cold reserve and hauteur in his bearing, that the trepidation which she had felt about him at times, the day before, and which had worn quite away under the events of the morning, was renewed again, and the aspect, in which he had been so strange that she did not know him, seemed the only one that he had ever worn. This effect lasted till Mr. Arbuton could find his way to her, and place in her eager hand a letter from the girls and Dr. Ellison. She forgot it then, and vanished till she read her letter.

V.

MR. ARBUTON MAKES HIMSELF AGREEABLE.

The first care of Colonel Ellison had been to call a doctor, and to know the worst about the sprained ankle, upon which his plans had fallen lame; and the worst was that it was not a bad sprain, but Mrs. Ellison, having been careless of it the day before, had aggravated the hurt, and she must now have that perfect rest, which physicians prescribe so recklessly of other interests and duties, for a week at least, and possibly two or three.

The colonel was still too much a soldier to be impatient at the doctor’s order, but he was of far too active a temper to be quiet under it. He therefore proposed to himself nothing less than the capture of Quebec in an historical sense, and even before dinner he began to prepare for the campaign. He sallied forth, and descended upon the bookstores wherever he found them lurking, in whatsoever recess of the Upper or Lower Town, and returned home laden with guide-books to Quebec, and monographs upon episodes of local history, such as are produced in great quantity by the semi-clerical literary taste of out-of-the-way Catholic capitals. The colonel (who had gone actively into business, after leaving the army, at the close of the war) had always a newspaper somewhere about him, but he was not a reader of many books. Of the volumes in the doctor’s library, he had never in former days willingly opened any but the plays of Shakespeare, and Don Quixote, long passages of which he knew by heart. He had sometimes attempted other books, but for the most of Kitty’s favorite authors he professed as frank a contempt as for the Mound-Builders themselves. He had read one book of travel, namely, The Innocents Abroad, which he held to be so good a book that he need never read anything else about the countries of which it treated. When he brought in this extraordinary collection of pamphlets, both Kitty and Fanny knew what to expect; for the colonel was as ready to receive literature at second-hand as to avoid its original sources. He had in this way picked up a great deal of useful knowledge, and he was famous for clipping from newspapers scraps of instructive fact, all of which he relentlessly remembered. He had already a fair outline of the local history in his mind, and this had been deepened and freshened by Dr. Ellison’s recent talk of his historical studies. Moreover, he had secured in the course of the present journey, from his wife’s and cousin’s reading of divers guide-books, a new store of names and dates, which he desired to attach to the proper localities with their help.

“Light reading for leisure hours, Fanny,” said Kitty, looking askance at the colonel’s literature as she sat down near her cousin after dinner.

“Yes; and you start fair, ladies. Start with Jacques Cartier, ancient mariner of Dieppe, in the year 1535. No favoritism in this investigation; no bringing forward of Champlain or Montcalm prematurely; no running off on subsequent conquests or other side-issues. Stick to the discovery, and the names of Jacques Cartier and Donnacona. Come, do something for an honest living.”

“Who was Donnacona?” demanded Mrs. Ellison, with indifference.

“That is just what these fascinating little volumes will tell us. Kitty, read something to your suffering cousins about Donnacona, — he sounds uncommonly like an Irishman,” answered the colonel, establishing himself in an easy-chair; and Kitty picked up a small sketch of the history of Quebec, and, opening it, fell into the trance which came upon her at the touch of a book, and read on for some pages to herself.

“Well, upon my word,” said the colonel, “I might as well be reading about Donnacona myself, for any comfort I get.”

“O Dick, I forgot. I was just looking. Now I’m really going to commence.”

“No, not yet,” cried Mrs. Ellison, rising on her elbow. “Where is Mr. Arbuton?”

“What has he to do with Donnacona, my dear?”

“Everything. You know he’s stayed on our account, and I never heard of anything so impolite, so inhospitable, as offering to read without him. Go and call him, Richard, do.”

“O, no,” pleaded Kitty, “he won’t care about it. Don’t call him, Dick.”

“Why, Kitty, I’m surprised at you! When you read so beautifully! Yon needn’t be ashamed, I’m sure.”

“I’m not ashamed; but, at the same time, I don’t want to read to him.”

“Well, call him any way, colonel. He’s in his room.”

“If you do,” said Kitty, with superfluous dignity, “I must go away.”

“Very well, Kitty, just as you please. Only I want Richard to witness that I’m not to blame if Mr. Arbuton thinks us unfeeling or neglectful.”

“O, if he doesn’t say what he thinks, it’ll make no difference.”

“It seems to me that this is a good deal of fuss to make about one human being, a mere passing man and brother of a day, isn’t it?” said the colonel. “Go on with Donnacona, do.”

There came a knock at the door. Kitty leaped nervously to her feet, and fled out of the room. But it was only the little French serving-maid upon some errand which she quickly despatched.

“Well, now what do you think?” asked Mrs. Ellison.

“Why, I think you’ve a surprising knowledge of French for one who studied it at school. Do you suppose she understood you?”

“O, nonsense! You know I mean Kitty and her very queer behavior. Richard, if you moon at me in that stupid way,” she continued, “I shall certainly end in an insane asylum. Can’t you see what’s under your very nose?”

“Yes, I can, Fanny,” answered the colonel, “if anything’s there. But I give you my word, I don’t know any more than millions yet unborn what you’re driving at.” The colonel took up the book which Kitty had thrown down, and went to his room to try to read up Donnacona for himself, while his wife penitently turned to a pamphlet in French, which he had bought with the others. “After all,” she thought, “men will be men”; and seemed not to find the fact wholly wanting in consolation.

A few minutes after there was a murmur of voices in the entry without, at a window looking upon the convent garden, where it happened to Mr. Arbuton, descending from his attic chamber, to find Kitty standing, a pretty shape against the reflected light of the convent roofs, and amidst a little greenery of house-plants, tall geraniums, an overarching ivy, some delicate roses. She had paused there, on her way from Fanny’s to her own room, and was looking into the garden, where a pair of silent nuns were pacing up and down the paths, turning now their backs with the heavy sable coiffure sweeping their black robes, and now their still, mask-like faces, set in that stiff framework of white linen. Sometimes they came so near that she could distinguish their features, and imagine an expression that she should know if she saw them again; and while she stood self-forgetfully feigning a character for each of them, Mr. Arbuton spoke to her and took his place at her side.

“We’re remarkably favored in having this bit of opera under our windows, Miss Ellison,” he said, and smiled as Kitty answered, “O, is it really like an opera? I never saw one, but I could imagine it must be beautiful,” and they both looked on in silence a moment, while the nuns moved, shadow-like, out of the garden, and left it empty.

Then Mr. Arbuton said something to which Kitty answered simply, “I’ll see if my cousin doesn’t want me,” and presently stood beside Mrs. Ellison’s sofa, a little conscious in color. “Fanny, Mr. Arbuton has asked me to go and see the cathedral with him. Do you think it would be right?”

Mrs. Ellison’s triumphant heart rose to her lips. “Why, you dear, particular, innocent little goose,” she cried, flinging her arms about Kitty, and kissing her till the young girl blushed again; “of course it would! Go! You mustn’t stay mewed up in here. I sha’n’t be able to go about with you; and if I can judge by the colonel’s breathing, as he calls it, from the room in there, he won’t, at present. But the idea of your having a question of propriety!” And indeed it was the first time Kitty had ever had such a thing, and the remembrance of it put a kind of constraint upon her, as she strolled demurely beside Mr. Arbuton towards the cathedral.

“You must be guide,” said he, “for this is my first day in Quebec, you know, and you are an old inhabitant in comparison.”

“I’ll show the way,” she answered, “if you’ll interpret the sights. I think I must be stranger to them than you, in spite of my long residence. Sometimes I’m afraid that I do only fancy I enjoy these things, as Mrs. March said, for I’ve no European experiences to contrast them with. I know that it seems very delightful, though, and quite like what I should expect in Europe.”

“You’d expect very little of Europe, then, in most things; though there’s no disputing that it’s a very pretty illusion of the Old World.”

A few steps had brought them into the market-square in front of the cathedral, where a little belated traffic still lingered in the few old peasant-women hovering over baskets of such fruits and vegetables as had long been out of season in the States, and the housekeepers and serving-maids cheapening these wares. A sentry moved mechanically up and down before the high portal of the Jesuit Barracks, over the arch of which were still the letters I. H. S. carved long ago upon the keystone; and the ancient edifice itself, with its yellow stucco front and its grated windows, had every right to be a monastery turned barracks in France or Italy. A row of quaint stone houses — inns and shops — formed the upper side of the Square; while the modern buildings of the Rue Fabrique on the lower side might serve very well for that show of improvement which deepens the sentiment of the neighboring antiquity and decay in Latin towns. As for the cathedral, which faced the convent from across the Square, it was as cold and torpid a bit of Renaissance as could be found in Rome itself. A red-coated soldier or two passed through the Square; three or four neat little French policemen lounged about in blue uniforms and flaring havelocks; some walnut-faced, blue-eyed old citizens and peasants sat upon the thresholds of the row of old houses, and gazed dreamily through the smoke of their pipes at the slight stir and glitter of shopping about the fine stores of the Rue Fabrique. An air of serene disoccupation pervaded the place, with which the occasional riot of the drivers of the long row of calashes and carriages in front of the cathedral did not discord. Whenever a stray American wandered into the Square, there was a wild flight of these drivers towards him, and his person was lost to sight amidst their pantomime. They did not try to underbid each other, and they were perfectly good-humored; as soon as he had made his choice, the rejected multitude returned to their places on the curbstone, pursuing the successful aspirant with inscrutable jokes as he drove off, while the horses went on munching the contents of their leathern head-bags, and tossing them into the air to shake down the lurking grains of corn.

“It is like Europe; your friends were right,” said Mr. Arbuton as they escaped into the cathedral from one of these friendly onsets. “It’s quite the atmosphere of foreign travel, and you ought to be able to realize the feelings of a tourist.”

A priest was saying mass at one of the side-altars, assisted by acolytes in their every-day clothes; and outside of the railing a market-woman, with a basket of choke-cherries, knelt among a few other poor people. Presently a young English couple came in, he with a dashing India scarf about his hat, and she very stylishly dressed, who also made their genuflections with the rest, and then sat down and dropped their heads in prayer.

“This is like enough Europe, too,” murmured Mr. Arbuton. “It’s very good North Italy; or South, for the matter of that.”

“O, is it?” answered Kitty, joyously. “I thought it must be!” And she added, in that trustful way of hers: “It’s all very familiar; but then it seems to me on this journey that I’ve seen a great many things that I know I’ve only read of before”; and so followed Mr. Arbuton in his tour of the pictures.

She was as ignorant of art as any Roman or Florentine girl whose life has been passed in the midst of it; and she believed these mighty fine pictures, and was puzzled by Mr. Arbuton’s behavior towards them, who was too little imaginative or too conscientious to make merit for them out of the things they suggested. He treated the poor altar-pieces of the Quebec cathedral with the same harsh indifference he would have shown to the second-rate paintings of a European gallery; doubted the Vandyck, and cared nothing for the Conception, “in the style of Le Brun,” over the high-altar, though it had the historical interest of having survived that bombardment of 1759 which destroyed the church.

Kitty innocently singled out the worst picture in the place as her favorite, and then was piqued, and presently frightened, at his cold reluctance about it. He made her feel that it was very bad, and that she shared its inferiority, though he said nothing to that effect. She learned the shame of not being a connoisseur in a connoisseur’s company, and she perceived more painfully than ever before that a Bostonian, who had been much in Europe, might be very uncomfortable to the simple, unravelled American. Yet, she reminded herself, the Marches had been in Europe, and they were Bostonians also; and they did not go about putting everything under foot; they seemed to care for everything they saw, and to have a friendly jest, if not praises, for it. She liked that; she would have been well enough pleased to have Mr. Arbuton laugh outright at her picture, and she could have joined him in it. But the look, however flattered into an air of polite question at last, which he had bent upon her, seemed to outlaw her and condemn her taste in everything. As they passed out of the cathedral, she would rather have gone home than continued the walk as he begged her, if she were not tired, to do; but this would have been flight, and she was not a coward. So they sauntered down the Rue Fabrique, and turned into Palace Street. As they went by the door of Hôtel Musty, her pleasant friends came again into her mind, and she said, “This is where we stayed last week, with Mr. and Mrs. March.”

“Those Boston people?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where they live in Boston?”

“Why, we have their address; but I can’t think of it. I believe somewhere in the southern part of the city—”

“The South End?”

“O yes, that’s it. Have you ever heard of them?”

“No.”

“I thought perhaps you might have known Mr. March. He’s in the insurance business—”

“O no! No, I don’t know him,” said Mr. Arbuton, eagerly. Kitty wondered if there could be anything wrong with the business repute of Mr. March, but dismissed the thought as unworthy; and having perceived that her friends were snubbed, she said bravely, that they were the most delightful people she had ever seen, and she was sorry that they were not still in Quebec. He shared her regret tacitly, if at all, and they walked in silence to the gate, whence they strolled down the winding street outside the wall into the Lower Town. But it was not a pleasant ramble for Kitty: she was in a dim dread of hitherto unseen and unimagined trespasses against good taste, not only in pictures and people, but in all life, which, from having been a very smiling prospect when she set out with Mr. Arbuton, had suddenly become a narrow pathway, in which one must pick one’s way with more regard to each step than any general end. All this was as obscure and uncertain as the intimations which had produced it, and which, in words, had really amounted to nothing. But she felt more and more that in her companion there was something wholly alien to the influences which had shaped her; and though she could not know how much, she was sure of enough to make her dreary in his presence.

They wandered through the quaintness and noiseless bustle of the Lower Town thoroughfares, and came by and by to that old church, the oldest in Quebec, which was built near two hundred years ago, in fulfilment of a vow made at the repulse of Sir William Phipps’s attack upon the city, and further famed for the prophecy of a nun, that this church should be ruined by the fire in which a successful attempt of the English was yet to involve the Lower Town. A painting, which represented the vision of the nun, perished in the conflagration which verified it, in 1759; but the walls of the ancient structure remain to witness this singular piece of history, which Kitty now glanced at furtively in one of the colonel’s guide-books; since her ill-fortune with the picture in the cathedral, she had not openly cared for anything.

At one side of the church there was a booth for the sale of crockery and tin ware; and there was an every-day cheerfulness of small business in the shops and tented stands about the square on which the church faced, and through which there was continual passing of heavy burdens from the port, swift calashes, and slow, country-paced market-carts.

Mr. Arbuton made no motion to enter the church, and Kitty would not hint the curiosity she felt to see the interior; and while they lingered a moment, the door opened, and a peasant came out with a little coffin in his arms. His eyes were dim and his face wet with weeping, and he bore the little coffin tenderly, as if his caress might reach the dead child within. Behind him she came who must be the mother, her face deeply hidden in her veil. Beside the pavement waited a shabby calash, with a driver half asleep on his perch; and the man, still clasping his precious burden, clambered into the vehicle, and laid it upon his knees, while the woman groped, through her tears and veil, for the step. Kitty and her companion had moved reverently aside; but now Mr. Arbuton came forward, and helped the woman to her place. She gave him a hoarse, sad “Merci!” and spread a fold of her shawl fondly over the end of the little coffin; the drowsy driver whipped up his beast, and the calash jolted away.

Kitty cast a grateful glance upon Mr. Arbuton, as they now entered the church, by a common impulse. On their way towards the high-altar they passed the rude black bier, with the tallow candles yet smoking in their black wooden candlesticks. A few worshippers were dropped here and there in the vacant seats, and at a principal side-altar knelt a poor woman praying before a wooden effigy of the dead Christ that lay in a glass case under the altar. The image was of life-size, and was painted to represent life, or rather death, with false hair and beard, and with the muslin drapery managed to expose the stigmata: it was stretched upon a bed strewn with artificial flowers; and it was dreadful. But the poor soul at her devotions there prayed to it in an ecstasy of supplication, flinging her arms asunder with imploring gesture, clasping her hands and bowing her head upon them, while her person swayed from side to side in the abandon of her prayer. Who could she be, and what was her mighty need of blessing or forgiveness? As her wont was, Kitty threw her own soul into the imagined case of the suppliant, the tragedy of her desire or sorrow. Yet, like all who suffer sympathetically, she was not without consolations unknown to the principal; and the waning afternoon, as it lit up the conventional ugliness of the old church, and the paraphernalia of its worship, relieved her emotional self-abandon with a remote sense of content, so that it may have been a jealousy for the integrity of her own revery, as well as a feeling for the poor woman, that made her tremble lest Mr. Arbuton should in some way disparage the spectacle. I suppose that her interest in it was more an aesthetic than a spiritual one; it embodied to her sight many a scene of penitence that had played before her fancy, and I do not know but she would have been willing to have the suppliant guilty of some dreadful misdeed, rather than eating meat last Friday, which was probably her sin. However it was, the ancient crone before that ghastly idol was precious to her, and it seemed too great a favor, when at last the suppliant wiped her eyes, rose trembling from her knees, and approaching Kitty, stretched towards her a shaking palm for charity.

It was a touch that transfigured all, and gave even Mr. Arbuton’s neutrality a light of ideal character. He bestowed the alms craved of him in turn, he did not repulse the beldame’s blessing; and Kitty, who was already moved by his kindness to that poor mourner at the door, forgot that the earlier part of their walk had been so miserable, and climbed back to the Upper Town through the Prescott Gate in greater gayety than she had yet known that day in his company. I think he had not done much to make her cheerful; but it is one of the advantages of a temperament like his, that very little is expected of it, and that it can more easily than any other make the human heart glad; at the least softening in it, the soul frolics with a craven lightsomeness. For this reason Kitty was able to enjoy with novel satisfaction the picturesqueness of Mountain Street, and they both admired the huge shoulder of rock near the gate, with its poplars atop, and the battery at the brink, with the muzzles of the guns thrust forward against the sky. She could not move him to her pleasure in the grotesqueness of the circus-bills plastered half-way up the rock; but he tolerated the levity with which she commented on them, and her light sallies upon passing things, and he said nothing to prevent her reaching home in serene satisfaction.

“Well, Kitty,” said the tenant of the sofa, as Kitty and the colonel drew up to the table on which the tea was laid at the sofa-side, “you’ve had a nice walk, haven’t you?”

“O yes, very nice. That is, the first part of it wasn’t very nice; but after a while we reached an old church in the Lower Town, — which was very interesting, — and then we appeared to cheer up and take a new start.”

“Well,” asked the colonel, “what did you find so interesting at that old church?”

“Why, there was a baby’s funeral; and an old woman, perfectly crushed by some trouble or other, praying before an altar, and—”

“It seems to take very little to cheer you up,” said the colonel. “All you ask of your fellow-beings is a heart-breaking bereavement and a religious agony, and you are lively at once. Some people might require human sacrifices, but you don’t.”

Kitty looked at her cousin a moment with vague amaze. The grossness of the absurdity flashed upon her, and she felt as if another touch must bring the tears. She said nothing; but Mrs. Ellison, who saw only that she was cut off from her heart’s desire of gossip, came to the rescue.

“Don’t answer a word, Kitty, not a single word; I never heard anything more insulting from one cousin to another; and I should say it, if I was brought into a court of justice.”

A sudden burst of laughter from Kitty, who hid her conscious face in her hands, interrupted Mrs. Ellison’s defence.

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, piqued at her desertion, “I hope you understand yourselves. I don’t.” This was Mrs. Ellison’s attitude towards her husband’s whole family, who on their part never had been able to account for the colonel’s choice except as a joke, and sometimes questioned if he had not perhaps carried the joke too far; though they loved her too, for a kind of passionate generosity and sublime, inconsequent unselfishness about her.

“What I want to know, now,” said the colonel, as soon as Kitty would let him, “and I’ll try to put it as politely as I can, is simply this: what made the first part of your walk so disagreeable? You didn’t see a wedding-party, or a child rescued from a horrible death, or a man saved from drowning, or anything of that kind, did you?”

But the colonel would have done better not to say anything. His wife was made peevish by his persistence, and the loss of the harmless pleasure upon which she had counted in the history of Kitty’s walk with Mr. Arbuton. Kitty herself would not laugh again; in fact she grew serious and thoughtful, and presently took up a book, and after that went to her own room, where she stood awhile at her window, and looked out on the garden of the Ursulines. The moon hung full orb in the stainless heaven, and deepened the mystery of the paths and trees, and lit the silvery roofs and chimneys of the convent with tender effulgence. A wandering odor of leaf and flower stole up from the garden, but she perceived the sweetness, like the splendor, with veiled senses. She was turning over in her thought the incidents of her walk, and trying to make out if anything had really happened, first to provoke her against Mr. Arbuton, and then to reconcile her to him. Had he said or done anything about her favorite painting (which she hated now), or the Marches, to offend her? Or if it had been his tone and manner, was his after-conduct at the old church sufficient penance? What was it he had done that common humanity did not require? Was he so very superior to common humanity, that she should meekly rejoice at his kindness to the afflicted mother? Why need she have cared for his forbearance toward the rapt devotee? She became aware that she was ridiculous. “Dick was right,” she confessed, “and I will not let myself be made a goose of”; and when the bugle at the citadel called the soldiers to rest, and the harsh chapel-bell bade the nuns go dream of heaven, she also fell asleep, a smile on her lips and a light heart in her breast.

VI.

A LETTER OF KITTY’S.

Quebec, August — , 1870.

Dear Girls: Since the letter I wrote you a day or two after we got here, we have been going on very much as you might have expected. A whole week has passed, but we still bear our enforced leisure with fortitude; and, though Boston and New York are both fading into the improbable (as far as we are concerned), Quebec continues inexhaustible, and I don’t begrudge a moment of the time we are giving it.

Fanny still keeps her sofa; the first enthusiasm of her affliction has worn away, and she has nothing to sustain her now but planning our expeditions about the city. She has got the map and the history of Quebec by heart, and she holds us to the literal fulfilment of her instructions. On this account, she often has to send Dick and me out together when she would like to keep him with her, for she won’t trust either of us alone, and when we come back she examines us separately to see whether we have skipped anything. This makes us faithful in the smallest things. She says she is determined that Uncle Jack shall have a full and circumstantial report from me of all that he wants to know about the celebrated places here, and I really think he will, if I go on, or am goaded on, in this way. It’s pure devotion to the cause in Fanny, for you know she doesn’t care for such things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying a point. Her chief consolation under her trial of keeping still is to see how I look in her different dresses. She sighs over me as I appear in a new garment, and says, O, if she only had the dressing of me! Then she gets up and limps and hops across the room to where I stand before the glass, and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little dab, to make it lie differently, and then scrambles back to her sofa, and knocks her lame ankle against something, and lies there groaning and enjoying herself like a martyr. On days when she thinks she is never going to get well, she says she doesn’t know why she doesn’t give me her things at once and be done with it; and on days when she thinks she is going to get well right away, she says she will have me one made something like whatever dress I have got on, as soon as she’s home. Then up she’ll jump again for the exact measure, and tell me the history of every stitch, and how she’ll have it altered just the least grain, and differently trimmed to suit my complexion better; and ends by having promised to get me something not in the least like it. You have some idea already of what Fanny is; and all you have got to do is to multiply it by about fifty thousand. Her sprained ankle simply intensifies her whole character.

Besides helping to compose Fanny’s expeditionary corps, and really exerting himself in the cause of Uncle Jack, as he calls it, Dick is behaving beautifully. Every morning, after breakfast, he goes over to the hotel, and looks at the arrivals and reads the newspapers, and though we never get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow feel informed of all that is going on. He has taken to smoking a clay pipe in honor of the Canadian fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf of Indian muslin wound round his hat and flying out behind; because the Quebeckers protect themselves in that way against sunstroke when the thermometer gets up among the sixties. He has also bought a pair of snow-shoes to be prepared for the other extreme of weather, in case anything else should happen to Fanny, and detain us into the winter. When he has rested from his walk to the hotel, we usually go out together and explore, as we do also in the afternoon; and in the evening we walk on Durham Terrace, — a promenade overlooking the river, where the whole cramped and crooked city goes for exercise. It’s a formal parade in the evening; but one morning I went there before breakfast, for a change, and found it the resort of careless ease; two or three idle boys were sunning themselves on the carriages of the big guns that stand on the Terrace, a little dog was barking at the chimneys of the Lower Town, and an old gentleman was walking up and down in his dressing-gown and slippers, just as if it were his own front porch. He looked something like Uncle Jack, and I wished it had been he, — to see the smoke curling softly up from the Lower Town, the bustle about the market-place, and the shipping in the river, and the haze hanging over the water a little way off, and the near hills all silver, and the distant ones blue.

But if we are coming to the grand and the beautiful, why, there is no direction in which you can look about Quebec without seeing it; and it is always mixed up with something so familiar and homelike, that my heart warms to it. The Jesuit Barracks are just across the street from us in the foreground of the most magnificent landscape; the building is — think, you Eriecreekers of an hour! — two hundred years old, and it looks five hundred. The English took it away from the Jesuits in 1760, and have used it as barracks ever since; but it isn’t in the least changed, so that a Jesuit missionary who visited it the other day said that it was as if his brother priests had been driven out of it the week before. Well, you might think so old and so historical a place would be putting on airs, but it takes as kindly to domestic life as a new frame-house, and I am never tired of looking over into the yard at the frowsy soldiers’ wives hanging out clothes, and the unkempt children playing among the burdocks, and chickens and cats, and the soldiers themselves carrying about the officers’ boots, or sawing wood and picking up chips to boil the teakettle. They are off dignity as well as off duty, then; but when they are on both, and in full dress, they make our volunteers (as I remember them) seem very shabby and slovenly.

Over the belfry of the Barracks, our windows command a view of half Quebec, with its roofs and spires dropping down the slope to the Lower Town, where the masts of the ships in the river come tapering up among them, and then of the plain stretching from the river in the valley to a range of mountains against the horizon, with far-off white villages glimmering out of their purple folds. The whole plain is bright with houses and harvest-fields; and the distinctly divided farms — the owners cut them up every generation, and give each son a strip of the entire length — run back on either hand, from the straight roads bordered by poplars, while the highways near the city pass between lovely villas.

But this landscape and the Jesuit Barracks, with all their merits, are nothing to the Ursuline Convent, just under our back windows, which I told you something about in my other letter. We have been reading up its history since, and we know about Madame de la Peltrie, the noble Norman lady who founded it in 1640. She was very rich and very beautiful, and a saint from the beginning, so that when her husband died, and her poor old father wanted her to marry again and not go into a nunnery, she didn’t mind cheating him by a sham marriage with a devout gentleman; and she came to Canada as soon as her father was dead, with another saint, Marie de l’Incarnation, and founded this convent. The first building is standing yet, as strong as ever, though everything but the stone walls was burnt two centuries ago. Only a few years since an old ash-tree, under which the Ursulines first taught the Indian children, blew down, and now a large black cross marks its place. The modern nuns are in the garden nearly the whole morning long, and by night the ghosts of the former nuns haunt it; and in very bright moonlight I myself do a bit of Madame de la Peltrie there, and teach little Indian boys, who dwindle like those in the song, as the moon goes down. It is an enchanted place, and I wish we had it in the back yard at Eriecreek, though I don’t think the neighbors would approve of the architecture. I have adopted two nuns for my own: one is tall and slender and pallid, and you can see at a glance that she broke the heart of a mortal lover, and knew it, when she became the bride of heaven; and the other is short and plain and plump, and looks as comfortable and commonplace as life-after-dinner. When the world is bright I revel in the statue-like sadness of the beautiful nun, who never laughs or plays with the little girl pupils; but when the world is dark — as the best of worlds will be at times for a minute or two — I take to the fat nun, and go in for a clumsy romp with the children; and then I fancy that I am wiser if not better than the fair slim Ursuline. But whichever I am, for the time being, I am vexed with the other; yet they always are together, as if they were counterparts. I think a nice story might be written about them.

In Wolfe’s siege of Quebec this Ursuline Garden of ours was everywhere torn up by the falling bombs, and the sisters were driven out into the world they had forsaken forever, as Fanny has been reading in a little French account of the events, written at the time, by a nun of the General Hospital. It was there the Ursulines took what refuge there was; going from their cloistered school-rooms and their innocent little ones to the wards of the hospital, filled with the wounded and dying of either side, and echoing with their dreadful groans. What a sad, evil, bewildering world they had a glimpse of! In the garden here, our poor Montcalm — I belong to the French side, please, in Quebec — was buried in a grave dug for him by a bursting shell. They have his skull now in the chaplain’s room of the convent, where we saw it the other day. They have made it comfortable in a glass box, neatly bound with black, and covered with a white lace drapery, just as if it were a saint’s. It was broken a little in taking it out of the grave; and a few years ago, some English officers borrowed it to look at, and were horrible enough to pull out some of the teeth. Tell Uncle Jack the head is very broad above the ears, but the forehead is small.

The chaplain also showed us a copy of an old painting of the first convent, Indian lodges, Madame de la Peltrie’s house, and Madame herself, very splendidly dressed, with an Indian chief before her, and some French cavaliers riding down an avenue towards her. Then he showed us some of the nuns’ work in albums, painted and lettered in a way to give me an idea of old missals. By and by he went into the chapel with us, and it gave such a queer notion of his indoors life to have him put on an overcoat and india-rubbers to go a few rods through the open air to the chapel door: he had not been very well, he said. When he got in, he took off his hat, and put on an octagonal priest’s cap, and showed us everything in the kindest way — and his manners were exquisite. There were beautiful paintings sent out from France at the time of the Revolution; and wood-carvings round the high-altar, done by Quebec artists in the beginning of the last century; for he said they had a school of arts then at St. Anne’s, twenty miles below the city. Then there was an ivory crucifix, so life-like that you could scarcely bear to look at it. But what I most cared for was the tiny twinkle of a votive lamp which he pointed out to us in one corner of the nuns’ chapel: it was lit a hundred and fifty years ago by two of our French officers when their sister took the veil, and has never been extinguished since, except during the siege of 1759. Of course, I think a story might be written about this; and the truth is, the possibilities of fiction in Quebec are overpowering; I go about in a perfect haze of romances, and meet people at every turn who have nothing to do but invite the passing novelist into their houses, and have their likenesses done at once for heroes and heroines. They needn’t change a thing about them, but sit just as they are; and if this is in the present, only think how the whole past of Quebec must be crying out to be put into historical romances!

I wish you could see the houses, and how substantial they are. I can only think of Eriecreek as an assemblage of huts and bark-lodges in contrast. Our boarding-house is comparatively slight, and has stone walls only a foot and a half thick, but the average is two feet and two and a half; and the other day Dick went through the Laval University, — he goes everywhere and gets acquainted with everybody, — and saw the foundation walls of the first building, which have stood all the sieges and conflagrations since the seventeenth century; and no wonder, for they are six feet thick, and form a series of low-vaulted corridors, as heavy, he says, as the casemates of a fortress. There is a beautiful old carved staircase there, of the same date; and he liked the president, a priest, ever so much; and we like the looks of all the priests we see; they are so handsome and polite, and they all speak English, with some funny little defect. The other day, we asked such a nice young priest about the way to Hare Point, where it is said the Recollet friars had their first mission on the marshy meadows: he didn’t know of this bit of history, and we showed him our book. “Ah! you see, the book say ‘pro-bab-ly the site.’ If it had said certainly, I should have known. But pro-bab-ly, pro-bab-ly, you see!” However, he showed us the way, and down we went through the Lower Town, and out past the General Hospital to this Pointe aux Lièvres, which is famous also because somewhere near it, on the St. Charles, Jacques Cartier wintered in 1536, and kidnapped the Indian king Donnacona, whom he carried to France. And it was here Montcalm’s forces tried to rally after their defeat by Wolfe. (Please read this several times to Uncle Jack, so that he can have it impressed upon him how faithful I am in my historical researches.)

It makes me dreadfully angry and sad to think the French should have been robbed of Quebec, after what they did to build it. But it is still quite a French city in everything, even to sympathy with France in this Prussian war, which you would hardly think they would care about. Our landlady says the very boys in the street know about the battles, and explain, every time the French are beaten, how they were outnumbered and betrayed, — something the way we used to do in the first of our war.

I suppose you will think I am crazy; but I do wish Uncle Jack would wind up his practice at Eriecreek, and sell the house, and come to live at Quebec. I have been asking prices of things, and I find that everything is very cheap, even according to the Eriecreek standard; we could get a beautiful house on the St. Louis Road for two hundred a year; beef is ten or twelve cents a pound, and everything else in proportion. Then besides that, the washing is sent out into the country to be done by the peasant-women, and there isn’t a crumb of bread baked in the house, but it all comes from the bakers; and only think, girls, what a relief that would be! Do get Uncle Jack to consider it seriously.

Since I began this letter the afternoon has worn away — the light from the sunset on the mountains would glorify our supper-table without extra charge, if we lived here — and the twilight has passed, and the moon has come up over the gables and dormer-windows of the convent, and looks into the garden so invitingly that I can’t help joining her. So I will put my writing by till to-morrow. The going-to-bed bell has rung, and the red lights have vanished one by one from the windows, and the nuns are asleep, and another set of ghosts is playing in the garden with the copper-colored phantoms of the Indian children of long ago. What! not Madame de la Peltrie? Oh! how do they like those little fibs of yours up in heaven?

Sunday afternoon. — As we were at the French cathedral last Sunday, we went to the English to-day; and I could easily have imagined myself in some church of Old England, hearing the royal family prayed for, and listening to the pretty poor sermon delivered with such an English brogue. The people, too, had such Englishy faces and such queer little eccentricities of dress; the young lady that sang contralto in the choir wore a scarf like a man’s on her hat. The cathedral isn’t much, architecturally, I suppose, but it affected me very solemnly, and I couldn’t help feeling that it was as much a part of British power and grandeur as the citadel itself. Over the bishop’s seat drooped the flag of a Crimean regiment, tattered by time and battles, which was hung up here with great ceremonies, in 1860, when the Prince of Wales presented them with new colors; and up in the gallery was a kind of glorified pew for royal highnesses and governor-generals and so forth, to sit in when they are here. There are tablets and monumental busts about the walls; and one to the memory of the Duke of Lenox, the governor-general who died in the middle of the last century from the bite of a fox; which seemed an odd fate for a duke, and somehow made me very sorry for him.

Fanny, of course, couldn’t go to church with me, and Dick got out of it by lingering too late over the newspapers at the hotel, and so I trudged off with our Bostonian, who is still with us here. I didn’t dwell much upon him in my last letter, and I don’t believe now I can make him quite clear to you. He has been a good deal abroad, and he is Europeanized enough not to think much of America, though I can’t find that he quite approves of Europe, and his experience seems not to have left him any particular country in either hemisphere.

He isn’t the Bostonian of Uncle Jack’s imagination, and I suspect he wouldn’t like to be. He is rather too young, still, to have much of an antislavery record, and even if he had lived soon enough, I think that he would not have been a John Brown man. I am afraid that he believes in “vulgar and meretricious distinctions” of all sorts, and that he hasn’t an atom of “magnanimous democracy” in him. In fact, I find, to my great astonishment, that some ideas which I thought were held only in England, and which I had never seriously thought of, seem actually a part of Mr. Arbuton’s nature or education. He talks about the lower classes, and tradesmen, and the best people, and good families, as I supposed nobody in this country ever did, — in earnest. To be sure, I have always been reading of characters who had such opinions, but I thought they were just put into novels to eke out somebody’s unhappiness, — to keep the high-born daughter from marrying beneath her for love, and so on; or else to be made fun of in the person of some silly old woman or some odious snob; and I could hardly believe at first that our Bostonian was serious in talking in that way. Such things sound so differently in real life; and I laughed at them till I found that he didn’t know what to make of my laughing, and then I took leave to differ with him in some of his notions; but he never disputes anything I say, and so makes it seem rude to differ with him. I always feel, though he begins it, as if I had thrust my opinions upon him. But in spite of his weaknesses and disagreeabilities, there is something really high about him; he is so scrupulously true, so exactly just, that Uncle Jack himself couldn’t be more so; though you can see that he respects his virtues as the peculiar result of some extraordinary system. Here at Quebec, though he goes round patronizing the landscape and the antiquities, and coldly smiling at my little enthusiasms, there is really a great deal that ought to be at least improving in him. I get to paying him the same respect that he pays himself, and imbues his very clothes with, till everything he has on appears to look like him and respect itself accordingly. I have often wondered what his hat, his honored hat, for instance, would do, if I should throw it out of the front window. It would make an earthquake, I believe.

He is politely curious about us; and from time to time, in a shrinking, disgusted way, he asks some leading question about Eriecreek, which he doesn’t seem able to form any idea of, as much as I explain it. He clings to his original notion, that it is in the heart of the Oil Regions, of which he has seen pictures in the illustrated papers; and when I assert myself against his opinions, he treats me very gingerly, as if I were an explosive sprite, or an inflammable naiad from a torpedoed well, and it wouldn’t be quite safe to oppose me, or I would disappear with a flash and a bang.

When Dick isn’t able to go with me on Fanny’s account, Mr. Arbuton takes his place in the expeditionary corps; and we have visited a good many points of interest together, and now and then he talks very entertainingly about his travels. But I don’t think they have made him very cosmopolitan. It seems as if he went about with a little imaginary standard, and was chiefly interested in things, to see whether they fitted it or not. Trifling matters annoy him; and when he finds sublimity mixed up with absurdity, it almost makes him angry. One of the oddest and oldest-looking buildings in Quebec is a little one-story house on St. Louis Street, to which poor General Montgomery was taken after he was shot; and it is a pastry-cook’s now, and the tarts and cakes in the window vexed Mr. Arbuton so much — not that he seemed to care for Montgomery — that I didn’t dare to laugh.

I live very little in the nineteenth century at present, and do not care much for people who do. Still I have a few grains of affection left for Uncle Jack, which I want you to give him.

I suppose it will take about six stamps to pay this letter. I forgot to say that Dick goes to be barbered every day at the “Montcalm Shaving and Shampooing Saloon,” so called because they say Montcalm held his last council of war there. It is a queer little steep-roofed house, with a flowering bean up the front, and a bit of garden, full of snap-dragons, before it.

We shall be here a week or so yet, at any rate, and then, I think, we shall go straight home, Dick has lost so much time already.

With a great deal of love,

Your Kitty.

VII.

LOVE’S YOUNG DREAM.

With the two young people whose days now lapsed away together, it could not be said that Monday varied much from Tuesday, or ten o’clock from half past three; they were not always certain what day of the week it was, and sometimes they fancied that a thing which happened in the morning had taken place yesterday afternoon.

But whatever it was, and however uncertain in time and character their slight adventure was to themselves, Mrs. Ellison secured all possible knowledge of it from Kitty. Since it was her misfortune that promoted it, she considered herself a martyr to Kitty’s acquaintance with Mr. Arbuton, and believed that she had the best claim to any gossip that could come of it. She lounged upon her sofa, and listened with a patience superior to the maiden caprice with which her inquisition was sometimes met; for if that delayed her satisfaction it also employed her arts, and the final triumph of getting everything out of Kitty afforded her a delicate self-flattery. But commonly the young girl was ready enough to speak, for she was glad to have the light of a worldlier mind and a greater experience than her own on Mr. Arbuton’s character: if Mrs. Ellison was not the wisest head, still talking him over was at least a relief from thinking him over; and then, at the end of the ends, when were ever two women averse to talk of a man?

She commonly sought Fanny’s sofa when she returned from her rambles through the city, and gave a sufficiently strict account of what had happened. This was done light-heartedly and with touches of burlesque and extravagance at first; but the reports grew presently to have a more serious tone, and latterly Kitty had been so absent at times that she would fall into a puzzled silence in the midst of her narration; or else she would meet a long procession of skilfully marshalled questions with a flippancy that no one but a martyr could have suffered. But Mrs. Ellison bore all and would have borne much more in that cause. Battled at one point, she turned to another, and the sum of her researches was often a clearer perception of Kitty’s state of mind than the young girl herself possessed. For her, indeed, the whole affair was full of mystery and misgiving.

“Our acquaintance has the charm of novelty every time we meet,” she said once, when pressed hard by Mrs. Ellison. “We are growing better strangers, Mr. Arbuton and I. By and by, some morning, we shall not know each other by sight. I can barely recognize him now, though I thought I knew him pretty well once. I want you to understand that I speak as an unbiassed spectator, Fanny.”

“O Kitty! how can you accuse me of trying to pry into your affairs!” cries injured Mrs. Ellison, and settles herself in a more comfortable posture for listening.

“I don’t accuse you of anything. I’m sure you’ve a right to know everything about me. Only, I want you really to know.”

“Yes, dear,” says the matron, with hypocritical meekness.

“Well,” resumes Kitty, “there are things that puzzle me more and more about him, — things that used to amuse me at first, because I didn’t actually believe that they could be, and that I felt like defying afterwards. But now I can’t bear up against them. They frighten me, and seem to deny me the right to be what I believe I am.”

“I don’t understand you, Kitty.”

“Why, you’ve seen how it is with us at home, and how Uncle Jack has brought us up. We never had a rule for anything except to do what was right, and to be careful of the rights of others.”

“Well.”

“Well, Mr. Arbuton seems to have lived in a world where everything is regulated by some rigid law that it would be death to break. Then, you know, at home we are always talking about people, and discussing them; but we always talk of each person for what he is in himself, and I always thought a person could refine himself if he tried, and was sincere, and not conceited. But he seems to judge people according to their origin and locality and calling, and to believe that all refinement must come from just such training and circumstances as his own. Without exactly saying so, he puts everything else quite out of the question. He doesn’t appear to dream that there can be any different opinion. He tramples upon all that I have been taught to believe; and though I cling the closer to my idols, I can’t help, now and then, trying myself by his criterions; and then I find myself wanting in every civilized trait, and my whole life coarse and poor, and all my associations hopelessly degraded. I think his ideas are hard and narrow, and I believe that even my little experience would prove them false; but then, they are his, and I can’t reconcile them with what I see is good in him.”

Kitty spoke with half-averted face where she sat beside one of the front windows, looking absently out on the distant line of violet hills beyond Charlesbourg, and now and then lifting her glove from her lap and letting it drop again.

“Kitty,” said Mrs. Ellison in reply to her difficulties, “you oughtn’t to sit against a light like that. It makes your profile quite black to any one back in the room.”

“O well, Fanny, I’m not black in reality.”

“Yes, but a young lady ought always to think how she is looking. Suppose some one was to come in.”

“Dick’s the only one likely to come in just now, and he wouldn’t mind it. But if you like it better, I’ll come and sit by you,” said Kitty, and took her place beside the sofa.

Her hat was in her hand, her sack on her arm; the fatigue of a recent walk gave her a soft pallor, and languor of face and attitude. Mrs. Ellison admired her pretty looks with a generous regret that they should be wasted on herself, and then asked, “Where were you this afternoon?”

“O, we went to the Hôtel Dieu, for one thing, and afterwards we looked into the court-yard of the convent; and there another of his pleasant little traits came out, — a way he has of always putting you in the wrong even when it’s a matter of no consequence any way, and there needn’t be any right or wrong about it. I remembered the place because Mrs. March, you know, showed us a rose that one of the nuns in the hospital gave her, and I tried to tell Mr. Arbuton about it, and he graciously took it as if poor Mrs. March had made an advance towards his acquaintance. I do wish you could see what a lovely place that court-yard is, Fanny. It’s so strange that such a thing should be right there, in the heart of this crowded city; but there it was, with its peasant cottage on one side, and its long, low barns on the other, and those wide-horned Canadian cows munching at the racks of hay outside, and pigeons and chickens all about among their feet—”

“Yes, yes; never mind all that, Kitty. You know I hate nature. Go on about Mr. Arbuton,” said Mrs. Ellison, who did not mean a sarcasm.

“It looked like a farmyard in a picture, far out in the country somewhere,” resumed Kitty; “and Mr. Arbuton did it the honor to say it was just like Normandy.”

“Kitty!”

“He did, indeed, Fanny; and the cows didn’t go down on their knees out of gratitude, either. Well, off on the right were the hospital buildings climbing up, you know, with their stone walls and steep roofs, and windows dropped about over them, like our convent here; and there was an artist there, sketching it all; he had such a brown, pleasant face, with a little black mustache and imperial, and such gay black eyes that nobody could help falling in love with him; and he was talking in such a free-and-easy way with the lazy workmen and women overlooking him. He jotted down a little image of the Virgin in a niche on the wall, and one of the people called out, — Mr. Arbuton was translating,— ‘Look there! with one touch he’s made our Blessed Lady.’ ‘O,’ says the painter, ‘that’s nothing; with three touches I can make the entire Holy Family.’ And they all laughed; and that little joke, you know, won my heart, — I don’t hear many jokes from Mr. Arbuton; — and so I said what a blessed life a painter’s must be, for it would give you a right to be a vagrant, and you could wander through the world, seeing everything that was lovely and funny, and nobody could blame you; and I wondered everybody who had the chance didn’t learn to sketch. Mr. Arbuton took it seriously, and said people had to have something more than the chance to learn before they could sketch, and that most of them were an affliction with their sketchbooks, and he had seen too much of the sad effects of drawing from casts. And he put me in the wrong, as he always does. Don’t you see? I didn’t want to learn drawing; I wanted to be a painter, and go about sketching beautiful old convents, and sit on camp-stools on pleasant afternoons, and joke with people. Of course, he couldn’t understand that. But I know the artist could. O Fanny, if it had only been the painter whose arm I took that first day on the boat, instead of Mr. Arbuton! But the worst of it is, he is making a hypocrite of me, and a cowardly, unnatural girl. I wanted to go nearer and look at the painter’s sketch; but I was ashamed to say I’d never seen a real artist’s sketch before, and I’m getting to be ashamed, or to seem ashamed, of a great many innocent things. He has a way of not seeming to think it possible that any one he associates with can differ from him. And I do differ from him. I differ from him as much as my whole past life differs from his; I know I’m just the kind of production that he disapproves of, and that I’m altogether irregular and unauthorized and unjustifiable; and though it’s funny to have him talking to me as if I must have the sympathy of a rich girl with his ideas, it’s provoking, too, and it’s very bad for me. Up to the present moment, Fanny, if you want to know, that’s the principal effect of Mr. Arbuton on me. I’m being gradually snubbed and scared into treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”

Mrs. Ellison did not find all this so very grievous, for she was one of those women who like a snub from the superior sex, if it does not involve a slight to their beauty or their power of pleasing. But she thought it best not to enter into the question, and merely said, “But surely, Kitty, there are a great many things in Mr. Arbuton that you must respect.”

“Respect? O, yes, indeed! But respect isn’t just the thing for one who seems to consider himself sacred. Say revere, Fanny; say revere!”

Kitty had risen from her chair, but Mrs. Ellison waved her again to her seat with an imploring gesture. “Don’t go, Kitty; I’m not half done with you yet. You must tell me something more. You’ve stirred me up so, now. I know you don’t always have such disagreeable times. You’ve often come home quite happy. What do you generally find to talk about? Do tell me some particulars for once.”

“Why, little topics come up, you know. But sometimes we don’t talk at all, because I don’t like to say what I think or feel, for fear I should be thinking or feeling something vulgar. Mr. Arbuton is rather a blight upon conversation in that way. He makes you doubtful whether there isn’t something a little common in breathing and the circulation of the blood, and whether it wouldn’t be true refinement to stop them.”

“Stuff, Kitty! He’s very cultivated, isn’t he? Don’t you talk about books? He’s read everything, I suppose.”

“O yes, he’s read enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing. Only sometimes it seems to me as if he hadn’t read because he loved it, but because he thought it due to himself. But maybe I’m mistaken. I could imagine a delicate poem shutting up half its sweetness from his cold, cold scrutiny, — if you will excuse the floweriness of the idea.”

“Why, Kitty! don’t you think he’s refined? I’m sure, I think he’s a very refined person.”

“He’s a very elaborated person. But I don’t think it would make much difference to him what our opinion of him was. His own good opinion would be quite enough.”

“Is he — is he — always agreeable?”

“I thought we were discussing his mind, Fanny. I don’t know that I feel like enlarging upon his manners,” said Kitty, slyly.

“But surely, Kitty,” said the matron, with an air of argument, “there’s some connection between his mind and his manners.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I don’t think there’s much between his heart and his manners. They seem to have been put on him instead of having come out of him. He’s very well trained, and nine times out of ten he’s so exquisitely polite that it’s wonderful; but the tenth time he may say something so rude that you can’t believe it.”

“Then you like him nine times out of ten.”

“I didn’t say that. But for the tenth time, it’s certain, his training doesn’t hold out, and he seems to have nothing natural to fall back upon. But you can believe that, if he knew he’d been disagreeable, he’d be sorry for it.”

“Why, then, Kitty, how can you say that there’s no connection between his heart and manners? This very thing proves that they come from his heart. Don’t be illogical, Kitty,” said Mrs. Ellison, and her nerves added, sotto voce, “if you are so abominably provoking!”

“O,” responded the young girl, with the kind of laugh that meant it was, after all, not such a laughing matter, “I didn’t say he’d be sorry for you! Perhaps he would; but he’d be certain to be sorry for himself. It’s with his politeness as it is with his reading; he seems to consider it something that’s due to himself as a gentleman to treat people well; and it isn’t in the least as if he cared for them. He wouldn’t like to fail in such a point.”

“But, Kitty, isn’t that to his credit?”

“Maybe. I don’t say. If I knew more about the world, perhaps I should admire it. But now, you see,” — and here Kitty’s laugh grew more natural, and she gave a subtle caricature of Mr. Arbuton’s air and tone as she spoke,— “I can’t help feeling that it’s a little — vulgar.”

Mrs. Ellison could not quite make out how much Kitty really meant of what she had said. She gasped once or twice for argument; then she sat up, and beat the sofa-pillows vengefully in composing herself anew, and finally, “Well, Kitty, I’m sure I don’t know what to make of it all,” she said with a sigh.

“Why, we’re not obliged to make anything of it, Fanny, there’s that comfort,” replied Kitty; and then there was a silence, while she brooded over the whole affair of her acquaintance with Mr. Arbuton, which this talk had failed to set in a more pleasant or hopeful light. It had begun like a romance; she had pleased her fancy, if not her heart, with the poetry of it; but at last she felt exiled and strange in his presence. She had no right to a different result, even through any deep feeling in the matter; but while she owned, with her half-sad, half-comical consciousness, that she had been tacitly claiming and expecting too much, she softly pitied herself, with a kind of impersonal compassion, as if it wore some other girl whose pretty dream had been broken. Its ruin involved the loss of another ideal; for she was aware that there had been gradually rising in her mind an image of Boston, different alike from the holy place of her childhood, the sacred city of the antislavery heroes and martyrs, and from the jesting, easy, sympathetic Boston of Mr. and Mrs. March. This new Boston with which Mr. Arbuton inspired her was a Boston of mysterious prejudices and lofty reservations; a Boston of high and difficult tastes, that found its social ideal in the Old World, and that shrank from contact with the reality of this; a Boston as alien as Europe to her simple experiences, and that seemed to be proud only of the things that were unlike other American things; a Boston that would rather perish by fire and sword than be suspected of vulgarity; a critical, fastidious, and reluctant Boston, dissatisfied with the rest of the hemisphere, and gelidly self-satisfied in so far as it was not in the least the Boston of her fond preconceptions. It was, doubtless, no more the real Boston we know and love, than either of the others: and it perplexed her more than it need, even if it had not been mere phantasm. It made her suspicious of Mr. Arbuton’s behavior towards her, and observant of little things that might very well have otherwise escaped her. The bantering humor, the light-hearted trust and self-reliance with which she had once met him deserted her, and only returned fitfully when some accident called her out of herself, and made her forget the differences that she now too plainly saw in their ways of thinking and feeling. It was a greater and greater effort to place herself in sympathy with him; she relaxed into a languid self-contempt, as if she had been playing a part, when she succeeded. “Sometimes, Fanny,” she said, now, after a long pause, speaking in behalf of that other girl she had been thinking of, “it seems to me as if Mr. Arbuton were all gloves and slim umbrella, — the mere husk of well dressed culture and good manners. His looks do promise everything; but O dear me! I should be sorry for any one that was in love with him. Just imagine some girl meeting with such a man, and taking a fancy to him! I suppose she never would quite believe but that he must somehow be what she first thought him, and she would go down to her grave believing that she had failed to understand him. What a curious story it would make!”

“Then, why don’t you write it, Kitty?” asked Mrs. Ellison. “No one could do it better.”

Kitty flushed quickly; then she smiled: “O, I don’t think I could do it at all. It wouldn’t be a very easy story to work out. Perhaps he might never do anything positively disagreeable enough to make anybody condemn him. The only way you could show his character would be to have her do and say hateful things to him, when she couldn’t help it, and then repent of it, while he was impassively perfect through everything. And perhaps, after all, he might be regarded by some stupid people as the injured one. Well, Mr. Arbuton has been very polite to us, I’m sure, Fanny,” she said after another pause, as she rose from her chair, “and maybe I’m unjust to him. I beg his pardon of you; and I wish,” she added with a dull disappointment quite her own, and a pang of surprise at words that seemed to utter themselves, “that he would go away.”

“Why, Kitty, I’m shocked,” said Mrs. Ellison, rising from her cushions.

“Yes; so am I, Fanny.”

“Are you really tired of him, then?”

Kitty did not answer, but turned away her face a little, where she stood beside the chair in which she had been sitting.

Mrs. Ellison put out her hand towards her. “Kitty, come here,” she said with imperious tenderness.

“No, I won’t, Fanny,” answered the young girl, in a trembling voice. She raised the glove that she had been nervously swinging back and forth, and bit hard upon the button of it. “I don’t know whether I’m tired of him, — though he isn’t a person to rest one a great deal, — but I’m tired of it. I’m perplexed and troubled the whole time, and I don’t see any end to it. Yes, I wish he would go away! Yes, he is tiresome. What is he staying here for? If he thinks himself so much better than all of us, I wonder he troubles himself with our company. It’s quite time for him to go. No, Fanny, no,” cried Kitty with a little broken laugh, still rejecting the outstretched hand, “I’ll be flat in private, if you please.” And dashing her hand across her eyes, she flitted out of the room. At the door she turned and said,

“You needn’t think it’s what you think it is, Fanny.”

“No indeed, dear; you’re just overwrought.”

“For I really wish he’d go.”

But it was on this very day that Mr. Arbuton found it harder than ever to renew his resolution of quitting Quebec, and cutting short at once his acquaintance with these people. He had been pledging himself to this in some form every day, and every morrow had melted his resolution away. Whatever was his opinion of Colonel and Mrs. Ellison, it is certain that, if he considered Kitty merely in relation to the present, he could not have said how, by being different, she could have been better than she was. He perceived a charm, that would be recognized anywhere, in her manner, though it was not of his world; her fresh pleasure in all she saw, though he did not know how to respond to it, was very winning; he respected what he thought the good sense running through her transports; he wondered at the culture she had somewhere, somehow got; and he was so good as to find that her literary enthusiasms had nothing offensive, but were as pretty and naive as a girl’s love of flowers. Moreover, he approved of some personal attributes of hers: a low, gentle voice, tender long-lashed eyes; a trick of drooping shoulders, and of idle hands fallen into the lap, one in the other’s palm; a serene repose of face; a light and eager laugh. There was nothing so novel in those traits, and in different combination he had seen them a thousand times; yet in her they strangely wrought upon his fancy. She had that soft, kittenish way with her which invites a caressing patronage, but, as he learned, she had also the kittenish equipment for resenting over-condescension; and she never took him half so much as when she showed the high spirit that was in her, and defied him most.

For here and now, it was all well enough; but he had a future to which he owed much, and a conscience that would not leave him at rest. The fascination of meeting her so familiarly under the same roof, the sorcery of the constant sight of her, were becoming too much; it would not do on any account; for his own sake he must put an end to it. But from hour to hour he lingered upon his unenforced resolve. The passing days, that brought him doubts in which he shuddered at the great difference between himself and her and her people, brought him also moments of blissful forgetfulness in which his misgivings were lost in the sweetness of her looks, or the young grace of her motions. Passing, the days rebuked his delay in vain; a week and two weeks slipped from under his feet, and still he had waited for fate to part him and his folly. But now at last he would go and in the evening, after his cigar on Durham Terrace, he knocked at Mrs. Ellison’s door to say that on the day after to-morrow he should push on to the White Mountains.

He found the Ellisons talking over an expedition for the next morning, in which he was also to take part. Mrs. Ellison had already borne her full share in the preparation; for, being always at hand there in her room, and having nothing to do, she had been almost a willing victim to the colonel’s passion for information at second-hand, and had probably come to know more than any other American woman of Arnold’s expedition against Quebec in 1775. She know why the attack was planned, and with what prodigious hazard and heroical toil and endurance it was carried out; how the dauntless little army of riflemen cut their way through the untrodden forests of Maine and Canada, and beleaguered the gray old fortress on her rock till the red autumn faded into winter, and, on the last bitter night of the year, flung themselves against her defences, and fell back, leaving half their number captive, Montgomery dead, and Arnold wounded, but haplessly destined to survive.

“Yes,” said the colonel, “considering the age in which they lived, and their total lack of modern improvements, mental, moral, and physical, we must acknowledge that they did pretty well. It wasn’t on a very large scale; but I don’t see how they could have been braver, if every man had been multiplied by ten thousand. In fact, as it’s going to be all the same thing a hundred years from now, I don’t know but I’d as soon be one of the men that tried to take Quebec as one of the men that did take Atlanta. Of course, for the present, and on account of my afflicted family, Mr. Arbuton, I’m willing to be what and where I am; but just see what those fellows did.” And the colonel drew from his glowing memory of Mrs. Ellison’s facts a brave historical picture of Arnold’s expedition. “And now we’re going to-morrow morning to look up the scene of the attack on the 31st of December. Kitty, sing something.”

At another time Kitty might have hesitated; but that evening she was so at rest about Mr. Arbuton, so sure she cared nothing for his liking or disliking anything she did, that she sat down at the piano, and sang a number of songs, which I suppose were as unworthy the cultivated ear as any he had heard. But though they were given with an untrained voice and a touch as little skilled as might be, they pleased, or else the singer pleased. The simple-hearted courage of the performance would alone have made it charming; and Mr. Arbuton had no reason to ask himself how he should like it in Boston, if he were married, and should hear it from his wife there. Yet when a young man looks at a young girl or listens to her, a thousand vagaries possess his mind, — formless imaginations, lawless fancies. The question that presented itself remotely, like pain in a dream, dissolved in the ripple of the singer’s voice, and left his revery the more luxuriously untroubled for having been.

He remembered, after saying good-night, that he had forgotten something: it was to tell them he was going away.

VIII.

NEXT MORNING.

Quebec lay shining in the tender oblique light of the northern sun when they passed next morning through the Upper Town market-place and took their way towards Hope Gate, where they were to be met by the colonel a little later. It is easy for the alert tourist to lose his course in Quebec, and they, who were neither hurried nor heedful, went easily astray. But the street into which they had wandered, if it did not lead straight to Hope Gate, had many merits, and was very characteristic of the city. Most of the houses on either hand were low structures of one story, built heavily of stone or stuccoed brick, with two dormer-windows, full of house-plants, in each roof; the doors were each painted of a livelier color than the rest of the house, and each glistened with a polished brass knob, a large brass knocker, or an intricate bell-pull of the same resplendent metal, and a plate bearing the owner’s name and his professional title, which if not avocat was sure to be notaire, so well is Quebec supplied with those ministers of the law. At the side of each house was a porte-cochère, and in this a smaller door. The thresholds and doorsteps were covered with the neatest and brightest oil-cloth; the wooden sidewalk was very clean, like the steep, roughly paved street itself; and at the foot of the hill down which it sloped was a breadth of the city wall, pierced for musketry, and, past the corner of one of the houses, the half-length of cannon showing. It had the charm of those ancient streets, dear to Old-World travel, in which the past and the present, decay and repair, peace and war, have made friends in an effect that not only wins the eye, but, however illogically, touches the heart; and over the top of the wall it had a stretch of such landscape as I know not what Old-World street can command: the St. Lawrence, blue and wide; a bit of the white village of Beauport on its bank; then a vast breadth of pale-green, upward-sloping meadows; then the purple heights; and the hazy heaven over them. Half-way down this happy street sat the artist whom they had seen before in the court of the Hôtel Dieu; he was sketching something, and evoking the curious life of the neighborhood. Two schoolboys in the uniform of the Seminary paused to look at him as they loitered down the pavement; a group of children encircled him; a little girl with her hair in blue ribbons talked at a window about him to some one within; a young lady opened her casement and gazed furtively at him; a door was set quietly ajar, and an old grandam peeped out, shading her eyes with her hand; a woman in deep mourning gave his sketch a glance as she passed; a calash with a fat Quebecker in it ran into a cart driven by a broad-hatted peasant-woman, so eager were both to know what he was drawing; a man lingered even at the head of the street, as if it were any use to stop there.

As Kitty and Mr. Arbuton passed him, the artist glanced at her with the smile of a man who believes he knows how the case stands, and she followed his eye in its withdrawal towards the bit he was sketching: an old roof, and on top of this a balcony, shut in with green blinds; yet higher, a weather-worn, wood-colored gallery, pent-roofed and balustered, with a geranium showing through the balusters; a dormer-window with hook and tackle, beside an Oriental-shaped pavilion with a shining tin dome, — a picturesque confusion of forms which had been, apparently, added from time to time without design, and yet were full of harmony. The unreasonable succession of roofs had lifted the top far above the level of the surrounding houses, into the heart of the morning light, and some white doves circled about the pavilion, or nestled cooing upon the window-sill, where a young girl sat and sewed.

“Why, it’s Hilda in her tower,” said Kitty, “of course! And this is just the kind of street for such a girl to look down into. It doesn’t seem like a street in real life, does it? The people all look as if they had stepped out of stories, and might step back any moment; and these queer little houses: they’re the very places for things to happen in!”

Mr. Arbuton smiled forbearingly, as she thought, at this burst, but she did not care, and she turned, at the bottom of the street, and lingered a few moments for another look at the whole charming picture; and then he praised it, and said that the artist was making a very good sketch. “I wonder Quebec isn’t infested by artists the whole summer long,” he added. “They go about hungrily picking up bits of the picturesque, along our shores and country roads, when they might exchange their famine for a feast by coming here.”

“I suppose there’s a pleasure in finding out the small graces and beauties of the poverty-stricken subjects, that they wouldn’t have in better ones, isn’t there?” asked Kitty. “At any rate, if I were to write a story, I should want to take the slightest sort of plot, and lay the scene in the dullest kind of place, and then bring out all their possibilities. I’ll tell you a book after my own heart: ‘Details,’ — just the history of a week in the life of some young people who happen together in an old New England country-house; nothing extraordinary, little, every-day things told so exquisitely, and all fading naturally away without any particular result, only the full meaning of everything brought out.”

“And don’t you think it’s rather a sad ending for all to fade away without any particular result?” asked the young man, stricken he hardly knew how or where. “Besides, I always thought that the author of that book found too much meaning in everything. He did for men, I’m sure; but I believe women are different, and see much more than we do in a little space.”

“‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For this plain reason, man is not a fly,’

nor a woman,” mocked Kitty. “Have you read his other books?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t they delightful?”

“They’re very well; and I always wondered he could write them. He doesn’t look it.”

“O, have you ever seen him?”

“He lives in Boston, you know.”

“Yes, yes; but—” Kitty could not go on and say that she had not supposed authors consorted with creatures of common clay; and Mr. Arbuton, who was the constant guest of people who would have thought most authors sufficiently honored in being received among them to meet such men as he, was very far from guessing what was in her mind.

He waited a moment for her, and then said, “He’s a very ordinary sort of man, — not what one would exactly call a gentleman, you know, in his belongings, — and yet his books have nothing of the shop, nothing professionally literary, about them. It seems as if almost any of us might have written them.”

Kitty glanced quickly at him to see if he were jesting; but Mr. Arbuton was not easily given to irony, and he was now very much in earnest about drawing on his light overcoat, which he had hitherto carried on his arm with that scrupulous consideration for it which was not dandyism, but part of his self-respect; apparently, as an overcoat, ho cared nothing for it; as the overcoat of a man of his condition he cared everything; and now, though the sun was so bright on the open spaces, in these narrow streets the garment was comfortable.

At another time, Kitty would have enjoyed the care with which he smoothed it about his person, but this profanation of her dearest ideals made the moment serious. Her pulse quickened, and she said, “I’m afraid I can’t enter into your feelings. I wasn’t taught to respect the idea of a gentleman very much. I’ve often heard my uncle say that, at the best, it was a poor excuse for not being just honest and just brave and just kind, and a false pretence of being something more. I believe, if I were a man, I shouldn’t want to be a gentleman. At any rate, I’d rather be the author of those books, which any gentleman might have written, than all the gentlemen who didn’t, put together.”

In the career of her indignation she had unconsciously hurried her companion forward so swiftly that they had reached Hope Gate as she spoke, and interrupted the revery in which Colonel Ellison, loafing up against the masonry, was contemplating the sentry in his box.

“You’d better not overheat yourself so early in the day, Kitty,” said her cousin, serenely, with a glance at her flushed face; “this expedition is not going to be any joke.”

Now that Prescott Gate, by which so many thousands of Americans have entered Quebec since Arnold’s excursionists failed to do so, is demolished, there is nothing left so picturesque and characteristic as Hope Gate, and I doubt if anywhere in Europe there is a more mediæval-looking bit of military architecture. The heavy stone gateway is black with age, and the gate, which has probably never been closed in our century, is of massive frame set thick with mighty bolts and spikes. The wall here sweeps along the brow of the crag on which the city is built, and a steep street drops down, by stone-parapeted curves and angles, from the Upper to the Lower Town, where, in 1775, nothing but a narrow lane bordered the St. Lawrence. A considerable breadth of land has since been won from the river, and several streets and many piers now stretch between this alley and the water; but the old Sault au Matelot still crouches and creeps along under the shelter of the city wall and the overhanging rock, which is thickly bearded with weeds and grass, and trickles with abundant moisture. It must be an ice-pit in winter, and I should think it the last spot on the continent for the summer to find; but when the summer has at last found it, the old Sault au Matelot puts on a vagabond air of Southern leisure and abandon, not to be matched anywhere out of Italy. Looking from that jutting rock near Hope Gate, behind which the defeated Americans took refuge from the fire of their enemies, the vista is almost unique for a certain scenic squalor and gypsy luxury of color: sag-roofed barns and stables, and weak-backed, sunken-chested workshops of every sort lounge along in tumble-down succession, and lean up against the cliff in every imaginable posture of worthlessness and decrepitude; light wooden galleries cross to them from the second stories of the houses which back upon the alley; and over these galleries flutters, from a labyrinth of clothes-lines, a variety of bright-colored garments of all ages, sexes, and conditions; while the footway underneath abounds in gossiping women, smoking men, idle poultry, cats, children, and large, indolent Newfoundland dogs.

“It was through this lane that Arnold’s party advanced almost to the foot of Mountain Street, where they were to be joined by Montgomery’s force in an attempt to surprise Prescott Gate,” said the colonel, with his unerring second-hand history.

“‘You that will follow me to this attempt,’

‘Wait till you see the whites of their eyes, and then fire low,’ and so forth. By the way, do you suppose anybody did that at Bunker Hill, Mr. Arbuton? Come, you’re a Boston man. My experience is that recruits chivalrously fire into the air without waiting to see the enemy at all, let alone the whites of their eyes. Why! aren’t you coming?” he asked, seeing no movement to follow in Kitty or Mr. Arbuton.

“It doesn’t look very pleasant under foot, Dick,” suggested Kitty.

“Well, upon my word! Is this your uncle’s niece? I shall never dare to report this panic at Eriecreek.”

“I can see the whole length of the alley, and there’s nothing in it but chickens and domestic animals.”

“Very well, as Fanny says; when Uncle Jack — he’s your uncle — asks you about every inch of the ground that Arnold’s men were demoralized over, I hope you’ll know what to say.”

Kitty laughed and said she should try a little invention, if her Uncle Jack came down to inches.

“All right, Kitty; you can go along St. Paul Street, there, and Mr. Arbuton and I will explore the Sault au Matelot, and come out upon you, covered with glory, at the other end.”

“I hope it’ll be glory,” said Kitty, with a glance at the lane, “but I think it’s more likely to be feathers and chopped straw. — Good by, Mr. Arbuton.”

“Not in the least,” answered the young man; “I’m going with you.”

The colonel feigned indignant surprise, and marched briskly down the Sault au Matelot alone, while the others took their way through St. Paul Street in the same direction, amidst the bustle and business of the port, past the banks and great commercial houses, with the encounter of throngs of seafaring faces of many nations, and, at the corner of St. Peter Street, a glimpse of the national flag thrown out from the American Consulate, which intensified for untravelled Kitty her sense of remoteness from her native land. At length they turned into the street now called Sault au Matelot, into which opens the lane once bearing that name, and strolled idly along in the cool shadow, silence, and solitude of the street. She was strangely released from the constraint which Mr. Arbuton usually put upon her. A certain defiant ease filled her heart; she felt and thought whatever she liked, for the first time in many days; while he went puzzling himself with the problem of a young lady who despised gentlemen, and yet remained charming to him.

A mighty marine smell of oakum and salt-fish was in the air, and “O,” sighed Kitty, “doesn’t it make you long for distant seas? Shouldn’t you like to be shipwrecked for half a day or so, Mr. Arbuton?”

“Yes; yes, certainly,” he replied absently, and wondered what she laughed at. The silence of the place was broken only by the noise of coopering which seemed to be going on in every other house; the solitude relieved only by the Newfoundland dogs that stretched themselves upon the thresholds of the cooper-shops. The monotony of these shops and dogs took Kitty’s humor, and as they went slowly by she made a jest of them, as she used to do with things she saw.

“But here’s a door without a dog!” she said, presently. “This can’t be a genuine cooper-shop, of course, without a dog. O, that accounts for it, perhaps!” she added, pausing before the threshold, and glancing up at a sign— “Académie commerciale et littéraire” — set under an upper window. “What a curious place for a seat of learning! What do you suppose is the connection between cooper-shops and an academical education, Mr. Arbuton?”

She stood looking up at the sign that moved her mirth, and swinging her shut parasol idly to and fro, while a light of laughter played over her face.

Suddenly a shadow seemed to dart betwixt her and the open doorway, Mr. Arbuton was hurled violently against her, and, as she struggled to keep her footing under the shock, she saw him bent over a furious dog, that hung from the breast of his overcoat, while he clutched its throat with both his hands.

He met the terror of her face with a quick glance. “I beg your pardon; don’t call out please,” he said. But from within the shop came loud cries and maledictions, “O nom de Dieu c’est le boule-dogue du capitaine anglais!” with appalling screams for help; and a wild, uncouth little figure of a man, bareheaded, horror-eyed came flying out of the open door. He wore a cooper’s apron, and he bore in one hand a red-hot iron, which, with continuous clamor, he dashed against the muzzle of the hideous brute. Without a sound the dog loosed his grip, and, dropping to the ground, fled into the obscurity of the shop as silently as he had launched himself out of it, while Kitty yet stood spell-bound, and before the crowd that the appeal of Mr. Arbuton’s rescuer had summoned could see what had happened.

Mr. Arbuton lifted himself, and looked angrily round upon the gaping spectators, who began, one by one, to take in their heads from their windows and to slink back to their thresholds as if they had been guilty of something much worse than a desire to succor a human being in peril.

“Good heavens!” said Mr. Arbuton, “what an abominable scene!” His face was deadly pale, as he turned from these insolent intruders to his deliverer, whom he saluted, with a “Merci bien!” spoken in a cold, steady voice. Then he drew off his overcoat, which had been torn by the dog’s teeth and irreparably dishonored in the encounter. He looked at it shuddering, with a countenance of intense disgust, and made a motion as if to hurl it into the street. But his eye again fell upon the cooper’s squalid little figure, as he stood twisting his hands into his apron, and with voluble eagerness protesting that it was not his dog, but that of the English ship-captain, who had left it with him, and whom he had many a time besought to have the beast killed. Mr. Arbuton, who seemed not to hear what he was saying, or to be so absorbed in something else as not to consider whether he was to blame or not, broke in upon him in French: “You’ve done me the greatest service. I cannot repay you, but you must take this,” he said, as he thrust a bank-note into the little man’s grimy hand.

“O, but it is too much! But it is like a monsieur so brave, so—”

“Hush! It was nothing,” interrupted Mr. Arbuton again. Then he threw his overcoat upon the man’s shoulder. “If you will do me the pleasure to receive this also? Perhaps you can make use of it.”

“Monsieur heaps me with benefits; — monsieur—” began the bewildered cooper; but Mr. Arbuton turned abruptly away from him toward Kitty, who trembled at having shared the guilt of the other spectators, and seizing her hand, he placed it on his arm, where he held it close as he strode away, leaving his deliverer planted in the middle of the sidewalk and staring after him. She scarcely dared ask him if he were hurt, as she found herself doing now with a faltering voice.

“No, I believe not,” he said with a glance at the frock-coat, which was buttoned across his chest and was quite intact; and still he strode on, with a quick glance at every threshold which did not openly declare a Newfoundland dog.

It had all happened so suddenly, and in so brief a time, that she might well have failed to understand it, even if she had seen it all. It was barely intelligible to Mr. Arbuton himself, who, as Kitty had loitered mocking and laughing before the door of the shop, chanced to see the dog crouched within, and had only time to leap forward and receive the cruel brute on his breast as it flung itself at her.

He had not thought of the danger to himself in what he had done. He knew that he was unhurt, but he did not care for that; he cared only that she was safe; and as he pressed her hand tight against his heart, there passed through it a thrill of inexpressible tenderness, a quick, passionate sense of possession, a rapture as of having won her and made her his own forever, by saving her from that horrible risk. The maze in which he had but now dwelt concerning her seemed an obsolete frivolity of an alien past; all the cold doubts and hindering scruples which he had felt from the first were gone; gone all his care for his world. His world? In that supreme moment, there was no world but in the tender eyes at which he looked down with a glance which she knew not how to interpret.

She thought that his pride was deeply wounded at the ignominy of his adventure, — for she was sure he would care more for that than for the danger, — and that if she spoke of it she might add to the angry pain he felt. As they hurried along she waited for him to speak, but he did not; though always, as he looked down at her with that strange look, he seemed about to speak.

Presently she stopped, and, withdrawing her hand from his arm, she cried, “Why, we’ve forgotten my cousin!”

“O — yes!” said Mr. Arbuton with a vacant smile.

Looking back they saw the colonel standing on the pavement near the end of the old Sault au Matelot, with his hands in his pockets, and steadfastly staring at them. He did not relax the severity of his gaze when they returned to join him, and appeared to find little consolation in Kitty’s “O Dick, I forgot all about you,” given with a sudden, inexplicable laugh, interrupted and renewed as some ludicrous image seemed to come and go in her mind.

“Well, this may be very flattering, Kitty, but it isn’t altogether comprehensible,” said he, with a keen glance at both their faces. “I don’t know what you’ll say to Uncle Jack. It’s not forgetting me alone: it’s forgetting the whole American expedition against Quebec.”

The colonel waited for some reply; but Kitty dared not attempt an explanation, and Mr. Arbuton was not the man to seem to boast of his share of the adventure by telling what had happened, even if he had cared at that moment to do so. Her very ignorance of what he had dared for her only confirmed his new sense of possession; and, if he could, he would not have marred the pleasure he felt by making her grateful yet, sweet as that might be in its time. Now he liked to keep his knowledge, to have had her unwitting compassion, to hear her pour out her unwitting relief in this laugh, while he superiorly permitted it.

“I don’t understand this thing,” said the colonel, through whose dense, masculine intelligence some suspicions of love-making were beginning to pierce. But he dismissed them as absurd, and added, “However, I’m willing to forgive, and you’ve done the forgetting; and all that I ask now is the pleasure of your company on the spot where Montgomery fell. Fanny’ll never believe I’ve found it unless you go with me,” he appealed, finally.

“O, we’ll go, by all means,” said Mr. Arbuton, unconsciously speaking, as by authority, for both.

They came into busier streets of the Port again, and then passed through the square of the Lower Town Market, with the market-house in the midst, the shops and warehouses on either side, the long row of tented booths with every kind of peasant-wares to sell, and the wide stairway dropping to the river which brought the abundance of the neighboring country to the mart. The whole place was alive with country-folk in carts and citizens on foot. At one point a gayly painted wagon was drawn up in the midst of a group of people to whom a quackish-faced Yankee was hawking, in his own personal French, an American patent-medicine, and making his audience giggle. Because Kitty was amused at this, Mr. Arbuton found it the drollest thing imaginable, but saw something yet droller when she made the colonel look at a peasant, standing in one corner beside a basket of fowls, which a woman, coming up to buy, examined as if the provision were some natural curiosity, while a crowd at once gathered round.

“It requires a considerable population to make a bargain, up here,” remarked the colonel. “I suppose they turn out the garrison when they sell a beef.” For both buyer and seller seemed to take advice of the bystanders, who discussed and inspected the different fowls as if nothing so novel as poultry had yet fallen in their way.

At last the peasant himself took up the fowls and carefully scrutinized them.

“Those chickens, it seems, never happened to catch his eye before,” interpreted Kitty; and Mr. Arbuton, who was usually very restive during such banter, smiled as if it were the most admirable fooling, or the most precious wisdom, in the world. He made them wait to see the bargain out, and could, apparently, have lingered there forever.

But the colonel had a conscience about Montgomery, and he hurried them away, on past the Queen’s Wharf, and down the Cove Road to that point where the scarped and rugged breast of the cliff bears the sign, “Here fell Montgomery,” though he really fell, not half-way up the height, but at the foot of it, where stood the battery that forbade his juncture with Arnold at Prescott Gate.

A certain wildness yet possesses the spot: the front of the crag, topped by the high citadel-wall, is so grim, and the few tough evergreens that cling to its clefts are torn and twisted by the winter blasts, and the houses are decrepit with age, showing here and there the scars of the frequent fires that sweep the Lower Town.

It was quite useless: neither the memories of the place nor their setting were sufficient to engage the wayward thoughts of these curiously assorted pilgrims; and the colonel, after some attempts to bring the matter home to himself and the others, was obliged to abandon Mr. Arbuton to his tender reveries of Kitty, and Kitty to her puzzling over the change in Mr. Arbuton. His complaisance made her uncomfortable and shy of him, it was so strange; it gave her a little shiver, as if he were behaving undignifiedly.

“Well, Kitty,” said the colonel, “I reckon Uncle Jack would have made more out of this than we’ve done. He’d have had their geology out of these rocks, any way.”

IX.

MR. ARBUTON’S INFATUATION.

Kitty went as usual to Mrs. Ellison’s room after her walk, but she lapsed into a deep abstraction as she sat down beside the sofa.

“What are you smiling at?” asked Mrs. Ellison, after briefly supporting her abstraction.

“Was I smiling?” asked Kitty, beginning to laugh. “I didn’t know it.”

“What has happened so very funny?”

“Why, I don’t know whether it’s so very funny or not. I believe it isn’t funny at all.”

“Then what makes you laugh?”

“I don’t know. Was I—”

“Now don’t ask me if you were laughing, Kitty. It’s a little too much. You can talk or not, as you choose; but I don’t like to be turned into ridicule.”

“O Fanny, how can you? I was thinking about something very different. But I don’t see how I can tell you, without putting Mr. Arbuton in a ludicrous light, and it isn’t quite fair.”

“You’re very careful of him, all at once,” said Mrs. Ellison. “You didn’t seem disposed to spare him yesterday so much. I don’t understand this sudden conversion.”

Kitty responded with a fit of outrageous laughter. “Now I see I must tell you,” she said, and rapidly recounted Mr. Arbuton’s adventure.

“Why, I never knew anything so cool and brave, Fanny, and I admired him more than ever I did; but then I couldn’t help seeing the other side of it, you know.”

“What other side? I don’t know.”

“Well, you’d have had to laugh yourself, if you’d seen the lordly way he dismissed the poor people who had come running out of their houses to help him, and his stateliness in rewarding that little cooper, and his heroic parting from his cherished overcoat, — which of course he can’t replace in Quebec, — and his absent-minded politeness in taking my hand under his arm, and marching off with me so magnificently. But the worst thing, Fanny,” — and she bowed herself under a tempest of long-pent mirth,— “the worst thing was, that the iron, you know, was the cooper’s branding-iron, and I had a vision of the dog carrying about on his nose, as long as he lived, the monogram that marks the cooper’s casks as holding a certain number of gallons—”

“Kitty, don’t be — sacrilegious!” cried Mrs. Ellison.

“No, I’m not,” she retorted, gasping and panting. “I never respected Mr. Arbuton so much, and you say yourself I haven’t shown myself so careful of him before. But I never was so glad to see Dick in my life, and to have some excuse for laughing. I didn’t dare to speak to Mr. Arbuton about it, for he couldn’t, if he had tried, have let me laugh it out and be done with it. I trudged demurely along by his side, and neither of us mentioned the matter to Dick,” she concluded breathlessly. Then, “I don’t know why I should tell you now; it seems wicked and cruel,” she said penitently, almost pensively.

Mrs. Ellison had not been amused. She said, “Well, Kitty, in some girls I should say it was quite heartless to do as you’ve done.”

“It’s heartless in me, Fanny; and you needn’t say such a thing. I’m sure I didn’t utter a syllable to wound him, and just before that he’d been very disagreeable, and I forgave him because I thought he was mortified. And you needn’t say that I’ve no feeling”; and thereupon she rose, and, putting her hands into her cousin’s, “Fanny,” she cried, vehemently, “I have been heartless. I’m afraid I haven’t shown any sympathy or consideration. I’m afraid I must have seemed dreadfully callous and hard. I oughtn’t to have thought of anything but the danger to him; and it seems to me now I scarcely thought of that at all. O, how rude it was of me to see anything funny in it! What can I do?”

“Don’t go crazy, at any rate, Kitty. He doesn’t know that you’ve been laughing about him. You needn’t do anything.”

“O yes, I need. He doesn’t know that I’ve been laughing about him to you; but, don’t you see, I laughed when we met Dick; and what can he think of that?”

“He just thinks you were nervous, I suppose.”

“O, do you suppose he does, Fanny? O, I wish I could believe that! O, I’m so horribly ashamed of myself! And here yesterday I was criticising him for being unfeeling, and now I’ve been a thousand times worse than he has ever been, or ever could be! O dear, dear, dear!”

“Kitty! hush!” exclaimed Mrs. Ellison; “you run on like a wild thing, and you’re driving me distracted, by not being like yourself.”

“O, it’s very well for you to be so calm; but if you didn’t know what to do, you wouldn’t.”

“Yes, I would; I don’t, and I am.”

“But what shall I do?” And Kitty plucked away the hands which Fanny had been holding and wrung them. “I’ll tell you what I can do,” she suddenly added, while a gleam of relief dawned upon her face: “I can bear all his disagreeable ways after this, as long as he stays, and not say anything back. Yes, I’ll put up with everything. I’ll be as meek! He may patronize me and snub me and put me in the wrong as much as he pleases. And then he won’t be approaching my behavior. O Fanny!”

Upon this, Mrs. Ellison said that she was going to give her a good scolding for her nonsense, and pulled her down and kissed her, and said that she had not done anything, and was, nevertheless, consoled at her resolve to expiate her offence by respecting thenceforward Mr. Arbuton’s foibles and prejudices.

It is not certain how far Kitty would have succeeded in her good purposes: these things, so easily conceived, are not of such facile execution; she passed a sleepless night of good resolutions and schemes of reparation; but, fortunately for her, Mr. Arbuton’s foibles and prejudices seemed to have fallen into a strange abeyance. The change that had come upon him that day remained; he was still Mr. Arbuton, but with a difference. He could not undo his whole inherited and educated being, and perhaps no chance could deeply affect it without destroying the man. He continued hopelessly superior to Colonel and Mrs. Ellison; but it is not easy to love a woman and not seek, at least before marriage, to please those dear to her. Mr. Arbuton had contested his passion at every advance; he had firmly set his face against the fancy that, at the beginning, invested this girl with a charm; he had only done the things afterwards that mere civilization required; he had suffered torments of doubt concerning her fitness for himself and his place in society; he was not sure yet that her unknown relations were not horribly vulgar people; even yet, he was almost wholly ignorant of the circumstances and conditions of her life. But how he saw her only in the enrapturing light of his daring for her sake, of a self-devotion that had seemed to make her his own; and he behaved toward her with a lover’s self-forgetfulness, — or something like it: say a perfect tolerance, a tender patience, in which it would have been hard to detect the lurking shadow of condescension.

He was fairly domesticated with the family. Mrs. Ellison’s hurt, in spite of her many imprudences, was decidedly better, and sometimes she made a ceremony of being helped down from her room to dinner; but she always had tea beside her sofa, and he with the others drank it there. Few hours of the day passed in which they did not meet in that easy relation which establishes itself among people sojourning in summer idleness under the same roof. In the morning he saw the young girl fresh and glad as any flower of the garden beneath her window, while the sweet abstraction of her maiden dreams yet hovered in her eyes. At night he sat with her beside the lamp whose light, illuming a little world within, shut out the great world outside, and seemed to be the soft effulgence of her presence, as she sewed, or knit, or read, — a heavenly spirit of home. Sometimes he heard her talking with her cousin, or lightly laughing after he had said good night; once, when he woke, she seemed to be looking out of her window across the moonlight in the Ursulines’ Garden while she sang a fragment of song. To meet her on the stairs or in the narrow entries; or to encounter her at the doors, and make way for her to pass with a jest and blush and flutter; to sit down at table with her three times a day, — was a potent witchery. There was a rapture in her shawl flung over the back of a chair; her gloves, lying light as fallen leaves on the table, and keeping the shape of her hands, were full of winning character; and all the more unaccountably they touched his heart because they had a certain careless, sweet shabbiness about the finger-tips.

He found himself hanging upon her desultory talk with Fanny about the set of things and the agreement of colors. There was always more or less of this talk going on, whatever the main topic was, for continual question arose in the minds of one or other lady concerning those adaptations of Mrs. Ellison’s finery to the exigencies of Kitty’s daily life. They pleased their innocent hearts with the secrecy of the affair, which, in the concealments it required, the sudden difficulties it presented, and the guiltless equivocations it inspired, had the excitement of intrigue. Nothing could have been more to the mind of Mrs. Ellison than to deck Kitty for this perpetual masquerade; and, since the things were very pretty, and Kitty was a girl in every motion of her being, I do not see how anything could have delighted her more than to wear them. Their talk effervesced with the delicious consciousness that he could not dream of what was going on, and babbled over with mysterious jests and laughter, which sometimes he feared to be at his expense, and so joined in, and made them laugh the more at his misconception. He went and came among them at will; he had but to tap at Mrs. Ellison’s door, and some voice of unaffected cordiality welcomed him in; he had but to ask, and Kitty was frankly ready for any of those strolls about Quebec in which most of their waking hours were dreamed away.

The gray Lady of the North cast her spell about them, — the freshness of her mornings, the still heat of her middays, the slant, pensive radiance of her afternoons, and the pale splendor of her auroral nights. Never was city so faithfully explored; never did city so abound in objects of interest; for Kitty’s love of the place was boundless, and his love for her was inevitable friendship with this adoptive patriotism.

“I didn’t suppose you Western people cared for these things,” he once said; “I thought your minds were set on things new and square.”

“But how could you think so?” replied Kitty, tolerantly. “It’s because we have so many new and square things that we like the old crooked ones. I do believe I should enjoy Europe even better than you. There’s a forsaken farm-house near Eriecreek, dropping to pieces amongst its wild-grown sweetbriers and quince-bushes, that I used to think a wonder of antiquity because it was built in 1815. Can’t you imagine how I must feel in a city like this, that was founded nearly three centuries ago, and has suffered so many sieges and captures, and looks like pictures of those beautiful old towns I can never see?”

“O, perhaps you will see them some day!” he said, touched by her fervor.

“I don’t ask it at present: Quebec’s enough. I’m in love with the place. I wish I never had to leave it. There isn’t a crook, or a turn, or a tin-roof, or a dormer-window, or a gray stone in it that isn’t precious.”

Mr. Arbuton laughed. “Well, you shall be sovereign lady of Quebec for me. Shall we have the English garrison turned out?”

“No; not unless you can bring back Montcalm’s men to take their places.”

This might be as they sauntered out of one of the city gates, and strayed through the Lower Town till they should chance upon some poor, bare-interiored church, with a few humble worshippers adoring their Saint, with his lamps alight before his picture; or as they passed some high convent-wall, and caught the strange, metallic clang of the nuns’ voices singing their hymns within. Sometimes they whiled away the hours on the Esplanade, breathing its pensive sentiment of neglect and incipient decay, and pacing up and down over the turf athwart the slim shadows of the poplars; or, with comfortable indifference to the local observances, sat in talk on the carriage of one of the burly, uncared-for guns, while the spider wove his web across the mortar’s mouth, and the grass nodded above the tumbled pyramids of shot, and the children raced up and down, and the nursery-maids were wooed of the dapper sergeants, and the red-coated sentry loitered lazily to and fro before his box. On the days of the music, they listened to the band in the Governor’s Garden, and watched the fine world of the old capital in flirtation with the blond-whiskered officers; and on pleasant nights they mingled with the citizen throng that filled the Durham Terrace, while the river shaped itself in the lights of its shipping, and the Lower Town, with its lamps, lay, like a nether firmament, two hundred feet below them, and Point Levis glittered and sparkled on the thither shore, and in the northern sky the aurora throbbed in swift pulsations of violet and crimson. They liked to climb the Break-Neck Steps at Prescott Gate, dropping from the Upper to the Lower Town, which reminded Mr. Arbuton of Naples and Trieste, and took Kitty with the unassociated picturesqueness of their odd shops and taverns, and their lofty windows green with house-plants. They would stop and look up at the geraniums and fuchsias, and fall a thinking of far different things, and the friendly, unbusy people would come to their doors and look up with them. They recognized the handsome, blond young man, and the pretty, gray-eyed girl; for people in Quebec have time to note strangers who linger there, and Kitty and Mr. Arbuton had come to be well-known figures, different from the fleeting tourists on their rounds; and, indeed, as sojourners they themselves perceived their poetic distinction from mere birds of passage.

Indoors they resorted much to the little entry-window looking out on the Ursulines’ Garden. Two chairs stood confronted there, and it was hard for either of the young people to pass them without sinking a moment into one of them, and this appeared always to charm another presence into the opposite chair. There they often lingered in the soft forenoons, talking in desultory phrase of things far and near, or watching, in long silences, the nuns pacing up and down in the garden below, and waiting for the pensive, slender nun, and the stout, jolly nun whom Kitty had adopted, and whom she had gayly interpreted to him as an allegory of Life in their quaint inseparableness; and they played that the influence of one or other nun was in the ascendant, according as their own talk was gay or sad. In their relation, people are not so different from children; they like the same thing over and over again; they like it the better the less it is in itself.

At times Kitty would come with a book in her hand (one finger shut in to keep the place), — some latest novel, or a pirated edition of Longfellow, recreantly purchased at a Quebec bookstore; and then Mr. Arbuton must ask to see it; and he read romance or poetry to her by the hour. He showed to as much advantage as most men do in the serious follies of wooing; and an influence which he could not defy, or would not, shaped him to all the sweet, absurd demands of the affair. From time to time, recollecting himself, and trying to look consequences in the face, he gently turned the talk upon Eriecreek, and endeavored to possess himself of some intelligible image of the place, and of Kitty’s home and friends. Even then, the present was so fair and full of content, that his thoughts, when they reverted to the future, no longer met the obstacles that had made him recoil from it before. Whatever her past had been, he could find some way to weaken the ties that bound her to it; a year or two of Europe would leave no trace of Eriecreek; without effort of his, her life would adapt itself to his own, and cease to be a part of the lives of those people there; again and again his amiable imaginations — they were scarcely intents — accomplished themselves in many a swift, fugitive revery, while the days went by, and the shadow of the ivy in the window at which they sat fell, in moonlight and sunlight, upon Kitty’s cheeks, and the fuchsia kissed her hair with its purple and crimson blossom.

X.

MR. ARBUTON SPEAKS.

Mrs. Ellison was almost well; she had already been shopping twice in the Rue Fabrique, and her recovery was now chiefly retarded by the dress-maker’s delays in making up a silk too precious to be risked in the piece with the customs officers, at the frontier. Moreover, although the colonel was beginning to chafe, she was not loath to linger yet a few days for the sake of an affair to which her suffering had been a willing sacrifice. In return for her indefatigable self-devotion, Kitty had lately done very little. She ungratefully shrunk more and more from those confidences to which her cousin’s speeches covertly invited; she openly resisted open attempts upon her knowledge of facts. If she was not prepared to confess everything to Fanny, it was perhaps because it was all so very little, or because a young girl has not, or ought not to have, a mind in certain matters, or else knows it not, till it is asked her by the one first authorized to learn it. The dream in which she lived was flattering and fair; and it wholly contented her imagination while it lulled her consciousness. It moved from phase to phase without the harshness of reality, and was apparently allied neither to the future nor to the past. She herself seemed to have no more fixity or responsibility in it than the heroine of a romance.

As their last week in Quebec drew to its close, only two or three things remained for them to do, as tourists; and chief among the few unvisited shrines of sentiment was the site of the old Jesuit mission at Sillery.

“It won’t do not to see that, Kitty,” said Mrs. Ellison, who, as usual, had arranged the details of the excursion, and now announced them. “It’s one of the principal things here, and your Uncle Jack would never be satisfied if you missed it. In fact, it’s a shame to have left it so long. I can’t go with you, for I’m saving up my strength for our picnic at Château-Bigot to-morrow; and I want you, Kitty, to see that the colonel sees everything. I’ve had trouble enough, goodness knows, getting the facts together for him.” This was as Kitty and Mr. Arbuton sat waiting in Mrs. Ellison’s parlor for the delinquent colonel, who had just stepped round to the Hôtel St. Louis and was to be back presently. But the moment of his return passed; a quarter-hour of grace; a half-hour of grim magnanimity, — and still no colonel. Mrs. Ellison began by saying that it was perfectly abominable, and left herself, in a greater extremity, with nothing more forcible to add than that it was too provoking. “It’s getting so late now,” she said at last, “that it’s no use waiting any longer, if you mean to go at all, to-day; and to-day’s the only day you can go. There, you’d better drive on without him. I can’t bear to have you miss it.” And, thus adjured, the younger people rose and went.

When the high-born Noël Brulart de Sillery, Knight of Malta and courtier of Marie de Medicis, turned from the vanities of this world and became a priest, Canada was the fashionable mission of the day, and the noble neophyte signalized his self-renunciation by giving of his great wealth for the conversion of the Indian heathen. He supplied the Jesuits with money to maintain a religious establishment near Quebec; and the settlement of red Christians took his musical name, which the region still keeps. It became famous at once as the first residence of the Jesuits and the nuns of the Hôtel Dieu, who wrought and suffered for religion there amidst the terrors of pestilence, Iroquois, and winter. It was the scene of miracles and martyrdoms, and marvels of many kinds, and the centre of the missionary efforts among the Indians. Indeed, few events of the picturesque early history of Quebec left it untouched; and it is worthy to be seen, no less for the wild beauty of the spot than for its heroical memories. About a league from the city, where the irregular wall of rock on which Quebec is built recedes from the river, and a grassy space stretches between the tide and the foot of the woody steep, the old mission and the Indian village once stood; and to this day there yet stands the stalwart frame of the first Jesuit Residence, modernized, of course, and turned to secular uses, but firm as of old, and good for a century to come. All round is a world of lumber, and rafts of vast extent cover the face of the waters in the ample cove, — one of many that indent the shore of the St. Lawrence. A careless village straggles along the roadside and the river’s margin; huge lumber-ships are loading for Europe in the stream; a town shines out of the woods on the opposite shore; nothing but a friendly climate is needed to make this one of the most charming scenes the heart could imagine.

Kitty and Mr. Arbuton drove out towards Sillery by the St. Louis Road, and already the jealous foliage that hides the pretty villas and stately places of that aristocratic suburb was tinged in here and there a bough with autumnal crimson or yellow; in the meadows here and there a vine ran red along the grass; the loath choke-cherries were ripening in the fence corners; the air was full of the pensive jargoning of the crickets and grasshoppers, and all the subtle sentiment of the fading summer. Their hearts were open to every dreamy influence of the time; their driver understood hardly any English, and their talk might safely be made up of those harmless egotisms which young people exchange, — those strains of psychological autobiography which mark advancing intimacy and in which they appear to each other the most uncommon persons that ever lived, and their experiences and emotions and ideas are the more surprisingly unique because exactly alike.

It seemed a very short league to Sillery when they left the St. Louis Road, and the driver turned his horses’ heads towards the river, down the winding sylvan way that descended to the shore; and they had not so much desire, after all, to explore the site of the old mission. Nevertheless, they got out and visited the little space once occupied by the Jesuit chapel, where its foundations may yet be traced in the grass, and they read the inscription on the monument lately raised by the parish to the memory of the first Jesuit missionary to Canada, who died at Sillery. Then there seemed nothing more to do but admire the mighty rafts and piles of lumber; but their show of interest in the local celebrity had stirred the pride of Sillery, and a little French boy entered the chapel-yard, and gave Kitty a pamphlet history of the place, for which he would not suffer himself to be paid; and a sweet-faced young Englishwoman came out of the house across the way, and hesitatingly asked if they would not like to see the Jesuit Residence. She led them indoors, and showed them how the ancient edifice had been encased by the modern house, and bade them note, from the deep shelving window-seats, that the stone walls were three feet thick. The rooms were low-ceiled and quaintly shaped, but they borrowed a certain grandeur from this massiveness; and it was easy to figure the priests in black and the nuns in gray in those dim chambers, which now a life so different inhabited. Behind the house was a plot of grass, and thence the wooded hill rose steep.

“But come up stairs,” said the ardent little hostess to Kitty, when her husband came in, and had civilly welcomed the strangers, “and I’ll show you my own room, that’s as old as any.”

They left the two men below, and mounted to a large room carpeted and furnished in modern taste. “We had to take down the old staircase,” she continued, “to get our bedstead up,” — a magnificent structure which she plainly thought well worth the sacrifice; and then she pointed out divers remnants of the ancient building. “It’s a queer place to live in; but we’re only here for the summer”; and she went on to explain, with a pretty naïveté, how her husband’s business brought him to Sillery from Quebec in that season. They were descending the stairs, Kitty foremost, as she added, “This is my first housekeeping, you know, and of course it would be strange anywhere; but you can’t think how funny it is here. I suppose,” she said, shyly, but as if her confidences merited some return, while Kitty stepped from the stairway face to face with Mr. Arbuton, who was about to follow them, with the lady’s husband,— “I suppose this is your wedding-journey.”

A quick alarm flamed through the young girl, and burned out of her glowing cheeks. This pleasant masquerade of hers must look to others like the most intentional love-making between her and Mr. Arbuton, — no dreams either of them, nor figures in a play, nor characters in a romance; nay, on one spectator, at least, it had shed the soft lustre of a honeymoon. How could it be otherwise? Here on this fatal line of wedding-travel, — so common that she remembered Mrs. March half apologized for making it her first tour after marriage, — how could it happen but that two young people together as they were should be taken for bride and bridegroom? Moreover, and worst of all, he must have heard that fatal speech!

He was pale, if she was flushed, and looked grave, as she fancied; but he passed on up the stairs, and she sat down to wait for his return.

“I used to notice so many couples from the States when we lived in the city,” continued the hospitable mistress of the house, “but I don’t think they often came out to Sillery. In fact, you’re the only pair that’s come this summer; and so, when you seemed interested about the mission, I thought you wouldn’t mind if I spoke to you, and asked you in to see the house. Most of the Americans stay long enough to visit the citadel, and the Plains of Abraham, and the Falls at Montmorenci, and then they go away. I should think they’d be tired always doing the same things. To be sure, they’re always different people.”

It was unfair to let her entertainer go on talking for quantity in this way; and Kitty said how glad she was to see the old Residence, and that she should always be grateful to her for asking them in. She did not disabuse her of her error; it cost less to leave it alone; and when Mr. Arbuton reappeared, she took leave of those kind people with a sort of remote enjoyment of the wife’s mistakenness concerning herself. Yet, as the young matron and her husband stood beside the carriage repeating their adieux, she would fain have prolonged the parting forever, so much she dreaded to be left alone with Mr. Arbuton. But, left alone with him, her spirits violently rose; and as they drove along under the shadow of the cliff, she descanted in her liveliest strain upon the various interests of the way; she dwelt on the beauty of the wide, still river, with the ships at anchor in it; she praised the lovely sunset-light on the other shore; she commented lightly on the village, through which they passed, with the open doors and the suppers frying on the great stoves set into the partition-walls of each cleanly home; she made him look at the two great stairways that climb the cliff from the lumber-yards to the Plains of Abraham, and the army of laborers, each with his empty dinner-pail in hand, scaling the once difficult heights on their way home to the suburb of St. Roch; she did whatever she could to keep the talk to herself and yet away from herself. Part of the way the village was French and neat and pleasant, then it grovelled with Irish people, and ceased to be a tolerable theme for discourse; and so at last the silence against which she had battled fell upon them and deepened like a spell that she could not break.

It would have been better for Mr. Arbuton’s success just then if he had not broken it. But failure was not within his reckoning; for he had so long regarded this young girl de haut en bas, to say it brutally, that he could not imagine she should feel any doubt in accepting him. Moreover, a magnanimous sense of obligation mingled with his confident love, for she must have known that he had overheard that speech at the Residence. Perhaps he let this feeling color his manner, however faintly. He lacked the last fine instinct; he could not forbear; and he spoke while all her nerves and fluttering pulses cried him mercy.

XI.

KITTY ANSWERS.

It was dimmest twilight when Kitty entered Mrs. Ellison’s room and sank down on the first chair in silence.

“The colonel met a friend at the St. Louis, and forgot about the expedition, Kitty,” said Fanny, “and he only came in half an hour ago. But it’s just as well; I know you’ve had a splendid time. Where’s Mr. Arbuton?”

Kitty burst into tears.

“Why, has anything happened to him?” cried Mrs. Ellison, springing towards her.

“To him? No! What should happen to him?” Kitty demanded with an indignant accent.

“Well, then, has anything happened to you?”

“I don’t know if you can call it happening. But I suppose you’ll be satisfied now, Fanny. He’s offered himself to me.” Kitty uttered the last words with a sort of violence, as if since the fact must be stated, she wished it to appear in the sharpest relief.

“O dear!” said Mrs. Ellison, not so well satisfied as the successful match-maker ought to be. So long as it was a marriage in the abstract, she had never ceased to desire it; but as the actual union of Kitty and this Mr. Arbuton, of whom, really, they knew so little, and of whom, if she searched her heart, she had as little liking as knowledge, it was another affair. Mrs. Ellison trembled at her triumph, and began to think that failure would have been easier to bear. Were they in the least suited to each other? Would she like to see poor Kitty chained for life to that impassive egotist, whose very merits were repellent, and whose modesty even seemed to convict and snub you? Mrs. Ellison was not able to put the matter to herself with moderation, either way; doubtless she did Mr. Arbuton injustice now. “Did you accept him?” she whispered, feebly.

“Accept him?” repeated Kitty. “No!”

“O dear!” again sighed Mrs. Ellison, feeling that this was scarcely better, and not daring to ask further.

“I’m dreadfully perplexed, Fanny,” said Kitty, after waiting for the questions which did not come, “and I wish you’d help me think.”

“I will, darling. But I don’t know that I’ll be of much use. I begin to think I’m not very good at thinking.”

Kitty, who longed chiefly to get the situation more distinctly before herself, gave no heed to this confession, but went on to rehearse the whole affair. The twilight lent her its veil; and in the kindly obscurity she gathered courage to face all the facts, and even to find what was droll in them.

“It was very solemn, of course, and I was frightened; but I tried to keep my wits about me, and not to say yes, simply because that was the easiest thing. I told him that I didn’t know, — and I don’t; and that I must have time to think, — and I must. He was very ungenerous, and said he had hoped I had already had time to think; and he couldn’t seem to understand, or else I couldn’t very well explain, how it had been with me all along.”

“He might certainly say you had encouraged him,” Mrs. Ellison remarked, thoughtfully.

“Encouraged him, Fanny? How can you accuse me of such indelicacy?”

“Encouraging isn’t indelicacy. The gentlemen have to be encouraged, or of course they’d never have any courage. They’re so timid, naturally.”

“I don’t think Mr. Arbuton is very timid. He seemed to think that he had only to ask as a matter of form, and I had no business to say anything. What has he ever done for me? And hasn’t he often been intensely disagreeable? He oughtn’t to have spoken just after overhearing what he did. It was horrid to do so. He was very obtuse, too, not to see that girls can’t always be so certain of themselves as men, or, if they are, don’t know they are as soon as they’re asked.”

“Yes,” interrupted Mrs. Ellison, “that’s the way with girls. I do believe that most of them — when they’re young like you, Kitty — never think of marriage as the end of their flirtations. They’d just like the attentions and the romance to go on forever, and never turn into anything more serious; and they’re not to blame for that, though they do get blamed for it.”

“Certainly,” assented Kitty, eagerly, “that’s it; that’s just what I was saying; that’s the very reason why girls must have time to make up their minds. You had, I suppose.”

“Yes, two minutes. Poor Dick was going back to his regiment, and stood with his watch in his hand. I said no, and called after him to correct myself. But, Kitty, if the romance had happened to stop without his saying anything, you wouldn’t have liked that either, would you?”

“No,” faltered Kitty, “I suppose not.”

“Well, then, don’t you see? That’s a great point in his favor. How much time did you want, or did he give you?”

“I said I should answer before we left Quebec,” answered Kitty, with a heavy sigh.

“Don’t you know what to say now?”

“I can’t tell. That’s what I want you to help me think out.”

Mrs. Ellison was silent for a moment before she said, “Well, then, I suppose we shall have to go back to the very beginning.”

“Yes,” assented Kitty, faintly.

“You did have a sort of fancy for him the first time you saw him, didn’t you?” asked Mrs. Ellison, coaxingly, while forcing herself to be systematic and coherent, by a mental strain of which no idea can be given.

“Yes,” said Kitty, yet more faintly, adding, “but I can’t tell just what sort of a fancy it was. I suppose I admired him for being handsome and stylish, and for having such exquisite manners.”

“Go on,” said Mrs. Ellison. “And after you got acquainted with him?”

“Why, you know we’ve talked that over once already, Fanny.”

“Yes, but we oughtn’t to skip anything now,” replied Mrs. Ellison, in a tone of judicial accuracy which made Kitty smile.

But she quickly became serious again, and said, “Afterwards I couldn’t tell whether to like him or not, or whether he wanted me to. I think he acted very strangely for a person in — love. I used to feel so troubled and oppressed when I was with him. He seemed always to be making himself agreeable under protest.”

“Perhaps that was just your imagination, Kitty.”

“Perhaps it was; but it troubled me just the same.”

“Well, and then?”

“Well, and then after that day of the Montgomery expedition, he seemed to change altogether, and to try always to be pleasant, and to do everything he could to make me like him. I don’t know how to account for it. Ever since then he’s been extremely careful of me, and behaved — of course without knowing it — as if I belonged to him already. Or maybe I’ve imagined that too. It’s very hard to tell what has really happened the last two weeks.”

Kitty was silent, and Mrs. Ellison did not speak at once. Presently she asked, “Was his acting as if you belonged to him disagreeable?”

“I can’t tell. I think it was rather presuming. I don’t know why he did it.”

“Do you respect him?” demanded Mrs. Ellison.

“Why, Fanny, I’ve always told you that I did respect some things in him.”

Mrs. Ellison had the facts before her, and it rested upon her to sum them up, and do something with them. She rose to a sitting posture, and confronted her task.

“Well, Kitty, I’ll tell you: I don’t really know what to think. But I can say this: if you liked him at first, and then didn’t like him, and afterwards he made himself more agreeable, and you didn’t mind his behaving as if you belonged to him, and you respected him, but after all didn’t think him fascinating—”

“He is fascinating — in a kind of way. He was, from the beginning. In a story his cold, snubbing, putting-down ways would have been perfectly fascinating.”

“Then why didn’t you take him?”

“Because,” answered Kitty, between laughing and crying, “it isn’t a story, and I don’t know whether I like him.”

“But do you think you might get to like him?”

“I don’t know. His asking brings back all the doubts I ever had of him, and that I’ve been forgetting the past two weeks. I can’t tell whether I like him or not. If I did, shouldn’t I trust him more?”

“Well, whether you are in love or not, I’ll tell you what you are, Kitty,” cried Mrs. Ellison, provoked with her indecision, and yet relieved that the worst, whatever it was, was postponed thereby for a day or two.

“What!”

“You’re—”

But at this important juncture the colonel came lounging in, and Kitty glided out of the room.

“Richard,” said Mrs. Ellison, seriously, and in a tone implying that it was the colonel’s fault, as usual, “you know what has happened, I suppose.”

“No, my dear, I don’t; but no matter: I will presently, I dare say.”

“O, I wish for once you wouldn’t be so flippant. Mr. Arbuton has offered himself to Kitty.”

Colonel Ellison gave a quick, sharp whistle of amazement, but trusted himself to nothing more articulate.

“Yes,” said his wife, responding to the whistle, “and it makes me perfectly wretched.”

“Why, I thought you liked him.”

“I didn’t like him; but I thought it would be an excellent thing for Kitty.”

“And won’t it?”

“She doesn’t know.”

“Doesn’t know?”

“No.”

The colonel was silent, while Mrs. Ellison stated the case in full, and its pending uncertainty. Then he exclaimed vehemently, as if his amazement had been growing upon him, “This is the most astonishing thing in the world! Who would ever have dreamt of that young iceberg being in love?”

“Haven’t I told you all along he was?”

“O yes, certainly; but that might be taken either way, you know. You would discover the tender passion in the eye of a potato.”

“Colonel Ellison,” said Fanny with sternness, “why do you suppose he’s been hanging about us for the last four weeks? Why should he have stayed in Quebec? Do you think he pitied me, or found you so very agreeable?”

“Well, I thought he found us just tolerable, and was interested in the place.”

Mrs. Ellison made no direct reply to this pitiable speech, but looked a scorn which, happily for the colonel, the darkness hid. Presently she said that bats did not express the blindness of men, for any bat could have seen what was going on.

“Why,” remarked the colonel, “I did have a momentary suspicion that day of the Montgomery business; they both looked very confused, when I saw them at the end of that street, and neither of them had anything to say; but that was accounted for by what you told me afterwards about his adventure. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the matter. The idea of his being in love seemed too ridiculous.”

“Was it ridiculous for you to be in love with me?”

“No; and yet I can’t praise my condition for its wisdom, Fanny.”

“Yes! that’s like men. As soon as one of them is safely married, he thinks all the love-making in the world has been done forever, and he can’t conceive of two young people taking a fancy to each other.”

“That’s something so, Fanny. But granting — for the sake of argument merely — that Boston has been asking Kitty to marry him, and she doesn’t know whether she wants him, what are we to do about it? I don’t like him well enough to plead his cause; do you? When does Kitty think she’ll be able to make up her mind?”

“She’s to let him know before we leave.”

The colonel laughed. “And so he’s to hang about here on uncertainties for two whole days! That is rather rough on him. Fanny, what made you so eager for this business?”

“Eager? I wasn’t eager.”

“Well, then, — reluctantly acquiescent?”

“Why, she’s so literary and that.”

“And what?”

“How insulting! — Intellectual, and so on; and I thought she would be just fit to live in a place where everybody is literary and intellectual. That is, I thought that, if I thought anything.”

“Well,” said the colonel, “you may have been right on the whole, but I don’t think Kitty is showing any particular force of mind, just now, that would fit her to live in Boston. My opinion is, that it’s ridiculous for her to keep him in suspense. She might as well answer him first as last. She’s putting herself under a kind of obligation by her delay. I’ll talk to her—”

“If you do, you’ll kill her. You don’t know how she’s wrought up about it.”

“O well, I’ll be careful of her sensibilities. It’s my duty to speak with her. I’m here in the place of a parent. Besides, don’t I know Kitty? I’ve almost brought her up.”

“Maybe you’re right. You’re all so queer that perhaps you’re right. Only, do be careful, Richard. You must approach the matter very delicately, — indirectly, you know. Girls are different, remember, from young men, and you mustn’t be blunt. Do maneuver a little, for once in your life.”

“All right, Fanny; you needn’t be afraid of my doing anything awkward or sudden. I’ll go to her room pretty soon, after she is quieted down, and have a good, calm old fatherly conversation with her.”

The colonel was spared this errand; for Kitty had left some of her things on Fanny’s table, and now came back for them with a lamp in her hand. Her averted face showed the marks of weeping; the corners of her firm-set lips were downward bent, as if some resolution which she had taken were very painful. This the anxious Fanny saw; and she made a gesture to the colonel which any woman would have understood to enjoin silence, or, at least, the utmost caution and tenderness of speech. The colonel summoned his finesse and said, cheerily, “Well, Kitty, what’s Boston been saying to you?”

Mrs. Ellison fell back upon her sofa as if shot, and placed her hand over her face.

Kitty seemed not to hear her cousin. Having gathered up her things, she bent an unmoved face and an unseeing gaze full upon him, and glided from the room without a word.

“Well, upon my soul,” cried the colonel, “this is a pleasant, nightmarish, sleep-walking, Lady-Macbethish little transaction. Confound it, Fanny this comes of your wanting me to maneuver. If you’d let me come straight at the subject, — like a man—”

“Please, Richard, don’t say anything more now,” pleaded Mrs. Ellison in a broken voice. “You can’t help it, I know; and I must do the best I can, under the circumstances. Do go away for a little while, darling! O dear!”

As for Kitty, when she had got out of the room in that phantasmal fashion, she dimly recalled, through the mists of her own trouble, the colonel’s dismay at her so glooming upon him, and began to think that she had used poor Dick more tragically than she need, and so began to laugh softly to herself; but while she stood there at the entry window a moment, laughing in the moonlight, that made her lamp-flame thin, and painted her face with its pale lustre, Mr. Arbuton came down the attic stairway. He was not a man of quick fancies; but to one of even slower imagination and of calmer mood, she might very well have seemed unreal, the creature of a dream, fantastic, intangible, insensible, arch, not wholly without some touch of the malign. In his heart he groaned over her beauty as if she were lost to him forever in this elfish transfiguration.

“Miss Ellison!” he scarcely more than whispered.

“You ought not to speak to me now,” she answered, gravely.

“I know it; but I could not help it. For heaven’s sake, do not let it tell against me. I wished to ask if I should not see you to-morrow; to beg that all might go on as had been planned, and as if nothing had been said to-day.”

“It’ll be very strange,” said Kitty. “My cousins know everything now. How can we meet before them!”

“I’m not going away without an answer, and we can’t remain here without meeting. It will be less strange if we let everything take its course.”

“Well.”

“Thanks.”

He looked strangely humbled, but even more bewildered than humbled.

She listened while he descended the steps, unbolted the street door, and closed it behind him. Then she passed out of the moonlight into her own room, whose close-curtained space the lamp filled with its ruddy glow, and revealed her again, no malicious sprite, but a very puzzled, conscientious, anxious young girl.

Of one thing, at least, she was clear. It had all come about through misunderstanding, through his taking her to be something that she was not; for she was certain that Mr. Arbuton was of too worldly a spirit to choose, if he had known, a girl of such origin and lot as she was only too proud to own. The deception must have begun with dress; and she determined that her first stroke for truth and sincerity should be most sublimely made in the return of Fanny’s things, and a rigid fidelity to her own dresses. “Besides,” she could not help reflecting, “my travelling-suit will be just the thing for a picnic.” And here, if the cynical reader of another sex is disposed to sneer at the method of her self-devotion, I am sure that women, at least, will allow it was most natural and highly proper that in this great moment she should first think of dress, upon which so great consequences hang in matters of the heart Who — to be honest for once, O vain and conceited men! — can deny that the cut, the color, the texture, the stylish set of dresses, has not had everything to do with the rapture of love’s young dream? Are not certain bits of lace and knots of ribbon as much a part of it as any smile or sidelong glance of them all? And hath not the long experience of the fair taught them that artful dress is half the virtue of their spells? Full well they know it; and when Kitty resolved to profit no longer by Fanny’s wardrobe, she had won the hardest part of the battle in behalf of perfect truth towards Mr. Arbuton. She did not, indeed, stop with this, but lay awake, devising schemes by which she should disabuse him of his errors about her, and persuade him that she was no wife for him.

XII.

THE PICNIC AT CHATEAU-BIGOT.

“Well,” said Mrs. Ellison, who had slipped into Kitty’s room, in the morning, to do her back hair with some advantages of light which her own chamber lacked, “it’ll be no crazier than the rest of the performance; and if you and he can stand it, I’m sure that we’ve no reason to complain.”

“Why, I don’t see how it’s to be helped, Fanny. He’s asked it; and I’m rather glad he has, for I should have hated to have the conventional headache that keeps young ladies from being seen; and at any rate I don’t understand how the day could be passed more sensibly than just as we originally planned to spend it. I can make up my mind a great deal better with him than away from him. But I think there never was a more ridiculous situation: now that the high tragedy has faded out of it, and the serious part is coming, it makes me laugh. Poor Mr. Arbuton will feel all day that he is under my mercilessly critical eye, and that he mustn’t do this and he mustn’t say that, for fear of me; and he can’t run away, for he’s promised to wait patiently for my decision. It’s a most inglorious position for him, but I don’t think of anything to do about it. I could say no at once, but he’d rather not.”

“What have you got that dress on for?” asked Mrs. Ellison, abruptly.

“Because I’m not going to wear your things any more, Fanny. It’s a case of conscience. I feel like a guilty creature, being courted in another’s clothes; and I don’t know but it’s for a kind of punishment of my deceit that I can’t realize this affair as I ought, or my part in it. I keep feeling, the whole time, as if it were somebody else, and I have an absurd kind of other person’s interest in it.”

Mrs. Ellison essayed some reply, but was met by Kitty’s steadfast resolution, and in the end did not prevail in so much as a ribbon for her hair.

It was not till well into the forenoon that the preparations for the picnic were complete and the four set off together in one carriage. In the strong need that was on each of them to make the best of the affair, the colonel’s unconsciousness might have been a little overdone, but Mrs. Ellison’s demeanor was sublimely successful. The situation gave full play to her peculiar genius, and you could not have said that any act of hers failed to contribute to the perfection of her design, that any tone or speech was too highly colored. Mr. Arbuton, of whom she took possession, and who knew that she knew all, felt that he had never done justice to her, and seconded her efforts with something like cordial admiration; while Kitty, with certain grateful looks and aversions of the face, paid an ardent homage to her strokes of tact, and after a few miserable moments, in which her nightlong trouble gnawed at her heart, began, in spite of herself, to enjoy the humor of the situation.

It is a lovely road out to Château-Bigot. First you drive through the ancient suburbs of the Lower Town, and then you mount the smooth, hard highway, between pretty country-houses, toward the village of Charlesbourg, while Quebec shows, to your casual backward-glance, like a wondrous painted scene, with the spires and lofty roofs of the Upper Town, and the long, irregular wall wandering on the verge of the cliff; then the thronging gables and chimneys of St. Roch, and again many spires and convent walls; lastly the shipping in the St. Charles, which, in one direction, runs, a narrowing gleam, up into its valley, and in the other widens into the broad light of the St. Lawrence. Quiet, elmy spaces of meadow land stretch between the suburban mansions and the village of Charlesbourg, where the driver reassured himself as to his route from the group of idlers on the platform before the church. Then he struck off on a country road, and presently turned from this again into a lane that grew rougher and rougher, till at last it lapsed to a mere cart-track among the woods, where the rich, strong odors of the pine, and of the wild herbs bruised under the wheels, filled the air. A peasant and his black-eyed, open-mouthed boy were cutting withes to bind hay at the side of the track, and the latter consented to show the strangers to the château from a point beyond which they could not go with the carriage. There the small habitant and the driver took up the picnic-baskets, and led the way through pathless growths of underbrush to a stream, so swift that it is said never to freeze, so deeply sprung that the summer never drinks it dry. A screen of water-growths bordered it; and when this was passed, a wide open space revealed itself, with the ruin of the château in the midst.

The pathos of long neglect lay upon the scene; for here were evidences of gardens and bowery aisles in other times, and now, for many a year, desolation and the slow return of the wilderness. The mountain rising behind the château grounds showed the dying flush of the deciduous leaves among the dark green of the pines that clothed it to the crest; a cry of innumerable crickets filled the ear of the dreaming noon.

The ruin itself is not of impressive size, and it is a château by grace of the popular fancy rather than through any right of its own; for it was, in truth, never more than the hunting-lodge of the king’s Intendant, Bigot, a man whose sins claim for him a lordly consideration in the history of Quebec, He was the last Intendant before the British conquest, and in that time of general distress he grew rich by oppression of the citizens, and by peculation from the soldiers. He built this pleasure-house here in the woods, and hither he rode out from Quebec to enjoy himself in the chase and the carouses that succeed the chase. Here, too, it is said, dwelt in secret the Huron girl who loved him, and who survives in the memory of the peasants as the murdered sauragesse; and, indeed, there is as much proof that she was murdered as that she ever lived. When the wicked Bigot was arrested and sent to France, where he was tried with great result of documentary record, his château fell into other hands; at last a party of Arnold’s men wintered there in 1775, and it is to our own countrymen that we owe the conflagration and the ruin of Château-Bigot. It stands, as I said, in the middle of that open place, with the two gable walls and the stone partition-wall still almost entire, and that day showing very effectively against the tender northern sky. On the most weatherward gable the iron in the stone had shed a dark red stain under the lash of many winter storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted patches of the surface; but, for the rest, the walls rose in the univied nakedness of all ruins in our climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith to pity and soften the forlornness of decay. Out of the rubbish at the foot of the walls there sprang a wilding growth of syringas and lilacs; and the interior was choked with flourishing weeds, and with the briers of the raspberry, on which a few berries hung. The heavy beams, left where they fell a hundred years ago, proclaimed the honest solidity with which the château had been built, and there was proof in the cut stone of the hearths and chimney-places that it had once had at least the ambition of luxury.

While its visitors stood amidst the ruin, a harmless garden-snake slipped out of one crevice into another; from her nest in some hidden corner overhead a silent bird flew away. For the moment, — so slight is the capacity of any mood, so deeply is the heart responsive to a little impulse, — the palace of the Cæsars could not have imparted a keener sense of loss and desolation. They eagerly sought such particulars of the ruin as agreed with the descriptions they had read of it, and were as well contented with a bit of cellar-way outside as if they had really found the secret passage to the subterranean chamber of the château, or the hoard of silver which the little habitant said was buried under it. Then they dispersed about the grounds to trace out the borders of the garden, and Mr. Arbuton won the common praise by discovering the foundations of the stable of the château.

Then there was no more to do but to prepare for the picnic. They chose a grassy plot in the shadow of a half-dismantled bark-lodge, — a relic of the Indians, who resort to the place every summer. In the ashes of that sylvan hearth they kindled their fire, Mr. Arbuton gathering the sticks, and the colonel showing a peculiar genius in adapting the savage flames to the limitations of the civilized coffee-pot borrowed of Mrs. Gray. Mrs. Ellison laid the cloth, much meditating the arrangement of the viands, and reversing again and again the relative positions of the sliced tongue and the sardines that flanked the cold roast chicken, and doubting dreadfully whether to put down the cake and the canned peaches at once, or reserve them for a second course; the stuffed olives drove her to despair, being in a bottle, and refusing to be balanced by anything less monumental in shape. Some wild asters and red leaves and green and yellowing sprays of fern which Kitty arranged in a tumbler were hailed with rapture, but presently flung far away with fierce disdain because they had ants on them. Kitty witnessed this outburst with her usual complacency, and then went on making the coffee. With such blissful pain as none but lovers know, Mr. Arbuton saw her break the egg upon the edge of the coffee-pot, and let it drop therein, and then, with a charming frenzy, stir it round and round. It was a picture of domestic suggestion, a subtle insinuation of home, the unconscious appeal of inherent housewifery to inherent husbandhood. At the crash of the eggshell he trembled; the swift agitation of the coffee and the egg within the pot made him dizzy.

“Sha’n’t I stir that for you, Miss Ellison?” he said, awkwardly.

“O dear, no!” she answered in surprise at a man’s presuming to stir coffee; “but you may go get me some water at the creek, if you please.”

She gave him a pitcher, and he went off to the brook, which was but a minute’s distance away. This minute, however, left her alone, for the first time that day, with both Dick and Fanny, and a silence fell upon all three at once. They could not help looking at one another; and then the colonel, to show that he was not thinking of anything, began to whistle, and Mrs. Ellison rebuked him for whistling.

“Why not?” he asked. “It isn’t a funeral, is it?”

“Of course it isn’t,” said Mrs. Ellison; and Kitty, who had been blushing to the verge of tears, laughed instead, and then was consumed with vexation when Mr. Arbuton came up, feeling that he must suspect himself the motive of her ill-timed mirth. “The champagne ought to be cooled, I suppose,” observed Mrs. Ellison, when the coffee had been finally stirred and set to boil on the coals.

“I’m best acquainted with the brook,” said Mr. Arbuton, “and I know just the eddy in it where the champagne will cool soonest.”

“Then you shall take it there,” answered the governess of the feast; and Mr. Arbuton duteously set off with the bottle in his hand.

The pitcher of water which he had already brought stood in the grass; by a sudden movement of the skirt, Kitty knocked it over. The colonel made a start forward; Mrs. Ellison arrested him with a touch, while she bent a look of ineffable admiration upon Kitty.

“Now, I’ll teach myself,” said Kitty, “that I can’t be so clumsy with impunity. I’ll go and fill that pitcher again myself.” She hurried after Mr. Arbuton; they scarcely spoke going or coming; but the constraint that Kitty felt was nothing to that she had dreaded in seeking to escape from the tacit raillery of the colonel and the championship of Fanny. Yet she trembled to realize that already her life had become so far entangled with this stranger’s, that she found refuge with him from her own kindred. They could do nothing to help her in this; the trouble was solely hers and his, and they two must get out of it one way or other themselves; the case scarcely admitted even of sympathy, and if it had not been hers, it would have been one to amuse her rather than appeal to her compassion. Even as it was, she sometimes caught herself smiling at the predicament of a young girl who had passed a month in every appearance of love-making, and who, being asked her heart, was holding her lover in suspense whilst she searched it, and meantime was picnicking with him upon the terms of casual flirtation. Of all the heroines in her books, she knew none in such a strait as this.

But her perplexities did not impair the appetite which she brought to the sylvan feast. In her whole simple life she had never tasted champagne before, and she said innocently, as she put the frisking fluid from her lips after the first taste, “Why, I thought you had to learn to like champagne.”

“No,” remarked the colonel, “it’s like reading and writing: it comes by nature. I suppose that even one of the lower animals would like champagne. The refined instinct of young ladies makes them recognize its merits instantly. Some of the Confederate cellars,” added the colonel, thoughtfully, “had very good champagne in them. Green seal was the favorite of our erring brethren. It wasn’t one of their errors. I prefer it myself to our own native cider, whether made of apples or grapes. Yes, it’s better even than the water from the old chain-pump in the back yard at Eriecreek, though it hasn’t so fine a flavor of lubricating oil in it.”

The faint chill that touched Mr. Arbuton at the mention of Eriecreek and its petrolic associations was transient. He was very light of heart, since the advance that Kitty seemed to have made him; and in his temporary abandon he talked well, and promoted the pleasure of the time without critical reserves. When the colonel, with the reluctance of our soldiers to speak of their warlike experiences before civilians, had suffered himself to tell a story that his wife begged of him about his last battle, Mr. Arbuton listened with a deference that flattered poor Mrs. Ellison, and made her marvel at Kitty’s doubt concerning him; and then he spoke entertainingly of some travel experiences of his own, which he politely excused as quite unworthy to come after the colonel’s story. He excused them a little too much, and just gave the modest soldier a faint, uneasy fear of having boasted. But no one else felt this result of his delicacy, and the feast was merry enough. When it was ended, Mrs. Ellison, being still a little infirm of foot, remained in the shadow of the bark-lodge, and the colonel lit his cigar, and loyally stretched himself upon the grass before her.

There was nothing else for Kitty and Mr. Arbuton but to stroll off together, and she preferred to do this.

They sauntered up to the château in silence, and peered somewhat languidly about the ruin. On a bit of smooth surface in a sheltered place many names of former visitors were written, and Mr. Arbuton said he supposed they might as well add those of their own party.

“O yes,” answered Kitty, with a half-sigh, seating herself upon a fallen stone, and letting her hands fall into each other in her lap as her wont was, “you write them.” A curious pensiveness passed from one to the other and possessed them both.

Mr. Arbuton began to write. Suddenly, “Miss Ellison,” said he, with a smile, “I’ve blundered in your name; I neglected to put the Miss before it; and now there isn’t room on the plastering.”

“O, never mind,” replied Kitty, “I dare say it won’t be missed!”

Mr. Arbuton neither perceived nor heeded the pun. He was looking in a sort of rapture at the name which his own hand had written now for the first time, and he felt an indecorous desire to kiss it.

“If I could speak it as I’ve written it—”

“I don’t see what harm there would be in that,” said the owner of the name, “or what object,” she added more discreetly.

— “I should feel that I had made a great gain.”

“I never told you,” answered Kitty, evasively, “how much I admire your first name, Mr. Arbuton.”

“How did you know it?”

“It was on the card you gave my cousin,” said Kitty, frankly, but thinking he now must know she had been keeping his card.

“It’s an old family name, — a sort of heirloom from the first of us who came to the country; and in every generation since, some Arbuton has had to wear it.”

“It’s superb!” cried Kitty. “Miles! ‘Miles Standish, the Puritan captain,’ ‘Miles Standish, the Captain of Plymouth.’ I should be very proud of such a name.”

“You have only to take it,” he said, gravely.

“O, I didn’t mean that,” she said with a blush, and then added, “Yours is a very old family, then, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s pretty well,” answered Mr. Arbuton, “but it’s not such a rare thing in the East, you know.”

“I suppose not. The Ellisons are not an old family. If we went back of my uncle, we should only come to backwoodsmen and Indian fighters. Perhaps that’s the reason we don’t care much for old families. You think a great deal of them in Boston, don’t you?”

“We do, and we don’t. It’s a long story, and I’m afraid I couldn’t make you understand, unless you had seen something of Boston society.”

“Mr. Arbuton,” said Kitty, abruptly plunging to the bottom of the subject on which they had been hovering, “I’m dreadfully afraid that what you said to me — what you asked of me, yesterday — was all through a misunderstanding. I’m afraid that you’ve somehow mistaken me and my circumstances, and that somehow I’ve innocently helped on your mistake.”

“There is no mistake,” he answered, eagerly, “about my loving you!”

Kitty did not look up, nor answer this outburst, which flattered while it pained her. She said, “I’ve been so much mistaken myself, and I’ve been so long finding it out, that I should feel anxious to have you know just what kind of girl you’d asked to be your wife, before I—”

“What?”

“Nothing. But I should want you to know that in many things my life has been very, very different from yours. The first thing I can remember — you’ll think I’m more autobiographical than our driver at Ha-Ha Bay, even, but I must tell you all this — is about Kansas, where we had moved from Illinois, and of our having hardly enough to eat or wear, and of my mother grieving over our privations. At last, when my father was killed,” she said, dropping her voice, “in front of our own door—”

Mr. Arbuton gave a start. “Killed?”

“Yes; didn’t you know? Or no: how could you? He was shot by the Missourians.”

Whether it was not hopelessly out of taste to have a father-in-law who had been shot by the Missourians? Whether he could persuade Kitty to suppress that part of her history? That she looked very pretty, sitting there, with her earnest eyes lifted toward his. These things flashed wilfully through Mr. Arbuton’s mind.

“My father was a Free-State man,” continued Kitty, in a tone of pride. “He wasn’t when he first went to Kansas,” she added simply; while Mr. Arbuton groped among his recollections of that forgotten struggle for some association with these names, keenly feeling the squalor of it all, and thinking still how very pretty she was. “He went out there to publish a proslavery paper. But when he found out what the Border Ruffians really were, he turned against them. He used to be very bitter about my uncle’s having become an Abolitionist; they had had a quarrel about it; but father wrote to him from Kansas, and they made it up; and before father died he was able to tell mother that we were to go to uncle’s. But mother was sick then, and she only lived a month after father; and when my cousin came out to get us, just before she died, there was scarcely a crust of cornbread in our cabin. It seemed like heaven to get to Eriecreek; but even at Eriecreek we live in a way that I am afraid you wouldn’t respect. My uncle has just enough, and we are very plain people indeed. I suppose,” continued the young girl meekly, “that I haven’t had at all what you’d call an education. Uncle told me what to read, at first, and after that I helped myself. It seemed to come naturally; but don’t you see that it wasn’t an education?”

“I beg pardon,” said Mr. Arbuton, with a blush; for he had just then lost the sense of what she said in the music of her voice, as it hesitated over these particulars of her history.

“I mean,” explained Kitty, “that I’m afraid I must be very one-sided. I’m dreadfully ignorant of a great many things. I haven’t any accomplishments, only the little bit of singing and playing that you’ve heard; I couldn’t tell a good picture from a bad one; I’ve never been to the opera; I don’t know anything about society. Now just imagine,” cried Kitty, with sublime impartiality, “such a girl as that in Boston!”

Even Mr. Arbuton could not help smiling at this comic earnestness, while she resumed: “At home my cousins and I do all kinds of things that the ladies whom you know have done for them. We do our own work, for one thing,” she continued, with a sudden treacherous misgiving that what she was saying might be silly and not heroic, but bravely stifling her doubt. “My cousin Virginia is housekeeper, and Rachel does the sewing, and I’m a kind of maid-of-all-work.”

Mr. Arbuton listened respectfully, vainly striving for some likeness of Miss Ellison in the figure of the different second-girls who, during life, had taken his card, or shown him into drawing-rooms, or waited on him at table; failing in this, he tried her in the character of daughter of that kind of farm-house where they take summer boarders and do their own work; but evidently the Ellisons were not of that sort either; and he gave it up and was silent, not knowing what to say, while Kitty, a little piqued by his silence, went on: “We’re not ashamed, you understand, of our ways; there’s such a thing as being proud of not being proud; and that’s what we are, or what I am; for the rest are not mean enough ever to think about it, and once I wasn’t, either. But that’s the kind of life I’m used to; and though I’ve read of other kinds of life a great deal, I’ve not been brought up to anything different, don’t you understand? And maybe — I don’t know — I mightn’t like or respect your kind of people any more than they did me. My uncle taught us ideas that are quite different from yours; and what if I shouldn’t be able to give them up?”

“There is only one thing I know or see: I love you!” he said, passionately, and drew nearer by a step; but she put out her hand and repelled him with a gesture.

“Sometimes you might be ashamed of me before those you knew to be my inferiors, — really common and coarse-minded people, but regularly educated, and used to money and fashion. I should cower before them, and I never could forgive you.”

“I’ve one answer to all this: I love you!”

Kitty flushed in generous admiration of his magnanimity, and said, with more of tenderness than she had yet felt towards him, “I’m sorry that I can’t answer you now, as you wish, Mr. Arbuton.”

“But you will, to-morrow.”

She shook her head. “I don’t know; O, I don’t know! I’ve been thinking of something. That Mrs. March asked me to visit her in Boston; but we had given up doing so, because of the long delay here. If I asked my cousins, they’d still go home that way. It’s too bad to put you off again; but you must see me in Boston, if only for a day or two, and after you’ve got back into your old associations there, before I answer you. I’m in great trouble. You must wait, or I must say no.”

“I’ll wait,” said Mr. Arbuton.

“O, thank you,” sighed Kitty, grateful for this patience, and not for the chance of still winning him; “you are very forbearing, I’m sure.”

She again put forth her hand, but not now to repel him. He clasped it, and kept it in his, then impulsively pressed it against his lips.

Colonel and Mrs. Ellison had been watching the whole pantomime, forgotten.

“Well,” said the colonel, “I suppose that’s the end of the play, isn’t it? I don’t like it, Fanny; I don’t like it.”

“Hush!” whispered Mrs. Ellison.

They were both puzzled when Kitty and Mr. Arbuton came towards them with anxious faces. Kitty was painfully revolving in her mind what she had just said, and thinking she had said not so much as she meant and yet so much more, and tormenting herself with the fear that she had been at once too bold and too meek in her demand for longer delay. Did it not give him further claim upon her? Must it not have seemed a very audacious thing? What right had she to make it, and how could she now finally say no? Then the matter of her explanation to him: was it in the least what she meant to say? Must it not give him an idea of intellectual and spiritual poverty in her life which she knew had not been in it? Would he not believe, in spite of her boasts, that she was humiliated before him by a feeling of essential inferiority? O, had she boasted? What she meant to do was just to make him understand clearly what she was; but, had she? Could he be made to understand this with what seemed his narrow conception of things outside of his own experience? Was it worth while to try? Did she care enough for him to make the effort desirable? Had she made it for his sake, or in the interest of truth, merely, or in self-defence?

These and a thousand other like questions beset her the whole way home to Quebec, amid the frequent pauses of the talk, and underneath whatever she was saying. Half the time she answered yes or no to them, and not to what Dick, or Fanny, or Mr. Arbuton had asked her; she was distraught with their recurrence, as they teased about her like angry bees, and one now and then settled, and stung and stung. Through the whole night, too, they pursued her in dreams with pitiless iteration and fantastic change; and at dawn she was awakened by voices calling up to her from the Ursulines’ Garden, — the slim, pale nun crying out, in a lamentable accent, that all men were false and there was no shelter save the convent or the grave, and the comfortable sister bemoaning herself that on meagre days Madame de la Peltrie ate nothing but choke-cherries from Château-Bigot.

Kitty rose and dressed herself, and sat at the window, and watched the morning come into the garden below: first, a tremulous flush of the heavens; then a rosy light on the silvery roofs and gables; then little golden aisles among the lilacs and hollyhocks. The tiny flower-beds just under her window were left, with their snap-dragons and larkspurs, in dew and shadow; the small dog stood on the threshold, and barked uneasily when the bell rang in the Ursulines’ Chapel, where the nuns were at matins.

It was Sunday, and a soft tranquillity blest the cool air in which the young girl bathed her troubled spirit. A faint anticipative homesickness mingled now with her nightlong anxiety, — a pity for herself that on the morrow she must leave those pretty sights, which had become so dear to her that she could not but feel herself native among them. She must go back to Eriecreek, which was not a walled city, and had not a stone building, much less a cathedral or convent, within its borders; and though she dearly loved those under her uncle’s roof there, yet she had to own that, beyond that shelter, there was little in Eriecreek to touch the heart or take the fancy; that the village was ugly, and the village people mortally dull, narrow, and uncongenial. Why was not her lot cast somewhere else? Why should she not see more of the world that she had found so fair, and which all her aspirations had fitted her to enjoy? Quebec had been to her a rapture of beautiful antiquity; but Europe, but London, Venice, Rome, those infinitely older and more storied cities of which she had lately talked so much with Mr. Arbuton, — why should she not see them?

Here, for the guilty space of a heat-lightning flash, Kitty wickedly entertained the thought of marrying Mr. Arbuton for the sake of a bridal trip to Europe, and bade love and the fitness of things and the incompatibility of Boston and Eriecreek traditions take care of themselves. But then she blushed for her meanness, and tried to atone for it as she could by meditating the praise of Mr. Arbuton. She felt remorse for having, as he had proved yesterday, undervalued and misunderstood him; and she was willing now to think him even more magnanimous than his generous words and conduct showed him. It would be a base return for his patience to accept him from a worldly ambition; a man of his noble spirit merited the best that love could give. But she respected him; at last she respected him fully and entirely, and she could tell him that at any rate.

The words in which he had yesterday protested his love for her repeated themselves constantly in her revery. If he should speak them again after he had seen her in Boston, in the light by which she was anxious to be tested, — she did not know what she should say.

XIII.

ORDEAL.

They had not planned to go anywhere that day; but after church they found themselves with the loveliest afternoon of their stay at Quebec to be passed somehow, and it was a pity to pass it indoors, the colonel said at their early dinner. They canvassed the attractions of the different drives out of town, and they decided upon that to Lorette. The Ellisons had already been there, but Mr. Arbuton had not, and it was from a dim motive of politeness towards him that Mrs. Ellison chose the excursion; though this did not prevent her from wondering aloud afterward, from time to time, why she had chosen it. He was restless and absent, and answered at random when points of the debate were referred to him, but he eagerly assented to the conclusion, and was in haste to set out.

The road to Lorette is through St. John’s Gate, down into the outlying meadows and rye-fields, where, crossing and recrossing the swift St. Charles, it finally rises at Lorette above the level of the citadel. It is a lonelier road than that to Montmorenci, and the scattering cottages upon it have not the well-to-do prettiness, the operatic repair, of stone-built Beauport. But they are charming, nevertheless, and the people seem to be remoter from modern influences. Peasant-girls, in purple gowns and broad straw hats, and not the fashions of the year before last, now and then appeared to our acquaintance; near one ancient cottage an old man, in the true habitant’s red woollen cap with a long fall, leaned over the bars of his gate and smoked a short pipe.

By and by they came to Jeune-Lorette, an almost ideally pretty hamlet, bordering the road on either hand with galleried and balconied little houses, from which the people bowed to them as they passed, and piously enclosing in its midst the village church and churchyard. They soon after reached Lorette itself, which they might easily have known for an Indian town by its unkempt air, and the irregular attitudes in which the shabby cabins lounged along the lanes that wandered through it, even if the Ellisons had not known it already, or if they had not been welcomed by a pomp of Indian boys and girls of all shades of darkness. The girls had bead-wrought moccasins and work-bags to sell, and the boys bore bows and arrows and burst into loud cries of “Shoot! shoot! grand shoot! Put-up-pennies! shoot-the-pennies! Grand shoot!” When they recognized the colonel, as they did after the party had dismounted in front of the church, they renewed these cries with greater vehemence.

“Now, Richard,” implored his wife, “you’re not going to let those little pests go through all that shooting performance again?”

“I must. It is expected of me whenever I come to Lorette; and I would never be the man to neglect an ancient observance of this kind.” The colonel stuck a copper into the hard sand as he spoke, and a small storm of arrows hurtled around it. Presently it flew into the air, and a fair-faced, blue-eyed boy picked it up: he won most of the succeeding coins.

“There’s an aborigine of pure blood,” remarked the colonel; “his ancestors came from Normandy two hundred years ago. That’s the reason he uses the bow so much better than these coffee-colored impostors.”

They went into the chapel, which stands on the site of the ancient church burnt not long ago. It is small, and it is bare and rude inside, with only the commonest ornamentation about the altar, on one side of which was the painted wooden statue of a nun, on the other that of a priest, — slight enough commemoration of those who had suffered so much for the hopeless race that lingers and wastes at Lorette in incurable squalor and wildness. They are Christians after their fashion, this poor remnant of the mighty Huron nation converted by the Jesuits and crushed by the Iroquois in the far-western wilderness; but whatever they are at heart, they are still savage in countenance, and these boys had faces of wolves and foxes. They followed their visitors into the church, where there was only an old woman praying to a picture, beneath which hung a votive hand and foot, and a few young Huron suppliants with very sleek hair, whose wandering devotions seemed directed now at the strangers, and now at the wooden effigy of the House of St. Ann borne by two gilt angels above the high-altar. There was no service, and the visitors soon quitted the chapel amid the clamors of the boys outside. Some young girls, in the dress of our period, were promenading up and down the road with their arms about each other and their eyes alert for the effect upon spectators.

From one of the village lanes came swaggering towards the visitors a figure of aggressive fashion, — a very buckish young fellow, with a heavy black mustache and black eyes, who wore a jaunty round hat, blue checked trousers, a white vest, and a morning-coat of blue diagonals, buttoned across his breast; in his hand he swung a light cane.

“That is the son of the chief, Paul Picot,” whispered the driver.

“Excuse me,” said the colonel, instantly; and the young gentleman nodded. “Can you tell me if we could see the chief to-day?”

“O yes!” answered the notary in English, “my father is chief. You can see him”; and passed on with a somewhat supercilious air.

The colonel, in his first hours at Quebec, had bought at a bazaar of Indian wares the photograph of an Indian warrior in a splendor of factitious savage panoply. It was called “The Last of the Hurons,” and the colonel now avenged himself for the curtness of M. Picot by styling him “The Next to the Last of the Hurons.”

“Well,” said Fanny, who had a wife’s willingness to see her husband occasionally snubbed, “I don’t know why you asked him. I’m sure nobody wants to see that old chief and his wretched bead trumpery again.”

“My dear,” answered the colonel, “wherever Americans go, they like to be presented at court. Mr. Arbuton, here, I’ve no doubt has been introduced to the crowned heads of the Old World, and longs to pay his respects to the sovereign of Lorette. Besides, I always call upon the reigning prince when I come to Lorette. The coldness of the heir-apparent shall not repel me.”

The colonel led the way up the principal lane of the village. Some of the cabins were ineffectually whitewashed, but none of them were so uncleanly within as the outside prophesied. At the doors and windows sat women and young girls working moccasins; here and there stood a well-fed mother of a family with an infant Huron in her arms. They all showed the traces of white blood, as did the little ones who trooped after the strangers and demanded charity as clamorously as so many Italians; only a few faces were of a clear dark, as if stained by walnut-juice, and it was plain that the Hurons were fading, if not dying out. They responded with a queer mixture of French liveliness and savage stolidity to the colonel’s jocose advances. Great lean dogs lounged about the thresholds; they and the women and children were alone visible; there were no men. None of the houses were fenced, save the chief’s; this stood behind a neat grass plot, across which, at the moment our travellers came up, two youngish women were trailing in long morning-gowns and eye-glasses. The chief’s house was a handsome cottage, papered and carpeted, with a huge stove in the parlor, where also stood a table exposing the bead trumpery of Mrs. Ellison’s scorn. A full-bodied elderly man with quick, black eyes and a tranquil, dark face stood near it; he wore a half-military coat with brass buttons, and was the chief Picot. At sight of the colonel he smiled slightly and gave his hand in welcome. Then he sold such of his wares as the colonel wanted, rather discouraging than inviting purchase. He talked, upon some urgency, of his people, who, he said, numbered three hundred, and were a few of them farmers, but were mostly hunters, and, in the service of the officers of the garrison, spent the winter in the chase. He spoke fair English, but reluctantly, and he seemed glad to have his guests go, who were indeed willing enough to leave him.

Mr. Arbuton especially was willing, for he had been longing to find himself alone with Kitty, of which he saw no hope while the idling about the village lasted.

The colonel bought an insane watch-pocket for une dolleur from a pretty little girl as they returned through the village; but he forbade the boys any more archery at his expense, with “Pas de grand shoot, now, mes enfans! — Friends,” he added to his own party, “we have the Falls of Lorette and the better part of the afternoon still before us; how shall we employ them?”

Mrs. Ellison and Kitty did not know, and Mr. Arbuton did not know, as they sauntered down past the chapel, to the stone mill that feeds its industry from the beauty of the fall. The cascade, with two or three successive leaps above the road, plunges headlong down a steep crescent-shaped slope, and hides its foamy whiteness in the dark-foliaged ravine below. It is a wonder of graceful motion, of iridescent lights and delicious shadows; a shape of loveliness that seems instinct with a conscious life. Its beauty, like that of all natural marvels on our continent, is on a generous scale; and now the spectators, after viewing it from the mill, passed for a different prospect of it to the other shore, and there the colonel and Fanny wandered a little farther down the glen, leaving Kitty with Mr. Arbuton. The affair between them was in such a puzzling phase, that there was as much reason for as against this: nobody could do anything, not even openly recognize it. Besides, it was somehow very interesting to Kitty to be there alone with him, and she thought that if all were well, and he and she were really engaged, the sense of recent betrothal could be nowhere else half so sweet as in that wild and lovely place. She began to imagine a bliss so divine, that it would have been strange if she had not begun to desire it, and it was with a half reluctant, half-acquiescent thrill that she suffered him to touch upon what was first in both their minds.

“I thought you had agreed not to talk of that again for the present,” she feebly protested.

“No; I was not forbidden to tell you I loved you: I only consented to wait for my answer; but now I shall break my promise. I cannot wait. I think the conditions you make dishonor me,” said Mr. Arbuton, with an impetuosity that fascinated her.

“O, how can you say such a thing as that?” she asked, liking him for his resentment of conditions that he found humiliating, while her heart leaped remorseful to her lips for having imposed them. “You know very well why I wanted to delay; and you know that — that — if — I had done anything to wound you, I never could forgive myself.”

“But you doubted me, all the same,” he rejoined.

“Did I? I thought it was myself that I doubted.” She was stricken with sudden misgiving as to what had seemed so well; her words tended rapidly she could not tell whither.

“But why do you doubt yourself?”

“I — I don’t know.”

“No,” he said bitterly, “for it’s really me that you doubt. I can’t understand what you have seen in me that makes you believe anything could change me towards you,” he added with a kind of humbleness that touched her. “I could have borne to think that I was not worthy of you.”

“Not worthy of me! I never dreamed of such a thing.”

“But to have you suspect me of such meanness—”

“O Mr. Arbuton!”

— “As you hinted yesterday, is a disgrace that I ought not to bear. I have thought of it all night; and I must have my answer now, whatever it is.”

She did not speak; for every word that she had uttered had only served to close escape behind her. She did not know what to do; she looked up at him for help. He said with an accent of meekness pathetic from him, “Why must you still doubt me?”

“I don’t,” she scarcely more than breathed.

“Then you are mine, now, without waiting, and forever,” he cried; and caught her to him in a swift embrace.

She only said, “Oh!” in a tone of gentle reproach, yet clung to him a helpless moment as for rescue from himself. She looked at him in blank pallor, striving to realize the tender violence in which his pulses wildly exulted; then a burning flush dyed her face, and tears came into her eyes. “O, I hope you’ll never be sorry,” she said; and then, “Do let us go,” for she had no distinct desire save for movement, for escape from that place.

Her heart had been surprised, she hardly knew how; but at his kiss a novel tenderness had leaped to life in it. She suffered him to put her hand upon his arm, and then she began to feel a strange pride in his being tall and handsome, and hers. But she kept thinking as they walked, “I hope he’ll never he sorry,” and she said it again, half in jest. He pressed her hand against his heart, and met her look with one of protest and reassurance, that presently melted into something sweeter yet. He said, “What beautiful eyes you have! I noticed the long lashes when I saw you on the Saguenay boat, and I couldn’t get away from them.”

“O please, don’t speak of that dreadful time!” cried Kitty.

“No? Why not?”

“O because! I think it was such a bold kind of accident my taking your arm by mistake; and the whole next day has always been a perfect horror to me.”

He looked at her in questioning amaze.

“I think I was very pert with you all day, — and I don’t think I’m pert naturally, — taking you up about the landscape, and twitting you about the Saguenay scenery and legends, you know. But I thought you were trying to put me down, — you are rather down-putting at times, — and I admired you, and I couldn’t bear it.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Arbuton. He dimly recollected, as if it had been in some former state of existence, that there were things he had not approved in Kitty that day, but now he met her penitence with a smile and another pressure of the hand. “Well, then,” he said, “if you don’t like to recall that time, let’s go back of it to the day I met you on Goat Island Bridge at Niagara.”

“O, did you see me there? I thought you didn’t; but I saw you. You had on a blue cravat,” she answered; and he returned with as much the air of coherency as if really continuing the same train of thought, “You won’t think it necessary to visit Boston, now, I suppose,” and he smiled triumphantly upon her. “I fancy that I have now a better right to introduce you there than your South End friends.”

Kitty smiled, too. “I’m willing to wait. But don’t you think you ought to see Eriecreek before you promise too solemnly? I can’t allow that there’s anything serious, till you’ve seen me at home.”

They had been going, for no reason that they knew, back to the country inn near which you purchase admittance to a certain view of the falls, and now they sat down on the piazza, somewhat apart from other people who were there, as Mr. Arbuton said, “O, I shall visit Eriecreek soon enough. But I shall not come to put myself or you to the proof. I don’t ask to see you at home before claiming you forever.”

Kitty murmured, “Ah! you are more generous than I was.”

“I doubt it.”

“O yes, you are. But I wonder if you’ll be able to find Eriecreek.”

“Is it on the map?”

“It’s on the county map; and so is Uncle Jack’s lot on it, and a picture of his house, for that matter. They’ll all be standing on the piazza — something like this one — when you come up. You’ll know Uncle Jack by his big gray beard, and his bushy eyebrows, and his boots, which he won’t have blacked, and his Leghorn hat, which we can’t get him to change. The girls will be there with him, — Virginia all red and heated with having got supper for you, and Rachel with the family mending in her hand, — and they’ll both come running down the walk to welcome you. How will you like it?”

Mr. Arbuton suspected the gross caricature of this picture, and smiled securely at it. “I shall like it well enough,” he said, “if you run down with them. Where shall you be?”

“I forgot. I shall be up stairs in my room, peeping through the window-blinds, to see how you take it. Then I shall come down, and receive you with dignity in the parlor, but after supper you’ll have to excuse me while I help with the dishes. Uncle Jack will talk to you. He’ll talk to you about Boston. He’s much fonder of Boston than you are, even.” And here Kitty broke off with a laugh, thinking what a very different Boston her Uncle Jack’s was from Mr. Arbuton’s, and maliciously diverted with what she conceived of their mutual bewilderment in trying to get some common stand-point. He had risen from his chair, and was now standing a few paces from her, looking toward the fall, as if by looking he might delay the coming of the colonel and Fanny.

She checked her merriment a moment to take note of two ladies who were coming up the path towards the porch where she was sitting. Mr. Arbuton did not see them. The ladies mounted the steps, and turned slowly and languidly to survey the company. But at sight of Mr. Arbuton, one of them advanced directly toward him, with exclamations of surprise and pleasure, and he with a stupefied face and a mechanical movement turned to meet her.

She was a lady of more than middle age, dressed with certain personal audacities of color and shape, rather than overdressed, and she thrust forward, in expression of her amazement, a very small hand, wonderfully well gloved; her manner was full of the anxiety of a woman who had fought hard for a high place in society, and yet suggested a latent hatred of people who, in yielding to her, had made success bitter and humiliating.

Her companion was a young and very handsome girl, exquisitely dressed, and just so far within the fashion as to show her already a mistress of style. But it was not the vivid New York stylishness. A peculiar restraint of line, an effect of lady-like concession to the ruling mode, a temperance of ornament, marked the whole array, and stamped it with the unmistakable character of Boston. Her clear tints of lip and cheek and eye were incomparable; her blond hair gave weight to the poise of her delicate head by its rich and decent masses. She had a look of independent innocence, an angelic expression of extremely nice young fellow blending with a subtle maidenly charm. She indicated her surprise at seeing Mr. Arbuton by pressing the point of her sun-umbrella somewhat nervously upon the floor, and blushing a very little. Then she gave him her hand with friendly frankness, and smiled dazzlingly upon him, while the elder hailed him with effusive assertion of familiar acquaintance, heaping him with greetings and flatteries and cries of pleasure.

“O dear!” sighed Kitty, “these are old friends of his; and will I have to know them? Perhaps it’s best to begin at once, though,” she thought.

But he made no movement toward her where she sat. The ladies began to walk up and down, and he with them. As they passed her, he did not seem to see her.

The ladies said they were waiting for their carriage, which they had left at a certain point when they went to look at the fall, and had ordered to take them up at the inn. They talked about people and things that Kitty had never heard of.

“Have you seen the Trailings since you left Newport?” asked the elder woman.

“No,” said Mr. Arbuton.

“Perhaps you’ll be surprised then — or perhaps you won’t — to hear that we parted with them on the top of Mount Washington, Thursday. And the Mayflowers are at the Glen House. The mountains are horribly full. But what are you to do! Now the Continent” — she spoke as if the English Channel divided it from us— “is so common, you can’t run over there any more.”

Whenever they walked towards Kitty, this woman, whose quick eye had detected Mr. Arbuton at her side as she came up to the inn, bent upon the young girl’s face a stare of insolent curiosity, yet with a front of such impassive coldness that to another she might not have seemed aware of her presence. Kitty shuddered at the thought of being made acquainted with her; then she remembered, “Why, how stupid I am! Of course a gentleman can’t introduce ladies; and the only thing for him to do is to excuse himself to them as soon as he can without rudeness, and come back to me.” But none the less she felt helpless and deserted. Though ordinarily so brave, she was so beaten down by that look, that for a glance of not unkindly interest that the young lady gave her she was abjectly grateful. She admired her, and fancied that she could easily be friends with such a girl as that, if they met fairly. She wondered that she should be there with that other, not knowing that society cannot really make distinctions between fine and coarse, and could not have given her a reason for their association.

Still the three walked up and down before Kitty, and still she made his peace with herself, thinking, “He is embarrassed; he can’t come to me at once; but he will, of course.”

The elder of his companions talked on in her loud voice of this thing and that, of her summer, and of the people she had met, and of their places and yachts and horses, and all the splendors of their keeping, — talk which Kitty’s aching sense sometimes caught by fragments, and sometimes in full. The lady used a slang of deprecation and apology for having come to such a queer resort as Quebec, and raised her brows when Mr. Arbuton reluctantly owned how long he had been there.

“Ah, ah!” she said briskly, bringing the group to a stand-still while she spoke, “one doesn’t stay in a slow Canadian city a whole month for love of the place. Come, Mr. Arbuton, is she English or French?”

Kitty’s heart beat thickly, and she whispered to herself, “O, now! — now surely he must do something.”

“Or perhaps,” continued his tormentor, “she’s some fair fellow-wanderer in these Canadian wilds, — some pretty companion of voyage.”

Mr. Arbuton gave a kind of start at this, like one thrilled for an instant with a sublime impulse. He cast a quick, stealthy look at Kitty, and then as suddenly withdrew his glance. What had happened to her who was usually dressed so prettily? Alas! true to her resolution, Kitty had again refused Fanny’s dresses that morning, and had faithfully put on her own travelling-suit, — the suit which Rachel had made her, and which had seemed so very well at Eriecreek that they had called Uncle Jack in to admire it when it was tried on. Now she knew that it looked countrified, and its unstylishness struck in upon her, and made her feel countrified in soul. “Yes,” she owned, as she met Mr. Arbuton’s glance, “I’m nothing but an awkward milkmaid beside that young lady.” This was unjust to herself; but truly it was never in her present figure that he had intended to show her to his world, which he had been sincere enough in contemning for her sake while away from it. Confronted with good society in these ladies, its delegates, he doubtless felt, as never before, the vastness of his self-sacrifice, the difficulty of his enterprise, and it would not have been so strange if just then she should have appeared to him through the hard cold vision of the best people instead of that which love had illumined. She saw whatever purpose toward herself was in his eyes, flicker and die out as they fell from hers. Then she sat alone while they three walked up and down, up and down, and the skirts of the ladies brushed her garments in passing.

“O, where can Dick and Fanny be?” she silently bemoaned herself, “and why don’t they come and save me from these dreadful people?”

She sat in a stony quiet while they talked on, she thought, forever. Their voices sounded in her ears like voices heard in a dream, their laughter had a nightmare cruelty. Yet she was resolved to be just to Mr. Arbuton, she was determined not meanly to condemn him; she confessed to herself, with a glimmer of her wonted humor, that her dress must be an ordeal of peculiar anguish to him, and she half blamed herself for her conscientiousness in wearing it. If she had conceived of any such chance as this, she would perhaps, she thought, have worn Fanny’s grenadine.

She glanced again at the group which was now receding from her. “Ah!” the elder of the ladies said, again halting the others midway of the piazza’s length, “there’s the carriage at last! But what is that stupid animal stopping for? O, I suppose he didn’t understand, and expects to take us up at the bridge! Provoking! But it’s no use; we may as well go to him at once; it’s plain he isn’t coming to us. Mr. Arbuton, will you see us on board?”

“Who — I? Yes, certainly,” he answered absently, and for the second time he cast a furtive look at Kitty, who had half started to her feet in expectation of his coming to her before he went, — a look of appeal, or deprecation, or reassurance, as she chose to interpret it, but after all a look only.

She sank back in blank rejection of his look, and so remained motionless as he led the way from the porch with a quick and anxious step. Since those people came he had not openly recognized her presence, and now he had left her without a word. She could not believe what she could not but divine, and she was powerless to stir as the three moved down the road towards the carriage. Then she felt the tears spring to her eyes: she flung down her veil, and, swept on by a storm of grief and pride and pain, she hurried, ran towards the grounds about the falls. She thrust aside the boy who took money at the gate. “I have no money,” she said fiercely; “I’m going to look for my friends: they’re in here.”

But Dick and Fanny were not to be seen. Instead, as she fluttered wildly about in search of them, she beheld Mr. Arbuton, who had missed her on his return to the inn, coming with a frightened face to look for her. She had hoped, somehow never to see him again in the world; but since it was to be, she stood still and waited his approach in a strange composure; while he drew nearer, thinking how yesterday he had silenced her prophetic doubt of him: “I have one answer to all this; I love you.” Her faltering words, verified so fatally soon, recalled themselves to him with intolerable accusation. And what should he say now? If possibly, — if by some miracle, — she might not have seen what he feared she must! One glance that he dared give her taught him better; and while she waited for him to speak, he could not lure any of the phrases, of which the air seemed full, to serve him.

“I wonder you came back to me,” she said after an eternal moment.

“Came back?” he echoed, vacantly.

“You seemed to have forgotten my existence!”

Of course the whole wrong, if any wrong had been done to her, was tacit, and much might be said to prove that she felt needlessly aggrieved, and that he could not have acted otherwise than as he did; she herself had owned that it must be an embarrassing position to him.

“Why, what have I done,” he began, “what makes you think... For heaven’s sake listen to me!” he cried; and then, while she turned a mute attentive face to him, he stood silent as before, like one who has lost his thought, and strives to recall what he was going to say. “What sense, — what use,” he resumed at last, as if continuing the course of some previous argument, “would there have been in making a display of our acquaintance before them? I did not suppose at first that they saw us together.”... But here he broke off, and, indeed, his explanation had but a mean effect when put into words. “I did not expect them to stay. I thought they would go away every moment; and then at last it was too late to manage the affair without seeming to force it.” This was better; and he paused again, for some sign of acquiescence from Kitty, and caught her eye fixed on his face in what seemed contemptuous wonder. His own eyes fell, and ran uneasily over her dress before he lifted them and began once more, as if freshly inspired: “I could have wished you to be known to my friends with every advantage on your side,” and this had such a magnanimous sound that he took courage; “and you ought to have had faith enough in me to believe that I never could have meant you a slight. If you had known more of the world, — if your social experience had been greater you would have seen.... Oh!” he cried, desperately, “is there nothing you have to say to me?”

“No,” said Kitty, simply, but with a languid quiet, and shrinking from speech as from an added pang. “You have been telling me that you were ashamed of me in this dress before those people. But I knew that already. What do you want me to do?”

“If you give me time, I can make everything clear to you.”

“But now you don’t deny it.”

“Deny what? I—”

But here the whole fabric of Mr. Arbuton’s defence toppled to the ground. He was a man of scrupulous truth, not accustomed to deceive himself or others. He had been ashamed of her, he could not deny it, not to keep the love that was now dearer to him than life. He saw it with paralyzing clearness; and, as an inexorable fact that confounded quite as much as it dismayed him, he perceived that throughout that ignoble scene she had been the gentle person and he the vulgar one. How could it have happened with a man like him! As he looked back upon it, he seemed to have been only the helpless sport of a sinister chance.

But now he must act; it could not go so, it was too horrible a thing to let stand confessed. A hundred protests thronged to his lips, but he refused utterance to them all as worse even than silence; and so, still meaning to speak, he could not speak. He could only stand and wait while it wrung his heart to see her trembling, grieving lips.

His own aspect was so lamentable, that she half pitied him, half respected him for his truth’s sake. “You were right; I think it won’t be necessary for me to go to Boston,” she said with a dim smile. “Good by. It’s all been a dreadful, dreadful mistake.”

It was like him, even in that humiliation, not to have thought of losing her, not to have dreamed but that he could somehow repair his error, and she would yet willingly be his. “O no, no, no,” he cried, starting forward, “don’t say that! It can’t be, it mustn’t be! You are angry now, but I know you’ll see it differently. Don’t be so quick with me, with yourself. I will do anything, say anything, you like.”

The tears stood in her eyes; but they were cruel drops. “You can’t say anything that wouldn’t make it worse. You can’t undo what’s been done, and that’s only a little part of what couldn’t be undone. The best way is for us to part; it’s the only way.”

“No, there are all the ways in the world besides! Wait — think! — I implore you not to be so — precipitate.”

The unfortunate word incensed her the more; it intimated that she was ignorantly throwing too much away. “I am not rash now, but I was very rash half an hour ago. I shall not change my mind again. O,” she cried, giving way, “it isn’t what you’ve done, but what you are and what I am, that’s the great trouble! I could easily forgive what’s happened, — if you asked it; but I couldn’t alter both our whole lives, or make myself over again, and you couldn’t change yourself. Perhaps you would try, and I know that I would, but it would be a wretched failure and disappointment as long as we lived. I’ve learnt a great deal since I first saw those people.” And in truth he felt as if the young girl whom he had been meaning to lift to a higher level than her own at his side had somehow suddenly grown beyond him; and his heart sank. “It’s foolish to try to argue such a thing, but it’s true; and you must let me go.”

“I can’t let you go,” he said in such a way, that she longed at least to part kindly with him.

“You can make it hard for me,” she answered, “but the end will be the same.”

“I won’t make it hard for you, then,” he returned, after a pause, in which he grew paler and she stood with a wan face plucking the red leaves from a low bough that stretched itself towards her.

He turned and walked away some steps; then he came suddenly back. “I wish to express my regret,” he began formally, and with his old air of doing what was required of him as a gentleman, “that I should have unintentionally done anything to wound—”

“O, better not speak of that,” interrupted Kitty with bitterness, “it’s all over now.” And the final tinge of superiority in his manner made her give him a little stab of dismissal. “Good by. I see my cousins coming.”

She stood and watched him walk away, the sunlight playing on his figure through the mantling leaves, till he passed out of the grove.

The cataract roared with a seven-fold tumult in her ears, and danced before her eyes. All things swam together, as in her blurred sight her cousins came wavering towards her.

“Where is Mr. Arbuton?” asked Mrs. Ellison.

Kitty threw her arms about the neck of that foolish woman, whoso loving heart she could not doubt, and clung sobbing to her. “Gone,” she said; and Mrs. Ellison, wise for once, asked no more.

She had the whole story that evening, without asking; and whilst she raged, she approved of Kitty, and covered her with praises and condolences.

“Why, of course, Fanny, I didn’t care for knowing those people. What should I want to know them for? But what hurt me was that he should so postpone me to them, and ignore me before them, and leave me without a word, then, when I ought to have been everything in the world to him and first of all. I believe things came to me while I sat there, as they do to drowning people, all at once, and I saw the whole affair more distinctly than ever I did. We were too far apart in what we had been and what we believed in and respected, ever to grow really together. And if he gave me the highest position in the world, I should have only that. He never could like the people who had been good to me, and whom I loved so dearly, and he only could like me as far as he could estrange me from them. If he could coolly put me aside now, how would it be afterwards with the rest, and with me too? That’s what flashed through me, and I don’t believe that getting splendidly married is as good as being true to the love that came long before, and honestly living your own life out, without fear or trembling, whatever it is. So perhaps,” said Kitty, with a fresh burst of tears, “you needn’t condole with me so much, Fanny. Perhaps if you had seen him, you would have thought he was the one to be pitied. I pitied him, though he was so cruel. When he first turned to meet them, you’d have thought he was a man sentenced to death, or under some dreadful spell or other; and while he was walking up and down listening to that horrible comical old woman, — the young lady didn’t talk much, — and trying to make straight answers to her, and to look as if I didn’t exist, it was the most ridiculous thing in the world.”

“How queer you are, Kitty!”

“Yes; but you needn’t think I didn’t feel it. I seemed to be like two persons sitting there, one in agony, and one just coolly watching it. But O,” she broke out again while Fanny held her closer in her arms, “how could he have done it, how could he have acted so towards me; and just after I had begun to think him so generous and noble! It seems too dreadful to be true.” And with this Kitty kissed her cousin and they had a little cry together over the trust so done to death; and Kitty dried her eyes, and bade Fanny a brave good-night, and went off to weep again, upon her pillow.

But before that, she called Fanny to her door, and with a smile breaking through the trouble of her face, she asked, “How do you suppose he got back? I never thought of it before.”

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Ellison with profound disgust, “I hope he had to walk back. But I’m afraid there were only too many chances for him to ride. I dare say he could get a calash at the hotel there.”

Kitty had not spoken a word of reproach to Fanny for her part in promoting this hapless affair; and when the latter, returning to her own room, found the colonel there, she told him the story and then began to discern that she was not without credit for Kitty’s fortunate escape, as she called it.

“Yes,” said the colonel, “under exactly similar circumstances she’ll know just what to expect another time, if that’s any comfort.”

“It’s a great comfort,” retorted Mrs. Ellison; “you can’t find out what the world is, too soon, I can tell you; and if I hadn’t maneuvered a little to bring them together, Kitty might have gone off with some lingering fancy for him; and think what a misfortune that would have been!”

“Horrible.”

“And now, she’ll not have a single regret for him.”

“I should think not,” said the colonel; and he spoke in a tone of such dejection, that it went to his wife’s heart more than any reproach of Kitty’s could have done. “You’re all right, and nobody blames you, Fanny; but if you think it’s well for such a girl as Kitty to find out that a man who has had the best that the world can give, and has really some fine qualities of his own, can be such a poor devil, after all, then I don’t. She may be the wiser for it, but you know she won’t be the happier.”

“O don’t, Dick, don’t speak seriously! It’s so dreadful from you. If you feel so about it, why don’t you do something.”

“O yes, there’s a fine opening. We know, because we know ever so much more, how the case really is; but the way it seems to stand is, that Kitty couldn’t bear to have him show civility to his friends, and ran away, and then wouldn’t give him a chance to explain. Besides, what could I do under any circumstances?”

“Well, Dick, of course you’re right, and I wish I could see things as clearly as you do. But I really believe Kitty’s glad to be out of it.”

“What?” thundered the colonel.

“I think Kitty’s secretly relieved to have it all over. But you needn’t stun me.”

“You do?” The colonel paused as if to gain force enough for a reply. But after waiting, nothing whatever came to him, and he wound up his watch.

“To be sure,” added Mrs. Ellison thoughtfully, after a pause, “she’s giving up a great deal; and she’ll probably never have such another chance as long as she lives.”

“I hope she won’t,” said the colonel.

“O, you needn’t pretend that a high position and the social advantages he could have given her are to be despised.”

“No, you heartless worldling; and neither are peace of mind, and self-respect, and whole feelings, and your little joke.”

“O, you — you sickly sentimentalist!”

“That’s what they used to call us in the good old abolition days,” laughed the colonel; and the two being quite alone, they made their peace with a kiss, and were as happy for the moment as if they had thereby assuaged Kitty’s grief and mortification.

“Besides, Fanny,” continued the colonel, “though I’m not much on religion, I believe these things are ordered.”

“Don’t be blasphemous, Colonel Ellison!” cried his wife, who represented the church if not religion in her family. “As if Providence had anything to do with love-affairs!”

“Well, I won’t; but I will say that if Kitty turned her back on Mr. Arbuton and the social advantages he could offer her, it’s a sign she wasn’t fit for them. And, poor thing, if she doesn’t know how much she’s lost, why she has the less to grieve over. If she thinks she couldn’t be happy with a husband who would keep her snubbed and frightened after he lifted her from her lowly sphere, and would tremble whenever she met any of his own sort, of course it may be a sad mistake, but it can’t be helped. She must go back to Eriecreek, and try to worry along without him. Perhaps she’ll work out her destiny some other way.”

XIV.

AFTERWARDS.

Mrs. Ellison had Kitty’s whole story, and so has the reader, but for a little thing that happened next day, and which is perhaps scarcely worthy of being set down.

Mr. Arbuton’s valise was sent for at night from the Hôtel St. Louis, and they did not see him again. When Kitty woke next morning, a fine cold rain was falling upon the drooping hollyhocks in the Ursulines’ Garden, which seemed stricken through every leaf and flower with sudden autumn. All the forenoon the garden-paths remained empty, but under the porch by the poplars sat the slender nun and the stout nun side by side, and held each other’s hands. They did not move, they did not appear to speak.

The fine cold rain was still falling as Kitty and Fanny drove down Mountain Street toward the Railway Station, whither Dick and the baggage had preceded them, for they were going away from Quebec. Midway, their carriage was stopped by a mass of ascending vehicles, and their driver drew rein till the press was over. At the same time Kitty saw advancing up the sidewalk a figure grotesquely resembling Mr. Arbuton. It was he, but shorter, and smaller, and meaner. Then it was not he, but only a light overcoat like his covering a very common little man about whom it hung loosely, — a burlesque of Mr. Arbuton’s self-respectful overcoat, or the garment itself in a state of miserable yet comical collapse.

“What is that ridiculous little wretch staring at you for, Kitty?” asked Fanny.

“I don’t know,” answered Kitty, absently.

The man was now smiling and gesturing violently. Kitty remembered having seen him before, and then recognized the cooper who had released Mr. Arbuton from the dog in the Sault au Matelot, and to whom he had given his lacerated overcoat.

The little creature awkwardly unbuttoned the garment, and took from the breast-pocket a few letters, which he handed to Kitty, talking eagerly in French all the time.

“What is he doing, Kitty?”

“What is he saying, Fanny?”

“Something about a ferocious dog that was going to spring upon you, and the young gentleman being brave as a lion and rushing forward, and saving your life.” Mrs. Ellison was not a woman to let her translation lack color, even though the original wanted it.

“Make him tell it again.”

When the man had done so, “Yes,” sighed Kitty, “it all happened that day of the Montgomery expedition; but I never knew, before, of what he had done for me. Fanny,” she cried, with a great sob, “may be I’m the one who has been cruel? But what happened yesterday makes his having saved my life seem such a very little matter.”

“Nothing at all!” answered Fanny, “less than nothing!” But her heart failed her.

The little cooper had bowed himself away, and was climbing the hill, Mr. Arbuton’s coat-skirts striking his heels as he walked.

“What letters are those?” asked Fanny.

“O, old letters to Mr. Arbuton, which he found in the pocket. I suppose he thought I would give them to him.”

“But how are you going to do it?”

“I ought to send them to him,” answered Kitty. Then, after a silence that lasted till they reached the boat, she handed the letters to Fanny. “Dick may send them,” she said.

THE END

A FOREGONE CONCLUSION

This tale of Americans abroad was first published in 1875. Set in and around Venice in the 1860’s, the title refers to the apparently obvious outcome of a love triangle that develops between American consul Henry Ferris and the Catholic priest, Don Ippolita, who both fall in love with a beautiful young American woman. Howells had been an American consul in Venice during the period in which the novel is set and drew on his experiences of the city in that period to create a realistic portrait.

A contemporary illustration of nineteenth century Venetian social life

CONTENTS

I.

II

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

I.

As Don Ippolito passed down the long narrow calle or footway leading from the Campo San Stefano to the Grand Canal in Venice, he peered anxiously about him: now turning for a backward look up the calle, where there was no living thing in sight but a cat on a garden gate; now running a quick eye along the palace walls that rose vast on either hand and notched the slender strip of blue sky visible overhead with the lines of their jutting balconies, chimneys, and cornices; and now glancing toward the canal, where he could see the noiseless black boats meeting and passing. There was no sound in the calle save his own footfalls and the harsh scream of a parrot that hung in the sunshine in one of the loftiest windows; but the note of a peasant crying pots of pinks and roses in the campo came softened to Don Ippolito’s sense, and he heard the gondoliers as they hoarsely jested together and gossiped, with the canal between them, at the next gondola station.

The first tenderness of spring was in the air though down in that calle there was yet enough of the wintry rawness to chill the tip of Don Ippolito’s sensitive nose, which he rubbed for comfort with a handkerchief of dark blue calico, and polished for ornament with a handkerchief of white linen. He restored each to a different pocket in the sides of the ecclesiastical talare, or gown, reaching almost to his ankles, and then clutched the pocket in which he had replaced the linen handkerchief, as if to make sure that something he prized was safe within. He paused abruptly, and, looking at the doors he had passed, went back a few paces and stood before one over which hung, slightly tilted forward, an oval sign painted with the effigy of an eagle, a bundle of arrows, and certain thunderbolts, and bearing the legend, CONSULATE OF THE UNITED STATES, in neat characters. Don Ippolito gave a quick sigh, hesitated a moment, and then seized the bell-pull and jerked it so sharply that it seemed to thrust out, like a part of the mechanism, the head of an old serving-woman at the window above him.

“Who is there?” demanded this head.

“Friends,” answered Don Ippolito in a rich, sad voice.

“And what do you command?” further asked the old woman.

Don Ippolito paused, apparently searching for his voice, before he inquired, “Is it here that the Consul of America lives?”

“Precisely.”

“Is he perhaps at home?”

“I don’t know. I will go ask him.”

“Do me that pleasure, dear,” said Don Ippolito, and remained knotting his fingers before the closed door. Presently the old woman returned, and looking out long enough to say, “The consul is at home,” drew some inner bolt by a wire running to the lock, that let the door start open; then, waiting to hear Don Ippolito close it again, she called out from her height, “Favor me above.” He climbed the dim stairway to the point where she stood, and followed her to a door, which she flung open into an apartment so brightly lit by a window looking on the sunny canal, that he blinked as he entered. “Signor Console,” said the old woman, “behold the gentleman who desired to see you;” and at the same time Don Ippolito, having removed his broad, stiff, three-cornered hat, came forward and made a beautiful bow. He had lost for the moment the trepidation which had marked his approach to the consulate, and bore himself with graceful dignity.

It was in the first year of the war, and from a motive of patriotism common at that time, Mr. Ferris (one of my many predecessors in office at Venice) had just been crossing his two silken gondola flags above the consular bookcase, where with their gilt lance-headed staves, and their vivid stars and stripes, they made a very pretty effect. He filliped a little dust from his coat, and begged Don Ippolito to be seated, with the air of putting even a Venetian priest on a footing of equality with other men under the folds of the national banner. Mr. Ferris had the prejudice of all Italian sympathizers against the priests; but for this he could hardly have found anything in Don Ippolito to alarm dislike. His face was a little thin, and the chin was delicate; the nose had a fine, Dantesque curve, but its final droop gave a melancholy cast to a countenance expressive of a gentle and kindly spirit; the eyes were large and dark and full of a dreamy warmth. Don Ippolito’s prevailing tint was that transparent blueishness which comes from much shaving of a heavy black beard; his forehead and temples were marble white; he had a tonsure the size of a dollar. He sat silent for a little space, and softly questioned the consul’s face with his dreamy eyes. Apparently he could not gather courage to speak of his business at once, for he turned his gaze upon the window and said, “A beautiful position, Signor Console.”

“Yes, it’s a pretty place,” answered Mr. Ferris, warily.

“So much pleasanter here on the Canalazzo than on the campos or the little canals.”

“Oh, without doubt.”

“Here there must be constant amusement in watching the boats: great stir, great variety, great life. And now the fine season commences, and the Signor Console’s countrymen will be coming to Venice. Perhaps,” added Don Ippolito with a polite dismay, and an air of sudden anxiety to escape from his own purpose, “I may be disturbing or detaining the Signor Console?”

“No,” said Mr. Ferris; “I am quite at leisure for the present. In what can I have the honor of serving you?”

Don Ippolito heaved a long, ineffectual sigh, and taking his linen handkerchief from his pocket, wiped his forehead with it, and rolled it upon his knee. He looked at the door, and all round the room, and then rose and drew near the consul, who had officially seated himself at his desk.

“I suppose that the Signor Console gives passports?” he asked.

“Sometimes,” replied Mr. Ferris, with a clouding face.

Don Ippolito seemed to note the gathering distrust and to be helpless against it. He continued hastily: “Could the Signor Console give a passport for America ... to me?”

“Are you an American citizen?” demanded the consul in the voice of a man whose suspicions are fully roused.

“American citizen?”

“Yes; subject of the American republic.”

“No, surely; I have not that happiness. I am an Austrian subject,” returned Don Ippolito a little bitterly, as if the last words were an unpleasant morsel in the mouth.

“Then I can’t give you a passport,” said Mr. Ferris, somewhat more gently. “You know,” he explained, “that no government can give passports to foreign subjects. That would be an unheard-of thing.”

“But I thought that to go to America an American passport would be needed.”

“In America,” returned the consul, with proud compassion, “they don’t care a fig for passports. You go and you come, and nobody meddles. To be sure,” he faltered, “just now, on account of the secessionists, they do require you to show a passport at New York; but,” he continued more boldly, “American passports are usually for Europe; and besides, all the American passports in the world wouldn’t get you over the frontier at Peschiera. You must have a passport from the Austrian Lieutenancy of Venice.”

Don Ippolito nodded his head softly several times, and said, “Precisely,” and then added with an indescribable weariness, “Patience! Signor Console, I ask your pardon for the trouble I have given,” and he made the consul another low bow.

Whether Mr. Ferris’s curiosity was piqued, and feeling himself on the safe side of his visitor he meant to know why he had come on such an errand, or whether he had some kindlier motive, he could hardly have told himself, but he said, “I’m very sorry. Perhaps there is something else in which I could be of use to you.”

“Ah, I hardly know,” cried Don Ippolito. “I really had a kind of hope in coming to your excellency.”

“I am not an excellency,” interrupted Mr. Ferris, conscientiously.

“Many excuses! But now it seems a mere bestiality. I was so ignorant about the other matter that doubtless I am also quite deluded in this.”

“As to that, of course I can’t say,” answered Mr. Ferris, “but I hope not.”

“Why, listen, signore!” said Don Ippolito, placing his hand over that pocket in which he kept his linen handkerchief. “I had something that it had come into my head to offer your honored government for its advantage in this deplorable rebellion.”

“Oh,” responded Mr. Ferris with a falling countenance. He had received so many offers of help for his honored government from sympathizing foreigners. Hardly a week passed but a sabre came clanking up his dim staircase with a Herr Graf or a Herr Baron attached, who appeared in the spotless panoply of his Austrian captaincy or lieutenancy, to accept from the consul a brigadier-generalship in the Federal armies, on condition that the consul would pay his expenses to Washington, or at least assure him of an exalted post and reimbursement of all outlays from President Lincoln as soon as he arrived. They were beautiful men, with the complexion of blonde girls; their uniforms fitted like kid gloves; the pale blue, or pure white, or huzzar black of their coats was ravishingly set off by their red or gold trimmings; and they were hard to make understand that brigadiers of American birth swarmed at Washington, and that if they went thither, they must go as soldiers of fortune at their own risk. But they were very polite; they begged pardon when they knocked their scabbards against the consul’s furniture, at the door they each made him a magnificent obeisance, said “Servus!” in their great voices, and were shown out by the old Marina, abhorrent of their uniforms and doubtful of the consul’s political sympathies. Only yesterday she had called him up at an unwonted hour to receive the visit of a courtly gentleman who addressed him as Monsieur le Ministre, and offered him at a bargain ten thousand stand of probably obsolescent muskets belonging to the late Duke of Parma. Shabby, hungry, incapable exiles of all nations, religions, and politics beset him for places of honor and emolument in the service of the Union; revolutionists out of business, and the minions of banished despots, were alike willing to be fed, clothed, and dispatched to Washington with swords consecrated to the perpetuity of the republic.

“I have here,” said Don Ippolito, too intent upon showing whatever it was he had to note the change in the consul’s mood, “the model of a weapon of my contrivance, which I thought the government of the North could employ successfully in cases where its batteries were in danger of capture by the Spaniards.”

“Spaniards? Spaniards? We have no war with Spain!” cried the consul.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Don Ippolito made haste to explain, “but those of South America being Spanish by descent” —

“But we are not fighting the South Americans. We are fighting our own Southern States, I am sorry to say.”

“Oh! Many excuses. I am afraid I don’t understand,” said Don Ippolito meekly; whereupon Mr. Ferris enlightened him in a formula (of which he was beginning to be weary) against European misconception of the American situation. Don Ippolito nodded his head contritely, and when Mr. Ferris had ended, he was so much abashed that he made no motion to show his invention till the other added, “But no matter; I suppose the contrivance would work as well against the Southerners as the South Americans. Let me see it, please;” and then Don Ippolito, with a gratified smile, drew from his pocket the neatly finished model of a breech-loading cannon.

“You perceive, Signor Console,” he said with new dignity, “that this is nothing very new as a breech-loader, though I ask you to observe this little improvement for restoring the breech to its place, which is original. The grand feature of my invention, however, is this secret chamber in the breech, which is intended to hold an explosive of high potency, with a fuse coming out below. The gunner, finding his piece in danger, ignites this fuse, and takes refuge in flight. At the moment the enemy seizes the gun the contents of the secret chamber explode, demolishing the piece and destroying its captors.”

The dreamy warmth in Don Ippolito’s deep eyes kindled to a flame; a dark red glowed in his thin cheeks; he drew a box from the folds of his drapery and took snuff in a great whiff, as if inhaling the sulphurous fumes of battle, or titillating his nostrils with grains of gunpowder. He was at least in full enjoyment of the poetic power of his invention, and no doubt had before his eyes a vivid picture of a score of secessionists surprised and blown to atoms in the very moment of triumph. “Behold, Signor Console!” he said.

“It’s certainly very curious,” said Mr. Ferris, turning the fearful toy over in his hand, and admiring the neat workmanship of it. “Did you make this model yourself?”

“Surely,” answered the priest, with a joyous pride; “I have no money to spend upon artisans; and besides, as you might infer, signore, I am not very well seen by my superiors and associates on account of these little amusements of mine; so keep them as much as I can to myself.” Don Ippolito laughed nervously, and then fell silent with his eyes intent upon the consul’s face. “What do you think, signore?” he presently resumed. “If this invention were brought to the notice of your generous government, would it not patronize my labors? I have read that America is the land of enterprises. Who knows but your government might invite me to take service under it in some capacity in which I could employ those little gifts that Heaven” — He paused again, apparently puzzled by the compassionate smile on the consul’s lips. “But tell me, signore, how this invention appears to you.” “Have you had any practical experience in gunnery?” asked Mr. Ferris.

“Why, certainly not.”

“Neither have I,” continued Mr. Ferris, “but I was wondering whether the explosive in this secret chamber would not become so heated by the frequent discharges of the piece as to go off prematurely sometimes, and kill our own artillerymen instead of waiting for the secessionists?”

Don Ippolito’s countenance fell, and a dull shame displaced the exultation that had glowed in it. His head sunk on his breast, and he made no attempt at reply, so that it was again Mr. Ferris who spoke. “You see, I don’t really know anything more of the matter than you do, and I don’t undertake to say whether your invention is disabled by the possibility I suggest or not. Haven’t you any acquaintances among the military, to whom you could show your model?”

“No,” answered Don Ippolito, coldly, “I don’t consort with the military. Besides, what would be thought of a priest,” he asked with a bitter stress on the word, “who exhibited such an invention as that to an officer of our paternal government?”

“I suppose it would certainly surprise the lieutenant-governor somewhat,” said Mr. Ferris with a laugh. “May I ask,” he pursued after an interval, “whether you have occupied yourself with other inventions?”

“I have attempted a great many,” replied Don Ippolito in a tone of dejection.

“Are they all of this warlike temper?” pursued the consul.

“No,” said Don Ippolito, blushing a little, “they are nearly all of peaceful intention. It was the wish to produce something of utility which set me about this cannon. Those good friends of mine who have done me the honor of looking at my attempts had blamed me for the uselessness of my inventions; they allowed that they were ingenious, but they said that even if they could be put in operation, they would not be what the world cared for. Perhaps they were right. I know very little of the world,” concluded the priest, sadly. He had risen to go, yet seemed not quite able to do so; there was no more to say, but if he had come to the consul with high hopes, it might well have unnerved him to have all end so blankly. He drew a long, sibilant breath between his shut teeth, nodded to himself thrice, and turning to Mr. Ferris with a melancholy bow, said, “Signor Console, I thank you infinitely for your kindness, I beg your pardon for the disturbance, and I take my leave.”

“I am sorry,” said Mr. Ferris. “Let us see each other again. In regard to the inventions, — well, you must have patience.” He dropped into some proverbial phrases which the obliging Latin tongues supply so abundantly for the races who must often talk when they do not feel like thinking, and he gave a start when Don Ippolito replied in English, “Yes, but hope deferred maketh the heart sick.”

It was not that it was so uncommon to have Italians innocently come out with their whole slender stock of English to him, for the sake of practice, as they told him; but there were peculiarities in Don Ippolito’s accent for which he could not account. “What,” he exclaimed, “do you know English?”

“I have studied it a little, by myself,” answered Don Ippolito, pleased to have his English recognized, and then lapsing into the safety of Italian, he added, “And I had also the help of an English ecclesiastic who sojourned some months in Venice, last year, for his health, and who used to read with me and teach me the pronunciation. He was from Dublin, this ecclesiastic.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Ferris, with relief, “I see;” and he perceived that what had puzzled him in Don Ippolito’s English was a fine brogue superimposed upon his Italian accent.

“For some time I have had this idea of going to America, and I thought that the first thing to do was to equip myself with the language.”

“Um!” said Mr. Ferris, “that was practical, at any rate,” and he mused awhile. By and by he continued, more kindly than he had yet spoken, “I wish I could ask you to sit down again: but I have an engagement which I must make haste to keep. Are you going out through the campo? Pray wait a minute, and I will walk with you.”

Mr. Ferris went into another room, through the open door of which Don Ippolito saw the paraphernalia of a painter’s studio: an easel with a half-finished picture on it; a chair with a palette and brushes, and crushed and twisted tubes of colors; a lay figure in one corner; on the walls scraps of stamped leather, rags of tapestry, desultory sketches on paper.

Mr. Ferris came out again, brushing his hat.

“The Signor Console amuses himself with painting, I see,” said Don Ippolito courteously.

“Not at all,” replied Mr. Ferris, putting on his gloves; “I am a painter by profession, and I amuse myself with consuling;” [Footnote: Since these words of Mr. Ferris were first printed, I have been told that a more eminent painter, namely Rubens, made very much the same reply to very much the same remark, when Spanish Ambassador in England. “The Ambassador of His Catholic Majesty, I see, amuses himself by painting sometimes,” said a visitor who found him at his easel. “I amuse myself by playing the ambassador sometimes,” answered Rubens. In spite of the similarity of the speeches, I let that of Mr. Ferris stand, for I am satisfied that he did not know how unhandsomely Rubens had taken the words out of his mouth.] and as so open a matter needed no explanation, he said no more about it. Nor is it quite necessary to tell how, as he was one day painting in New York, it occurred to him to make use of a Congressional friend, and ask for some Italian consulate, he did not care which. That of Venice happened to be vacant: the income was a few hundred dollars; as no one else wanted it, no question was made of Mr. Ferris’s fitness for the post, and he presently found himself possessed of a commission requesting the Emperor of Austria to permit him to enjoy and exercise the office of consul of the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian kingdom, to which the President of the United States appointed him from a special trust in his abilities and integrity. He proceeded at once to his post of duty, called upon the ship’s chandler with whom they had been left, for the consular archives, and began to paint some Venetian subjects.

He and Don Ippolito quitted the Consulate together, leaving Marina to digest with her noonday porridge the wonder that he should be walking amicably forth with a priest. The same spectacle was presented to the gaze of the campo, where they paused in friendly converse, and were seen to part with many politenesses by the doctors of the neighborhood, lounging away their leisure, as the Venetian fashion is, at the local pharmacy.

The apothecary craned forward over his counter, and peered through the open door. “What is that blessed Consul of America doing with a priest?”

“The Consul of America with a priest?” demanded a grave old man, a physician with a beautiful silvery beard, and a most reverend and senatorial presence, but one of the worst tongues in Venice. “Oh!” he added, with a laugh, after scrutiny of the two through his glasses, “it’s that crack-brain Don Ippolito Rondinelli. He isn’t priest enough to hurt the consul. Perhaps he’s been selling him a perpetual motion for the use of his government, which needs something of the kind just now. Or maybe he’s been posing to him for a picture. He would make a very pretty Joseph, give him Potiphar’s wife in the background,” said the doctor, who if not maligned would have needed much more to make a Joseph of him.

II

Mr. Ferris took his way through the devious footways where the shadow was chill, and through the broad campos where the sun was tenderly warm, and the towers of the church rose against the speck-less azure of the vernal heaven. As he went along, he frowned in a helpless perplexity with the case of Don Ippolito, whom he had begun by doubting for a spy with some incomprehensible motive, and had ended by pitying with a certain degree of amusement and a deep sense of the futility of his compassion. He presently began to think of him with a little disgust, as people commonly think of one whom they pity and yet cannot help, and he made haste to cast off the hopeless burden. He shrugged his shoulders, struck his stick on the smooth paving-stones, and let his eyes rove up and down the fronts of the houses, for the sake of the pretty faces that glanced out of the casements. He was a young man, and it was spring, and this was Venice. He made himself joyfully part of the city and the season; he was glad of the narrowness of the streets, of the good-humored jostling and pushing; he crouched into an arched doorway to let a water-carrier pass with her copper buckets dripping at the end of the yoke balanced on her shoulder, and he returned her smiles and excuses with others as broad and gay; he brushed by the swelling hoops of ladies, and stooped before the unwieldy burdens of porters, who as they staggered through the crowd with a thrust hero, and a shove there forgave themselves, laughing, with “We are in Venice, signori;” and he stood aside for the files of soldiers clanking heavily over the pavement, then muskets kindling to a blaze in the sunlit campos and quenched again in the damp shadows of the calles. His ear was taken by the vibrant jargoning of the boatmen as they pushed their craft under the bridges he crossed, and the keen notes of the canaries and the songs of the golden-billed blackbirds whose cages hung at lattices far overhead. Heaps of oranges, topped by the fairest cut in halves, gave their color, at frequent intervals, to the dusky corners and recesses and the long-drawn cry of the venders, “Oranges of Palermo!” rose above the clatter of feet and the clamor of other voices. At a little shop where butter and eggs and milk abounded, together with early flowers of various sorts, he bought a bunch of hyacinths, blue and white and yellow, and he presently stood smelling these while he waited in the hotel parlor for the ladies to whom he had sent his card. He turned at the sound of drifting drapery, and could not forbear placing the hyacinths in the hand of Miss Florida Vervain, who had come into the room to receive him. She was a girl of about seventeen years, who looked older; she was tall rather than short, and rather full, — though it could not be said that she erred in point of solidity. In the attitudes of shy hauteur into which she constantly fell, there was a touch of defiant awkwardness which had a certain fascination. She was blonde, with a throat and hands of milky whiteness; there was a suggestion of freckles on her regular face, where a quick color came and went, though her cheeks were habitually somewhat pale; her eyes were very blue under their level brows, and the lashes were even lighter in color than the masses of her fair gold hair; the edges of the lids were touched with the faintest red. The late Colonel Vervain of the United States army, whose complexion his daughter had inherited, was an officer whom it would not have been peaceable to cross in any purpose or pleasure, and Miss Vervain seemed sometimes a little burdened by the passionate nature which he had left her together with the tropical name he had bestowed in honor of the State where he had fought the Seminoles in his youth, and where he chanced still to be stationed when she was born; she had the air of being embarrassed in presence of herself, and of having an anxious watch upon her impulses. I do not know how otherwise to describe the effort of proud, helpless femininity, which would have struck the close observer in Miss Vervain.

“Delicious!” she said, in a deep voice, which conveyed something of this anxiety in its guarded tones, and yet was not wanting in a kind of frankness. “Did you mean them for me, Mr. Ferris?”

“I didn’t, but I do,” answered Mr. Ferris. “I bought them in ignorance, but I understand now what they were meant for by nature;” and in fact the hyacinths, with their smooth textures and their pure colors, harmonized well with Miss Vervain, as she bent her face over them and inhaled their full, rich perfume.

“I will put them in water,” she said, “if you’ll excuse me a moment. Mother will be down directly.”

Before she could return, her mother rustled into the parlor.

Mrs. Vervain was gracefully, fragilely unlike her daughter. She entered with a gentle and gliding step, peering near-sightedly about through her glasses, and laughing triumphantly when she had determined Mr. Ferris’s exact position, where he stood with a smile shaping his full brown beard and glancing from his hazel eyes. She was dressed in perfect taste with reference to her matronly years, and the lingering evidences of her widowhood, and she had an unaffected naturalness of manner which even at her age of forty-eight could not be called less than charming. She spoke in a trusting, caressing tone, to which no man at least could respond unkindly.

“So very good of you, to take all this trouble, Mr. Ferris,” she said, giving him a friendly hand, “and I suppose you are letting us encroach upon very valuable time. I’m quite ashamed to take it. But isn’t it a heavenly day? What I call a perfect day, just right every way; none of those disagreeable extremes. It’s so unpleasant to have it too hot, for instance. I’m the greatest person for moderation, Mr. Ferris, and I carry the principle into everything; but I do think the breakfasts at these Italian hotels are too light altogether. I like our American breakfasts, don’t you? I’ve been telling Florida I can’t stand it; we really must make some arrangement. To be sure, you oughtn’t to think of such a thing as eating, in a place like Venice, all poetry; but a sound mind in a sound body, I say. We’re perfectly wild over it. Don’t you think it’s a place that grows upon you very much, Mr. Ferris? All those associations, — it does seem too much; and the gondolas everywhere. But I’m always afraid the gondoliers cheat us; and in the stores I never feel safe a moment — not a moment. I do think the Venetians are lacking in truthfulness, a little. I don’t believe they understand our American fairdealing and sincerity. I shouldn’t want to do them injustice, but I really think they take advantages in bargaining. Now such a thing even as corals. Florida is extremely fond of them, and we bought a set yesterday in the Piazza, and I know we paid too much for them. Florida,” said Mrs. Vervain, for her daughter had reentered the room, and stood with some shawls and wraps upon her arm, patiently waiting for the conclusion of the elder lady’s speech, “I wish you would bring down that set of corals. I’d like Mr. Ferris to give an unbiased opinion. I’m sure we were cheated.”

“I don’t know anything about corals, Mrs. Vervain,” interposed Mr. Ferris.

“Well, but you ought to see this set for the beauty of the color; they’re really exquisite. I’m sure it will gratify your artistic taste.”

Miss Vervain hesitated with a look of desire to obey, and of doubt whether to force the pleasure upon Mr. Ferris. “Won’t it do another time, mother?” she asked faintly; “the gondola is waiting for us.”

Mrs. Vervain gave a frailish start from the chair, into which she had sunk, “Oh, do let us be off at once, then,” she said; and when they stood on the landing-stairs of the hotel: “What gloomy things these gondolas are!” she added, while the gondolier with one foot on the gunwale of the boat received the ladies’ shawls, and then crooked his arm for them to rest a hand on in stepping aboard; “I wonder they don’t paint them some cheerful color.”

“Blue, or pink, Mrs. Vervain?” asked Mr. Ferris. “I knew you were coming to that question; they all do. But we needn’t have the top on at all, if it depresses your spirits. We shall be just warm enough in the open sunlight.”

“Well, have it off, then. It sends the cold chills over me to look at it. What did Byron call it?”

“Yes, it’s time for Byron, now. It was very good of you not to mention him before, Mrs. Vervain. But I knew he had to come. He called it a coffin clapped in a canoe.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Vervain. “I always feel as if I were going to my own funeral when I get into it; and I’ve certainly had enough of funerals never to want to have anything to do with another, as long as I live.”

She settled herself luxuriously upon the feather-stuffed leathern cushions when the cabin was removed. Death had indeed been near her very often; father and mother had been early lost to her, and the brothers and sisters orphaned with her had faded and perished one after another, as they ripened to men and women; she had seen four of her own children die; her husband had been dead six years. All these bereavements had left her what they had found her. She had truly grieved, and, as she said, she had hardly ever been out of black since she could remember.

“I never was in colors when I was a girl,” she went on, indulging many obituary memories as the gondola dipped and darted down the canal, “and I was married in my mourning for my last sister. It did seem a little too much when she went, Mr. Ferris. I was too young to feel it so much about the others, but we were nearly of the same age, and that makes a difference, don’t you know. First a brother and then a sister: it was very strange how they kept going that way. I seemed to break the charm when I got married; though, to be sure, there was no brother left after Marian.”

Miss Vervain heard her mother’s mortuary prattle with a face from which no impatience of it could be inferred, and Mr. Ferris made no comment on what was oddly various in character and manner, for Mrs. Vervain touched upon the gloomiest facts of her history with a certain impersonal statistical interest. They were rowing across the lagoon to the Island of San Lazzaro, where for reasons of her own she intended to venerate the convent in which Byron studied the Armenian language preparatory to writing his great poem in it; if her pilgrimage had no very earnest motive, it was worthy of the fact which it was designed to honor. The lagoon was of a perfect, shining smoothness, broken by the shallows over which the ebbing tide had left the sea-weed trailed like long, disheveled hair. The fishermen, as they waded about staking their nets, or stooped to gather the small shell-fish of the shallows, showed legs as brown and tough as those of the apostles in Titian’s Assumption. Here and there was a boat, with a boy or an old man asleep in the bottom of it. The gulls sailed high, white flakes against the illimitable blue of the heavens; the air, though it was of early spring, and in the shade had a salty pungency, was here almost languorously warm; in the motionless splendors and rich colors of the scene there was a melancholy before which Mrs. Vervain fell fitfully silent. Now and then Ferris briefly spoke, calling Miss Vervain’s notice to this or that, and she briefly responded. As they passed the mad-house of San Servolo, a maniac standing at an open window took his black velvet skull-cap from his white hair, bowed low three times, and kissed his hand to the ladies. The Lido in front of them stretched a brown strip of sand with white villages shining out of it; on their left the Public Gardens showed a mass of hovering green; far beyond and above, the ghostlike snows of the Alpine heights haunted the misty horizon.

It was chill in the shadow of the convent when they landed at San Lazzaro, and it was cool in the parlor where they waited for the monk who was to show them through the place; but it was still and warm in the gardened court, where the bees murmured among the crocuses and hyacinths under the noonday sun. Miss Vervain stood looking out of the window upon the lagoon, while her mother drifted about the room, peering at the objects on the wall through her eyeglasses. She was praising a Chinese painting of fish on rice-paper, when a young monk entered with a cordial greeting in English for Mr. Ferris. She turned and saw them shaking hands, but at the same moment her eyeglasses abandoned her nose with a vigorous leap; she gave an amiable laugh, and groping for them over her dress, bowed at random as Mr. Ferris presented Padre Girolamo.

“I’ve been admiring this painting so much, Padre Girolamo,” she said, with instant good-will, and taking the monk into the easy familiarity of her friendship by the tone with which she spoke his name. “Some of the brothers did it, I suppose.”

“Oh no,” said the monk, “it’s a Chinese painting. We hung it up there because it was given to us, and was curious.”

“Well, now, do you know,” returned Mrs. Vervain, “I thought it was Chinese! Their things are, so odd. But really, in an Armenian convent it’s very misleading. I don’t think you ought to leave it there; it certainly does throw people off the track,” she added, subduing the expression to something very lady-like, by the winning appeal with which she used it.

“Oh, but if they put up Armenian paintings in Chinese convents?” said Mr. Ferris.

“You’re joking!” cried Mrs. Vervain, looking at him with a graciously amused air. “There are no Chinese convents. To be sure those rebels are a kind of Christians,” she added thoughtfully, “but there can’t be many of them left, poor things, hundreds of them executed at a time, that way. It’s perfectly sickening to read of it; and you can’t help it, you know. But they say they haven’t really so much feeling as we have — not so nervous.”

She walked by the side of the young friar as he led the way to such parts of the convent as are open to visitors, and Mr. Ferris came after with her daughter, who, he fancied, met his attempts at talk with sudden and more than usual hauteur. “What a fool!” he said to himself. “Is she afraid I shall be wanting to make love to her?” and he followed in rather a sulky silence the course of Mrs. Vervain and her guide. The library, the chapel, and the museum called out her friendliest praises, and in the last she praised the mummy on show there at the expense of one she had seen in New York; but when Padre Girolamo pointed out the desk in the refectory from which one of the brothers read while the rest were eating, she took him to task. “Oh, but I can’t think that’s at all good for the digestion, you know, — using the brain that way whilst you’re at table. I really hope you don’t listen too attentively; it would be better for you in the long run, even in a religious point of view. But now — Byron! You must show me his cell!” The monk deprecated the non-existence of such a cell, and glanced in perplexity at Mr. Ferris, who came to his relief. “You couldn’t have seen his cell, if he’d had one, Mrs. Vervain. They don’t admit ladies to the cloister.”

“What nonsense!” answered Mrs. Vervain, apparently regarding this as another of Mr. Ferris’s pleasantries; but Padre Girolamo silently confirmed his statement, and she briskly assailed the rule as a disrespect to the sex, which reflected even upon the Virgin, the object, as he was forced to allow, of their high veneration. He smiled patiently, and confessed that Mrs. Vervain had all the reasons on her side. At the polyglot printing-office, where she handsomely bought every kind of Armenian book and pamphlet, and thus repaid in the only way possible the trouble their visit had given, he did not offer to take leave of them, but after speaking with Ferris, of whom he seemed an old friend, he led them through the garden environing the convent, to a little pavilion perched on the wall that defends the island from the tides of the lagoon. A lay-brother presently followed them, bearing a tray with coffee, toasted rusk, and a jar of that conserve of rose-leaves which is the convent’s delicate hospitality to favored guests. Mrs. Vervain cried out over the poetic confection when Padre Girolamo told her what it was, and her daughter suffered herself to express a guarded pleasure. The amiable matron brushed the crumbs of the baicolo from her lap when the lunch was ended, and fitting on her glasses leaned forward for a better look at the monk’s black-bearded face. “I’m perfectly delighted,” she said. “You must be very happy here. I suppose you are.”

“Yes,” answered the monk rapturously; “so happy that I should be content never to leave San Lazzaro. I came here when I was very young, and the greater part of my life has been passed on this little island. It is my home — my country.”

“Do you never go away?”

“Oh yes; sometimes to Constantinople, sometimes to London and Paris.”

“And you’ve never been to America yet? Well now, I’ll tell you; you ought to go. You would like it, I know, and our people would give you a very cordial reception.”

“Reception?” The monk appealed once more to Ferris with a look.

Ferris broke into a laugh. “I don’t believe Padre Girolamo would come in quality of distinguished foreigner, Mrs. Vervain, and I don’t think he’d know what to do with one of our cordial receptions.”

“Well, he ought to go to America, any way. He can’t really know anything about us till he’s been there. Just think how ignorant the English are of our country! You will come, won’t you? I should be delighted to welcome you at my house in Providence. Rhode Island is a small State, but there’s a great deal of wealth there, and very good society in Providence. It’s quite New-Yorky, you know,” said Mrs. Vervain expressively. She rose as she spoke, and led the way back to the gondola. She told Padre Girolamo that they were to be some weeks in Venice, and made him promise to breakfast with them at their hotel. She smiled and nodded to him after the boat had pushed off, and kept him bowing on the landing-stairs.

“What a lovely place, and what a perfectly heavenly morning you have given us, Mr. Ferris I We never can thank you enough for it. And now, do you know what I’m thinking of? Perhaps you can help me. It was Byron’s studying there put me in mind of it. How soon do the mosquitoes come?”

“About the end of June,” responded Ferris mechanically, staring with helpless mystification at Mrs. Vervain.

“Very well; then there’s no reason why we shouldn’t stay in Venice till that time. We are both very fond of the place, and we’d quite concluded, this morning, to stop here till the mosquitoes came. You know, Mr. Ferris, my daughter had to leave school much earlier than she ought, for my health has obliged me to travel a great deal since I lost my husband; and I must have her with me, for we’re all that there is of us; we haven’t a chick or a child that’s related to us anywhere. But wherever we stop, even for a few weeks, I contrive to get her some kind of instruction. I feel the need of it so much in my own case; for to tell you the truth, Mr. Ferris, I married too young. I suppose I should do the same thing over again if it was to be done over; but don’t you see, my mind wasn’t properly formed; and then following my husband about from pillar to post, and my first baby born when I was nineteen — well, it wasn’t education, at any rate, whatever else it was; and I’ve determined that Florida, though we are such a pair of wanderers, shall not have my regrets. I got teachers for her in England, — the English are not anything like so disagreeable at home as they are in traveling, and we stayed there two years, — and I did in France, and I did in Germany. And now, Italian. Here we are in Italy, and I think we ought to improve the time. Florida knows a good deal of Italian already, for her music teacher in France was an Italian, and he taught her the language as well as music. What she wants now, I should say, is to perfect her accent and get facility. I think she ought to have some one come every day and read and converse an hour or two with her.”

Mrs. Vervain leaned back in her seat, and looked at Ferris, who said, feeling that the matter was referred to him, “I think — without presuming to say what Miss Vervain’s need of instruction is — that your idea is a very good one.” He mused in silence his wonder that so much addlepatedness as was at once observable in Mrs. Vervain should exist along with so much common-sense. “It’s certainly very good in the abstract,” he added, with a glance at the daughter, as if the sense must be hers. She did not meet his glance at once, but with an impatient recognition of the heat that was now great for the warmth with which she was dressed, she pushed her sleeve from her wrist, showing its delicious whiteness, and letting her fingers trail through the cool water; she dried them on her handkerchief, and then bent her eyes full upon him as if challenging him to think this unlady-like.

“No, clearly the sense does not come from her,” said Ferris to himself; it is impossible to think well of the mind of a girl who treats one with tacit contempt.

“Yes,” resumed Mrs. Vervain, “it’s certainly very good in the abstract. But oh dear me! you’ve no idea of the difficulties in the way. I may speak frankly with you, Mr. Ferris, for you are here as the representative of the country, and you naturally sympathize with the difficulties of Americans abroad; the teachers will fall in love with their pupils.”

“Mother!” began Miss Vervain; and then she checked herself.

Ferris gave a vengeful laugh. “Really, Mrs. Vervain, though I sympathize with you in my official capacity, I must own that as a man and a brother, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for those poor fellows, too.”

“To be sure, they are to be pitied, of course, and I feel for them; I did when I was a girl; for the same thing used to happen then. I don’t know why Florida should be subjected to such embarrassments, too. It does seem sometimes as if it were something in the blood. They all get the idea that you have money, you know.”

“Then I should say that it might be something in the pocket,” suggested Ferris with a look at Miss Vervain, in whose silent suffering, as he imagined it, he found a malicious consolation for her scorn.

“Well, whatever it is,” replied Mrs. Vervain, “it’s too vexatious. Of course, going to new places, that way, as we’re always doing, and only going to stay for a limited time, perhaps, you can’t pick and choose. And even when you do get an elderly teacher, they’re as bad as any. It really is too trying. Now, when I was talking with that nice monk of yours at the convent, there, I couldn’t help thinking how perfectly delightful it would be if Florida could have him for a teacher. Why couldn’t she? He told me that he would come to take breakfast or lunch with us, but not dinner, for he always had to be at the convent before nightfall. Well, he might come to give the lessons sometime in the middle of the day.”

“You couldn’t manage it, Mrs. Vervain, I know you couldn’t,” answered Ferris earnestly. “I’m sure the Armenians never do anything of the kind. They’re all very busy men, engaged in ecclesiastical or literary work, and they couldn’t give the time.”

“Why not? There was Byron.”

“But Byron went to them, and he studied Armenian, not Italian, with them. Padre Girolamo speaks perfect Italian, for all that I can see; but I doubt if he’d undertake to impart the native accent, which is what you want. In fact, the scheme is altogether impracticable.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Vervain; “I’m exceedingly sorry. I had quite set my heart on it. I never took such a fancy to any one in such a short time before.”

“It seemed to be a case of love at first sight on both sides,” said Ferris. “Padre Girolamo doesn’t shower those syruped rose-leaves indiscriminately upon visitors.”

“Thanks,” returned Mrs. Vervain; “it’s very good of you to say so, Mr. Ferris, and it’s very gratifying, all round; but don’t you see, it doesn’t serve the present purpose. What teachers do you know of?”

She had been by marriage so long in the service of the United States that she still regarded its agents as part of her own domestic economy. Consuls she everywhere employed as functionaries specially appointed to look after the interests of American ladies traveling without protection. In the week which had passed since her arrival in Venice, there had been no day on which she did not appeal to Ferris for help or sympathy or advice. She took amiable possession of him at once, and she had established an amusing sort of intimacy with him, to which the haughty trepidations of her daughter set certain bounds, but in which the demand that he should find her a suitable Italian teacher seemed trivially matter of course.

“Yes. I know several teachers,” he said, after thinking awhile; “but they’re all open to the objection of being human; and besides, they all do things in a set kind of way, and I’m afraid they wouldn’t enter into the spirit of any scheme of instruction that departed very widely from Ollendorff.” He paused, and Mrs. Vervain gave a sketch of the different professional masters whom she had employed in the various countries of her sojourn, and a disquisition upon their several lives and characters, fortifying her statements by reference of doubtful points to her daughter. This occupied some time, and Ferris listened to it all with an abstracted air. At last he said, with a smile, “There was an Italian priest came to see me this morning, who astonished me by knowing English — with a brogue that he’d learned from an English priest straight from Dublin; perhaps he might do, Mrs. Vervain? He’s professionally pledged, you know, not to give the kind of annoyance you’ve suffered from in teachers. He would do as well as Padre Girolamo, I suppose.”

“Do you really? Are you in earnest?”

“Well, no, I believe I’m not. I haven’t the least idea he would do. He belongs to the church militant. He came to me with the model of a breech-loading cannon he’s invented, and he wanted a passport to go to America, so that he might offer his cannon to our government.”

“How curious!” said Mrs. Vervain, and her daughter looked frankly into Ferris’s face. “But I know; it’s one of your jokes.”

“You overpraise me, Mrs. Vervain. If I could make such jokes as that priest was, I should set up for a humorist at once. He had the touch of pathos that they say all true pieces of humor ought to have,” he went on instinctively addressing himself to Miss Vervain, who did not repulse him. “He made me melancholy; and his face haunts me. I should like to paint him. Priests are generally such a snuffy, common lot. And I dare say,” he concluded, “he’s sufficiently commonplace, too, though he didn’t look it. Spare your romance, Miss Vervain.”

The young lady blushed resentfully. “I see as little romance as joke in it,” she said.

“It was a cannon,” returned Ferris, without taking any notice of her, and with a sort of absent laugh, “that would make it very lively for the Southerners — if they had it. Poor fellow! I suppose he came with high hopes of me, and expected me to receive his invention with eloquent praises. I’ve no doubt he figured himself furnished not only with a passport, but with a letter from me to President Lincoln, and foresaw his own triumphal entry into Washington, and his honorable interviews with the admiring generals of the Union forces, to whom he should display his wonderful cannon. Too bad; isn’t it?”

“And why didn’t you give him the passport and the letter?” asked Mrs. Vervain.

“Oh, that’s a state secret,” returned Ferris.

“And you think he won’t do for our purpose?”

“I don’t indeed.”

“Well, I’m not so sure of it. Tell me something more about him.”

“I don’t know anything more about him. Besides, there isn’t time.”

The gondola had already entered the canal, and was swiftly approaching the hotel.

“Oh yes, there is,” pleaded Mrs. Vervain, laying her hand on his arm. “I want you to come in and dine with us. We dine early.”

“Thank you, I can’t. Affairs of the nation, you know. Rebel privateer on the canal of the Brenta.”

“Really?” Mrs. Vervain leaned towards Ferris for sharper scrutiny of his face. Her glasses sprang from her nose, and precipitated themselves into his bosom.

“Allow me,” he said, with burlesque politeness, withdrawing them from the recesses of his waistcoat and gravely presenting them. Miss Vervain burst into a helpless laugh; then she turned toward her mother with a kind of indignant tenderness, and gently arranged her shawl so that it should not drop off when she rose to leave the gondola. She did not look again at Ferris, who resisted Mrs. Vervain’s entreaties to remain, and took leave as soon as the gondola landed.

The ladies went to their room, where Florida lifted from the table a vase of divers-colored hyacinths, and stepping out upon the balcony flung the flowers into the canal. As she put down the empty vase, the lingering perfume of the banished flowers haunted the air of the room.

“Why, Florida,” said her mother, “those were the flowers that Mr. Ferris gave you. Did you fancy they had begun to decay? The smell of hyacinths when they’re a little old is dreadful. But I can’t imagine a gentleman’s giving you flowers that were at all old.”

“Oh, mother, don’t speak to me!” cried Miss Vervain, passionately, clasping her hands to her face.

“Now I see that I’ve been saying something to vex you, my darling,” and seating herself beside the young girl on the sofa, she fondly took down her hands. “Do tell me what it was. Was it about your teachers falling in love with you? You know they did, Florida: Pestachiavi and Schulze, both; and that horrid old Fleuron.”

“Did you think I liked any better on that account to have you talk it over with a stranger?” asked Florida, still angrily.

“That’s true, my dear,” said Mrs. Vervain, penitently. “But if it worried you, why didn’t you do something to stop me? Give me a hint, or just a little knock, somewhere?”

“No, mother; I’d rather not. Then you’d have come out with the whole thing, to prove that you were right. It’s better to let it go,” said Florida with a fierce laugh, half sob. “But it’s strange that you can’t remember how such things torment me.”

“I suppose it’s my weak health, dear,” answered the mother. “I didn’t use to be so. But now I don’t really seem to have the strength to be sensible. I know it’s silly as well as you. The talk just seems to keep going on of itself, — slipping out, slipping out. But you needn’t mind. Mr. Ferris won’t think you could ever have done anything out of the way. I’m sure you don’t act with him as if you’d ever encouraged anybody. I think you’re too haughty with him, Florida. And now, his flowers.”

“He’s detestable. He’s conceited and presuming beyond all endurance. I don’t care what he thinks of me. But it’s his manner towards you that I can’t tolerate.”

“I suppose it’s rather free,” said Mrs. Vervain. “But then you know, my dear, I shall be soon getting to be an old lady; and besides, I always feel as if consuls were a kind of one of the family. He’s been very obliging since we came; I don’t know what we should have done without him. And I don’t object to a little ease of manner in the gentlemen; I never did.”

“He makes fun of you,” cried Florida: “and there at the convent,”, she said, bursting into angry tears, “he kept exchanging glances with that monk as if he.... He’s insulting, and I hate him!”

“Do you mean that he thought your mother ridiculous, Florida?” asked Mrs. Vervain gravely. “You must have misunderstood his looks; indeed you must. I can’t imagine why he should. I remember that I talked particularly well during our whole visit; my mind was active, for I felt unusually strong, and I was interested in everything. It’s nothing but a fancy of yours; or your prejudice, Florida. But it’s odd, now I’ve sat down for a moment, how worn out I feel. And thirsty.”

Mrs. Vervain fitted on her glasses, but even then felt uncertainly about for the empty vase on the table before her.

“It isn’t a goblet, mother,” said Florida; “I’ll get you some water.”

“Do; and then throw a shawl over me. I’m sleepy, and a nap before dinner will do me good. I don’t see why I’m so drowsy of late. I suppose it’s getting into the sea air here at Venice; though it’s mountain air that makes you drowsy. But you’re quite mistaken about Mr. Ferris. He isn’t capable of anything really rude. Besides, there wouldn’t have been any sense in it.”

The young girl brought the water and then knelt beside the sofa, on which she arranged the pillows under her mother, and covered her with soft wraps. She laid her cheek against the thinner face. “Don’t mind anything I’ve said, mother; let’s talk of something else.”

The mother drew some loose threads of the daughter’s hair through her slender fingers, but said little more, and presently fell into a deep slumber. Florida gently lifted her head away, and remained kneeling before the sofa, looking into the sleeping face with an expression of strenuous, compassionate devotion, mixed with a vague alarm and self-pity, and a certain wondering anxiety.

III.

Don Ippolito had slept upon his interview with Ferris, and now sat in his laboratory, amidst the many witnesses of his inventive industry, with the model of the breech-loading cannon on the workbench before him. He had neatly mounted it on wheels, that its completeness might do him the greater credit with the consul when he should show it him, but the carriage had been broken in his pocket, on the way home, by an unlucky thrust from the burden of a porter, and the poor toy lay there disabled, as if to dramatize that premature explosion in the secret chamber.

His heart was in these inventions of his, which had as yet so grudgingly repaid his affection. For their sake he had stinted himself of many needful things. The meagre stipend which he received from the patrimony of his church, eked out with the money paid him for baptisms, funerals, and marriages, and for masses by people who had friends to be prayed out of purgatory, would at best have barely sufficed to support him; but he denied himself everything save the necessary decorums of dress and lodging; he fasted like a saint, and slept hard as a hermit, that he might spend upon these ungrateful creatures of his brain. They were the work of his own hands, and so he saved the expense of their construction; but there were many little outlays for materials and for tools, which he could not avoid, and with him a little was all. They not only famished him; they isolated him. His superiors in the church, and his brother priests, looked with doubt or ridicule upon the labors for which he shunned their company, while he gave up the other social joys, few and small, which a priest might know in the Venice of that day, when all generous spirits regarded him with suspicion for his cloth’s sake, and church and state were alert to detect disaffection or indifference in him. But bearing these things willingly, and living as frugally as he might, he had still not enough, and he had been fain to assume the instruction of a young girl of old and noble family in certain branches of polite learning which a young lady of that sort might fitly know. The family was not so rich as it was old and noble, and Don Ippolito was paid from its purse rather than its pride. But the slender salary was a help; these patricians were very good to him; many a time he dined with them, and so spared the cost of his own pottage at home; they always gave him coffee when he came, and that was a saving; at the proper seasons little presents from them were not wanting. In a word, his condition was not privation. He did his duty as a teacher faithfully, and the only trouble with it was that the young girl was growing into a young woman, and that he could not go on teaching her forever. In an evil hour, as it seemed to Don Ippolito, that made the years she had been his pupil shrivel to a mere pinch of time, there came from a young count of the Friuli, visiting Venice, an offer of marriage; and Don Ippolito lost his place. It was hard, but he bade himself have patience; and he composed an ode for the nuptials of his late pupil, which, together with a brief sketch of her ancestral history, he had elegantly printed, according to the Italian usage, and distributed among the family friends; he also made a sonnet to the bridegroom, and these literary tributes were handsomely acknowledged.

He managed a whole year upon the proceeds, and kept a cheerful spirit till the last soldo was spent, inventing one thing after another, and giving much time and money to a new principle of steam propulsion, which, as applied without steam to a small boat on the canal before his door, failed to work, though it had no logical excuse for its delinquency. He tried to get other pupils, but he got none, and he began to dream of going to America. He pinned his faith in all sorts of magnificent possibilities to the names of Franklin, Fulton, and Morse; he was so ignorant of our politics and geography as to suppose us at war with the South American Spaniards, but he knew that English was the language of the North, and he applied himself to the study of it. Heaven only knows what kind of inventor’s Utopia, our poor, patent-ridden country appeared to him in these dreams of his, and I can but dimly figure it to myself. But he might very naturally desire to come to a land where the spirit of invention is recognized and fostered, and where he could hope to find that comfort of incentive and companionship which our artists find in Italy.

The idea of the breech-loading cannon had occurred to him suddenly one day, in one of his New-World-ward reveries, and he had made haste to realize it, carefully studying the form and general effect of the Austrian cannon under the gallery of the Ducal Palace, to the high embarrassment of the Croat sentry who paced up and down there, and who did not feel free to order off a priest as he would a civilian. Don Ippolito’s model was of admirable finish; he even painted the carriage yellow and black, because that of the original was so, and colored the piece to look like brass; and he lost a day while the paint was drying, after he was otherwise ready to show it to the consul.

He had parted from Ferris with some gleams of comfort, caught chiefly from his kindly manner, but they had died away before nightfall, and this morning he could not rekindle them.

He had had his coffee served to him on the bench, as his frequent custom was, but it stood untasted in the little copper pot beside the dismounted cannon, though it was now ten o’clock, and it was full time he had breakfasted, for he had risen early to perform the matin service for three peasant women, two beggars, a cat, and a paralytic nobleman, in the ancient and beautiful church to which he was attached. He had tried to go about his wonted occupations, but he was still sitting idle before his bench, while his servant gossiped from her balcony to the mistress of the next house, across a calle so deep and narrow that it opened like a mountain chasm beneath them. “It were well if the master read his breviary a little more, instead of always maddening himself with those blessed inventions, that eat more soldi than a Christian, and never come to anything. There he sits before his table, as if he were nailed to his chair, and lets his coffee cool — and God knows I was ready to drink it warm two hours ago — and never looks at me if I open the door twenty times to see whether he has finished. Holy patience! You have not even the advantage of fasting to the glory of God in this house, though you keep Lent the year round. It’s the Devil’s Lent, I say. Eh, Diana! There goes the bell. Who now? Adieu, Lusetta. To meet again, dear. Farewell!”

She ran to another window, and admitted the visitor. It was Ferris, and she went to announce him to her master by the title he had given, while he amused his leisure in the darkness below by falling over a cistern-top, with a loud clattering of his cane on the copper lid, after which he heard the voice of the priest begging him to remain at his convenience a moment till he could descend and show him the way upstairs. His eyes were not yet used to the obscurity of the narrow entry in which he stood, when he felt a cold hand laid on his, and passively yielded himself to its guidance. He tried to excuse himself for intruding upon Don Ippolito so soon, but the priest in far suppler Italian overwhelmed him with lamentations that he should be so unworthy the honor done him, and ushered his guest into his apartment. He plainly took it for granted that Ferris had come to see his inventions, in compliance with the invitation he had given him the day before, and he made no affectation of delay, though after the excitement of the greetings was past, it was with a quiet dejection that he rose and offered to lead his visitor to his laboratory.

The whole place was an outgrowth of himself; it was his history as well as his character. It recorded his quaint and childish tastes, his restless endeavors, his partial and halting successes. The ante-room in which he had paused with Ferris was painted to look like a grape-arbor, where the vines sprang from the floor, and flourishing up the trellised walls, with many a wanton tendril and flaunting leaf, displayed their lavish clusters of white and purple all over the ceiling. It touched Ferris, when Don Ippolito confessed that this decoration had been the distraction of his own vacant moments, to find that it was like certain grape-arbors he had seen in remote corners of Venice before the doors of degenerate palaces, or forming the entrances of open-air restaurants, and did not seem at all to have been studied from grape-arbors in the country. He perceived the archaic striving for exact truth, and he successfully praised the mechanical skill and love of reality with which it was done; but he was silenced by a collection of paintings in Don Ippolito’s parlor, where he had been made to sit down a moment. Hard they were in line, fixed in expression, and opaque in color, these copies of famous masterpieces, — saints of either sex, ascensions, assumptions, martyrdoms, and what not, — and they were not quite comprehensible till Don Ippolito explained that he had made them from such prints of the subjects as he could get, and had colored them after his own fancy. All this, in a city whose art had been the glory of the world for nigh half a thousand years, struck Ferris as yet more comically pathetic than the frescoed grape-arbor; he stared about him for some sort of escape from the pictures, and his eye fell upon a piano and a melodeon placed end to end in a right angle. Don Ippolito, seeing his look of inquiry, sat down and briefly played the same air with a hand upon each instrument.

Ferris smiled. “Don Ippolito, you are another Da Vinci, a universal genius.”

“Bagatelles, bagatelles,” said the priest pensively; but he rose with greater spirit than he had yet shown, and preceded the consul into the little room that served him for a smithy. It seemed from some peculiarities of shape to have once been an oratory, but it was now begrimed with smoke and dust from the forge which Don Ippolito had set up in it; the embers of a recent fire, the bellows, the pincers, the hammers, and the other implements of the trade, gave it a sinister effect, as if the place of prayer had been invaded by mocking imps, or as if some hapless mortal in contract with the evil powers were here searching, by the help of the adversary, for the forbidden secrets of the metals and of fire. In those days, Ferris was an uncompromising enemy of the theatricalization of Italy, or indeed of anything; but the fancy of the black-robed young priest at work in this place appealed to him all the more potently because of the sort of tragic innocence which seemed to characterize Don Ippolito’s expression. He longed intensely to sketch the picture then and there, but he had strength to rebuke the fancy as something that could not make itself intelligible without the help of such accessories as he despised, and he victoriously followed the priest into his larger workshop, where his inventions, complete and incomplete, were stored, and where he had been seated when his visitor arrived. The high windows and the frescoed ceiling were festooned with dusty cobwebs; litter of shavings and whittlings strewed the floor; mechanical implements and contrivances were everywhere, and Don Ippolito’s listlessness seemed to return upon him again at the sight of the familiar disorder. Conspicuous among other objects lay the illogically unsuccessful model of the new principle of steam propulsion, untouched since the day when he had lifted it out of the canal and carried it indoors through the ranks of grinning spectators. From a shelf above it he took down models of a flying-machine and a perpetual motion. “Fantastic researches in the impossible. I never expected results from these experiments, with which I nevertheless once pleased myself,” he said, and turned impatiently to various pieces of portable furniture, chairs, tables, bedsteads, which by folding up their legs and tops condensed themselves into flat boxes, developing handles at the side for convenience in carrying. They were painted and varnished, and were in all respects complete; they had indeed won favorable mention at an exposition of the Provincial Society of Arts and Industries, and Ferris could applaud their ingenuity sincerely, though he had his tacit doubts of their usefulness. He fell silent again when Don Ippolito called his notice to a photographic camera, so contrived with straps and springs that you could snatch by its help whatever joy there might be in taking your own photograph; and he did not know what to say of a submarine boat, a four-wheeled water-velocipede, a movable bridge, or the very many other principles and ideas to which Don Ippolito’s cunning hand had given shape, more or less imperfect. It seemed to him that they all, however perfect or imperfect, had some fatal defect: they were aspirations toward the impossible, or realizations of the trivial and superfluous. Yet, for all this, they strongly appealed to the painter as the stunted fruit of a talent denied opportunity, instruction, and sympathy. As he looked from them at last to the questioning face of the priest, and considered out of what disheartened and solitary patience they must have come in this city, — dead hundreds of years to all such endeavor, — he could not utter some glib phrases of compliment that he had on his tongue. If Don Ippolito had been taken young, he might perhaps have amounted to something, though this was questionable; but at thirty — as he looked now, — with his undisciplined purposes, and his head full of vagaries of which these things were the tangible witness.... Ferris let his eyes drop again. They fell upon the ruin of the breech-loading cannon, and he said, “Don Ippolito, it’s very good of you to take the trouble of showing me these matters, and I hope you’ll pardon the ungrateful return, if I cannot offer any definite opinion of them now. They are rather out of my way, I confess. I wish with all my heart I could order an experimental, life-size copy of your breech-loading cannon here, for trial by my government, but I can’t; and to tell you the truth, it was not altogether the wish to see these inventions of yours that brought me here to-day.”

“Oh,” said Don Ippolito, with a mortified air, “I am afraid that I have wearied the Signor Console.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Ferris made haste to answer, with a frown at his own awkwardness. “But your speaking English yesterday; ... perhaps what I was thinking of is quite foreign to your tastes and possibilities.”... He hesitated with a look of perplexity, while Don Ippolito stood before him in an attitude of expectation, pressing the points of his fingers together, and looking curiously into his face. “The case is this,” resumed Ferris desperately. “There are two American ladies, friends of mine, sojourning in Venice, who expect to be here till midsummer. They are mother and daughter, and the young lady wants to read and speak Italian with somebody a few hours each day. The question is whether it is quite out of your way or not to give her lessons of this kind. I ask it quite at a venture. I suppose no harm is done, at any rate,” and he looked at Don Ippolito with apologetic perturbation.

“No,” said the priest, “there is no harm. On the contrary, I am at this moment in a position to consider it a great favor that you do me in offering me this employment. I accept it with the greatest pleasure. Oh!” he cried, breaking by a sudden impulse from the composure with which he had begun to speak, “you don’t know what you do for me; you lift me out of despair. Before you came, I had reached one of those passes that seem the last bound of endeavor. But you give me new life. Now I can go on with my experiment. I can attest my gratitude by possessing your native country of the weapon I had designed for it — I am sure of the principle: some slight improvement, perhaps the use of some different explosive, would get over that difficulty you suggested,” he said eagerly. “Yes, something can be done. God bless you, my dear little son — I mean — perdoni! — my dear sir.”...

“Wait — not so fast,” said Ferris with a laugh, yet a little annoyed that a question so purely tentative as his should have met at once such a definite response. “Are you quite sure you can do what they want?” He unfolded to him, as fully as he understood it, Mrs. Vervain’s scheme.

Don Ippolito entered into it with perfect intelligence. He said that he had already had charge of the education of a young girl of noble family, and he could therefore the more confidently hope to be useful to this American lady. A light of joyful hope shone in his dreamy eyes, the whole man changed, he assumed the hospitable and caressing host. He conducted Ferris back to his parlor, and making him sit upon the hard sofa that was his hard bed by night, he summoned his servant, and bade her serve them coffee. She closed her lips firmly, and waved her finger before her face, to signify that there was no more coffee. Then he bade her fetch it from the caffè: and he listened with a sort of rapt inattention while Ferris again returned to the subject and explained that he had approached him without first informing the ladies, and that he must regard nothing as final. It was at this point that Don Ippolito, who had understood so clearly what Mrs. Vervain wanted, appeared a little slow to understand; and Ferris had a doubt whether it was from subtlety or from simplicity that the priest seemed not to comprehend the impulse on which he had acted. He finished his coffee in this perplexity, and when he rose to go, Don Ippolito followed him down to the street-door, and preserved him from a second encounter with the cistern-top.

“But, Don Ippolito — remember! I make no engagement for the ladies, whom you must see before anything is settled,” said Ferris.

“Surely, — surely!” answered the priest, and he remained smiling at the door till the American turned the next corner. Then he went back to his work-room, and took up the broken model from the bench. But he could not work at it now, he could not work at anything; he began to walk up and down the floor.

“Could he really have been so stupid because his mind was on his ridiculous cannon?” wondered Ferris as he sauntered frowning away; and he tried to prepare his own mind for his meeting with the Vervains, to whom he must now go at once. He felt abused and victimized. Yet it was an amusing experience, and he found himself able to interest both of the ladies in it. The younger had received him as coldly as the forms of greeting would allow; but as he talked she drew nearer him with a reluctant haughtiness which he noted. He turned the more conspicuously towards Mrs. Vervain. “Well, to make a long story short,” he said, “I couldn’t discourage Don Ippolito. He refused to be dismayed — as I should have been at the notion of teaching Miss Vervain. I didn’t arrange with him not to fall in love with her as his secular predecessors have done — it seemed superfluous. But you can mention it to him if you like. In fact,” said Ferris, suddenly addressing the daughter, “you might make the stipulation yourself, Miss Vervain.”

She looked at him a moment with a sort of defenseless pain that made him ashamed; and then walked away from him towards the window, with a frank resentment that made him smile, as he continued, “But I suppose you would like to have some explanation of my motive in precipitating Don Ippolito upon you in this way, when I told you only yesterday that he wouldn’t do at all; in fact I think myself that I’ve behaved rather fickle-mindedly — for a representative of the country. But I’ll tell you; and you won’t be surprised to learn that I acted from mixed motives. I’m not at all sure that he’ll do; I’ve had awful misgivings about it since I left him, and I’m glad of the chance to make a clean breast of it. When I came to think the matter over last night, the fact that he had taught himself English — with the help of an Irishman for the pronunciation — seemed to promise that he’d have the right sort of sympathy with your scheme, and it showed that he must have something practical about him, too. And here’s where the selfish admixture comes in. I didn’t have your interests solely in mind when I went to see Don Ippolito. I hadn’t been able to get rid of him; he stuck in my thought. I fancied he might be glad of the pay of a teacher, and — I had half a notion to ask him to let me paint him. It was an even chance whether I should try to secure him for Miss Vervain, or for Art — as they call it. Miss Vervain won because she could pay him, and I didn’t see how Art could. I can bring him round any time; and that’s the whole inconsequent business. My consolation is that I’ve left you perfectly free. There’s nothing decided.”

“Thanks,” said Mrs. Vervain; “then it’s all settled. You can bring him as soon as you like, to our new place. We’ve taken that apartment we looked at the other day, and we’re going into it this afternoon. Here’s the landlord’s letter,” she added, drawing a paper out of her pocket. “If he’s cheated us, I suppose you can see justice done. I didn’t want to trouble you before.”

“You’re a woman of business, Mrs. Vervain,” said Ferris. “The man’s a perfect Jew — or a perfect Christian, one ought to say in Venice; we true believers do gouge so much, more infamously here — and you let him get you in black and white before you come to me. Well,” he continued, as he glanced at the paper, “you’ve done it! He makes you pay one half too much. However, it’s cheap enough; twice as cheap as your hotel.”

“But I don’t care for cheapness. I hate to be imposed upon. What’s to be done about it?”

“Nothing; if he has your letter as you have his. It’s a bargain, and you must stand to it.”

“A bargain? Oh nonsense, now, Mr. Ferris. This is merely a note of mutual understanding.”

“Yes, that’s one way of looking at it. The Civil Tribunal would call it a binding agreement of the closest tenure, — if you want to go to law about it.”

“I will go to law about it.”

“Oh no, you won’t — unless you mean to spend your remaining days and all your substance in Venice. Come, you haven’t done so badly, Mrs. Vervain. I don’t call four rooms, completely furnished for housekeeping, with that lovely garden, at all dear at eleven francs a day. Besides, the landlord is a man of excellent feeling, sympathetic and obliging, and a perfect gentleman, though he is such an outrageous scoundrel. He’ll cheat you, of course, in whatever he can; you must look out for that; but he’ll do you any sort of little neighborly kindness. Good-by,” said Ferris, getting to the door before Mrs. Vervain could intercept him. “I’ll come to your new place this evening to see how you are pleased.”

“Florida,” said Mrs. Vervain, “this is outrageous.”

“I wouldn’t mind it, mother. We pay very little, after all.”

“Yes, but we pay too much. That’s what I can’t bear. And as you said yesterday, I don’t think Mr. Ferris’s manners are quite respectful to me.”

“He only told you the truth; I think he advised you for the best. The matter couldn’t be helped now.”

“But I call it a want of feeling to speak the truth so bluntly.”

“We won’t have to complain of that in our landlord, it seems,” said Florida. “Perhaps not in our priest, either,” she added.

“Yes, that was kind of Mr. Ferris,” said Mrs. Vervain. “It was thoroughly thoughtful and considerate — what I call an instance of true delicacy. I’m really quite curious to see him. Don Ippolito! How very odd to call a priest Don! I should have said Padre. Don always makes you think of a Spanish cavalier. Don Rodrigo: something like that.”

They went on to talk, desultorily, of Don Ippolito, and what he might be like. In speaking of him the day before, Ferris had hinted at some mysterious sadness in him; and to hint of sadness in a man always interests women in him, whether they are old or young: the old have suffered, the young forebode suffering. Their interest in Don Ippolito had not been diminished by what Ferris had told them of his visit to the priest’s house and of the things he had seen there; for there had always been the same strain of pity in his laughing account, and he had imparted none of his doubts to them. They did not talk as if it were strange that Ferris should do to-day what he had yesterday said he would not do; perhaps as women they could not find such a thing strange; but it vexed him more and more as he went about all afternoon thinking of his inconsistency, and wondering whether he had not acted rashly.

IV.

The palace in which Mrs. Vervain had taken an apartment fronted on a broad campo, and hung its empty marble balconies from gothic windows above a silence scarcely to be matched elsewhere in Venice. The local pharmacy, the caffè, the grocery, the fruiterer’s, the other shops with which every Venetian campo is furnished, had each a certain life about it, but it was a silent life, and at midday a frowsy-headed woman clacking across the flags in her wooden-heeled shoes made echoes whose garrulity was interrupted by no other sound. In the early morning, when the lid of the public cistern in the centre of the campo was unlocked, there was a clamor of voices and a clangor of copper vessels, as the housewives of the neighborhood and the local force of strong-backed Frinlan water-girls drew their day’s supply of water; and on that sort of special parochial holiday, called a sagra, the campo hummed and clattered and shrieked with a multitude celebrating the day around the stands where pumpkin seeds and roast pumpkin and anisette-water were sold, and before the movable kitchen where cakes were fried in caldrons of oil, and uproariously offered to the crowd by the cook, who did not suffer himself to be embarrassed by the rival drama of adjoining puppet-shows, but continued to bellow forth his bargains all day long and far into the night, when the flames under his kettles painted his visage a fine crimson. The sagra once over, however, the campo relapsed into its habitual silence, and no one looking at the front of the palace would have thought of it as a place for distraction-seeking foreign sojourners. But it was not on this side that the landlord tempted his tenants; his principal notice of lodgings to let was affixed to the water-gate of the palace, which opened on a smaller channel so near the Grand Canal that no wandering eye could fail to see it. The portal was a tall arch of Venetian gothic tipped with a carven flame; steps of white Istrian stone descended to the level of the lowest ebb, irregularly embossed with barnacles, and dabbling long fringes of soft green sea-mosses in the rising and falling tide. Swarms of water-bugs and beetles played over the edges of the steps, and crabs scuttled side-wise into deeper water at the approach of a gondola. A length of stone-capped brick wall, to which patches of stucco still clung, stretched from the gate on either hand under cover of an ivy that flung its mesh of shining green from within, where there lurked a lovely garden, stately, spacious for Venice, and full of a delicious, half-sad surprise for whoso opened upon it. In the midst it had a broken fountain, with a marble naiad standing on a shell, and looking saucier than the sculptor meant, from having lost the point of her nose, nymphs and fauns, and shepherds and shepherdesses, her kinsfolk, coquetted in and out among the greenery in flirtation not to be embarrassed by the fracture of an arm, or the casting of a leg or so; one lady had no head, but she was the boldest of all. In this garden there were some mulberry and pomegranate trees, several of which hung about the fountain with seats in their shade, and for the rest there seemed to be mostly roses and oleanders, with other shrubs of a kind that made the greatest show of blossom and cost the least for tendance. A wide terrace stretched across the rear of the palace, dropping to the garden path by a flight of balustraded steps, and upon this terrace opened the long windows of Mrs. Vervain’s parlor and dining-room. Her landlord owned only the first story and the basement of the palace, in some corner of which he cowered with his servants, his taste for pictures and bric-à-brac, and his little branch of inquiry into Venetian history, whatever it was, ready to let himself or anything he had for hire at a moment’s notice, but very pleasant, gentle, and unobtrusive; a cheat and a liar, but of a kind heart and sympathetic manners. Under his protection Mrs. Vervain set up her impermanent household gods. The apartment was taken only from week to week, and as she freely explained to the padrone hovering about with offers of service, she knew herself too well ever to unpack anything that would not spoil by remaining packed. She made her trunks yield all the appliances necessary for an invalid’s comfort, and then left them in a state to be strapped and transported to the station within half a day after the desire of change or the exigencies of her feeble health caused her going. Everything for housekeeping was furnished with the rooms. There was a gondolier and a sort of house-servant in the employ of the landlord, of whom Mrs. Vervain hired them, and she caressingly dismissed the padrone at an early moment after her arrival, with the charge to find a maid for herself and daughter. As if she had been waiting at the next door this maid appeared promptly, and being Venetian, and in domestic service, her name was of course Nina. Mrs. Vervain now said to Florida that everything was perfect, and contentedly began her life in Venice by telling Mr. Ferris, when he came in the evening, that he could bring Don Ippolito the day after the morrow, if he liked.

She and Florida sat on the terrace waiting for them on the morning named, when Ferris, with the priest in his clerical best, came up the garden path in the sunny light. Don Ippolito’s best was a little poverty-stricken; he had faltered a while, before leaving home, over the sad choice between a shabby cylinder hat of obsolete fashion and his well-worn three-cornered priestly beaver, and had at last put on the latter with a sigh. He had made his servant polish the buckles of his shoes, and instead of a band of linen round his throat, he wore a strip of cloth covered with small white beads, edged above and below with a single row of pale blue ones.

As he mounted the steps with Ferris, Mrs. Vervain came forward a little to meet them, while Florida rose and stood beside her chair in a sort of proud suspense and timidity. The elder lady was in that black from which she had so seldom been able to escape; but the daughter wore a dress of delicate green, in which she seemed a part of the young season that everywhere clothed itself in the same tint. The sunlight fell upon her blonde hair, melting into its light gold; her level brows frowned somewhat with the glance of scrutiny which she gave the dark young priest, who was making his stately bow to her mother, and trying to answer her English greetings in the same tongue.

“My daughter,” said Mrs. Vervain, and Don Ippolito made another low bow, and then looked at the girl with a sort of frank and melancholy wonder, as she turned and exchanged a few words with Ferris, who was assailing her seriousness and hauteur with unabashed levity of compliment. A quick light flashed and fled in her cheek as she talked, and the fringes of her serious, asking eyes swept slowly up and down as she bent them upon him a moment before she broke abruptly, not coquettishly, away from him, and moved towards her mother, while Ferris walked off to the other end of the terrace, with a laugh. Mrs. Vervain and the priest were trying each other in French, and not making great advance; he explained to Florida in Italian, and she answered him hesitatingly; whereupon he praised her Italian in set phrase.

“Thank you,” said the girl sincerely, “I have tried to learn. I hope,” she added as before, “you can make me see how little I know.” The deprecating wave of the hand with which Don Ippolito appealed to her from herself, seemed arrested midway by his perception of some novel quality in her. He said gravely that he should try to be of use, and then the two stood silent.

“Come, Mr. Ferris,” called out Mrs. Vervain, “breakfast is ready, and I want you to take me in.”

“Too much honor,” said the painter, coming forward and offering his arm, and Mrs. Vervain led the way indoors.

“I suppose I ought to have taken Don Ippolito’s arm,” she confided in under-tone, “but the fact is, our French is so unlike that we don’t understand each other very well.”

“Oh,” returned Ferris, “I’ve known Italians and Americans whom Frenchmen themselves couldn’t understand.”

“You see it’s an American breakfast,” said Mrs. Vervain with a critical glance at the table before she sat down. “All but hot bread; that you can’t have,” and Don Ippolito was for the first time in his life confronted by a breakfast of hot beef-steak, eggs and toast, fried potatoes, and coffee with milk, with a choice of tea. He subdued all signs of the wonder he must have felt, and beyond cutting his meat into little bits before eating it, did nothing to betray his strangeness to the feast.

The breakfast had passed off very pleasantly, with occasional lapses. “We break down under the burden of so many languages,” said Ferris. “It is an embarras de richesses. Let us fix upon a common maccheronic. May I trouble you for a poco piú di sugar dans mon café, Mrs. Vervain? What do you think of the bellazza de ce weather magnifique, Don Ippolito?”

“How ridiculous!” said Mrs. Vervain in a tone of fond admiration aside to Don Ippolito, who smiled, but shrank from contributing to the new tongue.

“Very well, then,” said the painter. “I shall stick to my native Bergamask for the future; and Don Ippolito may translate for the foreign ladies.”

He ended by speaking English with everybody; Don Ippolito eked out his speeches to Mrs. Vervain in that tongue with a little French; Florida, conscious of Ferris’s ironical observance, used an embarrassed but defiant Italian with the priest.

“I’m so pleased!” said Mrs. Vervain, rising when Ferris said that he must go, and Florida shook hands with both guests.

“Thank you, Mrs. Vervain; I could have gone before, if I’d thought you would have liked it,” answered the painter.

“Oh nonsense, now,” returned the lady. “You know what I mean. I’m perfectly delighted with him,” she continued, getting Ferris to one side, “and I know he must have a good accent. So very kind of you. Will you arrange with him about the pay? — such a shame! Thanks. Then I needn’t say anything to him about that. I’m so glad I had him to breakfast the first day; though Florida thought not. Of course, one needn’t keep it up. But seriously, it isn’t an ordinary case, you know.”

Ferris laughed at her with a sort of affectionate disrespect, and said good-by. Don Ippolito lingered for a while to talk over the proposed lessons, and then went, after more elaborate adieux. Mrs. Vervain remained thoughtful a moment before she said: —

“That was rather droll, Florida.”

“What, mother?”

“His cutting his meat into small bites, before he began to eat. But perhaps it’s the Venetian custom. At any rate, my dear, he’s a gentleman in virtue of his profession, and I couldn’t do less than ask him to breakfast. He has beautiful manners; and if he must take snuff, I suppose it’s neater to carry two handkerchiefs, though it does look odd. I wish he wouldn’t take snuff.”

“I don’t see why we need care, mother. At any rate, we cannot help it.”

“That’s true, my dear. And his nails. Now when they’re spread out on a book, you know, to keep it open, — won’t it be unpleasant?”

“They seem to have just such fingernails all over Europe — except in England.”

“Oh, yes; I know it. I dare say we shouldn’t care for it in him, if he didn’t seem so very nice otherwise. How handsome he is!”

V.

It was understood that Don Ippolito should come every morning at ten o’clock, and read and talk with Miss Vervain for an hour or two; but Mrs. Vervain’s hospitality was too aggressive for the letter of the agreement. She oftener had him to breakfast at nine, for, as she explained to Ferris, she could not endure to have him feel that it was a mere mercenary transaction, and there was no limit fixed for the lessons on these days. When she could, she had Ferris come, too, and she missed him when he did not come. “I like that bluntness of his,” she professed to her daughter, “and I don’t mind his making light of me. You are so apt to be heavy if you’re not made light of occasionally. I certainly shouldn’t want a son to be so respectful and obedient as you are, my dear.”

The painter honestly returned her fondness, and with not much greater reason. He saw that she took pleasure in his talk, and enjoyed it even when she did not understand it; and this is a kind of flattery not easy to resist. Besides, there was very little ladies’ society in Venice in those times, and Ferris, after trying the little he could get at, had gladly denied himself its pleasures, and consorted with the young men he met at the caffè’s, or in the Piazza. But when the Vervains came, they recalled to him the younger days in which he had delighted in the companionship of women. After so long disuse, it was charming to be with a beautiful girl who neither regarded him with distrust nor expected him to ask her in marriage because he sat alone with her, rode out with her in a gondola, walked with her, read with her. All young men like a house in which no ado is made about their coming and going, and Mrs. Vervain perfectly understood the art of letting him make himself at home. He perceived with amusement that this amiable lady, who never did an ungraceful thing nor wittingly said an ungracious one, was very much of a Bohemian at heart, — the gentlest and most blameless of the tribe, but still lawless, — whether from her campaigning married life, or the rovings of her widowhood, or by natural disposition; and that Miss Vervain was inclined to be conventionally strict, but with her irregular training was at a loss for rules by which to check her mother’s little waywardnesses. Her anxious perplexity, at times, together with her heroic obedience and unswerving loyalty to her mother had something pathetic as well as amusing in it. He saw her tried almost to tears by her mother’s helpless frankness, — for Mrs. Vervain was apparently one of those ladies whom the intolerable surprise of having anything come into their heads causes instantly to say or do it, — and he observed that she never tried to pass off her endurance with any feminine arts; but seemed to defy him to think what he would of it. Perhaps she was not able to do otherwise: he thought of her at times as a person wholly abandoned to the truth. Her pride was on the alert against him; she may have imagined that he was covertly smiling at her, and she no doubt tasted the ironical flavor of much of his talk and behavior, for in those days he liked to qualify his devotion to the Vervains with a certain nonchalant slight, which, while the mother openly enjoyed it, filled the daughter with anger and apprehension. Quite at random, she visited points of his informal manner with unmeasured reprisal; others, for which he might have blamed himself, she passed over with strange caprice. Sometimes this attitude of hers provoked him, and sometimes it disarmed him; but whether they were at feud, or keeping an armed truce, or, as now and then happened, were in an entente cordiale which he found very charming, the thing that he always contrived to treat with silent respect and forbearance in Miss Vervain was that sort of aggressive tenderness with which she hastened to shield the foibles of her mother. That was something very good in her pride, he finally decided. At the same time, he did not pretend to understand the curious filial self-sacrifice which it involved.

Another thing in her that puzzled him was her devoutness. Mrs. Vervain could with difficulty be got to church, but her daughter missed no service of the English ritual in the old palace where the British and American tourists assembled once a week with their guide-books in one pocket and their prayer-books in the other, and buried the tomahawk under the altar. Mr. Ferris was often sent with her; and then his thoughts, which were a young man’s, wandered from the service to the beautiful girl at his side, — the golden head that punctiliously bowed itself at the proper places in the liturgy: the full lips that murmured the responses; the silken lashes that swept her pale cheeks as she perused the morning lesson. He knew that the Vervains were not Episcopalians when at home, for Mrs. Vervain had told him so, and that Florida went to the English service because there was no other. He conjectured that perhaps her touch of ritualism came from mere love of any form she could make sure of.

The servants in Mrs. Vervain’s lightly ordered household, with the sympathetic quickness of the Italians, learned to use him as the next friend of the family, and though they may have had their decorous surprise at his untrammeled footing, they probably excused the whole relation as a phase of that foreign eccentricity to which their nation is so amiable. If they were not able to cast the same mantle of charity over Don Ippolito’s allegiance, — and doubtless they had their reserves concerning such frankly familiar treatment of so dubious a character as priest, — still as a priest they stood somewhat in awe of him; they had the spontaneous loyalty of their race to the people they served, and they never intimated by a look that they found it strange when Don Ippolito freely came and went. Mrs. Vervain had quite adopted him into her family; while her daughter seemed more at ease with him than with Ferris, and treated him with a grave politeness which had something also of compassion and of child-like reverence in it. Ferris observed that she was always particularly careful of his supposable sensibilities as a Roman Catholic, and that the priest was oddly indifferent to this deference, as if it would have mattered very little to him whether his church was spared or not. He had a way of lightly avoiding, Ferris fancied, not only religious points on which they could disagree, but all phases of religion as matters of indifference. At such times Miss Vervain relaxed her reverential attitude, and used him with something like rebuke, as if it did not please her to have the representative of even an alien religion slight his office; as if her respect were for his priesthood and her compassion for him personally. That was rather hard for Don Ippolito, Ferris thought, and waited to see him snubbed outright some day, when he should behave without sufficient gravity.

The blossoms came and went upon the pomegranate and almond trees in the garden, and some of the earliest roses were in their prime; everywhere was so full leaf that the wantonest of the strutting nymphs was forced into a sort of decent seclusion, but the careless naiad of the fountain burnt in sunlight that subtly increased its fervors day by day, and it was no longer beginning to be warm, it was warm, when one morning Ferris and Miss Vervain sat on the steps of the terrace, waiting for Don Ippolito to join them at breakfast.

By this time the painter was well on with the picture of Don Ippolito which the first sight of the priest had given him a longing to paint, and he had been just now talking of it with Miss Vervain.

“But why do you paint him simply as a priest?” she asked. “I should think you would want to make him the centre of some famous or romantic scene,” she added, gravely looking into his eyes as he sat with his head thrown back against the balustrade.

“No, I doubt if you think,” answered Ferris, “or you’d see that a Venetian priest doesn’t need any tawdry accessories. What do you want? Somebody administering the extreme unction to a victim of the Council of Ten? A priest stepping into a confessional at the Frari — tomb of Canova in the distance, perspective of one of the naves, and so forth — with his eye on a pretty devotee coming up to unburden her conscience? I’ve no patience with the follies people think and say about Venice!”

Florida stared in haughty question at the painter.

“You’re no worse than the rest,” he continued with indifference to her anger at his bluntness. “You all think that there can be no picture of Venice without a gondola or a Bridge of Sighs in it. Have you ever read the Merchant of Venice, or Othello? There isn’t a boat nor a bridge nor a canal mentioned in either of them; and yet they breathe and pulsate with the very life of Venice. I’m going to try to paint a Venetian priest so that you’ll know him without a bit of conventional Venice near him.”

“It was Shakespeare who wrote those plays,” said Florida. Ferris bowed in mock suffering from her sarcasm. “You’d better have some sort of symbol in your picture of a Venetian priest, or people will wonder why you came so far to paint Father O’Brien.”

“I don’t say I shall succeed,” Ferris answered. “In fact I’ve made one failure already, and I’m pretty well on with a second; but the principle is right, all the same. I don’t expect everybody to see the difference between Don Ippolito and Father O’Brien. At any rate, what I’m going to paint at is the lingering pagan in the man, the renunciation first of the inherited nature, and then of a personality that would have enjoyed the world. I want to show that baffled aspiration, apathetic despair, and rebellious longing which you caten in his face when he’s off his guard, and that suppressed look which is the characteristic expression of all Austrian Venice. Then,” said Ferris laughing, “I must work in that small suspicion of Jesuit which there is in every priest. But it’s quite possible I may make a Father O’Brien of him.”

“You won’t make a Don Ippolito of him,” said Florida, after serious consideration of his face to see whether he was quite in earnest, “if you put all that into him. He has the simplest and openest look in the world,” she added warmly, “and there’s neither pagan, nor martyr, nor rebel in it.”

Ferris laughed again. “Excuse me; I don’t think you know. I can convince you.”...

Florida rose, and looking down the garden path said, “He’s coming;” and as Don Ippolito drew near, his face lighting up with a joyous and innocent smile, she continued absently, “he’s got on new stockings, and a different coat and hat.”

The stockings were indeed new and the hat was not the accustomed nicchio, but a new silk cylinder with a very worldly, curling brim. Don Ippolito’s coat, also, was of a more mundane cut than the talare; he wore a waistcoat and small-clothes, meeting the stockings at the knee with a sprightly buckle. His person showed no traces of the snuff with which it used to be so plentifully dusted; in fact, he no longer took snuff in the presence of the ladies. The first week he had noted an inexplicable uneasiness in them when he drew forth that blue cotton handkerchief after the solace of a pinch shortly afterwards, being alone with Florida, he saw her give a nervous start at its appearance. He blushed violently, and put it back into the pocket from which he had half drawn it, and whence it never emerged again in her presence. The contessina his former pupil had not shown any aversion to Don Ippolito’s snuff or his blue handkerchief; but then the contessina had never rebuked his finger-nails by the tints of rose and ivory with which Miss Vervain’s hands bewildered him. It was a little droll how anxiously he studied the ways of these Americans, and conformed to them as far as he knew. His English grew rapidly in their society, and it happened sometimes that the only Italian in the day’s lesson was what he read with Florida, for she always yielded to her mother’s wish to talk, and Mrs. Vervain preferred the ease of her native tongue. He was Americanizing in that good lady’s hands as fast as she could transform him, and he listened to her with trustful reverence, as to a woman of striking though eccentric mind. Yet he seemed finally to refer every point to Florida, as if with an intuition of steadier and stronger character in her; and now, as he ascended the terrace steps in his modified costume, he looked intently at her. She swept him from head to foot with a glance, and then gravely welcomed him with unchanged countenance.

At the same moment Mrs. Vervain came out through one of the long windows, and adjusting her glasses, said with a start, “Why, my dear Don Ippolito, I shouldn’t have known you!”

“Indeed, madama?” asked the priest — with a painful smile. “Is it so great a change? We can wear this dress as well as the other, if we please.”

“Why, of course it’s very becoming and all that; but it does look so out of character,” Mrs. Vervain said, leading the way to the breakfast-room. “It’s like seeing a military man in a civil coat.”

“It must be a great relief to lay aside the uniform now and then, mother,” said Florida, as they sat down. “I can remember that papa used to be glad to get out of his.”

“Perfectly wild,” assented Mrs. Vervain. “But he never seemed the same person. Soldiers and — clergymen — are so much more stylish in their own dress — not stylish, exactly, but taking; don’t you know?”

“There, Don Ippolito,” interposed Ferris, “you had better put on your talare and your nicchio again. Your abbate’s dress isn’t acceptable, you see.”

The painter spoke in Italian, but Don Ippolito answered — with certain blunders which it would be tedious to reproduce — in his patient, conscientious English, half sadly, half playfully, and glancing at Florida, before he turned to Mrs. Vervain, “You are as rigid as the rest of the world, madama. I thought you would like this dress, but it seems that you think it a masquerade. As madamigella says, it is a relief to lay aside the uniform, now and then, for us who fight the spiritual enemies as well as for the other soldiers. There was one time, when I was younger and in the subdiaconate orders, that I put off the priest’s dress altogether, and wore citizen’s clothes, not an abbate’s suit like this. We were in Padua, another young priest and I, my nearest and only friend, and for a whole night we walked about the streets in that dress, meeting the students, as they strolled singing through the moonlight; we went to the theatre and to the caffè, — we smoked cigars, all the time laughing and trembling to think of the tonsure under our hats. But in the morning we had to put on the stockings and the talare and the nicchio again.”

Don Ippolito gave a melancholy laugh. He had thrust the corner of his napkin into his collar; seeing that Ferris had not his so, he twitched it out, and made a feint of its having been all the time in his lap. Every one was silent as if something shocking had been said; Florida looked with grave rebuke at Don Ippolito, whose story affected Ferris like that of some girl’s adventure in men’s clothes. He was in terror lest Mrs. Vervain should be going to say it was like that; she was going to say something; he made haste to forestall her, and turn the talk on other things.

The next day the priest came in his usual dress, and he did not again try to escape from it.

VI.

One afternoon, as Don Ippolito was posing to Ferris for his picture of A Venetian Priest, the painter asked, to make talk, “Have you hit upon that new explosive yet, which is to utilize your breech-loading cannon? Or are you engaged upon something altogether new?”

“No,” answered the other uneasily, “I have not touched the cannon since that day you saw it at my house; and as for other things, I have not been able to put my mind to them. I have made a few trifles which I have ventured to offer the ladies.”

Ferris had noticed the ingenious reading-desk which Don Ippolito had presented to Florida, and the footstool, contrived with springs and hinges so that it would fold up into the compass of an ordinary portfolio, which Mrs. Vervain carried about with her.

An odd look, which the painter caught at and missed, came into the priest’s face, as he resumed: “I suppose it is the distraction of my new occupation, and of the new acquaintances — so very strange to me in every way — that I have made in your amiable country-women, which hinders me from going about anything in earnest, now that their munificence has enabled me to pursue my aims with greater advantages than ever before. But this idle mood will pass, and in the mean time I am very happy. They are real angels, and madama is a true original.”

“Mrs. Vervain is rather peculiar,” said the painter, retiring a few paces from his picture, and quizzing it through his half-closed eyes. “She is a woman who has had affliction enough to turn a stronger head than hers could ever have been,” he added kindly. “But she has the best heart in the world. In fact,” he burst forth, “she is the most extraordinary combination of perfect fool and perfect lady I ever saw.”

“Excuse me; I don’t understand,” blankly faltered Don Ippolito.

“No; and I’m afraid I couldn’t explain to you,” answered Ferris.

There was a silence for a time, broken at last by Don Ippolito, who asked, “Why do you not marry madamigella?”

He seemed not to feel that there was anything out of the way in the question, and Ferris was too well used to the childlike directness of the most maneuvering of races to be surprised. Yet he was displeased, as he would not have been if Don Ippolito were not a priest. He was not of the type of priests whom the American knew from the prejudice and distrust of the Italians; he was alienated from his clerical fellows by all the objects of his life, and by a reciprocal dislike. About other priests there were various scandals; but Don Ippolito was like that pretty match-girl of the Piazza of whom it was Venetianly answered, when one asked if so sweet a face were not innocent, “Oh yes, she is mad!” He was of a purity so blameless that he was reputed crack-brained by the caffè-gossip that in Venice turns its searching light upon whomever you mention; and from his own association with the man Ferris perceived in him an apparent single-heartedness such as no man can have but the rarest of Italians. He was the albino of his species; a gray crow, a white fly; he was really this, or he knew how to seem it with an art far beyond any common deceit. It was the half expectation of coming sometime upon the lurking duplicity in Don Ippolito, that continually enfeebled the painter in his attempts to portray his Venetian priest, and that gave its undecided, unsatisfactory character to the picture before him — its weak hardness, its provoking superficiality. He expressed the traits of melancholy and loss that he imagined in him, yet he always was tempted to leave the picture with a touch of something sinister in it, some airy and subtle shadow of selfish design.

He stared hard at Don Ippolito while this perplexity filled his mind, for the hundredth time; then he said stiffly, “I don’t know. I don’t want to marry anybody. Besides,” he added, relaxing into a smile of helpless amusement, “it’s possible that Miss Vervain might not want to marry me.”

“As to that,” replied Don Ippolito, “you never can tell. All young girls desire to be married, I suppose,” he continued with a sigh. “She is very beautiful, is she not? It is seldom that we see such a blonde in Italy. Our blondes are dark; they have auburn hair and blue eyes, but their complexions are thick. Miss Vervain is blonde as the morning light; the sun’s gold is in her hair, his noonday whiteness in her dazzling throat; the flush of his coming is on her lips; she might utter the dawn!”

“You’re a poet, Don Ippolito,” laughed the painter. “What property of the sun is in her angry-looking eyes?”

“His fire! Ah, that is her greatest charm! Those strange eyes of hers, they seem full of tragedies. She looks made to be the heroine of some stormy romance; and yet how simply patient and good she is!”

“Yes,” said Ferris, who often responded in English to the priest’s Italian; and he added half musingly in his own tongue, after a moment, “but I don’t think it would be safe to count upon her. I’m afraid she has a bad temper. At any rate, I always expect to see smoke somewhere when I look at those eyes of hers. She has wonderful self-control, however; and I don’t exactly understand why. Perhaps people of strong impulses have strong wills to overrule them; it seems no more than fair.”

“Is it the custom,” asked Don Ippolito, after a moment, “for the American young ladies always to address their mammas as mother?”

“No; that seems to be a peculiarity of Miss Vervain’s. It’s a little formality that I should say served to hold Mrs. Vervain in check.”

“Do you mean that it repulses her?”

“Not at all. I don’t think I could explain,” said Ferris with a certain air of regretting to have gone so far in comment on the Vervains. He added recklessly, “Don’t you see that Mrs. Vervain sometimes does and says things that embarrass her daughter, and that Miss Vervain seems to try to restrain her?”

“I thought,” returned Don Ippolito meditatively, “that the signorina was always very tenderly submissive to her mother.”

“Yes, so she is,” said the painter dryly, and looked in annoyance from the priest to the picture, and from the picture to the priest.

After a minute Don Ippolito said, “They must be very rich to live as they do.”

“I don’t know about that,” replied Ferris. “Americans spend and save in ways different from the Italians. I dare say the Vervains find Venice very cheap after London and Paris and Berlin.”

“Perhaps,” said Don Ippolito, “if they were rich you would be in a position to marry her.”

“I should not marry Miss Vervain for her money,” answered the painter, sharply.

“No, but if you loved her, the money would enable you to marry her.”

“Listen to me, Don Ippolito. I never said that I loved Miss Vervain, and I don’t know how you feel warranted in speaking to me about the matter. Why do you do so?”

“I? Why? I could not but imagine that you must love her. Is there anything wrong in speaking of such things? Is it contrary to the American custom? I ask pardon from my heart if I have done anything amiss.”

“There is no offense,” said the painter, with a laugh, “and I don’t wonder you thought I ought to be in love with Miss Vervain. She is beautiful, and I believe she’s good. But if men had to marry because women were beautiful and good, there isn’t one of us could live single a day. Besides, I’m the victim of another passion, — I’m laboring under an unrequited affection for Art.”

“Then you do not love her?” asked Don Ippolito, eagerly.

“So far as I’m advised at present, no, I don’t.”

“It is strange!” said the priest, absently, but with a glowing face.

He quitted the painter’s and walked swiftly homeward with a triumphant buoyancy of step. A subtle content diffused itself over his face, and a joyful light burnt in his deep eyes. He sat down before the piano and organ as he had arranged them, and began to strike their keys in unison; this seemed to him for the first time childish. Then he played some lively bars on the piano alone; they sounded too light and trivial, and he turned to the other instrument. As the plaint of the reeds arose, it filled his sense like a solemn organ-music, and transfigured the place; the notes swelled to the ample vault of a church, and at the high altar he was celebrating the mass in his sacerdotal robes. He suddenly caught his fingers away from the keys; his breast heaved, he hid his face in his hands.

VII.

Ferris stood cleaning his palette, after Don Ippolito was gone, scraping the colors together with his knife and neatly buttering them on the palette’s edge, while he wondered what the priest meant by pumping him in that way. Nothing, he supposed, and yet it was odd. Of course she had a bad temper....

He put on his hat and coat and strolled vaguely forth, and in an hour or two came by a roundabout course to the gondola station nearest his own house. There he stopped, and after an absent contemplation of the boats, from which the gondoliers were clamoring for his custom, he stepped into one and ordered the man to row him to a gate on a small canal opposite. The gate opened, at his ringing, into the garden of the Vervains.

Florida was sitting alone on a bench near the fountain. It was no longer a ruined fountain; the broken-nosed naiad held a pipe above her head, and from this rose a willowy spray high enough to catch some colors of the sunset then striking into the garden, and fell again in a mist around her, making her almost modest.

“What does this mean?” asked Ferris, carelessly taking the young girl’s hand. “I thought this lady’s occupation was gone.”

“Don Ippolito repaired the fountain for the landlord, and he agreed to pay for filling the tank that feeds it,” said Florida. “He seems to think it a hard bargain, for he only lets it play about half an hour a day. But he says it’s very ingeniously mended. He didn’t believe it could be done. It is pretty.

“It is, indeed,” said the painter, with a singular desire, going through him like a pang, likewise to do something for Miss Vervain. “Did you go to Don Ippolito’s house the other day, to see his traps?”

“Yes; we were very much interested. I was sorry that I knew so little about inventions. Do you think there are many practical ideas amongst his things? I hope there are — he seemed so proud and pleased to show them. Shouldn’t you think he had some real inventive talent?”

“Yes, I think he has; but I know as little about the matter as you do.” He sat down beside her, and picking up a twig from the gravel, pulled the bark off in silence. Then, “Miss Vervain,” he said, knitting his brows, as he always did when he had something on his conscience and meant to ease it at any cost, “I’m the dog that fetches a bone and carries a bone; I talked Don Ippolito over with you, the other day, and now I’ve been talking you over with him. But I’ve the grace to say that I’m ashamed of myself.”

“Why need you be ashamed?” asked Florida. “You said no harm of him. Did you of us?”

“Not exactly; but I don’t think it was quite my business to discuss you at all. I think you can’t let people alone too much. For my part, if I try to characterize my friends, I fail to do them perfect justice, of course; and yet the imperfect result remains representative of them in my mind; it limits them and fixes them; and I can’t get them back again into the undefined and the ideal where they really belong. One ought never to speak of the faults of one’s friends: it mutilates them; they can never be the same afterwards.”

“So you have been talking of my faults,” said Florida, breathing quickly. “Perhaps you could tell me of them to my face.”

“I should have to say that unfairness was one of them. But that is common to the whole sex. I never said I was talking of your faults. I declared against doing so, and you immediately infer that my motive is remorse. I don’t know that you have any faults. They may be virtues in disguise. There is a charm even in unfairness. Well, I did say that I thought you had a quick temper,” —

Florida colored violently.

— “but now I see that I was mistaken,” said Ferris with a laugh.

“May I ask what else you said?” demanded the young girl haughtily.

“Oh, that would be a betrayal of confidence,” said Ferris, unaffected by her hauteur.

“Then why have you mentioned the matter to me at all?”

“I wanted to clear my conscience, I suppose, and sin again. I wanted to talk with you about Don Ippolito.”

Florida looked with perplexity at Ferris’s face, while her own slowly cooled and paled.

“What did you want to say of him?” she asked calmly.

“I hardly know how to put it: that he puzzles me, to begin with. You know I feel somewhat responsible for him.”

“Yes.”

“Of course, I never should have thought of him, if it hadn’t been for your mother’s talk that morning coming back from San Lazzaro.”

“I know,” said Florida, with a faint blush.

“And yet, don’t you see, it was as much a fancy of mine, a weakness for the man himself, as the desire to serve your mother, that prompted me to bring him to you.”

“Yes, I see,” answered the young girl.

“I acted in the teeth of a bitter Venetian prejudice against priests. All my friends here — they’re mostly young men with the modern Italian ideas, or old liberals — hate and despise the priests. They believe that priests are full of guile and deceit, that they are spies for the Austrians, and altogether evil.”

“Don Ippolito is welcome to report our most secret thoughts to the police,” said Florida, whose look of rising alarm relaxed into a smile.

“Oh,” cried the painter, “how you leap to conclusions! I never intimated that Don Ippolito was a spy. On the contrary, it was his difference from other priests that made me think of him for a moment. He seems to be as much cut off from the church as from the world. And yet he is a priest, with a priest’s education. What if I should have been altogether mistaken? He is either one of the openest souls in the world, as you have insisted, or he is one of the closest.”

“I should not be afraid of him in any case,” said Florida; “but I can’t believe any wrong of him.”

Ferris frowned in annoyance. “I don’t want you to; I don’t, myself. I’ve bungled the matter as I might have known I would. I was trying to put into words an undefined uneasiness of mine, a quite formless desire to have you possessed of the whole case as it had come up in my mind. I’ve made a mess of it,” said Ferris rising, with a rueful air. “Besides, I ought to have spoken to Mrs. Vervain.”

“Oh no,” cried Florida, eagerly, springing to her feet beside him. “Don’t! Little things wear upon my mother, so. I’m glad you didn’t speak to her. I don’t misunderstand you, I think; I expressed myself badly,” she added with an anxious face. “I thank you very much. What do you want me to do?”

By Ferris’s impulse they both began to move down the garden path toward the water-gate. The sunset had faded out of the fountain, but it still lit the whole heaven, in whose vast blue depths hung light whiffs of pinkish cloud, as ethereal as the draperies that floated after Miss Vervain as she walked with a splendid grace beside him, no awkwardness, now, or self-constraint in her. As she turned to Ferris, and asked in her deep tones, to which some latent feeling imparted a slight tremor, “What do you want me to do?” the sense of her willingness to be bidden by him gave him a delicious thrill. He looked at the superb creature, so proud, so helpless; so much a woman, so much a child; and he caught his breath before he answered. Her gauzes blew about his feet in the light breeze that lifted the foliage; she was a little near-sighted, and in her eagerness she drew closer to him, fixing her eyes full upon his with a bold innocence. “Good heavens! Miss Vervain,” he cried, with a sudden blush, “it isn’t a serious matter. I’m a fool to have spoken to you. Don’t do anything. Let things go on as before. It isn’t for me to instruct you.”

“I should have been very glad of your advice,” she said with a disappointed, almost wounded manner, keeping her eyes upon him. “It seems to me we are always going wrong” —

She stopped short, with a flush and then a pallor.

Ferris returned her look with one of comical dismay. This apparent readiness of Miss Vervain’s to be taken command of, daunted him, on second thoughts. “I wish you’d dismiss all my stupid talk from your mind,” he said. “I feel as if I’d been guiltily trying to set you against a man whom I like very much and have no reason not to trust, and who thinks me so much his friend that he couldn’t dream of my making any sort of trouble for him. It would break his heart, I’m afraid, if you treated him in a different way from that in which you’ve treated him till now. It’s really touching to listen to his gratitude to you and your mother. It’s only conceivable on the ground that he has never had friends before in the world. He seems like another man, or the same man come to life. And it isn’t his fault that he’s a priest. I suppose,” he added, with a sort of final throe, “that a Venetian family wouldn’t use him with the frank hospitality you’ve shown, not because they distrusted him at all, perhaps, but because they would be afraid of other Venetian tongues.”

This ultimate drop of venom, helplessly distilled, did not seem to rankle in Miss Vervain’s mind. She walked now with her face turned from his, and she answered coldly, “We shall not be troubled. We don’t care for Venetian tongues.”

They were at the gate. “Good-by,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I’m going.”

“Won’t you wait and see my mother?” asked Florida, with her awkward self-constraint again upon her.

“No, thanks,” said Ferris, gloomily. “I haven’t time. I just dropped in for a moment, to blast an innocent man’s reputation, and destroy a young lady’s peace of mind.”

“Then you needn’t go, yet,” answered Florida, coldly, “for you haven’t succeeded.”

“Well, I’ve done my worst,” returned Ferris, drawing the bolt.

He went away, hanging his head in amazement and disgust at himself for his clumsiness and bad taste. It seemed to him a contemptible part, first to embarrass them with Don Ippolito’s acquaintance, if it was an embarrassment, and then try to sneak out of his responsibility by these tardy cautions; and if it was not going to be an embarrassment, it was folly to have approached the matter at all.

What had he wanted to do, and with what motive? He hardly knew. As he battled the ground over and over again, nothing comforted him save the thought that, bad as it was to have spoken to Miss Vervain, it must have been infinitely worse to speak to her mother.

VIII.

It was late before Ferris forgot his chagrin in sleep, and when he woke the next morning, the sun was making the solid green blinds at his window odorous of their native pine woods with its heat, and thrusting a golden spear at the heart of Don Ippolito’s effigy where he had left it on the easel.

Marina brought a letter with his coffee. The letter was from Mrs. Vervain, and it entreated him to come to lunch at twelve, and then join them on an excursion, of which they had all often talked, up the Canal of the Brenta. “Don Ippolito has got his permission — think of his not being able to go to the mainland without the Patriarch’s leave! and can go with us to-day. So I try to make this hasty arrangement. You must come — it all depends upon you.”

“Yes, so it seems,” groaned the painter, and went.

In the garden he found Don Ippolito and Florida, at the fountain where he had himself parted with her the evening before; and he observed with a guilty relief that Don Ippolito was talking to her in the happy unconsciousness habitual with him.

Florida cast at the painter a swift glance of latent appeal and intelligence, which he refused, and in the same instant she met him with another look, as if she now saw him for the first time, and gave him her hand in greeting. It was a beautiful hand; he could not help worshipping its lovely forms, and the lily whiteness and softness of the back, the rose of the palm and finger-tips.

She idly resumed the great Venetian fan which hung from her waist by a chain. “Don Ippolito has been talking about the villeggiatura on the Brenta in the old days,” she explained.

“Oh, yes,” said the painter, “they used to have merry times in the villas then, and it was worth while being a priest, or at least an abbate di casa. I should think you would sigh for a return of those good old days, Don Ippolito. Just imagine, if you were abbate di casa with some patrician family about the close of the last century, you might be the instructor, companion, and spiritual adviser of Illustrissima at the theatres, card-parties, and masquerades, all winter; and at this season, instead of going up the Brenta for a day’s pleasure with us barbarous Yankees, you might be setting out with Illustrissima and all the ‘Strissimi and ‘Strissime, big and little, for a spring villeggiatura there. You would be going in a gilded barge, with songs and fiddles and dancing, instead of a common gondola, and you would stay a month, walking, going to parties and caffès, drinking chocolate and lemonade, gaming, sonneteering, and butterflying about generally.”

“It was doubtless a beautiful life,” answered the priest, with simple indifference. “But I never have thought of it with regret, because I have been preoccupied with other ideas than those of social pleasures, though perhaps they were no wiser.”

Florida had watched Don Ippolito’s face while Ferris was speaking, and she now asked gravely, “But don’t you think their life nowadays is more becoming to the clergy?”

“Why, madamigella? What harm was there in those gayeties? I suppose the bad features of the old life are exaggerated to us.”

“They couldn’t have been worse than the amusements of the hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-swearing, fox-hunting English parsons about the same time,” said Ferris. “Besides, the abbate di casa had a charm of his own, the charm of all rococo things, which, whatever you may say of them, are somehow elegant and refined, or at least refer to elegance and refinement. I don’t say they’re ennobling, but they’re fascinating. I don’t respect them, but I love them. When I think about the past of Venice, I don’t care so much to see any of the heroically historical things; but I should like immensely to have looked in at the Ridotto, when the place was at its gayest with wigs and masks, hoops and small-clothes, fans and rapiers, bows and courtesies, whispers and glances. I dare say I should have found Don Ippolito there in some becoming disguise.”

Florida looked from the painter to the priest and back to the painter, as Ferris spoke, and then she turned a little anxiously toward the terrace, and a shadow slipped from her face as her mother came rustling down the steps, catching at her drapery and shaking it into place. The young girl hurried to meet her, lifted her arms for what promised an embrace, and with firm hands set the elder lady’s bonnet straight with her forehead.

“I’m always getting it on askew,” Mrs. Vervain said for greeting to Ferris. “How do you do, Don Ippolito? But I suppose you think I’ve kept you long enough to get it on straight for once. So I have. I am a fuss, and I don’t deny it. At my time of life, it’s much harder to make yourself shipshape than it is when you’re younger. I tell Florida that anybody would take her for the old lady, she does seem to give so little care to getting up an appearance.”

“And yet she has the effect of a stylish young person in the bloom of youth,” observed Ferris, with a touch of caricature.

“We had better lunch with our things on,” said Mrs. Vervain, “and then there needn’t be any delay in starting. I thought we would have it here,” she added, as Nina and the house-servant appeared with trays of dishes and cups. “So that we can start in a real picnicky spirit. I knew you’d think it a womanish lunch, Mr. Ferris — Don Ippolito likes what we do — and so I’ve provided you with a chicken salad; and I’m going to ask you for a taste of it; I’m really hungry.”

There was salad for all, in fact; and it was quite one o’clock before the lunch was ended, and wraps of just the right thickness and thinness were chosen, and the party were comfortably placed under the striped linen canopy of the gondola, which they had from a public station, the house-gondola being engaged that day. They rowed through the narrow canal skirting the garden out into the expanse before the Giudecca, and then struck across the lagoon towards Fusina, past the island-church of San Giorgio in Alga, whose beautiful tower has flushed and darkened in so many pictures of Venetian sunsets, and past the Austrian lagoon forts with their coronets of guns threatening every point, and the Croatian sentinels pacing to and fro on their walls. They stopped long enough at one of the customs barges to declare to the swarthy, amiable officers the innocence of their freight, and at the mouth of the Canal of the Brenta they paused before the station while a policeman came out and scanned them. He bowed to Don Ippolito’s cloth, and then they began to push up the sluggish canal, shallow and overrun with weeds and mosses, into the heart of the land.

The spring, which in Venice comes in the softening air and the perpetual azure of the heavens, was renewed to their senses in all its miraculous loveliness. The garden of the Vervains had indeed confessed it in opulence of leaf and bloom, but there it seemed somehow only like a novel effect of the artifice which had been able to create a garden in that city of stone and sea. Here a vernal world suddenly opened before them, with wide-stretching fields of green under a dome of perfect blue; against its walls only the soft curves of far-off hills were traced, and near at hand the tender forms of full-foliaged trees. The long garland of vines that festoons all Italy seemed to begin in the neighboring orchards; the meadows waved their tall grasses in the sun, and broke in poppies as the sea-waves break in iridescent spray; the well-grown maize shook its gleaming blades in the light; the poplars marched in stately procession on either side of the straight, white road to Padua, till they vanished in the long perspective. The blossoms had fallen from the trees many weeks before, but the air was full of the vague sweetness of the perfect spring, which here and there gathered and defined itself as the spicy odor of the grass cut on the shore of the canal, and drying in the mellow heat of the sun.

The voyagers spoke from time to time of some peculiarity of the villas that succeeded each other along the canal. Don Ippolito knew a few of them, the gondoliers knew others; but after all, their names were nothing. These haunts of old-time splendor and idleness weary of themselves, and unable to escape, are sadder than anything in Venice, and they belonged, as far as the Americans were concerned, to a world as strange as any to which they should go in another life, — the world of a faded fashion and an alien history. Some of the villas were kept in a sort of repair; some were even maintained in the state of old; but the most showed marks of greater or less decay, and here and there one was falling to ruin. They had gardens about them, tangled and wild-grown; a population of decrepit statues in the rococo taste strolled in their walks or simpered from their gates. Two or three houses seemed to be occupied; the rest stood empty, each

 “Close latticed to the brooding heat,

 And silent in its dusty vines.”

The pleasure-party had no fixed plan for the day further than to ascend the canal, and by and by take a carriage at some convenient village and drive to the famous Villa Pisani at Strà.

“These houses are very well,” said Don Ippolito, who had visited the villa once, and with whom it had remained a memory almost as signal as that night in Padua when he wore civil dress, “but it is at Strà you see something really worthy of the royal splendor of the patricians of Venice. Royal? The villa is now one of the palaces of the ex-Emperor of Austria, who does not find it less imperial than his other palaces.” Don Ippolito had celebrated the villa at Strà in this strain ever since they had spoken of going up the Brenta: now it was the magnificent conservatories and orangeries that he sang, now the vast garden with its statued walks between rows of clipt cedars and firs, now the stables with their stalls for numberless horses, now the palace itself with its frescoed halls and treasures of art and vertu. His enthusiasm for the villa at Strà had become an amiable jest with the Americans. Ferris laughed at his fresh outburst he declared himself tired of the gondola, and he asked Florida to disembark with him and walk under the trees of a pleasant street running on one side between the villas and the canal. “We are going to find something much grander than the Villa Pisani,” he boasted, with a look at Don Ippolito.

As they sauntered along the path together, they came now and then to a stately palace like that of the Contarini, where the lions, that give their name to one branch of the family, crouch in stone before the grand portal; but most of the houses were interesting only from their unstoried possibilities to the imagination. They were generally of stucco, and glared with fresh whitewash through the foliage of their gardens. When a peasant’s cottage broke their line, it gave, with its barns and straw-stacks and its beds of pot-herbs, a homely relief from the decaying gentility of the villas.

“What a pity, Miss Vervain,” said the painter, “that the blessings of this world should be so unequally divided! Why should all this sketchable adversity be lavished upon the neighborhood of a city that is so rich as Venice in picturesque dilapidation? It’s pretty hard on us Americans, and forces people of sensibility into exile. What wouldn’t cultivated persons give for a stretch of this street in the suburbs of Boston, or of your own Providence? I suppose the New Yorkers will be setting up something of the kind one of these days, and giving it a French name — they’ll call it Aux bords du Brenta. There was one of them carried back a gondola the other day to put on a pond in their new park. But the worst of it is, you can’t take home the sentiment of these things.”

“I thought it was the business of painters to send home the sentiment of them in pictures,” said Florida.

Ferris talked to her in this way because it was his way of talking; it always surprised him a little that she entered into the spirit of it; he was not quite sure that she did; he sometimes thought she waited till she could seize upon a point to turn against him, and so give herself the air of having comprehended the whole. He laughed: “Oh yes, a poor little fragmentary, faded-out reproduction of their sentiment — which is ‘as moonlight unto sunlight and as water unto wine,’ when compared with the real thing. Suppose I made a picture of this very bit, ourselves in the foreground, looking at the garden over there where that amusing Vandal of an owner has just had his statues painted white: would our friends at home understand it? A whole history must be left unexpressed. I could only hint at an entire situation. Of course, people with a taste for olives would get the flavor; but even they would wonder that I chose such an unsuggestive bit. Why, it is just the most maddeningly suggestive thing to be found here! And if I may put it modestly, for my share in it, I think we two young Americans looking on at this supreme excess of the rococo, are the very essence of the sentiment of the scene; but what would the honored connoisseurs — the good folks who get themselves up on Ruskin and try so honestly hard to have some little ideas about art — make of us? To be sure they might justifiably praise the grace of your pose, if I were so lucky as to catch it, and your way of putting your hand under the elbow of the arm that holds your parasol,” — Florida seemed disdainfully to keep her attitude, and the painter smiled,— “but they wouldn’t know what it all meant, and couldn’t imagine that we were inspired by this rascally little villa to sigh longingly over the wicked past.”

“Excuse me,” interrupted Florida, with a touch of trouble in her proud manner, “I’m not sighing over it, for one, and I don’t want it back. I’m glad that I’m American and that there is no past for me. I can’t understand how you and Don Ippolito can speak so tolerantly of what no one can respect,” she added, in almost an aggrieved tone.

If Miss Vervain wanted to turn the talk upon Don Ippolito, Ferris by no means did; he had had enough of that subject yesterday; he got as lightly away from it as he could.

“Oh, Don Ippolito’s a pagan, I tell you; and I’m a painter, and the rococo is my weakness. I wish I could paint it, but I can’t; I’m a hundred years too late. I couldn’t even paint myself in the act of sentimentalizing it.”

While he talked, he had been making a few lines in a small pocket sketch-book, with a furtive glance or two at Florida. When they returned to the boat, he busied himself again with the book, and presently he handed it to Mrs. Vervain.

“Why, it’s Florida!” cried the lady. “How very nicely you do sketch, Mr. Ferris.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Vervain; you’re always flattering me.”

“No, but seriously. I wish that I had paid more attention to my drawing when I was a girl. And now, Florida — she won’t touch a pencil. I wish you’d talk to her, Mr. Ferris.”

“Oh, people who are pictures needn’t trouble themselves to be painters,” said Ferris, with a little burlesque.

Mrs. Vervain began to look at the sketch through her tubed hand; the painter made a grimace. “But you’ve made her too proud, Mr. Ferris. She doesn’t look like that.”

“Yes she does — to those unworthy of her kindness. I have taken Miss Vervain in the act of scorning the rococo, and its humble admirer, me, with it.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Ferris; but I can’t think that this proud look is habitual with Florida; and I’ve heard people say — very good judges — that an artist oughtn’t to perpetuate a temporary expression. Something like that.”

“It can’t be helped now, Mrs. Vervain: the sketch is irretrievably immortal. I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”

“Oh, stuff! As if you couldn’t turn up the corners of the mouth a little. Or something.”

“And give her the appearance of laughing at me? Never!”

“Don Ippolito,” said Mrs. Vervain, turning to the priest, who had been listening intently to all this trivial talk, “what do you think of this sketch?”

He took the book with an eager hand, and perused the sketch as if trying to read some secret there. After a minute he handed it back with a light sigh, apparently of relief, but said nothing.

“Well?” asked Mrs. Vervain.

“Oh! I ask pardon. No, it isn’t my idea of madamigella. It seems to me that her likeness must be sketched in color. Those lines are true, but they need color to subdue them; they go too far, they are more than true.”

“You’re quite right, Don Ippolito,” said Ferris.

“Then you don’t think she always has this proud look?” pursued Mrs. Vervain. The painter fancied that Florida quelled in herself a movement of impatience; he looked at her with an amused smile.

“Not always, no,” answered Don Ippolito.

“Sometimes her face expresses the greatest meekness in the world.”

“But not at the present moment,” thought Ferris, fascinated by the stare of angry pride which the girl bent upon the unconscious priest.

“Though I confess that I should hardly know how to characterize her habitual expression,” added Don Ippolito.

“Thanks,” said Florida, peremptorily. “I’m tired of the subject; it isn’t an important one.”

“Oh yes it is, my dear,” said Mrs. Vervain. “At least it’s important to me, if it isn’t to you; for I’m your mother, and really, if I thought you looked like this, as a general thing, to a casual observer, I should consider it a reflection upon myself.” Ferris gave a provoking laugh, as she continued sweetly, “I must insist, Don Ippolito: now did you ever see Florida look so?”

The girl leaned back, and began to wave her fan slowly to and fro before her face.

“I never saw her look so with you, dear madama,” said the priest with an anxious glance at Florida, who let her fan fall folded into her lap, and sat still. He went on with priestly smoothness, and a touch of something like invoked authority, such as a man might show who could dispense indulgences and inflict penances. “No one could help seeing her devotedness to you, and I have admired from the first an obedience and tenderness that I have never known equaled. In all her relations to you, madamigella has seemed to me” —

Florida started forward. “You are not asked to comment on my behavior to my mother; you are not invited to speak of my conduct at all!” she burst out with sudden violence, her visage flaming, and her blue eyes burning upon Don Ippolito, who shrank from the astonishing rudeness as from a blow in the face. “What is it to you how I treat my mother?”

She sank back again upon the cushions, and opening the fan with a clash swept it swiftly before her.

“Florida!” said her mother gravely.

Ferris turned away in cold disgust, like one who has witnessed a cruelty done to some helpless thing. Don Ippolito’s speech was not fortunate at the best, but it might have come from a foreigner’s misapprehension, and at the worst it was good-natured and well-meant. “The girl is a perfect brute, as I thought in the beginning,” the painter said to himself. “How could I have ever thought differently? I shall have to tell Don Ippolito that I’m ashamed of her, and disclaim all responsibility. Pah! I wish I was out of this.”

The pleasure of the day was dead. It could not rally from that stroke. They went on to Strà, as they had planned, but the glory of the Villa Pisani was eclipsed for Don Ippolito. He plainly did not know what to do. He did not address Florida again, whose savagery he would not probably have known how to resent if he had wished to resent it. Mrs. Vervain prattled away to him with unrelenting kindness; Ferris kept near him, and with affectionate zeal tried to make him talk of the villa, but neither the frescoes, nor the orangeries, nor the green-houses, nor the stables, nor the gardens could rouse him from the listless daze in which he moved, though Ferris found them all as wonderful as he had said. Amidst this heavy embarrassment no one seemed at ease but the author of it. She did not, to be sure, speak to Don Ippolito, but she followed her mother as usual with her assiduous cares, and she appeared tranquilly unconscious of the sarcastic civility with which Ferris rendered her any service. It was late in the afternoon when they got back to their boat and began to descend the canal towards Venice, and long before they reached Fusina the day had passed. A sunset of melancholy red, streaked with level lines of murky cloud, stretched across the flats behind them, and faintly tinged with its reflected light the eastern horizon which the towers and domes of Venice had not yet begun to break. The twilight came, and then through the overcast heavens the moon shone dim; a light blossomed here and there in the villas, distant voices called musically; a cow lowed, a dog barked; the rich, sweet breath of the vernal land mingled its odors with the sultry air of the neighboring lagoon. The wayfarers spoke little; the time hung heavy on all, no doubt; to Ferris it was a burden almost intolerable to hear the creak of the oars and the breathing of the gondoliers keeping time together. At last the boat stopped in front of the police-station in Fusina; a soldier with a sword at his side and a lantern in his hand came out and briefly parleyed with the gondoliers; they stepped ashore, and he marched them into the station before him.

“We have nothing left to wish for now,” said Ferris, breaking into an ironical laugh.

“What does it all mean?” asked Mrs. Vervain.

“I think I had better go see.”

“We will go with you,” said Mrs. Vervain.

“Pazienza!” replied Ferris.

The ladies rose; but Don Ippolito remained seated. “Aren’t you going too, Don Ippolito?” asked Mrs. Vervain.

“Thanks, madama; but I prefer to stay here.”

Lamentable cries and shrieks, as if the prisoners had immediately been put to the torture, came from the station as Ferris opened the door. A lamp of petroleum lighted the scene, and shone upon the figures of two fishermen, who bewailed themselves unintelligibly in the vibrant accents of Chiozza, and from time to time advanced upon the gondoliers, and shook their heads and beat their breasts at them, A few police-guards reclined upon benches about the room, and surveyed the spectacle with mild impassibility.

Ferris politely asked one of them the cause of the detention.

“Why, you see, signore,” answered the guard amiably, “these honest men accuse your gondoliers of having stolen a rope out of their boat at Dolo.”

“It was my blood, you know!” howled the elder of the fishermen, tossing his arms wildly abroad, “it was my own heart,” he cried, letting the last vowel die away and rise again in mournful refrain, while he stared tragically into Ferris’s face.

“What is the matter?” asked Mrs. Vervain, putting up her glasses, and trying with graceful futility to focus the melodrama.

“Nothing,” said Ferris; “our gondoliers have had the heart’s blood of this respectable Dervish; that is to say, they have stolen a rope belonging to him.”

“Our gondoliers! I don’t believe it. They’ve no right to keep us here all night. Tell them you’re the American consul.”

“I’d rather not try my dignity on these underlings, Mrs. Vervain; there’s no American squadron here that I could order to bombard Fusina, if they didn’t mind me. But I’ll see what I can do further in quality of courteous foreigner. Can you perhaps tell me how long you will be obliged to detain us here?” he asked of the guard again.

“I am very sorry to detain you at all, signore. But what can I do? The commissary is unhappily absent. He may be here soon.”

The guard renewed his apathetic contemplation of the gondoliers, who did not speak a word; the windy lamentation of the fishermen rose and fell fitfully. Presently they went out of doors and poured forth their wrongs to the moon.

The room was close, and with some trouble Ferris persuaded Mrs. Vervain to return to the gondola, Florida seconding his arguments with gentle good sense.

It seemed a long time till the commissary came, but his coming instantly simplified the situation. Perhaps because he had never been able to befriend a consul in trouble before, he befriended Ferris to the utmost. He had met him with rather a browbeating air; but after a glance at his card, he gave a kind of roar of deprecation and apology. He had the ladies and Don Ippolito in out of the gondola, and led them to an upper chamber, where he made them all repose their honored persons upon his sofas. He ordered up his housekeeper to make them coffee, which he served with his own hands, excusing its hurried feebleness, and he stood by, rubbing his palms together and smiling, while they refreshed themselves.

“They need never tell me again that the Austrians are tyrants,” said Mrs. Vervain in undertone to the consul.

It was not easy for Ferris to remind his host of the malefactors; but he brought himself to this ungraciousness. The commissary begged pardon, and asked him to accompany him below, where he confronted the accused and the accusers. The tragedy was acted over again with blood-curdling effectiveness by the Chiozzotti; the gondoliers maintaining the calm of conscious innocence.

Ferris felt outraged by the trumped-up charge against them.

“Listen, you others the prisoners,” said the commissary. “Your padrone is anxious to return to Venice, and I wish to inflict no further displeasures upon him. Restore their rope to these honest men, and go about your business.”

The injured gondoliers spoke in low tones together; then one of them shrugged his shoulders and went out. He came back in a moment and laid a rope before the commissary.

“Is that the rope?” he asked. “We found it floating down the canal, and picked it up that we might give it to the rightful owner. But now I wish to heaven we had let it sink to the bottom of the sea.”

“Oh, a beautiful story!” wailed the Chiozzoti. They flung themselves upon the rope, and lugged it off to their boat; and the gondoliers went out, too.

The commissary turned to Ferris with an amiable smile. “I am sorry that those rogues should escape,” said the American.

“Oh,” said the Italian, “they are poor fellows it is a little matter; I am glad to have served you.”

He took leave of his involuntary guests with effusion, following them with a lantern to the gondola.

Mrs. Vervain, to whom Ferris gave an account of this trial as they set out again on their long-hindered return, had no mind save for the magical effect of his consular quality upon the commissary, and accused him of a vain and culpable modesty.

“Ah,” said the diplomatist, “there’s nothing like knowing just when to produce your dignity. There are some officials who know too little, — like those guards; and there are some who know too much, — like the commissary’s superiors. But he is just in that golden mean of ignorance where he supposes a consul is a person of importance.”

Mrs. Vervain disputed this, and Ferris submitted in silence. Presently, as they skirted the shore to get their bearings for the route across the lagoon, a fierce voice in Venetian shouted from the darkness, “Indrio, indrio!” (Back, back!) and a gleam of the moon through the pale, watery clouds revealed the figure of a gendarme on the nearest point of land. The gondoliers bent to their oars, and sent the boat swiftly out into the lagoon.

“There, for example, is a person who would be quite insensible to my greatness, even if I had the consular seal in my pocket. To him we are possible smugglers; [Footnote: Under the Austrians, Venice was a free port but everything carried there to the mainland was liable to duty.] and I must say,” he continued, taking out his watch, and staring hard at it, “that if I were a disinterested person, and heard his suspicion met with the explanation that we were a little party out here for pleasure at half past twelve P. M., I should say he was right. At any rate we won’t engage him in controversy. Quick, quick!” he added to the gondoliers, glancing at the receding shore, and then at the first of the lagoon forts which they were approaching. A dim shape moved along the top of the wall, and seemed to linger and scrutinize them. As they drew nearer, the challenge, “Wer da?” rang out.

The gondoliers eagerly answered with the one word of German known to their craft, “Freunde,” and struggled to urge the boat forward; the oar of the gondolier in front slipped from the high rowlock, and fell out of his hand into the water. The gondola lurched, and then suddenly ran aground on the shallow. The sentry halted, dropped his gun from his shoulder, and ordered them to go on, while the gondoliers clamored back in the high key of fear, and one of them screamed out to his passengers to do something, saying that, a few weeks before, a sentinel had fired upon a fisherman and killed him.

“What’s that he’s talking about?” demanded Mrs. Vervain. “If we don’t get on, it will be that man’s duty to fire on us; he has no choice,” she said, nerved and interested by the presence of this danger.

The gondoliers leaped into the water and tried to push the boat off. It would not move, and without warning, Don Ippolito, who had sat silent since they left Fusina, stepped over the side of the gondola, and thrusting an oar under its bottom lifted it free of the shallow.

“Oh, how very unnecessary!” cried Mrs. Vervain, as the priest and the gondoliers clambered back into the boat. “He will take his death of cold.”

“It’s ridiculous,” said Ferris. “You ought to have told these worthless rascals what to do, Don Ippolito. You’ve got yourself wet for nothing. It’s too bad!”

“It’s nothing,” said Don Ippolito, taking his seat on the little prow deck, and quietly dripping where the water would not incommode the others.

“Oh, here!” cried Mrs. Vervain, gathering some shawls together, “make him wrap those about him. He’ll die, I know he will — with that reeking skirt of his. If you must go into the water, I wish you had worn your abbate’s dress. How could you, Don Ippolito?”

The gondoliers set their oars, but before they had given a stroke, they were arrested by a sharp “Halt!” from the fort. Another figure had joined the sentry, and stood looking at them.

“Well,” said Ferris, “now what, I wonder? That’s an officer. If I had a little German about me, I might state the situation to him.”

He felt a light touch on his arm. “I can speak German,” said Florida timidly.

“Then you had better speak it now,” said Ferris.

She rose to her feet, and in a steady voice briefly explained the whole affair. The figures listened motionless; then the last comer politely replied, begging her to be in no uneasiness, made her a shadowy salute, and vanished. The sentry resumed his walk, and took no further notice of them.

“Brava!” said Ferris, while Mrs. Vervain babbled her satisfaction, “I will buy a German Ollendorff to-morrow. The language is indispensable to a pleasure excursion in the lagoon.”

Florida made no reply, but devoted herself to restoring her mother to that state of defense against the discomforts of the time and place, which the common agitation had impaired. She seemed to have no sense of the presence of any one else. Don Ippolito did not speak again save to protect himself from the anxieties and reproaches of Mrs. Vervain, renewed and reiterated at intervals. She drowsed after a while, and whenever she woke she thought they had just touched her own landing. By fits it was cloudy and moonlight; they began to meet peasants’ boats going to the Rialto market; at last, they entered the Canal of the Zattere, then they slipped into a narrow way, and presently stopped at Mrs. Vervain’s gate; this time she had not expected it. Don Ippolito gave her his hand, and entered the garden with her, while Ferris lingered behind with Florida, helping her put together the wraps strewn about the gondola.

“Wait!” she commanded, as they moved up the garden walk. “I want to speak with you about Don Ippolito. What shall I do to him for my rudeness? You must tell me — you shall,” she said in a fierce whisper, gripping the arm which Ferris had given to help her up the landing-stairs. “You are — older than I am!”

“Thanks. I was afraid you were going to say wiser. I should think your own sense of justice, your own sense of” —

“Decency. Say it, say it!” cried the girl passionately; “it was indecent, indecent — that was it!”

— “would tell you what to do,” concluded the painter dryly.

She flung away the arm to which she had been clinging, and ran to where the priest stood with her mother at the foot of the terrace stairs. “Don Ippolito,” she cried, “I want to tell you that I am sorry; I want to ask your pardon — how can you ever forgive me? — for what I said.”

She instinctively stretched her hand towards him.

“Oh!” said the priest, with an indescribable long, trembling sigh. He caught her hand in his held it tight, and then pressed it for an instant against his breast.

Ferris made a little start forward.

“Now, that’s right, Florida,” said her mother, as the four stood in the pale, estranging moonlight. “I’m sure Don Ippolito can’t cherish any resentment. If he does, he must come in and wash it out with a glass of wine — that’s a good old fashion. I want you to have the wine at any rate, Don Ippolito; it’ll keep you from taking cold. You really must.”

“Thanks, madama; I cannot lose more time, now; I must go home at once. Good night.”

Before Mrs. Vervain could frame a protest, or lay hold of him, he bowed and hurried out of the land-gate.

“How perfectly absurd for him to get into the water in that way,” she said, looking mechanically in the direction in which he had vanished.

“Well, Mrs. Vervain, it isn’t best to be too grateful to people,” said Ferris, “but I think we must allow that if we were in any danger, sticking there in the mud, Don Ippolito got us out of it by putting his shoulder to the oar.”

“Of course,” assented Mrs. Vervain.

“In fact,” continued Ferris, “I suppose we may say that, under Providence, we probably owe our lives to Don Ippolito’s self-sacrifice and Miss Vervain’s knowledge of German. At any rate, it’s what I shall always maintain.”

“Mother, don’t you think you had better go in?” asked Florida, gently. Her gentleness ignored the presence, the existence of Ferris. “I’m afraid you will be sick after all this fatigue.”

“There, Mrs. Vervain, it’ll be no use offering me a glass of wine. I’m sent away, you see,” said Ferris. “And Miss Vervain is quite right. Good night.”

“Oh — good night, Mr. Ferris,” said Mrs. Vervain, giving her hand. “Thank you so much.”

Florida did not look towards him. She gathered her mother’s shawl about her shoulders for the twentieth time that day, and softly urged her in doors, while Ferris let himself out into the campo.

IX.

Florida began to prepare the bed for her mother’s lying down.

“What are you doing that for, my dear?” asked Mrs. Vervain. “I can’t go to bed at once.”

“But mother” —

“No, Florida. And I mean it. You are too headstrong. I should think you would see yourself how you suffer in the end by giving way to your violent temper. What a day you have made for us!”

“I was very wrong,” murmured the proud girl, meekly.

“And then the mortification of an apology; you might have spared yourself that.”

“It didn’t mortify me; I didn’t care for it.”

“No, I really believe you are too haughty to mind humbling yourself. And Don Ippolito had been so uniformly kind to us. I begin to believe that Mr. Ferris caught your true character in that sketch. But your pride will be broken some day, Florida.”

“Won’t you let me help you undress, mother? You can talk to me while you’re undressing. You must try to get some rest.”

“Yes, I am all unstrung. Why couldn’t you have let him come in and talk awhile? It would have been the best way to get me quieted down. But no; you must always have your own way Don’t twitch me, my dear; I’d rather undress myself. You pretend to be very careful of me. I wonder if you really care for me.”

“Oh, mother, you are all I have in the world!”

Mrs. Vervain began to whimper. “You talk as if I were any better off. Have I anybody besides you? And I have lost so many.”

“Don’t think of those things now, mother.”

Mrs. Vervain tenderly kissed the young girl. “You are good to your mother. Don Ippolito was right; no one ever saw you offer me disrespect or unkindness. There, there! Don’t cry, my darling. I think I had better lie down, and I’ll let you undress me.”

She suffered herself to be helped into bed, and Florida went softly about the room, putting it in order, and drawing the curtains closer to keep out the near dawn. Her mother talked a little while, and presently fell from incoherence to silence, and so to sleep.

Florida looked hesitatingly at her for a moment, and then set her candle on the floor and sank wearily into an arm-chair beside the bed. Her hands fell into her lap; her head drooped sadly forward; the light flung the shadow of her face grotesquely exaggerated and foreshortened upon the ceiling.

By and by a bird piped in the garden; the shriek of a swallow made itself heard from a distance; the vernal day was beginning to stir from the light, brief drowse of the vernal night. A crown of angry red formed upon the candle wick, which toppled over in the socket and guttered out with a sharp hiss.

Florida started from her chair. A streak of sunshine pierced shutter and curtain. Her mother was supporting herself on one elbow in the bed, and looking at her as if she had just called to her.

“Mother, did you speak?” asked the girl.

Mrs. Vervain turned her face away; she sighed deeply, stretched her thin hands on the pillow, and seemed to be sinking, sinking down through the bed. She ceased to breathe and lay in a dead faint.

Florida felt rather than saw it all. She did not cry out nor call for help. She brought water and cologne, and bathed her mother’s face, and then chafed her hands. Mrs. Vervain slowly revived; she opened her eyes, then closed them; she did not speak, but after a while she began to fetch her breath with the long and even respirations of sleep.

Florida noiselessly opened the door, and met the servant with a tray of coffee. She put her finger to her lip, and motioned her not to enter, asking in a whisper: “What time is it, Nina? I forgot to wind my watch.”

“It’s nine o’clock, signorina; and I thought you would be tired this morning, and would like your coffee in bed. Oh, misericordia!” cried the girl, still in whisper, with a glance through the doorway, “you haven’t been in bed at all!”

“My mother doesn’t seem well. I sat down beside her, and fell asleep in my chair without knowing it.”

“Ah, poor little thing! Then you must drink your coffee at once. It refreshes.”

“Yes, yes,” said Florida, closing the door, and pointing to a table in the next room, “put it down here. I will serve myself, Nina. Go call the gondola, please. I am going out, at once, and I want you to go with me. Tell Checa to come here and stay with my mother till I come back.”

She poured out a cup of coffee with a trembling hand, and hastily drank it; then bathing her eyes, she went to the glass and bestowed a touch or two upon yesterday’s toilet, studied the effect a moment, and turned away. She ran back for another look, and the next moment she was walking down to the water-gate, where she found Nina waiting her in the gondola.

A rapid course brought them to Ferris’s landing. “Ring,” she said to the gondolier, “and say that one of the American ladies wishes to see the consul.”

Ferris was standing on the balcony over her, where he had been watching her approach in mute wonder. “Why, Miss Vervain,” he called down, “what in the world is the matter?”

“I don’t know. I want to see you,” said Florida, looking up with a wistful face.

“I’ll come down.”

“Yes, please. Or no, I had better come up. Yes, Nina and I will come up.”

Ferris met them at the lower door and led them to his apartment. Nina sat down in the outer room, and Florida followed the painter into his studio. Though her face was so wan, it seemed to him that he had never seen it lovelier, and he had a strange pride in her being there, though the disorder of the place ought to have humbled him. She looked over it with a certain childlike, timid curiosity, and something of that lofty compassion with which young ladies regard the haunts of men when they come into them by chance; in doing this she had a haughty, slow turn of the head that fascinated him.

“I hope,” he said, “you don’t mind the smell,” which was a mingled one of oil-colors and tobacco-smoke. “The woman’s putting my office to rights, and it’s all in a cloud of dust. So I have to bring you in here.”

Florida sat down on a chair fronting the easel, and found herself looking into the sad eyes of Don Ippolito. Ferris brusquely turned the back of the canvas toward her. “I didn’t mean you to see that. It isn’t ready to show, yet,” he said, and then he stood expectantly before her. He waited for her to speak, for he never knew how to take Miss Vervain; he was willing enough to make light of her grand moods, but now she was too evidently unhappy for mocking; at the same time he did not care to invoke a snub by a prematurely sympathetic demeanor. His mind ran on the events of the day before, and he thought this visit probably related somehow to Don Ippolito. But his visitor did not speak, and at last he said: “I hope there’s nothing wrong at home, Miss Vervain. It’s rather odd to have yesterday, last night, and next morning all run together as they have been for me in the last twenty-four hours. I trust Mrs. Vervain is turning the whole thing into a good solid oblivion.”

“It’s about — it’s about — I came to see you” — said Florida, hoarsely. “I mean,” she hurried on to say, “that I want to ask you who is the best doctor here?”

Then it was not about Don Ippolito. “Is your mother sick?” asked Ferris, eagerly. “She must have been fearfully tired by that unlucky expedition of ours. I hope there’s nothing serious?”

“No, no! But she is not well. She is very frail, you know. You must have noticed how frail she is,” said Florida, tremulously.

Ferris had noticed that all his countrywomen, past their girlhood, seemed to be sick, he did not know how or why; he supposed it was all right, it was so common. In Mrs. Vervain’s case, though she talked a great deal about her ill-health, he had noticed it rather less than usual, she had so great spirit. He recalled now that he had thought her at times rather a shadowy presence, and that occasionally it had amused him that so slight a structure should hang together as it did — not only successfully, but triumphantly.

He said yes, he knew that Mrs. Vervain was not strong, and Florida continued: “It’s only advice that I want for her, but I think we had better see some one — or know some one that we could go to in need. We are so far from any one we know, or help of any kind.” She seemed to be trying to account to herself, rather than to Ferris, for what she was doing. “We mustn’t let anything pass unnoticed”.... She looked at him entreatingly, but a shadow, as of some wounding memory, passed over her face, and she said no more.

“I’ll go with you to a doctor’s,” said Ferris, kindly.

“No, please, I won’t trouble you.”

“It’s no trouble.”

“I don’t want you to go with me, please. I’d rather go alone.” Ferris looked at her perplexedly, as she rose. “Just give me the address, and I shall manage best by myself. I’m used to doing it.”

“As you like. Wait a moment.” Ferris wrote the address. “There,” he said, giving it to her; “but isn’t there anything I can do for you?”

“Yes,” answered Florida with awkward hesitation, and a half-defiant, half-imploring look at him. “You must have all sorts of people applying to you, as a consul; and you look after their affairs — and try to forget them” —

“Well?” said Ferris.

“I wish you wouldn’t remember that I’ve asked this favor of you; that you’d consider it a” —

“Consular service? With all my heart,” answered Ferris, thinking for the third or fourth time how very young Miss Vervain was.

“You are very good; you are kinder than I have any right,” said Florida, smiling piteously. “I only mean, don’t speak of it to my mother. Not,” she added, “but what I want her to know everything I do; but it would worry her if she thought I was anxious about her. Oh! I wish I wouldn’t.”

She began a hasty search for her handkerchief; he saw her lips tremble and his soul trembled with them.

In another moment, “Good-morning,” she said briskly, with a sort of airy sob, “I don’t want you to come down, please.”

She drifted out of the room and down the stairs, the servant-maid falling into her wake.

Ferris filled his pipe and went out on his balcony again, and stood watching the gondola in its course toward the address he had given, and smoking thoughtfully. It was really the same girl who had given poor Don Ippolito that cruel slap in the face, yesterday. But that seemed no more out of reason than her sudden, generous, exaggerated remorse both were of a piece with her coming to him for help now, holding him at a distance, flinging herself upon his sympathy, and then trying to snub him, and breaking down in the effort. It was all of a piece, and the piece was bad; yes, she had an ugly temper; and yet she had magnanimous traits too. These contradictions, which in his reverie he felt rather than formulated, made him smile, as he stood on his balcony bathed by the morning air and sunlight, in fresh, strong ignorance of the whole mystery of women’s nerves. These caprices even charmed him. He reflected that he had gone on doing the Vervains one favor after another in spite of Florida’s childish petulancies; and he resolved that he would not stop now; her whims should be nothing to him, as they had been nothing, hitherto. It is flattering to a man to be indispensable to a woman so long as he is not obliged to it; Miss Vervain’s dependent relation to himself in this visit gave her a grace in Ferris’s eyes which she had wanted before.

In the mean time he saw her gondola stop, turn round, and come back to the canal that bordered the Vervain garden.

“Another change of mind,” thought Ferris, complacently; and rising superior to the whole fitful sex, he released himself from uneasiness on Mrs. Vervain’s account. But in the evening he went to ask after her. He first sent his card to Florida, having written on it, “I hope Mrs. Vervain is better. Don’t let me come in if it’s any disturbance.” He looked for a moment at what he had written, dimly conscious that it was patronizing, and when he entered he saw that Miss Vervain stood on the defensive and from some willfulness meant to make him feel that he was presumptuous in coming; it did not comfort him to consider that she was very young. “Mother will be in directly,” said Florida in a tone that relegated their morning’s interview to the age of fable.

Mrs. Vervain came in smiling and cordial, apparently better and not worse for yesterday’s misadventures.

“Oh, I pick up quickly,” she explained. “I’m an old campaigner, you know. Perhaps a little too old, now. Years do make a difference; and you’ll find it out as you get on, Mr. Ferris.”

“I suppose so,” said Ferris, not caring to have Mrs. Vervain treat him so much like a boy. “Even at twenty-six I found it pleasant to take a nap this afternoon. How does one stand it at seventeen, Miss Vervain?” he asked.

“I haven’t felt the need of sleep,” replied Florida, indifferently, and he felt shelved, as an old fellow.

He had an empty, frivolous visit, to his thinking. Mrs. Vervain asked if he had seen Don Ippolito, and wondered that the priest had not come about, all day. She told a long story, and at the end tapped herself on the mouth with her fan to punish a yawn.

Ferris rose to go. Mrs. Vervain wondered again in the same words why Don Ippolito had not been near them all day.

“Because he’s a wise man,” said Ferris with bitterness, “and knows when to time his visits.” Mrs. Vervain did not notice his bitterness, but something made Florida follow him to the outer door.

“Why, it’s moonlight!” she exclaimed; and she glanced at him as though she had some purpose of atonement in her mind.

But he would not have it. “Yes, there’s a moon,” he said moodily. “Good-night.”

“Good night,” answered Florida, and she impulsively offered him her hand. He thought that it shook in his, but it was probably the agitation of his own nerves.

A soreness that had been lifted from his heart, came back; he walked home disappointed and defeated, he hardly knew why or in what. He did not laugh now to think how she had asked him that morning to forget her coming to him for help; he was outraged that he should have been repaid in this sort, and the rebuff with which his sympathy had just been met was vulgar; there was no other name for it but vulgarity. Yet he could not relate this quality to the face of the young girl as he constantly beheld it in his homeward walk. It did not defy him or repulse him; it looked up at him wistfully as from the gondola that morning. Nevertheless he hardened his heart. The Vervains should see him next when they had sent for him. After all, one is not so very old at twenty-six.

X.

“Don Ippolito has come, signorina,” said Nina, the next morning, approaching Florida, where she sat in an attitude of listless patience, in the garden.

“Don Ippolito!” echoed the young girl in a weary tone. She rose and went into the house, and they met with the constraint which was but too natural after the events of their last parting. It is hard to tell which has most to overcome in such a case, the forgiver or the forgiven. Pardon rankles even in a generous soul, and the memory of having pardoned embarrasses the sensitive spirit before the object of its clemency, humbling and making it ashamed. It would be well, I suppose, if there need be nothing of the kind between human creatures, who cannot sustain such a relation without mutual distrust. It is not so ill with them when apart, but when they meet they must be cold and shy at first.

“Now I see what you two are thinking about,” said Mrs. Vervain, and a faint blush tinged the cheek of the priest as she thus paired him off with her daughter. “You are thinking about what happened the other day; and you had better forget it. There is no use brooding over these matters. Dear me! if I had stopped to brood over every little unpleasant thing that happened, I wonder where I should be now? By the way, where were you all day yesterday, Don Ippolito?”

“I did not come to disturb you because I thought you must be very tired. Besides I was quite busy.”

“Oh yes, those inventions of yours. I think you are so ingenious! But you mustn’t apply too closely. Now really, yesterday, — after all you had been through, it was too much for the brain.” She tapped herself on the forehead with her fan.

“I was not busy with my inventions, madama,” answered Don Ippolito, who sat in the womanish attitude priests get from their drapery, and fingered the cord round his three-cornered hat. “I have scarcely touched them of late. But our parish takes part in the procession of Corpus Domini in the Piazza, and I had my share of the preparations.”

“Oh, to be sure! When is it to be? We must all go. Our Nina has been telling Florida of the grand sights, — little children dressed up like John the Baptist, leading lambs. I suppose it’s a great event with you.”

The priest shrugged his shoulders, and opened both his hands, so that his hat slid to the floor, bumping and tumbling some distance away. He recovered it and sat down again. “It’s an observance,” he said coldly.

“And shall you be in the procession?”

“I shall be there with the other priests of my parish.”

“Delightful!” cried Mrs. Vervain. “We shall be looking out for you. I shall feel greatly honored to think I actually know some one in the procession. I’m going to give you a little nod. You won’t think it very wrong?”

She saved him from the embarrassment he might have felt in replying, by an abrupt lapse from all apparent interest in the subject. She turned to her daughter, and said with a querulous accent, “I wish you would throw the afghan over my feet, Florida, and make me a little comfortable before you begin your reading this morning.” At the same time she feebly disposed herself among the sofa cushions on which she reclined, and waited for some final touches from her daughter. Then she said, “I’m just going to close my eyes, but I shall hear every word. You are getting a beautiful accent, my dear, I know you are. I should think Goldoni must have a very smooth, agreeable style; hasn’t he now, in Italian?”

They began to read the comedy; after fifteen or twenty minutes Mrs. Vervain opened her eyes and said, “But before you commence, Florida, I wish you’d play a little, to get me quieted down. I feel so very flighty. I suppose it’s this sirocco. And I believe I’ll lie down in the next room.”

Florida followed her to repeat the arrangements for her comfort. Then she returned, and sitting down at the piano struck with a sort of soft firmness a few low, soothing chords, out of which a lulling melody grew. With her fingers still resting on the keys she turned her stately head, and glanced through the open door at her mother.

“Don Ippolito,” she asked softly, “is there anything in the air of Venice that makes people very drowsy?”

“I have never heard that, madamigella.”

“I wonder,” continued the young girl absently, “why my mother wants to sleep so much.”

“Perhaps she has not recovered from the fatigues of the other night,” suggested the priest.

“Perhaps,” said Florida, sadly looking toward her mother’s door.

She turned again to the instrument, and let her fingers wander over the keys, with a drooping head. Presently she lifted her face, and smoothed back from her temples some straggling tendrils of hair. Without looking at the priest she asked with the child-like bluntness that characterized her, “Why don’t you like to walk in the procession of Corpus Domini?”

Don Ippolito’s color came and went, and he answered evasively, “I have not said that I did not like to do so.”

“No, that is true,” said Florida, letting her fingers drop again on the keys.

Don Ippolito rose from the sofa where he had been sitting beside her while they read, and walked the length of the room. Then he came towards her and said meekly, “Madamigella, I did not mean to repel any interest you feel in me. But it was a strange question to ask a priest, as I remembered I was when you asked it.”

“Don’t you always remember that?” demanded the girl, still without turning her head.

“No; sometimes I am suffered to forget it,” he said with a tentative accent.

She did not respond, and he drew a long breath, and walked away in silence. She let her hands fall into her lap, and sat in an attitude of expectation. As Don Ippolito came near her again he paused a second time.

“It is in this house that I forget my priesthood,” he began, “and it is the first of your kindnesses that you suffer me to do so, your good mother, there, and you. How shall I repay you? It cut me to the heart that you should ask forgiveness of me when you did, though I was hurt by your rebuke. Oh, had you not the right to rebuke me if I abused the delicate unreserve with which you had always treated me? But believe me, I meant no wrong, then.”

His voice shook, and Florida broke in, “You did nothing wrong. It was I who was cruel for no cause.”

“No, no. You shall not say that,” he returned. “And why should I have cared for a few words, when all your acts had expressed a trust of me that is like heaven to my soul?”

She turned now and looked at him, and he went on. “Ah, I see you do not understand! How could you know what it is to be a priest in this most unhappy city? To be haunted by the strict espionage of all your own class, to be shunned as a spy by all who are not of it! But you two have not put up that barrier which everywhere shuts me out from my kind. You have been willing to see the man in me, and to let me forget the priest.”

“I do not know what to say to you, Don Ippolito. I am only a foreigner, a girl, and I am very ignorant of these things,” said Florida with a slight alarm. “I am afraid that you may be saying what you will be sorry for.”

“Oh never! Do not fear for me if I am frank with you. It is my refuge from despair.”

The passionate vibration of his voice increased, as if it must break in tears. She glanced towards the other room with a little movement or stir.

“Ah, you needn’t be afraid of listening to me!” cried the priest bitterly.

“I will not wake her,” said Florida calmly, after an instant.

“See how you speak the thing you mean, always, always, always! You could not deny that you meant to wake her, for you have the life-long habit of the truth. Do you know what it is to have the life-long habit of a lie? It is to be a priest. Do you know what it is to seem, to say, to do, the thing you are not, think not, will not? To leave what you believe unspoken, what you will undone, what you are unknown? It is to be a priest!”

Don Ippolito spoke in Italian, and he uttered these words in a voice carefully guarded from every listener but the one before his face. “Do you know what it is when such a moment as this comes, and you would fling away the whole fabric of falsehood that has clothed your life — do you know what it is to keep still so much of it as will help you to unmask silently and secretly? It is to be a priest!”

His voice had lost its vehemence, and his manner was strangely subdued and cold. The sort of gentle apathy it expressed, together with a certain sad, impersonal surprise at the difference between his own and the happier fortune with which he contrasted it, was more touching than any tragic demonstration.

As if she felt the fascination of the pathos which she could not fully analyze, the young girl sat silent. After a time, in which she seemed to be trying to think it all out, she asked in a low, deep murmur: “Why did you become a priest, then?”

“It is a long story,” said Don Ippolito. “I will not trouble you with it now. Some other time.”

“No; now,” answered Florida, in English. “If you hate so to be a priest, I can’t understand why you should have allowed yourself to become one. We should be very unhappy if we could not respect you, — not trust you as we have done; and how could we, if we knew you were not true to yourself in being what you are?”

“Madamigella,” said the priest, “I never dared believe that I was in the smallest thing necessary to your happiness. Is it true, then, that you care for my being rather this than that? That you are in the least grieved by any wrong of mine?”

“I scarcely know what you mean. How could we help being grieved by what you have said to me?”

“Thanks; but why do you care whether a priest of my church loves his calling or not, — you, a Protestant? It is that you are sorry for me as an unhappy man, is it not?”

“Yes; it is that and more. I am no Catholic, but we are both Christians” —

Don Ippolito gave the faintest movement of his shoulders.

— “and I cannot endure to think of your doing the things you must do as a priest, and yet hating to be a priest. It is terrible!”

“Are all the priests of your faith devotees?”

“They cannot be. But are none of yours so?”

“Oh, God forbid that I should say that. I have known real saints among them. That friend of mine in Padua, of whom I once told you, became such, and died an angel fit for Paradise. And I suppose that my poor uncle is a saint, too, in his way.”

“Your uncle? A priest? You have never mentioned him to us.”

“No,” said Don Ippolito. After a certain pause he began abruptly, “We are of the people, my family, and in each generation we have sought to honor our blood by devoting one of the race to the church. When I was a child, I used to divert myself by making little figures out of wood and pasteboard, and I drew rude copies of the pictures I saw at church. We lived in the house where I live now, and where I was born, and my mother let me play in the small chamber where I now have my forge; it was anciently the oratory of the noble family that occupied the whole palace. I contrived an altar at one end of it; I stuck my pictures about the walls, and I ranged the puppets in the order of worshippers on the floor; then I played at saying mass, and preached to them all day long.

“My mother was a widow. She used to watch me with tears in her eyes. At last, one day, she brought my uncle to see me: I remember it all far better than yesterday. ‘Is it not the will of God?’ she asked. My uncle called me to him, and asked me whether I should like to be a priest in good earnest, when I grew up? ‘Shall I then be able to make as many little figures as I like, and to paint pictures, and carve an altar like that in your church?’ I demanded. My uncle answered that I should have real men and women to preach to, as he had, and would not that be much finer? In my heart I did not think so, for I did not care for that part of it; I only liked to preach to my puppets because I had made them. But said, ‘Oh yes,’ as children do. I kept on contriving the toys that I played with, and I grew used to hearing it told among my mates and about the neighborhood that I was to be a priest; I cannot remember any other talk with my mother, and I do not know how or when it was decided. Whenever I thought of the matter, I thought, ‘That will be very well. The priests have very little to do, and they gain a great deal of money with their masses; and I shall be able to make whatever I like.’ I only considered the office then as a means to gratify the passion that has always filled my soul for inventions and works of mechanical skill and ingenuity. My inclination was purely secular, but I was as inevitably becoming a priest as if I had been born to be one.”

“But you were not forced? There was no pressure upon you?”

“No, there was merely an absence, so far as they were concerned, of any other idea. I think they meant justly, and assuredly they meant kindly by me. I grew in years, and the time came when I was to begin my studies. It was my uncle’s influence that placed me in the Seminary of the Salute, and there I repaid his care by the utmost diligence. But it was not the theological studies that I loved, it was the mathematics and their practical application, and among the classics I loved best the poets and the historians. Yes, I can see that I was always a mundane spirit, and some of those in charge of me at once divined it, I think. They used to take us to walk, — you have seen the little creatures in their priest’s gowns, which they put on when they enter the school, with a couple of young priests at the head of the file, — and once, for an uncommon pleasure, they took us to the Arsenal, and let us see the shipyards and the museum. You know the wonderful things that are there: the flags and the guns captured from the Turks; the strange weapons of all devices; the famous suits of armor. I came back half-crazed; I wept that I must leave the place. But I set to work the best I could to carve out in wood an invention which the model of one of the antique galleys had suggested to me. They found it, — nothing can be concealed outside of your own breast in such a school, — and they carried me with my contrivance before the superior. He looked kindly but gravely at me: ‘My son,’ said he, ‘do you wish to be a priest?’ ‘Surely, reverend father,’ I answered in alarm, ‘why not?’ ‘Because these things are not for priests. Their thoughts must be upon other things. Consider well of it, my son, while there is yet time,’ he said, and he addressed me a long and serious discourse upon the life on which I was to enter. He was a just and conscientious and affectionate man; but every word fell like burning fire in my heart. At the end, he took my poor plaything, and thrust it down among the coals of his scaldino. It made the scaldino smoke, and he bade me carry it out with me, and so turned again to his book.

“My mother was by this time dead, but I could hardly have gone to her, if she had still been living. ‘These things are not for priests!’ kept repeating itself night and day in my brain. I was in despair, I was in a fury to see my uncle. I poured out my heart to him, and tried to make him understand the illusions and vain hopes in which I had lived. He received coldly my sorrow and the reproaches which I did not spare him; he bade me consider my inclinations as so many temptations to be overcome for the good of my soul and the glory of God. He warned me against the scandal of attempting to withdraw now from the path marked out for me. I said that I never would be a priest. ‘And what will you do?’ he asked. Alas! what could I do? I went back to my prison, and in due course I became a priest.

“It was not without sufficient warning that I took one order after another, but my uncle’s words, ‘What will you do?’ made me deaf to these admonitions. All that is now past. I no longer resent nor hate; I seem to have lost the power; but those were days when my soul was filled with bitterness. Something of this must have showed itself to those who had me in their charge. I have heard that at one time my superiors had grave doubts whether I ought to be allowed to take orders. My examination, in which the difficulties of the sacerdotal life were brought before me with the greatest clearness, was severe; I do not know how I passed it; it must have been in grace to my uncle. I spent the next ten days in a convent, to meditate upon the step I was about to take. Poor helpless, friendless wretch! Madamigella, even yet I cannot see how I was to blame, that I came forth and received the first of the holy orders, and in their time the second and the third.

“I was a priest, but no more a priest at heart than those Venetian conscripts, whom you saw carried away last week, are Austrian soldiers. I was bound as they are bound, by an inexorable and inevitable law.

“You have asked me why I became a priest. Perhaps I have not told you why, but I have told you how — I have given you the slight outward events, not the processes of my mind — and that is all that I can do. If the guilt was mine, I have suffered for it. If it was not mine, still I have suffered for it. Some ban seems to have rested upon whatever I have attempted. My work, — oh, I know it well enough! — has all been cursed with futility; my labors are miserable failures or contemptible successes. I have had my unselfish dreams of blessing mankind by some great discovery or invention; but my life has been barren, barren, barren; and save for the kindness that I have known in this house, and that would not let me despair, it would now be without hope.”

He ceased, and the girl, who had listened with her proud looks transfigured to an aspect of grieving pity, fetched a long sigh. “Oh, I am sorry for you!” she said, “more sorry than I know how to tell. But you must not lose courage, you must not give up!”

Don Ippolito resumed with a melancholy smile. “There are doubtless temptations enough to be false under the best of conditions in this world. But something — I do not know what or whom; perhaps no more my uncle or my mother than I, for they were only as the past had made them — caused me to begin by living a lie, do you not see?”

“Yes, yes,” reluctantly assented the girl.

“Perhaps — who knows? — that is why no good has come of me, nor can come. My uncle’s piety and repute have always been my efficient help. He is the principal priest of the church to which I am attached, and he has had infinite patience with me. My ambition and my attempted inventions are a scandal to him, for he is a priest of those like the Holy Father, who believe that all the wickedness of the modern world has come from the devices of science; my indifference to the things of religion is a terror and a sorrow to him which he combats with prayers and penances. He starves himself and goes cold and faint that God may have mercy and turn my heart to the things on which his own is fixed. He loves my soul, but not me, and we are scarcely friends.”

Florida continued to look at him with steadfast, compassionate eyes. “It seems very strange, almost like some dream,” she murmured, “that you should be saying all this to me, Don Ippolito, and I do not know why I should have asked you anything.”

The pity of this virginal heart must have been very sweet to the man on whom she looked it. His eyes worshipped her, as he answered her devoutly, “It was due to the truth in you that I should seem to you what I am.”

“Indeed, you make me ashamed!” she cried with a blush. “It was selfish of me to ask you to speak. And now, after what you have told me, I am so helpless and I know so very little that I don’t understand how to comfort or encourage you. But surely you can somehow help yourself. Are men, that seem so strong and able, just as powerless as women, after all, when it comes to real trouble? Is a man” —

“I cannot answer. I am only a priest,” said Don Ippolito coldly, letting his eyes drop to the gown that fell about him like a woman’s skirt.

“Yes, but a priest should be a man, and so much more; a priest” —

Don Ippolito shrugged his shoulders.

“No, no!” cried the girl. “Your own schemes have all failed, you say; then why do you not think of becoming a priest in reality, and getting the good there must be in such a calling? It is singular that I should venture to say such a thing to you, and it must seem presumptuous and ridiculous for me, a Protestant — but our ways are so different.”... She paused, coloring deeply, then controlled herself, and added with grave composure, “If you were to pray” —

“To what, madamigella?” asked the priest, sadly.

“To what!” she echoed, opening her eyes full upon him. “To God!”

Don Ippolito made no answer. He let his head fall so low upon his breast that she could see the sacerdotal tonsure.

“You must excuse me,” she said, blushing again. “I did not mean to wound your feelings as a Catholic. I have been very bold and intrusive. I ought to have remembered that people of your church have different ideas — that the saints” —

Don Ippolito looked up with pensive irony.

“Oh, the poor saints!”

“I don’t understand you,” said Florida, very gravely.

“I mean that I believe in the saints as little as you do.”

“But you believe in your Church?”

“I have no Church.”

There was a silence in which Don Ippolito again dropped his head upon his breast. Florida leaned forward in her eagerness, and murmured, “You believe in God?”

The priest lifted his eyes and looked at her beseechingly. “I do not know,” he whispered. She met his gaze with one of dumb bewilderment. At last she said: “Sometimes you baptize little children and receive them into the church in the name of God?”

“Yes.”

“Poor creatures come to you and confess their sins, and you absolve them, or order them to do penances?”

“Yes.”

“And sometimes when people are dying, you must stand by their death-beds and give them the last consolations of religion?”

“It is true.”

“Oh!” moaned the girl, and fixed on Don Ippolito a long look of wonder and reproach, which he met with eyes of silent anguish.

“It is terrible, madamigella,” he said, rising. “I know it. I would fain have lived single-heartedly, for I think I was made so; but now you see how black and deadly a lie my life is. It is worse than you could have imagined, is it not? It is worse than the life of the cruelest bigot, for he at least believes in himself.”

“Worse, far worse!”

“But at least, dear young lady,” he went on piteously, “believe me that I have the grace to abhor myself. It is not much, it is very, very little, but it is something. Do not wholly condemn me!”

“Condemn? Oh, I am sorry for you with my whole heart. Only, why must you tell me all this? No, no; you are not to blame. I made you speak; I made you put yourself to shame.”

“Not that, dearest madamigella. I would unsay nothing now, if I could, unless to take away the pain I have given you. It has been more a relief than a shame to have all this known to you; and even if you should despise me” —

“I don’t despise you; that isn’t for me; but oh, I wish that I could help you!”

Don Ippolito shook his head. “You cannot help me; but I thank you for your compassion; I shall never forget it.” He lingered irresolutely with his hat in his hand. “Shall we go on with the reading, madamigella?”

“No, we will not read any more to-day,” she answered.

“Then I relieve you of the disturbance, madamigella,” he said; and after a moment’s hesitation he bowed sadly and went.

She mechanically followed him to the door, with some little gestures and movements of a desire to keep him from going, yet let him go, and so turned back and sat down with her hands resting noiseless on the keys of the piano.

XI.

The next morning Don Ippolito did not come, but in the afternoon the postman brought a letter for Mrs. Vervain, couched in the priest’s English, begging her indulgence until after the day of Corpus Christi, up to which time, he said, he should be too occupied for his visits of ordinary.

This letter reminded Mrs. Vervain that they had not seen Mr. Ferris for three days, and she sent to ask him to dinner. But he returned an excuse, and he was not to be had to breakfast the next morning for the asking. He was in open rebellion. Mrs. Vervain had herself rowed to the consular landing, and sent up her gondolier with another invitation to dinner.

The painter appeared on the balcony in the linen blouse which he wore at his work, and looked down with a frown on the smiling face of Mrs. Vervain for a moment without speaking. Then, “I’ll come,” he said gloomily.

“Come with me, then,” returned Mrs. Vervain,

“I shall have to keep you waiting.”

“I don’t mind that. You’ll be ready in five minutes.”

Florida met the painter with such gentleness that he felt his resentment to have been a stupid caprice, for which there was no ground in the world. He tried to recall his fading sense of outrage, but he found nothing in his mind but penitence. The sort of distraught humility with which she behaved gave her a novel fascination.

The dinner was good, as Mrs. Vervain’s dinners always were, and there was a compliment to the painter in the presence of a favorite dish. When he saw this, “Well, Mrs. Vervain, what is it?” he asked. “You needn’t pretend that you’re treating me so well for nothing. You want something.”

“We want nothing but that you should not neglect your friends. We have been utterly deserted for three or four days. Don Ippolito has not been here, either; but he has some excuse; he has to get ready for Corpus Christi. He’s going to be in the procession.”

“Is he to appear with his flying machine, or his portable dining-table, or his automatic camera?”

“For shame!” cried Mrs. Vervain, beaming reproach. Florida’s face clouded, and Ferris made haste to say that he did not know these inventions were sacred, and that he had no wish to blaspheme them.

“You know well enough what I meant,” answered Mrs. Vervain. “And now, we want you to get us a window to look out on the procession.”

“Oh, that’s what you want, is it? I thought you merely wanted me not to neglect my friends.”

“Well, do you call that neglecting them?”

“Mrs. Vervain, Mrs. Vervain! What a mind you have! Is there anything else you want? Me to go with you, for example?”

“We don’t insist. You can take us to the window and leave us, if you like.”

“This clemency is indeed unexpected,” replied Ferris. “I’m really quite unworthy of it.”

He was going on with the badinage customary between Mrs. Vervain and himself, when Florida protested, —

“Mother, I think we abuse Mr. Ferris’s kindness.”

“I know it, my dear — I know it,” cheerfully assented Mrs. Vervain. “It’s perfectly shocking. But what are we to do? We must abuse somebody’s kindness.”

“We had better stay at home. I’d much rather not go,” said the girl, tremulously.

“Why, Miss Vervain,” said Ferris gravely, “I’m very sorry if you’ve misunderstood my joking. I’ve never yet seen the procession to advantage, and I’d like very much to look on with you.”

He could not tell whether she was grateful for his words, or annoyed. She resolutely said no more, but her mother took up the strain and discoursed long upon it, arranging all the particulars of their meeting and going together. Ferris was a little piqued, and began to wonder why Miss Vervain did not stay at home if she did not want to go. To be sure, she went everywhere with her mother but it was strange, with her habitual violent submissiveness, that she should have said anything in opposition to her mother’s wish or purpose.

After dinner, Mrs. Vervain frankly withdrew for her nap, and Florida seemed to make a little haste to take some sewing in her hand, and sat down with the air of a woman willing to detain her visitor. Ferris was not such a stoic as not to be dimly flattered by this, but he was too much of a man to be fully aware how great an advance it might seem.

“I suppose we shall see most of the priests of Venice, and what they are like, in the procession to-morrow,” she said. “Do you remember speaking to me about priests, the other day, Mr. Ferris?”

“Yes, I remember it very well. I think I overdid it; and I couldn’t perceive afterwards that I had shown any motive but a desire to make trouble for Don Ippolito.”

“I never thought that,” answered Florida, seriously. “What you said was true, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was and it wasn’t, and I don’t know that it differed from anything else in the world, in that respect. It is true that there is a great distrust of the priests amongst the Italians. The young men hate them — or think they do — or say they do. Most educated men in middle life are materialists, and of course unfriendly to the priests. There are even women who are skeptical about religion. But I suspect that the largest number of all those who talk loudest against the priests are really subject to them. You must consider how very intimately they are bound up with every family in the most solemn relations of life.”

“Do you think the priests are generally bad men?” asked the young girl shyly.

“I don’t, indeed. I don’t see how things could hang together if it were so. There must be a great basis of sincerity and goodness in them, when all is said and done. It seems to me that at the worst they’re merely professional people — poor fellows who have gone into the church for a living. You know it isn’t often now that the sons of noble families take orders; the priests are mostly of humble origin; not that they’re necessarily the worse for that; the patricians used to be just as bad in another way.”

“I wonder,” said Florida, with her head on one side, considering her seam, “why there is always something so dreadful to us in the idea of a priest.”

“They do seem a kind of alien creature to us Protestants. I can’t make out whether they seem so to Catholics, or not. But we have a repugnance to all doomed people, haven’t we? And a priest is a man under sentence of death to the natural ties between himself and the human race. He is dead to us. That makes him dreadful. The spectre of our dearest friend, father or mother, would be terrible. And yet,” added Ferris, musingly, “a nun isn’t terrible.”

“No,” answered the girl, “that’s because a woman’s life even in the world seems to be a constant giving up. No, a nun isn’t unnatural, but a priest is.”

She was silent for a time, in which she sewed swiftly; then she suddenly dropped her work into her lap, and pressing it down with both hands, she asked, “Do you believe that priests themselves are ever skeptical about religion?”

“I suppose it must happen now and then. In the best days of the church it was a fashion to doubt, you know. I’ve often wanted to ask our friend Don Ippolito something about these matters, but I didn’t see how it could be managed.” Ferris did not note the change that passed over Florida’s face, and he continued. “Our acquaintance hasn’t become so intimate as I hoped it might. But you only get to a certain point with Italians. They like to meet you on the street; maybe they haven’t any indoors.”

“Yes, it must sometimes happen, as you say,” replied Florida, with a quick sigh, reverting to the beginning of Ferris’s answer. “But is it any worse for a false priest than for a hypocritical minister?”

“It’s bad enough for either, but it’s worse for the priest. You see Miss Vervain, a minister doesn’t set up for so much. He doesn’t pretend to forgive us our sins, and he doesn’t ask us to confess them; he doesn’t offer us the veritable body and blood in the sacrament, and he doesn’t bear allegiance to the visible and tangible vicegerent of Christ upon earth. A hypocritical parson may be absurd; but a skeptical priest is tragical.”

“Yes, oh yes, I see,” murmured the girl, with a grieving face. “Are they always to blame for it? They must be induced, sometimes, to enter the church before they’ve seriously thought about it, and then don’t know how to escape from the path that has been marked out for them from their childhood. Should you think such a priest as that was to blame for being a skeptic?” she asked very earnestly.

“No,” said Ferris, with a smile at her seriousness, “I should think such a skeptic as that was to blame for being a priest.”

“Shouldn’t you be very sorry for him?” pursued Florida still more solemnly.

“I should, indeed, if I liked him. If I didn’t, I’m afraid I shouldn’t,” said Ferris; but he saw that his levity jarred upon her. “Come, Miss Vervain, you’re not going to look at those fat monks and sleek priests in the procession to-morrow as so many incorporate tragedies, are you? You’ll spoil my pleasure if you do. I dare say they’ll be all of them devout believers, accepting everything, down to the animalcula in the holy water.”

“If you were that kind of a priest,” persisted the girl, without heeding his jests, “what should you do?”

“Upon my word, I don’t know. I can’t imagine it. Why,” he continued, “think what a helpless creature a priest is in everything but his priesthood — more helpless than a woman, even. The only thing he could do would be to leave the church, and how could he do that? He’s in the world, but he isn’t of it, and I don’t see what he could do with it, or it with him. If an Italian priest were to leave the church, even the liberals, who distrust him now, would despise him still more. Do you know that they have a pleasant fashion of calling the Protestant converts apostates? The first thing for such a priest would be exile. But I’m not supposably the kind of priest you mean, and I don’t think just such a priest supposable. I dare say if a priest found himself drifting into doubt, he’d try to avoid the disagreeable subject, and, if he couldn’t, he’d philosophize it some way, and wouldn’t let his skepticism worry him.”

“Then you mean that they haven’t consciences like us?”

“They have consciences, but not like us. The Italians are kinder people than we are, but they’re not so just, and I should say that they don’t think truth the chief good of life. They believe there are pleasanter and better things. Perhaps they’re right.”

“No, no; you don’t believe that, you know you don’t,” said Florida, anxiously. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

“Oh yes, I have. I’ve told you it wasn’t a supposable case.”

“But suppose it was.”

“Well, if I must,” answered Ferris with a laugh. “With my unfortunate bringing up, I couldn’t say less than that such a man ought to get out of his priesthood at any hazard. He should cease to be a priest, if it cost him kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything. I don’t see how there can be any living in such a lie, though I know there is. In all reason, it ought to eat the soul out of a man, and leave him helpless to do or be any sort of good. But there seems to be something, I don’t know what it is, that is above all reason of ours, something that saves each of us for good in spite of the bad that’s in us. It’s very good practice, for a man who wants to be modest, to come and live in a Latin country. He learns to suspect his own topping virtues, and to be lenient to the novel combinations of right and wrong that he sees. But as for our insupposable priest — yes, I should say decidedly he ought to get out of it by all means.”

Florida fell back in her chair with an aspect of such relief as comes to one from confirmation on an important point. She passed her hand over the sewing in her lap, but did not speak.

Ferris went on, with a doubting look at her, for he had been shy of introducing Don Ippolito’s name since the day on the Brenta, and he did not know what effect a recurrence to him in this talk might have. “I’ve often wondered if our own clerical friend were not a little shaky in his faith. I don’t think nature meant him for a priest. He always strikes me as an extremely secular-minded person. I doubt if he’s ever put the question whether he is what he professes to be, squarely to himself — he’s such a mere dreamer.”

Florida changed her posture slightly, and looked down at her sewing. She asked, “But shouldn’t you abhor him if he were a skeptical priest?”

Ferris shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, I don’t find it such an easy matter to abhor people. It would be interesting,” he continued musingly, “to have such a dreamer waked up, once, and suddenly confronted with what he recognized as perfect truthfulness, and couldn’t help contrasting himself with. But it would be a little cruel.”

“Would you rather have him left as he was?” asked Florida, lifting her eyes to his.

“As a moralist, no; as a humanitarian, yes, Miss Vervain. He’d be much happier as he was.”

“What time ought we to be ready for you tomorrow?” demanded the girl in a tone of decision.

“We ought to be in the Piazza by nine o’clock,” said Ferris, carelessly accepting the change of subject; and he told her of his plan for seeing the procession from a window of the Old Procuratie.

When he rose to go, he said lightly, “Perhaps, after all, we may see the type of tragical priest we’ve been talking about. Who can tell? I say his nose will be red.”

“Perhaps,” answered Florida, with unheeding gravity.

XII.

The day was one of those which can come to the world only in early June at Venice. The heaven was without a cloud, but a blue haze made mystery of the horizon where the lagoon and sky met unseen. The breath of the sea bathed in freshness the city at whose feet her tides sparkled and slept.

The great square of St. Mark was transformed from a mart, from a salon, to a temple. The shops under the colonnades that inclose it upon three sides were shut; the caffès, before which the circles of idle coffee-drinkers and sherbet-eaters ordinarily spread out into the Piazza, were repressed to the limits of their own doors; the stands of the water-venders, the baskets of those that sold oranges of Palermo and black cherries of Padua, had vanished from the base of the church of St. Mark, which with its dim splendor of mosaics and its carven luxury of pillar and arch and finial rose like the high-altar, ineffably rich and beautiful, of the vaster temple whose inclosure it completed. Before it stood the three great red flag-staffs, like painted tapers before an altar, and from them hung the Austrian flags of red and white, and yellow and black.

In the middle of the square stood the Austrian military band, motionless, encircling their leader with his gold-headed staff uplifted. During the night a light colonnade of wood, roofed with blue cloth, had been put up around the inside of the Piazza, and under this now paused the long pomp of the ecclesiastical procession — the priests of all the Venetian churches in their richest vestments, followed in their order by facchini, in white sandals and gay robes, with caps of scarlet, white, green, and blue, who bore huge painted candles and silken banners displaying the symbol or the portrait of the titular saints of the several churches, and supported the canopies under which the host of each was elevated. Before the clergy went a company of Austrian soldiers, and behind the facchini came a long array of religious societies, charity-school boys in uniforms, old paupers in holiday dress, little naked urchins with shepherds’ crooks and bits of fleece about their loins like John the Baptist in the Wilderness, little girls with angels’ wings and crowns, the monks of the various orders, and civilian penitents of all sorts in cloaks or dress-coats, hooded or bareheaded, and carrying each a lighted taper. The corridors under the Imperial Palace and the New and Old Procuratie were packed with spectators; from every window up and down the fronts of the palaces, gay stuffs were flung; the startled doves of St. Mark perched upon the cornices, or fluttered uneasily to and fro above the crowd. The baton of the band leader descended with a crash of martial music, the priests chanted, the charity-boys sang shrill, a vast noise of shuffling feet arose, mixed with the foliage-like rustling of the sheets of tinsel attached to the banners and candles in the procession: the whole strange, gorgeous picture came to life.

After all her plans and preparations, Mrs. Vervain had not felt well enough that morning to come to the spectacle which she had counted so much upon seeing, but she had therefore insisted the more that her daughter should go, and Ferris now stood with Florida alone at a window in the Old Procuratie.

“Well, what do you think, Miss Vervain?” he asked, when their senses had somewhat accustomed themselves to the noise of the procession; “do you say now that Venice is too gloomy a city to have ever had any possibility of gayety in her?”

“I never said that,” answered Florida, opening her eyes upon him.

“Neither did I,” returned Ferris, “but I’ve often thought it, and I’m not sure now but I’m right. There’s something extremely melancholy to me in all this. I don’t care so much for what one may call the deplorable superstition expressed in the spectacle, but the mere splendid sight and the music are enough to make one shed tears. I don’t know anything more affecting except a procession of lantern-lit gondolas and barges on the Grand Canal. It’s phantasmal. It’s the spectral resurrection of the old dead forms into the present. It’s not even the ghost, it’s the corpse of other ages that’s haunting Venice. The city ought to have been destroyed by Napoleon when he destroyed the Republic, and thrown overboard — St. Mark, Winged Lion, Bucentaur, and all. There is no land like America for true cheerfulness and light-heartedness. Think of our Fourth of Julys and our State Fairs. Selah!”

Ferris looked into the girl’s serious face with twinkling eyes. He liked to embarrass her gravity with his antic speeches, and enjoyed her endeavors to find an earnest meaning in them, and her evident trouble when she could find none.

“I’m curious to know how our friend will look,” he began again, as he arranged the cushion on the window-sill for Florida’s greater comfort in watching the spectacle, “but it won’t be an easy matter to pick him out in this masquerade, I fancy. Candle-carrying, as well as the other acts of devotion, seems rather out of character with Don Ippolito, and I can’t imagine his putting much soul into it. However, very few of the clergy appear to do that. Look at those holy men with their eyes to the wind! They are wondering who is the bella bionda at the window here.”

Florida listened to his persiflage with an air of sad distraction. She was intent upon the procession as it approached from the other side of the Piazza, and she replied at random to his comments on the different bodies that formed it.

“It’s very hard to decide which are my favorites,” he continued, surveying the long column through an opera-glass. “My religious disadvantages have been such that I don’t care much for priests or monks, or young John the Baptists, or small female cherubim, but I do like little charity-boys with voices of pins and needles and hair cut à la dead-rabbit. I should like, if it were consistent with the consular dignity, to go down and rub their heads. I’m fond, also, of old charity-boys, I find. Those paupers make one in love with destitute and dependent age, by their aspect of irresponsible enjoyment. See how briskly each of them topples along on the leg that he hasn’t got in the grave! How attractive likewise are the civilian devotees in those imperishable dress-coats of theirs! Observe their high collars of the era of the Holy Alliance: they and their fathers and their grandfathers before them have worn those dress-coats; in a hundred years from now their posterity will keep holiday in them. I should like to know the elixir by which the dress-coats of civil employees render themselves immortal. Those penitents in the cloaks and cowls are not bad, either, Miss Vervain. Come, they add a very pretty touch of mystery to this spectacle. They’re the sort of thing that painters are expected to paint in Venice — that people sigh over as so peculiarly Venetian. If you’ve a single sentiment about you, Miss Vervain, now is the time to produce it.”

“But I haven’t. I’m afraid I have no sentiment at all,” answered the girl ruefully. “But this makes me dreadfully sad.”

“Why that’s just what I was saying a while ago. Excuse me, Miss Vervain, but your sadness lacks novelty; it’s a sort of plagiarism.”

“Don’t, please,” she pleaded yet more earnestly. “I was just thinking — I don’t know why such an awful thought should come to me — that it might all be a mistake after all; perhaps there might not be any other world, and every bit of this power and display of the church — our church as well as the rest — might be only a cruel blunder, a dreadful mistake. Perhaps there isn’t even any God! Do you think there is?”

“I don’t think it,” said Ferris gravely, “I know it. But I don’t wonder that this sight makes you doubt. Great God! How far it is from Christ! Look there, at those troops who go before the followers of the Lamb: their trade is murder. In a minute, if a dozen men called out, ‘Long live the King of Italy!’ it would be the duty of those soldiers to fire into the helpless crowd. Look at the silken and gilded pomp of the servants of the carpenter’s son! Look at those miserable monks, voluntary prisoners, beggars, aliens to their kind! Look at those penitents who think that they can get forgiveness for their sins by carrying a candle round the square! And it is nearly two thousand years since the world turned Christian! It is pretty slow. But I suppose God lets men learn Him from their own experience of evil. I imagine the kingdom of heaven is a sort of republic, and that God draws men to Him only through their perfect freedom.”

“Yes, yes, it must be so,” answered Florida, staring down on the crowd with unseeing eyes, “but I can’t fix my mind on it. I keep thinking the whole time of what we were talking about yesterday. I never could have dreamed of a priest’s disbelieving; but now I can’t dream of anything else. It seems to me that none of these priests or monks can believe anything. Their faces look false and sly and bad — all of them!”

“No, no, Miss Vervain,” said Ferris, smiling at her despair, “you push matters a little beyond — as a woman has a right to do, of course. I don’t think their faces are bad, by any means. Some of them are dull and torpid, and some are frivolous, just like the faces of other people. But I’ve been noticing the number of good, kind, friendly faces, and they’re in the majority, just as they are amongst other people; for there are very few souls altogether out of drawing, in my opinion. I’ve even caught sight of some faces in which there was a real rapture of devotion, and now and then a very innocent one. Here, for instance, is a man I should like to bet on, if he’d only look up.”

The priest whom Ferris indicated was slowly advancing toward the space immediately under their window. He was dressed in robes of high ceremony, and in his hand he carried a lighted taper. He moved with a gentle tread, and the droop of his slender figure intimated a sort of despairing weariness. While most of his fellows stared carelessly or curiously about them, his face was downcast and averted.

Suddenly the procession paused, and a hush fell upon the vast assembly. Then the silence was broken by the rustle and stir of all those thousands going down upon their knees, as the cardinal-patriarch lifted his hands to bless them.

The priest upon whom Ferris and Florida had fixed their eyes faltered a moment, and before he knelt his next neighbor had to pluck him by the skirt. Then he too knelt hastily, mechanically lifting his head, and glancing along the front of the Old Procuratie. His face had that weariness in it which his figure and movement had suggested, and it was very pale, but it was yet more singular for the troubled innocence which its traits expressed.

“There,” whispered Ferris, “that’s what I call an uncommonly good face.”

Florida raised her hand to silence him, and the heavy gaze of the priest rested on them coldly at first. Then a light of recognition shot into his eyes and a flush suffused his pallid visage, which seemed to grow the more haggard and desperate. His head fell again, and he dropped the candle from his hand. One of those beggars who went by the side of the procession, to gather the drippings of the tapers, restored it to him.

“Why,” said Ferris aloud, “it’s Don Ippolito! Did you know him at first?”

XIII.

The ladies were sitting on the terrace when Don Ippolito came next morning to say that he could not read with Miss Vervain that day nor for several days after, alleging in excuse some priestly duties proper to the time. Mrs. Vervain began to lament that she had not been able to go to the procession of the day before. “I meant to have kept a sharp lookout for you; Florida saw you, and so did Mr. Ferris. But it isn’t at all the same thing, you know. Florida has no faculty for describing; and now I shall probably go away from Venice without seeing you in your real character once.”

Don Ippolito suffered this and more in meek silence. He waited his opportunity with unfailing politeness, and then with gentle punctilio took his leave.

“Well, come again as soon as your duties will let you, Don Ippolito,” cried Mrs. Vervain. “We shall miss you dreadfully, and I begrudge every one of your readings that Florida loses.”

The priest passed, with the sliding step which his impeding drapery imposed, down the garden walk, and was half-way to the gate, when Florida, who had stood watching him, said to her mother, “I must speak to him again,” and lightly descended the steps and swiftly glided in pursuit.

“Don Ippolito!” she called.

He already had his hand upon the gate, but he turned, and rapidly went back to meet her.

She stood in the walk where she had stopped when her voice arrested him, breathing quickly. Their eyes met; a painful shadow overcast the face of the young girl, who seemed to be trying in vain to speak.

Mrs. Vervain put on her glasses and peered down at the two with good-natured curiosity.

“Well, madamigella,” said the priest at last, “what do you command me?” He gave a faint, patient sigh.

The tears came into her eyes. “Oh,” she began vehemently, “I wish there was some one who had the right to speak to you!”

“No one,” answered Don Ippolito, “has so much the right as you.”

“I saw you yesterday,” she began again, “and I thought of what you had told me, Don Ippolito.”

“Yes, I thought of it, too,” answered the priest; “I have thought of it ever since.”

“But haven’t you thought of any hope for yourself? Must you still go on as before? How can you go back now to those things, and pretend to think them holy, and all the time have no heart or faith in them? It’s terrible!”

“What would you, madamigella?” demanded Don Ippolito, with a moody shrug. “It is my profession, my trade, you know. You might say to the prisoner,” he added bitterly, “‘It is terrible to see you chained here.’ Yes, it is terrible. Oh, I don’t reject your compassion! But what can I do?”

“Sit down with me here,” said Florida in her blunt, child-like way, and sank upon the stone seat beside the walk. She clasped her hands together in her lap with some strong, bashful emotion, while Don Ippolito, obeying her command, waited for her to speak. Her voice was scarcely more than a hoarse whisper when she began.

“I don’t know how to begin what I want to say. I am not fit to advise any one. I am so young, and so very ignorant of the world.”

“I too know little of the world,” said the priest, as much to himself as to her.

“It may be all wrong, all wrong. Besides,” she said abruptly, “how do I know that you are a good man, Don Ippolito? How do I know that you’ve been telling me the truth? It may be all a kind of trap” —

He looked blankly at her.

“This is in Venice; and you may be leading me on to say things to you that will make trouble for my mother and me. You may be a spy” —

“Oh no, no, no!” cried the priest, springing to his feet with a kind of moan, and a shudder, “God forbid!” He swiftly touched her hand with the tips of his fingers, and then kissed them: an action of inexpressible humility. “Madamigella, I swear to you by everything you believe good that I would rather die than be false to you in a single breath or thought.”

“Oh, I know it, I know it,” she murmured. “I don’t see how I could say such a cruel thing.”

“Not cruel; no, madamigella, not cruel,” softly pleaded Don Ippolito.

“But — but is there no escape for you?”

They looked steadfastly at each other for a moment, and then Don Ippolito spoke.

“Yes,” he said very gravely, “there is one way of escape. I have often thought of it, and once I thought I had taken the first step towards it; but it is beset with many great obstacles, and to be a priest makes one timid and insecure.”

He lapsed into his musing melancholy with the last words; but she would not suffer him to lose whatever heart he had begun to speak with. “That’s nothing,” she said, “you must think again of that way of escape, and never turn from it till you have tried it. Only take the first step and you can go on. Friends will rise up everywhere, and make it easy for you. Come,” she implored him fervently, “you must promise.”

He bent his dreamy eyes upon her.

“If I should take this only way of escape, and it seemed desperate to all others, would you still be my friend?”

“I should be your friend if the whole world turned against you.”

“Would you be my friend,” he asked eagerly in lower tones, and with signs of an inward struggle, “if this way of escape were for me to be no longer a priest?”

“Oh yes, yes! Why not?” cried the girl; and her face glowed with heroic sympathy and defiance. It is from this heaven-born ignorance in women of the insuperable difficulties of doing right that men take fire and accomplish the sublime impossibilities. Our sense of details, our fatal habits of reasoning paralyze us; we need the impulse of the pure ideal which we can get only from them. These two were alike children as regarded the world, but he had a man’s dark prevision of the means, and she a heavenly scorn of everything but the end to be achieved.

He drew a long breath. “Then it does not seem terrible to you?”

“Terrible? No! I don’t see how you can rest till it is done!”

“Is it true, then, that you urge me to this step, which indeed I have so long desired to take?”

“Yes, it is true! Listen, Don Ippolito: it is the very thing that I hoped you would do, but I wanted you to speak of it first. You must have all the honor of it, and I am glad you thought of it before. You will never regret it!”

She smiled radiantly upon him, and he kindled at her enthusiasm. In another moment his face darkened again. “But it will cost much,” he murmured.

“No matter,” cried Florida. “Such a man as you ought to leave the priesthood at any risk or hazard. You should cease to be a priest, if it cost you kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything!” She blushed with irrelevant consciousness. “Why need you be downhearted? With your genius once free, you can make country and fame and friends everywhere. Leave Venice! There are other places. Think how inventors succeed in America” —

“In America!” exclaimed the priest. “Ah, how long I have desired to be there!”

“You must go. You will soon be famous and honored there, and you shall not be a stranger, even at the first. Do you know that we are going home very soon? Yes, my mother and I have been talking of it to-day. We are both homesick, and you see that she is not well. You shall come to us there, and make our house your home till you have formed some plans of your own. Everything will be easy. God is good,” she said in a breaking voice, “and you may be sure he will befriend you.”

“Some one,” answered Don Ippolito, with tears in his eyes, “has already been very good to me. I thought it was you, but I will call it God!”

“Hush! You mustn’t say such things. But you must go, now. Take time to think, but not too much time. Only, — be true to yourself.”

They rose, and she laid her hand on his arm with an instinctive gesture of appeal. He stood bewildered. Then, “Thanks, madamigella, thanks!” he said, and caught her fragrant hand to his lips. He loosed it and lifted both his arms by a blind impulse in which he arrested himself with a burning blush, and turned away. He did not take leave of her with his wonted formalities, but hurried abruptly toward the gate.

A panic seemed to seize her as she saw him open it. She ran after him. “Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito,” she said, coming up to him; and stammered and faltered. “I don’t know; I am frightened. You must do nothing from me; I cannot let you; I’m not fit to advise you. It must be wholly from your own conscience. Oh no, don’t look so! I will be your friend, whatever happens. But if what you think of doing has seemed so terrible to you, perhaps it is more terrible than I can understand. If it is the only way, it is right. But is there no other? What I mean is, have you no one to talk all this over with? I mean, can’t you speak of it to — to Mr. Ferris? He is so true and honest and just.”

“I was going to him,” said Don Ippolito, with a dim trouble in his face.

“Oh, I am so glad of that! Remember, I don’t take anything back. No matter what happens, I will be your friend. But he will tell you just what to do.”

Don Ippolito bowed and opened the gate.

Florida went back to her mother, who asked her, “What in the world have you and Don Ippolito been talking about so earnestly? What makes you so pale and out of breath?”

“I have been wanting to tell you, mother,” said Florida. She drew her chair in front of the elder lady, and sat down.

XIV.

Don Ippolito did not go directly to the painter’s. He walked toward his house at first, and then turned aside, and wandered out through the noisy and populous district of Canaregio to the Campo di Marte. A squad of cavalry which had been going through some exercises there was moving off the parade ground; a few infantry soldiers were strolling about under the trees. Don Ippolito walked across the field to the border of the lagoon, where he began to pace to and fro, with his head sunk in deep thought. He moved rapidly, but sometimes he stopped and stood still in the sun, whose heat he did not seem to feel, though a perspiration bathed his pale face and stood in drops on his forehead under the shadow of his nicchio. Some little dirty children of the poor, with which this region swarms, looked at him from the sloping shore of the Campo di Giustizia, where the executions used to take place, and a small boy began to mock his movements and pauses, but was arrested by one of the girls, who shook him and gesticulated warningly.

At this point the long railroad bridge which connects Venice with the mainland is in full sight, and now from the reverie in which he continued, whether he walked or stood still, Don Ippolito was roused by the whistle of an outward train. He followed it with his eye as it streamed along over the far-stretching arches, and struck out into the flat, salt marshes beyond. When the distance hid it, he put on his hat, which he had unknowingly removed, and turned his rapid steps toward the railroad station. Arrived there, he lingered in the vestibule for half an hour, watching the people as they bought their tickets for departure, and had their baggage examined by the customs officers, and weighed and registered by the railroad porters, who passed it through the wicket shutting out the train, while the passengers gathered up their smaller parcels and took their way to the waiting-rooms. He followed a group of English people some paces in this direction, and then returned to the wicket, through which he looked long and wistfully at the train. The baggage was all passed through; the doors of the waiting-rooms were thrown open with harsh proclamation by the guards, and the passengers flocked into the carriages. Whistles and bells were sounded, and the train crept out of the station.

A man in the company’s uniform approached the unconscious priest, and striking his hands softly together, said with a pleasant smile, “Your servant, Don Ippolito. Are you expecting some one?”

“Ah, good day!” answered the priest, with a little start. “No,” he added, “I was not looking for any one.”

“I see,” said the other. “Amusing yourself as usual with the machinery. Excuse the freedom, Don Ippolito; but you ought to have been of our profession, — ha, ha! When you have the leisure, I should like to show you the drawing of an American locomotive which a friend of mine has sent me from Nuova York. It is very different from ours, very curious. But monstrous in size, you know, prodigious! May I come with it to your house, some evening?”

“You will do me a great pleasure,” said Don Ippolito. He gazed dreamily in the direction of the vanished train. “Was that the train for Milan?” he asked presently.

“Exactly,” said the man.

“Does it go all the way to Milan?”

“Oh, no! it stops at Peschiera, where the passengers have their passports examined; and then another train backs down from Desenzano and takes them on to Milan. And after that,” continued the man with animation, “if you are on the way to England, for example, another train carries you to Susa, and there you get the diligence over the mountain to St. Michel, where you take railroad again, and so on up through Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer, and then by steamer to Folkestone, and then by railroad to London and to Liverpool. It is at Liverpool that you go on board the steamer for America, and piff! in ten days you are in Nuova York. My friend has written me all about it.”

“Ah yes, your friend. Does he like it there in America?”

“Passably, passably. The Americans have no manners; but they are good devils. They are governed by the Irish. And the wine is dear. But he likes America; yes, he likes it. Nuova York is a fine city. But immense, you know! Eight times as large as Venice!”

“Is your friend prosperous there?”

“Ah heigh! That is the prettiest part of the story. He has made himself rich. He is employed by a large house to make designs for mantlepieces, and marble tables, and tombs; and he has — listen! — six hundred francs a month!”

“Oh per Bacco!” cried Don Ippolito.

“Honestly. But you spend a great deal there. Still, it is magnificent, is it not? If it were not for that blessed war there, now, that would be the place for you, Don Ippolito. He tells me the Americans are actually mad for inventions. Your servant. Excuse the freedom, you know,” said the man, bowing and moving away.

“Nothing, dear, nothing,” answered the priest. He walked out of the station with a light step, and went to his own house, where he sought the room in which his inventions were stored. He had not touched them for weeks. They were all dusty and many were cobwebbed. He blew the dust from some, and bringing them to the light, examined them critically, finding them mostly disabled in one way or other, except the models of the portable furniture which he polished with his handkerchief and set apart, surveying them from a distance with a look of hope. He took up the breech-loading cannon and then suddenly put it down again with a little shiver, and went to the threshold of the perverted oratory and glanced in at his forge. Veneranda had carelessly left the window open, and the draught had carried the ashes about the floor. On the cinder-heap lay the tools which he had used in mending the broken pipe of the fountain at Casa Vervain, and had not used since. The place seemed chilly even on that summer’s day. He stood in the doorway with clenched hands. Then he called Veneranda, chid her for leaving the window open, and bade her close it, and so quitted the house and left her muttering.

Ferris seemed surprised to see him when he appeared at the consulate near the middle of the afternoon, and seated himself in the place where he was wont to pose for the painter.

“Were you going to give me a sitting?” asked the latter, hesitating. “The light is horrible, just now, with this glare from the canal. Not that I manage much better when it’s good. I don’t get on with you, Don Ippolito. There are too many of you. I shouldn’t have known you in the procession yesterday.”

Don Ippolito did not respond. He rose and went toward his portrait on the easel, and examined it long, with a curious minuteness. Then he returned to his chair, and continued to look at it. “I suppose that it resembles me a great deal,” he said, “and yet I do not feel like that. I hardly know what is the fault. It is as I should be if I were like other priests, perhaps?”

“I know it’s not good,” said the painter. “It is conventional, in spite of everything. But here’s that first sketch I made of you.”

He took up a canvas facing the wall, and set it on the easel. The character in this charcoal sketch was vastly sincerer and sweeter.

“Ah!” said Don Ippolito, with a sigh and smile of relief, “that is immeasurably better. I wish I could speak to you, dear friend, in a mood of yours as sympathetic as this picture records, of some matters that concern me very nearly. I have just come from the railroad station.”

“Seeing some friends off?” asked the painter, indifferently, hovering near the sketch with a bit of charcoal in his hand, and hesitating whether to give it a certain touch. He glanced with half-shut eyes at the priest.

Don Ippolito sighed again. “I hardly know. I was seeing off my hopes, my desires, my prayers, that followed the train to America!”

The painter put down his charcoal, dusted his fingers, and looked at the priest without saying anything.

“Do you remember when I first came to you?” asked Don Ippolito.

“Certainly,” said Ferris. “Is it of that matter you want to speak to me? I’m very sorry to hear it, for I don’t think it practical.”

“Practical, practical!” cried the priest hotly. “Nothing is practical till it has been tried. And why should I not go to America?”

“Because you can’t get your passport, for one thing,” answered the painter dryly.

“I have thought of that,” rejoined Don Ippolito more patiently. “I can get a passport for France from the Austrian authorities here, and at Milan there must be ways in which I could change it for one from my own king” — it was by this title that patriotic Venetians of those days spoke of Victor Emmanuel— “that would carry me out of France into England.”

Ferris pondered a moment. “That is quite true,” he said. “Why hadn’t you thought of that when you first came to me?”

“I cannot tell. I didn’t know that I could even get a passport for France till the other day.”

Both were silent while the painter filled his pipe. “Well,” he said presently, “I’m very sorry. I’m afraid you’re dooming yourself to many bitter disappointments in going to America. What do you expect to do there?”

“Why, with my inventions” —

“I suppose,” interrupted the other, putting a lighted match to his pipe, “that a painter must be a very poor sort of American: his first thought is of coming to Italy. So I know very little directly about the fortunes of my inventive fellow-countrymen, or whether an inventor has any prospect of making a living. But once when I was at Washington I went into the Patent Office, where the models of the inventions are deposited; the building is about as large as the Ducal Palace, and it is full of them. The people there told me nothing was commoner than for the same invention to be repeated over and over again by different inventors. Some few succeed, and then they have lawsuits with the infringers of their patents; some sell out their inventions for a trifle to companies that have capital, and that grow rich upon them; the great number can never bring their ideas to the public notice at all. You can judge for yourself what your chances would be. You have asked me why you should not go to America. Well, because I think you would starve there.”

“I am used to that,” said Don Ippolito; “and besides, until some of my inventions became known, I could give lessons in Italian.”

“Oh, bravo!” said Ferris, “you prefer instant death, then?”

“But madamigella seemed to believe that my success as an inventor would be assured, there.”

Ferris gave a very ironical laugh. “Miss Vervain must have been about twelve years old when she left America. Even a lady’s knowledge of business, at that age, is limited. When did you talk with her about it? You had not spoken of it to me, of late, and I thought you were more contented than you used to be.”

“It is true,” said the priest. “Sometimes within the last two months I have almost forgotten it.”

“And what has brought it so forcibly to your mind again?”

“That is what I so greatly desire to tell you,” replied Don Ippolito, with an appealing look at the painter’s face. He moistened his parched lips a little, waiting for further question from the painter, to whom he seemed a man fevered by some strong emotion and at that moment not quite wholesome. Ferris did not speak, and Don Ippolito began again: “Even though I have not said so in words to you, dear friend, has it not appeared to you that I have no heart in my vocation?”

“Yes, I have sometimes fancied that. I had no right to ask you why.”

“Some day I will tell you, when I have the courage to go all over it again. It is partly my own fault, but it is more my miserable fortune. But wherever the wrong lies, it has at last become intolerable to me. I cannot endure it any longer and live. I must go away, I must fly from it.”

Ferris shrank from him a little, as men instinctively do from one who has set himself upon some desperate attempt. “Do you mean, Don Ippolito, that you are going to renounce your priesthood?”

Don Ippolito opened his hands and let his priesthood drop, as it were, to the ground.

“You never spoke of this before, when you talked of going to America. Though to be sure” —

“Yes, yes!” replied Don Ippolito with vehemence, “but now an angel has appeared and shown me the blackness of my life!”

Ferris began to wonder if he or Don Ippolito were not perhaps mad.

“An angel, yes,” the priest went on, rising from his chair, “an angel whose immaculate truth has mirrored my falsehood in all its vileness and distortion — to whom, if it destroys me, I cannot devote less than a truthfulness like hers!”

“Hers — hers?” cried the painter, with a sudden pang. “Whose? Don’t speak in these riddles. Whom do you mean?”

“Whom can I mean but only one? — madamigella!”

“Miss Vervain? Do you mean to say that Miss Vervain has advised you to renounce your priesthood?”

“In as many words she has bidden me forsake it at any risk, — at the cost of kindred, friends, good fame, country, everything.”

The painter passed his hand confusedly over his face. These were his own words, the words he had used in speaking with Florida of the supposed skeptical priest. He grew very pale. “May I ask,” he demanded in a hard, dry voice, “how she came to advise such a step?”

“I can hardly tell. Something had already moved her to learn from me the story of my life — to know that I was a man with neither faith nor hope. Her pure heart was torn by the thought of my wrong and of my error. I had never seen myself in such deformity as she saw me even when she used me with that divine compassion. I was almost glad to be what I was because of her angelic pity for me!”

The tears sprang to Don Ippolito’s eyes, but Ferris asked in the same tone as before, “Was it then that she bade you be no longer a priest?”

“No, not then,” patiently replied the other; “she was too greatly overwhelmed with my calamity to think of any cure for it. To-day it was that she uttered those words — words which I shall never forget, which will support and comfort me, whatever happens!”

The painter was biting hard upon the stem of his pipe. He turned away and began ordering the color-tubes and pencils on a table against the wall, putting them close together in very neat, straight rows. Presently he said: “Perhaps Miss Vervain also advised you to go to America?”

“Yes,” answered the priest reverently. “She had thought of everything. She has promised me a refuge under her mother’s roof there, until I can make my inventions known; and I shall follow them at once.”

“Follow them?”

“They are going, she told me. Madama does not grow better. They are homesick. They — but you must know all this already?”

“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said the painter with a very bitter smile. “You are telling me news. Pray go on.”

“There is no more. She made me promise to come to you and listen to your advice before I took any step. I must not trust to her alone, she said; but if I took this step, then through whatever happened she would be my friend. Ah, dear friend, may I speak to you of the hope that these words gave me? You have seen — have you not? — you must have seen that” —

The priest faltered, and Ferris stared at him helpless. When the next words came he could not find any strangeness in the fact which yet gave him so great a shock. He found that to his nether consciousness it had been long familiar — ever since that day when he had first jestingly proposed Don Ippolito as Miss Vervain’s teacher. Grotesque, tragic, impossible — it had still been the under-current of all his reveries; or so now it seemed to have been.

Don Ippolito anxiously drew nearer to him and laid an imploring touch upon his arm,— “I love her!”

“What!” gasped the painter. “You? You I A priest?”

“Priest! priest!” cried Don Ippolito, violently. “From this day I am no longer a priest! From this hour I am a man, and I can offer her the honorable love of a man, the truth of a most sacred marriage, and fidelity to death!”

Ferris made no answer. He began to look very coldly and haughtily at Don Ippolito, whose heat died away under his stare, and who at last met it with a glance of tremulous perplexity. His hand had dropped from Ferris’s arm, and he now moved some steps from him. “What is it, dear friend?” he besought him. “Is there something that offends you? I came to you for counsel, and you meet me with a repulse little short of enmity. I do not understand. Do I intend anything wrong without knowing it? Oh, I conjure you to speak plainly!”

“Wait! Wait a minute,” said Ferris, waving his hand like a man tormented by a passing pain. “I am trying to think. What you say is.... I cannot imagine it!”

“Not imagine it? Not imagine it? And why? Is she not beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“And good?”

“Without doubt.”

“And young, and yet wise beyond her years? And true, and yet angelically kind?”

“It is all as you say, God knows. But.... a priest” —

“Oh! Always that accursed word! And at heart, what is a priest, then, but a man? — a wretched, masked, imprisoned, banished man! Has he not blood and nerves like you? Has he not eyes to see what is fair, and ears to hear what is sweet? Can he live near so divine a flower and not know her grace, not inhale the fragrance of her soul, not adore her beauty? Oh, great God! And if at last he would tear off his stifling mask, escape from his prison, return from his exile, would you gainsay him?”

“No!” said the painter with a kind of groan. He sat down in a tall, carven gothic chair, — the furniture of one of his pictures, — and rested his head against its high back and looked at the priest across the room. “Excuse me,” he continued with a strong effort. “I am ready to befriend you to the utmost of my power. What was it you wanted to ask me? I have told you truly what I thought of your scheme of going to America; but I may very well be mistaken. Was it about that Miss Vervain desired you to consult me?” His voice and manner hardened again in spite of him. “Or did she wish me to advise you about the renunciation of your priesthood? You must have thought that carefully over for yourself.”

“Yes, I do not think you could make me see that as a greater difficulty than it has appeared to me.” He paused with a confused and daunted air, as if some important point had slipped his mind. “But I must take the step; the burden of the double part I play is unendurable, is it not?”

“You know better than I.”

“But if you were such a man as I, with neither love for your vocation nor faith in it, should you not cease to be a priest?”

“If you ask me in that way, — yes,” answered the painter. “But I advise you nothing. I could not counsel another in such a case.”

“But you think and feel as I do,” said the priest, “and I am right, then.”

“I do not say you are wrong.”

Ferris was silent while Don Ippolito moved up and down the room, with his sliding step, like some tall, gaunt, unhappy girl. Neither could put an end to this interview, so full of intangible, inconclusive misery. Ferris drew a long breath, and then said steadily, “Don Ippolito, I suppose you did not speak idly to me of your — your feeling for Miss Vervain, and that I may speak plainly to you in return.”

“Surely,” answered the priest, pausing in his walk and fixing his eyes upon the painter. “It was to you as the friend of both that I spoke of my love, and my hope — which is oftener my despair.”

“Then you have not much reason to believe that she returns your — feeling?”

“Ah, how could she consciously return it? I have been hitherto a priest to her, and the thought of me would have been impurity. But hereafter, if I can prove myself a man, if I can win my place in the world.... No, even now, why should she care so much for my escape from these bonds, if she did not care for me more than she knew?”

“Have you ever thought of that extravagant generosity of Miss Vervain’s character?”

“It is divine!”

“Has it seemed to you that if such a woman knew herself to have once wrongly given you pain, her atonement might be as headlong and excessive as her offense? That she could have no reserves in her reparation?”

Don Ippolito looked at Ferris, but did not interpose.

“Miss Vervain is very religious in her way, and she is truth itself. Are you sure that it is not concern for what seems to her your terrible position, that has made her show so much anxiety on your account?”

“Do I not know that well? Have I not felt the balm of her most heavenly pity?”

“And may she not be only trying to appeal to something in you as high as the impulse of her own heart?”

“As high!” cried Don Ippolito, almost angrily. “Can there be any higher thing in heaven or on earth than love for such a woman?”

“Yes; both in heaven and on earth,” answered Ferris.

“I do not understand you,” said Don Ippolito with a puzzled stare.

Ferris did not reply. He fell into a dull reverie in which he seemed to forget Don Ippolito and the whole affair. At last the priest spoke again: “Have you nothing to say to me, signore?”

“I? What is there to say?” returned the other blankly.

“Do you know any reason why I should not love her, save that I am — have been — a priest?”

“No, I know none,” said the painter, wearily.

“Ah,” exclaimed Don Ippolito, “there is something on your mind that you will not speak. I beseech you not to let me go wrong. I love her so well that I would rather die than let my love offend her. I am a man with the passions and hopes of a man, but without a man’s experience, or a man’s knowledge of what is just and right in these relations. If you can be my friend in this so far as to advise or warn me; if you can be her friend” —

Ferris abruptly rose and went to his balcony, and looked out upon the Grand Canal. The time-stained palace opposite had not changed in the last half-hour. As on many another summer day, he saw the black boats going by. A heavy, high-pointed barge from the Sile, with the captain’s family at dinner in the shade of a matting on the roof, moved sluggishly down the middle current. A party of Americans in a gondola, with their opera-glasses and guide-books in their hands, pointed out to each other the eagle on the consular arms. They were all like sights in a mirror, or things in a world turned upside down.

Ferris came back and looked dizzily at the priest trying to believe that this unhuman, sacerdotal phantasm had been telling him that it loved a beautiful young girl of his own race, faith, and language.

“Will you not answer me, signore?” meekly demanded Don Ippolito.

“In this matter,” replied the painter, “I cannot advise or warn you. The whole affair is beyond my conception. I mean no unkindness, but I cannot consult with you about it. There are reasons why I should not. The mother of Miss Vervain is here with her, and I do not feel that her interests in such a matter are in my hands. If they come to me for help, that is different. What do you wish? You tell me that you are resolved to renounce the priesthood and go to America; and I have answered you to the best of my power. You tell me that you are in love with Miss Vervain. What can I have to say about that?”

Don Ippolito stood listening with a patient, and then a wounded air. “Nothing,” he answered proudly. “I ask your pardon for troubling you with my affairs. Your former kindness emboldened me too much. I shall not trespass again. It was my ignorance, which I pray you to excuse. I take my leave, signore.”

He bowed, and moved out of the room, and a dull remorse filled the painter, as he heard the outer door close after him. But he could do nothing. If he had given a wound to the heart that trusted him, it was in an anguish which he had not been able to master, and whose causes he could not yet define. It was all a shapeless torment; it held him like the memory of some hideous nightmare prolonging its horror beyond sleep. It seemed impossible that what had happened should have happened.

It was long, as he sat in the chair from which he had talked with Don Ippolito, before he could reason about what had been said; and then the worst phase presented itself first. He could not help seeing that the priest might have found cause for hope in the girl’s behavior toward him. Her violent resentments, and her equally violent repentances; her fervent interest in his unhappy fortunes, and her anxiety that he should at once forsake the priesthood; her urging him to go to America, and her promising him a home under her mother’s roof there: why might it not all be in fact a proof of her tenderness for him? She might have found it necessary to be thus coarsely explicit with him, for a man in Don Ippolito’s relation to her could not otherwise have imagined her interest in him. But her making use of Ferris to confirm her own purposes by his words, her repeating them so that they should come back to him from Don Ippolito’s lips, her letting another man go with her to look upon the procession in which her priestly lover was to appear in his sacerdotal panoply; these things could not be accounted for except by that strain of insolent, passionate defiance which he had noted ill her from the beginning. Why should she first tell Don Ippolito of their going away? “Well, I wish him joy of his bargain,” said Ferris aloud, and rising, shrugged his shoulders, and tried to cast off all care of a matter that did not concern him. But one does not so easily cast off a matter that does not concern one. He found himself haunted by certain tones and looks and attitudes of the young girl, wholly alien to the character he had just constructed for her. They were child-like, trusting, unconscious, far beyond anything he had yet known in women, and they appealed to him now with a maddening pathos. She was standing there before Don Ippolito’s picture as on that morning when she came to Ferris, looking anxiously at him, her innocent beauty, troubled with some hidden care, hallowing the place. Ferris thought of the young fellow who told him that he had spent three months in a dull German town because he had the room there that was once occupied by the girl who had refused him; the painter remembered that the young fellow said he had just read of her marriage in an American newspaper.

Why did Miss Vervain send Don Ippolito to him? Was it some scheme of her secret love for the priest; or mere coarse resentment of the cautions Ferris had once hinted, a piece of vulgar bravado? But if she had acted throughout in pure simplicity, in unwise goodness of heart? If Don Ippolito were altogether self-deceived, and nothing but her unknowing pity had given him grounds of hope? He himself had suggested this to the priest, and how with a different motive he looked at it in his own behalf. A great load began slowly to lift itself from Ferris’s heart, which could ache now for this most unhappy priest. But if his conjecture were just, his duty would be different. He must not coldly acquiesce and let things take their course. He had introduced Don Ippolito to the Vervains; he was in some sort responsible for him; he must save them if possible from the painful consequences of the priest’s hallucination. But how to do this was by no means clear. He blamed himself for not having been franker with Don Ippolito and tried to make him see that the Vervains might regard his passion as a presumption upon their kindness to him, an abuse of their hospitable friendship; and yet how could he have done this without outrage to a sensitive and right-meaning soul? For a moment it seemed to him that he must seek Don Ippolito, and repair his fault; but they had hardly parted as friends, and his action might be easily misconstrued. If he shrank from the thought of speaking to him of the matter again, it appeared yet more impossible to bring it before the Vervains. Like a man of the imaginative temperament as he was, he exaggerated the probable effect, and pictured their dismay in colors that made his interference seem a ludicrous enormity; in fact, it would have been an awkward business enough for one not hampered by his intricate obligations. He felt bound to the Vervains, the ignorant young girl, and the addle-pated mother; but if he ought to go to them and tell them what he knew, to which of them ought he to speak, and how? In an anguish of perplexity that made the sweat stand in drops upon his forehead, he smiled to think it just possible that Mrs. Vervain might take the matter seriously, and wish to consider the propriety of Florida’s accepting Don Ippolito. But if he spoke to the daughter, how should he approach the subject? “Don Ippolito tells me he loves you, and he goes to America with the expectation that when he has made his fortune with a patent back-action apple-corer, you will marry him.” Should he say something to this purport? And in Heaven’s name what right had he, Ferris, to say anything at all? The horrible absurdity, the inexorable delicacy of his position made him laugh.

On the other hand, besides, he was bound to Don Ippolito, who had come to him as the nearest friend of both, and confided in him. He remembered with a tardy, poignant intelligence how in their first talk of the Vervains Don Ippolito had taken pains to inform himself that Ferris was not in love with Florida. Could he be less manly and generous than this poor priest, and violate the sanctity of his confidence? Ferris groaned aloud. No, contrive it as he would, call it by what fair name he chose, he could not commit this treachery. It was the more impossible to him because, in this agony of doubt as to what he should do, he now at least read his own heart clearly, and had no longer a doubt what was in it. He pitied her for the pain she must suffer. He saw how her simple goodness, her blind sympathy with Don Ippolito, and only this, must have led the priest to the mistaken pass at which he stood. But Ferris felt that the whole affair had been fatally carried beyond his reach; he could do nothing now but wait and endure. There are cases in which a man must not protect the woman he loves. This was one.

The afternoon wore away. In the evening he went to the Piazza, and drank a cup of coffee at Florian’s. Then he walked to the Public Gardens, where he watched the crowd till it thinned in the twilight and left him alone. He hung upon the parapet, looking off over the lagoon that at last he perceived to be flooded with moonlight. He desperately called a gondola, and bade the man row him to the public landing nearest the Vervains’, and so walked up the calle, and entered the palace from the campo, through the court that on one side opened into the garden.

Mrs. Vervain was alone in the room where he had always been accustomed to find her daughter with her, and a chill as of the impending change fell upon him. He felt how pleasant it had been to find them together; with a vain, piercing regret he felt how much like home the place had been to him. Mrs. Vervain, indeed, was not changed; she was even more than ever herself, though all that she said imported change. She seemed to observe nothing unwonted in him, and she began to talk in her way of things that she could not know were so near his heart.

“Now, Mr. Ferris, I have a little surprise for you. Guess what it is!”

“I’m not good at guessing. I’d rather not know what it is than have to guess it,” said Ferris, trying to be light, under his heavy trouble.

“You won’t try once, even? Well, you’re going to be rid of us soon I We are going away.”

“Yes, I knew that,” said Ferris quietly. “Don Ippolito told me so to-day.”

“And is that all you have to say? Isn’t it rather sad? Isn’t it sudden? Come, Mr. Ferris, do be a little complimentary, for once!”

“It’s sudden, and I can assure you it’s sad enough for me,” replied the painter, in a tone which could not leave any doubt of his sincerity.

“Well, so it is for us,” quavered Mrs. Vervain. “You have been very, very good to us,” she went on more collectedly, “and we shall never forget it. Florida has been speaking of it, too, and she’s extremely grateful, and thinks we’ve quite imposed upon you.”

“Thanks.”

“I suppose we have, but as I always say, you’re the representative of the country here. However, that’s neither here nor there. We have no relatives on the face of the earth, you know; but I have a good many old friends in Providence, and we’re going back there. We both think I shall be better at home; for I’m sorry to say, Mr. Ferns, that though I don’t complain of Venice, — it’s really a beautiful place, and all that; not the least exaggerated, — still I don’t think it’s done my health much good; or at least I don’t seem to gain, don’t you know, I don’t seem to gain.”

“I’m very sorry to hear it, Mrs. Vervain.”

“Yes, I’m sure you are; but you see, don’t you, that we must go? We are going next week. When we’ve once made up our minds, there’s no object in prolonging the agony.”

Mrs. Vervain adjusted her glasses with the thumb and finger of her right hand, and peered into Ferris’s face with a gay smile. “But the greatest part of the surprise is,” she resumed, lowering her voice a little, “that Don Ippolito is going with us.”

“Ah!” cried Ferris sharply.

“I knew I should surprise you,” laughed Mrs. Vervain. “We’ve been having a regular confab — clave, I mean — about it here, and he’s all on fire to go to America; though it must be kept a great secret on his account, poor fellow. He’s to join us in France, and then he can easily get into England, with us. You know he’s to give up being a priest, and is going to devote himself to invention when he gets to America. Now, what do you think of it, Mr. Ferris? Quite strikes you dumb, doesn’t it?” triumphed Mrs. Vervain. “I suppose it’s what you would call a wild goose chase, — I used to pick up all those phrases, — but we shall carry it through.”

Ferris gasped, as though about to speak, but said nothing.

“Don Ippolito’s been here the whole afternoon,” continued Mrs. Vervain, “or rather ever since about five o’clock. He took dinner with us, and we’ve been talking it over and over. He’s so enthusiastic about it, and yet he breaks down every little while, and seems quite to despair of the undertaking. But Florida won’t let him do that; and really it’s funny, the way he defers to her judgment — you know I always regard Florida as such a mere child — and seems to take every word she says for gospel. But, shedding tears, now: it’s dreadful in a man, isn’t it? I wish Don Ippolito wouldn’t do that. It makes one creep. I can’t feel that it’s manly; can you?”

Ferris found voice to say something about those things being different with the Latin races.

“Well, at any rate,” said Mrs. Vervain, “I’m glad that Americans don’t shed tears, as a general rule. Now, Florida: you’d think she was the man all through this business, she’s so perfectly heroic about it; that is, outwardly: for I can see — women can, in each other, Mr. Ferris — just where she’s on the point of breaking down, all the while. Has she ever spoken to you about Don Ippolito? She does think so highly of your opinion, Mr. Ferris.”

“She does me too much honor,” said Ferris, with ghastly irony.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” returned Mrs. Vervain. “She told me this morning that she’d made Don Ippolito promise to speak to you about it; but he didn’t mention having done so, and — I hated, don’t you know, to ask him.... In fact, Florida had told me beforehand that I mustn’t. She said he must be left entirely to himself in that matter, and” — Mrs. Vervain looked suggestively at Ferris.

“He spoke to me about it,” said Ferris.

“Then why in the world did you let me run on? I suppose you advised him against it.”

“I certainly did.”

“Well, there’s where I think woman’s intuition is better than man’s reason.”

The painter silently bowed his head.

“Yes, I’m quite woman’s rights in that respect,” said Mrs. Vervain.

“Oh, without doubt,” answered Ferris, aimlessly.

“I’m perfectly delighted,” she went on, “at the idea of Don Ippolito’s giving up the priesthood, and I’ve told him he must get married to some good American girl. You ought to have seen how the poor fellow blushed! But really, you know, there are lots of nice girls that would jump at him — so handsome and sad-looking, and a genius.”

Ferris could only stare helplessly at Mrs. Vervain, who continued: —

“Yes, I think he’s a genius, and I’m determined that he shall have a chance. I suppose we’ve got a job on our hands; but I’m not sorry. I’ll introduce him into society, and if he needs money he shall have it. What does God give us money for, Mr. Ferris, but to help our fellow-creatures?”

So miserable, as he was, from head to foot, that it seemed impossible he could endure more, Ferris could not forbear laughing at this burst of piety.

“What are you laughing at?” asked Mrs. Vervain, who had cheerfully joined him. “Something I’ve been saying. Well, you won’t have me to laugh at much longer. I do wonder whom you’ll have next.”

Ferris’s merriment died away in something like a groan, and when Mrs. Vervain again spoke, it was in a tone of sudden querulousness. “I wish Florida would come! She went to bolt the land-gate after Don Ippolito, — I wanted her to, — but she ought to have been back long ago. It’s odd you didn’t meet them, coming in. She must be in the garden somewhere; I suppose she’s sorry to be leaving it. But I need her. Would you be so very kind, Mr. Ferris, as to go and ask her to come to me?”

Ferris rose heavily from the chair in which he seemed to have grown ten years older. He had hardly heard anything that he did not know already, but the clear vision of the affair with which he had come to the Vervains was hopelessly confused and darkened. He could make nothing of any phase of it. He did not know whether he cared now to see Florida or not. He mechanically obeyed Mrs. Vervain, and stepping out upon the terrace, slowly descended the stairway.

The moon was shining brightly into the garden.

XV.

Florida and Don Ippolito had paused in the pathway which parted at the fountain and led in one direction to the water-gate, and in the other out through the palace-court into the campo.

“Now, you must not give way to despair again,” she said to him. “You will succeed, I am sure, for you will deserve success.”

“It is all your goodness, madamigella,” sighed the priest, “and at the bottom of my heart I am afraid that all the hope and courage I have are also yours.”

“You shall never want for hope and courage then. We believe in you, and we honor your purpose, and we will be your steadfast friends. But now you must think only of the present — of how you are to get away from Venice. Oh, I can understand how you must hate to leave it! What a beautiful night! You mustn’t expect such moonlight as this in America, Don Ippolito.”

“It is beautiful, is it not?” said the priest, kindling from her. “But I think we Venetians are never so conscious of the beauty of Venice as you strangers are.”

“I don’t know. I only know that now, since we have made up our minds to go, and fixed the day and hour, it is more like leaving my own country than anything else I’ve ever felt. This garden, I seem to have spent my whole life in it; and when we are settled in Providence, I’m going to have mother send back for some of these statues. I suppose Signor Cavaletti wouldn’t mind our robbing his place of them if he were paid enough. At any rate we must have this one that belongs to the fountain. You shall be the first to set the fountain playing over there, Don Ippolito, and then we’ll sit down on this stone bench before it, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Venice.”

“No, no; let me be the last to set it playing here,” said the priest, quickly stooping to the pipe at the foot of the figure, “and then we will sit down here, and imagine ourselves in the garden of Casa Vervain at Providence.”

Florida put her hand on his shoulder. “You mustn’t do it,” she said simply. “The padrone doesn’t like to waste the water.”

“Oh, we’ll pray the saints to rain it back on him some day,” cried Don Ippolito with willful levity, and the stream leaped into the moonlight and seemed to hang there like a tangled skein of silver. “But how shall I shut it off when you are gone?” asked the young girl, looking ruefully at the floating threads of splendor.

“Oh, I will shut it off before I go,” answered Don Ippolito. “Let it play a moment,” he continued, gazing rapturously upon it, while the moon painted his lifted face with a pallor that his black robes heightened. He fetched a long, sighing breath, as if he inhaled with that respiration all the rich odors of the flowers, blanched like his own visage in the white lustre; as if he absorbed into his heart at once the wide glory of the summer night, and the beauty of the young girl at his side. It seemed a supreme moment with him; he looked as a man might look who has climbed out of lifelong defeat into a single instant of release and triumph.

Florida sank upon the bench before the fountain, indulging his caprice with that sacred, motherly tolerance, some touch of which is in all womanly yielding to men’s will, and which was perhaps present in greater degree in her feeling towards a man more than ordinarily orphaned and unfriended.

“Is Providence your native city?” asked Don Ippolito, abruptly, after a little silence.

“Oh no; I was born at St. Augustine in Florida.”

“Ah yes, I forgot; madama has told me about it; Providence is her city. But the two are near together?”

“No,” said Florida, compassionately, “they are a thousand miles apart.”

“A thousand miles? What a vast country!”

“Yes, it’s a whole world.”

“Ah, a world, indeed!” cried the priest, softly. “I shall never comprehend it.”

“You never will,” answered the young girl gravely, “if you do not think about it more practically.”

“Practically, practically!” lightly retorted the priest. “What a word with you Americans; That is the consul’s word: practical.”

“Then you have been to see him to-day?” asked Florida, with eagerness. “I wanted to ask you” —

“Yes, I went to consult the oracle, as you bade me.”

“Don Ippolito” —

“And he was averse to my going to America. He said it was not practical.”

“Oh!” murmured the girl.

“I think,” continued the priest with vehemence, “that Signor Ferris is no longer my friend.”

“Did he treat you coldly — harshly?” she asked, with a note of indignation in her voice. “Did he know that I — that you came” —

“Perhaps he was right. Perhaps I shall indeed go to ruin there. Ruin, ruin! Do I not live ruin here?”

“What did he say — what did he tell you?”

“No, no; not now, madamigella! I do not want to think of that man, now. I want you to help me once more to realize myself in America, where I shall never have been a priest, where I shall at least battle even-handed with the world. Come, let us forget him; the thought of him palsies all my hope. He could not see me save in this robe, in this figure that I abhor.”

“Oh, it was strange, it was not like him, it was cruel! What did he say?”

“In everything but words, he bade me despair; he bade me look upon all that makes life dear and noble as impossible to me!”

“Oh, how? Perhaps he did not understand you. No, he did not understand you. What did you say to him, Don Ippolito? Tell me!” She leaned towards him, in anxious emotion, as she spoke.

The priest rose, and stretched out his arms, as if he would gather something of courage from the infinite space. In his visage were the sublimity and the terror of a man who puts everything to the risk.

“How will it really be with me, yonder?” he demanded. “As it is with other men, whom their past life, if it has been guiltless, does not follow to that new world of freedom and justice?”

“Why should it not be so?” demanded Florida. “Did he say it would not?”

“Need it be known there that I have been a priest? Or if I tell it, will it make me appear a kind of monster, different from other men?”

“No, no!” she answered fervently. “Your story would gain friends and honor for you everywhere in America. Did he” —

“A moment, a moment!” cried Don Ippolito, catching his breath. “Will it ever be possible for me to win something more than honor and friendship there?”

She looked up at him askingly, confusedly.

“If I am a man, and the time should ever come that a face, a look, a voice, shall be to me what they are to other men, will she remember it against me that I have been a priest, when I tell her — say to her, madamigella — how dear she is to me, offer her my life’s devotion, ask her to be my wife?”...

Florida rose from the seat, and stood confronting him, in a helpless silence, which he seemed not to notice.

Suddenly he clasped his hands together, and desperately stretched them towards her.

“Oh, my hope, my trust, my life, if it were you that I loved?”...

“What!” shuddered the girl, recoiling, with almost a shriek. “You? A priest!”

Don Ippolito gave a low cry, half sob: —

“His words, his words! It is true, I cannot escape, I am doomed, I must die as I have lived!”

He dropped his face into his hands, and stood with his head bowed before her; neither spoke for a long time, or moved.

Then Florida said absently, in the husky murmur to which her voice fell when she was strongly moved, “Yes, I see it all, how it has been,” and was silent again, staring, as if a procession of the events and scenes of the past months were passing before her; and presently she moaned to herself “Oh, oh, oh!” and wrung her hands. The foolish fountain kept capering and babbling on. All at once, now, as a flame flashes up and then expires, it leaped and dropped extinct at the foot of the statue.

Its going out seemed somehow to leave them in darkness, and under cover of that gloom she drew nearer the priest, and by such approaches as one makes toward a fancied apparition, when his fear will not let him fly, but it seems better to suffer the worst from it at once than to live in terror of it ever after, she lifted her hands to his, and gently taking them away from his face, looked into his hopeless eyes.

“Oh, Don Ippolito,” she grieved. “What shall I say to you, what can I do for you, now?”

But there was nothing to do. The whole edifice of his dreams, his wild imaginations, had fallen into dust at a word; no magic could rebuild it; the end that never seems the end had come. He let her keep his cold hands, and presently he returned the entreaty of her tears with his wan, patient smile.

“You cannot help me; there is no help for an error like mine. Sometime, if ever the thought of me is a greater pain than it is at this moment, you can forgive me. Yes, you can do that for me.”

“But who, who will ever forgive me” she cried, “for my blindness! Oh, you must believe that I never thought, I never dreamt” —

“I know it well. It was your fatal truth that did it; truth too high and fine for me to have discerned save through such agony as.... You too loved my soul, like the rest, and you would have had me no priest for the reason that they would have had me a priest — I see it. But you had no right to love my soul and not me — you, a woman. A woman must not love only the soul of a man.”

“Yes, yes!” piteously explained the girl, “but you were a priest to me!”

“That is true, madamigella. I was always a priest to you; and now I see that I never could be otherwise. Ah, the wrong began many years before we met. I was trying to blame you a little” —

“Blame me, blame me; do!”

— “but there is no blame. Think that it was another way of asking your forgiveness.... O my God, my God, my God!”

He released his hands from her, and uttered this cry under his breath, with his face lifted towards the heavens. When he looked at her again, he said: “Madamigella, if my share of this misery gives me the right to ask of you” —

“Oh ask anything of me! I will give everything, do everything!”

He faltered, and then, “You do not love me,” he said abruptly; “is there some one else that you love?”

She did not answer.

“Is it ... he?”

She hid her face.

“I knew it,” groaned the priest, “I knew that too!” and he turned away.

“Don Ippolito, Don Ippolito — oh, poor, poor Don Ippolito!” cried the girl, springing towards him. “Is this the way you leave me? Where are you going? What will you do now?”

“Did I not say? I am going to die a priest.”

“Is there nothing that you will let me be to you, hope for you?”

“Nothing,” said Don Ippolito, after a moment. “What could you?” He seized the hands imploringly extended towards him, and clasped them together and kissed them both. “Adieu!” he whispered; then he opened them, and passionately kissed either palm; “adieu, adieu!”

A great wave of sorrow and compassion and despair for him swept through her. She flung her arms about his neck, and pulled his head down upon her heart, and held it tight there, weeping and moaning over him as over some hapless, harmless thing that she had unpurposely bruised or killed. Then she suddenly put her hands against his breast, and thrust him away, and turned and ran.

Ferris stepped back again into the shadow of the tree from which he had just emerged, and clung to its trunk lest he should fall. Another seemed to creep out of the court in his person, and totter across the white glare of the campo and down the blackness of the calle. In the intersected spaces where the moonlight fell, this alien, miserable man saw the figure of a priest gliding on before him.

XVI.

Florida swiftly mounted the terrace steps, but she stopped with her hand on the door, panting, and turned and walked slowly away to the end of the terrace, drying her eyes with dashes of her handkerchief, and ordering her hair, some coils of which had been loosened by her flight. Then she went back to the door, waited, and softly opened it. Her mother was not in the parlor where she had left her, and she passed noiselessly into her own room, where some trunks stood open and half-packed against the wall. She began to gather up the pieces of dress that lay upon the bed and chairs, and to fold them with mechanical carefulness and put them in the boxes. Her mother’s voice called from the other chamber, “Is that you, Florida?”

“Yes, mother,” answered the girl, but remained kneeling before one of the boxes, with that pale green robe in her hand which she had worn on the morning when Ferris had first brought Don Ippolito to see them. She smoothed its folds and looked down at it without making any motion to pack it away, and so she lingered while her mother advanced with one question after another; “What are you doing, Florida? Where are you? Why didn’t you come to me?” and finally stood in the doorway. “Oh, you’re packing. Do you know, Florida, I’m getting very impatient about going. I wish we could be off at once.”

A tremor passed over the young girl and she started from her languid posture, and laid the dress in the trunk. “So do I, mother. I would give the world if we could go to-morrow!”

“Yes, but we can’t, you see. I’m afraid we’ve undertaken a great deal, my dear. It’s quite a weight upon my mind, already; and I don’t know what it will be. If we were free, now, I should say, go to-morrow, by all means. But we couldn’t arrange it with Don Ippolito on our hands.”

Florida waited a moment before she replied. Then she said coldly, “Don Ippolito is not going with us, mother.”

“Not going with us? Why” —

“He is not going to America. He will not leave Venice; he is to remain a priest,” said Florida, doggedly.

Mrs. Vervain sat down in the chair that stood beside the door. “Not going to America; not leave Venice; remain a priest? Florida, you astonish me! But I am not the least surprised, not the least in the world. I thought Don Ippolito would give out, all along. He is not what I should call fickle, exactly, but he is weak, or timid, rather. He is a good man, but he lacks courage, resolution. I always doubted if he would succeed in America; he is too much of a dreamer. But this, really, goes a little beyond anything. I never expected this. What did he say, Florida? How did he excuse himself?”

“I hardly know; very little. What was there to say?”

“To be sure, to be sure. Did you try to reason with him, Florida?”

“No,” answered the girl, drearily.

“I am glad of that. I think you had said quite enough already. You owed it to yourself not to do so, and he might have misinterpreted it. These foreigners are very different from Americans. No doubt we should have had a time of it, if he had gone with us. It must be for the best. I’m sure it was ordered so. But all that doesn’t relieve Don Ippolito from the charge of black ingratitude, and want of consideration for us. He’s quite made fools of us.”

“He was not to blame. It was a very great step for him. And if”....

“I know that. But he ought not to have talked of it. He ought to have known his own mind fully before speaking; that’s the only safe way. Well, then, there is nothing to prevent our going to-morrow.”

Florida drew a long breath, and rose to go on with the work of packing.

“Have you been crying, Florida? Well, of course, you can’t help feeling sorry for such a man. There’s a great deal of good in Don Ippolito, a great deal. But when you come to my age you won’t cry so easily, my dear. It’s very trying,” said Mrs. Vervain. She sat awhile in silence before she asked: “Will he come here to-morrow morning?”

Her daughter looked at her with a glance of terrified inquiry.

“Do have your wits about you, my dear! We can’t go away without saying good-by to him, and we can’t go away without paying him.”

“Paying him?”

“Yes, paying him — paying him for your lessons. It’s always been very awkward. He hasn’t been like other teachers, you know: more like a guest, or friend of the family. He never seemed to want to take the money, and of late, I’ve been letting it run along, because I hated so to offer it, till now, it’s quite a sum. I suppose he needs it, poor fellow. And how to get it to him is the question. He may not come to-morrow, as usual, and I couldn’t trust it to the padrone. We might send it to him in a draft from Paris, but I’d rather pay him before we go. Besides, it would be rather rude, going away without seeing him again.” Mrs. Vervain thought a moment; then, “I’ll tell you,” she resumed. “If he doesn’t happen to come here to-morrow morning, we can stop on our way to the station and give him the money.”

Florida did not answer.

“Don’t you think that would be a good plan?”

“I don’t know,” replied the girl in a dull way.

“Why, Florida, if you think from anything Don Ippolito said that he would rather not see us again — that it would be painful to him — why, we could ask Mr. Ferris to hand him the money.”

“Oh no, no, no, mother!” cried Florida, hiding her face, “that would be too horribly indelicate!”

“Well, perhaps it wouldn’t be quite good taste,” said Mrs. Vervain perturbedly, “but you needn’t express yourself so violently, my dear. It’s not a matter of life and death. I’m sure I don’t know what to do. We must stop at Don Ippolito’s house, I suppose. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes,” faintly assented the daughter.

Mrs. Vervain yawned. “Well I can’t think anything more about it to-night; I’m too stupid. But that’s the way we shall do. Will you help me to bed, my dear? I shall be good for nothing to-morrow.”

She went on talking of Don Ippolito’s change of purpose till her head touched the pillow, from which she suddenly lifted it again, and called out to her daughter, who had passed into the next room: “But Mr. Ferris —— why didn’t he come back with you?”

“Come back with me?”

“Why yes, child. I sent him out to call you, just before you came in. This Don Ippolito business put him quite out of my head. Didn’t you see him? ... Oh! What’s that?”

“Nothing: I dropped my candle.”

“You’re sure you didn’t set anything on fire?”

“No! It went dead out.”

“Light it again, and do look. Now is everything right?”

“Yes.”

“It’s queer he didn’t come back to say he couldn’t find you. What do you suppose became of him?”

“I don’t know, mother.”

“It’s very perplexing. I wish Mr. Ferris were not so odd. It quite borders on affectation. I don’t know what to make of it. We must send word to him the very first thing to-morrow morning, that we’re going, and ask him to come to see us.”

Florida made no reply. She sat staring at the black space of the doorway into her mother’s room. Mrs. Vervain did not speak again. After a while her daughter softly entered her chamber, shading the candle with her hand; and seeing that she slept, softly withdrew, closed the door, and went about the work of packing again. When it was all done, she flung herself upon her bed and hid her face in the pillow.

The next morning was spent in bestowing those interminable last touches which the packing of ladies’ baggage demands, and in taking leave with largess (in which Mrs. Vervain shone) of all the people in the house and out of it, who had so much as touched a hat to the Vervains during their sojourn. The whole was not a vast sum; nor did the sundry extortions of the padrone come to much, though the honest man racked his brain to invent injuries to his apartments and furniture. Being unmurmuringly paid, he gave way to his real goodwill for his tenants in many little useful offices. At the end he persisted in sending them to the station in his own gondola and could with difficulty be kept from going with them.

Mrs. Vervain had early sent a message to Ferris, but word came back a first and a second time that he was not at home, and the forenoon wore away and he had not appeared. A certain indignation sustained her till the gondola pushed out into the canal, and then it yielded to an intolerable regret that she should not see him.

“I can’t go without saying good-by to Mr. Ferris, Florida,” she said at last, “and it’s no use asking me. He may have been wanting a little in politeness, but he’s been so good all along; and we owe him too much not to make an effort to thank him before we go. We really must stop a moment at his house.”

Florida, who had regarded her mother’s efforts to summon Ferris to them with passive coldness, turned a look of agony upon her. But in a moment she bade the gondolier stop at the consulate, and dropping her veil over her face, fell back in the shadow of the tenda-curtains.

Mrs. Vervain sentimentalized their departure a little, but her daughter made no comment on the scene they were leaving.

The gondolier rang at Ferris’s door and returned with the answer that he was not at home.

Mrs. Vervain gave way to despair. “Oh dear, oh dear! This is too bad! What shall we do?”

“We’ll lose the train, mother, if we loiter in this way,” said Florida.

“Well, wait. I must leave a message at least.” “How could you be away,” she wrote on her card, “when we called to say good-by? We’ve changed our plans and we’re going to-day. I shall write you a nice scolding letter from Verona — we’re going over the Brenner — for your behavior last night. Who will keep you straight when I’m gone? You’ve been very, very kind. Florida joins me in a thousand thanks, regrets, and good-byes.”

“There, I haven’t said anything, after all,” she fretted, with tears in her eyes.

The gondolier carried the card again to the door, where Ferris’s servant let down a basket by a string and fished it up.

“If Don Ippolito shouldn’t be in,” said Mrs. Vervain, as the boat moved on again, “I don’t know what I shall do with this money. It will be awkward beyond anything.”

The gondola slipped from the Canalazzo into the network of the smaller canals, where the dense shadows were as old as the palaces that cast them and stopped at the landing of a narrow quay. The gondolier dismounted and rang at Don Ippolito’s door. There was no response; he rang again and again. At last from a window of the uppermost story the head of the priest himself peered out. The gondolier touched his hat and said, “It is the ladies who ask for you, Don Ippolito.”

It was a minute before the door opened, and the priest, bare-headed and blinking in the strong light, came with a stupefied air across the quay to the landing-steps.

“Well, Don Ippolito!” cried Mrs. Vervain, rising and giving him her hand, which she first waved at the trunks and bags piled up in the vacant space in the front of the boat, “what do you think of this? We are really going, immediately; we can change our minds too; and I don’t think it would have been too much,” she added with a friendly smile, “if we had gone without saying good-by to you. What in the world does it all mean, your giving up that grand project of yours so suddenly?”

She sat down again, that she might talk more at her ease, and seemed thoroughly happy to have Don Ippolito before her again.

“It finally appeared best, madama,” he said quietly, after a quick, keen glance at Florida, who did not lift her veil.

“Well, perhaps you’re partly right. But I can’t help thinking that you with your talent would have succeeded in America. Inventors do get on there, in the most surprising way. There’s the Screw Company of Providence. It’s such a simple thing; and now the shares are worth eight hundred. Are you well to-day, Don Ippolito?”

“Quite well, madama.”

“I thought you looked rather pale. But I believe you’re always a little pale. You mustn’t work too hard. We shall miss you a great deal, Don Ippolito.”

“Thanks, madama.”

“Yes, we shall be quite lost without you. And I wanted to say this to you, Don Ippolito, that if ever you change your mind again, and conclude to come to America, you must write to me, and let me help you just as I had intended to do.”

The priest shivered, as if cold, and gave another look at Florida’s veiled face.

“You are too good,” he said.

“Yes, I really think I am,” replied Mrs. Vervain, playfully. “Considering that you were going to let me leave Venice without even trying to say good-by to me, I think I’m very good indeed.”

Mrs. Vervain’s mood became overcast, and her eyes filled with tears: “I hope you’re sorry to have us going, Don Ippolito, for you know how very highly I prize your acquaintance. It was rather cruel of you, I think.”

She seemed not to remember that he could not have known of their change of plan. Don Ippolito looked imploringly into her face, and made a touching gesture of deprecation, but did not speak.

“I’m really afraid you’re not well, and I think it’s too bad of us to be going,” resumed Mrs. Vervain; “but it can’t be helped now: we are all packed, don’t you see. But I want to ask one favor of you, Don Ippolito; and that is,” said Mrs. Vervain, covertly taking a little rouleau from her pocket, “that you’ll leave these inventions of yours for a while, and give yourself a vacation. You need rest of mind. Go into the country, somewhere, do. That’s what’s preying upon you. But we must really be off, now. Shake hands with Florida — I’m going to be the last to part with you,” she said, with a tearful smile.

Don Ippolito and Florida extended their hands. Neither spoke, and as she sank back upon the seat from which she had half risen, she drew more closely the folds of the veil which she had not lifted from her face.

Mrs. Vervain gave a little sob as Don Ippolito took her hand and kissed it; and she had some difficulty in leaving with him the rouleau, which she tried artfully to press into his palm. “Good-by, good-by,” she said, “don’t drop it,” and attempted to close his fingers over it.

But he let it lie carelessly in his open hand, as the gondola moved off, and there it still lay as he stood watching the boat slip under a bridge at the next corner, and disappear. While he stood there gazing at the empty arch, a man of a wild and savage aspect approached. It was said that this man’s brain had been turned by the death of his brother, who was betrayed to the Austrians after the revolution of ‘48, by his wife’s confessor. He advanced with swift strides, and at the moment he reached Don Ippolito’s side he suddenly turned his face upon him and cursed him through his clenched teeth: “Dog of a priest!”

Don Ippolito, as if his whole race had renounced him in the maniac’s words, uttered a desolate cry, and hiding his face in his hands, tottered into his house.

The rouleau had dropped from his palm; it rolled down the shelving marble of the quay, and slipped into the water.

The young beggar who had held Mrs. Vervain’s gondola to the shore while she talked, looked up and down the deserted quay, and at the doors and windows. Then he began to take off his clothes for a bath.

XVII.

Ferris returned at nightfall to his house, where he had not been since daybreak, and flung himself exhausted upon the bed. His face was burnt red with the sun, and his eyes were bloodshot. He fell into a doze and dreamed that he was still at Malamocco, whither he had gone that morning in a sort of craze, with some fishermen, who were to cast their nets there; then he was rowing back to Venice across the lagoon, that seemed a molten fire under the keel. He woke with a heavy groan, and bade Marina fetch him a light.

She set it on the table, and handed him the card Mrs. Vervain had left. He read it and read it again, and then he laid it down, and putting on his hat, he took his cane and went out. “Do not wait for me, Marina,” he said, “I may be late. Go to bed.”

He returned at midnight, and lighting his candle took up the card and read it once more. He could not tell whether to be glad or sorry that he had failed to see the Vervains again. He took it for granted that Don Ippolito was to follow; he would not ask himself what motive had hastened their going. The reasons were all that he should never more look upon the woman so hatefully lost to him, but a strong instinct of his heart struggled against them.

He lay down in his clothes, and began to dream almost before he began to sleep. He woke early, and went out to walk. He did not rest all day. Once he came home, and found a letter from Mrs. Vervain, postmarked Verona, reiterating her lamentations and adieux, and explaining that the priest had relinquished his purpose, and would not go to America at all. The deeper mystery in which this news left him was not less sinister than before.

In the weeks that followed, Ferris had no other purpose than to reduce the days to hours, the hours to minutes. The burden that fell upon him when he woke lay heavy on his heart till night, and oppressed him far into his sleep. He could not give his trouble certain shape; what was mostly with him was a formless loss, which he could not resolve into any definite shame or wrong. At times, what he had seen seemed to him some baleful trick of the imagination, some lurid and foolish illusion.

But he could do nothing, he could not ask himself what the end was to be. He kept indoors by day, trying to work, trying to read, marveling somewhat that he did not fall sick and die. At night he set out on long walks, which took him he cared not where, and often detained him till the gray lights of morning began to tremble through the nocturnal blue. But even by night he shunned the neighborhood in which the Vervains had lived. Their landlord sent him a package of trifles they had left behind, but he refused to receive them, sending back word that he did not know where the ladies were. He had half expected that Mrs. Vervain, though he had not answered her last letter, might write to him again from England, but she did not. The Vervains had passed out of his world; he knew that they had been in it only by the torment they had left him.

He wondered in a listless way that he should see nothing of Don Ippolito. Once at midnight he fancied that the priest was coming towards him across a campo he had just entered; he stopped and turned back into the calle: when the priest came up to him, it was not Don Ippolito.

In these days Ferris received a dispatch from the Department of State, informing him that his successor had been appointed, and directing him to deliver up the consular flags, seals, archives, and other property of the United States. No reason for his removal was given; but as there had never been any reason for his appointment, he had no right to complain; the balance was exactly dressed by this simple device of our civil service. He determined not to wait for the coming of his successor before giving up the consular effects, and he placed them at once in the keeping of the worthy ship-chandler who had so often transferred them from departing to arriving consuls. Then being quite ready at any moment to leave Venice, he found himself in nowise eager to go; but he began in a desultory way to pack up his sketches and studies.

One morning as he sat idle in his dismantled studio, Marina came to tell him that an old woman, waiting at the door below, wished to speak with him.

“Well, let her come up,” said Ferris wearily, and presently Marina returned with a very ill-favored beldam, who stared hard at him while he frowningly puzzled himself as to where he had seen that malign visage before.

“Well?” he said harshly.

“I come,” answered the old woman, “on the part of Don Ippolito Rondinelli, who desires so much to see your excellency.”

Ferris made no response, while the old woman knotted the fringe of her shawl with quaking hands, and presently added with a tenderness in her voice which oddly discorded with the hardness of her face: “He has been very sick, poor thing, with a fever; but now he is in his senses again, and the doctors say he will get well. I hope so. But he is still very weak. He tried to write two lines to you, but he had not the strength; so he bade me bring you this word: That he had something to say which it greatly concerned you to hear, and that he prayed you to forgive his not coming to revere you, for it was impossible, and that you should have the goodness to do him this favor, to come to find him the quickest you could.”

The old woman wiped her eyes with the corner of her shawl, and her chin wobbled pathetically while she shot a glance of baleful dislike at Ferris, who answered after a long dull stare at her, “Tell him I’ll come.”

He did not believe that Don Ippolito could tell him anything that greatly concerned him; but he was worn out with going round in the same circle of conjecture, and so far as he could be glad, he was glad of this chance to face his calamity. He would go, but not at once; he would think it over; he would go to-morrow, when he had got some grasp of the matter.

The old woman lingered.

“Tell him I’ll come,” repeated Ferris impatiently.

“A thousand excuses; but my poor master has been very sick. The doctors say he will get well. I hope so. But he is very weak indeed; a little shock, a little disappointment.... Is the signore very, very much occupied this morning? He greatly desired, — he prayed that if such a thing were possible in the goodness of your excellency .... But I am offending the signore!”

“What do you want?” demanded Ferris.

The old wretch set up a pitiful whimper, and tried to possess herself of his hand; she kissed his coat-sleeve instead. “That you will return with me,” she besought him.

“Oh, I’ll go!” groaned the painter. “I might as well go first as last,” he added in English. “There, stop that! Enough, enough, I tell you! Didn’t I say I was going with you?” he cried to the old woman.

“God bless you!” she mumbled, and set off before him down the stairs and out of the door. She looked so miserably old and weary that he called a gondola to his landing and made her get into it with him.

It tormented Don Ippolito’s idle neighborhood to see Veneranda arrive in such state, and a passionate excitement arose at the caffè, where the person of the consul was known, when Ferris entered the priest’s house with her.

He had not often visited Don Ippolito, but the quaintness of the place had been so vividly impressed upon him, that he had a certain familiarity with the grape-arbor of the anteroom, the paintings of the parlor, and the puerile arrangement of the piano and melodeon. Veneranda led him through these rooms to the chamber where Don Ippolito had first shown him his inventions. They were all removed now, and on a bed, set against the wall opposite the door, lay the priest, with his hands on his breast, and a faint smile on his lips, so peaceful, so serene, that the painter stopped with a sudden awe, as if he had unawares come into the presence of death.

“Advance, advance,” whispered the old woman.

Near the head of the bed sat a white-haired priest wearing the red stockings of a canonico; his face was fanatically stern; but he rose, and bowed courteously to Ferris.

The stir of his robes roused Don Ippolito. He slowly and weakly turned his head, and his eyes fell upon the painter. He made a helpless gesture of salutation with his thin hand, and began to excuse himself, for the trouble he had given, with a gentle politeness that touched the painter’s heart through all the complex resentments that divided them. It was indeed a strange ground on which the two men met. Ferris could not have described Don Ippolito as his enemy, for the priest had wittingly done him no wrong; he could not have logically hated him as a rival, for till it was too late he had not confessed to his own heart the love that was in it; he knew no evil of Don Ippolito, he could not accuse him of any betrayal of trust, or violation of confidence. He felt merely that this hapless creature, lying so deathlike before him, had profaned, however involuntarily, what was sacredest in the world to him; beyond this all was chaos. He had heard of the priest’s sickness with a fierce hardening of the heart; yet as he beheld him now, he began to remember things that moved him to a sort of remorse. He recalled again the simple loyalty with which Don Ippolito had first spoken to him of Miss Vervain and tried to learn his own feeling toward her; he thought how trustfully at their last meeting the priest had declared his love and hope, and how, when he had coldly received his confession, Don Ippolito had solemnly adjured him to be frank with him; and Ferris could not. That pity for himself as the prey of fantastically cruel chances, which he had already vaguely felt, began now also to include the priest; ignoring all but that compassion, he went up to the bed and took the weak, chill, nerveless hand in his own.

The canonico rose and placed his chair for Ferris beside the pillow, on which lay a brass crucifix, and then softly left the room, exchanging a glance of affectionate intelligence with the sick man.

“I might have waited a little while,” said Don Ippolito weakly, speaking in a hollow voice that was the shadow of his old deep tones, “but you will know how to forgive the impatience of a man not yet quite master of himself. I thank you for coming. I have been very sick, as you see; I did not think to live; I did not care.... I am very weak, now; let me say to you quickly what I want to say. Dear friend,” continued Don Ippolito, fixing his eyes upon the painter’s face, “I spoke to her that night after I had parted from you.”

The priest’s voice was now firm; the painter turned his face away.

“I spoke without hope,” proceeded Don Ippolito, “and because I must. I spoke in vain; all was lost, all was past in a moment.”

The coil of suspicions and misgivings and fears in which Ferris had lived was suddenly without a clew; he could not look upon the pallid visage of the priest lest he should now at last find there that subtle expression of deceit; the whirl of his thoughts kept him silent; Don Ippolito went on.

“Even if I had never been a priest, I would still have been impossible to her. She”....

He stopped as if for want of strength to go on. All at once he cried, “Listen!” and he rapidly recounted the story of his life, ending with the fatal tragedy of his love. When it was told, he said calmly, “But now everything is over with me on earth. I thank the Infinite Compassion for the sorrows through which I have passed. I, also, have proved the miraculous power of the church, potent to save in all ages.” He gathered the crucifix in his spectral grasp, and pressed it to his lips. “Many merciful things have befallen me on this bed of sickness. My uncle, whom the long years of my darkness divided from me, is once more at peace with me. Even that poor old woman whom I sent to call you, and who had served me as I believed with hate for me as a false priest in her heart, has devoted herself day and night to my helplessness; she has grown decrepit with her cares and vigils. Yes, I have had many and signal marks of the divine pity to be grateful for.” He paused, breathing quickly, and then added, “They tell me that the danger of this sickness is past. But none the less I have died in it. When I rise from this bed it shall be to take the vows of a Carmelite friar.”

Ferris made no answer, and Don Ippolito resumed: —

“I have told you how when I first owned to her the falsehood in which I lived, she besought me to try if I might not find consolation in the holy life to which I had been devoted. When you see her, dear friend, will you not tell her that I came to understand that this comfort, this refuge, awaited me in the cell of the Carmelite? I have brought so much trouble into her life that I would fain have her know I have found peace where she bade me seek it, that I have mastered my affliction by reconciling myself to it. Tell her that but for her pity and fear for me, I believe that I must have died in my sins.”

It was perhaps inevitable from Ferris’s Protestant association of monks and convents and penances chiefly with the machinery of fiction, that all this affected him as unreally as talk in a stage-play. His heart was cold, as he answered: “I am glad that your mind is at rest concerning the doubts which so long troubled you. Not all men are so easily pacified; but, as you say, it is the privilege of your church to work miracles. As to Miss Vervain, I am sorry that I cannot promise to give her your message. I shall never see her again. Excuse me,” he continued, “but your servant said there was something you wished to say that concerned me?”

“You will never see her again!” cried the priest, struggling to lift himself upon his elbow and falling back upon the pillow. “Oh, bereft! Oh, deaf and blind! It was you that she loved! She confessed it to me that night.”

“Wait!” said Ferris, trying to steady his voice, and failing; “I was with Mrs. Vervain that night; she sent me into the garden to call her daughter, and I saw how Miss Vervain parted from the man she did not love! I saw”....

It was a horrible thing to have said it, he felt now that he had spoken; a sense of the indelicacy, the shamefulness, seemed to alienate him from all high concern in the matter, and to leave him a mere self-convicted eavesdropper. His face flamed; the wavering hopes, the wavering doubts alike died in his heart. He had fallen below the dignity of his own trouble.

“You saw, you saw,” softly repeated the priest, without looking at him, and without any show of emotion; apparently, the convalescence that had brought him perfect clearness of reason had left his sensibilities still somewhat dulled. He closed his lips and lay silent. At last, he asked very gently, “And how shall I make you believe that what you saw was not a woman’s love, but an angel’s heavenly pity for me? Does it seem hard to believe this of her?”

“Yes,” answered the painter doggedly, “it is hard.”

“And yet it is the very truth. Oh, you do not know her, you never knew her! In the same moment that she denied me her love, she divined the anguish of my soul, and with that embrace she sought to console me for the friendlessness of a whole life, past and to come. But I know that I waste my words on you,” he cried bitterly. “You never would see me as I was; you would find no singleness in me, and yet I had a heart as full of loyalty to you as love for her. In what have I been false to you?”

“You never were false to me,” answered Ferris, “and God knows I have been true to you, and at what cost. We might well curse the day we met, Don Ippolito, for we have only done each other harm. But I never meant you harm. And now I ask you to forgive me if I cannot believe you. I cannot — yet. I am of another race from you, slow to suspect, slow to trust. Give me a little time; let me see you again. I want to go away and think. I don’t question your truth. I’m afraid you don’t know. I’m afraid that the same deceit has tricked us both. I must come to you to-morrow. Can I?”

He rose and stood beside the couch.

“Surely, surely,” answered the priest, looking into Ferris’s troubled eyes with calm meekness. “You will do me the greatest pleasure. Yes, come again to-morrow. You know,” he said with a sad smile, referring to his purpose of taking vows, “that my time in the world is short. Adieu, to meet again!”

He took Ferris’s hand, hanging weak and hot by his side, and drew him gently down by it, and kissed him on either bearded cheek. “It is our custom, you know, among friends. Farewell.”

The canonico in the anteroom bowed austerely to him as he passed through; the old woman refused with a harsh “Nothing!” the money he offered her at the door.

He bitterly upbraided himself for the doubts he could not banish, and he still flushed with shame that he should have declared his knowledge of a scene which ought, at its worst, to have been inviolable by his speech. He scarcely cared now for the woman about whom these miseries grouped themselves; he realized that a fantastic remorse may be stronger than a jealous love.

He longed for the morrow to come, that he might confess his shame and regret; but a reaction to this violent repentance came before the night fell. As the sound of the priest’s voice and the sight of his wasted face faded from the painter’s sense, he began to see everything in the old light again. Then what Don Ippolito had said took a character of ludicrous, of insolent improbability.

After dark, Ferris set out upon one of his long, rambling walks. He walked hard and fast, to try if he might not still, by mere fatigue of body, the anguish that filled his soul. But whichever way he went he came again and again to the house of Don Ippolito, and at last he stopped there, leaning against the parapet of the quay, and staring at the house, as though he would spell from the senseless stones the truth of the secret they sheltered. Far up in the chamber, where he knew that the priest lay, the windows were dimly lit.

As he stood thus, with his upturned face haggard in the moonlight, the soldier commanding the Austrian patrol which passed that way halted his squad, and seemed about to ask him what he wanted there.

Ferris turned and walked swiftly homeward; but he did not even lie down. His misery took the shape of an intent that would not suffer him to rest. He meant to go to Don Ippolito and tell him that his story had failed of its effect, that he was not to be fooled so easily, and, without demanding anything further, to leave him in his lie.

At the earliest hour when he might hope to be admitted, he went, and rang the bell furiously. The door opened, and he confronted the priest’s servant. “I want to see Don Ippolito,” said Ferris abruptly.

“It cannot be,” she began.

“I tell you I must,” cried Ferris, raising his voice. “I tell you.”....

“Madman!” fiercely whispered the old woman, shaking both her open hands in his face, “he’s dead! He died last night!”

XVIII.

The terrible stroke sobered Ferris, he woke from his long debauch of hate and jealousy and despair; for the first time since that night in the garden, he faced his fate with a clear mind. Death had set his seal forever to a testimony which he had been able neither to refuse nor to accept; in abject sorrow and shame he thanked God that he had been kept from dealing that last cruel blow; but if Don Ippolito had come back from the dead to repeat his witness, Ferris felt that the miracle could not change his own passive state. There was now but one thing in the world for him to do: to see Florida, to confront her with his knowledge of all that had been, and to abide by her word, whatever it was. At the worst, there was the war, whose drums had already called to him, for a refuge.

He thought at first that he might perhaps overtake the Vervains before they sailed for America, but he remembered that they had left Venice six weeks before. It seemed impossible that he could wait, but when he landed in New York, he was tormented in his impatience by a strange reluctance and hesitation. A fantastic light fell upon his plans; a sense of its wildness enfeebled his purpose. What was he going to do? Had he come four thousand miles to tell Florida that Don Ippolito was dead? Or was he going to say, “I have heard that you love me, but I don’t believe it: is it true?”

He pushed on to Providence, stifling these antic misgivings as he might, and without allowing himself time to falter from his intent, he set out to find Mrs. Vervain’s house. He knew the street and the number, for she had often given him the address in her invitations against the time when he should return to America. As he drew near the house a tender trepidation filled him and silenced all other senses in him; his heart beat thickly; the universe included only the fact that he was to look upon the face he loved, and this fact had neither past nor future.

But a terrible foreboding as of death seized him when he stood before the house, and glanced up at its close-shuttered front, and round upon the dusty grass-plots and neglected flower-beds of the door-yard. With a cold hand he rang and rang again, and no answer came. At last a man lounged up to the fence from the next house-door. “Guess you won’t make anybody hear,” he said, casually.

“Doesn’t Mrs. Vervain live in this house?” asked Ferris, finding a husky voice in his throat that sounded to him like some other’s voice lost there.

“She used to, but she isn’t at home. Family’s in Europe.”

They had not come back yet.

“Thanks,” said Ferris mechanically, and he went away. He laughed to himself at this keen irony of fortune; he was prepared for the confirmation of his doubts; he was ready for relief from them, Heaven knew; but this blank that the turn of the wheel had brought, this Nothing!

The Vervains were as lost to him as if Europe were in another planet. How should he find them there? Besides, he was poor; he had no money to get back with, if he had wanted to return.

He took the first train to New York, and hunted up a young fellow of his acquaintance, who in the days of peace had been one of the governor’s aides. He was still holding this place, and was an ardent recruiter. He hailed with rapture the expression of Ferris’s wish to go into the war. “Look here!” he said after a moment’s thought, “didn’t you have some rank as a consul?”

“Yes,” replied Ferris with a dreary smile, “I have been equivalent to a commander in the navy and a colonel in the army — I don’t mean both, but either.”

“Good!” cried his friend. “We must strike high. The colonelcies are rather inaccessible, just at present, and so are the lieutenant-colonelcies, but a majorship, now”....

“Oh no; don’t!” pleaded Ferris. “Make me a corporal — or a cook. I shall not be so mischievous to our own side, then, and when the other fellows shoot me, I shall not be so much of a loss.”

“Oh, they won’t shoot you,” expostulated his friend, high-heartedly. He got Ferris a commission as second lieutenant, and lent him money to buy a uniform.

Ferris’s regiment was sent to a part of the southwest, where he saw a good deal of fighting and fever and ague. At the end of two years, spent alternately in the field and the hospital, he was riding out near the camp one morning in unusual spirits, when two men in butternut fired at him: one had the mortification to miss him; the bullet of the other struck him in the arm. There was talk of amputation at first, but the case was finally managed without. In Ferris’s state of health it was quite the same an end of his soldiering.

He came North sick and maimed and poor. He smiled now to think of confronting Florida in any imperative or challenging spirit; but the current of his hopeless melancholy turned more and more towards her. He had once, at a desperate venture, written to her at Providence, but he had got no answer. He asked of a Providence man among the artists in New York, if he knew the Vervains; the Providence man said that he did know them a little when he was much younger; they had been abroad a great deal; he believed in a dim way that they were still in Europe. The young one, he added, used to have a temper of her own.

“Indeed!” said Ferris stiffly.

The one fast friend whom he found in New York was the governor’s dashing aide. The enthusiasm of this recruiter of regiments had not ceased with Ferris’s departure for the front; the number of disabled officers forbade him to lionize any one of them, but he befriended Ferris; he made a feint of discovering the open secret of his poverty, and asked how he could help him.

“I don’t know,” said Ferris, “it looks like a hopeless case, to me.”

“Oh no it isn’t,” retorted his friend, as cheerfully and confidently as he had promised him that he should not be shot. “Didn’t you bring back any pictures from Venice with you?”

“I brought back a lot of sketches and studies. I’m sorry to say that I loafed a good deal there; I used to feel that I had eternity before me; and I was a theorist and a purist and an idiot generally. There are none of them fit to be seen.”

“Never mind; let’s look at them.”

They hunted out Ferris’s property from a catch-all closet in the studio of a sculptor with whom he had left them, and who expressed a polite pleasure in handing them over to Ferris rather than to his heirs and assigns.

“Well, I’m not sure that I share your satisfaction, old fellow,” said the painter ruefully; but he unpacked the sketches.

Their inspection certainly revealed a disheartening condition of half-work. “And I can’t do anything to help the matter for the present,” groaned Ferris, stopping midway in the business, and making as if to shut the case again.

“Hold on,” said his friend. “What’s this? Why, this isn’t so bad.” It was the study of Don Ippolito as a Venetian priest, which Ferris beheld with a stupid amaze, remembering that he had meant to destroy it, and wondering how it had got where it was, but not really caring much. “It’s worse than you can imagine,” said he, still looking at it with this apathy.

“No matter; I want you to sell it to me. Come!”

“I can’t!” replied Ferris piteously. “It would be flat burglary.”

“Then put it into the exhibition.”

The sculptor, who had gone back to scraping the chin of the famous public man on whose bust he was at work, stabbed him to the heart with his modeling-tool, and turned to Ferris and his friend. He slanted his broad red beard for a sidelong look at the picture, and said: “I know what you mean, Ferris. It’s hard, and it’s feeble in some ways and it looks a little too much like experimenting. But it isn’t so infernally bad.”

“Don’t be fulsome,” responded Ferris, jadedly. He was thinking in a thoroughly vanquished mood what a tragico-comic end of the whole business it was that poor Don Ippolito should come to his rescue in this fashion, and as it were offer to succor him in his extremity. He perceived the shamefulness of suffering such help; it would be much better to starve; but he felt cowed, and he had not courage to take arms against this sarcastic destiny, which had pursued him with a mocking smile from one lower level to another. He rubbed his forehead and brooded upon the picture. At least it would be some comfort to be rid of it; and Don Ippolito was dead; and to whom could it mean more than the face of it?

His friend had his way about framing it, and it was got into the exhibition. The hanging-committee offered it the hospitalities of an obscure corner; but it was there, and it stood its chance. Nobody seemed to know that it was there, however, unless confronted with it by Ferris’s friend, and then no one seemed to care for it, much less want to buy it. Ferris saw so many much worse pictures sold all around it, that he began gloomily to respect it. At first it had shocked him to see it on the Academy’s wall; but it soon came to have no other relation to him than that of creatureship, like a poem in which a poet celebrates his love or laments his dead, and sells for a price. His pride as well as his poverty was set on having the picture sold; he had nothing to do, and he used to lurk about, and see if it would not interest somebody at last. But it remained unsold throughout May, and well into June, long after the crowds had ceased to frequent the exhibition, and only chance visitors from the country straggled in by twos and threes.

One warm, dusty afternoon, when he turned into the Academy out of Fourth Avenue, the empty hall echoed to no footfall but his own. A group of weary women, who wore that look of wanting lunch which characterizes all picture-gallery-goers at home and abroad, stood faint before a certain large Venetian subject which Ferris abhorred, and the very name of which he spat out of his mouth with loathing for its unreality. He passed them with a sombre glance, as he took his way toward the retired spot where his own painting hung.

A lady whose crapes would have betrayed to her own sex the latest touch of Paris stood a little way back from it, and gazed fixedly at it. The pose of her head, her whole attitude, expressed a quiet dejection; without seeing her face one could know its air of pensive wistfulness. Ferris resolved to indulge himself in a near approach to this unwonted spectacle of interest in his picture; at the sound of his steps the lady slowly turned a face of somewhat heavily molded beauty, and from low-growing, thick pale hair and level brows, stared at him with the sad eyes of Florida Vervain. She looked fully the last two years older.

As though she were listening to the sound of his steps in the dark instead of having him there visibly before her, she kept her eyes upon him with a dreamy unrecognition.

“Yes, it is I,” said Ferris, as if she had spoken.

She recovered herself, and with a subdued, sorrowful quiet in her old directness, she answered, “I supposed you must be in New York,” and she indicated that she had supposed so from seeing this picture.

Ferris felt the blood mounting to his head. “Do you think it is like?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “it isn’t just to him; it attributes things that didn’t belong to him, and it leaves out a great deal.”

“I could scarcely have hoped to please you in a portrait of Don Ippolito.” Ferris saw the red light break out as it used on the girl’s pale cheeks, and her eyes dilate angrily. He went on recklessly: “He sent for me after you went away, and gave me a message for you. I never promised to deliver it, but I will do so now. He asked me to tell you when we met, that he had acted on your desire, and had tried to reconcile himself to his calling and his religion; he was going to enter a Carmelite convent.”

Florida made no answer, but she seemed to expect him to go on, and he was constrained to do so.

“He never carried out his purpose,” Ferris said, with a keen glance at her; “he died the night after I saw him.”

“Died?” The fan and the parasol and the two or three light packages she had been holding slid down one by one, and lay at her feet. “Thank you for bringing me his last words,” she said, but did not ask him anything more.

Ferris did not offer to gather up her things; he stood irresolute; presently he continued with a downcast look: “He had had a fever, but they thought he was getting well. His death must have been sudden.” He stopped, and resumed fiercely, resolved to have the worst out: “I went to him, with no good-will toward him, the next day after I saw him; but I came too late. That was God’s mercy to me. I hope you have your consolation, Miss Vervain.”

It maddened him to see her so little moved, and he meant to make her share his remorse.

“Did he blame me for anything?” she asked.

“No!” said Ferris, with a bitter laugh, “he praised you.”

“I am glad of that,” returned Florida, “for I have thought it all over many times, and I know that I was not to blame, though at first I blamed myself. I never intended him anything but good. That is my consolation, Mr. Ferris. But you,” she added, “you seem to make yourself my judge. Well, and what do you blame me for? I have a right to know what is in your mind.”

The thing that was in his mind had rankled there for two years; in many a black reverie of those that alternated with his moods of abject self-reproach and perfect trust of her, he had confronted her and flung it out upon her in one stinging phrase. But he was now suddenly at a loss; the words would not come; his torment fell dumb before her; in her presence the cause was unspeakable. Her lips had quivered a little in making that demand, and there had been a corresponding break in her voice.

“Florida! Florida!” Ferris heard himself saying, “I loved you all the time!”

“Oh indeed, did you love me?” she cried, indignantly, while the tears shone in her eyes. “And was that why you left a helpless young girl to meet that trouble alone? Was that why you refused me your advice, and turned your back on me, and snubbed me? Oh, many thanks for your love!” She dashed the gathered tears angrily away, and went on. “Perhaps you knew, too, what that poor priest was thinking of?”

“Yes,” said Ferris, stolidly, “I did at last: he told me.”

“Oh, then you acted generously and nobly to let him go on! It was kind to him, and very, very kind to me!”

“What could I do?” demanded Ferris, amazed and furious to find himself on the defensive. “His telling me put it out of my power to act.”

“I’m glad that you can satisfy yourself with such a quibble! But I wonder that you can tell me — any woman of it!”

“By Heavens, this is atrocious!” cried Ferris. “Do you think ... Look here!” he went on rudely. “I’ll put the case to you, and you shall judge it. Remember that I was such a fool as to be in love with you. Suppose Don Ippolito had told me that he was going to risk everything — going to give up home, religion, friends — on the ten thousandth part of a chance that you might some day care for him. I did not believe he had even so much chance as that; but he had always thought me his friend, and he trusted me. Was it a quibble that kept me from betraying him? I don’t know what honor is among women; but no man could have done it. I confess to my shame that I went to your house that night longing to betray him. And then suppose your mother sent me into the garden to call you, and I saw ... what has made my life a hell of doubt for the last two years; what ... No, excuse me! I can’t put the case to you after all.”

“What do you mean?” asked Florida. “I don’t understand you!”

“What do I mean? You don’t understand? Are you so blind as that, or are you making a fool of me? What could I think but that you had played with that priest’s heart till your own”....

“Oh!” cried Florida with a shudder, starting away from him, “did you think I was such a wicked girl as that?”

It was no defense, no explanation, no denial; it simply left the case with Ferris as before. He stood looking like a man who does not know whether to bless or curse himself, to laugh or blaspheme.

She stooped and tried to pick up the things she had let fall upon the floor; but she seemed not able to find them. He bent over, and, gathering them together, returned them to her with his left hand, keeping the other in the breast of his coat.

“Thanks,” she said; and then after a moment, “Have you been hurt?” she asked timidly.

“Yes,” said Ferris in a sulky way. “I have had my share.” He glanced down at his arm askance. “It’s rather conventional,” he added. “It isn’t much of a hurt; but then, I wasn’t much of a soldier.”

The girl’s eyes looked reverently at the conventional arm; those were the days, so long past, when women worshipped men for such things. But she said nothing, and as Ferris’s eyes wandered to her, he received a novel and painful impression. He said, hesitatingly, “I have not asked before: but your mother, Miss Vervain — I hope she is well?”

“She is dead,” answered Florida, with stony quiet.

They were both silent for a time. Then Ferris said, “I had a great affection for your mother.”

“Yes,” said the girl, “she was fond of you, too. But you never wrote or sent her any word; it used to grieve her.”

Her unjust reproach went to his heart, so long preoccupied with its own troubles; he recalled with a tender remorse the old Venetian days and the kindliness of the gracious, silly woman who had seemed to like him so much; he remembered the charm of her perfect ladylikeness, and of her winning, weak-headed desire to make every one happy to whom she spoke; the beauty of the good-will, the hospitable soul that in an imaginably better world than this will outvalue a merely intellectual or aesthetic life. He humbled himself before her memory, and as keenly reproached himself as if he could have made her hear from him at any time during the past two years. He could only say, “I am sorry that I gave your mother pain; I loved her very truly. I hope that she did not suffer much before” —

“No,” said Florida, “it was a peaceful end; but finally it was very sudden. She had not been well for many years, with that sort of decline; I used sometimes to feel troubled about her before we came to Venice; but I was very young. I never was really alarmed till that day I went to you.”

“I remember,” said Ferris contritely.

“She had fainted, and I thought we ought to see a doctor; but afterwards, because I thought that I ought not to do so without speaking to her, I did not go to the doctor; and that day we made up our minds to get home as soon as we could; and she seemed so much better, for a while; and then, everything seemed to happen at once. When we did start home, she could not go any farther than Switzerland, and in the fall we went back to Italy. We went to Sorrento, where the climate seemed to do her good. But she was growing frailer, the whole time. She died in March. I found some old friends of hers in Naples, and came home with them.”

The girl hesitated a little over the words, which she nevertheless uttered unbroken, while the tears fell quietly down her face. She seemed to have forgotten the angry words that had passed between her and Ferris, to remember him only as one who had known her mother, while she went on to relate some little facts in the history of her mother’s last days; and she rose into a higher, serener atmosphere, inaccessible to his resentment or his regret, as she spoke of her loss. The simple tale of sickness and death inexpressibly belittled his passionate woes, and made them look theatrical to him. He hung his head as they turned at her motion and walked away from the picture of Don Ippolito, and down the stairs toward the street-door; the people before the other Venetian picture had apparently yielded to their craving for lunch, and had vanished.

“I have very little to tell you of my own life,” Ferris began awkwardly. “I came home soon after you started, and I went to Providence to find you, but you had not got back.”

Florida stopped him and looked perplexedly into his face, and then moved on.

“Then I went into the army. I wrote once to you.”

“I never got your letter,” she said.

They were now in the lower hall, and near the door.

“Florida,” said Ferris, abruptly, “I’m poor and disabled; I’ve no more right than any sick beggar in the street to say it to you; but I loved you, I must always love you. I — Good-by!”

She halted him again, and “You said,” she grieved, “that you doubted me; you said that I had made your life a” —

“Yes, I said that; I know it,” answered Ferris.

“You thought I could be such a false and cruel girl as that!”

“Yes, yes: I thought it all, God help me!”

“When I was only sorry for him, when it was you that I” —

“Oh, I know it,” answered Ferris in a heartsick, hopeless voice. “He knew it, too. He told me so the day before he died.”

“And didn’t you believe him?”

Ferris could not answer.

“Do you believe him now?”

“I believe anything you tell me. When I look at you, I can’t believe I ever doubted you.”

“Why?”

“Because — because — I love you.”

“Oh! That’s no reason.”

“I know it; but I’m used to being without a reason.”

Florida looked gravely at his penitent face, and a brave red color mantled her own, while she advanced an unanswerable argument: “Then what are you going away for?”

The world seemed to melt and float away from between them. It returned and solidified at the sound of the janitor’s steps as he came towards them on his round through the empty building. Ferris caught her hand; she leaned heavily upon his arm as they walked out into the street. It was all they could do at the moment except to look into each other’s faces, and walk swiftly on.

At last, after how long a time he did not know, Ferris cried: “Where are we going, Florida?”

“Why, I don’t know!” she replied. “I’m stopping with those friends of ours at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. We were going on to Providence to-morrow. We landed yesterday; and we stayed to do some shopping” —

“And may I ask why you happened to give your first moments in America to the fine arts?”

“The fine arts? Oh! I thought I might find something of yours, there!”

At the hotel she presented him to her party as a friend whom her mother and she had known in Italy; and then went to lay aside her hat. The Providence people received him with the easy, half-southern warmth of manner which seems to have floated northward as far as their city on the Gulf Stream bathing the Rhode Island shores. The matron of the party had, before Florida came back, an outline history of their acquaintance, which she evolved from him with so much tact that he was not conscious of parting with information; and she divined indefinitely more when she saw them together again. She was charming; but to Ferris’s thinking she had a fault, she kept him too much from Florida, though she talked of nothing else, and at the last she was discreetly merciful.

“Do you think,” whispered Florida, very close against his face, when they parted, “that I’ll have a bad temper?”

“I hope you will — or I shall be killed with kindness,” he replied.

She stood a moment, nervously buttoning his coat across his breast. “You mustn’t let that picture be sold, Henry,” she said, and by this touch alone did she express any sense, if she had it, of his want of feeling in proposing to sell it. He winced, and she added with a soft pity in her voice, “He did bring us together, after all. I wish you had believed him, dear!”

“So do I,” said Ferris, most humbly.

People are never equal to the romance of their youth in after life, except by fits, and Ferris especially could not keep himself at what he called the operatic pitch of their brief betrothal and the early days of their marriage. With his help, or even his encouragement, his wife might have been able to maintain it. She had a gift for idealizing him, at least, and as his hurt healed but slowly, and it was a good while before he could paint with his wounded arm, it was an easy matter for her to believe in the meanwhile that he would have been the greatest painter of his time, but for his honorable disability; to hear her, you would suppose no one else had ever been shot in the service of his country.

It was fortunate for Ferris, since he could not work, that she had money; in exalted moments he had thought this a barrier to their marriage; yet he could not recall any one who had refused the hand of a beautiful girl because of the accident of her wealth, and in the end he silenced his scruples. It might be said that in many other ways he was not her equal; but one ought to reflect how very few men are worthy of their wives in any sense. After his fashion he certainly loved her always, — even when she tried him most, for it must be owned that she really had that hot temper which he had dreaded in her from the first. Not that her imperiousness directly affected him. For a long time after their marriage, she seemed to have no other desire than to lose her outwearied will in his. There was something a little pathetic in this; there was a kind of bewilderment in her gentleness, as though the relaxed tension of her long self-devotion to her mother left her without a full motive; she apparently found it impossible to give herself with a satisfactory degree of abandon to a man who could do so many things for himself. When her children came they filled this vacancy, and afforded her scope for the greatest excesses of self-devotion. Ferris laughed to find her protecting them and serving them with the same tigerish tenderness, the same haughty humility, as that with which she used to care for poor Mrs. Vervain; and he perceived that this was merely the direction away from herself of that intense arrogance of nature which, but for her power and need of loving, would have made her intolerable. What she chiefly exacted from them in return for her fierce devotedness was the truth in everything; she was content that they should be rather less fond of her than of their father, whom indeed they found much more amusing.

The Ferrises went to Europe some years after their marriage, revisiting Venice, but sojourning for the most part in Florence. Ferris had once imagined that the tragedy which had given him his wife would always invest her with the shadow of its sadness, but in this he was mistaken. There is nothing has really so strong a digestion as love, and this is very lucky, seeing what manifold experiences love has to swallow and assimilate; and when they got back to Venice, Ferris found that the customs of their joint life exorcised all the dark associations of the place. These simply formed a sombre background, against which their wedded happiness relieved itself. They talked much of the past, with free minds, unashamed and unafraid. If it is a little shocking, it is nevertheless true, and true to human nature, that they spoke of Don Ippolito as if he were a part of their love.

Ferris had never ceased to wonder at what he called the unfathomable innocence of his wife, and he liked to go over all the points of their former life in Venice, and bring home to himself the utter simplicity of her girlish ideas, motives, and designs, which both confounded and delighted him.

“It’s amazing, Florida,” he would say, “it’s perfectly amazing that you should have been willing to undertake the job of importing into America that poor fellow with his whole stock of helplessness, dreamery, and unpracticality. What were you about?”

“Why, I’ve often told you, Henry. I thought he oughtn’t to continue a priest.”

“Yes, yes; I know.” Then he would remain lost in thought, softly whistling to himself. On one of these occasions he asked, “Do you think he was really very much troubled by his false position?”

“I can’t tell, now. He seemed to be so.”

“That story he told you of his childhood and of how he became a priest; didn’t it strike you at the time like rather a made-up, melodramatic history?”

“No, no! How can you say such things, Henry? It was too simple not to be true.”

“Well, well. Perhaps so. But he baffles me. He always did, for that matter.”

Then came another pause, while Ferris lay back upon the gondola cushions, getting the level of the Lido just under his hat-brim.

“Do you think he was very much of a skeptic, after all, Florida?”

Mrs. Ferris turned her eyes reproachfully upon her husband. “Why, Henry, how strange you are! You said yourself, once, that you used to wonder if he were not a skeptic.”

“Yes; I know. But for a man who had lived in doubt so many years, he certainly slipped back into the bosom of mother church pretty suddenly. Don’t you think he was a person of rather light feelings?”

“I can’t talk with you, my dear, if you go on in that way.”

“I don’t mean any harm. I can see how in many things he was the soul of truth and honor. But it seems to me that even the life he lived was largely imagined. I mean that he was such a dreamer that once having fancied himself afflicted at being what he was, he could go on and suffer as keenly as if he really were troubled by it. Why mightn’t it be that all his doubts came from anger and resentment towards those who made him a priest, rather than from any examination of his own mind? I don’t say it was so. But I don’t believe he knew quite what he wanted. He must have felt that his failure as an inventor went deeper than the failure of his particular attempts. I once thought that perhaps he had a genius in that way, but I question now whether he had. If he had, it seems to me he had opportunity to prove it — certainly, as a priest he had leisure to prove it. But when that sort of subconsciousness of his own inadequacy came over him, it was perfectly natural for him to take refuge in the supposition that he had been baffled by circumstances.”

Mrs. Ferris remained silently troubled. “I don’t know how to answer you, Henry; but I think that you’re judging him narrowly and harshly.”

“Not harshly. I feel very compassionate towards him. But now, even as to what one might consider the most real thing in his life, — his caring for you, — it seems to me there must have been a great share of imagined sentiment in it. It was not a passion; it was a gentle nature’s dream of a passion.”

“He didn’t die of a dream,” said the wife.

“No, he died of a fever.”

“He had got well of the fever.”

“That’s very true, my dear. And whatever his head was, he had an affectionate and faithful heart. I wish I had been gentler with him. I must often have bruised that sensitive soul. God knows I’m sorry for it. But he’s a puzzle, he’s a puzzle!”

Thus lapsing more and more into a mere problem as the years have passed, Don Ippolito has at last ceased to be even the memory of a man with a passionate love and a mortal sorrow. Perhaps this final effect in the mind of him who has realized the happiness of which the poor priest vainly dreamed is not the least tragic phase of the tragedy of Don Ippolito.

THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK

Originally serialised in The Atlantic Monthly, this novel was published in book form in 1879. It deals with the coming of age of Lydia Blood, who is sent to live with her aunt in Venice. The focus of the novel is Lydia’s relationship with the men she encounters on her journey to the Italian city — in particular her fellow traveller on the Aroostook, James Staniford.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

The cover of the first edition

I.

In the best room of a farm-house on the skirts of a village in the hills of Northern Massachusetts, there sat one morning in August three people who were not strangers to the house, but who had apparently assembled in the parlor as the place most in accord with an unaccustomed finery in their dress. One was an elderly woman with a plain, honest face, as kindly in expression as she could be perfectly sure she felt, and no more; she rocked herself softly in the haircloth arm-chair, and addressed as father the old man who sat at one end of the table between the windows, and drubbed noiselessly upon it with his stubbed fingers, while his lips, puckered to a whistle, emitted no sound. His face had that distinctly fresh-shaven effect which once a week is the advantage of shaving no oftener: here and there, in the deeper wrinkles, a frosty stubble had escaped the razor. He wore an old-fashioned, low black satin stock, over the top of which the linen of his unstarched collar contrived with difficulty to make itself seen; his high-crowned, lead-colored straw hat lay on the table before him. At the other end of the table sat a young girl, who leaned upon it with one arm, propping her averted face on her hand. The window was open beside her, and she was staring out upon the door-yard, where the hens were burrowing for coolness in the soft earth under the lilac bushes; from time to time she put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“I don’t like this part of it, father,” said the elderly woman,— “Lyddy’s seeming to feel about it the way she does right at the last moment, as you may say.” The old man made a noise in his throat as if he might speak; but he only unpuckered his mouth, and stayed his fingers, while the other continued: “I don’t want her to go now, no more than ever I did. I ain’t one to think that eatin’ up everything on your plate keeps it from wastin’, and I never was; and I say that even if you couldn’t get the money back, it would cost no more to have her stay than to have her go.”

“I don’t suppose,” said the old man, in a high, husky treble, “but what I could get some of it back from the captain; may be all. He didn’t seem any ways graspin’. I don’t want Lyddy should feel, any more than you do, Maria, that we’re glad to have her go. But what I look at is this: as long as she has this idea — Well, it’s like this — I d’know as I can express it, either.” He relapsed into the comfort people find in giving up a difficult thing.

“Oh, I know!” returned the woman. “I understand it’s an opportunity; you might call it a leadin’, almost, that it would be flyin’ in the face of Providence to refuse. I presume her gifts were given her for improvement, and it would be the same as buryin’ them in the ground for her to stay up here. But I do say that I want Lyddy should feel just so about goin’, or not go at all. It ain’t like goin’ among strangers, though, if it is in a strange land. They’re her father’s own kin, and if they’re any ways like him they’re warm-hearted enough, if that’s all you want. I guess they’ll do what’s right by Lyddy when she gets there. And I try to look at it this way: that long before that maple by the gate is red she’ll be with her father’s own sister; and I for one don’t mean to let it worry me.” She made search for her handkerchief, and wiped away the tears that fell down her cheeks.

“Yes,” returned the old man; “and before the leaves are on the ground we shall more’n have got our first letter from her. I declare for’t,” he added, after a tremulous pause, “I was goin’ to say how Lyddy would enjoy readin’ it to us! I don’t seem to get it rightly into my head that she’s goin’ away.”

“It ain’t as if Lyddy was leavin’ any life behind her that’s over and above pleasant,” resumed the woman. “She’s a good girl, and I never want to see a more uncomplainin’; but I know it’s duller and duller here all the while for her, with us two old folks, and no young company; and I d’know as it’s been any better the two winters she’s taught in the Mill Village. That’s what reconciles me, on Lyddy’s account, as much as anything. I ain’t one to set much store on worldly ambition, and I never was; and I d’know as I care for Lyddy’s advancement, as you may call it. I believe that as far forth as true happiness goes she’d be as well off here as there. But I don’t say but what she would be more satisfied in the end, and as long as you can’t have happiness, in this world, I say you’d better have satisfaction. Is that Josiah Whitman’s hearse goin’ past?” she asked, rising from her chair, and craning forward to bring her eyes on a level with the window, while she suspended the agitation of the palm-leaf fan which she had not ceased to ply during her talk; she remained a moment with the quiescent fan pressed against her bosom, and then she stepped out of the door, and down the walk to the gate. “Josiah!” she called, while the old man looked and listened at the window. “Who you be’n buryin’?”

The man halted his hearse, and answered briefly, “Mirandy Holcomb.”

“Why, I thought the funeral wa’n’t to be till tomorrow! Well, I declare,” said the woman, as she reëntered the room and sat down again in her rocking-chair, “I didn’t ask him whether it was Mr. Goodlow or Mr. Baldwin preached the sermon. I was so put out hearin’ it was Mirandy, you might say I forgot to ask him anything. Mirandy was always a well woman till they moved down to the Mill Village and began takin’ the hands to board, — so many of ‘em. When I think of Lyddy’s teachin’ there another winter, — well, I could almost rejoice that she was goin’ away. She ain’t a mite too strong as it is.”

Here the woman paused, and the old man struck in with his quaint treble while she fanned herself in silence: “I do suppose the voyage is goin’ to be everything for her health. She’ll be from a month to six weeks gettin’ to Try-East, and that’ll be a complete change of air, Mr. Goodlow says. And she won’t have a care on her mind the whole way out. It’ll be a season of rest and quiet. I did wish, just for the joke of the thing, as you may say, that the ship had be’n goin’ straight to Venus, and Lyddy could ‘a’ walked right in on ’em at breakfast, some morning. I should liked it to be’n a surprise. But there wa’n’t any ship at Boston loadin’ for Venus, and they didn’t much believe I’d find one at New York. So I just took up with the captain of the Aroostook’s offer. He says she can telegraph to her folks at Venus as soon as she gets to Try-East, and she’s welcome to stay on the ship till they come for her. I didn’t think of their havin’ our mod’n improvements out there; but he says they have telegraphs and railroads everywheres, the same as we do; and they’re real kind and polite when you get used to ‘em. The captain, he’s as nice a man as I ever see. His wife’s be’n two or three voyages with him in the Aroostook, and he’ll know just how to have Lyddy’s comfort looked after. He showed me the state-room she’s goin’ to have. Well, it ain’t over and above large, but it’s pretty as a pink: all clean white paint, with a solid mahogany edge to the berth, and a mahogany-framed lookin’-glass on one side, and little winders at the top, and white lace curtains to the bed. He says he had it fixed up for his wife, and he lets Lyddy have it all for her own. She can set there and do her mendin’ when she don’t feel like comin’ into the cabin. The cabin — well, I wish you could see that cabin, Maria! The first mate is a fine-appearing man, too. Some of the sailors looked pretty rough; but I guess it was as much their clothes as anything; and I d’know as Lyddy’d have a great deal to do with them, any way.” The old man’s treble ceased, and at the same moment the shrilling of a locust in one of the door-yard maples died away; both voices, arid, nasal, and high, lapsed as one into a common silence.

The woman stirred impatiently in her chair, as if both voices had been repeating something heard many times before. They seemed to renew her discontent. “Yes, I know; I know all that, father. But it ain’t the mahogany I think of. It’s the child’s gettin’ there safe and well.”

“Well,” said the old man, “I asked the captain about the seasickness, and he says she ain’t nigh so likely to be sick as she would on the steamer; the motion’s more regular, and she won’t have the smell of the machinery. That’s what he said. And he said the seasickness would do her good, any way. I’m sure I don’t want her to be sick any more than you do, Maria.” He added this like one who has been unjustly put upon his defense.

They now both remained silent, the woman rocking herself and fanning, and the old man holding his fingers suspended from their drubbing upon the table, and looking miserably from the woman in the rocking-chair to the girl at the window, as if a strict inquiry into the present situation might convict him of it in spite of his innocence. The girl still sat with her face turned from them, and still from time to time she put her handkerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears. The locust in the maple began again, and shrilled inexorably. Suddenly the girl leaped to her feet.

“There’s the stage!” she cried, with a tumult in her voice and manner, and a kind of choking sob. She showed, now that she stood upright, the slim and elegant shape which is the divine right of American girlhood, clothed with the stylishness that instinctive taste may evoke, even in a hill town, from study of paper patterns, Harper’s Bazar, and the costume of summer boarders. Her dress was carried with spirit and effect.

“Lydia Blood!” cried the other woman, springing responsively to her feet, also, and starting toward the girl, “don’t you go a step without you feel just like it! Take off your things this minute and stay, if you wouldn’t jus’ as lives go. It’s hard enough to have you go, child, without seemin’ to force you!”

“Oh, aunt Maria,” answered the girl, piteously, “it almost kills me to go; but I’m doing it, not you. I know how you’d like to have me stay. But don’t say it again, or I couldn’t bear up; and I’m going now, if I have to be carried.”

The old man had risen with the others; he was shorter than either, and as he looked at them he seemed half awed, half bewildered, by so much drama. Yet it was comparatively very little. The girl did not offer to cast herself upon her aunt’s neck, and her aunt did not offer her an embrace, it was only their hearts that clung together as they simply shook hands and kissed each other. Lydia whirled away for her last look at herself in the glass over the table, and her aunt tremulously began to put to rights some slight disorder in the girl’s hat.

“Father,” she said sharply, “are Lyddy’s things all ready there by the door, so’s not to keep Ezra Perkins waitin’? You know he always grumbles so. And then he gets you to the cars so’t you have to wait half an hour before they start.” She continued to pin and pull at details of Lydia’s dress, to which she descended from her hat. “It sets real nice on you, Lyddy. I guess you’ll think of the time we had gettin’ it made up, when you wear it out there.” Miss Maria Latham laughed nervously.

With a harsh banging and rattling, a yellow Concord coach drew up at the gate where Miss Maria had stopped the hearse. The driver got down, and without a word put Lydia’s boxes and bags into the boot, and left two or three light parcels for her to take into the coach with her.

Miss Maria went down to the gate with her father and niece. “Take the back seat, father!” she said, as the old man offered to take the middle place. “Let them that come later have what’s left. You’ll be home to-night, father; I’ll set up for you. Good-by again, Lyddy.” She did not kiss the girl again, or touch her hand. Their decent and sparing adieux had been made in the house. As Miss Maria returned to the door, the hens, cowering conscience-stricken under the lilacs, sprang up at sight of her with a screech of guilty alarm, and flew out over the fence.

“Well, I vow,” soliloquized Miss Maria, “from where she set Lyddy must have seen them pests under the lilacs the whole time, and never said a word.” She pushed the loosened soil into place with the side of her ample slipper, and then went into the house, where she kindled a fire in the kitchen stove, and made herself a cup of Japan tea: a variety of the herb which our country people prefer, apparently because it affords the same stimulus with none of the pleasure given by the Chinese leaf.

II.

Lydia and her grandfather reached Boston at four o’clock, and the old man made a bargain, as he fancied, with an expressman to carry her baggage across the city to the wharf at which the Aroostook lay. The expressman civilly offered to take their small parcels without charge, and deliver them with the trunk and large bag; but as he could not check them all her grandfather judged it safest not to part with them, and he and Lydia crowded into the horse-car with their arms and hands full. The conductor obliged him to give up the largest of these burdens, and hung the old-fashioned oil-cloth sack on the handle of the brake behind, where Mr. Latham with keen anxiety, and Lydia with shame, watched it as it swayed back and forth with the motion of the car and threatened to break loose from its hand-straps and dash its bloated bulk to the ground. The old man called out to the conductor to be sure and stop in Scollay’s Square, and the people, who had already stared uncomfortably at Lydia’s bundles, all smiled. Her grandfather was going to repeat his direction as the conductor made no sign of having heard it, when his neighbor said kindly, “The car always stops in Scollay’s Square.”

“Then why couldn’t he say so?” retorted the old man, in his high nasal key; and now the people laughed outright. He had the nervous restlessness of age when out of its wonted place: he could not remain quiet in the car, for counting and securing his parcels; when they reached Scollay’s Square, and were to change cars, he ran to the car they were to take, though there was abundant time, and sat down breathless from his effort. He was eager then that they should not be carried too far, and was constantly turning to look out of the window to ascertain their whereabouts. His vigilance ended in their getting aboard the East Boston ferry-boat in the car, and hardly getting ashore before the boat started. They now gathered up their burdens once more, and walked toward the wharf they were seeking, past those squalid streets which open upon the docks. At the corners they entangled themselves in knots of truck-teams and hucksters’ wagons and horse-cars; once they brought the traffic of the neighborhood to a stand-still by the thoroughness of their inability and confusion. They wandered down the wrong wharf amidst the slime cast up by the fishing craft moored in the dock below, and made their way over heaps of chains and cordage, and through the hand-carts pushed hither and thither with their loads of fish, and so struggled back to the avenue which ran along the top of all the wharves. The water of the docks was of a livid turbidity, which teemed with the gelatinous globes of the sun-fish; and people were rowing about there in pleasure-boats, and sailors on floats were painting the hulls of the black ships. The faces of the men they met were red and sunburned mostly, — not with the sunburn of the fields, but of the sea; these men lurched in their gait with an uncouth heaviness, yet gave them way kindly enough; but certain dull-eyed, frowzy-headed women seemed to push purposely against her grandfather, and one of them swore at Lydia for taking up all the sidewalk with her bundles. There were such dull eyes and slattern heads at the open windows of the shabby houses; and there were gaunt, bold-faced young girls who strolled up and down the pavements, bonnetless and hatless, and chatted into the windows, and joked with other such girls whom they met. Suddenly a wild outcry rose from the swarming children up one of the intersecting streets, where a woman was beating a small boy over the head with a heavy stick: the boy fell howling and writhing to the ground, and the cruel blows still rained upon him, till another woman darted from an open door and caught the child up with one hand, and with the other wrenched the stick away and flung it into the street. No words passed, and there was nothing to show whose child the victim was; the first woman walked off, and while the boy rubbed his head and arms, and screamed with the pain, the other children, whose sports had been scarcely interrupted, were shouting and laughing all about him again.

“Grandfather,” said Lydia faintly, “let us go down here, and rest a moment in the shade. I’m almost worn out.” She pointed to the open and quiet space at the side of the lofty granite warehouse which they had reached.

“Well, I guess I’ll set down a minute, too,” said her grandfather. “Lyddy,” he added, as they released their aching arms from their bags and bundles, and sank upon the broad threshold of a door which seemed to have been shut ever since the decay of the India trade, “I don’t believe but what it would have be’n about as cheap in the end to come down in a hack. But I acted for what I thought was the best. I supposed we’d be’n there before now, and the idea of givin’ a dollar for ridin’ about ten minutes did seem sinful. I ain’t noways afraid the ship will sail without you. Don’t you fret any. I don’t seem to know rightly just where I am, but after we’ve rested a spell I’ll leave you here, and inquire round. It’s a real quiet place, and I guess your things will be safe.”

He took off his straw hat and fanned his face with it, while Lydia leaned her head against the door frame and closed her eyes. Presently she heard the trampling of feet going by, but she did not open her eyes till the feet paused in a hesitating way, and a voice asked her grandfather, in the firm, neat tone which she had heard summer boarders from Boston use, “Is the young lady ill?” She now looked up, and blushed like fire to see two handsome young men regarding her with frank compassion.

“No,” said her grandfather; “a little beat out, that’s all. We’ve been trying to find Lucas Wharf, and we don’t seem somehow just to hit on it.”

“This is Lucas Wharf,” said the young man. He made an instinctive gesture of salutation toward his hat, with the hand in which he held a cigar; he put the cigar into his mouth as he turned from them, and the smoke drifted fragrantly back to Lydia as he tramped steadily and strongly on down the wharf, shoulder to shoulder with his companion.

“Well, I declare for’t, so it is,” said her grandfather, getting stiffly to his feet and retiring a few paces to gain a view of the building at the base of which they had been sitting. “Why, I might known it by this buildin’! But where’s the Aroostook, if this is Lucas Wharf?” He looked wistfully in the direction the young men had taken, but they were already too far to call after.

“Grandfather,” said the girl, “do I look pale?”

“Well, you don’t now,” answered the old man, simply. “You’ve got a good color now.”

“What right had he,” she demanded, “to speak to you about me?”

“I d’know but what you did look rather pale, as you set there with your head leaned back. I d’know as I noticed much.”

“He took us for two beggars, — two tramps!” she exclaimed, “sitting here with our bundles scattered round us!”

The old man did not respond to this conjecture; it probably involved matters beyond his emotional reach, though he might have understood them when he was younger. He stood a moment with his mouth puckered to a whistle, but made no sound, and retired a step or two farther from the building and looked up at it again. Then he went toward the dock and looked down into its turbid waters, and returned again with a face of hopeless perplexity. “This is Lucas Wharf, and no mistake,” he said. “I know the place first-rate, now. But what I can’t make out is, What’s got the Aroostook?”

A man turned the corner of the warehouse from the street above, and came briskly down towards them, with his hat off, and rubbing his head and face with a circular application of a red silk handkerchief. He was dressed in a suit of blue flannel, very neat and shapely, and across his ample waistcoat stretched a gold watch chain; in his left hand he carried a white Panama hat. He was short and stout; his round florid face was full of a sort of prompt kindness; his small blue eyes twinkled under shaggy brows whose sandy color had not yet taken the grizzled tone of his close-clipped hair and beard. From his clean wristbands his hands came out, plump and large; stiff, wiry hairs stood up on their backs, and under these various designs in tattooing showed their purple.

Lydia’s grandfather stepped out to meet and halt this stranger, as he drew near, glancing quickly from the girl to the old man, and then at their bundles. “Can you tell me where a ship named the Aroostook is, that was layin’ at this wharf — Lucas Wharf — a fortnight ago, and better?”

“Well, I guess I can, Mr. Latham,” answered the stranger, with a quizzical smile, offering one of his stout hands to Lydia’s grandfather. “You don’t seem to remember your friends very well, do you?”

The old man gave a kind of crow expressive of an otherwise unutterable relief and comfort. “Well, if it ain’t Captain Jenness! I be’n so turned about, I declare for’t, I don’t believe I’d ever known you if you hadn’t spoke up. Lyddy,” he cried with a child-like joy, “this is Captain Jenness!”

Captain Jenness having put on his hat changed Mr. Latham’s hand into his left, while he stretched his great right hand across it and took Lydia’s long, slim fingers in its grasp, and looked keenly into her face. “Glad to see you, glad to see you, Miss Blood. (You see I’ve got your name down on my papers.) Hope you’re well. Ever been a sea-voyage before? Little homesick, eh?” he asked, as she put her handkerchief to her eyes. He kept pressing Lydia’s hand in the friendliest way. “Well, that’s natural. And you’re excited; that’s natural, too. But we’re not going to have any homesickness on the Aroostook, because we’re going to make her home to you.” At this speech all the girl’s gathering forlornness broke in a sob. “That’s right!” said Captain Jenness. “Bless you, I’ve got a girl just about your age up at Deer Isle, myself!” He dropped her hand, and put his arm across her shoulders. “Good land, I know what girls are, I hope! These your things?” He caught up the greater part of them into his capacious hands, and started off down the wharf, talking back at Lydia and her grandfather, as they followed him with the light parcels he had left them. “I hauled away from the wharf as soon as I’d stowed my cargo, and I’m at anchor out there in the stream now, waiting till I can finish up a few matters of business with the agents and get my passengers on board. When you get used to the strangeness,” he said to Lydia, “you won’t be a bit lonesome. Bless your heart! My wife’s been with me many a voyage, and the last time I was out to Messina I had both my daughters.”

At the end of the wharf, Captain Jenness stopped, and suddenly calling out, “Here!” began, as she thought, to hurl Lydia’s things into the water. But when she reached the same point, she found they had all been caught, and deposited in a neat pile in a boat which lay below, where two sailors stood waiting the captain’s further orders. He keenly measured the distance to the boat with his eye, and then he bade the men work round outside a schooner which lay near; and jumping on board this vessel, he helped Lydia and her grandfather down, and easily transferred them to the small boat. The men bent to their oars, and pulled swiftly out toward a ship that lay at anchor a little way off. A light breeze crept along the water, which was here blue and clear, and the grateful coolness and pleasant motion brought light into the girl’s cheeks and eyes. Without knowing it she smiled. “That’s right!” cried Captain Jenness, who had applauded her sob in the same terms. “You’ll like it, first-rate. Look at that ship! That’s the Aroostook. Is she a beauty, or ain’t she?”

The stately vessel stood high from the water, for Captain Jenness’s cargo was light, and he was going out chiefly for a return freight. Sharp jibs and staysails cut their white outlines keenly against the afternoon blue of the summer heaven; the topsails and courses dripped, half-furled, from the yards stretching across the yellow masts that sprang so far aloft; the hull glistened black with new paint. When Lydia mounted to the deck she found it as clean scrubbed as her aunt’s kitchen floor. Her glance of admiration was not lost upon Captain Jenness. “Yes, Miss Blood,” said he, “one difference between an American ship and any other sort is dirt. I wish I could take you aboard an English vessel, so you could appreciate the Aroostook. But I guess you don’t need it,” he added, with a proud satisfaction in his laugh. “The Aroostook ain’t in order yet; wait till we’ve been a few days at sea.” The captain swept the deck with a loving eye. It was spacious and handsome, with a stretch of some forty or fifty feet between the house at the stern and the forecastle, which rose considerably higher; a low bulwark was surmounted by a heavy rail supported upon turned posts painted white. Everything, in spite of the captain’s boastful detraction, was in perfect trim, at least to landfolk’s eyes. “Now come into the cabin,” said the captain. He gave Lydia’s traps, as he called them, in charge of a boy, while he led the way below, by a narrow stairway, warning Lydia and her grandfather to look out for their heads as they followed. “There!” he said, when they had safely arrived, inviting their inspection of the place with a general glance of his own.

“What did I tell you, Lyddy?” asked her grandfather, with simple joy in the splendors about them. “Solid mahogany trimmin’s everywhere.” There was also a great deal of milk-white paint, with some modest touches of gilding here and there. The cabin was pleasantly lit by the long low windows which its roof rose just high enough to lift above the deck, and the fresh air entered with the slanting sun. Made fast to the floor was a heavy table, over which hung from the ceiling a swinging shelf. Around the little saloon ran lockers cushioned with red plush. At either end were four or five narrow doors, which gave into as many tiny state-rooms. The boy came with Lydia’s things, and set them inside one of these doors; and when he came out again the captain pushed it open, and called them in. “Here!” said he. “Here’s where my girls made themselves at home the last voyage, and I expect you’ll find it pretty comfortable. They say you don’t feel the motion so much, — I don’t know anything about the motion, — and in smooth weather you can have that window open sometimes, and change the air. It’s light and it’s large. Well, I had it fitted up for my wife; but she’s got kind of on now, you know, and she don’t feel much like going any more; and so I always give it to my nicest passenger.” This was an unmistakable compliment, and Lydia blushed to the captain’s entire content. “That’s a rug she hooked,” he continued, touching with his toe the carpet, rich in its artless domestic dyes as some Persian fabric, that lay before the berth. “These gimcracks belong to my girls; they left ‘em.” He pointed to various slight structures of card-board worked with crewel, which were tacked to the walls. “Pretty snug, eh?”

“Yes,” said Lydia, “it’s nicer than I thought it could be, even after what grandfather said.”

“Well, that’s right!” exclaimed the captain. “I like your way of speaking up. I wish you could know my girls. How old are you now?”

“I’m nineteen,” said Lydia.

“Why, you’re just between my girls!” cried the captain. “Sally is twenty-one, and Persis is eighteen. Well, now, Miss Blood,” he said, as they returned to the cabin, “you can’t begin to make yourself at home too soon for me. I used to sail to Cadiz and Malaga a good deal; and when I went to see any of them Spaniards he’d say, ‘This house is yours.’ Well, that’s what I say: This ship is yours as long as you stay in her. And I mean it, and that’s more than they did!” Captain Jenness laughed mightily, took some of Lydia’s fingers in his left hand and squeezed them, and clapped her grandfather on the shoulder with his right. Then he slipped his hand down the old man’s bony arm to the elbow, and held it, while he dropped his head towards Lydia, and said, “We shall be glad to have him stay to supper, and as much longer as he likes, heh?”

“Oh, no!” said Lydia; “grandfather must go back on the six o’clock train. My aunt expects him.” Her voice fell, and her face suddenly clouded.

“Good!” cried the captain. Then he pulled out his watch, and held it as far away as the chain would stretch, frowning at it with his head aslant. “Well!” he burst out. “He hasn’t got any too much time on his hands.” The old man gave a nervous start, and the girl trembled. “Hold on! Yes; there’s time. It’s only fifteen minutes after five.”

“Oh, but we were more than half an hour getting down here,” said Lydia, anxiously. “And grandfather doesn’t know the way back. He’ll be sure to get lost. I wish we’d come in a carriage.”

“Couldn’t ‘a’ kept the carriage waitin’ on expense, Lyddy,” retorted her grandfather, “But I tell you,” he added, with something like resolution, “if I could find a carriage anywheres near that wharf, I’d take it, just as sure! I wouldn’t miss that train for more’n half a dollar. It would cost more than that at a hotel to-night, let alone how your aunt Maria’d feel.”

“Why, look here!” said Captain Jenness, naturally appealing to the girl. “Let me get your grandfather back. I’ve got to go up town again, any way, for some last things, with an express wagon, and we can ride right to the depot in that. Which depot is it?”

“Fitchburg,” said the old man eagerly.

“That’s right!” commented the captain. “Get you there in plenty of time, if we don’t lose any now. And I’ll tell you what, my little girl,” he added, turning to Lydia: “if it’ll be a comfort to you to ride up with us, and see your grandfather off, why come along! My girls went with me the last time on an express wagon.”

“No,” answered Lydia. “I want to. But it wouldn’t be any comfort. I thought that out before I left home, and I’m going to say good-by to grandfather here.”

“First-rate!” said Captain Jenness, bustling towards the gangway so as to leave them alone. A sharp cry from the old man arrested him.

“Lyddy! Where’s your trunks?”

“Why!” said the girl, catching her breath in dismay, “where can they be? I forgot all about them.”

“I got the checks fast enough,” said the old man, “and I shan’t give ’em up without I get the trunks. They’d ought to had ’em down here long ago; and now if I’ve got to pester round after ’em I’m sure to miss the train.”

“What shall we do?” asked Lydia.

“Let’s see your checks,” said the captain, with an evident ease of mind that reassured her. When her grandfather had brought them with difficulty from the pocket visited last in the order of his search, and laid them in the captain’s waiting palm, the latter endeavored to get them in focus. “What does it say on ‘em?” he asked, handing them to Lydia. “My eyes never did amount to anything on shore.” She read aloud the name of the express stamped on them. The captain gathered them back into his hand, and slipped them into his pocket, with a nod and wink full of comfort. “I’ll see to it,” he said. “At any rate, this ship ain’t a-going to sail without them, if she waits a week. Now, then, Mr. Latham!”

The old man, who waited, when not directly addressed or concerned, in a sort of blank patience, suddenly started out of his daze, and following the captain too alertly up the gangway stairs drove his hat against the hatch — with a force that sent him back into Lydia’s arms.

“Oh, grandfather, are you hurt?” she piteously asked, trying to pull up the hat that was jammed down over his forehead.

“Not a bit! But I guess my hat’s about done for, — without I can get it pressed over; and I d’know as this kind of straw doos press.”

“First-rate!” called the captain from above. “Never mind the hat.” But the girl continued fondly trying to reshape it, while the old man fidgeted anxiously, and protested that he would be sure to be left. It was like a half-shut accordion when she took it from his head; when she put it back it was like an accordion pulled out.

“All ready!” shouted Captain Jenness from the gap in the bulwark, where he stood waiting to descend into the small boat. The old man ran towards him in his senile haste, and stooped to get over the side into the boat below.

“Why, grandfather!” cried the girl in a breaking voice, full of keen, yet tender reproach.

“I declare for’t,” he said, scrambling back to the deck. “I ‘most forgot. I be’n so put about.” He took Lydia’s hand loosely into his own, and bent forward to kiss her. She threw her arms round him, and while he remained looking over her shoulder, with a face of grotesque perplexity, and saying, “Don’t cry, Lyddy, don’t cry!” she pressed her face tighter into his withered neck, and tried to muffle her homesick sobs. The sympathies as well as the sensibilities often seem dulled by age. They have both perhaps been wrought upon too much in the course of the years, and can no longer respond to the appeal or distress which they can only dimly realize; even the heart grows old. “Don’t you, don’t you, Lyddy!” repeated the old man. “You mustn’t. The captain’s waitin’; and the cars — well, every minute I lose makes it riskier and riskier; and your aunt Maria, she’s always so uneasy, you know!”

The girl was not hurt by his anxiety about himself; she was more anxious about him than about anything else. She quickly lifted her head, and drying her eyes, kissed him, forcing her lips into the smile that is more heart-breaking to see than weeping. She looked over the side, as her grandfather was handed carefully down to a seat by the two sailors in the boat, and the captain noted her resolute counterfeit of cheerfulness. “That’s right!” he shouted up to her. “Just like my girls when their mother left ‘em. But bless you, they soon got over it, and so’ll you. Give way, men,” he said, in a lower voice, and the boat shot from the ship’s side toward the wharf. He turned and waved his handkerchief to Lydia, and, stimulated apparently by this, her grandfather felt in his pockets for his handkerchief; he ended after a vain search by taking off his hat and waving that.

When he put it on again, it relapsed into that likeness of a half-shut accordion from which Lydia had rescued it; but she only saw the face under it.

As the boat reached the wharf an express wagon drove down, and Lydia saw the sarcastic parley which she could not hear between the captain and the driver about the belated baggage which the latter put off. Then she saw the captain help her grandfather to the seat between himself and the driver, and the wagon rattled swiftly out of sight. One of the sailors lifted Lydia’s baggage over the side of the wharf to the other in the boat, and they pulled off to the ship with it.

III.

Lydia went back to the cabin, and presently the boy who had taken charge of her lighter luggage came dragging her trunk and bag down the gangway stairs. Neither was very large, and even a boy of fourteen who was small for his age might easily manage them.

“You can stow away what’s in ’em in the drawers,” said the boy. “I suppose you didn’t notice the drawers,” he added, at her look of inquiry. He went into her room, and pushing aside the valance of the lower berth showed four deep drawers below the bed; the charming snugness of the arrangement brought a light of housewifely joy to the girl’s face.

“Why, it’s as good as a bureau. They will hold everything.”

“Yes,” exulted the boy; “they’re for two persons’ things. The captain’s daughters, they both had this room. Pretty good sized too; a good deal the captain’s build. You won’t find a better stateroom than this on a steamer. I’ve been on ‘em.” The boy climbed up on the edge of the upper drawer, and pulled open the window at the top of the wall. “Give you a little air, I guess. If you want I should, the captain said I was to bear a hand helping you to stow away what was in your trunks.”

“No,” said Lydia, quickly. “I’d just as soon do it alone.”

“All right,” said the boy. “If I was you, I’d do it now. I don’t know just when the captain means to sail; but after we get outside, it might be rough, and it’s better to have everything pretty snug by that time. I’ll haul away the trunks when you’ve got ’em empty. If I shouldn’t happen to be here, you can just call me at the top of the gangway, and I’ll come. My name’s Thomas,” he said. He regarded Lydia inquiringly a moment before he added: “If you’d just as lives, I rather you’d call me Thomas, and not steward. They said you’d call me steward,” he explained, in a blushing, deprecating confidence; “and as long as I’ve not got my growth, it kind of makes them laugh, you know, — especially the second officer.”

“I will call you Thomas,” said Lydia.

“Thank you.” The boy glanced up at the round clock screwed to the cabin wall. “I guess you won’t have to call me anything unless you hurry. I shall be down here, laying the table for supper, before you’re done. The captain said I was to lay it for you and him, and if he didn’t get back in time you was to go to eating, any way. Guess you won’t think Captain Jenness is going to starve anybody.”

“Have you been many voyages with Captain Jenness before this?” asked Lydia, as she set open her trunk, and began to lay her dresses out on the locker. Homesickness, like all grief, attacks in paroxysms. One gust of passionate regret had swept over the girl; before another came, she could occupy herself almost cheerfully with the details of unpacking.

“Only one before,” said the boy. “The last one, when his daughters went out. I guess it was their coaxing got mother to let me go. My father was killed in the war.”

“Was he?” asked Lydia, sympathetically.

“Yes. I didn’t know much about it at the time; so little. Both your parents living?”

“No,” said Lydia. “They’re both dead. They died a long while ago. I’ve always lived with my aunt and grandfather.”

“I thought there must be something the matter, — your coming with your grandfather,” said the boy. “I don’t see why you don’t let me carry in some of those dresses for you. I’m used to helping about.”

“Well, you may,” answered Lydia, “if you want.” A native tranquil kindness showed itself in her voice and manner, but something of the habitual authority of a school-mistress mingled with it. “You must be careful not to rumple them if I let you.”

“I guess not. I’ve got older sisters at home. They hated to have me leave. But I looked at it this way: If I was ever going to sea — and I was — I couldn’t get such another captain as Captain Jenness, nor such another crew; all the men from down our way; and I don’t mind the second mate’s jokes much. He doesn’t mean anything by them; likes to plague, that’s all. He’s a first-rate sailor.”

Lydia was kneeling before one of the trunks, and the boy was stooping over it, with a hand on either knee. She had drawn out her only black silk dress, and was finding it rather crumpled. “I shouldn’t have thought it would have got so much jammed, coming fifty miles,” she soliloquized. “But they seemed to take a pleasure in seeing how much they could bang the trunks.” She rose to her feet and shook out the dress, and drew the skirt several times over her left arm.

The boy’s eyes glistened. “Goodness!” he said. “Just new, ain’t it? Going to wear it any on board?”

“Sundays, perhaps,” answered Lydia thoughtfully, still smoothing and shaping the dress, which she regarded at arm’s-length, from time to time, with her head aslant.

“I suppose it’s the latest style?” pursued the boy.

“Yes, it is,” said Lydia. “We sent to Boston for the pattern. I hate to pack it into one of those drawers,” she mused.

“You needn’t,” replied Thomas. “There’s a whole row of hooks.”

“I want to know!” cried Lydia. She followed Thomas into her state-room. “Well, well! They do seem to have thought of everything!”

“I should say so,” exulted the boy. “Look here!” He showed her a little niche near the head of the berth strongly framed with glass, in which a lamp was made fast. “Light up, you know, when you want to read, or feel kind of lonesome.” Lydia clasped her hands in pleasure and amaze. “Oh, I tell you Captain Jenness meant to have things about right. The other state-rooms don’t begin to come up to this.” He dashed out in his zeal, and opened their doors, that she might triumph in the superiority of her accommodations without delay. These rooms were cramped together on one side; Lydia’s was in a comparatively ample corner by itself.

She went on unpacking her trunk, and the boy again took his place near her, in the same attitude as before. “I tell you,” he said, “I shall like to see you with that silk on. Have you got any other nice ones?”

“No; only this I’m wearing,” answered Lydia, half amused and half honest in her sympathy with his ardor about her finery. “They said not to bring many clothes; they would be cheaper over there.” She had now reached the bottom of her trunk. She knew by the clock that her grandfather could hardly have left the city on his journey home, but the interval of time since she had parted with him seemed vast. It was as if she had started to Boston in a former life; the history of the choosing and cutting and making of these clothes was like a dream of preëxistence. She had never had so many things new at once, and it had been a great outlay, but her aunt Maria had made the money go as far as possible, and had spent it with that native taste, that genius for dress, which sometimes strikes the summer boarder in the sempstresses of the New England hills. Miss Latham’s gift was quaintly unrelated to herself. In dress, as in person and manner, she was uncompromisingly plain and stiff. All the more lavishly, therefore, had it been devoted to the grace and beauty of her sister’s child, who, ever since she came to find a home in her grandfather’s house, had been more stylishly dressed than any other girl in the village. The summer boarders, whom the keen eye of Miss Latham studied with unerring sense of the best new effects in costume, wondered at Lydia’s elegance, as she sat beside her aunt in the family pew, a triumph of that grim artist’s skill. Lydia knew that she was well dressed, but she knew that after all she was only the expression of her aunt’s inspirations. Her own gift was of another sort. Her father was a music-teacher, whose failing health had obliged him to give up his profession, and who had taken the traveling agency of a parlor organ manufactory for the sake of the out-door life. His business had brought him to South Bradfield, where he sold an organ to Deacon Latham’s church, and fell in love with his younger daughter. He died a few years after his marriage, of an ancestral consumption, his sole heritage from the good New England stock of which he came. His skill as a pianist, which was considerable, had not descended to his daughter, but her mother had bequeathed her a peculiarly rich and flexible voice, with a joy in singing which was as yet a passion little affected by culture. It was this voice which, when Lydia rose to join in the terrible hymning of the congregation at South Bradfield, took the thoughts of people off her style and beauty; and it was this which enchanted her father’s sister when, the summer before the date of which we write, that lady had come to America on a brief visit, and heard Lydia sing at her parlor organ in the old homestead.

Mrs. Erwin had lived many years abroad, chiefly in Italy, for the sake of the climate. She was of delicate health, and constantly threatened by the hereditary disease that had left her the last of her generation, and she had the fastidiousness of an invalid. She was full of generous impulses which she mistook for virtues; but the presence of some object at once charming and worthy was necessary to rouse these impulses. She had been prosperously married when very young, and as a pretty American widow she had wedded in second marriage at Naples one of those Englishmen who have money enough to live at ease in Latin countries; he was very fond of her, and petted her. Having no children she might long before have thought definitely of poor Henry’s little girl, as she called Lydia, but she had lived very comfortably indefinite in regard to her ever since the father’s death. Now and then she had sent the child a handsome present or a sum of money. She had it on her conscience not to let her be wholly a burden to her grandfather; but often her conscience drowsed. When she came to South Bradfield, she won the hearts of the simple family, which had been rather hardened against her, and she professed an enthusiasm for Lydia. She called her pretty names in Italian, which she did not pronounce well; she babbled a great deal about what ought to be done for her, and went away without doing anything; so that when a letter finally came, directing Lydia to be sent out to her in Venice, they were all surprised, in the disappointment to which they had resigned themselves.

Mrs. Erwin wrote an epistolary style exasperatingly vacuous and diffuse, and, like many women of that sort, she used pencil instead of ink, always apologizing for it as due now to her weak eyes, and now to her weak wrist, and again to her not being able to find the ink. Her hand was full of foolish curves and dashes, and there were no spaces between the words at times. Under these conditions it was no light labor to get at her meaning; but the sum of her letter was that she wished Lydia to come out to her at once, and she suggested that, as they could have few opportunities or none to send her with people going to Europe, they had better let her come the whole way by sea. Mrs. Erwin remembered — in the space of a page and a half — that nothing had ever done her so much good as a long sea voyage, and it would be excellent for Lydia, who, though she looked so strong, probably needed all the bracing up she could get. She had made inquiries, — or, what was the same thing, Mr. Erwin had, for her, — and she found that vessels from American ports seldom came to Venice; but they often came to Trieste, which was only a few hours away; and if Mr. Latham would get Lydia a ship for Trieste at Boston, she could come very safely and comfortably in a few weeks. She gave the name of a Boston house engaged in the Mediterranean trade to which Mr. Latham could apply for passage; if they were not sending any ship themselves, they could probably recommend one to him.

This was what happened when Deacon Latham called at their office a few days after Mrs. Erwin’s letter came. They directed him to the firm dispatching the Aroostook, and Captain Jenness was at their place when the deacon appeared there. The captain took cordial possession of the old man at once, and carried him down to the wharf to look at the ship and her accommodations. The matter was quickly settled between them. At that time Captain Jenness did not know but he might have other passengers out; at any rate he would look after the little girl (as Deacon Latham always said in speaking of Lydia) the same as if she were his own child.

Lydia knelt before her trunk, thinking of the remote events, the extinct associations of a few minutes and hours and days ago; she held some cuffs and collars in her hand, and something that her aunt Maria had said recurred to her. She looked up into the intensely interested face of the boy, and then laughed, bowing her forehead on the back of the hand that held these bits of linen.

The boy blushed. “What are you laughing at?” he asked, half piteously, half indignantly, like a boy used to being badgered.

“Oh, nothing,” said Lydia. “My aunt told me if any of these things should happen to want doing up, I had better get the stewardess to help me.” She looked at the boy in a dreadfully teasing way, softly biting her lip.

“Oh, if you’re going to begin that way!” he cried in affliction.

“I’m not,” she answered, promptly. “I like boys. I’ve taught school two winters, and I like boys first-rate.”

Thomas was impersonally interested again. “Time! You taught school?”

“Why not?”

“You look pretty young for a school-teacher!”

“Now you’re making fun of me,” said Lydia, astutely.

The boy thought he must have been, and was consoled. “Well, you began it,” he said.

“I oughtn’t to have done so,” she replied with humility; “and I won’t any more. There!” she said, “I’m not going to open my bag now. You can take away the trunk when you want, Thomas.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the boy. The idea of a school-mistress was perhaps beginning to awe him a little. “Put your bag in your state-room first.” He did this, and when he came back from carrying away her trunk he began to set the table. It was a pretty table, when set, and made the little cabin much cosier. When the boy brought the dishes from the cook’s galley, it was a barbarously abundant table. There was cold boiled ham, ham and eggs, fried fish, baked potatoes, buttered toast, tea, cake, pickles, and watermelon; nothing was wanting. “I tell you,” said Thomas, noticing Lydia’s admiration, “the captain lives well lay-days.”

“Lay-days?” echoed Lydia.

“The days we’re in port,” the boy explained.

“Well, I should think as much!” She ate with the hunger that tranquillity bestows upon youth after the swift succession of strange events, and the conflict of many emotions. The captain had not returned in time, and she ate alone.

After a while she ventured to the top of the gangway stairs, and stood there, looking at the novel sights of the harbor, in the red sunset light, which rose slowly from the hulls and lower spars of the shipping, and kindled the tips of the high-shooting masts with a quickly fading splendor. A delicate flush responded in the east, and rose to meet the denser crimson of the west; a few clouds, incomparably light and diaphanous, bathed themselves in the glow. It was a summer sunset, portending for the land a morrow of great heat. But cool airs crept along the water, and the ferry-boats, thrust shuttlewise back and forth between either shore, made a refreshing sound as they crushed a broad course to foam with their paddles. People were pulling about in small boats; from some the gay cries and laughter of young girls struck sharply along the tide. The noise of the quiescent city came off in a sort of dull moan. The lamps began to twinkle in the windows and the streets on shore; the lanterns of the ships at anchor in the stream showed redder and redder as the twilight fell. The homesickness began to mount from Lydia’s heart in a choking lump to her throat; for one must be very happy to endure the sights and sounds of the summer evening anywhere. She had to shield her eyes from the brilliancy of the kerosene when she went below into the cabin.

IV.

Lydia did not know when the captain came on board. Once, talking in the cabin made itself felt through her dreams, but the dense sleep of weary youth closed over her again, and she did not fairly wake till morning. Then she thought she heard the crowing of a cock and the cackle of hens, and fancied herself in her room at home; the illusion passed with a pang. The ship was moving, with a tug at her side, the violent respirations of which were mingled with the sound of the swift rush of the vessels through the water, the noise of feet on the deck, and of orders hoarsely shouted.

The girl came out into the cabin, where Thomas was already busy with the breakfast table, and climbed to the deck. It was four o’clock of the summer’s morning; the sun had not yet reddened the east, but the stars were extinct, or glimmered faint points immeasurably withdrawn in the vast gray of the sky. At that hour there is a hovering dimness over all, but the light on things near at hand is wonderfully keen and clear, and the air has an intense yet delicate freshness that seems to breathe from the remotest spaces of the universe, — a waft from distances beyond the sun. On the land the leaves and grass are soaked with dew; the densely interwoven songs of the birds are like a fabric that you might see and touch. But here, save for the immediate noises on the ship, which had already left her anchorage far behind, the shouting of the tug’s escape-pipes, and the huge, swirling gushes from her powerful wheel, a sort of spectacular silence prevailed, and the sounds were like a part of this silence. Here and there a small fishing schooner came lagging slowly in, as if belated, with scarce wind enough to fill her sails; now and then they met a steamboat, towering white and high, a many-latticed bulk, with no one to be seen on board but the pilot at his wheel, and a few sleepy passengers on the forward promenade. The city, so beautiful and stately from the bay, was dropping, and sinking away behind. They passed green islands, some of which were fortified: the black guns looked out over the neatly shaven glacis; the sentinel paced the rampart.

“Well, well!” shouted Captain Jenness, catching sight of Lydia where she lingered at the cabin door. “You are an early bird. Glad to see you up! Hope you rested well! Saw your grandfather off all right, and kept him from taking the wrong train with my own hand. He’s terribly excitable. Well, I suppose I shall be just so, at his age. Here!” The captain caught up a stool and set it near the bulwark for her. “There! You make yourself comfortable wherever you like. You’re at home, you know.” He was off again in a moment. Lydia cast her eye over at the tug. On the deck, near the pilot-house, stood the young man who had stopped the afternoon before, while she sat at the warehouse door, and asked her grandfather if she were not ill. At his feet was a substantial valise, and over his arm hung a shawl. He was smoking, and seated near him, on another valise, was his companion of the day before, also smoking. In the instant that Lydia caught sight of them, she perceived that they both recognized her and exchanged, as it were, a start of surprise. But they remained as before, except that he who was seated drew out a fresh cigarette, and without looking up reached to the other for a light. They were both men of good height, and they looked fresh and strong, with something very alert in their slight movements, — sudden turns of the head and brisk nods, which were not nervously quick. Lydia wondered at their presence there in an ignorance which could not even conjecture. She knew too little to know that they could not have any destination on the tug, and that they would not be making a pleasure-excursion at that hour in the morning. Their having their valises with them deepened the mystery, which was not solved till the tug’s engines fell silent, and at an unnoticed order a space in the bulwark not far from Lydia was opened and steps were let down the side of the ship. Then the young men, who had remained, to all appearance, perfectly unconcerned, caught up their valises and climbed to the deck of the Aroostook. They did not give her more than a glance out of the corners of their eyes, but the surprise of their coming on board was so great a shock that she did not observe that the tug, casting loose from the ship, was describing a curt and foamy semicircle for her return to the city, and that the Aroostook, with a cloud of snowy canvas filling overhead, was moving over the level sea with the light ease of a bird that half swims, half flies, along the water. A sudden dismay, which was somehow not fear so much as an overpowering sense of isolation, fell upon the girl. She caught at Thomas, going forward with some dishes in his hand, with a pathetic appeal.

“Where are you going, Thomas?”

“I’m going to the cook’s galley to help dish up the breakfast.”

“What’s the cook’s galley?”

“Don’t you know? The kitchen.”

“Let me go with you. I should like to see the kitchen.” She trembled with eagerness. Arrived at the door of the narrow passage that ran across the deck aft of the forecastle, she looked in and saw, amid a haze of frying and broiling, the short, stocky figure of a negro, bow-legged, and unnaturally erect from the waist up. At sight of Lydia, he made a respectful duck forward with his uncouth body. “Why, are you the cook?” she almost screamed in response to this obeisance.

“Yes, miss,” said the man, humbly, with a turn of the pleading black eyes of the negro.

Lydia grew more peremptory: “Why — why — I thought the cook was a woman!”

“Very sorry, miss,” began the negro, with a deprecatory smile, in a slow, mild voice.

Thomas burst into a boy’s yelling laugh: “Well, if that ain’t the best joke on Gabriel! He’ll never hear the last of it when I tell it to the second officer!”

“Thomas!” cried Lydia, terribly, “you shall not!” She stamped her foot. “Do you hear me?”

The boy checked his laugh abruptly. “Yes, ma’am,” he said submissively.

“Well, then!” returned Lydia. She stalked proudly back to the cabin gangway, and descending shut herself into her state-room.

V.

A few hours later Deacon Latham came into the house with a milk-pan full of pease. He set this down on one end of the kitchen table, with his straw hat beside it, and then took a chair at the other end and fell into the attitude of the day before, when he sat in the parlor with Lydia and Miss Maria waiting for the stage; his mouth was puckered to a whistle, and his fingers were held above the board in act to drub it. Miss Maria turned the pease out on the table, and took the pan into her lap. She shelled at the pease in silence, till the sound of their pelting, as they were dropped on the tin, was lost in their multitude; then she said, with a sharp, querulous, pathetic impatience, “Well, father, I suppose you’re thinkin’ about Lyddy.”

“Yes, Maria, I be,” returned her father, with uncommon plumpness, as if here now were something he had made up his mind to stand to. “I been thinkin’ that Lyddy’s a woman grown, as you may say.”

“Yes,” admitted Miss Maria, “she’s a woman, as far forth as that goes. What put it into your head?”

“Well, I d’know as I know. But it’s just like this: I got to thinkin’ whether she mightn’t get to feelin’ rather lonely on the voyage, without any other woman to talk to.”

“I guess,” said Miss Maria, tranquilly, “she’s goin’ to feel lonely enough at times, any way, poor thing! But I told her if she wanted advice or help about anything just to go to the stewardess. That Mrs. Bland that spent the summer at the Parkers’ last year was always tellin’ how they went to the stewardess for most everything, and she give her five dollars in gold when they got into Boston. I shouldn’t want Lyddy should give so much as that, but I should want she should give something, as long’s it’s the custom.”

“They don’t have ’em on sailin’ vessels, Captain Jenness said; they only have ’em on steamers,” said Deacon Latham.

“Have what?” asked Miss Maria, sharply.

“Stewardesses. They’ve got a cabin-boy.”

Miss Maria desisted a moment from her work; then she answered, with a gruff shortness peculiar to her, “Well, then, she can go to the cook, I suppose. It wouldn’t matter which she went to, I presume.”

Deacon Latham looked up with the air of confessing to sin before the whole congregation. “The cook’s a man, — a black man,” he said.

Miss Maria dropped a handful of pods into the pan, and sent a handful of peas rattling across the table on to the floor. “Well, who in Time” — the expression was strong, but she used it without hesitation, and was never known to repent it “will she go to, then?”

“I declare for’t,” said her father, “I don’t know. I d’know as I ever thought it out fairly before; but just now when I was pickin’ the pease for you, my mind got to dwellin’ on Lyddy, and then it come to me all at once: there she was, the only one among a whole shipful, and I — I didn’t know but what she might think it rather of a strange position for her.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Miss Maria, petulantly. “I guess Lyddy’d know how to conduct herself wherever she was; she’s a born lady, if ever there was one. But what I think is—” Miss Maria paused, and did not say what she thought; but it was evidently not the social aspect of the matter which was uppermost in her mind. In fact, she had never been at all afraid of men, whom she regarded as a more inefficient and feebler-minded kind of women.

“The only thing’t makes me feel easier is what the captain said about the young men,” said Deacon Latham.

“What young men?” asked Miss Maria.

“Why, I told you about ‘em!” retorted the old man, with some exasperation.

“You told me about two young men that stopped on the wharf and pitied Lyddy’s worn-out looks.”

“Didn’t I tell you the rest? I declare for’t, I don’t believe I did; I be’n so put about. Well, as we was drivin’ up to the depot, we met the same two young men, and the captain asked ‘em, ‘Are you goin’ or not a-goin’?’ — just that way; and they said, ‘We’re goin’.’ And he said, ‘When you comin’ aboard?’ and he told ’em he was goin’ to haul out this mornin’ at three o’clock. And they asked what tug, and he told ‘em, and they fixed it up between ’em all then that they was to come aboard from the tug, when she’d got the ship outside; and that’s what I suppose they did. The captain he said to me he hadn’t mentioned it before, because he wa’n’t sure’t they’d go till that minute. He give ’em a first-rate of a character.”

Miss Maria said nothing for a long while. The subject seemed one with which she did not feel herself able to grapple. She looked all about the kitchen for inspiration, and even cast a searching glance into the wood-shed. Suddenly she jumped from her chair, and ran to the open window: “Mr. Goodlow! Mr. Goodlow! I wish you’d come in here a minute.”

She hurried to meet the minister at the front door, her father lagging after her with the infantile walk of an old man.

Mr. Goodlow took off his straw hat as he mounted the stone step to the threshold, and said good-morning; they did not shake hands. He wore a black alpaca coat, and waistcoat of farmer’s satin; his hat was dark straw, like Deacon Latham’s, but it was low-crowned, and a line of ornamental openwork ran round it near the top.

“Come into the settin’-room,” said Miss Maria. “It’s cooler, in there.” She lost no time in laying the case before the minister. She ended by saying, “Father, he don’t feel just right about it, and I d’know as I’m quite clear in my own mind.”

The minister considered a while in silence before he said, “I think Lydia’s influence upon those around her will be beneficial, whatever her situation in life may be.”

“There, father!” cried Miss Maria, in reproachful relief.

“You’re right, Maria, you’re right!” assented the old man, and they both waited for the minister to continue.

“I rejoiced with you,” he said, “when this opportunity for Lydia’s improvement offered, and I am not disposed to feel anxious as to the ways and means. Lydia is no fool. I have observed in her a dignity, a sort of authority, very remarkable in one of her years.”

“I guess the boys at the school down to the Mill Village found out she had authority enough,” said Miss Maria, promptly materializing the idea.

“Precisely,” said Mr. Goodlow.

“That’s what I told father, in the first place,” said Miss Maria. “I guess Lyddy’d know how to conduct herself wherever she was, — just the words I used.”

“I don’t deny it, Maria, I don’t deny it,” shrilly piped the old man. “I ain’t afraid of any harm comin’ to Lyddy any more’n what you be. But what I said was, Wouldn’t she feel kind of strange, sort of lost, as you may say, among so many, and she the only one?”

“She will know how to adapt herself to circumstances,” said Mr. Goodlow. “I was conversing last summer with that Mrs. Bland who boarded at Mr. Parker’s, and she told me that girls in Europe are brought up with no habits of self-reliance whatever, and that young ladies are never seen on the streets alone in France and Italy.”

“Don’t you think,” asked Miss Maria, hesitating to accept this ridiculous statement, “that Mrs. Bland exaggerated some?”

“She talked a great deal,” admitted Mr. Goodlow. “I should be sorry if Lydia ever lost anything of that native confidence of hers in her own judgment, and her ability to take care of herself under any circumstances, and I do not think she will. She never seemed conceited to me, but she was the most self-reliant girl I ever saw.”

“You’ve hit it there, Mr. Goodlow. Such a spirit as she always had!” sighed Miss Maria. “It was just so from the first. It used to go to my heart to see that little thing lookin’ after herself, every way, and not askin’ anybody’s help, but just as quiet and proud about it! She’s her mother, all over. And yest’day, when she set here waitin’ for the stage, and it did seem as if I should have to give up, hearin’ her sob, sob, sob, — why, Mr. Goodlow, she hadn’t any more idea of backin’ out than — than—” Miss Maria relinquished the search for a comparison, and went into another room for a handkerchief. “I don’t believe she cared over and above about goin’, from the start,” said Miss Maria, returning, “but when once she’d made up her mind to it, there she was. I d’know as she took much of a fancy to her aunt, but you couldn’t told from anything that Lyddy said. Now, if I have anything on my mind, I have to blat it right out, as you may say; I can’t seem to bear it a minute; but Lyddy’s different. Well,” concluded Miss Maria, “I guess there ain’t goin’ to any harm come to her. But it did give me a kind of start, first off, when father up and got to feelin’ sort of bad about it. I d’know as I should thought much about it, if he hadn’t seemed to. I d’know as I should ever thought about anything except her not havin’ any one to advise with about her clothes. It’s the only thing she ain’t handy with: she won’t know what to wear. I’m afraid she’ll spoil her silk. I d’know but what father’s been hasty in not lookin’ into things carefuller first. He most always does repent afterwards.”

“Couldn’t repent beforehand!” retorted Deacon Latham. “And I tell you, Maria, I never saw a much finer man than Captain Jenness; and the cabin’s everything I said it was, and more. Lyddy reg’larly went off over it; ‘n’ I guess, as Mr. Goodlow says, she’ll influence ’em for good. Don’t you fret about her clothes any. You fitted her out in apple-pie order, and she’ll soon be there. ‘T ain’t but a little ways to Try-East, any way, to what it is some of them India voyages, Captain Jenness said. He had his own daughters out the last voyage; ‘n’ I guess he can tell Lyddy when it’s weather to wear her silk. I d’know as I’d better said anything about what I was thinkin’. I don’t want to be noways rash, and yet I thought I couldn’t be too partic’lar.”

For a silent moment Miss Maria looked sourly uncertain as to the usefulness of scruples that came so long after the fact. Then she said abruptly to Mr. Goodlow, “Was it you or Mr. Baldwin, preached Mirandy Holcomb’s fune’l sermon?”

VI.

One of the advantages of the negative part assigned to women in life is that they are seldom forced to commit themselves. They can, if they choose, remain perfectly passive while a great many things take place in regard to them; they need not account for what they do not do. From time to time a man must show his hand, but save for one supreme exigency a woman need never show hers. She moves in mystery as long as she likes; and mere reticence in her, if she is young and fair, interprets itself as good sense and good taste.

Lydia was, by convention as well as by instinct, mistress of the situation when she came out to breakfast, and confronted the young men again with collected nerves, and a reserve which was perhaps a little too proud. The captain was there to introduce them, and presented first Mr. Dunham, the gentleman who had spoken to her grandfather on the wharf, and then Mr. Staniford, his friend and senior by some four or five years. They were both of the fair New England complexion; but Dunham’s eyes were blue, and Staniford’s dark gray. Their mustaches were blonde, but Dunham’s curled jauntily outward at the corners, and his light hair waved over either temple from the parting in the middle. Staniford’s mustache was cut short; his hair was clipped tight to his shapely head, and not parted at all; he had a slightly aquiline nose, with sensitive nostrils, showing the cartilage; his face was darkly freckled. They were both handsome fellows, and fittingly dressed in rough blue, which they wore like men with the habit of good clothes; they made Lydia such bows as she had never seen before. Then the Captain introduced Mr. Watterson, the first officer, to all, and sat down, saying to Thomas, with a sort of guilty and embarrassed growl, “Ain’t he out yet? Well, we won’t wait,” and with but little change of tone asked a blessing; for Captain Jenness in his way was a religious man.

There was a sixth plate laid, but the captain made no further mention of the person who was not out yet till shortly after the coffee was poured, when the absentee appeared, hastily closing his state-room door behind him, and then waiting on foot, with a half-impudent, half-intimidated air, while Captain Jenness, with a sort of elaborate repressiveness, presented him as Mr. Hicks. He was a short and slight young man, with a small sandy mustache curling tightly in over his lip, floating reddish-blue eyes, and a deep dimple in his weak, slightly retreating chin. He had an air at once amiable and baddish, with an expression, curiously blended, of monkey-like humor and spaniel-like apprehensiveness. He did not look well, and till he had swallowed two cups of coffee his hand shook. The captain watched him furtively from under his bushy eyebrows, and was evidently troubled and preoccupied, addressing a word now and then to Mr. Watterson, who, by virtue of what was apparently the ship’s discipline, spoke only when he was spoken to, and then answered with prompt acquiescence. Dunham and Staniford exchanged not so much a glance as a consciousness in regard to him, which seemed to recognize and class him. They talked to each other, and sometimes to the captain. Once they spoke to Lydia. Mr. Dunham, for example, said, “Miss — ah — Blood, don’t you think we are uncommonly fortunate in having such lovely weather for a start-off?”

“I don’t know,” said Lydia.

Mr. Dunham arrested himself in the use of his fork. “I beg your pardon?” he smiled.

It seemed to be a question, and after a moment’s doubt Lydia answered, “I didn’t know it was strange to have fine weather at the start.”

“Oh, but I can assure you it is,” said Dunham, with a certain lady-like sweetness of manner which he had. “According to precedent, we ought to be all deathly seasick.”

“Not at this time of year,” said Captain Jenness.

“Not at this time of year,” repeated Mr. Watterson, as if the remark were an order to the crew.

Dunham referred the matter with a look to his friend, who refused to take part in it, and then he let it drop. But presently Staniford himself attempted the civility of some conversation with Lydia. He asked her gravely, and somewhat severely, if she had suffered much from the heat of the day before.

“Yes,” said Lydia, “it was very hot.”

“I’m told it was the hottest day of the summer, so far,” continued Staniford, with the same severity.

“I want to know!” cried Lydia.

The young man did not say anything more.

As Dunham lit his cigar at Staniford’s on deck, the former said significantly, “What a very American thing!”

“What a bore!” answered the other.

Dunham had never been abroad, as one might imagine from his calling Lydia’s presence a very American thing, but he had always consorted with people who had lived in Europe; he read the Revue des Deux Mondes habitually, and the London weekly newspapers, and this gave him the foreign stand-point from which he was fond of viewing his native world. “It’s incredible,” he added. “Who in the world can she be?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned Staniford, with a cold disgust. “I should object to the society of such a young person for a month or six weeks under the most favorable circumstances, and with frequent respites; but to be imprisoned on the same ship with her, and to have her on one’s mind and in one’s way the whole time, is more than I bargained for. Captain Jenness should have told us; though I suppose he thought that if she could stand it, we might. There’s that point of view. But it takes all ease and comfort out of the prospect. Here comes that blackguard.” Staniford turned his back towards Mr. Hicks, who was approaching, but Dunham could not quite do this, though he waited for the other to speak first.

“Will you — would you oblige me with a light?” Mr. Hicks asked, taking a cigar from his case.

“Certainly,” said Dunham, with the comradery of the smoker.

Mr. Hicks seemed to gather courage from his cigar. “You didn’t expect to find a lady passenger on board, did you?” His poor disagreeable little face was lit up with unpleasant enjoyment of the anomaly. Dunham hesitated for an answer.

“One never can know what one’s fellow passengers are going to be,” said Staniford, turning about, and looking not at Mr. Hicks’s face, but his feet, with an effect of being, upon the whole, disappointed not to find them cloven. He added, to put the man down rather than from an exact belief in his own suggestion, “She’s probably some relation of the captain’s.”

“Why, that’s the joke of it,” said Hicks, fluttered with his superior knowledge. “I’ve been pumping the cabin-boy, and he says the captain never saw her till yesterday. She’s an up-country school-marm, and she came down here with her grandfather yesterday. She’s going out to meet friends of hers in Venice.” The little man pulled at his cigar, and coughed and chuckled, and waited confidently for the impression.

“Dunham,” said Staniford, “did I hand you that sketch-block of mine to put in your bag, when we were packing last night?”

“Yes, I’ve got it.”

“I’m glad of that. Did you see Murray yesterday?”

“No; he was at Cambridge.”

“I thought he was to have met you at Parker’s.” The conversation no longer included Mr. Hicks or the subject he had introduced; after a moment’s hesitation, he walked away to another part of the ship. As soon as he was beyond ear-shot, Staniford again spoke: “Dunham, this girl is plainly one of those cases of supernatural innocence, on the part of herself and her friends, which, as you suggested, wouldn’t occur among any other people in the world but ours.”

“You’re a good fellow, Staniford!” cried Dunham.

“Not at all. I call myself simply a human being, with the elemental instincts of a gentleman, as far as concerns this matter. The girl has been placed in a position which could be made very painful to her. It seems to me it’s our part to prevent it from being so. I doubt if she finds it at all anomalous, and if we choose she need never do so till after we’ve parted with her. I fancy we can preserve her unconsciousness intact.”

“Staniford, this is like you,” said his friend, with glistening eyes. “I had some wild notion of the kind myself, but I’m so glad you spoke of it first.”

“Well, never mind,” responded Staniford. “We must make her feel that there is nothing irregular or uncommon in her being here as she is. I don’t know how the matter’s to be managed, exactly; it must be a negative benevolence for the most part; but it can be done. The first thing is to cow that nuisance yonder. Pumping the cabin-boy! The little sot! Look here, Dunham; it’s such a satisfaction to me to think of putting that fellow under foot that I’ll leave you all the credit of saving the young lady’s feelings. I should like to begin stamping on him at once.”

“I think you have made a beginning already. I confess I wish you hadn’t such heavy nails in your boots!”

“Oh, they’ll do him good, confound him!” said Staniford.

“I should have liked it better if her name hadn’t been Blood,” remarked Dunham, presently.

“It doesn’t matter what a girl’s surname is. Besides, Blood is very frequent in some parts of the State.”

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Dunham suggested.

“Oh, pretty enough, yes,” replied Staniford. “Nothing is so common as the pretty girl of our nation. Her beauty is part of the general tiresomeness of the whole situation.”

“Don’t you think,” ventured his friend, further, “that she has rather a lady-like air?”

“She wanted to know,” said Staniford, with a laugh.

Dunham was silent a while before he asked, “What do you suppose her first name is?”

“Jerusha, probably.”

“Oh, impossible!”

“Well, then, — Lurella. You have no idea of the grotesqueness of these people’s minds. I used to see a great deal of their intimate life when I went on my tramps, and chanced it among them, for bed and board, wherever I happened to be. We cultivated Yankees and the raw material seem hardly of the same race. Where the Puritanism has gone out of the people in spots, there’s the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and the gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes, and call a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the captain picked up that scoundrel.”

The turn of Staniford’s thought to Hicks was suggested by the appearance of Captain Jenness, who now issued from the cabin gangway, and came toward them with the shadow of unwonted trouble in his face. The captain, too, was smoking.

“Well, gentlemen,” he began, with the obvious indirectness of a man not used to diplomacy, “how do you like your accommodations?”

Staniford silently acquiesced in Dunham’s reply that they found them excellent. “But you don’t mean to say,” Dunham added, “that you’re going to give us beefsteak and all the vegetables of the season the whole way over?”

“No,” said the captain; “we shall put you on sea-fare soon enough. But you’ll like it. You don’t want the same things at sea that you do on shore; your appetite chops round into a different quarter altogether, and you want salt beef; but you’ll get it good. Your room’s pretty snug,” he suggested.

“Oh, it’s big enough,” said Staniford, to whom he had turned as perhaps more in authority than Dunham. “While we’re well we only sleep in it, and if we’re seasick it doesn’t matter where we are.”

The captain knocked the ash from his cigar with the tip of his fat little finger, and looked down. “I was in hopes I could have let you had a room apiece, but I had another passenger jumped on me at the last minute. I suppose you see what’s the matter with Mr. Hicks?” He looked up from one to another, and they replied with a glance of perfect intelligence. “I don’t generally talk my passengers over with one another, but I thought I’d better speak to you about him. I found him yesterday evening at my agents’, with his father. He’s just been on a spree, a regular two weeks’ tear, and the old gentleman didn’t know what to do with him, on shore, any longer. He thought he’d send him to sea a voyage, and see what would come of it, and he plead hard with me to take him. I didn’t want to take him, but he worked away at me till I couldn’t say no. I argued in my own mind that he couldn’t get anything to drink on my ship, and that he’d behave himself well enough as long as he was sober.” The captain added ruefully, “He looks worse this morning than he did last night. He looks bad. I told the old gentleman that if he got into any trouble at Try-East, or any of the ports where we touched, he shouldn’t set foot on my ship again. But I guess he’ll keep pretty straight. He hasn’t got any money, for one thing.”

Staniford laughed. “He stops drinking for obvious reasons, if for no others, like Artemus Ward’s destitute inebriate. Did you think only of us in deciding whether you should take him?”

The captain looked up quickly at the young men, as if touched in a sore place. “Well, there again I didn’t seem to get my bearings just right. I suppose you mean the young lady?” Staniford motionlessly and silently assented. “Well, she’s more of a young lady than I thought she was, when her grandfather first come down here and talked of sending her over with me. He was always speaking about his little girl, you know, and I got the idea that she was about thirteen, or eleven, may be. I thought the child might be some bother on the voyage, but thinks I, I’m used to children, and I guess I can manage. Bless your soul! when I first see her on the wharf yesterday, it most knocked me down! I never believed she was half so tall, nor half so good-looking.” Staniford smiled at this expression of the captain’s despair, but the captain did not smile. “Why, she was as pretty as a bird. Well, there I was. It was no time then to back out. The old man wouldn’t understood. Besides, there was the young lady herself, and she seemed so forlorn and helpless that I kind of pitied her. I thought, What if it was one of my own girls? And I made up my mind that she shouldn’t know from anything I said or did that she wasn’t just as much at home and just as much in place on my ship as she would be in my house. I suppose what made me feel easier about it, and took the queerness off some, was my having my own girls along last voyage. To be sure, it ain’t quite the same thing,” said the captain, interrogatively.

“Not quite,” assented Staniford.

“If there was two of them,” said the captain, “I don’t suppose I should feel so bad about it. But thinks I, A lady’s a lady the world over, and a gentleman’s a gentleman.” The captain looked significantly at the young men. “As for that other fellow,” added Captain Jenness, “if I can’t take care of him, I think I’d better stop going to sea altogether, and go into the coasting trade.”

He resumed his cigar with defiance, and was about turning away when Staniford spoke. “Captain Jenness, my friend and I had been talking this little matter over just before you came up. Will you let me say that I’m rather proud of having reasoned in much the same direction as yourself?”

This was spoken with that air which gave Staniford a peculiar distinction, and made him the despair and adoration of his friend: it endowed the subject with seriousness, and conveyed a sentiment of grave and noble sincerity. The captain held out a hand to each of the young men, crossing his wrists in what seemed a favorite fashion with him. “Good!” he cried, heartily. “I thought I knew you.”

VII.

Staniford and Dunham drew stools to the rail, and sat down with their cigars after the captain left them. The second mate passed by, and cast a friendly glance at them; he had whimsical brown eyes that twinkled under his cap-peak, while a lurking smile played under his heavy mustache; but he did not speak. Staniford said, there was a pleasant fellow, and he should like to sketch him. He was only an amateur artist, and he had been only an amateur in life otherwise, so far; but he did not pretend to have been anything else.

“Then you’re not sorry you came, Staniford?” asked Dunham, putting his hand on his friend’s knee. “He characteristically assumed the responsibility, although the voyage by sailing-vessel rather than steamer was their common whim, and it had been Staniford’s preference that decided them for Trieste rather than any nearer port.

“No, I’m not sorry, — if you call it come, already. I think a bit of Europe will be a very good thing for the present, or as long as I’m in this irresolute mood. If I understand it, Europe is the place for American irresolution. When I’ve made up my mind, I’ll come home again. I still think Colorado is the thing, though I haven’t abandoned California altogether; it’s a question of cattle-range and sheep-ranch.”

“You’ll decide against both,” said Dunham.

“How would you like West Virginia? They cattle-range in West Virginia, too. They may sheep-ranch, too, for all I know, — no, that’s in Old Virginia. The trouble is that the Virginias, otherwise irreproachable, are not paying fields for such enterprises. They say that one is a sure thing in California, and the other is a sure thing in Colorado. They give you the figures.” Staniford lit another cigar.

“But why shouldn’t you stay where you are, Staniford? You’ve money enough left, after all.”

“Yes, money enough for one. But there’s something ignoble in living on a small stated income, unless you have some object in view besides living, and I haven’t, you know. It’s a duty I owe to the general frame of things to make more money.”

“If you turned your mind to any one thing, I’m sure you’d succeed where you are,” Dunham urged.

“That’s just the trouble,” retorted his friend. “I can’t turn my mind to any one thing, — I’m too universally gifted. I paint a little, I model a little, I play a very little indeed; I can write a book notice. The ladies praise my art, and the editors keep my literature a long time before they print it. This doesn’t seem the highest aim of being. I have the noble earth-hunger; I must get upon the land. That’s why I’ve got upon the water.” Staniford laughed again, and pulled comfortably at his cigar. “Now, you,” he added, after a pause, in which Dunham did not reply, “you have not had losses; you still have everything comfortable about you. Du hast Alles was Menschen begehr, even to the schönsten Augen of the divine Miss Hibbard.”

“Yes, Staniford, that’s it. I hate your going out there all alone. Now, if you were taking some nice girl with you!” Dunham said, with a lover’s fond desire that his friend should be in love, too.

“To those wilds? To a redwood shanty in California, or a turf hovel in Colorado? What nice girl would go? ‘I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race.’”

“I don’t like to have you take any risks of degenerating,” began Dunham.

“With what you know to be my natural tendencies? Your prophetic eye prefigures my pantaloons in the tops of my boots. Well, there is time yet to turn back from the brutality of a patriarchal life. You must allow that I’ve taken the longest way round in going West. In Italy there are many chances; and besides, you know, I like to talk.”

It seemed to be an old subject between them, and they discussed it languidly, like some abstract topic rather than a reality.

“If you only had some tie to bind you to the East, I should feel pretty safe about you,” said Dunham, presently.

“I have you,” answered his friend, demurely.

“Oh, I’m nothing,” said Dunham, with sincerity.

“Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me, there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up a studio instead of a ranch, — choose between sculpture and painting, instead of cattle and sheep? After all, it does grind me to have lost that money! If I had only been swindled out of it, I shouldn’t have cared; but when you go and make a bad thing of it yourself, with your eyes open, there’s a reluctance to place the responsibility where it belongs that doesn’t occur in the other case. Dunham, do you think it altogether ridiculous that I should feel there was something sacred in the money? When I remember how hard my poor old father worked to get it together, it seems wicked that I should have stupidly wasted it on the venture I did. I want to get it back; I want to make money. And so I’m going out to Italy with you, to waste more. I don’t respect myself as I should if I were on a Pullman palace car, speeding westward. I’ll own I like this better.”

“Oh, it’s all right, Staniford,” said his friend. “The voyage will do you good, and you’ll have time to think everything over, and start fairer when you get back.”

“That girl,” observed Staniford, with characteristic abruptness, “is a type that is commoner than we imagine in New England. We fair people fancy we are the only genuine Yankees. I guess that’s a mistake. There must have been a good many dark Puritans. In fact, we always think of Puritans as dark, don’t we?”

“I believe we do,” assented Dunham. “Perhaps on account of their black clothes.”

“Perhaps,” said Staniford. “At any rate, I’m so tired of the blonde type in fiction that I rather like the other thing in life. Every novelist runs a blonde heroine; I wonder why. This girl has the clear Southern pallor; she’s of the olive hue; and her eyes are black as sloes, — not that I know what sloes are. Did she remind you of anything in particular?”

“Yes; a little of Faed’s Evangeline, as she sat in the door-way of the warehouse yesterday.”

“Exactly. I wish the picture were more of a picture; but I don’t know that it matters. She’s more of a picture.”

“‘Pretty as a bird,’ the captain said.”

“Bird isn’t bad. But the bird is in her manner. There’s something tranquilly alert in her manner that’s like a bird; like a bird that lingers on its perch, looking at you over its shoulder, if you come up behind. That trick of the heavily lifted, half lifted eyelids, — I wonder if it’s a trick. The long lashes can’t be; she can’t make them curl up at the edges. Blood, — Lurella Blood. And she wants to know.” Staniford’s voice fell thoughtful.

“She’s more slender than Faed’s Evangeline. Faed painted rather too fat a sufferer on that tombstone. Lurella Blood has a very pretty figure. Lurella. Why Lurella?”

“Oh, come, Staniford!” cried Dunham. “It isn’t fair to call the girl by that jingle without some ground for it.”

“I’m sure her name’s Lurella, for she wanted to know. Besides, there’s as much sense in it as there is in any name. It sounds very well. Lurella. It is mere prejudice that condemns the novel collocation of syllables.”

“I wonder what she’s thinking of now, — what’s passing in her mind,” mused Dunham aloud.

“You want to know, too, do you?” mocked his friend. “I’ll tell you what: processions of young men so long that they are an hour getting by a given point. That’s what’s passing in every girl’s mind — when she’s thinking. It’s perfectly right. Processsions of young girls are similarly passing in our stately and spacious intellects. It’s the chief business of the youth of one sex to think of the youth of the other sex.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” assented Dunham; “and I believe in it, too—”

“Of course you do, you wicked wretch, you abandoned Lovelace, you bruiser of ladies’ hearts! You hope the procession is composed entirely of yourself. What would the divine Hibbard say to your goings-on?”

“Oh, don’t, Staniford! It isn’t fair,” pleaded Dunham, with the flattered laugh which the best of men give when falsely attainted of gallantry. “I was wondering whether she was feeling homesick, or strange, or—”

“I will go below and ask her,” said Staniford. “I know she will tell me the exact truth. They always do. Or if you will take a guess of mine instead of her word for it, I will hazard the surmise that she is not at all homesick. What has a pretty young girl to regret in such a life as she has left? It’s the most arid and joyless existence under the sun. She has never known anything like society. In the country with us, the social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed, but there are monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are quite extinct now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns: ball-rooms that have had no dancing in them for half a century, and where they give you a bed sometimes. There used to be academies, too, in the hill towns, where they furnished a rude but serviceable article of real learning, and where the local octogenarian remembers seeing something famous in the way of theatricals on examination-day; but neither his children nor his grandchildren have seen the like. There’s a decay of the religious sentiment, and the church is no longer a social centre, with merry meetings among the tombstones between the morning and the afternoon service. Superficial humanitarianism of one kind or another has killed the good old orthodoxy, as the railroads have killed the turnpikes and the country taverns; and the common schools have killed the academies. Why, I don’t suppose this girl ever saw anything livelier than a township cattle show, or a Sunday-school picnic, in her life. They don’t pay visits in the country except at rare intervals, and their evening parties, when they have any, are something to strike you dead with pity. They used to clear away the corn-husks and pumpkins on the barn floor, and dance by the light of tin lanterns. At least, that’s the traditional thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides of the room, giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums, and coaxing somebody to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in the form of apples and water. I have assisted at some rural festivals where the apples were omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our country people don’t all go mad. They do go mad, a great many of them, and manage to get a little glimpse of society in the insane asylums.” Staniford ended his tirade with a laugh, in which he vented his humorous sense and his fundamental pity of the conditions he had caricatured.

“But how,” demanded Dunham, breaking rebelliously from the silence in which he had listened, “do you account for her good manner?”

“She probably was born with a genius for it. Some people are born with a genius for one thing, and some with a genius for another. I, for example, am an artistic genius, forced to be an amateur by the delusive possession of early wealth, and now burning with a creative instinct in the direction of the sheep or cattle business; you have the gift of universal optimism; Lurella Blood has the genius of good society. Give that girl a winter among nice people in Boston, and you would never know that she was not born on Beacon Hill.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said Dunham.

“You doubt it? Pessimist!”

“But you implied just now that she had no sensibility,” pursued Dunham.

“So I did!” cried Staniford, cheerfully. “Social genius and sensibility are two very different things; the cynic might contend they were incompatible, but I won’t insist so far. I dare say she may regret the natal spot; most of us have a dumb, brutish attachment to the cari luoghi; but if she knows anything, she hates its surroundings, and must be glad to get out into the world. I should like mightily to know how the world strikes her, as far as she’s gone. But I doubt if she’s one to betray her own counsel in any way. She looks deep, Lurella does.” Staniford laughed again at the pain which his insistence upon the name brought into Dunham’s face.

VIII.

After dinner, nature avenged herself in the young men for their vigils of the night before, when they had stayed up so late, parting with friends, that they had found themselves early risers without having been abed. They both slept so long that Dunham, leaving Staniford to a still unfinished nap, came on deck between five and six o’clock.

Lydia was there, wrapped against the freshening breeze in a red knit shawl, and seated on a stool in the waist of the ship, in the Evangeline attitude, and with the wistful, Evangeline look in her face, as she gazed out over the far-weltering sea-line, from which all trace of the shore had vanished. She seemed to the young man very interesting, and he approached her with that kindness for all other women in his heart which the lover feels in absence from his beloved, and with a formless sense that some retribution was due her from him for the roughness with which Staniford had surmised her natural history. Women had always been dear and sacred to him; he liked, beyond most young men, to be with them; he was forever calling upon them, getting introduced to them, waiting upon them, inventing little services for them, corresponding with them, and wearing himself out in their interest. It is said that women do not value men of this sort so much as men of some other sorts. It was long, at any rate, before Dunham — whom people always called Charley Dunham — found the woman who thought him more lovely than every other woman pronounced him; and naturally Miss Hibbard was the most exacting of her sex. She required all those offices which Dunham delighted to render, and many besides: being an invalid, she needed devotion. She had refused Dunham before going out to Europe with her mother, and she had written to take him back after she got there. He was now on his way to join her in Dresden, where he hoped that he might marry her, and be perfectly sacrificed to her ailments. She only lacked poverty in order to be thoroughly displeasing to most men; but Dunham had no misgiving save in regard to her money; he wished she had no money.

“A good deal more motion, isn’t there?” he said to Lydia, smiling sunnily as he spoke, and holding his hat with one hand. “Do you find it unpleasant?”

“No,” she answered, “not at all. I like it.”

“Oh, there isn’t enough swell to make it uncomfortable, yet,” asserted Dunham, looking about to see if there were not something he could do for her. “And you may turn out a good sailor. Were you ever at sea before?”

“No; this is the first time I was ever on a ship.”

“Is it possible!” cried Dunham; he was now fairly at sea for the first time himself, though by virtue of his European associations he seemed to have made many voyages. It appeared to him that if there was nothing else he could do for Lydia, it was his duty to talk to her. He found another stool, and drew it up within easier conversational distance. “Then you’ve never been out of sight of land before?”

“No,” said Lydia.

“That’s very curious — I beg your pardon; I mean you must find it a great novelty.”

“Yes, it’s very strange,” said the girl, seriously. “It looks like the Flood. It seems as if all the rest of the world was drowned.”

Dunham glanced round the vast horizon. “It is like the Flood. And it has that quality, which I’ve often noticed in sublime things, of seeming to be for this occasion only.”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

“Why, don’t you know? It seems as if it must be like a fine sunset, and would pass in a few minutes. Perhaps we feel that we can’t endure sublimity long, and want it to pass.”

“I could look at it forever,” replied Lydia.

Dunham turned to see if this were young-ladyish rapture, but perceived that she was affecting nothing. He liked seriousness, for he was, with a great deal of affectation for social purposes, a very sincere person. His heart warmed more and more to the lonely girl; to be talking to her seemed, after all, to be doing very little for her, and he longed to be of service. “Have you explored our little wooden world, yet?” he asked, after a pause.

Lydia paused too. “The ship?” she asked presently. “No; I’ve only been in the cabin, and here; and this morning,” she added, conscientiously, “Thomas showed me the cook’s galley, — the kitchen.”

“You’ve seen more than I have,” said Dunham. “Wouldn’t you like to go forward, to the bow, and see how it looks there?”

“Yes, thank you,” answered Lydia, “I would.”

She tottered a little in gaining her feet, and the wind drifted her slightness a step or two aside. “Won’t you take my arm, perhaps?” suggested Dunham.

“Thank you,” said Lydia, “I think I can get along.” But after a few paces, a lurch of the ship flung her against Dunham’s side; he caught her hand, and passed it through his arm without protest from her.

“Isn’t it grand?” he asked triumphantly, as they stood at the prow, and rose and sank with the vessel’s careering plunges. It was no gale, but only a fair wind; the water foamed along the ship’s sides, and, as her bows descended, shot forward in hissing jets of spray; away on every hand flocked the white caps. “You had better keep my arm, here.” Lydia did so, resting her disengaged hand on the bulwarks, as she bent over a little on that side to watch the rush of the sea. “It really seems as if there were more of a view here.”

“It does, somehow,” admitted Lydia.

“Look back at the ship’s sails,” said Dunham. The swell and press of the white canvas seemed like the clouds of heaven swooping down upon them from all the airy heights. The sweet wind beat in their faces, and they laughed in sympathy, as they fronted it. “Perhaps the motion is a little too strong for you here?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all!” cried the girl.

He had done something for her by bringing her here, and he hoped to do something more by taking her away. He was discomfited, for he was at a loss what other attention to offer. Just at that moment a sound made itself heard above the whistling of the cordage and the wash of the sea, which caused Lydia to start and look round.

“Didn’t you think,” she asked, “that you heard hens?”

“Why, yes,” said Dunham. “What could it have been? Let us investigate.”

He led the way back past the forecastle and the cook’s galley, and there, in dangerous proximity to the pots and frying pans, they found a coop with some dozen querulous and meditative fowl in it.

“I heard them this morning,” said Lydia. “They seemed to wake me with their crowing, and I thought — I was at home!”

“I’m very sorry,” said Dunham, sympathetically. He wished Staniford were there to take shame to himself for denying sensibility to this girl.

The cook, smoking a pipe at the door of his galley, said, “Dey won’t trouble you much, miss. Dey don’t gen’ly last us long, and I’ll kill de roosters first.”

“Oh, come, now!” protested Dunham. “I wouldn’t say that!” The cook and Lydia stared at him in equal surprise.

“Well,” answered the cook, “I’ll kill the hens first, den. It don’t make any difference to me which I kill. I dunno but de hens is tenderer.” He smoked in a bland indifference.

“Oh, hold on!” exclaimed Dunham, in repetition of his helpless protest.

Lydia stooped down to make closer acquaintance with the devoted birds. They huddled themselves away from her in one corner of their prison, and talked together in low tones of grave mistrust. “Poor things!” she said. As a country girl, used to the practical ends of poultry, she knew as well as the cook that it was the fit and simple destiny of chickens to be eaten, sooner or later; and it must have been less in commiseration of their fate than in self-pity and regret for the scenes they recalled that she sighed. The hens that burrowed yesterday under the lilacs in the door-yard; the cock that her aunt so often drove, insulted and exclamatory, at the head of his harem, out of forbidden garden bounds; the social groups that scratched and descanted lazily about the wide, sunny barn doors; the anxious companies seeking their favorite perches, with alarming outcries, in the dusk of summer evenings; the sentinels answering each other from farm to farm before winter dawns, when all the hills were drowned in snow, were of kindred with these hapless prisoners.

Dunham was touched at Lydia’s compassion. “Would you like — would you like to feed them?” he asked by a happy inspiration. He turned to the cook, with his gentle politeness: “There’s no objection to our feeding them, I suppose?”

“Laws, no!” said the cook. “Fats ’em up.” He went inside, and reappeared with a pan full of scraps of meat and crusts of bread.

“Oh, I say!” cried Dunham. “Haven’t you got some grain, you know, of some sort; some seeds, don’t you know?”

“They will like this,” said Lydia, while the cook stared in perplexity. She took the pan, and opening the little door of the coop flung the provision inside. But the fowls were either too depressed in spirit to eat anything, or they were not hungry; they remained in their corner, and merely fell silent, as if a new suspicion had been roused in their unhappy breasts.

“Dey’ll come, to it,” observed the cook.

Dunham felt far from content, and regarded the poultry with silent disappointment. “Are you fond of pets?” he asked, after a while.

“Yes, I used to have pet chickens when I was a little thing.”

“You ought to adopt one of these,” suggested Dunham. “That white one is a pretty creature.”

“Yes,” said Lydia. “He looks as if he were Leghorn. Leghorn breed,” she added, in reply to Dunham’s look of inquiry. “He’s a beauty.”

“Let me get him out for you a moment!” cried the young man, in his amiable zeal. Before Lydia could protest, or the cook interfere, he had opened the coop-door and plunged his arm into the tumult which his manoeuvre created within. He secured the cockerel, and drawing it forth was about to offer it to Lydia, when in its struggles to escape it drove one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it; and then ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the ship, in which it had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang upon the rail; he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a desperate screech, and flew far out over the sea. They watched the suicide till it sank exhausted into a distant white-cap.

“Dat’s gone,” said the cook, philosophically. Dunham looked round. Half the ship’s company, alarmed by his steeple-chase over the deck, were there, silently agrin.

Lydia did not laugh. When he asked, still with his habitual sweetness, but entirely at random, “Shall we — ah — go below?” she did not answer definitely, and did not go. At the same time she ceased to be so timidly intangible and aloof in manner. She began to talk to Dunham, instead of letting him talk to her; she asked him questions, and listened with deference to what he said on such matters as the probable length of the voyage and the sort of weather they were likely to have. She did not take note of his keeping his handkerchief wound round his hand, nor of his attempts to recur to the subject of his mortifying adventure. When they were again quite alone, the cook’s respect having been won back through his ethnic susceptibility to silver, she remembered that she must go to her room.

“In other words,” said Staniford, after Dunham had reported the whole case to him, “she treated your hurt vanity as if you had been her pet schoolboy. She lured you away from yourself, and got you to talking and thinking of other things. Lurella is deep, I tell you. What consummate tacticians the least of women are! It’s a pity that they have to work so often in such dull material as men; they ought always to have women to operate on. The youngest of them has more wisdom in human nature than the sages of our sex. I must say, Lurella is magnanimous, too. She might have taken her revenge on you for pitying her yesterday when she sat in that warehouse door on the wharf. It was rather fine in Lurella not to do it. What did she say, Dunham? What did she talk about? Did she want to know?”

“No!” shouted Dunham. “She talked very well, like any young lady.”

“Oh, all young ladies talk well, of course. But what did this one say? What did she do, except suffer a visible pang of homesickness at the sight of unattainable poultry? Come, you have represented the interview with Miss Blood as one of great brilliancy.”

“I haven’t,” said Dunham. “I have done nothing of the kind. Her talk was like any pleasant talk; it was refined and simple, and — unobtrusive.”

“That is, it was in no way remarkable,” observed Staniford, with a laugh. “I expected something better of Lurella; I expected something salient. Well, never mind. She’s behaved well by you, seeing what a goose you had made of yourself. She behaved like a lady, and I’ve noticed that she eats with her fork. It often happens in the country that you find the women practicing some of the arts of civilization, while their men folk are still sunk in barbaric uses. Lurella, I see, is a social creature; she was born for society, as you were, and I suppose you will be thrown a good deal together. We’re all likely to be associated rather familiarly, under the circumstances. But I wish you would note down in your mind some points of her conversation. I’m really curious to know what a girl of her traditions thinks about the world when she first sees it. Her mind must be in most respects an unbroken wilderness. She’s had schooling, of course, and she knows her grammar and algebra; but she can’t have had any cultivation. If she were of an earlier generation, one would expect to find something biblical in her; but you can’t count upon a Puritanic culture now among our country folks.”

“If you are so curious,” said Dunham, “why don’t you study her mind, yourself?”

“No, no, that wouldn’t do,” Staniford answered. “The light of your innocence upon hers is invaluable. I can understand her better through you. You must go on. I will undertake to make your peace with Miss Hibbard.”

The young men talked as they walked the deck and smoked in the starlight. They were wakeful after their long nap in the afternoon, and they walked and talked late, with the silences that old friends can permit themselves. Staniford recurred to his loss of money and his Western projects, which took more definite form now that he had placed so much distance between himself and their fulfillment. With half a year in Italy before him, he decided upon a cattle-range in Colorado. Then, “I should like to know,” he said, after one of the pauses, “how two young men of our form strike that girl’s fancy. I haven’t any personal curiosity about her impressions, but I should like to know, as an observer of the human race. If my conjectures are right, she’s never met people of our sort before.”

“What sort of men has she been associated with?” asked Dunham.

“Well, I’m not quite prepared to say. I take it that it isn’t exactly the hobbledehoy sort. She has probably looked high, — as far up as the clerk in the store. He has taken her to drive in a buggy Saturday afternoons, when he put on his ready-made suit, — and looked very well in it, too; and they’ve been at picnics together. Or may be, as she’s in the school-teaching line, she’s taken some high-browed, hollow-cheeked high-school principal for her ideal. Or it is possible that she has never had attention from any one. That is apt to happen to self-respectful girls in rural communities, and their beauty doesn’t save them. Fellows, as they call themselves, like girls that have what they call go, that make up to them. Lurella doesn’t seem of that kind; and I should not be surprised if you were the first gentleman who had ever offered her his arm. I wonder what she thought of you. She’s acquainted by sight with the ordinary summer boarder of North America; they penetrate everywhere, now; but I doubt if she’s talked with them much, if at all. She must be ignorant of our world beyond anything we can imagine.”

“But how do you account for her being so well dressed?”

“Oh, that’s instinct. You find it everywhere. In every little village there is some girl who knows how to out-preen all the others. I wonder,” added Staniford, in a more deeply musing tone, “if she kept from laughing at you out of good feeling, or if she was merely overawed by your splendor.”

“She didn’t laugh,” Dunham answered, “because she saw that it would have added to my annoyance. My splendor had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, don’t underrate your splendor, my dear fellow!” cried Staniford, with a caressing ridicule that he often used with Dunham. “Of course, I know what a simple and humble fellow you are, but you’ve no idea how that exterior of yours might impose upon the agricultural imagination; it has its effect upon me, in my pastoral moods.” Dunham made a gesture of protest, and Staniford went on: “Country people have queer ideas of us, sometimes. Possibly Lurella was afraid of you. Think of that, Dunham, — having a woman afraid of you, for once in your life! Well, hurry up your acquaintance with her, Dunham, or I shall wear myself out in mere speculative analysis. I haven’t the aplomb for studying the sensibilities of a young lady, and catching chickens for her, so as to produce a novel play of emotions. I thought this voyage was going to be a season of mental quiet, but having a young lady on board seems to forbid that kind of repose. I shouldn’t mind a half dozen, but one is altogether too many. Poor little thing! I say, Dunham! There’s something rather pretty about having her with us, after all, isn’t there? It gives a certain distinction to our voyage. We shall not degenerate. We shall shave every day, wind and weather permitting, and wear our best things.” They talked of other matters, and again Staniford recurred to Lydia: “If she has any regrets for her mountain home, — though I don’t see why she should have, — I hope they haven’t kept her awake. My far-away cot on the plains is not going to interfere with my slumbers.”

Staniford stepped to the ship’s side, and flung the end of his cigarette overboard; it struck, a red spark amidst the lurid phosphorescence of the bubbles that swept backward from the vessel’s prow.

IX.

The weather held fine. The sun shone, and the friendly winds blew out of a cloudless heaven; by night the moon ruled a firmament powdered with stars of multitudinous splendor. The conditions inspired Dunham with a restless fertility of invention in Lydia’s behalf. He had heard of the game of shuffle-board, that blind and dumb croquet, with which the jaded passengers on the steamers appease their terrible leisure, and with the help of the ship’s carpenter he organized this pastime, and played it with her hour after hour, while Staniford looked on and smoked in grave observance, and Hicks lurked at a distance, till Dunham felt it on his kind heart and tender conscience to invite him to a share in the diversion. As his nerves recovered their tone, Hicks showed himself a man of some qualities that Staniford would have liked in another man: he was amiable, and he was droll, though apt to turn sulky if Staniford addressed him, which did not often happen. He knew more than Dunham of shuffle-board, as well as of tossing rings of rope over a peg set up a certain space off in the deck, — a game which they eagerly took up in the afternoon, after pushing about the flat wooden disks all the morning. Most of the talk at the table was of the varying fortunes of the players; and the yarn of the story-teller in the forecastle remained half-spun, while the sailors off watch gathered to look on, and to bet upon Lydia’s skill. It puzzled Staniford to make out whether she felt any strangeness in the situation, which she accepted with so much apparent serenity. Sometimes, in his frequently recurring talks with Dunham, he questioned whether their delicate precautions for saving her feelings were not perhaps thrown away upon a young person who played shuffle-board and ring-toss on the deck of the Aroostook with as much self-possession as she would have played croquet on her native turf at South Bradfield.

“Their ideal of propriety up country is very different from ours,” he said, beginning one of his long comments. “I don’t say that it concerns the conscience more than ours does; but they think evil of different things. We’re getting Europeanized, — I don’t mean you, Dunham; in spite of your endeavors you will always remain one of the most hopelessly American of our species, — and we have our little borrowed anxieties about the free association of young people. They have none whatever; though they are apt to look suspiciously upon married people’s friendships with other people’s wives and husbands. It’s quite likely that Lurella, with the traditions of her queer world, has not imagined anything anomalous in her position. She may realize certain inconveniences. But she must see great advantages in it. Poor girl! How she must be rioting on the united devotion of cabin and forecastle, after the scanty gallantries of a hill town peopled by elderly unmarried women! I’m glad of it, for her sake. I wonder which she really prizes most: your ornate attentions, or the uncouth homage of those sailors, who are always running to fetch her rings and blocks when she makes a wild shot. I believe I don’t care and shouldn’t disapprove of her preference, whichever it was.” Staniford frowned before he added: “But I object to Hicks and his drolleries. It’s impossible for that little wretch to think reverently of a young girl; it’s shocking to see her treating him as if he were a gentleman.” Hicks’s behavior really gave no grounds for reproach; and it was only his moral mechanism, as Staniford called the character he constructed for him, which he could blame; nevertheless, the thought of him gave an oblique cast to Staniford’s reflections, which he cut short by saying, “This sort of worship is every woman’s due in girlhood; but I suppose a fortnight of it will make her a pert and silly coquette. What does she say to your literature, Dunham?”

Dunham had already begun to lend Lydia books, — his own and Staniford’s, — in which he read aloud to her, and chose passages for her admiration; but he was obliged to report that she had rather a passive taste in literature. She seemed to like what he said was good, but not to like it very much, or to care greatly for reading; or else she had never had the habit of talking books. He suggested this to Staniford, who at once philosophized it.

“Why, I rather like that, you know. We all read in such a literary way, now; we don’t read simply for the joy or profit of it; we expect to talk about it, and say how it is this and that; and I’ve no doubt that we’re sub-consciously harassed, all the time, with an automatic process of criticism. Now Lurella, I fancy, reads with the sense of the days when people read in private, and not in public, as we do. She believes that your serious books are all true; and she knows that my novels are all lies — that’s what some excellent Christians would call the fiction even of George Eliot or of Hawthorne; she would be ashamed to discuss the lives and loves of heroes and heroines who never existed. I think that’s first-rate. She must wonder at your distempered interest in them. If one could get at it, I suppose the fresh wholesomeness of Lurella’s mind would be something delicious, — a quality like spring water.”

He was one of those men who cannot rest in regard to people they meet till they have made some effort to formulate them. He liked to ticket them off; but when he could not classify them, he remained content with his mere study of them. His habit was one that does not promote sympathy with one’s fellow creatures. He confessed even that it disposed him to wish for their less acquaintance when once he had got them generalized; they became then collected specimens. Yet, for the time being, his curiosity in them gave him a specious air of sociability. He lamented the insincerity which this involved, but he could not help it. The next novelty in character was as irresistible as the last; he sat down before it till it yielded its meaning, or suggested to him some analogy by which he could interpret it.

With this passion for the arrangement and distribution of his neighbors, it was not long before he had placed most of the people on board in what he called the psychology of the ship. He did not care that they should fit exactly in their order. He rather preferred that they should have idiosyncrasies which differentiated them from their species, and he enjoyed Lydia’s being a little indifferent about books for this and for other reasons. “If she were literary, she would be like those vulgar little persons of genius in the magazine stories. She would have read all sorts of impossible things up in her village. She would have been discovered by some aesthetic summer boarder, who had happened to identify her with the gifted Daisy Dawn, and she would be going out on the aesthetic’s money for the further expansion of her spirit in Europe. Somebody would be obliged to fall in love with her, and she would sacrifice her career for a man who was her inferior, as we should be subtly given to understand at the close. I think it’s going to be as distinguished by and by not to like books as it is not to write them. Lurella is a prophetic soul; and if there’s anything comforting about her, it’s her being so merely and stupidly pretty.”

“She is not merely and stupidly pretty!” retorted Dunham. “She never does herself justice when you are by. She can talk very well, and on some subjects she thinks strongly.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that!” said Staniford. “But call me some time when she’s doing herself justice.”

“I don’t mean that she’s like the women we know. She doesn’t say witty things, and she hasn’t their responsive quickness; but her ideas are her own, no matter how old they are; and what she says she seems to be saying for the first time, and as if it had never been thought out before.”

“That is what I have been contending for,” said Staniford; “that is what I meant by spring water. It is that thrilling freshness which charms me in Lurella.” He laughed. “Have you converted her to your spectacular faith, yet?” Dunham blushed. “You have tried,” continued Staniford. “Tell me about it!”

“I will not talk with you on such matters,” said Dunham, “till you know how to treat serious things seriously.”

“I shall know how when I realize that they are serious with you. Well, I don’t object to a woman’s thinking strongly on religious subjects: it’s the only safe ground for her strong thinking, and even there she had better feel strongly. Did you succeed in convincing her that Archbishop Laud was a saint incompris, and the good King Charles a blessed martyr.”

Dunham did not answer till he had choked down some natural resentment. He had, several years earlier, forsaken the pale Unitarian worship of his family, because, Staniford always said, he had such a feeling for color, and had adopted an extreme tint of ritualism. It was rumored at one time, before his engagement to Miss Hibbard, that he was going to unite with a celibate brotherhood; he went regularly into retreat at certain seasons, to the vast entertainment of his friend; and, within the bounds of good taste, he was a zealous propagandist of his faith, of which he had the practical virtues in high degree. “I hope,” he said presently, “that I know how to respect convictions, even of those adhering to the Church in Error.”

Staniford laughed again. “I see you have not converted Lurella. Well, I like that in her, too. I wish I could have the arguments, pro and con. It would have been amusing. I suppose,” he pondered aloud, “that she is a Calvinist of the deepest dye, and would regard me as a lost spirit for being outside of her church. She would look down upon me from one height, as I look down upon her from another. And really, as far as personal satisfaction in superiority goes, she might have the advantage of me. That’s very curious, very interesting.”

As the first week wore away, the wonted incidents of a sea voyage lent their variety to the life on board. One day the ship ran into a school of whales, which remained heavily thumping and lolling about in her course, and blowing jets of water into the air, like so many breaks in garden hose, Staniford suggested. At another time some flying-fish came on board. The sailors caught a dolphin, and they promised a shark, by and by. All these things were turned to account for the young girl’s amusement, as if they had happened for her. The dolphin died that she might wonder and pity his beautiful death; the cook fried her some of the flying-fish; some one was on the lookout to detect even porpoises for her. A sail in the offing won the discoverer envy when he pointed it out to her; a steamer, celebrity. The captain ran a point out of his course to speak to a vessel, that she might be able to tell what speaking a ship at sea was like.

At table the stores which the young men had laid in for private use became common luxuries, and she fared sumptuously every day upon dainties which she supposed were supplied by the ship, — delicate jellies and canned meats and syruped fruits; and, if she wondered at anything, she must have wondered at the scrupulous abstinence with which Captain Jenness, seconded by Mr. Watterson, refused the luxuries which his bounty provided them, and at the constancy with which Staniford declined some of these dishes, and Hicks declined others. Shortly after the latter began more distinctly to be tolerated, he appeared one day on deck with a steamer-chair in his hand, and offered it to Lydia’s use, where she sat on a stool by the bulwark. After that, as she reclined in this chair, wrapped in her red shawl, and provided with a book or some sort of becoming handiwork, she was even more picturesquely than before the centre about which the ship’s pride and chivalrous sentiment revolved. They were Americans, and they knew how to worship a woman.

Staniford did not seek occasions to please and amuse her, as the others did. When they met, as they must, three times a day, at table, he took his part in the talk, and now and then addressed her a perfunctory civility. He imagined that she disliked him, and he interested himself in imagining the ignorant grounds of her dislike. “A woman,” he said, “must always dislike some one in company; it’s usually another woman; as there’s none on board, I accept her enmity with meekness.” Dunham wished to persuade him that he was mistaken. “Don’t try to comfort me, Dunham,” he replied. “I find a pleasure in being detested which is inconceivable to your amiable bosom.”

Dunham turned to go below, from where they stood at the head of the cabin stairs. Staniford looked round, and saw Lydia, whom they had kept from coming up; she must have heard him. He took his cigar from his mouth, and caught up a stool, which he placed near the ship’s side, where Lydia usually sat, and without waiting for her concurrence got a stool for himself, and sat down with her.

“Well, Miss Blood,” he said, “it’s Saturday afternoon at last, and we’re at the end of our first week. Has it seemed very long to you?”

Lydia’s color was bright with consciousness, but the glance she gave Staniford showed him looking tranquilly and honestly at her. “Yes,” she said, “it has seemed long.”

“That’s merely the strangeness of everything. There’s nothing like local familiarity to make the time pass, — except monotony; and one gets both at sea. Next week will go faster than this, and we shall all be at Trieste before we know it. Of course we shall have a storm or two, and that will retard us in fact as well as fancy. But you wouldn’t feel that you’d been at sea if you hadn’t had a storm.”

He knew that his tone was patronizing, but he had theorized the girl so much with a certain slight in his mind that he was not able at once to get the tone which he usually took towards women. This might not, indeed, have pleased some women any better than patronage: it mocked while it caressed all their little pretenses and artificialities; he addressed them as if they must be in the joke of themselves, and did not expect to be taken seriously. At the same time he liked them greatly, and would not on any account have had the silliest of them different from what she was. He did not seek them as Dunham did; their society was not a matter of life or death with him; but he had an elder-brotherly kindness for the whole sex.

Lydia waited awhile for him to say something more, but he added nothing, and she observed, with a furtive look: “I presume you’ve seen some very severe storms at sea.”

“No,” Staniford answered, “I haven’t. I’ve been over several times, but I’ve never seen anything alarming. I’ve experienced the ordinary seasickening tempestuousness.”

“Have you — have you ever been in Italy?” asked Lydia, after another pause.

“Yes,” he said, “twice; I’m very fond of Italy.” He spoke of it in a familiar tone that might well have been discouraging to one of her total unacquaintance with it. Presently he added of his own motion, looking at her with his interest in her as a curious study, “You’re going to Venice, I think Mr. Dunham told me.”

“Yes,” said Lydia.

“Well, I think it’s rather a pity that you shouldn’t arrive there directly, without the interposition of Trieste.” He scanned her yet more closely, but with a sort of absence in his look, as if he addressed some ideal of her.

“Why?” asked Lydia, apparently pushed to some self-assertion by this way of being looked and talked at.

“It’s the strangest place in the world,” said Staniford; and then he mused again. “But I suppose—” He did not go on, and the word fell again to Lydia.

“I’m going to visit my aunt, who is staying there. She was where I live, last summer, and she told us about it. But I couldn’t seem to understand it.”

“No one can understand it, without seeing it.”

“I’ve read some descriptions of it,” Lydia ventured.

“They’re of no use, — the books.”

“Is Trieste a strange place, too?”

“It’s strange, as a hundred other places are, — and it’s picturesque; but there’s only one Venice.”

“I’m afraid sometimes,” she faltered, as if his manner in regard to this peculiar place had been hopelessly exclusive, “that it will be almost too strange.”

“Oh, that’s another matter,” said Staniford. “I confess I should be rather curious to know whether you liked Venice. I like it, but I can imagine myself sympathizing with people who detested it, — if they said so. Let me see what will give you some idea of it. Do you know Boston well?”

“No; I’ve only been there twice,” Lydia acknowledged.

“Then you’ve never seen the Back Bay by night, from the Long Bridge. Well, let me see—”

“I’m afraid,” interposed Lydia, “that I’ve not been about enough for you to give me an idea from other places. We always go to Greenfield to do our trading; and I’ve been to Keene and Springfield a good many times.”

“I’m sorry to say I haven’t,” said Staniford. “But I’ll tell you: Venice looks like an inundated town. If you could imagine those sunset clouds yonder turned marble, you would have Venice as she is at sunset. You must first think of the sea when you try to realize the place. If you don’t find the sea too strange, you won’t find Venice so.”

“I wish it would ever seem half as home-like!” cried the girl.

“Then you find the ship — I’m glad you find the ship — home-like,” said Staniford, tentatively.

“Oh, yes; everything is so convenient and pleasant. It seems sometimes as if I had always lived here.”

“Well, that’s very nice,” assented Staniford, rather blankly. “Some people feel a little queer at sea — in the beginning. And you haven’t — at all?” He could not help this leading question, yet he knew its meanness, and felt remorse for it.

“Oh, I did, at first,” responded the girl, but went no farther; and Staniford was glad of it. After all, why should he care to know what was in her mind?

“Captain Jenness,” he merely said, “understands making people at home.”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” assented Lydia. “And Mr. Watterson is very agreeable, and Mr. Mason. I didn’t suppose sailors were so. What soft, mild voices they have!”

“That’s the speech of most of the Down East coast people.”

“Is it? I like it better than our voices. Our voices are so sharp and high, at home.”

“It’s hard to believe that,” said Staniford, with a smile.

Lydia looked at him. “Oh, I wasn’t born in South Bradfield. I was ten years old when I went there to live.”

“Where were you born, Miss Blood?” he asked.

“In California. My father had gone out for his health, but he died there.”

“Oh!” said Staniford. He had a book in his hand, and he began to scribble a little sketch of Lydia’s pose, on a fly-leaf. She looked round and saw it. “You’ve detected me,” he said; “I haven’t any right to keep your likeness, now. I must make you a present of this work of art, Miss Blood.” He finished the sketch with some ironical flourishes, and made as if to tear out the leaf.

“Oh!” cried Lydia, simply, “you will spoil the book!”

“Then the book shall go with the picture, if you’ll let it,” said Staniford.

“Do you mean to give it to me?” she asked, with surprise.

“That was my munificent intention. I want to write your name in it. What’s the initial of your first name, Miss Blood?”

“L, thank you,” said Lydia.

Staniford gave a start. “No!” he exclaimed. It seemed a fatality.

“My name is Lydia,” persisted the girl. “What letter should it begin with?”

“Oh — oh, I knew Lydia began with an L,” stammered Staniford, “but I — I — I thought your first name was—”

“What?” asked Lydia sharply.

“I don’t know. Lily,” he answered guiltily.

“Lily Blood!” cried the girl. “Lydia is bad enough; but Lily Blood! They couldn’t have been such fools!”

“I beg your pardon. Of course not. I don’t know how I could have got the idea. It was one of those impressions — hallucinations—” Staniford found himself in an attitude of lying excuse towards the simple girl, over whom he had been lording it in satirical fancy ever since he had seen her, and meekly anxious that she should not be vexed with him. He began to laugh at his predicament, and she smiled at his mistake. “What is the date?” he asked.

“The 15th,” she said; and he wrote under the sketch, Lydia Blood. Ship Aroostook, August 15, 1874, and handed it to her, with a bow surcharged with gravity.

She took it, and regarded the picture without comment.

“Ah!” said Staniford, “I see that you know how bad my sketch is. You sketch.”

“No, I don’t know how to draw,” replied Lydia.

“You criticise.”

“No.”

“So glad,” said Staniford. He began to like this. A young man must find pleasure in sitting alone near a pretty young girl, and talking with her about herself and himself, no matter how plain and dull her speech is; and Staniford, though he found Lydia as blankly unresponsive as might be to the flattering irony of his habit, amused himself in realizing that here suddenly he was almost upon the terms of window-seat flirtation with a girl whom lately he had treated with perfect indifference, and just now with fatherly patronage. The situation had something more even than the usual window-seat advantages; it had qualities as of a common shipwreck, of their being cast away on a desolate island together. He felt more than ever that he must protect this helpless loveliness, since it had begun to please his imagination. “You don’t criticise,” he said. “Is that because you are so amiable? I’m sure you could, if you would.”

“No,” returned Lydia; “I don’t really know. But I’ve often wished I did know.”

“Then you didn’t teach drawing, in your school?”

“How did you know I had a school?” asked Lydia quickly.

He disliked to confess his authority, because he disliked the authority, but he said, “Mr. Hicks told us.”

“Mr. Hicks!” Lydia gave a little frown as of instinctive displeasure, which gratified Staniford.

“Yes; the cabin-boy told him. You see, we are dreadful gossips on the Aroostook, — though there are so few ladies—” It had slipped from him, but it seemed to have no personal slant for Lydia.

“Oh, yes; I told Thomas,” she said. “No; it’s only a country school. Once I thought I should go down to the State Normal School, and study drawing there; but I never did. Are you — are you a painter, Mr. Staniford?”

He could not recollect that she had pronounced his name before; he thought it came very winningly from her lips. “No, I’m not a painter. I’m not anything.” He hesitated; then he added recklessly, “I’m a farmer.”

“A farmer?” Lydia looked incredulous, but grave.

“Yes; I’m a horny-handed son of the soil. I’m a cattle-farmer; I’m a sheep-farmer; I don’t know which. One day I’m the one, and the next day I’m the other.” Lydia looked mystified, and Staniford continued: “I mean that I have no profession, and that sometimes I think of going into farming, out West.”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

“How should I like it? Give me an opinion, Miss Blood.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” answered the girl.

“You would never have dreamt that I was a farmer, would you?”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Lydia, honestly. “It’s very hard work.”

“And I don’t look fond of hard work?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“And I’ve no right to press you for your meaning.”

“What I meant was — I mean — Perhaps if you had never tried it you didn’t know what very hard work it was. Some of the summer boarders used to think our farmers had easy times.”

“I never was a summer boarder of that description. I know that farming is hard work, and I’m going into it because I dislike it. What do you think of that as a form of self-sacrifice?”

“I don’t see why any one should sacrifice himself uselessly.”

“You don’t? You have very little conception of martyrdom. Do you like teaching school?”

“No,” said Lydia promptly.

“Why do you teach, then?” Staniford had blundered. He knew why she taught, and he felt instantly that he had hurt her pride, more sensitive than that of a more sophisticated person, who would have had no scruple in saying that she did it because she was poor. He tried to retrieve himself. “Of course, I understand that school-teaching is useful self-sacrifice.” He trembled lest she should invent some pretext for leaving him; he could not afford to be left at a disadvantage. “But do you know, I would no more have taken you for a teacher than you me for a farmer.”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

He could not tell whether she was appeased or not, and he rather feared not. “You don’t ask why. And I asked you why at once.”

Lydia laughed. “Well, why?”

“Oh, that’s a secret. I’ll tell you one of these days.” He had really no reason; he said this to gain time. He was always honest in his talk with men, but not always with women.

“I suppose I look very young,” said Lydia. “I used to be afraid of the big boys.”

“If the boys were big enough,” interposed Staniford, “they must have been afraid of you.”

Lydia said, as if she had not understood, “I had hard work to get my certificate. But I was older than I looked.”

“That is much better,” remarked Staniford, “than being younger than you look. I am twenty-eight, and people take me for thirty-four. I’m a prematurely middle-aged man. I wish you would tell me, Miss Blood, a little about South Bradfield. I’ve been trying to make out whether I was ever there. I tramped nearly everywhere when I was a student. What sort of people are they there?”

“Oh, they are very nice people,” said Lydia.

“Do you like them?”

“I never thought whether I did. They are nearly all old. Their children have gone away; they don’t seem to live; they are just staying. When I first came there I was a little girl. One day I went into the grave-yard and counted the stones; there were three times as many as there were living persons in the village.”

“I think I know the kind of place,” said Staniford. “I suppose you’re not very homesick?”

“Not for the place,” answered Lydia, evasively.

“Of course,” Staniford hastened to add, “you miss your own family circle.” To this she made no reply. It is the habit of people bred like her to remain silent for want of some sort of formulated comment upon remarks to which they assent.

Staniford fell into a musing mood, which was without visible embarrassment to the young girl, who must have been inured to much severer silences in the society of South Bradfield. He remained staring at her throughout his reverie, which in fact related to her. He was thinking what sort of an old maid she would have become if she had remained in that village. He fancied elements of hardness and sharpness in her which would have asserted themselves as the joyless years went on, like the bony structure of her face as the softness of youth left it. She was saved from that, whatever was to be her destiny in Italy. From South Bradfield to Venice, — what a prodigious transition! It seemed as if it must transfigure her. “Miss Blood,” he exclaimed, “I wish I could be with you when you first see Venice!”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

Even the interrogative comment, with the rising inflection, could not chill his enthusiasm. “It is really the greatest sight in the world.”

Lydia had apparently no comment to make on this fact. She waited tranquilly a while before she said, “My father used to talk about Italy to me when I was little. He wanted to go. My mother said afterwards — after she had come home with me to South Bradfield — that she always believed he would have lived if he had gone there. He had consumption.”

“Oh!” said Staniford softly. Then he added, with the tact of his sex, “Miss Blood, you mustn’t take cold, sitting here with me. This wind is chilly. Shall I go below and get you some more wraps?”

“No, thank you,” said Lydia; “I believe I will go down, now.”

She went below to her room, and then came out into the cabin with some sewing at which she sat and stitched by the lamp. The captain was writing in his log-book; Dunham and Hicks were playing checkers together. Staniford, from a corner of a locker, looked musingly upon this curious family circle. It was not the first time that its occupations had struck him oddly. Sometimes when they were all there together, Dunham read aloud. Hicks knew tricks of legerdemain which he played cleverly. The captain told some very good stories, and led off in the laugh. Lydia always sewed and listened. She did not seem to find herself strangely placed, and her presence characterized all that was said and done with a charming innocence. As a bit of life, it was as pretty as it was quaint.

“Really,” Staniford said to Dunham, as they turned in, that night, “she has domesticated us.”

“Yes,” assented Dunham with enthusiasm; “isn’t she a nice girl?”

“She’s intolerably passive. Or not passive, either. She says what she thinks, but she doesn’t seem to have thought of many things. Did she ever tell you about her father?”

“No,” said Dunham.

“I mean about his dying of consumption?”

“No, she never spoke of him to me. Was he—”

“Um. It appears that we have been upon terms of confidence, then.” Staniford paused, with one boot in his hand. “I should never have thought it.”

“What was her father?” asked Dunham.

“Upon my word, I don’t know. I didn’t seem to get beyond elemental statements of intimate fact with her. He died in California, where she was born; and he always had a longing to go to Italy. That was rather pretty.”

“It’s very touching, I think.”

“Yes, of course. We might fancy this about Lurella: that she has a sort of piety in visiting the scenes that her father wished to visit, and that — Well, anything is predicable of a girl who says so little and looks so much. She’s certainly very handsome; and I’m bound to say that her room could not have been better than her company, so far.”

X.

The dress that Lydia habitually wore was one which her aunt Maria studied from the costume of a summer boarder, who had spent a preceding summer at the sea-shore, and who found her yachting-dress perfectly adapted to tramping over the South Bradfield hills. Thus reverting to its original use on shipboard, the costume looked far prettier on Lydia than it had on the summer boarder from whose unconscious person it had been plagiarized. It was of the darkest blue flannel, and was fitly set off with those bright ribbons at the throat which women know how to dispose there according to their complexions. One day the bow was scarlet, and another crimson; Staniford did not know which was better, and disputed the point in vain with Dunham. They all grew to have a taste in such matters. Captain Jenness praised her dress outright, and said that he should tell his girls about it. Lydia, who had always supposed it was a walking costume, remained discreetly silent when the young men recognized its nautical character. She enjoyed its success; she made some little changes in the hat she wore with it, which met the approval of the cabin family; and she tranquilly kept her black silk in reserve for Sunday. She came out to breakfast in it, and it swept the narrow spaces, as she emerged from her state-room, with so rich and deep a murmur that every one looked up. She sustained their united glance with something tenderly deprecatory and appealingly conscious in her manner, much as a very sensitive girl in some new finery meets the eyes of her brothers when she does not know whether to cry or laugh at what they will say. Thomas almost dropped a plate. “Goodness!” he said, helplessly expressing the public sentiment in regard to a garment of which he alone had been in the secret. No doubt it passed his fondest dreams of its splendor; it fitted her as the sheath of the flower fits the flower.

Captain Jenness looked hard at her, but waited a decent season after saying grace before offering his compliment, which he did in drawing the carving-knife slowly across the steel. “Well, Miss Blood, that’s right!” Lydia blushed richly, and the young men made their obeisances across the table.

The flushes and pallors chased each other over her face, and the sight of her pleasure in being beautiful charmed Staniford. “If she were used to worship she would have taken our adoration more arrogantly,” he said to his friend when they went on deck after breakfast. “I can place her; but one’s circumstance doesn’t always account for one in America, and I can’t make out yet whether she’s ever been praised for being pretty. Some of our hill-country people would have felt like hushing up her beauty, as almost sinful, and some would have gone down before it like Greeks. I can’t tell whether she knows it all or not; but if you suppose her unconscious till now, it’s pathetic. And black silks must be too rare in her life not to be celebrated by a high tumult of inner satisfaction. I’m glad we bowed down to the new dress.”

“Yes,” assented Dunham, with an uneasy absence; “but — Staniford, I should like to propose to Captain Jenness our having service this morning. It is the eleventh Sunday after—”

“Ah, yes!” said Staniford. “It is Sunday, isn’t it? I thought we had breakfast rather later than usual. All over the Christian world, on land and sea, there is this abstruse relation between a late breakfast and religious observances.”

Dunham looked troubled. “I wish you wouldn’t talk that way, Staniford, and I hope you won’t say anything—”

“To interfere with your proposition? My dear fellow, I am at least a gentleman.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dunham, gratefully.

Staniford even went himself to the captain with Dunham’s wish; it is true the latter assumed the more disagreeable part of proposing the matter to Hicks, who gave a humorous assent, as one might to a joke of doubtful feasibility.

Dunham gratified both his love for social management and his zeal for his church in this organization of worship; and when all hands were called aft, and stood round in decorous silence, he read the lesson for the day, and conducted the service with a gravity astonishing to the sailors, who had taken him for a mere dandy. Staniford bore his part in the responses from the same prayer-book with Captain Jenness, who kept up a devout, inarticulate under-growl, and came out strong on particular words when he got his bearings through his spectacles. Hicks and the first officer silently shared another prayer-book, and Lydia offered half hers to Mr. Mason.

When the hymn was given out, she waited while an experimental search for the tune took place among the rest. They were about to abandon the attempt, when she lifted her voice and began to sing. She sang as she did in the meeting-house at South Bradfield, and her voice seemed to fill all the hollow height and distance; it rang far off like a mermaid’s singing, on high like an angel’s; it called with the same deep appeal to sense and soul alike. The sailors stood rapt; Dunham kept up a show of singing for the church’s sake. The others made no pretense of looking at the words; they looked at her, and she began to falter, hearing herself alone. Then Staniford struck in again wildly, and the sea-voices lent their powerful discord, while the girl’s contralto thrilled through all.

“Well, Miss Blood,” said the captain, when the service had ended in that subordination of the spiritual to the artistic interest which marks the process and the close of so much public worship in our day, “you’ve given us a surprise. I guess we shall keep you pretty busy with our calls for music, after this.”

“She is a genius!” observed Staniford at his first opportunity with Dunham. “I knew there must be something the matter. Of course she’s going out to school her voice; and she hasn’t strained it in idle babble about her own affairs! I must say that Lu — Miss Blood’s power of holding her tongue commands my homage. Was it her little coup to wait till we got into that hopeless hobble before she struck in?”

“Coup? For shame, Staniford! Coup at such a time!”

“Well, well! I don’t say so. But for the theatre one can’t begin practicing these effects too soon. Really, that voice puts a new complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she’ll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don’t know; I think I preferred the idyllic flavor I was beginning to find in the presence of the ordinary, futureless young girl, voyaging under the chaperonage of her own innocence, — the Little Sister of the Whole Ship. But this crepusculant prima donna — no, I don’t like it. Though it explains some things. These splendid creatures are never sent half equipped into the world. I fancy that where there’s an operatic voice, there’s an operatic soul to go with it. Well, La Sanguinelli will wear me out, yet! Suggest some new topic, Dunham; talk of something else, for heaven’s sake!”

“Do you suppose,” asked Dunham, “that she would like to help get up some musicales, to pass away the time?”

“Oh, do you call that talking of something else? What an insatiate organizer you are! You organize shuffleboard; you organize public worship; you want to organize musicales. She would have to do all your music for you.”

“I think she would like to go in for it,” said Dunham. “It must be a pleasure to exercise such a gift as that, and now that it’s come out in the way it has, it would be rather awkward for us not to recognize it.”

Staniford refused point-blank to be a party to the new enterprise, and left Dunham to his own devices at dinner, where he proposed the matter.

“If you had my Persis here, now,” observed Captain Jenness, “with her parlor organ, you could get along.”

“I wish Miss Jenness was here,” said Dunham, politely. “But we must try to get on as it is. With Miss Blood’s voice to start with, nothing ought to discourage us.” Dunham had a thin and gentle pipe of his own, and a fairish style in singing, but with his natural modesty he would not offer himself as a performer except in default of all others. “Don’t you sing, Mr. Hicks?”

“Anything to oblige a friend,” returned Hicks. “But I don’t sing — before Miss Blood.”

“Miss Blood,” said Staniford, listening in ironic safety, “you overawe us all. I never did sing, but I think I should want to make an effort if you were not by.”

“But don’t you — don’t you play something, anything?” persisted Dunham, in desperate appeal to Hicks.

“Well, yes,” the latter admitted, “I play the flute a little.”

“Flutes on water!” said Staniford. Hicks looked at him in sulky dislike, but as if resolved not to be put down by him.

“And have you got your flute with you?” demanded Dunham, joyously.

“Yes, I have,” replied Hicks.

“Then we are all right. I think I can carry a part, and if you will play to Miss Blood’s singing—”

“Try it this evening, if you like,” said the other.

“Well, ah — I don’t know. Perhaps — we hadn’t better begin this evening.”

Staniford laughed at Dunham’s embarrassment. “You might have a sacred concert, and Mr. Hicks could represent the shawms and cymbals with his flute.”

Dunham looked sorry for Staniford’s saying this. Captain Jenness stared at him, as if his taking the names of these scriptural instruments in vain were a kind of blasphemy, and Lydia seemed puzzled and a little troubled.

“I didn’t think of its being Sunday,” said Hicks, with what Staniford felt to be a cunning assumption of manly frankness, “or any more Sunday than usual; seems as if we had had a month of Sundays already since we sailed. I’m not much on religion myself, but I shouldn’t like to interfere with other people’s principles.”

Staniford was vexed with himself for his scornful pleasantry, and vexed with the others for taking it so seriously and heavily, and putting him so unnecessarily in the wrong. He was angry with Dunham, and he said to Hicks, “Very just sentiments.”

“I am glad you like them,” replied Hicks, with sullen apprehension of the offensive tone.

Staniford turned to Lydia. “I suppose that in South Bradfield your Sabbath is over at sundown on Sunday evening.”

“That used to be the custom,” answered the girl. “I’ve heard my grandfather tell of it.”

“Oh, yes,” interposed Captain Jenness. “They used to keep Saturday night down our way, too. I can remember when I was a boy. It came pretty hard to begin so soon, but it seemed to kind of break it, after all, having a night in.”

The captain did not know what Staniford began to laugh at. “Our Puritan ancestors knew just how much human nature could stand, after all. We did not have an uninterrupted Sabbath till the Sabbath had become much milder. Is that it?”

The captain had probably no very clear notion of what this meant, but simply felt it to be a critical edge of some sort. “I don’t know as you can have too much religion,” he remarked. “I’ve seen some pretty rough customers in the church, but I always thought, What would they be out of it!”

“Very true!” said Staniford, smiling. He wanted to laugh again, but he liked the captain too well to do that; and then he began to rage in his heart at the general stupidity which had placed him in the attitude of mocking at religion, a thing he would have loathed to do. It seemed to him that Dunham was answerable for his false position. “But we shall not see the right sort of Sabbath till Mr. Dunham gets his Catholic church fully going,” he added.

They all started, and looked at Dunham as good Protestants must when some one whom they would never have suspected of Catholicism turns out to be a Catholic. Dunham cast a reproachful glance at his friend, but said simply, “I am a Catholic, — that is true; but I do not admit the pretensions of the Bishop of Rome.”

The rest of the company apparently could not follow him in making this distinction; perhaps some of them did not quite know who the Bishop of Rome was. Lydia continued to look at him in fascination; Hicks seemed disposed to whistle, if such a thing were allowable; Mr. Watterson devoutly waited for the captain. “Well,” observed the captain at last, with the air of giving the devil his due, “I’ve seen some very good people among the Catholics.”

“That’s so, Captain Jenness,” said the first officer.

“I don’t see,” said Lydia, without relaxing her gaze, “why, if you are a Catholic, you read the service of a Protestant church.”

“It is not a Protestant church,” answered Dunham, gently, “as I have tried to explain to you.”

“The Episcopalian?” demanded Captain Jenness.

“The Episcopalian,” sweetly reiterated Dunham.

“I should like to know what kind of a church it is, then,” said Captain Jenness, triumphantly.

“An Apostolic church.”

Captain Jenness rubbed his nose, as if this were a new kind of church to him.

“Founded by Saint Henry VIII. himself,” interjected Staniford.

“No, Staniford,” said Dunham, with a soft repressiveness. And now a threatening light of zeal began to burn in his kindly eyes. These souls had plainly been given into his hands for ecclesiastical enlightenment. “If our friends will allow me, I will explain—”

Staniford’s shaft had recoiled upon his own head. “O Lord!” he cried, getting up from the table, “I can’t stand that!” The others regarded him, as he felt, even to that weasel of a Hicks, as a sheep of uncommon blackness. He went on deck, and smoked a cigar without relief. He still heard the girl’s voice in singing; and he still felt in his nerves the quality of latent passion in it which had thrilled him when she sang. His thought ran formlessly upon her future, and upon what sort of being was already fated to waken her to those possibilities of intense suffering and joy which he imagined in her. A wound at his heart, received long before, hurt vaguely; and he felt old.

XI.

No one said anything more of the musicales, and the afternoon and evening wore away without general talk. Each seemed willing to keep apart from the rest. Dunham suffered Lydia to come on deck alone after tea, and Staniford found her there, in her usual place, when he went up some time later. He approached her at once, and said, smiling down into her face, to which the moonlight gave a pale mystery, “Miss Blood, did you think I was very wicked to-day at dinner?”

Lydia looked away, and waited a moment before she spoke. “I don’t know,” she said. Then, impulsively, “Did you?” she asked.

“No, honestly, I don’t think I was,” answered Staniford. “But I seemed to leave that impression on the company. I felt a little nasty, that was all; and I tried to hurt Mr. Dunham’s feelings. But I shall make it right with him before I sleep; he knows that. He’s used to having me repent at leisure. Do you ever walk Sunday night?”

“Yes, sometimes,” said Lydia interrogatively.

“I’m glad of that. Then I shall not offend against your scruples if I ask you to join me in a little ramble, and you will refuse from purely personal considerations. Will you walk with me?”

“Yes.” Lydia rose.

“And will you take my arm?” asked Staniford, a little surprised at her readiness.

“Thank you.”

She put her hand upon his arm, confidently enough, and they began to walk up and down the stretch of open deck together.

“Well,” said Staniford, “did Mr. Dunham convince you all?”

“I think he talks beautifully about it,” replied Lydia, with quaint stiffness.

“I am glad you see what a very good fellow he is. I have a real affection for Dunham.”

“Oh, yes, he’s good. At first it surprised me. I mean—”

“No, no,” Staniford quickly interrupted, “why did it surprise you to find Dunham good?”

“I don’t know. You don’t expect a person to be serious who is so — so—”

“Handsome?”

“No, — so — I don’t know just how to say it: fashionable.”

Staniford laughed. “Why, Miss Blood, you’re fashionably dressed yourself, not to go any farther, and you’re serious.”

“It’s different with a man,” the girl explained.

“Well, then, how about me?” asked Staniford. “Am I too well dressed to be expected to be serious?”

“Mr. Dunham always seems in earnest,” Lydia answered, evasively.

“And you think one can’t be in earnest without being serious?” Lydia suffered one of those silences to ensue in which Staniford had already found himself helpless. He knew that he should be forced to break it: and he said, with a little spiteful mocking, “I suppose the young men of South Bradfield are both serious and earnest.”

“How?” asked Lydia.

“The young men of South Bradfield.”

“I told you that there were none. They all go away.”

“Well, then, the young men of Springfield, of Keene, of Greenfield.”

“I can’t tell. I am not acquainted there.”

Staniford had begun to have a disagreeable suspicion that her ready consent to walk up and down with a young man in the moonlight might have come from a habit of the kind. But it appeared that her fearlessness was like that of wild birds in those desert islands where man has never come. The discovery gave him pleasure out of proportion to its importance, and he paced back and forth in a silence that no longer chafed. Lydia walked very well, and kept his step with rhythmic unison, as if they were walking to music together. “That’s the time in her pulses,” he thought, and then he said, “Then you don’t have a great deal of social excitement, I suppose, — dancing, and that kind of thing? Though perhaps you don’t approve of dancing?”

“Oh, yes, I like it. Sometimes the summer boarders get up little dances at the hotel.”

“Oh, the summer boarders!” Staniford had overlooked them. “The young men get them up, and invite the ladies?” he pursued.

“There are no young men, generally, among the summer boarders. The ladies dance together. Most of the gentlemen are old, or else invalids.”

“Oh!” said Staniford.

“At the Mill Village, where I’ve taught two winters, they have dances sometimes, — the mill hands do.”

“And do you go?”

“No. They are nearly all French Canadians and Irish people.”

“Then you like dancing because there are no gentlemen to dance with?”

“There are gentlemen at the picnics.”

“The picnics?”

“The teachers’ picnics. They have them every summer, in a grove by the pond.”

There was, then, a high-browed, dyspeptic high-school principal, and the desert-island theory was probably all wrong. It vexed Staniford, when he had so nearly got the compass of her social life, to find this unexplored corner in it.

“And I suppose you are leaving very agreeable friends among the teachers?”

“Some of them are pleasant. But I don’t know them very well. I’ve only been to one of the picnics.”

Staniford drew a long, silent breath. After all, he knew everything. He mechanically dropped a little the arm on which her hand rested, that it might slip farther within. Her timid remoteness had its charm, and he fell to thinking, with amusement, how she who was so subordinate to him was, in the dimly known sphere in which he had been groping to find her, probably a person of authority and consequence. It satisfied a certain domineering quality in him to have reduced her to this humble attitude, while it increased the protecting tenderness he was beginning to have for her. His mind went off further upon this matter of one’s different attitudes toward different persons; he thought of men, and women too, before whom he should instantly feel like a boy, if he could be confronted with them, even in his present lordliness of mood. In a fashion of his when he convicted himself of anything, he laughed aloud. Lydia shrank a little from him, in question. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was laughing at something I happened to think of. Do you ever find yourself struggling very hard to be what you think people think you are?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Lydia. “But I thought no one else did.”

“Everybody does the thing that we think no one else does,” said Staniford, sententiously.

“I don’t know whether I quite like it,” said Lydia. “It seems like hypocrisy. It used to worry me. Sometimes I wondered if I had any real self. I seemed to be just what people made me, and a different person to each.”

“I’m glad to hear it, Miss Blood. We are companions in hypocrisy. As we are such nonentities we shall not affect each other at all.” Lydia laughed. “Don’t you think so? What are you laughing at? I told you what I was laughing at!”

“But I didn’t ask you.”

“You wished to know.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then you ought to tell me what I wish to know.”

“It’s nothing,” said Lydia. “I thought you were mistaken in what you said.”

“Oh! Then you believe that there’s enough of you to affect me?”

“No.”

“The other way, then?”

She did not answer.

“I’m delighted!” exclaimed Staniford. “I hope I don’t exert an uncomfortable influence. I should be very unhappy to think so.” Lydia stooped side-wise, away from him, to get a fresh hold of her skirt, which she was carrying in her right hand, and she hung a little more heavily upon his arm. “I hope I make you think better of yourself, — very self-satisfied, very conceited even.”

“No,” said Lydia.

“You pique my curiosity beyond endurance. Tell me how I make you feel.”

She looked quickly round at him, as if to see whether he was in earnest. “Why, it’s nothing,” she said. “You made me feel as if you were laughing at everybody.”

It flatters a man to be accused of sarcasm by the other sex, and Staniford was not superior to the soft pleasure of the reproach. “Do you think I make other people feel so, too?”

“Mr. Dunham said—”

“Oh! Mr. Dunham has been talking me over with you, has he? What did he tell you of me? There is nobody like a true friend for dealing an underhand blow at one’s reputation. Wait till you hear my account of Dunham! What did he say?”

“He said that was only your way of laughing at yourself.”

“The traitor! What did you say?”

“I don’t know that I said anything.”

“You were reserving your opinion for my own hearing?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you thought? It might be of great use to me. I’m in earnest, now; I’m serious. Will you tell me?”

“Yes, some time,” said Lydia, who was both amused and mystified at this persistence.

“When? To-morrow?”

“Oh, that’s too soon. When I get to Venice!”

“Ah! That’s a subterfuge. You know we shall part in Trieste.”

“I thought,” said Lydia, “you were coming to Venice, too.”

“Oh, yes, but I shouldn’t be able to see you there.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Why, because—” He was near telling the young girl who hung upon his arm, and walked up and down with him in the moonlight, that in the wicked Old World towards which they were sailing young people could not meet save in the sight and hearing of their elders, and that a confidential analysis of character would be impossible between them there. The wonder of her being where she was, as she was, returned upon him with a freshness that it had been losing in the custom of the week past. “Because you will be so much taken up with your friends,” he said, lamely. He added quickly, “There’s one thing I should like to know, Miss Blood: did you hear what Mr. Dunham and I were saying, last night, when we stood in the gangway and kept you from coming up?”

Lydia waited a moment. Then she said, “Yes. I couldn’t help hearing it.”

“That’s all right. I don’t care for your hearing what I said. But — I hope it wasn’t true?”

“I couldn’t understand what you meant by it,” she answered, evasively, but rather faintly.

“Thanks,” said Staniford. “I didn’t mean anything. It was merely the guilty consciousness of a generally disagreeable person.” They walked up and down many turns without saying anything. She could not have made any direct protest, and it pleased him that she could not frame any flourishing generalities. “Yes,” Staniford resumed, “I will try to see you as I pass through Venice. And I will come to hear you sing when you come out at Milan.”

“Come out? At Milan?”

“Why, yes! You are going to study at the conservatory in Milan?”

“How did you know that?” demanded Lydia.

“From hearing you to-day. May I tell you how much I liked your singing?”

“My aunt thought I ought to cultivate my voice. But I would never go upon the stage. I would rather sing in a church. I should like that better than teaching.”

“I think you’re quite right,” said Staniford, gravely. “It’s certainly much better to sing in a church than to sing in a theatre. Though I believe the theatre pays best.”

“Oh, I don’t care for that. All I should want would be to make a living.”

The reference to her poverty touched him. It was a confidence, coming from one so reticent, that was of value. He waited a moment and said, “It’s surprising how well we keep our footing here, isn’t it? There’s hardly any swell, but the ship pitches. I think we walk better together than alone.”

“Yes,” answered Lydia, “I think we do.”

“You mustn’t let me tire you. I’m indefatigable.”

“Oh, I’m not tired. I like it, — walking.”

“Do you walk much at home?”

“Not much. It’s a pretty good walk to the school-house.”

“Oh! Then you like walking at sea better than you do on shore?”

“It isn’t the custom, much. If there were any one else, I should have liked it there. But it’s rather dull, going by yourself.”

“Yes, I understand how that is,” said Staniford, dropping his teasing tone. “It’s stupid. And I suppose it’s pretty lonesome at South Bradfield every way.”

“It is, — winters,” admitted Lydia. “In the summer you see people, at any rate, but in winter there are days and days when hardly any one passes. The snow is banked up everywhere.”

He felt her give an involuntary shiver; and he began to talk to her about the climate to which she was going. It was all stranger to her than he could have realized, and less intelligible. She remembered California very dimly, and she had no experience by which she could compare and adjust his facts. He made her walk up and down more and more swiftly, as he lost himself in the comfort of his own talking and of her listening, and he failed to note the little falterings with which she expressed her weariness.

All at once he halted, and said, “Why, you’re out of breath! I beg your pardon. You should have stopped me. Let us sit down.” He wished to walk across the deck to where the seats were, but she just perceptibly withstood his motion, and he forbore.

“I think I won’t sit down,” she said. “I will go down-stairs.” She began withdrawing her hand from his arm. He put his right hand upon hers, and when it came out of his arm it remained in his hand.

“I’m afraid you won’t walk with me again,” said Staniford. “I’ve tired you shamefully.”

“Oh, not at all!”

“And you will?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks. You’re very amiable.” He still held her hand. He pressed it. The pressure was not returned, but her hand seemed to quiver and throb in his like a bird held there. For the time neither of them spoke, and it seemed a long time. Staniford found himself carrying her hand towards his lips; and she was helplessly, trustingly, letting him.

He dropped her hand, and said, abruptly, “Good-night.”

“Good-night,” she answered, and ceased from his side like a ghost.

XII.

Staniford sat in the moonlight, and tried to think what the steps were that had brought him to this point; but there were no steps of which he was sensible. He remembered thinking the night before that the conditions were those of flirtation; to-night this had not occurred to him. The talk had been of the dullest commonplaces; yet he had pressed her hand and kept it in his, and had been about to kiss it. He bitterly considered the disparity between his present attitude and the stand he had taken when he declared to Dunham that it rested with them to guard her peculiar isolation from anything that she could remember with pain or humiliation when she grew wiser in the world. He recalled his rage with Hicks, and the insulting condemnation of his bearing towards him ever since; and could Hicks have done worse? He had done better: he had kept away from her; he had let her alone.

That night Staniford slept badly, and woke with a restless longing to see the girl, and to read in her face whatever her thought of him had been. But Lydia did not come out to breakfast. Thomas reported that she had a headache, and that he had already carried her the tea and toast she wanted. “Well, it seems kind of lonesome without her,” said the captain. “It don’t seem as if we could get along.”

It seemed desolate to Staniford, who let the talk flag and fail round him without an effort to rescue it. All the morning he lurked about, keeping out of Dunham’s way, and fighting hard through a dozen pages of a book, to which he struggled to nail his wandering mind. A headache was a little matter, but it might be even less than a headache. He belated himself purposely at dinner, and entered the cabin just as Lydia issued from her stateroom door.

She was pale and looked heavy-eyed. As she lifted her glance to him, she blushed; and he felt the answering red stain his face. When she sat down, the captain patted her on the shoulder with his burly right hand, and said he could not navigate the ship if she got sick. He pressed her to eat of this and that; and when she would not, he said, well, there was no use trying to force an appetite, and that she would be better all the sooner for dieting. Hicks went to his state-room, and came out with a box of guava jelly, from his private stores, and won a triumph enviable in all eyes when Lydia consented to like it with the chicken. Dunham plundered his own and Staniford’s common stock of dainties for her dessert; the first officer agreed and applauded right and left; Staniford alone sat taciturn and inoperative, watching her face furtively. Once her eyes wandered to the side of the table where he and Dunham sat; then she colored and dropped her glance.

He took his book again after dinner, and with his finger between the leaves, at the last-read, unintelligible page, he went out to the bow, and crouched down there to renew the conflict of the morning. It was not long before Dunham followed. He stooped over to lay a hand on either of Staniford’s shoulders.

“What makes you avoid me, old man?” he demanded, looking into Staniford’s face with his frank, kind eyes.

“And I avoid you?” asked Staniford.

“Yes; why?”

“Because I feel rather shabby, I suppose. I knew I felt shabby, but I didn’t know I was avoiding you.”

“Well, no matter. If you feel shabby, it’s all right; but I hate to have you feel shabby.” He got his left hand down into Staniford’s right, and a tacit reconciliation was transacted between them. Dunham looked about for a seat, and found a stool, which he planted in front of Staniford. “Wasn’t it pleasant to have our little lady back at table, again?”

“Very,” said Staniford.

“I couldn’t help thinking how droll it was that a person whom we all considered a sort of incumbrance and superfluity at first should really turn out an object of prime importance to us all. Isn’t it amusing?”

“Very droll.”

“Why, we were quite lost without her, at breakfast. I couldn’t have imagined her taking such a hold upon us all, in so short a time. But she’s a pretty creature, and as good as she’s pretty.”

“I remember agreeing with you on those points before.” Staniford feigned to suppress fatigue.

Dunham observed him. “I know you don’t take so much interest in her as — as the rest of us do, and I wish you did. You don’t know what a lovely nature she is.”

“No?”

“No; and I’m sure you’d like her.”

“Is it important that I should like her? Don’t let your enthusiasm for the sex carry you beyond bounds, Dunham.”

“No, no. Not important, but very pleasant. And I think acquaintance with such a girl would give you some new ideas of women.”

“Oh, my old ones are good enough. Look here, Dunham,” said Staniford, sharply, “what are you after?”

“What makes you think I’m after anything?”

“Because you’re not a humbug, and because I am. My depraved spirit instantly recognized the dawning duplicity of yours. But you’d better be honest. You can’t make the other thing work. What do you want?”

“I want your advice. I want your help, Staniford.”

“I thought so! Coming and forgiving me in that — apostolic manner.”

“Don’t!”

“Well. What do you want my help for? What have you been doing?” Staniford paused, and suddenly added: “Have you been making love to Lurella?” He said this in his ironical manner, but his smile was rather ghastly.

“For shame, Staniford!” cried Dunham. But he reddened violently.

“Then it isn’t with Miss Hibbard that you want my help. I’m glad of that. It would have been awkward. I’m a little afraid of Miss Hibbard. It isn’t every one has your courage, my dear fellow.”

“I haven’t been making love to her,” said Dunham, “but — I—”

“But you what?” demanded Staniford sharply again. There had been less tension of voice in his joking about Miss Hibbard.

“Staniford,” said his friend, “I don’t know whether you noticed her, at dinner, when she looked across to our own side?”

“What did she do?”

“Did you notice that she — well, that she blushed a little?”

Staniford waited a while before he answered, after a gulp, “Yes, I noticed that.”

“Well, I don’t know how to put it exactly, but I’m afraid that I have unwittingly wronged this young girl.”

“Wronged her? What the devil do you mean, Dunham?” cried Staniford, with bitter impatience.

“I’m afraid — I’m afraid — Why, it’s simply this: that in trying to amuse her, and make the time pass agreeably, and relieve her mind, and all that, don’t you know, I’ve given her the impression that I’m — well — interested in her, and that she may have allowed herself — insensibly, you know — to look upon me in that light, and that she may have begun to think — that she may have become—”

“Interested in you?” interrupted Staniford rudely.

“Well — ah — well, that is — ah — well — yes!” cried Dunham, bracing himself to sustain a shout of ridicule. But Staniford did not laugh, and Dunham had courage to go on. “Of course, it sounds rather conceited to say so, but the circumstances are so peculiar that I think we ought to recognize even any possibilities of that sort.”

“Oh, yes,” said Staniford, gravely. “Most women, I believe, are so innocent as to think a man in love when he behaves like a lover. And this one,” he added ruefully, “seems more than commonly ignorant of our ways, — of our infernal shilly-shallying, purposeless no-mindedness. She couldn’t imagine a man — a gentleman — devoting himself to her by the hour, and trying by every art to show his interest and pleasure in her society, without imagining that he wished her to like him, — love him; there’s no half-way about it. She couldn’t suppose him the shallow, dawdling, soulless, senseless ape he really was.” Staniford was quite in a heat by this time, and Dunham listened in open astonishment.

“You are hard upon me,” he said. “Of course, I have been to blame; I know that, I acknowledge it. But my motive, as you know well enough, was never to amuse myself with her, but to contribute in any way I could to her enjoyment and happiness. I—”

“You!” cried Staniford. “What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Dunham, in his turn.

Staniford recollected himself. “I was speaking of abstract flirtation. I was firing into the air.”

“In my case, I don’t choose to call it flirtation,” returned Dunham. “My purpose, I am bound to say, was thoroughly unselfish and kindly.”

“My dear fellow,” said Staniford, with a bitter smile, “there can be no unselfishness and no kindliness between us and young girls, unless we mean business, — love-making. You may be sure that they feel it so, if they don’t understand it so.”

“I don’t agree with you. I don’t believe it. My own experience is that the sweetest and most generous friendships may exist between us, without a thought of anything else. And as to making love, I must beg you to remember that my love has been made once for all. I never dreamt of showing Miss Blood anything but polite attention.”

“Then what are you troubled about?”

“I am troubled—” Dunham stopped helplessly, and Staniford laughed in a challenging, disagreeable way, so that the former perforce resumed:

“I’m troubled about — about her possible misinterpretation.”

“Oh! Then in this case of sweet and generous friendship the party of the second part may have construed the sentiment quite differently! Well, what do you want me to do? Do you want me to take the contract off your hands?”

“You put it grossly,” said Dunham.

“And you put it offensively!” cried the other. “My regard for the young lady is as reverent as yours. You have no right to miscolor my words.”

“Staniford, you are too bad,” said Dunham, hurt even more than angered. “If I’ve come to you in the wrong moment — if you are vexed at anything, I’ll go away, and beg your pardon for boring you.”

Staniford was touched; he looked cordially into his friend’s face. “I was vexed at something, but you never can come to me at the wrong moment, old fellow. I beg your pardon. I see your difficulty plainly enough, and I think you’re quite right in proposing to hold up, — for that’s what you mean, I take it?”

“Yes,” said Dunham, “it is. And I don’t know how she will like it. She will be puzzled and grieved by it. I hadn’t thought seriously about the matter till this morning, when she didn’t come to breakfast. You know I’ve been in the habit of asking her to walk with me every night after tea; but Saturday evening you were with her, and last night I felt sore about the affairs of the day, and rather dull, and I didn’t ask her. I think she noticed it. I think she was hurt.”

“You think so?” said Staniford, peculiarly.

“I might not have thought so,” continued Dunham, “merely because she did not come to breakfast; but her blushing when she looked across at dinner really made me uneasy.”

“Very possibly you’re right.” Staniford mused a while before he spoke again. “Well, what do you wish me to do?”

“I must hold up, as you say, and of course she will feel the difference. I wish — I wish at least you wouldn’t avoid her, Staniford. That’s all. Any little attention from you — I know it bores you — would not only break the loneliness, but it would explain that — that my — attentions didn’t — ah — hadn’t meant anything.”

“Oh!”

“Yes; that it’s common to offer them. And she’s a girl of so much force of character that when she sees the affair in its true light — I suppose I’m to blame! Yes, I ought to have told her at the beginning that I was engaged. But you can’t force a fact of that sort upon a new acquaintance: it looks silly.” Dunham hung his head in self-reproach.

“Well?” asked Staniford.

“Well, that’s all! No, it isn’t all, either. There’s something else troubles me. Our poor little friend is a blackguard, I suppose?”

“Hicks?”

“Yes.”

“You have invited him to be the leader of your orchestra, haven’t you?”

“Oh, don’t, Staniford!” cried Dunham in his helplessness. “I should hate to see her dependent in any degree upon that little cad for society.” Cad was the last English word which Dunham had got himself used to. “That was why I hoped that you wouldn’t altogether neglect her. She’s here, and she’s no choice but to remain. We can’t leave her to herself without the danger of leaving her to Hicks. You see?”

“Well,” said Staniford gloomily, “I’m not sure that you couldn’t leave her to a worse cad than Hicks.” Dunham looked up in question. “To me, for example.”

“Oh, hallo!” cried Dunham.

“I don’t see how I’m to be of any use,” continued the other. “I’m not a squire of dames; I should merely make a mess of it.”

“You’re mistaken, Staniford, — I’m sure you are, — in supposing that she dislikes you,” urged his friend.

“Oh, very likely.”

“I know that she’s simply afraid of you.”

“Don’t flatter, Dunham. Why should I care whether she fears me or affects me? No, my dear fellow. This is irretrievably your own affair. I should be glad to help you out if I knew how. But I don’t. In the mean time your duty is plain, whatever happens. You can’t overdo the sweet and the generous in this wicked world without paying the penalty.”

Staniford smiled at the distress in which Dunham went his way. He understood very well that it was not vanity, but the liveliness of a sensitive conscience, that had made Dunham search his conduct for the offense against the young girl’s peace of heart which he believed he had committed, and it was the more amusing because he was so guiltless of harm. Staniford knew who was to blame for the headache and the blush. He knew that Dunham had never gone so far; that his chivalrous pleasure in her society might continue for years free from flirtation. But in spite of this conviction a little poignant doubt made itself felt, and suddenly became his whole consciousness. “Confound him!” he mused. “I wonder if she really could care anything for him!” He shut his book, and rose to his feet with such a burning in his heart that he could not have believed himself capable of the greater rage he felt at what he just then saw. It was Lydia and Hicks seated together in the place where he had sat with her. She leaned with one arm upon the rail, in an attitude that brought all her slim young grace into evidence. She seemed on very good terms with him, and he was talking and making her laugh as Staniford had never heard her laugh before — so freely, so heartily.

XIII.

The atoms that had been tending in Staniford’s being toward a certain form suddenly arrested and shaped themselves anew at the vibration imparted by this laughter. He no longer felt himself Hicks’s possible inferior, but vastly better in every way, and out of the turmoil of his feelings in regard to Lydia was evolved the distinct sense of having been trifled with. Somehow, an advantage had been taken of his sympathies and purposes, and his forbearance had been treated with contempt.

The conviction was neither increased nor diminished by the events of the evening, when Lydia brought out some music from her state-room, and Hicks appeared, flute in hand, from his, and they began practicing one of the pieces together. It was a pretty enough sight. Hicks had been gradually growing a better-looking fellow; he had an undeniable picturesqueness, as he bowed his head over the music towards hers; and she, as she held the sheet with one hand for him to see, while she noiselessly accompanied herself on the table with the fingers of the other, and tentatively sang now this passage and now that, was divine. The picture seemed pleasing to neither Staniford nor Dunham; they went on deck together, and sat down to their cigarettes in their wonted place. They did not talk of Lydia, or of any of the things that had formed the basis of their conversation hitherto, but Staniford returned to his Colorado scheme, and explained at length the nature of his purposes and expectations. He had discussed these matters before, but he had never gone into them so fully, nor with such cheerful earnestness. He said he should never marry, — he had made up his mind to that; but he hoped to make money enough to take care of his sister’s boy Jim handsomely, as the little chap had been named for him. He had been thinking the matter over, and he believed that he should get back by rail and steamer as soon as he could after they reached Trieste. He was not sorry he had come; but he could not afford to throw away too much time on Italy, just then.

Dunham, on his part, talked a great deal of Miss Hibbard, and of some curious psychological characteristics of her dyspepsia. He asked Staniford whether he had ever shown him the photograph of Miss Hibbard taken by Sarony when she was on to New York the last time: it was a three-quarters view, and Dunham thought it the best she had had done. He spoke of her generous qualities, and of the interest she had always had in the Diet Kitchen, to which, as an invalid, her attention had been particularly directed: and he said that in her last letter she had mentioned a project for establishing diet kitchens in Europe, on the Boston plan. When their talk grew more impersonal and took a wider range, they gathered suggestion from the situation, and remarked upon the immense solitude of the sea. They agreed that there was something weird in the long continuance of fine weather, and that the moon had a strange look. They spoke of the uncertainty of life. Dunham regretted, as he had often regretted before, that his friend had no fixed religious belief; and Staniford gently accepted his solicitude, and said that he had at least a conviction if not a creed. He then begged Dunham’s pardon in set terms for trying to wound his feelings the day before; and in the silent hand-clasp that followed they renewed all the cordiality of their friendship. From time to time, as they talked, the music from below came up fitfully, and once they had to pause as Lydia sang through the song that she and Hicks were practicing.

As the days passed their common interest in the art brought Hicks and the young girl almost constantly together, and the sound of their concerting often filled the ship. The musicales, less formal than Dunham had intended, and perhaps for that reason a source of rapidly diminishing interest with him, superseded both ring-toss and shuffle-board, and seemed even more acceptable to the ship’s company as an entertainment. One evening, when the performers had been giving a piece of rather more than usual excellence and difficulty, one of the sailors, deputed by his mates, came aft, with many clumsy shows of deference, and asked them to give Marching through Georgia. Hicks found this out of his repertory, but Lydia sang it. Then the group at the forecastle shouted with one voice for Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching, and so beguiled her through the whole list of war-songs. She ended with one unknown to her listeners, but better than all the rest in its pathetic words and music, and when she had sung The Flag’s come back to Tennessee, the spokesman of the sailors came aft again, to thank her for his mates, and to say they would not spoil that last song by asking for anything else. It was a charming little triumph for her, as she sat surrounded by her usual court: the captain was there to countenance the freedom the sailors had taken, and Dunham and Staniford stood near, but Hicks, at her right hand, held the place of honor.

The next night Staniford found her alone in the waist of the ship, and drew up a stool beside the rail where she sat.

“We all enjoyed your singing so much, last night, Miss Blood. I think Mr. Hicks plays charmingly, but I believe I prefer to hear your voice alone.”

“Thank you,” said Lydia, looking down, demurely.

“It must be a great satisfaction to feel that you can give so much pleasure.”

“I don’t know,” she said, passing the palm of one hand over the back of the other.

“When you are a prima donna you mustn’t forget your old friends of the Aroostook. We shall all take vast pride in you.”

It was not a question, and Lydia answered nothing. Staniford, who had rather obliged himself to this advance, with some dim purpose of showing that nothing had occurred to alienate them since the evening, of their promenade, without having proved to himself that it was necessary to do this, felt that he was growing angry. It irritated him to have her sit as unmoved after his words as if he had not spoken.

“Miss Blood,” he said, “I envy you your gift of snubbing people.”

Lydia looked at him. “Snubbing people?” she echoed.

“Yes; your power of remaining silent when you wish to put down some one who has been wittingly or unwittingly impertinent.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, in a sort of breathless way.

“And you didn’t intend to mark your displeasure at my planning your future?”

“No! We had talked of that. I—”

“And you were not vexed with me for anything? I have been afraid that I — that you—” Staniford found that he was himself getting short of breath. He had begun with the intention of mystifying her, but matters had suddenly taken another course, and he was really anxious to know whether any disagreeable associations with that night lingered in her mind. With this longing came a natural inability to find the right word. “I was afraid—” he repeated, and then he stopped again. Clearly, he could not tell her that he was afraid he had gone too far; but this was what he meant. “You don’t walk with me, any more, Miss Blood,” he concluded, with an air of burlesque reproach.

“You haven’t asked me — since,” she said.

He felt a singular value and significance in this word, since. It showed that her thoughts had been running parallel with his own; it permitted, if it did not signify, that he should resume the mood of that time, where their parting had interrupted it. He enjoyed the fact to the utmost, but he was not sure that he wished to do what he was permitted. “Then I didn’t tire you?” he merely asked. He was not sure, now he came to think of it, that he liked her willingness to recur to that time. He liked it, but not quite in the way he would have liked to like it.

“No,” she said.

“The fact is,” he went on aimlessly, “that I thought I had rather abused your kindness. Besides,” he added, veering off, “I was afraid I should be an interruption to the musical exercises.”

“Oh, no,” said Lydia. “Mr. Dunham hasn’t arranged anything yet.” Staniford thought this uncandid. It was fighting shy of Hicks, who was the person in his own mind; and it reawakened a suspicion which was lurking there. “Mr. Dunham seems to have lost his interest.”

This struck Staniford as an expression of pique; it reawakened quite another suspicion. It was evident that she was hurt at the cessation of Dunham’s attentions. He was greatly minded to say that Dunham was a fool, but he ended by saying, with sarcasm, “I suppose he saw that he was superseded.”

“Mr. Hicks plays well,” said Lydia, judicially, “but he doesn’t really know so much of music as Mr. Dunham.”

“No?” responded Staniford, with irony. “I will tell Dunham. No doubt he’s been suffering the pangs of professional jealousy. That must be the reason why he keeps away.”

“Keeps away?” asked Lydia.

“Now I’ve made an ass of myself!” thought Staniford. “You said that he seemed to have lost his interest,” he answered her.

“Oh! Yes!” assented Lydia. And then she remained rather distraught, pulling at the ruffling of her dress.

“Dunham is a very accomplished man,” said Staniford, finding the usual satisfaction in pressing his breast against the thorn. “He’s a great favorite in society. He’s up to no end of things.” Staniford uttered these praises in a curiously bitter tone. “He’s a capital talker. Don’t you think he talks well?”

“I don’t know; I suppose I haven’t seen enough people to be a good judge.”

“Well, you’ve seen enough people to know that he’s very good looking?”

“Yes?”

“You don’t mean to say you don’t think him good looking?”

“No, — oh, no, I mean — that is — I don’t know anything about his looks. But he resembles a lady who used to come from Boston, summers. I thought he must be her brother.”

“Oh, then you think he looks effeminate!” cried Staniford, with inner joy. “I assure you,” he added with solemnity, “Dunham is one of the manliest fellows in the world!”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

Staniford rose. He was smiling gayly as he looked over the broad stretch of empty deck, and down into Lydia’s eyes. “Wouldn’t you like to take a turn, now?”

“Yes,” she said promptly, rising and arranging her wrap across her shoulders, so as to leave her hands free. She laid one hand in his arm and gathered her skirt with the other, and they swept round together for the start and confronted Hicks.

“Oh!” cried Lydia, with what seemed dismay, “I promised Mr. Hicks to practice a song with him.” She did not try to release her hand from Staniford’s arm, but was letting it linger there irresolutely.

Staniford dropped his arm, and let her hand fall. He bowed with icy stiffness, and said, with a courtesy so fierce that Mr. Hicks, on whom he glared as he spoke, quailed before it, “I yield to your prior engagement.”

XIV.

It was nothing to Staniford that she should have promised Hicks to practice a song with him, and no process of reasoning could have made it otherwise. The imaginary opponent with whom he scornfully argued the matter had not a word for himself. Neither could the young girl answer anything to the cutting speeches which he mentally made her as he sat alone chewing the end of his cigar; and he was not moved by the imploring looks which his fancy painted in her face, when he made believe that she had meekly returned to offer him some sort of reparation. Why should she excuse herself? he asked. It was he who ought to excuse himself for having been in the way. The dialogue went on at length, with every advantage to the inventor.

He was finally aware of some one standing near and looking down at him. It was the second mate, who supported himself in a conversational posture by the hand which he stretched to the shrouds above their heads. “Are you a good sailor, Mr. Staniford?” he inquired. He and Staniford were friends in their way, and had talked together before this.

“Do you mean seasickness? Why?” Staniford looked up at the mate’s face.

“Well, we’re going to get it, I guess, before long. We shall soon be off the Spanish coast. We’ve had a great run so far.”

“If it comes we must stand it. But I make it a rule never to be seasick beforehand.”

“Well, I ain’t one to borrow trouble, either. It don’t run in the family. Most of us like to chance things, I chanced it for the whole war, and I come out all right. Sometimes it don’t work so well.”

“Ah?” said Staniford, who knew that this was a leading remark, but forbore, as he knew Mason wished, to follow it up directly.

“One of us chanced it once too often, and of course it was a woman.”

“The risk?”

“Not the risk. My oldest sister tried tamin’ a tiger. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, a tiger won’t tame worth a cent. But her pet was such a lamb most the while that she guessed she’d chance it. It didn’t work. She’s at home with mother now, — three children, of course, — and he’s in hell, I s’pose. He was killed ‘long-side o’ me at Gettysburg. Ike was a good fellow when he was sober. But my souls, the life he led that poor girl! Yes, when a man’s got that tiger in him, there ought to be some quiet little war round for puttin’ him out of his misery.” Staniford listened silently, waiting for the mate to make the application of his grim allegory. “I s’pose I’m prejudiced; but I do hate a drunkard; and when I see one of ’em makin’ up to a girl, I want to go to her, and tell her she’d better take a real tiger out the show, at once.”

The idea which these words suggested sent a thrill to Staniford’s heart, but he continued silent, and the mate went on, with the queer smile, which could be inferred rather than seen, working under his mustache and the humorous twinkle of his eyes evanescently evident under his cap peak.

“I don’t go round criticisn’ my superior officers, and I don’t say anything about the responsibility the old man took. The old man’s all right, accordin’ to his lights; he ain’t had a tiger in the family. But if that chap was to fall overboard, — well, I don’t know how long it would take to lower a boat, if I was to listen to my conscience. There ain’t really any help for him. He’s begun too young ever to get over it. He won’t be ashore at Try-East an hour before he’s drunk. If our men had any spirits amongst ’em that could be begged, bought, or borrowed, he’d be drunk now, right along. Well, I’m off watch,” said the mate, at the tap of bells. “Guess we’ll get our little gale pretty soon.”

“Good-night,” said Staniford, who remained pondering. He presently rose, and walked up and down the deck. He could hear Lydia and Hicks trying that song: now the voice, and now the flute; then both together; and presently a burst of laughter. He began to be angry with her ignorance and inexperience. It became intolerable to him that a woman should be going about with no more knowledge of the world than a child, and entangling herself in relations with all sorts of people. It was shocking to think of that little sot, who had now made his infirmity known for all the ship’s company, admitted to association with her which looked to common eyes like courtship. From the mate’s insinuation that she ought to be warned, it was evident that they thought her interested in Hicks; and the mate had come, like Dunham, to leave the responsibility with Staniford. It only wanted now that Captain Jenness should appear with his appeal, direct or indirect.

While Staniford walked up and down, and scorned and raged at the idea that he had anything to do with the matter, the singing and fluting came to a pause in the cabin; and at the end of the next tune, which brought him to the head of the gangway stairs, he met Lydia emerging. He stopped and spoke to her, having instantly resolved, at sight of her, not to do so.

“Have you come up for breath, like a mermaid?” he asked. “Not that I’m sure mermaids do.”

“Oh, no,” said Lydia. “I think I dropped my handkerchief where we were sitting.”

Staniford suspected, with a sudden return to a theory of her which he had already entertained, that she had not done so. But she went lightly by him, where he stood stolid, and picked it up; and now he suspected that she had dropped it there on purpose.

“You have come back to walk with me?”

“No!” said the girl indignantly. “I have not come back to walk with you!” She waited a moment; then she burst out with, “How dare you say such a thing to me? What right have you to speak to me so? What have I done to make you think that I would come back to—”

The fierce vibration in her voice made him know that her eyes were burning upon him and her lips trembling. He shrank before her passion as a man must before the justly provoked wrath of a woman, or even of a small girl.

“I stated a hope, not a fact,” he said in meek uncandor. “Don’t you think you ought to have done so?”

“I don’t — I don’t understand you,” panted Lydia, confusedly arresting her bolts in mid-course.

Staniford pursued his guilty advantage; it was his only chance. “I gave way to Mr. Hicks when you had an engagement with me. I thought — you would come back to keep your engagement.” He was still very meek.

“Excuse me,” she said with self-reproach that would have melted the heart of any one but a man who was in the wrong, and was trying to get out of it at all hazards. “I didn’t know what you meant — I—”

“If I had meant what you thought,” interrupted Staniford nobly, for he could now afford to be generous, “I should have deserved much more than you said. But I hope you won’t punish my awkwardness by refusing to walk with me.”

He knew that she regarded him earnestly before she said, “I must get my shawl and hat.”

“Let me go!” he entreated.

“You couldn’t find them,” she answered, as she vanished past him. She returned, and promptly laid her hand in his proffered arm; it was as if she were eager to make him amends for her harshness.

Staniford took her hand out, and held it while he bowed low toward her. “I declare myself satisfied.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lydia, in alarm and mortification.

“When a subject has been personally aggrieved by his sovereign, his honor is restored if they merely cross swords.”

The girl laughed her delight in the extravagance. She must have been more or less than woman not to have found his flattery delicious. “But we are republicans!” she said in evasion.

“To be sure, we are republicans. Well, then, Miss Blood, answer your free and equal one thing: is it a case of conscience?”

“How?” she asked, and Staniford did not recoil at the rusticity. This how for what, and the interrogative yes, still remained. Since their first walk, she had not wanted to know, in however great surprise she found herself.

“Are you going to walk with me because you had promised?”

“Why, of course,” faltered Lydia.

“That isn’t enough.”

“Not enough?”

“Not enough. You must walk with me because you like to do so.”

Lydia was silent.

“Do you like to do so?”

“I can’t answer you,” she said, releasing her hand from him.

“It was not fair to ask you. What I wish to do is to restore the original status. You have kept your engagement to walk with me, and your conscience is clear. Now, Miss Blood, may I have your company for a little stroll over the deck of the Aroostook?” He made her another very low bow.

“What must I say?” asked Lydia, joyously.

“That depends upon whether you consent. If you consent, you must say, ‘I shall be very glad.’”

“And if I don’t?”

“Oh, I can’t put any such decision into words.”

Lydia mused a moment. “I shall be very glad,” she said, and put her hand again into the arm he offered.

As happens after such a passage they were at first silent, while they walked up and down.

“If this fine weather holds,” said Staniford, “and you continue as obliging as you are to-night, you can say, when people ask you how you went to Europe, that you walked the greater part of the way. Shall you continue so obliging? Will you walk with me every fine night?” pursued Staniford.

“Do you think I’d better say so?” she asked, with the joy still in her voice.

“Oh, I can’t decide for you. I merely formulate your decisions after you reach them, — if they’re favorable.”

“Well, then, what is this one?”

“Is it favorable?”

“You said you would formulate it.” She laughed again, and Staniford started as one does when a nebulous association crystallizes into a distinctly remembered fact.

“What a curious laugh you have!” he said. “It’s like a nun’s laugh. Once in France I lodged near the garden of a convent where the nuns kept a girls’ school, and I used to hear them laugh. You never happened to be a nun, Miss Blood?”

“No, indeed!” cried Lydia, as if scandalized.

“Oh, I merely meant in some previous existence. Of course, I didn’t suppose there was a convent in South Bradfield.” He felt that the girl did not quite like the little slight his irony cast upon South Bradfield, or rather upon her for never having been anywhere else. He hastened to say, “I’m sure that in the life before this you were of the South somewhere.”

“Yes?” said Lydia, interested and pleased again as one must be in romantic talk about one’s self. “Why do you think so?”

He bent a little over toward her, so as to look into the face she instinctively averted, while she could not help glancing at him from the corner of her eye. “You have the color and the light of the South,” he said. “When you get to Italy, you will live in a perpetual mystification. You will go about in a dream of some self of yours that was native there in other days. You will find yourself retrospectively related to the olive faces and the dark eyes you meet; you will recognize sisters and cousins in the patrician ladies when you see their portraits in the palaces where you used to live in such state.”

Staniford spiced his flatteries with open burlesque; the girl entered into his fantastic humor. “But if I was a nun?” she asked, gayly.

“Oh, I forgot. You were a nun. There was a nun in Venice once, about two hundred years ago, when you lived there, and a young English lord who was passing through the town was taken to the convent to hear her sing; for she was not only of ‘an admirable beauty,’ as he says, but sang ‘extremely well.’ She sang to him through the grating of the convent, and when she stopped he said, ‘Die whensoever you will, you need to change neither voice nor face to be an angel!’ Do you think — do you dimly recollect anything that makes you think — it might — Consider carefully: the singing extremely well, and—” He leant over again, and looked up into her face, which again she could not wholly withdraw.

“No, no!” she said, still in his mood.

“Well, you must allow it was a pretty speech.”

“Perhaps,” said Lydia, with sudden gravity, in which there seemed to Staniford a tender insinuation of reproach, “he was laughing at her.”

“If he was, he was properly punished. He went on to Rome, and when he came back to Venice the beautiful nun was dead. He thought that his words ‘seemed fatal.’ Do you suppose it would kill you now to be jested with?”

“I don’t think people like it generally.”

“Why, Miss Blood, you are intense!”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Lydia.

“You like to take things seriously. You can’t bear to think that people are not the least in earnest, even when they least seem so.”

“Yes,” said the girl, thoughtfully, “perhaps that’s true. Should you like to be made fun of, yourself?”

“I shouldn’t mind it, I fancy, though it would depend a great deal upon who made fun of me. I suppose that women always laugh at men, — at their clumsiness, their want of tact, the fit of their clothes.”

“I don’t know. I should not do that with any one I—”

“You liked? Oh, none of them do!” cried Staniford.

“I was not going to say that,” faltered the girl.

“What were you going to say?”

She waited a moment. “Yes, I was going to say that,” she assented with a sigh of helpless veracity. “What makes you laugh?” she asked, in distress.

“Something I like. I’m different from you: I laugh at what I like; I like your truthfulness, — it’s charming.”

“I didn’t know that truth need be charming.”

“It had better be, in women, if it’s to keep even with the other thing.” Lydia seemed shocked; she made a faint, involuntary motion to withdraw her hand, but he closed his arm upon it. “Don’t condemn me for thinking that fibbing is charming. I shouldn’t like it at all in you. Should you in me?”

“I shouldn’t in any one,” said Lydia.

“Then what is it you dislike in me?” he suddenly demanded.

“I didn’t say that I disliked anything in you.”

“But you have made fun of something in me?”

“No, no!”

“Then it wasn’t the stirring of a guilty conscience when you asked me whether I should like to be made fun of? I took it for granted you’d been doing it.”

“You are very suspicious.”

“Yes; and what else?”

“Oh, you like to know just what every one thinks and feels.”

“Go on!” cried Staniford. “Analyze me, formulate me!”

“That’s all.”

“All I come to?”

“All I have to say.”

“That’s very little. Now, I’ll begin on you. You don’t care what people think or feel.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I care too much.”

“Do you care what I think?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think you’re too unsuspicious.”

“Ought I to suspect somebody?” she asked, lightly.

“Oh, that’s the way with all your sex. One asks you to be suspicious, and you ask whom you shall suspect. You can do nothing in the abstract. I should like to be suspicious for you. Will you let me?”

“Oh, yes, if you like to be.”

“Thanks. I shall be terribly vigilant, — a perfect dragon. And you really invest me with authority?”

“Yes.”

“That’s charming.” Staniford drew a long breath. After a space of musing, he said, “I thought I should be able to begin by attacking some one else, but I must commence at home, and denounce myself as quite unworthy of walking to and fro, and talking nonsense to you. You must beware of me, Miss Blood.”

“Why?” asked the girl.

“I am very narrow-minded and prejudiced, and I have violent antipathies. I shouldn’t be able to do justice to any one I disliked.”

“I think that’s the trouble with all of us,” said Lydia.

“Oh, but only in degree. I should not allow, if I could help it, a man whom I thought shabby, and coarse at heart, the privilege of speaking to any one I valued, — to my sister, for instance. It would shock me to find her have any taste in common with such a man, or amused by him. Don’t you understand?”

“Yes,” said Lydia. It seemed to him as if by some infinitely subtle and unconscious affinition she relaxed toward him as they walked. This was incomparably sweet and charming to Staniford, — too sweet as recognition of his protecting friendship to be questioned as anything else. He felt sure that she had taken his meaning, and he rested content from further trouble in regard to what it would have been impossible to express. Her tacit confidence touched a kindred spring in him, and he began to talk to her of himself: not of his character or opinions, — they had already gone over them, — but of his past life, and his future. Their strangeness to her gave certain well-worn topics novelty, and the familiar project of a pastoral career in the far West invested itself with a color of romance which it had not worn before. She tried to remember, at his urgence, something about her childhood in California; and she told him a great deal more about South Bradfield. She described its characters and customs, and, from no vantage-ground or stand-point but her native feeling of their oddity, and what seemed her sympathy with him, made him see them as one might whose life had not been passed among them. Then they began to compare their own traits, and amused themselves to find how many they had in common. Staniford related a singular experience of his on a former voyage to Europe, when he dreamed of a collision, and woke to hear a great trampling and uproar on deck, which afterwards turned out to have been caused by their bare escape from running into an iceberg. She said that she had had strange dreams, too, but mostly when she was a little girl; once she had had a presentiment that troubled her, but it did not come true. They both said they did not believe in such things, and agreed that it was only people’s love of mystery that kept them noticed. He permitted himself to help her, with his disengaged hand, to draw her shawl closer about the shoulder that was away from him. He gave the action a philosophical and impersonal character by saying immediately afterwards: “The sea is really the only mystery left us, and that will never be explored. They circumnavigate the whole globe,—” here he put the gathered shawl into the fingers which she stretched through his arm to take it, and she said, “Oh, thank you!”— “but they don’t describe the sea. War and plague and famine submit to the ameliorations of science,” — the closely drawn shawl pressed her against his shoulder; his mind wandered; he hardly knew what he was saying,— “but the one utterly inexorable calamity — the same now as when the first sail was spread — is a shipwreck.”

“Yes,” she said, with a deep inspiration. And now they walked back and forth in silence broken only by a casual word or desultory phrase. Once Staniford had thought the conditions of these promenades perilously suggestive of love-making; another time he had blamed himself for not thinking of this; now he neither thought nor blamed himself for not thinking. The fact justified itself, as if it had been the one perfectly right and wise thing in a world where all else might be questioned.

“Isn’t it pretty late?” she asked, at last.

“If you’re tired, we’ll sit down,” he said.

“What time is it?” she persisted.

“Must I look?” he pleaded. They went to a lantern, and he took out his watch and sprang the case open. “Look!” he said. “I sacrifice myself on the altar of truth.” They bent their heads low together over the watch; it was not easy to make out the time. “It’s nine o’clock,” said Staniford.

“It can’t be; it was half past when I came up,” answered Lydia.

“One hand’s at twelve and the other at nine,” he said, conclusively.

“Oh, then it’s a quarter to twelve.” She caught away her hand from his arm, and fled to the gangway. “I didn’t dream it was so late.”

The pleasure which her confession brought to his face faded at sight of Hicks, who was turning the last pages of a novel by the cabin lamp, as he followed Lydia in. It was the book that Staniford had given her.

“Hullo!” said Hicks, with companionable ease, looking up at her. “Been having quite a tramp.”

She did not seem troubled by the familiarity of an address that incensed Staniford almost to the point of taking Hicks from his seat, and tossing him to the other end of the cabin. “Oh, you’ve finished my book,” she said. “You must tell me how you like it, to-morrow.”

“I doubt it,” said Hicks. “I’m going to be seasick to-morrow. The captain’s been shaking his head over the barometer and powwowing with the first officer. Something’s up, and I guess it’s a gale. Good-by; I shan’t see you again for a week or so.”

He nodded jocosely to Lydia, and dropped his eyes again to his book, ignoring Staniford’s presence. The latter stood a moment breathing quick; then he controlled himself and went into his room. His coming roused Dunham, who looked up from his pillow. “What time is it?” he asked, stupidly.

“Twelve,” said Staniford.

“Had a pleasant walk?”

“If you still think,” said Staniford, savagely, “that she’s painfully interested in you, you can make your mind easy. She doesn’t care for either of us.”

“Either of us?” echoed Dunham. He roused himself.

“Oh, go to sleep; go to sleep!” cried Staniford.

XV.

The foreboded storm did not come so soon as had been feared, but the beautiful weather which had lasted so long was lost in a thickened sky and a sullen sea. The weather had changed with Staniford, too. The morning after the events last celebrated, he did not respond to the glance which Lydia gave him when they met, and he hardened his heart to her surprise, and shunned being alone with her. He would not admit to himself any reason for his attitude, and he could not have explained to her the mystery that at first visibly grieved her, and then seemed merely to benumb her. But the moment came when he ceased to take a certain cruel pleasure in it, and he approached her one morning on deck, where she stood holding fast to the railing where she usually sat, and said, as if there had been no interval of estrangement between them, but still coldly, “We have had our last walk for the present, Miss Blood. I hope you will grieve a little for my loss.”

She turned on him a look that cut him to the heart, with what he fancied its reproach and its wonder. She did not reply at once, and then she did not reply to his hinted question.

“Mr. Staniford,” she began. It was the second time he had heard her pronounce his name; he distinctly remembered the first.

“Well?” he said.

“I want to speak to you about lending that book to Mr. Hicks. I ought to have asked you first.”

“Oh, no,” said Staniford. “It was yours.”

“You gave it to me,” she returned.

“Well, then, it was yours, — to keep, to lend, to throw away.”

“And you didn’t mind my lending it to him?” she pursued. “I—”

She stopped, and Staniford hesitated, too. Then he said, “I didn’t dislike your lending it; I disliked his having it. I will acknowledge that.”

She looked up at him as if she were going to speak, but checked herself, and glanced away. The ship was plunging heavily, and the livid waves were racing before the wind. The horizon was lit with a yellow brightness in the quarter to which she turned, and a pallid gleam defined her profile. Captain Jenness was walking fretfully to and fro; he glanced now at the yellow glare, and now cast his eye aloft at the shortened sail. While Staniford stood questioning whether she meant to say anything more, or whether, having discharged her conscience of an imagined offense, she had now reached one of her final, precipitous silences, Captain Jenness suddenly approached them, and said to him, “I guess you’d better go below with Miss Blood.”

The storm that followed had its hazards, but Staniford’s consciousness was confined to its discomforts. The day came, and then the dark came, and both in due course went, and came again. Where he lay in his berth, and whirled and swung, and rose and sank, as lonely as a planetary fragment tossing in space, he heard the noises of the life without. Amidst the straining of the ship, which was like the sharp sweep of a thunder-shower on the deck overhead, there plunged at irregular intervals the wild trample of heavily-booted feet, and now and then the voices of the crew answering the shouted orders made themselves hollowly audible. In the cabin there was talking, and sometimes even laughing. Sometimes he heard the click of knives and forks, the sardonic rattle of crockery. After the first insane feeling that somehow he must get ashore and escape from his torment, he hardened himself to it through an immense contempt, equally insane, for the stupidity of the sea, its insensate uproar, its blind and ridiculous and cruel mischievousness. Except for this delirious scorn he was a surface of perfect passivity.

Dunham, after a day of prostration, had risen, and had perhaps shortened his anguish by his resolution. He had since taken up his quarters on a locker in the cabin; he looked in now and then upon Staniford, with a cup of tea, or a suggestion of something light to eat; once he even dared to boast of the sublimity of the ocean. Staniford stared at him with eyes of lack-lustre indifference, and waited for him to be gone. But he lingered to say, “You would laugh to see what a sea-bird our lady is! She hasn’t been sick a minute. And Hicks, you’ll be glad to know, is behaving himself very well. Really, I don’t think we’ve done the fellow justice. I think you’ve overshadowed him, and that he’s needed your absence to show himself to advantage.”

Staniford disdained any comment on this except a fierce “Humph!” and dismissed Dunham by turning his face to the wall. He refused to think of what he had said. He lay still and suffered indefinitely, and no longer waited for the end of the storm. There had been times when he thought with acquiescence of going to the bottom, as a probable conclusion; now he did not expect anything. At last, one night, he felt by inexpressibly minute degrees something that seemed surcease of his misery. It might have been the end of all things, for all he cared; but as the lull deepened, he slept without knowing what it was, and when he woke in the morning he found the Aroostook at anchor in smooth water.

She was lying in the roads at Gibraltar, and before her towered the embattled rock. He crawled on deck after a while. The captain was going ashore, and had asked such of his passengers as liked, to go with him and see the place. When Staniford appeared, Dunham was loyally refusing to leave his friend till he was fairly on foot. At sight of him they suspended their question long enough to welcome him back to animation, with the patronage with which well people hail a convalescent. Lydia looked across the estrangement of the past days with a sort of inquiry, and Hicks chose to come forward and accept a cold touch of the hand from him. Staniford saw, with languid observance, that Lydia was very fresh and bright; she was already equipped for the expedition, and could never have had any doubt in her mind as to going. She had on a pretty walking dress which he had not seen before, and a hat with the rim struck sharply upward behind, and her masses of dense, dull black hair pulled up and fastened somewhere on the top of her head. Her eyes shyly sparkled under the abrupt descent of the hat-brim over her forehead.

His contemptuous rejection of the character of invalid prevailed with Dunham; and Staniford walked to another part of the ship, to cut short the talk about himself, and saw them row away.

“Well, you’ve had a pretty tough time, they say,” said the second mate, lounging near him. “I don’t see any fun in seasickness myself.”

“It’s a ridiculous sort of misery,” said Staniford.

“I hope we shan’t have anything worse on board when that chap gets back. The old man thinks he can keep an eye on him.” The mate was looking after the boat.

“The captain says he hasn’t any money,” Staniford remarked carelessly. The mate went away without saying anything more, and Staniford returned to the cabin, where he beheld without abhorrence the preparations for his breakfast. But he had not a great appetite, in spite of his long fast. He found himself rather light-headed, and came on deck again after a while, and stretched himself in Hicks’s steamer chair, where Lydia usually sat in it. He fell into a dull, despairing reverie, in which he blamed himself for not having been more explicit with her. He had merely expressed his dislike of Hicks; but expressed without reasons it was a groundless dislike, which she had evidently not understood, or had not cared to heed; and since that night, now so far away, when he had spoken to her, he had done everything he could to harden her against himself. He had treated her with a stupid cruelty, which a girl like her would resent to the last; he had forced her to take refuge in the politeness of a man from whom he was trying to keep her.

His heart paused when he saw the boat returning in the afternoon without Hicks. The others reported that they had separated before dinner, and that they had not seen him since, though Captain Jenness had spent an hour trying to look him up before starting back to the ship. The captain wore a look of guilty responsibility, mingled with intense exasperation, the two combining in as much haggardness as his cheerful visage could express. “If he’s here by six o’clock,” he said, grimly, “all well and good. If not, the Aroostook sails, any way.”

Lydia crept timidly below. Staniford complexly raged to see that the anxiety about Hicks had blighted the joy of the day for her.

“How the deuce could he get about without any money?” he demanded of Dunham, as soon as they were alone.

Dunham vainly struggled to look him in the eye. “Staniford,” he faltered, with much more culpability than some criminals would confess a murder, “I lent him five dollars!”

“You lent him five dollars!” gasped Staniford.

“Yes,” replied Dunham, miserably; “he got me aside, and asked me for it. What could I do? What would you have done yourself?”

Staniford made no answer. He walked some paces away, and then returned to where Dunham stood helpless. “He’s lying about there dead-drunk, somewhere, I suppose. By Heaven, I could almost wish he was. He couldn’t come back, then, at any rate.”

The time lagged along toward the moment appointed by the captain, and the preparations for the ship’s departure were well advanced, when a boat was seen putting out from shore with two rowers, and rapidly approaching the Aroostook. In the stern, as it drew nearer, the familiar figure of Hicks discovered itself in the act of waving a handkerchief He scrambled up the side of the ship in excellent spirits, and gave Dunham a detailed account of his adventures since they had parted. As always happens with such scapegraces, he seemed to have had a good time, however he had spoiled the pleasure of the others. At tea, when Lydia had gone away, he clapped down a sovereign near Dunham’s plate.

“Your five dollars,” he said.

“Why, how—” Dunham began.

“How did I get on without it? My dear boy, I sold my watch! A ship’s time is worth no more than a setting hen’s, — eh, captain? — and why take note of it? Besides, I always like to pay my debts promptly: there’s nothing mean about me. I’m not going ashore again without my pocket-book, I can tell you.” He winked shamelessly at Captain Jenness. “If you hadn’t been along, Dunham, I couldn’t have made a raise, I suppose. You wouldn’t have lent me five dollars, Captain Jenness.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said the captain, bluntly.

“And I believe you’d have sailed without me, if I hadn’t got back on time.”

“I would,” said the captain, as before.

Hicks threw back his head, and laughed. Probably no human being had ever before made so free with Captain Jenness at his own table; but the captain must have felt that this contumacy was part of the general risk which he had taken in taking Hicks, and he contented himself with maintaining a silence that would have appalled a less audacious spirit. Hicks’s gayety, however, was not to be quelled in that way.

“Gibraltar wouldn’t be a bad place to put up at for a while,” he said. “Lots of good fellows among the officers, they say, and fun going all the while. First-class gunning in the Cork Woods at St. Roque. If it hadn’t been for the res angusta domi, — you know what I mean, captain, — I should have let you get along with your old dug-out, as the gentleman in the water said to Noah.” His hilarity had something alarmingly knowing in it; there was a wildness in the pleasure with which he bearded the captain, like that of a man in his first cups; yet he had not been drinking. He played round the captain’s knowledge of the sanative destitution in which he was making the voyage with mocking recurrence; but he took himself off to bed early, and the captain came through his trials with unimpaired temper. Dunham disappeared not long afterwards; and Staniford’s vague hope that Lydia might be going on deck to watch the lights of the town die out behind the ship as they sailed away was disappointed. The second mate made a point of lounging near him where he sat alone in their wonted place.

“Well,” he said, “he did come back sober.”

“Yes,” said Staniford.

“Next to not comin’ back at all,” the mate continued, “I suppose it was the best thing he could do.” He lounged away. Neither his voice nor his manner had that quality of disappointment which characterizes those who have mistakenly prophesied evil. Staniford had a mind to call him back, and ask him what he meant; but he refrained, and he went to bed at last resolved to unburden himself of the whole Hicks business once for all. He felt that he had had quite enough of it, both in the abstract and in its relation to Lydia.

XVI.

Hicks did not join the others at breakfast. They talked of what Lydia had seen at Gibraltar, where Staniford had been on a former voyage. Dunham had made it a matter of conscience to know all about it beforehand from his guide-books, and had risen early that morning to correct his science by his experience in a long entry in the diary which he was keeping for Miss Hibbard. The captain had the true sea-farer’s ignorance, and was amused at the things reported by his passengers of a place where he had been ashore so often; Hicks’s absence doubtless relieved him, but he did not comment on the cabin-boy’s announcement that he was still asleep, except to order him let alone.

They were seated at their one o’clock dinner before the recluse made any sign. Then he gave note of his continued existence by bumping and thumping sounds within his state-room, as if some one were dressing there in a heavy sea.

“Mr. Hicks seems to be taking his rough weather retrospectively,” said Staniford, with rather tremulous humor.

The door was flung open, and Hicks reeled out, staying himself by the door-knob. Even before he appeared, a reek of strong waters had preceded him. He must have been drinking all night. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bloodshot. He had no collar on; but he wove a cravat and otherwise he was accurately and even fastidiously dressed. He balanced himself by the door-knob, and measured the distance he had to make before reaching his place at the table, smiling, and waving a delicate handkerchief, which he held in his hand: “Spilt c’logne, tryin’ to scent my hic — handkerchief. Makes deuced bad smell — too much c’logne; smells — alcoholic. Thom’s, bear a hand, ‘s good f’low. No? All right, go on with your waitin’. B-ic — business b’fore pleasure, ‘s feller says. Play it alone, I guess.”

The boy had shrunk back in dismay, and Hicks contrived to reach his place by one of those precipitate dashes with which drunken men attain a point, when the luck is with them. He looked smilingly round the circle of faces. Staniford and the captain exchanged threatening looks of intelligence, while Mr. Watterson and Dunham subordinately waited their motion. But the advantage, as in such cases, was on the side of Hicks. He knew it, with a drunkard’s subtlety, and was at his ease.

“No app’tite, friends; but thought I’d come out, keep you from feeling lonesome.” He laughed and hiccuped, and smiled upon them all. “Well, cap’n,” he continued, “‘covered from ‘tigues day, sterday? You look blooming’s usual. Thom’s, pass the — pass the — victuals lively, my son, and fetch along coffee soon. Some the friends up late, and want their coffee. Nothing like coffee, carry off’fee’s.” He winked to the men, all round; and then added, to Lydia: “Sorry see you in this state — I mean, sorry see me — Can’t make it that way either; up stump on both routes. What I mean is, sorry hadn’t coffee first. But you’re all right — all right! Like see anybody offer you disrespec’, ‘n I’m around. Tha’s all.”

Till he addressed her, Lydia had remained motionless, first with bewilderment, and then with open abhorrence. She could hardly have seen in South Bradfield a man who had been drinking. Even in haying, or other sharpest stress of farmwork, our farmer and his men stay themselves with nothing stronger than molasses-water, or, in extreme cases, cider with a little corn soaked in it; and the Mill Village, where she had taught school, was under the iron rule of a local vote for prohibition. She stared in stupefaction at Hicks’s heated, foolish face; she started at his wild movements, and listened with dawning intelligence to his hiccup-broken speech, with its thickened sibilants and its wandering emphasis. When he turned to her, and accompanied his words with a reassuring gesture, she recoiled, and as if breaking an ugly fascination she gave a low, shuddering cry, and looked at Staniford.

“Thomas,” he said, “Miss Blood was going to take her dessert on deck to-day. Dunham?”

Dunham sprang to his feet, and led her out of the cabin.

The movement met Hicks’s approval. “Tha’s right; ‘sert on deck, ‘joy landscape and pudding together, — Rhine steamer style. All right. Be up there m’self soon’s I get my coffee.” He winked again with drunken sharpness. “I know wha’s what. Be up there m’self, ‘n a minute.”

“If you offer to go up,” said Staniford, in a low voice, as soon as Lydia was out of the way, “I’ll knock you down!”

“Captain,” said Mr. Watterson, venturing, perhaps for the first time in his whole maritime history, upon a suggestion to his superior officer, “shall I clap him in irons?”

“Clap him in irons!” roared Captain Jenness. “Clap him in bed! Look here, you!” He turned to Hicks, but the latter, who had been bristling at Staniford’s threat, now relaxed in a crowing laugh: —

“Tha’s right, captain. Irons no go, ‘cept in case mutiny; bed perfectly legal ‘t all times. Bed is good. But trouble is t’ enforce it.”

“Where’s your bottle?” demanded the captain, rising from the seat in which a paralysis of fury had kept him hitherto. “I want your bottle.”

“Oh, bottle’s all right! Bottle’s under pillow. Empty, — empty’s Jonah’s gourd; ‘nother sea-faring party, — Jonah. S’cure the shadow ere the substance fade. Drunk all the brandy, old boy. Bottle’s a canteen; ‘vantage of military port to houseless stranger. Brought the brandy on board under my coat; nobody noticed, — so glad get me back. Prodigal son’s return, — fatted calf under his coat.”

The reprobate ended his boastful confession with another burst of hiccuping, and Staniford helplessly laughed.

“Do me proud,” said Hicks. “Proud, I ‘sure you. Gentleman, every time, Stanny. Know good thing when you see it — hear it, I mean.”

“Look here, Hicks,” said Staniford, choosing to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, if any good end might be gained by it. “You know you’re drunk, and you’re not fit to be about. Go back to bed, that’s a good fellow; and come out again, when you’re all right. You don’t want to do anything you’ll be sorry for.”

“No, no! No, you don’t, Stanny. Coffee’ll make me all right. Coffee always does. Coffee — Heaven’s lash besh gift to man. ‘Scovered subse-subs’quently to grape. See? Comes after claret in course of nature. Captain doesn’t understand the ‘lusion. All right, captain. Little learning dangerous thing.” He turned sharply on Mr. Watterson, who had remained inertly in his place. “Put me in irons, heh! You put me in irons, you old Triton. Put me in irons, will you?” His amiable mood was passing; before one could say so, it was past. He was meditating means of active offense. He gathered up the carving-knife and fork, and held them close under Mr. Watterson’s nose. “Smell that!” he said, and frowned as darkly as a man of so little eyebrow could.

At this senseless defiance Staniford, in spite of himself, broke into another laugh, and even Captain Jenness grinned. Mr. Watterson sat with his head drawn as far back as possible, and with his nose wrinkled at the affront offered it. “Captain,” he screamed, appealing even in this extremity to his superior, “shall I fetch him one?”

“No, no!” cried Staniford, springing from his chair; “don’t hit him! He isn’t responsible. Let’s get him into his room.”

“Fetch me one, heh?” said Hicks, rising, with dignity, and beginning to turn up his cuffs. “One! It’ll take more than one, fetch me. Stan’ up, ‘f you’re man enough.” He was squaring at Mr. Watterson, when he detected signs of strategic approach in Staniford and Captain Jenness. He gave a wild laugh, and shrank into a corner. “No! No, you don’t, boys,” he said.

They continued their advance, one on either side, and reinforced by Mr. Watterson hemmed him in. The drunken man has the advantage of his sober brother in never seeming to be on the alert. Hicks apparently entered into the humor of the affair. “Sur-hic-surrender!” he said, with a smile in his heavy eyes. He darted under the extended arms of Captain Jenness, who was leading the centre of the advance, and before either wing could touch him he was up the gangway and on the deck.

Captain Jenness indulged one of those expressions, very rare with him, which are supposed to be forgiven to good men in moments of extreme perplexity, and Mr. Watterson profited by the precedent to unburden his heart in a paraphrase of the captain’s language. Staniford’s laugh had as much cursing in it as their profanity.

He mechanically followed Hicks to the deck, prepared to renew the attempt for his capture there. But Hicks had not stopped near Dunham and Lydia. He had gone forward on the other side of the ship, and was leaning quietly on the rail, and looking into the sea. Staniford paused irresolute for a moment, and then sat down beside Lydia, and they all tried to feign that nothing unpleasant had happened, or was still impending. But their talk had the wandering inconclusiveness which was inevitable, and the eyes of each from time to time furtively turned toward Hicks.

For half an hour he hardly changed his position. At the end of that time, they found him looking intently at them; and presently he began to work slowly back to the waist of the ship, but kept to his own side. He was met on the way by the second mate, when nearly opposite where they sat.

“Ain’t you pretty comfortable where you are?” they heard the mate asking. “Guess I wouldn’t go aft any further just yet.”

“You’re all right, Mason,” Hicks answered. “Going below — down cellar, ‘s feller says; go to bed.”

“Well, that’s a pious idea,” said the mate. “You couldn’t do better than that. I’ll lend you a hand.”

“Don’t care ‘f I do,” responded Hicks, taking the mate’s proffered arm. But he really seemed to need it very little; he walked perfectly well, and he did not look across at the others again.

At the head of the gangway he encountered Captain Jenness and Mr. Watterson, who had completed the perquisition they had remained to make in his state-room. Mr. Watterson came up empty-handed; but the captain bore the canteen in which the common enemy had been so artfully conveyed on board. He walked, darkly scowling, to the rail, and flung the canteen into the sea. Hicks, who had saluted his appearance with a glare as savage as his own, yielded to his whimsical sense of the futility of this vengeance. He gave his fleeting, drunken laugh: “Good old boy, Captain Jenness. Means well — means well. But lacks — lacks — forecast. Pounds of cure, but no prevention. Not much on bite, but death on bark. Heh?” He waggled his hand offensively at the captain, and disappeared, loosely floundering down the cabin stairs, holding hard by the hand-rail, and fumbling round with his foot for the steps before he put it down.

“As soon as he’s in his room, Mr. Watterson, you lock him in.” The captain handed his officer a key, and walked away forward, with a hang-dog look on his kindly face, which he kept averted from his passengers.

The sound of Hicks’s descent had hardly ceased when clapping and knocking noises were heard again, and the face of the troublesome little wretch reappeared. He waved Mr. Watterson aside with his left hand, and in default of specific orders the latter allowed him to mount to the deck again. Hicks stayed himself a moment, and lurched to where Staniford and Dunham sat with Lydia.

“What I wish say Miss Blood is,” he began,— “what I wish say is, peculiar circumstances make no difference with man if man’s gentleman. What I say is, everybody ‘spec’s — What I say is, circumstances don’t alter cases; lady’s a lady — What I want do is beg you fellows’ pardon — beg her pardon — if anything I said that firs’ morning—”

“Go away!” cried Staniford, beginning to whiten round the nostrils. “Hold your tongue!”

Hicks fell back a pace, and looked at him with the odd effect of now seeing him for the first time. “What you want?” he asked. “What you mean? Slingin’ criticism ever since you came on this ship! What you mean by it? Heh? What you mean?”

Staniford rose, and Lydia gave a start. He cast an angry look at her. “Do you think I’d hurt him?” he demanded.

Hicks went on: “Sorry, very sorry, ‘larm a lady, — specially lady we all respec’. But this particular affair. Touch — touches my honor. You said,” he continued, “‘f I came on deck, you’d knock me down. Why don’t you do it? Wha’s the matter with you? Sling criticism ever since you been on ship, and ‘fraid do it! ‘Fraid, you hear? ‘F-ic— ‘fraid, I say.” Staniford slowly walked away forward, and Hicks followed him, threatening him with word and gesture. Now and then Staniford thrust him aside, and addressed him some expostulation, and Hicks laughed and submitted. Then, after a silent excursion to the other side of the ship, he would return and renew his one-sided quarrel. Staniford seemed to forbid the interference of the crew, and alternately soothed and baffled his tedious adversary, who could still be heard accusing him of slinging criticism, and challenging him to combat. He leaned with his back to the rail, and now looked quietly into Hicks’s crazy face, when the latter paused in front of him, and now looked down with a worried, wearied air. At last he crossed to the other side, and began to come aft again.

“Mr. Dunham!” cried Lydia, starting up. “I know what Mr. Staniford wants to do. He wants to keep him away from me. Let me go down to the cabin. I can’t walk; please help me!” Her eyes were full of tears, and the hand trembled that she laid on Dunham’s arm, but she controlled her voice.

He softly repressed her, while he intently watched Staniford. “No, no!”

“But he can’t bear it much longer,” she pleaded. “And if he should—”

“Staniford would never strike him,” said Dunham, calmly. “Don’t be afraid. Look! He’s coming back with him; he’s trying to get him below; they’ll shut him up there. That’s the only chance. Sit down, please.” She dropped into her seat, hid her eyes for an instant, and then fixed them again on the two young men.

Hicks had got between Staniford and the rail. He seized him by the arm, and, pulling him round, suddenly struck at him. It was too much for his wavering balance: his feet shot from under him, and he went backwards in a crooked whirl and tumble, over the vessel’s side.

Staniford uttered a cry of disgust and rage. “Oh, you little brute!” he shouted, and with what seemed a single gesture he flung off his coat and the low shoes he wore, and leaped the railing after him.

The cry of “Man overboard!” rang round the ship, and Captain Jenness’s order, “Down with your helm! Lower a boat, Mr. Mason!” came, quick as it was, after the second mate had prepared to let go; and he and two of the men were in the boat, and she was sliding from her davits, while the Aroostook was coming up to the light wind and losing headway.

When the boat touched the water, two heads had appeared above the surface terribly far away. “Hold on, for God’s sake! We’ll be there in a second.”

“All right!” Staniford’s voice called back. “Be quick.” The heads rose and sank with the undulation of the water. The swift boat appeared to crawl.

By the time it reached the place where they had been seen, the heads disappeared, and the men in the boat seemed to be rowing blindly about. The mate stood upright. Suddenly he dropped and clutched at something over the boat’s side. The people on the ship could see three hands on her gunwale; a figure was pulled up into the boat, and proved to be Hicks; then Staniford, seizing the gunwale with both hands, swung himself in.

A shout went up from the ship, and Staniford waved his hand. Lydia waited where she hung upon the rail, clutching it hard with her hands, till the boat was along-side. Then from white she turned fire-red, and ran below and locked herself in her room.

XVII.

Dunham followed Staniford to their room, and helped him off with his wet clothes. He tried to say something ideally fit in recognition of his heroic act, and he articulated some bald commonplaces of praise, and shook Staniford’s clammy hand. “Yes,” said the latter, submitting; “but the difficulty about a thing of this sort is that you don’t know whether you haven’t been an ass. It has been pawed over so much by the romancers that you don’t feel like a hero in real life, but a hero of fiction. I’ve a notion that Hicks and I looked rather ridiculous going over the ship’s side; I know we did, coming back. No man can reveal his greatness of soul in wet clothes. Did Miss Blood laugh?”

“Staniford!” said Dunham, in an accent of reproach. “You do her great injustice. She felt what you had done in the way you would wish, — if you cared.”

“What did she say?” asked Staniford, quickly.

“Nothing. But—”

“That’s an easy way of expressing one’s admiration of heroic behavior. I hope she’ll stick to that line. I hope she won’t feel it at all necessary to say anything in recognition of my prowess; it would be extremely embarrassing. I’ve got Hicks back again, but I couldn’t stand any gratitude for it. Not that I’m ashamed of the performance. Perhaps if it had been anybody but Hicks, I should have waited for them to lower a boat. But Hicks had peculiar claims. You couldn’t let a man you disliked so much welter round a great while. Where is the poor old fellow? Is he clothed and in his right mind again?”

“He seemed to be sober enough,” said Dunham, “when he came on board; but I don’t think he’s out yet.”

“We must let Thomas in to gather up this bathing-suit,” observed Staniford. “What a Newportish flavor it gives the place!” He was excited, and in great gayety of spirits.

He and Dunham went out into the cabin, where they found Captain Jenness pacing to and fro. “Well, sir,” he said, taking Staniford’s hand, and crossing his right with his left, so as to include Dunham in his congratulations, “you ought to have been a sailor!” Then he added, as if the unqualified praise might seem fulsome, “But if you’d been a sailor, you wouldn’t have tried a thing like that. You’d have had more sense. The chances were ten to one against you.”

Staniford laughed. “Was it so bad as that? I shall begin to respect myself.”

The captain did not answer, but his iron grip closed hard upon Staniford’s hand, and he frowned in keen inspection of Hicks, who at that moment came out of his state-room, looking pale and quite sobered. Captain Jenness surveyed him from head to foot, and then from foot to head, and pausing at the level of his eyes he said, still holding Staniford by the hand: “The trouble with a man aboard ship is that he can’t turn a blackguard out-of-doors just when he likes. The Aroostook puts in at Messina. You’ll be treated well till we get there, and then if I find you on my vessel five minutes after she comes to anchor, I’ll heave you overboard, and I’ll take care that nobody jumps after you. Do you hear? And you won’t find me doing any such fool kindness as I did when I took you on board, soon again.”

“Oh, I say, Captain Jenness,” began Staniford.

“He’s all right,” interrupted Hicks. “I’m a blackguard; I know it; and I don’t think I was worth fishing up. But you’ve done it, and I mustn’t go back on you, I suppose.” He lifted his poor, weak, bad little face, and looked Staniford in the eyes with a pathos that belied the slang of his speech. The latter released his hand from Captain Jenness and gave it to Hicks, who wrung it, as he kept looking him in the eyes, while his lips twitched pitifully, like a child’s. The captain gave a quick snort either of disgust or of sympathy, and turned abruptly about and bundled himself up out of the cabin.

“I say!” exclaimed Staniford, “a cup of coffee wouldn’t be bad, would it? Let’s have some coffee, Thomas, about as quick as the cook can make it,” he added, as the boy came out from his stateroom with a lump of wet clothes in his hands. “You wanted some coffee a little while ago,” he said to Hicks, who hung his head at the joke.

For the rest of the day Staniford was the hero of the ship. The men looked at him from a distance, and talked of him together. Mr. Watterson hung about whenever Captain Jenness drew near him, as if in the hope of overhearing some acceptable expression in which he could second his superior officer. Failing this, and being driven to despair, “Find the water pretty cold, sir?” he asked at last; and after that seemed to feel that he had discharged his duty as well as might be under the extraordinary circumstances.

The second mate, during the course of the afternoon, contrived to pass near Staniford. “Why, there wa’n’t no need of your doing it,” he said, in a bated tone. “I could ha’ had him out with the boat, soon enough.”

Staniford treasured up these meagre expressions of the general approbation, and would not have had them different. From this time, within the narrow bounds that brought them all necessarily together in some sort, Hicks abolished himself as nearly as possible. He chose often to join the second mate at meals, which Mr. Mason, in accordance with the discipline of the ship, took apart both from the crew and his superior officers. Mason treated the voluntary outcast with a sort of sarcastic compassion, as a man whose fallen state was not without its points as a joke to the indifferent observer, and yet might appeal to the pity of one who knew such cases through the misery they inflicted. Staniford heard him telling Hicks about his brother-in-law, and dwelling upon the peculiar relief which the appearance of his name in the mortality list gave all concerned in him. Hicks listened in apathetic patience and acquiescence; but Staniford thought that he enjoyed, as much as he could enjoy anything, the second officer’s frankness. For his own part, he found that having made bold to keep this man in the world he had assumed a curious responsibility towards him. It became his business to show him that he was not shunned by his fellow-creatures, to hearten and cheer him up. It was heavy work. Hicks with his joke was sometimes odious company, but he was also sometimes amusing; without it, he was of a terribly dull conversation. He accepted Staniford’s friendliness too meekly for good comradery; he let it add, apparently, to his burden of gratitude, rather than lessen it. Staniford smoked with him, and told him stories; he walked up and down with him, and made a point of parading their good understanding, but his spirits seemed to sink the lower. “Deuce take him!” mused his benefactor; “he’s in love with her!” But he now had the satisfaction, such as it was, of seeing that if he was in love he was quite without hope. Lydia had never relented in her abhorrence of Hicks since the day of his disgrace. There seemed no scorn in her condemnation, but neither was there any mercy. In her simple life she had kept unsophisticated the severe morality of a child, and it was this that judged him, that found him unpardonable and outlawed him. He had never ventured to speak to her since that day, and Staniford never saw her look at him except when Hicks was not looking, and then with a repulsion which was very curious. Staniford could have pitied him, and might have interceded so far as to set him nearer right in her eyes; but he felt that she avoided him, too; there were no more walks on the deck, no more readings in the cabin; the checker-board, which professed to be the History of England, In 2 Vols., remained a closed book. The good companionship of a former time, in which they had so often seemed like brothers and sister, was gone. “Hicks has smashed our Happy Family,” Staniford said to Dunham, with little pleasure in his joke. “Upon my word, I think I had better have left him in the water.” Lydia kept a great deal in her own room; sometimes when Staniford came down into the cabin he found her there, talking with Thomas of little things that amuse children; sometimes when he went on deck in the evening she would be there in her accustomed seat, and the second mate, with face and figure half averted, and staying himself by one hand on the shrouds, would be telling her something to which she listened with lifted chin and attentive eyes. The mate would go away when Staniford appeared, but that did not help matters, for then Lydia went too. At table she said very little; she had the effect of placing herself more and more under the protection of the captain. The golden age, when they had all laughed and jested so freely and fearlessly together, under her pretty sovereignty, was past, and they seemed far dispersed in a common exile. Staniford imagined she grew pale and thin; he asked Dunham if he did not see it, but Dunham had not observed. “I think matters have taken a very desirable shape, socially,” he said. “Miss Blood will reach her friends as fancy-free as she left home.”

“Yes,” Staniford assented vaguely; “that’s the great object.”

After a while Dunham asked, “She’s never said anything to you about your rescuing Hicks?”

“Rescuing? What rescuing? They’d have had him out in another minute, any way,” said Staniford, fretfully. Then he brooded angrily upon the subject: “But I can tell you what: considering all the circumstances, she might very well have said something. It looks obtuse, or it looks hard. She must have known that it all came about through my trying to keep him away from her.”

“Oh, yes; she knew that,” said Dunham; “she spoke of it at the time. But I thought—”

“Oh, she did! Then I think that it would be very little if she recognized the mere fact that something had happened.”

“Why, you said you hoped she wouldn’t. You said it would be embarrassing. You’re hard to please, Staniford.”

“I shouldn’t choose to have her speak for my pleasure,” Staniford returned. “But it argues a dullness and coldness in her—”

“I don’t believe she’s dull; I don’t believe she’s cold,” said Dunham, warmly.

“What do you believe she is?”

“Afraid.”

“Pshaw!” said Staniford.

The eve of their arrival at Messina, he discharged one more duty by telling Hicks that he had better come on to Trieste with them. “Captain Jenness asked me to speak to you about it,” he said. “He feels a little awkward, and thought I could open the matter better.”

“The captain’s all right,” answered Hicks, with unruffled humility, “but I’d rather stop at Messina. I’m going to get home as soon as I can, — strike a bee-line.”

“Look here!” said Staniford, laying his hand on his shoulder. “How are you going to manage for money?”

“Monte di Pietà,” replied Hicks. “I’ve been there before. Used to have most of my things in the care of the state when I was studying medicine in Paris. I’ve got a lot of rings and trinkets that’ll carry me through, with what’s left of my watch.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“Because you can draw on me, if you’re going to be short.”

“Thanks,” said Hicks. “There’s something I should like to ask you,” he added, after a moment. “I see as well as you do that Miss Blood isn’t the same as she was before. I want to know — I can’t always be sure afterwards — whether I did or said anything out of the way in her presence.”

“You were drunk,” said Staniford, frankly, “but beyond that you were irreproachable, as regarded Miss Blood. You were even exemplary.”

“Yes, I know,” said Hicks, with a joyless laugh. “Sometimes it takes that turn. I don’t think I could stand it if I had shown her any disrespect. She’s a lady, — a perfect lady; she’s the best girl I ever saw.”

“Hicks,” said Staniford, presently, “I haven’t bored you in regard to that little foible of yours. Aren’t you going to try to do something about it?”

“I’m going home to get them to shut me up somewhere,” answered Hicks. “But I doubt if anything can be done. I’ve studied the thing; I am a doctor, — or I would be if I were not a drunkard, — and I’ve diagnosed the case pretty thoroughly. For three months or four months, now, I shall be all right. After that I shall go to the bad for a few weeks; and I’ll have to scramble back the best way I can. Nobody can help me. That was the mistake this last time. I shouldn’t have wanted anything at Gibraltar if I could have had my spree out at Boston. But I let them take me before it was over, and ship me off. I thought I’d try it. Well, it was like a burning fire every minute, all the way. I thought I should die. I tried to get something from the sailors; I tried to steal Gabriel’s cooking-wine. When I got that brandy in Gibraltar I was wild. Talk about heroism! I tell you it was superhuman, keeping that canteen corked till night! I was in hopes I could get through it, — sleep it off, — and nobody be any the wiser. But it wouldn’t work. O Lord, Lord, Lord!”

Hicks was as common a soul as could well be. His conception of life was vulgar, and his experience of it was probably vulgar. He had a good mind enough, with abundance of that humorous brightness which may hereafter be found the most national quality of the Americans; but his ideals were pitiful, and the language of his heart was a drolling slang. Yet his doom lifted him above his low conditions, and made him tragic; his despair gave him the dignity of a mysterious expiation, and set him apart with all those who suffer beyond human help. Without deceiving himself as to the quality of the man, Staniford felt awed by the darkness of his fate.

“Can’t you try somehow to stand up against it, and fight it off? You’re so young yet, it can’t—”

The wretched creature burst into tears. “Oh, try, — try! You don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t you suppose I’ve had reasons for trying? If you could see how my mother looks when I come out of one of my drunks, — and my father, poor old man! It’s no use; I tell you it’s no use. I shall go just so long, and then I shall want it, and will have it, unless they shut me up for life. My God, I wish I was dead! Well!” He rose from the place where they had been sitting together, and held out his hand to Staniford. “I’m going to be off in the morning before you’re out, and I’ll say good-by now. I want you to keep this chair, and give it to Miss Blood, for me, when you get to Trieste.”

“I will, Hicks,” said Staniford, gently.

“I want her to know that I was ashamed of myself. I think she’ll like to know it.”

“I will say anything to her that you wish,” replied Staniford.

“There’s nothing else. If ever you see a man with my complaint fall overboard again, think twice before you jump after him.”

He wrung Staniford’s hand, and went below, leaving him with a dull remorse that he should ever have hated Hicks, and that he could not quite like him even now.

But he did his duty by him to the last. He rose at dawn, and was on deck when Hicks went over the side into the boat which was to row him to the steamer for Naples, lying at anchor not far off. He presently returned, to Staniford’s surprise, and scrambled up to the deck of the Aroostook. “The steamer sails to-night,” he said, “and perhaps I couldn’t raise the money by that time. I wish you’d lend me ten napoleons. I’ll send ’em to you from London. There’s my father’s address: I’m going to telegraph to him.” He handed Staniford a card, and the latter went below for the coins. “Thanks,” said Hicks, when he reappeared with them. “Send ’em to you where?”

“Care Blumenthals’, Venice. I’m going to be there some weeks.”

In the gray morning light the lurid color of tragedy had faded out of Hicks. He was merely a baddish-looking young fellow whom Staniford had lent ten napoleons that he might not see again. Staniford watched the steamer uneasily, both from the Aroostook and from the shore, where he strolled languidly about with Dunham part of the day. When she sailed in the evening, he felt that Hicks’s absence was worth twice the money.

XVIII.

The young men did not come back to the ship at night, but went to a hotel, for the greater convenience of seeing the city. They had talked of offering to show Lydia about, but their talk had not ended in anything. Vexed with himself to be vexed at such a thing, Staniford at the bottom of his heart still had a soreness which the constant sight of her irritated. It was in vain that he said there was no occasion, perhaps no opportunity, for her to speak, yet he was hurt that she seemed to have seen nothing uncommon in his risking his own life for that of a man like Hicks. He had set the action low enough in his own speech; but he knew that it was not ignoble, and it puzzled him that it should be so passed over. She had not even said a word of congratulation upon his own escape. It might be that she did not know how, or did not think it was her place to speak. She was curiously estranged. He felt as if he had been away, and she had grown from a young girl into womanhood during his absence. This fantastic conceit was strongest when he met her with Captain Jenness one day. He had found friends at the hotel, as one always does in Italy, if one’s world is at all wide, — some young ladies, and a lady, now married, with whom he had once violently flirted. She was willing that he should envy her husband; that amused him in his embittered mood; he let her drive him about; and they met Lydia and the captain, walking together. Staniford started up from his lounging ease, as if her limpid gaze had searched his conscience, and bowed with an air which did not escape his companion.

“Ah! Who’s that?” she asked, with the boldness which she made pass for eccentricity.

“A lady of my acquaintance,” said Staniford, at his laziest again.

“A lady?” said the other, with an inflection that she saw hurt. “Why the marine animal, then? She bowed very prettily; she blushed prettily, too.”

“She’s a very pretty girl,” replied Staniford.

“Charming! But why blush?”

“I’ve heard that there are ladies who blush for nothing.”

“Is she Italian?”

“Yes, — in voice.”

“Oh, an American prima donna!” Staniford did not answer. “Who is she? Where is she from?”

“South Bradfield, Mass.” Staniford’s eyes twinkled at her pursuit, which he did not trouble himself to turn aside, but baffled by mere impenetrability.

The party at the hotel suggested that the young men should leave their ship and go on with them to Naples; Dunham was tempted, for he could have reached Dresden sooner by land; but Staniford overruled him, and at the end of four days they went back to the Aroostook. They said it was like getting home, but in fact they felt the change from the airy heights and breadths of the hotel to the small cabin and the closets in which they slept; it was not so great alleviation as Captain Jenness seemed to think that one of them could now have Hicks’s stateroom. But Dunham took everything sweetly, as his habit was; and, after all, they were meeting their hardships voluntarily. Some of the ladies came with them in the boat which rowed them to the Aroostook; the name made them laugh; that lady who wished Staniford to regret her waved him her hand kerchief as the boat rowed away again. She had with difficulty been kept from coming on board by the refusal of the others to come with her. She had contrived to associate herself with him again in the minds of the others, and this, perhaps, was all that she desired. But the sense of her frivolity — her not so much vacant-mindedness as vacant-heartedness — was like a stain, and he painted in Lydia’s face when they first met the reproach which was in his own breast.

Her greeting, however, was frank and cordial; it was a real welcome. Staniford wondered if it were not more frank and cordial than he quite liked, and whether she was merely relieved by Hicks’s absence, or had freed herself from that certain subjection in which she had hitherto been to himself.

Yet it was charming to see her again as she had been in the happiest moments of the past, and to feel that, Hicks being out of her world, her trust of everybody in it was perfect once more. She treated that interval of coldness and diffidence as all women know how to treat a thing which they wish not to have been; and Staniford, a man on whom no pleasing art of her sex was ever lost, admired and gratefully accepted the effect of this. He fell luxuriously into the old habits again. They had still almost the time of a steamer’s voyage to Europe before them; it was as if they were newly setting sail from America. The first night after they left Messina Staniford found her in her place in the waist of the ship, and sat down beside her there, and talked; the next night she did not come; the third she came, and he asked her to walk with him. The elastic touch of her hand on his arm, the rhythmic movement of her steps beside him, were things that seemed always to have been. She told him of what she had seen and done in Messina. This glimpse of Italy had vividly animated her; she had apparently found a world within herself as well as without.

With a suddenly depressing sense of loss, Staniford had a prevision of splendor in her, when she should have wholly blossomed out in that fervid air of art and beauty; he would fain have kept her still a wilding rosebud of the New England wayside. He hated the officers who should wonder at her when she first came into the Square of St. Mark with her aunt and uncle.

Her talk about Messina went on; he was thinking of her, and not of her talk; but he saw that she was not going to refer to their encounter. “You make me jealous of the objects of interest in Messina,” he said. “You seem to remember seeing everything but me, there.”

She stopped abruptly. “Yes,” she said, after a deep breath, “I saw you there;” and she did not offer to go on again.

“Where were you going, that morning?”

“Oh, to the cathedral. Captain Jenness left me there, and I looked all through it till he came back from the consulate.”

“Left you there alone!” cried Staniford.

“Yes; I told him I should not feel lonely, and I should not stir out of it till he came back. I took one of those little pine chairs and sat down, when I got tired, and looked at the people coming to worship, and the strangers with their guide-books.”

“Did any of them look at you?”

“They stared a good deal. It seems to be the custom in Europe; but I told Captain Jenness I should probably have to go about by myself in Venice, as my aunt’s an invalid, and I had better get used to it.”

She paused, and seemed to be referring the point to Staniford.

“Yes, — oh, yes,” he said.

“Captain Jenness said it was their way, over here,” she resumed; “but he guessed I had as much right in a church as anybody.”

“The captain’s common sense is infallible,” answered Staniford. He was ashamed to know that the beautiful young girl was as improperly alone in church as she would have been in a café, and he began to hate the European world for the fact. It seemed better to him that the Aroostook should put about and sail back to Boston with her, as she was, — better that she should be going to her aunt in South Bradfield than to her aunt in Venice. “We shall soon be at our journey’s end, now,” he said, after a while.

“Yes; the captain thinks in about eight days, if we have good weather.”

“Shall you be sorry?”

“Oh, I like the sea very well.”

“But the new life you are coming to, — doesn’t that alarm you sometimes?”

“Yes, it does,” she admitted, with a kind of reluctance.

“So much that you would like to turn back from it?”

“Oh, no!” she answered quickly. Of course not, Staniford thought; nothing could be worse than going back to South Bradfield. “I keep thinking about it,” she added. “You say Venice is such a very strange place. Is it any use my having seen Messina?”

“Oh, all Italian cities have something in common.”

“I presume,” she went on, “that after I get there everything will become natural. But I don’t like to look forward. It — scares me. I can’t form any idea of it.”

“You needn’t be afraid,” said Staniford. “It’s only more beautiful than anything you can imagine.”

“Yes — yes; I know,” Lydia answered.

“And do you really dread getting there?”

“Yes, I dread it,” she said.

“Why,” returned Staniford lightly, “so do I; but it’s for a different reason, I’m afraid. I should like such a voyage as this to go on forever. Now and then I think it will; it seems always to have gone on. Can you remember when it began?”

“A great while ago,” she answered, humoring his fantasy, “but I can remember.” She paused a long while. “I don’t know,” she said at last, “whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me as if I had died, and this long voyage was a kind of dream that I was going to wake up from in another world. I often used to think, when I was a little girl, that when I got to heaven it would be lonesome — I don’t know whether I can express it. You say that Italy — that Venice — is so beautiful; but if I don’t know any one there—” She stopped, as if she had gone too far.

“But you do know somebody there,” said Staniford. “Your aunt—”

“Yes,” said the girl, and looked away.

“But the people in this long dream, — you’re going to let some of them appear to you there,” he suggested.

“Oh, yes,” she said, reflecting his lighter humor, “I shall want to see them, or I shall not know I am the same person, and I must be sure of myself, at least.”

“And you wouldn’t like to go back to earth — to South Bradfield again?” he asked presently.

“No,” she answered. “All that seems over forever. I couldn’t go back there and be what I was. I could have stayed there, but I couldn’t go back.”

Staniford laughed. “I see that it isn’t the other world that’s got hold of you! It’s this world! I don’t believe you’ll be unhappy in Italy. But it’s pleasant to think you’ve been so contented on the Aroostook that you hate to leave it. I don’t believe there’s a man on the ship that wouldn’t feel personally flattered to know that you liked being here. Even that poor fellow who parted from us at Messina was anxious that you should think as kindly of him as you could. He knew that he had behaved in a way to shock you, and he was very sorry. He left a message with me for you. He thought you would like to know that he was ashamed of himself.”

“I pitied him,” said Lydia succinctly. It was the first time that she had referred to Hicks, and Staniford found it in character for her to limit herself to this sparse comment. Evidently, her compassion was a religious duty. Staniford’s generosity came easy to him.

“I feel bound to say that Hicks was not a bad fellow. I disliked him immensely, and I ought to do him justice, now he’s gone. He deserved all your pity. He’s a doomed man; his vice is irreparable; he can’t resist it.” Lydia did not say anything: women do not generalize in these matters; perhaps they cannot pity the faults of those they do not love. Staniford only forgave Hicks the more. “I can’t say that up to the last moment I thought him anything but a poor, common little creature; and yet I certainly did feel a greater kindness for him after — what I — after what had happened. He left something more than a message for you, Miss Blood; he left his steamer chair yonder, for you.”

“For me?” demanded Lydia. Staniford felt her thrill and grow rigid upon his arm, with refusal. “I will not have it. He had no right to do so. He — he — was dreadful! I will give it to you!” she said, suddenly. “He ought to have given it to you. You did everything for him; you saved his life.”

It was clear that she did not sentimentalize Hicks’s case; and Staniford had some doubt as to the value she set upon what he had done, even now she had recognized it.

He said, “I think you overestimate my service to him, possibly. I dare say the boat could have picked him up in good time.”

“Yes, that’s what the captain and Mr. Watterson and Mr. Mason all said,” assented Lydia.

Staniford was nettled. He would have preferred a devoted belief that but for him Hicks must have perished. Besides, what she said still gave no clew to her feeling in regard to himself. He was obliged to go on, but he went on as indifferently as he could. “However, it was hardly a question for me at the time whether he could have been got out without my help. If I had thought about it at all — which I didn’t — I suppose I should have thought that it wouldn’t do to take any chances.”

“Oh, no,” said Lydia, simply, “you couldn’t have done anything less than you did.”

In his heart Staniford had often thought that he could have done very much less than jump overboard after Hicks, and could very properly have left him to the ordinary life-saving apparatus of the ship. But if he had been putting the matter to some lady in society who was aggressively praising him for his action, he would have said just what Lydia had said for him, — that he could not have done anything less. He might have said it, however, in such a way that the lady would have pursued his retreat from her praises with still fonder applause; whereas this girl seemed to think there was nothing else to be said. He began to stand in awe of her heroic simplicity. If she drew every-day breath in that lofty air, what could she really think of him, who preferred on principle the atmosphere of the valley? “Do you know, Miss Blood,” he said gravely, “that you pay me a very high compliment?”

“How?” she asked.

“You rate my maximum as my mean temperature.” He felt that she listened inquiringly. “I don’t think I’m habitually up to a thing of that kind,” he explained.

“Oh, no,” she assented, quietly; “but when he struck at you so, you had to do everything.”

“Ah, you have the pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of us all!” cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled, shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take it away. “I was a long time laboring up to that point. I suppose you are always there!”

“I don’t understand,” she said, turning her head round with the slow motion of her beauty, and looking him full in the face.

“I can’t explain now. I will, by and by, — when we get to Venice,” he added, with quick lightness.

“You put off everything till we get to Venice,” she said, doubtfully.

“I beg your pardon. It was you who did it the last time.”

“Was it?” She laughed. “So it was! I was thinking it was you.”

It consoled him a little that she should have confused them in her thought, in this way. “What was it you were to tell me in Venice?” he asked.

“I can’t think, now.”

“Very likely something of yourself — or myself. A third person might say our conversational range was limited.”

“Do you think it is very egotistical?” she asked, in the gay tone which gave him relief from the sense of oppressive elevation of mind in her.

“It is in me, — not in you.”

“But I don’t see the difference.”

“I will explain sometime.”

“When we get to Venice?”

They both laughed. It was very nonsensical; but nonsense is sometimes enough.

When they were serious again, “Tell me,” he said, “what you thought of that lady in Messina, the other day.”

She did not affect not to know whom he meant. She merely said, “I only saw her a moment.”

“But you thought something. If we only see people a second we form some opinion of them.”

“She is very fine-appearing,” said Lydia.

Staniford smiled at the countrified phrase; he had observed that when she spoke her mind she used an instinctive good language; when she would not speak it, she fell into the phraseology of the people with whom she had lived. “I see you don’t wish to say, because you think she is a friend of mine. But you can speak out freely. We were not friends; we were enemies, if anything.”

Staniford’s meaning was clear enough to himself; but Lydia paused, as if in doubt whether he was jesting or not, before she asked, “Why were you riding with her then?”

“I was driving with her,” he replied, “I suppose, because she asked me.”

“Asked you!” cried the girl; and he perceived her moral recoil both from himself and from a woman who could be so unseemly. That lady would have found it delicious if she could have known that a girl placed like Lydia was shocked at her behavior. But he was not amused. He was touched by the simple self-respect that would not let her suffer from what was not wrong in itself, but that made her shrink from a voluntary semblance of unwomanliness. It endeared her not only to his pity, but to that sense which in every man consecrates womanhood, and waits for some woman to be better than all her sex. Again he felt the pang he had remotely known before. What would she do with these ideals of hers in that depraved Old World, — so long past trouble for its sins as to have got a sort of sweetness and innocence in them, — where her facts would be utterly irreconcilable with her ideals, and equally incomprehensible?

They walked up and down a few turns without speaking again of that lady. He knew that she grew momently more constrained toward him; that the pleasure of the time was spoiled for her; that she had lost her trust in him, and this half amused, half afflicted him. It did not surprise him when, at their third approach to the cabin gangway, she withdrew her hand from his arm and said, stiffly, “I think I will go down.” But she did not go at once. She lingered, and after a certain hesitation she said, without looking at him, “I didn’t express what I wanted to, about Mr. Hicks, and — what you did. It is what I thought you would do.”

“Thanks,” said Staniford, with sincere humility. He understood how she had had this in her mind, and how she would not withhold justice from him because he had fallen in her esteem; how rather she would be the more resolute to do him justice for that reason.

XIX.

He could see that she avoided being alone with him the next day, but he took it for a sign of relenting, perhaps helpless relenting, that she was in her usual place on deck in the evening. He went to her, and, “I see that you haven’t forgiven me,” he said.

“Forgiven you?” she echoed.

“Yes,” he said, “for letting that lady ask me to drive with her.”

“I never said—” she began.

“Oh, no! But I knew it, all the same. It was not such a very wicked thing, as those things go. But I liked your not liking it. Will you let me say something to you?”

“Yes,” she answered, rather breathlessly.

“You must think it’s rather an odd thing to say, as I ask leave. It is; and I hardly know how to say it. I want to tell you that I’ve made bold to depend a great deal upon your good opinion for my peace of mind, of late, and that I can’t well do without it now.”

She stole the quickest of her bird-like glances at him, but did not speak; and though she seemed, to his anxious fancy, poising for flight, she remained, and merely looked away, like the bird that will not or cannot fly.

“You don’t resent my making you my outer conscience, do you, and my knowing that you’re not quite pleased with me?”

She looked down and away with one of those turns of the head, so precious when one who beholds them is young, and caught at the fringe of her shawl. “I have no right,” she began.

“Oh, I give you the right!” he cried, with passionate urgence. “You have the right. Judge me!” She only looked more grave, and he hurried on. “It was no great harm of her to ask me; that’s common enough; but it was harm of me to go if I didn’t quite respect her, — if I thought her silly, and was willing to be amused with her. One hasn’t any right to do that. I saw this when I saw you.” She still hung her head, and looked away. “I want you to tell me something,” he pursued. “Do you remember once — the second time we talked together — that you said Dunham was in earnest, and you wouldn’t answer when I asked you about myself? Do you remember?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“I didn’t care, then. I care very much now. You don’t think me — you think I can be in earnest when I will, don’t you? And that I can regret — that I really wish—” He took the hand that played with the shawl-fringe, but she softly drew it away.

“Ah, I see!” he said. “You can’t believe in me. You don’t believe that I can be a good man — like Dunham!”

She answered in the same breathless murmur, “I think you are good.” Her averted face drooped lower.

“I will tell you all about it, some day!” he cried, with joyful vehemence. “Will you let me?”

“Yes,” she answered, with the swift expulsion of breath that sometimes comes with tears. She rose quickly and turned away. He did not try to keep her from leaving him. His heart beat tumultuously; his brain seemed in a whirl. It all meant nothing, or it meant everything.

“What is the matter with Miss Blood?” asked Dunham, who joined him at this moment. “I just spoke to her at the foot of the gangway stairs, and she wouldn’t answer me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about Miss Blood — I don’t know what’s the matter,” said Staniford. “Look here, Dunham; I want to talk with you — I want to tell you something — I want you to advise me — I — There’s only one thing that can explain it, that can excuse it. There’s only one thing that can justify all that I’ve done and said, and that can not only justify it, but can make it sacredly and eternally right, — right for her and right for me. Yes, it’s reason for all, and for a thousand times more. It makes it fair for me to have let her see that I thought her beautiful and charming, that I delighted to be with her, that I — Dunham,” cried Staniford, “I’m in love!”

Dunham started at the burst in which these ravings ended. “Staniford,” he faltered, with grave regret, “I hope not!”

“You hope not? You — you — What do you mean? How else can I free myself from the self-reproach of having trifled with her, of—”

Dunham shook his head compassionately. “You can’t do it that way. Your only safety is to fight it to the death, — to run from it.”

“But if I don’t choose to fight it?” shouted Staniford,— “if I don’t choose to run from it? If I—”

“For Heaven’s sake, hush! The whole ship will hear you, and you oughtn’t to breathe it in the desert. I saw how it was going! I dreaded it; I knew it; and I longed to speak. I’m to blame for not speaking!”

“I should like to know what would have authorized you to speak?” demanded Staniford, haughtily.

“Only my regard for you; only what urges me to speak now! You must fight it, Staniford, whether you choose or not. Think of yourself, — think of her! Think — you have always been my ideal of honor and truth and loyalty — think of her husband—”

“Her husband!” gasped Staniford. “Whose husband? What the deuce — who the deuce — are you talking about, Dunham?”

“Mrs. Rivers.”

“Mrs. Rivers? That flimsy, feather-headed, empty-hearted — eyes-maker! That frivolous, ridiculous — Pah! And did you think that I was talking of her? Did you think I was in love with her?”

“Why,” stammered Dunham, “I supposed — I thought — At Messina, you know—”

“Oh!” Staniford walked the deck’s length away. “Well, Dunham,” he said, as he came back, “you’ve spoilt a pretty scene with your rot about Mrs. Rivers. I was going to be romantic! But perhaps I’d better say in ordinary newspaper English that I’ve just found out that I’m in love with Miss Blood.”

“With her!” cried Dunham, springing at his hand.

“Oh, come now! Don’t you be romantic, after knocking my chance.”

“Why, but Staniford!” said Dunham, wringing his hand with a lover’s joy in another’s love and his relief that it was not Mrs. Rivers. “I never should have dreamt of such a thing!”

“Why?” asked Staniford, shortly.

“Oh, the way you talked at first, you know, and—”

“I suppose even people who get married have something to take back about each other,” said Staniford, rather sheepishly. “However,” he added, with an impulse of frankness, “I don’t know that I should have dreamt of it myself, and I don’t blame you. But it’s a fact, nevertheless.”

“Why, of course. It’s splendid! Certainly. It’s magnificent!” There was undoubtedly a qualification, a reservation, in Dunham’s tone. He might have thought it right to bring the inequalities of the affair to Staniford’s mind. With all his effusive kindliness of heart and manner, he had a keen sense of social fitness, a nice feeling for convention. But a man does not easily suggest to another that the girl with whom he has just declared himself in love is his inferior. What Dunham finally did say was: “It jumps with all your ideas — all your old talk about not caring to marry a society girl—”

“Society might be very glad of such a girl!” said Staniford, stiffly.

“Yes, yes, certainly; but I mean—”

“Oh, I know what you mean. It’s all right,” said Staniford. “But it isn’t a question of marrying yet. I can’t be sure she understood me, — I’ve been so long understanding myself. And yet, she must, she must! She must believe it by this time, or else that I’m the most infamous scoundrel alive. When I think how I have sought her out, and followed her up, and asked her judgment, and hung upon her words, I feel that I oughtn’t to lose a moment in being explicit. I don’t care for myself; she can take me or leave me, as she likes; but if she doesn’t understand, she mustn’t be left in suspense as to my meaning.” He seemed to be speaking to Dunham, but he was really thinking aloud, and Dunham waited for some sort of question before he spoke. “But it’s a great satisfaction to have had it out with myself. I haven’t got to pretend any more that I hang about her, and look at her, and go mooning round after her, for this no-reason and that; I’ve got the best reason in the world for playing the fool, — I’m in love!” He drew a long, deep breath. “It simplifies matters immensely to have reached the point of acknowledging that. Why, Dunham, those four days at Messina almost killed me! They settled it. When that woman was in full fascination it made me gasp. I choked for a breath of fresh air; for a taste of spring-water; for — Lurella!” It was a long time since Staniford had used this name, and the sound of it made him laugh. “It’s droll — but I always think of her as Lurella; I wish it was her name! Why, it was like heaven to see her face when I got back to the ship. After we met her that day at Messina, Mrs. Rivers tried her best to get out of me who it was, and where I met her. But I flatter myself that I was equal to that emergency.”

Dunham said nothing, at once. Then, “Staniford,” he faltered, “she got it out of me.”

“Did you tell her who Lu — who Miss Blood was?”

“Yes.”

“And how I happened to be acquainted with her?”

“Yes.”

“And that we were going on to Trieste with her?”

“She had it out of me before I knew,” said Dunham. “I didn’t realize what she was after; and I didn’t realize how peculiar the situation might seem—”

“I see nothing peculiar in the situation,” interrupted Staniford, haughtily. Then he laughed consciously. “Or, yes, I do; of course I do! You must know her to appreciate it, though.” He mused a while before he added: “No wonder Mrs. Rivers was determined to come aboard! I wish we had let her, — confound her! She’ll think I was ashamed of it. There’s nothing to be ashamed of! By Heaven, I should like to hear any one—” Staniford broke off, and laughed, and then bit his lip, smiling. Suddenly he burst out again, frowning: “I won’t view it in that light. I refuse to consider it from that point of view. As far as I’m concerned, it’s as regular as anything else in life. It’s the same to me as if she were in her own house, and I had come there to tell her that she has my future in her hand. She’s such a lady by instinct that she’s made it all a triumph, and I thank God that I haven’t done or said anything to mar it. Even that beast of a Hicks didn’t; it’s no merit. I’ve made love to her, — I own it; of course I have, because I was in love with her; and my fault has been that I haven’t made love to her openly, but have gone on fancying that I was studying her character, or some rubbish of that sort. But the fault is easily repaired.” He turned about, as if he were going to look for Lydia at once, and ask her to be his wife. But he halted abruptly, and sat down. “No; that won’t do,” he said. “That won’t do at all.” He remained thinking, and Dunham, unwilling to interrupt his reverie, moved a few paces off. “Dunham, don’t go. I want your advice. Perhaps I don’t see it in the right light.”

“How is it you see it, my dear fellow?” asked Dunham.

“I don’t know whether I’ve a right to be explicit with her, here. It seems like taking an advantage. In a few days she will be with her friends—”

“You must wait,” said Dunham, decisively. “You can’t speak to her before she is in their care; it wouldn’t be the thing. You’re quite right about that.”

“No, it wouldn’t be the thing,” groaned Staniford. “But how is it all to go on till then?” he demanded desperately.

“Why, just as it has before,” answered Dunham, with easy confidence.

“But is that fair to her?”

“Why not? You mean to say to her at the right time all that a man can. Till that time comes I haven’t the least doubt she understands you.”

“Do you think so?” asked Staniford, simply. He had suddenly grown very subject and meek to Dunham.

“Yes,” said the other, with the superiority of a betrothed lover; “women are very quick about those things.”

“I suppose you’re right,” sighed Staniford, with nothing of his wonted arrogant pretension in regard to women’s moods and minds, “I suppose you’re right. And you would go on just as before?”

“I would, indeed. How could you change without making her unhappy — if she’s interested in you?”

“That’s true. I could imagine worse things than going on just as before. I suppose,” he added, “that something more explicit has its charms; but a mutual understanding is very pleasant, — if it is a mutual understanding.” He looked inquiringly at Dunham.

“Why, as to that, of course I don’t know. You ought to be the best judge of that. But I don’t believe your impressions would deceive you.”

“Yours did, once,” suggested Staniford, in suspense.

“Yes; but I was not in love with her,” explained Dunham.

“Of course,” said Staniford, with a breath of relief. “And you think — Well, I must wait!” he concluded, grimly. “But don’t — don’t mention this matter, Dunham, unless I do. Don’t keep an eye on me, old fellow. Or, yes, you must! You can’t help it. I want to tell you, Dunham, what makes me think she may be a not wholly uninterested spectator of my — sentiments.” He made full statement of words and looks and tones. Dunham listened with the patience which one lover has with another.

XX.

The few days that yet remained of their voyage were falling in the latter half of September, and Staniford tried to make the young girl see the surpassing loveliness of that season under Italian skies; the fierceness of the summer is then past, and at night, when chiefly they inspected the firmament, the heaven has begun to assume something of the intense blue it wears in winter. She said yes, it was very beautiful, but she could not see that the days were finer, or the skies bluer, than those of September at home; and he laughed at her loyalty to the American weather. “Don’t you think so, too?” she asked, as if it pained her that he should like Italian weather better.

“Oh, yes, — yes,” he said. Then he turned the talk on her, as he did whenever he could. “I like your meteorological patriotism. If I were a woman, I should stand by America in everything.”

“Don’t you as a man?” she pursued, still anxiously.

“Oh, certainly,” he answered. “But women owe our continent a double debt of fidelity. It’s the Paradise of women, it’s their Promised Land, where they’ve been led up out of the Egyptian bondage of Europe. It’s the home of their freedom. It is recognized in America that women have consciences and souls.”

Lydia looked very grave. “Is it — is it so different with women in Europe?” she faltered.

“Very,” he replied, and glanced at her half-laughingly, half-tenderly.

After a while, “I wish you would tell me,” she said, “just what you mean. I wish you would tell me what is the difference.”

“Oh, it’s a long story. I will tell you — when we get to Venice.” The well-worn jest served its purpose again; she laughed, and he continued: “By the way, just when will that be? The captain says that if this wind holds we shall be in Trieste by Friday afternoon. I suppose your friends will meet you there on Saturday, and that you’ll go back with them to Venice at once.”

“Yes,” assented Lydia.

“Well, if I should come on Monday, would that be too soon?”

“Oh, no!” she answered. He wondered if she had been vaguely hoping that he might go directly on with her to Venice. They were together all day, now, and the long talks went on from early morning, when they met before breakfast on deck, until late at night, when they parted there, with blushed and laughed good-nights. Sometimes the trust she put upon his unspoken promises was terrible; it seemed to condemn his reticence as fantastic and hazardous. With her, at least, it was clear that this love was the first; her living and loving were one. He longed to testify the devotion which he felt, to leave it unmistakable and safe past accident; he thought of making his will, in which he should give her everything, and declare her supremely dear; he could only rid himself of this by drawing up the paper in writing, and then he easily tore it in pieces.

They drew nearer together, not only in their talk about each other, but in what they said of different people in their relation to themselves. But Staniford’s pleasure in the metaphysics of reciprocal appreciation, his wonder at the quickness with which she divined characters he painfully analyzed, was not greater than his joy in the pretty hitch of the shoulder with which she tucked her handkerchief into the back pocket of her sack, or the picturesqueness with, which she sat facing him, and leant upon the rail, with her elbow wrapped in her shawl, and the fringe gathered in the hand which propped her cheek. He scribbled his sketch-book full of her contours and poses, which sometimes he caught unawares, and which sometimes she sat for him to draw. One day, as they sat occupied in this, “I wonder,” he said, “if you have anything of my feeling, nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure excursion, without taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very much at home.”

“Why, yes,” she said, joyously; “do you have that feeling, too?”

“I wonder what it is makes us feel so,” he ventured.

“Perhaps,” she returned, “the long voyage.”

“I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe,” he said, reverting to the original figure. “Shall you?”

“You know I don’t know much about it,” she answered, in lithe evasion, for which she more than atoned with a conscious look and one of her dark blushes. Yet he chose, with a curious cruelty, to try how far she was his.

“How odd it would be,” he said, “if we never should have a chance to talk up this voyage of ours when it is over!”

She started, in a way that made his heart smite him. “Why, you said you—” And then she caught herself, and struggled pitifully for the self-possession she had lost. She turned her head away; his pulse bounded.

“Did you think I wouldn’t? I am living for that.” He took the hand that lay in her lap; she seemed to try to free it, but she had not the strength or will; she could only keep her face turned from him.

XXI.

They arrived Friday afternoon in Trieste, and Captain Jenness telegraphed his arrival to Lydia’s uncle as he went up to the consulate with his ship’s papers. The next morning the young men sent their baggage to a hotel, but they came back for a last dinner on the Aroostook. They all pretended to be very gay, but everybody was perturbed and distraught. Staniford and Dunham had paid their way handsomely with the sailors, and they had returned with remembrances in florid scarfs and jewelry for Thomas and the captain and the officers. Dunham had thought they ought to get something to give Lydia as a souvenir of their voyage; it was part of his devotion to young ladies to offer them little presents; but Staniford overruled him, and said there should be nothing of the kind. They agreed to be out of the way when her uncle came, and they said good-by after dinner. She came on deck to watch them ashore. Staniford would be the last to take leave. As he looked into her eyes, he saw brave trust of him, but he thought a sort of troubled wonder, too, as if she could not understand his reticence, and suffered from it. There was the same latent appeal and reproach in the pose in which she watched their boat row away. She stood with one hand resting on the rail, and her slim grace outlined against the sky. He waved his hand; she answered with a little languid wave of hers; then she turned away. He felt as if he had forsaken her.

The afternoon was very long. Toward night-fall he eluded Dunham, and wandered back to the ship in the hope that she might still be there. But she was gone. Already everything was changed. There was bustle and discomfort; it seemed years since he had been there. Captain Jenness was ashore somewhere; it was the second mate who told Staniford of her uncle’s coming.

“What sort of person was he?” he asked vaguely.

“Oh, well! Dum an Englishman, any way,” said Mason, in a tone of easy, sociable explanation.

The scruple to which Staniford had been holding himself for the past four or five days seemed the most incredible of follies, — the most fantastic, the most cruel. He hurried back to the hotel; when he found Dunham coming out from the table d’hôte he was wild.

“I have been the greatest fool in the world, Dunham,” he said. “I have let a quixotic quibble keep me from speaking when I ought to have spoken.”

Dunham looked at him in stupefaction. “Where have you been?” he inquired.

“Down to the ship. I was in hopes that she might be still there. But she’s gone.”

“The Aroostook gone?”

“Look here, Dunham,” cried Staniford, angrily, “this is the second time you’ve done that! If you are merely thick-witted, much can be forgiven to your infirmity; but if you’ve a mind to joke, let me tell you you choose your time badly.”

“I’m not joking. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I may be thick-witted, as you say; or you may be scatter-witted,” said Dunham, indignantly. “What are you after, any way?”

“What was my reason for not being explicit with her; for going away from her without one honest, manly, downright word; for sneaking off without telling her that she was more than life to me, and that if she cared for me as I cared for her I would go on with her to Venice, and meet her people with her?”

“Why, I don’t know,” replied Dunham, vaguely. “We agreed that there would be a sort of — that she ought to be in their care before—”

“Then I can tell you,” interrupted Staniford, “that we agreed upon the greatest piece of nonsense that ever was. A man can do no more than offer himself, and if he does less, after he’s tried everything to show that he’s in love with a woman, and to make her in love with him, he’s a scamp to refrain from a bad motive, and an ass to refrain from a good one. Why in the name of Heaven shouldn’t I have spoken, instead of leaving her to eat her heart out in wonder at my delay, and to doubt and suspect and dread — Oh!” he shouted, in supreme self-contempt.

Dunham had nothing to urge in reply. He had fallen in with what he thought Staniford’s own mind in regard to the course he ought to take; since he had now changed his mind, there seemed never to have been any reason for that course.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “it isn’t too late yet to see her, I dare say. Let us go and find what time the trains leave for Venice.”

“Do you suppose I can offer myself in the salle d’attente?” sneered Staniford. But he went with Dunham to the coffee-room, where they found the Osservatore Triestino and the time-table of the railroad. The last train left for Venice at ten, and it was now seven; the Austrian Lloyd steamer for Venice sailed at nine.

“Pshaw!” said Staniford, and pushed the paper away. He sat brooding over the matter before the table on which the journals were scattered, while Dunham waited for him to speak. At last he said, “I can’t stand it; I must see her. I don’t know whether I told her I should come on to-morrow night or not. If she should be expecting me on Monday morning, and I should be delayed — Dunham, will you drive round with me to the Austrian Lloyd’s wharf? They may be going by the boat, and if they are they’ll have left their hotel. We’ll try the train later. I should like to find out if they are on board. I don’t know that I’ll try to speak with them; very likely not.”

“I’ll go, certainly,” answered Dunham, cordially.

“I’ll have some dinner first,” said Staniford. “I’m hungry.”

It was quite dark when they drove on to the wharf at which the boat for Venice lay. When they arrived, a plan had occurred to Staniford, through the timidity which had already succeeded the boldness of his desperation. “Dunham,” he said, “I want you to go on board, and see if she’s there. I don’t think I could stand not finding her. Besides, if she’s cheerful and happy, perhaps I’d better not see her. You can come back and report. Confound it, you know, I should be so conscious before that infernal uncle of hers. You understand!”

“Yes, yes,” returned Dunham, eager to serve Staniford in a case like this. “I’ll manage it.”

“Well,” said Staniford, beginning to doubt the wisdom of either going aboard, “do it if you think best. I don’t know—”

“Don’t know what?” asked Dunham, pausing in the door of the fiacre.

“Oh, nothing, nothing! I hope we’re not making fools of ourselves.”

“You’re morbid, old fellow!” said Dunham, gayly. He disappeared in the darkness, and Staniford waited, with set teeth, till he came back. He seemed a long time gone. When he returned, he stood holding fast to the open fiacre-door, without speaking.

“Well!” cried Staniford, with bitter impatience.

“Well what?” Dunham asked, in a stupid voice.

“Were they there?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

“Can’t tell, man? Did you go to see?”

“I think so. I’m not sure.”

A heavy sense of calamity descended upon Staniford’s heart, but patience came with it. “What’s the matter, Dunham?” he asked, getting out tremulously.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve had a fall, somewhere. Help me in.”

Staniford got out and helped him gently to the seat, and then mounted beside him, giving the order for their return. “Where is your hat?” he asked, finding that Dunham was bareheaded.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Am I bleeding?”

“It’s so dark, I can’t see.”

“Put your hand here.” He carried Staniford’s hand to the back of his head.

“There’s no blood; but you’ve had an ugly knock there.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Dunham. “I remember now; I slipped and struck my head.” He lapsed away in a torpor; Staniford could learn nothing more from him.

The hurt was not what Staniford in his first anxiety had feared, but the doctor whom they called at the hotel was vague and guarded as to everything but the time and care which must be given in any event. Staniford despaired; but there was only one thing to do. He sat down beside his friend to take care of him.

His mind was a turmoil of regrets, of anxieties, of apprehensions; but he had a superficial calmness that enabled him to meet the emergencies of the case. He wrote a letter to Lydia which he somehow knew to be rightly worded, telling her of the accident. In terms which conveyed to her all that he felt, he said that he should not see her at the time he had hoped, but promised to come to Venice as soon as he could quit his friend. Then, with a deep breath, he put that affair away for the time, and seemed to turn a key upon it.

He called a waiter, and charged him to have his letter posted at once. The man said he would give it to the portier, who was sending out some other letters. He returned, ten minutes later, with a number of letters which he said the portier had found for him at the post-office. Staniford glanced at them. It was no time to read them then, and he put them into the breast pocket of his coat.

XXII.

At the hotel in Trieste, to which Lydia went with her uncle before taking the train for Venice, she found an elderly woman, who made her a courtesy, and, saying something in Italian, startled her by kissing her hand.

“It’s our Veronica,” her uncle explained; “she wants to know how she can serve you.” He gave Veronica the wraps and parcels he had been carrying. “Your aunt thought you might need a maid.”

“Oh, no!” said Lydia. “I always help myself.”

“Ah, I dare say,” returned her uncle. “You American ladies are so — up to snuff, as you say. But your aunt thought we’d better have her with us, in any case.”

“And she sent her all the way from Venice?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I never did!” said Lydia, not lightly, but with something of contemptuous severity.

Her uncle smiled, as if she had said something peculiarly acceptable to him, and asked, hesitatingly, “When you say you never did, you know, what is the full phrase?”

Lydia looked at him. “Oh! I suppose I meant I never heard of such a thing.”

“Ah, thanks, thanks!” said her uncle. He was a tall, slender man of fifty-five or sixty, with a straight gray mustache, and not at all the typical Englishman, but much more English-looking than if he had been. His bearing toward Lydia blended a fatherly kindness and a colonial British gallantry, such as one sees in elderly Canadian gentlemen attentive to quite young Canadian ladies at the provincial watering-places. He had an air of adventure, and of uncommon pleasure and no small astonishment in Lydia’s beauty. They were already good friends; she was at her ease with him; she treated him as if he were an old gentleman. At the station, where Veronica got into the same carriage with them, Lydia found the whole train very queer-looking, and he made her describe its difference from an American train. He said, “Oh, yes — yes, engine,” when she mentioned the locomotive, and he apparently prized beyond its worth the word cow-catcher, a fixture which Lydia said was wanting to the European locomotive, and left it very stubby. He asked her if she would allow him to set it down; and he entered the word in his note-book, with several other idioms she had used. He said that he amused himself in picking up these things from his American friends. He wished to know what she called this and that and the other thing, and was equally pleased whether her nomenclature agreed or disagreed with his own. Where it differed, he recorded the fact, with her leave, in his book. He plied her with a thousand questions about America, with all parts of which he seemed to think her familiar; and she explained with difficulty how very little of it she had seen. He begged her not to let him bore her, and to excuse the curiosity of a Britisher, “As I suppose you’d call me,” he added.

Lydia lifted her long-lashed lids half-way, and answered, “No, I shouldn’t call you so.”

“Ah, yes,” he returned, “the Americans always disown it. But I don’t mind it at all, you know. I like those native expressions.” Where they stopped for refreshments he observed that one of the dishes, which was flavored to the national taste, had a pretty tall smell, and seemed disappointed by Lydia’s unresponsive blankness at a word which a countryman of hers — from Kentucky — had applied to the odor of the Venetian canals. He suffered in like measure from a like effect in her when he lamented the complications that had kept him the year before from going to America with Mrs. Erwin, when she revisited her old stomping-ground.

As they rolled along, the warm night which had fallen after the beautiful day breathed through the half-dropped window in a rich, soft air, as strange almost as the flying landscape itself. Mr. Erwin began to drowse, and at last he fell asleep; but Veronica kept her eyes vigilantly fixed upon Lydia, always smiling when she caught her glance, and offering service. At the stations, so orderly and yet so noisy, where the passengers were held in the same meek subjection as at Trieste, people got in and out of the carriage; and there were officers, at first in white coats, and after they passed the Italian frontier in blue, who stared at Lydia. One of the Italians, a handsome young hussar, spoke to her. She could not know what he said; but when he crossed over to her side of the carriage, she rose and took her place beside Veronica, where she remained even after he left the carriage. She was sensible of growing drowsy. Then she was aware of nothing till she woke up with her head on Veronica’s shoulder, against which she had fallen, and on which she had been patiently supported for hours. “Ecco Venezia!” cried the old woman, pointing to a swarm of lights that seemed to float upon an expanse of sea. Lydia did not understand; she thought she was again on board the Aroostook, and that the lights she saw were the lights of the shipping in Boston harbor. The illusion passed, and left her heart sore. She issued from the glare of the station upon the quay before it, bewildered by the ghostly beauty of the scene, but shivering in the chill of the dawn, and stunned by the clamor of the gondoliers. A tortuous course in the shadow of lofty walls, more deeply darkened from time to time by the arch of a bridge, and again suddenly pierced by the brilliance of a lamp that shot its red across the gloom, or plunged it into the black water, brought them to a palace gate at which they stopped, and where, after a dramatic ceremony of sliding bolts and the reluctant yielding of broad doors on a level with the water, she passed through a marble-paved court and up a stately marble staircase to her uncle’s apartment. “You’re at home, now, you know,” he said, in a kindly way, and took her hand, very cold and lax, in his for welcome. She could not answer, but made haste to follow Veronica to her room, whither the old woman led the way with a candle. It was a gloomily spacious chamber, with sombre walls and a lofty ceiling with a faded splendor of gilded paneling. Some tall, old-fashioned mirrors and bureaus stood about, with rugs before them on the stone floor; in the middle of the room was a bed curtained with mosquito-netting. Carved chairs were pushed here and there against the wall. Lydia dropped into one of these, too strange and heavy-hearted to go to bed in that vastness and darkness, in which her candle seemed only to burn a small round hole. She longed forlornly to be back again in her pretty state-room on the Aroostook; vanishing glimpses and echoes of the faces and voices grown so familiar in the past weeks haunted her; the helpless tears ran down her cheeks.

There came a tap at her door, and her aunt’s voice called, “Shall I come in?” and before she could faintly consent, her aunt pushed in, and caught her in her arms, and kissed her, and broke into a twitter of welcome and compassion. “You poor child! Did you think I was going to let you go to sleep without seeing you, after you’d come half round the world to see me?” Her aunt was dark and slight like Lydia, but not so tall; she was still a very pretty woman, and she was a very effective presence now in the long white morning-gown of camel’s hair, somewhat fantastically embroidered in crimson silk, in which she drifted about before Lydia’s bewildered eyes. “Let me see how you look! Are you as handsome as ever?” She held the candle she carried so as to throw its light full upon Lydia’s face. “Yes!” she sighed. “How pretty you are! And at your age you’ll look even better by daylight! I had begun to despair of you; I thought you couldn’t be all I remembered; but you are, — you’re more! I wish I had you in Rome, instead of Venice; there would be some use in it. There’s a great deal of society there, — English society; but never mind: I’m going to take you to church with me to-morrow, — the English service; there are lots of English in Venice now, on their way south for the winter. I’m crazy to see what dresses you’ve brought; your aunt Maria has told me how she fitted you out. I’ve got two letters from her since you started, and they’re all perfectly well, dear. Your black silk will do nicely, with bright ribbons, especially; I hope you haven’t got it spotted or anything on the way over.” She did not allow Lydia to answer, nor seem to expect it. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes, Lydia, but your father had those straight eyebrows: you’re very much like him. Poor Henry! And now I’m having you get something to eat. I’m not going to risk coffee on you, for fear it will keep you awake; though you can drink it in this climate with comparative impunity. Veronica is warming you a bowl of bouillon, and that’s all you’re to have till breakfast!”

“Why, aunt Josephine,” said the girl, not knowing what bouillon was, and abashed by the sound of it, “I’m not the least hungry. You oughtn’t to take the trouble—”

“You’ll be hungry when you begin to eat. I’m so impatient to hear about your voyage! I am going to introduce you to some very nice people, here, — English people. There are no Americans living in Venice; and the Americans in Europe are so queer! You’ve no idea how droll our customs seem here; and I much prefer the English. Your poor uncle can never get me to ask Americans. I tell him I’m American enough, and he’ll have to get on without others. Of course, he’s perfectly delighted to get at you. You’ve quite taken him by storm, Lydia; he’s in raptures about your looks. It’s what I told him before you came; but I couldn’t believe it till I took a look at you. I couldn’t have gone to sleep without it. Did Mr. Erwin talk much with you?”

“He was very pleasant. He talked — as long as he was awake,” said Lydia.

“I suppose he was trying to pick up Americanisms from you; he’s always doing it. I keep him away from Americans as much as I can: but he will get at them on the cars and at the hotels. He’s always asking them such ridiculous questions, and I know some of them just talk nonsense to him.”

Veronica came in with a tray, and a bowl of bouillon on it; and Mrs. Erwin pulled up a light table, and slid about, serving her, in her cabalistic dress, like an Oriental sorceress performing her incantations. She volubly watched Lydia while she ate her supper, and at the end she kissed her again. “Now you feel better,” she said. “I knew it would cheer you up more than any one thing. There’s nothing like something to eat when you’re homesick. I found that out when I was off at school.”

Lydia was hardly kissed so much at home during a year as she had been since meeting Mrs. Erwin. Her aunt Maria sparely embraced her when she went and came each week from the Mill Village; anything more than this would have come of insincerity between them; but it had been agreed that Mrs. Erwin’s demonstrations of affection, of which she had been lavish during her visit to South Bradfield, might not be so false. Lydia accepted them submissively, and she said, when Veronica returned for the tray, “I hate to give you so much trouble. And sending her all the way to Trieste on my account, — I felt ashamed. There wasn’ a thing for her to do.”

“Why, of course not!” exclaimed her aunt. “But what did you think I was made of? Did you suppose I was going to have you come on a night-journey alone with your uncle? It would have been all over Venice; it would have been ridiculous. I sent Veronica along for a dragon.”

“A dragon? I don’t understand,” faltered Lydia.

“Well, you will,” said her aunt, putting the palms of her hands against Lydia’s, and so pressing forward to kiss her. “We shall have breakfast at ten. Go to bed!”

XXIII.

When Lydia came to breakfast she found her uncle alone in the room, reading Galignani’s Messenger. He put down his paper, and came forward to take her hand. “You are all right this morning, I see, Miss Lydia,” he said. “You were quite up a stump, last night, as your countrymen say.”

At the same time hands were laid upon her shoulders from behind, and she was pulled half round, and pushed back, and held at arm’s-length. It was Mrs. Erwin, who, entering after her, first scanned her face, and then, with one devouring glance, seized every detail of her dress — the black silk which had already made its effect — before she kissed her. “You are lovely, my dear! I shall spoil you, I know; but you’re worth it! What lashes you have, child! And your aunt Maria made and fitted that dress? She’s a genius!”

“Miss Lydia,” said Mr. Erwin, as they sat down, “is of the fortunate age when one rises young every morning.” He looked very fresh himself in his clean-shaven chin, and his striking evidence of snowy wristbands and shirt-bosom. “Later in life, you can’t do that. She looks as blooming,” he added, gallantly, “as a basket of chips, — as you say in America.”

“Smiling,” said Lydia, mechanically correcting him.

“Ah! It is? Smiling, — yes; thanks. It’s very good either way; very characteristic. It would be curious to know the origin of a saying like that. I imagine it goes back to the days of the first settlers. It suggests a wood-chopping period. Is it — ah — in general use?” he inquired.

“Of course it isn’t, Henshaw!” said his wife.

“You’ve been a great while out of the country, my dear,” suggested Mr. Erwin.

“Not so long as not to know that your Americanisms are enough to make one wish we had held our tongues ever since we were discovered, or had never been discovered at all. I want to ask Lydia about her voyage. I haven’t heard a word yet. Did your aunt Maria come down to Boston with you?”

“No, grandfather brought me.”

“And you had good weather coming over? Mr. Erwin told me you were not seasick.”

“We had one bad storm, before we reached Gibraltar; but I wasn’t seasick.”

“Were the other passengers?”

“One was.” Lydia reddened a little, and then turned somewhat paler than at first.

“What is it, Lydia?” her aunt subtly demanded. “Who was the one that was sick?”

“Oh, a gentleman,” answered Lydia.

Her aunt looked at her keenly, and for whatever reason abruptly left the subject. “Your silk,” she said, “will do very well for church, Lydia.”

“Oh, I say, now!” cried her husband, “you’re not going to make her go to church to-day!”

“Yes, I am! There will be more people there to-day than any other time this fall. She must go.”

“But she’s tired to death, — quite tuckered, you know.”

“Oh, I’m rested, now,” said Lydia. “I shouldn’t like to miss going to church.”

“Your silk,” continued her aunt, “will be quite the thing for church.” She looked hard at the dress, as if it were not quite the thing for breakfast. Mrs. Erwin herself wore a morning-dress of becoming delicacy, and an airy French cap; she had a light fall of powder on her face. “What kind of overthing have you got?” she asked.

“There’s a sack goes with this,” said the girl, suggestively.

“That’s nice! What is your bonnet?”

“I haven’t any bonnet. But my best hat is nice. I could—”

“No one goes to church in a hat! You can’t do it. It’s simply impossible.”

“Why, my dear,” said her husband, “I saw some very pretty American girls in hats at church, last Sunday.”

“Yes, and everybody knew they were Americans by their hats!” retorted Mrs. Erwin.

“I knew they were Americans by their good looks,” said Mr. Erwin, “and what you call their stylishness.”

“Oh, it’s all well enough for you to talk. You’re an Englishman, and you could wear a hat, if you liked. It would be set down to character. But in an American it would be set down to greenness. If you were an American, you would have to wear a bonnet.”

“I’m glad, then, I’m not an American,” said her husband; “I don’t think I should look well in a bonnet.”

“Oh, stuff, Henshaw! You know what I mean. And I’m not going to have English people thinking we’re ignorant of the common decencies of life. Lydia shall not go to church in a hat; she had better never go. I will lend her one of my bonnets. Let me see, which one.” She gazed at Lydia in critical abstraction. “I wear rather young bonnets,” she mused aloud, “and we’re both rather dark. The only difficulty is I’m so much more delicate—” She brooded upon the question in a silence, from which she burst exulting. “The very thing! I can fuss it up in no time. It won’t take two minutes to get it ready. And you’ll look just killing in it.” She turned grave again. “Henshaw,” she said, “I wish you would go to church this morning!”

“I would do almost anything for you, Josephine; but really, you know, you oughtn’t to ask that. I was there last Sunday; I can’t go every Sunday. It’s bad enough in England; a man ought to have some relief on the Continent.”

“Well, well. I suppose I oughtn’t to ask you,” sighed his wife, “especially as you’re going with us to-night.”

“I’ll go to-night, with pleasure,” said Mr. Erwin. He rose when his wife and Lydia left the table, and opened the door for them with a certain courtesy he had; it struck even Lydia’s uneducated sense as something peculiarly sweet and fine, and it did not overawe her own simplicity, but seemed of kind with it.

The bonnet, when put to proof, did not turn out to be all that it was vaunted. It looked a little odd, from the first; and Mrs. Erwin, when she was herself dressed, ended by taking it off, and putting on Lydia the hat previously condemned. “You’re divine in that,” she said. “And after all, you are a traveler, and I can say that some of your things were spoiled coming over, — people always get things ruined in a sea voyage, — and they’ll think it was your bonnet.”

“I kept my things very nicely, aunt Josephine,” said Lydia conscientiously. “I don’t believe anything was hurt.”

“Oh, well, you can’t tell till you’ve unpacked; and we’re not responsible for what people happen to think, you know. Wait!” her aunt suddenly cried. She pulled open a drawer, and snatched two ribbons from it, which she pinned to the sides of Lydia’s hat, and tied in a bow under her chin; she caught out a lace veil, and drew that over the front of the hat, and let it hang in a loose knot behind. “Now,” she said, pushing her up to a mirror, that she might see, “it’s a bonnet; and I needn’t say anything!”

They went in Mrs. Erwin’s gondola to the palace in which the English service was held, and Lydia was silent, as she looked shyly, almost fearfully, round on the visionary splendors of Venice.

Mrs. Erwin did not like to be still. “What are you thinking of, Lydia?” she asked.

“Oh! I suppose I was thinking that the leaves were beginning to turn in the sugar orchard,” answered Lydia faithfully. “I was thinking how still the sun would be in the pastures, there, this morning. I suppose the stillness here put me in mind of it. One of these bells has the same tone as our bell at home.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Erwin. “Everybody finds a familiar bell in Venice. There are enough of them, goodness knows. I don’t see why you call it still, with all this clashing and banging. I suppose this seems very odd to you, Lydia,” she continued, indicating the general Venetian effect. “It’s an old story to me, though. The great beauty of Venice is that you get more for your money here than you can anywhere else in the world. There isn’t much society, however, and you mustn’t expect to be very gay.”

“I have never been gay,” said Lydia.

“Well, that’s no reason you shouldn’t be,” returned her aunt. “If you were in Florence, or Rome, or even Naples, you could have a good time. There! I’m glad your uncle didn’t hear me say that!”

“What?” asked Lydia.

“Good time; that’s an Americanism.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. He’s perfectly delighted when he catches me in one. I try to break myself of them, but I don’t always know them myself. Sometimes I feel almost like never talking at all. But you can’t do that, you know.”

“No,” assented Lydia.

“And you have to talk Americanisms if you’re an American. You mustn’t think your uncle isn’t obliging, Lydia. He is. I oughtn’t to have asked him to go to church, — it bores him so much. I used to feel terribly about it once, when we were first married. But things have changed very much of late years, especially with all this scientific talk. In England it’s quite different from what it used to be. Some of the best people in society are skeptics now, and that makes it quite another thing.” Lydia looked grave, but she said nothing, and her aunt added, “I wouldn’t have asked him, but I had a little headache, myself.”

“Aunt Josephine,” said Lydia, “I’m afraid you’re doing too much for me. Why didn’t you let me come alone?”

“Come alone? To church!” Mrs. Erwin addressed her in a sort of whispered shriek. “It would have been perfectly scandalous.”

“To go to church alone?” demanded Lydia, astounded.

“Yes. A young girl mustn’t go anywhere alone.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain to you, sometime, Lydia; or rather, you’ll learn for yourself. In Italy it’s very different from what it is in America.” Mrs. Erwin suddenly started up and bowed with great impressiveness, as a gondola swept towards them. The gondoliers wore shirts of blue silk, and long crimson sashes. On the cushions of the boat, beside a hideous little man who was sucking the top of an ivory-handled stick, reclined a beautiful woman, pale, with purplish rings round the large black eyes with which, faintly smiling, she acknowledged Mrs. Erwin’s salutation, and then stared at Lydia.

“Oh, you may look, and you may look, and you may look!” cried Mrs. Erwin, under her breath. “You’ve met more than your match at last! The Countess Tatocka,” she explained to Lydia. “That was her palace we passed just now, — the one with the iron balconies. Did you notice the gentleman with her? She always takes to those monsters. He’s a Neapolitan painter, and ever so talented, — clever, that is. He’s dead in love with her, they say.”

“Are they engaged?” asked Lydia.

“Engaged!” exclaimed Mrs. Erwin, with her shriek in dumb show. “Why, child, she’s married!”

“To him?” demanded the girl, with a recoil.

“No! To her husband.”

“To her husband?” gasped Lydia. “And she—”

“Why, she isn’t quite well seen, even in Venice,” Mrs. Erwin explained. “But she’s rich, and her conversazioni are perfectly brilliant. She’s very artistic, and she writes poetry, — Polish poetry. I wish she could hear you sing, Lydia! I know she’ll be frantic to see you again. But I don’t see how it’s to be managed; her house isn’t one you can take a young girl to. And I can’t ask her: your uncle detests her.”

“Do you go to her house?” Lydia inquired stiffly.

“Why, as a foreigner, I can go. Of course, Lydia, you can’t be as particular about everything on the Continent as you are at home.”

The former oratory of the Palazzo Grinzelli, which served as the English chapel, was filled with travelers of both the English-speaking nationalities, as distinguishable by their dress as by their faces. Lydia’s aunt affected the English style, but some instinctive elegance betrayed her, and every Englishwoman there knew and hated her for an American, though she was a precisian in her liturgy, instant in all the responses and genuflexions. She found opportunity in the course of the lesson to make Lydia notice every one, and she gave a telegrammic biography of each person she knew, with a criticism of the costume of all the strangers, managing so skillfully that by the time the sermon began she was able to yield the text a statuesquely close attention, and might have been carved in marble where she sat as a realistic conception of Worship.

The sermon came to an end; the ritual proceeded; the hymn, with the hemming and hawing of respectable inability, began, and Lydia lifted her voice with the rest. Few of the people were in their own church; some turned and stared at her; the bonnets and the back hair of those who did not look were intent upon her; the long red neck of one elderly Englishman, restrained by decorum from turning his head toward her, perspired with curiosity. Mrs. Erwin fidgeted, and dropped her eyes from the glances which fell to her for explanation of Lydia, and hurried away with her as soon as the services ended. In the hall on the water-floor of the palace, where they were kept waiting for their gondola a while, she seemed to shrink even from the small, surly greetings with which people whose thoughts are on higher things permit themselves to recognize fellow-beings of their acquaintance in coming out of church. But an old lady, who supported herself with a cane, pushed through the crowd to where they stood aloof, and, without speaking to Mrs. Erwin, put out her hand to Lydia; she had a strong, undaunted, plain face, in which was expressed the habit of doing what she liked. “My dear,” she said, “how wonderfully you sing! Where did you get that heavenly voice? You are an American; I see that by your beauty. You are Mrs. Erwin’s niece, I suppose, whom she expected. Will you come and sing to me? You must bring her, Mrs. Erwin.”

She hobbled away without waiting for an answer, and Lydia and her aunt got into their gondola. “Oh! How glad I am!” cried Mrs. Erwin, in a joyful flutter. “She’s the very tip-top of the English here; she has a whole palace, and you meet the very best people at her house. I was afraid when you were singing, Lydia, that they would think your voice was too good to be good form, — that’s an expression you must get; it means everything, — it sounded almost professional. I wanted to nudge you to sing a little lower, or different, or something; but I couldn’t, everybody was looking so. No matter. It’s all right now. If she liked it, nobody else will dare to breathe. You can see that she has taken a fancy to you; she’ll make a great pet of you.”

“Who is she?” asked Lydia, bluntly.

“Lady Fenleigh. Such a character, — so eccentric! But really, I suppose, very hard to live with. It must have been quite a release for poor Sir Fenleigh.”

“She didn’t seem in mourning,” said Lydia. “Has he been dead long?”

“Why, he isn’t dead at all! He is what you call a grass-widower. The best soul in the world, everybody says, and very, very fond of her; but she couldn’t stand it; he was too good, don’t you understand? They’ve lived apart a great many years. She’s lived a great deal in Asia Minor, — somewhere. She likes Venice; but of course there’s no telling how long she may stay. She has another house in Florence, all ready to go and be lived in at a day’s notice. I wish I had presented you! It did go through my head; but it didn’t seem as if I could get the Blood out. It is a fearful name, Lydia; I always felt it so when I was a girl, and I was so glad to marry out of it; and it sounds so terribly American. I think you must take your mother’s name, my dear. Latham is rather flattish, but it’s worlds better than Blood.”

“I am not ashamed of my father’s name,” said Lydia.

“But you’ll have to change it some day, at any rate, — when you get married.”

Lydia turned away. “I will be called Blood till then. If Lady Fenleigh—”

“Yes, my dear,” promptly interrupted her aunt, “I know that sort of independence. I used to have whole Declarations of it. But you’ll get over that, in Europe. There was a time — just after the war — when the English quite liked our sticking up for ourselves; but that’s past now. They like us to be outlandish, but they don’t like us to be independent. How did you like the sermon? Didn’t you think we had a nicely-dressed congregation?”

“I thought the sermon was very short,” answered Lydia.

“Well, that’s the English way, and I like it. If you get in all the service, you must make the sermon short.”

Lydia did not say anything for a little while. Then she asked, “Is the service the same at the evening meeting?”

“Evening meeting?” repeated Mrs. Erwin.

“Yes, — the church to-night.”

“Why, child, there isn’t any church to-night! What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t uncle — didn’t Mr. Erwin say he would go with us to-night?”

Mrs. Erwin seemed about to laugh, and then she looked embarrassed. “Why, Lydia,” she cried at last, “he didn’t mean church; he meant — opera!”

“Opera! Sunday night! Aunt Josephine, do you go to the theatre on Sabbath evening?”

There was something appalling in the girl’s stern voice. Mrs. Erwin gathered herself tremulously together for defense. “Why, of course, Lydia, I don’t approve of it, though I never was Orthodox. Your uncle likes to go; and if everybody’s there that you want to see, and they will give the best operas Sunday night, what are you to do?”

Lydia said nothing, but a hard look came into her face, and she shut her lips tight.

“Now you see, Lydia,” resumed her aunt, with an air of deductive reasoning from the premises, “the advantage of having a bonnet on, even if it’s only a make-believe. I don’t believe a soul knew it. All those Americans had hats. You were the only American girl there with a bonnet. I’m sure that it had more than half to do with Lady Fenleigh’s speaking to you. It showed that you had been well brought up.”

“But I never wore a bonnet to church at home,” said Lydia.

“That has nothing to do with it, if they thought you did. And Lydia,” she continued, “I was thinking while you were singing there that I wouldn’t say anything at once about your coming over to cultivate your voice. That’s got to be such an American thing, now. I’ll let it out little by little, — and after Lady Fenleigh’s quite taken you under her wing. Perhaps we may go to Milan with you, or to Naples, — there’s a conservatory there, too; and we can pull up stakes as easily as not. Well!” said Mrs. Erwin, interrupting herself, “I’m glad Henshaw wasn’t by to hear that speech. He’d have had it down among his Americanisms instantly. I don’t know whether it is an Americanism; but he puts down all the outlandish sayings he gets hold of to Americans; he has no end of English slang in his book. Everything has opened beautifully, Lydia, and I intend you shall have the best time!” She looked fondly at her brother’s child. “You’ve no idea how much you remind me of your poor father. You have his looks exactly. I always thought he would come out to Europe before he died. We used to be so proud of his looks at home! I can remember that, though I was the youngest, and he was ten years older than I. But I always did worship beauty. A perfect Greek, Mr. Rose-Black calls me: you’ll see him; he’s an English painter staying here; he comes a great deal.”

“Mrs. Erwin, Mrs. Erwin!” called a lady’s voice from a gondola behind them. The accent was perfectly English, but the voice entirely Italian. “Where are you running to?”

“Why, Miss Landini!” retorted Mrs. Erwin, looking back over her shoulder. “Is that you? Where in the world are you going?”

“Oh, I’ve been to pay a visit to my old English teacher. He’s awfully ill with rheumatism; but awfully! He can’t turn in bed.”

“Why, poor man! This is my niece whom I told you I was expecting! Arrived last night! We’ve been to church!” Mrs. Erwin exclaimed each of the facts.

The Italian girl stretched her hand across the gunwales of the boats, which their respective gondoliers had brought skillfully side by side, and took Lydia’s hand. “I’m glad to see you, my dear. But my God, how beautiful you Americans are! But you don’t look American, you know; you look Spanish! I shall come a great deal to see you, and practice my English.”

“Come home with, us now, Miss Landini, and have lunch,” said Mrs. Erwin.

“No, my dear, I can’t. My aunt will be raising the devil if I’m not there to drink coffee with her; and I’ve been a great while away now. Till tomorrow!” Miss Landini’s gondolier pushed his boat away, and rowed it up a narrow canal on the right.

“I suppose,” Mrs. Erwin explained, “that she’s really her mother, — everybody says so; but she always calls her aunt. Dear knows who her father was. But she’s a very bright girl, Lydia, and you’ll like her. Don’t you think she speaks English wonderfully for a person who’s never been out of Venice?”

“Why does she swear?” asked Lydia, stonily.

“Swear? Oh, I know what you mean. That’s the funniest thing about Miss Landini. Your uncle says it’s a shame to correct her; but I do, whenever I think of it. Why, you know, such words as God and devil don’t sound at all wicked in Italian, and ladies use them quite commonly. She understands that it isn’t good form to do so in English, but when she gets excited she forgets. Well, you can’t say but what she was impressed, Lydia!”

After lunch, various people came to call upon Mrs. Erwin. Several of them were Italians who were learning English, and they seemed to think it inoffensive to say that they were glad of the opportunity to practice the language with Lydia. They talked local gossip with her aunt, and they spoke of an approaching visit to Venice from the king; it seemed to Lydia that the king’s character was not good.

Mr. Rose-Black, the English artist, came. He gave himself the effect of being in Mrs. Erwin’s confidence, apparently without her authority, and he bestowed a share of this intimacy upon Lydia. He had the manner of a man who had been taken up by people above him, and the impudence of a talent which had not justified the expectations formed of it. He softly reproached Mrs. Erwin for running away after service before he could speak to her, and told her how much everybody had been enchanted by her niece’s singing. “At least, they said it was your niece.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Rose-Black, let me introduce you to Miss—” Lydia looked hard, even to threatening, at her aunt, and Mrs. Erwin added, “Blood.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Rose-Black, with his picked-up politeness, “I didn’t get the name.”

“Blood,” said Mrs. Erwin, more distinctly.

“Aöh!” said Mr. Rose-Black, in a cast-off accent of jaded indifferentism, just touched with displeasure. “Yes,” he added, dreamily, to Lydia, “it was divine, you know. You might say it needed training; but it had the naïve sweetness we associate with your countrywomen. They’re greatly admired in England now, you know, for their beauty. Oh, I assure you, it’s quite the thing to admire American ladies. I want to arrange a little lunch at my studio for Mrs. Erwin and yourself; and I want you to abet me in it, Miss Blood.” Lydia stared at him, but he was not troubled. “I’m going to ask to sketch you. Really, you know, there’s a poise — something bird-like — a sort of repose in movement—” He sat in a corner of the sofa, with his head fallen back, and abandoned to an absent enjoyment of Lydia’s pictorial capabilities. He was very red; his full beard, which started as straw color, changed to red when it got a little way from his face. He wore a suit of rough blue, the coat buttoned tightly about him, and he pulled a glove through his hand as he talked. He was scarcely roused from his reverie by the entrance of an Italian officer, with his hussar jacket hanging upon one shoulder, and his sword caught up in his left hand. He ran swiftly to Mrs. Erwin, and took her hand.

“Ah, my compliments! I come practice my English with you a little. Is it well said, a little, or do you say a small?”

“A little, cavaliere,” answered Mrs. Erwin, amiably. “But you must say a good deal, in this case.”

“Yes, yes, — good deal. For what?”

“Let me introduce you to my niece. Colonel Pazzelli,” said Mrs. Erwin.

“Ah! Too much honor, too much honor!” murmured the cavaliere. He brought his heels together with a click, and drooped towards Lydia till his head was on a level with his hips. Recovering himself, he caught up his eye-glasses, and bent them on Lydia. “Very please, very honored, much—” He stopped, and looked confused, and Lydia turned pale and red.

“Now, won’t you play that pretty barcarole you played the other night at Lady Fenleigh’s?” entreated Mrs. Erwin.

Colonel Pazzelli wrenched himself from the fascination of Lydia’s presence, and lavished upon Mrs. Erwin the hoarded English of a week. “Yes, yes; very nice, very good. With much pleasure. I thank you. Yes, I play.” He was one of those natives who in all the great Italian cities haunt English-speaking societies; they try to drink tea without grimacing, and sing for the ladies of our race, who innocently pet them, finding them so very like other women in their lady-like sweetness and softness; it is said they boast among their own countrymen of their triumphs. The cavaliere unbuckled his sword, and laying it across a chair sat down at the piano. He played not one but many barcaroles, and seemed loath to leave the instrument.

“Now, Lydia,” said Mrs. Erwin, fondly, “won’t you sing us something?”

“Do!” called Mr. Rose-Black from the sofa, with the intonation of a spoiled first-cousin, or half-brother.

“I don’t feel like singing to-day,” answered Lydia, immovably. Mrs. Erwin was about to urge her further, but other people came in, — some Jewish ladies, and then a Russian, whom Lydia took at first for an American. They all came and went, but Mr. Rose-Black remained in his corner of the sofa, and never took his eyes from Lydia’s face. At last he went, and then Mr. Erwin looked in.

“Is that beast gone?” he asked. “I shall be obliged to show him the door, yet, Josephine. You ought to snub him. He’s worse than his pictures. Well, you’ve had a whole raft of folks today, — as your countrymen say.”

“Yes, thank Heaven,” cried Mrs. Erwin, “and they’re all gone. I don’t want Lydia to think that I let everybody come to see me on Sunday. Thursday is my day, Lydia, but a few privileged friends understand that they can drop in Sunday afternoon.” She gave Lydia a sketch of the life and character of each of these friends. “And now I must tell you that your manner is very good, Lydia. That reserved way of yours is quite the thing for a young girl in Europe: I suppose it’s a gift; I never could get it, even when I was a girl. But you mustn’t show any hauteur, even when you dislike people, and you refused to sing with rather too much aplomb. I don’t suppose it was noticed though, — those ladies coming in at the same time. Really, I thought Mr. Rose-Black and Colonel Pazzelli were trying to outstare each other! It was certainly amusing. I never saw such an evident case, Lydia! The poor cavaliere looked as if he had seen you somewhere before in a dream, and was struggling to make it all out.”

Lydia remained impassive. Presently she said she would go to her room, and write home before dinner. When she went out Mrs. Erwin fetched a deep sigh, and threw herself upon her husband’s sympathy.

“She’s terribly unresponsive,” she began. “I supposed she’d be in raptures with the place, at least, but you wouldn’t know there was anything at all remarkable in Venice from anything she’s said. We have met ever so many interesting people to-day, — the Countess Tatocka, and Lady Fenleigh, and Miss Landini, and everybody, but I don’t really think she’s said a word about a soul. She’s too queer for anything.”

“I dare say she hasn’t the experience to be astonished from,” suggested Mr. Erwin easily. “She’s here as if she’d been dropped down from her village.”

“Yes, that’s true,” considered his wife. “But it’s hard, with Lydia’s air and style and self-possession, to realize that she is merely a village girl.”

“She may be much more impressed than she chooses to show,” Mr. Erwin continued. “I remember a very curious essay by a French writer about your countrymen: he contended that they were characterized by a savage stoicism through their contact with the Indians.”

“Nonsense, Henshaw! There hasn’t been an Indian near South Bradfield for two hundred years. And besides that, am I stoical?”

“I’m bound to say,” replied her husband, “that so far as you go, you’re a complete refutation of the theory.”

“I hate to see a young girl so close,” fretted Mrs. Erwin. “But perhaps,” she added, more cheerfully, “she’ll be the easier managed, being so passive. She doesn’t seem at all willful, — that’s one comfort.”

She went to Lydia’s room just before dinner, and found the girl with her head fallen on her arms upon the table, where she had been writing. She looked up, and faced her aunt with swollen eyes.

“Why, poor thing!” cried Mrs. Erwin. “What is it, dear? What is it, Lydia?” she asked, tenderly, and she pulled Lydia’s face down upon her neck.

“Oh, nothing,” said Lydia. “I suppose I was a little homesick; writing home made me.”

She somewhat coldly suffered Mrs. Erwin to kiss her and smooth her hair, while she began to talk with her of her grandfather and her aunt at home. “But this is going to be home to you now,” said Mrs. Erwin, “and I’m not going to let you be sick for any other. I want you to treat me just like a mother, or an older sister. Perhaps I shan’t be the wisest mother to you in the world, but I mean to be one of the best. Come, now, bathe your eyes, my dear, and let’s go to dinner. I don’t like to keep your uncle waiting.” She did not go at once, but showed Lydia the appointments of the room, and lightly indicated what she had caused to be done, and what she had done with her own hands, to make the place pretty for her. “And now shall I take your letter, and have your uncle post it this evening?” She picked up the letter from the table. “Hadn’t you any wax to seal it? You know they don’t generally mucilage their envelopes in Europe.”

Lydia blushed. “I left it open for you to read. I thought you ought to know what I wrote.”

Mrs. Erwin dropped her hands in front of her, with the open letter stretched between them, and looked at her niece in rapture. “Lydia,” she cried, “one would suppose you had lived all your days in Europe! Showing me your letter, this way, — why, it’s quite like a Continental girl.”

“I thought it was no more than right you should see what I was writing home,” said Lydia, unresponsively.

“Well, no matter, even if it was right,” replied Mrs. Erwin. “It comes to the same thing. And now, as you’ve been quite a European daughter, I’m going to be a real American mother.” She took up the wax, and sealed Lydia’s letter without looking into it. “There!” she said, triumphantly.

She was very good to Lydia all through dinner, and made her talk of the simple life at home, and the village characters whom she remembered from her last summer’s visit. That amused Mr. Erwin, who several times, when, his wife was turning the talk upon Lydia’s voyage over, intervened with some new question about the life of the queer little Yankee hill-town. He said she must tell Lady Fenleigh about it, — she was fond of picking up those curios; it would make any one’s social fortune who could explain such a place intelligibly in London; when they got to having typical villages of the different civilizations at the international expositions, — as no doubt they would, — somebody must really send South Bradfield over. He pleased himself vastly with this fancy, till Mrs. Erwin, who had been eying Lydia critically from time to time, as if making note of her features and complexion, said she had a white cloak, and that in Venice, where one need not dress a great deal for the opera, Lydia could wear it that night.

Lydia looked up in astonishment, but she sat passive during her aunt’s discussion of her plans. When they rose from table, she said, at her stiffest and coldest, “Aunt Josephine, I want you to excuse me from going with you to-night. I don’t feel like going.”

“Not feel like going!” exclaimed her aunt in dismay. “Why, your uncle has taken a box!”

Lydia opposed nothing to this argument. She only said, “I would rather not go.”

“Oh, but you will, dear,” coaxed her aunt. “You would enjoy it so much.”

“I thought you understood from what I said to-day,” replied Lydia, “that I could not go.”

“Why, no, I didn’t! I knew you objected; but if I thought it was proper for you to go—”

“I should not go at home,” said Lydia, in the same immovable fashion.

“Of course not. Every place has its customs, and in Venice it has always been the custom to go to the opera on Sunday night.” This fact had no visible weight with Lydia, and after a pause her aunt added, “Didn’t Paul himself say to do in Rome as the Romans do?”

“No, aunt Josephine,” cried Lydia, indignantly, “he did not!”

Mrs. Erwin turned to her husband with a face of appeal, and he answered, “Really, my dear, I think you’re mistaken. I always had the impression that the saying was — an Americanism of some sort.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” interposed Lydia decisively. “I couldn’t go, if I didn’t think it was right, whoever said it.”

“Oh, well,” began Mrs. Erwin, “if you wouldn’t mind what Paul said—” She suddenly checked herself, and after a little silence she resumed, kindly, “I won’t try to force you, Lydia. I didn’t realize what a very short time it is since you left home, and how you still have all those ideas. I wouldn’t distress you about them for the world, my dear. I want you to feel at home with me, and I’ll make it as like home for you as I can in everything. Henshaw, I think you must go alone, this evening. I will stay with Lydia.”

“Oh, no, no! I couldn’t let you; I can’t let you! I shall not know what to do if I keep you at home. Oh, don’t leave it that way, please! I shall feel so badly about it—”

“Why, we can both stay,” suggested Mr. Erwin, kindly.

Lydia’s lips trembled and her eyes glistened, and Mrs. Erwin said, “I’ll go with you, Henshaw. I’ll be ready in half an hour. I won’t dress much.” She added this as if not to dress a great deal at the opera Sunday night might somehow be accepted as an observance of the Sabbath.

XXIV.

The next morning Veronica brought Lydia a little scrawl from her aunt, bidding the girl come and breakfast with her in her room at nine.

“Well, my dear,” her aunt called to her from her pillow, when she appeared, “you find me flat enough, this morning. If there was anything wrong about going to the opera last night, I was properly punished for it. Such wretched stuff as I never heard! And instead of the new ballet that they promised, they gave an old thing that I had seen till I was sick of it. You didn’t miss much, I can tell you. How fresh and bright you do look, Lydia!” she sighed. “Did you sleep well? Were you lonesome while we were gone? Veronica says you were reading the whole evening. Are you fond of reading?”

“I don’t think I am, very,” said Lydia. “It was a book that I began on the ship. It’s a novel.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t reading it; I was just looking at it.”

“What a queer child you are! I suppose you were dying to read it, and wouldn’t because it was Sunday. Well!” Mrs. Erwin put her hand under her pillow, and pulled out a gossamer handkerchief, with which she delicately touched her complexion here and there, and repaired with an instinctive rearrangement of powder the envious ravages of a slight rash about her nose. “I respect your high principles beyond anything, Lydia, and if they can only be turned in the right direction they will never be any disadvantage to you.” Veronica came in with the breakfast on a tray, and Mrs. Erwin added, “Now, pull up that little table, and bring your chair, my dear, and let us take it easy. I like to talk while I’m breakfasting. Will you pour out my chocolate? That’s it, in the ugly little pot with the wooden handle; the copper one’s for you, with coffee in it. I never could get that repose which seems to come perfectly natural to you. I was always inclined to be a little rowdy, my dear, and I’ve had to fight hard against it, without any help from either of my husbands; men like it; they think it’s funny. When I was first married, I was very young, and so was he; it was a real love match; and my husband was very well off, and when I began to be delicate, nothing would do but he must come to Europe with me. How little I ever expected to outlive him!”

“You don’t look very sick now,” began Lydia.

“Ill,” said her aunt. “You must say ill. Sick is an Americanism.”

“It’s in the Bible,” said Lydia, gravely.

“Oh, there are a great many words in the Bible you can’t use,” returned her aunt. “No, I don’t look ill now, and I’m worlds better. But I couldn’t live a year in any other climate, I suppose. You seem to take after your mother’s side. Well, as I was saying, the European ways didn’t come natural to me, at all. I used to have a great deal of gayety when I was a girl, and I liked beaux and attentions; and I had very free ways. I couldn’t get their stiffness here for years and years, and all through my widowhood it was one wretched failure with me. Do what I would, I was always violating the most essential rules, and the worst of it was that it only seemed to make me the more popular. I do believe it was nothing but my rowdiness that attracted Mr. Erwin; but I determined when I had got an Englishman I would make one bold strike for the proprieties, and have them, or die in the attempt. I determined that no Englishwoman I ever saw should outdo me in strict conformity to all the usages of European society. So I cut myself off from all the Americans, and went with nobody but the English.”

“Do you like them better?” asked Lydia, with the blunt, child-like directness that had already more than once startled her aunt.

“Like them! I detest them! If Mr. Erwin were a real Englishman, I think I should go crazy; but he’s been so little in his own country — all his life in India, nearly, and the rest on the Continent, — that he’s quite human; and no American husband was ever more patient and indulgent; and that’s saying a good deal. He would be glad to have nothing but Americans around; he has an enthusiasm for them, — or for what he supposes they are. Like the English! You ought to have heard them during our war; it would have made your blood boil! And then how they came crawling round after it was all over, and trying to pet us up! Ugh!”

“If you feel so about them,” said Lydia, as before, “why do you want to go with them so much?”

“My dear,” cried her aunt, “to beat them with their own weapons on their own ground, — to show them that an American can be more European than any of them, if she chooses! And now you’ve come here with looks and temperament and everything just to my hand. You’re more beautiful than any English girl ever dreamt of being; you’re very distinguished-looking; your voice is perfectly divine; and you’re colder than an iceberg. Oh, if I only had one winter with you in Rome, I think I should die in peace!” Mrs. Erwin paused, and drank her chocolate, which she had been letting cool in the eagerness of her discourse. “But, never mind,” she continued, “we will do the best we can here. I’ve seen English girls going out two or three together, without protection, in Rome and Florence; but I mean that you shall be quite Italian in that respect. The Italians never go out without a chaperone of some sort, and you must never be seen without me, or your uncle, or Veronica. Now I’ll tell you how you must do at parties, and so on. You must be very retiring; you’re that, any way; but you must always keep close to me. It doesn’t do for young people to talk much together in society; it makes scandal about a girl. If you dance, you must always hurry back to me. Dear me!” exclaimed Mrs. Erwin, “I remember how, when I was a girl, I used to hang on to the young men’s arms, and promenade with them after a dance, and go out to supper with them, and flirt on the stairs, — such times! But that wouldn’t do here, Lydia. It would ruin a girl’s reputation; she could hardly walk arm in arm with a young man if she was engaged to him.” Lydia blushed darkly red, and then turned paler than usual, while her aunt went on. “You might do it, perhaps, and have it set down to American eccentricity or under-breeding, but I’m not going to have that. I intend you to be just as dull and diffident in society as if you were an Italian, and more than if you were English. Your voice, of course, is a difficulty. If you sing, that will make you conspicuous, in spite of everything. But I don’t see why that can’t be turned to advantage; it’s no worse than your beauty. Yes, if you’re so splendid-looking and so gifted, and at the same time as stupid as the rest, it’s so much clear gain. It will come easy for you to be shy with men, for I suppose you’ve hardly ever talked with any, living up there in that out-of-the-way village; and your manner is very good. It’s reserved, and yet it isn’t green. The way,” continued Mrs. Erwin, “to treat men in Europe is to behave as if they were guilty till they prove themselves innocent. All you have to do is to reverse all your American ideas. But here I am, lecturing you as if you had been just such a girl as I was, with half a dozen love affairs on her hands at once, and no end of gentlemen friends. Europe won’t be hard for you, my dear, for you haven’t got anything to unlearn. But some girls that come over! — it’s perfectly ridiculous, the trouble they get into, and the time they have getting things straight. They take it for granted that men in good society are gentlemen, — what we mean by gentlemen.”

Lydia had been letting her coffee stand, and had scarcely tasted the delicious French bread and the sweet Lombard butter of which her aunt ate so heartily. “Why, child,” said Mrs. Erwin, at last, “where is your appetite? One would think you were the elderly invalid who had been up late. Did you find it too exciting to sit at home looking at a novel? What was it? If it’s a new story I should like to see it. But you didn’t bring a novel from South Bradfield with you?”

“No,” said Lydia, with a husky reluctance. “One of the — passengers gave it to me.”

“Had you many passengers? But of course not. That was what made it so delightful when I came over that way. I was newly married then, and with spirits — oh dear me! — for anything. It was one adventure, the whole way; and we got so well acquainted, it was like one family. I suppose your grandfather put you in charge of some family. I know artists sometimes come out that way, and people for their health.”

“There was no family on our ship,” said Lydia. “My state-room had been fixed up for the captain’s wife—”

“Our captain’s wife was along, too,” interposed Mrs. Erwin. “She was such a joke with us. She had been out to Venice on a voyage before, and used to be always talking about the Du-cal Palace. And did they really turn out of their state-room for you?”

“She was not along,” said Lydia.

“Not along?” repeated Mrs. Erwin, feebly. “Who — who were the other passengers?”

“There were three gentlemen,” answered Lydia.

“Three gentlemen? Three men? Three — And you — and—” Mrs. Erwin fell back upon her pillow, and remained gazing at Lydia, with a sort of remote bewildered pity, as at perdition, not indeed beyond compassion, but far beyond help. Lydia’s color had been coming and going, but now it settled to a clear white. Mrs. Erwin commanded herself sufficiently to resume: “And there were — there were — no other ladies?”

“No.”

“And you were—”

“I was the only woman on board,” replied Lydia. She rose abruptly, striking the edge of the table in her movement, and setting its china and silver jarring. “Oh, I know what you mean, aunt Josephine, but two days ago I couldn’t have dreamt it! From the time the ship sailed till I reached this wicked place, there wasn’t a word said nor a look looked to make me think I wasn’t just as right and safe there as if I had been in my own room at home. They were never anything but kind and good to me. They never let me think that they could be my enemies, or that I must suspect them and be on the watch against them. They were Americans! I had to wait for one of your Europeans to teach me that, — for that officer who was here yesterday—”

“The cavaliere? Why, where—”

“He spoke to me in the cars, when Mr. Erwin was asleep! Had he any right to do so?”

“He would think he had, if he thought you were alone,” said Mrs. Erwin, plaintively. “I don’t see how we could resent it. It was simply a mistake on his part. And now you see, Lydia—”

“Oh, I see how my coming the way I have will seem to all these people!” cried Lydia, with passionate despair. “I know how it will seem to that married woman who lets a man be in love with her, and that old woman who can’t live with her husband because he’s too good and kind, and that girl who swears and doesn’t know who her father is, and that impudent painter, and that officer who thinks he has the right to insult women if he finds them alone! I wonder the sea doesn’t swallow up a place where even Americans go to the theatre on the Sabbath!”

“Lydia, Lydia! It isn’t so bad as it seems to you,” pleaded her aunt, thrown upon the defensive by the girl’s outburst. “There are ever so many good and nice people in Venice, and I know them, too, — Italians as well as foreigners. And even amongst those you saw, Miss Landini is one of the kindest girls in the world, and she had just been to see her old teacher when we met her, — she half takes care of him; and Lady Fenleigh’s a perfect mother to the poor; and I never was at the Countess Tatocka’s except in the most distant way, at a ball where everybody went; and is it better to let your uncle go to the opera alone, or to go with him? You told me to go with him yourself; and they consider Sunday over, on the Continent, after morning service, any way!”

“Oh, it makes no difference!” retorted Lydia, wildly. “I am going away. I am going home. I have money enough to get to Trieste, and the ship is there, and Captain Jenness will take me back with him. Oh!” she moaned. “He has been in Europe, too, and I suppose he’s like the rest of you; and he thought because I was alone and helpless he had the right to — Oh, I see it, I see now that he never meant anything, and — Oh, oh, oh!” She fell on her knees beside the bed, as if crushed to them by the cruel doubt that suddenly overwhelmed her, and flung out her arms on Mrs. Erwin’s coverlet — it was of Venetian lace sewed upon silk, a choice bit from the palace of one of the ducal families — and buried her face in it.

Her aunt rose from her pillow, and looked in wonder and trouble at the beautiful fallen head, and the fair young figure shaken with sobs. “He — who — what are you talking about, Lydia? Whom do you mean? Did Captain Jenness—”

“No, no!” wailed the girl, “the one that gave me the book.”

“The one that gave you the book? The book you were looking at last night?”

“Yes,” sobbed Lydia, with her voice muffled in the coverlet.

Mrs. Erwin lay down again with significant deliberation. Her face was still full of trouble, but of bewilderment no longer. In moments of great distress the female mind is apt to lay hold of some minor anxiety for its distraction, and to find a certain relief in it. “Lydia,” said her aunt in a broken voice, “I wish you wouldn’t cry in the coverlet: it doesn’t hurt the lace, but it stains the silk.” Lydia swept her handkerchief under her face but did not lift it. Her aunt accepted the compromise. “How came he to give you the book?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t tell. I thought it was because — because — It was almost at the very beginning. And after that he walked up and down with me every night, nearly; and he tried to be with me all he could; and he was always saying things to make me think — Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! And he tried to make me care for him! Oh, it was cruel, cruel!”

“You mean that he made love to you?” asked her aunt.

“Yes — no — I don’t know. He tried to make me care for him, and to make me think he cared for me.”

“Did he say he cared for you? Did he—”

“No!”

Mrs. Erwin mused a while before she said, “Yes, it was cruel indeed, poor child, and it was cowardly, too.”

“Cowardly?” Lydia lifted her face, and flashed a glance of tearful fire at her aunt. “He is the bravest man in the world! And the most generous and high-minded! He jumped into the sea after that wicked Mr. Hicks, and saved his life, when he disliked him worse than anything!”

“Who was Mr. Hicks?”

“He was the one that stopped at Messina. He was the one that got some brandy at Gibraltar, and behaved so dreadfully, and wanted to fight him.”

“Whom?”

“This one. The one who gave me the book. And don’t you see that his being so good makes it all the worse? Yes; and he pretended to be glad when I told him I thought he was good, — he got me to say it!” She had her face down again in her handkerchief. “And I suppose you think it was horrible, too, for me to take his arm, and talk and walk with him whenever he asked me!”

“No, not for you, Lydia,” said her aunt, gently. “And don’t you think now,” she asked after a pause, “that he cared for you?”

“Oh, I did think so, — I did believe it; but now, now—”

“Now, what?”

“Now, I’m afraid that may be he was only playing with me, and putting me off; and pretending that he had something to tell me when he got to Venice, and he never meant anything by anything.”

“Is he coming to—” her aunt began, but Lydia broke vehemently out again.

“If he had cared for me, why couldn’t he have told me so at once, and not had me wait till he got to Venice? He knew I—”

“There are two ways of explaining it,” said Mrs. Erwin. “He may have been in earnest, Lydia, and felt that he had no right to be more explicit till you were in the care of your friends. That would be the European way which you consider so bad,” said Mrs. Erwin. “Under the circumstances, it was impossible for him to keep any distance, and all he could do was to postpone his declaration till there could be something like good form about it. Yes, it might have been that.” She was silent, but the troubled look did not leave her face. “I am sorry for you, Lydia,” she resumed, “but I don’t know that I wish he was in earnest.” Lydia looked up at her in dismay. “It might be far less embarrassing the other way, however painful. He may not be at all a suitable person.” The tears stood in Lydia’s eyes, and all her face expressed a puzzled suspense. “Where was he from?” asked Mrs. Erwin, finally; till then she had been more interested in the lover than the man.

“Boston,” mechanically answered Lydia.

“What was his name?”

“Mr. Staniford,” owned Lydia, with a blush.

Her aunt seemed dispirited at the sound. “Yes, I know who they are,” she sighed.

“And aren’t they nice? Isn’t he — suitable?” asked Lydia, tremulously.

“Oh, poor child! He’s only too suitable. I can’t explain to you, Lydia; but at home he wouldn’t have looked at a girl like you. What sort of looking person is he?”

“He’s rather — red; and he has — light hair.”

“It must be the family I’m thinking of,” said Mrs. Erwin. She had lived nearly twenty years in Europe, and had seldom revisited her native city; but at the sound of a Boston name she was all Bostonian again. She rapidly sketched the history of the family to which she imagined Staniford to belong. “I remember his sister; I used to see her at school. She must have been five or six years younger than I; and this boy—”

“Why, he’s twenty-eight years old!” interrupted Lydia.

“How came he to tell you?”

“I don’t know. He said that he looked thirty-four.”

“Yes; she was always a forward thing too, — with her freckles,” said Mrs. Erwin, musingly, as if lost in reminiscences, not wholly pleasing, of Miss Staniford.

“He has freckles,” admitted Lydia.

“Yes, it’s the one,” said Mrs. Erwin. “He couldn’t have known what your family was from anything you said?”

“We never talked about our families.”

“Oh, I dare say! You talked about yourselves?”

“Yes.”

“All the time?”

“Pretty nearly.”

“And he didn’t try to find out who or what you were?”

“He asked a great deal about South Bradfield.”

“Of course, that was where he thought you had always belonged.” Mrs. Erwin lay quiescent for a while, in apparent uncertainty as to how she should next attack the subject. “How did you first meet?”

Lydia began with the scene on Lucas Wharf, and little by little told the whole story up to the moment of their parting at Trieste. There were lapses and pauses in the story, which her aunt was never at a loss to fill aright. At the end she said, “If it were not for his promising to come here and see you, I should say Mr. Staniford had been flirting, and as it is he may not regard it as anything more than flirtation. Of course, there was his being jealous of Mr. Dunham and Mr. Hicks, as he certainly was; and his wanting to explain about that lady at Messina — yes, that looked peculiar; but he may not have meant anything by it. His parting so at Trieste with you, that might be either because he was embarrassed at its having got to be such a serious thing, or because he really felt badly. Lydia,” she asked at last, “what made you think he cared for you?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl; her voice had sunk to a husky whisper. “I didn’t believe it till he said he wanted me to be his — conscience, and tried to make me say he was good, and—”

“That’s a certain kind of man’s way of flirting. It may mean nothing at all. I could tell in an instant, if I saw him.”

“He said he would be here this afternoon,” murmured Lydia, tremulously.

“This afternoon!” cried Mrs. Erwin. “I must get up!”

At her toilette she had the exaltation and fury of a champion arming for battle.

XXV.

Mr. Erwin entered about the completion of her preparations, and without turning round from her glass she said, “I want you to think of the worst thing you can, Henshaw. I don’t see how I’m ever to lift up my head again.” As if this word had reminded her of her head, she turned it from side to side, and got the effect in the glass, first of one ear-ring, and then of the other. Her husband patiently waited, and she now confronted him. “You may as well know first as last, Henshaw, and I want you to prepare yourself for it. Nothing can be done, and you will just have to live through it. Lydia — has come over — on that ship — alone, — with three young men, — and not the shadow — not the ghost — of another woman — on board!” Mrs. Erwin gesticulated with her hand-glass in delivering the words, in a manner at once intensely vivid and intensely solemn, yet somehow falling short of the due tragic effect. Her husband stood pulling his mustache straight down, while his wife turned again to the mirror, and put the final touches to her personal appearance with hands which she had the effect of having desperately washed of all responsibility. He stood so long in this meditative mood that she was obliged to be peremptory with his image in the glass. “Well?” she cried.

“Why, my dear,” said Mr. Erwin, at last, “they were all Americans together, you know.”

“And what difference does that make?” demanded Mrs. Erwin, whirling from his image to the man again.

“Why, of course, you know, it isn’t as if they were — English.” Mrs. Erwin flung down three hair-pins upon her dressing-case, and visibly despaired. “Of course you don’t expect your countrymen—” His wife’s appearance was here so terrible that he desisted, and resumed by saying, “Don’t be vexed, my dear. I — I rather like it, you know. It strikes me as a genuine bit of American civilization.”

“American civilization! Oh, Henshaw!” wailed Mrs. Erwin, “is it possible that after all I’ve said, and done, and lived, you still think that any one but a girl from the greenest little country place could do such a thing as that? Well, it is no use trying to enlighten English people. You like it, do you? Well, I’m not sure that the Englishman who misunderstands American things and likes them isn’t a little worse than the Englishman who misunderstands them and dislikes them. You all misunderstand them. And would you like it, if one of the young men had been making love to Lydia?”

The amateur of our civilization hesitated and was serious, but he said at last, “Why, you know, I’m not surprised. She’s so uncommonly pretty. I — I suppose they’re engaged?” he suggested.

His wife held her peace for scorn. Then she said, “The gentleman is of a very good Boston family, and would no more think of engaging himself to a young girl without the knowledge of her friends than you would. Besides, he’s been in Europe a great deal.”

“I wish I could meet some Americans who hadn’t been in Europe,” said Mr. Erwin. “I should like to see what you call the simon-pure American. As for the young man’s not engaging himself, it seems to me that he didn’t avail himself of his national privileges. I should certainly have done it in his place, if I’d been an American.”

“Well, if you’d been an American, you wouldn’t,” answered his wife.

“Why?”

“Because an American would have had too much delicacy.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I know you don’t, Henshaw. And there’s where you show yourself an Englishman.”

“Really,” said her husband, “you’re beginning to crow, my dear. Come, I like that a great deal better than your cringing to the effete despotisms of the Old World, as your Fourth of July orators have it. It’s almost impossible to get a bit of good honest bounce out of an American, nowadays, — to get him to spread himself, as you say.”

“All that is neither here nor there, Henshaw,” said his wife. “The question is how to receive Mr. Staniford — that’s his name — when he comes. How are we to regard him? He’s coming here to see Lydia, and she thinks he’s coming to propose.”

“Excuse me, but how does she regard him?”

“Oh, there’s no question about that, poor child. She’s dead in love with him, and can’t understand why he didn’t propose on shipboard.”

“And she isn’t an Englishman, either!” exulted Mr. Erwin. “It appears that there are Americans and Americans, and that the men of your nation have more delicacy than the women like.”

“Don’t be silly,” said his wife. “Of course, women always think what they would do in such cases, if they were men; but if men did what women think they would do if they were men, the women would be disgusted.”

“Oh!”

“Yes. Her feeling in the matter is no guide.”

“Do you know his family?” asked Mr. Erwin.

“I think I do. Yes, I’m sure I do.”

“Are they nice people?”

“Haven’t I told you they were a good Boston family?”

“Then upon my word, I don’t see that we’ve to take any attitude at all. I don’t see that we’ve to regard him in one way or the other. It quite remains for him to make the first move.”

As if they had been talking of nothing but dress before, Mrs. Erwin asked: “Do you think I look better in this black mexicaine, or would you wear your écru?”

“I think you look very well in this. But why — He isn’t going to propose to you, I hope?”

“I must have on something decent to receive him in. What time does the train from Trieste get in?”

“At three o’clock.”

“It’s one, now. There’s plenty of time, but there isn’t any too much. I’ll go and get Lydia ready. Or perhaps you’ll tap on her door, Henshaw, and send her here. Of course, this is the end of her voice, — if it is the end.”

“It’s the end of having an extraordinarily pretty girl in the house. I don’t at all like it, you know, — having her whisked away in this manner.”

Mrs. Erwin refused to let her mind wander from the main point. “He’ll be round as soon as he can, after he arrives. I shall expect him by four, at the latest.”

“I fancy he’ll stop for his dinner before he comes,” said Mr. Erwin.

“Not at all,” retorted his wife, haughtily. And with his going out of the room, she set her face in a resolute cheerfulness, for the task of heartening Lydia when she should appear; but it only expressed misgiving when the girl came in with her yachting-dress on. “Why, Lydia, shall you wear that?”

Lydia swept her dress with a downward glance.

“I thought I would wear it. I thought he — I should seem — more natural in it. I wore it all the time on the ship, except Sundays. He said — he liked it the best.”

Mrs. Erwin shook her head. “It wouldn’t do. Everything must be on a new basis now. He might like it; but it would be too romantic, wouldn’t it, don’t you think?” She shook her head still, but less decisively. “Better wear your silk. Don’t you think you’d better wear your silk? This is very pretty, and the dark blue does become you, awfully. Still, I don’t know — I don’t know, either! A great many English wear those careless things in the house. Well, wear it, Lydia! You do look perfectly killing in it. I’ll tell you: your uncle was going to ask you to go out in his boat; he’s got one he rows himself, and this is a boating costume; and you know you could time yourselves so as to get back just right, and you could come in with this on—”

Lydia turned pale. “Oughtn’t I — oughtn’t I — to be here?” she faltered.

Her aunt laughed gayly. “Why, he’ll ask for me, Lydia.”

“For you?” asked Lydia, doubtfully.

“Yes. And I can easily keep him till you get back. If you’re here by four—”

“The train,” said Lydia, “arrives at three.”

“How did you know?” asked her aunt, keenly.

Lydia’s eyelids fell even lower than their wont.

“I looked it out in that railroad guide in the parlor.”

Her aunt kissed her. “And you’ve thought the whole thing out, dear, haven’t you? I’m glad to see you so happy about it.”

“Yes,” said the girl, with a fluttering breath, “I have thought it out, and I believe him. I—” She tried to say something more, but could not.

Mrs. Erwin rang the bell, and sent for her husband. “He knows about it, Lydia,” she said.

“He’s just as much interested as we are, dear, but you needn’t be worried. He’s a perfect post for not showing a thing if you don’t want him to. He’s really quite superhuman, in that, — equal to a woman. You can talk Americanisms with him. If we sat here staring at each other till four o’clock, — he must go to his hotel before he comes here; and I say four at the earliest; and it’s much more likely to be five or six, or perhaps evening, — I should die!”

Mr. Erwin’s rowing was the wonder of all Venice. There was every reason why he should fall overboard at each stroke, as he stood to propel the boat in the gondolier fashion, except that he never yet had done so. It was sometimes his fortune to be caught on the shallows by the falling tide; but on that day he safely explored the lagoons, and returned promptly at four o’clock to the palace.

His wife was standing on the balcony, looking out for them, and she smiled radiantly down into Lydia’s anxiously lifted face. But when she met the girl at the head of the staircase in the great hall, she embraced her, and said, with the same gay smile, “He hasn’t come yet, dear, and of course he won’t come till after dinner. If I hadn’t been as silly as you are, Lydia, I never should have let you expect him sooner. He’ll want to go to his hotel: and no matter how impatient he is, he’ll want to dress, and be a little ceremonious about his call. You know we’re strangers to him, whatever you are.”

“Yes,” said Lydia, mechanically. She was going to sit down, as she was; of her own motion she would not have stirred from the place till he came, or it was certain he would not come; but her aunt would not permit the despair into which she saw her sinking.

She laughed resolutely, and said, “I think we must give up the little sentimentality of meeting him in that dress, now. Go and change it, Lydia. Put on your silk, — or wait: let me go with you. I want to try some little effects with your complexion. We’ve experimented with the simple and familiar, and now we’ll see what can be done in the way of the magnificent and unexpected. I’m going to astonish the young man with a Venetian beauty; you know you look Italian, Lydia.”

“Yes, he said so,” answered Lydia.

“Did he? That shows he has an eye, and he’ll appreciate what we are going to do.”

She took Lydia to her own room, for the greater convenience of her experiments, and from that moment she did not allow her to be alone; she scarcely allowed her to be silent; she made her talk, she kept her in movement. At dinner she permitted no lapse. “Henshaw,” she said, “Lydia has been telling me about a storm they had just before they reached Gibraltar. I wish you would tell her of the typhoon you were in when you first went out to India.” Her husband obeyed; and then recurring to the days of his civil employment in India, he told stories of tiger-hunts, and of the Sepoy mutiny. Mrs. Erwin would not let them sit very long at table. After dinner she asked Lydia to sing, and she suffered her to sing all the American songs her uncle asked for. At eight o’clock she said with a knowing little look at Lydia, which included a sub-wink for her husband, “You may go to your café alone, this evening, Henshaw. Lydia and I are going to stay at home and talk South Bradfield gossip. I’ve hardly had a moment with her yet.” But when he was gone, she took Lydia to her own room again, and showed her all her jewelry, and passed the time in making changes in the girl’s toilette.

It was like the heroic endeavor of the arctic voyager who feels the deadly chill in his own veins, and keeps himself alive by rousing his comrade from the torpor stealing over him. They saw in each other’s eyes that if they yielded a moment to the doubt in their hearts they were lost.

At ten o’clock Mrs. Erwin said abruptly, “Go to bed, Lydia!” Then the girl broke down, and abandoned herself in a storm of tears. “Don’t cry, dear, don’t cry,” pleaded her aunt. “He will be here in the morning, I know he will. He has been delayed.”

“No, he’s not coming,” said Lydia, through her sobs.

“Something has happened,” urged Mrs. Erwin.

“No,” said Lydia, as before. Her tears ceased as suddenly as they had come. She lifted her head, and drying her eyes looked into her aunt’s face. “Are you ashamed of me?” she asked hoarsely.

“Ashamed of you? Oh, poor child—”

“I can’t pretend anything. If I had never told you about it at all, I could have kept it back till I died. But now — But you will never hear me speak of it again. It’s over.” She took up her candle, and stiffly suffering the compassionate embrace with which her aunt clung to her, she walked across the great hall in the vain splendor in which she had been adorned, and shut the door behind her.

XXVI.

Dunham lay in a stupor for twenty-four hours, and after that he was delirious, with dim intervals of reason in which they kept him from talking, till one morning he woke and looked up at Staniford with a perfectly clear eye, and said, as if resuming the conservation, “I struck my head on a pile of chains.”

“Yes,” replied Staniford, with a wan smile, “and you’ve been out of it pretty near ever since. You mustn’t talk.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Dunham. “I know about my being hurt. I shall be cautious. Have you written to Miss Hibbard? I hope you haven’t!”

“Yes, I have,” replied Staniford. “But I haven’t sent the letter,” he added, in answer to Dunham’s look of distress. “I thought you were going to pull through, in spite of the doctor, — he’s wanted to bleed you, and I could hardly keep his lancet out of you, — and so I wrote, mentioning the accident and announcing your complete restoration. The letter merely needs dating and sealing. I’ll look it up and have it posted.” He began a search in the pockets of his coat, and then went to his portfolio.

“What day is this?” asked Dunham.

“Friday,” said Staniford, rummaging his portfolio.

“Have you been in Venice?”

“Look here, Dunham! If you begin in that way, I can’t talk to you. It shows that you’re still out of your head. How could I have been in Venice?”

“But Miss Blood; the Aroostook—”

“Miss Blood went to Venice with her uncle last Saturday. The Aroostook is here in Trieste. The captain has just gone away. He’s stood watch and watch with me, while you were off on business.”

“But didn’t you go to Venice on Monday?”

“Well, hardly,” answered Staniford.

“No, you stayed with me, — I see,” said Dunham.

“Of course, I wrote to her at once,” said Staniford, huskily, “and explained the matter as well as I could without making an ado about it. But now you stop, Dunham. If you excite yourself, there’ll be the deuce to pay again.”

“I’m not excited,” said Dunham, “but I can’t help thinking how disappointed — But of course you’ve heard from her?”

“Well, there’s hardly time, yet,” said Staniford, evasively.

“Why, yes, there is. Perhaps your letter miscarried.”

“Don’t!” cried Staniford, in a hollow under-voice, which he broke through to add, “Go to sleep, now, Dunham, or keep quiet, somehow.”

Dunham was silent for a while, and Staniford continued his search, which he ended by taking the portfolio by one corner, and shaking its contents out on the table. “I don’t seem to find it; but I’ve put it away somewhere. I’ll get it.” He went to another coat, that hung on the back of a chair, and fumbled in its pockets. “Hello! Here are those letters they brought me from the post-office Saturday night, — Murray’s, and Stanton’s, and that bore Farrington’s. I forgot all about them.” He ran the unopened letters over in his hand. “Ah, here’s my familiar scrawl—” He stopped suddenly, and walked away to the window, where he stood with his back to Dunham.

“Staniford! What is it?”

“It’s — it’s my letter to her” said Staniford, without looking round.

“Your letter to Miss Blood — not gone?” Staniford, with his face still from him, silently nodded. “Oh!” moaned Dunham, in self-forgetful compassion. “How could it have happened?”

“I see perfectly well,” said the other, quietly, but he looked round at Dunham with a face that was haggard. “I sent it out to be posted by the portier, and he got it mixed up with these letters for me, and brought it back.”

The young men were both silent, but the tears stood in Dunham’s eyes. “If it hadn’t been for me, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

“No,” gently retorted Staniford, “if it hadn’t been for me, it wouldn’t have happened. I made you come from Messina with me, when you wanted to go on to Naples with those people; if I’d had any sense, I should have spoken fully to her before we parted; and it was I who sent you to see if she were on the steamer, when you fell and hurt yourself. I know who’s to blame, Dunham. What day did I tell you this was?”

“Friday.”

“A week! And I told her to expect me Monday afternoon. A week without a word or a sign of any kind! Well, I might as well take passage in the Aroostook, and go back to Boston again.”

“Why, no!” cried Dunham, “you must take the first train to Venice. Don’t lose an instant. You can explain everything as soon as you see her.”

Staniford shook his head. “If all her life had been different, if she were a woman of the world, it would be different; she would know how to account for some little misgivings on my part; but as it is she wouldn’t know how to account for even the appearance of them. What she must have suffered all this week — I can’t think of it!” He sat down and turned his face away. Presently he sprang up again. “But I’m going, Dunham. I guess you won’t die now; but you may die if you like. I would go over your dead body!”

“Now you are talking sense,” said Dunham.

Staniford did not listen; he had got out his railroad guide and was studying it. “No; there are only those two trains a day. The seven o’clock has gone; and the next starts at ten to-night. Great heavens! I could walk it sooner! Dunham,” he asked, “do you think I’d better telegraph?”

“What would you say?”

“Say that there’s been a mistake; that a letter miscarried; that I’ll be there in the morning; that—”

“Wouldn’t that be taking her anxiety a little too much for granted?”

“Yes, that’s true. Well, you’ve got your wits about you now, Dunham,” cried Staniford, with illogical bitterness. “Very probably,” he added, gloomily, “she doesn’t care anything for me, after all.”

“That’s a good frame of mind to go in,” said Dunham.

“Why is it?” demanded Staniford. “Did I ever presume upon any supposed interest in her?”

“You did at first,” replied Dunham.

Staniford flushed angrily. But you cannot quarrel with a man lying helpless on his back; besides, what Dunham said was true.

The arrangements for Staniford’s journey were quickly made, — so quickly that when he had seen the doctor, and had been down to the Aroostook and engaged Captain Jenness to come and take his place with Dunham for the next two nights, he had twelve hours on his hands before the train for Venice would leave, and he started at last with but one clear perception, — that at the soonest it must be twelve hours more before he could see her.

He had seemed intolerably slow in arriving on the train, but once arrived in Venice he wished that he had come by the steamboat, which would not be in for three hours yet. In despair he went to bed, considering that after he had tossed there till he could endure it no longer, he would still have the resource of getting up, which he would not have unless he went to bed. When he lay down, he found himself drowsy; and while he wondered at this, he fell asleep, and dreamed a strange dream, so terrible that he woke himself by groaning in spirit, a thing which, as he reflected, he had never done before. The sun was piercing the crevice between his shutters, and a glance at his watch showed him that it was eleven o’clock.

The shadow of his dream projected itself into his waking mood, and steeped it in a gloom which he could not escape. He rose and dressed, and meagrely breakfasted. Without knowing how he came there, he stood announced in Mrs. Erwin’s parlor, and waited for her to receive him.

His card was brought in to her where she lay in bed. After supporting Lydia through the first sharp shock of disappointment, she had yielded to the prolonged strain, and the girl was now taking care of her. She gave a hysterical laugh as she read the name on the card Veronica brought, and crushing it in her hand, “He’s come!” she cried.

“I will not see him!” said Lydia instantly.

“No,” assented her aunt. “It wouldn’t be at all the thing. Besides, he’s asked for me. Your uncle might see him, but he’s out of the way; of course he would be out of the way. Now, let me see!” The excitement inspired her; she rose in bed, and called for the pretty sack in which she ordinarily breakfasted, and took a look at herself in a hand-glass that lay on the bed. Lydia did not move; she scarcely seemed to breathe; but a swift pulse in her neck beat visibly. “If it would be decent to keep him waiting so long, I could dress, and see him myself. I’m well enough.” Mrs. Erwin again reflected. “Well,” she said at last, “you must see him, Lydia.”

“I—” began the girl.

“Yes, you. Some one must. It will be all right. On second thought, I believe I should send you, even if I were quite ready to go myself. This affair has been carried on so far on the American plan, and I think I shall let you finish it without my interference. Yes, as your uncle said when I told him, you’re all Americans together; and you are. Mr. Staniford has come to see you, though he asks for me. That’s perfectly proper; but I can’t see him, and I want you to excuse me to him.”

“What would you — what must I—” Lydia began again.

“No, Lydia,” interrupted her aunt. “I won’t tell you a thing. I might have advised you when you first came; but now, I — Well, I think I’ve lived too long in Europe to be of use in such a case, and I won’t have anything to do with it. I won’t tell you how to meet him, or what to say; but oh, child,” — here the woman’s love of loving triumphed in her breast,— “I wish I was in your place! Go!”

Lydia slowly rose, breathless.

“Lydia!” cried her aunt. “Look at me!” Lydia turned her head. “Are you going to be hard with him?”

“I don’t know what he’s coming for,” said Lydia dishonestly.

“But if he’s coming for what you hope?”

“I don’t hope for anything.”

“But you did. Don’t be severe. You’re terrible when you’re severe.”

“I will be just.”

“Oh, no, you mustn’t, my dear. It won’t do at all to be just with men, poor fellows. Kiss me, Lydia!” She pulled her down, and kissed her. When the girl had got as far as the door, “Lydia, Lydia!” she called after her. Lydia turned. “Do you realize what dress you’ve got on?” Lydia looked down at her robe; it was the blue flannel yachting-suit of the Aroostook, which she had put on for convenience in taking care of her aunt. “Isn’t it too ridiculous?” Mrs. Erwin meant to praise the coincidence, not to blame the dress. Lydia smiled faintly for answer, and the next moment she stood at the parlor door.

Staniford, at her entrance, turned from looking out of the window and saw her as in his dream, with her hand behind her, pushing the door to; but the face with which she looked at him was not like the dead, sad face of his dream. It was thrillingly alive, and all passions were blent in it, — love, doubt, reproach, indignation; the tears stood in her eyes, but a fire burnt through the tears. With his first headlong impulse to console, explain, deplore, came a thought that struck him silent at sight of her. He remembered, as he had not till then remembered, in all his wild longing and fearing, that there had not yet been anything explicit between them; that there was no engagement; and that he had upon the face of things, at least, no right to offer her more than some formal expression of regret for not having been able to keep his promise to come sooner. While this stupefying thought gradually filled his whole sense to the exclusion of all else, he stood looking at her with a dumb and helpless appeal, utterly stunned and wretched. He felt the life die out of his face and leave it blank, and when at last she spoke, he knew that it was in pity of him, or contempt of him. “Mrs. Erwin is not well,” she said, “and she wished me—”

But he broke in upon her: “Oh, don’t talk to me of Mrs. Erwin! It was you I wanted to see. Are you well? Are you alive? Do you—” He stopped as precipitately as he began; and after another hopeless pause, he went on piteously: “I don’t know where to begin. I ought to have been here five days ago. I don’t know what you think of me, or whether you have thought of me at all; and before I can ask I must tell you why I wanted to come then, and why I come now, and why I think I must have come back from the dead to see you. You are all the world to me, and have been ever since I saw you. It seems a ridiculously unnecessary thing to say, I have been looking and acting and living it so long; but I say it, because I choose to have you know it, whether you ever cared for me or not. I thought I was coming here to explain why I had not come sooner, but I needn’t do that unless — unless—” He looked at her where she still stood aloof, and he added: “Oh, answer me something, for pity’s sake! Don’t send me away without a word. There have been times when you wouldn’t have done that!”

“Oh, I did care for you!” she broke out. “You know I did—”

He was instantly across the room, beside her. “Yes, yes, I know it!” But she shrank away.

“You tried to make me believe you cared for me, by everything you could do. And I did believe you then; and yes, I believed you afterwards, when I didn’t know what to believe. You were the one true thing in the world to me. But it seems that you didn’t believe it yourself.”

“That I didn’t believe it myself? That I — I don’t know what you mean.”

“You took a week to think it over! I have had a week, too, and I have thought it over, too. You have come too late.”

“Too late? You don’t, you can’t, mean — Listen to me, Lydia; I want to tell you—”

“No, there is nothing you can tell me that would change me. I know it, I understand it all.”

“But you don’t understand what kept me.”

“I don’t wish to know what made you break your word. I don’t care to know. I couldn’t go back and feel as I did to you. Oh, that’s gone! It isn’t that you did not come — that you made me wait and suffer; but you knew how it would be with me after I got here, and all the things I should find out, and how I should feel! And you stayed away! I don’t know whether I can forgive you, even; oh, I’m afraid I don’t; but I can never care for you again. Nothing but a case of life and death—”

“It was a case of life and death!”

Lydia stopped in her reproaches, and looked at him with wistful doubt, changing to a tender fear.

“Oh, have you been hurt? Have you been sick?” she pleaded, in a breaking voice, and made some unconscious movement toward him. He put out his hand, and would have caught one of hers, but she clasped them in each other.

“No, not I, — Dunham—”

“Oh!” said Lydia, as if this were not at all enough.

“He fell and struck his head, the night you left. I thought he would die.” Staniford reported his own diagnosis, not the doctor’s; but he was perhaps in the right to do this. “I had made him go down to the wharf with me; I wanted to see you again, before you started, and I thought we might find you on the boat.” He could see her face relenting; her hands released each other. “He was delirious till yesterday. I couldn’t leave him.”

“Oh, why didn’t you write to me?” She ignored Dunham as completely as if he had never lived. “You knew that I—” Her voice died away, and her breast rose.

“I did write—”

“But how, — I never got it.”

“No, — it was not posted, through a cruel blunder. And then I thought — I got to thinking that you didn’t care—”

“Oh,” said the girl. “Could you doubt me?”

“You doubted me,” said Staniford, seizing his advantage. “I brought the letter with me to prove my truth.” She did not look at him, but she took the letter, and ran it greedily into her pocket. “It’s well I did so, since you don’t believe my word.”

“Oh, yes, — yes, I know it,” she said; “I never doubted it!” Staniford stood bemazed, though he knew enough to take the hands she yielded him; but she suddenly caught them away again, and set them against his breast. “I was very wrong to suspect you ever; I’m sorry I did; but there’s something else. I don’t know how to say what I want to say. But it must be said.”

“Is it something disagreeable?” asked Staniford, lightly.

“It’s right,” answered Lydia, unsmilingly.

“Oh, well, don’t say it!” he pleaded; “or don’t say it now, — not till you’ve forgiven me for the anxiety I’ve caused you; not till you’ve praised me for trying to do what I thought the right thing. You can’t imagine how hard it was for one who hasn’t the habit!”

“I do praise you for it. There’s nothing to forgive you; but I can’t let you care for me unless I know — unless” — She stopped, and then, “Mr. Staniford,” she began firmly, “since I came here, I’ve been learning things that I didn’t know before. They have changed the whole world to me, and it can never be the same again.”

“I’m sorry for that; but if they haven’t changed you, the world may go.”

“No, not if we’re to live in it,” answered the girl, with the soberer wisdom women keep at such times. “It will have to be known how we met. What will people say? They will laugh.”

“I don’t think they will in my presence,” said Staniford, with swelling nostrils. “They may use their pleasure elsewhere.”

“And I shouldn’t care for their laughing, either,” said Lydia. “But oh, why did you come?”

“Why did I come?”

“Was it because you felt bound by anything that’s happened, and you wouldn’t let me bear the laugh alone? I’m not afraid for myself. I shall never blame you. You can go perfectly free.”

“But I don’t want to go free!”

Lydia looked at him with piercing earnestness. “Do you think I’m proud?” she asked.

“Yes, I think you are,” said Staniford, vaguely.

“It isn’t for myself that I should be proud with other people. But I would rather die than bring ridicule upon one I — upon you.”

“I can believe that,” said Staniford, devoutly, and patiently reverencing the delay of her scruples.

“And if — and—” Her lips trembled, but she steadied her trembling voice. “If they laughed at you, and thought of me in a slighting way because—” Staniford gave a sort of roar of grief and pain to know how her heart must have been wrung before she could come to this. “You were all so good that you didn’t let me think there was anything strange about it—”

“Oh, good heavens! We only did what it was our precious and sacred privilege to do! We were all of one mind about it from the first. But don’t torture yourself about it, my darling. It’s over now; it’s past — no, it’s present, and it will always be, forever, the dearest and best thing in life Lydia, do you believe that I love you?”

“Oh, I must!”

“And don’t you believe that I’m telling you the truth when I say that I wouldn’t, for all the world can give or take, change anything that’s been?”

“Yes, I do believe you. Oh, I haven’t said at all what I wanted to say! There was a great deal that I ought to say. I can’t seem to recollect it.”

He smiled to see her grieving at this recreance of her memory to her conscience. “Well, you shall have a whole lifetime to recall it in.”

“No, I must try to speak now. And you must tell me the truth now, — no matter what it costs either of us.” She laid her hands upon his extended arms, and grasped them intensely. “There’s something else. I want to ask you what you thought when you found me alone on that ship with all of you.” If she had stopped at this point, Staniford’s cause might have been lost, but she went on: “I want to know whether you were ever ashamed of me, or despised me for it; whether you ever felt that because I was helpless and friendless there, you had the right to think less of me than if you had first met me here in this house.”

It was still a terrible question, but it offered a loop-hole of escape, which Staniford was swift to seize. Let those who will justify the answer with which he smiled into her solemn eyes: “I will leave you to say.” A generous uncandor like this goes as far with a magnanimous and serious-hearted woman as perhaps anything else.

“Oh, I knew it, I knew it!” cried Lydia. And then, as he caught her to him at last, “Oh — oh — are you sure it’s right?”

“I have no doubt of it,” answered Staniford. Nor had he any question of the strategy through which he had triumphed in this crucial test. He may have thought that there were always explanations that had to be made afterwards, or he may have believed that he had expiated in what he had done and suffered for her any slight which he had felt; possibly, he considered that she had asked more than she had a right to do. It is certain that he said with every appearance of sincerity, “It began the moment I saw you on the wharf, there, and when I came to know my mind I kept it from you only till I could tell you here. But now I wish I hadn’t! Life is too short for such a week as this.”

“No,” said Lydia, “you acted for the best, and you are — good.”

“I’ll keep that praise till I’ve earned it,” answered Staniford.

XXVII.

In the Campo Santi Apostoli at Venice there stands, a little apart from the church of that name, a chapel which has been for many years the place of worship for the Lutheran congregation. It was in this church that Staniford and Lydia were married six weeks later, before the altar under Titian’s beautiful picture of Christ breaking bread.

The wedding was private, but it was not quite a family affair. Miss Hibbard had come down with her mother from Dresden, to complete Dunham’s cure, and she was there with him perfectly recovered; he was not quite content, of course, that the marriage should not take place in the English chapel, but he was largely consoled by the candles burning on the altar. The Aroostook had been delayed by repairs which were found necessary at Trieste, and Captain Jenness was able to come over and represent the ship at the wedding ceremony, and at the lunch which followed. He reserved till the moment of parting a supreme expression of good-will. When he had got a hand of Lydia’s and one of Staniford’s in each of his, with his wrists crossed, he said, “Now, I ain’t one to tack round, and stand off and on a great deal, but what I want to say is just this: the Aroostook sails next week, and if you two are a mind to go back in her, the ship’s yours, as I said to Miss Blood, here, — I mean Mis’ Staniford; well, I hain’t had much time to get used to it! — when she first come aboard there at Boston. I don’t mean any pay; I want you to go back as my guests. You can use the cabin for your parlor; and I promise you I won’t take any other passengers this time. I declare,” said Captain Jenness, lowering his voice, and now referring to Hicks for the first time since the day of his escapade, “I did feel dreadful about that fellow!”

“Oh, never mind,” replied Staniford. “If it hadn’t been for Hicks perhaps I mightn’t have been here.” He exchanged glances with his wife, that showed they had talked all that matter over.

The captain grew confidential. “Mr. Mason told me he saw you lending that chap money. I hope he didn’t give you the slip?”

“No; it came to me here at Blumenthals’ the other day.”

“Well, that’s right! It all worked together for good, as you say. Now you come!”

“What do you say, my dear?” asked Staniford, on whom the poetic fitness of the captain’s proposal had wrought.

Women are never blinded by romance, however much they like it in the abstract. “It’s coming winter. Do you think you wouldn’t be seasick?” returned the bride of an hour, with the practical wisdom of a matron.

Staniford laughed. “She’s right, captain. I’m no sailor. I’ll get home by the all-rail route as far as I can.”

Captain Jenness threw back his head, and laughed too. “Good! That’s about it.” And he released their hands, so as to place one hairy paw on a shoulder of each. “You’ll get along together, I guess.”

“But we’re just as much obliged to you as if we went, Captain Jenness. And tell all the crew that I’m homesick for the Aroostook, and thank all for being so kind to me; and I thank you, Captain Jenness!” Lydia looked at her husband, and then startled the captain with a kiss.

He blushed all over, but carried it off as boldly as he could. “Well, well,” he said, “that’s right! If you change your minds before the Aroostook sails, you let me know.”

This affair made a great deal of talk in Venice, where the common stock of leisure is so great that each person may without self-reproach devote a much larger share of attention to the interests of the others than could be given elsewhere. The decorous fictions in which Mrs. Erwin draped the singular facts of the acquaintance and courtship of Lydia and Staniford were what unfailingly astonished and amused him, and he abetted them without scruple. He found her worldliness as innocent as the unworldliness of Lydia, and he gave Mrs. Erwin his hearty sympathy when she ingenuously owned that the effort to throw dust in the eyes of her European acquaintance was simply killing her. He found endless refreshment in the contemplation of her attitude towards her burdensome little world, and in her reasons for enslaving herself to it. He was very good friends with both of the Erwins. When he could spare the time from Lydia, he went about with her uncle in his boat, and respected his skill in rowing it without falling overboard. He could not see why any one should be so much interested in the American character and dialect as Mr. Erwin was; but he did not object, and he reflected that after all they were not what their admirer supposed them.

The Erwins came with the Stanifords as far as Paris on their way home, and afterwards joined them in California, where Staniford bought a ranch, and found occupation if not profit in its management. Once cut loose from her European ties, Mrs. Erwin experienced an incomparable repose and comfort in the life of San Francisco; it was, she declared, the life for which she had really been adapted, after all; and in the climate of Santa Barbara she found all that she had left in Italy. In that land of strange and surprising forms of every sort, her husband has been very happy in the realization of an America surpassing even his wildest dreams, and he has richly stored his note-book with philological curiosities. He hears around him the vigorous and imaginative locutions of the Pike language, in which, like the late Canon Kingsley, he finds a Scandinavian hugeness; and pending the publication of his Hand-Book of Americanisms, he is in confident search of the miner who uses his pronouns cockney-wise. Like other English observers, friendly and unfriendly, he does not permit the facts to interfere with his preconceptions.

Staniford’s choice long remained a mystery to his acquaintances, and was but partially explained by Mrs. Dunham, when she came home. “Why, I suppose he fell in love with her,” she said. “Of course, thrown together that way, as they were, for six weeks, it might have happened to anybody; but James Staniford was always the most consummate flirt that breathed; and he never could see a woman, without coming up, in that metaphysical way of his, and trying to interest her in him. He was always laughing at women, but there never was a man who cared more for them. From all that I could learn from Charles, he began by making fun of her, and all at once he became perfectly infatuated with her. I don’t see why. I never could get Charles to tell me anything remarkable that she said or did. She was simply a country girl, with country ideas, and no sort of cultivation. Why, there was nothing to her. He’s done the wisest thing he could by taking her out to California. She never would have gone down, here. I suppose James Staniford knew that as well as any of us; and if he finds it worth while to bury himself with her there, we’ve no reason to complain. She did sing, wonderfully; that is, her voice was perfectly divine. But of course that’s all over, now. She didn’t seem to care much for it; and she really knew so little of life that I don’t believe she could form the idea of an artistic career, or feel that it was any sacrifice to give it up. James Staniford was not worth any such sacrifice; but she couldn’t know that either. She was good, I suppose. She was very stiff, and she hadn’t a word to say for herself. I think she was cold. To be sure, she was a beauty; I really never saw anything like it, — that pale complexion some brunettes have, with her hair growing low, and such eyes and lashes!”

“Perhaps the beauty had something to do with his falling in love with her,” suggested a listener. The ladies present tried to look as if this ought not to be sufficient.

“Oh, very likely,” said Mrs. Dunham. She added, with an air of being the wreck of her former self, “But we all know what becomes of beauty after marriage.”

The mind of Lydia’s friends had been expressed in regard to her marriage, when the Stanifords, upon their arrival home from Europe, paid a visit to South Bradfield. It was in the depths of the winter following their union, and the hill country, stern and wild even in midsummer, wore an aspect of savage desolation. It was sheeted in heavy snow, through which here and there in the pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest wind cut shrill across the white wastes, and from the crests of the billowed drifts drove a scud of stinging particles in their faces, while the sun, as high as that of Italy, coldly blazed from a cloudless blue sky. Ezra Perkins, perched on the seat before them, stiff and silent as if he were frozen there, drove them from Bradfield Junction to South Bradfield in the long wagon-body set on bob-sleds, with which he replaced his Concord coach in winter. At the station he had sparingly greeted Lydia, as if she were just back from Greenfield, and in the interest of personal independence had ignored a faint motion of hers to shake hands; at her grandfather’s gate, he set his passengers down without a word, and drove away, leaving Staniford to get in his trunk as he might.

“Well, I declare,” said Miss Maria, who had taken one end of the trunk in spite of him, and was leading the way up through the path cleanly blocked out of the snow, “that Ezra Perkins is enough to make you wish he’d stayed in Dakoty!”

Staniford laughed, as he had laughed at everything on the way from the station, and had probably thus wounded Ezra Perkins’s susceptibilities. The village houses, separated so widely by the one long street, each with its path neatly tunneled from the roadway to the gate; the meeting-house, so much vaster than the present needs of worship, and looking blue-cold with its never-renewed single coat of white paint; the graveyard set in the midst of the village, and showing, after Ezra Perkins’s disappearance, as many signs of life as any other locality, realized in the most satisfactory degree his theories of what winter must be in such a place as South Bradfield. The burning smell of the sheet-iron stove in the parlor, with its battlemented top of filigree iron work; the grimness of the horsehair-covered best furniture; the care with which the old-fashioned fire-places had been walled up, and all accessible character of the period to which the house belonged had been effaced, gave him an equal pleasure. He went about with his arm round Lydia’s waist, examining these things, and yielding to the joy they caused him, when they were alone. “Oh, my darling,” he said, in one of these accesses of delight, “when I think that it’s my privilege to take you away from all this, I begin to feel not so very unworthy, after all.”

But he was very polite, as Miss Maria owned, when Mr. and Mrs. Goodlow came in during the evening, with two or three unmarried ladies of the village, and he kept them from falling into the frozen silence which habitually expresses social enjoyment in South Bradfield when strangers are present. He talked about the prospects of Italian advancement to an equal state of intellectual and moral perfection with rural New England, while Mr. Goodlow listened, rocking himself back and forth in the hair-cloth arm-chair. Deacon Latham, passing his hand continually along the stove battlements, now and then let his fingers rest on the sheet-iron till he burnt them, and then jerked them suddenly away, to put them, back the next moment, in his absorbing interest. Miss Maria, amidst a murmur of admiration from the ladies, passed sponge-cake and coffee: she confessed afterwards that the evening had been so brilliant to her as to seem almost wicked; and the other ladies, who owned to having lain awake all night on her coffee, said that if they had enjoyed themselves they were properly punished for it.

When they were gone, and Lydia and Staniford had said good-night, and Miss Maria, coming in from the kitchen with a hand-lamp for her father, approached the marble-topped centre-table to blow out the large lamp of pea-green glass with red woollen wick, which had shed the full radiance of a sun-burner upon the festival, she faltered at a manifest unreadiness in the old man to go to bed, though the fire was low, and they had both resumed the drooping carriage of people in going about cold houses. He looked excited, and, so far as his unpracticed visage could intimate the emotion, joyous.

“Well, there, Maria!” he said. “You can’t say but what he’s a master-hand to converse, any way. I’d know as I ever see Mr. Goodlow more struck up with any one. He looked as if every word done him good; I presume it put him in mind of meetin’s with brother ministers: I don’t suppose but what he misses it some, here. You can’t say but what he’s a fine appearin’ young man. I d’know as I see anything wrong in his kind of dressin’ up to the nines, as you may say. As long’s he’s got the money, I don’t see what harm it is. It’s all worked for good, Lyddy’s going out that way; though it did seem a mysterious providence at the time.”

“Well!” began Miss Maria. She paused, as if she had been hurried too far by her feelings, and ought to give them a check before proceeding. “Well, I don’t presume you’d notice it, but she’s got a spot on her silk, so’t a whole breadth’s got to come out, and be let in again bottom side up. I guess there’s a pair of ‘em, for carelessness.” She waited a moment before continuing: “I d’know as I like to see a husband puttin’ his arm round his wife, even when he don’t suppose any one’s lookin’; but I d’know but what it’s natural, too. But it’s one comfort to see’t she ain’t the least mite silly about him. He’s dreadful freckled.” Miss Maria again paused thoughtfully, while her father burnt his fingers on the stove for the last time, and took them definitively away. “I don’t say but what he talked well enough, as far forth as talkin’ goes; Mr. Goodlow said at the door’t he didn’t know’s he ever passed many such evenin’s since he’d been in South Bradfield, and I d’know as I have. I presume he has his faults; we ain’t any of us perfect; but he does seem terribly wrapped up in Lyddy. I don’t say but what he’ll make her a good husband, if she must have one. I don’t suppose but what people might think, as you may say, ‘t she’d made out pretty well; and if Lyddy’s suited, I d’know as anybody else has got any call to be over particular.”

THE END

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

I.

Some years ago, at a time when the rapid growth of the city was changing the character of many localities, two young men were sitting, one afternoon early in April, in the parlor of a house on one of those streets which, without having yet accomplished their destiny as business thoroughfares, were no longer the homes of the decorous ease that once inhabited them. The young men held their hats and canes in their hands, and they had that air of having just been admitted and of waiting to be received by the people of the house which rests gracefully only on persons of the other sex. One was tall and spare, and he sat stiffly expectant; the other, who was much shorter and stouter, with the mature bloom which comes of good living and a cherished digestion, was more restless. As he rose from his chair, after a few moments, and went to examine some detail of the dim room, he moved with a quick, eager step, and with a stoop which suggested a connoisseur’s habit of bending over and peering at things. He returned to his seat, and glanced round the parlor, as if to seize the whole effect more accurately.

“So this is the home of the Pythoness, is it?” he said.

“If you like to call her a Pythoness,” answered the other.

“Oh, I don’t know that I prefer it: I’m quite willing to call her a test-medium. I thought perhaps Pythoness would respectfully idealize the business. What a queer, melancholy house, what a queer, melancholy street! I don’t think I was ever in a street before where quite so many professional ladies, with English surnames, preferred Madam to Mrs on their door-plates. And the poor old place has such a desperately conscious air of going to the deuce. Every house seems to wince as you go by, and button itself up to the chin for fear you should find out it had no shirt on, — so to speak. I don’t know what’s the reason, but these material tokens of a social decay afflict me terribly: a tipsy woman isn’t dreadfuller than a haggard old house, that’s once been a home, in a street like this.”

“The street’s going the usual way,” said the other. “It will be all business in a few years.”

“But in the mean time it causes me inexpressible anguish, and it will keep doing it. If I know where there’s a thorn, I can’t help going up and pressing my waistcoat against it. I foresee that I shall keep coming. This parlor alone is poignant enough to afford me the most rapturous pain; it pierces my soul. This tawdry red velvet wallpaper; the faded green reps of that sofa; those family photographs in their oval papier-maché frames; that round table there in the corner, with its subscription literature and its tin-type albums; and this frantic tapestry carpet! I know now why the ghost-seers affect this sort of street and this sort of parlor: the spirits can’t resist the deadly fascination! No ghost, with any strength of character, could keep away. I suppose that this apartment is swarming, now, with disembodied ladies and gentlemen of the first distinction. Well, I like your going into this. I respect everybody’s superstition — except my own; I can’t respect that, you know.”

“Do you think I believe in these people’s rubbish?”

“I didn’t know. A man must believe in something. I couldn’t think of anything else you believed in. I’m not sure I don’t believe in it a trifle, myself: my nerves do. May I ask why you come here, if you refuse the particular rubbish afforded by the establishment? You’re not a curious man.”

“Why did you come?”

“You asked me. Besides, I have no occasion for a reason. I am an emotional, not a rational being, as I’ve often told you.”

The taller man laughed dryly. “Very well, then, you don’t need a reason from me. You can wait and see why I came.”

The short man gave a shrug. “I hope I shan’t have to wait long. An emotional being has a right to be unreasonably impatient.”

A light sound of hesitating steps made itself heard in the next room; the two men remained silent, and presently one of the partition doors was rolled back, and a tall young girl in a somewhat theatrical robe of white serge, with a pale green scarf on her shoulders, appeared at the threshold. Her beautiful, serious face had a pallid quiet, broken by what seemed the unnatural alertness of her blue eyes, which glanced quickly, like those of a child too early obliged to suspect and avert; her blonde hair, which had a plastic massiveness, was drawn smoothly back from her temples, and lay heaped in a heavy coil on her neck, where its rich abundance showed when she turned her profile away, as if to make sure that some one was following in the room behind her. A door opened and closed there, and she came on towards the two men, who had risen. At sight of the taller of the two, she halted, while an elderly gentleman hurried forward, with a bustling graciousness, and offered him his small, short hand. He had the same fair complexion as the girl, but his face was bright and eager; his thin, light hair was wavy and lustreless; he looked hardly so tall as she. He had a mouth of delicacy and refinement, and a smile of infantine sweetness.

“Ah, you’ve really come,” he said, shaking the young man’s hand cordially. “So many people manifest an interest in our public séances, and then let the matter drop without going any further. I don’t know whether I presented you to my daughter, the other day, Mr. Ford?”

Ford bowed gravely to the girl, who slightly returned his obeisance. “Let me introduce Mr. Phillips, Dr. Boynton, — a friend whom I ventured to bring with me.”

“Very glad to see you, Mr. Phillips. I was about to say — Oh! my daughter, Mr. Phillips, Miss Egeria Boynton. Take seats, gentlemen — I was about to say that one of the most curious facts connected with the phenomena is the ardor with which people take the matter up on first acquaintance, and the entire indifference with which they let it drop. In our line of life, Mr. Phillips, as public exhibitors, we often have occasion to note this. It seldom happens but half a dozen persons come to me at the close of a séance, and ask earnestly for the privilege of pursuing their investigations with the aid of my daughter’s mediumship. But these persons rarely call; I rarely see them at a second public séance, even. If I had not such abiding hopes of the phenomena myself, I should sometimes feel discouraged by the apathy and worse than apathy with which they are received, not the first, but the second time. You must excuse my expression of surprise at first greeting you, Mr. Ford, — you must indeed. It was but too natural under the circumstances.”

“By all means,” answered Ford. “I never thought of not coming. But I can’t promise that you’ll find me a ready believer.”

“Precisely,” returned the other. That is the very mood in which I could have wished you to come. I am myself, as I think I told you, merely an inquirer. In fact” — Dr. Boynton leaned forward, with his small, plump hands extended, as if the more conveniently to round his periods, but arrested himself, in the explanation he was about to make, at something Mr. Phillips was saying to his daughter.

“I couldn’t help being interested in the character of your parlor, before you came in, Miss Boynton. These old Boston houses all have so much character. It’s surprising what good taste people had fifty or sixty years ago, — the taste of the First Empire. That cornice is very pretty, — very simple and very refined, neither glutted nor starved in design; and that mantel, — how refreshing those sane and decent straight lines are after the squirms and wriggles of subsequent marble! I don’t know that I should have chosen urns for an ornament to the corners; but we must not forget that we are mortal; and there are cinerary associations with fire-places.”

Miss Boynton said nothing in return for this speech, the full sense of which had perhaps not quite reached her. She stared blankly at Phillips, to whom her father turned with his most winning smile. “An artist?” asked Dr. Boynton.

“A sufferer in the cause of art,” returned Phillips with ironical pathos.

“Ah! A connoisseur,” said the doctor.

“The fact is,” said Phillips, “I was finding the modern equipment of your old-fashioned parlor intolerable, as you came in. You won’t mind my not liking your landlady’s taste, Miss Boynton?” he demanded with suave ingratiation.

Miss Boynton looked about the room, as if she had not seen it before. “It is ugly,” she answered quietly. “But it does as well as any.”

“Yes,” her father eagerly interposed, “better than any other room in any other house in any other quarter of the city. We are still, as I may say, gentlemen, feeling our way towards what we believe a sublime truth. My daughter’s development is yet so recent, so incomplete, that we must not reject any furthering influences, however humble, however disagreeable. It is not by our own preference that we are here. I know, as well as you do, that this is a street inhabited by fortune-tellers and charlatans of low degree. For that very reason I have taken our lodgings here. The element, the atmosphere, of simple, unquestioning faith brought into this vicinity by the dupes of these people is, unknown to them, of the highest use, the most vital advantage, to us in our present attempt. At the same time, I should not, I could not in candor, deny to these pretenders themselves a beneficial, a highly — I may call it — evolutionary, influence upon my daughter. We desire no personal acquaintance with them. But they are of the old tradition of supernaturalism, — a tradition as old as nature, — and we cannot afford to reject the favor of the tradition which they represent. You will understand that, gentlemen. We cannot say, We hold — or we trust we hold — communion with spirits, and yet deny that there is something in second-sight, divination, or whatever mysteries these people pretend to. In some sort, we must psychologically ally ourselves with them. They are, no doubt, for the most part and in most cases, shameless swindlers; but it seems to be a condition of our success that we shall not deny — I don’t say that we shall believe — the fact of an occult power in some of them. Their neighborhood was very repulsive at first, and still is measurably so; but we accept it, and have found it of advantage. We are mere experimenters, as yet, and claim nothing except that my daughter is the medium, the instrument, of certain phenomena which we can explain only in one way; we do not dispute the different explanations of others. In the course of our investigations, we neglect no theory, however slight, that may assist us. Now, in so simple a matter as dress, even: we have found by repeated experiment that the manifestations have a greater affinity for white than any other color. This may point to some hidden truth — I don’t say — in the old-fashioned ghost-stories, where the spectre always appears in white. At any rate, we think it worth while that my daughter should wear white, in both her public and her private séances, for the present. And green, — just now we seem to find a good effect in pale green, Mr. Phillips, pale green.”

“If I may say it without impertinence to Miss Boynton’s father, in my character of connoisseur,” said Phillips, with a bow for the young girl, which he delivered to the doctor, “I think the effect is very good indeed.”

“Ah! yes, yes!” cried the doctor. “In that sense. I see. Very good. However, I meant” — Dr. Boynton paused, bending on either visitor an exquisite smile of child-like triumph. A series of light taps, beginning with a sound like a straining of the wood, and then separating into a sharper staccato, was heard at different points in the room, chiefly on the table, and on the valves of the sliding doors. Phillips gave a little nervous start. Ford remained indifferent, but for the slow movement of his eyes in the direction of the young girl, who bent an appealing look on her father. The doctor lifted a hand to invoke attention; the raps died away. “Giorgione, I presume. Will you ask, Egeria?”

She hesitated. Then, in a somewhat tremulous voice, she demanded, “Is it you, Giorgione?” A light shower of raps instantly responded. A thrill of strong excitement visibly passed over the girl, who clutched one hand with the other, and seemed to stay herself by a strong effort of will in her place on the sofa.

“Calmly, my daughter, calmly!” said Dr. Boynton, making a certain restraining gesture towards her. “Yes, it is Giorgione. He can never keep away when color is mentioned. Very celebrated for his coloring, I am told, when alive. A Viennese painter, I believe, Mr. Phillips.”

“Venetian,” answered Phillips, abstractedly.

He recalled himself, and added with a forced lightness, “But I don’t know that I can advise you to trust the professions of our rapping and tapping friend; there are so few genuine Giorgiones.” A brisk volley of taps discharged upon the wall directly behind Phillips’s head caused him to turn abruptly and stare hard at the place.

“Oh, you can’t see it, Phillips,” said Ford, with a spare laugh of derision.

“No,” said Dr. Boynton, sweetly, “you can’t see it. At least, not yet. But if our experiments progress as favorably as they have for the last six months, we may hope before a great while to render the invisible agencies of these sounds as sensible to sight as to hearing. Don’t disturb yourself, Mr. Phillips. Mere playfulness, I assure you. They never inflict any real injury.” While he spoke the raps renewed themselves here and there upon the woodwork, into the fibre of which they seemed at last to reenter, and died away in the sort of straining with which they began. “Egeria,” said the doctor, turning impressively towards his daughter, “it seems to me the conditions are uncommonly propitious, this afternoon. I think we may look for something of a very remarkable character.” He glanced at the clock on the mantel, and confronted his visitors with a smiling face of apology. “Gentlemen, I suppose you came for a séance. My interest in the matter has betrayed me into remarks that have taken up too much of your time.”

“I came with the hope of seeing some further proofs of your skill,” said Ford; “but if there is anything” —

“Oh, no, no, no! Not at all, not at all!” hastily interrupted the doctor, with a deprecatory wave of his hand. “But — ah: — I hardly know how to put it. The fact is, I am anxious for investigation by gentlemen of your intelligence, and I should very much dislike to postpone you — Our landlady, who is a medium of note in her way, — she has lately come to Boston from the West, — had arranged this afternoon for a séance with a number of persons rather more grounded in the belief than yourselves, and” —

The young men rose. “We won’t detain you,” said Ford. “We can come another time.”

“No, no! Wait!” Dr. Boynton waved them to their seats again, which they provisionally resumed, and turned to his daughter. “Egeria, I think I may venture to ask these gentlemen to join our friends?”

“There’s no reason why they shouldn’t stay, if they like,” said the girl, impassively.

“We should be delighted,” exclaimed Phillips, “if you’ll let us! I’m so little used to ghosts,” he said, glancing round at the walls and tables with an apprehensiveness which was perhaps not altogether affected, “that, for my part, I should rather like plenty of company, Miss Boynton, — if Messer Giorgione won’t take it amiss.”

“Ah, very good!” interposed her father. “Very good, indeed. Ha! Why I hesitated was that the sort of experiment to be tried this afternoon requires conditions, concessions, that I thought you might not care to offer, gentlemen. I wish to be perfectly frank with you; what you will see might be produced by trickery, especially in a company of ten or a dozen persons, some of whom could be in collusion with the medium. I pass no judgment upon a certain order of phenomena in their present stage of development, but I make it a rule, myself, measurably to distrust all manifestations occurring in the presence of more than three persons besides the medium. Still, if you will do us the honor to remain, I can promise you something very curious and interesting, — something novel in the present phase of supernaturalism; nothing less than apparitions, gentlemen, or, as we call them, materializations. You have heard, perhaps, of these materializations?”

“Yes,” said Ford indifferently, “I have heard of them.”

“Mrs. Le Roy — our landlady — has made an eclectic study of the materializations of several other mediums, and she has succeeded, or claims to have succeeded, not only in reproducing them, but in calling about her many of the principal apparitions who visit the original séances. If you are not familiar with apparitions you may find it interesting.”

“Really, Dr. Boynton,” said Phillips, “do you mean that I shall see my friend Giorgione performing that sort of tattoo on your wall-paper?”

“Not exactly,” urbanely responded Dr. Boynton. “No. It’s a curious feature of the manifestations that the audible spirits are never seen, and that those rendered visible by the new development of materialization are invariably mute. But in a dark séance to follow the materializations, my daughter” —

Egeria rose from her place on the sofa and moved toward her father, who, alarmed at some expression of her face, started to his feet to encounter her. She laid her arms with a beseeching gesture on his shoulder. “Father, father! Give it up for to-day, do! I can’t go through with it. I am weak — sick; I have no strength left. Everything is gone.”

“Why, Egeria! My poor girl! Excuse me, gentlemen: I will be with you in a moment.” He cast a sustaining arm about her slim shape, and with the other hand pushed open one of the sliding doors, and disappeared with her from the room beyond.

The men remained in a silence which Ford had apparently no intention of breaking. “Upon the whole,” said Phillips, at last, “this is rather painful. Miss Boynton is very much like some other young ladies — for a Pythoness. I should like to see the dark séance, — if I may express myself so inconsequently, — but really I hope the old gentleman will give it up, as she suggested.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Ford, gloomily. “The thing’s just beginning.”

“Ford, I don’t see how you have the heart to take your attitude towards these people,” returned the other. “It was shocking to stand on the defensive against the girl, as if she were an impostor. She’s a person you might help to escalloped oysters or ice-cream at an evening party, and not expect to talk half so magnificently as she looked. The man believes in himself, and it is your ironical attitude which annuls the honesty in him. That sort of thing kills any amount of genuineness in people.”

“Very likely,” assented Ford. “He’s coming back presently to say that our sphere — attitude, you call it; his quackery has a different nomenclature — has annulled his daughter’s power over the spirits.”

Phillips went up to examine the mantel-piece again. “Well, why not?”

“Certainly, why not? If you grant the one, there’s no trouble about granting the other.”

“What do you make of what we heard?”

“Nothing.”

“You heard it?”

“I hear clatter any time I wake in the night. But I don’t attribute it to disembodied spirits on that account.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are no disembodied spirits, for one thing.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure of that,” said Phillips, with sprightly generosity.

“Really? You doubt everything.”

“That’s very well, — but I suppose you mean anything. I prefer to keep an open mind. I don’t snub ghosts, for I think I may be one myself, some day.”

As he spoke the door-bell rang, and in the interval between the ringing of the bell and the slow response of the servant, Dr. Boynton reentered, rubbing his hands and smiling. “Sorry to have been obliged to leave you, gentlemen,” he said. “You have witnessed, however, one of the most interesting phases of this mystery: mystery, I call it, for I’m as much in the dark about it as yourselves. My daughter felt so deeply the dissenting, the perhaps incredulous, mood — sphere — of one of you that she quite succumbed to it. Don’t be alarmed! In an ordinary medium it would be an end of everything for the time being, but she will take part in the séance, all the same, to-day. I have been able to reinforce my daughter’s powers by a gift — we will call it a gift — of my own. In former years I looked quite deeply into mesmerism, and I have never quite disused the practice of it, as a branch of my profession, — I am a physician. My wife, who has been dead my daughter’s whole life,” — an expression of pain, curious with reference to the eager brightness of the man’s wonted aspect, passed over the speaker’s face,—” was a very impressible subject of mine, and in her childhood Egeria was so. Since we have discovered what seems her power as a medium, I have found the mesmeric force — the application of exterior will — of the greatest use in sustaining her against the exhaustion she would otherwise incur from the many conflicting influences she is subject to. I can’t regret — I rejoice, in fact „ — that this phenomenon has occurred as it has occurred. It will enable me to present in her to-day the united action of those strange forces, equally occult, the mesmeric and the spiritistic. I have just left my daughter in a complete mesmeric trance, and you will see — you will see” —

He broke off abruptly, and went forward to meet a gentleman and lady, apparently two of the expected guests of Mrs. Le Roy. He greeted them with gay warmth as Mr and Mrs. Merrifield, and was about to share their acquaintance with Ford and Phillips, when a tall man, with pale blue eyes and a thin growth of faded hair, of a like harshness on crown and chin, interrupted him with a solemnly proffered hand. “Why, Weatherby,” said the doctor, shaking his hand, “I didn’t hear you ring.”

“I found the girl still at the door, and had no occasion to ring,” said Mr. Weatherby.

“Right, right, — quite right!” returned Dr. Boynton. “Glad to see you. Mr. Weatherby, Mr. Ford and Mr. Phillips, — inquirers. Mr. Weatherby is known among us, gentlemen, for powers which he is developing in the direction of levitation.” Mr. Weatherby silently shook hands, regarding Phillips and Ford meantime with a remote keenness of glance, and then took a seat in a corner, with an air of established weariness, as if he had found levitation heavy work.

Dr. Boynton continued to receive his guests, and next introduced to the strangers a large, watery-eyed man with a mottled face and reddish hair: “Mr. Eccles, — an inquirer like yourselves, gentlemen, but in a different spirit. Mr. Eccles has no doubt of the nature of the manifestations, but he is investigating the subject with a view — with a view” — Dr. Boynton looked for help to the gentleman whose position he was trying to state, and the latter came to his aid with a vigorous alacrity which was accented by the lavish display of an upper and lower set of artificial teeth.

“With a view to determine whether something cannot be done to protect us against the assumption by inferior spirits of the identity of the better class of essences. There are doubtless laws of the spirit-life, could we invoke them aright, which would hold these unruly masqueraders in check. I am endeavoring to study the police system — if I may use the expression — of the other world. For I am satisfied that until we have learned to appeal to the proper authorities against these pretenders, we shall get nothing of value from the manifestations. At present it seems to me that in most cases the phenomena are held in contempt by all respectable spirits. This deplorable state of things has resulted, I have no doubt, in great degree from the hostile manner in which investigation of the phenomena has been pursued in the material world.”

“Yes,” said Ford, “that’s an interesting point. My friend, here, was just speaking of some things of the sort before you came in. He mentioned the disadvantage to the medium of what he called the ironical attitude; he contends that it makes them cheat.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” replied Mr. Eccles. “But its effect upon the approximating spiritual sphere is still worse. It drives from that sphere all candid and sober-minded spirits, and none but frivolous triflers remain. Are you a believer in the phenomena, Mr. — ah — Phillips?”

“I am scarcely even a witness of them yet,” said Phillips. “But as a mere speculative observer, I don’t see why one shouldn’t come as worshipfully minded to a séance as to a church.”

“Precisely, precisely, sir,” assented Mr. Eccles. “And yet I cannot say that a séance is exactly a religious service. No, it partakes rather of a dual nature. It will doubtless be elevated in character, as the retro-and inter-acting influences improve. But at present it is a sort of informal reception at which friends from both worlds meet and commingle in social intercourse; in short, a kind of bi-mundane — bi-mundane” —

“Kettle-drum,” suggested Ford.

“Ah!” breathed Mr. Eccles. He folded his arms, and set his artificial teeth to smile displeasure upon Ford’s impassible face. Anything that he may have been going to say farther was cut short by the approach of a gentleman, at sight of whom his smile relaxed nothing of its displeasure.

“Hello! How do, Eccles?” said the new-comer, gayly. He was a short and slight man, and he planted himself in front of Mr. Eccles upon his very small, squarely stepping feet. Whatever may have been the temperament of the invisible presences, those in the flesh were, with the exception of this gentleman, not at all lively: they were, in fact, of serious countenance and low spirits; and they were evidently glad of this co-religionist who could take their common belief so cheerfully. He had come in the last, and he had been passing a light word with this one and that, before saluting Mr. Eccles, who alone seemed not glad to see him. He was dressed in a smart business suit, whose fashionableness was as much at variance with the prevailing dress of the company as his gayety with its prevailing solemnity.

“How are you?” he said, looking up into Mr. Eccles’s dental smile. “Going to get after those scamps again? Well, I’m glad of it. Behaved shamefully at Mrs. Merrifield’s, the other night; knocked the chairs over and flung the flowers about, — ridiculous! If they can’t manage better than that, a man might as well go to a democratic ward meeting when he dies. Ah, doctor!”

Dr. Boynton approached from the other room, which had been closed, and on which he again shut the rolling doors. “Mr. Hatch!” said the doctor radiantly, while he pressed the other’s hand in both his own, and made a rose-bud of his mouth. “You just complete our list. Glad to see you.”

“Thanks, much!” said Mr. Hatch. “Where’s Miss Egeria?”

“In a moment,” replied the doctor mysteriously.

Then he turned to the company, and said in a formal tone, “As we are all here, now, friends, we won’t delay any farther.” He advanced and flung open the doors to the back parlor, discovering, in the middle of the room, a common extension dining-table, draped merely with so much of a striped turkey-red supper cloth as would fall over the edge and partly conceal the legs. The top of the table was pierced by a hole some ten or twelve inches square, and over this hole was set a box, open on one side, and lined with black velvet; a single gas jet burned at a half light overhead.

“Now, if you will take seats, ladies and gentlemen!” said Dr. Boynton. “Mrs. Merrifield, will you sit on my right, so as to be next my daughter? And Mr. Phillips on my left, here? And you, Mr. Ford, on Miss Smiley’s left, next to Mr. Eccles? Mr. Hatch, take your place between those two ladies” —

“I’m there, doctor, every time,” said Mr. Hatch, promptly obeying.

“I must protest at the outset, Dr. Boynton,” began Mr. Eccles, “against this sort of” —

“Beg pardon. You ‘re right, Eccles,” said Hatch, “I won’t do it any more. But when I get down at a table like this, I feel gay, and I can’t help running over a little. But no spilling’s the word, now. Do we join hands, doctor, comme à l’ordinaire?”

“Yes, all join hands, please,” answered the doctor. “Well, I want these ladies to promise not to squeeze my hands, either of them,” said Hatch. The ladies laughed, and Mr. Eccles, relinquishing the hands of the persons next him, made a movement to rise, in which he was met by an imploring downward wave of Dr. Boynton’s hand.

“Please, Mr. Eccles, remain. Mr. Hatch, I may trust your kindness? Miss Merrill, will you sing —— ah — something?”

A small, cheerful lady, on the sunny side of thirty, with a pair of spectacles gleaming on her amiable nose, responded to this last appeal. “I think we had better all sing, doctor.”

“I have a theory in wishing you to sing alone,” said the doctor.

“Oh, very well!” Miss Merrill acquiesced. “Have you any preference?”

“No. Anything devotional.”

“Maiden’s Prayer, Miss Merrill,” suggested Hatch.

This overcast Mr. Eccles again, but Miss Merrill took the fun in good part, and laughed.

“I don’t believe you know anything about devotional music, Mr. Hatch,” she said.

“That’s so. My repertoire is out already,” owned Hatch.

Miss Merrill raised her spectacles thoughtfully to the ceiling, and after a moment began to sing Flee as a Bird to your Mountain, in a sweet contralto. As the thrilling tones filled the room all other sounds were quelled; the circle at the table became motionlessly silent, and the long sighing breath of the listeners alone made itself heard in the pauses of the singing. Before the words died away, a draught of cold air struck across the room, and through the door at the head of the table, which unclosed mysteriously, as if blown open by the wind, a figure in white was seen in the passage without. It drifted nearer, and with a pale green scarf over her shoulders Egeria softly and waveringly entered the room. Her face was white, and her eyes had the still, sightless look of those who walk in their sleep. She advanced, and sank into the chair between her father and Mrs. Merrifield, and at the same moment that groaning and straining sound was heard, as if in the fibres of the wood; and then the sounds grew sharper and more distinct, and a continuous rapping seemed to cover the whole surface of the table, with a noise like that of heavy clots of snow driving against a window pane.

As Egeria took the chair left vacant for her, it could be seen that another had also found a place in the circle. This was a very large, dark woman of some fifty years, who silently saluted some of the company, half withdrawing from their sight as she sat down next to Mrs. Merrifield, behind the box.

Egeria remained staring blankly before her for a moment. Then she said in a weary voice, “They are here.”

“Who are, my daughter?” demanded her father.

In a long sigh, “Legion,” she responded.

“We may thank Mr. Hatch for the company we are in,” Mr. Eccles broke out resentfully. “I have protested” —

“Patience, — a little patience, Mr. Eccles!” implored Dr. Boynton. Then, without changing his polite tone, “Look again, Egeria,” he said. “Are they all evil?”

“Their name is legion,” wearily answered the girl, as before.

“Yes, yes, Egeria. They always come at first. But is there no hope of help against them? Look again, — look carefully.”

“The innumerable host” —

“I knew it, — I knew it!” exulted the doctor.

“Disperses them,” said the girl, and lapsed into a silence which she did not break again.

At a sign from the large woman, who proved to be Mrs. Le Roy, Dr. Boynton said, “Will you sing again, Miss Merrill?”

Miss Merrill repeated the closing stanza of the hymn she had already sung.

While she sang, flitting gleams of white began to relieve themselves against the black interior of the box. They seemed to gather shape and substance; as the singing ceased, the little hand of a child moved slowly back and forth in the gloom.

A moan broke from one of the women. “Oh, I hope it’s for me!” she quavered.

They began, one after another, to ask, “Is it for me?” the hand continuing to wave softly to and fro. When it came the turn of this woman, the hand was violently agitated; she burst into tears. “It’s my Lily, my darling little Lily.”

The apparition beckoned to the speaker.

“You can touch it,” said the doctor.

The woman bent over the table, and thrust her hand into the box; the apparition melted away; a single fragrant tuberose was flung upon the table. “Oh, oh!” sobbed the woman. “My Lily’s favorite flower! She always liked snow-drops above everything, because they came the first thing in the spring. Oh, to think she can come to me, — to know that she is living yet, and can never die! I’m sure I felt her little hand an instant, — so smooth and soft, so cold!”

“They always seem to be cold,” philosophized Boynton. “A more exquisite vitality coming in contact with our own would naturally give the sensation of cold. But you must sit down, now, Mrs. Blodgett,” added the doctor, kindly. “Look! There is another hand.”

A large wrinkled hand, like that of an elderly woman, crept tremulously through the opening of the box, sank, and then creeping upward again laid its fingers out over the edge of the opening. No one recognized it, and it would have won no general acclaim if Mrs. Merrifield had not called attention to the lace which encircled the wrist; she caught a bit of this between her thumb and finger, and detained it a moment while the other ladies bent over and examined it. There was but one voice; it was real lace.

One hand after another now appeared in the box, some of them finding a difficulty in making their way up through the aperture, which had been formed by cutting across in the figure of an X the black cloth which had lined the bottom of the box, and which now hung down in triangular flaps. The slow and feeble effort of the apparitions to free themselves from these dangling pieces of cloth heightened their effectiveness. From time to time a hand violently responded to the demand from one of the circle, “Is it for me?” and several persons were allowed to place their hands in the box and touch the materializations. These persons testified that they felt a distinct pressure from the spectral hands.

“Would you like to try, Mr. Phillips?” politely asked the doctor.

“Thanks, yes,” said Phillips, after a hesitation. He put his hand into the box: the apparitional hand, apparently that of a young girl, dealt him a flying touch, and vanished. Phillips nervously withdrew his hand.

“Did you feel it?” inquired Dr. Boynton.

“Yes,” answered Phillips.

“Oh, what was it like? Wasn’t it smooth and soft and cold?” demanded the mother of the first apparition.

“Yes,” said Phillips; “it was a sensation like the touch of a kid glove.”

“Oh, of course, of course!” Mr. Eccles burst out, in a sort of scornful groan. “A stuffed glove Î If we are to approach the investigation in this spirit” —

“I beg your pardon?” said Phillips, inquiringly. “I’m sure,” interposed Dr. Boynton, “that Mr. Phillips, whom I have had the honor of introducing to this circle, has intended nothing but a bona fide description of the sensation he experienced.”

“I don’t understand,” said Phillips.

“You were not aware, then,” pursued the doctor, “that there have been attempts to impugn the character of these and similar materializations, — in fact, to prove that these hands are merely stuffed gloves, mechanically operated?”

“Not at all I” cried Phillips.

“I was certain of your good feeling, your delicacy,” said the doctor. “We will go on, friends.” But the apparitions had apparently ceased, while the raps, which had been keeping up a sort of desultory, telegraphic tattoo throughout, when not actively in use as a means of conversation with the disembodied presences, suddenly seemed to cover the whole surface of the table with their detonation.

“The materializations are over,” said Mrs. Le Roy, speaking for the first time. Her voice, small and thin, oddly contrasted with her physical bulk.

“Oh, pshaw, Mrs. Le Roy!” protested Hatch, “don’t give it up, that way. Come! I want Jim. Ladies, join me in loud cries for Jim.”

Several of the ladies beset Mrs. Le Roy, who at last yielded so far as to ask if Jim were present. A sharp affirmative rap responded, and after an interval, during which the spectators peered anxiously into the dark box, a sort of dull fumbling was heard, and another materialization was evidently in progress.

“You can’t see the hand of a gentleman of Jim’s complexion against that black cloth,” said Hatch, rising. “Lend me your handkerchiefs, ladies. James has a salt and sullen rheum offends him.”

Several ladies made haste to offer their handkerchiefs, and, leaning over, Hatch draped them about the bottom of the box. The flaps were again agitated, and a large black hand showed itself distinctly against the white ground formed by the handkerchiefs. It was hailed with a burst of ecstasy from all those who seemed to be frequenters of these séances, and it wagged an awkward salutation to the company.

“Good for you, good for you, James!” said Hatch, approvingly. “Rings? Wish to adorn your person, James?” he continued. The hand gesticulated an imaginable assent to this proposal, and Hatch gravely said, “Your rings, ladies.” A half dozen were passed to him, and he contrived, with some trouble, to slip them on the fingers of the hand, which continually moved itself, in spite of many caressing demands from the ladies (with whom Jim was apparently a favorite spectre) that he would hold still, and Hatch’s repeated admonition that he should moderate his transports. When the rings were all in place, the hand was still dissatisfied, as it seemed, and beckoned toward Egeria. “Want Miss Boynton’s ring?” asked Hatch.

The girl gave a start, involuntarily laying hold of the ring, and Dr. Boynton said instantly, “He cannot have it. The ring was her mother’s.” This drew general attention to Miss Boynton’s ring: it was what is called a marchioness ring, and was set with a long, black stone, sharply pointed at either end.

“All right; beg pardon, doctor,” said Hatch, respectfully; but the hand, after a moment’s hesitation, sank through the aperture, as if in dudgeon, and was heard knocking off the rings against the table underneath. This seemed a climax for which the familiars of the house had been waiting. The ladies who had lent their rings to Mr. Hatch, and had joined their coaxing voices to his in entreating the black hand to be quiet, now rose with a rustle of drapery, and joyously cackled satisfaction in Jim’s characteristic behavior.

“That is the last,” Mrs. Le Roy announced, and withdrew. Some one turned on the light, and Hatch began to pick up the rings under the table; this was the occasion of renewed delight in Jim on the part of the ladies to whom Hatch restored their property.

“Would you like to look under the table?” asked Dr. Boynton of Ford, politely lifting the cloth and throwing it back.

“I don’t care to look,” said Ford, remaining seated, and keeping the same impassive face with which he had witnessed all the shows of the séance.

Dr. Boynton directed a glance of invitation at Phillips, who stooped and peered curiously at the under side of the table, and then passed his hand over the carpet beneath the aperture. “No signs of a trap?” suggested the doctor.

“No, quite solid,” said Phillips.

“These things are evidently merely in their inception,” remarked the doctor, candidly. “I wouldn’t advise their implicit acceptation under all circumstances, but here the conditions strike me as simple and really very fair.”

“I’ve been very greatly interested indeed,” said Phillips, “and I shouldn’t at all attempt to explain what I’ve seen.”

“We shall now try our own experiment,” said the doctor, looking round at the windows, through the blinds and curtains of which the early twilight was stealing. “Mr. Hatch, will you put up the battening?” While Hatch made haste to darken the windows completely with some light wooden sheathings prepared for the purpose, Dr. Boynton included Ford also in his explanation. “What we are about to do requires the exclusion of all light. These intelligences, whatever they are, that visit us seem peculiarly sensitive to certain qualities of light; they sometimes endure candles pretty well, but they dislike gas even more than daylight, and we shall shut that off entirely. Yes, my dear,” he said, turning lightly toward his daughter, who, apparently relieved from the spell under which she had sat throughout the séance, now approached him, and addressed him some entreaty in a low tone, to which the anxiety of her serious face gave its effect. Ford watched them narrowly while they spoke together; she evidently beseeching, and her father urging with a sort of obdurate kindness, from which she turned at last in despair, and sat listlessly down again in her place. One might have interpreted the substance of their difference as light or weighty, but there could be no doubt of its result in the girl’s reluctant obedience. She sat with her long hands in her lap and her eyes downcast, while the young man bent his glance upon her with a somewhat softened curiosity. Phillips drew up a chair beside her, and began to address her some evening-party conversation, to which, after her first terrified start at the sound of his voice, she listened with a look of dull mystification, and a vague and monosyllabic comment. He was in the midst of this difficult part when Dr. Boynton announced that the preparations were now perfect, and invited the company to seat themselves in a circle around his daughter, from whose side Phillips was necessarily driven. Mrs. Le Roy reentered, and after a survey of the forming circle took her place with the rest. Dr. Boynton instantly shut off the gas, and several of the circle, led by Miss Merrill, began to sing. It was music in a minor key, and as the sound of it fell the air was suddenly filled with noises of a heterogeneous variety. Voices whispered here and there, overhead and, as it appeared, underfoot; a fan was caught up, and each person in the circle was swiftly and violently fanned; a music-box, placed on Phillips’s knee, was wound up, and then set floating, as it seemed, through the air; rings were snatched from some fingers and roughly thrust upon others, amidst the cries and nervous laughter of the women.

Through all, the mystical voices continued, and now they began to be recognized by different persons in the circle. The mother of one briefly visited him, and exhorted him to have faith in a life to come; the little sister of another revealed that she could never tell the beauty of the spirit-land; a lady cried out, “Oh, John, is that you kissing me?” to which a hollow whisper answered, “Yes; persevere, and all will be well.” Suddenly a sharp smack was heard, and another lady, whose chubbiness had no doubt commended her as a medium for this sort of communication, exclaimed, with a hysterical laugh, “Oh, here’s Jim, again! He’s slapping me on the shoulder!” and in another instant this frolic ghost had passed round the circle, slapping shoulders and knees in the absolute darkness with amazing precision.

Jim went as suddenly as he came, and then there was a lull in the demonstrations. They began again with the voices, amidst which was heard the rhythmic clapping of hands, as Egeria beat her palms together, to prove that she had no material agency in the feats performed. Then, one of the circle called out, “Oh, delicious! Somebody is pressing a perfumed handkerchief to my face!”

“And mine!”

“And mine!” came quickly from others.

“Be careful,” warned the small voice of Mrs. Le Roy, “not to break the circle now, or some one will get hurt.”

She had scarcely spoken, when there came a shriek of pain and terror, with the muffled noise of a struggle; then a fainter cry, and a fall to the floor.

All sprang to their feet in confusion.

“Egeria! Egeria!” shouted Dr. Boynton. The girl made no answer. “Oh, light the gas, light the gas!” he entreated; and now the crowning wonder of the séance appeared. A hand of bluish flame shone in the air, and was seen to hover near one of the gas-burners, which it touched; as the gas flashed up and the hand vanished, a groan of admiration burst forth, which was hardly checked by the spectacle that the strong light revealed.

Egeria lay stretched along the floor in a swoon, the masses of her yellow hair disordered and tossed about her pale face. Her arms were flung outward, and the hand on which she wore her ring showed a stain of blood, oozing from a cut in a finger next the ring; the hand must have been caught in a savage clutch, and the sharp point of the setting crushed into the tender flesh.

Ford was already on his knees beside the girl, over whose insensible face he bowed himself to lift her fallen head.

“I told you,” said Mrs. Le Roy, “that some one would get hurt if anybody broke the circle.”

“It has been a glorious time I” cried Dr. Boynton, with sparkling eyes, while he went about shaking hands with one and another. “It has surpassed my utmost hopes! We stand upon the verge of a great era! The whole history of supernaturalism shows nothing like it! The key to the mystery is found!”

The company thronged eagerly about him, some to ask what the key was, others to talk of the wonderful hand. Egeria was forgotten; she might have been trodden under foot but for the active efforts of Hatch, who cleared a circle about her, and at last managed to withdraw the doctor from his auditors and secure his attention for the young girl.

“Oh, a faint, a mere faint,” he said, as he bent over her and touched her pulse. “The facts established are richly worth all they have cost. Ah!” he added, “we must have air to revive her.”

“You won’t get it in this crowd!” said Hatch, looking savagely round.

“We had better carry her to her room,” said Mrs. Le Roy.

“Yes, yes; very good, very good!” cried the doctor, absently trying to gather the languid shape into his arms. He presently desisted, and turned again to the group which Hatch had forced aside, and began to talk of the luminous hand and its points of difference from the hands shown in the box.

Hatch glanced round after him in despair, and then, with a look at Ford, said, “We must manage it somehow.” He bent over the inanimate girl, and with consummate reverence and delicacy drew her into his arms, and made some steps toward the door.

“It won’t do; you ‘re too little, Mr. Hatch,” said Mrs. Le Roy, with brutal common sense. “You never could carry her up them stairs in the world. Give her to the other gentleman, and go and fetch Dr. Boynton, if you can ever get him away.”

Hatch hesitated a moment, and with another look at Ford surrendered his burden to him. Ford received it as reverently as the other had given it; the beautiful face lay white upon his shoulder; the long, bright, disheveled hair fell over his arm; in his strong clasp he lifted her as lightly as if she had been indeed some pale phantom.

Phillips, standing aloof from the other group and intent upon this tableau, was able to describe it very effectively, a few evenings afterwards, to a lady who knew both himself and Ford well enough to enjoy it.

II.

Mr. Phillips’s father had been in business on that obscure line which divides the wholesale merchant’s social acceptability from the lost condition of the retail dealer. When he died, however, his son emerged forever from the social twilight in which the father had been content to remain. He took account of his means, and found that he had enough to live handsomely upon, not only without anything like shop-keeping, but without business of any sort, and he courageously resolved to be a man of leisure. He had certain tastes which qualified him for this life; he had read much, and he had traveled abroad. He joined a club convenient to the lodging which he kept in his paternal home, letting out the rest of the house to a thrifty woman whose interest it was that he should have nothing to complain of. Every morning, at nine precisely, he breakfasted at the club, beside one of the pleasantest windows; the sun came in there in the afternoon, and except in the winter months he dined at another table. His breakfast and his dinner were the chief events of a day which he had the wisdom to keep as like every other day as he could, unless for some very good reason. When he had finished either meal, he turned over the newspapers and magazines, largely English, in the reading-room; after dinner he often dozed a few minutes in his chair. For the rest, he paid visits and went about to the picture stores and to the studios. Now and then he bought a painting, which in his hands turned out a good investment; but his passion was bric-a-brac, and he liked the excitement of the auction-room, where he picked up from time to time a rug, a queer vase, a colonial clock, a claw-footed table or chest of drawers, and added them to his stores.

He kept up with the current literature, and distilled from it a polite essence, with which he knew how to perfume his conversation in the measure agreeable to ladies willing to learn what it was distinguished to read. With many he was an authority in such matters, and with nearly all he was acceptable for a certain freshness of the susceptibilities, which he studiously preserved, growing them under glass, as it were, when it was past their natural seasons to flourish in the open air. Now and then one revolted against this artificial bloom, and declared that Mr. Phillips’s emotions smelt of the watering-pot; but commonly they were well liked by the sex with which, even if he had not preferred, he would have been forced mainly to associate. There is no society but that of women for an idler in our country; the other men are busy and tired, with little patience and little sympathy for men who are not busy and tired.

Such men as Phillips consorted with were of the feminine temperament, like artists and musicians (he had a pretty taste in music); or else they were of the intensely masculine sort, like Ford, to whom he had attached himself. He liked to have their queer intimacy noted, and to talk of it with the ladies of his circle, finding it as much of a mystery as he could. At these times he treated his friend as a bit of vertu, telling at what length his lovely listener would of how he had happened to pick Ford up. He bore much from him in the way of contemptuous sarcasm; it illustrated the strange fascination which such a man as Ford had for such a man as Phillips. He lay in wait for his friend’s characteristics, and when he had surprised this trait or that in him he was fond of exhibiting his capture.

The tie that bound Ford, on his part, to Phillips was not tangible; it was hardly more than force of habit, or like an indifferent yielding to the advances made by the latter. Doubtless the absence of any other intimacy had much to do with this apparent intimacy. They had as little in common in matters of taste as in temperament. Ford openly scorned bric-a-brac; he rarely went into society; for the ladies in whose company Phillips liked to bask he cared as slightly as for stamped leather or Saracenic tiles. He was not of Bostonian origin, and had come to the city a much younger man than we find him. He was known to a few persons of like tastes for his scientific studies, which he pursued somewhat fitfully, as his poverty, and that dark industry known as writing for the press, by which he eked out his poverty, permitted. He wrote a caustic style; and this, together with his brooding look and his taciturn and evasive habits, gave rise to conjecture that his past life concealed a disappointment in love, “Or perhaps,” suggested a fair analyst, “in literature.” Several mornings after the séance at Mrs. Le Roy’s, he sat on one of the many benches which the time found vacant in the Public Garden. It was yet far too early for the nurse-maids and their charges and suitors; the marble Venus of the fountain was surprised without her shower on; Mr. Ball’s equestrian Washington drew his sword in solitude unbroken by a policeman upon Dr. Rimmer’s Hamilton in Commonwealth Avenue; the whole precinct rested in patrician insensibility to the plebeian hour of seven; and Ford, if he had cared, would have been safe from the polite amaze of that neighborhood at finding one even of its remote acquaintance in those pleasure-grounds at that period of the day. He sat in a place which was habitual with him; for he lodged in one of the boarding-houses on a street near by, and he made the Public Garden the resort of such leisure as each day afforded him, seeking always the same seat under the same Kilmarnock willow, and suffering a sense of invasion when he found it taken. Commonly his leisure fell much later in the day; and he had now the aspect of a sleep-broken man, rather than the early riser who takes the air on principle or from choice. He sat and gazed absently over at the pond, where the swans lay still on the still water, with their white reflections under them as distinct and substantial to the eye as their own bulk.

A few stragglers, looking as jaded as himself for the most part, lounged on the seats along the walks, or hung listless on the parapet of the bridge. The spiteful English sparrows scattered their sharp, irritating notes through the air, and quarreled about over the grass, or made love like the nagging lovers out of a lady’s novel.

When Ford at last withdrew his absent eyes from the swans and looked up, he was aware of a large and flabby presence, which towered, in the sense that a lofty mold of jelly may be said to tower, on the path directly before him. In this he gradually recognized an acquaintance of the spiritual séance, and finally knew the mottled face of Mr. Eccles; the morning was unseasonably close and warm; his hat was off, and the breeze played with the hair that crept thinly over his crown; his shirt and collar were clean, but affected the spectator differently.

“A-r-r-h — good-morning!” he said, with a slow, hard smoothness, staring intently at Ford, with a set smile and shut teeth.

“How d’ ye do!” answered Ford, without interest.

“Nice morning,” said Mr. Eccles, turning half about, and describing it with a wave of his limp-rimmed silk hat.

“Very pleasant,” assented Ford, making no motion to rise, and neither inviting nor forbidding further conversation.

“A habitual early riser?” suggested Mr. Eccles. “No, I merely happen to be up.”

“I rise early myself,” said Mr. Eccles. “It is my digestion. I sleep badly.” He looked, as he spoke, like a man who had never slept well. “Your friend, I presume, is not troubled in his digestion?”

“If you mean Mr. Phillips,” replied Ford, with a cold ray of amusement, “I believe not. He makes it a matter of conscience to digest well.”

“It isn’t that, sir,” said Mr. Eccles. “I have experimented in the matter a great deal. I have tried to digest well on principle, but that does not reach the root of the trouble. It may be alleviated by the proper influences; but this sourness.”

 —— he struck his stomach softly—” seems to be the material response to some spiritual ferment which we are at present powerless to escape. I am satisfied that the large majority of our indigestion, sir, comes from the existing imperfections of mediumization.”

“Some philosophers attribute it to pie,” said Ford, neutrally.

“That is a very superficial way of looking at it,” returned Mr. Eccles. “If we could once establish the true relations with the other life, pie wouldn’t stand in our way.”

“I’ve no doubt that those who establish their relations in the old-fashioned way, by dying, are not troubled by pie,” said Ford.

“Oh, death is not necessary to a complete rapport,” returned Mr. Eccles, somewhat impatiently. “I have long been satisfied of that. It may even prove an obstacle. What we want is to place ourselves in connection with the regions of order and peace. Till we can do this, we must feel the effects of the acidity, as I may call it, which characterizes the crude and unsettled spiritual existence reached by our present system of mediumization. We had an illustration of that the other night, sir, in the vulgar violence of the manifestations. I was ashamed that any person of refinement should have been invited to witness such a — a saturnalia. I should have withdrawn from the circle myself, at once, as soon as I perceived what the character of the communications was likely to be, if it had not been for my regard for Dr. Boynton and his daughter. There is no doubt in my mind, sir, that if we had then been in communication with ladies and gentlemen of the other life, the circle could have been broken with impunity. As it was, you saw the brutality with which the violation of a single condition was resented by the savage crew we had suffered to be called about us. They dreaded to lose an opportunity for riot. The consequence was that Miss Boynton’s hand was caught and crushed till the setting of her ring cut to the bone; then she was flung to the ground. The only redeeming feature, the only hopeful aspect, of the affair was the apparition which terminated the disgraceful scene. Undoubtedly the hand which turned on the gas was a celestial agency of the highest and purest type.”

Ford let his gaze, which had been dwelling upon Mr. Eccles’s face with cold scrutiny, drop to the ground. “I hope,” he said, “that Miss Boynton has quite recovered from her — accident.”

“It was a shock,” returned Mr. Eccles, candidly, “and her physique is delicate. She is a mingling of the finest elements, but the proportions are so adjusted that the equilibrium is very easily disturbed. Her digestion, I should say, was normally very good. She is evidently in relation, for the most part, with settled and orderly essences.” He again set his teeth, and shone upon Ford with a wide, joyless smile. He waited for a moment, and Ford making no sign of interest, he said “Good-morning,” and towered tremulously away, carrying his hat in his hand, and letting his baldness take the breeze as he walked.

When he was gone, Ford sat in a long reverie, from which he was roused by the clock of the Arlington Street church striking eight, which was his breakfast hour. He rose, and strolled down the path and across the street to his lodging, which he entered with his latch-key. The other boarders, with their morning freshness of toilet upon them, were lounging or tripping down-stairs to breakfast, and met him with various degrees of interest, umbrage, and indifference in their salutation as he went up. The men mostly growled at him, with settled dislike in their tones; some of the women beheld him with pique, others with kindly curiosity; one little lady, in a pretty morning-robe, warbled at him, as she swept her skirts aside to make room for him at the turn of the stairs, “Doing the early bird, Mr. Ford?”

“No; the early worm,” he returned with as little effusion as he had lavished upon Mr. Eccles.

The lady gave him the slant of a laughing face, turned up at him, as she tripped down the stairs. “Don’t disagree with the bird!” she said saucily. She had achieved celebrity among the other ladies by not being afraid of him.

He seemed not to think any answer necessary, and passed up two more flights to his room, which was small and in the rear of the house. It was cheerlessly furnished with a tumbled bed and two or three chairs and a large table, on which many papers and books, arranged in scrupulously neat order, left a small vacant space at one corner for writing, where some sheets of fresh manuscript lay. On the window seat were some chemical materials and apparatus; on the chimney shelf some faded photographs; a tobacco pouch and pipes. Ford’s business was with the manuscript leaves, which he took up and tore carefully into small pieces. He flung these into the grate, and then, with a conscious air, lifted one of the pipes, and fingered it a moment before he turned to leave the room. It was as if he had not liked the witness of his wonted environment of this act of his. He went on, down to breakfast, and took his place at a table as yet but sparsely tenanted. The lively lady of the stairs-landing was there; she sat long at meat, morning, noon, and night, not for the material, but for the mental refreshment; for she found that more people could be made to give some account of themselves there than anywhere else. She was sipping her coffee out of her spoon, and looking about her between sips, with a disengaged air, when Ford came in, and she fastened upon him over a good stretch of table, at once.

“Perhaps you went out so early in order to see a ghost, Mr. Ford?”

“Very likely,” answered Ford, making a listless decision between the steak and the bacon.

“And did you?”

“What?”

“See one.”

“They always charge people not to say.”

“Ah, not nowadays! They want you to go and tell all about it. That’s what I understand from Mr. Phillips.” She sank back a little into herself, with her eyes resting quietly upon Ford’s inattentive face, and her elbow brought gracefully to her side, and softly stirred her coffee. She was not of the society in which Mr. Phillips ordinarily moved, but was one of the interesting people on its borders whom his leisure allowed him to cultivate. She thus became in some sort of his world, — enough at least to know what was going on in it, and to be referred to there as Mr. Phillips’s bright little friend, by ladies who did not like her. She waited for Ford to speak in response to her last remark; but he was not one of those men who rush like air into any empty place; he had the gift of reticence, and the lady who had planned the vacuum beheld his self-control with admiration. It piqued her to fresh effort; she believed that his speaking was only a question of time. “Mr. Phillips,” she went on, beginning to sip her coffee again, “gave me quite a glowing description of the Pythoness, as he called her; quite a Medea-like beauty, I should judge, — if it was her own hair.”

“Mr. Phillips has a very catholic taste in female loveliness,” said Ford.

“But really, now, Mr. Ford,” said the lady, in a tone of alluring candor, “weren’t you very much frightened?”

“I am constitutionally timid.”

The lady laughed. “Then you were! What did you make of it all, Mr. Ford? What do you suppose made the cut in her hand? Don’t you think she made it herself? You know Mr. Phillips likes mystery, and he wouldn’t offer the least suggestion.”

“Then I don’t think it would be wise in me to hazard a guess. I don’t see Mr. Perham, this morning,” said Ford, lifting his eyes for the first time, and lazily looking at the vacant places about the lady.

She visibly honored him for this demonstration upon her weak point. She was a good-natured creature, and she liked skillful maneuvering, especially in men, where it had the piquancy of a surprise. “Oh, no!” she smiled. “Poor Mr. Perham is not equal to these early breakfasts. If you were often down yourself, Mr. Ford, you would have noticed his absence before this. He lets me come down on condition that I bring him his modest chop with my own hand, when I come up. You have no idea what a truly amiable invalid is till you know Mr. Perham well.”

Ford expressed no concern for the intimate character of Mr. Perham, and after some further toying with her spoon Mrs. Perham slipped back to her point of attack: “I don’t know but I ought to make my excuses for trying to provoke you to talk of the matter.”

“I don’t mind your trying. But I should have been vexed if you had succeeded.”

“Yes, that would have been a dead loss of material. I suppose you intend to write about it.”

A flush passed over Ford’s face, which Mrs. Perham gleefully noted. He replied, a little off his balance, that he had no intention of writing of it.

“Oh, then, you have written!” joyed Mrs. Perham.

Ford did not answer, but put his napkin into his ring, and rose from his chair, quitting the room with a faintly visible inclination toward the end of the table at which Mrs. Perham sat.

“Mrs. Perham, I don’t see how you can bear to speak to that man,” said one of the ladies.

“His manners are odious!” cried another.

“Oh, he has manners then — of some sort?” inquired a third. “I hadn’t observed.”

“My dears,” said Mrs. Perham, “he’s charming! He is as natural as the noble savage, and twice as handsome. I like those men who show their contempt of you. At least, they ‘re not hypocrites. And Mr. Ford’s insolence has a sort of cold thrill about it that’s delicious. Few men can retreat with dignity. He was routed, just now, but he went off like see the conquering hero.”

“He skulked off,” said one of the unpersuaded. “Skulked? Did he really skulk?” demanded Mrs. Perham. “I wish I could believe I had made him skulk. Mary, have you Mr. Perham’s chop ready? I’ll take it up, — I said I took it.”

Mrs. Perham laughed, and disappeared with her little tray, like a conjugal Chocolatière, and the ladies continued for a decent space to talk about Ford. Then they began to talk about her.

III.

Ford went back to his room, and turned over some new books which he had on his table for review. He could not make his choice among these volumes, or else he found them all unworthy; for after an absent glance at the deep chair in which he usually sat to read, he looked up his hat and went out, taking his way toward the shabbily adventurous street where the Boyntons had their lodgings.

Dr. Boynton met him at the door of his apartment with a smile of cheerful cordiality; but when Ford mentioned his encounter with Mr. Eccles, and expressed his hope that Miss Boynton was better, “Well, no,” answered the doctor, “I cannot say that she is. She has had a shock, — a shock from which she may be days and even weeks in recovering.” He rubbed his small, soft hands together, and beamed upon Ford’s cold front almost rapturously.

“I am very sorry to hear it,” said the latter, with a glance of misgiving.

“Yes, yes,” admitted the other. “In some respects it is regrettable. But there are in this case, as in all others, countervailing advantages.” He settled himself comfortably in the corner of the sofa as he proceeded. “Yes. The whole episode, on its scientific side, has been eminently satisfactory. The character of the manifestations at the séance, the violence with which neglect of the conditions was resented, the subsequent effects, primary and secondary, on the nervous organism of the medium, and indeed of almost all persons present, have been singularly impressive, and indicative of novel and momentous developments. I don’t know, Mr. Ford, whether you have had an opportunity of conversing with any of our friends, since the evening in question, but I have seen many of them, and they have all testified to an experience which, however difficult of formulation, was most distinct. It appears to have been something analogous to the electrization of persons in the vicinity of a point struck by lightning. In the case of Mrs. Le Roy there has scarcely been a cessation of the effects. The raps in her room have been almost continuous, and the furniture of the whole house has been affected. Miss Boynton has suffered the greatest distress from the continuance of the manifestations, and her mind is oppressed by influences which she is apparently powerless to throw off. In a word, everything has worked most harmoniously to the best advantage, and the progress made has been all that we could wish. Mr. Eccles perhaps told you of a marked increase of the discomfort he habitually suffers from indigestion?”

Ford hardly knew whether to laugh or rage at all this, but he merely said that Mr. Eccles had mentioned his dyspepsia, and remained in a bitter indecision, while Dr. Boynton went on. “Ah, yes I yes, yes! I think we may safely refer the aggravation of his complaint to the influences, still active, of our memorable séance. But I am not sure that Mr. Eccles’s peculiar theory is the correct one. I distrust his speculations in some degree. A ferment of the kind he speaks of in the world of spirits would be more apt to ultimate itself here in the mind than in the stomach.”

“Do you generally distrust speculations in regard to these matters?” asked Ford.

“I distrust all special speculation,” said the doctor. “We physicians know what specialism leads to in medicine. I prefer to base my convictions solely upon facts.”

“Are you able to satisfy yourself as to the facts of the séance here, the other night?”

“Not absolutely, — no. Not entirely. As yet we are only able to approximate facts.”

“Then as yet you have only approximated convictions?” asked Ford.

“As yet I am only inquiring,” said the doctor, with sweet acquiescence. “Startling and significant as those manifestations were, I feel that I am still only an inquirer. But I feel also that I have gained certain points which will almost infallibly lead me to a final conclusion in the matter.”

“Then you mean to say,” pursued Ford, “that as a man of science you rose from Mrs. Le Roy’s experiments in sleight of hand, the other night, with a degree of satisfaction. Have you the slightest confidence in her powers?”

“Why, there,” replied Boynton, “you touch upon a strange problem. I am always aware, in these matters, of an obscurity of motive and of opinion which will not allow me to make any explicit answer to such a question as yours.”

“You obfuscate yourself before sitting down, as you darken the room, that you may be in a perfectly receptive condition?”

“Something of that nature, yes. But I should distinguish: I should say that the obfuscation, though voluntary, was very largely unconscious.” Ford laughed. “I am afraid that I was in no state to judge of the exhibition, then. You are a man of such candor yourself that I am sure you will not blame my frankness in telling you that I thought the whole apparitional performance a piece of gross trickery.”

“Not at all, not at all!” cried Boynton, with friendly animation. “From one point your position is perfectly tenable, — perfectly. You will remember that I myself warned you of the possibility of deceit in the effects produced, and said that I always took part in such a séance with the full knowledge of this possibility. At the same time, I always try, for my own sake, and for the sake of the higher truth to be attained, to keep this knowledge in abeyance, — in the dark, as we were saying.”

“I see,” said Ford, dryly. He waited blankly a moment, while Boynton watched him with cheery interest. “I suppose it was my misfortune to have been able to expose the whole performance at any moment. I didn’t think it worth while.”

“It was not worth while,” Boynton interposed. “Those people would not have accepted your exposé, — I can’t say that I should have accepted it myself; and in your effort to fulfill a mission, a mere mechanical duty, to society, you might have placed obstacles in the way of the most extraordinary developments. Nothing is clearer to my mind,” he proceeded impressively, “than that it is our business, after the first intimations of a desire for converse on the part of spirits, to afford them every possible facility, to suggest, to arrange, to prepare, agencies for their use. Suppose you had detected Madam Le Roy in the employment of stuffed gloves; at the very moment when you seized upon the artificial apparition, a genuine spirit hand might have been about to manifest itself, in obedience to the example given. My dear sir,” cried Dr. Boynton, leaning from his perch on the sofa toward the place where Ford sat, “I have gone to’ the very bottom of this matter, and I find that in almost all cases there is a degree of solicitation on the part of mediums; that where this is most daring the results are most valuable; and what I wish now to establish as the central principle of spiritistic science is the principle of solicitationism. If the disembodied spirits do not voluntarily approach, invite them; if they cannot manifest their presence, show them by example the ways and means of so doing. Depend upon it, the whole science must die out without some such direct and vigorous effort on our part.” He paused, leaving Ford in a strange perplexity. The smoothness and finish with which Boynton had formulated the preposterous ideas just expressed rendered it impossible for Ford to approach without irony a confession which he had meant to make in a different spirit. “Then you would not blame me if I had lost patience at any point of the game, and actively interfered in the process of solicitation?”

“As a mere exterior inquirer,” returned Boynton, blandly, “I could not have blamed you.”

“In the dark séance,” said Ford, “I did interfere. It was my belief that Mrs. Le Roy was affording the agencies, as you express it, in that, too. It makes me sick to think that I should have hurt Miss Boynton, and if I could have suspected her of what I suspected Mrs. Le Roy I should never” —

“You were quite right,” interrupted Dr. Boynton, courteously as before, but with a touch of pride. “My daughter was entirely irresponsible, for she was purely the passive instrument of my will; she was carrying out my plan — a plan which the sequel proved triumphantly successful.”

“I have said what I wished to say,” remarked Ford, rising. “I can well believe that she did only as she was bidden. There were other things that showed that. I leave you to settle with yourself the little questions of honesty and decency in thrusting a helpless girl on the performance of a cheat like that. You seem to be well grounded in your great principle, and I dare say you won’t be troubled by my opinions. But my opinion of you, Dr. Boynton, is that you are either the most unconscionable knave and quack I have ever seen, or” —

Boynton sprang to his feet. “Not another word, sir! I regret for the sake of human nature to find you a ruffian. But there my concern in you ceases. I defy you to do your worst! Leave the house I”

“You defy me!” said Ford, setting his teeth, and struggling with the rage into which he found himself hurried. “What do you defy me to? Do you suppose I am going to mix myself up in any public way with your affairs? You are perfectly safe to go on and gull imbeciles to the end of time, for all I care.”

“I am an honest man I” retorted Dr. Boynton. “I have an unsullied life behind me, spent in the practice of an honorable profession and in earnest research into questions, into mysteries, on the solution of which the dearest hopes of the race repose. Who are you, to attaint me of unworthy motives, to cry pretender and impostor at me? I have met, in the course of my investigations, rude incredulity from the thoughtless crowds who witnessed them, and insolent disdain from those qualified to question, but too proud or too indolent to do so. Till now this indifference has only accused my judgment. It remained for you to asperse my motives.”

Dr. Boynton looked the resentment of an outraged man; he gained, in spite of his flowing rhetoric, a dignity which he did not have before. Ford stared at him in momentary helplessness. He was at the disadvantage that every man must be whose habits of life and whose temperament remove him from personal encounter, and who meets others in that sort of intellectual struggle in which his antagonist is for the time necessarily passive.

“You arraign me as a cheat,” resumed Boynton, “and you dare to judge my principle by the imperfect first steps of those who attempt to put it in practice, by the crudest preliminary processes. But even here you have no ground to stand upon. Even here the ultimate fact utterly defeats and annihilates your insolent assumptions.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” began Ford, “and” —

“I will tell you what I mean,” interrupted Boynton, “and you shall judge your own case. If all our endeavors at spirit intercourse were for the ends of selfish deception, as you claim, how do you account for the final response to them? I am willing to believe that it was your hand that inflicted a hurt upon a woman, — oh, whether my daughter or Mrs. Le Roy, it was still a woman, — and that invoked any possible consequence from the violation of conditions that you were bound in honor to respect; but whose hand was it that evolved itself from the darkness, and then dispersed that darkness? Whose hand was that which crowned my wildest hopes with success?”

“If you mean,” said Ford, and he felt that after all it was shocking to own it, “the hand which turned on the gas, it was my hand.”

“Your hand?” gasped Dr. Boynton.

“My hand — prepared by a trick so common and simple that it could have deceived no one but children, or men and women so eager for lies” —

“Oh, it was the truth, the sacred, vital, saving truth, they longed for! And it was this, it was this desire, you deluded!” Dr. Boynton hid his face in his handkerchief, and sank back upon the sofa. “Go, now,” he said. “I will not, I cannot, I must not, hear one word of excuse from you. Your action is indefensible.”

“Excuse?” cried Ford. “Do you really think I want to excuse myself? Do you think” —

“Why should you not wish to excuse yourself?” solemnly demanded Boynton, uncovering his face, which was pale, but calm. “You have dire need of excuse, if sacrilege is a crime.”

“Sacrilege?” Ford was aware of forcing his laugh.

“Yes, sacrilege. You intruded upon religious aspirations to turn them into ridicule. You derided the hope of immortality itself, — the evidences through which thousands cling to the belief in God.”

“You are such a very preposterous creature that I don’t quite know how to take you,” said Ford, “but I will ask you what you were doing yourself in making those simpletons think there were spirits present among them.”

“I was leading them on to the evolution of a great truth, to the comfort of an assured immortality. But you, — were you aiming at anything higher than the gratification of the wretched vanity that delights in finding all endeavor as low and hopeless as its own? Oh, I know your position, young man! I know the attitude of those shallow sciences which trace man backward to the brute, and forward to the clod. Which of them do you profess? They all join in a cowardly contempt of phenomena which they will not examine; and if one of their followers, more just, more candid, than the rest, like Crookes, of London, ventures into the field of investigation, and dares to own the truth, they unite like a pack of wolves to destroy him. His methods are non-scientific! Bah! Did you think you were doing a fine thing, that day, when you lay in wait to dash our hopes, — to prove to us by the success of your trick that we were as the beasts that perish?”

“I can’t say that I intended to trouble myself to expose you to them,” said Ford.

“Then how much better were you,” retorted Boynton, “than the worst you think of me? You call me an impostor. What were you but an impostor who wished to fool them to the top of their bent, for the sake of laughing them over in secret, or among others like yourself?”

“Here!” cried Ford. “I am sick of this foolery, and I warn you now that I will laugh you over with this whole city, if I know you to give another séance or public exhibition of any sort here. I believe there are no laws that can reach you, but justice shall. I am going to put an end to your researches, in Boston at least.”

“You threaten me, do you?” cried Dr. Boynton, following him in his retreat from the room. “You propose, in your small way, to play the tyrant, to fetter my action, to forbid me the exercise of my faculties in the pursuit of truth! And you think I shall regard your threats? Poh, I fling them in your face! I value them no more than I care for the miserable trick by which you have burlesqued without retarding my inquiries for an instant.”

“Very well,” retorted Ford, “we shall see!” He crushed on his hat, and left the house, Boynton pursuing him to the door, with noisy defiance, and remaining on the outer threshold to look after him.

IV.

DR. Boynton watched Ford out of sight, and then, hot and flushed, turned back into the house. He did not return to the parlor, where the stormy scene had taken place between them, but went to his daughter’s room. Egeria lay there in the twilight that befriended the shabbiness of the chamber, upon a lounge wheeled away from the wall, and at his entrance she asked, without lifting her eyes to his face (for women need not look at those dear to them, to know their moods), “What is it, father?”

“Nothing, nothing,” panted her father, with a poor show of evasion.

“Yes, there is something,” sadly persisted the girl. “Something has happened to worry you.”

“Yes, you are right!” cried Dr. Boynton, with vehemence. “I have just met the grossest outrage and contumely from a man whom — whom — But, Egeria,” he broke off, “tell me how you knew I was troubled. Did you hear angry talking?”

“No, I didn’t hear anything. Who was the man, father?”

“Did you notice anything in my manner?”

“No, I saw nothing unusual.”

“Then how did you know? Try to think, Egeria,” said her father, eagerly. “Try to trace the processes of your intuition. This may be a very important clue, leading to the most significant results. How could you suspect, having heard nothing, and in this darkened room, having seen nothing, strange in my manner, — how could you divine that something had occurred to trouble me? How did you know it?”

“Oh, I suppose I knew it because I love you so, father. There was nothing strange in that. Oh, father, you promised me that you wouldn’t speak of those things again, just yet. They wear my life out.” He had drawn his chair, in his excitement, close to her couch, and sat leaning intently over her. She put her arm round his neck, and gently pulled his face down on her pillow for a moment. “Poor father! What was it vexed you?”

Boynton freed himself, instantly reverting with his first vehemence to the outrage he had suffered. “It was that young man, — that Ford, who was here the other night. He has gone, after heaping every insult upon me, — after telling me to my face that it was he who seized your hand in the dark séance, and produced by a trick the effect of the luminous spirit hand which turned on the gas. He dared to call me an impostor, to taunt me with forcing you to take part in my deceptions, — and this after the fullest and freest and frankest statement from me of the principle upon which I proceed in these experiments. And he ended by threatening me — yes, by threatening me with public exposure if I gave another séance in this city. The insolent scoundrel! If I had been a younger man, I should have replied in the only fitting manner. As it was, I treated his threats with contempt. I answered him taunt for taunt, and I defied him to do his worst. I a quack, — the shameless swindler! To take part in a mystery whose conditions bound him to good faith, and to defeat all its results by his miserable trickery!” Boynton started up and crossed the room. Suddenly he broke out, “Egeria, I don’t believe him! I don’t believe it was he who hurt you! I don’t believe that he produced that effect of a luminous hand! I believe that in both cases supernatural agencies were at work; they must have been; and a man capable of wishing to defeat our experiments would be quite capable of claiming to have done so. He is a heartless liar, and so I will tell him in any public place. He forbid me to give another séance in Boston! He force me to quit this city in defeat and ignominy! I would perish first!”

“Oh, I wish we could go away! Oh, I wish we could go home!” moaned the girl, when the doctor’s furious tirade had ended.

“Egeria!”

“Yes, father,” said the girl, desperately; “I hate this wandering life; I’m afraid of these strange people, with their talk and their tricks and their dupes, and your part with them.”

“Egeria! This to your father? Do you join that scoundrel in his insult to me? Do you wish to add a crueler sting to the pain I have suffered, —— you who know how unselfish my motives are? Do you deny the power — the strange power — which you have yourself repeatedly exercised, and which you have not been able to analyze?”

“No, no, father,” said the girl fondly, rising from where she lay, and going quickly to the chair into which her father had sunk, “I don’t deny it, and I don’t doubt you. How could I doubt you?” She sat down upon his knee, and drew his head against her breast. “But let’s go away! Let us go back to the country, and think it all over again, and try to see more clearly what it is, and — and — pray about it!” She had dropped to her knees upon the floor, and held his hands beseechingly between her own. “Why shouldn’t we go home?”

“Home! home!” repeated her father. “We have no home, Egeria! We might go back to that hole where I have stifled all my life; but we should starve there. My practice had dwindled to nothing, before we left; you know that. Their miserable bigotry could not tolerate my opinions. No, Egeria, we must make the world our home hereafter. We must be content to associate our names with the establishment of — of a supreme principle, and find our consolation where all the benefactors of mankind have found it, — in the grave.” Boynton paused, as if he had too deeply wrought upon his own sensibilities; but he resumed with fresh animation: “But why look upon the dark side of things, Egeria? Surely, you are better with me here than in that old house, where they would have taught you to distrust and despise me? You cannot regret having decided in my favor between your grandfather and me? If you do” —

“Oh, no, father! Never! You are all the world to me; I know how good you are, and I shall never doubt your truth, whatever happens. But go — let us go away from here — from this town, where we’ve had nothing but trouble, where I’m sure there’s some great trouble coming to us yet.”

“Do you think so, Egeria?” asked her father with interest. “What makes you think so? What is the character, the purport, of your prescience?”

“It’s no prescience! It’s nothing. It’s only fear. Everything goes from me.”

“That is very curious!” mused Boynton. “Could it be something in the local electric conditions?”

“Oh, father, father!” moaned the girl in despair.

“Well, well, my child! What is it, then?”

“You have quarreled with this — this Mr. Ford?”

“Yes, Egeria; I told you.”

“And he has threatened you, if you stayed — threatened to do something — I don’t know — against us?”

“I suppose he means to vilify me in the public prints.”

“Oh, then don’t provoke him, father, — don’t provoke him. Let us go away.”

“Why, Egeria, are you afraid for your father?”

“I’m afraid for myself,” answered the girl, cowering nearer to her father. “He will come to see us, and I shall fail, and he will ruin you!”

“Egeria,” said Dr. Boynton, “this is very interesting. I remember that on the day he came here — the day of the séance — you seemed to be similarly affected by his sphere, his presence. Can you analyze your feeling sufficiently, my child, to tell me why he should affect you in this way?”

“No,” said Egeria.

“Do you remember any one else who has affected you as he has?”

“No, no one else.”

“Very curious!” mused Dr. Boynton, with a pleased air of scientific inquiry. “Very curious, indeed! It opens up a wholly new field of investigation. All these things seem to proceed by a sort of indirection. We may be further from the result we were seeking than I supposed; but we may be upon the point of determining the nature of the chief obstacle in our way, and therefore — therefore — Um! Very strange, very strange! Egeria, I have felt myself, ever since we came to Boston, something singularly antagonistic in the conditions.”

“Oh, then you’ll go away, won’t you, father, — you’ll go away at once?” pleaded the girl.

“I am not sure,” answered Dr. Boynton, in the same musing tone as before, “what our duty is in the premises. Suppose, Egeria,” he continued with spirit,—” suppose that this antagonistic influence were confined to a single person in a population of two hundred and fifty thousand souls; would it not be a striking proof of the vastness of the resistance already overcome by spiritistic science, and at the same time an — a — a — indication of responsibility in the matter which we ought not to shun?”

“I don’t understand you, father,” said Egeria, fearfully.

“I mean,” replied her father, “that it may be our duty to sink all personal feeling in this matter, and bend every energy to the conviction, the conversion, of the person who thus antagonizes us.”

The girl stood aghast, and for a moment did not reply, but glanced at her father’s heated face and shining eyes in a sort of terror. Some instinct, perhaps, flashed upon her a fear against which the habit of her whole life rebelled, and kept her from directly opposing him. She subdued the tremor that ran through her, and answered, “You know that I think whatever you do, father. How — how” — She apparently wished to temporize, to catch at this thought and that; without uttering any, she stopped short.

“How should I go about it?” radiantly demanded her father. “In the openest, the simplest manner possible, by submitting your — your gift to the test of opposing wills; by inviting this man to a public contest, in which, laying prejudice aside, he and I should enter the lists against each other in a fair struggle for supremacy. I am not afraid of the issue. In this view, he is no longer an enemy. He is a blind, opposing force of nature, which is simply to be overcome; he can no more have insulted or wronged me than the rock against which I strike in the dark, than the tempest that dashes its drops in my face. Poor, helpless, blameless obstacle! I am ashamed, Egeria, that I used harsh language to him; I am ashamed that I retorted from my vantage-ground the merely mechanical outrage which I suffered from him. My first business must be to — to — apologize; to seek him in a spirit of passive good feeling, and to invite him in a sentiment of the widest liberality to enter upon this rivalry to — to” — He bustled about the room, seeking his hat. “It is my duty, it is my right, it is my sacred privilege, to go to him without a moment’s delay, and withdraw every offensive expression that I may have used in the heat of — of — controversy; to solicit, upon whatever terms of personal humiliation he makes, his cooperation in this experiment; to conjure him by our common hopes of immortality” — Boynton had found that his hat was not in the room; he made a swift dash towards the door. Egeria flung herself against it, and, holding it fast, stretched out both her hands towards him.

“Wait!”

Her father suddenly arrested himself. “Egeria!”

“What — w hat” — the girl panted tumultuously, — — “what — if I can’t submit to the test?”

Boynton looked at her in stupefaction, as if this were a point that had not occurred to him; but she confronted him steadily. “You cannot refuse,” he began.

“You have not considered this matter yet, father,” said the girl. “You have not taken time” —

“Time, time!” retorted her father, with wild impatience. “There is no time! Eternity hems us in on all sides! It presses and invades at every point! The man may die; a wretched casualty — a falling timber on the street, a frightened horse, an open cellar-way — may snatch him from me before I can use him for the purpose to which Providence has appointed his being. And you talk of time! Come, my daughter, let me pass! You are not you, nor! I, in such a crisis as this.”

The girl moved from the door, and cast her arms about his neck, as he quickly advanced. “Oh, father, father!” she cried, “what is it you mean to do?”

“Why, I have told you, child,” he answered, putting up his hands to unclasp her arms.

“Yes; but if I failed?” she implored, clinging the closer. “Remember that I have been sick, that I am still very weak, and wait, — wait a little.”

Boynton’s mood changed instantly. “Ha!” he breathed, and continued in his tone of scientific investigation: “Are you sensible, Egeria, of any distinct loss of psychic force through the diminution of your physical strength?”

“How can I tell, father? It is you who do it. I see, or seem to see, whatever you tell me. I have always done that. It began so long ago, when I was so little, that I can’t remember anything different. I want to please you; I want to help you; but I don’t know if I can, father. It has always come from my thinking that what you wished was perfectly wise and right.”

“Yes, yes,” said Boynton, “that is of course a condition of the highest clairvoyant force, though I don’t remember to have heard it formulated before.”

“And don’t you see, father,” said the girl, looking tenderly into his face, as if she would fain interpose her love between him and what she must say, “that if I lose this perfect confidence I lose my power to do what you want me to do?”

Dr. Boynton was hurt through the shield of her affection. “Have I done anything to forfeit your trust in my purposes, Egeria? If I have, it is certainly time for me to despair.”

“Oh, no, no, father! I trust you; I love you this moment more dearly than ever I did. But are you sure — are you sure that it will all come out as you think? Are you sure that we are taking the right way? We have been trying now a long while, and I can’t see that we’ve accomplished anything. Perhaps I’m not a medium, but only a dreamer, and dream what you tell me. I’m afraid sometimes it isn’t right. I was thinking about it just before you came in. What if there should be nothing in it all?”

“How nothing in it?”

“What if you were deceiving yourself? I can’t tell how much my wanting to please you makes me — Oh, I’m afraid — I’m afraid it’s all wrong.”

“Egeria,” said Dr. Boynton, severely, “I have often explained to you my principle in regard to these matters. These are the first steps. It is necessary that we should take them. Other steps will advance from the world of spirits to meet them. I am convinced — I know — that in your last séance we had direct proof of this; and I will yet compel, I will extort from that lying villain the confession that he had no agency in the things he claims to have done.” Boynton had lost his compassionate sense of Ford as an irresponsible moral force, and as he walked up and down the floor he broke from time to time into expressions of vivid injuriousness. “Listen, Egeria: I respect your conscientious scruples, though they belong to a petty personal conscience that I hoped before this you had exchanged for the race-conscience that gives me perfect freedom to think and to act. I will set the matter before you, and you will see the logical sequence of my course. In the development of the phenomena which now agitate the world, mesmerism came first, and spiritism came second. I follow this providential order, and I begin with mesmerism. In this, the results are unquestioned in your case. You have been accustomed all your life to my controlling influence, my magnetic force, by which you have seen, heard, touched, tasted, spoken, whatever I willed. I knew this and you knew it. A thousand successful experiments attest its truth. Well, when we come to deal with disembodied life, we have to deal with it as I deal with you. We have to show this life how to approach us; to suggest, to intimate, to demonstrate, the ways and means of communication with us. The only perfectly ascertained fact of spiritistic science is the rap. This, with the innumerable exposures and explanations which expose and explain all the other phenomena, remains a mystery, insoluble, whatever we attribute it to. But as a method of commerce with the other life, it is nearly worthless, — slow, vague, uncertain. We must advance beyond it, or retire forever from the border of the invisible world. Now, then, you see the unbroken chain of my reasoning, and as an investigator I take my stand boldly upon the necessity of first doing ourselves what we wish the spirits to do. A feeble sense of right and wrong may call it deceit; a vulgar nihilism may call it trickery; but the results will justify us, — they have justified us. What I wish to do now, Egeria, is to determine whether an opposing force of doubt, embodied in a powerful intellectual organism, such as this man’s undoubtedly is, can annul, can annihilate, the progress we have made. We cannot meet this force too soon; for if it is able to do this, we may have to retrace all our steps and begin de novo.”

Egeria listened drearily to her father’s harangue, and at the pause he now made she looked hopelessly at his eager face, and did not reply, though he evidently expected some answer from her.

“After all, Egeria,” he resumed impatiently, “you have no manner of responsibility, moral or otherwise, in the affair. You have simply to yield yourself, as heretofore, to my will, and leave me to take the consequences. I will meet them all. But I wish, my daughter, to satisfy your minutest scruple. If you were acting in that séance upon the theories which you have often heard me advance; if you were supplying to the invisible agencies we had called about us the model, the prototype, the example, needed for communication with us; and if when that man seized your hand — granting that it was he who did so — you were yourself consciously doing any of the things supposed to be done by the spirits” —

“I tried to bring myself to it; but I couldn’t, father; I couldn’t!”

“Then — then,” panted her father, in a tumult of rising excitement, “it was not you who did those things? It was not you” —

“No, no!” desolately answered the girl. “From the moment the windows were darkened till my hand was seized, I did nothing but sit quietly in the centre of the circle and strike my palms together, as Mrs. Le Roy told me.”

“Thank God!” shouted Dr. Boynton, in an indescribable exaltation. “I knew I could not be wrong; I knew that you had no part in those things. This is a glorious moment! This — this —— is worth toiling and suffering and enduring any fate for!” He caught his daughter in his arms and pressed her to his heart, kissing her fondly and caressing her hair. “Now, now, everything is clear before me.”

“I am so glad, father,” Egeria began. “I was afraid you expected — that you would be disappointed — but indeed” —

“No, no! You were right! Your psychical perceptions were better than my logic. They taught you where to forbear. Your conscience — I am humiliated beyond expression to have undervalued it as a factor of our investigation — has brought us this splendid triumph. Egeria, we stand upon the threshold of the temple; its penetralia lie open before us; we have defeated death!”

The girl was perhaps too well used to the rhetorical ecstasies of her father to be either exalted or alarmed by them; and she now merely looked inquiringly at him.

“Don’t you see, my dear,” he continued with unabated transport, in reply to her look, “that if you did not do these things they were the results of supernatural agencies? It is this fact, ascertained now past all peradventure, that makes my heart leap.”

“Oh!” murmured Egeria, despairingly.

“But I must not lose a moment, now. I must see this young man at once, and challenge him to the ordeal that will release you from his noxious influence. I hope that I shall be able to treat him in the right spirit, and with the tenderness due an erring mind; I shall do my best, and I have every reason to be magnanimous. But his pretense of having performed by trick what was unquestionably the work of spirits is a thing that he must not urge too far. Or, yes, let him do so! I shall seek nothing of him but his consent to this contest. It may be for the general good that his discomfiture should not only be complete, but publicly complete.”

“Don’t go, father, — don’t go!” implored Egeria, for sole answer and comment upon all this. “Let him alone, and let us go away.”

“Go away?” cried her father. “Never! I must overrule you in this, my child,” he continued caressingly. “I respect, I revere, your power; but it is out of regard for that power that I must combat your weaker mood. It demands of me, as it were, that I should ascertain all its conditions, and remove every obstacle to its exercise.”

“Oh, I don’t know what you mean,” replied the girl, and broke into hopeless tears.

“You will know, Egeria,” returned her father. Not only shall I be clear to you, but you will be clear to yourself, as never before. I have now a clue that leads to final results, — the personal conscience in you, the race-conscience in me. I will be with you again in a little while, Egeria. Don’t be troubled. Trust everything to me.”

He made haste to get himself out of the room, and pausing in the hall on the ground-floor long enough to secure the hat of a visitor of Mrs. Le Roy (who was then in a trance for the recovery of lost property belonging to this gentleman) he issued from the door to which he had lately followed Ford in their common rage. The owner of the hat had a larger head than Boynton, who, as he pushed his way along the street, with his face eagerly working from the excitement of his mind, had an effect at once alarming and grotesque; the squalid little children of the street shrank from his approach in terror, and followed his going with derision.

V.

EGERIA had made a step after her father, as if to call him back, when he left the room, but she had turned again, and lain down upon her lounge without a word. It would have been useless to call him back; he could only have come to renew the scene that had passed between them, and the result would still have been the same.

From her despair there was but one refuge. She could appeal for help now only to the source of her terrors. The fact, hemming her inexorably in, pressed upon her excited brain with a strange, benumbing stress, in which there was yet all possible keenness of pain. Presently, it seemed as if she shrieked out with a cry that rang through the house. In reality she had uttered a little scream in response to a knock at the door.

“Oh, did I wake you?” asked the uncouth servant kindly, putting her head in.

“Yes — no — I was not asleep,” answered Egeria, lifting her face from the pillow.

“There’s a gentleman in the parlor wants to see your father; and I don’t know — well, I told him the doctor was out, but you was at home. Shall I say you’ll see him? He says you’ll do just as well.”

Egeria sprang from her lounge, and flinging open a shutter began to arrange her hair. “Yes; please tell him I’ll come at once.” At that moment she had but one sense, — the consciousness that Ford had come, and that she should have the courage to speak to him, and beseech him not to consent to her father’s proposal. She did not know how or why she should have this courage, but all fear had left her. She hastily smoothed her hair and arranged her dress, and ran down the stairs into the parlor to encounter her enemy with such eagerness as a girl might show in hastening to greet her lover.

It was Mr. Hatch who came forward to meet her, and who took her hand. “Didn’t expect to see me here, Miss Egeria? Well, I’m rather surprised myself. But I had to come back from Philadelphia, before I’d fairly got started on my grand rounds, and I thought I’d make one more attempt to say good-by to the doctor and you.”

“I understood — I thought” — began Egeria, her voice shaken with her disappointment, “I thought it was — it was” — She stopped, and tears came into her eyes.

“I’m sorry it isn’t, Miss Egeria,” said Hatch kindly. “I would be willing to be anybody else in the world that you wanted to see.”

“Oh, I didn’t want to see them! I was afraid to see them, and I hoped they had come,” answered Egeria.

Hatch smiled, but he looked at her compassionately, his head set scrutinizingly on one side, while she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes, and recovered herself in a sort of cold despair. “I want you to let me ask you what’s the matter, Miss Egeria,” he said, impulsively. “You won’t think I’m trying to pry into your trouble?”

“Oh, no!”

“Well, we all know what the doctor is: he’s as good as gold, and as simple as a child, but he hasn’t got the practical virtues, — or vices, whichever you choose to call ‘em. Now, you know, Miss Egeria, that I respect the doctor rather more than I should my own father, if I had one: has the doctor run short of money?”

“Oh, no, no! Not that I know of! It isn’t that at all,” Egeria hastened to say.

“Well, that’s one point gained,” said Hatch. “I’m glad of it. You’ll excuse my asking?”

“Yes, — oh, yes,” she answered.

“Well, then, is it something that I can help you about? I don’t care to know what it is, but I do want to help you. If I can, without knowing, you needn’t tell me.”

“You can’t help me. But there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know. You can’t help me against my father, can you?” she asked, putting the case, as women do, at worse than the worst, so as to have the comfort of finding the truth short of the extreme. “How can any one help me against him?” Then, as Hatch stood waiting with a somewhat hopeless and wholly puzzled face, “He doesn’t mean any harm,” she hurried on distractedly, “but if he does it, he will kill me. He has done it, and nothing can save me! He’s talking with him this moment, and planning it all out; and when they are ready I shall have to go out before the people, and try it, and fail.”

“Is it some test of your power?” asked Hatch.

“Yes,” answered the girl. “That man who was here the other night — that Mr. Ford, — father has gone to him to get him to make some public appointment, and try whether I can do the things he says I can’t do. He has been here. Father wants him to come and test it himself, and that’s what he’s gone to him for; and I know he will; and I can’t do anything when he’s by.”

She said no more, and Hatch began to walk up and down the room. Presently he stopped before her. “Well, Miss Egeria, there’s only one way out of it. The way is to go and talk to that fellow, and get him not to keep his appointment with your father, if he’s made one.”

“For me to go? I thought of that; and then” —

“Oh, no,” said Hatch, with a smile. “I’ll do the going and talking. You make yourself easy about it. But after that, don’t you think we could get your father to give this thing up, and go home?”

“Oh, if we only could!” cried the girl. “But it’s no use. I have been talking to him, and begging him to; but he’ll never go back in the world. He hates my grandfather.”

“The old gentleman was rough on him; but you can’t much wonder at it. I’m not saying anything against the doctor, mind; I don’t go back on him; I don’t forget what he did for me. But we can talk about all that afterwards. What we’ve got to do now is to go and beg off from that fellow. Good-by, Miss Egeria; I mustn’t lose time.”

She stopped him. “I can’t let you. It would be throwing blame on my father. I’d rather let him kill me.”

“Oh, I’ll make it all right about the doctor,” said Hatch. “No one shall have a right to blame him for anything. Don’t you be troubled. I’ll fix it. Don’t worry!”

Egeria faltered. “You’ll only lose your time. It won’t do any good.”

“But you don’t tell me not to go?”

“It won’t do any good,” she said.

“Well,” said Hatch, “I’m going to see this man, and then I’m coming back to have a talk with the doctor. I want to go away to-morrow feeling first-rate, and I don’t believe I shall feel just right unless you take the Eastern road back to Maine about the time I take the Boston and Albany for Omaha.” Egeria followed him from the room, and responded with a hopeless look to the bright nod with which he turned to her at the outer door. As it closed, she stood a moment in the dim entry, and then crept languidly up the stairs to her own room; she cast herself upon the lounge again, with her face to the wall, and lay there in the apathy which is the refuge from overstress of feeling. The worst could not be worse than the worst; and whatever happened, it could but be another form, not another degree, of ill.

Hatch hurried upon his errand, and climbed, heated and panting, to Ford’s room, and to a loud “Come in!” which followed his knock, he responded by entering and shutting the door behind him.

Ford stood before the fireplace, striking against the brick a burning paper with which he had been lighting his pipe. In this act, he looked round at Hatch over his shoulder, at first vaguely, and then with recognition, but not certainly with welcome. “Oh!” he said.

“Mr. Ford?” asked Hatch.

“Yes.”

“I met you at Mrs. Le Roy’s. I don’t know whether you remember me.”

“Yes, I do,” said Ford. He drew two or three whiffs at his pipe. “Will you sit down? You know Mr. Phillips.” He indicated with a motion of his head a third person, whose face, black against the window, Hatch had not made out.

At the mention of his name, Phillips came forward in his brisk way, and shook hands with Hatch. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Mr. Hatch hasn’t forgotten me. I feel myself memorable since that night. I was then an element of the supernatural. Have you seen our friends lately?”

“Yes,” said Hatch. “I’ve just come from them.”

“They ‘re well, I hope? Miss Boynton struck me as a most interesting person. Doesn’t her life of excitements wear upon her? Most young ladies find one world as much as they can stand; mingling in the society of two, as she does, must be rather fatiguing.”

“Miss Boynton isn’t very well, or, rather, she hasn’t been.”

“Ah, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Phillips. “I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“Well, no,” replied Hatch, uneasily. He turned to Ford, who from his superior stature had been smoking down upon Phillips and himself. “Mr. Ford,” he added, “I came here from Dr. Boynton’s to see you.”

“Yes?” said Ford.

Phillips made a polite movement in the direction of his hat. “I think I’ll be going, Ford,” he explained.

“You can go,” returned Ford, taking his pipe from his mouth, “but it isn’t necessary. This gentleman can have nothing confidential to say to me. I’d rather you’d stay — for once.”

“You’re so flattering,” said Phillips, “that I will stay, if Mr. Hatch doesn’t object. My engagement’s at one.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Hatch, reluctantly. Ford had remained standing, with his back to the fireplace, and Hatch had not accepted his invitation, or his permission, to sit down. “As Mr. Phillips was at Mrs. Le Roy’s that night, he might as well hear what I have to say. Mr. Ford,” he added abruptly, “I want you to do me a great favor.”

“Why should I do you a great favor, Mr. Hatch?” asked Ford, while he looked with halfclosed eyes at the ceiling, and blew a cloud of smoke above Hatch’s head.

Hatch glanced sharply at him, to see whether he spoke in gratuitous insolence or ill-timed jest. He decided for the latter, apparently, for he returned jocosely, “Well, do yourself a great favor, then.”

“I don’t feel the need of ‘that,” said Ford. “What is it?”

“Has Dr. Boynton been here this morning?” asked Hatch, with the anxiety he could not hide.

“No,” said Ford, taking out his pipe, and looking at him.

“Then that makes it a great deal easier. I want to ask you, when he comes, — I know he is coming, —— to refuse the proposition he will make you.”

“What proposition is Dr. Boynton coming to make me?” demanded Ford, with his pipe between his fingers.

Hatch faltered, and scanned Ford’s unyielding face. “I shall have to tell you, of course. He is coming to propose a public test séance with you, in which Miss Boynton’s powers shall be put to proof. I ask you to refuse it.”

Ford did not change countenance, but Phillips, from the easy-chair into which he had cast himself, smiled, and studied now his friend’s sad, cold visage, and now the eager, anxious face of Hatch.

“In whose behalf do you ask this?” Ford inquired, beginning to smoke again. “By what right do you ask it?”

“Miss Boynton has been sick, and is still very much unstrung. It would be a kindness, a mercy, to her, if you would refuse.”

“How do you know? Do you ask it from her?” Hatch hesitated in an interval of silence that prolonged itself painfully.

“I don’t come at her request,” he said, at last. Ford made no comment, but continued to smoke. His pipe died out; he struck a match and kindled it again; and then smoked as before. “Mr. Hatch,” he asked finally, “are you a spiritualist?”

“I am a spiritualist, but I am not a fool,” replied Hatch.

“Then you don’t care for the effect of this séance on the fortunes of your creed?”

“No, I don’t. I care for the effect of it on a young lady who dreads it, and who — and on a man that I owe a good deal to. Look here, Mr. Ford; I don’t decide on these things. I suppose spiritualism is a matter of faith, like other religions. These people are in earnest about it; that is, Dr. Boynton is, and his daughter thinks and does whatever he tells her to. I’m sorry they ‘re in the business, and I wish they were out of it. They ‘re good people, and as innocent as babies, both of ‘em. I don’t like the way you take with me, but you can walk over me as much as you like, if only you’ll grant this favor. I’m in hopes to get them back to where they belong. I used to live in their town, and I know all about them. He’s a visionary, but he’s a good man, and their people are first-rate people. I would do anything I could for him. He’s got a heart as tender as a child.”

“Very likely,” said Ford, with irony. “But I fail to see why I should let this child-like philanthropist go about preying upon the public. I may have my own opinion of his innocence. What if I told you I had detected them in a trick the other night?”

“I shouldn’t believe you,” answered Hatch, promptly.

Phillips half started out of his chair, but Ford smoked on unperturbed, and asked, as if the question were a pure abstraction, “Why?”

“Because I know that they couldn’t cheat.”

“But if I told you they did, should you consider them innocent?”

“I shouldn’t doubt them in the least. And let me tell you” —

Ford turned his back upon Hatch, and knocked the ashes of his pipe out against the corner of the chimney-piece. “Mr. Hatch, you said, a moment ago, that you were a spiritualist, but not a fool. I shall not say whether I will or will not refuse Dr. Boynton’s proposition.”

Ford began to fill his pipe again, and paid not enough regard to Hatch’s presence to seem to wish him away; it was quite as if he were not there, so far as Ford was concerned.

“Look here,” Hatch began, “I am sorry that I offended you. I’m anxious to get you to say that you won’t accept Dr. Boynton’s challenge.”

“I perceive that you are anxious,” assented Ford. “Oh, if I only — It’s a very serious matter, — it is indeed! I would do anything to get you to say that. Come, now! The young lady is in delicate health; she will do whatever her father tells her, and if she does this I believe it will kill her.” Ford made no reply.

“I can see the thing from your point of view. I suppose you feel that you have a public duty to perform, and all that sort of thing. Well, now, I’m going to make a strong move to get Dr. Boynton out of this business, any way; and I ask you just to hold on till I have a chance to try. Can’t you tell him that you’ll think it over? Can’t you go so far as to put him off a day, or half a day?” Ford took a book, and going to a chair at the window began to look into it.

“Come,” pleaded the other, “give me some sort of answer.”

Ford seemed not to have heard him.

“Well, sir,” said Hatch, “I’ve done with you:!” He stared at Ford in even more amaze than anger, and after waiting a moment, as if searching his mind for some fitting reproach, he turned and went out of the room.

Phillips rose from his chair with a shrug. “My dear fellow,” he said, “I hope you’ll let me know when this ordeal takes place.”

“What ordeal?” asked Ford, without looking up from his book.

“Surely I needn’t specify your public test séance with the Pythoness and her papa.”

“I am not going to meet Dr. Boynton in the way you mean,” returned Ford, quietly.

“No? Why, this is magnanimity!”

“I’ve no doubt it’s inconceivable to you.”

“Not at all! I know you better; you could be magnanimous to carry a point. But it must be inconceivable to our friend who has just left us. I fancied he was something in leather. Should you say shoes, or leather generally?”

Ford scorned to notice the conjecture as to Hatch’s business. “Are you fool enough to suppose that Dr. Boynton ever intended to come to me on such an errand?”

“Why, I fancied so.”

“You had better bridle your fancy, then. He has too much method in his madness for that. What he wanted was my refusal, beforehand, for professional use. He didn’t get it. This fellow is part of the game. But I don’t wonder you sympathize with him. He is a brother dilettante, it seems. He dabbles in ghosts as you dabble in bric-a-brac. He believes as much in ghosts as you believe in your Bonifazios. They may be genuine; in the mean time, you like to talk as if they were. Upon the whole, I believe I prefer blind superstition.”

“Why, so do I,” said Phillips. “The trouble is to get your blind superstition. I confess that when I was at Mrs. Le Roy’s, — what an uncommonly good factitious name for the profession! — and saw the performances of the phantom-like Egeria, — that’s a good name, too! — I experienced a very agreeable sensation of fear. It was really something to be proud of. But it wouldn’t last. It haunted me for a night or two; but I’m no more afraid in the dark now than I was before. And the worst of it is that my interest in the affair is gone with my terrors. Apparitions have palled upon me. It is quite as the good doctor said: people bore themselves with séances very soon. The question at present is, Will you go with me to Mrs. Burton’s to lunch?”

“No,” said Ford.

“You ‘re in the wrong, Ford,” argued Phillips. “You would please Mrs. Burton by coming; but it won’t matter to her if you don’t. That’s the attitude of society towards the individual, and upon the whole one can’t complain of it. You had better come.. Mrs. Burton is really making a very pretty fist at a salon. In the first place, she keeps Burton out of the way: it’s essential to a salon not to have the husband in it. You will meet the passing Englishman there, whoever he is; you stand a chance of seeing the starring actor or actress, — operatic or dramatic; authors we have always with us, and painters, of course. Mrs. Burton is so far from pretty herself that she is not afraid to ask charming women who are also beautiful; you’ve no idea what decorative qualities beautiful women have. And then she introduces the purely American element, the visiting young lady. Really, she has an uncommon feeling for pretty girls; I never knew her to have an inharmonious young person staying with her yet; with her sense of values, the composition of her salon is delightful. Will you come? She told me to bring you; what excuse shall I make?”

“Tell her that I’m not the sort of person to be brought.”

“Oh, there you do yourself wrong. I shall be more just to her ideal of you. Good-by.”

A knock was heard at the door, and Ford, without rising, growled, “Come in.”

The door flew open, and Boynton burst into the room in the face of Phillips, who was just going out. He caught him by the hand.

“Why, Mr. Phillips, is it possible! This is doubly fortunate. Finding you and Mr. Ford together, — it’s more than I could have hoped! I consider it a privilege — a privilege, in the old religious sense — to be allowed to say in your presence what I wish to say to our good friend here. Mr. Ford, I wish Mr. Phillips to hear me ask your pardon — humbly ask your pardon — for the violent language I used towards you at my lodging an hour ago.” Phillips grinned his triumph at Ford, but softened the derision to a smile, as he turned again to Boynton.

“Will you sit down?” said Ford, with grave kindness, and without any token of surprise.

“Thanks, thanks! But not till I have taken you by the hand.” Boynton stretched forth his small hand, and took the mechanically granted hand of Ford. “I wish to say that I have unexpectedly been enabled to see the subject matter of our difference from your point of view, and that I now recognize not only the justice, but the necessity — the necessity by operation of an inflexible law — of your attitude. In all these things,” continued Boynton, placing himself luxuriously in Ford’s deep chair, and didactically pressing the tips of his fingers together, “there is a law which I had quite lost sight of, — the law of progression through the antagonism of opposites.”

Phillips made an ironical murmur of assent and admiration; Ford remained silent.

“We are both, outside of our mere individual consciousness, blind forces. I affirm, you deny. We grind upon each other in the encounter of life, and a spark of light is evoked by the attrition. It was just so this morning: light was evoked by which I shall always see the correctness of your position and the error of mine. Understand me: I do not at all agree with you in your opinion of the phenomena; and I have come, so far as that is concerned, to cement our enmity, if I may so speak.” He smiled upon Ford with caressing suavity. “But what I have come for first is to withdraw all offensive expressions, and to say that I approve, even in its extreme, of your action on the afternoon of the séance.” He beamed upon Ford, and then turned his triumphantly amiable face upon Phillips.

“Ford,” said the latter, “this is very handsome!”

“Not at all, not at all!” cried Boynton; “simple duty, — self-interest, even. For I have a request to make of Mr. Ford, — a favor to ask. I wish Mr. Ford not only to continue steadfast in his opposition to my theories, but to assist me in a public exhibition, by antagonizing to the utmost of his power their application. I have learned from my daughter that she had no agency in the phenomena which we witnessed the other night, and of whose verity I am now perfectly convinced; and I wish Mr. Ford to join me in testing her supernatural gifts, either before a popular audience, or such persons, in considerable number, as we may select in common.”

“I must refuse, Dr. Boynton,” said Ford, gently.

Boynton’s face fell. “I hope,” he said, “you do not refuse because I have been remiss in not coming to you sooner.”

“No,” began Ford; but Boynton interrupted him.

“I started almost immediately upon your departure from my lodgings, to follow you up and make this application. But I was delayed by an accident: a child was run over in the street almost before my eyes, and was carried into the next apothecary’s. The force of habit is strong; I remembered that I was a physician, and forgot the larger in the lesser duty, till other attendance could be procured.”

Ford frowned. “It has nothing to do with your delay. What you propose is quite out of my way. I could not consent to it on any conditions. I went to your séance the other day out of an idle whim. I don’t care anything about the matter. I don’t care whether there is any truth in your opinions, or any error in mine. I refuse because I am thoroughly indifferent to the whole thing.”

Boynton rose, and buttoned his threadbare coat across his plump chest. “And you consider, sir,” he said, “that you have incurred no responsibility towards me, towards humanity, by going as far as you have, and then refusing to proceed?”

“That is my feeling,” said Ford, respectfully. Boynton stood as if stupefied. “And — and — Excuse me, sir,” he said, coming to himself, “if I remark upon the suddenness of your indifference. One hour ago, you threatened that if I pursued my inquiries in this city you would expose me, as I understood, in the public prints. You left me with that threat upon your lips.”

Phillips looked inquiringly at Ford, who said, “I left you in a passion that I’m ashamed of. I have no idea of carrying out that threat.”

“Poh, sir!” cried Boynton, with mounting scorn. “You refuse, not from indifference, but from the sense of your inability to cope with me in this test.”

“I am willing you should think that,” assented Ford.

“I call this gentleman to witness,” said Boynton, “that you have slunk out of a contest which you have provoked, and that you are afraid to meet me upon terms even of your own choosing. An hour ago I parted with you in hate; I now leave you in contempt. Good morning, Mr. Phillips.” Boynton had already turned his back upon Ford; he now strutted from the room without looking at him again.

“Our friend is violent,” observed Phillips, when the door had closed upon him. Ford made no reply, and Phillips continued: “I fancied his accident rather too opportune.”

“Very likely,” said Ford.

“And you won’t go with me to Mrs. Burton’s?”

“No.”

“I don’t wonder at your indifference to society, with such really dramatic excitements in your own life. The matinée has been extraordinarily brilliant — for a matinée. They ‘re apt to be tame.”

VI.

IN spite of the defiant temper in which Boynton had quitted Ford’s lodging, he reached his own in extreme dejection. He found Hatch with Egeria in the parlor.

“Well, my friend,” he said, wringing Hatch’s hand, as he passed him on his way from the door to the sofa, “I have met with a great disappointment.” Neither Hatch nor Egeria questioned him, but after an exchange of anxious glances waited silently. “It isn’t that I care for the frustration of my hopes; I do care for that; but that is a small matter compared with the loss of my faith in human nature, my reliance upon the willingness of man to make sacrifices tending to — to — solve, to unravel, our common riddle.” He let his head fall upon his breast.

“Oh, father,” pleaded Egeria tremulously, after the little dramatic pause which Boynton had let follow upon his period, “did you go to see him?”

“Yes,” said her father.

“And did he — is he going to do it?”

Boynton lifted his head. “No,” he said, solemnly; “he refuses.” Egeria drew a long breath, and turned very pale. She seemed about to fall from her chair, which she had drawn next the corner of the sofa on which he had thrown himself. Hatch made a movement toward her, but she recovered herself, and sat strongly upright.

“He refused?” she gasped.

“My dear friend,” said her father, looking toward Hatch, while he took her cold hand and gently smoothed it, “I must explain that I have had two interviews with this man, and what their nature has been. He came here this morning to boast that it was he who caught Egeria’s hand in the séance that day. I drove him from the house. Afterwards, upon conversing with Egeria, I learnt that the manifestations were really genuine, and that at the moment he caught her hand she had no agency whatever in their production.”

Hatch looked at Egeria. “I could have bet my soul on that!”

“On learning this,” pursued Boynton, “I at once determined to challenge him to a new test, in which he should pit his influence over Egeria against mine, and the public should decide upon the result. He has just refused the challenge, peremptorily and finally, and I have branded him as a coward in the presence of Mr. Phillips.”

Boynton flung his daughter’s hand away. Hatch and Egeria had the effect of refraining from looking at each other. At last the young fellow said, recovering something of his wonted cheery audacity, “Well, of course it’s a disappointment, doctor, but why not look at the bright side of it?”

“What bright side of it?” asked the doctor, tragically.

“Oh, it has its bright side,” said Hatch, undauntedly. “It saves Miss Egeria from a good deal, and I’m glad of that, for one.”

The doctor mistook the word. “Ordeal! There is no ordeal; there could have been no question about the result!”

“Not with you or me. But there’s no use trying to deny it, — the public is against you, and would be glad to have her fail.”

“Oh, yes, father: you know how it has always been,” cried Egeria.

“The circumstances had never been propitious before; but now they were all with us. We could not have failed!” replied her father.

“Well, you might,” said Hatch. “What do you think did produce the manifestations that day, doctor?”

“Do you ask that question?” demanded the doctor, in astonishment. “I answer, with an absolute certainty, such as I never reached before, the disembodied spirits of the dead!”

“I doubt it,” said Hatch, quietly.

“You doubt it?” shouted Boynton, in amaze.

“Dr. Boynton, you’ve told me twenty times that you wouldn’t give a straw for manifestations that took place in the presence of a dozen persons. Now, what makes you pin your faith to what happened the other day?” Boynton was silent; all his reasons, so prompt and facile, seemed to have forsaken him. “There were too many people on hand that day for me. You know I’m as much interested in these things, doctor, as anybody, and I should be the last to give aid and comfort to the enemy; but I couldn’t go those materializations, and the dark séance was rather too dark for me. I’ll tell you what, doctor, I wish you’d go back home, and start new.” Hatch planted himself directly in front of Boynton, who looked at him with astonishment and rising indignation.

“By what right do you presume to advise me?” he asked, with stately emphasis.

“Well, by no right,” said Hatch easily; “or else the right that I have from the good you’ve always done me.” The doctor waived away the sense of this with a gesture which was still stately, but no longer severe. “I only speak from, my interest in you and Miss Egeria, here. I think it’s wearing on her, — wearing on you both.”

“Has my daughter complained to you?” demanded Boynton, with more than his former hauteur, looking round at her. She returned his look with a glance of tender reproach, and Hatch answered: —

“No more than you, doctor. I’m talking of what I see. And I think you’ve made a wrong start. I think you’ve made a mistake. You oughtn’t to have ever mixed yourself up with professional mediums. You were on the right tack at home. Now, I say, you just go back there, and you form a disinterested circle, — people that haven’t got money in it, — and you go on with your investigations there; and when you’ve got a sure thing of it, you come out with it. But don’t you do it till then! Heh?”

“There is reason in what you urge,” replied Boynton; “or rather there was reason. But I have advanced beyond the point you indicate. I have got a sure thing of it, as you say. I am as fully persuaded of the reality of those manifestations as I am of my own existence.”

“Which ones?” asked Hatch.

“Those in the dark séance, and” —

“I’m not!” returned Hatch; “but I don’t want you to take my opinion for proof against them. I’m going to headquarters for that, and all I ask is, Don’t you interfere with my little game.” He took the doctor by the shoulders in a friendly caress, as he spoke, and then he rang the bell. The servant-girl put in her unkempt head at the door, with a look of surprise, after first going to the outer door, to see if the ring had come from there; evidently, she was not used to being rung for in-doors. “Ah, Mary — Jenny — Bridget — Susy — Polly — whatever it is,” said Hatch; “you just ask Mrs. Le Roy to step here half a second, that’s a good girl, and I’ll dance at your wedding.” The girl vanished, grinning. As the big woman appeared at the door, “Walk right in, Mrs. Le Roy,” he called out, and she advanced questioningly, while he closed the door behind her. “Now it’s all among friends, you know, Mrs. Le Roy; we won’t  keep you a minute. You know the doctor has some peculiar theories on this subject. We don’t care about the materializations, — they We all right; but you just tell us now how much you helped along in the dark séance, the other day.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Le Roy, with a sly look at each of her listeners, and a smile that ended in a small, thin chuckle, “give the spirits a chance, — that was the doctor’s idea, as I understood it.”

“Exactly,” said Hatch, “and you did give ’em a chance?”

“Now, Mr. Hatch,” said the huge sibyl, with a mixture of cunning and of that liking for Hatch which all women seemed to feel, “what are you up to?”

“I give you my word, Mrs. Le Roy, I’m up to nothing you’d object to. I just want to know how much of a chance you gave ‘em.”

Mrs. Le Roy hesitated a moment.

“Well, pretty much all they wanted, I guess,” she answered, at length.

“Do you mean,” said Boynton, “that you produced the phenomena in the dark séance?”

“Well, I did give the spirits a fair chance, as you may say,” admitted Mrs. Le Roy, with some awe and some apparent pity for Boynton.

He dropped his face in his hands, and bowed his head against the back of the sofa. “Oh, woman, woman!” he groaned.

“The witness can now retire,” said Hatch, and amid Mrs. Le Roy’s protestations of good intention and regret, and her mystification as to what it all meant, he took her by her vast shoulders and pushed her out of the door. “You’re all right, Mrs. Le Roy,” he explained. “See you again in half a second. Now, doctor,” he continued, turning to the desperate figure on the sofa, “you see how it is. It’s just as I said; you ‘re on the wrong tack. You can’t make any headway in connection with professional mediums. You can’t have your theories applied in the right spirit. What you want to do is to back out and start new.”

Boynton controlled himself, and, turning about, looked up at Hatch with a candor that was full of immediate courage and enterprise. “My friend, you are right! I see my error, now; but experience alone could have shown it to me. I have attempted to work in the public way, when I should have strictly confined myself to the social way. I see that my success depends upon the application of my theories by followers purely disinterested. It may be that no progress can be otherwise achieved, in psychological science. The experiment must be absolutely free from mercenary alloy.”

“Yes,” said Hatch; “if you let them see that there is money in it, you can’t get an honest count. Human nature is too much for you.”

“The true method,” Boynton mused aloud, “would be first to form some sort of society, in which the material basis was secured, and in which there would thus be leisure and disposition for the higher research. There are elements, in our own neighborhood which could be as favorably operated with as — Yes, the result will be much slower than I thought; but in the end it will be sure, beyond all peradventure. Egeria!” he cried, starting up, “we will go home!”

“At once — now — to-day?” asked the girl, her pale cheeks flushing.

“This very hour. There is not a moment to be lost. Go and put our things together, child.” Egeria turned towards the door; then she came back towards Hatch. “We won’t say good-by now, Miss Egeria. I shall be at the depot to see you off.”

“Yes, don’t delay,” said her father, impatiently. “We will be off by the first train.” She went out, and he mechanically carried his hand to his pocket. “We can’t go!” he cried, as if a sudden pang had caught him. “I haven’t five dollars in the world; we are in arrears for board. You see, my dear friend, there is no hope.”

“Oh, yes, there is,” said Hatch, with the ease of a man who had suspected something of this kind. “This gives me a chance to pay you my old bill, doctor.”

“My dear sir, I hope you wouldn’t offer me an affront,” said Boynton, staying the hand with which Hatch was opening his porte-monnaie.

“That’s what I said to you when you wouldn’t let me settle with you for my sickness, — or words to that effect.”

“Mr. Hatch, you — move me!”

“How much do you owe Mrs. Le Roy?” asked Hatch.

“I haven’t the least idea,” replied Boynton. “It may be three weeks, — it may be two. How long have we been here?”

“We must ask Mrs. Le Roy that.” Hatch rang again, and this time Mrs. Le Roy herself answered the bell. “The doctor’s going away, Mrs. Le Roy, and he wants to pay up.”

“Well, I’m real sorry,” said the woman, who had her bonnet on, as if about to go out, “to have you go, Dr. Boynton, — you and Miss Egeria both. But I guess you better. I thought, may be, Mr. Hatch was up to something of that kind. I don’t think you ‘re just fit for the business. You put too much dependence on other folks, and you ‘re sure to get exposed in the end. I don’t suppose but what there’s as much truth in it as there is in anything,” she said, by way of reservation.

Boynton answered nothing, and at a look from Hatch Mrs. Le Roy added, “Well, it’s two weeks, —— thirty dollars in all.” She took the money from Hatch and put it in the pocket of her dress. “Well, I’m going out now, and I shall be gone till evening; so if I don’t see you again, I’ll say good-by at once, Dr. Boynton. Come and see me when you ‘re up to Boston.”

She held out her hand to Boynton, who refused it with a very short “No!” and a quick shake of the head. “You are a charlatan,” he added,— “an impostor.”

Mrs. Le Roy stared at him, until his meaning dawned upon her. Then it amused her through her whole huge person, which shook with her enjoyment. “Why, land alive, man I what are you?”

“Something quite beyond your comprehension,” replied Boynton, with overwhelming state.

“Well, well!” said Mrs. Le Roy, as she went contentedly out of the room, “you certainly are a new kind of fool.”

They heard the stairs creak under her tread, as she went slowly and comfortably up; then they heard her voice, as she made her adieux to Egeria, who was probably too dimly informed as to her father’s point of honor to be able to take her stand upon it. “Poor child!” they heard Mrs. Le Roy’s voice saying, “I hope you’ll stay at home, and get well rested. You look half sick, now. Good-by. I wish I could stay and see you off. But I can’t. I’ve got a see-aunts with a patient of mine at her house, and I suppose I must go.” She added in a louder tone, for the listeners below, “Take care of that poor old father of yours, and don’t let him excite himself. I should be afraid he’d go out of his head, — if he was mine.”

Hatch looked at his watch. “You won’t be able to get the two o ‘clock train,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what,” he added: “you don’t want to stay here to-night, after what’s passed between you and Mrs. Le Roy, and you can take the five o’clock train on the Fitchburg road as far as Ayer Junction, and there you can connect with a train on the new road to Portland. You’ll have a little night travel.”

“Oh, that will make no difference,” said the doctor. “I would rather travel all night than stay here. I feel that if I’m to begin anew I can’t begin too soon. I shall be eternally grateful to you for your suggestion, my dear friend. I am sure now that it is in the right direction.”

“Good!” said Hatch. “I shall not leave till nine o’clock on the Albany road, and I shall have plenty of time to see you off. You’ll have to bank with me to the extent of tickets home, and I’ll have to come down any way and get them for you: I haven’t the money about me for them now.” Hatch seemed to think that the doctor might take offense at this, but he merely said, “Yes, yes; quite right,” and gave his hand dreamily, as the young man went out.

“Tell Miss Egeria I will meet you at the depot. Be there with you half an hour before the train starts.”

“Thanks,” said Boynton, and hardly waited for him to be gone before he lapsed into the easy corner of the sofa, apparently forgetful of all that had vexed him; his face was eager with the rush of his hopes and purposes, as he abandoned himself to a sort of intense reverie. At times he rose and walked the floor, but mostly he kept his place on the sofa. He took no counsel with Egeria, and he gave her no help in the work of packing, about which she went swiftly in the rooms overhead. It was not a great work, and it was finished before his reverie was ended. She looked in at the door when it was done, dressed for going out in a costume which was at once fantastic and shabby. In her village life it had once been her best dress, and it looked as if there had subsequently been some sketchy attempts to make it over into a street costume for city use; her bonnet was of a former season; her soiled gloves were frayed at more than one of the fingers. “I shall be back in a minute, father,” she said, buttoning one of the poor gloves. “I’m going out on an errand.” He looked at her, but did not seem to see her, and she passed on out.

At the next corner she stepped, after a hesitation at the door, into a little shop where they sold newspapers and stationery, and bought a few sheets of note-paper and envelopes, halting some time in her choice, and finally deciding on some paper of an outlandish color and envelopes of a rhomboid shape: they were not in good taste, but they were recommended to Egeria as a kind that the shopwoman “sold a great many of.” Returning to her own room she wrote a letter, which, when finished, she tore up, hiding the fragments in her pocket; she began a second, which she also destroyed; at last she took the pieces of the first, and carefully putting them together copied them slowly in the small, painful hand of one neither acquainted with the bold angularities of the fashionable female scrawl, nor accustomed to write any hand.

At the letter-box in front of the Fitchburg depot she faltered a moment; then, for her father was pushing on into the building, she caught her letter from her pocket, and posted it.

VII.

FORD received Egeria’s letter the next morning. He examined its outside, as people do that of letters coming to them in strange handwriting, and he bestowed a derisive curiosity upon the person who could choose that outlandish shape for a missive. A dashing hand might have authorized the form, but Egeria’s hand was timid and feeble, and only heightened its absurdity. She had not quite known how to address him; she had decided at last to begin without that formality.

“I do not know why you refused what my father asked you to do; but we were imposed upon as well as you. You had a right to suspect us; but we had nothing to do with those things. If you knew about us at home you would not regret that you had refused.

“I felt grateful to you; but perhaps it is wrong to write. If it is, I can only say that I meant it truly and rightly.

             “EGERIA BOYNTON.”

Ford read this note many times over, and then mused long upon it. But he put it by, at last, and did a good morning’s work, and at one o’clock he gathered up the copy he had made, and carried it out to the newspaper office. He found himself without appetite for the lunch at his boardinghouse, and he wandered about, the early part of the afternoon, playing in his mind with a tendency which was drawing him in the direction of the Boyntons. The origin of all our impulses is obscure, and every motive from which we act is mixed. Even when it is simplest we like to feign that it is different from what it really is, and often we do not know what it is. It would be idle, then, to attempt to give the reason Ford alleged to himself for yielding to the attraction which he felt. His cheek flushed and his pulse quickened, as he mounted the steps to Mrs. Le Roy’s door; but this was the mood, half shame and half thrilled expectation, of many people who rang her bell.

The door was set ajar by the servant, who revealed a three-quarters view of her face and a slice of her person in response to Ford’s summons. He asked if Dr. Boynton or Miss Boynton were at home, and she answered that they were gone, adding, “I don’t know as they ‘re gone for good;” and as he turned lingeringly away she said that Mrs. Le Roy was in.

“I’ll see her,” rejoined Ford, and entered.

Mrs. Le Roy made him wait her coming some minutes. He must have been announced to her merely as a gentleman, for after greeting him first with “How do you do, sir?” she added, “Ah, how do you do?” as if upon recognition, and offered him her hand.

“I don’t know that I ought to have troubled you,” said Ford; “but I wished to ask when you expected Dr. Boynton back.”

“Why, they ain’t coming back!” exclaimed Mrs. Le Roy. “They’ve gone home. Didn’t she tell you so?”

“She? Who?” asked Ford.

“The girl.”

“Miss Boynton?”

“Laws, no! The girl at the door.”

“Oh!” replied Ford, in confusion. “No; she said she wasn’t certain.”

“Well, they have.”

Ford rose. After a moment’s hesitation, he asked, “They live somewhere in Maine, I believe?”

“Yes, down there some’er’s,” assented Mrs. Le Roy, indifferently.

“Do you know their address?”

“Well, no, I don’t,” Mrs. Le Roy admitted. She asked, after a questioning glance at Ford, “Did you want to find out anything about them?”

“Yes,” returned Ford.

“Well,” exclaimed Mrs. Le Roy, “I could give you a see-aunts.”

“A what?”

“A see-aunts, — consult the spirits.”

“Oh!” said Ford. “No, thanks. I haven’t time now,” he said, as he would put off an importunate barber who had offered him a shampoo. “I’m sorry to hare troubled you.”

“Not at all,” said Mrs. Le Roy, following him out into the hall. “We have test see-auntses the first Sunday evenin’ of every month. Should be pleased to see you any time.”

“Thanks,” said Ford.

At the head of the street he met Phillips, walking toward the Public Garden. “Ah,” said Phillips, “I was thinking of you.”

“Were you?” growled Ford.

“Yes. I wanted to ask if you’d heard anything more of the Pythoness and her papa. They’re as curious an outcome of this bubble-and-squeak that we call our civilization as anything I know of. How did you find them?”

“I didn’t find them; they’ve gone away,” said Ford, not caring to deny the imputation that he had been to look them up.

“Gone away? How extraordinary! Has the doctor found Boston such a barren field, after all? Ford, you’ve deprived us of a phenomenon. You ought to have met him. It isn’t often that a father comes and invites a young man to contest his control over his daughter. The contest is generally against the old gentleman’s wishes. Where have they gone?”

“They’ve gone home,” replied Ford.

“And that is” —

“I don’t know. In Maine, somewhere.”

“I might have known, in Maine, — the land of Norembega, the mystical city. The witches settled Maine, when they were driven out of Salem. You will find all the witch names down there. Well, I’m sorry they ‘re gone. I had counted upon seeing more of them. One doesn’t often find such people in one’s way. I’ve been speculating about them since I saw you, and I find myself of two minds in regard to them, — just as I was before I began. I suppose we must consider them parts of a fraud; the question is whether they are conscious or unconscious parts of it. If they ‘re unconscious, it’s pathetic; if they ‘re conscious, they ‘re fascinating. I don’t wonder you couldn’t keep away, — that you had to come and try for another interview with them. As for me, I wonder that I haven’t fluttered about them continually ever since I first saw them. The girl is such a deliciously abnormal creature. It is girlhood at odds with itself. If she has been her father’s ‘subject’ ever since childhood, of course none of the ordinary young girl interests have entered into her life. She hasn’t known the delight of dress and of dancing; she hasn’t had ‘attentions;’ upon my word, that’s very suggestive! It means that she’s kept a childlike simplicity, and that she could go on and help out her father’s purposes, no matter how tricky they were, with no more sense of guilt than a child who makes believe talk with imaginary visitors. Yes, the Pythoness could be innocent in the midst of fraud. Come, I call that a pretty conjecture!”

“Why do you waste it on me?” said Ford. “You could have made your fortune for the evening with that piece of quackery at the next place where you dine.”

“Oh, it isn’t lost,” said Phillips. “I wasn’t wasting it; I was merely trying it on. Will you go with me to see a picture I’m hesitating about?”

“No; you know I don’t understand pictures.”

“Ah, that’s the reason I want you to see it. You are the light of the public square, the average ignorance, — an element of criticism not to be despised.”

“If I thought I could be of use,” said Ford, “I’d come.”

“You can. But what is the matter? Why this common decency?”

“I owe you a debt of gratitude. You’ve given shape to the infernal sophistry that was floating through my mind, and made it disgusting.”

Phillips laughed. “About the Pythoness? My dear fellow, I’m proud of that conjecture. It was worthy of Hawthorne.”

VIII.

EGERIA and her father had reached the station an hour before their train was to start; and the time, after the first flush of their arrival, began to hang heavy on her father’s hands. Now that he had set his face homeward, he was intolerant of delay. He looked at the waiting-room clock, and compared it with the clock above the tracks outside; he blamed Hatch for not being there to meet them, and fretted lest he should not come at all. It would be extremely embarrassing to be left behind, he said; he complained that it had the effect of placing him in a dependent position, and that Hatch had taken advantage of his temporary destitution to inflict a humiliation upon him. He said he would go out and look about the station while waiting, and he impatiently permitted Egeria to go with him. An idle throng were hanging about the draw of the Charlestown bridge, watching some men in a barge who were supplying air to a submarine diver at the bottom of the dock. The locality of the diver was indicated by the bubbles that rose and broke on the surface and floated away on the swift tide.

“Egeria,” said her father, with instant speculation, “if it were possible to isolate a medium thus absolutely from all adverse influences, great results might be expected. A speaking-tube of rubber, running from the mouth of the submerged medium” — He looked at the girl, who smiled faintly.

“I shouldn’t have the courage to go under the water, — I should be afraid of the fish.”

“At first, no doubt,” replied her father. “But I was not thinking of you. I should like to see the experiment tried with Mrs. Le Roy.”

Boynton was not jesting, and his daughter did. not laugh at a proposal which would doubtless have amused the seeress herself. “How strange,” said Egeria, as they turned away, “the western sky is!”

“Yes; the wind has changed to the east. The Probabilities, this morning, promised a storm.”

“And the frames of all these railroad drawbridges against that strange sky” —

“Yes, yes,” said her father; “they look like so many gibbets. It’s a homicidal sight, — or suicidal.” He gave a little shiver, and they walked back into the station, where the train they were to take was just making up. Boynton looked about for Hatch, but was arrested in his impatient scrutiny of the others by the presence of two men, whose peaceful faces no less than their quaint dress distinguished them from the rest of the thickening crowd. They wore low-crowned, broad-brimmed hats of beaver; one was habited in a straight-skirted coat of drab, and the other in a like garment of dark blue; their feet, in broad, flat shoes, protruded from pantaloons of a conscientiously unfashionable pattern. Their hair hung long in their necks, and when one lifted his hat to wipe his forehead he showed his hair cut in front like a young lady’s bang. They seemed quite at their ease under the glance of the passers, and talked quietly on, even when Boynton, expressing a doubt as to whether they were Quakers, halted Egeria, and lingered near them.

“That is so, Joseph,” said one who seemed the younger, and was much the graver of the two. “It began with our people, and I think it will get its only true development among us. In the world outside, its professors are as bad as the hireling priesthood of the churches.”

“Yee,” assented he called Joseph, with that quaint corruption through which the people of his sect fail in the scriptural injunction they strive to obey.

“As soon as the money element touched it, it began to degenerate, and now it’s a trade, like any other. They are tempted all the while to eke it out with imposture.”

“Nay, Elihu, not in all cases. At least, they don’t yield to the temptation in all cases. You must not let your judgment be too much swayed by the single case that has come to your knowledge.”

“They can’t be Quakers,” said Egeria, in a low voice; “they say ‘you,’ and not ‘thee’ and ‘thou.’” Her father did not answer; he pressed her hand to make her keep silence, and insensibly drew her a little nearer to the men.

“Yee,” replied the younger, “it is well to avoid a hasty judgment; but it is foolish to blind one’s self to the facts. And the facts are that in such hands as this gift has fallen into in the world outside it is mere sorcery, — a spell to conjure with.”

“Nay, it is something better than that. It is still a proof of life hereafter to those who could receive no other evidence.”

“Yee, that may be. But I feel that it cannot truly prosper except with those who are leading the angelic life, here and now.”

These words, these phrases, had visibly made a great impression upon Boynton. His daughter saw that he was longing to accost the speakers. But at that moment she caught sight of Hatch coming out of the ladies’ room, and looking anxiously about as if seeking them.

“Oh!” she cried gladly, “there’s Mr. Hatch!” and she pulled her father away with her.

The two men turned at the sound of their going, and gazed after them.

“That is a strange couple,” said he called Joseph. “Did you notice them as they stood here?”

“Yee, I saw them. They seemed to be listening. But we were not saying anything to be ashamed of, and I thought they could not receive any harm from overhearing us. They looked like stage players to me: before I was gathered in, I used often to see such folks.”

“Do you think they are man and wife?”

“Nay, I don’t know.”

“He seemed too old to be her husband.”

“That often happens in the world.”

“Yee,” said Joseph; “but I never like to see a young wife with an old husband. And there is something pleasing in a pretty young couple: they seem happy.”

“Nay,” returned the other, “what does it matter to us how they mate together?”

They stood looking after Egeria and her father, whom Hatch had now joined. “They seem to have found friends,” said Joseph. “I don’t think she is the elderly man’s wife.”

Hatch hurried them into the waiting-room; and then he went to buy their tickets, and have their baggage checked.

“I’ve got your trunks checked, doctor,” he said, when he returned and sat down beside them. “But you’ll have to change cars at Ayer Junction. You won’t have any trouble, though: you just walk out of the end of the depot, and take the train standing across the track of the one you’ve come on. You can stop at Portland, when you get there, or you can make the connection, and push right through, and be home by morning. I’ve been looking it all up for you in this Guide.” He drew a book out of his pocket.

“Oh, we shall want to push right through, sha’n’t we, father?” asked Egeria.

But her father had apparently lost all concern in the return home for which he had but now been so eager. He had listened with apathy to Hatch’s excuses for his delay, and he had received with indifference the checks and tickets the young man had brought him. “We will see how we feel when we get to Portland,” he answered testily, handing the money he had borrowed to Egeria. “Mr. Hatch,” he added, presently, with the mystery in which he liked to involve simple things, “are you pressed for time?”

“I have all the time there is,” replied Hatch, cheerily.

“Then oblige me by remaining here for a moment with Egeria, — for one moment only.”

He left them, and they looked blankly at each other.

“Your father,” Hatch began, “seems a little off the notion of going back.”

“Yes,” assented Egeria, dispiritedly.

“Well, of course; that’s the reaction. But he’ll be all right again when the train’s started. I know how that is. Miss Egeria,” he added, looking down at the neat valise between his feet, “I didn’t tell the doctor, but I hope you won’t object to company part of your journey. I’m going on your train as far as Ayer Junction.” He met her look of amaze with one of triumphant kindliness. “Yes. You know I can go West Iloosac Tunnel way.”

“I didn’t know,” said Egeria.

“Well, I can. And I thought I might be of use to you in changing cars at the Junction, and so I’m going.”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” Egeria murmured, brokenly.

“I thought you’d be glad,” said Hatch.

“Yes; only you do too much,” returned the girl.

“Well, I’m a little in debt to your father, yet; and I would do anything for — for your father. I hope you’ll make him push straight through tonight. I don’t think your father’s quite well, Miss Egeria. He needs rest. He ought to be home.”

“Yes, he needs rest,” said Egeria sadly. “I’m glad we ‘re going home. But you know how it is, there, between him and grandfather,” she added, reluctantly. “I don’t know just where we’ll go. We can’t go to our old house; there are people in it; and father wouldn’t go to grandfather’s, after what’s passed.”

“Oh, you’ll find friends there,” said Hatch, hopefully. “At any rate, you’ll be among your kind of folks, and that’s something. And that reminds me; here’s a little note I want you to give your grandfather for me. I always liked the old gentleman,” he added, giving her a letter. “He and I got along first-rate together. And I guess you can patch it up between him and your father.”

“Mr. Hatch,” said Egeria, looking at the letter—” Or no, no matter.”

“What is it?”

“Nothing; merely something I was going to ask you, — to ask your advice. But it’s done now, and so it would be of no use.”

Hatch laughed. “That’s the times ladies usually apply for advice, — after a thing’s done. And, as you say, it ain’t of much use then, — at least, not for that occasion.”

Egeria smiled sadly. “I suppose I wanted you to think I had done right.”

“Well, I think that without your asking me.” Egeria put the letter away in her handbag, and put that carefully behind her on the seat, before she asked, a little tremulously, “Mr. Hatch, what do you think made him change his mind about it after he talked with you?”

An angry flush passed over Hatch’s face, as he followed her meaning, and recalled the encounter of the morning. “I don’t know. Such a man as that wouldn’t need any reason. Perhaps he didn’t change his mind. He mightn’t choose to let me know what he intended to do.”

Boynton returned from the outside, and interrupted their talk.

“I went to see if I could find those two men,” he said to Egeria. “Some remarks that they dropped had a peculiar interest for me. But they were gone. Did you notice them, Mr. Hatch? They stood near us when we first caught sight of you.”

“Parties in broad-brims? Yes, I saw them. But I didn’t notice them particularly. What were they talking about?”

“The life hereafter,” said Boynton solemnly, “and the angelic life on earth.”

“Well, I don’t know about the last, but the first is a good subject for a railroad depot. Makes you think whether you’ve bought your insurance ticket. Quakers, I suppose.”

“No, they were not Quakers,” answered the doctor, with dry offense.

“Well, they looked it,” said Hatch. “Perhaps they belonged to some of the new religious brotherhoods. I’ve seen fellows going round with skirts down to their heels; I believe they ‘re pretty good fellows, too; they take care of the sick and poor. But I don’t see why they can’t do it in sack coats.”

“It’s possible that these are of the brotherhood you mean,” said the doctor. “I wish I could see them again.” He looked vexed and disappointed.

“Well, you may run across ‘em,” returned Hatch, easily. “Perhaps they’ll be on our train.” He added, at the doctor’s inquiring look, “I’m going to Troy by the tunnel route; I shall be with you as far as Ayer Junction.”

“Oh,” returned the doctor, with a little surprise, but with as little interest. “Isn’t it time to go on board?”

“Guess we might as well,” said Hatch, gathering up Egeria’s things and her father’s, beside his own compact luggage, and following Boynton, as he went out free-handed. Hatch had taken his berth in the sleeping-car, and he got them seats in this luxurious vehicle as far as the Junction. Boynton stared anxiously about the car, and walked up and down the aisle. “Remain here with Mr. Hatch a moment, Egeria,” he said. “I will be back, presently.”

Egeria made a little start of protest, but Hatch repressed her with a touch. “Let him go,” he whispered, as the doctor pushed off. “He’s after those Corsican Brothers. They can’t do him any harm, and they’ll occupy his mind. Who did you think they were?”

“I couldn’t tell,” said Egeria. “I was sure they were Quakers; but they didn’t use the plain language. I think father thought they were talking about the spirits,” she added, dejectedly.

“Well, I’m sorry for that,” replied Hatch. “I think he’s got enough of the spirits for one while. But probably they weren’t, if they ‘re any of those new kind of brothers. If they are, I hope he’ll find ‘em. They can give him some talk on the other side.”

The doctor came back, and sat down with an air of satisfaction. “I’ve found them, Egeria,” he said. “But the seats all about them were occupied, so that I couldn’t get a place near them. I overheard them say that they were going to Ayer, where friends are to meet them.”

“Well, that’s lucky,” Hatch interposed. “You may get a glimpse of them there. You’ll have to wait twenty minutes for connections. It’s surprising how much you can do in twenty minutes when you ‘re on the road. Why, twenty minutes on the road are as long as the good old twenty minutes a fellow used to have when he was a boy. But they won’t go any further in the way of time, generally, than twenty dollars will in the way of money, nowadays; we seem to have got an irredeemable paper currency in both things, since I grew up. I wish we could get back to a gold basis. I should like to see half a day or half a dollar of the old size. Why, doctor, you must remember when they were both as big as the full moon!”

The weather had been growing colder since morning, and though they had run out under clearer skies than those of the sea-board, the sun set at last in a series of cloudy bars, through which his red face looked as through the bars of a visor, before it dipped out of sight, and left the west pale and ashen. The lengthening twilight of the season prevailed over the landscape, sodden from long snow, and showing as yet no consciousness of the spring. It was sad and bare, and the girl shrank from its cold melancholy after a shivering glance. Presently her father rose and went into the next car.

“Going to make sure of his Brothers,” said the young man. He looked at his watch. “We ‘re a little late; but I shall have time to see you on board the Portland train when we get to the Junction. We ought to have had the twenty minutes there together; but we sha’n’t; my train leaves before yours does. I wish I was going on the whole way with you!”

“I wish you were,” responded Egeria. “But you mustn’t lose any time when we get to the Junction; you might miss your own train.”

“I couldn’t afford to do that. But there’ll be time. Now, I’ll tell you what, Miss Egeria: I want you to write to me when you get home. You know I shall want to know you’ve got there.”

“Yes, I will,” answered Egeria.

“There!” said Hatch, tearing a leaf from his pocket-book, in which he had written, “that’ll fetch me. I shall be a fortnight in Omaha before I push on to California. When I get back, in June, I’m coming to see you!”

“You may be sure we shall be glad to have you,” answered Egeria, putting the address in her bag. “I’m so eager to get home, it seems as if I could fly. I’d rather be in the grave-yard there than lead the life we have the last three months, I hope I shall never come away again!” she added, while the tears started to her eyes.

“Well, I hope you won’t if you don’t want to,” said Hatch. “But I guess we won’t talk about grave-yards in that connection. I’m coming back to find you strong and well, and your father in the good old track again.”

“Yes,” murmured the girl.

The doctor came in and resumed his seat.

“Corsican Brothers all right?” asked Hatch.

“They are still there,” replied the doctor, gravely accepting the designation.

“Well, you’ll have to cut it shorter than I thought for at Ayer,” said Hatch. “We ‘re a little behind time. But I guess you can transact all the business you have with them in fifteen minutes.”

“In fifteen minutes?” Boynton looked doubtful and unhappy.

“Why,” said Hatch, with a laugh, “I’ll see that you get the whole time. I’ll find your train with Miss Egeria, and put her into it. You ought to have some supper, though. I’ll ask the Brothers to hold on till you’ve had a cup of tea.”

“I shall want nothing to eat,” replied the doctor, excitedly. “If you will take charge of Egeria, I shall be obliged to you. I must speak to them.”

“All right,” said Hatch. “Don’t be anxious,” he whispered to Egeria, as they emerged into the crowd and clamor at the Junction. Locomotives were fuming and fretting under cover of the station; without, their bells were bleating everywhere; people ran to and fro, and were pushed about by men with long trucks; the baggage men hurled the trunks from one train to another, and called out the check numbers in metallic nasals. Hatch made his way with Egeria to the train standing across the Fitchburg track, and piled up her things in a seat. “Remember the train and car,” he said, making her look round, when they came out again. “Now come get something to eat.” He hurried her into the eating-room, and ordering supper he left her and went to find the doctor. It was some minutes before he returned with him, crest-fallen and disappointed.

“Did you see them?” asked Egeria, interpreting his gloom aright.

“No,” said her father, “I have missed them.”

“Good-by, doctor; good-by, Miss Egeria,” said Hatch, who had been paying for the supper. “That’s my train,” he added, at the sound of a bell. “Good luck to you!”

Egeria clung to his hand. “But your supper!”

“That’s the doctor’s supper. I shall snatch a bite at Fitchburg.”

“Oh!” moaned Egeria. But he was gone, and she turned to urge her father to eat.

“Oh, I want nothing, — I want nothing,” he said, impatiently; but the girl pressed him, and after she had made him drink a cup of tea, she followed him out of the eating-room. At the door, he gave a joyful start. There, not ten paces away, were the men whom he had seen at the depot in Boston, and whom he had been so anxiously seeking. A third, dressed like them, and of a like placidity of countenance, was talking with them. Nothing now could prevent Boynton from accosting them. He launched himself towards them with an excitement strangely contrasting with their own calm.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I must beg your pardon for addressing you. But I saw you in the depot at Boston” —

“Yee,” interrupted he called Elihu, tranquilly, “we saw you there.”

“And — and — I chanced to overhear something in your conversation” —

“Yee,” said the other, as before, “we saw you listening.”

“Well, well! I confess it, — I confess it!” cried Boynton, even more impatient than disconcerted. “I felt constrained to listen: your words seemed to me a message, a prophecy, a revelation. May I ask, gentlemen, if you were talking about spiritualism?”

“Yee, we were.” —

“Father, — father, we shall lose our train!” pleaded Egeria.

The three strange men, from studying Boynton intently, turned and looked kindly at her, while he continued, “And were you — you were — Gentlemen, this is a subject that interests me greatly, — vitally, I may say. Pardon me if I seem too bold. You were saying that this science, this dispensation, —— this — this — call it what you will, — originated with some society of which you are members?”

“Yee.”

The bell was ringing for their train to start; Egeria essayed another meek appeal of “Father, our train is going!” and was hushed with a harsh “Silence!” from Boynton, who eagerly pursued, “And this society — this — Gentlemen, what are you?”

“We are of the people called Shakers,” replied Joseph.

“Exactly! Exactly! I see it, — I understand it all! I understand now how you can make the only just claim to the development of these phenomena. In your community alone is the unselfish, the self devoted, basis to be found, without which we can rear no superstructure to the skies. I have wasted my life!” he cried,—” wasted my life! Does your community live near here?”

“Yee,” answered the eldest Shaker, cautiously, “some miles back. This brother has driven over from home.”

“I wish to be one of you!” said the doctor.

“Nay,” answered the Shaker, “that needs reflection.”

A train began to cross the front of the station. Egeria’s long-suffering broke in tears. At sight of her distress, the Shaker added, “Friend, there goes your train.”

“Well, well!” exclaimed Boynton, distractedly, “you shall hear from me!” He turned with Egeria, and ran towards the cars, the Shakers following, and making signals to the engineer. The train moved slowly, and Egeria and her father scrambled aboard. She led the way to the rear car, in which her things were left; but on going to the seat midway of it which Hatch had chosen for her, she could not find them. She sank down, stupefied. Her father noticed neither her loss nor her distress. She waited hopelessly for the conductor’s coming, and when he appeared she asked him timidly if he had seen her things. He said he would ask the brakeman about them, and added in the tone of formal demand, “Tickets!” The doctor surrendered them without looking at the conductor. “These tickets are for Portland,” said the conductor. “You ‘re on the wrong train, — this is the down train.”

“Oh, put us off, then, please,” implored Egeria, “and we’ll walk back.”

“Up train left before this did,” said the man, “and you couldn’t get it any way.”

“Oh, what shall we do!” lamented the girl. “How shall we ever get home?”

“I can take you on to Egerton; train doesn’t stop till we get there. You can go up on the morning express.”

“But we can’t pay!” gasped Egeria. “Our money was all in one of my bags!”

The conductor looked as if this might or might not be true. He glanced at Egeria’s shabby dress, and his face hardened as he said, “I can take you to Egerton,” and passed on.

Boynton had shown little concern in the matter, as if it were no affair of his. Egeria did not appeal to him for counsel or comfort, but sank back into her seat, and wept silently. In the twilight her tears could not be seen; when it grew darker, and the lamps were turned up, she averted her face, and stared out of the black window with streaming eyes.

When the train stopped, and the brakeman called “Egerton,” she led her father from the car, and began to walk with him from the station up into the village.

IX.

EGERTON is a village that presents a winning aspect to the summer visitor when he goes thither in June, and finds it at peace with all the world, in the shadow of immemorial, uncanker-wormed elms. Its chief street wanders quaintly, with a pleasant rise and fall, and on either hand are the large square mansions of a former day, and the trim, well-kept French-roof villas of ours. Hammocks, with girls reading novels in them, are swung between door-yard trees; swift buggies go by on the wide, dustless street; the children of summer visitors, a little too well dressed, play in the cool paths; all day long there is lounging and light literature and smoking and flirtation on the piazzas of the big summer hotel. But the place is far from being a mere summer resort; it is a village, with its own life, expressed in comfortable homes, in a post-office, an apothecary’s, a local bank, and various stores, all elm-embowered. A lovely country lies about it, dipping to a fertile valley on one side, and stretching on the other level and far, with an outlook to yet farther hills.

On the chilly April eve when Egeria and her father walked aimlessly away from the station up into the village, it did not wear the welcome it gives the summer visitor. Here and there a lamp pierced the gathering night, and about the stores and postoffice there was a languid stir; but the houses darkled away into the gloom of the country. A wind was rising; it took the elms over the street, and swung their long, pendulous boughs about under the sky, dully luminous with the coming storm.

The doctor had seemed carelessly indifferent about all that had happened; indeed, scarcely cognizant of it. He looked vaguely round as they passed through the space in front of the hotel. “Where are you going, Egeria?” he asked.

“I don’t know. We have no money.”

“No money?”

“You gave me the money, and I put it into my bag that was carried off on the train to Portland.”

“Ah, true, true,” responded her father, as if he granted the trivial point for argument’s sake. He added, with a sort of philosophical interest in the fact, “Well, we are beggars now, — houseless beggars, who don’t know how to beg! Yet I have no doubt there are doors enough on this street that would fly open at our touch, if it were known that we were without shelter and in need. Where shall we apply, my dear?”

“Oh, I don’t know, — I don’t know.”

“All the houses seem dark,” mused Boynton aloud. “If we rang, and made them the trouble of lighting hall and parlor lamps in the belief we were visitors, it would have a bad effect. We will stop at the first house where we see a light at the front windows.” But when they came to such a house, it seemed too brightly lighted, and they walked wearily by. At last, they paused before a door where the illumination was neither too brilliant nor too faint; and while they stood questioning themselves as to the form of their petition, the lamp at the window was suddenly blown out. They did not speak, but turned and kept on their way. They had passed through the denser part of the village, and the houses began to straggle at wider and wider intervals along the road. Presently they found themselves in the open country, between meadows and fields, with what seemed a long stretch of forest in front of them. But before they reached it they came to a wayside country store, in front of which they halted.

“I have an idea, Egeria,” said her father. “I will step into this store and pledge your ring for a night’s lodging.”

“Well,” said Egeria, yielding it with dull indifference. She went with him to the door, and lingered there while he addressed the man behind the counter with his airy flourish. It required time for the situation to make itself intelligible. Then the man took the ring extended to him, and looked coldly, not at it, but at Boynton. When the rustic leisure of the establishment had gathered itself about the transaction, he returned it. “I ain’t no goldsmith,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” queried Boynton.

The man lifted his voice: “May be it’s gold, and may be it’s brass.”

“Brass?”

“Well, you’d ought to know. Anyhow, I guess we can’t trade.” The spectators admired a fellow citizen’s cool ability to deal with a confidence man.

Boynton turned away with dignity, and addressed a young fellow in the group. “Can you tell me,” he said politely, “my shortest way to Ayer Junction? I was brought here by mistaking the downward for the upward train, at that point.” The listeners grinned at the shallow imposture, but the young man answered civilly that if he was going to walk he had better take the road to Vardley, keeping due northward on that street. He came to the door to be more explicit, and, throwing it open, discovered Egeria to the others.

“Funny pair of tramps,” said one of them, loud enough for the wanderers to hear.

“I guess they ain’t any tramps,” said the storekeeper, darkly.

“Why?” asked the other.

“Well, I guess they ain’t tramps,” repeated the man in authority. His success in coping with Boynton made the rest feel that he had a meaning withheld for the present from regard for the public good; they kept silent; his interlocutor spread out his hands as in an act of submission above the stove. He did not speak again, but after a while another took up the word.

“They say them Shakers at Vardley keeps a house a puppose for lodgin’ tramps,” he said, holding his knee between his clasped hands, as he sat, and striking the heel of his boot against the side of the stove.

Another silence followed, while a lounger on the other side of the stove worked his lips for expectoration against the iron; but it was too lukewarm to hiss.

“The old gentleman can put up with ‘em, and keep his ring, if he steps along pretty spry. ‘T ain’t more ‘n about five mile, is it, Parker?”

After a decent pause, “Well, I don’t know what the country’s comin’ to,” sighed a local pessimist.

“Oh, I guess it’ll all come out right in the end,” returned a local optimist. This put the pessimist down; the talk had wandered from horses, at Boynton’s appearance, and now it reverted to horses.

The young fellow who had gone to the door with Dr. Boynton did not return within; he walked a little way up the street with him and Egeria, and recollected to warn them about a turning to the right which they were not to take. When he parted with them at a comer, he stood and gazed after them, with perhaps a kindly impulse in his heart fainting through bashfulness and doubt, while they held their way till they drew near the edge of the forest. It looked black and dreadful under the darkened sky; they stopped before reaching it at a little house which stood upon its borders.

“We must ask here,” said Egeria desperately.

“Well, you ask, then, my dear,” said her father. “They won’t deny a woman.”

Egeria knocked, and after a long interval the light from the rear of the house disappeared, and, the door being opened, was held scarily aloft above the head of an elderly woman who surveyed them with an excited face.

Egeria briefly told her story, and ended with a prayer for a night’s shelter. “Just let us sit by your fire. We won’t trouble you, and in the morning we will go on.”

The woman did not change countenance. “You hain’t any of them that’s escaped from the reform school?” she demanded, in a high, frightened voice.

Egeria again explained their case. “I don’t know where the reform school is. This is my father, and we are honest people!” she added indignantly.

“Well,” said the woman, in the same key as before, and clinging to her preconception, “I guess you better go back. The off’cers is sure to catch you.”

“Oh, and won’t you let us in?”

“Why, I couldn’t, you know, — I couldn’t. You just keep right along. It’s early yet, and there’s a tavern up this road, — well, it ain’t more ‘n four mile, if it’s that; you can put up there.”

“Is this the road to Vardley?” asked Boynton.

“Yes, yes, — straight along,” said the woman, who had been making the aperture between them smaller and smaller; she now finally closed the door with a quick bang, and bolted it.

“What shall we do?” whispered Egeria.

“I don’t know,” her father faltered, in reply.

“Let us go back to the station,” said the girl. “They will let us stay there, and then in the morning we can take the train — Oh, but we haven’t any money to pay our way back!” She broke out into a wild sobbing.

“Don’t cry, don’t cry,” said her father, soothingly. “We will walk on. Some one must receive us. Or, if not, we can’t starve in a single night, and at this season we can’t perish of cold.” As they resumed their way, something struck lightly in their faces. “Rain?” said Boynton, stretching out his hand.

“No,” answered Egeria, “snow.”

Neither spoke as they entered the deep shadow of the forest, which in this part of Massachusetts covers miles of country, where the farmer has ceased to coax his wizened crops from the sterile soil and has abandoned it in despair to the wilderness from which his ancestors conquered it.

The road before the wanderers began to whiten. “Oh, when shall we come to a house?” moaned the girl, shrinking closer to her father, and clinging more heavily to his arm.

She started at the sound of voices and the red glare that came from a sheltered hollow of the woods beside the valley into which the road descended. Around a large fire crouched a party of tramps: one held a tilted bottle to his mouth, and smother clutched at it; the rest were shouting and singing. As Egeria and her father came into the range of the firelight, the men saw them. They yelled to them to stop and have a drink. The one who had the bottle snatched up a brand from the fire with his left hand and ran towards them. His foot must have caught in some root or vine; he fell, rolling over his bottle and torch, and while he screamed out that he was burning up, and the rest rushed upon him with laughter for his mishap and curses for the loss of his bottle, Egeria and her father fled into the shadows beyond the light.

Terror gave her force, but when she felt herself safe her strength began to fail.

“I can’t go any farther,” she said, releasing her hand from her father’s arm, and sinking upon the wayside bank. “We will wait here till morning.”

He made her no answer, but stood looking up and down the road. “Egeria,” he said at last, “I fancy that it’s lighter ahead of us than it is behind, and that we ‘re near the edge of the woods. Try to come a few steps farther.” He lifted her to her feet, and they moved painfully forward. It was as he said: in a little while the woods broke away on either hand, and they stood in the middle of crossroads; on one corner was a house. But as they drew near the verge of the open, the sound of voices stayed them; they were the voices of young men and young girls laughing and calling to one another, as they issued from this house on the corner. “It’s a school-house,” said her father; “they’ve had some sort of frolic there.”

“Well, you won’t get the Unabridged for spelling merry, Jim!” shouted one of the youths to another.

“Oh, how does he spell it?” cried one of the girls.

“He spells it M-a-r-y!”

The laugh that followed repeated itself in the woods.

“That’s a good joke for hoot-owls!” retorted some one who might be Jim.

“A spelling match,” Boynton interpreted.

A noise of joyous screaming and scuffling came from within the house as a light was quenched there, with cries of “I should think you’d be ashamed!” and “Now, you stop!” and the like; and a bevy of young people came scurrying from the door.

“Hello!” shouted one of the young men, “what about the books?”

“I don’t know,” answered another. “Guess nobody’ll hurt the books before morning.”

“I wish they’d steal mine!” said the gay voice of a girl.

“But the fire, — we’ve left a roaring fire.”

“Well, let it burn the old thing down.”

“All right!”

They hurried forward, shouting to the party ahead, who answered with a medley of derisive noises.

When they were all gone, and their voices had died away, the wanderers crept to the door of the school-house, which they tried anxiously. It opened, and they entered. A gush of mellow light from the stove door, left open to let the fire die soon, softly illumined the interior. They drew some benches close to the stove, and sank away from the sense of all their misery.

X.

THE last thing of which Egeria had been aware before she fell asleep was her own shadow thrown by the firelight against the school-house door. She thought it was this when she looked again. But the door melted away from around the shadow, and the shadow took feature and expression. Rousing herself with a start, she saw that it was a young girl, cloaked and hooded, standing in the open doorway. The pale, bluish light of a snowy morning filled the school-room. The girl stood still, and looked at Egeria with a stony gaze of fear. The past came back to her; the situation realized itself. Her father, a shabby, disreputable heap of crumpled clothing and tumbled hair, was still asleep; her own beautiful hair had fallen down her shoulder.

“We will go, — we will go,” she whispered to the girl in the door-way, with a face as frightened as her own. “It’s my father. We were walking to Vardley; we didn’t know where we were, and we found the school-house door unlocked, and we came in.” She caught at the wandering coils of her hair, and twisted them into place, and tied on her bonnet.

The girl in the door-way looked as if she would like to run away, but she came in, gasping, and shut the door behind her. “You ‘re not tramps?” she made out to ask.

“Oh, no, no, no!” replied Egeria, and she incoherently poured out the story of their misadventure.

The other girl drew a long breath. “And you were going to Vardley Station?”

“Yes.”

“That’s more than three miles from here.” Egeria did not say anything, but she turned to wake her father. “Oh, don’t wake him!” cried the other girl, with a new start of terror, and a partial flight towards the door. “I mean,” she added, coming back with a blush, “let him sleep. I — I’m the teacher; and I’ve come to build the fire. You can warm by it before you go. The scholars won’t be here yet for an hour.” Every word was visibly a conquest from fear, a fulfillment of duty.

The teacher took off her water-proof, the hood of which she had drawn up over her head, and showed herself a short, plain girl, with a homely face full of sense and goodness. Her hair, cut short, clung about her large head in tight rings. She looked at Egeria’s ethereal beauty and the masses of her hair, not enviously, but with a kind of compassionate admiration.

The fire had gone down in the stove, and there was still imbedded in the ashes a line of live embers keeping the shape of the original maple stick. She raked the coals forward, laid on some splinters and bark, and then logs, and closed the door; the fire shouted and roared within.

The teacher sat down on a bench across the stove from Egeria, took into her lap the tin pail she had brought with her, and raised the lid, discovering a smaller pail within, packed round with pieces of mince-pie, doughnuts, and biscuit with slices of cold meat between the buttered halves. She lifted this out, and set it on the stove; she tore some leaves out of a copy-book, and laying them on the iron put the slices of pie on them. She did not say anything to Egeria, who had no authority to interfere with her proceedings. “I’m sorry it isn’t coffee,” she said, looking into the pail on the stove; “but I can’t drink coffee; so it’s only cracked cocoa. Now wake him.”

But the stir of garments, the low voices, and the fragrant smell of the cocoa and mince-pie had already roused Boynton. He lifted himself, looked at Egeria, and stared at the teacher, to whom presently he made a courteous bow. She replied by pouring some of the cocoa into a saucer, which she took from the bottom of the larger pail, and handing it to him.

“I beg your pardon?” he said sweetly.

“There’s another saucer,” said the teacher evasively; “but you’ll have to eat your pie out of them afterwards.”

Her father saw Egeria supplied with cocoa, and then drank with the simple greed of a child.

“This — this lady is the teacher, father,” said Egeria. Boynton, brightened by his draught, bowed again, and the teacher gravely acknowledged his salutation. “I’ve told her how we came here.”

“Yes, yes,” said Boynton; “most disagreeable coincidence. I can assure you that in a somewhat checkered career I have never met with a more painful experience. At times, really I have hardly been able to recognize my own identity. But it’s well for once, no doubt, to find ourselves in the position in which we have often contemplated others.”

The teacher took the pie from the smoking paper and slid a piece into each saucer. “I presume it isn’t very wholesome,” she said, “but I’ve beard that Mr. Emerson says, if you will eat it, you’d best eat it for breakfast, so that you can have the whole day to digest it in.”

“Emerson,” said the doctor, receiving his saucer with one hand, while he opened his handkerchief and spread it on his knees with the other, “is a very receptive mind. I fancy that there is a social principle in these matters which isn’t clearly ascertained yet. Where whole communities eat pie, as ours do, there must be an unconscious cooperative force in its digestion.”

The teacher looked at him, but answered nothing. “I’m afraid,” said Egeria ruefully, “that it’s your dinner.”

“The children always want me to eat part of theirs,” the teacher explained. “I couldn’t think of your asking at a house for your breakfast. The country is overrun with tramps, and they might suppose” — She stopped and blushed, and then she added with rigid self-justice, “ Well, I don’t know as it was so strange I should.”

“No,” said Egeria, “you couldn’t have thought anything else. That’s what they took us for everywhere.” She spoke with patience and without bitterness, but she did not eat her breakfast with the hungry relish of the outcast she had been mistaken for.

The teacher sat looking at them, and a new sense of their forlornness seemed to flash upon her. “Why, you have no outside things!”

“No,” said Egeria; “they all went off on the train we lost.”

The teacher said, like one thinking aloud, “If you are not telling me the truth about yourselves, it will be your loss, and not mine.” Then she added, “I don’t want you should try to walk to Ayer; it would kill you, in this snow. You must take the cars at Vardley Station.” She drew out her purse. “There,” she said, handing Egeria some bits of scrip, “it’s ten cents apiece to the Junction; and here,” she continued, thriftily putting the biscuit together in a scrap of paper, “is something for your lunch on the cars.”

Egeria made no reply. From time to time she had lapsed from all apparent sense of what was going on. She now looked blankly at the teacher.

Her father was not so helpless. “My dear young lady,” he exclaimed, “you are perfectly right in your estimate of the consequences and penalties! If we were deceiving you, we should be the sufferers, and not you. There is a law in these things which no individual will can abrogate. In the end, truth and good always triumph.” He had finished his pie, and he now took a draught of cocoa. “Have you many pupils?” he asked.

“No,” replied the teacher, “not many. The old people say there used to be forty or fifty, but now there are only sixteen.”

Boynton shook his head. “Yes, it is this universal tendency to the cities and the large towns which is ruining us. Well, Egeria, shall we be going?” He had eaten and drunken to his apparent refreshment, and he was now ready to push on.

Egeria cast a look out of the window, and rose languidly.

“I’d ask you to stay,” said the teacher, taking note of her weariness, “but the children will be coming very soon, and” —

“Oh, no, no! we couldn’t stay. We must go.” The teacher took down her water-proof from the peg on which she had hung it, and, eying it a moment thoughtfully, handed it to Egeria. “I want you should wear this. You’ll take your death if you go out that way. You can give it to the depot man at Vardley Station, and tell him it’s Miss Thorn’s. He’ll send it back by the stage this afternoon, and I’ll get it in plenty of time.” Egeria did not reply, but stood looking at the teacher with a jaded and wondering regard.

“I will take it for her, Miss Thorn,” said the doctor, advancing with a sprightly air, and receiving the cloak. “I will see that it is duly returned. And let me thank you,” he added, “for your kindness at a time when, really, we should have been embarrassed without it. My name is Boynton, — Dr. Boynton. Though you can scarcely have heard of it.”

“No,” said the teacher, reluctantly, but firmly.

“Ah!” returned the doctor. But he did not attempt to enlighten her ignorance. He said, “Come, Egeria,” and led the way to the door. The girl turned and looked vaguely at the teacher; but no words of farewell or of thanks passed between them.

The doctor issued cheerfully, even gayly, from the school-house door. The wind had changed, and was blowing from the south. Whiffs of white cloud were sailing far overhead in the vast expanse of blue, from which poured a mellow sunshine. The snow, translucent in the light, and dark blue in the shadow, clung lazily to the trees and the eaves, from which at times the breeze detached it, and tossed it away in soft, large clots. Some unseen crows made themselves heard in the distance; near by, on the fence, a little bird stooped and sang.

“A bluebird!” cried Boynton.

“Yes,” answered the teacher; “there were a good many yesterday, before the weather changed. Robins, too.”

He made her an airy bow, and Egeria looked back at her over her shoulder as they walked out into the road. “Why, the snow-plow has gone by!” he exclaimed, with simple delight in the effect, and the teacher saw him stop and point out to Egeria the drift, massively broken, and flung on either side in moist blocks by the plow. She watched them from the school-house door-way till a turn of the road hid them from sight. Then she went within, and cast a doubtful glance at the peg where her water-proof had hung. But her face changed as her eye fell to the staunch and capacious rubber-boots standing in order below the peg. “I don’t believe that girl had the sign of a rubber!” she mused aloud, in the excess of her compassion.

XI.

THE adventure of the day before and the exercise of their night-walk, with the good breakfast he had eaten, seemed to have brightened Boynton past recollection of all the sorrows he had known. He went forward, discoursing hopefully, and developing a plan he had for leaving Egeria with her grandfather, and returning to this region in order to look up the Shaker community, with which he intended to unite for the purpose of spiritual investigation on the true basis. For some time he did not observe that she responded more languidly and indifferently than her wont; then he asked abruptly, “What is the matter, Egeria?”

“I don’t know. Nothing. I am not very well.”

“You ought to be, in such air as this. Let me see.” He caught up her wrist. “Rather a quick pulse; it may be the walking. Are you hot?”

“My feet are cold, — they’re wet.”

He looked down at her shoes, and shook his head in a perplexed fashion. “We must stop somewhere and dry your feet.”

“They wouldn’t let us,” said Egeria, in a dull way.

“We will stop at that tavern. Perhaps we can get a lift there with some one going to the station.” He took her hand under his arm, and helped her on. She did not complain, nor did she show any increasing weariness.

They had been passing through a long reach of woodland that stretched away on either side of the road, when they came to a wide, open plateau, high and bare. It looked old, and like a place where there had once been houses, though none were now in sight; from time to time, in fact, the ruinous traces of former habitations showed themselves by the wayside. A black fringe of pines and hemlocks bordered the plain where it softly rounded away to the eastward; a vast forest of oak and chestnut formed its western boundary. At its highest point they came in sight of a house on its northern slope, a large, square mansion of brick; an enormous elm almost swept the ground with its boughs, on its eastern side; before it stood an old-fashioned sign-post, and westward, almost in the edge of the forest, lay its stabling.

“That must be the tavern,” said Boynton, instinctively making haste towards it. As they drew near, they saw a light buggy standing at the door, and a man who seemed to unite the offices of host and ostler holding the horse by the head. He turned from smoothing the animal’s nose, and called to some one within, “Come, hurry up, in there!” A red-faced man, in the faded and misshapen clothes which American manufacture and the clothing store supply to our poor country-folks, issued from the door, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, and slouched away down the road. Then a girl, dressed in extreme fashion, of the sort that never convinces of elegance, nor ever mistakes itself for it, with her large hands cased in white gloves, came out and waited to be helped into the buggy. The thick, hard bloom on her somewhat sunken cheeks was incomparably artificial, till the dyed mustache of the man following her showed itself; this was of a purple so bold that if his hair had been purple too, and not of a light sandy color, it could not have looked falser. They had a little squabble, half jocose, which the man at the horses head admired, before he lifted her to the seat. The landlord handed him the reins.

“Well, give us another call, Bob,” he said.

The other looked at him over his dyed mustache without answering, while the girl stared round with her wild black eyes, as if startled at finding herself perched so high up in the light of day. Both at the same time caught sight of Boynton and Egeria, who fell behind her father as he approached the doorway. The man leaned toward the girl and whispered something to her, at which she gave him a push and bade him stop his fooling.

“Can I get a conveyance here to carry us to Vardley Village?” asked Boynton, accosting the landlord.

“I don’t know,” answered the man, looking doubtfully at the doctor and Egeria. He turned his back on them in the manner of some rustics who wish to show a sovereign indifference, and made a pace or two towards the door, before he half faced them again.

“Well, good-by, Tommy!” said the man in the buggy, drawing his reins, and then checking his horse. “Look here, will you?”

The landlord went back, and the man leaned over the side of the buggy and said something in a low tone.

“No!” cried the landlord.

“Bet you anything on it!” said the man. “Get up!” He drove away.

“Come in,” said the landlord to the doctor, “and I’ll see.”

Egeria shrunk from following her father, who was mechanically obeying, and murmured something about walking.

“Oh, come in, come in!” said the landlord, more eagerly. “I guess I can manage for you. Come in and rest ye, any way.”

“Come, Egeria,” said her father.

The landlord was a short, stout man, with a shock of iron-gray hair and a face of dusky red, coarse and harsh; his blood-shot eyes wandered curiously over Egeria’s figure. He led the way into the parlor of the tavern, which within had an air of former dignity, as if it had not been built for its present uses. The hall was wide and the staircase fine; the chimney-piece and wooden cornice of the parlor showed the nice and patient carpentry of seventy-five years ago. There was a fire in the sheet-iron stove on the hearth, and the lady who had just driven off in the buggy had left proof of a decided taste in perfumes. If Egeria had liked she might have dressed her hair at the glass in which this person had surveyed the effect of her paint, with the public comb and brush on the table before it. There were some claret-colored sporting prints on the wall, and some tattered, thumb-worn illustrated papers on the centre-table.

“I’ll tell ye what,” said the landlord, who had briefly disappeared after showing them into this room, and had now returned, “I hain’t got any hoss in now, but I’ll have one in about an hour, and then I’ll set ye over to Vardley.”

“What will you charge?” asked the doctor. “It ain’t a-goin’ to cost ye much. I d’ know as I’ll ask ye anything. I’m goin’ there, any way; and I guess we can ride three on a seat.”

Boynton expressed a flowery sense of this goodness, but said that they should insist upon paying him for his trouble. Egeria had dropped into the rocking-chair beside the window, and, propping her arm on the window-sill, supported her averted face on her hand. Her head throbbed, and the thick, foul sweetness of the air made her faint; the glare of the sun from the snow and gathering pools beat into her heavy eyes.

“Does your head ache?” asked her father.

“Yes,” she gasped.

“I’ll send in some tea,” said the landlord.

A black man brought it; there seemed to be no women about the house.

The landlord went and came often; through her pain and lethargy, the girl had a dull sense of his vigilance. Her father found her feverish, and no better for the tea she drank. He fretted and repined at her condition, and then he grew tired of looking at her pale face fallen against the chair back, and her closed eyes, that trembled under their lids, and now and then sent out a gush of hot tears. He went into the other room, where the landlord sat with his boots on the low, cast-iron stove, and a white-nosed bull-dog slept suspiciously in a corner. As the time passed, different people appeared within and without the tavern. A man in a blood-stained over-shirt drove a butcher’s wagon to the door; a tall man, in a silk hat, came with a fish cart painted black and varnished. With a blithe jingle of bells, a young fellow rattled up with a cracker wagon, and having come in for the landlord’s order — the landlord did not find it necessary to take down his feet from the stove, or to disturb the angle at which his hat rested on his head, during the transaction — he danced a figure on the painted floor, and caressed the bull-dog with the toe of his boot. “Next time you put up Pete,” he said, “I want to bring my brother’s brindle. I want him to wear the belt a spell. Pete must be gittin’ tired of it. Well, I wouldn’t ever said a dog-fight could be such fun,” he added, with an expression of agreeable reminiscence. “And the old ball-room’s just the place for it.” He spat on the stove, and taking under his arm the empty cracker box, which he had just replaced on its shelf with a full one, he went out as he had come in, without saluting the landlord. He stopped at the open door of the parlor, and catching sight of Egeria made her a bow of burlesque devotion, and turned to include the landlord in the fun with a parting wink.

Egeria had not seen him; her eyes were closed; and her father, where he sat in the office, was looking impatiently out of the window. The sky had begun to thicken again.

“Do you think it’s going to rain?” he asked, when the cracker wagon had jingled away.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” said the landlord.

“I hope your conveyance will be here soon,” pursued the doctor. “I’m anxious, on my daughter’s account, not to miss the train from Vardley that connects with the Portland express.”

“Daughter, eh?” said the landlord, with a certain intonation; but Dr. Boynton observed nothing strange in it.

“How soon do you think your horse will be here?” he asked.

“I can’t tell ye,” said the landlord doggedly.

“You did tell me,” retorted Boynton, “that it would be here in less than an hour. You have detained us that time already, and now you say you don’t know how much longer I must wait.”

“Now, look here,” began the other, taking down his feet from the stove.

“I wish to pay you for what accommodation we have had. I wish to go,” said the doctor, angrily.

“I don’t want ye should go!” replied the other, with a stupid air of secrecy.

“I’ve nothing to do with that,” said the doctor. “I am going. Here is the money for your tea.” He flung upon the counter the pieces of scrip which the school-teacher had given him.

The landlord rose to his feet. “Ye can’t go. I might as well have it out first as last. Ye can’t go.”

“Can’t go? You ‘re ridiculous!” Boynton exclaimed. “What’s the reason I can’t go?”

“Well, you can go, but the girl can’t, — not till the off’cers comes. I mean to say,” he added, at Dr. Boynton’s look of amaze, “that she’s no more your daughter than she is mine. I d’ know where you picked her up, but she’s one of the girls that’s escaped from the reform school, and she’s goin’ back there as soon as the off’cers gets here. That’s what’s the matter.”

“And do you mean to say that you are going to detain us here against our will?”

“I don’t know what you call it. I’m going to keep you here.” He had planted his burly bulk in the door-way leading into the hall.

“Stand aside,” said Boynton, “or I’ll take you by the throat.”

“I guess not,” returned the landlord coolly. “Pete!” The brute in the corner had opened his whitish, cruel eyes at the sound of angry voices. “Watch him!” The dog came and lay down at his master’s feet, with his face turned toward Boynton. “There! I guess you won’t take anybody by the throat much!” The man resumed his chair, which he tilted back against the counter at its former comfortable angle.

Boynton quivered with helpless indignation. “Is it possible,” he exclaimed, “that an outrage like this can be perpetrated at high noon in the heart of Massachusetts?”

“That’s about the size of it,” returned the landlord, with a grin of brutal exultation.

“I must submit,” said the doctor. “But you shall answer for this.” The man was silent, and the doctor fancied that he might perhaps be relenting. He poured out a recital of the whole misadventure that had ended in their coming to his door, and appealed to him not to detain them. “My daughter has been sick, and she is now far from well. I am most anxious to pursue our journey. We have no friends in this region, and we are out of money. Let us go, now, and I will consent to overlook this outrageous attempt upon our liberty. If we lose the train this afternoon, she may suffer very seriously from the delay and the disappointment.”

“She’ll be all right when she gets back to the reform school,” answered the landlord, as if bored by the long story.

Boynton’s self-command failed him. He burst into tears. “My God!” he sobbed, “have I fallen so low as this? — impostor, and tramp, and beggar, and now the captive, the slave, of this ruffian! It’s too much! What have I done, — what have I done!” He hid his face in his hands, and bowed himself abjectly forward in the chair into which he had sunk.

Some one drove up to the door, and shouted from the outside, “Hello!”

The landlord rose, and saying to his dog, “Stay there,” went out to the door, and after a brief parley came in again with two other men. Their steps sounded as if they went to the door of the parlor and looked in, while their voices sank to rapid whispers. In his agony of anxiety, Boynton made an involuntary movement forwards; the dog growled and crept nearer. He was helpless; but the steps returned to the outer door, and there a voice said, “No, I don’t want to see him, as long as’t ain’t the girl. Somebody’s made a dumn fool of you, Harris, and you’ve made dumn fools of us. Guess you better wait a while, next time.”

The landlord came sulkily back, and sat down in his chair, which he tilted against the counter as before. Boynton suffered some time to elapse before he asked, “Well, sir, do you mean to let us go?”

“Who’s henderin’ you?” sullenly demanded the landlord, without moving.

“Then call away your dog.”

The landlord refused, out of mere brutish wantonness, to comply at once; but he presently did so, and followed Boynton to the parlor. Then, according to Boynton’s report, ensued a series of those events of which the believers in such mysteries fiercely assert the reality, and of which others as strenuously deny the occurrence. The sky darkened; there was a noise like the straining of the branches of the elms beside the house; but there was no wind, and the boughs were motionless. Presently this straining sound, as if the fibres were twisting and writhing together, was heard in the wood-work of the room. —

“What the hell is that?” cried the landlord. The room was full of it, whatever it was; every part of the wood-work — doors, window casings, cornice, wainscot — was now voluble with a muffled detonation.

“Wait!” Boynton answered. The sound beat like rain-drops on the floor, at which the landlord stared, with the dog whimpering at his heels. Egeria lay white and still in the rocking-chair by the window. At the sound of their voices she stirred and moaned; then, as Boynton asserted, they saw the marble top of the centre-table lifted three times from its place; a picture swung out from the wall, as if blown by a strong gust; and the brush from the table was flung across the room, flying close to the dog’s head; with a howl, he fled out-of-doors.

“For God’s sake, man, what is it?” gasped the landlord, seizing Boynton’s arm, and cowering close to him.

“I forgive you, I bless you!” cried the other, rapturously. “It was from your evil that this good came. It’s a miracle; it’s — it’s the presence of the dead.”

“No, no!” protested the landlord. “I’ve kept a hard place; there’s been drinkin’ and fancy folks; but there hain’t been no murder, — not in my time. I can’t answer for it before that; they always tell about killin’ peddlers in these old houses. Oh! Lord have mercy!” A flash of red light filled the world, and a rending burst of thunder made the house shake. The electricity appeared to rise from the ground, and not to come from the clouds; it was, as sometimes happens, a sole discharge. The landlord turned, and followed his dog out-of-doors. The negro was already there, looking up at the house.

Egeria started from her chair. “Did you will it, father, — did you will it?” she implored, at sight of Dr. Boynton’s wild face.

“No; it has come without motion of mine,” he answered with a solemn joy. “I have never seen or heard anything like it.” He looked round the room, in which an absolute silence now prevailed.

The girl shuddered. “I have had a horrible dream. The house seemed full of drunken men — and women — like that girl in the buggy; and we couldn’t get away, and you couldn’t get to me, and — oh!” She shook violently, and hurried on her hat and water-proof. “Come! I can’t breathe here.”

As they passed out the landlord made no motion to detain them; he even shrank a few paces aside. When Boynton looked back from the next turn of the road, he saw him walking to and fro before the tavern, looking up now and then at its front, and taking unconsciously the cold rain that lashed his own face as he turned eastward again. He was in a frame of high exultation; he shouted in talk with Egeria, who scarcely answered, as she pressed forward with her head down.

The snow dissolved under the rain and flooded the road, in which they waded, plunging on and on. They came presently to a lonely country graveyard, where the soaked pines and spruces dripped upon the stones, standing white and stiffly upright where they were of recent date, and where darkened with the storms of many seasons slanting in various degrees of obliquity to a fall. Here was one of those terrible little houses in which the hearse, the bier, and the sexton’s tools are kept; Boynton tried the door, and when it yielded to his battering he called to his daughter to take shelter with him there.

“No!” she shouted back to him, “I would rather die!” She pushed, she knew not whither, down the road that wound into a stretch of pine forest, and he must needs follow her. At last they came to a hollow through which a brook, swollen by the snow and rain, rolled a yellow torrent. They stopped at the brink in despair; there was no house in sight, but on a knoll near by the trees stood so thick that the rain-fall was broken by the densely interwoven boughs.

The doctor led Egeria to this shelter, and placed her in the dryest spot; he felt her shiver, and heard her teeth chatter, as the waves of cold swept over her. He left her fallen on the brown needles, and went and tried the depth of the stream with a stick; the rain dripped from him everywhere, — from his elbows, from the rim of his silk hat, and from the point of his nose; he looked at once weird and grotesque.

“Heh!” cried a loud voice behind him. In a covered wagon crouched the figure of a young man in manifold capes and wraps of drab and blue, under the sweep of a very wide-brimmed hat. He had almost driven over Boynton. “Tryin’ for water, with a hazel-rod? Guess you’ll find it most anywheres to-day.”

The voice was pleasant, and Boynton, looking up, confronted a cheery face in the wagon. “I was seeing if it was too deep to cross.”

“‘T ain’t for the horses,” said their driver. “Get in.” He moved hospitably to one side. “You can’t make me any wetter.”

“Thank you,” said Boynton. “I have my daughter here under the pines.”

“Your daughter?” The young man in the wagon looked at first puzzled, and then, as he craned his neck round the side of the curtain and saw the little cowering heap which was Egeria,’ he looked daunted, but he only said, “Bring her, too.”

Boynton gathered her into his arms, and placed her on the seat between him and the driver. “We were going to Vardley Station,” he explained. “Is this the way?”

“It’s one way,” said the other, driving through the torrent. “But I guess you better stop with us till the rain’s over. We’ll be home in half a mile.”

“You are very good,” said Boynton, looking at him. “We must push on. We must get back to the Junction in time for the Portland express.” He once more gave the facts of their mischance.

When he had ended, “Oh, yee,” said the other, “you are the friend that was speakin’ to some of our folks at the Junction.”

The doctor started. “Your folks? What are you?”

“Shakers.”

“Egeria! Egeria!” shouted her father. “I have found them! This gentleman is a Shaker! He is taking us to the community! I accept, sir, with great pleasure. I shall be glad to stop and see more of your people. Egeria!” She made no answer. Her limp and sunken figure rested heavily against the young Shaker; her head had fallen on his shoulder.

“I guess she’s fainted,” he said.

XII.

Egeria had not fainted, but she had lapsed into a torpor from which she could not rouse herself. She could not speak or make any sign when her father drew her head away from the young man’s shoulder and laid it on his own. The Shaker chirped his reeking horses into a livelier pace, and when he reached the office in the village he sprang from the wagon with more alertness than could have been imagined of him, and ran in-doors to announce his guests.

Brother Humphrey and the three office sisters, (In placing some passages of his story among the Shakers of an easily recognizable locality, the author has avoided the study of personal traits, and he wishes explicitly to state that his Shakers are imaginary in everything but their truth, charity, and purity of life, and that scarcely less lovable quaintness to which no realism could do perfect justice.) very clean and very dry, with the warm smell of a stove fire exhaling from their comfortable garments, received him with countenances in which resignation blended with the natural reluctance of people within to have anything to do with people without, in such weather.

“Oh, better put them in the tramps’ house,” said Brother Humphrey,—” there’s a fire there.”

“Yee,” consented one of the sisters, “they will do very well there.”

“They would slop everything up here,” said another, “and we’ve just been over our floors, Laban.”

The third was silent, but she wrung her hands in nervous anxiety, like one who would not be selfish, and yet would like whatever advantage. may come of selfishness.

“Nay,” said Laban, “they ‘re not tramps. They ‘re the folks that Joseph and Elihu told about meetin’ yesterday. I don’t know as you’d ought to put them with the tramps. I guess the young woman’s in a faint.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say so, to begin with, Laban?” lamented that one of the sisters who had not yet spoken. “Of course she’s sick, and here we’ve been standin’ and troublin’ about our clean floors, and lettin’ her suffer. I don’t see how I can bear it.”

“Oh, you’ll be over it by fall, Frances,” answered Laban, jocosely. Humphrey caught up a cotton umbrella, vast enough for community use, and weather-worn to a Shaker drab, and sallied out to the gate. The doctor and Laban got their benumbed burden from the wagon between them, and carried Egeria into the house, where they were met with remorseful welcome by the sisters. They dispatched Brother Humphrey to kindle a fire in the stove of the upper chamber, reserved for guests, and into its sweet, fresh cleanliness Frances presently helped Egeria, and then helped her into bed, while the others went to make her a cup of tea.

Her father, meanwhile, had taken off his wet clothes, and arrayed himself in a suit belonging to one of the brethren, a much taller and a thinner man than Boynton, who made a Shaker of novel and striking pattern in his dress. But he beheld his appearance in the glass, which meagrely ministered to the vanity of the office guests, with uncommon content, as a token that he had already entered upon a new and final stage of investigation; and when his tongue had been loosed by the cup of tea brought to him in the office parlor, he regarded his surroundings with as great satisfaction. This room was carpeted, but it was like the rest of the house in its simple white walls and its plain finish of wood painted a warm brown; there were braided rugs scattered about before the stove and the large chairs, as there were at the foot of the stair-ways, and at the bedsides in the chambers above. Dr. Boynton, stirring his tea, walked out into the low, long hall, bare but not cheerless, and traversed it to look into the room on the other side; then he returned to the parlor, and glanced at the books and pamphlets on the table, — historical and doctrinal works relating to Shakerism, periodicals devoted to various social and hygienic reforms, and controversial tracts upon points in dispute between the community and the world; there were several weekly newspapers, and Boynton was turning over one of them with the hand that had momentarily relinquished his teaspoon when Brother Humphrey rejoined him.

“If we could have at all helped ourselves,” he began promptly, “I should consider our intrusion upon you most unwarrantable; but we had no will in the matter.”

“Nay,” replied the Shaker, “it’s no intrusion. This is not a family house. We call it the Office, for we do our business and receive friends from the world outside here.”

“Do you mean that you keep a house of entertainment?”

“Our rule forbids us to turn any one away. Of late years, the wayfaring poor have increased so much that we have appointed a small house especially for them; but we cannot put everybody there.”

“I thank you,” said Boynton.

“It is not a hotel,” continued Humphrey, “for we make out no bills. All are welcome to what we can do; those who can pay may pay.”

“I shall wish to pay, as soon as we can recover our effects,” Boynton interposed.

“Nay, I did not mean that,” quietly rejoined the Shaker. “You are welcome, whether you pay or not.”

Boynton turned from these civilities. “I am glad to find myself here. I met two of your number yesterday, and had some conversation with them on a subject that vitally interests me.”

“Yee, I heard,” said the Shaker. “You are spiritualists. Are you the medium?”

“My daughter is a medium, — a medium of extraordinary powers, which I dare not say I have developed, but to which I have humbly ministered; powers that within the last hour have received testimony of the most impressive and final nature.” Brother Humphrey made no outward sign of any inward movement that Boynton’s words might have produced, and the latter suddenly demanded, “Are you a spiritualist?”

“Yee,” answered the Shaker, “we are all spiritualists.”

“Then you will be interested — you will all be interested intensely — in the communication which I shall have to make to your community. I wish you to call a meeting of your people, before whom I desire to lay some facts of the most astounding character, and to whom I wish to propose myself for admission to your community, in order to the pursuance of investigations profoundly interesting to the race.”

He paused, full of repressed excitement; but Brother Humphrey was not moved. “There will be a family meeting to-morrow night,” he began.

“To-morrow night!” cried Boynton. “Is it possible that you are so indifferent to phenomena that ought to be instantly telegraphed from Maine to California? That” —

“We have heard a good deal of the doings with the spirits in the world outside,” interrupted the Shaker, in his turn, “and we know how often folks are deceived in them and in themselves. If something new and important has happened to you, I — guess it’ll keep for twenty-four hours.” Brother Humphrey smiled quaintly, and seemed to expect his guest to take this common-sense view of the matter.

“Oh, it will keep!” exclaimed the doctor. “But so would the thunder from Sinai have kept!” He plunged into a vivid and rapid narration of the events of his captivity and release at the tavern.

When he paused, the Shaker replied with unperturbed calm: “These are things to be judged of by the family. I cannot say anything about them.”

“Is it possible?” demanded Boynton, in a tone of indescribable disappointment. He seemed hurt and puzzled. After a while he said, “I submit. Could you let me have writing materials to take to my room? I wish to make some notes.”

“Yee,” said Humphrey.

Boynton went to his room, which was across a passage-way from that where one of the sisters was still busy with Egeria, and he did not reappear till dinner, which was served him in the basement of the office, in a dining-room made snug with a stove-fire. As Boynton unfolded his napkin, “What are your tenets?” he abruptly demanded of the sister who came to wait upon him.

“Tenets?” faltered Rebecca.

“Your doctrine, your religious creed.”

“We have no creed,” replied the sister.

“Well, then, you have a life. What is your life?”

“We try to live the angelic life,” said Rebecca, with some embarrassment: “to do as we would be done by; to return good for evil; to put down selfishness in our hearts.”

“Good, very good! There could be no better basis. But as a society, a community, what is your central idea?”

“I don’t know. We neither marry nor give in marriage.”

“Yes, yes! That is what I thought. That was my impression. I fully approve of your system. It is the only foundation on which a community can rest. And to keep up your numbers you depend upon converts from the world?”

“Yee.”

“But you bring up children whom you adopt?”

“Yee.”

“Do they remain with you?”

“We have better luck with those who are gathered in after middle life. The young folks — we are apt to lose them,” said the Shakeress, a little sadly.

“I see, I see!” returned Boynton. “You cannot fight nature unassisted by experience. Life must teach them something first. They fall in love with each other?”

“They are apt to get foolish,” the sister assented. “And then they run off together. That is what hurts us. They no need to. If they would come and tell us” —

Boynton shook his head. “Impossible! But you have the true principle. Celibacy is the only hope of communism, — of advanced truth.” He ceased to question her as abruptly as he began; but after he had dispatched his dinner, he asked leave to borrow from the parlor a work on Shakerism which he had noticed there, and he again shut himself up in his room. That evening they heard him restlessly walking the floor.

The sister who visited Egeria last had stood a moment, shading her lamp with her hand and looking down on the girl’s beauty. Her yellow hair strayed loosely out over the pillow; her lips were red and her cheeks flushed. The sister’s tresses had been shorn away as for the grave thirty years before, and her face had that unearthly pallor which the Shaker sisters share with nuns of all orders. She stooped and kissed Egeria’s hot cheek, and then went down to the office sitting-room to report her impressions to the other sisters before they slept.

“It appears as if her father didn’t want to go to bed,” said Sister Diantha, after a moment’s quiet, in which the doctor’s regular tread on the floor overhead made itself audible.

“If he’s got anything on his mind,” said Sister Rebecca, “it ain’t his daughter.”

“Yee, Rebecca,” said Sister Frances, “you’re right, there. I told him I thought she was going to have a fit of sickness, but he said it wa’n’t anything but exhaustion, and ‘t he’d see after her; ‘t he was a doctor himself. To my knowledge he hain’t been near her since. I think she’s goin’ to have a fit of sickness.”

Brother Humphrey came in from the next room and stood by the stove. “How did you leave her, Frances?” he asked.

“Well, I think she’s goin’ to have a fit of sickness,” repeated Frances.

“Well, I don’t know’s you’d have much to say agin that, would you?” returned the brother, after a general pause. “You hain’t had a good fit of sickness on hand for quite a spell.”

The other sisters laughed. “Set down, Humphrey,” said Diantha, putting him a chair. The manner of these elderly women with Humphrey was of a truly affectionate and sisterly simplicity, to which he responded with brotherly frankness.

“I guess she ain’t goin’ to be very sick,” resumed Humphrey, making himself easy in his chair. “Any way, we’ve got a doctor to prescribe for her.”

“What do you think of him, Humphrey?” asked Rebecca.

“Pretty glib,” said Humphrey.

“I don’t know as I ever heard better language,” suggested Frances.

“Oh, his language is good enough,” said Humphrey.

“It’s quite a convert Laban’s brought us,” observed Diantha. “Talk of winter Shakers!” she continued, referring to that frequent sort of convert whose Shakerism begins and ends with cold weather.

“I hain’t seen any one so ready to be gathered in for a long time.”

“Yee, too ready,” said Humphrey, soberly. “That kind ain’t apt to stay gathered in; and I’m about tired havin’ the family fill mouths for a month or two, and afterwards revilin’s proceed out of ‘em.”

“We must receive all, and try all,” interposed Frances, gently.

“Yee,” sighed Humphrey.

“What do you say to his story?” asked Diantha.

“I don’t judge it,” said the brother. “We know that spirits do communicate with men, and miracles happen every day. As to the doin’s at the Elm Tahvern, Harris might tell a different story.”

“I shouldn’t believe any story Harris told,” said Frances.

Humphrey smiled. “Well, I don’t know as I should, come to look at it,” he admitted.

“I wish that nest could be broken up,” said Rebecca. “It’s a cross.”

“Yee, it’s a cross,” answered Humphrey. “I most drove over a man, dead drunk, in the road yesterday, comin’ down into the woods, after I passed the tahvern; and nearly all the tramps that come now smell of rum. The off’cers don’t seem to do anything.”

“Oh, the off’cers!” cried Diantha.

The walking had continued regularly overhead; but now, after some hesitation, the steps approached the door, which was heard to open, and they crossed the hall to Egeria’s room. From thence, after a brief interval, they descended the stairs, and Dr. Boynton, lamp in hand, entered the room. The sisters rose in expectation.

“I find my daughter in a fever,” said Boynton, with an absent air. “What medicines have you in the house?”

“We have our herbs,” answered Sister Frances. “They may be the best thing,” said Boynton, with the same abstraction, as if he were thinking of something else at the same time. He stood and waited amid a general silence, till Sister Frances, who had gone out, reappeared with some neat packages of the medicinal herbs which the Shakers put up. He chose one, and asked for some water in a tin dish in which to steep it on the stove.

“Let me do it for you,” pleaded Sister Frances. The other sisters joined in an entreaty to be allowed to sit up with the sick girl.

“No,” said Boynton. “I have always taken care of her, and to-night at least I will watch with her. I couldn’t sleep if I went to bed, but I shall make myself easy in an arm-chair, if you’ll give me one.” Humphrey went to fetch the chair, and as he passed the door, on his way up-stairs with it, Boynton called out to him, “Thanks! If her fever increases,” he continued to the sisters, “she will wake at eleven, and then I shall give her this. I shall need nothing more. Good-night.”

He went out, and Sister Frances said, with perhaps some sense of penalty in this loss of opportunity for nursing the girl through the night, “I feel to say that I was hasty in judgin’ on him.”

“Yee,” said the others. “We judged him hastily.”

“We were too swift to blame,” said Humphrey, who now returned. “Let us remember it the next time.”

“But,” added Sister Frances, “I knew she was goin’ to have a fit of sickness.”

The sisters took each a kerosene hand-lamp, and passed up the bare, clean halls to their chambers. The brother went about trying the fastenings of the windows and the locks of the outer doors. The time had been, before the time of tramps, when he never turned a key at night.

In the morning Sister Frances made an early visit to Egeria’s room, and found the girl and her father both awake. She was without fever now, but she lay white and still in her bed, and her father stood looking at her unhopefully.

Sister Frances went down to the kitchen, where the other sisters were already busy getting Boynton’s breakfast. “It’s goin’ to be a fit of sickness,” she said.

“Then she had best go to the sick-house,” said Diantha.

“Yee,” added Rebecca, at a look of protest from Frances, “that’s what it’s for, and she can be better done for there. It’s noisy here.”

She urged that it was noisy when they spoke, later, of Egeria’s removal to Boynton, who owned that he could not now say she would not be sick: it was the belief of the office sisters that they lived in the midst of excitement.

The day had broken clear, and the New England spring was showing herself in one of her moods of conscientious adherence to duty: she would perform her part with sunshine and birds, but she breathed cold across the brilliant landscape, and she warned vegetation that it started at its own risk. The Shaker village had awakened to its round of labors and self-denials as quietly as if it had not awakened at all. Some of the elderly men, with the boys and the hired hands, were at work with the cattle in the great barns; some were raking together the last year’s decay in the garden into heaps for burning; some were busy in the workshops. The women went about their wonted cares in-doors, and there was no sign of interest in the arrival of guests at the office. Perhaps their presence had not been generally talked over in the family, but had been held in reserve for formal discussion at the meeting in the evening. The office sisters consulted with the eldress in the family house opposite in reference to Egeria’s removal, and the infirmary was made ready for her. It was aired, the damp was driven out by a hot fire in the stove, and Sister Frances strove to set its order still more in order; a little fluff under the bed or a spot upon the floor would have been a comfort to her; but everything was blamelessly, hopelessly neat. It was not quite regular for her to take an interest in things outside of the office, but she had been suffered to do so much in consideration of her affliction at haying a fit of sickness snatched from her care, as it were, and she was allowed a controlling voice in deciding upon the doctor’s request to have a bed put up for him in the infirmary. Such a thing was hitherto unknown; it was an invasion of family bounds by the world outside; but it stood to reason that the girl’s father had a double claim to be as near to her as possible, and after some conscientious difficulty his request was granted.

While they were making ready for her, Brother Elihu came to see him at the office, and gave him a sort of conditional welcome. He seemed to be a person of weight in the community, and after his brief visit Boynton perceived that his standing was more strictly probationary than before. There was no want of kindness in Elihu’s manner; he made several thoughtful suggestions for the welfare and convenience of the Boyntons; but he had shown no eagerness for the statement which the doctor wished to make to the community, nor for his ideas upon the development of spiritistic science. The statement, he said, could be made that evening, or at the next family meeting; it did not matter; there was no haste. “Spiritualism arose among us; our faith is based upon the fact of an uninterrupted revelation; the very songs we sing in our meetings were communicated to us, words and music, from the other world. We have seen much perversion of spiritualism in the world outside, - - much error, much folly, much filth. If you have new light, it will not suddenly be quenched. Rest here a while. Our first care must be for the young woman.”

“Yes, yes!” assented Boynton restively.

The office brothers and sisters had listened to Elihu with evident abeyance; only Sister Frances, by looks and tones, expressed herself unchanged to Boynton. As the time drew on toward evening, and Egeria seemed to need constant watchfulness, she offered to take his place at the infirmary, and to let him know if he was needed at any time during the meeting. This made it easy for him to go, and Sister Frances established herself in attendance upon the sick girl. She was not afterwards dislodged from her place in the infirmary. There were nurses whose duty it was to care for the sick, but Frances clung to her patient, not in defiance, but in a soft, elastic tenderness which served her as well.

Dr. Boynton went to the family meeting, and remained profoundly attentive to the services with which the speaking was preceded. He saw the sisters seated on one side of the large meeting-room, and the brothers on the other, with broad napkins half unfolded across their knees, on which they softly beat time, with rising and falling palms, as they sang. The sisters, young and old, all looked of the same age, with their throats strictly hid by the collars that came to their chins, and their close-cropped hair covered by stiff wire-framed caps of white gauze; there was greater visible disparity among the brothers, but their heads were mostly gray, though a few were still dark with youth or middle life; on either side there was a bench full of sedate children.

When the singing was ended, the minister read a chapter of the Bible, and one of the elders prayed. Then a sister began a hymn, in which all the family joined. At its close, a young girl rose and described a vision which she had seen the night before in a dream. When she sat down, the elders and eldresses came out into the vacant space between the rows of men and women, and, forming themselves into an ellipse, waved their hands up and down with a slow, rhythmic motion, and rocked back and forth on their feet. Then the others, who had risen with them, followed in a line round this group, with a quick, springing tread, and a like motion of the hands and arms, while they sang together the thrilling march which the others had struck up. They halted at the end of the hymn, and let their arms sink slowly to their sides; a number of them took the places of those in the midst, and the circling dance was resumed, ceasing, and then beginning again, till all had taken part in both centre and periphery; the lamps quivering on the walls, and the elastic floor, laid like that of a ball-room, responding to the tread of the dancers. When they went back to their seats, one woman remained standing, and began to prophesy in tongues.

A solemn silence followed upon her ceasing, and then Brother Elihu rose, and said briefly that a friend from the world outside had a statement to make to the family, in the belief that he had arrived at central truths relating to spiritualism. He claimed to have been operating in a certain direction, with results as striking as they were unexpected. Elihu reminded them that as Shakers they had not been able to maintain a cordial sympathy with spiritualists in the world outside, who had too often abused to love of gain and the gratification of their pride and vanity the principle of spiritual communion originally revealed to Shakers. Yet they could not in reason refuse to hear the statement of this friend, who had, as it were, been providentially cast in their way, and who was apparently not moved by considerations of personal glory and profit, but who, from all he said, had the wish to remand the science into the keeping of Shakers, and to pursue his own investigations under their auspices. Elihu spoke with neatness and point; he added some cautionary phrases against too hasty judgment of the facts about to be offered them, and warned them to beware of self-deception and the illusions arising from love of the marvelous, whether in their own hearts or the hearts of others.

Boynton could scarcely wait for him to have done. “I thank the brother,” he said, in rising, “for admonishing us to beware of self-deception; it is an evil which in an inquiry like this would prove fatal, — which does prove fatal wherever it mingles with religious impulse; it poisons, it palsies, religious impulse. I have always guarded against it with anxious care, and, though sometimes abused by the deceit of others, I have at least no cause to accuse myself of want of vigilance concerning my own impressions. I regarded with skeptical scrutiny the first developments of spiritualism. I had been bred in the strictest sect of the Calvinists, from which I had revolted to the opposite extreme of infidelity; I was a materialist, believing in nothing that I could not see, hear, touch, or taste. I rejected the notion of a Supreme Being; I derided the hypothesis of immortality. The interest which I had taken in mesmerism only intensified my contempt for the whole order of miracles, in all ages. I saw the effect of mind upon mind, of mind upon matter; but I saw that it was always the effect of earthly intellect upon earthly substance. I accounted even for the wonders performed by Christ and the Apostles by mesmerism, acting now upon the subjects of their cures and resuscitations, and now upon the imaginations of the spectators.

“When the new phenomena were forced upon my attention by their prevalence in so many widely separated places, under so many widely differing conditions, I began to study them as the effect of mind upon inanimate matter. I did not suffer myself to suppose a spiritual origin for these phenomena, for I would not suppose spirits. I imported into this fresh field of research the strict and hard methods with which I had wrought in the old.

“My wife died during the infancy of the daughter who is here with me now, the involuntary guest of your hospitality, and her death was attended by occurrences of a nature so intangible, so mysterious, so sacred, that I do not know how to shape them in words, but regarding which I may safely appeal to your own spiritual experience. In the moment of her passing I was aware of something, as of an incorporeal presence, a disembodied life, and in that moment I believed! I accepted the heritage which she had bequeathed me with her breath, and I dedicated the child to the study of truth under the new light I had received.

“That child has been my mesmeric subject almost from her birth, and all my endeavors have latterly been to her development as a medium of communication with the other world. She was naturally a child of gay and sunny temperament, loving the sports of children, and fond of simple, earthly pleasures. She showed great aptness for study, — she liked books and school; and the ordinary observer would have pronounced her a hopeless subject for psychological experiment. But I argued that if spirit was truly immortal it was immutable, and that a nature like hers, warm, happy, and loving, would have the same attraction for persons in one world as in another. The event proved that I was not mistaken; from the first, disembodied spirits showed a remarkable affinity for hers, and the demonstrations, though inarticulate and indefinite, were of the most unusual order. They frightened and disturbed her, and she did all that she could to escape from them. At different times, indeed, she effectually rebelled against my influence; and she was abetted in these periods of revolt by those who, after myself, were nearest and dearest to her. But in the end my influence always triumphed, for she loved me with the tender affection which her mother seemed to impart to her with the gift of her own life. I never appealed to this affection in vain, and I have seen her change from a creature of robust, terrestrial tendencies to a being of moods almost as ethereal as those of the spirits with which it has been my struggle to associate her.

“Her health has not always borne the strain well, and but for my own sustaining strength it must have given way completely. The conditions amidst which we lived were all unfavorable. I will not enter upon the long story of my own misfortunes. By the insidious operation of the prevailing bigotry, public confidence in me was undermined; I lost my practice; I was reduced to dependence upon her kindred, who were the bitterest of my antagonists, and who resisted by every means in their power my purpose of taking her away from them, and attempting her development in other circumstances. But I prevailed, as I always prevailed when I made a final appeal to her affection. We came away, and entered upon the career, distasteful to us both, of public exhibitors. At first we met with great success in the small places which we visited, and I was induced to try our experiment in Boston. Here, too, we made a good impression; but almost at the outset, We encountered an influence, an enmity, embodied in a certain individual, against which we were almost powerless. To this antagonism was added the paralyzing effect of fraud on the part of a medium who assisted at our principal séance.

“I saw, upon reflection, that we could not hope to succeed in the atmosphere of a mercenary, professional mediumism; and I determined to retire again to our village, and lay once more, however painfully and slowly, the foundations of our experiment. I dreamed of forming about me a community of kindred spirits, in which our work should be done unhindered by the selfish hope of gain, and I armed myself with patience for years of trial and discouragement.

“Brother Elihu will tell you how chance brought us together in the depot at Boston, and again at Ayer Junction; and I will not detain you with the history of the seeming disasters which have ended in our presence among the only people who have conceived of spiritism as a science, and practiced it as a religion. The mistake of a train going southward for a train going northward made us houseless and penniless wanderers; the cruel rapacity of a ruffian crowned our sufferings with a triumph surpassing my wildest hopes.”

Dr. Boynton entered upon a circumstantial account of the strange occurrences at the Elm Tavern, and painted every detail with a vividness which had its effect upon his hearers. At the close, one of the sisters struck into a rapturous hymn, in which the others joined. He remained standing while they sang, and when their voices died away he continued in a low and grave tone: —

“What I wish now is simply to be received among you without prejudice, and to be allowed to carry out my plan with the powerful help of your sympathetic and intelligent sphere. I do not ask to be received out of charity: I am a physician, and I offer you my professional services at need; I have strong arms, and I am willing to work in your shops and your fields. But I feel myself here in presence of the right conditions, and I would make any sacrifice, short of the sacrifice of selfrespect, to continue here. I am intensely disappointed that neither my investigations nor my usefulness to you can begin at once. My daughter, as you know, lies sick in your infirmary, and my first, my whole duty is to her. As soon as she is well again, you shall have my labor, and the world shall have my truth.”

He sat down. One of the elders rose, and, coming forward, said, “The thanks of the family are due to the friend for what he has spoken. The meeting is dismissed.”

The brothers and sisters dispersed to their dwelling-houses, and Boynton walked alone to the infirmary. He found Sister Frances with his daughter, who was wakeful and in a high fever.

XIII.

HER father watched over Egeria in her sickness with the mechanical skillfulness and the mental abstraction which the office sisters had seen in his treatment of her case from the first. He was at her bedside night and day while the danger lasted; he prepared the medicines himself and administered them with his own hand, and he waited their effect from hour to hour, almost from moment to moment, with anxious scrutiny. At the same time a second and more inward self in him remained at immeasurable remoteness. “I never see such doctorin’ or such nursin’,” said Sister Frances, in her daily report at the office; “but it don’t seem, somehow, as if he did it for her. I should say — and perhaps I should say more ‘n I ought if I did say it— ‘t he wanted her to get well, but ‘t he didn’t want her to get well on her own account; well, not in the first place. And still he’s just as kind and good! Well, it’s perplexin’.”

“I can’t see,” said Rebecca, carefully, “as we’ve got any call to judge him, as long as he does his duty by her.”

“That’s just where it is, Rebecca,” answered Frances. “It does seem as if there was somethin’ better than duty in this world. I d’ know as there is, nor what it is; but it does seem as if there might be.”

Boynton’s efforts were bent not only to Egeria’s escape from danger, but to her immunity from suffering, so far as he could avert it; and to this end he often used his mesmeric power with what appeared good effect. The rending headache yielded to the mystical passes made above her throbbing temples, or over her eyes that trembled with the hot pain; or perhaps it was only the touch of the physician’s wise fingers that soothed them, and brought her the deep, strange sleep. But after the crisis of the fever, and when the convalescence began, the influence, whatever it was, ceased to relieve. It fretted instead of strengthening the girl in her climb up toward health, as her father was quick to perceive. He desisted, and he did not talk with her of the schemes and hopes that preoccupied him. He scarcely talked of them at all, though now and then, when he met Elihu, it was clear that he had not relinquished them in the slightest measure. The Shaker wondered at the self-control with which he cast them into such complete abeyance, and could not forbear suggesting at one of their encounters, “Your daughter’s sickness is quite a little cross to your patience, Friend Boynton.”

“Yes, yes,” returned the other, intensely; “but it is not the first time I have had to use patience. The end is worth waiting for, and, as Humphrey said when we first talked of it, the end can wait for us; the truth will keep. I am sure of the result. But nothing can be done till she is perfectly well again.”

“Yee,” said Elihu; a the young woman’s welfare is more precious than any proof she could give us of the existence of spirits. We know that they exist already.”

They did not speak of Boynton’s union with the family; that question shared the suspense in which the great problem, to the solution of which Shakerism had been only a means in his mind, was left. But he had taken his place in the community like one of them. There were reasons in the condition of the only suit of clothing which he brought from the world outside why he should continue to dress in the Shaker garb; but it is probable that he would have preferred to wear it, even if the skill of the family tailoress could have rehabilitated the wreck of his secular raiment; and he was faithful in his attendance at all the religious meetings, both those held in the family-house and those opened to the public, with the advancing spring, in the meeting-house. He did not take an active part in the worship. Once, when asked to speak, he said briefly that for the present he had nothing to add to his first statement; and during the marching and singing he sat quietly in a corner, opposite a sister on the women’s side, whose extreme stoutness had long excused her from dancing before the Lord. In the mean time he had treated several slight cases of sickness which occurred in the family; and he had drawn all the teeth in the head of a young sister much tormented with toothache, and long emulous of the immunity enjoyed by most of the other sisters through their full sets of artificial teeth. He had also, in his moments of disoccupation, and during his watches beside Egeria, made a profound study of the history and doctrine of Shakerism; and he grew into general liking with the family at large, whose knowledge of his devotion to his daughter did not search motive so jealously or fantastically as that of Sister Frances, and who thought him a marvel of vigilance and skill.

April had passed, and May had worn away to its last weeks before the girl could sit up in an easy-chair, and with pillowed head look out on the landscape. Sometimes, after the favorable change in her fever began, she had asked, in the mellowing afternoons, to have her window opened to let in the rich, pungent odors of the burning refuse of the gardens, — the last year’s withered vines and stalks, which the boys had raked into large piles, and fired in the field below the infirmary. She could hear, from where she lay, the snap and crackle of the flames; and once, when Sister Frances returned after a moment in which she had left the sick girl alone, she found that Egeria had dragged herself across the bed to where she could see the fire, upon which she was gloating with rapture. Frances spoke to her; she replaced her pillow, and after a long look at the Shakeress she broke into tears. The watchers with her in these early days of her convalescence always found her awake at dawn, when the robins and orioles and sparrows were weaving that fabric of song which seems to rise everywhere from the earth to the low-hovering heaven.

“It’s like the singin’ of spirits, ain’t it?” said one of the sisters who saw the transport with which she silently listened, her large eyes wide and her lips open.

“No!” cried the girl, almost fiercely. “It’s like the singing of the birds at home.”

“Seemed as if she hated the spirits, as you might say,” the Shakeress commented to the office sisters. It was the first time that any of them had heard Egeria mention her former home, for even in the fever her ravings had been of experiences in Boston unintelligible to them. But they had all noted the passion with which, when her recovery began, she turned to the natural world. She asked for the wild flowers, and day by day demanded if it were not yet time for the anemones, the columbines, the dog-tooth violets. If the spring lingered, or at times turned backward, nothing could rouse her from the dejection into which she fell, till the sun began to shine and the birds began to sing again. It was felt in the family to be foolish, or worse, but none of the Shakers could come home through field or wood without staying to pluck some token of the season’s advance for the sick girl, who was longing so restlessly to go out and find the summer for herself. Her bed was decked with boughs of wilding bloom; on the shelves and window-sills the sylvan and campestral flowers gave their delicate colors and faint fragrances in whatever prim jug or sober vase the community could spare from its service. Something, surely, must be wrong about all this ministering to a love that might be said to savor of earthly vanities, but the most anxious of the nunlike sisters could not determine upon the sin; and while they wondered in just what sort they should deal with the elusive evil, a visiting brother from another community arrived to pronounce it no evil, but an instinct, wholesome as the harmless things themselves. Upon this, one of them brought and laid at Egeria’s bedside a rug which she had worked with the pattern of a grape-vine, and which for five years she had kept fearfully hidden away in her closet, from compunction for its likeness to a graven image.

Egeria first went out on the 20th of May, that signal date when the spring, whatever her previous reluctances, brings up all arrears with the apple-blossoms. The season is then no longer late or early, but is the consummate spring; and all weather-wise hopes and fears are lost in the richness with which she keeps the promise of her name. It might well have seemed to the girl’s impatience as she watched the orchard trees, sometimes from her closed window and sometimes from her open door, as the day was chill or soft, that the blossoms would never come; and even when every tip of the mossed and twisted boughs was lit with the pink glimmer of a bud, and the trees’ whole round was suffused with a tender flush of color, that the delicate petals of rose and snow would never unfold. The orioles and the bobolinks sang from the airy tops, and from the clover in the grassy alleys between the trees; in a neighboring field the oats were already high enough to brighten and darken in the wind. The canes of the blackberries and raspberries in the garden were tufted with dark green, and beyond the broad leaves of the pie-plant and the neat lines of sprouting peas, the grapevines on Elder Joseph’s trellis were set thick with short, velvety leaves of pinkish-olive, when suddenly, in a warm night, the delaying buds unfolded, and in the morning the apple-blossoms had come.

“I am going out under them,” the girl said, when she saw them, and she set a resolute face against the fond anxieties of Sister Frances. Her father came and approved her wish.

“It won’t hurt her; it will do her good,” he said, with that somewhat propitiatory acquiescence with which he now indulged his daughter’s whims. So, when the morning was well warmed through, as Sister Frances said, they spread some sad-colored wraps on the grass in the orchard, where the mingled wind and sun could reach her through the screen of blossoms. She walked a little tremulously, clinging to her father’s arm, but a light of perfect happiness played over her faintly flushing face as she sank upon the couch. From where she lounged she could look across the gardened intervale, declining from the street on which the hamlet was built, to the elms and sycamores that fringed the river-course, and beyond to other uplands, where the gray farmsteads dimly showed among the fields, and the white houses of villages clustered and sparkled in the sun. An unspeakable serenity filled the scene; and round her the little Shaker town was a part of the wide peace. There was seldom a passer on the sandy thoroughfare, now printed with the delicate shadows of the new maple leaves, and the stillness was unbroken by any sound of human life. The Shakers and their hired men were at work in the gardens and the fields, but they worked quietly; and the shops in which there was once the clinking of hammers on lap-stone and anvil had been hushed long ago by the cheaper industries of the world outside.

At the doors of the great family houses of brick a Shaker sister in strict drab and deep bonnet from time to time issued or entered silently. Nothing but the cat-bird twanging in the elder-bushes, and the bobolinks climbing in the sunlit air, to reel and slide down, gurgling and laughing, to the clover tufts from which they rose, broke upon the mellow diapason of the bees in the apple-blossoms overhead. Where she lay, propped on her arm, with her father seated beside her, some of the brothers and sisters came out of their way from time to time, to welcome her out-doors, and to warn her not to stay too long. Some rumor of her longing to be in the weather, and of her passion for the blossoms and the birds amongst which she was blessed at last, had penetrated the whole community, and many who did not come to speak to her looked out unseen from their windows upon her happiness, which they might have found somewhat too earthly, in spite of the ideas lately promulgated by the visiting brother. With her blue eyes dreamily untroubled, she looked like some sylvan creature, a part of the young terrestrial life that shone and sang and bloomed around her; while flashes of light and color momently repaired the waste that sickness had made in her beauty. A sense of her exquisite harmony with the great natural frame of things may have penetrated the well-defended consciousness of Elder Joseph, as he paused near her, on his way home to dinner; but if it did, it failed to grieve him. He looked indulgently down at her; by an obscure impulse he gathered some of the richest sprays from the branches at hand, and dropped them into her lap.

“It seems right,” he said, “to be getting well in the spring, when everything is taking a fresh start. I like to see the young woman looking so happy.”

He addressed the doctor as well as Egeria, but it was she who answered.

“Yes; it wouldn’t seem the same thing if it were fall. If it had been fall, I should not have got well; I should not have cared to get well.”

“Nay,” replied the Shaker; “if it is for us to choose, we are to choose to get well at all times.”

“I mean,” said the girl, “that I could not have chosen.”

“You can’t tell,” observed her father. “Most fevers are autumnal, and convalescents are braced up by the approach of cold weather.”

“Yes,” she rejoined, “but now I seem to be stronger because my getting well is part of the spring.”

“Our sympathetic relations with nature are subtle and strong,” consented Boynton. “No one can tell just how much influence they have over our physical condition.”

Egeria silently gazed upon the prospect. “It’s sightly, isn’t it?” asked the Shaker. “I have looked at it, now, for fifty spring-times, and it is as pretty as when it was first revealed to me.” Boynton started, and repeated, “Revealed?”

“Oh, yee,” returned the elder, “I first saw this place in a vision. It was when I was a young man, and several years before I was gathered in from the world outside. When I came here, I remembered the place and the persons I had seen in my vision, and I knew them all. Then I knew that it was meant, and I stayed.”

“Is it possible!” cried Boynton. “That was very extraordinary. Have you had other psychological experiences?”

“Nay,” said Brother Joseph, briefly.

“But they are common among you?” pursued Boynton.

“Oh, yee, we have all had some such intimations.

Have you never read Elder Evans’s account of his dealings with the supernatural?”

“No, never!” cried Boynton, with intensifying interest.

“I will lend you the book. He tells some strange things. But we do not follow up such experiences. They serve their purpose, and that is enough. We try to live the angelic life. That will bring what is good in the supernatural to us, and we need not go to it.”

“I think you make a mistake!” said Boynton, promptly. “These intimations are given expressly to invite pursuit. That is what miracles are for.”

“Nay,” returned the Shaker. “They are no miracles, if you follow them up to see them a second time. We must beware how we make the supernatural a commonplace. None of the disciples knew exactly who Christ was till he was taken from them; and he has only appeared since to one Doubter out of all the millions that have longed to believe on him. There is something in that. The other world cannot come twice to prove itself. Once is enough in miracles.”

“Then you disapprove of spiritistic research?” demanded Boynton. “You condemn the desire to develop the dim hints of immortality which we all think we have received into certain and absolute demonstration?”

“Nay, I do not condemn any earnest striving for the truth, under proper conditions.”

“I hope to find those conditions among you,” Boynton hastened to say.

“We shall be happy to afford them,” said the Shaker, smoothly, “if we can agree upon what they are. But it is right to say that we consider Shakerism the end and not the means of spiritualism.” He passed on down the orchard aisle, the sunlight falling upon his quaint figure through the apple-blossoms.

Boynton’s eyes followed him, but it was some time before he spoke. “After all,” he said, as if musing aloud, “he is not one of the controlling forces of the community.” He spoke with a certain effect of arming himself against opposition. “You had better come in, now, Egeria. It won’t do for you to take cold.”

“Yes, pretty soon. I don’t wonder that they think they ‘re living the angelic life.”

“Why?” asked her father, sharply.

“It’s like a heaven upon earth, here.”

This vexed her father. “Yes, like heaven now, with the apples in bloom and the birds singing. But how much like heaven would it be with three feet of snow where you are lying?”

“Yes, let us go in. I had better not stay too long.” She rose as if saddened by his words, and suffered herself to be helped back to the infirmary.

“The Swedenborgians,” said her father, in reparation, “believe that in the other world winter is absorbed into the other seasons, and that the whole year is a sort of spring-time.”

“All!” breathed the girl. “But I didn’t mean spring. I should want the whole year to be summer, and I should want it to be in this world. I should like a heaven upon earth.”

Her father looked closely at her. “This materialistic tendency is a trait of your convalescence. People are never so earthly as when they are recovering from a dangerous sickness. There is a kind of revolt from the world whose borders they have touched, — a rebound. The senses are riotous to try their strength again.” He said these things as if accounting to himself for a fact, rather than explaining her condition to Egeria.

“Well, we have a right to our life here!” she cried, passionately. “Let the other world keep to itself!”

He did not answer her directly, and at other times he avoided encounter with anything like opposition in her. She would not stay in-doors after she once liberated herself. The spring came on rapidly and brought the hot weather before its time; but she throve in the heat. Before she was strong enough to walk much the Shakers appointed for her use an open buggy, garrulous and plaintive with age, and an old horse past his usefulness at the plow, but very fit for lounging along by-roads, and skilled in cropping wayside foliage as he went. With her father beside her in his Shaker dress, while she wore a worldlier garb, which she had beguiled her convalescence in fashioning from materials supplied by the family dress-maker, she took the passers on the quiet roads with question and wonder. But they met few people, for they drove mostly over the grass-grown lanes that entered the forest, and the track oftener died away in the thickening vegetation than led any whither. Sometimes it arrived at a clearing deep in the woods, and accounted for itself as the way over which the teams had hauled wood in the winter, or got out logs. In other places it was a fading reminiscence of former population and led through the trees and thick undergrowth to the site of a vanished dwelling; a few apple-trees emerged from the ranks of their sylvan brethren; a rose or currant bush stood revealed among the blueberries or the sweet-fern; then the raw red and white of ruined masonry showed in the grass, and suddenly a cellar yawned before their feet, or they stepped over a well-curb choked with stones. Now and then they met lurking and evasive people on the lonesome roads, who were sometimes black, and who seldom seemed part of the ordinary New England life. If they followed up the track on which these men had shambled towards them, they might come upon a poverty-stricken dwelling of unpainted wood, which seemed never to have had heart to be a home. If they spoke to the slattern woman in the doorway, she was nasal enough, but otherwise the effect was as if some family of poor whites from the South had been dropped down in those Northern woods, with all its native environment of lounging dogs, half-starved colts, and frightened poultry.

Boynton philosophized the strange conditions as well as he could in the absence of any but obvious facts concerning them. When he stopped for a dipper of water at the well, from which he drew it with the old-fashioned sweep, and fell into talk with the women, they were voluble, but not very intelligible. They commonly took him for a Shaker, but Egeria gave them pause in their conjectures; and when he explained that he and his daughter were merely staying with the Shakers they said, Well, the Shakers were good folks, any way. There was sickness in some of these forlorn places, and once it happened to the doctor to be able to afford relief in the case of a suffering child. He was very tender with it, and gentle with the parents, who looked as if they would still be young if they had any encouragement, and on a second visit they asked him what he charged. When he said, “Nothing,” they followed him and Egeria out to their buggy in a sort of helpless gratitude.

“Well, you’ve done our little girl good, doctor,” the woman said on the doorstep, “and we sha’n’t forget it. The trouble is we don’t seem to get no ways forehanded.”

Boynton looked about him, as he took the reins in his hand, upon two or three other weather-beaten houses. “What place is this?” he asked.

“Well,” said the woman, with sober apology, while her man grinned, “I d’ know’s you may say it has any name. Skunk’s Misery, they call it.” She showed her sense of degradation in the brutal grotesquery. “Well, call again,” she said, as the doctor lifted his reins and chirruped to the old horse. “And you, too, lady,” she added, nodding to Egeria.

“She kept her house in good order, for such a poor place,” said the girl, when they had been watched out of sight by the man and his wife, “and the little girl’s bed was sweet and clean. I should think they might be happy, there.”

“In Skunk’s Misery?” asked her father.

“If the house is their own,” answered Egeria, simply. “They seemed good to each other.”

“Oh, you will change your mind when you ‘re quite well again. You will want to see more of the world.”

“I wish we had a house of our own, somewhere,” said Egeria. “I shouldn’t care where. I was thinking of that. I should like to keep house. I am going to get Frances to teach me everything.”

“That will all come in good time,” answered her father, soothingly. “And it will come with higher things. Only now get well.”

“What higher things?” demanded the girl. Boynton looked at her, and answered, evasively, “Things we couldn’t very well find in Skunk’s Misery. Perhaps we shall go abroad. Would you like to go to Europe?”

“I would rather go home.”

Boynton frowned, but did not answer; and they had escaped encounter for that time, at least.

As Egeria grew stronger they gave up their drives somewhat, and took walks in the nearer woods. Oftenest their errand was to gather laurel, which was now coming richly into bloom. It filled the open spaces of the small clearings and wherever the woods were thin; it hid the stumps and consoled the poor, sterile soil with the starry profusion of its flower. One afternoon, when they had climbed to the hill-top where the Shakers of earlier times lay in their nameless graves, they looked out over the masses of the laurel, and it was like a second blossoming of the orchards. Egeria sat down on one of the fallen stones, without knowing that it covered a grave, and began putting her boughs of laurel into shape, choosing this and rejecting that, while her father went about among the forgetful tombs.

“I am glad we came here,” he said, returning to her, “for I should not have liked to miss seeing their grave-yard.”

“Their grave-yard?” she repeated.

“Yes; this is the old Shaker burial-ground.”

She looked round. “I didn’t know it,” she sighed like one following out some tacit thought. “Well, what difference would it make if they had put their names on? They rest as well without it. And if they had put their names, who could remember who they were in fifty years from now?”

“They know one another in the other world just as well, without the record here,” consented her father. “And it isn’t here that we are to be remembered, at any rate.”

“I wish it were!” said the girl, with passion, dropping her flowers into her lap. “I like this world, and I like to be in it. I wish we didn’t have to die.”

“Death is the condition of our advancement,” said her father.

“But I would rather not advance,” said Egeria. “I almost wish I had been born an animal. I should have had to die, but I should not have known it, and there would have been nothing of me to come back!” She went on putting together her boughs of laurel, and she wore that look of being remote within her defenses which a woman knows how to assume no less with her father than with her lover. She then adventurously throws out thoughts and opinions, as if they had just casually occurred to her, which she has perhaps reached after long, secret cogitation or sensation, or which are perhaps really what they seem.

“Why shouldn’t you wish to come back, ages hence, and see what advance the world has made?” rejoined her father, after a pause.

“I should be afraid that I hadn’t kept up with it,” answered Egeria. “The spirits that come back say such silly things.”

“That is a childish way of looking at it,” said her father with severity. “We have no more right to accuse them of silliness than we have to laugh at the foreigner who can express only the simplest things in English. The medium of thought must be so different in the two conditions of being that the wonder is that returning spirits can understand and use our dialects at all.”

“I don’t see why they should forget their own language, if they ‘re the same persons there that they were here,” Egeria returned, stubbornly. “Yes,” she cried, “I would rather be here under the ground forever than be like some of the spirits! Oh, I should like to live always, too; but I don’t call that living. I should like to live here in this world, — on the earth.”

“Would you like to live always among the Shakers?” asked her father, willing to turn the current of her thoughts.

“They try all the time to make the other world of this world!”

“Perhaps that’s the only condition on which they find happiness in this world.”

“Perhaps. But I don’t believe so. We were not born into the other world. The Shakers are very good, and they have been kind to us. Yes, I could be contented among them. Are you going to stay with them, father?”

“I don’t know,” replied Boynton. “The time hasn’t come to decide, yet. I have been waiting. There is no hurry. I don’t feel that we are here on charity, quite. I am able to render some equivalent.”

“Yes,” said Egeria, “and I am going to work as soon as they will let me. I know they would like to have us stay and join them.”

“That was originally my idea. I still propose to do so, if I find them useful. Everything depends” — He stopped uneasily, and glanced at Egeria, but she showed no uneasiness.

XIV.

While their place in the community was thus indefinite, they dwelt with the brothers and sisters who had first received them in the office. Egeria helped the sisters in their work there, and they all liked to have her about them, though it was tacitly agreed that she belonged chiefly to Sister Frances, with whom she served, making the beds, wiping the dishes, and putting the rooms in order, while Diantha and Rebecca devoted themselves to the more public duties of the place. As she grew stronger she would not be kept from taking her share in the family work. Frances forbade her helping in the laundry, where one of the brothers, vague through wreaths of steam from the deep boilers, presided over a company of sisters and boys, and afterwards marshaled them in hanging out the community wash; this, she held, involved dangers of rheumatism and relapse; but she allowed her to find a place in the herb-house, where a score of the young Shakeresses, seated on the floor of the wide, low room, before fragrant heaps of catnip, boneset, and lobelia, sorted and cleaned these simples for the brothers in the packing-room below. “That is sort of being out-doors,” said Sister Frances, with a sly allusion to the girl’s well-known passion. Indeed, Egeria’s chief usefulness appeared when the first wild berries came. Her father no longer accompanied her, for he found the heat too great a burden. The women went, five or six in a wagon, with one of the brothers, who drove, to the berry pasture a mile or two away, and they sang their shrill hymns while passing through the pine woods, that gave out a balsamic sweetness in the sun. At the verge of a westward-sloping valley was a stretch of many hundred acres, swept by a forest fire a few years before, and now rank with the vegetation which the havoc had enriched. Blueberries and huckleberries, raspberries and blackberries, battened upon the ashes of the pine and oak and chestnut, and flourished round the charred stumps; the strawberry matted the blackened ground, and ran to the border of the woods, where, among the thin grass, it lifted its fruit on taller stems, and swung its clusters in the airs that drew through the alleys of the forest. Here and there were the shanties of Canadian wood-cutters, whom the Shakers had sent to save what fuel they might from the general loss, and whom, at noonday, the pickers came upon, as they sat in pairs at their doors, with a can of milk between them, dusky, furtive, and intent as animals. From the first of the strawberries to the last of the blackberries, the birds and chipmucks feasted, and only stirred in short flights when the young Shakeresses, shy as themselves, invaded their banquet.

“Why, Egery,” said one of them, the first day, “you empty your basket faster than any of us, and you said you never picked before. How do you always find such full vines? I do believe it’s because they know you love to pick ’em so, and they just give you a little wink.”

“Yes,” she answered absently, like one entranced by the rich influences of the time and scene. She drank of the strong vitality of the earth and air and sun, and day by day the potion showed its effect in the serenity of her established health.

“Oh, nothing in the weather hurts her,” said the girl who had surprised her secret understanding with the berries. “She keeps on with the birds and squirrels when the heat drives us off, and if it comes on to rain it runs off her as if she was a chipmuck or a robin; and next morning, when I’m as full of aches and pains as I can hold, she’s all ready to begin again.”

“Yee, that’s so, Elizabeth,” said the others, who laughed at this.

In their way they mingled what jollity they could in their work, and were sometimes demurely freakish in the depths of their poke-bonnets and under the wide brims of their hats. Certain of the elder brethren and sisters had their repute for humor, and made their quaint jokes without a bad conscience; while the younger played little pranks upon one another, with those gigglings and thrusts and pushes which accompany the expression of rustic drollery, and were not severely rebuked. Egeria did not take part in their jocularities; but it was another joke of the young Shakers and Shakeresses, kept children beyond their time and apt to allege children’s excuses when called to account, to say, “She made us do it — she looked so!”

They all liked her, and in spite of the secular fashion of her dress, to which she still clung, they treated her as if she were one of themselves, and were always to stay with them. Whatever may have been in their hearts, nothing in their manner betrayed surprise at the complete abeyance into which her supposed supernatural gifts had fallen. Perhaps, as people used to supernaturalism, to the caprice with which the other world uses this, they could be surprised at no lapse or access of divination, in any given case. At any rate, they all seemed content with her robust return to life and health, and if they were impatient for proof of the great things that her father had claimed for her, none of them showed impatience.

There were certain other faculties as dormant in her as her psychological powers. Once, as she passed through the pine woods where Laban had first found her and her father, he leaned across Sister Frances, who sat between them on the wagon-seat, and asked, “Do you know this road?” And when they came to that knoll beside the brook he asked again, “Do you mind this place?” He laughed when she said no. “Well, I don’t much wonder. You didn’t seem to be quite in your right senses. This is the place where I come across you and your father that day.”

At another time, when a different course brought them home by the Elm Tavern, she dimly recalled the aspect of the house and asked what it was. “It seems as if I had seen it in a dream,” she said.

“Must ha’ had the nightmare pretty bad,” returned Laban. “It’s a dreadful place.”

“Dreadful,” repeated Sister Frances. “But it’s just so when you ‘re comin’ down with a fit of sickness, especially fevers. Everything seems in a dream, like.”

Sister Frances rejoiced like a mother in the girl’s health, which came back to her in no ethereal quality, but in solid evidence, in color and in elasticity of step and touch. She had known her before the fever only in that brief interval in which all her faculties were invested by the disease; and both the spiritual and material change wrought in her by convalescence might well have appeared greater than they were. She had seen her lie down a frail and fearful girl, deeply shadowed, as she fancied, by the memories of a troubled past; and she had seen her rise up and grow, in sympathy with the reviving year, into a broad, tranquil summer of womanly ripeness and strength. To the homely mind of Sister Frances she was like the young maple which Brother Joseph had found in a sombre thicket of the woods, and had set out in the abundant sunshine of the village street before the office gate, where it had thriven in a single year out of all likeness to itself. She admired this tree, and in telling Egeria of her fancy she gave her a pin-cushion she had shaped in its image on the stem of a broken kerosene lamp: it was faithful, even to the emery bag in a red peak, like the first color which the maple showed at top in the autumn.

When the garden berries began to ripen, the two often talked long together as they sat in the cool basement of the office, sorting them with Shaker conscientiousness, and packing for market only boxes of honest fruit. Then the elder woman tried with maternal tenderness to draw nearer the life of this daughter of her care, in the fond hope that she might always keep her, and not lose her again to the world from which she had wandered.

“You seem happy here, Egeria,” she would say, timorously feeling her way toward what had already been talked of in the family; and then, when the girl answered that she had never been so happy before, the sister’s conscience gave her a check. It did not seem right to take advantage of Egeria’s happiness among them to urge her to any step to which she was not moved by conviction. “You know,” she resumed, “that we wouldn’t like anything better than to have you stay among us, — you and your father both. All the family’s agreed about that. But it isn’t for us to prevail without you feel a call to our life. What does your father say?”

“We have never talked much about it,” said Egeria. “May be he is waiting for me to get well before he makes up his mind.”

“Why, you look a great deal better than he does, now!” cried Sister Frances, bluntly. “I want you should both stay with us till he gets strong again. I don’t think your father’s over and above strong when he’s well.”

“Well?” echoed the girl. “Don’t you think he’s well?”

“Yee,” answered Sister Frances, “but nervous, worried, like. I suppose he hasn’t had a chance yet to wear off the excitement of the world outside. You know you’ve had a good fit of sickness. We all say that whatever happened before you came here, it’s dropped from you like a garment.”

“Yes, like a garment,” responded Egeria vaguely, letting her busy hands fall into her lap.

Frances took her by the arm. “Don’t you go and be anxious, now, at what I said about your father.”

“Oh, no! “said Egeria, recalling herself, and settling to work again.

“He’s as well as anybody need be. Only you ‘re so very well that anybody, to see you, would suppose you were the well one.”

“I was wondering,” mused the girl aloud, “if he had anything to perplex him. Sister Frances,” she asked presently, “did any letter come for me while I was sick?”

“Nay. Did you expect a letter?”

“No,” said Egeria, “there couldn’t have been any answer.” She blushed, and fell into a reverie so profound that Frances, working alone at the berries, knew not how to bring back the talk to the point from which it had strayed. She was not a person of much native tact, and the community life did not cherish tact among the virtues, counting truth much better; but now Sister Frances attempted a strategic approach.

“Sometimes,” she said, “the young people who are gathered in have hopes in the world outside that make it hard for them to conform to the true life. And we women, we all know what such hopes are. I was young, and the world looked very bright to me when I was gathered in.”

“You, Sister Frances? You gathered in? I thought you were brought up in the family from a child.”

“Nay, I was gathered in — when I was twenty.”

“When you were twenty? And I am nineteen.”

“I came to the neighborhood on a visit, and one Sunday I went to a Shaker meeting, and I heard something said that made me think it was the true life. I used to be troubled about religion; but I’ve had peace for many years. At first it was considerable of a cross, wondering whether I’d acted for the best. He’d never said anything to me, and I d’ know as he ever would. But he might have. That was what kept preying on my mind, whenever I got lonesome or doubtful about my choice. But I was helped to put it away. He’s been hero, since — with her. That was the most of a cross of anything. At first, he didn’t know me, so I don’t suppose he ever did care, much.”

“Had you ever,” said Egeria, in a sort of scare, “done anything that could have made him think you cared?”

“Nay. I was too proud for that.”

“But even if you had done such a thing — by a mistake, or by doing something you thought was right, and then you had been afraid he might take it differently — you would have felt safe here.”

“Yee, I should have felt safe.” Frances waited for Egeria to speak, but the girl was again silent. “I did hope,” resumed the sister, “in those young and foolish days, that he might be gathered in too. Then we could lived in sight of each other. But it wa’n’t to be, and I don’t know as’t would been for the best. Any rate, he got married. I’ve heard they live out in Illinoy, and’t he’s made out real well. And I’m at rest, here.”

“Sister Frances,” said Egeria, “do you think my father looks sick?”

“Well, I declare, if you ain’t thinkin’ of that silly talk of mine, yet! Anybody’d look sick alongside of you. I only meant that he was a little more peaked.”

“Yes,” responded the girl, with a sigh, “he doesn’t look well.”

She watched him at dinner, that day, and saw that he had a small and fastidious appetite, though the abundance of a Shaker garden was there to tempt him. “Are you feeling well, father?” she asked, when they went out after tea for a little stroll. “You ate hardly anything at dinner, and this evening you didn’t touch your tea.”

“Yes,” he answered quickly, with a touch of irritation, “I am well; very well; perfectly well. But the hot weather is trying, and — and” —

“And what?” coaxed the girl. “Have you been thinking about something that worries you? Is there anything on your mind?”

“No, no. Nothing. Have you ever noticed it before? What has made you notice it?”

“I don’t know. Sister Frances said she thought you didn’t look as well as I do. That seemed strange.”

“You are looking very well, Egeria. I am glad to see you looking so well. This fund of physical strength ought to contribute — There is nothing that is necessarily alien in it to — I am truly glad for your sake, my dear, that you are so well.”

They were walking down the sloping roadside from the office gate toward the clump of old willows in whose midst stood the spacious stone bowl, scooped out of the solid granite by some forgotten brother in former years, and now tenderly, darkly green inside and out, with a tint of cool mold. When they reached the bank beside the trough, he dropped wearily on the grass, but she remained standing, with her arms sunken before her and her fingers intertwined, watching the soft ebullition of the spring in the centre of the bowl. Either she had not been aware of his approach to the matter of their tacit avoidance or she was indifferent to it. A smile played upon her face as the bubble continually rounded itself without breaking upon the surface of the water; and in the mellow light of the waning day she looked strong and very beautiful. Her hair was darker than before her fever; her eyes had lost their look of vigilance and apprehension, and softly burned in their gaze; the sun and wind had enriched her fair Northern complexion with a tinge of the South. An artist or a poet of those who dream backward from fable might have figured her in his fancy as the Young Ceres: she looked so sweet and pure an essence of the harvest landscape, so earthly fair and good.

Her father glanced at her uneasily. “I don’t like my environment, here,” he broke out. “I am conscious of adverse influences.”

She slowly lifted her eyes from the fountain, and looked at him with gravely smiling question, as if she had not quite understood.

“You asked me just now,” he resumed, “whether I had been thinking about any vexatious matter. Have you seen nothing here of late to vex me?”

“No,” she answered, with the same question, but without the smile.

“Nothing in the attitude of these people?”

“Their attitude?”

“I have tried to believe,” he said vehemently, “that it was my fancy; but I can’t be mistaken. They regard me with distrust; they have withdrawn from me the sympathy upon which I was placing all my hopes of success. No, no,” he added, seeing her about to speak in refutation, “I am right. I feel it, I know it.”

“They seem kinder to me than ever,” Egeria ventured.

“They are kinder to you,” returned her father. “They are distinguishing between us. They wish to keep you and to cast me out.”

Egeria looked incredulous. “But how could they do that? Nothing could separate us!”

“I am glad to hear you say that,” said her father, huskily. “There have been times of late when I thought — when I was afraid — You have seemed indifferent” —

“Father!”

“I know that I wronged you.” He turned his face, and they were both silent, till Egeria spoke.

“If what you think is true, we must go away. Where will we go? Shall we go home?”

“No, I can’t go there. It’s impossible.”

Egeria did not reply directly, but after a while she said, “Father, do you ever think of Mr. Hatch?”

“No. Why should I think of him?”

“He lent us money, and he expected to find us at home when he got back.”

“His loan could scarcely have paid the debt he was under to me. I regarded it in that light, and so did he. We had no obligation to be where he expected to find us.”

“No; but if he went there, and didn’t find us, it would make grandfather very anxious.”

“I’m not obliged to preserve your grandfather from anxiety. He hasn’t known our movements since we left home. But I do care for Mr. Hatch. I will write him, and tell him where we are. Where was he going?”

Egeria turned a little white. “I — I don’t know,” she faltered. “I can’t remember. Wait! Yes — he gave me his address, and I — I can’t think what I did with it.”

“Perhaps you put it in your bag with the money.”

“Yes — I did. I put it in my bag. It’s gone. Everything about that time seems so dim, so”—” It’s no matter; not the least,” said her father. “He probably hasn’t returned to the East. When he does, he can readily find us out.” Egeria looked grieved and troubled, but he hurried on to say, “The great question is how to bring about the results — the important results — for which I came here. I will ‘not be driven from conditions which I thought so favorable, without an effort. Their leading men may turn against me if they choose; it is their peril and their loss; but the great mass of the community will be with me in any collision.”

“Why, what makes you think there is a feeling against you, father, in any of them?”

“Do you remember that day in the orchard when you first went out? Joseph and I had some words, in which he showed plainly what had been fermenting in his mind, when he intimated the subordination of spiritualism to Shakerism. I understood his drift, though at the time I said nothing. Afterward the matter dropped; but within a few days I have been made to feel very distinctly a sphere of opposition. They think, the leading men, that my utilization of their conditions will undermine their whole system. And so it will. Their system is unnaturally and ridiculously mistaken; next after their spiritualism, their communism is the only thing about them that is fit to survive. Their angelic life, as they call it, is an absurd delusion, the dream of a sick woman.” —

“Oh, I hope you won’t do anything to break up their life!” cried the girl, in simple trust of his power. “They have been so good to us.”

“Their system may remain, for all me,” returned her father. “Even in riding down the opposition to me I shall be careful of their rights. Egeria,” he said, “you must have observed that during your long convalescence I have spared you all discussion of this matter?”

“Yes,” she admitted, apprehensively.

“I noticed that it seemed to irritate you, — to cost you an effort of mind and of will, which I was unwilling to tax you with till you had regained your full strength. The delay has been very irksome to me. I felt that we were losing precious time — that we were being placed in a false position; the waiting has worn upon me, as you see.” He looked even haggard in the coming twilight. He had lost flesh, and two loose cords hung where his double chin had been. “The question now is whether you will be ready when I call upon you for the test which I am impatient to make.”

Egeria sank down upon the bank not far from him, and pulled weakly at a tuft of grass. “I was in hopes,” she said sadly, “that you had given it up, father.”

“Given it up!” he cried in amaze.

“Why couldn’t we wait?” she asked.

“Wait? Till when?”

“Till we are dead. Then we shall know whether there is any truth in it all. It will be only a little while at the longest.”

“A little while!” exclaimed the doctor indignantly. “We may live to be a hundred! There are people in those houses yonder,” — he indicated the dormitories with a wave of his hand,—” who have had everything to kill them in their prime; who came here with the women who were to be their wives, or who left husband and children and home to embrace this asceticism; who for scores of years have had the memories of these to brood upon in their withered hearts. We can’t wait for death. We have a right to know the truth from life.”

They had so often talked of this deep concern as knowledge to be acquired that probably neither of them found anything grotesque or terrible in this phase of the discussion. Egeria now only urged vaguely, “We have the Bible.”

“Yes,” rejoined her father, bitterly, “the Bible! the book with which they try to crush our hopes! the record, permeated and saturated with spiritualism from Genesis to Revelation, by which they pretend to disprove and forbid spiritualism! Shall one revelation suffice for all time? Shall we know nothing of the grand and hopeful changes which must have taken place in the world of spirits, as in this world, during the last eighteen hundred years? Are we less worthy of communion with supernal essences than those semi-barbarous Jews? Let us beware how we refuse the light of our day, because the light of the past still shines. Shines? Flickers! In many it is extinct. How shall faith and hope be rekindled? Egeria, you must not try to argue with me on this point. You must submit yourself and your power implicitly to me. Will you do so?”

“I don’t know what you mean by my power. I have no power.”

“You have power, if you think you have. What I ask is that you will not oppose your will to mine.”

“I will not oppose you,” she answered in a low voice. A gush of tears blinded her, and dimmed the beautiful world. “You know how I have always hated this, father, — ever since I was old enough to think about it. A thing that seemed to be and seemed not to be, — it scared me! And when it all stopped I thought you wouldn’t want to begin it again. But I will try to do whatever you ask me.”

“I can’t understand your repugnance,” said her father. “If this power of yours should bring you face to face with your mother” —

“I never saw her, — I should not know her; and she would not know me for the little baby she left!” cried the girl desperately. “Besides, I can wait to go to her. And she can wait, too. I don’t believe she would ever come. What good does it all do? Oh, it’s dreadful to me!”

“The time has been, Egeria,” rejoined her father, “when your attitude would have discouraged me. Now, it only gives me pain. I am convinced that your own opinions and ideas of the matter are of no consequence to the agencies operating through you. All that I ask of you is that you yield yourself passively to my influence. Will you do this?”

“Oh, yes, I will do all that I can. Oh, I wish I had died in the fever!”

“You talk childishly,” said her father. “How do you know that death would have released you from your obligation to this cause? It may be your office in the next world, as it is in this, to be the medium of communication between embodied and disembodied spirits.”

“Then I hope there won’t be any other world.” Her father looked angrily at her as she rose and stood beside the rustic fountain. One of the Shaker boys, uncouth in his wide straw hat and misshapen trowsers, came by with some cows from pasture, and they stopped to drink from the great stone bowl. The voices of bathers in the river half a mile away floated sad across the intervening space of meadow land. The air was so heavy with dew that the rumble of a distant railroad train was as clear as if near at hand in the valley which the sound even of the steam whistle seldom visited. As Egeria and her father walked back to the office the crickets trilled along the path. The smell of the prosperous gardens beyond the wall came to them, and mingled with the thick, sweet scent of the milkweed by the wayside.

There was a little group before the office door. At the foot of the steps stood Humphrey, and with him Joseph and Elihu; Diantha and Rachel were seen within the door-way, and Frances sat on the threshold. They were talking earnestly; at sight of the doctor and Egeria they lowered their voices, and as they drew near they ceased speaking altogether, with the consciousness of sincere people interrupted by those of whom they have been speaking. At the same time Sister Frances made room upon the step, and beckoned to Egeria with more than her usual fondness, — with a sort of tender reparation and defiance. The girl took the place, and her father remained standing with the other men.

It plainly cost Elihu an effort to break the silence, but he said, after a moment, “Have you seen the account of the exposure of that materialization medium out in St. Louis?”

“No,” said the doctor; “but nothing of that sort surprises me. It is too soon yet for successful materializations, and all attempts at it are mixed with imposture.”

“There’s quite a long account,” rejoined Elihu, “in yesterday’s Tribune.”

He made a movement to take the paper out of his breast pocket. “I don’t care to see it,” said the doctor abruptly; “I can very well imagine it. Those things are sickening. Some wretched creature — a woman, I suppose — trying to eke out her gift by cheating, to get her bread. It rests with you Shakers to rescue this precious opportunity from infamy. But you must take hold of it in no halfhearted way.”

“What do you mean?” asked Elihu.

“You have the conditions here of perfect success, as I heard you boast when I first saw you in the Fitchburg depot at Boston. You are released from all thought of the morrow; the spectre of want that pursues other men does not dog your steps; you have neither wife nor husband nor child to cling about your hearts and weaken your will to serve the truth with absolute fidelity. Your discipline has rescued you from the vanity of making men wonder. There is nothing to prevent you from developing a perfect mediumship amongst you.”

“You imply,” rejoined Elihu, with warmth, “that we have failed of our duty in this respect. You don’t seem to realize that our very existence is a witness to the truth of an open relation between the spiritual and the material worlds. As a people we had birth in the inspired visions of Ann; the very hymn we sang yesterday was breathed through our lips by angelic authority; the tradition of prophecy has never been broken with us We gave spiritualism to the world.”

“Yes, you gave spiritualism to the world,” retorted Boynton, “to mock its hopes and baffle its aspirations and corrupt its life. You flung it out a flaming brand, to be blown upon by cupidity and lust and ambition, till its heavenly light turned to an infernal fire, while you remained lapped in your secure prosperity, counting your gains; adding acre to acre, beef to beef, sheep to sheep; living the lives of clowns and peasants on week days, and on the Sabbath dancing before the Lord, for the amusement of the idlers who come to your church as they go to a circus.”

“Friend,” interrupted Elihu warningly, “you are abusing our patience!” The other Shakers looked shocked and alarmed, and Egeria rose to her feet.

“I mean to abuse your patience. I mean to sting you into life. I mean to make you think of your heavenly origin, and realize how unworthy you have grown. You have subordinated your spiritualism to your Shakerism” —

“Spiritualism was never anything but a means to Shakerism,” angrily retorted Elihu.

“I would make it the end of Shakerism. How has it profited you as a means?” demanded Boynton.

“It has made us what we are. It gave us a discipline and a rule of life, because it descended, unasked, from heaven. But your secular spiritualism which you want to have us take up, and which has continued through solicitation and entreaty, has given you no code of morality. It has been a vain show, making men worse and not better, and tempting them to all manner of lies. And you wish us to take it up at the point to which the world has brought it? Nay! You wish us to subordinate the angelic life, and the good that has crowned it, to the mere dead means? Nay! To value the staff by which we have climbed, and not the height we have reached? Nay! Prove first that in your hands it has not become a stock to conjure with, — to be cast on the ground and turned into a serpent for a wonder before Pharaoh and a confusion of true prophecy, — and then we will take it up again.”

The men’s faces had grown red, and they approached each other angrily.

“You have deceived me!” cried Boynton. “You led me to believe that among you I should find the sympathy and support which are essential to success.”

“We led you to believe nothing,” retorted Elihu. “An accident threw you among us, after we had fully and fairly warned you that we should not receive you or anyone without deliberation. We welcomed you kindly, and you have had our best.”

“Elihu, Elihu!” softly pleaded Sister Frances, “it isn’t for us to boast of our good deeds.” The others silently looked from him to her.

“There is no vainglory in the truth, Frances,” answered Elihu, severely. “We have been assailed with unjust tauntings.”

“And I,” said Boynton, “have been provoked to a harsher frankness than I meant to use, by your indifference to an interest infinitely more vital than any rule of life; by a gradually increasing enmity here which I have new felt for some time, and have struggled against in vain. There has been a withdrawal of confidence from me.”

“You have no right to say that,” Elihu promptly retorted. “The conditions remain precisely the same as when you first unfolded your plans to us in family meeting. We dealt plainly with you then, and we know nothing more of you now than we knew within two days after your arrival here. You made certain pretensions then, and you have fulfilled none of them. Instead of that, you come after nearly three months’ time, and require us to lay aside our industries, and join you in a pursuit which has proved the vainest and idlest that has ever wasted the human mind.”

“You have twice upbraided me, now,” said Dr. Boynton, “with my failure to make good my claim to your confidence. You shall not upbraid me a third time. You knew why I was waiting. You knew that it was at a cost almost like life itself that I waited, and that I counted every hour of delay as a drop of blood wrung from my heart. But I will delay no longer. You shall have the proof now —— at once — this very night. Call your family together. We won’t lose another moment. Egeria!” Egeria started: the quarrel — for it had assumed this character — had begun so suddenly, and probably without intention or expectation on either side, though this is by no means certain; but she must have known whither it tended.

“You are right!” cried Elihu, with equal heat. “There is no time like the present. Matters have come to such a pass that something must be done.”

“Call your family together!” repeated Boynton, defiantly.

“There is no need; this is the evening for family meeting,” the Shaker rejoined.

In fact, while they had been disputing, a group of the younger Shakers and Shakeresses had formed about the door of the family house in which the meeting was to be held, and their voices, unheeded by the angry disputants and their listeners, had risen on the cool twilight air. At that distance the white dresses of the young girls, freshly put on for the evening worship, showed pale through the gathering dusk, and their singing, robbed of its shrillness, was the voice of that disembodied devotion which haunts dim cathedral arches, and in our bright New World sometimes drifts out of open church windows to the ear of the passer, taking his heart with an indefinite religious passion and yearning.

XV.

The office sisters went in-doors to make some change in their dress for the meeting; Elihu and Joseph walked away together; Egeria had shrunk from the tearful embrace of Sister Frances, and she now slowly followed with her father, who continued in strenuous appeal to her, till they reached the door of the family house, and entered with the group awaiting them there. A dull look was in her eyes when they came into the hall, and she sank absent-mindedly into her usual place in one of the back rows of sisters, away from the light of the kerosene lamps burning in brackets against the wall. Her father, for reasons of his own, chose to sit apart from the men, and he now retired to one of the corners, where he remained with his head dropped on his hand during the greater part of the service.

Brother Humphrey did not join the rest till the meeting was nearly over. He had stayed to close up the office for the night, and to wait for the return of Brother Laban, who was away on business, and he was about to lock one of the front doors, when he found himself confronted at the threshold by two men, one of whom asked if he could oblige them with a night’s lodging.

“We do not keep a house of entertainment,” said Humphrey, willing to evade, but unwilling to deny.

“Oh, I’m perfectly aware of that,” said the stranger, “but I suppose you don’t turn people away. I was given to understand at the village, back here, that you sometimes took pity on wayfarers.”

“Yee, we do,” said Humphrey, still holding the door ajar.

“Then take pity on us, my dear friend, and on our horse,” said the stranger, not otherwise indicating the vehicle he had left at the gate, “and we will pay you what you like for your compassion.” He pushed in, and Humphrey mechanically setting the door wider his companion followed. “We can sleep in a double-bedded room, if you can’t give us two single ones.”

“Nay,” said Humphrey, “you can have two single rooms. Sit down,” he added, showing them into the office parlor.

“Ah, you double nothing, I suppose,” said the stranger. “Thanks!” He dropped into a rocking-chair, but when Humphrey went out, to see that the rooms were quite ready, he sprang actively to his feet again and went peering about the room with the lamp which Humphrey had left on the table. He stooped down and examined the legs of this piece of furniture. “No! Evidently the Shaker conscience is against the claw-foot. Probably they regard it as but one remove from the cloven-foot. And I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as a brass-mounting of any sort in the building. But really, this bare wall with the flat finish isn’t so bad; it’s expressive of the bare walls and flat finish of Shakerism; an instance of what the Swedenborgians call correspondence. Look here, my dear fellow! Here is something very original —— aboriginal — in rugs. That’s a good bit of color.” He seized upon one of the braided rugs on the floor and partly lifted it. “Look at this!”

“Oh, let it alone,” said the other, with a yawn. He looked not very well, and he glanced at his feet with the weariness that despairs of ever getting to bed with such an obstacle as boots in the way.

“But you don’t understand,” persisted the first, clinging to the rug. “This must be home-dyed. These yellows and reds — I was admiring your rug,” he explained to Humphrey, who now reappeared. “It’s something uncommon in color.”

“Yee,” said the Shaker; “we don’t generally like our things so gay. Your rooms are ready.”

“Ah, then we won’t detain you,” said the stranger; but he caught sight of the long clock at the lower end of the hall, into which they issued, and turned from going up-stairs to look closer at it, with his hand lamp. “This is good! Very good! A genuine Marm Storrs. A family heir-loom, I fancy?”

“Nay, I don’t know,” said the Shaker, stopping half-way up the stairs; “it came here before I did. I don’t know who brought it.”

“You don’t care for colonial bric-a-brac? But you should. It’s the only thing we can justly aspire to, this side of the water. You could pick up some nice things in the country. Have you a spinning-wheel?”

“Yee. But we don’t use it. It’s cheaper to buy our linen.”

“Of course. But you’ve no idea how much character it would give that pleasant parlor of yours.” Humphrey answered neither yea nor nay. The other stranger, who had stalked up-stairs past him, asked from the upper hall, “Which room is mine?” And when Humphrey pointed it out he entered and shut the door behind him.

“What singing is that?” asked his companion, as he paused again at the open window near the top of the stairs.

“It is our family meeting,” answered Humphrey. “Family meeting!” repeated the stranger briskly. “Would it be possible — could you allow a secular person like myself to look in a moment?”

“Nay,” said the Shaker, composedly, without vouchsafing any explanation.

The stranger looked at him as if puzzled. “I couldn’t go?”

“Nay,” repeated Humphrey, as before.

“But really, I’ve heard of people attending your meetings, haven’t I?”

“Yee.”

“Then why can’t I go?”

“This is a family meeting.”

“Oh! Is this my room?”

“Yee. Good-night,” he said, while the stranger was still hesitating at his door-way, and turned away; the latter then answered his good-night, and went in, and Humphrey descended to his room below, where, after he had put up the strangers’ horse, he busied himself restlessly in working at his accounts, till Laban raised the latch of the door.

“Laban,” said Humphrey, “there are two strangers — young men — in the house, that I’ve just give rooms to. One of us has got to stay away from the meetin’, I presume. It won’t do to have ’em alone here, these times.”

“Nay,” said Laban, taking off his hat, and hanging it on its appointed peg before he sat down. “I will stay.”

“I d’ know’s I’d ought to let ye,” rejoined Humphrey. “It’s a meetin’ of uncommon interest; quite excitin’, as you may say.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Well, Friend Boynton and Egery are goin’ to give what they call a test see-aunts, I suppose. Mahters have come to a head, all at once, — I don’t rightly know how. But Elihu and Friend Boynton, they got into consid’able of a dispute, just now; and Friend Boynton was tol’ble bitter, and spoke revilin’s that seemed to kind o’ edge Elihu on, and first we know they’d cooked it up between ’em that the’ wa’n’t any time like the present to prove whether spiritualism was better than Shakerism. I don’t believe’t she more ‘n half liked it, the way she looked.”

“I don’t seem to care anything about goin’,” said Laban. “I’ll stay.”

“Why, thank ye, Laban!” cried Humphrey, rising with an eagerness which betrayed itself, now that he had satisfied the scruples of conscience by setting forth the meeting in the most attractive colors, and giving Laban a free choice whether to go or stay.

When he came into the meeting Brother Elihu was on his feet, speaking. Humphrey softly crept to the place left vacant for him, beside Elihu, and sat down.

“I want,” Elihu was saying, “that all the brethren and sisters here present should wish well to Friend Boynton in his experiment. He claims that it is necessary to his success that there should be no feeling of enmity or suspicion towards him, and if any of us have such feelings I hope they will try to put them aside. I shall try to do so, for my part, with all my heart. Hard words have just passed between Friend Boynton and me, and I am willing to own that I was hasty and wrong in much that I said. I shall truly rejoice in all the success that he hopes for to-night.”

He sat down, and a little stir passed through the rows of listeners. One of them began a hymn, and they sang it through, while Dr. Boynton waited with a face of haughty offense. When the singing ceased, he came forward from his corner, and stood between the rows of brothers and sisters.

“I thank Elihu,” he said, without looking at him, “for his good intentions towards myself, and I freely acquit him for what he has said. I have myself nothing to withdraw and nothing to regret. Nor do I ask, in what I shall do to-night, any mood of especial assent or sympathy in you, or even of neutrality. I am not here to try an experiment. I am here to exhibit certain facts of psychological science, as thoroughly ascertained as the transmission of the electric current that bears your messages from Maine to California.” He seemed to gather defiance from his rotund phraseology; he rang the syllables of the last word through the hall with a clarion hardness. “When I last stood here,” he continued, “and addressed you upon this subject, I had to ask your patience. My daughter had fallen sick with a fever, of which no one could forecast the event. She lived, and made a recovery which, though painfully slow, is complete; and she is once more fully en rapport with my purposes and wishes. We shall begin with some simple experiments in biology, or, as it was originally called, mesmerism; and we shall gradually proceed to a combination of this science with spiritism, in a union which it has been the end and aim of all my inquiries to effect, — which I have foreseen from the beginning as the only true development of perfect mediumship. All that I shall ask of you,” said Dr. Boynton, with a certain emphasis on the last word, turning on his heel, so as to include all present in his glance of somewhat contemptuous demand, “is your strict attention and. your perfect silence. Stay! I shall ask one of you to oblige me by setting a chair here, where all can see, and by lending me a handkerchief.” His voice had fallen to the colloquial tone, and it touched something of its old suavity. But when Humphrey had set the chair, and Diantha had given him a folded handkerchief, he shook out the linen with a flirt, and called, with a sternness that startled all, “Come forward, Egeria!”

The girl rose from her place beside Sister Frances, and slowly advanced, with the Shakeress beside her.

“Come forward alone!” commanded her father, and Frances shrank back into her seat again, while Egeria continued to advance, and took her place in the chair as he directed with a wave of his hand. Those who were nearest saw that she was very pale, and they spoke afterwards of a peculiar look in her face, “as if,” they said, “the life had gone out of it.” She was also thought to tremble, and she let her arras fall into her lap, with a long patient sigh that was heard all over the room, and that brought tears to the eyes of some.

Her father stood drawing the handkerchief through his hand. “We will begin, as I said, with some of the most elementary phases of mesmerism, and we will work up through these to its ultimation in clairvoyance, at which point of junction we will invoke the aid of spiritism, the science into which it merges, and we will then continue our inquiries in a dark séance. For the present the lights can remain as they are.”

He came round in front of his daughter, and steadily regarded her. “Fix your eyes on mine,” he said, as if addressing a stranger.

She obeyed, lifting her eyes with an effect of mute appeal, while the corners of her mouth drooped.

“When I count three,” continued her father, “your eyes will close. One, two, three.”

Her eyelids fell, and she remained as if in a quiet sleep. Her father approached, and with a series of downward passes assumed to deepen the spell.

“Now,” he said, turning to the intent spectators, “we will exhibit some well-known phenomena of this condition. The subject is in a complete mesmeric trance, and is entirely under my control. I can will her to remain in that chair, and she will have no power to rise. If I were simply in my own mind, without the utterance of a word, to will her to go to the house-top and fling herself down, she would instantly do so. If I willed her to put her hand in the flame of that lamp, she could not refuse; neither would she feel any pain, if I forbade her to feel pain. She sees, hears, tastes, feels, whatever I will. She has no being except in my volition, and I have not a doubt that, terrible as it may seem, if I were to will her death, she would cease to breathe.”

His hearers had listened with interest that deepened at each successive assertion; at the last a sort of moan ran through the ranks of the sisters. The brothers remained hardly less impressively silent.

“You can now easily understand,” resumed Boynton, “what a tremendous engine, what a superhuman agency, such a power as that I exert must be in the development of a spirit medium. It is to this end that I have chiefly exerted it in the case of my daughter. My theory has been that the medium’s obsession by spirits is often so thorough that mind and body alike succumb to their influence, and that the medium is thus so obscured as to be able to transmit no intelligible result. It is at this point that the mesmeric power, sterile in itself, and hitherto useless, comes to her rescue. It stays and supports her; it enables another to reinforce her will, and she receives a distinct and ineffaceable impression from the other world. I ask you to consider but for a moment the vast consequences to flow from such a development. I ask you to do this, not in your behalf or mine; for we know, by our converse with spirits, that we shall live hereafter, — that another world lies beyond this, in which we shall abide forever. But you who dwell here, in the security, the sunshine, of this faith, have little conception of the doubt and darkness in which the whole Christian world is now involved. In and out of the church, it is honey-combed with skepticism. Priests in the pulpit and before the altar proclaim a creed which they hope it will be good for their hearers to believe, and the people envy the faith that can so confidently preach that creed; but neither priests nor people believe. As yet, this devastating doubt has not made itself felt in morals; for those who doubt were bred in the morality of those who believed. But how shall it be with the new generation, with the children of those who feel that it may be better to eat, drink, and make merry, for to-morrow they die forever? Will they be restrained by the morality which, ceasing to be a guest of the mind in us, remains master of the nerves? Will they not eat, drink, and make merry at their pleasure, set free as they are, or outlawed as they are, by the spirit of inquiry, by the spirit of science, which has beaten down the defenses and razed the citadel of the old faith? I shudder to contemplate the picture. In view of this calamitous future, I, as a spiritualist, cannot refrain from doing; and I appeal to you, as spiritualists, to shake off this drowse of prosperity, this poppied slumber of love and peace, and buckle on the armor of action. What right have you, I ask, — what right have you Shakers to remain simply a refuge for the world’s lame and halt and blind? This dream of perfect purity, of affectionate union, of heavenly life on earth, is very sweet; and I too have been fascinated by it. I too have asked myself why there should not be some provision in Protestantism, as there is in Romanism, for those who would retire from the world and dedicate themselves to humble industry, to meek communion with the skies, to brotherly love. But I tell you that this is all a delusion and a snare. On your purity rests the guilt of the world’s foulness; on your union the blame of the world’s discord; on your heavenly peace the responsibility of the world’s hellish unrest. To you was first given, in this latter time, the renewed gospel of immortality, the evidence of spiritual life, the truth that matter and spirit may converse for the salvation of mankind. What have you done with this priceless gift? Have you cherished it, kept alight the precious jewel, to shine before the eyes of men; or have you flung it into the world to be trampled under foot by the swinish herd of sorcerers, who will yet turn again and rend you, unless you fulfill your duty? Every one of you here should become a messenger of the truth, and devote himself and herself to its promulgation. Go forth into the world, though it leave your home desolate, and serve the truth! Or, better still, break up this outworn brotherhood, this barren union in which you dwell, a company of aging men and women, childless, hopeless, with whom their heritage must perish, and form with me on its ruins a new Shakerism, — a Shakerism which shall be devoted to the development of spiritistic science; which shall — which shall” —

He paused for the word, and Brother Elihu suddenly rose. “I would remind Friend Boynton,” he said, “that we are waiting to witness the mesmeric phenomena which he has promised us.”

The brethren and sisters, who had been unawares drawn upward and forward by Boynton’s eloquence, sank back into their seats, but some of the latter turned a reproachful glance at Elihu, in wonder that he could have the heart to interrupt the heroic strain. Then all eyes reverted to Egeria, who in the general forgetfulness had sat with her head drooping and her person dejected in a weary lassitude.

The doctor stopped, stared at Elihu, and caught his breath. He could not collect his thoughts at once, or master his overstrung nerves; but when he regained his voice he said dryly, “If you will do me the favor to look at your watch, I will show you the least of these phenomena.”

Brother Elihu promptly took out his watch and held it in his hand.

“Egeria,” said the doctor, “tell me the time by Elihu’s watch.”

The girl lifted herself like one peering forward, but her eyes were still closed. “The case is shut,” she answered.

“That is true,” Elihu declared. “I had shut it.” He opened it.

“Look now, Egeria.”

She remained in the same posture for some time. “I can’t tell,” she said at last. “I can’t see.”

The doctor smiled triumphantly. “Oh, I had forgotten to bandage your eyes. You can’t see, of course, unless your eyes are bandaged.” He bound the handkerchief, which he had continued to draw through his hand, over her eyes. “Now look.”

“I can’t see,” repeated the girl.

Boynton laughed. “Really,” he said, “I must apologize for having forgotten some essential conditions of these simpler phenomena. We had advanced so far beyond them that I didn’t recur to them at once in all their details. I can’t, of course, will the subject to know what I don’t know myself. If I were to guess at the time, she must necessarily repeat my guess.” He went quickly to Elihu, and glanced at the watch; then returning to his place beside Egeria’s chair, he looked off at a distant point and said, with a tone of easy indifference, “Well, Egeria, what time is it?”

The girl fell back into her chair, and putting up her hands took the bandage from her eyes, which she fixed upon her father’s face in a passion of pity and despair.

“Let it go, Friend Boynton,” said Elihu kindly. “There is no haste. Another time will do as well. Perhaps Egeria has not quite recovered.”

“Yee,” repeated one and another of the brethren and sisters, “another time will do as well.”

“No,” said Boynton, “another time will not do as well.” He was strongly moved, but he made a successful effort to command his voice. “My daughter has been so habitually under my influence that I had not thought it worth while to go through the preliminaries we use with a fresh subject. But as a great interruption has taken place during her fever, perhaps this has become necessary.” While he spoke, he was searching in his different pockets. He continued bitterly: “I was once the possessor of a silver piece which I used in producing the mesmeric trance, but it would not be strange if I had parted with it in the distress which threw me upon your charity. If any of you happens to have a silver coin of any sort” —

Few of these simple communists often had money about them; and in those days of paper currency even the business men of the family knew very well that there was no silver in their pockets. If a silver coin was the indispensable condition of the mesmeric slumber, apparently Boynton stood on safe ground.

But with a quick “Ah!” he came upon the piece he was seeking in his pocket-book. He pressed it between his palms, keeping his eyes fixed upon his daughter’s. Then he put it in her open hand, and bade her look at it without winking, till her eyelids fell. As they closed he softly removed the piece, and made a number of downward passes over her face. There was a pause, during which Boynton was about to say something to his audience, when Egeria opened her eyes and rose from her chair.

“I can’t, I can’t!” she cried, pitifully. “I’ve tried, but indeed, indeed, I can’t.” She stood before him, wringing her hands, and longing to cast her arms about his neck; but the sternness of his reproachful face forbade her. He opened his lips to speak, but no sound came from them. One of the brothers nearest him thought that he tottered, and half rose, with outstretched hands, to support him. Sister Frances was already at Egeria’s side, she drew her head down upon her shoulder with a motherly instinct, while a murmur of sympathy went through the house.

Boynton repelled the friendly hand extended towards him. “Let me alone,” he said; “I can take care of myself.” He turned about, and lifting his voice bravely addressed the meeting: “We have failed, — totally and completely failed, upon as fair a trial as I could have wished. I do not attempt to account for the result, and I cannot dispute any conclusions which you may draw from it in regard to ourselves.”

Elihu stood up. “Friend Boynton, we believe you are an honest man.”

“Yee, we do!” was repeated from bench to bench. —

“I thank you,” replied Boynton, in a breaking voice. “Then I can ask you to let me say that our failure is a profound mystery to me, and belies all our past experience. I do ask you to believe this; I ask you to let me say it, and to let it remain with you as my last word. For myself, I cannot lose faith in the past and keep my sanity. But somehow I see that the power has passed from us. In any case our destiny is accomplished among you. We must go out from you self-condemned. Before we go, I wish to acknowledge all your kindness, and to ask your forgiveness for such words of mine as have wronged you. Come, Egeria.”

The girl came forward to where her father stood, and he took her hand and passed it through his arm.

“You mustn’t leave us, Friend Boynton,” said Elihu. “We wish you to stay. We wish you to 16 stay,” he repeated, at a dazed look of inquiry from the doctor, “and take all the time that you want for your investigations.”

“Yee, that is so,” assented all the voices in the room successively. Brother Humphrey alone continued silent, and he was ordinarily so undemonstrative that his tacit dissent would hardly have been noticed, but for his saying, before Boynton could collect himself for reply, “There ain’t nothin’ agin Friend Boynton but what he can clear up with a word to the elders, and I jine with ye all in askin’ of him to stay.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Boynton, turning fiercely upon him. “If you know anything against me, I wish you to speak out.”

Brother Humphrey, who could scarcely have meant to intimate any mental reservation, hastened to answer in alarm, “I ha’n’t got any doubts of ye, Friend Boynton. I think just as the rest do. We’d believe you.”

“Believe me about what? I insist that you speak out.”

Humphrey looked at the faces near him for help, but there was only pity and surprise in them. “It ain’t no time or place,” he began.

“It is the very time and the very place,” retorted Boynton. “There can be no other like it. I wish you to say what you mean before the whole family. There is nothing in my life which I wish secretly examined into. I absolve you from all your scruples, and I wish, I demand, I require, that you speak out.”

Humphrey rose with a sort of groan. “I think,” he said, “as much as any on ye that there ought to be forgivin’ and forgettin’, and I ain’t one to bear resentment for revilin’s that’s been passed on Shakerism here to-night. But what I thought, if Friend Boynton was goin’ to stay amongst us, he’d ought to have a chance to clear himself. We all know what’s been flyin’ about the neighborhood here, and it ain’t fair to us, and it ain’t fair to him, to let it go without a word. I don’t want he should feel that we ‘re tryin’ on him, but I want him to know what’s said, for all I don’t believe in breakin’ a bruised reed.”

“As I said before, if you have heard anything to my disadvantage, I wish you to speak out, — I demand that you shall speak out,” said Boynton.

“I’m goin’ to speak out, now,” returned Humphrey more steadily, “and it ain’t for anything that Friend Harris said, although I think ye’d ought to know what he did say.”

“Who is Harris?” asked Boynton.

“He’s the landlord of the Elm Tahvern.”

“What does he say?”

“Well,” said Humphrey, with reluctance, “I think ye’d ought to know. He says you wa’n’t sober that mornin’ at his house, and he couldn’t hardly git ye out.” Humphrey turned very red, as if ashamed, and wiped his forehead with his napkin; Elihu and the brothers near him looked down, and a painful hush prevailed.

Boynton did not deign to notice this accusation.

“And what does your friend Harris say of the occurrences attending our departure?” he demanded, contemptuously.

“He ain’t no friend of our’n, except in the scriptural sense,” replied Humphrey, doggedly. “But he says the’ wa’n’t no occurrences. Just a flash of tol’ble sharp lightnin’ and that’s all. The’ wa’n’t no raps, nor no liftin’ o’ table-tops, accordin’ to his say.”

“I am glad to have you so explicit,” said the doctor, “and I think now I begin to understand the value of your family’s generosity towards myself. Did your friend Harris say anything in aspersion of my daughter?”

“Nay,” replied Humphrey.

“Then she probably remains as before in your estimation, and you would take her word against Harris’s, highly as you value his testimony?”

“Nay, we don’t value his testimony,” interposed Elihu. “Your word is better than his. We believe you against him.”

Boynton waved scornful rejection with his hand. “Oh, spare your flatteries, sir. I know what you think of me. But you would believe my daughter?”

“Yee, we would,” answered the whole audience. The doctor regarded them with a curling lip. “Egeria,” he said quietly, “state to these people what occurred. Tell the truth.” The girl was silent. “Speak!”

“Father!” she gasped, “I don’t know. I have heard you say. But I was asleep and dreaming till that clap of thunder came.”

“Then you remember nothing?”

“Oh, I can just remember our going into that house, and our coming out of it. I forgot everything, — I was beginning to be crazy with the fever. But don’t mind, — oh, don’t mind, father! They believe you, — they said they did. Oh, you do believe him, don’t you?” she implored of all those faces that swam on her tears.

Boynton reeled, and again the compassionate brother started up to save him from a fall. “Don’t touch me!” he cried harshly. “Is there anything else?” he demanded, turning to Humphrey.

Elihu rose with an air of authority. “This must stop now. It has been a painful season; but no one here thinks that these friends have done anything wrong, or said anything false. We believe them, and we welcome them, if they choose, to stay with us.”

“Yee, we do!” The assenting voices included Humphrey’s.

“You welcome us to stay amongst you!” cried the doctor, with intense disdain. “Do you think that after what has just passed here any earthly consideration could induce me to remain another day, another hour, under your roof?” He had his daughter’s hand in his arm, and he proudly pressed it as he spoke, drawing himself to his full height. “So much for ourselves! As for the experiments in which we have so ignominiously failed, I have no personal regrets. It would have been a pitiful triumph at best, if we had succeeded before you, and I cannot believe that the principle, the truth, involved can suffer by our defeat. We are simply proved unfit means for its development, — nothing more. Were it otherwise, were I persuaded that our humiliation was destined to arrest, or more than slightly retard, the progress of this science in men’s minds, then I should indeed regard this night as the blackest of my life, and should be ready to lay down that life in despair. But, no! It is not given to any one weak instrument, mysteriously breaking in the presence of a few obscure and sordid intelligences, to obstruct the divine intention. In this ineradicable conviction, I bid you a final farewell.” He strode toward the door with his daughter on his arm. One of the elders said, meekly and sadly, “The meeting is dismissed,” and the brethren and sisters dispersed to their different houses. Those of the office found themselves following Dr. Boynton thither. They apprehensively entered after him, dreading some fresh explosion, or some show of preparation for instant departure. But the rhetoric of his spectacular adieu had sufficed him for the present. He merely said, “Egeria, go to bed. You must be quite worn out. As for me, I can’t sleep, yet. I will go out for a walk. Would you oblige me with a glass of water?” he asked politely, turning to Sister Frances. When she brought it, “Thanks,” he said, and handed back the empty goblet with a bow.

“Do you think you’d better walk far?” tremulously asked Egeria.

The touch of opposition restored him to his sense of wrong and resentment.

“Go to bed, Egeria,” he said severely, “and don’t any one sit up for me. I can let myself in at the side door when I wish to return.”

He started away, but the girl put herself in his path to the door. “Oh, father! You won’t go to see that man at the tavern, will you? Tell me you won’t, or I can’t let you go.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” cried her father. “I have no idea of going to meet that ruffian. In due time I shall call him to account.”

“Don’t ye think, Friend Boynton,” said Humphrey, with awkward kindliness, “that you’d better try to get some rest?”

In the swift evanescence and recurrence of his moods under the strong excitement, Boynton was like a drunken man. After publishing his resolution not to accept the hospitality of the Shakers for an hour more, he had walked passively to the office with them, and had bidden Egeria go to bed there, as if nothing had happened. At Humphrey’s words, all his indignation was rekindled.

“Rest! No, sir! I will not try to get some rest. After what has passed, every offer of kindness from you is a fresh offense. You, Egeria, if you can close your eyes here, you are welcome. Doubtless you can. Your apathy, your total want of sympathetic response to my feelings and my will, may enable you to do so. But till some other roof shall cover us, I want no shelter.”

No one sought to detain him, now, and going quickly from the door he left them huddled in a blank and purposeless group together.

“Poor thing!” said Sister Frances, first breaking the silence, as she turned to Egeria. “Oh, poor child!” She tried to take the girl in her arms; but with a pathetic “Don’t!” Egeria prevented her, and averted her quivering face. She went out of the room and up-stairs without a word or sound; but Frances creeping softly after, to listen at her door, heard her sobbing within the room.

XVI.

The hot weather, with here and there a blazing day in June, flamed into whole weeks of unbroken heat before the middle of July. The business streets were observably quieter, and the fashionable quarters were solitudes. At the club windows a few elderly men sat in arm-chairs, with glasses of iced Apollinaris water at their elbows, and stared out on the Common; some young men, with their hats on (if they perished for it), stalked spectrally from room to room behind them. The imported bonnes with their charges no longer frequented the Public Garden; it was thronged with the children and the superannuated of the poor, and with groups of tourists from the South and West, who were finding Boston what so many natives boast it in winter, the most comfortable summer resort on the coast.

It was not Ford’s habit to go out of town at all; for in his hatred of the narrow and importunate conditions of the village life which he had left behind him with his earlier youth, he had become an impassioned cockney.

“If you are so bitter against the country,” said Phillips, who was urging an invitation to the seaside upon him, “why don’t you try really to be of the town as well as in it? Why don’t you try to be one of us? Why don’t you make an effort to fit in?”

“I don’t like fitting in; I like elbow-room,” answered Ford. “Do you suppose I should be fond of the town if I were of it? I should have to be one of a set, and a set is a village. If I am in the town, but not of it, I have freedom and seclusion. Besides, no man of simple social traditions like mine fits into a complex society without a loss of self-respect. He must hold aloof, or commit insincerities, — be a snob. I prefer to hold aloof. It isn’t hard.”

“And you don’t think you do it to make yourself interesting?” inquired Phillips.

“I think not,” said Ford.

“People would as lief be pleasant to you as not. But it ends there. They ‘re not anxious about you,” suggested the other.

“I believe I understand that.” Ford was sitting at his window in his deep easy-chair; and he had his coat off. “That’s what galls my peasant-pride. Suppose I went with you to this lady’s house” — he touched with the stem of his pipe a letter which lay open on the table pulled near him—” and visited among your friends, the nobility and gentry; I should be reminded by a thousand things every day that I was a sham and a pretender. That kind of people always take it for granted that you feel and think with them; and I don’t. You can’t keep telling them so, however. And suppose I tried to conform: I should be an amateur among professionals. They have the habit of breeding and of elegance, as they understand it; I may have a loftier ideal, but I haven’t discipline; I can’t realize my ideal; and they do realize theirs, — poor souls! That makes me their inferior; that makes me hate them.”.

“Oh,” said Phillips, “you can put an ironical face on it, but I suspect what you say is really your mind.”

“Of course it is. At heart I am a prince in disguise; but your friends won’t know it if I sit with my coat off. That would vex me.” He took up the letter from the table, and holding it at arm’s length admired it. “Such a hand alone is enough; the smallest letters half an inch high, and all of them shrugging their shoulders. I can’t come up to that. If I went to this lady’s house, to be like her other friends and acquaintance I should have to be just arrived from Europe, or just going; my talk should be of London and Paris and Rome, of the Saturday Review and the Revue des Deux Mondes, of English politics and society; my own country should exist for me on sufferance through a compassionate curiosity, half repulsion; I ought to have recently dined at Newport with poor Lord and Lady Scamperton, who are finding the climate so terrible; and I should be expected to speak of persons of the highest social distinction by their first names, or the first syllables of their first names. You see, that’s quite beyond me. ‘And do bring your friend, Mr. Ford,’” he read from the letter mincingly, and laughed. “I leave it to your fertile invention to excuse me, Phillips.”

He kindled his pipe, and Phillips presently went away. It was part of his routine not to fix himself in any summer resort, but to keep accessible to the invitations which did not fail him. He found his account in this socially, and it did not remain unsaid that he also gratified a passion for economy in it; but the people who said this continued among his hosts. Late in the summer, or almost when the leaves began to turn, he went away to the hills for a fortnight or three weeks, providing himself with quarters in some small hotel, and making a point of returning to the simplicity of nature. In the performance of this rite he wore a straw hat and a flannel shirt, and he took walks in the woods with the youngest young ladies among the boarders.

The intervals between his visits he spent in town, where he was very comfortable. When he went to the places that desired him, he explained that he had been in Boston trying to get Ford away. “Oh, yes! Your odd friend,” said the ladies driving him home from the station in their phaetons. Phillips must have known that they did not care either for his odd friend or for his own oddity in having him, and yet he rather prized this eccentricity in himself.

The people in Ford’s boarding-house went their different ways. Mrs. Perham remained latest, for Mr. Perham’s health had not yet allowed his removal. He had had two great passions in life: making money and driving horses. By the time he had made his money he had a touch of paralysis, and could no longer drive horses. This separated him much from his wife, who liked almost as well as he to ride after a good horse (as it is expressed by people who like it), and whom, since she had been forced so much to books for amusement, he could not join. She read the newspapers to him, and she went with him to the theatres; but there they ceased to sympathize in their tastes, for she was not fond of swearing, and it was this resource which remained to Mr. Perham after the papers and the play.

The house filled up for the summer with those people from the West and South who found the summer in Boston so pleasant, and with other transients; but many of the rooms and many of the places at the table remained vacant, and Mrs. Perham and Ford looked at each other across long distances, empty, or populated only by strange faces. At last Mr. Perham was able to bear removal; his wife seized the occasion and hurried him away to the country. That left Ford alone with the strangers, and he rather missed the woman’s hungry curiosity, her cheerfulness, and her indomitable patience under what a more sympathetic witness might have felt to be the hard conditions of her life. He clung to the town throughout July and far into August, with a growing restlessness. He did not care for the heat, and he amused himself well enough when he found time to be amused. He made a point of studying the different excursions in the harbor and beyond it; he studied also the entertainments offered at the theatres, where the variety combinations inculcated in small audiences a morality as relaxed as their systems.

One Sunday he went to the spiritualist meeting in the grove by Walden Pond. Most of the spiritualists were at a camp-meeting of their sect further up the road, and the people whom he met seemed, like himself, vaguely curious. They were nearly all country-folk: the young men had come with their sweethearts for pleasure; there were middle-aged husbands and wives who had brought their children for a day in the woods beside the pretty lake. Their horses were tied to the young pines and oaks; they sat in their buggies and carryalls, which were pushed into cool and breezy spots. The scene brought back to Ford the Sunday-school picnics of his childhood, but here was a profaner flavor: scraps of newspaper that had wrapped lunches blew about the grounds; at one place a man had swung a hammock, and lay in it reading, in his shirt-sleeves; on the pond was a fleet of gay rowboats, which, however, the railroad company would not allow to be hired on Sunday. Ford found the keeper of the floating bath-houses and got a bath. When he came out the man, with American splendor, refused to take any money; he said that they did not let the baths on Sunday, but when he saw a gentleman he liked to treat him as one. “ I hope you ‘re not mistaken in my case,” said Ford sadly; and the bath-man laughed, and said he would chance it. Another of the people in charge complained of the dullness of the place. “What you want is a band. You want a dance-hall in the middle of the pond, here; and you want a band.” They pointed out the auditorium in a hollow of the hills beyond the railroad track, where at the hour fixed for service he found the sparse company assembled. A score of listeners were scattered over the seats in the middle of the pavilion; outside, two young fellows who had come by the train leaned against the columns and smoked, with their hats on; a young girl in blue, with her lover, conspicuously occupied one of the seats under the trees that scaled the amphitheatre, worn grassless and brown by drought and the feet of many picnics; there were certain ladies in artificial teeth and long linen dusters whom Ford fixed upon as spiritualists, though he had no reason to do so. A trance-speaker was announced for the Invocation; he came forward, where the fiddlers sat when there was dancing, and, supporting himself by one hand on the music-stand, closed his eyes and passed into a trance of wandering rhetoric, returning to himself in a dribble of verse which bade the hearer, at the close of each stanza, “Come, then, come to Spirit-Land.”

The address was given by another speaker, who declaimed against the injustice of the world towards spiritualism and boasted of the importance of its Unfoldments. He sketched its rise and progress, and found an analogy between the “first lisping of the tinny rap at Rochester” and the advent of Christ, whom he described as the “infant Reformer in the manger,” and again as our “humble elder brother.” The people listened decently, and but for the young fellows with their cigars were as respectful as most country congregations to what was much duller than most country preaching. Ford came away before the end, and climbing the side of the amphitheatre encountered Mr. Eccles, who was also about to go. He shook hands with Ford, and on his present inquiry said that nothing had been heard of the Boyntons since the spring. He expressed a faded interest in them. He asked Ford if he had seen the experiments in self-expansion and compression of the new medium, Mrs. Sims. He viewed these experiments as the ultimation of certain moral fluctuations in the spiritual world, for if there was a steady movement either outward or inward in that world, Mrs. Sims might expand or might condense herself, but it stood to reason that she could not do both.

Ford came home with a headache; when he woke, the next morning, the long window danced round the room before it settled to its proper place. He was not in the habit of being sick, and he suffered some days with this dizziness before he saw a doctor. Then he asked advice, because the sickness interfered with his work.

“Go away somewhere,” said the doctor. “It’s indigestion. Get a change of air.”

“Do you mean the sea-side?” asked Ford.

“I don’t call that a change of air from Boston. Go to the hills.”

Ford reflected a moment in disgust. He could have endured the sea-side. “Any particular direction?”

“No. Go anywhere. Go to the White Mountains. Take a tramp through them.”

“I’d rather take medicine,” said Ford. “Give me some medicine.”

“Oh, I’ll give you all the medicine you want,” said the doctor; and he wrote him a prescription.

Ford went home, and took his medicine with the same skepticism, and tried to keep about his work. The lectures which he had been attending were over long ago; but he had found a chance to do some study with a practical chemist which he was loath to forego; and he had his pot-boiling for the press. But his mind feebly relaxed from the demands upon it, and at last it refused to respond at all. He lingered a week longer in town before he would suffer himself to act upon the doctor’s advice, and when at last he forced himself to submission it was the end of the month. As regarded such matters he was a man of small invention, and he was at a loss how to go, when he had made up his mind to it. He would have been glad of Phillips’s determining counsel, but the time had now come for Phillips’s annual return to nature, and he would be far from Boston and the North Shore. On his way to buy a Guide, Ford saw in the window of a railroad agency the advertisement of a route to the White Mountains, and he advised with the ticket-agent, who took no more interest in the matter than Ford himself, about getting a ticket over his line. It led first to Portland, and then, as the agent indifferently pointed out on the map, went straight to the mountains, with a bold, broad sweep, while rival routes, in spidery crooks, zigzagged thither with a preposterous, almost wanton, indirectness. Ford stood sadly amusing himself, first with the immense advantage of this line over all competitors, and then with the names of the towns near Gorham in New Hampshire, and in the adjoining region of Maine: Milan, Berlin, Success, Byron, Madrid, Avon, New Vineyard, Peru, Norway, Sweden, Industry, Paris, Carthage, — names conjecturably given at hap-hazard, or in despair, or out of humorous recklessness, as names are given to dogs and horses. He wondered whether Dr. Boynton came from Byron or Carthage, or perhaps a little farther off, from Cornville or Solon. He stood so long before the map that the agent lost his patience, and turned to his books; and Ford came away at last without buying a ticket.

At home he found a visitor whom his sick and dazzled eyes identified after a while as Phillips. “Hallo!” he said. “I thought you were somewhere in the country.”

“Theoretically I am in the country,” Phillips admitted, “but practically ‘I am here,’ — as Ruy Blas says.” He neatly imitated the accent of the late Charles Fechter in pronouncing the words. “It occurred to me, before committing myself to the country irretrievably, that I would stop in Boston and try to commit you with me.”

“Who told you I was sick?” asked Ford, with displeasure.

“Nobody. If I knew it, I divined it. If you are sick, so much the better. My plan is just the thing for you. I am going to drive in a buggy to Brattleboro’, where I underwent the water cure — for my first passion. It was a great while ago. I want you to come, too.”

Ford shook his head stupidly. “The doctor said the White Mountains.”

“Yes, White Mountains, Green Mountains; it’s all one. It’s air that you ‘re after. All you want is change of air. This journey will make another man of you. It’s to be a journey for the sake of going and coming; and we will loiter or hurry on the way, just as we like. Come! I’ve planned it all out. It’s to be an affair of weeks. I propose to make it an exploration, — a voyage of discovery. I wish to form the acquaintance of my native State, and of those men and brethren, her children, who have never left the domestic hearth. You had better come. It will be literary material to you, and money in your pocket. I thought of striking for Egerton, and looking in on the Perhams there, first; but we ought to stop on our way at Sudbury to see the Wayside Inn; and I must deflect a little to show you Concord, and the local history and philosophy; there are Shakers and all sorts of novelties at Vardley and Harshire; beyond Egerton is Princeton, with its Wachusett Mountain; and after that there is anything northwestwardly that you like; I haven’t the map by me. My mare is pining on the second floor of her stable, and would ask nothing better than to form a third in our party.”

“Oh, I’ll go with you,” said Ford listlessly.

“Good!” cried Phillips. “This is the fire of youth. If we get sick of it, we can send the mare back from any given point, and take to the rails. That is one of the advantages of having rails. It makes travel by the country roads a luxury, and not a necessary. I fancy we shall feel almost wicked in the pursuit of our journey, — it will be such unalloyed pleasure.”

Phillips’s mare was the remains of an establishment which he had set up some years before. It had included a man and a coupé, and he had relinquished these because of their expensiveness. The man, especially, had been unable to combine the advantages of outside man and inside man; he made Phillips’s lodgings smell of the mare, and he made the stable smell of Phillips’s wine. The man was paid off and sent away, and the coupe was sold at auction; but with a conservative unthrift that curiously combined with his frugal instincts, Phillips had suffered the mare to linger on his hands. Sometimes he took her out for exercise from the club stable, where he had lodged her; but he had intervals of forgetfulness, in which the club-groom found it his duty to warn him that the mare’s legs were swelling. She was consequently boarded out of town a good deal, and Phillips awoke to her possession only when the farmers’ bills came in. At these times he said he should sell that mare.

Like men who are rarely out of sorts, Ford was eager to be well at once, and he chafed under Phillips’s delays in getting off. But the latter, having secured Ford’s company, began to arrange the details of their journey with minuteness, and it was several days before they started. Their progress had then even more than the promised slowness. Phillips was intent not only upon the pleasure of the journey, but also upon the search for colonial bric-a-brac, and this began as soon as they struck the real country beyond the suburban villages. All that was colonial was to his purpose, from tall standing clocks to the coarsest cracked blue delft: spinning-wheels, andirons, shovels and tongs, clawfooted furniture, battered pewter plates, door-latches and door-knockers, tin lanterns, fiddle-back chairs — his craze generously embraced them all. He did not buy much, but he talked as long over what he left as what he took. He was not the first connoisseur who had visited these farm-houses; the people sometimes knew the worth of their wares; in certain cases, he traced the earlier presence of rival collectors whom he knew. Ford had nothing to do but to note the growth of the bargaining passion in the wary farm-wives. There were some who would sell nothing, and some had nothing they would not sell, and they asked too much or too little with the same simplicity. What most struck him was the entire rusticity of their thought and life. Off the lines of railroad, and out of the localities frequented by summer boarders, the people were as rural, within fifteen or twenty miles of Boston, as they would have been among the Vermont or New Hampshire hills. But the country was itself occasionally very wild, especially as they got southward in Sudbury, among overflowed meadows and long stretches of solitary pine woods. The sparse farmhouses and the lonesome villages afflicted him with the remembrance of his own youth; whatever his life had been since, it had not been embittered with the sense of hopeless endeavor, with the galled pride, with the angry ambition, which had once made it a torment in such places. But when they chanced upon some bit of absolute wilderness his heart relented towards the country; his jealous spirit found no more intrusion there than in the town; and he liked the wild odors, the tangle of vegetation, the life of the sylvan things. A hawk winging to covert under the avenging pursuit of small birds, a woodchuck lumpislily skurrying across an open field, the chase of chipmucks and squirrels along the walls, were sights that touched a remote and deep tenderness in his breast. As they drew near the old inn, which was the first monument Phillips had proposed to inspect, it was late in the afternoon, and the landscape grew more consolingly savage. No other house was near enough to be seen, and they approached the storied mansion through a long stretch of pine and sand, by a road which must be lonelier now than it was a hundred years ago. They dismounted under the elm before the vast yellow hostelry, and explored its rambling chambers: they saw Lafayette’s room and Washington’s room; the attic for the slaves and common folk; the quaint ball-room; the bar; the parlor where Longfellow and his friends used to sit before the fire that forever warms the rhyme celebrating the Wayside Inn. They found it not an inn any more, though it appeared from the assent of the tenant that they might command an elusive hospitality for the night. The back-door opened upon the fading memories of a garden, and the damp of late rains struck from it into the sad old house.

“It would be delightful,” Phillips said, “to stay, but I think we must push on to Sudbury for the night.” He lingered over an old chest of drawers in the dining-room; not claw-footed, certainly, but with a bulging front, and with some fragmentary relics of its former brasses. But, “It has carried antiquity to the point where it ceases to be a virtue,” he sighed at last. “It might be re-created; it couldn’t be restored.”

At Sudbury Village they found that there was no inn; though provision was occasionally made for wayfarers at the outlying farm-houses. They could be lodged in that way, or they could return for the night to the tavern at Way land where they had dined. It was now twilight. “I think it will give an agreeable flavor of hardship to our adventure if we push on to Concord,” said Phillips, and Ford willingly consented. They were no better assorted than ever in their strange companionship; but they had a good deal of talk. Phillips was volubly philosophical; and Ford, under the stimulus of the novelty, was more than commonly responsive, and pointed his comment, as was very unusual in him, with bits of his own history and observation. But the next day, after looking over Concord together, and making their start upon an early dinner, they had almost as little to say to each other as the tramps they met on the road, who had the air of not wishing to be disturbed in their meditations upon burglary and arson. They gave up their plan of stopping over night with the Harshire Shakers, and pushed on as far as Vardley instead, where they trusted to finding shelter in the community. They could spend the next morning there, Phillips said, and dine at Egerton; and Ford assented to anything.

XVII.

Boynton had passed the night wandering up and down the roads, and trying to puzzle out the causes of his discomfiture. Towards morning he had gone as far as the Elm Tavern and walked to and fro before it a long time, debating whether he should go in and confront the landlord with his lie. The house was brilliantly lighted upon one side, where there seemed to be a hall running its whole length, and a sound of clattering feet and laughing voices, mingled with the half-suppressed squeak of a fiddle, came out of the open windows. It was the landlord who was fiddling; Boynton recognized his tones in the harsh voice that called out the figures of the dance. From time to time a panting couple came to the door for breath. Several women came together, presently, and catching sight of Boynton, as he lurked in the shadow of the elms, one of them called out, “Lord, girls, there’s a ghost!” and they all fled in-doors again with hysterical cries and laughter. The word thrilled him with hope: what he had declared in regard to the phenomena there must be matter of general belief in the neighborhood. He stole away, borne forward as if on air by the tumult of cogitation that inflated his brain. He found himself, he knew not how, again on the long street of the Shaker village. The day was breaking, when he sat down near the granite bowl, still struggling hopefully for a clue to the mystery of his failure. His waking dreams began to mix with those of sleep, and an hour later Ford and Phillips, roused by a common foreboding of early breakfast, and strolling down the road a little for a glimpse of the village and a breath of the fresh morning air, halted at sight of this strange figure, clothed in Shaker habiliments, and with the broad-brimmed Shaker hat on the grass at its feet; the eyes were closed, and the head rested against the trunk of one of the willows. A chilly horror crept over Ford, who whispered, “Is he dead?” but Phillips had no emotion save utter astonishment.

“Great heavens!” he cried. “It’s Dr. Boynton!”

At the sound of his name, Boynton opened his eyes with a start, and sprang to his feet. He recognized them instantly, but he took no heed of Phillips as he launched himself upon Ford.

“You here! You here! You here!” he screamed. “Now I understand! Now I see! Where were you last night? Were you in this place, this neighborhood, this region? I see it! I know why we failed, — why we were put to shame, destroyed, annihilated, in the very hour of our triumph! I might have thought of it! I might have known you were here! Did you hunt us up? Did you follow us? You have ruined me! You have blasted my life!”

With whatever wild impulse, he caught at Ford’s throat, and clung to his collar, while the young man’s iron clutch tightened upon either of his wrists.

“Let go, you maniac! If you don’t let go, I’ll” —

Boynton flung up his hands, and reeling several steps backward, fell. He struck heavily against the sharp rim of the stone bowl, and seemed about to fall into the water, but dropped at the base, motionless.

“My God, you’ve killed him!” shouted Phillips, as he stepped out from behind one of the trees.

“Go and get help!” Ford fell on his knees beside Boynton, and searched his breast with a trembling hand for the beating of his heart; he put his ear to his mouth, and heard him breathe before he dipped his hand in the bowl, and dashed Boynton’s face with the water. He was kneeling beside him, and lifting his head upon his arm, when he looked up and saw the anxious visages of those whom Phillips’s clamors had summoned about them. Then Egeria had made her way through the circle. She pushed Ford away with an awful look and stooping over her father caught up his head in her arms, and now swiftly scanned his face, and now swiftly pressed it against her breast, in those shuddering impulses with which a mother will see and will not see if her child be hurt.

The Shakers pushed a wagon down to the place where Boynton lay, and Ford afterward remembered helping to lift him into it.

“I’m glad you didn’t strike him; I thought at first you had,” said Phillips, as they followed the wagon back to the village.

“So did I,” said Ford, mentally struggling to realize what had happened.

“What are they going to do, I wonder?” resumed Phillips, looking about him. “They ought to send for a doctor.”

“Yee,” said a Shaker at his elbow, whom neither of them had noticed, “we have sent.”

The doctor came quickly; and Boynton, whom they had got into the infirmary upon the bed where Egeria had lain sick, began to show signs of consciousness. From time to time, scraps of hopeful report were passed through the group outside to Ford and Phillips on its skirts. When the doctor reappeared at last from within the infirmary, the brothers and sisters by twos and threes waylaid him in the yard and the street with anxious demand. The young men walking apart ambushed him farther down the road.

“It’s a faint — I can’t tell what it’s complicated with. He received some contusions in his fall — about the head. He’s an elderly man. He’s stout.”

“Do you mean that he’s in danger?” Ford asked.

“Well, these apoplectic seizures are serious things for any one after thirty. Still it’s a slight attack —— comparatively. The contusions — I’m obliged to leave him for another patient just now. I shall be back again directly. Which of you is Mr. Ford?”

“My name is Ford.”

“He wanted to know where you were. You a friend of his?”

“No. I met him in Boston this spring.”

“Know his friends?”

“I don’t.”

“Get up!” said the doctor to his horse.

“If we knew any of his people,” said Phillips, “I suppose we ought to telegraph.”

“Yes,” assented Ford.

“But, as we don’t know them,” continued Phillips, “what are we going to do?”

“I can’t say.” When they reached the office on their walk back, Ford went in, and left Phillips to get their horse put to. In a little while he came out again, and said abruptly, “I’m going to stay here. I can’t say that I am responsible for the misfortunes of this man, but somehow I am entangled with him, and I can’t break away without playing the brute. I’ve been talking with these people about Boynton. He’s been trying some of his experiments here, and has failed. The thing happened last night, and I suppose that when he saw me, this morning, his mind recurred to his old delusion that I had something to do with his failure.”

“I imagined as much,” said Phillips, “from a remark that he made.”

Ford frowned at the levity, and then continued. “That’s all. I’ve explained to their head men, here, as well as I could, what relation he fancied I had to him, and they understood it better than I could have expected; they’ve seen enough of him to understand that his superstition about me would account for the assault. I’m not bound to respect his mania, but I don’t see how I can leave till I know how it goes with him.” Phillips shrugged his shoulders, but said nothing. “The Shakers tell me that I can be lodged at a house of theirs down the road here. I must stay, and be of what use I can, though I don’t know what. I’ll come away when I can do so decently.” —

“Oh, if you ‘re going in for decency,” said Phillips, “I’ve nothing to say. But that sort of thing can be carried too far, you know. Do you really mean it?”

“Yes.”

“Then there’s nothing for me to say. But what do you expect me to do?” he asked, glancing at the horse, which was now brought up.

“I expect you to go on. There’s no reason why you should stay.”

“No, I can’t see how I’m involved. And it’s a brisk drive to Egerton, — and breakfast. There’s no prospect of breakfast here, I suppose,” he said, looking wistfully at the office windows. “Well; if you’ve made up your mind, I shall be off at once. I’m sorry for our excursion.”

“Yes, it’s a pity for that,” said Ford.

“It promised everything. Perhaps you could join me at Egerton, to-morrow?”

“Yes; if I can.”

“I’ll give you day’s grace. Then I shall push on to Brattleboro’, and perhaps drop down this way with the falling leaf. I wish you’d write to me at Brattleboro’, and let me know how the doctor gets on.” —

They shook hands. Ford pulled his bag out of the back of his wagon; and as Phillips drove off, he set out under the guidance of one of the brothers, to find his quarters in the house of which he had spoken. It had been the dwelling of a family of Shakers, which in the decay of their numbers was absorbed into the other branches of the community, and it stood half a mile away from the office, quite empty, but kept in perfect neatness and repair. He was given his choice of its many dormitories, but he preferred to have his bed set up in the meeting-room, which opened by folding-doors into an ante-room as large, and thus extended the whole length of the building. It was low ceiled, but cool currents of air swept through it from the windows at either end, and it was a still haven of refuge from the heat by night and by day. Hardly a fly sang in its expanse, dimmed by the shade of the elms before it; and it was indescribably remote from noise. The passing even of an ox-cart on the street before it was hushed by the thick bed of sand that silenced the road-way; and the heavy voice of the driver in hawing and geeing came like some lulling sound of animal life. A tenant of the Shakers lived in a farm-house across the way, and his wife had agreed to give Ford his meals and bestow what care his room needed; but these people were childless, and except for the plaintive lament of their broods of young turkeys pursuing the grasshoppers through the ranks of sweet-corn, their presence involved hardly an interruption of the quiet.

Ford hung up some clothes in a closet, and after a hurried breakfast went again to the office. He found Boynton’s doctor there with Humphrey and the sisters, and presently Egeria came in from another room with a slip of paper in her hand; her eyes were swollen with weeping, but she said in a low, steady voice, “This is grandfather’s address.”

“I don’t want you to feel,” said the doctor, “that the case is immediately alarming. There is no necessity for your grandfather’s coming” —

“Oh, no! But I know that he would like to be told.” She gave the slip of paper to Humphrey, and without looking at Ford went out at the door, and he saw her cross the street to the infirmary. There was some talk as to how this dispatch should be sent, and Ford said he was going over to the village, and would carry it to the operator at the station. Outside, the doctor beckoned to him from his buggy, and said, “He has asked again if you were here. If he wishes to see you, you had better let him. Humphrey has told me what you explained to him. You can humor a sick man’s whim, I suppose.”

Ford really had another errand at Vardley; he wanted some ink and paper; for if he were to remain he must set to work as soon as possible. It was noon before he returned. With the lapse of time, that working mind, of which the operations are so obscure and incalculable, had unconsciously arranged its material in him, and when he sat down in his strange lodging he was able to put it all on paper, in spite of the remote, dull ache of anxiety which accompanied his writing.

His tea was ready by the time the work was done, but with the revival of his restlessness, upon the conclusion of his task and the release of the faculties devoted to it, he slighted the meal, and hastily started with his copy to the post-office.

He was met there by the telegraph operator, who asked him to carry back to the Shakers the reply to the telegram he had sent. He saw that he must be already identified with the Boyntons in the village gossip; but he did not observe the kindly interest expressed in some words dropped by the operator, as he put the dispatch into his pocket, and walked away with it.

There was a light in Humphrey’s room at the office when he returned, and he carried the telegram in to him, and waited while the Shaker brought his lamp to bear upon the sheet. Humphrey remained reading it as if it were a long, closely-written letter.

“You don’t know what it says?” he asked at last, looking up over his spectacles.

“Why, no,” said Ford. “I had no authority to open it.”

“I thought may be the telegrapher might told ye. It appears as if Friend Boynton’s father-in-law had been dead two months.”

The dispatch, which Humphrey handed to Ford, was signed by “Rev. Frederick Armstrong,” who promised that he “would write.”

“I suppose,” said Humphrey, “it’s the minister.”

“I suppose so,” Ford admitted absently. He came to himself to ask, “What’s to be done?” Humphrey scratched his head. “I d’ know as I’m rightly prepared to say. You don’t know nothin’ about Friend Boynton’s other folks, do ye?”

“No,” said Ford.

Another silence followed. “Seems to come kind o’ hard, right on top of the other Providence,” mused Humphrey, aloud. “Would it be your judgment to tell ‘em?”

“Really, I don’t know,” said Ford, quite unable to shake off his sterile dismay.

“You don’t feel,” suggested Humphrey, “as if you’d like to break the news to ‘em?”

“I doubt,” answered Ford, glad to be able to lay hold of any idea, “whether Dr. Boynton is in a condition to know even that we’ve telegraphed, much less what the answer is.”

“Yee,” assented Humphrey, “that is so. Then it comes to tellin’ Egery. If you was an old friend of the family” —

“I’m not,” said Ford. “I told you that I saw them for the first time in Boston, this spring. Why need you say anything at all?”

“Why,” returned Humphrey, with a gleam of hope, “I s’pose, if she asks, we’ll have to.”

“She may not ask at once. Don’t speak till she does.”

“That’s so,” mused Humphrey. “It could be done that way. I d’ know as anybody could say they was deceived, either.”

Certainly not.”

Humphrey put the telegram into a drawer and turned the key upon it. “She can have it when she asks for it,” he said doggedly, like a man who has made up his mind to accept the consequences of his transgression.

Ford drew a long breath; a little time had been gained, at any rate. “Can I be of any use over there to-night?” he asked, nodding his head in the direction of the infirmary. “Have you watchers?”

“Yee: Laban’s settin’ up with him, to-night; and Frances is there with Egery.”

“If he asks for me,” said Ford, “I should like you to call me at any hour.”

He went out, and walked down the dark, silent, road to his strange domicile. Hearing him approach, the farmer came across the road, and opened the door for him, and gave him matches to light his lamp. He found his way to his vast chamber; but after he had blown out his light, it was long before he slept.

XVIII.

The next morning, while Ford sat, after breakfast, at his writing-table, trying to put his mind upon his work, one of the little Shaker boys came to say that Friend Boynton wished to see him. He obeyed the summons with a stricture at the heart. The boy could not say whether Boynton was better or worse, but Ford conceived that he was called in a final moment. He had never seen any one die, and all through his childhood and his earlier youth the thought of death had been agony to him, probably because it was related to fears of the life after death, which survived in his blood after they ceased to be part of his belief. The confirmed health of his adolescence, as well as his accepted theories of existence, had now for years quieted these fears. The sleep and the forgetting which the future had been reasoned so clearly to be could not be terrible to any man of good health, and in the rare moments in which he lifted his mind from the claims of duty here it reposed tranquilly enough in the logical refuge of nullity provided for it. Annihilation was not dreadful, but the instant preceding it, the last breath of consciousness, in which his personality should be called to cease, to release its strong clutch upon reality, might contain a spiritual anguish, to which an eternity of theologically fancied pangs were nothing. He did not shrink from the consequences of his own mental position; there could be no consequences of belief or disbelief; but he was cold with the thought of confronting the image of his own dissolution in another. Life was not a good, he knew that; but he felt now that it was something, and beyond it there was not even evil. He touched first the swelling muscle of one arm, and then of the other; he laid his hand upon the trunk of a large maple as he passed; he swept the sky with a glance; he smiled to find himself behaving like a man on his way to execution; if he had himself been about to die, he could not have realized more intensely the preciousness of the existence which was slipping into shadow from the grasp of yonder stricken man.

If his face expressed anything of this dark sympathy when he entered the room where Boynton lay, the sick man did not see it. His doctor was there, seated at the bedside, and Boynton lifted one of the limp hands that lay upon the coverlet and gave it to Ford, saying, with his blandness diluted by physical debility, “You’ll excuse my sending for you, Mr. Ford, but I fancied that you would like to see that I was not in such bad case as I might be.”

“You are very good,” said Ford, touching his hand, and then taking the chair which the country doctor set for him. The exchange of civilities relieved the tension of his feelings, and he found it no longer possible to regard Boynton with the solemnity with which he had approached him.

“Dr. Wilson and I,” Boynton continued, “are treating my case together. By that means we draw the sting of the old proverb about having a fool for one’s patient, and we get the benefit of our combined experience. The doctor is inclined to take an optimistic view of my condition, which I don’t find myself able to share. I have spent a summer —— I may almost say a year — of intense excitements, and I am sure that an obscure affection of the heart with which I was once troubled has made progress.” He spoke of it with a courteous lightness and haste, as if not to annoy his listener, while Ford gazed at him dumbly. “I have been anxious to say that I regretted the expressions — the exasperation — into which I was betrayed on first meeting you, the other morning.” Dr. Wilson rose. “Ah! Going, doctor?” asked Boynton. “Don’t let me send you away. Mr. Ford and I have no confidences to make each other. I am only offering him the reparation which is due between gentlemen where there has been a misunderstanding.”

“Thank you,” said Dr. Wilson, “I must go, now. I will see you again to-morrow.”

“And in the mean time we will continue the same treatment? Good-morning, doctor. Dr. Wilson,” he added, when the latter had withdrawn, “is a man of uncommon qualifications for his profession. I have been much pleased with the manner in which he has taken hold of my case, though we could not agree in all points of our diagnosis.” Boynton’s voice was feeble, and from time to time he paused from weakness; but he was careful as ever to round his sentences and polish his diction. “As I was saying,” he continued, “I used certain expressions for which I wish to apologize.”

“There is no occasion for that,” Ford began.

“Oh, I beg your pardon, but there is!” retorted the other. “My language, even in view of your possible intention of antagonizing me, was ridiculous and unjustifiable; for I ought to have been only too glad of the solution of a painful mystery which your presence afforded me. The fact is,” he explained, “I met you yesterday after the entire failure of an experiment in psychology which I had been making here under conditions more favorable than I could expect to recur if I should live a thousand years. The experiment was by no means of an advanced character; it was of the simplest character, — the exhibition of a few of the most ordinary phenomena of animal magnetism, in which mere tyros succeed. The failure dumfounded me. At sight of you, my theory of your opposite control, of the necessary antagonism of your sphere, rushed into my mind, and I yielded to an impulse to resent my failure, when I ought, logically, to have hailed your presence as relief, as rescue from an annihilating despair.” —

“I am very sorry,” Ford began again.

“Not at ail, not at all!” cried Boynton. “Was I right in supposing that you had spent the previous evening in this vicinity?”

“Mr. Phillips and I had slept at the office — you call it?”

“Is it possible!” Boynton lay quiet for a moment, before he added, musingly, “Yes, that might account for it, if my premises were correct. But,” he continued sadly, “it is impossible to verify them now. Some one else must take up my work at the very point — You here, and under conditions favorable to the most complete and thorough investigation! This question of antagonization could be settled in a manner absolutely final; and here I lie, fettered and manacled!” ‘He heaved a passionate sigh, and Ford, in spite of the fact that he knew himself regarded for the moment as a mere instrumentality, an impersonal force, felt a sharp regret for the overthrow of this absurd dreamer.

“Is there — is there any way in which I can be of use to you, Dr. Boynton?” he asked presently.

Boynton did not reply at once. He moved his head uneasily on the pillow, and weakly knotted his fingers together. Then he said, “Yes, there is. I would rather you transacted the business than any of our good friends here, for I am afraid that it might get from them to my daughter. In fact, I should not know how to communicate with them without alarming her.”

He looked beseechingly at Ford, who said, “Well?”

“What are your religious beliefs?” —

“I have none,” said Ford.

“At your age I had none,” rejoined Boynton. “Afterward, in circumstances of great sorrow, I embraced the philosophy of spiritualism, because it promised immediate communion and reunion with the wife I had lost. Neither before nor since that time has my theory admitted the necessity of certain — certain — formalities to which the Christian world attaches importance. But the influence of early teachings is very strong, and I cannot resist an inclination — It is entirely illogical, upon either hypothesis, I know! If there is no life hereafter, then it is of no consequence whatever whether any reconciliation takes place. If there is a life hereafter, and it is a mere continuation of this, a progress, a development, under certain new conditions, then the reconciliation can take place there as well as here. This is what my reason tells me, and yet I am not at rest. My dear friend, if you were about to die,” — the hand which Boynton unexpectedly laid upon Ford’s sent a thrill to his heart,—” and you had parted with some one upon terms of mutual injury, what should you wish?”

“I should wish to see him before I died,” answered Ford, gravely.

“And make peace with him, — ask and offer forgiveness. Precisely. There is no doubt an element of superstition in the impulse; it seems childish and unreasonable; and yet I cannot help it. What is it? First, be reconciled to thy brother,... agree with thine adversary quickly — I don’t remember. My adversary is the father of my child’s mother. We quarreled very bitterly, about this — philosophy of mine. I think he used me harshly; but he is an old man, and doubtless I grieved and thwarted him more than I understood. I don’t justify myself. I would like to see him again, and ask him to forgive. I wish you would be so good, Mr. Ford, as to telegraph him — there’s an office at Vardley Station — that I am seriously sick, and would like to see him.” Ford could not reply, and Boynton took his silence for reluctance. “I hope I haven’t asked too much of you?”

“Oh, no! No. What,” he contrived to ask, “is your father-in-law’s name?” Boynton gave the name and that of the village in which he lived, and Ford mechanically took them down in his notebook. He remained with this in his hand, seated beside the bed, and not knowing what to do; but he rose at last, and murmured something about not losing time, when Egeria entered. He would have passed her with a bow, but the cheery voice of Boynton turned him motionless.

“Egeria,” he said, as the girl went up to his bedside, “I have been asking a favor of Mr. Ford, — something that I intended for a surprise and pleasure to you. But I think that the surprise might be too much, — might alarm you, — and I had better not let it be a surprise. Don’t you think that if your grandfather knew that I was so disposed he would like to make up our little quarrel? Mr.

Ford is going to telegraph him to come here! There is no occasion for anxiety” —

Egeria turned upon Ford, with swift self-betrayal. “They telegraphed yesterday. Haven’t they heard?” Ford glanced at her father in despair, and bent on her a look of compassion that he was conscious became an appeal for her pity. “Oh, what is it?” she cried, quivering under his imploring scrutiny. “Won’t he come? Oh, he is harder than I ever believed! Yes, yes! You were right, father; I will never forgive him!”

“I think I had better tell you the truth,” Ford said. “Some one must do it. Your grandfather is dead.”

A light of relief, almost of joy, shone in her face. “Oh! I was afraid — I was afraid — Oh, poor grandfather! How could I think it!” She put up her hands to her face, like a child, and wept with sobs that shook the young man’s heart.

“When did he die?” she asked at last.

“Two months ago. The telegram was from the minister. He promised to write.”

“Do you hear?” cried Egeria. “He would have come, but — he is dead!”

“Oh!” breathed her father, speaking for the first time, “I am very sorry!”

“And now, now do you forgive him?” demanded the girl. “Now” ——

“Oh, poor soul! I wanted him to forgive me” said Boynton. “Well, well! I must wait.”

His daughter dropped on her knees beside his bed, and hid her face in the coverlet. “Poor grandfather! Poor grandfather!” she moaned. “How could you think he wouldn’t come?” she said, lifting her face. “Do you think now that he was cruel?”

“We quarreled,” answered her father. “I was to blame.”

“No, you were not to blame,” she retorted, with swift revulsion. “You believed you did right, and you never pretended that you didn’t. Oh, if you could only have seen each other again!”

“Yes,” answered the sick man; “the wish to see him has been heavy on my soul ever since I came to myself.”

The word recalled her, and she looked fondly into her father’s face. “Oh, father, have I made you feel badly? I am so sorry for grandfather” —

“No, my poor girl! I can sympathize with your feeling about him; I can understand it.” He smoothed her hair with his gentle, weak, small hand. “I can understand, and I can approve of your feeling. But don’t be troubled. Your grandfather and I will be friends when we meet. It will make little difference there what theories or creeds we hold. They cannot separate us.”

“Why, father!” exclaimed the girl. “What do you mean? You are not going to die! The doctor said” —

Boynton smiled in recovering himself. “We are all mortal. Dr. Wilson is very hopeful about me. I am not going to die at once.”

He took one of her hands while she bent over him. “I had mentioned to our good friend here,” he said, indicating Ford, “in requesting him to notify your grandfather, my special reasons for wishing to see him, and some little statement — explanation — was necessary in regard to the terms of our separation. I was saying that I wished they had been different. But in the light of this new fact, does my part really appear worse to you than it did before? You can speak freely; I can bear —— I ought even to court — the truth.”

The girl threw her arms about his neck. “Father! You never had one selfish thought in it. I know that, and I always knew it. I didn’t mean to blame you; I only wanted you to excuse him. Oh, nobody needs excusing but me! I stood up before them all, and denied you. I am the one to blame!”

“No, no,” protested her father, “you were true to yourself. In the long run we could have succeeded upon no other conditions. You did right.”

“Oh, I did long so to please you! You can’t think how hard I tried! But something kept me” — She rose and looked at Ford, the obstruction of whose involuntary presence no effort of his had sufficed to remove, and panted, as if about to make some appeal to him. But her lips could not shape it; a piteous, formless, low cry broke from them, and she ran from the room, leaving him in a frowning daze.

“I hope, my dear sir,” said Boynton, “that you will be able to make allowance for the excitement under which we have been laboring. My daughter’s distress on my account, and her affection for her grandfather — But we don’t intend to make you the victim of our unhappiness.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Ford, not knowing what else to say.

“You were very considerate, with regard to me,” said Boynton gratefully. “I thank you for your good feeling relative to the telegram. But it is well that I should know the worst at once. In asking your patience for what has just occurred, I am sure that I am only anticipating my daughter’s wish. I am by no means as confident as I have been,” he added, “that I was correct in my theory of your influence. But you have somehow been strangely involved in our destiny. It is something that I hardly know how to apologize for.”

“There is no necessity,” said Ford.

“Thanks.” The doctor lifted his hand in gratitude, and Ford took it. “Are you comfortable in your quarters? It was a place that I had sometimes thought, under happier auspices, of devoting to my investigations; but now — My dear sir, I appreciate your kindness, your delicacy, in staying!” Ford made a murmur of civility, and Sister Frances came in. Then, with a parting pressure of the hand which Boynton had kept in his, he went out. He half dreaded to encounter Egeria again, at the outer threshold; but she was not there.

XIX.

They came to those last fervid days to which August often reverts after the shiver that passes over her at the beginning of her second fortnight. The noons were cloudless, and the nights were lit with a moon that hung lightly, like an airy ball, in the sky, whose unfathomable blue the vision must search for the faint stars. The unbroken splendor of these days and nights would be intolerably silent but for the hissing of the grasshoppers in the sun, and the hollow din in which the notes of the crickets sum themselves under the moon. While Ford was busy in the morning he could resist certain influences at work upon him, but at other times he was the prey of a wild restlessness, which he could not charge to his shaken health, for he had begun to grow strong again. He said to himself, as he lay under the sun-smitten pines, or when he walked beneath the maples that broke the glare of the moon on the village street, that he was waiting here for a man to die, and he tried to quell his restlessness with that cold fact. But he was not able to keep Boynton’s danger in his thoughts. There was, indeed, a suspense in Boynton’s condition for which neither he nor his fellow physician could account. His mind even grew more vivid under such peril as threatened his body, and in his immunity from pain he was more cheerfully speculative than ever. As the days passed, a curious sort of affectionate confidence grew up between Ford and the fantastic theorist, and the young man listened to his talk with a kindliness which he did not trouble himself to reason. He submitted patiently to the analysis which Boynton made of him and of his metaphysical condition, and heard without a smile certain analogies which he discovered. “Yes,” Boynton said, one day, “I find a great similarity of mind and temperament in us. At your age, I thought and felt as you do. There is a fascination, which I can still recognize, in the clean surface which complete negation gives. The refusal of science to believe what it cannot subject to its chemic tests has its sublime side. It is at least absolute devotion to the truth, and it involves martyrdom, like the devotion to any other religion. For it is a religion, and you cannot get away from religion. Whether you say, I believe, or whether you say, I do not believe, still you formulate a creed. The question whether we came from the Clam or the Ancient of Days, whether we shall live forever, or rot forever, remains; you cannot put it aside by saying there is no such question. From this vantage-ground of mine — a sick-bed is a vantage-ground — I can see that when I stood where you are I occupied a position not essentially different from that which I assumed afterwards. Light shone on me from one side, and I cast a shadow in this direction; light shone on me from the other side, and I cast a shadow in that direction. My mistake was to fancy at both times that the shadow was I.”

Ford evaded the issue as to the identity of their opinions. He admitted that faith in a second life might nerve a man to greater enterprises here; and that one might not so often flag in the pursuit of truth if the horizon did not shut down so close all round. But he said that we had the comfort of knowing that the work of each was delegated to the whole race, and that whoever failed his work could not fail.

“Ah, don’t delude yourself!” cried Boynton. “There is no comfort in that. What is the race to you or me? You are the race; I am the race; and no one else of all the myriad atoms of humanity could take up our work and keep it the same work.”

“You said, just now,” said Ford, with a smile, “that you and I were the same.”

“I was wrong,” promptly admitted Boynton. “We are not the same, and could not be, to all eternity. But if you accept the hypothesis of a second life, in which the objects of this shall remain dear to us, you establish an infrangible, a perpetual, continuity of endeavor. The man with whom a great idea has its inception becomes a disembodied spirit. By influx from the spirit world to which he goes, he becomes the partner of the man to whom his work falls here; and that man dying enlarges the partnership in his turn, and so on ad infinitum. It must be in this way that civilization is advanced, that the world-reforms are accomplished.”

Boynton’s eyes shone, and Ford listened with kindly neutrality. On some sides he was compelled to respect Boynton’s extraordinary alertness. In many things he was grotesquely ignorant; he was a man of very small literature, and he had the limitations of a country-bred person in his conceptions of the world; but his mind, in the speculations on which it habitually dwelt, had a vast and bold sweep, and his theories sprang up fully formed, under his breath, like those plants which the Japanese conjurer fans to flower in the moment after he has put the seed in the ground.

He tossed his head upon the pillow impatiently. “When I think of those things,” he said, “I can hardly wait for the slow process of decay to unfold the truth to me. Perhaps I approached the unseen world with too arrogant a confidence,” he continued. “At any rate, I have been found unworthy, and my progress on earth has been arrested forever.”

Ford could not withhold the expression of the senseless self-accusal in his heart. “I should be very sorry,” he said, “if I had been the means of crossing your purposes.”

“You never were willfully so,” said Boynton. “Besides, as I told you, I have begun to have my misgivings as to my theory of you. I suspect that I may have exaggerated my daughter’s powers; that they were of a limited nature, terminable by the lapse of time. What do you think,” he asked, after a silence, as if willing to break away from these thoughts, “of our Shaker friends? Does their life strike you as the solution of the great difficulty?”

“No,” said Ford; “it strikes me as begging the question.”

“Yes, so it is,” assented Boynton; “so it is, in some views. It is a life for women rather than men.”

An indefinable pang seized Ford. “I don’t quite understand you. Do you think it is a happy life for a woman?”

“There is no happy life for a woman — except as she is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in sacrificing herself to their pleasure, their pride and ambition. The advantage that the world offers her — and it does not always offer that — is her choice in self-sacrifice; the Shakers prescribe it for her.”

Ford said nothing for a time, while the pain still rankled. Then he asked, “Don’t you think the possible power of choosing is a great advantage? I don’t know that as a man I expect to be happy; but I like to make my ventures in unhappiness. It saves me from the folly of accusing fate. If I surrendered myself to Shakerism, I should feel myself a prisoner; I should not run the risk of wounds, but I should have no chance of escape.”

“A woman doesn’t like to fight,” replied Boynton. “Besides, there are no irrevocable vows in Shakerism. When you do not like it you leave it. It is no bad fate for a woman. For most women it would be a beneficent fate.”

An image of Egeria in the Shaker garb, with her soft young throat hidden to the chin, and the tight gauze cap imprisoning her beautiful hair, rose in the young man’s thought, and would not pass at his willing. It was with something like the relief of waking from an odious dream that he saw the girl enter the room in her usual dress. He involuntarily rose.

She had a spray of sumac in her hand, and she put it lightly beside her father on the bed. The leaves were already deeply tinged with crimson. “Ah, yes,” he said, taking it up and holding it before him, “I am glad you found it. I thought I saw it the last time I walked that way; but it was only partly red, then. I had intended to get it for you. After my daughter was sick here, this spring,” he added, turning his eyes upon Ford, “she showed a singular predilection during her convalescence for wild flowers. They wouldn’t come fast enough for her; all the family were set to looking for them. Do you remember, Egeria, the day when we got you out under the apple-blossoms? What is the apple-tree like, now? Some yellow leaves on it, here and there?”

“Yes, but the red apples burn like live coals among them,” said Egeria.

“Fruition, fruition,” murmured her father dreamily. “Not so sweet as hope. But autumn was always my favorite season, — my favorite season. I suppose the long grass is limp and the clover-heads are black in the alleys of the orchard. All those aspects of nature — The sumac is first to feel the fall. Have you seen any other red leaves, Egeria?” —

“I saw a young maple in the swamp that was almost as red in places as this,” said Egeria. “But they were too high to reach.”

“Ah,” returned her father, “they will soon be red enough everywhere.”

“Couldn’t Miss Boynton tell me where her maple is?” Ford interposed. “I could get you the leaves.”

“Oh, no, — no,” began the doctor.

“I do a certain amount of walking every day. If Miss Boynton will tell me where the maple is, and begin with the swamp” —

“The swamp,” said Egeria, “is just back of the south pasture; but I should have to look for the tree myself.”

“Take me with you then,” said the young man, with what he thought a great boldness.

“I could do that,” returned Egeria, simply. “If Frances were here, I could go with you now. It isn’t far.”

“I don’t need any one, now, my dear,” said her father. “You can put the bell here by my pillow, and I can ring.”

“Well,” said Egeria to Ford. “We will stop at the office, and tell them, father,” she added. Frances promised to listen for the bell, and stood at the office door watching them as they walked away together.

“I think you can easily bend the tree,” Egeria said. “It’s very slim, and I thought at first I could bend it myself. I should hate to have you break it.”

“I will try not to break it,” answered Ford. They crossed the meadow in desultory talk, but before they reached the edge of the swamp she abruptly halted him, and said with a sort of fearful resolution, “Did you know that my father was here when you came?” She searched his face with a piercing intensity of gaze, her lips apart with eagerness and her breathing fluttered.

“No,” said Ford, “my coming here was purely accidental.” Her eyes studied his a moment longer: then she dropped them, and hurried on again as abruptly as she had stopped. “But I always hoped I might see you again,” he continued, “ and tell you — I went to tell your father in Boston — that I never dreamt it was you I hurt there, that night. I wanted to tell him that nothing in the world — But we quarreled” —

“I know, I know,” interrupted the girl. “There is the tree,” she said, hastily, pointing out a young maple with reddened boughs, that stood some yards beyond the wall. “Do you think you can get to it? Do you think you can bend it down?”

Every nerve in him thrilled with the wrench of leaving half said what had been so long in his heart; but he must obey her will. “I think so,” he replied, and he got over the wall. He stepped from one quaking bed of mossy decay to another, till he reached the tree. He caught it about the slender stem well up towards the limbs, and, bending it over, began to break them away and fling them on the ground.

“Oh, no!” cried Egeria from where she stood. “Don’t!”

“Don’t what?” asked Ford, turning half round, without releasing the tree.

“You seemed to tear it so. You have enough. That branch at the top” —

“Shall I break it off?”

“No — no. Let it stay.”

“Would you like it?”

“Yes.”

Ford took out his knife, and slitted the branch from the tree with a downward stroke, and drove the blade into the thick of the hand with which he held the tree. He gathered up the branches, and putting them into the wounded hand gripped it with the other, and returned to Egeria.

She started at sight of the blood. “I made you cut yourself.” —

“I don’t see how that is,” answered Ford. “But I cut myself.” He stood holding his hand, while the blood dropped to the ground.

“I will tie it up for you,” said Egeria, quelling a shudder. “You ought to have something wet next to it. That will keep it from inflaming.”

“Yes?” said Ford.

She made search for her handkerchief, and drew forth the stout square of linen which the kindness of the community had provided for her. She shook out its tough expanse. “That is a Shaker handkerchief,” she said.

“It looks rather grandiose for the purpose,” Ford remarked. “If you will take mine” — He touched as nearly as he could the breast pocket of his coat with his elbow. She soberly obeyed his gesture, and pulled it out. “Can you tear it?”

“I needn’t tear it,” she answered, folding it into a narrow strip. “I can wet this end in the water, here, and wrap the rest round it.”

She stooped to a little pool near the wall, and dipped the handkerchief into it; then she laid the wet corner over the cut, which he had washed in the same pool, and folded the dry part firmly around it. Her finger-tips, soft and warm, left the sensation of their touch upon his hand.

They walked rapidly away. “Better hold it up,” she said, seeing that he let his arm hang at his side.

“Oh,” he answered stupidly, and obeyed for a moment, and then dropped his hand again.

“You ‘re forgetting,” she said.

“Yes, I was,” replied Ford, recollecting himself. “I was thinking that it must have seemed as if some savage beast had torn you.”

He looked at the hand on which she wore her ring, and she hid the hand in the folds of her dress, and turned her head away. Then she glanced at him, as if about to answer, but she only said, “When you get home, you must wet the cloth again.”

“Thanks,” said Ford; “it will have to look after itself when it stops stinging.”

She looked troubled. “Does it hurt you very badly?”

“I suppose it’s going through the usual formalities.”

“You had better show it to father — Oh!” she cried, blushing, “I have forgotten the leaves for him.” She almost ran in retracing her steps.

Ford pursued her. “Miss Boynton, let me go and get them.”

“No, no, I can get them. You mustn’t come. I don’t wish you to come.” She looked over her shoulder, and saw him standing irresolute. “Don’t wait for me; I can take them home.”

He lingered a moment, looking after her, and then turned and walked away. He did not go back to the infirmary, but kept on towards his own house, and arrived with a vague smile on his lips, which had shaped them ever since he left her. He scarcely realized then that she had been quick to avail herself of a chance to be alone with him, and that when once with him she had been willing to delay their parting. A jarring sensation of alternate abandon and reserve was what finally remained of the interview in his nerves.

XX.

IN the morning, when he walked up into the village, he found her coming out of the office gate. She faltered at sight of him, and glanced anxiously toward him. He had meant to stop at the office, but now he had a senseless impulse to keep on his way. He hesitated, and then crossed to where she stood. She had a small basket in her hand, and she said that Elder Joseph had given her leave to look over his vines, and see if there were any grapes ripe enough yet for her father to eat. There was an indefinable intention in her manner to detain him, which he felt as inarticulately, and there was something more intangible still, — something between fearful question and utter trust of him; something that chiefly intimated itself in the appeal with which her eyes rested on his when she first looked up. He dropped his own eyes before he gaze which he knew to be unconscious on her )art, and she said suddenly, as if recollecting herself, “Oh! Will you show your hand to father? How is it?”

“That’s all right,” answered Ford, putting it into his pocket. She began to walk towards the garden, and he walked with her. “It isn’t my work hand.”

“Work?” she asked.

“I keep up my scribbling. I write for the papers,” he explained further, at a glance of inquiry from her.

“Some of the brothers and sisters write, too,” she said. “The Shakers have a paper.”

“Yes, I have seen it,” said Ford. “They write for pleasure and from duty. I am sorry to say that my work is mostly for the pay it brings. I’m hoping to do something in another way by and by. In the mean time I write and sell my work. It’s what they call pot-boiling.”

“I didn’t know they paid for writing!”

“They do, — a little. You can starve very decently on it.”

“Father used to write for the paper at home, but they never paid him anything. He is slow getting well,” she added, with a sad inconsequence, “and I suppose he will never be quite so strong again. But it must be a good sign when he has these cravings. It seems as if he couldn’t wait till the grapes are ripe; the doctor says he can have all the fruit he wants. Have you ever been in this garden before?” she asked, as they entered the bounds of Brother Joseph’s peculiar province.

“No,” replied Ford, looking round him with a pleasure for which he could not account. “But I feel as if I might have been here always.”

“Yes. I suppose it looks like everybody’s garden. It’s like our garden at home.” He glanced about it with her, as they stood in the planked path together. At one side of the beds of pot-herbs, and apart from the ranks of sweet-corn, the melons, the beans, the faded peas, and the long rows of beets and carrots, was a space allotted to flowers, the simple annuals that have long been driven from our prim parterres. “Our garden ran back of the house down to the river; but it was all neglected and run wild. There was a summer-house on the edge of the terrace, and the floor was rotten; the trellises for the grapes were slanting every which way.”

She seemed to be recalling these aspects in a fond reverie, rather than addressing him; but they gave him a vivid sense of her past. He saw her in this old garden by the river-side, before any blight had fallen upon her life. He imagined her a very happy young girl, there; not romantic, but simple and good, and even gay. “I know that sort of a garden,” he said.

“Yes,” she continued, looking dreamily at Brother Joseph’s flower-beds, “here is prince’s feather, and coxcomb, that I hated to touch when I was little, because it seemed like flesh and blood. And here is bachelor’s button, and mourning bride, and marigolds, and touch-me-not.” —

“I had forgotten them,” said Ford. “I suppose I used to see them when I was a boy. But it’s a long time since I was in the country.”

“You must be glad to get back.”

“No,” replied Ford. “I can’t honestly say that I am. I wanted to get away from it too badly for that. The country is for the pleasure of people born in town.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Nothing very definite. When I began to grow up, I found the country in my way. I dare say I should have been uncomfortable anywhere. I was very uncomfortable in the country.”

“I have never been much in the city,” she said. “But I didn’t like it.”

He remembered that he had helped to make the city hateful to her, though she seemed to have forgotten it, and he said, in evasion of this recollection, “It’s different with a man. I had my way to make, and the city was my chance.”

“And didn’t you ever feel homesick?” she asked.

“I used to dream about the place after I came away. I used to dream that I had gone back there to live. That was my nightmare. It always woke me up.”

“And did you never go back?”

“No. I have never looked on those hills since I left them, and I never will if I can help it. I suppose it’s a matter of association,” he continued. “My associations of not getting on are with the country; my associations of getting on in some sort are with the city. That is enough to account for my hating the one and liking the other.”

“Yes,” said Egeria, “that is true.” She added after a moment, “Have they ever told you what Joseph’s associations with this region are?”

“No. I should like to know.”

“He saw it in a dream, years before he came here. When he first visited the Vardley Shakers he recognized it, and took it for a sign that he was to stay.”

“That was remarkable,” said Ford. Egeria was silent. “Do you believe in such things, Miss Boynton?” he asked.

She turned away as if she had not heard him, and began to search the vines for ripe grapes. She went down one side of the long trellis, and he followed down the other. Between the leaves and twisting stems he caught glimpses of her yellow hair and her blue eyes.

“Do you find any?” she asked.

“Any what?”

“Grapes.”

“I hadn’t looked.”

She sighed. “It’s about as well. There don’t seem to be any.” After a while she stopped, and he saw her glance at him through the leaves. “I don’t know whether I believe in those things or not. Do you?”

“No.”

“The Shakers do. They all think they have had some sign. But I shouldn’t like to know things beforehand. It wouldn’t help you to bear the bad. Besides, it doesn’t seem to leave you free, somehow. I think the great thing is to be free.”

“It’s the first thing.”

“Yes; that is what I always felt. It was slavery, even if it was true.” He knew what she meant; but he said nothing, though she waited for him to speak. “It was what I tried to say sometimes; but I couldn’t express it. And I couldn’t have made him understand.” With that screen of vines between them, and each other’s faces imperfectly seen through the leaves and tendrils, it was easier to be frank. “It cut us off from everybody in the world. It was what made the quarrel with grandfather.”

She waited again, and now Ford said, “Yes, your father said it was that.”

“It made everybody suspect us. I didn’t care so much for myself after I got away from home, where they didn’t know us; but I cared for father. He suffered so from the things he had to bear. You can’t think what they were.”

“I’m ashamed to think what some of them were,” said Ford.

She paused a moment. “You mean what you said to him in Boston?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, that hurt him,” she said, simply. “He had been very proud of the interest you took the first time you came. He said you were the only man of science that had taken any notice of him. Afterwards — he couldn’t make it out.”

“I don’t wonder!” cried Ford. “It was incredible. But I never came to threaten him.”

“He was more puzzled when you wouldn’t meet him in that public séance. Why wouldn’t you?”

“Why?” demanded Ford, in dismay.

“Yes, why?”

“I don’t know that I can say.”

“But you had some reason. Was it because you thought you would fail?”

Ford did not answer directly. “Can you believe that I wanted to consider him in the matter?” he asked, in turn.

“Yes, that is what I did believe.” She drew a long breath, and hid herself wholly behind a thick mass of the vine. “Did you — did you get a letter from me?”

“Yes,” said Ford.

“I thought that I ought to write it; I didn’t know whether to do it. But I couldn’t help it. I was glad you refused.”

“I was glad you wrote the letter. It wasn’t always a comfort to me, though. I had no right to any thanks from you. I felt as if I had extorted it.”

“Extorted it!” she repeated, with the same eager persistence with which she had pressed him for his reason in refusing to meet her father. “Do you mean — do you mean that you tried to make me write the letter?”

“How could I try to make you write me a letter?” demanded the young man, stupefied.

“I don’t know. I was not sure that I understood. I can’t tell you — now. Did you destroy it?”

“Destroy what?”

“The letter.”

“No: I kept it.”

“Oh — will you give it back to me?”

“Certainly.” Ford unfolded a pocket-book, and took out a worn-looking scrap of paper, which he passed through an open space in the trellis. Her hand appeared at the aperture and received it. A hesitation made itself felt through the vines. “Will you give it back to me, Miss Boynton?”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of in it,” she said, and her hand reappeared at the open space with the letter.

“Thanks,” said Ford.

“They will think I am a long time looking for a few grapes,” said Egeria.

“They’ve no idea how few there are, and how long it takes to find them,” answered Ford.

She laughed. “Are they scarce on your side, too?”

“There are no ripe bunches at all. Shall I pick single ones?” —

“Oh, yes; any that you can get. It’s rather early for them yet.”

“Is it? I thought it was about the right time.”

“That shows you haven’t lived in the country for a good while. You’ve forgotten.”

“Yes,” assented Ford. “I haven’t seen grapes on the vines for ten years.”

“Haven’t you been out of the city in that time?”

“Not if I could help it.”

“And why can’t you help it now?”

“They told me I wasn’t well, and I’d better go to the mountains.” He sketched in a few words his course in coming to Vardley.

“I thought you looked pale, when you first came,” she said. After a little while she added, “You can bear it if you ‘re getting better, I suppose.” —

He laughed. “Oh, it isn’t so disagreeable here. I’m interested in your Shaker friends.”

“They think they are living the true life,” said the girl.

“Do you?” asked Ford.

“They are very good; but I have seen good people in the world outside,” she answered. “I think they are the kind that would be good anywhere. I shouldn’t like having things in common with others. I should like a house of my own. And I should like a world of my own.”

“Yes,” said Ford, laughing. “I should like the private house, too. But I don’t think I could manage a whole world.”

“I mean a world that is for the people that live in it. When they die, they have their own world, and they oughtn’t to try to come back into ours.”

“Oh, decidedly, I agree with you there!” cried the young man.

She seemed not to like his light tone. “I know that I don’t express it well.”

“It couldn’t be expressed better.”

“I meant that I hoped any friend of mine would be too well off to be willing to come back.”

“Yes.”

They found themselves at the end of the trellis, and face to face. He dropped his grapes into the basket, where some loose berries rolled about. She looked ruefully at the result of their joint labors.

“Well!” she said, and they walked out of the garden together.

At the gate Ford took out his watch, and stopped with a guilty abruptness. “Miss Boynton, I am going away, — I am going to Boston, this afternoon.!” —

“Going away?”

“Yes, I have business in Boston. Can I do any thing for your father or — for you — there?”

“No,” she said, looking at him in bewilderment. “Will you come and say good-by to him? Or perhaps you had better not,” she faltered.

“I’m coming back this evening!” he cried in astonishment. “Will you lend me this basket?” he asked.

“Why, yes. It belongs to Rebecca.”

“Don’t tell her I borrowed it. I must go now. Good-by!”

“Good-by.” She stood looking after him till a turn of the road to Vardley Village hid him.

When he reached Boston he found that the year had turned from summer to autumn with a distinctness which he had not noted in the country. The streets, where his nerves expected the fierce heat in which he had left them, were swept by cool inland airs. The crowds upon the pavement had perceptibly increased; a tide of women, fresh from their sojourn at the sea-side and in the country, was pouring down Winter Street, reanimated for shopping, and with their thoughts set upon ribbons with a vividness that shone in their faces. The third week of the fall season was placarded at the Museum; and in the Public Garden, which he crossed upon an errand to his lodging, there was a blaze of autumnal flowers in place of the summer bloom which he had left. He met here and there groups of public-school children loitering homeward with their books. The great, toiling majority who never go out of town were there, of course; the many whose vacations and purses are short had all returned; it would be some weeks yet before the few who can indulge the luxury of the colored leaves and the peculiar charm of still September days out of town would come home. It was the moment in which Ford had ordinarily the most content in his city. He liked to renew his tacit companionship with all these returning exiles; the promise of winter snugness brought him almost a domestic joy; the keen sparkle of the early-lighted gas in the street lamps and the shop-windows was a pleasure as distinct as it was inarticulate. But now he felt estranged amid the cheerful spectacle of the September afternoon. The country quiet, which he used to hate, tenderly appealed to him; the quaint life of the Shaker village, of which he had, without knowing it, become a part, reclaimed him; the cry of a jay that strutted down an over-hanging branch to defy him as he walked along the road, after parting with Egeria, was still in his ears; his vision was full of the sunny glisten of meadows where the Shakers’ hired men were cutting the rowan, and of roadsides fringed with golden-rod and asters. He was impatient till he could be off again, and he made haste back to the fruiterer’s where he had left his basket with an order to fill it with grapes. He was vexed to find it standing empty in a corner.

“You didn’t say what kind you wanted,” explained the fruiterer.

“Put in what you like, — the best kind,” said Ford. “You can judge; they’re for a sick person.”

“All right.” The man filled the basket, and Ford went to another counter and took up a bouquet, which he added to his purchase.

He bought two or three newspapers, in the cars, and read them on the way back, throwing those he was not reading over the flowers on the seat beside him, so as to hide them.

He got out of the train at Vardley Station with the sense of having committed a public action. He was rescued from this embarrassment, and curiously restored to his self-possession at sight of Egeria, who came driving the old Shaker horse over from the post-office, as the train halted. He was not alarmed to see her, but he asked formally, “Nothing the matter, I hope, Miss Boynton?”

“Oh, no. I came to get the letters; and I thought I would wait for you, if you were on this train.”

“Thanks,” said Ford, putting the basket into the open buggy, and mounting to a place beside her. She looked down at it, but said nothing. He took the reins from her, and drove out of the village before he spoke again. “I have got some grapes for your father.”

She laughed, and lifted the basket at once into her lap. “I thought you were going for something,” she said, “after you were gone; and I guessed with Sister Frances. I guessed it was grapes, and she guessed it was peaches. You thought he would be disappointed at Elder Joseph’s vines.” She raised the lid of the basket and after a glance pushed it to again with a quick gesture, and looked gravely at him. “That is too much,” she said.

“I hope you don’t think so!” he pleaded. “I counted on your being pleased.”

“So I am pleased,” she returned. She opened the basket again, and looked within.

“You must have hated to come back to the country,” she said, after a silence, “if you like the city so much.”

“No. For once I was willing to come back. If the country hadn’t threatened to keep me, I shouldn’t have hated it. I never hated the country about here. What have you been doing this afternoon? It seems a great while.”

“Does it? Yes, it does! I suppose there’s such a sameness here that anything that breaks it up makes the time longer. Sister Frances says that it’s so when any of them are gone. After you went I came in and stayed with father. He didn’t know that I had been trying to get him some grapes. Your going away seemed to fret him, and that made me a little anxious to — to — see if you had come.”

“I never thought of not coming back.”

“Yes, I know. Silas went down to the post-office with me: but Humphrey came along in his buggy, and Silas went back with him. He couldn’t wait for you, and I said I would.”

“Thanks. But you took too much trouble. I expected to walk up from the station.”

“I didn’t believe you’d want to carry the basket.”

“Yes, I should. But what would you have done if you had had to drive home alone in the dusk?”

“Oh, I knew you would be there.”

The lamps were lit in the office, and the window was red with cheerful light where the doctor lay in the infirmary, when they drew up before the gate, and Ford helped Egeria down. Then he took the paper in which the bouquet was wrapped, and handed it to her. “There are a few flowers, too.”

“I thought it must be flowers,” she said. “I’ll put them round the grapes.”

“The flowers are for you,” said Ford, with dogged resolution.

Laban came across the street from the office, and took the horse by the bridle. “The sisters want you should take your tea at the office, to-night. They Ve got it ready for you, and they’ve sent word to Friend Williams not to be expectin’ you.”

While Ford waited a few moments in the office parlor, Egeria came, and he heard her talking with Rebecca and Diantha in the sitting-room. When the latter came to tell him that tea was ready, he perceived that his gift was already a matter of family approval. He sat down at the table, and Egeria came out of the kitchen adjoining with the polished tin tea-pot in her hand. Then he saw that the table was set for two. Her face was flushed, as if she had been near the heat; but she sat down quietly, saying, “He was asleep, and Frances was with him. I must run back in a minute, for I want him to have them as soon as he wakes.” He knew that she meant the grapes. When she was handing him his cup, she half drew it back. “I didn’t ask you whether you like cream and sugar both, and I’ve put them in.”

“I like it so,” said Ford.

She ate with more appetite than he, and was gayer than he had seen her before. A happy light was in her eyes, and when they met his this light seemed to suffuse her face. She talked, and he listened dreamily. It was very strange to a man of his solitary life. He did not remember to have seen any one pour tea. At the boarding-house they came and asked if you would have tea or coffee, and brought it to you in a cup; at the restaurant they set it before you in a pot, and you helped yourself, or the waiter reached over your shoulder and poured it out. Ford looked round the sincerely bare dining-room; the windows were shut to keep out the evening chill, and the curtains were snugly drawn. The door to the kitchen was open, and he could hear Diantha moving about there; now and then she made a little rattling at the stove; once she came in with a plate of rice-cakes, and offered to wait upon them; but Egeria passed the plate to Ford herself, and then gave him the butter and syrup. He tried to make her one with the frightened and joyless creature whom he had first seen in Boston; then he perceived that she had fallen silent under his silent scrutiny.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “is anything the matter?”

“Oh, no!” she answered. “But I must go back to father. Will you come over and see him?”

“Yes.”

He walked across the road with her under the stars, keen as points of steel in the moonless sky; but at the gate he said, “No, I won’t go in tonight. I will come to see your father to-morrow.”

She said “Well,” as if she understood that he wished to delay being thanked.

As he lingered, she faltered too, and they stood confronted without speaking. Then he said, “Goodnight,” and made an offer of offering his hand. She saw it, and stretched hers towards him; but by this time he had let his hand fall, thinking it unnoticed. The manœuvre was reciprocally repeated; by a common impulse they both broke into a low, nervous laugh, and their hands met in a quick clasp.

“Thank you for the flowers,” she said, when he had got a few paces away.

A little farther off, he glanced back. She seemed to be standing yet at the door; but the light was uncertain, and it might have been a shadow. He delayed a little, and then went back; but she was now gone, and he saw her head reflected against the curtain within.

XXI.

FORD expected that they would meet next in the mood of their parting; but she received him with a sort of defensive scrutiny that puzzled him and estranged her from him. He fancied that she avoided being alone with him, and made haste to shelter herself from him in her father’s presence, where she sat and knitted while they talked. If he glanced at her, he found her eye leaving him with a look of anxious quest. He went away feeling that she was capricious. Other days followed when she was different, and met him with eager welcome; but then he did not think her capricious, and he forgot from time to time the inquisition that vexed him and that seemed to weary and distress her.

He commonly wrote in the morning and came in the afternoon. She sat on the threshold of the infirmary, and if her father was awake she invited him in-doors; if her father was asleep, she drew Ford off a little way into the orchard. There had been a change in Boynton. He never spoke hopefully of his condition to Ford; but although he still showed a great feebleness, there were often days when he left his bed and sat up in a rocking-chair to receive his visitor. He did not remain long afoot, and he never showed any wish to go out-of-doors. Sometimes Egeria and Frances, in their zeal for his convalescence, urged him in the mild fall weather to go out for the air; but after a glance at the landscape he said, “Yes, yes, to-morrow, if it’s fair. I’m hardly equal to it to-day.” When Ford was not with him, or some of the more metaphysical of the Shakers, he read or mused in his chair. At first he had wished to talk of the questions that perplexed him with Egeria, but she had fondly evaded them; later, when she showed herself willing to afford him this resource, he had no longer the wish for it, and did not respond to her promptings.

His mind must have been dwelling upon this change in himself and her, one afternoon, when Ford came in and sat down with him. “You see,” he said, “how they have tricked out my room for me?” and he indicated the boughs of colored leaves, varied with bunches of wild asters and tops of golden-rod, in which the Shakers had carried him the autumn. “There isn’t healing in my leaves, as there was in the flowers which they brought Egeria this spring,” he added, with a slight sigh, “but there is sympathy — sympathy.” Ford left him to the pleasure he evidently found in the analogy and contrast, and Boynton presently resumed: “There is an experiment which I should have liked to try, if she had continued the same. I should have liked to see if we could not change places, and she exert upon me that influence which I once had over her. There is no telling how sanative it might be in a case like mine, in which there is a certain obscurity of origin and character. But I am convinced that it would be useless to attempt the experiment. I see now that the psychic force must have left her entirely during her sickness. Not a trace of it remains. The fact is a very interesting one, which I should hope to investigate with important results, if I could live to do so. It may be that we approach the other world only through some abnormal condition here. You have observed this remarkable change in my daughter?”

“You know I only saw Miss Boynton two or three times before I came here,” said Ford. “She seems very much better.”

“That is the change. Her power has escaped in this return to health. I saw it, — I almost noted its flight. Day by day, after the crisis of her fever, when convalescence began, I perceived that she grew more and more rebellious to my influence, without knowing it. If I had obeyed my intuitions, I should never have put her powers to the final test. I see now that you had nothing to do with our failure here, whatever the effect of your sphere was in Boston. Her gift, rare and wonderful as it was, was the perishable efflorescence of a nervous morbidity. I might have known this before, — perhaps I did know it, and refused to accept it as a fact. It was hard, it was impossible, to relinquish my belief in her continued powers just when I had brought them to the most favorable conditions for their exercise. But I don’t give up ray belief in what has been. I know that she once possessed the power that has been withdrawn, if ever it existed on earth. You will get out of the matter very easily by saying that it never did exist,” added Boynton bitterly. “I should once have said so; but now I say, whoever keeps it or loses it, this power has never ceased to exist. Has my daughter ever spoken to you of this matter?” he demanded abruptly.

“Yes,” said Ford.

“It would be intolerable if she knew how great her loss was. But she never realized the preciousness of her gift while she possessed it.”

The color of superiority, of censure, which tinged these words irritated the young man. “As far as I could understand, she seemed to dislike ghosts.”

“Yes, I know that. I had that to contend with in her.”

“It seemed to me that she had a terror of them, and that your researches had cost her” — Ford stopped.

“What?” asked Boynton.

“She has never complained,” answered the other. “I could only conjecture” —

“Oh, I can believe that she never complained!” cried Boynton; and now he lay a long space silent. At last, “Yes,” he groaned, with an indescribable intensity of contrition in his tone, “I see what you mean! I seized upon a simple, loving nature, good and sweet in its earthliness, and sacred in it, and alienated it from all its possible happiness to the uses of my ambition. I have played the vampire!” Ford rose in alarm at the effect of his words, and essayed what reparation he could. “No,” he protested. “The harm is less than you think. I don’t believe that any one but ourselves can do us essential injury here. We may make others unhappy, but we can’t destroy the possibility of happiness in them; we can only do that in ourselves. Your conscience has to do with your motives; it judges you by them, and God — if we suppose Him —— will not judge you by anything else. The effect of misguided actions belongs to the great mass of impersonal evil.”

It was the second time that he had presumed to distinguish between Boynton and Egeria, and he had again committed a cruel impertinence. He continued with a sort of remorseful rage to launch upon Boynton such fragments of consolation as came into his head; and he hurried from him without knowing that his phrases about impersonal evil had already floated that buoyant spirit beyond the regrets in which he had plunged it.

Still heated and ashamed, he issued from the infirmary, and, as if it were strange that she should be there, he started at sight of Egeria under one of the orchard trees. But in that fascination which makes us hover about the victim of some wrong or the witness of some folly of ours, he pressed towards her. She was leaning against the trunk of the tree, with some knitting in her hand, and he flung himself on the grass at her feet. He thought that he meant to confess to her what had just passed, but he made no attempt to do so. “Are you so very tired?” she asked, smiling down at him.

“Not very,” he answered, “but I know no reason why I shouldn’t sit down, — except one.”

“What’s that?”

“That you ‘re standing.”

It was pretty, and she was a girl, and she softly laughed as she began to knit. “That’s work in real earnest,” he said, looking at the substantial gray sock mounted on her needles.

“Yes; the Shakers sell them,” she explained. “I suppose you have got through your work for the day.”

“I’ve got through my writing, if you call that work. It’s so dull it can’t be play.” Again he thought he would speak of what had passed between him and her father, but he did not.

“Do you write stories?” she asked, with her eyes on her knitting.

“Oh, not so bad as that! I do what they call social topics, — perhaps because I never go into society; and I do them with difficulty, as I deserve, for I’m only making literature a means. I understand that if you want to be treated well by it you must make it an end, and be very serious and respectful with it.”

“Oh, yes,” said the girl, as if she did not understand.

“I’m serious enough,” he continued, “but I don’t respect my writing as it goes on. It’s as good as most; but it ought to be as good as the least.”

“What are social topics?” she asked presently.

“I suppose I’m treating a social topic now. I’m writing about some traits of New England country life. I began it — do you care to hear?”

“Yes, I should like to hear about it if you will tell me.”

“It’s nothing. I was telling you the other day of our start from Boston. I couldn’t help noticing some things on the way; my ten years in town had made me a sort of foreigner in the country, and I noticed the people and their way of living; and after I got here I sent a letter to a newspaper about it. You might think that would end it; but you don’t know the economies of a hack-writer. I’ve taken my letter for a text, and I’m working it over into an article for a magazine. If I were a real literary man I should turn it into a lecture afterwards, and then expand it into a little book.” Egeria knitted on in silence, as if her mind were away, or had not strength to deal with these abstractions. “Who is that?” asked Ford, as a young Shakeress with a gentle face looked out of a window of the nearest family house, and nodded in pleasant salutation to Egeria.

“That is the school-teacher.”

“They all look alike to me, — the sisters. I don’t see how you tell them apart, so far off.”

“Yes, they all have the same expression, — the Shaker look. But they ‘re very different.”

“Why, of course. And the Shaker look is a very good look. It’s peaceful. I suppose they have their bickerings, though.”

“Not often. They ‘re what they seem. That’s their great ambition.”

“It’s an immense comfort. You must be quite at home among them.”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“Do you mean no?”

“They do everything they can to make me; but they have their own world, and I don’t belong to it. They feel that as well as I do; but they can’t help it.”

“Of course not. That’s the nature of worlds, big and little. You can’t be at home near them; you have to be in them to be comfortable. I have a world in my own neighborhood that I don’t belong to. I like to abuse it; but it’s quite as good a neighbor as I deserve, and it would be civil if I made an effort to fit into it. But I suppose I was a sort of born outcast.”

“Does Mr. Phillips write, too?” asked the girl. The abruptness of the transition was a little bewildering; but Ford answered, “My Phillips? No; he talks.”

“But hasn’t he any business?”

“None of his own. Did he amuse you?”

“I don’t think I understood him,” said Egeria.

“He would be charmed with your further acquaintance. He would tell you that he could meet you on common ground, — that he didn’t understand himself.”

She left Phillips by another zigzag. “I suppose,” said she, “you like the influence that a writer has. It must be a pleasure to feel your power over people.”

“No,” said Ford, “I don’t care anything about the influence. It shocks me to think of people being turned this way or that by my stuff.”

“Then you believe,” she said, with that recurrent intensity, “that we can have power over others without knowing it, and even without wishing it?”

“Oh,” he answered carelessly, “we all control one another in the absurdest way.”

“Yes.” She turned quite pale, and looked away, passing her hand over her forehead as if she were giddy. Then she rose quickly, and hurried down the path to the infirmary. The young man followed.

“Did you think you heard your father’s bell?”

“I’d better see if he rang.” She went into the little house, but came out directly. “No; he’s trying to sleep.”

“Then we must go back, so as not to disturb him.”

“Yes,” she said, but with an accent of interrogation and reluctance. “I don’t believe I ought to leave him.”

“We shall be near enough,” he rejoined with a kind of willfulness. “Here comes Sister Frances; she will stay with him.”

“I might speak to her,” murmured Egeria, hesitating, as Frances came across the road.

“It isn’t worth while. She will find him alone, and will naturally stay till you come in.” Ford glanced about him. “Which is the apple-tree they call yours?”

“The one they brought me out under the first day I was well enough?”

“Yes; I have heard a great deal of that tree. It is famous in the community annals.”

“Oh, it doesn’t look the least now as it did then.” She led the way far up the orchard slope. But when they came to the tree, and she said, putting her hand on the trunk, “This is it,” neither of them spoke of it. She glanced at the hill on the brow of which some chestnut-trees stood.

“We could get a better view from that place,” he suggested.

“Do you think so?” She climbed half up the wall that divided the orchard from a meagre pasture above, and looked back. He passed her and helped her over the wall. “I forgot that this meadow was so wet,” she said, hesitating near the wall.

“But nature never does things by halves,” said Ford. “Where she makes a sopping meadow, she puts plenty of stones to step on; and where you are doubtful of your footing, she puts me to lend you a helping hand.” He extended his hand to her as he spoke, and drew her lightly to the sloping bowlder on which he stood, and on which she must cling to him for support.

“Oh, I could get on well enough alone,” she said, laughing nervously.

“You can get on better with help.”

“Yes.” —

She followed him, springing from stone to stone, staying herself now by his hand and now by his arm, till they reached the hard, dry top, where the tangled low blackberry vines overran the bowlder heads thickly crusted with lichens.

“I didn’t suppose it was so bad,” she said, shaking out her skirts.

“I don’t think it so very bad,” he returned. “It wasn’t a great way across.”

“No. There are some chestnuts. It must be too soon for them.”

“Let us see,” said Ford. He advanced leisurely, and with a club knocked off some burs. Returning with them to the rock, where she had stood watching him, he hammered the nuts from their cells. They were scarcely in the milk yet. “These trees are too old,” he said. “The nuts ripen first on the young trees that stand apart in the meadows. There are some in the rye-field just beyond these pine woods, here,” he said, pointing to the growth on their left.

“That would be too far,” she answered, following his gesture with a glance. “We had better go back.”

“We can go back that way. It’s good walking.” She did not answer, but he led on again, and she followed. “How still and warm it is!” she cried, with a luxurious surrender to the charm of the place. The slanting sun struck through the slender boles of the trees, and burnished the golden needles under their feet. There was no sound of life save their steps, and their voices, which took a lower key; the air was rich with the balsam of the trees. She deeply inhaled it. “Yes, yes,” she murmured. “It all comes back. I was afraid,” she said, in answer to the look with which he turned upon her, “that I had lost the feeling which I had when I first got well. But I haven’t.”

“What was it?”

“I don’t know if I can tell. Something as if I belonged in such places — as if they missed me when I came away — I don’t know. It was something very silly” — She stopped.

“Don’t grieve the woodland by hurrying through it, then,” said Ford, with a playfulness which, now that he indulged it, seemed natural to him. “Wait a moment. This rock is a new feature, — I don’t remember this.” A vast bowlder rose at the side of their path, and he walked round it and clambered to the top, from which he bent over to speak to her again. “Would you like to come up? It’s quite easy on this side.”

“What can you see?”

“Nearly the whole earth.”

She found the opposite side of the rock a slope, broken by some natural steps. He came halfway down, and, reaching her his hand, pulled her strongly up.

The top was scantly wide enough for them both; and while he stood she sat at his feet and looked out at the landscape which a break in the woods revealed at that height. It was the valley in which the village and farms of the Shakers lay; but it stretched wider than they had ever seen it, and on the other side, beyond the river, the hills rose steeper. The red sunset bathed it in a misty light, through which shone the scarlet of the maples, the gold of the elms by the river, the tender crimson of the young growths in the swamp lands. On the hill-side some of the farm windows had caught the sun, and blazed and flickered with mimic fire. Along a lower slope ran a silent train, marking its course with puffs of white steam.

“I can confess, now,” said Ford, “that if I hadn’t climbed this rock I shouldn’t have known just where we were. But here are all the landmarks.” He pointed to the familiar barns and family houses below.

“How near we are!” she cried, looking down. “I felt as if we were miles away. These woods are not large enough to get lost in, are they?”

“Not now. They were, a minute ago.” He sat down beside her, and they looked at the landscape together. “It’s rather sightly, as Joseph says.”

“We had better go down,” she murmured. But neither of them made a movement to go. They sat looking at the valley. “Now the fire has caught the windows higher up,” she said. They watched the glittering panes as they darkened and kindled. The windows of the highest farm-house flashed intensely, and then slowly blackened. A light blue haze hovered over the valley.

“The curtain is down,” said Ford.

She started to her feet, and looked round. “Why, the sun has set!”

“Didn’t you know that?” he asked.

“No,” she said, sadly. “It seemed as if it would last longer. But nothing lasts.”

“No, nothing lasts,” he repeated. “But generally things last long enough. I could have stood another hour or two of sunset, however. And sometimes I’ve known days that I would have been willing to have last forever, if I could have had out my eternity in this world.”

“Is that — is that the way you feel, too?” she asked, turning swiftly upon him that strange, searching glance.

“Why, not always. What is the matter?”

“Nothing — nothing. Let us go down.” She took his hand, and clung to it, in descending, as if eager to escape to him from some fear of him.

They went on in the direction they had first taken. She walked at his side, and when his pace fell to a slow saunter she did not attempt to hasten it. A red squirrel took shape and motion out of the russet needles, and raced up one of the pines, whose feathery tops he bent in his long leaps from tree to tree; a partridge suddenly whirred up from the path before them; the life was like shadow, the shadow was like life, as the twilight thickened round them. “Are you tired?” he asked. “Am I making you walk too far?”

“I am not tired,” she answered, but stopping as he stopped.

“I am. I’m out of breath,” he said. “Do you know this place?”

She glanced round. “I believe I should know it if I were here alone. It looks familiar. It looks like the place where Laban found us that morning when we were trying to walk to Vardley Station. The brook ought to be running along in the hollow, here. Once he asked me if I knew the place; but I didn’t. Do you think it’s the place?”

“How should I know? You never told me of it before.”

“Then the fever must have begun,” she mused aloud. “I thought — I must have thought you — were there! I oughtn’t” —

“Oh,” laughed Ford, “we put people in all sorts of places in dreams, feverish or otherwise. But I think the place you mean is lower down. I was in hopes you knew better where we were. I don’t know.”

Egeria laughed also. “Then we are lost!”

“Yes. Are you frightened?”

“I should hate to be lost here alone.”

“I shall go presently and look up our whereabouts. Shall I go now?”

“If we keep walking we shall get through the woods in a few minutes. Which way are your chestnuts?”

“I don’t know that, now, either. Do you care to look them up?”

“No. I thought you wanted them.”

“I think it’s better to stay here. No,” he added, capriciously, “it’s better to go home.”

“Well,” she responded with the same trusting content in which she had let all his impulses sway her.

A thrill, very wild and sweet, played through his nerves. “I — !” — he began; then suddenly, “Wait here!” he cried, and ran down to the brow of the bill along which the woodland stretched. “It’s all right!” he called back, and he turned to retrace his steps. But she was no longer where he had left her. He disliked to call out to her; they were very near the house in which he lodged, and he did not wish to make an alarm. He pushed hither and thither through the gathering dusk, but he could not find her; and he blamed himself for having brought her into this embarrassment. He had once seen tramps in those woods; and now it would be almost dark when they reached home. All at once he came upon her at the foot of a tree, against which she quietly leaned. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, impatiently. “Why did you go away?” He thought he had spoken harshly; but she only seemed amused.

“I haven’t moved. This is where you left me.”

They both laughed at that. “I have been running everywhere, round and round, as lost people do in the Adirondacks, when they are going to write about it afterwards. It’s absurd to be lost here. It’s like being drowned in a saucer. Were you afraid?”

“No. What should I be afraid of?”

“Certainly not bears, — till I came up. Will you take my arm? I mustn’t lose you again. Will they be uneasy about you?”

“Oh, they will know that I went away with you, and some of them will see us coming back together.”

“Yes,” said the young man.

“Besides, I can tell them that we missed the way.”

“I’m afraid if you do that they won’t let you come with me again.”

“I’m afraid they won’t believe me if I tell them where we got lost,” she said. When they came to open ground, it was much lighter. “It isn’t so late as I thought.”

“No,” he answered; “we were actually lost in that boundless forest by daylight. But it isn’t so remarkable in my case as it is in yours, Miss Boynton. I don’t know what mysterious influence you are going to say bewildered you.”

“Influence?” she repeated, with a start.

“What is the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing!” She withdrew her hand from his arm.

He looked round, and saw that they had reached the great stone bowl of the wayside fountain. A sense of hideous anomaly possessed him. “Did I become intolerable just here?” he demanded, bitterly. “Why do you endure me? You and your father ought to hate me. I have done you nothing but harm. Why do you ever speak to me? I ought to be abominable to you!”

“I don’t know,” she answered vaguely. “Do you think it is” —

He laughed harshly. “Inexplicable! You don’t forget anything?”

“No,” she reluctantly admitted. “I don’t forget.”

“I can understand your father’s position. He suffers me upon some theory of his. But you, — you are a woman, and women don’t forgive very easily. Come, Miss Boynton,” he cried, mixing his self-banter with his pain, “confess that I am some malignant enchanter, and that I have the power of casting an ugly spell over you, that deprives you of the wholesome satisfaction of telling me that I’m detestable.”

“A spell,” she began; but her voice died weakly away, and she stood looking into his face with puzzled entreaty.

“If you would tell me once for all that I am the greatest ruffian in the world, with neither pity nor decency, it might break the charm, and then I could go away to-morrow morning. I’ve been waiting for that. Will you try?”

“I can’t say that,” she murmured.

“But you believe it?”

“No” —

“That’s part of the sorcery. You must have often tried to believe it.”

She was silent, and he felt that her silence was full of distress. She turned away with a sort of helplessness; he followed her, trying to retrieve himself. But he could not find anything to say, and they scarcely spoke as they walked back through the village. At the gate of the office her parting with him was almost a flight.

XXII.

The next day Ford came, and found Egeria on the threshold, where she often met him. At first glance he thought he read in her face something like an impulse to run from him; but she quelled the impulse, if she had it, and greeted him with a resolute coldness, which he would not recognize. He had a broad yellow hickory leaf in one hand, and on this lay a little heap of blackberries; they were long and narrow like mulberries, and they had hung on the canes, hoarding the last sweetness of the year. “Perhaps your father will like these,” he said; and he told her of the hollow beside the road in which he had found them. “They’ve got all that was left of the summer in them,” he added. “Will you have them?”

“I don’t believe they would be good for him,” she began stiffly.

Ford tossed them away. “How is the doctor to-day?” he asked.

“He’s better. Will you come in?”

“No, thank you. I am going to the post-office. Good-by.”

“Good-by,” she said, and they exchanged a look of mutual dismay, which hardened into pride before their eyes dropped.

At the post-office Ford found a letter for Egeria, and carried it to Humphrey, who put it away in his desk, and said he would give it to her when she came in.

“It don’t seem the same handwritin’ as the other. I don’t know,” he said, shutting his desklid, “as you heard that they got a letter this mornin’ from a lawyer down t’ their place. As I understood from Frances, — Egery read it to her, —— the gran’father’s left Egery what prop’ty there was. The’ wa’n’t no great, I guess.”

The fact jarred upon Ford. Against all sense he connected it with her changed manner, for which, till then, he had found reason enough in the terms of their parting the day before. This legacy seemed the world thrusting in between them; it was as if it crossed some purpose, broke some hope, of his. He stopped mechanically, on his way home, in the hollow of the roadside where he had found the blackberries, and looked idly at the canes. Presently he saw that there were no berries left on them. He was turning away, when a sound like suppressed laughter caught his ear. There was a rustle in a thicket near, and Egeria and one of the youngest Shakeresses came out.

“We have got them all,” said the former; she blushed appealingly, while the latter still giggled. “I didn’t suppose you would come again. When we saw you looking so, Susan couldn’t help laughing.” Ford reddened with embarrassment. “It seems greedy to take them. I didn’t suppose — I never thought of your wanting them. Will you — will you — take some?” She offered him her basket.

“Thanks,” he said, awkwardly refusing, “I don’t care for them. I’m glad you’ve found them.”

He turned and walked off, leaving her where she stood, with her basket still extended towards him. She watched him out of sight, and then made a few paces after him. On a sudden she dropped her basket, and sinking down hid her face on her knees. The Shakeress picked up the basket and the berries which were jostled out of it, and stood passively near, looking at Egeria for what seemed a long time.

There came a sound of wheels. “Is that you, Susan?” called Elihu from the road.

“Yee,” promptly answered the Shakeress.

Egeria sprang to her feet, and seized the basket from her. “Come! come!” she whispered, and fled farther into the woods.

But the girl did not follow her. She went out into the road, where Elihu sat in his buggy, and stood demurely waiting his question.

“Was that Egeria?”

“Yee.”

“Why did she run away?”

“She was crying.”

“What made her cry?”

The girl was silent.

“What made her cry?” repeated Elihu.

“She had got all the berries, when Friend Ford came, and he seemed kind of put out.”

“Get in with me,” said Elihu. “You should not be here alone.”

In the evening Elihu went to the office, and joined the office sisters in their sitting-room. One of them took his hat and cane, and the other pulled a rocking-chair towards the air-tight stove, in which a new fire was softly roaring.

“The evenings begin to be chilly, now,” he said.

“Yee,” answered Rebecca, “the days are shortening. Did you find the folks all well at Harshire?”

“Yee,” he said; and then he sat rocking himself absently and somewhat sadly to and fro, while the sisters, with their hands in their laps, passively waited for him to speak farther. Humphrey, hearing his voice, came in from his room, and Laban followed. Sister Frances, with her pale cheeks a little brightened by her walk across from the infirmary, entered the other door. Elihu lifted his voice. “But I didn’t find all the folks here so well.”

“Why, what do you mean, Elihu?” cried Diantha. “Is anybody sick with you?”

“Is Friend Boynton worse?” Humphrey asked, turning his head up towards Frances, who was still on foot, while he was seated.

“Nay,” answered Frances, fluttered with anxiety and curiosity; “he is uncommon bright and well, to-night.”

“It is no sickness of the body that I mean, and yet it is a disease of this life only. I hardly know how to say what I suspect, — or rather feel sure of.” His listeners did not interrupt him, but waited in resignation for his next word. He looked round at their faces. “Egeria is getting foolish about Friend Ford.”

“For shame, Elihu!” exclaimed Frances, with an indignant impulse. The rest stirred uneasily in their chairs, but did not speak.

Elihu looked kindly at Frances, but he did not address her directly in adding, “As I was coming home this afternoon, I met Friend Ford down at the turn of the road, looking strange and excited. He didn’t seem to see me, and he went on without speaking. I thought I saw Susan among the bushes, and I called to her.”

“I sent her!” Frances broke in. “I sent her in my place, because I couldn’t leave Friend Boynton and Egery wanted to go and get some late blackberries for him that Friend Edward had told her about.” Frances, by right of her special tenderness for the Boyntons, always spoke of Ford by his first name.

“Yee,” replied Elihu gently, “so Susan told me, — she is a good child. She told me that Friend Ford had found them there, and because he had seemed vexed Egeria had shed tears.”

“It was because they had got all the berries, and she thought it would look selfish and greedy to him,” Frances interposed a second time.

“Yee,” Elihu again consented, “so Susan told me. It is not the only time that I feared she had got to feeling foolish about him.”

“Foolish about him!” Frances could not contain herself. “She would never feel foolish about a young man! And if she felt foolish about him he would feel foolish about her, too!”

“Yee,” said Elihu. “They have been driving and walking together, — picking leaves and grapes and berries. He stops in the orchard in the afternoon, and talks with her by the hour.”

“It’s while her father’s asleep,” explained Frances. “Whenever Friend Boynton’s awake, Edward talks with him. You wouldn’t want him waked up out of his sleep to talk, would you?”

“Nay,” said Elihu, while the faintest smile moved his lips, in kindly derision of the inefficiency of Frances’ defense. “Friend Ford writes in the morning, and Friend Boynton sleeps in the afternoon.”

“Elihu!” cried Frances, angrily.

“Frances,” returned Elihu, with reestablished gravity, “will you tell me yourself that you have never thought they were foolish about each other, —— what they call being in love?”

Frances wiped the tears from her eyes with her stout handkerchief, which she had knotted into a ball. “You are too bad, Elihu. You have no right to ask such a question. You hadn’t ought to put me on trial.”

“You put yourself on trial, Frances,” said Elihu, affectionately. “You began to talk while I was speaking. But I withdraw the question. I never meant to hurt your feelings. I know you have always done for the best.”

“I have often heard you say,” Frances quavered reproachfully, “that the worst thing about our young people, when they get to foolin’, is that they run away. You said that if they would only tell us honestly how they felt we would let them go and be married, and we would be friends with them afterwards. Now, when there are two young folks here that don’t think of runnin’ away, or hidin’ anything, you ‘re not satisfied. Do you want Egery and Edward to run away?”

“Nay,” replied Elihu; “do you want them to be courting each other here, right under our noses?”

“It isn’t under our noses!” cried Frances, resenting the phrase.

“Well, our eyes, then,” said Elihu, patiently. “Do you think it is a good example to the rest of our young folks?”

“They ‘re not of our family! They’ve never been gathered in!”

“Nay, I know that,” admitted Elihu. “But does that help the matter, as far as the example goes? We all know by bitter experience how hard it is for the young to tread the path that leads to the angelic life; how cruelly it is beset with flints and shards, and how the flesh bleeds with the sting of its brambles. Do you want them mocked with the sight of flowers that tempt them to the earthly pastures? Egeria is a good girl” —

“Oh, she is, she is!” sobbed Frances.

“And I don’t believe she understands herself that she’s foolish about him” —

“I know she doesn’t Î It would kill her!”

“Nay, I’m not sure of that,” said Elihu, with another flicker of a smile. “But that makes the case easier to deal with. We need not speak to her at all. We can speak to the young man.”

“Speak to the young man!” cried Frances. “Tell him that Egery is in love with him before he has ever asked her” — She stopped in horror.

“We do not gloss this thing among ourselves,” said Elihu coldly, “and we need not care for the feints and pretenses used in the world outside. But we can tell him that he’s foolish about her. I have talked the matter over with Joseph and the ministers, and we have agreed that Friend Ford should be spoken to.” Frances went out of the room, turning her back upon the meditated outrage. “The only question now is,” continued Elihu, without regarding her withdrawal, “who shall speak to him.”

A perceptible sensation passed through the others, but no one answered. After a moment, Laban said from the corner where he sat, “Some like bellin’ the cat.” The sisters relieved the tension of their nerves in a low titter, but Elihu and Humphrey remained grave; and it is doubtful if Laban really intended a joke, though his face relaxed at the merriment of the sisters.

“The ministers,” resumed Elihu, “were not sure whether it was the province of the elders or the trustees, and I came to consider that point with you, Humphrey.”

Humphrey rose, with his face twisted by an expression as of severe bodily pain. He moved his arms haplessly about, and took off and then put on his spectacles. He tried in vain to smile. “I d’ know,” he said, “as I’m a very good hand at speakin’ to folks. I don’t seem to have any command o’ language. I should think myself, it was for the elders, some on ‘em, to speak.”

“You have transacted all the business with the young man,” said Elihu. “You have had frequent interviews with him, and you go a good deal into the world, on business. We thought, perhaps, that you would best know how to approach him.”

“I ain’t one to get acquainted easy,” replied Humphrey, “and I never felt no ways at home with Friend Ford. He seems to be of a kind of offish disposition.” He sat down again, and hanging his head began to tilt the chair in front of him on its hind legs. “I shouldn’t want to intrude no ways into the province of the elders. I don’t seem to feel that it’s so much of a business question as what it is a question of family discipline.”

“You may be right,” admitted Elihu.

“If I could see it as my duty, I shouldn’t be one to shirk it. But it’s like this.” He paused unsuccessfully for a comparison, and then added, “It’s a question of family discipline. I should ha’ thought it was for the ministers to speak.”

“We should only have recourse to the ministers in extreme cases,” said Elihu. “Besides, you thought just now it was for the elders to speak.”

“Well, the elders or the ministers,” returned Humphrey, without looking up.

Elihu compassionated his futility with a moment’s silence. Then he sighed slightly, and said, “I agree with you, Humphrey. But I thought that I ought to give you the opportunity, and if you saw your duty in it I ought to yield to you. I did not want to have the appearance of forth-putting, in such a case, and I certainly don’t covet the task of speaking to Friend Ford. He appears to me a person subject to sudden gusts of anger, and there is no telling how he may take the interference.”

“That is so,” admitted one of the sisters.

“There ain’t no question about forth-puttin’, Elihu,” said Humphrey, with the cordiality of a great relief. “Every one’d know’t you didn’t seek such a duty. But Friend Ford’ll take it all right; you’ll see. He’ll look at it in the same light you do.”

Elihu rose, and took his hat and stick. “I shall probably find him in his room, now, I suppose.” Humphrey stood as much aghast as it was in his power to do. “Was you — you wa’n’t goin’ to speak to him right away?”

“Yee. Why should I put it off? He cannot take it any better to-morrow or next week than he would to-night. And the trouble wouldn’t grow less if we waited till doomsday.” Elihu went out; the closing of the hall door upon him was like an earthquake to those within.

“I declare for it,” said Laban, “I ‘most feel like goin’ along down to Friend Ford’s and waitin’ outside.”

“Well,” observed Rebecca, slighting the bold proposition, “Elihu never was one to be afraid.”

“That is so, Rebecca,” said Diantha.

Humphrey said nothing. The accumulation and complication of evils brought upon the family by the Boyntons had long passed his control.

XXIII.

Elihu walked rapidly down the moon-lighted street. When he reached the old family house, he groped his way up from the outer door to that of the meeting-room, in which Ford lodged, and tapped upon it with his stick. There was the sort of hesitation within which follows upon surprise and doubt; then the sound of a chair pushed back was heard, and Ford came to the door with a lamp in his hand; he looked like one startled out of a deep reverie. “Anything the matter with Dr. Boynton?” he asked, after a gradual recognition of Elihu.

“Nay,” replied the Shaker. “Friend Boynton is better than usual, I believe. I wish to have a little talk with you, Friend Ford. Shall I come in?”

Ford found that he was holding the door ajar, and blocking the entrance. “Why, certainly,” he said. He led the way, and setting the lamp on the table pushed up another chair to the corner fireplace, where some logs were burning, and where he had evidently been sitting. “Sit down.”

The Shaker obeyed, and with his palms resting on his knees craned his neck round and peered at the different corners of the room and up at the ceiling before he spoke. “Are you comfortable here, Friend Ford?”

“Yes,” answered the young man. “I am a sort of stray cat, and any garret is home to me. I can’t say, though, that I’ve ever occupied the dwelling of a whole community before.”

“Yee, this building once housed a good many people. It was a cross to leave it; but our numbers have fallen away, and we crowd together for comfort and encouragement. It’s an instinct, I suppose. Well, what do you think of the Shakers, so far, Friend Ford?” Elihu had an astute glimmer in his eye as he asked the question.

“Really, I hardly know what to say,” answered Ford.

“Say what you think. We may not like the truth, but we always desire to hear it.”

“I should probably say nothing offensive to you, if I said all that’s in my mind. I believe I think very well of you. I don’t see why you don’t succeed. I don’t see why you don’t supply to Protestantism the very refuge from the world that we talk of envying in Catholicism.”

“That is much the position that Friend Boynton took.”

“I don’t understand why you are a failing body. The world has tired and hopeless people enough to throng ten thousand such villages as yours.”

“We should hardly be satisfied with the weary and discouraged,” said Elihu, without resentment.

“And our system offers few attractions. Folks are not so anxious for the angelic life in heaven that they want to begin it on earth.”

Ford smiled. “You offer shelter, you offer a home and perfect immunity from care and anxiety.”

“But we require great sacrifices,” rejoined the Shaker gravely. “We put husband and wife asunder; we bid the young renounce the dream of youth; we say to the young man, Forego; to the young girl, Forget. We exact celibacy, the supreme self-offering to a higher life. Even if we did not consider celibacy essential to the angelic life, we should feel it to be essential to communism. We must exact it, as the one inviolable condition.”

Ford sat a moment thinking. “I dare say you are right.” He looked interested in what Elihu was saying, and he added, as if to prompt him to further talk, “I have been thinking about it a good deal since I’ve been here, and I don’t see how you can have communism on any other terms. But then your communism perishes, because nature is the stronger, and because you can’t recruit your numbers from the children of your adherents. You must look for accessions from the enemy.”

“Yee, that is one of our difficulties. And we have to fight the enemy within our gates perpetually. Even such of us as have peace in our own hearts must battle in behalf of the weaker brethren. We must especially guard the young against the snares of their own fancies.”

“I dare say it keeps you busy,” said Ford.

“It does. We must guard them from both the knowledge and the sight of love.” The word brought a flush to the young man’s face, which Elihu did not fail to note. “Friend Ford, I have understood you to wish us well?” He rose, and resting his arm on the chimney-piece looked down with gentle earnestness into the face of the young man, as he sat leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head.

“Yes, certainly.”

“You would not wittingly betray us?”

“Really” —

“I don’t mean that. You wouldn’t knowingly put any obstacle in our way, — any stumbling-block before the feet of those whom we are trying to lead towards what we think the true life?”

“Elihu,” said Ford, “I thoroughly respect you all, and I should be grieved to interfere with you. Why do you ask me these questions? Have you any reason to be dissatisfied with my behavior here?”

“Nothing,” continued Elihu, “is so hard to combat in the minds of our young folks as the presence of that feeling in others who consider it holy and heavenly, while we teach that it is of the earth, earthy.”

“Well?”

“The more right and fit it appears, the more complex and subtle is the effect of such an example. It is impossible that we should tolerate it a moment among us after we become convinced of its existence. Self-defense is the law of life.”

“Well, well!” cried Ford, getting up in his turn, and confronting Elihu on more equal terms, “what has all this to do with me?” His face was red, and his voice impatient.

Elihu was not disturbed. He asked calmly, “Don’t you know that Egeria is in love with you?”

Ford stood breathless a moment. “Good heavens, man!” he shouted. “Her father is at death’s door!”

Elihu stood with his wide-brimmed hat resting on one hand; he turned it slowly round with the other. “Friend Boynton is very strangely sick. The doctor says he doesn’t know how long he may last. Young people soon lose the sense of danger which is not immediate. The kind of love I speak of is the master-feeling of the human heart; it flourishes in the very presence of death; it grows upon sorrow that seems to kill. It knows how to hide itself from itself. It takes many shapes, and calls itself by many other names. We have seen much to make us think we are right about Egeria. Have you seen nothing?”

Ford did not reply. His thoughts ran back over all the times that he had seen and spoken with Egeria, and his heart slowly and deeply beat, like some alien thing intent upon the result; and then it leaped forward with a bound.

“Perhaps,” said the Shaker, “I am wrong to put the question in the way I do. We deal so plainly with ourselves and with one another in such cases that I might well forget the sophistication that the world outside requires in the matter. I do not wish to do you injustice, and I shall be glad if I have opened my mind for nothing. I will merely ask whether you have not done anything or said anything to make her like you.”

“This is preposterous,” said Ford. “Do you think these are the circumstances for love-making? I am here very much against my will, because I can’t decently abandon a friendless man” —

“Friend Boynton has plenty of friends here,” interrupted Elihu.

“I beg your pardon; I know that. Then I am here because I can’t leave a dying man who seems to find comfort in my presence. And whatever may be the security which Miss Boynton has fallen into, I have had her father to remind me of his danger by constant allusions to it, as if his death were near at hand.”

“Do you believe it is?”

“That isn’t the question. The question is whether a man, being trusted with a knowledge of dangers which she doesn’t know, could have any such feeling towards her as you imagine.” Ford bent a look of angry demand upon the Shaker.

“Yee,” the latter answered, “I think he could, if he meant the best that love means. If he knew that they were poor, and that after her father’s death she would be left alone in the world, he might very well look on her with affection even across a dying pillow, and desire to be the protector and the stay of her helplessness. I don’t wish to pry into your concerns, and if there is nothing between you and Egeria it will be enough for you to say so.”

“Between us!” cried Ford, bitterly. “I will tell you how I first met these people, and then you shall judge how much reason there is for love between her and me.”

“Nay,” interjected Elihu, “there is no need of a reason for love. I learned that before I was gathered in.”

Ford did not regard the interruption. “I saw them first at a public exhibition, and I made up my mind that Dr. Boynton was an impostor; and then I went to their house with this belief. I never believed his daughter was anything but his tool, the victim of himself and the woman of the house who did the tricking. I suspected tricking in the dark, but when I attempted to seize her hand it was Miss Boynton’s hand that I caught, and I hurt her — like the ruffian I was. Afterwards the old man tried to face me down, and we had a quarrel; and I saw him next that morning here, when he flew at my throat. It’s been his craze to suppose that I thwarted his control over his daughter, and he has regarded me as his deadliest enemy. Now you can tell how much love is lost between us.” Ford turned scornfully away and walked the length of the room. —

The Shaker remained in his place. “Egeria is of a very affectionate and believing disposition. She would take a pleasure in forgiving any unkindness, and she would forgive it so that it would never have been. I don’t see any cause in what you say to change my mind. If you told me that you did not care for her, it would be far more to the point than all you could say to show why you don’t.” Ford stopped, and glared at the serene figure and placid countenance. “This is too much,” he began, and then he paused, and they regarded each other.

“You don’t pretend now,” resumed Elihu, “that you suspect either of them of wrong.”

“No!”

“Then, whatever the mystery is about them, you know that they are good folks. We have had much more cause than you to suspect them, but I don’t doubt them any more than I doubt myself.”

“I would stake my life on her truth!” exclaimed Ford. The Shaker could not repress the glimmer of a smile. “!” — Ford paused. Then he burst out, “I have been a hypocrite, — the worst kind; a hypocrite to my own deceit! I do love her! She is dearer to me than — You talk of your angelic life! Can you dream of anything nearer the bliss of heaven than union with such tenderness and mercy as hers?”

“We say nothing against marriage in its place. A true marriage is the best thing in the earthly order. But it is of the earthly order. The angels neither marry nor are given in marriage. We seek to be perfect, as we are divinely bidden. If you choose to be less than perfect” —

“There can be no higher choice than love like hers. Do you assume” —

“Nay,” said the Shaker, “I assume nothing. The time has been when we hoped that Egeria might be gathered in. But that time is past. She could now never be one of us without suffering that we could not ask her to undergo. She must follow the leadings of her own heart, now.”

“Why, man, you have no right to say that she cares anything for me. It’s atrocious; it ‘s”— “We pass no censure upon the feeling between you,” said Elihu quietly, looking into his hat, as if he were about to put it on. “All we ask is that you will not let the sight of your affection be a snare to those whose faces should be set against such things.”

Ford regarded him with a stormy look; but he controlled himself, and asked coldly, “What do you wish me to do?” —

“Nay; that is for you to decide.”

“Well, I must go away!” Ford irefully stared at the Shaker again. “But how can I go away? If there was ever any reason why I should remain, the reason is now stronger than ever.”

“Yee,” said Elihu.

“What shall I do? If I have not been strong enough and honest enough with myself to keep from drifting into this — this affair, it is not likely that I can get out of it, — I don’t want to get out of it! Do you suppose that now I have the hope of her I wish to leave her? Whatever her father’s state is, and whatever my duty to him is, I am bound to stay here for her sake till she sends me away. It’s my duty, it’s my privilege.”

Elihu was not visibly swept from his feet by this lover’s-logic. He said gravely, “Now you consult your inclination rather than your sense of duty. Friend Boynton and his daughter are here by virtue of the charity we use towards all” —

“You shall be paid every cent!” cried Ford impulsively.

“Nay, I didn’t boast,” said the Shaker, with a gentle reproof in his tone, which put the young man to shame, “and I didn’t merit this return from you. I merely stated a fact. You are yourself here by our concession as their friend. I have opened our mind to you upon this matter, and you know just how we feel. Farewell.”

XXIV.

IN his preoccupation Ford let Elihu find his way out, and heard him stumbling and groping about for the outer door in the dark. All night the words and circumstances of the interview burned in his heart, and his face was hot with a transport half shameful and half sweet. Once he tried to think when his old misgivings had vanished, but he could not; he only remembered them to spurn them. In the morning he went out for a long walk, and visited the places where he had been with her. He had a formless fear and hope that he might meet her; these conflicting emotions resolved themselves into the resignation with which he went to the shop where Elihu was at work.

“I am going away. I have no right to stay here; it’s a violation of your rights, and it’s a profanation of her. I shall go away, but I shall never give up the hope of speaking to her at the right time and place, and asking her to be my wife.” Seeing that he expected an answer, Elihu said, “You cannot do less.”

Ford did not quite like the answer. “You don’t understand. I hope for nothing, — I have no reason to hope for anything.”

“Nay,” said the Shaker, “I don’t understand that. She is fond of you.”

Ford reddened, but he did not resent the words. “What I propose to do now — to-day — is to go away, and to come back from time to time, with your leave, and see how Dr. Boynton is doing. I should like some of you to write to me, — I should like to write to her. Would you have any objection to that? You don’t object to the fact, but to the appearance in this — affair, as I understand. The letters could come under cover to Sister Frances,” he submissively suggested.

“Nay,” answered the Shaker, after deliberation, “I don’t see how we could object to that.”

“Thanks,” said Ford, with a nervous sigh. “I hope you will feel it right that I should see Dr. Wilson, and ask his opinion of Dr. Boynton’s condition, before I go?”

“Yee. There is Dr. Wilson, now.” Elihu leaned out and beckoned to him, and the doctor, who was turning away from the office gate, stopped his horse in the middle of the street. “You can ask him now; he has just seen Friend Boynton.” Elihu delicately refrained from joining Ford in going to speak with the doctor.

“I have to go away for a while,” said the young man, abruptly, “and I wanted to ask you whether there is any immediate danger in Dr. Boynton’s case to prevent my going. I shouldn’t like to leave him at a critical moment.”

“No,” said the doctor, with the slowness of his thought. “It’s one of those obscure cases. I find him very well, — very well, indeed, considering. It’s the nature of his disease to make this sort of pause. It’s often a very long pause.”

Ford went back to Elihu, whom he found quietly at work again. “He says there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go,” he reported, with the excitement of a new purpose in his face. He waited a moment before he added, “I must go and tell Dr. Boynton, now. I confess I don’t know exactly how to do it.”

“Yee, it will be quite a little cross,” Elihu admitted.

“Do you think,” asked Ford, after a moment’s abstraction, “that there would be anything wrong in speaking to him about — what we have spoken of?”

“Nay,” said Elihu. “I was thinking that perhaps you might like to do that. It would set his mind at rest, perhaps.”

“Thank you,” said Ford, but he bit his nail in perplexity and hesitation.

“I presume that will be quite a cross, too,” added Elihu, quaintly.

Ford stared at him without perceiving his jest. “I suppose you don’t know what you’ve done in giving me the sort of hope you have! If you have mocked a drowning man with a straw” —

Rapt as he was in his own thoughts, when he entered the sick man’s room he could not but be aware of some great change in Boynton. When they had last seen each other, Boynton had sat up in an arm-chair to receive his visitor. Now he was stretched upon the bed, and he looked very old and frail.

“Why, the doctor said you were better!” cried the young man.

“So I am, — or so I was, half an hour ago,” replied Boynton. “I am glad you have come early to-day. I missed you yesterday; and there is something now on which I want the light of your clearest judgment. Sit down,” he said politely, seeing that Ford had remained on foot.

The young man mechanically drew up a chair, and sat facing him.

“I have heard a story of Agassiz,” Boynton said, “to the effect that when he had read some book wholly upsetting a theory he had labored many years to establish, he was so glad of the truth that his personal defeat was nothing to him. He exulted in his loss, because it was the gain of science. I have not the magnanimity of Agassiz, I find, though I have tried to pursue my inquiries in the same spirit of scientific devotion. Perhaps I had a great deal more at stake: there is a difference between seeking to ascertain some fact of natural science and endeavoring to place beyond question the truth of a future existence.”

He plainly expected some sort of acquiescence, and Ford cleared his throat to assent to the preposterous vanity of his speech: “Certainly.”

“You will bear me witness,” said Boynton, “that I have readily, even cheerfully, relinquished positions which I had carefully taken and painfully built upon, so long as their loss did not lead to doubt of this great truth, — did not weaken the citadel, so to speak.”

“Yes,” said Ford, with blank expectancy.

“You know I have rested my hopes upon a power, which I believed my daughter to possess, of communicating with the world of spirits?”

“Yes.”

“You remember that I abandoned without a murmur the hypothesis of your adverse control when that was no longer tenable?”

He was so anxious for Ford’s explicit assent that the young man again answered, “Yes.”

“And when I was forced to accept the conclusion that her power was limited by a certain nervous condition, and had forever passed away with her restoration to complete health, did you find any childish disposition in me to shrink from the truth?”

“No,” said Ford, “I did not.”

“I thank you!” cried Boynton. “These successive strokes, hard as they were to bear, had nothing mortal to my hopes in them. Now, I have had my death-blow.” Ford began a kindly dissent; but Boynton waved him to silence. “Unless your trained eye can see some way out of the conclusions to which I am now brought, I must give up the whole hypothesis of communion with disembodied life, and with that hypothesis my belief in that life itself. In other words, I have received my deathblow.”

No doubt Boynton still enjoyed his own rhetoric, and had a measurable consolation in his powers of graphic statement; but there was a real passion in his words, and the young man was moved by the presence of a veritable despair. “What facts, or reasons, have brought you to your conclusions?” he asked.

Boynton pushed his hand up under his pillow, and drew out an old copy of a magazine. “Here is what might have saved me years of research and of hopes as futile as those of the seekers for the philosopher’s stone, if I had seen it in time.” Though he laid the book on the coverlet, he kept his hand on it, and had evidently no intention that Ford should look at it for himself. “There is a paper in this magazine giving an account of a girl, in this very region, possessing powers so identical in all essentials with those of my daughter that there can be no doubt of their common origin. Wherever this unhappy creature appeared the most extraordinary phenomena attended her: raps were evoked; tables were moved; bells were rung; flashes of light were seen; and violent explosions were heard. The writer was not blinded by the fool’s faith that lured me on. He sought a natural cause for these unnatural effects, and he found that by insulating the posts of the girl’s bedstead — for these things mostly occurred during her sleep — he controlled them perfectly. She was simply surcharged with electricity. After a while she fell into a long sickness, from which she imperfectly recovered, and she died in a mad-house.” Boynton removed his hand from the magazine, as if to let Ford now see for himself, and impressively waited his movement.

“Excuse me,” said the young man, who found the parallel extremely distasteful, “but I don’t see the identity of the cases. Miss Boynton seems the perfection of health, and” —

“Yes,” interrupted Boynton, “there is that merciful difference. But I cannot base my selfforgiveness upon that. So far as my recklessness is concerned, her health and her sanity might have been sacrificed where her childhood has been wasted and her happiness destroyed. Poor girl! Poor girl!”

“I think you exaggerate,” Ford began, but Boynton interrupted him: — .

“Oh, you don’t know, you don’t know! I couldn’t exaggerate the sum of her sufferings at my hands. To be wrenched from a home in which she was simply happy, and from love that was immeasurably wiser and more unselfish than mine; to be thrust on to the public exhibition of abnormal conditions that puzzled and terrified her; to be made the partner of my defeat and shame; to be forced to share my aimless vagabondage and abject poverty, houseless, friendless, exposed to suspicion and insult and danger, — that is the fate to which I brought her; and for what? For a delusion that ends in chaos! Oh, my God! And here I lie at last, a sick beggar, sheltered by the charity of these Shakers, whose kindness I have insulted, and a sorrow and shame to the child whose young life I have blighted, — here I lie, stripped to the last shred of hope in anything, here or hereafter. Oh, young man! I once thought that you were hard upon me, and I resented the blame you spoke as outrage; but now I confess it merciful justice. You have your triumph!”

“Don’t say that!” cried Ford. “I never was more ashamed of what I said to you there in Boston than I am at this moment, and I never felt the need of your kindness so much. I believe that if Miss Boynton were here, and understood it all, she would feel nothing but pity” —

“Oh, does that make it different? Does that right the wrong which has been done?”

“Yes,” cried the young man, with a fervor that came he knew not how or whence, “forgiveness does somehow right a wrong! It must be so, or else this world is not a world of possibilities and recoveries, but a hopeless hell. Why, look!” He spoke as if Egeria were before them. “Have you ever seen her stronger, younger, more” — The image he had conjured up seemed to shine upon him with a smile that reflected itself upon his lips, and a thrill of tenderness passed through him. “No one could do her harm that her own goodness couldn’t repair.”

Boynton was not one to refuse the comfort of such rapture. “Yes, you are right. She is unharmed by all that she has suffered. I have at least that comfort.” Then he underwent a quick relapse. “But whether I have harmed her or not, the fact remains that she had never any supernatural power, and I return through all my years of experiment and research to the old ground, — the ground which I once occupied, and which you have never left, — the ground of materialism. It is doubtless well to have something under the foot, if it is only a lump of lifeless adamant.”

“I find it hard not to imagine something better than this life when I think of Miss Boynton!” exclaimed Ford impetuously.

“Very true,” said the doctor, accepting the tribute without perceiving the passion in it; “there has always been that suggestion of diviner goodness in her loving, self-devoted nature. But she had no more supernatural power than you or I, and the whole system of belief which I had built upon the hypothesis of its existence in her lies a heap of rubbish. And here at death’s door I am without a sense of anything but darkness and the void beyond.” A silence ensued, which Boynton broke with a startling appeal: “In the name of God, — in the name of whatever is better and greater than ourselves, — give me some hope! Speak! Say something from your vantage-ground of health and strength! Let me have some hope. I am not a coward. I am not afraid of torment. I should not be afraid of it if I had ever willed wrong to any living creature, and I know that I have not. But this darkness rushing back upon me, after years of faith and surety — it’s unendurable! Give me some hope! A word comes from you at times that does not seem of your own authority: speak! Say it!”

“You have the hope that the world has had for eighteen hundred years,” answered Ford, deeply moved.

“Was that first in your thoughts?” Boynton swiftly rejoined. “Was it all you could think of?”

“It was first in my thoughts, it was all I could think of,” repeated Ford.

“But you have rejected that hope.”

“It left me. It seemed to have left me. I don’t realize it now as a faith, but I realize that it was always present somewhere in me. It may be different with those who come after us, to whom it will never have been imparted; but we who were born in it, — how can we help it, how can we escape it?”

“Is that really true?” mused Boynton aloud. “Do we come back only to that at last? Have you ever spoken with a clergyman about it?”

“Oh, no!” cried Ford.

“I should like to talk with a clergyman — I should like to talk with the church about it! There must be something in organization — But it is of no use, now! Theories, theories, theories! A thousand formulas repeat themselves to me; the air is full of them; I can read and hear them.” He put his hands under his head and clasped them there. “And there is absolutely nothing else but that? Nothing in science?”

“No.”

“Nothing of hope in the new metaphysics?”

“No, nothing.”

“Nothing in the philosophy that applies the theories of science to the moral world?”

“Nothing but death.”

“Then that is the only hope, — that old story of a credulous and fabulous time, resting upon hearsay and the witness of the ignorant, the pedantic wisdom of the learned, the interest of a church lustful of power; and that allegory of the highest serving the lowest, the best suffering for the worst, — that is still the world’s only hope!” He paused; and then he recurred to the thought which he had dropped: “A clergyman, — a priest! — I should like to know the feelings of such a man. He fulfills an office with which his order has been clothed for two thousand years; he bears the tradition of authority which is as old as the human race; he claims to derive from Christ himself the touch of blessing and of healing for the broken spirit. I have often thought of that, — what a sacred and awful commission it must be, if we admit its divine origin! Yes, I should like to know the feelings of such a man. I wonder if he feels his authority perpetually reconsecrated by the anguish, the fears, the prayers, the trembling hopes, of all those who have lain upon beds of death, or wept over them! Poor human soul, it should make him superhuman! What a vast cumulative power of consolation must come to a priest in our time! He is the church incarnate, the vicar of Christ, the helpful brother of the helpless human race, — it’s a tremendous thought. I should like to talk with such a man.”

“Would you really like to see a minister?” asked Ford. “Because” —

“No, — no,” said Boynton. “At least, not now, not yet; not till I have clearly formulated my ideas. But there are certainly some points that I should like to discuss — Oh, words, words! Phrases, phrases, — this glibness tires me to death! I can’t get any foot-hold on it — I slip on it as if it were ice.” He lay in a silence which Ford did not interrupt, and which he broke himself at last in a mood of something like philosophical cheerfulness: “I can find reason, if not consolation, for my failure, — reason in the physical world. I shall take the first opportunity of committing my ideas to paper. Has it never struck you as very extraordinary that all the vast mass of evidence which has been accumulating in favor of spiritualism for the last twenty years, until now it is literally immense, should have no convincing power whatever with those who have not been convinced by their own senses? Why should I, as soon as personal proof failed me, instantly lapse from faith in it?”

“I am afraid,” Ford said, “that I have not thought sufficiently about the matter.”

“I believe I can explain why,” Boynton continued. “It is because it is not spiritualism at all, but materialism, — a grosser materialism than that which denies; a materialism that asserts and affirms, and appeals for proof to purely physical phenomena. All other systems of belief, all other revelations of the unseen world, have supplied a rule of life, have been given for our use here. But this offers nothing but the barren fact that we live again. If it has had any effect upon morals, it has been to corrupt them. I cannot see how it is better in its effect upon this world than sheer atheism. It is as thoroughly godless as atheism itself, and no man can accept it upon any other man’s word, because it has not yet shown its truth in the ameliorated life of men. It leaves them where it found them, or else a little worse for the conceit with which it fills them. Yes, yes; I see now. I see it all.”

The vigor of his speculative power buoyed him triumphantly above the abyss into which other men would have sunk. Ford listened with the fascination which the peculiar workings of Boynton’s mind had always had for him, and he felt his heart warm towards him with sympathy that was at once respectful and amused, as he thus constructed a new theory out of the ruin of all his old theories.

“All the research in that direction,” Boynton presently continued, “has been upon a false basis, and if anything has been granted it has been in mockery of an unworthy hope. I wonder that I was never struck before by that element of derision in it. The Calvinist gets Calvinism, the Unitarian Unitarianism; each carries away from communion with spirits the things that he brought. If men live again, it has been found that they live only in a frivolous tradition of their life in this world. Poor creatures! they seem lamed of half themselves, — the better half that aspires and advances; they hover in a dull stagnation, just above this ball of mire; they have nothing to tell us; they bring us no comfort and no wisdom. Annihilation is better than such an immortality!”

Ford saw that Boynton did not expect any comment from him, and he did not interrupt his monologue. “What I ought to have asked was not whether there was a life hereafter, but whether there was a life hereafter worth living. I stopped short of the vital question. I fancied that it was essential to men to know surely that they should live again; but now I recognize that it is not essential in itself.” He lay musing a while, and then resumed, “I had got them to bring me a Bible before you came in. I wanted to consult it upon a point raised by Elihu, yesterday. There are a great many new ideas in the Bible,” he added, simply; “a great many new ideas in Job, and David, and Ecclesiastes, and Paul, — a great many in Paul. Would you mind handing it to me from the table? Oh, thanks!” he said, as he took the volume which Ford rose to give him. “This old record, which keeps the veil drawn so close, and lets the light I wanted glimmer out so sparely in a few promises and warnings, against the agonized passion of the Cross, or flings the curtain wide upon the sublime darkness of the Apocalypse, is very clear upon this point. It tells us that we shall live hereafter in the blessing of our good will and the curse of our evil will; the question whether we shall live at all is left in abeyance, as if it were too trivial for affirmation. What a force it has, as it all comes back! I seem to have thought of it for the first time. And what a proof of its truth there is in our experience here! We shall reap as we have sown, and so much is sown which we cannot reap here — And if I should be doomed to spend eternity in asking whether I be really alive! No, no; God doesn’t make a jest of us.” He turned to Ford. “I am curious,” he said, “to know how this strikes you, as you sit here in the full possession of your powers. I know very well, and you know, how men in their extremity are apt to turn back to the faith taught them at their mother’s knees; and perhaps the common experience is repeating itself in my case. But you are in no such extremity. Does there seem to be any truth here?” He laid his hand on the book, and looked intently at Ford.

“It seems to be all the truth of the sort that there is.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Boynton. “I express myself badly. But it’s hard to express yourself well on this matter. I mean to say that whatever truth there was in that record has not been surpassed or superseded.”

“And is that all you have to say?”

“That’s all I could say till I had looked into the question. It seems to me that it is all any one could say.”

“No doubt,” said Boynton, with disappointment, “from your stand-point, — from the scientific standpoint. You say that there is nothing else, but you imply that this is not much.”

“No,” said Ford, “I think it’s a great deal. I think it ought to be enough, if one cares” —

“That’s the scientific attitude!” cried Boynton; “that’s the curse of the scientific attitude! You do not deny, but you ask, ‘ What difference?’”

“At least,” said Ford, with a smile, “you can let even such a poor representative of the scientific side as I am be glad that you see the fallacy of spiritualism.”

“Oh, I don’t pronounce it a fallacy,” returned Boynton. “I only say that it has proved fallacious in my hands, and that as long as it is used merely to establish the fact of a future life it will remain sterile. It will continue to be doubted, like a conjurer’s trick, by all who have not seen it; and those who see it will afterwards come to discredit their own senses. The world has been mocked with something of the kind from the beginning; it’s no new thing. Perhaps the hope of absolute assurance is given us only to be broken for our rebuke. Life is not so long at the longest that we need be impatient. If we wake, we shall know; if we do not wake, we shall not even know that we have not awakened.” He added, “It is very curious, very strange, indeed, but the only thing that I have got by all this research is the one great thing which it never included, — which all research of the kind ignores.”

Ford perceived that he wished him to ask what this was, and he said, “What is that?”

“God,” replied Boynton. “It may be through an instinctive piety that we forbear to inquire concerning him of those earth-bound spirits. What could they know of him? Many pure and simple souls in this world must be infinitely nearer him. But out of all that chaos I have reached him. No, I am not where I started: I have come in sight of him. I was anxious to know whether we should live hereafter; but whether we live or not, now I know that he lives, and he will take care. We need not be troubled. As for the dead, perhaps we shall go to them, but surely they shall not return to us. That seems true, doesn’t it?”

“It’s all the truth there is,” said Ford.

Boynton smiled. “You are an honest man. You won’t say more than you think. I like you for that. I have a great wish to ask your forgiveness.”

“My forgiveness? I have nothing to forgive!”

“Oh, yes. I involved you in the destiny of a mistaken and willful man; I afflicted you with the superstitious manias of a lunatic who fancied that he was seeking the truth when he was only seeking himself. I have burdened you with a sense of my wish that you should stay here, because I still hoped to work out something to my own glory and advantage” —

“I never knew it; I can’t think it,” interrupted Ford. “It was my privilege to stay. These have been the best days of my life, — the happiest.” He stopped; he believed that Boynton must know the meaning that rushed from his heart into the words; but the old man evidently found only a conventional kindliness in them.

“Thank you,” he said. “It is very strange to find you my friend after all, and to meet you on common ground, — I who have wandered so far round, and you who have continued forward with none of my aims. It would be interesting if a third could stand with us. I should like to see how far a minister of the gospel could come towards us. I should like to talk with a minister: not a theologian, but an ecclesiastic, — some one who embodied and represented the idea of a church.”

“Do you mean a Catholic priest?” asked Ford. “No, not that, — not just that; but still some one in whom the priestly character prevailed.”

“I will be glad to gratify any wish you have in the matter, Dr. Boynton,” said Ford. “I imagine it would be easy to get a clergyman to visit you from the village, and I’ll go to any one you want to see.”

“Well, not now, — not now. Not to-day. Perhaps to-morrow. I should like to think it over first. I may have some new light by that time. I should like to look up some other points, here. There is a text somewhere in Paul — it is a long time since I read it — Wait! ‘ We are saved by hope. But hope that is seen’ — that is seen—’ is not hope; for what a man seeth’ — Very significant, very significant!” he added, more to himself than to Ford. “Saved! Really, there seems to have been no question with them about the mere existence!” He lay quiet for a long time, with his hands folded behind his head, and a dreamy light was in his eyes. Ford heard the ticking of an insect in the wainscot. “Who is it,” Boynton asked suddenly, “that speaks of the undiscovered country?”

“Hamlet,” replied Ford.

“It might have been Job, — it might have been Ecclesiastes, — or David. ‘ The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’ Is that it?”

“Yes. They commonly misquote it,” added Ford mechanically.

“I know; they leave out bourn. They say, the undiscovered country whence no traveler returns. But it’s the same thing. Yes; and Hamlet says no traveler returns, when he believes that he has just seen his father’s spirit! The ghost that comes back to prove itself can’t hold him to a belief in its presence after the heated moment of vision is past! We must doubt it; we are better with no proof. Yes; yes! The undiscovered country — thank God, it can be what those babblers say! The undiscovered country — what a weight of doom is in the words — and hope!”

One of the sisters came in, and he seemed to forget Ford, who presently went away with an absent-minded salutation from him. Boynton had taken up the book, and while the sister propped his head with the pillows, he fluttered the leaves with impatient hands.

XXV.

AT the gate Ford turned towards Elihu’s shop, intending to explain why he had not been able to speak of Egeria to her father. In his liberation from Boynton’s appeals for sympathy, his thoughts thronged back to her; he framed a thousand happy phrases, in which he opened his heart, and she always answered as he wished. His face burned with the joyful shame of these thoughts, and he did not hear his name the first time it was called from a buggy standing at the office gate. The gay voices had hailed him a third time when he looked round, and slowly recognized Phillips and Mrs. Perham making frantic signs to him from the vehicle. They laughed at his stupefaction, and his sense of their intrusion mounted as he dragged himself across the street. Mrs. Perham leant out of the buggy and gave him her hand.

“Well, Mr. Ford! Is this the way you receive your friends? We have been chasing all over this outlandish place for you; we have spent an hour with the sisters here, and have questioned them down to the quick, so that we know all about you; and we were just going to drive away in despair without seeing you.”

“I’m very unfortunate,” said Ford.

“To be caught at the last moment? How good you always are! You don’t know how I’ve pined for your little speeches; they ‘re tonic. Yes, Mr. Ford!” she cried, with a daring laugh, “Mr. Perham is very well, for him, — I knew you were going to ask! — or I shouldn’t be philandering about the country in this way.” Ford glanced at Phillips, who trifled with the reins and looked sheepish.

“You should have gone over to Egerton before this, my dear fellow,” he said. “There have been some charming people over there.”

“Have been! His modesty,” cried Mrs. Perham, “and my humility! We are at Egerton yet, Mr. Ford!”

“Oh, certainly. But Ford has us in Boston.”

“Ah, very true,” said Mrs. Perham. “There was quite a little buzz of excitement for a while, when Mr. Phillips first explained the romantic circumstances. The young ladies drove over the next Sunday to Shaker meeting, on purpose to interview you, but they hadn’t the courage. It was one of Mr. Perham’s bad days, or I should have come, too; and we should have sent Mr. Phillips over long ago, if there had been any Mr. Phillips to send. But he’s only just got back to Egerton.

“Yes, my dear fellow, I carried out our little programme to the letter, — I wish I could say to the spirit; but your defection prevented. I found Butler at Egerton, and he jumped at the chance of driving on with me, in a manner that made your flattering consent seem nothing. We drove to Greenfield, and then followed up the valley of the Connecticut. It was indescribable, my dear friend. You have lost no end of material. I must really try to reproduce it for you some time. I thought of you often. I was always saying, ‘Now, if Ford were here!’ Two or three times I was actually on the point of writing to you. But you know how that is; you never wrote to me. I’m very glad to hear from our sisters, here, that the old gentleman is better. Is he still in his craze?” Phillips spoke with anxious rapidity, and with a certain propitiation of manner; but Ford did not relax the displeasure of the looks with which he had heard of his explanation of the romantic circumstances.

“You ought to get something out of him; you ought to write him up; he’d make a capital paper,” said Mrs. Perham. “I shall be on the lookout for him in your articles. And your Shaker experiences! The young ladies were sure you had turned Shaker, Mr. Ford, and they picked you out in the dance. We had such fun over it!” She continued, pulling down the corners of her mouth, “Oh, but we were all very respectful, Mr. Ford. We admired your self-devotion in staying here; especially, as you couldn’t esteem them.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” began Ford, with a sternness that would have silenced a less frivolous spirit.

“Why, haven’t you heard?” cried Mrs. Perham, leaning forward, and dropping her tone confidentially, while Phillips made some inarticulate attempts to hinder her speaking. “The poor old gentleman was quite tipsy that morning when they stopped up there at that country hotel, and they had to be turned out-of-doors. Is it possible you haven’t heard that?”

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” said Ford.

“I always said,” continued Mrs. Perham, “it was cruel to the girl; for she wasn’t responsible for her father’s habits, poor thing. Then of course you don’t believe it?”

“No!”

“And you believe that all those manifestations took place there?”

“No!”

“An armed neutrality! Well, it’s the only tenable position, and I shall take it myself in regard to the other affair. I never thought how convenient it must be.”

Phillips found his voice: “Mrs. Perham, it’s delightful chatting here; but I have to remind you that we shall be late for dinner if we stay any longer.”

“Oh, that’s true,” admitted Mrs. Perham. “Good-by, Mr. Ford. Do come over and see us, if you can tear yourself away from your protégés for a few hours. It’s very strange, his lingering along so! Good-by!”

“Good-by, my dear friend!” said Phillips, trying to throw some exculpation into his afflicted face.

“I am going back to Boston at the end of the week. Can I do anything for you there?” He did not wait for an answer, but lifted the reins and chirruped to his horse.

Ford caught the wheel in his hand, and stopped it. “Hold on!” he said, quite white in the face. “What other affair, Mrs. Perham?”

“Other affair?” she repeated. “Oh! about the water-proof, you know.”

“No, I don’t know about the water-proof. What do you mean?”

“Is it possible the Shakers haven’t told you? Perhaps they didn’t think it worth mentioning. You know your friends — I forget the name; Boyntons? — had passed the night before they reached the Elm Tavern in a school-house up here; and the teacher found them there in the morning, and lent the young lady her water-proof. They were to send it back from Vardley Station; but as they never went to Vardley Station they naturally never sent it back.”

“I don’t believe it!” cried Ford.

“Mr. Phillips always told me you were a terrible skeptic!” said Mrs. Perham. “I merely had the story from the mother of the school-teacher, herself! We happened to stop at her house to ask the way, and when we inquired if the Boyntons were still here she came out with this story. She’s a very voluble old lady. I dare say she tells it to every one. What is your theory about it?”

Ford released the wheel which he had been gripping, and, giving it a contemptuous push, turned away without a word.

Mrs. Perham craned her head round to look back after him. “What a natural man!” she said, with sincere admiration. “He’s perfectly fascinating.” She burst into a laugh. “Poor Mr. Phillips! He looked as if he wished you had been my authority.” Phillips shrugged his shoulders, and said dryly, “I hope you are satisfied, Mrs. Perham.”

“Why, no, I am not,” she candidly owned, with a touch of real regret in her voice. “I only meant to tease him; but if he’s in love with her, I suppose he’ll take it to heart.”

“In love with whom?” asked Phillips.

“Sister Diantha.”

Phillips stared at her.

“Well, with this medium, then, — this Medea, Ashtaroth, Egeria, — I don’t know what her name is.” As Phillips continued to stare at her, Mrs. Perham gave a shriller laugh. “Really, you are a man, too. I shall never dare take on such easy terms with you again, Mr. Phillips, — never! I don’t wonder men can’t understand women: they don’t understand their own simple sex. Of course he’s in love with her, and must have been from the first.”

“Well, then, allow me to say, Mrs. Perham, that if you think he’s in love with Miss Boynton I don’t quite see what your object was. I felt that it was an intrusion to come over here, at the best.”

“Oh, thanks, Mr. Phillips!”

“And it appears to me that it was extraneous to repeat those stories to him.”

“Extraneous is good! And you have an ally in my own conscience, Mr. Phillips. I wanted to see a natural man under the influence of a strong emotion, and I don’t like it, I think. I didn’t suppose he was so serious about her. But I don’t believe any harm’s done. He won’t give her up on account of what I’ve said; and if he does perhaps she ought to be given up.” Phillips dealt the horse a cut of the whip, and left the talk to Mrs. Perham, as they drove away.

In the dull first half-hour after dinner, while she sat absently feeling on the porcelain-toned piano in the hotel parlor for the music of the past, two ladies who wished to see her were announced. One of these visitors proved to be a Shaker sister, whom Mrs. Perham recognized, and who introduced her companion, a short, squarely built young woman, as Miss Thorn.

They took seats, though Mrs. Perham had risen and remained standing, and Miss Thorn said without preamble, “I teach in the school-house in Vardley, where Dr. Boynton stopped this spring. I heard from my mother this noon that a lady and gentleman had been asking the way to the Shaker Village, who seemed to know Dr. Boynton.”

“No, I don’t know him,” said Mrs. Perham. Phillips came forward, from a corner of the parlor. “I know Dr. Boynton; at least I saw him and Miss Boynton in Boston once.”

“I thought,” said Miss Thorn, “that I ought to come and tell you that my mother didn’t understand about that — that water-proof.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Perham; “we thought it so curious.”

“I was sure,” said Phillips, with an attempted severity, “that there was some mistake.” The severity had no apparent effect upon Mrs. Perham, but Miss Thorn, who had been talking in some sort to both, now addressed herself wholly to him:— “I was away from home when you stopped today. I thought you would like to know there was a misunderstanding. The water-proof was as much a gift as anything; though that wouldn’t have excused them if they had thought I wanted it again. But anybody could see that Miss Boynton was stupid then with the fever, and didn’t half know where she was or what she was doing. She had been walking late the night before through the snow, and they had slept on the benches before the stove.” Phillips bowed, and looked at Miss Thorn, who resumed with increasing stiffness: “I never wondered at his not remembering it; he seemed too flighty for anything. I knew they were here all summer at the Shakers’. I don’t,” said Miss Thorn, “pass any judgment on my mother for the way she looked at it; but I’d have given anything if she hadn’t spoken.” The tears started to her eyes, and she bit her lip as she rose.

“It didn’t make any difference to us,” said Diantha, who had hitherto sat a silent and inscrutable glimmer of spectacles in the depths of her Shaker bonnet. “It got hung up among our things while she was sick, and when she got well she couldn’t seem to remember about it. She thought she must have brought it from the cars with her for her own.”

Miss Thorn waited, and then resumed stiffly, “I never suspected or blamed them the least bit. As soon as I could, I went over to the Shakers’ to see about it, and told them the way I felt, and that I wanted to come to you. Diantha felt as if she would like to come with me, and I brought her. That’s all.” Miss Thorn rose with à personal primness that by contrast almost softened the Shaker primness of Diantha into ceremony.

Phillips experienced the rush of an emotion which, upon subsequent analysis, he knew to be of unquestionable genuineness. “My dear young lady,” he said, “I ask you to do me the justice to believe that I never had an injurious suspicion of Miss Boynton. Her father had attempted a line of life that naturally subjected himself and her to question, but I never doubted them. I have a positive pleasure in disbelieving anything to their disadvantage in connection with — with — your generous behavior to them. Did — did Mr. Ford speak of the matter to you? Did he wish any expression from me in their behalf? Because” —

“He no need to ask anything as far as we’re concerned,” interposed Diantha.

“No,” said Phillips. “I can only repeat that J was sure there was a misunderstanding, and that you’ve done us a favor in coming. Is there any way in which I could be of use to Dr. Boynton? I should be most happy if I thought there was.” Miss Thorn left the reply to Diantha, who said as they went out, “There ain’t anything as I know of.”

“Really,” commented Mrs. Perham, “this is edifying. I haven’t felt so put down for a long while. I don’t see what more we could do, unless we joined with Miss Thorn and Sister Diantha in presenting Miss Boynton with a piece of plate, as a slight token of gratitude for her noble example in borrowing a water-proof and keeping it. She has classed the water-proof with the umbrella, as a thing not to be returned. Is that the principle? Well, if Mr. Ford is going to marry her” —

“Going to marry her!” cried Phillips.

“Why, of course. Did you think anything else? Is marriage such an unnatural thing?”

“No. But Ford’s marrying is.”

“That remains to be seen. If he’s going to marry her, he can’t believe in her too thoroughly. I’ve an idea that the Pythoness is insipid; but if Mr. Ford likes insipidity, I want him to have it. I think we ought to drive over to the Shakers’, and assure him in person that we didn’t believe anything, and we didn’t mean anything. You shall do all the talking, this time; you talk so well.”

“Thanks,” said Phillips, “I suspect I’ve done my last talking to Ford.”

“And you won’t go?” demanded Mrs. Perham, with a laugh. “Then I must go alone, some day. Meantime, I know how to keep a secret. I hope Miss Thorn may be able to teach her mother.”

XXVI.

FORD stood still, looking at the ground, while Phillips and Mrs. Perham drove away. His impulse to pluck Phillips from his place, and make him pay in person for that woman’s malice, was still so vividly present in his nerves that he seemed to have done it; but when the misery of Phillips’s face, intensifying as Mrs. Perham went on from bad to worse, recurred to him, he broke into a laugh.

Sister Frances came out of the office. “Friend Edward,” she said, “was that wicked woman speakin’ to you about Egery?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you believe her!  Don’t you believe a word she said!” cried the Shakeress, with hot looks of indignation. “I know just how it all happened” —

“I don’t wish to know. I should feel disgraced if I let you tell me. Whatever happened, this woman lied. Where is Egeria?”

“Oh!” cried Frances. “She has gone to Harshire with Rebecca. She won’t be back till mornin’.” She bent on the young man a look of wistful sympathy. —

“Well!” he cried, throwing up his hands desperately, as if the morrow were a time so remote that it never would come, “I must wait.”

“She’d been plannin’ to go a long while,” Frances apologized, “and her father seemed so well this mornin’ she thought she might” —

“Oh, yes, yes!” answered Ford dejectedly. He knew that he somehow had driven her away by his behavior of the day before, and that he had himself to blame for this delay in which he stifled. He turned about, with some wild purpose of following her to Harshire, and speaking to her there, when he heard Frances calling him again: —

“Friend Edward, I don’t know as you know that Egery’s expectin’ friends to-morrow.”

“Friends? No, what friends?” asked Ford. “Has she gone to meet them at Harshire?” he added stupidly.

“Well, no; she only got the letter yesterday. I suppose her father didn’t think to tell you of it. I don’t know as you ever heard her speak of the young man that come with ’em as far as the Junction that day they missed their train. He was with ’em a while in Boston, and he come from the same place they did, Down East. He’s been twice to find ’em there in Maine, this summer; but he couldn’t hear any word of ’em till just now. They was children together, Egery and Friend — Well, I never could remember names.”

“Oh, never mind!” exclaimed Ford, with a deathly pallor. “I know the name, — I know the man!” And now he turned again, and hurried beyond a second recall from the trouble in which Frances saw him groping down the road, like one in the dark. When he had got out of her sight, he walked a little into the wayside woods, and stumbling to the ground gave himself to the despair which had blackened round him. His first feeling was a generous regret that now he could not let his love speak the contempt in which he held the wrong he had heard done her; this feeling came even before the sense of hopeless loss to which he abandoned himself with a lover’s rashness. He meekly owned that the man whom he marveled now that he could ever have forgotten as a rival was one of those in whom women confided, and were not disappointed, —— who made constant friends and good husbands; and questioning himself he could not be sure that her happiness would be as safe in his own keeping. He remembered with abject humiliation the last time he had met this man, and the savagery with which he had wreaked upon him the jealousy which he would not then admit to himself, and in which he had refused to consider even her at his prayer. The turmoil went on for hours, but always to this effect. The most that he could hope, when he crept homeward at dusk, sore as if bruised in body by the conflict in his mind, was that he might steal away before he saw them together. With this intent, to which he had worked with difficulty in the chaos of his dreams, he set about putting his books and other belongings together, but he gave up tremulous and exhausted before the work was half done. He fell to thinking again, and this time with a sort of sullen resentment, in which he said to himself that his love had its own rights, and that he would not betray them. It had a right to be heard, at any cost; and he began to despise his purpose of hurrying away as mock-heroic. It was like a character in a lady’s novel to leave the field to a rival whom he did not yet know to be preferred; the high humility, in which he had thought to yield Egeria without her explicit authority to a man whom he judged his better, sickened him. He saw that it was for her to choose between them, and it was the part of a coward and a fool to go before she had chosen. As matters stood, he had no right to go; she had a preeminent right to know from him that he loved her.

He hungrily dispatched the supper he had left standing on his table, and then kindled a brushwood fire on his hearth; he sat down before it in his easy-chair, and stayed by the clearer mind at which he had arrived he experienced a sensual comfort in the blaze. Presently he was aware of drowsing; and then suddenly he awoke. The dawn came in at the windows; he perceived that he had passed the night in his chair. A loud knocking continued at his door, while he gathered his scattered wits together. At length he cried, “Come in!” and the farmer from over the way entered.

“I don’t suppose ye know what’s happened?” he said.

“No,” said Ford, “I don’t, if it’s anything in particular.”

“No. Well. I thought may be ye’d like to know. The old man’s dead. Died sudden this mornin’.”

“What? Who? What old man?”

The farmer nodded his head in the direction of the village. “Dr. Boynton. I thought ye’d like to know it.”

“Thank you,” said Ford. He rose and stood at one corner of the hearth; the farmer, from the other, stiffly stretched his hard, knotted hand towards the ashes of the dead fire.

Ford went out and walked up through the village, whose familiar aspect was all estranged, as if he himself had died, and were looking upon it from another world. At the office he found a group of Shakers listening to Boynton’s physician, who, on his appearance, addressed more directly to him what he was saying of the painless death Boynton must have died in his sleep. “The first part of the night he was very restless, and several times he said that he would like to see you and talk with you; but he would not let them send; said he hadn’t formulated his ideas yet.” The doctor involuntarily smiled in recalling a turn of the phraseology so newly silent forever. “I wonder if he has formulated them now to his satisfaction.” Ford made no response, and the doctor asked, “Did he speak to you yesterday of the case of an electrical girl?”

“Yes.”

“I inferred as much from something he said, when I saw him in the afternoon. I had lent him the magazine containing the account. He found an analogy between that case and Miss Boynton’s that I had not anticipated. It seems to have put a quietus to his belief in her supernatural gifts.”

“Yes,” Ford assented, as before.

“He told me that it had depressed him to the lowest point. But when I saw him he had quite recovered his spirits.” He added thoughtfully, “You can’t say that a man dies because he wishes to die; though it sometimes seems as if people could live if they would. When I parted with Dr. Boynton he had what I might call an enthusiasm for death. It might be described in other words as a desire, amounting almost to frenzy, to know whether we live again, and a willingness to gratify that desire at the cost of not living at all.”

“He dwelt habitually on that question,” said Ford, with difficulty. “But when I talked with him yesterday, he seemed at rest on the main point.”

“Yes, I don’t know but he was. Perhaps I had better say that he was impatient to verify it. He talked of nothing else during the evening, Sister Frances tells me; though he fell off quietly to sleep at last.”

“Well,” said Ford drearily, “he has verified it now.”

“Yes, and in the old way, — the way appointed for all living. He knows now. Did it ever occur to you, sir,” added the doctor, philosophically, “what ignorance all our wisdom is compared with the knowledge of a child that has just died?”

“If it knows anything at all.”

“Oh, certainly, — if it does know.”

“We are sure it knows,” said Elihu.

They walked out together, and before the doctor mounted his buggy to drive away they stood a moment looking at the closed windows of the infirmary. “It’s useless, now, to talk of causes,” said the doctor. “The heart had been affected a long time” —

“He is dead, all the same,” said Ford.

“Oh, yes, he is dead,” assented the doctor. “What I meant to say was that while no human foresight could have prevented the result I confess its suddenness surprised me. One moment he was with us, and the next” —

“He wasn’t,” interrupted Ford, restively. “That’s all we can know: and neither he nor all the myriads that have gone that way can tell us anything more.”

“If we suppose him to be somewhere in a state of conscious being,” observed the doctor, “we can suppose that reflection to be a trial to him, after a life so much devoted to the effort of working out proof of something different.”

“He had been a spiritualist; and not a selfish or ignoble one,” answered Ford, oppressed by the doctor’s speculative mood, and letting his impatience appear. A voice was in his ears, repeating the things that Boynton had said. In the pauses of it, he brooded upon the chances that had thrown upon him for sympathy and comfort in his last days the man for whom he had once felt and shown such contempt. The dark irony, the broken meaning, afflicted him, and he lurked about, stunned and helpless, waiting till Egeria should come, and dreading to see the grief in which he had no rights. He thought of her trouble, not of his own; it blotted even his jealousy from his mind, and left him acquiescent in whatever fate befell. The time for what he had intended to do was swept away; he could now only wait passively for events to shape themselves.

Hatch did not come that day, and Ford took such part as Elihu assigned him in the sad business of fulfilling Boynton’s wishes. These had been casually expressed from time to time to Frances, and referred to his removal to his old home, where he desired to be laid by the side of his wife. When Hatch arrived, the second morning, he assumed charge of the affair, as a family friend; and Ford, lapsing from all active concern in it, shut himself in his own room, and waited for he knew not what. In the evening, Hatch came to see him. They had already met in the presence of the Shakers, but doubtless neither felt that they had met till now, since their parting in Boston. Hatch received awkwardly the civility which Ford awkwardly showed. He would not sit down, and he said abruptly that he had come to say that Miss Boynton was going back in the morning to her home in Maine, where the funeral was to be. He added that Frances and Elihu were going with her, on the part of the family; and after a hesitation he said, “Wouldn’t you like to attend the funeral, too?”

“Has she authorized you to invite me?” asked Ford.

“Well, no,” said Hatch. “I don’t suppose she wanted to put that much of a burden on you. It’s a long ways.”

Ford reflected a long time. “You are going, I suppose?”

“Why, of course,” said Hatch.

Ford pondered again. “Under the circumstances,” he said, “I believe that I oughtn’t to let my own preference have any weight. Miss Boynton is going with friends to her own home, and I couldn’t be of any use. I propose to do what I think would be least afflicting to her by not going.” He hesitated, and presently added, tentatively, “I believe she would prefer it.”

“You ought to know best,” said Hatch.

“Well, I believe that I am right. Tell her that I will not try to see her before she goes; but — but — some other time.” He said this tentatively, also, and with an odd sort of faltering, as if somehow Hatch might advise him better. “I thank you for coming.”

“Well, sir,” said the young fellow, standing with his feet squarely apart in the way that Ford had hated him for in Mrs. Le Roy’s parlor, “you must do what you think is best. I want to thank you, too. Dr. Boynton was a good friend to me, and from all I hear you were a good friend to him, —— at last. You’ve behaved like a man. They all say here that the doctor couldn’t have got along without you.”

“They overpraise me,” said Ford, helped to a melancholy irony by Hatch’s simple patronage.

“No, sir,” replied Hatch, “I don’t think so. And you must have found it pretty tough, feeling the way you did about him.”

“No,” said Ford, “it was not so tough as it might seem. I liked him. It isn’t a logical position; he never squared with my ideas; but I know now that he was a singularly upright and truthful man.”

“That’s so, every time,” said Hatch.

“I don’t care for my consistency in the thing; I’d rather do him justice. I’ve come to his own ground, and yours: I want to say that when I interfered with him there in Boston he had a noble motive, and I had an ignoble one.”

“If you ‘re not firing over my head,” said Hatch, “and if I catch your meaning rightly, I’m bound to confess that the doctor had got mixed up with a pretty queer lot in the course of his researches. But he was all right himself. I pinned my faith to him, right along. But if you mean that you ‘re going in for anything like spiritualism, I advise you to hush it up among yourself. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve about come to that conclusion. And I think Miss Egeria’s had enough of it.”

His mention of her name in this connection was at first puzzling, and at last so offensive to Ford that he found it harder than he had thought to say what he now said. After a dry assent to Hatch’s proposition, he added, “I dare say you ‘re right. Mr. Hatch, I treated you shabbily when we met last. I am sorry for that, and ashamed of it. I should have behaved better, if I had understood better”—” Oh, I knew how it was, myself,” Hatch interrupted. “Or I did when I came to think of it.” Ford looked at him as if he did not comprehend his drift; and Hatch continued, “It was pretty rough at the time, but I suppose I should have acted just so, in your place. Well, sir! I hope we part better friends, now,” he said, offering his hand. “I think that’s what the old doctor would have liked. Some of his ideas were most too large a fit for this world, but he was pretty practical about others.”

Ford took the proffered hand, and followed Hatch to his door, wholly baffled and unsettled. He longed to have it all out with him, but this was not possible, and he submitted as he best could. He had thought himself right in resolving not to follow Egeria home, or vex her with his presence before she went; but he was not sure of’ this now; and he spent the time intervening before her departure in an anguish of indecision. But he let her go without seeing her, and in the afternoon he went away, too.

XXVII.

HE did not go back to his old lodging in Boston, but spent a day at a hotel till he could find other quarters. It was intolerable to think of meeting any one he knew, and he had such a horror of Mrs. Perham’s possible return that he asked at the door whether she had come back before he went in to make ready for removal.

When the change was effected, all change seemed forever at an end. The days went by without event; he could not write, but he took up again his study with the practical chemist, and pushed on with that through an unstoried month which brought him through the bluster and chill of September to the mellow heart of October.

A chasm divided him from all that he had been, and he tried to keep from thinking across it. But his mind was full of broken glimpses of the past; of doubts of what he had done; of vague wonder if he should ever hear from her again, and how; of crazy purposes, broken as fast as formed, of going where he might look on her, if it might be only that, and know that she was still in life. There were terrible moments in which his heart was wrung with the possibility that his conjecture had been all wrong, and that she might be lingering in cruel amaze that he had never made any sign to her, and puzzling over the problem which his refusal to see her, or to stand with her at her father’s grave, had left her.

One evening when he came home, he found a flat, square package, which had arrived through the mail after going first to his old address. It was directed in an old-fashioned, round hand, and it yielded softly to the touch with which he fingered it before he tore it open. It proved to hold a handkerchief, which he recognized as his own, fragrantly washed and ironed; and he found a little note pinned to it, and signed F. Plumb, explaining that the handkerchief had been found in his room. While he stood scowling at it, and trying to make out who F. Plumb was, and where he had left the handkerchief, he turned the scrap of paper over, and saw written in pencil on the back, as if the writer had wished to whisper it there, “I do not know as you heard that Egeria is back with us. Frances.”

Now he knew, now he understood. All the hopes that had seemed dead sprang to life again.

He caught up a paper, and looked at the timetables. The last train passing Vardley would leave in fifteen minutes. He turned the key in his door, and two hours later he was rounding the dark point of the wooded hill that intervenes between the station and the Shaker village, where a light sparely twinkled in the window of Elihu’s shop. He had walked, as he supposed, but his pace was more like a run from the train; and his heart thundered in his ears as he sat and panted on Elihu’s door-step, trying to gather courage to go in. At last he went in without the courage.

Elihu was amazed, certainly, but hardly disquieted. He shut upon his thumb the book that he was reading, and pushed his spectacles above his forehead. “Friend Ford!” he said.

“Yes!” answered the young man, still striving for breath, as he pressed the Shaker’s hand. “I have come — I have come” —

“Yee,” Elihu assented; “sit down. We did not expect you, but the family will be glad to see you. Have you kept your health?”

“Is she well? Is she going to stay with you? When did she come back?” The questions thronged upon one another faster than he could utter them, and he stopped perforce again.

“I suppose you mean Egeria. Yee, she is well. She came back last week. I — I — wrote to you from her place that she was coming back.” Elihu colored with a guilty conscience.

“I never got your letter. I only heard two hours ago that she was with you.”

“She only stayed to settle up things there. I don’t know as Humphrey ever told you that her grandfather left his property to her?”

“I don’t know — Yes, yes, — he did.”

“There weren’t any of her folks left there, and her father had brought her up in such a way, late years, that she was pretty much a stranger outside of her grandfather’s house. When she got back there, she found that it was more like home to her here than anywhere else. Friend Hatch stayed a spell, to help her settle up the property, and then he had to go West again. As soon as she could she came to us.”

“Elihu,” said Ford, who had listened with but half a sense, “I have come here to speak to her. Shall I do it? I want you to advise me. I want you to tell me” —

“Nay, I must not meddle or make in this business,” said the Shaker.

“You did meddle and make in it once,” retorted Ford, unresentfully but inflexibly, “and I recognized your right to do so, from your point of view; I submitted to you. We can’t withdraw from each other’s confidence now. I have a claim upon your advice. Besides, in all worldly knowledge that comes through acquaintance with women, I am as much a Shaker as you are. I only know that I must speak with her. If she cares anything for me, as you said she did, I must speak. But when? Shall I go away again, and come back after a while? Since we last talked together have you learned anything that makes you think she would be willing to spend her life among you? If you have, I will leave her alone. She could be at peace here; and I, — I have only brought her trouble and sorrow so far. Even if she cared for me, I would leave her to you — No, I wouldn’t! I couldn’t do that I By all that a man can be to a woman, I oughtn’t to do it! But what do you say?”

Elihu had tilted his chair upon its hind-legs, and he rocked back and forth without bringing its forelegs to the ground. “I haven’t seen anything in her that would make me think she would like to stay with us. And I have heard that she intends to leave us as soon as she can find something to do in the world outside. Frances wants she should go to friends of hers in Boston that would help her find something. They’ve been talking about it this afternoon, and Egeria’s mind seems quite made up about going.”

“Well,” repeated Ford, “may I speak with her?” —

“I can’t answer you. I felt it a cross laid upon me to interfere against your showing your feeling for her here; but to interfere in behalf of it is a cross which I don’t have any call to take up — twice.”

“Can I stay here to-night?” asked Ford.

“Yee. They can give you a room at the office.”

“Do you suppose Mrs. Williams could put me up some sort of bed in my old place? I would rather sleep there.”

“Oh, yee, I guess so. I will step down with you and see.”

“No, I’ll go alone. If she can’t, I’ll come back to the office. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Elihu, with his flicker of a smile.

Ford’s bed had not been taken down, and while the farmer’s wife made it ready for him with fresh sheets, he kindled a roaring fire on his hearth. He sat a long time before it, turning over and over in his mind the same doubt which had tormented him when he last sat there. But he could not believe that Frances and Elihu would have let him come back if there had been any grounds for this fear. It had burnt in his heart to ask Elihu, and solve it; but that seemed a sort of cowardice, and he had withheld the question. He would not know the truth now till he had put his own fate to the test, and spoken in defiance of whatever the answer might be.

The next morning he perceived an undercurrent of deeply subdued excitement in such of the family as he met at the office, and a sympathy which he afterwards remembered with compassion. The brothers and sisters all shook hands with him, and, refraining from recognition of the suddenness of his return, said they were glad to see him back. “And that’s more than we can say to some of the friends from the world outside!” exclaimed Diantha, when her turn came. Ford was touched by this friendliness; a man so little used to being liked might overvalue it; but he looked impatiently about for Frances, and the sisters knew how to interpret his glance.

“She’s gone over to put the infirmary to rights a little,” Rebecca explained. She added casually, “Egery’s over there with her, I guess. She wanted to go.”

The sisters decently turned from the door, but they stood a little way back from the window, and looked at him there as he crossed the street.

The door of the little house stood open, and Ford saw Frances within, dusting where there was no dust, and vainly rubbing the neat chairs with a cloth. The bed where Boynton had lain was dismantled: it seemed as if he might have risen to have it made for him. Ford expected to hear his voice, and a lump hung in his throat. When his sad eyes met those of Frances, he saw that hers were red with weeping. She gave her hand and said, “Good-morning, Friend Edward. I’m real glad to see you back again. We’ve all missed you. I was just thinkin’ how you and Friend Boynton seemed to have been with us always. He went to a better place; but where did you go? Do you think the world outside is better? I wish you could feel to stay with us, Edward!”

“It isn’t possible,” said Ford, smiling sadly. “The only point on which I should agree with you is that the world outside is not so good a place.”

“Well, that’s a great deal.”

“It isn’t enough.”

“Really,” said Frances, “it’s discouragin’ to hear you and Egery go on. You say everything that’s good of the Shakers, but you won’t be gathered in.”

“I think everything that’s good of you. I honor and reverence you; I do everything but envy you. It’s another world that calls me.”

“Yee,” sighed the Shakeress, “that’s just the way with Egery. I suppose I have been here so long that I don’t see anything strange in Shakers. The other people are the ones that are strange to me. But I can see’t it’s different with Egery. She’s had so much queerness in her life already ‘t I guess she don’t want to have much more. Was you surprised to hear’t she’d got back?”

“I was very glad; and I’m very grateful to you, Frances” —

“I s’posed the handkerchief must be yours,” Frances interrupted, with artful evasion. She went on to give some particulars of Boynton’s funeral and of their sojourn in Egeria’s old home and of her affairs. “It was real kind and good of Friend Hatch to stay as long as he did, and help her, especially as they do say he’s engaged to be married out West, there.” Something like a luminous concussion seemed to take place in Ford’s brain. The burden suddenly thrown from his soul left him light and giddy, and he clung for support to the door-post, while Frances prattled on: “Well, Humphrey says he’s a master-hand for business, and he’s sure to get along. He’s been a good friend to Egery, all through, and her father before her. I guess if Friend Boynton had taken his advice, there wouldn’t been so much sufferin’ for her. Well, she’s back with us again. But it’s only till she can find something for herself in the world outside.

I suppose it’s natural for her to want to be like folks. That’s the way I look at it.”

Ford’s heart throbbed. “Do you think I’m like folks, Frances?”

“Not much,” replied Frances.

“Do you think I could be, — for her sake?”

A flash of joy, succeeded by a red blush, went over the pale face of the Shakeress. “You’d oughtn’t to talk to me of such things, Edward. You know it ain’t right.”

“I know — I know,” pleaded the young man. “I know it’s all wrong. But — but I knew you knew about it, and I thought — I thought” —

“She’s up in the orchard, by her apple-tree!” cried Frances, with hysterical abruptness. “Don’t you say another word to me!” But after Ford left the room, she ran to the door, and watched him going up the orchard aisle.

Egeria stood leaning against the tree, and looking another way, and she might well have been ignorant of his approach through the fallen grass, till she heard his husky voice: —

“I — I have come back — I would have come before, but I didn’t know you were here” — He had some intention of excusing himself, because in his cogitations it had occurred to him that she must have wondered why he had not come. But she only turned on him that face of intense resistance, changing to question, and then to wild appeal. “For Heaven’s sake,” he exclaimed, “don’t look at me in that way! What is the matter?”

“Oh, why did you come back?” she cried. “Why couldn’t you have stayed away, and left me in peace?”

He stood motionless, while his hopes seemed to fall in a tangible ruin round him. He saw now how eagerly he had built them on the fears of those fantastic communists, and how fondly he had hidden from himself all the reasons against them. He could have laughed at the ghastly wreck, but that he was too sick at heart. He moved his feet heavily, as if the long grass were fetters about them, and he tried to go; but without some other word he could not. “Well,” he said, at last, “if you ask me, I can’t tell you. I can go away again, and not molest you any more. Only, before I go, tell me —— you’ve not told me yet — that you forgive me, Egeria.” Her whispered name had been so often on his lips that he now spoke it aloud for the first time without knowing it. “Since your father is gone, I must be more hateful to you than ever. But I am going out of your way now; try to forgive me and to tell me so! Let me have your pardon to take with me.” She broke into a low sound of weeping, while he waited for her response. “Well, I will go. It’s best for me to know finally that, although you have tolerated me here, at the bottom of your heart you have always abhorred me.”

“No, no! I didn’t say that.” —

“Not in words, — no.”

“But if you made me say that I forgave you” —

“Make you say it? Nothing under heaven could make you say it! What is it you mean?” She looked up, and ran her eye in piteous search over his face.

“When you first came there, in Boston, and when you hurt me; when we went after the leaves, and I forgot him; when I talked with you in the garden, and blamed him; when I went with you into the woods, and neglected him, almost the last day he lived — Oh, even if I couldn’t, I ought to hate you! Did you expect — Yes, I will, — I will never let you go, now, till you tell me whether it was true. He is gone, and I have no one to help me. I shall have to do for myself; but whatever my life is to be, I am going to have it my own; and it isn’t mine if that is true.” —

“If that is true?” repeated Ford, in stupefaction. “If what is true?”

But the impulse which had carried her to this point failed her, apparently, and left her terrified at her own daring. She cowered at the involuntary step he made toward her, as a bird stoops for flight. “If what is true?” he reiterated. “Tell me what you mean!”

He wondered if perhaps some rumor of his talk with Elihu had come to her, and she had wished to punish his presumption in trusting the Shaker’s conjecture regarding her; if she were resolved to wreak upon him her maidenly indignation at the community’s meddling. It seemed out of keeping with her and all the circumstances; but he could think of nothing else, and he darkly approached it: “If you have heard anything here that makes you think that I have come to you in anything but the humblest, the most reverent, spirit, I beseech you not to believe it! Has Elihu — or Frances — Is it something they have said?” —

“No,” she said, and still shrunk away, as if he might be able to force the truth from her.

“Then, what is it? Surely you won’t leave me in this perplexity? If there is anything that I can do or undo” —

“No! Oh, go, for pity’s sake!”

“I can’t go now,” said the young man. “I won’t go till you have told me what you mean. You must tell me.”

She cast a strange glance at him. “If you make me tell you, that would show that it was true; and he was right when he used to say — I don’t want to believe it! Go, and let me try to think that you came here by chance, and that you stayed for his sake. Indeed, indeed, I can get to thinking again that you never tried to influence me in that way!”

“In what way?” he asked, but now a gleam of light, lurid enough, began to steal upon his confusion. Her alternate eagerness and reluctance to be with him; her broken questions, the gestures, the looks, the tones, that had crossed with mystery the happiness he had known with her in the last weeks before her father’s death, and made it at its sweetest fearful and insecure, recurred to him with new meaning, and a profound compassion qualified his despair, and made him gentle and patient. “Is it possible,” he asked, “that you mean that old delusion of your father’s about me? And could you believe that I would try to control you against your will — to use some unnatural power over you? Ah!” he cried, “I couldn’t take even your forgiveness, now; for you might think that I had extorted it!” He looked sadly at her, but she did not speak, and he had a struggle to keep his pity of her from turning to execration of the unhappy man whose error could thus rise from his grave to cloud her soul; but he ruled himself, — not without an ominous remembrance of his former attempts to separate her cause from her father’s, — and brokenly continued: “Well, I have deserved that, too. But I know that before he died your father came to a clearer mind about those things, and I believe that now, wherever he is, nothing could grieve him more than to know that he had left you in that hideous superstition.” He looked with grave tenderness at her hidden face. “How could you think” — and now his tone expressed his wounded self-respect as well as his sorrow for her—” that I could be so false to both of us?”

“I didn’t always think,” she whispered. “I — I was afraid” —

“But what made you afraid that such a thing could be? I am a brute, — I know that; I gave you early proof of that, — but I hoped there was nothing covert in me.”

“You said once that people influenced others without knowing it; and once — that night when we came from the woods — you said it was a spell that made me lose the way, and wouldn’t let me blame you” —

“And you really had those black doubts of me in your heart? I thought you were suffering me here because you were good and merciful, and you were always watching me to find out whether I was not using some vile magic against you.”

“No, no! Not always,” she protested, lifting her face. “Did I say that?”

“No, you didn’t say it! Well, you had the right to hurt me in any way you could; and I give you the satisfaction of knowing that nothing could hurt me worse than this.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to wound you! Don’t think that! And I forgave you; yes, I did forgive you! I never hated you — not even that morning there by the fountain when I thought you had hurt him. And when you said I ought, it made me wonder if what he used to say — And then I couldn’t get it out of my mind! But I never meant to tell you by a single word or look, if it killed me.”

“I believe you. It was something not to be spoken. I think now I can go without your pardon. It seems to me that we are quits.”

Once more he turned to go, but she implored, all her face red with generous remorse, “Oh, not till you’ve forgiven me! I never thought how it would seem to you. Indeed I never did!”

He smiled sadly. “Forgive you? Oh, that’s easy. But even if it were very hard, I could do it. I can see how it has been with you from the first, and how, with what you had been taught to think of me by your father, — I don’t blame him for it; he was as helpless as you were, — you perverted my careless words and gave them a sinister meaning that I never dreamt of. But what can I do, or say, to leave you with better thoughts of me?”

“I could see that you were kind and good even when I was the most afraid,” she murmured. “But after the way we had begun together, and all that you had done to us, — and said to him, — sometimes I couldn’t understand why you were here, or why you stayed, and then” —

“I don’t wonder! I hadn’t given you cause to expect any good of me; and if I were to tell you why I stayed, as I once hoped I might, I couldn’t make it appear an unselfish reason. Oh, my dearest!” he cried, “I loved you so that I couldn’t have taken your love itself against your will! Ever since I first saw you, and all the time that I had lost you, my whole life was for you; and when I found you again how could I help staying till you drove me from you? Good-by, and if any thought of yours has injured me, let me set it against my telling you this now.” She had slowly averted her face; she did not shrink from him, but she did not return his good-by, and he waited in vain for her to speak. Then, “Shall I go?” he asked in foolish anti-climax.

“No” —

The blood rioted in his heart. “And do you still believe that of me?”

“I believe — what you say,” she whispered.

“But why do you believe me? Do I make you do it?”

“I don’t know — yes, something makes me.”

“Against your will?”

“I can’t tell.”

“Do you think it is a spell, now?”

“I don’t know.”

“And are you afraid of it?” —

“No” ——

“What is it, Egeria?” he cried, and in the beseeching look which she lifted to his, their eyes tenderly met. “Oh, my darling! Was this the spell” —

The rapture choked him; he caught her hand and drew her towards him.

But at this bold action, Sister Frances, who had not ceased to watch them, threw her apron over her head.

XXVIII.

The powers of the family were heavily taxed by the consideration of a case without precedent in its annals. On the report of Sister Frances and the subsequent knowledge of Elihu, it became necessary to act at once. Probably no affair of such delicate importance had ever presented itself to a society vowed to celibacy as the fact of a courtship and proposal of marriage which had taken place with their privity, and with circumstances so peculiar that they could not wholly feel that they had withheld their approval.

“What I look at, Elihu,” said Frances, “is this: that we can’t any of us say but what it’s the best thing that can happen to Egery, so long as she ain’t going to be gathered in. And what I want to know is whether we’ve got to turn our backs on her because she’s doin’ the best she can, or whether we ‘re goin’ to show out that we feel to rejoice with her.” —

“Nay, we can’t do that,” replied Elihu, in sore embarrassment. “There are no two ways about it but what our natural feelings do go with her, — to some extent. I’m free to confess that when Friend Ford came and told me just now I felt” — Elihu apparently found himself not so free to confess after all. He stopped abruptly, and added, “But that’s neither here nor there. What we’ve got to do now is not to withhold our sympathy from these young people who are doing right in their order, and at the same time not to relax our opposition to the principle.”

“Love the sinner and condemn the sin,” suggested Laban.

“Nay,” replied Elihu, rejecting the phraseology rather than the idea, “not exactly that.”

“I can’t understand,” interposed Rebecca, with her sex’s abhorrence of an abstraction, “where and how they ‘re goin’ to get married. There ain’t any Shaker way of marryin’, and I don’t know what we should do with our young folks, if they got married here. I don’t suppose we should have one of ’em left by spring.”

“Nay,” said Elihu, “we might as well give up at once.” He rocked himself vigorously to and fro; but his hardening face did not lose its anxious expression.

“Where will they get married?” asked Rebecca. “She hasn’t got anywheres to go. Her own folks are all dead, at home, and she hasn’t got any home.”

“I don’t know. They can’t get married here,” returned Elihu.

“They can’t go right off to a minister and get married now, so soon after her father’s death. And besides, she ain’t ready. She hasn’t got anything made up.”

The question of clothes agitated even these unworldly women, and they debated and deplored Egeria’s unprepared condition, urging that she must have this, and could not do without that, till Elihu could bear it no longer. “I feel,” he cried, “that it is unseemly for us to consider these things Î It identifies us practically with a state which we only tolerate as part of the earthly order. We must not have anything to do with it from this time forth.”

“Well, Elihu, what shall we do?” demanded Diantha. “We might send him away, but we can’t turn her out-of-doors. Do you want he should go on courtin’ her here?” Elihu opened his lips to speak, but only emitted a groan. “We have got to bear our part. I guess the rule against marriage ain’t any stronger than the rule of love and charity, —— so long as we don’t any of us marry, ourselves.”

“Well, well!” cried Elihu, “settle it amongst you. Only remember, they can’t marry here.” He took his hat, and went into Humphrey’s room, where the latter had remained, discreetly absorbed in his accounts; and Laban, finding himself alone with the sisters, hastened to follow Elihu. Their withdrawal was inspiration to Frances: —

“I guess I can go down to Boston with Egery, and fix it with my sister so’t she can stay and be married from her house whenever she gets ready.” When the sensation following her solution of the problem allowed her to speak she added, “The question is how much it’ll be right for us to do for her. She hasn’t got a thing.”

The sisters justly understood this to mean their degree of complicity in decking Egeria for the unholy rite, and they entered into the question with the seriousness it merited. They began by agreeing with Elihu that the only way was to have nothing to do with the matter; and having appeased their consciences, they each made such concessions and sacrifices to the exigency as they must. Before spring, when the wedding took place, the sisters had found it consistent with an enlarged sense of duty to present the bride with a great number of little gifts, of an exemplary usefulness, for the most part, but not wholly inexpressive of a desire, if not a sense, of beauty. Their conceptions of the world’s fashions were too vague to allow of their contributing to the trousseau, and such small attempts as they made in that direction were overruled by Frances’s sister, a decisive and notable lady, who, however, ordained that certain of the decorative objects, as hooked rugs and embroidered tidies, were as worthy a place in Mrs. Ford’s simple house as most of the old-fashioned things that people like nowadays. With Frances, the question whether she should or should not be present at the wedding remained a cross which she bore all winter, and which grew sorer as the day approached. When it actually came, she meekly bowed her spirit and remained away. But she found compensation in the visit which she paid her sister directly afterwards, and which she spent chiefly in helping Egeria set in order the cottage Ford had taken in one of the suburbs. He had worked hard at his writing all winter, and they had no misgivings in beginning life on his earnings, and on the small sum Egeria had inherited from her grandfather.

It is now several years since their marriage, and they have never regretted their courage. They had their day of carefulness and of small things — that happy day, which all who have known it remember so fondly — but this is already past. One of those ignoble discoveries which chemists sometimes make in their more ambitious experiments has turned itself to profit, almost without his agency, and chiefly at the suggestion of his wife, whose more practical sense perceived its general acceptability; and the sale of an ingenious combination known to all housekeepers now makes life easy to the Fords. He has given up his newspaper work, and has built himself a laboratory at the end of his garden, where the income from his invention enables him to pursue the higher chemistry, without as yet any distinct advantage to the world, but to his own content. It is observed by those who formerly knew him that marriage has greatly softened him, and Phillips professes that, robbed of his former roughness, he is no longer so fascinating. Their acquaintance can scarcely be said to have been renewed since their parting in Vardley. Ford was able to see Phillips’s innocence in what occurred; but they could never have been easy in each other’s presence after that scene, though they have met on civil terms. Phillips accounts in his own way for not seeing his former friend any more. “As bric-a-brac,” he explains, when ladies inquire after their extinct acquaintance, “Ford was perpetually attractive; but as part of the world’s ordinary furniture he can’t interest me. When he married the Pythoness, I was afraid there was too much bric-a-brac; but really, so far as I can hear, they have neutralized each other into the vulgarest commonplace. Do you use the Ford Fire Kindler? He doesn’t put his name to it, and that isn’t exactly the discovery that is making his fortune. He has come to that, — making money. And imagine a Pythoness with a prayer-book, who goes to the Episcopal church, and hopes to get her husband to go, too! No, I don’t find my Bohemia in their suburb.” From time to time Phillips proposes to seek that realm in what he calls his native Europe; but he does not go. Perhaps because Mrs. Perham is there, widowed by Mr. Perham’s third stroke of paralysis, and emancipated to the career of travel and culture, which she has illustrated in the capitals of several Latin countries. To do her justice, she never turned the water-proof affair to malicious account, nor failed to speak well of Ford, for whom she always claimed to feel an unrequited respect.

As to Hatch, one of the first of those deep and full confidences between Ford and Egeria which follow engagement related to the man in whom Ford had feared a rival. Egeria knew merely that Hatch had repaid with constant services some favors that her father had been able to do him in 27 their old home, and that he had continued faithful to Boynton when all others had dropped away from him.

“I wish I had understood how it was when he came to me there in Boston,” said Ford. He added simply, “I treated him very badly, because I thought he was in love with you.”

“Was that any reason why you should treat him badly?” asked Egeria.

Ford reflected. “Yes, I suppose it was. I was in love with you, too. But he’s had his turn. He’s left me with the feeling that perhaps” —

“Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps — nothing!”

Egeria divined what he did not say. “He hasn’t left me with that feeling,” she said reproachfully.

Since that time Hatch is no longer on the road, as he would phrase it, but has gone into business for himself at Denver, where he married last year, with duly interviewed pomp and circumstance, the daughter of one of the early settlers, a hoary patriarch of forty-three, who went to Denver as remotely as 1870. He called upon the Fords when he came East on his wedding journey, and he and Ford found themselves friends. The Western lady thought Egeria a little stiff, but real kind-hearted, and one of the most stylish-appearing persons she ever saw. In fact, Egeria shows a decided fondness for dress, and after the long hunger of her solitary girlhood she enters, with a zest which Ford cannot always share, into all the innocent pleasures of life.

She likes parties and dinners and theatres; since their return from Europe she has given several picnic breakfasts, where her morning costume has been the marvel of her guests. The tradition of her life before marriage is locally very dim; it is supposed that she left the stage to marry. This is not altogether reconcilable with the appearance of quaint people in broad-brims, or in gauze caps and tightsleeved straight drab gowns, with whom she is sometimes seen in her suburb; but as the Fords are known to go every summer to pass a month in an old house belonging to the Vardley Shakers, their visitors are easily accounted for.

The grass has already grown long over Boynton’s grave. They who keep his memory think compassionately of his illusions, if they were wholly illusions, but they shrink with one impulse from the dusky twilight through which he hoped to surprise immortality, and Ford feels it a sacred charge to keep Egeria’s life in the full sunshine of our common day. If Boynton has found the undiscovered country, he has sent no message back to them, and they do not question his silence. They wait, and we must all wait.

A FEARFUL RESPONSIBILITY

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

I.

Every loyal American who went abroad during the first years of our great war felt bound to make himself some excuse for turning his back on his country in the hour of her trouble. But when Owen Elmore sailed, no one else seemed to think that he needed excuse. All his friends said it was the best thing for him to do; that he could have leisure and quiet over there, and would be able to go on with his work.

At the risk of giving a farcical effect to my narrative, I am obliged to confess that the work of which Elmore’s friends spoke was a projected history of Venice. So many literary Americans have projected such a work that it may now fairly be regarded as a national enterprise. Elmore was too obscure to have been announced in the usual way by the newspapers as having this design; but it was well known in his town that he was collecting materials when his professorship in the small inland college with which he was connected lapsed through the enlistment of nearly all the students. The president became colonel of the college regiment; and in parting with Elmore, while their boys waited on the campus without, he had said, “Now, Elmore, you must go on with your history of Venice. Go to Venice and collect your materials on the spot. We’re coming through this all right. Mr. Seward puts it at sixty days, but I’ll give them six months to lay down their arms, and we shall want you back at the end of the year. Don’t you have any compunctions about going. I know how you feel; but it is perfectly right for you to keep out of it. Good-by.” They wrung each other’s hands for the last time, — the president fell at Fort Donelson; but now Elmore followed him to the door, and when he appeared there one of the boyish captains shouted, “Three cheers for Professor Elmore!” and the president called for the tiger, and led it, whirling his cap round his head.

Elmore went back to his study, sick at heart. It grieved and vexed him that even these had not thought that he should go to the war, and that his inward struggle on that point had been idle so far as others were concerned. He had been quite earnest in the matter; he had once almost volunteered as a private soldier: he had consulted his doctor, who sternly discouraged him. He would have been truly glad of any accident that forced him into the ranks; but, as he used afterward to say, it was not his idea of soldiership to enlist for the hospital. At the distance of five hundred miles from the scene of hostilities, it was absurd to enter the Home Guard; and, after all, there were, even at first, some selfish people who went into the army, and some unselfish people who kept out of it. Elmore’s bronchitis was a disorder which active service would undoubtedly have aggravated; as it was, he made a last effort to be of use to our Government as a bearer of dispatches. Failing such an appointment, he submitted to expatriation as he best could; and in Italy he fought for our cause against the English, whom he found everywhere all but in arms against us.

He sailed, in fine, with a very fair conscience. “I should be perfectly at ease,” he said to his wife, as the steamer dropped smoothly down to Sandy Hook, “if I were sure that I was not glad to be getting away.”

“You are not glad,” she answered.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said, with the weak persistence of a man willing that his wife should persuade him against his convictions; “I wish that I felt certain of it.”

“You are too sick to go to the war; nobody expected you to go.”

“I know that, and I can’t say that I like it. As for being too sick, perhaps it’s the part of a man to go if he dies on the way to the field. It would encourage the others,” he added, smiling faintly.

She ignored the tint from Voltaire in replying: “Nonsense! It would do no good at all. At any rate, it’s too late now.”

“Yes, it’s too late now.”

The sea-sickness which shortly followed formed a diversion from his accusing thoughts. Each day of the voyage removed them further, and with the preoccupations of his first days in Europe, his travel to Italy, and his preparations for a long sojourn in Venice, they had softened to a pensive sense of self-sacrifice, which took a warmer or a cooler tinge according as the news from home was good or bad.

II.

He lost no time in going to work in the Marcian Library, and he early applied to the Austrian authorities for leave to have transcripts made in the archives. The permission was negotiated by the American consul (then a young painter of the name of Ferris), who reported a mechanical facility on the part of the authorities, — as if, he said, they were used to obliging American historians of Venice. The foreign tyranny which cast a pathetic glamour over the romantic city had certainly not appeared to grudge such publicity as Elmore wished to give her heroic memories, though it was then at its most repressive period, and formed a check upon the whole life of the place. The tears were hardly yet dry in the despairing eyes that had seen the French fleet sail away from the Lido, after Solferino, without firing a shot in behalf of Venice; but Lombardy, the Duchies, the Sicilies, had all passed to Sardinia, and the Pope alone represented the old order of native despotism in Italy. At Venice the Germans seemed tranquilly awaiting the change which should destroy their system with the rest; and in the meantime there had occurred one of those impressive pauses, as notable in the lives of nations as of men, when, after the occurrence of great events, the forces of action and endurance seem to be gathering themselves against the stress of the future. The quiet was almost consciously a truce and not a peace; and this local calm had drawn into it certain elements that picturesquely and sentimentally heightened the charm of the place. It was a refuge for many exiled potentates and pretenders; the gondolier pointed out on the Grand Canal the palaces of the Count of Chambord, the Duchess of Parma, and the Infante of Spain; and one met these fallen princes in the squares and streets, bowing with distinct courtesy to any that chose to salute them. Every evening the Piazza San Marco was filled with the white coats of the Austrian officers, promenading to the exquisite military music which has ceased there forever; the patrol clanked through the footways at all hours of the night, and the lagoon heard the cry of the sentinel from fort to fort, and from gunboat to gunboat. Through all this the demonstration of the patriots went on, silent, ceaseless, implacable, annulling every alien effort at gayety, depopulating the theatres, and desolating the ancient holidays.

There was something very fine in this, as a spectacle, Elmore said to his young wife, and he had to admire the austere self-denial of a people who would not suffer their tyrants to see them happy; but they secretly owned to each other that it was fatiguing. Soon after coming to Venice they had made some acquaintance among the Italians through Mr. Ferris, and had early learned that the condition of knowing Venetians was not to know Austrians. It was easy and natural for them to submit, theoretically. As Americans, they must respond to any impulse for freedom, and certainly they could have no sympathy with such a system as that of Austria. By whatever was sacred in our own war upon slavery, they were bound to abhor oppression in every form. But it was hard to make the application of their hatred to the amiable-looking people whom they saw everywhere around them in the quality of tyrants, especially when their Venetian friends confessed that personally they liked the Austrians. Besides, if the whole truth must be told, they found that their friendship with the Italians was not always of the most penetrating sort, though it had a superficial intensity that for a while gave the effect of lasting cordiality. The Elmores were not quite able to decide whether the pause of feeling at which they arrived was through their own defect or not. Much was to be laid to the difference of race, religion, and education; but something, they feared, to the personal vapidity of acquaintances whose meridional liveliness made them yawn, and in whose society they did not always find compensation for the sacrifices they made for it.

“But it is right,” said Elmore. “It would be a sort of treason to associate with the Austrians. We owe it to the Venetians to let them see that our feelings are with them.”

“Yes,” said his wife pensively.

“And it is better for us, as Americans abroad, during this war, to be retired.”

“Well, we are retired,” said Mrs. Elmore.

“Yes, there is no doubt of that,” he returned.

They laughed, and made what they could of chance American acquaintances at the caffès. Elmore had his history to occupy him, and doubtless he could not understand how heavy the time hung upon his wife’s hands. They went often to the theatre, and every evening they went to the Piazza, and ate an ice at Florian’s. This was certainly amusement; and routine was so pleasant to his scholarly temperament that he enjoyed merely that. He made a point of admitting his wife as much as possible into his intellectual life; he read her his notes as fast as he made them, and he consulted her upon the management of his theme, which, as his research extended, he found so vast that he was forced to decide upon a much lighter treatment than he had at first intended. He had resolved upon a history which should be presented in a series of biographical studies, and he was so much interested in this conclusion, and so charmed with the advantages of the form as they developed themselves, that he began to lose the sense of social dulness, and ceased to imagine it in his wife.

A sort of indolence of the sensibilities, in fact, enabled him to endure ennui that made her frantic, and he was often deeply bored without knowing it at the time, or without a reasoned suffering. He suffered as a child suffers, simply, almost ignorantly: it was upon reflection that his nerves began to quiver with retroactive anguish. He was also able to idealize the situation when his wife no longer even wished to do so. His fancy cast a poetry about these Venetian friends, whose conversation displayed the occasional sparkle of Ollendorff-English on a dark ground of lagoon-Italian, and whose vivid smiling and gesticulation she wearied herself in hospitable efforts to outdo. To his eyes their historic past clothed them with its interest, and the long patience of their hope and hatred under foreign rule ennobled them, while to hers they were too often only tiresome visitors, whose powers of silence and of eloquence were alike to be dreaded. It did not console her as it did her husband to reflect that they probably bored the Italians as much in their turn. When a young man, very sympathetic for literature and the Americans, spent an evening, as it seemed to her, in crying nothing but “Per Bácco!” she owned that she liked better his oppressor, who once came by chance, in the figure of a young lieutenant, and who unbuckled his wife, as he called his sword, and, putting her in a corner, sat up on a chair in the middle of the room and sang like a bird, and then told ghost-stories. The songs were out of Heine, and they reminded her of her girlish enthusiasm for German. Elmore was troubled at the lieutenant’s visit, and feared it would cost them all their Italian friends; but she said boldly that she did not care; and she never even tried to believe that the life they saw in Venice was comparable to that of their little college town at home, with its teas and picnics, and simple, easy social gayeties. There she had been a power in her way; she had entertained, and had helped to make some matches: but the Venetians ate nothing, and as for young people, they never saw each other but by stealth, and their matches were made by their parents on a money-basis. She could not adapt herself to this foreign life; it puzzled her, and her husband’s conformity seemed to estrange them, as far as it went. It took away her spirit, and she grew listless and dull. Even the history began to lose its interest in her eyes; she doubted if the annals of such a people as she saw about her could ever be popular.

There were other things to make them melancholy in their exile. The war at home was going badly, where it was going at all. The letters now never spoke of any term to it; they expressed rather the dogged patience of the time when it seemed as if there could be no end, and indicated that the country had settled into shape about it, and was pushing forward its other affairs as if the war did not exist. Mrs. Elmore felt that the America which she had left had ceased to be. The letters were almost less a pleasure than a pain, but she always tore them open, and read them with eager unhappiness. There were miserable intervals of days and even weeks when no letters came, and when the Reuter telegrams in the Gazette of Venice dribbled their vitriolic news of Northern disaster through a few words or lines, and Galignani’s long columns were filled with the hostile exultation and prophecy of the London press.

III.

They had passed eighteen months of this sort of life in Venice when one day a letter dropped into it which sent a thousand ripples over its stagnant surface. Mrs. Elmore read it first to herself, with gasps and cries of pleasure and astonishment, which did not divert her husband from the perusal of some notes he had made the day before, and had brought to the breakfast-table with the intention of amusing her. When she flattened it out over his notes, and exacted his attention, he turned an unwilling and lack-lustre eye upon it; then he looked up at her.

“Did you expect she would come?” he asked, in ill-masked dismay.

“I don’t suppose they had any idea of it at first. When Sue wrote me that Lily had been studying too hard, and had to be taken out of school, I said that I wished she could come over and pay us a visit. But I don’t believe they dreamed of letting her — Sue says so — till the Mortons’ coming seemed too good a chance to be lost. I am so glad of it, Owen! You know how much they have always done for me; and here is a chance now to pay a little of it back.”

“What in the world shall we do with her?” he asked.

“Do? Everything! Why, Owen,” she urged, with pathetic recognition of his coldness, “she is Susy Stevens’s own sister!”

“Oh, yes — yes,” he admitted.

“And it was Susy who brought us together!”

“Why, of course.”

“And oughtn’t you to be glad of the opportunity?”

“I am glad — very glad.”

“It will be a relief to you instead of a care. She’s such a bright, intelligent girl that we can both sympathize with your work, and you won’t have to go round with me all the time, and I can matronize her myself.”

“I see, I see,” Elmore replied, with scarcely abated seriousness. “Perhaps, if she is coming here for her health, she won’t need much matronizing.”

“Oh, pshaw! She’ll be well enough for that! She’s overdone a little at school. I shall take good care of her, I can tell you; and I shall make her have a real good time. It’s quite flattering of Susy to trust her to us, so far away, and I shall write and tell her we both think so.”

“Yes,” said Elmore, “it’s a fearful responsibility.”

There are instances of the persistence of husbands in certain moods or points of view on which even wheedling has no effect. The wise woman perceives that in these cases she must trust entirely to the softening influences of time, and as much as possible she changes the subject; or if this is impossible she may hope something from presenting a still worse aspect of the affair. Mrs. Elmore said, in lifting the letter from the table: “If she sailed the 3d in the City of Timbuctoo, she will be at Queenstown on the 12th or 13th, and we shall have a letter from her by Wednesday saying when she will be at Genoa. That’s as far as the Mortons can bring her, and there’s where we must meet her.”

“Meet her in Genoa! How?”

“By going there for her,” replied Mrs. Elmore, as if this were the simplest thing in the world. “I have never seen Genoa.”

Elmore now tacitly abandoned himself to his fate. His wife continued: “I needn’t take anything. Merely run on, and right back.”

“When must we go?” he asked.

“I don’t know yet; but we shall have a letter to-morrow. Don’t worry on my account, Owen. Her coming won’t be a bit of care to me. It will give me something to do and to think about, and it will be a pleasure all the time to know that it’s for Susy Stevens. And I shall like the companionship.”

Elmore looked at his wife in surprise, for it had not occurred to him before that with his company she could desire any other companionship. He desired none but hers, and when he was about his work he often thought of her. He supposed that at these moments she thought of him, and found society, as he did, in such thoughts. But he was not a jealous or exacting man, and he said nothing. His treatment of the approaching visit from Susy Stevens’s sister had not been enthusiastic, but a spark had kindled his imagination, and it burned warmer and brighter as the days went by. He found a charm in the thought of having this fresh young life here in his charge, and of teaching the girl to live into the great and beautiful history of the city: there was still much of the school-master in him, and he intended to make her sojourn an education to her; and as a literary man he hoped for novel effects from her mind upon material which he was above all trying to set in a new light before himself.

When the time had arrived for them to go and meet Miss Mayhew at Genoa, he was more than reconciled to the necessity. But at the last moment, Mrs. Elmore had one of her old attacks. What these attacks were I find myself unable to specify, but as every lady has an old attack of some kind, I may safely leave their precise nature to conjecture. It is enough that they were of a nervous character, that they were accompanied with headache, and that they prostrated her for several days. During their continuance she required the active sympathy and constant presence of her husband, whose devotion was then exemplary, and brought up long arrears of indebtedness in that way.

“Well, what shall we do?” he asked, as he sank into a chair beside the lounge on which Mrs. Elmore lay, her eyes closed, and a slice of lemon placed on each of her throbbing temples with the effect of a new sort of blinders. “Shall I go alone for her?”

She gave his hand the kind of convulsive clutch that signified, “Impossible for you to leave me.”

He reflected. “The Mortons will be pushing on to Leghorn, and somebody must meet her. How would it do for Mr. Hoskins to go?”

Mrs. Elmore responded with a clutch tantamount to “Horrors! How could you think of such a thing?”

“Well, then,” he said, “the only thing we can do is to send a valet de place for her. We can send old Cazzi. He’s the incarnation of respectability; five francs a day and his expenses will buy all the virtues of him. She’ll come as safely with him as with me.”

Mrs. Elmore had applied a vividly thoughtful pressure to her husband’s hand; she now released it in token of assent, and he rose.

“But don’t be gone long,” she whispered.

On his way to the caffè which Cazzi frequented, Elmore fell in with the consul.

By this time a change had taken place in the consular office. Mr. Ferris, some months before, had suddenly thrown up his charge and gone home; and after the customary interval of ship-chandler, the California sculptor, Hoskins, had arrived out, with his commission in his pocket, and had set up his allegorical figure of The Pacific Slope in the room where Ferris had painted his too metaphysical conception of A Venetian Priest. Mrs. Elmore had never liked Ferris; she thought him cynical and opinionated, and she believed that he had not behaved quite well towards a young American lady, — a Miss Vervain, who had stayed awhile in Venice with her mother. She was glad to have him go; but she could not admire Mr. Hoskins, who, however good-hearted, was too hopelessly Western. He had had part of one foot shot away in the nine months’ service, and walked with a limp that did him honor; and he knew as much of a consul’s business as any of the authors or artists with whom it is the tradition to fill that office at Venice. Besides he was at least a fellow-American, and Elmore could not forbear telling him the trouble he was in: a young girl coming from their town in America as far as Genoa with friends, and expecting to be met there by the Elmores, with whom she was to pass some months; Mrs. Elmore utterly prostrated by one of her old attacks, and he unable to leave her, or to take her with him to Genoa; the friends with whom Miss Mayhew travelled unable to bring her to Venice; she, of course, unable to come alone. The case deepened and darkened in Elmore’s view as he unfolded it.

“Why,” cried the consul sympathetically, “if I could leave my post I’d go!”

“Oh, thank you!” cried Elmore eagerly, remembering his wife. “I couldn’t think of letting you.”

“Look here!” said the consul, taking an official letter, with the seal broken, from his pocket. “This is the first time I couldn’t have left my post without distinct advantage to the public interests, since I’ve been here. But with this letter from Turin, telling me to be on the lookout for the Alabama, I couldn’t go to Genoa even to meet a young lady. The Austrians have never recognized the rebels as belligerents: if she enters the port of Venice, all I’ve got to do is to require the deposit of her papers with me, and then I should like to see her get out again. I should like to capture her. Of course, I don’t mean Miss Mayhew,” said the consul, recognizing the double sense in which his language could be taken.

“It would be a great thing for you,” said Elmore,— “a great thing.”

“Yes, it would set me up in my own eyes, and stop that infernal clatter inside about going over and taking a hand again.”

“Yes,” Elmore assented, with a twinge of the old shame. “I didn’t know you had it too.”

“If I could capture the Alabama, I could afford to let the other fellows fight it out.”

“I congratulate you, with all my heart,” said Elmore sadly, and he walked in silence beside the consul.

“Well,” said the latter, with a laugh at Elmore’s pensive rapture, “I’m as much obliged to you as if I had captured her. I’ll go up to the Piazza with you, and see Cazzi.”

The affair was easily arranged; Cazzi was made to feel by the consul’s intervention that the shield of American sovereignty had been extended over the young girl whom he was to escort from Genoa, and two days later he arrived with her. Mrs. Elmore’s attack now was passing off, and she was well enough to receive Miss Mayhew half-recumbent on the sofa where she had been prone till her arrival. It was pretty to see her fond greeting of the girl, and her joy in her presence as they sat down for the first long talk; and Elmore realized, even in his dreamy withdrawal, how much the bright, active spirit of his wife had suffered merely in the restriction of her English. Now it was not only English they spoke, but that American variety of the language of which I hope we shall grow less and less ashamed; and not only this, but their parlance was characterized by local turns and accents, which all came welcomely back to Mrs. Elmore, together with those still more intimate inflections which belonged to her own particular circle of friends in the little town of Patmos, N. Y. Lily Mayhew was of course not of her own set, being five or six years younger; but women, more easily than men, ignore the disparities of age between themselves and their juniors; and in Susy Stevens’s absence it seemed a sort of tribute to her to establish her sister in the affection which Mrs. Elmore had so long cherished. Their friendship had been of such a thoroughly trusted sort on both sides that Mrs. Stevens (the memorably brilliant Sue Mayhew in her girlish days) had felt perfectly free to act upon Mrs. Elmore’s invitation to let Lily come out to her; and here the child was, as much at home as if she had just walked into Mrs. Elmore’s parlor out of her sister’s house in Patmos.

IV.

They briefly dispatched the facts relating to Miss Mayhew’s voyage, and her journey to Genoa, and came as quickly as they could to all those things which Mrs. Elmore was thirsting to learn about the town and its people. “Is it much changed? I suppose it is,” she sighed. “The war changes everything.”

“Oh, you don’t notice the war much,” said Miss Mayhew. “But Patmos is gay, — perfectly delightful. We’ve got one of the camps there now; and such times as the girls have with the officers! We have lots of fun getting up things for the Sanitary. Hops on the parade-ground at the camp, and going out to see the prisoners, — you never saw such a place.”

“The prisoners?” murmured Mrs. Elmore.

“Why, yes!” cried Lily, with a gay laugh. “Didn’t you know that we had a prison-camp too? Some of the Southerners look real nice. I pitied them,” she added, with unabated gayety.

“Your sister wrote to me,” said Mrs. Elmore; “but I couldn’t realize it, I suppose, and so I forgot it.”

“Yes,” pursued Lily, “and Frank Halsey’s in command. You would never know by the way he walks that he had a cork leg. Of course he can’t dance, though, poor fellow. He’s pale, and he’s perfectly fascinating. So’s Dick Burton, with his empty sleeve; he’s one of the recruiting officers, and there’s nobody so popular with the girls. You can’t think how funny it is, Professor Elmore, to see the old college buildings used for barracks. Dick says it’s much livelier than it was when he was a student there.”

“I suppose it must be,” dreamily assented the professor. “Does he find plenty of volunteers?”

“Well, you know,” the young girl explained, “that the old style of volunteering is all over.”

“No, I didn’t know it.”

“Yes. It’s the bounties now that they rely upon, and they do say that it will come to the draft very soon, now. Some of the young men have gone to Canada. But everybody despises them. Oh, Mrs. Elmore, I should think you’d be so glad to have the professor off here, and honorably out of the way!”

“I’m dishonorably out of the way; I can never forgive myself for not going to the war,” said Elmore.

“Why, how ridiculous!” cried Lily. “Nobody feels that way about it now! As Dick Burton says, we’ve come down to business. I tell you, when you see arms and legs off in every direction, and women going about in black, you don’t feel that it’s such a romantic thing any more. There are mighty few engagements now, Mrs. Elmore, when a regiment sets off; no presentation of revolvers in the town hall; and some of the widows have got married again; and that I don’t think is right. But what can they do, poor things? You remember Tom Friar’s widow, Mrs. Elmore?”

“Tom Friar’s widow! Is Tom Friar dead?”

“Why, of course! One of the first. I think it was Ball’s Bluff. Well, she’s married. But she married his cousin, and as Dick Burton says, that isn’t so bad. Isn’t it awful, Mrs. Clapp’s losing all her boys, — all five of them? It does seem to bear too hard on some families. And then, when you see every one of those six Armstrongs going through without a scratch!”

“I suppose,” said Elmore, “that business is at a standstill. The streets must look rather dreary.”

“Business at a standstill!” exclaimed Lily. “What has Sue been writing you all this time? Why, there never was such prosperity in Patmos before! Everybody is making money, and people that you wouldn’t hardly speak to a year ago are giving parties and inviting the old college families. You ought to see the residences and business blocks going up all over the place. I don’t suppose you would know Patmos now. You remember George Fenton, Mrs. Elmore?”

“Mr. Haskell’s clerk?”

“Yes. Well, he’s made a fortune out of an army contract; and he’s going to marry — the engagement came out just before I left — Bella Stearns.”

At these words Mrs. Elmore sat upright, — the only posture in which the fact could be imagined. “Lily!”

“Oh, I can tell you these are gay times in America,” triumphed the young girl. She now put her hand to her mouth and hid a yawn.

“You’re sleepy,” said Mrs. Elmore. “Well, you know the way to your room. You’ll find everything ready there, and I shall let you go alone. You shall commence being at home at once.”

“Yes, I am sleepy,” assented Lily; and she promptly said her good-nights and vanished; though a keener eye than Elmore’s might have seen that her promptness had a color — or say light — of hesitation in it.

But he only walked up and down the room, after she was gone, in unheedful distress. “Gay times in America! Good heavens! Is the child utterly heartless, Celia, or is she merely obtuse?”

“She certainly isn’t at all like Sue,” sighed Mrs. Elmore, who had not had time to formulate Lily’s defence. “But she’s excited now, and a little off her balance. She’ll be different to-morrow. Besides, all America seems changed, and the people with it. We shouldn’t have noticed it if we had stayed there, but we feel it after this absence.”

“I never realized it before, as I did from her babble! The letters have told us the same thing, but they were like the histories of other times. Camps, prisoners, barracks, mutilation, widowhood, death, sudden gains, social upheavals, — it is the old, hideous story of war come true of our day and country. It’s terrible!”

“She will miss the excitement,” said Mrs. Elmore. “I don’t know exactly what we shall do with her. Of course, she can’t expect the attentions she’s been used to in Patmos, with those young men.”

Elmore stopped, and stared at his wife. “What do you mean, Celia?”

“We don’t go into society at all, and she doesn’t speak Italian. How shall we amuse her?”

“Well, upon my word, I don’t know that we’re obliged to provide her amusement! Let her amuse herself. Let her take up some branch of study, or of — of — research, and get something besides ‘fun’ into her head, if possible.” He spoke boldly, but his wife’s question had unnerved him, for he had a soft heart, and liked people about him to be happy. “We can show her the objects of interest. And there are the theatres,” he added.

“Yes, that is true,” said Mrs. Elmore. “We can both go about with her. I will just peep in at her now, and see if she has everything she wants.” She rose from her sofa and went to Lily’s room, whence she did not return for nearly three quarters of an hour. By this time Elmore had got out his notes, and, in their transcription and classification, had fallen into forgetfulness of his troubles. His wife closed the door behind her, and said in a low voice, little above a whisper, as she sank very quietly into a chair, “Well, it has all come out, Owen.”

“What has all come out?” he asked, looking up stupidly.

“I knew that she had something on her mind, by the way she acted. And you saw her give me that look as she went out?”

“No — no, I didn’t. What look was it? She looked sleepy.”

“She looked terribly, terribly excited, and as if she would like to say something to me. That was the reason I said I would let her go to her room alone.”

“Oh!”

“Of course she would have felt awfully if I had gone straight off with her. So I waited. It may never come to anything in the world, and I don’t suppose it will; but it’s quite enough to account for everything you saw in her.”

“I didn’t see anything in her, — that was the difficulty. But what is it — what is it, Celia? You know how I hate these delays.”

“Why, I’m not sure that I need tell you, Owen; and yet I suppose I had better. It will be safer,” said Mrs. Elmore, nursing her mystery to the last, enjoying it for its own sake, and dreading it for its effect upon her husband. “I suppose you will think your troubles are beginning pretty early,” she suggested.

“Is it a trouble?”

“Well, I don’t know that it is. If it comes to the very worst, I dare say that every one wouldn’t call it a trouble.”

Elmore threw himself back in his chair in an attitude of endurance. “What would the worst be?”

“Why, it’s no use even to discuss that, for it’s perfectly absurd to suppose that it could ever come to that. But the case,” added Mrs. Elmore, perceiving that further delay was only further suffering for her husband, and that any fact would now probably fall far short of his apprehensions, “is simply this, and I don’t know that it amounts to anything; but at Peschiera, just before the train started, she looked out of the window, and saw a splendid officer walking up and down and smoking; and before she could draw back he must have seen her, for he threw away his cigar instantly, and got into the same compartment. He talked awhile in German with an old gentleman who was there, and then he spoke in Italian with Cazzi; and afterwards, when he heard her speaking English with Cazzi, he joined in. I don’t know how he came to join in at first, and she doesn’t, either; but it seems that he knew some English, and he began speaking. He was very tall and handsome and distinguished-looking, and a perfect gentleman in his manners; and she says that she saw Cazzi looking rather queer, but he didn’t say anything, and so she kept on talking. She told him at once that she was an American, and that she was coming here to stay with friends; and, as he was very curious about America, she told him all she could think of. It did her good to talk about home, for she had been feeling a little blue at being so far away from everybody. Now, I don’t see any harm in it; do you, Owen?”

“It isn’t according to the custom here; but we needn’t care for that. Of course it was imprudent.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Elmore admitted. “The officer was very polite; and when he found that she was from America, it turned out that he was a great sympathizer with the North, and that he had a brother in our army. Don’t you think that was nice?”

“Probably some mere soldier of fortune, with no heart in the cause,” said Elmore.

“And very likely he has no brother there, as I told Lily. He told her he was coming to Padua; but when they reached Padua, he came right on to Venice. That shows you couldn’t place any dependence upon what he said. He said he expected to be put under arrest for it; but he didn’t care, — he was coming. Do you believe they’ll put him under arrest?”

“I don’t know — I don’t know,” said Elmore, in a voice of grief and apprehension, which might well have seemed anxiety for the officer’s liberty.

“I told her it was one of his jokes. He was very funny, and kept her laughing the whole way, with his broken English and his witty little remarks. She says he’s just dying to go to America. Who do you suppose it can be, Owen?”

“How should I know? We’ve no acquaintance among the Austrians,” groaned Elmore.

“That’s what I told Lily. She’s no idea of the state of things here, and she was quite horrified. But she says he was a perfect gentleman in everything. He belongs to the engineer corps, — that’s one of the highest branches of the service, he told her, — and he gave her his card.”

“Gave her his card!”

Mrs. Elmore had it in the hand which she had been keeping in her pocket, and she now suddenly produced it; and Elmore read the name and address of Ernst von Ehrhardt, Captain of the Royal-Imperial Engineers, Peschiera. “She says she knows he wanted hers, but she didn’t offer to give it to him; and he didn’t ask her where she was going, or anything.”

“He knew that he could get her address from Cazzi for ten soldi as soon as her back was turned,” said Elmore cynically. “What then?”

“Why, he said — and this is the only really bold thing he did do — that he must see her again, and that he should stay over a day in Venice in hopes of meeting her at the theatre or somewhere.”

“It’s a piece of high-handed impudence!” cried Elmore. “Now, Celia, you see what these people are! Do you wonder that the Italians hate them?”

“You’ve often said they only hate their system.”

“The Austrians are part of their system. He thinks he can take any liberty with us because he is an Austrian officer! Lily must not stir out of the house to-morrow.”

“She will be too tired to do so,” said Mrs. Elmore.

“And if he molests us further, I will appeal to the consul.” Elmore began to walk up and down the room again.

“Well, I don’t know whether you could call it molesting, exactly,” suggested Mrs. Elmore.

“What do you mean, Celia? Do you suppose that she — she — encouraged this officer?”

“Owen! It was all in the simplicity and innocence of her heart!”

“Well, then, that she wishes to see him again?”

“Certainly not! But that’s no reason why we should be rude about it.”

“Rude about it? How? Is simply avoiding him rudeness? Is proposing to protect ourselves from his impertinence rudeness?”

“No. And if you can’t see the matter for yourself, Owen, I don’t know how any one is to make you.”

“Why, Celia, one would think that you approved of this man’s behavior, — that you wished her to meet him again! You understand what the consequences would be if we received this officer. You know how all the Venetians would drop us, and we should have no acquaintances here outside of the army.”

“Who has asked you to receive him, Owen? And as for the Italians dropping us, that doesn’t frighten me. But what could he do if he did meet her again? She needn’t look at him. She says he is very intelligent, and that he has read a great many English books, though he doesn’t speak it very well, and that he knows more about the war than she does. But of course she won’t go out to-morrow. All that I hate is that we should seem to be frightened into staying at home.”

“She needn’t stay in on his account. You said she would be too tired to go out.”

“I see by the scattering way you talk, Owen, that your mind isn’t on the subject, and that you’re anxious to get back to your work. I won’t keep you.”

“Celia, Celia! Be fair, now!” cried Elmore. “You know very well that I’m only too deeply interested in this matter, and that I’m not likely to get back to my work to-night, at least. What is it you wish me to do?”

Mrs. Elmore considered a while. “I don’t wish you to do anything,” she returned placably. “Of course, you’re perfectly right in not choosing to let an acquaintance begun in that way go any further. We shouldn’t at home, and we sha’n’t here. But I don’t wish you to think that Lily has been imprudent, under the circumstances. She doesn’t know that it was anything out of the way, but she happened to do the best that any one could. Of course, it was very exciting and very romantic; girls like such things, and there’s no reason they shouldn’t. We must manage,” added Mrs. Elmore, “so that she shall see that we appreciate her conduct, and trust in her entirely. I wouldn’t do anything to wound her pride or self-confidence. I would rather send her out alone to-morrow.”

“Of course,” said Elmore.

“And if I were with her when she met him, I believe I should leave it entirely to her how to behave.”

“Well,” said Elmore, “you’re not likely to be put to the test. He’ll hardly force his way into the house, and she isn’t going out.”

“No,” said Mrs. Elmore. She added, after a silence, “I’m trying to think whether I’ve ever seen him in Venice; he’s here often. But there are so many tall officers with fair complexions and English beards. I should like to know how he looks! She said he was very aristocratic-looking.”

“Yes, it’s a fine type,” said Elmore. “They’re all nobles, I believe.”

“But after all, they’re no better looking than our boys, who come up out of nothing.”

“Ours are Americans,” said Elmore.

“And they are the best husbands, as I told Lily.”

Elmore looked at his wife, as she turned dreamily to leave the room; but since the conversation had taken this impersonal turn he would not say anything to change its complexion. A conjecture vaguely taking shape in his mind resolved itself to nothing again, and left him with only the ache of something unascertained.

V.

In the morning Lily came to breakfast as blooming as a rose. The sense of her simple, fresh, wholesome loveliness might have pierced even the indifference of a man to whom there was but one pretty woman in the world, and who had lived since their marriage as if his wife had absorbed her whole sex into herself: this deep, unconscious constancy was a noble trait in him, but it is not so rare in men as women would have us believe. For Elmore, Miss Mayhew merely pervaded the place in her finer way, as the flowers on the table did, as the sweet butter, the new eggs, and the morning’s French bread did; he looked at her with a perfectly serene ignorance of her piquant face, her beautiful eyes and abundant hair, and her trim, straight figure. But his wife exulted in every particular of her charm, and was as generously glad of it as if it were her own; as women are when they are sure that the charm of others has no designs. The ladies twittered and laughed together, and as he was a man without small talk, he soon dropped out of the conversation into a reverie, from which he found himself presently extracted by a question from his wife.

“We had better go in a gondola, hadn’t we, Owen?” She seemed to be, as she put this, trying to look something into him. He, on his part, tried his best to make out her meaning, but failed.

He simply asked, “Where? Are you going out?”

“Yes. Lily has some shopping she must do. I think we can get it at Pazienti’s in San Polo.”

Again she tried to pierce him with her meaning. It seemed to him a sudden advance from the position she had taken the night before in regard to Miss Mayhew’s not going out; but he could not understand his wife’s look, and he feared to misinterpret if he opposed her going. He decided that she wished him for some reason to oppose the gondola, so he said, “I think you’d better walk, if Lily isn’t too tired.”

“Oh, I’m not tired at all!” she cried.

“I can go with you, in that direction, on my way to the library,” he added.

“Well, that will be very nice,” said Mrs. Elmore, discontinuing her look, and leaving her husband with an uneasy sense of wantonly assumed responsibility.

“She can step into the Frari a moment, and see those tombs,” he said. “I think it will amuse her.”

Lily broke into a laugh. “Is that the way you amuse yourselves in Venice?” she asked; and Mrs. Elmore hastened to reassure her.

“That’s the way Mr. Elmore amuses himself. You know his history makes every bit of the past fascinating to him.”

“Oh, yes, that history! Everybody is looking out for that,” said Lily.

“Is it possible,” said Elmore, with a pensive sarcasm in which an agreeable sense of flattery lurked, “that people still remember me and my history?”

“Yes, indeed!” cried Miss Mayhew. “Frank Halsey was talking about it the night before I left. He couldn’t seem to understand why I should be coming to you at Venice, because he said it was a history of Florence you were writing. It isn’t, is it? You must be getting pretty near the end of it, Professor Elmore.”

“I’m getting pretty near the beginning,” said Elmore sadly.

“It must be hard writing histories; they’re so awfully hard to read,” said Lily innocently. “Does it interest you?” she asked, with unaffected compassion.

“Yes,” he said, “far more than it will ever interest anybody else.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that!” she cried sweetly, seizing the occasion to get in a little compliment.

Mrs. Elmore sat silent, while things were thus going against Miss Mayhew, and perhaps she was then meditating the stroke by which she restored the balance to her own favor as soon as she saw her husband alone after breakfast. “Well, Owen,” she said, “you’ve done it now.”

“Done what?” he demanded.

“Oh, nothing, perhaps!” she answered, while she got on her things for the walk with unusual gayety; and, with the consciousness of unknown guilt depressing him, he followed the ladies upon their errand, subdued, distraught, but gradually forgetting his sin, as he forgot everything but his history. His wife hated to see him so miserable, and whispered at the shop-door where they parted, “Don’t be troubled, Owen! I didn’t mean anything.”

“By what?”

“Oh, if you’ve forgotten, never mind!” she cried; and she and Miss Mayhew disappeared within.

It was two hours later when he next saw them, after he had turned over the book he wished to see, and had found the passage which would enable him to go on with his work for the rest of the day at home. He was fitting his key into the house-door when he happened to look up the little street toward the bridge that led into it, and there, defined against the sky on the level of the bridge, he saw Mrs. Elmore and Miss Mayhew receiving the adieux of a distinguished-looking man in the Austrian uniform. The officer had brought his heels together in the conventional manner, and with his cap in his right hand, while his left rested on the hilt of his sword, and pressed it down, he was bowing from the hips. Once, twice, and he was gone.

The ladies came down the calle with rapid steps and flushed faces, and Elmore let them in. His wife whispered as she brushed by his elbow, “I want to speak with you instantly, Owen. Well, now!” she added, when they were alone in their own room and she had shut the door, “what do you say now?”

“What do I say now, Celia?” retorted Elmore, with just indignation. “It seems to me that it is for you to say something — or nothing.”

“Why, you brought it on us.”

Elmore merely glanced at his wife, and did not speak, for this passed all force of language.

“Didn’t you see me looking at you when I spoke of going out in a gondola, at breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“What did you suppose I meant?”

“I didn’t know.”

“When I was trying to make you understand that if we took a gondola we could go and come without being seen! Lily had to do her shopping. But if you chose to run off on some interpretation of your own, was I to blame, I should like to know? No, indeed! You won’t get me to admit it, Owen.”

Elmore continued inarticulate, but he made a low, miserable sibillation between his set teeth.

“Such presumption, such perfect audacity I never saw in my life!” cried Mrs. Elmore, fleetly changing the subject in her own mind, and leaving her husband to follow her as he could. “It was outrageous!” Her words were strong, but she did not really look affronted; and it is hard to tell what sort of liberty it is that affronts a woman. It seems to depend a great deal upon the person who takes the liberty.

“That was the man, I suppose,” said Elmore quietly.

“Yes, Owen,” answered his wife, with beautiful candor, “it was.” Seeing that he remained unaffected by her display of this virtue, she added, “Don’t you think he was very handsome?”

“I couldn’t judge, at such a distance.”

“Well, he is perfectly splendid. And I don’t want you to think he was disrespectful at all. He wasn’t. He was everything that was delicate and deferential.”

“Did you ask him to walk home with you?”

Mrs. Elmore remained speechless for some moments. Then she drew a long breath, and said firmly: “If you won’t interrupt me with gratuitous insults, Owen, I will tell you all about it, and then perhaps you will be ready to do me justice. I ask nothing more.” She waited for his contrition, but proceeded without it, in a somewhat meeker strain: “Lily couldn’t get her things at Pazienti’s, and we had to go to the Merceria for them. Then of course the nearest way home was through St. Mark’s Square. I made Lily go on the Florian side, so as to avoid the officers who were sitting at the Quadri, and we had got through the square and past San Moïsè, as far as the Stadt Gratz. I had never thought of how the officers frequented the Stadt Gratz, but there we met a most magnificent creature, and I had just said, ‘What a splendid officer!’ when she gave a sort of stop and he gave a sort of stop, and bowed very low, and she whispered, ‘It’s my officer.’ I didn’t dream of his joining us, and I don’t think he did, at first; but after he took a second look at Lily, it really seemed as if he couldn’t help it. He asked if he might join us, and I didn’t say anything.”

“Didn’t say anything!”

“No! How could I refuse, in so many words? And I was frightened and confused, any way. He asked if we were going to the music in the Giardini Pubblici; and I said No, that Miss Mayhew was not going into society in Venice, but was merely here for her health. That’s all there is of it. Now do you blame me, Owen?”

“No.”

“Do you blame her?”

“No.”

“Well, I don’t see how he was to blame.”

“The transaction was a little irregular, but it was highly creditable to all parties concerned.”

Mrs. Elmore grew still meeker under this irony. Indignation and censure she would have known how to meet; but his quiet perplexed her: she did not know what might not be coming. “Lily scarcely spoke to him,” she pursued, “and I was very cold. I spoke to him in German.”

“Is German a particularly repellent tongue?”

“No. But I was determined he should get no hold upon us. He was very polite and very respectful, as I said, but I didn’t give him an atom of encouragement; I saw that he was dying to be asked to call, but I parted from him very stiffly.”

“Is it possible?”

“Owen, what is there so wrong about it all? He’s clearly fascinated with her; and as the matter stood, he had no hope of seeing her or speaking with her except on the street. Perhaps he didn’t know it was wrong, — or didn’t realize it.”

“I dare say.”

“What else could the poor fellow have done? There he was! He had stayed over a day, and laid himself open to arrest, on the bare chance — one in a hundred — of seeing Lily; and when he did see her, what was he to do?”

“Obviously, to join her and walk home with her.”

“You are too bad, Owen! Suppose it had been one of our own poor boys? He looked like an American.”

“He didn’t behave like one. One of ‘our own poor boys,’ as you call them, would have been as far as possible from thrusting himself upon you. He would have had too much reverence for you, too much self-respect, too much pride.”

“What has pride to do with such things, my dear? I think he acted very naturally. He acted upon impulse. I’m sure you’re always crying out against the restraints and conventionalities between young people, over here; and now, when a European does do a simple, unaffected thing—”

Elmore made a gesture of impatience. “This fellow has presumed upon your being Americans — on your ignorance of the customs here — to take a liberty that he would not have dreamed of taking with Italian or German ladies. He has shown himself no gentleman.”

“Now there you are very much mistaken, Owen. That’s what I thought when Lily first told me about his speaking to her in the cars, and I was very much prejudiced against him; but when I saw him to-day, I must say that I felt that I had been wrong. He is a gentleman; but — he is desperate.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Elmore, shrinking a little under her husband’s sarcastic tone. “Why, Owen,” she pleaded, “can’t you see anything romantic in it?”

“I see nothing but a vulgar impertinence in it. I see it from his standpoint as an adventure, to be bragged of and laughed over at the mess-table and the caffè. I’m going to put a stop to it.”

Mrs. Elmore looked daunted and a little bewildered. “Well, Owen,” she said, “I put the affair entirely in your hands.”

Elmore never could decide upon just what theory his wife had acted; he had to rest upon the fact, already known to him, of her perfect truth and conscientiousness, and his perception that even in a good woman the passion for manœuvring and intrigue may approach the point at which men commit forgery. He now saw her quelled and submissive; but he was by no means sure that she looked at the affair as he did, or that she voluntarily acquiesced.

“All that I ask is that you won’t do anything that you’ll regret afterward. And as for putting a stop to it, I fancy it’s put a stop to already. He’s going back to Peschiera this afternoon, and that’ll probably be the last of him.”

“Very well,” said Elmore, “if that is the last of him, I ask nothing better. I certainly have no wish to take any steps in the matter.”

But he went out of the house very unhappy and greatly perplexed. He thought at first of going to the Stadt Gratz, where Captain Ehrhardt was probably staying for the tap of Vienna beer peculiar to that hostelry, and of inquiring him out, and requesting him to discontinue his attentions; but this course, upon reflection, was less high-handed than comported with his present mood, and he turned aside to seek advice of his consul. He found Mr. Hoskins in the best humor for backing his quarrel. He had just received a second dispatch from Turin, stating that the rumor of the approaching visit of the Alabama was unfounded; and he was thus left with a force of unexpended belligerence on his hands which he was glad to contribute to the defence of Mr. Elmore’s family from the pursuit of this Austrian officer.

“This is a very simple affair, Mr. Elmore,” — he usually said “Elmore,” but in his haughty frame of mind, he naturally threw something more of state into their intercourse,— “a very simple affair, fortunately. All that I have to do is to call on the military governor, and state the facts of the case, and this fellow will get his orders quietly and definitively. This war has sapped our influence in Europe, — there’s no doubt of it; but I think it’s a pity if an American family living in this city can’t be safe from molestation; and if it can’t, I want to know the reason why.”

This language was very acceptable to Elmore, and he thanked the consul. At the same time he felt his own resentment moderated, and he said, “I’m willing to let the matter rest if he goes away this afternoon.”

“Oh, of course,” Hoskins assented, “if he clears out, that’s the end of it. I’ll look in to-morrow, and see how you’re getting along.”

“Don’t — don’t give them the impression that I’ve — profited by your kindness,” suggested Elmore at parting.

“You haven’t yet. I only hope you may have the chance.”

“Thank you; I don’t think I do.”

Elmore took a long walk, and returned home tranquillized and clarified as to the situation. Since it could be terminated without difficulty and without scandal in the way Hoskins had explained, he was not unwilling to see a certain poetry in it. He could not repress a degree of sympathy with the bold young fellow who had overstepped the conventional proprieties in the ardor of a romantic impulse, and he could see how this very boldness, while it had a terror, would have a charm for a young girl. There was no necessity, except for the purpose of holding Mrs. Elmore in check, to look at it in an ugly light. Perhaps the officer had inferred from Lily’s innocent frankness of manner that this sort of approach was permissible with Americans, and was not amusing himself with the adventure, but was in love in earnest. Elmore could allow himself this view of a case which he had so completely in his own hands; and he was sensible of a sort of pleasure in the novel responsibility thrown upon him. Few men at his age were called upon to stand in the place of a parent to a young girl, to intervene in her affairs, and to decide who was and who was not a proper person to pretend to her acquaintance.

Feeling so secure in his right, he rebelled against the restraint he had proposed to himself, and at dinner he invited the ladies to go to the opera with him. He chose to show himself in public with them, and to check any impression that they were without due protection. As usual, the pit was full of officers, and between the acts they all rose, as usual, and faced the boxes, which they perused through their lorgnettes till the bell rang for the curtain to rise. But Mrs. Elmore, having touched his arm to attract his notice, instructed him, by a slow turning of her head, that Captain Ehrhardt was not there. After that he undoubtedly breathed freer, and, in the relaxation from his sense of bravado, he enjoyed the last acts of the opera more than the first. Miss Mayhew showed no disappointment; and she bore herself with so much grace and dignity, and yet so evidently impressed every one with her beauty, that he was proud of having her in charge. He began himself to see that she was pretty.

VI.

The next day was Sunday, and in going to church they missed a call from Hoskins, whom Elmore felt bound to visit the following morning on his way to the library, and inform of his belief that the enemy had quitted Venice, and that the whole affair was probably at an end. He was strengthened in this opinion by Mrs. Elmore’s fear that she might have been colder than she supposed; she hoped that she had not hurt the poor young fellow’s feelings; and now that he was gone, and safely out of the way, Elmore hoped so too.

On his return from the library, his wife met him with an air of mystery before which his heart sank. “Owen,” she said, “Lily has a letter.”

“Not bad news from home, Celia!”

“No; a letter which she wishes to show you. It has just come. As I don’t wish to influence you, I would rather not be present.” Mrs. Elmore slipped out of the room, and Miss Mayhew glided gravely in, holding an open note in her hand, and looking into Elmore’s eyes with a certain unfathomable candor, of which she had the secret.

“Here,” she said, “is a letter which I think you ought to see at once, Professor Elmore”; and she gave him the note with an air of unconcern, which he afterward recalled without being able to determine whether it was real indifference or only the calm resulting from the transfer of the whole responsibility to him. She stood looking at him while he read:

Miss,

In this evening I am just arrived from Venise, 4 hours afterwards I have had the fortune to see you and to speake with you — and to favorite me of your gentil acquaintanceship at rail-away. I never forgeet the moments I have seen you. Your pretty and nice figure had attached my heard so much, that I deserted in the hopiness to see you at Venise. And I was so lukely to speak with you cut too short, and in the possibility to understand all. I wished to go also in this Sonday to Venise, but I am sory that I cannot, beaucause I must feeled now the consequences of the desertation. Pray Miss to agree the assurance of my lov, and perhaps I will be so lukely to receive a notice from you Miss if I can hop a little (hapiness) sympathie. Très humble

E. von Ehrhardt.

Elmore was not destitute of the national sense of humor; but he read this letter not only without amusement in its English, but with intense bitterness and renewed alarm. It appeared to him that the willingness of the ladies to put the affair in his hands had not strongly manifested itself till it had quite passed their own control, and had become a most embarrassing difficulty, — when, in fact, it was no longer a merit in them to confide it to him. In the resentment of that moment, his suspicions even accused his wife of desiring, from idle curiosity and sentiment, the accidental meeting which had resulted in this fresh aggression.

“Why did you show me this letter?” he asked harshly.

“Mrs. Elmore told me to do so,” Lily answered.

“Did you wish me to see it?”

“I don’t suppose I wished you to see it: I thought you ought to see it.”

Elmore felt himself relenting a little. “What do you want done about it?” he asked more gently.

“That is what I wished you to tell me,” replied the girl.

“I can’t tell you what you wish me to do, but I can tell you this, Miss Mayhew: this man’s behavior is totally irregular. He would not think of writing to an Italian or German girl in this way. If he desired to — to — pay attention to her, he would write to her father.”

“Yes, that’s what Mrs. Elmore said. She said she supposed he must think it was the American way.”

“Mrs. Elmore,” began her husband; but he arrested himself there, and said, “Very well. I want to know what I am to do. I want your full and explicit authority before I act. We will dismiss the fact of irregularity. We will suppose that it is fit and becoming for a gentleman who has twice met a young lady by accident — or once by accident, and once by his own insistence — to write to her. Do you wish to continue the correspondence?”

“No.”

Elmore looked into the eyes which dwelt full upon him, and, though they were clear as the windows of heaven, he hesitated. “I must do what you say, no matter what you mean, you know?”

“I mean what I say.”

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you would prefer to return him this letter with a few lines on your card.”

“No. I should like him to know that I have shown it to you. I should think it a liberty for an American to write to me in that way after such a short acquaintance, and I don’t see why I should tolerate it from a foreigner, though I suppose their customs are different.”

“Then you wish me to write to him?”

“Yes.”

“And make an end of the matter, once for all?”

“Yes—”

“Very well, then.” Elmore sat down at once, and wrote: —

Sir, — Miss Mayhew has handed me your note of yesterday, and begs me to express her very great surprise that you should have ventured to address her. She desires me also to add that you will consider at an end whatever acquaintance you suppose yourself to have formed with her.

Your obedient servant,

Owen Elmore.

He handed the note to Lily. “Yes, that will do,” she said, in a low, steady voice. She drew a deep breath, and, laying the letter softly down, went out of the room into Mrs. Elmore’s.

Elmore had not had time to kindle his sealing-wax when his wife appeared swiftly upon the scene.

“I want to see what you have written, Owen,” she said.

“Don’t talk to me, Celia,” he replied, thrusting the wax into the candle-light. “You have put this affair entirely in my hands, and Lily approves of what I have written. I am sick of the thing, and I don’t want any more talk about it.”

“I must see it,” said Mrs. Elmore, with finality, and possessed herself of the note. She ran it through, and then flung it on the table and dropped into a chair, while the tears started to her eyes. “What a cold, cutting, merciless letter!” she cried.

“I hope he will think so,” said Elmore, gathering it up from the table, and sealing it securely in its envelope.

“You’re not going to send it!” exclaimed his wife.

“Yes, I am.”

“I didn’t suppose you could be so heartless.”

“Very well, then, I won’t send it,” said Elmore. “I put the affair in your hands. What are you going to do about it?”

“Nonsense!”

“On the contrary, I’m perfectly serious. I don’t see why you shouldn’t manage the business. The gentleman is an acquaintance of yours. I don’t know him.” Elmore rose and put his hands in his pockets. “What do you intend to do? Do you like this clandestine sort of thing to go on? I dare say the fellow only wishes to amuse himself by a flirtation with a pretty American. But the question is whether you wish him to do so. I’m willing to lay his conduct to a misunderstanding of our customs, and to suppose that he thinks this is the way Americans do. I take the matter at its best: he speaks to Lily on the train without an introduction; he joins you in your walk without invitation; he writes to her without leave, and proposes to get up a correspondence. It is all perfectly right and proper, and will appear so to Lily’s friends when they hear of it. But I’m curious to know how you’re going to manage the sequel. Do you wish the affair to go on, and how long do you wish it to go on?”

“You know very well that I don’t wish it to go on.”

“Then you wish it broken off?”

“Of course I do.”

“How?”

“I think there is such a thing as acting kindly and considerately. I don’t see anything in Captain Ehrhardt’s conduct that calls for savage treatment,” said Mrs. Elmore.

“You would like to have him stopped, but stopped gradually. Well, I don’t wish to be savage, either, and I will act upon any suggestion of yours. I want Lily’s people to feel that we managed not only wisely but humanely in checking a man who was resolved to force his acquaintance upon her.”

Mrs. Elmore thought a long while. Then she said: “Why, of course, Owen, you’re right about it. There is no other way. There couldn’t be any kindness in checking him gradually. But I wish,” she added sorrowfully, “that he had not been such a complete goose; and then we could have done something with him.”

“I am obliged to him for the perfection which you regret, my dear. If he had been less complete, he would have been much harder to manage.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Elmore, rising, “I shall always say that he meant well. But send the letter.”

Her husband did not wait for a second bidding. He carried it himself to the general post-office that there might be no mistake and no delay about it; and a man who believed that he had a feeling and tender heart experienced a barbarous joy in the infliction of this pitiless snub. I do not say that it would not have been different if he had trusted at all in the sincerity of Captain Ehrhardt’s passion; but he was glad to discredit it. A misgiving to the other effect would have complicated the matter. But now he was perfectly free to disembarrass himself of a trouble which had so seriously threatened his peace. He was responsible to Miss Mayhew’s family, and Mrs. Elmore herself could not say, then or afterward, that there was any other way open to him. I will not contend that his motives were wholly unselfish. No doubt a sense of personal annoyance, of offended decorum, of wounded respectability, qualified the zeal for Miss Mayhew’s good which prompted him. He was still a young and inexperienced man, confronted with a strange perplexity: he did the best he could, and I suppose it was the best that could be done. At any rate, he had no regrets, and he went cheerfully about the work of interesting Miss Mayhew in the monuments and memories of the city.

Since the decisive blow had been struck, the ladies seemed to share his relief. The pursuit of Captain Ehrhardt, while it flattered, might well have alarmed, and the loss of a not unpleasant excitement was made good by a sense of perfect security. Whatever repining Miss Mayhew indulged was secret, or confided solely to Mrs. Elmore. To Elmore himself she appeared in better spirits than at first, or at least in a more equable frame of mind. To be sure, he did not notice very particularly. He took her to the places and told her the things that she ought to be interested in, and he conceived a better opinion of her mind from the quick intelligence with which she entered into his own feelings in regard to them, though he never could see any evidence of the over-study for which she had been taken from school. He made her, like Mrs. Elmore, the partner of his historical researches; he read his notes to both of them now; and when his wife was prevented from accompanying him, he went with Lily alone to visit the scenes of such events as his researches concerned, and to fill his mind with the local color which he believed would give life and character to his studies of the past. They also went often to the theatre; and, though Lily could not understand the plays, she professed to be entertained, and she had a grateful appreciation of all his efforts in her behalf that amply repaid him. He grew fond of her society; he took a childish pleasure in having people in the streets turn and glance at the handsome girl by his side, of whose beauty and stylishness he became aware through the admiration looked over the shoulders of the Austrians, and openly spoken by the Italian populace. It did not occur to him that she might not enjoy the growth of their acquaintance in equal degree, that she fatigued herself with the appreciation of the memorable and the beautiful, and that she found these long rambles rather dull. He was a man of little conversation; and, unless Mrs. Elmore was of the company, Miss Mayhew pursued his pleasures for the most part in silence. One evening, at the end of the week, his wife asked, “Why do you always take Lily through the Piazza on the side farthest from where the officers sit? Are you afraid of her meeting Captain Ehrhardt?”

“Oh, no! I consider the Ehrhardt business settled. But you know the Italians never walk on the officers’ side.”

“You are not an Italian. What do you gain by flattering them up? I should think you might suppose a young girl had some curiosity.”

“I do; and I do everything I can to gratify her curiosity. I went to San Pietro di Castello to-day, to show her where the Brides of Venice were stolen.”

“The oldest and dirtiest part of the city! What could the child care for the Brides of Venice? Now be reasonable, Owen!”

“It’s a romantic story. I thought girls liked such things, — about getting married.”

“And that’s the reason you took her yesterday to show her the Bucentaur that the doges wedded the Adriatic in! Well, what was your idea in going with her to the Cemetery of San Michele?”

“I thought she would be interested. I had never been there before myself, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to verify a passage I was at work on. We always show people the cemetery at home.”

“That was considerate. And why did you go to Canarregio on Wednesday?”

“I wished her to see the statue of Sior Antonio Rioba; you know it was the Venetian Pasquino in the Revolution of ‘48—”

“Charming!”

“And the Campo di Giustizia, where the executions used to take place.”

“Delightful!”

“And — and — the house of Tintoretto,” faltered Elmore.

“Delicious! She cares so much for Tintoretto! And you’ve been with her to the Jewish burying-ground at the Lido, and the Spanish synagogue in the Ghetto, and the fish-market at the Rialto, and you’ve shown her the house of Othello and the house of Desdemona, and the prisons in the ducal palace; and three nights you’ve taken us to the Piazza as soon as the Austrian band stopped playing, and all the interesting promenading was over, and those stuffy old Italians began to come to the caffès. Well, I can tell you that’s no way to amuse a young girl. We must do something for her, or she will die. She has come here from a country where girls have always had the best time in the world, and where the times are livelier now than they ever were, with all this excitement of the war going on; and here she is dropped down in the midst of this absolute deadness: no calls, no picnics, no parties, no dances — nothing! We must do something for her.”

“Shall we give her a ball?” asked Elmore, looking round the pretty little apartment.

“There’s nothing going on among the Italians. But you might get us invited to the German Casino.”

“I dare say. But I will not do that.”

“Then we could go to the Luogotenenza, to the receptions. Mr. Hoskins could call with us, and they would send us cards.”

“That would make us simply odious to the Venetians, and our house would be thronged with officers. What I’ve seen of them doesn’t make me particularly anxious for the honor of their further acquaintance.”

“Well, I don’t ask you to do any of these things,” said Mrs. Elmore, who had, in fact, mentioned them with the intention of insisting upon an abated claim. “But I think you might go and dine at one of the hotels — at the Danieli — instead of that Italian restaurant; and then Lily could see somebody at the table d’hôte, and not simply perish of despair.”

“I — I didn’t suppose it was so bad as that,” said Elmore.

“Why, of course, she hasn’t said anything, — she’s far too well-bred for that; but I can tell from my own feelings how she must suffer. I have you, Owen,” she said tenderly, “but Lily has nobody. She has gone through this Ehrhardt business so well that I think we ought to do all we can to divert her mind.”

“Well, now, Celia, you see the difficulty of our position, — the nature of the responsibility we have assumed. How are we possibly, here in Venice, to divert the mind of a young lady fresh from the parties and picnics of Patmos?”

“We can go and dine at the Danieli,” replied Mrs. Elmore.

“Very well, let us go, then. But she will learn no Italian there. She will hear nothing but English from the travellers and bad French from the waiters; while at our restaurant—”

“Pshaw!” cried Mrs. Elmore, “what does Lily care for Italian? I’m sure I never want to hear another word of it.”

At this desperate admission, Elmore quite gave way; he went to the Danieli the next morning, and arranged to begin dining there that day. There is no denying that Miss Mayhew showed an enthusiasm in prospect of the change that even the sight of the pillar to which Foscarini was hanged head downwards for treason to the Republic had not evoked. She made herself look very pretty, and she was visibly an impression at the table d’hôte when she sat down there. Elmore had found places opposite an elderly lady and quite a young gentleman, of English speech, but of not very English effect otherwise, who bowed to Lily in acknowledgment of some former meeting. The old lady said, “So you’ve reached Venice at last? I’m very pleased, for your sake,” as if at some point of the progress thither she had been privy to anxieties of Lily about arriving at her destination; and, in fact, they had been in the same hotels at Marseilles and Genoa. The young gentleman said nothing, but he looked at Lily throughout the dinner, and seemed to take his eyes from her only when she glanced at him; then he dropped his gaze to his neglected plate and blushed. When they left the table, he made haste to join the Elmores in the reading-room, where he contrived, with creditable skill, to get Lily apart from them for the examination of an illustrated newspaper, at which neither of them looked; they remained chatting and laughing over it in entire irrelevancy till the elderly lady rose and said, “Herbert, Herbert! I am ready to go now,” upon which he did not seem at all so, but went submissively.

“Who are those people, Lily?” asked Mrs. Elmore, as they walked towards Florian’s for their after-dinner coffee. The Austrian band was playing in the centre of the Piazza, and the tall, blond German officers promenaded back and forth with dark Hungarian women, who looked each like a princess of her race. The lights glittered upon them, and on the brilliant groups spread fan-wise out into the Piazza before the caffès; the scene seemed to shake and waver in the splendor, like something painted.

“Oh, their name is Andersen, or something like that; and they’re from Helgoland, or some such place. I saw them first in Paris, but we didn’t speak till we got to Marseilles. That’s his aunt; they’re English subjects, someway; and he’s got an appointment in the civil service — I think he called it — in India, and he doesn’t want to go; and I told him he ought to go to America. That’s what I tell all these Europeans.”

“It’s the best advice for them,” said Mrs. Elmore.

“They don’t seem in any great haste to act upon it,” laughed Miss Mayhew. “Who was the red-faced young man that seemed to know you, and stared so?”

“That’s an English artist who is staying here. He has a curious name, — Rose-Black; and he is the most impudent and pushing man in the world. I wouldn’t introduce him, because I saw he was just dying for it.”

Miss Mayhew laughed, as she laughed at everything, not because she was amused, but because she was happy; this childlike gayety of heart was great part of her charm.

Elmore had quieted his scruples as a good Venetian by coming inside of the caffè while the band played, instead of sitting outside with the bad patriots; but he put the ladies next the window, and so they were not altogether sacrificed to his sympathy with the dimostrazione.

VII.

The next morning Elmore was called from his bed — at no very early hour, it must be owned, but at least before a nine o’clock breakfast — to see a gentleman who was waiting in the parlor. He dressed hurriedly, with a thousand exciting speculations in his mind, and found Mr. Rose-Black looking from the balcony window. “You have a pleasant position here,” he said easily, as he turned about to meet Elmore’s look of indignant demand. “I’ve come to ask all about our friends the Andersens.”

“I don’t know anything about them,” answered Elmore. “I never saw them before.”

“Aöh!” said the painter. Elmore had not invited him to sit down, but now he dropped into a chair, with the air of asking Elmore to explain himself. “The young lady of your party seemed to know them. How uncommonly pretty all your American young girls are! But I’m told they fade very soon. I should like to make up a picnic party with you all for the Lido.”

“Thank you,” replied Elmore stiffly. “Miss Mayhew has seen the Lido.”

“Aöh! That’s her name. It’s a pretty name.” He looked through the open door into the dining-room, where the table was set for breakfast, with the usual water-goblet at each plate. “I see you have beer for breakfast. There’s nothing so nice, you know. Would you — would you mind giving me a glahs?”

Through an undefined sense of the duties of hospitality, Elmore was surprised by this impudence into sending out to the next caffè for a pitcher of beer. Rose-Black poured himself out one glass and another till he had emptied the pitcher, conversing affably meanwhile with his silent host.

“Why didn’t you turn him out of doors?” demanded Mrs. Elmore, as soon as the painter’s departure allowed her to slip from the closed door behind which she had been imprisoned in her room.

“I did everything but that,” replied her husband, whom this interview had saddened more than it had angered.

“You sent out for beer for him!”

“I didn’t know but it might make him sick. Really, the thing is incredible. I think the man is cracked.”

“He is an Englishman, and he thinks he can take any kind of liberty with us because we are Americans.”

“That seems to be the prevalent impression among all the European nationalities,” said Elmore. “Let’s drop him for the present, and try to be more brutal in the future.”

Mrs. Elmore, so far from dropping him, turned to Lily, who entered at that moment, and recounted the extraordinary adventure of the morning, which scarcely needed the embellishment of her fancy; it was not really a gallon of beer, but a quart, that Mr. Rose-Black had drunk. She enlarged upon previous aggressions of his, and said finally that they had to thank Mr. Ferris for his acquaintance.

“Ferris couldn’t help himself,” said Elmore. “He apologized to me afterward. The man got him into a corner. But he warned us about him as soon he could. And Rose-Black would have made our acquaintance, any way. I believe he’s crazy.”

“I don’t see how that helps the matter.”

“It helps to explain it,” concluded Elmore, with a sigh. “We can’t refer everything to our being American lambs, and his being a ravening European wolf.”

“Of course he came round to find out about Lily,” said Mrs. Elmore. “The Andersens were a mere blind.”

“Oh, Mrs. Elmore!” cried Lily in deprecation.

The bell jangled. “That is the postman,” said Mrs. Elmore.

There was a home-letter for Lily, and one from Lily’s sister enclosed to Mrs. Elmore. The ladies rent them open, and lost themselves in the cross-written pages; and neither of them saw the dismay with which Elmore looked at the handwriting of the envelope addressed to him. His wife vaguely knew that he had a letter, and meant to ask him for it as soon as she should have finished her own. When she glanced at him again, he was staring at the smiling face of Miss Mayhew, as she read her letter, with the wild regard of one who sees another in mortal peril, and can do nothing to avert the coming doom, but must dumbly await the catastrophe.

“What is it, Owen?” asked his wife in a low voice.

He started from his trance, and struggled to answer quietly. “I’ve a letter here which I suppose I’d better show to you first.”

They rose and went into the next room, Miss Mayhew following them with a bright, absent look, and then dropping her eyes again to her letter.

Elmore put the note he had received into his wife’s hands without a word.

Sir, — My position permitted me to take a woman. I am a soldier, but I am an engineer — operateous, and I can exercise wherever my profession in the civil life. I have seen Miss Mayhew, and I have great sympathie for she. I think I will be lukely with her, if Miss Mayhew would be of the same intention of me.

If you believe, Sir, that my open and realy proposition will not offendere Miss Mayhew, pray to handed to her this note. Pray sir to excuse me the liberty to fatigue you, and to go over with silence if you would be of another intention.

Your obedient servant,

E. von Ehrhardt.

Mrs. Elmore folded the letter carefully up and returned it to her husband. If he had perhaps dreaded some triumphant outburst from her, he ought to have been content with the thoroughly daunted look which she lifted to his, and the silence in which she suffered him to do justice to the writer.

“This is the letter of a gentleman, Celia,” he said.

“Yes,” she responded faintly.

“It puts another complexion on the affair entirely.”

“Yes. Why did he wait a whole week?” she added.

“It is a serious matter with him. He had a right to take time for thinking it over.” Elmore looked at the date of the Peschiera postmark, and then at that of Venice on the back of the envelope. “No, he wrote at once. This has been kept in the Venetian office, and probably read there by the authorities.”

His wife did not heed the conjecture. “He began all wrong,” she grieved. “Why couldn’t he have behaved sensibly?”

“We must look at it from another point of view now,” replied Elmore. “He has repaired his error by this letter.”

“No, no; he hasn’t.”

“The question is now what to do about the changed situation. This is an offer of marriage. It comes in the proper way. It’s a very sincere and manly letter. The man has counted the whole cost: he’s ready to leave the army and go to America, if she says so. He’s in love. How can she refuse him?”

“Perhaps she isn’t in love with him,” said Mrs. Elmore.

“Oh! That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that. Then it’s very simple.”

“But I don’t know that she isn’t,” murmured Mrs. Elmore.

“Well, ask her.”

“How could she tell?”

“How could she tell?”

“Yes. Do you suppose a child like that can know her own mind in an instant?”

“I should think she could.”

“Well, she couldn’t. She liked the excitement, — the romanticality of it; but she doesn’t know any more than you or I whether she cares for him. I don’t suppose marriage with anybody has ever seriously entered her head yet.”

“It will have to do so now,” said Elmore firmly. “There’s no help for it.”

“I think the American plan is much better,” pouted Mrs. Elmore. “It’s horrid to know that a man’s in love with you, and wants to marry you, from the very start. Of course it makes you hate him.”

“I dare say the American plan is better in this as in most other things. But we can’t discuss abstractions, Celia. We must come down to business. What are we to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“We must submit the question to her.”

“To that innocent, unsuspecting little thing? Never!” cried Mrs. Elmore.

“Then we must decide it, as he seems to expect we may, without reference to her,” said her husband.

“No, that won’t do. Let me think.” Mrs. Elmore thought to so little purpose that she left the word to her husband again.

“You see we must lay the matter before her.”

“Couldn’t — couldn’t we let him come to see us awhile? Couldn’t we explain our ways to him, and allow him to pay her attentions without letting her know about this letter?”

“I’m afraid he wouldn’t understand, — that we couldn’t make it clear to him,” said Elmore. “If we invited him to the house he would consider it as an acceptance. He wants a categorical answer, and he has a right to it. It would be no kindness to a man with his ideas to take him on probation. He has behaved honorably, and we’re bound to consider him.”

“Oh, I don’t think he’s done anything so very great,” said Mrs. Elmore, with that disposition we all have to disparage those who put us in difficulties.

“He’s done everything he could do,” said Elmore. “Shall I speak to Miss Mayhew?”

“No, you had better let me,” sighed his wife. “I suppose we must. But I think it’s horrid! Everything could have gone on so nicely if he hadn’t been so impatient from the beginning. Of course she won’t have him now. She will be scared, and that will be the end of it.”

“I think you ought to be just to him, Celia. I can’t help feeling for him. He has thrown himself upon our mercy, and he has a claim to right and thoughtful treatment.”

“She won’t have anything to do with him. You’ll see.”

“I shall be very glad of that,” Elmore began.

“Why should you be glad of it?” demanded his wife.

He laughed. “I think I can safely leave his case in your hands. Don’t go to the other extreme. If she married a German, he would let her black his boots, — like that general in Munich.”

“Who is talking of marriage?” retorted Mrs. Elmore.

“Captain Ehrhardt and I. That’s what it comes to; and it can’t come to anything else. I like his courage in writing English, and it’s wonderful how he hammers his meaning into it. ‘Lukely’ isn’t bad, is it? And ‘my position permitted me to take a woman’ — I suppose he means that he has money enough to marry on — is delicious. Upon my word, I have a good deal of sympathie for he!”

“For shame, Owen! It’s wicked to make fun of his English.”

“My dear, I respect him for writing in English. The whole letter is touchingly brave and fine. Confound him! I wish I had never heard of him. What does he come bothering across my path for?”

“Oh, don’t feel that way about it, Owen!” cried his wife. “It’s cruel.”

“I don’t. I wish to treat him in the most generous manner; after all, it isn’t his fault. But you must allow, Celia, that it’s very annoying and extremely perplexing. We can’t make up Miss Mayhew’s mind for her. Even if we found out that she liked him, it would be only the beginning of our troubles. We’ve no right to give her away in marriage, or let her involve her affections here. But be judicious, Celia.”

“It’s easy enough to say that!”

“I’ll be back in an hour,” said Elmore. “I’m going to the Square. We mustn’t lose time.”

As he passed out through the breakfast-room, Lily was sitting by the window with her letter in her lap, and a happy smile on her lips. When he came back she happened to be seated in the same place; she still had a letter in her lap, but she was smiling no longer; her face was turned from him as he entered, and he imagined a wistful droop in that corner of her mouth which showed on her profile.

But she rose very promptly, and with a heightened color said, “I am sorry to trouble you to answer another letter for me, Professor Elmore. I manage my correspondence at home myself, but here it seems to be different.”

“It needn’t be different here, Lily,” said Elmore kindly. “You can answer all the letters you receive in just the way you like. We don’t doubt your discretion in the least. We will abide by any decision of yours, on any point that concerns yourself.”

“Thank you,” replied the girl; “but in this case I think you had better write.” She kept slipping Ehrhardt’s letter up and down between her thumb and finger against the palm of her left hand, and delayed giving it to him, as if she wished him to say something first.

“I suppose you and Celia have talked the matter over?”

“Yes.”

“And I hope you have determined upon the course you are going to take, quite uninfluenced?”

“Oh, quite so.”

“I feel bound to tell you,” said Elmore, “that this gentleman has now done everything that we could expect of him, and has fully atoned for any error he committed in making your acquaintance.”

“Yes, I understand that. Mrs. Elmore thought he might have written because he saw he had gone too far, and couldn’t think of any other way out of it.”

“That occurred to me, too, though I didn’t mention it. But we’re bound to take the letter on its face, and that’s open and honorable. Have you made up your mind?”

“Yes.”

“Do you wish for delay? There is no reason for haste.”

“There’s no reason for delay, either,” said the girl. Yet she did not give up the letter, or show any signs of intending to terminate the interview. “If I had had more experience, I should know how to act better; but I must do the best I can, without the experience. I think that even in a case like this we should try to do right, don’t you?”

“Yes, above all other cases,” said Elmore, with a laugh.

She flushed in recognition of her absurdity. “I mean that we oughtn’t to let our feelings carry us away. I saw so many girls carried away by their feelings, when the first regiments went off, that I got a horror of it. I think it’s wicked: it deceives both; and then you don’t know how to break the engagement afterward.”

“You’re quite right, Lily,” said Elmore, with a rising respect for the girl.

“Professor Elmore, can you believe that, with all the attentions I’ve had, I’ve never seriously thought of getting married as the end of it all?” she asked, looking him freely in the eyes.

“I can’t understand it, — no man could, I suppose, — but I do believe it. Mrs. Elmore has often told me the same thing.”

“And this — letter — it — means marriage.”

“That and nothing else. The man who wrote it would consider himself cruelly wronged if you accepted his attentions without the distinct purpose of marrying him.”

She drew a deep breath. “I shall have to ask you to write a refusal for me.” But still she did not give him the letter.

“Have you made up your mind to that?”

“I can’t make up my mind to anything else.”

Elmore walked unhappily back and forth across the room. “I have seen something of international marriages since I’ve been in Europe,” he said. “Sometimes they succeed; but generally they’re wretched failures. The barriers of different race, language, education, religion, — they’re terrible barriers. It’s very hard for a man and woman to understand each other at the best; with these differences added, it’s almost a hopeless case.”

“Yes; that’s what Mrs. Elmore said.”

“And suppose you were married to an Austrian officer stationed in Italy. You would have no society outside of the garrison. Every other human creature that looked at you would hate you. And if you were ordered to some of those half barbaric principalities, — Moldavia or Wallachia, or into Hungary or Bohemia, — everywhere your husband would be an instrument for the suppression of an alien or disaffected population. What a fate for an American girl!”

“If he were good,” said the girl, replying in the abstract, “she needn’t care.”

“If he were good, you needn’t care. No. And he might leave the Austrian service, and go with you to America, as he hints. What could he do there? He might get an appointment in our army, though that’s not so easy now; or he might go to Patmos, and live upon your friends till he found something to do in civil life.”

Lily began a laugh. “Why, Professor Elmore, I don’t want to marry him! What in the world are you arguing with me for?”

“Perhaps to convince myself. I feel that I oughtn’t to let these considerations weigh as a feather in the balance if you are at all — at all — ahem! excuse me! — attached to him. That, of course, outweighs everything else.”

“But I’m not!” cried the girl “How could I be? I’ve only met him twice. It would be perfectly ridiculous. I know I’m not. I ought to know that if I know anything.”

Years afterward it occurred to Elmore, when he awoke one night, and his mind without any reason flew back to this period in Venice, that she might have been referring the point to him for decision. But now it only seemed to him that she was adding force to her denial; and he observed nothing hysterical in the little laugh she gave.

“Well, then, we can’t have it over too soon. I’ll write now, if you will give me his letter.”

She put it behind her. “Professor Elmore,” she said, “I am not going to have you think that he ever behaved in the least presumingly. And whatever you think of me, I must tell you that I suppose I talked very freely with him, — just as freely, as I should with an American. I didn’t know any better. He was very interesting, and I was homesick, and so glad to see any one who could speak English. I suppose I was a goose; but I felt very far away from all my friends, and I was grateful for his kindness. Even if he had never written this last letter, I should always have said that he was a true gentleman.”

“Well?”

“That is all. I can’t have him treated as if he were an adventurer.”

“You want him dismissed?”

“Yes.”

“A man can’t distinguish as to the terms of a dismissal. They’re always insolent, — more insolent than ever if you try to make them kindly. I should merely make this as short and sharp as possible.”

“Yes,” she said breathlessly, as if the idea affected her respiration.

“But I will show it to you, and I won’t send it without your approval.”

“Thank you. But I shall not want to see it. I’d rather not.” She was going out of the room.

“Will you leave me his letter? You can have it again.”

She turned red in giving it him. “I forgot. Why, it’s written to you, anyway!” she cried, with a laugh, and put the letter on the table.

The two doors opened and closed: one excluded Lily, and the other admitted Mrs. Elmore.

“Owen, I approve of all you said, except that about the form of the refusal. I will read what you say. I intend that it shall be made kindly.”

“Very well. I’ll copy a letter of yours, or write from your dictation.”

“No; you write it, and I’ll criticise it.”

“Oh, you talk as if I were eager to write the letter! Can’t you imagine it’s being a very painful thing to me?” he demanded.

“It didn’t seem to be so before.”

“Why, the situation wasn’t the same before he wrote this letter!”

“I don’t see how. He was as much in earnest then as he is now, and you had no pity for him.”

“Oh, my goodness!” cried Elmore desperately. “Don’t you see the difference? He hadn’t given any proof before” —

“Oh, proof, proof! You men are always wanting proof! What better proof could he have given than the way he followed her about? Proof, indeed! I suppose you’d like to have Lily prove that she doesn’t care for him!”

“Yes,” said Elmore sadly, “I should like very much to have her prove it.”

“Well, you won’t get her to. What makes you think she does?”

“I don’t. Do you?”

“N-o,” answered Mrs. Elmore reluctantly.

“Celia, Celia, you will drive me mad if you go on in this way! The girl has told me, over and over, that she wishes him dismissed. Why do you think she doesn’t?”

“I don’t. Who hinted such a thing? But I don’t want you to enjoy doing it.”

“Enjoy it? So you think I enjoy it! What do you suppose I’m made of? Perhaps you think I enjoyed catechizing the child about her feelings toward him? Perhaps you think I enjoy the whole confounded affair? Well, I give it up. I will let it go. If I can’t have your full and hearty support, I’ll let it go. I’ll do nothing about it.”

He threw Ehrhardt’s letter on the table, and went and sat down by the window. His wife took the letter up and read it over. “Why, you see he asks you to pass it over in silence if you don’t consent.”

“Does he?” asked Elmore. “I hadn’t noticed that.”

“Perhaps you’d better read some of your letters, Owen, before you answer them!”

“Really, I had forgotten. I had forgotten that the letter was written to me at all. I thought it was to Lily, and she had got to thinking so too. Well, then, I won’t do anything about it.” He drew a breath of relief.

“Perhaps,” suggested his wife, “he asked that so as to leave himself some hope if he should happen to meet her again.”

“And we don’t wish him to have any hope.”

Mrs. Elmore was silent.

“Celia,” cried her husband indignantly, “I can’t have you playing fast and loose with me in this matter!”

“I suppose I may have time to think?” she retorted.

“Yes, if you will tell me what you do think; but that I must know. It’s a thing too vital in its consequences for me to act without your full concurrence. I won’t take another step in it till I know just how far you have gone with me. If I may judge of what this man’s influence upon Lily would be by the fact that he has brought us to the verge of the only real quarrel we’ve ever had” —

“Who’s quarrelling, Owen?” asked Mrs. Elmore meekly. “I’m not.”

“Well, well! we won’t dispute about that. I want to know whether you thought with me that it was improper for him to address her in the car?”

“Yes.”

“And still more improper for him to join you in the street?”

“Yes. But he was very gentlemanly.”

“No matter about that. You were just as much annoyed as I was by his letter to her?”

“I don’t know about annoyed. It scared me.”

“Very well. And you approved of my answering it as I did?”

“I had nothing to do with it. I thought you were acting conscientiously. I’ll say that much.”

“You’ve got to say more. You have got to say you approved of it; for you know you did.”

“Oh — approved of it? Yes!”

“That’s all I want. Now I agree with you that if we pass this letter in silence, it will leave him with some hope. You agree with me that in a marriage between an American girl and an Austrian officer the chances would be ninety-nine to a hundred against her happiness at the best.”

“There are a great many unhappy marriages at home,” said Mrs. Elmore impartially.

“That isn’t the point, Celia, and you know it. The point is whether you believe the chances are for or against her in such a marriage. Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Agree with me?”

“Yes; but I say they might be very happy. I shall always say that.”

Elmore flung up his hands in despair. “Well, then, say what shall be done now.”

This was perhaps just what Mrs. Elmore did not choose to say. She was silent a long time, — so long that Elmore said, “But there’s really no haste about it,” and took some notes of his history out of a drawer, and began to look them over, with his back turned to her.

“I never knew anything so heartless!” she cried. “Owen, this must be attended to at once! I can’t have it hanging over me any longer. It will make me sick.”

He turned abruptly round, and, seating himself at the table, wrote a note, which he pushed across to her. It acknowledged the receipt of Captain von Ehrhardt’s letter, and expressed Miss Mayhew’s feeling that there was nothing in it to change her wish that the acquaintance should cease. In after years, the terms of this note did not always appear to Elmore wisely chosen or humanely considered; but he stood at bay, and he struck mercilessly. In spite of the explicit concurrence of both Miss Mayhew and his wife, he felt as if they were throwing wholly upon him a responsibility whose fearfulness he did not then realize. Even in his wife’s “Send it!” he was aware of a subtile reservation on her part.

VIII.

Mrs. Elmore and Lily again rose buoyantly from the conclusive event, but he succumbed to it. For the delicate and fastidious invalid, keeping his health evenly from day to day upon the condition of a free and peaceful mind, the strain had been too much. He had a bad night, and the next day a gastric trouble declared itself which kept him in bed half the week, and left him very weak and tremulous. His friends did not forget him during this time. Hoskins came regularly to see him, and supplied his place at the table d’hôte of the Danieli, going to and fro with the ladies, and efficiently protecting them from the depredations of the Austrian soldiery. From Mr. Rose-Black he could not protect them; and both the ladies amused Elmore with a dramatization of how the Englishman had boldly outwitted them, and trampled all their finessing under foot, by simply walking up to them in the reading-room, and saying, “This is Miss Mayhew, I suppose,” and putting himself at once on the footing of an old family friend. They read to Elmore, and they put his papers in order, so that he did not know where to find anything when he got well; but they always came home from the hotel with some lively gossip, and this he liked. They professed to recognize an anxiety on the part of Mr. Andersen’s aunt that his mind should not be diverted from the civil service in India by thoughts of young American ladies; but she sent some delicacies to Elmore, and one day she even came to call with her nephew, in extreme reluctance and anxiety as they pretended to him.

The next afternoon the young man called alone, and Elmore, who was now on foot, received him in the parlor, before the ladies came in. Mr. Andersen had a bunch of flowers in one hand, and a small wooden box containing a little turtle on a salad-leaf in the other; the poor animals are sold in the Piazza at Venice for souvenirs of the city, and people often carry them away. Elmore took the offerings simply, as he took everything in life, and interpreted them as an expression, however odd, of Mr. Andersen’s sympathy with his recent sufferings, of which he gave him some account; but he practised a decent self-denial, here, and they were already talking of the weather when the ladies appeared. He hastened to exhibit the tokens of Mr. Andersen’s kind remembrance, and was mystified by the young man’s confusion, and the impatient, almost contemptuous, air with which his wife listened to him. Hoskins came in at that moment to ask about Elmore’s health, and showed the hostile civility to Andersen which young men use toward each other in the presence of ladies; and then, seeing that the latter had secured the place at Miss Mayhew’s side on the sofa, he limped to the easy chair near Mrs. Elmore, and fell into talk with her about Rose-Black’s pictures, which he had just seen. They were based upon an endeavor to trace the moral principles believed by Mr. Ruskin to underlie Venetian art, and they were very queer, so Hoskins said; he roughly sketched an idea of some of them on a block he took from his pocket.

Mr. Andersen and Lily went out upon one of the high-railed balconies that overhung the canal, and stood there, with their backs to the others. She seemed to be listening, with averted face, while he, with his cheek leaning upon one hand and his elbow resting on the balcony rail, kept a pensive attitude after they had apparently ceased to speak. Something in their pose struck the sculptor’s fancy, and he made a hasty sketch of them, and was showing it to the Elmores when Lily suddenly descended into the room again, and, saying something about its being quite dark, went out, and left Mr. Andersen to make his adieux to the others. He startled them by saying that he was to set off for India in the morning, and he went away very melancholy.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Hoskins, thoughtfully retouching his sketch, “that I should feel very lively about going out to India myself.”

“He seems to be a very affectionate young fellow,” observed Elmore, “and I’ve no doubt he will feel the separation from his friends. But I really don’t know why he should have brought me a bouquet, and a small turtle in a box, on the eve of his departure.”

“What?” cried Hoskins, with a rude guffaw; and when Elmore had showed his gifts, Hoskins threw back his head and laughed indecently. His behavior nettled Elmore, and it sent Mrs. Elmore prematurely out of the room; for, not content with his explosions of laughter, he continued for some time to amuse himself by touching up with the point of his pencil the tail of the turtle which he had turned out of its box upon the table. At Mrs. Elmore’s withdrawal he stopped, and presently said good-night rather soberly.

Then she returned. “Owen,” she asked sadly, “did you really think these flowers and that turtle were for you?”

“Why, yes,” he answered.

“Well, I don’t know whether I wouldn’t almost rather it had been a joke. I believe that I would rather despise your heart than your head. Why should Mr. Andersen bring you flowers and a turtle?”

“Upon my word, I don’t know.”

“They were for Lily! And your mistake has added another pang to the poor young fellow’s suffering. She has just refused him,” she said; and as Elmore continued to glare blankly at her, she added: “She was refusing him there on the balcony while that disgusting Mr. Hoskins was sketching them; and he had his hand up, that way, because he was crying.”

“This is horrible, Celia!” cried Elmore. The scent of the flowers lying on the table seemed to choke him; the turtle clawing about on the smooth surface looked demoniacal. “Why — —”

“Now, don’t ask me why she refused him, Owen. Of course she couldn’t care for a boy like that. But he can’t realize it, and it’s just as miserable for him as if he were a thousand years old.”

Elmore hung his head. “It was all a mistake. But how should I know any better? I am a straightforward man, Celia; and I am unfit for the care that has been thrown upon me. It’s more than I can bear. No, I’m not fit for it!” he cried at last; and his wife, seeing him so crushed, now said something to console him.

“I know you’re not. I see it more and more. But I know that you will do the best you can, and that you will always act from a good motive. Only do try to be more on your guard.”

“I will — I will,” he answered humbly.

He had a temptation, the next time he visited Hoskins, to tell him the awful secret, and to see how the situation of that night, with this lurid light upon it, affected him: it could do poor Andersen, now on his way to India, no harm. He yielded to his temptation, at the same time that he confessed his own blunder about the flowers.

Hoskins whistled. “I tell you what,” he said, after a long pause, “there are some things in history that I never could realize, — like Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance, putting on her best things, and stepping down into the front parlor of that castle to have her head off. But a thing like this, happening on your own balcony, helps you to realize it.”

“It helps you to realize it,” assented Elmore, deeply oppressed by the tragic parallel.

“He’s just beginning to feel it about now,” said Hoskins, with strange sang froid. “I reckon it’s a good deal like being shot. I didn’t fully appreciate my little hit under a couple of days. Then I began to find out that something had happened. Look here,” he added, “I want to show you something;” and he pulled the wet cloth off a breadth of clay which he had set up on a board stayed against the wall. It was a bas-relief representing a female figure advancing from the left corner over a stretch of prairie towards a bulk of forest on the right; bison, bear, and antelope fled before her; a lifted hand shielded her eyes; a star lit the fillet that bound her hair.

“That’s the best thing you’ve done, Hoskins,” said Elmore. “What do you call it?”

“Well, I haven’t settled yet. I have thought of ‘Westward the Star of Empire,’ but that’s rather long; and I’ve thought of ‘American Enterprise.’ I ain’t in any hurry to name it. You like it, do you?”

“I like it immensely!” cried Elmore. “You must let me bring the ladies to see it.”

“Well, not just yet,” said the sculptor, in some confusion. “I want to get it a little further along first.”

They stood looking together at the figure; and when Elmore went away he puzzled himself about something in it, — he could not tell exactly what. He thought he had seen that face and figure before, but this is what often occurs to the connoisseur of modern sculpture. His mind heavily reverted to Lily and her suitors. Take her in one way, especially in her subordination to himself, the girl was as simply a child as any in the world, — good-hearted, tender, and sweet, and, as he could see, without tendency to flirtation. Take her in another way, confront her with a young and marriageable man, and Elmore greatly feared that she unconsciously set all her beauty and grace at work to charm him; another life seemed to inform her, and irradiate from her, apart from which she existed simple and childlike still. In the security of his own deposited affections, it appeared to him cruelly absurd that a passion which any other pretty girl might, and some other pretty girl in time must, have kindled, should cling, when once awakened, so inalienably to the pretty girl who had, in a million chances, chanced to awaken it. He wondered how much of this constancy was natural, and how much merely attributive and traditional, and whether human happiness or misery were increased by it on the whole.

IX.

In the respite which followed the dismissal of Andersen, the English painter, Rose-Black, visited the Elmores as often as the servant, who had orders in his case to say that they were impediti, failed of her duty. They could not always escape him at the caffè, and they would have left off dining at the hotel but for the shame of feeling that he had driven them away. If he had been an Englishman repelling their advances, instead of an Englishman pursuing them, he could not have been more offensive. He affronted their national as well as personal self-esteem; he early declared himself a sympathizer with the Southrons (as the London press then called them), and he expressed the current belief of his compatriots, that we were going to the dogs.

“What do you really make of him, Owen?” asked Mrs. Elmore, after an evening that, in its improbable discomfort, had passed quite like a nightmare.

“Well, I’ve been thinking a good deal about him. I have been wondering if, in his phenomenal way, he is not a final expression of the national genius, — the stupid contempt for the rights of others; the tacit denial of the rights of any people who are at English mercy; the assumption that the courtesies and decencies of life are for use exclusively towards Englishmen.”

This was in that embittered old war-time: we have since learned how forbearing and generous and amiable Englishmen are; how they never take advantage of any one they believe stronger than themselves, or fail in consideration for those they imagine their superiors; how you have but to show yourself successful in order to win their respect, and even affection.

But for the present Mrs. Elmore replied to her husband’s perverted ideas, “Yes, it must be so,” and she supported him in the ineffectual experiment of deferential politeness, Christian charity, broad humanity, and savage rudeness upon Rose-Black. It was all one to Rose-Black.

He took an air of serious protection towards Mrs. Elmore, and often gave her advice, while he practised an easy gallantry with Lily, and ignored Elmore altogether. His intimacy was superior to the accidents of their moods, and their slights and snubs were accepted apparently as interesting expressions of a civilization about which he was insatiably curious, especially as regarded the relations of young people. There was no mistaking the fact that Rose-Black in his way had fallen under the spell which Elmore had learned to dread; but there was nothing to be done, and he helplessly waited. He saw what must come; and one evening it came, when Rose-Black, in more than usually offensive patronage, lolled back upon the sofa at Miss Mayhew’s side, and said, “About flirtations, now, in America, — tell me something about flirtations. We’ve heard so much about your American flirtations. We only have them with married ladies, on the continent, and I don’t suppose Mrs. Elmore would think of one.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Lily. “I don’t know anything about flirtations.”

This seemed to amuse Rose-Black as an uncommonly fine piece of American humor, which was then just beginning to make its way with the English. “Oh, but come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that, you know. If you won’t tell me, suppose you show me what an American flirtation is like. Suppose we get up a flirtation. How should you begin?”

The girl rose with a more imposing air than Elmore could have imagined of her stature; but almost any woman can be awful in emergencies. “I should begin by bidding you good-evening,” she answered, and swept out of the room.

Elmore felt as if he had been left alone with a man mortally hurt in combat, and were likely to be arrested for the deed. He gazed with fascination upon Rose-Black, and wondered to see him stir, and at last rise, and with some incoherent words to them, get himself away. He dared not lift his gaze to the man’s eyes, lest he should see there some reflection of the pain that filled his own. He would have gone after him, and tried to say something in condolence, but he was quite helpless to move; and as he sat still, gazing at the door through which Rose-Black disappeared, Mrs. Elmore said quietly: —

“Well, really, I think that ought to be the last of him. You see, she’s quite able to take care of herself when she knows her ground. You can’t say that she has thrown the brunt of this affair upon you, Owen.”

“I am not so sure of that,” sighed Elmore. “I think I suffer less when I do it than when I see it. It’s horrible.”

“He deserved it, every bit,” returned his wife.

“Oh, I dare say,” Elmore granted. “But the sight even of justice isn’t pleasant, I find.”

“I don’t understand you, Owen. How can you care so much for this impudent wretch’s little snub, and yet be so indifferent about refusing Captain Ehrhardt?”

“I’m not indifferent about it, my dear. I know that I did right, but I don’t know that I could do right under the same circumstances again.”

In fact there were times when Elmore found almost insupportable the absolute conclusion to which that business had come. It is hard to believe that anything has come to an end in this world. For a time, death itself leaves the ache of an unsatisfied expectation, as if somehow the interrupted life must go on, and there is no change we make or suffer which is not denied by the sensation of daily habit. If Ehrhardt had really come back from the vague limbo to which he had been so inexorably relegated, he might only have restored the original situation in all its discomfort and apprehension; yet maintaining, as he did, this perfect silence and absence, he established a hold upon Elmore’s imagination which deepened because he could not discuss the matter frankly with his wife. He weakly feared to let her know what was passing in his thoughts, lest some misconception of hers should turn them into self-accusal or urge him to some attempt at the reparation towards which he wavered. He really could have done nothing that would not have made the matter worse, and he confined himself to speculating upon the character and history of the man whom he knew only by the incoherent hearsay of two excited women, and by the brief record of hope and passion left in the notes which Lily treasured somewhere among the archives of a young girl’s triumphs. He had a morbid curiosity to see these letters again, but he dared not ask for them; and indeed it would have been an idle self-indulgence: he remembered them perfectly well. Seeing Lily so indifferent, it was characteristic of him, in that safety from consequences which he chiefly loved, that he should tacitly constitute himself, in some sort, the champion of her rejected suitor, whose pain he luxuriously fancied in all its different stages and degrees. His indolent pity even developed into a sort of self-righteous abhorrence of the girl’s hardness. But this was wholly within himself, and could work no sort of harm. If he never ventured to hint these feelings to his wife, he was still further from confessing them to Lily; but once he approached the subject with Hoskins in a well-guarded generality relating to the different kinds of sensibility developed by the European and American civilization. A recent suicide for love which excited all Venice at that time — an Austrian officer hopelessly attached to an Italian girl had shot himself — had suggested their talk, and given fresh poignancy to the misgivings in Elmore’s mind.

“Well,” said Hoskins, “those Dutch are queer. They don’t look at women as respectfully as we do, and they mix up so much cabbage with their romance that you don’t know exactly how to take them; and yet here you find this fellow suffering just as much as a white man because the girl’s folks won’t let her have him. In fact, I don’t know but he suffered more than the average American citizen. I think we have a great deal more common sense in our love-affairs. We respect women more than any other people, and I think we show them more true politeness; we let ’em have their way more, and get their finger into the pie right along, and it’s right we should: but we don’t make fools of ourselves about them, as a general rule. We know they’re awfully nice, and they know we know it; and it’s a perfectly understood thing all round. We’ve been used to each other all our lives, and they’re just as sensible as we are. They like a fellow, when they do like him, about as well as any of ‘em; but they know he’s a man and a brother after all, and he’s got ever so much human nature in him. Well, now, I reckon one of these Dutch chaps, the first time he gets a chance to speak with a pretty girl, thinks he’s got hold of a goddess, and I suppose the girl feels just so about him. Why, it’s natural they should, — they’ve never had any chance to know any better, and your feelings are apt to get the upper hand of you, at such times, anyway. I don’t blame ‘em. One of ’em goes off and shoots himself, and the other one feels as if she was never going to get over it. Well, now, look at the way Miss Lily acted in that little business of hers: one of these girls over here would have had her head completely turned by that adventure; but when she couldn’t see her way exactly clear, she puts the case in your hands, and then stands by what you do, as calm as a clock.”

“It was a very perplexing thing. I did the best I knew,” said Elmore.

“Why, of course you did,” cried Hoskins, “and she sees that as well as you or I do, and she stands by you accordingly. I tell you, that girl’s got a cool head.”

In his soul Elmore ungratefully and inconsistently wished that her heart were not equally cool; but he only said, “Yes, she is a good and sensible girl. I hope the — the — other one is equally resigned.”

“Oh, he’ll get along,” answered Hoskins, with the indifference of one man for the sufferings of another in such matters. We are able to offer a brother very little comfort and scarcely any sympathy in those unhappy affairs of the heart which move women to a pretty compassion for a disappointed sister. A man in love is in no wise interesting to us for that reason; and if he is unfortunate, we hope at the farthest that he will have better luck next time. It is only here and there that a sentimentalist like Elmore stops to pity him; and it is not certain that even he would have sighed over Captain Ehrhardt if he had not been the means of his disappointment. As it was, he came away, feeling that doubtless Ehrhardt had “got along,” and resolved at least to spend no more unavailing regrets upon him.

The time passed very quietly now, and if it had not been for Hoskins, the ladies must have found it dull. He had nothing to do, except as he made himself occupation with his art, and he willingly bestowed on them the leisure which Elmore could not find. They went everywhere with him, and saw the city to advantage through his efforts. Doors, closed to ordinary curiosity, opened to the magic of his card, and he showed a pleasure in using such little privileges as his position gave him for their amusement. He went upon errands for them; he was like a brother, with something more than a brother’s pliability; he came half the time to breakfast with them, and was always welcome to all. He had the gift of extracting comfort from the darkest news about the war; he was a prophet of unfailing good to the Union cause, and in many hours of despondency they willingly submitted to the authority of his greater experience, and took heart again.

“I like your indomitable hopefulness, Hoskins,” said Elmore, on one of those occasions when the consul was turning defeat into victory. “There’s a streak of unconscious poetry in it, just as there is in your taking up the subjects you do. I imagine that, so far as the judgment of the world goes, our fortunes are at the lowest ebb just now—”

“Oh, the world is wrong!” interrupted the consul. “Those London papers are all in the pay of the rebels.”

“I mean that we have no sort of sympathy in Europe; and yet here you are, embodying in your conception of ‘Westward’ the arrogant faith of the days when our destiny seemed universal union and universal dominion. There is something sublime to me in your treatment of such a work at such a time. I think an Italian, for instance, if his country were involved in a life and death struggle like this of ours, would have expressed something of the anxiety and apprehension of the time in it; but this conception of yours is as serenely undisturbed by the facts of the war as if secession had taken place in another planet. There is something Greek in that repose of feeling, triumphant over circumstance. It is like the calm beauty which makes you forget the anguish of the Laocoön.”

“Is that so, Professor?” said Hoskins, blushing modestly, as an artist often must in these days of creative criticism. He seemed to reflect awhile before he added, “Well, I reckon you’re partly right. If we ever did go to smash, it would take us a whole generation to find it out. We have all been raised to put so much dependence on Uncle Sam, that if the old gentleman really did pass in his checks we should only think he was lying low for a new deal. I never happened to think it out before, but I’m pretty sure it’s so.”

“Your work wouldn’t be worth half so much to me if you had ‘thought it out,’” said Elmore. “It’s the unconsciousness of the faith that makes its chief value, as I said before; and there is another thing about it that interests and pleases me still more.”

“What’s that?” asked the sculptor.

“The instinctive way in which you have given the figure an entirely American quality. There was something very familiar to me in it, the first time you showed it, but I’ve only just been able to formulate my impression: I see now that while the spirit of your conception is Greek, you have given it, as you ought, the purest American expression. Your ‘Westward’ is no Hellenic goddess: she is a vivid and self-reliant American girl.”

At these words, Hoskins reddened deeply, and seemed not to know where to look. Mrs. Elmore had the effect of escaping through the door into her own room, and Miss Mayhew ran out upon the balcony. Hoskins followed each in turn with a queer glance, and sat a moment in silence. Then he said, “Well, I reckon I must be going,” and went rather abruptly, without offering to take leave of the ladies.

As soon as he was gone, Lily came in from the balcony, and whipped into Mrs. Elmore’s room, from which she flashed again in swift retreat to her own, and was seen no more; and then Mrs. Elmore came back, with a flushed face, to where her husband sat mystified.

“My dear,” he said gravely, “I’m afraid you’ve hurt Mr. Hoskins’s feelings.”

“Do you think so?” she asked; and then she burst into a wild cry of laughter. “O, Owen, Owen! you will kill me yet!”

“Really,” he replied with dignity, “I don’t see any occasion in what I said for this extraordinary behavior.”

“Of course you don’t, and that’s just what makes the fun of it. So you found something familiar in Mr. Hoskins’s statue from the first, did you?” she asked. “And you didn’t notice anything particular in it?”

“Particular, particular?” he demanded, beginning to lose his patience at this.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, “couldn’t you see that it was Lily, all over again?”

Elmore laughed in turn. “Why, so it is; so it is! That accounts for everything that puzzled me. I don’t wonder my maunderings amused you. It was ridiculous, to be sure! When in the world did she give him the sittings, and how did you manage to keep it from me so well?”

“Owen!” cried his wife, with terrible severity. “You don’t think that Lily would let him put her into it?”

“Why, I supposed — I didn’t know — I don’t see how he could have done it unless—”

“He did it without leave or license,” said Mrs. Elmore. “We saw it all along, but he never ‘let on,’ as he would say, about it, and we never meant to say anything, of course.”

“Then,” replied Elmore, delighted with the fact, “it has been a purely unconscious piece of cerebration.”

“Cerebration!” exclaimed Mrs. Elmore, with more scorn than she knew how to express. “I should think as much!”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Elmore, with the pique of a man who does not care to be quite trampled under foot. “I don’t see that the theory is so very unphilosophical.”

“Oh, not at all!” mocked his wife. “It’s philosophical to the last degree. Be as philosophical as you please, Owen; I shall love you still the same.” She came up to him where he sat, and twisting her arm round his face, patronizingly kissed him on top of the head. Then she released him, and left him with another burst of derision.

X.

After this Elmore had such an uncomfortable feeling that he hated to see Hoskins again, and he was relieved when the sculptor failed to make his usual call, the next evening. He had not been at dinner either, and he did not reappear for several days. Then he merely said that he had been spending the time at Chioggia, with a French painter who was making some studies down there, and they all took up the old routine of their friendly life without embarrassment.

At first it seemed to Elmore that Lily was a little shy of Hoskins, and he thought that she resented his using her charm in his art; but before the evening wore away, he lost this impression. They all got into a long talk about home, and she took her place at the piano and played some of the war-songs that had begun to supersede the old negro melodies. Then she wandered back to them, with fingers that idly drifted over the keys, and ended with “Stop dat knockin’,” in which Hoskins joined with his powerful bass in the recitative “Let me in,” and Elmore himself had half a mind to attempt a part. The sculptor rose as she struck the keys with a final crash, but lingered, as his fashion was when he had something to propose: if he felt pretty sure that the thing would be liked, he brought it in as if he had only happened to remember it. He now drew out a large, square, ceremonious-looking envelope, at which he glanced as if, after all, he was rather surprised to see it, and said, “Oh, by the by, Mrs. Elmore, I wish you’d tell me what to do about this thing. Here’s something that’s come to me in my official capacity, but it isn’t exactly consular business, — if it was I don’t believe I should ask any lady for instructions, — and I don’t know exactly what to do. It’s so long since I corresponded with a princess that I don’t even know how to answer her letter.”

The ladies perhaps feared a hoax of some sort, and would not ask to see the letter; and then Hoskins recognized his failure to play upon their curiosity with a laugh, and gave the letter to Mrs. Elmore. It was an invitation to a mask ball, of which all Venice had begun to speak. A great Russian lady, who had come to spend the winter in the Lagoons, and had taken a whole floor at one of the hotels, had sent out her cards, apparently to all the available people in the city, for the event which was to take place a fortnight later. In the mean time, a thrill of preparation was felt in various quarters, and the ordinary course of life was interrupted in a way that gave some idea of the old times, when Venice was the capital of pleasure, and everything yielded there to the great business of amusement. Mrs. Elmore had found it impossible to get a pair of fine shoes finished until after the ball; a dress which Lily had ordered could not be made; their laundress had given notice that for the present all fluting and quilling was out of the question; one already heard that the chief Venetian perruquier and his assistants were engaged for every moment of the forty-eight hours before the ball, and that whoever had him now must sit up with her hair dressed for two nights at least. Mrs. Elmore had a fanatical faith in these stories; and while agreeing with her husband, as a matter of principle, that mask balls were wrong, and that it was in bad taste for a foreigner to insult the sorrow of Venice by a festivity of the sort at such a time, she had secretly indulged longings which the sight of Hoskins’s invitation rendered almost insupportable. Her longings were not for herself, but for Lily: if she could provide Lily with the experience of a masquerade in Venice, she could overpay all the kindnesses that the Mayhews had ever done her. It was an ambition neither ignoble nor ungenerous, and it was with a really heroic effort that she silenced it in passing the invitation to her husband, and simply saying to Hoskins, “Of course you will go.”

“I don’t know about that,” he answered. “That’s the point I want some advice on. You see this document calls for a lady to fill out the bill.”

“Oh,” returned Mrs. Elmore, “you will find some Americans at the hotels. You can take them.”

“Well, now, I was thinking, Mrs. Elmore, that I should like to take you.”

“Take me!” she echoed tremulously. “What an idea! I’m too old to go to mask balls.”

“You don’t look it,” suggested Hoskins.

“Oh, I couldn’t go,” she sighed. “But it’s very, very kind.”

Hoskins dropped his head, and gave the low chuckle with which he confessed any little bit of humbug. “Well, you or Miss Lily.”

Lily had retired to the other side of the room as soon as the parley about the invitation began. Without asking or seeing, she knew what was in the note, and now she felt it right to make a feint of not knowing what Mrs. Elmore meant when she asked, “What do you say, Lily?”

When the question was duly explained to her, she answered languidly, “I don’t know. Do you think I’d better?”

“I might as well make a clean breast of it, first as last,” said Hoskins. “I thought perhaps Mrs. Elmore might refuse, she’s so stiff about some things,” — here he gave that chuckle of his,— “and so I came prepared for contingencies. It occurred to me that it mightn’t be quite the thing, and so I went round to the Spanish consul and asked him how he thought it would do for me to matronize a young lady if I could get one, and he said he didn’t think it would do at all.” Hoskins let this adverse decision sink into the breasts of his listeners before he added: “But he said that he was going with his wife, and that if we would come along she could matronize us both. I don’t know how it would work,” he concluded impartially.

They all looked at Elmore, who stood holding the princess’s missive in his hand, and darkly forecasting the chances of consent and denial. At the first suggestion of the matter, a reckless hope that this ball might bring Ehrhardt above their horizon again sprang up in his heart, and became a desperate fear when the whole responsibility of action was, as usual, left with him. He stood, feeling that Hoskins had used him very ill.

“I suppose,” began Mrs. Elmore very thoughtfully, “that this will be something quite in the style of the old masquerades under the Republic.”

“Regular Ridotto business, the Spanish consul says,” answered Hoskins.

“It might be very useful to you, Owen,” she resumed, “in an historical way, if Lily were to go and take notes of everything; so that when you came to that period you could describe its corruptions intelligently.”

Elmore laughed. “I never thought of that, my dear,” he said, returning the invitation to Hoskins. “Your historical sense has been awakened late, but it promises to be very active. Lily had better go, by all means, and I shall depend upon her coming home with very full notes upon her dance-list.”

They laughed at the professor’s sarcasm, and Hoskins, having undertaken to see that the last claims of etiquette were satisfied by getting an invitation sent to Miss Mayhew through the Spanish consul, went off, and left the ladies to the discussion of ways and means. Mrs. Elmore said that of course it was now too late to hope to get anything done, and then set herself to devise the character that Lily would have appeared in if there had been time to get her ready, or if all the work-people had not been so busy that it was merely frantic to think of anything. She first patriotically considered her as Columbia, with the customary drapery of stars and stripes and the cap of liberty. But while holding that she would have looked very pretty in the dress, Mrs. Elmore decided that it would have been too hackneyed; and besides, everybody would have known instantly who it was.

“Why not have had her go in the character of Mr. Hoskins’s ‘Westward’?” suggested Elmore, with lazy irony.

“The very thing!” cried his wife. “Owen, you deserve great credit for thinking of that; no one else would have done it! No one will dream what it means, and it will be great fun, letting them make it out. We must keep it a dead secret from Mr. Hoskins, and let her surprise him with it when he comes for her that evening. It will be a very pretty way of returning his compliment, and it will be a sort of delicate acknowledgement of his kindness in asking her, and in so many other ways. Yes, you’ve hit it exactly, Owen; she shall go as ‘Westward.’”

“Go?” echoed Elmore, who had with difficulty realized the rapid change of tense. “I thought you said you couldn’t get her ready.”

“We must manage somehow,” replied Mrs. Elmore. And somehow a shoemaker for the sandals, a seamstress for the delicate flowing draperies, a hair-dresser for the adjustment of the young girl’s rebellious abundance of hair beneath the star-lit fillet, were actually found, — with the help of Hoskins, as usual, though he was not suffered to know anything of the character to whose make-up he contributed. The perruquier, a personage of lordly address naturally, and of a dignity heightened by the demand in which he found himself came early in the morning, and was received by Elmore with a self-possession that ill-comported with the solemnity of the occasion. “Sit down,” said Elmore easily, pushing him a chair. “The ladies will be here presently.”

“But I have no time to sit down, signore!” replied the artist, with an imperious bow, “and the ladies must be here instantly.”

Mrs. Elmore always said that if she had not heard this conversation, and hurried in at once, the perruquier would have left them at that point. But she contrived to appease him by the manifestation of an intelligent sympathy; she made Lily leave her breakfast untasted, and submit her beautiful head to the touch of this man, with whom it was but a head of hair and nothing more; and in an hour the work was done. The artist whisked away the cloth which covered her shoulders, and crying, “Behold!” bowed splendidly to the spectators, and without waiting for criticism or suggestion, took his napoleon and went his way. All that day the work of his skill was sacredly guarded, and the custodian of the treasure went about with her head on her shoulders, as if it had been temporarily placed in her keeping, and were something she was not at all used to taking care of. More than once Mrs. Elmore had to warn her against sinister accidents. “Remember, Lily,” she said, “that if anything did happen, nothing could be done to save you!” In spite of himself Elmore shared these anxieties, and in the depths of his wonted studies he found himself pursued and harassed by vague apprehensions, which upon analysis proved to be fears for Miss Lily’s hair. It was a great moment when the robe came home — rather late — from the dressmaker’s, and was put on over Lily’s head; but from this thrilling rite Elmore was of course excluded, and only knew of it afterwards by hearsay. He did not see her till she came out just before Hoskins arrived to fetch her away, when she appeared radiantly perfect in her dress, and in the air with which she meant to carry it off. At Mrs. Elmore’s direction she paraded dazzlingly up and down the room a number of times, bending over to see how her dress hung, as she walked. Mrs. Elmore, with her head on one side, scrutinized her in every detail, and Elmore regarded her young beauty and delight with a pride as innocent as her own. A dim regret, evaporating in a long sigh, which made the others laugh, recalled him to himself, as the bell rang and Hoskins appeared. He was received in a preconcerted silence, and he looked from one to the other with his queer, knowing smile, and took in the whole affair without a word.

“Isn’t it a pretty idea?” said Mrs. Elmore. “Studied from an antique bas-relief, or just the same as an antique, — full of the anguish and the repose of the Laocoön.”

“Mrs. Elmore,” said the sculptor, “you’re too many for me. I reckon the procession had better start before I make a fool of myself. Well!” This was all Hoskins could say; but it sufficed. The ladies declared afterwards that if he had added a word more, it would have spoiled it. They had expected him to go to the ball in the character of a miner perhaps, or in that of a trapper of the great plains; but he had chosen to appear more naturally as a courtier of the time of Louis XIV. “When you go in for a disguise,” he explained, “you can’t make it too complete; and I consider that this limp of mine adds the last touch.”

“It’s no use to sit up for them,” Mrs. Elmore said, when she and her husband had come in from calling good wishes and last instructions after them from the balcony, as their gondola pushed away. “We sha’n’t see anything more of them till morning. Now this,” she added, “is something like the gayety that people at home are always fancying in Europe. Why, I can remember when I used to imagine that American tourists figured brilliantly in salons and conversazioni, and spent their time in masking and throwing confetti in carnival, and going to balls and opera. I didn’t know what American tourists were, then, and how dismally they moped about in hotels and galleries and churches. And I didn’t know how stupid Europe was socially, — how perfectly dead and buried it was, especially for young people. It would be fun if things happened so that Lily never found it out! I don’t think two offers already, — or three, if you count Rose-Black, — are very bad for any girl; and now this ball, coming right on top of it, where she will see hundreds of handsome officers! Well, she’ll never miss Patmos, at this rate, will she?”

“Perhaps she had better never have left Patmos,” suggested Elmore gravely.

“I don’t know what you mean, Owen,” said his wife, as if hurt.

“I mean that it’s a great pity she should give herself up to the same frivolous amusements here that she had there. The only good that Europe can do American girls who travel here is to keep them in total exile from what they call a good time, — from parties and attentions and flirtations; to force them, through the hard discipline of social deprivation, to take some interest in the things that make for civilization, — in history, in art, in humanity.”

“Now, there I differ with you, Owen. I think American girls are the nicest girls in the world, just as they are. And I don’t see any harm in the things you think are so awful. You’ve lived so long here among your manuscripts that you’ve forgotten there is any such time as the present. If you are getting so Europeanized, I think the sooner we go home the better.”

“I getting Europeanized!” began Elmore indignantly.

“Yes, Europeanized! And I don’t want you to be so severe with Lily, Owen. The child stands in terror of you now; and if you keep on in this way, she can’t draw a natural breath in the house.”

There is always something flattering, at first, to a gentle and peaceable man in the notion of being terrible to any one; Elmore melted at these words, and at the fear that he might have been, in some way that he could not think of, really harsh.

“I should be very sorry to distress her,” he began.

“Well, you haven’t distressed her yet,” his wife relented. “Only you must be careful not to. She was going to be very circumspect, Owen, on your account, for she really appreciates the interest you take in her, and I think she sees that it won’t do to be at all free with strangers over here. This ball will be a great education for Lily, — a great education. I’m going to commence a letter to Sue about her costume, and all that, and leave it open to finish up when Lily gets home.”

When she went to bed, she did not sleep till after the time when the girl ought to have come; and when she awoke to a late breakfast, Lily had still not returned. By eleven o’clock she and Elmore had passed the stage of accusing themselves, and then of accusing each other, for allowing Lily to go in the way they had; and had come to the question of what they had better do, and whether it was practicable to send to the Spanish consulate and ask what had become of her. They had resigned themselves to waiting for one half-hour longer, when they heard her voice at the water-gate, gayly forbidding Hoskins to come up; and running out upon the balcony, Mrs. Elmore had a glimpse of the courtier, very tawdry by daylight, re-entering his gondola, and had only time to turn about when Lily burst laughing into the room.

“Oh, don’t look at me, Professor Elmore!” she cried. “I’m literally danced to rags!”

Her dress and hair were splashed with drippings from the wax candles; she was wildly decorated with favors from the German, and one of these had been used to pin up a rent which the spur of a hussar had made in her robe; her hair had escaped from its fastenings during the night, and in putting it back she had broken the star in her fillet; it was now kept in place by a bit of black-and-yellow cord which an officer had lent her. “He said he should claim it of me the first time we met,” she exclaimed excitedly. “Why, Professor Elmore,” she implored with a laugh, “don’t look at me so!”

Grief and indignation were in his heart. “You look like the spectre of last night,” he said with dreamy severity, and as if he saw her merely as a vision.

“Why, that’s the way I feel!” she answered; and with a reproachful “Owen!” his wife followed her flight to her room.

XI.

Elmore went out for a long walk, from which he returned disconsolate at dinner. He was one of those people, common enough in our Puritan civilization, who would rather forego any pleasure than incur the reaction which must follow with all the keenness of remorse; and he always mechanically pitied (for the operation was not a rational one) such unhappy persons as he saw enjoying themselves. But he had not meant to add bitterness to the anguish which Lily would necessarily feel in retrospect of the night’s gayety; he had not known that he was recognizing, by those unsparing words of his, the nervous misgivings in the girl’s heart. He scarcely dared ask, as he sat down at table with Mrs. Elmore alone, whether Lily were asleep.

“Asleep?” she echoed, in a low tone of mystery. “I hope so.”

“Celia, Celia!” he cried in despair. “What shall I do? I feel terribly at what I said to her.”

“Sh! At what you said to her? Oh yes! Yes, that was cruel. But there is so much else, poor child, that I had forgotten that.”

He let his plate of soup stand untasted. “Why — why,” he faltered, “didn’t she enjoy herself?” And a historian of Venice, whose mind should have been wholly engaged in philosophizing the republic’s difficult past, hung abjectly upon the question whether a young girl had or had not had a good time at a ball.

“Yes. Oh, yes! She enjoyed herself — if that’s all you require,” replied his wife. “Of course she wouldn’t have stayed so late if she hadn’t enjoyed herself.”

“No,” he said in a tone which he tried to make leading; but his wife refused to be led by indirect methods. She ate her soup, but in a manner to carry increasing bitterness to Elmore with every spoonful.

“Come, Celia!” he cried at last, “tell me what has happened. You know how wretched this makes me. Tell me it, whatever it is. Of course, I must know it in the end. Are there any new complications?”

“No new complications,” said his wife, as if resenting the word. “But you make such a bugbear of the least little matter that there’s no encouragement to tell you anything.”

“Excuse me,” he retorted, “I haven’t made a bugbear of this.”

“You haven’t had the opportunity.” This was so grossly unjust that Elmore merely shrugged his shoulders and remained silent. When it finally appeared that he was not going to ask anything more, his wife added: “If you could listen, like any one else, and not interrupt with remarks that distort all one’s ideas” — Then, as he persisted in his silence, she relented still further. “Why, of course, as you say, you will have to know it in the end. But I can tell you, to begin with, Owen, that it’s nothing you can do anything about, or take hold of in any way. Whatever it is, it’s done and over; so it needn’t distress you at all.”

“Ah, I’ve known some things done and over that distressed me a great deal,” he suggested.

“The princess wasn’t so very young, after all,” said Mrs. Elmore, as if this had been the point in dispute, “but very fat and jolly, and very kind. She wasn’t in costume; but there was a young countess with her, helping receive, who appeared as Night, — black tulle, you know, with silver stars. The princess seemed to take a great fancy to Lily, — the Russians always have sympathized with us in the war, — and all the time she wasn’t dancing, the princess kept her by her, holding her hand and patting it. The officers — hundreds of them, in their white uniforms and those magnificent hussar dresses — were very obsequious to the princess, and Lily had only too many partners. She says you can’t imagine how splendid the scene was, with all those different costumes, and the rooms a perfect blaze of waxlights; the windows were battened, so that you couldn’t tell when it came daylight, and she hadn’t any idea how the time was passing. They were not all in masks; and there didn’t seem to be any regular hour for unmasking. She can’t tell just when the supper was, but she thinks it must have been towards morning. She says Mr. Hoskins got on capitally, and everybody seemed to like him, he was so jolly and good-natured; and when they found out that he had been wounded in the war, they made quite a belle of him, as he called it. The princess made a point of introducing all the officers to Lily that came up after they unmasked. They paid her the greatest attention, and you can easily see that she was the prettiest girl there.”

“I can believe that without seeing,” said Elmore, with magnanimous pride in the loveliness that had made him so much trouble. “Well?”

“Well, they couldn’t any of them get the hang, as Mr. Hoskins said, of the character she came in, for a good while; but when they did, they thought it was the best idea there: and it was all your idea, Owen,” said Mrs. Elmore, in accents of such tender pride that he knew she must now be approaching the difficult passage of her narration. “It was so perfectly new and unconventional. She got on very well speaking Italian with the officers, for she knew as much of it as they did.”

Here Mrs. Elmore paused, and glanced hesitatingly at her husband. “They only made one little mistake; but that was at the beginning, and they soon got over it.” Elmore suffered, but he did not ask what it was, and his wife went on with smooth caution. “Lily thought it was just as it is at home, and she mustn’t dance with any one unless they had been introduced. So after the first dance with the Spanish consul, as her escort, a young officer came up and asked her; and she refused, for she thought it was a great piece of presumption. Afterwards the princess told her she could dance with any one, introduced or not, and so she did; and pretty soon she saw this first officer looking at her very angrily, and going about speaking to others and glancing toward her. She felt badly about it, when she saw how it was; and she got Mr. Hoskins to go and speak to him. Mr. Hoskins asked him if he spoke English, and the officer said No; and it seems that he didn’t know Italian either, and Mr. Hoskins tried him in Spanish, — he picked up a little in New Mexico, — but the officer didn’t understand it; and all at once it occurred to Mr. Hoskins to say, ‘Parlez-vous Français?’ and says the officer instantly, ‘Oui, monsieur.’”

“Of course the man knew French. He ought to have tried him with that in the beginning. What did Hoskins say then?” asked Elmore impatiently.

“He didn’t say anything: that was all the French he knew.”

Elmore broke into a cry of laughter, and laughed on and on with the wild excess of a sad man when once he unpacks his heart in that way. His wife did not, perhaps, feel the absurdity as keenly as he, but she gladly laughed with him, for it smoothed her way to have him in this humor. “Mr. Hoskins just took him by the arm, and said, ‘Here! you come along with me,’ and led him up to the princess, where Lily was sitting; and when the princess had explained to him, Lily rose, and mustered up enough French to say, ‘Je vous prie, monsieur, de danser avec moi,’ and after that they were the greatest friends.”

“That was very pretty in her; it was sovereignly gracious,” said Elmore.

“Oh, if an American girl is left to manage for herself she can always manage!” cried Mrs. Elmore.

“Well, and what else?” asked her husband.

“Oh, I don’t know that it amounts to anything,” said Mrs. Elmore; but she did not delay further.

It appeared from what she went on to say that in the German, which began not long after midnight, there was a figure fancifully called the symphony, in which musical toys were distributed among the dancers in pairs; the possessor of a small pandean pipe, or tin horn, went about sounding it, till he found some lady similarly equipped, when he demanded her in the dance. In this way a tall mask, to whom a penny trumpet had fallen, was stalking to and fro among the waltzers, blowing the silly plaything with a disgusted air, when Lily, all unconscious of him, where she sat with her hand in that of her faithful princess, breathed a responsive note. The mask was instantly at her side, and she was whirling away in the waltz. She tried to make him out, but she had already danced with so many people that she was unable to decide whether she had seen this mask before. He was not disguised except by the little visor of black silk, coming down to the point of his nose; his blond whiskers escaped at either side, and his blond moustache swept beneath, like the whiskers and moustaches of fifty other officers present, and he did not speak. This was a permissible caprice of his, but if she were resolved to make him speak, this also was a permissible caprice. She made a whole turn of the room in studying up the Italian sentence with which she assailed him: “Perdoni, Maschera; ma cosa ha detto? Non ho ben inteso.”

“Speak English, Mask,” came the reply. “I did not say anything.” It came certainly with a German accent, and with a foreigner’s deliberation; but it came at once, and clearly.

The English astonished her, and somehow it daunted her, for the mask spoke very gravely; but she would not let him imagine that he had put her down, and she rejoined laughingly, “Oh, I knew that you hadn’t spoken, but I thought I would make you.”

“You think you can make one do what you will?” asked the mask.

“Oh, no. I don’t think I could make you tell me who you are, though I should like to make you.”

“And why should you wish to know me? If you met me in Piazza, you would not recognize my salutation.”

“How do you know that?” demanded Lily. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Oh, it is understood yet already,” answered the mask. “Your compatriot, with whom you live, wishes to be well seen by the Italians, and he would not let you bow to an Austrian.”

“That is not so,” exclaimed Lily indignantly.

“Professor Elmore wouldn’t be so mean; and if he would, I shouldn’t.” She was frightened, but she felt her spirit rising, too. “You seem to know so well who I am: do you think it is fair for you to keep me in ignorance?”

“I cannot remain masked without your leave. Shall I unmask? Do you insist?”

“Oh, no,” she replied. “You will have to unmask at supper, and then I shall see you. I’m not impatient. I prefer to keep you for a mystery.”

“You will be a mystery to me even when you unmask,” replied the mask gravely.

Lily was ill at ease, and she gave a little, unsuccessful laugh. “You seem to take the mystery very coolly,” she said in default of anything else.

“I have studied the American manner,” replied the mask. “In America they take everything coolly: life and death, love and hate — all things.”

“How do you know that? You have never been in America.”

“That is not necessary, if the Americans come here to show us.”

“They are not true Americans, if they show you that,” cried the girl.

“No?”

“But I see that you are only amusing yourself.”

“And have you never amused yourself with me?”

“How could I,” she demanded, “if I never saw you before?”

“But are you sure of that?” She did not answer, for in this masquerade banter she had somehow been growing unhappy. “Shall I prove to you that you have seen me before? You dare not let me unmask.”

“Oh, I can wait till supper. I shall know then that I have never seen you before. I forbid you to unmask till supper! Will you obey?” she cried anxiously.

“I have obeyed in harder things,” replied the mask.

She refused to recognize anything but meaningless badinage in his words. “Oh, as a soldier, yes! — you must be used to obeying orders.” He did not reply, and she added, releasing her hand and slipping it into his arm, “I am tired now; will you take me back to the princess?”

He led her silently to her place, and left her with a profound bow.

“Now,” said the princess, “they shall give you a little time to breathe. I will not let them make you dance every minute. They are indiscreet. You shall not take any of their musical instruments, and so you can fairly escape till supper.”

“Thank you,” said Lily absently, “that will be the best way”; and she sat languidly watching the dancers. A young naval officer who spoke English ran across the floor to her.

“Come,” he cried, “I shall have twenty duels on my hands if I let you rest here, when there are so many who wish to dance with you.” He threw a pipe into her lap, and at the same moment a pipe sounded from the other side of the room.

“This is a conspiracy!” exclaimed the girl. “I will not have it! I am not going to dance any more.” She put the pipe back into his hands; he placed it to his lips, and sounded it several times, and then dropped it into her lap again with a laugh, and vanished in the crowd.

“That little fellow is a rogue,” said the princess. “But he is not so bad as some of them. Monsieur,” she cried in French to the fair-whiskered, tall mask who had already presented himself before Lily, “I will not permit it, if it is for a trick. You must unmask. I will dispense mademoiselle from dancing with you.”

The mask did not reply, but turned his eyes upon Lily with an appeal which the holes of the visor seemed to intensify. “It is a promise,” she said to the princess, rising in a sort of fascination. “I have forbidden him to unmask before supper.”

“Oh, very well,” answered the princess, “if that is the case. But make him bring you back soon: it is almost time.”

“Did you hear, Mask?” asked the girl, as they waltzed away. “I will only make two turns of the room with you.”

“Perdoni?”

“This is too bad!” she exclaimed. “I will not be trifled with in this way. Either speak English, or unmask at once.”

The mask again answered in Italian, with a repeated apology for not understanding. “You understand very well,” retorted Lily, now really indignant, “and you know that this passes a jest.”

“Can you speak German?” asked the mask in that tongue.

“Yes, a little, but I do not choose to speak it. If you have anything to say to me you can say it in English.”

“I cannot understand English,” replied the mask, still in German, and now Lily thought the voice seemed changed; but she clung to her belief that it was some hoax played at her expense, and she continued her efforts to make him answer her in English. The two turns round the room had stretched to half a dozen in this futile task, but she felt herself powerless to leave the mask, who for his part betrayed signs of embarrassment, as if he had undertaken a ruse of which he repented. A confused movement in the crowd and a sudden cessation of the music recalled her to herself, and she now took her partner’s arm and hurried with him toward the place where she had left the princess. But the princess had already gone into the supper-room, and she had no other recourse than to follow with the stranger.

As they entered the supper-room she removed her little visor, and she felt, rather than saw, the mask put up his hand and lift away his own: he turned his head, and looked down upon her with the face of a man she had never seen before.

“Ah, you are there!” she heard the princess’s voice calling to her from one of the tables. “How tired you look! Here — here! I will make you drink this glass of wine.”

The officer who brought her the wine gave her his arm and led her to the princess, and the late mask mixed with the two-score other tall blond officers.

The night which stretched so far into the day ended at last, and she followed Hoskins down to their gondola. He entered the boat first, to give her his hand in stepping from the riva; at the same moment she involuntarily turned at the closing of the door behind her, and found at her side the tall blond mask, or one of the masks, if there were two who had danced with her. He caught her hand suddenly to his lips, and kissed it.

“Adieu — forgive!” he murmured in English, and then vanished indoors again.

“Owen,” said Mrs. Elmore dramatically at the end of her narration, “who do you think it could have been?”

“I have no doubt as to who it was, Celia,” replied Elmore, with a heat evidently quite unexpected to his wife, “and if Lily has not been seriously annoyed by the matter, I am glad that it has happened. I have had my regrets — my doubts — whether I did not dismiss that man’s pretensions too curtly, too unkindly. But I am convinced now that we did exactly right, and that she was wise never to bestow another thought upon him. A man capable of contriving a petty persecution of this sort — of pursuing a young girl who had rejected him in this shameless fashion, — is no gentleman.”

“It was a persecution,” said Mrs. Elmore, with a dazed air, as if this view of the case had not occurred to her.

“A miserable, unworthy persecution!” repeated her husband.

“Yes.”

“And we are well rid of him. He has relieved me by this last performance, immensely; and I trust that if Lily had any secret lingering regrets, he has given her a final lesson. Though I must say, in justice to her, poor girl, she didn’t seem to need it.”

Mrs. Elmore listened with a strange abeyance; she looked beaten and bewildered, while he vehemently uttered these words. She could not meet his eyes, with her consciousness of having her intended romance thrown back upon her hands; and he seemed in nowise eager to meet hers, for whatever consciousness of his own. “Well, it isn’t certain that he was the one, after all,” she said.

XII.

Long after the ball Lily seemed to Elmore’s eye not to have recovered her former tone. He thought she went about languidly, and that she was fitful and dreamy, breaking from moods of unwonted abstraction in bursts of gayety as unnatural. She did not talk much of the ball; he could not be sure that she ever recurred to it of her own motion. Hoskins continued to come a great deal to the house, and she often talked with him for a whole evening; Elmore fancied she was very serious in these talks.

He wondered if Lily avoided him, or whether this was only an illusion of his; but in any case, he was glad that the girl seemed to find so much comfort in Hoskins’s company, and when it occurred to him he always said something to encourage his visits. His wife was singularly quiescent at this time, as if, having accomplished all she wished in Lily’s presence at the princess’s ball, she was willing to rest for a while from further social endeavor. Life was falling into the dull routine again, and after the past shocks his nerves were gratefully clothing themselves in the old habits of tranquillity once more, when one day a letter came from the overseers of Patmos University, offering him the presidency of that institution on condition of his early return. The board had in view certain changes, intended to bring the university abreast with the times, which they hoped would meet his approval.

Among these was a modification of the name, which was hereafter to be Patmos University and Military Institute. The board not only believed that popular feeling demanded the introduction of military drill into the college, but they felt that a college which had been closed at the beginning of the Rebellion, through the dedication of its president and nearly all its students to the war, could in no way so gracefully recognize this proud fact of its history as by hereafter making war one of the arts which it taught. The board explained that of course Mr. Elmore would not be expected to take charge of this branch of instruction at once. A competent military assistant would be provided, and continued under him as long as he should deem his services essential. The letter closed with a cordial expression of the desire of Elmore’s old friends to have him once more in their midst, at the close of labors which they were sure would do credit to the good old university and to the whole city of Patmos.

Elmore read this letter at breakfast, and silently handed it to his wife: they were alone, for Lily, as now often happened, had not yet risen. “Well?” he said, when she had read it in her turn. She gave it back to him with a look in her dimmed eyes which he could not mistake. “I see there is no doubt of your feeling, Celia,” he added.

“I don’t wish to urge you,” she replied, “but yes, I should like to go back. Yes, I am homesick. I have been afraid of it before, but this chance of returning makes it certain.”

“And you see nothing ridiculous in my taking the presidency of a military institute?”

“They say expressly that they don’t expect you to give instruction in that branch.”

“No, not immediately, it seems,” he said, with his pensive irony. “And the history?”

“Haven’t you almost got notes enough?”

Elmore laughed sadly. “I have been here two years. It would take me twenty years to write such a history of Venice as I ought not to be ashamed to write; it would take me five years to scamp it as I thought of doing. Oh, I dare say I had better go back. I have neither the time nor the money to give to a work I never was fit for, — of whose magnitude even I was unable to conceive.”

“Don’t say that!” cried his wife, with the old sympathy. “You will write it yet, I know you will. I would rather spend all my days in this — watery mausoleum than have you talk so, Owen!”

“Thank you, my dear; but the work won’t be lost even if I give it up at this point. I can do something with my material, I suppose. And you know that if I didn’t wish to give up my project I couldn’t. It’s a sign of my unfitness for it that I’m able to abandon it. The man who is born to write the history of Venice will have no volition in the matter: he cannot leave it, and he will not die till he has finished it.” He feebly crushed a bit of bread in his fingers as he ended with this burst of feeling, and he shook his head in sad negation to his wife’s tender protest,— “Oh, you will come back some day to finish it!”

“No one ever comes back to finish a history of Venice,” he said.

“Oh, yes, you will,” she returned. “But you need the rest from this kind of work, now, just as you needed rest from your college work before. You need a change of standpoint, — and the American standpoint will be the very thing for you.”

“Perhaps so, perhaps so,” he admitted. “At any rate, this is a handsome offer, and most kindly made, Celia. It’s a great compliment. I didn’t suppose they valued me so much.”

“Of course they valued you, and they will be very glad to get you. I call it merely letting the historic material ripen in your mind, or else I shouldn’t let you accept. And I shall be glad to go home, Owen, on Lily’s account. The child is getting no good here: she’s drooping.”

“Drooping?”

“Yes. Don’t you see how she mopes about?”

“I’m afraid — that — I have — noticed.”

He was going to ask why she was drooping; but he could not. He said, recurring to the letter of the overseers, “So Patmos is a city.”

“Of course it is by this time,” said his wife, “with all that prosperity!”

Now that they were determined to go, their little preparations for return were soon made; and a week after Elmore had written to accept the offer of the overseers, they were ready to follow his letter home. Their decision was a blow to Hoskins under which he visibly suffered; and they did not realize till then in what fond and affectionate friendship he held them. He now frankly spent his whole time with them; he disconsolately helped them pack, and he did all that a consul can do to secure free entry for some objects of Venice that they wished to get in without payment of duties at New York.

He said a dozen times, “I don’t know what I will do when you’re gone”; and toward the last he alarmed them for his own interests by beginning to say, “Well, I don’t see but what I will have to go along.”

The last night but one Lily felt it her duty to talk to him very seriously about his future and what he owed to it. She told him that he must stay in Italy till he could bring home something that would honor the great, precious, suffering country for which he had fought so nobly, and which they all loved. She made the tears come into her eyes as she spoke, and when she said that she should always be proud to be associated with one of his works, Hoskins’s voice was quite husky in replying: “Is that the way you feel about it?” He went away promising to remain at least till he finished his bas-relief of Westward, and his figure of the Pacific Slope; and the next morning he sent around by a facchino a note to Lily.

She ran it through in the presence of the Elmores, before whom she received it, and then, with a cry of “I think Mr. Hoskins is too bad!” she threw it into Mrs. Elmore’s lap, and, catching her handkerchief to her eyes, she broke into tears and went out of the room. The note read: —

Dear Miss Lily, — Your kind interest in me gives me courage to say something that will very likely make me hateful to you forevermore. But I have got to say it, and you have got to know it; and it’s all the worse for me if you have never suspected it. I want to give my whole life to you, wherever and however you will have it. With you by my side, I feel as if I could really do something that you would not be ashamed of in sculpture, and I believe that I could make you happy. I suppose I believe this because I love you very dearly, and I know the chances are that you will not think this is reason enough. But I would take one chance in a million, and be only too glad of it. I hope it will not worry you to read this: as I said before, I had to tell you. Perhaps it won’t be altogether a surprise. I might go on, but I suppose that until I hear from you I had better give you as little of my eloquence as possible.

Clay Hoskins.

“Well, upon my word,” said Elmore, to whom his wife had transferred the letter, “this is very indelicate of Hoskins! I must say, I expected something better of him.” He looked at the note with a face of disgust.

“I don’t know why you had a right to expect anything better of him, as you call it,” retorted his wife. “It’s perfectly natural.”

“Natural!” cried Elmore. “To put this upon us at the last moment, when he knows how much trouble I’ve — —”

Lily re-entered the room as precipitately as she had left it, and saved him from betraying himself as to the extent of his confidences to Hoskins. “Professor Elmore,” she said, bending her reddened eyes upon him, “I want you to answer this letter for me; and I don’t want you to write as you — I mean, don’t make it so cutting — so — so — Why, I like Mr. Hoskins! He’s been so kind! And if you said anything to wound his feelings—”

“I shall not do that, you may be sure; because, for one reason, I shall say nothing at all to him,” replied Elmore.

“You won’t write to him?” she gasped.

“No.”

“Why, what shall I do-o-o-o?” demanded Lily, prolonging the syllable in a burst of grief and astonishment.

“I don’t know,” answered Elmore.

“Owen,” cried his wife, interfering for the first time, in response to the look of appeal that Lily turned upon her, “you must write!”

“Celia,” he retorted boldly, “I won’t write. I have a genuine regard for Hoskins; I respect him, and I am very grateful to him for all his kindness to you. He has been like a brother to you both.”

“Why, of course,” interrupted Lily, “I never thought of him as anything but a brother.”

“And though I must say I think it would have been more thoughtful and — and — more considerate in him not to do this—”

“We did everything we could to fight him off from it,” interrupted Mrs. Elmore, “both of us. We saw that it was coming, and we tried to stop it. But nothing would help. Perhaps, as he says, he did have to do it.”

“I didn’t dream of his — having any such — idea,” said Elmore. “I felt so perfectly safe in his coming; I trusted everything to him.”

“I suppose you thought his wanting to come was all unconscious cerebration,” said his wife disdainfully. “Well, now you see it wasn’t.”

“Yes; but it’s too late now to help it; and though I think he ought to have spared us this, if he thought there was no hope for him, still I can’t bring myself to inflict pain upon him, and the long and the short of it is, I won’t.”

“But how is he to be answered?”

“I don’t know. You can answer him.”

“I could never do it in the world!”

“I own it’s difficult,” said Elmore coldly.

“Oh, I will answer him — I will answer him,” cried Lily, “rather than have any trouble about it. Here, — here,” she said, reaching blindly for pen and paper, as she seated herself at Elmore’s desk, “give me the ink, quick. Oh, dear! What shall I say? What date is it? — the 25th? And it doesn’t matter about the day of the week. ‘Dear Mr. Hoskins — Dear Mr. Hoskins — Dear Mr. Hosk’ — Ought you to put Clay Hoskins, Esq., at the top or the bottom — or not at all, when you’ve said Dear Mr. Hoskins? Esquire seems so cold, anyway, and I won’t put it! ‘Dear Mr. Hoskins’ — Professor Elmore!” she implored reproachfully, “tell me what to say!”

“That would be equivalent to writing the letter,” he began.

“Well, write it, then,” she said, throwing down the pen. “I don’t ask you to dictate it. Write it, — write anything, — just in pencil, you know; that won’t commit you to anything; they say a thing in pencil isn’t legal, — and I’ll copy it out in the first person.”

“Owen,” said his wife, “you shall not refuse! It’s inhuman, it’s inhospitable, when Lily wants you to, so! Why, I never heard of such a thing!”

Elmore desperately caught up the sheet of paper on which Lily had written “Dear Mr. Hoskins,” and groaning out “Well, well!” he added, —

I have your letter. Come to the station to-morrow and say good-by to her whom you will yet live to thank for remaining only

Your friend,

Elizabeth Mayhew.

“There! there, that will do beautifully — beautifully! Oh, thank you, Professor Elmore, ever and ever so much! That will save his feelings, and do everything,” said Lily, sitting down again to copy it; while Mrs. Elmore, looking over her shoulder, mingled her hysterical excitement with the girl’s, and helped her out by sealing the note when it was finished and directed.

It accomplished at least one purpose intended. It kept Hoskins away till the final moment, and it brought him to the station for their adieux just before their train started. A consciousness of the absurdity of his part gave his face a humorously rueful cast. But he came pluckily to the mark. He marched straight up to the girl. “It’s all right, Miss Lily,” he said, and offered her his hand, which she had a strong impulse to cry over. Then he turned to Mrs. Elmore, and while he held her hand in his right, he placed his left affectionately on Elmore’s shoulder, and, looking at Lily, he said, “You ought to get Miss Lily to help you out with your history, Professor; she has a very good style, — quite a literary style, I should have said, if I hadn’t known it was hers. I don’t like her subjects, though.” They broke into a forlorn laugh together; he wrung their hands once more, without a word, and, without looking back, limped out of the waiting-room and out of their lives.

They did not know that this was really the last of Hoskins, — one never knows that any parting is the last, — and in their inability to conceive of a serious passion in him, they quickly consoled themselves for what he might suffer. They knew how kindly, how tenderly even, they felt towards him, and by that juggle with the emotions which we all practise at times, they found comfort for him in the fact. Another interest, another figure, began to occupy the morbid fancy of Elmore, and as they approached Peschiera his expectation became intense. There was no reason why it should exist; it would be by the thousandth chance, even if Ehrhardt were still there, that they should meet him at the railroad station, and there were a thousand chances that he was no longer in Peschiera. He could see that his wife and Lily were restive too: as the train drew into the station they nodded to each other, and pointed out of the window, as if to identify the spot where Lily had first noticed him; they laughed nervously, and it seemed to Elmore that he could not endure their laughter.

During that long wait which the train used to make in the old Austrian times at Peschiera, while the police authorities viséd the passports of those about to cross the frontier, Elmore continued perpetually alert. He was aware that he should not know Ehrhardt if he met him; but he should know that he was present from the looks of Lily and Mrs. Elmore, and he watched them. They dined well in waiting, while he impatiently trifled with the food, and ate next to nothing; and they calmly returned to their places in the train, to which he remounted after a last despairing glance around the platform in a passion of disappointment. The old longing not to be left so wholly to the effect of what he had done possessed him to the exclusion of all other sensations, and as the train moved away from the station he fell back against the cushions of the carriage, sick that he should never even have looked on the face of the man in whose destiny he had played so fatal a part.

XIII.

In America, life soon settled into form about the daily duties of Elmore’s place, and the daily pleasures and cares which his wife assumed as a leader in Patmos society. Their sojourn abroad conferred its distinction; the day came when they regarded it as a brilliant episode, and it was only by fitful glimpses that they recognized its essential dulness. After they had been home a year or two, Elmore published his Story of Venice in the Lives of her Heroes, which fell into a ready oblivion; he paid all the expenses of the book, and was puzzled that, in spite of this, the final settlement should still bring him in debt to his publishers. He did not understand, but he submitted; and he accepted the failure of his book very meekly. If he could have chosen, he would have preferred that the Saturday Review, which alone noticed it in London with three lines of exquisite slight, should have passed it in silence. But after all, he felt that the book deserved no better fate. He always spoke of it as unphilosophized and incomplete, without any just claim to being.

Lily had returned to her sister’s household, but though she came home in the heyday of her young beauty, she failed somehow to take up the story of her life just where she had left it in Patmos. On the way home she had refused an offer in London, and shortly after her arrival in America she received a letter from a young gentleman whom she had casually seen in Geneva, and who had found exile insupportable since parting with her, and was ready to return to his native land at her bidding; but she said nothing of these proposals till long afterwards to Professor Elmore, who, she said, had suffered enough from her offers. She went to all the parties and picnics, and had abundant opportunities of flirtation and marriage; but she neither flirted nor married. She seemed to have greatly sobered; and the sound sense which she had always shown became more and more qualified with a thoughtful sweetness. At first, the relation between her and the Elmores lost something of its intimacy; but when, after several years, her health gave way, a familiarity, even kinder than before, grew up. She used to like to come to them, and talk and laugh fondly over their old Venetian days. But often she sat pensive and absent, in the midst of these memories, and looked at Elmore with a regard which he found hard to bear: a gentle, unconscious wonder it seemed, in which he imagined a shade of tender reproach.

When she recovered her health, after a journey to the West one winter, they saw that, by some subtile and indefinable difference, she was no longer a young girl. Perhaps it was because they had not met her for half a year. But perhaps it was age, — she was now thirty. However it was, Elmore recognized with a pang that the first youth at least had gone out of her voice and eyes. She only returned to arrange for a long sojourn in the West. She liked the climate and the people, she said; and she seemed well and happy. She had planned starting a Kindergarten school in Omaha with another young lady; she said that she wanted something to do. “She will end by marrying one of those Western widowers,” said Mrs. Elmore.

“I wonder she didn’t take poor old Hoskins,” mused Elmore aloud.

“No, you don’t, dear,” said his wife, who had not grown less direct in dealing with him. “You know it would have been ridiculous; besides, she never cared anything for him, — she couldn’t. You might as well wonder why she didn’t take Captain Ehrhardt after you dismissed him.”

“I dismissed him?”

“You wrote to him, didn’t you?”

“Celia,” cried Elmore, “this I cannot bear. Did I take a single step in that business without her request and your full approval? Didn’t you both ask me to write?”

“Yes, I suppose we did.”

“Suppose?”

“Well, we did, — if you want me to say it. And I’m not accusing you of anything. I know you acted for the best. But you can see yourself, can’t you, that it was rather sudden to have it end so quickly—”

She did not finish her sentence, or he did not hear the close in the miserable absence into which he lapsed. “Celia,” he asked at last, “do you think she — she had any feeling about him?”

“Oh,” cried his wife restively, “how should I know?”

“I didn’t suppose you knew,” he pleaded. “I asked if you thought so.”

“What would be the use of thinking anything about it? The matter can’t be helped now. If you inferred from anything she said to you—”

“She told me repeatedly, in answer to questions as explicit as I could make them, that she wished him dismissed.”

“Well, then, very likely she did.”

“Very likely, Celia?”

“Yes. At any rate, it’s too late now.”

“Yes, it’s too late now.” He was silent again, and he began to walk the floor, after his old habit, without speaking. He was always mute when he was in pain, and he startled her with the anguish in which he now broke forth. “I give it up! I give it up! Celia, Celia, I’m afraid I did wrong! Yes, I’m afraid that I spoiled two lives. I ventured to lay my sacrilegious hands upon two hearts that a divine force was drawing together, and put them asunder. It was a lamentable blunder, — it was a crime!”

“Why, Owen, how strangely you talk! How could you have done any differently under the circumstances?”

“Oh, I could have done very differently. I might have seen him, and talked with him brotherly, face to face. He was a fearless and generous soul! And I was meanly scared for my wretched little decorums, for my responsibility to her friends, and I gave him no chance.”

“We wouldn’t let you give him any,” interrupted his wife.

“Don’t try to deceive yourself, don’t try to deceive me, Celia! I know well enough that you would have been glad to have me show mercy; and I would not even show him the poor grace of passing his offer in silence, if I must refuse it. I couldn’t spare him even so much as that!”

“We decided — we both decided — that it would be better to cut off all hope at once,” urged his wife.

“Ah, it was I who decided that — decided everything. Leave me to deal honestly with myself at last, Celia! I have tried long enough to believe that it was not I who did it!” The pent-up doubt of years, the long-silenced self-accusal, burst forth in his words. “Oh, I have suffered for it! I thought he must come back, somehow, as long as we stayed in Venice. When we left Peschiera without a glimpse of him — I wonder I outlived it. But even if I had seen him there, what use would it have been? Would I have tried to repair the wrong done? What did I do but impute unmanly and impudent motives to him when he seized his chance to see her once more at that masquerade—”

“No, no, Owen! He was not the one. Lily was satisfied of that long ago. It was nothing but a chance, a coincidence. Perhaps it was some one he had told about the affair—”

“No matter! no matter! If I thought it was he, my blame is the same. And she, poor girl, — in my lying compassion for him, I used to accuse her of cold-heartedness, of indifference! I wonder she did not abhor the sight of me. How has she ever tolerated the presence, the friendship, of a man who did her this irreparable wrong? Yes, it has spoiled her life, and it was my work. No, no, Celia! you and she had nothing to do with it, except as I forced your consent — it was my work; and, however I have tried openly and secretly to shirk it, I must bear this fearful responsibility.”

He dropped into a chair, and hid his face in his hands, while his wife soothed him with loving excuses for what he had done, with tender protests against the exaggerations of his remorse. She said that he had done the only thing he could do; that Lily wished it, and that she never had blamed him. “Why, I don’t believe she would ever have married Captain Ehrhardt, anyhow. She was full of that silly fancy of hers about Dick Burton, all the time, — you know how she used always to be talking about him; and when she came home and found she had outgrown him, she had to refuse him, and I suppose it’s that that’s made her rather melancholy.” She explained that Major Burton had become extremely fat, that his moustache was too big and black, and his laugh too loud; there was nothing left of him, in fact, but his empty sleeve, and Lily was too conscientious to marry him merely for that.

In fact, Elmore’s regret did reflect a monstrous and distorted image of his conduct. He had really acted the part of a prudent and conscientious man; he was perfectly justifiable at every step: but in the retrospect those steps which we can perfectly justify sometimes seem to have cost so terribly that we look back even upon our sinful stumblings with better heart. Heaven knows how such things will be at the last day; but at that moment there was no wrong, no folly of his youth, of which Elmore did not think with more comfort than of this passage in which he had been so wise and right.

Of course the time came when he saw it all differently again; when his wife persuaded him that he had done the best that any one could do with the responsibilities that ought never to have been laid on a man of his temperament and habits; when he even came to see that Lily’s feeling was a matter of pure conjecture with him, and that so far as he knew she had never cared anything for Ehrhardt. Yet he was glad to have her away; he did not like to talk of her with his wife; he did not think of her if he could help it.

They heard from time to time through her sister that her little enterprise in Omaha was prospering, and that she was very contented out West; at last they heard directly from her that she was going to be married. Till then, Elmore had been dumbly tormented in his sombre moods with the solution of a problem at which his imagination vainly toiled, — the problem of how some day she and Ehrhardt should meet again and retrieve the error of the past for him. He contrived this encounter in a thousand different ways by a thousand different chances; what he so passionately and sorrowfully longed for accomplished itself continually in his dreams, but only in his dreams.

In due course Lily married, and from all they could understand, very happily. Her husband was a clergyman, and she took particular interest in his parochial work, which her good heart and clear head especially qualified her to share with him. To connect her fate any longer with that of Ehrhardt was now not only absurd, it was improper; yet Elmore sometimes found his fancy forgetfully at work as before. He could not at once realize that the tragedy of this romance, such as it was, remained to him alone, except perhaps as Ehrhardt shared it. With him, indeed, Elmore still sought to fret his remorse and keep it poignant, and his final failure to do so made him ashamed. But what lasting sorrow can one have from the disappointment of a man whom one has never seen? If Lily could console herself, it seemed probable that Ehrhardt too had “got along.”

DR. BREEN’S PRACTICE

Howells’ seventh novel, Dr Breen’s Practice, first appeared in 1881 and is further evidence of the author’s commitment to the realist mode, which avoided sensation in order to faithfully record the everyday lives of ordinary middle class Americans. Set in Jocelyn’s Hotel, Newport, Rhode Island, the novel concerns the early career of a female homeopathic doctor (the eponymous Dr. Breen) and her love life, after her first love deserts her in favour of her best friend.

The novel broke new ground in its focus not only on a female doctor (at a time when women were just beginning to enter the medical profession in the US) but a homeopathic one at that. The novel also drew praise for its lively and accurate depiction of New England society.

Cover of the first edition

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

Newport, Rhode Island, where the novel is set

I.

Near the verge of a bold promontory stands the hotel, and looks southeastward over a sweep of sea unbroken to the horizon. Behind it stretches the vast forest, which after two hundred years has resumed the sterile coast wrested from it by the first Pilgrims, and has begun to efface the evidences of the inroad made in recent years by the bold speculator for whom Jocelyn’s is named. The young birches and spruces are breast high in the drives and avenues at Jocelyn’s; the low blackberry vines and the sweet fern cover the carefully-graded sidewalks, and obscure the divisions of the lots; the children of the boarders have found squawberries in the public square on the spot where the band-stand was to have been. The notion of a sea-side resort at this point was courageously conceived, and to a certain extent it was generously realized. Except for its remoteness from the railroad, a drawback which future enterprise might be expected to remedy in some way, the place has many natural advantages. The broad plateau is cooled by a breeze from the vast forests behind it, which comes laden with health and freshness from the young pines; the sea at its feet is warmed by the Gulf Stream to a temperature delicious for bathing. There are certainly mosquitoes from the woods; but there are mosquitoes everywhere, and the report that people have been driven away by them is manifestly untrue, for whoever comes to Jocelyn’s remains. The beach at the foot of the bluff is almost a mile at its curve, and it is so smooth and hard that it glistens like polished marble when newly washed by the tide. It is true that you reach it from the top by a flight of eighty steps, but it was intended to have an elevator, like those near the Whirlpool at Niagara. In the mean time it is easy enough to go down, and the ladies go down every day, taking their novels or their needle-work with them. They have various notions of a bath: some conceive that it is bathing to sit in the edge of the water, and emit shrieks as the surge sweeps against them; others run boldly in, and after a moment of poignant hesitation jump up and down half-a-dozen times, and run out; yet others imagine it better to remain immersed to the chin for a given space, looking toward the shore with lips tightly shut and the breath held. But after the bath they are all of one mind; they lay their shawls on the warm sand, and, spreading out their hair to dry, they doze in the sun, in such coils and masses as the unconscious figure lends itself to. When they rise from their beds, they sit in the shelter of the cliff and knit or sew, while one of them reads aloud, and another stands watch to announce the coming of the seals, which frequent a reef near the shore in great numbers. It has been said at rival points on the coast that the ladies linger there in despair of ever being able to remount to the hotel. A young man who clambered along the shore from one of those points reported finding day after day the same young lady stretched out on the same shawl, drying the same yellow hair, who had apparently never gone upstairs since the season began. But the recurrence of this phenomenon in this spot at the very moment when the young man came by might have been accounted for upon other theories. Jocelyn’s was so secluded that she could not have expected any one to find her there twice, and if she had expected this she would not have permitted it. Probably he saw a different young lady each time.

Many of the same boarders come year after year, and these tremble at the suggestion of a change for the better in Jocelyn’s. The landlord has always believed that Jocelyn’s would come up, some day, when times got better. He believes that the narrow-gauge railroad from New Leyden — arrested on paper at the disastrous moment when the fortunes of Jocelyn’s felt the general crash — will be pushed through yet; and every summer he promises that next summer they are going to have a steam-launch running twice a day from Leyden Harbor. But at present his house is visited once a day by a barge, as the New England coast-folks call the vehicle in which they convey city boarders to and from the station, and the old frequenters of the place hope that the station will never be nearer Jocelyn’s than at present. Some of them are rich enough to afford a sojourn at more fashionable resorts; but most of them are not, though they are often people of polite tastes and of aesthetic employments. They talk with slight of the large watering-places, and probably they would not like them, though it is really economy that inspires their passion for Jocelyn’s with most of them, and they know of the splendid weariness of Newport mostly by hearsay. New arrivals are not favored, but there are not often new arrivals at Jocelyn’s. The chief business of the barge is to bring fresh meat for the table and the gaunt bag which contains the mail; for in the first flush of the enterprise the place was made a post-office, and the landlord is postmaster; he has the help of the lady-boarders in his official duties.

Scattered about among the young birches there are several of those pine frames known as shells, within easy walk of the hotel, where their inmates board. They are picturesque interiors, and are on informal terms with the public as to many domestic details. The lady of the house, doing her back hair at her dressing-room glass, is divided from her husband, smoking at the parlor fire-place, only by a partition of unlathed studding. The arrest of development in these shells is characteristic of everything about the place. None of the improvements invented since the hard times began have been added to Jocelyn’s; lawntennis is still unknown there; but there is a croquet-ground before the hotel, where the short, tough grass is kept in tolerable order. The wickets are pretty rusty, and it is usually the children who play; but toward the close of a certain, afternoon a young lady was pushing the balls about there. She seemed to be going over a game just played, and trying to trace the cause of her failure. She made bad shots, and laughed at her blunders. Another young lady drooped languidly on a bench at the side of the croquet-ground, and followed her movements with indifference.

“I don’t see how you did it, Louise,” panted the player; “it’s astonishing how you beat me.”

The lady on the bench made as if to answer, but ended by coughing hoarsely.

“Oh, dear child!” cried the first, dropping her mallet, and running to her. “You ought to have put on your shawl!” She lifted the knit shawl lying beside her on the bench, and laid it across the other’s shoulders, and drew it close about her neck.

“Oh, don’t!” said the other. “It chokes me to be bundled up so tight.” She shrugged the shawl down to her shoulders with a pretty petulance. “If my chest’s protected, that’s all that’s necessary.” But she made no motion to drape the outline which her neatly-fitted dress displayed, and she did not move from her place, or look up at her anxious friend.

“Oh, but don’t sit here, Louise,” the latter pleaded, lingering near her. “I was wrong to let you sit down at all after you had got heated.”

“Well, Grace, I had to,” said she who was called Louise. “I was so tired out. I’m not going to take more cold. I can always tell when I am. I’ll put on the shawl in half a minute; or else I’ll go in.”

“I’m sure there’s nothing to keep me out. That’s the worst of these lonely places: my mind preys upon itself. That’s what Dr. Nixon always said: he said it was no use in air so long as my mind preyed upon itself. He said that I ought to divert my mind all I could, and keep it from preying upon itself; that it was worth all the medicine in the world.”

“That’s perfectly true.”

“Then you ought n’t to keep reminding me all the time that I’m sick. That’s what starts my mind to preying upon itself; and when it gets going once I can’t stop it. I ought to treat myself just like a well person; that’s what the doctor said.”

The other stood looking at the speaker in frowning perplexity. She was a serious-faced girl, and now when she frowned her black brows met sternly above her gray eyes. But she controlled any impulse she had to severity, and asked gently, “Shall I send Bella to you?”

“Oh, no! I can’t make society out of a child the whole time. I’ll just sit here till the barge comes in. I suppose it will be as empty as a gourd, as usual.” She added, with a sick and weary negligence, “I don’t even know where Bella is. She’s run off, somewhere.”

“It’s quite time she should be looked up, for tea. I’ll wander out that way and look for her.” She indicated the wilderness generally.

“Thanks,” said Louise. She now gratefully drew her shawl up over her shoulders, and faced about on the bench so as to command an easy view of the arriving barge. The other met it on her way to the place in the woods where the children usually played, and found it as empty as her friend had foreboded. But the driver stopped his horses, and leaned out of the side of the wagon with a little package in his hand. He read the superscription, and then glanced consciously at the girl. “You’re Miss Breen, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, with lady-like sweetness and a sort of business-like alertness.

“Well,” suggested the driver, “this is for Miss Grace Breen, M. D.”

“For me, thank you,” said the young lady. “I’m Dr. Breen.” She put out her hand for the little package from the homoeopathic pharmacy in Boston; and the driver yielded it with a blush that reddened him to his hair. “Well,” he said slowly, staring at the handsome girl, who did not visibly share his embarrassment, “they told me you was the one; but I could n’t seem to get it through me. I thought it must be the old lady.”

“My mother is Mrs. Breen,” the young lady briefly explained, and walked rapidly away, leaving the driver stuck in the heavy sand of Sea-Glimpse Avenue.

“Why, get up!” he shouted to his horses. “Goin’ to stay here all day?” He craned his neck round the side of the wagon for a sight of her. “Well, dumm ‘f I don’t wish I was sick! Steps along,” he mused, watching the swirl and ripple of her skirt, “like — I dunno what.”

With her face turned from him Dr. Breen blushed, too; she was not yet so used to her quality of physician that she could coldly bear the confusion to which her being a doctor put men. She laughed a little to herself at the helplessness of the driver, confronted probably for the first time with a graduate of the New York homoeopathic school; but she believed that she had reasons for taking herself seriously in every way, and she had not entered upon this career without definite purposes. When she was not yet out of her teens, she had an unhappy love affair, which was always darkly referred to as a disappointment by people who knew of it at the time. Though the particulars of the case do not directly concern this story, it may be stated that the recreant lover afterwards married her dearest girl-friend, whom he had first met in her company. It was cruel enough, and the hurt went deep; but it neither crushed nor hardened her. It benumbed her for a time; she sank out of sight; but when she returned to the knowledge of the world she showed no mark of the blow except what was thought a strange eccentricity in a girl such as she had been. The world which had known her — it was that of an inland New England city — heard of her definitely after several years as a student of medicine in New York. Those who had more of her intimacy understood that she had chosen this work with the intention of giving her life to it, in the spirit in which other women enter convents, or go out to heathen lands; but probably this conception had its exaggerations. What was certain was that she was rich enough to have no need of her profession as a means of support, and that its study had cost her more than the usual suffering that it brings to persons of sensitive nerves. Some details were almost insuperably repugnant; but in schooling herself to them she believed that she was preparing to encounter anything in the application of her science.

Her first intention had been to go back to her own town after her graduation, and begin the practice of her profession among those who had always known her, and whose scrutiny and criticism would be hardest to bear, and therefore, as she fancied, the most useful to her in the formation of character. But afterwards she relinquished her purpose in favor of a design which she thought would be more useful to others: she planned going to one of the great factory towns, and beginning practice there, in company with an older physician, among the children of the operatives. Pending the completion of this arrangement, which was waiting upon the decision of the other lady, she had come to Jocelyn’s with her mother, and with Mrs. Maynard, who had arrived from the West, aimlessly sick and unfriended, just as they were about leaving home. There was no resource but to invite her with them, and Dr. Breen was finding her first patient in this unexpected guest. She did not wholly regret the accident; this, too, was useful work, though not that she would have chosen; but her mother, after a fortnight, openly repined, and could not mention Mrs. Maynard without some rebellious murmur. She was an old lady, who had once kept a very vigilant conscience for herself; but after making her life unhappy with it for some threescore years, she now applied it entirely to the exasperation and condemnation of others. She especially devoted it to fretting a New England girl’s naturally morbid sense of duty in her daughter, and keeping it in the irritation of perpetual self-question. She had never actively opposed her studying medicine; that ambition had harmonized very well with certain radical tendencies of her own, and it was at least not marriage, which she had found tolerable only in its modified form of widowhood; but at every step after the decisive step was taken she was beset with misgivings lest Grace was not fully alive to the grave responsibilities of her office, which she accumulated upon the girl in proportion as she flung off all responsibilities of her own. She was doubtless deceived by that show of calm which sometimes deceived Grace herself, who, in tutoring her soul to bear what it had to bear, mistook her tense effort for spiritual repose, and scarcely realized through her tingling nerves the strain she was undergoing. In spite of the bitter experience of her life, she was still very ardent in her hopes of usefulness, very scornful of distress or discomfort to herself, and a little inclined to exact the heroism she was ready to show. She had a child’s severe morality, and she had hardly learned to understand that there is much evil in the world that does not characterize the perpetrators: she held herself as strictly to account for every word and deed as she held others, and she had an almost passionate desire to meet the consequence of her errors; till that was felt, an intolerable doom hung over her. She tried not to be impulsive; that was criminal in one of her calling; and she struggled for patience with an endeavor that was largely successful.

As to the effect of her career outside of herself, and of those whom her skill was to benefit, she tried to think neither arrogantly nor meanly. She would not entertain the vanity that she was serving what is called the cause of woman, and she would not assume any duties or responsibilities toward it. She thought men were as good as women; at least one man had been no worse than one woman; and it was in no representative or exemplary character that she had chosen her course. At the same time that she held these sane opinions, she believed that she had put away the hopes with the pleasures that might once have taken her as a young girl. In regard to what had changed the current of her life, she mentally asserted her mere nullity, her absolute non-existence. The thought of it no longer rankled, and that interest could never be hers again. If it had not been so much like affectation, and so counter to her strong aesthetic instinct, she might have made her dress somehow significant of her complete abeyance in such matters; but as it was she only studied simplicity, and as we have seen from the impression of the barge-driver she did not finally escape distinction in dress and manner. In fact, she could not have escaped that effect if she would; and it was one of the indomitable contradictions of her nature that she would not.

When she came back to the croquet-ground, leading the little girl by the hand, she found Mrs. Maynard no longer alone and no longer sad. She was chatting and laughing with a slim young fellow, whose gay blue eyes looked out of a sunburnt face, and whose straw hat, carried in his hand, exposed a closely shaven head. He wore a suit of gray flannel, and Mrs. Maynard explained that he was camping on the beach at Birkman’s Cove, and had come over in the steamer with her when she returned from Europe. She introduced him as Mr. Libby, and said, “Oh, Bella, you dirty little thing!”

Mr. Libby bowed anxiously to Grace, and turned for refuge to the little girl. “Hello, Bella!” “Hello!” said the child. “Remember me?” The child put her left hand on that of Grace holding her right, and prettily pressed her head against the girl’s arm in bashful silence. Grace said some coldly civil words to the young man: without looking at Mrs. Maynard, and passed on into the house.

“You don’t mean that’s your doctor?” he scarcely more than whispered.

“Yes, I do,” answered Mrs. Maynard. “Is n’t she too lovely? And she’s just as good! She used to stand up at school for me, when all the girls were down on me because I was Western. And when I came East, this time, I just went right straight to her house. I knew she could tell me exactly what to do. And that’s the reason I’m here. I shall always recommend this air to anybody with lung difficulties. It’s the greatest thing! I’m almost another person. Oh, you need n’t look after her, Mr. Libby! There’s nothing flirtatious about Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard.

The young man recovered himself from his absentminded stare in the direction Grace had taken, with a frank laugh. “So much the better for a fellow, I should say!”

Grace handed the little girl over to her nurse, and went to her own room, where she found her mother waiting to go down to tea.

“Where is Mrs. Maynard?” asked Mrs. Breen.

“Out on the croquet-ground,” answered the daughter.

“I should think it would be damp,” suggested Mrs. Green.

“She will come in when the tea-bell rings. She wouldn’t come in now, if I told her.”

“Well,” said the elder lady, “for a person who lets her doctor pay her board, I think ‘she’s very independent.”

“I wish you would n’t speak of that, mother,” said the girl.

“I can’t help it, Grace. It’s ridiculous, — that’s what it is; it’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t see anything ridiculous in it. A physician need not charge anything unless he chooses, or she; and if I choose to make Louise my guest here it’s quite the same as if she were my guest at home.”

“I don’t like you to have such a guest,” said Mrs. Green. “I don’t see what claim she has upon your hospitality.”

“She has a double claim upon it,” Grace answered, with a flush. “She is in sickness and in trouble. I don’t see how she could have a better claim. Even if she were quite well I should consider the way she had been treated by her husband sufficient, and I should want to do everything I could for her.”

“I should want her to behave herself,” said Mrs. Breen dryly.

“How behave herself? What do you mean?” demanded Grace, with guilty heat.

“You know what I mean, Grace. A woman in her position ought to be more circumspect than any other woman, if she wants people to believe that her husband treated her badly.”

“We ought n’t to blame her for trying to forget her troubles. It’s essential to her recovery for her to be as cheerful as she can be. I know that she’s impulsive, and she’s free in her manners with strangers; but I suppose that’s her Westernism. She’s almost distracted. She was crying half the night, with her troubles, and kept Bella and me both awake.”

“Is Bella with her now?”

“No,” Grace admitted. “Jane’s getting her ready to go down with us. Louise is talking with a gentleman who came over on the steamer with her; he’s camping on the beach near here. I didn’t wait to hear particulars.”

When the nurse brought the little girl to their door, Mrs. Green took one hand and Grace the other, and they led her down to tea. Mrs. Maynard was already at table, and told them all about meeting Mr. Libby abroad.

Until the present time she and Grace had not seen each other since they were at school together in Southington, where the girl used to hear so much to the disadvantage of her native section that she would hardly have owned to it if her accent had not found her out. It would have been pleasanter to befriend another person, but the little Westerner suffered a veritable persecution, and that was enough to make Grace her friend. Shortly after she returned home from school she married, in that casual and tentative fashion in which so many marriages seem made. Grace had heard of her as travelling in Europe with her husband, from whom she was now separated. She reported that he had known Mr. Libby in his bachelor days, and that Mr. Libby had travelled with them. Mr. Maynard appeared to have left to Mr. Libby the arrangement of his wife’s pleasures, the supervision of her shopping, and the direction of their common journeys and sojourns; and it seemed to have been indifferent to him whether his friend was smoking and telling stories with him, or going with his wife to the opera, or upon such excursions as he had no taste for. She gave the details of the triangular intimacy with a frank unconsciousness; and after nine o’clock she returned from a moonlight walk on the beach with Mr. Libby.

Grace sat waiting for her at the little one’s bedside, for Bella had been afraid to go to sleep alone.

“How good you are!” cried Louise, in a grateful under-tone, as she came in. She kissed Grace, and choked down a cough with her hand over her mouth.

“Louise,” said Grace sternly, “this is shameful! You forget that you are married, and ill, too.”

“Oh, I’m ever so much better, to-night. The air’s just as dry! And you needn’t mind Mr. Libby. He’s such an old friend! Besides, I’m sure to gain the case.”

“No matter. Even as a divorced woman, you oughtn’t to go on in this way.”

“Well, I would n’t, with every one. But it’s quite different with Mr. Libby. And, besides, I have to keep my mind from preying on itself somehow.”

II.

Mrs. Maynard sat in the sun on the seaward-looking piazza of the hotel, and coughed in the warm air. She told the ladies, as they came out from breakfast, that she was ever so much better generally, but that she seemed to have more of that tickling in her throat. Each of them advised her for good, and suggested this specific and that; and they all asked her what Miss Breen was doing for her cough. Mrs. Maynard replied, between the paroxysms, that she did not know: it was some kind of powders. Then they said they would think she would want to try something active; even those among them who were homoeopathists insinuated a fine distrust of a physician of their own sex. “Oh, it’s nothing serious,” Mrs. Maynard explained. “It’s just bronchial. The air will do me more good than anything. I’m keeping out in it all I can.”

After they were gone, a queer, gaunt man came and glanced from the doorway at her. He had one eye in unnatural fixity, and the other set at that abnormal slant which is said to qualify the owner for looking round a corner before he gets to it. A droll twist of his mouth seemed partly physical, but: there is no doubt that he had often a humorous intention. It was Barlow, the man-of-all-work, who killed and plucked the poultry, peeled the potatoes and picked the peas, pulled the sweet-corn and the tomatoes, kindled the kitchen fire, harnessed the old splayfooted mare, — safe for ladies and children, and intolerable for all others, which formed the entire stud of the Jocelyn House stables, — dug the clams, rowed and sailed the boat, looked after the bath-houses, and came in contact with the guests at so many points that he was on easy terms with them all. This ease tended to an intimacy which he was himself powerless to repress, and which, from time to time, required their intervention. He now wore a simple costume of shirt and trousers, the latter terminated by a pair of broken shoes, and sustained by what he called a single gallows; his broad-brimmed straw hat scooped down upon his shoulders behind, and in front added to his congenital difficulty of getting people in focus. “How do you do, this morning, Mrs. Maynard?” he said.

“Oh, I’m first-rate, Mr. Barlow. What sort of day do you think it’s going to be for a sail?”

Barlow came out to the edge of the piazza, and looked at the sea and sky. “First-rate. Fog’s most burnt away now. You don’t often see a fog at Jocelyn’s after ten o’clock in the mornin’.”

He looked for approval to Mrs. Maynard, who said, “That’s so. The air’s just splendid. It ‘s doing everything for me.”

“It’s these pine woods, back o’ here. Every breath on ’em does ye good. It’s the balsam in it. D’ you ever try,” he asked, stretching his hand as far up the piazza-post as he could, and swinging into a conversational posture,— “d’ you ever try whiskey — good odd Bourbon whiskey — with white-pine chips in it?”

Mrs. Maynard looked up with interest, but, shaking her head, coughed for no.

“Well, I should like to have you try that.”

“What does it do?” she gasped, when she could get her breath.

“Well, it’s soothin’ t’ the cough, and it builds ye up, every ways. Why, my brother,” continued the factotum, “he died of consumption when I was a boy, — reg’lar old New England consumption. Don’t hardly ever hear of it any more, round here. Well, I don’t suppose there’s been a case of reg’lar old New England consumption — well, not the old New England kind — since these woods growed up. He used to take whiskey with white-pine chips in it; and I can remember hearin ’em say that it done him more good than all the doctor’s stuff. He’d been out to Demarary, and everywheres, and he come home in the last stages, and took up with this whiskey with whitepine chips in it. Well, it’s just like this, I presume it’s the balsam in the chips. It don’t make any difference how you git the balsam into your system, so ‘s ‘t you git it there. I should like to have you try whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”

He looked convincingly at Mrs. Maynard, who said she should like to try it. “It’s just bronchial with me, you know. But I should like to try it. I know it would be soothing; and I’ve always heard that whiskey was the very thing to build you up. But,” she added, lapsing from this vision of recovery, “I couldn’t take it unless Grace said so. She’d be sure to find it out.”

“Why, look here,” said Barlow. “As far forth as that goes, you could keep the bottle in my room. Not but what I believe in going by your doctor’s directions, it don’t matter who your doctor is. I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ against Miss Breen, you understand?”

“Oh, no!” cried Mrs. Maynard.

“I never see much nicer ladies than her and her mother in the house. But you just tell her about the whiskey with the white-pine chips in it. Maybe she never heard of it. Well, she hain’t had a great deal of experience yet.”

“No,” said Mrs. Maynard. “And I think she’ll be glad to hear of it. You may be sure I’ll tell her, Mr. Barlow. Grace is everything for the balsamic properties of the air, down here. That’s what she said; and as you say, it doesn’t matter how you get the balsam into your system, so you get it there.”

“No,” said the factotum, in a tone of misgiving, as if the repetition of the words presented the theory in a new light to him.

“What I think is, and what I’m always telling Grace,” pursued Mrs. Maynard, in that confidential spirit in which she helplessly spoke of her friends by their first names to every one, “that if I could once get my digestion all right, then the cough would stop of itself. The doctor said — Dr. Nixon, that is — that it was more than half the digestion any way. But just as soon as I eat anything — or if I over-eat a little — then that tickling in my throat begins, and then I commence coughing; and I’m back just where I was. It’s the digestion. I oughtn’t to have eaten that mince pie, yesterday.”

“No,” admitted Barlow. Then he said, in indirect defence of the kitchen, “I think you had n’t ought to be out in the night air, — well, not a great deal.”

“Well, I don’t suppose it does do me much good,” Mrs. Maynard said, turning her eyes seaward.

Barlow let his hand drop from the piazza post, and slouched in-doors; but he came out again as if pricked by conscience to return.

“After all, you know, it did n’t cure him.”

“What cure him?” asked Mrs. Maynard.

“The whiskey with the white-pine chips in it.”

“Cure who?”

“My brother.”

“Oh! Oh, yes! But mine’s only bronchial. I think it might do me good. I shall tell Grace about it.”

Barlow looked troubled, as if his success in the suggestion of this remedy were not finally a pleasure; but as Mrs. Maynard kept her eyes persistently turned from him, and was evidently tired, he had nothing for it but to go in-doors again. He met Grace, and made way for her on the threshold to pass out.

As she joined Mrs. Maynard, “Well, Grace,” said the latter, “I do believe you are right. I have taken some more cold. But that shows that it does n’t get worse of itself, and I think we ought to be encouraged by that. I’m going to be more careful of the night air after this.”

“I don’t think the night air was the worst thing about it, Louise,” said Grace bluntly.

“You mean the damp from the sand? I put on my rubbers.”

“I don’t mean the damp sand,” said Grace, beginning to pull over some sewing which she had in her lap, and looking down at it.

Mrs. Maynard watched her a while in expectation that she would say more, but she did not speak. “Oh — well!” she was forced to continue herself, “if you’re going to go on with that!”

“The question is,” said Grace, getting the thread she wanted, “whether you are going on with it.”

“Why, I can’t see any possible harm in it,” protested Mrs. Maynard. “I suppose you don’t exactly like my going with Mr. Libby, and I know that under some circumstances it would n’t be quite the thing. But did n’t I tell you last night how he lived with us in Europe? And when we were all coming over on the steamer together Mr. Libby and Mr. Maynard were together the whole time, smoking and telling stories. They were the greatest friends! Why, it isn’t as if he was a stranger, or an enemy of Mr. Maynard’s.”

Grace dropped her sewing into her lap. “Really, Louise, you’re incredible!” She looked sternly at the invalid; but broke into a laugh, on which Mrs. Maynard waited with a puzzled face. As Grace said nothing more, she helplessly resumed: —

“We did n’t expect to go down the cliff when he first called in the evening. But he said he would help me up again, and — he did, nicely. I was n’t exhausted a bit; and how I took more cold I can’t understand; I was wrapped up warmly. I think I took the cold when I was sitting there after our game of croquet, with my shawl off. Don’t you think so?” she wheedled.

“Perhaps,” said Grace.

“He did nothing but talk about you, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, with a sly look at the other. “He’s awfully afraid of you, and he kept asking about you.”

“Louise,” said the other, gravely ignoring these facts, “I never undertook the care of you socially, and I object very much to lecturing you. You are nearly as old as I am, and you have had a great deal more experience of life than I have.” Mrs. Maynard sighed deeply in assent. “But it does n’t seem to have taught you that if you will provoke people to talk of you, you must expect criticism. One after another you’ve told nearly every woman in the house your affairs, and they have all sympathized with you and pitied you. I shall have to be plain, and tell you that I can’t have them sneering and laughing at any one who is my guest. I can’t let you defy public opinion here.”

“Why, Grace,” said Mrs. Maynard, buoyed above offence at her friend’s words by her consciousness of the point she was about to make, “you defy public opinion yourself a good deal more than I do, every minute.”

“I? How do I defy it?” demanded Grace indignantly.

“By being a doctor.”

Grace opened her lips to speak, but she was not a ready person, and she felt the thrust. Before she could say anything Mrs. Maynard went on: “There isn’t one of them that does n’t think you’re much more scandalous than if you were the greatest flirt alive. But, I don’t mind them, and why should you?”

The serious girl whom she addressed was in that helpless subjection to the truth in which so many New England women pass their lives. She could not deny the truth which lurked in the exaggeration of these words, and it unnerved her, as the fact that she was doing what the vast majority of women considered unwomanly always unnerved her when she suffered herself to think of it. “You are right, Louise,” she said meekly and sadly. “They think as well of you as they do of me.”

“Yes, that’s just what I said!” cried Mrs. Maynard, glad of her successful argument.

But however disabled, her friend resumed: “The only safe way for you is to take the ground that so long as you wear your husband’s name you must honor it, no matter how cruel and indifferent to you he has been.”

“Yes,” assented Mrs. Maynard ruefully, “of course.”

“I mean that you must n’t even have the appearance of liking admiration, or what you call attentions. It’s wicked.”

“I suppose so,” murmured the culprit.

“You have been brought up to have such different ideas of divorce from what I have,” continued Grace, “that I don’t feel as if I had any right to advise you about what you are to do after you gain your suit.”

“I shall not want to get married again for one while; I know that much,” Mrs. Maynard interpolated self-righteously.

“But till you do gain it, you ought not to regard it as emancipating you in the slightest degree.”

“No,” came in sad assent from the victim of the law’s delays.

“And I want you to promise me that you won’t go walking with Mr. Libby any more; and that you won’t even see him alone, after this.”

“Why, but Grace!” cried Mrs. Maynard, as much in amazement as in annoyance. “You don’t seem to understand! Have n’t I told you he was a friend of the family? He’s quite as much Mr. Maynard’s friend as he is mine. I’m sure,” she added, “if I asked Mr. Libby, I should never think of getting divorced. He’s all for George; and it’s as much as I can do to put up with him.”

“No matter. That does n’t alter the appearance to people here. I don’t wish you to go with him alone any more.”

“Well, Grace, I won’t,” said Mrs. Maynard earnestly. “I won’t, indeed. And that makes me think: he wanted you to go along this morning.”

“To go along? Wanted me — What are you talking about?”

“Why, I suppose that’s his boat, out there, now.” Mrs. Maynard pointed to a little craft just coming to anchor inside the reef. “He said he wanted me to take a sail with him, this morning; and he said he would come up and ask you, too. I do hope you’ll go, Grace. It’s just as calm; and he always has a man with him to help sail the boat, so there is n’t the least danger.” Grace looked at her in silent sorrow, and Mrs. Maynard went on with sympathetic seriousness: “Oh! there’s one thing I want to ask you about, Grace: I don’t like to have any concealments from you.” Grace did not speak, but she permitted Mrs. Maynard to proceed: “Barlow recommended it, and he’s lived here a great while. His brother took it, and he had the regular old New England consumption. I thought I shouldn’t like to try it without your knowing it.”

“Try it? What are you talking about, Louise?”

“Why, whiskey with white-pine chips in it.”

Grace rose, and moved towards the door, with the things dropping from her lap. One of these was a spool, that rolled down the steps and out upon the sandy road. She turned to pursue it, and recovered it at the cost of dropping her scissors and thimble out of opposite sides of her skirt, which she had gathered up apronwise to hold her work. When she rose from the complicated difficulty, in which Mrs. Maynard had amiably lent her aid, she confronted Mr. Libby, who was coming towards them from the cliff. She gave him a stiff nod, and attempted to move away; but in turning round and about she had spun herself into the folds of a stout linen thread escaping from its spool. These gyves not only bound her skirts but involved her feet in an extraordinary mesh, which tightened at the first step and brought her to a standstill.

Mrs. Maynard began to laugh and cough, as Mr. Libby came to her friend’s help. He got the spool in his hand, and walked around her in the endeavor to free her; but in vain. She extended him the scissors with the stern passivity of a fate. “Cut it,” she commanded, and Mr. Libby knelt before her and obeyed. “Thanks,” she said, taking back the scissors; and now she sat down again, and began deliberately to put up her work in her handkerchief.

“I ‘ll go out and get my things. I won’t be gone half a minute, Mr. Libby,” said Mrs. Maynard, with her first breath, as she vanished indoors.

Mr. Libby leaned against the post lately occupied by the factotum in his talk with Mrs. Maynard, and looked down at Grace as she bent over her work. If he wished to speak to her, and was wavering as to the appropriate style of address for a handsome girl, who was at once a young lady and a physician, she spared him the agony of a decision by looking up at him suddenly.

“I hope,” he faltered, “that you feel like a sail, this morning? Did Mrs. Maynard—”

“I shall have to excuse myself,” answered Grace, with a conscience against saying she was sorry. “I am a very bad sailor.”

“Well, so am I, for that matter,” said Mr. Libby. “But it’s smooth as a pond, to-day.”

Grace made no direct response, and he grew visibly uncomfortable under the cold abstraction of the gaze with which she seemed to look through him. “Mrs. Maynard tells me you came over with her from Europe.”

“Oh yes!” cried the young man, the light of pleasant recollection kindling in his gay eyes. “We had a good time. Maynard was along: he’s a first-rate fellow. I wish he were here.”

“Yes,” said Grace, “I wish so, too.” She did not know what to make of this frankness of the young man’s, and she did not know whether to consider him very depraved or very innocent. In her question she continued to stare at him, without being aware of the embarrassment to which she was putting him.

“I heard of Mrs. Maynard’s being here, and I thought I should find him, too. I came over yesterday to get him to go into the woods with us.”

Grace decided that this was mere effrontery. “It is a pity that he is not here,” she said; and though it ought to have been possible for her to go on and rebuke the young fellow for bestowing upon Mrs. Maynard the comradeship intended for her husband, it was not so. She could only look severely at him, and trust that he might conceive the intention which she could not express. She rebelled against the convention and against her own weakness, which would not let her boldly interfere in what she believed a wrong; she had defied society, in the mass, but here, with this man, whom as an atom of the mass she would have despised, she was powerless.

“Have you ever seen him?” Libby asked, perhaps clinging to Maynard because he was a topic of conversation in default of which there might be nothing to say.

“No,” answered Grace.

“He ‘s funny. He’s got lots of that Western humor, and he tells a story better than any man I ever saw. There was one story of his” —

“I have no sense of humor,” interrupted Grace impatiently. “Mr. Libby,” she broke out, “I ‘m sorry that you’ve asked Mrs. Maynard to take a sail with you. The sea air” — she reddened with the shame of not being able to proceed without this wretched subterfuge— “won’t do her any good.”

“Then,” said the young man, “you must n’t let her go.”

“I don’t choose to forbid her,” Grace began.

“I beg your pardon,” he broke in. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

He turned, and ran to the edge of the cliff, over which he vanished, and he did not reappear till Mrs. Maynard had rejoined Grace on the piazza.

“I hope you won’t mind its being a little rough, Mrs. Maynard,” he said, breathing quickly. “Adams thinks we’re going to have it pretty fresh before we get back.”

“Indeed, I don’t want to go, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, in petulant disappointment, letting her wraps fall upon a chair.

Mr. Libby looked at Grace, who haughtily rejected a part in the conspiracy. “I wish you to go, Louise,” she declared indignantly. “I will take the risk of all the harm that comes to you from the bad weather.” She picked up the shawls, and handed them to Mr. Libby, on whom her eyes blazed their contempt and wonder. It cost a great deal of persuasion and insistence now to make Mrs. Maynard go, and he left all this to Grace, not uttering a word till he gave Mrs. Maynard his hand to help her down the steps. Then he said, “Well, I wonder what Miss Breen does want.”

“I ‘m sure I don’t know,” said the other. “At first she did n’t want me to go, this morning, and now she makes me. I do hope it is n’t going to be a storm.”

“I don’t believe it is. A little fresh, perhaps. I thought you might be seasick.”

“Don’t you remember? I’m never seasick! That’s one of the worst signs.”

“Oh, yes.”

“If I could be thoroughly seasick once, it would be the best thing I could do.”

“Is she capricious?” asked Mr. Libby.

“Grace?” cried Mrs. Maynard, releasing her hand half-way down the steps, in order to enjoy her astonishment without limitation of any sort. “Grace capricious!”

“Yes,” said Mr. Libby, “that’s what I thought. Better take my hand again,” and he secured that of Mrs. Maynard, who continued her descent. “I suppose I don’t understand her exactly. Perhaps she did n’t like my not calling her Doctor. I did n’t call her anything. I suppose she thought I was dodging it. I was. I should have had to call her Miss Breen, if I called her anything.”

“She wouldn’t have cared. She is n’t a doctor for the name of it.”

“I suppose you think it’s a pity?” he asked.

“What?”

“Her being a doctor.”

“I’ll tell her you say so.”

“No, don’t. But don’t you?”

“Well, I would n’t want to be one,” said Mrs. Mayward candidly.

“I suppose it’s all right, if she does it from a sense of duty, as you say,” he suggested.

“Oh, yes, she’s all right. And she’s just as much of a girl as anybody; though she don’t know it,” Mrs. Maynard added astutely. “Why would n’t she come with us? Were you afraid to ask her?”

“She said she was n’t a good sailor. Perhaps she thought we were too young. She must be older than you.”

“Yes, and you, too!” cried Mrs. Maynard, with good-natured derision.

“She doesn’t look old,” returned Mr. Libby.

“She’s twenty-eight. How old are you?”

“I promised the census-taker not to tell till his report came out.”

“What is the color of her hair?”

“Brown.”

“And her eyes?”

“I don’t know!”

“You had better look out, Mr. Libby!” said Mrs. Maynard, putting her foot on the ground at last.

They walked across the beach to where his dory lay, and Grace saw him pulling out to the sail boat before she went in from the piazza. Then she went to her mother’s room. The elderly lady was keeping indoors, upon a theory that the dew was on, and that it was not wholesome to go out till it was off. She asked, according to her habit when she met her daughter alone, “Where is Mrs. Maynard?”

“Why do you always ask that, mother?” retorted Grace, with her growing irritation in regard to her patient intensified by the recent interview. “I can’t be with her the whole time.”

“I wish you could,” said Mrs. Breen, with noncommittal suggestion.

Grace could not keep herself from demanding, “Why?” as her mother expected, though she knew why too well.

“Because she wouldn’t be in mischief then,” returned Mrs. Breen.

“She’s in mischief now!” cried the girl vehemently; “and it’s my fault! I did it. I sent her off to sail with that ridiculous Mr. Libby!”

“Why?” asked Mrs. Breen, in her turn, with unbroken tranquillity.

“Because I am a fool, and I couldn’t help him lie out of his engagement with her.”

“Did n’t he want to go?”

“I don’t know. Yes. They both wanted me to go with them. Simpletons! And while she had gone up-stairs for her wraps I managed to make him understand that I did n’t wish her to go, either; and he ran down to his boat, and came back with a story about its going to be rough, and looked at me perfectly delighted, as if I should be pleased. Of course, then, I made him take her.”

“And is n’t it going to be rough?” asked Mrs. Green.

“Why, mother, the sea’s like glass.”

Mrs. Breen turned the subject. “You would have done better, Grace, to begin as you had planned. Your going to Fall River, and beginning practice there among those factory children, was the only thing that I ever entirely liked in your taking up medicine. There was sense in that. You had studied specially for it. You could have done good there.”

“Oh, yes,” sighed the girl, “I know. But what was I to do, when she came to us, sick and poor? I couldn’t turn my back on her, especially after always befriending her, as I used to, at school, and getting her to depend on me.”

“I don’t see how you ever liked her,” said Mrs. Breen.

“I never did like her. I pitied her. I always thought her a poor, flimsy little thing. But that ought n’t to make any difference, if she was in trouble.”

“No,” Mrs. Breen conceded, and in compensation Grace admitted something more on her side: “She’s worse than she used to be, — sillier. I don’t suppose she has a wrong thought; but she’s as light as foam.”

“Oh, it is n’t the wicked people who, do the harm,” said Mrs. Green.

“I was sure that this air would be everything for her; and so it would, with any ordinary case. But a child would take better care of itself. I have to watch her every minute, like a child; and I never know what she will do next.”

“Yes; it’s a burden,” said Mrs. Breen, with a sympathy which she had not expressed before. “And you’re a good girl, Grace,” she added in very unwonted recognition.

The grateful tears stole into the daughter’s eyes, but she kept a firm face, even after they began to follow one another down her cheeks. “And if Louise had n’t come, you know, mother, that I was anxious to have some older person with me when I went to Fall River. I was glad to have this respite; it gives me a chance to think. I felt a little timid about beginning alone.”

“A man would n’t,” Mrs. Breen remarked.

“No. I am not a man. I have accepted that; with all the rest. I don’t rebel against being a woman. If I had been a man, I should n’t have studied medicine. You know that. I wished to be a physician because I was a woman, and because — because — I had failed where — other women’s hopes are.” She said it out firmly, and her mother softened to her in proportion to the girl’s own strength. “I might have been just a nurse. You know I should have been willing to be that, but I thought I could be something more. But it’s no use talking.” She added, after an interval, in which her mother rocked to and fro with a gentle motion that searched the joints of her chair, and brought out its most plaintive squeak in pathetic iteration, and watched Grace, as she sat looking seaward through the open window, “I think it’s rather hard, mother, that you should be always talking as if I wished to take my calling mannishly. All that I intend is not to take it womanishly; but as for not being a woman about it, or about anything, that’s simply impossible. A woman is reminded of her insufficiency to herself every hour of the day. And it’s always a man that comes to her help. I dropped some things out of my lap down there, and by the time I had gathered them up I was wound round and round with linen thread so that I could n’t move a step, and Mr. Libby cut me loose. I could have done it myself, but it seemed right and natural that he should do it. I dare say he plumed himself upon his service to me, — that would be natural, too. I have things enough to keep me meek, mother!”

She did not look round at Mrs. Breen, who said, “I think you are morbid about it.”

“Yes. And I have the satisfaction of knowing that whatever people think of Louise’s giddiness, I’m, a great deal more scandalous to them than she is simply because I wish to do some good in the world, in a way that women have n’t done it, usually.”

“Now you are morbid.”

“Oh, yes! Talk about men being obstacles! It’s other women! There isn’t a woman in the house that would n’t sooner trust herself in the hands of the stupidest boy that got his diploma with me than she would in mine. Louise knows it, and she feels that she has a claim upon me in being my patient. And I ‘ve no influence with her about her conduct because she understands perfectly well that they all consider me much worse. She prides herself on doing me justice. She patronizes me. She tells me that I’m just as nice as, if I hadn’t ‘been through all that.’” Grace rose, and a laugh, which was half a sob, broke from her.

Mrs. Breen could not feel the humor of the predicament. “She puts you in a false position.”

“I must go and see where that poor little wretch of a child is,” said Grace, going out of the room. She returned in an hour, and asked her mother for the arnica. “Bella has had a bump,” she explained.

“Why, have you been all this time looking for her?

“No, I couldn’t find her, and I’ve been reading. Barlow has just brought her in. HE could find her. She fell out of a tree, and she’s frightfully bruised.”

She was making search on a closet shelf as she talked. When she reappeared with the bottle in her hand, her mother asked, “Is n’t it very hot and close?”

“Very,” said Grace.

“I should certainly think they would perish,” said Mrs. Breen, hazarding the pronoun, with a woman’s confidence that her interlocutor would apply it correctly.

When Grace had seen Bella properly bathed and brown-papered, and in the way to forgetfulness of her wounds in sleep, she came down to the piazza, and stood looking out to sea. The ladies appeared one by one over the edge of the cliff, and came up, languidly stringing their shawls after them, or clasping their novels to their bosoms.

“There isn’t a breath down there,” they said, one after another. The last one added, “Barlow says it’s the hottest day he’s ever seen here.”

In a minute Barlow himself appeared at the head of the steps with the ladies’ remaining wraps, and confirmed their report in person. “I tell you,” he said, wiping his forehead, “it’s a ripper.”

“It must be an awful day in town,” said one of the ladies, fanning herself with a newspaper.

“Is that to-day’s Advertiser, Mrs. Alger?” asked another.

“Oh, dear, no! yesterday’s. We sha’n’t have today’s till this afternoon. It shows what a new arrival you are, Mrs. Scott — your asking.”

“To be sure. But it’s such a comfort being where you can see the Advertiser the same morning. I always look at the Weather Report the first thing. I like to know what the weather is going to be.”

“You can’t at Jocelyn’s. You can only know what it’s been.”

“Well,” Barlow interposed, jealous for Jocelyn’s, “you can most al’ays tell by the look o’ things.”

“Yes,” said one of the ladies; “but I’d rather trust the Weather Report. It’s wonderful how it comes true. I don’t think there ‘s anything that you miss more in Europe than our American Weather Report.”

“I’m sure you miss the oysters,” said another.

“Yes,” the first admitted, “you do miss the oysters. It was the last of the R months when we landed in New York; and do you know what we did the first thing — ? We drove to Fulton Market, and had one of those Fulton Market broils! My husband said we should have had it if it had been July. He used to dream of the American oysters when we were in Europe. Gentlemen are so fond of them.”

Barlow, from scanning the heavens, turned round and faced the company, which had drooped in several attitudes of exhaustion on the benching of the piazza. “Well, I can most al’ays tell about Jocelyn’s as good as the Weather Report. I told Mrs. Maynard here this mornin’ that the fog was goin’ to burn off.”

“Burn off?” cried Mrs. Alger. “I should think it had!” The other ladies laughed.

“And you’ll see,” added Barlow, “that the wind ‘ll change at noon, and we’ll have it cooler.”

“If it’s as hot on the water as it is here,” said Mrs. Scott, “I should think those people would get a sunstroke.”

“Well, so should I, Mrs. Scott,” cordially exclaimed a little fat lady, as if here at last were an opinion in which all might rejoice to sympathize.

“It’s never so hot on the water, Mrs. Merritt,” said Mrs. Alger, with the instructiveness of an old habitude.

“Well, not at Jocelyn’s,” suggested Barlow. Mrs. Alger stopped fanning herself with her newspaper, and looked at him. Upon her motion, the other ladies looked at Barlow. Doubtless he felt that his social acceptability had ceased with his immediate usefulness. But he appeared resolved to carry it off easily. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I must go and pick my peas.”

No one said anything to this. When the factotum had disappeared round the corner of the house, Mrs. Alger turned her head’ aside, and glanced downward with an air of fatigue. In this manner Barlow was dismissed from the ladies’ minds.

“I presume,” said young Mrs. Scott, with a deferential glance at Grace, “that the sun is good for a person with lung-difficulty.”

Grace silently refused to consider herself appealed to, and Mrs. Merritt said, “Better than the moon, I should think.”

Some of the others tittered, but Grace looked up at Mrs. Merritt and said, “I don’t think Mrs. Maynard’s case is so bad that she need be afraid of either.”

“Oh, I am so glad to hear it!” replied the other. She looked round, but was unable to form a party. By twos or threes they might have liked to take Mrs. Maynard to pieces; but no one cares to make unkind remarks before a whole company of people. Some of the ladies even began to say pleasant things about Mr. Libby, as if he were Grace’s friend.

“I always like to see these fair men when they get tanned,” said Mrs. Alger. “Their blue eyes look so very blue. And the backs of their necks — just like my boys!”

“Do you admire such a VERY fighting-clip as Mr. Libby has on?” asked Mrs. Scott.

“It must be nice for summer,” returned the elder lady.

“Yes, it certainly must,” admitted the younger.

“Really,” said another, “I wish I could go in the fighting-clip. One does n’t know what to do with one’s hair at the sea-side; it’s always in the way.”

“Your hair would be a public loss, Mrs. Frost,” said Mrs. Alger. The others looked at her hair, as if they had seen it now for the first time.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Frost, in a sort of flattered coo.

“Oh, don’t have it cut off!” pleaded a young girl, coming up and taking the beautiful mane, hanging loose after the bath, into her hand. Mrs. Frost put her arm round the girl’s waist, and pulled her down against her shoulder. Upon reflection she also kissed her.

Through a superstition, handed down from mother to daughter, that it is uncivil and even unkind not to keep saying something, they went on talking vapidities, where the same number of men, equally vacuous, would have remained silent; and some of them complained that the nervous strain of conversation took away all the good their bath had done them. Miss Gleason, who did not bathe, was also not a talker. She kept a bright-eyed reticence, but was apt to break out in rather enigmatical flashes, which resolved the matter in hand into an abstraction, and left the others with the feeling that she was a person of advanced ideas, but that, while rejecting historical Christianity, she believed in a God of Love. This Deity was said, upon closer analysis, to have proved to be a God of Sentiment, and Miss Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in such phrases as, “Too bad!” or, “I don’t see how you keep-up?” and darkly insinuate that she appreciated all that Grace was doing. She seemed to rejoice in keeping herself at a respectful distance, to which she breathlessly retired, as she did now, after waylaying her at the top of the stairs, and confidentially darting at her the words, “I’m so glad you don’t like scandal!”

III.

After dinner the ladies tried to get a nap, but such of them as re-appeared on the piazza later agreed that it was perfectly useless. They tested every corner for a breeze, but the wind had fallen dead, and the vast sweep of sea seemed to smoulder under the sun. “This is what Mr. Barlow calls having it cooler,” said Mrs. Alger.

“There are some clouds that look like thunderheads in the west,” said Mrs. Frost, returning from an excursion to the part of the piazza commanding that quarter.

“Oh, it won’t rain to-day,” Mrs. Alger decided.

“I thought there was always a breeze at Jocelyn’s,” Mrs. Scott observed, in the critical spirit of a recent arrival.

“There always is,” the other explained, “except the first week you’re here.”

A little breath, scarcely more than a sentiment of breeze, made itself felt. “I do believe the wind has changed,” said Mrs. Frost. “It’s east.” The others owned one by one that it was so, and she enjoyed the merit of a discoverer; but her discovery was rapidly superseded. The clouds mounted in the west, and there came a time when the ladies disputed whether they had heard thunder or not: a faction contended for the bowling alley, and another faction held for a wagon passing over the bridge just before you reached Jocelyn’s. But those who were faithful to the theory of thunder carried the day by a sudden crash that broke over the forest, and, dying slowly away among the low hills, left them deeply silent.

“Some one,” said Mrs. Alger, “ought to go for those children.” On this it appeared that there were two minds as to where the children were, — whether on the beach or in the woods.

“Was n’t that thunder, Grace?” asked Mrs. Breen, with the accent by which she implicated her daughter in whatever happened.

“Yes,” said Grace, from where she sat at her window, looking seaward, and waiting tremulously for her mother’s next question.

“Where is Mrs. Maynard?”

“She is n’t back, yet.”

“Then,” said Mrs. Breen, “he really did expect rough weather.”

“He must,” returned Grace, in a guilty whisper.

“It’s a pity,” remarked her mother, “that you made them go.”

“Yes.” She rose, and, stretching herself far out of the window, searched the inexorable expanse of sea. It had already darkened at the verge, and the sails of some fishing-craft flecked a livid wall with their white, but there was no small boat in sight.

“If anything happened to them,” her mother continued, “I should feel terribly for you.”

“I should feel terribly for myself,” Grace responded, with her eyes still seaward.

“Where do you think they went?”

“I did n’t ask,” said the girl. “I wouldn’t,” she added, in devotion to the whole truth.

“Well, it is all of the same piece,” said Mrs. Breen. Grace did not ask what the piece was. She remained staring at the dark wall across the sea, and spiritually confronting her own responsibility, no atom of which she rejected. She held herself in every way responsible, — for doubting that poor young fellow’s word, and then for forcing that reluctant creature to go with him, and forbidding by her fierce insistence any attempt of his at explanation; she condemned herself to perpetual remorse with even greater zeal than her mother would have sentenced her, and she would not permit herself any respite when a little sail, which she knew for theirs, blew round the point. It seemed to fly along just on the hither side of that mural darkness, skilfully tacking to reach the end of the-reef before the wall pushed it on the rocks. Suddenly, the long low stretch of the reef broke into white foam, and then passed from sight under the black wall, against which the little sail still flickered. The girl fetched a long, silent breath. They were inside the reef, in comparatively smooth water, and to her ignorance they were safe. But the rain would be coming in another moment, and Mrs. Maynard would be drenched; and Grace would be to blame for her death. She ran to the closet, and pulled down her mother’s India-rubber cloak and her own, and fled out-of-doors, to be ready on the beach with the wrap, against their landing. She met the other ladies on the stairs and in the hall, and they clamored at her; but she glided through them like something in a dream, and then she heard a shouting in her ear, and felt herself caught and held up against the wind.

“Where in land be you goin’, Miss Breen?”

Barlow, in a long, yellow oil-skin coat and sou’wester hat, kept pushing her forward to the edge of the cliff, as he asked.

“I’m going down to meet them!” she screamed.

“Well, I hope you WILL meet ‘em. But I guess you better go back to the house. Hey? WUNT? Well; come along, then, if they ain’t past doctorin’ by the time they git ashore! Pretty well wrapped up, any way!” he roared; and she perceived that she had put on her waterproof and drawn the hood over her head.

Those steps to the beach had made her giddy when she descended with leisure for such dismay; but now, with the tempest flattening her against the stair-case, and her gossamer clutching and clinging to every surface, and again twisting itself about her limbs, she clambered down as swiftly and recklessly as Barlow himself, and followed over the beach beside the men who were pulling a boat down the sand at a run.

“Let me get in!” she screamed. “I wish to go with you!”

“Take hold of the girl, Barlow!” shouted one of the men. “She’s crazy.”

He tumbled himself with four others into the boat, and they all struck out together through the froth and swirl of the waves. She tried to free herself from Barlow, so as to fling the waterproof into the boat. “Take this, then. She’ll be soaked through!”

Barlow broke into a grim laugh. “She won’t need it, except for a windin’-sheet!” he roared. “Don’t you see the boat’s drivin’ right on t’ the sand? She’ll be kindlin’ wood in a minute.”

“But they’re inside the reef! They can come to anchor!” she shrieked in reply. He answered her with a despairing grin and a shake of the head. “They can’t. What has your boat gone out for, then?”

“To pick ’em up out the sea. But they’ll never git ’em alive. Look how she slaps her boom int’ the water! Well! He DOES know how to handle a boat!”

It was Libby at the helm, as she could dimly see, but what it was in his management that moved Barlow’s praise she could not divine. The boat seemed to be aimed for the shore, and to be rushing, head on, upon the beach; her broad sail was blown straight out over her bow, and flapped there like a banner, while the heavy boom hammered the water as she rose and fell. A jagged line of red seamed the breast of the dark wall behind; a rending crash came, and as if fired upon, the boat flung up her sail, as a wild fowl flings up its wing when shot, and lay tossing keel up, on the top of the waves. It all looked scarcely a stone’s cast away, though it was vastly farther. A figure was seen to drag itself up out of the sea, and fall over into the boat, hovering and pitching in the surrounding welter, and struggling to get at two other figures clinging to the wreck. Suddenly the men in the boat pulled away, and Grace uttered a cry of despair and reproach: “Why, they’re leaving it, they’re leaving it!”

“Don’t expect ’em to tow the wreck ashore in this weather, do ye?” shouted Barlow. “They’ve got the folks all safe enough. I tell ye I see ‘em!” he cried, at a wild look of doubt in her eyes. “Run to the house, there, and get everything in apple-pie order. There’s goin’ to be a chance for some of your doctor’n’ now, if ye know how to fetch folks to.”

It was the little house on the beach, which the children were always prying and peering into, trying the lock, and wondering what the boat was like, which Grace had seen launched. Now the door yielded to her, and within she found a fire kindled in the stove, blankets laid in order, and flasks of brandy in readiness in the cupboard. She put the blankets to heat for instant use, and prepared for the work of resuscitation. When she could turn from them to the door, she met there a procession that approached with difficulty, heads down and hustled by the furious blast through which the rain now hissed and shot. Barlow and one of the boat’s crew were carrying Mrs. Maynard, and bringing up the rear of the huddling oil-skins and sou’westers came Libby, soaked, and dripping as he walked. His eyes and Grace’s encountered with a mutual avoidance; but whatever was their sense of blame, their victim had no reproaches to make herself. She was not in need of restoration. She was perfectly alive, and apparently stimulated by her escape from deadly peril to a vivid conception of the wrong that had been done her. If the adventure had passed off prosperously, she was the sort of woman to have owned to her friend that she ought not to have thought of going. But the event had obliterated these scruples, and she realized herself as a hapless creature who had been thrust on to dangers from which she would have shrunk. “Well, Grace!” she began, with a voice and look before which the other quailed, “I hope you are satisfied! All the time I was clinging to that wretched boat. I was wondering how you would feel. Yes, my last thoughts were of you. I pitied you. I did n’t see how you could ever have peace again.”

“Hold on, Mrs. Maynard!” cried Libby. “There’s no, time for that, now. What had best be done, Miss Green? Had n’t she better be got up to the house?”

“Yes, by all means,” answered Grace.

“You might as well let me die here,” Mrs. Maynard protested, as Grace wrapped the blankets round her dripping dress. “I ‘m as wet as I can be, now.”

Libby began to laugh at these inconsequences, to which he was probably well used. “You would n’t have time to die here. And we want to give this hydropathic treatment a fair trial. You’ve tried the douche, and now you’re to have the pack.” He summoned two of the boatmen, who had been considerately dripping outside, in order to leave the interior to the shipwrecked company, and they lifted Mrs. Maynard, finally wrapped in, Grace’s India-rubber cloak, and looking like some sort of strange, huge chrysalis, and carried her out into the storm and up the steps.

Grace followed last with Mr. Libby, very heavyhearted and reckless. She had not only that sore self-accusal; but the degradation of the affair, its grotesqueness, its spiritual squalor, its utter gracelessness, its entire want of dignity, were bitter as death in her proud soul. It was not in this shameful guise that she had foreseen the good she was to do. And it had all come through her own wilfulness and self-righteousness. The tears could mix unseen with the rain that drenched her face, but they blinded her, and half-way up the steps she stumbled on her skirt, and would have fallen, if the young man had not caught her. After that, from time to time he put his arm about her, and stayed her against the gusts.

Before they reached the top he said, “Miss Breen, I’m awfully sorry for all this. Mrs. Maynard will be ashamed of what she said. Confound it! If Maynard were only here!”

“Why should she be ashamed?” demanded Grace. “If she had been drowned, I should have murdered her, and I’m responsible if anything happens to her, — I am to blame.” She escaped from him, and ran into the house. He slunk round the piazza to the kitchen door, under the eyes of the ladies watching at the parlor windows.

“I wonder he let the others carry her up,” said Miss Gleason. “Of course, he will marry her now, — when she gets her divorce.” She spoke of Mrs. Maynard, whom her universal toleration not only included in the mercy which the opinions of the other ladies denied her, but round whom her romance cast a halo of pretty possibilities as innocently sentimental as the hopes of a young girl.

IV.

The next morning Grace was sitting beside her patient, with whom she had spent the night. It was possibly Mrs. Maynard’s spiritual toughness which availed her, for she did not seem much the worse for her adventure: she had a little fever, and she was slightly hoarser; but she had died none of the deaths that she projected during the watches of the night, and for which she had chastened the spirit of her physician by the repeated assurance that she forgave her everything, and George Maynard everything, and hoped that they would be good to her poor little Bella. She had the child brought from its crib to her own bed, and moaned over it; but with the return of day and the duties of life she appeared to feel that she had carried her forgiveness far enough, and was again remembering her injuries against Grace, as she lay in her morning gown on the lounge which had been brought in for her from the parlor.

“Yes, Grace, I shall always say if I had died and I may die yet — that I did not wish to go out with Mr. Libby, and that I went purely to please you. You forced me to go. I can’t understand why you did it; for I don’t suppose you wanted to kill us, whatever you did.”

Grace could not lift her head. She bowed it over the little girl whom she had on her knee, and who was playing with the pin at her throat, in apparent unconsciousness of all that was said. But she had really followed it, with glimpses of intelligence, as children do, and now at this negative accusal she lifted her hand, and suddenly struck Grace a stinging blow on the cheek.

Mrs. Maynard sprang from her lounge. “Why, Bella! you worthless little wretch!” She caught her from Grace’s knee, and shook her violently. Then, casting the culprit from her at random, she flung herself down again in a fit of coughing, while the child fled to Grace for consolation, and, wildly sobbing, buried her face in the lap of her injured friend.

“I don’t know what I shall do about that child!” cried Mrs. Maynard. “She has George Maynard’s temper right over again. I feel dreadfully, Grace!”

“Oh, never mind it,” said Grace, fondling the child, and half addressing it. “I suppose Bella thought I had been unkind to her mother.”

“That’s just it!” exclaimed Louise. “When you’ve been kindness itself! Don’t I owe everything to you? I should n’t be alive at this moment if it were not for your treatment. Oh, Grace!” She began to cough again; the paroxysm increased in vehemence. She caught her handkerchief from her lips; it was spotted with blood. She sprang to her feet, and regarded it with impersonal sternness. “Now,” she said, “I am sick, and I want a doctor!”

“A doctor,” Grace meekly echoed.

“Yes. I can’t be trifled with any longer. I want a man doctor!”

Grace had looked at the handkerchief. “Very well,” she said, with coldness. “I shall not stand in your way of calling another physician. But if it will console you, I can tell you that the blood on your handkerchief means nothing worth speaking of. Whom shall I send for?” she asked, turning to go out of the roam. “I wish to be your friend still, and I will do anything I can to help you.”

“Oh, Grace Breen! Is that the way you talk to me?” whimpered Mrs. Maynard. “You know that I don’t mean to give you up. I’m not a stone; I have some feeling. I did n’t intend to dismiss you, but I thought perhaps you would like to have a consultation about it. I should think it was time to have a consultation, should n’t you? Of course, I’m not alarmed, but I know it’s getting serious, and I’m afraid that your medicine is n’t active enough. That’s it; it’s perfectly good medicine, but it is n’t active. They’ve all been saying that I ought to have something active. Why not try the whiskey with the white-pine chips in it? I’m sure it’s indicated.” In her long course of medication she had picked up certain professional phrases, which she used with amusing seriousness. “It would be active, at any rate.”

Grace did not reply. As she stood smoothing the head of the little girl, who had followed her to the door, and now leaned against her, hiding her tearful face in Grace’s dress, she said, “I don’t know of any homoeopathic physician in this neighborhood. I don’t believe there’s one nearer than Boston, and I should make myself ridiculous in calling one so far for a consultation. But I’m quite willing you should call one, and I will send for you at once.”

“And wouldn’t you consult with him, after he came?”

“Certainly not. It would be absurd.”

“I shouldn’t like to have a doctor come all the way from Boston,” mused Mrs. Maynard, sinking on the lounge again. “There must be a doctor in the neighborhood. It can’t be so healthy as that!”

“There’s an allopathic physician at Corbitant,” said Grace passively. “A very good one, I believe,” she added.

“Oh, well, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, with immense relief. “Consult with him!”

“I’ve told you, Louise, that I would not consult with anybody. And I certainly wouldn’t consult with a physician whose ideas and principles I knew nothing about.”

“Why but, Grace,” Mrs. Maynard expostulated. “Is n’t that rather prejudiced?” She began to take an impartial interest in Grace’s position, and fell into an argumentative tone. “If two heads are better than one, — and everybody says they are, — I don’t see how you can consistently refuse to talk with another physician.”

“I can’t explain to you, Louise,” said Grace. “But you can call Dr. Mulbridge, if you wish. That will be the right way for you to do, if you have lost confidence in me.”

“I have n’t lost confidence in you, Grace. I don’t see how you can talk so. You can give me bread pills, if you like, or air pills, and I will take them gladly. I believe in you perfectly. But I do think that in a matter of this kind, where my health, and perhaps my life, is concerned, I ought to have a little say. I don’t ask you to give up your principles, and I don’t dream of giving you up, and yet you won’t just to please me! — exchange a few words with another doctor about my case, merely because he’s allopathic. I should call it bigotry, and I don’t see how you can call it anything else.” There was a sound of voices at the door outside, and she called cheerily, “Come in, Mr. Libby, — come in! There’s nobody but Grace here,” she added, as the young man tentatively opened the door, and looked in. He wore an evening dress, even to the white cravat, and he carried in his hand a crush hat: there was something anomalous in his appearance, beyond the phenomenal character of his costume, and he blushed consciously as he bowed to Grace, and then at her motion shook hands with her. Mrs. Maynard did not give herself the fatigue of rising; she stretched her hand to him from the lounge, and he took it without the joy which he had shown when Grace made him the same advance. “How very swell you look. Going to an evening party this morning?” she cried; and after she had given him a second glance of greater intensity, “Why, what in the world has come over’ you?” It was the dress which Mr. Libby wore. He was a young fellow far too well made, and carried himself too alertly, to look as if any clothes misfitted him; his person gave their good cut elegance, but he had the effect of having fallen away in them. “Why, you look as if you had been sick a month!” Mrs. Maynard interpreted.

The young man surveyed himself with a downward glance. “They’re Johnson’s,” he explained. “He had them down for a hop at the Long Beach House, and sent over for them. I had nothing but my camping flannels, and they have n’t been got into shape yet, since yesterday. I wanted to come over and see how you were.”

“Poor fellow!” exclaimed Mrs. Maynard. “I never thought of you! How in the world did you get to your camp?”

“I walked.”

“In all that rain?”

“Well, I had been pretty well sprinkled, already. It was n’t a question of wet and dry; it was a question of wet and wet. I was going off bareheaded, I lost my hat in the water, you know, — but your man, here, hailed me round the corner of the kitchen, and lent me one. I’ve been taking up collections of clothes ever since.”

Mr. Libby spoke lightly, and with a cry of “Barlow’s hat!” Mrs. Maynard went off in a shriek of laughter; but a deep distress kept Grace silent. It seemed to her that she had been lacking not only in thoughtfulness, but in common humanity, in suffering him to walk away several miles in the rain, without making an offer to keep him and have him provided for in the house. She remembered now her bewildered impression that he was without a hat when he climbed the stairs and helped her to the house; she recalled the fact that she had thrust him on to the danger he had escaped, and her heart was melted with grief and shame. “Mr. Libby” — she began, going up to him, and drooping before him in an attitude which simply and frankly expressed the contrition she felt; but she could not continue. Mrs. Maynard’s laugh broke into the usual cough, and as soon as she could speak she seized the word.

“Well, there, now; we can leave it to Mr. Libby. It’s the principle of the thing that I look at. And I want to see how it strikes him. I want to know, Mr. Libby, if you were a doctor,” — he looked at Grace, and flushed,— “and a person was very sick, and wanted you to consult with another doctor, whether you would let the mere fact that you had n’t been introduced have any weight with you?” The young man silently appealed to Grace, who darkened angrily, and before he could speak Mrs. Maynard interposed. “No, no, you sha’n’t ask her. I want your opinion. It’s just an abstract question.” She accounted for this fib with a wink at Grace.

“Really,” he said, “it’s rather formidable. I’ve never been a doctor of any kind.”

“Oh, yes, we know that!” said Mrs. Maynard. “But you are now, and now would you do it?”

“If the other fellow knew more, I would.”

“But if you thought he did n’t?”

“Then I wouldn’t. What are you trying to get at, Mrs. Maynard? I’m not going to answer any more of your questions.”

“Yes, — one more. Don’t you think it’s a doctor’s place to get his patient well any way he can?”

“Why, of course!”

“There, Grace! It’s just exactly the same case. And ninety-nine out of a hundred would decide against you every time.”

Libby turned towards Grace in confusion. “Miss Breen — I did n’t understand — I don’t presume to meddle in anything — You’re not fair, Mrs. Maynard! I have n’t any opinion on the subject, Miss Breen; I haven’t, indeed!”

“Oh, you can’t back out, now!” exclaimed Mrs. Maynard joyously. “You’ve said it.”

“And you’re quite right, Mr. Libby,” said Grace haughtily. She bade him good-morning; but he followed her from the room, and left Mrs. Maynard to her triumph.

“Miss Breen — Do let me speak to you, please! Upon my word and honor, I didn’t know what she was driving at; I did n’t, indeed! It’s pretty rough on me, for I never dreamt of setting myself up as a judge of your affairs. I know you’re right, whatever you think; and I take it all back; it was got out of me by fraud, any way. And I beg your pardon for not calling you Doctor — if you want me to do it. The other comes more natural; but I wish to recognize you in the way you prefer, for I do feel most respectul — reverent—”

He was so very earnest and so really troubled, and he stumbled about so for the right word, and hit upon the wrong one with such unfailing disaster, that she must have been superhuman not to laugh. Her laughing seemed to relieve him even more than her hearty speech. “Call me how you like, Mr. Libby. I don’t insist upon anything with you; but I believe I prefer Miss Breen.”

“You’re very kind! Miss Breen it is, then. And you’ll, forgive my siding against you?” he demanded radiantly.

“Don’t speak of that again, please. I’ve nothing to forgive you.”

They walked down-stairs and out on the piazza. Barlow stood before the steps, holding by the bit a fine bay mare, who twitched her head round a little at the sound of Libby’s voice, and gave him a look. He passed without noticing the horse. “I’m glad to find Mrs. Maynard so well. With that cold of hers, hanging on so long, I didn’t know but she’d be in an awful state this morning.”

“Yes,” said Grace, “it’s a miraculous escape.”

“The fact is I sent over to New Leyden for my team yesterday. I did n’t know how things might turn out, and you’re so far from a lemon here, that I thought I might be useful in going errands.”

Grace turned her head and glanced at the equipage. “Is that your team?”

“Yes,” said the young fellow, with a smile of suppressed pride.

“What an exquisite creature!” said the girl.

“ISN’T she?” They both faced about, and stood looking at the mare, and the light, shining, open buggy behind her. The sunshine had the after-storm glister; the air was brisk, and the breeze blew balm from the heart of the pine forest. “Miss Breen,” he broke out, “I wish you’d take a little dash through the woods with me. I’ve got a broad-track buggy, that’s just right for these roads. I don’t suppose it’s the thing at all to ask you, on such short acquaintance, but I wish you would. I know you’d enjoy it: Come?”

His joyous urgence gave her a strange thrill. She had long ceased to imagine herself the possible subject of what young ladies call attentions, and she did not think of herself in that way now. There was something in the frank, eager boyishness of the invitation that fascinated her, and the sunny face turned so hopefully upon her had its amusing eloquence. She looked about the place with an anxiety of which she was immediately ashamed: all the ladies were out of sight, and probably at the foot of the cliff.

“Don’t say no, Miss Breen,” pleaded the gay voice.

The answer seemed to come of itself. “Oh, thank you, yes, I should like to go.”

“Good!” he exclaimed, and the word which riveted her consent made her recoil.

“But not this morning. Some other day. I — I — I want to think about Mrs. Maynard. I — ought n’t to leave her. Excuse me this morning, Mr. Libby.”

“Why, of course,” he tried to say with unaltered gayety, but a note of disappointment made itself felt. “Do you think she’s going to be worse?”

“No, I don’t think she is. But—” She paused, and waited a space before she continued. “I ‘m afraid I can’t be of use to her any longer. She has lost confidence in me — It’s important she should trust her physician.” Libby blushed, as he always did when required to recognize Grace in her professional quality. “It’s more a matter of nerves than anything else, and if she does n’t believe in me I can’t do her any good.”

“Yes, I can understand that,” said the young man, with gentle sympathy; and she felt, somehow, that he delicately refrained from any leading or prompting comment.

“She has been urging me to have a consultation with some doctor about her case, and I — it would be ridiculous!”

“Then I would n’t do it!” said Mr. Libby. “You know a great deal better what she wants than she does. You had better make her, do what you say.”

“I didn’t mean to burden you with my affairs,” said Grace, “but I wished to explain her motive in speaking to you as she did.” After she had said this, it seemed to her rather weak, and she could not think of anything else that would strengthen it. The young man might think that she had asked advice of him. She began to resent his telling her to make Mrs. Maynard do what she said. She was about to add something to snub him, when she recollected that it was her own wilfulness which had precipitated the present situation, and she humbled herself.

“She will probably change her mind,” said Libby. “She would if you could let her carry her point,” he added, with a light esteem for Mrs. Maynard which set him wrong again in Grace’s eyes: he had no business to speak so to her.

“Very likely,” she said, in stiff withdrawal from all terms of confidence concerning Mrs. Maynard. She did not add anything more, and she meant that the young fellow should perceive that his, audience was at an end. He did not apparently resent it, but she fancied him hurt in his acquiescence.

She went back to her patient, whom she found languid and disposed to sleep after the recent excitement, and she left her again, taking little Bella with her. Mrs. Maynard slept long, but woke none the better for her nap. Towards evening she grew feverish, and her fever mounted as the night fell. She was restless and wakeful, and between her dreamy dozes she was incessant in her hints for a consultation to Grace, who passed the night in her room, and watched every change for the worse with a self-accusing heart. The impending trouble was in that indeterminate phase which must give the physician his most anxious moments; and this inexperienced girl; whose knowledge was all to be applied, and who had hardly arrived yet at that dismaying stage when a young physician finds all the results at war with all the precepts, began to realize the awfulness of her responsibility. She had always thought of saving life, and not of losing it.

V.

By morning Grace was as nervous and anxious as her patient, who had momentarily the advantage of her in having fallen asleep. She went stealthily out, and walked the length of the piazza, bathing her eyes with the sight of the sea, cool and dim under a clouded sky. At the corner next the kitchen she encountered Barlow, who, having kindled the fire for the cook, had spent s moment of leisure in killing some chickens at the barn; he appeared with a cluster of his victims in his hand, but at sight of Grace he considerately put them behind him.

She had not noticed them. “Mr. Barlow,” she said, “how far is it to Corbitant?”

Barlow slouched into a conversational posture, easily resting on his raised hip the back of the hand in which he held the chickens. “Well, it ‘s accordin’ to who you ask. Some says six mile, and real clever folks makes it about four and a quarter.”

“I ask you,” persisted Grace.

“Well, the last time I was there, I thought it was about sixty. ‘Most froze my fingers goin’ round the point. ‘N’ all I was afraid of was gettin’ there too soon. Tell you, a lee shore ain’t a pleasant neighbor in a regular old northeaster. ‘F you go by land, I guess it’s about ten mile round through the woods. Want to send for Dr. Mulbridge? I thought mebbe” —

“No, no!” said Grace. She turned back into the house, and then she came running out again; but by this time Barlow had gone into the kitchen, where she heard him telling the cook that these were the last of the dommyneckers. At breakfast several of the ladies came and asked after Mrs. Maynard, whose restless night they had somehow heard of. When she came out of the dining-room’ Miss Gleason waylaid her in the hall.

“Dr. Breen,” she said, in a repressed tumult, “I hope you won’t give way. For woman’s sake, I hope you won’t! You owe it to yourself not to give way! I’m sure Mrs. Maynard is as well off in your hands as she can be. If I did n’t think so, I should be the last to advise your being firm; but, feeling as I do, I do advise it most strongly. Everything depends on it.”

“I don’t know what you mean, Miss Gleason,” said Grace.

“I’m glad it hasn’t come to you yet. If it was a question of mere professional pride, I should say, By all means call him at once. But I feel that a great deal more is involved. If you yield, you make it harder for other women to help themselves hereafter, and you confirm such people as these in their distrust of female physicians. Looking at it in a large way, I almost feel that it would be better for her to die than for you to give up; and feeling as I do” —

“Are you talking of Mrs. Maynard?” asked Grace.

“They are all saying that you ought to give up the case to Dr. Mulbridge. But I hope you won’t. I should n’t blame you for calling in another female physician” —

“Thank you,” answered Grace. “There is no danger of her dying. But it seems to me that she has too many female physicians already. In this house I should think it better to call a man.” She left the barb to rankle in Miss Gleason’s breast, and followed her mother to her room, who avenged Miss Gleason by a series of inquisitional tortures, ending with the hope that, whatever she did, Grace would not have that silly creature’s blood on her hands. The girl opened her lips to attempt some answer to this unanswerable aspiration, when the unwonted sound of wheels on the road without caught her ear.

“What is that, Grace?” demanded her mother, as if Grace were guilty of the noise.

“Mr. Libby,” answered Grace, rising.

“Has he come for you?”

“I don’t know. But I am going down to see him.”

At sight of the young man’s face, Grace felt her heart lighten. He had jumped from his buggy, and was standing at his smiling ease on the piazza steps, looking about as if for some one, and he brightened joyfully at her coming. He took her hand with eager friendliness, and at her impulse began to move away to the end of the piazza with her. The ladies had not yet descended to the beach; apparently their interest in Dr. Breen’s patient kept them.

“How is Mrs. Maynard this morning?” he asked; and she answered, as they got beyond earshot, —

“Not better, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said the young man. “Then you won’t be able to drive with me this morning? I hope she is n’t seriously worse?” he added, recurring to Mrs. Maynard at the sight of the trouble in Grace’s face.

“I shall ask to drive with you,” she returned. “Mr. Libby, do you know where Corbitant is?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And will you drive me there?”

“Why, certainly!” he cried, in polite wonder.

“Thank you.” She turned half round, and cast a woman’s look at the other women. “I shall be ready in half an hour. Will you go away, and comeback then? Not sooner.”

“Anything you please, Miss Breen,” he said, laughing in his mystification. “In thirty minutes, or thirty days.”

They went back to the steps, and he mounted his buggy. She sat down, and taking some work from her pocket, bent her head over it. At first she was pale, and then she grew red. But these fluctuations of color could not keep her spectators long; one by one they dispersed and descended the cliff; and when she rose to go for her hat the last had vanished, with a longing look at her. It was Miss Gleason.

Grace briefly announced her purpose to her mother, who said, “I hope you are not doing anything impulsive”; and she answered, “No, I had quite made up my mind to it last night.”

Mr. Libby had not yet returned when she went back to the piazza, and she walked out on the road by which he must arrive. She had not to walk far. He drew in sight before she had gone a quarter of a mile, driving rapidly. “Am I late?” he asked, turning, and pulling up at the roadside, with well-subdued astonishment at encountering her.

“Oh, no; not that I know.” She mounted to the seat, and they drove off in a silence which endured for a long time. If Libby had been as vain as he seemed light, he must have found it cruelly unflattering, for it ignored his presence and even his existence. She broke the silence at last with a deep-drawn sigh, as frankly sad as if she had been quite alone, but she returned to consciousness of him in it. “Mr. Libby, you must think it is very strange for me to ask you to drive me to Corbitant without troubling myself to tell you my errand.”

“Oh, not at all,” said the young man. “I’m glad to be of use on any terms. It is n’t often that one gets the chance.”

“I am going to see Dr. Mulbridge,” she began, and then stopped so long that he perceived she wished him to say something.

He said, “Yes?”

“Yes. I thought this morning that I should give Mrs. Maynard’s case up to him. I shouldn’t be at all troubled at seeming to give it up under a pressure of opinion, though I should not give it up for that. Of course,” she explained, “you don’t know that all those women have been saying that I ought to call in Dr. Mulbridge. It’s one of those things,” she added bitterly, “that make it so pleasant for a woman to try to help women.” He made a little murmur of condolence, and she realized that she had thrown herself on his sympathy, when she thought she had been merely thinking aloud. “What I mean is that he is a man of experience and reputation, and could probably be of more use to her than I, for she would trust him more. But I have known her a long time, and I understand her temperament and her character, — which goes for a good deal in such matters, — and I have concluded not to give up the case. I wish to meet Dr. Mulbridge, however, and ask him to see her in consultation with me. That is all,” she ended rather haughtily, as if she had been dramatizing the fact to Dr. Mulbridge in her own mind.

“I should think that would be the right thing,” said Libby limply, with uncalled-for approval; but he left this dangerous ground abruptly. “As you say, character goes for a great deal in these things. I’ve seen Mrs. Maynard at the point of death before. As a general rule, she does n’t die. If you have known her a long time, you know what I mean. She likes to share her sufferings with her friends. I’ve seen poor old Maynard” —

“Mr. Libby!” Grace broke in. “You may speak of Mr. Maynard as you like, but I cannot allow your disrespectfulness to Mrs. Maynard. It’s shocking! You had no right to be their friend if you felt toward them as you seem to have done.”

“Why, there was no harm in them. I liked them!” explained the young man.

“People have no right to like those they don’t respect!”

Libby looked as if this were rather a new and droll idea. But he seemed not to object to her tutoring him. “Well,” he said, “as far as Mrs. Maynard was concerned, I don’t know that I liked her any more than I respected her.”

Grace ought to have frowned at this, but she had to check a smile in. order to say gravely, “I know she is disagreeable at times. And she likes to share her sufferings with others, as you say. But her husband was fully entitled to any share of them that he may have borne. If he had been kinder to her, she wouldn’t be what and where she is now.”

“Kinder to her!” Libby exclaimed. “He’s the kindest fellow in the world! Now, Miss Breen,” he said earnestly, “I hope Mrs. Maynard hasn’t been talking against her husband to you?”

“Is it possible,” demanded Grace, “that you don’t know they’re separated, and that she’s going to take steps for a divorce?”

“A divorce? No! What in the world for?”

“I never talk gossip. I thought of course she had told you” —

“She never told me a word! She was ashamed to do it! She knows that I know Maynard was the best husband in the world to her. All she told me was that he was out on his ranch, and she had come on here for her health. It’s some ridiculous little thing that no reasonable woman would have dreamt of caring for. It’s one of her caprices. It’s her own fickleness. She’s tired of him, — or thinks she is, and that’s all about it. Miss Breen, I beg you won’t believe anything against Maynard!”

“I don’t understand,” faltered Grace, astonished at his fervor; and the light it cast upon her first doubts of him. “Of course, I only know the affair from her report, and I haven’t concerned myself in it, except as it affected her health. And I don’t wish to misjudge him. And I like your — defending him,” she said, though it instantly seemed a patronizing thing to have said. “But I couldn’t withhold my sympathy where I believed there had been neglect and systematic unkindness, and finally desertion.”

“Oh, I know Mrs. Maynard; I know her kind of talk. I’ve seen Maynard’s neglect and unkindness, and I know just what his desertion would be. If he’s left her, it’s because she wanted him to leave her; he did it to humor her, to please her. I shall have a talk with Mrs. Maynard when we get back.”

“I ‘m afraid I can’t allow it at present,” said Grace, very seriously.

“She is worse to-day. Otherwise I should n’t be giving you this trouble.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble”— “But I’m glad — I’m glad we’ve had this understanding. I’m very glad. It makes me think worse of myself and better of — others.”

Libby gave a laugh. “And you like that? You’re easily pleased.”

She remained grave. “I ought to be able to tell you what I mean. But it is n’t possible — now. Will you let me beg your pardon?” she urged, with impulsive earnestness.

“Why, yes,” he answered, smiling.

“And not ask me why?”

“Certainly.”

“Thank you. Yes,” she added hastily, “she is so much worse that some one of greater experience than I must see her, and I have made up my mind. Dr. Mulbridge may refuse to consult with me. I know very well that there is a prejudice against women physicians, and I couldn’t especially blame him for sharing it. I have thought it all over. If he refuses, I shall know what to do.” She had ceased to address Libby, who respected her soliloquy. He drove on rapidly over the soft road, where the wheels made no sound, and the track wandered with apparent aimlessness through the interminable woods of young oak and pine. The low trees were full of the sunshine, and dappled them with shadow as they dashed along; the fresh, green ferns springing from the brown carpet of the pine-needles were as if painted against it. The breath of the pines was heavier for the recent rain; and the woody smell of the oaks was pungent where the balsam failed. They met no one, but the solitude did not make itself felt through her preoccupation. From time to time she dropped a word or two; but for the most she was silent, and he did not attempt to lead. By and by they came to an opener place, where there were many red field-lilies tilting in the wind.

“Would you like some of those?” he asked, pulling up.

“I should, very much,” she answered, glad of the sight of the gay things. But when he had gathered her a bunch of the flowers she looked down at them in her lap, and said, “It’s silly in me to be caring for lilies at such a time, and I should make an unfavorable impression on Dr. Mulbridge if he saw me with them. But I shall risk their effect on him. He may think I have been botanizing.”

“Unless you tell him you have n’t,” the young man suggested.

“I need n’t do that.”

“I don’t think any one else would do it.”

She colored a little at the tribute to her candor, and it pleased her, though it had just pleased her as much to forget that she was not like any other young girl who might be simply and irresponsibly happy in flowers gathered for her by a young man. “I won’t tell him, either!” she cried, willing to grasp the fleeting emotion again; but it was gone, and only a little residue of sad consciousness remained.

The woods gave way on either side of the road, which began to be a village street, sloping and shelving down toward the curve of a quiet bay. The neat weather-gray dwellings, shingled to the ground and brightened with door-yard flowers and creepers, straggled off into the boat-houses and fishing-huts on the shore, and the village seemed to get afloat at last in the sloops and schooners riding in the harbor, whose smooth plane rose higher to the eye than the town itself. The salt and the sand were everywhere, but though there had been no positive prosperity in Corbitant for a generation, the place had an impregnable neatness, which defied decay; if there had been a dog in the street, there would not have been a stick to throw at him.

One of the better, but not the best, of the village houses, which did not differ from the others in any essential particular, and which stood flush upon the street, bore a door-plate with the name Dr. Rufus Mulbridge, and Libby drew up in front of it without having had to alarm the village with inquiries. Grace forbade his help in dismounting, and ran to the door, where she rang one of those bells which sharply respond at the back of the panel to the turn of a crank in front; she observed, in a difference of paint, that this modern improvement had displaced an old-fashioned knocker. The door was opened by a tall and strikingly handsome old woman, whose black eyes still kept their keen light under her white hair, and whose dress showed none of the incongruity which was offensive in the door-bell: it was in the perfection of an antiquated taste, which, however, came just short of characterizing it with gentle womanliness.

“Is Dr. Mulbridge at home?” asked Grace.

“Yes,” said the other, with a certain hesitation, and holding the door ajar.

“I should like to see him,” said Grace, mounting to the threshold.

“Is it important?” asked the elder woman.

“Quite,” replied Grace, with an accent at once of surprise and decision.

“You may come in,” said the other reluctantly, and she opened a door into a room at the side of the hall.

“You may give Dr. Mulbridge my card, if you please,” said Grace, before she turned to go into this room; and the other took it, and left her to find a chair for herself. It was a country doctor’s office, with the usual country doctor’s supply of drugs on a shelf, but very much more than the country doctor’s usual library: the standard works were there, and there were also the principal periodicals and the latest treatises of note in the medical world. In a long, upright case, like that of an old hall-clock, was the anatomy of one who had long done with time; a laryngoscope and some other professional apparatus of constant utility lay upon the leaf of the doctor’s desk. There was nothing in the room which did not suggest his profession, except the sword and the spurs which hung upon the wall opposite where Grace sat beside one of the front windows. She spent her time in study of the room and its appointments, and in now and then glancing out at Mr. Libby, who sat statuesquely patient in the buggy. His profile cut against the sky was blameless; and a humorous shrewdness which showed in the wrinkle at his eye and in the droop of his yellow mustache gave its regularity life and charm. It occurred to her that if Dr. Mulbridge caught sight of Mr. Libby before he saw her, or before she could explain that she had got one of the gentlemen at the hotel — she resolved upon this prevarication — to drive her to Corbitant in default of another conveyance, he would have his impressions and conjectures, which doubtless the bunch of lilies in her hand would do their part to stimulate. She submitted to this possibility, and waited for his coming, which began to seem unreasonably delayed. The door opened at last, and a tall, powerfully framed man of thirty-five or forty, dressed in an ill-fitting suit of gray Canada homespun appeared. He moved with a slow, pondering step, and carried his shaggy head bent downwards from shoulders slightly rounded. His dark beard was already grizzled, and she saw that his mustache was burnt and turned tawny at points by smoking, of which habit his presence gave stale evidence to another sense. He held Grace’s card in his hand, and he looked at her, as he advanced, out of gray eyes that, if not sympathetic, were perfectly intelligent, and that at once sought to divine and class her. She perceived that he took in the lilies and her coming color; she felt that he noted her figure and her dress.

She half rose in response to his questioning bow, and he motioned her to her seat again. “I had to keep you waiting,” he said. “I was up all night with a patient, and I was asleep when my mother called me.” He stopped here, and definitively waited for her to begin.

She did not find this easy, as he took a chair in front of her, and sat looking steadily in her face. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you” “Oh, not at all,” he interrupted. “The rule is to disturb a doctor.”

“I mean,” she began again, “that I am not sure that I am justified in disturbing you.”

He waited a little while for her to go on, and then he said, “Well, let us hear.”

“I wish to consult with you,” she broke out, and again she came to a sudden pause; and as she looked into his vigilant face, in which she was not sure there was not a hovering derision, she could not continue. She felt that she ought to gather courage from the fact that he had not started, or done anything positively disagreeable when she had asked for a consultation; but she could not, and it did not avail her to reflect that she was rendering herself liable to all conceivable misconstruction, — that she was behaving childishly, with every appearance of behaving guiltily.

He came to her aid again, in a blunt fashion, neither kind nor unkind, but simply common sense. “What is the matter?”

“What is the matter?” she repeated.

“Yes. What are the symptoms? Where and how are, you sick?”

“I am not sick,” she cried. They stared at each other in reciprocal amazement and mystification.

“Then excuse me if I ask you what you wish me to do?”

“Oh!” said Grace, realizing his natural error, with a flush. “It is n’t in regard to myself that I wish to consult with you. It’s another person — a friend” —

“Well,” said Dr. Mulbridge, laughing, with the impatience of a physician used to making short cuts through the elaborate and reluctant statements of ladies seeking advice, “what is the matter with your friend?”

“She has been an invalid for some time,” replied Grace. The laugh, which had its edge of patronage and conceit, stung her into self-possession again, and she briefly gave the points of Mrs. Maynard’s case, with the recent accident and the symptoms developed during the night. He listened attentively, nodding his head at times, and now and then glancing sharply at her, as one might at a surprisingly intelligent child.

“I must see her,” he said decidedly, when she came to an end. “I will see her as soon as possible. I will come over to Jocelyn’s this afternoon, — as soon as I can get my dinner, in fact.”

There was such a tone of dismissal in his words that she rose, and he promptly followed her example. She stood hesitating a moment. Then, “I don’t know whether you understood that I wish merely to consult with you,” she said; “that I don’t wish to relinquish the case to you” —

“Relinquish the case — consult” — Dr. Mulbridge stared at her. “No, I don’t understand. What do you mean by not relinquishing the case? If there is some one else in attendance.”

“I am in attendance,” said the girl firmly. “I am Mrs. Maynard’s physician.”

“You? Physician”

“If you have looked at my card” — she began with indignant severity.

He gave a sort of roar of amusement and apology, and then he stared at her again with much of the interest of a naturalist in an extraordinary specimen.

“I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed. “I did n’t look at it”; but he now did so, where he held it crumpled in the palm of his left hand. “My mother said it was a young lady, and I did n’t look. Will you will you sit down, Dr. Breen?” He bustled in getting her several chairs. “I live off here in a corner, and I have never happened to meet any ladies of our profession before. Excuse me, if I spoke under a — mistaken impression. I — I — I should not have — ah — taken you for a physician. You” — He checked himself, as if he might have been going to say that she was too young and too pretty. “Of course, I shall have pleasure in consulting with you in regard to your friend’s case, though I’ve no doubt you are doing all that can be done.” With a great show of deference, he still betrayed something of the air of one who humors a joke; and she felt this, but felt that she could not openly resent it.

“Thank you,” she returned with dignity, indicating with a gesture of her hand that she would not sit down again. “I am sorry to ask you to come so far.”

“Oh, not at all. I shall be driving over in that direction at any rate. I’ve a patient near there.” He smiled upon her with frank curiosity, and seemed willing to detain her, but at a loss how to do so. “If I had n’t been stupid from my nap I should have inferred a scientific training from your statement of your friend’s case.” She still believed that he was laughing at her, and that this was a mock but she was still helpless to resent it, except by an assumption of yet colder state. This had apparently no effect upon Dr. Mulbridge. He continued to look at her with hardly concealed amusement, and visibly to grow more and more conscious of her elegance and style, now that she stood before him. There had been a time when, in planning her career, she had imagined herself studying a masculine simplicity and directness of address; but the over-success of some young women, her fellows at the school, in this direction had disgusted her with it, and she had perceived that after all there is nothing better for a girl, even a girl who is a doctor of medicine, than a ladylike manner. Now, however, she wished that she could do or say something aggressively mannish, for she felt herself dwindling away to the merest femininity, under a scrutiny which had its fascination, whether agreeable or disagreeable. “You must,” he said, with really unwarrantable patronage, “have found that the study of medicine has its difficulties, — you must have been very strongly drawn to it.”

“Oh no, not at all; I had rather an aversion at first,” she replied, with the instant superiority of a woman where the man suffers any topic to become personal. “Why did you think I was drawn to it?”

“I don’t know — I don’t know that I thought so,” he stammered. “I believe I intended to ask,” he added bluntly; but she had the satisfaction of seeing him redden, and she did not volunteer anything in his relief. She divined that it would leave him with an awkward sense of defeat if he quitted the subject there; and in fact he had determined that he would not. “Some of our ladies take up the study abroad,” he said; and he went on to speak, with a real deference, of the eminent woman who did the American name honor by the distinction she achieved in the schools of Paris.

“I have never been abroad,” said Grace.

“No?” he exclaimed. “I thought all American ladies had been abroad”; and now he said, with easy recognition of her resolution not to help him out, “I suppose you have your diploma from the Philadelphia school.”

“No,” she returned, “from the New York school, — the homoeopathic school of New York.”

Dr. Mulbridge instantly sobered, and even turned a little pale, but he did not say anything. He remained looking at her as if she had suddenly changed from a piquant mystery to a terrible dilemma.

She moved toward the door. “Then I may expect you,” she said, “about the middle of the afternoon.”

He did not reply; he stumbled upon the chairs in following her a pace or two, with a face of acute distress. Then he broke out with “I can’t come! I can’t consult with you!”

She turned and looked at him with astonishment, which he did his best to meet. Her astonishment congealed into hauteur, and then dissolved into the helplessness of a lady who has been offered a rudeness; but still she did not speak. She merely looked at him, while he halted and stammered on.

“Personally, I — I — should be — obliged — I should feel honored — I — I — It has nothing to do with your — your — being a — a — a — woman lady. I should not care for that. No. But surely you must know the reasons — the obstacles — which deter me?”

“No, I don’t,” she said, calm with the advantage of his perturbation. “But if you refuse, that is sufficient. I will not inquire your reasons. I will simply withdraw my request.”

“Thank you. But I beg you to understand that they have no reference whatever to you in — your own — capacity — character — individual quality. They are purely professional — that is, technical — I should say disciplinary, — entirely disciplinary. Yes, disciplinary.” The word seemed to afford Dr. Mulbridge the degree of relief which can come only from an exactly significant and luminously exegetic word.

“I don’t at all know what you mean,” said Grace. “But it is not necessary that I should know. Will you allow me?” she asked, for Dr. Mulbridge had got between her and the door, and stood with his hand on the latch.

His face flushed, and drops stood on his forehead. “Surely, Miss — I mean Doctor — Breen, you must know why I can’t consult with you! We belong to two diametrically opposite schools — theories — of medicine. It would be impracticable — impossible for us to consult. We could find no common ground. Have you never heard that the — ah regular practice cannot meet homoeopathists in this way? If you had told me — if I had known — you were a homoeopathist, I could n’t have considered the matter at all. I can’t now express any opinion as to your management of the case, but I have no doubt that you will know what to do — from your point of view — and that you will prefer to call in some one of your own — persuasion. I hope that you don’t hold me personally responsible for this result!”

“Oh, no!” replied the girl, with a certain dreamy abstraction. “I had heard that you made some such distinction — I remember, now. But I could n’t realize anything so ridiculous.”

Dr. Mulbridge colored. “Excuse me,” he said, “if, even under the circumstances, I can’t agree with you that the position taken by the regular practice is ridiculous.”

She did not make any direct reply. “But I supposed that you only made this distinction, as you call it, in cases where there is no immediate danger; that in a matter of life and death you would waive it. Mrs. Maynard is really—”

“There are no conditions under which I could not conscientiously refuse to waive it.”

“Then,” cried Grace, “I withdraw the word! It is not ridiculous. It is monstrous, atrocious, inhuman!”

A light of humorous irony glimmered in Dr. Mulbridge’s eye. “I must submit to your condemnation.”

“Oh, it isn’t a personal condemnation!” she retorted. “I have no doubt that personally you are not responsible. We can lay aside our distinctions as allopathist and homoeopathist, and you can advise with me” —

“It’s quite impossible,” said Dr. Mulbridge. “If I advised with you, I might be — A little while ago one of our school in Connecticut was expelled from the State Medical Association for consulting with” — he began to hesitate, as if he had not hit upon a fortunate or appropriate illustration, but he pushed on— “with his own wife, who was a physician of your school.”

She haughtily ignored his embarrassment. “I can appreciate your difficulty, and pity any liberal-minded person who is placed as you are, and disapproves of such wretched bigotry.”

“I am obliged to tell you,” said Dr. Mulbridge, “that I don’t disapprove of it.”

“I am detaining you,” said Grace. “I beg your pardon. I was curious to know how far superstition and persecution can go in our day.” If the epithets were not very accurate, she used them with a woman’s effectiveness, and her intention made them descriptive. “Good-day,” she added, and she made a movement toward the door, from which Dr. Mulbridge retired. But she did not open the door. Instead, she sank into the chair which stood in the corner, and passed her hand over her forehead, as if she were giddy.

Dr. Mulbridge’s finger was instantly on her wrist. “Are you faint?”

“No, no!” she gasped, pulling her hand away. “I am perfectly well.” Then she was silent for a time before she added by a supreme effort, “I have no right to endanger another’s life, through any miserable pride, and I never will. Mrs. Maynard needs greater experience than mine, and she must have it. I can’t justify myself in the delay and uncertainty of sending to Boston. I relinquish the case. I give it to you. And I will nurse her under your direction, obediently, conscientiously. Oh!” she cried, at his failure to make any immediate response, “surely you won’t refuse to take the case!”

“I won’t refuse,” he said, with an effect of difficult concession. “I will come. I will drive over at once, after dinner.”

She rose now, and put her hand on the door-latch. “Do you object to my nursing your patient? She is an old school friend. But I could yield that point too, if” —

“Oh, no, no! I shall be only too glad of your help, and your” — he was going to say advice, but he stopped himself, and repeated— “help.”

They stood inconclusively a moment, as if they would both be glad of something more to say. Then she said tentatively, “Good-morning,” and he responded experimentally, “Good-morning”; and with that they involuntarily parted, and she went out of the door, which he stood holding open even after she had got out of the gate.

His mother came down the stairs. “What in the world were you quarrelling with that girl about, Rufus?”

“We were not quarrelling, mother.”

“Well, it sounded like it. Who was she?

“Who?” repeated her son absently. “Dr. Breen.”

“Doctor Breen? That girl a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“I thought she was some saucy thing. Well, upon my word!” exclaimed Mrs. Mulbridge. “So that is a female doctor, is it? Was she sick?”

“No,” said her son, with what she knew to be professional finality. “Mother, if you can hurry dinner a little, I shall be glad. I have to drive over to Jocelyn’s, and I should like to start as soon as possible.”

“Who was the young man with her? Her beau, I guess.”

“Was there a young man with her?” asked Dr. Mulbridge.

His mother went out without speaking. She could be unsatisfactory, too.

VI.

No one but Mrs. Breen knew of her daughter’s errand, and when Grace came back she alighted from Mr. Libby’s buggy with an expression of thanks that gave no clew as to the direction or purpose of it. He touched his hat to her with equal succinctness, and drove away, including all the ladies on the piazza in a cursory obeisance.

“We must ask you, Miss Gleason,” said Mrs. Alger. “Your admiration of Dr. Breen clothes you with authority and responsibility.”

“I can’t understand it at all,” Miss Gleason confessed. “But I’m sure there’s nothing in it. He isn’t her equal. She would feel that it wasn’t right — under the circumstances.”

“But if Mrs. Maynard was well it would be a fair game, you mean,” said Mrs. Alger.

“No,” returned Miss Gleason, with the greatest air of candor, “I can’t admit that I meant that.”

“Well,” said the elder lady, “the presumption is against them. Every young couple seen together must be considered in love till they prove the contrary.”

“I like it in her,” said Mrs. Frost. “It shows that she is human, after all. It shows that she is like other girls. It’s a relief.”

“She is n’t like other girls,” contended Miss Gleason darkly.

“I would rather have Mr. Libby’s opinion,” said Mrs. Merritt.

Grace went to Mrs. Maynard’s room, and told her that Dr. Mulbridge was coming directly after dinner.

“I knew you would do it!” cried Mrs. Maynard, throwing her right arm round Grace’s neck, while the latter bent over to feel the pulse in her left. “I knew where you had gone as soon as your mother told me you had driven off with Walter Libby. I’m so glad that you’ve got somebody to consult! Your theories are perfectly right and I’m sure that Dr. Mulbridge will just tell you to keep on as you’ve been doing.”

Grace withdrew from her caress. “Dr. Mulbridge is not coming for a consultation. He refused to consult with me.”

“Refused to consult? Why, how perfectly ungentlemanly! Why did he refuse?”

“Because he is an allopathist and I am a homoeopathist.”

“Then, what is he coming for, I should like to know!”

“I have given up the case to him,” said Grace wearily.

“Very well, then!” cried Mrs. Maynard, “I won’t be given up. I will simply die! Not a pill, not a powder, of his will I touch! If he thinks himself too good to consult with another doctor, and a lady at that, merely because she doesn’t happen to be allopathist, he can go along! I never heard of anything so conceited, so disgustingly mean, in my life. No, Grace! Why, it’s horrid!” She was silent, and then, “Why, of course,” she added, “if he comes, I shall have to see him. I look like a fright, I suppose.”

“I will do your hair,” said Grace, with indifference to these vows and protests; and without deigning further explanation or argument she made the invalid’s toilet for her. If given time, Mrs. Maynard would talk herself into any necessary frame of mind, and Grace merely supplied the monosyllabic promptings requisite for her transition from mood to mood. It was her final resolution that when Dr. Mulbridge did come she should give him a piece of her mind; and she received him with anxious submissiveness, and hung upon all his looks and words with quaking and with an inclination to attribute her unfavorable symptoms to the treatment of her former physician. She did not spare him certain apologies for the disorderly appearance of her person and her room.

Grace sat by and watched him with perfectly quiescent observance. The large, somewhat uncouth man gave evidence to her intelligence that he was all physician — that he had not chosen his profession from any theory or motive, however good, but had been as much chosen by it as if he had been born a Physician. He was incredibly gentle and soft in all his movements, and perfectly kind, without being at any moment unprofitably sympathetic. He knew when to listen and when not to listen, — to learn everything from the quivering bundle of nerves before him without seeming to have learnt anything alarming; he smiled when it would do her good to be laughed at, and treated her with such grave respect that she could not feel herself trifled with, nor remember afterwards any point of neglect. When he rose and left some medicines, with directions to Grace for giving them and instructions for contingencies, she followed him from the room.

“Well?” she said anxiously.

“Mrs. Maynard is threatened with pneumonia. Or, I don’t know why I should say threatened,” he added; “she has pneumonia.”

“I supposed — I was afraid so,” faltered the girl.

“Yes.” He looked into her eyes with even more seriousness than he spoke.

“Has she friends here?” he asked.

“No; her husband is in Cheyenne, out on the plains.”

“He ought to know,” said Dr. Mulbridge. “A great deal will depend upon her nursing — Miss — ah — Dr. Breen.”

“You need n’t call me Dr. Breen,” said Grace. “At present, I am Mrs. Maynard’s nurse.”

He ignored this as he had ignored every point connected with the interview of the morning. He repeated the directions he had already given with still greater distinctness, and, saying that he should come in the morning, drove away. She went back to Louise: inquisition for inquisition, it was easier to meet that of her late patient than that of her mother, and for once the girl spared herself.

“I know he thought I was very bad,” whimpered Mrs. Maynard, for a beginning. “What is the matter with me?”

“Your cold has taken an acute form; you will have to go to bed.”

“Then I ‘m going to be down sick! I knew I was! I knew it! And what am I going to do, off in such a place as this? No one to nurse me, or look after Bella! I should think you would be satisfied now, Grace, with the result of your conscientiousness: you were so very sure that Mr. Libby was wanting to flirt with me that you drove us to our death, because you thought he felt guilty and was trying to fib out of it.”

“Will you let me help to undress you?” asked Grace gently. “Bella shall be well taken care of, and I am going to nurse you myself, under Dr. Mulbridge’s direction. And once for all, Louise, I wish to say that I hold myself to blame for all” —

“Oh, yes! Much good that does now!” Being got into bed, with the sheet smoothed under her chin, she said, with the effect of drawing a strictly logical conclusion from the premises, “Well, I should think George Maynard would want to be with his family!”

Spent with this ordeal, Grace left her at last, and went out on the piazza, where she found Libby returned. In fact, he had, upon second thoughts, driven back, and put up his horse at Jocelyn’s, that he might be of service there in case he were needed. The ladies, with whom he had been making friends, discreetly left him to Grace, when she appeared, and she frankly walked apart with him, and asked him if he could go over to New Leyden, and telegraph to Mr. Maynard.

“Has she asked for him?” he inquired, laughing. “I knew it would come to that.”

“She has not asked; she has said that she thought he ought to be with his family,” repeated Grace faithfully.

“Oh, I know how she said it: as if he had gone away wilfully, and kept away against her wishes and all the claims of honor and duty. It wouldn’t take her long to get round to that if she thought she was very sick. Is she so bad?” he inquired, with light scepticism.

“She’s threatened with pneumonia. We can’t tell how bad she may be.”

“Why, of course I’ll telegraph. But I don’t think anything serious can be the matter with Mrs. Maynard.”

“Dr. Mulbridge said that Mr. Maynard ought to know.”

“Is that so?” asked Libby, in quite a different tone. If she recognized the difference, she was meekly far from resenting it; he, however, must have wished to repair his blunder. “I think you need n’t have given up the case to him. I think you’re too conscientious about it.”

“Please don’t speak of that now,” she interposed.

“Well, I won’t,” he consented. “Can I be of any use here to-night?”

“No, we shall need nothing more. The doctor will be here again in the morning.”

“Libby did not come in the morning till after the doctor had gone, and then he explained that he had waited to hear in reply to his telegram, so that they might tell Mrs. Maynard her husband had started; and he had only just now heard.

“And has he started?” Grace asked.

“I heard from his partner. Maynard was at the ranch. His partner had gone for him.”

“Then he will soon be here,” she said.

“He will, if telegraphing can bring him. I sat up half the night with the operator. She was very obliging when she understood the case.”

“She?” reputed Grace, with a slight frown.

“The operators are nearly all women in the country.”

“Oh!” She looked grave. “Can they trust young girls with such important duties?”

“They did n’t in this instance,” relied Libby. “She was a pretty old girl. What made you think she was young?”

“I don’t know. I thought you said she was young.” She blushed, and seemed about to say more, but she did not.

He waited, and then he said, “You can tell Mrs. Maynard that I telegraphed on my own responsibility, if you think it’s going to alarm her.”

“Well,” said Grace, with a helpless sigh.

“You don’t like to tell her that,” he suggested, after a moment, in which he had watched her.

“How do you know?”

“Oh, I know. And some day I will tell you how — if you will let me.”

It seemed a question; and she did not know what it was that kept her — silent and breathless and hot in the throat. “I don’t like to do it,” she said at last. “I hate myself whenever I have to feign anything. I knew perfectly well that you did n’t say she was young,” she broke out desperately.

“Say Mrs. Maynard was young?” he asked stupidly.

“No!” she cried. She rose hastily from the bench where she had been sitting with him. “I must go back to her now.”

He mounted to his buggy, and drove thoughtfully away at a walk.

The ladies, whose excited sympathies for Mrs. Maynard had kept them from the beach till now, watched him quite out of sight before they began to talk of Grace.

“I hope Dr. Breen’s new patient will be more tractable,” said Mrs. Merritt. “It would be a pity if she had to give him up, too, to Dr. Mulbridge.”

Mrs. Scott failed of the point. “Why, is Mr. Libby sick?”

“Not very,” answered Mrs. Merritt, with a titter of self-applause.

“I should be sorry,” interposed Mrs. Alger authoritatively, “if we had said anything to influence the poor thing in what she has done.”

“Oh, I don’t think we need distress ourselves about undue influence!” Mrs. Merritt exclaimed.

Mrs. Alger chose to ignore the suggestion. “She had a very difficult part; and I think she has acted courageously. I always feel sorry for girls who attempt anything of that kind. It’s a fearful ordeal.”

“But they say Miss Breen was n’t obliged to do it for a living,” Mrs. Scott suggested.

“So much the worse,” said Mrs. Merritt.

“No, so much the better,” returned Mrs. Alger.

Mrs. Merritt, sitting on the edge of the piazza, stooped over with difficulty and plucked a glass-straw, which she bit as she looked rebelliously away.

Mrs. Frost had installed herself as favorite since Mrs. Alger had praised her hair. She now came forward, and, dropping fondly at her knee, looked up to her for instruction. “Don’t you think that she showed her sense in giving up at the very beginning, if she found she was n’t equal to it?” She gave her head a little movement from side to side, and put the mass of her back hair more on show.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Alger, looking at the favorite not very favorably.

“Oh, I don’t think she’s given up,” Miss Gleason interposed, in her breathless manner. She waited to be asked why, and then she added, “I think she’s acting in consultation with Dr. Mulbridge. He may have a certain influence over her, — I think he has; but I know they are acting in unison.”

Mrs. Merritt flung her grass-straw away. “Perhaps it is to be Dr. Mulbridge, after all, and not Mr. Libby.”

“I have thought of that,” Miss Gleason assented candidly. “Yes, I have thought of that. I have thought of their being constantly thrown together, in this way. It would not discourage me. She could be quite as true to her vocation as if she remained single. Truer.”

“Talking of true,” said Mrs. Scott, “always does make me think of blue. They say that yellow will be worn on everything this winter.”

“Old gold?” asked Mrs. Frost. “Yes, more than ever.”

“Dear!” cried the other lady. “I don’t know what I shall do. It perfectly kills my hair.”

“Oh, Miss Gleason!” exclaimed the young girl.

“Do you believe in character coming out in color?”

“Yes, certainly. I have always believed that.”

“Well, I’ve got a friend, and she wouldn’t have anything to do with a girl that wore magenta more than she would fly.”

“I should suppose,” explained Miss Gleason, “that all those aniline dyes implied something coarse in people.”

“Is n’t it curious,” asked Mrs. Frost, “how red-haired people have come in fashion? I can recollect, when I was a little girl, that everybody laughed at red hair. There was one girl at the first school I ever went to, — the boys used to pretend to burn their fingers at her hair.”

“I think Dr. Breen’s hair is a very pretty shade of brown,” said the young girl.

Mrs. Merritt rose from the edge of the piazza. “I think that if she hasn’t given up to him entirely she’s the most submissive consulting physician I ever saw,” she said, and walked out over the grass towards the cliff.

The ladies looked after her. “Is Mrs. Merritt more pudgy when she’s sitting down or when she’s standing up?” asked Mrs. Scott.

Miss Gleason seized her first chance of speaking with Grace alone. “Oh, do you know how much you are doing for us all?”

“Doing for you, all? How doing?” faltered Grace, whom she had whisperingly halted in a corner of the hall leading from the dining-room.

“By acting in unison, — by solving the most perplexing problem in women’s practising your profession. She passed the edge of her fan over her lips before letting it fall furled upon her left hand, and looked luminously into Grace’s eyes.

“I don’t at all know what you mean, Miss Gleason,” said the other.

Miss Gleason kicked out the skirt of her dress, so as to leave herself perfectly free for the explanation. “Practising in harmony with a physician of the other sex. I have always felt that there was the great difficulty, — how to bring that about. I have always felt that the TRUE physician must be DUAL, — have both the woman’s nature and the man’s; the woman’s tender touch, the man’s firm grasp. You have shown how the medical education of women can meet this want. The physician can actually be dual, — be two, in fact. Hereafter, I have no doubt we shall always call a physician of each sex. But it’s wonderful how you could ever bring it about, though you can do anything! Has n’t it worn upon you?” Miss Gleason darted out her sentences in quick, short breaths, fixing Grace with her eyes, and at each clause nervously tapping her chest with her reopened fan.

“If you suppose,” said Grace, “that Dr. Mulbridge and I are acting professionally in unison, as you call it, you are mistaken. He has entire charge of the case; I gave it up to him, and I am merely nursing Mrs. Maynard under his direction.”

“How splendid!” Miss Gleason exclaimed. “Do you know that I admire you for giving up, — for knowing when to give up? So few women do that! Is n’t he magnificent?”

“Magnificent?”

“I mean psychically. He is what I should call a strong soul You must have felt his masterfulness; you must have enjoyed it! Don’t you like to be dominated?”

“No,” said Grace, “I should n’t at all like it.”

“Oh, I do! I like to meet one of those forceful masculine natures that simply bid you obey. It’s delicious. Such a sense of self-surrender,” Miss Gleason explained. “It is n’t because they are men,” she added. “I have felt the same influence from some women. I felt it, in a certain degree, on first meeting you.”

“I am very sorry,” said Grace coldly. “I should dislike being controlled myself, and I should dislike still more to control others.”

“You’re doing it now!” cried Miss Gleason, with delight. “I could not do a thing to resist your putting me down! Of course you don’t know that you’re doing it; it’s purely involuntary. And you wouldn’t know that he was dominating you. And he would n’t.”

Very probably Dr. Mulbridge would not have recognized himself in the character of all-compelling lady’s-novel hero, which Miss Gleason imagined for him. Life presented itself rather simply to him, as it does to most men, and he easily dismissed its subtler problems from a mind preoccupied with active cares. As far as Grace was concerned, she had certainly roused in him an unusual curiosity; nothing less than her homoeopathy would have made him withdraw his consent to a consultation with her, and his fear had been that in his refusal she should escape from his desire to know more about her, her motives, her purposes. He had accepted without scruple the sacrifice of pride she had made to him; but he had known how to appreciate her scientific training, which he found as respectable as that of any clever, young man of their profession. He praised, in his way, the perfection with which she interpreted his actions and intentions in regard to the patient. “If there were such nurses as you, Miss Breen, there would be very little need of doctors,” he said, with a sort of interogative fashion of laughing peculiar to him.

“I thought of being a nurse once;” she answered. “Perhaps I may still be one. The scientific training won’t be lost.”

“Oh, no? It’s a pity that more of them have n’t it. But I suppose they think nursing is rather too humble an ambition.”

“I don’t think it so,” said Grace briefly.

“Then you did n’t care for medical distinction.”

“No.”

He looked at her quizzically, as if this were much droller than if she had cared. “I don’t understand why you should have gone into it. You told me, I think, that it was repugnant to you; and it’s hard work for a woman, and very uncertain work for anyone. You must have had a tremendous desire to benefit your race.”

His characterization of her motive was so distasteful that she made no reply, and left him to his conjectures, in which he did not appear unhappy. “How do you find Mrs. Maynard to-day?” she asked.

He looked at her with an instant coldness, as if he did not like her asking, and were hesitating whether to answer. But he said at last, “She is no better. She will be worse before she is better. You see,” he added, “that I haven’t been able to arrest the disorder in its first stage. We must hope for what can be done now, in the second.”

She had gathered from the half jocose ease with which he had listened to Mrs. Maynard’s account of herself, and to her own report, an encouragement which now fell to the ground “Yes,” she assented, in her despair, “that is the only hope.”

He sat beside the table in the hotel parlor, where they found themselves alone for the moment, and drubbed upon it with an absent look. “Have you sent for her husband?” he inquired, returning to himself.

“Yes; Mr. Libby telegraphed the evening we saw you.”

“That’s good,” said Dr. Mulbridge, with comfortable approval; and he rose to go away.

Grace impulsively detained him. “I — won’t — ask you whether you consider Mrs. Maynard’s case a serious one, if you object to my doing so.”

“I don’t know that I object,” he said slowly, with a teasing smile, such as one might use with a persistent child whom one chose to baffle in that way.

She disdained to avail herself of the implied permission. “What I mean — what I wish to tell you is — that I feel myself responsible for her sickness, and that if she dies, I shall be guilty of her death.”

“Ah?” said Dr. Mulbridge, with more interest, but the same smile. “What do you mean?”

“She didn’t wish to go that day when she was caught in the storm. But I insisted; I forced her to go.” She stood panting with the intensity of the feeling which had impelled her utterance.

“What do you mean by forcing her to go?”

“I don’t know. I — I — persuaded her.”

Dr. Mulbridge smiled, as if he perceived her intention not to tell him something she wished to tell him. He looked down into his hat, which he carried in his hand.

“Did you believe the storm was coming?”

“No!”

“And you did n’t make it come?”

“Of course not!”

He looked at her and laughed.

“Oh, you don’t at all understand!” she cried.

“I’m not a doctor of divinity,” he said. “Good morning.”

“Wait, wait!” she implored, “I’m afraid — I don’t know — Perhaps my being near her is injurious to her; perhaps I ought to let some one else nurse her. I wished to ask you this” — She stopped breathlessly.

“I don’t think you have done her any harm as yet,” he answered lightly.

“However,” he said, after a moment’s consideration, “why don’t you take a holiday? Some of the other ladies might look after her a while.”

“Do you really think,” she palpitated, “that I might? Do you think I ought? I’m afraid I ought n’t” —

“Not if your devotion is hurtful to her?” he asked. “Send some one else to her for a while. Any one can take care of her for a few hours.”

“I couldn’t leave her — feeling as I do about her.”

“I don’t know how you feel about her,” said Dr. Mulbridge. “But you can’t go on at this rate. I shall want your help by and by, and Mrs. Maynard doesn’t need you now. Don’t go back to her.”

“But if she should get worse while I am away” —

“You think your staying and feeling bad would make her better? Don’t go back,” he repeated; and he went out to his ugly rawboned horse, and, mounting his shabby wagon, rattled away. She lingered, indescribably put to shame by the brutal common sense which she could not impeach, but which she still felt was no measure of the case. It was true that she had not told him everything, and she could not complain that he had mocked her appeal for sympathy if she had trifled with him by a partial confession. But she indignantly denied to herself that she had wished to appeal to him for sympathy.

She wandered out on the piazza, which she found empty, and stood gazing at the sea in a revery of passionate humiliation. She was in that mood, familiar to us all, when we long to be consoled and even flattered for having been silly. In a woman this mood is near to tears; at a touch of kindness the tears come, and momentous questions are decided. What was perhaps uppermost in the girl’s heart was a detestation of the man to whom she had seemed a simpleton; her thoughts pursued him, and divined the contempt with which he must be thinking of her and her pretensions. She heard steps on the sand, and Libby came round the corner of the house from the stable.

VII.

Libby’s friends had broken up their camp on the beach, and had gone to a lake in the heart of the woods for the fishing. He had taken a room at the Long Beach House, but he spent most of his time at Jocelyn’s, where he kept his mare for use in going upon errands for Mrs. Maynard. Grace saw him constantly, and he was always doing little things for her with a divination of her unexpressed desires which women find too rarely in men. He brought her flowers, which, after refusing them for Mrs. Maynard the first time, she accepted for herself. He sometimes brought her books, the light sort which form the sentimental currency of young people, and she lent them round among the other ladies, who were insatiable of them. She took a pleasure in these attentions, as if they had been for some one else. In this alien sense she liked to be followed up with a chair to the point where she wished to sit; to have her hat fetched, or her shawl; to drop her work or her handkerchief, secure that it would be picked up for her.

It all interested her, and it was a relief from the circumstances that would have forbidden her to recognize it as gallantry, even if her own mind had not been so far from all thought of that. His kindness followed often upon some application of hers for his advice or help, for she had fallen into the habit of going to him with difficulties. He had a prompt common sense that made him very useful in emergencies, and a sympathy or an insight that was quick in suggestions and expedients. Perhaps she overrated other qualities of his in her admiration of the practical readiness which kept his amiability from seeming weak. But the practical had so often been the unattainable with her that it was not strange she should overrate it, and that she should rest upon it in him with a trust that included all he chose to do in her behalf.

“What is the matter, Mr. Libby?” she asked, as he came toward her.

“Is anything the matter?” he demanded in turn.

“Yes; you are looking downcast,” she cried reproachfully.

“I didn’t know that I mustn’t look downcast. I did n’t suppose it would be very polite, under the circumstances, to go round looking as bobbish as I feel.”

“It’s the best thing you could possibly do. But you’re not feeling very bobbish now.” A woman respects the word a man uses, not because she would have chosen it, but because she thinks that he has an exact intention in it, which could not be reconveyed in a more feminine phrase. In this way slang arises. “Is n’t it time for Mr. Maynard to be here?”

“Yes,” he answered. Then, “How did you know I was thinking of that?”

“I did n’t. I only happened to think it was time. What are you keeping back, Mr. Libby?” she pursued tremulously.

“Nothing, upon my honor. I almost wish there were something to keep back. But there is n’t anything. There have n’t been any accidents reported. And I should n’t keep anything back from you.”

“Why?”

“Because you would be equal to it, whatever it was.”

“I don’t see why you say that.” She weakly found comfort in the praise which she might once have resented as patronage.

“I don’t see why I should n’t,” he retorted:

“Because I am not fit to be trusted at all.”

“Do you mean” —

“Oh, I haven’t the strength, to mean anything,” she said. “But I thank you, thank you very much,” she added. She turned her head away.

“Confound Maynard!” cried the young man. “I don’t see why he does n’t come. He must have started four days ago. He ought to have’ had sense enough to telegraph when he did start. I did n’t tell his partner to ask him. You can’t think of everything. I’ve been trying to find out something. I’m going over to Leyden, now, to try to wake up somebody in Cheyenne who knows Maynard.” He looked ruefully at Grace, who listened with anxious unintelligence. “You’re getting worn out, Miss Breen,” he said. “I wish I could ask you to go with me to Leyden. It would do you good. But my mare’s fallen lame; I’ve just been to see her. Is there anything I can do for you over there?”

“Why, how are you going?” she asked.

“In my boat,” he answered consciously.

“The same boat?”

“Yes. I’ve had her put to rights. She was n’t much damaged.”

She was silent a moment, while he stood looking down at her in the chair into which she had sunk. “Does it take you long?”

“Oh, no. It’s shorter than it is by land. I shall have the tide with me both ways. I can make the run there and back in a couple of hours.”

“Two hours?”

“Yes.”

A sudden impulse, unreasoned and unreasonable, in which there seemed hope of some such atonement, or expiation, as the same ascetic nature would once have found in fasting or the scourge, prevailed with her. She rose. “Mr. Libby,” she panted, “if you will let me, I should like to go with you in your boat. Do you think it will be rough?”

“No, it’s a light breeze; just right. You need n’t be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid. I should not care if it were rough! I should not care if it stormed! I hope it — I will ask mother to stay with Mrs. Maynard.”

Mrs. Breen had not been pleased to have her daughter in charge of Mrs. Maynard’s case, but she had not liked her giving it up. She had said more than once that she had no faith in Dr. Mulbridge. She willingly consented to Grace’s prayer, and went down into Mrs. Maynard’s room, and insinuated misgivings in which the sick woman found so much reason that they began for the first time to recognize each other’s good qualities. They decided that the treatment was not sufficiently active, and that she should either have something that would be more loosening to the cough, or some application — like mustard plasters — to her feet, so as to take away that stuffed feeling about the head.

At that hour of the afternoon, when most of the ladies were lying down in their rooms, Grace met no one on the beach but Miss Gleason and Mrs. Alger, who rose from their beds of sand under the cliff at her passage with Mr. Libby to his dory.

“Don’t you want to go to Leyden?” he asked jocosely over his shoulder.

“You don’t mean to say you’re going?” Miss Gleason demanded of Grace.

“Yes, certainly. Why not?”

“Well, you are brave!”

She shut her novel upon her thumb, that she might have nothing to do but admire Grace’s courage, as the girl walked away.

“It will do her good, poor thing,” said the elder woman. “She looks wretchedly.”

“I can understand just why she does it,” murmured Miss Gleason in adoring rapture.

“I hope she does it for pleasure,” said Mrs. Alger.

“It is n’t that,” returned Miss Gleason mysteriously.

“At any rate, Mr. Libby seemed pleased.”

“Oh, she would never marry HIM!” said Miss Gleason.

The other laughed, and at that moment Grace also laughed. The strong current of her purpose, the sense of escape from the bitter servitude of the past week, and the wild hope of final expiation through the chances she was tempting gave her a buoyancy long unfelt. She laughed in gayety of heart as she helped the young man draw his dory down the sand, and then took her place at one end while he gave it the last push and then leaped in at the other. He pulled out to where the boat lay tilting at anchor, and held the dory alongside by the gunwale that she might step aboard. But after rising she faltered, looking intently at the boat as if she missed something there.

“I thought you had a man to sail your boat”

“I had. But I let him go last week. Perhaps I ought to have told you,” he said, looking up at her aslant. “Are you afraid to trust my seamanship? Adams was a mere form. He behaved like a fool that day.”

“Oh, I’m not afraid,” said Grace. She stepped from the dory into the boat, and he flung out the dory’s anchor and followed. The sail went up with a pleasant clucking of the tackle, and the light wind filled it. Libby made the sheet fast, and, sitting down in the stern on the other side, took the tiller and headed the boat toward the town that shimmered in the distance. The water hissed at the bow, and seethed and sparkled from the stern; the land breeze that bent their sail blew cool upon her cheek and freshened it with a tinge of color.

“This will do you good,” he said, looking into hers with his kind, gay eyes.

The color in her cheeks deepened a little. “Oh, I am better than I look. I did n’t come for” —

“For medicinal purposes. Well, I am glad of it. We’ve a good hour between us and news or no news from Maynard, and I should like to think we were out for pleasure. You don’t object?”

“No. You can even smoke, if that will heighten the illusion.”

“It will make it reality. But you don’t mean it?”

“Yes; why not?”

“I don’t know. But I could n’t have dreamt of smoking in your presence. And we take the liberty to dream very strange things.”

“Yes,” she said, “it’s shocking what things we do dream of people. But am I so forbidding?” she asked, a little sadly.

“Not now,” said Libby. He got out a pouch of tobacco and some cigarette papers, and putting the tiller under his arm, he made himself a cigarette.

“You seem interested,” he said, as he lifted his eyes from his work, on which he found her intent, and struck his fusee.

“I was admiring your skill,” she answered.

“Do you think it was worth a voyage to South America?”

“I shouldn’t have thought the voyage was necessary.”

“Oh, perhaps you think you can do it,” he said, handing her the tobacco and papers. She took them and made a cigarette. “It took me a whole day to learn to make bad ones, and this, is beautiful. But I will never smoke it. I will keep this always.”

“You had better smoke it, if you want more,” she said.

“Will you make some more? I can’t smoke the first one!”

“Then smoke the last,” she said, offering him the things back.

“No, go on. I’ll smoke it.”

She lent herself to the idle humor of the time, and went on making cigarettes till there were no more papers. From time to time she looked up from this labor, and scanned the beautiful bay, which they had almost wholly to themselves. They passed a collier lagging in the deep channel, and signalling for a pilot to take her up to the town. A yacht, trim and swift, cut across their course; the ladies on board waved a salutation with their handkerchiefs, and Libby responded.

“Do you know them?” asked Grace.

“No!” he laughed. “But ladies like to take these liberties at a safe distance.”

“Yes, that’s a specimen of woman’s daring,” she said, with a self-scornful curl of the lip, which presently softened into a wistful smile. “How lovely it all is!” she sighed.

“Yes, there’s nothing better in all the world than a sail. It is all the world while it lasts. A boat’s like your own fireside for snugness.”

A dreamier light came into her eye, which wandered, with a turn of the head giving him the tender curve of her cheek, over the levels of the bay, roughened everywhere by the breeze, but yellowish green in the channels and dark with the thick growth of eel-grass in the shallows; then she lifted her face to the pale blue heavens in an effort that slanted towards him the soft round of her chin, and showed her full throat.

“This is the kind of afternoon,” she said, still looking at the sky, “that you think will never end.”

“I wish it would n’t,” he answered.

She lowered her eyes to his, and asked: “Do you have times when you are sorry that you ever tried to do anything — when it seems foolish to have tried?”

“I have the other kind of times, — when I wish that I had tried to do something.”

“Oh yes, I have those, too. It’s wholesome to be ashamed of not having tried to do anything; but to be ashamed of having tried — it’s like death. There seems no recovery from that.”

He did not take advantage of her confession, or try to tempt her to further confidence; and women like men who have this wisdom, or this instinctive generosity, and trust them further.

“And the worst of it is that you can’t go back and be like those that have never tried at all. If you could, that would be some consolation for having failed. There is nothing left of you but your mistake.”

“Well,” he said, “some people are not even mistakes. I suppose that almost any sort of success looks a good deal like failure from the inside. It must be a poor creature that comes up to his own mark. The best way is not to have any mark, and then you’re in no danger of not coming up to it.” He laughed, but she smiled sadly.

“You don’t believe in thinking about yourself,” she said.

“Oh, I try a little introspection, now and then. But I soon get through: there isn’t much of me to think about.”

“No, don’t talk in that way,” she pleaded, and she was very charming in her earnestness: it was there that her charm lay. “I want you to be serious with me, and tell me — tell me how men feel when.” —

A sudden splashing startled her, and looking round she saw a multitude of curious, great-eyed, black heads, something like the heads of boys, and something like the heads of dogs, thrusting from the water, and flashing under it again at sight of them with a swish that sent the spray into the air. She sprang to her feet. “Oh, look at those things! Look at them! Look at them!” She laid vehement hands upon the young man, and pushed him in the direction in which she wished him to look, at some risk of pushing him overboard, while he laughed at her ecstasy.

“They’re seals. The bay’s full of them. Did you never see them on the reef at Jocelyn’s?”

“I never saw them before!” she cried. “How wonderful they are! Oh!” she shouted; as one of them glanced sadly at her over its shoulder, and then vanished with a whirl of the head. “The Beatrice Cenci attitude!”

“They ‘re always trying that,” said Libby. “Look yonder.” He pointed to a bank of mud which the tide had not yet covered, and where a herd of seals lay basking in the sun. They started at his voice, and wriggling and twisting and bumping themselves over the earth to the water’s edge, they plunged in. “Their walk isn’t so graceful as their swim. Would you like one for a pet, Miss Breen? That’s all they ‘re good for since kerosene came in. They can’t compete with that, and they’re not the kind that wear the cloaks.”

She was standing with her hand pressed hard upon his shoulder.

“Did they ever kill them?”

“They used to take that precaution.”

“With those eyes? It was murder!” She withdrew her hand and sat down.

“Well, they only catch them, now. I tried it myself once. I set out at low tide, about ten o’clock, one night, and got between the water and the biggest seal on the bank. We fought it out on that line till daylight.”

“And did you get it?” she demanded, absurdly interested.

“No, it got me. The tide came in, and the seal beat.”

“I am glad of that.”

“Thank you.”

“What did you want with it?”

“I don’t think I wanted it at all. At any rate, that’s what I always said. I shall have to ask you to sit on this side,” he added, loosening the sheet and preparing to shift the sail. “The wind has backed round a little more to the south, and it’s getting lighter.”

“If it’s going down we shall be late,” she said, with an intimation of apprehension.

“We shall be at Leyden on time. If the wind falls then, I can get a horse at the stable and have you driven back.”

“Well.”

He kept scanning the sky. Then, “Did you ever hear them whistle for a wind?” he asked.

“No. What is it like?”

“When Adams does it, it’s like this.” He put on a furtive look, and glanced once or twice at her askance. “Well!” he said with the reproduction of a strong nasal, “of course I don’t believe there’s anything in it. Of course it’s all foolishness. Now you must urge me a little,” he added, in his own manner.

“Oh, by all means go on, Mr. Adams,” she cried, with a laugh.

He rolled his head again to one side sheepishly.

“Well, I don’t presume it DOES have anything to do with the wind — well, I don’t PRESUME it does.” He was silent long enough to whet an imagined expectation; then he set his face towards the sky, and began a soft, low, coaxing sibilation between his teeth. “S-s-s-s; s-s-s-s-s-s! Well, it don’t stand to reason it can bring the wind — S-s-s-s-s-s-s; s-s-s-s. Why, of course it ‘s all foolishness. S-s-s-s.” He continued to emit these sibilants, interspersing them with Adams’s protests. Suddenly the sail pulled the loose sheet taut and the boat leaped forward over the water.

“Wonderful!” cried the girl.

“That’s what I said to Adams, or words to that effect. But I thought we should get it from the look of the sky before I proposed to whistle for it. Now, then,” he continued, “I will be serious, if you like.”

“Serious?”

“Yes. Didn’t you ask me to be serious just before those seals interrupted you?”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, coloring a little. “I don’t think we can go back to that, now.” He did not insist, and she said presently, “I thought the sailors had a superstition about ships that are lucky and unlucky. But you’ve kept your boat.”

“I kept her for luck: the lightning never strikes twice in the same place. And I never saw a boat that behaved so well.”

“Do you call it behaving well to tip over?”

“She behaved well before that. She didn’t tip over outside the reef”

“It certainly goes very smoothly,” said the girl. She had in vain recurred to the tragic motive of her coming; she could not revive it; there had been nothing like expiation in this eventless voyage; it had been a pleasure and no penance. She abandoned herself with a weak luxury to the respite from suffering and anxiety; she made herself the good comrade of the young man whom perhaps she even tempted to flatter her farther and farther out of the dreariness in which she had dwelt; and if any woful current of feeling swept beneath, she would not fathom it, but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface. They laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay idleness of such rare moods.

They passed a yacht at anchor, and a young fellow in a white duck cap, leaning over the rail, saluted Libby with the significant gravity which one young man uses towards another whom he sees in a sail-boat with a pretty girl.

She laughed at this. “Do you know your friend?” she asked.

“Yes. This time I do?”

“He fancies you are taking some young lady a sail. What would he say if you were to stop and introduce me to him as Dr. Breen?”

“Oh, he knows who you are. It’s Johnson.”

“The one whose clothes you came over in, that morning?”

“Yes. I suppose you laughed at me.”

“I liked your having the courage to do it. But how does he know me?”

“I — I described you. He’s rather an old friend.” This also amused her. “I should like to hear how you described me.”

“I will tell you sometime. It was an elaborate description. I could n’t get through with it now before we landed.”

The old town had come out of the haze of the distance, — a straggling village of weather-beaten wood and weather-beaten white paint, picturesque, but no longer a vision of gray stone and pale marble. A coal-yard, and a brick locomotive house, and rambling railroad sheds stretched along the water-front. They found their way easily enough through the sparse shipping to the steps at the end of the wooden pier, where Libby dropped the sail and made his boat fast.

A little pleasant giddiness, as if the lightness of her heart had mounted to her head, made her glad of his arm up these steps and up the wharf; and she kept it as they climbed the sloping elm-shaded village street to the main thoroughfare, with its brick sidewalks, its shops and awnings, and its cheerful stir and traffic.

The telegraph office fronted the head of the street which they had ascended. “You can sit here in the apothecary’s till I come down,” he said.

“Do you think that will be professionally appropriate? I am only a nurse now.”

“No, I wasn’t thinking of that. But I saw a chair in there. And we can make a pretense of wanting some soda. It is the proper thing to treat young ladies to soda when one brings them in from the country.”

“It does have that appearance,” she assented, with a smile. She kept him waiting with what would have looked like coquettish hesitation in another, while she glanced at the windows overhead, pierced by a skein of converging wires. “Suppose I go up with you?”

“I should like that better,” he said; and she followed him lightly up the stairs that led to the telegraph office. A young man stood at the machine with a cigar in his mouth, and his eyes intent upon the ribbon of paper unreeling itself before him.

“Just hold on,” he said to Libby, without turning his head. “I’ve got something here for you.” He read: “Despatch received yesterday. Coming right through. George Maynard.”

“Good!” cried Libby.

“Dated Council Bluffs. Want it written out?”

“No. What ‘s to pay?”

“Paid,” said the operator.

The laconically transacted business ended with this, the wire began to cluck again like the anxious hen whose manner the most awful and mysterious of the elements assumes in becoming articulate, and nothing remained for them but to come away.

“That was what I was afraid of,” said Libby. “Maynard was at his ranch, and it must have been a good way out. They’re fifty or sixty miles out, sometimes. That would account for the delay. Well, Mrs. Maynard doesn’t know how long it takes to come from Cheyenne, and we can tell her he’s on the way, and has telegraphed.” They were walking rapidly down the street to the wharf where his boat lay. “Oh!” he exclaimed, halting abruptly. “I promised to send you back by land, if you preferred.”

“Has the wind fallen?”

“Oh, no. We shall have a good breeze:”

“I won’t put you to the trouble of getting a horse. I can go back perfectly well in the boat.”

“Well, that’s what I think,” he said cheerily.

She did not respond, and he could not be aware that any change had come over her mood. But when they were once more seated in the boat, and the sail was pulling in the fresh breeze, she turned to him with a scarcely concealed indignation. “Have you a fancy for experimenting upon people, Mr. Libby?”

“Experimenting? I? I don’t know in the least what you mean!”

“Why did you tell me that the operator was a woman?”

“Because the other operator is,” he answered.

“Oh!” she said, and fell blankly silent.

“There is a good deal of business there. They have to have two operators,” he explained, after a pause.

“Why, of course,” she murmured in deep humiliation. If he had suffered her to be silent as long as she would, she might have offered him some reparation; but he spoke.

“Why did you think I had been experimenting on you?” he asked.

“Why?” she repeated. The sense of having put herself in the wrong exasperated her with him. “Oh, I dare say you were curious. Don’t you suppose I have noticed that men are puzzled at me? What did you mean by saying that you thought I would be equal to anything?”

“I meant — I thought you would like to be treated frankly.”

“And you would n’t treat everybody so?”

“I wouldn’t treat Mrs. Maynard so.”

“Oh!” she said. “You treat me upon a theory.”

“Don’t you like that? We treat everybody upon a theory” —

“Yes, I know”

“And I should tell you the worst of anything at once, because I think you are one of the kind that don’t like to have their conclusions made for them.”

“And you would really let women make their own conclusions,” she said. “You are very peculiar!” She waited a while, and then she asked, “And what is your theory of me?”

“That you are very peculiar.”

“How?”

“You are proud.”

“And is pride so very peculiar?”

“Yes; in women.”

“Indeed! You set up for a connoisseur of female character. That’s very common, nowadays. Why don’t you tell me something more about Yourself? We’re always talking about me.”

He might well have been doubtful of her humor. He seemed to decide that she was jesting, for he answered lightly, “Why, you began it.”

“I know I did, this time. But now I wish to stop it, too.”

He looked down at the tiller in his hands. “Well,” he said, “I should like to tell you about myself. I should like to know what you think of the kind of man I am. Will you be honest if I will?”

“That’s a very strange condition,” she answered, meeting and then avoiding the gaze he lifted to her face.

“What? Being honest?”

“Well, no — Or, yes!”

“It is n’t for you.”

“Thank you. But I’m not under discussion now.”

“Well, in the first place,” he began, “I was afraid of you when we met.”

“Afraid of me?”

“That is n’t the word, perhaps. We’ll say ashamed of myself. Mrs. Maynard told me about you, and I thought you would despise me for not doing or being anything in particular. I thought you must.”

“Indeed!”

He hesitated, as if still uncertain of her mood from this intonation, and then he went on: “But I had some little hope you would tolerate me, after all. You looked like a friend I used to have. — Do you mind my telling you?”

“Oh, no. Though I can’t say that it’s ever very comfortable to be told that you look like some one else.”

“I don’t suppose any one else would have been struck by the resemblance,” said Libby, with a laugh of reminiscence. “He was huge. But he had eyes like a girl, — I beg your pardon, — like yours.”

“You mean that I have eyes like a man.”

He laughed, and said, “No,” and then turned grave. “As long as he lived” —

“Oh, is he dead?” she asked more gently than she had yet spoken.

“Yes, he died just before I went abroad. I went out on business for my father, — he’s an importer and jobber, — and bought goods for him. Do you despise business?”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

“I did it to please my father, and he said I was a very good buyer. He thinks there’s nothing like buying — except selling. He used to sell things himself, over the counter, and not so long ago, either.

“I fancied it made a difference for me when I was in college, and that the yardstick came between me and society. I was an ass for thinking anything about it. Though I did n’t really care, much. I never liked society, and I did like boats and horses. I thought of a profession, once. But it would n’t work. I’ve been round the world twice, and I’ve done nothing but enjoy myself since I left college, — or try to. When I first saw you I was hesitating about letting my father make me of use. He wants me to become one of the most respectable members of society, he wants me to be a cotton-spinner. You know there ‘s nothing so irreproachable as cotton, for a business?”

“No. I don’t know about those things.”

“Well, there is n’t. When I was abroad, buying and selling, I made a little discovery: I found that there were goods we could make and sell in the European market cheaper than the English, and that gave my father the notion of buying a mill to make them. I’m boring you!”

“No.”

“Well, he bought it; and he wants me to take charge of it.”

“And shall you?”

“Do you think I’m fit for it?”

“I? How should I know?”

“You don’t know cotton; but you know me a little. Do I strike you as fit for anything?” She made no reply to this, and he laughed. “I assure you I felt small enough when I heard what you had done, and thought — what I had done. It gave me a start; and I wrote my father that night that I would go in for it.”

“I once thought of going to a factory town,” she answered, without wilful evasion, “to begin my practice there among the operatives’ children. I should have done it if it had not been for coming here with Mrs. Maynard. It would have been better.”

“Come to my factory town, Miss Breen! There ought to be fevers there in the autumn, with all the low lands that I’m allowed to flood Mrs. Maynard told me about your plan.”

“Pray, what else did Mrs. Maynard tell you about me?”

“About your taking up a profession, in the way you did, when you needn’t, and when you did n’t particularly like it.”

“Oh!” she said. Then she added, “And because I was n’t obliged to it, and did n’t like it, you tolerated me?”

“Tolerated?” he echoed.

This vexed her. “Yes, tolerate! Everybody, interested or not, has to make up his mind whether to tolerate me as soon as he hears what I am. What excuse did you make for me?”

“I did n’t make any,” said Libby.

“But you had your misgiving, your surprise.”

“I thought if you could stand it, other people might. I thought it was your affair.”

“Just as if I had been a young man?”

“No! That wasn’t possible.”

She was silent. Then, “The conversation has got back into the old quarter,” she said. “You are talking about me again. Have you heard from your friends since they went away?”

“What friends?”

“Those you were camping with.”

“No.”

“What did they say when they heard that you had found a young doctress at Jocelyn’s? How did you break the fact to them? What jokes did they make? You need n’t be afraid to tell me!” she cried. “Give me Mr. Johnson’s comments.”

He looked at her in surprise that incensed her still more, and rendered her incapable of regarding the pain with which he answered her. “I ‘m afraid,” he said, “that I have done something to offend you.”

“Oh no! What could you have done?”

“Then you really mean to ask me whether I would let any one make a joke of you in my presence?”

“Yes; why not?”

“Because it was impossible,” he answered.

“Why was it impossible?” she pursued.

“Because — I love you.”

She had been looking him defiantly in the eyes, and she could not withdraw her gaze. For the endless moment that ensued, her breath was taken away. Then she asked in a low, steady voice, “Did you mean to say that?”

“No.”

“I believe you, and I forgive you. No, no!” she cried, at a demonstration of protest from him, “don’t speak again!”

He obeyed, instantly, implicitly. With the tiller in his hand he looked past her and guided the boat’s course. It became intolerable.

“Have I ever done anything that gave you the right to — to — say that?” she asked, without the self-command which she might have wished to show.

“No,” he said, “you were only the most beautiful” —

“I am not beautiful! And if I were” —

“It wasn’t to be helped! I saw from the first how good and noble you were, and” —

“This is absurd!” she exclaimed. “I am neither good nor noble; and if I were” —

“It wouldn’t make any difference. Whatever you are, you are the one woman in the world to me; and you always will be.”

“Mr. Libby!”

“Oh, I must speak now! You were always thinking, because you had studied a man’s profession, that no one would think of you as a woman, as if that could make any difference to a man that had the soul of a man in him!”

“No, no!” she protested. “I did n’t think that. I always expected to be considered as a woman.”

“But not as a woman to fall in love with. I understood. And that somehow made you all the dearer to me. If you had been a girl like other girls, I should n’t have cared for you.”

“Oh!”

“I did n’t mean to speak to you to-day. But sometime I did mean to speak; because, whatever I was, I loved you; and I thought you did n’t dislike me.”

“I did like you,” she murmured, “very much. And I respected you. But you can’t say that I ever gave you any hope in this — this — way.” She almost asked him if she had.

“No, — not purposely. And if you did, it ‘s over now. You have rejected me. I understand that. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t. And I can hold my tongue.” He did not turn, but looked steadily past her at the boat’s head.

An emotion stirred in her breast which took the form of a reproach. “Was it fair, then, to say this when neither of us could escape afterwards?”

“I did n’t mean to speak,” he said, without looking up, “and I never meant to place you where you could n’t escape.”

It was true that she had proposed to go with him in the boat, and that she had chosen to come back with him, when he had offered to have her driven home from Leyden. “No, you are not to blame,” she said, at last. “I asked to some with you. Shall I tell you why?” Her voice began to break. In her pity for him and her shame for herself the tears started to her eyes. She did not press her question, but, “Thank you for reminding me that I invited myself to go with you,” she said, with feeble bitterness.

He looked up at her in silent wonder, and she broke into a sob. He said gently, “I don’t suppose you expect me to deny that. You don’t think me such a poor dog as that.”

“Why, of course not,” she answered, with quivering lips, while she pressed her handkerchief to her eyes.

“I was only too glad to have you come. I always meant to tell you — what I have told; but not when I should seem to trap you into listening.”

“No,” she murmured, “I can believe that of you. I do believe it. I take back what I said. Don’t let us speak of it any more now,” she continued, struggling for her lost composure, with what success appeared in the fresh outburst with which she recognized his forbearance to hint at any painfulness to himself in the situation.

“I don’t mind it so much on my account, but oh! how could you for your own sake? Do let us get home as fast as we can!”

“I am doing everything I can to release you,” he said. “If you will sit here,” he added, indicating the place beside him in the stern, “you won’t have to change so much when I want to tack.”

She took the other seat, and for the first time she noticed that the wind had grown very light. She watched him with a piteous impatience while he shifted the sail from side to side, keeping the sheet in his hand for convenience in the frequent changes. He scanned the sky, and turned every current of the ebbing tide to account. It was useless; the boat crept, and presently it scarcely moved.

“The wind is down,” he said, making the sheet fast, and relaxing his hold on the tiller.

“And — And the tide is going out!” she exclaimed.

“The tide is going out,” he admitted.

“If we should get caught on these flats,” she began, with rising indignation.

“We should have to stay till the tide turned.”

She looked wildly about for aid. If there were a row-boat anywhere within hail, she could be taken to Jocelyn’s in that. But they were quite alone on those lifeless waters.

Libby got out a pair of heavy oars from the bottom of the boat, and, setting the rowlocks on either side, tugged silently at them.

The futile effort suggested an idea to her which doubtless she would not have expressed if she had not been lacking, as she once said, in a sense of humor.

“Why don’t you whistle for a wind?”

He stared at her in sad astonishment to make sure that she was in earnest, and then, “Whistle!” he echoed forlornly, and broke into a joyless laugh.

“You knew the chances of delay that I took in asking to come with you,” she cried, “and you should have warned me. It was ungenerous — it was ungentlemanly!”

“It was whatever you like. I must be to blame. I suppose I was too glad to have you come. If I thought anything, I thought you must have some particular errand at Leyden. You seemed anxious to go, even if it stormed.”

“If it had stormed,” she retorted, “I should not have cared! I hoped it would storm. Then at least I should have run the same danger, — I hoped it would be dangerous.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said.

“I forced that wretched creature to go with you that day when you said it was going to be rough; and I shall have her blood upon my hands if she dies.”

“Is it possible,” cried Libby, pulling in his useless oars, and leaning forward upon them, “that she has gone on letting you think I believed there was going to be a storm? She knew perfectly well that I didn’t mind what Adams said; he was always croaking.” She sat looking at him in a daze, but she could not speak, and he continued. “I see: it happened by one chance in a million to turn out as he said; and she has been making you pay for it. Why, I suppose,” he added, with a melancholy smile of intelligence, “she’s had so much satisfaction in holding you responsible for what’s happened, that she’s almost glad of it!”

“She has tortured me!” cried the girl. “But you — you, when you saw that I did n’t believe there was going to be any storm, why did you — why didn’t — you” —

“I did n’t believe it either! It was Mrs. Maynard that proposed the sail, but when I saw that you did n’t like it I was glad of any excuse for putting it off. I could n’t help wanting to please you, and I couldn’t see why you urged us afterwards; but I supposed you had some reason.”

She passed her hand over her forehead, as if to clear away the confusion in which all this involved her. “But why — why did you let me go on thinking myself to blame” —

“How could I know what you were thinking? Heaven knows I didn’t dream of such a thing! Though I remember, now, your saying” —

“Oh, I see!” she cried. “You are a man! But I can’t forgive it, — no, I can’t forgive it! You wished to deceive her if you did n’t wish to deceive me. How can you excuse yourself for repeating what you did n’t believe?”

“I was willing she should think Adams was right.”

“And that was deceit. What can you say to it?”

“There is only one thing I could say,” he murmured, looking hopelessly into her eyes, “and that’s of no use.”

She turned her head away. Her tragedy had fallen to nothing; or rather it had never been. All her remorse, all her suffering, was mere farce now; but his guilt in the matter was the greater. A fierce resentment burned in her heart; she longed to make him feel something of the anguish she had needlessly undergone.

He sat watching her averted face. “Miss Breen,” he said huskily, “will you let me speak to you?”

“Oh, you have me in your power,” she answered cruelly. “Say what you like.”

He did not speak, nor make any motion to do so.

A foolish, idle curiosity to know what, after all that had happened, he could possibly have to say, stirred within her, but she disdainfully stifled it. They were both so still that a company of seals found it safe to put their heads above water, and approach near enough to examine her with their round soft eyes. She turned from the silly things in contempt that they should even have interested her. She felt that from time to time her companion lifted an anxious glance to the dull heavens. At last the limp sail faintly stirred; it flapped; it filled shallowly; the boat moved. The sail seemed to have had a prescience of the wind before it passed over the smooth water like a shadow.

When a woman says she never will forgive a man, she always has a condition of forgiveness in her heart. Now that the wind had risen again, “I have no right to forbid you to speak,” she said, as if no silence had elapsed, and she turned round and quietly confronted him; she no longer felt so impatient to escape.

He did not meet her eye at once, and he seemed in no haste to avail himself of the leave granted him. A heavy sadness blotted the gayety of a face whose sunny sympathy had been her only cheer for many days. She fancied a bewilderment in its hopelessness which smote her with still sharper pathos. “Of course,” she said, “I appreciate your wish to do what I wanted, about Mrs. Maynard. I remember my telling you that she ought n’t to go out, that day. But that was not the way to do it” —

“There was no other,” he said.

“No,” she assented, upon reflection. “Then it ought n’t to have been done.”

He showed no sign of intending to continue, and after a moment of restlessness, she began again.

“If I have been rude or hasty in refusing to hear you, Mr. Libby, I am very wrong. I must hear anything you have to say.”

“Oh, not unless you wish.”

“I wish whatever you wish.”

“I’m not sure that I wish that now. I have thought it over; I should only distress you for nothing. You are letting me say why sentence shouldn’t be passed upon me. Sentence is going to be passed any way. I should only repeat what I have said. You would pity me, but you couldn’t help me. And that would give you pain for nothing. No, it would be useless.”

“It would be useless to talk to me about — loving.” She took the word on her lips with a certain effect of adopting it for convenience’ sake in her vocabulary. “All that was ended for me long ago, — ten years ago. And my whole life since then has been shaped to do without it. I will tell you my story if you like. Perhaps it’s your due. I wish to be just. You may have a right to know.”

“No, I haven’t. But — perhaps I ought to say that Mrs. Maynard told me something.”

“Well, I am glad of that, though she had no right to do it. Then you can understand.”

“Oh, yes, I can understand. I don’t pretend that I had any reason in it.”

He forbore again to urge any plea for himself, and once more she was obliged to interfere in his behalf. “Mr. Libby, I have never confessed that I once wronged you in a way that I’m very sorry for.”

“About Mrs. Maynard? Yes, I know. I won’t try to whitewash myself; but it didn’t occur to me how it would look. I wanted to talk with her about you.”

“You ought to have considered her, though,” she said gently.

“She ought to have considered herself,” he retorted, with his unfailing bitterness for Mrs. Maynard. “But it doesn’t matter whose fault it was. I’m sufficiently punished; for I know that it injured me with you.”

“It did at first. But now I can see that I was wrong. I wished to tell you that. It isn’t creditable to me that I thought you intended to flirt with her. If I had been better myself” —

“You!” He could not say more.

That utter faith in her was very charming. It softened her more and more; it made her wish to reason with him, and try gently to show him how impossible his hope was. “And you know,” she said, recurring to something that had gone before, “that even if I had cared for you in the way you wish, it could n’t be. You would n’t want to have people laughing and saying I had been a doctress.”

“I shouldn’t have minded. I know how much people’s talk is worth.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know you would be generous and brave about that — about anything. But what — what if I could n’t give up my career — my hopes of being useful in the way I have planned? You would n’t have liked me to go on practising medicine?”

“I thought of that,” he answered simply. “I didn’t see how it could be done. But if you saw any way, I was willing — No, that was my great trouble! I knew that it was selfish in me, and very conceited, to suppose you would give up your whole life for me; and whenever I thought of that, I determined not to ask you. But I tried not to think of that.”

“Well, don’t you see? But if I could have answered you as you wish, it wouldn’t have been anything to give up everything for you. A woman isn’t something else first, and a woman afterwards. I understand how unselfishly you meant, and indeed, indeed, I thank you. But don’t let’s talk of it any more. It couldn’t have been, and there is nothing but misery in thinking of it. Come,” she said, with a struggle for cheerfulness, “let us forget it. Let it be just as if you hadn’t spoken to me; I know you did n’t intend to do it; and let us go on as if nothing had happened.”

“Oh, we can’t go on,” he answered. “I shall get away, as soon as Maynard comes, and rid you of the sight of me.”

“Are you going away?” she softly asked. “Why need you? I know that people always seem to think they can’t be friends after — such a thing as this. But why shouldn’t we? I respect you, and I like you very much. You have shown me more regard and more kindness than any other friend” —

“But I wasn’t your friend,” he interrupted. “I loved you.”

“Well,” she sighed, in gentle perplexity, “then you can’t be my friend?”

“Never. But I shall always love you. If it would do any good, I would stay, as you ask it. I should n’t mind myself. But I should be a nuisance to you.”

“No, no!” she exclaimed. “I will take the risk of that. I need your advice, your — sympathy, your — You won’t trouble me, indeed you won’t. Perhaps you have mistaken your — feeling about me. It’s such a very little time since we met,” she pleaded.

“That makes no difference, — the time. And I’m not mistaken.”

“Well, stay at least till Mrs. Maynard is well, and we can all go away together. Promise me that!” She instinctively put out her hand toward him in entreaty. He took it, and pressing it to his lips covered it with kisses.

“Oh!” she grieved in reproachful surprise.

“There!” he cried. “You see that I must go!”

“Yes,” she sighed in assent, “you must go.”

They did not look at each other again, but remained in a lamentable silence while the boat pushed swiftly before the freshening breeze; and when they reached the place where the dory lay, he dropped the sail and threw out the anchor without a word.

He was haggard to the glance she stole at him, when they had taken their places in the dory, and he confronted her, pulling hard at the oars. He did not lift his eyes to hers, but from time to time he looked over his shoulder at the boat’s prow, and he rowed from one point to another for a good landing. A dreamy pity for him filled her; through the memories of her own suffering, she divined the soreness of his heart.

She started from her reverie as the bottom of the dory struck the sand. The shoal water stretched twenty feet beyond. He pulled in the oars and rose desperately. “It’s of no use: I shall have to carry you ashore.”

She sat staring up into his face, and longing to ask him something, to accuse him of having done this purposely. But she had erred in so many doubts, her suspicions of him had all recoiled so pitilessly upon her, that she had no longer the courage to question or reproach him. “Oh, no, thank you,” she said weakly. “I won’t trouble you. I — I will wait till the tide is out.”

“The tide’s out now,” he answered with coldness, “and you can’t wade.”

She rose desperately. “Why, of course!” she cried in self-contempt, glancing at the water, into which he promptly stepped to his boot-tops. “A woman must n’t get her feet wet.”

VIII.

Grace went to her own room to lay aside her shawl and hat, before going to Mrs. Maynard, and found her mother sewing there.

“Why, who is with Mrs. Maynard?” she asked.

“Miss Gleason is reading to her,” said Mrs. Breen. “If she had any sort of active treatment, she could get well at once. I couldn’t take the responsibility of doing anything for her, and it was such a worry to stay and see everything going wrong, that when Miss Gleason came in I was glad to get away. Miss Gleason seems to believe in your Dr. Mulbridge.”

“My Dr. Mulbridge!” echoed Grace.

“She talked of him as if he were yours. I don’t know what you’ve been saying to her about him; but you had better be careful. The woman is a fool.” She now looked up at her daughter for the first time. “Why, what is the matter with you what kept you so long? You look perfectly wild.”

“I feel wild,” said Grace calmly. “The wind went down.”

“Was that all? I don’t see why that should make you feel wild,” said her mother, dropping her spectacles to her sewing again.

“It was n’t all,” answered the girl, sinking provisionally upon the side of a chair, with her shawl still on her arm, and her hat in her hand. “Mother, have you noticed anything peculiar about Mr. Libby?”

“He’s the only person who seems to be of the slightest use about here; I’ve noticed that,” said Mrs. Breen. “He’s always going and coming for you and Mrs. Maynard. Where is that worthless husband of hers? Has n’t he had time to come from Cheyenne yet?”

“He’s on the way. He was out at his ranch when Mr. Libby telegraphed first, and had to be sent for. We found a despatch from him at Leyden, saying he had started,” Grace explained.

“What business had he to be so far away at all?” demanded her mother. It was plain that Mrs. Breen was in her most censorious temper, which had probably acquired a sharper edge towards Maynard from her reconciliation with his wife.

Grace seized her chance to meet the worst. “Do you think that I have done anything to encourage Mr. Libby?” she asked, looking bravely at her mother.

“Encourage him to do what?” asked Mrs. Breen, without lifting her eyes from her work.

“Encouraged him to — think I cared for him; to — to be in love with me.”

Mrs. Breen lifted her head now, and pushed her spectacles up on her forehead, while she regarded her daughter in silence. “Has he been making love to you?”

“Yes.”

Her mother pushed her spectacles down again; and, turning the seam which she had been sewing, flattened it with her thumb-nail. She made this action expressive of having foreseen such a result, and of having struggled against it, neglected and alone. “Very well, then. I hope you accepted him?” she asked quietly.

“Mother!”

“Why not? You must like him,” she continued in the same tone. “You have been with him every moment the last week that you have n’t been with Mrs. Maynard. At least I’ve seen nothing of you, except when you came to tell me you were going to walk or to drive with him. You seem to have asked him to take you most of the time.”

“How can you say such a thing, mother?” cried the girl.

“Did n’t you ask him to let you go with him this afternoon? You told me you did.”

“Yes, I did. I did it for a purpose.”

“Ah! for a purpose,” said Mrs. Breen, taking a survey of the new seam, which she pulled from her knee, where one end of it was pinned, towards her chin. She left the word to her daughter, who was obliged to take it.

“I asked him to let me go with him because Louise had tortured me about making her go out in his boat, till I could n’t bear it any longer. It seemed to me that if I took the same risk myself, it would be something; and I hoped there would be a storm.”

“I should think you had taken leave of your senses,” Mrs. Breen observed, with her spectacles intent upon her seam. “Did you think it would be any consolation to him if you were drowned, or to her? And if,” she added, her conscience rising equal to the vicarious demand upon it, “you hoped there would be danger, had you any right to expose him to it? Even if you chose to risk your own life, you had no right to risk his.” She lifted her spectacles again, and turned their austere glitter upon her daughter.

“Yes, it all seems very silly now,” said the girl, with a hopeless sigh.

“Silly!” cried her mother. “I’m glad you can call it silly.”

“And it seemed worse still when he told me that he had never believed it was going to storm that day, when he took Louise out. His man said it was, and he repeated it because he saw I did n’t want her to go.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Breen, “if he was willing to deceive her then, he is willing to deceive you now.”

“He didn’t deceive her. He said what he had heard. And he said it because he — I wished it.”

“I call it deceiving. Truth is truth. That is what I was taught; and that’s what I supposed I had taught you.”

“I would trust Mr. Libby in anything,” returned the daughter. “He is perfectly frank about himself. He confessed that he had done it to please me. He said that nothing else could excuse it.”

“Oh, then you have accepted him!”

“No, mother, I haven’t. I have refused him, and he is going away as soon as Mr. Maynard comes.” She sat looking at the window, and the tears stole into her eyes, and blurred the sea and sky together where she saw their meeting at the horizon line.

“Well,” said her mother, “their that is the end of it, I presume.”

“Yes, that’s the end,” said Grace. “But — I felt sorry for him, mother. Once,” she went on, “I thought I had everything clear before me; but now I seem only to have made confusion of my life. Yes,” she added drearily, “it was foolish and wicked, and it was perfectly useless, too. I can’t escape from the consequences of what I did. It makes no difference what he believed or any one believed. I drove them on to risk their lives because I thought myself so much better than they; because I was self-righteous and suspicious and stubborn. Well, I must bear the penalty: and oh, if I could only bear it alone!” With a long sigh she took back the burden which she had been struggling to cast off, and from which for a time she had actually seemed to escape. She put away her hat and shawl, and stood before the glass, smoothing her hair. “When will it ever end?” she moaned to the reflection there, rather than to her mother, who did not interrupt this spiritual ordeal. In another age, such a New England girl would have tortured herself with inquisition as to some neglected duty to God; — in ours, when religion is so largely humanified, this Puritan soul could only wreak itself in a sense of irreparable wrong to her fellow-creature.

When she went out she met Miss Gleason half-way down the corridor to Mrs. Maynard’s door. The latter had a book in her hand, and came forward whispering. “She’s asleep,” she said very sibilantly. “I have read her to sleep, and she’s sleeping beautifully. Have you ever read it?” she asked, with hoarse breaks from her undertone, as she held up one of those cheap library-editions of a novel toward Grace.

“Jane Eyre? Why, of course. Long ago.”

“So have I,” said Miss Gleason. “But I sent and got it again, to refresh my impressions of Rochester. We all think Dr. Mulbridge is just like him. Rochester is my ideal character, — a perfect conception of a man: so abrupt, so rough, so savage. Oh, I like those men! Don’t you?” she fluted. “Mrs. Maynard sees the resemblance, as well as the rest of us. But I know! You don’t approve of them. I suppose they can’t be defended on some grounds; but I can see how, even in such a case as this, the perfect mastery of the man-physician constitutes the highest usefulness of the woman-physician. The advancement of women must be as women. ‘Male and female created he them,’ and it is only in remembering this that we are helping Gawd, whether as an anthropomorphic conception or a universally pervading instinct of love, don’t you think?”

With her novel clapped against her breast, she leaned winningly over toward Grace, and fixed her with her wide eyes, which had rings of white round the pupils.

“Do tell me!” she ran on without waiting an answer. “Didn’t you go with Mr. Libby because you hoped it might storm, and wished to take the same risk as Mrs. Maynard? I told Mrs. Alger you did!”

Grace flushed guiltily, and Miss Gleason cowered a little, perhaps interpreting the color as resentment. “I should consider that a very silly motive,” she said, helplessly ashamed that she was leaving the weight of the blow upon Miss Gleason’s shoulders instead of her own.

“Of course,” said Miss Gleason enthusiastically, “you can’t confess it. But I know you are capable of such a thing — of anything heroic! Do forgive me,” she said, seizing Grace’s hand. She held it a moment, gazing with a devouring fondness into her face, which she stooped a little sidewise to peer up into. Then she quickly dropped her hand, and, whirling away, glided slimly out of the corridor.

Grace softly opened Mrs. Maynard’s door, and the sick woman opened her eyes. “I was n’t asleep,” she said hoarsely, “but I had to pretend to be, or that woman would have killed me.”

Grace went to her and felt her hands and her flushed forehead.

“I am worse this evening,” said Mrs. Maynard.

“Oh, no,” sighed the girl, dropping into a chair at the bedside, with her eyes fixed in a sort of fascination on the lurid face of the sick woman.

“After getting me here,” continued Mrs. Maynard, in the same low, hoarse murmur, “you might at least stay with me a little. What kept you so long?”

“The wind fell. We were becalmed.”

“We were not becalmed the day I went out with Mr. Libby. But perhaps nobody forced you to go.”

Having launched this dart, she closed her eyes again with something more like content than she had yet shown: it had an aim of which she could always be sure.

“We have heard from Mr. Maynard,” said Grace humbly. “There was a despatch waiting for Mr. Libby at Leyden. He is on his way.”

Mrs. Maynard betrayed no immediate effect of this other than to say, “He had better hurry,” and did not open her eyes.

Grace went about the room with a leaden weight in every fibre, putting the place in order, and Mrs. Maynard did not speak again till she had finished. Then she said, “I want you to tell me just how bad Dr. Mulbridge thinks I am.”

“He has never expressed any anxiety,” Grace began, with her inaptness at evasion.

“Of course he has n’t,” murmured the sick woman. “He isn’t a fool! What does he say?”

This passed the sufferance even of remorse. “He says you mustn’t talk,” the girl flashed out. “And if you insist upon doing so, I will leave you, and send some one else to take care of you.”

“Very well, then. I know what that means. When a doctor tells you not to talk, it’s because he knows he can’t do you any good. As soon as George Maynard gets here I will have some one that can cure me, or I will know the reason why.” The conception of her husband as a champion seemed to commend him to her in novel degree. She shed some tears, and after a little reflection she asked, “How soon will he be here?”

“I don’t know,” said Grace. “He seems to have started yesterday morning.”

“He can be here by day after to-morrow,” Mrs. Maynard computed. “There will be some one to look after poor little Bella then,” she added, as if, during her sickness, Bella must have been wholly neglected. “Don’t let the child be all dirt when her father comes.”

“Mother will look after Bella,” Grace replied, too meek again to resent the implication. After a pause, “Oh, Louise,” she added beseechingly, “I’ve suffered so much from my own wrong-headedness and obstinacy that I couldn’t bear to see you taking the same risk, and I’m so glad that you are going to meet your husband in the right spirit.”

“What right spirit?” croaked Mrs. Maynard.

“The wish to please him, to” —

“I don’t choose to have him say that his child disgraces him,” replied Mrs. Maynard, in the low, husky, monotonous murmur in which she was obliged to utter everything.

“But, dear Louise!” cried the other, “you choose something else too, don’t you? You wish to meet him as if no unkindness had parted you, and as if you were to be always together after this? I hope you do! Then I should feel that all this suffering and, trouble was a mercy.”

“Other people’s misery is always a mercy to them,” hoarsely suggested Mrs. Maynard.

“Yes, I know that,” Grace submitted, with meek conviction. “But, Louise,” she pleaded, “you will make up with your husband, won’t you? Whatever he has done, that will surely be best. I know that you love him, and that he must love you, yet. It’s the only way. If you were finally separated from him, and you and he could be happy apart, what would become of that poor child? Who will take a father’s place with her? That’s the worst about it. Oh, Louise, I feel so badly for you — for what you have lost, and may lose. Marriage must change people so that unless they live to each other, their lives will be maimed and useless. It ought to be so much easier to forgive any wrong your husband does you than to punish it; for that perpetuates the wrong, and forgiveness ends it, and it’s the only thing that can end a wrong. I am sure that your husband will be ready to do or say anything you wish; but if he shouldn’t, Louise, you will receive him forgivingly, and make the first advance? It’s a woman’s right to make the advances in forgiving.”

Mrs. Maynard lay with her hands stretched at her side under the covering, and only her face visible above it. She now turned her head a little, so as to pierce the earnest speaker with a gleam from her dull eye. “Have you accepted Walter Libby?” she asked.

“Louise!” cried Grace, with a blush that burned like fire.

“That’s the way I used to talk when I was first engaged. Wait till you’re married a while. I want Bella to have on her pique, and her pink sash, — not the cherry one. I should think you would have studied to be a minister instead of a doctor. But you need n’t preach to me; I shall know how to behave to George Maynard when he comes, — if he ever does come. And now I should think you had made me talk enough!”

“Yes, Yes,” said Grace, recalled to her more immediate duty in alarm.

All her helpfulness was soon to be needed. The disease, which had lingered more than usual in the early stages, suddenly approached a crisis. That night Mrs. Maynard grew so much worse that Grace sent Libby at daybreak for Dr. Mulbridge; and the young man, after leading out his own mare to see if her lameness had abated, ruefully put her back in the stable, and set off to Corbitant with the splay-foot at a rate of speed unparalleled, probably, in the animal’s recollection of a long and useful life. In the two anxious days that followed, Libby and Grace were associated in the freedom of a common interest outside of themselves; she went to him for help and suggestion, and he gave them, as if nothing had passed to restrict or embarrass their relations. There was that, in fact, in the awe of the time and an involuntary disoccupation of hers that threw them together even more constantly than before. Dr. Mulbridge remained with his patient well into the forenoon; in the afternoon he came again, and that night he did not go away. He superseded Grace as a nurse no less completely than he had displaced her as a physician. He let her relieve him when he flung himself down for a few minutes’ sleep, or when he went out for the huge meals which he devoured, preferring the unwholesome things with a depravity shocking to the tender physical consciences of the ladies who looked on; but when he returned to his charge, he showed himself jealous of all that Grace had done involving the exercise of more than a servile discretion. When she asked him once if there were nothing else that she could do, he said, “fires, keep those women and children quiet,” in a tone that classed her with both. She longed to ask him what he thought of Mrs. May nard’s condition; but she had not the courage to invoke the intelligence that ignored her so completely, and she struggled in silence with such disheartening auguries as her theoretical science enabled her to make.

The next day was a Sunday, and the Sabbath hush which always hung over Jocelyn’s was intensified to the sense of those who ached between hope and fear for the life that seemed to waver and flicker in that still air. Dr. Mulbridge watched beside his patient, noting every change with a wary intelligence which no fact escaped and no anxiety clouded; alert, gentle, prompt; suffering no question, and absolutely silent as to all impressions. He allowed Grace to remain with him when she liked, and let her do his bidding in minor matters; but when from time to time she escaped from the intolerable tension in which his reticence and her own fear held her, he did not seem to see whether she went or came. Toward nightfall she met him coming out of Mrs. Maynard’s room, as she drew near in the narrow corridor.

“Where is your friend — the young man — the one who smokes?” he asked, as if nothing unusual had occupied him. “I want him to give me a cigar.”

“Dr. Mulbridge,” she said, “I will not bear this any longer. I must know the worst — you have no right to treat me in this way. Tell me now — tell me instantly: will she live?”

He looked at her with an imaginable apprehension of hysterics, but as she continued firm, and placed herself resolutely in his way, he relaxed his scrutiny, and said, with a smile, “Oh, I think so. What made you think she would n’t?”

She drew herself aside, and made way far him.

“Go!” she cried. She would have said more, but her indignation choked her.

He did not pass at once, and he did not seem troubled at her anger. “Dr. Breen,” he said, “I saw a good deal of pneumonia in the army, and I don’t remember a single case that was saved by the anxiety of the surgeon.”

He went now, as people do when they fancy themselves to have made a good point; and she heard him asking Barlow for Libby, outside, and then walking over the gravel toward the stable. At that moment she doubted and hated him so much that she world have been glad to keep Libby from talking or even smoking with him. But she relented a little toward him afterwards, when he returned and resumed the charge of his patient with the gentle, vigilant cheerfulness which she had admired in him from the first, omitting no care and betraying none. He appeared to take it for granted that Grace saw an improvement, but he recognized it by nothing explicit till he rose and said, “I think I will leave Mrs. Maynard with you to-night, Dr. Breen.”

The sick woman’s eyes turned to him imploringly from her pillow, and Grace spoke the terror of both when she faltered in return, “Are you — you are not going home?”

“I shall sleep in the house.”

“Oh, thank you!” she cried fervently.

“And you can call me if you wish. But there won’t be any occasion. Mrs. Maynard is very much better.” He waited to give, in a sort of absent-minded way, certain directions. Then he went out, and Grace sank back into the chair from which she had started at his rising, and wept long and silently with a hidden face. When she took away her hands and dried her tears, she saw Mrs. Maynard beckoning to her. She went to the bedside.

“What is it, dear?” she asked tenderly.

“Stoop down,” whispered the other; and as Grace bowed her ear Mrs. Maynard touched her cheek with her dry lips. In this kiss doubtless she forgave the wrong which she had hoarded in her heart, and there perverted into a deadly injury. But they both knew upon what terms the pardon was accorded, and that if Mrs. Maynard had died, she would have died holding Grace answerable for her undoing.

IX.

In the morning Dr. Mulbridge drove back to Corbitant, and in the evening Libby came over from New Leyden with Maynard, in a hired wagon. He was a day later than his wife had computed, but as she appeared to have reflected, she had left the intervening Sunday out of her calculation; this was one of the few things she taxed herself to say. For the rest, she seemed to be hoarding her strength against his coming.

Grace met him at a little distance from the house, whither she had walked with Bella, for a breath of the fresh air after her long day in the sick-room, and did not find him the boisterous and jovial Hoosier she had imagined him. It was, in fact, hardly the moment for the expression of Western humor. He arrived a sleep-broken, travel-creased figure, with more than the Western man’s usual indifference to dress; with sad, dull eyes, and an untrimmed beard that hung in points and tags, and thinly hid the corners of a large mouth. He took her hand laxly in his, and bowing over her from his lank height listened to her report of his wife’s state, while he held his little girl on his left arm, and the child fondly pressed her cheek against his bearded face, to which he had quietly lifted her as soon as he alighted from Libby’s buggy.

Libby introduced Grace as Dr. Breen, and drove on, and Maynard gave her the title whenever he addressed her, with a perfect effect of single-mindedness in his gravity, as if it were an every-day thing with him to meet young ladies who were physicians. He had a certain neighborly manner of having known her a long time, and of being on good terms with her; and somewhere there resided in his loosely knit organism a powerful energy. She had almost to run in keeping at his side, as he walked on to the house, carrying his little girl on his arm, and glancing about him; and she was not sure at last that she had succeeded in making him understand how serious the case had been.

“I don’t know whether I ought to let you go in,” she said, “without preparing her.”

“She’s been expecting me, has n’t she?” he asked.

“Yes, but” —

“And she’s awake?”

“Then I’ll just go in and prepare her myself. I’m a pretty good hand at preparing people to meet me. You’ve a beautiful location here, Dr. Breen; and your town has a chance to grow. I like to see a town have some chance,” he added, with a sadness past tears in his melancholy eyes. “Bella can show me the way to the room, I reckon,” he said, setting the little one down on the piazza, and following her indoors; and when Grace ventured, later, to knock at the door, Maynard’s voice bade her come in.

He sat beside his wife’s pillow, with her hand in his left; on his right arm perched the little girl, and rested her head on his shoulder. They did not seem to have been talking, and they did not move when Grace entered the room. But, apparently, Mrs. Maynard had known how to behave to George Maynard, and peace was visibly between them.

“Now, you tell me about the medicines, Dr. Breen, and then you go and get some rest,” said Maynard in his mild, soothing voice. “I used to understand Mrs. Maynard’s ways pretty well, and I can take care of her. Libby told me all about you and your doings, and I know you must feel as pale as you look.”

“But you can’t have had any sleep on the way,” Grace began.

“Sleep?” Maynard repeated, looking wanly at her. “I never sleep. I’d as soon think of digesting.”

After she had given him the needed instructions he rose from the rocking-chair in-which he had been softly swinging to and fro, and followed her out into the corridor, caressing with his large hand the child that lay on his shoulder. “Of course,” she said, “Mrs. Maynard is still very sick, and needs the greatest care and attention.”

“Yes, I understand that. But I reckon it will come out all right in the end,” he said, with the optimistic fatalism which is the real religion of our orientalizing West. “Good-night, doctor.”

She went away, feeling suddenly alone in this exclusion from the cares that had absorbed her. There was no one on the piazza, which the moonlight printed with the shadows of the posts and the fanciful jigsaw work of the arches between them. She heard a step on the sandy walk round the corner, and waited wistfully.

It was Barlow who came in sight, as she knew at once, but she asked, “Mr. Barlow?”

“Yes’m,” said Barlow. “What can I do for you?”

“Nothing. I thought it might be Mr. Libby at first. Do you know where he is?”

“Well, I know where he ain’t,” said Barlow; and having ineffectually waited to be questioned further, he added, “He ain’t here, for one place. He’s gone back to Leyden. He had to take that horse back.”

“Oh!” she said.

“N’ I guess he’s goin’ to stay.”

“To stay? Where?”

“Well, there you’ve got me again. All I know is I’ve got to drive that mare of his’n over to-morrow, if I can git off, and next day if I can’t. Did n’t you know he was goin’?” asked Barlow, willing to recompense himself for the information he had given.

“Well!” he added sympathetically, at a little hesitation of hers:

Then she said, “I knew he must go. Good-night, Mr. Barlow,” and went indoors. She remembered that he had said he would go as soon as Maynard came, and that she had consented that this would be best. But his going now seemed abrupt, though she approved it. She thought that she had something more to say to him, which might console him or reconcile him; she could not think what this was, but it left an indefinite longing, an unsatisfied purpose in her heart; and there was somewhere a tremulous sense of support withdrawn. Perhaps this was a mechanical effect of the cessation of her anxiety for Mrs. Maynard, which had been a support as well as a burden. The house was strangely quiet, as if some great noise had just been hushed, and it seemed empty. She felt timid in her room, but she dreaded the next day more than the dark. Her life was changed, and the future, which she had once planned so clearly, and had felt so strong to encounter, had fallen to a ruin, in which she vainly endeavored to find some clew or motive of the past. She felt remanded to the conditions of the girlhood that she fancied she had altogether outlived; she turned her face upon her pillow in a grief of bewildered aspiration and broken pride, and shed tears scarcely predicable of a doctor of medicine.

But there is no lapse or aberration of character which can be half so surprising to others as it is to one’s self. She had resented Libby’s treating her upon a theory, but she treated herself upon a theory, and we all treat ourselves upon a theory. We proceed each of us upon the theory that he is very brave, or generous, or gentle, or liberal, or truthful, or loyal, or just. We may have the defects of our virtues, but nothing is more certain than that we have our virtues, till there comes a fatal juncture, not at all like the juncture in which we had often imagined ourselves triumphing against temptation. It passes, and the hero finds, to his dismay and horror, that he has run away; the generous man has been niggard; the gentleman has behaved like a ruffian, and the liberal like a bigot; the champion of truth has foolishly and vainly lied; the steadfast friend has betrayed his neighbor, the just person has oppressed him. This is the fruitful moment, apparently so sterile, in which character may spring and flower anew; but the mood of abject humility in which the theorist of his own character is plunged and struggles for his lost self-respect is full of deceit for others. It cannot last: it may end in disowning and retrieving the error, or it may end in justifying it, and building it into the reconstructed character, as something upon the whole unexpectedly fine; but it must end, for after all it is only a mood. In such a mood, in the anguish of her disappointment at herself, a woman clings to whatever support offers, and it is at his own risk that the man who chances to be this support accepts the weight with which she casts herself upon him as the measure of her dependence, though he may make himself necessary to her, if he has the grace or strength to do it.

Without being able to understand fully the causes of the dejection in which this girl seemed to appeal to him, Mulbridge might well have believed himself the man to turn it in his favor. If he did not sympathize with her distress, or even clearly divine it, still his bold generalizations, he found, always had their effect with women, whose natures are often to themselves such unknown territory that a man who assumes to know them has gone far to master them. He saw that a rude moral force alone seemed to have a charm with his lady patients, — women who had been bred to ease and wealth, and who had cultivated, if not very disciplined, minds. Their intellectual dissipation had apparently made them a different race from the simpler-hearted womenkind of his neighbors, apt to judge men in a sharp ignorance of what is fascinating in heroes; and it would not be strange if he included Grace in the sort of contemptuous amusement with which he regarded these-flatteringly dependent and submissive invalids. He at least did not conceive of her as she conceived of herself; but this may be impossible to any man with regard to any woman.

With his experience of other women’s explicit and even eager obedience, the resistance which he had at first encountered in Grace gave zest to her final submission. Since he had demolished the position she had attempted to hold against him, he liked her for having imagined she could hold it; and she had continued to pique and interest him. He relished all her scruples and misgivings, and the remorse she had tried to confide to him; and if his enjoyment of these foibles of hers took too little account of her pain, it was never his characteristic to be tender of people in good health. He was, indeed, as alien to her Puritan spirit as if he had been born in Naples instead of Corbitant. He came of one of those families which one finds in nearly every New England community, as thoroughly New England in race as the rest, but flourishing in a hardy scepticism and contempt of the general sense. Whatever relation such people held to the old Puritan commonwealth when Puritanism was absolute, they must later have taken an active part in its disintegration, and were probably always a destructive force at its heart.

Mulbridge’s grandfather was one of the last captains who sailed a slaver from Corbitant. When this commerce became precarious, he retired from the seas, took a young wife in second marriage, and passed his declining days in robust inebriety. He lived to cast a dying vote for General Jackson, and his son, the first Dr. Mulbridge, survived to illustrate the magnanimity of his fellow-townsmen during the first year of the civil war, as a tolerated Copperhead. Then he died, and his son, who was in the West, looking up a location for practice, was known to have gone out as surgeon with one of the regiments there. It was not supposed that he went from patriotism; but when he came back, a year before the end of the struggle, and settled in his native place, his service in the army was accepted among his old neighbors as evidence of a better disposition of some sort than had hitherto been attributable to any of his name.

In fact, the lazy, good-natured boy, whom they chiefly remembered before his college days, had always been well enough liked among those who had since grown to be first mates and ship captains in the little port where he was born and grew up. They had now all retired from the sea, and, having survived its manifold perils, were patiently waiting to be drowned in sail-boats on the bay. They were of the second generation of ships’ captains still living in Corbitant; but they would be the last. The commerce of the little port had changed into the whaling trade in their time; this had ceased in turn, and the wharves had rotted away. Dr. Mulbridge found little practice among them; while attending their appointed fate, they were so thoroughly salted against decay as to preserve even their families. But he gradually gathered into his hands, from the clairvoyant and the Indian doctor, the business which they had shared between them since his father’s death. There was here and there a tragical case of consumption among the farming families along the coast, and now and then a frightful accident among the fishermen; the spring and autumn brought their typhoid; the city people who came down to the neighboring hotels were mostly sick, or fell sick; and with the small property his father had left, he and his mother contrived to live.

They dwelt very harmoniously together; for his mother, who had passed more than a quarter of a century in strong resistance to her husband’s will, had succumbed, as not uncommonly happens with such women, to the authority of her son, whom she had no particular pleasure or advantage in thwarting. In the phrase and belief of his neighbors, he took after her, rather than his father; but there was something ironical and baffling in him, which the local experts could not trace to either the Mulbridges or the Gardiners. They had a quiet, indifferent faith in his ability to make himself a position and name anywhere; but they were not surprised that he had come back to live in Corbitant, which was so manifestly the best place in the world, and which, if somewhat lacking in opportunity, was ample in the leisure they believed more congenial to him than success. Some of his lady patients at the hotels, who felt at times that they could not live without him, would have carried him back to the city with them by a gentle violence; but there was nothing in anything he said or did that betrayed ambition on his part. He liked to hear them talk, especially of their ideas of progress, as they called them, at which, with the ready adaptability of their sex, they joined him in laughing when they found that he could not take them seriously. The social, the emotional expression of the new scientific civilization struck him as droll, particularly in respect to the emancipation of women; and he sometimes gave these ladies the impression that he did not value woman’s intellect at its true worth. He was far from light treatment of them, he was considerate of the distances that should be guarded; but he conveyed the sense of his scepticism as to their fitness for some things to which the boldest of them aspired.

His mother would have been willing to have him go to the city if he wished, but she was too ignorant of the world outside of Corbitant to guess at his possibilities in it, and such people as she had seen from it had not pleased her with it. Those summer-boarding lady patients who came to see him were sometimes suffered to wait with her till he came in, and they used to tell her how happy she must be to keep such a son with her, and twittered their patronage of her and her nice old-fashioned parlor, and their praises of his skill in such wise against her echoless silence that she conceived a strong repugnance for all their tribe, in which she naturally included Grace when she appeared. She had decided the girl to be particularly forth-putting, from something prompt and self-reliant in her manner that day; and she viewed with tacit disgust her son’s toleration of a handsome young woman who had taken up a man’s profession. They were not people who gossiped together, or confided in each other, and she would have known nothing and asked nothing from him about her, further than she had seen for herself. But Barlow had folks, as he called them, at Corbitant; and without her own connivance she had heard from them of all that was passing at Jocelyn’s.

It was her fashion to approach any subject upon which she wished her son to talk as if they had already talked of it, and he accepted this convention with a perfect understanding that she thus expressed at once her deference to him and her resolution to speak whether he liked it or not. She had not asked him about Mrs. Maynard’s sickness, or shown any interest in it; but after she learned from the Barlows that she was no longer in danger, she said to her son one morning, before he drove away upon his daily visit, “Is her husband going to stay with her, or is he going back?”

“I don’t know, really,” he answered, glancing at her where she sat erect across the table from him, with her hand on the lid of the coffee-pot, and her eyes downcast; it was the face of silent determination not to be put off, which he knew. “I don’t suppose you care, mother,” he added pleasantly.

“She’s nothing to me,” she assented. “What’s that friend of hers going to do?”

“Which friend?”

“You know. The one that came after you.”

“Oh! Dr. Breen. Yes. What did you think of her?”

“I don’t see why you call her doctor.”

“Oh, I do it out of politeness. Besides, she is one sort of doctor. Little pills,” he added, with an enjoyment of his mother’s grimness on this point.

“I should like to see a daughter of mine pretending to be a doctor,” said Mrs. Mulbridge.

“Then you would n’t like Dr. Breen for a daughter,” returned her son, in the same tone as before.

“She wouldn’t like me for a mother,” Mrs. Mulbridge retorted.

Her son laughed, and helped himself to more baked beans and a fresh slice of rye-and-Indian. He had the homely tastes and the strong digestion of the people from whom he sprung; and he handed his cup to be filled with his mother’s strong coffee in easy defiance of consequences. As he took it back from her he said, “I should like to see you and Mrs. Breen together. You would make a strong team.” He buttered his bread, with another laugh in appreciation of his conceit. “If you happened to pull the same way. If you did n’t, something would break. Mrs. Breen is a lady of powerful convictions. She thinks you ought to be good, and you ought to be very sorry for it, but not so sorry as you ought to be for being happy. I don’t think she has given her daughter any reason to complain on the last score.” He broke into his laugh again, and watched his mother’s frown with interest. “I suspect that she does n’t like me very well. You could meet on common ground there: you don’t like her daughter.”

“They must be a pair of them,” said Mrs. Mulbridge immovably. “Did her mother like her studying for a doctor?”

“Yes, I understand so. Her mother is progressive she believes in the advancement of women; she thinks the men would oppress them if they got a chance.”

“If one half the bold things that are running about the country had masters it would be the best thing,” said Mrs. Mulbridge, opening the lid of the coffee-pot, and clapping it to with force, after a glance inside.

“That’s where Mrs. Green wouldn’t agree with you. Perhaps because it would make the bold things happy to have masters, though she does n’t say so. Probably she wants the women to have women doctors so they won’t be so well, and can have more time to think whether they have been good or not. You ought to hear some of the ladies over there talk, mother.”

“I have heard enough of their talk.”

“Well, you ought to hear Miss Gleason. There are very few things that Miss Gleason does n’t think can be done with cut flowers, from a wedding to a funeral.”

Mrs. Mulbridge perceived that her son was speaking figuratively of Miss Gleason’s sentimentality, but she was not very patient with the sketch he, enjoyed giving of her. “Is she a friend of that Breen girl’s?” she interrupted to ask.

“She’s an humble friend, an admirer, a worshipper. The Breen girl is her ideal woman. She thinks the Breen girl is so superior to any man living that she would like to make a match for her.” His mother glanced sharply at him, but he went on in the tone of easy generalization, and with a certain pleasure in the projection of these strange figures against her distorting imagination: “You see, mother, that the most advanced thinkers among those ladies are not so very different, after all, from you old-fashioned people. When they try to think of the greatest good fortune that can befall an ideal woman, it is to have her married. The only trouble is to find a man good enough; and if they can’t find one, they’re apt to invent one. They have strong imaginations.”

“I should think they would make you sick, amongst them,” said his mother. “Are you going to have anything more to eat?” she asked, with a housekeeper’s latent impatience to get her table cleared away.

“Yes,” said Dr. Mulbridge; “I have n’t finished yet. And I’m in no hurry this morning. Sit still, mother; I want you to hear something more about my lady friends at Jocelyn’s. Dr. Breen’s mother and Miss Gleason don’t feel alike about her. Her mother thinks she was weak in giving up Mrs. Maynard’s case to me; but Miss Gleason told me about their discussion, and she thinks it is the great heroic act of Dr. Breen’s life.”

“It showed some sense, at least,” Mrs. Mulbridge replied. She had tacitly offered to release her son from telling her anything when she had made her motion to rise; if he chose to go on now, it was his own affair. She handed him the plate of biscuit, and he took one.

“It showed inspiration, Miss Gleason says. The tears came into her eyes; I understood her to say it was godlike. ‘And only to think, doctor,’” he continued, with a clumsy, but unmistakable suggestion of Miss Gleason’s perfervid manner, “‘that such a girl should be dragged down by her own mother to the level of petty, every-day cares and duties, and should be blamed for the most beautiful act of self-sacrifice! Is n’t it too bad?’”

“Rufus, Rufus!” cried his mother, “I can’t stun’ it! Stop!”

“Oh, Dr. Breen is n’t so bad — not half so divine as Miss Gleason thinks her. And Mrs. Maynard does n’t consider her surrendering the case an act of self-sacrifice at all.”

“I should hope not!” said Mrs. Mulbridge. “I guess she would n’t have been alive to tell the tale, if it had n’t been for you.”

“Oh, you can’t be sure of that. You must n’t believe too much in doctors, mother. Mrs. Maynard is pretty tough. And she’s had wonderfully good nursing. You’ve only heard the Barlow side of the matter,” said her sun, betraying now for the first time that he had been aware of any knowledge of it on her part. That was their way: though they seldom told each other anything, and went on as if they knew nothing of each other’s affairs, yet when they recognized this knowledge it was without surprise on either side. “I could tell you a different story. She’s a very fine girl, mother; cool and careful under instruction, and perfectly tractable and intelligent. She’s as different from those other women you’ve seen as you are. You would like her!” He had suddenly grown earnest, and crushing the crust of a biscuit in the strong left hand which he rested on the table, he gazed keenly at her undemonstrative face. “She’s no baby, either. She’s got a will and a temper of her own. She’s the only one of them I ever saw that was worth her salt.”

“I thought you did n’t like self-willed women,” said his mother impassively.

“She knows when to give up,” he answered, with unrelaxed scrutiny.

His mother did not lift her eyes, yet. “How long shall you have to visit over there?”

“I’ve made my last professional visit.”

“Where are you going this morning?”

“To Jocelyn’s.”

Mrs. Mulbridge now looked up, and met her son’s eye. “What makes you think she’ll have you?”

He did not shrink at her coming straight to the point the moment the way was clear. He had intended it, and he liked it. But he frowned a little as he said, “Because I want her to have me, for one thing.” His jaw closed heavily, but his face lost a certain brutal look almost as quickly as it had assumed it. “I guess,” he said, with a smile, “that it’s the only reason I’ve got.”

“You no need to say that,” said his mother, resenting the implication that any woman would not have him.

“Oh, I’m not pretty to look at, mother, and I’m not particularly young; and for a while I thought there might be some one, else.”

“Who?”

“The young fellow that came with her, that day.”

“That whipper-snapper?”

Dr. Mulbridge assented by his silence. “But I guess I was mistaken. I guess he’s tried and missed it. The field is ‘clear, for all I can see. And she’s made a failure in one way, and then you know a woman is in the humor to try it in another. She wants a good excuse for giving up. That’s what I think.”

“Well,” said his mother, “I presume you know what you’re about, Rufus!”

She took up the coffee-pot on the lid of which she had been keeping her hand, and went into the kitchen with it. She removed the dishes, and left him sitting before the empty table-cloth. When she came for that, he took hold of her hand, and looked up into her face, over which a scarcely discernible tremor passed. “Well, mother?”

“It’s what I always knew I had got to come to, first or last. And I suppose I ought to feel glad enough I did n’t have to come to it at first.”

“No!” said her son. “I’m not a stripling any longer.” He laughed, keeping his mother’s hand.

She freed it and taking up the table-cloth folded it lengthwise and then across, and laid it neatly away in the cupboard. “I sha’n’t interfere with you, nor any woman that you bring here to be your wife. I’ve had my day, and I’m not one of the old fools that think they’re going to have and to hold forever. You’ve always been a good boy to me, and I guess you hain’t ever had to complain’ of your mother stan’in’ in your way. I sha’n’t now. But I did think—”

She stopped and shut her lips firmly. “Speak up, mother!” he cried.

“I guess I better not,” she answered, setting her chair back against the wall.

“I know what you mean. You mean about my laughing at women that try to take men’s places in the world. Well, I did laugh at them. They’re ridiculous. I don’t want to marry this girl because she’s a doctor. That was the principal drawback, in my mind. But it does n’t make any difference, and wouldn’t now, if she was a dozen doctors.”

His mother let down the leaves of the table, and pushed it against the wall, and he rose from the chair in which he was left sitting in the middle of the room. “I presume,” she said, with her back toward him, as she straightened the table accurately against the mopboard, “that you can let me have the little house at Grant’s Corner.”

“Why, mother!” he cried. “You don’t suppose I should ever let you be turned out of house and home? You can stay here as long as you live. But it has n’t come to that, yet. I don’t know that she cares anything about me. But there are chances, and there are signs. The chances are that she won’t have the courage to take up her plan of life again, and that she’ll consider any other that’s pressed home upon her. And I take it for a good sign that she’s sent that fellow adrift. If her mind had n’t been set on some one else, she’d have taken him, in this broken-up state of hers. Besides, she has formed the habit of doing what I say, and there’s a great deal in mere continuity of habit. It will be easier for her to say yes than to say no; it would be very hard for her to say no.”

While he eagerly pressed these arguments his mother listened stonily, without apparent interest or sympathy. But at the end she asked, “How are you going to support a wife? Your practice here won’t do it. Has she got anything?”

“She has property, I believe,” replied her son. “She seems to have been brought up in that way.”

“She won’t want to come and live here, then. She’ll have notions of her own. If she’s like the rest of them, she’ll never have you.”

“If she were like the rest of them, I’d never have her. But she is n’t. As far as I’m concerned, it’s nothing against her that she’s studied medicine. She did n’t do it from vanity, or ambition, or any abnormal love of it. She did it, so far so I can find out, because she wished to do good that way. She’s been a little notional, she’s had her head addled by women’s talk, and she’s in a queer freak; but it’s only a girl’s freak after all: you can’t say anything worse of her. She’s a splendid woman, and her property’s neither here nor there. I could support her.”

“I presume,” replied his mother, “that she’s been used to ways that ain’t like our ways. I’ve always stuck up for you, Rufus, stiff enough, I guess; but I ain’t agoin’ to deny that you’re country born and bred. I can see that, and she can see it, too. It makes a great difference with girls. I don’t know as she’d call you what they call a gentleman.”

Dr. Mulbridge flushed angrily. Every American, of whatever standing or breeding, thinks of himself as a gentleman, and nothing can gall him more than the insinuation that he is less. “What do you mean, mother?”

“You hain’t ever been in such ladies’ society as hers in the same way. I know that they all think the world of you, and flatter you up, and they’re as biddable as you please when you’re doctorin’ ‘em; but I guess it would be different if you was to set up for one of their own kind amongst ‘em.”

“There is n’t one of them,” he retorted, “that I don’t believe I could have for the turn of my hand, especially if it was doubled into a fist. They like force.”

“Oh, you’ve only seen the sick married ones. I guess you’ll find a well girl is another thing.”

“They’re all alike. And I think I should be something of a relief if I was n’t like what she’s been used to hearing called a gentleman; she’d prefer me on that account. But if you come to blood, I guess the Mulbridges and Gardiner, can hold up their heads with the best, anywhere.”

“Yes, like the Camfers and Rafllins.” These were people of ancestral consequence and local history, who had gone up to Boston from Corbitant, and had succeeded severally as green-grocers and retail dry-goods men, with the naturally attendant social distinction.

“Pshaw!” cried her son. “If she cares for me at all, she won’t care for the cut of my clothes, or my table manners.”

“Yes, that’s so. ‘T ain’t on my account that I want you should make sure she doos care.”

He looked hard at her immovable face, with its fallen eyes, and then went out of the room. He never quarrelled with his mother, because his anger, like her own, was dumb, and silenced him as it mounted. Her misgivings had stung him deeply, and at the bottom of his indolence and indifference was a fiery pride, not easily kindled, but unquenchable. He flung the harness upon his old unkempt horse, and tackled him to the mud-encrusted buggy, for whose shabbiness he had never cared before. He was tempted to go back into the house, and change his uncouth Canada homespun coat for the broadcloth frock which he wore when he went to Boston; but he scornfully resisted it, and drove off in his accustomed figure.

His mother’s last words repeated themselves to him, and in that dialogue, in which he continued to dramatize their different feelings, he kept replying, “Well, the way to find out whether she cares is to ask her.”

X.

During her convalescence Mrs. Maynard had the time and inclination to give Grace some good advice. She said that she had thought a great deal about it throughout her sickness, and she had come to the conclusion that Grace was throwing away her life.

“You’re not fit to be a doctor, Grace,” she said. “You’re too nervous, and you’re too conscientious. It is n’t merely your want of experience. No matter how much experience you had, if you saw a case going wrong in your hands, you’d want to call in some one else to set it right. Do you suppose Dr. Mulbridge would have given me up to another doctor because he was afraid he couldn’t cure me? No, indeed! He’d have let me die first, and I should n’t have blamed him. Of course I know what pressure I brought to bear upon you, but you had no business to mind me. You oughtn’t to have minded my talk any more than the buzzing of a mosquito, and no real doctor would. If he wants to be a success, he must be hard-hearted; as hard-hearted as” — she paused for a comparison, and failing any other added— “as all possessed.” To the like large-minded and impartial effect, she, ran on at great length. “No, Grace,” she concluded, “what you want to do is to get married. You would be a good wife, and you would be a good mother. The only trouble is that I don’t know any man worthy of you, or half worthy. No, I don’t!”

Now that her recovery was assured, Mrs. Maynard was very forgiving and sweet and kind with every one. The ladies who came in to talk with her said that she was a changed creature; she gave them all the best advice, and she had absolutely no shame whatever for the inconsistency involved by her reconciliation with her husband. She rather flaunted the happiness of her reunion in the face of the public, and she vouchsafed an explanation to no one. There had never been anything definite in her charges against him, even to Grace, and her tacit withdrawal of them succeeded perfectly well. The ladies, after some cynical tittering, forgot them, and rejoiced in the spectacle of conjugal harmony afforded them: women are generous creatures, and there is hardly any offence which they are not willing another woman should forgive her husband, when once they have said that they do not see how she could ever forgive him.

Mrs. Maynard’s silence seemed insufficient to none but Mrs. Breen and her own husband. The former vigorously denounced its want of logic to Grace as all but criminal, though she had no objection to Mr. Maynard. He, in fact, treated her with a filial respect which went far to efface her preconceptions; and he did what he could to retrieve himself from the disgrace of a separation in Grace’s eyes. Perhaps he thought that the late situation was known to her alone, when he casually suggested, one day, that Mrs. Maynard was peculiar.

“Yes,” said Grace mercifully; “but she has been out of health so long. That makes a great difference. She’s going to be better now.”

“Oh, it’s going to come out all right in the end,” he said, with his unbuoyant hopefulness, “and I reckon I’ve got to help it along. Why, I suppose every man’s a trial at times, doctor?”

“I dare say. I know that every woman is,” said the girl.

“Is that so? Well, may be you’re partly right. But you don’t suppose but what a man generally begins it, do you? There was Adam, you know. He did n’t pull the apple; but he fell off into that sleep, and woke up with one of his ribs dislocated, and that’s what really commenced the trouble. If it had n’t been for Adam, there would n’t have been any woman, you know; and you could n’t blame her for what happened after she got going?” There was no gleam of insinuation in his melancholy eye, and Grace listened without quite knowing what to make of it all. “And then I suppose he was n’t punctual at meals, and stood round talking politics at night, when he ought to have been at home with his family?”

“Who?” asked Grace.

“Adam,” replied Mr. Maynard lifelessly. “Well, they got along pretty well outside,” he continued. “Some of the children didn’t turn out just what you might have expected; but raising children is mighty uncertain business. Yes, they got along.” He ended his parable with a sort of weary sigh, as if oppressed by experience. Grace looked at his slovenly figure, his smoky complexion, and the shaggy outline made by his untrimmed hair and beard, and she wondered how Louise could marry him; but she liked him, and she was willing to accept for all reason the cause of unhappiness at which he further hinted. “You see, doctor, an incompatibility is a pretty hard thing to manage. You can’t forgive it like a real grievance. You have to try other things, and find out that there are worse things, and then you come back to it and stand it. We’re talking Wyoming and cattle range, now, and Mrs. Maynard is all for the new deal; it’s going to make us healthy, wealthy, and wise. Well, I suppose the air will be good for her, out there. You doctors are sending lots of your patients our way, now.” The gravity with which he always assumed that Grace was a physician in full and regular practice would have had its edge of satire, coming from another; but from him, if it was ironical, it was also caressing, and she did not resent it. “I’ve had some talk with your colleague, here, Dr. Mulbridge, and he seems to think it will be the best thing for her. I suppose you agree with him?”

“Oh, yes,” said Grace, “his opinion would be of great value. It wouldn’t be at all essential that I should agree with him:’

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Maynard. “I reckon he thinks a good deal of your agreeing with him. I’ve been talking with him about settling out our way. We’ve got a magnificent country, and there’s bound to be plenty of sickness there, sooner or later. Why, doctor, it would be a good opening for you! It ‘s just the place for you. You ‘re off here in a corner, in New England, and you have n’t got any sort of scope; but at Cheyenne you’d have the whole field to yourself; there is n’t another lady doctor in Cheyenne. Now, you come out with us. Bring your mother with you, and grow up with the country. Your mother would like it. There’s enough moral obliquity in Cheyenne to keep her conscience in a state of healthful activity all the time. Yes, you’d get along out there.”

Grace laughed, and shook her head. It was part of the joke which life seemed to be with Mr. Maynard that the inhabitants of New England were all eager to escape from their native section, and that they ought to be pitied and abetted in this desire. As soon as his wife’s convalescence released him from constant attendance upon her, he began an inspection of the region from the compassionate point of view; the small, frugal husbandry appealed to his commiseration, and he professed to have found the use of canvas caps upon the haycocks intolerably pathetic. “Why, I’m told,” he said, “that they have to blanket the apple-trees while the fruit is setting; and they kill off our Colorado bugs by turning them loose, one at a time, on the potato-patches: the bug starves to death in forty-eight hours. But you’ve got plenty of schoolhouses, doctor; it does beat all, about the schoolhouses. And it’s an awful pity that there are no children to go to school in them. Why, of course the people go West as fast as they can, but they ought to be helped; the Government ought to do something. They’re good people; make first-rate citizens when you get them waked up, out there. But they ought all to be got away, and let somebody run New England’ as a summer resort. It’s pretty, and it’s cool and pleasant, and the fishing is excellent; milk, eggs, and all kinds of berries and historical associations on the premises; and it could be made very attractive three months of the year; but my goodness! you oughtn’t to ask anybody to live here. You come out with us, doctor, and see that country, and you’ll know what I mean.”

His boasts were always uttered with a wan, lack-lustre irony, as if he were burlesquing the conventional Western brag and enjoying the mystifications of his listener, whose feeble sense of humor often failed to seize his intention, and to whom any depreciation of New England was naturally unintelligible. She had not come to her final liking for him without a season of serious misgiving, but after that she rested in peace upon what every one knowing him felt to be his essential neighborliness. Her wonder had then come to be how he could marry Louise, when they sat together on the seaward piazza, and he poured out his easy talk, unwearied and unwearying, while, with one long, lank leg crossed upon the other, he swung his unblacked, thin-soled boot to and fro.

“Well, he was this kind of a fellow: When we were in Switzerland, he was always climbing some mountain or other. They could n’t have hired me to climb one of their mountains if they’d given me all their scenery, and thrown their goitres in. I used to tell him that the side of a house was good enough for me. But nothing but the tallest mountains would do him; and one day when he was up there on the comb of the roof somewhere, tied with a rope round his waist to the guide and a Frenchman, the guide’s foot slipped, and he commenced going down. The Frenchman was just going to cut the rope and let the guide play it alone; but he knocked the knife out of his hand with his long-handled axe, and when the jerk came he was on the other side of the comb, where he could brace himself, and brought them both up standing. Well, he’s got muscles like bunches of steel wire. Did n’t he ever tell you about it?”

“No,” said Grace sadly.

“Well, somebody ought to expose Libby. I don’t suppose I should ever have known about it myself, if I hadn’t happened to see the guide’s friends and relations crying over him next day as if he was the guide’s funeral. Hello! There’s the doctor.” He unlimbered his lank legs, and rose with an effect of opening his person like a pocket-knife. “As I understand it, this is an unprofessional visit, and the doctor is here among us as a guest. I don’t know exactly what to do under the circumstances, whether we ought to talk about Mrs. Maynard’s health or the opera; but I reckon if we show our good intentions it will come out all right in the end.”

He went forward to meet the doctor, who came up to shake hands with Grace, and then followed him in-doors to see Mrs. Maynard. Grace remained in her place, and she was still sitting there when Dr. Mulbridge returned without him. He came directly to her, and said, “I want to speak with you, Miss Breen. Can I see you alone?”

“Is — is Mrs. Maynard worse?” she asked, rising in a little trepidation.

“No; it has nothing to do with her. She’s practically well now; I can remand the case to you. I wish to see you — about yourself.” She hesitated at this peculiar summons, but some pressure was upon her to obey Dr. Mulbridge, as there was upon most people where he wished to obey him. “I want to talk with you,” he added, “about what you are going to do, — about your future. Will you come?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered; and she suffered him to lead the way down from the piazza, and out upon one of the sandy avenues toward the woods, in which it presently lost itself. “But there will be very little to talk about,” she continued, as they moved away, “if you confine yourself to my future. I have none.”

“I don’t see how you’ve got rid of it,” he rejoined. “You’ve got a future as much as you have a past, and there’s this advantage, — that you can do something with your future.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, with a little bitterness. “That has n’t been my experience.”

“It’s been mine,” he said, “and you can make it yours. Come, I want to talk with you about your future, because I have been thinking very seriously about my own. I want to ask your advice and to give you mine. I’ll commence by asking yours. What do you think of me as a physician? I know you are able to judge.”

She was flattered, in spite of herself. There were long arrears of cool indifference to her own claims in that direction, which she might very well have resented; but she did not. There was that flattery in his question which the junior in any vocation feels in the appeal of his senior; and there was the flattery which any woman feels in a man’s recourse to her judgment. Still, she contrived to parry it with a little thrust. “I don’t suppose the opinion of a mere homoeopathist can be of any value to a regular practitioner.”

He laughed. “You have been a regular practitioner yourself for the last three weeks. What do you think of my management of the case?”

“I have never abandoned my principles,” she began.

“Oh, I know all about that? What do you think of me as a doctor?” he persisted.

“Of course I admire you. Why do you ask me that?”

“Because I wished to know. And because I wished to ask you something else. You have been brought up in a city, and I have always lived here in the country, except the two years I was out with the army. Do you think I should succeed if I pulled up here, and settled in Boston?”

“I have not lived in Boston,” she answered. “My opinion wouldn’t be worth much on that point.”

“Yes, it would. You know city people, and what they are. I have seen a good deal of them in my practice at the hotels about here, and some of the ladies — when they happened to feel more comfortable — have advised me to come to Boston.” His derision seemed to throw contempt on all her sex; but he turned to her, and asked again earnestly, “What do you think? Some of the profession know me there. When I left the school, some of the faculty urged me to try my chance in the city.”

She waited a moment before she answered. “You know that I must respect your skill, and I believe that you could succeed anywhere. I judge your fitness by my own deficiency. The first time I saw you with Mrs. Maynard, I saw that you had everything that I hadn’t. I saw that I was a failure, and why, and that it would be foolish for me to keep up the struggle.”

“Do you mean that you have given it up?” he demanded, with a triumph in which there was no sympathy.

“It has given me up. I never liked it, — I told you that before, — and I never took it up from any ambitious motive. It seemed a shame for me to be of no use in the world; and I hoped that I might do something in a way that seemed natural for women. And I don’t give up because I’m unfit as a woman. I might be a man, and still be impulsive and timid and nervous, and everything that I thought I was not.”

“Yes, you might be all that, and be a man; but you’d be an exceptional man, and I don’t think you’re an exceptional woman. If you’ve failed, it is n’t your temperament that’s to blame.”

“I think it is. The wrong is somewhere in me individually. I know it is.”

Dr. Mulbridge, walking beside her, with his hands clasped behind him, threw up his head and laughed. “Well, have it your own way, Miss Breen. Only I don’t agree with you. Why should you wish to spare your sex at your own expense? But that’s the way with some ladies, I’ve noticed. They approve of what women attempt because women attempt it, and they believe the attempt reflects honor on them. It’s tremendous to think what men could accomplish for their sex, if they only hung together as women do. But they can’t. They haven’t the generosity.”

“I think you don’t understand me,” said Grace, with a severity that amused him. “I wished to regard myself, in taking up this profession, entirely as I believed a man would have regarded himself.”

“And were you able to do it?”

“No,” she unintentionally replied to this unexpected question.

“Haw, haw, haw!” laughed Dr. Mulbridge at her helpless candor. “And are you sure that you give it up as a man would?”

“I don’t know how you mean,” she said, vexed and bewildered.

“Do you do it fairly and squarely because you believe that you’re a failure, or because you partly feel that you have n’t been fairly dealt with?”

“I believe that if Mrs. Maynard had had the same confidence in me that she would have had in any man I should not have failed. But every woman physician has a double disadvantage that I hadn’t the strength to overcome, — her own inexperience and the distrust of other women.”

“Well, whose fault is that?”

“Not the men’s. It is the men alone who give women any chance. They are kind and generous and liberal-minded. I have no blame for them, and I have no patience with women who want to treat them as the enemies of women’s advancement. Women can’t move a step forwards without their sufferance and help. Dr. Mulbridge,” she cried, “I wish to apologize for the hasty and silly words I used to you the day I came to ask you to consult with me. I ought to have been grateful to you for consenting at first, and when you took back your consent I ought to have considered your position. You were entirely right. We had no common ground to meet on, and I behaved like a petulant, foolish, vulgar girl!”

“No, no,” he protested, laughing in recollection of the scene. “You were all right, and I was in a fix; and if your own fears had n’t come to the rescue, I don’t know how I should have got out of it. It would have been disgraceful, wouldn’t it, to refuse a lady’s request. You don’t know how near I was to giving way. I can tell you, now that it’s all over. I had never seen a lady of our profession before,” he added hastily, “and my curiosity was up. I always had my doubts about the thoroughness of women’s study, and I should have liked to see where your training failed. I must say I found it very good, — I’ve told you that. You wouldn’t fail individually: you would fail because you are a woman.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Grace.

“Well, then, because your patients are women. It’s all one. What will you do?”

“I shall not do anything. I shall give it all up.”

“But what shall you do then?”

“I — don’t know.”

“What are you going to be? A fashionable woman? Or are you going to Europe, and settle down there with the other American failures? I’ve heard about them, — in Rome and Florence and Paris. Are you going to throw away the study you’ve put into this profession? You took it up because you wanted to do good. Don’t you want to do good any more? Has the human race turned out unworthy?”

She cowered at this arraignment, in which she could not separate the mocking from the justice. “What do you advise me to do? Do you think I could ever succeed?”

“You could never succeed alone.”

“Yes, I know that; I felt that from the first. But I have planned to unite with a woman physician older than myself.”

“And double your deficiency. Sit down here,” he said; “I wish to talk business.” They had entered the border of the woods encompassing Jocelyn’s, and he painted to a stump, beside which lay the fallen tree. She obeyed mechanically, and he remained standing near her, with one foot lifted to the log; he leaned forward over her, and seemed to seize a physical advantage in the posture. “From your own point of view, you would have no right to give up your undertaking if there was a chance of success in it. You would have no more right to give up than a woman who had gone out as a missionary.”

“I don’t pretend to compare myself with such a woman; but I should have no more right to give up,” she answered, helpless against the logic of her fate, which he had somehow divined.

“Well, then, listen to me. I can give you this chance. Are you satisfied that with my advice you could have succeeded in Mrs. Maynard’s case?”

“Yes, I think so. But what” —

“I think so, too. Don’t rise!”

His will overcame the impulse that had betrayed itself, and she sank back to her seat. “I offer you my advice from this time forward; I offer you my help.”

“That is very good of you,” she murmured; “and I appreciate your generosity more than I can say. I know the prejudice you must have had to overcome in regard to women physicians before you could bring yourself to do this; and I know how you must have despised me for failing in my attempt, and giving myself up to my feeble temperament. But” —

“Oh, we won’t speak of all that,” he interrupted. “Of course I felt the prejudice against women entering the profession which we all feel; it was ridiculous and disgusting to me till I saw you. I won’t urge you from any personal motive to accept my offer. But I know that if you do you can realize all your hopes of usefulness; and I ask you to consider that certainly. But you know the only way it could be done.”

She looked him in the eyes, with dismay in her growing intelligence.

“What — what do you mean?”

“I mean that I ask you to let me help you carry out your plan of life, and to save all you have done, and all you have hoped, from waste — as your husband. Think” —

She struggled to her feet as if he were opposing a palpable resistance, so strongly she felt the pressure of his will. “It can’t be, Dr. Mulbridge. Oh, it can’t, indeed! Let us go back; I wish to go back!”

But he had planted himself in her way, and blocked her advance, unless she chose to make it a flight.

“I expected this,” he said, with a smile, as if her wild trepidation interested him as an anticipated symptom. “The whole idea is new and startling to you. But I know you won’t dismiss it abruptly, and I won’t be discouraged.”

“Yes, yes, you must! I will not think of it! I can’t! I do dismiss it at once. Let me go!”

“Then you really choose to be like the rest, — a thing of hysterical impulses, without conscience or reason! I supposed the weakest woman would be equal to an offer of marriage. And you had dreamt of being a physician and useful!”

“I tell you,” she cried, half quelled by his derision, “that I have found out that I am not fit for it, — that I am a failure and a disgrace; and you had no right to expect me to be anything else.”

“You are no failure, and I had a right to expect anything of you after the endurance and the discretion you have shown in the last three weeks. Without your help I should have failed myself. You owe it to other women to go on.”

“They must take care of themselves,” she said. “If my weakness throws shame on them, they must bear it. I thank you for what you say. I believe you mean it. But if I was of any use to you I did n’t know it.”

“It was probably inspiration, then,” he interrupted coolly. “Come, this isn’t a thing to be frightened at. You’re not obliged to do what I say. But I think you ought to hear me out. I haven’t spoken without serious thought, and I didn’t suppose you would reject me without a reason.”

“Reason?” she repeated. “There is no reason in it.”

“There ought to be. There is, on my side. I have all kinds of reasons for asking you to be my wife: I believe that I can make you happy in the fulfilment of your plans; I admire you and respect you more than any other woman I ever saw; and I love you.”

“I don’t love you, and that is reason enough.”

“Yes, between boys and girls. But between men and women it isn’t enough. Do you dislike me?”

“No.”

“Am I repulsive in any way?”

“No, no!”

“I know that I am not very young and that I am not very good-looking.”

“It is n’t that at all.”

“Of course I know that such things weigh with women, and that personal traits and habits are important in an affair like this. I am slovenly and indifferent about my dress; but it’s only because I have lived where every sort of spirit and ambition was useless. I don’t know about city ways, but I could pick up all of them that were worth while. I spoke of going to Boston; but I would go anywhere else with you, east or west, that you chose, and I know that I should succeed. I haven’t done what I might have done with myself, because I’ve never had an object in life. I’ve always lived in the one little place, and I’ve never been out of it except when I was in the army. I’ve always liked my profession; but nothing has seemed worth while. You were a revelation to me; you have put ambition and hope into me. I never saw any woman before that I would have turned my hand to have. They always seemed to me fit to be the companions of fools, or the playthings of men. But of all the simpletons, the women who were trying to do something for woman, as they called it, trying to exemplify and illustrate a cause, were the silliest that I came across. I never happened to have met a woman doctor before you came to me; but I had imagined them, and I could n’t believe in you when I saw you. You were not supersensitive, you were not presumptuous, and you gave up, not because you distrusted yourself, but because your patient distrusted you. That was right: I should have done the same thing myself. Under my direction, you have shown yourself faithful, docile, patient, intelligent beyond anything I have seen. I have watched you, and I know; and I know what your peculiar trials have been from that woman. You have taught me a lesson, — I ‘m not ashamed to say it; and you’ve given me a motive. I was wrong to ask you to marry me so that you might carry out your plans: that was no way to appeal to you. What I meant was that I might make your plans my own, and that we might carry them out together. I don’t care for making money; I have always been poor, and I had always expected to be so; and I am not afraid of hard work. There is n’t any self-sacrifice you’ve dreamed of that I wouldn’t gladly and proudly share with you. You can’t do anything by yourself, but we could do anything together. If you have any scruple about giving up your theory of medicine, you needn’t do it; and the State Medical Association may go to the devil. I’ve said my say. What do you say?”

She looked all round, as if seeking escape from a mesh suddenly flung about her, and then she looked imploringly up at him. “I have nothing to say,” she whispered huskily. “I can’t answer you.”

“Well, that’s all I ask,” he said, moving a few steps, away, and suffering her to rise. “Don’t answer me now. Take time, — all the time you want, all the time there is.”

“No,” she said, rising, and gathering some strength from the sense of being on foot again. “I don’t mean that. I mean that I don’t — I can’t consent.”

“You don’t believe in me? You don’t think I would do it?”

“I don’t believe in myself. I have no right to doubt you. I know that I ought to honor you for what you propose.”

“I don’t think it calls for any great honor. Of course I shouldn’t propose it to every lady physician.” He smiled with entire serenity and self-possession. “Tell me one thing: was there ever a time when you would have consented?” She did not answer. “Then you will consent yet?”

“No. Don’t deceive yourself. I shall never consent.”

“I’ll leave that to the logic of your own conscience. You will do what seems your duty.”

“You must n’t trust to my conscience. I fling it away! I won’t have anything to do with it. I’ve been tortured enough by it. There is no sense or justice in it!”

He laughed easily at her vehemence. “I ‘ll trust your conscience. But I won’t stay to worry you now. I’m coming again day after to-morrow, and I’m not afraid of what you will say then.”

He turned and left her, tearing his way through the sweet-fern and low blackberry vines, with long strides, a shape of uncouth force. After he was out of sight, she followed, scared and trembling at herself, as if she had blasphemed.

XI.

Grace burst into the room where her mother sat; and flung her hat aside with a desperate gesture. “Now, mother, you have got to listen to me. Dr. Mulbridge has asked me to marry him!”

Mrs. Green put up her spectacles on her forehead, and stared at her daughter, while some strong expressions, out of the plebeian or rustic past which lies only a generation or two behind most of us, rose to her lips. I will not repeat them here; she had long denied them to herself as an immoral self-indulgence, and it must be owned that such things have a fearful effect, coming from old ladies. “What has got into all the men? What in nature does he want you to marry him for?”

“Oh, for the best reasons in the world,” exclaimed the daughter. “For reasons that will make you admire and respect him,” she added ironically. “For great, and unselfish, and magnanimous reasons!”

“I should want to believe they were the real ones, first,” interrupted Mrs. Breen.

“He wants to marry me because he knows that I can’t fulfil my plans of life alone, and because we could fulfil them together. We shall not only be husband and wife, but we shall be physicians in partnership. I may continue a homoeopath, he says, and the State Medical Association may go to the devil.” She used his language, that would have been shocking to her ordinary moods, without blenching, and in their common agitation her mother accepted it as fit and becoming. “He counts upon my accepting him because I must see it as my duty, and my conscience won’t let me reject the only opportunity I shall have of doing some good and being of some use in the world. What do you think I ought to do, mother?”

“There’s reason in what he says. It is an opportunity. You could be of use, in that way, and perhaps it’s the only way. Yes,” she continued, fascinated by the logic of the position, and its capabilities for vicarious self-sacrifice. “I don’t see how you can get out of it: You have spent years and years of study, and a great deal of money, to educate yourself for a profession that you’re too weak to practise alone. You can’t say that I ever advised your doing it. It was your own idea, and I did n’t oppose it. But when you’ve gone so far, you’ve formed an obligation to go on. It’s your duty not to give up, if you know of any means to continue. That’s your duty, as plain as can be. To say nothing of the wicked waste of your giving up now, you’re bound to consider the effect it would have upon other women who are trying to do something for themselves. The only thing,” she added, with some misgiving, “is whether you believe he was in earnest and would keep his word to you.”

“I think he was secretly laughing at me, and that he would expect to laugh me out of his promise.”

“Well, then, you ought to take time to reflect, and you ought to be sure that you’re right about him.”

“Is that what you really think, mother?”

“I am always governed by reason, Grace, and by right; and I have brought you up on that plan. If you have ever departed from it, it has not been with my consent, nor for want of my warning. I have simply laid the matter before you.”

“Then you wish me to marry him?”

This was perhaps a point that had not occurred to Mrs. Breen in her recognition of the strength of Dr. Mulbridge’s position. It was one thing to trace the path of duty; another to support the aspirant in treading it. “You ought to take time to reflect,” Mrs. Green repeated, with evasion that she never used in behalf of others.

“Well, mother,” answered Grace, “I didn’t take time to reflect, and I should n’t care whether I was right about him or not. I refused him because I did n’t love him. If I had loved him that would have been the only reason I needed to marry him. But all the duty in the world wouldn’t be enough without it. Duty? I am sick of duty! Let the other women who are trying to do something for themselves, take care of themselves as men would. I don’t owe them more than a man would owe other men, and I won’t be hoodwinked into thinking I do. As for the waste, the past is gone, at any rate; and the waste that I lament is the years I spent in working myself up to an undertaking that I was never fit for. I won’t continue that waste, and I won’t keep up the delusion that because I was very unhappy I was useful, and that it was doing good to be miserable. I like pleasure and I like dress; I like pretty things. There is no harm in them. Why should n’t I have them?”

“There is harm in them for you,” — her mother began.

“Because I have tried to make my life a horror? There is no other reason, and that is no reason. When we go into Boston this winter I shall go to the theatre. I shall go to the opera, and I hope there will be a ballet. And next summer, I am going to Europe; I am going to Italy.” She whirled away toward the door as if she were setting out.

“I should think you had taken leave of your conscience!” cried her mother.

“I hope I have, mother. I am going to consult my reason after this.”

“Your reason!”

“Well, then, my inclination. I have had enough of conscience, — of my own, and of yours, too. That is what I told him, and that is what I mean. There is such a thing as having too much conscience, and of getting stupefied by it, so that you can’t really see what’s right. But I don’t care. I believe I should like to do wrong for a while, and I will do wrong if it’s doing right to marry him.”

She had her hand on the door-knob, and now she opened the door, and closed it after her with something very like a bang.

She naturally could not keep within doors in this explosive state, and she went downstairs, and out upon the piazza. Mr. Maynard was there, smoking, with his boots on top of the veranda-rail, and his person thrown back in his chair at the angle requisite to accomplish this elevation of the feet. He took them down, as he saw her approach, and rose, with the respect in which he never failed for women, and threw his cigar away.

“Mr. Maynard,” she asked abruptly, “do you know where Mr. Libby is?”

“No, I don’t, doctor, I’m sorry to say. If I did, I would send and borrow some more cigars of him. I think that the brand our landlord keeps must have been invented by Mr. Track, the great anti-tobacco reformer.”

“Is he coming back? Is n’t he coming back?” she demanded breathlessly.

“Why, yes, I reckon he must be coming back. Libby generally sees his friends through. And he’ll have some curiosity to know how Mrs. Maynard and I have come out of it all.” He looked at her with something latent in his eye; but what his eye expressed was merely a sympathetic regret that he could not be more satisfactory.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “Mr. Barlow might know something.”

“Well, now,” said Maynard, “perhaps he might, that very thing. I’ll go round and ask him.” He went to the stable, and she waited for his return. “Barlow says,” he reported, “that he guesses he’s somewhere about Leyden. At any rate, his mare,’s there yet, in the stable where Barlow left her. He saw her there, yesterday.”

“Thanks. That’s all I wished to know,” said Grace. “I wished to write to him,” she added boldly.

She shut herself in her room and spent the rest of the forenoon in writing a letter, which when first finished was very long, but in its ultimate phase was so short as to occupy but a small space on a square correspondence-card. Having got it written on the card, she was dissatisfied with it in that shape, and copied it upon a sheet of note-paper. Then she sealed and addressed it, and put it into her pocket; after dinner she went down to the beach, and walked a long way upon the sands. She thought at first that she would ask Barlow to get it to him, somehow; and then she determined to find out from Barlow the address of the people who had Mr. Libby’s horse, and send it to them for him by the driver of the barge. She would approach the driver with a nonchalant, imperious air, and ask him to please have that delivered to Mr. Libby immediately; and in case he learned from the stable-people that he was not in Leyden, to bring the letter back to her. She saw how the driver would take it, and then she figured Libby opening and reading it. She sometimes figured him one way, and sometimes another. Sometimes he rapidly scanned the lines, and then instantly ordered his horse, and feverishly hastened the men; again he deliberately read it, and then tore it into stall pieces, with a laugh, and flung them away. This conception of his behavior made her heart almost stop beating; but there was a luxury in it, too, and she recurred to it quite as often as to the other, which led her to a dramatization of their meeting, with all their parley minutely realized, and every most intimate look and thought imagined. There is of course no means of proving that this sort of mental exercise was in any degree an exercise of the reason, or that Dr. Breen did not behave unprofessionally in giving herself up to it. She could only have claimed in self-defence that she was no longer aiming at a professional behavior; that she was in fact abandoning herself to a recovered sense of girlhood and all its sweetest irresponsibilities. Those who would excuse so weak and capricious a character may urge, if they like, that she was behaving as wisely as a young physician of the other sex would have done in the circumstances.

She concluded to remain on the beach, where only the children were playing in the sand, and where she could easily escape any other companionship that threatened. After she had walked long enough to spend the first passion of her reverie, she sat down under the cliff, and presently grew conscious of his boat swinging at anchor in its wonted place, and wondered that she had not thought he must come back for that. Then she had a mind to tear up her letter as superfluous; but she did not. She rose from her place under the cliff, and went to look for the dory. She found it drawn up on the sand in a little cove. It was the same place, and the water was so shoal for twenty feet out that no one could have rowed the dory to land; it must be dragged up. She laughed and blushed, and then boldly amused herself by looking for footprints; but the tide must have washed them out long ago; there were only the light, small footprints of the children who had been playing about the dory. She brushed away some sand they had scattered over the seat, and got into the boat and sat down there. It was a good seat, and commanded a view of the sail-boat in the foreground of the otherwise empty ocean; she took out her letter, and let it lie in the open hands which she let lie in her lap.

She was not impatient to have the time pass; it went only too soon. Though she indulged that luxury of terror in imagining her letter torn up and scornfully thrown away, she really rested quite safe as to the event; but she liked this fond delay, and the soft blue afternoon might have lasted forever to her entire content.

A little whiff of breeze stole up, and suddenly caught the letter from her open hands, and whisked it out over the sand. With a cry she fled after it, and when she had recaptured it, she thought to look at her watch. It was almost time for the barge, and now she made such needless haste, in order not to give herself chance for misgiving or retreat, that she arrived too soon at the point where she meant to intercept the driver on his way to the house; for in her present mutiny she had resolved to gratify a little natural liking for manoeuvre, long starved by the rigid discipline to which she had subjected herself. She had always been awkward at it, but she liked it; and now it pleased her to think that she should give her letter secretly to the driver, and on her way to meet him she forgot that she had meant to ask Barlow for part of the address. She did not remember this till it was too late to go back to the hotel, and she suddenly resolved not to consult Barlow, but to let the driver go about from one place to another with the letter till he found the right one. She kept walking on out into the forest through which the road wound, and she had got a mile away before she saw the weary bowing of the horses’ heads as they tugged the barge through the sand at a walk. She stopped involuntarily, with some impulses to flight; and as the vehicle drew nearer, she saw the driver turned round upon his seat, and talking to a passenger behind. She had never counted upon his having a passenger, and the fact undid all.

She remained helpless in the middle of the road; the horses came to a stand-still a few paces from her, and the driver ceased from the high key of conversation, and turned to see what was the matter.

“My grief!” he shouted. “If it had n’t been for them horses o’ mine, I sh’d ‘a’ run right over ye.”

“I wished to speak with you,” she began. “I wished to send” —

She stopped, and the passenger leaned forward to learn what was going on. “Miss Breen!” he exclaimed, and leaped out of the back of the barge and ran to her.

“You — you got my letter!” she gasped.

“No! What letter? Is there anything the matter?”

She did not answer. She had become conscious of the letter, which she had never ceased to hold in the hand that she had kept in her pocket for that purpose. She crushed it into a small wad.

Libby turned his head, and said to the driver of the barge, “Go ahead.”

“Will you take my arm?” he added to her. “It’s heavy walking in this sand.”

“No, thank you,” she murmured, recoiling. “I’m not tired.”

“Are you well? Have you been quite well?”

“Oh, yes, perfectly. I did n’t know you were coming back.”

“Yes. I had to come back. I’m going to Europe next week, and I had to come to look after my boat, here; and I wanted to say good-by to Maynard. I was just going to speak to Maynard, and then sail my boat over to Leyden.”

“It will be very pleasant,” she said, without looking at him. “It’s moonlight now.”

“Oh, I sha’n’t have any use for the moon. I shall get over before nightfall, if this breeze holds.”

She tried to think of something else, and to get away from this talk of a sail to Leyden, but she fatally answered, “I saw your boat this afternoon. I had n’t noticed before that it was still here.”

He hesitated a moment, and then asked, “Did you happen to notice the dory?”

“Yes, it was drawn up on the sand.”

“I suppose it’s all right — if it’s in the same place.”

“It seemed to be,” she answered faintly.

“I’m going to give the boat to Johnson.”

She did not say anything, for she could think of nothing to say, but that she had looked for seals on the reef, but had not seen any, and this would have been too shamelessly leading. That left the word to him, and he asked timidly, —

“I hope my coming don’t seem intrusive, Miss Breen?”

She did not heed this, but “You are going to be gone a great while?” she asked, in turn.

“I don’t know,” he replied, in an uncertain tone, as if troubled to make out whether she was vexed with him or not. “I thought,” he added, “I would go up the Nile this time. I’ve never been up the Nile, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know that. Well,” she added to herself, “I wish you had not come back! You had better not have come back. If you had n’t come, you would have got my letter. And now it can never be done! No, I can’t go through it all again, and no one has the right to ask it. We have missed the only chance,” she cried to herself, in such keen reproach of him that she thought she must have spoken aloud.

“Is Mrs. Maynard all right again?” he asked.

“Yes, she is very much better,” she answered, confusedly, as if he had heard her reproach and had ignored it.

“I hope you’re not so tired as you were.”

“No, I ‘m not tired now.”

“I thought you looked a little pale,” he said sympathetically, and now she saw that he was so. It irritated her that she should be so far from him, in all helpfulness, and she could scarcely keep down the wish that ached in her heart.

We are never nearer doing the thing we long to do than when we have proclaimed to ourselves that it must not and cannot be.

“Why are you so pale?” she demanded, almost angrily.

“I? I didn’t know that I was,” he answered. “I supposed I was pretty well. I dare say I ought to be ashamed of showing it in that way. But if you ask me, well, I will tell you; I don’t find it any easier than I did at first.”

“You are to blame, then!” she cried. “If I were a man, I should not let such a thing wear upon me for a moment.”

“Oh, I dare say I shall live through it,” he answered, with the national whimsicality that comes to our aid in most emergencies.

A little pang went through her heart, but she retorted, “I would n’t go to Europe to escape it, nor up the Nile. I would stay and fight it where I was.” “Stay?” He seemed to have caught hopefully at the word.

“I thought you were stronger. If you give up in this way how can you expect me” — She stopped; she hardly knew what she had intended to say; she feared that he knew.

But he only said: “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to trouble you with the sight of me. I had a plan for getting over the cliff without letting you know, and having Maynard come down to me there.”

“And did you really mean,” she cried piteously, “to go away without trying to see me again?”

“Yes,” he owned simply. “I thought I might catch a glimpse of you, but I did n’t expect to speak to you.”

“Did you hate me so badly as that? What had I done to you?”

“Done?” He gave a sorrowful laugh; and added, with an absent air, “Yes, it’s really like doing something to me! And sometimes it seems as if you had done it purposely.”

“You know I did n’t! Now, then,” she cried, “you have insulted me, and you never did that before. You were very good and noble and generous, and would n’t let me blame myself for anything. I wanted always to remember that of you; for I did n’t believe that any man could be so magnanimous. But it seems that you don’t care to have me respect you!”

“Respect?” he repeated, in the same vague way. “No, I should n’t care about that unless it was included in the other. But you know whether I have accused you of anything, or whether I have insulted you. I won’t excuse myself. I think that ought to be insulting to your common sense.”

“Then why should you have wished to avoid seeing me to-day? Was it to spare yourself?” she demanded, quite incoherently now. “Or did you think I should not be equal to the meeting?”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” answered the young man. “I think I must be crazy.” He halted, and looked at her in complete bewilderment. “I don’t understand you at all.”

“I wished to see you very much. I wanted your advice, as — as — a friend.” He shook his head. “Yes! you shall be my friend, in this at least. I can claim it — demand it. You had no right to — to — make me — trust you so much, and — and then — desert me.”

“Oh, very well,” he answered. “If any advice of mine — But I couldn’t go through that sacrilegious farce of being near you and not” — She waited breathlessly, a condensed eternity, for him to go on; but he stopped at that word, and added: “How can I advise you?”

The disappointment was so cruel that the tears came into her eyes and ran down her face, which she averted from him. When she could control herself she said, “I have an opportunity of going on in my profession now, in a way that makes me sure of success.”

“I am very glad on your account. You must be glad to realize”

“No, no!” she retorted wildly. “I am not glad!”

“I thought you” —

“But there are conditions! He says he will go with me anywhere, and we can practise our profession together, and I can carry out all my plans. But first — first — he wants me to — marry him!”

“Who?”

“Don’t you know? Dr. Mulbridge!”

“That — I beg your pardon. I’ve no right to call him names.” The young fellow halted, and looked at her downcast face. “Well, do you want me to tell you to take him? That is too much. I did n’t know you were cruel.”

“You make me cruel! You leave me to be cruel!”

“I leave you to be cruel?”

“Oh, don’t play upon my words, if you won’t ask me what I answered!”

“How can I ask that? I have no right to know.”

“But you shall know!” she cried. “I told him that I had no plans. I have given them all up because — because I’m too weak for them, and because I abhor him, and because — But it was n’t enough. He would not take what I said for answer, and he is coming again for an answer.”

“Coming again?”

“Yes. He is a man who believes that women may change, for reason or no reason; and” —

“You — you mean to take him when he comes back?” gasped the young man.

“Never! Not if he came a thousand times!”

“Then what is it you want me to advise you about?” he faltered.

“Nothing!” she answered, with freezing hauteur. She suddenly put up her arms across her eyes, with the beautiful, artless action of a shame-smitten child, and left her young figure in bewildering relief. “Oh, don’t you see that I love you?”

“Could n’t you understand, — couldn’t you see what I meant?” she asked again that night, as they lost themselves on the long stretch of the moonlit beach. With his arm close about that lovely shape they would have seemed but one person to the inattentive observer, as they paced along in the white splendor.

“I couldn’t risk anything. I had spoken, once for all. I always thought that for a man to offer himself twice was indelicate and unfair. I could never have done it.”

“That’s very sweet in you,” she said; and perhaps she would have praised in the same terms the precisely opposite sentiment. “It’s some comfort,” she added, with a deep-fetched sigh, “to think I had to speak.”

He laughed. “You didn’t find it so easy to make love!”

“Oh, NOTHING is easy that men have to do!” she answered, with passionate earnestness.

There are moments of extreme concession, of magnanimous admission, that come but once in a lifetime.

XII.

Dr. Mulbridge did not wait for the time he had fixed for his return. He may have judged that her tendency against him would strengthen by delay, or he may have yielded to his own impatience in coming the next day. He asked for Grace with his wonted abruptness, and waited for her coming in the little parlor of the hotel, walking up and down the floor, with his shaggy head bent forward, and his big hands clasped behind him.

As she hovered at the door before entering, she could watch him while he walked the whole room’s length away, and she felt a pang at sight of him. If she could have believed that he loved her, she could not have faced him, but must have turned and run away; and even as it was she grieved for him. Such a man would not have made up his mind to this step without a deep motive, if not a deep feeling. Her heart had been softened so that she could not think of frustrating his ambition, if it were no better than that, without pity. One man had made her feel very kindly toward all other men; she wished in the tender confusion of the moment that she need not reject her importunate suitor, whose importunity even she could not resent.

He caught sight of her as soon as he made his turn at the end of the room, and with a quick “Ah, Ah!” he hastened to meet her, with the smile in which there was certainly something attractive. “You see I’ve come back a day sooner than I promised. I haven’t the sort of turnout you’ve been used to, but I want you to drive with me.” “I can’t drive with you, Dr. Mulbridge,” she faltered.

“Well, walk, then. I should prefer to walk.”

“You must excuse me,” she answered, and remained standing before him.

“Sit down,” he bade her, and pushed up a chair towards her. His audacity, if it had been a finer courage, would have been splendid, and as it was she helplessly obeyed him, as if she were his patient, and must do so. “If I were superstitious I should say that you receive me ominously,” he said, fixing his gray eyes keenly upon her.

“I do!” she forced herself to reply. “I wish you had not come.”

“That’s explicit, at any rate. Have you thought it over?”

“No; I had no need to do that, I had fully resolved when I spoke yesterday. Dr. Mulbridge, why didn’t you spare me this? It’s unkind of you to insist, after what I said. You know that I must hate to repeat it. I do value you so highly in some ways that I blame you for obliging me to hurt you — if it does hurt — by telling you again that I don’t love you.”

He drew in a long breath, and set his teeth hard upon his lip. “You may depend upon its hurting,” he said, “but I was glad to risk the pain, whatever it was, for the chance of getting you to reconsider. I presume I’m not the conventional wooer. I’m too old for it, and I’m too blunt and plain a man. I’ve been thirty-five years making up my mind to ask you to marry me. You’re the first woman, and you shall be the last. You couldn’t suppose I was going to give you up for one no?”

“You had better.”

“Not for twenty! I can understand very well how you never thought of me in this way; but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t. Come, it’s a matter that we can reason about, like anything else.”

“No. I told you, it’s something we can’t reason about. Or yes, it is. I will reason with you. You say that you love me?”

“Yes.”

“If you did n’t love me, you would n’t ask me to marry you?”

“No.”

“Then how can you expect me to marry you without loving you?”

“I don’t. All that I ask is that you won’t refuse me. I know that you can love me.”

“No, no, never!”

“And I only want you to take time to try.”

“I don’t wish to try. If you persist, I must leave the room. We had better part. I was foolish to see you. But I thought — I was sorry — I hoped to make it less unkind to you.”

“In spite of yourself, you were relenting.”

“Not at all!”

“But if you pitied me, you did care for me a little?”

“You know that I had the highest respect for you as a physician. I tell you that you were my ideal in that way, and I will tell you that if” — she stopped, and he continued for her.

“If you had not resolved to give it up, you might have done what I asked.”

“I did not say that,” she answered indignantly.

“But why do you give it up?”

“Because I am not equal to it.”

“How do you know it? Who told you?”

“You have told me, — by every look and act of yours, — and I’m grateful to you for it.”

“And if I told you now by word that you were fit for it.”

“I shouldn’t believe you.”

“You would n’t believe my word?” She did not answer. “I see,” he said presently, “that you doubt me somehow as a man. What is it you think of me?”

“You wouldn’t like to know.”

“Oh, yes, I should.”

“Well, I will tell you. I think you are a tyrant, and that you want a slave, not a wife. You wish to be obeyed. You despise women. I don’t mean their minds, — they ‘re despicable enough, in most cases, as men’s are, — but their nature.”

“This is news to me,” he said, laughing. “I never knew that I despised women’s nature.”

“It’s true, whether you knew it or not.”

“Do I despise you?”

“You would, if you saw that I was afraid of you: Oh, why do you force me to say such things? Why don’t you spare me — spare yourself?”

“In this cause I couldn’t spare myself. I can’t bear to give you up! I’m what I am, whatever you say; but with you, I could be whatever you would. I could show you that you are wrong if you gave me the chance. I know that I could make you happy. Listen to me a moment.”

“It’s useless.”

“No! If you have taken the trouble to read me in this way, there must have been a time when you might have cared.”

“There never was any such time. I read you from the first.”

“I will go away,” he said, after a pause, in which she had risen, and began a retreat towards the door. “But I will not — I cannot — give you up. I will see you again.”

“No, sir. You shall not see me again. I will not submit to it. I will not be persecuted.” She was trembling, and she knew that he saw her tremor.

“Well,” he said, with a smile that recognized her trepidation, “I will not persecute you. I’ll renounce these pretensions. But I’ll ask you to see me once more, as a friend, — an acquaintance.”

“I will not see you again.”

“You are rather hard with me, I think,” he urged gently. “I don’t think I’m playing the tyrant with you now.”

“You are, — the baffled tyrant.”

“But if I promised not to offend again, why should you deny me your acquaintance?”

“Because I don’t believe you.” She was getting nearer the door, and as she put her hand behind her and touched the knob, the wild terror she had felt, lest he should reach it first and prevent her escape, left her. “You are treating me like a child that does n’t know its own mind, or has none to know. You are laughing at me — playing with me; you have shown me that you despise me.”

He actually laughed. “Well, you’ve shown that you are not afraid of me. Why are you not afraid?”

“Because,” she answered, and she dealt the blow now without pity, “I’m engaged, — engaged to Mr. Libby!” She whirled about and vanished through the door, ashamed, indignant, fearing that if she had not fled, he would somehow have found means to make his will prevail even yet.

He stood, stupefied, looking at the closed door, and he made a turn or two about the room before he summoned intelligence to quit it. When death itself comes, the sense of continuance is not at once broken in the survivors. In these moral deaths, which men survive in their own lives, there is no immediate consciousness of an end. For a while, habit and the automatic tendency of desire carry them on.

He drove back to Corbitant perched on the rickety seat of his rattling open buggy, and bowed forward as his wont was, his rounded shoulders bringing his chin well over the dashboard. As he passed down the long sandy street, toward the corner where his own house stood, the brooding group of loafers, waiting in Hackett’s store for the distribution of the mail, watched him through the open door, and from under the boughs of the weatherbeaten poplar before it. Hackett had been cutting a pound of cheese out of the thick yellow disk before him, for the Widow Holman, and he stared at the street after Mulbridge passed, as if his mental eye had halted him there for the public consideration, while he leaned over the counter, and held by the point the long knife with which he had cut the cheese.

“I see some the folks from over to Jocelyn’s, yist’d’y,” he said, in a spasm of sharp, crackling speech, “and they seemed to think ‘t Mis’ Mulbridge’d got to step round pretty spry ‘f she did n’t want another the same name in the house with her.”

A long silence followed, in which no one changed in any wise the posture in which he found himself when Hackett began to speak. Cap’n George Wray, tilted back against the wall in his chair, continued to stare at the store-keeper; Cap’n Jabez Wray, did not look up from whittling the chair between his legs; their cousin, Cap’n Wray Storrell, seated on a nailkeg near the stove, went on fretting the rust on the pipe with the end of a stiff, cast-off envelope; two other captains, more or less akin to them, continued their game of checkers; the Widow Seth Wray’s boy rested immovable, with his chin and hand on the counter, where he had been trying since the Widow Holman went out to catch Hackett’s eye and buy a corn-ball. Old Cap’n Billy Wray was the first to break the spell. He took his cigar from his mouth, and held it between his shaking thumb and forefinger, while he pursed his lips for speech. “Jabez,” he said, “did Cap’n Sam’l git that coalier?”

“No,” answered the whittler, cutting deeper into his chair, “she did n’t signal for him till she got into the channel, and then he’d got a couple o’ passengers for Leyden; and Cap’n Jim brought her up.”

“I don’t know,” said Cap’n Billy, with a stiff yet tremulous reference of himself to the storekeeper, “as spryness would help her, as long as he took the notion. I guess he’s master of his own ship. Who’s he going to marry? The grahs-widow got well enough?”

“No. As I understand,” crackled the store-keeper, “her husband’s turned up. Folks over there seem to think’t he’s got his eye on the other doctor.”

“Going to marry with her, hey? Well, if either of ’em gets sick they won’t have to go far for advice, and they won’t have any doctor’s bills to pay. Still, I shouldn’t ha’ picked out just that kind of a wife for him.”

“As I understand,” the storekeeper began; but here he caught sight of Widow Seth Wray’s boy, and asked, “What’s wanted, Bub? Corn-ball?” and turning to take that sweetmeat from the shelf behind him he added the rest in the mouth of the hollowly reverberating jar, “She’s got prop’ty.”

“Well, I never knew a Mulbridge yet ‘t objected to prop’ty, — especially, other folks’s.”

“Barlow he’s tellin’ round that she ‘s very fine appearin’.” He handed the corn-ball to Widow Seth Wray’s boy, who went noiselessly out on his bare feet.

Cap’n Billy drew several long breaths. When another man might have been supposed to have dismissed the subject he said, “Well, I never knew a Mulbridge that objected to good looks in women folks. They’ve all merried hahnsome wives, ever since the old gentleman set ’em the example with his second one. They got their own looks from the first. Well,” he added, “I hope she’s a tough one. She’s got either to bend or to break.”

“They say,” said Cap’n George Wray, like one rising from the dead to say it, so dumb and motionless had he been till now, “that Mis’ Mulbridge was too much for the old doctor.”

“I don’t know about that,” Cap’n Billy replied, “but I guess her son’s too much for her: she’s only Gardiner, and he’s Gardiner and Mulbridge both.”

No one changed countenance, but a sense of Cap’n Billy’s wit sparely yet satisfyingly glimmered from the eyes of Cap’n George and the storekeeper, and Cap’n Jabez closed his knife with a snap and looked up. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “she’s seen enough of him to know beforehand that there would be too much of him.”

“I never rightly understood,” said Hackett, “just what it was about him, there in the army — coming out a year beforehand, that way.”

“I guess you never will, — from him,” said Cap’n Jabez.

“Laziness, I guess, — too much work,” said old Cap’n Billy. “What he wants is a wife with money. There ain’t a better doctor anywhere. I’ve heard ‘t up to Boston, where he got his manifest, they thought everything of him. He’s smart enough, but he’s lazy, and he always was lazy, and harder’n a nut. He’s a curious mixtur’. ‘N’ I guess he’s been on the lookout for somethin’ of this kind ever sence he begun practising among the summer boarders. Guess he’s had an eye out.”

“They say he’s poplar among ‘em,” observed the storekeeper thoughtfully.

“He’s been pooty p’tic’lar, or they have,” said Cap’n Jabez.

“Well, most on ‘em’s merried women,” Hackett urged. “It’s astonishin’ how they do come off and leave their husbands, the whole summer long. They say they’re all out o’ health, though.”

“I wonder,” said old Cap’n Billy, “if them coaliers is goin’ to make a settled thing of haulin’ inside before they signal a pilot.”

“I know one thing,” answered Cap’n Jabez, “that if any coalier signals me in the channel, I’ll see her in hell first” He slipped his smooth, warm knife into his pocket, and walked out of the store amid a general silence.

“He’s consid’ble worked up, about them coaliers,” said old Cap’n Billy. “I don’t know as I’ve heard Jabez swear before — not since he was mate of the Gallatin. He used to swear then, consid’able.”

“Them coaliers is enough to make any one swear,” said Cap’n George. “If it’s any ways fair weather they won’t take you outside, and they cut you down from twenty-five dollars to two dollars if they take you inside.”

Old Cap’n Billy did not answer before he had breathed awhile, and then, having tried his cigar and found it out, he scraped a match on his coat-sleeve. He looked at the flame while it burned from blue to yellow. “Well, I guess if anybody’s been p’tic’lar, it’s been him. There ain’t any doubt but what he’s got a takin’ way with the women. They like him. He’s masterful, and he ain’t a fool, and women most gen’ly like a man that ain’t a fool. I guess if he ‘s got his eye on the girl’s prop’ty, she’ll have to come along. He’d begin by havin’ his own way about her answer; he’d hang on till she said Yes, if she did n’t say it first-off; and he’d keep on as he’d begun. I guess if he wants her it’s a match.” And Cap’n Billy threw his own into the square box of tobacco-stained sawdust under the stove.

Mrs. Maynard fully shared the opinion which rocked Dr. Mulbridge’s defeat with a belief in his invincible will. When it became necessary, in the course of events which made Grace and Libby resolve upon a short engagement, to tell her that they were going to be married, she expressed a frank astonishment. “Walter Libby!” she cried. “Well, I am surprised. When I was talking to you the other day about getting married, of course I supposed it was going to be Dr. Mulbridge. I did n’t want you to marry him, but I thought you were going to.”

“And why,” demanded Grace, with mounting sensation, “did you think that?”

“Oh, I thought you would have to.”

“Have to?”

“Oh, you have such a weak will. Or I always thought you had. But perhaps it’s only a weak will with other women. I don’t know! But Walter Libby! I knew he was perfectly gone upon you, and I told you so at the beginning; but I never dreamt of your caring for him. Why, it seems too ridiculous.”

“Indeed! I’m glad that it amuses you.”

“Oh no, you’re not, Grace. But you know what I mean. He seems so much younger.”

“Younger? He’s half a year older than I am.”

“I did n’t say he was younger. But you’re so very grave and he’s so very light. Well, I always told Walter Libby I should get him a wife, but you were the last person I should have thought of. What’s going to become of all your high purposes? You can’t do anything with them when you’re married! But you won’t have any occasion for them, that’s one comfort.”

“It’s not my idea of marriage that any high purpose will be lost in it.”

“Oh, it is n’t anybody’s, before they get married. I had such high purposes I couldn’t rest. I felt like hiring a hall, as George says, all the time. Walter Libby is n’t going to let you practise, is he? You mustn’t let him! I know he’d be willing to do anything you said, but a husband ought to be something more than a mere & Co.”

Grace laughed at the impudent cynicism of all this, for she was too happy to be vexed with any one just then. “I’m glad you’ve come to think so well of husbands’ rights at last, Louise,” she said.

Mrs. Maynard took the little puncture in good part. “Oh, yes, George and I have had a good deal of light let in on us. I don’t suppose my character was much changed outwardly in my sickness,” she suggested.

“It was not,” answered Grace warmly. “It was intensified, that was all.”

Mrs. Maynard laughed in her turn, with real enjoyment of the conception. “Well, I wasn’t going to let on, unless it came to the worst; I did n’t say much, but I kept up an awful thinking. It would have been easy enough to get a divorce, and George would n’t have opposed it; but I looked at it in this way: that the divorce wouldn’t have put us back where we were, anyway, as I had supposed it would. We had broken into each other’s lives, and we couldn’t get out again, with all the divorces under the sun. That’s the worst of getting married: you break into each other’s lives. You said something like it to me, that day when you came back from your sail with Walter Libby. And I just concluded that there could n’t be any trial that would n’t be a great deal easier to bear than getting rid of all your trials; and I just made up my mind that if any divorce was to be got, George Maynard might get it himself; a temporary separation was bad enough for me, and I told him so, about the first words I could speak. And we’re going to try the new departure on that platform. We don’t either of us suspect we can have things perfectly smooth, but we’ve agreed to rough it together when we can’t. We’ve found out that we can’t marry and then become single, any more than we could die and come to life again. And don’t you forget it, Grace! You don’t half know yourself, now. You know what you have been; but getting married lets loose all your possibilities. You don’t know what a temper you’ve got, nor how badly you can behave — how much like a naughty, good-for-nothing little girl; for a husband and wife are just two children together: that’s what makes the sweetness of it, and that’s what makes the dreadfulness. Oh, you’ll have need of all your good principles, I can tell you, and if you’ve a mind to do anything practical in the way of high purposes, I reckon there’ll be use for them all.”

Another lady who was astonished at Grace’s choice was more incurably disappointed and more grieved for the waste of those noble aims with which her worshipping fancy had endowed the girl even more richly than her own ambition. It was Grace’s wish to pass a year in Europe before her husband should settle down in charge of his mills; and their engagement, marriage, and departure followed so swiftly upon one another, that Miss Gleason would have had no opportunity to proffer remonstrance or advice. She could only account for Grace’s course on the theory that Dr. Mulbridge had failed to offer himself; but this explained her failure to marry him, without explaining her marriage with Mr. Libby. That remained for some time a mystery, for Miss Gleason firmly refused to believe that such a girl could be in love with a man so much her inferior: the conception disgraced not only her idol, but cast shame upon all other women, whose course in such matters is notoriously governed by motives of the highest sagacity and judgment.

Mrs. Breen hesitated between the duty of accompanying the young couple on their European travels, and that of going to the village where Libby’s mills were situated, — in southern New Hampshire. She was not strongly urged to a decision by her children, and she finally chose the latter course. The mill property had been a long time abandoned before Libby’s father bought it, and put it in a repair which he did not hasten to extend to the village. This had remained in a sort of picturesque neglect, which harmonized with the scenery of the wild little valley where it nestled; and Mrs. Breen found, upon the vigorous inquiry which she set on foot, that the operatives were deplorably destitute of culture and drainage. She at once devoted herself to the establishment of a circulating library and an enlightened system of cess-pools, to such an effect of ingratitude in her beneficiaries that she was quite ready to remand them to their former squalor when her son-in-law returned. But he found her work all so good that he mediated between her and the inhabitants, and adopted it with a hearty appreciation that went far to console her, and finally popularized it. In fact, he entered into the spirit of all practical reforms with an energy and intelligence that quite reconciled her to him. It was rather with Grace than with him that she had fault to find. She believed that the girl had returned from Europe materialized and corrupted; and she regarded the souvenirs of travel with which the house was filled as so many tokens of moral decay. It is undeniable that Grace seemed for a time, to have softened to, a certain degree of self-indulgence. During the brief opera season the first winter after her return, she spent a week in Boston; she often came to the city, and went to the theatres and the exhibitions of pictures. It was for some time Miss Gleason’s opinion that these escapades were the struggles of a magnanimous nature, unequally mated, to forget itself. When they met she indulged the habit of regarding Mrs. Libby with eyes of latent pity, till one day she heard something that gave her more relief than she could ever have hoped for. This was the fact, perfectly ascertained by some summer sojourners in the neighborhood; that Mrs. Libby was turning her professional training to account by treating the sick children among her husband’s operatives.

In the fall Miss Gleason saw her heroine at an exhibition of pictures. She rushed across the main hall of the Museum to greet her. “Congratulate you!” she deeply whispered, “on realizing your dream! Now you are happy, now you can be at peace!”

“Happy? At peace?”

“In the good work you have taken up. Oh, nothing, under Gawd, is lost!” she exclaimed, getting ready to run away, and speaking with her face turned over her shoulder towards Mrs. Libby.

“Dream? Good work? What do you mean?”

“Those factory children!”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Libby coldly, “that was my husband’s idea.”

“Your husband’s!” cried Miss Gleason, facing about again, and trying to let a whole history of suddenly relieved anxiety speak in her eyes. “How happy you make me! Do let me thank you!”

In the effort to shake hands with Mrs. Libby she knocked the catalogue out of her hold, and vanished in the crowd without knowing it. Some gentleman picked it up, and gave it to her again, with a bow of burlesque devotion.

Mrs. Libby flushed tenderly. “I might have known it would be you, Walter. Where did you spring from?”

“I’ve been here ever since you came.”

“What in the world doing?”

“Oh, enjoying myself.”

“Looking at the pictures?”

“Watching you walk round:’

“I thought you couldn’t be enjoying the pictures,” she said simply. “I’m not.”

She was not happy, indeed, in any of the aesthetic dissipations into which she had plunged, and it was doubtless from a shrewder knowledge of her nature than she had herself that her husband had proposed this active usefulness, which she once intended under such different conditions. At the end of the ends she was a Puritan; belated, misdated, if the reader will, and cast upon good works for the consolation which the Puritans formerly found in a creed. Riches and ease were sinful to her, and somehow to be atoned for; and she had no real love for anything that was not of an immediate humane and spiritual effect. Under the shelter of her husband’s name the benevolent use of her skill was no queerer than the charity to which many ladies devote themselves; though they are neither of them people to have felt the anguish which comes from the fear of what other people will think. They go their way in life, and are probably not disturbed by any misgivings concerning them. It is thought, on one hand, that he is a man of excellent head, and of a heart so generous that his deference to her in certain matters is part of the devoted flattery which would spoil any other woman, but that she consults his judgment in every action of her life, and trusts his sense with the same completeness that she trusts his love. On the other hand, when it is felt that she ought to have done for the sake of woman what she could not do for herself, she is regarded as sacrificed in her marriage. If, it is feared, she is not infatuated with her husband, she is in a disgraceful subjection, without the hope of better or higher things. If she had children, they might be a compensation and refuge for her; in that case, to be sure, she must be cut off from her present resource in caring for the children of others; though the conditions under which she now exercises her skill certainly amount to begging the whole question of woman’s fitness for the career she had chosen.

Both parties to this contention are, strange to say, ladies. If it has not been made clear from the events and characters of the foregoing history which opinion is right, I am unable to decide. It is well, perhaps, not to be too explicitly in the confidence of one’s heroine. After her marriage perhaps it is not even decorous.

A MODERN INSTANCE

First published in 1882 by J.R. Osgood and Co., this realistic novel concerns the deterioration of a once loving marriage under the influence of capitalistic greed. It is the first American novel by a canonical author to seriously consider divorce as a realistic outcome of marriage.

The novel solidified Howells’ reputation as a champion of realism in the United States. Part of that realism is the unapologetic portrait of the agnosticism of Bartley Hubbard (the husband in the doomed marriage at the novel’s centre). Howells modelled this aspect of Hubbard’s character on his friend Mark Twain. A version of the Bartley Hubbard character reappears as a journalist that interviews the protagonist of Howells’s later novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885).

Cover of the first edition

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

The author Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), a close friend of Howells, on whom he based some aspects of Bartley Hubbard

INTRODUCTION.

Mr. Howells has written a long series of poems, novels, sketches, stories, and essays, and has been perhaps the most continuous worker in the literary art among American writers. He was born at Martin’s Perry, Belmont County, Ohio, March 1, 1837, and the experiences of his early life have been delightfully told by himself in A Boy’s Town, My Year in a Log Cabin, and My Literary Passions. These books, which seem like pastimes in the midst of Howells’s serious work, are likely to live long, not only as playful autobiographic records, but as vivid pictures of life in the middle west in the middle of the nineteenth century. The boy lived in a home where frugality was the law of economy, but where high ideals of noble living were cheerfully maintained, and the very occupations of the household tended to stimulate literary activity. He read voraciously and with an instinctive scent for what was great and permanent in literature, and in his father’s printing-office learned to set type, and soon to make contributions to the local journals. He went to the state Capitol to report the proceedings of the legislature, and before he was twenty-two had become news editor of the State Journal of Columbus, Ohio.

But at the same time he had given clear intimations of his literary skill, and had contributed several poems to the Atlantic Monthly. His introduction to literature was in the stirring days just before the war for the Union, and he had a generous enthusiasm for the great principles which were then at stake. Yet the political leaven chiefly caused the bread he was baking to rise, and his native genius was distinctly for work in creative literature. His contribution to the political writing of the day, besides his newspaper work, was a small campaign life of Lincoln; and shortly after the incoming of the first Republican administration he received the appointment of consul at Venice.

At Venice he remained from 1861 to 1865, and these years may fairly be taken as standing for his university training. He carried with him to Europe some conversance with French, German, Spanish, and Italian, and an insatiable thirst for literature in these, languages. Naturally now he concentrated his attention on the Italian language and literature, but after all he was not made for a microscopic or encyclopaedic scholar, least of all for a pedant. What he was looking for in literature, though he scarcely so stated it to himself at the time, was human life, and it was this first-hand acquaintance he was acquiring with life in another circumstance that constituted his real training in literature. To pass from Ohio straight to Italy, with the merest alighting by the way in New York and Boston, was to be transported from one world to another; but he carried with him a mind which had already become naturalized in the large world of history and men through the literature in which he had steeped his mind. No one can read the record of the books he had revelled in, and observe the agility with which he was absorbed, successively, in books of greatly varying character, without perceiving how wide open were the windows of his mind; and as the light streamed in from all these heavens, so the inmate looked out with unaffected interest on the views spread before him.

Thus it was that Italy and Venice in particular afforded him at once the greatest delight and also the surest test of his growing power. The swift observation he had shown in literature became an equally rapid survey of all these novel forms before him. The old life embedded in this historic country became the book whose leaves he turned, but he looked with the greatest interest and most sympathetic scrutiny on that which passed before his eyes. It was novel, it was quaint, it was filled with curious, unexpected betrayals of human nature, but it was above all real, actual, a thing to be touched and as it were fondled by hands that were deft by nature and were quickly becoming more skilful by use. Mr. Howells began to write letters home which were printed in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and grew easily into a book which still remains in the minds of many of his readers the freshest of all his writings, Venetian Life. This was followed shortly by Italian Journeys, in which Mr. Howells gathered his observations made in going from place to place in Italy. A good many years later, after returning to the country of his affection, he wrote a third book of a similar character under the title of Tuscan Cities. But his use of Italy in literature was not confined to books of travels; he made and published studies of Italian literature, and he wove the life of the country into fiction in a charming manner. Illustrations may be found in A Foregone Conclusion, one of the happiest of his novels, whose scene is laid in Venice, in The Lady of the Aroostook, and in many slight sketches.

When Mr. Howells returned to America at the close of his term as consul, he found warm friends whom he had made through his writings. He served for a short time on the staff of The Nation, of New York, and then was invited to Boston to take the position of assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly under Mr. Fields. This was in 1866, and five years later, on the retirement of Mr. Fields, he became editor, and remained in the position until 1881, living during this period in Cambridge. He was not only editor of the magazine; he was really its chief contributor. Any one who takes the trouble to examine the pages of the Atlantic Index will see how far his work outnumbers in titles that of all other contributors, and the range of his work was great.

He wrote a large proportion of the reviews of books, which in those days constituted a marked feature of the magazine. These reviews were conscientiously written, and showed penetration and justice, but they had besides a felicitous and playful touch which rendered them delightful reading, even though one knew little or cared little for the book reviewed. Sometimes, though not often, he wrote poems, but readers soon learned to look with eagerness for a kind of writing which seemed almost more individual with him than any other form of writing. We mean the humorous sketches of every-day life, in which he took scenes of the commonest sort and drew from them an inherent life which most never suspected, yet confessed the moment he disclosed it. He would do such a common-place thing as take an excursion down the harbor, or even a ride to town in a horse-car, and come back to turn his experience into a piece of genuine literature. A number of these pieces were collected into a volume entitled Suburban Sketches.

It is interesting to observe how slowly yet surely Mr. Howells drew near the great field of novel-writing, and how deliberately he laid the foundations of his art. First, the graceful sketch which was hardly more than a leaf out of his note-book; then the blending of travel with character-drawing, as in A Chance Acquaintance and Their Wedding Journey, and later stories of people who moved about and thus found the incidents which the author had not to invent, as in The Lady of the Aroostook. Meanwhile, the eye which had taken note of surface effects was beginning to look deeper into the springs of being, and the hand which had described was beginning to model figures also which stood alone.

So there followed a number of little dramatic sketches, where the persons of the drama carried on their little play; and since they were not on a stage before the spectator, the author constructed a sort of literary stage for the reader; that is to say, he supplied by paragraphs what in a regular play would be stage directions. This is seen in such little comedies as A Counterfeit Presentment, which, indeed, was put on the stage. But instead of pushing forward on this line into the field of great drama, Mr. Howells contented himself with dexterous strokes with a fine pen, so to speak, and created a number of sparkling farces like The Parlor Car.

The real issue of all this practice in the dramatic art was to disengage the characters he created from too close dependence on the kind of circumstance, as of travel, which the author did not invent, and to give them substantial life in the working out of the drama of their spiritual evolution. Thus by the time he was released from editorial work, Mr. Howells was ready for the thorough-going novel, and he gave to readers such examples of art as A Modern Instance, The Rise of Silas Lapham, and that most important of all his novels, A Hazard of New Fortunes. By the time this last novel was written, he had become thoroughly interested, not merely in the men, women, and children about him, but in that mysterious, complex order named by us society, with its roots matted together as in a swamp, and seeming to many to be sucking up maleficent, miasmatic vapors from the soil in which it was rooted. Like many another lover of his kind, he has sought to trace the evils of individual life to their source in this composite order, and to guess at the mode by which society shall right itself and drink up healthy and life-giving virtues from the soil.

But it must not be inferred that his novels and other literary work have been by any means exclusively concerned with the reconstruction of the social order. He has indeed experimented with this theme, but he has always had a sane interest in life as he sees it, and with the increasing scope of his observation he has drawn his figures from a larger world, which includes indeed the world in which he first began to find his characters and their action.

Not long after retiring from the Atlantic he went to live in New York, and varied his American experience with frequent travels and continued residence in Europe. For a while he maintained a department in Harper’s Magazine, where he gave expression to his views on literature and the dramatic art, and for a short period returned to the editorial life in conducting The Cosmopolitan; later he entered also the field of lecturing, and thus further extended the range of his observation. For many years, Mr. Howells was the writer of “Editor’s Easy Chair” in Harper’s Magazine. In 1909 he was made president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Howells’s death occurred May 11, 1920.

This in fine is the most summary statement of his career in literature, — that he has been a keen and sympathetic observer of life, and has caught its character, not like a reporter going about with a kodak and snapping it aimlessly at any conspicuous object, but like an alert artist who goes back to his studio after a walk and sets down his comments on what he has seen in quick, accurate sketches, now and then resolving numberless undrawn sketches into some one comprehensive and beautiful picture.

I.

The village stood on a wide plain, and around it rose the mountains. They were green to their tops in summer, and in winter white through their serried pines and drifting mists, but at every season serious and beautiful, furrowed with hollow shadows, and taking the light on masses and stretches of iron-gray crag. The river swam through the plain in long curves, and slipped away at last through an unseen pass to the southward, tracing a score of miles in its course over a space that measured but three or four. The plain was very fertile, and its features, if few and of purely utilitarian beauty, had a rich luxuriance, and there was a tropical riot of vegetation when the sun of July beat on those northern fields. They waved with corn and oats to the feet of the mountains, and the potatoes covered a vast acreage with the lines of their intense, coarse green; the meadows were deep with English grass to the banks of the river, that, doubling and returning upon itself, still marked its way with a dense fringe of alders and white birches.

But winter was full half the year. The snow began at Thanksgiving, and fell snow upon snow till Fast Day, thawing between the storms, and packing harder and harder against the break-up in the spring, when it covered the ground in solid levels three feet high, and lay heaped in drifts, that defied the sun far into May. When it did not snow, the weather was keenly clear, and commonly very still. Then the landscape at noon had a stereoscopic glister under the high sun that burned in a heaven without a cloud, and at setting stained the sky and the white waste with freezing pink and violet. On such days the farmers and lumbermen came in to the village stores, and made a stiff and feeble stir about their doorways, and the school children gave the street a little life and color, as they went to and from the Academy in their red and blue woollens. Four times a day the mill, the shrill wheeze of whose saws had become part of the habitual silence, blew its whistle for the hands to begin and leave off work, in blasts that seemed to shatter themselves against the thin air. But otherwise an arctic quiet prevailed.

Behind the black boles of the elms that swept the vista of the street with the fine gray tracery of their boughs, stood the houses, deep-sunken in the accumulating drifts, through which each householder kept a path cut from his doorway to the road, white and clean as if hewn out of marble. Some cross streets straggled away east and west with the poorer dwellings; but this, that followed the northward and southward reach of the plain, was the main thoroughfare, and had its own impressiveness, with those square white houses which they build so large in Northern New England. They were all kept in scrupulous repair, though here and there the frost and thaw of many winters had heaved a fence out of plumb, and threatened the poise of the monumental urns of painted pine on the gate-posts. They had dark-green blinds, of a color harmonious with that of the funereal evergreens in their dooryards; and they themselves had taken the tone of the snowy landscape, as if by the operation of some such law as blanches the fur-bearing animals of the North. They seemed proper to its desolation, while some houses of more modern taste, painted to a warmer tone, looked, with their mansard roofs and jig-sawed piazzas and balconies, intrusive and alien.

At one end of the street stood the Academy, with its classic fa�ade and its belfry; midway was the hotel, with the stores, the printing-office, and the churches; and at the other extreme, one of the square white mansions stood advanced from the rank of the rest, at the top of a deep-plunging valley, defining itself against the mountain beyond so sharply that it seemed as if cut out of its dark, wooded side. It was from the gate before this house, distinct in the pink light which the sunset had left, that, on a Saturday evening in February, a cutter, gay with red-lined robes, dashed away, and came musically clashing down the street under the naked elms. For the women who sat with their work at the windows on either side of the way, hesitating whether to light their lamps, and drawing nearer and nearer to the dead-line of the outer cold for the latest glimmer of the day, the passage of this ill-timed vehicle was a vexation little short of grievous. Every movement on the street was precious to them, and, with all the keenness of their starved curiosity, these captives of the winter could not make out the people in the cutter. Afterward it was a mortification to them that they should not have thought at once of Bartley Hubbard and Marcia Gaylord. They had seen him go up toward Squire Gaylord’s house half an hour before, and they now blamed themselves for not reflecting that of course he was going to take Marcia over to the church sociable at Lower Equity. Their identity being established, other little proofs of it reproached the inquirers; but these perturbed spirits were at peace, and the lamps were out in the houses (where the smell of rats in the wainscot and of potatoes in the cellar strengthened with the growing night), when Bartley and Marcia drove back through the moonlit silence to her father’s door. Here, too, the windows were all dark, except for the light that sparely glimmered through the parlor blinds; and the young man slackened the pace of his horse, as if to still the bells, some distance away from the gate.

The girl took the hand he offered her when he dismounted at the gate, and, as she jumped from the cutter, “Won’t you come in?” she asked.

“I guess I can blanket my horse and stand him under the wood-shed,” answered the young man, going around to the animal’s head and leading him away.

When he returned to the door the girl opened it, as if she had been listening for his step; and she now stood holding it ajar for him to enter, and throwing the light upon the threshold from the lamp, which she lifted high in the other hand. The action brought her figure in relief, and revealed the outline of her bust and shoulders, while the lamp flooded with light the face she turned to him, and again averted for a moment, as if startled at some noise behind her. She thus showed a smooth, low forehead, lips and cheeks deeply red, a softly rounded chin touched with a faint dimple, and in turn a nose short and aquiline; her eyes were dark, and her dusky hair flowed crinkling above her fine black brows, and vanished down the curve of a lovely neck. There was a peculiar charm in the form of her upper lip: it was exquisitely arched, and at the corners it projected a little over the lower lip, so that when she smiled it gave a piquant sweetness to her mouth, with a certain demure innocence that qualified the Roman pride of her profile. For the rest, her beauty was of the kind that coming years would only ripen and enrich; at thirty she would be even handsomer than at twenty, and be all the more southern in her type for the paling of that northern, color in her cheeks. The young man who looked up at her from the doorstep had a yellow mustache, shadowing either side of his lip with a broad sweep, like a bird’s wing; his chin, deep-cut below his mouth, failed to come strenuously forward; his cheeks were filled to an oval contour, and his face had otherwise the regularity common to Americans; his eyes, a clouded gray, heavy-lidded and long-lashed, were his most striking feature, and he gave her beauty a deliberate look from them as he lightly stamped the snow from his feet, and pulled the seal-skin gloves from his long hands.

“Come in,” she whispered, coloring with pleasure under his gaze; and she made haste to shut the door after him, with a luxurious impatience of the cold. She led the way into the room from which she had come, and set down the lamp on the corner of the piano, while he slipped off his overcoat and swung it over the end of the sofa. They drew up chairs to the stove, in which the smouldering fire, revived by the opened draft, roared and snapped. It was midnight, as the sharp strokes of a wooden clock declared from the kitchen, and they were alone together, and all the other inmates of the house were asleep. The situation, scarcely conceivable to another civilization, is so common in ours, where youth commands its fate and trusts solely to itself, that it may be said to be characteristic of the New England civilization wherever it keeps its simplicity. It was not stolen or clandestine; it would have interested every one, but would have shocked no one in the village if the whole village had known it; all that a girl’s parents ordinarily exacted was that they should not be waked up.

“Ugh!” said the girl. “It seems as if I never should get warm.” She leaned forward, and stretched her hands toward the stove, and he presently rose from the rocking-chair in which he sat, somewhat lower than she, and lifted her sack to throw it over her shoulders. But he put it down and took up his overcoat.

“Allow my coat the pleasure,” he said, with the ease of a man who is not too far lost to be really flattering.

“Much obliged to the coat,” she replied, shrugging herself into it and pulling the collar close about her throat. “I wonder you didn’t put it on the sorrel. You could have tied the sleeves around her neck.”

“Shall I tie them around yours?” He leaned forward from the low rocking-chair into which he had sunk again, and made a feint at what he had proposed.

But she drew back with a gay “No!” and added: “Some day, father says, that sorrel will be the death of us. He says it’s a bad color for a horse. They’re always ugly, and when they get heated they’re crazy.”

“You never seem to be very much frightened when you’re riding after the sorrel,” said Bartley.

“Oh, I’ve great faith in your driving.”

“Thanks. But I don’t believe in this notion about a horse being vicious because he’s of a certain color. If your father didn’t believe in it, I should call it a superstition; but the Squire has no superstitions.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the girl. “I don’t think he likes to see the new moon over his left shoulder.”

“I beg his pardon, then,” returned Bartley. “I ought to have said religions: the Squire has no religions.” The young fellow had a rich, caressing voice, and a securely winning manner which comes from the habit of easily pleasing; in this charming tone, and with this delightful insinuation, he often said things that hurt; but with such a humorous glance from his softly shaded eyes that people felt in some sort flattered at being taken into the joke, even while they winced under it. The girl seemed to wince, as if, in spite of her familiarity with the fact, it wounded her to have her father’s scepticism recognized just then. She said nothing, and he added, “I remember we used to think that a redheaded boy was worse-tempered on account of his hair. But I don’t believe the sorrel-tops, as we called them, were any more fiery than the rest of us.”

Marcia did not answer at once, and then she said, with the vagueness of one not greatly interested by the subject, “You’ve got a sorrel-top in your office that’s fiery enough, if she’s anything like what she used to be when she went to school.”

“Hannah Morrison?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, she isn’t so bad. She’s pretty lively, but she’s very eager to learn the business, and I guess we shall get along. I think she wants to please me.”

“Does she! But she must be going on seventeen now.”

“I dare say,” answered the young man, carelessly, but with perfect intelligence. “She’s good-looking in her way, too.”

“Oh! Then you admire red hair?”

He perceived the anxiety that the girl’s pride could not keep out of her tone, but he answered indifferently, “I’m a little too near that color myself. I hear that red hair’s coming into fashion, but I guess it’s natural I should prefer black.”

She leaned back in her chair, and crushed the velvet collar of his coat under her neck in lifting her head to stare at the high-hung mezzotints and family photographs on the walls, while a flattered smile parted her lips, and there was a little thrill of joy in her voice. “I presume we must be a good deal behind the age in everything at Equity.”

“Well, you know my opinion of Equity,” returned the young man. “If I didn’t have you here to free my mind to once in a while, I don’t know what I should do.”

She was so proud to be in the secret of his discontent with the narrow world of Equity that she tempted him to disparage it further by pretending to identify herself with it. “I don’t see why you abuse Equity to me. I Ve never been anywhere else, except those two winters at school. You’d better look out: I might expose you,” she threatened, fondly.

“I’m not afraid. Those two winters make a great difference. You saw girls from other places, — from Augusta, and Bangor, and Bath.”

“Well, I couldn’t see how they were so very different from Equity girls.”

“I dare say they couldn’t, either, if they judged from you.”

She leaned forward again, and begged for more flattery from him with her happy eyes. “Why, what does make me so different from all the rest? I should really like to know.”

“Oh, you don’t expect me to tell you to your face!”

“Yes, to my face! I don’t believe it’s anything complimentary.”

“No, it’s nothing that you deserve any credit for.”

“Pshaw!” cried the girl. “I know you’re only talking to make fun of me. How do I know but you make fun of me to other girls, just as you do of them to me? Everybody says you’re sarcastic.”

“Have I ever been sarcastic with you?”

“You know I wouldn’t stand it.”

He made no reply, but she admired the ease with which he now turned from her, and took one book after another from the table at his elbow, saying some words of ridicule about each. It gave her a still deeper sense of his intellectual command when he finally discriminated, and began to read out a poem with studied elocutionary effects. He read in a low tone, but at last some responsive noises came from the room overhead; he closed the book, and threw himself into an attitude of deprecation, with his eyes cast up to the ceiling.

“Chicago,” he said, laying the book on the table and taking his knee between his hands, while he dazzled her by speaking from the abstraction of one who has carried on a train of thought quite different from that on which he seemed to be intent,— “Chicago is the place for me. I don’t think I can stand Equity much longer. You know that chum of mine I told you about; he’s written to me to come out there and go into the law with him at once.”

“Why don’t you go?” the girl forced herself to ask.

“Oh, I’m not ready yet. Should you write to me if I went to Chicago?”

“I don’t think you’d find my letters very interesting. You wouldn’t want any news from Equity.”

“Your letters wouldn’t be interesting if you gave me the Equity news; but they would if you left it out. Then you’d have to write about yourself.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would interest anybody.”

“Well, I feel almost like going out to Chicago to see.”

“But I haven’t promised to write yet,” said the girl, laughing for joy in his humor.

“I shall have to stay in Equity till you do, then. Better promise at once.”

“Wouldn’t that be too much like marrying a man to get rid of him?”

“I don’t think that’s always such a bad plan — for the man.” He waited for her to speak; but she had gone the length of her tether in this direction. “Byron says, —

 ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart, —

 ’Tis woman’s whole existence.’

Do you believe that?” He dwelt upon her with his tree look, in the happy embarrassment with which she let her head droop.

“I don’t know,” she murmured. “I don’t know anything about a man’s life.”

“It was the woman’s I was asking about.”

“I don’t think I’m competent to answer.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, then. I think Byron was mistaken. My experience is, that, when a man is in love, there’s nothing else of him. That’s the reason I’ve kept out of it altogether of late years. My advice is, don’t fall in love: it takes too much time.” They both laughed at this. “But about corresponding, now; you haven’t said whether you would write to me, or not. Will you?”

“Can’t you wait and see?” she asked, slanting a look at him, which she could not keep from being fond.

“No, no. Unless you wrote to me I couldn’t go to Chicago.”

“Perhaps I ought to promise, then, at once.”

“You mean that you wish me to go.”

“You said that you were going. You oughtn’t to let anything stand in the way of your doing the best you can for yourself.”

“But you would miss me a little, wouldn’t you? You would try to miss me, now and then?”

“Oh, you are here pretty often. I don’t think I should have much difficulty in missing you.”

“Thanks, thanks! I can go with a light heart, now. Good by.” He made a pretence of rising.

“What! Are you going at once?”

“Yes, this very night, — or to-morrow. Or no, I can’t go to-morrow. There’s something I was going to do to-morrow.”

“Perhaps go to church.”

“Oh, that of course. But it was in the afternoon. Stop! I have it! I want you to go sleigh-riding with me in the afternoon.”

“I don’t know about that,” Marcia began.

“But I do,” said the young man. “Hold on: I’ll put my request in writing.” He opened her portfolio, which lay on the table. “What elegant stationery! May I use some of this elegant stationery? The letter is to a lady, — to open a correspondence. May I?” She laughed her assent. “How ought I to begin? Dearest Miss Marcia, or just Dear Marcia: which is better?”

“You had better not put either—”

“But I must. You’re one or the other, you know. You’re dear — to your family, — and you’re Marcia: you can’t deny it. The only question is whether you’re the dearest of all the Miss Marcias. I may be mistaken, you know. We’ll err on the safe side: Dear Marcia:” He wrote it down. “That looks well, and it reads well. It looks very natural, and it reads like poetry, — blank verse; there’s no rhyme for it that I can remember. Dear Marcia: Will you go sleigh-riding with me to-morrow afternoon, at two o’clock sharp? Yours — yours? sincerely, or cordially, or affectionately, or what? The ‘dear Marcia’ seems to call for something out of the common. I think it had better be affectionately.” He suggested it with ironical gravity.

“And I think it had better be ‘truly,’” protested the girl.

“‘Truly’ it shall be, then. Your word is law, — statute in such case made and provided.” He wrote, “With unutterable devotion, yours truly, Bartley J. Hubbard,” and read it aloud.

She leaned forward, and lightly caught it away from him, and made a feint of tearing it. He seized her hands. “Mr. Hubbard!” she cried, in undertone. “Let me go, please.”

“On two conditions, — promise not to tear up my letter, and promise to answer it in writing.”

She hesitated long, letting him hold her wrists. At last she said, “Well,” and he released her wrists, on whose whiteness his clasp left red circles. She wrote a single word on the paper, and pushed it across the table to him. He rose with it, and went around to her side.

“This is very nice. But you haven’t spelled it correctly. Anybody would say this was No, to look at it; and you meant to write Yes. Take the pencil in your hand, Miss Gaylord, and I will steady your trembling nerves, so that you can form the characters. Stop! At the slightest resistance on your part, I will call out and alarm the house; or I will — .” He put the pencil into her fingers, and took her soft fist into his, and changed the word, while she submitted, helpless with her smothered laughter. “Now the address. Dear—”

“No, no!” she protested.

“Yes, yes! Dear Mr. Hubbard. There, that will do. Now the signature. Yours—”

“I won’t write that. I won’t, indeed!”

“Oh, yes, you will. You only think you won’t. Yours gratefully, Marcia Gaylord. That’s right. The Gaylord is not very legible, on account of a slight tremor in the writer’s arm, resulting from a constrained posture, perhaps. Thanks, Miss Gaylord. I will be here promptly at the hour indicated—”

The noises renewed themselves overhead, — some one seemed to be moving about. Hubbard laid his hand on that of the girl, still resting on the table, and grasped it in burlesque alarm; she could scarcely stifle her mirth. He released her hand, and, reaching his chair with a theatrical stride, sat there cowering till the noises ceased. Then he began to speak soberly, in a low voice. He spoke of himself; but in application of a lecture which they had lately heard, so that he seemed to be speaking of the lecture. It was on the formation of character, and he told of the processes by which he had formed his own character. They appeared very wonderful to her, and she marvelled at the ease with which he dismissed the frivolity of his recent mood, and was now all seriousness. When he came to speak of the influence of others upon him, she almost trembled with the intensity of her interest. “But of all the women I have known, Marcia,” he said, “I believe you have had the strongest influence upon me. I believe you could make me do anything; but you have always influenced me for good; your influence upon me has been ennobling and elevating.”

She wished to refuse his praise; but her heart throbbed for bliss and pride in it; her voice dissolved on her lips. They sat in silence; and he took in his the hand that she let hang over the side of her chair. The lamp began to burn low, and she found words to say, “I had better get another,” but she did not move.

“No, don’t,” he said; “I must be going, too. Look at the wick, there, Marcia; it scarcely reaches the oil. In a little while it will not reach it, and the flame will die out. That is the way the ambition to be good and great will die out of me, when my life no longer draws its inspiration from your influence.”

This figure took her imagination; it seemed to her very beautiful; and his praise humbled her more and more.

“Good night,” he said, in a low, sad voice. He gave her hand a last pressure, and rose to put on his coat. Her admiration of his words, her happiness in his flattery, filled her brain like wine. She moved dizzily as she took up the lamp to light him to the door. “I have tired you,” he said, tenderly, and he passed his hand around her to sustain the elbow of the arm with which she held the lamp; she wished to resist, but she could not try.

At the door he bent down his head and kissed her. “Good night, dear — friend.”

“Good night,” she panted; and after the door had closed upon him, she stooped and kissed the knob on which his hand had rested.

As she turned, she started to see her father coming down the stairs with a candle in his hand. He had his black cravat tied around his throat, but no collar; otherwise, he had on the rusty black clothes in which he ordinarily went about his affairs, — the cassimere pantaloons, the satin vest, and the dress-coat which old-fashioned country lawyers still wore ten years ago, in preference to a frock or sack. He stopped on one of the lower steps, and looked sharply down into her uplifted face, and, as they stood confronted, their consanguinity came out in vivid resemblances and contrasts; his high, hawk-like profile was translated into the fine aquiline outline of hers; the harsh rings of black hair, now grizzled with age, which clustered tightly over his head, except where they had retreated from his deeply seamed and wrinkled forehead, were the crinkled flow above her smooth white brow; and the line of the bristly tufts that overhung his eyes was the same as that of the low arches above hers. Her complexion was from her mother; his skin was dusky yellow; but they had the same mouth, and hers showed how sweet his mouth must have been in his youth. His eyes, deep sunk in their cavernous sockets, had rekindled their dark fires in hers; his whole visage, softened to her sex and girlish years, looked up at him in his daughter’s face.

“Why, father! Did we wake you?”

“No. I hadn’t been asleep at all. I was coming down to read. But it’s time you were in bed, Marcia.”

“Yes, I’m going, now. There’s a good fire in the parlor stove.”

The old man descended the remaining steps, but turned at the parlor door, and looked again at his daughter with a glance that arrested her, with her foot on the lowest stair.

“Marcia,” he asked, grimly, “are you engaged to Bartley Hubbard?”

The blood flashed up from her heart into her face like fire, and then, as suddenly, fell back again, and left her white. She let her head droop and turn, till her eyes were wholly averted from him, and she did not speak. He closed the door behind him, and she went upstairs to her own room; in her shame, she seemed to herself to crawl thither, with her father’s glance burning upon her.

II.

Bartley Hubbard drove his sorrel colt back to the hotel stable through the moonlight, and woke up the hostler, asleep behind the counter, on a bunk covered with buffalo-robes. The half-grown boy did not wake easily; he conceived of the affair as a joke, and bade Bartley quit his fooling, till the young man took him by his collar, and stood him on his feet. Then he fumbled about the button of the lamp, turned low and smelling rankly, and lit his lantern, which contributed a rival stench to the choking air. He kicked together the embers that smouldered on the hearth of the Franklin stove, sitting down before it for his greater convenience, and, having put a fresh pine-root on the fire, fell into a doze, with his lantern in his hand. “Look here, young man!” said Bartley, shaking him by the shoulder, “you had better go out and put that colt up, and leave this sleeping before the fire to me.”

“Guess the colt can wait awhile,” grumbled the boy; but he went out, all the same, and Bartley, looking through the window, saw his lantern wavering, a yellow blot in the white moonshine, toward the stable. He sat down in the hostler’s chair, and, in his turn, kicked the pine-root with the heel of his shoe, and looked about the room. He had had, as he would have said, a grand good time; but it had left him hungry, and the table in the middle of the room, with the chairs huddled around it, was suggestive, though he knew that it had been barrenly put there for the convenience of the landlord’s friends, who came every night to play whist with him, and that nothing to eat or drink had ever been set out on it to interrupt the austere interest of the game. It was long since there had been anything on the shelves behind the counter more cheerful than corn-balls and fancy crackers for the children of the summer boarders; these dainties being out of season, the jars now stood there empty. The young man waited in a hungry reverie, in which it appeared to him that he was undergoing unmerited suffering, till the stable-boy came back, now wide awake, and disposed to let the house share his vigils, as he stamped over the floor in his heavy boots.

“Andy,” said Bartley, in a pathetic tone of injury, “can’t you scare me up something to eat?”

“There aint anything in the buttery but meat-pie,” said the boy.

He meant mince-pie, as Hubbard knew, and not a pasty of meat; and the hungry man hesitated. “Well, fetch it,” he said, finally. “I guess we can warm it up a little by the coals here.”

He had not been so long out of college but the idea of this irregular supper, when he had once formed it, began to have its fascination. He took up the broad fire-shovel, and, by the time the boy had shuffled to and from the pantry beyond the dining-room, Bartley had cleaned the shovel with a piece of newspaper and was already heating it by the embers which he had raked out from under the pine-root. The boy silently transferred the half-pie he had brought from its plate to the shovel. He pulled up a chair and sat down to watch it. The pie began to steam and send out a savory odor; he himself, in thawing, emitted a stronger and stronger smell of stable. He was not without his disdain for the palate which must have its mince-pie warm at midnight, — nor without his respect for it, either. This fastidious taste must be part of the splendor which showed itself in Mr. Hubbard’s city-cut clothes, and in his neck-scarfs and the perfection of his finger-nails and mustache. The boy had felt the original impression of these facts deepened rather than effaced by custom; they were for every day, and not, as he had at first conjectured, for some great occasion only.

“You don’t suppose, Andy, there is such a thing as cold tea or coffee anywhere, that we could warm up?” asked Bartley, gazing thoughtfully at the pie.

The boy shook his head. “Get you some milk,” he said; and, after he had let the dispiriting suggestion sink into the other’s mind, he added, “or some water.”

“Oh, bring on the milk,” groaned Bartley, but with the relief that a choice of evils affords. The boy stumped away for it, and when he came back the young man had got his pie on the plate again, and had drawn his chair up to the table. “Thanks,” he said, with his mouth full, as the boy set down the goblet of milk. Andy pulled his chair round so as to get an unrestricted view of a man who ate his pie with his fork as easily as another would with a knife. “That sister of yours is a smart girl,” the young man added, making deliberate progress with the pie.

The boy made an inarticulate sound of satisfaction, and resolved in his heart to tell her what Mr. Hubbard had said.

“She’s as smart as time,” continued Bartley.

This was something concrete. The boy knew he should remember that comparison. “Bring you anything else?” he asked, admiring the young man’s skill in getting the last flakes of the crust on his fork. The pie had now vanished.

“Why, there isn’t anything else, is there?” Bartley demanded, with the plaintive dismay of a man who fears he has flung away his hunger upon one dish when he might have had something better.

“Cheese,” replied the boy.

“Oh!” said Bartley. He reflected awhile. “I suppose I could toast a piece on this fork. But there isn’t any more milk.”

The boy took away the plate and goblet, and brought them again replenished.

Bartley contrived to get the cheese on his fork and rest it against one of the andirons so that it would not fall into the ashes. When it was done, he ate it as he had eaten the pie, without offering to share his feast with the boy. “There’” he said. “Yes, Andy, if she keeps on as she’s been doing, she won’t have any trouble. She’s a bright girl.” He stretched his legs before the fire again, and presently yawned.

“Want your lamp, Mr. Hubbard?” asked the boy.

“Well, yes, Andy,” the young man consented. “I suppose I may as well go to bed.”

But when the boy brought his lamp, he still remained with outstretched legs in front of the fire. Speaking of Hannah Morrison made him think of Marcia again, and of the way in which she had spoken of the girl. He lolled his head on one side in such comfort as a young man finds in the conviction that a pretty girl is not only fond of him, but is instantly jealous of any other girl whose name is mentioned. He smiled at the flame in his reverie, and the boy examined, with clandestine minuteness, the set and pattern of his trousers, with glances of reference and comparison to his own.

There were many things about his relations with Marcia Gaylord which were calculated to give Bartley satisfaction. She was, without question, the prettiest girl in the place, and she had more style than any other girl began to have. He liked to go into a room with Marcia Gaylord; it was some pleasure. Marcia was a lady; she had a good education; she had been away two years at school; and, when she came back at the end of the second winter, he knew that she had fallen in love with him at sight. He believed that he could time it to a second. He remembered how he had looked up at her as he passed, and she had reddened, and tried to turn away from the window as if she had not seen him. Bartley was still free as air; but if he could once make up his mind to settle down in a hole like Equity, he could have her by turning his hand. Of course she had her drawbacks, like everybody. She was proud, and she would be jealous; but, with all her pride and her distance, she had let him see that she liked him; and with not a word on his part that any one could hold him to.

“Hollo!” he cried, with a suddenness that startled the boy, who had finished his meditation upon Bartley’s trousers, and was now deeply dwelling on his boots. “Do you like ‘em? See what sort of a shine you can give ’em for Sunday-go-to-meeting to-morrow morning.” He put out his hand and laid hold of the boy’s head, passing his fingers through the thick red hair. “Sorrel-top!” he said, with a grin of agreeable reminiscence. “They emptied all the freckles they had left into your face, — didn’t they, Andy?”

This free, joking way of Bartley’s was one of the things that made him popular; he passed the time of day, and was give and take right along, as his admirers expressed it, from the first, in a community where his smartness had that honor which gives us more smart men to the square mile than any other country in the world. The fact of his smartness had been affirmed and established in the strongest manner by the authorities of the college at which he was graduated, in answer to the reference he made to them when negotiating with the committee in charge for the place he now held as editor of the Equity Free Press. The faculty spoke of the solidity and variety of his acquirements, and the distinction with which he had acquitted himself in every branch of study’ he had undertaken. They added that he deserved the greater credit because his early disadvantages as an orphan, dependent on his own exertions for a livelihood, had been so great that he had entered college with difficulty, and with heavy conditions. This turned the scale with a committee who had all been poor boys themselves, and justly feared the encroachments of hereditary aristocracy. They perhaps had their misgivings when the young man, in his well-blacked boots, his gray trousers neatly fitting over them, and his diagonal coat buttoned high with one button, stood before them with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, and looked down over his mustache at the floor with sentiments concerning their wisdom which they could not explore; they must have resented the fashionable keeping of everything about him, for Bartley wore his one suit as if it were but one of many; but when they understood that he had come by everything through his own unaided smartness, they could no longer hesitate: One, indeed, still felt it a duty to call attention to the fact that the college authorities said nothing of the young man’s moral characteristics in a letter dwelling so largely upon his intellectual qualifications. The others referred this point by a silent look to Squire Gaylord.

“I don’t know;” said the Squire, “as I ever heard that a great deal of morality was required by a newspaper editor.” The rest laughed at the joke, and the Squire continued: “But I guess if he worked his own way through college, as they say, that he haint had time to be up to a great deal of mischief. You know it’s for idle hands that the Devil provides, doctor.”

“That’s true, as far as it goes,” said the doctor.

“But it isn’t the whole truth. The Devil provides for some busy hands, too.”

“There’s a good deal of sense in that,” the Squire admitted. “The worst scamps I ever knew were active fellows. Still, industry is in a man’s favor. If the faculty knew anything against this young man they would have given us a hint of it. I guess we had better take him; we sha’n’t do better. Is it a vote?”

The good opinion of Bartley’s smartness which Squire Gaylord had formed was confirmed some months later by the development of the fact that the young man did not regard his management of the Equity Free Press as a final vocation. The story went that he lounged into the lawyer’s office one Saturday afternoon in October, and asked him to let him take his Blackstone into the woods with him. He came back with it a few hours later.

“Well, sir,” said the attorney, sardonically, “how much Blackstone have you read?”

“About forty pages,” answered the young man, dropping into one of the empty chairs, and hanging his leg over the arm.

The lawyer smiled, and, opening the book, asked half a dozen questions at random. Bartley answered without changing his indifferent countenance, or the careless posture he had fallen into. A sharper and longer examination followed; the very language seemed to have been unbrokenly transferred to his mind, and he often gave the author’s words as well as his ideas.

“Ever looked at this before?” asked the lawyer, with a keen glance at him over his spectacles.

“No,” said Bartley, gaping as if bored, and further relieving his weariness by stretching. He was without deference for any presence; and the old lawyer did not dislike him for this: he had no deference himself.

“You think of studying law?” he asked, after a pause.

“That’s what I came to ask you about,” said Bartley, swinging his leg.

The elder recurred to his book, and put some more questions. Then he said, “Do you want to study with me?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

He shut the book, and pushed it on the table toward the young man. “Go ahead. You’ll get along — if you don’t get along too easily.”

It was in the spring after this that Marcia returned home from her last term at boarding-school, and first saw him.

III.

Bartley woke on Sunday morning with the regrets that a supper of mince-pie and toasted cheese is apt to bring. He woke from a bad dream, and found that he had a dull headache. A cup of coffee relieved his pain, but it left him listless, and with a longing for sympathy which he experienced in any mental or physical discomfort. The frankness with which he then appealed for compassion was one of the things that made people like him; he flung himself upon the pity of the first he met. It might be some one to whom he had said a cutting or mortifying thing at their last encounter, but Bartley did not mind that; what he desired was commiseration, and he confidingly ignored the past in a trust that had rarely been abused. If his sarcasm proved that he was quick and smart, his recourse to those who had suffered from it proved that he did not mean anything by what he said; it showed that he was a man of warm feelings, and that his heart was in the right place.

Bartley deplored his disagreeable sensations to the other boarders at breakfast, and affectionately excused himself to them for not going to church, when they turned into the office, and gathered there before the Franklin stove, sensible of the day in freshly shaven chins and newly blacked boots. The habit of church-going was so strong and universal in Equity that even strangers stopping at the hotel found themselves the object of a sort of hospitable competition with the members of the different denominations, who took it for granted that they would wish to go somewhere, and only suffered them a choice between sects. There was no intolerance in their offer of pews, but merely a profound expectation, and one might continue to choose his place of worship Sabbath after Sabbath without offence. This was Bartley’s custom, and it had worked to his favor rather than his disadvantage: for in the rather chaotic liberality into which religious sentiment had fallen in Equity, it was tacitly conceded that the editor of a paper devoted to the interests of the whole town ought not to be of fixed theological opinions.

Religion there had largely ceased to be a fact of spiritual experience, and the visible church flourished on condition of providing for the social needs of the community. It was practically held that the salvation of one’s soul must not be made too depressing, or the young people would have nothing to do with it. Professors of the sternest creeds temporized with sinners, and did what might be done to win them to heaven by helping them to have a good time here. The church embraced and included the world. It no longer frowned even upon social dancing, — a transgression once so heinous in its eyes; it opened its doors to popular lectures, and encouraged secular music in its basements, where, during the winter, oyster suppers were given in aid of good objects. The Sunday school was made particularly attractive, both to the children and the young men and girls who taught them. Not only at Thanksgiving, but at Christmas, and latterly even at Easter, there were special observances, which the enterprising spirits having the welfare of the church at heart tried to make significant and agreeable to all, and promotive of good feeling. Christenings and marriages in the church were encouraged, and elaborately celebrated; death alone, though treated with cut-flowers in emblematic devices, refused to lend itself to the cheerful intentions of those who were struggling to render the idea of another and a better world less repulsive. In contrast with the relaxation and uncertainty of their doctrinal aim, the rude and bold infidelity of old Squire Gaylord had the greater affinity with the mood of the Puritanism they had outgrown. But Bartley Hubbard liked the religious situation well enough. He took a leading part in the entertainments, and did something to impart to them a literary cast, as in the series of readings from the poets which he gave, the first winter, for the benefit of each church in turn. At these lectures he commended himself to the sober elders, who were troubled by the levity of his behavior with young people on other occasions, by asking one of the ministers to open the exercises with prayer, and another, at the close, to invoke the Divine blessing; there was no especial relevancy in this, but it pleased. He kept himself, from the beginning, pretty constantly in the popular eye. He was a speaker at all public meetings, where his declamation was admired; and at private parties, where the congealed particles of village society were united in a frozen mass, he was the first to break the ice, and set the angular fragments grating and grinding upon one another.

He now went to his room, and opened his desk with some vague purpose of bringing up the arrears of his correspondence. Formerly, before his interest in the newspaper had lapsed at all, he used to give his Sunday leisure to making selections and writing paragraphs for it; but he now let the pile of exchanges lie unopened on his desk, and began to rummage through the letters scattered about in it. They were mostly from young ladies with whom he had corresponded, and some of them enclosed the photographs of the writers, doing their best to look as they hoped he might think they looked. They were not love-letters, but were of that sort which the laxness of our social life invites young people, who have met pleasantly, to exchange as long as they like, without explicit intentions on either side; they commit the writers to nothing; they are commonly without result, except in wasting time which is hardly worth saving. Every one who has lived the American life must have produced them in great numbers. While youth lasts, they afford an excitement whose charm is hard to realize afterward.

Bartley’s correspondents were young ladies of his college town, where he had first begun to see something of social life in days which he now recognized as those of his green youth. They were not so very far removed in point of time; but the experience of a larger world in the vacation he had spent with a Boston student had relegated them to a moral remoteness that could not readily be measured. His friend was the son of a family who had diverted him from the natural destiny of a Boston man at Harvard, and sent him elsewhere for sectarian reasons. They were rich people, devout in their way, and benevolent, after a fashion of their own; and their son always brought home with him, for the holidays and other short vacations, some fellow-student accounted worthy of their hospitality through his religious intentions or his intellectual promise. These guests were indicated to the young man by one of the faculty, and he accepted their companionship for the time with what perfunctory civility he could muster. He and Bartley had amused themselves very well during that vacation. The Hallecks were not fashionable people, but they lived wealthily: they had a coachman and an inside man (whom Bartley at first treated with a consideration, which it afterward mortified him to think of); their house was richly furnished with cushioned seats, dense carpets, and heavy curtains; and they were visited by other people of their denomination, and of a like abundance. Some of these were infected with the prevailing culture of the city, and the young ladies especially dressed in a style and let fall ideas that filled the soul of the country student with wonder and worship. He heard a great deal of talk that he did not understand; but he eagerly treasured every impression, and pieced it out, by question or furtive observation, into an image often shrewdly true, and often grotesquely untrue, to the conditions into which he had been dropped. He civilized himself as rapidly as his light permitted. There was a great deal of church-going; but he and young Halleck went also to lectures and concerts; they even went to the opera, and Bartley, with the privity of his friend, went to the theatre. Halleck said that he did not think there was much harm in a play; but that his people stayed away for the sake of the example, — a reason that certainly need not hold with Bartley.

At the end of the vacation he returned to college, leaving his measure with Halleck’s tailor, and his heart with all the splendors and elegances of the town. He found the ceilings very low and the fashions much belated in the village; but he reconciled himself as well as he could. The real stress came when he left college and the question of doing something for himself pressed upon him. He intended to study law, but he must meantime earn his living. It had been his fortune to be left, when very young, not only an orphan, but an extremely pretty child, with an exceptional aptness for study; and he had been better cared for than if his father and mother had lived. He had been not only well housed and fed, and very well dressed, but pitied as an orphan, and petted for his beauty and talent, while he was always taught to think of himself as a poor boy, who was winning his own way through the world. But when his benefactor proposed to educate him for the ministry, with a view to his final use in missionary work, he revolted. He apprenticed himself to the printer of his village, and rapidly picked up a knowledge of the business, so that at nineteen he had laid by some money, and was able to think of going to college. There was a fund in aid of indigent students in the institution to which he turned, and the faculty favored him. He finished his course with great credit to himself and the college, and he was naturally inclined to look upon what had been done for him earlier as an advantage taken of his youthful inexperience. He rebelled against the memory of that tutelage, in spite of which he had accomplished such great things. If he had not squandered his time or fallen into vicious courses in circumstances of so much discouragement, if he had come out of it all self-reliant and independent, he knew whom he had to thank for it. The worst of the matter was that there was some truth in all this.

The ardor of his satisfaction cooled in the two years following his graduation, when in intervals of teaching country schools he was actually reduced to work at his trade on a village newspaper. But it was as a practical printer, through the freemasonry of the craft, that Bartley heard of the wish of the Equity committee to place the Free Press in new hands, and he had to be grateful to his trade for a primary consideration from them which his collegiate honors would not have won him. There had not yet begun to be that talk of journalism as a profession which has since prevailed with our collegians, and if Bartley had thought, as other collegians think, of devoting himself to newspaper life, he would have turned his face toward the city where its prizes are won, — the ten and fifteen dollar reporterships for which a font years’ course of the classics is not too costly a preparation. But, to tell the truth, he had never regarded his newspaper as anything but a make-shift, by which he was to be carried over a difficult and anxious period of his life, and enabled to attempt something worthier his powers. He had no illusions concerning it; if he had ever thought of journalism as a grand and ennobling profession, these ideas had perished, in his experience in a village printing-office. He came to his work in Equity with practical and immediate purposes which pleased the committee better. The paper had been established some time before, in one of those flurries of ambition which from time to time seized Equity, when its citizens reflected that it was the central town in the county, and yet not the shire-town. The question of the removal of the county-seat had periodically arisen before; but it had never been so hotly agitated as now. The paper had been a happy thought of a local politician, whose conception of its management was that it might be easily edited by a committee, if a printer could be found to publish it; but a few months’ experience had made the Free Press a terrible burden to its founders; it could not be sustained, and it could not be let die without final disaster to the interests of the town; and the committee began to cast about for a publisher who could also be editor. Bartley, to whom it fell, could not be said to have thrown his heart and soul into the work, but he threw all his energy, and he made it more than its friends could have hoped. He espoused the cause of Equity in the pending question with the zeal of a condottiere, and did service no less faithful because of the cynical quality latent in it. When the legislative decision against Equity put an end to its ambitious hopes for the time being, he continued in control of the paper, with a fair prospect of getting the property into his own hands at last, and with some growing question in his mind whether, after all, it might not be as easy for him to go into politics from the newspaper as from the law. He managed the office very economically, and by having the work done by girl apprentices, with the help of one boy, he made it self-supporting. He modelled the newspaper upon the modern conception, through which the country press must cease to have any influence in public affairs, and each paper become little more than an open letter of neighborhood gossip. But while he filled his sheet with minute chronicles of the goings and comings of unimportant persons, and with all attainable particulars of the ordinary life of the different localities, he continued to make spicy hits at the enemies of Equity in the late struggle, and kept the public spirit of the town alive. He had lately undertaken to make known its advantages as a summer resort, and had published a series of encomiums upon the beauty of its scenery and the healthfulness of its air and water, which it was believed would put it in a position of rivalry with some of the famous White Mountain places. He invited the enterprise of outside capital, and advocated a narrow-gauge road up the valley of the river through the Notch, so as to develop the picturesque advantages of that region. In all this, the color of mockery let the wise perceive that Bartley saw the joke and enjoyed it, and it deepened the popular impression of his smartness.

This vein of cynicism was not characteristic, as it would have been in an older man; it might have been part of that spiritual and intellectual unruliness of youth, which people laugh at and forgive, and which one generally regards in after life as something almost alien to one’s self. He wrote long, bragging articles about Equity, in a tone bordering on burlesque, and he had a department in his paper where he printed humorous squibs of his own and of other people; these were sometimes copied, and in the daily papers of the State he had been mentioned as “the funny man of the Equity Free Press.” He also sent letters to one of the Boston journals, which he reproduced in his own sheet, and which gave him an importance that the best endeavor as a country editor would never have won him with the villagers. He would naturally, as the local printer, have ranked a little above the foreman of the saw-mill in the social scale, and decidedly below the master of the Academy; but his personal qualities elevated him over the head even of the latter. But above all, the fact that he was studying law was a guaranty of his superiority that nothing else could have given; that science is the fountain of the highest distinction in a country town. Bartley’s whole course implied that he was above editing the Free Press, but that he did it because it served his turn. That was admirable.

He sat a long time with these girls’ letters before him, and lost himself in a pensive reverie over their photographs, and over the good times he used to have with them. He mused in that formless way in which a young man thinks about young girls; his soul is suffused with a sense of their sweetness and brightness, and unless he is distinctly in love there is no intention in his thoughts of them; even then there is often no intention. Bartley might very well have a good conscience about them; he had broken no hearts among them, and had only met them half-way in flirtation. What he really regretted, as he held their letters in his hand, was that he had never got up a correspondence with two or three of the girls whom he had met in Boston. Though he had been cowed by their magnificence in the beginning, he had never had any reverence for them; he believed that they would have liked very well to continue his acquaintance; but he had not known how to open a correspondence, and the point was one on which he was ashamed to consult Halleck. These college belles, compared with them, were amusingly inferior; by a natural turn of thought, he realized that they were inferior to Marcia Gaylord, too, in looks and style, no less than in an impassioned preference for himself. A distaste for their somewhat veteran ways in flirtation grew upon him as he thought of her; he philosophized against them to her advantage; he could not blame her if she did not know how to hide her feelings for him. Yet he knew that Marcia would rather have died than let him suppose that she cared for him, if she had known that she was doing it. The fun of it was, that she should not know; this charmed him, it touched him, even; he did not think of it exultingly, as the night before, but sweetly, fondly, and with a final curiosity to see her again, and enjoy the fact in her presence. The acrid little jets of smoke which escaped from the joints of his stove from time to time annoyed him; he shut his portfolio at last, and went out to walk.

IV.

The forenoon sunshine, beating strong upon the thin snow along the edges of the porch floor, tattered them with a little thaw here and there; but it had no effect upon the hard-packed levels of the street, up the middle of which Bartley walked in a silence intensified by the muffled voices of exhortation that came to him out of the churches. It was in the very heart of sermon-time, and he had the whole street to himself on his way up to Squire Gaylord’s house. As he drew near, he saw smoke ascending from the chimney of the lawyer’s office, — a little white building that stood apart from the dwelling on the left of the gate, and he knew that the old man was within, reading there, with his hat on and his long legs flung out toward the stove, unshaven and unkempt, in a grim protest against the prevalent Christian superstition. He might be reading Hume or Gibbon, or he might be reading the Bible, — a book in which he was deeply versed, and from which he was furnished with texts for the demolition of its friends, his adversaries. He professed himself a great admirer of its literature, and, in the heat of controversy, he often found himself a defender of its doctrines when he had occasion to expose the fallacy of latitudinarian interpretations. For liberal Christianity he had nothing but contempt, and refuted it with a scorn which spared none of the worldly tendencies of the church in Equity. The idea that souls were to be saved by church sociables filled him with inappeasable rancor; and he maintained the superiority of the old Puritanic discipline against them with a fervor which nothing but its re-establishment could have abated. It was said that Squire Gaylord’s influence had largely helped to keep in place the last of the rigidly orthodox ministers, under whom his liberalizing congregation chafed for years of discontent; but this was probably an exaggeration of the native humor. Mrs. Gaylord had belonged to this church, and had never formally withdrawn from it, and the lawyer always contributed to pay the minister’s salary. He also managed a little property for him so well as to make him independent when he was at last asked to resign by his deacons.

In another mood, Bartley might have stepped aside to look in on the Squire, before asking at the house door for Marcia. They relished each other’s company, as people of contrary opinions and of no opinions are apt to do. Bartley loved to hear the Squire get going, as he said, and the old man felt a fascination in the youngster. Bartley was smart; he took a point as quick as lightning; and the Squire did not mind his making friends with the Mammon of Righteousness, as he called the visible church in Equity. It amused him to see Bartley lending the church the zealous support of the press, with an impartial patronage of the different creeds. There had been times in his own career when the silence of his opinions would have greatly advanced him, but he had not chosen to pay this price for success; he liked his freedom, or he liked the bitter tang of his own tongue too well, and he had remained a leading lawyer in Equity, when he might have ended a judge, or even a Congressman. Of late years, however, since people whom he could have joined in their agnosticism so heartily, up to a certain point, had begun to make such fools of themselves about Darwinism and the brotherhood of all men in the monkey, he had grown much more tolerant. He still clung to his old-fashioned deistical opinions; but he thought no worse of a man for not holding them; he did not deny that a man might be a Christian, and still be a very good man.

The audacious humor of his position sufficed with a people who liked a joke rather better than anything else; in his old age, his infidelity was something that would hardly have been changed, if possible, by a popular vote. Even his wife, to whom it had once been a heavy cross, borne with secret prayer and tears, had long ceased to gainsay it in any wise. Her family had opposed her yoking with an unbeliever when she married him, but she had some such hopes of converting him as women cherish who give themselves to men confirmed in drunkenness. She learned, as other women do, that she could hardly change her husband in the least of his habits, and that, in this great matter of his unbelief, her love was powerless. It became easier at last for her to add self-sacrifice to self-sacrifice than to vex him with her anxieties about his soul, and to act upon the feeling that, if he must be lost, then she did not care to be saved. He had never interfered with her church-going; he had rather promoted it, for he liked to have women go; but the time came when she no longer cared to go without him; she lapsed from her membership, and it was now many years since she had worshipped with the people of her faith, if, indeed, she were still of any faith. Her life was silenced in every way, and, as often happens with aging wives in country towns, she seldom went out of her own door, and never appeared at the social or public solemnities of the village. Her husband and her daughter composed and bounded her world, — she always talked of them, or of other things as related to them. She had grown an elderly woman, without losing the color of her yellow hair; and the bloom of girlhood had been stayed in her cheeks as if by the young habit of blushing, which she had kept. She was still what her neighbors called very pretty-appearing, and she must have been a beautiful girl. The silence of her inward life subdued her manner, till now she seemed always to have come from some place on which a deep hush had newly fallen.

She answered the door when Bartley turned the crank that snapped the gong-bell in its centre; and the young man, who was looking at the street while waiting for some one to come, confronted her with a start. “Oh!” he said, “I thought it was Marcia. Good morning, Mrs. Gaylord. Isn’t Marcia at home?”

“She went to church, this morning,” replied her mother. “Won’t you walk in?”

“Why, yes, I guess I will, thank you,” faltered Bartley, in the irresolution of his disappointment. “I hope I sha’n’t disturb you.”

“Come right into the sitting-room. She won’t be gone a great while, now,” said Mrs. Gaylord, leading the way to the large square room into which a door at the end of the narrow hall opened. A slumberous heat from a sheet-iron wood-stove pervaded the place, and a clock ticked monotonously on a shelf in the corner. Mrs. Gaylord said, “Won’t you take a chair?” and herself sank into the rocker, with a deep feather cushion in the seat, and a thinner feather cushion tied half-way up the back. After the more active duties of her housekeeping were done, she sat every day in this chair with her knitting or sewing, and let the clock tick the long hours of her life away, with no more apparent impatience of them, or sense of their dulness, than the cat on the braided rug at her feet, or the geraniums in the pots at the sunny window. “Are you pretty well to-day?” she asked.

“Well, no, Mrs. Gaylord, I’m not,” answered Bartley. “I’m all out of sorts. I haven’t felt so dyspeptic for I don’t know how long.”

Mrs. Gaylord smoothed the silk dress across her lap, — the thin old black silk which she still instinctively put on for Sabbath observance, though it was so long since she had worn it to church. “Mr. Gaylord used to have it when we were first married, though he aint been troubled with it of late years. He seemed to think then it was worse Sundays.”

“I don’t believe Sunday has much to do with it, in my case. I ate some mince-pie and some toasted cheese last night, and I guess they didn’t agree with me very well,” said Bartley, who did not spare himself the confession of his sins when seeking sympathy: it was this candor that went so far to convince people of his good-heartedness.

“I don’t know as I ever heard that meat-pie was bad,” said Mrs. Gaylord, thoughtfully. “Mr. Gaylord used to eat it right along all through his dyspepsia, and he never complained of it. And the cheese ought to have made it digest.”

“Well, I don’t know what it was,” replied Bartley, plaintively submitting to be exonerated, “but I feel perfectly used up. Oh, I suppose I shall get over it, or forget all about it, by to-morrow,” he added, with strenuous cheerfulness. “It isn’t anything worth minding.”

Mrs. Gaylord seemed to differ with him on this point. “Head ache any?” she asked.

“It did this morning, when I first woke up,” Bartley assented.

“I don’t believe but what a cup of tea would be the best thing for you,” she said, critically.

Bartley had instinctively practised a social art which ingratiated him with people at Equity as much as his demands for sympathy endeared him: he gave trouble in little unusual ways. He now said, “Oh, I wish you would give me a cup, Mrs. Gaylord.”

“Why, yes, indeed! That’s just what I was going to,” she replied. She went to the kitchen, which lay beyond another room, and reappeared with the tea directly, proud of her promptness, but having it on her conscience to explain it. “I ‘most always keep the pot on the stove hearth, Sunday morning, so’s to have it ready if Mr. Gaylord ever wants a cup. He’s a master hand for tea, and always was. There: I guess you better take it without milk. I put some sugar in the saucer, if you want any.” She dropped noiselessly upon her feather cushion again, and Bartley, who had risen to receive the tea from her, remained standing while he drank it.

“That does seem to go to the spot,” he said, as he sipped it, thoughtfully observant of its effect upon his disagreeable feelings. “I wish I had you to take care of me, Mrs. Gaylord, and keep me from making a fool of myself,” he added, when he had drained the cup. “No, no!” he cried, at her offering to take it from him. “I’ll set it down. I know it will fret you to have it in here, and I’ll carry it out into the kitchen.” He did so before she could prevent him, and came back, touching his mustache with his handkerchief. “I declare, Mrs. Gaylord, I should love to live in a kitchen like that.”

“I guess you wouldn’t if you had to,” said Mrs. Gaylord, flattered into a smile. “Marcia, she likes to sit out there, she says, better than anywheres in the house. But I always tell her it’s because she was there so much when she was little. I don’t see as she seems over-anxious to do anything there but sit, I tell her. Not but what she knows how well enough. Mr. Gaylord, too, he’s great for being round in the kitchen. If he gets up in the night, when he has his waking spells, he had rather take his lamp out there, if there’s a fire left, and read, any time, than what he would in the parlor. Well, we used to sit there together a good deal when we were young, and he got the habit of it. There’s everything in habit,” she added, thoughtfully. “Marcia, she’s got quite in the way, lately, of going to the Methodist church.”

“Yes, I’ve seen her there. You know I board round at the different churches, as the schoolmaster used to at the houses in the old times.”

Mi’s. Gaylord looked up at the clock, and gave a little nervous laugh. “I don’t know what Marcia will say to my letting her company stay in the sitting-room. She’s pretty late to-day. But I guess you won’t have much longer to wait, now.”

She spoke with that awe of her daughter and her judgments which is one of the pathetic idiosyncrasies of a certain class of American mothers. They feel themselves to be not so well educated as their daughters, whose fancied knowledge of the world they let outweigh their own experience of life; they are used to deferring to them, and they shrink willingly into household drudges before them, and leave them to order the social affairs of the family. Mrs. Gaylord was not much afraid of Bartley for himself, but as Marcia’s company he made her more and more uneasy toward the end of the quarter of an hour in which she tried to entertain him with her simple talk, varying from Mr. Gaylord to Marcia, and from Marcia to Mr. Gaylord again. When she recognized the girl’s quick touch in the closing of the front door, and her elastic step approached through the hall, the mother made a little deprecating noise in her throat, and fidgeted in her chair. As soon as Marcia opened the sitting-room door, Mrs. Gaylord modestly rose and went out into the kitchen: the mother who remained in the room when her daughter had company was an oddity almost unknown in Equity.

Marcia’s face flashed all into a light of joy at sight of Bartley, who scarcely waited for her mother to be gone before he drew her toward him by the hand she had given. She mechanically yielded; and then, as if the recollection of some new resolution forced itself through her pleasure at sight of him, she freed her hand, and, retreating a step or two, confronted him.

“Why, Marcia,” he said, “what’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

It might have amused Bartley, if he had felt quite well, to see the girl so defiant of him, when she was really so much in love with him, but it certainly did not amuse him now: it disappointed him in his expectation of finding her femininely soft and comforting, and he did not know just what to do. He stood staring at her in discomfiture, while she gained in outward composure, though her cheeks were of the Jacqueminot red of the ribbon at her throat. “What have I done, Marcia?” he faltered.

“Oh, you haven’t done anything.”

“Some one has been talking to you against me.”

“No one has said a word to me about you.”

“Then why are you so cold — so strange — so — so — different?”

“Different?”

“Yes, from what you were last night,” he answered, with an aggrieved air.

“Oh, we see some things differently by daylight,” she lightly explained. “Won’t you sit down?”

“No, thank you,” Bartley replied, sadly but unresentfully. “I think I had better be going. I see there is something wrong—”

“I don’t see why you say there is anything wrong,” she retorted. “What have I done?”

“Oh, you have not done anything; I take it back. It is all right. But when I came here this morning — encouraged — hoping — that you had the same feeling as myself, and you seem to forget everything but a ceremonious acquaintanceship — why, it is all right, of course. I have no reason to complain; but I must say that I can’t help being surprised.” He saw her lips quiver and her bosom heave. “Marcia, do you blame me for feeling hurt at your coldness when I came here to tell you — to tell you I — I love you?” With his nerves all unstrung, and his hunger for sympathy, he really believed that he had come to tell her this. “Yes,” he added, bitterly, “I will tell you, though it seems to be the last word I shall speak to you. I’ll go, now.”

“Bartley! You shall never go!” she cried, throwing herself in his way. “Do you think I don’t care for you, too? You may kiss me, — you may kill me, now!”

The passionate tears sprang to her eyes, without the sound of sobs or the contortion of weeping, and she did not wait for his embrace. She flung her arms around his neck and held him fast, crying, “I wouldn’t let you, for your own sake, darling; and if I had died for it — I thought I should die last night — I was never going to let you kiss me again till you said — till — till — now! Don’t you see?” She caught him tighter, and hid her face in his neck, and cried and laughed for joy and shame, while he suffered her caresses with a certain bewilderment. “I want to tell you now — I want to explain,” she said, lifting her face and letting him from her as far as her arms, caught around his neck, would reach, and fervidly searching his eyes, lest some ray of what he would think should escape her. “Don’t speak a word first! Father saw us at the door last night, — he happened to be coming downstairs, because he couldn’t sleep, — just when you — Oh, Bartley, don’t!” she implored, at the little smile that made his mustache quiver. “And he asked me whether we were engaged; and when I couldn’t tell him we were, I know what he thought. I knew how he despised me, and I determined that, if you didn’t tell me that you cared for me — And that’s the reason, Bartley, and not — not because I didn’t care more for you than I do for the whole world. And — and — you don’t mind it, now, do you? It was for your sake, dearest.”

Whether Bartley perfectly divined or not all the feeling at which her words hinted, it was delicious to be clung about by such a pretty girl as Marcia Gaylord, to have her now darting her face into his neck-scarf with intolerable consciousness, and now boldly confronting him with all-defying fondness while she lightly pushed him and pulled him here and there in the vehemence of her appeal. Perhaps such a man, in those fastnesses of his nature which psychology has not yet explored, never loses, even in the tenderest transports, the sense of prey as to the girl whose love he has won; but if this is certain, it is also certain that he has transports which are tender, and Bartley now felt his soul melted with affection that was very novel and sweet.

“Why, Marcia!” he said, “what a strange girl you are!” He sunk into his chair again, and, putting his arms around her waist, drew her upon his knee, like a child.

She held herself apart from him at her arm’s length, and said, “Wait! Let me say it before it seems as if we had always been engaged, and everything was as right then as it is now. Did you despise me for letting you kiss me before we were engaged?”

“No,” he laughed again. “I liked you for it.”

“But if you thought I would let any one else, you wouldn’t have liked it?”

This diverted him still more. “I shouldn’t have liked that more than half as well.”

“No,” she said thoughtfully. She dropped her face awhile on his shoulder, and seemed to be struggling with herself. Then she lifted it, and “Did you ever — did you—” she gasped.

“If you want me to say that all the other girls in the world are not worth a hair of your head, I’ll say that, Marcia. Now, let’s talk business!”

This made her laugh, and “I shall want a little lock of yours,” she said, as if they had hitherto been talking of nothing but each other’s hair.

“And I shall want all of yours,” he answered.

“No. Don’t be silly.” She critically explored his face. “How funny to have a mole in your eyebrow!” She put her finger on it. “I never saw it before.”

“You never looked so closely. There’s a scar at the corner of your upper lip that I hadn’t noticed.”

“Can you see that?” she demanded, radiantly. “Well, you have got good eyes! The cat did it when I was a little girl.”

The door opened, and Mrs. Gaylord surprised them in the celebration of these discoveries, — or, rather, she surprised herself, for she stood holding the door and helpless to move, though in her heart she had an apologetic impulse to retire, and she even believed that she made some murmurs of excuse for her intrusion. Bartley was equally abashed, but Marcia rose with the coolness of her sex in the intimate emergencies which confound a man. “Oh, mother, it’s you! I forgot about you. Come in! Or I’ll set the table, if that’s what you want.” As Mrs. Gaylord continued to look from her to Bartley in her daze, Marcia added, simply, “We’re engaged, mother. You may as well know it first as last, and I guess you better know it first.”

Her mother appeared not to think it safe to relax her hold upon the door, and Bartley went filially to her rescue — if it was rescue to salute her blushing defencelessness as he did. A confused sense of the extraordinary nature and possible impropriety of the proceeding may have suggested her husband to her mind; or it may have been a feeling that some remark was expected of her, even in the mental destitution to which she was reduced.

“Have you told Mr. Gaylord about it?” she asked of either, or neither, or both, as they chose to take it.

Bartley left the word to Marcia, who answered, “Well, no, mother. We haven’t yet. We’ve only just found it out ourselves. I guess father can wait till he comes in to dinner. I intend to keep Bartley here to prove it.”

“He said,” remarked Mrs. Gaylord, whom Bartley had led to her chair and placed on her cushion, “‘t he had a headache when he first came in,” and she appealed to him for corroboration, while she vainly endeavored to gather force to grapple again with the larger fact that he and Marcia were just engaged to be married.

Marcia stopped down, and pulled her mother up out of her chair with a hug. “Oh, come now, mother: You mustn’t let it take your breath away,” she said, with patronizing fondness. “I’m not afraid of what father will say. You know what he thinks of Bartley, — or Mr. Hubbard, as I presume you’ll want me to call him! Now, mother, you just run up stairs, and put on your best cap, and leave me to set the table and get up the dinner. I guess I can get Bartley to help me. Mother, mother, mother!” she cried, in happiness that was otherwise unutterable, and clasping her mother closer in her strong young arms, she kissed her with a fervor that made her blush again before the young man.

“Marcia, Marcia! You hadn’t ought to! It’s ridiculous!” she protested. But she suffered herself to be thrust out of the room, grateful for exile, in which she could collect her scattered wits and set herself to realize the fact that had dispersed them. It was decorous, also, for her to leave Marcia alone with Mr. Hubbard, far more so now than when he was merely company; she felt that, and she fumbled over the dressing she was sent about, and once she looked out of her chamber window at the office where Mr. Gaylord sat, and wondered what Mr. Gaylord (she thought of him, and even dreamt of him, as Mr. Gaylord, and had never, in the most familiar moments, addressed him otherwise) would say! But she left the solution of the problem to him and Marcia; she was used to leaving them to the settlement of their own difficulties.

“Now, Bartley,” said Marcia, in the business-like way that women assume in such matters, as soon as the great fact is no longer in doubt, “you must help me to set the table. Put up that leaf and I’ll put up this. I’m going to do more for mother than I used to,” she said, repentant in her bliss. “It’s a shame how much I’ve left to her.” The domestic instinct was already astir in her heart.

Bartley pulled the table-cloth straight from her, and vied with her in the rapidity and exactness with which he arranged the knives and forks at right angles beside the plates. When it came to some heavier dishes, they agreed to carry them turn about; but when it was her turn, he put out his hand to support her elbow: “As I did last night, and saved you from dropping a lamp.”

This made her laugh, and she dropped the first dish with a crash. “Poor mother!” she exclaimed. “I know she heard that, and she’ll be in agony to know which one it is.”

Mrs. Gaylord did indeed hear it, far off in her chamber, and quaked with an anxiety which became intolerable at last.

“Marcia! Marcia!” she quavered, down the stairs, “what have you broken?”

Marcia opened the door long enough to call back, “Oh, only the old blue-edged platter, mother!” and then she flew at Bartley, crying, “For shame! For shame!” and pressing her hand over his mouth to stifle his laughter. “She’ll hear you, Bartley, and think you’re laughing at her.” But she laughed herself at his struggles, and ended by taking him by the hand and pulling him out into, the kitchen, where neither of them could be heard. She abandoned herself to the ecstasy of her soul, and he thought she had never been so charming as in this wild gayety.

“Why, Marsh! I never saw you carry on so before!”

“You never saw me engaged before! That’s the way all girls act — if they get the chance. Don’t you like me to be so?” she asked, with quick anxiety.

“Rather!” he replied.

“Oh, Bartley!” she exclaimed, “I feel like a child. I surprise myself as much as I do you; for I thought I had got very old, and I didn’t suppose I should ever let myself go in this way. But there is something about this that lets me be as silly as I like. It’s somehow as if I were a great deal more alone when I’m with you than when I’m by myself! How does it make you feel?”

“Good!” he answered, and that satisfied her better than if he had entered into those subtleties which she had tried to express: it was more like a man. He had his arm about her again, and she put down her hand on his to press it closer against her heart.

“Of course,” she explained, recurring to his surprise at her frolic mood, “I don’t expect you to be silly because I am.”

“No,” he assented; “but how can I help it?”

“Oh, I don’t mean for the time being; I mean generally speaking. I mean that I care for you because I know you know a great deal more than I do, and because I respect you. I know that everybody expects you to be something great, and I do, too.”

Bartley did not deny the justness of her opinions concerning himself, or the reasonableness of the general expectation, though he probably could not see the relation of these cold abstractions to the pleasure of sitting there with a pretty girl in that way. But he said nothing.

“Do you know,” she went on, turning her face prettily around toward him, but holding it a little way off, to secure attention as impersonal as might be under the circumstances, “what pleased me more than anything else you ever said to me?”

“No,” answered Bartley. “Something you got out of me when you were trying to make me tell you the difference between you and the other Equity girls?”

She laughed, in glad defiance of her own consciousness. “Well, I was trying to make you compliment me; I’m not going to deny it. But I must say I got my come-uppance: you didn’t say a thing I cared for. But you did afterward. Don’t you remember?”

“No. When?”

She hesitated a moment. “When you told me that my influence had — had — made you better, you know—”

“Oh!” said Bartley. “That! Well,” he added, carelessly, “it’s every word true. Didn’t you believe it?”

“I was just as glad as if I did; and it made me resolve never to do or say a thing that could lower your opinion of me; and then, you know, there at the door — it all seemed part of our trying to make each other better. But when father looked at me in that way, and asked me if we were engaged, I went down into the dust with shame. And it seemed to me that you had just been laughing at me, and amusing yourself with me, and I was so furious I didn’t know what to do. Do you know what I wanted to do? I wanted to run downstairs to father, and tell him what you had said, and ask him if he believed you had ever liked any other girl.” She paused a little, but he did not answer, and she continued. “But now I’m glad I didn’t. And I shall never ask you that, and I shall not care for anything that you — that’s happened before to-day. It’s all right. And you do think I shall always try to make you good and happy, don’t you?”

“I don’t think you can make me much happier than I am at present, and I don’t believe anybody could make me feel better,” answered Bartley.

She gave a little laugh at his refusal to be serious, and let her head, for fondness, fall upon his shoulder, while he turned round and round a ring he found on her finger.

“Ah, ha!” he said, after a while. “Who gave you this ring, Miss Gaylord?”

“Father, Christmas before last,” she promptly answered, without moving. “I’m glad you asked,” she murmured, in a lower voice, full of pride in the maiden love she could give him. “There’s never been any one but you, or the thought of any one.” She suddenly started away.

“Now, let’s play we’re getting dinner.” It was quite time; in the next moment the coffee boiled up, and if she had not caught the lid off and stirred it down with her spoon, it would have been spoiled. The steam ascended to the ceiling, and filled the kitchen with the fragrant smell of the berry.

“I’m glad we’re going to have coffee,” she said. “You’ll have to put up with a cold dinner, except potatoes. But the coffee will make up, and I shall need a cup to keep me awake. I don’t believe I slept last night till nearly morning. Do you like coffee?”

“I’d have given all I ever expect to be worth for a cup of it, last night,” he said. “I was awfully hungry when I got back to the hotel, and I couldn’t find anything but a piece of mince-pie and some old cheese, and I had to be content with cold milk. I felt as if I had lost all my friends this morning when I woke up.”

A sense of remembered grievance trembled in his voice, and made her drop her head on his arm, in pity and derision of him. “Poor Bartley!” she cried. “And you came up here for a little petting from me, didn’t you? I’ve noticed that in you! Well, you didn’t get it, did you?”

“Well, not at first,” he said.

“Yes, you can’t complain of any want of petting at last,” she returned, delighted at his indirect recognition of the difference. Then the daring, the archness, and caprice that make coquetry in some women, and lurk a divine possibility in all, came out in her; the sweetness, kept back by the whole strength of her pride, overflowed that broken barrier now, and she seemed to lavish this revelation of herself upon him with a sort of tender joy in his bewilderment. She was not hurt when he crudely expressed the elusive sense which has been in other men’s minds at such times: they cannot believe that this fascination is inspired, and not practised.

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad you told me that I was the first. I should have thought you’d had a good deal of experience in flirtation.”

“You wouldn’t have thought so if you hadn’t been a great flirt yourself,” she answered, audaciously. “Perhaps I have been engaged before!”

Their talk was for the most part frivolous, and their thoughts ephemeral; but again they were, with her at least, suddenly and deeply serious. Till then all things seemed to have been held in arrest, and impressions, ideas, feelings, fears, desires, released themselves simultaneously, and sought expression with a rush that defied coherence. “Oh, why do we try to talk?” she asked, at last. “The more we say, the more we leave unsaid. Let us keep still awhile!” But she could not. “Bartley! When did you first think you cared about me?”

“I don’t know,” said Bartley, “I guess it must have been the first time I saw you.”

“Yes, that is when I first knew that I cared for you. But it seems to me that I must have always cared for you, and that I only found it out when I saw you going by the house that day.” She mused a little time before she asked again, “Bartley!”

“Well?”

“Did you ever use to be afraid — Or, no! Wait! I’ll tell you first, and then I’ll ask you. I’m not ashamed of it now, though once I thought I couldn’t bear to have any one find it out. I used to be awfully afraid you didn’t care for me! I would try to make out, from things you did and said, whether you did or not; but I never could be certain. I believe I used to find the most comfort in discouraging myself. I used to say to myself, ‘Why, of course he doesn’t! How can he? He’s been everywhere, and he’s seen so many girls. He corresponds with lots of them. Altogether likely he’s engaged to some of the young ladies he’s met in Boston; and he just goes with me here for a blind.’ And then when you would praise me, sometimes, I would just say, ‘Oh, he’s complimented plenty of girls. I know he’s thinking this instant of the young lady he’s engaged to in Boston.’ And it would almost kill me; and when you did some little thing to show that you liked me, I would think, ‘He doesn’t like me! He hates, he despises me. He does, he does, he does!’ And I would go on that way, with my teeth shut, and my breath held, I don’t know how long.” Bartley broke out into a broad laugh at this image of desperation, but she added, tenderly, “I hope I never made you suffer in that way?”

“What way?” he asked.

“That’s what I wanted you to tell me. Did you ever — did you use to be afraid sometimes that I — that you — did you put off telling me that you cared for me so long because you thought, you dreaded — Oh, I don’t see what I can ever do to make it up to you if you did! Were you afraid I didn’t care for you?”

“No!” shouted Bartley. She had risen and stood before him in the fervor of her entreaty, and he seized her arms, pinioning them to her side, and holding her helpless, while he laughed, and laughed again. “I knew you were dead in love with me from the first moment.”

“Bartley! Bartley Hubbard!” she exclaimed; “let me go, — let me go, this instant! I never heard of such a shameless thing!”

But she really made no effort to escape.

V.

The house seemed too little for Marcia’s happiness, and after dinner she did not let Bartley forget his last night’s engagement. She sent him off to get his horse at the hotel, and ran up to her room to put on her wraps for the drive. Her mother cleared away the dinner things; she pushed the table to the side of the room, and then sat down in her feather-cushioned chair and waited her husband’s pleasure to speak. He ordinarily rose from the Sunday dinner and went back to his office; to-day he had taken a chair before the stove. But he had mechanically put his hat on, and he wore it pushed off his forehead as he tilted his chair back on its hind legs, and braced himself against the hearth of the stove with his feet.

A man is master in his own house generally through the exercise of a certain degree of brutality, but Squire Gaylord maintained his predominance by an enlightened absenteeism. No man living always at home was ever so little under his own roof. While he was in more active business life, he had kept an office in the heart of the village, where he spent all his days, and a great part of every night; but after he had become rich enough to risk whatever loss of business the change might involve, he bought this large old square house on the border of the village, and thenceforth made his home in the little detached office.

If Mrs. Gaylord had dimly imagined that she should see something more of him, having him so near at hand, she really saw less: there was no weather, by day or night, in which he could not go to his office, now. He went no more than his wife into the village society; she might have been glad now and then of a little glimpse of the world, but she never said so, and her social life had ceased, like her religious life. Their house was richly furnished according to the local taste of the time; the parlor had a Brussels carpet, and heavy chairs of mahogany and hair-cloth; Marcia had a piano there, and since she had come home from school they had made company, as Mrs. Gaylord called it, two or three times for her; but they had held aloof from the festivity, the Squire in his office, and Mrs. Gaylord in the family room where they now sat in unwonted companionship.

“Well, Mr. Gaylord,” said his wife, “I don’t know as you can say but what Marcia’s suited well enough.”

This was the first allusion they had made to the subject, but she let it take the argumentative form of her cogitations.

“M-yes,” sighed the Squire, in long, nasal assent, “most too well, if anything.” He rasped first one unshaven cheek and then the other, with his thin, quivering hand.

“He’s smart enough,” said Mrs. Gaylord, as before.

“M-yes, most too smart,” replied her husband, a little more quickly than before. “He’s smart enough, even if she wasn’t, to see from the start that she was crazy to have him, and that isn’t the best way to begin life for a married couple, if I’m a judge.”

“It would killed her if she hadn’t got him. I could see ‘t was wearin’ on her every day, more and more. She used to fairly jump, every knock she’d hear at the door; and I know sometimes, when she was afraid he wa’ n’t coming, she used to go out, in hopes ‘t she sh’d meet him: I don’t suppose she allowed to herself that she did it for that — Marcia’s proud.”

“M-yes,” said the Squire, “she’s proud. And when a proud girl makes a fool of herself about a fellow, it’s a matter of life and death with her. She can’t help herself. She lets go everything.”

“I declare,” Mrs. Gaylord went on, “it worked me up considerable to have her come in some those times, and see by her face ‘t she’d seen him with some the other girls. She used to look so! And then I’d hear her up in her room, cryin’ and cryin’. I shouldn’t cared so much, if Marcia’d been like any other girl, kind of flirty, like, about it. But she wa’ n’t. She was just bowed down before her idol.”

A final assent came from the Squire, as if wrung out of his heart, and he rose from his chair, and then sat down again. Marcia was his child, and he loved her with his whole soul. “M-well!” he deeply sighed, “all that part’s over, anyway,” but he tingled in an anguish of sympathy with what she had suffered. “You see, Miranda, how she looked at me when she first came in with him, — so proud and independent, poor girl! and yet as if she was afraid I mightn’t like it?”

“Yes, I see it.”

He pulled his hat far down over his cavernous eyes, and worked his thin, rusty old jaws.

“I hope ‘t she’ll be able to school herself, so ‘s t’ not show out her feelings so much,” said Mrs. Gaylord.

“I wish she could school herself so as to not have ’em so much; but I guess she’ll have ‘em, and I guess she’ll show ’em out.” They were both silent; after a while he added, throwing at the stove a minute fragment of the cane he had pulled off the seat of his chair: “Miranda, I’ve expected something of this sort a good while, and I’ve thought over what Bartley had better do.”

Mrs. Gaylord stooped forward and picked up the bit of wood which her husband had thrown down; her vigilance was rewarded by finding a thread on the oil-cloth near where it lay; she whipped this round her finger, and her husband continued: “He’d better give up his paper and go into the law. He ‘s done well in the paper, and he’s a smart writer; but editing a newspaper aint any work for a man. It’s all well enough as long as he’s single, but when he’s got a wife to look after, he’d better get down to work. My business is in just such a shape now that I could hand it over to him in a lump; but come to wait a year or two longer, and this young man and that one ‘ll eat into it, and it won’t be the same thing at all. I shall want Bartley to push right along, and get admitted at once. He can do it, fast enough. He’s bright enough,” added the old man, with a certain grimness. “M-well!” he broke out, with a quick sigh, after a moment of musing; “it hasn’t happened at any very bad time. I was just thinking, this morning, that I should like to have my whole time, pretty soon, to look after my property. I sha’n’t want Bartley to do that for me. I’ll give him a good start in money and in business; but I’ll look after my property myself. I’ll speak to him, the first chance I get.”

A light step sounded on the stairs, and Marcia burst into the room, ready for her drive. “I wanted to get a good warm before I started,” she explained, stooping before the stove, and supporting herself with one hand on her father’s knee. There had been no formal congratulations upon her engagement from either of her parents; but this was not requisite, and would have been a little affected; they were perhaps now ashamed to mention it outright before her alone. The Squire, however, went so far as to put his hand over the hand she had laid upon his knee, and to smooth it twice or thrice.

“You going to ride after that sorrel colt of Bartley’s?” he asked.

“Of course!” she answered, with playful pertness. “I guess Bartley can manage the sorrel colt! He’s never had any trouble yet.”

“He’s always been able to give his whole mind to him before,” said the Squire. He gave Marcia’s hand a significant squeeze, and let it go.

She would not confess her consciousness of his meaning at once. She looked up at the clock, and then turned and pulled her father’s watch out of his waistcoat pocket, and compared the time. “Why, you’re both fast!”

“Perhaps Bartley’s slow,” said the Squire; and having gone as far as he intended in this direction, he permitted himself a low chuckle.

The sleigh-bells jingled without, and she sprang lightly to her feet. “I guess you don’t think Bartley’s slow,” she exclaimed, and hung over her father long enough to rub her lips against his bristly cheek. “By, mother,” she said, over her shoulder, and went out of the room. She let her muff hang as far down in front of her as her arms would reach, in a stylish way, and moved with a little rhythmical tilt, as if to some inner music. Even in her furs she was elegantly slender in shape.

The old people remained silent and motionless till the clash of the bells died away. Then the Squire rose, and went to the wood-shed beyond the kitchen, whence he reappeared with an armful of wood. His wife started at the sight. “Mr. Gaylord, what be you doin’?”

“Oh, I’m going to make ’em up a little fire in the parlor stove. I guess they won’t want us round a great deal, when they come back.”

Mrs. Gaylord said, “Well, I never did!” When her husband returned from the parlor, she added, “I suppose some folks’d say it was rather of a strange way of spendin’ the Sabbath.”

“It’s a very good way of spending the Sabbath. You don’t suppose that any of the people in church are half as happy, do you? Why, old Jonathan Edwards himself used to allow ‘all proper opportunity’ for the young fellows that come to see his girls, ‘and a room and fire, if needed.’ His ‘Life’ says so.”

“I guess he didn’t allow it on the Sabbath,” retorted Mrs. Gaylord.

“Well, the ‘Life’ don’t say,” chuckled the Squire. “Why, Miranda, I do it for Marcia! There’s never but one first day to an engagement. You know that as well as I do.” In saying this, Squire Gaylord gave way to his repressed emotion in an extravagance. He suddenly stooped over and kissed his wife; but he spared her confusion by going out to his office at once, where he stayed the whole afternoon.

Bartley and Marcia took the “Long Drive,” as it was called, at Equity. The road plunged into the darkly wooded gulch beyond the house, and then struck away eastward, crossing loop after loop of the river on the covered bridges, where the neighbors, who had broken it out with their ox-teams in the open, had thickly bedded it in snow. In the valleys and sheltered spots it remained free, and so wide that encountering teams could easily pass each other; but where it climbed a hill, or crossed a treeless level, it was narrowed to a single track, with turn-outs at established points, where the drivers of the sleighs waited to be sure that the stretch beyond was clear before going forward. In the country, the winter which held the village in such close siege was an occupation under which Nature seemed to cower helpless, and men made a desperate and ineffectual struggle. The houses, banked up with snow almost to the sills of the windows that looked out, blind with frost, upon the lifeless world, were dwarfed in the drifts, and seemed to founder in a white sea blotched with strange bluish shadows under the slanting sun. Where they fronted close upon the road, it was evident that the fight with the snow was kept up unrelentingly; spaces were shovelled out, and paths were kept open to the middle of the highway, and to the barn; but where they were somewhat removed, there was no visible trace of the conflict, and no sign of life except the faint, wreathed lines of smoke wavering upward from the chimneys.

In the hollows through which the road passed, the lower boughs of the pines and hemlocks were weighed down with the snow-fall till they lay half submerged in the drifts; but wherever the wind could strike them, they swung free of this load and met in low, flat arches above the track. The river betrayed itself only when the swift current of a ripple broke through the white surface in long, irregular, grayish blurs. It was all wild and lonesome, but to the girl alone in it with her lover, the solitude was sweet, and she did not wish to speak even to him. His hands were both busy with the reins, but it was agreed between them that she might lock hers through his arm. Cowering close to him under the robes, she laid her head on his shoulder and looked out over the flying landscape in measureless content, and smiled, with filling eyes, when he bent over, and warmed his cold, red cheek on the top of her fur cap.

The moments of bliss that silence a woman rouse a man to make sure of his rapture. “How do you like it, Marsh?” he asked, trying at one of these times to peer round into her face. “Are you afraid?”

“No, — only of getting back too soon.”

He made the shivering echoes answer with his delight in this, and chirruped to the colt, who pushed forward at a wilder speed, flinging his hoofs out before him with the straight thrust of the horn trotter, and seeming to overtake them as they flew. “I should like this ride to last forever!”

“Forever!” she repeated. “That would do for a beginning.”

“Marsh! What a girl you are! I never supposed you would be so free to let a fellow know how much you cared for him.”

“Neither did I,” she answered dreamily. “But now — now the only trouble is that I don’t know how to let him know.” She gave his arm to which she clung a little convulsive clutch, and pressed her head harder upon his shoulder.

“Well, that’s pretty much my complaint, too,” said Bartley, “though I couldn’t have expressed it so well.”

“Oh, you express!” she murmured, with the pride in him which implied that there were no thoughts worth expressing to which he could not give a monumental utterance. Her adoration flattered his self-love to the same passionate intensity, and to something like the generous complexion of her worship.

“Marcia,” he answered, “I am going to try to be all you expect of me. And I hope I shall never do anything unworthy of your ideal.”

She could only press his arm again in speechless joy, but she said to herself that she should always remember these words.

The wind had been rising ever since they started but they had not noticed it till now, when the woods began to thin away on either side, and he stopped before striking out over one of the naked stretches of the plain, — a white waste swept by the blasts that sucked down through a gorge of the mountain, and flattened the snow-drifts as the tornado flattens the waves. Across this expanse ran the road, its stiff lines obliterated here and there, in the slight depressions, and showing dark along the rest of the track.

It was a good half-mile to the next body of woods, and midway there was one of those sidings where a sleigh approaching from the other quarter must turn out and yield the right of way. Bartley stopped his colt, and scanned the road.

“Anybody coming?” asked Marcia.

“No, I don’t see any one. But if there’s any one in the woods yonder, they’d better wait till I get across. No horse in Equity can beat this colt to the turn-out.”

“Oh, well, look carefully, Bartley. If we met any one beyond the turn-out, I don’t know what I should do,” pleaded the girl.

“I don’t know what they would do,” said Bartley. “But it’s their lookout now, if they come. Wrap your face up well, or put your head under the robe. I’ve got to hold my breath the next half-mile.” He loosed the reins, and sped the colt out of the shelter where he had halted. The wind struck them like an edge of steel, and, catching the powdery snow that their horse’s hoofs beat up, sent it spinning and swirling far along the glistening levels on their lee. They felt the thrill of the go as if they were in some light boat leaping over a swift current. Marcia disdained to cover her face, if he must confront the wind, but after a few gasps she was glad to bend forward, and bury it in the long hair of the bearskin robe. When she lifted it, they were already past the siding, and she saw a cutter dashing toward them from the cover of the woods. “Bartley!” she screamed, “the sleigh!”

“Yes,” he shouted. “Some fool! There’s going to be trouble here,” he added, checking his horse as he could. “They don’t seem to know how to manage — It’s a couple of women! Hold on! hold on!” he called. “Don’t try to turn out! I’ll turn out!”

The women pulled their horse’s head this way and that, in apparent confusion, and then began to turn out into the trackless snow at the roadside, in spite of Bartley’s frantic efforts to arrest them. They sank deeper and deeper into the drift; their horse plunged and struggled, and then their cutter went over, amidst their shrieks and cries for help.

Bartley drove up abreast of the wreck, and, saying, “Still, Jerry! Don’t be afraid, Marcia,” — he put the reins into her hands, and sprang out to the rescue.

One of the women had been flung out free of the sleigh, and had already gathered herself up, and stood crying and wringing her hands; “Oh, Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Hubbard! Help Hannah! she’s under there!”

“All right! Keep quiet, Mrs. Morrison! Take hold of your horse’s head!” Bartley had first of all seized him by the bit, and pulled him to his feet; he was old and experienced in obedience, and he now stood waiting orders, patiently enough. Bartley seized the cutter and by an effort of all his strength righted it. The colt started and trembled, but Marcia called to him in Bartley’s tone, “Still, Jerry!” and he obeyed her.

The girl, who had been caught under the overturned cutter, escaped like a wild thing out of a trap, when it was lifted, and, plunging some paces away, faced round upon her rescuer with the hood pulled straight and set comely to her face again, almost before he could ask, “Any bones broken, Hannah?”

“No!” she shouted. “Mother! mother! stop crying! Don’t you see I’m not dead?” She leaped about, catching up this wrap and that, shaking the dry snow out of them, and flinging them back into the cutter, while she laughed in the wild tumult of her spirits. Bartley helped her pick up the fragments of the wreck, and joined her in making fun of the adventure. The wind hustled them, but they were warm in defiance of it with their jollity and their bustle.

“Why didn’t you let me turn out?” demanded Bartley, as he and the girl stood on opposite sides of the cutter, rearranging the robes in it.

“Oh, I thought I could turn out well enough. You had a right to the road.”

“Well, the next time you see any one past the turn-out, you better not start from the woods.”

“Why, there’s no more room in the woods to get past than there is here,” cried the girl.

“There’s more shelter.”

“Oh, I’m not cold!” She flashed a look at him from her brilliant face, warm with all the glow of her young health, and laughed, and before she dropped her eyes, she included Marcia in her glance. They had already looked at each other without any sign of recognition. “Come, mother! All right, now!”

Her mother left the horse’s head, and, heavily ploughing back to the cutter, tumbled herself in. The girl, from her side, began to climb in, but her weight made the sleigh careen, and she dropped down with a gay shriek.

Bartley came round and lifted her in; the girl called to her horse, and drove up into the road and away.

Bartley looked after her a moment, and continued to glance in that direction when he stood stamping the snow off his feet, and brushing it from his legs and arms, before he remounted to Marcia’s side. He was excited, and talked rapidly and loudly, as he took the reins from Marcia’s passive hold, and let the colt out. “That girl is the pluckiest fool, yet! Wouldn’t let me turn out because I had the right of way! And she wasn’t going to let anybody else have a hand in getting that old ark of theirs afloat again. Good their horse wasn’t anything like Jerry! How well Jerry behaved! Were you frightened, Marsh?” He bent over to see her face, but she had not her head on his shoulder, and she did not sit close to him, now. “Did you freeze?”

“Oh, no! I got along very well,” she answered, dryly, and edged away as far as the width of the seat would permit. “It would have been better for you to lead their horse up into the road, and then she could have got in without your help. Her mother got in alone.”

He took the reins into his left hand, and, passing his strong right around her, pulled her up to his side. She resisted, with diminishing force; at last she ceased to resist, and her head fell passively to its former place on his shoulder. He did not try to speak any word of comfort; he only held her close to him; when she looked up, as they entered the village, she confronted him with a brilliant smile that ignored her tears.

But that night, when she followed him to the door, she looked him searchingly in the eyes. “I wonder if you really do despise me, Bartley?” she asked.

“Certainly,” he answered, with a jesting smile. “What for?”

“For showing out my feelings so. For not even trying to pretend not to care everything for you.”

“It wouldn’t be any use your trying: I should know that you did, anyway.”

“Oh, don’t laugh, Bartley, don’t laugh! I don’t believe that I ought to. I’ve heard that it makes people sick of you. But I can’t help it, — I can’t help it! And if — if you think I’m always going to be so, — and that I’m going to keep on getting worse and worse, and making you so unhappy, why, you’d better break your engagement now — while you have a chance.”

“What have you been making me unhappy about, I should like to know? I thought I’d been having a very good time.”

She hid her face against his breast. “It almost killed me to see you there with her. I was so cold, — my hands were half frozen, holding the reins, — and I was so afraid of the colt I didn’t know what to do; and I had been keeping up my courage on your account; and you seemed so long about it all; and she could have got in perfectly well — as well as her mother did — without your help—” Her voice broke in a miserable sob, and she clutched herself tighter to him.

He smoothed down her hair with his hand. “Why, Marsh! Did you think that made me unhappy? I didn’t mind it a bit. I knew what the trouble was, at the time; but I wasn’t going to say anything. I knew you would be all right as soon as you could think it over. You don’t suppose I care anything for that girl?”

“No,” answered a rueful sob. “But I wish you didn’t have anything to do with her. I know she’ll make trouble for you, somehow.”

“Well,” said Bartley, “I can’t very well turn her off as long as she does her work. But you needn’t be worried about making me unhappy. If anything, I rather liked it. It showed how much you did care for me.” He bent toward her, with a look of bright raillery, for the parting kiss. “Now then: once, twice, three times, — and good night it is!”

VI.

The spectacle of a love affair in which the woman gives more of her heart than the man gives of his is so pitiable that we are apt to attribute a kind of merit to her, as if it were a voluntary self-sacrifice for her to love more than her share. Not only other men, but other women, look on with this canonizing compassion; for women have a lively power of imagining themselves in the place of any sister who suffers in matters of sentiment, and are eager to espouse the common cause in commiserating her. Each of them pictures herself similarly wronged or slighted by the man she likes best, and feels how cruel it would be if he were to care less for her than she for him; and for the time being, in order to realize the situation, she loads him with all the sins of omission proper to the culprit in the alien case. But possibly there is a compensation in merely loving, even where the love given is out of all proportion to the love received.

If Bartley Hubbard’s sensations and impressions of the day had been at all reasoned, that night as he lay thinking it over, he could unquestionably have seen many advantages for Marcia in the affair, — perhaps more than for himself. But to do him justice he did not formulate these now, or in any wise explicitly recognize the favors he was bestowing. At twenty-six one does not naturally compute them in musing upon the girl to whom one is just betrothed; and Bartley’s mind was a confusion of pleasure. He liked so well to think how fond of him Marcia was, that it did not occur to him then to question whether he were as fond of her. It is possible that as he drowsed, at last, there floated airily through the consciousness which was melting and dispersing itself before the approach of sleep, an intimation from somewhere to some one that perhaps the affair need not be considered too seriously. But in that mysterious limbo one cannot be sure of what is thought and what is dreamed; and Bartley always acquitted himself, and probably with justice, of any want of seriousness.

What he did make sure of when he woke was that he was still out of sorts, and that he had again that dull headache; and his instant longing for sympathy did more than anything else to convince him that he really loved Marcia, and had never, in his obscurest or remotest feeling, swerved in his fealty to her. In the atmosphere of her devotion yesterday, he had so wholly forgotten his sufferings that he had imagined himself well; but now he found that he was not well, and he began to believe that he was going to have what the country people call a fit of sickness. He felt that he ought to be taken care, of, that he was unfit to work; and in his vexation at not being able to go to Marcia for comfort-it really amounted to nothing less — he entered upon the day’s affairs with fretful impatience.

The Free Press was published on Tuesdays, and Monday was always a busy time of preparation. The hands were apt also to feel the demoralization that follows a holiday, even when it has been a holy day. The girls who set the type of the Free Press had by no means foregone the rights and privileges of their sex in espousing their art, and they had their beaux on Sunday night like other young ladies. It resulted that on Monday morning they were nervous and impatient, alternating between fits of giggling delight in the interchange of fond reminiscences, and the crossness which is pretty sure to disfigure human behavior from want of sleep. But ordinarily Bartley got on very well with them. In spite of the assumption of equality between all classes in Equity, they stood in secret awe of his personal splendor, and the tradition of his achievements at college and in the great world; and a flattering joke or a sharp sarcasm from him went a great way with them. Besides, he had an efficient lieutenant in Henry Bird, the young printer who had picked up his trade in the office, and who acted as Bartley’s foreman, so far as the establishment had an organization. Bird had industry and discipline which were contagious, and that love of his work which is said to be growing rare among artisans in the modern subdivision of trades. This boy — for he was only nineteen — worked at his craft early and late out of pleasure in it. He seemed one of those simple, subordinate natures which are happy in looking up to whatever assumes to be above them. He exulted to serve in a world where most people prefer to be served, and it is uncertain whether he liked his work better for its own sake, or Bartley’s, for whom he did it. He was slight and rather delicate in health, and it came natural for Bartley to patronize him. He took him on the long walks of which he was fond, and made him in some sort his humble confidant, talking to him of himself and his plans with large and braggart vagueness. He depended upon Bird in a great many things, and Bird never failed him; for he had a basis of constancy that was immovable. “No,” said a philosopher from a neighboring logging-camp, who used to hang about the printing-office a long time after he had got his paper, “there aint a great deal of natural git up and howl about Henry; but he stays put.” In the confidences which Bartley used to make Bird, he promised that, when he left the newspaper for the law, he would see that no one else succeeded him. The young fellow did not need this promise to make him Bartley’s fast friend, but it colored his affection with ambitious enthusiasm; to edit and publish a newspaper, — his dreams did not go beyond that: to devote it to Bartley’s interest in the political life on which Bartley often hinted he might enter, — that would be the sweetest privilege of realized success. Bird already wrote paragraphs for the Free Press, and Bartley let him make up a column of news from the city exchanges, which was partly written and partly selected.

Bartley came to the office rather late on Monday morning, bringing with him the papers from Saturday night’s mail, which had lain unopened over Sunday, and went directly into his own room, without looking into the printing-office. He felt feverish and irritable, and he resolved to fill up with selections and let his editorial paragraphing go, or get Bird to do it. He was tired of the work, and sick of Equity; Marcia’s face seemed to look sadly in upon his angry discontent, and he no longer wished to go to her for sympathy. His door opened, and, without glancing from the newspaper which he held up before him, he asked, “What is it, Bird? Do you want copy?”

“Well, no, Mr. Hubbard,” answered Bird, “we have copy enough for the force we’ve got this morning.”

“Why, what’s up?” demanded Bartley, dropping his paper.

“Lizzie Sawyer has sent word that she is sick, and we haven’t heard or seen anything of Hannah Morrison.”

“Confound the girls!” said Bartley, “there’s always something the matter with them.” He rubbed his hand over his forehead, as if to rub out the dull pain there. “Well,” he said, “I must go to work myself, then.” He rose, and took hold of the lapels of his coat, to pull it off; but something in Bird’s look arrested him. “What is it?” he asked.

“Old Morrison was here, just before you came in, and said he wanted to see you. I think he was drunk,” said Bird, anxiously. “He said he was coming back again.”

“All right; let him come,” replied Bartley. “This is a free country, — especially in Equity. I suppose he wants Hannah’s wages raised, as usual. How much are we behind on the paper, Henry?”

“We’re not a great deal behind, Mr. Hubbard, if we were not so weak-handed.”

“Perhaps we can get Hannah back, during the forenoon. At any rate, we can ask her honored parent when he comes.”

Where Morrison got his liquor was a question that agitated Equity from time to time, and baffled the officer of the law empowered to see that no strong drink came into the town. Under conditions which made it impossible even in the logging-camps, and rendered the sale of spirits too precarious for the apothecary, who might be supposed to deal in them medicinally, Morrison never failed of his spree when the mysterious mechanism of his appetite enforced it. Probably it was some form of bedevilled cider that supplied the material of his debauch; but even cider was not easily to be had.

Morrison’s spree was a movable feast, and recurred at irregular intervals of two, or three, or even six weeks; but it recurred often enough to keep him poor, and his family in a social outlawry against which the kindly instincts of their neighbors struggled in vain. Mrs. Morrison was that pariah who, in a village like Equity, cuts herself off from hope by taking in washing; and it was a decided rise in the world for Hannah, a wild girl at school, to get a place in the printing-office. Her father had applied for it humbly enough at the tremulous and penitent close of one of his long sprees, and was grateful to Bartley for taking the special interest in her which she reported at home.

But the independence of a drunken shoemaker is proverbial, and Morrison’s meek spirit soared into lordly arrogance with his earliest cups. The first warning which the community had of his change of attitude was the conspicuous and even defiant closure of his shop, and the scornful rejection of custom, however urgent or necessitous. All Equity might go in broken shoes, for any patching or half-soling the people got from him. He went about collecting his small dues, and paying up his debts as long as the money lasted, in token of his resolution not to take any favors from any man thereafter. Then he retired to his house on one of the by streets, and by degrees drank himself past active offence. It was of course in his defiant humor that he came to visit Bartley, who had learned to expect him whenever Hannah failed to appear promptly at her work. The affair was always easily arranged. Bartley instantly assented, with whatever irony he liked, to Morrison’s demands; he refused with overwhelming politeness even to permit him to give himself the trouble to support them by argument; he complimented Hannah inordinately as one of the most gifted and accomplished ladies of his acquaintance, and inquired affectionately after the health of each member of the Morrison family. When Morrison rose to go he always said, in shaking hands, “Well, sir, if there was more like you in Equity a poor man could get along. You’re a gentleman, sir.” After getting some paces away from the street door, he stumbled back up the stairs to repeat, “You’re a gentleman!” Hannah came during the day, and the wages remained the same: neither of the contracting parties regarded the increase so elaborately agreed upon, and Morrison, on becoming sober, gratefully ignored the whole transaction, though, by a curious juggle of his brain, he recurred to it in his next spree, and advanced in his new demand from the last rise: his daughter was now nominally in receipt of an income of forty dollars a week, but actually accepted four.

Bartley, on his part, enjoyed the business as an agreeable excitement and a welcome relief from the monotony of his official life. He never hurried Morrison’s visits, but amused himself by treating him with the most flattering distinction, and baffling his arrogance by immediate concession. But this morning, when Morrison came back with a front of uncommon fierceness, he merely looked up from his newspapers, to which he had recurred, and said coolly. “Oh, Mr. Morrison! Good morning. I suppose it’s that little advance that you wish to see me about. Take a chair. What is the increase you ask this time? Of course I agree to anything.”

He leaned forward, pencil in hand, to make a note of the figure Morrison should name, when the drunkard approached and struck the table in front of him with his fist, and blazed upon Bartley’s face, suddenly uplifted, with his blue crazy eyes:

“No, sir! I won’t take a seat, and I don’t come on no such business! No, sir!” He struck the table again, and the violence of his blow upset the inkstand.

Bartley saved himself by suddenly springing away. “Hollo here!” he shouted. “What do you mean by this infernal nonsense?”

“What do you mean,” retorted the drunkard, “by makin’ up to my girl?”

“You’re a fool,” cried Bartley, “and drunk!”

“I’ll show you whether I’m a fool, and I’ll show you whether I’m drunk,” said Morrison. He opened the door and beckoned to Bird, with an air of mysterious authority. “Young man! Come here!”

Bird was used to the indulgence with which Bartley treated Morrison’s tipsy freaks, and supposed that he had been called by his consent to witness another agreement to a rise in Hannah’s wages. He came quickly, to help get Morrison out of the way the sooner, and he was astonished to be met by Bartley with “I don’t want you, Bird.”

“All right,” answered the boy, and he turned to go out of the door.

But Morrison had planted himself against it, and waved Bird austerely back. “I want you,” he said, with drunken impressiveness, “for a witness — wick — witness — while I ask Mr. Hubbard what he means by—”

“Hold your tongue!” cried Bartley. “Get out of this!” He advanced a pace or two toward Morrison who stood his ground without swerving.

“Now you — you keep quiet, Mr. Hubbard,” said Morrison, with a swift drunken change of mood, by which he passed from arrogant denunciation to a smooth, patronizing mastery of the situation. “I wish this thing all settled amic — ic — amelcabilly.”

Bartley broke into a helpless laugh at Morrison’s final failure on a word difficult to sober tongues, and the latter went on: “No ‘casion for bad feeling on either side. All I want know is what you mean.”

“Well, go on!” cried Bartley, good-naturedly, and he sat down in his chair, which he tilted back, and, clasping his hands behind his head, looked up into Morrison’s face. “What do I mean by what?”

Probably Morrison had not expected to be categorical, or to bring anything like a bill of particulars against Bartley, and this demand gave him pause. “What you mean,” he said, at last, “by always praising her up so?”

“What I said. She’s a very good girl, and a very bright one. You don’t deny that?”

“No — no matter what I deny. What — what you lend her all them books for?”

“To improve her mind. You don’t object to that? I thought you once thanked me for taking an interest in her.”

“Don’t you mind what I object to, and what I thank you for,” said Morrison, with dignity. “I know what I’m about.”

“I begin to doubt. But get on. I’m in a great hurry this morning,” said Bartley.

Morrison seemed to be making a mental examination of his stock of charges, while the strain of keeping his upright position began to tell upon him, and he swayed to and fro against the door. “What’s that word you sent her by my boy, Sat’day night?”

“That she was a smart girl, and would be sure to get on if she was good — or words to that effect. I trust there was no offence in that, Mr. Morrison?”

Morrison surrendered, himself to another season of cogitation, in which he probably found his vagueness growing upon him. He ended by fumbling in all his pockets, and bringing up from the last a crumpled scrap of paper. “What you — what you say that?”

Bartley took the extended scrap with an easy air. “Miss Morrison’s handwriting, I think.” He held it up before him and read aloud, “‘I love my love with an H because he is Handsome.’ This appears to be a confidence of Miss Morrison to her Muse. Whom do you think she refers to, Mr. Morrison?”

“What’s — what’s the first letter your name?” demanded Morrison, with an effort to collect his dispersing severity.

“B,” promptly replied Bartley. “Perhaps this concerns you, Henry. Your name begins with an H.” He passed the paper up over his head to Bird, who took it silently. “You see,” he continued, addressing Bird, but looking at Morrison as he spoke, “Mr. Morrison wishes to convict me of an attempt upon Miss Hannah’s affections. Have you anything else to urge, Mr. Morrison?”

Morrison slid at last from his difficult position into a convenient chair, and struggled to keep himself from doubling forward. “I want know what you mean,” he said, with dogged iteration.

“I’ll show you what I mean,” said Bartley with an ugly quiet, while his mustache began to twitch. He sprang to his feet and seized Morrison by the collar, pulling him up out of the chair till he held him clear of the floor, and opened the door with his other hand. “Don’t show your face here again, — you or your girl either!” Still holding the man by the collar, he pushed him before him through the office, and gave him a final thust out of the outer door.

Bartley returned to his room in a white heat: “Miserable tipsy rascal!” he panted; “I wonder who has set him on to this thing.”

Bird stood pale and silent, still, nolding the crumpled scrap of paper in his hand.

“I shouldn’t be surprised if that impudent little witch herself had put him up to it. She’s capable of it,” said Bartley, fumbling aimlessly about on his table, in his wrath, without looking at Bird.

“It’s a lie!” said Bird.

Bartley started as if the other had struck him, and as he glared at Bird the anger went out of his face for pure amazement. “Are you out of your mind, Henry?” he asked calmly. “Perhaps you’re drunk too, this morning. The Devil seems to have got into pretty much everybody.”

“It’s a lie!” repeated the boy, while the tears sprang to his eyes. “She’s as good a girl as Marcia Gaylord is, any day!”

“Better go away, Henry,” said Bartley, with a deadly sort of gentleness.

“I’m going away,” answered the boy, his face twisted with weeping. “I’ve done my last day’s work for you.” He pulled down his shirt-sleeves, and buttoned them at the wrists, while the tears ran out over his face, — helpless tears, the sign of his womanish tenderness, his womanish weakness.

Bartley continued to glare at him. “Why, I do believe you’re in love with her yourself, you little fool!”

“Oh, I’ve been a fool!” cried Bird. “A fool to think as much of you as I always have, — a fool to believe that you were a gentleman, and wouldn’t take a mean advantage. I was a fool to suppose you wanted to do her any good, when you came praising and flattering her, and turning her head!”

“Well, then,” said Bartley with harsh insolence, “don’t be a fool any longer. If you’re in love with her, you haven’t any quarrel with me, my boy. She flies at higher game than humble newspaper editors. The head of Willett’s lumbering gang is your man; and so you may go and tell that old sot, her father. Why, Henry! You don’t mean to say you care anything for that girl?”

“And do you mean to say you haven’t done everything you could to turn her head since she’s been in this office? She used to like me well enough at school.” All men are blind and jealous children alike, when it comes to question of a woman between them, and this poor boy’s passion was turning him into a tiger. “Don’t come to me with your lies, any more!” Here his rage culminated, and with a blind cry of “Ay!” he struck the paper which he had kept in his hand into Bartley’s face.

The demons, whatever they were, of anger, remorse, pride, shame, were at work in Bartley’s heart too, and he returned the blow as instantly as if Bird’s touch had set the mechanism of his arm in motion. In contempt of the other’s weakness he struck with the flat of his hand; but the blow was enough. Bird fell headlong, and the concussion of his head upon the floor did the rest. He lay senseless.

VII.

Bartley hung over the boy with such a terror in his soul as he had never had before. He believed that he had killed him, and in this conviction came with the simultaneity of events in dreams the sense of all his blame, of which the blow given for a blow seemed the least part. He was not so wrong in that as he was wrong in what led to it. He did not abhor in himself so much the wretch who had struck his brother down as the light and empty fool who had trifled with that silly hoyden. The follies that seemed so amusing and resultless in their time had ripened to this bitter effect, and he knew that he, and not she, was mainly culpable. Her self-betrayal, however it came about, was proof that they were more serious with her than with him, and he could not plead to himself even the poor excuse that his fancy had been caught. Amidst the anguish of his self-condemnation the need to conceal what he had done occurred to him. He had been holding Bird’s head in his arms, and imploring him, “Henry! Henry! wake up!” in a low, husky voice; but now he turned to the door and locked it, and the lie by which he should escape sprang to his tongue. “He died in a fit.” He almost believed it as it murmured itself from his lips. There was no mark, no bruise, nothing to show that he had touched the boy. Suddenly he felt the lie choke him. He pulled down the window to let in the fresh air, and this pure breath of heaven blew into his darkened spirit and lifted there a little the vapors which were thickening in it. The horror of having to tell that lie, even if he should escape by it, all his life long, till he was a gray old man, and to keep the truth forever from his lips, presented itself to him as intolerable slavery. “Oh, my God!” he spoke aloud, “how can I bear that?” And it was in self-pity that he revolted from it. Few men love the truth for its own sake, and Bartley was not one of these; but he practised it because his experience had been that lies were difficult to manage, and that they were a burden on the mind. He was not candid; he did not shun concealments and evasions; but positive lies he had kept from, and now he could not trust one to save his life. He unlocked the door and ran out to find help; he must do that at last; he must do it at any risk; no matter what he said afterward. When our deeds and motives come to be balanced at the last day, let us hope that mercy, and not justice, may prevail.

It must have been mercy that sent the doctor at that moment to the apothecary’s, on the other side of the street, and enabled Bartley to get him up into his office, without publicity or explanation other than that Henry Bird seemed to be in a fit. The doctor lifted the boy’s head, and explored his bosom with his hand.

“Is he — is he dead?” gasped Bartley, and the words came so mechanically from his tongue that he began to believe he had not spoken them, when the doctor answered.

“No! How did this happen? Tell me exactly.”

“We had a quarrel. He struck me. I knocked him down.” Bartley delivered up the truth, as a prisoner of war — or a captive brigand, perhaps — parts with his weapons one by one.

“Very well,” said the doctor. “Get some water.”

Bartley poured some out of the pitcher on his table, and the doctor, wetting his handkerchief, drew it again and again over Bird’s forehead.

“I never meant to hurt him,” said Bartley. “I didn’t even intend to strike him when he hit me.”

“Intentions have very little to do with physical effects,” replied the doctor sharply. “Henry!”

The boy opened his eyes, and, muttering feebly, “My head!” closed them again.

“There’s a concussion here,” said the doctor. “We had better get him home. Drive my sleigh over, will you, from Smith’s.”

Bartley went out into the glare of the sun, which beat upon him like the eye of the world. But the street was really empty, as it often was in the middle of the forenoon at Equity. The apothecary, who saw him untying the doctor’s horse, came to his door, and said jocosely, “Hello, Doc! who’s sick?”

“I am,” said Bartley, solemnly, and the apothecary laughed at his readiness. Bartley drove round to the back of the printing-office, where the farmers delivered his wood. “I thought we could get him out better that way,” he explained, and the doctor, who had to befriend a great many concealments in his practice, silently spared Bartley’s disingenuousness.

The rush of the cold air, as they drove rapidly down the street, with that limp shape between them, revived the boy, and he opened his eyes, and made an effort to hold himself erect, but he could not; and when they got him into the warm room at home, he fainted again. His mother had met them at the door of her poor little house, without any demonstration of grief or terror; she was far too well acquainted in her widowhood — bereft of all her children but this son — with sickness and death, to show even surprise, if she felt it. When Bartley broke out into his lamentable confession, “Oh, Mrs. Bird! this is my work!” she only wrung her hands and answered, “Your work! Oh, Mr. Hubbard, he thought the world of you!” and did not ask him how or why he had done it. After they had got Henry on the bed, Bartley was no longer of use there; but they let him remain in the corner into which he had shrunk, and from which he watched all that went on, with a dry mouth and faltering breath. It began to appear to him that he was very young to be involved in a misfortune like this; he did not understand why it should have happened to him; but he promised himself that, if Henry lived, he would try to be a better man in every way.

After he had lost all hope, the time seemed so long, the boy on the bed opened his eyes once more, and looked round, while Bartley still sat with his face in his hands. “Where — where is Mr. Hubbard?” he faintly asked, with a bewildered look at his mother and the doctor.

Bartley heard the weak voice, and staggered forward, and fell on his knees beside the bed. “Here, here! Here I am, Henry! Oh, Henry, I didn’t intend—” He stopped at the word, and hid his face in the coverlet.

The boy lay as if trying to make out what had happened, and the doctor told him that he had fainted. After a time, he put out his hand and laid it on Bartley’s head. “Yes; but I don’t understand what makes him cry.”

They looked at Bartley, who had lifted his head, and he went over the whole affair, except so far as it related to Hannah Morrison; he did not spare himself; he had often found that strenuous self-condemnation moved others to compassion; and besides, it was his nature to seek the relief of full confession. But Henry heard him through with a blank countenance. “Don’t you remember?” Bartley implored at last.

“No, I don’t remember. I only remember that there seemed to be something the matter with my head this morning.”

“That was the trouble with me, too,” said Bartley. “I must have been crazy — I must have been insane — when I struck you. I can’t account for it.”

“I don’t remember it,” answered the boy.

“That’s all right,” said the doctor. “Don’t try. I guess you better let him alone, now,” he added to Bartley, with such a significant look that the young man retired from the bedside, and stood awkwardly apart. “He’ll get along. You needn’t be anxious about leaving him. He’ll be better alone.”

There was no mistaking this hint. “Well, well!” said Bartley, humbly, “I’ll go. But I’d rather stay and watch with him, — I sha’n’t eat or sleep till he’s on foot again. And I can’t leave till you tell me that you forgive me, Mrs. Bird. I never dreamed — I didn’t intend—” He could not go on.

“I don’t suppose you meant to hurt Henry,” said the mother. “You always pretended to be so fond of him, and he thought the world of you. But I don’t see how you could do it. I presume it was all right.”

“No, it was all wrong, — or so nearly all wrong that I must ask your forgiveness on that ground. I loved him, — I thought the world of him, too. I’d ten thousand times rather have hurt myself,” pleaded Bartley. “Don’t let me go till you say that you forgive me.”

“I’ll see how Henry gets along,” said Mrs. Bird. “I don’t know as I could rightly say I forgive you just yet.” Doubtless she was dealing conscientiously with herself and with him. “I like to be sure of a thing when I say it,” she added.

The doctor followed him into the hall, and Bartley could not help turning to him for consolation. “I think Mrs. Bird is very unjust, Doctor. I’ve done everything I could, and said everything to explain the matter; and I’ve blamed myself where I can’t feel that I was to blame; and yet you see how she holds out against me.”

“I dare say,” answered the doctor dryly, “she’ll feel differently, as she says, if the boy gets along.”

Bartley dropped his hat to the floor. “Get along! Why — why you think he’ll get well now, don’t you, Doctor?”

“Oh, yes; I was merely using her words. He’ll get well.”

“And — and it wont affect his mind, will it? I thought it was very strange, his not remembering anything about it—”

“That’s a very common phenomenon,” said the doctor. “The patient usually forgets everything that occurred for some little time before the accident, in cases of concussion of the brain.” Bartley shuddered at the phrase, but he could not ask anything further. “What I wanted to say to you,” continued the doctor, “was that this may be a long thing, and there may have to be an inquiry into it. You’re lawyer enough to understand what that means. I should have to testify to what I know, and I only know what you told me.”

“Why, you don’t doubt—”

“No, sir; I’ve no reason to suppose you haven’t told me the truth, as far as it goes. If you have thought it advisable to keep anything back from me, you may wish to tell the whole story to an attorney.”

“I haven’t kept anything back, Doctor Wills,” said Bartley. “I’ve told you everything — everything that concerned the quarrel. That drunken old scoundrel of a Morrison got us into it. He accused me of making love to his daughter; and Henry was jealous — I never knew he cared anything for her. I hated to tell you this before his mother. But this is the whole truth, so help me God.”

“I supposed it was something of the kind,” replied the doctor. “I’m sorry for you. You can’t keep it from having an ugly look if it gets out; and it may have to be made public. I advise you to go and see Squire Gaylord; he’s always stood your friend.”

“I — I was just going there,” said Bartley; and this was true.

Through all, he had felt the need of some sort of retrieval, — of re-establishing himself in his own esteem by some signal stroke; and he could think of but one thing. It was not his fault if he believed that this must combine self-sacrifice with safety, and the greatest degree of humiliation with the largest sum of consolation. He was none the less resolved not to spare himself at all in offering to release Marcia from her engagement. The fact that he must now also see her father upon the legal aspect of his case certainly complicated the affair, and detracted from its heroic quality. He could not tell which to see first, for he naturally wished his action to look as well as possible; and if he went first to Marcia, and she condemned him, he did not know in what figure he should approach her father. If, on the other hand, he went first to Squire Gaylord, the old lawyer might insist that the engagement was already at an end by Bartley’s violent act, and might well refuse to let a man in his position even see his daughter. He lagged heavy-heartedly up the middle of the street, and left the question to solve itself at the last moment. But when he reached Squire Gaylord’s gate, it seemed to him that it would be easier to face the father first; and this would be the right way too.

He turned aside to the little office, and opened the door without knocking, and as he stood with the knob in his hand, trying to habituate his eyes, full of the snow-glare, to the dimmer light within, he heard a rapturous cry of “Why Bartley!” and he felt Marcia’s arms flung around his neck. His burdened heart yearned upon her with a tenderness he had not known before; he realized the preciousness of an embrace that might be the last; but he dared not put down his lips to hers. She pushed back her head in a little wonder, and saw the haggardness of his face, while he discovered her father looking at them. How strong and pure the fire in her must be when her father’s presence could not abash her from this betrayal of her love! Bartley sickened, and he felt her arms slip from his neck. “Why — why — what is the matter?”

In spite of some vaguely magnanimous intention to begin at the beginning, and tell the whole affair just as it happened, Bartley found himself wishing to put the best face on it at first, and trust to chances to make it all appear well. He did not speak at once, and Marcia pressed him into a chair, and then, like an eager child, who will not let its friend escape till it has been told what it wishes to know, she set herself on his knee, and put her hand on his shoulder. He looked at her father, not at her, while he spoke hoarsely: “I have had trouble with Henry Bird, Squire Gaylord, and I’ve come to tell you about it.”

The old squire did not speak, but Marcia repeated in amazement, “With Henry Bird?”

“He struck me—”

“Henry Bird struck you!” cried the girl. “I should like to know why Henry Bird struck you, when you’ve made so much of him, and he’s always pretended to be so grateful—”

Bartley still looked at her father. “And I struck him back.”

“You did perfectly right, Bartley,” exclaimed Marcia, “and I should have despised you if you had let any one run over you. Struck you! I declare—”

He did not heed her, but continued to look at her father. “I didn’t intend to hurt him, — I hit him with my open hand, — but he fell and struck his head on the floor. I’m afraid it hurt him pretty badly.” He felt the pang that thrilled through the girl at his words, and her hand trembled on his shoulder; but she did not take it away.

The old man came forward from the pile of books which he and Marcia had been dusting, and sat down in a chair on the other side of the stove. He pushed back his hat from his forehead, and asked drily, “What commenced it?”

Bartley hesitated. It was this part of the affair which he would rather have imparted to Marcia after seeing it with her father’s eyes, or possibly, if her father viewed it favorably, have had him tell her. The old man noticed his reluctance. “Hadn’t you better go into the house, Marsh?”

She merely gave him a look of utter astonishment for answer, and did not move. He laughed noiselessly, and said to Bartley, “Go on.”

“It was that drunken old scoundrel of a Morrison who began it!” cried Bartley, in angry desperation. Marcia dropped her hand from his shoulder, while her father worked his jaws upon the bit of stick he had picked up from the pile of wood, and put between his teeth. “You know that whenever he gets on a spree he comes to the office and wants Hannah’s wages raised.”

Marcia sprang to her feet. “Oh, I knew it! I knew it! I told you she would get you into trouble! I told you so!” She stood clinching her hands, and her father bent his keen scrutiny first upon her, and then upon the frowning face with which Bartley regarded her.

“Did he come to have her wages raised to-day?”

“No.”

“What did he come for?” He involuntarily assumed the attitude of a lawyer crossquestioning a slippery witness.

“He came for — He came — He accused me of — He said I had — made love to his confounded girl.”

Marcia gasped.

“What made him think you had?”

“It wasn’t necessary for him to have any reason. He was drunk. I had been kind to the girl, and favored her all I could, because she seemed to be anxious to do her work well; and I praised her for trying.”

“Um-umph,” commented the Squire. “And that made Henry Bird jealous?”

“It seems that he was fond of her. I never dreamed of such a thing, and when I put old Morrison out of the office, and came back, he called me a liar, and struck me in the face.” He did not lift his eyes to the level of Marcia’s, who in her gray dress stood there like a gray shadow, and did not stir or speak.

“And you never had made up to the girl at all?”

“No.”

“Kissed her, I suppose, now and then?” suggested the Squire.

Bartley did not reply.

“Flattered her up, and told how much you thought of her, occasionally?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with it,” said Bartley with a sulky defiance.

“No, I suppose it’s what you’d do with most any pretty girl,” returned the Squire. He was silent awhile. “And so you knocked Henry down. What happened then?”

“I tried to bring him to, and then I went for the doctor. He revived, and we got him home to his mother’s. The doctor says he will get well; but he advised me to come and see you.”

“Any witnesses of the assault?”

“No; we were alone in my own room.”

“Told any one else about it?”

“I told the doctor and Mrs. Bird. Henry couldn’t remember it at all.”

“Couldn’t remember about Morrison, or what made him mad at you?”

“Nothing.”

“And that’s all about it?”

“Yes.”

The two men had talked across the stove at each other, practically ignoring the girl, who stood apart from them, gray in the face as her dress, and suppressing a passion which had turned her as rigid as stone.

“Now, Marcia,” said her father, kindly, “better go into the house. That’s all there is of it.”

“No, that isn’t all,” she answered. “Give me my ring, Bartley. Here’s yours.” She slipped it off her finger, and put it into his mechanically extended hand.

“Marcia!” he implored, confronting her.

“Give me my ring, please.”

He obeyed, and put it into her hand. She slipped it back on the finger from which she had so fondly suffered him to take it yesterday, and replace it with his own.

“I’ll go into the house now, father. Good by, Bartley.” Her eyes were perfectly clear and dry, and her voice controlled; and as he stood passive before her, she took him round the neck, and pressed against his face, once, and twice, and thrice, her own gray face, in which all love, and unrelenting, and despair, were painted. Once and again she held him, and looked him in the eyes, as if to be sure it was he. Then, with a last pressure of her face to his, she released him, and passed out of the door.

“She’s been talking about you, here, all the morning,” said the Squire, with a sort of quiet absence, as if nothing in particular had happened, and he were commenting on a little fact that might possibly interest Bartley. He ruminated upon the fragment of wood in his mouth awhile before he added: “I guess she won’t want to talk about you any more. I drew you out a little on that Hannah Morrison business, because I wanted her to understand just what kind of fellow you were. You see it isn’t the trouble you’ve got into with Henry Bird that’s killed her; it’s the cause of the trouble. I guess if it had been anything else, she’d have stood by you. But you see that’s the one thing she couldn’t bear, and I’m glad it’s happened now instead of afterwards: I guess you’re one of that kind, Mr. Hubbard.”

“Squire Gaylord!” cried Bartley, “upon my sacred word of honor, there isn’t any more of this thing than I’ve told you. And I think it’s pretty hard to be thrown over for — for—”

“Fooling with a pretty girl, when you get a chance, and the girl seems to like it? Yes, it is rather hard. And I suppose you haven’t even seen her since you were engaged to Marcia?”

“Of course not! That is—”

“It’s a kind of retroactive legislation on Marcia’s part,” said the Squire, rubbing his chin, “and that’s against one of the first principles of law. But women don’t seem to be able to grasp that idea. They’re queer about some things. They appear to think they marry a man’s whole life, — his past as well as his future, — and that makes ’em particular. And they distinguish between different kinds of men. You’ll find ’em pinning their faith to a fellow who’s been through pretty much everything, and swearing by him from the word go; and another chap, who’s never done anything very bad, they won’t trust half a minute out of their sight. Well, I guess Marcia is of rather a jealous disposition,” he concluded, as if Bartley had urged this point.

“She’s very unjust to me,” Bartley began.

“Oh, yes, — she’s unjust,” said her father. “I don’t deny that. But it wouldn’t be any use talking to her. She’d probably turn round with some excuse about what she had suffered, and that would be the end of it. She would say that she couldn’t go through it again. Well, it ought to be a comfort to you to think you don’t care a great deal about it.”

“But I do care!” exclaimed Bartley. “I care all the world for it. I—”

“Since when?” interrupted the Squire. “Do you mean to say that you didn’t know till you asked her yesterday that Marcia was in love with you?”

Bartley was silent.

“I guess you knew it as much as a year ago, didn’t you? Everybody else did. But you’d just as soon it had been Hannah Morrison, or any other pretty girl. You didn’t care! But Marcia did, you see. She wasn’t one of the kind that let any good-looking fellow make love to them. It was because it was you; and you knew it. We’re plain men, Mr. Hubbard; and I guess you’ll get over this, in time. I shouldn’t wonder if you began to mend, right away.”

Bartley found himself helpless in the face of this passionless sarcasm. He could have met stormy indignation or any sort of invective in kind; but the contemptuous irony with which his pretensions were treated, the cold scrutiny with which his motives were searched, was something he could not meet. He tried to pull himself together for some sort of protest, but he ended by hanging his head in silence. He always believed that Squire Gaylord had liked him, and here he was treating him like his bitterest enemy, and seeming to enjoy his misery. He could not understand it; he thought it extremely unjust, and past all the measure of his offence. This was true, perhaps: but it is doubtful if Bartley would have accepted any suffering, no matter how nicely proportioned, in punishment of his wrong-doing. He sat hanging his head, and taking his pain in rebellious silence, with a gathering hate in his heart for the old man.

“M-well!” said the Squire, at last, rising from his chair, “I guess I must be going.”

Bartley sprang to his feet aghast. “You’re not going to leave me in the lurch, are you? You’re not—”

“Oh, I shall take care of you, young man, — don’t be afraid. I’ve stood your friend too long, and your name’s been mixed up too much with my girl’s, for me to let you come to shame openly, if I can help it. I’m going to see Dr. Wills about you, and I’m going to see Mrs. Bird, and try to patch it up somehow.”

“And — and — where shall I go?” gasped Bartley.

“You might go to the Devil, for all I cared for you,” said the old man, with the contempt which he no longer cared to make ironical. “But I guess you better go back to your office, and go to work as if nothing had happened — till something does happen. I shall close the paper out as soon as I can. I was thinking of doing that just before you came in. I was thinking of taking you into the law business with me. Marcia and I were talking about it here. But I guess you wouldn’t like the idea now.”

He seemed to get a bitter satisfaction out of these mockeries, from which, indeed, he must have suffered quite as much as Bartley. But he ended, sadly and almost compassionately, with, “Come, come! You must start some time.” And Bartley dragged his leaden weight out of the door. The Squire closed it after him; but he did not accompany him down the street. It was plain that he did not wish to be any longer alone with Bartley, and the young man suspected, with a sting of shame, that he scorned to be seen with him.

VIII.

The more Bartley dwelt upon his hard case, during the week that followed, the more it appeared to him that he was punished out of all proportion to his offence. He was in no mood to consider such mercies as that he had been spared from seriously hurting Bird; and that Squire Gaylord and Doctor Wills had united with Henry’s mother in saving him from open disgrace. The physician, indeed, had perhaps indulged a professional passion for hushing the matter up, rather than any pity for Bartley. He probably had the scientific way of looking at such questions; and saw much physical cause for moral effects. He refrained, with the physician’s reticence, from inquiring into the affair; but he would not have thought Bartley without excuse under the circumstances. In regard to the relative culpability in matters of the kind, his knowledge of women enabled him to take much the view of the woman’s share that other women take.

But Bartley was ignorant of the doctor’s leniency, and associated him with Squire Gaylord in the feeling that made his last week in Equity a period of social outlawry. There were moments in which he could not himself escape the same point of view. He could rebel against the severity of the condemnation he had fallen under in the eyes of Marcia and her father; he could, in the light of example and usage, laugh at the notion of harm in his behavior to Hannah Morrison; yet he found himself looking at it as a treachery to Marcia. Certainly, she had no right to question his conduct before his engagement. Yet, if he knew that Marcia loved him, and was waiting with life-and-death anxiety for some word of love from him, it was cruelly false to play with another at the passion which was such a tragedy to her. This was the point that, put aside however often, still presented itself, and its recurrence, if he could have known it, was mercy and reprieve from the only source out of which these could come.

Hannah Morrison did not return to the printing-office, and Bird was still sick, though it was now only a question of time when he should be out again. Bartley visited him some hours every day, and sat and suffered under the quiet condemnation of his mother’s eyes. She had kept Bartley’s secret with the same hardness with which she had refused him her forgiveness, and the village had settled down into an ostensible acceptance of the theory of a faint as the beginning of Bird’s sickness, with such other conjectures as the doctor freely permitted each to form. Bartley found his chief consolation in the work which kept him out of the way of a great deal of question. He worked far into the night, as he must, to make up for the force that was withdrawn from the office. At the same time he wrote more than ever in the paper, and he discovered in himself that dual life of which every one who sins or sorrows is sooner or later aware: that strange separation of the intellectual activity from the suffering of the soul, by which the mind toils on in a sort of ironical indifference to the pangs that wring the heart; the realization that, in some ways, his brain can get on perfectly well without his conscience.

There was a great deal of sympathy felt for Bartley at this time, and his popularity in Equity was never greater than now when his life there was drawing to a close. The spectacle of his diligence was so impressive that when, on the following Sunday, the young minister who had succeeded to the pulpit of the orthodox church preached a sermon on the beauty of industry from the text “Consider the lilies,” there were many who said that they thought of Bartley the whole while, and one — a lady — asked Mr. Savin if he did not have Mr. Hubbard in mind in the picture he drew of the Heroic Worker. They wished that Bartley could have heard that sermon.

Marcia had gone away early in the week to visit in the town where she used to go to school, and Bartley took her going away as a sign that she wished to put herself wholly beyond his reach, or any danger of relenting at sight of him. He talked with no one about her; and going and coming irregularly to his meals, and keeping himself shut up in his room when he was not at work, he left people very little chance to talk with him. But they conjectured that he and Marcia had an understanding; and some of the ladies used such scant opportunity as he gave them to make sly allusions to her absence and his desolate condition. They were confirmed in their surmise by the fact, known from actual observation, that Bartley had not spoken a word to any other young lady since Marcia went away.

“Look here, my friend,” said the philosopher from, the logging-camp, when he came in for his paper on the Tuesday afternoon following, “seems to me from what I hear tell around here, you’re tryin’ to kill yourself on this newspaper. Now, it won’t do; I tell you it won’t do.”

Bartley was addressing for the mail the papers which one of the girls was folding. “What are you going to do about it?” he demanded of his sympathizer with whimsical sullenness, not troubling himself to look up at him.

“Well, I haint exactly settled yet,” replied the philosopher, who was of a tall, lank figure, and of a mighty brown beard. “But I’ve been around pretty much everywhere, and I find that about the poorest use you can put a man to is to kill him.”

“It depends a good deal on the man,” said Bartley. “But that’s stale, Kinney. It’s the old formula of the anti-capital-punishment fellows. Try something else. They’re not talking of hanging me yet.” He kept on writing, and the philosopher stood over him with a humorous twinkle of enjoyment at Bartley’s readiness.

“Well, I’ll allow it’s old,” he admitted. “So’s Homer.”

“Yes; but you don’t pretend that you wrote Homer.”

Kinney laughed mightily; then he leaned forward, and slapped Bartley on the shoulder with his newspaper. “Look here!” he exclaimed, “I like you!”

“Oh, try some other tack! Lots of fellows like me.” Bartley kept on writing. “I gave you your paper, didn’t I, Kinney?”

“You mean that you want me to get out?”

“Far be it from me to say so.”

This delighted Kinney as much as the last refinement of hospitality would have pleased another man. “Look here!” he said, “I want you should come out and see our camp. I can’t fool away any more time on you here; but I want you should come out and see us. Give you something to write about. Hey?”

“The invitation comes at a time when circumstances over which I have no control oblige me to decline it. I admire your prudence, Kinney.”

“No, honest Injian, now,” protested Kinney. “Take a day off, and fill up with dead advertisements. That’s the way they used to do out in Alkali City when they got short of help on the Eagle, and we liked it just as well.”

“Now you are talking sense,” said Bartley, looking up at him. “How far is it to your settlement?”

“Two miles, if you’re goin’; three and a half, if you aint.”

“When are you coming in?”

“I’m in, now.”

“I can’t go with you to-day.”

“Well, how’ll to-morrow morning suit?”

“To-morrow morning will suit,” said Bartley.

“All right. If anybody comes to see the editor to-morrow morning, Marilla,” said Kinney to the girl, “you tell ’em he’s sick, and gone a-loggin’, and won’t be back till Saturday. Say,” he added, laying his hand on Bartley’s shoulder, “you aint foolin’?”

“If I am,” replied Bartley, “just mention it.”

“Good!” said Kinney. “To-morrow it is, then.”

Bartley finished addressing the newspapers, and then he put them up in wrappers and packages for the mail. “You can go, now, Marilla,” he said to the girl. “I’ll leave some copy for you and Kitty; you’ll find it on my table in the morning.”

“All right,” answered the girl.

Bartley went to his supper, which he ate with more relish than he had felt for his meals since his troubles began, and he took part in the supper-table talk with something of his old audacity. The change interested the lady boarders, and they agreed that he must have had a letter. He returned to his office, and worked till nine o’clock, writing and selecting matter out of his exchanges. He spent most of the time in preparing the funny column, which was a favorite feature in the Free Press. Then he put the copy where the girls would find it in the morning, and, leaving the door unlocked, took his way up the street toward Squire Gaylord’s.

He knew that he should find the lawyer in his office, and he opened the office door without knocking, and went in. He had not met Squire Gaylord since the morning of his dismissal, and the old man had left him for the past eight days without any sign as to what he expected of Bartley, or of what he intended to do in his affair.

They looked at each other, but exchanged no sort of greeting, as Bartley, unbidden, took a chair on the opposite side of the stove; the Squire did not put down the book he had been reading.

“I’ve come to see what you’re going to do about the Free Press,” said Bartley.

The old man rubbed his bristling jaw, that seemed even lanker than when Bartley saw it last. He waited almost a minute before he replied, “I don’t know as I’ve got any call to tell you.”

“Then I’ll tell you what I’m going to do about it,” retorted Bartley. “I’m going to leave it. I’ve done my last day’s work on that paper. Do you think,” he cried, angrily, “that I’m going to keep on in the dark, and let you consult your pleasure as to my future? No, sir! You don’t know your man quite, Mr. Gaylord!”

“You’ve got over your scare,” said the lawyer.

“I’ve got over my scare,” Bartley retorted.

“And you think, because you’re not afraid any longer, that you’re out of danger. I know my man as well as you do, I guess.”

“If you think I care for the danger, I don’t. You may do what you please. Whatever you do, I shall know it isn’t out of kindness for me. I didn’t believe from the first that the law could touch me, and I wasn’t uneasy on that account. But I didn’t want to involve myself in a public scandal, for Miss Gaylord’s sake. Miss Gaylord has released me from any obligations to her; and now you may go ahead and do what you like.” Each of the men knew how much truth there was in this; but for the moment in his anger, Bartley believed himself sincere, and there is no question but his defiance was so. Squire Gaylord made him no answer, and after a minute of expectation Bartley added, “At any rate, I’ve done with the Free Press. I advise you to stop the paper, and hand the office over to Henry Bird, when he gets about. I’m going out to Willett’s logging-camp tomorrow, and I’m coming back to Equity on Saturday. You’ll know where to find me till then, and after that you may look me up if you want me.”

He rose to go, but stopped with his hand on the door-knob, at a sound, preliminary to speaking, which the old man made in his throat. Bartley stopped, hoping for a further pretext of quarrel, but the lawyer merely asked, “Where’s the key?”

“It’s in the office door.”

The old man now looked at him as if he no longer saw him, and Bartley went out, balked of his purpose in part, and in that degree so much the more embittered.

Squire Gaylord remained an hour longer; then he blew out his lamp, and left the little office for the night. A light was burning in the kitchen, and he made his way round to the back door of the house, and let himself in. His wife was there, sitting before the stove, in those last delicious moments before going to bed, when all the house is mellowed to such a warmth that it seems hard to leave it to the cold and dark. In this poor lady, who had so long denied herself spiritual comfort, there was a certain obscure luxury: she liked little dainties of the table; she liked soft warmth, an easy cushion. It was doubtless in the disintegration of the finer qualities of her nature, that, as they grew older together, she threw more and more the burden of acute feeling upon her husband, to whose doctrine of life she had submitted, but had never been reconciled. Marriage is, with all its disparities, a much more equal thing than appears, and the meek little wife, who has all the advantage of public sympathy, knows her power over her oppressor, and at some tender spot in his affections or his nerves can inflict an anguish that will avenge her for years of coarser aggression. Thrown in upon herself in so vital a matter as her religion, Mrs. Gaylord had involuntarily come to live largely for herself, though her talk was always of her husband. She gave up for him, as she believed, her soul’s salvation, but she held him to account for the uttermost farthing of the price. She padded herself round at every point where she could have suffered through her sensibilities, and lived soft and snug in the shelter of his iron will and indomitable courage. It was not apathy that she had felt when their children died one after another, but an obscure and formless exultation that Mr. Gaylord would suffer enough for both.

Marcia was the youngest, and her mother left her training almost wholly to her father; she sometimes said that she never supposed the child would live. She did not actually urge this in excuse, but she had the appearance of doing so; and she held aloof from them both in their mutual relations, with mildly critical reserves. They spoiled each other, as father and daughter are apt to do when left to themselves. What was good in the child certainly received no harm from his indulgence; and what was naughty was after all not so very naughty. She was passionate, but she was generous; and if she showed a jealous temperament that must hereafter make her unhappy, for the time being it charmed and flattered her father to have her so fond of him that she could not endure any rivalry in his affection.

Her education proceeded fitfully. He would not let her be forced to household tasks that she disliked; and as a little girl she went to school chiefly because she liked to go, and not because she would have been obliged to it if she had not chosen. When she grew older, she wished to go away to school, and her father allowed her; he had no great respect for boarding-schools, but if Marcia wanted to try it, he was willing to humor the joke.

What resulted was a great proficiency in the things that pleased her, and ignorance of the other things. Her father bought her a piano, on which she did not play much, and he bought her whatever dresses she fancied. He never came home from a journey without bringing her something; and he liked to take her with him when he went away to other places. She had been several times at Portland, and once at Montreal; he was very proud of her; he could not see that any one was better-looking, or dressed any better than his girl.

He came into the kitchen, and sat down with his hat on, and, taking his chin between his fingers, moved uneasily about on his chair.

“What’s brought you in so early?” asked his wife.

“Well, I got through,” he briefly explained. After a while he said, “Bartley Hubbard’s been out there.”

“You don’t mean ‘t he knew she—”

“No, he didn’t know anything about that. He came to tell me he was going away.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re going to do, Mr. Gaylord,” said his wife, shifting the responsibility wholly upon him. “‘D he seem to want to make it up?”

“M-no!” said the Squire, “he was on his high horse. He knows he aint in any danger now.”

“Aint you afraid she’ll carry on dreadfully, when she finds out ‘t he’s gone for good?” asked Mrs. Gaylord, with a sort of implied satisfaction that the carrying on was not to affect her.

“M-yes,” said the Squire, “I suppose she’ll carry on. But I don’t know what to do about it. Sometimes I almost wish I’d tried to make it up between ’em that day; but I thought she’d better see, once for all, what sort of man she was going in for, if she married him. It’s too late now to do anything. The fellow came in to-night for a quarrel, and nothing else; I could see that; and I didn’t give him any chance.”

“You feel sure,” asked Mrs. Gaylord, impartially, “that Marcia wa’n’t too particular?”

“No, Miranda, I don’t feel sure of anything, except that it’s past your bed-time. You better go. I’ll sit up awhile yet. I came in because I couldn’t settle my mind to anything out there.”

He took off his hat in token of his intending to spend the rest of the evening at home, and put it on the table at his elbow.

His wife sewed at the mending in her lap, without offering to act upon his suggestion. “It’s plain to be seen that she can’t get along without him.”

“She’ll have to, now,” replied the Squire.

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Gaylord, softly, “that she’ll be down sick. She don’t look as if she’d slept any great deal since she’s been gone. I d’ know as I like very much to see her looking the way she does. I guess you’ve got to take her off somewheres.”

“Why, she’s just been off, and couldn’t stay!”

“That’s because she thought he was here yet. But if he’s gone, it won’t be the same thing.”

“Well, we’ve got to fight it out, some way,” said the Squire. “It wouldn’t do to give in to it now. It always was too much of a one-sided thing, at the best; and if we tried now to mend it up, it would be ridiculous. I don’t believe he would come back at all, now, and if he did, he wouldn’t come back on any equal terms. He’d want to have everything his own way. M-no!” said the Squire, as if confirming himself in a conclusion often reached already in his own mind, “I saw by the way he began to-night that there wasn’t anything to be done with him. It was fight from the word go.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Gaylord, with gentle, sceptical interest in the outcome, “if you’ve made up your mind to that, I hope you’ll be able to carry it through.”

“That’s what I’ve made up my mind to,” said her husband.

Mrs. Gaylord rolled up the sewing in her work-basket, and packed it away against the side, bracing it with several pairs of newly darned socks and stockings neatly folded one into the other. She took her time for this, and when she rose at last to go out, with her basket in her hand, the door opened in her face, and Marcia entered. Mrs. Gaylord shrank back, and then slipped round behind her daughter and vanished. The girl took no notice of her mother, but went and sat down on her father’s knee, throwing her arms round his neck, and dropping her haggard face on his shoulder. She had arrived at home a few hours earlier, having driven over from a station ten miles distant, on a road that did not pass near Equity. After giving as much of a shock to her mother’s mild nature as it was capable of receiving by her unexpected return, she had gone to her own room, and remained ever since without seeing her father. He put up his thin old hand and passed it over her hair, but it was long before either of them spoke.

At last Marcia lifted her head, and looked her father in the face with a smile so pitiful that he could not bear to meet it. “Well, father?” she said.

“Well, Marsh,” he answered huskily. “What do you think of me now?”

“I’m glad to have you back again,” he replied.

“You know why I came?”

“Yes, I guess I know.”

She put down her head again, and moaned and cried, “Father! Father!” with dry sobs. When she looked up, confronting him with her tearless eyes, “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she demanded desolately.

He tried to clear his throat to speak, but it required more than one effort to bring the words. “I guess you better go along with me up to Boston. I’m going up the first of the week.”

“No,” she said quietly.

“The change would do you good. It’s a long while since you’ve been away from home,” her father urged.

She looked at him in sad reproach of his uncandor. “You know there’s nothing the matter with me, father. You know what the trouble is.” He was silent. He could not face the trouble. “I’ve heard people talk of a heartache,” she went on. “I never believed there was really such a thing. But I know there is, now. There’s a pain here.” She pressed her hand against her breast. “It’s sore with aching. What shall I do? I shall have to live through it somehow.”

“If you don’t feel exactly well,” said her father “I guess you better see the doctor.”

“What shall I tell him is the matter with me? That I want Bartley Hubbard?” He winced at the words, but she did not. “He knows that already. Everybody in town does. It’s never been any secret. I couldn’t hide it, from the first day I saw him. I’d just as lief as not they should say I was dying for him. I shall not care what they say when I’m dead.”

“You’d oughtn’t, — you’d oughtn’t to talk that way, Marcia,” said her father, gently.

“What difference?” she demanded, scornfully. There was truly no difference, so far as concerned any creed of his, and he was too honest to make further pretence. “What shall I do?” she went on again. “I’ve thought of praying; but what would be the use?”

“I’ve never denied that there was a God, Marcia,” said her father.

“Oh, I know. That kind of God! Well, well! I know that I talk like a crazy person! Do you suppose it was providential, my being with you in the office that morning when Bartley came in?”

“No,” said her father, “I don’t. I think it was an accident.”

“Mother said it was providential, my finding him out before it was too late.”

“I think it was a good thing. The fellow has the making of a first-class scoundrel in him.”

“Do you think he’s a scoundrel now?” she asked quietly.

“He hasn’t had any great opportunity yet,” said the old man, conscientiously sparing him.

“Well, then, I’m sorry I found him out. Yes! If I hadn’t, I might have married him, and perhaps if I had died soon I might never have found him out. He could have been good to me a year or two, and then, if I died, I should have been safe. Yes, I wish he could have deceived me till after we were married. Then I couldn’t have borne to give him up, may be.”

“You would have given him up, even then. And that’s the only thing that reconciles me to it now. I’m sorry for you, my girl; but you’d have made me sorrier then. Sooner or later he’d have broken your heart.”

“He’s broken it now,” said the girl, calmly.

“Oh, no, he hasn’t,” replied her father, with a false cheerfulness that did not deceive her. “You’re young and you’ll get over it. I mean to take you away from here for a while. I mean to take you up to Boston, and on to New York. I shouldn’t care if we went as far as Washington. I guess, when you’ve seen a little more of the world, you won’t think Bartley Hubbard’s the only one in it.”

She looked at him so intently that he thought she must be pleased at his proposal. “Do you think I could get him back?” she asked.

Her father lost his patience; it was a relief to be angry. “No, I don’t think so. I know you couldn’t. And you ought to be ashamed of mentioning such a thing!”

“Oh, ashamed! No, I’ve got past that. I have no shame any more where he’s concerned. Oh, I’d give the world if I could call him back, — if I could only undo what I did! I was wild; I wasn’t reasonable; I wouldn’t listen to him. I drove him away without giving him a chance to say a word! Of course, he must hate me now. What makes you think he wouldn’t come back?” she asked.

“I know he wouldn’t,” answered her father, with a sort of groan. “He’s going to leave Equity for one thing, and—”

“Going to leave Equity,” she repeated, absently Then he felt her tremble. “How do you know he’s going?” She turned upon her father, and fixed him sternly with her eyes.

“Do you suppose he would stay, after what’s happened, any longer than he could help?”

“How do you know he’s going?” she repeated.

“He told me.”

She stood up. “He told you? When?”

“To-night.”

“Why, where — where did you see him?” she whispered.

“In the office.”

“Since — since — I came? Bartley been here! And you didn’t tell me, — you didn’t let me know?” They looked at each other in silence. At last, “When is he going?” she asked.

“To-morrow morning.”

She sat down in the chair which her mother had left, and clutched the back of another, on which her fingers opened and closed convulsively, while she caught her breath in irregular gasps. She broke into a low moaning, at last, the expression of abject defeat in the struggle she had waged with herself. Her father watched her with dumb compassion. “Better go to bed, Marcia,” he said, with the same dry calm as if he had been sending her away after some pleasant evening which she had suffered to run too far into the night.

“Don’t you think — don’t you think — he’ll have to see you again before he goes?” she made out to ask.

“No; he’s finished up with me,” said the old man.

“Well, then,” she cried, desperately, “you’ll have to go to him, father, and get him to come! I can’t help it! I can’t give him up! You’ve got to go to him, now, father, — yes, yes, you have! You’ve got to go and tell him. Go and get him to come, for mercy’s sake! Tell him that I’m sorry, — that I beg his pardon, — that I didn’t think — I didn’t understand, — that I knew he didn’t do anything wrong—” She rose, and, placing her hand on her father’s shoulder, accented each entreaty with a little push.

He looked up into her face with a haggard smile of sympathy. “You’re crazy, Marcia,” he said, gently.

“Don’t laugh!” she cried. “I’m not crazy now. But I was, then, — yes, stark, staring crazy. Look here, father! I want to tell you, — I want to explain to you!” She dropped upon his knee again, and tremblingly passed her arm round his neck. “You see, I had just told him the day before that I shouldn’t care for anything that happened before we were engaged, and then at the very first thing I went and threw him off! And I had no right to do it. He knows that, and that’s what makes him so hard towards me. But if you go and tell him that I see now I was all wrong, and that I beg his pardon, and then ask him to give me one more trial, just one more — You can do as much as that for me, can’t you?”

“Oh, you poor, crazy girl!” groaned her father. “Don’t you see that the trouble is in what the fellow is, and not in any particular thing that he’s done? He’s a scamp, through and through; and he’s all the more a scamp when he doesn’t know it. He hasn’t got the first idea of anything but selfishness.”

“No, no! Now, I’ll tell you, — now, I’ll prove it to you. That very Sunday when we were out riding together; and we met her and her mother, and their sleigh upset, and he had to lift her back; and it made me wild to see him, and I wouldn’t hardly touch him or speak to him afterwards, he didn’t say one angry word to me. He just pulled me up to him, and wouldn’t let me be mad; and he said that night he didn’t mind it a bit because it showed how much I liked him. Now, doesn’t that prove he’s good, — a good deal better than I am, and that he’ll forgive me, if you’ll go and ask him? I know he isn’t in bed yet; he always sits up late, — he told me so; and you’ll find him there in his room. Go straight to his room, father; don’t let anybody see you down in the office; I couldn’t bear it; and slip out with him as quietly as you can. But, oh, do hurry now! Don’t lose another minute!”

The wild joy sprang into her face, as her father rose; a joy that it was terrible to him to see die out of it as he spoke: “I tell you it’s no use, Marcia! He wouldn’t come if I went to him—”

“Oh, yes, — yes, he would! I know he would! If—”

“He wouldn’t! You’re mistaken! I should have to get down in the dust for nothing. He’s a bad fellow, I tell you; and you’ve got to give him up.”

“You hate me!” cried the girl. The old man walked to and fro, clutching his hands. Their lives had always been in such intimate sympathy, his life had so long had her happiness for its sole pleasure, that the pang in her heart racked his with as sharp an agony. “Well, I shall die; and then I hope you will be satisfied.”

“Marcia, Marcia!” pleaded her father. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“You’re letting him go away from me, — you’re letting me lose him, — you’re killing me!”

“He wouldn’t come, my girl. It would be perfectly useless to go to him. You must — you must try to control yourself, Marcia. There’s no other way, — there’s no other hope. You’re disgraceful. You ought to be ashamed. You ought to have some pride about you. I don’t know what’s come over you since you’ve been with that fellow. You seem to be out of your senses. But try, — try, my girl, to get over it. If you’ll fight it, you’ll conquer yet. You’ve got a spirit for anything. And I’ll help you, Marcia. I’ll take you anywhere. I’ll do anything for you—”

“You wouldn’t go to him, and ask him to come here, if it would save his life!”

“No,” said the old man, with a desperate quiet, “I wouldn’t.”

She stood looking at him, and then she sank suddenly and straight down, as if she were sinking through the floor. When he lifted her, he saw that she was in a dead faint, and while the swoon lasted would be out of her misery. The sight of this had wrung him so that he had a kind of relief in looking at her lifeless face; and he was slow in laying her down again, like one that fears to wake a sleeping child. Then he went to the foot of the stairs, and softly called to his wife: “Miranda! Miranda!”

IX.

Kinney came into town the next morning bright and early, as he phrased it; but he did not stop at the hotel for Bartley till nine o’clock. “Thought I’d give you time for breakfast,” he exclaimed, “and so I didn’t hurry up any about gettin’ in my supplies.”

It was a beautiful morning, so blindingly sunny that Bartley winked as they drove up through the glistening street, and was glad to dip into the gloom of the first woods; it was not cold; the snow felt the warmth, and packed moistly under their runners. The air was perfectly still; at a distance on the mountain-sides it sparkled as if full of diamond dust. Far overhead some crows called.

“The sun’s getting high,” said Bartley, with the light sigh of one to whom the thought of spring brings no hope.

“Well, I shouldn’t begin to plough for corn just yet,” replied Kinney. “It’s curious,” he went on, “to see how anxious we are to have a thing over, it don’t much matter what it is, whether it’s summer or winter. I suppose we’d feel different if we wa’n’t sure there was going to be another of ‘em. I guess that’s one reason why the Lord concluded not to keep us clearly posted on the question of another life. If it wa’n’t for the uncertainty of the thing, there are a lot of fellows like you that wouldn’t stand it here a minute. Why, if we had a dead sure thing of over-the-river, — good climate, plenty to eat and wear, and not much to do, — I don’t believe any of us would keep Darling Minnie waiting, — well, a great while. But you see, the thing’s all on paper, and that makes us cautious, and willing to hang on here awhile longer. Looks splendid on the map: streets regularly laid out; public squares; band-stands; churches; solid blocks of houses, with all the modern improvements; but you can’t tell whether there’s any town there till you’re on the ground; and then, if you don’t like it, there’s no way of gettin’ back to the States.” He turned round upon Bartley and opened his mouth wide, to imply that this was pleasantry.

“Do you throw your philosophy in, all under the same price, Kinney?” asked the young fellow.

“Well, yes; I never charge anything over,” said Kinney. “You see, I have a good deal of time to think when I’m around by myself all day, and the philosophy don’t cost me anything, and the fellows like it. Roughing it the way they do, they can stand ‘most anything. Hey?” He now not only opened his mouth upon Bartley, but thrust him in the side with his elbow, and then laughed noisily.

Kinney was the cook. He had been over pretty nearly the whole uninhabitable globe, starting as a gaunt and awkward boy from the Maine woods, and keeping until he came back to them in late middle-life the same gross and ridiculous optimism. He had been at sea, and shipwrecked on several islands in the Pacific; he had passed a rainy season at Panama, and a yellow-fever season at Vera Cruz, and had been carried far into the interior of Peru by a tidal wave during an earthquake season; he was in the Border Ruffian War of Kansas, and he clung to California till prosperity deserted her after the completion of the Pacific road. Wherever he went, he carried or found adversity; but, with a heart fed on the metaphysics of Horace Greeley, and buoyed up by a few wildly interpreted maxims of Emerson, he had always believed in other men, and their fitness for the terrestrial millennium, which was never more than ten days or ten miles off. It is not necessary to say that he had continued as poor as he began, and that he was never able to contribute to those railroads, mills, elevators, towns, and cities which were sure to be built, sir, sure to be built, wherever he went. When he came home at last to the woods, some hundreds of miles north of Equity, he found that some one had realized his early dream of a summer hotel on the shore of the beautiful lake there; and he unenviously settled down to admire the landlord’s thrift, and to act as guide and cook for parties of young ladies and gentlemen who started from the hotel to camp in the woods. This brought him into the society of cultivated people, for which he had a real passion. He had always had a few thoughts rattling round in his skull, and he liked to make sure of them in talk with those who had enjoyed greater advantages than himself. He never begrudged them their luck; he simply and sweetly admired them; he made studies of their several characters, and was never tired of analyzing them to their advantage to the next summer’s parties. Late in the fall, he went in, as it is called, with a camp of loggers, among whom he rarely failed to find some remarkable men. But he confessed that he did not enjoy the steady three or four months in the winter woods with no coming out at all till spring; and he had been glad of this chance in a logging camp near Equity, in which he had been offered the cook’s place by the owner who had tested his fare in the Northern woods the summer before. Its proximity to the village allowed him to loaf in upon civilization at least once a week, and he spent the greater part of his time at the Free Press office on publication day. He had always sought the society of newspaper men, and, wherever he could, he had given them his. He was not long in discovering that Bartley was smart as a steel trap; and by an early and natural transition from calling the young lady compositors by their pet names, and patting them on their shoulders, he had arrived at a like affectionate intimacy with Bartley.

As they worked deep into the woods on their way to the camp, the road dwindled to a well-worn track between the stumps and bushes. The ground was rough, and they constantly plunged down the slopes of little hills, and climbed the sides of the little valleys, and from time to time they had to turn out for teams drawing logs to the mills in Equity, each with its equipage of four or five wild young fellows, who saluted Kinney with an ironical cheer or jovial taunt in passing.

“They’re all just so,” he explained, with pride, when the last party had passed. “They’re gentlemen, every one of ‘em, — perfect gentlemen.”

They came at last to a wider clearing than any they had yet passed through, and here on a level of the hillside stretched the camp, a long, low structure of logs, with the roof broken at one point by a stovepipe, and the walls irregularly pierced by small windows; around it crouched and burrowed in the drift the sheds that served as stables and storehouses.

The sun shone, and shone with dazzling brightness, upon the opening; the sound of distant shouts and the rhythmical stroke of axes came to it out of the forest; but the camp was deserted, and in the stillness Kinney’s voice seemed strange and alien. “Walk in, walk in!” he said, hospitably. “I’ve got to look after my horse.”

But Bartley remained at the door, blinking in the sunshine, and harking to the near silence that sang in his ears. A curious feeling possessed him; sickness of himself as of some one else; a longing, consciously helpless, to be something different; a sense of captivity to habits and thoughts and hopes that centred in himself, and served him alone.

“Terribly peaceful around here,” said Kinney, coming back to him, and joining him in a survey of the landscape, with his hands on his hips, and a stem of timothy projecting from his lips.

“Yes, terribly,” assented Bartley.

“But it aint a bad way for a man to live, as long as he’s young; or haint got anybody that wants his company more than his room. — Be the place for you.”

“On which ground?” Bartley asked, drily, without taking his eyes from a distant peak that showed through the notch in the forest.

Kinney laughed in as unselfish enjoyment as if he had made the turn himself. “Well, that aint exactly what I meant to say: what I meant was that any man engaged in intellectual pursuits wants to come out and commune with nature, every little while.”

“You call the Equity Free Press intellectual pursuits?” demanded Bartley, with scorn. “I suppose it is,” he added. “Well, here I am, — right on the commune. But nature’s such a big thing, I think it takes two to commune with her.”

“Well, a girl’s a help,” assented Kinney.

“I wasn’t thinking of a girl, exactly,” said Bartley, with a little sadness. “I mean that, if you’re not in first-rate spiritual condition, you’re apt to get floored if you undertake to commune with nature.”

“I guess that’s about so. If a man’s got anything, on his mind, a big railroad depot’s the place for him. But you’re run down. You ought to come out here, and take a hand, and be a man amongst men.” Kinney talked partly for quantity, and partly for pure, indefinite good feeling.

Bartley turned toward the door. “What have you got inside, here?”

Kinney flung the door open, and followed his guest within. The first two-thirds of the cabin was used as a dormitory, and the sides were furnished with rough bunks, from the ground to the roof. The round, unhewn logs showed their form everywhere; the crevices were calked with moss; and the walls were warm and tight. It was dark between the bunks, but beyond it was lighter, and Bartley could see at the farther end a vast cooking-stove, and three long tables with benches at their sides. A huge coffee-pot stood on the top of the stove, and various pots and kettles surrounded it.

“Come into the dining-room and sit down in the parlor,” said Kinney, drawing off his coat as he walked forward. “Take the sofa,” he added, indicating a movable bench. He hung his coat on a peg and rolled up his shirt-sleeves, and began to whistle cheerily, like a man who enjoys his work, as he threw open the stove door and poked in some sticks of fuel. A brooding warmth filled the place, and the wood made a pleasant crackling as it took fire.

“Here’s my desk,” said Kinney, pointing to a barrel that supported a broad, smooth board-top. “This is where I compose my favorite works.” He turned round, and cut out of a mighty mass of dough in a tin trough a portion, which he threw down on his table and attacked with a rolling-pin. “That means pie, Mr. Hubbard,” he explained, “and pie means meat-pie, — or squash-pie, at a pinch. Today’s pie-baking day. But you needn’t be troubled on that account. So’s to-morrow, and so was yesterday. Pie twenty-one times a week is the word, and don’t you forget it. They say old Agassiz,” Kinney went on, in that easy, familiar fondness with which our people like to speak of greatness that impresses their imagination,— “they say old Agassiz recommended fish as the best food for the brain. Well, I don’t suppose but what it is. But I don’t know but what pie is more stimulating to the fancy. I never saw anything like meat-pie to make ye dream.”

“Yes,” said Bartley, nodding gloomily, “I’ve tried it.”

Kinney laughed. “Well, I guess folks of sedentary pursuits, like you and me, don’t need it; but these fellows that stamp round in the snow all day, they want something to keep their imagination goin’. And I guess pie does it. Anyway, they can’t seem to get enough of it. Ever try apples when you was at work? They say old Greeley kep’ his desk full of ‘em; kep’ munchin’ away all the while when he was writin’ his editorials. And one of them German poets — I don’t know but what it was old Gutty himself — kept rotten ones in his drawer; liked the smell of ‘em. Well, there’s a good deal of apple in meat-pie. May be it’s the apple that does it. I don’t know. But I guess if your pursuits are sedentary, you better take the apple separate.”

Bartley did not say anything; but he kept a lazily interested eye on Kinney as he rolled out his piecrust, fitted it into his tins, filled these from a jar of mince-meat, covered them with a sheet of dough pierced in herring-bone pattern, and marshalled them at one side ready for the oven.

“If fish is any better for the brain,” Kinney proceeded, “they can’t complain of any want of it, at least in the salted form. They get fish-balls three times a week for breakfast, as reg’lar as Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday comes round. And Fridays I make up a sort of chowder for the Kanucks; they’re Catholics, you know, and I don’t believe in interferin’ with any man’s religion, it don’t matter what it is.”

“You ought to be a deacon in the First Church at Equity,” said Bartley.

“Is that so? Why?” asked Kinney.

“Oh, they don’t believe in interfering with any man’s religion, either.”

“Well,” said Kinney, thoughtfully, pausing with the rolling-pin in his hand, “there ‘a such a thing as being too liberal, I suppose.”

“The world’s tried the other thing a good while,” said Bartley, with cynical amusement at Kinney’s arrest.

It seemed to chill the flow of the good fellow’s optimism, so that he assented with but lukewarm satisfaction.

“Well, that’s so, too,” and he made up the rest of his pies in silence.

“Well,” he exclaimed at last, as if shaking himself out of an unpleasant reverie, “I guess we shall get along, somehow. Do you like pork and beans?”

“Yes, I do,” said Bartley.

“We’re goin’ to have ’em for dinner. You can hit beans any meal you drop in on us; beans twenty-one times a week, just like pie. Set ’em in to warm,” he said, taking up a capacious earthen pot, near the stove, and putting it into the oven. “I been pretty much everywheres, and I don’t know as I found anything for a stand-by that come up to beans. I’m goin’ to give ’em potatoes and cabbage to-day, — kind of a boiled-dinner day, — but you’ll see there aint one in ten ‘ll touch ’em to what there will these old residenters. Potatoes and cabbage’ll do for a kind of a delicacy, — sort of a side-dish, — on-tree, you know; but give ’em beans for a steady diet. Why, off there in Chili, even, the people regularly live on beans, — not exactly like ours, — broad and flat, — but they’re beans. Wa’n’t there some those ancients — old Horace, or Virgil, may be — rung in something about beans in some their poems?”

“I don’t remember anything of the kind,” said Bartley, languidly.

“Well, I don’t know as I can. I just have a dim recollection of language thrown out at the object, — as old Matthew Arnold says. But it might have been something in Emerson.”

Bartley laughed “I didn’t suppose you were such a reader, Kinney.”

“Oh, I nibble round wherever I can get a chance. Mostly in the newspapers, you know. I don’t get any time for books, as a general rule. But there’s pretty much everything in the papers. I should call beans a brain food.”

“I guess you call anything a brain food that you happen to like, don’t you, Kinney?”

“No, sir,” said Kinney, soberly; “but I like to see the philosophy of a thing when I get a chance. Now, there’s tea, for example,” he said, pointing to the great tin pot on the stove.

“Coffee, you mean,” said Bartley.

“No, sir, I mean tea. That’s tea; and I give it to ’em three times a day, good and strong, — molasses in it, and no milk. That’s a brain food, if ever there was one. Sets ’em up, right on end, every time. Clears their heads and keeps the cold out.”

“I should think you were running a seminary for young ladies, instead of a logging-camp,” said Bartley.

“No, but look at it: I’m in earnest about tea. You look at the tea drinkers and the coffee-drinkers all the world over! Look at ’em in our own country! All the Northern people and all the go-ahead people drink tea. The Pennsylvanians and the Southerners drink coffee. Why our New England folks don’t even know how to make coffee so it’s fit to drink! And it’s just so all over Europe. The Russians drink tea, and they’d e’t up those coffee-drinkin’ Turks long ago, if the tea-drinkin’ English hadn’t kept ’em from it. Go anywheres you like in the North, and you find ’em drinkin’ tea. The Swedes and Norwegians in Aroostook County drink it; and they drink it at home.”

“Well, what do you think of the French and Germans? They drink coffee, and they’re pretty smart, active people, too.”

“French and Germans drink coffee?”

“Yes.”

Kinney stopped short in his heated career of generalization, and scratched his shaggy head. “Well,” he said, finally, “I guess they’re a kind of a missing link, as old Darwin says.” He joined Bartley in his laugh cordially, and looked up at the round clock nailed to a log. “It’s about time I set my tables, anyway. Well,” he asked, apparently to keep the conversation from flagging, while he went about this work, “how is the good old Free Press getting along?”

“It’s going to get along without me from this out,” said Bartley. “This is my last week in Equity.”

“No!” retorted Kinney, in tremendous astonishment.

“Yes; I’m off at the end of the week. Squire Gaylord takes the paper back for the committee, and I suppose Henry Bird will run it for a while; or perhaps they’ll stop it altogether. It’s been a losing business for the committee.”

“Why, I thought you’d bought it of ‘em.”

“Well, that’s what I expected to do; but the office hasn’t made any money. All that I’ve saved is in my colt and cutter.”

“That sorrel?”

Bartley nodded. “I’m going away about as poor as I came. I couldn’t go much poorer.”

“Well!” said Kinney, in the exhaustion of adequate language. He went on laying the plates and knives and forks in silence. These were of undisguised steel; the dishes and the drinking mugs were of that dense and heavy make which the keepers of cheap restaurants use to protect themselves against breakage, and which their servants chip to the quick at every edge. Kinney laid bread and crackers by each plate, and on each he placed a vast slab of cold corned beef. Then he lifted the lid of the pot in which the cabbage and potatoes were boiling together, and pricked them with a fork. He dished up the beans in a succession of deep tins, and set them at intervals along the tables, and began to talk again. “Well, now, I’m sorry. I’d just begun to feel real well acquainted with you. Tell you the truth, I didn’t take much of a fancy to you, first off.”

“Is that so?” asked Bartley, not much disturbed by the confession.

“Yes, sir. Well, come to boil it down,” said Kinney, with the frankness of the analytical mind that disdains to spare itself in the pursuit of truth, “I didn’t like your good clothes. I don’t suppose I ever had a suit of clothes to fit me. Feel kind of ashamed, you know, when I go into the store, and take the first thing the Jew wants to put off on to me. Now, I suppose you go to Macullar and Parker’s in Boston, and you get what you want.”

“No; I have my measure at a tailor’s,” said Bartley, with ill-concealed pride in the fact.

“You don’t say so!” exclaimed Kinney. “Well!” he said, as if he might as well swallow this pill, too, while he was about it. “Well, what’s the use? I never was the figure for clothes, anyway. Long, gangling boy to start with, and a lean, stoop-shouldered man. I found out some time ago that a fellow wa’n’t necessarily a bad fellow because he had money, or a good fellow because he hadn’t. But I hadn’t quite got over hating a man because he had style. Well, I suppose it was a kind of a survival, as old Tylor calls it. But I tell you, I sniffed round you a good while before I made up my mind to swallow you. And that turnout of yours, it kind of staggered me, after I got over the clothes. Why, it wa’n’t so much the colt, — any man likes to ride after a sorrel colt; and it wa’n’t so much the cutter: it was the red linin’ with pinked edges that you had to your robe; and it was the red ribbon that you had tied round the waist of your whip. When I see that ribbon on that whip, damn you, I wanted to kill you.” Bartley broke out into a laugh, but Kinney went on soberly. “But, thinks I to myself: ‘Here! Now you stop right here! You wait! You give the fellow a chance for his life. Let him have a chance to show whether that whip-ribbon goes all through him, first. If it does, kill him cheerfully; but give him a chance first.’ Well, sir, I gave you the chance, and you showed that you deserved it. I guess you taught me a lesson. When I see you at work, pegging away hard at something or other, every time I went into your office, up and coming with everybody, and just as ready to pass the time of day with me as the biggest bug in town, thinks I: ‘You’d have made a great mistake to kill that fellow, Kinney!’ And I just made up my mind to like you.”

“Thanks,” said Bartley, with ironical gratitude.

Kinney did not speak at once. He whistled thoughtfully through his teeth, and then he said: “I’ll tell you what: if you’re going away very poor, I know a wealthy chap you can raise a loan out of.”

Bartley thought seriously for a silent moment. “If your friend offers me twenty dollars, I’m not too well dressed to take it.”

“All right,” said Kinney. He now dished up the cabbage and potatoes, and throwing a fresh handful of tea into the pot, and filling it up with water, he took down a tin horn, with which he went to the door and sounded a long, stertorous note.

X.

“Guess it was the clothes again,” said Kinney, as he began to wash his tins and dishes after the dinner was over, and the men had gone back to their work. “I could see ’em eyin’ you over when they first came in, and I could see that they didn’t exactly like the looks of ‘em. It would wear off in time, but it takes time for it to wear off; and it had to go pretty rusty for a start-off. Well, I don’t know as it makes much difference to you, does it?”

“Oh, I thought we got along very well,” said Bartley, with a careless yawn. “There wasn’t much chance to get acquainted.” Some of the loggers were as handsome and well-made as he, and were of as good origin and traditions, though he had some advantages of training. But his two-button cutaway, his well-fitting trousers, his scarf with a pin in it, had been too much for these young fellows in their long ‘stoga boots and flannel shirts. They looked at him askance, and despatched their meal with more than their wonted swiftness, and were off again into the woods without any demonstrations of satisfaction in Bartley’s presence.

He had perceived their grudge, for he had felt it in his time. But it did not displease him; he had none of the pain with which Kinney, who had so long bragged of him to the loggers, saw that his guest was a failure.

“I guess they’ll come out all right in the end,” he said. In this warm atmosphere, after the gross and heavy dinner he had eaten, he yawned again and again. He folded his overcoat into a pillow for his bench and lay down, and lazily watched Kinney about his work. Presently he saw Kinney seated on a block of wood beside the stove, with his elbow propped in one hand, and holding a magazine, out of which he was reading; he wore spectacles, which gave him a fresh and interesting touch of grotesqueness. Bartley found that an empty barrel had been placed on each side of him, evidently to keep him from rolling off his bench.

“Hello!” he said. “Much obliged to you, Kinney. I haven’t been taken such good care of since I can remember. Been asleep, haven’t I?”

“About an hour,” said Kinney, with a glance at the clock, and ignoring his agency in Bartley’s comfort.

“Food for the brain!” said Bartley, sitting up. “I should think so. I’ve dreamt a perfect New American Cyclopaedia, and a pronouncing gazetteer thrown in.”

“Is that so?” said Kinney, as if pleased with the suggestive character of his cookery, now established by eminent experiment.

Bartley yawned a yawn of satisfied sleepiness, and rubbed his hand over his face. “I suppose,” he said, “if I’m going to write anything about Camp Kinney, I had better see all there is to see.”

“Well, yes, I presume you had,” said Kinney. “We’ll go over to where they’re cuttin’, pretty soon, and you can see all there is in an hour. But I presume you’ll want to see it so as to ring in some description, hey? Well, that’s all right. But what you going to do with it, when you’ve done it, now you’re out of the Free Press?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t have printed it in the Free Press, anyway Coals to Newcastle, you know. I’ll tell you what I think I’ll do, Kinney: I’ll get my outlines, and then you post me with a lot of facts, — queer characters, accidents, romantic incidents, snowings-up, threatened starvation, adventures with wild animals, — and I can make something worth while; get out two or three columns, so they can print it in their Sunday edition. And then I’ll take it up to Boston with me, and seek my fortune with it.”

“Well, sir, I’ll do it,” said Kinney, fired with the poetry of the idea. “I’ll post you! Dumn ‘f I don’t wish I could write! Well, I did use to scribble once for an agricultural paper; but I don’t call that writin’. I’ve set down, well, I guess as much as sixty times, to try to write out what I know about loggin’—”

“Hold on!” cried Bartley, whipping out his notebook. “That’s first-rate. That’ll do for the first line in the head, — What I Know About Logging, — large caps. Well!”

Kinney shut his magazine, and took his knee between his hands, closing one of his eyes in order to sharpen his recollection. He poured forth a stream of reminiscence, mingled observation, and personal experience. Bartley followed him with his pencil, jotting down points, striking in sub-head lines, and now and then interrupting him with cries of “Good!” “Capital!” “It’s a perfect mine, — it’s a mint! By Jove!” he exclaimed, “I’ll make six columns of this! I’ll offer it to one of the magazines, and it’ll come out illustrated! Go on, Kinney.”

“Hark!” said Kinney, craning his neck forward to listen. “I thought I heard sleigh-bells. But I guess it wa’n’t. Well, sir, as I was sayin’, they fetched that fellow into camp with both feet frozen to the knees — Dumn ‘f it wa’n’t bells!”

He unlimbered himself, and hurried to the door at the other end of the cabin, which he opened, letting in a clear block of the afternoon sunshine, and a gush of sleigh-bell music, shot with men’s voices, and the cries and laughter of women.

“Well, sir,” said Kinney, coming back and making haste to roll down his sleeves and put on his coat. “Here’s a nuisance! A whole party of folks — two sleigh-loads — right on us. I don’t know who they be, or where they’re from. But I know where I wish they was. Well, of course, it’s natural they should want to see a loggin’-camp,” added Kinney, taking himself to task for his inhospitable mind, “and there ain’t any harm in it. But I wish they’d give a fellow a little notice!”

The voices and bells drew nearer, but Kinney seemed resolved to observe the decorum of not going to the door till some one knocked.

“Kinney! Kinney! Hello, Kinney!” shouted a man’s voice, as the bells hushed before the door, and broke into a musical clash when one of the horses tossed his head.

“Well, sir,” said Kinney, rising, “I guess it’s old Willett himself. He’s the owner; lives up to Portland, and been threatening to come down here all winter, with a party of friends. You just stay still,” he added; and he paid himself the deference which every true American owes himself in his dealings with his employer: he went to the door very deliberately, and made no haste on account of the repeated cries of “Kinney! Kinney!” in which others of the party outside now joined.

When he opened the door again, the first voice saluted him with a roar of laughter. “Why, Kinney, I began to think you were dead!”

“No, sir,” Bartley heard Kinney reply, “it takes more to kill me than you suppose.” But now he stepped outside, and the talk became unintelligible.

Finally Bartley heard what was imaginably Mr. Willett’s voice saying, “Well, let’s go in and have a look at it now”; and with much outcry and laughter the ladies were invisibly helped to dismount, and presently the whole party came stamping and rustling in.

Bartley’s blood tingled. He liked this, and he stood quite self-possessed, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and his elbows dropped, while Mr. Willett advanced in a friendly way.

“Ah, Mr. Hubbard! Kinney told us you were in here, and asked me to introduce myself while he looked after the horses. My name’s Willett. These are my daughters; this is Mrs. Macallister, of Montreal; Mrs. Witherby, of Boston; Miss Witherby, and Mr. Witherby. You ought to know each other; Mr. Hubbard is the editor of the Equity Free Press. Mr. Witherby, of The Boston Events, Mr. Hubbard. Oh, and Mr. Macallister.”

Bartley bowed to the Willett and Witherby ladies, and shook hands with Mr. Witherby, a large, solemn man, with a purse-mouth and tight rings of white hair, who treated him with the pomp inevitable to the owner of a city newspaper in meeting a country editor.

At the mention of his name, Mr. Macallister, a slight little straight man, in a long ulster and a sealskin cap, tiddled farcically forward on his toes, and, giving Bartley his hand, said, “Ah, haow d’e-do, haow d’e-do!”

Mrs. Macallister fixed upon him the eye of the flirt who knows her man. She was of the dark-eyed English type; her eyes were very large and full, and her smooth black hair was drawn flatly backward, and fastened in a knot just under her dashing fur cap. She wore a fur sack, and she was equipped against the cold as exquisitely as her Southern sisters defend themselves from the summer. Bits of warm color, in ribbon and scarf, flashed out here and there; when she flung open her sack, she showed herself much more lavishly buttoned and bugled and bangled than the Americans. She sat clown on the movable bench which Bartley had vacated, and crossed her feet, very small and saucy, even in their arctics, on a stick of fire-wood, and cast up her neat profile, and rapidly made eyes at every part of the interior. “Why, it’s delicious, you know. I never saw anything so comfortable. I want to spend the rest of me life here, you know.” She spoke very far down in her throat, and with a rising inflection in each sentence. “I’m going to have a quarrel with you, Mr. Willett, for not telling me what a delightful surprise you had for us here. Oh, but I’d no idea of it, I assure you!”

“Well, I’m glad you like it, Mrs. Macallister,” said Mr. Willett, with the clumsiness of American middle-age when summoned to say something gallant. “If I’d told you what a surprise I had for you, it wouldn’t have been one.”

“Oh, it’s no good your trying to get out of it that way,” retorted the beauty. “There he comes now! I’m really in love with him, you know,” she said, as Kinney opened the door and came hulking forward.

Nobody said anything at once, but Bartley laughed finally, and ventured, “Well, I’ll propose for you to Kinney.”

“Oh, I dare say!” cried the beauty, with a lively effort of wit. “Mr. Kinney, I have fallen in love with your camp, d’ ye know?” she added, as Kinney drew near, “and I’m beggin’ Mr. Willett to let me come and live here among you.”

“Well, ma’am,” said Kinney, a little abashed at this proposition, “you couldn’t do a better thing for your health, I guess.”

The proprietor of The Boston Events turned about, and began to look over the arrangements of the interior; the other ladies went with him, conversing, in low tones. “These must be the places where the men sleep,” they said, gazing at the bunks.

“We must get Kinney to explain things to us,” said Mr. Willett a little restlessly.

Mrs. Macallister jumped briskly to her feet. “Oh, yes, do, Mr. Willett, make him explain everything! I’ve been tryin’ to coax it out of him, but he’s such a tease!”

Kinney looked very sheepish in this character, and Mrs. Macallister hooked Bartley to her side for the tour of the interior. “I can’t let you away from me, Mr. Hubbard; your friend’s so satirical, I’m afraid of him. Only fancy, Mr. Willett! He’s been talkin’ to me about brain foods! I know he’s makin’ fun of me; and it isn’t kind, is it, Mr. Hubbard?”

She did not give the least notice to the things that the others looked at, or to Kinney’s modest lecture upon the manners and customs of the loggers. She kept a little apart with Bartley, and plied him with bravadoes, with pouts, with little cries of suspense. In the midst of this he heard Mr. Willett saying, “You ought to get some one to come and write about this for your paper, Witherby.” But Mrs. Macallister was also saying something, with a significant turn of her floating eyes, and the thing that concerned Bartley, if he were to make his way among the newspapers in Boston, slipped from his grasp like the idea which we try to seize in a dream. She made sure of him for the drive to the place which they visited to see the men felling the trees, by inviting him to a seat at her side in the sleigh; this crowded the others, but she insisted, and they all gave way, as people must, to the caprices of a pretty woman. Her coquetries united British wilfulness to American nonchalance, and seemed to have been graduated to the appreciation of garrison and St. Lawrence River steamboat and watering-place society. The Willett ladies had already found it necessary to explain to the Witherby ladies that they had met her the summer before at the sea-side, and that she had stopped at Portland on her way to England; they did not know her very well, but some friends of theirs did; and their father had asked her to come with them to the camp. They added that the Canadian ladies seemed to expect the gentlemen to be a great deal more attentive than ours were. They had known as little what to do with Mr. Macallister’s small-talk and compliments as his wife’s audacities, but they did not view Bartley’s responsiveness with pleasure. If Mrs. Macallister’s arts were not subtle, as Bartley even in the intoxication of her preference could not keep from seeing, still, in his mood, it was consoling to be singled out by her; it meant that even in a logging-camp he was recognizable by any person of fashion as a good-looking, well-dressed man of the world. It embittered him the more against Marcia, while, in some sort, it vindicated him to himself.

The early winter sunset was beginning to tinge the snow with crimson, when the party started back to camp, where Kinney was to give them supper; he had it greatly on his conscience that they should have a good time, and he promoted it as far as hot mince-pie and newly fried doughnuts would go. He also opened a few canned goods, as he called some very exclusive sardines and peaches, and he made an entirely fresh pot of tea, and a pan of soda-biscuit. Mrs. Macallister made remarks across her plate which were for Bartley alone; and Kinney, who was seriously waiting upon his guests, refused to respond to Bartley’s joking reference to himself of some questions and comments of hers.

After supper, when the loggers had withdrawn to the other end of the long hut, she called out to Kinney, “Oh, do tell them to smoke: we shall not mind it at all, I assure you. Can’t some of them do something? Sing or dance?”

Kinney unbent a little at this. “There’s a first-class clog-dancer among them; but he’s a little stuck up, and I don’t know as you could get him to dance,” he said in a low tone.

“What a bloated aristocrat!” cried the lady. “Then the only thing is for us to dance first. Can they play?”

“One of ’em can whistle like a bird, — he can whistle like a whole band,” answered Kinney, warming. “And of course the Kanucks can fiddle.”

“And what are Kanucks? Is that what you call us Canadians?”

“Well, ma’am, it aint quite the thing to do,” said Kinney, penitently.

“It isn’t at all the thing to do! Which are the Kanucks?”

She rose, and went forward with Kinney, in her spoiled way, and addressed a swarthy, gleaming-eyed young logger in French. He answered with a smile that showed all his white teeth, and turned to one of his comrades; then the two rose, and got violins out of the bunks, and came forward. Others of their race joined them, but the Yankees hung gloomily back; they clearly did not like these liberties, this patronage.

“I shall have your clog-dancer on his feet yet, Mr. Kinney,” said Mrs. Macallister, as she came back to her place.

The Canadians began to play and sing those gay, gay airs of old France which they have kept unsaddened through all the dark events that have changed the popular mood of the mother country; they have matched words to them in celebration of their life on the great rivers and in the vast forests of the North, and in these blithe barcaroles and hunting-songs breathes the joyous spirit of a France that knows neither doubt nor care, — France untouched by Revolution or Napoleonic wars; some of the airs still keep the very words that came over seas with them two hundred years ago. The transition to the dance was quick and inevitable; a dozen slim young fellows were gliding about behind the players, pounding the hard earthen floor, and singing in time.

“Oh, come, come!” cried the beauty, rising and stamping impatiently with her little foot, “suppose we dance, too.”

She pulled Bartley forward by the hand; her husband followed with the taller Miss Willett; two of the Canadians, at the instance of Mrs. Macallister, came forward and politely asked the honor of the other young ladies’ hands in the dance; their temper was infectious, and the cotillon was in full life before their partners had time to wonder at their consent. Mrs. Macallister could sing some of the Canadian songs; her voice, clear and fresh, rang through those of the men, while in at the window, thrown open for air, came the wild cries of the forest, — the wail of a catamount, and the solemn hooting of a distant owl.

“Isn’t it jolly good fun?” she demanded, when the figure was finished; and now Kinney went up to the first-class clog-dancer, and prevailed with him to show his skill. He seemed to comply on condition that the whistler should furnish the music; he came forward with a bashful hauteur, bridling stiffly like a girl, and struck into the laborious and monotonous jig which is, perhaps, our national dance. He was exquisitely shaped, and as he danced he suppled more and more, while the whistler warbled a wilder and swifter strain, and kept time with his hands. There was something that stirred the blood in the fury of the strain and dance. When it was done, Mrs. Macallister caught off her cap and ran round among the spectators to make them pay; she excused no one, and she gave the money to Kinney, telling him to get his loggers something to keep the cold out.

“I should say whiskey, if I were in the Canadian bush,” she suggested.

“Well, I guess we sha’n’t say anything of that sort in this camp,” said Kinney.

She turned upon Bartley, “I know Mr. Hubbard is dying to do something. Do something, Mr. Hubbard!” Bartley looked up in surprise at this interpretation of his tacit wish to distinguish himself before her. “Come, sing us some of your student songs.”

Bartley’s vanity had confided the fact of his college training to her, and he was really thinking just then that he would like to give them a serio-comic song, for which he had been famous with his class. He borrowed the violin of a Kanuck, and, sitting down, strummed upon it banjo-wise. The song was one of those which is partly spoken and acted; he really did it very well; but the Willett and Witherby ladies did not seem to understand it quite; and the gentlemen looked as if they thought this very undignified business for an educated American.

Mrs. Macallister feigned a yawn, and put up her hand to hide it. “Oh, what a styupid song!” she said. She sprang to her feet, and began to put on her wraps. The others were glad of this signal to go, and followed her example. “Good by!” she cried, giving her hand to Kinney. “I don’t think your ideas are ridiculous. I think there’s no end of good sense in them, I assure you. I hope you won’t leave off that regard for the brain in your cooking. Good by!” She waved her hand to the Americans, and then to the Kanucks, as she passed out between their respectfully parted ranks. “Adieu, messieurs!” She merely nodded to Bartley; the others parted from him coldly, as he fancied, and it seemed to him that he had been made responsible for that woman’s coquetries, when he was conscious, all the time, of having forborne even to meet them half-way. But this was not so much to his credit as he imagined. The flirt can only practise her audacities safely by grace of those upon whom she uses them, and if men really met them half-way there could be no such tiling as flirting.

XI.

The loggers pulled off their boots and got into their bunks, where some of them lay and smoked, while others fell asleep directly.

Bartley made some indirect approaches to Kinney for sympathy in the snub which he had received, and which rankled in his mind with unabated keenness.

But Kinney did not respond. “Your bed’s ready,” he said. “You can turn in whenever you like.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Bartley.

“Nothing’s the matter, if you say so,” answered Kinney, going about some preparations for the morning’s breakfast.

Bartley looked at his resentful back. He saw that he was hurt, and he surmised that Kinney suspected him of making fun of his eccentricities to Mrs. Macallister. He had laughed at Kinney, and tried to amuse her with him; but he could not have made this appear as harmless as it was. He rose from the bench on which he had been sitting, and shut with a click the penknife with which he had been cutting a pattern on its edge.

“I shall have to say good night to you, I believe,” he said, going to the peg on which Kinney had hung his hat and overcoat. He had them on, and was buttoning the coat in an angry tremor before Kinney looked up and realized what his guest was about.

“Why, what — why, where — you goin’?” he faltered in dismay.

“To Equity,” said Bartley, feeling in his coat pockets for his gloves, and drawing them on, without looking at Kinney, whose great hands were in a pan of dough.

“Why — why — no, you aint!” he protested, with a revulsion of feeling that swept away all his resentment, and left him nothing but remorse for his inhospitality.

“No?” said Bartley, putting up the collar of the first ulster worn by a native in that region.

“Why, look here!” cried Kinney, pulling his hands out of the dough, and making a fruitless effort to cleanse them upon each other. “I don’t want you to go, this way.”

“Don’t you? I’m sorry to disoblige you; but I’m going,” said Bartley.

Kinney tried to laugh. “Why, Hubbard, — why, Bartley, — why, Bart!” he exclaimed. “What’s the matter with you? I aint mad!”

“You have an unfortunate manner, then. Good night.” He strode out between the bunks, full of snoring loggers.

Kinney hurried after him, imploring and protesting in a low voice, trying to get before him, and longing to lay his floury paws upon him and detain him by main force, but even in his distress respecting Bartley’s overcoat too much to touch it. He followed him out into the freezing air in his shirt-sleeves, and besought him not to be such a fool. “It makes me feel like the devil!” he exclaimed, pitifully. “You come back, now, half a minute, and I’ll make it all right with you. I know I can; you’re a gentleman, and you’ll understand. Do come back! I shall never get over it if you don’t!”

“I’m sorry,” said Bartley, “but I’m not going back. Good night.”

“Oh, good Lordy!” lamented Kinney. “What am I goin’ to do? Why, man! It’s a good three mile and more to Equity, and the woods is full of catamounts. I tell ye ‘t aint safe for ye.” He kept following Bartley down the path to the road.

“I’ll risk it,” said Bartley.

Kinney had left the door of the camp open, and the yells and curses of the awakened sleepers recalled him to himself. “Well, well! If you will go” he groaned in despair, “here’s that money.” He plunged his doughy hand into his pocket, and pulled out a roll of bills. “Here it is. I haint time to count it; but it’ll be all right, anyhow.”

Bartley did not even turn his head to look round at him. “Keep your money!” he said, as he plunged forward through the snow. “I wouldn’t touch a cent of it to save your life.”

“All right,” said Kinney, in hapless contrition, and he returned to shut himself in with the reproaches of the loggers and the upbraiding of his own heart.

Bartley dashed along the road in a fury that kept him unconscious of the intense cold; and he passed half the night, when he was once more in his own room, packing his effects against his departure next day. When all was done, he went to bed, half wishing that he might never rise from it again. It was not that he cared for Kinney; that fool’s sulking was only the climax of a long series of injuries of which he was the victim at the hands of a hypercritical omnipotence.

Despite his conviction that it was useless to struggle longer against such injustice, he lived through the night, and came down late to breakfast, which he found stale, and without the compensating advantage of finding himself alone at the table. Some ladies had lingered there to clear up on the best authority the distracting rumors concerning him which they had heard the day before. Was it true that he had intended to spend the rest of the winter in logging? and was it true that he was going to give up the Free Press? and was it true that Henry Bird was going to be the editor? Bartley gave a sarcastic confirmation to all these reports, and went out to the printing-office to gather up some things of his. He found Henry Bird there, looking pale and sick, but at work, and seemingly in authority. This was what Bartley had always intended when he should go out, but he did not like it, and he resented some small changes that had already been made in the editor’s room, in tacit recognition of his purpose not to occupy it again.

Bird greeted him stiffly; the printer girls briefly nodded to him, suppressing some little hysterical titters, and tacitly let him feel that he was no longer master there. While he was in the composing-room Hannah Morrison came in, apparently from some errand outside, and, catching sight of him, stared, and pertly passed him in silence. On his inkstand he found a letter from Squire Gaylord, briefly auditing his last account, and enclosing the balance due him. From this the old lawyer, with the careful smallness of a village business man, had deducted various little sums for things which Bartley had never expected to pay for. With a like thriftiness the landlord, when Bartley asked for his bill, had charged certain items that had not appeared in the bills before. Bartley felt that the charges were trumped up; but he was powerless to dispute them; besides, he hoped to sell the landlord his colt and cutter, and he did not care to prejudice that matter. Some bills from storekeepers, which he thought he had paid, were handed to him by the landlord, and each of the churches had sent in a little account for pew-rent for the past eighteen months: he had always believed himself dead-headed at church. He outlawed the latter by tearing them to pieces in the landlord’s presence, and dropping the fragments into a spittoon. It seemed to him that every soul in Equity was making a clutch at the rapidly diminishing sum of money which Squire Gaylord had enclosed to him, and which was all he had in the world. On the other hand, his popularity in the village seemed to have vanished over night. He had sometimes fancied a general and rebellious grief when it should become known that he was going away; but instead there was an acquiescence amounting to airiness.

He wondered if anything about his affairs with Henry Bird and Hannah Morrison had leaked out. But he did not care. He only wished to shake the snow of Equity off his feet as soon as possible.

After dinner, when the boarders had gone out, and the loafers had not yet gathered in, he offered the landlord his colt and cutter. Bartley knew that the landlord wanted the colt; but now the latter said, “I don’t know as I care to buy any horses, right in the winter, this way.”

“All right,” answered Bartley. “Just have the colt put into the cutter.”

Andy Morrison brought it round. The boy looked at Bartley’s set face with a sort of awe-stricken affection; his adoration for the young man survived all that he had heard said against him at home during the series of family quarrels that had ensued upon his father’s interview with him; he longed to testify, somehow, his unabated loyalty, but he could not think of anything to do, much less to say.

Bartley pitched his valise into the cutter, and then, as Andy left the horse’s head to give him a hand with his trunk, offered him a dollar. “I don’t want anything,” said the boy, shyly refusing the money out of pure affection.

But Bartley mistook his motive, and thought it sulky resentment. “Oh, very well,” he said. “Take hold.”

The landlord came out. “Hold on a minute,” he said. “Where you goin’ to take the cars?”

“At the Junction,” answered Bartley. “I know a man there that will buy the colt. What is it you want?”

The landlord stepped back a few paces, and surveyed the establishment. “I should like to ride after that hoss,” he said, “if you aint in any great of a hurry.”

“Get in,” said Bartley, and the landlord took the reins.

From time to time, as he drove, he rose up and looked over the dashboard to study the gait of the horse. “I’ve noticed he strikes some, when he first comes out in the spring.”

“Yes,” Bartley assented.

“Pulls consid’able.”

“He pulls.”

The landlord rose again and scrutinized the horse’s legs. “I don’t know as I ever noticed ‘t he’d capped his hock before.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Done it kickin’ nights, I guess.”

“I guess so.”

The landlord drew the whip lightly across the colt’s rear; he shrank together, and made a little spring forward, but behaved perfectly well.

“I don’t know as I should always be sure he wouldn’t kick in the daytime.”

“No,” said Bartley, “you never can be sure of anything.”

They drove along in silence. At last the landlord said, “Well, he aint so fast as I supposed.”

“He’s not so fast a horse as some,” answered Bartley.

The landlord leaned over sidewise for an inspection of the colt’s action forward. “Haint never thought he had a splint on that forward off leg?”

“A splint? Perhaps he has a splint.”

They returned to the hotel and both alighted.

“Skittish devil,” remarked the landlord, as the colt quivered under the hand he laid upon him.

“He’s skittish,” said Bartley.

The landlord retired as far back as the door, and regarded the colt critically. “Well, I s’pose you’ve always used him too well ever to winded him, but dumn ‘f he don’t blow like it.”

“Look here, Simpson,” said Bartley, very quietly. “You know this horse as well as I do, and you know there isn’t an out about him. You want to buy him because you always have. Now make me an offer.”

“Well,” groaned the landlord, “what’ll you take for the whole rig, just as it stands, — colt, cutter, leathers, and robe?”

“Two hundred dollars,” promptly replied Bartley.

“I’ll give ye seventy-five,” returned the landlord with equal promptness.

“Andy, take hold of the end of that trunk, will you?”

The landlord allowed them to put the trunk into the cutter. Bartley got in too, and, shifting the baggage to one side, folded the robe around him from his middle down and took his seat. “This colt can road you right along all day inside of five minutes, and he can trot inside of two-thirty every time; and you know it as well as I do.”

“Well,” said the landlord, “make it an even hundred.”

Bartley leaned forward and gathered up the reins, “Let go his head, Andy,” he quietly commanded.

“Make it one and a quarter,” cried the landlord, not seeing that his chance was past. “What do you say?”

What Bartley said, as he touched the colt with the whip, the landlord never knew. He stood watching the cutter’s swift disappearance up the road, in a sort of stupid expectation of its return. When he realized that Bartley’s departure was final, he said under his breath, “Sold, ye dumned old fool, and serve ye right,” and went in-doors with a feeling of admiration! for colt and man that bordered on reverence.

XII.

This last drop of the local meanness filled Bartley’s bitter cup. As he passed the house at the end of the street he seemed to drain it all. He knew that the old lawyer was there sitting by the office stove, drawing his hand across his chin, and Bartley hoped that he was still as miserable as he had looked when he last saw him; but he did not know that by the window in the house, which he would not even look at, Marcia sat self-prisoned in her room, with her eyes upon the road, famishing for the thousandth part of a chance to see him pass. She saw him now for the instant of his coming and going. With eyes trained to take in every point, she saw the preparation which seemed like final departure, and with a gasp of “Bartley!” as if she were trying to call after him, she sank back into her chair and shut her eyes.

He drove on, plunging into the deep hollow beyond the house, and keeping for several miles the road they had taken on that Sunday together; but he did not make the turn that brought them back to the village again. The pale sunset was slanting over the snow when he reached the Junction, for he had slackened his colt’s pace after he had put ten miles behind him, not choosing to reach a prospective purchaser with his horse all blown and bathed with sweat. He wished to be able to say, “Look at him! He’s come fifteen miles since three o’clock, and he’s as keen as when he started.”

This was true, when, having left his baggage at the Junction, he drove another mile into the country to see the farmer of the gentleman who had his summer-house here, and who had once bantered Bartley to sell him his colt. The farmer was away, and would not be at home till the up-train from Boston was in. Bartley looked at his watch, and saw that to wait would lose him the six o’clock down-train. There would be no other till eleven o’clock. But it was worth while: the gentleman had said, “When you want the money for that colt, bring him over any time; my farmer will have it ready for you.” He waited for the up-train; but when the farmer arrived, he was full of all sorts of scruples and reluctances. He said he should not like to buy it till he had heard from Mr. Farnham; he ended by offering Bartley eighty dollars for the colt on his own account; he did not want the cutter.

“You write to Mr. Farnham,” said Bartley, “that you tried that plan with me, and it wouldn’t work, he’s lost the colt.”

He made this brave show of indifference, but he was disheartened, and, having carried the farmer home from the Junction for the convenience of talking over the trade with him, he drove back again through the early night-fall in sullen desperation.

The weather had softened and was threatening rain or snow; the dark was closing in spiritlessly; the colt, shortening from a trot into a short, springy jolt, dropped into a walk at last as if he were tired, and gave Bartley time enough on his way back to the Junction for reflection upon the disaster into which his life had fallen. These passages of utter despair are commoner to the young than they are to those whom years have experienced in the impermanence of any fate, good, bad, or indifferent, unless, perhaps, the last may seem rather constant. Taken in reference to all that had been ten days ago, the present ruin was incredible, and had nothing reasonable in proof of its existence. Then he was prosperously placed, and in the way to better himself indefinitely. Now, he was here in the dark, with fifteen dollars in his pocket, and an unsalable horse on his hands; outcast, deserted, homeless, hopeless: and by whose fault? He owned even then that he had committed some follies; but in his sense of Marcia’s all-giving love he had risen for once in his life to a conception of self-devotion, and in taking herself from him as she did, she had taken from him the highest incentive he had ever known, and had checked him in his first feeble impulse to do and be all in all for another. It was she who had ruined him.

As he jumped out of the cutter at the Junction the station-master stopped with a cluster of party-colored signal-lanterns in his hand and cast their light over the sorrel.

“Nice colt you got there.”

“Yes,” said Bartley, blanketing the horse, “do you know anybody who wants to buy?”

“Whose is he?” asked the man.

“He’s mine!” shouted Bartley. “Do you think I stole him?”

“I don’t know where you got him,” said the man, walking off, and making a soft play of red and green lights on the snow beyond the narrow platform.

Bartley went into the great ugly barn of a station, trembling, and sat down in one of the gouged and whittled arm-chairs near the stove. A pomp of timetables and luminous advertisements of Western railroads and their land-grants decorated the wooden walls of the gentlemen’s waiting-room, which had been sanded to keep the gentlemen from writing and sketching upon them. This was the more judicious because the ladies’ room, in the absence of tourist travel, was locked in winter, and they were obliged to share the gentlemen’s. In summer, the Junction was a busy place, but after the snow fell, and until the snow thawed, it was a desolation relieved only by the arrival of the sparsely peopled through-trains from the north and east, and by such local travellers as wished to take trains not stopping at their own stations. These broke in upon the solitude of the joint station-master and baggage-man and switch-tender with just sufficient frequency to keep him in a state of uncharitable irritation and unrest. To-night Bartley was the sole intruder, and he sat by the stove wrapped in a cloud of rebellious memories, when one side of a colloquy without made itself heard.

“What?”

Some question was repeated.

“No; it went down half an hour ago.”

An inaudible question followed.

“Next down-train at eleven.”

There was now a faintly audible lament or appeal.

“Guess you’ll have to come earlier next time. Most folks doos that wants to take it.”

Bartley now heard the despairing moan of a woman: he had already divined the sex of the futile questioner whom the station-master was bullying; but he had divined it without compassion, and if he had not himself been a sufferer from the man’s insolence he might even have felt a ferocious satisfaction in it. In a word, he was at his lowest and worst when the door opened and the woman came in, with a movement at once bewildered and daring, which gave him the impression of a despair as complete and final as his own. He doggedly kept his place; she did not seem to care for him, but in the uncertain light of the lamp above them she drew near the stove, and, putting one hand to her pocket as if to find her handkerchief, she flung aside her veil with her other, and showed her tear stained face.

He was on his feet somehow. “Marcia!”

“Oh! Bartley—”

He had seized her by the arm to make sure that she was there in verity of flesh and blood, and not by some trick of his own senses, as a cold chill running over him had made him afraid. At the touch their passion ignored all that they had made each other suffer; her head was on his breast, his embrace was round her; it was a moment of delirious bliss that intervened between the sorrows that had been and the reasons that must come.

“What — what are you doing here, Marcia?” he asked at last.

They sank on the benching that ran round the wall; he held her hands fast in one of his, and kept his other arm about her as they sat side by side.

“I don’t know — I—” She seemed to rouse herself by an effort from her rapture. “I was going to see Nettie Spaulding. And I saw you driving past our house; and I thought you were coming here; and I couldn’t bear — I couldn’t bear to let you go away without telling you that I was wrong; and asking — asking you to forgive me. I thought you would do it, — I thought you would know that I had behaved that way because I — I — cared so much for you. I thought — I was afraid you had gone on the other train—” She trembled and sank back in his embrace, from which she had lifted herself a little.

“How did you get here?” asked Bartley, as if willing to give himself all the proofs he could of the every-day reality of her presence.

“Andy Morrison brought me. Father sent him from the hotel. I didn’t care what you would say to me, I wanted to tell you that I was wrong, and not let you go away feeling that — that — you were all to blame. I thought when I had done that you might drive me away, — or laugh at me, or anything you pleased, if only you would let me take back—”

“Yes,” he answered dreamily. All that wicked hardness was breaking up within him; he felt it melting drop by drop in his heart. This poor love-tossed soul, this frantic, unguided, reckless girl, was an angel of mercy to him, and in her folly and error a messenger of heavenly peace and hope. “I am a bad fellow, Marcia,” he faltered. “You ought to know that. You did right to give me up. I made love to Hannah Morrison; I never promised to marry her, but I made her think that I was fond of her.”

“I don’t care for that,” replied the girl. “I told you when we were first engaged that I would never think of anything that had gone before that; and then when I would not listen to a word from you, that day, I broke my promise.”

“When I struck Henry Bird because he was jealous of me, I was as guilty as if I had killed him.”

“If you had killed him, I was bound to you by my word. Your striking him was part of the same thing, — part of what I had promised I never would care for.” A gush of tears came into his eyes, and she saw them. “Oh, poor Bartley! Poor Bartley!”

She took his head between her hands and pressed it hard against her heart, and then wrapped her arms tight about him, and softly bemoaned him.

They drew a little apart when the man came in with his lantern, and set it down to mend the fire. But as a railroad employee he was far too familiar with the love that vaunts itself on all railroad trains to feel that he was an intruder. He scarcely looked at them, and went out when he had mended the fire, and left it purring.

“Where is Andy Morrison?” asked Bartley. “Has he gone back?”

“No; he is at the hotel over there. I told him to wait till I found out when the train went north.”

“So you inquired when it went to Boston,” said Bartley, with a touch of his old raillery. “Come,” he added, taking her hand under his arm. He led her out of the room, to where his cutter stood outside. She was astonished to find the colt there.

“I wonder I didn’t see it. But if I had, I should have thought that you had sold it and gone away; Andy told me you were coming here to sell the colt. When the man told me the express was gone, I knew you were on it.”

They found the boy stolidly waiting for Marcia on the veranda of the hotel, stamping first upon one foot and then the other, and hugging himself in his great-coat as the coming snow-fall blew its first flakes in his face.

“Is that you, Andy?” asked Bartley.

“Yes, sir,” answered the boy, without surprise at finding him with Marcia.

“Well, here! Just take hold of the colt’s head a minute.”

As the boy obeyed, Bartley threw the reins on the dashboard, and leaped out of the cutter, and went within. He returned after a brief absence, followed by the landlord.

“Well, it ain’t more ‘n a mile ‘n a half, if it’s that. You just keep straight along this street, and take your first turn to the left, and you’re right at the house; it’s the first house on the left-hand side.”

“Thanks,” returned Bartley. “Andy, you tell the Squire that you left Marcia with me, and I said I would see about her getting back. You needn’t hurry.”

“All right,” said the boy, and he disappeared round the corner of the house to get his horse from the barn.

“Well, I’ll be all ready by the time you’re here,” said the landlord, still holding the hall-door ajar, “Luck to you!” he shouted, shutting it.

Marcia locked both her hands through Bartley’s arm, and leaned her head on his shoulder. Neither spoke for some minutes; then he asked, “Marcia, do you know where you are?”

“With you,” she answered, in a voice of utter peace.

“Do you know where we are going?” he asked, leaning over to kiss her cold, pure cheek.

“No,” she answered in as perfect content as before.

“We are going to get married.”

He felt her grow tense in her clasp upon his arm, and hold there rigidly for a moment, while the swift thoughts whirled through her mind. Then, as if the struggle had ended, she silently relaxed, and leaned more heavily against him.

“There’s still time to go back, Marcia,” he said, “if you wish. That turn to the right, yonder, will take us to Equity, and you can be at home in two hours.” She quivered. “I’m a poor man, — I suppose you know that; I’ve only got fifteen dollars in the world, and the colt here. I know I can get on; I’m not afraid for myself; but if you would rather wait, — if you’re not perfectly certain of yourself, — remember, it’s going to be a struggle; we’re going to have some hard times—”

“You forgive me?” she huskily asked, for all answer, without moving her head from where it lay.

“Yes, Marcia.”

“Then — hurry.”

The minister was an old man, and he seemed quite dazed at the suddenness of their demand for his services. But he gathered himself together, and contrived to make them man and wife, and to give them his marriage certificate.

“It seems as if there were something else,” he said, absently, as he handed the paper to Bartley.

“Perhaps it’s this,” said Bartley, giving him a five-dollar note in return.

“Ah, perhaps,” he replied, in unabated perplexity. He bade them serve God, and let them out into the snowy night, through which they drove back to the hotel.

The landlord had kindled a fire on the hearth of the Franklin stove in his parlor, and the blazing hickory snapped in electrical sympathy with the storm when they shut themselves into the bright room, and Bartley took Marcia fondly into his arms.

“Wife!”

“Husband!”

They sat down before the fire, hand in hand, and talked of the light things that swim to the top, and eddy round and round on the surface of our deepest moods. They made merry over the old minister’s perturbation, which Bartley found endlessly amusing. Then he noticed that the dress Marcia had on was the one she had worn to the sociable in Lower Equity, and she said, yes, she had put it on because he once said he liked it. He asked her when, and she said, oh, she knew; but if he could not remember, she was not going to tell him. Then she wanted to know if he recognized her by the dress before she lifted her veil in the station.

“No,” he said, with a teasing laugh. “I wasn’t thinking of you.”

“Oh, Bartley!” she joyfully reproached him. “You must have been!”

“Yes, I was! I was so mad at you, that I was glad to have that brute of a station-master bullying some woman!”

“Bartley!”

He sat holding her hand. “Marcia,” he said, gravely, “we must write to your father at once, and tell him. I want to begin life in the right way, and I think it’s only fair to him.”

She was enraptured at his magnanimity. “Bartley! That’s like you! Poor father! I declare — Bartley, I’m afraid I had forgotten him! It’s dreadful; but — you put everything else out of my head. I do believe I’ve died and come to life somewhere else!”

“Well, I haven’t,” said Bartley, “and I guess you’d better write to your father. You’d better write; at present, he and I are not on speaking terms. Here!” He took out his note-book, and gave her his stylographic pen after striking the fist that held it upon his other fist, in the fashion of the amateurs of that reluctant instrument, in order to bring down the ink.

“Oh, what’s that?” she asked.

“It’s a new kind of pen. I got it for a notice in the Free Press.”

“Is Henry Bird going to edit the paper?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” answered Bartley.

“I’ll go out and get an envelope, and ask the landlord what’s the quickest way to get the letter to your father.”

He took up his hat, but she laid her hand on his arm. “Oh, send for him!” she said.

“Are you afraid I sha’n’t come back?” he demanded, with a laughing kiss. “I want to see him about something else, too.”

“Well, don’t be gone long.”

They parted with an embrace that would have fortified older married people for a year’s separation. When Bartley came back, she handed him the leaf she had torn out of his book, and sat down beside him while he read it, with her arm over his shoulder.

“Dear father,” the letter ran, “Bartley and I are married. We were married an hour ago, just across the New Hampshire line, by the Rev. Mr. Jessup. Bartley wants I should let you know the very first thing. I am going to Boston with Bartley to-night, and, as soon as we get settled there, I will write again. I want you should forgive us both; but if you wont forgive Bartley, you mustn’t forgive me. You were mistaken about Bartley, and I was right. Bartley has told me everything, and I am perfectly satisfied. Love to mother.

“MARCIA.”

“P.S. — I did intend to visit Netty Spaulding. But I saw Bartley driving past on his way to the Junction, and I determined to see him if I could before he started for Boston, and tell him I was all wrong, no matter what he said or did afterwards. I ought to have told you I meant to see Bartley; but then you would not have let me come, and if I had not come, I should have died.”

“There’s a good deal of Bartley in it,” said the young man with a laugh.

“You don’t like it!”

“Yes, I do; it’s all right. Did you use to take the prize for composition at boarding-school?”

“Why, I think it’s a very good letter for when I’m in such an excited state.”

“It’s beautiful!” cried Bartley, laughing more and more. The tears started to her eyes.

“Marcia,” said her husband fondly, “what a child you are! If ever I do anything to betray your trust in me—”

There came a shuffling of feet outside the door, a clinking of glass and crockery, and a jarring sort of blow, as if some one were trying to rap on the panel with the edge of a heavy-laden waiter. Bartley threw the door open and found the landlord there, red and smiling, with the waiter in his hand.

“I thought I’d bring your supper in here, you know,” he explained confidentially, “so ‘s’t you could have it a little more snug. And my wife she kind o’ got wind o’ what was going on, — women will, you know,” he said with a wink,— “and she’s sent ye in some hot biscuit and a little jell, and some of her cake.” He set the waiter down on the table, and stood admiring its mystery of napkined dishes. “She guessed you wouldn’t object to some cold chicken, and she’s put a little of that on. Sha’n’t cost ye any more,” he hastened to assure them. “Now this is your room till the train comes, and there aint agoin’ to anybody come in here. So you can make yourselves at home. And I hope you’ll enjoy your supper as much as we did ourn the night we was married. There! I guess I’ll let the lady fix the table; she looks as if she knowed how.”

He got himself out of the room again, and then Marcia, who had made him some embarrassed thanks, burst out in praise of his pleasantness.

“Well, he ought to be pleasant,” said Bartley, “he’s just beaten me on a horse-trade. I’ve sold him the colt.”

“Sold him the colt!” cried Marcia, tragically dropping the napkin she had lifted from the plate of cold chicken.

“Well, we couldn’t very well have taken him to Boston with us. And we couldn’t have got there without selling him. You know you haven’t married a millionnaire, Marcia.”

“How much did you get for the colt?”

“Oh, I didn’t do so badly. I got a hundred and fifty for him.”

“And you had fifteen besides.”

“That was before we were married. I gave the minister five for you, — I think you are worth it, I wanted to give fifteen.”

“Well, then, you have a hundred and sixty now. Isn’t that a great deal?”

“An everlasting lot,” said Bartley, with an impatient laugh. “Don’t let the supper cool, Marcia!”

She silently set out the feast, but regarded it ruefully. “You oughtn’t to have ordered so much, Bartley,” she said. “You couldn’t afford it.”

“I can afford anything when I’m hungry. Besides. I only ordered the oysters and coffee; all the rest is conscience money — or sentiment — from the landlord. Come, come! cheer up, now! We sha’n’t starve to-night, anyhow.”

“Well, I know father will help us.”

“We sha’n’t count on him,” said Bartley. “Now drop it!” He put his arm round her shoulders and pressed her against him, till she raised her face for his kiss.

“Well, I will!” she said, and the shadow lifted itself from their wedding feast, and they sat down and made merry as if they had all the money in the world to spend. They laughed and joked; they praised the things they liked, and made fun of the others.

“How strange! How perfectly impossible it all seems! Why, last night I was taking supper at Kinney’s logging-camp, and hating you at every mouthful with all my might. Everything seemed against me, and I was feeling ugly, and flirting like mad with a fool from Montreal: she had come out there from Portland for a frolic with the owners’ party. You made me do it, Marcia!” he cried jestingly. “And remember that, if you want me to be good, you must be kind. The other thing seems to make me worse and worse.”

“I will, — I will, Bartley.” she said humbly. “I will try to be kind and patient with you. I will indeed.”

He threw back his head, and laughed and laughed. “Poor — poor old Kinney! He’s the cook, you know, and he thought I’d been making fun of him to that woman, and he behaved so, after they were gone, that I started home in a rage; and he followed me out with his hands all covered with dough, and wanted to stop me, but he couldn’t for fear of spoiling my clothes—” He lost himself in another paroxysm.

Marcia smiled a little. Then, “What sort of a looking person was she?” she tremulously asked.

Bartley stopped abruptly. “Not one ten-thousandth part as good-looking, nor one millionth part as bright, as Marcia Hubbard!” He caught her and smothered her against his breast.

“I don’t care! I don’t care!” she cried. “I was to blame more than you, if you flirted with her, and it serves me right. Yes, I will never say anything to you for anything that happened after I behaved so to you.”

“There wasn’t anything else happened,” cried Bartley. “And the Montreal woman snubbed me soundly before she was done with me.”

“Snubbed you!” exclaimed Marcia, with illogical indignation. This delighted Bartley so much that it was long before he left off laughing over her.

Then they sat down, and were silent till she said, “And did you leave him in a temper?”

“Who? Kinney? In a perfect devil of a temper. I wouldn’t even borrow some money he wanted to lend me.”

“Write to him, Bartley,” said his wife, seriously. “I love you so I can’t bear to have anybody bad friends with you.”

XIII.

The whole thing was so crazy, as Bartley said, that it made no difference if they kept up the expense a few days longer. He took a hack from the depot when they arrived in Boston, and drove to the Revere House, instead of going up in the horse-car. He entered his name on the register with a flourish, “Bartley J. Hubbard and Wife, Boston,” and asked for a room and fire, with laconic gruffness; but the clerk knew him at once for a country person, and when the call-boy followed him into the parlor where Marcia sat, in the tremor into which she fell whenever Bartley was out of her sight, the call-boy discerned her provinciality at a glance, and made free to say that he guessed they had better let him take their things up to their room, and come up themselves after the porter had got their fire going.

“All right,” said Bartley, with hauteur; and he added, for no reason, “Be quick about it.”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy.

“What time is supper — dinner, I mean?”

“It’s ready now, sir.”

“Good. Take up the things. Come just as you are, Marcia. Let him take your cap, — no, keep it on; a good many of them come down in their bonnets.”

Marcia put off her sack and gloves, and hastily repaired the ravages of travel as best she could. She would have liked to go to her room just long enough to brush her hair a little, and the fur cap made her head hot; but she was suddenly afraid of doing something that would seem countrified in Bartley’s eyes, and she promptly obeyed: they had come from Portland in a parlor car, and she had been able to make a traveller’s toilet before they reached Boston.

She had been at Portland several times with her father; but he stopped at a second-class hotel where he had always “put up” when alone, and she was new to the vastness of hotel mirrors and chandeliers, the glossy paint, the frescoing, the fluted pillars, the tessellated marble pavements upon which she stepped when she left the Brussels carpeting of the parlors. She clung to Bartley’s arm, silently praying that she might not do anything to mortify him, and admiring everything he did with all her soul. He made a halt as they entered the glittering dining-room, and stood frowning till the head-waiter ran respectfully up to them, and ushered them with sweeping bows to a table, which they had to themselves. Bartley ordered their dinner with nonchalant ease, beginning with soup and going to black coffee with dazzling intelligence. While their waiter was gone with their order, he beckoned with one finger to another, and sent him out for a paper, which he unfolded and spread on the table, taking a toothpick into his mouth, and running the sheet over with his eyes. “I just want to see what’s going on to-night,” he said, without looking at Marcia.

She made a little murmur of acquiescence in her throat, but she could not speak for strangeness. She began to steal little timid glances about, and to notice the people at the other tables. In her heart she did not find the ladies so very well dressed as she had expected the Boston ladies to be; and there was no gentleman there to compare with Bartley, either in style or looks. She let her eyes finally dwell on him, wishing that he would put his paper away and say something, but afraid to ask, lest it should not be quite right: all the other gentlemen were reading papers. She was feeling lonesome and homesick, when he suddenly glanced at her and said, “How pretty you look, Marsh!”

“Do I?” she asked, with a little grateful throb, while her eyes joyfully suffused themselves.

“Pretty as a pink,” he returned. “Gay, — isn’t it?” he continued, with a wink that took her into his confidence again, from which his study of the newspaper had seemed to exclude her. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to take you to the Museum after dinner, and let you see Boucicault in the ‘Colleen Bawn.’” He swept his paper off the table and unfolded his napkin in his lap, and, leaning back in his chair, began to tell her about the play. “We can walk: it’s only just round the corner,” he said at the end.

Marcia crept into the shelter of his talk, — he sometimes spoke rather loud, — and was submissively silent. When they got into their own room, — which had gilt lambrequin frames, and a chandelier of three burners, and a marble mantel, and marble-topped table and washstand, — and Bartley turned up the flaring gas, she quite broke down, and cried on his breast, to make sure that she had got him all back again.

“Why, Marcia!” he said. “I know just how you feel. Don’t you suppose I understand as well as you do that we’re a country couple? But I’m not going to give myself away; and you mustn’t, either. There wasn’t a woman in that room that could compare with you, — dress or looks!”

“You were splendid,” she whispered, “and just like the rest! and that made me feel somehow as if I had lost you.”

“I know, — I saw just how you felt; but I wasn’t going to say anything for fear you’d give way right there. Come, there’s plenty of time before the play begins. I call this nice! Old-fashioned, rather, in the decorations,” he said, “but pretty good for its time.” He had pulled up two arm-chairs in front of the glowing grate of anthracite; as he spoke, he cast his eyes about the room, and she followed his glance obediently. He had kept her hand in his, and now he held her slim finger-tips in the fist which he rested on his knee. “No; I’ll tell you what, Marcia, if you want to get on in a city, there’s no use being afraid of people. No use being afraid of anything, so long as we’re good to each other. And you’ve got to believe in me right along. Don’t you let anything get you on the wrong track. I believe that as long as you have faith in me, I shall deserve it; and when you don’t—”

“Oh, Bartley, you know I didn’t doubt you! I just got to thinking, and I was a little worked up! I suppose I’m excited.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” cried her husband. “Don’t you suppose I understand you?”

They talked a long time together, and made each other loving promises of patience. They confessed their faults, and pledged each other that they would try hard to overcome them. They wished to be good; they both felt they had much to retrieve; but they had no concealments, and they knew that was the best way to begin the future, of which they did their best to conceive seriously. Bartley told her his plans about getting some newspaper work till he could complete his law studies. He meant to settle down to practice in Boston. “You have to wait longer for it than you would in a country place; but when you get it, it’s worth while.” He asked Marcia whether she would look up his friend Halleck if she were in his place; but he did not give her time to decide. “I guess I won’t do it. Not just yet, at any rate. He might suppose that I wanted something of him. I’ll call on him when I don’t need his help.”

Perhaps, if they had not planned to go to the theatre, they would have staid where they were, for they were tired, and it was very cosey. But when they were once in the street, they were glad they had come out. Bowdoin Square and Court Street and Tremont Row were a glitter of gas-lights, and those shops, with their placarded bargains, dazzled Marcia.

“Is it one of the principal streets?” she asked Bartley.

He gave the laugh of a veteran habitu� of Boston. “Tremont Row? No. Wait till I show you Washington Street to-morrow. There’s the Museum,” he said, pointing to the long row of globed lights on the fa�ade of the building. “Here we are in Scollay Square. There’s Hanover Street; there’s Cornhill; Court crooks down that way; there’s Pemberton Square.”

His familiarity with these names estranged him to her again; she clung the closer to his arm, and caught her breath nervously as they turned in with the crowd that was climbing the stairs to the box-office of the theatre. Bartley left her a moment, while he pushed his way up to the little window and bought the tickets. “First-rate seats,” he said, coming back to her, and taking her hand under his arm again, “and a great piece of luck. They were just returned for sale by the man in front of me, or I should have had to take something ‘way up in the gallery. There’s a regular jam. These are right in the centre of the parquet.”

Marcia did not know what the parquet was; she heard its name with the certainty that but for Bartley she should not be equal to it. All her village pride was quelled; she had only enough self-control to act upon Bartley’s instructions not to give herself away by any conviction of rusticity. They passed in through the long, colonnaded vestibule, with its paintings, and plaster casts, and rows of birds and animals in glass cases on either side, and she gave scarcely a glance at any of those objects, endeared by association, if not by intrinsic beauty, to the Boston play-goer. Gulliver, with the Liliputians swarming upon him; the painty-necked ostriches and pelicans; the mummied mermaid under a glass bell; the governors’ portraits; the stuffed elephant; Washington crossing the Delaware; Cleopatra applying the asp; Sir William Pepperell, at full length, on canvas; and the pagan months and seasons in plaster, — if all these are, indeed, the subjects, — were dim phantasmagoria amid which she and Bartley moved scarcely more real. The usher, in his dress-coat, ran up the aisle to take their checks, and led them down to their seats; half a dozen elegant people stood to let them into their places; the theatre was filled with faces. At Portland, where she saw the “Lady of Lyons,” with her father, three-quarters of the house was empty.

Bartley only had time to lean over and whisper, “The place is packed with Beacon Street swells, — it’s a regular field night,” — when the bell tinkled and the curtain rose.

As the play went on, the rich jacqueminot-red flamed into her cheeks, and burnt there a steady blaze to the end. The people about her laughed and clapped, and at times they seemed to be crying. But Marcia sat through every part as stoical as a savage, making no sign, except for the flaming color in her cheeks, of interest or intelligence. Bartley talked of the play all the way home, but she said nothing, and in their own room he asked: “Didn’t you really like it? Were you disappointed? I haven’t been able to get a word out of you about it. Didn’t you like Boucicault?”

“I didn’t know which he was,” she answered, with impassioned exaltation. “I didn’t care for him. I only thought of that poor girl, and her husband who despised her—”

She stopped. Bartley looked at her a moment, and then caught her to him and fell a-laughing over her, till it seemed as if he never would end. “And you thought — you thought,” he cried, trying to get his breath,— “you thought you were Eily, and I was Hardress Cregan! Oh, I see, I see!” He went on making a mock and a burlesque of her tragical hallucination till she laughed with him at last. When he put his hand up to turn out the gas, he began his joking afresh. “The real thing for Hardress to do,” he said, fumbling for the key, “is to blow it out. That’s what Hardress usually does when he comes up from the rural districts with Eily on their bridal tour. That finishes off Eily, without troubling Danny Mann. The only drawback is that it finishes off Hardress, too: they’re both found suffocated in the morning.”

XIV.

The next day, after breakfast, while they stood together before the parlor fire, Bartley proposed one plan after another for spending the day. Marcia rejected them all, with perfectly recovered self-composure.

“Then what shall we do?” he asked, at last.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, rather absently. She added, after an interval, smoothing the warm front of her dress, and putting her foot on the fender, “What did those theatre-tickets cost?”

“Two dollars,” he replied carelessly. “Why?”

Marcia gasped. “Two dollars! Oh, Bartley, we couldn’t afford it!”

“It seems we did.”

“And here, — how much are we paying here?”

“That room, with fire,” said Bartley, stretching himself, “is seven dollars a day—”

“We mustn’t stay another instant!” said Marcia, all a woman’s terror of spending money on anything but dress, all a wife’s conservative instinct, rising within her. “How much have you got left?”

Bartley took out his pocket-book and counted over the bills in it. “A hundred and twenty dollars.”

“Why, what has become of it all? We had a hundred and sixty!”

“Well, our railroad tickets were nineteen, the sleeping-car was three, the parlor-car was three, the theatre was two, the hack was fifty cents, and we’ll have to put down the other two and a half to refreshments.”

Marcia listened in dismay. At the end she drew a long breath. “Well, we must go away from here as soon as possible, — that I know. We’ll go out and find some boarding-place. That’s the first thing.”

“Oh, now, Marcia, you’re not going to be so severe as that, are you?” pleaded Bartley. “A few dollars, more or less, are not going to keep us out of the poorhouse. I just want to stay here three days: that will leave us a clean hundred, and we can start fair.” He was half joking, but she was wholly serious.

“No, Bartley! Not another hour, — not another minute! Come!” She took his arm and bent it up into a crook, where she put her hand, and pulled him toward the door.

“Well, after all,” he said, “it will be some fun looking up a room.”

There was no one else in the parlor; in going to the door they took some waltzing steps together.

While she dressed to go out, he looked up places where rooms were let with or without board, in the newspaper. “There don’t seem to be a great many,” he said meditatively, bending over the open sheet. But he cut out half a dozen advertisements with his editorial scissors, and they started upon their search.

They climbed those pleasant old up-hill streets that converge to the State House, and looked into the houses on the quiet Places that stretch from one thoroughfare to another. They had decided that they would be content with two small rooms, one for a chamber, and the other for a parlor, where they could have a fire. They found exactly what they wanted in the first house where they applied, one flight up, with sunny windows, looking down the street; but it made Marcia’s blood run cold when the landlady said that the price was thirty dollars a week. At another place the rooms were only twenty; the position was as good, and the carpet and furniture prettier. This was still too dear, but it seemed comparatively reasonable till it appeared that this was the price without board.

“I think we should prefer rooms with board, shouldn’t we?” asked Bartley, with a sly look at Marcia.

The prices were of all degrees of exorbitance, and they varied for no reason from house to house; one landlady had been accustomed to take more and another less, but never little enough for Marcia, who overruled Bartley again and again when he wished to close with some small abatement of terms. She declared now that they must put up with one room, and they must not care what floor it was on. But the cheapest room with board was fourteen dollars a week, and Marcia had fixed her ideal at ten: even that was too high for them.

“The best way will be to go back to the Revere House, at seven dollars a day,” said Bartley. He had lately been leaving the transaction of the business entirely to Marcia, who had rapidly acquired alertness and decision in it.

She could not respond to his joke. “What is there left?” she asked.

“There isn’t anything left,” he said. “We’ve got to the end.”

They stood on the edge of the pavement and looked up and down the street, and then, by a common impulse, they looked at the house opposite, where a placard in the window advertised, “Apartments to Let — to Gentlemen only.”

“It would be of no use asking there,” murmured Marcia, in sad abstraction.

“Well, let’s go over and try,” said her husband. “They can’t do more than turn us out of doors.”

“I know it won’t be of any use,” Marcia sighed, as people do when they hope to gain something by forbidding themselves hope. But she helplessly followed, and stood at the foot of the door-steps while he ran up and rang.

It was evidently the woman of the house who came to the door and shrewdly scanned them.

“I see you have apartments to let,” said Bartley.

“Well, yes,” admitted the woman, as if she considered it useless to deny it, “I have.”

“I should like to look at them,” returned Bartley, with promptness. “Come, Marcia.” And, reinforced by her, he invaded the premises before the landlady had time to repel him. “I’ll tell you what we want,” he continued, turning into the little reception-room at the side of the door, “and if you haven’t got it, there’s no need to trouble you. We want a fair-sized room, anywhere between the cellar-floor and the roof, with a bed and a stove and a table in it, that sha’n’t cost us more than ten dollars a week, with board.”

“Set down,” said the landlady, herself setting the example by sinking into the rocking-chair behind her and beginning to rock while she made a brief study of the intruders. “Want it for yourselves?”

“Yes,” said Bartley.

“Well,” returned the landlady, “I always have preferred single gentlemen.”

“I inferred as much from a remark which you made in your front window,” said Bartley, indicating the placard.

The landlady smiled. They were certainly a very pretty-appearing young couple, and the gentleman was evidently up-and-coming. Mrs. Nash liked Bartley, as most people of her grade did, at once. “It’s always be’n my exper’ence,” she explained, with the lazily rhythmical drawl in which most half-bred New-Englanders speak, “that I seemed to get along rather better with gentlemen. They give less trouble — as a general rule,” she added, with a glance at Marcia, as if she did not deny that there were exceptions, and Marcia might be a striking one.

Bartley seized his advantage. “Well, my wife hasn’t been married long enough to be unreasonable. I guess you’d get along.”

They both laughed, and Marcia, blushing, joined them.

“Well, I thought when you first come up the steps you hadn’t been married — well, not a great while,” said the landlady.

“No,” said Bartley. “It seems a good while to my wife; but we were only married day before yesterday.”

“The land!” cried Mrs. Nash.

“Bartley!” whispered Marcia, in soft upbraiding.

“What? Well, say last week, then. We were married last week, and we’ve come to Boston to seek our fortune.”

His wit overjoyed Mrs. Nash. “You’ll find Boston an awful hard place to get along,” she said, shaking her head with a warning smile.

“I shouldn’t think so, by the price Boston people ask for their rooms,” returned Bartley. “If I had rooms to let, I should get along pretty easily.”

This again delighted the landlady. “I guess you aint goin’ to get out of spirits, anyway,” she said. “Well,” she continued, “I have got a room ‘t I guess would suit you. Unexpectedly vacated.” She seemed to recur to the language of an advertisement in these words, which she pronounced as if reading them. “It’s pretty high up,” she said, with another warning shake of the head.

“Stairs to get to it?” asked Bartley.

“Plenty of stairs.”

“Well, when a place is pretty high up, I like to have plenty of stairs to get to it. I guess we’ll see it, Marcia.” He rose.

“Well, I’ll just go up and see if it’s fit to be seen, first,” said the landlady.

“Oh, Bartley!” said Marcia, when she had left them alone, “how could you joke so about our just being married!”

“Well, I saw she wanted awfully to ask. And anybody can tell by looking at us, anyway. We can’t keep that to ourselves, any more than we can our greenness. Besides, it’s money in our pockets; she’ll take something off our board for it, you’ll see. Now, will you manage the bargaining from this on? I stepped forward because the rooms were for gentlemen only.”

“I guess I’d better,” said Marcia.

“All right; then I’ll take a back seat from this out.”

“Oh, I do hope it won’t be too much!” sighed the young wife. “I’m so tired, looking.”

“You can come right along up,” the landlady called down through the oval spire formed by the ascending hand-rail of the stairs.

They found her in a broad, low room, whose ceiling sloped with the roof, and had the pleasant irregularity of the angles and recessions of two dormer windows. The room was clean and cosey; there was a table, and a stove that could be used open or shut; Marcia squeezed Bartley’s arm to signify that it would do perfectly — if only the price would suit.

The landlady stood in the middle of the floor and lectured: “Now, there! I get five dollars a week for this room; and I gen’ly let it to two gentlemen. It’s just been vacated by two gentlemen unexpectedly; and it’s hard to get gentlemen at this time the year; and that’s the reason I thought of takin’ you. As I say, I don’t much like ladies for inmates, and so I put in the window ‘for gentlemen only.’ But it’s no use bein’ too particular; I can’t have the room layin’ empty on my hands. If it suits you, you can have it for four dollars. It’s high up, and there’s no use tryin’ to deny it. But there aint such another view as them winders commands anywheres. You can see the harbor, and pretty much the whole coast.”

“Anything extra for the view?” said Bartley, glancing out.

“No, I throw that in.”

“Does the price include gas and fire?” asked Marcia, sharpened as to all details by previous interviews.

“It includes the gas, but it don’t include the fire,” said the landlady, firmly. “And it’s pretty low at that, as you’ve found out, I guess.”

“Yes, it is low,” said Marcia. “Bartley, I think we’d better take it.”

She looked at him timidly, as if she were afraid he might not think it good enough; she did not think it good enough for him, but she felt that they must make their money go as far as possible.

“All right!” he said. “Then it’s a bargain.”

“And how much more will the board be?”

“Well, there,” the landlady said, with candor, “I don’t know as I can meet your views. I don’t ever give board. But there’s plenty of houses right on the street here where you can get day-board from four dollars a week up.”

“Oh, dear!” sighed Marcia; “and that would make it twelve dollars!”

“Why, the dear suz, child!” exclaimed the landlady, “you didn’t expect to get it for less?”

“We must,” said Marcia.

“Then you’ll have to go to a mechanics’ boardin’-house.”

“I suppose we shall,” she returned, dejectedly. Bartley whistled.

“Look here,” said the landlady, “aint you from Down East, some’eres?”

Marcia started, as if the woman had recognized them. “Yes.” she said.

“Well, now,” said Mrs. Nash, “I’m from down Maine way myself, and I’ll tell you what I should do, if I was in your place. You don’t want much of anything tor breakfast or tea; you can boil you an egg on the stove here, and you can make your own tea or coffee; and if I was you, I’d go out for my dinners to an eatin’-house. I heard some my lodgers tellin’ how they done. Well, I heard the very gentlemen that occupied this room sayin’ how they used to go to an eatin’-house, and one ‘d order one thing, and another another, and then they’d halve it between ‘em, and make out a first-rate meal for about a quarter apiece. Plenty of places now where they give you a cut o’lamb or rib-beef for a shillin’, and they bring you bread and butter and potato with it; an’ it’s always enough for two. That’s what they said. I haint never tried it myself; but as long as you haint got anybody but yourselves to care for, there aint any reason why you shouldn’t.”

They looked at each other.

“Well,” added the landlady for a final touch, “say fire. That stove won’t burn a great deal, anyway.”

“All right,” said Bartley, “we’ll take the room — for a month, at least.”

Mrs. Nash looked a little embarrassed. If she had made some concession to the liking she had conceived for this pretty young couple, she could not risk everything. “I always have to get the first week in advance — where there ain’t no reference,” she suggested.

“Of course,” said Bartley, and he took out his pocket-book, which he had a boyish satisfaction in letting her see was well filled. “Now, Marcia,” he continued, looking at his watch, “I’ll just run over to the hotel, and give up our room before they get us in for dinner.”

Marcia accepted Mrs. Nash’s invitation to come and sit with her till the chill was off the room; and she borrowed a pen and paper of her to write home. The note she sent was brief: she was not going to seem to ask anything of her father. But she was going to do what was right; she told him where she was, and she sent her love to her mother. She would not speak of her things; he might send them or not, as he chose; but she knew he would. This was the spirit of her letter, and her training had not taught her to soften and sweeten her phrase; but no doubt the old man, who was like her, would understand that she felt no compunction for what she had done, and that she loved him though she still defied him.

Bartley did not ask her what her letter was when she demanded a stamp of him on his return; but he knew. He inquired of Mrs. Nash where these cheap eating-houses were to be found, and he posted the letter in the first box they came to, merely saying, “I hope you haven’t been asking any favors, Marsh?”

“No, indeed.”

“Because I couldn’t stand that.”

Marcia had never dined in a restaurant, and she was somewhat bewildered by the one into which they turned. There was a great show of roast, and steak, and fish, and game, and squash and cranberry-pie in the window, and at the door a tack was driven through a mass of bills of fare, two of which Bartley plucked off as they entered, with a knowing air, and then threw on the floor when he found the same thing on the table. The table had a marble top, and a silver-plated castor in the centre. The plates were laid with a coarse red doily in a cocked hat on each, and a thinly plated knife and fork crossed beneath it; the plates were thick and heavy; the handle as well as the blade of the knife was metal, and silvered. Besides the castor, there was a bottle of Leicestershire sauce on the table, and salt in what Marcia thought a pepper-box; the marble was of an unctuous translucence in places, and showed the course of the cleansing napkin on its smeared surface. The place was hot, and full of confused smells of cooking; all the tables were crowded, so that they found places with difficulty, and pale, plain girls, of the Provincial and Irish-American type, in fashionable bangs and pull-backs, went about taking the orders, which they wailed out toward a semicircular hole opening upon a counter at the farther end of the room; there they received the dishes ordered, and hurried with them to the customers, before whom they laid them with a noisy clacking of the heavy crockery. A great many of the people seemed to be taking hulled corn and milk; baked beans formed another favorite dish, and squash-pie was in large request. Marcia was not critical; roast turkey for Bartley and stewed chicken for herself, with cranberry-pie for both, seemed to her a very good and sufficient dinner, and better than they ought to have had. She asked Bartley if this were anything like Parker’s; he had always talked to her about Parker’s.

“Well, Marcia,” he said, folding up his doily, which does not betray use like the indiscreet white napkin, “I’ll just take you round and show you the outside of Parker’s, and some day we’ll go there and get dinner.”

He not only showed her Parker’s, but the City Hall; they walked down School Street, and through Washington as far as Boylston: and Bartley pointed out the Old South, and brought Marcia home by the Common, where they stopped to see the boys coasting under the care of the police, between two long lines of spectators.

“The State House,” said Bartley, with easy command of the facts, and, pointing in the several directions; “Beacon Street; Public Garden; Back Bay.”

She came home to Mrs. Nash joyfully admiring the city, but admiring still more her husband’s masterly knowledge of it.

Mrs. Nash was one of those people who partake intimately of the importance of the place in which they live; to whom it is sufficient splendor and prosperity to be a Bostonian, or New-Yorker, or Chicagoan, and who experience a delicious self-flattery in the celebration of the municipal grandeur. In his degree, Bartley was of this sort, and he exchanged compliments of Boston with Mrs. Nash, till they grew into warm favor with each other.

After a while, he said he must go up-stairs and do some writing; and then he casually dropped the fact that he was an editor, and that he had come to Boston to get an engagement on a newspaper; he implied that he had come to take one.

“Well,” said Mrs. Nash, smoothing the back of the cat, which she had in her lap, “I guess there ain’t anything like our Boston papers. And they say this new one — the ‘Daily Events’ — is goin’ to take the lead. You acquainted any with our Boston editors?”

Bartley hemmed. “Well — I know the proprietor of the Events.”

“Ah, yes: Mr. Witherby. Well, they say he’s got the money. I hear my lodgers talkin’ about that paper consid’able. I haven’t ever seen it.”

Bartley now went up-stairs; he had an idea in his head. Marcia remained with Mrs. Nash a few moments. “He’s been in Boston before,” she said, with proud satisfaction; “he visited here when he was in college.”

“Law, is he college-bred?” cried Mrs. Nash. “Well, I thought he looked ‘most too wide-awake for that. He aint a bit offish. He seems re’l practical. What you hurryin’ off so for?” she asked, as Marcia rose, and stood poised on the threshold, in act to follow her husband. “Why don’t you set here with me, while he’s at his writin’? You’ll just keep talkin to him and takin’ his mind off, the whole while. You stay here!” she commanded hospitably. “You’ll just be in the way, up there.”

This was a novel conception to Marcia, but its good sense struck her. “Well, I will,” she said. “I’ll run up a minute to leave my things, and then I’ll come back.”

She found Bartley dragging the table, on which he had already laid out his writing-materials, into a good light, and she threw her arms round his neck, as if they had been a great while parted.

“Come up to kiss me good luck?” he asked, finding her lips.

“Yes, and to tell you how splendid you are, going right to work this way,” she answered fondly.

“Oh, I don’t believe in losing time; and I’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot, if I’m going to write out that logging-camp business. I’ll take it over to that Events man, and hit him with it, while it’s fresh in his mind.”

“Yes,” said Marcia. “Are you going to write that out?”

“Why, I told you I was. Any objections?” He did not pay much attention to her, and he asked his question jokingly, as he went on making his preparations.

“It’s hard for me to realize that people can care for such things. I thought perhaps you’d begin with something else,” she suggested, hanging up her sack and hat in the closet.

“No, that’s the very thing to begin with,” he answered, carelessly. “What are you going to do? Want that book to read that I bought on the cars?”

“No, I’m going down to sit with Mrs. Nash while you’re writing.”

“Well, that’s a good idea.”

“You can call me when you’ve done.”

“Done!” cried Bartley. “I sha’n’t be done till this time to-morrow. I’m going to make a lot about it.”

“Oh!” said his wife. “Well, I suppose the more there is, the more you will get for it. Shall you put in about those people coming to see the camp?”

“Yes, I think I can work that in so that old Witherby will like it. Something about a distinguished Boston newspaper proprietor and his refined and elegant ladies, as a sort of contrast to the rude life of the loggers.”

“I thought you didn’t admire them a great deal.”

“Well, I didn’t much. But I can work them up.”

Marcia was quite ready to go; Bartley had seated himself at his table, but she still hovered about. “And are you — shall you put that Montreal woman in?”

“Yes, get it all in. She’ll work up first-rate.”

Marcia was silent. Then, “I shouldn’t think you’d put her in,” she said, “if she was so silly and disagreeable.”

Bartley turned around, and saw the look on her face that he could not mistake. He rose and took her by the chin. “Look here, Marsh!” he said, “didn’t you promise me you’d stop that?”

“Yes,” she murmured, while the color flamed into her cheeks.

“And will you?”

“I did try—”

He looked sharply into her eyes. “Confound the Montreal woman! I won’t put in a word about her. There!” He kissed Marcia, and held her in his arms and soothed her as if she had been a jealous child.

“Oh, Bartley! Oh, Bartley!” she cried. “I love you so!”

“I think it’s a remark you made before,” he said, and, with a final kiss and laugh, he pushed her out of the door; and she ran down stairs to Mrs. Nash again.

“Your husband ever write poetry, any?” inquired the landlady.

“No,” returned Marcia; “he used to in college, but he says it don’t pay.”

“One my lodgers — well, she was a lady; you can’t seem to get gentlemen oftentimes in the summer season, for love or money, and I was puttin’ up with her, — breakin’ joints, as you may say, for the time bein’ — she wrote poetry; ‘n’ I guess she found it pretty poor pickin’. Used to write for the weekly papers, she said, ‘n’ the child’n’s magazines. Well, she couldn’t get more ‘n a doll’ or two, ‘n’ I do’ know but what less, for a piece as long as that.” Mrs. Nash held her hands about a foot apart. “Used to show ’em to me, and tell me about ‘em. I declare I used to pity her. I used to tell her I ruther break stone for my livin’.”

Marcia sat talking more than an hour to Mrs. Nash, informing herself upon the history of Mrs. Nash’s past and present lodgers, and about the ways of the city, and the prices of provisions and dress-goods. The dearness of everything alarmed and even shocked her; but she came back to her faith in Bartley’s ability to meet and overcome all difficulties. She grew drowsy in the close air which Mrs. Nash loved, after all her fatigues and excitements, and she said she guessed she would go up and see how Bartley was getting on. But when she stole into the room and saw him busily writing, she said, “Now I won’t speak a word, Bartley,” and coiled herself down under a shawl on the bed, near enough to put her hand on his shoulder if she wished, and fell asleep.

XV.

It took Bartley two days to write out his account of the logging-camp. He worked it up to the best of his ability, giving all the facts that he had got out of Kinney, and relieving these with what he considered picturesque touches. He had the newspaper instinct, and he divined that his readers would not care for his picturesqueness without his facts. He therefore subordinated this, and he tried to give his description of the loggers a politico-economical interest, dwelling upon the variety of nationalities engaged in the industry, and the changes it had undergone in what he called its personnel; he enlarged upon its present character and its future development in relation to what he styled, in a line of small capitals, with an early use of the favorite newspaper possessive,

COLUMBIA’S MORIBUND SHIP-BUILDING.

And he interspersed his text plentifully with exclamatory headings intended to catch the eye with startling fragments of narration and statement, such as

THE PINE-TREE STATE’S STORIED STAPLE

MORE THAN A MILLION OF MONEY

UNBROKEN WILDERNESS

WILD-CATS, LYNXES, AND BEARS

BITTEN OFF

BOTH LEGS FROZEN TO THE KNEES

CANADIAN SONGS

JOY UNCONFINED

THE LAMPLIGHT ON THEIR SWARTHY FACES.

He spent a final forenoon in polishing his article up, and stuffing it full of telling points. But after dinner on this last day he took leave of Marcia with more trepidation than he was willing to show, or knew how to conceal. Her devout faith in his success seemed to unnerve him, and he begged her not to believe in it so much.

He seized what courage he had left in both hands, and found himself, after the usual reluctance of the people in the business office, face to face with Mr. Witherby in his private room. Mr. Witherby had lately dismissed his managing editor for his neglect of the true interests of the paper as represented by the counting-room; and was managing the Events himself. He sat before a table strewn with newspapers and manuscripts; and as he looked up, Bartley saw that he did not recognize him.

“How do you do, Mr. Witherby? I had the pleasure of meeting you the other day in Maine — at Mr. Willett’s logging-camp. Hubbard is my name; remember me as editor of the Equity Free Press.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Witherby, rising and standing at his desk, as a sort of compromise between asking his visitor to sit down and telling him to go away. He shook hands in a loose way, and added: “I presume you would like to exchange. But the fact is, our list is so large already, that we can’t extend it, just now; we can’t—”

Bartley smiled. “I don’t want any exchange, Mr. Witherby. I’m out of the Free Press.”

“Ah!” said the city journalist, with relief. He added, in a leading tone: “Then—”

“I’ve come to offer you an article, — an account of lumbering in our State. It’s a little sketch that I’ve prepared from what I saw in Mr. Willett’s camp, and some facts and statistics I’ve picked up. I thought it might make an attractive feature of your Sunday edition.”

“The Events,” said Mr. Witherby, solemnly, “does not publish a Sunday edition!”

“Of course not,” answered Bartley, inwardly cursing his blunder,— “I mean your Saturday evening supplement.” He handed him his manuscript.

Mr. Witherby looked at it, with the worry of a dull man who has assumed unintelligible duties. He had let the other papers “get ahead of him” on several important enterprises lately, and he would have been glad to retrieve himself; but he could not be sure that this was an enterprise. He began by saying that their last Saturday supplement was just out, and the next was full; and he ended by declaring, with stupid pomp, that the Events preferred to send its own reporters to write up those matters. Then he hemmed, and looked at Bartley, and he would really have been glad to have him argue him out of this position; but Bartley could not divine what was in his mind. The cold fit, which sooner or later comes to every form of authorship, seized him. He said awkwardly he was very sorry, and putting his manuscript back in his pocket he went out, feeling curiously light-headed, as if his rebuff had been a stunning blow. The affair was so quickly over, that he might well have believed it had not happened. But he was sickeningly disappointed; he had counted upon the sale of his article to the Events; his hope had been founded upon actual knowledge of the proprietor’s intention; and although he had rebuked Marcia’s overweening confidence, he had expected that Witherby would jump at it. But Witherby had not even looked at it.

Bartley walked a long time in the cold winter sunshine, fie would have liked to go back to his lodging, and hide his face in Marcia’s hands, and let her pity him, but he could not bear the thought of her disappointment, and he kept walking. At last he regained courage enough to go to the editor of the paper for which he used to correspond in the summer, and which had always printed his letters. This editor was busy, too, but he apparently felt some obligations to civility with Bartley; and though he kept glancing over his exchanges as they talked, he now and then glanced at Bartley also. He said that he should be glad to print the sketch, but that they never paid for outside material, and he advised Bartley to go with it to the Events or to the Daily Chronicle-Abstract; the Abstract and the Brief Chronicle had lately consolidated, and they were showing a good deal of enterprise. Bartley said nothing to betray that he had already been at the Events office, and upon this friendly editor’s invitation to drop in again some time he went away considerably re-inspirited.

“If you should happen to go to the Chronicle-Abstract folks,” the editor called after him, “you can tell them I suggested your coming.”

The managing editor of the Chronicle-Abstract was reading a manuscript, and he did not desist from his work on Bartley’s appearance, which he gave no sign of welcoming. But he had a whimsical, shrewd, kind face, and Bartley felt that he should get on with him, though he did not rise, and though he let Bartley stand.

“Yes,” he said. “Lumbering, hey? Well, there’s some interest in that, just now, on account of this talk about the decay of our shipbuilding interests. Anything on that point?”

“That’s the very point I touch on first,” said Bartley.

The editor stopped turning over his manuscript. “Let’s see,” he said, holding out his hand for Bartley’s article. He looked at the first head-line, “What I Know about Logging,” and smiled. “Old, but good.” Then he glanced at the other headings, and ran his eye down the long strips on which Bartley had written; nibbled at the text here and there a little; returned to the first paragraph, and read that through; looked back at something else, and then read the close.

“I guess you can leave it,” he said, laying the manuscript on the table.

“No, I guess not,” said Bartley, with equal coolness, gathering it up.

The editor looked fairly at him for the first time, and smiled. Evidently he liked this. “What’s the reason? Any particular hurry?”

“I happen to know that the Events is going to send a man down East to write up this very subject. And I don’t propose to leave this article here till they steal my thunder, and then have it thrown back on my hands not worth the paper it’s written on.”

The editor tilted himself back in his chair and braced his knees against his table. “Well, I guess you’re right,” he said. “What do you want for it?”

This was a terrible question. Bartley knew nothing about the prices that city papers paid; he feared to ask too much, but he also feared to cheapen his wares by asking too little. “Twenty-five dollars,” he said, huskily.

“Let’s look at it,” said the editor, reaching out his hand for the manuscript again. “Sit down.” He pushed a chair toward Bartley with his foot, having first swept a pile of newspapers from it to the floor. He now read the article more fully, and then looked up at Bartley, who sat still, trying to hide his anxiety. “You’re not quite a new hand at the bellows, are you?”

“I’ve edited a country paper.”

“Yes? Where?”

“Down in Maine.”

The editor bent forward and took out a long, narrow blank-book. “I guess we shall want your article What name?”

“Bartley J. Hubbard.” It sounded in his ears like some other name.

“Going to be in Boston some time?”

“All the time,” said Bartley, struggling to appear nonchalant. The revulsion from the despair into which he had fallen after his interview with Witherby was still very great. The order on the counting-room which the editor had given him shook in his hand. He saw his way before him clearly now; he wished to propose some other things that he would like to write; but he was saved from this folly for the time by the editor’s saying, in a tone of dismissal: “Better come in to-morrow and see a proof. We shall put you into the Wednesday supplement.”

“Thanks,” said Bartley. “Good day.”

The editor did not hear him, or did not think it necessary to respond from behind the newspaper which he had lifted up between them, and Bartley went out. He did not stop to cash his order; he made boyish haste to show it to Marcia, as something more authentic than the money itself, and more sacred. As he hurried homeward he figured Marcia’s ecstasy in his thought. He saw himself flying up the stairs to their attic three steps at a bound, and bursting into the room, where she sat eager and anxious, and flinging the order into her lap; and then, when she had read it with rapture at the sum, and pride in the smartness with which he had managed the whole affair, he saw himself catching her up and dancing about the floor with her. He thought how fond of her he was, and he wondered that he could ever have been cold or lukewarm.

She was standing at the window of Mrs. Nash’s little reception-room when he reached the house. It was not to be as he had planned, but he threw her a kiss, glad of the impatience which would not let her wait till he could find her in their own room, and he had the precious order in his hand to dazzle her eyes as soon as he should enter. But, as he sprang into the hall, his foot struck against a trunk and some boxes.

“Hello!” he cried, “Your things have come!”

Marcia lingered within the door of the reception-room; she seemed afraid to come out. “Yes,” she said, faintly; “father brought them. He has just been here.”

He seemed there still, and the vision unnerved her as if Bartley and he had been confronted there in reality. Her husband had left her hardly a quarter of an hour, when a hack drove up to the door, and her father alighted. She let him in herself, before he could ring, and waited tremulously for what he should do or say. But he merely took her hand, and, stooping over, gave her the chary kiss with which he used to greet her at home when he returned from an absence.

She flung her arms around his neck. “Oh, father!”

“Well, well! There, there!” he said, and then he went into the reception-room with her; and there was nothing in his manner to betray that anything unusual had happened since they last met. He kept his hat on, as his fashion was, and he kept on his overcoat, below which the skirts of his dress-coat hung an inch or two; he looked old, and weary, and shabby.

“I can’t leave Bartley, father,” she began, hysterically.

“I haven’t come to separate you from your husband, Marcia. What made you think so? It’s your place to stay with him.”

“He’s out, now,” she answered, in an incoherent hopefulness. “He’s just gone. Will you wait and see him, father?”

“No, I guess I can’t wait,” said the old man. “It wouldn’t do any good for us to meet now.”

“Do you think he coaxed me away? He didn’t. He took pity on me, — he forgave me. And I didn’t mean to deceive you when I left home, father. But I couldn’t help trying to see Bartley again.”

“I believe you, Marcia. I understand. The thing had to be. Let me see your marriage certificate.”

She ran up to her room and fetched it.

Her father read it carefully. “Yes, that is all right,” he said, and returned it to her. He added, after an absent pause: “I have brought your things, Marcia. Your mother packed all she could think of.”

“How is mother?” asked Marcia, as if this had first reminded her of her mother.

“She is usually well,” replied her father.

“Won’t you — won’t you come up and see our room, father?” Marcia asked, after the interval following this feint of interest in her mother.

“No,” said the old man, rising restlessly from his chair, and buttoning at his coat, which was already buttoned. “I guess I sha’n’t have time. I guess I must be going.”

Marcia put herself between him and the door. “Won’t you let me tell you about it, father?”

“About what?”

“How — I came to go off with Bartley. I want you should know.”

“I guess I know all I want to know about it, Marcia. I accept the facts. I told you how I felt. What you’ve done hasn’t changed me toward you. I understand you better than you understand yourself; and I can’t say that I’m surprised. Now I want you should make the best of it.”

“You don’t forgive Bartley!” she cried, passionately. “Then I don’t want you should forgive me!”

“Where did you pick up this nonsense about forgiving?” said her father, knitting his shaggy brows. “A man does this thing or that, and the consequence follows. I couldn’t forgive Bartley so that he could escape any consequence of what he’s done; and you’re not afraid I shall hurt him?”

“Stay and see him!” she pleaded. “He is so kind to me! He works night and day, and he has just gone out to sell something he has written for the papers.”

“I never said he was lazy,” returned her father. “Do you want any money, Marcia?”

“No, we have plenty. And Bartley is earning it all the time. I wish you would stay and see him!”

“No, I’m glad he didn’t happen to be in,” said the Squire. “I sha’n’t wait for him to come back. It wouldn’t do any good, just yet, Marcia; it would only do harm. Bartley and I haven’t had time to change our minds about each other yet. But I’ll say a good word for him to you. You’re his wife, and it’s your part to help him, not to hinder him. You can make him worse by being a fool; but you needn’t be a fool. Don’t worry him about other women; don’t be jealous. He’s your husband, now: and the worst thing you can do is to doubt him.”

“I won’t, father, I won’t, indeed! I will be good, and I will try to be sensible. Oh, I wish Bartley could know how you feel!”

“Don’t tell him from me,” said her father. “And don’t keep making promises and breaking them. I’ll help the man in with your things.”

He went out, and came in again with one end of a trunk, as if he had been giving the man a hand with it into the house at home, and she suffered him as passively as she had suffered him to do her such services all her life. Then he took her hand laxly in his, and stooped down for another chary kiss. “Good by, Marcia.”

“Why, father! Are you going to leave me?” she faltered.

He smiled in melancholy irony at the bewilderment, the childish forgetfulness of all the circumstances, which her words expressed. “Oh, no! I’m going to take you with me.”

His sarcasm restored her to a sense of what she had said, and she ruefully laughed at herself through her tears. “What am I talking about? Give my love to mother. When will you come again?” she asked, clinging about him almost in the old playful way.

“When you want me,” said the Squire, freeing himself.

“I’ll write!” she cried after him, as he went down the steps; and if there had been, at any moment, a consciousness of her cruelty to him in her heart, she lost it, when he drove away, in her anxious waiting for Bartley’s return. It seemed to her that, though her father had refused to see him, his visit was of happy augury for future kindness between them, and she was proudly eager to tell Bartley what good advice her father had given her. But the sight of her husband suddenly turned these thoughts to fear. She trembled, and all that she could say was, “I know father will be all right, Bartley.”

“How?” he retorted, savagely. “By the way he abused me to you? Where is he?”

“He’s gone, — gone back.”

“I don’t care where he’s gone, so he’s gone. Did he come to take you home with him? Why didn’t you go? — Oh, Marcia!” The brutal words had hardly escaped him when he ran to her as if he would arrest them before their sense should pierce her heart.

She thrust him back with a stiffly extended arm. “Keep away! Don’t touch me!” She walked by him up the stairs without looking round at him, and he heard her close their door and lock it.

XVI.

Bartley stood for a moment, and then went out and wandered aimlessly about till nightfall. He went out shocked and frightened at what he had done, and ready for any reparation. But this mood wore away, and he came back sullenly determined to let her make the advances toward reconciliation, if there was to be one. Her love had already made his peace, and she met him in the dimly lighted little hall with a kiss of silent penitence and forgiveness. She had on her hat and shawl, as if she had been waiting for him to come and take her out to tea; and on their way to the restaurant she asked him of his adventure among the newspapers. He told her briefly, and when they sat down at their table he took out the precious order and showed it to her. But its magic was gone; it was only an order for twenty-five dollars, now; and two hours ago it had been success, rapture, a common hope and a common joy. They scarcely spoke of it, but talked soberly of indifferent things.

She could not recur to her father’s visit at once, and he would not be the first to mention it. He did nothing to betray his knowledge of her intention, as she approached the subject through those feints that women use, and when they stood again in their little attic room she was obliged to be explicit.

“What hurt me, Bartley,” she said, “was that you should think for an instant that I would let father ask me to leave you, or that he would ask such a thing. He only came to tell me to be good to you, and help you, and trust you; and not worry you with my silliness and — and — jealousy. And I don’t ever mean to. And I know he will be good friends with you yet. He praised you for working so hard;” — she pushed it a little beyond the bare fact;— “he always did that; and I know he’s only waiting for a good chance to make it up with you.”

She lifted her eyes, glistening with tears, and it touched his peculiar sense of humor to find her offering him reparation, when he had felt himself so outrageously to blame; but he would not be outdone in magnanimity, if it came to that.

“It’s all right, Marsh. I was a furious idiot, or I should have let you explain at once. But you see I had only one thought in my mind, and that was my luck, which I wanted to share with you; and when your father seemed to have come in between us again—”

“Oh, yes, yes!” she answered. “I understand.” And she clung to him in the joy of this perfect intelligence, which she was sure could never be obscured again.

When Bartley’s article came out, she read it with a fond admiration which all her praises seemed to leave unsaid. She bought a scrap-book, and pasted the article into it, and said that she was going to keep everything he wrote. “What are you going to write the next thing?” she asked.

“Well, that’s what I don’t know,” he answered. “I can’t find another subject like that, so easily.”

“Why, if people care to read about a logging-camp, I should think they would read about almost anything. Nothing could be too common for them. You might even write about the trouble of getting cheap enough rooms in Boston.”

“Marcia,” cried Bartley, “you’re a treasure! I’ll write about that very thing! I know the Chronicle-Abstract will be glad to get it.”

She thought he was joking, till he came to her after a while for some figures which he did not remember. He had the true newspaper instinct, and went to work with a motive that was as different as possible from the literary motive. He wrote for the effect which he was to make, and not from any artistic pleasure in the treatment. He did not attempt to give it form, — to imagine a young couple like himself and Marcia coming down from the country to place themselves in the city; he made no effort to throw about it the poetry of their ignorance and their poverty, or the pathetic humor of their dismay at the disproportion of the prices to their means. He set about getting all the facts he could, and he priced a great many lodgings in different parts of the city; then he went to a number of real-estate agents, and, giving himself out as a reporter of the Chronicle-Abstract, he interviewed them as to house-rents, past and present. Upon these bottom facts, as he called them, he based a “spicy” sketch, which had also largely the character of an expos�. There is nothing the public enjoys so much as an expos�: it seems to be made in the reader’s own interest; it somehow constitutes him a party to the attack upon the abuse, and its effectiveness redounds to the credit of all the newspaper’s subscribers. After a week’s stay in Boston, Bartley was able to assume the feelings of a native who sees his city falling into decay through the rapacity of its landladies. In the heading of ten or fifteen lines which he gave his sketch, the greater number were devoted to this feature of it; though the space actually allotted to it in the text was comparatively small. He called his report “Boston’s Boarding-Houses,” and he spent a paragraph upon the relation of boarding-houses to civilization, before detailing his own experience and observation. This part had many of those strokes of crude picturesqueness and humor which he knew how to give, and was really entertaining; but it was when he came to contrast the rates of house-rent and the cost of provisions with the landladies’

“PERPENDICULAR PRICES,”

that Bartley showed all the virtue of a born reporter. The sentences were vivid and telling; the ensemble was very alarming; and the conclusion was inevitable, that, unless this abuse could somehow be reached, we should lose a large and valuable portion of our population, — especially those young married people of small means with whom the city’s future prosperity so largely rested, and who must drift away to find homes in rival communities if the present exorbitant demands were maintained.

As Bartley had foretold, he had not the least trouble in selling this sketch to the Chronicle-Abstract. The editor probably understood its essential cheapness perfectly well; but he also saw how thoroughly readable it was. He did not grumble at the increased price which Bartley put upon his work; it was still very far from dear; and he liked the young Downeaster’s enterprise. He gave him as cordial a welcome as an overworked man may venture to offer when Bartley came in with his copy, and he felt like doing him a pleasure. Some things out of the logging-camp sketch had been copied, and people had spoken to the editor about it, which was a still better sign that it was a hit.

“Don’t you want to come round to our club to-night?” asked the editor, as he handed Bartley the order for his money across the table. “We have a bad dinner, and we try to have a good time. We’re all newspaper men together.”

“Why, thank you,” said Bartley, “I guess I should like to go.”

“Well, come round at half-past five, and go with me.”

Bartley walked homeward rather soberly. He had meant, if he sold this article, to make amends for the disappointment they had both suffered before, and to have a commemorative supper with Marcia at Parker’s: he had ignored a little hint of hers about his never having taken her there yet, because he was waiting for this chance to do it in style. He resolved that, if she did not seem to like his going to the club, he would go back and withdraw his acceptance. But when he told her he had been invited, — he thought he would put the fact in this tentative way, — she said, “I hope you accepted!”

“Would you have liked me to?” he asked with relief.

“Why, of course! It’s a great honor. You’ll get acquainted with all those editors, and perhaps some of them will want to give you a regular place.” A salaried employment was their common ideal of a provision for their future.

“Well, that’s what I was thinking myself,” said Bartley.

“Go and accept at once,” she pursued.

“Oh, that isn’t necessary. If I get round there by half-past five, I can go,” he answered.

His lurking regret ceased when he came into the reception-room, where the members of the club were constantly arriving, and putting off their hats and overcoats, and then falling into groups for talk. His friend of the Chronicle-Abstract introduced him lavishly, as our American custom is. Bartley had a little strangeness, but no bashfulness, and, with his essentially slight opinion of people, he was promptly at his ease. These men liked his handsome face, his winning voice, the good-fellowship of his instant readiness to joke; he could see that they liked him, and that his friend Ricker was proud of the impression he made; before the evening was over he kept himself with difficulty from patronizing Ricker a little.

The club has grown into something much more splendid and expensive; but it was then content with a dinner certainly as bad as Ricker promised, but fabulously modest in price, at an old-fashioned hotel, whose site was long ago devoured by a dry-goods palace. The drink was commonly water or beer; occasionally, if a great actor or other distinguished guest honored the board, some spendthrift ordered champagne. But no one thought fit to go to this ruinous extreme for Bartley. Ricker offered him his choice of beer or claret, and Bartley temperately preferred water to either; he could see that this raised him in Ricker’s esteem.

No company of men can fail to have a good time at a public dinner, and the good time began at once with these journalists, whose overworked week ended in this Saturday evening jollity. They were mostly young men, who found sufficient compensation in the excitement and adventure of their underpaid labors, and in the vague hope of advancement; there were grizzled beards among them, for whom neither the novelty nor the expectation continued, but who loved the life for its own sake, and would hardly have exchanged it for prosperity. Here and there was an old fellow, for whom probably all the illusion was gone; but he was proud of his vocation, proud even of the changes that left him somewhat superannuated in his tastes and methods. None, indeed, who have ever known it, can wholly forget the generous rage with which journalism inspires its followers. To each of those young men, beginning the strangely fascinating life as reporters and correspondents, his paper was as dear as his king once was to a French noble; to serve it night and day, to wear himself out for its sake, to merge himself in its glory, and to live in its triumphs without personal recognition from the public, was the loyal devotion which each expected his sovereign newspaper to accept as its simple right. They went and came, with the prompt and passive obedience of soldiers, wherever they were sent, and they struggled each to “get in ahead” of all the others with the individual zeal of heroes. They expanded to the utmost limits of occasion, and they submitted with an anguish that was silent to the editorial excision, compression, and mutilation of reports that were vitally dear to them. What becomes of these ardent young spirits, the inner history of journalism in any great city might pathetically show; but the outside world knows them only in the fine frenzy of interviewing, or of recording the midnight ravages of what they call the devouring element, or of working up horrible murders or tragical accidents, or of tracking criminals who have baffled all the detectives. Hearing their talk Bartley began to realize that journalism might be a very different thing from what he had imagined it in a country printing-office, and that it might not be altogether wise to consider it merely as a stepping-stone to the law.

With the American eagerness to recognize talent, numbers of good fellows spoke to him about his logging sketch; even those who had not read it seemed to know about it as a hit. They were all delighted to be able to say, “Ricker tells me that you offered it to old Witherby, and he wouldn’t look at it!” He found that this fact, which he had doubtfully confided to Ricker, was not offensive to some of the Events people who were there; one of them got him aside, and darkly owned to him that Witherby was doing everything that any one man could to kill the Events, and that in fact the counting-room was running the paper.

All the club united in abusing the dinner, which in his rustic ignorance Bartley had not found so infamous; but they ate it with perfect appetite and with mounting good spirits. The president brewed punch in a great bowl before him, and, rising with a glass of it in his hand, opened a free parliament of speaking, story-telling, and singing. Whoever recollected a song or a story that he liked, called upon the owner of it to sing it or tell it; and it appeared not to matter how old the fun or the music was: the company was resolved to be happy; it roared and clapped till the glasses rang. “You will like this song,” Bartley’s neighbors to right and left of him prophesied; or, “Just listen to this story of Mason’s, — it’s capital,” — as one or another rose in response to a general clamor. When they went back to the reception-room they carried the punch-bowl with them, and there, amid a thick cloud of smoke, two clever amateurs took their places at the piano, and sang and played to their heart’s content, while the rest, glass in hand, talked and laughed, or listened as they chose. Bartley had not been called upon, but he was burning to try that song in which he had failed so dismally in the logging-camp. When the pianist rose at last, he slipped down into the chair, and, striking the chords of the accompaniment, he gave his piece with brilliant audacity. The room silenced itself and then burst into a roar of applause, and cries of “Encore!” There could be no doubt of the success. “Look here, Ricker,” said a leading man at the end of the repetition, “your friend must be one of us!” — and, rapping on the table, he proposed Bartley’s name. In that simple time the club voted viva voce on proposed members, and Bartley found himself elected by acclamation, and in the act of paying over his initiation fee to the treasurer, before he had well realized the honor done him. Everybody near him shook his hand, and offered to be of service to him. Much of this cordiality was merely collective good feeling; something of it might be justly attributed to the punch; but the greater part was honest. In this civilization of ours, grotesque and unequal and imperfect as it is in many things, we are bound together in a brotherly sympathy unknown to any other. We new men have all had our hard rubs, but we do not so much remember them in soreness or resentment as in the wish to help forward any other who is presently feeling them. If he will but help himself too, a hundred hands are stretched out to him.

Bartley had kept his head clear of the punch, but he left the club drunk with joy and pride, and so impatient to be with Marcia and tell her of his triumphs that he could hardly wait to read the proof of his boarding-house article which Ricker had put in hand at once for the Sunday edition. He found Marcia sitting up for him, and she listened with a shining face while he hastily ran over the most flattering facts of the evening. She was not so much surprised at the honors done him as he had expected but she was happier, and she made him repeat it all and give her the last details. He was afraid she would ask him what his initiation had cost; but she seemed to have no idea that it had cost anything, and though it had swept away a third of the money he had received for his sketch, he still resolved that she should have that supper at Parker’s.

“I consider my future made,” he said aloud, at the end of his swift cogitation on this point.

“Oh, yes!” she responded rapturously. “We needn’t have a moment’s anxiety. But we must be very saving still till you get a place.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Bartley.

XVII.

During several months that followed, Bartley’s work consisted of interviewing, of special reporting in all its branches, of correspondence by mail and telegraph from points to which he was sent; his leisure he spent in studying subjects which could be treated like that of the boarding-houses. Marcia entered into his affairs with the keen half-intelligence which characterizes a woman’s participation in business; whatever could be divined, she was quickly mistress of; she vividly sympathized with his difficulties and his triumphs; she failed to follow him in matters of political detail, or of general effect; she could not be dispassionate or impartial; his relation to any enterprise was always more important than anything else about it. On some of his missions he took her with him, and then they made it a pleasure excursion; and if they came home late with the material still unwritten, she helped him with his notes, wrote from his dictation, and enabled him to give a fuller report than his rivals. She caught up with amusing aptness the technical terms of the profession, and was voluble about getting in ahead of the Events and the other papers; and she was indignant if any part of his report was cut out or garbled, or any feature was spoiled.

He made a “card” of grouping and treating with picturesque freshness the spring openings of the milliners and dry-goods people; and when he brought his article to Ricker, the editor ran it over, and said, “Guess you took your wife with you, Hubbard.”

“Yes, I did,” Bartley owned. He was always proud of her looks, and it flattered him that Ricker should see the evidences of her feminine taste and knowledge in his account of the bonnets and dress goods. “You don’t suppose I could get at all these things by inspiration, do you?”

Marcia was already known to some of his friends whom he had introduced to her in casual encounters. They were mostly unmarried, or if married they lived at a distance, and they did not visit the Hubbards at their lodgings. Marcia was a little shy, and did not quite know whether they ought to call without being asked, or whether she ought to ask them; besides, Mrs. Nash’s reception-room was not always at her disposal, and she would not have liked to take them all the way up to her own room. Her social life was therefore confined to the public places where she met these friends of her husband’s. They sometimes happened together at a restaurant, or saw one another between the acts at the theatre, or on coming out of a concert. Marcia was not so much admired for her conversation by her acquaintance, as for her beauty and her style; a rustic reluctance still lingered in her; she was thin and dry in her talk with any one but Bartley, and she could not help letting even men perceive that she was uneasy when they interested him in matters foreign to her.

Bartley did not see why they could not have some of these fellows up in their room for tea; but Marcia told him it was impossible. In fact, although she willingly lived this irregular life with him, she was at heart not at all a Bohemian. She did not like being in lodgings or dining at restaurants; on their horse-car excursions into the suburbs, when the spring opened, she was always choosing this or that little house as the place where she would like to live, and wondering if it were within their means. She said she would gladly do all the work herself; she hated to be idle so much as she now must. The city’s novelty wore off for her sooner than for him: the concerts, the lectures, the theatres, had already lost their zest for her, and she went because he wished her to go, or in order to be able to help him with what he was always writing about such things.

As the spring advanced, Bartley conceived the plan of a local study, something in the manner of the boarding-house article, but on a much vaster scale: he proposed to Ricker a timely series on the easily accessible hot-weather resorts, to be called “Boston’s Breathing-Places,” and to relate mainly to the seaside hotels and their surroundings. His idea was encouraged, and he took Marcia with him on most of his expeditions for its realization. These were largely made before the regular season had well begun; but the boats were already running, and the hotels were open, and they were treated with the hospitality which a knowledge of Bartley’s mission must invoke. As he said, it was a matter of business, give and take on both sides, and the landlords took more than they gave in any such trade.

On her part Marcia regarded dead-heading as a just and legitimate privilege of the press, if not one of its chief attributes; and these passes on boats and trains, this system of paying hotel-bills by the presentation of a card, constituted distinguished and honorable recognition from the public. To her simple experience, when Bartley told how magnificently the reporters had been accommodated, at some civic or commercial or professional banquet, with a table of their own, where they were served with all the wines and courses, he seemed to have been one of the principal guests, and her fear was that his head should be turned by his honors. But at the bottom of her heart, though she enjoyed the brilliancy of Bartley’s present life, she did not think his occupation comparable to the law in dignity. Bartley called himself a journalist now, but his newspaper connection still identified him in her mind with those country editors of whom she had always heard her father speak with such contempt: men dedicated to poverty and the despite of all the local notables who used them. She could not shake off the old feeling of degradation, even when she heard Bartley and some of his fellow-journalists talking in their boastfulest vein of the sovereign character of journalism; and she secretly resolved never to relinquish her purpose of having him a lawyer. Till he was fairly this, in regular and prosperous practice, she knew that she should not have shown her father that she was right in marrying Bartley.

In the mean time their life went ignorantly on in the obscure channels where their isolation from society kept it longer than was natural. Three or four months after they came to Boston, they were still country people, with scarcely any knowledge of the distinctions and differences so important to the various worlds of any city. So far from knowing that they must not walk in the Common, they used to sit down on a bench there, in the pleasant weather, and watch the opening of the spring, among the lovers whose passion had a publicity that neither surprised nor shocked them. After they were a little more enlightened, they resorted to the Public Garden, where they admired the bridge, and the rock-work, and the statues. Bartley, who was already beginning to get up a taste for art, boldly stopped and praised the Venus, in the presence of the gardeners planting tulip-bulbs.

They went sometimes to the Museum of Fine Arts, where they found a pleasure in the worst things which the best never afterwards gave them; and where she became as hungry and tired as if it were the Vatican. They had a pride in taking books out of the Public Library, where they walked about on tiptoe with bated breath; and they thought it a divine treat to hear the Great Organ play at noon. As they sat there in the Music Hall, and let the mighty instrument bellow over their strong young nerves, Bartley whispered Marcia the jokes he had heard about the organ; and then, upon the wave of aristocratic sensation from this experience, they went out and dined at Copeland’s, or Weber’s, or Fera’s, or even at Parker’s: they had long since forsaken the humble restaurant with its doilies and its ponderous crockery, and they had so mastered the art of ordering that they could manage a dinner as cheaply at these finer places as anywhere, especially if Marcia pretended not to care much for her half of the portion, and connived at its transfer to Bartley’s plate.

In his hours of leisure, they were so perpetually together that it became a joke with the men who knew them to say, when asked if Bartley were married, “Very much married.” It was not wholly their inseparableness that gave the impression of this extreme conjugality; as I said, Marcia’s uneasiness when others interested Bartley in things alien to her made itself felt even by these men. She struggled against it because she did not wish to put him to shame before them, and often with an aching sense of desolation she sent him off with them to talk apart, or left him with them if they met on the street, and walked home alone, rather than let any one say that she kept her husband tied to her apron-strings. His club, after the first sense of its splendor and usefulness wore away, was an ordeal; she had failed to conceal that she thought the initiation and annual fees extravagant. She knew no other bliss like having Bartley sit down in their own room with her; it did not matter whether they talked; if he were busy, she would as lief sit and sew, or sit and silently look at him as he wrote. In these moments she liked to feign that she had lost him, that they had never been married, and then come back with a rush of joy to the reality. But on his club nights she heroically sent him off, and spent the evening with Mrs. Nash. Sometimes she went out by day with the landlady, who had a passion for auctions and cemeteries, and who led Marcia to an intimate acquaintance with such pleasures. At Mount Auburn, Marcia liked the marble lambs, and the emblematic hands pointing upward with the dexter finger, and the infants carved in stone, and the angels with folded wings and lifted eyes, better than the casts which Bartley said were from the antique, in the Museum; on this side her mind was as wholly dormant as that of Mrs. Nash herself. She always came home feeling as if she had not seen Bartley for a year, and fearful that something had happened to him.

The hardest thing about their irregular life was that he must sometimes be gone two or three days at a time, when he could not take her with him. Then it seemed to her that she could not draw a full breath in his absence; and once he found her almost wild on his return: she had begun to fancy that he was never coming back again. He laughed at her when she betrayed her secret, but she was not ashamed; and when he asked her, “Well, what if I hadn’t come back?” she answered passionately, “It wouldn’t have made much difference to me: I should not have lived.”

The uncertainty of his income was another cause of anguish to her. At times he earned forty or fifty dollars a week; oftener he earned ten; there was now and then a week when everything that he put his hand to failed, and he earned nothing at all. Then Marcia despaired; her frugality became a mania, and they had quarrels about what she called his extravagance. She embittered his daily bread by blaming him for what he spent on it; she wore her oldest dresses, and would have had him go shabby in token of their adversity. Her economies were frantic child’s play, — methodless, inexperienced, fitful; and they were apt to be followed by remorse in which she abetted him in some wanton excess.

The future of any heroic action is difficult to manage; and the sublime sacrifice of her pride and all the conventional proprieties which Marcia had made in giving herself to Bartley was inevitably tried by the same sordid tests that every married life is put to.

That salaried place which he was always seeking on the staff of some newspaper, proved not so easy to get as he had imagined in the flush of his first successes. Ricker willingly included him among the Chronicle-Abstract’s own correspondents and special reporters; and he held the same off-and-on relation to several other papers; but he remained without a more definite position. He earned perhaps more money than a salary would have given him, and in their way of living he and Marcia laid up something out of what he earned. But it did not seem to her that he exerted himself to get a salaried place; she was sure that, if so many others who could not write half so well had places, he might get one if he only kept trying. Bartley laughed at these business-turns of Marcia’s as he called them; but sometimes they enraged him, and he had days of sullen resentment when he resisted all her advances towards reconciliation. But he kept hard at work, and he always owned at last how disinterested her most ridiculous alarm had been.

Once, when they had been talking as usual about that permanent place on some newspaper, she said, “But I should only want that to be temporary, if you got it. I want you should go on with the law, Bartley. I’ve been thinking about that. I don’t want you should always be a journalist.”

Bartley smiled. “What could I do for a living, I should like to know, while I was studying law?”

“You could do some newspaper work, — enough to support us, — while you were studying. You said when we first came to Boston that you should settle down to the law.”

“I hadn’t got my eyes open, then. I’ve got a good deal longer row to hoe than I supposed, before I can settle down to the law.”

“Father said you didn’t need to study but a little more.”

“Not if I were going into the practice at Equity. But it’s a very different thing, I can tell you, in Boston: I should have to go in for a course in the Harvard Law School, just for a little start-off.”

Marcia was silenced, but she asked, after a moment, “Then you’re going to give up the law, altogether?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do; I’m going to do the best I can for the present, and trust to luck. I don’t like special reporting, for a finality; but I shouldn’t like shystering, either.”

“What’s shystering?” asked Marcia.

“It’s pettifogging in the city courts. Wait till I can get my basis, — till I have a fixed amount of money for a fixed amount of work, — and then I’ll talk to you about taking up the law again. I’m willing to do it whenever it seems the right thing. I guess I should like it, though I don’t see why it’s any better than journalism, and I don’t believe it has any more prizes.”

“But you’ve been a long time trying to get your basis on a newspaper,” she reasoned. “Why don’t you try to get it in some other way? Why don’t you try to get a clerk’s place with some lawyer?”

“Well, suppose I was willing to starve along in that way, how should I go about to get such a place?” demanded Bartley, with impatience.

“Why don’t you go to that Mr. Halleck you visited here? You used to tell me he was going to be a lawyer.”

“Well, if you remember so distinctly what I said about going into the law when I first came to Boston,” said her husband angrily, “perhaps you’ll remember that I said I shouldn’t go to Halleck until I didn’t need his help. I shall not go to him for his help.”

Marcia gave way to spiteful tears. “It seems as if you were ashamed to let them know that you were in town. Are you afraid I shall want to get acquainted with them? Do you suppose I shall want to go to their parties, and disgrace you?”

Bartley took his cigar out of his mouth, and looked blackly at her. “So, that’s what you’ve been thinking, is it?”

She threw herself upon his neck. “No! no, it isn’t!” she cried, hysterically. “You know that I never thought it till this instant; you know I didn’t think it at all; I just said it. My nerves are all gone; I don’t know what I’m saying half the time, and you’re as strict with me as if I were as well as ever! I may as well take off my things, — I’m not well enough to go with you, to-day, Bartley.”

She had been dressing while they talked for an entertainment which Bartley was going to report for the Chronicle-Abstract; and now she made a feint of wishing to remove her hat. He would not let her. He said that if she did not go, he should not; he reproached her with not wishing to go with him any more; he coaxed her laughingly and fondly.

“It’s only because I’m not so strong, now,” she said in a whisper that ended in a kiss on his cheek. “You must walk very slowly, and not hurry me.”

The entertainment was to be given in aid of the Indigent Children’s Surf-Bathing Society, and it was at the end of June, rather late in the season. But the society itself was an afterthought, not conceived till a great many people had left town on whose assistance such a charity must largely depend. Strenuous appeals had been made, however: it was represented that ten thousand poor children could be transported to Nantasket Beach, and there, as one of the ladies on the committee said, bathed, clam-baked, and lemonaded three times during the summer at a cost so small that it was a saving to spend the money. Class Day falling about the same time, many exiles at Newport and on the North Shore came up and down; and the affair promised to be one of social distinction, if not pecuniary success. The entertainment was to be varied: a distinguished poet was to read an old poem of his, and a distinguished poetess was to read a new poem of hers; some professional people were to follow with comic singing; an elocutionist was to give impressions of noted public speakers; and a number of vocal and instrumental amateurs were to contribute their talent.

Bartley had instructions from Ricker to see that his report was very full socially. “We want something lively, and at the same time nice and tasteful, about the whole thing, and I guess you’re the man to do it. Get Mrs. Hubbard to go with you, and keep you from making a fool of yourself about the costumes.” He gave Bartley two tickets. “Mighty hard to get, I can tell you, for love or money, — especially love,” he said; and Bartley made much of this difficulty in impressing Marcia’s imagination with the uncommon character of the occasion. She had put on a new dress which she had just finished for herself, and which was a marvel not only of cheapness, but of elegance; she had plagiarized the idea from the costume of a lady with whom she stopped to look in at a milliner’s window where she formed the notion of her bonnet. But Marcia had imagined the things anew in relation to herself, and made them her own; when Bartley first saw her in them, though he had witnessed their growth from the germ, he said that he was afraid of her, she was so splendid, and he did not quite know whether he felt acquainted. When they were seated at the concert, and had time to look about them, he whispered, “Well, Marsh, I don’t see anything here that comes near you in style,” and she flung a little corner of her drapery out over his hand so that she could squeeze it: she was quite happy again.

After the concert, Bartley left her for a moment, and went up to a group of the committee near the platform, to get some points for his report. He spoke to one of the gentlemen, note-book and pencil in hand, and the gentleman referred him to one of the ladies of the committee, who, after a moment of hesitation, demanded in a rich tone of injury and surprise, “Why! Isn’t this Mr. Hubbard?” and, indignantly answering herself, “Of course it is!” gave her hand with a sort of dramatic cordiality, and flooded him with questions: “When did you come to Boston? Are you at the Hallecks’? Did you come — Or no, you’re not Harvard. You’re not living in Boston? And what in the world are you getting items for? Mr. Hubbard, Mr. Atherton.”

She introduced him in a breathless climax to the gentleman to whom he had first spoken, and who had listened to her attack on Bartley with a smile which he was at no trouble to hide from her. “Which question are you going to answer first, Mr. Hubbard?” he asked quietly, while his eyes searched Bartley’s for an instant with inquiry which was at once kind and keen. His face had the distinction which comes of being clean-shaven in our bearded times.

“Oh, the last,” said Bartley. “I’m reporting the concert for the Chronicle-Abstract, and I want to interview some one in authority about it.”

“Then interview me, Mr. Hubbard,” cried the young lady. “I’m in authority about this affair, — it’s my own invention, as the White Knight says, — and then I’ll interview you afterwards. And you’ve gone into journalism, like all the Harvard men! So glad it’s you, for you can be a perfect godsend to the cause if you will. The entertainment hasn’t given us all the money we shall want, by any means, and we shall need all the help the press can give us. Ask me any questions you please, Mr. Hubbard: there isn’t a soul here that I wouldn’t sacrifice to the last personal particular, if the press will only do its duty in return. You’ve no idea how we’ve been working during the last fortnight since this Old Man of the Sea-Bathing sprang upon us. I was sitting quietly at home, thinking of anything else in the world, I can assure you, when the atrocious idea occurred to me.” She ran on to give a full sketch of the inception and history of the scheme up to the present time. Suddenly she arrested herself and Bartley’s flying pencil: “Why, you’re not putting all that nonsense down?”

“Certainly I am,” said Bartley, while Mr. Atherton, with a laugh, turned and walked away to talk with some other ladies. “It’s the very thing I want. I shall get in ahead of all the other papers on this; they haven’t had anything like it, yet.”

She looked at him for a moment in horror. Then, “Well, go on; I would do anything for the cause!” she cried.

“Tell me who’s been here, then,” said Bartley.

She recoiled a little. “I don’t like giving names.”

“But I can’t say who the people were, unless you do.”

“That’s true,” said the young lady thoughtfully. She prided herself on her thoughtfulness, which sometimes came before and sometimes after the fact. “You’re not obliged to say who told you?”

“Of course not.”

She ran over a list of historical and distinguished names, and he slyly asked if this and that lady were not dressed so, and so, and worked in the costumes from her unconsciously elaborate answers; she was afterwards astonished that he should have known what people had on. Lastly, he asked what the committee expected to do next, and was enabled to enrich his report with many authoritative expressions and intimations. The lady became all zeal in these confidences to the public, at last; she told everything she knew, and a great deal that she merely hoped.

“And now come into the committee-room and have a cup of coffee; I know you must be faint with all this talking,” she concluded. “I want to ask you something about yourself.” She was not older than Bartley, but she addressed him with the freedom we use in encouraging younger people.

“Thank you,” he said coolly; “I can’t, very well. I must go back to my wife, and hurry up this report.”

“Oh! is Mrs. Hubbard here?” asked the young lady with well-controlled surprise. “Present me to her!” she cried, with that fearlessness of social consequences for which she was noted: she believed there were ways of getting rid of undesirable people without treating them rudely.

The audience had got out of the hall, and Marcia stood alone near one of the doors waiting for Bartley. He glanced proudly toward her, and said, “I shall be very glad.”

Miss Kingsbury drifted by his side across the intervening space, and was ready to take Marcia impressively by the hand when she reached her; she had promptly decided her to be very beautiful and elegantly simple in dress, but she found her smaller than she had looked at a distance. Miss Kingsbury was herself rather large, — sometimes, she thought, rather too large: certainly too large if she had not had such perfect command of every inch of herself. In complexion she was richly blonde, with beautiful fair hair roughed over her forehead, as if by a breeze, and apt to escape in sunny tendrils over the peachy tints of her temples. Her features were massive rather than fine; and though she thoroughly admired her chin and respected her mouth, she had doubts about her nose, which she frankly referred to friends for solution: had it not too much of a knob at the end? She seemed to tower over Marcia as she took her hand at Bartley’s introduction, and expressed her pleasure at meeting her.

“I don’t know why it need be such a surprise to find one’s gentlemen friends married, but it always is, somehow. I don’t think Mr. Hubbard would have known me if I hadn’t insisted upon his recognizing me; I can’t blame him: it’s three years since we met. Do you help him with his reports? I know you do! You must make him lenient to our entertainment, — the cause is so good! How long have you been in Boston? Though I don’t know why I should ask that, — you may have always been in Boston! One used to know everybody; but the place is so large, now. I should like to come and see you; but I’m going out of town to-morrow, for the summer. I’m not really here, now, except ex officio; I ought to have been away weeks ago, but this Indigent Surf-Bathing has kept me. You’ve no idea what such an undertaking is. But you must let me have your address, and as soon as I get back to town in the fall, I shall insist upon looking you up. Good by! I must run away, now, and leave you; there are a thousand things for me to look after yet to-day.” She took Marcia again by the hand, and superadded some bows and nods and smiles of parting, after she released her, but she did not ask her to come into the committee-room and have some coffee; and Bartley took his wife’s hand under his arm and went out of the hall.

“Well,” he said, with a man’s simple pleasure in Miss Kingsbury’s friendliness to his wife, “that’s the girl I used to tell you about, — the rich one with the money in her own right, whom I met at the Hallecks’. She seemed to think you were about the thing, Marsh! I saw her eyes open as she came up, and I felt awfully proud of you; you never looked half so well. But why didn’t you say something?”

“She didn’t give me any chance,” said Marcia, “and I had nothing to say, anyway. I thought she was very disagreeable.”

“Disagreeable!” repeated Bartley in amaze.

Miss Kingsbury went back to the committee-room, where one of the amateurs had been lecturing upon her: “Clara Kingsbury can say and do, from the best heart in the world, more offensive things in ten minutes than malice could invent in a week. Somebody ought to go out and drag her away from that reporter by main force. But I presume it’s too late already; she’s had time to destroy us all. You’ll see that there won’t be a shred left of us in his paper at any rate. Really, I wonder that, in a city full of nervous and exasperated people like Boston, Clara Kingsbury has been suffered to live. She throws her whole soul into everything she undertakes, and she has gone so en masse into this Indigent Bathing, and splashed about in it so, that I can’t understand how we got anybody to come to-day. Why, I haven’t the least doubt that she’s offered that poor man a ticket to go down to Nantasket and bathe with the other Indigents; she’s treated me as if I ought to be personally surf-bathed for the last fortnight; and if there’s any chance for us left by her tactlessness, you may be sure she’s gone at it with her conscience and simply swept it off the face of the earth.”

XVIII.

One hot day in August, when Bartley had been doing nothing for a week, and Marcia was gloomily forecasting the future when they would have to begin living upon the money they had put into the savings bank, she reverted to the question of his taking up the law again. She was apt to recur to this in any moment of discouragement, and she urged him now to give up his newspaper work with that wearisome persistence with which women torment the men they love.

“My newspaper work seems to have given me up, my dear,” said Bartley. “It’s like asking a fellow not to marry a girl that won’t have him.” He laughed and then whistled; and Marcia burst into fretful, futile tears, which he did not attempt to assuage.

They had been all summer in town; the country would have been no change to them; and they knew nothing of the seaside except the crowded, noisy, expensive resorts near the city. Bartley wished her to go to one of these for a week or two, at any rate, but she would not; and in fact neither of them had the born citizen’s conception of the value of a summer vacation. But they had found their attic intolerable; and, the single gentlemen having all given up their rooms by this time, Mrs. Nash let Marcia have one lower down, where they sat looking out on the hot street.

“Well,” cried Marcia at last, “you don’t care for my feelings, or you would take up the law again.”

Her husband rose with a sigh that was half a curse, and went out. After what she had said, he would not give her the satisfaction of knowing what he meant to do; but he had it in his head to go to that Mr. Atherton to whom Miss Kingsbury had introduced him, and ask his advice; he had found out that Mr. Atherton was a lawyer, and he believed that he would tell him what to do. He could at least give him some authoritative discouragement which he might use in these discussions with Marcia.

Mr. Atherton had his office in the Events building, and Bartley was on his way thither when he met Ricker.

“Seen Witherby?” asked his friend. “He was round looking for you.”

“What does Witherby want with me?” asked Bartley, with a certain resentment.

“Wants to give you the managing-editorship of the Events,” said Ricker, jocosely.

“Pshaw! Well, he knows where to find me, if he wants me very badly.”

“Perhaps he doesn’t,” suggested Ricker. “In that case, you’d better look him up.”

“Why, you don’t advise—”

“Oh, I don’t advise anything! But if he can let bygones be bygones, I guess you can afford to! I don’t know just what he wants with you, but if he offers you anything like a basis, you’d better take it.”

Bartley’s basis had come to be a sort of by-word between them; Ricker usually met him with some such demand as, “Well, what about the basis?” or, “How’s your poor basis?” Bartley’s ardor for a salaried position amused him, and he often tried to argue him out of it. “You’re much better off as a free lance. You make as much money as most of the fellows in places, and you lead a pleasanter life. If you were on any one paper, you’d have to be on duty about fifteen hours out of the twenty-four; you’d be out every night till three or four o’clock; you’d have to do fires, and murders, and all sorts of police business; and now you work mostly on fancy jobs, — something you suggest yourself, or something you’re specially asked to do. That’s a kind of a compliment, and it gives you scope.”

Nevertheless, if Bartley had his heart set upon a basis, Ricker wanted him to have it. “Of course,” he said, “I was only joking about the basis. But if Witherby should have something permanent to offer, don’t quarrel with your bread and butter, and don’t hold yourself too cheap. Witherby’s going to get all he can, for as little as he can, every time.”

Ricker was a newspaper man in every breath. His great interest in life was the Chronicle-Abstract, which paid him poorly and worked him hard. To get in ahead of the other papers was the object for which he toiled with unremitting zeal; but after that he liked to see a good fellow prosper, and he had for Bartley that feeling of comradery which comes out among journalists when their rivalries are off. He would hate to lose Bartley from the Chronicle-Abstract; if Witherby meant business, Bartley and he might be excoriating each other before a week passed in sarcastic references to “our esteemed contemporary of the Events,” and “our esteemed contemporary of the Chronicle-Abstract”; but he heartily wished him luck, and hoped it might be some sort of inside work.

When Ricker left him Bartley hesitated. He was half minded to go home and wait for Witherby to look him up, as the most dignified and perhaps the most prudent course. But he was curious and impatient, and he was afraid of letting the chance, whatever it might be, slip through his fingers. He suddenly resolved upon a little ruse, which would still oblige Witherby to make the advance, and yet would risk nothing by delay. He mounted to Witherby’s room in the Events building, and pushed open the door. Then he drew back, embarrassed, as if he had made a mistake. “Excuse me,” he said, “isn’t Mr. Atherton’s office on this floor?”

Witherby looked up from the papers on his desk, and cleared his throat. When he overreached himself he was apt to hold any party to the transaction accountable for his error. Ever since he refused Bartley’s paper on the logging-camp, he had accused him in his heart of fraud because he had sold the rejected sketch to another paper, and anticipated Witherby’s tardy enterprise in the same direction. Each little success that Bartley made added to Witherby’s dislike; and whilst Bartley had written for all the other papers, he had never got any work from the Events. Witherby had the guilty sense of having hated him as he looked up, and Bartley on his part was uneasily sensible of some mocking paragraphs of a more or less personal cast, which he had written in the Chronicle-Abstract, about the enterprise of the Events.

“Mr. Atherton is on the floor above,” said Witherby. “But I’m very glad you happened to look in, Mr. Hubbard. I — I was just thinking about you. Ah — wont you take a chair?”

“Thanks,” said Bartley, non-committally; but he sat down in the chair which the other rose to offer him.

Witherby fumbled about among the things on his desk before he resumed his own seat. “I hope you have been well since I saw you?”

“Oh, yes, I’m always well. How have you been?” Bartley wondered whither this exchange of civilities tended; but he believed he could keep it up as long as old Witherby could.

“Why, I have not been very well,” said Witherby, getting into his chair, and taking up a paper-weight to help him in talk. “The fact is, I find that I have been working too hard. I have undertaken to manage the editorial department of the Events in addition to looking after its business, and the care has been too great. It has told upon me. I flatter myself that I have not allowed either department to suffer—”

He referred this point so directly to him, that Bartley made a murmur of assent, and Witherby resumed.

“But the care has told upon me. I am not so well as I could wish. I need rest, and I need help,” he added.

Bartley had by this time made up his mind that, if Witherby had anything to say to him, he should say it unaided.

Witherby put down the paper-weight, and gave his attention for a moment to a paper-cutter. “I don’t know whether you have heard that Mr. Clayton is going to leave us?”

“No,” Bartley said, “I hadn’t heard that.”

“Yes, he is going to leave us. Mr. Clayton and I have not agreed upon some points, and we have both judged it best that we should part.” Witherby paused again, and changed the positions of his inkstand and mucilage-bottle. “Mr. Clayton has failed me, as I may say, at the last moment, and we have been compelled to part. I found Mr. Clayton — unpractical.”

He looked again at Bartley, who said, “Yes?”

“Yes. I found Mr. Clayton so much at variance in his views with — with my own views — that I could do nothing with him. He has used language to me which I am sure he will regret. But that is neither here nor there; he is going. I have had my eye on you, Mr. Hubbard, ever since you came to Boston, and have watched your career with interest. But I thought of Mr. Clayton, in the first instance, because he was already attached to the Events, and I wished to promote him. Office during good behavior, and promotion in the direct line: I’m that much of a civil-service reformer,” said Witherby.

“Certainly,” said Bartley.

“But of course my idea in starting the Events was to make money.”

“Of course.”

“I hold that the first duty of a public journal is to make money for the owner; all the rest follows naturally.”

“You’re quite right, Mr. Witherby,” said Bartley. “Unless it makes money, there can be no enterprise about it, no independence, — nothing. That was the way I did with my little paper down in Maine. The first thing — I told the committee when I took hold of the paper — is to keep it from losing money; the next is to make money with it. First peaceable, then pure: that’s what I told them.”

“Precisely so!” Witherby was now so much at his ease with Bartley that he left off tormenting the things on his desk, and used his hands in gesticulating. “Look at the churches themselves! No church can do any good till it’s on a paying basis. As long as a church is in debt, it can’t secure the best talent for the pulpit or the choir, and the members go about feeling discouraged and out of heart. It’s just so with a newspaper. I say that a paper does no good till it pays; it has no influence, its motives are always suspected, and you’ve got to make it pay by hook or by crook, before you can hope to — to — forward any good cause by it. That’s what I say. Of course,” he added, in a large, smooth way, “I’m not going to contend that a newspaper should be run solely in the interest of the counting-room. Not at all! But I do contend that, when the counting-room protests against a certain course the editorial room is taking, it ought to be respectfully listened to. There are always two sides to every question. Suppose all the newspapers pitch in — as they sometimes do — and denounce a certain public enterprise: a projected scheme of railroad legislation, or a peculiar system of banking, or a co-operative mining interest, and the counting-room sends up word that the company advertises heavily with us; shall we go and join indiscriminately in that hue and cry, or shall we give our friends the benefit of the doubt?”

“Give them the benefit of the doubt,” answered Bartley. “That’s what I say.”

“And so would any other practical man!” said Witherby. “And that’s just where Mr. Clayton and I differed. Well, I needn’t allude to him any more,” he added leniently. “What I wish to say is this, Mr. Hubbard. I am overworked, and I feel the need of some sort of relief. I know that I have started the Events in the right line at last, — the only line in which it can be made a great, useful, and respectable journal, efficient in every good cause, — and what I want now is some sort of assistant in the management who shall be in full sympathy with my own ideas. I don’t want a mere slave, — a tool; but I do want an independent, right-minded man, who shall be with me for the success of the paper the whole time and every time, and shall not be continually setting up his will against mine on all sorts of doctrinaire points. That was the trouble with Mr. Clayton. I have nothing against Mr. Clayton personally; he is an excellent young man in very many respects; but he was all wrong about journalism, all wrong, Mr. Hubbard. I talked with him a great deal, and tried to make him see where his interest lay. He had been on the paper as a reporter from the start, and I wished very much to promote him to this position; which he could have made the best position in the country. The Events is an evening paper; there is no night-work; and the whole thing is already thoroughly systematized. Mr. Clayton had plenty of talent, and all he had to do was to step in under my direction and put his hand on the helm. But, no! I should have been glad to keep him in a subordinate capacity; but I had to let him go. He said that he would not report the conflagration of a peanut-stand for a paper conducted on the principles I had developed to him. Now, that is no way to talk. It’s absurd.”

“Perfectly.” Bartley laughed his rich, caressing laugh, in which there was the insinuation of all worldly-wise contempt for Clayton and all worldly-wise sympathy with Witherby. It made Witherby feel good, — better perhaps than he had felt at any time since his talk with Clayton.

“Well, now, what do you say, Mr. Hubbard? Can’t we make some arrangement with you?” he asked, with a burst of frankness.

“I guess you can,” said Bartley. The fact that Witherby needed him was so plain that he did not care to practise any finesse about the matter.

“What are your present engagements?”

“I haven’t any.”

“Then you can take hold at once?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good!” Witherby now entered at large into the nature of the position which he offered Bartley. They talked a long time, and in becoming better acquainted with each other’s views, as they called them, they became better friends. Bartley began to respect Witherby’s business ideas, and Witherby in recognizing all the admirable qualities of this clear-sighted and level-headed young man began to feel that he had secretly liked him from the first, and had only waited a suitable occasion to unmask his affection. It was arranged that Bartley should come on as Witherby’s assistant, and should do whatever he was asked to do in the management of the paper; he was to write on topics as they occurred to him, or as they were suggested to him. “I don’t say whether this will lead to anything more, Mr. Hubbard, or not; but I do say that you will be in the direct line of promotion.”

“Yes, I understand that,” said Bartley.

“And now as to terms,” continued Witherby, a little tremulously.

“And now as to terms,” repeated Bartley to himself; but he said nothing aloud. He felt that Witherby had cut out a great deal of work for him, and work of a kind that he could not easily find another man both willing and able to do. He resolved that he would have all that his service was worth.

“What should you think of twenty dollars a week?” asked Witherby.

“I shouldn’t think it was enough,” said Bartley, amazed at his own audacity, but enjoying it, and thinking how he had left Marcia with the intention of offering himself to Mr. Atherton as a clerk for ten dollars a week. “There is a great deal of labor in what you propose, and you command my whole time. You would not like to have me do any work outside of the Events.”

“No,” Witherby assented. “Would twenty-five be nearer the mark?” he inquired soberly.

“It would be nearer, certainly,” said Bartley. “But I guess you had better make it thirty.” He kept a quiet face, but his heart throbbed.

“Well, say thirty, then,” replied Witherby so promptly that Bartley perceived with a pang that he might as easily have got forty from him. But it was now too late, and a salary of fifteen hundred a year passed the wildest hopes he had cherished half an hour before.

“All right,” he said quietly. “I suppose you want me to take hold at once?”

“Yes, on Monday. Oh, by the way,” said Witherby, “there is one little piece of outside work which I should like you to finish up for us; and we’ll agree upon something extra for it, if you wish. I mean our Solid Men series. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed the series in the Events?”

“Yes,” said Bartley, “I have.”

“Well, then, you know what they are. They consist of interviews — guarded and inoffensive as respects the sanctity of private life — with our leading manufacturers and merchant princes at their places of business and their residences, and include a description of these, and some account of the lives of the different subjects.”

“Yes, I have seen them,” said Bartley. “I’ve noticed the general plan.”

“You know that Mr. Clayton has been doing them. He made them a popular feature. The parties themselves were very much pleased with them.”

“Oh, people are always tickled to be interviewed,” said Bartley. “I know they put on airs about it, and go round complaining to each other about the violation of confidence, and so on; but they all like it. You know I reported that Indigent Surf-Bathing entertainment in June for the Chronicle-Abstract. I knew the lady who got it up, and I interviewed her after the entertainment.”

“Miss Kingsbury?”

“Yes.” Witherby made an inarticulate murmur of respect for Bartley in his throat, and involuntarily changed toward him, but not so subtly that Bartley’s finer instinct did not take note of the change. “She was a fresh subject, and she told me everything. Of course I printed it all. She was awfully shocked, — or pretended to be, — and wrote me a very O-dear-how-could-you note about it. But I went round to the office the next day, and I found that nearly every lady mentioned in the interview had ordered half a dozen copies of that issue sent to her seaside address, and the office had been full of Beacon Street swells all the morning buying Chronicle-Abstracts,— ‘the one with the report of the Concert in it.’” These low views of high society, coupled with an apparent familiarity with it, modified Witherby more and more. He began to see that he had got a prize. “The way to do with such fellows as your Solid Men,” continued Bartley, “is to submit a proof to ‘em. They never know exactly what to do about it, and so you print the interview with their approval, and make ’em particeps criminis. I’ll finish up the series for you, and I won’t make any very heavy extra charge.”

“I should wish to pay you whatever the work was worth,” said Witherby, not to be outdone in nobleness.

“All right; we sha’n’t quarrel about that, at any rate.”

Bartley was getting toward the door, for he was eager to be gone now to Marcia, but Witherby followed him up as if willing to detain him. “My wife,” he said, “knows Miss Kingsbury. They have been on the same charities together.”

“I met her a good while ago, when I was visiting a chum of mine at his father’s house here. I didn’t suppose she’d know me; but she did at once, and began to ask me if I was at the Hallecks’ — as if I had never gone away.”

“Mr. Ezra B. Halleck?” inquired Witherby reverently. “Leather trade?”

“Yes,” said Bartley. “I believe his first name was Ezra. Ben Halleck was my friend. Do you know the family?” asked Bartley.

“Yes, we have met them — in society. I hope you’re pleasantly situated where you are, Mr. Hubbard? Should be glad to have you call at the house.”

“Thank you,” said Bartley, “my wife will be glad to have Mrs. Witherby call.”

“Oh!” cried Witherby. “I didn’t know you were married! That’s good! There’s nothing like marriage, Mr. Hubbard, to keep a man going in the right direction. But you’ve begun pretty young.”

“Nothing like taking a thing in time,” answered Bartley. “But I haven’t been married a great while; and I’m not so young as I look. Well, good afternoon, Mr. Witherby.”

“What did you say was your address?” asked Witherby, taking out his note-book. “My wife will certainly call. She’s down at Nantasket now, but she’ll be up the first part of September, and then she’ll call. Good afternoon.”

They shook hands at last, and Bartley ran home to Marcia. He burst into the room with a glowing face. “Well, Marcia,” he shouted, “I’ve got my basis!”

“Hush! No! Don’t be so loud! You haven’t!” she answered, springing to her feet. “I don’t believe it! How hot you are!”

“I’ve been running — almost all the way from the Events office. I’ve got a place on the Events, — assistant managing-editor, — thirty dollars a week,” he panted.

“I knew you would succeed yet, — I knew you would, if I could only have a little patience. I’ve been scolding myself ever since you went. I thought you were going to do something desperate, and I had driven you to it. But Bartley, Bartley! It can’t be true, is it? Here, here! Do take this fan. Or no, I’ll fan you, if you’ll let me sit on your knee! O poor thing, how hot you are! But I thought you wouldn’t white for the Events; I thought you hated that old Witherby, who acted so ugly to you when you first came.”

“Oh, Witherby is a pretty good old fellow,” said Bartley, who had begun to get his breath again. He gave her a full history of the affair, and they rejoiced together over it, and were as happy as if Bartley had been celebrating a high and honorable good fortune. She was too ignorant to feel the disgrace, if there were any, in the compact which Bartley had closed, and he had no principles, no traditions, by which to perceive it. To them it meant unlimited prosperity; it meant provision for the future, which was to bring a new responsibility and a new care.

“We will take the parlor with the alcove, now,” said Bartley. “Don’t excite yourself,” he added, with tender warning.

“No, no,” she said, pillowing her head on his shoulder, and shedding peaceful tears.

“It doesn’t seem as if we should ever quarrel again, does it?”

“No, no! We never shall,” she murmured. “It has always come from my worrying you about the law, and I shall never do that any more. If you like journalism better, I shall not urge you any more to leave it, now you’ve got your basis.”

“But I’m going on with the law, now, for that very reason. I shall read law all my leisure time. I feel independent, and I shall not be anxious about the time I give, because I shall know that I can afford it.”

“Well, only you mustn’t overdo.” She put her lips against his cheek. “You’re more to me than anything you can do for me.”

“Oh, Marcia!”

XIX.

Now that Bartley had got his basis and had no favors to ask of any one, he was curious to see his friend Halleck again; but when, in the course of the Solid Men Series, he went to interview A Nestor of the Leather Interest, as he meant to call the elder Halleck, he resolved to let him make all the advances. On a legitimate business errand it should not matter to him whether Mr. Halleck welcomed him or not. The old man did not wait for Bartley to explain why he came; he was so simply glad to see him that Bartley felt a little ashamed to confess that he had been eight months in Boston without making himself known. He answered all the personal questions with which Mr. Halleck plied him; and in his turn he inquired after his college friend.

“Ben is in Europe,” said his father. “He has been there all summer; but we expect him home about the middle of September. He’s been a good while settling down,” continued the old man, with an unconscious sigh. “He talked of the law at first, and then he went into business with me; but he didn’t seem to find his calling in it; and now he’s taken up the law again. He’s been in the Law School at Cambridge, and he’s going back there for a year or two longer. I thought you used to talk of the law yourself when you were with us, Mr. Hubbard.”

“Yes, I did,” Bartley assented. “And I haven’t given up the notion yet. I’ve read a good deal of law already; but when I came up to Boston, I had to go into newspaper work till I could see my way out of the woods.”

“Well,” said Mr. Halleck, “that’s right. And you say you like the arrangement you’ve made with Mr. Witherby?”

“It’s ideal — for me,” answered Bartley.

“Well, that’s good,” said the old man. “And you’ve come to interview me. Well, that’s all right. I’m not much used to being in print, but I shall be glad to tell you all I know about leather.”

“You may depend upon my not saying anything that will be disagreeable to you, Mr. Halleck,” said Bartley, touched by the old man’s trusting friendliness. When his inquisition ended, he slipped his notebook back into his pocket, and said with a smile, “We usually say something about the victim’s private residence, but I guess I’ll spare you that, Mr. Halleck.”

“Why, we live in the old place, and I don’t suppose there is much to say. We are plain people, and we don’t like to change. When I built there thirty years ago, Rumford Street was one of the most desirable streets in Boston. There was no Back Bay, then, you know, and we thought we were doing something very fashionable. But fashion has drifted away, and left us high and dry enough on Rumford Street; though we don’t mind it. We keep the old house and the old garden pretty much as you saw them. You can say whatever you think best. There’s a good deal of talk about the intrusiveness of the newspapers; all I know is that they’ve never intruded upon me. We shall not be afraid that you will abuse our house, Mr. Hubbard, because we expect you to come there again. When shall it be? Mrs. Halleck and I have been at home all summer; we find it the most comfortable place; and we shall be very glad if you’ll drop in any evening and take tea with us. We keep the old hours; we’ve never taken kindly to the late dinners. The girls are off at the mountains, and you’d see nobody but Mrs. Halleck. Come this evening!” cried the old man, with mounting cordiality.

His warmth as he put his hand on Bartley’s shoulder made the young man blush again for the reserve with which he had been treating his own affairs. He stammered out, hoping that the other would see the relevancy of the statement, “Why, the fact is, Mr. Halleck, I — I’m married.”

“Married?” said Mr. Halleck. “Why didn’t you tell me before? Of course we want Mrs. Hubbard, too. Where are you living? We won’t stand upon ceremony among old friends. Mrs. Halleck will come with the carriage and fetch Mrs. Hubbard, and your wife must take that for a call. Why, you don’t know how glad we shall be to have you both! I wish Ben was married. You’ll come?”

“Of course we will,” said Bartley. “But you mustn’t let Mrs. Halleck send for us; we can walk perfectly well.”

“You can walk if you want, but Mrs. Hubbard shall ride,” said the old man.

When Bartley reported this to Marcia, “Bartley!” she cried. “In her carriage? I’m afraid!”

“Nonsense! She’ll be a great deal more afraid than you are. She’s the bashfulest old lady you ever saw. All that I hope is that you won’t overpower her.”

“Bartley, hush! Shall I wear my silk, or—”

“Oh, wear the silk, by all means. Crush them at a blow!”

Rumford Street is one of those old-fashioned thoroughfares at the West End of Boston, which are now almost wholly abandoned to boarding-houses of the poorer class. Yet they are charming streets, quiet, clean, and respectable, and worthy still to be the homes, as they once were, of solid citizens. The red brick houses, with their swell fronts, looking in perspective like a succession of round towers, are reached by broad granite steps, and their doors are deeply sunken within the wagon-roofs of white-painted Roman arches. Over the door there is sometimes the bow of a fine transom, and the parlor windows on the first floor of the swell front have the same azure gleam as those of the beautiful old houses which front the Common on Beacon Street.

When her husband bought his lot there, Mrs. Halleck could hardly believe that a house on Rumford Street was not too fine for her. They had come to the city simple and good young village people, and simple and good they had remained, through the advancing years which had so wonderfully — Mrs. Halleck hoped, with a trembling heart, not wickedly — prospered them. They were of faithful stock, and they had been true to their traditions in every way. One of these was constancy to the orthodox religious belief in which their young hearts had united, and which had blessed all their life; though their charity now abounded perhaps more than their faith. They still believed that for themselves there was no spiritual safety except in their church; but since their younger children had left it they were forced tacitly to own that this might not be so in all cases. Their last endeavor for the church in Ben’s case was to send him to the college where he and Bartley met; and this was such a failure on the main point, that it left them remorsefully indulgent. He had submitted, and had foregone his boyish dreams of Harvard, where all his mates were going; but the sacrifice seemed to have put him at odds with life. The years which had proved the old people mistaken would not come back upon their recognition of their error. He returned to the associations from which they had exiled him too much estranged to resume them, and they saw, with the unavailing regrets which visit fathers and mothers in such cases, that the young know their own world better than their elders can know it, and have a right to be in it and of it, superior to any theory of their advantage which their elders can form. Ben was not the fellow to complain; in fact, after he came home from college, he was allowed to shape his life according to his own rather fitful liking. His father was glad now to content him in anything he could, it was so very little that Ben asked. If he had suffered it, perhaps his family would have spoiled him.

The Halleck girls went early in July to the Profile House, where they had spent their summers for many years; but the old people preferred to stay at home, and only left their large, comfortable house for short absences. Their ways of life had been fixed in other times, and Mrs. Halleck liked better than mountain or sea the high-walled garden that stretched back of their house to the next street. They had bought through to this street when they built, but they had never sold the lot that fronted on it. They laid it out in box-bordered beds, and there were clumps of hollyhocks, sunflowers, lilies, and phlox, in different corners; grapes covered the trellised walls; there were some pear-trees that bore blossoms, and sometimes ripened their fruit beside the walk. Mrs. Halleck used to work in the garden; her husband seldom descended into it, but he liked to sit on the iron-railed balcony overlooking it from the back parlor.

As for the interior of the house, it had been furnished, once for all, in the worst style of that most tasteless period of household art, which prevailed from 1840 to 1870; and it would be impossible to say which were most hideous, the carpets or the chandeliers, the curtains or the chairs and sofas; crude colors, lumpish and meaningless forms, abounded in a rich and horrible discord. The old people thought it all beautiful, and those daughters who had come into the new house as little girls revered it; but Ben and his youngest sister, who had been born in the house, used the right of children of their parents’ declining years to laugh at it. Yet they laughed with a sort of filial tenderness.

“I suppose you know how frightful you have everything about you, Olive,” said Clara Kingsbury, one day after the Eastlake movement began, as she took a comprehensive survey of the Halleck drawing-room through her pince-nez.

“Certainly,” answered the youngest Miss Halleck. “It’s a perfect chamber of horrors. But I like it, because everything’s so exquisitely in keeping.”

“Really, I feel as if I had seen it all for the first time,” said Miss Kingsbury. “I don’t believe I ever realized it before.”

She and Olive Halleck were great friends, though Clara was fashionable and Olive was not.

“It would all have been different,” Ben used to say, in whimsical sarcasm of what he had once believed, “if I had gone to Harvard. Then the fellows in my class would have come to the house with me, and we should have got into the right set naturally. Now, we’re outside of everything, and it makes me mad, because we’ve got money enough to be inside, and there’s nothing to prevent it. Of course, I’m not going to say that leather is quite as blameless as cotton socially, but taken in the wholesale form it isn’t so very malodorous, and it’s quite as good as other things that are accepted.”

“It’s not the leather, Ben,” answered Olive, “and it’s not your not going to Harvard altogether, though that has something to do with it. The trouble’s in me. I was at school with all those girls Clara goes with, and I could have been in that set if I’d wanted; but I didn’t really want to. I saw, at a very tender age, that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth, and I just quietly kept out of it. Of course, I couldn’t have gone to Papanti’s without a fuss, but mother would have let me go if I had made the fuss; and I could be hand and glove with those girls now, if I tried. They come here whenever I ask them; and when I meet them on charities, I’m awfully popular. No, if I’m not fashionable, it’s my own fault. But what difference does it make to you, Ben? You don’t want to marry any of those girls as long as your heart’s set on that unknown charmer of yours.” Ben had once seen his charmer in the street of a little Down East town, where he met her walking with some other boarding-school girls; in a freak with his fellow-students, he had bribed the village photographer to let him have the picture of the young lady, which he had sent home to Olive, marked, “My Lost Love.”

“No, I don’t want to marry anybody,” said Ben. “But I hate to live in a town where I’m not first chop in everything.”

“Pshaw!” cried his sister, “I guess it doesn’t trouble you much.”

“Well, I don’t know that it does,” he admitted.

Mrs. Halleck’s black coachman drove her to Mrs. Nash’s door on Canary Place, where she alighted and rang with as great perturbation as if it had been a palace, and these poor young people to whom she was going to be kind were princes. It was sufficient that they were strangers; but Marcia’s anxiety, evident even to meekness like Mrs. Halleck’s, restored her somewhat to her self-possession; and the thought that Bartley, in spite of his personal splendor, was a friend of Ben’s, was a help, and she got home with her guests without any great chasms in the conversation, though she never ceased to twist the window-tassel in her embarrassment.

Mr. Halleck came to her rescue at her own door, and let them in. He shook hands with Bartley again, and viewed Marcia with a fatherly friendliness that took away half her awe of the ugly magnificence of the interior. But still she admired that Bartley could be so much at his ease. He pointed to a stick at the foot of the hat-rack, and said, “How much that looks like Halleck!” which made the old man laugh, and clap him on the shoulder, and cry: “So it does! so it does! Recognized it, did you? Well, we shall soon have him with us again, now. Seems a long time to us since he went.”

“Still limps a little?” asked Bartley.

“Yes, I guess he’ll never quite get over that.”

“I don’t believe I should like him to,” said Bartley. “He wouldn’t seem natural without a cane in his hand, or hanging by the crook over his left elbow, while he stood and talked.”

The old man clapped Bartley on the shoulder again, and laughed again at the image suggested. “That’s so! that’s so! You’re right, I guess!”

As soon as Marcia could lay off her things in the gorgeous chamber to which Mrs. Halleck had shown her, they went out to tea in the dining-room overlooking the garden.

“Seems natural, don’t it?” asked the old man, as Bartley turned to one of the windows.

“Not changed a bit, except that I was here in winter, and I hadn’t a chance to see how pretty your garden was.”

“It is pretty, isn’t it?” said the old man. “Mother — Mrs. Halleck, I mean — looks after it. She keeps it about right. Here’s Cyrus!” he said, as the serving-man came into the room with something from the kitchen in his hands. “You remember Cyrus, I guess, Mr. Hubbard?”

“Oh, yes!” said Bartley, and when Cyrus had set down his dish, Bartley shook hands with the New Hampshire exemplar of freedom and equality; he was no longer so young as to wish to mark a social difference between himself and the inside-man who had served Mr. Halleck with unimpaired self-respect for twenty-five years.

There was a vacant place at table, and Mr. Halleck said he hoped it would be taken by a friend of theirs. He explained that the possible guest was his lawyer, whose office Ben was going into after he left the Law School; and presently Mr. Atherton came. Bartley was prepared to be introduced anew, but he was flattered and the Hallecks were pleased to find that he and Mr. Atherton were already acquainted; the latter was so friendly, that Bartley was confirmed in his belief that you could not make an interview too strong, for he had celebrated Mr. Atherton among the other people present at the Indigent Surf-Bathing entertainment.

He was put next to Marcia, and after a while he began to talk with her, feeling with a tacit skill for her highest note, and striking that with kindly perseverance. It was not a very high note, and it was not always a certain sound. She could not be sure that he was really interested in the simple matters he had set her to talking about, and from time to time she was afraid that Bartley did not like it: she would not have liked him to talk so long or so freely with a lady. But she found herself talking on, about boarding, and her own preference for keeping house; about Equity, and what sort of place it was, and how far from Crawford’s; about Boston, and what she had seen and done there since she had come in the winter. Most of her remarks began or ended with Mr. Hubbard; many of her opinions, especially in matters of taste, were frank repetitions of what Mr. Hubbard thought; her conversation had the charm and pathos of that of the young wife who devotedly loves her husband, who lives in and for him, tests everything by him, refers everything to him. She had a good mind, though it was as bare as it could well be of most of the things that the ladies of Mr. Atherton’s world put into their minds.

Mrs. Halleck made from time to time a little murmur of satisfaction in Marcia’s loyalty, and then sank back into the meek silence that she only emerged from to propose more tea to some one, or to direct Cyrus about offering this dish or that.

After they rose she took Marcia about, to show her the house, ending with the room which Bartley had when he visited there. They sat down in this room and had a long chat, and when they came back to the parlor they found Mr. Atherton already gone. Marcia inferred the early habits of the household from the departure of this older friend, but Bartley was in no hurry; he was enjoying himself, and he could not see that Mr. Halleck seemed at all sleepy.

Mrs. Halleck wished to send them home in her carriage, but they would not hear of this; they would far rather walk, and when they had been followed to the door, and bidden mind the steps as they went down, the wide open night did not seem too large for their content in themselves and each other.

“Did you have a nice time?” asked Bartley, though he knew he need not.

“The best time I ever had in the world!” cried Marcia.

They discussed the whole affair; the two old people; Mr. Atherton, and how pleasant he was; the house and its splendors, which they did not know were hideous. “Bartley,” said Marcia at last, “I told Mrs. Halleck.”

“Did you?” he returned, in trepidation; but after a while he laughed. “Well, all right, if you wanted to.”

“Yes, I did; and you can’t think how kind she was. She says we must have a house of our own somewhere, and she’s going round with me in her carriage to help me to find one.”

“Well,” said Bartley, and he fetched a sigh, half of pride, half of dismay.

“Yes, I long to go to housekeeping. We can afford it now. She says we can get a cheap little house, or half a house, up at the South End, and it won’t cost us any more than to board, hardly; and that’s what I think, too.”

“Go ahead, if you can find the house. I don’t object to my own fireside. And I suppose we must.”

“Yes, we must. Ain’t you glad of it?”

They were in the shadow of a tall house, and he dropped his face toward the face she lifted to his, and gave her a silent kiss that made her heart leap toward him.

XX.

With the other news that Halleck’s mother gave him on his return, she told him of the chance that had brought his old college comrade to them again, and of how Bartley was now married, and was just settled in the little house she had helped his wife to find. “He has married a very pretty girl,” she said.

“Oh, I dare say!” answered her son. “He isn’t the fellow to have married a plain girl.”

“Your father and I have been to call upon them in their new house, and they seem very happy together. Mr. Hubbard wants you should come to see them. He talks a great deal about you.”

“I’ll look them up in good time,” said the young man. “Hubbard’s ardor to see me will keep.”

That evening Mr. Atherton came to tea, and Halleck walked home with him to his lodgings, which were over the hill, and beyond the Public Garden. “Yes, it’s very pleasant, getting back,” he said, as they sauntered down the Common side of Beacon Street, “and the old town is picturesque after the best they can do across the water.” He halted his friend, and brought himself to a rest on his cane, for a look over the hollow of the Common and the level of the Garden where the late September dark was keenly spangled with lamps. “‘My heart leaps up,’ and so forth, when I see that. Now that Athens and Florence and Edinburgh are past, I don’t think there is any place quite so well worth being born in as Boston.” He moved forward again, gently surging with his limp, in a way that had its charm for those that loved him. “It’s more authentic and individual, more municipal, after the old pattern, than any other modern city. It gives its stamp, it characterizes. The Boston Irishman, the Boston Jew, is a quite different Irishman or Jew from those of other places. Even Boston provinciality is a precious testimony to the authoritative personality of the city. Cosmopolitanism is a modern vice, and we’re antique, we’re classic, in the other thing. Yes, I’d rather be a Bostonian, at odds with Boston, than one of the curled darlings of any other community.”

A friend knows how to allow for mere quantity in your talk, and only replies to the quality, separates your earnest from your whimsicality, and accounts for some whimsicality in your earnest. “I didn’t know but you might have got that bee out of your bonnet, on the other side,” said Atherton.

“No, sir; we change our skies, but not our bees. What should I amount to without my grievance? You wouldn’t have known me. This talk to-night about Hubbard has set my bee to buzzing with uncommon liveliness; and the thought of the Law School next week does nothing to allay him. The Law School isn’t Harvard; I realize that more and more, though I have tried to fancy that it was. No, sir, my wrongs are irreparable. I had the making of a real Harvard man in me, and of a Unitarian, nicely balanced between radicalism and amateur episcopacy. Now, I am an orthodox ruin, and the undutiful stepson of a Down East alma mater. I belong nowhere; I’m at odds. — Is Hubbard’s wife really handsome, or is she only country-pretty?”

“She’s beautiful, — I assure you she’s beautiful,” said Atherton with such earnestness that Halleck laughed.

“Well, that’s right! as my father says. How’s she beautiful?”

“That’s difficult to tell. It’s rather a superb sort of style; and — What did you really use to think of your friend?” Atherton broke off to ask.

“Who? Hubbard?”

“Yes.”

“He was a poor, cheap sort of a creature. Deplorably smart, and regrettably handsome. A fellow that assimilated everything to a certain extent, and nothing thoroughly. A fellow with no more moral nature than a base-ball The sort of chap you’d expect to find, the next time you met him, in Congress or the house of correction.”

“Yes, that accounts for it,” said Atherton, thoughtfully.

“Accounts for what?”

“The sort of look she had. A look as if she were naturally above him, and had somehow fascinated herself with him, and were worshipping him in some sort of illusion.”

“Doesn’t that sound a little like refining upon the facts? Recollect: I’ve never seen her, and I don’t say you’re wrong.”

“I’m not sure I’m not, though. I talked with her, and found her nothing more than honest and sensible and good; simple in her traditions, of course, and countrified yet, in her ideas, with a tendency to the intensely practical. I don’t see why she mightn’t very well be his wife. I suppose every woman hoodwinks herself about her husband in some degree.”

“Yes; and we always like to fancy something pathetic in the fate of pretty girls that other fellows marry. I notice that we don’t sorrow much over the plain ones. How’s the divine Clara?”

“I believe she’s well,” said Atherton. “I haven’t seen her, all summer. She’s been at Beverley.”

“Why, I should have supposed she would have come up and surf-bathed those indigent children with her own hand. She’s equal to it. What made her falter in well-doing?”

“I don’t know that we can properly call it faltering. There was a deficit in the appropriation necessary, and she made it up herself. After that, she consulted me seriously as to whether she ought not to stay in town and superintend the execution of the plan. But I told her she might fitly delegate that. She was all the more anxious to perform her whole duty, because she confessed that indigent children were personally unpleasant to her.”

Halleck burst out laughing. “That’s like Clara! How charming women are! They’re charming even in their goodness! I wonder the novelists don’t take a hint from that fact, and stop giving us those scaly heroines they’ve been running lately. Why, a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant. I like them for that!”

“Do you?” asked Atherton, laughing in his turn at the single-minded confession. He was some years older than his friend.

They had got down to Charles Street, and Halleck took out his watch at the corner lamp. “It isn’t at all late yet, — only half-past eight. The days are getting shorter.”

“Well?”

“Suppose we go and call on Hubbard now? He’s right up here on Clover Street!”

“I don’t know,” said Atherton. “It would do for you; you’re an old friend. But for me, — wouldn’t it be rather unceremonious?”

“Oh, come along! They’ll not be punctilious. They’ll like our dropping in, and I shall have Hubbard off my conscience. I must go to see him sooner or later, for decency’s sake.”

Atherton suffered himself to be led away. “I suppose you won’t stay long?”

“Oh, no; I shall cut it very short,” said Halleck; and they climbed the narrow little street where Marcia had at last found a house, after searching the South End quite to the Highlands, and ransacking Charlestown and Carnbridgeport. These points all seemed to her terribly remote from where Bartley must be at work during the day, and she must be alone without the sight of him from morning till night. The accessibility of Canary Place had spoiled her for distances; she wanted Bartley at home for their one-o’clock dinner; she wanted to have him within easy call at all times; and she was glad when none of those far-off places yielded quite what they desired in a house. They took the house on Clover Street, though it was a little dearer than they expected, for two years, and they furnished it, as far as they could, out of the three or four hundred dollars they had saved, including the remaining hundred from the colt and cutter, kept sacredly intact by Marcia. When you entered, the narrow staircase cramped you into the little parlor opening out of the hall; and back of the parlor was the dining-room. Overhead were two chambers, and overhead again were two chambers more; in the basement was the kitchen. The house seemed absurdly large to people who had been living for the last seven months in one room, and the view of the Back Bay from the little bow-window of the front chamber added all outdoors to their superfluous space.

Bartley came himself to answer Halleck’s ring, and they met at once with such a “Why, Halleck!” and “How do you do, Hubbard?” as restored something of their old college comradery. Bartley welcomed Mr. Atherton under the gas-light he had turned up, and then they huddled into the little parlor, where Bartley introduced his old friend to his wife. Marcia wore a sort of dark robe, trimmed with bows of crimson ribbon, which she had made herself, and in which she looked a Roman patrician in an avatar of Boston domesticity; and Bartley was rather proud to see his friend so visibly dazzled by her beauty. It quite abashed Halleck, who limped helplessly about, after his cane had been taken from him, before he sat down, while Marcia, from the vantage of the sofa and the covert of her talk with Atherton, was content that Halleck should be plain and awkward, with close-cut drab hair and a dull complexion; she would not have liked even a man who knew Bartley before she did to be very handsome.

Halleck and Bartley had some talk about college days, from which their eyes wandered at times; and then Marcia excused herself to Atherton, and went out, reappearing after an interval at the sliding doors, which she rolled open between the parlor and dining-room. A table set for supper stood behind her, and as she leaned a little forward with her hands each on a leaf of the door, she said, with shy pride, “Bartley, I thought the gentlemen would like to join you,” and he answered, “Of course they would,” and led the way out, refusing to hear any demur. His heart swelled with satisfaction in Marcia; it was something like: having fellows drop in upon you, and be asked out to supper in this easy way; it made Bartley feel good, and he would have liked to give Marcia a hug on the spot. He could not help pressing her foot, under the table, and exchanging a quiver of the eyelashes with her, as he lifted the lid of the white tureen, and looked at her across the glitter of their new crockery and cutlery. They made the jokes of the season about the oyster being promptly on hand for the first of the R months, and Bartley explained that he was sometimes kept at the Events office rather late, and that then Marcia waited supper for him, and always gave him an oyster stew, which she made herself. She could not stop him, and the guests praised the oysters, and then they praised the dining-room and the parlor; and when they rose from the table Bartley said, “Now, we must show you the house,” and persisted against her deprecations in making her lead the way. She was in fact willing enough to show it; her taste had made their money go to the utmost in furnishing it; and though most people were then still in the period of green reps and tan terry, and of dull black-walnut movables, she had everywhere bestowed little touches that told. She had covered the marble parlor-mantel with cloth, and fringed it; and she had set on it two vases in the Pompeiian colors then liked; her carpet was of wood color and a moss pattern; she had done what could be done with folding carpet chairs to give the little room a specious air of luxury; the centre-table was heaped with her sewing and Bartley’s newspapers.

“We’ve just moved in, and we haven’t furnished all the rooms yet,” she said of two empty ones which Bartley perversely flung open.

“And I don’t know that we shall. The house is much too big for us; but we thought we’d better take it,” he added, as if it were a castle for vastness.

Halleck and Atherton were silent for some moments after they came away, and then, “I don’t believe he whips her,” suggested the latter.

“No, I guess he’s fond of her,” said Halleck, gravely.

“Did you see how careful he was of her, coming up and down stairs? That was very pretty; and it was pretty to see them both so ready to show off their young housekeeping to us.”

“Yes, it improves a man to get married,” said Halleck, with a long, stifled sigh. “It’s improved the most selfish hound I ever knew.”

XXI.

The two elder Miss Hallecks were so much older than Olive, the youngest, that they seemed to be of a sort of intermediary generation between her and her parents, though Olive herself was well out of her teens, and was the senior of her brother Ben by two or three years. The elder sisters were always together, and they adhered in common to the religion of their father and mother. The defection of their brother was passive, but Olive, having conscientiously adopted an alien faith, was not a person to let others imagine her ashamed of it, and her Unitarianism was outspoken. In her turn she formed a kind of party with Ben inside the family, and would have led him on in her own excesses of independence if his somewhat melancholy indifferentism had consented. It was only in his absence that she had been with her sisters during their summer sojourn in the White Mountains; when they returned home, she vigorously went her way, and left them to go theirs. She was fond of them in her defiant fashion; but in such a matter as calling on Mrs. Hubbard she chose not to be mixed up with her family, or in any way to countenance her family’s prepossessions. Her sisters paid their visit together, and she waited for Clara Kingsbury to come up from the seaside. Then she went with her to call upon Marcia, sitting observant and non-committal while Clara swooped through the little house, up stairs and down, clamoring over its prettiness, and admiring the art with which so few dollars could be made to go so far. “Think of finding such a bower on Clover Street!” She made Marcia give her the cost of everything; and her heart swelled with pride in her sex — when she heard that Marcia had put down all the carpets herself. “I wanted to make them up,” Marcia explained, “but Mr. Hubbard wouldn’t let me, — it cost so little at the store.”

“Wouldn’t let you!” cried Miss Kingsbury. “I should hope as much, indeed! Why, my child, you’re a Roman matron!”

She came away in agony lest Marcia might think she meant her nose. She drove early the next morning to tell Olive Halleck that she had spent a sleepless night from this cause, and to ask her what she should do. “Do you think she will be hurt, Olive? Tell me what led up to it. How did I behave before that? The context is everything in such cases.”

“Oh, you went about praising everything, and screaming and shouting, and my-dearing and my-childing her, and patronizing—”

“There, there! say no more! That’s sufficient! I see, — I see it all! I’ve done the very most offensive thing I could, when I meant to be the most appreciative.”

“These country people don’t like to be appreciated down to the quick, in that way,” said Olive. “I should think Mrs. Hubbard was rather a proud person.”

“I know! I know!” moaned Miss Kingsbury. “It was ghastly.”

“I don’t suppose she’s ashamed of her nose—”

“Olive!” cried her friend, “be still! Why, I can’t bear it! Why, you wretched thing!”

“I dare say all the ladies in Equity make up their own carpets, and put them down, and she thought you were laughing at her.”

“Will you be still, Olive Halleck?” Miss Kingsbury was now a large, blonde mass of suffering, “Oh, dear, dear! What shall I do? It was sacrilege — yes, it was nothing less than sacrilege — to go on as I did. And I meant so well! I did so admire, and respect, and revere her!” Olive burst out laughing. “You wicked girl!” whimpered Clara. “Should you — should you write to her?”

“And tell her you didn’t mean her nose? Oh, by all means, Clara, — by all means! Quite an inspiration. Why not make her an evening party?”

“Olive,” said Clara, with guilty meekness, “I have been thinking of that.”

“No, Clara! Not seriously!” cried Olive, sobered at the idea.

“Yes, seriously. Would it be so very bad? Only just a little party,” she pleaded. “Half a dozen people or so; just to show them that I really feel — friendly. I know that he’s told her all about meeting me here, and I’m not going to have her think I want to drop him because he’s married, and lives in a little house on Clover Street.”

“Noble Clara! So you wish to bring them out in Boston society? What will you do with them after you’ve got them there?” Miss Kingsbury fidgeted in her chair a little. “Now, look me in the eye, Clara! Whom were you going to ask to meet them? Your unfashionable friends, the Hallecks?”

“My friends, the Hallecks, of course.”

“And Mr. Atherton, your legal adviser?”

“I had thought of asking Mr. Atherton. You needn’t say what he is, if you please, Olive; you know that there’s no one I prize so much.”

“Very good. And Mr. Cameron?”

“He has got back, — yes. He’s very nice.”

“A Cambridge tutor; very young and of recent attachment to the College, with no local affiliations, yet. What ladies?”

“Miss Strong is a nice girl; she is studying at the Conservatory.”

“Yes. Poverty-stricken votary of Miss Kingsbury. Well?”

“Miss Clancy.”

“Unfashionable sister of fashionable artist. Yes?”

“The Brayhems.”

“Young radical clergyman, and his wife, without a congregation, and hoping for a pulpit in Billerica. Parlor lectures on German literature in the mean time. Well?”

“And Mrs. Savage, I thought.”

“Well-preserved young widow of uncertain antecedents tending to grassiness; out-door prot�g�e of the hostess. Yes, Clara, go on and give your party. It will be perfectly safe! But do you think it will deceive anybody?”

“Now, Olive Halleck!” cried Clara, “I am not going to have you talking to me in that way! You have no right to do it, and you have no business to do it,” she added, trying to pluck up a spirit. “Is there anybody that I value more than I do you and your sisters, and Ben?”

“No. But you don’t value us just in that way, and you know it. Don’t you be a humbug, Clara. Now go on with your excuses.”

“I’m not making excuses! Isn’t Mr. Atherton in the most fashionable society?”

“Yes. Why don’t you ask some other fashionable people?”

“Olive, this is all nonsense, — perfect nonsense! I can invite any one I like to meet any one I like, and if I choose to show Mr. Hubbard’s wife a little attention, I can do it, can’t I?”

“Oh, of course!”

“And what would be the use of inviting fashionable people — as you call them — to meet them? It would just embarrass them, all round.”

“Perfectly correct, Miss Kingsbury. All that want you to do is to face the facts of the case. I want you to realize that, in showing Mr. Hubbard’s wife this little attention, you’re not doing it because you scorn to drop an old friend, and want to do him the highest honor; but because you think you can palm off your second-class acquaintance on them for first-class, and try to make up in that way for telling her she had a hooked nose!”

“You know that I didn’t tell her she had a hooked nose.”

“You told her that she was a Roman matron, — it’s the same thing,” said Olive.

Miss Kingsbury bit her lip and tried to look a dignified resentment. She ended by saying, with feeble spite, “I shall have the little evening for all you say. I suppose you won’t refuse to come because I don’t ask the whole Blue Book to meet them.”

“Of course we shall come! I wouldn’t miss it for anything. I always like to see how you manage your pieces of social duplicity, Clara. But you needn’t expect that I will be a party to the swindle. No, Clara! I shall go to these poor young people and tell them plainly, ‘This is not the best society; Miss Kingsbury keeps that for—’”

“Olive! I think I never saw even you in such a teasing humor.” The tears came into Clara’s large, tender blue eyes, and she continued with an appeal that had no effect, “I’m sure I don’t see why you should make it a question of anything of the sort. It’s simply a wish to — to have a little company of no particular kind, for no partic — Because I want to.”

“Oh, that’s it, is it? Then I highly approve of it,” said Olive. “When is it to be?”

“I sha’n’t tell you, now! You may wait till I’m ready,” pouted Clara, as she rose to go.

“Don’t go away thinking I’m enough to provoke a saint because you’ve got mad at me, Clara!”

“Mad? You know I’m not mad! But I think you might be a little sympathetic sometimes, Olive!” said her friend, kissing her.

“Not in cases of social duplicity, Clara. My wrath is all that saves you. If you were not afraid of me, you would have been a lost worldling long ago.”

“I know you always really love me,” said Miss Kingsbury, tenderly.

“No, I don’t,” retorted her friend, promptly. “Not when you’re humbugging. Don’t expect it, for you won’t get it.” She followed Clara with a triumphant laugh as she went out of the door; and except for this parting taunt Clara might have given up her scheme. She first ordered her coup� driven home, in fact, and then lowered the window to countermand the direction, and drove to Bartley’s door on Clover Street.

It was a very handsome equipage, and was in keeping with all the outward belongings of Miss Kingsbury, who mingled a sense of duty and a love of luxury in her life in very exact proportions. When her coup� was not standing before some of the wretchedest doors in the city, it was waiting at the finest; and Clara’s days were divided between the extremes of squalor and of fashion.

She was the only child of parents who had early left her an orphan. Her father, who was much her mother’s senior, was an old friend of Olive’s father, and had made him his executor and the guardian of his daughter. Mr. Halleck had taken her into his own family, and, in the conscientious pursuance of what he believed would have been her father’s preference, he gave her worldly advantages which he would not have desired for one of his own children. But the friendship that grew up between Clara and Olive was too strong for him in some things, and the girls went to the same fashionable school together.

When his ward came of age he made over to her the fortune, increased by his careful management, which her father had left her, and advised her to put her affairs in the hands of Mr. Atherton. She had shown a quite ungirlish eagerness to manage them for herself; in the midst of her profusion she had odd accesses of stinginess, in which she fancied herself coming to poverty; and her guardian judged it best that she should have a lawyer who could tell her at any moment just where she stood. She hesitated, but she did as he advised; and having once intrusted her property to Atherton’s care, she added her conscience and her reason in large degree, and obeyed him with embarrassing promptness in matters that did not interfere with her pleasures. Her pleasures were of various kinds. She chose to buy herself a fine house, and, having furnished it luxuriously and unearthed a cousin of her father’s in Vermont and brought her to Boston to matronize her, she kept house on a magnificent scale, pinching, however, at certain points with unexpected meanness. When she was alone, her table was of a Spartan austerity; she exacted a great deal from her servants, and paid them as small wages as she could. After that she did not mind lavishing money upon them in kindness. A seamstress whom she had once employed fell sick, and Miss Kingsbury sent her to the Bahamas and kept her there till she was well, and then made her a guest in her house till the girl could get back her work. She watched her cook through the measles, caring for her like a mother; and, as Olive Halleck said, she was always portioning or burying the sisters of her second-girls. She was in all sorts of charities, but she was apt to cut her charities off with her pleasures at any moment, if she felt poor. She was fond of dress, and went a great deal into society: she suspected men generally of wishing to marry her for her money, but with those whom she did not think capable of aspiring to her hand, she was generously helpful with her riches. She liked to patronize; she had long supported an unpromising painter at Rome, and she gave orders to desperate artists at home.

The world had pretty well hardened one half of her heart, but the other half was still soft and loving, and into this side of her mixed nature she cowered when she believed she had committed some blunder or crime, and came whimpering to Olive Halleck for punishment. She made Olive her discipline partly in her lack of some fixed religion. She had not yet found a religion that exactly suited her, though she had many times believed herself about to be anchored in some faith forever.

She was almost sorry that she had put her resolution in effect when she rang at the door, and Marcia herself answered the bell, in place of the one servant who was at that moment hanging out the wash. It seemed wicked to pretend to be showing this pretty creature a social attention, when she meant to palm off a hollow imitation of society upon her. Why should she not ask the very superfinest of her friends to meet such a brilliant beauty? It would serve Olive Halleck right if she should do this, and leave the Hallecks out; and Marcia would certainly be a sensation. She half believed that she meant to do it when she quitted the house with Marcia’s promise that she would bring her husband to tea on Wednesday evening, at eight; and she drove away so far penitent that she resolved at least to make her company distinguished, if not fashionable. She said to herself that she would make it fashionable yet, if she chose, and as a first move in this direction she easily secured Mr. Atherton: he had no engagements, so few people had got back to town. She called upon Mrs. Witherby, needlessly reminding her of the charity committees they had served on together; and then she went home and actually sent out notes to the plainest daughter and the maiden aunt of two of the most high-born families of her acquaintance. She added to her list an artist and his wife, (“Now I shall have to let him paint me!” she reflected,) a young author whose book had made talk, a teacher of Italian with whom she was pretending to read Dante, and a musical composer.

Olive came late, as if to get a whole effect of the affair at once; and her smile revealed Clara’s failure to her, if she had not realized it before. She read there that the aristocratic and aesthetic additions which she had made to the guests Olive originally divined had not sufficed; the party remained a humbug. It had seemed absurd to invite anybody to meet two such little, unknown people as the Hubbards; and then, to avoid marking them as the subjects of the festivity by the precedence to be observed in going out to supper, she resolved to have tea served in the drawing-room, and to make it literally tea, with bread and butter, and some thin, ascetic cakes.

However sharp he was in business, Mr. Witherby was socially a dull man; and his wife and daughter seemed to partake of his qualities by affinition and heredity. They tried to make something of Marcia, but they failed through their want of art. Mrs. Witherby, finding the wife of her husband’s assistant in Miss Kingsbury’s house, conceived an awe of her, which Marcia would not have known how to abate if she had imagined it; and in a little while the Witherby family segregated themselves among the photograph albums and the bricabrac, from which Clara seemed to herself to be fruitlessly detaching them the whole evening. The plainest daughter and the maiden aunt of the patrician families talked to each other with unavailing intervals of the painter and the author, and the radical clergyman and his wife were in danger of a conjugal devotion which society does not favor; the unfashionable sister of the fashionable artist conversed with the young tutor and the Japanese law-student whom he had asked leave to bring with him, and whose small, mouse-like eyes continually twinkled away in pursuit of the blonde beauty of his hostess. The widow was winningly attentive, with a tendency to be confidential, to everybody. The Italian could not disabuse himself of the notion that he was expected to be light and cheerful, and when the pupil of the Conservatory sang, he abandoned himself to his error, and clapped and cried bravo with unseemly vivacity. But he was restored to reason when the composer sat down at the piano and played, amid the hush that falls on society at such times, something from Beethoven, and again something of his own, which was so like Beethoven that Beethoven himself would not have known the difference.

Mr. Atherton and Halleck moved about among the guests, and did their best to second Clara’s efforts for their encouragement; but it was useless. In the desperation which owns defeat, she resolved to devote herself for the rest of the evening to trying to make at least the Hubbards have a good time; and then, upon the dangerous theory, of which young and pretty hostesses cannot be too wary, that a wife is necessarily flattered by attentions to her husband, she devoted herself exclusively to Bartley, to whom she talked long and with a reckless liveliness of the events of his former stay in Boston. Their laughter and scraps of their reminiscence reached Marcia where she sat in a feint of listening to Ben Halleck’s perfunctory account of his college days with her husband, till she could bear it no longer. She rose abruptly, and, going to him, she said that it was time to say good-night. “Oh, so soon!” cried Clara, mystified and a little scared at the look she saw on Marcia’s face. “Good night,” she added coldly.

The assembly hailed this first token of its disintegration with relief; it became a little livelier; there was a fleeting moment in which it seemed as if it might yet enjoy itself; but its chance passed; it crumbled rapidly away, and Clara was left looking humbly into Olive Halleck’s pitiless eyes. “Thank you for a delightful evening, Miss Kingsbury! Congratulate you!” she mocked, with an unsparing laugh. “Such a success! But why didn’t you give them something to eat, Clara? Those poor Hubbards have a one-o’clock dinner, and I famished for them. I wasn’t hungry myself, — we have a two-o’clock dinner!”

XXII.

Bartley came home elate from Miss Kingsbury’s entertainment. It was something like the social success which he used to picture to himself. He had been flattered by the attention specially paid him, and he did not detect the imposition. He was half starved, but he meant to have up some cold meat and bottled beer, and talk it all over with Marcia.

She did not seem inclined to talk it over on their way home, and when they entered their own door, she pushed in and ran up-stairs. “Why, where are you going, Marcia?” he called after her.

“To bed!” she replied, closing the door after her with a crash of unmistakable significance.

Bartley stood a moment in the fury that tempted him to pursue her with a taunt, and then leave her to work herself out of the transport of senseless jealousy she had wrought herself into. But he set his teeth, and, full of inward cursing, he followed her up-stairs with a slow, dogged step. He took her in his arms without a word, and held her fast, while his anger changed to pity, and then to laughing. When it came to that, she put up her arms, which she had kept rigidly at her side, and laid them round his neck, and began softly to cry on his breast.

“Oh, I’m not myself at all, any more!” she moaned penitently.

“Then this is very improper — for me,” said Bartley.

The helpless laughter broke through her lamentation, but she cried a little more to keep herself in countenance.

“But I guess, from a previous acquaintance with the party’s character, that it’s really all you, Marcia. I don’t blame you. Miss Kingsbury’s hospitality has left me as hollow as if I’d had nothing to eat for a week; and I know you’re perishing from inanition. Hence these tears.”

It delighted her to have him make fun of Miss Kingsbury’s tea, and she lifted her head to let him see that she was laughing for pleasure now, before she turned away to dry her eyes.

“Oh, poor fellow!” she cried. “I did pity you so when I saw those mean little slices of bread and butter coming round!”

“Yes,” said Bartley, “I felt sorry myself. But don’t speak of them any more, dearest.”

“And I suppose,” pursued Marcia, “that all the time she was talking to you there, you were simply ravening.”

“I was casting lots in my own mind to see which of the company I should devour first.”

His drollery appeared to Marcia the finest that ever was; she laughed and laughed again; when he made fun of the conjecturable toughness of the elderly aristocrat, she implored him to stop if he did not want to kill her. Marcia was not in the state in which woman best convinces her enemies of her fitness for empire, though she was charming in her silly happiness, and Bartley felt very glad that he had not yielded to his first impulse to deal savagely with her. “Come,” he said, “let us go out somewhere, and get some oysters.”

She began at once to take out her ear-rings and loosen her hair. “No, I’ll get something here in the house; I’m not very hungry. But you go, Bartley, and have a good supper, or you’ll be sick to-morrow, and not fit to work. Go,” she added to his hesitating image in the glass, “I insist upon it. I won’t have you stay.” His reflected face approached from behind; she turned hers a little, and their mirrored lips met over her shoulder. “Oh, how sweet you are, Bartley!” she murmured.

“Yes, you will always find me obedient when commanded to go out and repair my wasted tissue.”

“I don’t mean that, dear,” she said softly. “I mean — your not quarrelling with me when I’m unreasonable. Why can’t we always do so!”

“Well, you see,” said Bartley, “it throws the whole burden on the fellow in his senses. It doesn’t require any great degree of self-sacrifice to fly off at a tangent, but it’s rather a maddening spectacle to the party that holds on.”

“Now I will show you,” said Marcia, “that I can be reasonable too: I shall let you go alone to make our party call on Miss Kingsbury.” She looked at him heroically.

“Marcia,” said Bartley, “you’re such a reasonable person when you’re the most unreasonable, that I wonder I ever quarrel with you. I rather think I’ll let you call on Miss Kingsbury alone. I shall suffer agonies of suspicion, but it will prove that I have perfect confidence in you.” He threw her a kiss from the door, and ran down the stairs. When he returned, an hour later, he found her waiting up for him. “Why, Marcia!” he exclaimed.

“Oh! I just wanted to say that we will both go to call on her very soon. If I sent you, she might think I was mad, and I won’t give her that satisfaction.”

“Noble girl!” cried Bartley, with irony that pleased her better than praise. Women like to be understood, even when they try not to be understood.

When Marcia went with Bartley to call, Miss Kingsbury received her with careful, perhaps anxious politeness, but made no further effort to take her up. Some of the people whom Marcia met at Miss Kingsbury’s called; and the Witherbys came, father, mother, and daughter together; but between the evident fact that the Hubbards were poor, and the other evident fact that they moved in the best society, the Witherbys did not quite know what to do about them. They asked them to dinner, and Bartley went alone; Marcia was not well enough to go.

He was very kind and tractable, now, and went whenever she bade him go without her, though tea at the Hallecks was getting to be an old story with him, and it was generally tea at the Hallecks to which she sent him. The Halleck ladies came faithfully to see her, and she got on very well with the two older sisters, who gave her all the kindness they could spare from their charities, and seemed pleased to have her so pretty and conjugal, though these things were far from them. But she was afraid of Olive at first, and disliked her as a friend of Miss Kingsbury. This rather attracted the odd girl. What she called Marcia’s snubs enabled her to declare in her favor with a sense of disinterestedness, and to indulge her repugnance for Bartley with a good heart. She resented his odious good looks, and held it a shame that her mother should promote his visible tendency to stoutness by giving him such nice things for tea.

“Now, I like Mr. Hubbard,” said her mother placidly. “It’s very kind of him to come to such plain folks as we are, whenever we ask him; now that his wife can’t come, I know he does it because he likes us.”

“Oh, he comes for the eating,” said Olive, scornfully. Then another phase of her mother’s remark struck her: “Why, mother!” she cried, “I do believe you think Bartley Hubbard’s a distinguished man somehow!”

“Your father says it’s very unusual for such a young man to be in a place like his. Mr. Witherby really leaves everything to him, he says.”

“Well, I think he’d better not, then! The Events has got to be perfectly horrid, of late. It’s full of murders and all uncleanness.”

“That seems to be the way with the papers, nowadays. Your father hears that the Events is making money.”

“Why, mother! What a corrupt old thing you are! I believe you’ve been bought up by that disgusting interview with father. Nestor of the Leather Interest! Father ought to have turned him out of doors. Well, this family is getting a little too good, for me! And Ben’s almost as bad as any of you, of late, — I haven’t a bit of influence with him any more. He seems determined to be friendlier with that person than ever; he’s always trying to do him good, — I can see it, and it makes me sick. One thing I know: I’m going to stop Mr. Hubbard’s calling me Olive. Impudent!”

Mrs. Halleck shifted her ground with the pretence which women use, even amongst themselves, of having remained steadfast. “He is a very good husband.”

“Oh, because he likes to be!” retorted her daughter. “Nothing is easier than to be a good husband.”

“Ah, my dear,” said Mrs. Halleck, “wait till you have tried.”

This made Olive laugh; but she answered with an argument that always had weight with her mother, “Ben doesn’t think he’s a good husband.”

“What makes you think so, Olive?” asked her mother.

“I know he dislikes him intensely.”

“Why, you just said yourself, dear, that he was friendlier with him than ever.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. The more he disliked him the kinder he would be to him.”

“That’s true,” sighed her mother. “Did he ever say anything to you about him?”

“No,” cried Olive, shortly; “he never speaks of people he doesn’t like.”

The mother returned, with logical severity, “All that doesn’t prove that Ben thinks he isn’t a good husband.”

“He dislikes him. Do you believe a bad man can be a good husband, then?”

“No,” Mrs. Halleck admitted, as if confronted with indisputable proof of Bartley’s wickedness.

In the mean time the peace between Bartley and Marcia continued unbroken, and these days of waiting, of suffering, of hoping and dreading, were the happiest of their lives. He did his best to be patient with her caprices and fretfulness, and he was at least manfully comforting and helpful, and instant in atonement for every failure. She said a thousand times that she should die without him; and when her time came, he thought that she was going to die before he could tell her of his sorrow for all that he had ever done to grieve her. He did not tell her, though she lived to give him the chance; but he took her and her baby both into his arms, with tears of as much fondness as ever a man shed. He even began his confession; but she said, “Hush! you never did a wrong thing yet that I didn’t drive you to.” Pale and faint, she smiled joyfully upon him, and put her hand on his head when he hid his face against hers on the pillow, and put her lips against his cheek. His heart was full; he was grateful for the mercy that had spared him; he was so strong in his silent repentance that he felt like a good man.

“Bartley,” she said, “I’m going to ask a great favor of you.”

“There’s nothing that I can do that I shall think a favor, darling!” he cried, lifting his face to look into hers.

“Write for mother to come. I want her!”

“Why, of course.” Marcia continued to look at him, and kept the quivering hold she had laid of his hand when he raised his head. “Was that all?”

She was silent, and he added, “I will ask your father to come with her.”

She hid her face for the space of one sob. “I wanted you to offer.”

“Why, of course! of course!” he replied.

She did not acknowledge his magnanimity directly, but she lifted the coverlet and showed him the little head on her arm, and the little creased and crumpled face.

“Pretty?” she asked. “Bring me the letter before you send it. — Yes, that is just right, — perfect!” she sighed, when he came back and read the letter to her; and she fell away to happy sleep.

Her father answered that he would come with her mother as soon as he got the better of a cold he had taken. It was now well into the winter, and the journey must have seemed more formidable in Equity than in Boston. But Bartley was not impatient of his father-in-law’s delay, and he set himself cheerfully about consoling Marcia for it. She stole her white, thin hand into his, and now and then gave it a little pressure to accent the points she made in talking.

“Father was the first one I thought of — after you, Bartley. It seems to me as if baby came half to show me how unfeeling I had been to him. Of course, I’m not sorry I ran away and asked you to take me back, for I couldn’t have had you if I hadn’t done it; but I never realized before how cruel it was to father. He always made such a pet of me; and I know that he thought he was acting for the best.”

“I knew that you were,” said Bartley, fervently.

“What sweet things you always say to me!” she murmured. “But don’t you see, Bartley, that I didn’t think enough of him? That’s what baby seems to have come to teach me.” She pulled a little away on the pillow, so as to fix him more earnestly with her eyes. “If baby should behave so to you when she grew up, I should hate her!”

He laughed, and said, “Well, perhaps your mother hates you.”

“No, they don’t — either of them,” answered Marcia, with a sigh. “And I behaved very stiffly and coldly with him when he came up to see me, — more than I had any need to. I did it for your sake; but he didn’t mean any harm to you, he just wanted to make sure that I was safe and well.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Marsh.”

“Yes, I know. But what if he had died!”

“Well, he didn’t die,” said Bartley, with a smile. “And you’ve corresponded with them regularly, ever since, and you know they’ve been getting along all right. And it’s going to be altogether different from this out,” he added, leaning back a little weary with a matter in which he could not be expected to take a very cordial interest.

“Truly?” she asked, with one of the eagerest of those hand-pressures.

“It won’t be my fault if it isn’t,” he replied, with a yawn.

“How good you are, Bartley!” she said, with an admiring look, as if it were the goodness of God she was praising.

Bartley released himself, and went to the new crib, in which the baby lay, and with his hands in his pockets stood looking down at it with a curious smile.

“Is it pretty?” she asked, envious of his bird’s-eye view of the baby.

“Not definitively so,” he answered. “I dare say she will smooth out in time; but she seems to be considerably puckered yet.”

“Well,” returned Marcia, with forced resignation, “I shouldn’t let any one else say so.”

Her husband set up a soft, low, thoughtful whistle. “I’ll tell you what, Marcia,” he said presently. “Suppose we name this baby after your father?”

She lifted herself on her elbow, and stared at him as if he must be making fun of her. “Why, how could we?” she demanded. Squire Gaylord’s parents had called his name Flavius Josephus, in a superstition once cherished by old-fashioned people, that the Jewish historian was somehow a sacred writer.

“We can’t name her Josephus, but we can call her Flavia,” said Bartley. “And if she makes up her mind to turn out a blonde, the name will just fit. Flavia, — it’s a very pretty name.” He looked at his wife, who suddenly turned her face down on the pillow.

“Bartley Hubbard,” she cried, “you’re the best man in the world!”

“Oh, no! Only the second-best,” suggested Bartley.

In these days they took their fill of the delight of young fatherhood and motherhood. After its morning bath Bartley was called in, and allowed to revere the baby’s mottled and dimpled back as it lay face downward on the nurse’s lap, feebly wiggling its arms and legs, and responding with ineffectual little sighs and gurgles to her acceptable rubbings with warm flannel. When it was fully dressed, and its long clothes pulled snugly down, and its limp person stiffened into something tenable, he was suffered to take it into his arms, and to walk the room with it. After all, there is not much that a man can actually do with a small baby, either for its pleasure or his own, and Barkley’s usefulness had its strict limitations. He was perhaps most beneficial when he put the child in its mother’s arms, and sat down beside the bed, and quietly talked, while Marcia occasionally put up a slender hand, and smoothed its golden brown hair, bending her neck over to look at it where it lay, with the action of a mother bird. They examined with minute interest the details of the curious little creature: its tiny finger-nails, fine and sharp, and its small queer fist doubled so tight, and closing on one’s finger like a canary’s claw on a perch; the absurdity of its foot, the absurdity of its toes, the ridiculous inadequacy of its legs and arms to the work ordinarily expected of legs and arms, made them laugh. They could not tell yet whether its eyes would be black like Marcia’s, or blue like Bartley’s; those long lashes had the sweep of hers, but its mop of hair, which made it look so odd and old, was more like his in color.

“She will be a dark-eyed blonde,” Bartley decided.

“Is that nice?” asked Marcia.

“With the telescope sight, they’re warranted to kill at five hundred yards.”

“Oh, for shame, Bartley! To talk of baby’s ever killing!”

“Why, that’s what they all come to. It’s what you came to yourself.”

“Yes, I know. But it’s quite another thing with baby.” She began to mumble it with her lips, and to talk baby-talk to it. In their common interest in this puppet they already called each other papa and mamma.

Squire Gaylord came alone, and when Marcia greeted him with “Why, father! Where’s mother?” he asked, “Did you expect her? Well, I guess your mother’s feeling rather too old for such long winter journeys. You know she don’t go out a great deal I guess she expects your family down there in the summer.”

The old man was considerably abashed by the baby when it was put into his arms, and being required to guess its name he naturally failed.

“Flavia!” cried Marcia, joyfully. “Bartley named it after you.”

This embarrassed the Squire still more. “Is that so?” he asked, rather sheepishly. “Well, it’s quite a compliment.”

Marcia repeated this to her husband as evidence that her father was all right now. Bartley and the Squire were in fact very civil to each other; and Bartley paid the old man many marked attentions. He took him to the top of the State House, and walked him all about the city, to show him its points of interest, and introduced him to such of his friends as they met, though the Squire’s dresscoat, whether fully revealed by the removal of his surtout, or betraying itself below the skirt of the latter, was a trial to a fellow of Bartley’s style. He went with his father-in-law to see Mr. Warren in Jefferson Scattering Batkins, and the Squire grimly appreciated the burlesque of the member from Cranberry Centre; but he was otherwise not a very amusable person, and off his own ground he was not conversable, while he refused to betray his impressions of many things that Bartley expected to astonish him. The Events editorial rooms had no apparent effect upon him, though they were as different from most editorial dens as tapestry carpets, black-walnut desks, and swivel chairs could make them. Mr. Witherby covered him with urbanities and praises of Bartley that ought to have delighted him as a father-in-law; but apparently the great man of the Events was but a strange variety of the type with which he was familiar in the despised country editors. He got on better with Mr. Atherton, who was of a man’s profession. The Squire wore his hat throughout their interview, and everywhere except at table and in bed; and as soon as he rose front either, he put it on.

Bartley tried to impress him with such novel traits of cosmopolitan life as a table d’h�te dinner at a French restaurant; but the Squire sat through the courses, as if his barbarous old appetite had satisfied itself in that manner all his life. After that, Bartley practically gave him up; he pleaded his newspaper work, and left the Squire to pass the time as he could in the little house on Clover Street, where he sat half a day at a stretch in the parlor, with his hat on, reading the newspapers, his legs sprawled out towards the grate. In this way he probably reconstructed for himself some image of his wonted life in his office at home, and was for the time at peace; but otherwise he was very restless, except when he was with Marcia. He was as fond of her in his way as he had ever been, and though he apparently cared nothing for the baby, he enjoyed Marcia’s pride in it; and he bore to have it thrust upon him with the surly mildness of an old dog receiving children’s caresses. He listened with the same patience to all her celebrations of Bartley, which were often tedious enough, for she bragged of him constantly, of his smartness and goodness, and of the great success that had crowned the merit of both in him.

Mr. Halleck had called upon the Squire the morning after his arrival, and brought Marcia a note from his wife, offering to have her father stay with them if she found herself too much crowded at this eventful time. “There! That is just the sort of people the Hallecks are!” she cried, showing the letter to her father. “And to think of our not going near them for months and mouths after we came to Boston, for fear they were stuck up! But Bartley is always just so proud. Now you must go right in, father, and not keep Mr. Halleck waiting. Give me your hat, or you’ll be sure to wear it in the parlor.” She made him stoop down to let her brush his coat-collar a little. “There! Now you look something like.”

Squire Gaylord had never received a visit except on business in his life, and such a thing as one man calling socially upon another, as women did, was unknown to the civilization of Equity. But, as he reported to Marcia, he got along with Mr. Halleck; and he got along with the whole family when he went with Bartley to tea, upon the invitation Mr. Halleck made him that morning. Probably it appeared to him an objectless hospitality; but he spent as pleasant an evening as he could hope to spend with his hat off and in a frock-coat, which he wore as a more ceremonious garment than the dress-coat of his every-day life. He seemed to take a special liking to Olive Halleck, whose habit of speaking her mind with vigor and directness struck him as commendable. It was Olive who made the time pass for him; and as the occasion was not one for personal sarcasm or question of the Christian religion, her task in keeping the old pagan out of rather abysmal silences must have had its difficulties.

“What did you talk about?” asked Marcia, requiring an account of his enjoyment from him the next morning, after Bartley had gone down to his work.

“Mostly about you, I guess,” said the Squire, with a laugh. “There was a large sandy-haired young woman there—”

“Miss Kingsbury,” said Marcia, with vindictive promptness. Her eyes kindled, and she began to grow rigid under the coverlet. “Whom did she talk with?”

“Well, she talked a little with me; but she talked most of the time to the young man. She engaged to him?”

“No,” said Marcia, relaxing. “She’s a great friend of the whole family. I don’t know what they meant by telling you it was to be just a family party, when they were going to have strangers in,” she pouted.

“Perhaps they didn’t count her.”

“No.” But Marcia’s pleasure in the affair was tainted, and she began to talk of other things.

Her father stayed nearly a week, and they all found it rather a long week. After showing him her baby, and satisfying herself that he and Bartley were on good terms again, there was not much left for Marcia. Bartley had been banished to the spare room by the presence of the nurse; and he gave up his bed there to the Squire, and slept on a cot in the unfurnished attic room; the cook and a small girl got in to help, had the other. The house that had once seemed so vast was full to bursting.

“I never knew how little it was till I saw your father coming down stairs,” said Bartley. “He’s too tall for it. When he sits on the sofa, and stretches out his legs, his boots touch the mop-board on the other side of the room. Fact!”

“He won’t stay over Sunday,” began Marcia, with a rueful smile.

“Why, Marcia, you don’t think I want him to go!”

“No, you’re as good as can be about it. But I hope he won’t stay over Sunday.”

“Haven’t you enjoyed his visit?” asked Bartley.

“Oh, yes, I’ve enjoyed it.” The tears came into her eyes. “I’ve made it all up with father; and he doesn’t feel hard to me. But, Bartley — Sit down, dear, here on the bed!” She took his hand and gently pulled him down. “I see more and more that father and mother can never be what they used to be to me, — that you’re all the world to me. Yes, my life is broken off from theirs forever. Could anything break it off from yours? You’ll always be patient with me, won’t you? and remember that I’d always rather be good when I’m behaving the worst?”

He rose, and went over to the crib, and kissed the head of their little girl. “Ask Flavia,” he said from the door.

“Bartley!” she cried, in utter fondness, as he vanished from her happy eyes.

The next morning they heard the Squire moving about in his room, and he was late in coming down to breakfast, at which he was ordinarily so prompt. “He’s packing,” said Marcia, sadly. “It’s dreadful to be willing to have him go!”

Bartley went out and met him at his door, bag in hand. “Hollo!” he cried, and made a decent show of surprise and regret.

“M-yes!” said the old man, as they went down stairs. “I’ve made out a visit. But I’m an old fellow, and I ain’t easy away from home. I shall tell Mis’ Gaylord how you’re gettin’ along, and she’ll be pleased to hear it. Yes, she’ll be pleased to hear it. I guess I shall get off on the ten-o’clock train.”

The conversation between Bartley and his father-in-law was perfunctory. Men who have dealt so plainly with each other do not assume the conventional urbanities in their intercourse without effort. They had both been growing more impatient of the restraint; they could not have kept it up much longer.

“Well, I suppose it’s natural you should want to be home again, but I can’t understand how any one can want to go back to Equity when he has the privilege of staying in Boston.”

“Boston will do for a young man,” said the Squire, “but I’m too old for it. The city cramps me; it’s too tight a fit; and yet I can’t seem to find myself in it.”

He suffered from the loss of identity which is a common affliction with country people coming to town. The feeling that they are of no special interest to any of the thousands they meet bewilders and harasses them; after the searching neighborhood of village life, the fact that nobody would meddle in their most intimate affairs if they could, is a vague distress. The Squire not only experienced this, but, after reigning so long as the censor of morals and religion in Equity, it was a deprivation for him to pass a whole week without saying a bitter thing to any one. He was tired of the civilities that smoothed him down on every side.

“Well, if you must go,” said Bartley, “I’ll order a hack.”

“I guess I can walk to the depot,” returned the old man.

“Oh, no, you can’t.” Bartley drove to the station with him, and they bade each other adieu with a hand-shake. They were no longer enemies, but they liked each other less than ever.

“See you in Equity next summer, I suppose?” suggested the Squire.

“So Marcia says,” replied Bartley. “Well, take care of yourself. — You confounded, tight-fisted old woodchuck!” he added under his breath, for the Squire had allowed him to pay the hack fare.

He walked home, composing variations on his parting malison, to find that the Squire had profited by his brief absence while ordering the hack, to leave with Marcia a silver cup, knife, fork, and spoon, which Olive Halleck had helped him choose, for the baby. In the cup was a check for five hundred dollars. The Squire was embarrassed in presenting the gifts, and when Marcia turned upon him with, “Now, look here, father, what do you mean?” he was at a loss how to explain.

“Well, it’s what I always meant to do for you.”

“Baby’s things are all right,” said Marcia. “But I’m not going to let Bartley take any money from you, unless you think as well of him as I do, and say so, right out.”

The Squire laughed. “You couldn’t quite expect me to do that, could you?”

“No, of course not. But what I mean is, do you think now that I did right to marry him?”

“Oh, you’re all right, Marcia. I’m glad you’re getting along so well.”

“No, no! Is Bartley all right?”

The Squire laughed again, and rubbed his chin in enjoyment of her persistence. “You can’t expect me to own up to everything all at once.”

“So you see, Bartley,” said Marcia, in repeating these words to him, “it was quite a concession.”

“Well, I don’t know about the concession, but I guess there’s no doubt about the check,” replied Bartley.

“Oh, don’t say that, dear!” protested his wife. “I think father was pleased with his visit every way. I know he’s been anxious about me, all the time; and yet it was a good deal for him to do, after what he had said, to come down here and as much as take it all back. Can’t you look at it from his side?”

“Oh, I dare say it was a dose,” Bartley admitted. The money had set several things in a better light. “If all the people that have abused me would take it back as handsomely as your father has,” — he held the check up,— “why, I wish there were twice as many of them.”

She laughed for pleasure in his joke. “I think father was impressed by everything about us, — beginning with baby,” she said, proudly.

“Well, he kept his impressions to himself.”

“Oh, that’s nothing but his way. He never was demonstrative, — like me.”

“No, he has his emotions under control, — not to say under lock and key, — not to add, in irons.”

Bartley went on to give some instances of the Squire’s fortitude when apparently tempted to express pleasure or interest in his Boston experiences.

They both undeniably felt freer now that he was gone. Bartley stayed longer than he ought from his work, in tacit celebration of the Squire’s departure, and they were very merry together; but when he left her, Marcia called for her baby, and, gathering it close to her heart, sighed over it, “Poor father! poor father!”

XXIII.

When the spring opened, Bartley pushed Flavia about the sunny pavements in a baby carriage, while Marcia paced alongside, looking in under the calash top from time to time, arranging the bright afghan, and twitching the little one’s lace hood into place. They never noticed that other perambulators were pushed by Irish nurse-girls or French bonnes; they had paid somewhat more than they ought for theirs, and they were proud of it merely as a piece of property. It was rather Bartley’s ideal, as it is that of most young American fathers, to go out with his wife and baby in that way; he liked to have his friends see him; and he went out every afternoon he could spare. When he could not go, Marcia went alone. Mrs. Halleck had given her a key to the garden, and on pleasant mornings she always found some of the family there, when she pushed the perambulator up the path, to let the baby sleep in the warmth and silence of the sheltered place. She chatted with Olive or the elder sisters, while Mrs. Halleck drove Cyrus on to the work of tying up the vines and trimming the shrubs, with the pitiless rigor of women when they get a man about some outdoor labor. Sometimes, Ben Halleck was briefly of the party; and one morning when Marcia opened the gate, she found him there alone with Cyrus, who was busy at some belated tasks of horticulture. The young man turned at the unlocking of the gate, and saw Marcia lifting the front wheels of the perambulator to get it over the steps of the pavement outside. He limped hastily down the walk to help her, but she had the carriage in the path before he could reach, her, and he had nothing to do but to walk back at its side, as she propelled it towards the house. “You see what a useless creature a cripple is,” he said.

Marcia did not seem to have heard him. “Is your mother at home?” she asked.

“I think she is,” said Halleck. “Cyrus, go in and tell mother that Mrs. Hubbard is here, won’t you?”

Cyrus went, after a moment of self-respectful delay, and Marcia sat down on a bench under a pear-tree beside the walk. Its narrow young leaves and blossoms sprinkled her with shade shot with vivid sunshine, and in her light dress she looked like a bright, fresh figure from some painter’s study of spring. She breathed quickly from her exertion, and her cheeks had a rich, dewy bloom. She had pulled the perambulator round so that she might see her baby while she waited, and she looked at the baby now, and not at Halleck, as she said, “It is quite hot in the sun to-day.” She had a way of closing her lips, after speaking, in that sweet smile of hers, and then of glancing sidelong at the person to whom she spoke.

“I suppose it is,” said Halleck, who remained on foot. “But I haven’t been out yet. I gave myself a day off from the Law School, and I hadn’t quite decided what to do with it.”

Marcia leaned forward, and brushed a tendril of the baby’s hair out of its eye. “She’s the greatest little sleeper that ever was when she gets into her carriage,” she half mused, leaning back with her hands folded in her lap, and setting her head on one side for the effect of the baby without the stray ringlet. “She’s getting so fat!” she said, proudly.

Halleck smiled. “Do you find it makes a difference in pushing her carriage, from day to day?”

Marcia took his question in earnest, as she must take anything but the most obvious pleasantry concerning her baby. “The carriage runs very easily; we picked out the lightest one we could, and I never have any trouble with it, except getting up curbstones and crossing Cambridge Street. I don’t like to cross Cambridge Street, there are always so many horse-cars. But it’s all down-hill coming here: that’s one good thing.”

“That makes it a very bad thing going home, though,” said Halleck.

“Oh, I go round by Charles Street, and come up the hill from the other side; it isn’t so steep there.”

There was no more to be said upon this point, and in the lapse of their talk Halleck broke off some boughs of the blooming pear, and dropped them on the baby’s afghan.

“Your mother won’t like your spoiling her pear-tree,” said Marcia, seriously.

“She will when she knows that I did it for Miss Hubbard.”

“Miss Hubbard!” repeated the young mother, and she laughed in fond derision. “How funny to hear you saying that! I thought you hated babies!”

Halleck looked at her with strong self-disgust, and he dropped the bough which he had in his hand upon the ground. There is something in a young man’s ideal of women, at once passionate and ascetic, so fine that any words are too gross for it. The event which intensified the interest of his mother and sisters in Marcia had abashed Halleck; when she came so proudly to show her baby to them all, it seemed to him like a mockery of his pity for her captivity to the love that profaned her. He went out of the room in angry impatience, which he could hardly hide, when one of his sisters tried to make him take the baby. Little by little his compassion adjusted itself to the new conditions; it accepted the child as an element of her misery in the future, when she must realize the hideous deformity of her marriage. His prophetic feeling of this, and of her inaccessibility to human help here and hereafter, made him sometimes afraid of her; but all the more severely he exacted of his ideal of her that she should not fall beneath the tragic dignity of her fate through any levity of her own. Now, at her innocent laugh, a subtile irreverence, which he was not able to exorcise, infused itself into his sense of her.

He stood looking at her, after he dropped the pear-bough, and seeing her mere beauty as he had never seen it before. The bees hummed in the blossoms, which gave out a dull, sweet smell; the sunshine had the luxurious, enervating warmth of spring. He started suddenly from his reverie: Marcia had said something. “I beg your pardon?” he queried.

“Oh, nothing. I asked if you knew where I went to church yesterday?”

Halleck flushed, ashamed of the wrong his thoughts, or rather his emotions, had done. “No, I don’t,” he answered.

“I was at your church.”

“I ought to have been there myself,” he returned, gravely, “and then I should have known.”

She took his self-reproach literally. “You couldn’t have seen me. I was sitting pretty far back, and I went out before any of your family saw me. Don’t you go there?”

“Not always, I’m sorry to say. Or, rather, I’m sorry not to be sorry. What church do you generally go to?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes to one, and sometimes to another. Bartley used to report the sermons, and we went round to all the churches then. That is the way I did at home, and it came natural to me. But I don’t like it very well. I want Flavia should belong to some particular church.”

“There are enough to choose from,” said Halleck, with pensive sarcasm.

“Yes, that’s the difficulty. But I shall make up my mind to one of them, and then I shall always keep to it. What I mean is that I should like to find out where most of the good people belong, and then have her be with them,” pursued Marcia. “I think it’s best to belong to some church, don’t you?”

There was something so bare, so spiritually poverty-stricken, in these confessions and questions, that Halleck found nothing to say to them. He was troubled, moreover, as to what the truth was in his own mind. He answered, with a sort of mechanical adhesion to the teachings of his youth, “I should be a recreant not to think so. But I’m not sure that I know what you mean by belonging to some church,” he added. “I suppose you would want to believe in the creed of the church, whichever it was.”

“I don’t know that I should be particular,” said Marcia, with perfect honesty.

Halleck laughed sadly. “I’m afraid they would, then, unless you joined the Broad Church.”

“What is that?” He explained as well as he could. At the end she repeated, as if she had not followed him very closely: “I should like her to belong to the church where most of the good people went. I think that would be the right one, if you could only find which it is.” Halleck laughed again. “I suppose what I say must sound very queer to you; but I’ve been thinking a good deal about this lately.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Halleck. “I had no reason to laugh, either on your account or my own. It’s a serious subject.” She did not reply, and he asked, as if she had left the subject, “Do you intend to pass the summer in Boston?”

“No; I’m going down home pretty early, and I wanted to ask your mother what is the best way to put away my winter things.”

“You’ll find my mother very good authority on such matters,” said Halleck. Through an obscure association with moths that corrupt, he added, “She’s a good authority on church matters, too.”

“I guess I shall talk with her about Flavia,” said Marcia.

Cyrus came out of the house. “Mis’ Halleck will be here in a minute. She’s got to get red of a lady that’s calling, first,” he explained.

“I will leave you, then,” said Halleck, abruptly.

“Good by,” answered Marcia, tranquilly. The baby stirred; she pushed the carriage to and fro, without glancing after him as he walked away.

His mother came down the steps from the house, and kissed Marcia for welcome, and looked under the carriage-top at the sleeping baby. “How she does sleep!” she whispered.

“Yes,” said Marcia, with the proud humility of a mother, who cannot deny the merit of her child, “and she sleeps the whole night through. I’m never up with her. Bartley says she’s a perfect Seven-Sleeper. It’s a regular joke with him, — her sleeping.”

“Ben was a good baby for sleeping, too,” said Mrs. Halleck, retrospectively emulous. “It’s one of the best signs. It shows that the child is strong and healthy.” They went on to talk of their children, and in their community of motherhood they spoke of the young man as if he were still an infant. “He has never been a moment’s care to me,” said Mrs. Halleck. “A well baby will be well even in teething.”

“And I had somehow thought of him as sickly!” said Marcia, in self-derision.

Tears of instant intelligence sprang into his mother’s eyes. “And did you suppose he was always lame?” she demanded, with gentle indignation. “He was the brightest and strongest boy that ever was, till he was twelve years old. That’s what makes it so hard to bear; that’s what makes me wonder at the way the child bears it! Did you never hear how it happened? One of the big boys, as he called him, tripped him up at school, and he fell on his hip. It kept him in bed for a year, and he’s never been the same since; he will always be a cripple,” grieved the mother. She wiped her eyes; she never could think of her boy’s infirmity without weeping. “And what seemed the worst of all,” she continued, “was that the boy who did it never expressed any regret for it, or acknowledged it by word or deed, though he must have known that Ben knew who hurt him. He’s a man here, now; and sometimes Ben meets him. But Ben always says that he can stand it, if the other one can. He was always just so from the first! He wouldn’t let us blame the boy; he said that he didn’t mean any harm, and that all was fair in play. And now he says he knows the man is sorry, and would own to what he did, if he didn’t have to own to what came of it. Ben says that very few of us have the courage to face the consequences of the injuries we do, and that’s what makes people seem hard and indifferent when they are really not so. There!” cried Mrs. Halleck. “I don’t know as I ought to have told you about it; I know Ben wouldn’t like it. But I can’t bear to have any one think he was always lame, though I don’t know why I shouldn’t: I’m prouder of him since it happened than ever I was before. I thought he was here with you,” she added, abruptly.

“He went out just before you came,” said Marcia, nodding toward the gate. She sat listening to Mrs. Halleck’s talk about Ben; Mrs. Halleck took herself to task from time to time, but only to go on talking about him again. Sometimes Marcia commented on his characteristics, and compared them with Bartley’s, or with Flavia’s, according to the period of Ben’s life under consideration.

At the end Mrs. Halleck said: “I haven’t let you get in a word! Now you must talk about your baby. Dear little thing! I feel that she’s been neglected. But I’m always just so selfish when I get to running on about Ben. They all laugh at me.”

“Oh, I like to hear about other children,” said Marcia, turning the perambulator round. “I don’t think any one can know too much that has the care of children of their own.” She added, as if it followed from something they had been saying of vaccination, “Mrs. Halleck, I want to talk with you about getting Flavia christened. You know I never was christened.”

“Weren’t you?” said Mrs. Halleck, with a dismay which she struggled to conceal.

“No,” said Marcia, “father doesn’t believe in any of those things, and mother had got to letting them go, because he didn’t take any interest in them. They did have the first children christened, but I was the last.”

“I didn’t speak with your father on the subject,” faltered Mrs. Halleck. “I didn’t know what his persuasion was.”

“Why, father doesn’t belong to any church! He believes in a God, but he doesn’t believe in the Bible.” Mrs. Halleck sank down on the garden seat too much shocked to speak, and Marcia continued. “I don’t know whether the Bible is true or not; but I’ve often wished that I belonged to church.”

“You couldn’t, unless you believed in the Bible,” said Mrs. Halleck.

“Yes, I know that. Perhaps I should, if anybody proved it to me. I presume it could be explained. I never talked much with any one about it. There must be a good many people who don’t belong to church, although they believe in the Bible. I should be perfectly willing to try, if I only knew how to begin.”

In view of this ruinous open-mindedness, Mrs. Halleck could only say, “The way to begin is to read it.”

“Well, I will try. How do you know, after you’ve become so that you believe the Bible, whether you’re fit to join the church?”

“It’s hard to tell you, my dear. You have to feel first that you have a Saviour, — that you’ve given your whole heart to him, — that he can save you, and that no one else can, — that all you can do yourself won’t help you. It’s an experience.”

Marcia looked at her attentively, as if this were all a very hard saying. “Yes, I’ve heard of that. Some of the girls had it at school. But I never did. Well,” she said at last, “I don’t feel so anxious about myself, just at present, as I do about Flavia. I want to do everything I can for Flavia, Mrs. Halleck. I want her to be christened, — I want her to be baptized into some church. I think a good deal about it. I think sometimes, what if she should die, and I hadn’t done that for her, when may be it was one of the most important things—” Her voice shook, and she pressed her lips together.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Halleck, tenderly, “I think it is the most important thing.”

“But there are so many churches,” Marcia resumed. “And I don’t know about any of them. I told Mr. Halleck just now, that I should like her to belong to the church where the best people went, if I could find it out. Of course, it was a ridiculous way to talk; I knew he thought so. But what I meant was that I wanted she should be with good people all her life; and I didn’t care what she believed.”

“It’s very important to believe the truth, my dear,” said Mrs. Halleck.

“But the truth is so hard to be certain of, and you know goodness as soon as you see it. Mrs. Halleck, I’ll tell you what I want: I want Flavia should be baptized into your church. Will you let her?”

“Let her? O my dear child, we shall be humbly thankful that it has been put into your heart to choose for her what we think is the true church,” said Mrs. Halleck, fervently.

“I don’t know about that,” returned Marcia. “I can’t tell whether it’s the true church or not, and I don’t know that I ever could; but I shall be satisfied — if it’s made you what you are,” she added, simply.

Mrs. Halleck did not try to turn away her praise with vain affectations of humility. “We try to do right, Marcia,” she said. “Whenever we do it, we must be helped to it by some power outside of ourselves. I can’t tell you whether it’s our church; I’m not so sure of that as I used to be. I once thought that there could be no real good out of it; but I can’t think that, any more. Olive and Ben are as good children as ever lived; I know they won’t be lost; but neither of them belongs to our church.”

“Why, what church does he belong to?”

“He doesn’t belong to any, my dear,” said Mrs. Halleck, sorrowfully.

Marcia looked at her absently. “I knew Olive was a Unitarian; but I thought — I thought he—”

“No, he doesn’t,” returned Mrs. Halleck. “It has been a great cross to his father and me. He is a good boy; but we think the truth is in our church!”

Marcia was silent a moment. Then she said, decisively, “Well, I should like Flavia to belong to your church.”

“She couldn’t belong to it now,” Mrs. Halleck explained. “That would have to come later, when she could understand. But she could be christened in it — dear little thing!”

“Well, christened, then. It must be the training he got in it. I’ve thought a great deal about it, and I think my worst trouble is that I’ve been left too free in everything. One mustn’t be left too free. I’ve never had any one to control me, and now I can’t control myself at the very times when I need to do it the most, with — with — When I ‘in in danger of vexing — When Bartley and I—”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Halleck, sympathetically.

“And Bartley is just so, too. He’s always been left to himself. And Flavia will need all the control we can give her, — I know she will. And I shall have her christened in your church, and I shall teach her all about it. She shall go to the Sunday school, and I will go to church, so that she can have an example. I told father I should do it when he was up here, and he said there couldn’t be any harm in it. And I’ve told Bartley, and he doesn’t care.”

They were both far too single-minded and too serious to find anything droll in the terms of the adhesion of Marcia’s family to her plan, and Mrs. Halleck entered into its execution with affectionate zeal.

“Ben, dear,” she said, tenderly, that evening, when they were all talking it over in the family council, “I hope you didn’t drop anything, when that poor creature spoke to you about it this morning, that could unsettle her mind in any way?”

“No, mother,” said Halleck, gently.

“I was sure you didn’t,” returned his mother, repentantly.

They had been talking a long time of the matter, and Halleck now left the room.

“Mother! How could you say such a thing to Ben?” cried Olive, in a quiver of indignant sympathy. “Ben say anything to unsettle anybody’s religious purposes! He’s got more religion now than all the rest of the family put together!”

“Speak for yourself, Olive,” said one of the intermediary sisters.

“Why, Olive, I spoke because I thought she seemed to place more importance on Ben’s belonging to the church than anything else, and she seemed so surprised when I told her he didn’t belong to any.”

“I dare say she thinks Ben is good when she compares him with that mass of selfishness of a husband of hers,” said Olive. “But I will thank her,” she added, hotly, “not to compare Ben with Bartley Hubbard, even to Bartley Hubbard’s disadvantage. I don’t feel flattered by it.”

“Of course she thinks all the world of her husband,” said Mrs. Halleck. “And I know Ben is good; and, as you say, he is religious; I feel that, though I don’t understand how, exactly. I wouldn’t hurt his feelings for the world, Olive, you know well enough. But it was a stumbling-block when I had to tell that poor, pretty young thing that Ben didn’t belong to church; and I could see that it puzzled her. I couldn’t have believed,” continued Mrs. Halleck, “that there was any person in a Christian land, except among the very lowest, that seemed to understand so little about the Christian religion, or any scheme of salvation. Really, she talked to me like a pagan. She sat there much better dressed and better educated than I was; but I felt like a missionary talking to a South Sea Islander.”

“I wonder the old Bartlett pear didn’t burst into a palm-tree over your heads,” said Olive. Mrs. Halleck looked grieved at her levity, and Olive hastened to add: “Don’t take it to heart, mother! I understood just what you meant, and I can imagine just how shocking Mrs. Hubbard’s heathen remarks must have been. We should all be shocked if we knew how many people there were like her, and we should all try to deny it, and so would they. I guess Christianity is about as uncommon as civilization, — and that’s very uncommon. If her poor, feeble mind was such a chaos, what do you suppose her husband’s is?”

This would certainly not have been easy for Mrs. Halleck to say then, or to say afterward, when Bartley walked up to the font in her church, with Marcia at his side, and Flavia in his arms, and a faintly ironical smile on his face, as if he had never expected to be got in for this, but was going to see it through now. He had, in fact, said, “Well, let’s go the whole figure,” when Marcia had expressed a preference for having the rite performed in church, instead of in their own house.

He was unquestionably growing stout, and even Mrs. Halleck noticed that his blonde face was unpleasantly red that day. He was, of course, not intemperate. He always had beer with his lunch, which he had begun to take down town since the warm weather had come on and made the walk up the hill to Clover Street irksome: and he drank beer at his dinner, — he liked a late dinner, and they dined at six, now, — because it washed away the fatigues of the day, and freshened you up. He was rather particular about his beer, which he had sent in by the gross, — it came cheaper that way; after trying both the Cincinnati and the Milwaukee lagers, and making a cursory test of the Boston brand, he had settled down upon the American tivoli; it was cheap, and you could drink a couple of bottles without feeling it. Freshened up by his two bottles, he was apt to spend the evening in an amiable drowse and get early to bed, when he did not go out on newspaper duty. He joked about the three fingers of fat on his ribs, and frankly guessed it was the beer that did it; at such times he said that perhaps he should have to cut down on his tivoli.

Marcia and he had not so much time together as they used to have; she was a great deal taken up with the baby, and he found it dull at home, not doing anything or saying anything; and when he did not feel sleepy, he sometimes invented work that took him out at night. But he always came upstairs after putting his hat on, and asked Marcia if he could help her about anything.

He usually met other newspaper men on these excursions, and talked newspaper with them, airing his favorite theories. He liked to wander about with reporters who were working up cases; to look in at the police stations, and go to the fires; and he was often able to give the Events men points that had escaped the other reporters. If asked to drink, he always said, “Thanks, no; I don’t do anything in that way. But if you’ll make it beer, I don’t mind.” He took nothing but beer when he hurried out of the theatre into one of the neighboring resorts, just as the great platters of stewed kidneys and lyonnaise potatoes came steaming up out of the kitchen, prompt to the drop of the curtain on the last act. Here; sometimes, he met a friend, and shared with him his dish of kidneys and his schooner of beer; and he once suffered himself to be lured by the click of the balls into the back room. He believed that he played a very good game of billiards; but he was badly beaten that night. He came home at daylight, fifty dollars out. But he had lost like a gentleman in a game with gentlemen; and he never played again.

By day he worked hard, and since his expenses had been increased by Flavia’s coming, he had undertaken more work for more pay. He still performed all the routine labor of a managing editor, and he now wrote the literary notices of the Events, and sometimes, especially if there was anything new, the dramatic criticisms; he brought to the latter task all the freshness of a man who, till the year before, had not been half a dozen times inside a theatre.

He attributed the fat on his ribs to the tivoli; perhaps it was also owing in some degree to a good conscience, which is a much easier thing to keep than people imagine. At any rate, he now led a tranquil, industrious, and regular life, and a life which suited him so well that he was reluctant to interrupt it by the visit to Equity, which he and Marcia had talked of in the early spring. He put it off from time to time, and one day when she was pressing him to fix some date for it he said, “Why can’t you go, Marcia?”

“Alone?” she faltered.

“Well, no; take the baby, of course. And I’ll run down for a day or two when I get a chance.”

Marcia seemed in these days to be schooling herself against the impulses that once brought on her quarrels with Bartley. “A day or two—” she began, and then stopped and added gravely, “I thought you said you were going to have several weeks’ vacation.”

“Oh, don’t tell me what I said!” cried Bartley. “That was before I undertook this extra work, or before I knew what a grind it was going to be. Equity is a good deal of a dose for me, any way. It’s all well enough for you, and I guess the change from Boston will do you good, and do the baby good, but I shouldn’t look forward to three weeks in Equity with unmitigated hilarity.”

“I know it will be stupid for you. But you need the rest. And the Hallecks are going to be at North Conway, and they said they would come over,” urged Marcia. “I know we should have a good time.”

Bartley grinned. “Is that your idea of a good time, Marsh? Three weeks of Equity, relieved by a visit from such heavy weights as Ben Halleck and his sisters? Not any in mine, thank you.”

“How can you — how dare you speak of them so!” cried Marcia lightening upon him. “Such good friends of yours — such good people—” Her voice shook with indignation and wounded feeling.

Bartley rose and took a turn about the room, pulling down his waistcoat and contemplating its outward slope with a smile. “Oh, I’ve got more friends than I can shake a stick at. And with pleasure at the helm, goodness is a drug in the market, — if you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor. Look here, Marcia,” he added, severely. “If you like the Hallecks, all well and good; I sha’n’t interfere with you; but they bore me. I outgrew Ben Halleck years ago. He’s duller than death. As for the old people, there’s no harm in them, — though they’re bores, too, — nor in the old girls; but Olive Halleck doesn’t treat me decently. I suppose that just suits you: I’ve noticed that you never like the women that do treat me decently.”

“They don’t treat me decently!” retorted Marcia.

“Oh, Miss Kingsbury treated you very well that night. She couldn’t imagine your being jealous of her politeness to me.”

Marcia’s temper fired at his treacherous recurrence to a grievance which he had once so sacredly and sweetly ignored. “If you wish to take up bygones, why don’t you go back to Hannah Morrison at once? She treated you even better than Miss Kingsbury.”

“I should have been very willing to do that,” said Bartley, “but I thought it might remind you of a disagreeable little episode in your own life, when you flung me away, and had to go down on your knees to pick me up again.”

These thrusts which they dealt each other in their quarrels, however blind and misdirected, always reached their hearts: it was the wicked will that hurt, rather than the words. Marcia rose, bleeding inwardly, and her husband felt the remorse of a man who gets the best of it in such an encounter.

“Oh, I’m sorry I said that, Marcia! I didn’t mean it; indeed I—” She disdained to heed him, as she swept out of the room, and up the stairs; and his anger flamed out again.

“I give you fair warning,” he called after her, “not to try that trick of locking the door, or I will smash it in.”

Her answer was to turn the key in the door with a click which he could not fail to hear.

The peace in which they had been living of late was very comfortable to Bartley; he liked it; he hated to have it broken; he was willing to do what he could to restore it at once. If he had no better motive than this, he still had this motive; and he choked down his wrath, and followed Marcia softly upstairs. He intended to reason with her, and he began, “I say, Marsh,” as he turned the door-knob. But you cannot reason through a keyhole, and before he knew he found himself saying, “Will you open this?” in a tone whose quiet was deadly. She did not answer; he heard her stop in her movements about the room, and wait, as if she expected him to ask again. He hesitated a moment whether to keep his threat of breaking the door in; but he turned away and went down stairs, and so into the street. Once outside, he experienced the sense of release that comes to a man from the violation of his better impulses; but he did not know what to do or where to go. He walked rapidly away; but Marcia’s eyes and voice seemed to follow him, and plead with him for his forbearance. But he answered his conscience, as if it had been some such presence, that he had forborne too much already, and that now he should not humble himself; that he was right and should stand upon his right. There was not much comfort in it, and he had to brace himself again and again with vindictive resolution.

XXIV.

Bartley walked about the streets for a long time, without purpose or direction, brooding fiercely on his wrongs, and reminding himself how Marcia had determined to have him, and had indeed flung herself upon his mercy, with all sorts of good promises; and had then at once taken the whip-hand, and goaded and tormented him ever since. All the kindness of their common life counted for nothing in this furious reverie, or rather it was never once thought of; he cursed himself for a fool that he had ever asked her to marry him, and for doubly a fool that he had married her when she had as good as asked him. He was glad, now, that he had taunted her with that; he only regretted that he had told her he was sorry. He was presently aware of being so tired that he could scarcely pull one leg after another; and yet he felt hopelessly wide awake. It was in simple despair of anything else to do that he climbed the stairs to Ricker’s lofty perch in the Chronicle-Abstract office. Ricker turned about as he entered, and stared up at him from beneath the green pasteboard visor with which he was shielding his eyes from the gas; his hair, which was of the harshness and color of hay, was stiffly poked up and strewn about on his skull, as if it were some foreign product.

“Hello!” he said. “Going to issue a morning edition of the Events?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Oh, I supposed you evening-paper gents went to bed with the hens. What has kept you up, esteemed contemporary?” He went on working over some despatches which lay upon his table.

“Don’t you want to come out and have some oysters?” asked Bartley.

“Why this princely hospitality? I’ll come with you in half a minute,” Ricker said, going to the slide that carried up the copy to the composing-room and thrusting his manuscript into the box.

“Where are you going?” he asked, when they found themselves out in the soft starlit autumnal air; and Bartley answered with the name of an oyster-house, obscure, but of singular excellence.

“Yes, that’s the best place,” Ricker commented. “What I always wonder at in you is the rapidity with which you Ve taken on the city. You were quite in the green wood when you came here, and now you know your Boston like a little man. I suppose it’s your newspaper work that’s familiarized you with the place. Well, how do you like your friend Witherby, as far as you’ve gone?”

“Oh, we shall get along, I guess,” said Bartley. “He still keeps me in the background, and plays at being editor, but he pays me pretty well.”

“Not too well, I hope.”

“I should like to see him try it.”

“I shouldn’t,” said Ricker. “He’d expect certain things of you, if he did. You’ll have to look out for Witherby.”

“You mean that he’s a scamp?”

“No; there isn’t a better conscience than Witherby carries in the whole city. He’s perfectly honest. He not only believes that he has a right to run the Events in his way; but he sincerely believes that he is right in doing it. There’s where he has the advantage of you, if you doubt him. I don’t suppose he ever did a wrong thing in his life; he’d persuade himself that the thing was right before he did it.”

“That’s a common phenomenon, isn’t it?” sneered Bartley. “Nobody sins.”

“You’re right, partly. But some of us sinners have our misgivings, and Witherby never has. You know he offered me your place?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Bartley, astonished and not pleased.

“I thought he might have told you. He made me inducements; but I was afraid of him: Witherby is the counting-room incarnate. I talked you into him for some place or other; but he didn’t seem to wake up to the value of my advice at once. Then I couldn’t tell what he was going to offer you.”

“Thank you for letting me in for a thing you were afraid of!”

“I didn’t believe he would get you under his thumb, as he would me. You’ve got more back-bone than I have. I have to keep out of temptation; you have noticed that I never drink, and I would rather not look upon Witherby when he is red and giveth his color in the cup. I’m sorry if I’ve let you in for anything that you regret. But Witherby’s sincerity makes him dangerous, — I own that.”

“I think he has some very good ideas about newspapers,” said Bartley, rather sulkily.

“Oh, very,” assented Ricker. “Some of the very best going. He believes that the press is a great moral engine, and that it ought to be run in the interest of the engineer.”

“And I suppose you believe that it ought to be run in the interest of the public?”

“Exactly — after the public has paid.”

“Well, I don’t; and I never did. A newspaper is a private enterprise.”

“It’s private property, but it isn’t a private enterprise, and in its very nature it can’t be. You know I never talk ‘journalism’ and stuff; it amuses me to hear the young fellows at it, though I think they might be doing something worse than magnifying their office; they might be decrying it. But I’ve got a few ideas and principles of my own in my back pantaloons pocket.”

“Haul them out,” said Bartley.

“I don’t know that they’re very well formulated,” returned Ricker, “and I don’t contend that they’re very new. But I consider a newspaper a public enterprise, with certain distinct duties to the public. It’s sacredly bound not to do anything to deprave or debauch its readers; and it’s sacredly bound not to mislead or betray them, not merely as to questions of morals and politics, but as to questions of what we may lump as ‘advertising.’ Has friend Witherby developed his great ideas of advertisers’ rights to you?” Bartley did not answer, and Ricker went on: “Well, then, you can understand my position, when I say it’s exactly the contrary.”

“You ought to be on a religious newspaper, Ricker,” said Bartley with a scornful laugh.

“Thank you, a secular paper is bad enough for me.”

“Well, I don’t pretend that I make the Events just what I want,” said Bartley. “At present, the most I can do is to indulge in a few cheap dreams of what I should do, if I had a paper of my own.”

“What are your dreams? Haul out, as you say.”

“I should make it pay, to begin with; and I should make it pay by making it such a thorough newspaper that every class of people must have it. I should cater to the lowest class first, and as long as I was poor I would have the fullest and best reports of every local accident and crime; that would take all the rabble. Then, as I could afford it, I’d rise a little, and give first-class non-partisan reports of local political affairs; that would fetch the next largest class, the ward politicians of all parties. I’d lay for the local religious world, after that; — religion comes right after politics in the popular mind, and it interests the women like murder: I’d give the minutest religious intelligence, and not only that, but the religious gossip, and the religious scandal. Then I’d go in for fashion and society, — that comes next. I’d have the most reliable and thorough-going financial reports that money could buy. When I’d got my local ground perfectly covered, I’d begin to ramify. Every fellow that could spell, in any part of the country, should understand that, if he sent me an account of a suicide, or an elopement, or a murder, or an accident, he should be well paid for it; and I’d rise on the same scale through all the departments. I’d add art criticisms, dramatic and sporting news, and book reviews, more for the looks of the thing than for anything else; they don’t any of ’em appeal to a large class. I’d get my paper into such a shape that people of every kind and degree would have to say, no matter what particular objection was made to it, ‘Yes, that’s so; but it’s the best newspaper in the world, and we can’t get along without it.’”

“And then,” said Ricker, “you’d begin to clean up, little by little, — let up on your murders and scandals, and purge and live cleanly like a gentleman? The trick’s been tried before.”

They had arrived at the oyster-house, and were sitting at their table, waiting for the oysters to be brought to them. Bartley tilted his chair back. “I don’t know about the cleaning up. I should want to keep all my audience. If I cleaned up, the dirty fellows would go off to some one else; and the fellows that pretended to be clean would be disappointed.”

“Why don’t you get Witherby to put your ideas in force?” asked Ricker, dryly.

Bartley dropped his chair to all fours, and said with a smile, “He belongs to church.”

“Ah! he has his limitations. What a pity! He has the money to establish this great moral engine of yours, and you haven’t. It’s a loss to civilization.”

“One thing, I know,” said Bartley, with a certain effect of virtue, “nobody should buy or sell me; and the advertising element shouldn’t spread beyond the advertising page.”

“Isn’t that rather high ground?” inquired Ricker.

Bartley did not think it worth while to answer. “I don’t believe that a newspaper is obliged to be superior in tone to the community,” he said.

“I quite agree with you.”

“And if the community is full of vice and crime, the newspaper can’t do better than reflect its condition.”

“Ah! there I should distinguish, esteemed contemporary. There are several tones in every community, and it will keep any newspaper scratching to rise above the highest. But if it keeps out of the mud at all, it can’t help rising above the lowest. And no community is full of vice and crime any more than it is full of virtue and good works. Why not let your model newspaper mirror these?”

“They’re not snappy.”

“No, that’s true.”

“You must give the people what they want.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, it’s a beautiful dream,” said Ricker, “nourished on a youth sublime. Why do not these lofty imaginings visit us later in life? You make me quite ashamed of my own ideal newspaper. Before you began to talk, I had been fancying that the vice of our journalism was its intense localism. I have doubted a good while whether a drunken Irishman who breaks his wife’s head, or a child who falls into a tub of hot water, has really established a claim on the public interest. Why should I be told by telegraph how three negroes died on the gallows in North Carolina? Why should an accurate correspondent inform me of the elopement of a married man with his maid-servant in East Machias? Why should I sup on all the horrors of a railroad accident, and have the bleeding fragments hashed up for me at breakfast? Why should my newspaper give a succession of shocks to my nervous system, as I pass from column to column, and poultice me between shocks with the nastiness of a distant or local scandal? You reply, because I like spice. But I don’t. I am sick of spice; and I believe that most of our readers are.”

“Cater to them with milk-toast, then,” said Bartley.

Ricker laughed with him, and they fell to upon their oysters.

When they parted, Bartley still found himself wakeful. He knew that he should not sleep if he went home, and he said to himself that he could not walk about all night. He turned into a gayly-lighted basement, and asked for something in the way of a nightcap.

The bar-keeper said there was nothing like a hot-scotch to make you sleep; and a small man with his hat on, who had been talking with the bar-keeper, and coming up to the counter occasionally to eat a bit of cracker or a bit of cheese out of the two bowls full of such fragments that stood at the end of the counter, said that this was so.

It was very cheerful in the bar-room, with the light glittering on the rows of decanters behind the bar-keeper, a large, stout, clean, pale man in his shirt-sleeves, after the manner of his kind; and Bartley made up his mind to stay there till he was drowsy, and to drink as many hot-scotches as were necessary to the result. He had his drink put on a little table and sat down to it easily, stirring it to cool it a little, and feeling its flattery in his brain from the first sip.

The man who was munching cheese and crackers wore a hat rather large for him, pulled down over his eyes. He now said that he did not care if he took a gin-sling, and the bar-keeper promptly set it before him on the counter, and saluted with “Good evening, Colonel,” a large man who came in, carrying a small dog in his arms. Bartley recognized him as the manager of a variety combination playing at one of the theatres, and the manager recognized the little man with the gin-sling as Tommy. He did not return the bar-keeper’s salutation, but he asked, as he sat down at a table, “What do I want for supper, Charley?”

The bar-keeper said, oracularly, as he leaned forward to wipe his counter with a napkin, “Fricassee chicken.”

“Fricassee devil,” returned the manager. “Get me a Welsh rabbit.”

The bar-keeper, unperturbed by this rejection, called into the tube behind him, “One Welsh rabbit.”

“I want some cold chicken for my dog,” said the manager.

“One cold chicken,” repeated the bar-keeper, in his tube.

“White meat,” said the manager.

“White meat,” repeated the bar-keeper.

“I went into the Parker House one night about midnight, and I saw four doctors there eating lobster salad, and devilled crab, and washing it down with champagne; and I made up my mind that the doctors needn’t talk to me any more about what was wholesome. I was going in for what was good. And there aint anything better for supper than Welsh rabbit in this world.”

As the manager addressed this philosophy to the company at large, no one commented upon it, which seemed quite the same to the manager, who hitched one elbow over the back of his chair, and caressed with the other hand the dog lying in his lap.

The little man in the large hat continued to walk up and down, leaving his gin-sling on the counter, and drinking it between his visits to the cracker and cheese.

“What’s that new piece of yours, Colonel?” he asked, after a while. “I aint seen it yet.”

“Legs, principally,” sighed the manager. “That’s what the public wants. I give the public what it wants. I don’t pretend to be any better than the public. Nor any worse,” he added, stroking his dog.

These ideas struck Bartley in their accordance with his own ideas of journalism, as he had propounded them to Ricker. He had drunk half of his hot-scotch.

“That’s what I say,” assented the little man. “All that a theatre has got to do is to keep even with the public.”

“That’s so, Tommy,” said the manager of a school of morals, with wisdom that impressed more and more the manager of a great moral engine.

“The same principle runs through everything,” observed Bartley, speaking for the first time.

The drink had stiffened his tongue somewhat, but it did not incommode his utterance; it rather gave dignity to it, and his head was singularly clear. He lifted his empty glass from the table, and, catching the bar-keeper’s eye, said, “Do it again.” The man brought it back full.

“It runs through the churches as well as the theatres. As long as the public wanted hell-fire, the ministers gave them hell-fire. But you couldn’t get hell-fire — not the pure, old-fashioned brimstone article — out of a popular preacher now, for love or money.”

The little man said, “I guess you’ve got about the size of it there”; and the manager laughed.

“It’s just so with the newspapers, too,” said Bartley. “Some newspapers used to stand out against publishing murders, and personal gossip, and divorce trials. There ain’t a newspaper that pretends to keep anyways up with the times, now, that don’t do it! The public want spice, and they will have it!”

“Well, sir,” said the manager, “that’s my way of looking at it. I say, if the public don’t want Shakespeare, give ’em burlesque till they’re sick of it. I believe in what Grant said: ‘The quickest way to get rid of a bad law is to enforce it.’”

“That’s so,” said the little man, “every time.” He added, to the bar-keeper, that he guessed he would have some brandy and soda, and Bartley found himself at the bottom of his second tumbler. He ordered it replenished.

The little man seemed to be getting further away. He said, from the distance to which he had withdrawn, “You want to go to bed with three nightcaps on, like an old-clothes man.”

Bartley felt like resenting the freedom, but he was anxious to pour his ideas of journalism into the manager’s sympathetic ear, and he began to talk, with an impression that it behooved him to talk fast. His brain was still very clear, but his tongue was getting stiffer. The manager now had his Welsh rabbit before him; but Bartley could not make out how it had got there, nor when. He was talking fast, and he knew, by the way everybody was listening, that he was talking well. Sometimes he left his table, glass in hand, and went and laid down the law to the manager, who smilingly assented to all he said. Once he heard a low growling at his feet, and, looking down, he saw the dog with his plate of cold chicken, that had also been conjured into the room somehow.

“Look out,” said the manager, “he’ll nip you in the leg.”

“Curse the dog! he seems to be on all sides of you,” said Bartley. “I can’t stand anywhere.”

“Better sit down, then,” suggested the manager.

“Good idea,” said the little man, who was still walking up and down. It appeared as if he had not spoken for several hours; his hat was further over his eyes. Bartley had thought he was gone.

“What business is it of yours?” he demanded, fiercely, moving towards the little man.

“Come, none of that,” said the bar-keeper, steadily.

Bartley looked at him in amazement. “Where’s your hat?” he asked.

The others laughed; the bar-keeper smiled.

“Are you a married man?”

“Never mind!” said the bar-keeper, severely.

Bartley turned to the little man: “You married?”

“Not much,” replied the other. He was now topping off with a whiskey-straight.

Bartley referred himself to the manager: “You?”

“Pas si b�te,” said the manager, who did his own adapting from the French.

“Well, you’re scholar, and you’re gentleman,” said Bartley. The indefinite articles would drop out, in spite of all his efforts to keep them in. “‘N I want ask you what you do — to — ask — you — what — would — you — do,” he repeated, with painful exactness, but he failed to make the rest of the sentence perfect, and he pronounced it all in a word, “‘fyour-wifelockyouout?”

“I’d take a walk,” said the manager.

“I’d bu’st the door in,” said the little man.

Bartley turned and gazed at him as if the little man were a much more estimable person than he had supposed. He passed his arm through the little man’s, which the other had just crooked to lift his whiskey to his mouth. “Look here,” said Bartley, “tha’s jus’ what I told her. I want you to go home ‘th me; I want t’ introduce you to my wife.”

“All right,” answered the little man. “Don’t care if I do.” He dropped his tumbler to the floor. “Hang it up, Charley, glass and all. Hang up this gentleman’s nightcaps — my account. Gentleman asks me home to his house, I’ll hang him — I’ll get him hung, — well, fix it to suit yourself, — every time!”

They got themselves out of the door, and the manager said to the bar-keeper, who came round to gather up the fragments of the broken tumbler, “Think his wife will be glad to see ‘em, Charley?”

“Oh, they’ll be taken care of before they reach his house.”

XXV.

When they were once out under the stars, Bartley, who still, felt his brain clear, said that he would not take his friend home at once, but would show him where he visited when he first came to Boston. The other agreed to the indulgence of this sentiment, and they set out to find Rumford Street together.

“You’ve heard of old man Halleck, — Lestor Neather Interest? Tha’s place, — there’s where I stayed. His son’s my frien’, — damn stuck-up, supercilious beast he is, too! I do’ care f’r him! I’ll show you place, so’s’t you’ll know it when you come to it,— ‘f I can ever find it.”

They walked up and down the street, looking, while Bartley poured his sorrows into the ear of his friend, who grew less and less responsive, and at last ceased from his side altogether. Bartley then dimly perceived that he was himself sitting on a door-step, and that his head was hanging far down between his knees, as if he had been sleeping in that posture.

“Locked out, — locked out of my own door, and by my own wife!” He shed tears, and fell asleep again. From time to time he woke, and bewailed himself to Ricker as a poor boy who had fought his own way; he owned that he had made mistakes, as who had not? Again he was trying to convince Squire Gaylord that they ought to issue a daily edition of the Equity Free Press, and at the same time persuading Mr. Halleck to buy the Events for him, and let him put it on a paying basis. He shivered, sighed, hiccupped, and was dozing off again, when Henry Bird knocked him down, and he fell with a cry, which at last brought to the door the uneasy sleeper, who had been listening to him within, and trying to realize his presence, catching his voice in waking intervals, doubting it, drowsing when it ceased, and then catching it and losing it again.

“Hello, here! What do you want? Hubbard! Is it you? What in the world are you doing here?”

“Halleck,” said Bartley, who was unsteadily straightening himself upon his feet, “glad to find you at home. Been looking for your house all night. Want to introduce you to partic-ic-ular friend of mine. Mr. Halleck, Mr. —— . Curse me if I know your name—”

“Hold on a minute,” said Halleck.

He ran into the house for his hat and coat, and came out again, closing the door softly after him. He found Bartley in the grip of a policeman, whom he was asking his name, that he might introduce him to his friend Halleck.

“Do you know this man, Mr. Halleck?” asked the policeman.

“Yes, — yes, I know him,” said Ben, in a low voice. “Let’s get him away quietly, please. He’s all right. It’s the first time I ever saw him so. Will you help me with him up to Johnson’s stable? I’ll get a carriage there and take him home.”

They had begun walking Bartley along between them; he dozed, and paid no attention to their talk.

The policeman laughed. “I was just going to run him in, when you came out. You didn’t come a minute too soon.”

They got Bartley to the stable, and he slept heavily in one of the chairs in the office, while the ostlers were putting the horses to the carriage. The policeman remained at the office-door, looking in at Bartley, and philosophizing the situation to Halleck. “Your speakin’ about its bein’ the first time you ever saw him so made me think ‘t I rather help take home a regular habitual drunk to his family, any day, than a case like this. They always seem to take it so much harder the first time. Boards with his mother, I presume?”

“He’s married,” said Halleck? sadly. “He has a house of his own.”

“Well!” said the policeman.

Bartley slept all the way to Clover Street, and when the carriage stopped at his door, they had difficulty in waking him sufficiently to get him out.

“Don’t come in, please,” said Halleck to the policeman, when this was done. “The man will carry you back to your beat. Thank you, ever so much!”

“All right, Mr. Halleck. Don’t mention it,” said the policeman, and leaned back in the hack with an air of luxury, as it rumbled softly away.

Halleck remained on the pavement with Bartley falling limply against him in the dim light of the dawn. “What you want? What you doing with me?” he demanded with sullen stupidity.

“I’ve got you home, Hubbard. Here we are at your house.” He pulled him across the pavement to the threshold, and put his hand on the bell, but the door was thrown open before he could ring, and Marcia stood there, with her face white, and her eyes red with watching and crying.

“Oh, Bartley! oh, Bartley!” she sobbed. “Oh, Mr. Halleck! what is it? Is he hurt? I did it, — yes, I did it! It’s my fault! Oh! will he die? Is he sick?”

“He isn’t very well. He’d better go to bed,” said Halleck.

“Yes, yes! I will help you upstairs with him.”

“Do’ need any help,” said Bartley, sulkily. “Go upstairs myself.”

He actually did so, with the help of the hand-rail, Marcia running before, to open the door, and smooth the pillows which her head had not touched, and Halleck following him to catch him if he should fall. She unlaced his shoes and got them off, while Halleck removed his coat.

“Oh, Bartley! where do you feel badly, dear? Oh I what shall I do?” she moaned, as he tumbled himself on the bed, and lapsed into a drunken stupor.

“Better — better come out, Mrs. Hubbard,” said Halleck. “Better let him alone, now. You only make him worse, talking to him.”

Quelled by the mystery of his manner, she followed him out and down the stairs. “Oh, do tell me what it is,” she implored, in a low voice, “or I shall go wild! But tell me, and I can bear it! I can bear anything if I know what it is!” She came close to him in her entreaty, and fixed her eyes beseechingly on his, while she caught his hand in both of hers. “Is he — is he insane?”

“He isn’t quite in his right mind, Mrs. Hubbard,” Halleck began, softly releasing himself, and retreating a little from her; but she pursued him, and put her hand on his arm.

“Oh, then go for the doctor, — go instantly! Don’t lose a minute! I shall not be afraid to stay alone. Or if you think I’d better not, I will go for the doctor myself.”

“No, no,” said Halleck, smiling sadly: the case certainly had its ludicrous side. “He doesn’t need a doctor. You mustn’t think of calling a doctor. Indeed you mustn’t. He’ll come out all right of himself. If you sent for a doctor, it would make him very angry.”

She burst into tears. “Well, I will do what you say,” she cried. “It would never have happened, if it hadn’t been for me. I want to tell you what I did,” she went on wildly. “I want to tell—”

“Please don’t tell me anything, Mrs. Hubbard! It will all come right — and very soon. It isn’t anything to be alarmed about. He’ll be well in a few hours. I — ah — Good by.” He had found his cane, and he made a limp toward the door, but she swiftly interposed herself.

“Why,” she panted, in mixed reproach and terror, “you’re not going away? You’re not going to leave me before Bartley is well? He may get worse, — he may die! You mustn’t go, Mr. Halleck!”

“Yes, I must, — I can’t stay, — I oughtn’t to stay, — it won’t do! He won’t get worse, he won’t die.” The perspiration broke out on Halleck’s face, which he lifted to hers with a distress as great as her own.

She only answered, “I can’t let you go; it would kill me. I wonder at your wanting to go.”

There was something ghastly comical in it all, and Halleck stood in fear of its absurdity hardly less than of its tragedy. He rapidly revolved in his mind the possibilities of the case. He thought at first that it might be well to call a doctor, and, having explained the situation to him, pay him to remain in charge; but he reflected that it would be insulting to ask a doctor to see a man in Hubbard’s condition. He took out his watch, and saw that it was six o’clock; and he said, desperately, “You can send for me, if you get anxious—”

“I can’t let you go!”

“I must really get my breakfast—”

“The girl will get something for you here! Oh, don’t go away!” Her lip began to quiver again, and her bosom to rise.

He could not bear it. “Mrs. Hubbard, will you believe what I say?”

“Yes,” she faltered, reluctantly.

“Well, I tell you that Mr. Hubbard is in no sort of danger; and I know that it would be extremely offensive to him if I stayed.”

“Then you must go,” she answered promptly, and opened the door, which she had closed for fear he might escape. “I will send for a doctor.”

“No; don’t send for a doctor, don’t send for anybody don’t speak of the matter to any one: it would be very mortifying to him. It’s merely a — a — kind of — seizure, that a great many people — men — are subject to; but he wouldn’t like to have it known.” He saw that his words were making an impression upon her; perhaps her innocence was beginning to divine the truth. “Will you do what I say?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

Her head began to droop, and her face to turn away in a dawning shame too cruel for him to see.

“I — I will come back as soon as I get my breakfast, to make sure that everything is right.”

She let him find his own way out, and Halleck issued upon the street, as miserable as if the disgrace were his own. It was easy enough for him to get back into his own room without alarming the family. He ate his breakfast absently, and then went out while the others were still at table.

“I don’t think Ben seems very well,” said his mother, anxiously, and she looked to her husband for the denial he always gave.

“Oh, I guess he’s all right. What’s the matter with him?”

“It’s nothing but his ridiculous, romantic way of taking the world to heart,” Olive interposed. “You may be sure he’s troubled about something that doesn’t concern him in the least. It’s what comes of the life-long conscientiousness of his parents. If Ben doesn’t turn out a philanthropist of the deepest dye yet, you’ll have me to thank for it. I see more and more every day that I was providentially born wicked, so as to keep this besottedly righteous family’s head above water.”

She feigned an angry impatience with the condition of things; but when her father went out, she joined her mother in earnest conjectures as to what Ben had on his mind.

Halleck wandered about till nearly ten o’clock, and then he went to the little house on Clover Street. The servant-girl answered his ring, and when he asked for Mrs. Hubbard, she said that Mr. Hubbard wished to see him, and please would he step upstairs.

He found Bartley seated at the window, with a wet towel round his head, and his face pale with headache.

“Well, old man,” he said, with an assumption of comradery that was nauseous to Halleck, “you’ve done the handsome thing by me. I know all about it. I knew something about it all the time.” He held out his hand, without rising, and Halleck forced himself to touch it. “I appreciate your delicacy in not telling my wife. Of course you couldn’t tell,” he said, with depraved enjoyment of what he conceived of Halleck’s embarrassment. “But I guess she must have smelt a rat. As the fellow says,” he added, seeing the disgust that Halleck could not keep out of his face, “I shall make a clean breast of it, as soon as she can bear it. She’s pretty high-strung. Lying down, now,” he explained. “You see, I went out to get something to make me sleep, and the first thing I knew I had got too much. Good thing I turned up on your doorstep; might have been waltzing into the police court about now. How did you happen to hear me?”

Halleck briefly explained, with an air of abhorrence for the facts.

“Yes, I remember most of it,” said Bartley. “Well, I want to thank you, Halleck. You’ve saved me from disgrace, — from ruin, for all I know. Whew! how my head aches!” he said, making an appeal to Halleck’s pity, with closed eyes. “Halleck,” he murmured, feebly, “I wish you would do me a favor.”

“Yes? What is it?” asked Halleck, dryly.

“Go round to the Events office and tell old Witherby that I sha’n’t be able to put in an appearance to-day. I’m not up to writing a note, even; and he’d feel flattered at your coming personally. It would make it all right for me.”

“Of course I will go,” said Halleck.

“Thanks,” returned Bartley, plaintively, with his eyes closed.

XXVI.

Bartley would willingly have passed this affair over with Marcia, like some of their quarrels, and allowed a reconciliation to effect itself through mere lapse of time and daily custom. But there were difficulties in the way to such an end; his shameful escapade had given the quarrel a character of its own, which could not be ignored. He must keep his word about making a clean breast of it to Marcia, whether he liked or not; but she facilitated his confession by the meek and dependent fashion in which she hovered about, anxious to do something or anything for him. If, as he suggested to Halleck, she had divined the truth, she evidently did not hold him wholly to blame for what had happened, and he was not without a self-righteous sense of having given her a useful and necessary lesson. He was inclined to a severity to which his rasped and shaken nerves contributed, when he spoke to her that night, as they sat together after tea; she had some sewing in her lap, little mysteries of soft muslin for the baby, which she was edging with lace, and her head drooped over her work, as if she could not confront him with her swollen eyes.

“Look here, Marcia,” he said, “do you know what was the matter with me this morning?”

She did not answer in words; her hands quivered a moment; then she caught up the things out of her lap, and sobbed into them. The sight unmanned Bartley; he hated to see any one cry, — even his wife, to whose tears he was accustomed. He dropped down beside her on the sofa, and pulled her head over on his shoulder.

“It was my fault! it was my fault, Bartley!” she sobbed. “Oh, how can I ever get over it?”

“Well, don’t cry, don’t cry! It wasn’t altogether your fault,” returned Bartley. “We were both to blame.”

“No! I began it. If I hadn’t broken my promise about speaking of Hannah Morrison, it never would have happened.” This was so true that Bartley could not gainsay it. “But I couldn’t seem to help it; and you were — you were — so quick with me; you didn’t give me time to think; you — But I was the one to blame, I was to blame!”

“Oh, well, never mind about it; don’t take on so,” coaxed Bartley. “It’s all over now, and it can’t be helped. And I can promise you,” he added, “that it shall never happen again, no matter what you do,” and in making this promise he felt the glow of virtuous performance. “I think we’ve both had a lesson. I suppose,” he continued sadly, as one might from impersonal reflection upon the temptations and depravity of large cities, “that it’s common enough. I dare say it isn’t the first time Ben Halleck has taken a fellow home in a hack.” Bartley got so much comfort from the conjecture he had thrown out for Marcia’s advantage, that he felt a sort of self-approval in the fact with which he followed it up. “And there’s this consolation about it, if there isn’t any other: that it wouldn’t have happened now, if it had ever happened before.”

Marcia lifted her head and looked into his face: “What — what do you mean, Bartley?”

“I mean that I never was overcome before in my life by — wine.” He delicately avoided saying whiskey.

“Well?” she demanded.

“Why, don’t you see? If I’d had the habit of drinking, I shouldn’t have been affected by it.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, anxiously.

“Why, I knew I shouldn’t be able to sleep, I was so mad at you—”

“Oh!”

“And I dropped into the hotel bar-room for a nightcap, — for something to make me sleep.”

“Yes, yes!” she urged eagerly.

“I took what wouldn’t have touched a man that was in the habit of it.”

“Poor Bartley!”

“And the first thing I knew I had got too much. I was drunk, — wild drunk,” he said with magnanimous frankness.

She had been listening intensely, exculpating him at every point, and now his innocence all flashed upon her. “I see! I see!” she cried. “And it was because you had never tasted it before—”

“Well, I had tasted it once or twice,” interrupted Bartley, with heroic veracity.

“No matter! It was because you had never more than hardly tasted it that a very little overcame you in an instant. I see!” she repeated, contemplating him in her ecstasy, as the one habitually sober man in a Boston full of inebriates. “And now I shall never regret it; I shall never care for it; I never shall think about it again! Or, yes! I shall always remember it, because it shows — because it proves that you are always strictly temperance. It was worth happening for that. I am glad it happened!”

She rose from his side, and took her sewing nearer the lamp, and resumed her work upon it with shining eyes.

Bartley remained in his place on the sofa, feeling, and perhaps looking, rather sheepish. He had made a clean breast of it, and the confession had redounded only too much to his credit. To do him justice, he had not intended to bring the affair to quite such a triumphant conclusion; and perhaps something better than his sense of humor was also touched when he found himself not only exonerated, but transformed into an exemplar of abstinence.

“Well,” he said, “it isn’t exactly a thing to be glad of, but it certainly isn’t a thing to worry yourself about. You know the worst of it, and you know the best of it. It never happened before, and it never shall happen again; that’s all. Don’t lament over it, don’t accuse yourself; just let it go, and we’ll both see what we can do after this in the way of behaving better.”

He rose from the sofa, and began to walk about the room.

“Does your head still ache?” she asked, fondly. “I wish I could do something for it!”

“Oh, I shall sleep it off,” returned Bartley.

She followed him with her eyes. “Bartley!”

“Well?”

“Do you suppose — do you believe — that Mr. Halleck — that he was ever—”

“No, Marcia, I don’t,” said Bartley, stopping. “I know he never was. Ben Halleck is slow; but he’s good. I couldn’t imagine his being drunk any more than I could imagine your being so. I’d willingly sacrifice his reputation to console you,” added Bartley, with a comical sense of his own regret that Halleck was not, for the occasion, an habitual drunkard, “but I cannot tell a lie.” He looked at her with a smile, and broke into a sudden laugh. “No, my dear, the only person I think of just now as having suffered similarly with myself is the great and good Andrew Johnson. Did you ever hear of him?”

“Was he the one they impeached?” she faltered, not knowing what Bartley would be at, but smiling faintly in sympathy with his mirth.

“He was the one they impeached. He was the one who was overcome by wine on his inauguration day, because he had never been overcome before. It’s a parallel case!” Bartley got a great deal more enjoyment out of the parallel case than Marcia. The smile faded from her face.

“Come, come,” he coaxed, “be satisfied with Andrew Johnson, and let Halleck go. Ah, Marcia!” he added, seriously, “Ben Halleck is the kind of man you ought to have married! Don’t you suppose that I know I’m not good enough for you? I’m pretty good by fits and starts; but he would have been good right straight along. I should never have had to bring him home in a hack to you!”

His generous admission had the just effect. “Hush, Bartley! Don’t talk so! You know that you’re better for me than the best man in the world, dear, and even if you were not, I should love you the best. Don’t talk, please, that way, of any one else, or it will make me hate you!”

He liked that; and after all he was not without an obscure pride in his last night’s adventure as a somewhat hazardous but decided assertion of manly supremacy. It was not a thing to be repeated; but for once in a way it was not wholly to be regretted, especially as he was so well out of it.

He pulled up a chair in front of her, and began to joke about the things she had in her lap; and the shameful and sorrowful day ended in the bliss of a more perfect peace between them than they had known since the troubles of their married life began. “I tell you,” said Bartley to Marcia, “I shall stick to tivoli after this, religiously.”

It was several weeks later that Halleck limped into Atherton’s lodgings, and dropped into one of his friend’s easy-chairs. The room had a bachelor comfort of aspect, and the shaded lamp on the table shed a mellow light on the green leather-covered furniture, wrinkled and creased, and worn full of such hospitable hollows as that which welcomed Halleck. Some packages of law papers were scattered about on the table; but the hour of the night had come when a lawyer permits himself a novel. Atherton looked up from his as Halleck entered, and stretched out a hand, which the latter took on his way to the easy-chair across the table.

“How do you do?” said Atherton, after allowing him to sit for a certain time in the silence, which expressed better than words the familiarity that existed between them in spite of the lawyer’s six or seven years of seniority.

Halleck leaned forward and tapped the floor with his stick; then he fell back again, and laid his cane across the arms of his chair, and drew a long breath. “Atherton,” he said, “if you had found a blackguard of your acquaintance drunk on your doorstep early one morning, and had taken him home to his wife, how would you have expected her to treat you the next time you saw her?”

The lawyer was too much used to the statement, direct and hypothetical, of all sorts of cases, to be startled at this. He smiled slightly, and said, “That would depend a good deal upon the lady.”

“Oh, but generalize! From what you know of women as Woman, what should you expect? Shouldn’t you expect her to make you pay somehow for your privity to her disgrace, to revenge her misery upon you? Isn’t there a theory that women forgive injuries, but never ignominies?”

“That’s what the novelists teach, and we bachelors get most of our doctrine about women from them.” He closed his novel on the paper-cutter, and, laying the book upon the table, clasped his hands together at the back of his head. “We don’t go to nature for our impressions; but neither do the novelists, for that matter. Now and then, however, in the way of business, I get a glimpse of realities that make me doubt my prophets. Who had this experience?”

“I did.”

“I’m sorry for that,” said Atherton.

“Yes,” returned Halleck, with whimsical melancholy; “I’m not particularly adapted for it. But I don’t know that it would be a very pleasant experience for anybody.”

He paused drearily, and Atherton said, “And how did she actually treat you?”

“I hardly know. I hadn’t been at the pains to look them up since the thing happened, and I had been carrying their squalid secret round for a fortnight, and suffering from it as if it were all my own.”

Atherton smiled at the touch of self-characterization.

“When I met her and her husband and her baby to-day, — a family party, — well, she made me ashamed of the melodramatic compassion I had been feeling for her. It seemed that I had been going about unnecessarily, not to say impertinently, haggard with the recollection of her face as I saw it when she opened the door for her blackguard and me that morning. She looked as if nothing unusual had happened at our last meeting. I couldn’t brace up all at once: I behaved like a sneak, in view of her serenity.”

“Perhaps nothing unusual had happened,” suggested Atherton.

“No, that theory isn’t tenable,” said Halleck. “It was the one fact in the blackguard’s favor that she had evidently never seen him in that state before, and didn’t know what was the matter. She was wild at first; she wanted to send for a doctor. I think towards the last she began to suspect. But I don’t know how she looked then: I couldn’t look at her.” He stopped as if still in the presence of the pathetic figure, with its sidelong, drooping head.

Atherton respected his silence a moment before he again suggested, as lightly as before, “Perhaps she is magnanimous.”

“No,” said Halleck, with the effect of having also given that theory consideration. “She’s not magnanimous, poor soul. I fancy she is rather a narrow-minded person, with strict limitations in regard to people who think ill — or too well — of her husband.”

“Then perhaps,” said Atherton, with the air of having exhausted conjecture, “she’s obtuse.”

“I have tried, to think that too,” replied Halleck, “but I can’t manage it. No, there are only two ways out of it; the fellow has abused her innocence and made her believe it’s a common and venial affair to be brought home in that state, or else she’s playing a part. He’s capable of telling her that neither you nor I, for example, ever go to bed sober. But she isn’t obtuse: I fancy she’s only too keen in all the sensibilities that women suffer through; and I’d rather think that he had deluded her in that way, than that she was masquerading about it, or she strikes me as an uncommonly truthful person. I suppose you know whom I’m talking about, Atherton?” he said, with a sudden look at his friend’s face across the table.

“Yes, I know,” said the lawyer. “I’m sorry it’s come to this already. Though I suppose you’re not altogether surprised.”

“No; something of the kind was to be expected,” Halleck sighed, and rolled his cane up and down on the arms of his chair. “I hope we know the worst.”

“Perhaps we do. But I recollect a wise remark you made the first time we talked of these people,” said Atherton, replying to the mood rather than the speech of his friend. “You suggested that we rather liked to grieve over the pretty girls that other fellows marry, and that we never thought of the plain ones as suffering.”

“Oh, I hadn’t any data for my pity in this case, then,” replied Halleck. “I’m willing to allow that a plain woman would suffer under the same circumstances; and I think I should be capable of pitying her. But I’ll confess that the notion of a pretty woman’s sorrow is more intolerable; there’s no use denying a fact so universally recognized by the male consciousness. I take my share of shame for it. I wonder why it is? Pretty women always seem to appeal to us as more dependent and childlike. I dare say they’re not.”

“Some of them are quite able to take care of themselves,” said Atherton. “I’ve known striking instances of the kind. How do you know but the object of your superfluous pity was cheerful because fate had delivered her husband, bound forever, into her hand, through this little escapade of his?”

“Isn’t that rather a coarse suggestion?” asked Halleck.

“Very likely. I suggest it; I don’t assert it. But I fancy that wives sometimes like a permanent grievance that is always at hand, no matter what the mere passing occasion of the particular disagreement is. It seems to me that I have detected obscure appeals to such a weapon in domestic interviews at which I’ve assisted in the way of business.”

“Don’t, Atherton!” cried Halleck.

“Don’t how? In this particular case, or in regard to wives generally. We can’t do women a greater injustice than not to account for a vast deal of human nature in them. You may be sure that things haven’t come to the present pass with those people without blame on both sides.”

“Oh, do you defend a man for such beastliness, by that stale old plea of blame on both sides?” demanded Halleck, indignantly.

“No; but I should like to know what she had said or done to provoke it, before I excused her altogether.”

“You would! Imagine the case reversed.”

“It isn’t imaginable.”

“You think there is a special code of morals for women, — sins and shames for them that are no sins and shames for us!”

“No, I don’t think that! I merely suggest that you don’t idealize the victim in this instance. I dare say she hasn’t suffered half as much as you have. Remember that she’s a person of commonplace traditions, and probably took a simple view of the matter, and let it go as something that could not be helped.”

“No, that would not do, either,” said Halleck.

“You’re hard to please. Suppose we imagine her proud enough to face you down on the fact, for his sake; too proud to revenge her disgrace on you—”

“Oh, you come back to your old plea of magnanimity! Atherton, it makes me sick at heart to think of that poor creature. That look of hers haunts me! I can’t get rid of it!”

Atherton sat considering his friend with a curious smile. “Well, I’m sorry this has happened to you, Halleck.”

“Oh, why do you say that to me?” demanded Halleck, impatiently. “Am I a nervous woman, that I must be kept from unpleasant sights and disagreeable experiences? If there’s anything of the man about me, you insult it! Why not be a little sorry for her?”

“I’m sorry enough for her; but I suspect that, so far, you have been the principal sufferer. She’s simply accepted the fact, and survived it.”

“So much the worse, so much the worse!” groaned Halleck. “She’d better have died!”

“Well, perhaps. I dare say she thinks it will never happen again, and has dismissed the subject; while you’ve had it happening ever since, whenever you’ve thought of her.”

Halleck struck the arms of his chair with his clinched hands. “Confound the fellow! What business has he to come back into my way, and make me think about his wife? Oh, very likely it’s quite as you say! I dare say she’s stupidly content with him; that she’s forgiven it and forgotten all about it. Probably she’s told him how I behaved, and they’ve laughed me over together. But does that make it any easier to bear?”

“It ought,” said Atherton. “What did the husband do when you met them?”

“Everything but tip me the wink, — everything but say, in so many words, ‘You see I’ve made it all right with her: don’t you wish you knew — how?’” Halleck dropped his head, with a wrathful groan.

“I fancy,” said Atherton, thoughtfully, “that, if we really knew how, it would surprise us. Married life is as much a mystery to us outsiders as the life to come, almost. The ordinary motives don’t seem to count; it’s the realm of unreason. If a man only makes his wife suffer enough, she finds out that she loves him so much she must forgive him. And then there’s a great deal in their being bound. They can’t live together in enmity, and they must live together. I dare say the offence had merely worn itself out between them.”

“Oh, I dare say,” Halleck assented, wearily. “That isn’t my idea of marriage, though.”

“It’s not mine, either,” returned Atherton. “The question is whether it isn’t often the fact in regard to such people’s marriages.”

“Then they are so many hells,” cried Halleck, “where self-respect perishes with resentment, and the husband and wife are enslaved to each other. They ought to be broken up!”

“I don’t think so,” said Atherton, soberly. “The sort of men and women that marriage enslaves would be vastly more wretched and mischievous if they were set free. I believe that the hell people make for themselves isn’t at all a bad place for them. It’s the best place for them.”

“Oh, I know your doctrine,” said Halleck, rising. “It’s horrible! How a man with any kindness in his heart can harbor such a cold-blooded philosophy I don’t understand. I wish you joy of it. Good night,” he added, gloomily, taking his hat from the table. “It serves me right for coming to you with a matter that I ought to have been man enough to keep to myself.”

Atherton followed him toward the door. “It won’t do you any harm to consider your perplexity in the light of my philosophy. An unhappy marriage isn’t the only hell, nor the worst.”

Halleck turned. “What could be a worse hell than marriage without love?” he demanded, fiercely.

“Love without marriage,” said Atherton.

Halleck looked sharply at his friend. Then he shrugged his shoulders as he turned again and swung out of the door. “You’re too esoteric for me. It’s quite time I was gone.”

The way through Clover Street was not the shortest way home; but he climbed the hill and passed the little house. He wished to rehabilitate in its pathetic beauty the image which his friend’s conjectures had jarred, distorted, insulted; and he lingered for a moment before the door where this vision had claimed his pity for anguish that no after serenity could repudiate. The silence in which the house was wrapped was like another fold of the mystery which involved him. The night wind rose in a sudden gust, and made the neighboring lamp flare, and his shadow wavered across the pavement like the figure of a drunken man. This, and not that other, was the image which he saw.

XXVII.

“Of course,” said Marcia, when she and Bartley recurred to the subject of her visit to Equity, “I have always felt as if I should like to have you with me, so as to keep people from talking, and show that it’s all right between you and father. But if you don’t wish to go, I can’t ask it.”

“I understand what you mean, and I should like to gratify you,” said Bartley. “Not that I care a rap what all the people in Equity think. I’ll tell you what I’ll do, I’ll go down there with you and hang round a day or two; and then I’ll come after you, when your time’s up, and stay a day or two there. I couldn’t stand three weeks in Equity.”

In the end, he behaved very handsomely. He dressed Flavia out to kill, as he said, in lace hoods and embroidered long-clothes, for which he tossed over half the ready-made stock of the great dry-goods stores; and he made Marcia get herself a new suit throughout, with a bonnet to match, which she thought she could not afford, but he said he should manage it somehow. In Equity he spared no pains to deepen the impression of his success in Boston, and he was affable with everybody. He hailed his friends across the street, waving his hand to them, and shouting out a jolly greeting. He visited the hotel office and the stores to meet the loungers there; he stepped into the printing-office, and congratulated Henry Bird on having stopped the Free Press and devoted himself to job-work. He said, “Hello, Marilla! Hello, Hannah!” and he stood a good while beside the latter at her case, joking and laughing. He had no resentments. He stopped old Morrison on the street and shook hands with him. “Well, Mr. Morrison, do you find it as easy to get Hannah’s wages advanced nowadays as you used to?”

As for his relations with Squire Gaylord, he flattened public conjecture out like a pancake, as he told Marcia, by making the old gentleman walk arm-and-arm with him the whole length of the village street the morning after his arrival. “And I never saw your honored father look as if he enjoyed a thing less,” added Bartley. “Well, what’s the use? He couldn’t help himself.” They had arrived on Friday evening, and, after spending Saturday in this social way, Bartley magnanimously went with Marcia to church. He was in good spirits, and he shook hands, right and left, as he came out of church. In the afternoon he had up the best team from the hotel stable, and took Marcia the Long Drive, which they had taken the day of their engagement. He could not be contented without pushing the perambulator out after tea, and making Marcia walk beside it, to let people see them with the baby.

He went away the next morning on an early train, after a parting which he made very cheery, and a promise to come down again as soon as he could manage it. Marcia watched him drive off toward the station in the hotel barge, and then she went upstairs to their room, where she had been so long a young girl, and where now their child lay sleeping. The little one seemed the least part of all the change that had taken place. In this room she used to sit and think of him; she used to fly up thither when he came unexpectedly, and order her hair or change a ribbon of her dress, that she might please him better; at these windows she used to sit and watch, and long for his coming; from these she saw him go by that day when she thought she should see him no more, and took heart of her despair to risk the wild chance that made him hers. There was a deadly, unsympathetic stillness in the room which seemed to leave to her all the responsibility for what she had done.

The days began to go by in a sunny, still, midsummer monotony. She pushed the baby out in its carriage, and saw the summer boarders walking or driving through the streets; she returned the visits that the neighbors paid her; indoors she helped her mother about the housework. An image of her maiden life reinstated itself. At times it seemed almost as if she had dreamed her marriage. When she looked at her baby in these moods, she thought she was dreaming yet. A young wife suddenly parted for the first time from her husband, in whose intense possession she has lost her individual existence, and devolving upon her old separate personality, must have strong fancies, strange sensations. Marcia’s marriage had been full of such shocks and storms as might well have left her dazed in their entire cessation.

“She seems to be pretty well satisfied here,” said her father, one evening when she had gone upstairs with her sleeping baby in her arms.

“She seems to be pretty quiet,” her mother noncommittally assented.

“M-yes,” snarled the Squire, and he fell into a long revery, while Mrs. Gaylord went on crocheting the baby a bib, and the smell of the petunia-bed under the window came in through the mosquito netting. “M-yes,” he resumed, “I guess you’re right. I guess it’s only quiet. I guess she ain’t any more likely to be satisfied than the rest of us.”

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t be,” said Mrs. Gaylord, resenting the compassion in the Squire’s tone with that curious jealousy a wife feels for her husband’s indulgence of their daughter. “She’s had her way.”

“She’s had her way, poor girl, — yes. But I don’t know as it satisfies people to have their way, always.”

Doubtless Mrs. Gaylord saw that her husband wished to talk about Marcia, and must be helped to do so by a little perverseness. “I don’t know but what most of folks would say ‘t she’d made out pretty well. I guess she’s got a good provider.”

“She didn’t need any provider,” said the Squire haughtily.

“No; but so long as she would have something, it’s well enough that she should have a provider.” Mrs. Gaylord felt that this was reasoning, and she smoothed out so much of the bib as she had crocheted across her knees with an air of self-content. “You can’t have everything in a husband,” she added, “and Marcia ought to know that, by this time.”

“I’ve no doubt she knows it,” said the Squire.

“Why, what makes you think she’s disappointed any?” Mrs. Gaylord came plump to the question at last.

“Nothing she ever said,” returned her husband promptly. “She’d die, first. When I was up there I thought she talked about him too much to be feeling just right about him. It was Bartley this and Bartley that, the whole while. She was always wanting me to say that I thought she had done right to marry him. I did sort of say it, at last, — to please her. But I kept thinking that, if she felt sure of it, she wouldn’t want to talk it into me so. Now, she never mentions him at all, if she can help it. She writes to him every day, and she hears from him often enough, — postals, mostly; but she don’t talk about Bartley, Bartley!” The Squire stretched his lips back from his teeth, and inhaled a long breath, as he rubbed his chin.

“You don’t suppose anything’s happened since you was up there,” said Mrs. Gaylord.

“Nothing but what’s happened from the start. He’s happened. He keeps happening right along, I guess.”

Mrs. Gaylord found herself upon the point of experiencing a painful emotion of sympathy, but she saved herself by saying: “Well, Mr. Gaylord, I don’t know as you’ve got anybody but yourself to thank for it all. You got him here, in the first place.” She took one of the kerosene lamps from the table, and went upstairs, leaving him to follow at his will.

Marcia sometimes went out to the Squire’s office in the morning, carrying her baby with her, and propping her with law-books on a newspaper in the middle of the floor, while she dusted the shelves, or sat down for one of the desultory talks in the satisfactory silences which she had with her father.

He usually found her there when he came up from the post-office, with the morning mail in the top of his hat: the last evening’s Events, — which Bartley had said must pass for a letter from him when he did not write, — and a letter or a postal card from him. She read these, and gave her lather any news or message that Bartley sent; and then she sat down at his table to answer them. But one morning, after she had been at home nearly a month, she received a letter for which she postponed Bartley’s postal. “It’s from Olive Halleck!” she said, with a glance at the handwriting on the envelope; and she tore it open, and ran it through. “Yes, and they’ll come here, any time I let them know. They’ve been at Niagara, and they’ve come down the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and they will be at North Conway the last of next week. Now, father, I want to do something for them!” she cried, feeling an American daughter’s right to dispose of her father, and all his possessions, for the behoof of her friends at any time. “I want they should come to the house.”

“Well, I guess there won’t be any trouble about that, if you think they can put up with our way of living.’ He smiled at her over his spectacles.

“Our way of living! Put up with it! I should hope as much! They’re just the kind of people that will put up with anything, because they’ve had everything. And because they’re all as sweet and good as they can be. You don’t know them, father, you don’t half know them! Now, just get right away,” — she pushed him out of the chair he had taken at the table,— “and let me write to Bartley this instant. He’s got to come when they’re here, and I’ll invite them to come over at once, before they get settled at North Conway.”

He gave his dry chuckle to see her so fired with pleasure, and he enjoyed the ardor with which she drove him up out of his chair, and dashed off her letters. This was her old way; he would have liked the prospect of the Hallecks coming, because it made his girl so happy, if for nothing else.

“Father, I will tell you about Ben Halleck,” she said, pounding her letter to Olive with the thick of her hand to make the envelope stick. “You know that lameness of his?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it came from his being thrown down by another boy when he was at school. He knew the boy that did it; and the boy must have known that Mr. Halleck knew it, but he never said a word to show that he was sorry, or did anything to make up for it He’s a man now, and lives there in Boston, and Ben Halleck often meets him. He says that if the man can stand it he can. Don’t you think that’s grand? When I heard that, I made up my mind that I wanted Flavia to belong to Ben Halleck’s church, — or the church he did belong to; he doesn’t belong to any now!”

“He couldn’t have got any damages for such a thing anyway,” the Squire said.

Marcia paid no heed to this legal opinion of the case. She took off her father’s hat to put the letters into it, and, replacing it on his head, “Now don’t you forget them, father,” she cried.

She gathered up her baby and hurried into the house, where she began her preparations for her guests.

The elder Miss Hallecks had announced with much love, through Olive, that they should not be able to come to Equity, and Ben was to bring Olive alone. Marcia decided that Ben should have the guest-chamber, and Olive should have her room; she and Bartley could take the little room in the L while their guests remained.

But when the Hallecks came, it appeared that Ben had engaged quarters for himself at the hotel, and no expostulation would prevail with him to come to Squire Gaylord’s house.

“We have to humor him in such things, Mrs. Hubbard,” Olive explained, to Marcia’s distress. “And most people get on very well without him.”

This explanation was of course given in Halleck’s presence. His sister added, behind his back: “Ben has a perfectly morbid dread of giving trouble in a house. He won’t let us do anything to make him comfortable at home, and the idea that you should attempt it drove him distracted. You mustn’t mind it. I don’t believe he’d have come if his bachelor freedom couldn’t have been respected; and we both wanted to come Very much.”

The Hallecks arrived in the forenoon, and Bartley was due in the evening. But during the afternoon Marcia had a telegram saying that he could not come till two days later, and asking her to postpone the picnic she had planned. The Hallecks were only going to stay three days, and the suspicion that Bartley had delayed in order to leave himself as little time as possible with them rankled in her heart so that she could not keep it to herself when they met.

“Was that what made you give me such a cool reception?” he asked, with cynical good-nature. “Well, you’re mistaken; I don’t suppose I mind the Hallecks any more than they do me. I’ll tell you why I stayed. Some people dropped down on Witherby, who were a little out of his line, — fashionable people that he had asked to let him know if they ever came to Boston; and when they did come and let him know, he didn’t know what to do about it, and he called on me to help him out. I’ve been almost boarding with Witherby for the last three days; and I’ve been barouching round all over the moral vineyard with his friends: out to Mount Auburn and the Washington Elm, and Bunker Hill, and Brookline, and the Art Museum, and Lexington; we’ve been down the harbor, and we haven’t left a monumental stone unturned. They were going north, and they came down here with me; and I got them to stop over a day for the picnic.”

“You got them to stop over for the picnic? Why, I don’t want anybody but ourselves, Bartley! This spoils everything.”

“The Hallecks are not ourselves,” said Bartley. “And these are jolly people; they’ll help to make it go off.”

“Who are they?” asked Marcia, with provisional self-control.

“Oh, some people that Witherby met in Portland at Willett’s, who used to have the logging-camp out here.”

“That Montreal woman!” cried Marcia, with fatal divination.

Bartley laughed. “Yes, Mrs. Macallister and her husband. She’s a regular case. She’ll amuse you.”

Marcia’s passionate eyes blazed. “She shall never come to my picnic in the world!”

“No?” Bartley looked at her in a certain way. “She shall come to mine, then. There will be two picnics. The more the merrier.”

Marcia gasped, as if she felt the clutch in which her husband had her tightening on her heart. She said that she could only carry her point against him at the cost of disgraceful division before the Hallecks, for which he would not care in the least. She moved her head a little from side to side, like one that breathes a stifling air. “Oh, let her come,” she said quietly, at last.

“Now you’re talking business,” said Bartley. “I haven’t forgotten the little snub Mrs. Macallister gave me, and you’ll see me pay her off.”

Marcia made no answer, but went downstairs to put what face she could upon the matter to Olive, whom she had left alone in the parlor, while she ran up with Bartley immediately upon his arrival to demand an explanation of him. In her wrathful haste she had forgotten to kiss him, and she now remembered that he had not looked at the baby, which she had all the time had in her arms.

The picnic was to be in a pretty glen three or four miles north of the village, where there was shade on a bit of level green, and a spring bubbling out of a fern-hung bluff: from which you looked down the glen over a stretch of the river. Marcia had planned that they were to drive thither in a four-seated carryall, but the addition of Bartley’s guests disarranged this.

“There’s only one way,” said Mrs. Macallister, who had driven up with her husband from the hotel to the Squire’s house in a buggy. “Mr. Halleck tells me he doesn’t know how to drive, and my husband doesn’t know the way. Mr. Hubbard must get in here with me, and you must take Mr. Macallister in your party.” She looked authoritatively at the others.

“First rate!” cried Bartley, climbing to the seat which Mr. Macallister left vacant. “We’ll lead the way.”

Those who followed had difficulty in keeping their buggy in sight. Sometimes Bartley stopped long enough for them to come up, and then, after a word or two of gay banter, was off again.

They had taken possession of the picnic grounds, and Mrs. Macallister was disposing shawls for rugs and drapery, while Bartley, who had got the horse out, and tethered where he could graze, was pushing the buggy out of the way by the shafts, when the carryall came up.

“Don’t we look quite domestic?” she asked of the arriving company, in her neat English tone, and her rising English inflection. “You know I like this,” she added, singling Halleck out for her remark, and making it as if it were brilliant. “I like being out of doors, don’t you know. But there’s one thing I don’t like: we weren’t able to get a drop of champagne at that ridiculous hotel. They told us they were not allowed to keep ‘intoxicating liquors.’ Now I call that jolly stupid, you know. I don’t know whatever we shall do if you haven’t brought something.”

“I believe this is a famous spring,” said Halleck.

“How droll you are! Spring, indeed!” cried Mrs. Macallister. “Is that the way you let your brother make game of people, Miss Halleck?” She directed a good deal of her rattle at Olive; she scarcely spoke to Marcia, but she was nevertheless furtively observant of her. Mr. Macallister had his rattle too, which, after trying it unsatisfactorily upon Marcia, he plied almost exclusively for Olive. He made puns; he asked conundrums; he had all the accomplishments which keep people going in a lively, mirthful, colonial society; and he had the idea that he must pay attentions and promote repartee. His wife and he played into each other’s hands in their jeux d’esprit; and kept Olive’s inquiring Boston mind at work in the vain endeavor to account for and to place them socially. Bartley hung about Mrs. Macallister, and was nearly as obedient as her husband. He felt that the Hallecks disapproved his behavior, and that made him enjoy it; he was almost rudely negligent of Olive.

The composition of the party left Marcia and Halleck necessarily to each other, and she accepted this arrangement in a sort of passive seriousness; but Halleck saw that her thoughts wandered from her talk with him, and that her eyes were always turning with painful anxiety to Bartley. After their lunch, which left them with the whole afternoon before them, Marcia said, in a timid effort to resume her best leadership of the affair, “Bartley, don’t you think they would like to see the view from the Devil’s Backbone?”

“Would you like to see the view from the Devil’s Backbone?” he asked in turn of Mrs. Macallister.

“And what is the Devil’s Backbone?” she inquired.

“It’s a ridge of rocks on the bluff above here,” said Bartley, nodding his head vaguely towards the bank.

“And how do you get to it?” asked Mrs. Macallister, pointing her pretty chin at him in lifting her head to look.

“Walk.”

“Thanks, then; I shall try to be satisfied with me own backbone,” said Mrs. Macallister, who had that freedom in alluding to her anatomy which marks the superior civilization of Great Britain and its colonial dependencies.

“Carry you,” suggested Bartley.

“I dare say you’d be very sure-footed; but I’d quite enough of donkeys in the hills at home.”

Bartley roared with the resolution of a man who will enjoy a joke at his own expense.

Marcia turned away, and referred her invitation, with a glance, to Olive.

“I don’t believe Miss Halleck wants to go,” said Mr. Macallister.

“I couldn’t,” said Olive, regretfully. “I’ve neither the feet nor the head for climbing over high rocky places.”

Marcia was about to sink down on the grass again, from which she had risen, in the hopes that her proposition would succeed, when Bartley called out: “Why don’t you show Ben the Devil’s Backbone? The view is worth seeing, Halleck.”

“Would you like to go?” asked Marcia, listlessly.

“Yes, I should, very much,” said Halleck, scrambling to his feet, “if it won’t tire you too much?”

“Oh, no,” said Marcia, gently, and led the way. She kept ahead of him in the climb, as she easily could, and she answered briefly to all he said. When they arrived at the top, “There is the view,” she said coldly. She waved her hand toward the valley; she made a sound in her throat as if she would speak again, but her voice died in one broken sob.

Halleck stood with downcast eyes, and trembled. He durst not look at her, not for what he should see in her face, but for what she should see in his: the anguish of intelligence, the helpless pity. He beat the rock at his feet with the ferule of his stick, and could not lift his head again. When he did, she stood turned from him and drying her eyes on her handkerchief. Their looks met, and she trusted her self-betrayal to him without any attempt at excuse or explanation.

“I will send Hubbard up to help you down,” said Halleck.

“Well,” she answered, sadly.

He clambered down the side of the bluff, and Bartley started to his feet in guilty alarm when he saw him approach. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. But I think you had better help Mrs. Hubbard down the bluff.”

“Oh!” cried Mrs. Macallister. “A panic! how interesting!”

Halleck did not respond. He threw himself on the grass, and left her to change or pursue the subject as she liked. Bartley showed more savoir-faire when he came back with Marcia, after an absence long enough to let her remove the traces of her tears.

“Pretty rough on your game foot, Halleck. But Marcia had got it into her head that it wasn’t safe to trust you to help her down, even after you had helped her up.”

“Ben,” said Olive, when they were seated in the train the next day, “why did you send Marcia’s husband up there to her?” She had the effect of not having rested till she could ask him.

“She was crying,” he answered.

“What do you suppose could have been the matter?”

“What you do: she was miserable about his coquetting with that woman.”

“Yes. I could see that she hated terribly to have her come; and that she felt put down by her all the time. What kind of person is Mrs. Macallister?”

“Oh, a fool,” replied Halleck. “All flirts are fools.”

“I think she’s more wicked than foolish.”

“Oh, no, flirts are better than they seem, — perhaps because men are better than flirts think. But they make misery just the same.”

“Yes,” sighed Olive. “Poor Marcia, poor Marcia! But I suppose that, if it were not Mrs. Macallister, it would be some one else.”

“Given Bartley Hubbard, — yes.”

“And given Marcia. Well, — I don’t like being mixed up with other people’s unhappiness, Ben. It’s dangerous.”

“I don’t like it either. But you can’t very well keep out of people’s unhappiness in this world.”

“No,” assented Olive, ruefully.

The talk fell, and Halleck attempted to read a newspaper, while Olive looked out of the window. She presently turned to him. “Did you ever fancy any resemblance between Mrs. Hubbard and the photograph of that girl we used to joke about, — your lost love?”

“Yes,” said Halleck.

“What’s become of it, — the photograph? I can’t find it any more; I wanted to show it to her one day.”

“I destroyed it. I burnt it the first evening after I had met Mrs. Hubbard. It seemed to me that it wasn’t right to keep it.”

“Why, you don’t think it was her photograph!”

“I think it was,” said Halleck. He took up his paper again, and read on till they left the cars.

That evening, when Halleck came to his sister’s room to bid her good night, she threw her arms round his neck, and kissed his plain, common face, in which she saw a heavenly beauty.

“Ben, dear,” she said, “if you don’t turn out the happiest man in the world, I shall say there’s no use in being good!”

“Perhaps you’d better say that after all I wasn’t good,” he suggested, with a melancholy smile.

“I shall know better,” she retorted.

“Why, what’s the matter, now?”

“Nothing. I was only thinking. Good night!”

“Good night,” said Halleck. “You seem to think my room is better than my company, good as I am.”

“Yes,” she said, laughing in that breathless way which means weeping next, with women. Her eyes glistened.

“Well,” said Halleck, limping out of the room, “you’re quite good-looking with your hair down, Olive.”

“All girls are,” she answered. She leaned out of her doorway to watch him as he limped down the corridor to his own room. There was something pathetic, something disappointed and weary in the movement of his figure, and when she shut her door, and ran back to her mirror, she could not see the good-looking girl there for her tears.

XXVIII.

“Hello!” said Bartley, one day after the autumn had brought back all the summer wanderers to the city, “I haven’t seen you for a month of Sundays.” He had Ricker by the hand, and he pulled him into a doorway to be a little out of the rush on the crowded pavement, while they chatted.

“That’s because I can’t afford to go to the White Mountains, and swell round at the aristocratic summer resorts like some people,” returned Ricker. “I’m a horny-handed son of toil, myself.”

“Pshaw!” said Bartley. “Who isn’t? I’ve been here hard at it, except for three days at one time and live at another.”

“Well, all I can say is that I saw in the Record personals, that Mr. Hubbard, of the Events, was spending the summer months with his father-in-law, Judge Gaylord, among the spurs of the White Mountains. I supposed you wrote it yourself. You’re full of ideas about journalism.”

“Oh, come! I wouldn’t work that joke any more. Look here, Ricker, I’ll tell you what I want. I want you to dine with me.”

“Dines people!” said Ricker, in an awestricken aside.

“No, — I mean business! You Ve never seen my kid yet: and you’ve never seen my house. I want you to come. We’ve all got back, and we’re in nice running order. What day are you disengaged?”

“Let me see,” said Ricker, thoughtfully. “So many engagements! Wait! I could squeeze your dinner in some time next month, Hubbard.”

“All right. But suppose we say next Sunday. Six is the hour.”

“Six? Oh, I can’t dine in the middle of the forenoon that way! Make it later!”

“Well, we’ll say one P.M., then. I know your dinner hour. We shall expect you.”

“Better not, till I come.” Bartley knew that this was Ricker’s way of accepting, and he said nothing, but he answered his next question with easy joviality. “How are you making it with old Witherby?”

“Oh, hand over hand! Witherby and I were formed for each other. By, by!”

“No, hold on! Why don’t you come to the club any more?”

“We-e-ll! The club isn’t what it used to be,” said Bartley, confidentially.

“Why, of course! It isn’t just the thing for a gentleman moving in the select circles of Clover Street, as you do; but why not come, sometimes, in the character of distinguished guest, and encourage your humble friends? I was talking with a lot of the fellows about you the other night.”

“Were they abusing me?”

“They were speaking the truth about you, and I stopped them. I told them that sort of thing wouldn’t do. Why, you’re getting fat!”

“You’re behind the times, Kicker,” said Bartley. “I began to get fat six months ago. I don’t wonder the Chronicle Abstract is running down on your hands. Come round and try my tivoli on Sunday. That’s what gives a man girth, my boy.” He tapped Ricker lightly on his hollow waistcoat, and left him with a wave of his hand.

Ricker leaned out of the doorway and followed him down the street with a troubled eye. He had taken stock in Bartley, as the saying is, and his heart misgave him that he should lose on the investment; he could not have sold out to any of their friends for twenty cents on the dollar. Nothing that any one could lay his finger on had happened, and yet there had been a general loss of confidence in that particular stock. Ricker himself had lost confidence in it, and when he lightly mentioned that talk at the club, with a lot of the fellows, he had a serious wish to get at Bartley some time, and see what it was that was beginning to make people mistrust him. The fellows who liked him at first and wished him well, and believed in his talent, had mostly dropped him. Bartley’s associates were now the most raffish set on the press, or the green hands; and something had brought this to pass in less than two years. Ricker had believed that it was Witherby; at the club he had contended that it was Bartley’s association with Witherby that made people doubtful of him. As for those ideas that Bartley had advanced in their discussion of journalism, he had considered it all mere young man’s nonsense that Bartley would outgrow. But now, as he looked at Bartley’s back, he had his misgivings; it struck him as the back of a degenerate man, and that increasing bulk seemed not to represent an increase of wholesome substance, but a corky, buoyant tissue, materially responsive to some sort of moral dry-rot.

Bartley pushed on to the Events office in a blithe humor. Witherby had recently advanced his salary; he was giving him fifty dollars a week now; and Bartley had made himself necessary in more ways than one. He was not only readily serviceable, but since he had volunteered to write those advertising articles for an advance of pay, he was in possession of business facts that could be made very uncomfortable to Witherby in the event of a disagreement. Witherby not only paid him well, but treated him well; he even suffered Bartley to bully him a little, and let him foresee the day when he must be recognized as the real editor of the Events.

At home everything went on smoothly. The baby was well and growing fast; she was beginning to explode airy bubbles on her pretty lips that a fond superstition might interpret as papa and mamma. She had passed that stage in which a man regards his child with despair; she had passed out of slippery and evasive doughiness into a firm tangibility that made it some pleasure to hold her.

Bartley liked to take her on his lap, to feel the spring of her little legs, as she tried to rise on her feet; he liked to have her stretch out her arms to him from her mother’s embrace. The innocent tenderness which he experienced at these moments was satisfactory proof to him that he was a very good fellow, if not a good man. When he spent an evening at home, with Flavia in his lap for half an hour after dinner, he felt so domestic that he seemed to himself to be spending all his evenings at home now. Once or twice it had happened, when the housemaid was out, that he went to the door with the baby on his arm, and answered the ring of Olive and Ben Halleck, or of Olive and one or both of the intermediary sisters.

The Hallecks were the only people at all apt to call in the evening, and Bartley ran so little chance of meeting any one else, when he opened the door with Flavia on his arm, that probably he would not have thought it worth while to put her down, even if he had not rather enjoyed meeting them in that domestic phase. He had not only long felt how intensely Olive disliked him, but he had observed that somehow it embarrassed Ben Halleck to see him in his character of devoted young father. At those times he used to rally his old friend upon getting married, and laughed at the confusion to which the joke put him. He said more than once afterwards, that he did not see what fun Ben Halleck got out of coming there; it must bore even such a dull fellow as he was to sit a whole evening like that and not say twenty words. “Perhaps he’s livelier when I’m not here, though,” he suggested. “I always did seem to throw a wet blanket on Ben Halleck.” He did not at all begrudge Halleck’s having a better time in his absence if he could.

One night when the bell rung Bartley rose, and saying, “I wonder which of the tribe it is this time,” went to the door. But when he opened it, instead of hearing the well-known voices, Marcia listened through a hesitating silence, which ended in a loud laugh from without, and a cry from her husband of “Well, I swear! Why, you infamous old scoundrel, come in out of the wet!” There ensued, amidst Bartley’s voluble greetings, a noise of shy shuffling about in the hall, as of a man not perfectly master of his footing under social pressure, a sound of husky, embarrassed whispering, a dispute about doffing an overcoat, and question as to the disposition of a hat, and then Bartley reappeared, driving before him the lank, long figure of a man who blinked in the flash of gaslight, as Bartley turned it all up in the chandelier overhead, and rubbed his immense hands in cruel embarrassment at the beauty of Marcia, set like a jewel in the pretty comfort of the little parlor.

“Mr. Kinney, Mrs. Hubbard,” said Bartley; and having accomplished the introduction, he hit Kinney a thwack between the shoulders with the flat of his hand that drove him stumbling across Marcia’s footstool into the seat on the sofa to which she had pointed him. “You old fool, where did you come from?”

The refined warmth of Bartley’s welcome seemed to make Kinney feel at home, in spite of his trepidations at Marcia’s presence. He bobbed his head forward, and stretched his mouth wide, in one of his vast, silent laughs. “Better ask where I’m goin’ to.”

“Well, I’ll ask that, if it’ll be any accommodation. Where you going?”

“Illinois.”

“For a divorce?”

“Try again.”

“To get married?”

“Maybe, after I’ve made my pile.” Kinney’s eyes wandered about the room, and took in its evidences of prosperity, with simple, unenvious admiration; he ended with a furtive glimpse of Marcia, who seemed to be a climax of good luck, too dazzling for contemplation; he withdrew his glance from her as if hurt by her splendor, and became serious.

“Well, you’re the last man I ever expected to see again,” said Bartley, sitting down with the baby in his lap, and contemplating Kinney with deliberation. Kinney was dressed in a long frock-coat of cheap diagonals, black cassimere pantaloons, a blue necktie, and a celluloid collar. He had evidently had one of his encounters with a cheap clothier, in which the Jew had triumphed; but he had not yet visited a barber, and his hair and beard were as shaggy as they were in the logging-camp; his hands and face were as brown as leather. “But I’m as glad,” Bartley added, “as if you had telegraphed you were coming. Of course, you’re going to put up with us.” He had observed Kinney’s awe of Marcia, and he added this touch to let Kinney see that he was master in his house, and lord even of that radiant presence.

Kinney started in real distress. “Oh, no! I couldn’t do it! I’ve got all my things round at the Quincy House.”

“Trunk or bag?” asked Bartley.

“Well, it’s a bag; but—”

“All right. We’ll step round and get it together. I generally take a little stroll out, after dinner,” said Bartley, tranquilly.

Kinney was beginning again, when Marcia, who had been stealing some covert looks at him under her eye lashes, while she put together the sewing she was at work on, preparatory to going upstairs with the baby, joined Bartley in his invitation.

“You wont make us the least trouble, Mr. Kinney,” she said. “The guest-chamber is all ready, and we shall be glad to have you stay.”

Kinney must have felt the note of sincerity in her words. He hesitated, and Bartley clinched his tacit assent with a quotation: “‘The chief ornament of a house is the guests who frequent it.’ Who says that?”

Kinney’s little blue eyes twinkled. “Old Emerson.”

“Well, I agree with him. We don’t care anything about your company, Kinney; but we want you for decorative purposes.”

Kinney opened his mouth for another noiseless laugh, and said, “Well, fix it to suit yourselves.”

“I’ll carry her up for you,” said Bartley to Marcia, who was stooping forward to take the baby from him, “if Mr. Kinney will excuse us a moment.”

“All right,” said Kinney.

Bartley ventured upon this bold move, because he had found that it was always best to have things out with Marcia at once, and, if she was going to take his hospitality to Kinney in bad part, he wanted to get through the trouble. “That was very nice of you, Marcia,” he said, when they were in their own room. “My invitation rather slipped out, and I didn’t know how you would like it.”

“Oh, I’m very glad to have him stay. I never forget about his wanting to lend you money that time,” said Marcia, opening the baby’s crib.

“You’re a mighty good fellow, Marcia!” cried Bartley, kissing her over the top of the baby’s head as she took it from him. “And I’m not half good enough for you. You never forget a benefit. Nor an injury either,” he added, with a laugh. “And I’m afraid that I forget one about as easily as the other.”

Marcia’s eyes suffused themselves at this touch of self-analysis which, coming from Bartley, had its sadness; but she said nothing, and he was eager to escape and get back to their guest. He told her he should go out with Kinney, and that she was not to sit up, for they might be out late.

In his pride, he took Kinney down to the Events office, and unlocked it, and lit the gas, so as to show him the editorial rooms; and then he passed him into one of the theatres, where they saw part of an Offenbach opera; after that they went to the Parker House, and had a New York stew. Kinney said he must be off by the Sunday-night train, and Bartley thought it well to concentrate as many dazzling effects upon him as he could in the single evening at his disposal. He only regretted that it was not the club night, for he would have liked to take Kinney round, and show him some of the fellows.

“But never mind,” he said. “I’m going to have one of them dine with us to-morrow, and you’ll see about the best of the lot.”

“Well, sir,” observed Kinney, when they had got back into Bartley’s parlor, and he was again drinking in its prettiness in the subdued light of the shaded argand burner, “I hain’t seen anything yet that suits me much better than this.”

“It isn’t bad,” said Bartley. He had got up a plate of crackers and two bottles of tivoli, and was opening the first. He offered the beaded goblet to Kinney.

“Thank you,” said Kinney. “Not any. I never do.”

Bartley quaffed half of it in tolerant content. “I always do. Find it takes my nerves down at the end of a hard week’s work. Well, now, tell me some thing about yourself. What are you going to do in Illinois?”

“Well, sir, I’ve got a friend out there that’s got a coal mine, and he thinks he can work me in somehow. I guess he can: I’ve tried pretty much everything. Why don’t you come out there and start a newspaper? We’ve got a town that’s bound to grow.”

It amused Bartley to hear Kinney bragging already of a town that he had never seen. He winked a good-natured disdain over the rim of the goblet which he tilted on his lips. “And give up my chances here?” he said, as he set the goblet down.

“Well, that’s so!” said Kinney, responding to the sense of the wink. “I’ll tell you what, Bartley, I didn’t know as you’d speak to me when I rung your bell to-night. But thinks I to myself, ‘Dumn it! look here! He can’t more’n slam the door in your face, anyway. And you’ve hankered after him so long, — go and take your chances, you old buzzard!’ And so I got your address at the Events office pretty early this morning; and I went round all day screwing my courage up, as old Macbeth says, — or Ritchloo, I don’t know which it was, — and at last I did get myself so that I toed the mark like a little man.”

Bartley laughed so that he could hardly get the cork out of the second bottle.

“You see,” said Kinney, leaning forward, and taking Bartley’s plump, soft knee between his thumb and forefinger, “I felt awfully about the way we parted that night. I felt bad. I hadn’t acted well, just to my own mind, and it cut me to have you refuse my money; it cut me all the worse because I saw that you was partly right; I hadn’t been quite fair with you. But I always did admire you, and you know it. Some them little things you used to get off in the old Free Press — well, I could see ‘t you was smart. And I liked you; and it kind o’ hurt me when I thought you’d been makin’ fun o’ me to that woman. Well, I could see ‘t I was a dumned old fool, afterwards. And I always wanted to tell you so. And I always did hope that I should be able to offer you that money again, twice over, and get you to take it just to show that you didn’t bear malice.” Bartley looked up, with quickened interest. “But I can’t do it now, sir,” added Kinney.

“Why, what’s happened?” asked Bartley, in a disappointed tone, pouring out his second glass from his second bottle.

“Well, sir,” said Kinney, with a certain reluctance, “I undertook to provision the camp on spec, last winter, and — well, you know, I always run a little on food for the brain,” — Bartley broke into a reminiscent cackle, and Kinney smiled forlornly,— “and thinks I, ‘Dumn it, I’ll give ’em the real thing, every time.’ And I got hold of a health-food circular; and I sent on for a half a dozen barrels of their crackers and half a dozen of their flour, and a lot of cracked cocoa, and I put the camp on a health-food basis. I calculated to bring those fellows out in the spring physically vigorous and mentally enlightened. But my goodness! After the first bakin’ o’ that flour and the first round o’ them crackers, it was all up! Fellows got so mad that I suppose if I hadn’t gone back to doughnuts, and sody biscuits, and Japan tea, they’d ‘a’ burnt the camp down. Of course I yielded. But it ruined me, Bartley; it bu’st me.”

Bartley dropped his arms upon the table, and, hiding his face upon them, laughed and laughed again.

“Well, sir,” said Kinney, with sad satisfaction, “I’m glad to see that you don’t need any money from me.” He had been taking another survey of the parlor and the dining-room beyond. “I don’t know as I ever saw anybody much better fixed. I should say that you was a success; and you deserve it. You’re a smart fellow, Bart, and you’re a good fellow. You’re a generous fellow.” Kinney’s voice shook with emotion.

Bartley, having lifted his wet and flushed face, managed to say: “Oh, there’s nothing mean about me, Kinney,” as he felt blindly for the beer bottles, which he shook in succession with an evident surprise at finding them empty.

“You’ve acted like a brother to me, Bartley Hubbard,” continued Kinney, “and I sha’n’t forget it in a hurry. I guess it would about broke my heart, if you hadn’t taken it just the way you did to-night. I should like to see the man that didn’t use you well, or the woman, either!” said Kinney, with vague defiance. “Though they don’t seem to have done so bad by you,” he added, in recognition of Marcia’s merit. “I should say that was the biggest part of your luck She’s a lady, sir, every inch of her. Mighty different stripe from that Montreal woman that cut up so that night.”

“Oh, Mrs. Macallister wasn’t such a scamp, after all,” said Bartley, with magnanimity.

“Well, sir, you can say so. I ain’t going to be too strict with a girl; but I like to see a married woman act like a married woman. Now, I don’t think you’d catch Mrs. Hubbard flirting with a young fellow the way that woman went on with you that night?” Bartley grinned. “Well, sir, you’re getting along and you’re happy.”

“Perfect clam,” said Bartley.

“Such a position as you’ve got, — such a house, such a wife, and such a baby! Well,” said Kinney, rising, “it’s a little too much for me.”

“Want to go to bed?” asked Bartley.

“Yes, I guess I better turn in,” returned Kinney, despairingly.

“Show you the way.”

Bartley tripped up stairs with Kinney’s bag, which they had left standing in the hall, while Kinney creaked carefully after him; and so led the way to the guest-chamber, and turned up the gaslight, which had been left burning low.

Kinney stood erect, dwarfing the room, and looked round on the pink chintzing, and soft carpet, and white coverleted bed, and lace-hooded dressing-mirror, with meek veneration. “Well, I swear!” He said no more, but sat hopelessly down, and began to pull off his boots.

He was in the same humble mood the next morning, when, having got up inordinately early, he was found trying to fix his mind on a newspaper by Bartley, who came down late to the Sunday breakfast, and led his guest into the dining-room. Marcia, in a bewitching morning-gown, was already there, having put the daintier touches to the meal herself; and the baby, in a fresh white dress, was there tied into its arm-chair with a napkin, and beating on the table with a spoon. Bartley’s nonchalance amidst all this impressed Kinney with a yet more poignant sense of his superiority, and almost deprived him of the powers of speech. When after breakfast Bartley took him out to Cambridge on the horse-cars, and showed him the College buildings, and Memorial Hall, and the Washington Elm, and Mount Auburn, Kinney fell into such a cowed and broken condition, that something had to be specially done to put him in repair against Ricker’s coming to dinner. Marcia luckily thought of asking him if he would like to see her kitchen. In this region Kinney found himself at home, and praised its neat perfection with professional intelligence. Bartley followed them round with Flavia on his arm, and put in a jocose word here and there, when he saw Kinney about to fall a prey to his respect for Marcia, and so kept him going till Ricker rang. He contrived to give Ricker a hint of the sort of man he had on his hands, and by their joint effort they had Kinney talking about himself at dinner before he knew what he was about. He could not help talking well upon this theme, and he had them so vividly interested, as he poured out adventure after adventure in his strange career, that Bartley began to be proud of him.

“Well, sir,” said Ricker, when he came to a pause, “you’ve lived a romance.”

“Yes,” replied Kinney, looking at Bartley for his approval, “and I’ve always thought that, if I ever got run clean ashore, high and dry, I’d make a stagger to write it out and do something with it. Do you suppose I could?”

“I promise to take it for the Sunday edition of the Chronicle Abstract, whenever you get it ready,” said Ricker.

Bartley laid his hand on his friend’s arm. “It’s bought up, old fellow. That narrative— ‘Confessions of an Average American’ — belongs to the Events.”

They had their laugh at this, and then Ricker said to Kinney: “But look here, my friend! What’s to prevent our interviewing you on this little personal history of yours, and using your material any way we like? It seems to me that you’ve put your head in the lion’s mouth.”

“Oh, I’m amongst gentlemen,” said Kinney, with an innocent swagger. “I understand that.”

“Well, I don’t know about it,” said Ricker. “Hubbard, here, is used to all sorts of hard names; but I’ve never had that epithet applied to me before.”

Kinney doubled himself up over the side of his chair in recognition of Ricker’s joke; and when Bartley rose and asked him if he would come into the parlor and have a cigar, he said, with a wink, no, he guessed he would stay with the ladies. He waited with great mystery till the folding-doors were closed, and Bartley had stopped peeping through the crevice between them, and then he began to disengage from his watch-chain the golden nugget, shaped to a rude sphere, which hung there. This done, he asked if he might put it on the little necklace — a christening gift from Mrs. Halleck — which the baby had on, to see how it looked. It looked very well, like an old Roman bolla, though neither Kinney nor Marcia knew it. “Guess we’ll let it stay there,” he suggested, timidly.

“Mr. Kinney!” cried Marcia, in amaze, “I can’t let you!”

“Oh, do now, ma’am!” pleaded the big fellow, simply. “If you knew how much good it does me, you would. Why, it’s been like heaven to me to get into such a home as this for a day, — it has indeed.”

“Like heaven?” said Marcia, turning pale. “Oh, my!”

“Well, I don’t mean any harm. What I mean is, I’ve knocked about the world so much, and never had any home of my own, that to see folks as happy as you be makes me happier than I’ve been since I don’t know when. Now, you let it stay. It was the first piece of gold I picked up in Californy when I went out there in ‘50, and it’s about the last; I didn’t have very good luck. Well, of course! I know I ain’t fit to give it; but I want to do it. I think Bartley’s about the greatest fellow and he’s the best fellow this world can show. That’s the way I feel about him. And I want to do it. Sho! the thing wa’n’t no use to me!”

Marcia always gave her maid off all work Sunday afternoon, and she would not trespass upon her rule because she had guests that day. Except for the confusion to which Kinney’s unexpected gift had put her, she would have waited for him to join the others before she began to clear away the dinner; but now she mechanically began, and Kinney, to whom these domestic occupations were a second nature, joined her in the work, equally absent-minded in the fervor of his petition.

Bartley suddenly flung open the doors. “My dear, Mr. Ricker says he must be go—” He discovered Marcia with the dish of potatoes in her hand, and Kinney in the act of carrying off the platter of turkey. “Look here, Ricker!”

Kinney came to himself, and, opening his mouth above the platter wide enough to swallow the remains of the turkey, slapped his leg with the hand that he released for the purpose, and shouted, “The ruling passion, Bartley, the ruling passion!”

The men roared; but Marcia, even while she took in the situation, did not see anything so ridiculous in it as they. She smiled a little in sympathy with their mirth, and then said, with a look and tone which he had not seen or heard in her since the day of their picnic at Equity, “Come, see what Mr. Kinney has given baby, Bartley.”

They sat up talking Kinney over after he was gone; but even at ten o’clock Bartley said he should not go to bed; he felt like writing.

XXIX.

Bartley lived well now. He felt that he could afford it, on fifty dollars a week; and yet somehow he had always a sheaf of unpaid bills on hand. Rent was so much, the butcher so much, the grocer so much; these were the great outlays, and he knew just what they were; but the sum total was always much larger than he expected. At a pinch, he borrowed; but he did not let Marcia know of this, for she would have starved herself to pay the debt; what was worse, she would have wished him to starve with her. He kept the purse, and he kept the accounts; he was master in his house, and he meant to be so.

The pinch always seemed to come in the matter of clothes, and then Marcia gave up whatever she wanted, and said she must make the old things do. Bartley hated this; in his position he must dress well, and, as there was nothing mean about him, he wished Marcia to dress well to. Just at this time he had set his heart on her having a certain sacque which they had noticed in a certain window one day when they were on Washington Street together. He surprised her a week later by bringing the sacque home to her, and he surprised himself with a seal-skin cap which he had long coveted: it was coming winter, now, and for half a dozen days of the season he would really need the cap. There would be many days when it would be comfortable, and many others when it would be tolerable, and he looked so handsome in it that Marcia herself could not quite feel that it was an extravagance. She asked him how they could afford both of the things at once, but he answered with easy mystery that he had provided the funds; and she went gayly round with him to call on the Hallecks that evening and show off her sacque. It was so stylish and pretty that it won her a compliment from Ben Halleck, which she noticed because it was the first compliment, or anything like it, that he had ever paid her. She repeated it to Bartley. “He said that I looked like a Hungarian princess that he saw in Vienna.”

“Well, I suppose it has a hussar kind of look with that fur trimming and that broad braid. Did anybody say anything about my cap?” asked Bartley with burlesque eagerness.

“Oh, poor Bartley!” she cried in laughing triumph. “I don’t believe any of them noticed it; and you kept twirling it round in your hands all the time to make them look.”

“Yes, I did my level best,” said Bartley.

They had a jolly time about that. Marcia was proud of her sacque; when she took it off and held it up by the loop in the neck, so as to realize its prettiness, she said she should make it last three winters at least; and she leaned over and gave Bartley a sweet kiss of gratitude and affection, and told him not to try to make up for it by extra work, but to help her scrimp for it.

“I’d rather do the extra work,” he protested. In fact he already had the extra work done. It was something that he felt he had the right to sell outside of the Events, and he carried his manuscript to Ricker and offered it to him for his Sunday edition.

Ricker read the title and ran his eye down the first slip, and then glanced quickly at Hubbard. “You don’t mean it?”

“Yes I do,” said Bartley. “Why not?”

“I thought he was going to use the material himself some time.”

Bartley laughed. “He use the material! Why, he can’t write, any more than a hen; he can make tracks on paper, but nobody would print ‘em, much less buy ‘em. I know him, he’s all right. It wouldn’t hurt the material for his purpose, any way; and he’ll be tickled to death when he sees it. If he ever does. Look here, Ricker!” added Bartley, with a touch of anger at the hesitation in his friend’s face, “if you’re going to spring any conscientious scruples on me, I prefer to offer my manuscript elsewhere. I give you the first chance at it; but it needn’t go begging. Do you suppose I’d do this if I didn’t understand the man, and know just how he’d take it?”

“Why, of course, Hubbard! I beg your pardon. If you say it’s all right, I am bound to be satisfied. What do you want for it?”

“Fifty dollars.”

“That’s a good deal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. But I can’t afford to do a dishonorable thing for less money,” said Bartley, with a wink.

The next Sunday, when Marcia came home from church, she went into the parlor a moment to speak to Bartley before she ran upstairs to the baby. He was writing, and she put her left hand on his back while with her right she held her sacque slung over her shoulder by the loop, and leaned forward with a wandering eye on the papers that strewed the table. In that attitude he felt her pause and grow absorbed, and then rigid; her light caress tightened into a grip. “Why, how base! How shameful! That man shall never enter my doors again! Why, it’s stealing!”

“What’s the matter? What are you talking about?” Bartley looked up with a frown of preparation.

“This!” cried Marcia, snatching up the Chronicle-Abstract, at which she had been looking. “Haven’t you seen it? Here’s Mr. Kinney’s life all written out! And when he said that he was going to keep it and write it out himself. That thief has stolen it!”

“Look out how you talk,” said Bartley. “Kinney’s an old fool, and he never could have written it out in the world—”

“That makes no difference. He said that he told the things because he knew he was among gentlemen. A great gentleman Mr. Ricker is! And I thought he was so nice!” The tears sprang to her eyes, which flashed again. “I want you to break off with him. Bartley; I don’t want you to have anything to do with such a thief! And I shall be proud to tell everybody that you’ve broken off with him because he was a thief. Oh, Bartley—”

“Hold your tongue!” shouted her husband.

“I won’t hold my tongue! And if you defend—”

“Don’t you say a word against Ricker. It’s all right, I tell you. You don’t understand such things. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I — I — I wrote the thing myself.”

He could face her, but she could not face him. There was a subsidence in her proud attitude, as if her physical strength had snapped with her breaking spirit.

“There’s no theft about it.” Bartley went on. “Kinney would never write it out, and if he did, I’ve put the material in better shape for him here than he could ever have given it. Six weeks from now nobody will remember a word of it; and he could tell the same things right over again, and they would be just as good as new.” He went on to argue the point.

She seemed not to have listened to him. When he stopped, she said, in a quiet, passionless voice, “I suppose you wrote it to get money for this sacque.”

“Yes; I did,” replied Bartley.

She dropped it on the floor at his feet. “I shall never wear it again,” she said in the same tone, and a little sigh escaped her.

“Use your pleasure about that,” said Bartley, sitting down to his writing again, as she turned and left the room.

She went upstairs and came down immediately, with the gold nugget, which she had wrenched from the baby’s necklace, and laid it on the paper before him. “Perhaps you would like to spend it for tivoli beer,” she suggested. “Flavia shall not wear it.”

“I’ll get it fitted on to my watch-chain.” Bartley slipped it into his waistcoat pocket.

The sacque still lay on the floor at his feet; he pulled his chair a little forward and put his feet on it. He feigned to write awhile longer, and then he folded up his papers, and went out, leaving Marcia to make her Sunday dinner alone. When he came home late at night, he found the sacque where she had dropped it, and with a curse he picked it up and hung it on the hat-rack in the hall.

He slept in the guest-chamber, and at times during the night the child cried in Marcia’s room and waked him; and then he thought he heard a sound of sobbing which was not the child’s. In the morning, when he came down to breakfast, Marcia met him with swollen eyes.

“Bartley,” she said tremulously, “I wish you would tell me how you felt justified in writing out Mr. Kinney’s life in that way.”

“My dear,” said Bartley, with perfect amiability, for he had slept off his anger, and he really felt sorry to see her so unhappy, “I would tell you almost anything you want on any other subject; but I think we had better remand that one to the safety of silence, and go upon the general supposition that I know what I’m about.”

“I can’t, Bartley!”

“Can’t you? Well, that’s a pity.” He pulled his chair to the breakfast-table. “It seems to me that girl’s imagination always fails her on Mondays. Can she never give us anything but hash and corn-bread when she’s going to wash? However, the coffee’s good. I suppose you made it?”

“Bartley!” persisted Marcia, “I want to believe in everything you do, — I want to be proud of it—”

“That will be difficult,” suggested Bartley, with an air of thoughtful impartiality, “for the wife of a newspaper man.”

“No, no! It needn’t be! It mustn’t be! If you will only tell me—” She stopped, as if she feared to repeat her offence.

Bartley leaned back in his chair and looked at her intense face with a smile. “Tell you that in some way I had Kinney’s authority to use his facts? Well, I should have done that yesterday if you had let me. In the first place, Kinney’s the most helpless ass in the world. He could never have used his own facts. In the second place, there was hardly anything in his rigmarole the other day that he hadn’t told me down there in the lumber camp, with full authority to use it in any way I liked; and I don’t see how he could revoke that authority. That’s the way I reasoned about it.”

“I see, — I see!” said Marcia, with humble eagerness.

“Well, that’s all there is about it. What I’ve done can’t hurt Kinney. If he ever does want to write his old facts out, he’ll be glad to take my report of them, and — spoil it,” said Bartley, ending with a laugh.

“And if — if there had been anything wrong about it,” said Marcia, anxious to justify him to herself, “Mr. Ricker would have told you so when you offered him the article.”

“I don’t think Mr. Ricker would have ventured on any impertinence with me,” said Bartley, with grandeur. But he lapsed into his wonted, easy way of taking everything. “What are you driving at, Marsh? I don’t care particularly for what happened yesterday. We’ve had rows enough before, and I dare say we shall have them again. You gave me a bad quarter of an hour, and you gave yourself” — he looked at her tear-stained eyes— “a bad night, apparently. That’s all there is about it.”

“Oh, no, that isn’t all! It isn’t like the other quarrels we’ve had. When I think how I’ve felt toward you ever since, it scares me. There can’t be anything sacred in our marriage unless we trust each other in everything.”

“Well, I haven’t done any of the mistrusting,” said Bartley, with humorous lightness. “But isn’t sacred rather a strong word to use in regard to our marriage, anyway?”

“Why — why — what do you mean, Bartley? We were married by a minister.”

“Well, yes, by what was left of one,” said Bartley. “He couldn’t seem to shake himself together sufficiently to ask for the proof that we had declared our intention to get married.”

Marcia looked mystified. “Don’t you remember his saying there was something else, and my suggesting to him that it was the fee?”

Marcia turned white. “Father said the certificate was all right—”

“Oh, he asked to see it, did he? He is a prudent old gentleman. Well, it is all right.”

“And what difference did it make about our not proving that we had declared our intention?” asked Marcia, as if only partly reassured.

“No difference to us; and only a difference of sixty dollars fine to him, if it was ever found out.”

“And you let the poor old man run that risk?”

“Well, you see, it couldn’t be helped. We hadn’t declared our intention, and the lady seemed very anxious to be married. You needn’t be troubled. We are married, right and tight enough; but I don’t know that there’s anything sacred about it.”

“No,” Marcia wailed out, “its tainted with fraud from the beginning.”

“If you like to say so,” Bartley assented, putting his napkin into its ring.

Marcia hid her face in her arms on the table; the baby left off drumming with its spoon, and began to cry.

Witherby was reading the Sunday edition of the Chronicle-Abstract, when Bartley got down to the Events office; and he cleared his throat with a premonitory cough as his assistant swung easily into the room. “Good morning, Mr. Hubbard,” he said. “There is quite an interesting article in yesterday’s Chronicle-Abstract. Have you seen it?”

“Yes,” said Bartley. “What article?”

“This Confessions of an Average American.” Witherby held out the paper, where Bartley’s article, vividly head-lined and sub-headed, filled half a page. “What is the reason we cannot have something of this kind?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Bartley began.

“Have you any idea who wrote this?”

“Oh, yes, I wrote it.”

Witherby had the task before him of transmuting an expression of rather low cunning into one of wounded confidence, mingled with high-minded surprise. “I thought it had your ear-marks, Mr. Hubbard: but I preferred not to believe it till I heard the fact from your own lips. I supposed that our contract covered such contributions as this.”

“I wrote it out of time, and on Sunday night. You pay me by the week, and all that I do throughout the week belongs to you. The next day after that Sunday I did a full day’s work on the Events. I don’t see what you have to complain of. You told me when I began that you would not expect more than a certain amount of work from me. Have I ever done less?”

“No, but—”

“Haven’t I always done more?”

“Yes, I have never complained of the amount of work. But upon this theory of yours, what you did in your summer vacation would not belong to the Events, or what you did on legal holidays.”

“I never have any summer vacation or holidays, legal or illegal. Even when I was down at Equity last summer I sent you something for the paper every day.”

This was true, and Witherby could not gainsay it. “Very well, sir. If this is to be your interpretation of our understanding for the future, I shall wish to revise our contract,” he said pompously.

“You can tear it up if you like,” returned Bartley. “I dare say Ricker would jump at a little study of the true inwardness of counting-room journalism. Unless you insist upon having it for the Events.” Bartley gave a chuckle of enjoyment as he sat down at his desk; Witherby rose and stalked away.

He returned in half an hour and said, with an air of frank concession, touched with personal grief: “Mr. Hubbard, I can see how, from your point of view, you were perfectly justifiable in selling your article to the Chronicle-Abstract. My point of view is different, but I shall not insist upon it; and I wish to withdraw — and — and apologize for — any hasty expressions I may have used.”

“All right,” said Bartley, with a wicked grin. He had triumphed; but his triumph was one to leave some men with an uneasy feeling, and there was not altogether a pleasant taste in Bartley’s mouth. After that his position in the Events office was whatever he chose to make it, but he did not abuse his ascendency, and he even made a point of increased deference towards Witherby. Many courtesies passed between them; each took some trouble to show the other that he had no ill feeling.

Three or four weeks later Bartley received a letter with an Illinois postmark which gave him a disagreeable sensation, at first, for he knew it must be from Kinney. But the letter was so amusingly characteristic, so helplessly ill-spelled and ill-constructed, that he could not help laughing. Kinney gave an account of his travels to the mining town, and of his present situation and future prospects; he was full of affectionate messages and inquiries for Bartley’s family, and he said he should never forget that Sunday he had passed with them. In a postscript he added: “They copied that String of lies into our paper, here, out of the Chron.-Ab. It was pretty well done, but if your friend Mr. Ricker done it, I’me not goen to Insult him soon again by calling him a gentleman.”

This laconic reference to the matter in a postscript was delicious to Bartley; he seemed to hear Kinney saying the words, and imagined his air of ineffective sarcasm. He carried the letter about with him, and the first time he saw Ricker he showed it to him. Ricker read it without appearing greatly diverted; when he came to the postscript he flushed, and demanded, “What have you done about it?”

“Oh, I haven’t done anything. It wasn’t necessary. You see, now, what Kinney could have done with his facts if we had left them to him. It would have been a wicked waste of material I thought the sight of some of his literature would help you wash up your uncleanly scruples on that point.”

“How long have you had this letter?” pursued Ricker.

“I don’t know. A week or ten days.”

Ricker folded it up and returned it to him. “Mr. Hubbard,” he said, “the next time we meet, will you do me the favor to cut my acquaintance?”

Bartley stared at him; he thought he must be joking. “Why, Ricker, what’s the matter? I didn’t suppose you’d care anything about old Kinney. I thought it would amuse you. Why, confound it! I’d just as soon write out and tell him that I did the thing.” He began to be angry. “But I can cut your acquaintance fast enough, or any man’s, if you’re really on your ear!”

“I’m on my ear,” said Ricker. He left Bartley standing where they had met.

It was peculiarly unfortunate, for Bartley had occasion within that week to ask Ricker’s advice, and he was debarred from doing so by this absurd displeasure. Since their recent perfect understanding, Witherby had slighted no opportunity to cement their friendship, and to attach Bartley more and more firmly to the Events. He now offered him some of the Events stock on extremely advantageous terms, with the avowed purpose of attaching him to the paper. There seemed nothing covert in this, and Bartley had never heard any doubts of the prosperity of the Events, but he would have especially liked to have Ricker’s mind upon this offer of stock. Witherby had urged him not to pay for the whole outright, but to accept a somewhat lower salary, and trust to his dividends to make up the difference. The shares had paid fifteen per cent the year before, and Bartley could judge for himself of the present chances from that showing. Witherby advised him to borrow only fifteen hundred dollars on the three thousand of stock which he offered him, and to pay up the balance in three years by dropping five hundred a year from his salary. It was certainly a flattering proposal; and under his breath, where Bartley still did most of his blaspheming, he cursed Ricker for an old fool; and resolved to close with Witherby on his own responsibility. After he had done so he told Marcia of the step he had taken.

Since their last quarrel there had been an alienation in her behavior toward him, different from any former resentment. She was submissive and quiescent; she looked carefully after his comfort, and was perfect in her housekeeping; but she held aloof from him somehow, and left him to a solitude in her presence in which he fancied, if he did not divine, her contempt. But in this matter of common interest, something of their community of feeling revived; they met on a lower level, but they met, for the moment, and Marcia joined eagerly in the discussion of ways and means.

The notion of dropping five hundred from his salary delighted her, because they must now cut down their expenses as much; and she had long grieved over their expenses without being able to make Bartley agree to their reduction. She went upstairs at once and gave the little nurse-maid a week’s warning; she told the maid of all work that she must take three dollars a week hereafter instead of four, or else find another place; she mentally forewent new spring dresses for herself and the baby, and arranged to do herself all of the wash she had been putting out; she put a note in the mouth of the can at the back door, telling the milkman to leave only two quarts in future; and she came radiantly back to tell Bartley that she had saved half of the lost five hundred a year already. But her countenance fell. “Why, where are you to get the other fifteen hundred dollars, Bartley?”

“Oh, I Ve thought of that,” said Bartley, laughing at her swift alternations of triumph and despair. “You trust to me for that.”

“You’re not — not going to ask father for it?” she faltered.

“Not very much,” said Bartley, as he took his hat to go out.

He meant to make a raise out of Ben Halleck, as he phrased it to himself. He knew that Halleck had plenty of money; he could make the stock itself over to him as security; he did not see why Halleck should hesitate. But when he entered Halleck’s room, having asked Cyrus to show him directly there, Halleck gave a start which seemed ominous to Bartley. He had scarcely the heart to open his business, and Halleck listened with changing color, and something only too like the embarrassment of a man who intends a refusal. He would not look Bartley in the face, and when Bartley had made an end he sat for a time without speaking. At last he said with a quick sigh, as if at the close of an internal conflict, “I will lend you the money!”

Bartley’s heart gave a bound, and he broke out into an immense laugh of relief, and clapped Halleck on the shoulder. “You looked deucedly as it’ you wouldn’t, old man! By George, you had on such a dismal, hang-dog expression that I didn’t know but you’d come to borrow money of me, and I’d made up my mind not to let you have it! But I’m everlastingly obliged to you, Halleck, and I promise you that you won’t regret it.”

“I shall have to speak to my father about this,” said Halleck, responding coldly to Bartley’s robust pressure of his hand.

“Of course, — of course.”

“How soon shall you want the money?”

“Well, the sooner the better, now. Bring the check round — can’t you? — to-morrow night, — and take dinner with us, you and Olive; and we’ll celebrate a little. I know it will please Marcia when she finds out who my hard-hearted creditor is!”

“Well,” assented Halleck with a smile so ghastly that Bartley noticed it even in his joy.

“Curse me,” he said to himself, “if ever I saw a man so ashamed of doing a good action!”

XXX.

The Presidential canvas of the summer — which, followed upon these events in Bartley’s career was not very active. Sometimes, in fact, it languished so much that people almost forgot it, and a good field was afforded the Events for the practice of independent journalism. To hold a course of strict impartiality, and yet come out on the winning side was a theory of independent journalism which Bartley illustrated with cynical enjoyment. He developed into something rather artistic the gift which he had always shown in his newspaper work for ironical persiflage. Witherby was not a man to feel this burlesque himself; but when it was pointed out to him by others, he came to Bartley in some alarm from its effect upon the fortunes of the paper. “We can’t afford, Mr. Hubbard,” he said, with virtuous trepidation, “we can’t afford to make fun of our friends!”

Bartley laughed at Witherby’s anxiety. “They’re no more our friends than the other fellows are. We are independent journalists; and this way of treating the thing leaves us perfectly free hereafter to claim, just as we choose, that we were in fun or in earnest on any particular question if we’re ever attacked. See?”

“I see,” said Witherby, with not wholly subdued misgiving. But after due time for conviction no man enjoyed Bartley’s irony more than Witherby when once he had mastered an instance of it. Sometimes it happened that Bartley found him chuckling over a perfectly serious paragraph, but he did not mind that; he enjoyed Witherby’s mistake even more than his appreciation.

In these days Bartley was in almost uninterrupted good humor, as he had always expected to be when he became fairly prosperous. He was at no time an unamiable fellow, as he saw it; he had his sulks, he had his moments of anger; but generally he felt good, and he had always believed, and he had promised Marcia, that when he got squarely on his legs he should feel good perpetually. This sensation he now agreeably realized; and he was also now in that position in which he had proposed to himself some little moral reforms. He was not much in the habit of taking stock; but no man wholly escapes the contingencies in which he is confronted with himself, and sees certain habits, traits, tendencies, which he would like to change for the sake of his peace of mind hereafter. To some souls these contingencies are full of anguish, of remorse for the past, of despair; but Bartley had never yet seen the time when he did not feel himself perfectly able to turn over a new leaf and blot the old one. There were not many things in his life which he really cared to have very different; but there were two or three shady little corners which he always intended to clean up. He had meant some time or other to have a religious belief of some sort, he did not much care what; since Marcia had taken to the Hallecks’ church, he did not see why he should not go with her, though he had never yet done so. He was not quite sure whether he was always as candid with her as he might be, or as kind; though he maintained against this question that in all their quarrels it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. He had never been tipsy but once in his life, and he considered that he had repented and atoned for that enough, especially as nothing had ever come of it; but sometimes he thought he might be over-doing the beer; yes, he thought he must cut down on the tivoli; he was getting ridiculously fat. If ever he met Kinney again he should tell him that it was he and not Ricker who had appropriated his facts and he intended to make it up with Ricker somehow.

He had not found just the opportunity yet; but in the mean time he did not mind telling the real cause of their alienation to good fellows who could enjoy a joke. He had his following, though so many of his brother journalists had cooled toward him, and those of his following considered him as smart as chain-lightning and bound to rise. These young men and not very wise elders roared over Bartley’s frank declaration of the situation Between himself and Ricker, and they contended that, if Ricker had taken the article for the Chronicle-Abstract, he ought to take the consequences. Bartley told them that, of course, he should explain the facts to Kinney; but that he meant to let Ricker enjoy his virtuous indignation awhile. Once, after a confidence of this kind at the club, where Ricker had refused to speak to him, he came away with a curious sense of moral decay. It did not pain him a great deal, but it certainly surprised him that now, with all these prosperous conditions, so favorable for cleaning up, he had so little disposition to clean up. He found himself quite willing to let the affair with Ricker go, and he suspected that he had been needlessly virtuous in his intentions concerning church-going and beer. As to Marcia, it appeared to him that he could not treat a woman of her disposition otherwise than as he did. At any rate, if he had not done everything he could to make her happy, she seemed to be getting along well enough, and was probably quite as happy as she deserved to be. They were getting on very quietly now; there had been no violent outbreak between them since the trouble about Kinney, and then she had practically confessed herself in the wrong, as Bartley looked at it. She had appeared contented with his explanation; there was what might be called a perfect business amity between them. If her life with him was no longer an expression of that intense devotion which she used to show him, it was more like what married life generally comes to, and he accepted her tractability and what seemed her common-sense view of their relations as greatly preferable. With his growth in flesh, Bartley liked peace more and more.

Marcia had consented to go down to Equity alone, that summer, for he had convinced her that during a heated political contest it would not do for him to be away from the paper. He promised to go down for her when she wished to come home; and it was easily arranged for her to travel as far as the Junction under Halleck’s escort, when he went to join his sisters in the White Mountains. Bartley missed her and the baby at first. But he soon began to adjust himself with resignation to his solitude. They had determined to keep their maid over this summer, for they had so much trouble in replacing her the last time after their return; and Bartley said he should live very economically. It was quiet, and the woman kept the house cool and clean; she was a good cook, and when Bartley brought a man home to dinner she took an interest in serving it well. Bartley let her order the things from the grocer and butcher, for she knew what they were used to getting, and he had heard so much talk from Marcia about bills since he bought that Events stock that he was sick of the prices of things. There was no extravagance, and vet he seemed to live very much better after Marcia went. There is no doubt but he lived very much more at his ease. One little restriction after another fell away from him; he went and came with absolute freedom, not only without having to account for his movements, but without having a pang for not doing so. He had the sensation of stretching himself after a cramping posture; and he wrote Marcia the cheerfulest letters, charging her not to cut short her visit from anxiety on his account. He said that he was working hard, but hard work evidently agreed with him, for he was never better in his life. In this high content he maintained a feeling of loyalty by going to the Hallecks, where Mrs. Halleck often had him to tea in pity of his loneliness. They were dull company, certainly; but Marcia liked them, and the cooking was always good. Other evenings he went to the theatres, where there were amusing variety bills; and sometimes he passed the night at Nantasket, or took a run for a day to Newport; he always reported these excursions to Marcia, with expressions of regret that Equity was too far away to run down to for a day.

Marcia’s letters were longer and more regular than his; but he could have forgiven some want of constancy for the sake of a less searching anxiety on her part. She was anxious not only for his welfare, which was natural and proper, but she was anxious about the housekeeping and the expenses, things Bartley could not afford to let trouble him, though he did what he could in a general way to quiet her mind. She wrote fully of the visit which Olive Halleck had paid her, but said that they had not gone about much, for Ben Halleck had only been able to come for a day. She was very well, and so was Flavia.

Bartley realized Flavia’s existence with an effort, and for the rest this letter bored him. What could he care about Olive Halleck’s coming, or Ben Halleck’s staying away? All that he asked of Ben Halleck was a little extension of time when his interest fell due. The whole thing was disagreeable; and he resented what he considered Marcia’s endeavor to clap the domestic harness on him again. His thoughts wandered to conditions, to contingencies, of which a man does not permit himself even to think without a degree of moral disintegration. In these ill-advised reveries he mused upon his life as it might have been if he had never met her, or if they had never met after her dismissal of him. As he recalled the facts, he was at that time in an angry and embittered mood, but he was in a mood of entire acquiescence; and the reconciliation had been of her own seeking. He could not blame her for it; she was very much in love with him, and he had been fond of her. In fact, he was still very fond of her; when he thought of little ways of hers, it filled him with tenderness. He did justice to her fine qualities, too: her generosity, her truthfulness, her entire loyalty to his best interests; he smiled to realize that he himself preferred his second-best interests, and in her absence he remembered that her virtues were tedious, and even painful at times. He had his doubts whether there was sufficient compensation in them. He sometimes questioned whether he had not made a great mistake to get married; he expected now to stick it through; but this doubt occurred to him. A moment came in which he asked himself, What if he had never come back to Marcia that night when she locked him out of her room? Might it not have been better for both of them? She would soon have reconciled herself to the irreparable; he even thought of her happy in a second marriage; and the thought did not enrage him; he generously wished Marcia well. He wished — he hardly knew what he wished. He wished nothing at all but to have his wife and child back again as soon as possible; and he put aside with a laugh the fancies which really found no such distinct formulation as I have given them; which were mere vague impulses, arrested mental tendencies, scraps of undirected revery. Their recurrence had nothing to do with what he felt to be his sane and waking state. But they recurred, and he even amused himself in turning them over.

XXXI.

One morning in September, not long before Marcia returned, Bartley found Witherby at the office waiting for him. Witherby wore a pensive face, which had the effect of being studied. “Good morning, Mr. Hubbard,” he said, and when Bartley answered, “Good morning,” cheerfully ignoring his mood, he added, “What is this I hear, Mr. Hubbard, about a personal misunderstanding between you and Mr. Ricker?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Bartley; “but I suppose that if you have heard anything you know.”

“I have heard,” proceeded Witherby, a little dashed by Bartley’s coolness, “that Mr. Ricker accuses you of having used material in that article you sold him which had been intrusted to you under the seal of confidence, and that you had left it to be inferred by the party concerned — that Mr. Ricker had written the article himself.”

“All right,” said Bartley.

“But, Mr. Hubbard,” said Witherby, struggling to rise into virtuous supremacy, “what am I to think of such a report?”

“I can’t say; unless you should think that it wasn’t your affair. That would be the easiest thing.”

“But I can’t think that, Mr. Hubbard! Such a report reflects through you upon the Events; it reflects upon me!” Bartley laughed. “I can’t approve of such a thing. If you admit the report, it appears to me that you have — a — done a — a — wrong action, Mr. Hubbard.”

Bartley turned upon him with a curious look; at the same time he felt a pang, and there was a touch of real anguish in the sarcasm of his demand, “Have I fallen so low as to be rebuked by you?”

“I — I don’t know what you mean by such an expression as that, Mr. Hubbard,” said Witherby. “I don’t know what I’ve done to forfeit your esteem, — to justify you in using such language to me.”

“I don’t suppose you really do,” said Bartley. “Go on.”

“I have nothing more to say, Mr. Hubbard, except — except to add that this has given me a great blow, — a great blow. I had begun to have my doubts before as to whether we were quite adapted to each other, and this has — increased them. I pass no judgment upon what you have done, but I will say that it has made me anxious and — a — unrestful. It has made me ask myself whether upon the whole we should not be happier apart. I don’t say that we should; but I only feel that nine out of ten business men would consider you, in the position you occupy on the Events, — a — a — dangerous person.”

Bartley got up from his desk, and walked toward Witherby, with his hands in his pockets; he halted a few paces from him, and looked down on him with a sinister smile. “I don’t think they’d consider you a dangerous person in any position.”

“May be not, may be not,” said Witherby, striving to be easy and dignified. In the effort he took up an open paper from the desk before him, and, lifting it between Bartley and himself, feigned to be reading it.

Bartley struck it out of his trembling hands. “You impudent old scoundrel! Do you pretend to be reading when I speak to you? For half a cent—”

Witherby, slipping and sliding in his swivel chair, contrived to get to his feet “No violence, Mr. Hubbard, no violence here!”

“Violence!” laughed Bartley. “I should have to touch you! Come! Don’t be afraid! But don’t you put on airs of any sort! I understand your game. You want, for some reason, to get rid of me, and you have seized the opportunity with a sharpness that does credit to your cunning. I don’t condescend to deny this report,” — speaking in this lofty strain, Bartley had a momentary sensation of its being a despicable slander,— “but I see that as far as you are concerned it answers all the purposes of truth. You think that with the chance of having this thing exploited against me I won’t expose your nefarious practices, and you can get rid of me more safely now than ever you could again. Well, you’re right. I dare say you heard of this report a good while ago, and you’ve waited till you could fill my place without inconvenience to yourself. So I can go at once. Draw your check for all you owe me, and pay me back the money I put into your stock, and I’ll clear out at once.” He went about putting together a few personal effects on his desk.

“I must protest against any allusion to nefarious practices, Mr. Hubbard,” said Witherby, “and I wish you to understand that I part from you without the slightest ill-feeling. I shall always have a high regard for your ability, and — and — your social qualities.” While he made these expressions he hastened to write two checks.

Bartley, who had paid no attention to what Witherby was saying, came up and took the checks. “This is all right,” he said of one. But looking at the other, he added, “Fifteen hundred dollars? Where is the dividend?”

“That is not due till the end of the month,” said Witherby. “If you withdraw your money now, you lose it.”

Bartley looked at the face to which Witherby did his best to give a high judicial expression. “You old thief!” he said good-humoredly, almost affectionately. “I have a mind to tweak your nose!” But he went out of the room without saying or doing anything more. He wondered a little at his own amiability; but with the decay of whatever was right-principled in him, he was aware of growing more and more incapable of indignation. Now, his flash of rage over, he was not at all discontented. With these checks in his pocket, with his youth, his health, and his practised hand, he could have faced the world, with a light heart, if he had not also had to face his wife. But when he thought of the inconvenience of explaining to her, of pacifying her anxiety, of clearing up her doubts on a thousand points, and of getting her simply to eat or sleep till he found something else to do, it dismayed him. “Good Lord!” he said to himself, “I wish I was dead — or some one.” That conclusion made him smile again.

He decided not to write to Marcia of the change in his affairs, but to take the chance of finding something better before she returned. There was very little time for him to turn round, and he was still without a place or any prospect when she came home. It had sufficed with his acquaintance when he said that he had left the Events because he could not get on with Witherby; but he was very much astonished when it seemed to suffice with her.

“Oh, well,” she said, “I am glad of it. You will do better by yourself; and I know you can earn just as much by writing on the different papers.”

Bartley knew better than this, but he said, “Yes, I shall not be in a hurry to take another engagement just yet. But, Marsh,” he added, “I was afraid you would blame me, — think I had been reckless, or at fault—”

“No,” she answered after a little pause, “I shall not do that any more. I have been thinking all these things over, while I was away from you, and I’m going to do differently, after this. I shall believe that you’ve acted for the best, — that you’ve not meant to do wrong in anything, — and I shall never question you or doubt you any more.”

“Isn’t that giving me rather too much rope?” asked Bartley, with lightness that masked a vague alarm lest the old times of exaction should be coming back with the old times of devotion.

“No; I see where my mistake has always been. I’ve always asked too much, and expected too much, even when I didn’t ask it. Now, I shall be satisfied with what you don’t do, as well as what you do.”

“I shall try to live up to my privileges,” said Bartley, with a sigh of relief. He gave her a kiss, and then he unclasped Kinney’s nugget from his watch-chain, and fastened it on the baby’s necklace, which lay in a box Marcia had just taken from her trunk. She did not speak; but Bartley felt better to have the thing off him; Marcia’s gentleness, the tinge of sadness in her tone, made him long to confess himself wrong in the whole matter, and justly punished by Ricker’s contempt and Witherby’s dismissal. But he did not believe that he could trust her to forgive him, and he felt himself unable to go through all that without the certainty of her forgiveness.

As she took the things out of her trunk, and laid them away in this drawer and that, she spoke of events in the village, and told who was dead, who was married, and who had gone away. “I stayed longer than I expected, a little, because father seemed to want me to. I don’t think mother’s so well as she used to be, I — I’m afraid she seems to be failing, somehow.”

Her voice dropped to a lower key, and Bartley said, “I’m sorry to hear that. I guess she isn’t failing. But of course she’s getting on, and every year makes a difference.”

“Yes, that must be it,” she answered, looking at a bundle of collars she had in her hand, as if absorbed in the question as to where she should put them.

Before they slept that night she asked, “Bartley, did you hear about Hannah Morrison?”

“No. What about her?”

“She’s gone — gone away. The last time she was seen was in Portland. They don’t know what’s become of her. They say that Henry Bird is about heart-broken; but everybody knows she never cared for him. I hated to write to you about it.”

Bartley experienced so disagreeable a sensation that he was silent for a time. Then he gave a short, bitter laugh. “Well, that’s what it was bound to come to, sooner or later, I suppose. It’s a piece of good luck for Bird.”

Bartley went about picking up work from one paper and another, but not securing a basis on any. In that curious and unwholesome leniency which corrupt natures manifest, he and Witherby met at their next encounter on quite amicable terms. Bartley reported some meetings for the Events, and experienced no resentment when Witherby at the office introduced him to the gentleman with whom he had replaced him. Of course Bartley expected that Witherby would insinuate things to his disadvantage, but he did not mind that. He heard of something of the sort being done in Ricker’s presence, and of Ricker’s saying that in any question of honor and veracity between Witherby and Hubbard he should decide for Hubbard. Bartley was not very grateful for this generous defence; he thought that if Ricker had not been such an ass in the first place there would have been no trouble between them, and Witherby would not have had that handle against him.

He was enjoying himself very well, and he felt entitled to the comparative rest which had not been of his seeking. He wished that Halleck would come back, for he would like to ask his leave to put that money into some other enterprise. His credit was good, and he had not touched the money to pay any of his accumulated bills; he would have considered it dishonorable to do so. But it annoyed him to have the money lying idle. In his leisure he studied the stock market, and he believed that he had several points which were infallible. He put a few hundreds — two or three — of Halleck’s money into a mining stock which was so low that it must rise. In the mean time he tried a new kind of beer, — Norwegian beer, which he found a little lighter even than tivoli. It was more expensive, but it was very light, and it was essential to Bartley to drink the lightest beer he could find.

He stayed a good deal at home, now, for he had leisure, and it was a much more comfortable place since Marcia had ceased to question or reproach him. She did not interfere with some bachelor habits he had formed, in her absence, of sleeping far into the forenoon; he now occasionally did night-work on some of the morning papers, and the rest was necessary; he had his breakfast whenever he got up, as if he had been at a hotel. He wondered upon what new theory she was really treating him; but he had always been apt to accept what was comfortable in life without much question, and he did not wonder long. He was immensely good-natured now. In his frequent leisure he went out to walk with Marcia and Flavia, and sometimes he took the little girl alone. He even went to church with them one Sunday, and called at the Hallecks as often as Marcia liked. The young ladies had returned, but Ben Halleck was still away. It made Bartley smile to hear his wife talking of Halleck with his mother and sisters, and falling quite into the family way of regarding him as if he were somehow a saint and martyr.

Bartley was still dabbling in stocks with Halleck’s money; some of it had lately gone to pay an assessment which had unexpectedly occurred in place of a dividend. He told Marcia that he was holding the money ready to return to Halleck when he came back, or to put it into some other enterprise where it would help to secure Bartley a new basis. They were now together more than they had been since the first days of their married life in Boston; but the perfect intimacy of those days was gone; he had his reserves, and she her preoccupations, — with the house, with the little girl, with her anxiety about her mother. Sometimes they sat a whole evening together, with almost nothing to say to each other, he reading and she sewing. After an evening of this sort, Bartley felt himself worse bored than if Marcia had spent it in taking him to task as she used to do. Once he looked at her over the top of his paper, and distinctly experienced that he was tired of the whole thing.

But the political canvass was growing more interesting now. It was almost the end of October, and the speech-making had become very lively. The Democrats were hopeful and the Republicans resolute, and both parties were active in getting out their whole strength, as the saying is, at such times. This was done not only by speech-making, but by long nocturnal processions of torch-lights; by day, as well as by night, drums throbbed and horns brayed, and the feverish excitement spread its contagion through the whole population. But it did not affect Bartley. He had cared nothing about the canvass from the beginning, having an equal contempt for the bloody shirt of the Republicans and the reform pretensions of the Democrats. The only thing that he took an interest in was the betting; he laid his wagers with so much apparent science and sagacity that he had a certain following of young men who bet as Hubbard did. Hubbard, they believed, had a long head; he disdained bets of hats, and of barrels of apples, and ordeals by wheelbarrow; he would bet only with people who could put up their money, and his followers honored him for it; when asked where he got his money, being out of place, and no longer instant to do work that fell in his way, they answered from a ready faith that he had made a good thing in mining stocks.

In her heart, Marcia probably did not share this faith. But she faithfully forbore to harass Bartley with her doubts, and on those evenings when he found her such dull company she was silent because if she spoke she must express the trouble in her mind. Women are more apt to theorize their husbands than men in their stupid self-absorption ever realize. When a man is married, his wife almost ceases to be exterior to his consciousness; she afflicts or consoles him like a condition of health or sickness; she is literally part of him in a spiritual sense, even when he is rather indifferent to her; but the most devoted wife has always a corner of her soul in which she thinks of her husband as him; in which she philosophizes him wholly aloof from herself. In such an obscure fastness of her being, Marcia had meditated a great deal upon Bartley during her absence at Equity, — meditated painfully, and in her sort prayerfully, upon him. She perceived that he was not her young dream of him; and since it appeared to her that she could not forego that dream and live, she could but accuse herself of having somehow had a perverse influence upon him. She knew that she had never reproached him except for his good, but she saw too that she had always made him worse, and not better. She recurred to what he said the first night they arrived in Boston: “I believe that, if you have faith in me, I shall get along; and when you don’t, I shall go to the bad.” She could reason to no other effect, than that hereafter, no matter what happened, she must show perfect faith in him by perfect patience. It was hard, far harder than she had thought. But she did forbear; she did use patience.

The election day came and went. Bartley remained out till the news of Tilden’s success could no longer be doubted, and then came home jubilant. Marcia seemed not to understand. “I didn’t know you cared so much for Tilden,” she said, quietly. “Mr. Halleck is for Hayes; and Ben Halleck was coming home to vote.”

“That’s all right: a vote in Massachusetts makes no difference. I’m for Tilden, because I have the most money up on him. The success of that noble old reformer is worth seven hundred dollars to me in bets.” Bartley laughed, rubbed her cheeks with his chilly hands, and went down into the cellar for some beer. He could not have slept without that, in his excitement; but he was out very early the next morning, and in the raw damp of the rainy November day he received a more penetrating chill when he saw the bulletins at the newspaper offices intimating that a fair count might give the Republicans enough Southern States to elect Hayes. This appeared to Bartley the most impudent piece of political effrontery in the whole history of the country, and among those who went about denouncing Republican chicanery at the Democratic club-rooms, no one took a loftier tone of moral indignation than he. The thought that he might lose so much of Halleck’s money through the machinations of a parcel of carpet-bagging tricksters filled him with a virtue at which he afterwards smiled when he found that people were declaring their bets off. “I laid a wager on the popular result, not on the decision of the Returning Boards,” he said in reclaiming his money from the referees. He had some difficulty in getting it back, but he had got it when he walked homeward at night, after having been out all day; and there now ensued in his soul a struggle as to what he should do with this money. He had it all except the three hundred he had ventured on the mining stock, which would eventually he worth everything he had paid for it. After his frightful escape from losing half of it on those bets, he had an intense longing to be rid of it, to give it back to Halleck, who never would ask him for it, and then to go home and tell Marcia everything, and throw himself on her mercy. Better poverty, better disgrace before Halleck and her, better her condemnation, than this life of temptation that he had been leading. He saw how hideous it was in the retrospect, and he shuddered; his good instincts awoke, and put forth their strength, such as it was; tears came into his eyes; he resolved to write to Kinney and exonerate Ricker, he resolved humbly to beg Ricker’s pardon. He must leave Boston; but if Marcia would forgive him, he would go back with her to Equity, and take up the study of the law in her father’s office again, and fulfil all her wishes. He would have a hard time to overcome the old man’s prejudices, but he deserved a hard time, and he knew he should finally succeed. It would be bitter, returning to that stupid little town, and he imagined the intrusive conjecture and sarcastic comment that would attend his return; but he believed that he could live this down, and he trusted himself to laugh it down. He already saw himself there, settled in the Squire’s office, reinstated in public opinion, a leading lawyer of the place, with Congress open before him whenever he chose to turn his face that way.

He had thought of going first to Halleck, and returning the money, but he was willing to give himself the encouragement of Marcia’s pleasure, of her forgiveness and her praise in an affair that had its difficulties and would require all his manfulness. The maid met him at the door with little Flavia, and told him that Marcia had gone out to the Hallecks’, but had left word that she would soon return, and that then they would have supper together. Her absence dashed his warm impulse, but he recovered himself, and took the little one from the maid. He lighted the gas in the parlor, and had a frolic with Flavia in kindling a fire in the grate, and making the room bright and cheerful. He played with the child and made her laugh; he already felt the pleasure of a good conscience, though with a faint nether ache in his heart which was perhaps only his wish to have the disagreeable preliminaries to his better life over as soon as possible. He drew two easy-chairs up at opposite corners of the hearth, and sat down in one, leaving the other for Marcia; he had Flavia standing on his knees, and clinging fast to his fingers, laughing and crowing while he danced her up and down, when he heard the front door open, and Marcia burst into the room.

She ran to him and plucked the child from him, and then went back as far as she could from him in the room, crying, “Give me the child!” and facing him with the look he knew. Her eyes were dilated, and her visage white with the transport that had whirled her far beyond the reach of reason. The frail structure of his good resolutions dropped to ruin at the sight, but he mechanically rose and advanced upon her till she forbade him with a muffled shriek of “Don’t touch me! So!” she went on, gasping and catching her breath, “it was you! I might have known it! I might have guessed it from the first! You! Was that the reason why you didn’t care to have me hurry home this summer? Was that — was that—” She choked, and convulsively pressed her face into the neck of the child, which began to cry.

Bartley closed the doors, and then, with his hands in his pockets, confronted her with a smile of wicked coolness. “Will you be good enough to tell me what you’re talking about?”

“Do you pretend that you don’t know? I met a woman at the bottom of the street just now. Do you know who?”

“No; but it’s very dramatic. Go on!”

“It was Hannah Morrison! She reeled against me; and when I — such a fool as I was! — pitied her, because I was on my way home to you, and was thinking about you and loving you, and was so happy in it, and asked her how she came to that, she struck me, and told me to — to — ask my — husband!”

The transport broke in tears; the denunciation had turned to entreaty in everything but words; but Bartley had hardened his heart now past all entreaty. The idiotic penitent that he had been a few moments ago, the soft, well-meaning dolt, was so far from him now as to be scarce within the reach of his contempt. He was going to have this thing over once for all; he would have no mercy upon himself or upon her; the Devil was in him, and uppermost in him, and the Devil is fierce and proud, and knows how to make many base emotions feel like a just self-respect. “And did you believe a woman like that?” he sneered.

“Do I believe a man like this?” she demanded, with a dying flash of her fury. “You — you don’t dare to deny it.”

“Oh, no, I don’t deny it. For one reason, it would be of no use. For all practical purposes, I admit it. What then?”

“What then?” she asked, bewildered. “Bartley; You don’t mean it!”

“Yes, I do. I mean it. I don’t deny it. What then? What are you going to do about it?” She gazed at him in incredulous horror. “Come! I mean what I say. What will you do?”

“Oh, merciful God! what shall I do?” she prayed aloud.

“That’s just what I’m curious to know. When you leaped in here, just now, you must have meant to do something, if I couldn’t convince you that the woman was lying. Well, you see that I don’t try. I give you leave to believe whatever she said. What then?”

“Bartley!” she besought him in her despair. “Do you drive me from you?”

“Oh, no, certainly not. That isn’t my way. You have driven me from you, and I might claim the right to retaliate, but I don’t. I’ve no expectation that you’ll go away, and I want to see what else you’ll do. You would have me, before we were married; you were tolerably shameless in getting me; when your jealous temper made you throw me away, you couldn’t live till you got me back again; you ran after me. Well, I suppose you’ve learnt wisdom, now. At least you won’t try that game again. But what will you do?” He looked at her smiling, while he dealt her these stabs one by one.

She set down the child, and went out to the entry where its hat and cloak hung. She had not taken off her own things, and now she began to put on the little one’s garments with shaking hands, kneeling before it. “I will never live with you again, Bartley,” she said.

“Very well. I doubt it, as far as you’re concerned; but if you go away now, you certainly won’t live with me again, for I shall not let you come back. Understand that.”

Each had most need of the other’s mercy, but neither would have mercy.

“It isn’t for what you won’t deny. I don’t believe that. It’s for what you’ve said now.” She could not make the buttons and the button-holes of the child’s sack meet with her quivering fingers; he actually stooped down and buttoned the little garment for her, as if they had been going to take the child out for a walk between them. She caught it up in her arms, and, sobbing “Good by, Bartley!” ran out of the room.

“Recollect that if you go, you don’t come back,” he said. The outer door crashing to behind her was his answer.

He sat down to think, before the fire he had built for her. It was blazing brightly now, and the whole room had a hideous cosiness. He could not think, he must act. He went up to their room, where the gas was burning low, as if she had lighted it and then frugally turned it down as her wont was. He did not know what his purpose was, but it developed itself. He began to pack his things in a travelling-bag which he took out of the closet, and which he had bought for her when she set out for Equity in the summer; it had the perfume of her dresses yet.

When this was finished, he went down stairs again and being now strangely hungry he made a meal of such things as he found set out on the tea-table. Then he went over the papers in his secretary; he burnt some of them, and put others into his bag.

After all this was done he sat down by the fire again, and gave Marcia a quarter of an hour longer in which to return. He did not know whether he was afraid that she would or would not come. But when the time ended, he took up his bag and went out of the house. It began to rain, and he went back for an umbrella: he gave her that one chance more, and he ran up into their room. But she had not come back. He went out again, and hurried away through the rain to the Albany Depot, where he bought a ticket for Chicago. There was as yet nothing definite in his purpose, beyond the fact that he was to be rid of her: whether for a long or short time, or forever, he did not yet know; whether he meant ever to communicate with her, or seek or suffer a reconciliation, the locomotive that leaped westward into the dark with him knew as well as he.

Yet all the mute, obscure forces of habit, which are doubtless the strongest forces in human nature, were dragging him back to her. Because their lives had been united so long, it seemed impossible to sever them, though their union had been so full of misery and discord; the custom of marriage was so subtile and so pervasive, that his heart demanded her sympathy for what he was suffering in abandoning her. The solitude into which he had plunged stretched before him so vast, so sterile and hopeless, that he had not the courage to realize it; he insensibly began to give it limits: he would return after so many months, weeks, days.

He passed twenty-four hours on the train, and left it at Cleveland for the half-hour it stopped for supper. But he could not eat; he had to own to himself that he was beaten, and that he must return, or throw himself into the lake. He ran hastily to the baggage-car, and effected the removal of his bag; then he went to the ticket-office, and waited at the end of a long queue for his turn at the window. His turn came at last, and he confronted the nervous and impatient ticket-agent, without speaking.

“Well, sir, what do you want?” demanded the agent. Then, with rising temper, “What is it? Are you deaf? Are you dumb? You can’t expect to stand there all night!”

The policeman outside the rail laid his hand on Bartley’s shoulder: “Move on, my friend.”

He obeyed, and reeled away in a fashion that confirmed the policeman’s suspicions. He searched his pockets again and again; but his porte-monnaie was in none of them. It had been stolen, and Halleck’s money with the rest. Now he could not return; nothing remained for him but the ruin he had chosen.

XXXII.

Halleck prolonged his summer vacation beyond the end of October. He had been in town from time to time and then had set off again on some new absence; he was so restless and so far from well during the last of these flying visits, that the old people were glad when he wrote them that he should stay as long as the fine weather continued. He spoke of an interesting man whom he had met at the mountain resort where he was staying; a Spanish-American, attached to one of the Legations at Washington, who had a scheme for Americanizing popular education in his own country. “He has made a regular set at me,” Halleck wrote, “and if I had not fooled away so much time already on law and on leather, I should like to fool away a little more on such a cause as this.” He did not mention the matter again in his letters; but the first night after his return, when they all sat together in the comfort of having him at home again, he asked his father, “What should you think of my going to South America?”

The old man started up from the pleasant after-supper drowse into which he was suffering himself to fall, content with Halleck’s presence, and willing to leave the talk to the women folk. “I don’t know what you mean, Ben?”

“I suppose it’s my having the matter so much in mind that makes me feel as if we had talked it over. I mentioned it in one of my letters.”

“Yes,” returned his father; “but I presumed you were joking.”

Halleck frowned impatiently; he would not meet the gaze of his mother and sisters, but he addressed himself again to his father. “I don’t know that I was in earnest.” His mother dropped her eyes to her mending, with a faint sigh of relief. “But I can’t say,” he added, “that I was joking, exactly. The man himself was very serious about it.” He stopped, apparently to govern an irritable impulse, and then he went on to set the project of his Spanish-American acquaintance before them, explaining it in detail.

At the end, “That’s good,” said his father, “but why need you have gone, Ben?”

The question seemed to vex Halleck; he did not answer at once. His mother could not bear to see him crossed, and she came to his help against herself and his father, since it was only supposing the case. “I presume,” she said, “that we could have looked at it as a missionary work.”

“It isn’t a missionary work, mother,” answered Halleck, severely, “in any sense that you mean. I should go down there to teach, and I should be paid for it. And I want to say at once that they have no yellow-fever nor earthquakes, and that they have not had a revolution for six years. The country’s perfectly safe every way, and so wholesome that it will be a good thing for me. But I shouldn’t expect to convert anybody.”

“Of course not, Ben,” said his mother, soothingly.

“I hope you wouldn’t object to it if it were a missionary work,” said one of the elder sisters.

“No, Anna,” returned Ben.

“I merely wanted to know,” said Anna.

“Then I hope you’re satisfied, Anna,” Olive cut in. “Ben won’t refuse to convert the Uruguayans if they apply in a proper spirit.”

“I think Anna had a right to ask,” said Miss Louisa, the eldest.

“Oh, undoubtedly, Miss Halleck,” said Olive. “I like to see Ben reproved for misbehavior to his mother, myself.”

Her father laughed at Olive’s prompt defence. “Well, it’s a cause that we’ve all got to respect; but I don’t see why you should go, Ben, as I said before. It would do very well for some young fellow who had no settled prospects, but you’ve got your duties here. I presume you looked at it in that light. As you said in your letter, you’ve fooled away so much time on leather and law—”

“I shall never amount to anything in the law!” Ben broke out. His mother looked at him in anxiety; his father kept a steady smile on his face; Olive sat alert for any chance that offered to put down her elder sisters, who drew in their breath, and grew silently a little primmer. “I’m not well—”

“Oh, I know you’re not, dear,” interrupted his mother, glad of another chance to abet him.

“I’m not strong enough to go on with the line of work I’ve marked out, and I feel that I’m throwing away the feeble powers I have.”

His father answered with less surprise than Halleck had evidently expected, for he had thrown out his words with a sort of defiance; probably the old man had watched him closely enough to surmise that it might come to this with him at last. At any rate, he was able to say, without seeming to assent too readily, “Well, well, give up the law, then, and come back into leather, as you call it. Or take up something else. We don’t wish to make anything a burden to you; but take up some useful work at home. There are plenty of things to be done.”

“Not for me,” said Halleck, gloomily.

“Oh, yes, there are,” said the old man.

“I see you are not willing to have me go,” said Halleck, rising in uncontrollable irritation. “But I wish you wouldn’t all take this tone with me!”

“We haven’t taken any tone with you, Ben,” said his mother, with pleading tenderness.

“I think Anna has decidedly taken a tone,” said Olive.

Anna did not retort, but “What tone?” demanded Louisa, in her behalf.

“Hush, children,” said their mother.

“Well, well,” suggested his father to Ben. “Think it over, think it over. There’s no hurry.”

“I’ve thought it over; there is hurry,” retorted Halleck. “If I go, I must go at once.”

His mother arrested her thread, half drawn through the seam, letting her hand drop, while she glanced at him.

“It isn’t so much a question of your giving up the law, Ben, as of your giving up your family and going so far away from us all,” said his father. “That’s what I shouldn’t like.”

“I don’t like that, either. But I can’t help it.” He added, “Of course, mother, I shall not go without your full and free consent. You and father must settle it between you.” He fetched a quick, worried sigh as he put his hand on the door.

“Ben isn’t himself at all,” said Mrs. Halleck, with tears in her eyes, after he had left the room.

“No,” said her husband. “He’s restless. He’ll get over this idea in a few days.” He urged this hope against his wife’s despair, and argued himself into low spirits.

“I don’t believe but what it would be the best thing for his health, may be,” said Mrs. Halleck, at the end.

“I’ve always had my doubts whether he would ever come to anything in the law,” said the father.

The elder sisters discussed Halleck’s project apart between themselves, as their wont was with any family interest, and they bent over a map of South America, so as to hide what they were doing from their mother.

Olive had left the room by another door, and she intercepted Halleck before he reached his own.

“What is the matter, Ben?” she whispered.

“Nothing,” he answered, coldly. But he added, “Come in, Olive.”

She followed him, and hovered near after he turned up the gas.

“I can’t stand it here, I must go,” he said, turning a dull, weary look upon her.

“Who was at the Elm House that you knew this last time?” she asked, quickly.

“Laura Dixmore isn’t driving me away, if you mean that,” replied Halleck.

“I couldn’t believe it was she! I should have despised you if it was. But I shall hate her, whoever it was.”

Halleck sat down before his table, and his sister sank upon the corner of a chair near it, and looked wistfully at him. “I know there is some one!”

“If you think I’ve been fool enough to offer myself to any one, Olive, you’re very much mistaken.”

“Oh, it needn’t have come to that,” said Olive, with indignant pity.

“My life’s a failure here,” cried Halleck, moving his head uneasily from side to side. “I feel somehow as if I could go out there and pick up the time I’ve lost. Great Heaven!” he cried, “if I were only running away from some innocent young girl’s rejection, what a happy man I should be!”

“It’s some horrid married thing, then, that’s been flirting with you!”

He gave a forlorn laugh. “I’d almost confess it to please you, Olive. But I’d prefer to get out of the matter without lying, if I could. Why need you suppose any reason but the sufficient one I’ve given? — Don’t afflict me! don’t imagine things about me, don’t make a mystery of me! I’ve been blunt and awkward, and I’ve bungled the business with father and mother; but I want to get away because I’m a miserable fraud here, and I think I might rub on a good while there before I found myself out again.”

“Ben,” demanded Olive, regardless of his words, “what have you been doing?”

“The old story, — nothing.”

“Is that true, Ben?”

“You used to be satisfied with asking once, Olive.”

“You haven’t been so wicked, so careless, as to get some poor creature in love with, you, and then want to run away from the misery you’ve made?”

“I suppose if I look it there’s no use denying it,” said Halleck, letting his sad eyes meet hers, and smiling drearily. “You insist upon having a lady in the case?”

“Yes. But I see you won’t tell me anything; and I won’t afflict you. Only I’m afraid it’s just some silly thing, that you’ve got to brooding over, and that you’ll let drive you away.”

“Well, you have the comfort of reflecting that I can’t get away, whatever the pressure is.”

“You know better than that, Ben; and so do I. You know that, if you haven’t got father and mother’s consent already, it’s only because you haven’t had the heart to ask for it. As far as that’s concerned, you’re gone already. But I hope you won’t go without thinking it over, as father says, — and talking it over. I hate to have you seem unsteady and fickle-minded, when I know you’re not; and I’m going to set myself against this project till I know what’s driving you from us, — or till I’m sure that it’s something worth while. You needn’t expect that I shall help to make it easy for you; I shall help to make it hard.”

Her loving looks belied her threats; if the others could not resist Ben when any sort of desire showed itself through his habitual listlessness, how could she, who understood him best and sympathized with him most? “There was something I was going to talk to you about, to-night, if you hadn’t scared us all with this ridiculous scheme, and ask you whether you couldn’t do something.” She seemed to suggest the change of interest with the hope of winning his thoughts away from the direction they had taken; but he listened apathetically, and left her to go further or not as she chose. “I think,” she added abruptly, “that some trouble is hanging over those wretched Hubbards.”

“Some new one?” asked Halleck, with sad sarcasm, turning his eyes towards her, as if with the resolution of facing her.

“You know he’s left his place on that newspaper.”

“Yes, I heard that when I was at home before.”

“There are some very disagreeable stories about it. They say he was turned away by Mr. Witherby for behaving badly, — for printing something he oughtn’t to have done.”

“That was to have been expected,” said Halleck.

“He hasn’t found any other place, and Marcia says he gets very little work to do. He must be running into debt, terribly. I feel very anxious about them. I don’t know what they’re living on.”

“Probably on some money I lent him,” said Halleck, quietly. “I lent him fifteen hundred in the spring. It ought to make him quite comfortable for the present.”

“Oh, Ben! Why did you lend him money? You might have known he wouldn’t do any good with it.”

Halleck explained how and why the loan had been made, and added: “If he’s supporting his family with it, he’s doing some good. I lent it to him for her sake.”

Halleck looked hardily into his sister’s face, but he dropped his eyes when she answered, simply: “Yes, of course. But I don’t believe she knows anything about it; and I’m glad of it: it would only add to her trouble. She worships you, Ben!”

“Does she?”

“She seems to think you are perfect, and she never comes here but she asks when you’re to be home. I suppose she thinks you have a good influence on that miserable husband of hers. He’s going from bad to worse, I guess. Father heard that he is betting on the election. That’s what he’s doing with your money.”

“It would be somebody else’s money if it wasn’t mine,” said Halleck. “Bartley Hubbard must live, and he must have the little excitements that make life agreeable.”

“Poor thing!” sighed Olive, “I don’t know what she would do if she heard that you were going away. To hear her talk, you would think she had been counting the days and hours till you got back. It’s ridiculous, the way she goes on with mother; asking everything about you, as if she expected to make Bartley Hubbard over again on your pattern. I should hate to have anybody think me such a saint as she does you. But there isn’t much danger, thank goodness! I could laugh, sometimes, at the way she questions us all about you, and is so delighted when she finds that you and that wretch have anything in common. But it’s all too miserably sad. She certainly is the most single-hearted creature alive,” continued Olive, reflectively. “Sometimes she scares me with her innocence. I don’t believe that even her jealousy ever suggested a wicked idea to her: she’s furious because she feels the injustice of giving so much more than he does. She hasn’t really a thought for anybody else: I do believe that if she were free to choose from now till doomsday she would always choose Bartley Hubbard, bad as she knows him to be. And if she were a widow, and anybody else proposed to her, she would be utterly shocked and astonished.”

“Very likely,” said Halleck, absently.

“I feel very unhappy about her,” Olive resumed. “I know that she’s anxious and troubled all the time. Can’t you do something, Ben? Have a talk with that disgusting thing, and see if you can’t put him straight again, somehow?”

“No!” exclaimed Halleck, bursting violently from his abstraction. “I shall have nothing to do with them! Let him go his own way and the sooner he goes to the — I won’t interfere, — I can’t, I mustn’t! I wonder at you, Olive!” He pushed away from the table, and went limping about the room, searching here and there for his hat and stick, which were on the desk where he had put them, in plain view. As he laid hand on them at last, he met his sister’s astonished eyes. “If I interfered, I should not interfere because I cared for him at all!” he cried.

“Of course not,” said Olive. “But I don’t see anything to make you wonder at me about that.”

“It would be because I cared for her—”

“Certainly! You didn’t suppose I expected you to interfere from any other motive?”

He stood looking at her in stupefaction, with his hand on his hat and stick, like a man who doubts whether he has heard aright. Presently a shiver passed over him, another light came into his eyes, and he said quietly, “I’m going out to see Atherton.”

“To-night?” said his sister, accepting provisionally, as women do, the apparent change of subject. “Don’t go to-night, Ben! You’re too tired.”

“I’m not tired. I intended to see him to-night, at any rate. I want to talk over this South American scheme with him.” He put on his hat, and moved quickly toward the door.

“Ask him about the Hubbards,” said Olive. “Perhaps he can tell you something.”

“I don’t want to know anything. I shall ask him nothing.”

She slipped between him and the door. “Ben, you haven’t heard anything against poor Marcia, have you?”

“No!”

“You don’t think she’s to blame in any way for his going wrong, do you?

“How could I?”

“Then I don’t understand why you won’t do anything to help her.”

He looked at her again, and opened his lips to speak once, but closed them before he said, “I’ve got my own affairs to worry me. Isn’t that reason enough for not interfering in theirs?”

“Not for you, Ben.”

“Then I don’t choose to mix myself up in other people’s misery. I don’t like it, as you once said.”

“But you can’t help it sometimes, as you said.”

“I can this time, Olive. Don’t you see,—” he began.

“I see there’s something you won’t tell me. But I shall find it out.” She threatened him half playfully.

“I wish you could,” he answered. “Then perhaps you’d let me know.” She opened the door for him now, and as he passed out he said gently, “I am tired, but I sha’n’t begin to rest till I have had this talk with Atherton. I had better go.”

“Yes,” Olive assented, “you’d better.” She added in banter, “You’re altogether too mysterious to be of much comfort at home.”

The family heard him close the outside door behind him after Olive came back to them, and she explained, “He’s gone out to talk it over with Mr. Atherton.”

His father gave a laugh of relief. “Well, if he leaves it to Atherton, I guess we needn’t worry about it.”

“The child isn’t at all well,” said his mother.

XXXIII.

Halleck met Atherton at the door of his room with his hat and coat on. “Why, Halleck! I was just going to see if you had come home!”

“You needn’t now,” said Halleck, pushing by him into the room. “I want to see you, Atherton, on business.”

Atherton took off his hat, and closed the door with one hand, while he slipped the other arm out of his overcoat sleeve. “Well, to tell the truth, I was going to mingle a little business myself with the pleasure of seeing you.” He turned up the gas in his drop-light, and took the chair from which he had looked across the table at Halleck, when they talked there before. “It’s the old subject,” he said, with a sense of repetition in the situation. “I learn from Witherby that Hubbard has taken that money of yours out of the Events, and from what I hear elsewhere he is making ducks and drakes of it on election bets. What shall you do about it?”

“Nothing,” said Halleck.

“Oh! Very well,” returned Atherton, with the effect of being a little snubbed, but resolved to take his snub professionally. He broke out, however, in friendly exasperation: “Why in the world did you lend the fellow that money?”

Halleck lifted his brooding eyes, and fixed them half pleadingly, half defiantly upon his friend’s face. “I did it for his wife’s sake.”

“Yes, I know,” returned Atherton. “I remember how you felt. I couldn’t share your feeling, but I respected it. However, I doubt if your loan was a benefit to either of them. It probably tempted him to count upon money that he hadn’t earned, and that’s always corrupting.”

“Yes,” Halleck replied. “But I can’t say that, so far as he’s concerned, I’m very sorry. I don’t suppose it would do her any good if I forced him to disgorge any balance he may have left from his wagers?”

“No, hardly.”

“Then I shall let him alone.”

The subject was dismissed, and Atherton waited for Halleck to speak of the business on which he had come. But Halleck only played with the paper cutter which his left hand had found on the table near him, and, with his chin sunk on his breast, seemed lost in an unhappy reverie.

“I hope you won’t accuse yourself of doing him an injury,” said Atherton, at last, with a smile.

“Injury?” demanded Halleck, quickly. “What injury? How?”

“By lending him that money.”

“Oh! I had forgotten that; I wasn’t thinking of it,” returned Halleck impatiently. “I was thinking of something different. I’m aware of disliking the man so much, that I should be willing to have greater harm than that happen to him, — the greatest, for what I know. Though I don’t know, after all, that it would be harm. In another life, if there is one, he might start in a new direction; but that isn’t imaginable of him here; he can only go from bad to worse; he can only make more and more sorrow and shame. Why shouldn’t one wish him dead, when his death could do nothing but good?”

“I suppose you don’t expect me to answer such a question seriously.”

“But suppose I did?”

“Then I should say that no man ever wished any such good as that, except from the worst motive; and the less one has to do with such questions, even as abstractions, the better.”

“You’re right,” said Halleck. “But why do you call it an abstraction?”

“Because, in your case, nothing else is conceivable.”

“I told you I was willing the worst should happen to him.”

“And I didn’t believe you.”

Halleck lay back in his chair, and laughed wearily. “I wish I could convince somebody of my wickedness. But it seems to be useless to try. I say things that ought to raise the roof, both to you here and to Olive at home, and you tell me you don’t believe me, and she tells me that Mrs. Hubbard thinks me a saint. I suppose now, that if I took you by the button-hole and informed you confidentially that I had stopped long enough at 129 Clover Street to put Bartley Hubbard quietly out of the way, you wouldn’t send for a policeman.”

“I should send for a doctor,” said Atherton.

“Such is the effect of character! And yet out of the fulness of the heart, the mouth speaketh. Out of the heart proceed all those unpleasant things enumerated in Scripture; but if you bottle them up there, and keep your label fresh, it’s all that’s required of you, by your fellow-beings, at least. What an amusing thing morality would be if it were not — otherwise. Atherton, do you believe that such a man as Christ ever lived?”

“I know you do, Halleck,” said Atherton.

“Well, that depends upon what you call me. It what I was — if my well Sunday-schooled youth — is I, I do. But if I, poising dubiously on the momentary present, between the past and future, am I, I’m afraid I don’t. And yet it seems to me that I have a fairish sort of faith. I know that, if Christ never lived on earth, some One lived who imagined him, and that One must have been a God. The historical fact oughtn’t to matter. Christ being imagined, can’t you see what a comfort, what a rapture, it must have been to all these poor souls to come into such a presence and be looked through and through? The relief, the rest, the complete exposure of Judgment Day—”

“Every day is Judgment Day,” said Atherton.

“Yes, I know your doctrine. But I mean the Last Day. We ought to have something in anticipation of it, here, in our social system. Character is a superstition, a wretched fetish. Once a year wouldn’t be too often to seize upon sinners whose blameless life has placed them above suspicion, and turn them inside out before the community, so as to show people how the smoke of the Pit had been quietly blackening their interior. That would destroy character as a cult.” He laughed again. “Well, this isn’t business, — though it isn’t pleasure, either, exactly. What I came for was to ask you something. I’ve finished at the Law School, and I’m just ready to begin here in the office with you. Don’t you think it would be a good time for me to give up the law? Wait a moment!” he said, arresting in Atherton an impulse to speak. “We will take the decent surprise, the friendly demur, the conscientious scruple, for granted. Now, honestly, do you believe I’ve got the making of a lawyer in me?”

“I don’t think you’re very well, Halleck,” Atherton began.

“Ah, you’re a lawyer! You won’t give me a direct answer!”

“I will if you wish,” retorted Atherton.

“Well.”

“Do you want to give it up?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it. No man ever prospered in it yet who wanted to leave it. And now, since it’s come to this, I’ll tell you what I really have thought, all along. I’ve thought that, if your heart was really set on the law, you would overcome your natural disadvantages for it; but if the time ever came when you were tired of it, your chance was lost: you never would make a lawyer. The question is, whether that time has come.”

“It has,” said Halleck.

“Then stop, here and now. You’ve wasted two years’ time, but you can’t get it back by throwing more after it. I shouldn’t be your friend, I shouldn’t be an honest man, if I let you go on with me, after this. A bad lawyer is such a very bad thing. This isn’t altogether a surprise to me, but it will be a blow to your father,” he added, with a questioning look at Halleck, after a moment.

“It might have been, if I hadn’t taken the precaution to deaden the place by a heavier blow first.”

“Ah! you’ve spoken to him already?”

“Yes, I’ve had it out in a sneaking, hypothetical way. But I could see that, so far as the law was concerned it was enough; it served. Not that he’s consented to the other thing; there’s where I shall need your help, Atherton. I’ll tell you what my plan is.” He stated it bluntly at first; and then went over the ground and explained it fully, as he had done at home. Atherton listened without permitting any sign of surprise to escape him; but he listened with increasing gravity, as if he heard something not expressed in Halleck’s slow, somewhat nasal monotone, and at the end he said, “I approve of any plan that will take you away for a while. Yes, I’ll speak to your father about it.”

“If you think you need any conviction, I could use arguments to bring it about in you,” said Halleck, in recognition of his friend’s ready concurrence.

“No, I don’t need any arguments to convince me, I believe,” returned Atherton.

“Then I wish you’d say something to bring me round! Unless argument is used by somebody, the plan always produces a cold chill in me.” Halleck smiled, but Atherton kept a sober face. “I wish my Spanish American was here! What makes you think it’s a good plan? Why should I disappoint my father’s hopes again, and wring my mother’s heart by proposing to leave them for any such uncertain good as this scheme promises?” He still challenged his friend with a jesting air, but a deeper and stronger feeling of some sort trembled in his voice.

Atherton would not reply to his emotion; he answered, with obvious evasion: “It’s a good cause; in some sort — the best sort — it’s a missionary work.”

“That’s what my mother said to me.”

“And the change will be good for your health.”

“That’s what I said to my mother!”

Atherton remained silent, waiting apparently for Halleck to continue, or to end the matter there, as he chose.

It was some moments before Halleck went on; “You would say, wouldn’t you, that my first duty was to my own undertakings, and to those who had a right to expect their fulfilment from me? You would say that it was an enormity to tear myself away from the affection that clings to me in that home of mine, yonder, and that nothing but some supreme motive, could justify me? And yet you pretend to be satisfied with the reasons I’ve given you. You’re not dealing honestly with me, Atherton!”

“No,” said Atherton, keeping the same scrutiny of Halleck’s face which he had bent upon him throughout, but seeming now to hear his thoughts rather than his words. “I knew that you would have some supreme motive; and if I have pretended to approve your scheme on the reasons you have given me, I haven’t dealt honestly with you. But perhaps a little dishonesty is the best thing under the circumstances. You haven’t told me your real motive, and I can’t ask it.”

“But you imagine it?”

“Yes.”

“And what do you imagine? That I have been disappointed in love? That I have been rejected? That the girl who had accepted me has broken her engagement? Something of that sort?” demanded Halleck, scornfully.

Atherton did not answer.

“Oh, how far you are from the truth! How blest and proud and happy I should be if it were the truth!” He looked into his friend’s eyes, and added bitterly: “You’re not curious, Atherton; you don’t ask me what my trouble really is! Do you wish me to tell you what it is without asking?”

Atherton kept turning a pencil end for end between his fingers, while a compassionate smile slightly curved his lips. “No,” he said, finally, “I think you had better not tell me your trouble. I can believe very well without knowing it that it’s serious—”

“Oh, tragic!” said Halleck, self-contemptuously.

“But I doubt if it would help you to tell it. I’ve too much respect for your good sense to suppose that it’s an unreality; and I suspect that confession would only weaken you. If you told me, you would feel that you had made me a partner in your responsibility, and you would be tempted to leave the struggle to me. If you’re battling with some temptation, some self-betrayal, you must make the fight alone: you would only turn to an ally to be flattered into disbelief of your danger or your culpability.”

Halleck assented with a slight nod to each point that the lawyer made. “You’re right,” he said, “but a man of your subtlety can’t pretend that he doesn’t know what the trouble is in such a simple case as mine.”

“I don’t know anything certainly,” returned Atherton, “and as far as I can I refuse to imagine anything. If your trouble concerns some one besides yourself, — and no great trouble can concern one man alone, — you’ve no right to tell it.”

“Another Daniel come to judgment!”

“You must trust to your principles, your self-respect, to keep you right—”

Halleck burst into a harsh laugh, and rose from his chair: “Ah, there you abdicate the judicial function! Principles, self-respect! Against that? Don’t you suppose I was approached through my principles and self-respect? Why, the Devil always takes a man on the very highest plane. He knows all about our principles and self-respect, and what they’re made of. How the noblest and purest attributes of our nature, with which we trap each other so easily, must amuse him! Pity, rectitude, moral indignation, a blameless life, — he knows that they’re all instruments for him. No, sir! No more principles and self-respect for me, — I’ve had enough of them; there’s nothing for me but to run, and that’s what I’m going to do. But you’re quite right about the other thing, Atherton, and I give you a beggar’s thanks for telling me that my trouble isn’t mine alone, and I’ve no right to confide it to you. It is mine in the sense that no other soul is defiled with the knowledge of it, and I’m glad you saved me from the ghastly profanation, the sacrilege, of telling it. I was sneaking round for your sympathy; I did want somehow to shift the responsibility on to you; to get you — God help me! — to flatter me out of my wholesome fear and contempt of myself. Well! That’s past, now, and — Good night!” He abruptly turned away from Atherton and swung himself on his cane toward the door.

Atherton took up his hat and coat. “I’ll walk home with you,” he said.

“All right,” returned Halleck, listlessly.

“How soon shall you go?” asked the lawyer, when they were in the street.

“Oh, there’s a ship sailing from New York next week,” said Halleck, in the same tone of weary indifference. “I shall go in that.”

They talked desultorily of other things.

When they came to the foot of Clover Street, Halleck plucked his hand out of Atherton’s arm. “I’m going up through here!” he said, with sullen obstinacy.

“Better not,” returned his friend, quietly.

“Will it hurt her if I stop to look at the outside of the house where she lives?”

“It will hurt you,” said Atherton.

“I don’t wish to spare myself!” retorted Halleck. He shook off the touch that Atherton had laid upon his shoulder, and started up the hill; the other overtook him, and, like a man who has attempted to rule a drunkard by thwarting his freak, and then hopes to accomplish his end by humoring it, he passed his arm through Halleck’s again, and went with him. But when they came to the house, Halleck did not stop; he did not even look at it; but Atherton felt the deep shudder that passed through him.

In the week that followed, they met daily, and Halleck’s broken pride no longer stayed him from the shame of open self-pity and wavering purpose. Atherton found it easier to persuade the clinging reluctance of the father and mother, than to keep Halleck’s resolution for him: Halleck could no longer keep it for himself. “Not much like the behavior of people we read of in similar circumstances,” he said once. “They never falter when they see the path of duty: they push forward without looking to either hand; or else,” he added, with a hollow laugh at his own satire, “they turn their backs on it, — like men! Well!”

He grew gaunt and visibly feeble. In this struggle the two men changed places. The plan for Halleck’s flight was no longer his own, but Atherton’s; and when he did not rebel against it, he only passively acquiesced. The decent pretence of ignorance on Atherton’s part necessarily disappeared: in all but words the trouble stood openly confessed between them, and it came to Atherton’s saying, in one of Halleck’s lapses of purpose, from which it had required all the other’s strength to lift him: “Don’t come to me any more, Halleck, with the hope that I shall somehow justify your evil against your good. I pitied you at first; but I blame you now.”

“You’re atrocious,” said Halleck, with a puzzled, baffled look. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you secretly think you have somehow come by your evil virtuously; and you want me to persuade you that it is different from other evils of exactly the same kind, — that it is beautiful and sweet and pitiable, and not ugly as hell and bitter as death, to be torn out of you mercilessly and flung from you with abhorrence. Well, I tell you that you are suffering guiltily, for no man suffers innocently from such a cause. You must go, and you can’t go too soon. Don’t suppose that I find anything noble in your position. I should do you a great wrong if I didn’t do all I could to help you realize that you’re in disgrace, and that you’re only making a choice of shames in running away. Suppose the truth was known, — suppose that those who hold you dear could be persuaded of it, — could you hold up your head?”

“Do I hold up my head as it is?” asked Halleck. “Did you ever see a more abject dog than I am at this moment? Your wounds are faithful, Atherton; but perhaps you might have spared me this last stab. If you want to know, I can assure you that I don’t feel any melodramatic vainglory. I know that I’m running away because I’m beaten, but no other man can know the battle I’ve fought. Don’t you suppose I know how hideous this thing is? No one else can know it in all its ugliness!” He covered his face with his hands. “You are right,” he said, when he could find his voice. “I suffer guiltily. I must have known it when I seemed to be suffering for pity’s sake; I knew it before, and when you said that love without marriage was a worse hell than any marriage without love, you left me without refuge: I had been trying not to face the truth, but I had to face it then. I came away in hell, and I have lived in hell ever since. I had tried to think it was a crazy fancy, and put it on my failing health; I used to make believe that some morning I should wake and find the illusion gone. I abhorred it from the beginning as I do now; it has been torment to me; and yet somewhere in my lost soul — the blackest depth, I dare say! — this shame has been so sweet, — it is so sweet, — the one sweetness of life — Ah!” He dashed the weak tears from his eyes, and rose and buttoned his coat about him. “Well, I shall go. And I hope I shall never come back. Though you needn’t mention this to my father as an argument for my going when you talk me over with him,” he added, with a glimmer of his wonted irony. He waited a moment, and then turned upon his friend, in sad upbraiding: “When I came to you a year and a half ago, after I had taken that ruffian home drunk to her — Why didn’t you warn me then, Atherton? Did you see any danger?”

Atherton hesitated: “I knew that, with your habit of suffering for other people, it would make you miserable; but I couldn’t have dreamed this would come of it. But you’ve never been out of your own keeping for a moment. You are responsible, and you are to blame if you are suffering now, and can find no safety for yourself but in running away.”

“That’s true,” said Halleck, very humbly, “and I won’t trouble you any more. I can’t go on sinning against her belief in me here, and live. I shall go on sinning against it there, as long as I live; but it seems to me the harm will be a little less. Yes, I will go.”

But the night before he went, he came to Atherton’s lodging to tell him that he should not go; Atherton was not at home, and Halleck was spared this last dishonor. He returned to his father’s house through the rain that was beginning to fall lightly, and as he let himself in with his key Olive’s voice said, “It’s Ben!” and at the same time she laid her hand upon his arm with a nervous, warning clutch. “Hush! Come in here!” She drew him from the dimly lighted hall into the little reception-room near the door. The gas was burning brighter there, and in the light he saw Marcia white and still, where she sat holding her baby in her arms. They exchanged no greeting: it was apparent that her being there transcended all usage, and that they need observe none.

“Ben will go home with you,” said Olive, soothingly. “Is it raining?” she asked, looking at her brother’s coat. “I will get my water-proof.”

She left them a moment. “I have been — been walking — walking about,” Marcia panted. “It has got so dark — I’m — afraid to go home. I hate to — take you from them — the last — night.”

Halleck answered nothing; he sat staring at her till Olive came back with the water-proof and an umbrella. Then, while his sister was putting the waterproof over Marcia’s shoulders, he said, “Let me take the little one,” and gathered it, with or without her consent, from her arms into his. The baby was sleeping; it nestled warmly against him with a luxurious quiver under the shawl that Olive threw round it. “You can carry the umbrella,” he said to Marcia.

They walked fast, when they got out into the rainy dark, and it was hard to shelter Halleck as he limped rapidly on. Marcia ran forward once, to see if her baby were safely kept from the wet, and found that Halleck had its little face pressed close between his neck and cheek. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’m looking out for it.”

His voice sounded broken and strange, and neither of them spoke again till they came in sight of Marcia’s door. Then she tried to stop him. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Oh, I’m afraid — afraid to go in,” she pleaded.

He halted, and they stood confronted in the light of a street lamp; her face was twisted with weeping. “Why are you afraid?” he demanded, harshly.

“We had a quarrel, and I — I ran away — I said that I would never come back. I left him—”

“You must go back to him,” said Halleck. “He’s your husband!” He pushed on again, saying over and over, as if the words were some spell in which he found safety, “You must go back, you must go back, you must go back!”

He dragged her with him now, for she hung helpless on his arm, which she had seized, and moaned to herself. At the threshold, “I can’t go in!” she broke out. “I’m afraid to go in! What will he say? What will he do? Oh, come in with me! You are good, — and then I shall not be afraid!”

“You must go in alone! No man can be your refuge from your husband! Here!” He released himself, and, kissing the warm little face of the sleeping child, he pressed it into her arms. His fingers touched hers under the shawl; he tore his hand away with a shiver.

She stood a moment looking at the closed door; then she flung it open, and, pausing as if to gather her strength, vanished into the brightness within.

He turned, and ran crookedly down the street, wavering from side to side in his lameness, and flinging up his arms to save himself from falling as he ran, with a gesture that was like a wild and hopeless appeal.

XXXIV.

Marcia pushed into the room where she had left Bartley. She had no escape from her fate; she must meet it, whatever it was. The room was empty, and she began doggedly to search the house for him, up stairs and down, carrying the child with her. She would not have been afraid now to call him; but she had no voice, and she could not ask the servant anything when she looked into the kitchen. She saw the traces of the meal he had made in the dining-room, and when she went a second time to their chamber to lay the little girl down in her crib, she saw the drawers pulled open, and the things as he had tossed them about in packing his bag. She looked at the clock on the mantel — an extravagance of Bartley’s, for which she had scolded him — and it was only half past eight; she had thought it must be midnight.

She sat all night in a chair beside the bed; in the morning she drowsed and dreamed that she was weeping on Bartley’s shoulder, and he was joking her and trying to comfort her, as he used to do when they were first married; but it was the little girl, sitting up in her crib, and crying loudly for her breakfast. She put on the child a pretty frock that Bartley liked, and when she had dressed her own tumbled hair she went down stairs, feigning to herself that they should find him in the parlor. The servant was setting the table for breakfast, and the little one ran forward: “Baby’s chair; mamma’s chair; papa’s chair!”

“Yes,” answered Marcia, so that the servant might hear too. “Papa will soon be home.”

She persuaded herself that he had gone as before for the night, and in this pretence she talked with the child at the table, and she put aside some of the breakfast to be kept warm for Bartley. “I don’t know just when he may be in,” she explained to the girl. The utterance of her pretence that she expected him encouraged her, and she went about her work almost cheerfully.

At dinner she said, “Mr. Hubbard must have been called away, somewhere. We must get his dinner for him when he comes: the things dry up so in the oven.”

She put Flavia to bed early, and then trimmed the fire, and made the parlor cosey against Bartley’s coming. She did not blame him for staying away the night before; it was a just punishment for her wickedness, and she should tell him so, and tell him that she knew he never was to blame for anything about Hannah Morrison. She enacted over and over in her mind the scene of their reconciliation. In every step on the pavement he approached the door; at last all the steps died away, and the second night passed.

Her head was light, and her brain confused with loss of sleep. When the child called her from above, and woke her out of her morning drowse, she went to the kitchen and begged the servant to give the little one its breakfast, saying that she was sick and wanted nothing herself. She did not say anything about Bartley’s breakfast, and she would not think anything; the girl took the child into the kitchen with her, and kept it there all day.

Olive Halleck came during the forenoon, and Marcia told her that Bartley had been unexpectedly called away. “To New York,” she added, without knowing why.

“Ben sailed from there to-day,” said Olive sadly.

“Yes,” assented Marcia.

“We want you to come and take tea with us this evening,” Olive began.

“Oh, I can’t,” Marcia broke in. “I mustn’t be away when Bartley gets back.” The thought was something definite in the sea of uncertainty on which she was cast away; she never afterwards lost her hold of it; she confirmed herself in it by other inventions; she pretended that he had told her where he was going, and then that he had written to her. She almost believed these childish fictions as she uttered them. At the same time, in all her longing for his return, she had a sickening fear that when he came back he would keep his parting threat and drive her away: she did not know how he could do it, but this was what she feared.

She seldom left the house, which at first she kept neat and pretty, and then let fall into slatternly neglect. She ceased to care for her dress or the child’s; the time came when it seemed as if she could scarcely move in the mystery that beset her life, and she yielded to a deadly lethargy which paralyzed all her faculties but the instinct of concealment.

She repelled the kindly approaches of the Hallecks, sometimes sending word to the door when they came, that she was sick and could not see them; or when she saw any of them, repeating those hopeless lies concerning Bartley’s whereabouts, and her expectations of his return.

For the time she was safe against all kindly misgivings; but there were some of Bartley’s creditors who grew impatient of his long absence, and refused to be satisfied with her fables. She had a few dollars left from some money that her father had given her at home, and she paid these all out upon the demand of the first-comer. Afterwards, as other bills were pressed, she could only answer with incoherent promises and evasions that scarcely served for the moment. The pursuit of these people dismayed her. It was nothing that certain of them refused further credit; she would have known, both for herself and her child, how to go hungry and cold; but there was one of them who threatened her with the law if she did not pay. She did not know what he could do; she had read somewhere that people who did not pay their debts were imprisoned, and if that disgrace were all she would not care. But if the law were enforced against her, the truth would come out; she would be put to shame before the world as a deserted wife; and this when Bartley had not deserted her. The pride that had bidden her heart break in secret rather than suffer this shame even before itself, was baffled: her one blind device had been concealment, and this poor refuge was possible no longer. If all were not to know, some one must know.

The law with which she had been threatened might be instant in its operation; she could not tell. Her mind wavered from fear to fear. Even while the man stood before her, she perceived the necessity that was upon her, and when he left her she would not allow herself a moment’s delay.

She reached the Events building, in which Mr. Atherton had his office, just as a lady drove away in her coup�. It was Miss Kingsbury, who made a point of transacting all business matters with her lawyer at his office, and of keeping her social relations with him entirely distinct, as she fancied, by this means. She was only partially successful, but at least she never talked business with him at her house, and doubtless she would not have talked anything else with him at his office, but for that increasing dependence upon him in everything which she certainly would not have permitted herself if she had realized it. As it was, she had now come to him in a state of nervous exaltation, which was not business-like. She had been greatly shocked by Ben Halleck’s sudden freak; she had sympathized with his family till she herself felt the need of some sort of condolence, and she had promised herself this consolation from Atherton’s habitual serenity. She did not know what to do when he received her with what she considered an impatient manner, and did not seem at all glad to see her. There was no reason why he should be glad to see a lady calling on business, and no doubt he often found her troublesome, but he had never shown it before. She felt like crying at first; then she passed through an epoch of resentment, and then through a period of compassion for him. She ended by telling him with dignified severity that she wanted some money: they usually made some jokes about her destitution when she came upon that errand. He looked surprised and vexed, and “I have spent what you gave me last month,” she explained.

“Then you wish to anticipate the interest on your bonds?”

“Certainly not,” said Clara, rather sharply. “I wish to have the interest up to the present time.”

“But I told you,” said Atherton, and he could not, in spite of himself, help treating her somewhat as a child, “I told you then that I was paying you the interest up to the first of November. There is none due now. Didn’t you understand that?”

“No, I didn’t understand,” answered Clara. She allowed herself to add, “It is very strange!” Atherton struggled with his irritation, and made no reply. “I can’t be left without money,” she continued. “What am I to do without it?” she demanded with an air of unanswerable argument. “Why, I must have it!”

“I felt that I ought to understand you fully,” said Atherton, with cold politeness. “It’s only necessary to know what sum you require.”

Clara flung up her veil and confronted him with an excited face. “Mr. Atherton, I don’t wish a loan; I can’t permit it; and you know that my principles are entirely against anticipating interest.”

Atherton, from stooping over his table, pencil in hand, leaned back in his chair, and looked at her with a smile that provoked her: “Then may I ask what you wish me to do?”

“No! I can’t instruct you. My affairs are in your hands. But I must say—” She bit her lip, however, and did not say it. On the contrary she asked, rather feebly, “Is there nothing due on anything?”

“I went over it with you, last month,” said Atherton patiently, “and explained all the investments. I could sell some stocks, but this election trouble has disordered everything, and I should have to sell at a heavy loss. There are your mortgages, and there are your bonds. You can have any amount of money you want, but you will have to borrow it.”

“And that you know I won’t do. There should always be a sum of money in the bank,” said Clara decidedly.

“I do my very best to keep a sum there, knowing your theory; but your practice is against me. You draw too many checks,” said Atherton, laughing.

“Very well!” cried the lady, pulling down her veil. “Then I’m to have nothing?”

“You won’t allow yourself to have anything,” Atherton began. But she interrupted him haughtily.

“It is certainly very odd that my affairs should be in such a state that I can’t have all the money of my own that I want, whenever I want it.”

Atherton’s thin face paled a little more than usual. “I shall be glad to resign the charge of your affair Miss Kingsbury.”

“And I shall accept your resignation,” cried Clara, magnificently, “whenever you offer it.” She swept out of the office, and descended to her coup� like an incensed goddess. She drew the curtains and began to cry. At her door, she bade the servant deny her to everybody, and went to bed, where she was visited a little later by Olive Halleck, whom no ban excluded. Clara lavishly confessed her sin and sorrow. “Why, I went there, more than half, to sympathize with him about Ben; I don’t need any money, just yet; and the first thing I knew, I was accusing him of neglecting my interests, and I don’t know what all! Of course he had to say he wouldn’t have anything more to do with them, and I should have despised him if he hadn’t. And now I don’t care what becomes of the property: it’s never been anything but misery to me ever since I had it, and I always knew it would get me into trouble sooner or later.” She whirled her face over into her pillow, and sobbed, “But I didn’t suppose it would ever make me insult and outrage the best friend I ever had, — and the truest man, — and the noblest gentleman! Oh, what will he think of me?”

Olive remained sadly quiet, as if but superficially interested in these transports, and Clara lifted her face again to say in her handkerchief, “It’s a shame, Olive, to burden you with all this at a time when you’ve care enough of your own.”

“Oh, I’m rather glad of somebody else’s care; it helps to take my mind off,” said Olive.

“Then what would you do?” asked Clara, tempted by the apparent sympathy with her in the effect of her naughtiness.

“You might make a party for him, Clara,” suggested Olive, with lack-lustre irony.

Clara gave way to a loud burst of grief. “Oh, Olive Halleck! I didn’t suppose you could be so cruel!”

Olive rose impatiently. “Then write to him, or go to him and tell him that you’re ashamed of yourself, and ask him to take your property back again.”

“Never!” cried Clara, who had listened with fascination. “What would he think of me?”

“Why need you care? It’s purely a matter of business!”

“Yes.”

“And you needn’t mind what he thinks.”

“Of course,” admitted Clara, thoughtfully.

“He will naturally despise you,” added Olive, “but I suppose he does that, now.”

Clara gave her friend as piercing a glance as her soft blue eyes could emit, and, detecting no sign of jesting in Olive’s sober face, she answered haughtily, “I don’t see what right Mr. Atherton has to despise me!”

“Oh, no! He must admire a girl who has behaved to him as you’ve done.”

Clara’s hauteur collapsed, and she began to truckle to Olive. “If he were merely a business man, I shouldn’t mind it; but knowing him socially, as I do, and as a — friend, and — an acquaintance, that way, I don’t see how I can do it.”

“I wonder you didn’t think of that before you accused him of fraud and peculation, and all those things.”

“I didn’t accuse him of fraud and peculation!” cried Clara, indignantly.

“You said you didn’t know what all you’d called him,” said Olive, with her hand on the door.

Clara followed her down stairs. “Well, I shall never do it in the world,” she said, with reviving hope in her voice.

“Oh, I don’t expect you to go to him this morning,” said Olive dryly. “That would be a little too barefaced.”

Her friend kissed, her. “Olive Halleck, you’re the strangest girl that ever was. I do believe you’d joke at the point of death! But I’m so glad you have been perfectly frank with me, and of course it’s worth worlds to know that you think I’ve behaved horridly, and ought to make some reparation.”

“I’m glad you value my opinion, Clara. And if you come to me for frankness, you can always have all you want; it’s a drug in the market with me.” She meagrely returned Clara’s embrace, and left her in a reverie of tactless scheming for the restoration of peace with Mr. Atherton.

Marcia came in upon the lawyer before he had thought, after parting with Miss Kingsbury, to tell the clerk in the outer office to deny him; but she was too full of her own trouble to see the reluctance which it tasked all his strength to quell, and she sank into the nearest chair unbidden. At sight of her, Atherton became the prey of one of those fantastic repulsions in which men visit upon women the blame of others’ thoughts about them: he censured her for Halleck’s wrong; but in another instant he recognized his cruelty, and atoned by relenting a little in his intolerance of her presence. She sat gazing at him with a face of blank misery, to which he could not refuse the charity of a prompting question: “Is there something I can do for you, Mrs. Hubbard?”

“Oh, I don’t know, — I don’t know!” She had a folded paper in her hands, which lay helpless in her lap. After a moment she resumed, in a hoarse, low voice: “They have all begun to come for their money, and this one — this one says he will have the law of me — I don’t know what he means — if I don’t pay him.”

Marcia could not know how hard Atherton found it to govern the professional suspicion which sprung up at the question of money. But he overruled his suspicion by an effort that was another relief to the struggle in which he was wrenching his mind from Miss Kingsbury’s outrageous behavior. “What have you got there?” he asked gravely, and not unkindly, and being used to prompt the reluctance of lady clients, he put out his hand for the paper she held. It was the bill of the threatening creditor, for indefinitely repeated dozens of tivoli beer.

“Why do they come to you with this?”

“Mr. Hubbard is away.”

“Oh, yes. I heard. When do you expect him home?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is he?”

She looked at him piteously without speaking.

Atherton stepped to his door, and gave the order forgotten before. Then he closed the door, and came back to Marcia. “Don’t you know where your husband is, Mrs. Hubbard?”

“Oh, he will come back! He couldn’t leave me! He’s dead, — I know he’s dead; but he will come back! He only went away for the night, and something must have happened to him.”

The whole tragedy of her life for the past fortnight was expressed in these wild and inconsistent words; she had not been able to reason beyond the pathetic absurdities which they involved; they had the effect of assertions confirmed in the belief by incessant repetition, and doubtless she had said them to herself a thousand times. Atherton read in them, not only the confession of her despair, but a prayer for mercy, which it would have been inhuman to deny, and for the present he left her to such refuge from herself as she had found in them. He said, quietly, “You had better give me that paper, Mrs. Hubbard,” and took the bill from her. “If the others come with their accounts again, you must send them to me. When did you say Mr. Hubbard left home?”

“The night after the election,” said Marcia.

“And he didn’t say how long he should be gone?” pursued the lawyer, in the feint that she had known he was going.

“No,” she answered.

“He took some things with him?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you could judge how long he meant to be absent from the preparation he made?”

“I’ve never looked to see. I couldn’t!”

Atherton changed the line of his inquiry. “Does any one else know of this?”

“No,” said Marcia, quickly, “I told Mrs. Halleck and all of them that he was in New York, and I said that I had heard from him. I came to you because you were a lawyer, and you would not tell what I told you.”

“Yes,” said Atherton.

“I want it kept a secret. Oh, do you think he’s dead?” she implored.

“No,” returned Atherton, gravely, “I don’t think he’s dead.”

“Sometimes it seems to me I could bear it better if I knew he was dead. If he isn’t dead, he’s out of his mind! He’s out of his mind, don’t you think, and he’s wandered off somewhere?”

She besought him so pitifully to agree with her, bending forward and trying to read the thoughts in his face, that he could not help saying, “Perhaps.”

A gush of grateful tears blinded her, but she choked down her sobs.

“I said things to him that night that were enough to drive him crazy. I was always the one in fault, but he was always the one to make up first, and he never would have gone away from me if he had known what he was doing! But he will come back, I know he will,” she said, rising. “And oh, you won’t say anything to anybody, will you? And he’ll get back before they find out. I will send those men to you, and Bartley will see about it as soon as he comes home—”

“Don’t go, Mrs. Hubbard,” said the lawyer. “I want to speak with you a little longer.” She dropped again in her chair, and looked at him inquiringly. “Have you written to your father about this?”

“Oh, no,” she answered quickly, with an effect of shrinking back into herself.

“I think you had better do so. You can’t tell when your husband will return, and you can’t go on in this way.”

“I will never tell father,” she replied, closing her lips inexorably.

The lawyer forbore to penetrate the family trouble he divined. “Are you all alone in the house?” he asked.

“The girl is there. And the baby.”

“That won’t do, Mrs. Hubbard,” said Atherton, with a compassionate shake of the head. “You can’t go on living there alone.”

“Oh, yes, I can. I’m not afraid to be alone,” she returned with the air of having thought of this.

“But he may be absent some time yet,” urged the lawyer; “he may be absent indefinitely. You must go home to your father and wait for him there.”

“I can’t do that. He must find me here when he comes,” she answered firmly.

“But how will you stay?” pleaded Atherton; he had to deal with an unreasonable creature who could not be driven, and he must plead. “You have no money, and how can you live?”

“Oh,” replied Marcia, with the air of having thought of this too, “I will take boarders.”

Atherton smiled at the hopeless practicality, and shook his head; but he did not oppose her directly. “Mrs. Hubbard,” he said earnestly, “you have done well in coming to me, but let me convince you that this is a matter which can’t be kept. It must be known. Before you can begin to help yourself, you must let others help you. Either you must go home to your father and let your husband find you there—”

“He must find me here, in our own house.”

“Then you must tell your friends here that you don’t know where he is, nor when he will return, and let them advise together as to what can be done. You must tell the Hallecks—”

“I will never tell them!” cried Marcia. “Let me go! I can starve there and freeze, and if he finds me dead in the house, none of them shall have the right to blame him, — to say that he left me, — that he deserted his little child! Oh! oh! oh! oh! What shall I do?”

The hapless creature shook with the thick-coming sobs that overpowered her now, and Atherton refrained once more. She did not seem ashamed before him of the sorrows which he felt it a sacrilege to know, and in a blind instinctive way he perceived that in proportion as he was a stranger it was possible for her to bear her disgrace in his presence. He spoke at last from the hint he found in this fact: “Will you let me mention the matter to Miss Kingsbury?”

She looked at him with sad intensity in the eyes, as if trying to fathom any nether thought that he might have. It must have seemed to her at first that he was mocking her, but his words brought her the only relief from her self-upbraiding she had known. To suffer kindness from Miss Kingsbury would be in some sort an atonement to Bartley for the wrong her jealousy had done him; it would be self-sacrifice for his sake; it would be expiation. “Yes, tell her,” she answered with a promptness whose obscure motive was not illumined by the flash of passionate pride with which she added, “I shall not care for her.”

She rose again, and Atherton did not detain her; but when she had left him he lost no time in writing to her father the facts of the case as her visit had revealed them. He spoke of her reluctance to have her situation known to her family, but assured the Squire that he need have no anxiety about her for the present. He promised to keep him fully informed in regard to her, and to telegraph the first news of Mr. Hubbard. He left the Squire to form his own conjectures, and to take whatever action he thought best. For his own part, he had no question that Hubbard had abandoned his wife, and had stolen Halleck’s money; and the detectives to whom he went were clear that it was a case of European travel.

XXXV.

Atherton went from the detectives to Miss Kingsbury, and boldly resisted the interdict at her door, sending up his name with the message that he wished to see her immediately on business. She kept him waiting while she made a frightened toilet, and leaving the letter to him which she had begun half finished on her desk, she came down to meet him in a flutter of despondent conjecture. He took her mechanically yielded hand, and seated himself on the sofa beside her. “I sent word that I had come on business,” he said, “but it is no affair of yours,” — she hardly knew whether to feel relieved or disappointed,— “except as you make all unhappy people’s affairs your own.”

“Oh!” she murmured in meek protest, and at the same time she remotely wondered if these affairs were his.

“I came to you for help,” he began again, and again she interrupted him in deprecation.

“You are very good, after — after — what I — what happened, — I’m sure.” She put up her fan to her lips, and turned her head a little aside. “Of course I shall be glad to help you in anything, Mr. Atherton; you know I always am.”

“Yes, and that gave me courage to come to you, even after the way in which we parted this morning. I knew you would not misunderstand me” —

“No,” said Clara softly, doing her best to understand him.

“Or think me wanting in delicacy—”

“Oh, no, no!”

“If I believed that we need not have any embarrassment in meeting in behalf of the poor creature who came to see me just after you left me. The fact is,” he went on, “I felt a little freer to promise your interest since I had no longer any business relation to you, and could rely on your kindness like — like — any other.”

“Yes,” assented Clara, faintly; and she forbore to point out to him, as she might fitly have done, that he had never had the right to advise or direct her at which he hinted, except as she expressly conferred it from time to time. “I shall be only too glad—”

“And I will have a statement of your affairs drawn up to-morrow, and sent to you.” Her heart sank; she ceased to move the fan which she had been slowly waving back and forth before her face. “I was going to set about it this morning, but Mrs. Hubbard’s visit—”

“Mrs. Hubbard!” cried Clara, and a little air of pique qualified her despair.

“Yes; she is in trouble, — the greatest: her husband has deserted her.”

“Oh, Mr. Atherton!” Clara’s mind was now far away from any concern for herself. The woman whose husband has deserted her supremely appeals to all other women. “I can’t believe it! What makes you think so?”

“What she concealed, rather than what she told me, I believe,” answered Atherton. He ran over the main points of their interview, and summed up his own conjectures. “I know from things Halleck has let drop that they haven’t always lived happily together; Hubbard has been speculating with borrowed money, and he’s in debt to everybody. She’s been alone in her house for a fortnight, and she only came to me because people had begun to press her for money. She’s been pretending to the Hallecks that she hears from her husband, and knows where he is.”

“Oh, poor, poor thing!” said Clara, too shocked to say more. “Then they don’t know?”

“No one knows but ourselves. She came to me because I was a comparative stranger, and it would cost her less to confess her trouble to me than to them, and she allowed me to speak to you for very much the same reason.”

“But I know she dislikes me!”

“So much the better! She can’t doubt your goodness—”

“Oh!”

“And if she dislikes you, she can keep her pride better with you.”

Clara let her eyes fall, and fingered the edges of her fan. There was reason in this, and she did not care that the opportunity of usefulness was personally unflattering, since he thought her capable of rising above the fact. “What do you want me to do?” she asked, lifting her eyes docilely to his.

“You must find some one to stay with her, in her house, till she can be persuaded to leave it, and you must lend her some money till her father can come to her or write to her. I’ve just written to him, and I’ve told her to send all her bills to me; but I’m afraid she may be in immediate need.”

“Terrible!” sighed Clara to whom the destitution of an acquaintance was appalling after all her charitable knowledge of want and suffering. “Of course, we mustn’t lose a moment,” she added; but she lingered in her corner of the sofa to discuss ways and means with him, and to fathom that sad enjoyment which comfortable people find in the contemplation of alien sorrows. It was not her fault if she felt too kindly toward the disaster that had brought Atherton back to her on the old terms; or if she arranged her plans for befriending Marcia in her desolation with too buoyant a cheerfulness. But she took herself to task for the radiant smile she found on her face, when she ran up stairs and looked into her glass to see how she looked in parting with Atherton: she said to herself that he would think her perfectly heartless.

She decided that it would be indecent to drive to Marcia’s under the circumstances, and she walked; though with all the time this gave her for reflection she had not wholly banished this smile when she looked into Marcia’s woe-begone eyes. But she found herself incapable of the awkwardnesses she had deliberated, and fell back upon the native motherliness of her heart, into which she took Marcia with sympathy that ignored everything but her need of help and pity. Marcia’s bruised pride was broken before the goodness of the girl she had hated, and she performed her sacrifice to Bartley’s injured memory, not with the haughty self-devotion which she intended should humiliate Miss Kingsbury, but with the prostration of a woman spent with watching and fasting and despair. She held Clara away for a moment of scrutiny, and then submitted to the embrace in which they recognized and confessed all.

It was scarcely necessary for Clara to say that Mr. Atherton had told her; Marcia already knew that; and Clara became a partisan of her theory of Bartley’s absence almost without an effort, in spite of the facts that Atherton had suggested to the contrary. “Of course! He has wandered off somewhere, and at soon as he comes to his senses he will hurry home. Why I was reading of such a case only the other day, — the case of a minister who wandered off in just the same way, and found himself out in Western New York somewhere, after he had been gone three mouths.”

“Bartley won’t be gone three months,” protested Marcia.

“Certainly not!” cried Clara, in severe self-rebuke. Then she talked of his return for a while as if it might be expected any moment. “In the mean time,” she added, “you must stay here; you’re quite right about that, too, but you mustn’t stay here alone: he’d be quite as much shocked at that as if he found you gone when he came back. I’m going to ask you to let my friend Miss Strong stay with you; and she must pay her board; and you must let me lend you all the money you need. And, dear,” — Clara dropped her voice to a lower and gentler note,— “you mustn’t try to keep this from your friends. You must let Mr. Atherton write to your father; you must let me tell the Hallecks: they’ll be hurt if you don’t. You needn’t be troubled; of course he wandered off in a temporary hallucination, and nobody will think differently.”

She adopted the fiction of Bartley’s aberration with so much fervor that she even silenced Atherton’s injurious theories with it when he came in the evening to learn the result of her intervention. She had forgotten, or she ignored, the facts as he had stated them in the morning; she was now Bartley’s valiant champion, as well as the tender protector of Marcia: she was the equal friend of the whole exemplary Hubbard family.

Atherton laughed, and she asked what he was laughing at.

“Oh,” he answered, “at something Ben Halleck once said: a real woman can make righteousness delicious and virtue piquant.”

Clara reflected. “I don’t know whether I like that,” she said finally.

“No?” said Atherton. “Why not?”

She was serving him with an after-dinner cup of tea, which she had brought into the drawing-room, and in putting the second lump of sugar into his saucer she paused again, thoughtfully, holding the little cube in the tongs. She was rather elaborately dressed for so simple an occasion, and her silken train coiled itself far out over the mossy depth of the moquette carpet; the pale blue satin of the furniture, and the delicate white and gold of the decorations, became her wonderfully.

“I can’t say, exactly. It seems depreciatory, somehow, as a generalization. But a man might say it of the woman he was in love with,” she concluded.

“And you wouldn’t approve of a man’s saying it of the woman his friend was in love with?” pursued Atherton, taking his cup from her.

“If they were very close friends.” She did not know why, but she blushed, and then grew a little pale.

“I understand what you mean,” he said, “and I shouldn’t have liked the speech from another kind of man. But Halleck’s innocence characterized it.” He stirred his tea, and then let it stand untasted in his abstraction.

“Yes, he is good,” sighed Clara. “If he were not so good, it would be hard to forgive him for disappointing all their hopes in the way he’s done.”

“It’s the best thing he could have done,” said Atherton gravely, even severely.

“I know you advised it,” asserted Clara. “But it’s a great blow to them. How strange that Mr. Hubbard should have disappeared the last night Ben was at home! I’m glad that he got away without knowing anything about it.”

Atherton drank off his tea, and refused a second cup with a gesture of his hand. “Yes, so am I,” he said. “I’m glad of every league of sea he puts behind him.” He rose, as if eager to leave the subject.

Clara rose too, with the patient acquiescence of a woman, and took his hand proffered in parting. They had certainly talked out, but there seemed no reason why he should go. He held her hand, while he asked, “How shall I make my peace with you?”

“My peace? What for?” She flushed joyfully. “I was the one in fault.”

He looked at her mystified. “Why, surely, you didn’t repeat Halleck’s remark?”

“Oh!” she cried indignantly, withdrawing her hand. “I meant this morning. It doesn’t matter,” she added. “If you still wish to resign the charge of my affairs, of course I must submit. But I thought — I thought—” She did not go on, she was too deeply hurt. Up to this moment she had imagined that she had befriended Marcia, and taken all that trouble upon herself for goodness’ sake; but now she was ready to upbraid him for ingratitude in not seeing that she had done it for his sake. “You can send me the statement, and then — and then — I don’t know what I shall do! Why do you mind what I said? I’ve often said quite as much before, and you know that I didn’t mean it. I want you to take my property back again, and never to mind anything I say: I’m not worth minding.” Her intended upbraiding had come to this pitiful effect of self-contempt, and her hand somehow was in his again. “Do take it back!”

“If I do that,” said Atherton, gravely, “I must make my conditions,” and now they sat down together on the sofa from which he had risen. “I can’t be subjected again to your — disappointments,” — he arrested with a motion of his hand the profuse expression of her penitence and good intentions,— “and I’ve felt for a long time that this was no attitude for your attorney. You ought to have the right to question and censure; but I confess I can’t grant you this. I’ve allowed myself to make your interests too much my own in everything to be able to bear it. I’ve thought several times that I ought to give up the trust; but it seemed like giving up so much more, that I never had the courage to do it in cold blood. This morning you gave me my chance to do it in hot blood, and if I resume it, I must make my terms.”

It seemed a long speech to Clara, who sometimes thought she knew whither it tended, and sometimes not. She said in a low voice, “Yes.”

“I must be relieved,” continued Atherton, “of the sense I’ve had that it was indelicate in me to keep it, while I felt as I’ve grown to feel — towards you.” He stopped: “If I take it back, you must come with it!” he suddenly concluded.

The inconsistency of accepting these conditions ought to have struck a woman who had so long imagined herself the chase of fortune-hunters. But Clara apparently found nothing alarming in the demand of a man who openly acted upon his knowledge of what could only have been matter of conjecture to many suitors she had snubbed. She found nothing incongruous in the transaction, and she said, with as tremulous breath and as swift a pulse as if the question had been solely of herself, “I accept — the conditions.”

In the long, happy talk that lasted till midnight, they did not fail to recognize that, but for their common pity of Marcia, they might have remained estranged, and they were decently ashamed of their bliss when they thought of misery like hers. When Atherton rose to bid Clara good night, Marcia was still watching for Bartley, indulging for the last time the folly of waiting for him as if she definitely expected him that night.

Every night since he disappeared, she had kept the lights burning in the parlor and hall, and drowsed before the fire till the dawn drove her to a few hours of sleep in bed. But with the coming of the stranger who was to be her companion, she must deny herself even this consolation, and openly accept the fact that she no longer expected Bartley at any given time. She bitterly rebelled at the loss of her solitude, in which she could be miserable in whatever way her sorrow prompted, and the pangs with which she had submitted to Miss Kingsbury’s kindness grew sharper hour by hour till she maddened in a frenzy of resentment against the cruelty of her expiation. She longed for the day to come that she might go to her, and take back her promises and her submission, and fling her insulting good-will in her face. She said to herself that no one should enter her door again till Bartley opened it; she would die there in the house, she and her baby, and as she stood wringing her hands and moaning over the sleeping little one, a hideous impulse made her brain reel; she wished to look if Bartley had left his pistol in its place; a cry for help against herself broke from her; she dropped upon her knees.

The day came, and the hope and strength which the mere light so strangely brings to the sick in spirit as well as the sick in body visited Marcia. She abhorred the temptation of the night like the remembrance of a wicked dream, and she went about with a humble and grateful prayer — to something, to some one — in her heart. Her housewifely pride stirred again: that girl should not think she was a slattern; and Miss Strong, when she preceded her small trunk in the course of the forenoon, found the parlor and the guest-chamber, which she was to have, swept, and dusted, and set in perfect order by Marcia’s hands. She had worked with fury, and kept her heart-ache still, but it began again at sight of the girl. Fortunately, the conservatory pupil had embraced with even more than Miss Kingsbury’s ardor the theory of Bartley’s aberration, and she met Marcia with a sympathy in her voice and eyes that could only have come from sincere conviction. She was a simple country thing, who would never be a prima donna; but the overflowing sentimentality which enabled her to accept herself at the estimate of her enthusiastic fellow-villagers made her of far greater comfort to Marcia than the sublimest musical genius would have done. She worshipped the heroine of so tragic a fact, and her heart began to go out to her in honest helpfulness from the first. She broke in upon the monotony of Marcia’s days with the offices and interests of wholesome commonplace, and exorcised the ghostly silence with her first stroke on the piano, — which Bartley had bought on the instalment plan and had not yet paid for.

In fine, life adjusted itself with Marcia to the new conditions, as it does with women less wofully widowed by death, who promise themselves reunion with their lost in another world, and suffer through the first weeks and days in the hope that their parting will be for but days or weeks, and then gradually submit to indefinite delay. She prophesied Bartley’s return, and fixed it in her own mind for this hour and that. “Now, in the morning, I shall wake and find him standing by the bed. No, at night he will come in and surprise us at dinner.” She cheated herself with increasing faith at each renewal of her hopes. When she ceased to formulate them at last, it was because they had served their end, and left her established, if not comforted, in the superstition by which she lived. His return at any hour or any moment was the fetish which she let no misgiving blaspheme; everything in her of woman and of wife consecrated it. She kept the child in continual remembrance of him by talking of him, and by making her recognize the photographs in which Bartley had abundantly perpetuated himself; at night, when she folded the little one’s hands for prayer, she made her pray God to take care of poor papa and send him home soon to mamma. She was beginning to canonize him.

Her father came to see her as soon as he thought it best after Atherton’s letter; and the old man had to endure talk of Bartley to which all her former praises were as refreshing shadows of defamation. She required him to agree with everything she said, and he could not refuse; she reproached him for being with herself the cause of all Bartley’s errors, and he had to bear it without protest. At the end he could say nothing but “Better come home with me, Marcia,” and he suffered in meekness the indignation with which she rebuked him: “I will stay in Bartley’s house till he comes back to me. If he is dead, I will die here.”

The old man had satisfied himself that Bartley had absconded in his own rascally right mind, and he accepted with tacit grimness the theory of the detectives that he had not gone to Europe alone. He paid back the money which Bartley had borrowed from Halleck, and he set himself as patiently as he could to bear with Marcia’s obstinacy. It was a mania which must be indulged for the time, and he could only trust to Atherton to keep him advised concerning her. When he offered her money at parting, she hesitated. But she finally took it, saying, “Bartley will pay it back, every cent, as soon as he gets home. And if,” she added, “he doesn’t get back soon, I will take some other boarders and pay it myself.”

He could see that she was offended with him for asking her to go home. But she was his girl; he only pitied her. He shook hands with her as usual, and kissed her with the old stoicism; but his lips, set to fierceness by the life-long habit of sarcasm, trembled as he turned away. She was eager to have him go; for she had given him Miss Strong’s room, and had taken the girl into her own, and Bartley would not like it if he came back and found her there.

Bartley’s disappearance was scarcely a day’s wonder with people outside his own circle in that time of anxiety for a fair count in Louisiana and Florida, and long before the Returning Boards had partially relieved the tension of the public mind by their decision he had quite dropped out of it. The reporters who called at his house to get the bottom facts in the case, adopted Marcia’s theory, given them by Miss Strong, and whatever were their own suspicions or convictions, paragraphed him with merciful brevity as having probably wandered away during a temporary hallucination. They spoke of the depression of spirits which many of his friends had observed in him, and of pecuniary losses, as the cause. They mentioned his possible suicide only to give the report the authoritative denial of his family; and they added, that the case was in the hands of the detectives, who believed themselves in possession of important clews. The detectives in fact remained constant to their original theory, that Bartley had gone to Europe, and they were able to name with reasonable confidence the person with whom he had eloped. But these were matters hushed up among the force and the press. In the mean time, Bartley had been simultaneously seen at Montreal and Cincinnati, at about the same time that an old friend had caught a glimpse of him on a train bound westward from Chicago.

So far as the world was concerned, the surmise with which Marcia saved herself from final despair was the only impression that even vaguely remained of the affair. Her friends, who had compassionately acquiesced in it at first, waited for the moment when they could urge her to relinquish it and go home to her father; but while they waited, she gathered strength to establish herself immovably in it, and to shape her life more and more closely about it. She had no idea, no instinct, but to stay where he had left her till he came back. She opposed this singly and solely against all remonstrance, and treated every suggestion to the contrary as an instigation to crime. Her father came from time to time during the winter to see her, but she would never go home with him even for a day. She put her plan in force; she took other boarders: other girl students like Miss Strong, whom her friends brought her when they found that it was useless to oppose her and so began to abet her; she worked hard, and she actually supported herself at last in a frugal independence. Her father consulted with Atherton and the Hallecks; he saw that she was with good and faithful friends, and he submitted to what he could not help. When the summer came, he made a last attempt to induce her to go home with him. He told her that her mother wished to see her. She would not understand. “I’ll come,” she said, “if mother gets seriously sick. But I can’t go home for the summer. If I hadn’t been at home last summer, he would never have got into that way, and it would never have happened.”

She went home at last, in obedience to a peremptory summons; but her mother was too far gone to know her when she came. Her quiet, narrow life had grown colder and more inward to the end, and it passed without any apparent revival of tenderness for those once dear to her; the funeral publicity that followed seemed a final touch of the fate by which all her preferences had been thwarted in the world.

Marcia stayed only till she could put the house in order after they had laid her mother to rest among the early reddening sumacs under the hot glare of the August sun; and when she came away, she brought her father with her to Boston, where he spent his days as he might, taking long and aimless walks, devouring heaps of newspapers, rusting in idleness, and aging fast, as men do in the irksomeness of disuse.

Halleck’s father was beginning to show his age, too; and Halleck’s mother lived only in her thoughts of him, and her hopes of his return; but he did not even speak of this in his letters to them. He said very little of himself, and they could merely infer that the experiment to which he had devoted himself was becoming less and less satisfactory. Their sense of this added its pang to their unhappiness in his absence.

One day Marcia said to Olive Halleck, “Has any one noticed that you are beginning to look like your sisters?”

“I’ve noticed it,” answered the girl. “I always was an old maid, and now I’m beginning to show it.”

Marcia wondered if she had not hurt Olive’s feelings; but she would never have known how to excuse herself; and latterly she had been growing more and more like her father in certain traits. Perhaps her passion for Bartley had been the one spring of tenderness in her nature, and, if ever it were spent, she would stiffen into the old man’s stern aridity.

XXXVI.

It was nearly two years after Atherton’s marriage that Halleck one day opened the door of the lawyer’s private office, and, turning the key in the lock, limped forward to where the latter was sitting at his desk. Halleck was greatly changed: the full beard that he had grown scarcely hid the savage gauntness of his face; but the change was not so much in lines and contours as in that expression of qualities which we call looks.

“Well, Atherton!”

“Halleck! You!”

The friends looked at each other; and Atherton finally broke from his amaze and offered his hand, with an effect, even then, of making conditions. But it was Halleck who was the first to speak again.

“How is she? Is she well? Is she still here? Have they heard anything from him yet?”

“No,” said Atherton, answering the last question with the same provisional effect as before.

“Then he is dead. That’s what I knew; that’s what I said! And here I am. The fight is over, and that’s the end of it. I’m beaten.”

“You look it,” said Atherton, sadly.

“Oh, yes; I look it. That’s the reason I can afford to be frank, in coming back to my friends. I knew that with this look in my face I should make my own welcome; and it’s cordial even beyond my expectations.”

“I’m not glad to see you, Halleck,” said Atherton. “For your own sake I wish you were at the other end of the world.”

“Oh, I know that. How are my people? Have you seen my father lately? Or my mother? Or — Olive?” A pathetic tremor shook his voice.

“Why, haven’t you seen them yet?” demanded Atherton.

Halleck laughed cynically. “My dear friend, my steamer arrived this morning, and I’m just off the New York train. I’ve hurried to your office in all the impatience of friendship. I’m very lucky to find you here so late in the day! You can take me home to dinner, and let your domestic happiness preach to me. Come, I rather like the notion of that!”

“Halleck,” said Atherton, without heeding his banter, “I wish you would go away again! No one knows you are here, you say, and no one need ever know it.”

Halleck set his lips and shook his head, with a mocking smile. “I’m surprised at you, Atherton, with your knowledge of human nature. I’ve come to stay; you must know that. You must know that I had gone through everything before I gave up, and that I haven’t the strength to begin the struggle over again. I tell you I’m beaten, and I’m glad of it; for there is rest in it. You would waste your breath, if you talked to me in the old way; there’s nothing in me to appeal to, any more. If I was wrong — But I don’t admit, any more, that I was wrong: by heaven, I was right!”

“You are beaten, Halleck,” said Atherton sorrowfully. He pushed himself back in his chair, and clasped his hands together behind his head, as his habit was in reasoning with obstinate clients. “What do you propose to do?”

“I propose to stay.”

“What for?”

“What for? Till I can prove that he is dead.”

“And then?”

“Then I shall be free to ask her.” He added angrily, “You know what I’ve come back for: why do you torment me with these questions? I did what I could; I ran away. And the last night I saw her, I thrust her back into that hell she called her home, and I told her that no man could be her refuge from that devil, her husband, — when she had begged me in her mortal terror to go in with her, and save her from him. That was the recollection I had to comfort me when I tried to put her out of my mind, — out of my soul! When I heard that he was gone, I respected her days of mourning. God knows how I endured it, now it’s over; but I did endure it. I waited, and here I am. And you ask me to go away again! Ah!” He fetched his breath through his set teeth, and struck his fist on his knee. “He is dead! And now, if she will, she can marry me. Don’t look at me as if I had killed him! There hasn’t been a time in these two infernal years when I wouldn’t have given my life to save his — for her sake. I know that, and that gives me courage, it gives me hope.”

“But if he isn’t dead?”

“Then he has abandoned her, and she has the right to be free: she can get a divorce!”

“Oh,” said Atherton, compassionately, “has that poison got into you, Halleck? You might ask her, if she were a widow, to marry you; but how will you ask her, if she’s still a wife, to get a divorce and then marry you? How will you suggest that to a woman whose constancy to her mistake has made her sacred to you?” Halleck seemed about to answer; but he only panted, dry-lipped and open-mouthed, and Atherton continued: “You would have to corrupt her soul first. I don’t know what change you’ve made in yourself during these two years; you look like a desperate and defeated man, but you don’t look like that. You don’t look like one of those scoundrels who lure women from their duty, ruin homes, and destroy society, not in the old libertine fashion in which the seducer had at least the grace to risk his life, but safely, smoothly, under the shelter of our infamous laws. Have you really come back here to give your father’s honest name, and the example of a man of your own blameless life, in support of conditions that tempt people to marry with a mental reservation, and that weaken every marriage bond with the guilty hope of escape whenever a fickle mind, or secret lust, or wicked will may dictate? Have you come to join yourself to those miserable spectres who go shrinking through the world, afraid of their own past, and anxious to hide it from those they hold dear; or do you propose to defy the world, to help form within it the community of outcasts with whom shame is not shame, nor dishonor, dishonor? How will you like the society of those uncertain men, those certain women?”

“You are very eloquent,” said Halleck, “but I ask you to observe that these little abstractions don’t interest me. I’ve a concrete purpose, and I can’t contemplate the effect of other people’s actions upon American civilization. When you ask me to believe that I oughtn’t to try to rescue a woman from the misery to which a villain has left her, simply because some justice of the peace consecrated his power over her, I decline to be such a fool. I use my reason, and I see who it was that defiled and destroyed that marriage, and I know that she is as free in the sight of God as if he had never lived. If the world doesn’t like my open shame, let it look to its own secret shame, — the marriages made and maintained from interest, and ambition, and vanity, and folly. I will take my chance with the men and women who have been honest enough to own their mistake, and to try to repair it, and I will preach by my life that marriage has no sanctity but what love gives it, and that when love ceases marriage ceases, before heaven. If the laws have come to recognize that, by whatever fiction, so much the better for the laws!” Halleck rose.

“Well, then,” cried Atherton, rising, too, “you shall meet me on your own ground! This poor creature is constant in every breath she draws to the ruffian who has abandoned her. I must believe, since you say it, that you are ready to abet her in getting a divorce, even one of those divorces that are ‘obtained without publicity, and for any cause,’” — Halleck winced,— “that you are willing to put your sisters to shame before the world, to break your mother’s heart, and your father’s pride, — to insult the ideal of goodness that she herself has formed of you; but how will you begin? The love on her part, at least, hasn’t ceased: has the marriage?”

“She shall tell me,” answered Halleck. He left Atherton without another word, and in resentment that effaced all friendship between them, though after this parting they still kept up its outward forms, and the Athertons took part in the rejoicings with which the Hallecks celebrated Ben’s return. His meeting with the lawyer was the renewal of the old conflict on terms of novel and hopeless degradation. He had mistaken for peace that exhaustion of spirit which comes to a man in battling with his conscience; he had fancied his struggle over, and he was to learn now that its anguish had just begun. In that delusion his love was to have been a law to itself, able to loose and to bind, and potent to beat down all regrets, all doubts, all fears, that questioned it; but the words with which Marcia met him struck his passion dumb.

“Oh, I am so glad you have come lack!” she said. “Now I know that we can find him. You were such friends with him, and you understood him so well, that you will know just what to do. Yes, we shall find him now, and we should have found him long ago if you had been here. Oh, if you had never gone away! But I can never be grateful enough for what you said to me that night when you would not come in with me. The words have rung in my ears ever since; they showed that you had faith in him, more faith than I had, and I’ve made them my rule and my guide. No one has been my refuge from him, and no one ever shall be. And I thank you — yes, I thank you on my bended knees — for making me go into the house alone; it’s my one comfort that I had the strength to come back to him, and let him do anything he would to me, after I had treated him so; but I’ve never pretended it was my own strength. I have always told everybody that the strength came from you!”

Halleck had brought Olive with him; she and Marcia’s father listened to these words with the patience of people who had heard them many times before; but at the end Olive glanced at Halleck’s downcast face with fond pride in the satisfaction she imagined they must give him. The old man ruminated upon a bit of broom straw, and absently let the little girl catch by his hands, as she ran to and fro between him and her mother while her mother talked. Halleck made a formless sound in his throat, for answer, and Marcia went on.

“I’ve got a new plan now, but it seems as if father took a pleasure in discouraging all my plans. I know that Bartley’s shut up, somewhere, in some asylum, and I want them to send detectives to all the asylums in the United States and in Canada, — you can’t tell how far off he would wander in that state, — and inquire if any stray insane person has been brought to them. Doesn’t it seem to you as if that would be the right way to find him? I want to talk it all over with you, Mr. Halleck, for I know you can sympathize with me; and if need be I will go to the asylums myself; I will walk to them, I will crawl to them on my knees! When I think of him shut up there among those raving maniacs, and used as they use people in some of the asylums — Oh, oh, oh, oh!”

She broke out into sobs, and caught her little girl to her breast. The child must have been accustomed to her mother’s tears; she twisted her head round, and looked at Halleck with a laughing face.

Marcia dried her eyes, and asked, with quivering lips, “Isn’t she like him?”

“Yes,” replied Halleck huskily.

“She has his long eyelashes exactly, and his hair and complexion, hasn’t she?”

The old man sat chewing his broom straw in silence; but when Marcia left the room to get Bartley’s photograph, so that Halleck might see the child’s resemblance to him, her father looked at Halleck from under his beetling brows: “I don’t think we need trouble the asylums much for Bartley Hubbard. But if it was to search the States prisons and the jails, the rum-holes and the gambling-hells, or if it was to dig up the scoundrels who have been hung under assumed names during the last two years, I should have some hopes of identifying him.”

Marcia came back, and the old man sat in cast-iron quiet, as if he had never spoken; it was clear that whatever hate he felt for Bartley he spared her; and that if he discouraged her plans, as she said, it was because they were infected by the craze in which she canonized Bartley.

“You see how she is,” said Olive, when they came away.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Halleck desolately assented.

“Sometimes she seems to me just like a querulous, vulgar, middle-aged woman in her talk; she repeats herself in the same scolding sort of way; and she’s so eager to blame somebody besides Bartley for Bartley’s wickedness that, when she can’t punish herself, she punishes her father. She’s merciless to that wretched old man, and he’s wearing his homesick life out here in the city for her sake. You heard her just now, about his discouraging her plans?”

“Yes,” said Halleck, as before.

“She’s grown commoner and narrower, but it’s hardly her fault, poor thing, and it seems terribly unjust that she should be made so by what she has suffered. But that’s just the way it has happened. She’s so undisciplined, that she couldn’t get any good out of her misfortunes; she’s only got harm: they’ve made her selfish, and there seems to be nothing left of what she was two years ago but her devotion to that miserable wretch. You mustn’t let it turn you against her, Ben; you mustn’t forget what she might have been. She had a rich nature; but how it’s been wasted, and turned back upon itself! Poor, untrained, impulsive, innocent creature, — my heart aches for her! It’s been hard to bear with her at times, terribly hard, and you’ll find it so, Ben. But you must bear with her. The awfulest thing about people in trouble is that they are such bores; they tire you to death. But you’ll only have to stand her praises of what Bartley was, and we had to stand them, and her hopes of what you would be if you were only at home, besides. I don’t know what all she expects of you; but you must try not to disappoint her; she worships the ground you tread on, and I really think she believes you can do anything you will, just because you’re good.”

Halleck listened in silence. He was indeed helpless to be otherwise than constant. With shame and grief in his heart, he could only vow her there the greater fealty because of the change he found in her.

He was doomed at every meeting to hear her glorify a man whom he believed a heartless traitor, to plot with her for the rescue from imaginary captivity of the wretch who had cruelly forsaken her. He actually took some of the steps she urged; he addressed inquiries to the insane asylums, far and near; and in these futile endeavors, made only with the desire of failure, his own reason seemed sometimes to waver. She insisted that Atherton should know all the steps they were taking; and his sense of his old friend’s exact and perfect knowledge of his motives was a keener torture than even her father’s silent scorn of his efforts, or the worship in which his own family held him for them.

XXXVII.

Halleck had come home in broken health, and had promised his family, with the self-contempt that depraves, not to go away again, since the change had done him no good. There was no talk for the present of his trying to do anything but to get well; and for a while, under the strong excitement, he seemed to be better. But suddenly he failed; he kept his room, and then he kept his bed; and the weeks stretched into months before he left it.

When the spring weather came, he was able to go out again, and he spent most of his time in the open air, feeling every day a fresh accession of strength. At the end of one long April afternoon, he walked home with a light heart, whose right to rejoice he would not let his conscience question. He had met Marcia in the Public Garden, where they sat down on a bench and talked, while her father and the little girl wandered away in the restlessness of age and the restlessness of childhood.

“We are going home to Equity this summer,” she said, “and perhaps we shall not come back. No, we shall not come back. I have given up. I have waited, hoping — hoping. But now I know that it is no use waiting any longer: he is dead.” She spoke in tearless resignation, and the peace of accepted widowhood seemed to diffuse itself around her.

Her words repeated themselves to Halleck, as he walked homeward. He found the postman at the door with a newspaper, which he took from him with a smile at its veteran appearance, and its probable adventures in reaching him. The wrapper seemed to have been several times slipped off, and then slit up; it was tied with a string, now, and was scribbled with rejections in the hands of various Hallocks and Halletts, one of whom had finally indorsed upon it, “Try 97 Rumford Street.” It was originally addressed, as he made out, to “Mr. B. Halleck, Boston, Mass.,” and he carried it to his room before he opened it, with a careless surmise as to its interest for him. It proved to be a flimsy, shabbily printed country newspaper, with an advertisement marked in one corner.

   State of Indiana, Tecumseh County

   In Tecumseh Circuit Court, April Term, 1879.

   BARTLEY J. HUBBARD

   vs.

   MARCIA G. HUBBARD.

   Divorce. No. 5793.

   It appearing by affidavit this day filed in the office of the Clerk of

   the Tecumseh Circuit Court, that Marcia G. Hubbard, defendant in the

   above entitled action for divorce on account of abandonment and gross

   neglect of duty, is a non-resident of the State of Indiana, notice of

   the pendency of such action is therefore hereby given said defendant

   above named, and that the same will be called for answer on the 11th

   day of April, 1879, the same being the 3d judicial day of the April

   term of said court, for said year, which said term of said court will

   begin on the first Monday in April, 1879, and will be held at the Court

   House, in the town of Tecumseh, in said County and State, said 11th day

   of April, 1879, being the time fixed by said plaintiff by indorsement

   on his complaint, at which said time said defendant is required to

   answer herein.

   Witness my hand and the seal of the said Court, this 4th day of March,

   1879.

   AUGUSTUS H. HAWKINS,

   Clerk.

   SEAL

   Milikin & Ayres, Att’ys for Plff.

Halleck read this advertisement again and again, with a dull, mechanical action of the brain. He saw the familiar names, but they were hopelessly estranged by their present relation to each other; the legal jargon reached no intelligence in him that could grasp its purport.

When his daze began to yield, he took evidence of his own reality by some such tests as one might in waking from a long faint. He looked at his hands, his feet; he rose and looked at his face in the glass. Turning about, he saw the paper where he had left it on the table; it was no illusion. He picked up the cover from the floor, and scanned it anew, trying to remember the handwriting on it, to make out who had sent this paper to him, and why. Then the address seemed to grow into something different under his eye: it ceased to be his name; he saw now that the paper was directed to Mrs. B. Hubbard, and that by a series of accidents and errors it had failed to reach her in its wanderings, and by a final blunder had fallen into his hands.

Once solved, it was a very simple affair, and he had now but to carry it to her; that was very simple, too. Or he might destroy it; this was equally simple. Her words repeated themselves once more: “I have given up. He is dead.” Why should he break the peace she had found, and destroy her last sad illusion? Why should he not spare her the knowledge of this final wrong, and let the merciful injustice accomplish itself? The questions seemed scarcely to have any personal concern for Halleck; his temptation wore a heavenly aspect. It softly pleaded with him to forbear, like something outside of himself. It was when he began to resist it that he found it the breath in his nostrils, the blood in his veins. Then the mask dropped, and the enemy of souls put forth his power against this weak spirit, enfeebled by long strife and defeat already acknowledged.

At the end Halleck opened his door, and called, “Olive, Olive!” in a voice that thrilled the girl with strange alarm where she sat in her own room. She came running, and found him clinging to his doorpost, pale and tremulous. “I want you — want you to help me,” he gasped. “I want to show you something — Look here!”

He gave her the paper, which he had kept behind him, clutched fast in his hand as if he feared it might somehow escape him at last, and staggered away to a chair.

His sister read the notice. “Oh, Ben!” She dropped her hands with the paper in them before her, a gesture of helpless horror and pity, and looked at him. “Does she know it? Has she seen it?”

“No one knows it but you and I. The paper was left here for me by mistake. I opened it before I saw that it was addressed to her.”

He panted forth these sentences in an exhaustion that would have terrified her, if she had not been too full of indignant compassion for Marcia to know anything else. She tried to speak.

“Don’t you understand, Olive? This is the notice that the law requires she shall have to come and defend her cause, and it has been sent by the clerk of the court, there, to the address that villain must have given in the knowledge that it could reach her only by one chance in ten thousand.”

“And it has come to you! Oh, Ben! Who sent it to you?” The brother and sister looked at each other, but neither spoke the awestricken thought that was in both their hearts. “Ben,” she cried in a solemn ecstasy of love and pride, “I would rather be you this minute than any other man in the world!”

“Don’t!” pleaded Halleck. His head dropped, and then he lifted it by a sudden impulse. “Olive!” — But the impulse failed, and he only said, “I want you to go to Atherton with me. We mustn’t lose time. Have Cyrus get a carriage. Go down and tell them we’re going out. I’ll be ready as soon as you are.”

But when she called to him from below that the carriage had come and she was waiting, he would have refused to go with her if he durst. He no longer wished to keep back the fact, but he felt an invalid’s weariness of it, a sick man’s inadequacy to the farther demands it should make upon him. He crept slowly down the stairs, keeping a tremulous hold upon the rail; and he sank with a sigh against the carriage cushions, answering Olive’s eager questions and fervid comments with languid monosyllables.

They found the Athertons at coffee, and Clara would have them come to the dining-room and join them. Halleck refused the coffee, and while Olive told what had happened he looked listlessly about the room, aware of a perverse sympathy with Bartley, from Bartley’s point of view: Bartley might never have gone wrong if he had had all that luxury; and why should he not have had it, as well as Atherton? What right had the untempted prosperity of such a man to judge the guilt of such men as himself and Bartley Hubbard?

Olive produced the newspaper from her lap, where she kept both hands upon it, and opened it to the advertisement in dramatic corroboration of what she had been telling Atherton. He read it and passed it to Clara.

“When did this come to you?”

Olive answered for him. “This evening, — just now. Didn’t I say that?”

“No,” said Atherton; and he added to Halleck, gently: “I beg your pardon. Did you notice the dates?”

“Yes,” answered Halleck, with cold refusal of Atherton’s tone of reparation.

“The cause is set for hearing on the 11th,” said Atherton. “This is the 8th. The time is very short.”

“It’s long enough,” said Halleck, wearily.

“Oh, telegraph!” cried Clara. “Telegraph them instantly that she never dreamt of leaving him! Abandonment! Oh, if they only knew how she had been slaving her lingers off for the last two years to keep a home for him to come back to, they’d give her the divorce!”

Atherton smiled and turned to Halleck: “Do you know what their law is, now? It was changed two years ago.”

“Yes,” said Halleck, replying to the question Atherton had asked and the subtler question he had looked, “I have read up the whole subject since I came home. The divorce is granted only upon proof, even when the defendant fails to appear, and if this were to go against us,” — he instinctively identified himself with Marcia’s cause,— “we can have the default set aside, and a new trial granted, for cause shown.”

The women listened in awe of the legal phrases; but when Atherton rose, and asked, “Is your carriage here?” his wife sprang to her feet.

“Why, where are you going?” she demanded, anxiously.

“Not to Indiana, immediately,” answered her husband. “We’re first going to Clover Street, to see Squire Gaylord and Mrs. Hubbard. Better let me take the paper, dear,” he said, softly withdrawing it from her hands.

“Oh, it’s a cruel, cruel law!” she moaned, deprived of this moral support. “To suppose that such a notice as this is sufficient! Women couldn’t have made such a law.”

“No, women only profit by such laws after they’re made: they work both ways. But it’s not such a bad law, as divorce laws go. We do worse, now, in some New England States.”

They found the Squire alone in the parlor, and, with a few words of explanation, Atherton put the paper in his hands, and he read the notice in emotionless quiet. Then he took off his spectacles, and shut them in their case, which he put back into his waistcoat pocket. “This is all right,” he said. He cleared his throat, and, lifting the fierce glimmer of his eyes to Atherton’s, he asked, drily, “What is the law, at present?”

Atherton briefly recapitulated the points as he had them from Halleck.

“That’s good,” said the old man. “We will fight this, gentlemen.” He rose, and from his gaunt height looked down on both of them, with his sinuous lips set in a bitter smile. “Bartley must have been disappointed when he found a divorce so hard to get in Indiana. He must have thought that the old law was still in force there. He’s not the fellow to swear to a lie if he could help it; but I guess he expects to get this divorce by perjury.”

Marcia was putting little Flavia to bed. She heard the talking below; she thought she heard Bartley’s name. She ran to the stairs, and came hesitantly down, the old wild hope and wild terror fluttering her pulse and taking her breath. At sight of the three men, apparently in council, she crept toward them, holding out her hands before her like one groping his way. “What — what is it?” She looked from Atherton’s face to her father’s; the old man stopped, and tried to smile reassuringly; he tried to speak; Atherton turned away.

It was Halleck who came forward, and took her wandering hands. He held them quivering in his own, and said gravely and steadily, using her name for the first time in the deep pity which cast out all fear and shame, “Marcia, we have found your husband.”

“Dead?” she made with her lips.

“He is alive,” said Halleck. “There is something in this paper for you to see, — something you must see—”

“I can bear anything if he is not dead. Where — what is it? Show it to me—” The paper shook in the hands which Halleck released; her eyes strayed blindly over its columns; he had to put his finger on the place before she could find it. Then her tremor ceased, and she seemed without breath or pulse while she read it through. She fetched a long, deep sigh, and passed her hand over her eyes, as if to clear them; staying herself unconsciously against Halleck’s breast, and laying her trembling arm along his arm till her fingers knit themselves among his fingers, she read it a second time and a third. Then she dropped the paper, and turned to look up at him. “Why!” she cried, as if she had made it out at last, while an awful, joyful light of hope flashed into her face. “It is a mistake! Don’t you see? He thinks that I never came back! He thinks that I meant to abandon him. That I — that I — But you know that I came back, — you came back with me! Why, I wasn’t gone an hour, — a half-hour, hardly. Oh, Bartley, poor Bartley! He thought I could leave him, and take his child from him; that I could be so wicked, so heartless — Oh, no, no, no! Why, I only stayed away that little time because I was afraid to go back! Don’t you remember how I told you I was afraid, and wanted you to come in with me?” Her exaltation broke in a laugh. “But we can explain it now, and it will be all right. He will see — he will understand — I will tell him just how it was — Oh, Flavia, Flavia, we’ve found papa, we’ve found papa! Quick!”

She whirled away toward the stairs, but her father caught her by the arm. “Marcia!” he shouted, in his old raucous voice, “You’ve got to understand! This” — he hesitated, as if running over all terms of opprobrium in his mind, and he resumed as if he had found them each too feeble— “Bartley hasn’t acted under any mistake.”

He set the facts before her with merciless clearness, and she listened with an audible catching of the breath at times, while she softly smoothed her forehead with her left hand. “I don’t believe it,” she said when he had ended. “Write to him, tell him what I say, and you will see.”

The old man uttered something between a groan and a curse. “Oh, you poor, crazy child! Can nothing make you understand that Bartley wants to get rid of you, and that he’s just as ready for one lie as another? He thinks he can make out a case of abandonment with the least trouble, and so he accuses you of that, but he’d just as soon accuse you of anything else. Write to him? You’ve got to go to him! You’ve got to go out there and fight him in open court, with facts and witnesses. Do you suppose Bartley Hubbard wants any explanation from you? Do you think he’s been waiting these two years to hear that you didn’t really abandon him, but came back to this house an hour after you left it, and that you’ve waited for him here ever since? When he knows that, will he withdraw this suit of his and come home? He’ll want the proof, and the way to do is to go out there and let him have it. If I had him on the stand for five minutes,” said the old man between his set teeth,— “just five minutes, — I’d undertake to convince him from his own lips that he was wrong about you! But I am afraid he wouldn’t mind a letter! You think I say so because I hate him; and you don’t believe me. Well, ask either of these gentlemen here whether I’m telling you the truth.”

She did not speak, but, with a glance at their averted faces, she sank into a chair, and passed one hand over the other, while she drew her breath in long, shuddering respirations, and stared at the floor with knit brows and starting eyes, like one stifling a deadly pang. She made several attempts to speak before she could utter any sound; then she lifted her eyes to her father’s: “Let us — let us — go — home! Oh, let us go home! I will give him up. I had given him up already; I told you,” she said, turning to Halleck, and speaking in a slow, gentle tone, “only an hour ago, that he was dead. And this — this that’s happened, it makes no difference. Why did you bring the paper to me when you knew that I thought he was dead?”

“God knows I wished to keep it from you.”

“Well, no matter now. Let him go free if he wants to. I can’t help it.”

“You can help it,” interrupted her father. “You’ve got the facts on your side, and you’ve got the witnesses!”

“Would you go out with me, and tell him that I never meant to leave him?” she asked simply, turning to Halleck. “You — and Olive?”

“We would do anything for you, Marcia!”

She sat musing, and drawing her hands one over the other again, while her quivering breath came and went on the silence. She let her hands fall nervelessly on her lap. “I can’t go; I’m too weak; I couldn’t bear the journey. No!” She shook her head. “I can’t go!”

“Marcia,” began her father, “it’s your duty to go!”

“Does it say in the law that I have to go, if I don’t choose?” she asked of Halleck.

“No, you certainly need not go, if you don’t choose!”

“Then I will stay. Do you think it’s my duty to go?” she asked, referring her question first to Halleck and then to Atherton. She turned from the silence by which they tried to leave her free. “I don’t care for my duty, any more. I don’t want to keep him, if it’s so that he — left me — and — and meant it — and he doesn’t — care for me any — more.”

“Care for you? He never cared for you, Marcia! And you may be sure he doesn’t care for you now.”

“Then let him go, and let us go home.”

“Very well!” said the old man. “We will go home, then, and before the week’s out Bartley Hubbard will be a perjured bigamist.”

“Bigamist?” Marcia leaped to her feet.

“Yes, bigamist! Don’t you suppose he had his eye on some other woman out there before he began this suit?”

The languor was gone from Marcia’s limbs. As she confronted her father, the wonderful likeness in the outline of their faces appeared. His was dark and wrinkled with age, and hers was gray with the anger that drove the blood back to her heart, but one impulse animated those fierce profiles, and the hoarded hate in the old man’s soul seemed to speak in Marcia’s thick whisper, “I will go.”

XXXVIII.

The Athertons sat late over their breakfast in the luxurious dining-room where the April sun came in at the windows overlooking the Back Bay, and commanding at that stage of the tide a long stretch of shallow with a flight of white gulls settled upon it.

They had let Clara’s house on the hill, and she had bought another on the new land; she insisted upon the change, not only because everybody was leaving the hill, but also because, as she said, it would seem too much like taking Mr. Atherton to board, if they went to housekeeping where she had always lived; she wished to give him the effect before the world of having brought her to a house of his own. She had even furnished it anew for the most part, and had banished as far as possible the things that reminded her of the time when she was not his wife. He humored her in this fantastic self-indulgence, and philosophized her wish to give him the appearance of having the money, as something orderly in its origin, and not to be deprecated on other grounds, since probably it deceived nobody. They lived a very tranquil life, and Clara had no grief of her own unless it was that there seemed to be no great things she could do for him. One day when she whimsically complained of this, he said: “I’m very glad of that. Let’s try to be equal to the little sacrifices we must make for each other; they will be quite enough. Many a woman who would be ready to die for her husband makes him wretched because she won’t live for him. Don’t despise the day of small things.”

“Yes, but when every day seems the day of small things!” she pouted.

“Every day is the day of small things,” said Atherton, “with people who are happy. We’re never so prosperous as when we can’t remember what happened last Monday.”

“Oh, but I can’t bear to be always living in the present.”

“It’s not so spacious, I know, as either the past or the future, but it’s all we have.”

“There!” cried Clara. “That’s fatalism! It’s worse than fatalism!”

“And is fatalism so very bad?” asked her husband.

“It’s Mahometanism!”

“Well, it isn’t necessarily a plurality of wives,” returned Atherton, in subtle anticipation of her next point. “And it’s really only another name for resignation, which is certainly a good thing.”

“Resignation? Oh, I don’t know about that!”

Atherton laughed, and put his arm round her waist: an argument that no woman can answer in a man she loves; it seems to deprive her of her reasoning faculties. In the atmosphere of affection which she breathed, she sometimes feared that her mental powers were really weakening. As a girl she had lived a life full of purposes, which, if somewhat vague, were unquestionably large. She had then had great interests, — art, music, literature, — the symphony concerts, Mr. Hunt’s classes, the novels of George Eliot, and Mr Fiske’s lectures on the cosmic philosophy; and she had always felt that they expanded and elevated existence. In her moments of question as to the shape which her life had taken since, she tried to think whether the happiness which seemed so little dependent on these things was not beneath the demands of a spirit which was probably immortal and was certainly cultivated. They all continued to be part of her life, but only a very small part; and she would have liked to ask her husband whether his influence upon her had been wholly beneficial. She was not sure that it had; but neither was she sure that it had not. She had never fully consented to the distinctness with which he classified all her emotions and ideas as those of a woman: in her heart she doubted whether a great many of them might not be those of a man, though she had never found any of them exactly like his. She could not complain that he did not treat her as an equal; he deferred to her, and depended upon her good sense to an extent that sometimes alarmed her, for she secretly knew that she had a very large streak of silliness in her nature. He seemed to tell her everything, and to be greatly ruled by her advice, especially in matters of business; but she could not help observing that he often kept matters involving certain moral questions from her till the moment for deciding them was past. When she accused him of this, he confessed that it was so; but defended himself by saying that he was afraid her conscience might sway him against his judgment.

Clara now recurred to these words of his as she sat looking at him through her tears across the breakfast table. “Was that the reason you never told me about poor Ben before?”

“Yes, and I expect you to justify me. What good would it have done to tell you?”

“I could have told you, at least, that, if Ben had any such feeling as that, it wasn’t his fault altogether.”

“But you wouldn’t have believed that, Clara,” said Atherton. “You know that, whatever that poor creature’s faults are, coquetry isn’t one of them.”

Clara only admitted the fact passively. “How did he excuse himself for coming back?” she asked.

“He didn’t excuse himself; he defied himself. We had a stormy talk, and he ended by denying that he had any social duty in the matter.”

“And I think he was quite right!” Clara flashed out. “It was his own affair.”

“He said he had a concrete purpose, and wouldn’t listen to abstractions. Yes, he talked like a woman. But you know he wasn’t right, Clara, though you talk like a woman, too. There are a great many things that are not wrong except as they wrong others. I’ve no doubt that, as compared with the highest love her husband ever felt for her, Ben’s passion was as light to darkness. But if he could only hope for its return through the perversion of her soul, — through teaching her to think of escape from her marriage by a divorce, — then it was a crime against her and against society.”

“Ben couldn’t do such a thing!”

“No, he could only dream of doing it. When it came to the attempt, everything that was good in him revolted against it and conspired to make him help her in the efforts that would defeat his hopes if they succeeded. It was a ghastly ordeal, but it was sublime; and when the climax came, — that paper, which he had only to conceal for a few days or weeks, — he was equal to the demand upon him. But suppose a man of his pure training and traditions had yielded to temptation, — suppose he had so far depraved himself that he could have set about persuading her that she owed no allegiance to her husband, and might rightfully get a divorce and marry him, — what a ruinous blow it would have been to all who knew of it! It would have disheartened those who abhorred it, and encouraged those who wanted to profit by such an example. It doesn’t matter much, socially, what undisciplined people like Bartley and Marcia Hubbard do; but if a man like Ben Halleck goes astray, it’s calamitous; it ‘confounds the human conscience,’ as Victor Hugo says. All that careful nurture in the right since he could speak, all that life-long decency of thought and act, that noble ideal of unselfishness and responsibility to others, trampled under foot and spit upon, — it’s horrible!”

“Yes,” answered Clara, deeply moved, even as a woman may be in a pretty breakfast-room, “and such a good soul as Ben always was naturally. Will you have some more tea?”

“Yes, I will take another cup. But as for natural goodness—”

“Wait! I will ring for some hot water.”

When the maid had appeared, disappeared, reappeared, and finally vanished, Atherton resumed. “The natural goodness doesn’t count. The natural man is a wild beast, and his natural goodness is the amiability of a beast basking in the sun when his stomach is full. The Hubbards were full of natural goodness, I dare say, when they didn’t happen to cross each other’s wishes. No, it’s the implanted goodness that saves, — the seed of righteousness treasured from generation to generation, and carefully watched and tended by disciplined fathers and mothers in the hearts where they have dropped it. The flower of this implanted goodness is what we call civilization, the condition of general uprightness that Halleck declared he owed no allegiance to. But he was better than his word.”

Atherton lifted, with his slim, delicate hand, the cup of translucent china, and drained off the fragrant Souchong, sweetened, and tempered with Jersey cream to perfection. Something in the sight went like a pang to his wife’s heart. “Ah!” she said, “it is easy enough for us to condemn. We have everything we want!”

“I don’t forget that, Clara,” said Atherton, gravely. “Sometimes when I think of it, I am ready to renounce all judgment of others. The consciousness of our comfort, our luxury, almost paralyzes me at those times, and I am ashamed and afraid even of our happiness.”

“Yes, what right,” pursued Clara, rebelliously, “have we to be happy and united, and these wretched creatures so—”

“No right, — none in the world! But somehow the effects follow their causes. In some sort they chose misery for themselves, — we make our own hell in this life and the next, — or it was chosen for them by undisciplined wills that they inherited. In the long run their fate must be a just one.”

“Ah, but I have to look at things in the short run, and I can’t see any justice in Marcia’s husband using her so!” cried Clara. “Why shouldn’t you use me badly? I don’t believe that any woman ever meant better by her husband than she did.”

“Oh, the meaning doesn’t count! It’s our deeds that judge us. He is a thoroughly bad fellow, but you may be sure she has been to blame. Though I don’t blame the Hubbards, either of them, so much as I blame Halleck. He not only had everything he wished, but the training to know what he ought to wish.”

“I don’t know about his having everything. I think Ben must have been disappointed, some time,” said Clara, evasively.

“Oh, that’s nothing,” replied Atherton, with the contented husband’s indifference to sentimental grievances.

Clara did not speak for some moments, and then she summed up a turmoil of thoughts in a profound sigh. “Well, I don’t like it! I thought it was bad enough having a man, even on the outskirts of my acquaintance, abandon his wife; but now Ben Halleck, who has been like a brother to me, to have him mixed up in such an affair in the way he is, it’s intolerable!”

“I agree with you,” said Atherton, playing with his spoon. “You know how I hate anything that sins against order, and this whole thing is disorderly. It’s intolerable, as you say. But we must bear our share of it. We’re all bound together. No one sins or suffers to himself in a civilized state, — or religious state; it’s the same thing. Every link in the chain feels the effect of the violence, more or less intimately. We rise or fall together in Christian society. It’s strange that it should be so hard to realize a thing that every experience of life teaches. We keep on thinking of offences against the common good as if they were abstractions!”

“Well, one thing,” said Clara, “I shall always think unnecessarily shocking and disgraceful about it. And that is Ben’s going out with her on this journey. I don’t see how you could allow that, Eustace.”

“Yes,” said Atherton, after a thoughtful silence, “it is shocking. The only consolation is that it is not unnecessarily shocking. I’m afraid that it’s necessarily so. When any disease of soul or body has gone far enough, it makes its own conditions, and other things must adjust themselves to it. Besides, no one knows the ugliness of the situation but Halleck himself. I don’t see how I could have interfered; and upon the whole I don’t know that I ought to have interfered, if I could. She would be helpless without him; and he can get no harm from it. In fact, it’s part of his expiation, which must have begun as soon as he met her again after he came home.”

Clara was convinced, but not reconciled. She only said, “I don’t like it.”

Her husband did not reply; he continued musingly: “When the old man made that final appeal to her jealousy, — all that there is really left, probably, of her love for her husband, — and she responded with a face as wicked as his, I couldn’t help looking at Halleck—”

“Oh, poor Ben! How did he take it? It must have scared, it must have disgusted him!”

“That’s what I had expected. But there was nothing in his face but pity. He understood, and he pitied her. That was all.”

Clara rose, and turned to the window, where she remained looking through her tears at the gulls on the shallow. It seemed much more than twenty-four hours since she had taken leave of Marcia and the rest at the station, and saw them set out on their long journey with its uncertain and unimaginable end. She had deeply sympathized with them all, but at the same time she had felt very keenly the potential scandalousness of the situation; she shuddered inwardly when she thought what if people knew; she had always revolted from contact with such social facts as their errand involved. She got Olive aside for a moment, and asked her, “Don’t you hate it, Olive? Did you ever dream of being mixed up in such a thing? I should die, — simply die!”

“I shall not think of dying, unless we fail,” answered Olive. “And, as for hating it, I haven’t consulted my feelings a great deal; but I rather think I like it.”

“Like going out to be a witness in an Indiana divorce case!”

“I don’t look at it in that way, Clara. It’s a crusade to me; it’s a holy war; it’s the cause of an innocent woman against a wicked oppression. I know how you would feel about it, Clara; but I never was as respectable as you are, and I’m quite satisfied to do what Ben, and father, and Mr. Atherton approve. They think it’s my duty, and I am glad to go, and to be of all the use I can. But you shall have my heartfelt sympathy through all, Clara, for your involuntary acquaintance with our proceedings.”

“Olive! You know that I’m proud of your courage and Ben’s goodness, and that I fully appreciate the sacrifice you’re making. And I’m not ashamed of your business: I think it’s grand and sublime, and I would just as soon scream it out at the top of my voice, right here in the Albany depot.”

“Don’t,” said Olive. “It would frighten the child.” She had Flavia by the hand, and she made the little girl her special charge throughout the journey. The old Squire seemed anxious to be alone, and he restlessly escaped from Marcia’s care. He sat all the first day apart, chewing upon some fragment of wood that he had picked up, and now and then putting up a lank hand to rasp his bristling jaw; glancing furtively at people who passed him, and lapsing into his ruminant abstraction. He had been vexed that they did not start the night before; and every halt the train made visibly afflicted him. He would not leave his place to get anything to eat when they stopped for refreshment, though he hungrily devoured the lunch that Marcia brought into the car for him. At New York he was in a tumult of fear lest they should lose the connecting train on the Pennsylvania Road; and the sigh of relief with which he sank into his seat in the sleeping-car expressed the suffering he had undergone. He said he was not tired, but he went to bed early, as if to sleep away as much of the time as he could.

When Halleck came into their car, the next morning, he found Marcia and her father sitting together, and looking out of the window at the wooded slopes of the Alleghanies through which the train was running. The old man’s impatience had relaxed; he let Marcia lay her hand on his, and he answered her with quiet submission, when she spoke now and then of the difference between these valleys, where the wild rhododendrons were growing, and the frozen hollows of the hills at home, which must be still choked with snow.

“But, oh! how much I would rather see them!” she said at last with a homesick throb.

“Well,” he assented, “we can go right back — afterwards.”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Well, sir, good morning,” said the old man to Halleck, “we are getting along, sir. At this rate, unless our calculations were mistaken, we shall be there by midnight. We are on time, the porter tells me.”

“Yes, we shall soon be at Pittsburg,” said Halleck, and he looked at Marcia, who turned away her face. She had not spoken of the object of the journey to him since they had left Boston, and it had not been so nearly touched by either of them before.

He could see that she recoiled from it, but the old man, once having approached it, could not leave it. “If everything goes well, we shall have our grip on that fellow’s throat in less than forty-eight hours.” He looked down mechanically at his withered hands, lean and yellow like the talons of a bird, and lifted his accipitral profile with a predatory alertness. “I didn’t sleep very well the last part of the night, but I thought it all out. I sha’n’t care whether I get there before or after judgment is rendered; all I want is to get there before he has a chance to clear out. I think I shall be able to convince Bartley Hubbard that there is a God in Israel yet! Don’t you be anxious, Marcia; I’ve got this thing at my fingers’ ends, as clear as a bell. I intend to give Bartley a little surprise!”

Marcia kept her face averted, and Halleck relinquished his purpose of sitting down with them, and went forward to the state-room that Marcia and Olive had occupied with the little girl. He tapped on the door, and found his sister dressed, but the child still asleep.

“What is the matter, Ben?” she asked. “You don’t look well. You oughtn’t to have undertaken this journey.”

“Oh, I’m all right. But I’ve been up a good while, with nothing to eat. That old man is terrible. Olive!”

“Her father? Yes, he’s a terrible old man!”

“It sickened me to hear him talk, just now, — throwing out his threats of vengeance against Hubbard. It made me feel a sort of sympathy for that poor dog. Do you suppose she has the same motive? I couldn’t forgive her!” he said, with a kind of passionate weakness. “I couldn’t forgive myself!”

“We’ve got nothing to do with their motive, Ben. We are to be her witnesses for justice against a wicked wrong. I don’t believe in special providences, of course; but it does seem as if we had been called to this work, as mother would say. Your happening to go home with her, that night, and then that paper happening to come to you, — doesn’t it look like it?”

“It looks like it, yes.”

“We couldn’t have refused to come. That’s what consoles me for being here this minute. I put on a bold face with Clara Atherton, yesterday morning at the depot; but I was in a cold chill, all the time. Our coming off, in this way, on such an errand, is something so different from the rest of our whole life! And I do like quiet, and orderly ways, and all that we call respectability! I’ve been thinking that the trial will be reported by some such interviewing wretch as Bartley himself, and that we shall figure in the newspapers. But I’ve concluded that we mustn’t care. It’s right, and we must do it. I don’t shut my eyes to the kind of people we’re mixed up with. I pity Marcia, and I love her — poor, helpless, unguided thing! — but that old man is terrible! He’s as cruel as the grave where he thinks he’s been wronged, and crueller where he thinks she’s been wronged. You’ve forgiven so much, Ben, that you can’t understand a man who forgives nothing; but I can, for I’m a pretty good hater, myself. And Marcia’s just like her father, at times. I’ve seen her look at Clara Atherton as if she could kill her!”

The little girl stirred in her berth, and then lifted herself on her hands, and stared round at them through her tangled golden hair. “Is it morning, yet?” she asked sleepily. “Is it to-morrow?”

“Yes; it’s to-morrow, Flavia,” said Olive. “Do you want to get up?”

“And is next day the day after to-morrow?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s only one day till I shall see papa. That’s what mamma said. Where is mamma?” asked the child, rising to her knees, and sweeping back her hair from her face with either hand.

“I will go and send her to you,” said Halleck.

At Pittsburg the Squire was eager for his breakfast, and made amends for his fast of the day before. He ate grossly of the heterogeneous abundance of the railroad restaurant, and drank two cups of coffee that in his thin, native air would have disordered his pulse for a week. But he resumed his journey with a tranquil strength that seemed the physical expression of a mind clear and content. He was willing and even anxious to tell Halleck what his theories and plans were; but the young man shrank from knowing them. He wished only to know whether Marcia were privy to them, and this, too, he shrank from knowing.

XXXIX.

They left Pittsburg under the dun pall of smoke that hangs perpetually over the city, and ran out of a world where the earth seemed turned to slag and cinders, and the coal grime blackened even the sheathing from which the young leaves were unfolding their vivid green. Their train twisted along the banks of the Ohio, and gave them now and then a reach of the stream, forgetful of all the noisy traffic that once fretted its waters, and losing itself in almost primitive wildness among its softly rounded hills. It is a beautiful land, and it had, even to their loath eyes, a charm that touched their hearts. They were on the borders of the illimitable West, whose lands stretch like a sea beyond the hilly Ohio shore; but as yet this vastness, which appalls and wearies all but the born Westerner, had not burst upon them; they were still among heights and hollows, and in a milder and softer New England.

“I have a strange feeling about this journey,” said Marcia, turning from the window at last, and facing Halleck on the opposite seat. “I want it to be over, and yet I am glad of every little stop. I feel like some one that has been called to a death-bed, and is hurrying on and holding back with all her might, at the same time. I shall have no peace till I am there, and then shall I have peace?” She fixed her eyes imploringly on his. “Say something to me, if you can! What do you think?”

“Whether you will — succeed?” He was confounding what he knew of her father’s feeling with what he had feared of hers.

“Do you mean about the lawsuit? I don’t care for that! Do you think he will hate me when he sees me? Do you think he will believe me when I tell him that I never meant to leave him, and that I’m sorry for what I did to drive him away?”

She seemed to expect him to answer, and he answered as well as he could: “He ought to believe that, — yes, he must believe it.”

“Then all the rest may go,” she said. “I don’t care who gains the case. But if he shouldn’t believe me, — if he should drive me away from him, as I drove him from me—” She held her breath in the terror of such a possibility, and an awe of her ignorance crept over Halleck. Apparently she had not understood the step that Bartley had taken, except as a stage in their quarrel from which they could both retreat, if they would, as easily as from any other dispute; she had not realized it as a final, an almost irrevocable act on his part, which could only be met by reprisal on hers. All those points of law which had been so sharply enforced upon her must have fallen blunted from her longing to be at one with him; she had, perhaps, not imagined her defence in open court, except as a sort of public reconciliation.

But at another time she recurred to her wrongs in all the bitterness of her father’s vindictive purpose. A young couple entered the car at one of the country stations, and the bride made haste to take off her white bonnet, and lay her cheek on her husband’s shoulder, while he passed his arm round her silken waist, and drew her close to him on the seat, in the loving rapture which is no wise inconvenienced by publicity on our railroad trains. Indeed, after the first general recognition of their condition, no one noticed them except Marcia, who seemed fascinated by the spectacle of their unsophisticated happiness; it must have recalled the blissful abandon of her own wedding journey to her. “Oh, poor fool!” she said to Olive. “Let her wait, and it will not be long before she will know that she had better lean on the empty air than on him. Some day, he will let her fall to the ground, and when she gathers herself up all bruised and bleeding — But he hasn’t got the all-believing simpleton to deal with that he used to have; and he shall pay me back for all — drop by drop, and ache for ache!”

She was in that strange mental condition into which women fall who brood long upon opposing purposes and desires. She wished to be reconciled, and she wished to be revenged, and she recurred to either wish for the time as vehemently as if the other did not exist. She took Flavia on her knee, and began to prattle to her of seeing papa to-morrow, and presently she turned to Olive, and said: “I know he will find us both a great deal changed. Flavia looks so much older, — and so do I. But I shall soon show him that I can look young again. I presume he’s changed too.”

Marcia held the little girl up at the window. They had now left the river hills and the rolling country beyond, and had entered the great plain which stretches from the Ohio to the Mississippi; and mile by mile, as they ran southward and westward, the spring unfolded in the mellow air under the dull, warm sun. The willows were in perfect leaf, and wore their delicate green like veils caught upon their boughs; the may-apples had already pitched their tents in the woods, beginning to thicken and darken with the young foliage of the oaks and hickories; suddenly, as the train dashed from a stretch of forest, the peach orchards flushed pink beside the brick farmsteads. The child gave a cry of delight, and pointed; and her mother seemed to forget all that had gone before, and abandoned herself to Flavia’s joy in the blossoms, as if there were no trouble for her in the world.

Halleck rose and went into the other car; he felt giddy, as if her fluctuations of mood and motive had somehow turned his own brain. He did not come back till the train stopped at Columbus for dinner. The old Squire showed the same appetite as at breakfast: he had the effect of falling upon his food like a bird of prey; and as soon as the meal was despatched he went back to his seat in the car, where he lapsed into his former silence and immobility, his lank jaws working with fresh activity upon the wooden toothpick he had brought away from the table. While they waited for a train from the north which was to connect with theirs, Halleck walked up and down the vast, noisy station with Olive and Marcia, and humored the little girl in her explorations of the place. She made friends with a red-bird that sang in its cage in the dining-hall, and with an old woman, yellow, and wrinkled, and sunken-eyed, sitting on a bundle tied up in a quilt beside the door, and smoking her clay pipe, as placidly as if on her own cabin threshold. “‘Pears like you ain’t much afeard of strangers, honey,” said the old woman, taking her pipe out of her mouth, to fill it. “Where do you live at when you’re home?”

“Boston,” said the child, promptly. “Where do you live?”

“I used to live in Old Virginny. But my son, he’s takin’ me out to Illinoy, now. He’s settled out there.” She treated the child with the serious equality which simple old people use with children; and spat neatly aside in resuming her pipe. “Which o’ them ladies yender is your maw, honey?”

“My mamma?”

The old woman nodded.

Flavia ran away and laid her hand on Marcia’s dress, and then ran back to the old woman.

“That your paw, with her?” Flavia looked blank, and the old woman interpreted, “Your father.”

“No! We’re going out to see papa, — out West. We’re going to see him to-morrow, and then he’s coming back with us. My grandpa is in that car.”

The old woman now laid her folded arms on her knees, and smoked obliviously. The little girl lingered a moment, and then ran off laughing to her mother, and pulled her skirt. “Wasn’t it funny, mamma? She thought Mr. Halleck was my papa!” She hung forward by the hold she had taken, as children do, and tilted her head back to look into her mother’s face. “What is Mr. Halleck, mamma?”

“What is he?” The group halted involuntarily.

“Yes, what is he? Is he my uncle, or my cousin, or what? Is he going out to see papa, too? What is he going for? Oh, look, look!” The child plucked away her hand, and ran off to join the circle of idle men and half-grown boys who were forming about two shining negroes with banjos. The negroes flung their hands upon the strings with an ecstatic joy in the music, and lifted their black voices in a wild plantation strain. The child began to leap and dance, and her mother ran after her.

“Naughty little girl!” she cried. “Come into the car with me, this minute.”

Halleck did not see Marcia again till the train had run far out of the city, and was again sweeping through the thick woods, and flashing out upon the levels of the fields where the farmers were riding their sulky-plows up and down the long furrows in the pleasant afternoon sun. There was something in this transformation of man’s old-time laborious dependence into a lordly domination over the earth which strikes the westward journeyer as finally expressive of human destiny in the whole mighty region, and which penetrated even to Halleck’s sore and jaded thoughts. A different type of men began to show itself in the car, as the Western people gradually took the places of his fellow-travellers from the East. The men were often slovenly and sometimes uncouth in their dress; but they made themselves at home in the exaggerated splendor and opulence of the car, as if born to the best in every way; their faces suggested the security of people who trusted the future from the past, and had no fears of the life that had always used them well; they had not that eager and intense look which the Eastern faces wore; there was energy enough and to spare in them, but it was not an anxious energy. The sharp accent of the seaboard yielded to the rounded, soft, and slurring tones, and the prompt address was replaced by a careless and confident neighborliness of manner.

Flavia fretted at her return to captivity in the car, and demanded to be released with a teasing persistence from which nothing she was shown out of the window could divert her. A large man leaned forward at last from a seat near by, and held out an orange. “Come here to me, little Trouble,” he said; and Flavia made an eager start toward this unlooked-for friend.

Marcia wished to check her; but Halleck pleaded to have her go. “It will be a relief to you,” he said.

“Well, let her go,” Marcia consented. “But she was no trouble, and she is no relief.” She sat looking dully at the little girl after the Westerner had gathered her up into his lap. “Should I have liked to tell her,” she said, as if thinking aloud, “how we were really going to meet her father, and that you were coming with me to be my witness against him in a court, — to put him down and disgrace him, — to fight him, as father says?”

“You mustn’t think of it in that way,” said Halleck, gently, but, as he felt, feebly and inadequately.

“Oh, I shall not think of it in that way long,” she answered. “My head is in a whirl, and I can’t hold what we’re doing before my mind in any one shape for a minute at a time. I don’t know what will become of me, — I don’t know what will become of me!”

But in another breath she rose from this desolation, and was talking with impersonal cheerfulness of the sights that the car-window showed. As long as the light held, they passed through the same opulent and monotonous landscape; through little towns full of signs of material prosperity, and then farms, and farms again; the brick houses set in the midst of evergreens, and compassed by vast acreages of corn land, where herds of black pigs wandered, and the farmers were riding their ploughs, or heaping into vast windrows for burning the winter-worn stalks of the last year’s crop. Where they came to a stream the landscape was roughened into low hills, from which it sank again luxuriously to a plain. If there was any difference between Ohio and Indiana, it was that in Indiana the spring night, whose breath softly buffeted their cheeks through the open window, had gathered over those eternal cornfields, where the long crooked windrows, burning on either hand, seemed a trail of fiery serpents writhing away from the train as it roared and clamored over the track.

They were to leave their car at Indianapolis, and take another road which would bring them to Tecumseh by daylight the next morning. Olive went away with the little girl, and put her to bed on the sofa in their state-room, and Marcia suffered them to go alone; it was only by fits that she had cared for the child, or even noticed it. “Now tell me again,” she said to Halleck, “why we are going.”

“Surely you know.”

“Yes, yes, I know; but I can’t think, — I don’t seem to remember. Didn’t I give it up once? Didn’t I say that I would rather go home, and let Bartley get the divorce, if he wanted?”

“Yes, you said that, Marcia.”

“I used to make him very unhappy; I was very strict with him, when I knew he couldn’t bear any kind of strictness. And he was always so patient with me; though he never really cared for me. Oh, yes, I knew that from the first! He used to try; but he must have been glad to get away. Poor Bartley! It was cruel, cruel, to put that in about my abandoning him when he knew I would come back; but perhaps the lawyers told him he must; he had to put in something! Why shouldn’t I let him go? Father said he only wanted to get rid of me, so that he could marry some one else — Yes, yes; it was that that made me start! Father knew it would! Oh,” she grieved, with a wild self-pity that tore Halleck’s heart, “he knew it would!” She fell wearily back against the seat, and did not speak for some minutes. Then she said, in a slow, broken utterance: “But now I don’t seem to mind even that, any more. Why shouldn’t he marry some one else that he really likes, if he doesn’t care for me?”

Halleck laughed in bitterness of soul as his thought recurred to Atherton’s reasons. “Because,” he said, “you have a public duty in the matter. You must keep him bound to you, for fear some other woman, whose husband doesn’t care for her, should let him go, too, and society be broken up, and civilization destroyed. In a matter like this, which seems to concern yourself alone, you are only to regard others.”

His reckless irony did not reach her through her manifold sorrow. “Well,” she said, simply, “it must be that. But, oh! how can I bear it! how can I bear it!”

The time passed; Olive did not return for an hour; then she merely said that the little girl had just fallen asleep, and that she should go back and lie down with her; that she was sleepy too.

Marcia did not answer, but Halleck said he would call her in good time before they reached Indianapolis.

The porter made up the berths of such as were going through to St. Louis, and Marcia was left sitting alone with Halleck. “I will go and get your father to come here,” he said.

“I don’t want him to come! I want to talk to you — to say something — What was it? I can’t think!” She stopped, like one trying to recover a faded thought; he waited, but she did not speak again. She had laid a nervous clutch upon his arm, to detain him from going for her father, and she kept her hand there mechanically; but after a while he felt it relax; she drooped against him, and fell away into a sleep in which she started now and then like a frightened child. He could not release himself without waking her; but it did not matter; her sorrow had unsexed her; only the tenderness of his love for this hapless soul remained in his heart, which ached and evermore heavily sank within him.

He woke her at last when he must go to tell Olive that they were running into Indianapolis. Marcia struggled to her feet: “Oh, oh! Are we there? Are we there?”

“We are at Indianapolis,” said Halleck.

“I thought it was Tecumseh!” She shuddered. “We can go back; oh, yes, we can still go back!”

They alighted from the train in the chilly midnight air, and found their way through the crowd to the eating-room of the station. The little girl cried with broken sleep and the strangeness, and Olive tried to quiet her. Marcia clung to Halleck’s arm, and shivered convulsively. Squire Gaylord stalked beside them with a demoniac vigor. “A few more hours, a few more hours, sir!” he said. He made a hearty supper, while the rest scalded their mouths with hot tea, which they forced with loathing to their lips.

Some women who were washing the floor of the ladies’ waiting-room told them they must go into the men’s room, and wait there for their train, which was due at one o’clock. They obeyed, and found the room full of emigrants, and the air thick with their tobacco smoke. There was no choice; Olive went in first and took the child on her lap, where it straightway fell asleep; the Squire found a seat beside them, and sat erect, looking round on the emigrants with the air of being amused at their outlandish speech, into which they burst clamorously from their silence at intervals. Marcia stopped Halleck at the threshold. “Stay out here with me,” she whispered. “I want to tell you something,” she added, as he turned mechanically and walked away with her up the vast lamp-shot darkness of the depot. “I am not going on! I am going back. We will take the train that goes to the East; father will never know till it is too late. We needn’t speak to him about it—”

Halleck set himself against this delirious folly: he consented to her return; she could do what she would; but he would not consent to cheat her father. “We must go and tell him,” he said, for all answer to all her entreaties. He dragged her back to the waiting-room; but at the door she started at the figure of a man who was bending over a group of emigrant children asleep in the nearest corner, — poor, uncouth, stubbed little creatures, in old-mannish clothes, looking like children roughly blocked out of wood, and stiffly stretched on the floor, or resting woodenly against their mother.

“There!” said the man, pressing a mug of coffee on the woman. “You drink that! It’ll do you good, — every drop of it! I’ve seen the time,” he said, turning round with the mug, when she had drained it, in his hand, and addressing Marcia and Halleck as the most accessible portion of the English-speaking public, “when I used to be down on coffee; I thought it was bad for the nerves; but I tell you, when you’re travelling it’s a brain-food, if ever there was a brain—” He dropped the mug, and stumbled back into the heap of sleeping children, fixing a ghastly stare on Marcia.

She ran toward him. “Mr. Kinney!”

“No, you don’t! — no, you don’t!”

“Why, don’t you know me? Mrs. Hubbard?”

“He — he — told me you — was dead!” roared Kinney.

“He told you I was dead?”

“More’n a year ago! The last time I seen him! Before I went out to Leadville!”

“He told you I was dead,” repeated Marcia huskily. “He must have wished it!” she whispered. “Oh, mercy, mercy, mercy!” She stopped, and then she broke into a wild laugh: “Well, you see he was wrong. I’m on my way to him now to show him that I’m alive!”

XL.

Halleck woke at daybreak from the drowse into which he had fallen. The train was creeping slowly over the track, feeling its way, and he heard fragments of talk among the passengers about a broken rail that the conductor had been warned of. He turned to ask some question, when the pull of rising speed came from the locomotive, and at the same moment the car stopped with a jolting pitch. It settled upon the track again; but the two cars in front were overturned, and the passengers were still climbing from their windows, when Halleck got his bewildered party to the ground. Children were crying, and a woman was led by with her face cut and bleeding from the broken glass; but it was reported that no one else was hurt, and the trainmen gave their helplessness to the inspection of the rotten cross-tie that had caused the accident. One of the passengers kicked the decayed wood with his boot. “Well,” he said, “I always like a little accident like this, early; it makes us safe the rest of the day.” The sentiment apparently commended itself to popular acceptance; Halleck went forward with part of the crowd to see what was the matter with the locomotive: it had kept the track, but seemed to be injured somehow; the engineer was working at it, hammer in hand; he exchanged some dry pleasantries with a passenger who asked him if there was any chance of hiring a real fast ox-team in that neighborhood, in case a man was in a hurry to get on to Tecumseh.

They were in the midst of a level prairie that stretched all round to the horizon, where it was broken by patches of timber; the rising sun slanted across the green expanse, and turned its distance to gold; the grass at their feet was full of wild-flowers, upon which Flavia flung herself as soon as they got out of the car. By the time Halleck returned to them, she was running with cries of joy and wonder toward a windmill that rose beautiful above the roofs of a group of commonplace houses, at a little distance from the track; it stirred its mighty vans in the thin, sweet inland breeze, and took the sun gayly on the light gallery that encircled it.

A vision of Belgian plains swept before Halleck’s eyes. “There ought to be storks on its roof,” he said, absently.

“How strange that it should be here, away out in the West!” said Olive.

“If it were less strange than we are, here, I couldn’t stand it,” he answered.

A brakeman came up with a flag in his hand, and nodded toward Flavia. “She’s on the right track for breakfast,” he said. “There’s an old Dutchman at that mill, and his wife knows how to make coffee like a fellow’s mother. You’ll have plenty of time. This train has come here to stay — till somebody can walk back five miles and telegraph for help.”

“How far are we from Tecumseh?” asked Halleck.

“Fifty miles,” the brakeman called back over his shoulder.

“Don’t you worry any, Marcia,” said her father, moving off in pursuit of Flavia. “This accident makes it all right for us, if we don’t get there for a week.”

Marcia answered nothing. Halleck began to talk to her of that Belgian landscape in which he had first seen a windmill, and he laughed at the blank unintelligence with which she received his reminiscences of travel. For the moment, the torturing stress was lifted from his soul; he wished that the breakfast in the miller’s house might never come to an end; he explored the mill with Flavia; he bantered the Squire on his saturnine preference for steam power in the milling business; he made the others share his mood; he pushed far from him the series of tragic or squalid facts which had continually brought the end to him in reveries in which he found himself holding his breath, as if he might hold it till the end really came.

But this respite could not last. A puff of white steam showed on the horizon, and after an interval the sound of the locomotive whistle reached them, as it came backing down a train of empty cars towards them. They were quickly on their journey again, and a scanty hour before noon they arrived at Tecumseh.

The pretty town, which in prospect had worn to Olive Halleck’s imagination the blended hideousness of Sodom and Gomorrah, was certainly very much more like a New England village in fact. After the brick farmsteads and coal-smoked towns of Central Ohio, its wooden houses, set back from the street with an ample depth of door-yard, were appealingly familiar, and she exchanged some homesick whispers with Marcia about them, as they drove along under the full-leaved maples which shadowed the way. The grass was denser and darker than in New England, and, pretty as the town was, it wore a more careless and unscrupulous air than the true New England village; the South had touched it, and here and there it showed a wavering line of fence and a faltering conscientiousness in its paint. Presently all aspects of village quiet and seclusion ceased, and a section of conventional American city, with flab-roofed brick blocks, showy hotel, stores, paved street, and stone sidewalks expressed the readiness of Tecumseh to fulfil the destiny of every Western town, and become a metropolis at a day’s notice, if need be. The second-hand omnibus, which reflected the actuality of Tecumseh, set them down at the broad steps of the court-house, fronting on an avenue which for a city street was not very crowded or busy. Such passers as there were had leisure and inclination, as they loitered by, to turn and stare at the strangers; and the voice of the sheriff, as he called from an upper window of the court-house the names of absentee litigants or witnesses required to come into court, easily made itself heard above all the other noises.

It seemed to Halleck as if the sheriff were calling them; he lifted his head and looked at Olive, but she would not meet his eye; she led by the hand the little girl, who kept asking, “Is this the house where papa lives?” with the merciless iteration of a child. Halleck dragged lamely after the Squire, who had mounted the steps with unnatural vigor; he promptly found his way to the clerk’s office, where he examined the docket, and then returned to his party triumphant. “We are in time,” he said, and he led them on up into the court-room.

A few spectators, scattered about on the rows of benching, turned to look at them as they walked up the aisle, where the cocoa matting, soaked and dried, and soaked again, with perpetual libations of tobacco-juice, mercifully silenced their footsteps; most of the faces turned upon them showed a slow and thoughtful movement of the jaws, and, as they were dropped or averted, a general discharge of tobacco-juice seemed to express the general adoption of the new-comers, whoever they were, as a necessary element of the scene, which it was useless to oppose, and about which it was idle to speculate. Before the Squire had found his party seats on one of the benches next the bar, the spectators had again given their languid attention to the administration of justice, which is everywhere informal with us, and is only a little more informal in the West than in the East. An effect of serene disoccupation pervaded the place, such as comes at the termination of an interesting affair; and no one seemed to care for what the clerk was reading aloud in a set, mechanical tone. The judge was busy with his docket; the lawyers, at their several little tables within the bar, lounged in their chairs, or stalked about laughing and whispering to each other; the prosecuting attorney leaned upon the shoulder of a jolly-looking man, who lifted his face to joke up at him, as he tilted his chair back; a very stout, youngish person, who sat next him, kept his face dropped while the clerk proceeded: —

“And now, on motion of plaintiff, it is ordered by the Court that said defendant be now here three times called, which is done in open court, and she comes not; but wholly makes default herein. And this cause is now submitted to the Court for trial, and the Court having heard the evidence, and being fully advised, find for the plaintiff, — that the allegations of his complaint are true, and that he is entitled to a divorce. It is therefore considered by the Court, that said plaintiff be and he is hereby divorced, and the bonds of matrimony heretofore existing between said parties are dissolved and held for naught.”

As the clerk closed the large volume before him, the jolly lawyer, as if the record had been read at his request, nodded to the Court, and said, “The record of the decree seems correct, your honor.” He leaned forward, and struck the fat man’s expanse of back with the flat of his hand. “Congratulate you, my dear boy!” he said in a stage whisper that was heard through the room. “Many happy returns of the day!”

A laugh went round, and the judge said severely, “Mr. Sheriff, see that order is kept in the courtroom.”

The fat man rose to shake hands with another friend, and at the same moment Squire Gaylord stretched himself to his full height before stooping over to touch the shoulder of one of the lawyers within the bar, and his eyes encountered those of Bartley Hubbard in mutual recognition.

It was not the fat on Bartley’s ribs only that had increased: his broad cheeks stood out and hung down with it, and his chin descended by the three successive steps to his breast. His complexion was of a tender pink, on which his blonde moustache showed white; it almost vanished in the tallowy pallor to which the pink turned as he saw his father-in-law, and then the whole group which the intervening spectators had hitherto hidden from him. He dropped back into his chair, and intimated to his lawyer, with a wave of his hand and a twist of his head, that some hopeless turn in his fortunes had taken place. That jolly soul turned to him for explanation, and at the same time the lawyer whom Squire Gaylord had touched on the shoulder responded to a few whispered words from him by beckoning to the prosecuting attorney, who stepped briskly across to where they stood. A brief dumb-show ensued, and the prosecutor ended by taking the Squire’s hand, and inviting him within the bar; the other attorney politely made room for him at his table, and the prosecutor returned to his place near the jury-box, where he remained standing for a moment.

“If it please the Court,” he began, in a voice breaking heavily upon the silence that had somehow fallen upon the whole room, “I wish to state that the defendant in the case of Hubbard vs. Hubbard is now and here present, having been prevented by an accident on the road between this place and Indianapolis from arriving in time to make defence. She desires to move the Court to set aside the default.”

The prosecutor retired a few paces, and nodded triumphantly at Bartley’s lawyer, who could not wholly suppress his enjoyment of the joke, though it told so heavily against him and his client. But he was instantly on his feet with a technical objection.

The judge heard him through, and then opened his docket, at the case of Hubbard vs. Hubbard. “What name shall I enter for the defence?” he inquired formally.

Squire Gaylord turned with an old-fashioned state and deliberation which had their effect, and cast a glance of professional satisfaction in the situation at the attorneys and the spectators. “I ask to be allowed to appear for the defence in this case, if the Court please. My friend, Mr. Hathaway, will move my admission to this bar.”

The attorney to whom the Squire had first introduced himself promptly complied: “Your honor, I move the admission of Mr. F. J. Gaylord, of Equity, Equity County, Maine, to practise at this bar.”

The judge bowed to the Squire, and directed the clerk to administer the usual oath. “I have entered your name for the defence, Mr. Gaylord. Do you desire to make any motion in the case?” he pursued, the natural courtesy of his manner further qualified by a feeling which something pathetic in the old Squire’s bearing inspired.

“Yes, your honor, I move to set aside the default, and I shall offer in support of this motion my affidavit, setting forth the reasons for the non-appearance of the defendant at the calling of the cause.”

“Shall I note your motion as filed?” asked the Judge.

“Yes, your honor,” replied the old man. He made a futile attempt to prepare the paper; the pen flew out of his trembling hand. “I can’t write,” he said in despair that made other hands quick to aid him. A young lawyer at the next desk rapidly drew up the paper, and the Squire duly offered it to the clerk of the Court. The clerk stamped it with the file-mark of the Court, and returned it to the Squire, who read aloud the motion and affidavit, setting forth the facts of the defendant’s failure to receive the notice in time to prepare for her defence, and of the accident which had contributed to delay her appearance, declaring that she had a just defence to the plaintiff’s bill, and asking to be heard upon the facts.

Bartley’s attorney was prompt to interpose again. He protested that the printed advertisement was sufficient notice to the defendant, whenever it came to her knowledge, or even if it never came to her knowledge, and that her plea of failure to receive it in time was not a competent excuse. This might be alleged in any case, and any delay of travel might be brought forward to account for non-appearance as plausibly as this trumped-up accident in which nobody was hurt. He did his best, which was also his worst, and the judge once more addressed the Squire, who stood waiting for Bartley’s counsel to close. “I was about to adjourn the Court,” said the judge, in that accent which is the gift of the South to some parts of the West; it is curiously soft and gentle, and expressive, when the speaker will, of a caressing deference. “But we have still some minutes before noon in which we can hear you in support of your motion, if you are ready.”

“I am m-ready, your honor!” The old man’s nasals cut across the judge’s rounded tones, almost before they had ceased. His lips compressed themselves to a waving line, and his high hawk-beak came down over them; the fierce light burned in his cavernous eyes, and his grizzled hair erected itself like a crest. He swayed slightly back and forth at the table, behind which he stood, and paused as if waiting for his hate to gather head.

In this interval it struck several of the spectators, who had appreciative friends outside, that it was a pity they should miss the coming music, and they risked the loss of some strains themselves that they might step out and inform these dilettanti. One of them was stopped by a man at the door. “What’s up, now?” The other impatiently explained; but the inquirer, instead of hurrying in to enjoy the fun, turned quickly about, and ran down the stairs. He crossed the street, and, by a system of alleys and byways, modestly made his way to the outlying fields of Tecumseh, which he traversed at heightened speed, plunging at last into the belt of timber beyond. This excursion, which had so much the appearance of a chase, was an exigency of the witness who had corroborated on oath the testimony of Bartley in regard to his wife’s desertion. Such an establishment of facts, purely imaginary with the witness, was simple enough in the absence of rebutting testimony; but confronted with this, it became another affair; it had its embarrassments, its risks.

“M-ready,” repeated Squire Gay lord, “m-ready with facts and witnesses!” The word, in which he exulted till it rang and echoed through the room, drew the eyes of all to the little group on the bench next the bar, where Marcia, heavily veiled in the black which she had worn ever since Bartley’s disappearance, sat with Halleck and Olive. The little girl, spent with her long journey, rested her head on her mother’s lap, and the mother’s hand tremulously smoothed her hair, and tried to hush the grieving whisper in which she incessantly repeated, “Where is papa? I want to see papa!”

Olive looked straight before her, and Halleck’s eyes were fixed upon the floor. After the first glance at them Bartley did not lift his head, but held it bent forward where he sat, and showed only a fold of fat red neck above his coat-collar. Marcia might have seen his face in that moment before it blanched and he sank into his chair; she did not look toward him again.

“Mr. Sheriff, keep silence in the Court!” ordered the judge, in reprimand of the stir that ensued upon the general effort to catch sight of the witnesses.

“Silence in the Court! Keep your seats, gentlemen!” cried the sheriff.

“And I thank the Court,” resumed the Squire, “for this immediate opportunity to redress an atrocious wrong, and to vindicate an innocent and injured woman. Sir, I think it will prejudice our cause with no one, when I say that we are here not only in the relation of attorney and client, but in that of father and daughter, and that I stand in this place singularly and sacredly privileged to demand justice for my own child!”

“Order, order!” shouted the sheriff. But he could not quell the sensation that followed; the point had been effectively made, and it was some moments before the noise of the people beginning to arrive from the outside permitted the Squire to continue. He waited, with one lean hand hanging at his side, and the other resting in a loosely folded fist on the table before him. He took this fist up as if it were some implement he had laid hold of, and swung it in the air.

“By a chance which I shall not be the last to describe as providential,” — he paused, and looked round the room as if defying any one there to challenge the sincerity of his assertion,— “the notice, which your law requires to be given by newspaper advertisement to the non-resident defendant in such a case as this, came, by one chance in millions, to her hand. By one chance more or less, it would not have reached her, and a monstrous crime against justice would have been irrevocably accomplished. For she had mourned this man as dead, — dead to the universal frame of things, when he was only dead to honor, dead to duty, and dead to her; and it was that newspaper, sent almost at random through the mail, and wandering from hand to hand, and everywhere rejected, for weeks, before it reached her at last, which convinced her that he was still in such life as a man may live who has survived his own soul. We are therefore here, standing upon our right, and prepared to prove it God’s right, and the everlasting truth. Two days ago, a thousand miles and a thousand uncertainties intervened between us and this right, but now we are here to show that the defendant, basely defamed by the plea of abandonment, returned to her home within an hour after she had parted there with the plaintiff, and has remained there day and night ever since.” He stopped. “Did I say she had never absented herself during all this time? I was wrong. I spoke hastily. I forgot.” He dropped his voice. “She did absent herself at one time, — for three days, — while she could come home to close her mother’s dying eyes, and help me to lay her in the grave!” He tried to close his lips firmly again, but the sinuous line was broken by a convulsive twitching. “Perhaps,” he resumed with the utmost gentleness, “the plaintiff returned in this interval, and, finding her gone, was confirmed in his belief that she had abandoned him.”

He felt blindly about on the table with his trembling hands, and his whole figure had a pathos that gave the old dress-coat statuesque dignity. The spectators quietly changed their places, and occupied the benches near him, till Bartley was left sitting alone with his counsel. We are beginning to talk here at the East of the decline of oratory; but it is still a passion in the West, and his listeners now clustered about the Squire in keen appreciation of his power; it seemed to summon even the loiterers in the street, whose ascending tramp on the stairs continually made itself heard; the lawyers, the officers of the court, the judge, forgot their dinner, and posed themselves anew in their chairs to listen.

No doubt the electrical sphere of sympathy and admiration penetrated to the old man’s consciousness. When he pulled off his black satin stock — the relic of ancient fashion which the piety of his daughter kept in repair — and laid it on the table, there was a deep inarticulate murmur of satisfaction which he could not have mistaken. His voice rose again: —

“If the plaintiff indeed came at that time, the walls of those empty rooms, into which he peered like a thief in the night, might have told him — if walls had tongues to speak as they have ears to hear — a tale that would have melted even his heart with remorse and shame. They might have told him of a woman waiting in hunger and cold for his return, and willing to starve and freeze, rather than own herself forsaken, — waiting till she was hunted from her door by the creditors whom he had defrauded, and forced to confess her disgrace and her despair, in order to save herself from the unknown terrors of the law, invoked upon her innocent head by his villany. This is the history of the first two weeks of those two years, during which, as his perjured lips have sworn, he was using every effort to secure her return to him. I will not enlarge now upon this history, nor upon that of the days and weeks and months that followed, wringing the heart and all but crazing the brain of the wife who would not, in the darkest hours of her desolation, believe herself wilfully abandoned. But we have the record, unbroken and irrefragable, which shall not only right his victim, but shall bring yonder perjurer to justice.”

The words had an iron weight; they fell like blows. Bartley did not stir; but Marcia moved uneasily in her chair, and a low pitiful murmur broke from behind her veil. Her father stopped again, panting, and his dry lips closed and parted several times before he could find his voice again. But at that sound of grief he partially recovered himself, and went on brokenly.

“I now ask this Court, for due cause, to set aside the default upon which judgment has been rendered against the defendant, and I shall then ask leave to file her cross-petition for divorce.”

Marcia started half-way from her chair, and then fell back again; she looked round at Halleck as if for help, and hid her face in her hands. Her father cast a glance at her as if for her approval of this development of his plan.

“Then, may it please the Court, upon the rendition of judgment in our favor upon that petition — a result of which I have no more doubt than of my own existence — I shall demand under your law the indictment of yonder perjurer for his crime, and I shall await in security the sentence which shall consign him to a felon’s cell in a felon’s garb—”

Marcia flung herself upon her father’s arm, outstretched toward Bartley. “No! No! No!” she cried, with deep, shuddering breaths, in a voice thick with horror. “Never! Let him go! I will not have it! I didn’t understand! I never meant to harm him! Let him go! It is my cause, and I say—”

The old man’s arm dropped; he fixed a ghastly, bewildered look upon his daughter, and fell forward across the table at which he stood. The judge started from his chair; the people leaped over the benches, and crushed about the Squire, who fetched his breath in convulsive gasps. “Keep back!” “Give him air!” “Open the window!” “Get a doctor!” cried those next him.

Even Bartley’s counsel had joined the crowd about the Squire, from the midst of which broke the long, frightened wail of a child. This was Bartley’s opportunity. When his counsel turned to look for him, and advise his withdrawal from a place where he could do no good, and where possibly he might come to harm, he found that his advice had been anticipated: Bartley’s chair was vacant.

XLI.

That night when Halleck had left the old man to the care of Marcia and Olive, for the time, a note was brought to him from Bartley’s lawyer, begging the favor of a few moments’ interview on very important business. It might be some offer of reparation or advance in Marcia’s interest, and Halleck went with the bearer of the note. The lawyer met him hospitably at the door of his office. “How do you do, sir?” he said, shaking hands. Then he indicated a bulk withdrawn into a corner of the dimly-lighted room; the blinds were drawn, and he locked the door after Halleck’s entrance. “Mr. Hubbard, whom I think you know,” he added. “I’ll just step into the next room, gentlemen, and will be subject to your call at any moment.”

The bulk lifted itself and moved some paces toward Halleck; Bartley even raised his hand, with the vague expectation of taking Halleck’s, but seeing no responsive gesture on his part, he waved a salutation and dropped it again to his side.

“How d’ ye do, Halleck? Rather a secret, black, and midnight interview,” he said jocosely. “But I couldn’t very well manage it otherwise. I’m not just in the position to offer you the freedom of the city.”

“What do you want, Hubbard?” asked Halleck, bluntly.

“How is the old Squire?”

“The doctor thinks he may rally from the shock.”

“Paralysis?”

“Yes.”

“I have spent the day in the ‘tall timber,’ as our friends out here say, communing with nature; and I’ve only just come into town since dark, so I hadn’t any particulars.” He paused, as if expecting that Halleck might give them, but upon his remaining silent, he resumed. “Of course, as the case now stands, I know very well that the law can’t touch me. But I didn’t know what the popular feeling might be. The Squire laid it on pretty hot, and he might have made it livelier for me than he intended: he isn’t aware of the inflammable nature of the material out here.” He gave a nervous chuckle. “I wanted to see you, Halleck, to tell you that I haven’t forgotten that money I owe you, and that I mean to pay it all up, some time, yet. If it hadn’t been for some expenses I’ve had lately, — doctor’s bills, and so forth, — I haven’t been very well, myself,” — he made a sort of involuntary appeal for Halleck’s sympathy,— “and I’ve had to pay out a good deal of money, — I should be able to pay most of it now. As it is, I can only give you five hundred of it.” He tugged his porte-monnaie with difficulty up the slope of his pantaloons. “That will leave me just three hundred to begin the world with; for of course I’ve got to clear out of here. And I’d got very comfortably settled after two years of pretty hard work at the printing business, and hard reading at the law. Well, it’s all right. And I want to pay you this money, now, and I’ll pay you the rest whenever I can. And I want you to tell Marcia that I did it. I always meant to do it.”

“Hubbard,” interrupted Halleck, “you don’t owe me any money. Your father-in-law paid that debt two years ago. But you owe some one else a debt that no one can pay for you. We needn’t waste words: what are you going to do to repair the wrong you have done the woman and the child—” He stopped; the effort had perhaps been too much.

Bartley saw his emotion, and in his benighted way he honored it. “Halleck, you are a good fellow. You are such a good fellow that you can’t understand this thing. But it’s played out. I felt badly about it myself, at one time; and if I hadn’t been robbed of that money you lent me on my way here, I’d have gone back inside of forty-eight hours. I was sorry for Marcia; it almost broke my heart to think of the little one; but I knew they were in the hands of friends; and the more time I had to think it over, the more I was reconciled to what I had done. That was the only way out, for either of us. We had tried it for three years, and we couldn’t make it go; we never could have made it go; we were incompatible. Don’t you suppose I knew Marcia’s good qualities? No one knows them better, or appreciates them more. You might think that I applied for this divorce because I had some one else in view. Not any more in mine at present! But I thought we ought to be free, both of us; and if our marriage had become a chain, that we ought to break it.” Bartley paused, apparently to give these facts and reasons time to sink into Halleck’s mind. “But there’s one thing I should like to have you tell her, Halleck: she was wrong about that girl; I never had anything to do with her. Marcia will understand.” Halleck made no reply, and Bartley resumed, in a burst of generosity, which marked his fall into the abyss as nothing else could have done. “Look here, Halleck! I can’t marry again for two years. But as I understand the law, Marcia isn’t bound in any way. I know that she always had a very high opinion of you, and that she thinks you are the best man in the world: why don’t you fix it up with Marcia?”

Bartley was in effect driven into exile by the accidents of his suit for divorce which have been described. He was not in bodily danger after the first excitement passed off, if he was ever in bodily danger at all; but he could not reasonably hope to establish himself in a community which had witnessed such disagreeable facts concerning him; before which indeed he stood attainted of perjury, and only saved from the penalty of his crime by the refusal of his wife to press her case.

As soon as her father was strong enough to be removed, Marcia returned to the East with him, in the care of the friends who continued with them. They did not go back to Boston, but went directly to Equity, where in the first flush of the young and jubilant summer they opened the dim old house at the end of the village street, and resumed their broken lives. Her father, with one side palsy-stricken, wavered out every morning to his office, and sat there all day, the tremulous shadow of his former will. Sometimes his old friends came in to see him; but no one expected now to hear the Squire “get going.” He no longer got going on any topic; he had become as a little child, — as the little child that played about him there in the still, warm summer days and built houses with his law-books on the floor. He laughed feebly at her pranks, and submitted to her rule with pathetic meekness in everything where Marcia had not charged them both to the contrary. He was very obedient to Marcia, who looked vigilantly after his welfare, and knew all his goings and comings, as she knew those of his little comrade. Two or three times a day she ran out to see that they were safe; but for the rest she kept herself closely housed, and saw no one whom she was not forced to see; only the meat-man and the fish-man could speak authoritatively concerning her appearance and behavior before folks. They reported the latter as dry, cold, and uncommunicative. Doubtless the bitter experiences of her life had wrought their due effect in that passionate heart; but probably it was as much a morbid sensitiveness as a hardened indifference that turned her from her kind. The village inquisitiveness that invades, also suffers much eccentricity; and after it had been well ascertained that Marcia was as queer as her mother, she was allowed to lead her mother’s unmolested life in the old house, which had always turned so cold a shoulder to the world. Toward the end of the summer the lame young man and his sister, who had been several times in Equity before, paid her a visit; but stayed only a day or two, as was accurately known by persons who had noted the opening and closing of the spare-chamber blinds. In the winter he came again, but this time he came alone, and stayed at the hotel. He remained over a Sunday, and sat in the pulpit of the Orthodox church, where the minister extended to him the right hand of fellowship, and invited him to make the opening prayer. It was considered a good prayer, generally speaking, but it was criticised as not containing anything attractive to young people. He was understood to be on his way to take charge of a backwoods church down in Aroostook County, where probably his prayers would be more acceptable to the popular taste.

That winter Squire Gaylord had another stroke of paralysis, and late in the following spring he succumbed to a third. The old minister who had once been Mrs. Gaylord’s pastor was now dead; and the Squire was buried by the lame man, who came up to Equity for that purpose, at the wish, often expressed, of the deceased. This at least was the common report, and it is certain that Halleck officiated.

In entering the ministry he had returned to the faith which had been taught him almost before he could speak. He did not defend or justify this course on the part of a man who had once thrown off all allegiance to creeds; he said simply that for him there was no other course. He freely granted that he had not reasoned back to his old faith; he had fled to it as to a city of refuge. His unbelief had been helped, and he no longer suffered himself to doubt; he did not ask if the truth was here or there, any more; he only knew that he could not find it for himself, and he rested in his inherited belief. He accepted everything; if he took one jot or tittle away from the Book, the curse of doubt was on him. He had known the terrors of the law, and he preached them to his people; he had known the Divine mercy, and he also preached that.

The Squire’s death occurred a few months before the news came of another event to which the press of the State referred with due recognition, but without great fulness of detail. This was the fatal case of shooting — penalty or consequence, as we choose to consider it, of all that had gone before — which occurred at Whited Sepulchre, Arizona, where Bartley Hubbard pitched his tent, and set up a printing-press, after leaving Tecumseh. He began with the issue of a Sunday paper, and made it so spicy and so indispensable to all the residents of Whited Sepulchre who enjoyed the study of their fellow-citizens’ affairs, that he was looking hopefully forward to the establishment of a daily edition, when he unfortunately chanced to comment upon the domestic relations of “one of Whited Sepulchre’s leading citizens.” The leading citizen promptly took the war-path, as an esteemed contemporary expressed it in reporting the difficulty with the cynical lightness and the profusion of felicitous head-lines with which our journalism often alleviates the history of tragic occurrences: the parenthetical touch in the closing statement, that “Mr. Hubbard leaves a (divorced) wife and child somewhere at the East,” was quite in Bartley’s own manner.

Marcia had been widowed so long before that this event could make no outward change in her. What inner change, if any, it wrought, is one of those facts which fiction must seek in vain to disclose. But if love such as hers had been did not deny his end the pang of a fresh grief, we may be sure that her sorrow was not unmixed with self-accusal as unavailing as it was passionate, and perhaps as unjust.

One evening, a year later, the Athertons sat talking over a letter from Halleck, which Atherton had brought from Boston with him: it was summer, and they were at their place on the Beverley shore. It was a long letter, and Atherton had read parts of it several times already, on his way down in the cars, and had since read it all to his wife. “It’s a very morbid letter,” he said, with a perplexed air, when he had finished.

“Yes,” she assented. “But it’s a very good letter. Poor Ben!”

Her husband took it up again, and read here and there a passage from it.

“But I am turning to you now for help in a matter on which my own conscience throws such a fitful and uncertain light that I cannot trust it. I know that you are a good man, Atherton, and I humbly beseech you to let me have your judgment without mercy: though it slay me, I will abide by it.... Since her father’s death, she lives there quite alone with her child. I have seen her only once, but we write to each other, and there are times when it seems to me at last that I have the right to ask her to be my wife. The words give me a shock as I write them; and the things which I used to think reasons for my right rise up in witness against me. Above all, I remember with horror that he approved it, that he advised it!.... It is true that I have never, by word or deed, suffered her to know what was in my heart; but has there ever been a moment when I could do so? It is true that I have waited for his death; but if I have been willing he should die, am I not a potential murderer?”

“Oh, what ridiculous nonsense!” Clara indignantly protested.

Atherton read on: “These are the questions which I ask myself in my despair. She is free, now; but am I free? Am I not rather bound by the past to perpetual silence? There are times when I rebel against these tortures; when I feel a sanction for my love of her, an assurance from somewhere that it is right and good to love her; but then I sink again, for if I ask whence this assurance comes — I beseech you to tell me what you think. Has my offence been so great that nothing can atone for it? Must I sacrifice to this fear all my hopes of what I could be to her, and for her?”

Atherton folded up the letter, and put it back into its envelope, with a frown of exasperation. “I can’t see what should have infatuated Halleck with that woman. I don’t believe now that he loves her; I believe he only pities her. She is altogether inferior to him: passionate, narrow-minded, jealous, — she would make him miserable. He’d much better stay as he is. If it were not pathetic to have him deifying her in this way, it would be laughable.”

“She had a jealous temperament,” said Clara, looking down. “But all the Hallecks are fond of her. They think there is a great deal of good in her. don’t suppose Ben himself thinks she is perfect But—”

“I dare say,” interrupted her husband, “that he thinks he’s entirely sincere in asking my advice. But you can see how he wishes to be advised.”

“Of course. He wishes to marry her. It isn’t so much a question of what a man ought to have, as what he wants to have, in marrying, is it? Even the best of men. If she is exacting and quick-tempered, he is good enough to get on with her. If she had a husband that she could thoroughly trust, she would be easy enough to get on with. There is no woman good enough to get on with a bad man. It’s terrible to think of that poor creature living there by herself, with no one to look after her and her little girl; and if Ben—”

“What do you mean, Clara? Don’t you see that his being in love with her when she was another man’s wife is what he feels it to be, — an indelible stain?”

“She never knew it; and no one ever knew it but you. You said it was our deeds that judged us. Didn’t Ben go away when he realized his feeling for her?”

“He came back.”

“But he did everything he could to find that poor wretch, and he tried to prevent the divorce. Ben is morbid about it; but there is no use in our being so.”

“There was a time when he would have been glad to profit by a divorce.”

“But he never did. You said the will didn’t count. And now she is a widow, and any man may ask her to marry him.”

“Any man but the one who loved her during her husband’s life. That is, if he is such a man as Halleck. Of course it isn’t a question of gross black and white, mere right and wrong; there are degrees, there are shades. There might be redemption for another sort of man in such a marriage; but for Halleck there could only be loss, — deterioration, — lapse from the ideal. I should think that he might suffer something of this even in her eyes—”

“Oh, how hard you are! I wish Ben hadn’t asked your advice. Why, you are worse than, he is! You’re not going to write that to him?”

Atherton flung the letter upon the table, and drew a troubled sigh. “Ah, I don’t know! I don’t know!”

A WOMAN’S REASON

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

I.

THE day had been very oppressive, and at halfpast five in the afternoon, the heat had scarcely abated, to the perception of Mr. Joshua Harkness, as he walked heavily up the Park Street mall in Boston Common. When he came opposite the Brewer Fountain, with its Four Seasons of severe drouth, he stopped short, and stared at the bronze group with its insufficient dribble, as if he had never seen it before. Then he felt infirmly about the ground with his stick, stepped aside, and sank tremulously into one of the seats at the edge of the path. The bench was already partly occupied by a young man and a young woman; the young man had his arm thrown along the back of the seat behind the young woman; their heads were each tilted toward the other, and they were making love almost as frankly in that public place as they might in the seclusion of a crowded railway train. They both glanced at the intruder, and exchanged smiles, apparently of pity for his indecency, and then went on with their love-making, while Mr. Harkness, unconscious of his offence, stared eagerly out over the Common, and from time to time made gestures or signals with his stick in that direction. It was that one day of the week when people are not shouted at by a multitude of surly sign-boards to keep off the grass, and the turf was everywhere dotted with lolling and lounging groups. Perhaps to compensate for the absence of the sign-boards (which would reappear over night like a growth of disagreeable fungi), there was an unusual number of policemen sauntering about, and it was one of these whom Mr. Harkness was trying to attract with his cane. If any saw him, none heeded, and he had to wait till a policeman came down the mall in front of him. This could not have been so long a time as it seemed to Mr. Harkness, who was breathing thickly, and now and then pressing his hand against his forehead, like one who tries to stay a reeling brain.

“Please call a carriage,” he panted, as the officer whom he had thrust in the side with his cane stopped and looked down at him; and then as the man seemed to hesitate, he added: “My name is Harkness; I live at 9 Beacon Steps. I wish to go home at once; I’ve been taken faint.”

Beacon Steps is not Beacon Street, but it is of like blameless social tradition, and the name, together with a certain air of moneyed respectability in Mr. Harkness, had its effect with the policeman.

“Sick?” he asked., “Well, you are pale. You just hold on, a minute. Heh, there! heh!” he shouted to a passing hack man, who promptly stopped, turned his horses, and drew up beside the curb next the Common. “Now you take my arm, Mr. Harkness, and I’ll help you to the carriage.” He raised the gentleman to his benumbed feet, and got him away through the gathering crowd; when he was gone, the crowd continued to hang about the place where he had been sitting in such numbers, that the young man first took his arm down from the back of the seat, and the young woman tilted her head away from his, and then they both, with vexed and impatient looks, rose and walked away, seeking some other spot for the renewal of their courtship.

The policeman had not been able to refrain from driving home with Mr. Harkness, whom he patronised with a sort of municipal kindness, on the way; and for whom, when he had got him in-doors, and comfortably stretched upon a lounge in the library, he wanted to go and call the doctor. But Mr. Harkness refused, saying that he had had these attacks before, and would soon be all right. He thanked the officer by name, after asking him for it, and the officer went away, leaving Mr. Harkness to the care of the cook who, in that midsummer time, seemed to have sole charge of the house and its master. The policeman flipped the dust from the breast and collar of his coat, in walking back to his beat, with the right feeling of a man who would like to be better prepared if summoned a second time to befriend a gentleman of Mr. Harkness’s standing, and to meet in coming out of his house a young lady of such beauty and elegance as he had just encountered. This young lady, as he closed the door behind him, had run up the steps with the loop of her train in one hand — after the fashion of ten years ago, and in the other a pretty travelling-bag, carried with the fearlessness of a lady who knows that people are out of town. She glanced a little wonderingly, a little defiantly, at the policeman, who, seeing that she must drop one or other of her burdens to ring, politely rang for her.

“Thank you!” said the young lady, speaking a little more wonderingly, a little more defiantly than she had looked.

“Quite welcome, Miss,” returned the policeman, and touched his hat in going down the steps, while the young lady turned and stared after him, leaning a little over the top step on which she stood, with her back to the door. She was very pretty indeed, with blue eyes at once tender and honest, and the fair hair, that goes with their beauty, hanging loosely upon her forehead. Her cheeks, in their young perfection of outline, had a flush beyond their usual delicate colour; the heat, and her eager dash up the steps had suffused them with a dewy bloom, that seemed momently to deepen and soften. Her loveliness was saved from the insipidity of faultless lines by a little downward curve, a quirk, or call it dimple, at one corner of her mouth, which, especially in repose, gave it a touch of humorous feeling and formed its final charm: it seemed less a trait of face than of character. That fine positive grace, which is called style, and which is so eminently the gift of exquisite nerves, had not cost her too much; she was slim, but not fragile, and her very motionlessness suggested a vivid bird-like mobility; she stood, as if she had alighted upon the edge of the step. At the opening, of the door behind her she turned alertly from the perusal of the policeman’s retreating back, and sprang within.

“How d’ do, Margaret?” She greeted the cook in a voice whose bright kindness seemed the translation of her girlish beauty into sound. “Surprised to see me?” She did not wait for the cook’s answer, but put down her bag, and began pulling off her gloves, after shaking out her skirt, and giving that penetrating sidelong downward look at it, which women always give their drapery at moments of arrival or departure. She turned into the drawing-room from the hall, and went up to the long, old-fashioned mirror, and glanced at the face which it dimly showed her in the close-shuttered room. The face had apparently not changed since she last saw it in that mirror, and one might have fancied that the young lady was somehow surprised at this.

“May I ask why policemen are coming and going in and out of our house, Margaret?” she demanded of the cook’s image, which, further down in the mirror, hesitated at the doorway.

“He come home with your father, Miss Helen,” answered the cook, and as Helen turned round and stared at her in the flesh, she continued: “He had one of his faint turns in the Common. He’s laying down in the library now, Miss Helen.”

“O, poor papa!” wailed the young lady, who knew that in spite of the cook’s pronoun, it could not be the policeman who was then reposing from faintness in the library. She whirled away from the mirror, and swooped through the doorway into the hall, and back into the room where her father lay. “The heat has been too much for him,” she moaned, in mixed self-reproach and compassion, as she flew; and she dropped upon her knees beside him, and fondly caressed his grey head, and cooed and lamented over him, with the irreverent tenderness he liked her to use with him. “Poor old fellow,” she murmured. “It’s too bad! You ‘re working yourself to death, and I’m going to stay with you now, and put a stop to your being brought home by policemen. Why, you ought to be ashamed, breaking down in this way, as soon as my back is turned! Has Margaret done everything for you? Wouldn’t you like a little light?” She started briskly to her feet, flung up the long window, and raising and lowering the shade to get the right level for her father’s eyes, stood silhouetted against the green space without: a grass plot between high brick walls, on one of which clambered a grape-vine, and on the other a wisteria, while a bed of bright-leafed plants gave its colour in the centre of the yard. “There!” she said, with a glance at this succinct landscape. “That’s the prettiest bit of nature I’ve seen since I left Boston.” She came back and sat down on a low chair beside her father, who smiled fondly upon her, and took one of her hands to hold, while she pushed back his hair with the other.

“Are you awfully glad to see me?”

“Awfully,” said Mr. Harkness, falling in with her mood, and brightening with the light and her presence. “What brought you so suddenly?”

“Oh, that’s a long story. Are you feeling better, now?”

“Yes. I was merely fault. I shall be all right by morning. I’ve been a little worn out.”

“Was it like the last time?” asked Helen.

“Yes,” said her father.

“A little more like?”

“I don’t think it was more severe,” said Mr. Harkness, thoughtfully.

“What had you been doing? Honour bright, now: was it accounts?”

“Yes, it was accounts, my dear.”

“The same old wretches?”

“The same old ones; some new ones, too. They ‘re in hopeless confusion,” sighed Mr. Harkness, who seemed to age and sadden with the thought.

“Well, now, I’ll tell you what, papa,” said Helen, sternly: “I want you to leave all accounts, old and new, quite alone till the cold weather comes. Will you promise?”

Harkness smiled, as wearily as he had sighed. He knew that she was burlesquing somewhat her ignorance of affairs; and yet it was not much burlesqued, after all; for her life, like that of other American girls of prosperous parentage, had been almost as much set apart from the hard realities of bread-winning as the life of a princess, as entirely dedicated to society, to the studies that refine, and the accomplishments that grace society. The question of money had hardly entered into it. Since she was a little child, and used to climb upon her father’s knee, and ask him, in order to fix his status in her fairy tales, whether he was rich or poor, she might be said never to have fairly thought of that matter. Of course, she understood that she was not so rich as some girls, but she had never found that the difference was against her in society; she could not help perceiving that in regard to certain of them it was in her favour, and that she might have patronised them if she had liked, and that they were glad of her friendship on any terms. Her father’s great losses had come when she was too young to see the difference that they made in his way of living; ever since she could remember they had kept to the same scale of simple ease in the house where she was born, and she had known no wish that there had not been money enough to gratify. Pleasures of every kind had always come to her as freely and with as little wonder on her part as if they had been, like her youth, her bounding health, her beauty, the direct gift of heaven. She knew that the money came from her father’s business, but she had never really asked herself how it was earned. It is doubtful if she could have told what his business was; it was the India trade, whatever that was, and of late years he had seemed to be more worried by it than he used to be, and she had vaguely taken this ill, as an ungrateful return on the part of business. Once he had gone so far as to tell her that he had been hurt by the Great Fire somewhat. But the money for all her needs and luxuries (she was not extravagant, and really did not spend much upon herself) had come as before, and walking through the burnt district, and seeing how handsomely it had been rebuilt, she had a comforting sense that its losses had all been repaired.

“You look a little flushed and excited, my dear,” said her father, in evasion of the commands laid upon him, and he touched her fair cheek. He was very fond of her beauty and of her style; in the earlier days of her young ladyhood, he used to go about with her a great deal, and was angry when he thought she did not get all the notice she ought, and a little jealous when she did.

“Yes, I am flushed and excited, papa,” she owned, throwing herself back in the low chair she had pulled up to his sofa, and beginning to pluck nervously at those little tufts of silk that roughened the cobwebby fabric of the grey summer stuff she wore. “Don’t you think,” she asked, lifting her downcast eyes, “that coming home and finding you in this state is enough to make me look flushed and excited?”

“Not quite,” said her father quietly. “It’s not a new thing.”

Helen gave a sort of lamentable laugh. “I know I was humbugging, and I’m as selfish as I can be, to think more of myself even now than I do of you. But, oh papa! I’m so unhappy!” She looked at him through a mist that gathered and fell in silent drops from her eyes without clearing them, so that she did not see him carry the hand she had abandoned to his heart, and check a gasp. “I suppose we all have our accounts, one way or other, and they get confused like yours. Mine with — with — a certain person, had got so mixed up that there was nothing for it but just to throw them away.”

“Do you mean that you have broken with him finally, Helen?” asked her father gravely.

“I don’t know whether you call it finally,” said Helen, “but I told him it was no use — not just in those words — and that he ought to forget me; and I was afraid I wasn’t equal to it; and that I couldn’t see my way to it clearly; and unless I could see my way clearly, I oughtn’t to go on any longer. I wrote to him last week, and I thought — I thought that perhaps he wouldn’t answer it; perhaps he would come over to Eye Beach — he could easily have run over from Portsmouth — to see me — about it. But he didn’t — he didn’t — he — wrote a very short letter — . Oh, I didn’t see how he could write such a letter; I tried to spare him in every way; and yesterday he — he — s — s — sailed!” Here the storm broke, and Helen bowed herself to the sobs with which her slimness shook, like a tall flower beaten in the wind. Then she suddenly stopped, and ran her hand into her pocket, and pulled out her handkerchief. She wiped away her tears, and waited for her father to speak; but he lay silent, and merely regarded her pitifully. “I couldn’t bear it any longer there with those geese of Merrills — I’m sure they were as kind as could be — and so I came home to burden and afflict you, papa. Dont you think that was like me?” She gave her lamentable laugh again, sobbed, laughed once more, dried the fresh tears with her handkerchief, which she had mechanically shaped into a rabbit, and sat plucking at her dress as before. “What do people do, papa,” she asked presently, with a certain hoarseness in her voice, “when they’ve thrown away their accounts?”

“I never heard of their doing it, my dear,” said her father.

“Well, but when they’ve come to the very end of everything, and there’s nothing to go on with, and they might as well stop?”

“They go into bankruptcy,” answered the old man, absently, as if the thought had often been in his mind before.

“Well, that’s what I’ve gone into — bankruptcy,” said Helen. “And what do they do after they’ve gone into bankruptcy?”

“They begin the world again with nothing, if they have the heart,” replied her father.

“That’s what I have to do then — begin the world again with nothing! There! my course is clear, and I hope I like it, and I hope I’m satisfied!”

With these words of self-reproach, Helen again broke down, and bowed herself over the ruin she had made of her life.

“I don’t think you need despair,” said her father, soothingly, yet with a sort of physical effort which escaped her self-centred grief. “Robert is such a good fellow that if you wrote to him—”

“Why, papa! Are you crazy?” shouted the young girl. “Write to him? He’s off for three years, and I don’t think he’d come posting back from China, if I did write to him. And how could I write to him, even if he were in the next room?”

“It wouldn’t be necessary, in that case,” said her father. “I’m sorry he’s gone for so long,” he added, rather absently.

“If he were gone for a day, it couldn’t make any difference,” cried Helen, inexorably. “I argued it all out, — and it’s a perfect chain of logic — before I wrote to him. I looked at it in this way. I said to myself that it was no use having the affair off and on, any longer. It would be perfect misery to a person of my temperament to be an officer’s wife, and have my husband with me to-day and at the ends of the earth to-morrow. Besides, his pay wouldn’t support us. You told me that yourself, papa.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Harkness. “But I thought Robert might leave the navy, and—”

“I never would have let him!” Helen burst in. “He would have been as unhappy as a fish out of water, and I wouldn’t have his wretchedness on my conscience, and his idleness — you know how long that splendid Captain Seymour was trying to get into business in Boston, after he left the service: and then he had to go to California before he could find anything to do; and do you suppose I was going to have Robert mooning round in that way, for ages?”

“He might have gone into business with me for the time being,” said Mr. Harkness, not very hopefully.

“Oh yes! you could have made a place for him, I know! And we should both have been a burden to you, then. But I shouldn’t have cared for all that. I would have met any fate with Robert, if I had believed that I felt toward him just as I should. But, don’t you see, papa? If I had felt towards him in that way, I never should have thought of any — any — prudential considerations. That was what convinced me, that was what I couldn’t escape from, turn which way I would. That was the point I put to Robert himself, and — and — oh, I don’t see how he could answer as he did! I don’t see how he could!” Helen convulsively clutched something in the hand which she had thrust into her pocket. “It isn’t that I care for myself; but oh, I am so sorry for him, away off there all alone, feeling so hard and bitter towards me, and thinking me heartless, and I don’t, know what all, — and hating me so.”

“What did he say, Helen?” asked her father, tenderly. She snatched her hand from her pocket and laid a paper, crumpled, bewept, distained, in the hand he stretched towards her, and then bowed her face upon her knees.

Helen and her father were old confidants, and she had not more reluctance in showing him this letter than most girls would have had in trusting such a paper to their mother’s eyes. Her own mother had died long ago, and in the comradeship of her young life her father had entered upon a second youth, happier, or at least tranquiller, than the first. She adored him and petted him, as a wife could not, and this worship did not spoil him as it might if it had been a conjugal devotion. They had always a perfect understanding; she had not withdrawn her childish intimacy of thought and feeling from him to give it to her mother, as she would have done if her mother had lived; he knew all her small heart affairs without asking, more or less in a tacit way; and she had an abidingly grateful sense of his wisdom in keeping her from follies which she could see she had escaped through it. He had never before so directly sought to know her trouble; but he had never before seen her in so much trouble; besides, he had always been Robert Fenton’s friend at court with Helen; and he had quietly kept his hopes of their future through rather a stormy and uncertain present.

He liked Robert for the sake of Robert’s father, who had been captain and supercargo of one of Harkness and Co.’s ships, and had gone down in her on her home voyage when he was returning to be junior partner in the house, after a prosperous venture of his own in Wenham ice. He left this boy, and a young wife who died soon afterwards. Then Mr. Harkness, who was the boy’s guardian, gave him and the small property that remained to him more than a guardian’s care. He sent him to school, but he made him at home in his own house on all holidays and in vacation. These sojourns and absences, beginning when Robert was ten years old, and continuing through his school-boy age, had renewed alternately his intimacy and strangeness with Helen, and kept her a mystery and enchantment which grew with his growth, while to her consciousness he was simply Robert, a nice boy, who was now at school, or now at home, and who was often so shy that it was perfectly silly. When he was old enough to be placed in some career he was allowed to choose Harvard and a profession afterwards, or any more technical training that he liked better. He chose neither: the sea called him, as the old superstition is, and every nerve in his body responded. He would have liked to go into the trade in which his father had died, but here his guardian overruled him. He knew that the India trade was dying out. If Robert’s soul was set upon the sea, of which there seemed no doubt, it was better that he should go into the navy; at Annapolis he would have a thorough schooling, which would stand him in good stead, if future chance or choice ever cast him ashore to live.

Helen was in the sophomore year of the class with which she was dancing through Harvard when Robert came home from his first cruise. She was then a very great lady, and she patronised the midshipman with killing kindness as a younger brother, though he was in fact half a year her senior. He now fell in love with her outright: very proud love, very jealous, very impatient. She could not understand it. She said to her father it was so queer. She never thought of such a thing. Why, Robert! It was absurd. Besides, he had such a funny name; Fenton! But a passion like his was not to be quenched with reasons even so good as these. He went to sea again, bitterly, rapturously brooding over her idea, and came home in the autumn after Helen’s class-day. All the fellows had scattered now; and she was left much younger and humbler in her feelings, and not so great a lady for all her triumphs. Two of her class had proposed to her, and lots had come near it; but her heart had been left untouched, and she perceived, or thought she perceived, that these young gentlemen, who were wise and mature enough for their age, though neither Solomons nor Methuselahs, were all silly boys. In herself, on the contrary, the tumult of feeling with which she had first entered the world had been succeeded by a calm, which she might well have mistaken for wisdom. She felt that she now knew the world thoroughly, and while she was resolved to judge it kindly, she was not going to be dazzled by it any longer. She had become an observer of human nature; she analysed her feelings; sometimes she made cutting remarks to people, and was dreadfully sorry for it. She withdrew a great deal from society, and liked being thought odd. She had begun to take lessons in painting with a number of ladies under an artist’s criticism; she took up courses of reading; she felt that life was a serious affair. On his return, Robert at first seemed to her more boyish, more brotherly than before. But in talking with him certain facts of his history came out that showed him a very brave and manly fellow, and good, too. This gave her pause; so keen an observer of human nature at once discerned in this young man, who did not brag of his experiences, nor yet affect to despise them as trifles, but honestly owned that at one time he was scared, and that at another he would have given everything to be ashore, an object worthy of her closest and most reverent study. She proceeded to idealise him, and to stand in awe of him. Oh yes! with a deep sighing breath, and a long dreamy look at him — he! What he had been through must have changed the whole world to him. After that night in the typhoon — well, nothing could ever have been the same to her after that. He must find all the interests at home sickeningly mean. This was the tone she took with him, driving him to despair. When he again urged his suit, she said that she could not see why he should care for her. At the same time she wanted to ask him why he did not wear his uniform ashore, instead of that unnatural civil dress that he seemed so anxious to make himself ridiculous in. Being pressed for some sort of answer, she said that she had resolved never to marry. After this Robert went off very melancholy upon his third cruise. But she wrote him such kind and sympathetic letters that he came home from this cruise, which was a short one, more fondly in love than ever, but more patiently, more pleasingly in love; and he now behaved so sensibly, with so much apparent consideration for her uncertainty of mind, that she began to think seriously of him. But though she liked him ever so much, and respected him beyond anything, the very fact that she was wondering whether she could ask him to leave the navy or not, and where and how they should live, seemed sufficient proof to her that she did not care for him in the right way. Love, she knew, did not consider ways and means; it did not stop to argue; it found in itself its own reason and the assurance of a future. It did not come after years of shilly-shallying, and beating about the bush, and weighing this and that, and scrutiny of one’s emotions. If she loved Robert so little as to care what happened after they were married, she did not love him at all. Something like this, but expressed with infinite kindness was what she had written from Rye Beach to Robert stationed at Portsmouth. She ended by leaving the case in his hands. She forbade, him to hope, but she told him that there had been a time, a moment, when she thought that she might have loved him.

Robert took all this awry. He did not deign to ask her when this mysterious moment was, far less whether it might ever recur; he did not answer one of her arguments; he did not even come over to Rye Beach to combat and trample on her reasons. He wrote her a furious, foolish reply, in which he agreed with her that she had never loved him, and never would, and he bade her farewell. He managed to exchange with a friend who was bemoaning his hard lot in being ordered away from his young wife to the China station, and he sailed with their blessing three days after getting Helen’s letter. She only learned of his departure by chance.

The old man held the letter in his hand, after reading it, for so long a time, that at last Helen looked up. “It seems to me you take it pretty coolly, papa,” she said, her lips quivering.

“Yes, yes. Poor Robert! poor boy!” sighed her father. Then while she bridled indignantly at his misplaced compassion, he added, “I’m sorry, Helen. I think you would have come to like him. Well, well! If you are contented, my dear—”

“How can you say such a thing, papa?” cried Helen, astonished that he should have taken what he understood of her letter just as Robert had done, “when you know, — when you know I—” but Helen could not finish what she was going to say. She could not own that she thought her letter susceptible of quite a different answer. She set her lips and tried to stop their trembling, while her eyes filled.

Her father did not notice. “My dear,” he said presently, “will you ask Margaret to make me a cup of tea? I feel unpleasantly weak.”

“Why, papa!” cried Helen, flying to the bell, “why didn’t you tell me before, instead of letting me worry you with all this foolishness? why didn’t you say you were not so well?”

“I wasn’t thinking of it,” said her father, meekly accepting her reproof. “It’s nothing. The wind has changed, hasn’t it? I feel the east a little.”

“You’re chilly?” Helen was now tempted to be really harsh with him for his remissness, but she did not stay from running after the wrap, soft and light, which she had brought back from the sea-side with her, and had thrown down with her bag in the hall, and though she bemoaned his thoughtlessness, as she flung it over him, still she did not pour out upon him all the self-reproach in her heart. She went and hurried Margaret with the tea, and then set an old-fashioned tea-poy beside the sofa, and when the tea came, she drew up her chair, and poured it for him She offered to pull down the window, but he made her a sign to let it be; and in fact, it was not cooler without than within, and no chill came from the little yard, on whose lofty walls the sunset was beginning to burn in tender red light. She poured herself a cup of tea when she came back, and when she had made her father repeat again and again that he felt much better, she began to see the absurdity of being tragic about Robert at this late day, when she had so often refused him before without the least tragedy. This, to be sure, was not quite like the other refusals; not so one-sided; but really, except for Robert’s own sake, what had she to be sorry for, and why should she pity his towering dudgeon? An ache, faint and dull, made itself felt deep in her heart, and she answered sadly, “Well,” to her father’s tentative “Helen.”

He did not go on, and she asked presently, “What is it, papa?”

“Oh, nothing. There was Something I was going to speak to you about. But it will do another time.” Helen recollected that once or twice before this her father had begun in the same way, and postponed whatever he had been going to say in the same fashion. It was not a thing to be curious about, and she had never pressed him to speak. She knew that he would speak when he really thought best. But she wondered now a little if his mind were still running upon Robert.

“Was it something in regard to — to — me, papa?”

“Why, yes. Yes; indirectly.”

“Well, then, don’t think of it any more. I shall not. I’m sorry I worried you about it.”

“About what, my dear?” asked her father, who could not have followed her.

“Robert!” said Helen, abruptly.

“Oh! I wasn’t thinking about Robert.”

“Because, if you were, papa, I want to tell you that I am quite reconciled to have everything end as it has done. Robert and I will always be good friends. You needn’t be troubled about that.”

“Oh yes, certainly,” assented her father, closing his eyes.

Helen sat looking at him, as if she would like to go on. But she was a little ashamed, and a little piqued that her father should shut his eyes in that way while she was talking of Robert. He had taken the whole affair rather oddly. She had been prepared to defend Robert if her father were angry with him, as she expected; but instead of being angry, he had really seemed to side with Robert, and had somehow, by his reticence, implied that he would have been glad to have her humble herself to Robert.

“If you wish to sleep, papa,” she said with a dignity wasted upon him, for he still lay with his eyes closed, “I will go away.”

“I’m drowsy,” said her father. “But don’t go, Helen. Sit down here.”

He made a motion for her to sit beside him, and after an instant’s further resentment she drew up her chair, and laid her beautiful head down upon the cushion by his. She gave him a kiss, and dropped a large tear against his withered cheek, and wiped it away with her handkerchief, and then she hid her face again, and wept peacefully till all her tears were gone. At last she lifted her face, and dried her eyes, and sat dreamily watching the red sunset light creeping up the wall on which the wisteria clambered. It rose slowly, leaf by leaf, till it lit an airy frond at top, that swayed in it like a pennon. Suddenly it leaped from this and left it dark, and a shiver coursed through the next rank of foliage. It somehow made her think of a ship going down below the horizon, and the waves running along the sky where the streamers had just hung. But Robert must have been out of sight of land for two days and more before that.

II.

HELEN sat beside her father, while the solitude of the house deepened from silence to silence. Then Margaret came to the door, and looked in as if to ask whether it was not time for her to fetch away the tea-things. Helen gave her a nod of acquiescence, and presently rose, and followed her out to the kitchen, to tell her that she was going to her own room, and to say that she must be called when her father woke. But in the kitchen Margaret’s company was a temptation to her loneliness, and she made one little pretext after another for remaining, till Margaret set her a chair in the doorway. Margaret had been in the house ever since Helen was born, and Helen still used the same freedom with her that she had in childhood, and gave herself the range of places to which young ladyhood ordinarily denies its radiant presence. She had indeed as much intimacy with the cook as could consist with their different ages, and she got on smoothly with the cook’s temper, which had not been so good as her looks in youth, and had improved quite as little with age. Margaret was of a remote sort of Irish birth; but her native land had scarcely marked her accent, and but for her church and her sense of place, which was sometimes very respectful and sometimes very high and mighty with those above her, she might have been mistaken for an American; she had a low voice which only grew lower as she grew angry. A family in which she could do all the work had been her ideal when she first came to Boston, but she had failed of this now for some thirty years, and there seemed little hope that the chances would still turn in her favour. In Helen’s childhood, when she used to ask Margaret in moments of tenderness, following the gift of dough in unexpected quantity, whether she would come and live with her after she got married, Margaret had always answered, “Yes, if you won’t have anyone else bothering round,” which was commonly too much for the just pride of the actual second-girl. She had been cook in the family so long ago as when Mr. Harkness had kept a man; she had pressed upon the retreat of the last man with a broom in her hand and a joyful sarcasm on her lips; and she would willingly have kept vacant the place that she had made too hot for a long succession of second-girls. In the intervals of their going and coming, she realised her ideal of domestic service for the time being; and in the summer when Helen was away a good deal, she prolonged these intervals to the utmost. She was necessarily much more the housekeeper than Helen, though they both respected a fiction of contrary effect, and Helen commonly left her the choice of her helpers. She had not been surprised to find Margaret alone in the house, but she thought it well to ask her how she was getting on without anybody.

“Oh, very well, Miss Helen! You know your father don’t make any trouble.”

“Well, I’ve come now, and we must get somebody,” said Helen.

“Why, I thought you was going back on Monday, Miss Helen,” answered Margaret.

“No, I shall not leave papa. I think he’s not at all well.”

“He does seem rather poorly, Miss Helen. But I don’t see why you need any one, in the summer, this way.”

“Who’s to go to the door?” asked Helen. “Besides, you couldn’t take care of both of us, Margaret.”

“Just as you say, Miss Helen; I’d just as lives,” answered Margaret, stubbornly. “It isn’t for me to say; but I don’t see what you want with anybody: you won’t see a soul.”

“O, you never can tell, Margaret. You’ve had a good rest now, and you must have somebody to help you.” Helen’s sadness smiled at this confusion of ideas, and its suitableness to Margaret’s peculiar attitude. “Get somebody that you know, Margaret, and that you’ll like. But we must have somebody.” She regarded Margaret’s silent and stiff displeasure with a moment’s amusement, and then her bright face clouded; and she asked softly: “Did you know, Margaret, that Robert, — that Lieutenant Fenton — had sailed again?”

“Why, no, Miss Helen! You don’t mean that? Why, I thought he was going to stay the summer at Portsmouth.”

“He was,” said Helen, in the same low voice, “but he changed his mind, it seems.”

“Sailors is a roving set, anyway,” Margaret generalised. Then she added: “Did he come down to say good-bye to your father?”

“Why, no,” sadly answered Helen, who now thought of this for the first time. Her heart throbbed indignantly; then she reflected that she had kept him from coming. She looked up at the evening blue, with the swallows weaving a woof of flight across the top of the space framed in by the high walls on every hand, and “He hadn’t time, I suppose,” she said sadly. “He couldn’t get off.”

“Well, I don’t call it very nice, his not coming,” persisted Margaret. “I’d ‘a’ deserted first.” Her associations with naval service had been through gallant fellows who were not in a position to resign.

Helen smiled so ruefully at this that she would better for cheerfulness have wept. But she recognised Margaret’s limitations as a confidant, and said no more. She rose presently, and again asked Margaret to look in pretty soon, and see if her father were awake, and call her, if he were: she was going to her’ room. She looked in a moment herself as she went, and listened till she heard him breathing, and so passed on through the drawing-room, and trailed heavily up-stairs.

The house was rather old-fashioned, and it was not furnished in the latest taste, but it made the appeal with which things out of date, or passing out of date, touch the heart. It was in fact beginning to be respectable because it was no longer in the contest for effect, which the decorations of the newer houses carried on about it, and there was a sort of ugly keeping throughout.

In the very earliest days of Mr. Harkness’s housekeeping, the ornamentation of his home had reflected the character of his business somewhat. There had been even a time when the young supercargo brought back — it was his first voyage — quaint and beautiful shells from the East, for his wife to set about the tables and mantels; but these objects, so exquisite in themselves, so unyielding in composition, had long since disappeared. Some grotesque bronzes, picked up in Chinese ports, to which his early ventures had taken him, survived the expulsion of ivory carvings and Indian idols and genre statuettes in terra cotta, (like those you see in the East Indian Museum at Salem) and now found themselves, with the new feeling for oriental art, in the very latest taste. The others were bestowed in neglected drawers and shelves, along with boxes containing a wealth of ghastly rich and elaborate white crape shawls from China, and fantastically subtle cotton webs from India which Helen had always thought she should use in tableaux, and never had worn. Among the many pictures on the walls (there were too many), there were three Stuarts, the rest were of very indifferent merit; large figure paintings, or allegorical landscapes, after the taste of Cole and Poussin, in great carved and scrolly frames. Helen had once thought of making a raid upon these enemies of art, and in fact she had contemplated remodelling the whole equipment of the parlours, in conformity to the recent feeling in such matters; but she had not got further than the incomplete representation of some golden-rod and mullein-stalks upon the panels of her own chamber-door; and now that the fervour of her first enthusiasm had burnt itself out, she was not sorry she had left the old house in peace.

“Oh, I should think you’d be so rejoiced,” said the chief of her friends; “it’s such a comfort to go into one house where you don’t have to admire the artistic sentiment, and where every wretched little aesthetic prig of a table or a chair isn’t asserting a principle or teaching a lesson. Don’t touch a cobweb, Helen!” It had never even come to a talk between her and her father, and the house remained unmolested the home of her childhood. She had not really cared much for it since she was a child. The sense of our impermanent relation to the parental roof comes to us very early in life; and perhaps more keenly to a young girl than to her brothers. They are of the world by all the conditions of their active, positive being, almost from the first — a great world that is made for them; but she has her world to create. She cannot sit and adorn her father’s house, as she shall one day beautify and worship her husband’s; she can indeed do her duty by it, but the restless longing remains, and her housewifeliness does not voluntarily blossom out beyond the precincts of her own chamber, which she makes her realm of fancy and of dreams. She could not be the heart of the house if she would, as her mother is, or has been; and though in her mother’s place, she can be housekeeper, thrifty, wise, and notable, still some mysterious essential is wanting which it is not in her nature to supply to her father’s house.

Helen went to her own room, and, flinging up the windows, let in the noises of the streets. A few feet went by in the secluded place, and a sound of more frequent trampling came from the street into which it opened. Further off rose the blurred tumult of business, softened by the stretch of the Common, and growing less and less with the lapse of the long summer day. It was already a little cooler, and the smell of the sprinkled street stole refreshingly in at the window. It was still very light, and when Helen opened her blinds, the room brightened cheerfully all about her, and the sympathetic intimacy of her own closest belongings tenderly appealed to her. After something has happened, and we first see familiar things about us as they were, there comes, just before the sense of difference in ourselves returns to torment us, a moment of blind and foolish oblivion, and this was Helen’s as she sat down beside the window, and looked round upon the friendly prettiness of her room. It had been her room when she was a child, and there were childish keepsakes scattered about in odd places, out of the way of young-ladyish luxuries, highshouldered bottles of perfume, and long-handled ivory brushes, and dainty boxes and cases, and starred and bevelled hand-glasses, and other sacred mysteries of toilet. Of the period when she had thought herself wedded to art there were certain charcoal sketches pinned against the wall, and in one corner, not very definite at first glance under the draperies tossed upon it from time to time, was her easel. On projections of her mirror-frame hung souvenirs of Robert’s first cruise, which had been in the Mediterranean: ropes of Roman pearls; nets and bracelets and necklaces of shells and beads from Venice; filigree silver jewellery from Genoa; strands and rosaries of black, barbarically scented wooden beads from the Levant: not things you could wear at all, but very pleasant to have; they gave a sentiment to your room when you brought any one into it; they were nice to have lying about, and people liked to take them into their hands: they were not so very uncommon, either, that you had to keep telling what they were. She had never thought that possibly Robert had expected her to wear the absurd things. With an aching recurrence to their quarrel (it could be called no less) and a penitent self-pity, she thought of it now. It did not seem to her that she could touch them, but she went languidly to the mirror and took some of them down, and then all at once fantastically began to array herself in them: like a mad girl, she reflected. She threw the loops of Roman pearls and the black strands of Levantine beads about her neck; she set a net of the Venetian shell-work on her hair, and decked her wrists and her lovely ears with the Genoese filigree; a perfectly frantic combination, she mused, as she shook her head a little to make the ear-bobs dance. “Yes, perfectly frantic,” she said aloud, but not much thinking of the image confronting her from the mirror, thinking rather of Robert, and poignantly regretting that she had never put them on for him; and thinking that if the loss of him had made her certain about him too late for ever, how fatally strange that would be. Again she went over all the facts of the affair, and was able to make much surer of Robert’s motives than of her own. She knew that if he had understood her saying that she might have loved him once to be any encouragement for the future, he would not have written as he did. She could imagine Robert’s being very angry at the patronising tone of the rest of her letter; she had entire faith in his stupidity; she never doubted his generosity, his magnanimous incapability of turning her refusal of him into a refusal of her; his was not the little soul that could rejoice in such a chance. She wondered if now, far out at sea, sailing, sailing away, three years away, from her, he saw anything in her letter but refusal; or was he still in that blind rage? Did he never once think that it had seemed such a great thing for her to make confession, which meant him to come to her? But had she really meant that? It seemed so now, but perhaps then she had only thought of mingling a drop of kindness in his bitter cup, of trying to spare him the mortification of having loved a person who had never thought for a moment of loving him? From time to time, her image appeared to advance upon her from the depths of the mirror, decked in all that incongruous frippery, and to say with trembling lips, “Perfectly frantic, perfectly frantic,” while the tears ran down its face; and she found a wild comfort in regarding herself as quite an insane, irresponsible creature, who did not know what she was about. She felt that fate ought not to hold her to account. The door-bell rang, and she snatched the net from her hair with a fearful shudder, and flung down all the ornaments in a heap upon her dressing-table. Bumping sounds in the hall below reminded her that in her trance before the glass, she had remotely known of a wagon stopping at the door, and presently she heard Margaret coming up the stairs behind the panting express-man who was fetching up her trunk. She fled into another room, and guiltily lurked there till they went out again, before she returned to unlock and unpack the box. It was one of Helen’s economies not to drive home from the station, but to send her baggage by express and come up in a horse-car. The sums thus saved she devoted to a particular charity, and was very rigid with herself about spending every half-dollar coach-fare for that object. She only gave twenty-five cents to the express, and she made a merit of the fact that neither the coach-hire nor the charity ever cost her father anything. Robert had once tried to prove that it always cost him seventy-five cents, but she had easily seen through the joke, and had made him confess it.

She was still busy unpacking when Margaret came up to say that her father was awake now, and then she left off at once to go to him. The gas had been lighted in the hall and library, and that made life another thing. Her father was in his arm-chair, and was feeling decidedly better, he said; he had told Margaret to have tea there in the library. Helen laughed at him for having two teas within two hours; he owned to being hungry, and that reminded her that she had eaten nothing since an early dinner. When the tea and toast came in, and the cloth was laid half across the round table, in the mellow light of the study lamp, they were very cosy. Helen, who was always thinking of Robert, whatever else she thought of, began to play in fancy at a long life of devotion to her father, in which she should never marry. She had always imagined him living with her, but now she was living with him, and they were to grow old together; in twenty years, when he was eighty, she would be forty-three, and then there would not be much difference between them. She now finally relinquished the very last idea of Robert, except as a brother. She did not suppose she should ever quite like his wife, but she should pet their children.

“Helen,” said her father, breaking in upon these ideas, “how should you like to live in the country?”

“Why, papa, I was just thinking of it! That is, not in the country exactly, but somewhere off by ourselves, just you and I. Of course, I should like it.”

“I don’t mean on a farm,” pursued her father, “but in some of the suburban towns, where we could have a bit of ground and breathing space. I think it grows closer and closer in town; at times it seems as if I could hardly catch my breath. I believe it would agree with me in the country. I can’t get away from business entirely for a few years yet — if the times continue so bad, I must bend all my energies to it, in fact — and I have a fancy that the coming in and out of town would do me good. And I have a notion that I should like to build. I should like a new house — a perfectly new house. We could live on a simpler scale in the country.”

“O yes, indeed!” said Helen. “I should come into town to shop, with my initials worked in worsted on the side of my bag, and I should know where the bargains were, and lunch at Copeland’s. I should like it.”

“Well, we must think about it. I daresay we could let the house here without much trouble. I feel it somehow a great burden upon me, but I shouldn’t like to sell it.”

“O no, papa! We couldn’t think of selling it. I should just like to let it, and then never go near it, or look in the same direction, till we were ready to come back to it.”

“I have lived here so long,” continued her father, making her the listener to his musings rather than speaking to her, “that I should like a change. I used to think that I should never leave the house, but a place may become overcrowded with associations. You are too young, Helen, to understand how terrible it is to find one’s own past grow into the dumb material things about one, and become, as it were, imprisoned in them.”

“O yes,” sighed the girl, “there are some dresses of mine that I can’t bear the sight of, just because I felt, or said, or did certain things when I wore them.”

“An old house like this,” Mr. Harkness went on, “gets to be your body, and usurps all your reality, which doesn’t seem to live in it either, while you move round like a ghost. The past is so much more than the present. Think how much more these walls and these old chairs and tables have known of us than we now are!”

“No, no! Don’t think of it, papa, or we shall be getting into the depths again,” pleaded Helen.

“Well, I won’t,” consented her father, coming back to himself with a smile, which presently faded. “But it all makes me restless and impatient. I should like to begin a new life somewhere else, in a new house.” He was silent a while, trifling with the toast on his plate; his appetite had passed at the sight of the food, and he had eaten scarcely anything. He looked at Helen, and then at a portrait on the wall, and than at Helen again.

“I’m not much like mamma, am I, papa?” she asked.

“Not much in face,” said Mr. Harkness.

“Do you wish I was more?” she pursued timidly.

“No, I don’t think I do,” said her father.

“It would only make me more painful, if I looked more like her, such a helpless, selfish thing as I am,” morbidly assented Helen. “I should only make you miss her the more.”

“Why, Helen, you ‘re a very good girl — the best child in the world,” said her father.

“O no, I’m not, papa. I’m one of the worst. I never think of anybody but myself,” said Helen, who was thinking of Robert. “You don’t know how many times I’ve gone down on my mental knees to you and asked you to have patience with me.”

“Asked me to have patience with you?” said her father, taking her by the chin, and pressing against his cheek the beautiful face which she leaned toward him. “Poor child! There’s hardly a day since you were born that I haven’t done you a greater wrong than the sum of all your sins would come to. Papas are dreadful fellows, Helen; but they sometimes live in the hope of repairing their misdeeds.”

“Write them on a slip of paper, and hide it in a secret drawer that opens with a clasp and spring, when you don’t know they’re there,” said Helen, glad of his touch of playfulness. “We’ve both been humbugging, and we know it.”

He stared at her and said, “Your voice is like your mother’s; and just now, when you came in, your movement was very like hers. I hadn’t noticed it before. But she has been a great deal in my mind of late.”

If he had wished to talk of her mother, whom Helen could not remember, and who had been all her life merely the shadow of a sorrow to her, a death, a grave, a name upon a stone, a picture on the wall, she would not spare herself the duty of encouraging him to do so. “Was she tall, like me?” she asked.

“Not so tall,” answered her father. “And she was dark.”

“Yes,” said Helen, lifting her eyes to the picture on the wall “She had a great passion for the country,” continued Mr. Harkness, “and I liked the town. It was more convenient for me, and I was born in Boston. It has often grieved me to think that I didn’t yield to her. I must have been dreaming of her, for when I woke a little while ago, this regret was like a physical pang at my heart. As long as we live, we can’t help treating each other as if we were to live always. But it’s a mistake. I never refused to go into the country with her,” he said as if to appease this old regret. “I merely postponed it. Now I should like to go.”

He rose from the table, and taking the study-lamp in his hand, he feebly pushed apart the sliding-doors that opened into the drawing-room. He moved slowly down its length, on one side, throwing the light upon this object and that, before which he faltered, and so returned on the other side, as if to familiarise himself with every detail. Sometimes he held the lamp above, and sometimes below his face, but always throwing its age and weariness into relief. Helen had remained watching him As he came back she heard him say, less to her as it seemed than to himself, “Yes, I should like to sell it. I’m tired of it.”

He set the lamp down upon the table again, and sank into his chair, and lapsed into a reverie which left Helen solitary beside him. “Ah,” she realised, as she looked on his musing, absent face, “he is old and I am young, and he has more to love in the other world, with my mother and both my brothers there, than he has in this. Oh, Robert, Robert, Robert!”

But perhaps his absent mind was not so much bent upon the lost as she thought. He had that way fathers have of treating his daughter as an equal, of talking to her gravely and earnestly, and then of suddenly dropping her into complete nothingness, as if she were a child to be amused for a while, and then set down from his knee and sent out of doors. Helen dutifully accepted this condition of their companionship; she cared for it so little as never to have formulated it to herself; when she was set down she went out, and ordinarily she did not think of it.

A peremptory ring at the door startled them both, and when Margaret had opened it there entered all at the same instant, a loud, kindly voice, the chirp of boots, heavily trodden upon by a generous bulk, that rocked from side to side in its advance, and a fragrance of admirable cigars, that active and passive perfume, which comes from smoking and being smoked in the best company. “At home, Margaret?” asked the voice, whose loudness was a husky loudness, in a pause of the boots. “Yes? Well, don’t put me in there, Margaret,” which was apparently in rejection of the drawing-room. “I’ll join them in the library.”

The boots came chirping down the hall in that direction, with a sound of heavy breathing. Helen sprang from her chair, and fled to meet the cheerful sound; there was the noise of an encountering kiss, and a jolly laugh, and “Well, Helen!” and “Oh, Captain Butler!” and later, “Harkness!” and “Butler!” as Helen led the visitor in.

“Well!” said this guest, for the third time. He straightened his tall mass to its full height, and looked out over his chest with eyes of tender regard upon Harkness’s thin and refined face, now lit up after the hand-shaking with cordial welcome. “Do you know,” he said, as if somehow it were a curious fact of natural history, “that you have it uncommonly close in here?” He went over to the window that opened upon the little grassy yard, and put it up for himself, while Harkness was explaining that it had been put down while he was napping. Then he planted himself in a large leathern chair beside it, and went on smoking the cigar on the end of which he had been chewing. He started from the chair with violence, coughing and gesturing to forbid Helen, who was hospitably whispering to Margaret. “No, no; don’t do it. I won’t have anything. I couldn’t. I’ve just dined at the club. Yes, you may do that much,” he added to Helen, as she set a little table with an ash-holder at his elbow. “You’ve no idea what a night it is. It’s cooler, and the air’s delicious. I say, I want to take Helen back with me. I wish she’d go alone, and leave us two old fellows together here. There’s no place like Boston in the summer, after all. But you haven’t told me whether you’re surprised to see me.” Captain Butler looked round at them with something of the difficulty of a sea-turtle in a lateral inspection.

“Never surprised, but always charmed,” said Helen, with just the shade of mockery in her tone which she knew suited this visitor.

“Charmed, eh?” asked Captain Butler. Apparently he meant to say something satirical about the word, but could not think of anything. He turned again to her father: “How are you, Harkness?”

“Oh, I’m very well,” said Harkness evasively. “I’m as well as usual.”

“Then you have yourself fetched home in a hack by a policeman every day, do you?” remarked Captain Butler, blowing a succession of white rings into the air. “You were seen from the club window. I’ll tell you what; you ‘re sticking to it too close.”

“O yes, Captain Butler, do get him away,” sighed Helen, while her father, who had not sat down, began to walk back and forth in an irritated, restless way.

“For the present I can’t leave it,” said Harkness, fretfully. He added more graciously: “Perhaps in a week or two, or next month, I can get off for a few days. You know I was one of the securities for Bates and Mather,” he said, looking at Captain Butler over Helen’s head.

“I had forgotten that,” answered Captain Butler gravely.

“They left things in a complete tangle. I can’t tell just where I am yet, and, of course, I’ve no peace till I know.”

“Of course,” assented Captain Butler. “I won’t vex you with retroactive advice, Joshua,” he added affectionately, “but I hope you won’t do anything of that kind again.”

“No, Jack, I won’t. But you know under the circumstances it would have been black ingratitude to refuse.”

“Yes,” said Captain Butler. He smoked a while in silence. Then he said, “I suppose it’s no worse with the old trade than with everything else, at present.”

“No, we’re all in the same boat, I believe,” said Harkness.

“How is Marian?” asked Helen, a little restive under the cross firing.

“Oh, Marian’s all right. But if she were not, she wouldn’t know it.”

“I suppose she’s very much engaged,” said Helen, with a faint pang of something like envy.

“Yes,” said Captain Butler. “I thought you were at Bye Beach, young lady.”

“I thought you were at Beverley, old gentleman,” retorted Helen; she had been saucy to Captain Butler from infancy.

“So I was. But I came up unexpectedly to-day.”

“So did I.”

“Did you? Good! Now I’ll tell you why I came, and you shall tell me why you did. I came because I got to thinking of your father, and had a fancy I should like to see him. Did you?”

Helen hung her head. “No,” she said at length. The Captain laughed. “Whom had you a fancy to see here, then, at this time of year?”

“Oh, I didn’t say I should tell. You made that bargain all yourself,” mocked Helen. “But it was very kind of you to come on papa’s account,” she added softly.

“What are you making there?” asked the Captain, bending forward to look at the work Helen had taken into her lap.

“Who — I?” she asked, as if she had perhaps been asked what Robert was making. Her mind had been running upon him since Captain Butler asked her why she had come up to Boston. “Oh!” she recovered herself. “Why, this,” she said, taking the skeleton frame-work of gauze and wire on her finger-tips, and holding it at arm’s-length, with her head aslant surveying it, “this is a bonnet for Margaret.”

“A bonnet, hey?” said the Captain. “It looks like a Shaker cap.”

“Yes?” Helen clapped it on her head, and looked jauntily at the captain, dropping her shoulders, and putting her chin out. “Now, does it?”

“No, not now. The Shaker sisters don’t wear crimps, and they don’t smile in that wicked way.” Helen laughed, and took the bonnet-frame off. “So you make Margaret’s bonnets, do you? Do you make your own?”

“Sometimes. Not often. But I like millinery. It’s what I should turn to if I were left to take care of myself.”

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t find it such fun,” said the Captain.

“Oh, milliners make lots of money,” returned Helen. “They must. Why, when this bonnet is done, you couldn’t get it for ten dollars. Well, the materials don’t cost three.”

“I wish my girls had your head for business,” said the Captain honestly. Helen made him a burlesque obeisance. “Yes, I mean it,” he insisted. “You know that I always admired your good sense. I’m always talking it into Marian.”

“Better not,” said Helen, with a pin between her teeth.

“Why?”

“Because I haven’t got it, and it’d make her hate me if I had.”

“Do you mean to tell me that you ‘re not a sensible girl?” inquired the Captain.

Helen nodded, and made “Yes” with her lips, as well as she could with the pin between her teeth. She took it out to say, “You should have seen my performances in my room a little while ago.” She was thinking of that rehearsal before the mirror.

“What were they?” asked the Captain.

“Oh, as if I should tell!” Helen bowed herself over the bonnet, and blushed, and laughed. Her father liked to hear the banter between her and his old friend. They both treated her as if she were a child, and she knew it and liked it; she behaved like a child.

“Harkness,” said the Captain, turning his fat head half round toward his friend, who sat a little back of him, and breaking off his cigar-ash into the bronze plate at his elbow, “do you know that your remaining in the trade after all the rest of us have gone out of it is something quite monumental?” Captain Butler had a tender and almost reverential love for Joshua Harkness, but he could not help using a little patronage toward him, since his health had grown delicate, and his fortunes had not distinctly prospered.

“I am glad you like it, Jack,” said Harkness quietly.

“The Captain is a mass of compliments to-night,” remarked Helen.

The Captain grinned his consciousness. “You are a minx,” he said admiringly to Helen. Then he threw back his head and pulled at his cigar, uttering between puffs, “No, but I mean it, Harkness. There’s something uncommonly fine about it. A man gets to be noblesse by sticking to any old order of things. It makes one think of the ancien régime somehow to look at you. Why, you ‘re still of the oldest tradition of commerce, the stately and gorgeous traffic of the orient j you ‘re what Samarcand, and Venice, and Genoa, and Lisbon, and London, and Salem have come to.”

“They’ve come to very little in the end then,” said Harkness as before.

“Oh, I don’t know about that the Captain took the end of his cigar out and lit a fresh one from it before he laid it down upon the ash-holder; “I don’t know about that. We don’t consider material things merely. There has always been something romantic, something heroic about the old trade. To be sure, now that it’s got down to telegraphing, it’s only fit for New-Yorkers. They ‘re quite welcome to it.” This was not very logical taken as a whole, but we cannot always be talking reason. At the words romantic and heroic Helen had pricked her ears, if that phrase may be used concerning ears of such loveliness as hers, and she paused from her millinery. “Ah ha, young lady!” cried the Captain; “you’re listening, are you? You didn’t know there was any romance or heroism in business, did you?”

“What business?” asked Helen.

“Your father’s business, young woman; my old business, the India trade.”

“The India trade? Why, were you ever in the India trade, Captain Butler?”

“Was I ever in the India trade?” demanded the Captain, taking his cigar out of his mouth in order to frown with more effect upon Helen. “Well, upon my word! Where did you think I got my title? I’m too old to have been in the war.”

“I didn’t know,” said Helen.

“I got it in the India trade. I was captain and supercargo many an eleven months’ voyage, just as your father was.”

Helen was vastly amused at this. “Why, papa! were you ever captain of a ship !”

“For a time,” said Mr. Harkness, smiling at the absurdity.

“Of course he was!” shouted the Captain.

“Then why isn’t he captain, now?”

“Because there’s a sort of captain that loses his handle When he comes ashore, and there’s a sort that keeps it. I’m one sort and your father’s the other. It’s natural to call a person of my model and complexion by some kind of title, and it isn’t natural to call such a man as your father so. Besides, I was captain longer than he was. I was in the India trade, young lady, and out of it before you were born.”

“I was born a great while ago,” observed Helen, warningly.

“I daresay you think so,” said the Captain. “I thought I was, at your age. But you’ll find, as you grow older, that you weren’t born such a very great while ago after all. The time shortens up. Isn’t that so, Harkness?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Harkness. “Everything happened day before yesterday.”

“Exactly,” said the Captain. Helen thought how young she must be to have already got that letter of Robert’s so many centuries ago. “Yes,” the Captain pursued. “I had been in the India trade twenty-five years when I went out of it in 1857 — or it went out of me.” He nodded his great, close-clipped head in answer to her asking glance. “It went out of a good many people at that time. We had a grand smash. We had overdone it. We had warnings enough, but we couldn’t realise that our world was coming to an end. It hadn’t got so low as telegraphing, yet; but it was mere shop then even, compared with the picturesque traffic of our young days. Eh, Harkness?”

“Yes, it had lost nil attraction but profit.”

“Were you ever down at India Wharf, Helen?” demanded the Captain. “I don’t blame you; neither were my girls. But were you?”

“Of course,” said Helen, scorning to lift her eyes from her work. “The Nahant boat starts from it.”

“The Nahant boat!”. repented the Captain in a great rage. “In my day there was no Nahant boat about India Wharf, I can tell you, nor any other steamboat; nor any dirty shanties ashore. The place was sacred to the shipping of the grandest commerce in the world. There they lay, those beautiful ships, clean as silver, every one of them, and manned by honest Yankee crews.” The Captain got upon his feet for the greater convenience of his eloquence. “Not by ruffians from every quarter of the globe. There were gentlemen’s sons before the mast, with their share in the venture, going out for the excitement of the thing; boys from Harvard, fellows of education and spirit; and the forecastle was filled with good Toms and Jims and Joes from the Cape; chaps whose aunts you knew; good stock through and through, sound to the core. The supercargo was often his own captain, and he was often a Harvard man — you know what they are!”

“Nicest fellows in the world,” consented Helen.

The Captain blew a shaft of white smoke into the air, and then cut it through with a stroke of his cigar. “We had on a mixed cargo, and we might be going to trade at eastern ports on the way out. Nobody knew what market we should find in Calcutta. It was pure adventure, and a calculation of chances, and it was a great school of character. It was a trade that made men as well as fortunes; it took thought and forethought. The owners planned their ventures like generals planning a campaign. They were not going to see us again for a year; they were not going to hear of us till we were signalled outside on our return. When we sailed it was an event, a ceremony, a solemnity; and we celebrated it with song from all the tarry throats on board. Yes, the men used to sing as we dropped down the bay.”

“Oh, Captain Butler, it was fine!” cried Helen, dropping her hands on her work, and looking up at the Captain in his smoke-cloud, with rapture. “Papa, why didn’t you ever let me come down to see your ships sail?”

“It was all changed before you were born, Helen,” began her father.

“O yes, all changed,” cried the Captain, taking the word away from him. “The ships had begun, long before that, to stop at East Boston, and we sold their cargoes by sample, instead of handling them in our warehouses, and getting to feel some sort of human interest in them. When it came to that, a mere shopman’s speculation, I didn’t much care for the New-Yorkers getting it.” The Captain sat down and smoked in silence.

“How did the New-Yorkers get it?” asked Helen, with some indignant stir in her local pride.

“In the natural course of things,” said her father. “Just as we got it from Salem. By being bigger and richer.”

“Oh, it was all changed anyway,” broke in the Captain. “We used to import nearly all the cotton goods used in this country, — fabrics that the natives wove on their little looms at home, and that had the sentiment you girls pretend to find in hand-made things, — but before we stopped we got to sending our own cottons to India. And then came the telegraph, and put the finishing-stroke to romance in the trade. Your father loads now according to the latest despatches from Calcutta. He knows just what his cargo will be worth when it gets there, and he telegraphs his people what to send back.” The Captain ended in a very minor key: “I’m glad I went out of it when I did. You’d have done well to go out too, Harkness.”

“I don’t know, Jack. I had nothing else in view. You know I had become involved before the crash came; and I couldn’t get out.”

“I think you could,” returned the Captain stubbornly, and he went on to show his old friend how; and the talk wandered back to the great days of the old trade, and to the merchants, the supercargoes, the captains, the mates of their youth. They talked of the historic names before their date, of Cleaveland and his voyages, of Handasy de Perkins, of Bromfield, of the great chiefs of a commerce which founded the city’s prosperity, and which embraced all climes and regions. The Dutch colonies and coffee, the China trade and tea, the North-west coast and furs; the Cape, and its wines and oil; the pirates that used to harass the early adventurers; famous shipwrecks; great gains and magnificent losses; the splendour of the English nabobs and American residents at Calcutta; mutinies aboardship; the idiosyncrasies of certain sailors; the professional merits of certain black cooks: these varied topics and interests conspired to lend a glamour to the India trade as it had been, that at last moved Captain Butler to argument in proof of the feasibility of its revival. It was the explanation of this scheme that wearied Helen. At the same time she saw that Captain Butler did not mean to go very soon, for he had already sunk the old comrade in the theorist so far as to be saying, “Well, sir,” and “Why, sir,” and “I tell you, sir.” She got up — not without dropping her scissors from her lap, as is the custom of her sex — and gave him her hand, which he took in his left, without rising.

“Going to bed? That’s right. I shall stay a bit, yet. I want to talk with your father.”

“Talk him into taking a little rest,” said Helen, looking at the Captain as she bent over her father to kiss him good-night.

“I shall give him all sorts of good advice,” returned the Captain cheerily.

Her father held her hand fondly till she drew an arm’s-length away, and then relinquished it with a very tender “Good-night, my dear.”

Helen did not mean to go to bed, and when she reached her own room, she sat a long time there, working at Margaret’s bonnet, and overhearing now and then some such words of the Captain’s as “dyes,” “muslins,” “ice,” “teak,” “gunny-bags,” “shellac,” “Company’s choppers,” — a name of fearful note descriptive of a kind of Calcutta handkerchief once much imported. She imagined that the Captain was still talking of the India trade. Her father spoke so low that she could not make out any words of his; the sound of’ his voice somehow deeply touched her, his affection appealed to hers in that unintelligible murmur, as the disembodied religion of a far-heard hymn appeals to the solemnity of the listener’s soul. She began to make a fantastic comparison of the qualities of her father’s voice and the Captain’s, to the disadvantage of the Captain’s other qualities; she found that her father was of finer spirit and of gentler nature, and by a natural transition she perceived that it was a grander thing to be sitting alone in one’s room with one’s heart-ache than to be perhaps foolishly walking the piazza with one’s accepted commonplace destiny as Marian Butler was at that moment. At this point she laughed at herself, said “Poor Marian” aloud, and recognised that her vagaries were making Captain Butler an ill return for his kindness in dropping in to chat with her father; she hoped he would not chat too long, and tire him out; and so her thoughts ran upon Robert again, and she heard no more of the talk below, till after what seemed to her, starting from it, a prolonged reverie. Then she was aware of Captain Butler’s boots chirping out of the library into the hall, toward the door, with several pauses, and she caught fragments of talk again: “I had no idea it was as bad as that, Harkness — bad business, must see what can be done, weather it a few weeks longer — confoundedly straitened myself — pull you through,” and faintly,”

“Well, good-night, Joshua; I’ll see you in the morning.” There was another pause, in which she fancied Captain Butler lighting his cigar at the chimney of the study-lamp with which her father would be following him to the door; the door closed and her father went slowly back to the library, where she felt rather than heard him walking up and down. She wanted to go to him, but she would not; she wanted to call to him, but she remained silent; when at last she heard his step upon the stairs, heavily ascending, and saw the play of his lamp-light on the walls without, she stealthily turned down the gas that he might not think her awake. Half an hour later, she crept to his door, which stood a little ajar, and whispered, “Papa!”

“What is it, Helen?” He was in bed, but his voice sounded very wakeful. “What is it, my dear!”

“Oh, I don’t know!” — she flung herself on her knees beside his bed in the dark, and put her arms about his neck—” but I feel so unhappy!”

“About—” began her father, but she quickly interrupted.

“No, no! About you, papa! You seem so sad and careworn, and I’m nothing but a burden and a trouble to you.”

“You are nothing but a comfort and a help to me. Poor child! You mustn’t be worried by my looks. I shall be all right in the morning. Come, come!”

“But weren’t you perplexed somehow about business? Weren’t you thinking about those accounts?”

“No, my dear.”

“What were you thinking of?”

“Well, Helen, I was thinking of your mother and your little brothers.”

“Oh!” said Helen, with the kind of recoil which the young must feel even from the dearest dead. “Do you often think of them?”

“No, I believe, not often. Never so much as tonight, since I first lost them; the house seemed full of them then. I suppose these impressions must recur.”

“Oh, doesn’t it make you feel strange?” asked Helen, cowering a little closer to him.

“Why should it? It doesn’t make me feel strange to have your face against mine.”

“No, but — O don’t, don’t talk of such things, or I can’t endure it! Papa, papa! I love you so, it breaks my heart to have you talk in that way. How wicked I must be not to like you to think of them! But don’t, to-night! I want you to think of me, and what we are going to do together, and about all our plans for next winter, and for that new house, and everything. Will you? Promise!” Her father pressed her cheek closer against his, and she felt the fond smile which she could not see in the dark. He gave her his promise, and then began to talk about her going down to the Butlers’, which it seemed the Captain had urged further after she had bidden him good-night. The Captain was going to stay in Boston a day or two, and Mr. Harkness thought he might run down with him at the end of the week. Helen did not care to go, but with this in view she did not care to say so. She let her father comfort her with caressing words and touches, as when she was a child, and she frankly stayed her weak-heartedness upon his love. She was ashamed, but she could not help it, nor wish to help it. As she rested her head upon his pillow she heard his watch ticking under it; in this sound all the years since she was a little girl were lost Then his voice began to sink drowsily, as it used to do in remote times, when she had wearied him out with her troubles. He answered at random, and his talk wandered so that it made her laugh. That roused him to full consciousness of her parting kiss. “Goodnight,” he said, and held her hand, and drew her down by it again, and kissed her once more.

III.

HELEN woke the next morning with the overnight ache still at her heart: she wondered that she could have thought of leaving her father; but when she opened her shutters and let in the light, she was aware of a change that she could not help sharing. It was the wind that had changed, and was now east; the air was fresh and sparkling; the homicidal sunshine of the day before lay in the streets and on the house fronts as harmless as painted sunshine in a picture. Another day might transform all again; the tidal wave of life that the sea had sent from its deep cisterns out over the land might ebb as quickly, and the world find itself old and haggard, and suffering once more; but while it lasted, this respite was a rapture.

Helen came down with something of it in her face, the natural unreasoned and unreasoning hopefulness of young nerves rejoicing in the weather’s mood; but she began at breakfast by asking her father if he did not think it was rather crazy for her to be starting off for Beverley the very day after she had got home for good, and had just unpacked everything. She said she would go only on three conditions: — first, that he felt perfectly well; second, that he would be sure to come down on Saturday; and third, that he would be sure to bring her back with him on Monday.

“I don’t think I could stand Marian Butler in her present semi-fluid state more than three days; and I wouldn’t consent to leave you, papa, except that while you ‘re worrying over business you’d really rather not have me about. Would you?”

Her father said he always liked to have her about.

“O yes; of course,” said Helen. “But don’t you see, I’m trying to make it a virtue to go, and I can’t go unless I do?”

He laughed with her at her hypocrisy. They agreed that this was Thursday the 15th, and that he should come down on Saturday the 17th, and that he would let nothing detain him, and that he would come in time for dinner, and not put it off, as he would be sure to do, till the last train. Helen gave him a number of charges as to his health, and his hours of work, and bade him, if he did not feel perfectly well, to telegraph her instantly. When he started down town she made him promise to drive home. After the door closed upon him, she wondered that she had ever allowed herself to think of leaving him, and indignantly dismissed the idea of going to Beverley; but she went on and packed her trunk so as to have it ready when the express-man came for it. She could easily send him away, and besides, if she did not go now, there was no hope of getting her father off for a holiday and a little change of scene. She quitted the house in time to catch the noon train, and rode drearily down to Beverley, but not without the comfort of feeling herself the victim of an inexorable destiny. All the way down she was in impulse rushing back to Boston, and astonishing Margaret by her return, and telling her father that she found she could not go, and being fondly laughed at by him. She was almost in tears when the brakeman shouted out the name of the station, and if Marian Butler had not been there with her phaeton, in obedience to the Captain’s telegram announcing Helen’s arrival, she would have hidden herself somewhere, and taken the next train back to town. As it was, she descended into the embrace of her friend, who was so glad to see her that she tried to drive through the train, just beginning to move off, on the track that crossed their road, and had to be stopped by the baggage-master, who held the pony’s nose till the train was well on its way to Portland. At the door of the cottage, when the pony had drawn up the phaeton there, with a well-affected air of being driven up, Mrs. Butler met Helen with tender and approving welcome, and said that they could never have hoped to get her father to come unless she had come first. “This change in the weather will be everything for him, and you mustn’t worry about him,” she said, laying a soothing touch upon Helen’s lingering anxieties. “If he has any business perplexities, you may be sure he’d rather have you out of the way. I have seen something of business perplexities in my time, my dear, and I know what they are. I shall telegraph to Mr. Butler to bring your father in the same train with him, and not give him any chance of slipping through his fingers.”

Mrs. Butler was one of those pale, slight ladies, not easily imaginable apart from the kind of soft breakfast shawl which she wore, and which harmonised with the invalid purple under her kind eyes, the homes of habitual headache; and the daughters of the marriage Captain Butler had made rather late in life with a woman fifteen years younger than himself, were as unlike their mother as their father was. These large, warm blondes invited all the coolness they could with their draperies, and stood grouped about her, so many statues of health and young good looks and perpetual good-nature, with bangs and frizzes over their white foreheads, and shadowing their floating, heavily-lashed blue eyes. When alone they often tended in behaviour to an innocent rowdiness; they were so amiable, and so glad, and so strong, that they could not very well keep quiet, and when quiet, especially in their mother’s presence, they had a knowingly quelled look: in their father’s presence they were not expected nor liked to be quiet. They admired Helen almost as much as they admired their mother. She was older than any of them, except Marian, and was believed to be a pattern of style and wisdom, who had had lots of offers, and could marry anybody. While Helen and their mother talked together, they listened in silence, granting their superiority, with the eager humility of well-bred younger girlhood; and Marian went to see about lunch.

Mr. Ray was coming to lunch, and Helen was to see him with Marian for the first time since their engagement. He was a man she had not known very well in Harvard, though he was of the class she had danced through with. He was rather quiet, and she had not formed a flattering opinion of him; some of the most brilliant fellows liked him, but she had chosen to think him dull. That was some years ago, and she had not often met him since; he had been away a great deal.

His quiet seemed to have grown upon him, when he appeared, or it might have been the contrast of his composure with the tumult of the young girls that gave it such a positive effect. He seemed the best of friends with them all, but in his own way. He spoke little and he spoke low; and he could not be got to repeat what he said; he always said something different the second time, and if he only looked as if he were going to speak, his prospective sisters-in-law fell helplessly silent. He was not quite so tall as Marian, and he was much slighter; she generously prided herself upon being unable to wear his gloves, which Jessie Butler could just get on. He was a very scrupulously perfect man as to his gloves, and every part of his dress, which the young ladies now criticised in detail, after he had paid his duty to Helen and their mother. They all used him with a freedom that amused Helen, and that was not much short of the frankness with which Marian came out and planted a large kiss upon his lips, and then, without speaking to him, turned to her mother with an air of housekeeperly pre-occupation to ask something about the lunch, and disappeared again.

Mr. Ray took everything with grave composure, a little point of light in either of his brown eyes, and the slightest curve of the small brown moustache that curled tightly in over his upper lip, showing his sense from time to time of what he must have found droll if some one else had been in his place. He had an affectionate deference for Mrs. Butler that charmed Helen. He carved at lunch with a mastery of the difficult art, and he was quite at ease in his character of head of the family. It gave Helen a sort of shock to detect him in pressing Marian’s hand under the table; but upon reflection, she was not sure that she disapproved of it.

She perceived that she must revise her opinion of Mr. Ray. Without being witty, his talk was bright and to the last degree sensible, with an edge of satire for the young girls, to whom at the same time he was alertly attentive. Helen thought his manner exquisite, especially towards herself in her quality of Marian’s old and valued friend; it was just what the manner of a man in his place should be. He talked a good deal to her, and told her he had spent most of the summer on the water, “Which accounts,” she mused, “for his brown little hands, not much bigger than a Jap law-student’s, and for that perfect mass of freckles.” He said he was expecting his boat round from Manchester; and he hoped that she would come with the other young ladies and take a look at her after lunch. He said “boat” so low that Helen could just catch the word, and she smiled in consenting to go and look at it, for she imagined from his deprecatory tone that it was something like a dory which might have been bestowed upon Mr. Ray’s humility by some kindly fisherman. Walking to the shore by Helen’s side he said something further about running down to Mt. Dessert in his boat, and about one of his men knowing how to broil a mackerel pretty well, which puzzled her, and shook her in her error, just before they came upon a vision of snowy duck and paint, and shining brasses, straight and slim and exquisite as Helen herself in line, and light as a bird dipped for a moment upon the water. A small boat put out for them, and they were received on board the yacht with grave welcome by Mr. Ray, whose simple dress — so far hitherto from proclaiming itself nautical in cut or colour — now appeared perfectly adapted to yachting. He did not seem to do the host here any more than at Captain Butler’s table, but he distinguished Helen as his chief guest, with a subtle accent in his politeness that gave her quick nerves something of the pleasure of a fine touch in music. She was now aware that she admired Mr. Ray, and she wondered if he did not look shorter than he really was.

She found it quite in character that he should have a friend on board, whom he had not mentioned to any of them, and whom he now introduced in his most suppressed tones. The friend was a tall young Englishman, in blue Scotch stuff; and Helen decided at once that his shoulders sloped too much; he talked very far down in his throat, and he had a nervous laugh; Helen discovered that he had also a shy, askance effect of having just looked at you.

Ray asked the ladies if they would fish, and when they would not, he frankly tried to entertain them in other ways. It came out that he could both play and sing; and he picked on a banjo the air of a Canadian boat-song he had learned at Gaspé the summer before. That made the girls ask him to show his sketches of the habitans, and Helen thought them very good, and very droll, done with vigour and chic. He made the afternoon pass charmingly, but what amused Helen most was Marian’s having already got his tone about his possessions and accomplishments; her instinct would not suffer her to afflict him by any show of pride in them, proud as she was of them; and on the yacht there was no approach to endearments between them. “Really,” thought Helen, “Marian will be equal to it, after all,” and began to respect her sex. After supper, which Ray offered them on board, and which that one of the men who could broil a mackerel pretty well served with touches of exquisite marine cookery, Helen felt that it would be mean to refrain any longer. “Marian,” she whispered to her friend apart, “he is perfect!” and Marian looked gratefully at her and breathed “Yes!”

Helen was generous, but the proximity of this prosperous love made her feel very desolate and left behind. The aching tenderness for Robert, which was at the bottom of all her moods, throbbed sorer; she must still it somehow, and she began to talk with the Englishman. As she went on she could not help seeing that the young Butler girls, innocently wondering at her under their bangs, were suffering some loss of an ideal, and that Marian’s averted eyes were reflecting Mr. Ray’s disapproval, otherwise hidden deeper than the sea over which they sailed.

The Englishman after a moment of awkward hesitation and apparent self-question, seemed to fall an easy prey. He presently hung about her quite helplessly; but his helplessness did not make her pity him. “So nice,” he said, as they sat a little apart, after Ray had attempted a diversion with another Canadian barcarole, “to be able to do something of that kind. But it isn’t very common in the States, is it, Miss — Harkness?”

“I don’t understand. Do you mean that we don’t commonly know Canadian boat-songs? I don’t suppose we do.”

“No, no; I don’t mean that!” replied Mr. Rainford; if that was the name which Helen had caught. “I meant being able to do something, you know, to keep the ball foiling, as you say.”

“Do we say ‘keep the ball rolling’?” Helen affected to muse.

“I heard it was an Americanism,” said Mr. Rainford, laughing at the pretence she made, with her downward look, of giving his words anxious thought. “I was thinking of the Canadians when I spoke.

They seem to be up to all sorts of things. I was at a place last month — Old Beach or Old Orchard — something like that — where the Montreal people come; and some of those fellows knew no end of things. Songs, like Mr. Ray’s; and tricks; and — and — well, I don’t know.”

Helen shook her head. “No, we don’t have those accomplishments in the States, as you say. We ‘re a serious people.”

“I don’t know,” laughed Mr. Rainford. “You have your own fun, I suppose.”

“In our poor way, yes. We go to lectures, and attend the public school exhibitions, and — yes, we have our amusements.”

Mr. Rainford seemed carried quite beyond himself by these ironical impertinences. “Really, I can’t admit that they ‘re all of that kind. I saw a good deal of an amusement at the sea-side that I was told was not very serious.”

“Indeed! What could it have been?” asked Helen, with the affectation of deep interest “Oh, surely now, Miss Harkness, you don’t expect me to explain it. All the young people seemed to understand it; the Canadian ladies said it was an American institution.” She did not help him on, and he had to get out of the affair as he could. He reddened with the effort. “I must say it seemed very pleasant, at least for the two people concerned.”

“Oh, only two!” cried Helen.

The poor young man laughed gratefully, and took up the burden of silliness which she now left wholly to him. “Yes; a young lady — always very charming — and—”

“A gentleman always very brilliant and interesting. Oh, yes!” She turned about on her camp-stool with an unconscious air, and began to talk to the young Butler girls. She had provoked his recognition of the situation, if he had meant his allusion to sea-side flirtations for that, but her fretted nerves did not resent it the less because she was in the wrong. She could have said that there was nothing in her words, and afterwards she did say so to herself; but, as if he found a personal edge in them, Mr. Rainford sat quite blank for a moment; then after some attempts at self-recovery in talk with the others, he rose and went below.

“Ned,” said Marian, “where did you pick up that particularly odious Englishman?” In her vexation with Helen, it was necessary to assail some one.

“He’s a very good fellow,” said Ray quietly. “I met him in Cairo, first. He’s very clever; and remarkably well up in Coptic — for a lord.”

All the Butlers started, as if to pounce upon Ray. “A lord!” they hoarsely breathed, with the bitter sense of loss natural to girls who might never see a nobleman again.

“Why did you introduce him as Mister?” demanded Marian, in accents expressive of the common anguish; and somehow the revelation of her victim’s quality seemed to Helen to heighten the folly and cruelty of her behaviour; it seemed to elevate it into a question of international interest.

“I said Lord Rainford,” retorted Ray.

“You whispered it!” cried Marian bitterly.

“Well, he won’t mind your calling him Mr. Rainford. I can explain,” said Ray. “Don’t change, now,” he added mischievously.

“As if we should!” indignantly retorted Marian. “And let him know that we’d been talking about him! No, he shall remain Mister to the end of the chapter with us. Are you going to bring him to the house?”’

“I’m going to Salem with him as soon as I put you ashore. I’d have asked you to let me bring him to lunch if I’d supposed he was on the boat. When I left him at Manchester this morning, he talked of going to Boston by the cars.”

“I think he’s hideous,” said Marian, for all comment on the explanation.

“Not pretty, but precious,” returned Ray tranquilly. “He’s a good fellow, but he knows he isn’t good-looking. He’s rather sensitive about it, and it makes him nervous and awkward with ladies; but he’s a very sensible fellow among men,” Ray concluded.

There was a little unpleasant pause, and then Ray and Marian began talking eagerly to Helen, as if they felt a little ashamed, and a good deal sorry for her, and were anxious to get her to do or say something that would bring back their good opinion of her.

They dropped anchor in a sheet of sunset red off Captain Butler’s place, and Ray pulled them ashore in his small boat. Some of them tried to sing the barcarole he had played, but the girlish voices thrilled sadly over the glassy tide, which was softly ebbing, and leaving more and more bare the drowned-looking boulders, heavily tressed with the dripping golden brown seaweed.

Marian sat in the bow of the boat, and as she rose and stood there, holding out one hand to Ray to be helped ashore, and gathering her skirts with the other, she glanced towards the house: “Why, who is there with mamma on the verandah? Why, it can’t be papa!”

Helen looked round over her shoulder where she sat, and now they all looked, Ray turning his head and mechanically clasping Marian’s hand.

Captain Butler was walking up and down before his wife, who sat listening to what he was saying. He was talking very loud and very fast, with a sort of passionate vehemence; his tones reached them, but they could not make out his words. He gesticulated as if describing some scene, and then suddenly stopped, and threw back his head, and seemed to be laughing.

“What can amuse Captain Butler so much?” asked Helen, with a smile. At the same time she saw him draw out his handkerchief and hide his face in it, and sit down with his face still hidden. The pantomime which they could see with such distinctness, and of which they yet remained so ignorant, somehow began to overawe them. Ray quickly helped them from the boat. “I am going up with you,” he said, and with a glance at Marian, “Miss Harkness,” he added, “won’t you take my arm over these rocks?”

Helen clung heavily to him as she tottered up the path. “I wonder what has brought Captain Butler to-night,” she said tremulously. “He wasn’t to be here till Saturday.”

“I fancy he’s persuaded your father to come with him,” answered Ray. “Look out for that stone, Miss Harkness.”

“Oh, I hope papa isn’t worse again,” said Helen, stumbling over it. She hurt herself, and was glad of the pain that let her give their way to the tears that came into her eyes.

“No; I should think he was more likely to be better,” said Ray, refusing to see her trouble, and really lifting her along. The others had fallen behind a little, and these two had now reached the gravel drive up to the piazza steps alone.

They saw a quick parley between the Captain and Mrs. Butler, and he stepped in-doors through one of the long windows, while she came forward to the rail, and called out to Marian, “Your father wants all of you to go to the other door, Marian.”

“Why, mamma—” began Marian.

“Go, go!” cried her mother. “Don’t ask! — Edward, bring Helen here!”

“Yes, it’s some little surprise,” said Ray, beginning to laugh. “Do you like surprises, Miss Harkness?”

“I don’t believe I do,” she answered, trying to laugh too.

Mrs. Butler came forward and took her from Ray, motioning or rather looking him aside, as she clasped the girl tight in her arms. At this moment she saw Captain Butler glance stealthily at them from within the room; his face was contorted and wet with tears. “What — what is it, Mrs. Butler?” she gasped, weakly pulling back a little from her close embrace, and facing her.

There was an instant in which the elder woman dwelt upon her with all of compassion and imploring in her eyes. Then she said, “Death, Helen. Your father is dead!”

Helen’s strength came back. As if many days had passed since she saw him, “To-day?” she asked, still holding her hand against Mrs. Butler’s breast, where she had pressed it.

“At two o’clock.”

Helen softly loosed herself from Mrs. Butler’s arms, and sat down in the chair near which they stood, and looked out upon the grounds sloping to the water, the black rocks by the shore; the huger rocks that showed their backs like sleeping sea-beasts out of the smooth water; the yacht darkening against the east; far beyond the rim of the sea, a light just twinkling up in the invisible tower at the horizon’s verge. A thick darkness seemed to come down out of the sky over all, but Helen would not let it close upon her. She fought the swoon away, and looked up at the pitying, suffering face above her.

“I am glad you told me at once, Mrs. Butler.

Thank you,” she said, and sank back in her chair, while the other fell on her knees beside her, and gathered her to her heart again, and wept over her.

“O my poor, poor child! It’s the one certain thing in all the world. It will be known, and it will be seen. What wouldn’t I have given to keep it from you for ever, Helen? You and my Marian were babies together. I used to know your mother. You are like a daughter to me.” Helen passively submitted to the caresses, to the kisses, dropped with tears upon her pale cheeks, but she did not say anything, or try to reply. “But it was not to be kept,” Mrs. Butler went on. “It could not be hidden, and it seemed the mercifullest and best way not to try to keep it from you in foolish self-pity for a moment, more or less.”

“O yes, yes,” said Helen, like another person hearing of her own case. “It was best,” and she found herself toying with the strings of her hat, curling them round her finger, and running them out in a long roll.

“It doesn’t kill, my dear. It brings its own cure with it. It’s sorrow, but it isn’t trouble! It passes over us like a black wave, but it doesn’t destroy us. You don’t realise it yet, Helen, my poor girl, but even when you do, you will bear it. Put your head down on my shoulder, dear, and I will tell you. It was in his office, where he had spent so many years at the work which had given him his honoured name and place in the world. My husband was there with him. They were turning over some books together. He saw your father put his hand over his heart, and then your father sank down in his armchair, and gave a little sigh, and — that was all.”

Mrs. Butler broke into a fresh sobbing on the girl’s neck, but Helen remained silent and still, letting herself be clutched tight to that loving breast. “There was no pain, Helen, there was no suffering. It was a falling into rest. But before he rested — before he drew that last little sigh, my dear — he spoke one word. Do you know what it was, Helen?” She felt the girl tremble, and, as it were, lapse in her arms. “It was just your name: it was, ‘Helen.’ You were the last thing in his thoughts upon earth — the first in heaven.”

Helen broke into a long, low wail. She rose from where she sat, and flung off the kind clinging arms, as if their pity stifled her, and fled up and down the verandah, a storm of grief that beat forth in thick sobs, and escaped in desolate moans.

Mrs. Butler did not try to stay her, or even to approach her, as she wavered to and fro, and wrung her hands, or pressed them to her streaming eyes. At last, after many moments, as long as hours of common life, Helen suddenly checked herself, and dried the tears that drenched her face. There had come the lull which must succeed such a passion. She stopped before Mrs. Butler, and asked in a husky, changed voice, “Isn’t there any train up tonight?”

“Why, Helen—”

“Because if there is, I must take it. I know what you will say, but don’t say it. If you try to stop me, I will walk. I am going home.”

It was too soon yet for her to realise that she should never go home again, but the word went to the mother-heart that ached for her with the full measure of its tragic irony, and she perceived with a helpless throe of compassion how alone in the world this fair young stricken creature stood.

Ray had sent word to his English friend that he should not join him again on board the yacht that night, briefly explaining the trouble that kept him, and promising to see him again on the morrow. He directed the yacht to put in to Salem, as had been arranged, and instructed his men to tell Lord Rainford about the trains for Boston. He was with Captain Butler and the awe-stricken girls in the parlour, while Mrs. Butler kept Helen on the verandah, and he had gathered from the captain such part of the story as he had not already divined.

‘‘Edward!” called Mrs. Butler from without, and he went to her where she stood with Helen, now perfectly silent and tearless. “Miss Harkness wishes to go home to-night. I shall go with her. Mr. Butler has just got home, and—” She hesitated to say before Helen’s affliction that he had had too hard a day already, and she could not let him incur the further excitement and fatigue; but Ray seemed to know.

“Captain Butler had better stay here,” he said promptly, “and let me go. We haven’t time for the seven o’clock at Beverley,” he added, glancing at his watch, “but we can catch the eight o’clock express at Salem if we start at once.”

“I am ready,” said Helen quietly. “My trunk can come to-morrow. I haven’t even unlocked it.” Ray had turned away to ring the stable bell. “Jerry, put my mare into the two-seated phaeton. Don’t lose any time,” he called out, stopping Jerry’s advance up the walk for orders, and the phaeton was at the steps a minute or two after Mrs. Butler appeared in readiness to go.

Helen went into the lighted dining-room, where Captain Butler and the girls had fearfully grouped themselves, waiting what motion of farewell she should make. Her face was pale, and somewhat stem. She went round and kissed them, beginning and ending with Marian, and she did not give way, though they each broke out crying at her touch, or at her turning from them. When she came to the Captain she put out her arms, and took him into them, and pressed herself to his breast in a succession of quick embraces, while he hid his face, and could not look at her.

“Good-bye all,” she said, in a firm tone, and went out and got into the phaeton, where Mrs. Butler was sitting. Ray sprang to the place beside the driver. “Salem, Jerry. Quick!” and they flew forward through the evening air, cold and damp in currents, and warm in long stretches over the smooth road. She smelt the heavy scent of the spiraea in the swampy places, and of the milkweed in the sand. She said no, she was not chilly, to Mrs. Butler; and from time to time they talked together: about the days beginning to get a little shorter now, and its not being so late as it seemed. Once Ray struck a match and looked at his watch, and the driver looked at Ray, who said, “All right,” and did not say anything else during the drive. Again, after silence, Helen spoke —

“You know I wouldn’t let you come with me, if I could help it, Mrs. Butler.”

“You couldn’t help it, dear,” answered the other. “Don’t talk of it.”

The station was a blur and dance of lights; she was pushed into the train as it moved away. She sat next the window in the seat with Mrs. Butler, and Ray in the seat before them. He did not look round, nor did Mrs. Butler sit very close, or take her hand, or try in any futile way to offer her comfort. The train seemed to go forward into the night by long leaps. Once it stopped somewhere on the track remote from a station, and Ray went out with some other passengers to see what had happened. Helen was aware of a wild joy in the delay, and of a wish that it might last for ever. She did not care to know what had caused it. As the cars drew into the Boston depot, she found her handkerchief, soaked with tears, in her hand, and she pulled down her veil over her swollen eyes.

At her own door, she said, “Well, Margaret,” like a ghostly echo of her wonted greetings, and found Margaret’s eyes red and swollen too.

“I knew you would come, Miss Helen,” said Margaret. “I told them you never would let the night pass over your head.”

“Yes, I would come, of course,” answered Helen. She led the way back into the library, where there were lights, and where the study-lamp burnt upon the table at which last night she had sat with her father. Then, while the others stood there, she took up the lamp, and pushed open the drawing-room doors, as she had seen him do, and, as she felt, with something of his movement, and walked forward under the dimly-burning gas to the place where she had known he would be lying. Everything had been done decorously, and he appeared, as they say, very natural. She stood with the lamp lifted high, and looked down at the face, slowly and softly wiping the tears, and shaken now and then with a sob. She did not offer to kiss or touch him. She turned from the clay out of which he had departed, and walked back to the library, where it seemed as if he should meet her, and speak to her of what had happened.

There were Mrs. Butler and Mr. Ray, and behind them there was Margaret. She felt how pitifully she must be looking at them. Some one caught the lamp, which had grown so light, from her hand, and some one had thrown up the window. That was right; she should not faint now; and now she was opening her eyes, and Ray’s arm was under her neck, where she lay upon the floor, and Mrs. Butler was dashing her face with cologne.

IV.

In those days Helen came to understand what her father had meant by saying, that after her mother and her little brothers died, the house seemed full of them, and that it did not make him afraid. Now that he had died, the house seemed full of him, and she was not afraid. She grew to be weak and sore, and almost blind from weeping; but even when she cowered over the dead face, and cried and moaned to it, it seemed something earthly and perishable in her love bewailing only the earthly and perished part of him, while what was really himself beheld her grief with a high, serene compassion, and an intelligence with some immortal quiet in her own soul. Whatever it was, whether the assurance of his life after death, or the mere blind effect of custom, prolonging his presence, as the severed nerves refer sensation to the amputated limb, and rehabilitate and create it anew, this sense of his survival and nearness to her was so vivid at times that she felt as if she might, could she but turn quickly enough, see him there before her; that the inward voice must make itself audible — the airy presence tangible. It was strongest with her that first night, but it did not cease for long afterwards.

He was with her as she followed him to the grave; and he came back with her to the house from which they had borne him.

In this sense of his survival, which neither then nor afterwards had any fantastic quality to her, she seemed to draw nearer to him than ever before. He understood now, he knew the depth and truth of her love, through all her vanities and follies. Something inexpressibly sweet and dear was in this consciousness, and remained always, when its vividness had faded with the keen anguish of her grief. Such things, the common experience of all bereavement, are hard to put in words. Said, they seem crude and boastful, and more than what is felt; but what is felt is more than can ever be said.

Captain Butler came up the morning after Helen’s return home, and he and Mrs. Butler remained in the house with her till all was over. Marian came up too, and Ray was there with his silent vigilance, from which everything seemed done without his agency. Helen had but to weep, to sorrow up and down the house; they gave her anguish way, and did not mock it with words of comfort When the tempests of her grief swept over her, they left her ‘to herself; when the calm that follows such paroxysms came, they talked to her of her father, and led her to talk of him. Then she was tranquil enough. At some droll things that forced themselves into remembrance in their talk, she even laughed without feeling it treason to her grief; and it was not what she thought or recalled of him that touched the springs of her sorrow. It was meeting Margaret, downcast and elusive on the stairs, and saying sadly to her, “Well, Margaret;” or catching sight of Captain Butler sitting opposite her father’s vacant chair in the library, his grizzled head sunk on his breast, and looking suddenly aged, and, at the same time, awkward in his bereavement, like a great boy, that moved her with intolerable pathos.

Mrs. Butler went home and had out the headache which she had kept back while she must, by force of will, but every day some of them came up to see Helen, and reminded her without urgence that she was to come to them soon. She said yes, she would come very soon, and so remained without going abroad, or looking into the light of the sun. At night, when she lay down she wept, and in the morning when she woke, but through the day her tears were dried. She brooded upon what her father had said and done in the last hours they had spent together, his longing for change and for a new life that now seemed to have been prophetic of death. His weariness of the house that had been his home took a new meaning; he must long have been more in the other world than in this, and but for his pitying love for her, he must have been glad when his swift summons came. She realised at last that he had been an old man. She had known without realising it that his ways were the ways of one who has outlived himself, and who patiently remains in the presence of things that no longer interest him. She wondered if the tie by which she, who was so wholly of the earth, had bound her father to it, had not sometimes been a painful one. She remembered all the little unthinking selfishnesses of the past, and worse than these, the consolations which she had tried to offer him. She thought of the gentleness with which he always listened to her and consented, and ended by comforting her; and she bitterly accused herself for not having seen all this long ago. But she had not even seen that he had a mortal disorder about him; she had merely thought him wearied with work, or spent with the heat, in those sinkings which had at first so much alarmed her.

The hand carried so often to his heart that she now recognised it as an habitual gesture, had given her no warning, and she blamed herself that it had not. But in truth she was not to blame. The sources of his malady were obscure, and even its nature had been so dimly hinted to him that doubtless her father had justified himself in keeping his fear of it from her. Perhaps he had hoped that yet somehow he could struggle to a better footing in other things, before he need cloud her young life with the shadow that hung upon his own; perhaps the end of many resolutions was that he could not do it. She wondered if he had himself known his danger, and if it was of that which he so often began to speak to her. But all now was dark, and this question and every other searched the darkness in vain.

She seemed to stand somewhere upon a point of time between life and death, from which either world was equally remote. She was quite alien here, without the will or the fitness to be anywhere else; and she shrank, with a vague resentment, from the world that had taken him from her.

This terrible touchstone of death, while it revealed the unimagined tenderness of many hearts, revealed also to her the fact that no friendliness could supply the love in which there was perfect unity of interest and desire, and perfect rest. Every day, when the Butlers came to her they brought her word from some one, from people who had known her father in business, from others who had casually met him, and who all now spoke their regret for his death. A rare quality of character had given him standing in the world that vastly greater prosperity could not have won him; and men who were of quite another stuff had a regard for him, which perhaps now and then expressed itself in affectionate patronage, but which was yet full of reverence. They found something heroic in the quiet constancy with which he fought his long, losing battle, and now that he was down at last, they had their honest regrets and spoke their honest praises. It made Helen very proud of her father to hear them; she read with a swelling heart the paragraphs about him in the newspapers, and even the formal preambles and resolutions which expressed the loss the commerce of the city had suffered in the death of a merchant of his standing and integrity. These things set Helen’s father in a new light to her; but while they made her prouder and fonder of his memory, they brought her a pang that she should have known so little of what formed his life, and should never have cared to know anything of it apart from herself.

This was not the only phase in which she seemed to have been ignorant of him. She had always believed him good and kind, without thinking of him in that way. But now there came poor people to the door, who sometimes asked to see her, or who sometimes only sent by Margaret, to tell how sorry they felt for her, and to say that her father had at this time or that been a good friend to each of them. They all seemed to be better acquainted with him than she, and their simple stories set him in a light in which she had never seen him before. It touched Helen that they should frankly lament her father’s death as another of their deprivations, more than if they had pretended merely to condole with her, and she did not take it ill of them, that they generally concluded their blessings on his memory with some hint that further benefactions would be gratefully received. The men accepted her half-dollars in sign that their audience was ended, and went away directly; the women shed tears over the old clothes she gave them, and stayed to drink tea in the kitchen.

One day after she had already seen three or four of these visitors, the bell rang, and Captain Butler’s boots came chirping along the hall, not with their old cheerful hint of a burly roll in the wearer’s gait, but subdued and slow as if he approached with unnaturally measured tread. Helen sprang into his arms, and broke out crying on his breast. “Oh Captain Butler! I felt just now that papa must he here. Ever since he died he has been with me somehow. It seems wild to say it; but no words can ever tell how I have felt it; and just before you came in, I know that he was going to speak to me.”

The Captain held her away at arm’s-length, and looked into her face. “Poor child! They’ve sent me to bring you home with me, and I see that I haven’t come a moment too soon. You have been alone in this house quite long enough. My God, if he only could speak to us!” The Captain controlled himself as he walked up and down the library, with his face twitching, and his hand knotting itself into a fist at his side, and presently he came and sat down in his accustomed chair near Helen. He waited till she lifted her head and wiped her eyes before he began to speak.

“Helen,” said Captain Butler, “I told you that they had sent me for you, and I hope that you will come.”

“Yes,’’ answered Helen, “I shall be very glad to go with you; but I think it’s hard for Marian, bringing my trouble there, to be a blot on her happiness.”

“We won’t speak of that, my dear,” said the Captain. “If Marian can’t find her happiness in something besides gaiety, she’d better not think of getting married.”

“I wouldn’t come if I thought I could endure it here any longer; I wouldn’t come, if I had anywhere else to go,” cried Helen.

“We wouldn’t let you go anywhere else,” returned the Captain. “But we can talk of all that another time. What I have to say to you now is something for you to decide. Do you think you are equal to talking a little business with me?”

“O yes. I should like to.”

“Yes, it will take up your mind.”

The Captain paused restively, and seemed at a loss how to frame what he had next to say. “Helen,” he broke out abruptly, “did you know anything about your father’s affairs?”

“Papa’s affairs?” asked Helen, with a start.

“Oh, don’t be troubled — don’t be troubled,” the Captain hastened to say. “It’s all right; perfectly right; but I want to speak to you about yourself, and — it’s all right. Don’t you think we’d better, have one of these windows open?”

“Are they shut?” asked Helen. “Yes, you can open them, please.”

“We shall be cheerfuller with a little light,” said the Captain, flinging back the shutters; but they hardly looked so. Helen had dark rings round her eyes, which were swollen with her long weeping; she was very pale, and looked old in that black which, in a house of mourning, seems to grow upon women in a single night. She thought the Captain tremulous and broken; these muscles at the sides of his chin hung down, as if ten years had been added to his age in the last fortnight. They made a feint of finding nothing strange in each other, and the Captain resumed as he sat down again: “I mentioned your father’s affairs because there has to be some settlement of the estate, you know; and there are circumstances that make it desirable to have an early settlement. The business was left in a little confusion; it’s apt to be the case,” Captain Butler added quickly.

“Yes,” Helen said, “papa sometimes spoke of the perplexity he felt about his accounts.”

“Did he?” asked the Captain with some relief. “Then I suppose he gave you some idea of how he stood.”

“No; he merely said they worried him.”

“Well, well. I don’t know that there was any occasion to tell you, any occasion for alarm. There seems to have been no will; but that makes no difference. The law makes a will, and you get what there is — that is, all there is.” The Captain had a certain forlorn air of disoccupation, which now struck Helen more than what he was saying.

“Would you like to smoke, Captain Butler?” she asked.

“Why, yes, if you will let me, my dear,” he said, with an eager, humble gratitude, putting his hand quickly into his breast-pocket. “I didn’t know—”

Helen rose, and placed the little table at his elbow, and set the ash-holder on it, as she had done that last night when he had sat there with her father. They looked at each other without speaking.

The Captain struck his match, and said apologetically between the long whiffs with which he lit his cigar, “I talk better with, it, and I have some things to explain.”

He paused, and sinking back into his chair with a sigh of comfort which brought a dim smile into Helen’s face, presently resumed: “As there is no will, and no executor, there will have to be an administrator. Whom should you like appointed? I believe the Court appoints any one you wish.”

“Oh, you, Captain Butler!” replied Helen instantly.

“I expected this,’’ said the Captain, “and I suppose I am as fit as any one. I’m sure that no one could care more for your father’s interests and honour, and I know rather more of his affairs than anybody else. You will have to make your wishes known in form; but that’s easily managed. In the meantime, you had better be away, don’t you think, while we are looking into things? I don’t know what there is to do, exactly; but I suppose there’s to be some sort of survey, or appraisal, and — yes, you had better be away, when we are looking into things.”

“Do you mean — away from the house?” asked Helen.

“Why, yes,” the Captain reluctantly assented. “It’s a — form; a necessary form.”

“It’s quite right,” said Helen positively. “And — yes, — I had better be out of the way.”

“I’m glad you see it in that light, my dear,” returned Captain Butler. “You’re a good girl, Helen, and you make it much easier for me. Pack up everything that belongs to you, and go as if you were going to stay.” The Captain made a ghastly show of heartiness, and smoked without looking at Helen. “Run over the house, and put together all the things that you would like to retain, and I’ll see that they come down.” Helen was trying to catch his eye, and he was keeping his gaze fixed upon the ceiling.

“I don’t think I need do that,” said Helen; “I should merely have to bring them back with me,” Captain Butler took his cigar from his mouth in compassion, as he now looked at her puzzled face. “We don’t mean you should come back, my dear child. We want you to stay with us.”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” said Helen quickly.

“You can’t go on living here alone,” retorted the Captain.

“No,” Helen ruefully assented, and faced Captain Butler in touching dismay.

“You see,” he said, “that you must submit. And, Helen,” he said with a show of brisk, businesslike cheerfulness “I think you had better sell this house. If I were you, I should sell it at once. You’ll never get more for it.’’

“Why, what would become of Margaret?” gasped Helen.

“Well, Mrs. Butler has been talking of that. We want a cook, and we will take Margaret.”

Helen simply looked bewildered. The Captain apparently found it better to go on while she was in this daze than await her emergence from it. “And if I were you, I would sell the furniture and pictures and all the things that you have not some particular association with; everything of that sort I should keep.” Helen still made no comment, and the Captain went on. “I know all this is very painful, Helen—”

“It isn’t painful,” said Helen quietly. “It was papa’s wish to sell the house. We were talking of it that night — the night before — He thought of building in the country.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Captain Butler. “Then we can push right ahead and do it.”

“It’s very sudden, though,” faltered Helen. “Poor Margaret! What will she say?”

“We will hear what she will say,” cried the Captain, ringing the bell before Helen could stop him. Margaret answered it, drying her hands on her apron, as she came in, and then with a prescience of the coming interview, resting them folded upon that prop with which nature in process of time provides the persons of most cooks. “Margaret,” said the Captain, “Miss Helen is going to break up housekeeping. She is coming to us. Mrs, Butler wished me to ask you to come too.”

Margaret pursed her mouth, and bent forward so far over the natural provision as to catch sight of the toe of her neatly shod small foot. “Should you like to come?” asked the Captain.

“I’m afraid I should feel the change,” said Margaret.

“Of course,” retorted the Captain shortly. “There is going to he a change, and you would feel it. We understand that. But you know me, and you know Mrs. Butler, and you know whether you would have a good place.”

“It would be a good place,” said Margaret, still surveying her slipper. “But I think I should feel the change more and more.”

“Well,” said the Captain impatiently, “do you mean yes, or no?”

“I think I should feel the change,” replied Margaret.

The Captain was nonplussed by this dry response to his cordial advance, and he waited a moment before he asked: “Have you any other place in view?”

“I had arranged,” said Margaret calmly, “to go to a cousin’s of mine that lives in the Portland then advertise for some small family in Old Cambridge where they only keep one girl.”

Helen had felt hurt by Margaret’s cold foresight in having already so far counted the chances as to have looked out for herself; but at this expression of Margaret’s ruling passion, she could not help smiling.

The Captain gave an angry snort. “Very well, then,” he said, “there is nothing to do but to pay you up, and let you go,” and he took out his pocket-book. “How much is it?”

“There isn’t anything coming to me,” Margaret returned with the same tranquillity; “Mr. Harkness paid me up.”

“But he didn’t pay you up to the present time,” said the Captain.

“I should wish to consider Miss Helen my guest for the past two weeks,” said Margaret, in the neatness of an evidently thought-out speech.

The Captain gave a laugh; but Helen, who knew all Margaret’s springs of action, and her insuperable pride, interposed: “You may, Margaret,” she said gently.

“Thank you, Miss Helen,” said Margaret, lifting her eyes now for the first to glance at Helen. She turned with a little nod of self-dismissal, and went back to the kitchen, leaving the Captain hot and baffled.

It was some moments before he spoke again. “Well, then,” he said; “about selling the house: do you know, Helen, I think it had better be sold at auction? It might be tedious waiting for a private sale, and real estate is such a drug, with the market falling, that you might have to lose more on it after waiting than if you forced it to a sale now. How do you feel about it?”

The finesse that the Captain was using in all the business, wreathing the hard legal exigencies of the case in flowers of suggestion and counsel, and putting on all a smiling air of volition, could never be fully known, except to the goodness that inspired it; but he was rewarded by the promptness with which Helen assented to everything.

“I shall be glad to have-you do whatever you think is best, Captain Butler,” she answered. “I have no feeling about the house — it’s strange that I shouldn’t have — and I don’t care how soon it is sold, nor how it is sold.”

The Captain instantly advanced a step further. “Perhaps you wouldn’t care to come back to it at all, any more? Perhaps you could put your hand on what you’d like to keep, and I could look after it for you, and—” He stopped at seeing Helen change countenance. “Well?”

“Did you think of selling the furniture too?” she asked.

“Why, yes,” assented the Captain. “I said so just now. I’m afraid you’d find it a burden after the house was gone. You’d have to store it, you know. Still, if you don’t wish it—”

“Oh, yes,” said Helen, drawing a long breath, “it had better go!” She spoke with a gentle submissiveness that smote the Captain to the heart “You can keep everything you want, my dear — you can keep it all!” he returned vehemently.

“That would be silly,” said Helen. “Besides, there are very few things I should want to keep. I couldn’t keep papa’s things: they ‘re terrible. I should like you to take everything that belonged to him, Captain Butler — except his watch and his Bible — and give them to some poor people that could use them. Then I only want my own things; and perhaps his chair, and—” Helen stopped, and the Captain, not to look at her, cast a roving eye about the room.

“Those Copleys, of course, you would reserve,” he remarked presently.

“No,” said Helen, “I never saw the people. You can sell them. But I shall keep my mother’s picture, because I think papa would like me to.”

The sense of her father’s presence expressed in these words touched the Captain again. He cleared his throat, but he was still hoarse in saying, “I think the Museum would buy the Copleys.” Helen seemed too indifferent about their fate to make any reply.

The worst was now over. Captain Butler had accomplished all that he wished without being obliged to explain anything to Helen, or to alarm her fears in any way, and he was unreasonably heartened by the fact. He might, perhaps, have stated the whole truth to her ignorance of affairs without being much more intelligible than he had been with all these skilful evasions. If he had said, “Your father died with his business in the utmost confusion, and probably insolvent,” she would scarcely have realised that life was not to go on just as before; and if he had said, “You are left a beggar,” how could Helen Harkness have conceived of herself in the figure of one of the women who had dropped their tears into their tea-cups in the kitchen, as they cried over the old clothes she had given them? It had wrung the Captain’s heart to hear her talk of poor people, and of giving; and yet, he rose from his chair, when he saw Helen still safe in her ignorance, with something like cheerfulness.

“You just make a memorandum of what you’d like reserved, Helen,” he said, “and I’ll attend to it for you. Put your own little traps together, and I’ll send a carriage to take you down to the four o’clock train. Anything you think of afterwards of course will he kept for you.”

He left her to this task. It was at least something to do, and Helen went about it with an energy which she was surprised to find in herself. At first the reproach with which the silent house seemed to use her indifference smote upon her, but it did not last long. Home had died out of it, as life had gone out of her father’s dust; and neither house nor grave was anything to her. She passed from room to room, and opened closets and drawers, and looked at a hundred things. She ended in despair by choosing a very few. If she could not keep all, why should she want any? Whatever it seemed desecration to sell she put on her memorandum to be given away. She selected a large number of things for Margaret, and when she sat down at the old Bostonian half-past two o’clock dinner (to which her father had always kept), she told Margaret what she had done. Margaret took one or two little trinkets which Helen offered her in her hand, and declined the other gifts.

“Why, what do you mean, Margaret’!” asked Helen. “Why don’t you take them?”

“I shouldn’t wish to, Miss Helen,” said Margaret, pursing her mouth.

“Well, have your own way,” returned Helen. “I suppose this is another of your mysteries.’’

“I should wish to do everything properly, Miss Helen.”

“What do you mean by properly? Why do you Miss Helen me, all the time? What made you so stiff with Captain Butler? and he so kind!”

“Captain Butler is a very pleasant gentleman,” said Margaret, in her neatest manner, “but I shouldn’t wish him to think it was quite the same as going on here.”

“You ‘re very foolish. It would have been a nice place.”

“I wished him to understand that I felt it a change.’’

“Well, well!” cried Helen impatiently. “You must do as you please, but you needn’t have been so cross.”

Helen’s nerves were beginning to give way, and she went on childishly. “You act just as if we were going to be together always. Do you know that I’m going away now, and not coming back any more?”

“Yes, Miss Helen.”

“And do you think this is the way to treat me at the last moment? Why don’t you take the things?”

“I shouldn’t wish to be under a compliment, Miss Helen.”

“What do you mean by being under a compliment?”

“I shouldn’t wish to be beholden.”

“Oh, you shouldn’t wish, you shouldn’t wish! This is too bad!” whimpered Helen. “What am I but under a compliment to you, as you call it? I didn’t think you’d behave so at the last moment. But I see. Yon ‘re too proud for anything, and you never did care for me.”

“Oh, Miss Helen!”

“Yes! And go to your cousin’s, — the quicker the better — and have your own cross way. I’m sure I don’t care, if you’ll be the happier for it. I can tell you what you are, Margaret: you ‘re a silly goose, and you make every one hate you. The charm’s broken between us, — quite; and I’m glad of it.”

Margaret went out without saying anything, and Helen tried to go on with her dinner, but failed, and began her inventory again, and at last went to her room and dressed for her journey. She came down into the library just before starting, and rang for Margaret. When the cook appeared, the young girl suddenly threw her arms round her neck. “Goodbye,” she sobbed out, “you good, old, wicked, foolish, stuck-up Margaret. I’m glad you didn’t come to the Butlers’, it would have killed me to see you there! Good-bye, good-bye! Remember your poor little Helen, Margaret, and come to see me! I can’t bear to look into the kitchen! Say good-bye to it for me! Oh my poor old slighted happy home! Oh my home, my home, my home! Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye!” She ran wildly through the well-known rooms, and bade them adieu with heart-breaking farewells; she stooped down and kissed the lounge, on which her father used to lie, and spread out her empty arms upon it, and laid her homeless head where his had rested. At the sound of the bell she sprang up, and opened the door herself, and fled down the steps, and into the carriage, shrinking into the furthest corner, and thickly hiding her face under her black veil.

She seemed to herself part of a vast train of events, without control, without volition, save the will to obey. She did what she was bid, and the great movement went on. Somewhere must be arrest, somewhere repose, but as yet she could not foresee it, and she could only yield herself to the forces carrying her forward. She was going to the Butlers’ because Captain Butler had told her to come; she had assented to everything he proposed because he had seemed to wish it; but she felt that he was as powerless as she in the matter. If he had proposed everything of contrary effect, she must still have yielded the same.

Captain Butler joined her at the station half-an-hour after she had left home, and just in time to step aboard the train with her. He was hot and looked vexed. When he got his breath a little, “Do you know,” said he, “that old fool hasn’t made any bills?”

“What old fool?” asked Helen passively.

“Margaret!” replied the Captain, with a burst. “Didn’t you understand that she meant merely to refuse her wages for the last two weeks, when she said she wished to consider you her guest?”

“Why, yes,” said Helen.

“Well, she meant a great deal more,” cried the Captain. “I’ve been round to the butcher and baker and all the rest, to settle their accounts, and I find that she’s paid for everything since we left you. But I shall have it out with her. It won’t do. It’s ridiculous!”

“Poor Margaret!” said Helen softly. She understood now the secret of Margaret’s intolerable stateliness, and of her reluctance to mar her ideal of hospitality by accepting a reciprocal benefit. It was all very droll and queer, but so like Margaret that Helen did not want so much to laugh as to weep at it. She saw that Captain Butler was annoyed at the way she took the matter, and she thought he would have scolded her at any other time. She said very gently: “We must let her have her way about it, Captain Butler. You couldn’t get her to take the money back, and you would only hurt her feelings if you tried. Perhaps I can do something for her some time.”

“Do you mean that you ‘re actually going to stand it, Helen?”

“Yes, why not? It isn’t as if anybody else did it for me — any equal, you know. I can’t feel that it’s a disgrace, from Margaret; and it will do her so much good — you’ve no idea how much. She’s been with us ever since I was born, and surely I may accept such a kindness from an old servant, rather than wound her queer pride.”

The Captain listened to these swelling words with dismay. This poor girl, at whose feet he saw destitution yawning, was taking life as she had always done, en princesse. He wondered what possible conception she had formed of her situation. Sooner or later he must’ tell her what it was.

V.

Captain Butler believed that his old friend had died a bankrupt; he represented the estate as insolvent, and the sale of the property took place at the earliest possible day. A red flannel flag, on which the auctioneer’s name was lettered, was hung out from the transome above the front door, and at ten o’clock on a dull morning when the sea-turn was beginning to break in a thin, chilly rain, a long procession of umbrellas began to ascend the front steps, where Helen had paused to cast that look of haughty wonder after the retreating policeman. The umbrellas were of all qualities, from the silk that shuts into the slimness of a walking-stick, to the whity-brown, whale-bone ribbed family umbrella, under which the habitual auction-goer of a certain size and age repairs to her favourite amusement. Many of the people had a suburban look, and some even the appearance of having arrived by the Fitchburg railroad; but there was a large proportion of citizens, and a surprising number of fashionably dressed ladies, who, nevertheless, did not seem to be of that neighbourhood; they stared curiously about them, as if they had now for the first time G entered a house there. They sat down in the sad old parlour, and looked up at the pictures and the general equipment of the room with the satisfied air of not finding it after all any better than their own. One large and handsome woman, whose person trembled and twinkled all over with black bugles, stood in the middle of the floor, and had the effect of stamping upon the supposed pride of the place. People were prowling all over the house, from cellar to garret, peering into closets and feeling of walls and doors; several elderly women in feeble health were to be met at the turns of the stairways, pressing their hands against their chests, and catching their breath with difficulty. Few, apparently, of the concourse had come to buy; but when the sale began they densely thronged the rooms in which the bidding successively went on, and made it hard for one another to get out of the packed doorways. The whole morning long the auctioneer intoned his chant of “A half, and a half and half, do-I-hear-the-three-quarters?” varied with a quick “Sold!” as from time to time he knocked off this lot or that. The cheaper carpets, chairs, beds, and tables were bought for the most part by certain fading women who bid with a kind of reluctant greed, and got together each her store of those mismated moveables which characterise furnished lodgings. They wore cheap camel’s hair Wraps and thread gloves; others, who seemed poor mothers of families, showed their black stubbed finger-tips, pressed anxiously together outside the edges of imitation India shawls, and bid upon the kitchen crockery. The Copleys were bought, as Captain Butler had expected, by the Museum of Fine Arts; the other paintings were bought by men who got them low to sell again, and in whose ruinous bazaars they were destined to consort with secondhand refrigerators and strips of dusty carpeting.

Captain Butler would gladly have stayed away from the auction, but his duty in the matter was not to be avoided. Helen had given him a list of things to be reserved from the sale, which she had made out under two heads. The first was marked “For self,” and this was very short, and easily managed by setting the things aside before the sale began. But the list of articles “To be given away,” was on a scale which troubled the Captain’s conscience, while it forlornly amused him, by its lavish generosity; the girl had done charity to an extent that wronged the creditors of the estate, and that put it quite beyond Captain Butler’s power to humour her unwitting munificence by purchasing the things to give away. He used a discretion with which he invested himself, to put all the valuable articles up at the sale, and bestowed in charity only the cheaper matters on Helen’s list. Even then, the auction was an expensive affair to him. He was unable to let certain things, with which he intimately associated his old friend, pass’ into the hands of strangers, especially things connected with the India trade. He bought the Chinese vases and bronze monsters, the terra cotta statues and ivory carvings, the outlandish weapons, and Oriental bric-a-brac, which in the age of Eastlake mantel-shelves, then setting in with great severity, he discovered to be in great request.

His dismay increased as these costly and worthless treasures accumulated upon his hands, for his house was already full of them, to the utmost capacity of its closets and out-of-the-way corners. Besides, he laid himself open to the suspicion of bidding in, and remained under that doubt with many. He had a haughty way of outbidding that stood him in no good stead, and went far to convince the crowd that all the sales to him were sham.

The auction, which began in the basement, ascended through the several stories, wandering from room to room till it reached the remotest attic chamber. Then, all the personal property had been sold, and it descended again to the first floor, where the crowd was already much thinner than at first, and was composed mainly of respectable-looking citizens who had come to bid on the house, or to see how much it would bring. The fashionably-dressed women were gone; it was not long before the last auction-goer’s whity-brown umbrella, expanded after the usual struggle, went down the front steps, and round the next corner. The auctioneer took his stand in the parlour before the pier-glass, — into which Helen looked that day to see whether her trouble with Robert had changed her, — with the long windows of the swell-front on either side of him. He was a young man, eager to win his reputation. He had been praised to Captain Butler as a frightfully vulgar wretch, who could get him more for the property than any other auctioneer in the city, and the Captain had taken him with certain misgivings. As he now confronted his respectable audience, he kept his hat a little aslant; he had an unlighted cigar in his left hand, which he put into his mouth from time to time, and chewed upon nervously; his eyes shone with a gross, humorous twinkle, and his whole face expressed a reckless audacity, and a willingness to take other people into the joke of life’s being a swindle, any way.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “I feel honoured in being the instrument, however humble, of offering this property to your consideration; this old family mansion, rich in tradition and association, in the very heart of the most select quarter of Boston. You have already examined the house, gentlemen, from attic to cellar, you have seen that it is in perfect repair, and that it has no concealments to make—’ nothing extenuate nor aught set down in malice,’ as our coloured brother says in the play. I will not insult your intelligence, gentlemen, by dwelling upon its entire soundness. Built forty years ago, it is this day a better house than the day its foundations were laid — better than nine-tenths of the gaudy and meretricious conceptions of modem architecture. Plain, substantial, soberly elegant, — these, gentlemen, are its virtues, which, like

‘A bold peasantry, their country’s pride,

When once destroyed, can never be supplied.’

Gentlemen, I will not ask your attention to the eligible position of the house. I see none but Boston faces here, and I am proud to take it for granted that you need no instructions from me upon this point. When I say that this is one of the best sites on Beacon Hill, I say everything. You know the value of the location, you know the character of the social surroundings, — you know what I mean, and all that I mean. I do not appeal to strangers here. I appeal to the old Boston blood, animated by a generous affection for our city and its history, and unwilling to see dishonour cast upon her by the sale, even in these ruinous times, of a property in her midst at less than its full value. Gentlemen, I feel that you will stand by me in this matter; and I have the pleasure of opening the sale with a bid of $10,000. Is this so, Mr. Wetherall?”

The gentleman addressed, in the midst of the laughing crowd, nodded slightly.

The auctioneer looked keenly at the faces in an irregular semicircle before him. “With a bid of $10,000 from Mr. Wetherall,” he resumed. “Mr. Wetherall, gentlemen, does not want the property, and he does not dream of getting it at a sixth or seventh — in any other times I should say a tenth — of its value. But he does not choose that it shall be disgraced by the offer of any ignobler sum; and, gentlemen, if Mr. Wetherall had not made this bid I should have made it myself in good faith. I am offered ten thousand, ten thousand, ten thous — eleven, from Mr. Wheeler. You don’t want the property either, Mr. Wheeler, but I thank you nevertheless. Eleven, eleven, eleven — do I hear the twelve? Twelve from Mr. White. The W.’s are doing well, but we must mount higher yet in the alphabet. Twelve, do I hear the thirteen? Five hundred! Thanks: twelve five, twelve five — thirteen. Going at thirteen, at thirteen — fourteen! This is something like, gentlemen; this is very good as a genteel relaxation; fourteen has its merits as part of the joke; but, gentlemen, we must not give too much time to it We must come to business, before long; we must indeed. I am willing to accept these ironical bids for the present, but — fifteen, did you say, Mr. Newell? Thank — you for fifteen. I am offered fifteen, fifteen, fifteen, by an eminent American humorist; fifteen, fifteen, going at fifteen? Oh come, gentlemen! Some one say twenty, and let the sale begin seriously.” Nobody had bidden twenty, but at that moment a greedy-eyed, nervous little man, with a hot air of having hurried to arrive, wedged his way through the people who filled the doorway, and entered the opener space inside with a bid of five hundred. A roar of laughter rewarded his ardour, and the auctioneer instantly went on: “Twenty thousand, five; twenty thousand, five. Now we are really warming to the work. We have reached the point at which blood begins to tell. Twenty thousand, five from Mr. Everton — do I hear the twenty-one? Yes, right again; I do hear the twenty-one, and from Mr. Newell, who redeems his reputation from the charge of elegant trifling, and twenty-two from Mr. White, who also perceives that the time for jesting is past. Going at twenty-two, at twenty-two, twenty-two! Do I hear twenty-three? No, only twenty-two, three; I regret to say it is only twenty-two, three.”

A quick succession of small bids now ran the sum up to twenty-four thousand, at which point it hung in spite of all the devices of the auctioneer to urge it beyond. “Going, going, going,” — he swung his right hand threatingly above the open palm of his left—” going to Mr. White at twenty-four thousand dollars! Are you all done?” He scanned the crowd, and pierced it to the outer circle with his audacious glance. “Going at twenty-four thousand dollars to Mr. White. Are you all done, twice? Are you all done, three times? Going once, going twice, going — Gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, putting his cigar in his mouth and his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets, and addressing them in a low, impassioned tone, “Gentlemen, it’s no money for it! I should feel ashamed, personally disgraced, if this property went for such a sum. I should know that it was owing to some fault of mine, some failure on my part to impress its value upon you. But I have trusted to your own sagacity, to your own intelligence, to the fact that you are all Boston men, and thoroughly acquainted with the prices of adjacent property, and the worth of this. I may have deceived myself; but I appeal to you now, gentlemen, not to let me suffer by the confidence I have reposed in you. My professional repute is in your hands. If this estate goes at $24,000 I am a ruined man.” A general laugh, in which the auctioneer himself joined so far as to smile, met this appeal. He ran his eye over the assembly. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Thank you, Mr. Everton! Was it twenty-six!” He leaned forward over his desk, and beamed with a flattering gratitude upon the new-comer.

“No, twenty-four, fifty,” replied Mr. Everton in a weak, dry voice.

“Thank you all the same, Mr. Everton. You are none the less my preserver. Thank you for twenty-four, fifty. We breathe again. Twenty-four, fifty, — do I hear the five? Twenty-four, fifty, — will you give me the five? Twenty-five, very good, twenty-five thousand, twenty-five, twenty-five — just one-fourth of the worth of the estate in prosperous times. Now let me hear the twenty-six! Gentlemen,” said the auctioneer, again breaking from his chant, and lowering his voice to the colloquial tone, “you all know the old story of the sibyl and her books: how, when she came with nine copies in the first instance, she asked a sum which struck the officials as a fancy price; how she went away and burnt three of the edition and then asked twice the original price for the six; and how, when she had burnt three more, they were glad to take the rest off her hands at her own terms. We have here a parallel case.”

“Don’t see the parallel,” said one of the crowd.

“Don’t you, Mr. Rogers? Well, you will, presently, when you’ve failed to buy this property for half the money that you’d be glad to offer the purchaser for his bargain. Do I hear twenty-six from you, Mr. Rogers?” Mr. Rogers laughed and nodded. “Twenty-six it is from Mr. Rogers. Twenty-six, twenty-six, twenty-six, will you give me the seven?” He went on crying this sum in varying tones of exultation, reproach, and persuasion for several minutes. Again and again he brought himself to the point of knocking off the house at that price, and then retired from it upon some fresh pretence of having heard a higher bid. But none came, or could be made to seem to have come; every one to whom he turned with a questioning look shook his head in prompt denial. The auctioneer’s mobile countenance took on an air of deep discouragement He threw aside his mallet, and pulled down his waistcoat. “I won’t sell this property at that price. I suppose there are men in this city who would do it, but I won’t. Captain Butler, I should like a word with you.” He came down from his perch, and retiring to a corner with the Captain talked with him in a dumb show of bitter and passionate appeal. When he again mounted to his place, he wore a look of grim despair. “Well, gentlemen, I have done my best to persuade Captain Butler to withdraw the property, and stop this bloody sacrifice.” The crowd laughed and the auctioneer’s eye twinkled. “But he feels bound by the terms of his notice to you to let the sale proceed. The property will be sold without reserve. Now let us see whether you will meet him in the same magnanimous spirit” Captain Butler looked on in blank amaze while this statement was making; but an intenser surprise was painted upon the face of Mr. Wetherall as the auctioneer proceeded: “Twenty-seven, twenty-seven.”

“Twenty-six was the last bid,” said a bystander.

“Excuse me, sir,” retorted the auctioneer severely, “I don’t think I deceived myself in a nod from my friend Mr. Wetherall. Twenty-seven!”

Mr. Wetherall seemed struggling to open his petrified mouth in protest, when Mr. Everton quickly bid twenty-seven five hundred. Mr. Wetherall turned sharply upon him and bid twenty-eight. The keen auctioneer scented their rivalry, and played upon it so artfully that in five minutes the property was going at thirty thousand, to Mr. Everton. He came to the third going, in his thrice-repeated warning, when he once more paused, and leaning forward, bent a look of pitying incredulity upon the faces before him. “Gentlemen,” he asked in an accent of soft reproach, “is this Boston?”

His audience again roared their pleasure, and the auctioneer, leaving his place, stepped forward and personally approached several gentlemen of the group in a conversational tone. “Mr. Wetherall, am I going to have nothing more from you? Mr. White, what do you say? You know this house is worth more than thirty thousand, and whoever buys it will have a dozen people after him to morrow offering to take his bargain off his hands at an advance. Mr. Merritt, we haven’t heard from you at all yet, I believe. You’ve been enjoying the show for nothing: it isn’t your custom to dead-head yourself on these occasions. And you, sir, — I can’t call your name, but I know your face; I’ve seen it in State Street often — can’t I get a bid out of you?” The gentleman addressed coloured, and shrank further back in the crowd. The auctioneer smiled in perfect good-humour, and turned away for another word with Captain Butler in private.

“Captain,” he whispered, “Mr. Everton is going to buy this property. Do you think he will stand another five thousand?”

Captain Butler, who seemed in a sort of daze, said, “I don’t believe he will. But if you—”

“I’ll get it,” said the auctioneer briskly, and returned to his work, into which he struck with a sudden and startling energy. “Going at thirty thousand, go — . Thirty-one, thirty-one, thirty-one; at thirty-two; thirty two, five; thirty-three, thirty-three — and five; thirty-four!” He clashed off the bids with a rapid confidence that would have inspired belief in the most sceptical. Mr. Wetherall bid thirty-four thousand five hundred, and was instantly topped by Mr. Everton at thirty-five. “Thirty-five, thirty-five, thirty-five,” cried the auctioneer, “going at thirty-five thousand, going, going, going, and sold — given away — to Mr. Everton!”

Mr. Everton came forward, with a half-frightened look, and laid down the money necessary to secure his purchase, and received a provisional deed of the property.

“Look here!” said Captain Butler, as soon as he could get the auctioneer aside, “I didn’t hear any of these bids till Wetherall’s last.” The Captain looked troubled and unhappy.

The auctioneer laid a re-assuring hand upon his shoulder. “Yon haven’t got a practised ear, Captain Butler. I have. Mr. Everton has got a great bargain. But it was hard, working up to that final point.”

VI.

“WHAT perplexed me the most about it,” said the Captain to Mrs. Butler, when he came home the day after the sale, “was that the auctioneer had so misrepresented his first talk with me. He never asked me to withdraw the property at all; he knew I couldn’t; he merely offered to bet me that he would get thirty thousand for it. Well! I don’t see what I could do about it. I couldn’t have proved that the bids were fictitious, and the attempt to try would have made a great scandal. That’s the way Hibbard looks at it; I went to him for advice; I put the case to him, and he says that there’s no way of going back of the fact, for the auctioneer would swear, to save himself, that he heard the bids, or thought he did. Most probably he did; it was all confusion; and my not having heard them proves nothing at all. Besides, Everton was not obliged to bid thirty-five thousand, and he did get a great bargain. The property is worth fifty, in any decent times. And that extra five thousand is a perfect godsend for Helen, poor girl! It’s all she’ll have in the world. I tell you, my dear, I haven’t had many things in life that gave me more satisfaction no than meeting the principal creditors to-day. You see, when I looked into his affairs with Joshua the day he died I was very badly discouraged. They were all in confusion; he seemed to have lost his grip of them; I suppose it was his failing health, but he couldn’t make head or tail of anything; and when I was appointed administrator I reported the estate insolvent. It was precipitate—”

“It was like you, my dear,” said Mrs. Butler. “You never believe that anything is wrong till you believe that everything is wrong.

“Well, well — very likely,” returned the Captain. “I had what I thought very good reasons for my course. But afterwards I set a shrewd hand at work on the books, and we found out that things were very much better, as I told you at the time. When a man’s affairs are in such confusion as Joshua’s, the confusion is usually against him, but in this case it was mostly for him. There wasn’t a day after I reported the estate insolvent that the case didn’t brighten. If it had been any other case, I should have been mortified at the way things turned out. To be sure, I didn’t believe there’d be anything for Helen, but before the sale I saw that unless the property went for nothing the estate would pay all Joshua’s debts, dollar for dollar. This morning we called a meeting of the creditors. They had the notion they were going to lose, and they were prepared for that. When I told them how matters really stood they were tremendously taken aback. But they had behaved very handsomely all along, out of respect for Joshua’s memory, and they came out strong now about him, and said such things — well, I can’t tell you,” said the Captain. “But,” he added confusedly, “I wish Harkness could have been there!”

“Perhaps he was,” said Mrs. Butler devoutly. “Eh?” cried the Captain sharply. “Ah! Yes! Well, perhaps. Old Rogers asked me to wait a minute, and they had a little confabulation among themselves, and then Rogers came forward and asked if there would be anything left for Helen. Then I told them the estate had yielded $5000 more than the indebtedness, so far as I knew of it; and we had congratulations all round, and if Joshua had been alive to resume, he might have started business again on a better basis than ever he had in his life. I wish — confound it! — I could be sure about those bids.”

“Why, my dear!” cried his wife, “you talk as if some fraud had been really committed. Can’t you look at it as Mr. Hibbard does? Probably the man did hear the bids. He wouldn’t have dared to pretend that he heard them; it wouldn’t have been safe for him.”

“No,” said the Captain thoughtfully. “Why, of course not,” he added briskly, after a moment. “Of course you’re right about it. He wouldn’t have dared. Where’s Helen?”

He went down and found Helen on the rocks by the sea, where she often strayed apart from the others; they did not follow her, they respected her right to what solitude she would. Her sorrow was no longer a thing of tears and sobs; but it was no more comprehensible than at first; her bereavement still seemed the one great unreasoned fact of the universe. She turned the pathos of her bewildered smile upon the Captain, as she heard him climbing the rocks behind her, and rose to meet him.

“No, sit down,” he said. “I want to have a little talk with you, Helen, as your man of business.”

“You’re my man of business as — as — papa was,” said Helen, with a grateful look.

“Thank you, my dear, for that,” answered the Captain. “I’ve only tried to do what he would have done for my girls. I don’t know, my dear, whether I had ever given you the idea that your father was in embarrassed circumstances?”

“O yes; I knew that,” said Helen.

“Well, we won’t enlarge upon the fact. It isn’t necessary. Would you like me to go into particulars about the settlement of the estate?”

“No,” answered Helen, “that isn’t necessary either. I shouldn’t be any the wiser if you did. Tell me whatever you think I ought to know, Captain Butler.”

“I was very much afraid, my dear,” said the Captain, “when I began to look into your father’s affairs that there would be nothing, or worse than nothing, left.” This did not seem to affect Helen as a matter of personal concern, and the Captain went on: “There was a time when I was afraid that the creditors would not get more than seventy-five per cent, of their money, and might be very glad to get that.” Helen looked round at the Captain with a quick glance, as if here were something that touched her. “But as I got along towards the bottom, things looked better, and I saw that unless the sale turned out very badly, we should save ourselves. The sale turned out far beyond my expectations. — Helen,” cried the Captain, “the prospect now is that I shall pay up every cent that your father owed in the world, and have some five thousand dollars left for you.”

“Oh, Captain Butler!”

“It isn’t a great sum—”

“It’s more than I dared to dream of!”

“But if it’s carefully handled, it can be made to go a great way.”

“Oh, it’s ample, ample! But I don’t care for that. What I think of — and I feel like going down on my knees for it — is that no one lost anything by papa. He would rather have died than wronged any one, and that any one should have differed by him after he was helpless to repair the wrong, that would have been more than the bitterness of death to me. Oh, I’m so happy about this, Captain Butler; you can’t think how much more of a comfort it is than anything else could have been!”

“You’re a good girl, Helen,” said the Captain, with a reverent fondness; “you “re your father’s girl, my dear. He would have died a rich man if he had not stood by people whom he knew to be in a bad way, because they had helped him long ago, when it was no risk for them to do so.”

“He was right!” cried Helen. “He would not have been papa if he had done less.”

“I should not have said he was right,” said Captain Butler, “if he had not believed that he had already put you beyond want. He had insured his life for twenty-five thousand dollars in the Metropolitan Reciprocal; but that went to pieces two years ago.’’

“That’s nothing. I couldn’t have managed so much money,” promptly answered Helen. “The five thousand will be enough, and more than enough, for my utmost desires. I’m not extravagant. I can get on with very little, and this is wildly abundant.”

The Captain, from rejoicing in her mood, suddenly looked aghast, as if a terrible idea had presented itself. “You understand, Helen,” he said, “that it will be some time yet — six months at least — before I can place the money due you at your disposal. It isn’t certainly due you till all the creditors have had full notice to present their claims, and these have been passed upon by the commissioners.’”

“Oh, that makes no difference,” said Helen. “I’m in no haste for the money.”

“And you understand,” pursued the Captain, as if this were really the point he wished to insist on, “that it is only five thousand?”

“O yes, I understand perfectly,” quickly answered the girl, and then she stopped, and cast a keen glance at the Captain, without, however, seeming to perceive his chopfallen aspect: she was, perhaps, looking deeper.

“You haven’t brought any more letters for me, I suppose?” she said.

“No, I must have got everything the last time,” replied the Captain. “I went carefully through all the drawers again before the sale began.”

“I shall ask you to take care of those law-papers for me, Captain Butler; I don’t know what to do with them. The letters were all recent ones. I thought there might have been some old ones. Not that I have missed any. But you did sometimes lose home letters when you were off on those long voyages of yours, didn’t you?”

“No, very few,” the Captain responded. “We get them nearly all, sooner or later.”

“But sometimes they had to wander about after you?”

“Yes, sometimes. And sometimes they waited.”

“It must have been terribly distressing,” said Helen, “to wait for them.”

“Well,” returned the Captain, “that depended a good deal on whom the letter was from.” Helen flushed a little. “There were some letters that I shouldn’t have cared if I’d never got. But, generally speaking, the fellows in the navy had the advantage of us in the merchant service.”

“I don’t see why,” said Helen.

“Oh, their letters were addressed to them through the Navy Department, and of course they came the straightest and safest way. I recollect once at Singapore,” and the Captain went on with much circumstance to give a case in point. Helen had furnished him a thread of associations which the Captain never willingly dropped. She listened at first with interest, then patience, then respect. At last she said it was getting a little chilly, and Captain Butler agreed that it was. They went back to the house together, and parted on the piazza, where Helen paused a moment to say: “I haven’t thanked you, Captain Butler, because it seemed no use to try. Where should I end?”

“Don’t begin,” said the Captain, with the smile which he kept for Helen; she was as dear to him as his own daughters, and just strange enough to be a colour of romance in his thoughts. It always astonished him, and slightly abashed him that she should be a young lady; she had so long been a little girl.

She looked fondly into his kind eyes. “It is too much — too much!” she cried, and slipped away with a fallen head.

The words made the Captain think of the money again, and the smile went and the trouble came back to his face, as he walked away to find his wife.

“Well?” said Mrs. Butler.

“Catharine,” said the Captain, “I’m afraid she thinks it’s five thousand a year.”

“O no, she doesn’t!” pleaded his wife.

“Yes, she does, my dear. She spoke of it as an enormous sum, and I hadn’t the courage to make the thing clear. I began to, and then gave it up. I don’t see what’s to be done about it. I’m afraid it’s going to be a dreadful blow when she finds out what it really is.” Captain Butler looked ruefully at his wife.

“I think you’re mistaken,” said Mrs. Butler. “It’s her ignorance of money that makes her think of five thousand, and not the income from it; but as you’ve raised the doubt she must be told that it is not five thousand a year, and she must be told just how much it is.” The Captain groaned. “But you needn’t tell her, John. You’ve gone through quite enough. I will tell her.”

Captain Butler looked ashamed, but relieved. “Well, my dear, I must let you. It’s shirking, but I can’t help it. You can manage it better than I can. When I think of telling that poor child how very little better than a beggar she is, my tongue turns to a chip in my mouth.”

“Yes, it’s hard. But suppose she’d had nothing?”

“Then something better than this might have been done with the creditors. Some were old friends. But you can’t ask people to help a girl who has five thousand dollars. It sounds preposterous.”

“I doubt whether Helen would have allowed herself to be helped in that way if she had known it, and how could it have been kept from her?” Mrs. Butler rose to go to another room.

“Catharine,” asked the Captain, “was it at Singapore that I got that first letter of yours, after it had chased me round so long?”

“No; it was at Cape Town,” said Mrs. Butler. “Why?”

“I told Helen it was at Singapore.”

“How in the world came you to be talking to Helen of our old love-letters, my dear?”

“Oh, she was asking if letters to the East didn’t often get lost. I don’t know why she should have happened to ask. But she did.”

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Butler simply, “she is going to write to Robert Fenton.”

A light dawned upon Captain Butler; he laughed in a shamefaced way, and then he frowned a little. “Why didn’t she ask me outright which was the best way to address him?”

“How could she? She couldn’t have asked her own father. You wouldn’t have wished your own daughter to do it.”

“Yes, I should,” defiantly answered the Captain.

“Well, she wouldn’t,” replied Mrs. Butler. The Captain was silenced, but not satisfied. He suffered Mrs. Butler to go, but remained still with that duped smile, and did not half like it.

That night Helen came rather late and tapped at Mrs. Butler’s door. “It’s I — Helen — Mrs. Butler. Can I speak with you?”

“Yes,’ come in, Helen.”

She pushed in impetuously. “I came to ask Captain Butler’s pardon for the mean little intriguing way I got out of him how to address a letter to Robert Fenton. He must have told you!”

“He said you asked him if his letters from home weren’t lost sometimes,” said Mrs. Butler, with a little smile. “I understood, my dear,” she added, leaning forward to smooth Helen’s hair, where she had sunk on the cricket at her feet. “It was a perfectly natural thing.”

“O yes, only too natural with me! But I hate and detest all that beating round the bush, in me, even when I’m doing it; and what I came for now, Mrs. Butler, is to ask you how I had better write to Robert. “ Neither found anything worthy of remark in this second avowal of purpose, which might be said in a manner to supersede the first “If it hadn’t been for my wretched shilly-shallying ways, I shouldn’t have to write to him at all. But now I must. There is something — something — that I must tell him for his own sake, and — for his peace of mind. For if a person hates any one, especially if it’s through a mistake, I don’t think we ought to let any foolish pride interfere; do you, Mrs. Butler?”

“No, Helen,” said Mrs. Butler, with perfect intelligence.

“That’s what I think too, and it would be perfectly easy — more than easy — to write and tell him that, and take the consequences, whatever they were. You see it is just this: we had a quarrel before he went away, — or not a quarrel, but a misunderstanding; that is, he misunderstood — and he was so vexed with me that he wouldn’t come to say good-bye. I don’t care for that. He did perfectly right. But what I can’t forgive is his not trying to see papa, and bid him good-bye. I can’t bear to have him think any longer that I was trifling with him, and yet I can’t write to him, when I think of the way he treated papa. It seems very bad-hearted in him. Of course, I didn’t see how he could have borne to see papa under the circumstances, and feeling the way he did towards me; and, of course, if papa had lived it would have been different, and if it hadn’t been for me, I know Robert wouldn’t have done it, for he’s one of the best and kindest—” Helen stopped, and Mrs. Butler waited a moment before she answered.

“Did you ever think, Helen, that Robert loved your father like — not like you, not like a daughter — but like a son?”

“Why, papa had always been a father to him!” cried Helen. “Why shouldn’t he?”

“And were you never remiss with your father, because you trusted that somehow, sometime, the love you felt for him would more than make it up to him?”

“OH, a thousand times!” cried Helen, bowing her head on Mrs. Butler’s knees.

The pale hand continued to stroke her hair. “That’s a risk we all take with those we love. It’s an earnest of something hereafter, perhaps. But for this world it isn’t safe. Go, and write your letter, my dear, and give Robert all our love.”

Mrs. Butler leaned forward, and kissed the beautiful head good-night, and Helen, after a silent embrace, went back to her room again. It was easy now to write the letter which she had found so hard before, and a deep peace was in her heart when she read it over, and found no shadow of resentment or unkindness in it. She was glad to have abased herself so utterly before him, to have put herself so completely in his power. Now he might do as he pleased, but he never could have it to say that he had misunderstood her, or that he had cause to think her proud or cruel.

“Dear Robert,” the letter ran, “it is five weeks now since papa died. I wrote you a line to tell you the sad news as soon as I could bring myself to put it in words, and I suppose you will get that letter before this reaches you. But for fear that it may fail (I sent you a Newspaper with the account, too), I will tell you again, that it was very sudden, and while I was away here at Beverley, where he expected to join me in a day or two. It was at his office; Captain Butler was there with him. I thought I could tell you more about it; but I cannot. He died of a disease of the heart. I will send a cutting from another newspaper that will tell you more.

“The day before papa died I told him everything about that last letter I wrote you, and he took your part. The last words he spoke of you were full of affection and sympathy. I thought you would like to know this. You were mistaken about that letter. Read it again, and see if it doesn’t mean something different. But I’m afraid you tore it up in your disgust with me. Well, then, I must tell you. I did love you all the time. There, — I don’t care what you think of me. You can’t think less of me than I do.

“The house has been sold, and everything in it.

Papa did not leave a will, but I know he would have liked you to have his watch, and I am keeping that for you.

“I am with the Butlers at Beverley. They have been everything to me, and are everything.

“HELEN.”

In Helen’s tall hand it took three sheets of note-paper to hold this letter; the paper was very thin, but she put on a double postage to make perfectly sure, and she kept the letter till she went up to Boston, and then posted it herself in the general post-office.

VII.

Helen had been three weeks at the Butlers’, and, in spite of their goodness, which guarded her freedom, as well as all her wishes, she began to feel a constraint which she could not throw off. Life had come to a pause with her, and when it should move forward it must be seriously, and even sadly; and she was morbidly conscious that she somehow clogged the joyous march of Marian Butler’s days. There had been an effort to keep out of her sight the preparations for the wedding, till she had protested against it, and demanded to see every dress. But this very demand emphasised the dark difference between her fate and her friend’s, and Marian was apologetically happy in Helen’s presence, however they both tried to have it otherwise. Once Marian had explained with tears that she would like to put it off for Helen’s sake, if she could, but the time of the marriage had been fixed with regard to so many other matters that it could not be postponed. Helen had answered that Marian made her very wretched talking of such a thing, and that she must go at once if Marian spoke of it again. They had embraced with perfect tenderness and sympathy, and Helen had remained with the helpless feeling of her incongruity in a house of rejoicing. It seemed to her intolerable that she must bring her sorrow thither; she suffered till she could get away with it; all they did to make her feel at ease could only heighten her trouble. She had waited with a painful patience till the Captain should report to her on the settlement of her father’s affairs, and she could begin to shape her future; now that he had spoken she need wait no longer.

She found Mrs. Butler in the parlour the morning after she had written to Robert.

“Mrs. Butler,” she said, “I want you to let me go away next week.”

“I can’t bear to have you talk of leaving us, Helen!” cried Mrs. Butler, with a wistful trouble in her eyes and voice, yet as if she had expected this.

“Yes, I know,” returned Helen, “but I must go. It’s foolish and useless to keep staying on; and now that I’ve made up my feeble mind about it, don’t try to stop me.”

“Helen,” said Mrs. Butler, “don’t go! We all want you to stay. We want you to go to Europe with us — to be our guest, our child. Put away your scruples, my dear — I understand them, and honour them — and go with us.”

“You know I can’t, Mrs. Butler.”

“But if your father had been living, you would have felt free to accept our invitation.”

“Perhaps. But it would have been different then. Don’t press me.”

“I’m sorry, Helen,” sighed Mrs. Butler. “I won’t press you. But stay with us, my dear. It does us good to have you. Mr. Butler and I often talk of it; we all feel it. Say that you’ll stay till we go away, and then we’ll feel as if we had parted because we must.” Helen was standing before Mrs. Butler, who had the girl’s hands in hers, as she sat in her easy-chair, and looked up into her evasive face.

“No,” said Helen, gently taking away her hands, and sitting down near the other, “I couldn’t. Don’t let us deceive ourselves. I’m a shadow in the house; we all know it, and feel it. Nobody’s to blame, nobody can help it,” she added quickly, to stay a protest from Mrs. Butler, “but it’s true. You see how I have to take my blackness out of the loom when your friends come; I give them a painful shock when they catch sight of me; it checks the pleasant things they would like to say; and I hate myself for glooming about the house in secret; I feel that I must cast a shadow on them even through the walls and floors.”

“Helen, dear, there’s no friend we have who is so precious to us as you are!”

“O yes — yes! I know how kind you are. But you see it can’t be. I should have to go away at the time of the wedding, and you had better let me go before.”

“Go away at the time of Marian’s wedding? Not be — Why, Helen!”

“Yes. Think, Mrs. Butler! It couldn’t be.”

Mrs. Butler was silent. “I shouldn’t care for myself, and I know you wouldn’t care for yourselves; but the others have some rights which we mustn’t overlook. I should throw a chill over everything. I couldn’t endure that, and you can’t persuade me, Mrs. Butler; you mustn’t try.”

Mrs. Butler looked really disconsolate. Helen was right; there was no possibility of gainsaying her, much less of outreasoning her; and Mrs. Butler was one of those feminine temperaments, rather commoner in New England than elsewhere, whom a good reason absolutely silences: they may not often have it themselves, but their reverence for truth and a clear conclusion is such that they must bow to it in others. The most that she could say was, “But you will come back to us afterwards, Helen? You will come after Marian is gone, to comfort us, won’t you? It will be a month before we shall sail, and we should so like to have you with us. We shall not be gay ourselves, then, and you will feel more at home. I won’t oppose you now, dear, but you’ll promise me that!”

“Yes,” answered Helen, “I’ll come back, then, if you want me.”

“And where are you going, now? Where do you mean to stay?”

“I don’t know. I thought I should go to the Miss Amys — you remember them, don’t you? — and ask them to let me stay with them for the present. I know they sometimes take people to board.”

“O yes, I remember them — on West Pomegranate Street; one of those pleasant old houses, with the threshold level with the side-walk. It will be a good place,” said Mrs. Butler, cheered with the thought. “You must let Mr. Butler arrange for you. He—”

“No,” said Helen promptly; “I am not going to trouble Captain Butler any more. I must begin taking care of myself now, and I can’t begin too soon. I have my own money, and I ought to know how to use it.” Human nature is such a very simple as well as complex thing, that Helen could feel a childish pride in being absolute mistress of a certain sum, and for the moment could forget the loss that had endowed her with it. “I am going to be very saving of it, Mrs. Butler.” She smiled, but the smile took away all hope from Mrs. Butler. She looked at Helen in despair, and did not know how to begin what she felt it on her conscience to say at once.

“Oh, Helen!” she broke out, and then checked herself.

“What, Mrs. Butler?” asked the girl, startled by her accent.

“Oh, nothing! I mean — has Mr. Butler told you how much it is?” Mrs. Butler was ashamed of her flighty reluctance and indecision, and now took herself firmly in hand.

“Yes, it’s five thousand dollars — so much more than I ever—”

“Did you understand,” interrupted Mrs. Butler, “that it’s only five thousand in all? Not — not five thousand a year?” Mrs. Butler was prepared for the worst dismay that Helen could show, but Helen showed none. On the contrary, she gave a little laugh.

“Five thousand a year? No indeed! Why, Mrs. Butler, what have you been thinking of? That would be insanity.”

Mrs. Butler looked like one to whom the worst dismay might have been welcomer than this cheerfulness: this might be a far more hopeless condition than the realisation of the fact that the sum of five thousand dollars was not a fortune; Helen might be thinking it was. Mrs. Butler felt obliged to ask: “Do you know how much that will give you to live on?”

“Not exactly,” said Helen, “but not much, I suppose.”

Perhaps she thought a thousand a year. Mrs. Butler must still go on. “Some of Mr. Butler’s Chicago mortgages bring him nine per cent. That would be five times ninety — four hundred and fifty?”

“Oh, I should never send my money away to Chicago. I want it where I can put my hand on it at once. I shall deposit it in savings-banks — like Margaret — at six per cent., and then I shall get three hundred a year from it.”

“But, poor child! you can’t live upon that,” Mrs. Butler besought her.

“No, I must do something. I’m determined never to encroach upon the principal, whatever happens.

Don’t you think that’s the right way? I’ve always heard that it’s perfectly ruinous to live upon your principal.”

Mrs. Butler could not combat these just conceptions. “Have you thought what you shall do, Helen?” she asked.

“Yes, I’ve been thinking about it nearly all night. I couldn’t sleep, and I thought I might as well think. I couldn’t decide. But one thing I have made up my mind’ I shall not do: I shall not paint holly-wood boxes.” They both laughed, the elder lady pityingly and reluctantly. “In the first place, I paint horridly; but that wouldn’t make any difference. What I couldn’t do would be to ask the outrageous prices which holly-wood boxes bring from sympathising friends when painted by young ladies in need. Besides, I think the market must be overstocked. Only consider, Mrs. Butler, how many holly-wood boxes must have been painted by this time, and what stores of them people must have laid by, that they couldn’t give away if Christmas came twice a year from now till the millennium. And all so much alike, too: a farm-house very deep in the snow; the moon monopolising the sky, and Santa Claus, very fuzzy all over, and much too large for his sleigh, with his reindeers and his pipe just of a size; and fat robins at each end of the box. No, you needn’t be afraid of holly-wood boxes from me, Mrs. Butler.”

“Oh, Helen, you queer child!” laughed Mrs. Butler helplessly.

“But I will confess that when I thought of doing something for myself, holly-wood boxes popped into my head the first thing. I suppose there’s really no getting away from them. And, O yes! I thought of something else; I thought of parlour-readings. What should you think of parlour-readings, Mrs. Butler?” Mrs. Butler visibly cowered under the proposition, and Helen gave a wild laugh. “‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,’ don’t you know? and Poe’s ‘Bells; ‘ and ‘Curfew shall not ring to-night.’ How would that do? Don’t you believe that if it could be generally given out, I might be handsomely bought off by public subscription? But I really needn’t do anything at once, Mrs. Butler,” Helen went on seriously. “I’ve got clothes enough to last me indefinitely, for I shall expect to make over and make over, now; and I shall take a very cheap little room at the Miss Amys’, and think it all over very carefully, and look about before I attempt anything. I’m not afraid: I can do all sorts of things. Don’t — don’t — sympathise with me!” she added, suddenly breaking. “That hills me! It disheartens me more than anything.”

“She understands perfectly well how much she’s got,” Mrs. Butler reported to her husband. “She had worked out just how much income it would be, and she says she expects to do something to help herself. But she is so cheerful about it that I don’t believe she does. There’s something between her and Robert Fenton.”

“It would be the best thing that could happen,” said the Captain, with a sigh of relief. “I hope to the Lord it’s so! But he’s off for three years!” he added, with dismay.

“She doesn’t think of that. Or perhaps she hopes he can get leave to come home — or something. Besides, such a girl as Helen could wait thirty years,” said Mrs. Butler, viewing the affair in the heroical abstract. “Her hope and her trust will support her.”

“Morally, perhaps. But she would have to be supported otherwise,” said the Captain. He refused to be wholly comforted by his wife’s manner. Still, its probability, in the absence of anything more substantial, afforded him a measure of consolation. At any rate it was, to his thinking, the sole hopeful outlook for Helen. Since the hard times began he had seen so much futile endeavour by able and experienced men, to get something to do for even a scanty living, that he had grown sceptical of all endeavour at self-help. Every year he was called upon to assist at the disillusion of a score or more of bright young spirits fresh from the University, with their academic honours still green upon their brows, and eager for victory in the battle of life. He knew the boys’ fathers and mothers, and of what excellent stock they came, what honest fellows they were, and what good reason there was to believe them capable of bearing their part with distinction in any place demanding quality and talent, and training. But there seemed to be no such place for them; the world in which their sires had prospered did not want them, did not know what to do with them. Through the strange blight which had fallen upon a land where there should be work for every one, and success for every one willing to work, there seemed to be nothing but idleness and defeat for these young men in the city of their ancestry and birth. They were fit to lead in any commonwealth, but the common-illness apparently would not have them; they were somehow anachronisms in their own day and generation; they were too far before or too far behind their time. The Captain saw them dispersed in a various exile. Some tried cattle-raising in Colorado; some tried sheep-farming in Virginia, and some sheep-ranching in California. There were others who tried cotton-planting in the South and the orange-culture in Florida; there were others yet, bolder and more imaginative, who tried the milk-farming in Massachusetts. The Captain heard of their undertakings, and then he saw them with their hats scrupulously on, at the club, which a few of their comrades had in a superior wisdom never abandoned.

They had got back, and they were not to blame. Perhaps there was some error in the training of these young gentlemen, which had not quite fitted them to solve the simple yet exacting problem of making a living. But then, people who had worked hard all their lives were not now solving this problem. Captain Butler thought of these nice fellows, and how willing and helpless they were, and then he thought, with compassion too keen for any expression but grim laughter, of such a girl as Helen, and what her training was for the task of taking care of herself. It was probably the same as Marian’s, and he knew what that was. They had in fact gone to the same schools, and grown through the same circumstances into the same society, in which everything they had been and had done fitted them to remain, and which was very charming and refined, and good in a good sense, and so very, very far from doing anything for anything but culture’s, or pleasure’s, or kindness’ sake.

At five or six years of age, Helen had begun to go with the other little girls of her station in life to a school, in which the established language was French, and in which she acquired a graceful and ladylike use of that tongue. It stood her in good stead when she went abroad one summer with her father, and she found that she spoke it as correctly as most English girls she met, and a great deal more readily. But she had too much sense to be sure of her accent or her syntax; at Paris she found that her French was good, but with a difference, and she would not have dreamt of such a thing as teaching it. In fact she had not thought of that at any time, and she had no such natural gift for languages as would have enabled her to master it without such a design.

From this school she went to others, where she was taught what people must learn, with thoroughness and with an intelligence very different alike from the old-fashioned methods of young ladies’ establishments, and from the hard, mechanical processes of the public schools. She was made to feel an enlightened interest in her studies; she liked some of them very much, and she respected those she did not like. Still she had not shown a passionate preference for any particular branch of learning; she had a ladylike ease and kindness withal; if she really hated anything it was mathematics, but because she hated this she had been the more conscientiously attentive to it. She had a good taste in music, and fair skill. After she left school, she had a musical enthusiasm, in the height of which she devoted herself under her German instructor to many hours of practice every day, and had her own ideas of becoming a great performer. But these gave way to clearer conceptions of her powers, and she remained an impassioned amateur of musical genius in others. She went devotedly to all the private musicales; she was unfailing at the rehearsals of the Symphony Concerts, and of the Handel and Haydn Society. She made her father join the Apollo Club for her, and she made him go to some of the concerts with her. In those days her talk was of Bach and Beethoven; she thought poorly of Italian music, though she was very fond of the Italian operas.

It was to this period that her passion for the German language also belonged. She had studied German at school, of course, but it was not till after leaving school that French was relegated to its true place as something charming enough, but not serious; and German engrossed her. She read Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays with her teacher, and Heine’s songs with one of her girl-friends. She laid out a course of reading in German, which was to include Schopenhauer’s philosophy, already familiar to her through the talk of a premature Harvard man, who rarely talked of anything else. But it never really came to this; German literature presently took the form of drama, and after Helen’s participation in a certain number of German plays, it yielded to the pleasing dance of the same name; though not till it had superseded Italian as well as French in her affections. Dante, of course, one must always respect, but after Dante, there was so little in Italian as compared with German! The soft throat from which the southern vowels came so mellow roughed itself with gutturals. But this, like music, was only for a time. In the end, Helen was always a girl of sense. She knew that she was not a German scholar, any more than a great performer, and she would have shrunk with astonished modesty from the notion of putting such acquirements as she had in either to practical use. She hid them away, when her frenzy for them was past, as really so little that one ought to be ashamed of them.

It was the same with painting — or Art, as she then called it — in which it has already been represented that she at one time took a great interest. She really liked it very much; she had that feeling for form and colour without which no dressmaker can enable a young lady to dress exquisitely, and she enjoyed form and colour in painting. But by and by, as the class fanned itself down to the grains of wheat in its large measure of amiable and well-meaning chaff, Helen found that her place was with the chaff. It did not need the eye of the great painter, glancing with a humorous gleam from her work at her, to teach her this; she had felt it before, and she gave it up before she had conspicuously disgraced herself. She was always very glad to have taken to it; the attempt to paint for herself had cleared and defined her taste in painting, and indefinitely enlarged the bounds of her knowledge and enjoyment. But it had not done anything more, and all that Helen had learnt and done had merely had the effect that was meant: to leave her a cultivated and agreeable girl, with bright ideas on all sorts of pleasant subjects. She was, as the sum of it, merely and entirely a lady, the most charming thing in the world, and as regards anything but a lady’s destiny the most helpless.

It was the fact that Helen’s life now seemed wrenched and twisted so far from its rightful destiny, which bowed Captain Butler over it in such despair, and which well might strike pity into the hardiest beholder. Her old friend saw no hope for her but in the chance of there being something, as his wife suggested, between her and Robert Fenton. Yet it was against this hope that Helen herself had most strenuously steeled her heart. She had not the least doubt of Robert. He was a gentleman, and he would take what she had written in the right way. She rested in such absolute faith in his generosity, that she shrank from the possibility of abusing it as from something like sacrilege. If Robert were that moment to come and ask her to marry him, she would not take him till she had fairly won him again; and if, when he had got her letter, and thought it all over, he decided that she was too light and flippant a girl to trust with his happiness, she should know just how to take it. She should not blame him; she should not think him less kind and true; he should be none the less her hero. In fact, it seemed as if his willingness to forget her folly would somehow mar the perfection of her self-sacrifice. So, while she clung the most fondly to the thought of him, it was with the austerest readiness to give him up, and even a sort of impatience. Women seldom reason, it is said; when they do so, it must be owned that it is with passionate largeness. The sum of Helen’s emotional logic was that she must plan her future with as much severity and seriousness, as much will to venture and to endure, as if there were no Robert Fenton, or ever had been, in the world. Her sole difficulty was to imagine her future, and to begin to imagine it, she must first escape from the affectionate restraint of these kind friends of hers. She had no purpose more definite than that.

When she went from Mrs. Butler to her own room, the chamber did not seem spacious enough for the tumult in her mind, and now that she had resolved to go up to Boston that afternoon, and was, as it were, already in motion, the inertness of the place was intolerable. She put on a wrap and a hat, and stole out to her accustomed place on the rocks. It was a very still morning late in September, after the first autumn gales had blown themselves away, and a glistening calm, with a deep heart of mellow warmth, had followed. The sea sparkled and shone with a thousand radiances in its nearer levels, and in its distance was a blue that melted into a hardly more ethereal heaven, a few white sails that might have been wings showing palely at its confluence with the sky. It washed languidly up the little beach of the cove, and with a slow, shouldering action, softly heaved against the foot of the rocks where the sea-weed flung up by the storm hung drying its masses in the sun, and trailing its ribbons in the tide. The air seemed to sparkle and burn like the sea, and was full of the same pungent, saline odours.

Helen came round a knot of twisted cedars that hid her haunt from the house, and, climbing to the perch where she was used to sit, found herself confronted by a gentleman apparently in as great trouble as herself at their encounter. She could not mistake those sloping shoulders, that long neck, and that ineffective chin: it was Lord Rainford, not now in the blue yachting-stuff in which she had last seen him, but in a morning costume which seemed to make even less of him in point of personal attractiveness. Helen held the only pass by which he could have escaped, and, much as she would have liked to let him go, it was impossible for her to yield without speaking.

“Ah — good-morning. I’m intruding here, I’m afraid, Miss — Harkness,” he began.

“O no,” she said, and paused, not knowing just what else to say.

“The fact is,” the Englishman continued, “that I had been calling with Mr. Ray, and he went back a moment, and I stepped down here on the rocks, and—” Helen perceived that he had taken in the fact of her crapes, visiting them with a glance of wistful pity, as if he would like to say something fit and due about her bereavement. But he only asked, after his abrupt pause, “Have you been always well since I saw you?”

She remembered Ray’s praises of Lord Rainford, and would have liked to put herself right with him. She hated to have him thinking her flippant and unfeeling, though she might have proved that it was his fault she had been so. But she could think of nothing more than “Thank you” to say; and then she asked, “Have you been well?”

“Oh, very!” answered Lord Rainford; “my American summer has quite set me up.”

This seemed to imply that he had not been very well when he came, but Helen did not ask. She was thinking that when he should have a heavier moustache and a beard to that feeble chin, his face and neck might be helped off a little, but nothing could ever do anything for those shoulders. She settled this in her mind before she said, rather absently, “I am glad of that. You will be going home soon, I suppose,” she added, from mere dearth, though it occurred to her that this might be set down as an instance of the Yankee inquisitiveness that Englishmen are always in quest of.

“Yes; I’m going to sail to-morrow,” said Lord Rainford. “Your friends have promised to come and see me in England.”

“They told me,” assented Helen.

“I’m sure they owe me a revenge in that way,” continued the young man. “Mr. Ray has done me no end of kindness. In fact everybody’s been most uncommonly kind. I couldn’t say enough of it!”

“I’m glad you have enjoyed your stay here,” said Helen. “We Americans are rather weak about our country. We like people to like it, and take it as a personal favour when they do. I suppose none of us,” she added, “does anything to set even the least important person in it before a stranger in a false light, without feeling sorry.” She examined Lord Rainford’s face for an instant before she dropped her eyes, and saw it kindle with a delicate intelligence.

“I wish,” he answered, “that I could be sure I leave everybody in America as well pleased with me as I am with all America.”

“Good-bye,” said Helen; “we shall be making international allusions to the language of Shakespeare and Milton in another minute.

“No,” said Lord Rainford; “it seems to me you don’t care to do that any more. Very curious,” he added; “I can’t get the people I meet to say a good word for their country. They all seem ashamed of it, and abuse it, no end.”

“That’s because they want you to praise it,” suggested Helen.

“Ah, but they won’t let you praise it! They’ll let you join them in crying it down.”

“But you had better not.”

“Ah, yes; very likely. I can’t think that a country where I’ve met so many nice people, and seen scarcely anything but order and comfort even in these very bad times, can be going to the dogs; but I can’t get anybody here to agree with me — that is, in society. I don’t understand it.”

“I can’t explain,” said Helen, with a little smile, “except by ‘the settled opposition to our institutions which pervades the British mind.’”

“Ah, Chuzzlewit; I know. But you’ll excuse my saying that I think your institutions have changed for the worse in this respect since Mr. Pogram’s time. I think Pogramism is better than this other thing.”

“What other thing?” asked Helen, not a great deal interested.

“Why, this not talking of America at all. I find your people — your best people, I suppose they are — very nice, very intelligent, very pleasant — only talk about Europe. They talk about London, and about Paris, and about Rome; there seems to be quite a passion for Italy; but they don’t seem interested in their own country. I can’t make it out. It isn’t as if they were cosmopolitan; that isn’t quite the impression, though — excuse my saying so — they try to give it. They always seem to have been reading the Fortnightly and the Saturday Review, and the Spectator, and the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the last French and English books. It’s very odd! Upon my word, at one dinner the Americans got to talking to one another about some question of local finance in pounds, shillings, and pence. I don’t understand it.” Lord Rainford seemed to find nothing ridiculous, but only something mysterious in this, and reddened a little when Helen laughed.

“Perhaps you’re embittered because experience has destroyed your ideal. You expected us all to call you a Britisher, and to flaunt Bunker Hill Monument in your face.”

“Ah, now, do you think that’s quite fair, Miss Harkness?”

Helen stooped a little sidewise and felt about her skirts with her left hand for the loop of her train, in that peculiar clawing and grappling manner which once had its fascination for the idle spectator. “We American women are accused of not caring anything about our institutions,” she said. She secured the loop now, and, erecting herself, gave Lord Rainford her right hand for good-bye.

A deeper red dyed the young man’s face, as he took her hand and detained it a moment. “Are you going,” he asked, and hesitated before he added, with an abrupt change of tone: “I can’t let you go, Miss Harkness, without saying — without saying — without trying to say how very sorry I have felt at — at — your bereavement. It came so soon after I first saw you that — that I — thought you — thought myself not altogether wrong to tell you. But, I suppose, I shouldn’t have spoken. I beg your pardon!”

“You are very, very kind, Lord Rainford,” answered Helen steadily, “and I thank you for speaking of it. I know people usually avoid speaking to others in — mourning — about it to spare them; but it’s better to recognise it; I like it better than trying to ignore it.”

“I’ve always felt,-”’ pursued Lord Rainford, “that I was painfully associated in your mind — I mean — I don’t know — I hope you won’t always think of me as a particularly disagreeable part of that day’s experience.” Lord Rainford still spoke with an awkward halt and hesitation, but the genuine feeling with which he seemed eager to leave Helen a better impression dignified his manner. “If you won’t think it egotistical,” he hastened to add, “I’ll say that I believe I’m rather a serious man; at least I’m a heavy one; and when I attempt anything else, I — I know I’m disgusting — more disgusting than ordinarily. I was shocked — I can’t tell you how much I was shocked — to think I had followed you up almost to the moment of that — intelligence, with imbecilities that must have been a — in distressing contrast. I don’t know whether I make myself clear — whether I ought to speak—”

“O yes!” cried Helen, touched at his assumption of all the blame. “I’m so glad you have spoken of that, if only for the selfish reason that it gives me a chance to say how ashamed I am of my own part in it. I never thought of yours” — this was not quite true, but we cannot be very generous and quite true at the same time— “but it was the thought of my own frivolity that sometimes helped to make what followed so hard to bear. I was very rude.”

“O no, no!” answered the young man. “You said nothing but what I richly deserved. If you’d only said more, I should have liked it much better — afterwards. But what I want you to think is, that I shouldn’t have done so badly, perhaps, if I’d been acting quite naturally, or in my own character. That is—”

“I’m afraid,” said Helen, “that I can’t ask you to think that I was acting out of my character — or all of my characters: I seem to have so many—”

“Yes,” interrupted Lord Rainford,- “that’s what I meant.”

“It seems to me that it was only too much like one of mine — the one I’m most ashamed of. You will have a pleasant time to cross, Lord Rainford,” she added, and took away her hand.

“Well, I don’t know,’; said the other, accepting the close of this passage of their interview, and answering from the conscientiousness in talk which serves the English so well instead of conventional politeness, and is not so pleasant, “there are apt to, be gales at this season, you know.”

“O yes, yes!” returned Helen, a little vexed at herself. “Gales, yes. But I was thinking of the equinoctial storm being past. They say it’s past now.”

“I’m a good sailor,” said Lord Rainford. “I think I shall take a run over again, next year.”

“You’ve not got enough of America in three months!”

“No. I hope it hasn’t got too much of me.” He looked at Helen as if he expected her to say something civil on the part of her hemisphere. But she refused to be the national voice, except very evasively.

“Oh, we ought to be flattered that people care to come back.”

“You know,” said Lord Rainford, “that I’ve seen almost nothing of the country yet. I’ve not even been in Washington, and I want to see Chicago and San Francisco.” Helen did not say that she could not understand why, and Lord Rainford went on. “I’d only a few weeks in Canada, you know, before I came down to Orchard Beach — I think they call it — with some Montreal people, and then I came to Boston, and I’ve been about Boston and Newport ever since. People have been extraordinarily kind. I couldn’t really get away, and as I’m going away rather prematurely now, I must come back.”

From this outline of his experience, Helen knew quite accurately all its details. She could have told just what had happened to him at Newport, going thither with Boston introductions, what lawn-parties, lunches, and dinners had been made for him, and in whose carriage he had first driven to the polo grounds. He had been perhaps once at the Town and Country Club; and he had been a good deal at the bathing-beaches, although early assured that nobody bathed there any more, and the Manhattan Yacht Club had sailed him over all the neighbouring waters. He had seen the decay of the custom of Fort Day, and had been told what numbers of people used to go to the music in Fort Adams before polo began. When he returned to Boston, it was too soon for society to have come back in full force, but enough of it had got back to show him with what intensity of hospitality the sojourning Englishman, distinguished by rank, or otherwise, or simply well accredited, is used among us. Helen knew, without asking, the houses and their succession, in which Lord Rainford had been entertained, and she could have guessed pretty-well at what semi-civic feasts he had assisted. The Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday Evening Clubs had all shared in him, and he had listened to part of a lecture at the Woman’s Club. He had been taught much more about the charitable, penal, and educational establishments of Boston, than any one Bostonian could endure to know, and he had kept his original impression that Boston reminded you of an English town. If he was at all astonished, as a young man, at the attentions heaped upon him, he must, as a Lord, have been too much used to consideration in his own country, to be surprised at it in ours. Men vastly his superiors in everything but birth liked to speak casually of him as that very nice young Englishman, who had dined with them, and to let the fact of his rank rather patronisingly escape them in talk. People whose secret pride and dearest prejudices he had unwittingly trodden into pulp in his plump expressions of crude opinion, professed rather to like his frankness. They said that there was something in his bearing — a simplicity, a directness, an unconsciousness — which showed the advantage of a standard of manners. The fact that you might often think him, at first glance, the most plebeian-looking person in company, showed his extraordinary qualities of race; the persistence, through so many hundred years, of the ancestral traits, which, in the attrition of a democratic society like our own must have been obliterated long ago, was held to be a peculiar triumph of aristocratic civilisation. One accomplished gentleman had proved himself much better versed in the Rainford pedigree than Lord Rainford himself. “Talked to me about my great-grandmother,” said the nobleman afterwards to Ray, “and my maiden step-aunts.”

“Good-bye,” said Helen once more, and nodding, she turned away, and went down the rocks.

Lord Rainford bowed, and said good-bye, too, following her with his eyes, but not otherwise pursuing her.

“You ‘re back soon,” he said to Mr. Ray, when the latter presently joined him.

At Salem that afternoon he came into the car where Helen sat. The place beside her was the only vacant one, and he stood leaning against the seat while he explained that he had been left by his train at that station in the morning. He looked as if he would like to be asked to take the vacant seat, Helen thought; but she was perturbed and preoccupied, she could not endure the -thought of talking all the way to Boston, and she made no sign of invitation. She was sorry, but she could not help it. He hesitated an instant, and bidding her good-bye once more, said he was going forward into the smoking-car, and she did not see him again.

She went first to the post-office, where she had never been before, and which was so vast, and looked so hurried and careless with those throngs of people sweeping through its corridors, that she began to question whether it could be safely intrusted with a letter for Robert. Through one of the windows opening in the long façade of glass above the stretch of brass drawers, which people were unlocking and locking up, all about, she saw a weary-looking clerk toss a little package into the air for relaxation, and then throw it into a distant corner, and she thought with a shudder, what if that had been her letter, and it had slipped under something and been lost? Besides, now that she had come to the post-office, she did not know in which of the many letter-holes to trust, and she studied the neighbouring inscriptions without being able to make up her mind. At last she asked an old gentleman, who was unlocking his box, and he showed her; she feigned to drop her letter according to his instructions, but waited till he went away, and then asked the clerk at the nearest window. He confirmed the statement of the old gentleman, and Helen had almost allowed her letter to go when she bethought herself to say to the clerk that it was to the care of the Navy Department. He smiled — sarcastically, Helen fancied — and said it was quite the same thing. Then she dedicated a final blush to the act, and posted her letter, and found herself quite at a distance from the post-office, walking giddily along, with a fluttering heart full of delicious shame. She was horrified to think she had done it, and so glad it was done.

VIII.

THE walk from the post-office to West Pomegranate Street is not very short, but Helen was at the Miss Amys’ door before she knew. The elder Miss Amy came herself to answer the bell. She recognised Helen presently through her veil, and welcomed her with a decayed-gentlewoman-politeness, explaining that she and her sister kept no servant when their lodgers were out of town. Helen had begun to say, after the preliminary parley about health and the weather, that she had come to see if she could take board with them, when the younger Miss Amy came in. She shook her head in response to the elder Miss Amy’s reference of the matter to her, and said she was sorry, but it was a mistake: they only let their rooms furnished now, and people must find table-board at some of the neighbouring houses. At Helen’s look of disappointment, she said she knew it was very disagreeable going out to meals; but their lodgers were nearly always gentlemen, and they did not mind it.

“Is the lady who wishes the rooms a young person?” asked Miss Amy.

Helen saw that they thought she was looking up a place for some one else, and that they were far from imagining her errand to be on her own behalf. They saw in her an amiable young lady, interesting herself for some one who was out of town perhaps, and wished to come in for the winter. It cost Helen more to set them right than she could have believed; the first steps downward in the world are not so painful from the surprise of your equals as from that of people on the level to which you descend.

“It’s for myself that I want the rooms,” said Helen, and both the Miss Amys said “Oh!” and then were silent, till Helen asked if they could recommend her to some good place where she could find both board and lodging under the same roof. The Miss Amys thought a while. All the neighbouring places were very large boarding-houses, and the company very promiscuous. “I don’t think you would like it, Miss Harkness,” said the younger Miss Amy.

“I’m afraid it isn’t a question of what I shall like, any more,” said Helen bravely. “It’s necessary that I should economise, and if I can get a room there cheaply, I must not be fastidious.”

“Oh!” said the younger Miss Amy a little more expressively than before.

“Still,” continued the young girl, “I should like it better if I could find some place where there were not many other boarders.”

The elder Miss Amy looked at the younger with a blankness for which the glare of her spectacles was mainly responsible, and asked, “How would Mrs. Hewitt’s do?”

“Mrs. Hewitt’s might do,” assented the younger sister. “Her rooms are good, and the Smileys liked her table. But Miss Harkness would find it very different from what she’s been used to.” She seemed to add this caution with a certain indefinable insinuation, that the change might be a useful lesson.

“Oh, no doubt,” said Helen, “but I shall not mind, if—”

“It’s quite a proper place in every way,” continued the younger Miss Amy, “and the neighbourhood unexceptionable. If you can get the use of the parlour to see your friends in, it would be desirable.”

“You won’t keep all your acquaintance,” she added, “but some will remain true. We retained all that we wished.”

“Yes,” said Helen drily, not choosing that Miss Amy should assume their equality in that fashion. The Miss Amys had, in fact, declined to their present station from no great social eminence, but the former position had been growing in distinction ever since they lost it, and they had so long been spoken of as “such gentlewomen,” that they had come to look back upon it as something quite commanding; and there was a note of warning for Helen in the younger Miss Amy’s remark, as if all persons must not expect to be so fortunate as they. “I should like,” said the young girl with some stateliness, “very much to see Mrs. Hewitt. Will you give me her address?”

“I will write it on one of our cards,” said Miss Amy, who found with difficulty, in a portable writing-desk on the table, a card inscribed with The Misses Amy in the neat pencilling of a professional card-writer. The reception-room of these ladies was respectable in threadbare brussels, and green reps; a fire of English cannel coal, in the grate, seemed to have been a long time laid, and the lumps of coal would have been the better for dusting. The house was clean, but it had the dusty smell, which small city houses have at the end of summer before their furnace fires are lit, and Helen had found the Miss Amys not such nice Miss Amys as she had thought them in former days, when she had come to their house to call upon some friends there. When the card was inscribed with Mrs. Hewitt’s address, she rose to receive it.

She felt strangely depressed, and the tears came into her eyes as she pulled down her veil and hurried away. She had packed a bag before leaving Beverley, with the purpose of not going back that night, for she had not thought but that she should go at once to the Miss Amys, and had resisted all entreaties that she would return and tell the Butlers about it. She would not have gone to the Miss Amys now on any account, and yet she felt somehow hurt at not finding their house open to her in the way she had imagined. She had a cowardly satisfaction in thinking that she could easily get the six o’clock train to Beverley after she had seen Mrs. Hewitt.

Like the elder Miss Amy, that lady answered her door in person when Helen rang, and taking the card, with the explanation that Helen gave her, led the way to her reception room. It took shape from the swell-front; and the rocking-chair, into which Mrs. Hewitt sank, stood between the two windows, by which she could easily command the life without, up street and down. What had been the fireplace was occupied by a register; over the mantel hung the faded photograph of an officer in uniform; in the corner was a whatnot, with shells and daguerreotypes in cases, and baskets of sewing on its successive shelves; against the wall, opposite the windows, stood a sewing-machine; the carpet was a tapestry of moss pattern in green colour; the window shades had a band of gilt around their edges, relieved in green, and the reps of the sofa and chairs were green. Simple and few as these appointments were, they had an unreconciled look, as if they had not been bought to match, but were fortuitous combinations on which some one else had lost money.

Mrs. Hewitt asked her to sit down, but Helen remained standing, and said that she was a little pressed for time, and must ask at once if she could have a room with board.

“I don’t know as I’ve got anything ’twould suit you, but we can look,” said Mrs. Hewitt, apparently disappointed in not being first allowed to talk it all over. “Did you want something on suit, or singly?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Helen.

“Do you want more than one room?”

“O no! I only want one.”

The landlady preceded Helen up the stripe of linen that covered half the narrow carpeting on the cramped staircase. “Parlour,” she announced on arriving at the first landing, as she threw open the door of a large room furnished in much-worn brown plush. “Goes with the rooms on this floor; I always let ’em on suit. Now, if you wanted anything on suit—”

“I only want one room, and I don’t care for a private parlour,” said Helen.

The landlady glanced up the next flight of stairs. “That whole floor is let to one family — lady and gentleman and little boy — and then there’s only a room on the top floor besides,” said Mrs. Hewitt.

“I’ll look at it, please,” said Helen, and followed the landlady up. The room had a pretty bed and bureau; it was very neat, and it was rather spacious. “Is there any one else on this floor?” asked Helen, feeling sure that the cook and second-girl must be her neighbours.

The landlady pushed open the door across the little passage-way. “There’s an art-student in this room,” she said.

“Art-student?” gasped Helen.

“Young lady from Nashua,” said the landlady.

“Oh!” cried Helen, remembering with relief that art-students in our time and country are quite as apt to be of one sex as another, and thinking with a smile that she had been surprised not to smell tobacco as soon as Mrs. Hewitt had said “art-student.” She reflected that she had once been an art-student herself, and wondered what the sketches of the young lady from Nashua were like. “What would be the price of this room?”

The landlady leaned against the side of the bed. “Seven dollars,” she said in an experimental tone. “I used to get my ten and twelve dollars for it, right after the war.”

“I will take it,” said Helen, who found it much less than she feared. “And I should like to come at once.”

“To-night?” asked the landlady, looking at Helen. “Yes, if the room’s ready.”

“Oh, the room’s ready. But — did you bring a trunk?”

“I forgot! It’s at the station. I can send for it.”

“O yes, the express is right round the corner from here. You just give ’em your check. But you better not lose any time. They ‘re late sometimes, any way.” —

“Very well,” said Helen, childishly pleased at having transacted the business so successfully. “I will take the room from to-day, and I will pay you for the first week now.”

“Just as you please,” said Mrs. Hewitt.

Helen drew out her porte-monnaie, and said, “The Miss Amys can tell you about me.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” answered Mrs. Hewitt, politely. She had perhaps been perplexed to know how she should hint anything ‘about references to this young lady who took an attic room with such a high and mighty air. “Their card was sufficient.”

When Helen came back from her errand to the express office, and went to her room, she laid aside her things and made herself at home in it She did not know in the least what her life was to be there; but she felt that this, whatever it was not, was escape and independence, and beginning. A rapid calculation had shown her that her payment of seven dollars a week would not encroach much upon her capital, and somehow she would earn enough money to meet her other expenses. She could not sit still; she rose and opened her closet and found it deep and convenient; she pulled out the bureau drawers, and they were very sweet and clean. She discovered a little cupboard with shelves where she thought she would put her books. The room was very complete; there was even a hook in the ceiling by the window where some one must have hung a bird-cage. Helen was happy, without accusing herself, for the first time since her father died. She smiled to herself at her landlady’s queerness, and was glad, as young people are, to be housed along with a character. She wondered how the art-student looked, and who the family could be. At the sound of the tea-bell she felt the emotion of a healthful hunger.

There was a dish of cream toast, very hot and fragrant; hotter, and more fragrant still, there was a dish of oysters, delicately stewed and flavoured; in a plated basket in the centre of the table was a generous stack of freshly sliced lady-cake. “From Copeland’s,” Mrs. Hewitt explained, when she passed it. “Mr and Mrs. Evans are out to tea, and I thought we wouldn’t wait for Miss Root. She’s late  sometimes. Did you like your oysters?”

“Delicious!” said Helen.

“Yes, I think there’s nothing like a drop — not more than a drop — of sherry in your stew, just when it comes to the stew. I don’t believe in any thickenin’ myself; but if you must have it, let it be cracker crumbs: flour makes it so kind of slippy.” Mrs. Hewitt went on to enlarge upon many different kinds of dishes, and then from whatever obscure association of ideas, she said: “When you firsts came in to-day, before I fairly looked at the Miss Amys’ card, I thought you’d been buryin’ a husband.

I don’t see how I could took you if you had. Widows are more trouble in a house! Boston family?”

“What?” cried Helen.

“Your folks Boston people?”

“O yes,” replied the girl, and she submitted with what grace she could to the inquisition into her past that followed. “I’ve never lived anywhere else;” and nothing seemed stranger than this when she came to think it over in her room. Here in the heart of Boston, she was as remote from the; Boston she had always known as if it were a thousand miles away; from herself of the time when she lived in that far-off Boston she seemed divided by centuries. Into what a strange and undreamt-of world she had fallen! She did not dislike it. On the contrary, she thought she should be rather content in it.

Without definite aims as yet for the future, she fancied that she should try to be wholly of her present world, and ignore that in which she used to live. Already she felt alien to it so far as to wish that the Butlers would not send people to call on her, nor come much themselves. She knew that she could adapt herself to her circumstances, but she dreaded the pain of their inability to realise her in them, and felt that their unhappiness about her would be more than she could bear. She planned a geographical limit within which she could live a long time and not meet any one whom she had known, and she resolved next day to begin her exploration of her solitude. The dark gathered into the room, and the window showed a black frame against the sky before she thought of lighting her gas. She was shaking her match out, as women do, when a light tap at her door standing ajar startled her, and then the door was pushed open, and the figure of a tall girl stood on the threshold. “Miss Root: Miss Harkness, I believe,” said the figure. “Will you lend me a match, please? I waited for you to light your gas so as to be sure you had matches before I bothered you. It’s such a long journey down-stairs.”

Helen smiled in her most radiant way, and got the matches, saying as she held them forward, “Won’t you come in, please?”

“No, I thank you,” said Miss Root, taking one match only. “I begin badly. But you won’t find me a great borrower. Have you got everything you want in your room?”

“Yes, everything, I believe,” said Helen, sweeping it with a comprehensive glance.

“You’ll find Mrs. Hewitt pretty prompt. You won’t have anything to complain of, unless you mind being talked to death. Good-night,” and drawing the door to after her, Miss Root returned to her own room.

Before she slept, Helen heard the street door open and shut, and then voices ascending to the third floor: a lady’s voice, and a gentleman’s voice, and a sleepy little boy’s voice.

“Well, this is the last time we shall take Tom to the theatre,” said the lady’s voice — the voice of spent nerves.

“Yes,” said the gentleman’s voice. “We shall confine ourselves to the circus after this, Tom.”

“Circuses are the best, any way,” said the child’s voice.

“Hush! Don’t speak so!” cried the lady.

“Why, they are, mamma,” insisted the boy.

“This is a question of morals, not of opinions, Tom,” said the father. “You ‘re not to prefer circuses when they ‘re inflicted as a punishment.”

They had now reached their door, as it appeared, for a light flashed into the hall below as from gas turned up.

The lady’s voice was heard again: “His forehead’s burning hot! If that child should have a fever — Here, feel his forehead!”

“Forehead’s all right!” responded the heavier voice.

“I shall give him three of aconite!” cried the lady.

“Give him three thousand, but put him to bed,” assented the gentleman.

“Will you shut the door?” implored the lady. “Waking the whole house!”

“I haven’t refused, my dear,” said the gentleman. “Why do you always—”

The door closed, expressively, and not, as Helen fancied, by the gentleman’s hand. “The Evanses,” she inferred. She fell asleep wondering if she could indeed be the same girl who had talked that morning to Lord Rainford on the rocks at Beverley.

IX.

HELEN saw the Evanses in going to breakfast. They came down-stairs just after her, Mr. Evans leading his boy by his extended forefinger, and Mrs. Evans coming behind, and twitching something about the child’s dress into place, as mothers do.

“Mrs. Hewitt,” said Mr. Evans, as they sat down at table, “I have been some time in your house, but you must have older friends than I, and I don’t understand why the law has honoured me as it has.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you ‘re talkin’ about,” said Mrs. Hewitt, pouring the coffee.

“Well, I don’t, myself,” returned Mr. Evans, “and I thought I would get you to explain. You don’t find yourself unusually infirm of mind, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” replied Mrs. Hewitt candidly.

“And you haven’t experienced anything like a return of extreme youth?”

“What is the man after?” cried Mrs. Hewitt.

“Then why should you be taken care of in any special manner, and why should I, of all people, be called upon to take care of you? Here’s a paper,” Mr. Evans continued, taking a document from his pocket, “that I found slipped under my door this morning. It makes a personal appeal to me, in the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to become your trustee. Of course, it’s very flattering and all that, but I’d much rather not. You must allow me to resign, Mrs. Hewitt. I never did understand business very well, and—”

“How’d they ever get into this house without my knowing it? That’s what I should like to find out!” said Mrs. Hewitt, gazing absently at the paper which Mr. Evans had given her.

“What does it mean?” he asked.

“Pshaw!” cried his landlady. “You don’t say you never was trusteed before? And boarded round as much as you have!”

“Trusteed! Is it so common a thing as to have a participial form? Then I needn’t have any scruples about resigning?”

Mrs. Hewitt broke into a laugh. “Resigning! Bless you, you can’t resign. There’s no such thing.”

“Gracious powers! Not resign an office for which I don’t feel myself competent—”

“Oh, come, now! you know very well what it is. It’s them curtains,” said Mrs. Hewitt, pointing to the green-and-gold-trimmed shades.

Mr. Evans rose and curiously examined the shades; his boy also slipped down out of his chair, and joined in the inspection.

“Thomas, who gave you leave to quit the table? Come back!” cried Mrs. Evans.

“My dear!” expostulated her husband, “the child very naturally wishes to see what sort of window-shade it is that thrusts an irresignable office of honour and profit upon his father. Look carefully, Tom. Regard the peculiarity of the texture; the uncommon tone of the colours.”

“Oh, pshaw, Mr. Evans! You stop!” exclaimed Mrs. Hewitt. “When they sent in their bill, I told ’em ’twas too much, and I shouldn’t pay it I didn’t believe they’d really go so far as to trustee me.”

“But what does it mean, Mrs. Hewitt?” asked Mrs. Evans. “I don’t believe Mr. Evans knows any more than the rest of us,”

“Why, Mrs. Evans, it means just this: that your husband isn’t to pay me any board till this bill is settled, and if he does, he’s liable for it himself. I presume they’ll be trusteein’ all of you. I shall have to pay it now.”

“Is that the law?” demanded Mrs. Evans. “It makes one long for a delinquent debtor of one’s own. So simple, yet so effective.”

“Well, you have it to say,” said Mrs. Hewitt, surprisingly little ruffled by the incident, “that you never was trusteed in my Louse before.”

“I certainly have that to say,” admitted Mr. Evans. “I’m sorry on your account that I can’t resign my trusteeship, and I’m sorry on my own that it’s such a very sordid affair. I never happened to be appointed to office before, and I was feeling rather proud of the confidence reposed in me.”

They all rose from the table together, and Helen went up-stairs with the Evanses. She and Mrs. Evans exchanged a few words on the way, and stopped on the first landing to glance into the large parlour. Mr. Evans came after, bestriding his boy, who now had hold of both his forefingers — like a walking Colossus of Rhodes. He flung open the parlour door, which stood ajar, in Mrs. Hewitt’s manner. “Goes with the rooms on this floor; I always let ’em on suit; now, if you wanted anything on suit—” He looked Helen for sympathy, and she laughed. —

“Yes”, I know,” she said.

“Mrs. Hewitt won’t like your joking her so much,” said his wife.

“She won’t know it, if I do it behind her back. And she seems to enjoy it to her face.”

“Do you think she liked your coming out about that trusteeing?”

“She didn’t mind it. But I have it on my conscience to tell Miss Harkness that Mrs. Hewitt is, for all I know, a very just person — and that I’m surprised she let those shade-people get the advantage of her. She has a passion, like all landladies, for single gentlemen. She idealises them, I am afraid. There haven’t been any single gentlemen in the house since we came here, two years ago. We sometimes fancy that her preference is founded upon her experience of Mr. Hewitt as a married gentleman, which was probably unpleasant.”

“Is — is she a widow?” Helen ventured to Mrs. Evans.

— “Why, not exactly,” said Mrs. Evans, “It’s a very neat way of putting it,” said Mr. Evans. “She’s a widow, Miss Harkness, of the herbaceous variety.”

“My dear, she’ll hear you,” cried Mrs. Evans.

“Very well, then, she won’t understand me. I’ll venture to say Miss Harkness doesn’t.”

“No, I don’t,” said Helen, and looked at Mrs. Evans for light.

“Her husband is living, I believe,” explained Mrs. Evans, “but — absent.”

Mr. Evans laughed again. “Not lost, but gone before. Come, Tom! We must go to work!” He led the way up to the next floor, and at her door Mrs. Evans asked Helen if she would not come in.

Helen had a curiosity, which she thought harmless, to see their apartment, and she accepted the invitation in the drifting, indecisive manner which ladies have when they do not mean to commit themselves to the consequences of a self-indulgence. She did not feel quite sure of these people; she had a strong impression that she was their social superior, but thrown with them as she was, she had too much good sense to hold stiffly aloof from them. She sat down without, as it were, acknowledging that she sat down; and she followed Mrs. Evans about from room to room without seeming to do so, as well as she could manage that difficult effect. It was a very pretty little apartment of four tiny rooms, of which the last was Mr. Evans’s study: this was just large enough to admit his desk and chairs, and was packed with books on shelves to the ceiling, and Helen inferred that he was some sort of literary man. She would not sit down again, but paid a frosty little net-work of compliments to the souvenirs of travel that she saw upon the tables and walls; she praised the balcony on which one of the windows opened, and she smiled upon the flowers with which Mrs. Evans had filled it. In fine she guarded her distance with the skill that had kept the acquaintance at a standstill, and yet left it resumable on more cordial terms at will. One is of one’s world after all; and even in resigning her world, as she thought she had done, Helen had not yet made up her mind to be of a lower one.

She had promised to go down to Beverley on the morrow, and tell her friends what she had done, as the condition of their letting her come up to Boston at all on that wild enterprise of hers; and though she would have been glad not to go, she kept her word. But it was really not so hard meeting them as she had feared. Mrs. Butler was forbearing, and Marian was preoccupied; the younger girls saw it somewhat as Helen did, and thought it an enviable adventure. She told them all that had happened in detail, and made them laugh. She partly dramatised her interview with the Miss Amys, and they said it was perfectly delightful to think of Helen being patronised by such people. They wanted to see Mrs. Hewitt, and the fellow-boarders; they wished that somebody would trustee their mother; they said that the life Helen was leading was fascinating.

“Perhaps you wouldn’t find it so fascinating if you were obliged to lead it,” said Mrs. Butler.

“Helen leads it, and she finds it fascinating.”

“Helen leads it out of the hardness of her heart, because her friends don’t wish her to,” returned Mrs. Butler fondly.

“Mrs. Butler! Remember your promise!” said Helen.

“I hope you’ll remember yours, my dear, — to come back to us.”

“Oh! And what are you going to do, Helen? What are you going to do for a living?” demanded Jessie Butler.

“Jessie!” cried her mother. “Don’t be absurd! Do for a living!”

“I hope you won’t think it absurd, Mrs. Butler,” said Helen, with serious dignity, “for I really want to do something for a living.”

“Poor child!” said Mrs. Butler, getting Helen’s hand between hers, and tenderly smoothing it.

“What could you do?”

“I don’t know what yet. But I know I could do something.” She felt dispirited by Mrs. Butler’s; motherly kindness, and would have liked to take her hand away. This was what she had dreaded, this feeling on the part of such friends as the Butlers that anything useful and practical was impossible to her. For the moment this feeling seemed all that stood between her and a prosperous career of self-help; it unnerved her so terribly “Do tell us what you’ve been thinking of trying,” persisted Jessie. She was the youngest, and she ventured on almost as great freedoms with her mother and Helen as Marian herself did.

“Oh, I thought over a great many things as I came down this morning,” answered Helen. “But I haven’t settled upon anything yet. Indeed, indeed, Mrs. Butler!” she exclaimed, “I’m very much in earnest about it, and don’t try to discourage me, please!”

“I won’t, dear!” Mrs. Butler assented soothingly, as if Helen were a sick child, and must be humoured in her little fancies.

“How would plain sewing do?” suggested Jessie. “Or, Wanted by a young lady, to have the care of small children, where she would be received as one of the family; no objection to the country; wages not so much of an object as permanent home, address H. H., Transcript Office?”

They laughed at this, Helen forlornly and helplessly with the rest. They could not realise her ambition, and they did not believe in her necessity: Mrs. Butler because she felt that all Helen need really do was to go to Europe with her, and return to marry Robert Fenton as soon as he could get leave to come home; the young girls because they had no experience of life, and could not imagine Helen’s case. They were merry about her projects all through lunch, and Helen herself felt that she was behaving very ridiculously in pretending to be anything but the well-taken-care-of young lady that she had always been. The world which she had touched yesterday became as unreal in its turn as it had made her old life seem.

“I will tell you,” said Marian, who had given the subject less attention than the rest, and had laughed at Helen with half her mind all the while on her approaching marriage; “I will tell you. In these days Helen must take to some form of keramics. I wonder that we didn’t think of it before. How could we discuss this subject in Beverley, of all places and not think of pottery? Helen must decorate pottery for a living.”

“O yes! and she can drive over to the pottery this afternoon with us, and select the shapes!” clamoured the younger sisters.

Their noise submerged Mrs. Butler’s rebukes; there was open rebellion to her voice.

“Mamma!” cried Jessie, “you needn’t try to put us down about this. It’s an extraordinary case! We’ve never had the opportunity before, to decide the vocation of a young lady who wants a lucrative employment. Do say you’ll decorate pottery for a living, Helen!”

“Do! do!” pleaded all the rest. They had left their places and gathered round her in postures of supplication.

Helen was swept along in the tide. “I don’t know anything about keramics,” she laughed, turning upon the group. —

“That’s the beauty of the profession,” they shouted in reply. “You don’t need to know anything about it.”

“I can’t draw!”

“Drawing’s the very last thing that’s wanted for art-pottery. Say that you’ll drive-over with us and select the shapes!”

“You must first begin with a bean-pot, like that pretty little Mrs. Gay,” said Jessie Butler. “You ought to have heard her talk about it: so colonial, so in character with Beverley!” The young girl gave the tone and the languish. “She decorated it with a flowering bean; they say she thought that was the kind they baked. Perhaps you’ll find that they’ve begun to give bean-pots an æsthetic shape. Miss Harkness’s bean-pots will become the fashion. We shall have a course of beans in their native earthenware, at dinners, and when the pot comes in, everybody will put on their pince-nez, and crane over, and ask, ‘Is that a Harkness, Mrs. Jones?”

“No, no! I can’t go with you!” cried Helen; “I’m going back to Boston this afternoon.”

They all protested, but Helen stood firm, feeling that it was her one chance for life, or for making a living. If she was ever to put in force her resolutions to be something and to do something, she could not get away too soon from an atmosphere in which no one,” not even herself, could regard them seriously. It was a trying ordeal, this pity of Mrs. Butler’s, and this jocose incredulity of the young girls; yet as Helen rode back to town, she was more and more satisfied that there was something possible and practical in Marian’s suggestion. She recalled some pretty shapes of pottery which she had seen in a shop-window, and which seemed to her more stupidly decorated than anything she could do if she did her worst. They were there on sale, and somebody had been paid for doing them, or expected to be paid for it. The conclusion from the premises was irresistible, and Helen found herself impatient to arrive and begin work. She could really draw very prettily, though she had denied her gift; she was even a clever copyist; but she knew that she lacked the imaginative impulse, and she had not cared for what she could do, because so many others could do it as well.

As soon as she left the train she hastened to this shop, where, besides the decorated pots and vases, she had seen a good many uncontaminated examples of the Beverley ware. She was vexed to find the place already closed, and she could hardly wait for the morning.

She hurried from her breakfast to the shop in the morning; when her purchase came home, and she unpacked it on her bed (the largest and safest surface in her room), she cowered a little to see it so great in quantity. She blushed to find herself making such an ambitious beginning, and though five dollars had seemed a great deal to spend, she wished for the moment that it had not bought quite so much. But this was foolish; of course she must spoil some of the designs, and since she was going to try a variety of decorations, she should want a variety of jars. She set them all on the shelf of her closet, which she locked; she folded up the wrapping-paper and tacked it away; she even concealed the string; and after putting on her hat and veil for the street, she had to sit down and have a paroxysm of guilty consciousness before she could summon courage to go out on her next errand.

She was going to a shop where they sold artists’ materials, to get her colours, and to pick up any hints they could give her there about her work. They were not personally very well informed, but they sold her several little books which had keramic designs in them, and which would tell her all she wished to know. After she had bought them, she thought them rather poverty-stricken in their patterns, and as she passed a print-shop window she saw that pretty series of engravings, illustrative of the old fable of the storks and the babies; and the keramic fitness of storks at once struck her. The prints were rather expensive, and Helen thought that she could not get on without the whole set. Then, as the matter developed in her mind, a great idea occurred to her: Flaxman’s illustrations of Homer. They were of course the only things to copy in the classic shapes. The book cost more than she supposed it would, but as she meant to stop with that, she believed she might afford it, and at any rate she bought it. She was afraid to look the whole sum in the face at first, but her hopes rose with her rapid walk homeward, and she finally confronted the fifteen dollars with serene courage.

The next three weeks were given to very ardent if not very diligent labour. Helen had an insuperable shyness about her enterprise; she managed so that she might put everything out of sight at a moment’s warning, if any one came to her room.

Before actually beginning upon the vases, Helen schooled herself in reproducing on paper the designs she meant to use, and this took time. She was also interrupted by excursions to Beverley; but she did not count this as loss altogether, for she was able to, make several studies in colour of the low blackberry vine, now in its richest autumnal bronze, and of certain sea-weeds, with which she meant to decorate several pieces. She did three with storks, and had a fourth half-done when she let it fall. She wrapped the fragments in paper, and took them out at twilight, and dropped them in the street some distance away, that the pieces might not be traced to her, and so proceeded to the Flaxmans. She chose three subjects among these: The old nurse Euryclea recognising Ulysses as she bathes his feet; Penelope carrying the bow of Ulysses to the Suitors; and the meeting of Ulysses and Penelope. These all related to the return of the wanderer, and they went very prettily round the vases. Ulysses following the homeward car of Nausicaa from the coast on which she found him shipwrecked, was a subject which Helen instinctively rejected, though the lines were lovely, and she felt that she could do it easily. The jar which she decorated with the seaweed had a band of shells round the middle; a slanting flight of birds encircled the vases, over which she taught the blackberry vine to wanton.

She had many alternating moods of exaltation and despair while upon this work, but when it was all done, and the pots set out in a fair row on her window-shelf, and she retired a pace or two with her pencil at her lip to get their entire effect, she could not but own that they seemed very successful. At that distance certain defects of drawing — such as that which gave Penelope bearing the bow rather a pert and mincing look — and other blemishes were subdued, but even when taken up severally and scrutinised merely at arm’s length, the vases bore the ordeal of critical inspection very well. “And no one,” thought Helen, “will ever look at them more severely than I have.”

She sank into her chair, which she drew up in front of her work, and indulged a long reverie. In this she dramatised her appearance at one of those charming shops where they deal in such things; she set little scenes in which the proprietors called one another up to look at her vases; and she dialogued their compliments and her own evasive acceptance of them. They ended by asking very respectfully if she could not be persuaded to employ a part of her leisure in doing something of the kind for them; and on her replying that these were for sale, they had instantly offered her a price for them that passed her wildest hopes; that seemed so much too much, indeed, that she insisted upon abating something from it. Struck by this nobleness in her, they had conversed in low tones together; and then the senior member of the firm had confessed that they had some hesitation in asking her to design certain friezes which they were to do for a cottage at Newport, and their admiration for her work must be their excuse if they were proposing something quite out of the way; but they begged her to remember that two ladies in London had taken up decorative architecture as a profession, and they trusted they were not wrong. Then Helen had replied, O no, indeed! She was only too much flattered by their confidence in her, and she would be very glad to think it over; all that she feared was that she would not be able to meet their expectation; at which they had laughed, and said they had no such fear, and had drawn her a check for her vases, and had added a few hundreds as a sort of retainer in the matter of the friezes. At this point Helen broke from her reveries with “What silly, silly nonsense! What a simpleton I am!”  While she was in good humour with them, she resolved to pack her vases in the basket that she had got for that purpose, and when each was carefully wrapped, and put in, she laughed to find the basket looking like that of an old Jew who used to come to the kitchen door to sell Bohemian glass, when she was a child. The matter of transportation was one that she did not consider till the next morning, when it flashed upon her that she could not go carrying that basket about. She must drive, and though this did not accord with her severe ideas of economy, she had to own that she had been rather lavish in her preparations for work, and that it would be foolish to try now to scrimp at an impossible point.

She would take a coupé by the hour, and perhaps get it cheaper, if she had it several hours; though when she went out for the carriage, she found the driver inflexible, and she had to take it at the usual rate. She bade him drive her to Mrs. Hewitt’s door, and she wanted him to go up with her and carry down her basket; but he, seeing her a single defenceless woman, boldly answered that he could not leave his horse; and Helen, indignant, and trembling for her secret, was forced to bring it down herself. Happily, Miss Root had gone out; the Evanses’ door was closed; and she encountered Mrs. Hewitt neither in going up nor in coming down. When she lifted the basket on the carriage seat she was out of breath, but exultant at her escape, and with unbroken courage she ordered the driver to go to the address given him. But it now occurred to her that she could not lug that great hamper across a crowded pavement into a shop-door, and she must sell her wares by sample. She employed the drive in taking out the best of the stork vases; one of the most characteristic Flaxmans; and the blackberry and bird-banded jar. She scarcely dared look at them now, but as she gathered them to her bosom with one hand, while she caught up her skirt with the other to alight from the coupé, it was with quite as much hope as fear that her heart palpitated against “those classic shapes. She pulled down her veil, however, for she knew that she was blushing violently and when she stepped upon the ground, she found herself giddy.

The people were all busy when she entered the store, and the gentleman to whom she hoped to speak was occupied with a lady whom Helen knew: a lady who gave proof of having lived abroad by the loud and confident voice which she had succeeded in managing, not like an Englishwoman but like an Englishman. Helen shrank from her recognition, and lurked about, pretending to be interested in distant bric-a-brac, and growing momentarily more faint and tremulous, but when the lady went out and  the gentleman turned from closing the door after her, Helen came quickly forward. She plucked up an excited gasp from somewhere, and waiving the respectful kindness with which he bent to listen, said, “I’ve something here I’d like to show you,” and she unfolded one of her vases, and as he took it up, with “Ah, yes! Something in keramics,” she unwrapped the others and set them on the shelf near which they stood. “Why, this is very nice, Miss Harkness,” said the dealer, “very nice indeed.” He carried all three of the vases to the light and returned with them, holding out the bird-banded jar.

“I like this one best. You’ve managed these birds and this vine in quite the Japanese spirit: they ‘re v the only people who understand the use of unconventionalised forms. The way your blackberry climbs into the neck of your vase is thoroughly Japanese. These storks are good, too, very effectively handled. The classic subject — well, I don’t think that’s quite so successful, do you?”

“No, I don’t know that it is,” said Helen, so grateful for his praise of the others that she would willingly have allowed this to be a disgraceful failure.

“Have you ever done anything of this kind before?” asked the dealer.

“No,” replied Helen.

“Very remarkable,” said the dealer. He had set the vases back on the shelf again, and now gazed at them somewhat absently. “It shows what can be done with this sort of thing. See here!” he called to his partner, who was also disengaged. “Here’s something pretty, and rather new?”

“Your work, Miss Harkness?” asked the other partner politely, coming up. He said much the same things that the first had said; he even stopped a young lady assistant who was passing, and made her admire the jars. Then he also fell into a musing silence, while Helen waited with a thickly beating heart for the rest of her reverie to come true, and stayed herself against a counter, till these amiable partners should formulate some offer for her wares. The young lady assistant ebbed noiselessly away, and went to writing at a high desk; the second partner shifted from his right foot to his left, turned his head abruptly, and feigned to be called suddenly by some duty in the direction to which he looked. His going roused the first partner. “Yes!” he said with a deep, nasal sigh, in coming to himself, and was sinking again into his abstraction, when he seemed to think of something. “Excuse me a moment,” he said, and went and looked into the show window, and then into a dark corner in the back part of the room. “I thought we had some of that Cambridge pottery,” he called out to his partner.

“No,” said the other, remaining aloof, “we only had a few pieces.”

“Well!” said the first, coming back to Helen.

“I supposed we had some of it left. I was going to suggest, Miss Harkness, if you ‘re interested in this sort of thing, that you ought to see that North Cambridge ware. Have you ever seen it?”

“No,” answered Helen faintly.

“It isn’t so native quite in sentiment as this Beverley ware, but it’s much more refined in form.

It’s beautifully finished. Really, I don’t see how it falls short of that Copenhagen pottery in finish. If you have plenty of time on your hands, you couldn’t do a better thing than go out to see them making it.

I think it would interest you.”

“Thank you,” said Helen; her head whirled, but she resolved to speak steadily if it killed her. “I shall certainly go. I’m glad you mentioned it. I never saw any of it.” She fumbled piteously at the papers which she had taken off her vases, and the dealer brought some softer stuff, and skilfully wrapped them up for her.

“These things are quite worthy of Japanese paper,” he said, indicating the silky texture of the fabric he had used. “I’m sure I’m very much obliged to you for letting us see your work, Miss Harkness. It’s charming. I hope you’ll keep on at it. I’m interested business-wise, you know,” he added, “in having you ladies take up these graceful arts. And be sure and go to see that Cambridge ware. We can get some of it for you, if you wish.” He had followed her to the door, and now opened it for her, with a bow.

“Thanks,” said Helen. “I won’t forget. Good-morning.”

“Good-morning.”

She got into the coupé, and put her vases carefully back in the basket, and sat down on the seat beside it. She quivered with the intense and bitter disappointment, and she burnt with shame, as every particular of her interview blazoned itself upon her consciousness, and she realised that she had no one but herself to blame for the precise result. The people had been thoroughly kind and sympathetic; they had praised her work, and had been far more interested in it than she had any right to expect; but their taking her on her old social plane had made it impossible for her to meet them on any other. Apparently, they had never once imagined that she wished to sell these things, and she had not known how to approach the fact. They had thought she wished merely to show them as matters of aesthetic interest, but if they had not supposed she came for advice, what could they think of her conceit in making such a display, and of staying and staying till she had all but to be turned out of doors! All that about the Cambridge ware must have been a polite ruse to get rid of her, — to spare her feelings while they relieved their own. What had kept her from telling them honestly and bravely what she had come for? Did she really expect them to ask her if her work was for sale, as in her reverie; and then offer her that frieze to do in Newport? It was intolerable!  She literally bowed herself down in self-contempt, while her heart ached with the sickening defeat of her hopes.

“Where to?” asked a gruff voice.

She had been sitting still in her coupé, and this was the voice of the driver, as he leaned over from his seat, and projected the demand in at the window.

“Oh!” cried Helen. Then she hesitated in a flutter. She had never thought where she should go next; she had not taken any next place into account. “Oh! Drive — drive—” She hesitated again, and then she gave the address of the street where she had bought her pottery. She remembered the decorated pieces there; and they might like hers. At any rate the people did not know her, and she should have the courage to offer them her work.

She began somewhat as at the other place: “I thought you might like to see — ,” and then corrected herself, and said, “I wished, to show you my decoration of some of the Beverley ware I got here the other day.”

“O yes,” said the shopman, — warily, Helen thought. But she undid her vases, and saw him smile in approval. “They’ve come out very well,” he added, as if they had been subjected to a process.

“Here are some new shapes, which we’ve just got in to-day.”

Helen only glanced at the vases he indicated. “I see you have some decorated pieces here,” she said hastily. “Would you like to buy these?”

The man’s smile gave place to a look of something like anguish. He took off his hat, and scratched his head. “Well — well — not this morning, I think. The fact is, it’s a new thing, you know; and these decorated pieces are principally to show what may be done with the ware. We do sell them, but we don’t — we don’t buy. By and by, I hope we shall be able to do so, but as yet we only expect to supply the plain ware to ladies who wish to paint it. There are places where—” He looked still more distressed, and stopped.

Helen hastily wrapped her jars up again, and turned to go. The man followed her a few paces.

“Your own work?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Helen shortly, without looking round. “Drive slowly along Washington Street,” she ordered, and as the coupé started she blamed herself for not re-opening the parley at the man’s last question, and trying to learn of him something about those other places he had begun to mention. She was too much bewildered to do that, but it must have looked like pride. Helen resolved now that she would be not only bold but meek.

She had a plan of stopping at various little shops, in whose windows she remembered seeing artistic caprices, like pictures in birch-bark, and comic designs jig-sawed out of white-wood. They might somewhere take a fancy to her vases. She stopped accordingly wherever bric-a-brac showed itself in any sort. The street was full of people, that is to say of women, thronging in and out of the shop-doors, and intent upon spending the money of their natural protectors. It is always a wonderful spectacle, and in the circuit of a quarter of a mile, about the confluence of Washington and Winter Streets, it enforces itself with incomparable vividness.

There is doubtless more shopping in New York or London, or Paris, but in those cities it is dispersed over a larger area, and nowhere in the world perhaps has shopping such an intensity of physiognomy as in Boston. It is unsparingly sincere in its expression. It means business, and the sole business of the city seems to be shopping. The lovely faces of the swarming crowd were almost fierce in their preoccupation, as they pressed into the shop-doors; as they issued from them, and each lady stooped and caught the loop of her train in one hand, while she clasped half-a-dozen paper parcels to her heart with the other, those faces exhibited no relaxation of their eager purpose. Where do they all come from, and where does the money all come from? It is a fearful problem, and the imagination must shrink from following these multitudinous shoppers to their homes, in city and suburb, when they arrive frayed and limp and sore, with overspent allowances, and the hard task before them of making the worse appear the better reason.

Helen was dismayed to realise herself the only one of all her sex who wished to sell, and not to buy, and at the shops which she entered they were puzzled to conceive of her in that unique character. They were busy with the buyers, and when she had waited about patiently, and had at last found a moment to show her work, they only considered it in various patterns of indifference and refusal. For the most part they scarcely looked at it, and Helen found her scantest toleration at those places where she was obliged to deal with women. Commonly they could not put her errand and her coupé intelligibly together; the conjunction seemed to raise suspicion. In one shop it raised laughter, which followed her from the young lady behind the counter, who said quite audibly to the young lady at the desk: “Actually in a coupé! Think I should walk, myself!” Helen, who had now hardened her sensibilities to everything, took the hint, and let the carriage come after her from shop to shop. But that served no purpose except perhaps to excite the fears of the driver lest she should try to escape from him. When every place had been tried, she still had her vases on her arm, which, when she got them back into the basket, she perceived was sore with carrying them.

“Home,” she said to the driver, and leaned back against the cushions, and closed her hot dry eyes. She was so benumbed by what she had undergone, that she did not feel very keenly, and her physical fatigue helped off the mental pain. Presently the carriage stopped, and she saw that they were in a jam of vehicles in front of a large jewelry store. There had been something the matter with her watch, and now she thought she would have it looked at; and she dismounted and went in. She gave her watch to a man behind one of the counters, and while he screwed a glass into his eye, and began to peer and blow into the works, Helen cast a listless look into a window where there were some jars of limoges and plates of modern majolica. A gentleman, who did not look quite like a clerk, came forward. Helen carelessly asked him the price of some of the faience. It seemed very little, and he explained that it was merely earthenware painted in imitation of the faience, and began to praise it, and to tell who did it. Helen did not listen very attentively; she was thinking of her own work, and wondering if she should have courage to ask him to look at it, and how, if she should, she could get it from the coupé without awkwardness, when he said, “I see you have something there in the way of our business.” Then she saw that she had mechanically gathered up her three vases and brought them in with her on her arm; she had long ceased to wrap and unwrap them. She looked at them stupidly, but said, “Yes, this is something I’ve been doing;” and the gentleman politely took them, and admired them with a civility that was so cordial to her after the ordeal she had passed through that the tears came behind her veil.

“Do you think,” she asked very timidly, “you would like to buy something of the kind?”

“M — in — no,” said the gentleman musingly, as he turned one of the vases over in his hand.

Helen’s breath came again, and she turned to get her watch, which the workman said was ready; one of the wheels had caught, merely; and there was no charge. She took back her vase, and nodded to the gentleman. He did not bow very definitively in return, but followed her to the door.

“The fact is,” he said, “there’s very little sale for these things now. The whole decoration business has been overdone. However,” he added, after a pause in which he seemed to take in the fact of Helen’s black, “we might chance to dispose of them for you. If you like, you can leave them here on sale.” Helen promptly handed him the vases.

“You mustn’t form any expectations,” he cautioned. “It will be a chance. What shall I ask for them?”

“Oh, anything — anything you can get,” cried Helen desperately. “Nobody wants them.”

“Well, we’ll see,” said the other, and he now set the vases in the window between the jars of imitation faïence.

Helen timidly offered him her card, and she stole a glance at the vases from the outside, and thought they looked very common, and dreadfully personal. Their being there gave her neither hope nor pleasure.

The door of the coupé stuck fast, and while she stood tugging at it, a policeman stepped up and opened it for her. “See here, my man,” he said to the driver, “you’d better get down and wait on your passengers decently, or give up the business. What’s your number?” and, while the man mumbled something in explanation and excuse, Helen looked up into the face of her champion. She failed at first to recognise the civil fellow who had come home with her father the day of his seizure, and whom she had met on the steps; but the officer knew her, and touched his hat.

Then she remembered him. “Oh, is it you?” she cried, as if it were some old friend.

“Yes,” said the officer, very much pleased.

“I’ve always wanted to see you again and thank you,” began Helen.

“Oh, that’s all right,” answered the officer. “Your father was a man, I can tell you. I — I — I was awfully sorry for you, Miss Harkness.” He spoke with such simple and honest cordiality that Helen felt it nothing odd to be shaking hands with a policeman at high noon in Washington Street.

“Thank you, you are very kind. Good-bye. I shall never forget your goodness to him that day.”

“Oh, don’t mention it,” said the policeman. He touched his hat again, and vanished in the crowd; and she reflected that she had not asked his name. As she looked in the direction he had gone, she saw not him but herself. She saw herself standing on the threshold of her old, lost home, and turning to look after this man with the stare of amused, haughty wonder, that., a girl bred in ease and fashion, and fondly shielded from all that was rude or was abrupt in life, might fitly bend upon such a curious” piece” of the social mechanism, unexpectedly and inconceivably related to herself. Her attitude implied secure possession in perpetuity of whatever was gracefully supreme in the world, of whatever was prosperously fastidious, and aloof. It was enough to remember this attitude now.

The coupé stopped at Mrs. Hewitt’s narrow door, and the man got down and helped her out. “I guess the horse is tired enough to stand while I carry this basket up for you,” he said.

Helen had no gratitude to express, and she did not thank him for this service when she took out her purse to pay him. She had kept the carriage two hours and a half, and he said they never counted less than an hour, but he would call it four dollars. As he folded the bills, he said he hoped she did not blame him for not opening the coupé door for her; she got out and in so often, and his horse always started up so when he left the box.

“O no, no!” cried Helen. “Only go, please.” She closed the door behind him, and she flung herself upon the bed, and hid her face in her pillow, and drenched it with her rushing tears. Her head ached, and her heart was sore in her breast. All that had happened repeated itself with ceaseless iteration in her mind; all the looks, all the tones, all the words; they burnt, and rang, and hummed in her brain; the long ordeal of her disappointment dramatised itself to the inner sense in thousand-fold swift reverberation; the disappointment was as bitter as if starvation were before her, and the shock to her pride was even greater. She had fancied, as she now realised, that she should succeed because she was she; while warning herself that she must not expect anything but failure, she had secretly cherished an ideal of triumph that made the future a matter of fortunate inspirations and delightful toil. This was what she had really hoped; and now, to her defeat was added the stinging sense of having been a fool. She had probably set to work quite in the wrong way; and she had been not only a fool, but such a coward as to be afraid to say that she wished to sell her work to the only people who could take a special interest in it. Yet they might not have cared for it either, and if she had spoken she would have had only one ignominy the more to remember. For, what puzzled and surprised Helen most of all was that when she had taken the humblest mien, and approached those shop-people on their own level, as it were, without pretension and without pride, they should have shown no sense of the sacrifice she had made, but should have trampled upon her all the same.

The glamour was gone from her experiment. She was in the mood to accept any conditions of dependence; she wondered at the vain courage with which she had refused the idleness and uselessness of the home offered her by the Butlers.

The dinner bell rang, but she remained with her face in the pillow; after a while some one tapped at her door, and then pushed it softly open and looked in, but she did not stir. Whoever it was must have thought her asleep, and so left her; yet when Helen opened her eyes there was still some one in her room. A shawl had been flung over her, and Miss Root was sitting at the window looking at her, and apparently waiting for her to wake up.

“Not going to be sick, are you?” she asked. “You’ve been sleeping ever since before dinner, and Mrs. Hewitt asked me to look in and see how you were getting along. I guess you haven’t taken cold; she put the shawl on you.”

“O no!” said Helen, rising briskly, in the first free moment of waking, when care has not yet dropped back upon the heart. “I came in with a headache, and threw myself on the bed to rest.”

“That some of your work?” Miss Root indicated with a nod the basket which stood in the middle of the floor where the man had set it. The paper had come off one of the jars, and showed its decoration.

“Yes,” said Helen. “I did them — I—” A thought flashed into her mind: “They are for a wedding present!”

“May I look at it?” asked Miss Root.

“Certainly,” said Helen, feeling bolder, now that she was protected by this little outwork of unreality against the invasion of Miss Root’s sympathy. She unwrapped two or three of the jars and set them on the window seat. —

Miss Root did not trouble herself to take them up, but stood at a little distance and glanced at them with an eye that Helen saw understood and classed them, and that made her feel like the amateur she was. The girl turned away without comment.

“I saw some just like them in a window as I came along Washington Street. I pity any poor wretch that expects to live by painting and selling them.” Miss Root could not have meant her equivocal speech in unkindness, for she added, looking back as she went out, “Don’t you come down if you don’t feel just right; I’ll bring up your supper to you.” Helen said she was going down, and arming herself with the courage of her despair, she confronted the question of the tea-table with gaiety even, and made light of her long nap. She said she had been shopping all the morning, and the irony of the phrase in this application flattered her bitter mood. It was a stroke of the finest sarcasm, could they but know it; and in her heart she mocked at their simple acceptance of her statement.

Mr. Evans said he was surprised she could sleep after shopping. When his wife went shopping it kept the whole family awake for the next twenty-four hours, and careworn for a week. Mrs. Hewitt asked about the fashions, and said that she always found things just as cheap and a good deal better at the large stores, and you spent more time and laid out as much money running round to the little places.

It seemed to Helen the height of the sardonic to answer, “Yes, it was quite useless to go to the little places.”

“D’you find your letters all right, Miss Harkness?” asked the landlady, when this talk had taken its course; “I put ’em on the corner of your mantel.”

“No,” said Helen; “I didn’t look.”

“Well, you’ll see ’em when you go back. They came after you went to sleep. The most curious stamps on I ever saw!”

Helen’s heart stood still with fear and hope, and “Oh, papa, get them for my collection,” pleaded the little boy.

“Here,” she said, rising, and making this opportune prayer her shelter, “come up with me, and you shall have them;” and after due reproach from his mother, he was suffered to go with her.

It was Robert Fenton’s handwriting on the envelopes. “It’s my answer — it’s my sentence, — and I deserve it,” she said under her breath, as she stood with the letters in her hand, trying to detach one of the stamps with her trembling fingers.

“There,” cried the boy, “you’re tearing it!”

“Never mind,” said Helen; “they’re both alike. I’ll cut this other off for you but her hand shook so that she chopped into the letter a little with the scissors.

“If I couldn’t cut better than that!” roared the boy, anxious for the integrity of his stamp. “What makes you get so white, and then get so red?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” answered Helen, incoherently. “Here’s your stamp,” she stooped to give it. The child was pretty, with still grey eyes and full lips. “Will you kiss me, Tom,” she asked in a very soft trembling voice, “for good luck?” It seemed as if her fate hung upon his will, but when he hastily kissed her, and ran out, she still had not courage to open the letters. She flung them on the bed, and locked the door, and then came back and looked at them. She could see a little of the writing in one through the hole where she had cut away the stamp, and she tried to make out the words; they were such words as “from,” and “for,” and “with.”

If there had been but one letter, she thought, she should not have been afraid of it; but this mystery of there being two! She tried putting one out of sight under the pillow, but that did no good. Her sole comfort was that while they were still unopened she did not know the worst; but in the meantime she was consumed with a terrible curiosity. She studied them hard, and then walked away to the furthest corner.

“Oh, what is it in them? Indeed, I couldn’t bear anything after to-day, indeed I couldn’t!” she whimpered. “I can’t open them!” and then she pounced upon one of them in a frenzy and tore it open.

X.

The character of no man is fixed till it has been tried by that of the woman he loves. Till then he has only the materials of character, and they are all to be shaped and ordered as newly as if he had never had them before. The thousand and one mysteries of Helen’s girlish uncertainty, her fantastic waverings, her aesthetic coquetries with the idea of being in love, were as unintelligible to Fenton as his headlong and outspoken passion was to her. But while she thought his bluntness charming, in a way, and constantly trembled nearer and nearer to him in her heart, Fenton was far too simple a fellow to feel anything but trouble at the misgivings and delays which she enjoyed. When at last he made what he felt must be his last offer, and she met it with all those freshly alarmed ideals and metaphysical scruples, which a wiser and worse man would have trampled under foot, — tearing her from herself, as she unconsciously meant, and making her his in her own despite, as she reluctantly wished, Fenton lost his head in a delirium of angry and wounded pride.

When he awoke from it, irretrievably committed to three years’ exile, it was in a self-abhorrence and despair, and a sort of stupefaction that he should have done what he had done. His repentance came before he had forgiven Helen, and long before he had begun to conceive that the letter might have another meaning than that which he had first taken from it.

Of his own light, perhaps, he never saw more in it than it seemed to say. It was without reading it again, without having the heart to look at it, that he hated himself for what he had done, and loathed himself for his futile desire to make reparation. It was impossible to repair his fault, and if it were possible, it would be despicable to attempt it.

He went haggardly about his duty, a machine that did its work, but with no more mind upon it than a machine. There came long spaces of time in which he afterwards recognised that he had not known what he was doing; that he had been altogether absent without having been anywhere else; he awoke from these absences as from a profound, dreamless torpor, and with a start of fear and amaze, to find that all had been going well in the meantime, that he had been talking, eating, and drinking, and shrewdly attentive to whatever immediately concerned him. It would have been hard for him to say whether the time when he was on duty, and no one spoke to him, or the leisure in which he was intimately thrown with his brother officers was the more terrible: his solitude was dense with piercing regrets, that stung for ever in the same place; his association with others was tormented by an un forgettable remorse, which, if it seemed to grant him a moment’s oblivion, awoke him presently, from somebody’s joke or story, to the consciousness that it had only been more deeply and inwardly gnawing his soul.

Some sort of action was indispensable, but action which did not relate to Helen, was none. He began to write letters to her. He had no idea of sending them, but it had grown insufferable to be perpetually ‘ talking to her as he was in those airy dramas within himself; and since his words could not be made audible, he must let them take visible shape. This became his daily habit; and before the ship reached Rio de Janeiro he had accumulated a score of letters, which he bitterly amused himself by reading over, and considering, and putting by without destroying. He kept them, and found a sort of miserable relief in communing with them instead of his intangible thoughts. His industry did not escape the idle vigilance of the ship’s comradery; but at sea every one must be suffered his whim, and after laughing at Fenton’s, they left him to it, in the feigned belief that it was a book he was writing: a marine novel, they decided. Each thought it in the way of his rightful joke to say, “Don’t put me into it, Fenton,” till Fenton, who worked up slowly to his repartees, found presence of mind at last to answer “No; I can’t afford to make it dull, you know,” and then they left him quite alone, with a roar at the expense of the chance victim. Before the laugh was over, Fenton had almost ceased to know what it was about, and had wholly ceased to care. He was quite too miserable to be glad of the immunity he had won.

He went on with his letter-writing; but on the eve of arrival at Rio de Janeiro he destroyed all his work, and set about writing one letter, which should be his last. It was his purpose to post this without reference to consequences, as an act of final expiation. He was not without some trembling illusion that there might be a letter awaiting him: he did not dare to think from Helen, and he could not think from whom else. But his letter was to go before he knew what was in that, or even whether it existed. He had no reason to suppose it did exist; it was in fact as purely a figment of his distempered fancy as a starving man’s visions of feasting; and when he had faithfully posted his letter before going to the consul to ask if there were anything for him, he could not make out that it was disappointment that sickened him to find there was nothing. But a mail was expected the following day, and he kept his wrecked hopes adrift upon its possibilities during the night.

The mail brought him no letter, but it brought the consul a copy of The Boston Advertiser, which he politely offered to Lieutenant Fenton unopened, not having the leisure just then for the newspaper. Fenton unfolded it with indifference, and mechanically glanced at the marriages. The paper was of a date four or five days after he had sailed, and the name of Helen Harkness did not appear in the marriage list. He had not expected that it would, nevertheless he had looked at the marriages on her account; and he was about laying the paper aside when the record of a single death caught his eye. It was the death of Helen’s father, with a dozen lines of mortuary praise. He dropped the paper.

“Nothing in the Advertiser?” asked the consul, who was busy about some letters, without looking up. “Too much!” said Fenton, pulling his cap over his eyes.

The consul thought this was a joke, and laughed in a companionable, uninterested way. Fenton looked at him and saw his innocence, and then he sat a long time in silence, with his arms folded, and his head down. At last he asked the consul if he could give him a sheet of paper and an envelope, and briefly wrote the second of the two letters which had reached Helen together. In her desperation, she had found no resource but to open them according to the order of the dates in their postmarks, and she had seized first upon that of the 9th. It began simply, Helen, and it ran in this way: —

“I hope you will have patience to read this letter through, though I have forfeited all right to a hearing from you. I am not going to make an appeal for your forgiveness, because I know I ought not to have it. I have suffered, not all that I ought to suffer, but all that human nature can suffer for that letter I sent you from Portsmouth. But I shall not try to work upon your pity; I believe that I have that already. I only wish you to understand that in again renouncing all pretensions to your regard, I do it with a full approval of your conduct to me. I do not blame you in the least thing. I see that I was altogether to blame. I see what I did not see before: that you never cared for me, and that you tried with all your heart, to be kind to me, and yet not to give me hope. I thank you for your goodness, and I beg you to believe, when you have read this letter, that my eyes are open at last, and that if I keep on loving you, it is because my love of you has become my life, and that I know I am no more worthy to love you than I am to live. I cannot help one or the other, but I can keep either from being troublesome to you, and I will. So I do not ask you to admit any of my former pretensions, but only to let me be your friend, in whatever humble and useful way I can. I consider myself a disgraced man, and I shall expect nothing of you but the kind of forbearance and patience you would show some repentant criminal who was depending upon your countenance for strength to reform himself.

“I know you have told Mr. Harkness of my Portsmouth letter, and that he must be very much incensed with me. But though I do not ask your forgiveness, Helen, I do beseech you to try to get me his. I owe him all the little good there is in me, and I owe him all that I am and have done in this world. I could not tell you how dearly and truly I honour and love him. The thought that I came away without trying to take leave of him chokes me; but after writing you that fatal letter, everything that was right and decent became impossible.

“Good-bye, Helen.

“ROBERT FENTON.”

When Helen had finished this letter, which, indeed, she seemed instantly to divine rather than to read, she not only kissed it but pressed it to her breast and locked her arms upon it, clasping it close, as if it were some living thing and could feel the wild, happy tumult of her heart. She wept long and sweetly over it. It might not have been the perfection of reason to another, but to her all the parts were linked together by an impenetrable and infrangible logic. Nay, it was not that, it was not eloquence; it was the sum of everything, it was love, and however hapless love to the writer, it was heaven-prospered passion to Helen, who seemed in that fond embrace to implore, to forgive, to console Robert, as if he were there present and she had fallen upon his neck. They were happy, and they were happy together; it was so much to know that she need never wish to know more.

For some time, in the rush of her emotion, she did not realise that it was not an answer to her own letter. But it was infinitely more. It forestalled and anticipated her letter, as that, when it came to his hand, would in its turn be both appeal and response to him. Best of all, his letter made the first advance towards reconciliation, and assumed for Robert the blame for what she had suffered. She knew that he was not wholly to blame, but as a woman she liked to have him say that he was, and she liked him to be generously first in owning himself wrong — that always seems a man’s part. She had almost forgotten the letter of later date, the letter of the 10th, which still lay unopened before her. That, too, would be precious, but never so dear as this of the 9th, which should always be first in the history of their love; the other, no matter how sweet it proved, must always remain second. It was, in fact, not a fortunate inspiration. In his grief at the news which he had just read, Fenton’s mind had reverted to the old relation in which he had first known Helen, and in the presence of the bereavement that they had both suffered in the loss of one who had been no less a father to him than to her, he addressed her as a sister, and signed himself as her brother Robert. These words, coming upon the different tenderness his other letter had evoked, seemed to push her coldly from him, to disown their love and to ignore it, to take her at a certain disadvantage with respect to the sorrow in which they humbly asked a brother’s share; they made her jealous in a wild sort of her sorrow, they indescribably wounded her so that she threw the letter from her and wept bitter tears for the happy ones she had shed. It was such a letter as no woman would have written if she had been a man! She should not know which letter to answer now, nor how to answer either; for if she answered the first as she would have done, might not Robert think her bold and unfilial? and if she answered the second as she ought, would she not appear reserved and cold with him upon whom her heart had just thrown itself with such tender abandon? The letters made two Roberts of him, and left her to despair between them. She passed a hapless night, and in the morning she took the first train after breakfast for Beverley, where she appeared at the Butlers’ before ten o’clock, asking in such a high hysteric key for Mrs. Butler, who was not yet down, that they led her at once to her room. There she threw up her veil, revealing eyes tragic with tears and want of sleep, and gave the two letters into Mrs. Butler’s hand while she hid her face in Mrs. Butler’s pillow.

“O Helen, Helen!” said the elder lady, when she had spelled through these documents in the dim light, “how glad I am for you!  Come, look at me, my dear, and let me see your happy face! This makes up your quarrel, and you are — Why, Helen!” she cried, when the girl obeying, bent those eyes of tragedy upon her, “what is the matter? Don’t you — didn’t you—”

“O yes, I care for him — all the world!” Helen broke out. “But the more I care for him the worse it is, and unless you can help me out of this trouble, Mrs. Butler, I shall surely go crazy. Oh, how indelicate it is of me to come to you! But I don’t know what to do — I don’t know what to do; I’m so horribly alone! And it’s such a very strange, ridiculous thing!” She did not suffer herself to pause, while Mrs. Butler stared compassionately at her, till she had put her in full possession of her perplexity, and explained how it had poisoned all her joy.

Mrs. Butler did not laugh at her; she was one of those high spirits who perceive the sacred rather than the absurd, and amidst the girl’s wild talk, she saw the reasonableness of pain that to a coarser sense would only have been ludicrous. “You must not think of this second letter at all, Helen,” she said seriously. “Shall I tear it up?”

“Oh, oh!” said Helen, half-reaching for it, and yet holding her hand. “It’s about papa, and — it’s from him!” She caught her breath, and trembled for Mrs. Butler’s decision.

“I didn’t think of destroying it,” said the other, “but I’m not going to let you have it back. This is the only letter you’ve got, Helen, for the present,” she added, handing the girl the first, and putting the second under her pillow. “The letter that you sent him the other day — wouldn’t that be a kind of answer to this?”

“Why, yes!” cried Helen with electrical perception.

“Well, then, answer the first. I want you to let me keep this till — till I can give it back to Mrs. Fenton.”

“Oh!” said Helen.

“And kiss me, my dear,” said Mrs. Butler fondly; “and bathe your eyes yonder. And if you touch the left hand-bell, Marian will come up.”

“Oh!” said Helen in the same shaken tone as before. “Shall you — shall you tell her?”

“No; you shall,” replied Mrs. Butler. But when Marian came, it was Mrs. Butler who had to explain the embrace in which Helen seized her, and which, first returning with mechanical affection, she now returned with rapturous intelligence.

“Engaged?” she exulted. “Oh, Helen, Helen, Helen!”

“Why,” cried Helen, laughing from her happy heart, and pulling away from her friend, “I don’t know what you call it. I’ve written him a making-up letter, and he’s written me one, and they’ve crossed on the way.”

“Oh, that’s an engagement,” said Marian, with the authority of a connoisseur.

“But he hasn’t got my letter yet, and I’m not engaged till he has.”

“That’s nothing. He’s engaged, because you’ve got his, and in an engagement the man counts for everything; the girl goes without saying.” Marian Butler was at that period full of those airs of selfabnegation with which women adorn themselves in the last days of betrothal, and the first of marriage, and never afterwards.

They talked Helen’s whole affair over, in the light of the full candour which she was able to bring to bear upon it now for the first time, As to feelings she must still have her reserves; but as to facts, she made them little by little all theirs; it helped her to realise Robert to be talking of him by his name, and to hear others doing so. At the sound of approaching footsteps without, Marian said —

“Now mother, those children are not to know about this. They ‘re too forthputting now, especially Jessie.”

Ignorant of this supreme interest, the younger sisters were richly content with Helen’s further account of her boarding-house life, which she continued to them like an instalment of some intoxicating romance. When she came to the end of her chapter, she stopped with a manner that roused their worst suspicions.

“Oh, she’s keeping something back!” complained Jessie, and “Oh, oh!” went up from the others.

“Yes!” cried Helen, “I’m keeping back the best of all, because it doesn’t seem as if I could tell it.”

While they all stared, she abruptly began the confession of her experiment in decorative keramics. She was by this time in high spirits, and she poured it all out, illustrating, mimicking, not sparing herself in the minutest particular of conceited expectation or forlorn reality. It was all past now, far past, and was part of a former existence which she had suddenly outlived by an untraversable period of time. It made them laugh, Marian with amusement, and Mrs. Butler with a sort of grieving compassion; as for the young girls, it seemed to them the wildest and most enviable adventure that ever was known out of a book.

“And you didn’t meet a soul — not a soul you knew?” asked Mrs. Butler. —

“O no; no one shops in Boston now, you know; and I was perfectly safe. But I shouldn’t have cared.”

“I should have been glad of it!” cried Jessie Butler. “I should have liked to lug my basket up and poke it into their carriage-doors, and offer to sell them the things, and see how they would look!”

“Jessie!” said her mother.

“Well, never mind. Go on, go on, Helen!”

“That’s all,” said Helen, who had brought them back to the period of her return to her room and her long desperate slumber. “No, the worst is to come! Miss Root came in while I was asleep, and discovered them; and what do you think I told her? I told her I had been doing them for a wedding present!” There was fresh sensation at this, but Jessie exclaimed, “Marian Butler shall never have those vases in the world. They shall be sold! The idea! I will go up and sell them!”

“No,” said Helen soberly; “she must take them, Jessie, to save me from fibbing, if nothing else. Besides, you suggested painting pottery, Marian, and they’re Beverley ware — all very appropriate, you see. And some of them are not so bad. And I can’t give you anything better till — my ship comes home!

At this idea of a ship, and of its coming home, Helen and Marian simultaneously pressed each other’s hands, where they sat side by side on the lounge, with delicious intelligence. Marian said that she should prize Helen’s present more than anything else that could be given her, and that its history, which could not be known out the family, would make it all the more precious; the legend would be something to tell the future age. It would be great to say, “Only think of your great-grandmother going about the whole day with these beautiful things, and not being able to sell them for a crust of bread to keep her from starving.”

“Marian” said her mother, “I can’t let you make a joke of it. I can’t help thinking how wretched it would have been if poor Helen had really been in need.”

“Indeed I was in need, Mrs. Butler,” said Helen, “while I was doing those things. I felt just as destitute! And I worked at them, early and late, as if my life depended upon it.”

“Oh, that’s a very different thing, my dear,” said Mrs. Butler. “It was only play poverty, after all. Think if you had really been some poor girl, with nothing, and had met with such a disappointment!”? “I don’t believe I could have suffered more,” said Helen, confidently.

“I’m glad you’ve no means of knowing, certainly. But now that you’ve tried your experiment, Helen, hadn’t you better end this little escapade, and come back to us? Things have come about very fortunately,” she added quickly, at a look of refusal in Helen’s eye, “and your failure to earn a living makes it easier for me to tell you something that’s been rather weighing upon my mind.”

She spoke with a double sense to Helen, who understood that it was not her failure, but the letter from Robert which made it easy for Mrs. Butler to say what followed.

“We have concluded not to wait a month after Marian is married, before we sail, but to go the next week. We shall not try to run them down — Girls,” she broke off, and speaking with the tone of authority which they knew when they heard it, “go and see where your father is,” and when they were gone, she resumed,— “but we shall follow them up pretty closely, and we shall meet them in Venice just before they start from Trieste for Egypt. Now, Marian!”

“And there,” said Marian, “Miss Harkness, who has come to that point with the bride’s family, will join the happy couple, and make one of their party up the Nile. It s to be a trusteeship, Helen,” she cried, “it can’t be resigned; you must come. We are going to take a dahabeiah at Cairo, with some Philadelphia friends of Ned’s, very quiet people whom he took a great fancy to; and I want you along to do the correct, and elegant, and superior thing for Boston, and leave me to uninterrupted enjoyment of the sillies. Yes, Helen, you must come. Ned wishes it as much as I, and I can’t tell you how much that is. We want to take you away from yourself, and we promise to bring you back in a year—” She hesitated: “I was pausing for want of an idea, but say — improved in every way.”

“Oh, I can’t!” lamented Helen. She leaned back upon the lounge, and brooded upon the matter in a silence to which the others left her unmolested. “It isn’t because it doesn’t seem the loveliest and kindest thing in the world, Marian, and I’ve no peasant pride that would prevent me from accepting it; and it isn’t because I think I should do better to go on trying to take care of myself, Mrs. Butler. I know that I’m a distinct failure in that way, and I haven’t any heart or conceit for further experiments. But — ? I must stay! He will come back — I know he will come back, as soon as he gets that letter of mine — and he must find me here waiting for him. It would be a shocking kind of treachery if I were away.”

“You could write to him now that you were going with us,” said Marian, a good deal shaken by the heroism of Helen’s position, “and he could meet you somewhere abroad.”

Mrs. Butler said nothing.

“The second letter might miss,” replied Helen, as if the first letter could not.

“You could keep writing,” urged Marian, “before you sailed, and then from Europe.”

“No; it wouldn’t do. He must find me here waiting for him; and I mustn’t stir from the spot till he gets back. I don’t know how to explain it exactly. But it would look very queer and light minded, wouldn’t it, if I went off junketing up the Nile, while he was thinking all the time that I was forlornly waiting for him in Boston, and was as unhappy as he till we met?  Besides, I feel this way about it, after what has passed between us: I Ought not to be on a high horse of any sort when Robert comes back. I feel that it is his right and his due to be able to stoop to me a little; and it would only be a just reparation for me to be in very humble circumstances when I met him. Doesn’t that seem like a kind of reason to you, Mrs. Butler?” —

“Yes,” assented Mrs. Butler doubtfully; “a little romantic!”

“Do you think so?” asked Helen, rather hurt; “I hoped you would think it sensible.”

“I do, my dear, I do,” Mrs. Butler hastened to reply, “from your point of view.”

“There’s this, too,” Helen added, not quite appeased, after a hesitation. “Robert hasn’t any money, but his pay; and I only have such a very little, that we couldn’t begin living like rich people; and the question is whether I had better keep on living as I used to do, or whether I hadn’t better get accustomed to something very plain and simple at once.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Butler, while Marian fidgeted in protest, but said nothing.

“I try to look at it quite dispassionately, and in the light of common sense, without any foolishness, and it seems to me that I shouldn’t be doing right unless I were making some sacrifice for Robert, and suffering, don’t you know, in some way; I should not be happy unless I were. You know,” she said softly, “that I don’t think I always used Robert very well. I don’t mean that I meant to; but I didn’t understand myself; and now that I do, and understand him, I should be detestable, if I went off to be pleased and diverted, while he was hurrying home with his mind burning upon the thought that I was waiting here in perfect wretchedness till he came Don’t you see? I must be here, and I must be wretched, to be perfectly true to him!”

“You are right, Helen!” cried Mrs. Butler, deeply moved by this divine logic of the heart. “Hush, Marian don’t speak! You know she is right. Come here, Helen!” The matron embraced the girl in the fervour of that youth which women of all ages have in common. “We won’t say anything more of this matter, Marian, and we will just tell your father that Helen can’t go. You won’t mind my letting out a little of your secret to him?”

“O no!” blushed Helen. “I had expected you to tell him.”

Captain Butler would once have teased the girl about her happiness. But since her father’s death he seemed not to have been able to treat her lightly; her loss and her uncertain future made her a serious affair to him; and now that her father was gone, Helen was startled at times to find how much his old friend was like him. There were tones and movements of strange resemblance; perhaps the impression came partly from Captain Butler’s impaired health; he was certainly not well, and that made her think of her father. He took what Mrs. Butler told him very much as her father would have done, she thought, and he expressed his satisfaction almost as quietly. His only revenge was to ask: —

“Shall you answer in care of the Navy Department, or would you like to telegraph a reply?”

“Oh, Captain Butler,” cried Helen, “could I telegraph?”

“Yes,” said the Captain. “How would you word your despatch?”

“Mr. Butler!” said his wife in reproach.

“I — I don’t know!” gasped Helen.

“It wouldn’t reach him, now, any sooner than your letter of three weeks ago. He’ll find that at Hong Kong when he gets there, and you wouldn’t know where to hit him with a telegram on the way. If your letter was posted at Rio, the Muskingum—”

“Messasauga,” Helen softly corrected him.

“Was it Messasauga? — is going round the Cape  of Good Hope, and she must have passed that point a week ago, and she won’t stop at any other telegraphic port, probably. Here,” said the Captain, with rising interest, “I’ll show you his course.”

He got a chart out of the library, and Helen began to study navigation with the impassioned devotion which love lends to intellectual pursuits. One observes this ardour in two young persons of opposite sexes who take up some branch of literature or science together, which they might not perhaps have thought of, if they had not thought of each other. It has been known to cast a purple light upon metaphysics. Helen borrowed the chart and brought it away with her.

It was a happy day, and its memory remained to sweeten the days in the increasing bustle of preparation for Marian’s wedding, when Helen saw her friends less and less, and then the days when she saw them no more.

XI.

HELEN’S letter, crossing the letter Fenton wrote at Rio de Janeiro, reached him at Hong-Kong. It added, after the first hours of rapture, the anguish of a hopeless longing to the remorse he had been suffering. It was no longer a question of her forgiveness; but he did not find it easier, now that he had the assurance of her love, to forgive himself for his rashness; he thought of her alone in her sorrow, without the instant sympathy and support which she had a right to expect from him, even if there had been no tie but their common affection for her father between them; and his whole life centred in an impulse to return to her somehow from the banishment he had inflicted upon himself. But he had himself made return impossible — for the present at least — by the terms on which he had sought exile; he must wait and he must suffer — that would have been simple enough — and he must also make her wait and suffer. When he came to this conclusion, as he always must, it was with a mental shock that was like a veritable concussion of the brain, that left him weaker day by day, and that broke him at last. He fell sick of a disorder that baffled the science of the surgeon when he visited him in his room.

“What the devil is the matter with you? I believe in my soul you ‘re trying to make a die of it,” said the doctor, a cheerful, elderly man, tight in his uniform.

“No man ever wanted to live as I do,” answered Fenton.

“Well, then, you must brace up. I’ll give you a tonic. Make you up a bottle and send it to you.” The doctor felt his pulse again and said, “You’re either down with the climate, and that affects your spirits, or else it’s your spirits that affect your health. But in any case you must brace up.” As Fenton lay perfectly still with his face turned away, Dr. Simmons passed his hand over the top of his head where a perspiration of perplexity had gathered in the scattering down. “I can’t minister to a mind diseased, you know,” he suggested.

“No,” said Fenton.

“You must go to some other shop.”

He got himself with difficulty out of Fenton’s door into the ward-room, and presently sent him the bottle. It seemed to make him worse, and the doctor visited him again in renewed mystification. After the usual inspection, he sat looking at Fenton as before, and then said casually, “What a lucky chap N Nixon is, going home on leave so soon!”

Fenton sat up. “Going home! O my God!” He fell back on his pillow, and the doctor nodded his head.

“I thought so. You’re homesick. Nixon isn’t going home; but if you keep on in this way, you are — in a box. This thing will kill you as sure as you live, if you don’t fight it, and if you’ve got particular reasons for living, as you intimated the other day, you’d better make the most of them. Get leave and go off somewhere for a while. Amuse yourself; try to forget about it. You can worry it off somehow. You must; and so I tell you.”

“Two days after I sailed the man who had taken care of me all my life, and been more than a father to me, died suddenly, and left his only child alone in the world,” said Fenton desperately. “How am I to worry that off? I ought to be there — to help her, to take care of her, to show the gratitude that common decency—” —

“Well, that is bad,” assented the doctor. “But she’s got friends, of course?”

“Oh, friends, yes!”

“And of course she’ll be looked after. You must try to see the bright side of it,” added the doctor. “There’s a bright side to everything.”

“Do you think so? Then I’ll tell you the bright side to this. I came away in a quarrel with them — a quarrel where I was to blame — without seeing them or saying a word to them; and I can’t ask leave to go home, because I made a point of getting ordered here. That’s the bright side of it!”

“It isn’t very dazzling,” admitted the doctor, with the smile that men put on at other men’s troubles of sentiment. “But it isn’t a thing to be morbid about. You can write home and explain. You’re a little under the influence of the climate here; you’ll see all these things differently when you’re used to it. I’d better give you some quinine. There’s no use in giving way; you’ll only make bad worse.”

The shame of having confessed to an anxiety that another seemed to find so slight was a powerful auxiliary in the effort of will that Fenton made to overcome its physical effects. He succeeded so far that he was able to go on duty again, after a week or two, and to live doggedly on from day to day in that double consciousness where the secret trouble remains a dull, incessant ache underneath all the outward conditions. It began to be a superstition with him that something must happen, some chance of escape must offer; he could not yet bring himself to the thought of the last resort, though the knowledge that at the end of all he could resign and go home continually tempted him.

Helen’s letters, as they came, were brave and hopeful, and Fenton only wrote of the time when they should meet; he instinctively wrote as if this time must be near. Then the mere lapse of days and weeks began to have its effect as it does in every human affliction; it lessened his burden by making it a thing of custom, to which his life adjusted itself. He had not less to bear, but he had learned better how to bear it; and the pride and joy which he had felt in Helen’s love, even when he felt himself least worthy of it, seemed more and more his right, and less and less his unlawful possession. Apparently she was pleasantly placed in the house which she amusingly described to him, and she was living quietly and trustfully on there, waiting for his return. She wrote him very freely about everything else, but she shrank from telling him of her experiment in decorating pottery for sale, because she would not let him know that she had ever thought herself in need. She never spoke of any need in her life except his return; she only spoke of that in answer to his letters saying that he would use every effort to get back, and then she said that they must both have patience, and that she would be content to wait all her days for him, rather than have him do anything that he would not have done if she had not wished. She said something that made Fenton smile, about her knowing that he would not dream of deserting his post of duty; and then she begged his forgiveness if she had seemed to express any fear of such a thing; and again she said that she was very well and very contented, and that he must not worry about her, and she only wished that he could look into her little room at Mrs, Hewitt’s, and see how comfortable she was.

To the next letter, which reached him a month later, she put a postscript in which she offered to give him back every word that bound him to such a helpless and foolish creature as she was, but told him that it would kill her if he consented. “If it were not for thinking of you, Robert, I should hardly have the courage to keep up. If you were ever to be unkind to me again, no matter if it were entirely my fault, I could not forgive you, but I should die in the attempt. There are some things,” she added, with subtle relevancy, “about my everyday life, and its cares and difficulties, that make me wish for your advice, but you are too far away for that; and if you were here, I should not have the troubles, and should not need the advice. It all comes from my not having any head for figures, and not calculating beforehand instead of afterwards, when it does no good; and then I have to pay a poor girl’s penalty for flinging money away as no rich girl ought.”

The day she wrote, Helen had met in the street one of the women whom she had put down on her list of the things “To be given away” before the auction, for certain tables, chairs, and bedsteads, which Captain Butler, in the use of a wise discretion, had ordered to be sold for the benefit of the estate. Mrs. Sullivan, though poor, was not proud, and she was one of those who had formerly profited by the sums which Helen saved from hack-hire. She now thanked her for a small present of old clothes, which, being sent her before Captain Butler’s agency in Helen’s charities began, had really reached her. Helen saw the expectation of future old clothes in the woman’s eye, and thought it right to cut off her vain hope.

“I’m afraid I shall not have any more clothes for you very soon,” she said coldly. “I must wear my old things myself after this.” Then, with some exasperation at being invited to an impossible beneficence, where she had already done so much, she added: “I hope you found the furniture useful, Mrs. Sullivan?”

“What foornitoor, Miss?” quavered the poor woman, reduced to destitution by the idea of the prosperity that had evaded her; and it came out that she had never received the things intended for her.

Helen did not pause to inquire how this had happened. “There has been some misunderstanding, Mrs. Sullivan,” she said loftily; “but I don’t intend that you shall be the sufferer by it.” She gave Mrs. Sullivan everything she had in her porte-monnaie except some horse-car tickets. “It may not be so much as the furniture was worth, but it’s ready money, and no doubt you can buy things with it that you would rather have.”

Mrs. Sullivan was apparently not inclined to this opinion; the loss because uncertain seemed greater; but she did not fail to invoke God’s favour upon Helen, and she asked for her washing, as an amend for the unmerited deprivation which the Sullivan family had undergone through her. Helen hurried home, and found that she had given Mrs. Sullivan all her money but ten dollars, and that now she must encroach upon her capital at last. She must go to the lawyer in whose hands Captain Butler had left her money, and ask him for some of it. She could have wept for vexation at her rashness, and shame for the necessity to which it had brought her; but the sum of her varying moods was the mood of self-pity in which she wrote that postscript to Robert.

She was sorry for it as soon as she had posted the letter, but even then she merely regretted it as the expression of a mood, which she had always said was foolish in writing a letter.

Fenton had never imagined her poor, or in need of any kind; the fancy of a lover does not deal with material circumstances; but he now made ample amends for past failure. He took unsparing blame to himself for the false delicacy that had kept him from asking in what state her father’s affairs had been left, for not making her tell him how much or how little she had. At this first vague hint of cares and difficulties, — of the necessity of saving, — which she had allowed to escape her, he saw her in a poverty that scarcely stopped short of the municipal soup-kitchen. With the distance which he had put between them, how could he hope to help her? How could he even intimate his longing to do so, without wounding her? He wore himself out in vain contrivance for getting his pay to her in some secret and anonymous way.

Her next letter was cheerful and happy, with no hint of trouble; but he could see nothing in it but a feint of gaiety, a pretence to keep him in heart about her; and the effect of time and will were undone in him.

“I don’t understand all this bother of yours, Fenton,” said the doctor, to whom he applied once more. “But I guess you’ve got to go home. You ‘re dying here.”

“Going home doesn’t follow,” replied Fenton.

“You’re useless, and worse than useless, as you are, here,” continued the doctor. “I know how you feel about it; you feel that it’s a disgrace to give up; but you ‘re sick, and you ‘re as irresponsibly sick as if you had the consumption. You have got to look at it in that light.”

“I can’t go,” said Fenton.

“Oh, very well,” retorted the doctor. “I can’t force a man to live.”

That night, as Fenton sat in the wardroom with two or three others, who were smoking and reading, while he pretended to read, the figure of Helen suddenly glided out of the empty air, and paused full form before him; it melted by slow degrees away, her face vanishing last, and leaving him with a sense of her strange look: it was neither sad nor reproachful, but of a peculiarly sweet and gentle archness.

He turned a ghastly countenance on the doctor, whom he found looking at him across the table. He trembled to his feet, and the doctor ran round and helped him to his room “Well?” he impatiently demanded, when they were alone in his room.

“She’s dead! I saw her ghost!” whispered Fenton. The perspiration, which stood in drops on his forehead, bathed the clammy hand with which he clutched the doctor’s warm hairy fist.

“I agree to the ghost,” the doctor answered, cheerfully, “but I guess she isn’t dead, all the same.”

“You think not?” queried Fenton with a childish submissiveness. “But — but T saw her!”

“Oh, no doubt,” replied Simmons. “If you keep on at this rate, you’ll see a ball-room full of her! It’s a phenomenon of your condition. You turn in, now, and I’ll make you up a bottle that will keep her away till to-morrow night, anyway.”

The surgeon had the professional humanity, and he would have pitied Fenton as the doctor pities his patient, even if he had felt no personal kindness for him. But he really had a liking for the young fellow; he respected him as the most striking case of nostalgia that had ever come under his notice. The case was all the more interesting from the character of the man, which was one of stubborn endurance in everything; his pride was as evident as his quick temper; and yet here he was, beaten down, perfectly broken up, by a purely moral disorder. “If I had not got that man away,” Doctor Simmons could say in imaginable boastings that were to hold future wardrooms in awe, “he would have died, sir; died of sheer home-sickness!”

Of any other sort of sickness with which the nostalgia was complicated, no intimation seemed to have penetrated to the doctor’s thickened consciousness; it was long since he had had any love affairs of his own; the passion, as he had observed it later in life, was not apt to manifest itself in any such condition as Fenton’s; he ascertained that the apparition was that of the lieutenant’s adoptive sister, and he rested in that knowledge. But the fact that patients suffering from nostalgia were sometimes haunted by y visions of absent friends was an incident of the malady noted in the books, and upon its occurrence every possible means should be made to secure their return home.

It was upon this authority and this conviction that Doctor Simmons approached the Admiral in Fenton’s behalf. He explained the case with scientific zeal, and then dwelt upon the peculiar circumstances which rendered it impossible for Mr. Fenton to apply for leave to return, while he was at the same time in such a condition of mind that to condemn him for service by medical survey, and send him home in that way, would be simply sentencing him to death. The doctor acknowledged the irregularity of his own proceeding in making this appeal; but he urged the extremity and the delicacy of the case in justification: Mr. Fenton would certainly not survive if he remained in the station; Doctor Simmons staked his professional reputation upon that, and without presuming to suggest anything, he begged the Admiral to consider whether some public interest could not be served by Mr. Fenton’s return on duty. The next day Fenton received orders to sail by the first steamer from Yokohama with despatches for Washington. It was at the time of the war between Japan and Corea, in which, as is well known, certain eventualities threatened to compromise American interests.

When Doctor Simmons visited his patient after the orders reached him, he was rewarded for the tact with which he had accomplished his difficult task by Fenton’s accusation that he had brought the result about. He expected this, and in the interest of science, he met the accusation with lies so prompt that they would have carried conviction to any mind less sore and disordered than Fenton’s. He told him that his orders were a god-send, and advised him not to trouble himself about how or why they had been given. In fact the situation admitted of nothing but obedience; upon the face of it there was no point that the most self-accusing scruples could lay hold of; and Fenton discovered with helpless shame that all the natural forces in him were fighting against his broken will. He was quite ready for the steamer that sailed in a few days for Yokohama and San Francisco; and he accepted his good fortune upon the best terms he could. When it was too late he began to realise his obligation to the man who had saved his life, and given it back to him with such hope as now rioted in his heart at every thought of Helen and of home. He was a week out from Yokohama, and he could do nothing but write a letter to the surgeon, trying to make up for his past thanklessness by a vain and remote profusion of gratitude.

He was, as he figured it, only a fortnight from San Francisco, and unless he suffered some detention at Washington, only a little over three weeks from Helen. The possibility that he might be ordered away upon some other service before he saw her occurred to him, but only as one of those disasters which each of us regards as too cruel and monstrous ever to happen to himself. He bet on the highest figures in the pools formed to guess at the run of the ship from day to day; and the lady who held the pools was not long in divining the cause of his sanguine faith in a short passage. Mrs. Bowers was going to join her husband in San Francisco; the similarity of their objects gave them a natural interest in each other, and a man of Fenton’s ordinary good sense and reserve was capable of confiding in this sympathising listener, with the lover’s ingenuous egotism, so incredible to us later in life. He talked continually of Helen to her, when perhaps she would much rather have had him talk about himself, as they walked up and down the deck together; he told her everything but Helen’s name, which she threatened she would have yet before they got to San Francisco. In the meantime they always spoke of Helen as the Mystery. It was folly, but it made Fenton transcendently happy; these confidences brought Helen nearer, they realised her; they almost, in the spiritualists’ phrase, materialised her. The time came when, the moonless night being propitious, he told Mrs. Bowers of the apparition of Helen, and asked her what she thought of it. She said that she thought it the most wonderful thing she had ever heard of: but she owned that she did not know what it meant. She added that she should always stand in awe of a person who had had such a thing happen to him; and then she pressed the arm on which she hung, and giggled; and the next moment she shrieked. There had been a sudden, violent wrench and shock; her cry was answered, after a moment’s deathly silence, by a confused clamour from all parts of the ship; and the passengers came rushing up from below, where they had been playing euchre, and singing hymns, and eating bacon and Welsh-rabbit, and implored one another to say what had happened. According to usage everywhere in cases of accident, there was no authority to turn to for information; the officers of the ship were each about his duty, and they severally and collectively underwent severe criticism from the passengers for their absence from the scene of the common dismay and curiosity.

Fenton was the first, in virtue of his office and mission, to learn that the ship had broken her shaft, and must put back to Yokohama. He received his sentence with desperate fortitude.

“I think we might get you back in time for the next boat,” said the captain, considerate of the haste of a bearer of despatches, “but it would be only a chance. This is a sailing craft now. With a fair wind all the way, we might do it; but that’s almost too much to hope for. Of course we might meet the next boat on her way home before we make Yokohama, but that would be still more of a chance.”

“Well, I must go back with you, that’s all,” replied Fenton.

“Yes, there’s nothing else for it, that I see.”

The passengers in the saloon were divided between two minds, and inclined in about equal numbers to hold a service of song and thanksgiving for their delivery from danger, and to organise an indignation meeting for the adoption of resolutions condemning the captain for snubbing a committee of inquiry, which had presented a just interrogation as to his purposes, in view of the accident. It appeared, from the best informed, that the captain had at once put his ship about, not only without consulting the passengers’ wishes, but evidently without considering whether it was not quite as feasible to push on to San Francisco as to return to Yokohama. There were attempts to commit some of the stewards to the former hypothesis.

About noon the next day, the captain spoke a ship, which, under a full press of canvas, was making speed eastward that mocked the laggard reluctance of the steamer on her backward course. She proved to be the clipper Meteor, bound for San Francisco, for a freight of wheat to Europe. The captain invited Fenton on to the bridge.

“There’s your chance,” he said, “if you want to risk it. But you must be quick about it.”

“How much of a chance is it?” asked Fenton.

“Those clippers often make very quick runs. She’s bound straight for where you want to go. I can’t advise, and I don’t know whether they’ll take you.”

“I’ll risk it!” said Fenton. If he had been given more time to hesitate he might have refused the risk; but he was not given the time. He scratched a line to Helen, telling her what had happened, for the captain of the steamer to post in Yokohama when he got back, so that she might have some intelligence of him in case of further delay; but, when he had finished his letter, he decided that it would distress her with needless anxiety if it reached her before his arrival, and that it would in all probability come after him; and so he put it into his pocket, instead of giving it to the captain. In the meantime, there was further unintelligible parley with the clipper; she shortened sail and hove-to, and before the other passengers had well realised the fact, Fenton and his baggage were in the boat which the steamer had lowered, and was rising and sinking on the long swells that stretched between her and the other ship. Mrs. Bowers had parted from him with effusion: “I know you’ll find her alive and well,” she whispered in  generous sympathy; and he volunteered to look Mr. Bowers up in San Francisco, and tell him all about everything.

The other passengers received the adieux which he waved and bowed them, in that awe which Americans like to feel for any representative of the national dignity: we see so little of it. Fenton had put on his uniform to affect as powerfully as possible the imagination of the captain of the clipper, who was quite master to refuse him passage, after all; the captain of the steamer had not thought it best to make too plain his purpose in sending out a boat to the hasty stranger.

Both his precaution and Fenton’s had been well taken. When Captain Rollins of the Meteor came to understand the reason why his ship had been stopped, he discharged a blast of profanity of a range that included nearly everything in animated nature, except Lieutenant Fenton, who stood sternly patient before him, until he should finish; perhaps it devoted him the more terribly by this exception. When the captain stopped for breath, Fenton leaned over the rail, and motioned off the steamer’s boat which lay rocking on the sea by the ship’s side; he had taken the precaution to have his baggage brought on board with himself. —

“I am bearer of despatches to Washington from the flag-ship at Hong-Kong. Of course, you expect to take me on to San Francisco, and I expect to pay you for the best quarters you can give me. I am Lieutenant Fenton of the Messasauga. What is your name?”

“Rollins,” growled the captain.

“Here, my man,” said Fenton to one of the seamen, “take these things to Captain Rollins’s room.” The uniform and the secure bearing had their effect; few men knew just what is the quality and the authority of a bearer of despatches; the sailor obeyed, and the skipper submitted. He was by no means a bad fellow; he belonged to the old school of sea-captains, now almost as extinct as the pirates whose diction they inherited; his furious blasphemies were merely what in another man would have been some tacit reflections upon the vexatious nature of the case. —

Fenton found himself neither uncomfortable nor really unwelcome on the Meteor. Upon the hint given him, the captain turned out of his room for the lieutenant, and he caused some distinct improvements to be made in the ship’s fare. There were a number of Chinese in the steerage, and among the passengers in the cabin a young American lady returning with her mother from a visit to her brother in China, and a man from Kankakee, Illinois, who had been out looking up the sorghum-culture in its native land. The sea-monotony which Fenton’s coming had broken for the moment promptly returned upon this company. The young lady had not Mrs. Bowers’s art of making attentions to herself appear an act of devotion to Helen, and Fenton offered her only the necessary politeness. What companionship he had was with the Kankakee man, a small, meagre, melancholy figure, full of an unembittered discouragement. Continual failure in life had apparently subdued him into acquiescence in whatever happened, without destroying his faith in the schemes he projected; he was disheartened with himself, not with them, and he had the gentleness of a timid nature which curiously appealed to the gentleness of Fenton’s courage. He confessed that the first encounter between the lieutenant and the captain of the ship had given him apprehensions, and he insinuated a deep admiration for Fenton’s behaviour in that difficult moment. He attached himself to the stronger man, and accepted him in detail with a simple devotion, which seemed to refer as much to Fenton’s personal presence as to his moral qualities; and, in fact, the lieutenant was then a gallant figure. The oval of his regular face had been chiselled by his sickness into something impressively fine; with his good nose and mouth, his dark moustache and imperial, and his brown tint, he was that sort of young American whom you might pronounce an Italian, before you had seen the American look in his grey eyes. His slight figure had a greater apparent height than it really attained.

“You see,” explained the Kankakee man, whose named proved to be Giffen, “my idea was that if I could go right in among the Chinese people, and find out how the thing was carried on, and mebbe talk with some of their leading agriculturists about it, I could do more to get the sorghum culture going among us in six months than the agricultural department of Washington could in six years. It’s bound to come. It won’t come in my time, nor through anything I’ve done, but that sorghum interest is bound to be a big thing with us yet. We’ve got the climate, and we Ve got the soil for it. I’ll allow I’ve had sorghum on the brain ever since I first saw it; but that’s no reason I’m mistaken about it. I know it’s got to come, and if I could have hit it the way I expected, I could have done more good, and made more money in two years after I got home than I’d known what to do with.”

“And how was it you didn’t hit it?” asked Fenton.

“Well, you see,” said the Kankakee man, whose name was Giffen, “I found I couldn’t talk the language, for one thing. And then I couldn’t seem to get anybody interested. I did try to get into the country districts, but I couldn’t make any great headway: such a prejudice against foreigners amongst the Chinese; and I hadn’t very much money with me, and I concluded to give it up. But I found out enough to know that our people can’t grow sorghum on the Chinese plan and make it pay; labour’s too dear and we’ve got to employ machinery. I’ve got the idea of a sorghum-planter, that, if I can get any one to take hold of it, is going to make somebody’s fortune. Have you ever been to Alaska?”

“No,” said Fenton.

“They say there’s good soil in Alaska, and there’s nothing to prevent it’s being a great agricultural country except the frost four or five feet down. Sun can’t get at it on account of the moss. But you scrape that moss off once, and let the sun have a fair show for one summer, — well, I believe the thing can be done, if any one had the sense to go about it the right way. And I’ve got my eye on a kind of coffee they grow on the Sandwich Islands, that I believe can be introduced with us, if the right parties can be got to take hold of it.”

The good weather continued for another week, with westerly winds that carried the Meteor on her course till she had made nearly three thousand miles since leaving Shanghai. Each day took him two hundred or two hundred and fifty nearer home, and Fenton looked forward to a prosperous run all the way to San Francisco with hopes that he dutifully disguised to himself as fears. Towards the end of the week, the wind began to haul back to the southward, and fell till it scarcely stirred a ripple on the sea, but he did not lose courage. He explained to the other passengers that they could afford to lose a few days’ time and still make one of the greatest runs on record. They heard him with the trust due a man of his experience and profession, and when the wind again sprang up in the west, they paid him the honours of a prophet with the idle zeal of people at sea, glad even of the distraction which respect for another’s wisdom afforded them. But the wind suddenly backed from the west to the south, a strange yellow tinge spread over the purple sky, and faded to a dull grey, through which the sun burnt only the space of its rayless ball. The mercury fell, and the wind dropped again to a dead calm, from which it rose in sharp gusts that settled, as the day closed, into a heavy gale from the northwest. The ship drove before the storm for three days and nights. When the fourth morning broke she seemed to have been blown beyond its track; but one of her masts was gone; the sails hung in ribbons from the yards; the tangled and twisted shrouds swept her deck, and all but two of her boats had been carried away. The first observation possible since the storm began showed that she had been driven nearly a thousand miles to the southeast; but she was put upon her course again, and laboured on till night-fall. At nine o’clock the passengers huddled together in the cabin heard a cry of “Hard down your helm!” and the ship struck with a violence that threw them to the floor; then recoiling, she struck again, with a harsh, grating force, and ceased to move. In this instant of arrest Fenton found his feet and scrambled to the deck.

The Meteor hung upon a coral reef, that defined itself under the starlight in the curving line of breakers on either hand. The seas swept over her where she lay on her beam-ends, and at every rush of the breakers she pounded heavily on the reef. Beyond it was a stretch of smoother water, from which seemed to rise a low irregular mass of rock, forming with the reef a rude quadrangle. There was no hope for the ship, and no hope for her people unless they could somehow reach this rock. It was useless to launch the boats in such a sea; they tried one, but it filled as soon as it touched the water, and nothing remained but to carry a line, if it could be done, to the island beyond the reef. The captain called for volunteers, but the men hung back. It was not the time to parley; Fenton passed one end of the line round his waist, and plunged into the gulf under the lee of the ship. When he reached the rock, he found that two sailors had followed him, and these now helped him to pull in the heavier line attached to the cord, which he had made fast to a point of the rock. A hauling rope was carried along this line, and in the glare of the lights burned on the ship, they began to bring her people away one by one. A sailor mounted into the sling running upon the rope, with a woman or child in his arms, and was hauled to the rock and back again to the ship; and all the women and children were set ashore, even some poor creatures among the Chinese, before any of the men were suffered to land. These followed, till none of the passengers but the Chinamen were left. They stood huddled together at the bow, which had shifted round under the blows of the surf, and was hanging seaward, and the lights, burning now green, now crimson, now purple, showed them tossing their arms into the air, as if in some weird incantation, as they tried to free the wet joss-papers that clung to their fingers; their shrill supplications pierced through the roar of the breakers. The captain reported that he tried to make them understand how they were to reach the reef; but they would not or could not understand. He and his officers then flung themselves upon the line, straining under the seaward lapse of the wreck; and at the same moment the vessel parted amidships, and the bow where the Chinese were grouped weltered back with them into the sea. The lights died out, and the ship’s bell, which had been tolling dismally as she pounded on the reef, suddenly ceased to sound. The broken hulk grew up once more in the dark, and the roar of the breakers rushed loud again upon the moment of horror that had been like a moment of silence.

When Fenton first touched the rock where all the survivors of the wreck were now gathered, it rose scarcely a foot above the water at the highest point, and by the time the captain reached it, they stood knee-deep in the rising tide. An hour after midnight it was high-tide, and it was only by holding fast to each other that they could keep their footing.

The moon broke from the clouds, and one of the sailors whipped out his knife, with a cry of “Look out for yourselves!” and made a cut at something in the water. Fenton looked, and saw that the sea around them was full of sharks. He helped the captain form the men about the women and children, and they fought the fish away with cries, and thrusts of their knives, and blows of the splinters and fragments of the wreck which the breakers had flung them over the reef, till the tide turned, and the most hideous of their dangers had passed for the time.

With the first light of day came their first gleam of hope. One of the ship’s boats, which must have been carried around the line of their reef, came floating to them, bottom up, on the refluent tide from the other quarter. It proved to be so little injured that the captain and some of his men were able to put off in it to the wreck, where they found tools for repairing it, and abundant stores. When they returned to the rock, they had a mast with its sail ready to be stepped, lying in the boat, and several pairs of mismated oars, which they had picked up outside. But it was the smallest of the boats, and the castaways counted each other with cruel eyes as it drew near. The rock where they stood was one of those dead atolls in which the Pacific abounds: a tiny coral isle, once tufted with palms, and gay with perpetual green, which the sinking of the ocean’s floor had dropped below the tide, and left lurking there with its guardian reef, a menace and a deadly peril to navigation. Somewhere within a day’s sail there must be other islands of kindred origin, but with a certain area of dry and habitable land, which the boat might reach. But who should go, and who should wait her uncertain return? It was not a question of the women and children, nor of their husbands and fathers, but when all these had crowded into the boat, seven men remained upon the rock.

“Captain Rollins, there isn’t room for us all in that boat,” Fenton heard his voice saying: “I ask no man to share my risk, but I’m going to stay here, for one.”

“I don’t ask any man to stay,” said Captain Rollins. “I’ve left sixteen thousand dollars in gold, — all I’ve got in this world, — on the ship, so as to keep the boat as light as I could; but, as you say, lieutenant, she can’t hold us all.”

There was a little pause; then three sailors, with a shame-faced avoidance of Fenton’s eye, pushed past him toward the boat.

One of the passengers — an Englishman — rose up. “My good men,” he said, “you ‘re surely not coming.”

“Yes, we are,” replied one of them surlily. “Why shouldn’t we come as well as you?”

“But the boat is too full already!” he expostulated. “You endanger the lives of the passengers!” he cried, with that respect for the rights of the travelling public which fills the Englishman when he writes to the Times of the inattention of the railway company’s servants.

“Let the passengers get out, then,” said the sailor. “We don’t want ’em here.” His joke raised a laugh among his fellows. “Come along, John; come along, Jake,” he called to the seamen who still remained with Fenton.

“No; guess not,” said one of them quietly.

The matter-of-fact, every-day character of the details of the calamity, the unchanged nature of the actors in this tragedy of life and death, robbed it of reality to Fenton’s sense, and made it like some crudely represented fiction of the theatre.

The figure of Giffen interposed itself between him and the captain who stood at the bow of the boat, in the act of offering his hand in farewell. “Excuse me,” he said, answering Fenton’s look, “I’m going to stay. But I want Captain Rollins, if he gets back, to write to my brother, George Giffen, at Kankakee.”

The harsh name, so grotesquely unrelated to anything that was there or then, awoke Fenton from his maze. Was there a world beyond these seas where there were towns and fields, chimneys and trees, the turmoil of streets, the quiet of firesides? His heart seemed to close upon itself, and stand still, as the image of Helen sewing beside the little table in the library, in the way he always saw her, possessed him. The next moment, this in its turn was the theatrical vision, and he was standing on a point of rock in a wilderness of waters, the boat at his feet, and the broken wreck upon the reef a stone’s-cast away. He took from his breast the water-tight packet in which he carried his despatches, and wrote upon the back of one of them a line to Helen; with her address, and a request that it might be forwarded to her. “Here are some letters,” he said, handing the packet to the captain, with a light-headed sense of sending them to some one in another life.

“Why, bless you, man!” cried Captain Rollins, “I shall find land before night, and I shall be back for you here by this time to-morrow morning!”

“Yes, yes!” returned Fenton. “Don’t stay, now,” he added impatiently. “Good-bye.”

The four men on the rock watched the boat till she showed so small in the distance that they could no longer be sure whether they saw her or not; then they turned their eyes upon each other. Whatever the two seamen left behind with Fenton may have thought of his looks, he could not congratulate himself upon theirs. But he said, “You are the men who followed me with the line last night.”

“Yes, sir,” answered one of them.

“You ‘re not afraid, any way,” said Fenton, as if this were the most that could be said for them.

“I guess we get along,” said the man, “I rather be on this rock, than that boat, with so much people.”

“What are you?” asked Fenton; for the man spoke with a certain accent and a foreigner’s hesitation.

“I’m Fayal man; I live at. Gloucester, Massa chusetts; John Jones.”

Fenton recognised the name under which most Portuguese sailors ship. “And who are you?” he asked of the other, who was as tall and fair as the Portuguese was dark and short.

He grinned, and the latter answered for him. “He don’t speak much English. He’s some Dutchman; Icelander, I guess.”

“Very well,” said Fenton. “You know where we are, and what the chances are.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I reckon,” said Giffen, “we can make out to worry along somehow till the boat gets back.” The sailors had begun to breakfast on the stores the boat had brought off from the wreck and left for them on the rock, and Giffen turned to with them.

“It won’t do to count too much upon the boat’s coming back,” replied Fenton, suddenly hungry at sight of the others eating. “They may find land before night, and they may not find it for two weeks. At any rate, the sharks will be back before they are.”

Giffen’s jaw dropped, with a large morsel bulging his cheek.

“Come, man!” cried Fenton sharply, “you’d better have crowded into the boat with the others, if you’re sorry you stayed.”

“I don’t suppose I’ve got any great physical courage,” said Giffen, in his slow weak voice. “But I’m not sorry I stayed. I’m ready to do whatever you say. I’m a born high-private, if ever there was one.”

“I beg your pardon,” Fenton began, ashamed of his petulant outburst.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Giffen quietly. “But I’m in earnest, I’d rather follow some other man’s luck, any time.”

“I shall not ask you to do anything that I’m not ready to do myself,” returned Fenton. “We must get out to the wreck,” he added, including the Portuguese, “and see what we can make of it. And the sooner we get to it the better.”

“I’m ready,” said the sailor, closing the clasp knife with which he had been eating; and the Icelander, who seemed to understand everything through him, pocketed his knife also.

They waded into the shoal water, and swam round the stern of the ship where it overhung the reef, and tried to board her. But there was no means of doing this, unless they passed the reef, and ventured into the sea beyond, where they knew the sharks were waiting. They returned to their rock, and began to gather up the pieces of shattered spars and planks, that the rising tide was bringing in, and with such odds and ends of cordage and rags of sail as clung to these fragments, they contrived a raft, on which they hoped to float out to the wreck when the tide turned once more. After the raft was finished and made fast to the rock, they climbed upon it, and, launching upon the ebb, drifted out through a break in the reef, and contrived to clamber up her broken timbers. They could see that this fragment of a ship must soon go to pieces, under the incessant blows of the waves; and Fenton and Giffen made all haste in their search for tools and materials to strengthen their float so that they might put to sea on it if the worst came to the worst. The sailors began ransacking the wreck with a purpose of their own, and in the end, they all owed their lives to the rapacity which left no part of the ship unsearched; for it was the Portuguese who found wedged in among the shattered timbers of the hulk, where some caprice of the waves had lodged it, the boat that had foundered the night before. Every blow of the sea had driven it tighter into the ruin, and it was an hour’s struggle in the dark, waist-deep in water, amid the bodies of the drowned Chinamen, and just within the line of the sharks that were preying upon them, before the boat could be cut out. When they pulled it up on the deck at last, it was in a condition that must have seemed desperate to less desperate men; but in this extremity Giffen developed the shiftiness of a dabbler in many trades, and his rude knack with the saw and hammer rendered the battered boat seaworthy. Fenton found a bag of flour, water-soaked without, but fresh and dry within; a few biscuit and some peas and beans, with which he provisioned her; and a shot gun, with a store of water-proof cartridges, with which he armed her. With Giffen’s help he fashioned a mast out of one of the broken yards, and patched together a sail from the shreds and tatters of canvas hanging about it. The wreck was settling more and more deeply into the sea when they launched their boat at sunset, and returned to the rock where they made her fast.

The last man to come over the side of the ship was the Portuguese, who carried in either hand a buckskin bag.

“That’s Captain Rollins’s money,” said Fenton. “Take good care of it.”

“All right. I look out for it,” answered the sailor.

With the refluent tide the sharks came back again. The dead Chinamen came with them, and seemed to join in beleaguering the castaways, crouching in their boat, which pulled at her moorings, as if struggling to escape the horrors that hemmed them round. They had found no water on the wreck, and a consuming thirst parched them. When the morning broke it showed them the surf beating over the reef where the ship had hung, and the sea strewn with its fragments.

“We can’t stay here,” said Fenton. “We must find land for ourselves somewhere — and water.”

“That’s so,” admitted Giffen, with feeble acquiescence.

“I know they never come back for us,” said the Portuguese. “I goin’ tell you that, yesterday.”

They cut their boat from her moorings, and ran lightly away before the breeze that carried them where it would.

The sky was again of the blue of the weather that had prospered the first weeks of the Meteor’s voyage; again its vast arch was undimmed by a cloud from horizon to horizon; and it only darkened to a deeper blue, filled with large southern stars, when the sun dropped below the sea, and the swift tropical night closed round them.

The castaways, voyaging none of them knew where, and trusting for rescue to whatever chance of land or passing sail befriended them, with the danger of tempest, and the certainty of starvation after a given time, before them, had already divided themselves into two camps, tacitly distrustful if not hostile; the sailors guarded between them the booty that they had brought from the wreck, and Fenton and Giffen watched by turns with the gun in their hands. But at daybreak, a common joy united them. On the edge of the sea a line of dark points printed itself against the sky, and, as they approached, these points rounded into tufts, and then opened into the feathery crests of cocoa palms, with broken stretches of delicious verdure between the stems. The long white wall beneath, that glistened in the rising sun, like a bank of snow, expanded into a smooth, sloping beach, the deep surf flashed and thundered along the outer reef; and then the little coral isle, encircling its slumbrous lagoon, took shape before their eyes. They tacked and wore to find a passage through the reef, and so, between the islets of the palm-belt, over smooth depths of delicate yellow and apple-green, they slipped into the still waters of the lake, and ran across to the white coral beach. They fell upon the sand, and scooped with their hands a hollow into which oozed a little water that they could drink; and then they kindled a fire with some matches that Giffen had brought from the wreck, and roasted the shell-fish the sailors found among the rocks.

“I think this goin’ to be nice place, Cap’n,” said the Portuguese, stretching himself face downwards on the clean sand, when he had eaten and drunken his fill. “Plenty to eat, plenty to drink, nothin’ to do. By-’n’-by some ship goin’ to come here. We ‘re all right, heigh?”

The little brown-faced man lifted to Fenton’s face his black eyes, sparkling like a rat’s with the content of a full stomach.

The Icelander laughed as if he had understood his shipmate, and while the Portuguese luxuriously dropped off to sleep, he wandered away, leaving Fenton and Giffen to prospect for the best place to put the hut they must build. “I don’t like the way those fellows take it, exactly,” said the latter. “They let themselves up pretty easy when it comes to a question of work,” he added, with a mild sense of injury in his tone.

But the Icelander returned after a while with a large turtle he had caught, and with his hat full of turtles’ eggs, which he had found in the sand. The Fayal man, when he awoke, joined him in a second foraging expedition, and they came back laden with fish and birds. John Jones showed himself skilled in primitive methods of roasting and broiling on hot stones. He opened the bag of flour, and made a store of bread, which he baked in the ashes; and by the time Fenton and Giffen had finished the rude shelter they had been knocking together for the night, in the cocoa grove, he called them to a supper which a famine far less fastidious than theirs must have found delicious.

“Well, you are a cook,” said Giffen, with the innate disrespect for his art, which our race feels.

“But you’ve got enough here for a regiment,” he added, looking round on the store of provisions, cooked and uncooked, which was heaped up on the sand.

“Oh, plenty more where that come from,” said the Portuguese. “They all good cold. I don’t like cookin’ to-morrow; want to eat and sleep for a week.”

The Icelander had strayed away again, and they saw him climbing the palms, and strewing the earth beneath with cocoa-nuts. “Jake seems to be laying out for a week’s rest too,” said Giffen.

The Portuguese laughed at the joke. “You better take that money up to your house, Cap’n,” he said to Fenton.

“Where is it?” asked Fenton.

The Portuguese showed the two bags, where he had placed them, in a tuft of grass.

Fenton hesitated a moment. “You can bring it up with you when you get through here,” he said finally.

The Portuguese and his ship-mate came carrying up the provision to the hut, after Fenton and Giffen had stretched themselves on their beds of grass.

“Cap’n,” he said, waking Fenton, “here’s the money. What we goin’ do with that boat?”

“Let her be where she is; nothing can happen to her,” answered Fenton, heavy in heart and soul, and sodden with sleep, as he placed his hand on the bags the sailor had put down beside him.

“Yes,” chuckled the Portuguese, “I guess nobody goin’ steal her.”

The sailors did not come into the hut; they began to build a shelter of their own, and the noise of their work followed Fenton into his sleep. He had watched for three days and nights; he could not rouse himself from the deathly slumber into which he dropped again in spite of a formless fear that beset him; but he woke toward morning, with this terror, which proved more potent than the fatigue that drugged him. The money was still there; the sailors were peacefully snoring in their hut; and Giffen lay asleep across the gun. He staggered down to look at the boat. It was safe where they had left it, and he returned to their shelter, where he watched an hour, as he thought; then he woke Giffen, and bidding him call him in his turn, when he could no longer keep awake, he fell asleep once more. It must have been his visit to the boat that suggested the dream which seemed to begin as soon as he closed his eyes. He dreamed that they were at sea again in the boat, and that they saw a sail in the offing, so near that those on board, who did not see them, must hear them if they united in one loud cry. They rose up together for the effort, but their voices died in a gasp on their lips. Fenton burst into a groan of despair. —

“My Lord! what’s the matter?” cried Giffen, shaking the dreamer. Fenton scrambled to his feet; the money-bags were still there, but the sailors were gone; he tore open the bags; they were filled with shells and sand. He rushed down to the beach; the boat had disappeared; on the horizon a sail, no bigger than the petal of a flower, flickered and faded.

It was sunset, and they had slept through the night and the whole day.

Fenton turned a look on his fellow-captive, which Giffen met with a face of ghastly self-upbraiding. “My God,” he said, “I fell asleep! I hated to wake you, and I fell asleep before I knew it!”

“It doesn’t matter,” replied Fenton, with the nerveless quiet of his despair. “Sooner or later, they meant to do it.”

They turned blankly from the fact; it was days before they could confront it in speech; and then, with the conjecture that the sailors had set out in search of some inhabited land, where they could enjoy the spoil of the ship, their desertion remained incredible, unimaginable.

XII.

IT has been intimated that Helen entered upon her new life at Mrs. Hewitt’s with social preoccupations in her own favour which she was by no means prepared to surrender; and she did not think of yielding them, even in the abjectest moments of her failure and humiliation. In the interval of idleness that followed, she was again purely and simply a young lady, not attached by any sort of sympathy to the little boarding-house world, though she had always meant to treat it with consideration. But it is impossible that one who has been bred to be of no use should not feel an advantage over all those who have been bred to be of some use; and if for no other reason Helen must have confessed, wittingly and unwittingly, by a thousand little recoils and reserves, that her fellow boaders and herself could never meet on a level. It was perfectly easy, however, to keep aloof. After the first necessary civilities with the Evanses, she only met them on the stairs or at the table, where the talk was mainly between Mr. Evans and Miss Root, the art-student. It appeared from the casual confidences of the landlady that Miss Root was studying to be a painter, and that some of her work was beautiful. Mrs. Hewitt owned that she was no judge of painting, but she said that she knew what she liked. She told Helen also that Mr. Evans was one of the editors of Saturday Afternoon, a paper which she praised because she said it gave you the news about everybody, and kept you posted, so that you could tell just where they were and what they were doing, all the while; she believed that Mr. Evans was not connected with this admirable part of the paper: he wrote mostly about the theatres and the new books.

Helen was amused by some of his talk at the table; but she was not at all sure about the Evanses. She could not tell exactly why; one never can tell exactly why, especially if one is a lady. Mrs. Evans seemed well enough educated and well enough dressed; she had been abroad the usual term of years; she neither unduly sought nor repelled acquaintance; but from the first, Helen was painfully aware of not having heard of her; and one is equally uncertain of people of whom one has heard nothing, or heard too much. As soon as she learned what Mr. Evans’s business was, she understood, of course, that they could never have been people that  people knew; and, Were they not a little Bohemian? she asked, rather tepidly, one day, when an old friend of hers, whom she happened to meet, broke into effusive praise of them, on hearing that Helen was in the same house with them.

“My dear,” said Miss Kingsbury, summing up in a word the worst that a New England woman can say of a man, he is easy-going! But he is very kind; and she is the salt of the earth.”

“And some of the pepper?” suggested Helen.

“A little of the pepper, without doubt. But not a grain more than is good for him. He would be nothing without her,” she added, in the superstition ladies love to cherish concerning the real headship of the family. “She makes up all her own things, and teaches that boy herself. And you have another person there who is really a character: Miss Root.

If you see any of her work, you’ll see that she is an artist; but you’ll have to see a great deal of her before you find out that she’s the best soul in the world. With her little time, and her little money, she does more good! She’s practical, and she knows just how to help people that want to help themselves: poor girls, you know, trying to learn things, and get into occupations. And so rectangular she is!”

Miss Kingsbury ran off, professing an instant and pressing duty. “I’m coming to see you very soon. Good-bye, Helen dear! You know how I feel for you,” she added tenderly.

Many other people, returning to town, looked Helen up, and left cards, and messages of friendly interest. She did not see any one that she could help seeing; she was doubly exiled by her bereavement and her poverty from the gay and prosperous world they belonged to; she knew that they were kind, and meant well, but she knew that henceforward she could have few interests in common with them. She was happiest when she was quite alone with her sorrow and with her love, which seemed to have sprung from it, and to be hallowed by it. Their transmutation gave her memories and her hopes a common sweetness, which was sometimes very strange; it seemed as if Robert were present with her when she thought of her father, and that her father came to share all her thoughts of Robert.

Her old life had otherwise almost wholly dropped away from her. After her return from Beverley, Margaret came often to see her, but the visits were a trial to Helen; and perhaps Margaret saw this, for she came at longer and longer intervals, and at last came no more. Helen supposed that she had taken a place, but waited patiently till she should reappear.

She spent a great part of each day in writing to Robert and thinking about him, and trying to contrive their common future, and she made over all her bonnets and dresses. She saved a good deal of money by not buying anything new for the winter, and after her benefaction to Mrs. Sullivan, she found that even with these economies, she had nothing to buy spring dresses. But that mattered very little; she had not cared, after she first put on black, to mark the degrees of mourning punctiliously; she had always dressed quietly, and now she could wear what she wore last year without treason to her grief. The trouble was that she would soon need money for other things, before any interest would be due from the money in Mr. Hibbard’s hands, and she spent several days in trying to put into dignified and self-respectful terms the demand she must make upon him for part of her capital. She felt rather silly about it, and the longing to do something to earn a little money for herself revived. At the bottom of her heart was the expectation, always disowned and silenced, that Robert would somehow soon return; she had told Mrs. Butler that she knew he would come back as soon as he got her letter; but after the first keen pang of disappointment and surprise with which she realised that he could not at once ask leave of absence, or resign without a sort of ignominy, she heroically accepted the fact of a prolonged separation. She had caused it, she said to herself, and she must bear it; she must do everything she could to help him bear it. She idealised him in his devotion to duty, and worshipped him as if he had been the first man to practise it. She was more than ever determined not to be a burden to him in any way; she determined to be a help to him, and she had planned a pretty scene in which she brought out a little hoard of earnings, in addition to her five thousand dollars, and put them into Robert’s hand the day after their marriage. It would be doubly sweet to toil for Robert; in the meantime it was sweet to dream for him; and she had not yet decided how the sum she intended to bestow upon him was to be earned, when she found herself obliged to borrow of the future rather than able to lend to it. But she resolved all the more severely to replace with interest what she borrowed; she would not leave a stone unturned; and she forced herself, in going to Mr. Hibbard’s office, to pass the store where she had left her painted vases on sale six months before. She said to herself that they would be all in the window still; but when she dared to lift her eyes to it there were none. Then she said that they must have been taken out, and stuck away in some corner as too hopelessly ugly and unsaleable.

The proprietor of the store came forward with a smile of recognition, and of something more. “This is really a coincidence,” he said. “We have just sold your vases, and I was beginning to wonder where I should send you the money; I find there is no address on the card you gave me.”

He filliped her card with one hand against the other, and looked at her with friendly pleasure, while she stayed herself against a show-case with a faintness which he could not see.

“Sold them!” she whispered.

“Yes, all three. Mr. Trufitt was looking at them yesterday, and asked me who did them. This morning he called and took them.”

“How dared he?” cried Helen in a tumult of indignation, none the less appalling because wholly unintelligible to the person of whom she made the demand. At the mere name of Trufitt a series of odious facts had flashed without sequence into her thought: his obtuse persistence in love; his baldness; his stinginess; the fit of his pantaloons; his spiritual aridity, and his physical knobbiness. She hardly knew for which of his qualities she disliked him the most, but she recognised with perhaps superior disdain that after learning that the vases were her work, he had turned over for a whole day in his frugal mind the question of buying them. After presuming to think of owning her vases, he had also presumed to hesitate! It was intolerable.

“What right—” she began on the innocent means of the offence, but corrected herself so far as to ask instead, “Why did you tell him who did them?”

“Really,” said her victim, with just pique, “I saw no reason why I shouldn’t. You gave me no charges on that point, and I gave the matter no reflection.

I seized the first chance that offered to sell them for you.” He looked hurt and vexed; perhaps he had made his little romance about serving this very pretty young lady in her trouble and need.

Helen would not consider his kindness; in her own vexation she continued to treat him de haut en bas. “I can’t allow him to keep my vases,” she said. “You must send for them.”

“The vases were on sale,” returned the proprietor, “and I sold them in good faith. I can’t ask them back.”

“I will ask them back,” said Helen grandly.

“Good-morning.” When she put her hand on the bell-pull at Mrs. Hewitt’s, she remembered that the shopman had not given her the money for her vases, and that she had again left him without her address. This was some satisfaction, but it was not enough: she would not rest till she had her vases back again, and had broken them into a thousand pieces.

But she found that the first thing she must do was to write to the people who had sold them, and apologise for the strange return she had made for the interest they had taken in her, recognising the justice of their position and the absurdity of her own. It was not an easy note to write, but she contrived it at last, and that gave her courage to think how she should get her vases back from Mr. Trufitt, who had bought them, and had certainly a right to keep them. She knew why he had bought them, and this enraged her, but it did not help her; she felt that it would be putting herself in an asking attitude, however imperiously she demanded them again. If he yielded, it would be in grace to her; and he might refuse — very likely he would refuse. She had not decided in her own mind what she should do in this event, when she received a reply from Messrs. Pout & Lumley, enclosing Mr. Trufitt’s money for her vases, less their commission. Messrs. Pout & Lumley regretted that their Mr. Lumley had not clearly understood Miss Harkness’s wishes in regard to the vases she had left with them; but finding themselves unable to ask their return from the gentleman who purchased them, they had no course open to them but to send her the money for them.

Helen saw that she must have written her address at the top of her letter of apology, and that she must have seemed to them to have repented of her magnificent behaviour on another ground, and to have tacitly asked for the money.

She broke into a laugh at the hopeless complication.

“Really,” she mused, “I don’t know whether I’d better be put into the Home for Little Wanderers or into the Insane Hospital,” and for the present there seemed no safety but in entire inaction. She was so much abashed at the result of her yesterday’s work, that she remained with Messrs. Pout & Lumley’s letter in her hand, wondering when she should have courage to go out again and renew her attempt to see Mr. Hibbard. At first she thought she would write to him, but there seemed something fatal about her writing to people on business, and she hesitated. It was impossible to use this money of Mr. Trufitt’s; she was quite clear as to that, and, with various little expenses, her money had dwindled to less than three dollars since her interview with Mrs. Sullivan. She let the morning slip away in her irresolution, and then she decided to put the whole affair off till the next day. She felt a comfort in the decision, merely as a decision, and she began to enjoy something like the peace of mind which moral strength brings. Perhaps the weather had something to do with her willingness to postpone any duty that must take her out of doors; it was a day that would scarcely have invited her to an errand of pleasure. For almost a week the weather had been relenting, and the warmth of yesterday had brought a tinge of life to the bare slopes of the Common, where for three months past the monumental dumpings of the icy streets had dismally accumulated; and along the base of these heaps, a thin adventurous verdure showed itself, like that hardy vegetation which skirts the snowline on the’ Alps. As Helen walked across the planking on her way to Mr. Hibbard’s office, she had heard a blue-bird in the blue soft air high through the naked boughs of the elms, making querulous inquiry for the spring; and there had seemed a vernal respite even in the exasperation of the English sparrows. The frozen year, in fact, was awaking to consciousness, with secret pangs of resuscitation that now declared themselves in an easterly storm of peculiar spitefulness, driving against the umbrellas, which she saw ascending the narrow hillside street, in gusts that were filled from moment to moment with sleet and rain and snow.

In the little grate in her room the anthracite had thrown off its first gaseous malice, and now lay a core of brownish-red under a soft, lurid blur of flame; and she stood before it thinking to herself that, rather than go out in that weather, she would spend some of Mr. Trufitt’s money, as she called it, and smiling faintly at the demoralisation which had succeeded her heroics, when some one rapped at her door. She turned away from the fire, where she had stood smoothing the front of her dress in the warmth, with a dreamy eye on the storm outside, and opened the door rather resentfully. Mrs. Hewitt was there with a card in her hand, which she had apparently preferred to bring in person, rather than send up by the general housework girl. Before she gave Helen the card, she said, with a studied indifference of manner that might well have invited confidence —

“I heard him askin’ for you, and I showed him into the parlour on the second floor, till I could find out whether you wanted to see company.”

Mrs. Hewitt made her own inferences from the flush and then the pallor with which Helen received the card; and while Helen stood staring at it, she added suggestively, “Seemed to have some kind of a passel, or something, ‘t he brought with him in the carriage.”

“Oh!” said Helen, as if this idle detail had clinched the matter, “then will you tell him, please, that I’ll be down in a minute.”

She hastily made a woman’s imperceptible changes of hair and ribbon, and descended to the parlour, with her line of behaviour distinctly drawn in her mind. After a first impulse to refuse to see her visitor, and then a full recognition of the stupidity of such a thing, she saw that she must be frankly cordial. Mrs. Hewitt had hospitably put a match to the soft-coal fire laid in the grate, and it was now lustily snapping in the chilly air of the parlour; but Lord Rainford was not standing before it. He stood with his back to the door, with his hat in his hand, and his overcoat on, looking out into the storm, whose national peculiarities might well have interested him; he turned when Helen came in, and she greeted him with a welcome which she felt must have the same effect of being newly-kindled as the fire in the grate. He did not seem to notice this, but began a huddled and confused explanation of his presence, as if it ought to be accounted for and justified upon special grounds. Helen pulled the wrap she had flung on tightly round her, and concealing the little shiver that the cold air struck through her, asked him to sit down.

“The fact is,” he said, “that I was anxious to put this little parcel into your own hands, Miss Harkness, and to make sure that it had reached you in safety.” He gave her the package he had been holding, and then offered to relieve her of it.

“Oh, thank you,” said Helen, ignoring it as well as she could, while refusing to give it up. She had gathered from the fact that Lord Rainford would not have felt authorised to present himself to her at that moment, if he had not this commission from the Rays, that the Rays had sent her the parcel by him, and she began to unravel the maze, in which he was involving them both, by that clew. There had been something in what he said about London, and Nice, and Rome, and Alexandria; but whether he had been with her friends at any or all of these points, she had not made out.

“Where did you see the Rays last?” she asked. “Were the Butlers with them, or—”

Lord Rainford laughed. “Why, the fact is,” he exclaimed, “I haven’t seen them at all! They made no stop in England, through some change of plans.”

“Yes, I know,” said Helen.

“And later, I gave up my winter in Egypt. I found that I couldn’t go up the Nile, and get back in time, — in time for the visit I had intended to make to America; and — and I had decided to come to America, and — so I came!”

“Yes,” said Helen, a little dazed still. She added, to gain time for reflection rather than to seek information, “And you are fond of the Atlantic in the middle of March?”

“It wasn’t so bad. We’d a very good passage. I found myself so well here, last year, that I’ve been impatient ever since to come back.”

“I’m glad America agrees with you,” returned Helen vaguely.

“Why, I’m not here for my health, exactly,” said Lord Rainford. “I’d some other objects, and Mr. Ray asked me to bring the little box from his wife for you.”

“O yes, I understand! They sent it to you from Egypt.”

“Precisely. I assure you it wasn’t an easy matter to get it through your Custom House unopened.”

“How did you manage? By bribery and corruption?”

“No. I won’t say I wasn’t tempted to try it. But I don’t altogether like that sort of thing even in countries where they naturally expect it; and I couldn’t feel that the inspector whose hands I fell into did quite expect it. I told him that it contained a present from one lady to another, and that I would rather deliver it unopened, if he could trust me to come back and pay the duty in case it proved to be anything subject to duty. I gave him my card and address, and I did go so far as to offer to deposit a sum of money with him as surety.”

“How very, very kind of you!” cried Helen, beginning to be charmed.

“Oh, not at all,” said Lord Rainford, colouring a little. “I merely mentioned it because it led up to something that interested me. He looked at my card, and then he looked at me, and said, ‘That it wasn’t necessary between gentlemen!”’

Helen laughed at the man’s diverting assumption of a community of feeling with Lord Rainford. “You must have been edified,” she said, “with such an early example of American equality.”

Lord Rainford looked rather mystified and a little troubled. “I don’t know. I rather liked it, I believe,” he said tentatively; as one does who has not been taken in quite the way he expected.

“You are easily pleased,” cried Helen; and he seemed still more perplexed.

But as if he set these speeches down finally to some ironical intention in her, he went on: “He said I could ‘take the box along,’ and then he looked at the address on it, and said, ‘Oh, ‘t’s all right! I know Miss Harkness!”

“Who in the world could it have been?” wondered Helen. “I never dreamt that I had a friend at court — or the Custom-House.”

Lord Rainford took out his pocket-book, and, to do this, he had to unbutton his overcoat. “Won’t you lay off your coat?” asked Helen. “I believe we shall not freeze to death here, now. The fire is really making an impression.”

“Thank you,” he said, obeying. “He gave me his card. I have it here somewhere. Ah, here it is!” Helen received it and gazed at the name. “No!” she said, returning it with a shake of the head, “it doesn’t throw any light on my acquaintance, and I don’t exactly understand it.”

“Perhaps it was some other lady of the same name.”

“Perhaps. But I haven’t asked you yet when you arrived; and that ought to have been the first question.”

He seemed willing to evade it; but he said gravely that he had arrived that morning. “The fact is,” he added, “I had them send the luggage to the hotel, and I — took the liberty of driving directly here.”

“Why, this is zeal in stewardship!” cried Helen. She felt a girl’s thrill of pleasure in it. To see Lord Rainford was like meeting an old friend; she had parted from the Rays and Butlers long since he had; but his coming on an errand from them seemed like news from them, and she found herself at home with him, and truly touched by his kindness. She had been too little abroad to consider whether she was behaving like an English girl under the circumstances, and she ended by behaving like an American girl. “Now, Lord Rainford,” she said, “I’m going to do all I can to reward you, and if you were a woman you would feel very lavishly rewarded; I’m going to open this box at once in your presence.”

“I’m sure you ‘re very good,” said Lord Rainford. She put the box on a little table near them, and “I hope it isn’t the kind that opens with a screw-driver,” she continued, breaking the line of barbaric seals which held the edge of the paper covering, and then coming to a second wrapper tied with an oriental cord of silk, for which she required the aid of Lord Rainford’s penknife. “What a pity to break and cut such things!” she sighed.

“Why, I don’t know,” said the young man, not feeling the occidental strangeness to which the paper and the cord were poetry. “It’s the way they put things up, there. I dare say their dragoman had it done at a bazaar.”

“Their dragoman! At a bazaar!” cried Helen, and now he dimly sympathised with her mood, and said, “O yes! yes!” while she tore away wrapper after wrapper, vaguely fragrant of musk or sandal, and came at last to a box, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the Persian fancy. She opened this, and found, under a note from Marian Ray, a set of gold jewelry, — ear-rings, bracelets and necklace rich in the colour of the unalloyed metal, and fascinating in their fantastic naïveté of design; as old as man, as young as childhood.

“Ah, yes,” said Lord Rainford, smiling back her rapture in the trinkets. “Those goldsmith’s things. They’re very pretty. And it’s amusing to see those fellows work. They set up their little forge in the street before their doors, and make the things you’ve ordered while you’re waiting.”

“And the high, white house-walls, and the yellow sun, and the purple shadows all round them?” cried Helen, dangling the necklace from her fingers.

“Well — ah — yes; you’re quite right,” said Lord Rainford. But he added conscientiously, “There isn’t much sun, you know. The street is very narrow; and I don’t know about the walls being white; they’re apt to be coloured.”

“Oh!” deeply sighed the girl, as she dropped the pretty things back into their box. “Marian has certainly outdone herself,” she said, shutting the lid. She re-opened it, and took out the necklace again, and one by one the bracelets and the ear-rings, and stood absently regarding them, held a little way off, with her head on one side. She was thinking of the night before her father died, when she put on that silver filigree of Robert’s, and she had forgotten the young man before her. He made a little movement that recalled her to herself. “Oh, I beg your pardon,” she said softly. He had his hat in his hand, and she saw that he had taken up his overcoat. “Must you go?  I can never thank you enough for all the trouble you have taken.” She stopped, for she had a sudden difficulty. It seemed savagely inhospitable, after what Lord Rainford had done, in the way he had done it, not to attempt some sort of return. But she felt sure he must see at a glance that she was not in her own house: the bare spectacularity of the keeping; the meagre decoration of the mantelpiece and whatnot; the second-hand brown plush furniture; the fire, burning on the hearth, as in a scene set for some home of virtuous poverty on the stage, must all be eloquent of a boarding-house, even to unpractised eyes; and Helen was in doubt what she ought to do under all the circumstances. She decided upon a bold, indefinite course, and asserted that they would see each other again before he left Boston.

“Thank you,” he said. But he did not go. He looked vaguely round the room.

“Your umbrella?” she suggested, joining actively in the search.

“Ah, I don’t think I brought one,” he said speciously.

When he was gone, Helen put on the trinkets, and found them very becoming, though, as she frankly owned to her reflection in the glass, a dark girl would have carried them off better. “That comes,” she mused, “from Marian’s want of feeling for colour. I’m sure she chose them.” She smiled a little superiority at the mirrored face, and then she started away from it in dismay. Of course Lord Rainford had hesitated in that way, because he promised the Customs’ officer to come back and pay duty on the box; and she had not offered to let him take it, and he could not ask for it. There seemed no end to this day’s contretemps. He had not given her his address, and there was no telling, after that sort of parting, when she should see him again, if she ever saw him again. She had placed him in a cruelly embarrassing position, for he had given his card to that Mr. Kimball. The name was inspiration; she could at least go to the Custom-House, and pay the duty herself, and trust to some future chance of telling Lord Rainford that she had saved his honour with Mr. Kimball. Kimball! She only wondered that she should have remembered the name.

She had no idea where the Custom-House was, but she wrapped herself against the storm, and took a carriage at the nearest hack-stand. The janitor and messengers, who passed her from one to another in the Custom-House, were of opinion that Mr. Kimball was on duty in East Boston, but the last who asserted this immediately added, “Oh, here he is now!” and called after a figure retreating down a corridor, “Kimball! Here! You’re wanted!” and Helen found herself, box in hand, confronted with her old friend, the policeman.

“Why, is it you?” she cried, as joyously as if she had met him in some foreign land.

“Well, I thought it must be you,” he said, with the half-shy, half-jocose respect of that sort of Americans in the presence of a fashionable woman.

It amuses them to see the women putting on style, as they would say; but they revere them as ladies all the same. Kimball touched his hat, and then pushed it back on his head in token of standing uncovered while they talked.

Helen could not wait till she had transacted her own business before she said, “But I thought you were a policeman!”

“Well, so I was the last time I saw you,” returned Kimball. “I left the force about two months ago.

Got kind of sick of it myself, and my wife was always in a tew about the danger, and bein’ out so much nights, and the new collector was a friend of mine, and he gave me this place,” said Kimball briefly, putting the case into Helen’s hands. “That fellow behave himself after that?”

“O yes,” answered Helen, knowing that Kimball meant the hackman whom he had rebuked in her behalf; “he was very civil.”

“I thought I could fetch him,” said Kimball. “I don’t know as anything, while I was on the force, done me so much good as a chance like that now and then.” He dropped his eyes suggestively to the box in Helen’s hands; but he did not otherwise manifest any consciousness of it, and he left Helen to take her own time to say how glad she was to see him again, and how grateful she had always been to him. When she arrived, in due course, at the box, he merely permitted himself a dry smile. “I told him I knew you,” and this time Helen understood Lord Rainford, and not the hackman. “I knew it would be all right.”

“It was very kind of you, Mr. Kimball, and it’s only a chance that it wasn’t all wrong. Lord Rainford told me all about it, and I forgot to let him have the box to bring back to you till after he had gone, and then I hurried off with it myself, at once. I couldn’t endure that you should think for a moment he hadn’t kept his word.”

“Of course not,” said Kimball sympathetically. “Full of diamonds?” he asked jokingly, as he received it from her. He opened the lid, and then frowned regretfully at the trinkets. “Gold, do you suppose?”

“O yes, they must be gold,” said Helen. “It’s a present.”

“Just so. And of course you don’t know what they cost. Well, now, I’m sorry, Miss Harkness,” said Kimball, with a deep-drawn sigh of reflection.

“I guess I’ve got to have these things valued.”

“Of course,” said Helen, with a beating heart, at the bottom of which, perhaps, she accused the punctilious folly of forcing the jewels to official knowledge. She had her feminine limitations of conscience in regard to smuggling, and did not see why it could be wrong to bring in dutiable goods if the Customs’ officers did not know it; she had come out of regard to Lord Rainford, and not at all from tenderness for the public revenue; and she had a sort of vague expectation that the Government would politely decline to levy any impost in recognition of her exemplary integrity. “You just sit here,” said Kimball, finding her a chair which one of the messengers had temporarily vacated, “and I’ll see about it for you. I’ll be back in half a minute.” He was gone much longer, and then he returned with an official paper in his hand, and a fallen countenance. “Well, I done everything I could, Miss Harkness,” he said in strong disgust. He was a man who had enjoyed official consequence largely as a means of doing people unexpected favours, and he was deeply mortified at the turn this affair had taken. “You’ve got to pay fourteen dollars and seventy-five cents on this box. I wouldn’t say it to every one, and I shouldn’t want it reported, but I think it’s a regular swindle.”

“O no,” said Helen sweetly, but with a deep inward bitterness, and finding her pocket with that difficulty which ladies seem always to have, she found her pocket-book, and in it two dollars and a half. “I shall have to leave the box with you and come again,” she said: after resolving to borrow Mr. Trufitt’s money for the payment of possible but improbable duties, she had come away and left it at home in the letter enclosing it.

“No, take the box along,” said Kimball, measurably consoled at this unexpected turn. “It’s just the way with my wife. Never knows how much money she takes with her, and comes back with her bank-bills balled up into little balls like gun-wads, and her silver layin’ round all over the bottom of her bag — what there is to lay round. Never gets home ‘th more than sixty-two and a half cents. Don’t you fret, Miss Harkness; I’ll make it all right, and you can make it all right with me, any time.”

He would not listen to Helen’s protests, but forced the box back into her hands, and walked along the corridor to the vestibule with her, largely waiving each return of her self-reproach and gratitude, and at the door resolutely changing the subject, as he took a card from his waistcoat-pocket. “Lord Rainford! Curious chap Lord Rainford! Don’t know as I ever saw many lords before,” he said with Yankee caution. “Don’t know as I ever saw any,” he added with Yankee conscientiousness. He pondered the card with a sarcastic smile, as if amused that any fellow-creature should seriously call himself a lord, and then broke out in a sort of repentance: “Well, he’s a gentleman, I guess. Had his declaration made out fair and square, and opened up all his traps, first off, like a man. Forced ’em on to your notice, as you may say. No hangin’ back about him. Well!” he added, after a final inspection of the card, “it wa’n’t quite regular, as you may say, to let him take, the box along without openin’ it; but a man has some discretion, I suppose; and — well, the fact is, I took a fancy to the fellow. Seemed kind of human, after all.”

“Oh, Mr. Kimball,” cried Helen, deeply enjoying the inspector’s condescension, but with a sudden superficial terror at the thought that she had not Lord Rainford’s address, and should not know how to inform him that his word had been kept for him, “let me see his card, please!”

“Why, certainly, take it along,” said Kimball. “Or I don’t know,” he added sheepishly. “I thought my wife might like to see it — kind of a novelty, you know.”

“Oh, thank you! I don’t want to keep it,” said Helen, returning it after a swift glance. “I merely wanted to look at it. Thank you, ever so much!” When she reached home she wrote two letters: one to Kimball, enclosing the money he had lent her, and another to Lord Rainford, telling him what she S had done. She felt that finally the whole affair was very funny, and she suffered herself to run into a sprightly little account of her adventure, which she tore up. She wrote it all out fully in the letter to Robert, to which she gave up the whole afternoon; but to Lord Rainford she merely said that she thought he would have been amused at Mr. Kimball’s remarks.

XIII.

THE next day Lord Rainford came to acknowledge her note in person, and he excused himself for coming rather early on the ground of an intolerable impatience to know what Mr. Kimball had said.

“Oh, did I promise to tell you?” asked Helen, not well remembering just what she had written.

“No, I can’t say that you did,” said he with a candour which she began to see was unfailing. “But I thought, perhaps, you might.”

“I’m not sure about that. But I was thinking that if you were disappointed when you were here before not to find any of us aggressively American, you might be consoled by studying Mr. Kimball; he’s so absolutely and wholly American, that he takes every other condition of things as a sort of joke.”

“Ah, yes,” said Lord Rainford, “I understand.

I think I observed something of the sort in that class of people. But I didn’t meet it in — society.”

He looked at her inquiringly, as if he spoke under correction.

Helen laughed. “Oh, society has all been to Europe, and has lost the old American point of view — or thinks it has.” —

“Thinks it has?” he repeated with interest. “Why, I mean that, with all that acquiescence which you found so monotonous there wasn’t one of those people — except a very few sophisticated instances — who looked at you at all as people in European society would. You were hopelessly improbable to them, no matter how hard they tried to realise you, as a — nobleman. Excuse me!” cried Helen, “I didn’t intend to be personal!”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. It’s very interesting, I’m sure. It’s quite a new view of the matter. And you—”

“Now you are personal!”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. Or, yes, perhaps I did.”

“Well, then, even I, although I’m able to lecture so clearly and dispassionately about it, I’m not sure that I’m able to take the social state of Europe seriously, either.”

“Really? I didn’t find you such deeply-dyed democrats.

“We ‘re not — in our opinions; you found that out; nor in our practice, I suppose. But in our traditions and — I’ve been talking so bookishly already—”

“Oh, it’s quite what they told me to expect in Boston!

“Then you won’t mind my saying — in our environment” said Helen, with a laugh, “we are. For instance — and now I’m going to be horribly personal — as long as we supposed that Mr. Ray had introduced you as Mr. Rainford, you were real enough; but as soon as we found that you were Lord Rainford, you vanished back into the stage-plays and the storybooks.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry,” he said, with an accent of so much earnestness that she laughed again, and now with a mischievous pleasure, which he must have perceived: for he added more lightly, “It’s really very uncomfortable, you know, to be going about as a fictitious character.”

“You can’t help it, and we can’t,” said Helen. “But I suppose if you were to live here a very long while, and were to be very, very good, we might begin to believe a little in your probability.”

They talked of other matters, and she let her visitor go, with an uneasy misgiving which haunted her throughout the morning, and still lingered about her when Clara Kingsbury came later in the afternoon to beg her to lunch with her the next day, “I know you’ve not been going out, but this will be an errand of charity. Last night I picked up, of all things in the world, a live lord, and before I knew it, I had asked him to lunch with me, and he had accepted. I suppose that lords are lunched very much like other mortals, — if lords are mortal — but really when he told me that he had met you, I was ready to weep on the first person’s neck for joy. You do know him, don’t you: Lord Rainford, whom you met last fall at the Butlers?”

“O yes,” said Helen, “he brought me a message from them yesterday.”

“How very odd!” cried Miss Kingsbury, “I wonder he didn’t mention meeting you yesterday.”

“He didn’t mention going to lunch with you tomorrow,” said Helen defensively, betraying the fact that she had seen him since.

Miss Kingsbury ignored it. “Then it must be his English reticence. How droll they are! I should think it would worry them to keep things on their minds the way they do. You must let me send the coupé for you! Lord Rainford, and Miss Harkness for the first time in many months, as the play-bills say: really, for a lunch in Lent—”

“Oh! I think you must excuse me, Clara,” Helen began. “You know I can’t meet people.”

“I quite understand, dear,” said Miss Kingsbury. “There are not going to be people, or I shouldn’t have ventured to ask you. There are only to be Professor and Mrs. Fraser: Lord Rainford wanted especially to talk over Aztec antiquities with him, and I promised to get him to come. But I must have some other young lady besides myself; I can’t let it be all Aztecs and antiquities. You must come to keep me in countenance, sitting up there behind the tea-pot like a — a — teocallis.”

Helen laughed, and Clara immediately kissed her. If it were to be such a mild little affair, she felt that she could certainly go; she could see how Clara would hate to seem to have paired herself off with Lord Rainford, and she said, “Well, Clara, I will go; but I believe that, so far as Lord Rainford is concerned, I shall go as an act of penance. He was here this morning again.”

“Oh!” popped out of Miss Kingsbury’s mouth. “And I’m afraid I said something inhospitable to him — something, at any rate, that I’d like to do away the impression of.”

“Oh! do tell me what it was, Helen dear! I’m always saying such hideous things to people!”

Helen explained, and Miss Kingsbury silently reflected. “I suppose my joking about it annoyed him.”

“What did he say?” pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

“He said it was very uncomfortable going about as a fictitious character.”

“But you didn’t make him a fictitious character, Helen!”

“No; but I can see how he might misunderstand—”

“They’re very sensitive,” assented Miss Kingsbury, with a sigh. “Really,” she continued more briskly, “for people who have gone tramping about the world ever since they could walk — and they began to walk very early — and crushing other people’s feelings quite into the mire, they’re extraordinarily sensitive. One would think that they had always behaved themselves with the utmost delicacy and consideration, instead of scolding and criticising and advising wherever they went.”

“Yes,” said Helen. “But all that doesn’t excuse me, if I said too much.”

“Well, then,” said Miss Kingsbury, “come and take some of it back; or all. Tell him that the British aristocracy is the one only solid and saving fact of the universe! Good-bye, dear! Don’t worry about it. I daresay he was delighted!”

Helen was afterwards sorry that they had not dressed a little more. She was necessarily in mourning, and Lord Rainford was dipped in the gloom of her crape, and of three black silks: Mrs. Fraser’s best black silk, Miss Kingsbury’s Vermont aunt’s only black silk, and the black silk which Miss Kingsbury herself wore, in some mistaken ideal of simplicity. Helen longed to laugh, but remained unnaturally quiet.

Perhaps the black silks were too much for the Aztecs. Lord Rainford had the Englishman’s stiffness, and Professor Fraser had the professor’s stiffness; they seemed unable to get upon common ground, or to find each other’s point of view. They became very polite and deferential, and ended by openly making nothing of each other. The Frasers were obliged to go early, and Helen shortly afterwards made a movement towards departure.

Miss Kingsbury laid imploring hands on her. “Don’t go!” she tragically breathed. Stay, and try to save the pieces!” and Helen magnanimously remained; under the circumstances it would have been inhuman to go. She brightened at Miss Kingsbury’s imploring appeal; and they had a gay afternoon. When she said at last that now she really must go she was scared to find that it was half-past four. She hurried on her sack and bonnet and rubbers, and when she came down-stairs, Lord Rainford, of whom she had deliberately taken leave, was there, hospitably followed out of the drawingroom by Miss Kingsbury.

“I forgive your not taking the coupé,” she said subtly, seizing Helen’s hand for a grateful pressure at parting.

“I much prefer to walk, I assure you,” said Helen, “after being mewed up in the house all day yesterday. Good-bye.”

Miss Kingsbury’s man opened the door, and Lord Rainford stood aside for Helen to pass out. But he hurried after her.

“If you’re walking, Miss Harkness,” he said, with an obvious effort to continue the light strain in which they had been laughing and talking, “I really wish you’d let me walk with you.”

“Why, certainly,” said Helen. “I shall be very glad.”

But they walked away together rather soberly, as people do after a merry time indoors. There was a constraint on them both which Helen had to make a little effort to break. Whatever caused it on his part, on hers it was remotely vexation that she had allowed the afternoon to slip away without going to see Mr. Hibbard about her money. She must wait again till the morning.

“I’m afraid,” she said, “that you found Professor Fraser rather an unsatisfactory Aztec.”

“O no. Not at all! He’s extremely well informed, I daresay. But we approach the subject from very different points. He is interested mainly in the pottery, as the remains of an arrested indigenous civilisation; and I, as an amateur Egyptologist, was rather hoping to — ah — hear something new about the monuments — the architectural evidences. But the ground has been pretty thoroughly traversed in Mexico, and we can only look for fresh results now in Yucatan and Central America.”

He hurried off the statement without apparent interest in the matter, and with something of present impatience. The effect was to make Helen laugh a little, at which he seemed grateful.

“I suppose you have come over to look up the ground for yourself,” she began; but he hastily interrupted.

“No, I can’t say I came for that, exactly. I can’t say I came for that. I should like extremely to see those things for myself; but I didn’t come for that.”

Helen was amused at his scrupulous insistence on the point, and had a mischievous temptation to ask him just why he had come, then; but she contented herself with saying, “I always wonder that English people care to come to America at all. I’m afraid that if we had Germany and Italy at our doors, we shouldn’t care to cross the Atlantic for a run to Colorado and back.”

“The Continent is rather an old story with us, you know. Of course the towns are a good deal alike here, after you leave Boston, and there is nothing to see in the usual sight-seeing way; but the conditions are all new, and they ‘re interesting; yes, they ‘re interesting. But I can’t say exactly—” Helen felt a nervous inability to let him define, as he clearly intended, that it was not exactly the new conditions either that had brought him to America, and she turned a smiling face from the anguish of sincerity that was urging him on, and looked about her with the hope that something in their surroundings would suggest escape for them both.

“I suppose,” she said, “that you know Boston very well by this time?”

“No, I don’t know it very well,” replied Lord Rainford. “But I believe I know something about this quarter of it. This is where your principal people live — professional people, and large merchants?”

“All sorts of people live everywhere, now,” said Helen, with a little touch of her superiority; “and I can’t say that Beacon Street is any better than Commonwealth Avenue. Papa was in the India trade,” she continued, “and we lived just here in Beacon Steps.” She remembered what Captain Butler had said of the India trade and its splendour, and she had a tender filial pride in speaking of it.

Lord Rainford had not caught the word. “In trade?” he repeated.

“His business was with Indian products of all sorts,” Helen explained.

“Ah, yes,” said Lord Rainford. He walked on a silence which Helen did not heed particularly.

He must have been pondering the complications of American society, through which he was walking about the most exclusive quarter of Boston with the daughter of a person who had bartered beads and whisky to the aborigines for peltries; for, “Really,” he said at last, “I didn’t suppose there were enough of them left in this region to make it worth any one’s while. But perhaps he carried on the business at a distance — in the West?”

They came to an involuntary pause together, in which they stared at each other. “What — do you mean?” cried Helen.

“Upon my word I don’t know whether I ought to say,” returned Lord Rainford.

“You didn’t — you didn’t suppose,” Helen continued, “that papa traded with our Indians?” Lord Rainford’s silence confessed his guilt, and she added with a severity which she could not mitigate, “Papa’s business was with India; he sent out ships to Calcutta!”

“Oh — oh!” said her companion. “I beg your pardon.”

Helen made a polite response, and began to talk of other things; but in her heart she was aware of not pardoning him in the least; and she had an unworthy satisfaction in leaving him in evident distress when they parted.

The next morning, at the earliest permissible hour, Mrs. Hewitt brought her his card, with a confidential impressiveness that vexed Helen almost to the point of asking Mrs. Hewitt to say that Miss Harkness was not well, and begged to be excused; but she repented of the intention before it was formed, and went down to receive her guest.

She received him coldly, and his manner confessed the chill by an awkward constraint in the commonplaces that passed before he broke out abruptly with, “I’m afraid I must have annoyed you, Miss Harkness. I’m not ready — I don’t suppose I’ve any tact at all — but it would grieve me to think that I had misunderstood you yesterday in a way to vex you.”

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” cried Helen, with the generosity which his frankness evoked. “There was never anything of it, and now it’s all gone.” She began to laugh at the droll side of his blunder, and she said, “I was afraid that I must have seemed very rude the other day, in openly reducing you to a fairy prince.” —

“No, I rather liked that,” said Lord Rainford.

“It interested me, and it explained some things.

I’m sure people get on better in the end by being frank.”

“Oh,” said Helen, “there’s nothing like frankness,” and at the same moment she felt herself an intricate and inextricable coil of reservations.

“I think the Americans particularly like it,” he suggested.

“We expect it,” said Helen, with a subtlety which he missed.

He went on to say, with open joy in the restoration of their good understanding: “The distinctions you make in regard to different kinds of trade rather puzzle me. I don’t see why cotton-spinning should be any better than shoe-manufacturing; but I’m told it is.”

“Why, certainly,” said Helen.

“But I don’t see the ‘ certainly’!” he protested, with a laugh.

“Oh, but it is!” she explained.

“Ah,” he returned, with the air of desisting, “it’s my defective education, I suppose. But if people go into trade at all, I don’t see why they shouldn’t go into one thing as well as another. It appears all the same to — us.”

The little word slipped out; and neither of them thought of it at the time. He went away, happy in having made his peace; she parted from him with sufficient cordiality and as soon as he was gone, this word by which he had unconsciously distinguished between them and classed her, began to rankle and to sting. When it came to herself, she had the national inability to accept classification, which seems such a right and wise arrangement to Europeans, and which some Americans uphold — till it comes to themselves.

She could not get rid of her resentment by asking herself what Lord Rainford’s opinions and prejudices were to her, and resolving not to see him if he came again; and she was so hot with it, when she went out in the afternoon to Mr. Hibbard’s office at last, that she must have seemed to the clerk, who told her he was not in, to have some matter of personal question with the delinquent lawyer.

She stopped a moment on her way home at the window of a picture-store, attracted by some jars of imitation faïence, and she went in to ask about them; the sight of them suddenly revived her belief that she could still do something of the kind, and spare herself the shame of encroaching upon her capital.

A gentleman turned round from looking at them on the inside of the window, and she confronted Lord Rainford. “Ah, Miss Harkness!” he said. “Was it you who were spell-bound outside there by these disagreeable shams?”

His words struck her new hopes dead. “They are ghastly,” she said, with society hardness. Then Miss Root’s words came involuntarily to her lips,” I pity the poor wretch that expects to live by painting and selling them.” That door, she felt, was for ever closed against her, even if she starved on the outside.  The shock brought the tears into her eyes behind her veil, and she remained staring at the fictitious faience without seeing it.

“Frankly, now,” said Lord Rainford, “don’t you think that all effort in that direction is misdirected, and that the world was better before people set about prettifying  it so much?”

“Frankly,” said Helen hysterically, “I don’t believe I like frankness as much as you do.”

He laughed. “If you have ever decorated pottery, Miss Harkness, I take it all back.”

“Oh, it isn’t a question of that,” said Helen breathlessly. “It’s a question of what else the poor girl, who probably did the things, shall turn to if she stops doing them.” She had a kind of dire satisfaction in dramatising her own desperation; and the satisfaction was not diminished by the fact that these ideas had come into her head since she had denounced frankness, to which they had no relation whatever. She had meant — if she meant anything by that denunciation — to punish him for the tone of his talk in the morning. She had not forgotten his patrician us. But the talk was now far from that, and he had not been punished.

“Ah,” he said, with feeling that she respected in spite of her resentment, “I should be sorry if I seemed indifferent to that side of the question. It was only that I hadn’t thought of it.”

“I didn’t mean that,” she returned, with an aimlessness from which she thought to escape by asking, “ Is there anything up-stairs?”

“Yes,” he said; “a very beautiful picture — I fancy a very American picture.”

“The two things ought to tempt me,” said Helen, passing on as if to terminate their casual interview. — She mounted the thickly-carpeted stairs, which silenced the steps behind her; but she was not surprised to find the portière held back for her to enter the pretty little gallery, or to find Lord Rainford beside her, when she stood within. There was a gentleman there with his hat off, after our fashion in picture-galleries at home, and two suburban ladies with a multiplicity of small paper parcels, in awe-stricken whisper; but they all presently went out, and left her alone with Lord Rainford before the painting.

A yellow light fell rich into an open space in the primeval New England forest, and revealed the tragedy of an arrest for witchcraft, — an old woman haled away in the distance by the officers, with her withered arms flung upward in prayer or imprecation; and in the foreground a young girl cowering at the door of the cabin, from which her mother has just been torn. The picture was an intense expression of the pathos of the fact, which seemed as wholly unrelated to canvas or pigment, in the painter’s poetic treatment, as if it were his perfect dream of what he had meant to do.

“Yes!” said Helen, with a deep sigh of the impassioned admiration with which she always devoted her being for the moment to the book or picture she liked.

“One of your Boston painters?” asked the Englishman.

“The one,” answered Helen, and she launched out in a fury of praise, while he continued attentive to her rather than to her words.

“I suppose you can’t understand how it afflicts me,” he said finally, “to find any of the errors and sufferings of Europe repeated here.”

Helen laughed as people do at mysterious grievances. “Why, no; as far as such things are historical, I believe we’re rather proud of them. They do something to satisfy the taste for the picturesque, though after all they’re such a mere morsel that we land in Europe perfectly ravenous.”

“If they were all historical, I shouldn’t mind,” said the young man. “It was finding our current superstitions accepted here that surprised and disappointed me.”

“You don’t mean to tell me that you find any imperfections — domestic or foreign — in us now?”

“Ah, you get beyond my joking depth very soon,” he protested. “I told you once that I was a serious person.”

“I didn’t believe you could be serious about it!”

“I was, I assure you. I suppose it was my habit of taking things very seriously that put me at odds with matters at home, and that puts me at odds with matters here, where I fancied that I might be rather more of the regular order.

“I don’t understand,” said Helen; and being curious, and being fatigued, she dropped into one of the chairs that the suburban ladies had vacated.

“I mean that this morning I was trying to express the feeling which has made me a sort of white crow among my own people, and which doesn’t seem even credible here. I was very far indeed from wishing to imply disrespect for any sort of usefulness — which is the only thing I really respect in the world. Did you understand me to do so?” —

“Not exactly that,” said Helen, with a reserve which he must have seen was as yet inexpugnable.

“I daresay it was one of the misfortunes of my being a sickly boy, bred at home, apart from other boys, and indulging himself in all sorts of fancies; but I used to imagine that in America our distinctions — criterions — didn’t exist. When I began to know Americans, at home as well as here, it seemed to me that they were often rather more subservient — more eager to get on with people of rank, than Englishmen even. I confess it baffled me, and you ‘re the only American — if you’ll excuse my being so personal, as you say — who has at all explained it to me. I can see now how they may have a romantic -an historical — interest in knowing such people, and that they are not merely tuft-hunters in the ordinary sense.”

Helen could not tell whether he was speaking in irony or in earnest; she dropped the glance she was lifting to his face, in a little fear of him.

“I daresay I’ve been mistaken about other matters — appearances; and I’m vexed that I should have said something this morning that I saw put me further than ever in the wrong with you. I assure you that I don’t think better of myself for belonging to an order of things that I believe to be founded and perpetuated in ignorance and injustice. I would really rather have been one of the pilgrims who came over in the May-Blossom—”

“Flower,” said Helen, helplessly correcting him.

“Flower — I beg your pardon — than one of the robbers who came over with the Conqueror!”

He seemed to think this a prodigious tribute; but Helen could not even make a murmur of grateful acceptance. Those radical ideas, in which he expected her to sympathise, were ridiculous to her; she had always heard them laughed at, and she could not imagine how an Englishman of rank could entertain them, though she had heard that such Englishmen sometimes did, for a while.  To hear him talking in that way made him seem not so much unnatural as impossible; it was so unexpected from him that she felt a little uneasy, as if he were not quite in his right mind; but she had so far a compassion for his mania that she could not find it in her heart to tell him that he had totally misconceived her, and he went on to explain further.

“And I was merely trying to say that I thought it odd in a society where you are all commoners together-”

“Commoners!” cried Helen, in astonished recognition of the fact.

He did not heed this effect in her, but went on— “That there should be any such distinctions as ours. I’ll go further, and say that I thought it preposterous; and the other day, when I fell into that unaccountable blunder in regard to the India trade, I had no such-feeling as you — as you — might have supposed.  If I venture to speak of something that Mr. Ray let drop in one of his letters about your determination to trust to yourself and your own efforts, rather than accept any sort of dependence, it’s because I wish to tell you how much I revere and — and — honour it? It only endeared you to me the more! Miss Harkness!” he cried, while she began to look about her with a wild hope of escape, “it was for your sake that I came back!”

They were quite alone, and if it were to come to this, it might as well have come to it here as anywhere else: Helen realised the fact with a superficial satisfaction, following her superficial terror of the publicity of the place. “Ever since I first saw you—”

“Oh, don’t say any more! Indeed, you mustn’t! Didn’t the Rays — didn’t they tell you—”

“I haven’t seen them. Before I went home I knew that your father’s circumstances — But I beg you to do me at least the kindness to believe that it made no difference at all. God knows I never considered the circumstances or made them an instant’s question.”

“You are very kind, Lord Rainford; generous — but—”

“No. It pleased me to think you had nothing.

I would rather have found you as I have than in the best house in your town; I don’t like people of fashion at home; and when it comes to what is called position, or loss of it, here —

Helen tried to interpose again, but he would not let her speak.

“What Ray told me only made me the more impatient to see you again, and to assure you — to tell you how wholly I sympathised with your — ideas; and to prove my sincerity in any way you choose. If you dislike going to England — and I could very well imagine you might, for some reasons — I will come here. It’s indifferent to me where I live, so that I honestly live out my opinions. I love you for what you are, — for your courage, your sincerity, your truth to yourself; and if you think that your having — your being—”

“Oh, it isn’t at all!” cried Helen piteously,  compassionately. To a girl who had never dreamt of being loved for anything but herself, and in her quality of well-born and well-bred American, could not imagine herself less than the equal of princes, Lord Rainford’s impassioned misconceptions contained as many offences as could have been put into as many words; but she forgave them all to the pain that she saw that she must inflict. He had misunderstood everything: all her assumptions of equality, on his own plane, had been thrown away upon him; she had only been his equal as he ordained it, and condescended to her level. But she could not be angry with him, since she was to crush him with the word she must speak. She had never forgiven herself for her reckless behaviour the first time they met; and now he must have taken all her kind sufferance, all her hospitable goodwill of the past week — which she had shown in atonement — as invitation for him to hope, even to expect. She hung her head, but she must stop him at once, and, “Oh! Lord Rainford,” she murmured, “I’m engaged!”

He turned very white. “I beg your pardon,” he said, simply and quietly.

“I’ve been very greatly to blame from the beginning; I see it now, and I ought to have seen it before. But that first day, when I met you, I was very unhappy — I hardly knew what I did; I’m afraid I didn’t care.

I had driven away the dearest friend I had by my foolishness; and he had left me, hating me; it made me desperate! But it all came right very soon again; and it’s he — It’s cruel of me to be telling you this; but I want you to believe that I do prize your regard, and that since you’ve been here this time, I’ve only tried to do what I could to remove that first impression, and to — to — to — You must forgive me!”

“O yes,” said the young man with a bewildered look.

“I do see how good you are, and I respect — Any girl might be proud and glad, if she were not bound—”

“Good-bye,” said Lord Rainford abruptly. She took his hand in a clinging, pitying pressure; she would have liked to detain him, and say something more, to add those futilities with which women vainly seek to soften the blow they deal a man whom they value, but do not love. But the useless words would not come to her lips, and she must let him go without them.

XIV.

HELEN hurried home, and ran up to her room. She had thought she wanted to hide; but now she found that she wanted to walk, to run, to fly, to get into the open air again, to escape from herself some-how. She was frantic with the nervous access of which, now that Lord Rainford was gone, she had fallen the prey. She was pulling on her gloves, as she rushed down-stairs, and she almost ran over the servant, who was coming up with a card in her hand. She stopped short, and the girl gave her the card.

“For me!” she cried in wild exasperation. “I can’t see anybody! Say that I’m going out. I can’t see any one!”

A little old gentleman, with his overcoat on, and his hat in his hand, who must have overheard her, came out of the reception-room, and stood between the foot of the stairs and the street-door.

“I wish to see you, Miss Harkness, on very important business.”

“I can’t see you now. I can’t see any one! I don’t know you, sir! Why do you come to me?” she demanded indignantly, and quivering with impatience.

“My name is Everton. I bought your father’s house when it was sold last fall at auction, and I came to see you in regard to some circumstances connected with that purchase.”

“I don’t know anything about the circumstances,” cried Helen. “You must wait till Captain Butler gets home.”

“I was sure,” said Mr. Everton, with insinuation that arrested her in spite of herself, “that you knew nothing of the circumstances, and from what I knew of your father, I felt certain that his daughter would like to know of them.”

“Please tell me what you mean,” said Helen, and with a glance at the gaping servant-girl she pushed open the reception-room door. Mr. Everton politely refused to enter first, and he softly closed the door when they were both within.

“It is simply this, Miss Harkness,” said Mr. Everton, who had a small, hard neatness of speech, curiously corresponding to his small, hard neatness of person. “I have reason to believe — in fact, I have evidence — that I was the victim of a fraud on the part of the auctioneer; and that I was induced to outbid, by five or six thousand dollars, bids that were cried by the auctioneer, but that had never been made at all.”

“I don’t understand,” faltered Helen.

Mr. Everton explained, but she shook her head.

“This is all a mystery to me. Why don’t you wait till Captain Butler returns? Why do you come to me?” She suddenly added: “Or, no! I am glad you came to me. I can’t suffer any doubt to rest in your mind for an instant: if you have been wronged, that’s quite enough. Thank you for coming.” She rose with a splendour which seemed to increase her stature, and diminish Mr. Everton’s. “I was just going out, and if you will come with me I will go at once to Mr. Hibbard’s office with you. He has charge of my affairs in Captain Butler’s absence. If there has been any mistake, I am sure that he will have it corrected immediately.”

She started out with Mr. Everton at her side, and swept haughtily on for several squares. Then she found herself trembling. “I wish you would call a carriage, please,” she said faintly.

When they arrived at Mr. Hibbard’s office, Mr. Everton allowed her to pay for the carriage he had shared with her. She could not quell her excitement when she entered the lawyer’s private room with him. “Mr. Hibbard,” she began, in a key which she knew sounded hysterical, and which she despised, but was helpless to control, “Mr. Everton thinks that he was cheated in the purchase of our house; and I wish you to hear his story, please, and if it is so, I wish him to be righted, no matter what it costs.”

“Sit down,” said the lawyer. He placed a chair for Helen, and allowed Mr. Everton to find one for himself, and then waited for him to begin. Mr. Everton was not embarrassed. He behaved like a man secure of his right, and told his story over again, straight-forwardly and clearly. Mr. Hibbard smiled so lightly and carelessly at the end, that Helen felt at once that it must be all rubbish, and that it would be perfectly easy for him to undeceive Mr. Everton.

“Why didn’t you come to me directly with this story, Mr. Everton?” asked the lawyer.

“I don’t know, Mr. Hibbard,” returned the old man keenly, “that I’m obliged to account to you for my motives. I don’t know but that I should have preferred to communicate with you through my lawyer, if it had not been for this young lady, who felt sure that you would see justice done.”

The lawyer smiled at an assertion which was evidently not made to weigh with him. “You ought to know by this time, Mr. Everton, that justice is an affair of the Courts, and that lawyers look after their clients’ interests.”

“I don’t want you to look after mine at the expense of justice, Mr. Hibbard,” said Helen nervously, pulling herself back to the point from which she had lapsed at Mr. Hibbard’s smile.

“We will try to do what is right,” said the lawyer, in a way that made her feel rather silly. “But we won’t do anything rashly because two romantic young people have decided that it is right without consulting any one else.”

If Mr. Hibbard expected Mr. Everton to enjoy this joke he was mistaken. “I am quite willing,” said the old gentleman grimly, “to leave the affair to the Courts.”

“If I hadn’t your word for that, Mr. Everton,” returned the lawyer briskly, “I should doubt your willingness to do anything of the kind.”

“Why?”

“Because you know as well as I do, that you have no case, that all your suspicions and impressions, and conjectures and hearsay, wouldn’t amount to that in Court.” The lawyer snapped his fingers. “You know very well that you went to Miss Harkness to fortify yourself at the expense of the weakness you hoped to find in her, and that you have done an irregular and ungentlemanly thing in annoying her with this matter. I am sorry to say it to so old a man as you. Did you expect to extort money from her? Probably you were surprised that she chose to consult me at all. — Miss Harkness, I advise you to go home, and think no more about this matter. There’s nothing of it!”

The lawyer rose, as if to end the interview, but Mr. Everton remained seated, looking through the papers of a long pocket-book he had taken from his coat, and unfolded upon his knee, and Helen remained seated too, fascinated by the old man’s quiet self-possession.

“I have something here to show you,” he said tranquilly, offering the lawyer the paper which he had found. “And I wish you to understand,” he added, “that I am not here to be instructed as to the conduct of a gentleman, or to account for my conduct in any way. I prefer that you should not attempt to account for my possession of this paper; and if you ask me any questions in regard to it, I shall not answer them. It is sufficient for you to consider whether it is worth while for you to go into Court against it. I was willing, and am still so, to spare the scandal attending such an affair in Court, but I am determined to have the sum out of which I have been defrauded.”

The lawyer was reading the paper without apparent attention to what Mr. Everton was saying, but when he had gone through the paper again, he turned to Helen, and said reluctantly, “Miss Harkness, it’s my duty to tell you what this paper is: it’s a confession from the auctioneer that he did invent a series of bids by which he ran the price of the house up from thirty to thirty-five thousand dollars. I haven’t the slightest idea that the case, if brought into Court, would be decided in Mr. Everton’s favour on any such evidence as this; in fact, I think it would not be easy to bring the case into Court at all. But Mr. Everton hasn’t obtained the paper for any such purpose. He has obtained it with a view of frightening you into the payment of a sum — I don’t know what figure he has fixed on in his mind — to keep the matter still. Now, I advise you not to pay anything to keep it still — not a cent.” He folded up the paper and handed it back to Mr. Everton, who put it into his pocket-book again.

“Will you let me see it, please?” said Helen gently. He gave her the paper, and she read it, and then restored it to him. After a while she said, “I am trying to think what papa would have done.

Wasn’t Captain Butler at the auction — wouldn’t he have suspected, if anything had gone wrong?”

“Yes, certainly,” said the lawyer.

“And if he had had any misgivings—”

“He would have come to me with them, and I should have told him not to pay the slightest attention to them,” said Mr. Hibbard promptly. “My dear Miss Harkness, the whole thing is preposterous. That fellow Mortimer is a scamp, but he isn’t such a scamp as he professes to be. If Mr. Everton will excuse my frankness, I will say that I believe this is purely a financial transaction between himself and Mortimer. The fellow had heard of Mr. Everton’s suspicions, and when he wanted money very badly, he went to him, and sold out — for a sum which Mr. Everton’s delicacy would prevent him from naming; but probably something handsome, though Mortimer has been going to the dogs lately, and he may have sold out cheap.”

Mr. Everton, having folded up his paper and put it back into his pocket-book, and restored that to his breast-pocket, rose, and buttoned his coat over it. “I’m sorry, Miss Harkness,” he said, “that you haven’t a better adviser. I can’t expect you to act independently of him, and that’s your misfortune. I knew your father, and he was a very honest man. Good-morning.”

“He was too honest,” cried the lawyer, “to make any difficulty about paying you your cut-throat usury.”

“My loan came at a time, Miss Harkness, when your father could get money nowhere else, and it saved him from bankruptcy. Good-afternoon.”

He took no notice of the lawyer in quitting the room, and when he was gone the latter broke out with, “I hope he will press this to an issue! I think I could give him something to think of if I could get a chance at him in open Court. The old scoundrel, to come to you with this thing! But he knew better than to come to me first. I wonder he dared to come at all! Miss Harkness, don’t be troubled about it; there’s nothing of it, I assure you; nothing that need give you a moment’s anxiety as to the result. You may be absolutely certain that this is the end of the whole affair; he would never dare to go into Court with that paper in the world. It was given to him, you may rest satisfied, for the sole purpose of extorting money from us privately, and with the agreement — which Mortimer would know how to make perfectly safe for himself — that it was never to be used in any public or legal way. Mr. Everton has made his attempt, and has failed; that’s all. You’ll hear no more of it.”

“Is it true,” asked Helen gently, and with an entire absence of the lawyer’s resentful excitement, “that he lent papa money when he could get it nowhere else?”

“In any ordinarily disastrous time your father could always have got money, Miss Harkness. But the time that Everton alluded to was one when it could be got only of usurers like himself. He made your father pay three or four times what any man with a Christian conscience would have asked for it.”

“And did it save papa from bankruptcy?”

“Everybody was in difficulties at that time; and—”

“Do you think,” pursued Helen, as if it were a branch of the same inquiry, “that he really supposes the auctioneer cheated?”

“Very likely he had his suspicions. He’s full of all sorts of suspicions. I daresay he suspects that you and I were in collusion in regard to this matter, and prepared for him if he should ever come upon such an errand.”

“Oh!” murmured Helen.

“Why should you worry yourself about it, Miss Harkness? As it was, he bought the house at a ruinously low figure, and it’s worth now a third more than he paid for it six months ago.”

“But you don’t think it is possible the auctioneer could have done such a thing?”

“Oh, possible — yes, but extremely improbable.”

“It makes me unhappy, very unhappy,” said Helen. “I can’t bear to have any doubt about it. It seems a kind of stain on papa’s memory.”

“Bless my soul, my dear young lady!” cried the lawyer, “what has it to do with your father’s memory?”

“Everything, if I don’t see the wrong righted.”

“But if there hasn’t been any wrong?”

“Ah, that’s the worst: we can’t find out. Mr. Hibbard, you never heard any one else express any misgivings about the sale?” The lawyer shifted a little in his chair, and betrayed a fleeting uneasiness, which he tried to hide with a laugh. Helen was instantly upon him: “Oh, who was it?”

“I haven’t admitted that it was anybody.”

“But it was! You must tell me!”

“There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. It was as innocent a person as yourself: it was Captain Butler!”

“Captain Butler!”

“And I can tell you, for your entire satisfaction, I hope, that he went to the auctioneer and laid his doubts before him, and the auctioneer solemnly assured him that the bids were all bona fide, just as he now solemnly assures Mr. Everton that they were fictitious. But Captain Butler was not so shrewd as Mr. Everton — he didn’t make the auctioneer put himself in writing.”

Helen pulled her veil over her face. “And is — is there no way of solving the doubt?” she made out to ask.

“There is no doubt to solve, in my mind,” said Mr. Hibbard. “I advised Captain Butler to dismiss the matter altogether, as I now advise you. I tell you that you’ve heard the last of Mr. Everton in this connection.”

Helen did not answer. But presently she said, “Mr. Hibbard, I was going to come to you for some money. I understood from Captain Butler that you had charge of what was left for me, and that I could get it of you whenever I wanted it.”

“Yes, certainly.”

“In such sums as I like?”

The lawyer laughed. “In any sums short of the amount of Mr. Everton’s claim.”

Helen was daunted to find herself unmasked; but she only put on the bolder front. “But if I wish to pay that claim?”

“Then I should intervene, and say the claim did not exist.’’

“But if the money is mine?” she urged.

“If you insisted upon taking up all your money, I should, as Captain Butler’s friend, and as the old friend of your father, refuse to let you have it, unless you explicitly promised me that you would not give it to Mr. Everton. For it would literally be giving it to him.”

“And if I said that you had no right to refuse it? If I told you that I was of age, and that I was determined to have it without conditions?”

“Then I should make bold to defy you at any risk till I had laid the whole matter before Captain Butler, and heard from him in reply. Now, my dear Miss Harkness,” said the lawyer, “I know just how you feel about this matter, and I want you to believe that if I thought it was just, I should not only be willing to have you pay Mr. Everton’s claim, but should urge you to pay it, even if it beggared you.”

“Would it — would it take all the money?” faltered Helen.

“Yes, all. But it isn’t to be thought of; the whole thing’s in the air; it’s preposterous.” The lawyer went carefully and judicially into the whole case, and clearly explained the points and principles to Helen, who listened silently, and to all appearance with conviction. At the end he asked cheerfully, as he prepared to write a cheque, “And now, how much money shall I let you have to-day?”

“None!” said Helen, “I couldn’t bear to touch it. I know that you feel as you say; and it seems as if you must be right. But if I spent a cent of that money I could never be happy again unless I knew absolutely that there was nothing in this claim.”

The lawyer smiled despairingly. “But you never can know absolutely!”

“Then I will never touch the money.”

“Really, really,” cried the lawyer, “this is too bad. Do you want me to give you this money to throw into the street? I honestly believe that the first man who picked it up there would have as much right to it as Mr. Everton.”

“Yes, but nobody knows” said Helen, rising. “I’m sorry to give you all this trouble, and take up your time; and I wish that I needn’t seem so obstinate and unreasonable; but indeed, indeed I can’t help it.”

“Confound the old rascal!” exclaimed Mr. Hibbard. “I wish I’d indulged myself in kicking him out of doors. Miss Harkness, I’ll inquire into this matter, and in the meantime I’ll write to Captain Butler. Do you think that I can do more?”

“No.”

“And now I shall be glad to give you any money on account.”

“I can’t take any,” said Helen; “it would be quite the same thing. I never could pay it back, and if it turned out that it belonged to him, I should be either a beggar or a thief.”

The lawyer gave a roar of expostulation. “But if you are out of money what will you do?”

“I have a little yet. Captain Butler supplied me with money before he went away, and I have still some of it left.” This was true. She had been using what she called Mr. Trufitt’s money, and she had a dollar and seventy-five cents left of the sum that Captain Butler had made her believe was hers.

The lawyer, on his part, forbore to explain that the money Captain Butler gave her must have been in anticipation of interest on the five thousand dollars he held for her. He only said, “But you will accept a loan from me?”

“No; I shouldn’t feel that I was making any sacrifice then.”

“But why, under heaven, should you make a sacrifice?” demanded the business man of the girl.

“I must — to feel true to myself,” she answered; and something like this absurdity she repeated in answer to all his prayers and reasons, and went away empty-handed at the end.

XV.

THAT evening Helen tapped at Miss Root’s door, and entered in response to the girl’s invitation to “Come in!” When she showed herself within, “Oh, excuse me!” cried Miss Root, in the reedy note which ladies make when they have pins in their mouths. She had her lap full of sewing, and she obviously could not get up. “I thought it was Bridget.”

“Bridget wouldn’t be coming to you on my errand,” said Helen with a bluntness which at once made its way with Miss Root.

“What is your errand?” she asked, taking three pins out of her mouth for the purpose.

“I must earn some money, somehow. I thought perhaps you could tell me — advise me—”

“I can tell you, but I can’t advise you,” said Miss Root, bending over her work, and treating Helen’s extremity as one of the most natural things in life, “I earned money enough to come to Boston and study Art” — she pronounced it with the conventional capital rather disdainfully, as if she would have chosen a homelier expression if she could have thought of one—” by helpin’ mother take boarders. We took ’em our summers, and I taught winters. That’s the way I earned some money. But I suppose you don’t want to take boarders.”

Helen hardly knew how to interpret the gleam in Miss Root’s eye. But, “No,” she answered simply, “I shouldn’t know how to do that.”

“Well, neither do most of the boardin’-house keepers.” She stopped here so definitively that Helen was obliged to take the word if the conversation was to go on.

“I thought,” she faltered, “that perhaps you could tell me how to do something with my pencil that would sell. I can sketch a little.”

“Yes,” said Miss Root non-committally; “I remember.”

“And it seems to me, that if I knew how to go about it, I ought to be able to turn the study I have given it to some account.”

“I suppose,” said Miss Root, “that it’s for some charity.”

“For some charity!” cried Helen. “No, indeed! it’s for myself.”

“Oh,” said the other. “Then if I were you, I wouldn’t throw my time away. You’ll never succeed.”

“I don’t want to succeed — as an artist,” retorted Helen with a little pique. “But I have really come to the point where I must either earn some money, or else borrow or beg it. There are plenty of people who would be ready to give it or lend it, but I can’t let them, and I hoped that you might be able to tell me how to earn it.”

Miss Root shook her head. “Of course, I like your spirit; it’s the right spirit; but I can’t help you in that way. I’ve never sold a thing yet, and I don’t know when I shall, if I ever shall. If I didn’t love to paint, I should quit and go home by the first train. But I do love it, and I’m goin’ to stick to it till I begin to starve. I don’t ever expect to get married — that was finished up long ago! — and mother’s married again, and here I am without a chick or a child to trouble me, or trouble about me. But if I had a cat to keep, I shouldn’t try to keep it on Art. Oh, I presume that after years and years, I can sell a picture, maybe; but I know painters in this city — real artists” — she put the words unsparingly, as with a conscience against letting Helen suppose herself  for a moment anything of the kind—” that would be glad to give all they do for a regular income of a thousand dollars a year. If you’ve a mind to paint gimcracks,” she added, and this was the only way in which she deigned to acknowledge her privity to Helen’s previous performance, “you can sell ’em if some simpleton sets the fashion of buying ‘em, or if people know you did ‘em. But I presume that ain’t what you want.”

“No, indeed,” said Helen, shuddering at the thought of Mr. Trufitt, and helplessly loathing herself for being at that moment a pensioner on his bounty; “it would be better to starve.”

“Or,” pursued Miss Root, “you might teach drawing. People have to throw away their money somehow. But, if I understand, you don’t want to go to people that have money to throw away for that any more than the other thing.”

“No,” murmured Helen. She knew that Miss Root had at once divined that she had come to her instead of going to any friends of her former life because she did not choose to let them pity her, and help her to any sort of trivial work out of pity. In the girl’s straightforward sincerity she felt the comfort that the feminine soul finds in the frankness of a man, and she subtly perceived that, for all her show of indifference, Cornelia liked her, and was touched by the advance she had made in coming to her. In fact, Miss Root prided herself on her large-mindedness, a quality which she applied more impartially to people about her than is generally done. Her liberality was not merely for people of her own origin and experience, but for others who had known better fortunes, and had lost them, or who had them still and were unhappy in them; and the severity which accompanied her large-mindedness began with herself, and extended only to envious and detracting spirits. If the secrets of Miss Root’s soul could be unveiled, it would be seen that she had been obliged from the beginning to discipline herself into accepting Helen as worthy her esteem and regard, in spite of her beauty, her style, and her air of a finer world than Cornelia Root had known, except at a distance. The struggle was sharp, but it had ended in the interest of large-mindedness. When Mrs. Hewitt assumed, in Helen’s absence from dinner, while she was lunching at Miss Kingsbury’s, to be confidentially speculative about the English lord who seemed to be coming to see Miss Harkness pretty often, and spending a good deal of time when he did come, and so tittered, Cornelia led off a generous opposition.

“I don’t know,” she said, “how much a lord’s time is worth; but if it ain’t worth any more than some of the fellows’ time that used to come flirtin’ round with our summer boarders, I don’t see how he could put it in much better. I guess he ain’t after her fortune, any way; and I guess he ain’t goin’ to find much more of a lady anywhere. If he wants to marry her, I shan’t object, even if they don’t ask me to the weddin’. I shouldn’t want much to marry a lord for my own pleasure; but I don’t believe but what if Miss Harkness does she’ll be a credit to him.”

Cornelia had steadfastly set her face against knowing or caring anything about the affair, and such was now her discipline that she believed she could keep it up till the end, whenever that was. She had not only snubbed Mrs. Hewitt the day before, but this evening, when Helen early withdrew from tea, pale, and with the evidence of having passed a day of great nervous excitement, she refused even to enter into discussion of what Mr. Evans called the phenomena, in the light of philosophico-economic speculation.

“Here,” he contended, “are a most interesting series of facts. I suppose that never, since the earliest settlement of Boston, has a member of the British aristocracy called three times, on three successive days, upon a young lady resident in a boarding-house, even of such acknowledged gentility as ours. If Mrs. Hewitt will excuse me, I will assume that it is not the merits of her establishment which have attracted him, but that he has been drawn here by that charm in Miss Harkness which we all feel. He knew her in other days — in better days — and nobly, and like a nobleman, he has sought her out in our humble midst — if that is a correct expression — and laid his coronet — if it is a coronet — which he keeps somewhere concealed about his person, at her feet. As no human girl of the American persuasion was ever known to refuse a lord, if she got the chance, the inference is irresistible that our noble friend was instantly accepted, and has already written home to have his ancestral halls whitewashed up for the reception of his bride.”

“Well, you may twist it and you may turn it as much as you please, Mr. Evans, and call it philosophico-economic speculation, or anything you want to,” returned Miss Root. “I call it gossip; and I never did gossip, and I never will. I don’t care if she was goin’ to marry twenty lords; it’s none of my business. All I know is that she has behaved herself like a perfect lady ever since she’s been in the house.”

“New Hampshire for ever!” cried Mr. Evans. “The granite ribs of your native State speak in every syllable, Miss Root. But you will acknowledge that you did hate her just a little, won’t you, for her superiority to us all — which she can’t conceal — and that you would recognise the hand of Providence in the dispensation, if his lordship had jilted her today?”

“No, I wouldn’t!” retorted Cornelia, all the more vehemently for her perception of the malicious truth in the insinuation.

“Why, that’s exactly what my wife said, when I taxed her with the same thing. It must be so. Now don’t,” said her tormentor, as Cornelia rose from the table, “let her see any change in your manner because you think she’s going to marry a lord.”

It was the insinuation in this charge that made it extremely difficult for Cornelia Root to adjust her behaviour to the occasion: if Miss Harkness was going to marry that lord — and Cornelia Root was principled against inquiring — she was not going to make the slightest change, and yet she was aware that some extra internal stiffness, which she must be careful not to show, would be requisite for this uniformity. When it appeared from Helen’s application that she could not be going to marry the lord, at least for the present, Cornelia had to guard against self-betrayal in a too precipitate relaxation. The note of despair in Helen’s confession that she could not go to people to ask pupils for the same reason that she could not ask them to buy her gimcracks, touched Cornelia, or as she would have said, it made her feel for the girl. But feeling was the last thing, according to her belief, that any honest person ought to show. She was going to help her, but she was not going to let her see that she was capable of any such weakness as sympathy; and she had before her the difficult task of treating Helen just as she would have treated a girl who had always been poor, and of not treating her any worse. “There are a good many things that women take up nowadays,” she said, with an aspect of hard indifference. “Some of ’em learn telegraphin’ — that must pay almost a cook’s wages; some of ’em go into the hospitals, and learn to be professional nurses — that takes you about two years before you can get a certificate, and then it’s a killin’ life; there are the public schools, but there are so few vacancies, and you have to wait and wait for months, even after you ‘re prepared.”

She looked at Helen as if she thought that Helen was probably not prepared, and Helen shook her head assentingly. “No,” she sighed, “I couldn’t wait. But perhaps I shouldn’t want to do anything for a great length of time,” she said innocently, with the thought of Robert’s return in her mind. “It might only be for a limited period.”

“That’s what I supposed,” said Miss Root. “That’s the great trouble., If a man takes a thing up, he takes it up for life, but if a woman takes it up, she takes it up till some fellow comes along and tells her to drop it. And then they ‘re always complainin’ that they ain’t paid as much as men are for the same work. I’m not speakin’ of you, Miss Harkness,” she said, with a glance at Helen’s face, “and I don’t know whether I want to join in any cry that’ll take women’s minds off of gettin’ married. It’s the best thing for ‘em, and it’s about all they ‘re fit for, most of ‘em, and it’s nature: there’s no denyin’ that.

But if women are to be helped along independent of men — and I never was such a fool as to say they were — why, it’s a drawback. And so most of ’em that can’t wait to prepare themselves for anything, because they don’t expect to stick to anything, they turn book-agents, or sell some little paytented thing; or they try to get a situation in a store.” Cornelia began to sew furiously, as if in an exasperation with her sex, that she could not otherwise express. “And you may be sure,” she said, after a silence, “that every one of ’em tries to do something better than she’s fit for, and that she despises her work, and thinks she ain’t paid half enough for it.” Helen did not heed this last outburst. She was trying, with a sickening chill at heart, to realise herself in the character of those resolute young women who had sometimes won a furtive access to her by asking at the door for Miss Harkness, and sending up their names as if they were acquaintances, and then suddenly developing their specimen copy of the book for which they were taking subscriptions, or the needle-threader or thimble-case, or convertible pen-wiper and boot-buttoner which they were selling. She could as little imagine herself behind the counter of a Washington Streetfancy or variety store, standing all day in the hot, dry air, and shrilly piping “Ca-ish!” as she had heard those poor shop-girls doing while they rapped on the counter with their pencils for the cash-boy, and munched a surreptitious lunch of crackers and chocolate creams. If it must come to this, she did not know what she should do.

She was as firm as ever that she would not touch the money in Mr. Hibbard’s hands as long as the least doubt tainted it; but she began to be frightened at herself, and at the prospect before her.

“And is there — is there nothing else?” she asked, in a voice which she tried to make steady, and only succeeded in making almost as low as a whisper.

“O yes,” said Miss Root; “there’s the theatre.”

Helen’s heart gave a throb of hope. She used to play a good deal in private theatricals; she had acted a French monologue once, and she had taken a part in a German vaudeville; everybody had praised her, and she had unquestionably borne the palm from all her dramatic competitors. A brief but brilliant future dazzled before her: an actress who was evidently a lady, and carried the air and tone of good society with her on the stage; triumphs and gains in cities distant from Boston in an incognito strictly preserved; and then a sudden but inexorable retirement after a given time: it was easy work for Helen’s lively fancy to contrive all this, with a shining amplification, as rapid and full as if she had dreamed it in sleep. “Yes?” she said with an interest which she could not at once forbid herself.

“I had a friend,” pursued Miss Root, “a friend — well, she was a kind of connection, — and she came up to Boston the same time I did — crazy to go on the stage. She used to act in the school exhibitions, and I guess she got her head turned; anyway nothing else would do her. But she was real modest about it; they all are; she only wanted to play little parts like Juliet, and Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth.

Well, she went to a manager, and he was very kind and pleasant, and I guess he saw what a simple goose she was, and he told her he would let her have a chance to show what she could do, and he gave her a place in the ballet.”

“In the ballet?” palpitated Helen. The colours had already begun to fade from her vision of histrionic success, and the crazy structure now trembled to its fall.

“She thought,” resumed Cornelia, “just as I. presume you do, that it was dancin’. She said she couldn’t dance any; her folks had always been strict orthodox, and wouldn’t let her learn; and he laughed and said most of the ballet never danced at all. She’d have to go on as a peasant, or something like that, with a lot of others, first off; and as soon as he could he’d give her a few words to say, and she could see how she got along. It wa’n’t playing Ophelia exactly, but she was dead set on going on to the stage, and so she took up with his offer, and glad enough, and she got six dollars a week from the start.”

“And has she ever — ever got on?” asked Helen faintly.

“Well, the only time I ever saw her was one night when she had the part of a page. I guess she must have been on the stage as much as a minute, and she said at least a dozen words. But I couldn’t seem to stand it, to see any friend of mine up before all those people in boy’s clothes; and she seemed pretty long for a page, and kind of bony, and I went away after the first act; I was afraid she might come on again.”

Helen smiled and shuddered; the idea of boy’s clothes was final, even in a reverie, and she hung her head in innocent shame.

“Now,” said Cornelia, with a keen glance at her abasement, and apparently convinced that she had brought her low enough, “if you really do want to do something, I can get you a chance to try.”

Helen started. “In the theatre? Oh, I couldn’t.” Cornelia laughed. “No, not in the theatre. But there’s a friend of mine — well, he’s a kind of a connection too — used to have a photograph saloon down in our place; used to have it on wheels, and get it dragged round from one village to another; and he’s got Boston-bit too; and so he’s come up, and he’s opened a gallery down in Hanover Street; well, it’s pretty far down. Well, he hain’t got a very high class of custom, that’s a fact; and if he had he wouldn’t have this work to do, I presume.”

“What is it?” asked Helen, “It’s colourin’ photographs.”

“O yes; I’ve seen them,” said Helen, remembering some examples of the art, hung aloft in oval frames, in country parlours, of which they were cherished ornaments.

“It ain’t a very high kind of art,” said Miss Root, as if she found something to reprove in Helen’s tone, “but it ain’t every one that can do it, low as it is.”

“I’m sure I don’t depreciate it,” returned Helen.

“I should be only too glad if you thought I could do it.”

“I guess I can get you the chance to try,” said Cornelia; and now, as if she wished to leave the subject and prevent the premature acknowledgments which she felt she had not yet earned, she unpinned her sewing from her knee, and stood up holding it at arm’s-length from her.

“The trouble is,” she mused aloud, “that you can’t tell how it’s going to hang, after all your worry.”

“Why don’t you let me drape it on you?” asked Helen.

Cornelia dropped the lifted arm, and let the skirt trail on the floor. “Well, if you think, Miss Harkness, that I’ve been hintin’ round for anything of that kind!”

“I don’t,” said Helen. “Honestly! But I like to fit dresses. I used to help Our cook with hers.” Cornelia Root had to discipline with uncommon severity the proud spirit that revolted at having the same hands drape its corporeal covering which had draped the person of an. Irish cook. She subdued it, but it was not in human nature that she should yield gracefully. “I guess I better go to a dressmaker with it,” she said. “I don’t want to trouble you.”

“It won’t be any trouble, indeed,” said Helen, taking the dress from her.

After fifteen minutes of lively discussion, of pinning back and pulling forward, and holding up and letting drop, during which Cornelia twisted her neck half off, as she said, looking at her own back, she mounted a chair and surveyed herself in the glass. “Well, you have got a touch, Miss Harkness,” she said. “O yes,” returned Helen simply. “I know that.”

“Well, why in the world—” Cornelia began. But she checked herself.

“Why what?” asked Helen.

“Oh, nothing,” returned Cornelia, with the outward hauteur which was apt to mark a spiritual struggle with her. “I’ll see Zenas Pearson to-morrow about those photographs.”

“That will be very kind of you,” said Helen.

The next day Cornelia brought her three of the unsparing likenesses in which the art of photography sometimes unmasks its objects. One was a gentleman in what he would have called chin-whiskers, with his hair gathered in a puff over his forehead, and a gold watch-chain wandering across his bulging shirt-front. The other was a lady in middle life, with her small features losing themselves in the obese contour out of which her eyes looked over little cushions of fat. The gentleman was to be painted of a fair complexion, and the lady as a brunette. The third picture was the likeness of this lady’s child, which was to be coloured in accordance with her present appearance in the spirit-life as reported by a writing-medium.

“I don’t envy you the job, any,” said Cornelia Root. “Zenas apologised for not havin’ any place for you to work in his gallery, but I told him I guessed you’d rather work a while at home first.”

“O yes,” murmured Helen, lost in a heart-sick contemplation of her subjects.

“He can allow you two dollars apiece for ‘em. It’s better than nothin’, and it ain’t much better, and so I told him,” said Cornelia.

“Oh, it’s quite enough; quite,” returned Helen. After her first despair, she resolved to be very faithful and conscientious in her work, and try to make the poor things look as well as she could. She had finished them all by the end of the week, but when Cornelia carried her work to Mr. Pearson, he was critical of it. “Of course,” he said, “she’s done her best, and so far forth she’s earned her money; but anybody can see with half an eye that she ain’t a natural artist. There ain’t any touch about it.”

“Good gracious, Zenas Pearson!” cried Cornelia.

“Do you expect to get an artist to paint up those scarecrows of yours?”

She put Zenas down, but he offered her no more work, and she was too proud, in Helen’s behalf, to ask for it. She was more deeply hurt and discouraged than Helen herself appeared. The latter, in fact, professed a sense of relief when Cornelia, with a blunt reluctance, owned the truth.

“I couldn’t do any more, if he had given them to you for me. I know that I don’t do them well, and they ‘re so hideous, that if I were the greatest artist in the world I couldn’t help making them wooden and staring. I must try something else; and I’ve been thinking — I’ve been wondering — if I couldn’t write something and sell it. Do you know any people — women — who write for the magazines, or the newspapers, rather?”

“Well, I know one girl: she’s an art-student, and she helps herself out by correspondin’; writes for two or three papers up-country, and out West; but I never saw any of her stuff, and I don’t want to; for of all the perfect simpletons — !” Cornelia was expressively silent; she added thoughtfully: “Yes,? guess it must be pretty easy to do, if that girl can do it. I wonder I didn’t think of it before. Why don’t you ask that ridic’lous Mr. Evans? He’s the literary editor of Saturday Afternoon, and I guess he could tell you all about it.”

“I don’t like to trouble him,” said Helen.

“Well, I do, then,” retorted Cornelia. “What’s he here for?”

“I can’t let you,” said Helen, thoughtfully folding the dollar-bills that Cornelia had brought her. “This money will last a little while, and perhaps — perhaps,” she concluded rather faintly, “I can think of something to do by the time it’s gone. I know I’m very weak and silly,” she said, lifting her suffused eyes to Cornelia’s.

“Not at all!” cried Cornelia; and that evening she cornered Mr. Evans, as she said, and attacked him about some sort of newspaper work for a friend of hers.

He was sitting before his fire in a deep chair, with his feet on the hearth of the open soap-stone stove; Cornelia assailed him from a higher chair at a little distance. “Some young man you ‘re trying to help along?” he asked, smiling up into Cornelia’s eyes.

“You know it ain’t any young man!” cried the girl.

“Oh! You didn’t sky” returned Mr. Evans coolly. He asked presently, “Why does Miss Harkness want to write for the papers?”

“Mr. Evans! I think you ‘re too bad! I never said it was Miss Harkness.”

“But you won’t say it isn’t.” —

“I won’t say anything about it. There! And if you can’t give me any advice without askin’ who it is—”

“Oh, that isn’t necessary now. But what I do wish to ask, Miss Root — and I think you owe it to yourself to answer frankly — is simply this: are you sure that you are trying to befriend Miss Harkness from the highest motive?” —

“Highest motive?” demanded Cornelia whom such  an appeal must always arrest. “What does the man mean?” She was on such terms of offence and defence with Mr. Evans, that she often cast aside all formalities of speech in dealing with him and came down to sincerities that seemed to afford him the purest delight.

“What do I mean? Why, I mean this — and a person who pretends to keep such a conscience as you do always dusted off and ready for use in any emergency, ought to be able to answer without prevarication. Are you sure that you are not doing more to help this Miss Harkness because she is a lady of fallen fortunes, than you would do for some poor girl who was struggling up, and trying to support inebriate parents, and pay a younger brother’s way through college?” Cornelia opened her mouth to protest, but he hastened to prevent her. “Wait! Don’t commit yourself! Are you sure that her being visited by a lord has nothing to do with your beneficent zeal? Are you sure that you are not indulging a native disposition to curry favour with worldlings and vanities, generally? Are you certain that at the best you are seeking anything better than the self-flattery that comes through the ability to patronise a social superior? I merely ask you to reflect.”

These were precisely the doubts which Cornelia had already exorcised; but they all sprang into new life at the touch of the laughing malice that divined them.

“I declare,” she said, “you are enough to provoke a saint!”

“I’m glad to see it,” said Mr. Evans. “Now, I’m not a saint, and I can be frank and open about a great many things that I observe saints like to fight shy of. A saint — especially a female one — is about as difficult a party to bring to book as any I know. Now I don’t mind acknowledging all these shameful motives which you feel that you must blink. I don’t mind saying that the notion of throwing something in the way of a young lady who has moved in the first circles, and still associates with lords and ladies on equal terms, is quite intoxicating to me, and that I will help you in this work with far more pleasure than if she were a mechanic’s or farmer’s daughter.” He smiled at the rueful misgiving painted in Cornelia’s countenance. “Come, Miss Root, what kind of newspaper work does your patrician protégée think she can do?”

“I don’t know as I want to talk with you about it,” said Cornelia. “You had no business to find out who it was.”

“I know — I know. It was my fatal gift of divination. A random guess, and your own guilty soul did the rest. Well, go on, Miss Root. You know that you ‘re not going to let a selfish pique interfere with an opportunity to do good — to one above us,” he added.

“I should suppose,” said Cornelia grimly, “that you would know a great deal better than I do what she’d best try. I presume she could do most any kind of writin’.”

“That is the presumption in regard to all refined and cultivated people till they prove the contrary, — which they usually do at the first opportunity.”

“I should think,” pursued Cornelia, whose courage always rose in view of any but moral obstacles, “that she could write notices of books. Seems as if almost anybody could write them.”

“Yes,” assented the journalist. “It seems as if anybody did write the greater part of them.” He took up some books from his tables. “Here are three novels, if she wants to try her hand on them, and she can review the batch together. That is the way we do. There’s quite a range in these: one is an old writer of established fame, one has not quite proved himself yet, and one is unknown. You would naturally think that if such books are works of art they would go to people of experience and reflection for review, but that is a mistake: they go to people who can be the most flippant and impertinent about them, and we find, as a general rule, that the young ladies who write for us can be more flippant and impertinent than the young men.” He laughed as he handed the books to Miss Root, and Watched her face.

“If I could ever tell,” she said, taking them from him, “how much you believed of what you said, it would be one satisfaction.”

“No, no, that isn’t it, Miss Root: what you would like to know is how much you believe of what I say. Very little, I imagine. The philanthropist’s ability to reject any truth that tells against him — or her-is unbounded.”

“Well,” said Cornelia, “I don’t know as I care, so long as you give her this chance.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly safe: she’ll be sure to fail,” said the editor. “Tell her I want the notices next week, sometime. In the meantime, I don’t know who’s writing them.”

He did not betray himself in any way during the ensuing week, and he left Cornelia unmolested with a secret which she did not know whether she ought or ought not to keep. Helen worked Very hard at the criticisms; she had it on her conscience to do them very fairly and justly, because when she had read the books carefully through she perceived for the first time how much thought and labour must go to the construction of even indifferent stories; and she felt that it would be a sin not to do justice to all this in the case of novels which were certainly not first-rate. She thought that she ought to be careful about her style, and not say anything in a slipshod or slovenly way. She wrote out her reviews in her neatest hand, and then she copied them all, so that there was not one blot or erasure. She determined that if Mr. Evans accepted them, Miss Root should tell him who had done them, for there were some points which she was doubtful about, and on which she would like his instruction. She was very simple and humble in the matter, and in her own mind looked up to the journalist in his professional quality with an awe that she had not hitherto felt for anything connected with Saturday Afternoon. Her father used sometimes to buy that paper, and send it to her when she was away from home, and she had read its social gossip with a high-minded disapproval of the entertainment it gave her. She never thought of looking at the notices of books in it, and when she first heard that Mr. Evans was connected with it she had resolved to be very careful what she said before him, and she had partly withdrawn from anything like intimacy with Mrs. Evans for that reason. It was very well for Clara Kingsbury; Clara Kingsbury was a kind of public character herself, with her charities and enterprises, her Homes and her Fairs, which were always needing newspaper mention; but for Helen it was another affair. Even now, while the question of the acceptance of her work was pending, Helen asked herself whether she would like to have the Butlers know that she wrote for the Saturday Afternoon, and was quite sure that she would not. “If he should take them, and you tell him who did them, please ask Mr. Evans not to mention it to any one,” she said in giving her manuscript to Cornelia Root, who had suffered everything in the guilty consciousness that he knew already who had done them.

“I ain’t afraid,” she said to Mr. Evans, in discharging herself of the business, “that you’ll mention it; but if you should have to refuse them, and then if you should show out any way that you knew, it would about kill me.”

“Rely upon me, Miss Root,” returned the editor. “I have rejected such loads of young-lady literature, that I have become perfectly hardened, and never show out in any way that I know there are young ladies or literature in the world. Ah!” he added, carelessly opening the manuscript, “the bold, free hand of fashion; pages neatly pierced at the upper right-hand corner, and strung upon a narrow red ribbon with notched edges; faint odour of the young person’s favourite perfume. Yes, this is the real thing!” He laughed in the way that Cornelia Root had more than once said she could not stand when talking with him about serious things.

She went out after leaving the manuscript with him in the morning, and shortly afterwards Helen received the card of Mr. Hibbard, who was waiting for her in the reception-room. It was rather a shock at first, and then she found a sort of relief in the second anxiety, as people do in playing one care off against the other. She said to herself, in putting her ear-rings in before the glass, that he must have heard from Captain Butler, and that if Captain Butler sided with Mr. Hibbard, she should not know what to do; she would have to yield, or at least let the whole matter rest till she had heard from Robert, to whom she had written all about it.

“Good-morning, Miss Harkness,” said the lawyer, absently dropping her proffered hand, “I have a cablegram here from Captain Butler.”

“Oh, I thought you must have,” said Helen, in the pause which he suffered to take place before he went on, with a frown at the paper in his hand.

“He telegraphs me from Naples, in answer to my letter, and directs me to obey your wishes as to paying Mr. Everton’s claim.”

The lawyer lifted his eyes and looked into Helen’s face, as if to wait her orders; and her heart sank.  This was what she had been eager and urgent to do when they last met: it had seemed to her then that she could not rest till Mr. Everton’s claim, just or unjust, was paid, since its existence involved a doubt of fraud. But, in fact, she had, not being able to help herself, rested very well, and she had begun to hope that the doubt could be somehow cleared away without the cost of everything to her.

“Is that all he says?” she asked feebly.

“No; he says he will write.” He handed her the despatch, which she mechanically read, and then twisted round her finger.

“What do you think, Mr, Hibbard?” she asked at last pitifully.

The lawyer must have seen so many people halt between their interest and their sense of abstract right, and gladly take advantage of any doubt in their own favour, that he could not have wondered at her hesitation. But he was obliged to say, “I can do nothing now but receive your instructions. I will contest the claim to the last, or I will pay it.” He again explained the matter, and put the points clearly before her.

“And there must always be this doubt about it, even if we gained the case?” she asked.

“Always. Even if that scamp himself were to declare in our favour, and acknowledge that he had played upon Everton’s suspicion, the doubt would remain.”

“Then, I can’t bear it! You must pay Mr. Everton!” cried Helen. “Anything, anything is better than living upon stolen money!” At the same time that she pronounced this heroic truth, which indeed came from her inmost heart, she burst into human tears for the loss of all that she could call her own.

“Miss Harkness,” said the old lawyer, “I would not let you do this — I would take the responsibility of disobeying you and Captain Butler both; but — but I must tell you that my inquiries into the matter have not been satisfactory. I have talked confidentially with several of the gentlemen who were present at the sale, and I find that they all carried away the impression that there was something queer about the bidding towards the last. Now, as I said before, I don’t believe that Everton’s understanding with Mortimer will ever allow him to press the question to an issue, and that you could rest legally secure in the possession of this money; but this, as I conceive, isn’t the point with you.”

“O no, no, no! And thank you, thank you, Mr. Hibbard, for letting me decide the matter — and thank God for helping me to decide it rightly — before you told me this. Whatever happens now, I shall have the consolation of knowing that I wasn’t influenced by the fear of what people would think or say. I know that I should have been, but I know that I wasn’t.” She dried her eyes, and controlled her quivering lips. “Don’t lose an instant, please, about paying him, and pay him every cent. And oughtn’t I — oughtn’t I — to say something, do something to show that I was sorry that he was kept out of the money so long?”

“I don’t think Mr. Everton will care for that,” said Mr. Hibbard. “The money is what he wants. I will pay it; and then what will you do, Miss Harkness? You were coming to me for money, you said; you mustn’t allow any mistaken feeling—”

“O no, I won’t.”

“I am sure that Captain Butler will wish me to be your banker till he comes home.”

“Yes, certainly; but I have a little money yet,” said Helen, following Mr. Hibbard to the door.

XVI.

THE lawyer was mistaken in supposing that Mr. Everton cared for nothing in the affair except the money. He came that afternoon to make his acknowledgments to Helen, who felt it her duty to receive him when he called, and he showed himself capable of responding generously to her own action.

“I am well aware,” he said, “that I owe this reparation to you, Miss Harkness, and I wished you to understand that I could appreciate your conduct. The original claim is now fully satisfied, but the interest on the money that I have been kept out of would have amounted during the past seven months to something like two hundred dollars — a little short of two hundred dollars. I have written to your attorney that we will say nothing about this sum, that we will consider it paid.”

“Thank you,” said Helen blankly. It was not, perhaps, that she was insensible to Mr. Everton’s magnanimity, but just then she was studying his personal appearance with a strange fascination. She found something horrible in the neatness of this little old man’s dress, in the smug freshness of his newly-shaven face, which had the puckered bloom of an apple that hangs upon the tree far into the winter’s cold, and even in the smoothness and cleanness of his conspicuous linen.

He returned her absent gaze, winking his little, red-lidded eyes. He presently said, “I have had to lay out a great deal of money on the house, and I thought this might as well go into the general account. The structure was very good, but there were many things that needed going over, the plumbing especially. I have had the plumbing put into perfect order. Mrs. Everton was very particular about it — the ladies are, I believe. I think you would be pleased to see the improvement.”

“Yes,” said Helen.

“I have had brass pipes put in nearly everywhere; Mrs. Everton had heard that they were very much superior, and I was willing to do anything to gratify her: she was very low at the time.”

He coughed behind his hand, and Helen awoke from her daze to say gently, “Oh, I hope she’s better.”

“Thank you,” returned the old man. “But she is dead.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, she was so far gone that she could not be moved from our old house. I never expected she could, but I made the changes to please her, and she went over them all in the architect’s plans. I spared no expense. I don’t suppose,” said Mr. Everton, with a sort of brisk appeal to Helen, “that you would know the place now: the old cornices all down, and fresh paint and paper everywhere.”

Helen did not reply; but she looked at the man with a pathetic wonder, which he apparently did not feel.

“I think,” he continued, with a certain insinuation, “it would interest you to see the changes.”

“O no!” Helen broke out.

Mr. Everton looked at her and passed his tongue over his red lips, fringed with dry cuticle at their edges, in apparent perplexity. “I don’t mean to say,” he resumed, “that the general plan of the house is changed; that couldn’t be done; Mrs. Everton saw that herself. In many respects she was a woman you could reason with. It was a great blow to lose her.”

“It must have been,” said Helen, relenting again; but wondering a little why Mr. Everton should speak to her of these matters.

He explained for himself. “Your burying your father such a short time before I buried Mrs. Everton — it seems a sort of coincidence, a kind of bond, as one may say, and makes me feel as if — as if — you could appreciate my feelings.”

“I am sorry for you with all my heart,” said Helen. “I didn’t know,” she added vaguely, “that you had met with any bereavement.”

“Yes; she’s dead,” sighed the old man. “It isn’t as if I were broken, or hadn’t kept my health. I’m as well as ever I was. And as strong. I’m as good for business as any two young men I know of. But it’s when I come home from business that I feel it; that’s where the rub comes in; it’s lonely. Yes, it’s lonely.”

 —

“O yes,” said Helen, surprised into sympathetic confidence by the simple words. “I often felt it in my father’s case, especially towards the end, when he seemed to live so much in the recollection of the past, and I knew that I was scarcely any companionship for him.”

“Your father,” said Mr. Everton dryly, “was a much older man than I am, and he was all broken up before he died; I used to notice it. I don’t believe,” he went on, “but what you’d like the house as well as ever, if you saw it. I should be very sorry to think I’d done anything to it that you didn’t like.”

“It’s very, very kind of you to say so, Mr. Everton.” returned Helen cordially. “And you mustn’t think at all about it. When I made up my mind to part with it, I made up my mind never to care what became of it.” —

“Well, that was the right spirit,” said Mr. Everton. —

“And if the changes you have made in it gratified your wife in her last days, I can only be glad of them. I shall always think of my old home as it used to be; if it were burned to the ground, it would remain there, just as I left it, as long as I live.”

“Well, I’m pleased to hear you say so,” said the old man. “I like to see a young lady sensible—”

“Oh, I’m not sensible,” protested Helen; “but I like what you’ve done because you did it to gratify your wife in her last days; that makes it sacred.”

“I was always on good terms with her,” said the widower; “and I always determined to wait a proper time, if I should want to marry again. But if you believe you’ve found the right one, there’s no sense in waiting too long.”

He looked inquiringly at Helen, who was somewhat mystified at the turn the conversation had taken. But she said politely, “O no.”

“I should want you should like the house on your own account,” he continued, still more irrelevantly.

“On my own account?” faltered Helen.

“Because I want it to be yours,” cried the old man, with a sort of violence. “I appreciate the course you have taken in regard to the fraud that was practised upon me at the sale, and I say that you have acted nobly. Yes, nobly? And I should wish to give the house to you as a mark of — of — my esteem; that, and everything else I have. I’m alone in the world, and nobody has any real claim on me, no matter what her relations may expect, and I will deed the house to you to-day, if you say so!”

It all seemed like a dream of romance to Helen; it was fabulous, it was incredible, it must be impossible. She began to think that the old man was insane, and involuntarily left her chair. But there was nothing abnormal about him, unless it was the repressed excitement in which he sat blinking at her, as he went on: “The house can be your home to-morrow — today, if you like. You have only to say the word.” He seemed to form some sort of hope or expectation from her continued silence, and now he rose. “If you ‘re willing, there’s nobody to interfere, and I should soon teach them to attend to their own business if they attempted it. My mind is as clear and my health is as good as ever it was, and I would do everything I could for you. I admire you, and I respect you. I think you have right principles, and that’s a very important thing. I should be proud of you. To be sure, we haven’t been much acquainted; and I suppose it’s only reasonable you should want time to think it over. I’m in no hurry; though, as I said, my own mind is made up.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” gasped Helen. “What do you mean? Why should you give me your property and why—”

Her eyes dwelt hopelessly upon his face, in which a smirk of cunning insinuation struggled with an anxious perplexity. He again passed his tongue over his dry, red lips, and then cleared his throat, and breathed hard: “I mean — all I have; not that house, but half-a-dozen houses, and everything I’m worth. I’m not afraid of what people would say. If we ‘re both of one mind, the difference in age is nothing.” At a sign of renewed impatience from Helen, he added desperately: “I want you to be my wife!” She recoiled, with a shudder, and her teeth closed in a nervous paroxysm. “Oh!” she uttered, in abhorrence far beyond rejection; and, creeping softly by the wall to the door, with her eyes fixed warily upon him, as if he were some nightmare spider that might spring upon her, she vanished out of it, and fled up-stairs to her own room, where she bolted herself in.

The half-hour of self-loathing that she passed, with her burning face in her pillow, could not have been more cruel if what had happened were some shameful deed of her own. She searched her soul for cause of blame, but she could find nothing worse there than the consciousness of having suffered herself for one inappreciable instant to dream of her home coming back to her by the wild poetic chance which the old man’s words had intimated. This point of time, fine and tenuous as it was, had been vast enough for her to paint a picture on, where she and Robert, dim figures of grateful reverence, had seemed piously to care for the declining years of their benefactor, and to comfort his childless solitude at their fireside. But the silly vision, for which she grieved and blushed, was innocent, as she felt even in the depths of her self-abasement, and the thought of it ended in the reaction through which she rose from the bed, and dashed off a letter commanding Mr. Hibbard to pay the interest on the money due Mr. Everton, to the last cent, and not to accept any sort of concession from him. But the horror of his offer survived, an incredible fact, which she could not reject. His age, in asking to mate itself with her youth, had seemed to dishonour both, and had become unspeakably ugly and revolting to her. She wondered what kind of young girl it could be that would marry an old man, and what he had seen in her that made him think she could be such a girl. Nothing, she was sure; and therefore this humiliation, when she was so blameless, must be her punishment for sins from the consequence of which she had seemed to escape; for the way in which she had tortured Robert; for her flirting, as she did that first day, with Lord Rainford; for liking to be admired, and for, perhaps, trying to make people admire her. Yes, that must be it; and as soon as she had fitted the burden to her spirit, she rose up with strength to bear it. Whatever men have contrived to persuade themselves, in these latter days, as to the relations of cause and effect in the moral world, there are yet few women who do not like to find a reason for their sufferings in their sins, and they often seem still to experience the heroic satisfaction in their penalties, which nothing but the old-fashioned Christian’s privity to the designs of Providence can give.

When Cornelia Root came home to tea she knocked at Helen’s door, and passed in round the jamb a hand with which she produced the effect of rejecting all responsibility for the letter it conveyed. “I guess it’s from Mr. Evans,” she said, refusing to look in. “I don’t know what’s in it.”

Helen was ready, in her penitence, almost to welcome the worst; but the envelope only conveyed a printed slip from the publishers of the Saturday Afternoon, in which they thanked her for her contribution, and begged to enclose their cheque in payment. She rapped in her turn at Miss Root’s door. “Just to tell you the good news,” she explained to Cornelia’s inquiring face, while a laugh fluttered out of her throat, which just failed of being a sob. “They’ve accepted them!” She escaped again into her own room, before Cornelia could formulate that strictly truthful expression of her feelings without which she would not speak at all. She joined Helen a little later, and underwent the pangs of remorse in arranging with her to call on A Mr. Evans that evening and confess the authorship of the reviews preparatory to asking his candid criticism and his advice about future work. Cornelia’s heart smote her in the presence of Helen’s unsuspicious rejoicings; she languished for the moment when she could own that Mr. Evans had wickedly divined their secret from the first, and she found no relief, but rather an added anguish in the skilful duplicity with which he received Helen’s avowal.

He was alone when they knocked at his door, for Mrs. Evans was putting their boy to bed after the usual conflict with his entreaties and stratagems.

“Is it possible?” he demanded with a radiant deceit.

“Why, this is delightful, Miss Harkness. We are quite an aesthetic colony here, under Mrs. Hewitt’s hospitable roof — with Miss Root’s art-work and your literature and my journalism. Really!” He deepened Cornelia’s sense of nefarious complicity by the smile aside which she could not reject. “Have you written much for publication?”

“I’m afraid you must see that I haven’t,” said Helen, with a straightforward honesty that Cornelia felt ought to have made Mr. Evans ashamed of himself; “and I wished you to tell me just where I have failed in my work, and, if you will be so good, how I can improve it.”

This seemed to Helen a perfectly simple and natural request, and she was not, perhaps, altogether without the feeling that Mr. Evans ought to be gratified at her approaching him for instruction.

“Well, there you set me rather a difficult task, Miss Harkness,” he said evasively. “We usually expect the fact that we are willing to print a contribution to suffice as criticism in its favour.”

“Yes,” pursued Helen, “but you want beginners to do better and better, don’t you? I’m not saying it to fish up a compliment from you; but I wish really and truly that you would tell me what my faults are. Please specify something,” she said with an ingenuous sweetness which smote Cornelia to the soul, but which apparently glanced effectlessly from the editor’s toughened spirit. He laughed, as if other ladies had said the like to him before. “Indeed, I shall not be hurt at anything you say!” cried Helen.

“It’s a little academic,” said the editor. “But that’s a good fault. It had better be that than be smart.”

“O yes! I detest smartness in everything.” She wondered just what Mr. Evans meant by academic, but she did not like to ask, and she consoled herself by reflecting that he had’ said it was a good fault to be academic.

“I don’t know,” he continued, “that it is the best plan to tell the plots and explain the characters so fully as you’ve done; but that can be easily remedied.”

“I see,” said Helen. “It destroys the reader’s interest in the story.”

“Yes,” assented the editor, “and in the review a little. And I don’t think it’s best to sum up very deliberately at the end, and to balance considerations so formally.”

“No?” said Helen. She had thought it was well; and she began to wonder why it was not.

“But that part can be easily omitted. And I shouldn’t quote from the book unless I could give something very significant or characteristic. Your sentences are a little long. And it is rather late in the day to open with an essay, however brief, on the general effect and tendency of fiction. I think I should always begin directly with the book in hand, and let those ideas come in incidentally.”

“Yes, to be sure,” said Helen eagerly.

Mr. Evans put down her manuscript, which he had taken up from the table, and added lightly, “I shall have to work it over a little before it goes to the printers, and then when you have it in the proof you will see what I’ve done, and get a better notion of what I mean than I could give you in words.”

“Oh, thank you very much. That will be so kind of you!” exclaimed Helen. She added: “I was careful to write only on one side of the paper. I heard that the printers preferred it.”

“Quite right,” said Evans with a smile at this innocence. Cornelia Root felt the irony of it, but it was simply amiable to Helen. “They do, very much. It’s beautiful copy. By the way, here is the Afternoon for this week, if you want to look it over. You’re one of us now, you know.”

“Thank you, I shall be very glad of it,” said Helen, taking the paper he offered her.

Mr. Evans seemed to have all his work about him, and she thought that she ought not to keep him any longer. She said good-night, but Cornelia lingered a little; she could not help it; she could not rest till she knew from the editor, taken alone and defenceless, whether he thought Helen would ever be able to help herself by writing, and she told him so in as many words.

“I saw you attempting to pierce my inmost soul all the time, Miss Root,” said the editor. “And I tell you frankly, you won’t get the truth out of me. Miss Harkness is a very cultivated young lady.” He bent over her MS., which he had again drawn towards him. “She possesses a neat and polished style. I could imagine that in letter-writing she would have all the charm that tradition attributes to your sex in that art In addressing the object of her affections” — Cornelia gave a start of indignant protest and disclaimer, which had no effect upon Mr. Evans, who went smoothly on— “she must be fascinating, and I have no doubt the fashionable friends to whom she describes our humble boardinghouse ménage think she writes delightfully. But in appealing to the general reader through the medium of the public prints, Miss Harkness seems to think it advisable to present her ideas and impressions in the desiccated form. Her review has all the fixed and immovable grace, all the cold and dignified slipperiness, of a literary exercise.” He looked up, and laughed out his enjoyment of the righteous despair in Cornelia’s face.

She dropped upon the corner of a chair. “She’s got to do something,” she said.

“O no, she hasn’t,” returned Mr. Evans cheerily. “She hasn’t kept her secret so well as you have, Miss Root; and yesterday a fashionable friend of hers stopped her coupé at the pavement, and called me up to the window to say that she was so glad I was giving Miss Harkness a chance to write for Saturday Afternoon, and was sure that I would find her very clever. She was always such a brilliant girl, and said such delightful things! Miss Kingsbury asked me if I didn’t think it was dreadful, her having lost everything, and being thrown upon her own resources in this way, and I said I did; but I don’t. And then Miss Kingsbury explained that of course she, and numerous other persons of wealth and respectability, would be only too glad to have Helen Harkness come and spend her days with them, but she could not bear the idea of dependence; and wasn’t her trying to do something for herself splendid? And I said that I thought it was; but I don’t. And Miss Kingsbury said she knew it would appeal to me, and I said that it did; but it doesn’t.

Why should it appeal to me, — why should I think it splendid that a healthy young woman refuses to be a loafer and a pauper? Why, under heaven, shouldn’t she do something for herself? The town is full of young women who are obliged to do something for themselves. That’s the kind of splendour that appeals to me — the involuntary kind, — like my own. Is it any worse for Miss Harkness to work for a living than for the tens of thousands of other girls who are doing it? You have worked for a living yourself, Miss Root. Do you want me to regard you as splendid?”

Cornelia examined her just spirit in silence for a moment. “It’s different with us,” she answered, “because we were brought up to work. We never expected anything else, and it isn’t so much of a hardship for us, as it is for a girl like her who is used to being taken care of, and never had to do or think for herself.”

“Ah, my dear Miss Root, it is the princess in exile who appeals to us both! But is she more to be praised for refusing to eat the buttered roll of others’ prosperity than the peasant-maids who have never had the chance of refusing?”

“She’s more to be pitied!”

“Right again, Miss Root! You are always right. By the way, why didn’t you urge Miss Harkness to attempt something in art? Miss Kingsbury asked me if I couldn’t get her some book to illustrate! She said that Miss Harkness’s sketches were exquisite, and she asked me if I had ever seen any of them. Have you?”

“Yes,” Cornelia reluctantly admitted.

“Well?”

“They’re hopeless!” cried Cornelia, with an involuntary vehemence that delighted Evans.

“And you thought that if she couldn’t draw she could write! That was quite natural.”

“It was her own idea,” urged Cornelia.

“And it was your idea that she should write for me! Very good, very right, very like a philanthropist!”

“Now, you know well enough, Mr. Evans,” began Cornelia, “that you were perfectly free to refuse Miss Harkness’s writin’; and I ain’t goin’ to praise you up for takin’ it, if that’s what you ‘re after.”

“That’s what I’m after; but I knew I shouldn’t get it before you told me. Who praises an editor for anything? You and Miss Kingsbury will only think I’ve done my duty when I’ve sat up till midnight putting this pretty rubbish into  shape.”

“Is it so bad as that?” asked Cornelia, aghast.

“Why didn’t you give it back to her, and tell her it was rubbish? It would have been the best for her in the end!”

“Because I have a timid and truckling spirit, Miss Root, and you know it. Because I have scarcely the heart to refuse the rubbish of ladies who tell me they have produced it in the interest of some worthy charity, or for the purpose of eking out their pin-money; and I’m naturally helpless in the presence of a lady who has written it for bread — as I am given to understand.” Cornelia was silent, and the editor continued gleefully: “A woman can sometimes do something without damaging others. But when a lady undertakes to help herself, some man has to suffer for it; and why shouldn’t I be the victim? I usually devote Saturday night to working on a little play I’m trying to write, but I daresay the time will be much better employed in rewriting Miss Harkness’s reviews.”

He watched the travail of Miss Root’s soul in her honest eyes with a smile of unrelenting enjoyment. “Besides, I like to befriend gentility in adversity as well as you do, Miss Root. The thought that I am actually earning money, without her knowing it, for a young lady of Miss Harkness’s condescension, does my mean and servile little soul more good than I can well describe.”

Cornelia burst forth with a sort of groan, “Oh, it’s all wrong, I know it is! But what is a girl fit for that’s been brought up just as a lady? If there’s anything under the sun that she can honestly do, without imposing upon other people, and putting them to twice the trouble she takes for herself, for goodness’ sake, let her do it!”

“Very just sentiments; but what is it?”

“Well, one thing it isn’t; and that’s writing for the papers, and I shall tell her so!”

“You have no right to abuse my confidence, Miss Root,” said the editor with superficial gravity, through which his laughter broke when she turned desperately upon him. “Miss Harkness’s failure is my secret. If it is a failure. I supposed it was a shining success! There are very few young ladies who can get editors to write their articles for them, and then let them pocket the proceeds.”

“I should think,” said Cornelia, “that you would be ashamed to make fun of everything the way you do. It seems as if you didn’t have a morsel of compassion for the poor thing.”

“Ah, there it is again! Accept her inefficiency and applaud her failure because you pity her! Do you think the ladies are ever going to do anything for themselves as long as the world is asked and expected to take that attitude? Did you tell her that she was an artist, and then work up her sketches for her? Have a morsel of compassion yourself, Miss Root! I’m going to have large masses of it. I’m going rewrite Miss Harkness’s whole review!”

His laugh followed Cornelia as she climbed the stairs in slow and heavy perplexity to her room.

Helen in her room was light-heartedly writing to Robert, and telling him that though she had now absolutely nothing in the world, she had never felt so happy since her father died, for now she had found at last that she could do something and be of some use. She could not grieve, even for his sake, for the loss of the money paid back to Mr. Everton; the thought of it now was such a perfect horror. She said that some time she should tell him why, but not now; and she turned from the odious subject to describe her interview with Mr. Evans, who had been so frankly kind and encouraging. She had not said anything to Robert about Lord Rainford yet, and she wondered whether she ought. Some time, of course, she must do so; but she was afraid it might be difficult to make the whole affair clear to Robert at that distance. It was something that could be much better spoken than written; she resolved at least to leave her letter open till morning, and decide then what she should do.

She was not sleepy, but she felt a pleasant languor, such as comes after the fortunate close of a period of strong excitements, and she sat down before the fire, which was giving out its last delicious glow, to indulge her fatigue a little more luxuriously. She looked back over what had happened during the week with satisfaction, now that it was past; she was glad not only that she had paid that horrible old man his money, but that she had been right, and not, as she had sometimes feared, morbid and conceited about wishing him to be paid. She felt that she had behaved in a sensible and business-like manner; that Captain Butler’s action proved this;  and that all the events sustained her in her first instinctive impulse. At this safe removal in time and space, Mr. Everton’s proposal did not seem so simply horrible; it began to reveal some amusing aspects; she broke into a little murmur of laughter when she thought of certain moments of perplexity for him.

As for the money, it was a little matter: it was five thousand dollars in the abstract, but in reality it was only six dollars a week; and with the prospect of literary work from Mr. Evans, and perhaps other editors, she could easily make that up: she had earned ten dollars by her pen already.

She unfolded the paper that Mr. Evans had given her, and the crepitation of its leaves sent a light shiver through her. What would the Butlers say when she sent them the next number with her reviews marked in it? She knew from her own fine reluctance that it would surprise them disagreeably; and she fancied Jessie Butler supporting, and Mrs. Butler forgiving, while Marian Ray denounced her new attempt. But, she reflected, she would often have to disagree with Marian Ray; and whatever people said of the society gossip in the Saturday Afternoon, it was a good literary paper; everybody acknowledged that. She heard herself defending it to Marian, and, in the rapid process of reverie, it had come to her saying plainly to Marian that she saw no disgrace in writing for the newspapers, and that the only disgrace could be in writing dishonestly and vulgarly for them. She had said she had Clara Kingsbury’s approval, and Marian had laughed and answered, “Oh, if she had Clara Kingsbury’s approval!” and had retreated again to Naples; for Helen now had the newspaper quite open, and was looking for the book-reviews occupying the place which hers would have the next Saturday. They were rather appallingly well written; she could see that they were indefinitely better done than hers; she wondered if they were Mr. Evans’s, and she gave a little sigh of dismay; while her eye wandered idly to the next column, where a name arrested it.

The name was Fenton’s; and the paragraph in which it occurred seemed to become alive and sentient under her eyes. It was a despatch from Washington, rehearsing, with telegraphic brevity, the facts of the wreck of the Meteor, as furnished to the State Department by the Consul at Tahiti, from the statements of the survivors.

Five days after the disaster the French ship Belle Paysanne, which brought them to that port, had fallen in with an open boat containing Captain Rollins and a number of the Meteor’s crew and passengers, who reported that Lieutenant Fenton and three others had volunteered to remain on the reef where the Meteor struck till the overladen boat could find land and return to them. The Belle Paysanne altered her course, and visited the scene of the catastrophe; but the wreck had then disappeared, and there were no traces of the men left behind. A week later, however, the ship picked up another of the Meteor’s boats, with the two sailors who had remained with Lieutenant Fenton. From the narrative of these men it seemed that the wreck had broken up the day after Captain Rollins abandoned her, and that Lieutenant Fenton, who had lingered on board after helping to launch the boat, was caught in the wreck and carried down with her. His companion, a passenger named Giffen, was rescued by the seamen; but he had been so badly bruised by the floating timbers that he died the following day.

They confirmed the statements of Captain Rollins and all the other survivors, concerning the heroic behaviour of Lieutenant Fenton, who had chosen to remain on the rock rather than imperil the lives of the passengers in Captain Rollins’s boat, and who had been most efficient throughout the events that followed the striking of the ship. The boat in which the men were found was in a ruinous condition, and was set adrift after their rescue. A large sum of money, belonging to Captain Rollins, which they had recovered from the wreck before it broke up, was restored to him.

XVII.

HELEN did not come down to her breakfast, and Cornelia Root, who was finishing hers about the time there began to be question at Miss Harkness’s absence, said she would step in and see what the matter was after she got on her things. She found Helen sitting before the empty grate; the gas was burning, and the bed untouched; and a thrill of terror went through her lest Helen should be sitting there dead. When, after bidding her good-morning in vain, she ventured to touch her on the shoulder, Helen looked round, with a stare that, for the moment, made Cornelia repent being so bold. “For the good Lord’s sake!” cried the girl, “what is it, Miss Harkness?”

“Oh, nothing,” said Helen. She began to laugh, and tried to hide under her hands the newspaper she had in her lap, and then, as if at her failure in this, she began to weep piteously. “Look!” she exclaimed, opening the paper, and pointing to the story of the shipwreck, “he’s dead! And those men killed him. Oh, I’ve thought it all out!”

Cornelia took the paper, and, after a swift glance at the paragraph, put it aside without questioning her. “I guess you better lie down, Miss Harkness, and try to get some rest. I’m going to have your fire made up.”

She got her to bed, and then she conferred with the landlady outside the door; she ended by sacrificing her own preference for a female physician, and calling in the doctor who, Mrs. Hewitt recollected hearing Miss Harkness once say, had taken care of her father.

She sent a note to Miss Kingsbury telling her that she was afraid Miss Harkness was going to be sick, and asking her to come to see her; but word was returned that Miss Kingsbury was in New York, and would not be home till the latter part of the week. It was then too late to move the sick girl to her friend’s house.

It did not need the light which Miss Kingsbury threw on her relation to Lieutenant Fenton to enable Helen’s fellow-boarders to understand what had happened. Cornelia Root had understood it at once, with austere resolution not to recognise her own privity to the fact even to herself; Mrs. Evans had divined it, and talked it over with her husband, who halted between remorse for having laughed at Helen’s contributions and secret question whether he would not be justifiable in using a parallel incident in his play; Mrs. Hewitt guessed it out, in a hungry inability to talk it over with anybody, and got her first real comfort out of the expansive desolation in which Miss Kingsbury confided to them all her grief for what had happened, and stated the facts as fully as she knew them.

“Well, it didn’t stand to reason,” said Mrs. Hewitt, “that she would care so much for a brother, and an adopted one, at that.”

“O no!” cried Clara. “It was much more than that!”

She got a professional nurse to relieve the devotion of all Helen’s volunteer nurses; and from this young woman Mrs. Hewitt at first hoped everything, but only to be the more keenly disappointed; for, so far from reporting the tenor of Helen’s delirium, the nurse wholly refused to talk of her patient. She would sit at Mrs. Hewitt’s own table, and blink at Mrs. Hewitt through her glasses, and never say a word, morning, noon, or night, until Mrs. Hewitt did not know what would become of her. Mrs. Hewitt’s disgust with the nurse authorised the first full laugh which Evans had permitted himself since Helen’s sickness began. It was after a favourable turn had taken place; nevertheless Cornelia Root bent upon him a look of keen reproof.

“Oh, come now, Miss Root |” he protested, “I’m not going to stand that. I’ve just succeeded, after infinite pains and argument, in convincing Mrs. Evans that I didn’t cause Miss Harkness’s fever by laughing at her literature whilst I was putting it into shape that night; and I still believe that if she had died my wife would have required me to deliver myself up to justice. But I am an innocent man, and I won’t have you going round and looking as though this never would have happened if it hadn’t been for me.”

Cornelia opened her mouth to deny the accusation, but Evans hastily interposed. “Do you mean to say that you haven’t thought — that you haven’t felt — that I was somehow to blame for the whole thing?” She refused to answer, with a dignity that did not avail her. “Don’t fall back upon the fact that I lent her the newspaper! I didn’t invent the facts, at any rate; but I’ve suffered under the ban of public opinion quite as if I had, and now I’m going to stop it.”

“What nonsense!” said Cornelia. “But if your conscience pricks you for anything, I’m not going to comfort you.”

“Oh, it isn’t my conscience that pricks me! It’s your conscience, and Mrs. Evans’s conscience, that have goaded me to desperation. I can get on very well with my own conscience.”

As soon as Helen could be safely taken away, Clara had her carried to her house, where she completed her convalescence amidst every superfluity of luxury. For many weeks she remained gathering strength, and listlessly accepting service and favour that she never could repay; but at last the day came when the tide of life rose high enough in her veins to beat in feeble revolt.

“You know,” she said, “this must end some time, Clara. I’m not your mother or sister. You can’t keep on taking care of me, as if I belonged to you.” —

“You do belong to me, Helen dear,” cried her friend, with a rush of generous tenderness. “Don’t talk of anything ending, but just stay on and on. Why shouldn’t you? What would you do?”

“Ah, that’s the old question!”

“I didn’t mean that! I meant, why should you try to do anything?”

“I suppose, because I’m not a lily of the field, for one thing.” Clara laughed gratefully for the gleam of gaiety from Helen, whose sadness had been heavy on her heart. “I should be glad enough never to do anything, or even be anything again. You understand, Clara, what I’ve been through?” she asked.

“You hinted something once, and I could guess the rest.”

“Then we won’t speak of it. It’s such a mercy we needn’t! But you can see that all the past is swept away from me. There’s nothing left; I have to begin everything new, with new ideas and new objects. I used to be ambitious about helping myself, but I’m not now; even my pride in that is broken.” The tears of self-pity started to her eyes. “Yes, I would be humbly grateful if I needn’t do anything. But I must. And the old question comes back: what?”

“Oh, Helen,” said her friend devoutly, “if you would only stay and be a companion to me — anything!”

Helen smiled. “To cheer you up — read to you — keep you interested — go pleasure journeys with you? Yes, I should be a gay companion.”

“Well, then, my housekeeper, if you will insist upon usefulness — and I don’t blame you for it; I should myself. Why shouldn’t you be my housekeeper? I have heard of girls trying that!”

“I should be glad to learn housekeeping of you, Clara. You know I don’t know anything about it, and that you know everything. I used to pretend to keep house for papa; but Margaret really did it all. I must be fit for something; but I can’t tell what it is, yet.”

“I can’t bear to hear you talk so, Helen. Why don’t you try writing again? I’m sure Mr. Evans would be glad to have you.”

“Don’t!” cried Helen. “I couldn’t think of anything I tried before — that.” She touched her calamity with the word, and then struggled to get away from it with a curious effort of her broken spirit, which Clara said afterwards made her think of a crippled bird trying to fly. “I’m a fearful problem, Clara. But don’t worry over me any longer, now. There must be some very simple answer to me if we take time to think it out; and I’m afraid I’m willing to take all the time you’ll let me. I’ll accept any sort of disguised charity at present; and if you want to start a subscription for me, Clara, you may. Only, don’t let me know about it.”

A thought seemed to strike Miss Kingsbury, which kept her silent for a moment. “There was a Hungarian lady here last year, who had a plan of gardening for girls — vegetable and flower gardening.

I wonder if you met her.”

“No,” said Helen.

“She was at the Kelloggs’. She was Mrs. Kellogg’s religion for the time being.” Helen did not catch hopefully at the gospel of the Magyar prophetess, but looked with a rueful surprise at her friend, who went on: “Then there has been a good deal of talk about farming for women, — small fruits, and poultry.” She threw out the suggestion diffidently, but gathered courage when once it was projected from her. “I suppose one becomes interested in it, and gets very fond of the poor little things.”

“Which, Clara — the berries or the chickens?” asked Helen, with a lifeless laugh. “I should want to eat the berries; but I can’t imagine eating poultry of one’s personal acquaintance.”

“Oh, I meant having an affection for the chickens; you’d have to let other people eat them.” She joined in Helen’s laugh at the futility of her suggestions; but she added: “Well, we must think out the answer to you. There’s no hurry.”

“O no.”

That afternoon Margaret came with a heart full of proud contrition to blame herself for having been in Ireland for the past three months, and for having just learned of Helen’s sickness and whereabouts. She wept over Helen’s sorrows, and over her wasted looks and hollow eyes; and the girl was freer to talk with her of what had happened than she had yet felt with any one else.

She told her about the shipwreck, of which Margaret had not heard before, and she showed her a scrap of paper, the cover of an official despatch.

“Here are his last words. He wrote them to me while he was standing on that rock in the middle of the sea, and they came from Washington after I was taken sick.”

“Oh, Miss Helen, Miss Helen, how did you ever live to tell the tale?”

Helen did not answer. “We were engaged, and he was coming home,” she said, with a sort of crazy satisfaction in the poignancy of Margaret’s sympathy. She threw the burden of suffering upon her for the time, and talked with an unsparing hardness for herself. “But I deserved it — I deserved it all.” Her thin hands trembled in her lap, and her head shook. “Where are you living now, Margaret?” she broke off abruptly.

“Why, Miss Helen,” answered Margaret, with a blush, “I’m living in the Port, in a house of my own.”

“In a house of your own?”

“Yes, Miss Helen.” Margaret hesitated. “You see, there was an old fellow on the ship coming back, that had been out to Ireland too, and he kept talking so much about it all the way, and never leaving me a moment’s peace, that I thought maybe I’d better. And so, I did — three weeks ago.”

“Did what?”

“Married him, Miss Helen.” Margaret seemed doubtful of the effect of the intelligence upon Helen; she hastened to add in excuse, “He’s a very quiet body, and he works at the glass-works in East Cambridge. We have a nice little house, and I should be much pleased to have you come out some day and see it, Miss Helen. The worst of it is, that there isn’t enough to keep a person busy, and I’m thinking that maybe I’ll take a boarder. There’s a spare room. He’d like to see you, Miss Helen. I’ve told him a good deal about you.”

“Thank you, Margaret, I will come out some day. I should like to see your husband.”

“Oh, he’s no great things. But he’s a very quiet body.”

Helen was looking at the bonnet on Margaret’s head, and she answered rather absently, “Yes.” The bonnet was a combination of purple fruits and magenta flowers, caught in a net of lace, as if to protect them from the depredations of birds and insects. “Where did you get your bonnet, Margaret?”

“In Hanover Street, Miss Helen,” said Margaret. “I don’t think it’s very good; do you? I paid enough for it; but money won’t buy the like of the bonnets that you used to make me, Miss Helen.”

“You’d better let me see what I can do with this. The shape isn’t bad,” said Helen critically.

“Oh, I couldn’t, Miss Helen. After what I’ve said to you! I should feel as if I’d hinted.”

“You needn’t ‘be under a compliment’ for it, Margaret,” said Helen, with a sudden inspiration; “You may pay me for making over the bonnet!”

“Oh, Miss Helen!”

“Yes. I need the money. I must work for my living now.”

“How good of you!” said Clara, when she found Helen with the bonnet in her hands the next day, and learned whose it was.

“It’s good for me,” returned Helen. “Margaret pays me for doing it. Perhaps this is the solution.” Clara permitted herself a silence in which her imagination kindled with the idea. “Helen,” she cried, “it is splendid! Why shouldn’t you do something of the sort? There’s nothing disgraceful about it, and with your taste, your genius, you could make every bonnet a work of art — as they do those picture-dresses in London.”

They talked the scheme over, and as soon as Helen was strong enough to attempt it, they put it in practice. Clara wanted her to set up a shop in her drawing-room, but they devolved upon something more modest in the end, and Helen took Mrs. Hewitt’s parlour floor. Clara advanced the capital; a tasteful and récherché stock of frames and feathers and ribbons was chosen, and Helen embarked in the enterprise under the favouring smiles of a world at once fashionable and sympathetic and high-minded.  It would not be easy to say just how the scheme came to final ruin. But when once a lively lady had said Miss Harkness’s bonnets had so much touch, and another had answered, “O yes, they were all touch,” and both had then tittered in tacit recognition of a certain amateurish lack in them, it was well on the way to failure. By the time that a visiting New York lady had said Miss Harkness seemed to be quite a Boston fashion, and had been answered, “O no; a Boston passion,” she was no longer so. Clara Kingsbury wore her Harkness bonnet to the bitter end (as some one phrased it), but she was notoriously interested, and her heroic devotion counted for nothing. All Helen’s gains went to pay the assistant whom she had taken from a well-known milliner’s shop, with a just conviction of her own unfitness for practical details; and when her stock was exhausted, and the ladies had given away her bonnets to their second-girls, she had nothing but her debt to Clara for her pains. They cried over the failure together when they had to face it at last, and Clara inveighed against the hollowness and ingratitude of the world. But Helen took the blame upon herself. “It was arrogant in me to suppose that I could succeed in any business without serving an apprenticeship to it — without beginning at the bottom. It was like those silly women who go on the stage, and expect to begin at the very top, over the heads of people who have faithfully worked all their lives learning to be actors. It’s just!”

“That doesn’t make it any the easier to bear,” Clara repined.

“It does for me,” said Helen. “If the things that have happened to me were not just, I couldn’t endure them.”

Clara took her in her arms, vowing that she was the best and bravest creature in the world, and that she had never done anything except suffer unmerited wrong. She would not hear any talk of the money she had advanced; she professed that if their undertaking had succeeded, she had always intended to take her share of the profits, and that she was more than willing to take her share of the loss. How little it was, compared to Helen’s, who had lost time and labour, and everything but courage! She did not understand how Helen kept up.

“Because I must” Helen explained. “You can bear things that you must bear. I suppose that’s what makes death endurable to those that have to live on.” Clara was silent in awe of her sad wisdom, and she went on more lightly: “Besides, this hasn’t been altogether a loss to me, this experience. I’ve learnt a good many things. I’ve really learnt how to make bonnets, for one thing, and I believe I can be of some little use to others as well as myself. I’ve got a new idea, and I’m going out to talk with Margaret about it.”

“With Margaret! Oh, Helen, dear, what is it?

I’m afraid—”

“That it’s something foolish? It isn’t. It’s only something distasteful — something very humble. It’s something Miss Root suggested.”

Clara was only partly comforted. “Miss Root is terribly severe. She doesn’t know how to spare people’s sensibilities.”

“She’s had to do with people who have no business to have any sensibilities — like me. I’ve thought it all out, Clara.” A woman instinctively respects another woman who says this, and believes her; Clara listened attentively. “I’ve thought it all out, and I see that I haven’t talent enough to be first-rate in anything. I couldn’t endure to be a second-rate artist or writer; but I don’t mind being a second rate milliner; and that’s what I’m going to be, if I can. And now I won’t tell you anything more about my scheme till I see whether it’s practicable. People will laugh, but they won’t sneer, and if they pity me, I shall be glad and grateful for their pity.”

Clara tried to get from her some details of her plan, but she would not give them; she would not leave her any comfort but the fact that she could not say or do anything to prevent her trying to carry out her plan.

She went out to Margaret’s in the horse-cars, and walked down the little side street to the end of the row of French-roof cottages, in the last and poorest of which Margaret was so proud of living. Helen’s sickness and convalescence, and her subsequent experiment in aesthetic millinery, had carried her through the summer and the early fall; the young elms along the side-walk had dropped their last yellow leaves, and the grass in the narrow door-yards lay limp and flat after the heavy November frosts; around, the open lots stretched brown and bare, swept by an east wind that brought the salt savour of the bay rank across them. A few slatternly goats, lank and heavy-uddered, wandered over the dismal expanse, as if to crop the battered tomato-cans and old boots in which it abounded.

Margaret’s house had never had more than one coat of pinkish-brown paint, and it looked rather thinly clad for the season; but within, a pungent heat from the furnace, which did more than anything else to make Margaret feel that she was an American householder, struck into the parlour where she received Helen. It was curious and amusing to see how little Margaret had profited by her life in Beacon Steps, in arranging and decorating her best room. There were no evidences of the better taste to which she had been accustomed half her days; she had simply tried to make her parlour as like all the other parlours in that row as she could, with a wood-coloured ingrain carpet, tan terry furniture, and a marble-topped centre-table; if she had been a Protestant, she would have had a large gilt-edged Bible on this; as it was, she had an infant Jesus in wax under a glass bell.

Helen stopped her in her ceremonious preparations for making company of her. “Margaret,” she said abruptly, “I want to come and live with you, — if you think you can trust me for my board a while.”

“Indeed, Miss Helen,” said Margaret with a splendour that was worth more than money to her, “I don’t know what you mean, exactly; but if you do mean to come and live with me, there’ll be no talk of board.”

“Well, well,” returned Helen, “we’ll talk of that later; we’re both pretty headstrong.” Margaret deprecated this, as far as Helen was concerned, with a flattered simper. “But now I’ll tell you what I want to do. You know I’ve been trying to set up for a fashionable milliner in Boston.”

“Yes, Miss Helen,” sighed Margaret.

“And I’ve made a failure of it. The fashionable people don’t want my bonnets.”

“They ‘re a set of hateful things, Miss Helen,” cried Margaret, “and the best of them isn’t fit to scrub your floors for you.”

Helen laughed at the unmeasured zeal of Margaret’s loyalty, expressed in terms so little fit for the polite ears of those they devoted to condemnation. “No, no, Margaret; they were quite right, and I was all wrong. I didn’t know how to make bonnets when I began.”

“Miss Helen, if there’s been one person spoke to me on this very street about that last bonnet you done over for me, there’s been a hundred! Everybody says it’s the becomingest bonnet, with more real Beacon Street style to it than any they ever saw me have on!”

“Well, I’m very glad,” answered Helen patiently; “and that brings me to what I wanted to say. “If I didn’t know how to make bonnets before I began, I did know when I got through — perhaps by spoiling so many.” Margaret sniffed a disdainful denial of the premises, and remained with inflated nostrils, while Helen went on. “And what I think is this: that if I could come out here, and take your spare room, you might tell your friends — those poor girls that sometimes waste so much on bonnets — that I could do their work for them just as well, and a great deal cheaper—”

“You work for them good-for-nothing hussies, Miss Helen! No, indeed! It’s bad enough having you work for ladies — if they choose to call themselves such after they throw your bonnets back on your hands — but as for them trollops of general housework and second-girls, let them fling their money away; they ‘re soon enough parted from it; but you shan’t take a stitch for them.”

“Margaret, Margaret!” cried Helen. “I’m not strong enough to talk to you, if you go on in that silly way. I haven’t a cent of my own in the world, and I must work, or I must beg. The question is whether you will let me have your spare room to live and work in, or whether you will turn me out of doors.”

“Oh, Miss Helen, how can you say such a thing?”

“Well, then, don’t talk so!”

“You can have the whole house, and all that we can do for you, and you shall not pay a penny for it.”

Helen rose. “Very well, then, I shall not take it. You don’t want me to have the room, and that’s your way of putting me off. I understand you, Margaret. But I did suppose that after all these years you’d lived with us, you wouldn’t turn me into the streets.”

She sank weakly into her chair again, and Margaret called to all the saints to witness if she did not wish to do in every particular exactly what Helen desired.

“Well, then,” demanded Helen tragically, “will you let me pay you five dollars a week, and make all your bonnets for you?”

“Yes, yes! Indeed I will, Miss Helen!”

“And never let your horrid, wicked, foolish old pride interfere with your taking the money — if I ever get it to pay you?” —

Margaret solemnly promised, and Helen said, “Let me go to the room at once, then. I’m so tired!” and suffered herself to be helped up-stairs to the little chamber which Margaret had adorned in the worst taste of Limekiln Avenue, with chromos over the chimneypiece, and a set of painted furniture, grained to match the oak-paper on the wall. It was like the inside of an ugly box; but Helen fell upon the clean bed, and slept a sleep which carried her well through the afternoon, and left her refreshed and encouraged to begin the long fight, in which she forced Margaret from one stand after another in her determination to treat her as a lady guests But she understood Margaret well enough to know where to hold her hand, and when Margaret sent him to eat his supper in the kitchen, and sat stiffly down in fresh linen cuffs and collar to pour the tea for her in the dining-room, and would not touch anything on the table herself, Helen knew better than to interfere.

When work began to come to her, she resolutely set her face against the indignant majesty with which Margaret would have treated the poor girls her customers. It was clearly Margaret’s intention to make them feel that it was an honour and a privilege to have their bonnets made by her Miss Helen; at first she remained present at their interviews, brow beating them by her haughty silence into acquiescence with every suggestion of Miss Helen’s, and reducing them to a submission so abject that Helen was sure some of them ordered just the ribbons and flowers they did not want, and others bought bonnets when they had merely come to talk them over. Margaret followed to the door one hapless creature who had failed, in her confusion, to give any order, with allusions to people who wasted other people’s time for nothing so cuttingly sarcastic, that Helen revolted, and positively forbade her to interfere; after that she was obliged to content herself with a haughty reception and dismissal of the customers.

Helen did her best to serve the simple, stupid things cheaply and well. She knew that she saved them money, and she made their mistaken tastes her own, and in that way sometimes corrected them, without their knowing it, and launched them upon the world a little less formidable in shape and crude in colour than they had intended. But she instinctively studied to obey one of the first laws of business, and that was to supply an existing demand till she had created another. She did not attempt to make her shop — for finally it was nothing more nor less — a school of aesthetics, as she had in first attempting millinery; she advised and suggested, but she decided nothing. She put both her pride and her preferences into the pocket where she bestowed her customers’ money, and kept only a conscience about giving them the material worth of it. They were a great variety of poor girls and women, beginning with the cooks and second-girls of Margaret’s acquaintance, whose patronage founded Helen’s prosperity, and rising through economical mothers of families to the upper ranks of seamstresses and “sales-ladies.” One day there came a young coloured girl, when luckily Helen was alone; Margaret would never have “demeaned” herself by receiving her, but Helen received her, and in due time sent her forth resplendent in a white hat trimmed in orange and purple.

This incident of her new career seemed to give it an ultimate stamp of authenticity, and it afforded her such saddened satisfaction as could come to her through a sense of recognised usefulness. She spoke of it to Miss Kingsbury and Cornelia Root, who equally approved; the former because she admired everything Helen did, and the latter because she found it, as Helen herself did, a final testimony to her practicality.

“It’s all very well in that way,” said Mr. Evans, whom Cornelia had not been able to refrain from triumphing over with a fact that refuted all his predictions of renewed failure for Helen. “So is any one who caters to a depraved popular taste of any sort, practical. But what I want you to consider is whether there is not something immoral in allowing a savage preference for purple and orange to indulge itself. If I read my Ruskin aright, I understand that there is some sort of occult connection between a feeling for colour and righteousness. Now you say that Miss Harkness allows her customers to array themselves in whatever hue of the rainbow they like best; that she daily and hourly violates her own sense of right in colour for the sake of money. Don’t you call that immoral?”

“What do you have anything to do for with a paper that publishes all those personals and society gossip?” demanded Cornelia in her turn.

“Oh, I’m a poor, weak, erring male man! But I’ve frequently been taught that when Woman entered the arena of business, it would be in some way that would elevate and ennoble affairs. I shudder to think what will become of us when women go into politics, if they show themselves so ready in business at all the tricks of trade. But I’ve noticed that when Ladies — I’m not speaking of women now — determine to be practical, they let no consideration stand in their way: they aim to succeed. Look at the unprincipled way they conduct their fairs for benevolent objects! What prices! What swindling lotteries of all sorts! No, your Miss Harkness is like the rest; and it appears to me that at the present moment she is pandering to a very depraved taste in ribbonry, and I see nothing to admire in the mere fact that she is making a living by it. Lots of people make a living by selling crooked whisky.”

Cornelia Root disdained to reply. She only said: “You talked very differently when she was lyin’ sick here in the house; you couldn’t pity and praise her enough, then.”

Evans laughed shamelessly. “Well, I was afraid she was going to die, and we always try to make interest with the other world by being kind to people about to go into it. But we never keep it up after if they turn back.”

He succeeded no better than he meant in unsettling Cornelia Root’s mind in regard to Helen. He wished his wife, who usually made her own bonnets, to go out to the Port and order them of Helen, and in turn suffered much the same sort of reproach which he was fond of addressing to Cornelia. Mrs. Evans said he had never before wished her to get her bonnets in Cambridgeport, and she understood that Miss Harkness had quite all the work she could do. She had helped to take care of Helen during her sickness, and had been devotedly kind to her, like every one else in the house; but a woman likes  to place her own limits to her benevolence, especially towards other women; and the husband will commit an error who attempts to extend them. She asked him why he did not wish her to get her bonnets of some of the common milliners in Hanover Street, and he was unable to say why.

XVIII.

THE world of fashion, on whose bonnets Helen had experimented in learning her business, accepted the hearsay of her success in a humbler way with selfsatisfaction, and attributed far greater things to her than she achieved. It understood that she was making money, and several fictions in regard to the sums she had amassed had a ready currency. The world intended to look her up, when it had time; it was neither hard-hearted nor indifferent, but it was preoccupied. There were ladies who meant almost every day to drive out and see Helen; there were others who refrained because they fancied she would rather not have them come; but all were unfeignedly glad that the poor thing had found something at last that she could do. Her experiment in aesthetic millinery had thrown a great deal of light on her former endeavours; people said there was hardly anything she had not tried. In fine, they practically left her acquaintance and her memory in the keeping of Clara Kingsbury, who remained faithful to both, and perhaps did the best thing for them in rather hushing them up. She was herself a little sensitive about Helen’s first experiment, and she was aware that many people held her indirectly responsible for the enthusiasm with which they had encouraged it. She always answered inquiries about Helen in an elusive way; she generalised her, and passed her over as quickly as possible, so that really the world had it to say that, so far from having dropped Helen, she had dropped herself. It was certainly not to blame for having heard nothing of her failing health, which began to break some six months after she had established herself at Margaret’s. She had worked very hard, for she had incurred expenses during her fever at Mrs. Hewitt’s, for which she was still in debt to Clara Kingsbury, and she had cherished the secret determination to reimburse her for all her losses through her. She had not earned enough to do this, but she had worn herself thin and pale by the time the advancing spring made it a year since she had heard of Robert’s death. Her friend wished her to give up and go down to her cottage with her; but Helen refused to do more than spare herself a little, and she was still at Margaret’s when the Butlers and Rays arrived from Europe.

They had been abroad longer than they had intended, because Captain Butler had continued in feeble health; but now they had come home to stay, as Marian wrote from London before they sailed. They were all going to be in Beverley together till Ray could decide whether to buy or to build in Boston, and Marian said that the first thing must be an indefinite visit from Helen. There was a tone of peremptory hospitality in her letter, which made Helen, in spite of her affection for them, dread the return of her old friends. She was much more comfortable with Clara Kingsbury, who had become the friend of her adversity, who realised it, and took it seriously; and she could see that it was still a freakish piece of wilfulness to the Butlers. Marian somehow treated her as if she were a little girl, and rather an absurd little girl. She knew that she could right herself against Marian’s assumptions of sincerity and wisdom, but she shrank weakly from the effort, and she foresaw that she should not have the physical strength to make it.

In fact she yielded at once when Marian drove out to Cambridgeport and took possession of her. She was not even to be allowed to wait till they were settled at Beverley, but was to go down with them; and Marian came from the hotel where they were stopping for the day to fetch her.

Marian had always been large and blonde; she now showed a tendency to stoutness; she was very English in dress, and she had the effect of feeling as if she looked very English. In fact, she had visited so much at great English houses that she was experiencing the difficulty, which sometimes besets American sojourners in England, of distinguishing herself from the aristocracy, or at least the landed gentry. “The illusion shortly yields to American air, but it is very perfect while it lasts.

Marian had a nurse for her little boy, and she called this nurse by her surname simply; she was quite English in her intonation, and she was at the same time perfectly honest and unaffected in these novel phases, and as thoroughly good and kind-hearted as ever. But her handsome bulk and her airs of a large strange world made Helen feel undersized and provincial; in spite of all she could do, and in spite of her accurate knowledge of just what Marian Ray was and had always been, her friend made her feel provincial. She had been almost two years out of society, and for the last six months her relations had been with inferior people; she asked herself if she might not really have retrograded in mind and manners, and she gladly escaped from Marian to the others; to the exuberant welcome of the younger girls; to the pitying tenderness of Mrs. Butler; to the quiet and cordial simplicity of Ray, — his quiet seemed to have been intensified by absence. But what went most to her heart was Captain Butler’s tremulous fondness, and the painful sense that the others were watching, whether they would or not, for the effect of his broken health upon her. He brightened at meeting Helen; they said afterwards that he had not seemed for a long time so much like himself; and they left him to entertain her while they made a show of busying themselves about other affairs. It was probably an indulgence they had agreed to grant his impatience. He kept her little worn hands in his, and looked at her forefinger, roughed with the needle, and deeply tinted with the stuffs in which she worked, and it seemed to be this sight that suggested his words:

“I managed very badly for you, my dear! If it hadn’t been for my hesitation when I first doubted that rascal, I could have made terms for you with the creditors. I don’t wonder you would never accept help from me! It’s very good of you to come to us now.”

“Oh, Captain Butler, you break my heart! Did you think that was the reason? I only wished to help myself. Indeed, indeed, that was all. I wouldn’t have accepted any provision from the creditors.”

“You need never have known it. That could have been arranged,” said Captain Butler.

“It’s been a mercy, the work — my only mercy!” cried the girl. “Oh, Captain Butler!” She caught her hands away and hid her face in them, and let the black wave of her sorrow go over her once more. When it was past, she lifted her dim eyes to those of the old man. “Did you read about it — all about it?”

“Yes, my dear, and many a night I’ve lain awake and thought about it!”

“Did you ever think that he might still be alive — that perhaps those men came away and left him, and he escaped somehow? Don’t tell me that you did if you never did!”

The old man remained silent.

“Then they must have killed him — to get that money—”

“No; probably they told the truth. It might very well have happened as they said,” pleaded Captain Butler.

“Ah, you know it couldn’t!”

Again his hopeless silence assented, and Helen said, with a long, deep sigh, “That is all. You know how I must have felt. There is no use talking of it. I only wanted to see you and speak of it just once, because I knew you would know. Thank you!” she said, with a wandering pitifulness that forced a groan from her old friend’s lips.

“For crushing your last hope, Helen?”

“Ah! it’s better not to have false hopes.”

She stole her hands back into his, and after a while she began to tell him quietly of her life, and what she had done and expected to do; and he gave her the comfort of his fatherly praise, in which there was no surprise or foolish admiration, such as afflicted her in most people’s knowledge of her efforts.

“I don’t have to work very hard,” she explained, in answer to a question of his; “not harder than I wish; and I have got to working at last as other people do who earn their living, without thinking at all that it’s I that am doing it. That’s a comfort, — a great comfort. And I know my trade, and I’m sure that I do good work. Do you remember when I told you that I should be a milliner if I were ever left to take care of myself?”

“I remember, Helen.”

They were both silent; then she said, with a light sigh, “I’m only feeling a little fagged now.”

“You must stay with us, Helen,” began Captain Butler.

“I shall be glad enough to stay a while,” she answered evasively, and in her own mind she had already fixed the term.

It was inevitable, perhaps, that she should extend the term. The summer was a vacant time, at best, and she could let the luxury of Captain Butler’s house flatter her feeble health into strength again without such a bad conscience as she would have had if she felt that she was spoiling her future, or if she had got back her strength very rapidly. The family did not see many people, and only saw them in a quiet informal way in which Helen could share. The world, with which she had never had any quarrel, took her back kindly enough; it discreetly suppressed its curiosity; it spoke of bonnets and ribbons in her presence with a freedom that was wiser and politer than an avoidance of such topics would have been; it sent her invitations to little luncheons and low teas, and accepted her excuses gracefully, and always renewed the invitations, just as if she had come.

The old affection enfolded and enfeebled her. It was quite as bad as she had feared. She said to herself sometimes that it would be better to break off at once and go back to Margaret’s; but she did not do so. The thought of the little wooden house baking beside the dust of Limekiln Avenue, and her own low chamber gathering heat and mosquitoes from day to day under the slope of the slated mansard, opposed itself to the actuality of the Butler cottage, with its wide verandahs that looked seaward through cool breaks of foliage on the lawn dropping, smoothly to the boulders on the beach; with its orderly succession of delicate meals; with the pretty chintzed and muslined room in which she seemed to drowse her life away, safe from the harms that had hunted her so long; and she felt how easy it would be to accept indefinitely the fond hospitality that claimed her. She said that she must not; but in the meantime she did. She had the soft, feline preference for sunny exposures and snug corners which is to blame for so much frailty of purpose, or so much purposeless frailty in women; and now she was further weakened by ill-health. She stayed on and on, in spite of the feeling that they all regarded her as a poor, broken thing, who could no longer be the ideal of the young girls, or the equal friend of Marian.

Mrs. Ray was much preoccupied with her baby, with the house that Ray had decided to build, with the friends abroad from whom she heard and to whom she wrote. She carried with her an impression of wealth, an odour of opulence, which accorded well with her affluent personality; she accepted her lot of rich woman with a robust satisfaction which would have been vulgar except for her incorruptible good-heartedness. She never talked of money, but she was a living expression of large expenditure; and in discussing the plans of her new house with Helen, she had an unconsciousness of cost, as related to questions of convenience or beauty, which went further to plunge Helen into hopeless poverty than any boast of riches could have done. Her manner was none the less effective for her assumption that Helen was equally able to pay for such a house. She was not planning altogether for her own comfort and splendour, though these were duly provided for; but she was looking after the wellbeing of everybody in her household, and she was as willing to lavish upon the servants’ quarters as her own.

“I think it’s barbaric,” she said, “to make those poor creatures, because they do our work, pass their days in holes in the ground and coops under the roof, and I’m determined that they shall be decently housed with me, at least. I’m making the architect work out this idea — it was something I talked over — with” — she added, with the effect of feeling it absurd to shrink from saying it— “Lord Rainford.”

They both continued quietly looking at the plan, but the word had been spoken, and they no longer talked of the servants’ quarters in Marian’s house. Helen leaned back in her chair, with her listless hands in her lap, and Marian took up the work she had laid down before unfolding the plan.

“When did you see him last?” asked Helen.

“Oh, he came to see us off at Liverpool,” returned Marian.

“Was he — well?”

“Yes, as well as he usually is. I believe he’s never very strong, though he’s never in a bad way. He’s much better than he used to be.”

Helen was silent. Then she began, as if involuntarily: “Marian” — and stopped.

“Well?”

She was forced to go on. “Did you know—”

“He told Ned. Now, Helen,” she added quickly, “I promised Ned not to open this subject with you!”

“You haven’t,” returned Helen with quiet sadness. “I opened it. I knew that we should have to speak of it some time. I feel that I was not to blame, and I have never felt sorry for anything but his — disappointment.”

“He never blamed you. He understood just how it happened, and how he had mistaken you. He is the soul of delicate appreciation.”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And his only trouble was, that he should have forced you to say that you were engaged.”

“Yes.”

“And I don’t believe that any of us grieved more sincerely for you than he did.”

“Oh, I believe it.”

“Well,” said Marian, breaking her needle in expression of her resolution, “I won’t talk with you about Lord Rainford, Helen; for I can only talk with you in one way about him, and I promised Ned not to do that!”

“What way?” asked Helen.

“You know!”

“Now,” cried Helen, “you must tell me all about it! If I didn’t believe that I had suffered as much as he, I couldn’t forgive myself. How did he find out about — about — Robert?” She whispered the last word.

“We told him!”

“And he was sorry for me — he —

“Yes.”

“How kind he is!”

“Yes, he is kind,” said Marian. “He’s a good deal changed since he was here.” Helen looked the interest which she did not otherwise express, and Marian continued: “He’s giving up a good many of his wild Utopian ideas about democracy, and all that kind of thing. You know, at one time — before he first came out to America — he thought of dividing up his estates amongst the labourers on them.”

“What a strange idea!”

“Yes. But there was some legal obstacle to that — I don’t know what — and now he’s devoting himself to making his people comfortable in the station where he finds them. He conforms a great deal more than he used to, in every way I think his acquaintance with America did him good: he saw what a humbug democracy and equality really Were. He must have seen that nobody practically believed in them; and we must say this for the English, that they ‘re too honest to get any pleasure merely from the names of things. He must have found that people here were just as anxious about position and occupation as they are in England.”

“He seemed very much puzzled by it,” said Helen. “I couldn’t understand why.”

“Because he was very sincere; the English are all sincerer than Ave are. They accept rank and royalty, and carry it out in good faith; and we accept democracy, and then shirk the consequences. That’s what Ned says. I wonder that the Englishmen who have been here, or seen us running after titles abroad, can keep from laughing in our faces! And I don’t wonder that Lord Rainford was cured of his fancies in America. Why, he actually, at one time, was a sort of republican!”

“A very curious sort,” said Helen. “He said that Americans were all commoners.”

Marian paused. “Did he say that? Well,” she added with heroic resolution, “I suppose we are.”

“I don’t think so,” said Helen. “Or at least it wasn’t delicate of him to say so.”

“I don’t believe he meant anything by it. He gave us to understand — or Ray at least — that he particularly admired you for your courage in earning your own living, and being no more ashamed of your work than if you were noble.”

“Yes,” said Helen thoughtfully, “I suppose it might be natural for him, if he had those notions, to idealise us here, just as it would be for one of us to idealise them: it would be his romance.”

“Certainly,” said Marian, with eager assent, as if this mood ought to be encouraged in Helen, “that is just the way.”

“And, perhaps,” Helen went on, “it would have been better for me if I had been such a girl as he supposed — trying to help myself because I respected work, and all that. But I wasn’t.”

“Of course not.”

“I was merely doing it because I couldn’t bear to be a burden to any one; and I’ve never had any higher motive.”

“And I’m sure it’s high enough,” said Marian. “And crazy enough to suit any one,” she added.

“He would like it all the better when he found out what it really was; especially now that his own ideas have changed a little.”

“He was an aristocrat at heart all the time,” returned Helen. “If I had been born to work for my living, like the poor girls whom I make bonnets for—”

“It would have been another thing, quite. We ‘re all inconsistent. I don’t deny it. There’s no merit in working for a living, whatever disgrace there is in not doing it. You don’t find your Bridgets and Norahs, or your Sadies and Mamies so very superior to human weaknesses that you wish the rest of us to form ourselves on the pattern of working girls.” O no,” said Helen, with humorous sadness. “They’re poor silly things, most of them, and as full of prejudice and exclusiveness as any one. I’ve never seen distinctions in society so awful as the distinction between shop-girls and parlour-girls. Their differences seem such a burlesque of ours, that sometimes? can hardly help laughing at the whole thing. I supposed once that all work-people were on a level; but really I had no idea of inequality till I came down to them. I daresay,” she added, “Lord Rainford’s experience in coming down to us must have been something like it. But it didn’t make it any pleasanter to have him suggest his surprise. And I don’t know that I need feel particularly flattered at his singling me out for praise because I choose to help myself rather than be wholly dependent — I’ve always been partly so. It isn’t a thing, as you say, that I deserve the least credit for.”

“I never said that about you,” protested Marian, “and I do think it’s a credit to you — or would be, if there were any necessity for it.”

“Any necessity for it?”

“I will speak now,” cried Marian, “hospitable or inhospitable; and I don’t see how it has anything to do with it.” Helen understood perfectly that these enigmatical sentences were the report, so far as they went, of some discussion between Marian and her husband, and that she was now about to break some promise she had made him out of half-conviction. “Do you expect, Helen Harkness, to go back to that horrid shanty, and spend the rest of your life in making servants’ bonnets?”

“Yes — till I have learnt how to do better work.”

“Well, then, I think it’s a shame!” Helen drew herself up, but Marian did not quail. “I think that you might have had some little consideration for us — for all your friends, if you had none for yourself. Why should it have been any more disgraceful to accept help from papa — from your father’s old friend, who felt towards you just as he does towards his own children — than to take up such work as that? If it comes to that, why shouldn’t you be dependent upon us, as well as dependent on them?”

“I’m not dependent on them,” said Helen, “and you have no right to say such a thing, Marian.” But she felt herself physically unable to cope with Marian’s misrepresentation, or the no-reasons with which she supported it.

“I say it for your good, and to let you see how it appears to others. It will kill you to go back there.

I can’t bear to think of it.”

“It won’t kill me,” answered Helen sadly, “but I shouldn’t be frightened by that if it were true. Why do you think I should be so anxious to live?”

“Helen!”

“Yes, — seriously. What is there left for me in this world?”

“There’s everything — if you would see it so.”

“Everything?”

“Helen,” said Marian, dropping her hands, with the sewing in them, into her lap, “you force me to break one of the most solemn promises I ever made in my life. But I don’t care; if I can do any good by it, I will break it. And I want you to understand that I speak entirely on my own responsibility, and quite against Ned’s advice and orders. We saw a great deal of Lord Rainford while we were in England, and everything we saw made us like him more and more.”

Helen feebly put herself on the defensive, but without saying anything, and Marian continued —

“He’s very greatly improved, in every way. He’s better, and he’s better-looking.”

“I thought him improved the last time he was here,” said Helen impartially.

“He’s the kind of man who doesn’t show to advantage out of his own surroundings,” returned Marian, pursuing her apparent advantage. “We visited him at one of his places, in the country: an old house of the fifteenth century, that kings and queens had slept in, and that had been in his family almost as long as it had been built. You never saw such a place, Helen! There wasn’t much of a park, but there were groups and avenues of beautiful old trees all about, and lawns so fine and close, that it seemed as if they had been woven and laid down there just for our visit; ivy all over the front of the house, and such gardens, with peaches and pears and roses trained along their high walls — just like Tennyson’s poems; and an exquisite keeping about everything that I never could make you understand unless you had been there. But everything was so fit that you felt as if that low English sky was part of the place, and the arrangement of the clouds had been studied for it. There wasn’t a jar or a hitch in anything, and Lord Rainford himself came in such a way that you would have thought he was as much a guest as ourselves.”

“Yes,” assented Helen; “I suppose they’ve brought the art of all that to perfection.”

“It isn’t an art with them; it’s nature — second nature. This was only one of his places — the smallest of them, — but there wasn’t the least effect of ownership about him; and it wasn’t from him, you may be sure, that we found out the good he was doing!”

“No; I could imagine that. He must find a great happiness in it. I’m glad—”

“Oh, he didn’t seem very happy. Not that he made any parade of melancholy. But you can tell whether such a man is happy or not, without his saying so, or looking so, even.”

Helen was silent, and Marian made a bold push. “You know what I mean, Helen, perfectly well. He didn’t speak to me about it, but he told Ned everything, and Ned told me; and I don’t believe he’s forgotten you, or ever will.”

“He had better, then,” said Helen, with a momentary firmness. “He must.”

“Didn’t you tell him that if you were not engaged—”

“Oh, did he say that? Then don’t talk to me of his delicacy, Marian! It was shameful to repeat it.”

“What nonsense! Mightn’t he say it, if he were asking Ned whether he thought you really would have cared for him if you hadn’t been?”

“Did he ask that?”

“I don’t know. But if he had, would it have been anything so very strange? Not half so strange as your saying it if you didn’t mean it. Why did you say it, Helen?”

“You know well enough, Marian. Because I felt sorry for him; because I had to say something. Did Ned — did Mr. Ray encourage him to think that I meant—”

“Of course he didn’t. He never ventured a word about it. He seems to think, like all the rest of us, except me, that you ‘re a very peculiar kind of porcelain, with none of the flaws of common clay, and I can’t persuade him you’re a girl like other girls.

But if you come to the common sense of the matter, I don’t see why Lord Rainford shouldn’t have supposed you meant what you said, and that when it was all over—”

“Marian!”

“ — Why he shouldn’t have begun to have some hopes again. I’m speaking for your good, Helen, and I’m going to speak plainly. I don’t see why you shouldn’t marry him now! If you have no pity for yourself, if you prefer to go on with the wretched life you’ve planned, I don’t see why you shouldn’t, have a little compassion for him. You’re spoiling his life as well as your own.”

Helen had to struggle from under the crushing weight of this charge by an effort that resulted in something like levity. “Oh, I don’t know that it’s spoiling his life. He seemed to care for me as an element of social and political reform, and wanted to marry me because I illustrated a theory. Perhaps, if you told him I didn’t really illustrate it, he would be quite willing to accept the situation!” —

She left Marian where she was sitting, and the subject — for that day. But the next week Ray went off to town by a train earlier than usual one morning, and Marian went restlessly about the house. The moment she found herself alone with Helen, she began abruptly: “Helen, I won’t have you thinking it’s the same thing, my talking to you the other day about Lord Rainford, as it would be if Robert Fenton had lived.”

“No,” said Helen, recognising the fact that it had seemed so to her.

“I wish to talk as if he never had lived.”

“You can’t do that!”

“Yes, I can; for now it is the same, so far as Lord Rainford is concerned. If you said anything to make him believe that it would have been different if you had not been engaged, then you owe him another chance. If you ever did or said anything to encourage him—’

“Encourage him!”

“Without knowing it — But you can’t deny that he might have thought you encouraged him deliberately that first day—”

“No,” said Helen, with a guilty sense that did not suffer her to protest against Marian’s cruelty in going back to that.

“Then I say you must listen to him. Helen, I’m speaking entirely for your good. I didn’t like him at first, either; but now I know how nice he really is. I do want you to reconsider! You would be happy with him; he would make any woman happy, and he would be simply in heaven with you. And you ‘re adapted to the life you would lead in England. You could be fashionable or unfashionable, just as you liked; and if you wanted to be useful, to do good, and that sort of thing, you’d have every chance in the world. You’d be a great success, Helen, in every way. I do want America to be well represented over there! And don’t you see what a great thing his offering himself to you is? It’s almost unprecedented! I hardly know any other American girl who hasn’t been married for her money in Europe; they’re always married for their money, even by cheap little continental counts and barons; and for an English lord to marry a poor American girl, why, it’s like an American man marrying a woman of rank, and that never was heard of! I want you to look at it on all sides, Helen; and that’s the reason I’m almost perjuring myself in talking to you of it at all. I did promise Ned so solemnly; but if I didn’t speak now, I shouldn’t have another chance before—” She suddenly stopped herself, and Helen, who had been borne down by her tide of words, lifted her head again: “Before what, Marian?”

“Before he comes!” cried Marian hysterically. “He’s coming here to-day!”

Helen rose. “Then I must go,” she said quietly. “It would be indelicate, it would be indecent, for me to be here. I wonder, Marian, you could set such a trap for me.”

Marian forgave the offensive charge to Helen’s excitement. “Trap,” she repeated. “Do you call it a trap, when I might have let him come without saying a word to you? I wanted to do it! And I should have had a perfectly good excuse; for we didn’t know ourselves that he was coming, till this morning. He wrote us from New York, and he started for Boston last night: I didn’t even know he was in the country — indeed I didn’t!” she added, beginning to quail, woman as she was, under the awfulness of the reproach in Helen’s eyes. “We couldn’t tell him not to come! How could we tell him not to come? There wasn’t even time!”

“Yes,” said Helen brokenly, “I know. I don’t blame you. But you see that I can’t stay.”

“No, I don’t,” retorted Marian, “I don’t see anything of the kind.”

“It would be shameful — it would be a trap for him.”

“He’s a man, and he’ll never dream of such a thing; he’s a gentleman, and he won’t think so!”

“But I shall,” returned Helen definitively. “It will look as if I had been waiting for him here; as if I wished to see him. It leaves me no freedom; it binds me hand and foot. If he spoke to me again, what could I say? Don’t you see, Marian?”

“No, I don’t,” said Marian. But she denied with her lips only.

“No matter; it’s quite time I was back with Margaret. I will get ready, and go up to Boston at once.”

“Helen! And when he’s crossed the ocean to see you?”

“If he’s done that, it’s all the more reason why I shouldn’t see him. He had no right to come. It was very presumptuous; it was unfeeling.”

“You encouraged him to believe that if you had not been engaged to Robert Fenton you would have accepted him. What was he to think? Perhaps he felt that, as a gentleman, he was bound to come.” Helen panted breathless. “I must go away,” was all she could say at last. —

“Oh, very well!” cried Marian. “You see how awkward you make it for us.”

“I know. I’m very sorry. But I can’t help it. How soon do you expect him?”

“Ned went up to Boston to meet him. I don’t know which train they’ll be down on,” returned Marian coldly.

“Then there isn’t a moment to be lost,” said Helen, hurrying to the door. “Will you let Jerry take me to the station?” she asked formally.

“Oh, certainly,” replied Marian, with equal state. A few minutes later Mrs. Butler came to Helen’s room, her gentle eyes full of sympathetic trouble. “Marian is feeling terribly. Must you go, dear?”

“Why, yes, Mrs. Butler. Don’t you see that I must?” returned Helen, without desisting from her packing, while Mrs. Butler sank upon a chair near the trunk.

“Yes, of course; Marian sees it too; if you are fully resolved not to — to give him any hope. But she thought — we all thought — that perhaps — . Helen, dear, I don’t wish to pry into your affairs; I have no right—”

“Oh, Mrs. Butler!” cried Helen, dropping an armful of clothes chaotically into her trunk, in order that she might give the tears, with which she was bedewing them, free course upon Mrs. Butler’s neck, “you have all the right in the world. Say anything you please to me; ask anything! How should I take it wrong?”

“There’s nothing I wish to ask, dear. If you’re quite firm — if your mind is entirely made up — there’s nothing to say. I wouldn’t urge you to anything. But we all have such a regard for him that if you should — . It seemed such a fortunate way out of all your struggles and sorrows—”

“And Robert? Do you ask me to forget him, Mrs. Butler, so soon?”

“Oh, no, my dear! I should be the last to do that! But wives lose their husbands and husbands their wives, and marry again. They don’t forget their dead; but in this world we can’t live for the dead; we must live for the living. Don’t look at it as if it were forgetting him or betraying him in any way. As long as you live — you must understand that — he can be nothing to you!”

“Oh, I do understand it,” sobbed the girl. “My heart has ached it all out, long ago, and night and A day I know it. And that’s what makes me wish I were dead too.”

Mrs. Butler ignored this outburst. “And this young man is so good — and he is so true to you—”

“Oh, is that the reason I should be untrue to myself?”

“No, dear, it isn’t any question of that. It’s merely a question of examining yourself about it, of making sure of your own mind when you see him again. The children are all romantic about it because it’s a title, and they like to think of a splendid marriage for you; but if it were only that, I should be very sorry. I’ve seen enough of splendid marriages, and I know what risks American girls take when they marry out of their own country, and their own kind of thinking and living. But this isn’t the same thing, Helen — indeed it isn’t. He likes you because you ‘re American, and because you ‘re poor; and the last thing he thinks of is his title. No, dear. If he were some penniless young American, he couldn’t be any better or simpler. Mr. Butler and I both agreed about that.”

“Captain Butler!” cried Helen, with the tragedy of Et tu, Brute, in her tones, and the effect of pre-

 — paring to fall with dignity. —

“Yes. He says he never saw any young man whom he liked better. They formed quite a friendship. He was very sweet and filial with Mr. Butler; and was always making him talk about you!”

A throe of some kind passed through Helen, and the arm round Mrs. Butler’s neck tightened convulsively.

“I never approved,” continued the elder lady, “of what people call marrying for a home; but I thought — we all thought — that if, when you saw him again, you felt a little differently about everything, it would be such an easy way out of all your difficulties. We approve — all of us — of your spirit, Helen; we quite understand how you shouldn’t wish to be dependent, and we admire your courage and self-respect, and all that; but we don’t like to see you working so hard — wearing your pretty young life away, wasting your best days in toil and sorrow.”

“Oh, Mrs. Butler! the sorrow was sent, I don’t know why; but the work was sent to save me. If it were not for that I should have gone mad long ago!”

“But couldn’t anything else save you, Helen? That’s what we want you to ask yourself. Can’t you let the sunlight come back to you—”

“No, no!” cried Helen, with hysterical self-pity; “I must dwell in the valley of the shadow of death all my life. There is no escape for me. I’m one of those poor things that I used to wonder at — people always in black, always losing friends, always carrying gloom and discouragement to every one. You must let me go. Let me go back to my work and my poverty. I will never leave it again. Don’t ask me. Indeed, indeed, it can’t be; it mustn’t be! For pity’s sake, don’t speak of it any more!”

Mrs. Butler rose and pressed the girl to her heart in a motherly embrace. “I won’t, dear,” she said, and went out of the room.

Helen heard her encounter some one who had just come up the stairs, at the head of which a briefly-murmured colloquy took place, and she heard in Jessie Butler’s penetrating whisper: “Will she stay? Will she accept him? Is she going to be Lady Rainford? Oh, I hope—”

“Hush, Jessie!” came in Mrs. Butler’s whisper, and then there was a scurry of feet along the matting, and a confusion of suppressed gaiety, as if the girls were running off to talk it over among themselves.

Helen would not make allowance for the innocent  romance it was to them. She saw it only as a family conspiracy that the Butlers ought all to have been ashamed of, and she began again to pack her trunk with a degree of hauteur which, perhaps, never before attended such a task. Her head was in a whirl, but she worked furiously for a half-hour, when she found herself faint, and was forced to lie down. She would have liked to ring and ask for a biscuit and a glass of wine; but she would not, she could not consent to add the slightest thing to that burden of obligation towards the Butlers which she now found so odious, and on which they had so obviously counted, to control her action and force her will.

She lay on the bed, growing more and more bitter against them, and quite helpless to rise. She heard a carriage grate up to the door on the gravel outside, and she flung a shawl over her head to shut out the voices of Ray and Lord Rainford; she felt that if she heard them she must shriek; and she cried to herself that she was trapped, trapped, trapped!

Some one knocked lightly at her door, and Marian entered in answer to a reckless invitation from the pillow. It seemed an intolerable piece of effrontery, and Helen wondered that Marian was able to put on that air of cold indifference in proposing to ask her to come down and meet Lord Rainford before he had been in the house ten minutes.

“Helen,” said Marian, in a stiff tone of offence, “Mrs. Wilson is here, and wants you to come over and take lunch with her. I couldn’t do less than promise to give you her message. Shall I say that you ‘re lying down with a headache?”

“Oh, not at all, Marian,” said Helen; “there’s nothing the matter with me. I’m perfectly well Please tell Mrs. Wilson that I shall be very glad to come, and that I’ll be down directly.”

She was already twisting up her hair before the glass with a vigour of which she could not have believed herself capable. But the idea of flight, of escape, inspired her; in that moment she could have fought her way through overwhelming odds of Butlers; her lax nerves were turned to steel.

“Marian,” she said, “I will ask Mrs. Wilson to drive me to the station this afternoon, and I’ll be very glad if you can send my trunk there.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Marian.

“I know I’m making it horrid for you,” added Helen, beginning to relent a little, now that she felt herself safe, “but I can’t help it. I must go, and I must go at once. But Mrs. Wilson is such a kind old thing, and she’s asked me so often, and I can easily make her understand that I must come now or not at all, and if she knows that you ‘re expecting other people your letting me go to her for lunch the last day won’t seem strange.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Marian, with a slight laugh, whose hollowness was lost upon Helen.

Mrs. Butler said she was to come and visit them as soon as they got back to town; she kissed her as lovingly as ever, and the Captain was affectionately acquiescent; but the young girls were mystified, and Marian was cold. Helen tried to make it up to her by redoubled warmth in parting; but this was not to be done, and as soon as she was out of the house she began to feel how ungracious she had been to Marian, who had certainly done everything she could, and had behaved very honourably and candidly. In the undercurrent of reverie which ran along evenly with Mrs. Wilson’s chat, she atoned to Marian with fond excuses and explanations, and presently she found herself looking at the affair from the Butlers’ point of view. It did not then appear so monstrous; she relented so far as to imagine herself, for their sake and for Lord Rainford’s, consenting to what seemed so right and fit to them. She saw herself, in pensively luxurious y fancy, the lady of all that splendid circumstance at which Marian had hinted, moving vaguely on through years of gentle beneficence and usefulness, chivalrously attended in her inalienable sadness by her husband’s patient and forbearing devotion; giving him, as she could from a heart never his, and now broken, respect and honour that might warm before her early death to something like tenderness. It was a picture that had often been painted in romance, and satisfied her present mood as well as if its false drawing and impossible colour were true to any human life that had ever been or could be.

By the time she reached Mrs. Wilson’s cottage Ray drove up to the Butlers’, and met the surmise of his wife and sisters-in-law with monosyllabic evasion till he could be alone with Marian. “I didn’t bring him,” he explained then, “because the more I thought of it the less I liked our seeming to trap Helen into meeting him.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Marian. “That was her own word!”

“Then you told her? I might have expected that. Well, it was quite right. What did she say?”

“Everything unpleasant that she very well could. You would have thought that really we had taken the most unfair advantage of her, and had placed her where she couldn’t say no, if she wished.”

“I could see how it might look that way to her,” said Ray, “and that’s what I was afraid of. It was extremely awkward, every way. We couldn’t very well tell him not to come, and we couldn’t very well tell her to go; the only thing I was clear of was that we must tell her he was coming, and let her decide upon her own course.”

“That’s what I did, and she decided very quickly — she’s gone.”

Ray looked worried. “It’s tantamount to turning her out of doors, I suppose, and yet I don’t know what else we could have done. Well! I might as well have brought him straight here, and saved myself all the diplomacy of getting old Wilson to take him home for the night.”

Marian did not for the present ask what was the diplomacy which Ray had used. “Mr. Wilson!” she shrieked. “You got Mr. Wilson to take him home for the night?”

“Yes,” returned her husband quietly. “What is so very remarkable about my getting Wilson to do it?”

She did not answer, but burst from her door with a cry for Mrs. Butler that brought all her sisters also. “Mother, Lord Rainford has gone home with Mr. Wilson?”

Mrs. Butler was dumb with sensation that silenced all her daughters but Jessie. This young lady, not hitherto noted in the family for her piety, recognised a divine intention in the accident: “I call it a special Providence!” she exclaimed ecstatically.

“What is it all about?” inquired Ray.

“Oh, nothing,” replied his wife. “Nothing at all! Merely that Helen was in such haste to get away that she accepted an invitation to lunch with Mrs. Wilson, and has just driven over there with her. I suppose she’ll accuse us of having plotted with the Wilsons to ‘ trap’ her, as she calls it.”

“Marian!” said Mrs. Butler, with grave reproach. “I don’t care, mother!” retorted Marian, with tears of vexation in her eyes. “Can’t you see that she’ll accept him over there, and that I shall be cheated out of having brought them together, when I had set my heart on it so much? I didn’t suppose Helen Harkness could be such a goose, after all she’s been through!”

“My dear,” said her mother, “I don’t wish you to speak so of Helen; and as for her accepting him — Children,” she broke off to the younger girls, “run away!” and they obeyed as if they had really been children. “Edward,” she resumed, “how in the world did you contrive with Lord Rainford?”

“Well, Mrs. Butler,” said Ray, “with men, there was only one way. He had told me so much, you know, that I could take certain things for granted, and I made a clean breast of it at last, on the way home. I told him she was here, and that I thought it wasn’t quite fair bringing him into the house without giving her some chance to protest — or escape.”

“It was terrible,” said Mrs. Butler, “but I see that you had to do it. Go on.”

“And he quite agreed with me, that it wouldn’t be fair to either of them. I don’t know that I should have spoken if I had not seen old Wilson in the car. I asked him if he wouldn’t give Rainford a bed for the night; and he was only too glad. That’s all. I told him he could walk over here this evening, and meet her on equal terms.”

“That won’t be necessary now,” said Marian bitterly. “I congratulate you on the success of your diplomacy, Ned!”

“Perhaps it is providential, as Jessie says,” murmured Mrs. Butler.

“Oh, very providential!” cried Marian. “It’s as if it had all been arranged by the providence of the theatre. I hate it! Instead of taking place romantically and prettily, among her old friends, she’s obliged it to take place fancically, by a vulgar accident, where there can be nothing pleasant about it.”

“Why, Marian,” said her mother. “Do you think she will accept him?”

“Accept him? Of course she will! She is dying to do it — I could see that all the time — and I could hardly have patience with her for not seeing it herself. She’s old enough.”

“Well, never mind about that,” said Ray, authoritatively. “We have done what we all saw to be right, and we must let the consequences take care of themselves.”

“Oh, it’s very easy to say that,” cried Marian. “But, for my part, I’m sorry I did right.”

“Well, your doing wrong in this case wouldn’t have helped. My doing right alone was enough to put everything at sixes and sevens.”

XIX.

A SERIES of trivial chances brought Helen and Lord Rainford together alone, before she could get away from the Wilsons’ after lunch. The first train for town did not start till three, and it was impossible that she should shut herself up in her room and avoid him until that time. In fact she found that there was nothing in his mere presence that forced her to any such defensive measure, while there was much in the fatal character of the situation, as there is in every inevitable contingency, to calm if not to console her; and the sense of security that came from meeting him by accident, where she was perfectly free to say no, and could not seem by the remotest possible implication to have invited an advance from him, disposed her in his favour. They met certainly with open surprise, but their surprise was not apparently greater than that of the Wilsons in bringing their guests together; and when Mr. Wilson explained that he owed the pleasure of Lord Rainford’s company for the night to a domestic exigency at the Butlers’, Helen divined that Ray’s thoughtfulness had given her this chance of escape, and wondered if Lord Rainford was privy to it. But he was listening with his head down to Mrs.

Wilsons explanation of the chance that had given them the pleasure of Miss Harkness’s company; she wondered if he were wondering whether she knew that he was coming and had fled on that account; but it was impossible to guess from anything he said or looked, and she began to believe that Ray had not told him she was with them. With impartial curiosity she took note of the fact that his full-grown beard had unquestionably improved his chin; it appeared almost as if something had been done for his shoulders; certainly his neck was not so long; or else she had become used to these traits, and they did not affect her so much as formerly. More than once during the lunch she thought him handsome; it was when his face lighted up in saying something pleasant about seeing America again. He pretended that even twenty-four hours of American air had made another man of him. Mr. Wilson said that he did not know that there had been any American air for a week, and Lord Rainford said that he did not mind the heat; he believed he rather liked it.

“But you certainly haven’t got it to complain of here,” he added. —

“Oh, no, it’s always cool on the North Shore,” Mrs. Wilson explained. “We shall not let you go home this afternoon, Miss Harkness,” she turned to say to Helen; “you would certainly perish in Cambridge.”

“Port,” added Helen, with inflexible conscience; she never permitted herself or any one else the flattering pretence that she lived in Old Cambridge. “You must,” she continued quietly. “I’ve made all my preparations.” This fact was final with a woman, and Mrs. Wilson could only make a murmur of distress, and beg her at least to go by a later train, but Helen was firm also about the train; she said her trunk would be at the station, and she must go then. If she had her formless intention that this should be discouraging to Lord Rainford, she could see no such effect in him; he remained unmoved, and she began to question whether at sight of her he might not have lost whatever illusion he had cherished concerning her. She said to herself that she knew she had changed, that she had grown older and thinner, and plainer every way. If this were so, it was best; she hoped — with a pang — that it was so. She ought to have thought of it before; it might have saved her from giving Marian pain. Of course he had entirely ceased to care for her.

After lunch Mr. Wilson betrayed signs of heaviness, which obliged his wife to the confession that nothing could keep Mr. Wilson awake after lunch. She sent him away for his nap, and she was going to lead her guests down over the lawn for a look at the sea from the rocks by the shore, when a servant came with some inexorable demand upon her.

“You know the way, Miss Harkness,” she said.

“Take Lord Rainford down there, and I will be with you in a moment.”

She hurried away with the maid, and Helen descended the piazza steps and sauntered past the beds of foliage-plants across the grass with her charge. He did not leave her in a moment’s doubt of his mind or purpose after they were beyond hearing.

“Do you know why I have come back?” he asked abruptly, and striving to catch the eyes she averted.

“How should I—” she began, but he spared her the sin of even an insinuated ignorance.

“I came back for you,” he said with a straightforward sincerity that shamed her out of all evasion.

“Then I am sorry for that,” she replied frankly, “for you had better have forgotten me.”

“That wasn’t possible. I couldn’t have forgotten you when I knew you were not free; how could I forget you now? For the last year my life has been a count of days, hours, minutes. If I have come too soon, tell me, and I will go away till you let me come again. I can wait!”

He spoke with the strength but not the vehemence of his passion, and she stayed her fluttered nerves against his quiet. If it were to be reasonably talked over, and dismissed like any other impossibility, it would be very simple; she liked him for making it so easy; she felt humbly grateful to him; she imagined that she could reconcile him to his fate.

“You must forgive me,” he added, “if what I say is painful. I will spend my life in atoning for it.”

“There is nothing to forgive on my part. If you can have patience with me.”

“Patience?”

“Oh, I don’t mean what you think!”

“I hope I haven’t seemed impatient. I couldn’t excuse myself if I had. No one could have respected, revered your bereavement more than I; and if I thought that I had sinned against it in coming now—”

“No — no—”

“It seemed to me that I had a kind of warrant — permission — in something you said — something, nothing — that took away all hope and then became my hope—” —

“Oh,” she trembled, “what did I say?”

“Nothing,” he said, “if you remember nothing.

I abide by what you say now.”

She was thrilled with an aesthetic delight in his forbearance, and with a generous longing to recognise it. “I know what you mean, and I blame myself more than any words can say for letting you suppose — It was my culpable weakness — I only meant to save you — to spare you all I could!” A dismay came into his face that she could not endure to see. “Oh, don’t look so! Did you — did you really come back on account of that?”

“I misunderstood you — I see. Not perhaps at first; but afterwards. I came back because I thought you told me that if you had been free you might have answered me differently then.”

“Yes, that’s what the words said; but not what they meant!” She silently grieved for him, walking a little apart, and not daring to lift her eyes to his face. He would not speak, and she had perforce to go on. “Why did you ever care for me?” she implored at last, rushing desperately at the question, as if there might be escape on that side.

“Why?” he echoed.

“Surely, the first time we met — what was there to make you even endure me?”

“Endure?” He seemed to reflect. “I don’t think you were to blame. But it never was a question of that. You — you were my fancy. I can’t tell you better than that. And you have always been so. It isn’t for what you did; it isn’t for what you said.”

It seemed hopeless. They walked on, and they only ceased from walking because they had reached the brink of the rocks beyond which lay the sea.

She stood there looking on its glassy levels, which shivered against the rocks at her feet in impulses that were like her own feeble and broken purposes. In a certain way life was past with her; there could be no more of what had been, no longer the romantic tenderness, the heroic vision of love; but there could be honour, faith, affection. The sense of this passed vaguely through her heart, and exhaled at her lips in a long, hopeless sigh.

At the light sound he spoke again. “But I didn’t come back to make good any claim upon you. I came to see you again because I must, and because it seemed as if I had the privilege of speaking once more to you. But perhaps I haven’t.”

“Oh, certainly, you have that!” she weakly assented.

“I don’t urge you to anything. I only tell you again that I love you, and that I believe I always shall. But I don’t ask your answer now or at any given time. I can wait your will, and I can abide by it then, whatever your answer is.”

A heavy weight was on her tongue, which hindered her from making her answer “No.” A ship lagging by in the offing as if it panted with full sails for every breath of the light breeze, the whole spectacle of the sea, intimated a reproach, poignant as fleeting and intangible. She felt herself drifting beyond her own control, and any keeping would be better than none; she longed for rest, for shelter; she no longer cared for escape. There was no reason why she should refuse the love offered her. She could not doubt its truth; its constancy even charmed her a little; she was a little in love, — pensively, reluctantly, — with a love for herself so steadfast, so patient, so magnanimous. The sense  of her own insufficiency to herself, the conviction that after all, and at the very most, she was a half success only even in the sordid and humiliating endeavour which was the alternative, unnerved her.

“Oh, what shall I say?” she asked herself; and then looked up in terror lest she had uttered the words. But she had not. He met her inquiring glance only with a look of sympathy, in which perhaps the hope suggested by her hesitation was beginning to dawn. She appealed to him against himself.

“I wish you had not come back. You have made a great mistake.”

His countenance fell again.

“A mistake?”

“Yes, you are mistaken in me. I’m not at all what you think me. If I were that, ‘ I shouldn’t be here, now, begging you for mercy. If I were not so foolish, so fickle-minded, that no words can describe me, he would never have left me; he would have been alive and with me. Oh!” she cried, “I can’t let any one else trust me or believe in me for an instant. It isn’t as if I were bereft in any common way; it’s as if I had killed him!”

Lord Rainford remained so little moved by this assumption of guilt that she added, “Ah, I see you won’t believe me!”

“No,” he said. “I understood something of that from Ray; and if I hoped only to be your friend — if I knew I was never to see you again — I should still say that you were wrong in blaming yourself now; that you were right then in wishing to make sure of yourself before you married him. It would have been unjust to him to have done less.”

“Oh, does it seem so to you?” she implored. “That was the way it seemed to me then.”

“And it ought always to seem so. If you’ve made it my privilege to speak to you of this matter—”

“Oh, yes, yes!”

“Then I say that I think what you did in that matter ought to be your greatest consolation now. It may be one of those eccentricities which people have found in my way of thinking, but? can’t feel less reverently towards marriage than that.”

He had never seemed so noble, so lovable even, as at that moment. Her heart turned toward him in a fervent acceptance of the comfort, the support he offered her; it thanked him and rejoiced in him; but it was heavy again with its former dismay when he said, “I don’t urge you to any decision. Remember I am always yours, whether you refuse me or not.” —

She perceived then that it was not really a question of her and Robert, but of her and Lord Rainford, and that the decision to which he did not urge her must rest finally with her. If she could have been taken from herself without her own consent, passively, negatively, it would have been another affair.

She gathered herself together as best she could. “I am acting very weakly, very wrongly. I’ve no excuse but that this is all a surprise to me. I didn’t know you were in this country. I didn’t dream of ever meeting you again till three hours ago, when Mrs. Ray told me you were coming. Then I ran away from her to avoid meeting you. Yes, I had better be frank! It seemed horrible to me that I should meet you in her house; you could never have believed that I hadn’t wished to meet you.”

“That’s what I should be glad to believe, if I could. But I saw — I agreed with Ray — that it might not be leaving you quite free in every way; and so I was glad to accept his suggestion that I should come here first till something could be arranged — till you could be told.”

“That was like Mr. Ray,” interrupted Helen.

“I see how it has all happened; and oh, I’m so sorry it’s happened!”

The young man turned pale. But he answered courageously, “I’m not. I had to know whether there was any hope for me; I had to know it from you.”

“Yes,” she assented, moved by his courage.

“And I should not have gone away without at least making sure that there is none, and that is all I ask you now.”

“But if I can’t tell you? I must wait — I must think. You must give me time.”

“Did I seem to be impatient?” he asked with exquisite deference and protest.

“No. It must have been my own impatience — I don’t know what — and you mustn’t try to see me again — unless—” A deep blush dyed her face.

She had put some paces between them, with a sort of nervous dread that he might off his hand in parting. She now said abruptly, “Good-bye,” and turned and ran up toward the house, leaving him on  the rocks by the sea.

Mrs. Wilson met her half-way across the lawn. “I was coming to join you,” she began.

“Lord Rainford is there,” said Helen. “Mrs. Wilson, I find that I must see Mrs Ray again before I go to town. Could you let them drive me across, and then to the station?”

“Why, certainly,” said Mrs. Wilson in the national terms of acquiescence.

XX.

AT first Fenton’s arrival on the island had seemed, like the breaking of the steamer’s shaft, the storm, the shipwreck, the escape to the reef, and the voyage in the open boat, one step in a series in which there was no arrest, and in which there was at least the consolation of movement from point to point But this consolation ceased with his last glimpse of the sail, in which all hope of escape fainted and died; and it did not revisit him when he gathered courage to explore the fairy solitude of the atoll. It was so small as to have been abandoned even by the savages of those seas, who forsake their overpeopled islands, and wander from reef to reef in search of other homes, and it would never be visited from the world to which he had belonged. The whalers that sometimes stop for water at the coral islands would not touch at this little point of land, lifted, like a flower among its thorns, above those perilous rocks. It had probably never been laid down on any chart; in a century which had explored every part of the globe, it must be a spot unknown to civilised men. The soil showed like snow through the vegetation that thinly covered it, and the perpetual green on white repeated itself in the trailing vines that overran the coral blocks, with narrow spaces of sea between, which Fenton leaped, in his round of the island, to find himself again and again on the white soil of the groves, through which the palm struck its roots, and anchored itself fast to the reef. At the highest point the land rose fifteen feet above the sea; at the widest place it measured a hundred yards; and if he had fetched a compass of the whole, he would have walked less than two miles. They should not starve; the palms would yield them abundant fruit through the unvarying year; the sea, he knew, was full of fish. As he emerged from the grove at the point at which he had started, Giffen called out to him, “What’s that on the tree right by your shoulder?” Fenton looked round, and the bright blossom near him turned into a bird. He put out his hand; it did not move; and when he lifted it from its perch, it rested fearlessly on his palm. He flung it from him with a sickening sensation, and Giffen came running towards him.

“Hallo! what’s the matter?” demanded Fenton. “I thought mebbe it was poison!”

“There’s nothing to kill us here,” Fenton replied. “Come, we must begin to live.”

The sailors had left behind the remnant of the bag of flour, and the peas and beans. Giffen had carried them up to the hut, and one day Fenton found that he had made a garden and planted it with them. They came up quickly, and then, as if the soil lacked vitality, they withered away, all but a vine sprung from a seed that Giffen found among the peas.

He tenderly cherished this vine, which he hoped would prove a musk-melon, or at least a cucumber; in due time it turned out a gourd. “My luck,” he said, and gathered his gourds, for drinking-cups.

In the maze which had deepened upon Fenton, the whole situation had an unreality, as of something read long ago, and half-forgotten, and now slowly recalled, point by point; and there were moments of the illusion in which it was not he who was imprisoned there on that unknown island, but the hero of adventures whom he had envied and admired in boyhood, or known in some romance of later life. The gun and the cartridges which they treasured so carefully after they found traces of a former savage habitation; the tools which they had brought from the wreck, and which they used in shaping the timbers for their hut; the palm-leaves they plucked for its thatch; the nuts they gathered for their food and drink; the fishing-lines they twisted from the fibre of the cocoa-bark; the hooks they carved from the bones of the birds they ate, and the traps they set for game when the wild things once so tame began to grow wary; their miserable economies of clothing; the rude arts by which they fashioned plates from shells, and cooking utensils from the clay they found in sinking their well; the vats they made to evaporate the sea-water for its salt: all these things seemed the well-worn properties and stock experiences of the castaways of fiction; he himself the figment of some romancer’s brain, with which the author was toying for the purposes of his plot, to be duly rescued and restored to the world when it should serve the exigency of the tale. Once when this notion was whimsically repeating itself to Fenton in the silence and solitude, it brought a smile to his haggard face, and when Giffen asked him what the matter was, he told him.

“No,” said Giffen, “it ain’t much like us.”

That two modern men should be lost out of a world so knit together with telegraphs and railroads and steamships, that it seemed as if a whisper at any point must be audible at all others, was too grotesque a fact, too improbable for acceptance. It was not like them, and it was not like any one he could think of, and when he tried to imagine some contemporary and acquaintance in his case, it became even more impossible than when he supposed it of himself.

There were ironical moods in which he amused himself with the carefully ascertained science of the story-tellers as he recalled it, and in which he had a fantastic interest in noting how near and yet how far from the truth their study came. But there were other times when the dreary sense of the hackneyed character of the situation overpowered him, and he dropped his work and lay with his face in the sand, helpless and hopeless for hours, sick of the repetition of such stale inventions. There was no greater reality in it all, when he recalled the narratives of men actually cast away on desert islands, though there were moments when the sum of what they had suffered seemed to accumulate itself upon his soul, and his heart and hand were heavy with their sorrows.

Yet in spite of all, the simple and wholesome conditions of his life were restoring him to physical health, which reacted upon his mind at last; and one morning he woke with a formless, joyful expectation that was like a hope. It was merely the habit of hope, reviving from a worn-out despair, but he sprang to his feet with a buoyancy of soul that he had not known since the storm first began to close round the Meteor.

Hitherto, the thought of Helen had been fruitless torment, which he banished when he could, but now, all at once, he found it an inspiration and an incentive; he thought of her gladly; she seemed to call him.

He left Giffen to kindle the fire for their breakfast, and ran down to the lagoon for a morning bath. The sun shone on a long black object that stretched across the main channel from the sea, and swimming out to it, he found it the trunk of a tree which had drifted to their island. With Giffen’s help he got it inside of the reef, and floated it to their beach, and he could not rest till they had dragged it up out of the water. It was a message from the world they had lost, and the promise of rescue and return to it. At the bottom of his heart he knew that it might have drifted a thousand miles before it reached them, but it was as easy to believe that it came from land within a day’s sail; it was of a timber unknown to the atolls; the pebbles that it held in the network of its roots were from shores where there were hills and rivers, from peopled shores that they might reach if they had any craft in which they could venture to sea.

Giffen walked up and down beside the log, and examined it critically, stooping aside, and glancing at it as if to make sure of its soundness in every part.

“Well?” demanded Fenton.

“Chop it along the top, and shape it up at the ends, and dig it out; and maybe we can fix some sort of outrigger to it, like they use on their canoes around here. I’ve seen pictures of ‘em.”

He made the suggestion with melancholy diffidence; but Fenton caught at it eagerly. The wood was very hard, and it cost them weeks of labour, with the tools they had, before they were ready to launch their canoe upon the lagoon. But even in those placid waters, it proved hopelessly unseaworthy. Some fatal defect of construction, which their skill could not remedy, disabled it, and it capsized with Giffen, who was caught in the outrigger, and with difficulty saved from drowning by Fenton.

“Well, sir,” he said, as he walked dripping to their hut, “we’ve got a lot of good firewood in that thing. I believe if you hadn’t had me around, you could have made it go.”

But the idea of escape had taken full possession of Fenton’s mind, and the failure of the canoe turned it all upon another scheme which had begun to haunt it. They had kept a fire burning night and day ever since they had landed on the island, to attract the notice of any ship that came in sight; but now Fenton determined to build a tower on the highest point, and light a beacon on it, so that no lookout on those seas could fail of the smoke by day or the flame by night.

“All right,” assented Giffen, “it will kind of occupy our minds any way.”

“Don’t say that!” cried Fenton, with a pang.  “Well, I won’t,” returned Giffen penitently.

The tower was to be not only a beacon for friendly sail, but a refuge from wandering savages who caught sight of it. They must make it the centre of defences to which they could resort if they were attacked, and which they could hold against any such force as would probably land on their atoll.

Fenton drew a plan, and by nightfall they had dug the foundations of their fortress. They burnt some of the coral blocks, which they brought from the reef, for lime, and laid their walls strongly in mortar.

The days passed, and as they toiled together, Fenton had at last the heart to talk to his fellow-castaway of the world to which they were preparing to return.

He found that to speak of his affairs in that world made it not only credible again, but brought it very near.

He told Giffen that he was going to be married as soon as he got back to Boston, and that he was going to leave the navy, and try to get into some sort of business ashore. He described Helen to his comrade, and what she wore when he saw her last; and then he added, that she must be in black now, for she had lost her father, who died very suddenly a few days after he sailed.

“I behaved badly,” he added, with the feeling that always struggled for utterance when he thought of this, and which it was a relief to speak out now. “We had a misunderstanding, and I came off without saying good-bye to him.”

“That was pretty rough,” said Giffen. “But you can make it all right when you get back.”

“Oh, it’s all right now — with her,” rejoined Fenton quickly.

“And with him too, I reckon,” suggested his comrade.

“Yes, it must be,” sighed Fenton. If the situation was in anywise incomprehensible to Giffen, he did not try to explore it. He remained deferentially content with what Fenton had volunteered, and he was sympathetically patient when Fenton tried to make him understand where Mr. Harkness’s house was, by a plan of the Common, which he drew on a smooth surface of the plastered wall, with Park Street running up one side, and Beacon Street along the other, and Beacon Steps ascending from it into the quiet Place, where the house stood. He made a plot of the house, up-stairs and down, with the different rooms marked off: Helen’s room at the front, Mr. Harkness’s room; the room that he used to have when he came home from school; the parlours, and the library. He lingered fondly on the details; and then he mapped the whole town for Giffen, accurately placing the principal streets and squares and public buildings. He marked the lines of railroad running out of the city, and the different depots. “This,” he said, placing the Albany Station, “is where you would have to start for Kankakee. It’s a little south of Chicago, isn’t it? — on one of the lines from Chicago to St. Louis? There’s a Kankakee line, isn’t there?” He laughed for joy in the assent which seemed to confirm the existence of the places; the sound of the names alone re-established them. At times he stealthily glanced from this work at the rim of the sea, where, as he had been silently making-believe while he talked, there must be a sail. But he bore the inevitable disappointment patiently, and returned enthusiastically to his map; he projected another map in sections, on a larger scale, where the details could be more fully given.

Giffen did not speak much of his own life; it was nothing worth speaking of, he said; but sometimes at night he would drop a hint or scrap of his history from which Fenton could infer what remained unspoken. It was the career of a feeble nature, constantly pushed to the wall in the struggle of a new country. All his life, Giffen had failed; he had always had bad crops, bad partners, bad luck, hard times; if he went away from home to better his condition, he made it worse; when he came back he found that he would have done better to stay away. He bought on a rising market, and sold with the first fall in prices. When a crash came, it found him extended; the return of prosperity overtook him without money or credit. He had tried all sorts of things with equal disaster: he had farmed, he had kept store, he had run a sawmill, he had been a book-agent, and agent for many patent rights. In any other country he would have remained quietly in some condition of humble dependence; but the unrest of the new world had infected him; he had spent his life in vain experiments, and his last venture had been the most ruinous of all. He had sold everything to get the means of going to China, and when the common calamity, that could scarcely be said to have blasted any hopes of his, overtook him, he was coming home little better than a beggar.

Even in that solitude he made Fenton his ideal, with the necessity that is in such natures to form themselves upon some other, and appreciated his confidence and friendship as gratefully as if they had been offered in the midst of men where he must have been chosen out of a multitude for Fenton’s kindness. On his part, Fenton learned to admire the fineness of spirit which survived all circumstance in this poor fellow; and when his hopes were highest, he formed plans doing something for Giffen in the world.

When they had finished their tower, and removed into it, he bade him make one more errand to the hut they had abandoned, and get fire to light the beacon.

Giffen refused. “No, sir; better not have any of my luck about it.”

But he was off, early in the day that followed, to cut wood for their beacon; and it was he who discovered that they could make the densest smoke by day in drying the fuel for the flame by night.

“Don’t you think we ought to do something with that canoe again?” he asked one day.

“No, not yet,” answered Fenton. “There’ll be time enough for that if the beacon doesn’t succeed. But it will succeed.” He formlessly felt the need of economising all the materials of hope within him. If he turned so soon from the beacon to some other device for escape, he knew that he must lose his faith in it, and he could not bear the thought of this loss. He was passionately devoting himself to the belief that it must bring a ship to their rescue. He divided the day and night into regular watches, and whenever he came to relieve Giffen, he questioned him closely as to every appearance of the sea; when he lay down to sleep he hastened to take upon himself the burden of disappointment with which he must wake, by saying to himself, “I know that he will not see anything.” He contrived to postpone the anguish of his monotonous failure to conjure any sail out of the empty air by saying, as each week began, that now they must not expect to see anything for at least three days, or five days, or ten days to come. He invented reasons for these repeated procrastinations, but he was angry with Giffen for acquiescing in them; he tried to drive him into some question of them, by making them fantastic, and he was childishly happy when Giffen disputed them. Then he urged other and better reasons: if it were fine, he said that nothing but stress of weather would bring them a ship, and that they could only hope for some vessel blown out of her course, like the Meteor; when it was stormy, he argued that any vessel sighting their beacon would keep away from it till the storm was past, but would be sure to come back then, and see what their fire meant.

“Yes,” said Giffen, “but if we are going to keep that fire up at the rate we have for the last three months, we must begin to cut our cocoa palms.”

“It isn’t three months!” cried Fenton.

Giffen proved the fact by the reckoning he had kept on a block of coral in the tower: the tale of little straight marks, one for each day, was irrefutable.

“Why did you keep that count?” cried Fenton desperately. “Let the time go, I say, and the quicker it goes, and the sooner we are both dead, the better! Put out the fire; it’s no use.”

He left Giffen in the tower, and wandered away, as far away as the narrow bounds of his prison would permit. He stopped at a remote point of the island, which he had not visited since the first day when he had hastened to explore the atoll. The hoarse roaring of the surf, that beat incessantly upon the reef, filled the air; the sea was purple all round the horizon, and the sky blue above it; flights of tern and petrel wheeled and shrieked overhead: the sun shone, tempered by the delicate gale, and all things were as they had been half a year ago, as they must be half a year hence, and for ever. In a freak of the idle curiosity that sometimes plays on the surface of our deepest and blackest moods, he descended the low plateau to look at a smoother and darker rock which showed itself at the point where the reef began to break away from the white sand. A growth of soft sea-mosses clothed the rock, and it had a fantastic likeness to a boat in shape. The mosses waved back and forth in the water; the rock itself appeared to move, and Fenton fell upon it, and clutched it, as if it had been some living thing struggling to escape him. He pulled it up on the sand, and then he sank down beside it, too weak to stir, too weak to cry out; the tears ran down his face, like the tears of a sick man’s feebleness.

Giffen found him beside the boat, which they righted together without a word.

“Well, sir,” he said at last, “I’m glad you found her.” He went carefully over the places where it had been patched, with a solemn and critical scrutiny. “That’s our boat,” he added.

“Yes, I thought so,” assented Fenton.

“And those fellows—”

Neither of them put into words his conjecture as to the fate of the men who had abandoned them: they accepted in silent awe the chance of escape which this fate, whatever it was, had given them; but late that night, when they lay hopefully sleepless in their tower, Giffen said, “I don’t know as they meant to leave us for good. I reckon, if they’d got through all right, they’d have come back for us.”

“Yes, we must believe that,” replied Fenton.

How the boat had reached their atoll, and when, remained the secret of the power that had given it back to them. It was enough for them that the little craft was not beyond repair; it was thoroughly waterlogged, and it must be some time before they could begin work upon it; but they spent this time in preparing material, and gathering provision for their voyage. They stocked it with nuts, and dried and salted fish sufficient to last them for six weeks; they filled Giffen’s crop of gourds with water. “More of a tank than cucumbers or musk-melons would have been, after all; and better than cocoa-nuts,” he quietly remarked. They were of one mind, whatever happened, never to return to their atoll; they had no other definite purpose; but they talked now as if their escape were certain.

“It stands to reason,” said Giffen, “that it’s meant for us to get back, or else this boat wouldn’t have been sent for us;” and he began to plan a life as remote from the sea as he could make it. “When I put my foot on shore, I ain’t going to stop walking till I get where salt water is worth six dollars a quart; yes, sir, I’m going to start with an oar on my shoulder; and when some fellow asks me what that thing is, I’m going to rest, and not before!”

They built a fire on the tower that would last all day and night, and then they set sail out of the lagoon, and through the breakers beyond the reef. The breeze was very light, but the sky was clear, with the promise of indefinite good weather; and before nightfall they saw the plumes of their palms form themselves into the tufts into which they had grown from the points they had first discovered on the horizon; they became points again, and the night softly blotted them from the verge of the ocean.

They had neither compass nor sextant; under strange stars and alien constellations they were wandering as absolutely at the will of the winds and waves as any savages of those seas. For a while they saw the light of their beacon duller and paler on the waters where their island had been. This, too, died away, and the night fell round them on the illimitable sea.

Fenton stood the first watch, and when he gave the helm to Giffen, he simply bade him keep the, boat before the wind. In the morning, when he took it, he asked if the wind had shifted or freshened, and still kept the boat before it. Toward sunset they sighted a series of points on the horizon, which, as they approached, expanded into the plumage of palms; the long white beach of an atoll grew from the water, and they heard faintly the thunder of the surf along the reef. It looked larger than their own island, and they scanned it anxiously for some sign of human life. But there were no huts under the palms, and no smoke rose above their fronds.

The breeze carried their boat toward the shore, and Fenton decided to pass the night on the atoll.

If it were, as it looked, larger than the atoll they had abandoned, it must be known to navigation, and sooner or later it might be visited by ships for water; or the bêche-de-mer, which abounds in the larger reefs, might bring American traders for a freight of the fish for China. They might find traces of European sojourn on the island, and perhaps some hint by which they could profit when they set sail again.

In the failing light, they stove their boat on the reef, but the breaker that drove them upon it carried them beyond, and once in the smooth lagoon, they managed to reach the shore before the boat filled. They pulled her up on the sand, and climbed to the top of the low plateau on which the palms grew; but it was now so dark that they could see nothing, and they waited for the morning to show them the familiar paths and trees of their own atoll, and their tower gleaming white through the foliage in the distance. They walked slowly towards it in silence, and when Giffen reached it, he busied himself in searching the ashes of the beacon for some spark of fire. He soon had a blaze; he brought water from the well, and boiled the eggs of the sea-birds, which he gathered from their nests in the sedge. He broke some young cocoa-nuts, and poured the milk into the shells they had made for drinking-cups, and then he approached Fenton, where he sat motionless and vacant-eyed, and begged him to eat, humbly, as if he expected some outbreak from him.

“No,” said Fenton quite gently. “But you eat. I’m not hungry.”

“I reckon,” said Giffen piteously, “the wind must have changed in the night without my knowing it, and brought us right back.”

“Very likely,” answered Fenton. “But it makes no difference. It was to be, any way.”

He hardly knew how the days began to pass again; he no longer thought of escape; but a longing to leave some record of himself in this prison, since he was doomed never to quit it, grew up in his heart, and he wrote on the walls of his tower a letter to Helen, which he conjured the reader, at whatever time he came, to transcribe and send to her. He narrated the facts of his shipwreck, and the barren history of his sojourn on the island, his attempt to escape, and his return to it. He tenderly absolved her from all ties and promises, and prayed for her happiness in whatever sort she could find it. In this surrender he felt the pang which the dead may be supposed to know, when the soul passes into the exile of eternity, and sees those it leaves behind inevitably committed to other affections and other cares. Sometimes it seemed to him as if he might really be dead, and all his experience of the past year a nightmare of the everlasting sleep.

The tern that were nesting on the atoll when he first landed, and that visited it every six months to rear their young, were now a third time laying their eggs in the tufts of coarse thin grass. He thought these visits of the birds were annual, and there was nothing in the climate to correct his error, or group in fixed periods the lapse of his monotonous days. There was at times more rain, and again less rain; but the change scarcely divided the year into seasons. flower and fruit were there at all times, and spring, summer, autumn, and winter, with their distinct variety, were ideas as alien as hills, and valleys, and streams, in this little land, raised for the most part scarcely a man’s height above the sea, where there could never even be the names of these things in any native tongue. Once or twice the atoll felt the tremor of an earthquake, that perhaps shook continental shores, or perhaps only sent its vibrations along the ocean floor, and lifted, or let fall beneath the waves, some tiny point of land like their own; and once there had fallen a shower of ashes from the clear sky, which must have been carried by a wind-current from some far-off volcano. This, with the log that had drifted to their reef, was their sole message from beyond the wilderness that weltered around them from horizon to horizon, and knew no change but from calm to storm, and then to calm again. The weather was nearly always fair, with light winds or none; and often they saw an approaching cloud divide before it reached their atoll and pass on either hand, leaving it serenely safe between the two paths of the tempest. At last, how long after their return Fenton could not tell, in his indifference to the passage of the weeks and days, — a change came over the sky different from any that had portended other storms, and before night a hurricane broke from it that heaped the sea around their island, and drove it across the lagoon and high over the plateau. For two days and nights it beat against the walls of their tower; then the waters went down, and the ravaged atoll rose from the sea again. But when Fenton clambered to the top of the tower, and looked out, he saw that it could no longer be a refuge to them. The trees of the cocoa groves were blown down and flung hither and thither; their tops were twisted off and tossed into the lagoon; their trunks lay tangled and intertwisted, as if they had been straws in the frolic of a whirlwind. The smooth beach of the lagoon was strewn with fragments of coral, torn from the reef and tossed upon it; the grassy level where the sea-birds nested was scattered with their dead bodies, caught among the coarse herbage and beaten into the white sand.

He left Giffen cowering within, and ran down from the tower to look for the boat. He found it lodged in a heap of cocoa fronds, and wedged fast among some blocks of coral; and he hurried back with his good news. He met Giffen at the door. “All right,” he said to the anxious face. “The boat is safe, and we must get her afloat. You see we can’t stay here.”

“No,” said Giffen, “we can’t stay.” He looked drearily out over the wreck of their fairy isle, and then with a sigh he turned into the tower again, and crouched down in the corner where Fenton had left him.

“What’s the matter? Are you sick, Giffen?” demanded Fenton.

Giffen did not answer, but rose with a stupid air, and came out into the sun. He shivered, but gathered himself together, and in a dull mechanical way set about his usual work of getting breakfast. He ate little, but when Fenton had finished, he went with him, and helped him to cut the boat free. It was hard getting it out of the mass of rocks and boughs, and it was noon before they had dragged her back from the point where the sea had carried her to a free space where they could begin to repair her.

At the end of a week they had her afloat in the lagoon once more, and provisioned from the stores accumulated in the tower.

The morning when they were to set sail, Giffen could not rise from his bed of grass. “I can’t go,” he said; “I’m sick.”

Fenton had seen that he was ailing with a fear from which he revolted in a frenzy of impatient exertion. If they were but once at sea again, he had crazily reasoned with himself, then they could not help themselves, and, sick or well, they must make the best of it. This illusion failed him now, and he abandoned himself to a cynical scorn of all that had hitherto supported and consoled him. Every act of self-sacrifice, every generous impulse, seemed to him the part of a fool or a madman. Till now he had thought that he had somehow endured and dared all things for Helen’s sake, that anything less than he had done would have been unworthy of her; but now the devil that was uppermost in him mocked him with the suggestion that the best he could ever have done for her was to live for her, and do his utmost to return to her. As he stood looking at the face of the poor wretch who had twice betrayed him to despair, and who, at last, in this supreme moment, had fallen helpless across the only avenue of escape that remained to him, he trembled with a strong temptation. He turned away, and went down to the lagoon-beach, where the boat swung at anchor, and the sail, on which he had worked late the night before, lay on the sand, ready to be stepped. The boat lightly pulled at its moorings on the falling tide, and he felt the strain as if it had been anchored in his heart. He drew it to the shore; he stepped the mast, and ran up the sail, which filled and tugged in the morning breeze. He dropped it again, and went back to Giffen.

As the days passed, he watched with the sick man, and brought him the water he craved, and the food he loathed; there was nothing else to be done. One night Giffen roused himself from the torpor in which he remained sunken, for the most part, and asked:

“Did you ever hear that people were not afraid to die when they came to it?”

“I’ve heard that — yes,” said Fenton.

“I just happened to think of it; because this is the first time, since I can remember, that I wasn’t afraid.

I was awfully afraid to stay with you on that rock when the captain’s boat went away; but I ain’t sorry for it now. No, sir, you’ve behaved to me like a white man from the start; and now, I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I’m all right here, — or I will be, pretty soon, I reckon — and I don’t want you to lose any more time. The boat’s ready, and now’s your last chance. Don’t you mind me; I’d only bring you bad luck, any way. If you find land, or a ship picks you up, you can come back and see how I’m getting along.”

What had been Fenton’s temptation became the burden of the sick man’s delirium, and he frantically urged him to go while there was still time. He seemed to wear this notion out through mere iteration; and at last, when he awoke one day, “I dreamt,” he said, “that there was a ship!” That night, sleeping or waking, he raved of a ship that had come to take them away. The third morning after, he opened his eyes, and looked into his comrade’s face with ominous recovery of intelligence. “Has it come?” he asked eagerly. “The ship?”

“No, you dreamed it, Giffen,” returned Fenton, with a tender compassion unalloyed by self-pity.

“My luck,” said Giffen. He gasped, and made a mechanical effort to rise. He gave a sort of cry, and. fixed a stare of wild demand on Fenton, who caught him in his arms.

Fenton covered up the dead face with a branch of palm, and walked giddily out into the sun. It was rising a red, rayless ball, and against this disk the figure of a ship seemed printed. He passed his hand over his eyes, but when he took it away, the spectre remained. He thought he saw a boat lying at the lagoon-beach, and her crew advancing up the sand toward him, men with friendly, home-like faces. They wavered and glided in the vision his watch-worn eyes reported to his reeling brain.

Then one of them called out to the strange figure, with matted hair, and long beard, and haggard eyes, that had stopped as if with the impulse to turn and fly,— “Hallo!’

A shudder went through Fenton as he stayed himself, and faced the men again. He could not speak, but the men waited. At last, “For God’s sake,” he gasped, “are you something in a dream?”

“No,” replied the leader with slow gentleness, as if giving the idea consideration. “We ‘re a boat’s crew from the whale-ship Martha Brigham of New Bedford, come ashore to see what that smoke means. Who are you?”

XXI.

“I WISH to speak with you, Marian — instantly!” cried Helen, re-appearing at the Butlers’. Marian was alone in her room; Mrs. Butler was lying down, and the younger sisters were on the rocks by the sea, looking across the cove to the rocks on the Wilson place, as if they might hope to rend from them the secret of what had happened when Helen and Lord Rainford met in the Wilson cottage. With the inhumanity of their youth and inexperience they thought it very funny, and they had come away where they could enjoy this sense of it, apart from those to whom it seemed a serious affair.

It had become so serious to Marian that she quaked in rising to meet Helen, as if she had been rising to meet Helen’s ghost, and she no more thought of asking her to sit down than of offering a chair to an apparition.

“I didn’t know he was to be there, Helen, indeed I didn’t,” she made out to say, after the moment in which she had remained fascinated by the intensity of the girl’s face.

“Oh, it’s long past, that!” cried Helen. “What I wish you to tell me is simply this, Marian Ray: Is your husband part of your whole life, and was he from the very first instant?”

“From the very first instant?”

“That you were married — so that you couldn’t think, couldn’t consider — whether you cared for him — loved him?”

“Of course! It was all settled long before. Did—”

“I knew it! And if it isn’t settled before, it’s no time afterwards?”

“What an idea! What do you mean, Helen?”

“And it’s all false about girls that marry a man because they respect and honour him, and then have a romantic time finding out that they love him?”

“What nonsense! It’s the most ridiculous thing in the world! But—”

“I was sure of it! If there’s anything sacred about marrying, it’s the love that makes it so; and they might as well marry for money or position!” She hid her face in her hands, and then burst out again: “But I will never have such a hideous thing on my conscience — such a ghastly wrong to him! He said himself that if I wasn’t sure that I cared for Robert, it would have been unjust to marry him; and now how is it better with him? It’s worse! He said it to comfort me, and it seems monstrous to turn his words against him; but if the truth kills him he had better die! Yes, a thousand times! And don’t suppose I didn’t see all the advantages of accepting him that you did; and that I wasn’t tempted to persuade myself that I should care for him. I only blush and burn to think that I saw them, and that I’ve come away, even now, without crushing every spark of hope out of him! I do respect and honour him — yes, he is high-minded and good every way; but if I don’t love him, his being so good is all the more reason why I shouldn’t marry him. Hush! Don’t say a word, Marian!” she cried, hastening to spoil her point, as women will, with hysterical insistence. “That dreadful old man who bought our house came, while you were gone, and offered himself to me one day: it makes me creep! How would it be any better to marry Lord Rainford, if I didn’t love him, than to marry Mr. Everton?”

She did not wait for the indignant protest that was struggling through Marian’s bewilderment at this extraordinary revelation and assumption. “I shall always say that you meant the kindest and best; but if you try to argue with me now, I shall never forgive you! Good-bye, dear!” She flew at her friend, and catching her round the neck, convulsively kissed her, and ran out of the house, without seeing any one else. “To the station,” she gasped, climbing into the Wilson phaeton. “And, do hurry, please!”

Mrs. Butler came into Marian’s room as soon as Helen had driven away. “Well?” she said.

“Oh, she’s refused him, — or just the same thing! How shall we meet him? What shall we do?”

“I’m not concerned about that. What will she do, poor thing? That’s what wrings my heart. She has thrown away the greatest chance that a girl ever did: wealth, position, devoted goodness, the truest and noblest heart! — Marian!” cried Mrs. Butler, abandoning herself for a moment to her compassionate impatience, “why did she do it?”

“She said she didn’t love him,” answered Marian shortly, with a cast of contempt in the shortness.

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Butler, with resignation. She had found, as every woman must, who lives to her age, that life has so many great interests besides love, that for the time she was confused as to the justice of its paramount claim in a question of marriage.

In fact, Helen found her champions in two men. When Mrs. Butler stated the case to the Captain, he promptly approved of Helen’s decision.

Mrs. Butler stood surprised. “Why, do you think that people ought to marry from a fancy?” she asked.

“I hope my girls will never marry without it,” said the Captain.

Marion reported the result to Ray, with a vexation at Helen’s ridiculous behaviour, which he allowed her to vent freely before he answered her a word, chewing the end of his cigarette, as they walked to the house together from the beach, where she found him pulling his dory up on the sand. “It’s not only that she’s thrown away such a splendid chance, but she’s thrown it away for the mere memory of a man who couldn’t compare with Lord Rainford in any way — even if he were alive. And when Robert Fenton was alive, she wasn’t certain, till it was too late, that she cared for him; and kept him waiting for years and years, till she could make up her mind, and had to quarrel with him then before she was sure of it. And now for her to pretend that she never can care for any one else, and that she can’t marry Lord Rainford because she doesn’t love him — as if she were a girl of seventeen, instead of twenty-five! Oh! I’ve no patience with her!”

Ray said nothing for a moment. Then, “There’s some difference between not being sure you do, and being sure you don’t,” he remarked quietly, “and the difference doesn’t seem to be in Rainford’s favour.” After a moment, he asked, without looking at her, “What did you marry me for?”

“What nonsense! You know!”

“Yes, I always thought it was for love. How would you like to have me think it wasn’t?”

“Don’t be absurd!” cried his wife. But his words went deep, and at the bottom of her heart she felt in them a promise of the perpetual reconsecration of their marriage.

A story was at one time current (and still has its adherents among those who knew vaguely something of Helen’s romance) to the effect that Fenton returned at a moment when his presence seemed a miracle opportunely wrought to save her from further struggle, and to reward her for all her suffering and self-sacrifice in the past. It fixed with much accuracy of date and circumstance the details of their dramatic meeting at the little house in the Port, where she found him waiting for her one hot, dusty afternoon in the summer, when she came back, broken in health and spirit, from a visit with some friends at the sea-side. If the story had been true, it would have brought them together the very day Helen refused Lord Rainford.

But, as a matter of fact, she went back to her work of making bonnets for cooks and second-girls in Margaret’s cottage on Limekiln Avenue, under conditions that would have caused an intelligent witness of it to wonder whether she were not expiating an error rather than enjoying the recompense of devotion to a high ideal. The rewards of principle are often scarcely distinguishable from penalties, and the spectator is confounded between question of the martyrs wisdom and a dark doubt of the value of living out any real conviction in a world so badly constituted as this. Helen, however, was harassed by neither of these misgivings. She never regretted her refusal of Lord Rainford, except for the pain it inflicted; she never blamed herself for anything but the hesitation in which she was tempted to accept him without loving him. Her sense of self-approval grew only the stronger and clearer with the trials which gathered upon her in what might have seemed to others a sort of malign derision. Her custom fell off, and the patrons who remained to her grew inevitably more and more into an odious mastery; their exactions increased as her health failed, and she could not always keep her promises to them; they complained that other people’s bonnets were better made, and “more in the style.”

One night she overheard through the thin partition that separated her chamber from Margaret’s a tipsy threat from Margaret’s husband that he was going to be master in his own house; and that he was going to turn that girl and her bonnets into the street. He went off to his work in the morning, sullen and lowering, and she and Margaret could not look at each other. She fled to Boston for the day, which she passed in incoherent terror at Clara Kingsbury’s; when she turned from this misery the next morning and ventured back to Margarets, an explosion at the glass-works, so opportune that it seemed to her for a black instant as if she were guilty of the calamity through which she escaped, had freed her from all she had to dread from Margaret’s husband.

But quite the same end of her experiment had come. Margaret could not live upon the little sum that Helen paid her for board; in spite of her impassioned devotion to her darling, and her good intention (witnessed again and again to all the saints), she was forced to break up her little establishment and find a servant’s place; and Helen did not know where else to go.

In her extremity she appealed, of course, neither to the Butlers nor to Clara Kingsbury, but to Cornelia Root, and this proved to be the most fortunate as well as the most natural course. Zenas Pearson had just moved his photographic establishment up from Hanover Street to the fashionable quarter of the town, and had applied to Cornelia for some pretty-appearing, respectable girl, to stay in the front room and receive people, and show them the different styles of photographs, and help them to decide in what shape and size they would be taken. There was nothing mean about Zenas Pearson, and he was willing, he told Cornelia, to pay the right girl ten dollars a week as a start-off, and to put it up to twelve within the year if she behaved herself, and showed any sconce for the business.

Cornelia trembled with excitement and eagerness in laying the proposition before a person so perfectly adapted to the place in every respect as Helen, and they did not lose an instant in going to Zenas and closing with him. Did she want to come right off? he asked Helen, and at a little hesitation on her part he looked more closely at her worn face and said, “Well, take a week to recuperate, and come the 20th. I don’t know as I’ll be ready for you much before that time any way.”

She spent the week with the Butlers, who were now too well used to her eccentricity to attempt any protest against this new phase of it. They had all reconciled themselves to her refusal of Lord Rainford; even Marian Ray had accepted the inevitable, and she and Helen had a long quiet talk about the matter, in which they fully made up what had almost been a quarrel between them about it, and Marian told her the latest news of him, and how splendidly he had behaved about her, justifying and applauding her with a manly self-abnegation which permitted no question of her conduct throughout.

“Yes, he is very generous,” said Helen, with a sigh; and something happened that day which made her feel that the word was hardly adequate. She had gone with Marian, who wished to give some instructions about a picture she was having framed, to the shop where Helen had her memorable meeting with Lord Rainford; and when the business was finished the proprietor said with a certain hesitation: “ Miss Harkness, you remember being in our place about a year ago with an English gentleman who was looking at some imitation limoges in the window?”

Helen looked an amazed and perhaps alarmed, assent.

“He came back and bought them after you went away, and said he would send his address; but we’ve never heard of him from that day to this, and we don’t want his jars and his money. I thought perhaps you could tell me who he was.”

“Yes,” said Helen, “it was Lord Rainford. But he’s in England now.”

“Oh!” said the proprietor. And as she said nothing more, he presently bowed himself apologetically away.

“Why didn’t you let me give his address?” asked Marian, who had been checked in a wish to do so by a glance from Helen.

“I don’t believe he ever intended to take them away; he thought they were hideous,” Helen answered. She added presently, “He must have gone back to buy them because I said that the poor wretch who painted them was to be pitied!” Marian had now been at home more than six months, and her Anglo-mania had in some degree abated. She no longer expected to establish an hereditary aristocracy and a State Church among us, whatever she secretly wished to do. She Had grown resigned to the anomalies of our civilisation in some degree. She had rediscovered certain traits of it that compared favourably even with those of England; but she cherished a conviction that an English noble was the finest gentleman in the world; that her own husband was still finer was a mystery of faith, easily tenable, though not susceptible of exegesis.

She now preserved the silence of one whose point has been sufficiently made for her, and left Helen to recognise it. Helen was not reluctant to do so.

“Yes, Marian,” she said fervently, “considering what had just happened, that was very magnanimous in him. It was exquisite!”

“Oh, it was merely what he owed to himself as a gentleman,” said Marian, with well-concealed triumph.

It seemed to be a day of trial for Helen. A gaunt, shabby man, coming down the pavement towards them, lifted his hand half-way to his hat at sight of her, and then, as if seeing himself unrecognised, dropped it to his side again, and slunk by. Helen turned and stopped him. “Mr. Kimball! Is that you?”

“Yes, what there is left,” answered Kimball, with a ghost of his old quizzical smile, and the spectre of his municipal, office holding patronage of manner, as he took Helen’s extended hand.

“Why — why — what’s the matter?”

“Well, I’ve been sick for a spell back. Just got to knocking round again,” said Kimball evasively. “You don’t look over and above well yourself, Miss Harkness.”

“No, no, I’m not well. But I’m better now. Are you—” She stopped, with her eyes upon his conspicuous shabbiness, and, through an irresistible association of ideas, she added— “Mr. Kimball, I hope you got the money that I returned to you safely?”

Kimball hung his head, and kicked the pavement with his toe. “Well, no,” he answered reluctantly, “I didn’t.”

“You didn’t get it?”

“It’s all right. I told my wife at the time that I knew you sent it. But I guess somebody in the Post-Office got the start of me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” demanded Helen.

“Well, you know, I couldn’t do that,” said Kimball.

Helen took out her purse. There were only twelve dollars in it, and Marian had walked on, so that she could not borrow of her, and make up the whole sum at once. But she put the money in Kimball’s hand, and said, “I will bring you the rest this very day. Shall I bring it to the Custom-House?”

“O no; there’s been a change, you know. My collector was kicked out, and all our heads went into the basket together.’ I ain’t there any more. I guess we’ll call this square now. I don’t feel just right about taking this money, Miss Harkness. But I’ve been sick, and my wife ain’t very well herself; and — well, I guess it’s a godsend.” His lips twitched. “I feel kind of mean about it, but I’ll have to stand it. There ain’t a thing in the house, or I wouldn’t take it. My wife and me both said we knew you sent it.”

“Who in the world is your shabby friend. Helen?” demanded Marian when Helen had overtaken her at last.

“Oh, he used to be in the Custom-House. He’s a character. He’s the one who told Lord Rainford, when he offered to deposit money for the duties on those Egyptian things he brought me from you, that it wasn’t necessary between gentlemen!”

“How amusing!”

“Yes, I thought it was amusing too. But I don’t think I can ever laugh at him again.” She shut her lips till she could command her voice sufficiently to tell what had just passed between her and Kimball.

Marian continued amused by it. In the flush of her re-Anglicisation, she said it was a very American affair. But she added that something ought really to be done for the chivalric simpleton, and that she was going to tell Ray about him.

During the week that Helen spent with the Butlers, before she was to take her place in Zenas Pearson’s Photographic Parlours, as he called them, the wisdom of her decision was tested by another incident or accident — one of those chances of real life which one must hesitate to record because they have so much the air of having been contrived. From her life in the Port she had contracted the suburban habit of lunching at restaurants, so alien to the Bostonian lady proper; and one day, when she was down town alone, she found herself at a table in Parkers, so near that of two other ladies that she could not help hearing what they said. They were both dressed with a certain floridity, and one was of a fearless, good-humoured beauty, who stared a great deal about the room and out of the window, and, upon the whole, seemed amused to realise herself in Boston, as if it were a place whose peculiarities she had reflected much upon, without being greatly awed or dazzled by them. “We used to see a great many Bostonians in California when the Pacific road was first opened. They came out there in shoals, and I afterwards met them in Japan, — men, I mean, of course. I had quite a flirtation with one — the pleasantest one I ever met.” The lady breathed, above the spoil of the quail-on-toast before her, a sigh to the memory of this agreeable passage of her life. “Yes, a regular flirtation. It was on the steamer coming to San Francisco; and he was on his way home to be married, poor fellow, and I suppose he thought, Now or never! The steamer broke her shaft, and had to put back to Japan, and he took passage home on a sailing vessel that we hailed, and she was lost, and the last that was known of him he was left on a reef in the Pacific with three others, while a boatful of people went off to prospect for land. When the boat came back they were gone, and nobody ever knew what became of them.”

“And whatever became of the girl, Mrs. Bowers?”

“Oh, as to that this deponent saith not. Consoled herself, I suppose, in the usual way.”

The two women laughed together, and began to pull up their sacks, which had dropped from their shoulders into their chairs behind them.

Helen tried to speak, but she could not. She tried to rise and seize the woman before she left the room, to make her render some account of her words. But the shame of a terrible doubt crushed her with a burden under which she could not move. When the waiter, respectfully hovering near, approached at last, and, viewing her untouched plate, suggestively asked if he could bring her anything more, she said “No,” and paid her check and came out.

It was a beautiful day, but she walked spiritlessly, along in the sunshine that seemed to smile life into everything but her; and she feebly sought to adjust the pang of this last blow to some misdeed of her own. But she could not. She could only think how she should once have contrasted Lord Rainford’s nobleness with Robert’s folly, and indignantly preferred him. But now she was aware of not having the strength to do this — of not being able to pluck her heart from the idea to which love and loss had rooted it; and she could not even wish to wish anything but to die. In another world, perhaps — if there were any other world — Robert could explain and justify the weakness for which she could not do other than pity him here.

Her brain was so dull and jaded withal, that when she dragged herself wearily up the steps at the Butlers’ door, she felt no surprise that it should be the old Captain who opened it to her, or that he should seek to detain her in the drawing-room alone with him. At last she found something strange in his manner, something mysterious in the absence of all the others, and she asked, “What is it, Captain Butler?”

He seemed troubled, as though he felt himself unequal to the task before him. “Helen,” he began, “do you still sometimes think that those men’s story about Robert wasn’t true?”

“I know it wasn’t true. I always knew they killed him. Why do you ask me that?”

“I didn’t mean that,” returned the Captain, with increasing trouble, “but that perhaps he—”

She turned upon him in awful quiet. “Captain Butler, don’t try to soften or break any bad news to me! What is it I haven’t borne that you think I must be spared now? You will make it worse, whatever you are keeping back. Did they leave him there to starve on that rock? Did—”

“No — no. It isn’t that. Mrs. Butler thought that I could prepare — we’ve had news—”

“News? — prepare? Oh, how can you mock me so? For pity’s sake, what is it?”

The Captain’s poor attempt to mediate between her and whatever fact he was concealing broke down in the appeal with which he escaped from Helen through the open door, and called his wife. She came quickly, as if she had been waiting near; and as on that day when she had told the girl of her father’s death, she took her fast in her arms. Perhaps the thoughts of both went back to that hour.

“Helen — Helen — Helen! It’s life this time! You have borne the worst so bravely, I know you can bear the best. Robert is here!”

The papers of that time gave full particulars of Fenton’s rescue from the island on which he was cast away, and the reader can hardly have forgotten them. It is unnecessary even to record the details of his transfer, after several months, from the whaler which took him off, to another vessel homeward bound, and of his final arrival in San Francisco. When the miracle of his resurrection had become familiar enough for Helen to begin to touch it at here and there a point, she asked him why he did not telegraph her from San Francisco as soon as he landed, and instantly answered herself that it would have killed her if he had done so; and that if he had not been there at once to help her bear the fact of his being alive, she could not have borne it.

They were married, and went to live in a little house in a retired street of Old Cambridge, and Margaret came to live with them. She sacrificed to this end an ideal place in an expressman’s family in East Somerville, where she had the sole charge of the housework for twelve persons; but it was something that Miss Helen kept no other girl; and it was everything that she could be with her when Lieutenant Fenton should be ordered away to sea again. He had six months’ leave, and he tried to find some occupation which would justify him in quitting the navy. He found nothing, and in the leisure of this time Helen and he concerned themselves rather with their past than their future. They rehabilitated every moment of it for each other; and, as their lives came completely together again, he developed certain limitations which at first puzzled her. She did not approach that passage which related to Lord Rainford without trying to establish defences from which, if necessary, she could make reprisals; and she began by abruptly asking one day, “Robert, who is Mrs. Bowers?”

“Did she turn up?” he asked in reply, with a joyous guiltlessness that at once defeated and utterly consoled his wife. “That was very kind of her! But how did she find you out? I never told her your name!”

“She never turned up — directly,” said Helen; and then she told him how she happened to know of Mrs. Bowers, and of the bad half-hour that lady had given her.

“Well, she might call it a flirtation,” said Fenton, “but I didn’t know it was one. I thought it was just walking up and down the deck and talking about you.”

“I’d rather you wouldn’t have talked to that kind of people about me,” returned Helen, with a retrospective objection which she tried in vain to make avail her.

“How should I know what kind of person she was? I never took the least notice of anything she did or said.”

This was heavenly hopeless, and Helen resolved that for the present at least she would not inculpate herself. But she found herself saying, “Well, then, I’m going to tell you about something that all came from my being desperate about you, and flirting a little one day just after you sailed.” She went on to make a full and free confession, to which her husband listened with surprisingly little emotion.

He could not see anything romantic in it at all. He could not see anything remarkable in Lord Rainford.

“You can’t,” he said finally, “expect me to admire a man who came so near making an Enoch Arden of me.”

“Oh, you know he never came near doing anything of the kind, Robert.”

“He came as near as he could. Do you wish me to admire him because you refused him? You refused me three times.”

“I wish you to — to — appreciate him.”

Fenton laughed. “Oh, well, I do that, of course.

I’ve no doubt he was a very good fellow; and I daresay he’s behaving more sensibly than I did. From what you tell me, I think he’ll get over his disappointment. Perhaps he’ll end by marrying some one who will help him to complete his reaction, and cure him of all his illusions about us over here. But his buying that pottery was nothing. He would have been a very poor creature if he had resented your refusal; I know that from my own experience.” He would not be serious about Lord Rainford; he made her share in the good-natured slight with which husband and wife always talk over the sorrows of unlucky pretendants. He professed to find something much more admirable in Kimball’s quiet acceptance of the loss he had incurred through Helen: that, he said, was fine, for Kimball was supported by no sentimental considerations, and had no money to back his delicacy. He looked Kimball up, and made friends with him and a man who could do nothing to advance his own fortunes had the cheerful audacity to suppose that he might promote another’s. He wrote to Washington, and tried to get Kimball appointed assistant-keeper of one of the lighthouses on Cape Ann; but, pending the appointment of a gentleman who had “worked” for the newly-elected Congressman, Kimball found a place as night-watchman in a large clothing house, where he distinguished himself, when off duty one day, by quelling a panic among the sewing girls at an alarm of fire, and getting them safely out of the building. The newspaper éclat following this affair seemed to have silently wrought upon the imagination of a public-spirited gentleman, who about that time was maturing his plans for the establishment of our well-known Everton Institute of Industrial Arts for Young Ladies. The Institute was opened on a small scale in the residence of Mr. Everton at Beacon Steps, which he devoted to it during his life, and at his death it was removed to the new building at West Newton; but from the first Kimball was put in charge as janitor, and still holds his place from the trustees.

He came rather apologetically to announce his appointment to the Fentons. “I don’t seem to feel.” he said, “as if it was quite the thing to go in there without saying ‘By your leave to you, Mrs. Fenton. I hain’t forgot the first time I was in the house; and I don’t suppose I ever passed it without lookin’ up at them steps and thinkin’ of you, just how you appeared that day when you came runnin’ up with your bag in your hand, and I let you in.”

“Yes, I remember it too, Mr. Kimball. But you mustn’t think of it as my old home, and you mustn’t feel as if you were intruding. If the place could be anything to me after Mr. Everton had lived there, I should be glad to think of you and Mrs. Kimball in it, looking after those poor girls, as I know you will.”

“I guess we shall do the best we know how by ‘em. And whatever Mr. Everton is — and I guess least said’s soonest mended, even amongst friends, about him in some respects — you can’t say but what it’s a good object. If he can have girls without any dependence but themselves taught how to do something for their own livin’, I guess it’s about equal to turnin’ the house into a church. And I guess the old gentleman’s about right in confinin’ it to girls brought up as ladies. I ain’t much on caste myself; as I know of, but I guess that’s the class of girls that need help the most.”

“O yes, indeed!” cried Helen fervently. “Of all helpless creatures in the world, they are the most to be pitied. I know you’ll be kind to them, Mr. Kimball, and save their poor, foolish feelings as much as you can, and not mind their weak, silly little pride, if it ever shows itself.”

“I guess you can depend upon me for that,” said Kimball. “I understand girls pretty well — or I ought to, by this time. And once a lady, always a lady, I say.” Helen even promised to come with her husband to see the Kimballs in her old home. She courageously kept her promise, and she was rewarded by meeting Mr. Everton there. He received her very cordially, showing no sort of pique or resentment, — no more, Fenton suggested, than Lord Rainford himself, — and took her over the house, and explained all his plans to her with a flattering confidence in her interest. There were already some young ladies there, and he introduced Helen to them, and, in the excess of his good feeling, hinted at the desirability of her formally addressing them as visitors to schools are expected to do. She refused imperatively; but to one of the girls with whom she found herself in sympathy she opened her heart and told her own story. “And oh!” she said at the end, “do learn to do something that people have need of, and learn to do it well and humbly, and just as if you had been working for your living all your life. Try to notice how men do things, and when you ‘re at work, forget that you ‘re a woman, and, above all, a young lady.”

After she came away, she said there was one more thing she wished to say to that girl.

“What was that?” asked Fenton.

“Not to omit the first decent opportunity of marrying any one she happened to be in love with.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to say that,” suggested her husband.

“No,” sighed Helen; “and that’s what undoes all the rest.”

When the Butlers heard of this visit of hers to her old home, it seemed to them but another instance of that extraordinary fortitude of spirit which they had often reason to admire in her. Marian Ray could not suffer it to pass, however, without some expression of surprise that Fenton should have allowed her to go: she was a little his rival on behalf of Lord Rainford still, and she seized what occasions she could for an unfavourable comparison of their characters. In fact, now that he had really come back, she had not wholly forgiven him for doing so; but the younger sisters rejoiced in him as a thoroughly satisfactory equivalent for the romance they had lost in the nobleman. If Helen was not to be Lady Rainford, it was consoling to have her the wife of a man who had been cast away on a desert island, and had been mourned for dead a whole year and more. They were disappointed, however, that he should not be always telling the story of his adventures, but should only now and then drop bits of it in a scrappy way, and once — but once only — when he and Helen were at Beverley, they pinned him down to a full and minute narration.

“Ah, but,” said Jessie Butler, when all was told, to the very last moment of his meeting Helen after his return, “you haven’t said how you felt, any of the time.”

“Well, you know,” answered Fenton, rising, and going over to where Helen sat dwelling on him with shining eyes, “I can look back and see how I ought to have felt at given points.”

“But — but how did you feel,” pursued one of his rapt auditors, “when—”

“No, no,” said Fenton, “that will do! I’ve given you the facts; you must make your own fiction out of them. And I think, while you’re at it, you’d better get another hero.”

“Never!” exclaimed Jessie Butler. “We want you. And we want you to behave something like a hero, now. You can, if you will. Can’t he, Helen?”

“I never can make him,” said his wife fondly.

“Then that’s because he doesn’t appreciate his own adventures properly. Now—”

“Why,” explained Fenton, “the adventures were merely a lot of things that happened to me.”

“Happened to you!” cried his champion against himself in generous indignation. “Did it merely happen to you to put that rope round you and swim ashore with it when the ship struck? Did it merely happen to you to stay there, and let the others go off in the boat?”

Fenton affected to give the arguments serious thought. “Well, you know, I couldn’t very well have done otherwise under the circumstances.”

“You needn’t try to get out of it in that way!

You have every attribute of a real hero,” persisted his worshipper.

The hero laughed, and did his best to bear the part like a man. Another of the young girls took up the strain.

“Yes, you would be entirely satisfactory if you had only had some better companion in misfortune.”  “Who, — Giffen?”

“Yes. He seems so hopelessly commonplace,” sighed the gentle connoisseur of castaways.

“He was certainly not more than, an average fellow-being,” said Fenton, preparing to escape. “But he was equal to his bad luck.”

When he and Helen were alone, he was a long time silent.

“What is the matter, Robert?” she asked tenderly at last.

“Oh, nothing,” he said. “But whenever it comes to that point, I’m afraid that Giffen knew I wanted to leave him to die alone there!”

“You didn’t want to!” she protested for him.

“Ah, don’t put it that way!” he cried. “The best you can say for me is that I didn’t do it.”

She could only tell him that she loved him more’ dearly for the temptation he confessed, than if there had been no breach in his armour. He had a simplicity in dealing with all the incidents of his experience which seemed to her half divine. When she hotly invoked justice upon the wretches who had stolen the boat and abandoned him and Giffen on the island, he said, “Oh, what could atone for a thing like that? The only way was for them to escape altogether.” He would not even let her denounce them as cowards; he contended that they had shown as much mere courage in remaining to rifle the ship as he had in anything. Giffen, he said, was the only one to be admired, for Giffen was afraid all the time, and yet remained to share his fate. But Helen con tended that this was nothing wonderful; and again she wished to praise him for what he had suffered.

“Ah, don’t!” he said, with tragic seriousness.

“There’s nothing in all that. It might all have happened to a worse man, and it has happened to many a better one. It hurts me to have you value me for it. Let it go, and give me a little chance for the future.” He was indeed eager to escape from all that related to that passage of his life, and Helen learned to believe this. At certain moments he seemed to be suffering from some strange sort of mental stress, which he could not explain, but which they both thought must be the habit of anguish formed in his imprisonment on the atoll. It sometimes woke him from his sleep — the burden, but not the drama, of nightmare — a mere formless horror, which they had to shape and recognise for themselves.

It grew less and less as the time passed, and when his orders came to report for duty at Washington, they had strength for the parting. He supposed that he was to be sent to sea again, but he found that he was to be put in charge for the present of the revenue cutter for provisioning the lighthouses on the Rhode Island coast; and when removed from this service, he was appointed commandant at the Narragansett Navy Yard. It is there that ‘Helen still finds her home in a little house overlooking the Bay, on the height behind the vast sheds in which two frigates of obsolete model, began in Polk’s time, are slowly rotting on the stocks, in a sort of emblematic expression of the present formidable character of the American navy.

Fenton is subject to be ordered away at any moment upon other duty; but till his orders come he rests with Helen in as much happiness as can fall to the share of people in a world of chance and change. The days of their separation have already faded into the incredible past: and if her experience ever had any peculiar significance to her, it is rapidly losing that meaning.

She remains limited in her opinions and motives by the accidents of tradition and circumstance that shape us all; at the end she is neither more nor less than a lady, as she was at the beginning. She has acquired no ideals of woman’s work or woman’s destiny; she is glad to have solved in the old way the problems that once beset her; and in all that has happened she feels as if she had escaped, rather than achieved. She is the same, and yet not quite the same; for one never endures or endeavours to one’s-self alone; she keeps her little prejudices, but she has accumulated a stock of exceptions to their application; her sympathies, if not her opinions, have been enlarged; and, above all, her unconsciousness has been trained to meet bravely and sweetly the duties of a life which she is content should never be splendid or ambitious.

THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM

Possibly Howells’ best-known novel, this work of realistic fiction was first published by Ticknor and Co. in 1885. The story follows the materialistic rise of Silas Lapham from rags to riches, and the ensuing erosion of his moral integrity.

The novel further exemplifies Howells’ commitment to realism, by eschewing a neat, sentimental conclusion to the central love triangle that develops as the novel progresses. Howells was committed to a truthful and likely outcome for his characters (although not necessarily a pessimistic or unhappy one) which would reflect the complexities of ordinary experience – against this, he saw the more simplistic conventions of sentimental romantic novels as unrealistic and deceitful.

The way in which the novel begins with Lapham, at the height of his success, being interviewed for a newspaper also highlights another genre whose rigid generic strictures Howells was keen to expose as a potentially false reflection of real life. Howells, who himself had written a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln, attacked the formulaic style of biographies of the day, including the inevitable pattern of a “rise” from early adversity to later success. Howells emphasises this early in the novel, in a scene where Lapham is interviewed by Bartley Hubbard (a character revived from his 1882 novel A Modern Instance) who interjects while his subject tells his life story with assumptions of his romanticised life.

302 Beacon Street, Boston, where Howells completed the novel

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

Cover of the first edition

I.

WHEN Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas Lapham for the “Solid Men of Boston” series, which he undertook to finish up in The Events, after he replaced their original projector on that newspaper, Lapham received him in his private office by previous appointment.

“Walk right in!” he called out to the journalist, whom he caught sight of through the door of the counting-room.

He did not rise from the desk at which he was writing, but he gave Bartley his left hand for welcome, and he rolled his large head in the direction of a vacant chair. “Sit down! I’ll be with you in just half a minute.”

“Take your time,” said Bartley, with the ease he instantly felt. “I’m in no hurry.” He took a note-book from his pocket, laid it on his knee, and began to sharpen a pencil.

“There!” Lapham pounded with his great hairy fist on the envelope he had been addressing.

“William!” he called out, and he handed the letter to a boy who came to get it. “I want that to go right away. Well, sir,” he continued, wheeling round in his leather-cushioned swivel-chair, and facing Bartley, seated so near that their knees almost touched, “so you want my life, death, and Christian sufferings, do you, young man?”

“That’s what I’m after,” said Bartley. “Your money or your life.”

“I guess you wouldn’t want my life without the money,” said Lapham, as if he were willing to prolong these moments of preparation.

“Take ’em both,” Bartley suggested. “Don’t want your money without your life, if you come to that. But you’re just one million times more interesting to the public than if you hadn’t a dollar; and you know that as well as I do, Mr. Lapham. There’s no use beating about the bush.”

“No,” said Lapham, somewhat absently. He put out his huge foot and pushed the ground-glass door shut between his little den and the book-keepers, in their larger den outside.

“In personal appearance,” wrote Bartley in the sketch for which he now studied his subject, while he waited patiently for him to continue, “Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood. He is of medium height, and fills an average arm-chair with a solid bulk, which on the day of our interview was unpretentiously clad in a business suit of blue serge. His head droops somewhat from a short neck, which does not trouble itself to rise far from a pair of massive shoulders.”

“I don’t know as I know just where you want me to begin,” said Lapham.

“Might begin with your birth; that’s where most of us begin,” replied Bartley.

A gleam of humorous appreciation shot into Lapham’s blue eyes.

“I didn’t know whether you wanted me to go quite so far back as that,” he said. “But there’s no disgrace in having been born, and I was born in the State of Vermont, pretty well up under the Canada line — so well up, in fact, that I came very near being an adoptive citizen; for I was bound to be an American of SOME sort, from the word Go! That was about — well, let me see! — pretty near sixty years ago: this is ‘75, and that was ‘20. Well, say I’m fifty-five years old; and I’ve LIVED ‘em, too; not an hour of waste time about ME, anywheres! I was born on a farm, and — —”

“Worked in the fields summers and went to school winters: regulation thing?” Bartley cut in.

“Regulation thing,” said Lapham, accepting this irreverent version of his history somewhat dryly.

“Parents poor, of course,” suggested the journalist. “Any barefoot business? Early deprivations of any kind, that would encourage the youthful reader to go and do likewise? Orphan myself, you know,” said Bartley, with a smile of cynical good-comradery.

Lapham looked at him silently, and then said with quiet self-respect, “I guess if you see these things as a joke, my life won’t interest you.”

“Oh yes, it will,” returned Bartley, unabashed. “You’ll see; it’ll come out all right.” And in fact it did so, in the interview which Bartley printed.

“Mr. Lapham,” he wrote, “passed rapidly over the story of his early life, its poverty and its hardships, sweetened, however, by the recollections of a devoted mother, and a father who, if somewhat her inferior in education, was no less ambitious for the advancement of his children. They were quiet, unpretentious people, religious, after the fashion of that time, and of sterling morality, and they taught their children the simple virtues of the Old Testament and Poor Richard’s Almanac.”

Bartley could not deny himself this gibe; but he trusted to Lapham’s unliterary habit of mind for his security in making it, and most other people would consider it sincere reporter’s rhetoric.

“You know,” he explained to Lapham, “that we have to look at all these facts as material, and we get the habit of classifying them. Sometimes a leading question will draw out a whole line of facts that a man himself would never think of.” He went on to put several queries, and it was from Lapham’s answers that he generalised the history of his childhood. “Mr. Lapham, although he did not dwell on his boyish trials and struggles, spoke of them with deep feeling and an abiding sense of their reality.” This was what he added in the interview, and by the time he had got Lapham past the period where risen Americans are all pathetically alike in their narrow circumstances, their sufferings, and their aspirations, he had beguiled him into forgetfulness of the check he had received, and had him talking again in perfect enjoyment of his autobiography.

“Yes, sir,” said Lapham, in a strain which Bartley was careful not to interrupt again, “a man never sees all that his mother has been to him till it’s too late to let her know that he sees it. Why, my mother—” he stopped. “It gives me a lump in the throat,” he said apologetically, with an attempt at a laugh. Then he went on: “She was a little frail thing, not bigger than a good-sized intermediate school-girl; but she did the whole work of a family of boys, and boarded the hired men besides. She cooked, swept, washed, ironed, made and mended from daylight till dark — and from dark till daylight, I was going to say; for I don’t know how she got any time for sleep. But I suppose she did. She got time to go to church, and to teach us to read the Bible, and to misunderstand it in the old way. She was GOOD. But it ain’t her on her knees in church that comes back to me so much like the sight of an angel as her on her knees before me at night, washing my poor, dirty little feet, that I’d run bare in all day, and making me decent for bed. There were six of us boys; it seems to me we were all of a size; and she was just so careful with all of us. I can feel her hands on my feet yet!” Bartley looked at Lapham’s No. 10 boots, and softly whistled through his teeth. “We were patched all over; but we wa’n’t ragged. I don’t know how she got through it. She didn’t seem to think it was anything; and I guess it was no more than my father expected of her. HE worked like a horse in doors and out — up at daylight, feeding the stock, and groaning round all day with his rheumatism, but not stopping.”

Bartley hid a yawn over his note-book, and probably, if he could have spoken his mind, he would have suggested to Lapham that he was not there for the purpose of interviewing his ancestry. But Bartley had learned to practise a patience with his victims which he did not always feel, and to feign an interest in their digressions till he could bring them up with a round turn.

“I tell you,” said Lapham, jabbing the point of his penknife into the writing-pad on the desk before him, “when I hear women complaining nowadays that their lives are stunted and empty, I want to tell ’em about my MOTHER’S life. I could paint it out for ‘em.”

Bartley saw his opportunity at the word paint, and cut in. “And you say, Mr. Lapham, that you discovered this mineral paint on the old farm yourself?”

Lapham acquiesced in the return to business. “I didn’t discover it,” he said scrupulously. “My father found it one day, in a hole made by a tree blowing down. There it was, lying loose in the pit, and sticking to the roots that had pulled up a big, cake of dirt with ‘em. I don’t know what give him the idea that there was money in it, but he did think so from the start. I guess, if they’d had the word in those days, they’d considered him pretty much of a crank about it. He was trying as long as he lived to get that paint introduced; but he couldn’t make it go. The country was so poor they couldn’t paint their houses with anything; and father hadn’t any facilities. It got to be a kind of joke with us; and I guess that paint-mine did as much as any one thing to make us boys clear out as soon as we got old enough. All my brothers went West, and took up land; but I hung on to New England and I hung on to the old farm, not because the paint-mine was on it, but because the old house was — and the graves. Well,” said Lapham, as if unwilling to give himself too much credit, “there wouldn’t been any market for it, anyway. You can go through that part of the State and buy more farms than you can shake a stick at for less money than it cost to build the barns on ‘em. Of course, it’s turned out a good thing. I keep the old house up in good shape, and we spend a month or so there every summer. M’ wife kind of likes it, and the girls. Pretty place; sightly all round it. I’ve got a force of men at work there the whole time, and I’ve got a man and his wife in the house. Had a family meeting there last year; the whole connection from out West. There!” Lapham rose from his seat and took down a large warped, unframed photograph from the top of his desk, passing his hand over it, and then blowing vigorously upon it, to clear it of the dust. “There we are, ALL of us.”

“I don’t need to look twice at YOU,” said Bartley, putting his finger on one of the heads.

“Well, that’s Bill,” said Lapham, with a gratified laugh. “He’s about as brainy as any of us, I guess. He’s one of their leading lawyers, out Dubuque way; been judge of the Common Pleas once or twice. That’s his son — just graduated at Yale — alongside of my youngest girl. Good-looking chap, ain’t he?”

“SHE’S a good-looking chap,” said Bartley, with prompt irreverence. He hastened to add, at the frown which gathered between Lapham’s eyes, “What a beautiful creature she is! What a lovely, refined, sensitive face! And she looks GOOD, too.”

“She is good,” said the father, relenting.

“And, after all, that’s about the best thing in a woman,” said the potential reprobate. “If my wife wasn’t good enough to keep both of us straight, I don’t know what would become of me.”

“My other daughter,” said Lapham, indicating a girl with eyes that showed large, and a face of singular gravity. “Mis’ Lapham,” he continued, touching his wife’s effigy with his little finger. “My brother Willard and his family — farm at Kankakee. Hazard Lapham and his wife — Baptist preacher in Kansas. Jim and his three girls — milling business at Minneapolis. Ben and his family — practising medicine in Fort Wayne.”

The figures were clustered in an irregular group in front of an old farm-house, whose original ugliness had been smartened up with a coat of Lapham’s own paint, and heightened with an incongruous piazza. The photographer had not been able to conceal the fact that they were all decent, honest-looking, sensible people, with a very fair share of beauty among the young girls; some of these were extremely pretty, in fact. He had put them into awkward and constrained attitudes, of course; and they all looked as if they had the instrument of torture which photographers call a head-rest under their occiputs. Here and there an elderly lady’s face was a mere blur; and some of the younger children had twitched themselves into wavering shadows, and might have passed for spirit-photographs of their own little ghosts. It was the standard family-group photograph, in which most Americans have figured at some time or other; and Lapham exhibited a just satisfaction in it. “I presume,” he mused aloud, as he put it back on top of his desk, “that we sha’n’t soon get together again, all of us.”

“And you say,” suggested Bartley, “that you stayed right along on the old place, when the rest cleared out West?”

“No o-o-o,” said Lapham, with a long, loud drawl; “I cleared out West too, first off. Went to Texas. Texas was all the cry in those days. But I got enough of the Lone Star in about three months, and I come back with the idea that Vermont was good enough for me.”

“Fatted calf business?” queried Bartley, with his pencil poised above his note-book.

“I presume they were glad to see me,” said Lapham, with dignity. “Mother,” he added gently, “died that winter, and I stayed on with father. I buried him in the spring; and then I came down to a little place called Lumberville, and picked up what jobs I could get. I worked round at the saw-mills, and I was ostler a while at the hotel — I always DID like a good horse. Well, I WA’N’T exactly a college graduate, and I went to school odd times. I got to driving the stage after while, and by and by I BOUGHT the stage and run the business myself. Then I hired the tavern-stand, and — well to make a long story short, then I got married. Yes,” said Lapham, with pride, “I married the school-teacher. We did pretty well with the hotel, and my wife she was always at me to paint up. Well, I put it off, and PUT it off, as a man will, till one day I give in, and says I, ‘Well, let’s paint up. Why, Pert,’ — m’wife’s name’s Persis,— ‘I’ve got a whole paint-mine out on the farm. Let’s go out and look at it.’ So we drove out. I’d let the place for seventy-five dollars a year to a shif’less kind of a Kanuck that had come down that way; and I’d hated to see the house with him in it; but we drove out one Saturday afternoon, and we brought back about a bushel of the stuff in the buggy-seat, and I tried it crude, and I tried it burnt; and I liked it. M’wife she liked it too. There wa’n’t any painter by trade in the village, and I mixed it myself. Well, sir, that tavern’s got that coat of paint on it yet, and it hain’t ever had any other, and I don’t know’s it ever will. Well, you know, I felt as if it was a kind of harumscarum experiment, all the while; and I presume I shouldn’t have tried it but I kind of liked to do it because father’d always set so much store by his paint-mine. And when I’d got the first coat on,” — Lapham called it CUT,— “I presume I must have set as much as half an hour; looking at it and thinking how he would have enjoyed it. I’ve had my share of luck in this world, and I ain’t a-going to complain on my OWN account, but I’ve noticed that most things get along too late for most people. It made me feel bad, and it took all the pride out my success with the paint, thinking of father. Seemed to me I might ‘a taken more interest in it when he was by to see; but we’ve got to live and learn. Well, I called my wife out, — I’d tried it on the back of the house, you know, — and she left her dishes, — I can remember she came out with her sleeves rolled up and set down alongside of me on the trestle, — and says I, ‘What do you think, Persis?’ And says she, ‘Well, you hain’t got a paint-mine, Silas Lapham; you’ve got a GOLD-mine.’ She always was just so enthusiastic about things. Well, it was just after two or three boats had burnt up out West, and a lot of lives lost, and there was a great cry about non-inflammable paint, and I guess that was what was in her mind. ‘Well, I guess it ain’t any gold-mine, Persis,’ says I; ‘but I guess it IS a paint-mine. I’m going to have it analysed, and if it turns out what I think it is, I’m going to work it. And if father hadn’t had such a long name, I should call it the Nehemiah Lapham Mineral Paint. But, any rate, every barrel of it, and every keg, and every bottle, and every package, big or little, has got to have the initials and figures N.L.f. 1835, S.L.t. 1855, on it. Father found it in 1835, and I tried it in 1855.’”

“‘S.T. — 1860 — X.’ business,” said Bartley.

“Yes,” said Lapham, “but I hadn’t heard of Plantation Bitters then, and I hadn’t seen any of the fellow’s labels. I set to work and I got a man down from Boston; and I carried him out to the farm, and he analysed it — made a regular Job of it. Well, sir, we built a kiln, and we kept a lot of that paint-ore red-hot for forty-eight hours; kept the Kanuck and his family up, firing. The presence of iron in the ore showed with the magnet from the start; and when he came to test it, he found out that it contained about seventy-five per cent. of the peroxide of iron.”

Lapham pronounced the scientific phrases with a sort of reverent satisfaction, as if awed through his pride by a little lingering uncertainty as to what peroxide was. He accented it as if it were purr-ox-EYED; and Bartley had to get him to spell it.

“Well, and what then?” he asked, when he had made a note of the percentage.

“What then?” echoed Lapham. “Well, then, the fellow set down and told me, ‘You’ve got a paint here,’ says he, ‘that’s going to drive every other mineral paint out of the market. Why’ says he, ‘it’ll drive ’em right into the Back Bay!’ Of course, I didn’t know what the Back Bay was then, but I begun to open my eyes; thought I’d had ’em open before, but I guess I hadn’t. Says he, ‘That paint has got hydraulic cement in it, and it can stand fire and water and acids;’ he named over a lot of things. Says he, ‘It’ll mix easily with linseed oil, whether you want to use it boiled or raw; and it ain’t a-going to crack nor fade any; and it ain’t a-going to scale. When you’ve got your arrangements for burning it properly, you’re going to have a paint that will stand like the everlasting hills, in every climate under the sun.’ Then he went into a lot of particulars, and I begun to think he was drawing a long-bow, and meant to make his bill accordingly. So I kept pretty cool; but the fellow’s bill didn’t amount to anything hardly — said I might pay him after I got going; young chap, and pretty easy; but every word he said was gospel. Well, I ain’t a-going to brag up my paint; I don’t suppose you came here to hear me blow.”

“Oh yes, I did,” said Bartley. “That’s what I want. Tell all there is to tell, and I can boil it down afterward. A man can’t make a greater mistake with a reporter than to hold back anything out of modesty. It may be the very thing we want to know. What we want is the whole truth; and more; we’ve got so much modesty of our own that we can temper almost any statement.”

Lapham looked as if he did not quite like this tone, and he resumed a little more quietly. “Oh, there isn’t really very much more to say about the paint itself. But you can use it for almost anything where a paint is wanted, inside or out. It’ll prevent decay, and it’ll stop it, after it’s begun, in tin or iron. You can paint the inside of a cistern or a bath-tub with it, and water won’t hurt it; and you can paint a steam-boiler with it, and heat won’t. You can cover a brick wall with it, or a railroad car, or the deck of a steamboat, and you can’t do a better thing for either.”

“Never tried it on the human conscience, I suppose,” suggested Bartley.

“No, sir,” replied Lapham gravely. “I guess you want to keep that as free from paint as you can, if you want much use of it. I never cared to try any of it on mine.” Lapham suddenly lifted his bulk up out of his swivel-chair, and led the way out into the wareroom beyond the office partitions, where rows and ranks of casks, barrels, and kegs stretched dimly back to the rear of the building, and diffused an honest, clean, wholesome smell of oil and paint. They were labelled and branded as containing each so many pounds of Lapham’s Mineral Paint, and each bore the mystic devices, N.L.f. 1835 — S.L.t. 1855. “There!” said Lapham, kicking one of the largest casks with the toe of his boot, “that’s about our biggest package; and here,” he added, laying his hand affectionately on the head of a very small keg, as if it were the head of a child, which it resembled in size, “this is the smallest. We used to put the paint on the market dry, but now we grind every ounce of it in oil — very best quality of linseed oil — and warrant it. We find it gives more satisfaction. Now, come back to the office, and I’ll show you our fancy brands.”

It was very cool and pleasant in that dim wareroom, with the rafters showing overhead in a cloudy perspective, and darkening away into the perpetual twilight at the rear of the building; and Bartley had found an agreeable seat on the head of a half-barrel of the paint, which he was reluctant to leave. But he rose and followed the vigorous lead of Lapham back to the office, where the sun of a long summer afternoon was just beginning to glare in at the window. On shelves opposite Lapham’s desk were tin cans of various sizes, arranged in tapering cylinders, and showing, in a pattern diminishing toward the top, the same label borne by the casks and barrels in the wareroom. Lapham merely waved his hand toward these; but when Bartley, after a comprehensive glance at them, gave his whole attention to a row of clean, smooth jars, where different tints of the paint showed through flawless glass, Lapham smiled, and waited in pleased expectation.

“Hello!” said Bartley. “That’s pretty!”

“Yes,” assented Lapham, “it is rather nice. It’s our latest thing, and we find it takes with customers first-rate. Look here!” he said, taking down one of the jars, and pointing to the first line of the label.

Bartley read, “THE PERSIS BRAND,” and then he looked at Lapham and smiled.

“After HER, of course,” said Lapham. “Got it up and put the first of it on the market her last birthday. She was pleased.”

“I should think she might have been,” said Bartley, while he made a note of the appearance of the jars.

“I don’t know about your mentioning it in your interview,” said Lapham dubiously.

“That’s going into the interview, Mr. Lapham, if nothing else does. Got a wife myself, and I know just how you feel.” It was in the dawn of Bartley’s prosperity on the Boston Events, before his troubles with Marcia had seriously begun.

“Is that so?” said Lapham, recognising with a smile another of the vast majority of married Americans; a few underrate their wives, but the rest think them supernal in intelligence and capability. “Well,” he added, “we must see about that. Where’d you say you lived?”

“We don’t live; we board. Mrs. Nash, 13 Canary Place.”

“Well, we’ve all got to commence that way,” suggested Lapham consolingly.

“Yes; but we’ve about got to the end of our string. I expect to be under a roof of my own on Clover Street before long. I suppose,” said Bartley, returning to business, “that you didn’t let the grass grow under your feet much after you found out what was in your paint-mine?”

“No, sir,” answered Lapham, withdrawing his eyes from a long stare at Bartley, in which he had been seeing himself a young man again, in the first days of his married life. “I went right back to Lumberville and sold out everything, and put all I could rake and scrape together into paint. And Mis’ Lapham was with me every time. No hang back about HER. I tell you she was a WOMAN!”

Bartley laughed. “That’s the sort most of us marry.”

“No, we don’t,” said Lapham. “Most of us marry silly little girls grown up to LOOK like women.”

“Well, I guess that’s about so,” assented Bartley, as if upon second thought.

“If it hadn’t been for her,” resumed Lapham, “the paint wouldn’t have come to anything. I used to tell her it wa’n’t the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in the ORE that made that paint go; it was the seventy-five per cent. of purr-ox-eyed of iron in HER.”

“Good!” cried Bartley. “I’ll tell Marcia that.”

“In less’n six months there wa’n’t a board-fence, nor a bridge-girder, nor a dead wall, nor a barn, nor a face of rock in that whole region that didn’t have ‘Lapham’s Mineral Paint — Specimen’ on it in the three colours we begun by making.” Bartley had taken his seat on the window-sill, and Lapham, standing before him, now put up his huge foot close to Bartley’s thigh; neither of them minded that.

“I’ve heard a good deal of talk about that S.T. — 1860 — X. man, and the stove-blacking man, and the kidney-cure man, because they advertised in that way; and I’ve read articles about it in the papers; but I don’t see where the joke comes in, exactly. So long as the people that own the barns and fences don’t object, I don’t see what the public has got to do with it. And I never saw anything so very sacred about a big rock, along a river or in a pasture, that it wouldn’t do to put mineral paint on it in three colours. I wish some of the people that talk about the landscape, and WRITE about it, had to bu’st one of them rocks OUT of the landscape with powder, or dig a hole to bury it in, as we used to have to do up on the farm; I guess they’d sing a little different tune about the profanation of scenery. There ain’t any man enjoys a sightly bit of nature — a smooth piece of interval with half a dozen good-sized wine-glass elms in it — more than I do. But I ain’t a-going to stand up for every big ugly rock I come across, as if we were all a set of dumn Druids. I say the landscape was made for man, and not man for the landscape.”

“Yes,” said Bartley carelessly; “it was made for the stove-polish man and the kidney-cure man.”

“It was made for any man that knows how to use it,” Lapham returned, insensible to Bartley’s irony. “Let ’em go and live with nature in the WINTER, up there along the Canada line, and I guess they’ll get enough of her for one while. Well — where was I?”

“Decorating the landscape,” said Bartley.

“Yes, sir; I started right there at Lumberville, and it give the place a start too. You won’t find it on the map now; and you won’t find it in the gazetteer. I give a pretty good lump of money to build a town-hall, about five years back, and the first meeting they held in it they voted to change the name, — Lumberville WA’N’T a name, — and it’s Lapham now.”

“Isn’t it somewhere up in that region that they get the old Brandon red?” asked Bartley.

“We’re about ninety miles from Brandon. The Brandon’s a good paint,” said Lapham conscientiously. “Like to show you round up at our place some odd time, if you get off.”

“Thanks. I should like it first-rate. WORKS there?”

“Yes; works there. Well, sir, just about the time I got started, the war broke out; and it knocked my paint higher than a kite. The thing dropped perfectly dead. I presume that if I’d had any sort of influence, I might have got it into Government hands, for gun-carriages and army wagons, and may be on board Government vessels. But I hadn’t, and we had to face the music. I was about broken-hearted, but m’wife she looked at it another way. ‘I guess it’s a providence,’ says she. ‘Silas, I guess you’ve got a country that’s worth fighting for. Any rate, you better go out and give it a chance.’ Well, sir, I went. I knew she meant business. It might kill her to have me go, but it would kill her sure if I stayed. She was one of that kind. I went. Her last words was, ‘I’ll look after the paint, Si.’ We hadn’t but just one little girl then, — boy’d died, — and Mis’ Lapham’s mother was livin’ with us; and I knew if times DID anyways come up again, m’wife’d know just what to do. So I went. I got through; and you can call me Colonel, if you want to. Feel there!” Lapham took Bartley’s thumb and forefinger and put them on a bunch in his leg, just above the knee. “Anything hard?”

“Ball?”

Lapham nodded. “Gettysburg. That’s my thermometer. If it wa’n’t for that, I shouldn’t know enough to come in when it rains.”

Bartley laughed at a joke which betrayed some evidences of wear. “And when you came back, you took hold of the paint and rushed it.”

“I took hold of the paint and rushed it — all I could,” said Lapham, with less satisfaction than he had hitherto shown in his autobiography. “But I found that I had got back to another world. The day of small things was past, and I don’t suppose it will ever come again in this country. My wife was at me all the time to take a partner — somebody with capital; but I couldn’t seem to bear the idea. That paint was like my own blood to me. To have anybody else concerned in it was like — well, I don’t know what. I saw it was the thing to do; but I tried to fight it off, and I tried to joke it off. I used to say, ‘Why didn’t you take a partner yourself, Persis, while I was away?’ And she’d say, ‘Well, if you hadn’t come back, I should, Si.’ Always DID like a joke about as well as any woman I ever saw. Well, I had to come to it. I took a partner.” Lapham dropped the bold blue eyes with which he had been till now staring into Bartley’s face, and the reporter knew that here was a place for asterisks in his interview, if interviews were faithful. “He had money enough,” continued Lapham, with a suppressed sigh; “but he didn’t know anything about paint. We hung on together for a year or two. And then we quit.”

“And he had the experience,” suggested Bartley, with companionable ease.

“I had some of the experience too,” said Lapham, with a scowl; and Bartley divined, through the freemasonry of all who have sore places in their memories, that this was a point which he must not touch again.

“And since that, I suppose, you’ve played it alone.”

“I’ve played it alone.”

“You must ship some of this paint of yours to foreign countries, Colonel?” suggested Bartley, putting on a professional air.

“We ship it to all parts of the world. It goes to South America, lots of it. It goes to Australia, and it goes to India, and it goes to China, and it goes to the Cape of Good Hope. It’ll stand any climate. Of course, we don’t export these fancy brands much. They’re for home use. But we’re introducing them elsewhere. Here.” Lapham pulled open a drawer, and showed Bartley a lot of labels in different languages — Spanish, French, German, and Italian. “We expect to do a good business in all those countries. We’ve got our agencies in Cadiz now, and in Paris, and in Hamburg, and in Leghorn. It’s a thing that’s bound to make its way. Yes, sir. Wherever a man has got a ship, or a bridge, or a lock, or a house, or a car, or a fence, or a pig-pen anywhere in God’s universe to paint, that’s the paint for him, and he’s bound to find it out sooner or later. You pass a ton of that paint dry through a blast-furnace, and you’ll get a quarter of a ton of pig-iron. I believe in my paint. I believe it’s a blessing to the world. When folks come in, and kind of smell round, and ask me what I mix it with, I always say, ‘Well, in the first place, I mix it with FAITH, and after that I grind it up with the best quality of boiled linseed oil that money will buy.’”

Lapham took out his watch and looked at it, and Bartley perceived that his audience was drawing to a close. “‘F you ever want to run down and take a look at our works, pass you over the road,” — he called it RUD— “and it sha’n’t cost you a cent.”

“Well, may be I shall, sometime,” said Bartley. “Good afternoon, Colonel.”

“Good afternoon. Or — hold on! My horse down there yet, William?” he called to the young man in the counting-room who had taken his letter at the beginning of the interview. “Oh! All right!” he added, in response to something the young man said.

“Can’t I set you down somewhere, Mr. Hubbard? I’ve got my horse at the door, and I can drop you on my way home. I’m going to take Mis’ Lapham to look at a house I’m driving piles for, down on the New Land.”

“Don’t care if I do,” said Bartley.

Lapham put on a straw hat, gathered up some papers lying on his desk, pulled down its rolling cover, turned the key in it, and gave the papers to an extremely handsome young woman at one of the desks in the outer office. She was stylishly dressed, as Bartley saw, and her smooth, yellow hair was sculpturesquely waved over a low, white forehead. “Here,” said Lapham, with the same prompt gruff kindness that he had used in addressing the young man, “I want you should put these in shape, and give me a type-writer copy to-morrow.”

“What an uncommonly pretty girl!” said Bartley, as they descended the rough stairway and found their way out to the street, past the dangling rope of a block and tackle wandering up into the cavernous darkness overhead.

“She does her work,” said Lapham shortly.

Bartley mounted to the left side of the open buggy standing at the curb-stone, and Lapham, gathering up the hitching-weight, slid it under the buggy-seat and mounted beside him.

“No chance to speed a horse here, of course,” said Lapham, while the horse with a spirited gentleness picked her way, with a high, long action, over the pavement of the street. The streets were all narrow, and most of them crooked, in that quarter of the town; but at the end of one the spars of a vessel pencilled themselves delicately against the cool blue of the afternoon sky. The air was full of a smell pleasantly compounded of oakum, of leather, and of oil. It was not the busy season, and they met only two or three trucks heavily straggling toward the wharf with their long string teams; but the cobble-stones of the pavement were worn with the dint of ponderous wheels, and discoloured with iron-rust from them; here and there, in wandering streaks over its surface, was the grey stain of the salt water with which the street had been sprinkled.

After an interval of some minutes, which both men spent in looking round the dash-board from opposite sides to watch the stride of the horse, Bartley said, with a light sigh, “I had a colt once down in Maine that stepped just like that mare.”

“Well!” said Lapham, sympathetically recognising the bond that this fact created between them. “Well, now, I tell you what you do. You let me come for you ‘most any afternoon, now, and take you out over the Milldam, and speed this mare a little. I’d like to show you what this mare can do. Yes, I would.”

“All right,” answered Bartley; “I’ll let you know my first day off.”

“Good,” cried Lapham.

“Kentucky?” queried Bartley.

“No, sir. I don’t ride behind anything but Vermont; never did. Touch of Morgan, of course; but you can’t have much Morgan in a horse if you want speed. Hambletonian mostly. Where’d you say you wanted to get out?”

“I guess you may put me down at the Events Office, just round the corner here. I’ve got to write up this interview while it’s fresh.”

“All right,” said Lapham, impersonally assenting to Bartley’s use of him as material.

He had not much to complain of in Bartley’s treatment, unless it was the strain of extravagant compliment which it involved. But the flattery was mainly for the paint, whose virtues Lapham did not believe could be overstated, and himself and his history had been treated with as much respect as Bartley was capable of showing any one. He made a very picturesque thing of the discovery of the paint-mine. “Deep in the heart of the virgin forests of Vermont, far up toward the line of the Canadian snows, on a desolate mountain-side, where an autumnal storm had done its wild work, and the great trees, strewn hither and thither, bore witness to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered, just forty years ago, the mineral which the alchemy of his son’s enterprise and energy has transmuted into solid ingots of the most precious of metals. The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the bottom of a hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him, and which for many years remained a paint-mine of no more appreciable value than a soap-mine.”

Here Bartley had not been able to forego another grin; but he compensated for it by the high reverence with which he spoke of Colonel Lapham’s record during the war of the rebellion, and of the motives which impelled him to turn aside from an enterprise in which his whole heart was engaged, and take part in the struggle. “The Colonel bears embedded in the muscle of his right leg a little memento of the period in the shape of a minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as his thermometer, and which relieves him from the necessity of reading ‘The Probabilities’ in his morning paper. This saves him just so much time; and for a man who, as he said, has not a moment of waste time on him anywhere, five minutes a day are something in the course of a year. Simple, clear, bold, and straightforward in mind and action, Colonel Silas Lapham, with a prompt comprehensiveness and a never-failing business sagacity, is, in the best sense of that much-abused term, one of nature’s noblemen, to the last inch of his five eleven and a half. His life affords an example of single-minded application and unwavering perseverance which our young business men would do well to emulate. There is nothing showy or meretricious about the man. He believes in mineral paint, and he puts his heart and soul into it. He makes it a religion; though we would not imply that it IS his religion. Colonel Lapham is a regular attendant at the Rev. Dr. Langworthy’s church. He subscribes liberally to the Associated Charities, and no good object or worthy public enterprise fails to receive his support. He is not now actively in politics, and his paint is not partisan; but it is an open secret that he is, and always has been, a staunch Republican. Without violating the sanctities of private life, we cannot speak fully of various details which came out in the free and unembarrassed interview which Colonel Lapham accorded our representative. But we may say that the success of which he is justly proud he is also proud to attribute in great measure to the sympathy and energy of his wife — one of those women who, in whatever walk of life, seem born to honour the name of American Woman, and to redeem it from the national reproach of Daisy Millerism. Of Colonel Lapham’s family, we will simply add that it consists of two young lady daughters.

“The subject of this very inadequate sketch is building a house on the water side of Beacon Street, after designs by one of our leading architectural firms, which, when complete, will be one of the finest ornaments of that exclusive avenue. It will, we believe, be ready for the occupancy of the family sometime in the spring.”

When Bartley had finished his article, which he did with a good deal of inward derision, he went home to Marcia, still smiling over the thought of Lapham, whose burly simplicity had peculiarly amused him. “He regularly turned himself inside out to me,” he said, as he sat describing his interview to Marcia.

“Then I know you could make something nice out of it,” said his wife; “and that will please Mr. Witherby.”

“Oh yes, I’ve done pretty well; but I couldn’t let myself loose on him the way I wanted to. Confound the limitations of decency, anyway! I should like to have told just what Colonel Lapham thought of landscape advertising in Colonel Lapham’s own words. I’ll tell you one thing, Marsh: he had a girl there at one of the desks that you wouldn’t let ME have within gunshot of MY office. Pretty? It ain’t any name for it!” Marcia’s eyes began to blaze, and Bartley broke out into a laugh, in which he arrested himself at sight of a formidable parcel in the corner of the room.

“Hello! What’s that?”

“Why, I don’t know what it is,” replied Marcia tremulously. “A man brought it just before you came in, and I didn’t like to open it.”

“Think it was some kind of infernal machine?” asked Bartley, getting down on his knees to examine the package. “MRS. B. Hubbard, heigh?” He cut the heavy hemp string with his penknife. “We must look into this thing. I should like to know who’s sending packages to Mrs. Hubbard in my absence.” He unfolded the wrappings of paper, growing softer and finer inward, and presently pulled out a handsome square glass jar, through which a crimson mass showed richly. “The Persis Brand!” he yelled. “I knew it!”

“Oh, what is it, Bartley?” quavered Marcia. Then, courageously drawing a little nearer: “Is it some kind of jam?” she implored. “Jam? No!” roared Bartley. “It’s PAINT! It’s mineral paint — Lapham’s paint!”

“Paint?” echoed Marcia, as she stood over him while he stripped their wrappings from the jars which showed the dark blue, dark green, light brown, dark brown, and black, with the dark crimson, forming the gamut of colour of the Lapham paint. “Don’t TELL me it’s paint that I can use, Bartley!”

“Well, I shouldn’t advise you to use much of it — all at once,” replied her husband. “But it’s paint that you can use in moderation.”

Marcia cast her arms round his neck and kissed him. “O Bartley, I think I’m the happiest girl in the world! I was just wondering what I should do. There are places in that Clover Street house that need touching up so dreadfully. I shall be very careful. You needn’t be afraid I shall overdo. But, this just saves my life. Did you BUY it, Bartley? You know we couldn’t afford it, and you oughtn’t to have done it! And what does the Persis Brand mean?”

“Buy it?” cried Bartley. “No! The old fool’s sent it to you as a present. You’d better wait for the facts before you pitch into me for extravagance, Marcia. Persis is the name of his wife; and he named it after her because it’s his finest brand. You’ll see it in my interview. Put it on the market her last birthday for a surprise to her.”

“What old fool?” faltered Marcia.

“Why, Lapham — the mineral paint man.”

“Oh, what a good man!” sighed Marcia from the bottom of her soul. “Bartley! you WON’T make fun of him as you do of some of those people? WILL you?”

“Nothing that HE’LL ever find out,” said Bartley, getting up and brushing off the carpet-lint from his knees.

II.

AFTER dropping Bartley Hubbard at the Events building, Lapham drove on down Washington Street to Nankeen Square at the South End, where he had lived ever since the mistaken movement of society in that direction ceased. He had not built, but had bought very cheap of a terrified gentleman of good extraction who discovered too late that the South End was not the thing, and who in the eagerness of his flight to the Back Bay threw in his carpets and shades for almost nothing. Mrs. Lapham was even better satisfied with their bargain than the Colonel himself, and they had lived in Nankeen Square for twelve years. They had seen the saplings planted in the pretty oval round which the houses were built flourish up into sturdy young trees, and their two little girls in the same period had grown into young ladies; the Colonel’s tough frame had expanded into the bulk which Bartley’s interview indicated; and Mrs. Lapham, while keeping a more youthful outline, showed the sharp print of the crow’s-foot at the corners of her motherly eyes, and certain slight creases in her wholesome cheeks. The fact that they lived in an unfashionable neighbourhood was something that they had never been made to feel to their personal disadvantage, and they had hardly known it till the summer before this story opens, when Mrs. Lapham and her daughter Irene had met some other Bostonians far from Boston, who made it memorable. They were people whom chance had brought for the time under a singular obligation to the Lapham ladies, and they were gratefully recognisant of it. They had ventured — a mother and two daughters — as far as a rather wild little Canadian watering-place on the St. Lawrence, below Quebec, and had arrived some days before their son and brother was expected to join them. Two of their trunks had gone astray, and on the night of their arrival the mother was taken violently ill. Mrs. Lapham came to their help, with her skill as nurse, and with the abundance of her own and her daughter’s wardrobe, and a profuse, single-hearted kindness. When a doctor could be got at, he said that but for Mrs. Lapham’s timely care, the lady would hardly have lived. He was a very effusive little Frenchman, and fancied he was saying something very pleasant to everybody.

A certain intimacy inevitably followed, and when the son came he was even more grateful than the others. Mrs. Lapham could not quite understand why he should be as attentive to her as to Irene; but she compared him with other young men about the place, and thought him nicer than any of them. She had not the means of a wider comparison; for in Boston, with all her husband’s prosperity, they had not had a social life. Their first years there were given to careful getting on Lapham’s part, and careful saving on his wife’s. Suddenly the money began to come so abundantly that she need not save; and then they did not know what to do with it. A certain amount could be spent on horses, and Lapham spent it; his wife spent on rich and rather ugly clothes and a luxury of household appointments. Lapham had not yet reached the picture-buying stage of the rich man’s development, but they decorated their house with the costliest and most abominable frescoes; they went upon journeys, and lavished upon cars and hotels; they gave with both hands to their church and to all the charities it brought them acquainted with; but they did not know how to spend on society. Up to a certain period Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her neighbourhood in to tea, as her mother had done in the country in her younger days. Lapham’s idea of hospitality was still to bring a heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them imagined dinners.

Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they had not got on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they were a year behind in graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they had got education enough. His wife was of a different mind; she would have liked them to go to some private school for their finishing. But Irene did not care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the sisters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a different sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these were mostly from the parks and squares, like themselves. It ended in their going part of a year. But the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading, and she took some private lessons, and read books out of the circulating library; the whole family were amazed at the number she read, and rather proud of it.

They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her abundant leisure in shopping for herself and her mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her caps and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses far beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and spent hours on her toilet every day. Her sister had a simpler taste, and, if she had done altogether as she liked, might even have slighted dress. They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours together minutely discussing what they saw out of the window. In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder sister went to many church lectures on a vast variety of secular subjects, and usually came home with a comic account of them, and that made more matter of talk for the whole family. She could make fun of nearly everything; Irene complained that she scared away the young men whom they got acquainted with at the dancing-school sociables. They were, perhaps, not the wisest young men.

The girls had learned to dance at Papanti’s; but they had not belonged to the private classes. They did not even know of them, and a great gulf divided them from those who did. Their father did not like company, except such as came informally in their way; and their mother had remained too rustic to know how to attract it in the sophisticated city fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of European travel; but they had gone about to mountain and sea-side resorts, the mother and the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts present throughout New England, of multitudes of girls, lovely, accomplished, exquisitely dressed, humbly glad of the presence of any sort of young man; but the Laphams had no skill or courage to make themselves noticed, far less courted by the solitary invalid, or clergyman, or artist. They lurked helplessly about in the hotel parlours, looking on and not knowing how to put themselves forward. Perhaps they did not care a great deal to do so. They had not a conceit of themselves, but a sort of content in their own ways that one may notice in certain families. The very strength of their mutual affection was a barrier to worldly knowledge; they dressed for one another; they equipped their house for their own satisfaction; they lived richly to themselves, not because they were selfish, but because they did not know how to do otherwise. The elder daughter did not care for society, apparently. The younger, who was but three years younger, was not yet quite old enough to be ambitious of it. With all her wonderful beauty, she had an innocence almost vegetable. When her beauty, which in its immaturity was crude and harsh, suddenly ripened, she bloomed and glowed with the unconsciousness of a flower; she not merely did not feel herself admired, but hardly knew herself discovered. If she dressed well, perhaps too well, it was because she had the instinct of dress; but till she met this young man who was so nice to her at Baie St. Paul, she had scarcely lived a detached, individual life, so wholly had she depended on her mother and her sister for her opinions, almost her sensations. She took account of everything he did and said, pondering it, and trying to make out exactly what he meant, to the inflection of a syllable, the slightest movement or gesture. In this way she began for the first time to form ideas which she had not derived from her family, and they were none the less her own because they were often mistaken.

Some of the things that he partly said, partly looked, she reported to her mother, and they talked them over, as they did everything relating to these new acquaintances, and wrought them into the novel point of view which they were acquiring. When Mrs. Lapham returned home, she submitted all the accumulated facts of the case, and all her own conjectures, to her husband, and canvassed them anew.

At first he was disposed to regard the whole affair as of small importance, and she had to insist a little beyond her own convictions in order to counteract his indifference.

“Well, I can tell you,” she said, “that if you think they were not the nicest people you ever saw, you’re mightily mistaken. They had about the best manners; and they had been everywhere, and knew everything. I declare it made me feel as if we had always lived in the backwoods. I don’t know but the mother and the daughters would have let you feel so a little, if they’d showed out all they thought; but they never did; and the son — well, I can’t express it, Silas! But that young man had about perfect ways.”

“Seem struck up on Irene?” asked the Colonel.

“How can I tell? He seemed just about as much struck up on me. Anyway, he paid me as much attention as he did her. Perhaps it’s more the way, now, to notice the mother than it used to be.”

Lapham ventured no conjecture, but asked, as he had asked already, who the people were.

Mrs. Lapham repeated their name. Lapham nodded his head. “Do you know them? What business is he in?”

“I guess he ain’t in anything,” said Lapham.

“They were very nice,” said Mrs. Lapham impartially.

“Well, they’d ought to be,” returned the Colonel. “Never done anything else.”

“They didn’t seem stuck up,” urged his wife.

“They’d no need to — with you. I could buy him and sell him, twice over.”

This answer satisfied Mrs. Lapham rather with the fact than with her husband. “Well, I guess I wouldn’t brag, Silas,” she said.

In the winter the ladies of this family, who returned to town very late, came to call on Mrs. Lapham. They were again very polite. But the mother let drop, in apology for their calling almost at nightfall, that the coachman had not known the way exactly.

“Nearly all our friends are on the New Land or on the Hill.”

There was a barb in this that rankled after the ladies had gone; and on comparing notes with her daughter, Mrs. Lapham found that a barb had been left to rankle in her mind also.

“They said they had never been in this part of the town before.”

Upon a strict search of her memory, Irene could not report that the fact had been stated with anything like insinuation, but it was that which gave it a more penetrating effect.

“Oh, well, of course,” said Lapham, to whom these facts were referred. “Those sort of people haven’t got much business up our way, and they don’t come. It’s a fair thing all round. We don’t trouble the Hill or the New Land much.”

“We know where they are,” suggested his wife thoughtfully.

“Yes,” assented the Colonel. “I know where they are. I’ve got a lot of land over on the Back Bay.”

“You have?” eagerly demanded his wife.

“Want me to build on it?” he asked in reply, with a quizzical smile.

“I guess we can get along here for a while.”

This was at night. In the morning Mrs. Lapham said —

“I suppose we ought to do the best we can for the children, in every way.”

“I supposed we always had,” replied her husband.

“Yes, we have, according to our light.”

“Have you got some new light?”

“I don’t know as it’s light. But if the girls are going to keep on living in Boston and marry here, I presume we ought to try to get them into society, some way; or ought to do something.”

“Well, who’s ever done more for their children than we have?” demanded Lapham, with a pang at the thought that he could possibly have been out-done. “Don’t they have everything they want? Don’t they dress just as you say? Don’t you go everywhere with ‘em? Is there ever anything going on that’s worth while that they don’t see it or hear it? I don’t know what you mean. Why don’t you get them into society? There’s money enough!”

“There’s got to be something besides money, I guess,” said Mrs. Lapham, with a hopeless sigh. “I presume we didn’t go to work just the right way about their schooling. We ought to have got them into some school where they’d have got acquainted with city girls — girls who could help them along.”

“Nearly everybody at Miss Smillie’s was from some where else.”

“Well, it’s pretty late to think about that now,” grumbled Lapham.

“And we’ve always gone our own way, and not looked out for the future. We ought to have gone out more, and had people come to the house. Nobody comes.”

“Well, is that my fault? I guess nobody ever makes people welcomer.”

“We ought to have invited company more.”

“Why don’t you do it now? If it’s for the girls, I don’t care if you have the house full all the while.”

Mrs. Lapham was forced to a confession full of humiliation. “I don’t know who to ask.”

“Well, you can’t expect me to tell you.”

“No; we’re both country people, and we’ve kept our country ways, and we don’t, either of us, know what to do. You’ve had to work so hard, and your luck was so long coming, and then it came with such a rush, that we haven’t had any chance to learn what to do with it. It’s just the same with Irene’s looks; I didn’t expect she was ever going to have any, she WAS such a plain child, and, all at once, she’s blazed out this way. As long as it was Pen that didn’t seem to care for society, I didn’t give much mind to it. But I can see it’s going to be different with Irene. I don’t believe but what we’re in the wrong neighbourhood.”

“Well,” said the Colonel, “there ain’t a prettier lot on the Back Bay than mine. It’s on the water side of Beacon, and it’s twenty-eight feet wide and a hundred and fifty deep. Let’s build on it.”

Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. “No,” she said finally; “we’ve always got along well enough here, and I guess we better stay.”

At breakfast she said casually: “Girls, how would you like to have your father build on the New Land?”

The girls said they did not know. It was more convenient to the horse-cars where they were.

Mrs. Lapham stole a look of relief at her husband, and nothing more was said of the matter.

The mother of the family who had called upon Mrs. Lapham brought her husband’s cards, and when Mrs. Lapham returned the visit she was in some trouble about the proper form of acknowledging the civility. The Colonel had no card but a business card, which advertised the principal depot and the several agencies of the mineral paint; and Mrs. Lapham doubted, till she wished to goodness that she had never seen nor heard of those people, whether to ignore her husband in the transaction altogether, or to write his name on her own card. She decided finally upon this measure, and she had the relief of not finding the family at home. As far as she could judge, Irene seemed to suffer a little disappointment from the fact.

For several months there was no communication between the families. Then there came to Nankeen Square a lithographed circular from the people on the Hill, signed in ink by the mother, and affording Mrs. Lapham an opportunity to subscribe for a charity of undeniable merit and acceptability. She submitted it to her husband, who promptly drew a cheque for five hundred dollars.

She tore it in two. “I will take a cheque for a hundred, Silas,” she said.

“Why?” he asked, looking up guiltily at her.

“Because a hundred is enough; and I don’t want to show off before them.”

“Oh, I thought may be you did. Well, Pert,” he added, having satisfied human nature by the preliminary thrust, “I guess you’re about right. When do you want I should begin to build on Beacon Street?” He handed her the new cheque, where she stood over him, and then leaned back in his chair and looked up at her.

“I don’t want you should begin at all. What do you mean, Silas?” She rested against the side of his desk.

“Well, I don’t know as I mean anything. But shouldn’t you like to build? Everybody builds, at least once in a lifetime.”

“Where is your lot? They say it’s unhealthy, over there.”

Up to a certain point in their prosperity Mrs. Lapham had kept strict account of all her husband’s affairs; but as they expanded, and ceased to be of the retail nature with which women successfully grapple, the intimate knowledge of them made her nervous. There was a period in which she felt that they were being ruined, but the crash had not come; and, since his great success, she had abandoned herself to a blind confidence in her husband’s judgment, which she had hitherto felt needed her revision. He came and went, day by day, unquestioned. He bought and sold and got gain. She knew that he would tell her if ever things went wrong, and he knew that she would ask him whenever she was anxious.

“It ain’t unhealthy where I’ve bought,” said Lapham, rather enjoying her insinuation. “I looked after that when I was trading; and I guess it’s about as healthy on the Back Bay as it is here, anyway. I got that lot for you, Pert; I thought you’d want to build on the Back Bay some day.”

“Pshaw!” said Mrs. Lapham, deeply pleased inwardly, but not going to show it, as she would have said. “I guess you want to build there yourself.” She insensibly got a little nearer to her husband. They liked to talk to each other in that blunt way; it is the New England way of expressing perfect confidence and tenderness.

“Well, I guess I do,” said Lapham, not insisting upon the unselfish view of the matter. “I always did like the water side of Beacon. There ain’t a sightlier place in the world for a house. And some day there’s bound to be a drive-way all along behind them houses, between them and the water, and then a lot there is going to be worth the gold that will cover it — COIN. I’ve had offers for that lot, Pert, twice over what I give for it. Yes, I have. Don’t you want to ride over there some afternoon with me and see it?”

“I’m satisfied where we be, Si,” said Mrs. Lapham, recurring to the parlance of her youth in her pathos at her husband’s kindness. She sighed anxiously, for she felt the trouble a woman knows in view of any great change. They had often talked of altering over the house in which they lived, but they had never come to it; and they had often talked of building, but it had always been a house in the country that they had thought of. “I wish you had sold that lot.”

“I hain’t,” said the colonel briefly.

“I don’t know as I feel much like changing our way of living.”

“Guess we could live there pretty much as we live here. There’s all kinds of people on Beacon Street; you mustn’t think they’re all big-bugs. I know one party that lives in a house he built to sell, and his wife don’t keep any girl. You can have just as much style there as you want, or just as little. I guess we live as well as most of ’em now, and set as good a table. And if you come to style, I don’t know as anybody has got more of a right to put it on than what we have.”

“Well, I don’t want to build on Beacon Street, Si,” said Mrs. Lapham gently.

“Just as you please, Persis. I ain’t in any hurry to leave.”

Mrs. Lapham stood flapping the cheque which she held in her right hand against the edge of her left.

The Colonel still sat looking up at her face, and watching the effect of the poison of ambition which he had artfully instilled into her mind.

She sighed again — a yielding sigh. “What are you going to do this afternoon?”

“I’m going to take a turn on the Brighton road,” said the Colonel.

“I don’t believe but what I should like to go along,” said his wife.

“All right. You hain’t ever rode behind that mare yet, Pert, and I want you should see me let her out once. They say the snow’s all packed down already, and the going is A 1.”

At four o’clock in the afternoon, with a cold, red winter sunset before them, the Colonel and his wife were driving slowly down Beacon Street in the light, high-seated cutter, where, as he said, they were a pretty tight fit. He was holding the mare in till the time came to speed her, and the mare was springily jolting over the snow, looking intelligently from side to side, and cocking this ear and that, while from her nostrils, her head tossing easily, she blew quick, irregular whiffs of steam.

“Gay, ain’t she?” proudly suggested the Colonel.

“She IS gay,” assented his wife.

They met swiftly dashing sleighs, and let them pass on either hand, down the beautiful avenue narrowing with an admirably even sky-line in the perspective. They were not in a hurry. The mare jounced easily along, and they talked of the different houses on either side of the way. They had a crude taste in architecture, and they admired the worst. There were women’s faces at many of the handsome windows, and once in a while a young man on the pavement caught his hat suddenly from his head, and bowed in response to some salutation from within.

“I don’t think our girls would look very bad behind one of those big panes,” said the Colonel.

“No,” said his wife dreamily.

“Where’s the YOUNG man? Did he come with them?”

“No; he was to spend the winter with a friend of his that has a ranch in Texas. I guess he’s got to do something.”

“Yes; gentlemaning as a profession has got to play out in a generation or two.”

Neither of them spoke of the lot, though Lapham knew perfectly well what his wife had come with him for, and she was aware that he knew it. The time came when he brought the mare down to a walk, and then slowed up almost to a stop, while they both turned their heads to the right and looked at the vacant lot, through which showed the frozen stretch of the Back Bay, a section of the Long Bridge, and the roofs and smoke-stacks of Charlestown.

“Yes, it’s sightly,” said Mrs. Lapham, lifting her hand from the reins, on which she had unconsciously laid it.

Lapham said nothing, but he let the mare out a little.

The sleighs and cutters were thickening round them. On the Milldam it became difficult to restrict the mare to the long, slow trot into which he let her break. The beautiful landscape widened to right and left of them, with the sunset redder and redder, over the low, irregular hills before them. They crossed the Milldam into Longwood; and here, from the crest of the first upland, stretched two endless lines, in which thousands of cutters went and came. Some of the drivers were already speeding their horses, and these shot to and fro on inner lines, between the slowly moving vehicles on either side of the road. Here and there a burly mounted policeman, bulging over the pommel of his M’Clellan saddle, jolted by, silently gesturing and directing the course, and keeping it all under the eye of the law. It was what Bartley Hubbard called “a carnival of fashion and gaiety on the Brighton road,” in his account of it. But most of the people in those elegant sleighs and cutters had so little the air of the great world that one knowing it at all must have wondered where they and their money came from; and the gaiety of the men, at least, was expressed, like that of Colonel Lapham, in a grim almost fierce, alertness; the women wore an air of courageous apprehension. At a certain point the Colonel said, “I’m going to let her out, Pert,” and he lifted and then dropped the reins lightly on the mare’s back.

She understood the signal, and, as an admirer said, “she laid down to her work.” Nothing in the immutable iron of Lapham’s face betrayed his sense of triumph as the mare left everything behind her on the road. Mrs. Lapham, if she felt fear, was too busy holding her flying wraps about her, and shielding her face from the scud of ice flung from the mare’s heels, to betray it; except for the rush of her feet, the mare was as silent as the people behind her; the muscles of her back and thighs worked more and more swiftly, like some mechanism responding to an alien force, and she shot to the end of the course, grazing a hundred encountered and rival sledges in her passage, but unmolested by the policemen, who probably saw that the mare and the Colonel knew what they were about, and, at any rate, were not the sort of men to interfere with trotting like that. At the end of the heat Lapham drew her in, and turned off on a side street into Brookline.

“Tell you what, Pert,” he said, as if they had been quietly jogging along, with time for uninterrupted thought since he last spoke, “I’ve about made up my mind to build on that lot.”

“All right, Silas,” said Mrs. Lapham; “I suppose you know what you’re about. Don’t build on it for me, that’s all.”

When she stood in the hall at home, taking off her things, she said to the girls, who were helping her, “Some day your father will get killed with that mare.”

“Did he speed her?” asked Penelope, the elder.

She was named after her grandmother, who had in her turn inherited from another ancestress the name of the Homeric matron whose peculiar merits won her a place even among the Puritan Faiths, Hopes, Temperances, and Prudences. Penelope was the girl whose odd serious face had struck Bartley Hubbard in the photograph of the family group Lapham showed him on the day of the interview. Her large eyes, like her hair, were brown; they had the peculiar look of near-sighted eyes which is called mooning; her complexion was of a dark pallor.

Her mother did not reply to a question which might be considered already answered. “He says he’s going to build on that lot of his,” she next remarked, unwinding the long veil which she had tied round her neck to hold her bonnet on. She put her hat and cloak on the hall table, to be carried upstairs later, and they all went in to tea: creamed oysters, birds, hot biscuit, two kinds of cake, and dishes of stewed and canned fruit and honey. The women dined alone at one, and the Colonel at the same hour down-town. But he liked a good hot meal when he got home in the evening. The house flared with gas; and the Colonel, before he sat down, went about shutting the registers, through which a welding heat came voluming up from the furnace.

“I’ll be the death of that darkey YET,” he said, “if he don’t stop making on such a fire. The only way to get any comfort out of your furnace is to take care of it yourself.”

“Well,” answered his wife from behind the teapot, as he sat down at table with this threat, “there’s nothing to prevent you, Si. And you can shovel the snow too, if you want to — till you get over to Beacon Street, anyway.”

“I guess I can keep my own sidewalk on Beacon Street clean, if I take the notion.”

“I should like to see you at it,” retorted his wife.

“Well, you keep a sharp lookout, and may be you will.”

Their taunts were really expressions of affectionate pride in each other. They liked to have it, give and take, that way, as they would have said, right along.

“A man can be a man on Beacon Street as well as anywhere, I guess.”

“Well, I’ll do the wash, as I used to in Lumberville,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I presume you’ll let me have set tubs, Si. You know I ain’t so young any more.” She passed Irene a cup of Oolong tea, — none of them had a sufficiently cultivated palate for Sou-chong, — and the girl handed it to her father. “Papa,” she asked, “you don’t really mean that you’re going to build over there?”

“Don’t I? You wait and see,” said the Colonel, stirring his tea.

“I don’t believe you do,” pursued the girl.

“Is that so? I presume you’d hate to have me. Your mother does.” He said DOOS, of course.

Penelope took the word. “I go in for it. I don’t see any use in not enjoying money, if you’ve got it to enjoy. That’s what it’s for, I suppose; though you mightn’t always think so.” She had a slow, quaint way of talking, that seemed a pleasant personal modification of some ancestral Yankee drawl, and her voice was low and cozy, and so far from being nasal that it was a little hoarse.

“I guess the ayes has it, Pen,” said her father. “How would it do to let Irene and your mother stick in the old place here, and us go into the new house?” At times the Colonel’s grammar failed him.

The matter dropped, and the Laphams lived on as before, with joking recurrences to the house on the water side of Beacon. The Colonel seemed less in earnest than any of them about it; but that was his way, his girls said; you never could tell when he really meant a thing.

III.

TOWARD the end of the winter there came a newspaper, addressed to Miss Irene Lapham; it proved to be a Texas newspaper, with a complimentary account of the ranch of the Hon. Loring G. Stanton, which the representative of the journal had visited.

“It must be his friend,” said Mrs. Lapham, to whom her daughter brought the paper; “the one he’s staying with.”

The girl did not say anything, but she carried the paper to her room, where she scanned every line of it for another name. She did not find it, but she cut the notice out and stuck it into the side of her mirror, where she could read it every morning when she brushed her hair, and the last thing at night when she looked at herself in the glass just before turning off the gas. Her sister often read it aloud, standing behind her and rendering it with elocutionary effects.

“The first time I ever heard of a love-letter in the form of a puff to a cattle-ranch. But perhaps that’s the style on the Hill.”

Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the arrival of the paper, treating the fact with an importance that he refused to see in it.

“How do you know the fellow sent it, anyway?” he demanded.

“Oh, I know he did.”

“I don’t see why he couldn’t write to ‘Rene, if he really meant anything.”

“Well, I guess that wouldn’t be their way,” said Mrs. Lapham; she did not at all know what their way would be.

When the spring opened Colonel Lapham showed that he had been in earnest about building on the New Land. His idea of a house was a brown-stone front, four stories high, and a French roof with an air-chamber above. Inside, there was to be a reception-room on the street and a dining-room back. The parlours were to be on the second floor, and finished in black walnut or party-coloured paint. The chambers were to be on the three floors above, front and rear, with side-rooms over the front door. Black walnut was to be used everywhere except in the attic, which was to be painted and grained to look like black walnut. The whole was to be very high-studded, and there were to be handsome cornices and elaborate centre-pieces throughout, except, again, in the attic.

These ideas he had formed from the inspection of many new buildings which he had seen going up, and which he had a passion for looking into. He was confirmed in his ideas by a master builder who had put up a great many houses on the Back Bay as a speculation, and who told him that if he wanted to have a house in the style, that was the way to have it.

The beginnings of the process by which Lapham escaped from the master builder and ended in the hands of an architect are so obscure that it would be almost impossible to trace them. But it all happened, and Lapham promptly developed his ideas of black walnut finish, high studding, and cornices. The architect was able to conceal the shudder which they must have sent through him. He was skilful, as nearly all architects are, in playing upon that simple instrument Man. He began to touch Colonel Lapham’s stops.

“Oh, certainly, have the parlours high-studded. But you’ve seen some of those pretty old-fashioned country-houses, haven’t you, where the entrance-story is very low-studded?”

“Yes,” Lapham assented.

“Well, don’t you think something of that kind would have a very nice effect? Have the entrance-story low-studded, and your parlours on the next floor as high as you please. Put your little reception-room here beside the door, and get the whole width of your house frontage for a square hall, and an easy low-tread staircase running up three sides of it. I’m sure Mrs. Lapham would find it much pleasanter.” The architect caught toward him a scrap of paper lying on the table at which they were sitting and sketched his idea. “Then have your dining-room behind the hall, looking on the water.”

He glanced at Mrs. Lapham, who said, “Of course,” and the architect went on —

“That gets you rid of one of those long, straight, ugly staircases,” — until that moment Lapham had thought a long, straight staircase the chief ornament of a house,— “and gives you an effect of amplitude and space.”

“That’s so!” said Mrs. Lapham. Her husband merely made a noise in his throat.

“Then, were you thinking of having your parlours together, connected by folding doors?” asked the architect deferentially.

“Yes, of course,” said Lapham. “They’re always so, ain’t they?”

“Well, nearly,” said the architect. “I was wondering how would it do to make one large square room at the front, taking the whole breadth of the house, and, with this hall-space between, have a music-room back for the young ladies?”

Lapham looked helplessly at his wife, whose quicker apprehension had followed the architect’s pencil with instant sympathy. “First-rate!” she cried.

The Colonel gave way. “I guess that would do. It’ll be kind of odd, won’t it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the architect. “Not so odd, I hope, as the other thing will be a few years from now.” He went on to plan the rest of the house, and he showed himself such a master in regard to all the practical details that Mrs. Lapham began to feel a motherly affection for the young man, and her husband could not deny in his heart that the fellow seemed to understand his business. He stopped walking about the room, as he had begun to do when the architect and Mrs. Lapham entered into the particulars of closets, drainage, kitchen arrangements, and all that, and came back to the table. “I presume,” he said, “you’ll have the drawing-room finished in black walnut?”

“Well, yes,” replied the architect, “if you like. But some less expensive wood can be made just as effective with paint. Of course you can paint black walnut too.”

“Paint it?” gasped the Colonel.

“Yes,” said the architect quietly. “White, or a little off white.”

Lapham dropped the plan he had picked up from the table. His wife made a little move toward him of consolation or support.

“Of course,” resumed the architect, “I know there has been a great craze for black walnut. But it’s an ugly wood; and for a drawing-room there is really nothing like white paint. We should want to introduce a little gold here and there. Perhaps we might run a painted frieze round under the cornice — garlands of roses on a gold ground; it would tell wonderfully in a white room.”

The Colonel returned less courageously to the charge. “I presume you’ll want Eastlake mantel-shelves and tiles?” He meant this for a sarcastic thrust at a prevailing foible of the profession.

“Well, no,” gently answered the architect. “I was thinking perhaps a white marble chimney-piece, treated in the refined Empire style, would be the thing for that room.”

“White marble!” exclaimed the Colonel. “I thought that had gone out long ago.”

“Really beautiful things can’t go out. They may disappear for a little while, but they must come back. It’s only the ugly things that stay out after they’ve had their day.”

Lapham could only venture very modestly, “Hard-wood floors?”

“In the music-room, of course,” consented the architect.

“And in the drawing-room?”

“Carpet. Some sort of moquette, I should say. But I should prefer to consult Mrs. Lapham’s taste in that matter.”

“And in the other rooms?”

“Oh, carpets, of course.”

“And what about the stairs?”

“Carpet. And I should have the rail and banisters white — banisters turned or twisted.”

The Colonel said under his breath, “Well, I’m dumned!” but he gave no utterance to his astonishment in the architect’s presence. When he went at last, — the session did not end till eleven o’clock, — Lapham said, “Well, Pert, I guess that fellow’s fifty years behind, or ten years ahead. I wonder what the Ongpeer style is?”

“I don’t know. I hated to ask. But he seemed to understand what he was talking about. I declare, he knows what a woman wants in a house better than she does herself.”

“And a man’s simply nowhere in comparison,” said Lapham. But he respected a fellow who could beat him at every point, and have a reason ready, as this architect had; and when he recovered from the daze into which the complete upheaval of all his preconceived notions had left him, he was in a fit state to swear by the architect. It seemed to him that he had discovered the fellow (as he always called him) and owned him now, and the fellow did nothing to disturb this impression. He entered into that brief but intense intimacy with the Laphams which the sympathetic architect holds with his clients. He was privy to all their differences of opinion and all their disputes about the house. He knew just where to insist upon his own ideas, and where to yield. He was really building several other houses, but he gave the Laphams the impression that he was doing none but theirs.

The work was not begun till the frost was thoroughly out of the ground, which that year was not before the end of April. Even then it did not proceed very rapidly. Lapham said they might as well take their time to it; if they got the walls up and the thing closed in before the snow flew, they could be working at it all winter. It was found necessary to dig for the kitchen; at that point the original salt-marsh lay near the surface, and before they began to put in the piles for the foundation they had to pump. The neighbourhood smelt like the hold of a ship after a three years’ voyage. People who had cast their fortunes with the New Land went by professing not to notice it; people who still “hung on to the Hill” put their handkerchiefs to their noses, and told each other the old terrible stories of the material used in filling up the Back Bay.

Nothing gave Lapham so much satisfaction in the whole construction of his house as the pile-driving. When this began, early in the summer, he took Mrs. Lapham every day in his buggy and drove round to look at it; stopping the mare in front of the lot, and watching the operation with even keener interest than the little loafing Irish boys who superintended it in force. It pleased him to hear the portable engine chuckle out a hundred thin whiffs of steam in carrying the big iron weight to the top of the framework above the pile, then seem to hesitate, and cough once or twice in pressing the weight against the detaching apparatus. There was a moment in which the weight had the effect of poising before it fell; then it dropped with a mighty whack on the iron-bound head of the pile, and drove it a foot into the earth.

“By gracious!” he would say, “there ain’t anything like that in THIS world for BUSINESS, Persis!”

Mrs. Lapham suffered him to enjoy the sight twenty or thirty times before she said, “Well, now drive on, Si.”

By the time the foundation was in and the brick walls had begun to go up, there were so few people left in the neighbourhood that she might indulge with impunity her husband’s passion for having her clamber over the floor-timbers and the skeleton stair-cases with him. Many of the householders had boarded up their front doors before the buds had begun to swell and the assessor to appear in early May; others had followed soon; and Mrs. Lapham was as safe from remark as if she had been in the depth of the country. Ordinarily she and her girls left town early in July, going to one of the hotels at Nantasket, where it was convenient for the Colonel to get to and from his business by the boat. But this summer they were all lingering a few weeks later, under the novel fascination of the new house, as they called it, as if there were no other in the world.

Lapham drove there with his wife after he had set Bartley Hubbard down at the Events office, but on this day something happened that interfered with the solid pleasure they usually took in going over the house. As the Colonel turned from casting anchor at the mare’s head with the hitching-weight, after helping his wife to alight, he encountered a man to whom he could not help speaking, though the man seemed to share his hesitation if not his reluctance at the necessity. He was a tallish, thin man, with a dust-coloured face, and a dead, clerical air, which somehow suggested at once feebleness and tenacity.

Mrs. Lapham held out her hand to him.

“Why, Mr. Rogers!” she exclaimed; and then, turning toward her husband, seemed to refer the two men to each other. They shook hands, but Lapham did not speak. “I didn’t know you were in Boston,” pursued Mrs. Lapham. “Is Mrs. Rogers with you?”

“No,” said Mr. Rogers, with a voice which had the flat, succinct sound of two pieces of wood clapped together. “Mrs. Rogers is still in Chicago.”

A little silence followed, and then Mrs Lapham said —

“I presume you are quite settled out there.”

“No; we have left Chicago. Mrs. Rogers has merely remained to finish up a little packing.”

“Oh, indeed! Are you coming back to Boston?”

“I cannot say as yet. We sometimes think of so doing.”

Lapham turned away and looked up at the building. His wife pulled a little at her glove, as if embarrassed, or even pained. She tried to make a diversion.

“We are building a house,” she said, with a meaningless laugh.

“Oh, indeed,” said Mr. Rogers, looking up at it.

Then no one spoke again, and she said helplessly —

“If you come to Boston, I hope I shall see Mrs. Rogers.”

“She will be happy to have you call,” said Mr Rogers.

He touched his hat-brim, and made a bow forward rather than in Mrs. Lapham’s direction.

She mounted the planking that led into the shelter of the bare brick walls, and her husband slowly followed. When she turned her face toward him her cheeks were burning, and tears that looked hot stood in her eyes.

“You left it all to me!” she cried. “Why couldn’t you speak a word?”

“I hadn’t anything to say to him,” replied Lapham sullenly.

They stood a while, without looking at the work which they had come to enjoy, and without speaking to each other.

“I suppose we might as well go on,” said Mrs. Lapham at last, as they returned to the buggy. The Colonel drove recklessly toward the Milldam. His wife kept her veil down and her face turned from him. After a time she put her handkerchief up under her veil and wiped her eyes, and he set his teeth and squared his jaw.

“I don’t see how he always manages to appear just at the moment when he seems to have gone fairly out of our lives, and blight everything,” she whimpered.

“I supposed he was dead,” said Lapham.

“Oh, don’t SAY such a thing! It sounds as if you wished it.”

“Why do you mind it? What do you let him blight everything for?”

“I can’t help it, and I don’t believe I ever shall. I don’t know as his being dead would help it any. I can’t ever see him without feeling just as I did at first.”

“I tell you,” said Lapham, “it was a perfectly square thing. And I wish, once for all, you would quit bothering about it. My conscience is easy as far as he is concerned, and it always was.”

“And I can’t look at him without feeling as if you’d ruined him, Silas.”

“Don’t look at him, then,” said her husband, with a scowl. “I want you should recollect in the first place, Persis, that I never wanted a partner.”

“If he hadn’t put his money in when he did, you’d ‘a’ broken down.”

“Well, he got his money out again, and more, too,” said the Colonel, with a sulky weariness.

“He didn’t want to take it out.”

“I gave him his choice: buy out or go out.”

“You know he couldn’t buy out then. It was no choice at all.”

“It was a business chance.”

“No; you had better face the truth, Silas. It was no chance at all. You crowded him out. A man that had saved you! No, you had got greedy, Silas. You had made your paint your god, and you couldn’t bear to let anybody else share in its blessings.”

“I tell you he was a drag and a brake on me from the word go. You say he saved me. Well, if I hadn’t got him out he’d ‘a’ ruined me sooner or later. So it’s an even thing, as far forth as that goes.”

“No, it ain’t an even thing, and you know it, Silas. Oh, if I could only get you once to acknowledge that you did wrong about it, then I should have some hope. I don’t say you meant wrong exactly, but you took an advantage. Yes, you took an advantage! You had him where he couldn’t help himself, and then you wouldn’t show him any mercy.”

“I’m sick of this,” said Lapham. “If you’ll ‘tend to the house, I’ll manage my business without your help.”

“You were very glad of my help once.”

“Well, I’m tired of it now. Don’t meddle.”

“I WILL meddle. When I see you hardening yourself in a wrong thing, it’s time for me to meddle, as you call it, and I will. I can’t ever get you to own up the least bit about Rogers, and I feel as if it was hurting you all the while.”

“What do you want I should own up about a thing for when I don’t feel wrong? I tell you Rogers hain’t got anything to complain of, and that’s what I told you from the start. It’s a thing that’s done every day. I was loaded up with a partner that didn’t know anything, and couldn’t do anything, and I unloaded; that’s all.”

“You unloaded just at the time when you knew that your paint was going to be worth about twice what it ever had been; and you wanted all the advantage for yourself.”

“I had a right to it. I made the success.”

“Yes, you made it with Rogers’s money; and when you’d made it you took his share of it. I guess you thought of that when you saw him, and that’s why you couldn’t look him in the face.”

At these words Lapham lost his temper.

“I guess you don’t want to ride with me any more to-day,” he said, turning the mare abruptly round.

“I’m as ready to go back as what you are,” replied his wife. “And don’t you ask me to go to that house with you any more. You can sell it, for all me. I sha’n’t live in it. There’s blood on it.”

IV.

THE silken texture of the marriage tie bears a daily strain of wrong and insult to which no other human relation can be subjected without lesion; and sometimes the strength that knits society together might appear to the eye of faltering faith the curse of those immediately bound by it. Two people by no means reckless of each other’s rights and feelings, but even tender of them for the most part, may tear at each other’s heart-strings in this sacred bond with perfect impunity; though if they were any other two they would not speak or look at each other again after the outrages they exchange. It is certainly a curious spectacle, and doubtless it ought to convince an observer of the divinity of the institution. If the husband and wife are blunt, outspoken people like the Laphams, they do not weigh their words; if they are more refined, they weigh them very carefully, and know accurately just how far they will carry, and in what most sensitive spot they may be planted with most effect.

Lapham was proud of his wife, and when he married her it had been a rise in life for him. For a while he stood in awe of his good fortune, but this could not last, and he simply remained supremely satisfied with it. The girl who had taught school with a clear head and a strong hand was not afraid of work; she encouraged and helped him from the first, and bore her full share of the common burden. She had health, and she did not worry his life out with peevish complaints and vagaries; she had sense and principle, and in their simple lot she did what was wise and right. Their marriage was hallowed by an early sorrow: they lost their boy, and it was years before they could look each other in the face and speak of him. No one gave up more than they when they gave up each other and Lapham went to the war. When he came back and began to work, her zeal and courage formed the spring of his enterprise. In that affair of the partnership she had tried to be his conscience, but perhaps she would have defended him if he had accused himself; it was one of those things in this life which seem destined to await justice, or at least judgment, in the next. As he said, Lapham had dealt fairly by his partner in money; he had let Rogers take more money out of the business than he put into it; he had, as he said, simply forced out of it a timid and inefficient participant in advantages which he had created. But Lapham had not created them all. He had been dependent at one time on his partner’s capital. It was a moment of terrible trial. Happy is the man for ever after who can choose the ideal, the unselfish part in such an exigency! Lapham could not rise to it. He did what he could maintain to be perfectly fair. The wrong, if any, seemed to be condoned to him, except when from time to time his wife brought it up. Then all the question stung and burned anew, and had to be reasoned out and put away once more. It seemed to have an inextinguishable vitality. It slept, but it did not die.

His course did not shake Mrs. Lapham’s faith in him. It astonished her at first, and it always grieved her that he could not see that he was acting solely in his own interest. But she found excuses for him, which at times she made reproaches. She vaguely perceived that his paint was something more than business to him; it was a sentiment, almost a passion. He could not share its management and its profit with another without a measure of self-sacrifice far beyond that which he must make with something less personal to him. It was the poetry of that nature, otherwise so intensely prosaic; and she understood this, and for the most part forbore. She knew him good and true and blameless in all his life, except for this wrong, if it were a wrong; and it was only when her nerves tingled intolerably with some chance renewal of the pain she had suffered, that she shared her anguish with him in true wifely fashion.

With those two there was never anything like an explicit reconciliation. They simply ignored a quarrel; and Mrs. Lapham had only to say a few days after at breakfast, “I guess the girls would like to go round with you this afternoon, and look at the new house,” in order to make her husband grumble out as he looked down into his coffee-cup. “I guess we better all go, hadn’t we?”

“Well, I’ll see,” she said.

There was not really a great deal to look at when Lapham arrived on the ground in his four-seated beach-wagon. But the walls were up, and the studding had already given skeleton shape to the interior. The floors were roughly boarded over, and the stairways were in place, with provisional treads rudely laid. They had not begun to lath and plaster yet, but the clean, fresh smell of the mortar in the walls mingling with the pungent fragrance of the pine shavings neutralised the Venetian odour that drew in over the water. It was pleasantly shady there, though for the matter of that the heat of the morning had all been washed out of the atmosphere by a tide of east wind setting in at noon, and the thrilling, delicious cool of a Boston summer afternoon bathed every nerve.

The foreman went about with Mrs. Lapham, showing her where the doors were to be; but Lapham soon tired of this, and having found a pine stick of perfect grain, he abandoned himself to the pleasure of whittling it in what was to be the reception-room, where he sat looking out on the street from what was to be the bay-window. Here he was presently joined by his girls, who, after locating their own room on the water side above the music-room, had no more wish to enter into details than their father.

“Come and take a seat in the bay-window, ladies,” he called out to them, as they looked in at him through the ribs of the wall. He jocosely made room for them on the trestle on which he sat.

They came gingerly and vaguely forward, as young ladies do when they wish not to seem to be going to do a thing they have made up their minds to do. When they had taken their places on their trestle, they could not help laughing with scorn, open and acceptable to their father; and Irene curled her chin up, in a little way she had, and said, “How ridiculous!” to her sister.

“Well, I can tell you what,” said the Colonel, in fond enjoyment of their young ladyishness, “your mother wa’n’t ashamed to sit with me on a trestle when I called her out to look at the first coat of my paint that I ever tried on a house.”

“Yes; we’ve heard that story,” said Penelope, with easy security of her father’s liking what she said. “We were brought up on that story.”

“Well, it’s a good story,” said her father.

At that moment a young man came suddenly in range, who began to look up at the signs of building as he approached. He dropped his eyes in coming abreast of the bay-window, where Lapham sat with his girls, and then his face lightened, and he took off his hat and bowed to Irene. She rose mechanically from the trestle, and her face lightened too.

She was a very pretty figure of a girl, after our fashion of girls, round and slim and flexible, and her face was admirably regular. But her great beauty — and it was very great — was in her colouring. This was of an effect for which there is no word but delicious, as we use it of fruit or flowers. She had red hair, like her father in his earlier days, and the tints of her cheeks and temples were such as suggested May-flowers and apple-blossoms and peaches. Instead of the grey that often dulls this complexion, her eyes were of a blue at once intense and tender, and they seemed to burn on what they looked at with a soft, lambent flame. It was well understood by her sister and mother that her eyes always expressed a great deal more than Irene ever thought or felt; but this is not saying that she was not a very sensible girl and very honest.

The young man faltered perceptibly, and Irene came a little forward, and then there gushed from them both a smiling exchange of greeting, of which the sum was that he supposed she was out of town, and that she had not known that he had got back. A pause ensued, and flushing again in her uncertainty as to whether she ought or ought not to do it, she said, “My father, Mr. Corey; and my sister.”

The young man took off his hat again, showing his shapely head, with a line of wholesome sunburn ceasing where the recently and closely clipped hair began. He was dressed in a fine summer check, with a blue white-dotted neckerchief, and he had a white hat, in which he looked very well when he put it back on his head. His whole dress seemed very fresh and new, and in fact he had cast aside his Texan habiliments only the day before.

“How do you do, sir?” said the Colonel, stepping to the window, and reaching out of it the hand which the young man advanced to take. “Won’t you come in? We’re at home here. House I’m building.”

“Oh, indeed?” returned the young man; and he came promptly up the steps, and through its ribs into the reception-room.

“Have a trestle?” asked the Colonel, while the girls exchanged little shocks of terror and amusement at the eyes.

“Thank you,” said the young man simply, and sat down.

“Mrs. Lapham is upstairs interviewing the carpenter, but she’ll be down in a minute.”

“I hope she’s quite well,” said Corey. “I supposed — I was afraid she might be out of town.”

“Well, we are off to Nantasket next week. The house kept us in town pretty late.”

“It must be very exciting, building a house,” said Corey to the elder sister.

“Yes, it is,” she assented, loyally refusing in Irene’s interest the opportunity of saying anything more.

Corey turned to the latter. “I suppose you’ve all helped to plan it?”

“Oh no; the architect and mamma did that.”

“But they allowed the rest of us to agree, when we were good,” said Penelope.

Corey looked at her, and saw that she was shorter than her sister, and had a dark complexion.

“It’s very exciting,” said Irene.

“Come up,” said the Colonel, rising, “and look round if you’d like to.”

“I should like to, very much,” said the young man. He helped the young ladies over crevasses of carpentry and along narrow paths of planking, on which they had made their way unassisted before. The elder sister left the younger to profit solely by these offices as much as possible. She walked between them and her father, who went before, lecturing on each apartment, and taking the credit of the whole affair more and more as he talked on.

“There!” he said, “we’re going to throw out a bay-window here, so as get the water all the way up and down. This is my girls’ room,” he added, looking proudly at them both.

It seemed terribly intimate. Irene blushed deeply and turned her head away.

But the young man took it all, apparently, as simply as their father. “What a lovely lookout!” he said. The Back Bay spread its glassy sheet before them, empty but for a few small boats and a large schooner, with her sails close-furled and dripping like snow from her spars, which a tug was rapidly towing toward Cambridge. The carpentry of that city, embanked and embowered in foliage, shared the picturesqueness of Charlestown in the distance.

“Yes,” said Lapham, “I go in for using the best rooms in your house yourself. If people come to stay with you, they can put up with the second best. Though we don’t intend to have any second best. There ain’t going to be an unpleasant room in the whole house, from top to bottom.”

“Oh, I wish papa wouldn’t brag so!” breathed Irene to her sister, where they stood, a little apart, looking away together.

The Colonel went on. “No, sir,” he swelled out, “I have gone in for making a regular job of it. I’ve got the best architect in Boston, and I’m building a house to suit myself. And if money can do it, guess I’m going to be suited.”

“It seems very delightful,” said Corey, “and very original.”

“Yes, sir. That fellow hadn’t talked five minutes before I saw that he knew what he was about every time.”

“I wish mamma would come!” breathed Irene again. “I shall certainly go through the floor if papa says anything more.”

“They are making a great many very pretty houses nowadays,” said the young man. “It’s very different from the old-fashioned building.”

“Well,” said the Colonel, with a large toleration of tone and a deep breath that expanded his ample chest, “we spend more on our houses nowadays. I started out to build a forty-thousand-dollar house. Well, sir! that fellow has got me in for more than sixty thousand already, and I doubt if I get out of it much under a hundred. You can’t have a nice house for nothing. It’s just like ordering a picture of a painter. You pay him enough, and he can afford to paint you a first-class picture; and if you don’t, he can’t. That’s all there is of it. Why, they tell me that A. T. Stewart gave one of those French fellows sixty thousand dollars for a little seven-by-nine picture the other day. Yes, sir, give an architect money enough, and he’ll give you a nice house every time.”

“I’ve heard that they’re sharp at getting money to realise their ideas,” assented the young man, with a laugh.

“Well, I should say so!” exclaimed the Colonel. “They come to you with an improvement that you can’t resist. It has good looks and common-sense and everything in its favour, and it’s like throwing money away to refuse. And they always manage to get you when your wife is around, and then you’re helpless.”

The Colonel himself set the example of laughing at this joke, and the young man joined him less obstreperously. The girls turned, and he said, “I don’t think I ever saw this view to better advantage. It’s surprising how well the Memorial Hall and the Cambridge spires work up, over there. And the sunsets must be magnificent.”

Lapham did not wait for them to reply.

“Yes, sir, it’s about the sightliest view I know of. I always did like the water side of Beacon. Long before I owned property here, or ever expected to, m’wife and I used to ride down this way, and stop the buggy to get this view over the water. When people talk to me about the Hill, I can understand ‘em. It’s snug, and it’s old-fashioned, and it’s where they’ve always lived. But when they talk about Commonwealth Avenue, I don’t know what they mean. It don’t hold a candle to the water side of Beacon. You’ve got just as much wind over there, and you’ve got just as much dust, and all the view you’ve got is the view across the street. No, sir! when you come to the Back Bay at all, give me the water side of Beacon.”

“Oh, I think you’re quite right,” said the young man. “The view here is everything.”

Irene looked “I wonder what papa is going to say next!” at her sister, when their mother’s voice was heard overhead, approaching the opening in the floor where the stairs were to be; and she presently appeared, with one substantial foot a long way ahead. She was followed by the carpenter, with his rule sticking out of his overalls pocket, and she was still talking to him about some measurements they had been taking, when they reached the bottom, so that Irene had to say, “Mamma, Mr. Corey,” before Mrs. Lapham was aware of him.

He came forward with as much grace and speed as the uncertain footing would allow, and Mrs. Lapham gave him a stout squeeze of her comfortable hand.

“Why, Mr. Corey! When did you get back?”

“Yesterday. It hardly seems as if I HAD got back. I didn’t expect to find you in a new house.”

“Well, you are our first caller. I presume you won’t expect I should make excuses for the state you find it in. Has the Colonel been doing the honours?”

“Oh yes. And I’ve seen more of your house than I ever shall again, I suppose.”

“Well, I hope not,” said Lapham. “There’ll be several chances to see us in the old one yet, before we leave.”

He probably thought this a neat, off-hand way of making the invitation, for he looked at his woman-kind as if he might expect their admiration.

“Oh yes, indeed!” said his wife. “We shall be very glad to see Mr. Corey, any time.”

“Thank you; I shall be glad to come.”

He and the Colonel went before, and helped the ladies down the difficult descent. Irene seemed less sure-footed than the others; she clung to the young man’s hand an imperceptible moment longer than need be, or else he detained her. He found opportunity of saying, “It’s so pleasant seeing you again,” adding, “all of you.”

“Thank you,” said the girl. “They must all be glad to have you at home again.”

Corey laughed.

“Well, I suppose they would be, if they were at home to have me. But the fact is, there’s nobody in the house but my father and myself, and I’m only on my way to Bar Harbour.”

“Oh! Are they there?”

“Yes; it seems to be the only place where my mother can get just the combination of sea and mountain air that she wants.”

“We go to Nantasket — it’s convenient for papa; and I don’t believe we shall go anywhere else this summer, mamma’s so taken up with building. We do nothing but talk house; and Pen says we eat and sleep house. She says it would be a sort of relief to go and live in tents for a while.”

“She seems to have a good deal of humour,” the young man ventured, upon the slender evidence.

The others had gone to the back of the house a moment, to look at some suggested change. Irene and Corey were left standing in the doorway. A lovely light of happiness played over her face and etherealised its delicious beauty. She had some ado to keep herself from smiling outright, and the effort deepened the dimples in her cheeks; she trembled a little, and the pendants shook in the tips of her pretty ears.

The others came back directly, and they all descended the front steps together. The Colonel was about to renew his invitation, but he caught his wife’s eye, and, without being able to interpret its warning exactly, was able to arrest himself, and went about gathering up the hitching-weight, while the young man handed the ladies into the phaeton. Then he lifted his hat, and the ladies all bowed, and the Laphams drove off, Irene’s blue ribbons fluttering backward from her hat, as if they were her clinging thoughts.

“So that’s young Corey, is it?” said the Colonel, letting the stately stepping, tall coupe horse make his way homeward at will with the beach-wagon. “Well, he ain’t a bad-looking fellow, and he’s got a good, fair and square, honest eye. But I don’t see how a fellow like that, that’s had every advantage in this world, can hang round home and let his father support him. Seems to me, if I had his health and his education, I should want to strike out and do something for myself.”

The girls on the back seat had hold of each other’s hands, and they exchanged electrical pressures at the different points their father made.

“I presume,” said Mrs. Lapham, “that he was down in Texas looking after something.”

“He’s come back without finding it, I guess.”

“Well, if his father has the money to support him, and don’t complain of the burden, I don’t see why WE should.”

“Oh, I know it’s none of my business, but I don’t like the principle. I like to see a man ACT like a man. I don’t like to see him taken care of like a young lady. Now, I suppose that fellow belongs to two or three clubs, and hangs around ’em all day, lookin’ out the window, — I’ve seen ‘em, — instead of tryin’ to hunt up something to do for an honest livin’.”

“If I was a young man,” Penelope struck in, “I would belong to twenty clubs, if I could find them and I would hang around them all, and look out the window till I dropped.”

“Oh, you would, would you?” demanded her father, delighted with her defiance, and twisting his fat head around over his shoulder to look at her. “Well, you wouldn’t do it on my money, if you were a son of MINE, young lady.”

“Oh, you wait and see,” retorted the girl.

This made them all laugh. But the Colonel recurred seriously to the subject that night, as he was winding up his watch preparatory to putting it under his pillow.

“I could make a man of that fellow, if I had him in the business with me. There’s stuff in him. But I spoke up the way I did because I didn’t choose Irene should think I would stand any kind of a loafer ‘round — I don’t care who he is, or how well educated or brought up. And I guess, from the way Pen spoke up, that ‘Rene saw what I was driving at.”

The girl, apparently, was less anxious about her father’s ideas and principles than about the impression which he had made upon the young man. She had talked it over and over with her sister before they went to bed, and she asked in despair, as she stood looking at Penelope brushing out her hair before the glass —

“Do you suppose he’ll think papa always talks in that bragging way?”

“He’ll be right if he does,” answered her sister. “It’s the way father always does talk. You never noticed it so much, that’s all. And I guess if he can’t make allowance for father’s bragging, he’ll be a little too good. I enjoyed hearing the Colonel go on.”

“I know you did,” returned Irene in distress. Then she sighed. “Didn’t you think he looked very nice?”

“Who? The Colonel?” Penelope had caught up the habit of calling her father so from her mother, and she used his title in all her jocose and perverse moods.

“You know very well I don’t mean papa,” pouted Irene. “Oh! Mr. Corey! Why didn’t you say Mr. Corey if you meant Mr. Corey? If I meant Mr. Corey, I should say Mr. Corey. It isn’t swearing! Corey, Corey, Co — —”

Her sister clapped her hand over her mouth “Will you HUSH, you wretched thing?” she whimpered. “The whole house can hear you.”

“Oh yes, they can hear me all over the square. Well, I think he looked well enough for a plain youth, who hadn’t taken his hair out of curl-papers for some time.”

“It WAS clipped pretty close,” Irene admitted; and they both laughed at the drab effect of Mr. Corey’s skull, as they remembered it. “Did you like his nose?” asked Irene timorously.

“Ah, now you’re COMING to something,” said Penelope. “I don’t know whether, if I had so much of a nose, I should want it all Roman.”

“I don’t see how you can expect to have a nose part one kind and part another,” argued Irene.

“Oh, I do. Look at mine!” She turned aside her face, so as to get a three-quarters view of her nose in the glass, and crossing her hands, with the brush in one of them, before her, regarded it judicially. “Now, my nose started Grecian, but changed its mind before it got over the bridge, and concluded to be snub the rest of the way.”

“You’ve got a very pretty nose, Pen,” said Irene, joining in the contemplation of its reflex in the glass.

“Don’t say that in hopes of getting me to compliment HIS, Mrs.” — she stopped, and then added deliberately— “C.!”

Irene also had her hair-brush in her hand, and now she sprang at her sister and beat her very softly on the shoulder with the flat of it. “You mean thing!” she cried, between her shut teeth, blushing hotly.

“Well, D., then,” said Penelope. “You’ve nothing to say against D.? Though I think C. is just as nice an initial.”

“Oh!” cried the younger, for all expression of unspeakable things.

“I think he has very good eyes,” admitted Penelope.

“Oh, he HAS! And didn’t you like the way his sackcoat set? So close to him, and yet free — kind of peeling away at the lapels?”

“Yes, I should say he was a young man of great judgment. He knows how to choose his tailor.”

Irene sat down on the edge of a chair. “It was so nice of you, Pen, to come in, that way, about clubs.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by it except opposition,” said Penelope. “I couldn’t have father swelling on so, without saying something.”

“How he did swell!” sighed Irene. “Wasn’t it a relief to have mamma come down, even if she did seem to be all stocking at first?”

The girls broke into a wild giggle, and hid their faces in each other’s necks. “I thought I SHOULD die,” said Irene.

“‘It’s just like ordering a painting,’” said Penelope, recalling her father’s talk, with an effect of dreamy absent-mindedness. “‘You give the painter money enough, and he can afford to paint you a first-class picture. Give an architect money enough, and he’ll give you a first-class house, every time.’”

“Oh, wasn’t it awful!” moaned her sister. “No one would ever have supposed that he had fought the very idea of an architect for weeks, before he gave in.”

Penelope went on. “‘I always did like the water side of Beacon, — long before I owned property there. When you come to the Back Bay at all, give me the water side of Beacon.’”

“Ow-w-w-w!” shrieked Irene. “DO stop!”

The door of their mother’s chamber opened below, and the voice of the real Colonel called, “What are you doing up there, girls? Why don’t you go to bed?”

This extorted nervous shrieks from both of them. The Colonel heard a sound of scurrying feet, whisking drapery, and slamming doors. Then he heard one of the doors opened again, and Penelope said, “I was only repeating something you said when you talked to Mr. Corey.”

“Very well, now,” answered the Colonel. “You postpone the rest of it till to-morrow at breakfast, and see that you’re up in time to let ME hear it.”

V.

AT the same moment young Corey let himself in at his own door with his latch-key, and went to the library, where he found his father turning the last leaves of a story in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He was a white-moustached old gentleman, who had never been able to abandon his pince-nez for the superior comfort of spectacles, even in the privacy of his own library. He knocked the glasses off as his son came in and looked up at him with lazy fondness, rubbing the two red marks that they always leave on the side of the nose.

“Tom,” he said, “where did you get such good clothes?”

“I stopped over a day in New York,” replied the son, finding himself a chair. “I’m glad you like them.”

“Yes, I always do like your clothes, Tom,” returned the father thoughtfully, swinging his glasses, “But I don’t see how you can afford ‘em, I can’t.”

“Well, sir,” said the son, who dropped the “sir” into his speech with his father, now and then, in an old-fashioned way that was rather charming, “you see, I have an indulgent parent.”

“Smoke?” suggested the father, pushing toward his son a box of cigarettes, from which he had taken one.

“No, thank you,” said the son. “I’ve dropped that.”

“Ah, is that so?” The father began to feel about on the table for matches, in the purblind fashion of elderly men. His son rose, lighted one, and handed it to him. “Well, — oh, thank you, Tom! — I believe some statisticians prove that if you will give up smoking you can dress very well on the money your tobacco costs, even if you haven’t got an indulgent parent. But I’m too old to try. Though, I confess, I should rather like the clothes. Whom did you find at the club?”

“There were a lot of fellows there,” said young Corey, watching the accomplished fumigation of his father in an absent way.

“It’s astonishing what a hardy breed the young club-men are,” observed his father. “All summer through, in weather that sends the sturdiest female flying to the sea-shore, you find the clubs filled with young men, who don’t seem to mind the heat in the least.”

“Boston isn’t a bad place, at the worst, in summer,” said the son, declining to take up the matter in its ironical shape.

“I dare say it isn’t, compared with Texas,” returned the father, smoking tranquilly on. “But I don’t suppose you find many of your friends in town outside of the club.”

“No; you’re requested to ring at the rear door, all the way down Beacon Street and up Commonwealth Avenue. It’s rather a blank reception for the returning prodigal.”

“Ah, the prodigal must take his chance if he comes back out of season. But I’m glad to have you back, Tom, even as it is, and I hope you’re not going to hurry away. You must give your energies a rest.”

“I’m sure you never had to reproach me with abnormal activity,” suggested the son, taking his father’s jokes in good part.

“No, I don’t know that I have,” admitted the elder. “You’ve always shown a fair degree of moderation, after all. What do you think of taking up next? I mean after you have embraced your mother and sisters at Mount Desert. Real estate? It seems to me that it is about time for you to open out as a real-estate broker. Or did you ever think of matrimony?”

“Well, not just in that way, sir,” said the young man. “I shouldn’t quite like to regard it as a career, you know.”

“No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I’ve always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn’t have a man marry for money, — that would be rather bad, — but I don’t see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn’t fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should say that the chances of a quiet life with them were rather greater. They’ve always had everything, and they wouldn’t be so ambitious and uneasy. Don’t you think so?”

“It would depend,” said the son, “upon whether a girl’s people had been rich long enough to have given her position before she married. If they hadn’t, I don’t see how she would be any better than a poor girl in that respect.”

“Yes, there’s sense in that. But the suddenly rich are on a level with any of us nowadays. Money buys position at once. I don’t say that it isn’t all right. The world generally knows what it’s about, and knows how to drive a bargain. I dare say it makes the new rich pay too much. But there’s no doubt but money is to the fore now. It is the romance, the poetry of our age. It’s the thing that chiefly strikes the imagination. The Englishmen who come here are more curious about the great new millionaires than about any one else, and they respect them more. It’s all very well. I don’t complain of it.”

“And you would like a rich daughter-in-law, quite regardless, then?”

“Oh, not quite so bad as that, Tom,” said his father. “A little youth, a little beauty, a little good sense and pretty behaviour — one mustn’t object to those things; and they go just as often with money as without it. And I suppose I should like her people to be rather grammatical.”

“It seems to me that you’re exacting, sir,” said the son. “How can you expect people who have been strictly devoted to business to be grammatical? Isn’t that rather too much?”

“Perhaps it is. Perhaps you’re right. But I understood your mother to say that those benefactors of hers, whom you met last summer, were very passably grammatical.”

“The father isn’t.”

The elder, who had been smoking with his profile toward his son, now turned his face full upon him. “I didn’t know you had seen him?”

“I hadn’t until to-day,” said young Corey, with a little heightening of his colour. “But I was walking down street this afternoon, and happened to look round at a new house some one was putting up, and I saw the whole family in the window. It appears that Mr. Lapham is building the house.”

The elder Corey knocked the ash of his cigarette into the holder at his elbow. “I am more and more convinced, the longer I know you, Tom, that we are descended from Giles Corey. The gift of holding one’s tongue seems to have skipped me, but you have it in full force. I can’t say just how you would behave under peine forte et dure, but under ordinary pressure you are certainly able to keep your own counsel. Why didn’t you mention this encounter at dinner? You weren’t asked to plead to an accusation of witchcraft.”

“No, not exactly,” said the young man. “But I didn’t quite see my way to speaking of it. We had a good many other things before us.”

“Yes, that’s true. I suppose you wouldn’t have mentioned it now if I hadn’t led up to it, would you?”

“I don’t know, sir. It was rather on my mind to do so. Perhaps it was I who led up to it.”

His father laughed. “Perhaps you did, Tom; perhaps you did. Your mother would have known you were leading up to something, but I’ll confess that I didn’t. What is it?”

“Nothing very definite. But do you know that in spite of his syntax I rather liked him?”

The father looked keenly at the son; but unless the boy’s full confidence was offered, Corey was not the man to ask it. “Well?” was all that he said.

“I suppose that in a new country one gets to looking at people a little out of our tradition; and I dare say that if I hadn’t passed a winter in Texas I might have found Colonel Lapham rather too much.”

“You mean that there are worse things in Texas?”

“Not that exactly. I mean that I saw it wouldn’t be quite fair to test him by our standards.”

“This comes of the error which I have often deprecated,” said the elder Corey. “In fact I am always saying that the Bostonian ought never to leave Boston. Then he knows — and then only — that there can BE no standard but ours. But we are constantly going away, and coming back with our convictions shaken to their foundations. One man goes to England, and returns with the conception of a grander social life; another comes home from Germany with the notion of a more searching intellectual activity; a fellow just back from Paris has the absurdest ideas of art and literature; and you revert to us from the cowboys of Texas, and tell us to our faces that we ought to try Papa Lapham by a jury of his peers. It ought to be stopped — it ought, really. The Bostonian who leaves Boston ought to be condemned to perpetual exile.”

The son suffered the father to reach his climax with smiling patience. When he asked finally, “What are the characteristics of Papa Lapham that place him beyond our jurisdiction?” the younger Corey crossed his long legs, and leaned forward to take one of his knees between his hands.

“Well, sir, he bragged, rather.”

“Oh, I don’t know that bragging should exempt him from the ordinary processes. I’ve heard other people brag in Boston.”

“Ah, not just in that personal way — not about money.”

“No, that was certainly different.”

“I don’t mean,” said the young fellow, with the scrupulosity which people could not help observing and liking in him, “that it was more than an indirect expression of satisfaction in the ability to spend.”

“No. I should be glad to express something of the kind myself, if the facts would justify me.”

The son smiled tolerantly again. “But if he was enjoying his money in that way, I didn’t see why he shouldn’t show his pleasure in it. It might have been vulgar, but it wasn’t sordid. And I don’t know that it was vulgar. Perhaps his successful strokes of business were the romance of his life — —”

The father interrupted with a laugh. “The girl must be uncommonly pretty. What did she seem to think of her father’s brag?”

“There were two of them,” answered the son evasively.

“Oh, two! And is the sister pretty too?”

“Not pretty, but rather interesting. She is like her mother.”

“Then the pretty one isn’t the father’s pet?”

“I can’t say, sir. I don’t believe,” added the young fellow, “that I can make you see Colonel Lapham just as I did. He struck me as very simple-hearted and rather wholesome. Of course he could be tiresome; we all can; and I suppose his range of ideas is limited. But he is a force, and not a bad one. If he hasn’t got over being surprised at the effect of rubbing his lamp.”

“Oh, one could make out a case. I suppose you know what you are about, Tom. But remember that we are Essex County people, and that in savour we are just a little beyond the salt of the earth. I will tell you plainly that I don’t like the notion of a man who has rivalled the hues of nature in her wildest haunts with the tints of his mineral paint; but I don’t say there are not worse men. He isn’t to my taste, though he might be ever so much to my conscience.”

“I suppose,” said the son, “that there is nothing really to be ashamed of in mineral paint. People go into all sorts of things.”

His father took his cigarette from his mouth and once more looked his son full in the face. “Oh, is THAT it?”

“It has crossed my mind,” admitted the son. “I must do something. I’ve wasted time and money enough. I’ve seen much younger men all through the West and South-west taking care of themselves. I don’t think I was particularly fit for anything out there, but I am ashamed to come back and live upon you, sir.”

His father shook his head with an ironical sigh. “Ah, we shall never have a real aristocracy while this plebeian reluctance to live upon a parent or a wife continues the animating spirit of our youth. It strikes at the root of the whole feudal system. I really think you owe me an apology, Tom. I supposed you wished to marry the girl’s money, and here you are, basely seeking to go into business with her father.”

Young Corey laughed again like a son who perceives that his father is a little antiquated, but keeps a filial faith in his wit. “I don’t know that it’s quite so bad as that; but the thing had certainly crossed my mind. I don’t know how it’s to be approached, and I don’t know that it’s at all possible. But I confess that I ‘took to’ Colonel Lapham from the moment I saw him. He looked as if he ‘meant business,’ and I mean business too.”

The father smoked thoughtfully. “Of course people do go into all sorts of things, as you say, and I don’t know that one thing is more ignoble than another, if it’s decent and large enough. In my time you would have gone into the China trade or the India trade — though I didn’t; and a little later cotton would have been your manifest destiny — though it wasn’t mine; but now a man may do almost anything. The real-estate business is pretty full. Yes, if you have a deep inward vocation for it, I don’t see why mineral paint shouldn’t do. I fancy it’s easy enough approaching the matter. We will invite Papa Lapham to dinner, and talk it over with him.”

“Oh, I don’t think that would be exactly the way, sir,” said the son, smiling at his father’s patrician unworldliness.

“No? Why not?”

“I’m afraid it would be a bad start. I don’t think it would strike him as business-like.”

“I don’t see why he should be punctilious, if we’re not.”

“Ah, we might say that if he were making the advances.”

“Well, perhaps you are right, Tom. What is your idea?”

“I haven’t a very clear one. It seems to me I ought to get some business friend of ours, whose judgment he would respect, to speak a good word for me.”

“Give you a character?”

“Yes. And of course I must go to Colonel Lapham. My notion would be to inquire pretty thoroughly about him, and then, if I liked the look of things, to go right down to Republic Street and let him see what he could do with me, if anything.”

“That sounds tremendously practical to me, Tom, though it may be just the wrong way. When are you going down to Mount Desert?”

“To-morrow, I think, sir,” said the young man. “I shall turn it over in my mind while I’m off.”

The father rose, showing something more than his son’s height, with a very slight stoop, which the son’s figure had not. “Well,” he said, whimsically, “I admire your spirit, and I don’t deny that it is justified by necessity. It’s a consolation to think that while I’ve been spending and enjoying, I have been preparing the noblest future for you — a future of industry and self-reliance. You never could draw, but this scheme of going into the mineral-paint business shows that you have inherited something of my feeling for colour.”

The son laughed once more, and waiting till his father was well on his way upstairs, turned out the gas and then hurried after him and preceded him into his chamber. He glanced over it to see that everything was there, to his father’s hand. Then he said, “Good night, sir,” and the elder responded, “Good night, my son,” and the son went to his own room.

Over the mantel in the elder Corey’s room hung a portrait which he had painted of his own father, and now he stood a moment and looked at this as if struck by something novel in it. The resemblance between his son and the old India merchant, who had followed the trade from Salem to Boston when the larger city drew it away from the smaller, must have been what struck him. Grandfather and grandson had both the Roman nose which appears to have flourished chiefly at the formative period of the republic, and which occurs more rarely in the descendants of the conscript fathers, though it still characterises the profiles of a good many Boston ladies. Bromfield Corey had not inherited it, and he had made his straight nose his defence when the old merchant accused him of a want of energy. He said, “What could a man do whose unnatural father had left his own nose away from him?” This amused but did not satisfy the merchant. “You must do something,” he said; “and it’s for you to choose. If you don’t like the India trade, go into something else. Or, take up law or medicine. No Corey yet ever proposed to do nothing.”

“Ah, then, it’s quite time one of us made a beginning,” urged the man who was then young, and who was now old, looking into the somewhat fierce eyes of his father’s portrait. He had inherited as little of the fierceness as of the nose, and there was nothing predatory in his son either, though the aquiline beak had come down to him in such force. Bromfield Corey liked his son Tom for the gentleness which tempered his energy.

“Well let us compromise,” he seemed to be saying to his father’s portrait. “I will travel.”

“Travel? How long?” the keen eyes demanded. “Oh, indefinitely. I won’t be hard with you, father.” He could see the eyes soften, and the smile of yielding come over his father’s face; the merchant could not resist a son who was so much like his dead mother. There was some vague understanding between them that Bromfield Corey was to come back and go into business after a time, but he never did so. He travelled about over Europe, and travelled handsomely, frequenting good society everywhere, and getting himself presented at several courts, at a period when it was a distinction to do so. He had always sketched, and with his father’s leave he fixed himself at Rome, where he remained studying art and rounding the being inherited from his Yankee progenitors, till there was very little left of the ancestral angularities. After ten years he came home and painted that portrait of his father. It was very good, if a little amateurish, and he might have made himself a name as a painter of portraits if he had not had so much money. But he had plenty of money, though by this time he was married and beginning to have a family. It was absurd for him to paint portraits for pay, and ridiculous to paint them for nothing; so he did not paint them at all. He continued a dilettante, never quite abandoning his art, but working at it fitfully, and talking more about it than working at it. He had his theory of Titian’s method; and now and then a Bostonian insisted upon buying a picture of him. After a while he hung it more and more inconspicuously, and said apologetically, “Oh yes! that’s one of Bromfield Corey’s things. It has nice qualities, but it’s amateurish.”

In process of time the money seemed less abundant. There were shrinkages of one kind and another, and living had grown much more expensive and luxurious. For many years he talked about going back to Rome, but he never went, and his children grew up in the usual way. Before he knew it his son had him out to his class-day spread at Harvard, and then he had his son on his hands. The son made various unsuccessful provisions for himself, and still continued upon his father’s hands, to their common dissatisfaction, though it was chiefly the younger who repined. He had the Roman nose and the energy without the opportunity, and at one of the reversions his father said to him, “You ought not to have that nose, Tom; then you would do very well. You would go and travel, as I did.”

LAPHAM and his wife continued talking after he had quelled the disturbance in his daughters’ room overhead; and their talk was not altogether of the new house.

“I tell you,” he said, “if I had that fellow in the business with me I would make a man of him.”

“Well, Silas Lapham,” returned his wife, “I do believe you’ve got mineral paint on the brain. Do you suppose a fellow like young Corey, brought up the way he’s been, would touch mineral paint with a ten-foot pole?”

“Why not?” haughtily asked the Colonel.

“Well, if you don’t know already, there’s no use trying to tell you.”

VI.

THE Coreys had always had a house at Nahant, but after letting it for a season or two they found they could get on without it, and sold it at the son’s instance, who foresaw that if things went on as they were going, the family would be straitened to the point of changing their mode of life altogether. They began to be of the people of whom it was said that they stayed in town very late; and when the ladies did go away, it was for a brief summering in this place and that. The father remained at home altogether; and the son joined them in the intervals of his enterprises, which occurred only too often.

At Bar Harbour, where he now went to find them, after his winter in Texas, he confessed to his mother that there seemed no very good opening there for him. He might do as well as Loring Stanton, but he doubted if Stanton was doing very well. Then he mentioned the new project which he had been thinking over. She did not deny that there was something in it, but she could not think of any young man who had gone into such a business as that, and it appeared to her that he might as well go into a patent medicine or a stove-polish.

“There was one of his hideous advertisements,” she said, “painted on a reef that we saw as we came down.”

Corey smiled. “Well, I suppose, if it was in a good state of preservation, that is proof positive of the efficacy of the paint on the hulls of vessels.”

“It’s very distasteful to me, Tom,” said his mother; and if there was something else in her mind, she did not speak more plainly of it than to add: “It’s not only the kind of business, but the kind of people you would be mixed up with.”

“I thought you didn’t find them so very bad,” suggested Corey.

“I hadn’t seen them in Nankeen Square then.”

“You can see them on the water side of Beacon Street when you go back.”

Then he told of his encounter with the Lapham family in their new house. At the end his mother merely said, “It is getting very common down there,” and she did not try to oppose anything further to his scheme.

The young man went to see Colonel Lapham shortly after his return to Boston. He paid his visit at Lapham’s office, and if he had studied simplicity in his summer dress he could not have presented himself in a figure more to the mind of a practical man. His hands and neck still kept the brown of the Texan suns and winds, and he looked as business-like as Lapham himself.

He spoke up promptly and briskly in the outer office, and caused the pretty girl to look away from her copying at him. “Is Mr. Lapham in?” he asked; and after that moment for reflection which an array of book-keepers so addressed likes to give the inquirer, a head was lifted from a ledger and nodded toward the inner office.

Lapham had recognised the voice, and he was standing, in considerable perplexity, to receive Corey, when the young man opened his painted glass door. It was a hot afternoon, and Lapham was in his shirt sleeves. Scarcely a trace of the boastful hospitality with which he had welcomed Corey to his house a few days before lingered in his present address. He looked at the young man’s face, as if he expected him to despatch whatever unimaginable affair he had come upon.

“Won’t you sit down? How are you? You’ll excuse me,” he added, in brief allusion to the shirt-sleeves. “I’m about roasted.”

Corey laughed. “I wish you’d let me take off MY coat.”

“Why, TAKE it off!” cried the Colonel, with instant pleasure. There is something in human nature which causes the man in his shirt-sleeves to wish all other men to appear in the same deshabille.

“I will, if you ask me after I’ve talked with you two minutes,” said the young fellow, companionably pulling up the chair offered him toward the desk where Lapham had again seated himself. “But perhaps you haven’t got two minutes to give me?”

“Oh yes, I have,” said the Colonel. “I was just going to knock off. I can give you twenty, and then I shall have fifteen minutes to catch the boat.”

“All right,” said Corey. “I want you to take me into the mineral paint business.”

The Colonel sat dumb. He twisted his thick neck, and looked round at the door to see if it was shut. He would not have liked to have any of those fellows outside hear him, but there is no saying what sum of money he would not have given if his wife had been there to hear what Corey had just said.

“I suppose,” continued the young man, “I could have got several people whose names you know to back my industry and sobriety, and say a word for my business capacity. But I thought I wouldn’t trouble anybody for certificates till I found whether there was a chance, or the ghost of one, of your wanting me. So I came straight to you.”

Lapham gathered himself together as well as he could. He had not yet forgiven Corey for Mrs. Lapham’s insinuation that he would feel himself too good for the mineral paint business; and though he was dispersed by that astounding shot at first, he was not going to let any one even hypothetically despise his paint with impunity. “How do you think I am going to take you on?” They took on hands at the works; and Lapham put it as if Corey were a hand coming to him for employment. Whether he satisfied himself by this or not, he reddened a little after he had said it.

Corey answered, ignorant of the offence: “I haven’t a very clear idea, I’m afraid; but I’ve been looking a little into the matter from the outside.”

“I hope you hain’t been paying any attention to that fellow’s stuff in the Events?” Lapham interrupted. Since Bartley’s interview had appeared, Lapham had regarded it with very mixed feelings. At first it gave him a glow of secret pleasure, blended with doubt as to how his wife would like the use Bartley had made of her in it. But she had not seemed to notice it much, and Lapham had experienced the gratitude of the man who escapes. Then his girls had begun to make fun of it; and though he did not mind Penelope’s jokes much, he did not like to see that Irene’s gentility was wounded. Business friends met him with the kind of knowing smile about it that implied their sense of the fraudulent character of its praise — the smile of men who had been there and who knew how it was themselves. Lapham had his misgivings as to how his clerks and underlings looked at it; he treated them with stately severity for a while after it came out, and he ended by feeling rather sore about it. He took it for granted that everybody had read it.

“I don’t know what you mean,” replied Corey, “I don’t see the Events regularly.”

“Oh, it was nothing. They sent a fellow down here to interview me, and he got everything about as twisted as he could.”

“I believe they always do,” said Corey. “I hadn’t seen it. Perhaps it came out before I got home.”

“Perhaps it did.”

“My notion of making myself useful to you was based on a hint I got from one of your own circulars.”

Lapham was proud of those circulars; he thought they read very well. “What was that?”

“I could put a little capital into the business,” said Corey, with the tentative accent of a man who chances a thing. “I’ve got a little money, but I didn’t imagine you cared for anything of that kind.”

“No, sir, I don’t,” returned the Colonel bluntly. “I’ve had one partner, and one’s enough.”

“Yes,” assented the young man, who doubtless had his own ideas as to eventualities — or perhaps rather had the vague hopes of youth. “I didn’t come to propose a partnership. But I see that you are introducing your paint into the foreign markets, and there I really thought I might be of use to you, and to myself too.”

“How?” asked the Colonel scantly.

“Well, I know two or three languages pretty well. I know French, and I know German, and I’ve got a pretty fair sprinkling of Spanish.”

“You mean that you can talk them?” asked the Colonel, with the mingled awe and slight that such a man feels for such accomplishments. “Yes; and I can write an intelligible letter in either of them.”

Lapham rubbed his nose. “It’s easy enough to get all the letters we want translated.”

“Well,” pursued Corey, not showing his discouragement if he felt any, “I know the countries where you want to introduce this paint of yours. I’ve been there. I’ve been in Germany and France and I’ve been in South America and Mexico; I’ve been in Italy, of course. I believe I could go to any of those countries and place it to advantage.”

Lapham had listened with a trace of persuasion in his face, but now he shook his head.

“It’s placing itself as fast as there’s any call for it. It wouldn’t pay us to send anybody out to look after it. Your salary and expenses would eat up about all we should make on it.”

“Yes,” returned the young man intrepidly, “if you had to pay me any salary and expenses.”

“You don’t propose to work for nothing?”

“I propose to work for a commission.” The Colonel was beginning to shake his head again, but Corey hurried on. “I haven’t come to you without making some inquiries about the paint, and I know how it stands with those who know best. I believe in it.”

Lapham lifted his head and looked at the young man, deeply moved.

“It’s the best paint in God’s universe,” he said with the solemnity of prayer.

“It’s the best in the market,” said Corey; and he repeated, “I believe in it.”

“You believe in it,” began the Colonel, and then he stopped. If there had really been any purchasing power in money, a year’s income would have bought Mrs. Lapham’s instant presence. He warmed and softened to the young man in every way, not only because he must do so to any one who believed in his paint, but because he had done this innocent person the wrong of listening to a defamation of his instinct and good sense, and had been willing to see him suffer for a purely supposititious offence.

Corey rose.

“You mustn’t let me outstay my twenty minutes,” he said, taking out his watch. “I don’t expect you to give a decided answer on the spot. All that I ask is that you’ll consider my proposition.”

“Don’t hurry,” said Lapham. “Sit still! I want to tell you about this paint,” he added, in a voice husky with the feeling that his hearer could not divine. “I want to tell you ALL about it.”

“I could walk with you to the boat,” suggested the young man.

“Never mind the boat! I can take the next one. Look here!” The Colonel pulled open a drawer, as Corey sat down again, and took out a photograph of the locality of the mine. “Here’s where we get it. This photograph don’t half do the place justice,” he said, as if the imperfect art had slighted the features of a beloved face. “It’s one of the sightliest places in the country, and here’s the very spot “ — he covered it with his huge forefinger— “where my father found that paint, more than forty — years — ago. Yes, sir!”

He went on, and told the story in unsparing detail, while his chance for the boat passed unheeded, and the clerks in the outer office hung up their linen office coats and put on their seersucker or flannel street coats. The young lady went too, and nobody was left but the porter, who made from time to time a noisy demonstration of fastening a distant blind, or putting something in place. At last the Colonel roused himself from the autobiographical delight of the history of his paint. “Well, sir, that’s the story.”

“It’s an interesting story,” said Corey, with a long breath, as they rose together, and Lapham put on his coat.

“That’s what it is,” said the Colonel. “Well!” he added, “I don’t see but what we’ve got to have another talk about this thing. It’s a surprise to me, and I don’t see exactly how you’re going to make it pay.”

“I’m willing to take the chances,” answered Corey. “As I said, I believe in it. I should try South America first. I should try Chili.”

“Look here!” said Lapham, with his watch in his hand. “I like to get things over. We’ve just got time for the six o’clock boat. Why don’t you come down with me to Nantasket? I can give you a bed as well as not. And then we can finish up.”

The impatience of youth in Corey responded to the impatience of temperament in his elder. “Why, I don’t see why I shouldn’t,” he allowed himself to say. “I confess I should like to have it finished up myself, if it could be finished up in the right way.”

“Well, we’ll see. Dennis!” Lapham called to the remote porter, and the man came. “Want to send any word home?” he asked Corey.

“No; my father and I go and come as we like, without keeping account of each other. If I don’t come home, he knows that I’m not there. That’s all.”

“Well, that’s convenient. You’ll find you can’t do that when you’re married. Never mind, Dennis,” said the Colonel.

He had time to buy two newspapers on the wharf before he jumped on board the steam-boat with Corey. “Just made it,” he said; “and that’s what I like to do. I can’t stand it to be aboard much more than a minute before she shoves out.” He gave one of the newspapers to Corey as he spoke, and set him the example of catching up a camp-stool on their way to that point on the boat which his experience had taught him was the best. He opened his paper at once and began to run over its news, while the young man watched the spectacular recession of the city, and was vaguely conscious of the people about him, and of the gay life of the water round the boat. The air freshened; the craft thinned in number; they met larger sail, lagging slowly inward in the afternoon light; the islands of the bay waxed and waned as the steamer approached and left them behind.

“I hate to see them stirring up those Southern fellows again,” said the Colonel, speaking into the paper on his lap. “Seems to me it’s time to let those old issues go.”

“Yes,” said the young man. “What are they doing now?”

“Oh, stirring up the Confederate brigadiers in Congress. I don’t like it. Seems to me, if our party hain’t got any other stock-in-trade, we better shut up shop altogether.” Lapham went on, as he scanned his newspaper, to give his ideas of public questions, in a fragmentary way, while Corey listened patiently, and waited for him to come back to business. He folded up his paper at last, and stuffed it into his coat pocket. “There’s one thing I always make it a rule to do,” he said, “and that is to give my mind a complete rest from business while I’m going down on the boat. I like to get the fresh air all through me, soul and body. I believe a man can give his mind a rest, just the same as he can give his legs a rest, or his back. All he’s got to do is to use his will-power. Why, I suppose, if I hadn’t adopted some such rule, with the strain I’ve had on me for the last ten years, I should ‘a’ been a dead man long ago. That’s the reason I like a horse. You’ve got to give your mind to the horse; you can’t help it, unless you want to break your neck; but a boat’s different, and there you got to use your will-power. You got to take your mind right up and put it where you want it. I make it a rule to read the paper on the boat —— Hold on!” he interrupted himself to prevent Corey from paying his fare to the man who had come round for it. “I’ve got tickets. And when I get through the paper, I try to get somebody to talk to, or I watch the people. It’s an astonishing thing to me where they all come from. I’ve been riding up and down on these boats for six or seven years, and I don’t know but very few of the faces I see on board. Seems to be a perfectly fresh lot every time. Well, of course! Town’s full of strangers in the summer season, anyway, and folks keep coming down from the country. They think it’s a great thing to get down to the beach, and they’ve all heard of the electric light on the water, and they want to see it. But you take faces now! The astonishing thing to me is not what a face tells, but what it don’t tell. When you think of what a man is, or a woman is, and what most of ’em have been through before they get to be thirty, it seems as if their experience would burn right through. But it don’t. I like to watch the couples, and try to make out which are engaged, or going to be, and which are married, or better be. But half the time I can’t make any sort of guess. Of course, where they’re young and kittenish, you can tell; but where they’re anyways on, you can’t. Heigh?”

“Yes, I think you’re right,” said Corey, not perfectly reconciled to philosophy in the place of business, but accepting it as he must.

“Well,” said the Colonel, “I don’t suppose it was meant we should know what was in each other’s minds. It would take a man out of his own hands. As long as he’s in his own hands, there’s some hopes of his doing something with himself; but if a fellow has been found out — even if he hasn’t been found out to be so very bad — it’s pretty much all up with him. No, sir. I don’t want to know people through and through.”

The greater part of the crowd on board — and, of course, the boat was crowded — looked as if they might not only be easily but safely known. There was little style and no distinction among them; they were people who were going down to the beach for the fun or the relief of it, and were able to afford it. In face they were commonplace, with nothing but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they did not wholly lack fire. But they were nearly all shrewd and friendly-looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous intimacy native to us all. The women were dandified in dress, according to their means and taste, and the men differed from each other in degrees of indifference to it. To a straw-hatted population, such as ours is in summer, no sort of personal dignity is possible. We have not even the power over observers which comes from the fantasticality of an Englishman when he discards the conventional dress. In our straw hats and our serge or flannel sacks we are no more imposing than a crowd of boys.

“Some day,” said Lapham, rising as the boat drew near the wharf of the final landing, “there’s going to be an awful accident on these boats. Just look at that jam.”

He meant the people thickly packed on the pier, and under strong restraint of locks and gates, to prevent them from rushing on board the boat and possessing her for the return trip before she had landed her Nantasket passengers.

“Overload ’em every time,” he continued, with a sort of dry, impersonal concern at the impending calamity, as if it could not possibly include him. “They take about twice as many as they ought to carry, and about ten times as many as they could save if anything happened. Yes, sir, it’s bound to come. Hello! There’s my girl!” He took out his folded newspaper and waved it toward a group of phaetons and barouches drawn up on the pier a little apart from the pack of people, and a lady in one of them answered with a flourish of her parasol.

When he had made his way with his guest through the crowd, she began to speak to her father before she noticed Corey. “Well, Colonel, you’ve improved your last chance. We’ve been coming to every boat since four o’clock, — or Jerry has, — and I told mother that I would come myself once, and see if I couldn’t fetch you; and if I failed, you could walk next time. You’re getting perfectly spoiled.”

The Colonel enjoyed letting her scold him to the end before he said, with a twinkle of pride in his guest and satisfaction in her probably being able to hold her own against any discomfiture, “I’ve brought Mr. Corey down for the night with me, and I was showing him things all the way, and it took time.”

The young fellow was at the side of the open beach-wagon, making a quick bow, and Penelope Lapham was cozily drawling, “Oh, how do you do, Mr. Corey?” before the Colonel had finished his explanation.

“Get right in there, alongside of Miss Lapham, Mr. Corey,” he said, pulling himself up into the place beside the driver. “No, no,” he had added quickly, at some signs of polite protest in the young man, “I don’t give up the best place to anybody. Jerry, suppose you let me have hold of the leathers a minute.”

This was his way of taking the reins from the driver; and in half the time he specified, he had skilfully turned the vehicle on the pier, among the crooked lines and groups of foot-passengers, and was spinning up the road toward the stretch of verandaed hotels and restaurants in the sand along the shore. “Pretty gay down here,” he said, indicating all this with a turn of his whip, as he left it behind him. “But I’ve got about sick of hotels; and this summer I made up my mind that I’d take a cottage. Well, Pen, how are the folks?” He looked half-way round for her answer, and with the eye thus brought to bear upon her he was able to give her a wink of supreme content. The Colonel, with no sort of ulterior design, and nothing but his triumph over Mrs. Lapham definitely in his mind, was feeling, as he would have said, about right.

The girl smiled a daughter’s amusement at her father’s boyishness. “I don’t think there’s much change since morning. Did Irene have a headache when you left?”

“No,” said the Colonel.

“Well, then, there’s that to report.”

“Pshaw!” said the Colonel with vexation in his tone.

“I’m sorry Miss Irene isn’t well,” said Corey politely.

“I think she must have got it from walking too long on the beach. The air is so cool here that you forget how hot the sun is.”

“Yes, that’s true,” assented Corey.

“A good night’s rest will make it all right,” suggested the Colonel, without looking round. “But you girls have got to look out.”

“If you’re fond of walking,” said Corey, “I suppose you find the beach a temptation.”

“Oh, it isn’t so much that,” returned the girl. “You keep walking on and on because it’s so smooth and straight before you. We’ve been here so often that we know it all by heart — just how it looks at high tide, and how it looks at low tide, and how it looks after a storm. We’re as well acquainted with the crabs and stranded jelly-fish as we are with the children digging in the sand and the people sitting under umbrellas. I think they’re always the same, all of them.”

The Colonel left the talk to the young people. When he spoke next it was to say, “Well, here we are!” and he turned from the highway and drove up in front of a brown cottage with a vermilion roof, and a group of geraniums clutching the rock that cropped up in the loop formed by the road. It was treeless and bare all round, and the ocean, unnecessarily vast, weltered away a little more than a stone’s-cast from the cottage. A hospitable smell of supper filled the air, and Mrs. Lapham was on the veranda, with that demand in her eyes for her belated husband’s excuses, which she was obliged to check on her tongue at sight of Corey.

VII.

THE exultant Colonel swung himself lightly down from his seat. “I’ve brought Mr. Corey with me,” he nonchalantly explained.

Mrs. Lapham made their guest welcome, and the Colonel showed him to his room, briefly assuring himself that there was nothing wanting there. Then he went to wash his own hands, carelessly ignoring the eagerness with which his wife pursued him to their chamber.

“What gave Irene a headache?” he asked, making himself a fine lather for his hairy paws.

“Never you mind Irene,” promptly retorted his wife. “How came he to come? Did you press him? If you DID, I’ll never forgive you, Silas!”

The Colonel laughed, and his wife shook him by the shoulder to make him laugh lower. “‘Sh!” she whispered. “Do you want him to hear EVERY thing? DID you urge him?”

The Colonel laughed the more. He was going to get all the good out of this. “No, I didn’t urge him. Seemed to want to come.”

“I don’t believe it. Where did you meet him?”

“At the office.”

“What office?”

“Mine.”

“Nonsense! What was he doing there?”

“Oh, nothing much.”

“What did he come for?”

“Come for? Oh! he SAID he wanted to go into the mineral paint business.”

Mrs. Lapham dropped into a chair, and watched his bulk shaken with smothered laughter. “Silas Lapham,” she gasped, “if you try to get off any more of those things on me — —”

The Colonel applied himself to the towel. “Had a notion he could work it in South America. I don’t know what he’s up to.”

“Never mind!” cried his wife. “I’ll get even with you YET.”

“So I told him he had better come down and talk it over,” continued the Colonel, in well-affected simplicity. “I knew he wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”

“Go on!” threatened Mrs. Lapham.

“Right thing to do, wa’n’t it?”

A tap was heard at the door, and Mrs. Lapham answered it. A maid announced supper. “Very well,” she said, “come to tea now. But I’ll make you pay for this, Silas.”

Penelope had gone to her sister’s room as soon as she entered the house.

“Is your head any better, ‘Rene?” she asked.

“Yes, a little,” came a voice from the pillows. “But I shall not come to tea. I don’t want anything. If I keep still, I shall be all right by morning.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” said the elder sister. “He’s come down with father.”

“He hasn’t! Who?” cried Irene, starting up in simultaneous denial and demand.

“Oh, well, if you say he hasn’t, what’s the use of my telling you who?”

“Oh, how can you treat me so!” moaned the sufferer. “What do you mean, Pen?”

“I guess I’d better not tell you,” said Penelope, watching her like a cat playing with a mouse. “If you’re not coming to tea, it would just excite you for nothing.”

The mouse moaned and writhed upon the bed.

“Oh, I wouldn’t treat YOU so!”

The cat seated herself across the room, and asked quietly —

“Well, what could you do if it WAS Mr. Corey? You couldn’t come to tea, you say. But HE’LL excuse you. I’ve told him you had a headache. Why, of course you can’t come! It would be too barefaced. But you needn’t be troubled, Irene; I’ll do my best to make the time pass pleasantly for him.” Here the cat gave a low titter, and the mouse girded itself up with a momentary courage and self-respect.

“I should think you would be ashamed to come here and tease me so.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t believe me,” argued Penelope. “Why shouldn’t he come down with father, if father asked him? and he’d be sure to if he thought of it. I don’t see any p’ints about that frog that’s any better than any other frog.”

The sense of her sister’s helplessness was too much for the tease; she broke down in a fit of smothered laughter, which convinced her victim that it was nothing but an ill-timed joke.

“Well, Pen, I wouldn’t use you so,” she whimpered.

Penelope threw herself on the bed beside her.

“Oh, poor Irene! He IS here. It’s a solemn fact.” And she caressed and soothed her sister, while she choked with laughter. “You must get up and come out. I don’t know what brought him here, but here he is.”

“It’s too late now,” said Irene desolately. Then she added, with a wilder despair: “What a fool I was to take that walk!”

“Well,” coaxed her sister, “come out and get some tea. The tea will do you good.”

“No, no; I can’t come. But send me a cup here.”

“Yes, and then perhaps you can see him later in the evening.”

“I shall not see him at all.”

An hour after Penelope came back to her sister’s room and found her before her glass. “You might as well have kept still, and been well by morning, ‘Rene,” she said. “As soon as we were done father said, ‘Well, Mr. Corey and I have got to talk over a little matter of business, and we’ll excuse you, ladies.’ He looked at mother in a way that I guess was pretty hard to bear. ‘Rene, you ought to have heard the Colonel swelling at supper. It would have made you feel that all he said the other day was nothing.”

Mrs. Lapham suddenly opened the door.

“Now, see here, Pen,” she said, as she closed it behind her, “I’ve had just as much as I can stand from your father, and if you don’t tell me this instant what it all means — —”

She left the consequences to imagination, and Penelope replied with her mock soberness —

“Well, the Colonel does seem to be on his high horse, ma’am. But you mustn’t ask me what his business with Mr. Corey is, for I don’t know. All that I know is that I met them at the landing, and that they conversed all the way down — on literary topics.”

“Nonsense! What do you think it is?”

“Well, if you want my candid opinion, I think this talk about business is nothing but a blind. It seems a pity Irene shouldn’t have been up to receive him,” she added.

Irene cast a mute look of imploring at her mother, who was too much preoccupied to afford her the protection it asked.

“Your father said he wanted to go into the business with him.”

Irene’s look changed to a stare of astonishment and mystification, but Penelope preserved her imperturbability.

“Well, it’s a lucrative business, I believe.”

“Well, I don’t believe a word of it!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “And so I told your father.”

“Did it seem to convince him?” inquired Penelope.

Her mother did not reply. “I know one thing,” she said. “He’s got to tell me every word, or there’ll be no sleep for him THIS night.”

“Well, ma’am,” said Penelope, breaking down in one of her queer laughs, “I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if you were right.”

“Go on and dress, Irene,” ordered her mother, “and then you and Pen come out into the parlour. They can have just two hours for business, and then we must all be there to receive him. You haven’t got headache enough to hurt you.”

“Oh, it’s all gone now,” said the girl.

At the end of the limit she had given the Colonel, Mrs. Lapham looked into the dining-room, which she found blue with his smoke.

“I think you gentlemen will find the parlour pleasanter now, and we can give it up to you.”

“Oh no, you needn’t,” said her husband. “We’ve got about through.” Corey was already standing, and Lapham rose too. “I guess we can join the ladies now. We can leave that little point till to-morrow.”

Both of the young ladies were in the parlour when Corey entered with their father, and both were frankly indifferent to the few books and the many newspapers scattered about on the table where the large lamp was placed. But after Corey had greeted Irene he glanced at the novel under his eye, and said, in the dearth that sometimes befalls people at such times: “I see you’re reading Middlemarch. Do you like George Eliot?”

“Who?” asked the girl.

Penelope interposed. “I don’t believe Irene’s read it yet. I’ve just got it out of the library; I heard so much talk about it. I wish she would let you find out a little about the people for yourself,” she added. But here her father struck in —

“I can’t get the time for books. It’s as much as I can do to keep up with the newspapers; and when night comes, I’m tired, and I’d rather go out to the theatre, or a lecture, if they’ve got a good stereopticon to give you views of the places. But I guess we all like a play better than ‘most anything else. I want something that’ll make me laugh. I don’t believe in tragedy. I think there’s enough of that in real life without putting it on the stage. Seen ‘Joshua Whitcomb’?”

The whole family joined in the discussion, and it appeared that they all had their opinions of the plays and actors. Mrs. Lapham brought the talk back to literature. “I guess Penelope does most of our reading.”

“Now, mother, you’re not going to put it all on me!” said the girl, in comic protest.

Her mother laughed, and then added, with a sigh: “I used to like to get hold of a good book when I was a girl; but we weren’t allowed to read many novels in those days. My mother called them all LIES. And I guess she wasn’t so very far wrong about some of them.”

“They’re certainly fictions,” said Corey, smiling.

“Well, we do buy a good many books, first and last,” said the Colonel, who probably had in mind the costly volumes which they presented to one another on birthdays and holidays. “But I get about all the reading I want in the newspapers. And when the girls want a novel, I tell ’em to get it out of the library. That’s what the library’s for. Phew!” he panted, blowing away the whole unprofitable subject. “How close you women-folks like to keep a room! You go down to the sea-side or up to the mountains for a change of air, and then you cork yourselves into a room so tight you don’t have any air at all. Here! You girls get on your bonnets, and go and show Mr. Corey the view of the hotels from the rocks.”

Corey said that he should be delighted. The girls exchanged looks with each other, and then with their mother. Irene curved her pretty chin in comment upon her father’s incorrigibility, and Penelope made a droll mouth, but the Colonel remained serenely content with his finesse. “I got ’em out of the way,” he said, as soon as they were gone, and before his wife had time to fall upon him, “because I’ve got through my talk with him, and now I want to talk with YOU. It’s just as I said, Persis; he wants to go into the business with me.”

“It’s lucky for you,” said his wife, meaning that now he would not be made to suffer for attempting to hoax her. But she was too intensely interested to pursue that matter further. “What in the world do you suppose he means by it?”

“Well, I should judge by his talk that he had been trying a good many different things since he left college, and he hain’t found just the thing he likes — or the thing that likes him. It ain’t so easy. And now he’s got an idea that he can take hold of the paint and push it in other countries — push it in Mexico and push it in South America. He’s a splendid Spanish scholar,” — this was Lapham’s version of Corey’s modest claim to a smattering of the language,— “and he’s been among the natives enough to know their ways. And he believes in the paint,” added the Colonel.

“I guess he believes in something else besides the paint,” said Mrs. Lapham.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Silas Lapham, if you can’t see NOW that he’s after Irene, I don’t know what ever CAN open your eyes. That’s all.”

The Colonel pretended to give the idea silent consideration, as if it had not occurred to him before. “Well, then, all I’ve got to say is, that he’s going a good way round. I don’t say you’re wrong, but if it’s Irene, I don’t see why he should want to go off to South America to get her. And that’s what he proposes to do. I guess there’s some paint about it too, Persis. He says he believes in it,” — the Colonel devoutly lowered his voice,— “and he’s willing to take the agency on his own account down there, and run it for a commission on what he can sell.”

“Of course! He isn’t going to take hold of it any way so as to feel beholden to you. He’s got too much pride for that.”

“He ain’t going to take hold of it at all, if he don’t mean paint in the first place and Irene afterward. I don’t object to him, as I know, either way, but the two things won’t mix; and I don’t propose he shall pull the wool over my eyes — or anybody else. But, as far as heard from, up to date, he means paint first, last, and all the time. At any rate, I’m going to take him on that basis. He’s got some pretty good ideas about it, and he’s been stirred up by this talk, just now, about getting our manufactures into the foreign markets. There’s an overstock in everything, and we’ve got to get rid of it, or we’ve got to shut down till the home demand begins again. We’ve had two or three such flurries before now, and they didn’t amount to much. They say we can’t extend our commerce under the high tariff system we’ve got now, because there ain’t any sort of reciprocity on our side, — we want to have the other fellows show all the reciprocity, — and the English have got the advantage of us every time. I don’t know whether it’s so or not; but I don’t see why it should apply to my paint. Anyway, he wants to try it, and I’ve about made up my mind to let him. Of course I ain’t going to let him take all the risk. I believe in the paint TOO, and I shall pay his expenses anyway.”

“So you want another partner after all?” Mrs. Lapham could not forbear saying.

“Yes, if that’s your idea of a partner. It isn’t mine,” returned her husband dryly.

“Well, if you’ve made up your mind, Si, I suppose you’re ready for advice,” said Mrs. Lapham.

The Colonel enjoyed this. “Yes, I am. What have you got to say against it?”

“I don’t know as I’ve got anything. I’m satisfied if you are.”

“Well?”

“When is he going to start for South America?”

“I shall take him into the office a while. He’ll get off some time in the winter. But he’s got to know the business first.”

“Oh, indeed! Are you going to take him to board in the family?”

“What are you after, Persis?”

“Oh, nothing! I presume he will feel free to visit in the family, even if he don’t board with us.”

“I presume he will.”

“And if he don’t use his privileges, do you think he’ll be a fit person to manage your paint in South America?”

The Colonel reddened consciously. “I’m not taking him on that basis.”

“Oh yes, you are! You may pretend you ain’t to yourself, but you mustn’t pretend so to me. Because I know you.”

The Colonel laughed. “Pshaw!” he said.

Mrs. Lapham continued: “I don’t see any harm in hoping that he’ll take a fancy to her. But if you really think it won’t do to mix the two things, I advise you not to take Mr. Corey into the business. It will do all very well if he DOES take a fancy to her; but if he don’t, you know how you’ll feel about it. And I know you well enough, Silas, to know that you can’t do him justice if that happens. And I don’t think it’s right you should take this step unless you’re pretty sure. I can see that you’ve set your heart on this thing.”

“I haven’t set my heart on it at all,” protested Lapham.

“And if you can’t bring it about, you’re going to feel unhappy over it,” pursued his wife, regardless of his protest.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “If you know more about what’s in my mind than I do, there’s no use arguing, as I can see.”

He got up, to carry off his consciousness, and sauntered out of the door on to his piazza. He could see the young people down on the rocks, and his heart swelled in his breast. He had always said that he did not care what a man’s family was, but the presence of young Corey as an applicant to him for employment, as his guest, as the possible suitor of his daughter, was one of the sweetest flavours that he had yet tasted in his success. He knew who the Coreys were very well, and, in his simple, brutal way, he had long hated their name as a symbol of splendour which, unless he should live to see at least three generations of his descendants gilded with mineral paint, he could not hope to realise in his own. He was acquainted in a business way with the tradition of old Phillips Corey, and he had heard a great many things about the Corey who had spent his youth abroad and his father’s money everywhere, and done nothing but say smart things. Lapham could not see the smartness of some of them which had been repeated to him. Once he had encountered the fellow, and it seemed to Lapham that the tall, slim, white-moustached man, with the slight stoop, was everything that was offensively aristocratic. He had bristled up aggressively at the name when his wife told how she had made the acquaintance of the fellow’s family the summer before, and he had treated the notion of young Corey’s caring for Irene with the contempt which such a ridiculous superstition deserved. He had made up his mind about young Corey beforehand; yet when he met him he felt an instant liking for him, which he frankly acknowledged, and he had begun to assume the burden of his wife’s superstition, of which she seemed now ready to accuse him of being the inventor.

Nothing had moved his thick imagination like this day’s events since the girl who taught him spelling and grammar in the school at Lumberville had said she would have him for her husband.

The dark figures, stationary on the rocks, began to move, and he could see that they were coming toward the house. He went indoors, so as not to appear to have been watching them.

VIII.

A WEEK after she had parted with her son at Bar Harbour, Mrs. Corey suddenly walked in upon her husband in their house in Boston. He was at breakfast, and he gave her the patronising welcome with which the husband who has been staying in town all summer receives his wife when she drops down upon him from the mountains or the sea-side. For a little moment she feels herself strange in the house, and suffers herself to be treated like a guest, before envy of his comfort vexes her back into possession and authority. Mrs. Corey was a lady, and she did not let her envy take the form of open reproach.

“Well, Anna, you find me here in the luxury you left me to. How did you leave the girls?”

“The girls were well,” said Mrs. Corey, looking absently at her husband’s brown velvet coat, in which he was so handsome. No man had ever grown grey more beautifully. His hair, while not remaining dark enough to form a theatrical contrast with his moustache, was yet some shades darker, and, in becoming a little thinner, it had become a little more gracefully wavy. His skin had the pearly tint which that of elderly men sometimes assumes, and the lines which time had traced upon it were too delicate for the name of wrinkles. He had never had any personal vanity, and there was no consciousness in his good looks now.

“I am glad of that. The boy I have with me,” he returned; “that is, when he IS with me.”

“Why, where is he?” demanded the mother.

“Probably carousing with the boon Lapham somewhere. He left me yesterday afternoon to go and offer his allegiance to the Mineral Paint King, and I haven’t seen him since.”

“Bromfield!” cried Mrs. Corey. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“Well, my dear, I’m not sure that it isn’t a very good thing.”

“A good thing? It’s horrid!”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s decent. Tom had found out — without consulting the landscape, which I believe proclaims it everywhere — —”

“Hideous!”

“That it’s really a good thing; and he thinks that he has some ideas in regard to its dissemination in the parts beyond seas.”

“Why shouldn’t he go into something else?” lamented the mother.

“I believe he has gone into nearly everything else and come out of it. So there is a chance of his coming out of this. But as I had nothing to suggest in place of it, I thought it best not to interfere. In fact, what good would my telling him that mineral paint was nasty have done? I dare say YOU told him it was nasty.”

“Yes! I did.”

“And you see with what effect, though he values your opinion three times as much as he values mine. Perhaps you came up to tell him again that it was nasty?”

“I feel very unhappy about it. He is throwing himself away. Yes, I should like to prevent it if I could!”

The father shook his head.

“If Lapham hasn’t prevented it, I fancy it’s too late. But there may be some hopes of Lapham. As for Tom’s throwing himself away, I don’t know. There’s no question but he is one of the best fellows under the sun. He’s tremendously energetic, and he has plenty of the kind of sense which we call horse; but he isn’t brilliant. No, Tom is not brilliant. I don’t think he would get on in a profession, and he’s instinctively kept out of everything of the kind. But he has got to do something. What shall he do? He says mineral paint, and really I don’t see why he shouldn’t. If money is fairly and honestly earned, why should we pretend to care what it comes out of, when we don’t really care? That superstition is exploded everywhere.”

“Oh, it isn’t the paint alone,” said Mrs. Corey; and then she perceptibly arrested herself, and made a diversion in continuing: “I wish he had married some one.”

“With money?” suggested her husband. “From time to time I have attempted Tom’s corruption from that side, but I suspect Tom has a conscience against it, and I rather like him for it. I married for love myself,” said Corey, looking across the table at his wife.

She returned his look tolerantly, though she felt it right to say, “What nonsense!”

“Besides,” continued her husband, “if you come to money, there is the paint princess. She will have plenty.”

“Ah, that’s the worst of it,” sighed the mother. “I suppose I could get on with the paint — —”

“But not with the princess? I thought you said she was a very pretty, well-behaved girl?”

“She is very pretty, and she is well-behaved; but there is nothing of her. She is insipid; she is very insipid.”

“But Tom seemed to like her flavour, such as it was?”

“How can I tell? We were under a terrible obligation to them, and I naturally wished him to be polite to them. In fact, I asked him to be so.”

“And he was too polite.”

“I can’t say that he was. But there is no doubt that the child is extremely pretty.”

“Tom says there are two of them. Perhaps they will neutralise each other.”

“Yes, there is another daughter,” assented Mrs. Corey. “I don’t see how you can joke about such things, Bromfield,” she added.

“Well, I don’t either, my dear, to tell you the truth. My hardihood surprises me. Here is a son of mine whom I see reduced to making his living by a shrinkage in values. It’s very odd,” interjected Corey, “that some values should have this peculiarity of shrinking. You never hear of values in a picture shrinking; but rents, stocks, real estate — all those values shrink abominably. Perhaps it might be argued that one should put all his values into pictures; I’ve got a good many of mine there.”

“Tom needn’t earn his living,” said Mrs. Corey, refusing her husband’s jest. “There’s still enough for all of us.”

“That is what I have sometimes urged upon Tom. I have proved to him that with economy, and strict attention to business, he need do nothing as long as he lives. Of course he would be somewhat restricted, and it would cramp the rest of us; but it is a world of sacrifices and compromises. He couldn’t agree with me, and he was not in the least moved by the example of persons of quality in Europe, which I alleged in support of the life of idleness. It appears that he wishes to do something — to do something for himself. I am afraid that Tom is selfish.”

Mrs. Corey smiled wanly. Thirty years before, she had married the rich young painter in Rome, who said so much better things than he painted — charming things, just the things to please the fancy of a girl who was disposed to take life a little too seriously and practically. She saw him in a different light when she got him home to Boston; but he had kept on saying the charming things, and he had not done much else. In fact, he had fulfilled the promise of his youth. It was a good trait in him that he was not actively but only passively extravagant. He was not adventurous with his money; his tastes were as simple as an Italian’s; he had no expensive habits. In the process of time he had grown to lead a more and more secluded life. It was hard to get him out anywhere, even to dinner. His patience with their narrowing circumstances had a pathos which she felt the more the more she came into charge of their joint life. At times it seemed too bad that the children and their education and pleasures should cost so much. She knew, besides, that if it had not been for them she would have gone back to Rome with him, and lived princely there for less than it took to live respectably in Boston.

“Tom hasn’t consulted me,” continued his father, “but he has consulted other people. And he has arrived at the conclusion that mineral paint is a good thing to go into. He has found out all about it, and about its founder or inventor. It’s quite impressive to hear him talk. And if he must do something for himself, I don’t see why his egotism shouldn’t as well take that form as another. Combined with the paint princess, it isn’t so agreeable; but that’s only a remote possibility, for which your principal ground is your motherly solicitude. But even if it were probable and imminent, what could you do? The chief consolation that we American parents have in these matters is that we can do nothing. If we were Europeans, even English, we should take some cognisance of our children’s love affairs, and in some measure teach their young affections how to shoot. But it is our custom to ignore them until they have shot, and then they ignore us. We are altogether too delicate to arrange the marriages of our children; and when they have arranged them we don’t like to say anything, for fear we should only make bad worse. The right way is for us to school ourselves to indifference. That is what the young people have to do elsewhere, and that is the only logical result of our position here. It is absurd for us to have any feeling about what we don’t interfere with.”

“Oh, people do interfere with their children’s marriages very often,” said Mrs. Corey.

“Yes, but only in a half-hearted way, so as not to make it disagreeable for themselves if the marriages go on in spite of them, as they’re pretty apt to do. Now, my idea is that I ought to cut Tom off with a shilling. That would be very simple, and it would be economical. But you would never consent, and Tom wouldn’t mind it.”

“I think our whole conduct in regard to such things is wrong,” said Mrs. Corey.

“Oh, very likely. But our whole civilisation is based upon it. And who is going to make a beginning? To which father in our acquaintance shall I go and propose an alliance for Tom with his daughter? I should feel like an ass. And will you go to some mother, and ask her sons in marriage for our daughters? You would feel like a goose. No; the only motto for us is, Hands off altogether.”

“I shall certainly speak to Tom when the time comes,” said Mrs. Corey.

“And I shall ask leave to be absent from your discomfiture, my dear,” answered her husband.

The son returned that afternoon, and confessed his surprise at finding his mother in Boston. He was so frank that she had not quite the courage to confess in turn why she had come, but trumped up an excuse.

“Well, mother,” he said promptly, “I have made an engagement with Mr. Lapham.”

“Have you, Tom?” she asked faintly.

“Yes. For the present I am going to have charge of his foreign correspondence, and if I see my way to the advantage I expect to find in it, I am going out to manage that side of his business in South America and Mexico. He’s behaved very handsomely about it. He says that if it appears for our common interest, he shall pay me a salary as well as a commission. I’ve talked with Uncle Jim, and he thinks it’s a good opening.”

“Your Uncle Jim does?” queried Mrs. Corey in amaze.

“Yes; I consulted him the whole way through, and I’ve acted on his advice.”

This seemed an incomprehensible treachery on her brother’s part.

“Yes; I thought you would like to have me. And besides, I couldn’t possibly have gone to any one so well fitted to advise me.”

His mother said nothing. In fact, the mineral paint business, however painful its interest, was, for the moment, superseded by a more poignant anxiety. She began to feel her way cautiously toward this.

“Have you been talking about your business with Mr. Lapham all night?”

“Well, pretty much,” said her son, with a guiltless laugh. “I went to see him yesterday afternoon, after I had gone over the whole ground with Uncle Jim, and Mr. Lapham asked me to go down with him and finish up.”

“Down?” repeated Mrs. Corey. “Yes, to Nantasket. He has a cottage down there.”

“At Nantasket?” Mrs. Corey knitted her brows a little. “What in the world can a cottage at Nantasket be like?”

“Oh, very much like a ‘cottage’ anywhere. It has the usual allowance of red roof and veranda. There are the regulation rocks by the sea; and the big hotels on the beach about a mile off, flaring away with electric lights and roman-candles at night. We didn’t have them at Nahant.”

“No,” said his mother. “Is Mrs. Lapham well? And her daughter?”

“Yes, I think so,” said the young man. “The young ladies walked me down to the rocks in the usual way after dinner, and then I came back and talked paint with Mr. Lapham till midnight. We didn’t settle anything till this morning coming up on the boat.”

“What sort of people do they seem to be at home?”

“What sort? Well, I don’t know that I noticed.” Mrs. Corey permitted herself the first part of a sigh of relief; and her son laughed, but apparently not at her. “They’re just reading Middlemarch. They say there’s so much talk about it. Oh, I suppose they’re very good people. They seemed to be on very good terms with each other.”

“I suppose it’s the plain sister who’s reading Middlemarch.”

“Plain? Is she plain?” asked the young man, as if searching his consciousness. “Yes, it’s the older one who does the reading, apparently. But I don’t believe that even she overdoes it. They like to talk better. They reminded me of Southern people in that.” The young man smiled, as if amused by some of his impressions of the Lapham family. “The living, as the country people call it, is tremendously good. The Colonel — he’s a colonel — talked of the coffee as his wife’s coffee, as if she had personally made it in the kitchen, though I believe it was merely inspired by her. And there was everything in the house that money could buy. But money has its limitations.”

This was a fact which Mrs. Corey was beginning to realise more and more unpleasantly in her own life; but it seemed to bring her a certain comfort in its application to the Laphams. “Yes, there is a point where taste has to begin,” she said.

“They seemed to want to apologise to me for not having more books,” said Corey. “I don’t know why they should. The Colonel said they bought a good many books, first and last; but apparently they don’t take them to the sea-side.”

“I dare say they NEVER buy a NEW book. I’ve met some of these moneyed people lately, and they lavish on every conceivable luxury, and then borrow books, and get them in the cheap paper editions.”

“I fancy that’s the way with the Lapham family,” said the young man, smilingly. “But they are very good people. The other daughter is humorous.”

“Humorous?” Mrs. Corey knitted her brows in some perplexity. “Do you mean like Mrs. Sayre?” she asked, naming the lady whose name must come into every Boston mind when humour is mentioned.

“Oh no; nothing like that. She never says anything that you can remember; nothing in flashes or ripples; nothing the least literary. But it’s a sort of droll way of looking at things; or a droll medium through which things present themselves. I don’t know. She tells what she’s seen, and mimics a little.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Corey coldly. After a moment she asked: “And is Miss Irene as pretty as ever?”

“She’s a wonderful complexion,” said the son unsatisfactorily. “I shall want to be by when father and Colonel Lapham meet,” he added, with a smile.

“Ah, yes, your father!” said the mother, in that way in which a wife at once compassionates and censures her husband to their children.

“Do you think it’s really going to be a trial to him?” asked the young man quickly.

“No, no, I can’t say it is. But I confess I wish it was some other business, Tom.”

“Well, mother, I don’t see why. The principal thing looked at now is the amount of money; and while I would rather starve than touch a dollar that was dirty with any sort of dishonesty — —”

“Of course you would, my son!” interposed his mother proudly.

“I shouldn’t at all mind its having a little mineral paint on it. I’ll use my influence with Colonel Lapham — if I ever have any — to have his paint scraped off the landscape.”

“I suppose you won’t begin till the autumn.”

“Oh yes, I shall,” said the son, laughing at his mother’s simple ignorance of business. “I shall begin to-morrow morning.”

“To-morrow morning!”

“Yes. I’ve had my desk appointed already, and I shall be down there at nine in the morning to take possession.”

“Tom,” cried his mother, “why do you think Mr. Lapham has taken you into business so readily? I’ve always heard that it was so hard for young men to get in.”

“And do you think I found it easy with him? We had about twelve hours’ solid talk.”

“And you don’t suppose it was any sort of — personal consideration?”

“Why, I don’t know exactly what you mean, mother. I suppose he likes me.”

Mrs. Corey could not say just what she meant. She answered, ineffectually enough —

“Yes. You wouldn’t like it to be a favour, would you?”

“I think he’s a man who may be trusted to look after his own interest. But I don’t mind his beginning by liking me. It’ll be my own fault if I don’t make myself essential to him.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Corey.

“Well,” demanded her husband, at their first meeting after her interview with their son, “what did you say to Tom?”

“Very little, if anything. I found him with his mind made up, and it would only have distressed him if I had tried to change it.”

“That is precisely what I said, my dear.”

“Besides, he had talked the matter over fully with James, and seems to have been advised by him. I can’t understand James.”

“Oh! it’s in regard to the paint, and not the princess, that he’s made up his mind. Well, I think you were wise to let him alone, Anna. We represent a faded tradition. We don’t really care what business a man is in, so it is large enough, and he doesn’t advertise offensively; but we think it fine to affect reluctance.”

“Do you really feel so, Bromfield?” asked his wife seriously.

“Certainly I do. There was a long time in my misguided youth when I supposed myself some sort of porcelain; but it’s a relief to be of the common clay, after all, and to know it. If I get broken, I can be easily replaced.”

“If Tom must go into such a business,” said Mrs. Corey, “I’m glad James approves of it.”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t matter to Tom if he didn’t; and I don’t know that I should care,” said Corey, betraying the fact that he had perhaps had a good deal of his brother-in-law’s judgment in the course of his life. “You had better consult him in regard to Tom’s marrying the princess.”

“There is no necessity at present for that,” said Mrs. Corey, with dignity. After a moment, she asked, “Should you feel quite so easy if it were a question of that, Bromfield?”

“It would be a little more personal.”

“You feel about it as I do. Of course, we have both lived too long, and seen too much of the world, to suppose we can control such things. The child is good, I haven’t the least doubt, and all those things can be managed so that they wouldn’t disgrace us. But she has had a certain sort of bringing up. I should prefer Tom to marry a girl with another sort, and this business venture of his increases the chances that he won’t. That’s all.”

“‘’Tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ‘twill serve.’”

“I shouldn’t like it.”

“Well, it hasn’t happened yet.”

“Ah, you never can realise anything beforehand.”

“Perhaps that has saved me some suffering. But you have at least the consolation of two anxieties at once. I always find that a great advantage. You can play one off against the other.”

Mrs. Corey drew a long breath as if she did not experience the suggested consolation; and she arranged to quit, the following afternoon, the scene of her defeat, which she had not had the courage to make a battlefield. Her son went down to see her off on the boat, after spending his first day at his desk in Lapham’s office. He was in a gay humour, and she departed in a reflected gleam of his good spirits. He told her all about it, as he sat talking with her at the stern of the boat, lingering till the last moment, and then stepping ashore, with as little waste of time as Lapham himself, on the gang-plank which the deck-hands had laid hold of. He touched his hat to her from the wharf to reassure her of his escape from being carried away with her, and the next moment his smiling face hid itself in the crowd.

He walked on smiling up the long wharf, encumbered with trucks and hacks and piles of freight, and, taking his way through the deserted business streets beyond this bustle, made a point of passing the door of Lapham’s warehouse, on the jambs of which his name and paint were lettered in black on a square ground of white. The door was still open, and Corey loitered a moment before it, tempted to go upstairs and fetch away some foreign letters which he had left on his desk, and which he thought he might finish up at home. He was in love with his work, and he felt the enthusiasm for it which nothing but the work we can do well inspires in us. He believed that he had found his place in the world, after a good deal of looking, and he had the relief, the repose, of fitting into it. Every little incident of the momentous, uneventful day was a pleasure in his mind, from his sitting down at his desk, to which Lapham’s boy brought him the foreign letters, till his rising from it an hour ago. Lapham had been in view within his own office, but he had given Corey no formal reception, and had, in fact, not spoken to him till toward the end of the forenoon, when he suddenly came out of his den with some more letters in his hand, and after a brief “How d’ye do?” had spoken a few words about them, and left them with him. He was in his shirt-sleeves again, and his sanguine person seemed to radiate the heat with which he suffered. He did not go out to lunch, but had it brought to him in his office, where Corey saw him eating it before he left his own desk to go out and perch on a swinging seat before the long counter of a down-town restaurant. He observed that all the others lunched at twelve, and he resolved to anticipate his usual hour. When he returned, the pretty girl who had been clicking away at a type-writer all the morning was neatly putting out of sight the evidences of pie from the table where her machine stood, and was preparing to go on with her copying. In his office Lapham lay asleep in his arm-chair, with a newspaper over his face.

Now, while Corey lingered at the entrance to the stairway, these two came down the stairs together, and he heard Lapham saying, “Well, then, you better get a divorce.”

He looked red and excited, and the girl’s face, which she veiled at sight of Corey, showed traces of tears. She slipped round him into the street.

But Lapham stopped, and said, with the show of no feeling but surprise: “Hello, Corey! Did you want to go up?”

“Yes; there were some letters I hadn’t quite got through with.”

“You’ll find Dennis up there. But I guess you better let them go till to-morrow. I always make it a rule to stop work when I’m done.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” said Corey, yielding.

“Come along down as far as the boat with me. There’s a little matter I want to talk over with you.”

It was a business matter, and related to Corey’s proposed connection with the house.

The next day the head book-keeper, who lunched at the long counter of the same restaurant with Corey, began to talk with him about Lapham. Walker had not apparently got his place by seniority; though with his forehead, bald far up toward the crown, and his round smooth face, one might have taken him for a plump elder, if he had not looked equally like a robust infant. The thick drabbish yellow moustache was what arrested decision in either direction, and the prompt vigour of all his movements was that of a young man of thirty, which was really Walker’s age. He knew, of course, who Corey was, and he had waited for a man who might look down on him socially to make the overtures toward something more than business acquaintance; but, these made, he was readily responsive, and drew freely on his philosophy of Lapham and his affairs.

“I think about the only difference between people in this world is that some know what they want, and some don’t. Well, now,” said Walker, beating the bottom of his salt-box to make the salt come out, “the old man knows what he wants every time. And generally he gets it. Yes, sir, he generally gets it. He knows what he’s about, but I’ll be blessed if the rest of us do half the time. Anyway, we don’t till he’s ready to let us. You take my position in most business houses. It’s confidential. The head book-keeper knows right along pretty much everything the house has got in hand. I’ll give you my word I don’t. He may open up to you a little more in your department, but, as far as the rest of us go, he don’t open up any more than an oyster on a hot brick. They say he had a partner once; I guess he’s dead. I wouldn’t like to be the old man’s partner. Well, you see, this paint of his is like his heart’s blood. Better not try to joke him about it. I’ve seen people come in occasionally and try it. They didn’t get much fun out of it.”

While he talked, Walker was plucking up morsels from his plate, tearing off pieces of French bread from the long loaf, and feeding them into his mouth in an impersonal way, as if he were firing up an engine.

“I suppose he thinks,” suggested Corey, “that if he doesn’t tell, nobody else will.”

Walker took a draught of beer from his glass, and wiped the foam from his moustache.

“Oh, but he carries it too far! It’s a weakness with him. He’s just so about everything. Look at the way he keeps it up about that type-writer girl of his. You’d think she was some princess travelling incognito. There isn’t one of us knows who she is, or where she came from, or who she belongs to. He brought her and her machine into the office one morning, and set ’em down at a table, and that’s all there is about it, as far as we’re concerned. It’s pretty hard on the girl, for I guess she’d like to talk; and to any one that didn’t know the old man — —” Walker broke off and drained his glass of what was left in it.

Corey thought of the words he had overheard from Lapham to the girl. But he said, “She seems to be kept pretty busy.”

“Oh yes,” said Walker; “there ain’t much loafing round the place, in any of the departments, from the old man’s down. That’s just what I say. He’s got to work just twice as hard, if he wants to keep everything in his own mind. But he ain’t afraid of work. That’s one good thing about him. And Miss Dewey has to keep step with the rest of us. But she don’t look like one that would take to it naturally. Such a pretty girl as that generally thinks she does enough when she looks her prettiest.”

“She’s a pretty girl,” said Corey, non-committally. “But I suppose a great many pretty girls have to earn their living.”

“Don’t any of ’em like to do it,” returned the book-keeper. “They think it’s a hardship, and I don’t blame ‘em. They have got a right to get married, and they ought to have the chance. And Miss Dewey’s smart, too. She’s as bright as a biscuit. I guess she’s had trouble. I shouldn’t be much more than half surprised if Miss Dewey wasn’t Miss Dewey, or hadn’t always been. Yes, sir,” continued the book-keeper, who prolonged the talk as they walked back to Lapham’s warehouse together, “I don’t know exactly what it is, — it isn’t any one thing in particular, — but I should say that girl had been married. I wouldn’t speak so freely to any of the rest, Mr. Corey, — I want you to understand that, — and it isn’t any of my business, anyway; but that’s my opinion.”

Corey made no reply, as he walked beside the book-keeper, who continued —

“It’s curious what a difference marriage makes in people. Now, I know that I don’t look any more like a bachelor of my age than I do like the man in the moon, and yet I couldn’t say where the difference came in, to save me. And it’s just so with a woman. The minute you catch sight of her face, there’s something in it that tells you whether she’s married or not. What do you suppose it is?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Corey, willing to laugh away the topic. “And from what I read occasionally of some people who go about repeating their happiness, I shouldn’t say that the intangible evidences were always unmistakable.”

“Oh, of course,” admitted Walker, easily surrendering his position. “All signs fail in dry weather. Hello! What’s that?” He caught Corey by the arm, and they both stopped.

At a corner, half a block ahead of them, the summer noon solitude of the place was broken by a bit of drama. A man and woman issued from the intersecting street, and at the moment of coming into sight the man, who looked like a sailor, caught the woman by the arm, as if to detain her. A brief struggle ensued, the woman trying to free herself, and the man half coaxing, half scolding. The spectators could now see that he was drunk; but before they could decide whether it was a case for their interference or not, the woman suddenly set both hands against the man’s breast and gave him a quick push. He lost his footing and tumbled into a heap in the gutter. The woman faltered an instant, as if to see whether he was seriously hurt, and then turned and ran.

When Corey and the book-keeper re-entered the office, Miss Dewey had finished her lunch, and was putting a sheet of paper into her type-writer. She looked up at them with her eyes of turquoise blue, under her low white forehead, with the hair neatly rippled over it, and then began to beat the keys of her machine.

IX.

LAPHAM had the pride which comes of self-making, and he would not openly lower his crest to the young fellow he had taken into his business. He was going to be obviously master in his own place to every one; and during the hours of business he did nothing to distinguish Corey from the half-dozen other clerks and book-keepers in the outer office, but he was not silent about the fact that Bromfield Corey’s son had taken a fancy to come to him. “Did you notice that fellow at the desk facing my type-writer girl? Well, sir, that’s the son of Bromfield Corey — old Phillips Corey’s grandson. And I’ll say this for him, that there isn’t a man in the office that looks after his work better. There isn’t anything he’s too good for. He’s right here at nine every morning, before the clock gets in the word. I guess it’s his grandfather coming out in him. He’s got charge of the foreign correspondence. We’re pushing the paint everywhere.” He flattered himself that he did not lug the matter in. He had been warned against that by his wife, but he had the right to do Corey justice, and his brag took the form of illustration. “Talk about training for business — I tell you it’s all in the man himself! I used to believe in what old Horace Greeley said about college graduates being the poorest kind of horned cattle; but I’ve changed my mind a little. You take that fellow Corey. He’s been through Harvard, and he’s had about every advantage that a fellow could have. Been everywhere, and talks half a dozen languages like English. I suppose he’s got money enough to live without lifting a hand, any more than his father does; son of Bromfield Corey, you know. But the thing was in him. He’s a natural-born business man; and I’ve had many a fellow with me that had come up out of the street, and worked hard all his life, without ever losing his original opposition to the thing. But Corey likes it. I believe the fellow would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don’t know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old Phillips Corey; it often skips a generation, you know. But what I say is, a thing has got to be born in a man; and if it ain’t born in him, all the privations in the world won’t put it there, and if it is, all the college training won’t take it out.”

Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table, to a guest whom he had brought to Nantasket for the night. Then he suffered exposure and ridicule at the hands of his wife, when opportunity offered. She would not let him bring Corey down to Nantasket at all.

“No, indeed!” she said. “I am not going to have them think we’re running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of doing it for himself.”

“Who wants him to see Irene?” retorted the Colonel angrily.

“I do,” said Mrs. Lapham. “And I want him to see her without any of your connivance, Silas. I’m not going to have it said that I put my girls at anybody. Why don’t you invite some of your other clerks?”

“He ain’t just like the other clerks. He’s going to take charge of a part of the business. It’s quite another thing.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. “Then you ARE going to take a partner.”

“I shall ask him down if I choose!” returned the Colonel, disdaining her insinuation.

His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.

“But you won’t choose when you’ve thought it over, Si.” Then she applied an emollient to his chafed surface. “Don’t you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I’m not going to have you do anything that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he’s going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don’t, all the plotting and planning in the world isn’t going to make him.”

“Who’s plotting?” again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a milliner’s bill.

“Oh, not you!” exulted his wife. “I understand what you want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office.”

The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the Mill-dam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly have helped feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics; and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon Street, it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bow-window on a trestle, and looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on up-stairs to find her mother, and Corey pulled up another trestle which he found in the back part of the room. The first floorings had been laid throughout the house, and the partitions had been lathed so that one could realise the shape of the interior.

“I suppose you will sit at this window a good deal,” said the young man.

“Yes, I think it will be very nice. There’s so much more going on than there is in the Square.”

“It must be very interesting to you to see the house grow.”

“It is. Only it doesn’t seem to grow so fast as I expected.”

“Why, I’m amazed at the progress your carpenter has made every time I come.”

The girl looked down, and then lifting her eyes she said, with a sort of timorous appeal —

“I’ve been reading that book since you were down at Nantasket.”

“Book?” repeated Corey, while she reddened with disappointment. “Oh yes. Middlemarch. Did you like it?”

“I haven’t got through with it yet. Pen has finished it.”

“What does she think of it?”

“Oh, I think she likes it very well. I haven’t heard her talk about it much. Do you like it?”

“Yes; I liked it immensely. But it’s several years since I read it.”

“I didn’t know it was so old. It’s just got into the Seaside Library,” she urged, with a little sense of injury in her tone.

“Oh, it hasn’t been out such a very great while,” said Corey politely. “It came a little before DANIEL DERONDA.”

The girl was again silent. She followed the curl of a shaving on the floor with the point of her parasol.

“Do you like that Rosamond Vincy?” she asked, without looking up.

Corey smiled in his kind way.

“I didn’t suppose she was expected to have any friends. I can’t say I liked her. But I don’t think I disliked her so much as the author does. She’s pretty hard on her good-looking” — he was going to say girls, but as if that might have been rather personal, he said— “people.”

“Yes, that’s what Pen says. She says she doesn’t give her any chance to be good. She says she should have been just as bad as Rosamond if she had been in her place.”

The young man laughed. “Your sister is very satirical, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know,” said Irene, still intent upon the convolutions of the shaving. “She keeps us laughing. Papa thinks there’s nobody that can talk like her.” She gave the shaving a little toss from her, and took the parasol up across her lap. The unworldliness of the Lapham girls did not extend to their dress; Irene’s costume was very stylish, and she governed her head and shoulders stylishly. “We are going to have the back room upstairs for a music-room and library,” she said abruptly.

“Yes?” returned Corey. “I should think that would be charming.”

“We expected to have book-cases, but the architect wants to build the shelves in.”

The fact seemed to be referred to Corey for his comment.

“It seems to me that would be the best way. They’ll look like part of the room then. You can make them low, and hang your pictures above them.”

“Yes, that’s what he said.” The girl looked out of the window in adding, “I presume with nice bindings it will look very well.”

“Oh, nothing furnishes a room like books.”

“No. There will have to be a good many of them.”

“That depends upon the size of your room and the number of your shelves.”

“Oh, of course! I presume,” said Irene, thoughtfully, “we shall have to have Gibbon.”

“If you want to read him,” said Corey, with a laugh of sympathy for an imaginable joke.

“We had a great deal about him at school. I believe we had one of his books. Mine’s lost, but Pen will remember.”

The young man looked at her, and then said, seriously, “You’ll want Greene, of course, and Motley, and Parkman.”

“Yes. What kind of writers are they?”

“They’re historians too.”

“Oh yes; I remember now. That’s what Gibbon was. Is it Gibbon or Gibbons?”

The young man decided the point with apparently superfluous delicacy. “Gibbon, I think.”

“There used to be so many of them,” said Irene gaily. “I used to get them mixed up with each other, and I couldn’t tell them from the poets. Should you want to have poetry?”

“Yes; I suppose some edition of the English poets.”

“We don’t any of us like poetry. Do you like it?”

“I’m afraid I don’t very much,” Corey owned. “But, of course, there was a time when Tennyson was a great deal more to me than he is now.”

“We had something about him at school too. I think I remember the name. I think we ought to have ALL the American poets.”

“Well, not all. Five or six of the best: you want Longfellow and Bryant and Whittier and Holmes and Emerson and Lowell.”

The girl listened attentively, as if making mental note of the names.

“And Shakespeare,” she added. “Don’t you like Shakespeare’s plays?”

“Oh yes, very much.”

“I used to be perfectly crazy about his plays. Don’t you think ‘Hamlet’ is splendid? We had ever so much about Shakespeare. Weren’t you perfectly astonished when you found out how many other plays of his there were? I always thought there was nothing but ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Macbeth’ and ‘Richard III.’ and ‘King Lear,’ and that one that Robeson and Crane have — oh yes! ‘Comedy of Errors.’”

“Those are the ones they usually play,” said Corey.

“I presume we shall have to have Scott’s works,” said Irene, returning to the question of books.

“Oh yes.”

“One of the girls used to think he was GREAT. She was always talking about Scott.” Irene made a pretty little amiably contemptuous mouth. “He isn’t American, though?” she suggested.

“No,” said Corey; “he’s Scotch, I believe.”

Irene passed her glove over her forehead. “I always get him mixed up with Cooper. Well, papa has got to get them. If we have a library, we have got to have books in it. Pen says it’s perfectly ridiculous having one. But papa thinks whatever the architect says is right. He fought him hard enough at first. I don’t see how any one can keep the poets and the historians and novelists separate in their mind. Of course papa will buy them if we say so. But I don’t see how I’m ever going to tell him which ones.” The joyous light faded out of her face and left it pensive.

“Why, if you like,” said the young man, taking out his pencil, “I’ll put down the names we’ve been talking about.”

He clapped himself on his breast pockets to detect some lurking scrap of paper.

“Will you?” she cried delightedly. “Here! take one of my cards,” and she pulled out her card-case. “The carpenter writes on a three-cornered block and puts it into his pocket, and it’s so uncomfortable he can’t help remembering it. Pen says she’s going to adopt the three-cornered-block plan with papa.”

“Thank you,” said Corey. “I believe I’ll use your card.” He crossed over to her, and after a moment sat down on the trestle beside her. She looked over the card as he wrote. “Those are the ones we mentioned, but perhaps I’d better add a few others.”

“Oh, thank you,” she said, when he had written the card full on both sides. “He has got to get them in the nicest binding, too. I shall tell him about their helping to furnish the room, and then he can’t object.” She remained with the card, looking at it rather wistfully.

Perhaps Corey divined her trouble of mind. “If he will take that to any bookseller, and tell him what bindings he wants, he will fill the order for him.”

“Oh, thank you very much,” she said, and put the card back into her card-case with great apparent relief. Then she turned her lovely face toward the young man, beaming with the triumph a woman feels in any bit of successful manoeuvring, and began to talk with recovered gaiety of other things, as if, having got rid of a matter annoying out of all proportion to its importance, she was now going to indemnify herself.

Corey did not return to his own trestle. She found another shaving within reach of her parasol, and began poking that with it, and trying to follow it through its folds. Corey watched her a while.

“You seem to have a great passion for playing with shavings,” he said. “Is it a new one?”

“New what?”

“Passion.”

“I don’t know,” she said, dropping her eyelids, and keeping on with her effort. She looked shyly aslant at him. “Perhaps you don’t approve of playing with shavings?”

“Oh yes, I do. I admire it very much. But it seems rather difficult. I’ve a great ambition to put my foot on the shaving’s tail and hold it for you.”

“Well,” said the girl.

“Thank you,” said the young man. He did so, and now she ran her parasol point easily through it. They looked at each other and laughed. “That was wonderful. Would you like to try another?” he asked.

“No, I thank you,” she replied. “I think one will do.”

They both laughed again, for whatever reason or no reason, and then the young girl became sober. To a girl everything a young man does is of significance; and if he holds a shaving down with his foot while she pokes through it with her parasol, she must ask herself what he means by it.

“They seem to be having rather a long interview with the carpenter to-day,” said Irene, looking vaguely toward the ceiling. She turned with polite ceremony to Corey. “I’m afraid you’re letting them keep you. You mustn’t.”

“Oh no. You’re letting me stay,” he returned.

She bridled and bit her lip for pleasure. “I presume they will be down before a great while. Don’t you like the smell of the wood and the mortar? It’s so fresh.”

“Yes, it’s delicious.” He bent forward and picked up from the floor the shaving with which they had been playing, and put it to his nose. “It’s like a flower. May I offer it to you?” he asked, as if it had been one.

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” She took it from him and put it into her belt, and then they both laughed once more.

Steps were heard descending. When the elder people reached the floor where they were sitting, Corey rose and presently took his leave.

“What makes you so solemn, ‘Rene?” asked Mrs. Lapham.

“Solemn?” echoed the girl. “I’m not a BIT solemn. What CAN you mean?”

Corey dined at home that evening, and as he sat looking across the table at his father, he said, “I wonder what the average literature of non-cultivated people is.”

“Ah,” said the elder, “I suspect the average is pretty low even with cultivated people. You don’t read a great many books yourself, Tom.”

“No, I don’t,” the young man confessed. “I read more books when I was with Stanton, last winter, than I had since I was a boy. But I read them because I must — there was nothing else to do. It wasn’t because I was fond of reading. Still I think I read with some sense of literature and the difference between authors. I don’t suppose that people generally do that; I have met people who had read books without troubling themselves to find out even the author’s name, much less trying to decide upon his quality. I suppose that’s the way the vast majority of people read.”

“Yes. If authors were not almost necessarily recluses, and ignorant of the ignorance about them, I don’t see how they could endure it. Of course they are fated to be overwhelmed by oblivion at last, poor fellows; but to see it weltering all round them while they are in the very act of achieving immortality must be tremendously discouraging. I don’t suppose that we who have the habit of reading, and at least a nodding acquaintance with literature, can imagine the bestial darkness of the great mass of people — even people whose houses are rich and whose linen is purple and fine. But occasionally we get glimpses of it. I suppose you found the latest publications lying all about in Lapham cottage when you were down there?”

Young Corey laughed. “It wasn’t exactly cumbered with them.”

“No?”

“To tell the truth, I don’t suppose they ever buy books. The young ladies get novels that they hear talked of out of the circulating library.”

“Had they knowledge enough to be ashamed of their ignorance?”

“Yes, in certain ways — to a certain degree.”

“It’s a curious thing, this thing we call civilisation,” said the elder musingly. “We think it is an affair of epochs and of nations. It’s really an affair of individuals. One brother will be civilised and the other a barbarian. I’ve occasionally met young girls who were so brutally, insolently, wilfully indifferent to the arts which make civilisation that they ought to have been clothed in the skins of wild beasts and gone about barefoot with clubs over their shoulders. Yet they were of polite origin, and their parents were at least respectful of the things that these young animals despised.”

“I don’t think that is exactly the case with the Lapham family,” said the son, smiling. “The father and mother rather apologised about not getting time to read, and the young ladies by no means scorned it.”

“They are quite advanced!”

“They are going to have a library in their Beacon Street house.”

“Oh, poor things! How are they ever going to get the books together?”

“Well, sir,” said the son, colouring a little, “I have been indirectly applied to for help.”

“You, Tom!” His father dropped back in his chair and laughed.

“I recommended the standard authors,” said the son.

“Oh, I never supposed your PRUDENCE would be at fault, Tom!”

“But seriously,” said the young man, generously smiling in sympathy with his father’s enjoyment, “they’re not unintelligent people. They are very quick, and they are shrewd and sensible.”

“I have no doubt that some of the Sioux are so. But that is not saying that they are civilised. All civilisation comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilisation by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise. Once we were softened, if not polished, by religion; but I suspect that the pulpit counts for much less now in civilising.”

“They’re enormous devourers of newspapers, and theatre-goers; and they go a great deal to lectures. The Colonel prefers them with the stereopticon.”

“They might get a something in that way,” said the elder thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose one must take those things into account — especially the newspapers and the lectures. I doubt if the theatre is a factor in civilisation among us. I dare say it doesn’t deprave a great deal, but from what I’ve seen of it I should say that it was intellectually degrading. Perhaps they might get some sort of lift from it; I don’t know. Tom!” he added, after a moment’s reflection. “I really think I ought to see this patron of yours. Don’t you think it would be rather decent in me to make his acquaintance?”

“Well, if you have the fancy, sir,” said the young man. “But there’s no sort of obligation. Colonel Lapham would be the last man in the world to want to give our relation any sort of social character. The meeting will come about in the natural course of things.”

“Ah, I didn’t intend to propose anything immediate,” said the father. “One can’t do anything in the summer, and I should prefer your mother’s superintendence. Still, I can’t rid myself of the idea of a dinner. It appears to me that there ought to be a dinner.”

“Oh, pray don’t feel that there’s any necessity.”

“Well,” said the elder, with easy resignation, “there’s at least no hurry.”

“There is one thing I don’t like,” said Lapham, in the course of one of those talks which came up between his wife and himself concerning Corey, “or at least I don’t understand it; and that’s the way his father behaves. I don’t want to force myself on any man; but it seems to me pretty queer the way he holds off. I should think he would take enough interest in his son to want to know something about his business. What is he afraid of?” demanded Lapham angrily. “Does he think I’m going to jump at a chance to get in with him, if he gives me one? He’s mightily mistaken if he does. I don’t want to know him.”

“Silas,” said his wife, making a wife’s free version of her husband’s words, and replying to their spirit rather than their letter, “I hope you never said a word to Mr. Corey to let him know the way you feel.”

“I never mentioned his father to him!” roared the Colonel. “That’s the way I feel about it!”

“Because it would spoil everything. I wouldn’t have them think we cared the least thing in the world for their acquaintance. We shouldn’t be a bit better off. We don’t know the same people they do, and we don’t care for the same kind of things.”

Lapham was breathless with resentment of his wife’s implication. “Don’t I tell you,” he gasped, “that I don’t want to know them? Who began it? They’re friends of yours if they’re anybody’s.”

“They’re distant acquaintances of mine,” returned Mrs. Lapham quietly; “and this young Corey is a clerk of yours. And I want we should hold ourselves so that when they get ready to make the advances we can meet them half-way or not, just as we choose.”

“That’s what grinds me,” cried her husband. “Why should we wait for them to make the advances? Why shouldn’t we make ‘em? Are they any better than we are? My note of hand would be worth ten times what Bromfield Corey’s is on the street to-day. And I made MY money. I haven’t loafed my life away.”

“Oh, it isn’t what you’ve got, and it isn’t what you’ve done exactly. It’s what you are.”

“Well, then, what’s the difference?”

“None that really amounts to anything, or that need give you any trouble, if you don’t think of it. But he’s been all his life in society, and he knows just what to say and what to do, and he can talk about the things that society people like to talk about, and you — can’t.”

Lapham gave a furious snort. “And does that make him any better?”

“No. But it puts him where he can make the advances without demeaning himself, and it puts you where you can’t. Now, look here, Silas Lapham! You understand this thing as well as I do. You know that I appreciate you, and that I’d sooner die than have you humble yourself to a living soul. But I’m not going to have you coming to me, and pretending that you can meet Bromfield Corey as an equal on his own ground. You can’t. He’s got a better education than you, and if he hasn’t got more brains than you, he’s got different. And he and his wife, and their fathers and grandfathers before ‘em, have always had a high position, and you can’t help it. If you want to know them, you’ve got to let them make the advances. If you don’t, all well and good.”

“I guess,” said the chafed and vanquished Colonel, after a moment for swallowing the pill, “that they’d have been in a pretty fix if you’d waited to let them make the advances last summer.”

“That was a different thing altogether. I didn’t know who they were, or may be I should have waited. But all I say now is that if you’ve got young Corey into business with you, in hopes of our getting into society with his father, you better ship him at once. For I ain’t going to have it on that basis.”

“Who wants to have it on that basis?” retorted her husband.

“Nobody, if you don’t,” said Mrs. Lapham tranquilly.

Irene had come home with the shaving in her belt, unnoticed by her father, and unquestioned by her mother. But her sister saw it at once, and asked her what she was doing with it.

“Oh, nothing,” said Irene, with a joyful smile of self-betrayal, taking the shaving carefully out, and laying it among the laces and ribbons in her drawer.

“Hadn’t you better put it in water, ‘Rene? It’ll be all wilted by morning,” said Pen.

“You mean thing!” cried the happy girl. “It isn’t a flower!”

“Oh, I thought it was a whole bouquet. Who gave it to you?”

“I shan’t tell you,” said Irene saucily.

“Oh, well, never mind. Did you know Mr. Corey had been down here this afternoon, walking on the beach with me?”

“He wasn’t — he wasn’t at all! He was at the house with ME. There! I’ve caught you fairly.”

“Is that so?” drawled Penelope. “Then I never could guess who gave you that precious shaving.”

“No, you couldn’t!” said Irene, flushing beautifully. “And you may guess, and you may guess, and you may guess!” With her lovely eyes she coaxed her sister to keep on teasing her, and Penelope continued the comedy with the patience that women have for such things.

“Well, I’m not going to try, if it’s no use. But I didn’t know it had got to be the fashion to give shavings instead of flowers. But there’s some sense in it. They can be used for kindlings when they get old, and you can’t do anything with old flowers. Perhaps he’ll get to sending ’em by the barrel.”

Irene laughed for pleasure in this tormenting. “O Pen, I want to tell you how it all happened.”

“Oh, he DID give it to you, then? Well, I guess I don’t care to hear.”

“You shall, and you’ve got to!” Irene ran and caught her sister, who feigned to be going out of the room, and pushed her into a chair. “There, now!” She pulled up another chair, and hemmed her in with it. “He came over, and sat down on the trestle alongside of me — —”

“What? As close as you are to me now?”

“You wretch! I will GIVE it to you! No, at a proper distance. And here was this shaving on the floor, that I’d been poking with my parasol — —”

“To hide your embarrassment.”

“Pshaw! I wasn’t a bit embarrassed. I was just as much at my ease! And then he asked me to let him hold the shaving down with his foot, while I went on with my poking. And I said yes he might — —”

“What a bold girl! You said he might hold a shaving down for you?”

“And then — and then — —” continued Irene, lifting her eyes absently, and losing herself in the beatific recollection, “and then —— Oh yes! Then I asked him if he didn’t like the smell of pine shavings. And then he picked it up, and said it smelt like a flower. And then he asked if he might offer it to me — just for a joke, you know. And I took it, and stuck it in my belt. And we had such a laugh! We got into a regular gale. And O Pen, what do you suppose he meant by it?” She suddenly caught herself to her sister’s breast, and hid her burning face on her shoulder.

“Well, there used to be a book about the language of flowers. But I never knew much about the language of shavings, and I can’t say exactly — —”

“Oh, don’t — DON’T, Pen!” and here Irene gave over laughing, and began to sob in her sister’s arms.

“Why, ‘Rene!” cried the elder girl.

“You KNOW he didn’t mean anything. He doesn’t care a bit about me. He hates me! He despises me! Oh, what shall I do?”

A trouble passed over the face of the sister as she silently comforted the child in her arms; then the drolling light came back into her eyes. “Well, ‘Rene, YOU haven’t got to do ANYthing. That’s one advantage girls have got — if it IS an advantage. I’m not always sure.”

Irene’s tears turned to laughing again. When she lifted her head it was to look into the mirror confronting them, where her beauty showed all the more brilliant for the shower that had passed over it. She seemed to gather courage from the sight.

“It must be awful to have to DO,” she said, smiling into her own face. “I don’t see how they ever can.”

“Some of ’em can’t — especially when there’s such a tearing beauty around.”

“Oh, pshaw, Pen! you know that isn’t so. You’ve got a real pretty mouth, Pen,” she added thoughtfully, surveying the feature in the glass, and then pouting her own lips for the sake of that effect on them.

“It’s a useful mouth,” Penelope admitted; “I don’t believe I could get along without it now, I’ve had it so long.”

“It’s got such a funny expression — just the mate of the look in your eyes; as if you were just going to say something ridiculous. He said, the very first time he saw you, that he knew you were humorous.”

“Is it possible? It must be so, if the Grand Mogul said it. Why didn’t you tell me so before, and not let me keep on going round just like a common person?”

Irene laughed as if she liked to have her sister take his praises in that way rather than another.

“I’ve got such a stiff, prim kind of mouth,” she said, drawing it down, and then looking anxiously at it.

“I hope you didn’t put on that expression when he offered you the shaving. If you did, I don’t believe he’ll ever give you another splinter.”

The severe mouth broke into a lovely laugh, and then pressed itself in a kiss against Penelope’s cheek.

“There! Be done, you silly thing! I’m not going to have you accepting ME before I’ve offered myself, ANYWAY.” She freed herself from her sister’s embrace, and ran from her round the room.

Irene pursued her, in the need of hiding her face against her shoulder again. “O Pen! O Pen!” she cried.

The next day, at the first moment of finding herself alone with her eldest daughter, Mrs. Lapham asked, as if knowing that Penelope must have already made it subject of inquiry: “What was Irene doing with that shaving in her belt yesterday?”

“Oh, just some nonsense of hers with Mr. Corey. He gave it to her at the new house.” Penelope did not choose to look up and meet her mother’s grave glance.

“What do you think he meant by it?”

Penelope repeated Irene’s account of the affair, and her mother listened without seeming to derive much encouragement from it.

“He doesn’t seem like one to flirt with her,” she said at last. Then, after a thoughtful pause: “Irene is as good a girl as ever breathed, and she’s a perfect beauty. But I should hate the day when a daughter of mine was married for her beauty.”

“You’re safe as far as I’m concerned, mother.”

Mrs. Lapham smiled ruefully. “She isn’t really equal to him, Pen. I misdoubted that from the first, and it’s been borne in upon me more and more ever since. She hasn’t mind enough.”

“I didn’t know that a man fell in love with a girl’s intellect,” said Penelope quietly.

“Oh no. He hasn’t fallen in love with Irene at all. If he had, it wouldn’t matter about the intellect.”

Penelope let the self-contradiction pass.

“Perhaps he has, after all.”

“No,” said Mrs. Lapham. “She pleases him when he sees her. But he doesn’t try to see her.”

“He has no chance. You won’t let father bring him here.”

“He would find excuses to come without being brought, if he wished to come,” said the mother. “But she isn’t in his mind enough to make him. He goes away and doesn’t think anything more about her. She’s a child. She’s a good child, and I shall always say it; but she’s nothing but a child. No, she’s got to forget him.”

“Perhaps that won’t be so easy.”

“No, I presume not. And now your father has got the notion in his head, and he will move heaven and earth to bring it to pass. I can see that he’s always thinking about it.”

“The Colonel has a will of his own,” observed the girl, rocking to and fro where she sat looking at her mother.

“I wish we had never met them!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “I wish we had never thought of building! I wish he had kept away from your father’s business!”

“Well, it’s too late now, mother,” said the girl. “Perhaps it isn’t so bad as you think.”

“Well, we must stand it, anyway,” said Mrs. Lapham, with the grim antique Yankee submission.

“Oh yes, we’ve got to stand it,” said Penelope, with the quaint modern American fatalism.

X.

IT was late June, almost July, when Corey took up his life in Boston again, where the summer slips away so easily. If you go out of town early, it seems a very long summer when you come back in October; but if you stay, it passes swiftly, and, seen foreshortened in its flight, seems scarcely a month’s length. It has its days of heat, when it is very hot, but for the most part it is cool, with baths of the east wind that seem to saturate the soul with delicious freshness. Then there are stretches of grey westerly weather, when the air is full of the sentiment of early autumn, and the frying of the grasshopper in the blossomed weed of the vacant lots on the Back Bay is intershot with the carol of crickets; and the yellowing leaf on the long slope of Mt. Vernon Street smites the sauntering observer with tender melancholy. The caterpillar, gorged with the spoil of the lindens on Chestnut, and weaving his own shroud about him in his lodgment on the brick-work, records the passing of summer by mid-July; and if after that comes August, its breath is thick and short, and September is upon the sojourner before he has fairly had time to philosophise the character of the town out of season.

But it must have appeared that its most characteristic feature was the absence of everybody he knew. This was one of the things that commended Boston to Bromfield Corey during the summer; and if his son had any qualms about the life he had entered upon with such vigour, it must have been a relief to him that there was scarcely a soul left to wonder or pity. By the time people got back to town the fact of his connection with the mineral paint man would be an old story, heard afar off with different degrees of surprise, and considered with different degrees of indifference. A man has not reached the age of twenty-six in any community where he was born and reared without having had his capacity pretty well ascertained; and in Boston the analysis is conducted with an unsparing thoroughness which may fitly impress the un-Bostonian mind, darkened by the popular superstition that the Bostonians blindly admire one another. A man’s qualities are sifted as closely in Boston as they doubtless were in Florence or Athens; and, if final mercy was shown in those cities because a man was, with all his limitations, an Athenian or Florentine, some abatement might as justly be made in Boston for like reason. Corey’s powers had been gauged in college, and he had not given his world reason to think very differently of him since he came out of college. He was rated as an energetic fellow, a little indefinite in aim, with the smallest amount of inspiration that can save a man from being commonplace. If he was not commonplace, it was through nothing remarkable in his mind, which was simply clear and practical, but through some combination of qualities of the heart that made men trust him, and women call him sweet — a word of theirs which conveys otherwise indefinable excellences. Some of the more nervous and excitable said that Tom Corey was as sweet as he could live; but this perhaps meant no more than the word alone. No man ever had a son less like him than Bromfield Corey. If Tom Corey had ever said a witty thing, no one could remember it; and yet the father had never said a witty thing to a more sympathetic listener than his own son. The clear mind which produced nothing but practical results reflected everything with charming lucidity; and it must have been this which endeared Tom Corey to every one who spoke ten words with him. In a city where people have good reason for liking to shine, a man who did not care to shine must be little short of universally acceptable without any other effort for popularity; and those who admired and enjoyed Bromfield Corey loved his son. Yet, when it came to accounting for Tom Corey, as it often did in a community where every one’s generation is known to the remotest degrees of cousinship, they could not trace his sweetness to his mother, for neither Anna Bellingham nor any of her family, though they were so many blocks of Wenham ice for purity and rectangularity, had ever had any such savour; and, in fact, it was to his father, whose habit of talk wronged it in himself, that they had to turn for this quality of the son’s. They traced to the mother the traits of practicality and common-sense in which he bordered upon the commonplace, and which, when they had dwelt upon them, made him seem hardly worth the close inquiry they had given him.

While the summer wore away he came and went methodically about his business, as if it had been the business of his life, sharing his father’s bachelor liberty and solitude, and expecting with equal patience the return of his mother and sisters in the autumn. Once or twice he found time to run down to Mt. Desert and see them; and then he heard how the Philadelphia and New York people were getting in everywhere, and was given reason to regret the house at Nahant which he had urged to be sold. He came back and applied himself to his desk with a devotion that was exemplary rather than necessary; for Lapham made no difficulty about the brief absences which he asked, and set no term to the apprenticeship that Corey was serving in the office before setting off upon that mission to South America in the early winter, for which no date had yet been fixed.

The summer was a dull season for the paint as well as for everything else. Till things should brisk up, as Lapham said, in the fall, he was letting the new house take a great deal of his time. Aesthetic ideas had never been intelligibly presented to him before, and he found a delight in apprehending them that was very grateful to his imaginative architect. At the beginning, the architect had foreboded a series of mortifying defeats and disastrous victories in his encounters with his client; but he had never had a client who could be more reasonably led on from one outlay to another. It appeared that Lapham required but to understand or feel the beautiful effect intended, and he was ready to pay for it. His bull-headed pride was concerned in a thing which the architect made him see, and then he believed that he had seen it himself, perhaps conceived it. In some measure the architect seemed to share his delusion, and freely said that Lapham was very suggestive. Together they blocked out windows here, and bricked them up there; they changed doors and passages; pulled down cornices and replaced them with others of different design; experimented with costly devices of decoration, and went to extravagant lengths in novelties of finish. Mrs. Lapham, beginning with a woman’s adventurousness in the unknown region, took fright at the reckless outlay at last, and refused to let her husband pass a certain limit. He tried to make her believe that a far-seeing economy dictated the expense; and that if he put the money into the house, he could get it out any time by selling it. She would not be persuaded.

“I don’t want you should sell it. And you’ve put more money into it now than you’ll ever get out again, unless you can find as big a goose to buy it, and that isn’t likely. No, sir! You just stop at a hundred thousand, and don’t you let him get you a cent beyond. Why, you’re perfectly bewitched with that fellow! You’ve lost your head, Silas Lapham, and if you don’t look out you’ll lose your money too.”

The Colonel laughed; he liked her to talk that way, and promised he would hold up a while.

“But there’s no call to feel anxious, Pert. It’s only a question what to do with the money. I can reinvest it; but I never had so much of it to spend before.”

“Spend it, then,” said his wife; “don’t throw it away! And how came you to have so much more money than you know what to do with, Silas Lapham?” she added.

“Oh, I’ve made a very good thing in stocks lately.”

“In stocks? When did you take up gambling for a living?”

“Gambling? Stuff! What gambling? Who said it was gambling?”

“You have; many a time.”

“Oh yes, buying and selling on a margin. But this was a bona fide transaction. I bought at forty-three for an investment, and I sold at a hundred and seven; and the money passed both times.”

“Well, you better let stocks alone,” said his wife, with the conservatism of her sex. “Next time you’ll buy at a hundred and seven and sell at forty three. Then where’ll you be?”

“Left,” admitted the Colonel.

“You better stick to paint a while yet.” The Colonel enjoyed this too, and laughed again with the ease of a man who knows what he is about. A few days after that he came down to Nantasket with the radiant air which he wore when he had done a good thing in business and wanted his wife’s sympathy. He did not say anything of what had happened till he was alone with her in their own room; but he was very gay the whole evening, and made several jokes which Penelope said nothing but very great prosperity could excuse: they all understood these moods of his.

“Well, what is it, Silas?” asked his wife when the time came. “Any more big-bugs wanting to go into the mineral paint business with you?”

“Something better than that.”

“I could think of a good many better things,” said his wife, with a sigh of latent bitterness. “What’s this one?”

“I’ve had a visitor.”

“Who?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“I don’t want to try. Who was it?”

“Rogers.”

Mrs. Lapham sat down with her hands in her lap, and stared at the smile on her husband’s face, where he sat facing her.

“I guess you wouldn’t want to joke on that subject, Si,” she said, a little hoarsely, “and you wouldn’t grin about it unless you had some good news. I don’t know what the miracle is, but if you could tell quick — —”

She stopped like one who can say no more.

“I will, Persis,” said her husband, and with that awed tone in which he rarely spoke of anything but the virtues of his paint. “He came to borrow money of me, and I lent him it. That’s the short of it. The long — —”

“Go on,” said his wife, with gentle patience.

“Well, Pert, I was never so much astonished in my life as I was to see that man come into my office. You might have knocked me down with — I don’t know what.”

“I don’t wonder. Go on!”

“And he was as much embarrassed as I was. There we stood, gaping at each other, and I hadn’t hardly sense enough to ask him to take a chair. I don’t know just how we got at it. And I don’t remember just how it was that he said he came to come to me. But he had got hold of a patent right that he wanted to go into on a large scale, and there he was wanting me to supply him the funds.”

“Go on!” said Mrs. Lapham, with her voice further in her throat.

“I never felt the way you did about Rogers, but I know how you always did feel, and I guess I surprised him with my answer. He had brought along a lot of stock as security — —”

“You didn’t take it, Silas!” his wife flashed out.

“Yes, I did, though,” said Lapham. “You wait. We settled our business, and then we went into the old thing, from the very start. And we talked it all over. And when we got through we shook hands. Well, I don’t know when it’s done me so much good to shake hands with anybody.”

“And you told him — you owned up to him that you were in the wrong, Silas?”

“No, I didn’t,” returned the Colonel promptly; “for I wasn’t. And before we got through, I guess he saw it the same as I did.”

“Oh, no matter! so you had the chance to show how you felt.”

“But I never felt that way,” persisted the Colonel. “I’ve lent him the money, and I’ve kept his stocks. And he got what he wanted out of me.”

“Give him back his stocks!”

“No, I shan’t. Rogers came to borrow. He didn’t come to beg. You needn’t be troubled about his stocks. They’re going to come up in time; but just now they’re so low down that no bank would take them as security, and I’ve got to hold them till they do rise. I hope you’re satisfied now, Persis,” said her husband; and he looked at her with the willingness to receive the reward of a good action which we all feel when we have performed one. “I lent him the money you kept me from spending on the house.”

“Truly, Si? Well, I’m satisfied,” said Mrs. Lapham, with a deep tremulous breath. “The Lord has been good to you, Silas,” she continued solemnly. “You may laugh if you choose, and I don’t know as I believe in his interfering a great deal; but I believe he’s interfered this time; and I tell you, Silas, it ain’t always he gives people a chance to make it up to others in this life. I’ve been afraid you’d die, Silas, before you got the chance; but he’s let you live to make it up to Rogers.”

“I’m glad to be let live,” said Lapham stubbornly, “but I hadn’t anything to make up to Milton K. Rogers. And if God has let me live for that — —”

“Oh, say what you please, Si! Say what you please, now you’ve done it! I shan’t stop you. You’ve taken the one spot — the one SPECK — off you that was ever there, and I’m satisfied.”

“There wa’n’t ever any speck there,” Lapham held out, lapsing more and more into his vernacular; “and what I done I done for you, Persis.”

“And I thank you for your own soul’s sake, Silas.”

“I guess my soul’s all right,” said Lapham.

“And I want you should promise me one thing more.”

“Thought you said you were satisfied?”

“I am. But I want you should promise me this: that you won’t let anything tempt you — anything! — to ever trouble Rogers for that money you lent him. No matter what happens — no matter if you lose it all. Do you promise?”

“Why, I don’t ever EXPECT to press him for it. That’s what I said to myself when I lent it. And of course I’m glad to have that old trouble healed up. I don’t THINK I ever did Rogers any wrong, and I never did think so; but if I DID do it — IF I did — I’m willing to call it square, if I never see a cent of my money back again.”

“Well, that’s all,” said his wife.

They did not celebrate his reconciliation with his old enemy — for such they had always felt him to be since he ceased to be an ally — by any show of joy or affection. It was not in their tradition, as stoical for the woman as for the man, that they should kiss or embrace each other at such a moment. She was content to have told him that he had done his duty, and he was content with her saying that. But before she slept she found words to add that she always feared the selfish part he had acted toward Rogers had weakened him, and left him less able to overcome any temptation that might beset him; and that was one reason why she could never be easy about it. Now she should never fear for him again.

This time he did not explicitly deny her forgiving impeachment. “Well, it’s all past and gone now, anyway; and I don’t want you should think anything more about it.”

He was man enough to take advantage of the high favour in which he stood when he went up to town, and to abuse it by bringing Corey down to supper. His wife could not help condoning the sin of disobedience in him at such a time. Penelope said that between the admiration she felt for the Colonel’s boldness and her mother’s forbearance, she was hardly in a state to entertain company that evening; but she did what she could.

Irene liked being talked to better than talking, and when her sister was by she was always, tacitly or explicitly, referring to her for confirmation of what she said. She was content to sit and look pretty as she looked at the young man and listened to her sister’s drolling. She laughed and kept glancing at Corey to make sure that he was understanding her. When they went out on the veranda to see the moon on the water, Penelope led the way and Irene followed.

They did not look at the moonlight long. The young man perched on the rail of the veranda, and Irene took one of the red-painted rocking-chairs where she could conveniently look at him and at her sister, who sat leaning forward lazily and running on, as the phrase is. That low, crooning note of hers was delicious; her face, glimpsed now and then in the moonlight as she turned it or lifted it a little, had a fascination which kept his eye. Her talk was very unliterary, and its effect seemed hardly conscious. She was far from epigram in her funning. She told of this trifle and that; she sketched the characters and looks of people who had interested her, and nothing seemed to have escaped her notice; she mimicked a little, but not much; she suggested, and then the affair represented itself as if without her agency. She did not laugh; when Corey stopped she made a soft cluck in her throat, as if she liked his being amused, and went on again.

The Colonel, left alone with his wife for the first time since he had come from town, made haste to take the word. “Well, Pert, I’ve arranged the whole thing with Rogers, and I hope you’ll be satisfied to know that he owes me twenty thousand dollars, and that I’ve got security from him to the amount of a fourth of that, if I was to force his stocks to a sale.”

“How came he to come down with you?” asked Mrs. Lapham.

“Who? Rogers?”

“Mr. Corey.”

“Corey? Oh!” said Lapham, affecting not to have thought she could mean Corey. “He proposed it.”

“Likely!” jeered his wife, but with perfect amiability.

“It’s so,” protested the Colonel. “We got talking about a matter just before I left, and he walked down to the boat with me; and then he said if I didn’t mind he guessed he’d come along down and go back on the return boat. Of course I couldn’t let him do that.”

“It’s well for you you couldn’t.”

“And I couldn’t do less than bring him here to tea.”

“Oh, certainly not.”

“But he ain’t going to stay the night — unless,” faltered Lapham, “you want him to.”

“Oh, of course, I want him to! I guess he’ll stay, probably.”

“Well, you know how crowded that last boat always is, and he can’t get any other now.”

Mrs. Lapham laughed at the simple wile. “I hope you’ll be just as well satisfied, Si, if it turns out he doesn’t want Irene after all.”

“Pshaw, Persis! What are you always bringing that up for?” pleaded the Colonel. Then he fell silent, and presently his rude, strong face was clouded with an unconscious frown.

“There!” cried his wife, startling him from his abstraction. “I see how you’d feel; and I hope that you’ll remember who you’ve got to blame.”

“I’ll risk it,” said Lapham, with the confidence of a man used to success.

From the veranda the sound of Penelope’s lazy tone came through the closed windows, with joyous laughter from Irene and peals from Corey.

“Listen to that!” said her father within, swelling up with inexpressible satisfaction. “That girl can talk for twenty, right straight along. She’s better than a circus any day. I wonder what she’s up to now.”

“Oh, she’s probably getting off some of those yarns of hers, or telling about some people. She can’t step out of the house without coming back with more things to talk about than most folks would bring back from Japan. There ain’t a ridiculous person she’s ever seen but what she’s got something from them to make you laugh at; and I don’t believe we’ve ever had anybody in the house since the girl could talk that she hain’t got some saying from, or some trick that’ll paint ’em out so’t you can see ’em and hear ‘em. Sometimes I want to stop her; but when she gets into one of her gales there ain’t any standing up against her. I guess it’s lucky for Irene that she’s got Pen there to help entertain her company. I can’t ever feel down where Pen is.”

“That’s so,” said the Colonel. “And I guess she’s got about as much culture as any of them. Don’t you?”

“She reads a great deal,” admitted her mother. “She seems to be at it the whole while. I don’t want she should injure her health, and sometimes I feel like snatchin’ the books away from her. I don’t know as it’s good for a girl to read so much, anyway, especially novels. I don’t want she should get notions.”

“Oh, I guess Pen’ll know how to take care of herself,” said Lapham.

“She’s got sense enough. But she ain’t so practical as Irene. She’s more up in the clouds — more of what you may call a dreamer. Irene’s wide-awake every minute; and I declare, any one to see these two together when there’s anything to be done, or any lead to be taken, would say Irene was the oldest, nine times out of ten. It’s only when they get to talking that you can see Pen’s got twice as much brains.”

“Well,” said Lapham, tacitly granting this point, and leaning back in his chair in supreme content. “Did you ever see much nicer girls anywhere?”

His wife laughed at his pride. “I presume they’re as much swans as anybody’s geese.”

“No; but honestly, now!”

“Oh, they’ll do; but don’t you be silly, if you can help it, Si.”

The young people came in, and Corey said it was time for his boat. Mrs. Lapham pressed him to stay, but he persisted, and he would not let the Colonel send him to the boat; he said he would rather walk. Outside, he pushed along toward the boat, which presently he could see lying at her landing in the bay, across the sandy tract to the left of the hotels. From time to time he almost stopped in his rapid walk, as a man does whose mind is in a pleasant tumult; and then he went forward at a swifter pace. “She’s charming!” he said, and he thought he had spoken aloud. He found himself floundering about in the deep sand, wide of the path; he got back to it, and reached the boat just before she started. The clerk came to take his fare, and Corey looked radiantly up at him in his lantern-light, with a smile that he must have been wearing a long time; his cheek was stiff with it. Once some people who stood near him edged suddenly and fearfully away, and then he suspected himself of having laughed outright.

XI.

COREY put off his set smile with the help of a frown, of which he first became aware after reaching home, when his father asked —

“Anything gone wrong with your department of the fine arts to-day, Tom?”

“Oh no — no, sir,” said the son, instantly relieving his brows from the strain upon them, and beaming again. “But I was thinking whether you were not perhaps right in your impression that it might be well for you to make Colonel Lapham’s acquaintance before a great while.”

“Has he been suggesting it in any way?” asked Bromfield Corey, laying aside his book and taking his lean knee between his clasped hands.

“Oh, not at all!” the young man hastened to reply. “I was merely thinking whether it might not begin to seem intentional, your not doing it.”

“Well, Tom, you know I have been leaving it altogether to you — —”

“Oh, I understand, of course, and I didn’t mean to urge anything of the kind — —”

“You are so very much more of a Bostonian than I am, you know, that I’ve been waiting your motion in entire confidence that you would know just what to do, and when to do it. If I had been left quite to my own lawless impulses, I think I should have called upon your padrone at once. It seems to me that my father would have found some way of showing that he expected as much as that from people placed in the relation to him that we hold to Colonel Lapham.”

“Do you think so?” asked the young man.

“Yes. But you know I don’t pretend to be an authority in such matters. As far as they go, I am always in the hands of your mother and you children.”

“I’m very sorry, sir. I had no idea I was over-ruling your judgment. I only wanted to spare you a formality that didn’t seem quite a necessity yet. I’m very sorry,” he said again, and this time with more comprehensive regret. “I shouldn’t like to have seemed remiss with a man who has been so considerate of me. They are all very good-natured.”

“I dare say,” said Bromfield Corey, with the satisfaction which no elder can help feeling in disabling the judgment of a younger man, “that it won’t be too late if I go down to your office with you to-morrow.”

“No, no. I didn’t imagine your doing it at once, sir.”

“Ah, but nothing can prevent me from doing a thing when once I take the bit in my teeth,” said the father, with the pleasure which men of weak will sometimes take in recognising their weakness. “How does their new house get on?”

“I believe they expect to be in it before New Year.”

“Will they be a great addition to society?” asked Bromfield Corey, with unimpeachable seriousness.

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” returned the son, a little uneasily.

“Ah, I see that you do, Tom.”

“No one can help feeling that they are all people of good sense and — right ideas.”

“Oh, that won’t do. If society took in all the people of right ideas and good sense, it would expand beyond the calling capacity of its most active members. Even your mother’s social conscientiousness could not compass it. Society is a very different sort of thing from good sense and right ideas. It is based upon them, of course, but the airy, graceful, winning superstructure which we all know demands different qualities. Have your friends got these qualities, — which may be felt, but not defined?”

The son laughed. “To tell you the truth, sir, I don’t think they have the most elemental ideas of society, as we understand it. I don’t believe Mrs. Lapham ever gave a dinner.”

“And with all that money!” sighed the father.

“I don’t believe they have the habit of wine at table. I suspect that when they don’t drink tea and coffee with their dinner, they drink ice-water.”

“Horrible!” said Bromfield Corey.

“It appears to me that this defines them.”

“Oh yes. There are people who give dinners, and who are not cognoscible. But people who have never yet given a dinner, how is society to assimilate them?”

“It digests a great many people,” suggested the young man.

“Yes; but they have always brought some sort of sauce piquante with them. Now, as I understand you, these friends of yours have no such sauce.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that!” cried the son.

“Oh, rude, native flavours, I dare say. But that isn’t what I mean. Well, then, they must spend. There is no other way for them to win their way to general regard. We must have the Colonel elected to the Ten O’clock Club, and he must put himself down in the list of those willing to entertain. Any one can manage a large supper. Yes, I see a gleam of hope for him in that direction.”

In the morning Bromfield Corey asked his son whether he should find Lapham at his place as early as eleven.

“I think you might find him even earlier. I’ve never been there before him. I doubt if the porter is there much sooner.”

“Well, suppose I go with you, then?”

“Why, if you like, sir,” said the son, with some deprecation.

“Oh, the question is, will HE like?”

“I think he will, sir;” and the father could see that his son was very much pleased.

Lapham was rending an impatient course through the morning’s news when they appeared at the door of his inner room. He looked up from the newspaper spread on the desk before him, and then he stood up, making an indifferent feint of not knowing that he knew Bromfield Corey by sight.

“Good morning, Colonel Lapham,” said the son, and Lapham waited for him to say further, “I wish to introduce my father.” Then he answered, “Good morning,” and added rather sternly for the elder Corey, “How do you do, sir? Will you take a chair?” and he pushed him one.

They shook hands and sat down, and Lapham said to his subordinate, “Have a seat;” but young Corey remained standing, watching them in their observance of each other with an amusement which was a little uneasy. Lapham made his visitor speak first by waiting for him to do so.

“I’m glad to make your acquaintance, Colonel Lapham, and I ought to have come sooner to do so. My father in your place would have expected it of a man in my place at once, I believe. But I can’t feel myself altogether a stranger as it is. I hope Mrs. Lapham is well? And your daughter?”

“Thank you,” said Lapham, “they’re quite well.”

“They were very kind to my wife — —”

“Oh, that was nothing!” cried Lapham. “There’s nothing Mrs. Lapham likes better than a chance of that sort. Mrs. Corey and the young ladies well?”

“Very well, when I heard from them. They’re out of town.”

“Yes, so I understood,” said Lapham, with a nod toward the son. “I believe Mr. Corey, here, told Mrs. Lapham.” He leaned back in his chair, stiffly resolute to show that he was not incommoded by the exchange of these civilities.

“Yes,” said Bromfield Corey. “Tom has had the pleasure which I hope for of seeing you all. I hope you’re able to make him useful to you here?” Corey looked round Lapham’s room vaguely, and then out at the clerks in their railed enclosure, where his eye finally rested on an extremely pretty girl, who was operating a type-writer.

“Well, sir,” replied Lapham, softening for the first time with this approach to business, “I guess it will be our own fault if we don’t. By the way, Corey,” he added, to the younger man, as he gathered up some letters from his desk, “here’s something in your line. Spanish or French, I guess.”

“I’ll run them over,” said Corey, taking them to his desk.

His father made an offer to rise.

“Don’t go,” said Lapham, gesturing him down again. “I just wanted to get him away a minute. I don’t care to say it to his face, — I don’t like the principle, — but since you ask me about it, I’d just as lief say that I’ve never had any young man take hold here equal to your son. I don’t know as you care.”

“You make me very happy,” said Bromfield Corey. “Very happy indeed. I’ve always had the idea that there was something in my son, if he could only find the way to work it out. And he seems to have gone into your business for the love of it.”

“He went to work in the right way, sir! He told me about it. He looked into it. And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into.”

“Oh yes. You might think he had invented it, if you heard him celebrating it.”

“Is that so?” demanded Lapham, pleased through and through. “Well, there ain’t any other way. You’ve got to believe in a thing before you can put any heart in it. Why, I had a partner in this thing once, along back just after the war, and he used to be always wanting to tinker with something else. ‘Why,’ says I, ‘you’ve got the best thing in God’s universe now. Why ain’t you satisfied?’ I had to get rid of him at last. I stuck to my paint, and that fellow’s drifted round pretty much all over the whole country, whittling his capital down all the while, till here the other day I had to lend him some money to start him new. No, sir, you’ve got to believe in a thing. And I believe in your son. And I don’t mind telling you that, so far as he’s gone, he’s a success.”

“That’s very kind of you.”

“No kindness about it. As I was saying the other day to a friend of mine, I’ve had many a fellow right out of the street that had to work hard all his life, and didn’t begin to take hold like this son of yours.”

Lapham expanded with profound self-satisfaction. As he probably conceived it, he had succeeded in praising, in a perfectly casual way, the supreme excellence of his paint, and his own sagacity and benevolence; and here he was sitting face to face with Bromfield Corey, praising his son to him, and receiving his grateful acknowledgments as if he were the father of some office-boy whom Lapham had given a place half but of charity.

“Yes, sir, when your son proposed to take hold here, I didn’t have much faith in his ideas, that’s the truth. But I had faith in him, and I saw that he meant business from the start. I could see it was born in him. Any one could.”

“I’m afraid he didn’t inherit it directly from me,” said Bromfield Corey; “but it’s in the blood, on both sides.”

“Well, sir, we can’t help those things,” said Lapham compassionately. “Some of us have got it, and some of us haven’t. The idea is to make the most of what we HAVE got.”

“Oh yes; that is the idea. By all means.”

“And you can’t ever tell what’s in you till you try. Why, when I started this thing, I didn’t more than half understand my own strength. I wouldn’t have said, looking back, that I could have stood the wear and tear of what I’ve been through. But I developed as I went along. It’s just like exercising your muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as much after you’ve been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it’s going to be just so with your son. His going through college won’t hurt him, — he’ll soon slough all that off, — and his bringing up won’t; don’t be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn’t ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will get along.”

“Thank you,” said Bromfield Corey, and smiled — whether because his spirit was safe in the humility he sometimes boasted, or because it was triply armed in pride against anything the Colonel’s kindness could do.

“He’ll get along. He’s a good business man, and he’s a fine fellow. MUST you go?” asked Lapham, as Bromfield Corey now rose more resolutely. “Well, glad to see you. It was natural you should want to come and see what he was about, and I’m glad you did. I should have felt just so about it. Here is some of our stuff,” he said, pointing out the various packages in his office, including the Persis Brand.

“Ah, that’s very nice, very nice indeed,” said his visitor. “That colour through the jar — very rich — delicious. Is Persis Brand a name?”

Lapham blushed.

“Well, Persis is. I don’t know as you saw an interview that fellow published in the Events a while back?”

“What is the Events?”

“Well, it’s that new paper Witherby’s started.”

“No,” said Bromfield Corey, “I haven’t seen it. I read The Daily,” he explained; by which he meant The Daily Advertiser, the only daily there is in the old-fashioned Bostonian sense.

“He put a lot of stuff in my mouth that I never said,” resumed Lapham; “but that’s neither here nor there, so long as you haven’t seen it. Here’s the department your son’s in,” and he showed him the foreign labels. Then he took him out into the warehouse to see the large packages. At the head of the stairs, where his guest stopped to nod to his son and say “Good-bye, Tom,” Lapham insisted upon going down to the lower door with him “Well, call again,” he said in hospitable dismissal. “I shall always be glad to see you. There ain’t a great deal doing at this season.” Bromfield Corey thanked him, and let his hand remain perforce in Lapham’s lingering grasp. “If you ever like to ride after a good horse — —” the Colonel began.

“Oh, no, no, no; thank you! The better the horse, the more I should be scared. Tom has told me of your driving!”

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the Colonel. “Well! every one to his taste. Well, good morning, sir!” and he suffered him to go.

“Who is the old man blowing to this morning?” asked Walker, the book-keeper, making an errand to Corey’s desk.

“My father.”

“Oh! That your father? I thought he must be one of your Italian correspondents that you’d been showing round, or Spanish.”

In fact, as Bromfield Corey found his way at his leisurely pace up through the streets on which the prosperity of his native city was founded, hardly any figure could have looked more alien to its life. He glanced up and down the facades and through the crooked vistas like a stranger, and the swarthy fruiterer of whom he bought an apple, apparently for the pleasure of holding it in his hand, was not surprised that the purchase should be transacted in his own tongue.

Lapham walked back through the outer office to his own room without looking at Corey, and during the day he spoke to him only of business matters. That must have been his way of letting Corey see that he was not overcome by the honour of his father’s visit. But he presented himself at Nantasket with the event so perceptibly on his mind that his wife asked: “Well, Silas, has Rogers been borrowing any more money of you? I don’t want you should let that thing go too far. You’ve done enough.”

“You needn’t be afraid. I’ve seen the last of Rogers for one while.” He hesitated, to give the fact an effect of no importance. “Corey’s father called this morning.”

“Did he?” said Mrs. Lapham, willing to humour his feint of indifference. “Did HE want to borrow some money too?”

“Not as I understood.” Lapham was smoking at great ease, and his wife had some crocheting on the other side of the lamp from him.

The girls were on the piazza looking at the moon on the water again. “There’s no man in it to-night,” Penelope said, and Irene laughed forlornly.

“What DID he want, then?” asked Mrs. Lapham.

“Oh, I don’t know. Seemed to be just a friendly call. Said he ought to have come before.”

Mrs. Lapham was silent a while. Then she said: “Well, I hope you’re satisfied now.”

Lapham rejected the sympathy too openly offered. “I don’t know about being satisfied. I wa’n’t in any hurry to see him.”

His wife permitted him this pretence also. “What sort of a person is he, anyway?”

“Well, not much like his son. There’s no sort of business about him. I don’t know just how you’d describe him. He’s tall; and he’s got white hair and a moustache; and his fingers are very long and limber. I couldn’t help noticing them as he sat there with his hands on the top of his cane. Didn’t seem to be dressed very much, and acted just like anybody. Didn’t talk much. Guess I did most of the talking. Said he was glad I seemed to be getting along so well with his son. He asked after you and Irene; and he said he couldn’t feel just like a stranger. Said you had been very kind to his wife. Of course I turned it off. Yes,” said Lapham thoughtfully, with his hands resting on his knees, and his cigar between the fingers of his left hand, “I guess he meant to do the right thing, every way. Don’t know as I ever saw a much pleasanter man. Dunno but what he’s about the pleasantest man I ever did see.” He was not letting his wife see in his averted face the struggle that revealed itself there — the struggle of stalwart achievement not to feel flattered at the notice of sterile elegance, not to be sneakingly glad of its amiability, but to stand up and look at it with eyes on the same level. God, who made us so much like himself, but out of the dust, alone knows when that struggle will end. The time had been when Lapham could not have imagined any worldly splendour which his dollars could not buy if he chose to spend them for it; but his wife’s half discoveries, taking form again in his ignorance of the world, filled him with helpless misgiving. A cloudy vision of something unpurchasable, where he had supposed there was nothing, had cowed him in spite of the burly resistance of his pride.

“I don’t see why he shouldn’t be pleasant,” said Mrs. Lapham. “He’s never done anything else.”

Lapham looked up consciously, with an uneasy laugh. “Pshaw, Persis! you never forget anything?”

“Oh, I’ve got more than that to remember. I suppose you asked him to ride after the mare?”

“Well,” said Lapham, reddening guiltily, “he said he was afraid of a good horse.”

“Then, of course, you hadn’t asked him.” Mrs. Lapham crocheted in silence, and her husband leaned back in his chair and smoked.

At last he said, “I’m going to push that house forward. They’re loafing on it. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be in it by Thanksgiving. I don’t believe in moving in the dead of winter.”

“We can wait till spring. We’re very comfortable in the old place,” answered his wife. Then she broke out on him: “What are you in such a hurry to get into that house for? Do you want to invite the Coreys to a house-warming?”

Lapham looked at her without speaking.

“Don’t you suppose I can see through you I declare, Silas Lapham, if I didn’t know different, I should say you were about the biggest fool! Don’t you know ANYthing? Don’t you know that it wouldn’t do to ask those people to our house before they’ve asked us to theirs? They’d laugh in our faces!”

“I don’t believe they’d laugh in our faces. What’s the difference between our asking them and their asking us?” demanded the Colonel sulkily.

“Oh, well! If you don t see!”

“Well, I DON’T see. But I don’t want to ask them to the house. I suppose, if I want to, I can invite him down to a fish dinner at Taft’s.”

Mrs. Lapham fell back in her chair, and let her work drop in her lap with that “Tckk!” in which her sex knows how to express utter contempt and despair.

“What’s the matter?”

“Well, if you DO such a thing, Silas, I’ll never speak to you again! It’s no USE! It’s NO use! I did think, after you’d behaved so well about Rogers, I might trust you a little. But I see I can’t. I presume as long as you live you’ll have to be nosed about like a perfect — I don’t know what!”

“What are you making such a fuss about?” demanded Lapham, terribly crestfallen, but trying to pluck up a spirit. “I haven’t done anything yet. I can’t ask your advice about anything any more without having you fly out. Confound it! I shall do as I please after this.”

But as if he could not endure that contemptuous atmosphere, he got up, and his wife heard him in the dining-room pouring himself out a glass of ice-water, and then heard him mount the stairs to their room, and slam its door after him.

“Do you know what your father’s wanting to do now?” Mrs. Lapham asked her eldest daughter, who lounged into the parlour a moment with her wrap stringing from her arm, while the younger went straight to bed. “He wants to invite Mr. Corey’s father to a fish dinner at Taft’s!”

Penelope was yawning with her hand on her mouth; she stopped, and, with a laugh of amused expectance, sank into a chair, her shoulders shrugged forward.

“Why! what in the world has put the Colonel up to that?”

“Put him up to it! There’s that fellow, who ought have come to see him long ago, drops into his office this morning, and talks five minutes with him, and your father is flattered out of his five senses. He’s crazy to get in with those people, and I shall have a perfect battle to keep him within bounds.”

“Well, Persis, ma’am, you can’t say but what you began it,” said Penelope.

“Oh yes, I began it,” confessed Mrs. Lapham. “Pen,” she broke out, “what do you suppose he means by it?”

“Who? Mr. Corey’s father? What does the Colonel think?”

“Oh, the Colonel!” cried Mrs. Lapham. She added tremulously: “Perhaps he IS right. He DID seem to take a fancy to her last summer, and now if he’s called in that way . . .” She left her daughter to distribute the pronouns aright, and resumed: “Of course, I should have said once that there wasn’t any question about it. I should have said so last year; and I don’t know what it is keeps me from saying so now. I suppose I know a little more about things than I did; and your father’s being so bent on it sets me all in a twitter. He thinks his money can do everything. Well, I don’t say but what it can, a good many. And ‘Rene is as good a child as ever there was; and I don’t see but what she’s pretty-appearing enough to suit any one. She’s pretty-behaved, too; and she IS the most capable girl. I presume young men don’t care very much for such things nowadays; but there ain’t a great many girls can go right into the kitchen, and make such a custard as she did yesterday. And look at the way she does, through the whole house! She can’t seem to go into a room without the things fly right into their places. And if she had to do it to-morrow, she could make all her own dresses a great deal better than them we pay to do it. I don’t say but what he’s about as nice a fellow as ever stepped. But there! I’m ashamed of going on so.”

“Well, mother,” said the girl after a pause, in which she looked as if a little weary of the subject, “why do you worry about it? If it’s to be it’ll be, and if it isn’t — —”

“Yes, that’s what I tell your father. But when it comes to myself, I see how hard it is for him to rest quiet. I’m afraid we shall all do something we’ll repent of afterwards.”

“Well, ma’am,” said Penelope, “I don’t intend to do anything wrong; but if I do, I promise not to be sorry for it. I’ll go that far. And I think I wouldn’t be sorry for it beforehand, if I were in your place, mother. Let the Colonel go on! He likes to manoeuvre, and he isn’t going to hurt any one. The Corey family can take care of themselves, I guess.”

She laughed in her throat, drawing down the corners of her mouth, and enjoying the resolution with which her mother tried to fling off the burden of her anxieties. “Pen! I believe you’re right. You always do see things in such a light! There! I don’t care if he brings him down every day.”

“Well, ma’am,” said Pen, “I don’t believe ‘Rene would, either. She’s just so indifferent!”

The Colonel slept badly that night, and in the morning Mrs. Lapham came to breakfast without him.

“Your father ain’t well,” she reported. “He’s had one of his turns.”

“I should have thought he had two or three of them,” said Penelope, “by the stamping round I heard. Isn’t he coming to breakfast?”

“Not just yet,” said her mother. “He’s asleep, and he’ll be all right if he gets his nap out. I don’t want you girls should make any great noise.”

“Oh, we’ll be quiet enough,” returned Penelope. “Well, I’m glad the Colonel isn’t sojering. At first I thought he might be sojering.” She broke into a laugh, and, struggling indolently with it, looked at her sister. “You don’t think it’ll be necessary for anybody to come down from the office and take orders from him while he’s laid up, do you, mother?” she inquired.

“Pen!” cried Irene.

“He’ll be well enough to go up on the ten o’clock boat,” said the mother sharply.

“I think papa works too hard all through the summer. Why don’t you make him take a rest, mamma?” asked Irene.

“Oh, take a rest! The man slaves harder every year. It used to be so that he’d take a little time off now and then; but I declare, he hardly ever seems to breathe now away from his office. And this year he says he doesn’t intend to go down to Lapham, except to see after the works for a few days. I don’t know what to do with the man any more! Seems as if the more money he got, the more he wanted to get. It scares me to think what would happen to him if he lost it. I know one thing,” concluded Mrs. Lapham. “He shall not go back to the office to-day.”

“Then he won’t go up on the ten o’clock boat,” Pen reminded her.

“No, he won’t. You can just drive over to the hotel as soon as you’re through, girls, and telegraph that he’s not well, and won’t be at the office till to-morrow. I’m not going to have them send anybody down here to bother him.”

“That’s a blow,” said Pen. “I didn’t know but they might send — —” she looked demurely at her sister— “Dennis!”

“Mamma!” cried Irene.

“Well, I declare, there’s no living with this family any more,” said Penelope.

“There, Pen, be done!” commanded her mother. But perhaps she did not intend to forbid her teasing. It gave a pleasant sort of reality to the affair that was in her mind, and made what she wished appear not only possible but probable.

Lapham got up and lounged about, fretting and rebelling as each boat departed without him, through the day; before night he became very cross, in spite of the efforts of the family to soothe him, and grumbled that he had been kept from going up to town. “I might as well have gone as not,” he repeated, till his wife lost her patience.

“Well, you shall go to-morrow, Silas, if you have to be carried to the boat.”

“I declare,” said Penelope, “the Colonel don’t pet worth a cent.”

The six o’clock boat brought Corey. The girls were sitting on the piazza, and Irene saw him first.

“O Pen!” she whispered, with her heart in her face; and Penelope had no time for mockery before he was at the steps.

“I hope Colonel Lapham isn’t ill,” he said, and they could hear their mother engaged in a moral contest with their father indoors.

“Go and put on your coat! I say you shall! It don’t matter HOW he sees you at the office, shirt-sleeves or not. You’re in a gentleman’s house now — or you ought to be — and you shan’t see company in your dressing-gown.”

Penelope hurried in to subdue her mother’s anger.

“Oh, he’s very much better, thank you!” said Irene, speaking up loudly to drown the noise of the controversy.

“I’m glad of that,” said Corey, and when she led him indoors the vanquished Colonel met his visitor in a double-breasted frock-coat, which he was still buttoning up. He could not persuade himself at once that Corey had not come upon some urgent business matter, and when he was clear that he had come out of civility, surprise mingled with his gratification that he should be the object of solicitude to the young man. In Lapham’s circle of acquaintance they complained when they were sick, but they made no womanish inquiries after one another’s health, and certainly paid no visits of sympathy till matters were serious. He would have enlarged upon the particulars of his indisposition if he had been allowed to do so; and after tea, which Corey took with them, he would have remained to entertain him if his wife had not sent him to bed. She followed him to see that he took some medicine she had prescribed for him, but she went first to Penelope’s room, where she found the girl with a book in her hand, which she was not reading.

“You better go down,” said the mother. “I’ve got to go to your father, and Irene is all alone with Mr. Corey; and I know she’ll be on pins and needles without you there to help make it go off.”

“She’d better try to get along without me, mother,” said Penelope soberly. “I can’t always be with them.”

“Well,” replied Mrs. Lapham, “then I must. There’ll be a perfect Quaker meeting down there.”

“Oh, I guess ‘Rene will find something to say if you leave her to herself. Or if she don’t, HE must. It’ll be all right for you to go down when you get ready; but I shan’t go till toward the last. If he’s coming here to see Irene — and I don’t believe he’s come on father’s account — he wants to see her and not me. If she can’t interest him alone, perhaps he’d as well find it out now as any time. At any rate, I guess you’d better make the experiment. You’ll know whether it’s a success if he comes again.”

“Well,” said the mother, “may be you’re right. I’ll go down directly. It does seem as if he did mean something, after all.”

Mrs. Lapham did not hasten to return to her guest. In her own girlhood it was supposed that if a young man seemed to be coming to see a girl, it was only common-sense to suppose that he wished to see her alone; and her life in town had left Mrs. Lapham’s simple traditions in this respect unchanged. She did with her daughter as her mother would have done with her.

Where Penelope sat with her book, she heard the continuous murmur of voices below, and after a long interval she heard her mother descend. She did not read the open book that lay in her lap, though she kept her eyes fast on the print. Once she rose and almost shut the door, so that she could scarcely hear; then she opened it wide again with a self-disdainful air, and resolutely went back to her book, which again she did not read. But she remained in her room till it was nearly time for Corey to return to his boat.

When they were alone again, Irene made a feint of scolding her for leaving her to entertain Mr. Corey.

“Why! didn’t you have a pleasant call?” asked Penelope.

Irene threw her arms round her. “Oh, it was a SPLENDID call! I didn’t suppose I could make it go off so well. We talked nearly the whole time about you!”

“I don’t think THAT was a very interesting subject.”

“He kept asking about you. He asked everything. You don’t know how much he thinks of you, Pen. O Pen! what do you think made him come? Do you think he really did come to see how papa was?” Irene buried her face in her sister’s neck.

Penelope stood with her arms at her side, submitting. “Well,” she said, “I don’t think he did, altogether.”

Irene, all glowing, released her. “Don’t you — don’t you REALLY? O Pen! don’t you think he IS nice? Don’t you think he’s handsome? Don’t you think I behaved horridly when we first met him this evening, not thanking him for coming? I know he thinks I’ve no manners. But it seemed as if it would be thanking him for coming to see me. Ought I to have asked him to come again, when he said good-night? I didn’t; I couldn’t. Do you believe he’ll think I don’t want him to? You don’t believe he would keep coming if he didn’t — want to — —”

“He hasn’t kept coming a great deal, yet,” suggested Penelope.

“No; I know he hasn’t. But if he — if he should?”

“Then I should think he wanted to.”

“Oh, would you — WOULD you? Oh, how good you always are, Pen! And you always say what you think. I wish there was some one coming to see you too. That’s all that I don’t like about it. Perhaps —— He was telling about his friend there in Texas — —”

“Well,” said Penelope, “his friend couldn’t call often from Texas. You needn’t ask Mr. Corey to trouble about me, ‘Rene. I think I can manage to worry along, if you’re satisfied.”

“Oh, I AM, Pen. When do you suppose he’ll come again?” Irene pushed some of Penelope’s things aside on the dressing-case, to rest her elbow and talk at ease. Penelope came up and put them back.

“Well, not to-night,” she said; “and if that’s what you’re sitting up for — —”

Irene caught her round the neck again, and ran out of the room.

The Colonel was packed off on the eight o’clock boat the next morning; but his recovery did not prevent Corey from repeating his visit in a week. This time Irene came radiantly up to Penelope’s room, where she had again withdrawn herself. “You must come down, Pen,” she said. “He’s asked if you’re not well, and mamma says you’ve got to come.”

After that Penelope helped Irene through with her calls, and talked them over with her far into the night after Corey was gone. But when the impatient curiosity of her mother pressed her for some opinion of the affair, she said, “You know as much as I do, mother.”

“Don’t he ever say anything to you about her — praise her up, any?”

“He’s never mentioned Irene to me.”

“He hasn’t to me, either,” said Mrs. Lapham, with a sigh of trouble. “Then what makes him keep coming?”

“I can’t tell you. One thing, he says there isn’t a house open in Boston where he’s acquainted. Wait till some of his friends get back, and then if he keeps coming, it’ll be time to inquire.”

“Well!” said the mother; but as the weeks passed she was less and less able to attribute Corey’s visits to his loneliness in town, and turned to her husband for comfort.

“Silas, I don’t know as we ought to let young Corey keep coming so. I don’t quite like it, with all his family away.”

“He’s of age,” said the Colonel. “He can go where he pleases. It don’t matter whether his family’s here or not.”

“Yes, but if they don’t want he should come? Should you feel just right about letting him?”

“How’re you going to stop him? I swear, Persis, I don’t know what’s got over you! What is it? You didn’t use to be so. But to hear you talk, you’d think those Coreys were too good for this world, and we wa’n’t fit for ’em to walk on.”

“I’m not going to have ’em say we took an advantage of their being away and tolled him on.”

“I should like to HEAR ’em say it!” cried Lapham. “Or anybody!”

“Well,” said his wife, relinquishing this point of anxiety, “I can’t make out whether he cares anything for her or not. And Pen can’t tell either; or else she won’t.”

“Oh, I guess he cares for her, fast enough,” said the Colonel.

“I can’t make out that he’s said or done the first thing to show it.”

“Well, I was better than a year getting my courage up.”

“Oh, that was different,” said Mrs. Lapham, in contemptuous dismissal of the comparison, and yet with a certain fondness. “I guess, if he cared for her, a fellow in his position wouldn’t be long getting up his courage to speak to Irene.”

Lapham brought his fist down on the table between them.

“Look here, Persis! Once for all, now, don’t you ever let me hear you say anything like that again! I’m worth nigh on to a million, and I’ve made it every cent myself; and my girls are the equals of anybody, I don’t care who it is. He ain’t the fellow to take on any airs; but if he ever tries it with me, I’ll send him to the right about mighty quick. I’ll have a talk with him, if — —”

“No, no; don’t do that!” implored his wife. “I didn’t mean anything. I don’t know as I meant ANYthing. He’s just as unassuming as he can be, and I think Irene’s a match for anybody. You just let things go on. It’ll be all right. You never can tell how it is with young people. Perhaps SHE’S offish. Now you ain’t — you ain’t going to say anything?”

Lapham suffered himself to be persuaded, the more easily, no doubt, because after his explosion he must have perceived that his pride itself stood in the way of what his pride had threatened. He contented himself with his wife’s promise that she would never again present that offensive view of the case, and she did not remain without a certain support in his sturdy self-assertion.

XII.

MRS. COREY returned with her daughters in the early days of October, having passed three or four weeks at Intervale after leaving Bar Harbour. They were somewhat browner than they were when they left town in June, but they were not otherwise changed. Lily, the elder of the girls, had brought back a number of studies of kelp and toadstools, with accessory rocks and rotten logs, which she would never finish up and never show any one, knowing the slightness of their merit. Nanny, the younger, had read a great many novels with a keen sense of their inaccuracy as representations of life, and had seen a great deal of life with a sad regret for its difference from fiction. They were both nice girls, accomplished, well-dressed of course, and well enough looking; but they had met no one at the seaside or the mountains whom their taste would allow to influence their fate, and they had come home to the occupations they had left, with no hopes and no fears to distract them.

In the absence of these they were fitted to take the more vivid interest in their brother’s affairs, which they could see weighed upon their mother’s mind after the first hours of greeting.

“Oh, it seems to have been going on, and your father has never written a word about it,” she said, shaking her head.

“What good would it have done?” asked Nanny, who was little and fair, with rings of light hair that filled a bonnet-front very prettily; she looked best in a bonnet. “It would only have worried you. He could not have stopped Tom; you couldn’t, when you came home to do it.”

“I dare say papa didn’t know much about it,” suggested Lily. She was a tall, lean, dark girl, who looked as if she were not quite warm enough, and whom you always associated with wraps of different aesthetic effect after you had once seen her.

It is a serious matter always to the women of his family when a young man gives them cause to suspect that he is interested in some other woman. A son-in-law or brother-in-law does not enter the family; he need not be caressed or made anything of; but the son’s or brother’s wife has a claim upon his mother and sisters which they cannot deny. Some convention of their sex obliges them to show her affection, to like or to seem to like her, to take her to their intimacy, however odious she may be to them. With the Coreys it was something more than an affair of sentiment. They were by no means poor, and they were not dependent money-wise upon Tom Corey; but the mother had come, without knowing it, to rely upon his sense, his advice in everything, and the sisters, seeing him hitherto so indifferent to girls, had insensibly grown to regard him as altogether their own till he should be released, not by his marriage, but by theirs, an event which had not approached with the lapse of time. Some kinds of girls — they believed that they could readily have chosen a kind — might have taken him without taking him from them; but this generosity could not be hoped for in such a girl as Miss Lapham.

“Perhaps,” urged their mother, “it would not be so bad. She seemed an affectionate little thing with her mother, without a great deal of character though she was so capable about some things.”

“Oh, she’ll be an affectionate little thing with Tom too, you may be sure,” said Nanny. “And that characterless capability becomes the most in tense narrow-mindedness. She’ll think we were against her from the beginning.”

“She has no cause for that,” Lily interposed, “and we shall not give her any.”

“Yes, we shall,” retorted Nanny. “We can’t help it; and if we can’t, her own ignorance would be cause enough.”

“I can’t feel that she’s altogether ignorant,” said Mrs. Corey justly.

“Of course she can read and write,” admitted Nanny.

“I can’t imagine what he finds to talk about with her,” said Lily.

“Oh, THAT’S very simple,” returned her sister.

“They talk about themselves, with occasional references to each other. I have heard people ‘going on’ on the hotel piazzas. She’s embroidering, or knitting, or tatting, or something of that kind; and he says she seems quite devoted to needlework, and she says, yes, she has a perfect passion for it, and everybody laughs at her for it; but she can’t help it, she always was so from a child, and supposes she always shall be, — with remote and minute particulars. And she ends by saying that perhaps he does not like people to tat, or knit, or embroider, or whatever. And he says, oh, yes, he does; what could make her think such a thing? but for his part he likes boating rather better, or if you’re in the woods camping. Then she lets him take up one corner of her work, and perhaps touch her fingers; and that encourages him to say that he supposes nothing could induce her to drop her work long enough to go down on the rocks, or out among the huckleberry bushes; and she puts her head on one side, and says she doesn’t know really. And then they go, and he lies at her feet on the rocks, or picks huckleberries and drops them in her lap, and they go on talking about themselves, and comparing notes to see how they differ from each other. And — —”

“That will do, Nanny,” said her mother.

Lily smiled autumnally. “Oh, disgusting!”

“Disgusting? Not at all!” protested her sister. “It’s very amusing when you see it, and when you do it — —”

“It’s always a mystery what people see in each other,” observed Mrs. Corey severely.

“Yes,” Nanny admitted, “but I don’t know that there is much comfort for us in the application.”

“No, there isn’t,” said her mother.

“The most that we can do is to hope for the best till we know the worst. Of course we shall make the best of the worst when it comes.”

“Yes, and perhaps it would not be so very bad. I was saying to your father when I was here in July that those things can always be managed. You must face them as if they were nothing out of the way, and try not to give any cause for bitterness among ourselves.”

“That’s true. But I don’t believe in too much resignation beforehand. It amounts to concession,” said Nanny.

“Of course we should oppose it in all proper ways,” returned her mother.

Lily had ceased to discuss the matter. In virtue of her artistic temperament, she was expected not to be very practical. It was her mother and her sister who managed, submitting to the advice and consent of Corey what they intended to do.

“Your father wrote me that he had called on Colonel Lapham at his place of business,” said Mrs. Corey, seizing her first chance of approaching the subject with her son.

“Yes,” said Corey. “A dinner was father’s idea, but he came down to a call, at my suggestion.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Corey, in a tone of relief, as if the statement threw a new light on the fact that Corey had suggested the visit. “He said so little about it in his letter that I didn’t know just how it came about.”

“I thought it was right they should meet,” explained the son, “and so did father. I was glad that I suggested it, afterward; it was extremely gratifying to Colonel Lapham.”

“Oh, it was quite right in every way. I suppose you have seen something of the family during the summer.”

“Yes, a good deal. I’ve been down at Nantasket rather often.”

Mrs. Corey let her eyes droop. Then she asked: “Are they well?”

“Yes, except Lapham himself, now and then. I went down once or twice to see him. He hasn’t given himself any vacation this summer; he has such a passion for his business that I fancy he finds it hard being away from it at any time, and he’s made his new house an excuse for staying.”

“Oh yes, his house! Is it to be something fine?”

“Yes; it’s a beautiful house. Seymour is doing it.”

“Then, of course, it will be very handsome. I suppose the young ladies are very much taken up with it; and Mrs. Lapham.”

“Mrs. Lapham, yes. I don’t think the young ladies care so much about it.”

“It must be for them. Aren’t they ambitious?” asked Mrs. Corey, delicately feeling her way.

Her son thought a while. Then he answered with a smile —

“No, I don’t really think they are. They are unambitious, I should say.” Mrs. Corey permitted herself a long breath. But her son added, “It’s the parents who are ambitious for them,” and her respiration became shorter again.

“Yes,” she said.

“They’re very simple, nice girls,” pursued Corey. “I think you’ll like the elder, when you come to know her.”

When you come to know her. The words implied an expectation that the two families were to be better acquainted.

“Then she is more intellectual than her sister?” Mrs. Corey ventured.

“Intellectual?” repeated her son. “No; that isn’t the word, quite. Though she certainly has more mind.”

“The younger seemed very sensible.”

“Oh, sensible, yes. And as practical as she’s pretty. She can do all sorts of things, and likes to be doing them. Don’t you think she’s an extraordinary beauty?”

“Yes — yes, she is,” said Mrs. Corey, at some cost.

“She’s good, too,” said Corey, “and perfectly innocent and transparent. I think you will like her the better the more you know her.”

“I thought her very nice from the beginning,” said the mother heroically; and then nature asserted itself in her. “But I should be afraid that she might perhaps be a little bit tiresome at last; her range of ideas seemed so extremely limited.”

“Yes, that’s what I was afraid of. But, as a matter of fact, she isn’t. She interests you by her very limitations. You can see the working of her mind, like that of a child. She isn’t at all conscious even of her beauty.”

“I don’t believe young men can tell whether girls are conscious or not,” said Mrs. Corey. “But I am not saying the Miss Laphams are not — —” Her son sat musing, with an inattentive smile on his face. “What is it?”

“Oh! nothing. I was thinking of Miss Lapham and something she was saying. She’s very droll, you know.”

“The elder sister? Yes, you told me that. Can you see the workings of her mind too?”

“No; she’s everything that’s unexpected.” Corey fell into another reverie, and smiled again; but he did not offer to explain what amused him, and his mother would not ask.

“I don’t know what to make of his admiring the girl so frankly,” she said afterward to her husband. “That couldn’t come naturally till after he had spoken to her, and I feel sure that he hasn’t yet.”

“You women haven’t risen yet — it’s an evidence of the backwardness of your sex — to a conception of the Bismarck idea in diplomacy. If a man praises one woman, you still think he’s in love with another. Do you mean that because Tom didn’t praise the elder sister so much, he HAS spoken to HER?”

Mrs. Corey refused the consequence, saying that it did not follow. “Besides, he did praise her.”

“You ought to be glad that matters are in such good shape, then. At any rate, you can do absolutely nothing.”

“Oh! I know it,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “I wish Tom would be a little opener with me.”

“He’s as open as it’s in the nature of an American-born son to be with his parents. I dare say if you’d asked him plumply what he meant in regard to the young lady, he would have told you — if he knew.”

“Why, don’t you think he does know, Bromfield?”

“I’m not at all sure he does. You women think that because a young man dangles after a girl, or girls, he’s attached to them. It doesn’t at all follow. He dangles because he must, and doesn’t know what to do with his time, and because they seem to like it. I dare say that Tom has dangled a good deal in this instance because there was nobody else in town.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I throw out the suggestion. And it strikes me that a young lady couldn’t do better than stay in or near Boston during the summer. Most of the young men are here, kept by business through the week, with evenings available only on the spot, or a few miles off. What was the proportion of the sexes at the seashore and the mountains?”

“Oh, twenty girls at least for even an excuse of a man. It’s shameful.”

“You see, I am right in one part of my theory. Why shouldn’t I be right in the rest?”

“I wish you were. And yet I can’t say that I do. Those things are very serious with girls. I shouldn’t like Tom to have been going to see those people if he meant nothing by it.”

“And you wouldn’t like it if he did. You are difficult, my dear.” Her husband pulled an open newspaper toward him from the table.

“I feel that it wouldn’t be at all like him to do so,” said Mrs. Corey, going on to entangle herself in her words, as women often do when their ideas are perfectly clear. “Don’t go to reading, please, Bromfield! I am really worried about this matter; I must know how much it means. I can’t let it go on so. I don’t see how you can rest easy without knowing.”

“I don’t in the least know what’s going to become of me when I die; and yet I sleep well,” replied Bromfield Corey, putting his newspaper aside.

“Ah! but this is a very different thing.”

“So much more serious? Well, what can you do? We had this out when you were here in the summer, and you agreed with me then that we could do nothing. The situation hasn’t changed at all.”

“Yes, it has; it has continued the same,” said Mrs. Corey, again expressing the fact by a contradiction in terms. “I think I must ask Tom outright.”

“You know you can’t do that, my dear.”

“Then why doesn’t he tell us?”

“Ah, that’s what HE can’t do, if he’s making love to Miss Irene — that’s her name, I believe — on the American plan. He will tell us after he has told HER. That was the way I did. Don’t ignore our own youth, Anna. It was a long while ago, I’ll admit.”

“It was very different,” said Mrs. Corey, a little shaken.

“I don’t see how. I dare say Mamma Lapham knows whether Tom is in love with her daughter or not; and no doubt Papa Lapham knows it at second hand. But we shall not know it until the girl herself does. Depend upon that. Your mother knew, and she told your father; but my poor father knew nothing about it till we were engaged; and I had been hanging about — dangling, as you call it — —”

“No, no; YOU called it that.”

“Was it I? — for a year or more.”

The wife could not refuse to be a little consoled by the image of her young love which the words conjured up, however little she liked its relation to her son’s interest in Irene Lapham. She smiled pensively. “Then you think it hasn’t come to an understanding with them yet?”

“An understanding? Oh, probably.”

“An explanation, then?”

“The only logical inference from what we’ve been saying is that it hasn’t. But I don’t ask you to accept it on that account. May I read now, my dear?”

“Yes, you may read now,” said Mrs. Corey, with one of those sighs which perhaps express a feminine sense of the unsatisfactoriness of husbands in general, rather than a personal discontent with her own.

“Thank you, my dear; then I think I’ll smoke too,” said Bromfield Corey, lighting a cigar.

She left him in peace, and she made no further attempt upon her son’s confidence. But she was not inactive for that reason. She did not, of course, admit to herself, and far less to others, the motive with which she went to pay an early visit to the Laphams, who had now come up from Nantasket to Nankeen Square. She said to her daughters that she had always been a little ashamed of using her acquaintance with them to get money for her charity, and then seeming to drop it. Besides, it seemed to her that she ought somehow to recognise the business relation that Tom had formed with the father; they must not think that his family disapproved of what he had done. “Yes, business is business,” said Nanny, with a laugh. “Do you wish us to go with you again?”

“No; I will go alone this time,” replied the mother with dignity.

Her coupe now found its way to Nankeen Square without difficulty, and she sent up a card, which Mrs. Lapham received in the presence of her daughter Penelope.

“I presume I’ve got to see her,” she gasped.

“Well, don’t look so guilty, mother,” joked the girl; “you haven’t been doing anything so VERY wrong.”

“It seems as if I HAD. I don’t know what’s come over me. I wasn’t afraid of the woman before, but now I don’t seem to feel as if I could look her in the face. He’s been coming here of his own accord, and I fought against his coming long enough, goodness knows. I didn’t want him to come. And as far forth as that goes, we’re as respectable as they are; and your father’s got twice their money, any day. We’ve no need to go begging for their favour. I guess they were glad enough to get him in with your father.”

“Yes, those are all good points, mother,” said the girl; “and if you keep saying them over, and count a hundred every time before you speak, I guess you’ll worry through.”

Mrs. Lapham had been fussing distractedly with her hair and ribbons, in preparation for her encounter with Mrs. Corey. She now drew in a long quivering breath, stared at her daughter without seeing her, and hurried downstairs. It was true that when she met Mrs. Corey before she had not been awed by her; but since then she had learned at least her own ignorance of the world, and she had talked over the things she had misconceived and the things she had shrewdly guessed so much that she could not meet her on the former footing of equality. In spite of as brave a spirit and as good a conscience as woman need have, Mrs. Lapham cringed inwardly, and tremulously wondered what her visitor had come for. She turned from pale to red, and was hardly coherent in her greetings; she did not know how they got to where Mrs. Corey was saying exactly the right things about her son’s interest and satisfaction in his new business, and keeping her eyes fixed on Mrs. Lapham’s, reading her uneasiness there, and making her feel, in spite of her indignant innocence, that she had taken a base advantage of her in her absence to get her son away from her and marry him to Irene. Then, presently, while this was painfully revolving itself in Mrs. Lapham’s mind, she was aware of Mrs. Corey’s asking if she was not to have the pleasure of seeing Miss Irene.

“No; she’s out, just now,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I don’t know just when she’ll be in. She went to get a book.” And here she turned red again, knowing that Irene had gone to get the book because it was one that Corey had spoken of.

“Oh! I’m sorry,” said Mrs. Corey. “I had hoped to see her. And your other daughter, whom I never met?”

“Penelope?” asked Mrs. Lapham, eased a little. “She is at home. I will go and call her.” The Laphams had not yet thought of spending their superfluity on servants who could be rung for; they kept two girls and a man to look after the furnace, as they had for the last ten years. If Mrs. Lapham had rung in the parlour, her second girl would have gone to the street door to see who was there. She went upstairs for Penelope herself, and the girl, after some rebellious derision, returned with her.

Mrs. Corey took account of her, as Penelope withdrew to the other side of the room after their introduction, and sat down, indolently submissive on the surface to the tests to be applied, and following Mrs. Corey’s lead of the conversation in her odd drawl.

“You young ladies will be glad to be getting into your new house,” she said politely.

“I don’t know,” said Penelope. “We’re so used to this one.”

Mrs. Corey looked a little baffled, but she said sympathetically, “Of course, you will be sorry to leave your old home.”

Mrs. Lapham could not help putting in on behalf of her daughters: “I guess if it was left to the girls to say, we shouldn’t leave it at all.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Corey; “are they so much attached? But I can quite understand it. My children would be heart-broken too if we were to leave the old place.” She turned to Penelope. “But you must think of the lovely new house, and the beautiful position.”

“Yes, I suppose we shall get used to them too,” said Penelope, in response to this didactic consolation.

“Oh, I could even imagine your getting very fond of them,” pursued Mrs. Corey patronisingly. “My son has told me of the lovely outlook you’re to have over the water. He thinks you have such a beautiful house. I believe he had the pleasure of meeting you all there when he first came home.”

“Yes, I think he was our first visitor.”

“He is a great admirer of your house,” said Mrs. Corey, keeping her eyes very sharply, however politely, on Penelope’s face, as if to surprise there the secret of any other great admiration of her son’s that might helplessly show itself.

“Yes,” said the girl, “he’s been there several times with father; and he wouldn’t be allowed to overlook any of its good points.”

Her mother took a little more courage from her daughter’s tranquillity.

“The girls make such fun of their father’s excitement about his building, and the way he talks it into everybody.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Corey, with civil misunderstanding and inquiry.

Penelope flushed, and her mother went on: “I tell him he’s more of a child about it than any of them.”

“Young people are very philosophical nowadays,” remarked Mrs. Corey.

“Yes, indeed,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I tell them they’ve always had everything, so that nothing’s a surprise to them. It was different with us in our young days.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Corey, without assenting.

“I mean the Colonel and myself,” explained Mrs. Lapham.

“Oh yes — yes!” said Mrs. Corey.

“I’m sure,” the former went on, rather helplessly, “we had to work hard enough for everything we got. And so we appreciated it.”

“So many things were not done for young people then,” said Mrs. Corey, not recognising the early-hardships standpoint of Mrs. Lapham. “But I don’t know that they are always the better for it now,” she added vaguely, but with the satisfaction we all feel in uttering a just commonplace.

“It’s rather hard living up to blessings that you’ve always had,” said Penelope.

“Yes,” replied Mrs. Corey distractedly, and coming back to her slowly from the virtuous distance to which she had absented herself. She looked at the girl searchingly again, as if to determine whether this were a touch of the drolling her son had spoken of. But she only added: “You will enjoy the sunsets on the Back Bay so much.”

“Well, not unless they’re new ones,” said Penelope. “I don’t believe I could promise to enjoy any sunsets that I was used to, a great deal.”

Mrs. Corey looked at her with misgiving, hardening into dislike. “No,” she breathed vaguely. “My son spoke of the fine effect of the lights about the hotel from your cottage at Nantasket,” she said to Mrs. Lapham.

“Yes, they’re splendid!” exclaimed that lady. “I guess the girls went down every night with him to see them from the rocks.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Corey, a little dryly; and she permitted herself to add: “He spoke of those rocks. I suppose both you young ladies spend a great deal of your time on them when you’re there. At Nahant my children were constantly on them.”

“Irene likes the rocks,” said Penelope. “I don’t care much about them, — especially at night.”

“Oh, indeed! I suppose you find it quite as well looking at the lights comfortably from the veranda.”

“No; you can’t see them from the house.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Corey. After a perceptible pause, she turned to Mrs. Lapham. “I don’t know what my son would have done for a breath of sea air this summer, if you had not allowed him to come to Nantasket. He wasn’t willing to leave his business long enough to go anywhere else.”

“Yes, he’s a born business man,” responded Mrs. Lapham enthusiastically. “If it’s born in you, it’s bound to come out. That’s what the Colonel is always saying about Mr. Corey. He says it’s born in him to be a business man, and he can’t help it.” She recurred to Corey gladly because she felt that she had not said enough of him when his mother first spoke of his connection with the business. “I don’t believe,” she went on excitedly, “that Colonel Lapham has ever had anybody with him that he thought more of.”

“You have all been very kind to my son,” said Mrs. Corey in acknowledgment, and stiffly bowing a little, “and we feel greatly indebted to you. Very much so.” At these grateful expressions Mrs. Lapham reddened once more, and murmured that it had been very pleasant to them, she was sure. She glanced at her daughter for support, but Penelope was looking at Mrs. Corey, who doubtless saw her from the corner of her eyes, though she went on speaking to her mother.

“I was sorry to hear from him that Mr. — Colonel? — Lapham had not been quite well this summer. I hope he’s better now?”

“Oh yes, indeed,” replied Mrs. Lapham; “he’s all right now. He’s hardly ever been sick, and he don’t know how to take care of himself. That’s all. We don’t any of us; we’re all so well.”

“Health is a great blessing,” sighed Mrs. Corey.

“Yes, so it is. How is your oldest daughter?” inquired Mrs. Lapham. “Is she as delicate as ever?”

“She seems to be rather better since we returned.” And now Mrs. Corey, as if forced to the point, said bunglingly that the young ladies had wished to come with her, but had been detained. She based her statement upon Nanny’s sarcastic demand; and, perhaps seeing it topple a little, she rose hastily, to get away from its fall. “But we shall hope for some — some other occasion,” she said vaguely, and she put on a parting smile, and shook hands with Mrs. Lapham and Penelope, and then, after some lingering commonplaces, got herself out of the house.

Penelope and her mother were still looking at each other, and trying to grapple with the effect or purport of the visit, when Irene burst in upon them from the outside.

“O mamma! wasn’t that Mrs. Corey’s carriage just drove away?”

Penelope answered with her laugh. “Yes! You’ve just missed the most delightful call, ‘Rene. So easy and pleasant every way. Not a bit stiff! Mrs. Corey was so friendly! She didn’t make one feel at all as if she’d bought me, and thought she’d given too much; and mother held up her head as if she were all wool and a yard wide, and she would just like to have anybody deny it.”

In a few touches of mimicry she dashed off a sketch of the scene: her mother’s trepidation, and Mrs. Corey’s well-bred repose and polite scrutiny of them both. She ended by showing how she herself had sat huddled up in a dark corner, mute with fear.

“If she came to make us say and do the wrong thing, she must have gone away happy; and it’s a pity you weren’t here to help, Irene. I don’t know that I aimed to make a bad impression, but I guess I succeeded — even beyond my deserts.” She laughed; then suddenly she flashed out in fierce earnest. “If I missed doing anything that could make me as hateful to her as she made herself to me — —” She checked herself, and began to laugh. Her laugh broke, and the tears started into her eyes; she ran out of the room, and up the stairs.

“What — what does it mean?” asked Irene in a daze.

Mrs. Lapham was still in the chilly torpor to which Mrs. Corey’s call had reduced her. Penelope’s vehemence did not rouse her. She only shook her head absently, and said, “I don’t know.”

“Why should Pen care what impression she made? I didn’t suppose it would make any difference to her whether Mrs. Corey liked her or not.”

“I didn’t, either. But I could see that she was just as nervous as she could be, every minute of the time. I guess she didn’t like Mrs. Corey any too well from the start, and she couldn’t seem to act like herself.”

“Tell me about it, mamma,” said Irene, dropping into a chair.

Mrs. Corey described the interview to her husband on her return home. “Well, and what are your inferences?” he asked.

“They were extremely embarrassed and excited — that is, the mother. I don’t wish to do her injustice, but she certainly behaved consciously.”

“You made her feel so, I dare say, Anna. I can imagine how terrible you must have been in the character of an accusing spirit, too lady-like to say anything. What did you hint?”

“I hinted nothing,” said Mrs. Corey, descending to the weakness of defending herself. “But I saw quite enough to convince me that the girl is in love with Tom, and the mother knows it.”

“That was very unsatisfactory. I supposed you went to find out whether Tom was in love with the girl. Was she as pretty as ever?”

“I didn’t see her; she was not at home; I saw her sister.”

“I don’t know that I follow you quite, Anna. But no matter. What was the sister like?”

“A thoroughly disagreeable young woman.”

“What did she do?”

“Nothing. She’s far too sly for that. But that was the impression.”

“Then you didn’t find her so amusing as Tom does?”

“I found her pert. There’s no other word for it. She says things to puzzle you and put you out.”

“Ah, that was worse than pert, Anna; that was criminal. Well, let us thank heaven the younger one is so pretty.”

Mrs. Corey did not reply directly. “Bromfield,” she said, after a moment of troubled silence, “I have been thinking over your plan, and I don’t see why it isn’t the right thing.”

“What is my plan?” inquired Bromfield Corey.

“A dinner.”

Her husband began to laugh. “Ah, you overdid the accusing-spirit business, and this is reparation.” But Mrs. Corey hurried on, with combined dignity and anxiety —

“We can’t ignore Tom’s intimacy with them — it amounts to that; it will probably continue even if it’s merely a fancy, and we must seem to know it; whatever comes of it, we can’t disown it. They are very simple, unfashionable people, and unworldly; but I can’t say that they are offensive, unless — unless,” she added, in propitiation of her husband’s smile, “unless the father — how did you find the father?” she implored.

“He will be very entertaining,” said Corey, “if you start him on his paint. What was the disagreeable daughter like? Shall you have her?”

“She’s little and dark. We must have them all,” Mrs. Corey sighed. “Then you don’t think a dinner would do?”

“Oh yes, I do. As you say, we can’t disown Tom’s relation to them, whatever it is. We had much better recognise it, and make the best of the inevitable. I think a Lapham dinner would be delightful.” He looked at her with delicate irony in his voice and smile, and she fetched another sigh, so deep and sore now that he laughed outright. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it would be the best way of curing Tom of his fancy, if he has one. He has been seeing her with the dangerous advantages which a mother knows how to give her daughter in the family circle, and with no means of comparing her with other girls. You must invite several other very pretty girls.”

“Do you really think so, Bromfield?” asked Mrs. Corey, taking courage a little. “That might do,” But her spirits visibly sank again. “I don’t know any other girl half so pretty.”

“Well, then, better bred.”

“She is very lady-like, very modest, and pleasing.”

“Well, more cultivated.”

“Tom doesn’t get on with such people.”

“Oh, you wish him to marry her, I see.”

“No, no.”

“Then you’d better give the dinner to bring them together, to promote the affair.”

“You know I don’t want to do that, Bromfield. But I feel that we must do something. If we don’t, it has a clandestine appearance. It isn’t just to them. A dinner won’t leave us in any worse position, and may leave us in a better. Yes,” said Mrs. Corey, after another thoughtful interval, “we must have them — have them all. It could be very simple.”

“Ah, you can’t give a dinner under a bushel, if I take your meaning, my dear. If we do this at all, we mustn’t do it as if we were ashamed of it. We must ask people to meet them.”

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “There are not many people in town yet,” she added, with relief that caused her husband another smile. “There really seems a sort of fatality about it,” she concluded religiously.

“Then you had better not struggle against it. Go and reconcile Lily and Nanny to it as soon as possible.”

Mrs. Corey blanched a little. “But don’t you think it will be the best thing, Bromfield?”

“I do indeed, my dear. The only thing that shakes my faith in the scheme is the fact that I first suggested it. But if you have adopted it, it must be all right, Anna. I can’t say that I expected it.”

“No,” said his wife, “it wouldn’t do.”

XIII.

HAVING distinctly given up the project of asking the Laphams to dinner, Mrs. Corey was able to carry it out with the courage of sinners who have sacrificed to virtue by frankly acknowledging its superiority to their intended transgression. She did not question but the Laphams would come; and she only doubted as to the people whom she should invite to meet them. She opened the matter with some trepidation to her daughters, but neither of them opposed her; they rather looked at the scheme from her own point of view, and agreed with her that nothing had really yet been done to wipe out the obligation to the Laphams helplessly contracted the summer before, and strengthened by that ill-advised application to Mrs. Lapham for charity. Not only the principal of their debt of gratitude remained, but the accruing interest. They said, What harm could giving the dinner possibly do them? They might ask any or all of their acquaintance without disadvantage to themselves; but it would be perfectly easy to give the dinner just the character they chose, and still flatter the ignorance of the Laphams. The trouble would be with Tom, if he were really interested in the girl; but he could not say anything if they made it a family dinner; he could not feel anything. They had each turned in her own mind, as it appeared from a comparison of ideas, to one of the most comprehensive of those cousinships which form the admiration and terror of the adventurer in Boston society. He finds himself hemmed in and left out at every turn by ramifications that forbid him all hope of safe personality in his comments on people; he is never less secure than when he hears some given Bostonian denouncing or ridiculing another. If he will be advised, he will guard himself from concurring in these criticisms, however just they appear, for the probability is that their object is a cousin of not more than one remove from the censor. When the alien hears a group of Boston ladies calling one another, and speaking of all their gentlemen friends, by the familiar abbreviations of their Christian names, he must feel keenly the exile to which he was born; but he is then, at least, in comparatively little danger; while these latent and tacit cousinships open pitfalls at every step around him, in a society where Middlesexes have married Essexes and produced Suffolks for two hundred and fifty years.

These conditions, however, so perilous to the foreigner, are a source of strength and security to those native to them. An uncertain acquaintance may be so effectually involved in the meshes of such a cousinship, as never to be heard of outside of it and tremendous stories are told of people who have spent a whole winter in Boston, in a whirl of gaiety, and who, the original guests of the Suffolks, discover upon reflection that they have met no one but Essexes and Middlesexes.

Mrs. Corey’s brother James came first into her mind, and she thought with uncommon toleration of the easy-going, uncritical, good-nature of his wife. James Bellingham had been the adviser of her son throughout, and might be said to have actively promoted his connection with Lapham. She thought next of the widow of her cousin, Henry Bellingham, who had let her daughter marry that Western steamboat man, and was fond of her son-in-law; she might be expected at least to endure the paint-king and his family. The daughters insisted so strongly upon Mrs. Bellingham’s son Charles, that Mrs. Corey put him down — if he were in town; he might be in Central America; he got on with all sorts of people. It seemed to her that she might stop at this: four Laphams, five Coreys, and four Bellinghams were enough.

“That makes thirteen,” said Nanny. “You can have Mr. and Mrs. Sewell.”

“Yes, that is a good idea,” assented Mrs. Corey. “He is our minister, and it is very proper.”

“I don’t see why you don’t have Robert Chase. It is a pity he shouldn’t see her — for the colour.”

“I don’t quite like the idea of that,” said Mrs. Corey; “but we can have him too, if it won’t make too many.” The painter had married into a poorer branch of the Coreys, and his wife was dead. “Is there any one else?”

“There is Miss Kingsbury.”

“We have had her so much. She will begin to think we are using her.”

“She won’t mind; she’s so good-natured.”

“Well, then,” the mother summed up, “there are four Laphams, five Coreys, four Bellinghams, one Chase, and one Kingsbury — fifteen. Oh! and two Sewells. Seventeen. Ten ladies and seven gentlemen. It doesn’t balance very well, and it’s too large.”

“Perhaps some of the ladies won’t come,” suggested Lily.

“Oh, the ladies always come,” said Nanny.

Their mother reflected. “Well, I will ask them. The ladies will refuse in time to let us pick up some gentlemen somewhere; some more artists. Why! we must have Mr. Seymour, the architect; he’s a bachelor, and he’s building their house, Tom says.”

Her voice fell a little when she mentioned her son’s name, and she told him of her plan, when he came home in the evening, with evident misgiving.

“What are you doing it for, mother?” he asked, looking at her with his honest eyes.

She dropped her own in a little confusion. “I won’t do it at all, my dear,” she said, “if you don’t approve. But I thought — You know we have never made any proper acknowledgment of their kindness to us at Baie St. Paul. Then in the winter, I’m ashamed to say, I got money from her for a charity I was interested in; and I hate the idea of merely USING people in that way. And now your having been at their house this summer — we can’t seem to disapprove of that; and your business relations to him — —”

“Yes, I see,” said Corey. “Do you think it amounts to a dinner?”

“Why, I don’t know,” returned his mother. “We shall have hardly any one out of our family connection.”

“Well,” Corey assented, “it might do. I suppose what you wish is to give them a pleasure.”

“Why, certainly. Don’t you think they’d like to come?”

“Oh, they’d like to come; but whether it would be a pleasure after they were here is another thing. I should have said that if you wanted to have them, they would enjoy better being simply asked to meet our own immediate family.”

“That’s what I thought of in the first place, but your father seemed to think it implied a social distrust of them; and we couldn’t afford to have that appearance, even to ourselves.”

“Perhaps he was right.”

“And besides, it might seem a little significant.”

Corey seemed inattentive to this consideration. “Whom did you think of asking?” His mother repeated the names. “Yes, that would do,” he said, with a vague dissatisfaction.

“I won’t have it at all, if you don’t wish, Tom.”

“Oh yes, have it; perhaps you ought. Yes, I dare say it’s right. What did you mean by a family dinner seeming significant?”

His mother hesitated. When it came to that, she did not like to recognise in his presence the anxieties that had troubled her. But “I don’t know,” she said, since she must. “I shouldn’t want to give that young girl, or her mother, the idea that we wished to make more of the acquaintance than — than you did, Tom.”

He looked at her absent-mindedly, as if he did not take her meaning. But he said, “Oh yes, of course,” and Mrs. Corey, in the uncertainty in which she seemed destined to remain concerning this affair, went off and wrote her invitation to Mrs. Lapham. Later in the evening, when they again found themselves alone, her son said, “I don’t think I understood you, mother, in regard to the Laphams. I think I do now. I certainly don’t wish you to make more of the acquaintance than I have done. It wouldn’t be right; it might be very unfortunate. Don’t give the dinner!”

“It’s too late now, my son,” said Mrs. Corey. “I sent my note to Mrs. Lapham an hour ago.” Her courage rose at the trouble which showed in Corey’s face. “But don’t be annoyed by it, Tom. It isn’t a family dinner, you know, and everything can be managed without embarrassment. If we take up the affair at this point, you will seem to have been merely acting for us; and they can’t possibly understand anything more.”

“Well, well! Let it go! I dare say it’s all right. At any rate, it can’t be helped now.”

“I don’t wish to help it, Tom,” said Mrs. Corey, with a cheerfullness which the thought of the Laphams had never brought her before. “I am sure it is quite fit and proper, and we can make them have a very pleasant time. They are good, inoffensive people, and we owe it to ourselves not to be afraid to show that we have felt their kindness to us, and his appreciation of you.”

“Well,” consented Corey. The trouble that his mother had suddenly cast off was in his tone; but she was not sorry. It was quite time that he should think seriously of his attitude toward these people if he had not thought of it before, but, according to his father’s theory, had been merely dangling.

It was a view of her son’s character that could hardly have pleased her in different circumstances, yet it was now unquestionably a consolation if not wholly a pleasure. If she considered the Laphams at all, it was with the resignation which we feel at the evils of others, even when they have not brought them on themselves.

Mrs. Lapham, for her part, had spent the hours between Mrs. Corey’s visit and her husband’s coming home from business in reaching the same conclusion with regard to Corey; and her spirits were at the lowest when they sat down to supper. Irene was downcast with her; Penelope was purposely gay; and the Colonel was beginning, after his first plate of the boiled ham, — which, bristling with cloves, rounded its bulk on a wide platter before him, — to take note of the surrounding mood, when the door-bell jingled peremptorily, and the girl left waiting on the table to go and answer it. She returned at once with a note for Mrs. Lapham, which she read, and then, after a helpless survey of her family, read again.

“Why, what IS it, mamma?” asked Irene, while the Colonel, who had taken up his carving-knife for another attack on the ham, held it drawn half across it.

“Why, I don’t know what it does mean,” answered Mrs. Lapham tremulously, and she let the girl take the note from her.

Irene ran it over, and then turned to the name at the end with a joyful cry and a flush that burned to the top of her forehead. Then she began to read it once more.

The Colonel dropped his knife and frowned impatiently, and Mrs. Lapham said, “You read it out loud, if you know what to make of it, Irene.” But Irene, with a nervous scream of protest, handed it to her father, who performed the office.

“DEAR MRS. LAPHAM:

“Will you and General Lapham — —”

“I didn’t know I was a general,” grumbled Lapham. “I guess I shall have to be looking up my back pay. Who is it writes this, anyway?” he asked, turning the letter over for the signature.

“Oh, never mind. Read it through!” cried his wife, with a kindling glance of triumph at Penelope, and he resumed —

“ — and your daughters give us the pleasure of your company at dinner on Thursday, the 28th, at half-past six.

“Yours sincerely,

“ANNA B. COREY.”

The brief invitation had been spread over two pages, and the Colonel had difficulties with the signature which he did not instantly surmount. When he had made out the name and pronounced it, he looked across at his wife for an explanation.

“I don’t know what it all means,” she said, shaking her head and speaking with a pleased flutter. “She was here this afternoon, and I should have said she had come to see how bad she could make us feel. I declare I never felt so put down in my life by anybody.”

“Why, what did she do? What did she say?” Lapham was ready, in his dense pride, to resent any affront to his blood, but doubtful, with the evidence of this invitation to the contrary, if any affront had been offered. Mrs. Lapham tried to tell him, but there was really nothing tangible; and when she came to put it into words, she could not make out a case. Her husband listened to her excited attempt, and then he said, with judicial superiority, “I guess nobody’s been trying to make you feel bad, Persis. What would she go right home and invite you to dinner for, if she’d acted the way you say?”

In this view it did seem improbable, and Mrs. Lapham was shaken. She could only say, “Penelope felt just the way I did about it.”

Lapham looked at the girl, who said, “Oh, I can’t prove it! I begin to think it never happened. I guess it didn’t.”

“Humph!” said her father, and he sat frowning thoughtfully a while — ignoring her mocking irony, or choosing to take her seriously. “You can’t really put your finger on anything,” he said to his wife, “and it ain’t likely there is anything. Anyway, she’s done the proper thing by you now.”

Mrs. Lapham faltered between her lingering resentment and the appeals of her flattered vanity. She looked from Penelope’s impassive face to the eager eyes of Irene. “Well — just as you say, Silas. I don’t know as she WAS so very bad. I guess may be she was embarrassed some — —”

“That’s what I told you, mamma, from the start,” interrupted Irene. “Didn’t I tell you she didn’t mean anything by it? It’s just the way she acted at Baie St. Paul, when she got well enough to realise what you’d done for her!”

Penelope broke into a laugh. “Is that her way of showing her gratitude? I’m sorry I didn’t understand that before.”

Irene made no effort to reply. She merely looked from her mother to her father with a grieved face for their protection, and Lapham said, “When we’ve done supper, you answer her, Persis. Say we’ll come.”

“With one exception,” said Penelope.

“What do you mean?” demanded her father, with a mouth full of ham. “Oh, nothing of importance. Merely that I’m not going.”

Lapham gave himself time to swallow his morsel, and his rising wrath went down with it. “I guess you’ll change your mind when the time comes,” he said. “Anyway, Persis, you say we’ll all come, and then, if Penelope don’t want to go, you can excuse her after we get there. That’s the best way.”

None of them, apparently, saw any reason why the affair should not be left in this way, or had a sense of the awful and binding nature of a dinner engagement. If she believed that Penelope would not finally change her mind and go, no doubt Mrs. Lapham thought that Mrs. Corey would easily excuse her absence. She did not find it so simple a matter to accept the invitation. Mrs. Corey had said “Dear Mrs. Lapham,” but Mrs. Lapham had her doubts whether it would not be a servile imitation to say “Dear Mrs. Corey” in return; and she was tormented as to the proper phrasing throughout and the precise temperature which she should impart to her politeness. She wrote an unpractised, uncharacteristic round hand, the same in which she used to set the children’s copies at school, and she subscribed herself, after some hesitation between her husband’s given name and her own, “Yours truly, Mrs. S. Lapham.”

Penelope had gone to her room, without waiting to be asked to advise or criticise; but Irene had decided upon the paper, and on the whole, Mrs. Lapham’s note made a very decent appearance on the page.

When the furnace-man came, the Colonel sent him out to post it in the box at the corner of the square. He had determined not to say anything more about the matter before the girls, not choosing to let them see that he was elated; he tried to give the effect of its being an everyday sort of thing, abruptly closing the discussion with his order to Mrs. Lapham to accept; but he had remained swelling behind his newspaper during her prolonged struggle with her note, and he could no longer hide his elation when Irene followed her sister upstairs.

“Well, Pers,” he demanded, “what do you say now?”

Mrs. Lapham had been sobered into something of her former misgiving by her difficulties with her note. “Well, I don’t know what TO say. I declare, I’m all mixed up about it, and I don’t know as we’ve begun as we can carry out in promising to go. I presume,” she sighed, “that we can all send some excuse at the last moment, if we don’t want to go.”

“I guess we can carry out, and I guess we shan’t want to send any excuse,” bragged the Colonel. “If we’re ever going to be anybody at all, we’ve got to go and see how it’s done. I presume we’ve got to give some sort of party when we get into the new house, and this gives the chance to ask ’em back again. You can’t complain now but what they’ve made the advances, Persis?”

“No,” said Mrs. Lapham lifelessly; “I wonder why they wanted to do it. Oh, I suppose it’s all right,” she added in deprecation of the anger with her humility which she saw rising in her husband’s face; “but if it’s all going to be as much trouble as that letter, I’d rather be whipped. I don’t know what I’m going to wear; or the girls either. I do wonder — I’ve heard that people go to dinner in low-necks. Do you suppose it’s the custom?”

“How should I know?” demanded the Colonel. “I guess you’ve got clothes enough. Any rate, you needn’t fret about it. You just go round to White’s or Jordan & Marsh’s, and ask for a dinner dress. I guess that’ll settle it; they’ll know. Get some of them imported dresses. I see ’em in the window every time I pass; lots of ‘em.”

“Oh, it ain’t the dress!” said Mrs. Lapham. “I don’t suppose but what we could get along with that; and I want to do the best we can for the children; but I don’t know what we’re going to talk about to those people when we get there. We haven’t got anything in common with them. Oh, I don’t say they’re any better,” she again made haste to say in arrest of her husband’s resentment. “I don’t believe they are; and I don’t see why they should be. And there ain’t anybody has got a better right to hold up their head than you have, Silas. You’ve got plenty of money, and you’ve made every cent of it.”

“I guess I shouldn’t amounted to much without you, Persis,” interposed Lapham, moved to this justice by her praise.

“Oh, don’t talk about ME!” protested the wife. “Now that you’ve made it all right about Rogers, there ain’t a thing in this world against you. But still, for all that, I can see — and I can feel it when I can’t see it — that we’re different from those people. They’re well-meaning enough, and they’d excuse it, I presume, but we’re too old to learn to be like them.”

“The children ain’t,” said Lapham shrewdly.

“No, the children ain’t,” admitted his wife, “and that’s the only thing that reconciles me to it.”

“You see how pleased Irene looked when I read it?”

“Yes, she was pleased.”

“And I guess Penelope’ll think better of it before the time comes.”

“Oh yes, we do it for them. But whether we’re doing the best thing for ‘em, goodness knows. I’m not saying anything against HIM. Irene’ll be a lucky girl to get him, if she wants him. But there! I’d ten times rather she was going to marry such a fellow as you were, Si, that had to make every inch of his own way, and she had to help him. It’s in her!”

Lapham laughed aloud for pleasure in his wife’s fondness; but neither of them wished that he should respond directly to it. “I guess, if it wa’n’t for me, he wouldn’t have a much easier time. But don’t you fret! It’s all coming out right. That dinner ain’t a thing for you to be uneasy about. It’ll pass off perfectly easy and natural.”

Lapham did not keep his courageous mind quite to the end of the week that followed. It was his theory not to let Corey see that he was set up about the invitation, and when the young man said politely that his mother was glad they were able to come, Lapham was very short with him. He said yes, he believed that Mrs. Lapham and the girls were going. Afterward he was afraid Corey might not understand that he was coming too; but he did not know how to approach the subject again, and Corey did not, so he let it pass. It worried him to see all the preparation that his wife and Irene were making, and he tried to laugh at them for it; and it worried him to find that Penelope was making no preparation at all for herself, but only helping the others. He asked her what should she do if she changed her mind at the last moment and concluded to go, and she said she guessed she should not change her mind, but if she did, she would go to White’s with him and get him to choose her an imported dress, he seemed to like them so much. He was too proud to mention the subject again to her.

Finally, all that dress-making in the house began to scare him with vague apprehensions in regard to his own dress. As soon as he had determined to go, an ideal of the figure in which he should go presented itself to his mind. He should not wear any dress-coat, because, for one thing, he considered that a man looked like a fool in a dress-coat, and, for another thing, he had none — had none on principle. He would go in a frock-coat and black pantaloons, and perhaps a white waistcoat, but a black cravat anyway. But as soon as he developed this ideal to his family, which he did in pompous disdain of their anxieties about their own dress, they said he should not go so. Irene reminded him that he was the only person without a dress-coat at a corps reunion dinner which he had taken her to some years before, and she remembered feeling awfully about it at the time. Mrs. Lapham, who would perhaps have agreed of herself, shook her head with misgiving. “I don’t see but what you’ll have to get you one, Si,” she said. “I don’t believe they ever go without ’em to a private house.”

He held out openly, but on his way home the next day, in a sudden panic, he cast anchor before his tailor’s door and got measured for a dress-coat. After that he began to be afflicted about his waist-coat, concerning which he had hitherto been airily indifferent. He tried to get opinion out of his family, but they were not so clear about it as they were about the frock. It ended in their buying a book of etiquette, which settled the question adversely to a white waistcoat. The author, however, after being very explicit in telling them not to eat with their knives, and above all not to pick their teeth with their forks, — a thing which he said no lady or gentleman ever did, — was still far from decided as to the kind of cravat Colonel Lapham ought to wear: shaken on other points, Lapham had begun to waver also concerning the black cravat. As to the question of gloves for the Colonel, which suddenly flashed upon him one evening, it appeared never to have entered the thoughts of the etiquette man, as Lapham called him. Other authors on the same subject were equally silent, and Irene could only remember having heard, in some vague sort of way, that gentlemen did not wear gloves so much any more.

Drops of perspiration gathered on Lapham’s forehead in the anxiety of the debate; he groaned, and he swore a little in the compromise profanity which he used.

“I declare,” said Penelope, where she sat purblindly sewing on a bit of dress for Irene, “the Colonel’s clothes are as much trouble as anybody’s. Why don’t you go to Jordan & Marsh’s and order one of the imported dresses for yourself, father?” That gave them all the relief of a laugh over it, the Colonel joining in piteously.

He had an awful longing to find out from Corey how he ought to go. He formulated and repeated over to himself an apparently careless question, such as, “Oh, by the way, Corey, where do you get your gloves?” This would naturally lead to some talk on the subject, which would, if properly managed, clear up the whole trouble. But Lapham found that he would rather die than ask this question, or any question that would bring up the dinner again. Corey did not recur to it, and Lapham avoided the matter with positive fierceness. He shunned talking with Corey at all, and suffered in grim silence.

One night, before they fell asleep, his wife said to him, “I was reading in one of those books to-day, and I don’t believe but what we’ve made a mistake if Pen holds out that she won’t go.”

“Why?” demanded Lapham, in the dismay which beset him at every fresh recurrence to the subject.

“The book says that it’s very impolite not to answer a dinner invitation promptly. Well, we’ve done that all right, — at first I didn’t know but what we had been a little too quick, may be, — but then it says if you’re not going, that it’s the height of rudeness not to let them know at once, so that they can fill your place at the table.”

The Colonel was silent for a while. “Well, I’m dumned,” he said finally, “if there seems to be any end to this thing. If it was to do over again, I’d say no for all of us.”

“I’ve wished a hundred times they hadn’t asked us; but it’s too late to think about that now. The question is, what are we going to do about Penelope?”

“Oh, I guess she’ll go, at the last moment.”

“She says she won’t. She took a prejudice against Mrs. Corey that day, and she can’t seem to get over it.”

“Well, then, hadn’t you better write in the morning, as soon as you’re up, that she ain’t coming?”

Mrs. Lapham sighed helplessly. “I shouldn’t know how to get it in. It’s so late now; I don’t see how I could have the face.”

“Well, then, she’s got to go, that’s all.”

“She’s set she won’t.”

“And I’m set she shall,” said Lapham with the loud obstinacy of a man whose women always have their way.

Mrs. Lapham was not supported by the sturdiness of his proclamation.

But she did not know how to do what she knew she ought to do about Penelope, and she let matters drift. After all, the child had a right to stay at home if she did not wish to go. That was what Mrs. Lapham felt, and what she said to her husband next morning, bidding him let Penelope alone, unless she chose herself to go. She said it was too late now to do anything, and she must make the best excuse she could when she saw Mrs. Corey. She began to wish that Irene and her father would go and excuse her too. She could not help saying this, and then she and Lapham had some unpleasant words.

“Look here!” he cried. “Who wanted to go in for these people in the first place? Didn’t you come home full of ’em last year, and want me to sell out here and move somewheres else because it didn’t seem to suit ‘em? And now you want to put it all on me! I ain’t going to stand it.”

“Hush!” said his wife. “Do you want to raise the house? I didn’t put it on you, as you say. You took it on yourself. Ever since that fellow happened to come into the new house that day, you’ve been perfectly crazy to get in with them. And now you’re so afraid you shall do something wrong before ‘em, you don’t hardly dare to say your life’s your own. I declare, if you pester me any more about those gloves, Silas Lapham, I won’t go.”

“Do you suppose I want to go on my own account?” he demanded furiously.

“No,” she admitted. “Of course I don’t. I know very well that you’re doing it for Irene; but, for goodness gracious’ sake, don’t worry our lives out, and make yourself a perfect laughing-stock before the children.”

With this modified concession from her, the quarrel closed in sullen silence on Lapham’s part. The night before the dinner came, and the question of his gloves was still unsettled, and in a fair way to remain so. He had bought a pair, so as to be on the safe side, perspiring in company with the young lady who sold them, and who helped him try them on at the shop; his nails were still full of the powder which she had plentifully peppered into them in order to overcome the resistance of his blunt fingers. But he was uncertain whether he should wear them. They had found a book at last that said the ladies removed their gloves on sitting down at table, but it said nothing about gentlemen’s gloves. He left his wife where she stood half hook-and-eyed at her glass in her new dress, and went down to his own den beyond the parlour. Before he shut his door he caught a glimpse of Irene trailing up and down before the long mirror in HER new dress, followed by the seamstress on her knees; the woman had her mouth full of pins, and from time to time she made Irene stop till she could put one of the pins into her train; Penelope sat in a corner criticising and counselling. It made Lapham sick, and he despised himself and all his brood for the trouble they were taking. But another glance gave him a sight of the young girl’s face in the mirror, beautiful and radiant with happiness, and his heart melted again with paternal tenderness and pride. It was going to be a great pleasure to Irene, and Lapham felt that she was bound to cut out anything there. He was vexed with Penelope that she was not going too; he would have liked to have those people hear her talk. He held his door a little open, and listened to the things she was “getting off” there to Irene. He showed that he felt really hurt and disappointed about Penelope, and the girl’s mother made her console him the next evening before they all drove away without her. “You try to look on the bright side of it, father. I guess you’ll see that it’s best I didn’t go when you get there. Irene needn’t open her lips, and they can all see how pretty she is; but they wouldn’t know how smart I was unless I talked, and maybe then they wouldn’t.”

This thrust at her father’s simple vanity in her made him laugh; and then they drove away, and Penelope shut the door, and went upstairs with her lips firmly shutting in a sob.

XIV.

THE Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered in Bellingham Place, the handsome, quiet old street which the sympathetic observer must grieve to see abandoned to boarding-houses. The dwellings are stately and tall, and the whole place wears an air of aristocratic seclusion, which Mrs. Corey’s father might well have thought assured when he left her his house there at his death. It is one of two evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been painted white, and which, with the delicate mouldings of the cornice, form the sole and sufficient decoration of the street front; nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be better. Within, the architect has again indulged his preference for the classic; the roof of the vestibule, wide and low, rests on marble columns, slim and fluted like the wooden columns without, and an ample staircase climbs in a graceful, easy curve from the tesselated pavement. Some carved Venetian scrigni stretched along the wall; a rug lay at the foot of the stairs; but otherwise the simple adequacy of the architectural intention had been respected, and the place looked bare to the eyes of the Laphams when they entered. The Coreys had once kept a man, but when young Corey began his retrenchments the man had yielded to the neat maid who showed the Colonel into the reception-room and asked the ladies to walk up two flights.

He had his charges from Irene not to enter the drawing-room without her mother, and he spent five minutes in getting on his gloves, for he had desperately resolved to wear them at last. When he had them on, and let his large fists hang down on either side, they looked, in the saffron tint which the shop-girl said his gloves should be of, like canvased hams. He perspired with doubt as he climbed the stairs, and while he waited on the landing for Mrs. Lapham and Irene to come down from above before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at his hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard. He heard quiet talking beyond the portiere within, and presently Tom Corey came out.

“Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you.”

Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, “Waiting for Mis’ Lapham,” to account for his presence. He had not been able to button his right glove, and he now began, with as much indifference as he could assume, to pull them both off, for he saw that Corey wore none. By the time he had stuffed them into the pocket of his coat-skirt his wife and daughter descended.

Corey welcomed them very cordially too, but looked a little mystified. Mrs. Lapham knew that he was silently inquiring for Penelope, and she did not know whether she ought to excuse her to him first or not. She said nothing, and after a glance toward the regions where Penelope might conjecturably be lingering, he held aside the portiere for the Laphams to pass, and entered the room with them.

Mrs. Lapham had decided against low-necks on her own responsibility, and had entrenched herself in the safety of a black silk, in which she looked very handsome. Irene wore a dress of one of those shades which only a woman or an artist can decide to be green or blue, and which to other eyes looks both or neither, according to their degrees of ignorance. If it was more like a ball dress than a dinner dress, that might be excused to the exquisite effect. She trailed, a delicate splendour, across the carpet in her mother’s sombre wake, and the consciousness of success brought a vivid smile to her face. Lapham, pallid with anxiety lest he should somehow disgrace himself, giving thanks to God that he should have been spared the shame of wearing gloves where no one else did, but at the same time despairing that Corey should have seen him in them, had an unwonted aspect of almost pathetic refinement.

Mrs. Corey exchanged a quick glance of surprise and relief with her husband as she started across the room to meet her guests, and in her gratitude to them for being so irreproachable, she threw into her manner a warmth that people did not always find there. “General Lapham?” she said, shaking hands in quick succession with Mrs. Lapham and Irene, and now addressing herself to him.

“No, ma’am, only Colonel,” said the honest man, but the lady did not hear him. She was introducing her husband to Lapham’s wife and daughter, and Bromfield Corey was already shaking his hand and saying he was very glad to see him again, while he kept his artistic eye on Irene, and apparently could not take it off. Lily Corey gave the Lapham ladies a greeting which was physically rather than socially cold, and Nanny stood holding Irene’s hand in both of hers a moment, and taking in her beauty and her style with a generous admiration which she could afford, for she was herself faultlessly dressed in the quiet taste of her city, and looking very pretty. The interval was long enough to let every man present confide his sense of Irene’s beauty to every other; and then, as the party was small, Mrs. Corey made everybody acquainted. When Lapham had not quite understood, he held the person’s hand, and, leaning urbanely forward, inquired, “What name?” He did that because a great man to whom he had been presented on the platform at a public meeting had done so to him, and he knew it must be right.

A little lull ensued upon the introductions, and Mrs. Corey said quietly to Mrs. Lapham, “Can I send any one to be of use to Miss Lapham?” as if Penelope must be in the dressing-room.

Mrs. Lapham turned fire-red, and the graceful forms in which she had been intending to excuse her daughter’s absence went out of her head. “She isn’t upstairs,” she said, at her bluntest, as country people are when embarrassed. “She didn’t feel just like coming to-night. I don’t know as she’s feeling very well.”

Mrs. Corey emitted a very small “O!” — very small, very cold, — which began to grow larger and hotter and to burn into Mrs. Lapham’s soul before Mrs. Corey could add, “I’m very sorry. It’s nothing serious, I hope?”

Robert Chase, the painter, had not come, and Mrs. James Bellingham was not there, so that the table really balanced better without Penelope; but Mrs. Lapham could not know this, and did not deserve to know it. Mrs. Corey glanced round the room, as if to take account of her guests, and said to her husband, “I think we are all here, then,” and he came forward and gave his arm to Mrs. Lapham. She perceived then that in their determination not to be the first to come they had been the last, and must have kept the others waiting for them.

Lapham had never seen people go down to dinner arm-in-arm before, but he knew that his wife was distinguished in being taken out by the host, and he waited in jealous impatience to see if Tom Corey would offer his arm to Irene. He gave it to that big girl they called Miss Kingsbury, and the handsome old fellow whom Mrs. Corey had introduced as her cousin took Irene out. Lapham was startled from the misgiving in which this left him by Mrs. Corey’s passing her hand through his arm, and he made a sudden movement forward, but felt himself gently restrained. They went out the last of all; he did not know why, but he submitted, and when they sat down he saw that Irene, although she had come in with that Mr. Bellingham, was seated beside young Corey, after all.

He fetched a long sigh of relief when he sank into his chair and felt himself safe from error if he kept a sharp lookout and did only what the others did. Bellingham had certain habits which he permitted himself, and one of these was tucking the corner of his napkin into his collar; he confessed himself an uncertain shot with a spoon, and defended his practice on the ground of neatness and common-sense. Lapham put his napkin into his collar too, and then, seeing that no one but Bellingham did it, became alarmed and took it out again slyly. He never had wine on his table at home, and on principle he was a prohibitionist; but now he did not know just what to do about the glasses at the right of his plate. He had a notion to turn them all down, as he had read of a well-known politician’s doing at a public dinner, to show that he did not take wine; but, after twiddling with one of them a moment, he let them be, for it seemed to him that would be a little too conspicuous, and he felt that every one was looking. He let the servant fill them all, and he drank out of each, not to appear odd. Later, he observed that the young ladies were not taking wine, and he was glad to see that Irene had refused it, and that Mrs. Lapham was letting it stand untasted. He did not know but he ought to decline some of the dishes, or at least leave most of some on his plate, but he was not able to decide; he took everything and ate everything.

He noticed that Mrs. Corey seemed to take no more trouble about the dinner than anybody, and Mr. Corey rather less; he was talking busily to Mrs. Lapham, and Lapham caught a word here and there that convinced him she was holding her own. He was getting on famously himself with Mrs. Corey, who had begun with him about his new house; he was telling her all about it, and giving her his ideas. Their conversation naturally included his architect across the table; Lapham had been delighted and secretly surprised to find the fellow there; and at something Seymour said the talk spread suddenly, and the pretty house he was building for Colonel Lapham became the general theme. Young Corey testified to its loveliness, and the architect said laughingly that if he had been able to make a nice thing of it, he owed it to the practical sympathy of his client.

“Practical sympathy is good,” said Bromfield Corey; and, slanting his head confidentially to Mrs. Lapham, he added, “Does he bleed your husband, Mrs. Lapham? He’s a terrible fellow for appropriations!”

Mrs. Lapham laughed, reddening consciously, and said she guessed the Colonel knew how to take care of himself. This struck Lapham, then draining his glass of sauterne, as wonderfully discreet in his wife. Bromfield Corey leaned back in his chair a moment. “Well, after all, you can’t say, with all your modern fuss about it, that you do much better now than the old fellows who built such houses as this.”

“Ah,” said the architect, “nobody can do better than well. Your house is in perfect taste; you know I’ve always admired it; and I don’t think it’s at all the worse for being old-fashioned. What we’ve done is largely to go back of the hideous style that raged after they forgot how to make this sort of house. But I think we may claim a better feeling for structure. We use better material, and more wisely; and by and by we shall work out something more characteristic and original.”

“With your chocolates and olives, and your clutter of bric-a-brac?”

“All that’s bad, of course, but I don’t mean that. I don’t wish to make you envious of Colonel Lapham, and modesty prevents my saying, that his house is prettier, — though I may have my convictions, — but it’s better built. All the new houses are better built. Now, your house — —”

“Mrs. Corey’s house,” interrupted the host, with a burlesque haste in disclaiming responsibility for it that made them all laugh. “My ancestral halls are in Salem, and I’m told you couldn’t drive a nail into their timbers; in fact, I don’t know that you would want to do it.”

“I should consider it a species of sacrilege,” answered Seymour, “and I shall be far from pressing the point I was going to make against a house of Mrs. Corey’s.”

This won Seymour the easy laugh, and Lapham silently wondered that the fellow never got off any of those things to him.

“Well,” said Corey, “you architects and the musicians are the true and only artistic creators. All the rest of us, sculptors, painters, novelists, and tailors, deal with forms that we have before us; we try to imitate, we try to represent. But you two sorts of artists create form. If you represent, you fail. Somehow or other you do evolve the camel out of your inner consciousness.”

“I will not deny the soft impeachment,” said the architect, with a modest air.

“I dare say. And you’ll own that it’s very handsome of me to say this, after your unjustifiable attack on Mrs. Corey’s property.”

Bromfield Corey addressed himself again to Mrs. Lapham, and the talk subdivided itself as before. It lapsed so entirely away from the subject just in hand, that Lapham was left with rather a good idea, as he thought it, to perish in his mind, for want of a chance to express it. The only thing like a recurrence to what they had been saying was Bromfield Corey’s warning Mrs. Lapham, in some connection that Lapham lost, against Miss Kingsbury. “She’s worse,” he was saying, “when it comes to appropriations than Seymour himself. Depend upon it, Mrs. Lapham, she will give you no peace of your mind, now she’s met you, from this out. Her tender mercies are cruel; and I leave you to supply the content from your own scriptural knowledge. Beware of her, and all her works. She calls them works of charity; but heaven knows whether they are. It don’t stand to reason that she gives the poor ALL the money she gets out of people. I have my own belief” — he gave it in a whisper for the whole table to hear— “that she spends it for champagne and cigars.”

Lapham did not know about that kind of talking; but Miss Kingsbury seemed to enjoy the fun as much as anybody, and he laughed with the rest.

“You shall be asked to the very next debauch of the committee, Mr. Corey; then you won’t dare expose us,” said Miss Kingsbury.

“I wonder you haven’t been down upon Corey to go to the Chardon Street home and talk with your indigent Italians in their native tongue,” said Charles Bellingham. “I saw in the Transcript the other night that you wanted some one for the work.”

“We did think of Mr. Corey,” replied Miss Kingsbury; “but we reflected that he probably wouldn’t talk with them at all; he would make them keep still to be sketched, and forget all about their wants.”

Upon the theory that this was a fair return for Corey’s pleasantry, the others laughed again.

“There is one charity,” said Corey, pretending superiority to Miss Kingsbury’s point, “that is so difficult, I wonder it hasn’t occurred to a lady of your courageous invention.”

“Yes?” said Miss Kingsbury. “What is that?”

“The occupation, by deserving poor of neat habits, of all the beautiful, airy, wholesome houses that stand empty the whole summer long, while their owners are away in their lowly cots beside the sea.”

“Yes, that is terrible,” replied Miss Kingsbury, with quick earnestness, while her eyes grew moist. “I have often thought of our great, cool houses standing useless here, and the thousands of poor creatures stifling in their holes and dens, and the little children dying for wholesome shelter. How cruelly selfish we are!”

“That is a very comfortable sentiment, Miss Kingsbury,” said Corey, “and must make you feel almost as if you had thrown open No. 31 to the whole North End. But I am serious about this matter. I spend my summers in town, and I occupy my own house, so that I can speak impartially and intelligently; and I tell you that in some of my walks on the Hill and down on the Back Bay, nothing but the surveillance of the local policeman prevents my offering personal violence to those long rows of close-shuttered, handsome, brutally insensible houses. If I were a poor man, with a sick child pining in some garret or cellar at the North End, I should break into one of them, and camp out on the grand piano.”

“Surely, Bromfield,” said his wife, “you don’t consider what havoc such people would make with the furniture of a nice house!”

“That is true,” answered Corey, with meek conviction. “I never thought of that.”

“And if you were a poor man with a sick child, I doubt if you’d have so much heart for burglary as you have now,” said James Bellingham.

“It’s wonderful how patient they are,” said the minister. “The spectacle of the hopeless comfort the hard-working poor man sees must be hard to bear.”

Lapham wanted to speak up and say that he had been there himself, and knew how such a man felt. He wanted to tell them that generally a poor man was satisfied if he could make both ends meet; that he didn’t envy any one his good luck, if he had earned it, so long as he wasn’t running under himself. But before he could get the courage to address the whole table, Sewell added, “I suppose he don’t always think of it.”

“But some day he WILL think about it,” said Corey. “In fact, we rather invite him to think about it, in this country.”

“My brother-in-law,” said Charles Bellingham, with the pride a man feels in a mentionably remarkable brother-in-law, “has no end of fellows at work under him out there at Omaha, and he says it’s the fellows from countries where they’ve been kept from thinking about it that are discontented. The Americans never make any trouble. They seem to understand that so long as we give unlimited opportunity, nobody has a right to complain.”

“What do you hear from Leslie?” asked Mrs. Corey, turning from these profitless abstractions to Mrs. Bellingham.

“You know,” said that lady in a lower tone, “that there is another baby?”

“No! I hadn’t heard of it!”

“Yes; a boy. They have named him after his uncle.”

“Yes,” said Charles Bellingham, joining in. “He is said to be a noble boy, and to resemble me.”

“All boys of that tender age are noble,” said Corey, “and look like anybody you wish them to resemble. Is Leslie still home-sick for the bean-pots of her native Boston?”

“She is getting over it, I fancy,” replied Mrs. Bellingham. “She’s very much taken up with Mr. Blake’s enterprises, and leads a very exciting life. She says she’s like people who have been home from Europe three years; she’s past the most poignant stage of regret, and hasn’t reached the second, when they feel that they must go again.”

Lapham leaned a little toward Mrs. Corey, and said of a picture which he saw on the wall opposite, “Picture of your daughter, I presume?”

“No; my daughter’s grandmother. It’s a Stewart Newton; he painted a great many Salem beauties. She was a Miss Polly Burroughs. My daughter IS like her, don’t you think?” They both looked at Nanny Corey and then at the portrait. “Those pretty old-fashioned dresses are coming in again. I’m not surprised you took it for her. The others” — she referred to the other portraits more or less darkling on the walls— “are my people; mostly Copleys.”

These names, unknown to Lapham, went to his head like the wine he was drinking; they seemed to carry light for the moment, but a film of deeper darkness followed. He heard Charles Bellingham telling funny stories to Irene and trying to amuse the girl; she was laughing, and seemed very happy. From time to time Bellingham took part in the general talk between the host and James Bellingham and Miss Kingsbury and that minister, Mr. Sewell. They talked of people mostly; it astonished Lapham to hear with what freedom they talked. They discussed these persons unsparingly; James Bellingham spoke of a man known to Lapham for his business success and great wealth as not a gentleman; his cousin Charles said he was surprised that the fellow had kept from being governor so long.

When the latter turned from Irene to make one of these excursions into the general talk, young Corey talked to her; and Lapham caught some words from which it seemed that they were speaking of Penelope. It vexed him to think she had not come; she could have talked as well as any of them; she was just as bright; and Lapham was aware that Irene was not as bright, though when he looked at her face, triumphant in its young beauty and fondness, he said to himself that it did not make any difference. He felt that he was not holding up his end of the line, however. When some one spoke to him he could only summon a few words of reply, that seemed to lead to nothing; things often came into his mind appropriate to what they were saying, but before he could get them out they were off on something else; they jumped about so, he could not keep up; but he felt, all the same, that he was not doing himself justice.

At one time the talk ran off upon a subject that Lapham had never heard talked of before; but again he was vexed that Penelope was not there, to have her say; he believed that her say would have been worth hearing.

Miss Kingsbury leaned forward and asked Charles Bellingham if he had read Tears, Idle Tears, the novel that was making such a sensation; and when he said no, she said she wondered at him. “It’s perfectly heart-breaking, as you’ll imagine from the name; but there’s such a dear old-fashioned hero and heroine in it, who keep dying for each other all the way through, and making the most wildly satisfactory and unnecessary sacrifices for each other. You feel as if you’d done them yourself.”

“Ah, that’s the secret of its success,” said Bromfield Corey. “It flatters the reader by painting the characters colossal, but with his limp and stoop, so that he feels himself of their supernatural proportions. You’ve read it, Nanny?”

“Yes,” said his daughter. “It ought to have been called Slop, Silly Slop.”

“Oh, not quite SLOP, Nanny,” pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

“It’s astonishing,” said Charles Bellingham, “how we do like the books that go for our heart-strings. And I really suppose that you can’t put a more popular thing than self-sacrifice into a novel. We do like to see people suffering sublimely.”

“There was talk some years ago,” said James Bellingham, “about novels going out.”

“They’re just coming in!” cried Miss Kingsbury.

“Yes,” said Mr. Sewell, the minister. “And I don’t think there ever was a time when they formed the whole intellectual experience of more people. They do greater mischief than ever.”

“Don’t be envious, parson,” said the host.

“No,” answered Sewell. “I should be glad of their help. But those novels with old-fashioned heroes and heroines in them — excuse me, Miss Kingsbury — are ruinous!”

“Don’t you feel like a moral wreck, Miss Kingsbury?” asked the host.

But Sewell went on: “The novelists might be the greatest possible help to us if they painted life as it is, and human feelings in their true proportion and relation, but for the most part they have been and are altogether noxious.”

This seemed sense to Lapham; but Bromfield Corey asked: “But what if life as it is isn’t amusing? Aren’t we to be amused?”

“Not to our hurt,” sturdily answered the minister. “And the self-sacrifice painted in most novels like this — —”

“Slop, Silly Slop?” suggested the proud father of the inventor of the phrase.

“Yes — is nothing but psychical suicide, and is as wholly immoral as the spectacle of a man falling upon his sword.”

“Well, I don’t know but you’re right, parson,” said the host; and the minister, who had apparently got upon a battle-horse of his, careered onward in spite of some tacit attempts of his wife to seize the bridle.

“Right? To be sure I am right. The whole business of love, and love-making and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Love is very sweet, very pretty — —”

“Oh, THANK you, Mr. Sewell,” said Nanny Corey, in a way that set them all laughing.

“But it’s the affair, commonly, of very young people, who have not yet character and experience enough to make them interesting. In novels it’s treated, not only as if it were the chief interest of life, but the sole interest of the lives of two ridiculous young persons; and it is taught that love is perpetual, that the glow of a true passion lasts for ever; and that it is sacrilege to think or act otherwise.”

“Well, but isn’t that true, Mr. Sewell?” pleaded Miss Kingsbury.

“I have known some most estimable people who had married a second time,” said the minister, and then he had the applause with him. Lapham wanted to make some open recognition of his good sense, but could not.

“I suppose the passion itself has been a good deal changed,” said Bromfield Corey, “since the poets began to idealise it in the days of chivalry.”

“Yes; and it ought to be changed again,” said Mr. Sewell.

“What! Back?”

“I don’t say that. But it ought to be recognised as something natural and mortal, and divine honours, which belong to righteousness alone, ought not to be paid it.”

“Oh, you ask too much, parson,” laughed his host, and the talk wandered away to something else.

It was not an elaborate dinner; but Lapham was used to having everything on the table at once, and this succession of dishes bewildered him; he was afraid perhaps he was eating too much. He now no longer made any pretence of not drinking his wine, for he was thirsty, and there was no more water, and he hated to ask for any. The ice-cream came, and then the fruit. Suddenly Mrs. Corey rose, and said across the table to her husband, “I suppose you will want your coffee here.” And he replied, “Yes; we’ll join you at tea.”

The ladies all rose, and the gentlemen got up with them. Lapham started to follow Mrs. Corey, but the other men merely stood in their places, except young Corey, who ran and opened the door for his mother. Lapham thought with shame that it was he who ought to have done that; but no one seemed to notice, and he sat down again gladly, after kicking out one of his legs which had gone to sleep.

They brought in cigars with coffee, and Bromfield Corey advised Lapham to take one that he chose for him. Lapham confessed that he liked a good cigar about as well as anybody, and Corey said: “These are new. I had an Englishman here the other day who was smoking old cigars in the superstition that tobacco improved with age, like wine.”

“Ah,” said Lapham, “anybody who had ever lived off a tobacco country could tell him better than that.” With the fuming cigar between his lips he felt more at home than he had before. He turned sidewise in his chair and, resting one arm on the back, intertwined the fingers of both hands, and smoked at large ease. James Bellingham came and sat down by him. “Colonel Lapham, weren’t you with the 96th Vermont when they charged across the river in front of Pickensburg, and the rebel battery opened fire on them in the water?”

Lapham slowly shut his eyes and slowly dropped his head for assent, letting out a white volume of smoke from the corner of his mouth.

“I thought so,” said Bellingham. “I was with the 85th Massachusetts, and I sha’n’t forget that slaughter. We were all new to it still. Perhaps that’s why it made such an impression.”

“I don’t know,” suggested Charles Bellingham. “Was there anything much more impressive afterward? I read of it out in Missouri, where I was stationed at the time, and I recollect the talk of some old army men about it. They said that death-rate couldn’t be beaten. I don’t know that it ever was.”

“About one in five of us got out safe,” said Lapham, breaking his cigar-ash off on the edge of a plate. James Bellingham reached him a bottle of Apollinaris. He drank a glass, and then went on smoking.

They all waited, as if expecting him to speak, and then Corey said: “How incredible those things seem already! You gentlemen KNOW that they happened; but are you still able to believe it?”

“Ah, nobody FEELS that anything happened,” said Charles Bellingham. “The past of one’s experience doesn’t differ a great deal from the past of one’s knowledge. It isn’t much more probable; it’s really a great deal less vivid than some scenes in a novel that one read when a boy.”

“I’m not sure of that,” said James Bellingham.

“Well, James, neither am I,” consented his cousin, helping himself from Lapham’s Apollinaris bottle. “There would be very little talking at dinner if one only said the things that one was sure of.”

The others laughed, and Bromfield Corey remarked thoughtfully, “What astonishes the craven civilian in all these things is the abundance — the superabundance — of heroism. The cowards were the exception; the men that were ready to die, the rule.”

“The woods were full of them,” said Lapham, without taking his cigar from his mouth.

“That’s a nice little touch in School,” interposed Charles Bellingham, “where the girl says to the fellow who was at Inkerman, ‘I should think you would be so proud of it,’ and he reflects a while, and says, ‘Well, the fact is, you know, there were so many of us.’”

“Yes, I remember that,” said James Bellingham, smiling for pleasure in it. “But I don’t see why you claim the credit of being a craven civilian, Bromfield,” he added, with a friendly glance at his brother-in-law, and with the willingness Boston men often show to turn one another’s good points to the light in company; bred so intimately together at school and college and in society, they all know these points. “A man who was out with Garibaldi in ‘48,” continued James Bellingham.

“Oh, a little amateur red-shirting,” Corey interrupted in deprecation. “But even if you choose to dispute my claim, what has become of all the heroism? Tom, how many club men do you know who would think it sweet and fitting to die for their country?”

“I can’t think of a great many at the moment, sir,” replied the son, with the modesty of his generation.

“And I couldn’t in ‘61,” said his uncle. “Nevertheless they were there.”

“Then your theory is that it’s the occasion that is wanting,” said Bromfield Corey. “But why shouldn’t civil service reform, and the resumption of specie payment, and a tariff for revenue only, inspire heroes? They are all good causes.”

“It’s the occasion that’s wanting,” said James Bellingham, ignoring the persiflage. “And I’m very glad of it.”

“So am I,” said Lapham, with a depth of feeling that expressed itself in spite of the haze in which his brain seemed to float. There was a great deal of the talk that he could not follow; it was too quick for him; but here was something he was clear of. “I don’t want to see any more men killed in my time.” Something serious, something sombre must lurk behind these words, and they waited for Lapham to say more; but the haze closed round him again, and he remained silent, drinking Apollinaris.

“We non-combatants were notoriously reluctant to give up fighting,” said Mr. Sewell, the minister; “but I incline to think Colonel Lapham and Mr. Bellingham may be right. I dare say we shall have the heroism again if we have the occasion. Till it comes, we must content ourselves with the every-day generosities and sacrifices. They make up in quantity what they lack in quality, perhaps.”

“They’re not so picturesque,” said Bromfield Corey. “You can paint a man dying for his country, but you can’t express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen.”

“Perhaps the novelists will get at him by and by,” suggested Charles Bellingham. “If I were one of these fellows, I shouldn’t propose to myself anything short of that.”

“What? the commonplace?” asked his cousin.

“Commonplace? The commonplace is just that light, impalpable, aerial essence which they’ve never got into their confounded books yet. The novelist who could interpret the common feelings of commonplace people would have the answer to ‘the riddle of the painful earth’ on his tongue.”

“Oh, not so bad as that, I hope,” said the host; and Lapham looked from one to the other, trying to make out what they were at. He had never been so up a tree before.

“I suppose it isn’t well for us to see human nature at white heat habitually,” continued Bromfield Corey, after a while. “It would make us vain of our species. Many a poor fellow in that war and in many another has gone into battle simply and purely for his country’s sake, not knowing whether, if he laid down his life, he should ever find it again, or whether, if he took it up hereafter, he should take it up in heaven or hell. Come, parson!” he said, turning to the minister, “what has ever been conceived of omnipotence, of omniscience, so sublime, so divine as that?”

“Nothing,” answered the minister quietly. “God has never been imagined at all. But if you suppose such a man as that was Authorised, I think it will help you to imagine what God must be.”

“There’s sense in that,” said Lapham. He took his cigar out of his mouth, and pulled his chair a little toward the table, on which he placed his ponderous fore-arms. “I want to tell you about a fellow I had in my own company when we first went out. We were all privates to begin with; after a while they elected me captain — I’d had the tavern stand, and most of ’em knew me. But Jim Millon never got to be anything more than corporal; corporal when he was killed.” The others arrested themselves in various attitudes of attention, and remained listening to Lapham with an interest that profoundly flattered him. Now, at last, he felt that he was holding up his end of the rope. “I can’t say he went into the thing from the highest motives, altogether; our motives are always pretty badly mixed, and when there’s such a hurrah-boys as there was then, you can’t tell which is which. I suppose Jim Millon’s wife was enough to account for his going, herself. She was a pretty bad assortment,” said Lapham, lowering his voice and glancing round at the door to make sure that it was shut, “and she used to lead Jim ONE kind of life. Well, sir,” continued Lapham, synthetising his auditors in that form of address, “that fellow used to save every cent of his pay and send it to that woman. Used to get me to do it for him. I tried to stop him. ‘Why, Jim,’ said I, ‘you know what she’ll do with it.’ ‘That’s so, Cap,’ says he, ‘but I don’t know what she’ll do without it.’ And it did keep her straight — straight as a string — as long as Jim lasted. Seemed as if there was something mysterious about it. They had a little girl, — about as old as my oldest girl, — and Jim used to talk to me about her. Guess he done it as much for her as for the mother; and he said to me before the last action we went into, ‘I should like to turn tail and run, Cap. I ain’t comin’ out o’ this one. But I don’t suppose it would do.’ ‘Well, not for you, Jim,’ said I. ‘I want to live,’ he says; and he bust out crying right there in my tent. ‘I want to live for poor Molly and Zerrilla’ — that’s what they called the little one; I dunno where they got the name. ‘I ain’t ever had half a chance; and now she’s doing better, and I believe we should get along after this.’ He set there cryin’ like a baby. But he wa’n’t no baby when he went into action. I hated to look at him after it was over, not so much because he’d got a ball that was meant for me by a sharpshooter — he saw the devil takin’ aim, and he jumped to warn me — as because he didn’t look like Jim; he looked like — fun; all desperate and savage. I guess he died hard.”

The story made its impression, and Lapham saw it. “Now I say,” he resumed, as if he felt that he was going to do himself justice, and say something to heighten the effect his story had produced. At the same time he was aware of a certain want of clearness. He had the idea, but it floated vague, elusive, in his brain. He looked about as if for something to precipitate it in tangible shape.

“Apollinaris?” asked Charles Bellingham, handing the bottle from the other side. He had drawn his chair closer than the rest to Lapham’s, and was listening with great interest. When Mrs. Corey asked him to meet Lapham, he accepted gladly. “You know I go in for that sort of thing, Anna. Since Leslie’s affair we’re rather bound to do it. And I think we meet these practical fellows too little. There’s always something original about them.” He might naturally have believed that the reward of his faith was coming.

“Thanks, I will take some of this wine,” said Lapham, pouring himself a glass of Madeira from a black and dusty bottle caressed by a label bearing the date of the vintage. He tossed off the wine, unconscious of its preciousness, and waited for the result. That cloudiness in his brain disappeared before it, but a mere blank remained. He not only could not remember what he was going to say, but he could not recall what they had been talking about. They waited, looking at him, and he stared at them in return. After a while he heard the host saying, “Shall we join the ladies?”

Lapham went, trying to think what had happened. It seemed to him a long time since he had drunk that wine.

Miss Corey gave him a cup of tea, where he stood aloof from his wife, who was talking with Miss Kingsbury and Mrs. Sewell; Irene was with Miss Nanny Corey. He could not hear what they were talking about; but if Penelope had come, he knew that she would have done them all credit. He meant to let her know how he felt about her behaviour when he got home. It was a shame for her to miss such a chance. Irene was looking beautiful, as pretty as all the rest of them put together, but she was not talking, and Lapham perceived that at a dinner-party you ought to talk. He was himself conscious of having, talked very well. He now wore an air of great dignity, and, in conversing with the other gentlemen, he used a grave and weighty deliberation. Some of them wanted him to go into the library. There he gave his ideas of books. He said he had not much time for anything but the papers; but he was going to have a complete library in his new place. He made an elaborate acknowledgment to Bromfield Corey of his son’s kindness in suggesting books for his library; he said that he had ordered them all, and that he meant to have pictures. He asked Mr. Corey who was about the best American painter going now. “I don’t set up to be a judge of pictures, but I know what I like,” he said. He lost the reserve which he had maintained earlier, and began to boast. He himself introduced the subject of his paint, in a natural transition from pictures; he said Mr. Corey must take a run up to Lapham with him some day, and see the Works; they would interest him, and he would drive him round the country; he kept most of his horses up there, and he could show Mr. Corey some of the finest Jersey grades in the country. He told about his brother William, the judge at Dubuque; and a farm he had out there that paid for itself every year in wheat. As he cast off all fear, his voice rose, and he hammered his arm-chair with the thick of his hand for emphasis. Mr. Corey seemed impressed; he sat perfectly quiet, listening, and Lapham saw the other gentlemen stop in their talk every now and then to listen. After this proof of his ability to interest them, he would have liked to have Mrs. Lapham suggest again that he was unequal to their society, or to the society of anybody else. He surprised himself by his ease among men whose names had hitherto overawed him. He got to calling Bromfield Corey by his surname alone. He did not understand why young Corey seemed so preoccupied, and he took occasion to tell the company how he had said to his wife the first time he saw that fellow that he could make a man of him if he had him in the business; and he guessed he was not mistaken. He began to tell stories of the different young men he had had in his employ. At last he had the talk altogether to himself; no one else talked, and he talked unceasingly. It was a great time; it was a triumph.

He was in this successful mood when word came to him that Mrs. Lapham was going; Tom Corey seemed to have brought it, but he was not sure. Anyway, he was not going to hurry. He made cordial invitations to each of the gentlemen to drop in and see him at his office, and would not be satisfied till he had exacted a promise from each. He told Charles Bellingham that he liked him, and assured James Bellingham that it had always been his ambition to know him, and that if any one had said when he first came to Boston that in less than ten years he should be hobnobbing with Jim Bellingham, he should have told that person he lied. He would have told anybody he lied that had told him ten years ago that a son of Bromfield Corey would have come and asked him to take him into the business. Ten years ago he, Silas Lapham, had come to Boston a little worse off than nothing at all, for he was in debt for half the money that he had bought out his partner with, and here he was now worth a million, and meeting you gentlemen like one of you. And every cent of that was honest money, — no speculation, — every copper of it for value received. And here, only the other day, his old partner, who had been going to the dogs ever since he went out of the business, came and borrowed twenty thousand dollars of him! Lapham lent it because his wife wanted him to: she had always felt bad about the fellow’s having to go out of the business.

He took leave of Mr. Sewell with patronising affection, and bade him come to him if he ever got into a tight place with his parish work; he would let him have all the money he wanted; he had more money than he knew what to do with. “Why, when your wife sent to mine last fall,” he said, turning to Mr. Corey, “I drew my cheque for five hundred dollars, but my wife wouldn’t take more than one hundred; said she wasn’t going to show off before Mrs. Corey. I call that a pretty good joke on Mrs. Corey. I must tell her how Mrs. Lapham done her out of a cool four hundred dollars.”

He started toward the door of the drawing-room to take leave of the ladies; but Tom Corey was at his elbow, saying, “I think Mrs. Lapham is waiting for you below, sir,” and in obeying the direction Corey gave him toward another door he forgot all about his purpose, and came away without saying good-night to his hostess.

Mrs. Lapham had not known how soon she ought to go, and had no idea that in her quality of chief guest she was keeping the others. She stayed till eleven o’clock, and was a little frightened when she found what time it was; but Mrs. Corey, without pressing her to stay longer, had said it was not at all late. She and Irene had had a perfect time. Everybody had been very polite, on the way home they celebrated the amiability of both the Miss Coreys and of Miss Kingsbury. Mrs. Lapham thought that Mrs. Bellingham was about the pleasantest person she ever saw; she had told her all about her married daughter who had married an inventor and gone to live in Omaha — a Mrs. Blake.

“If it’s that car-wheel Blake,” said Lapham proudly, “I know all about him. I’ve sold him tons of the paint.”

“Pooh, papa! How you do smell of smoking!” cried Irene.

“Pretty strong, eh?” laughed Lapham, letting down a window of the carriage. His heart was throbbing wildly in the close air, and he was glad of the rush of cold that came in, though it stopped his tongue, and he listened more and more drowsily to the rejoicings that his wife and daughter exchanged. He meant to have them wake Penelope up and tell her what she had lost; but when he reached home he was too sleepy to suggest it. He fell asleep as soon as his head touched the pillow, full of supreme triumph.

But in the morning his skull was sore with the unconscious, night-long ache; and he rose cross and taciturn. They had a silent breakfast. In the cold grey light of the morning the glories of the night before showed poorer. Here and there a painful doubt obtruded itself and marred them with its awkward shadow. Penelope sent down word that she was not well, and was not coming to breakfast, and Lapham was glad to go to his office without seeing her.

He was severe and silent all day with his clerks, and peremptory with customers. Of Corey he was slyly observant, and as the day wore away he grew more restively conscious. He sent out word by his office-boy that he would like to see Mr. Corey for a few minutes after closing. The type-writer girl had lingered too, as if she wished to speak with him, and Corey stood in abeyance as she went toward Lapham’s door.

“Can’t see you to-night, Zerrilla,” he said bluffly, but not unkindly. “Perhaps I’ll call at the house, if it’s important.”

“It is,” said the girl, with a spoiled air of insistence.

“Well,” said Lapham, and, nodding to Corey to enter, he closed the door upon her. Then he turned to the young, man and demanded: “Was I drunk last night?”

XV.

LAPHAM’S strenuous face was broken up with the emotions that had forced him to this question: shame, fear of the things that must have been thought of him, mixed with a faint hope that he might be mistaken, which died out at the shocked and pitying look in Corey’s eyes.

“Was I drunk?” he repeated. “I ask you, because I was never touched by drink in my life before, and I don’t know.” He stood with his huge hands trembling on the back of his chair, and his dry lips apart, as he stared at Corey.

“That is what every one understood, Colonel Lapham,” said the young man. “Every one saw how it was. Don’t — —”

“Did they talk it over after I left?” asked Lapham vulgarly.

“Excuse me,” said Corey, blushing, “my father doesn’t talk his guests over with one another.” He added, with youthful superfluity, “You were among gentlemen.”

“I was the only one that wasn’t a gentleman there!” lamented Lapham. “I disgraced you! I disgraced my family! I mortified your father before his friends!” His head dropped. “I showed that I wasn’t fit to go with you. I’m not fit for any decent place. What did I say? What did I do?” he asked, suddenly lifting his head and confronting Corey. “Out with it! If you could bear to see it and hear it, I had ought to bear to know it!”

“There was nothing — really nothing,” said Corey. “Beyond the fact that you were not quite yourself, there was nothing whatever. My father DID speak of it to me,” he confessed, “when we were alone. He said that he was afraid we had not been thoughtful of you, if you were in the habit of taking only water; I told him I had not seen wine at your table. The others said nothing about you.”

“Ah, but what did they think?”

“Probably what we did: that it was purely a misfortune — an accident.”

“I wasn’t fit to be there,” persisted Lapham. “Do you want to leave?” he asked, with savage abruptness.

“Leave?” faltered the young man.

“Yes; quit the business? Cut the whole connection?”

“I haven’t the remotest idea of it!” cried Corey in amazement. “Why in the world should I?”

“Because you’re a gentleman, and I’m not, and it ain’t right I should be over you. If you want to go, I know some parties that would be glad to get you. I will give you up if you want to go before anything worse happens, and I shan’t blame you. I can help you to something better than I can offer you here, and I will.”

“There’s no question of my going, unless you wish it,” said Corey. “If you do — —”

“Will you tell your father,” interrupted Lapham, “that I had a notion all the time that I was acting the drunken blackguard, and that I’ve suffered for it all day? Will you tell him I don’t want him to notice me if we ever meet, and that I know I’m not fit to associate with gentlemen in anything but a business way, if I am that?”

“Certainly I shall do nothing of the kind,” retorted Corey. “I can’t listen to you any longer. What you say is shocking to me — shocking in a way you can’t think.”

“Why, man!” exclaimed Lapham, with astonishment; “if I can stand it, YOU can!”

“No,” said Corey, with a sick look, “that doesn’t follow. You may denounce yourself, if you will; but I have my reasons for refusing to hear you — my reasons why I CAN’T hear you. If you say another word I must go away.”

“I don’t understand you,” faltered Lapham, in bewilderment, which absorbed even his shame.

“You exaggerate the effect of what has happened,” said the young man. “It’s enough, more than enough, for you to have mentioned the matter to me, and I think it’s unbecoming in me to hear you.”

He made a movement toward the door, but Lapham stopped him with the tragic humility of his appeal. “Don’t go yet! I can’t let you. I’ve disgusted you, — I see that; but I didn’t mean to. I — I take it back.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to take back,” said Corey, with a repressed shudder for the abasement which he had seen. “But let us say no more about it — think no more. There wasn’t one of the gentlemen present last night who didn’t understand the matter precisely as my father and I did, and that fact must end it between us two.”

He went out into the larger office beyond, leaving Lapham helpless to prevent his going. It had become a vital necessity with him to think the best of Lapham, but his mind was in a whirl of whatever thoughts were most injurious. He thought of him the night before in the company of those ladies and gentlemen, and he quivered in resentment of his vulgar, braggart, uncouth nature. He recognised his own allegiance to the exclusiveness to which he was born and bred, as a man perceives his duty to his country when her rights are invaded. His eye fell on the porter going about in his shirt-sleeves to make the place fast for the night, and he said to himself that Dennis was not more plebeian than his master; that the gross appetites, the blunt sense, the purblind ambition, the stupid arrogance were the same in both, and the difference was in a brute will that probably left the porter the gentler man of the two. The very innocence of Lapham’s life in the direction in which he had erred wrought against him in the young man’s mood: it contained the insult of clownish inexperience. Amidst the stings and flashes of his wounded pride, all the social traditions, all the habits of feeling, which he had silenced more and more by force of will during the past months, asserted their natural sway, and he rioted in his contempt of the offensive boor, who was even more offensive in his shame than in his trespass. He said to himself that he was a Corey, as if that were somewhat; yet he knew that at the bottom of his heart all the time was that which must control him at last, and which seemed sweetly to be suffering his rebellion, secure of his submission in the end. It was almost with the girl’s voice that it seemed to plead with him, to undo in him, effect by effect, the work of his indignant resentment, to set all things in another and fairer light, to give him hopes, to suggest palliations, to protest against injustices. It WAS in Lapham’s favour that he was so guiltless in the past, and now Corey asked himself if it were the first time he could have wished a guest at his father’s table to have taken less wine; whether Lapham was not rather to be honoured for not knowing how to contain his folly where a veteran transgressor might have held his tongue. He asked himself, with a thrill of sudden remorse, whether, when Lapham humbled himself in the dust so shockingly, he had shown him the sympathy to which such ABANDON had the right; and he had to own that he had met him on the gentlemanly ground, sparing himself and asserting the superiority of his sort, and not recognising that Lapham’s humiliation came from the sense of wrong, which he had helped to accumulate upon him by superfinely standing aloof and refusing to touch him.

He shut his desk and hurried out into the early night, not to go anywhere, but to walk up and down, to try to find his way out of the chaos, which now seemed ruin, and now the materials out of which fine actions and a happy life might be shaped. Three hours later he stood at Lapham’s door.

At times what he now wished to do had seemed for ever impossible, and again it had seemed as if he could not wait a moment longer. He had not been careless, but very mindful of what he knew must be the feelings of his own family in regard to the Laphams, and he had not concealed from himself that his family had great reason and justice on their side in not wishing him to alienate himself from their common life and associations. The most that he could urge to himself was that they had not all the reason and justice; but he had hesitated and delayed because they had so much. Often he could not make it appear right that he should merely please himself in what chiefly concerned himself. He perceived how far apart in all their experiences and ideals the Lapham girls and his sisters were; how different Mrs. Lapham was from his mother; how grotesquely unlike were his father and Lapham; and the disparity had not always amused him.

He had often taken it very seriously, and sometimes he said that he must forego the hope on which his heart was set. There had been many times in the past months when he had said that he must go no further, and as often as he had taken this stand he had yielded it, upon this or that excuse, which he was aware of trumping up. It was part of the complication that he should be unconscious of the injury he might be doing to some one besides his family and himself; this was the defect of his diffidence; and it had come to him in a pang for the first time when his mother said that she would not have the Laphams think she wished to make more of the acquaintance than he did; and then it had come too late. Since that he had suffered quite as much from the fear that it might not be as that it might be so; and now, in the mood, romantic and exalted, in which he found himself concerning Lapham, he was as far as might be from vain confidence. He ended the question in his own mind by affirming to himself that he was there, first of all, to see Lapham and give him an ultimate proof of his own perfect faith and unabated respect, and to offer him what reparation this involved for that want of sympathy — of humanity — which he had shown.

XVI.

THE Nova Scotia second-girl who answered Corey’s ring said that Lapham had not come home yet.

“Oh,” said the young man, hesitating on the outer step.

“I guess you better come in,” said the girl, “I’ll go and see when they’re expecting him.”

Corey was in the mood to be swayed by any chance. He obeyed the suggestion of the second-girl’s patronising friendliness, and let her shut him into the drawing-room, while she went upstairs to announce him to Penelope. “Did you tell him father wasn’t at home?”

“Yes. He seemed so kind of disappointed, I told him to come in, and I’d see when he WOULD be in,” said the girl, with the human interest which sometimes replaces in the American domestic the servile deference of other countries.

A gleam of amusement passed over Penelope’s face, as she glanced at herself in the glass. “Well,” she cried finally, dropping from her shoulders the light shawl in which she had been huddled over a book when Corey rang, “I will go down.”

“All right,” said the girl, and Penelope began hastily to amend the disarray of her hair, which she tumbled into a mass on the top of her little head, setting off the pale dark of her complexion with a flash of crimson ribbon at her throat. She moved across the carpet once or twice with the quaint grace that belonged to her small figure, made a dissatisfied grimace at it in the glass, caught a handkerchief out of a drawer and slid it into her pocket, and then descended to Corey.

The Lapham drawing-room in Nankeen Square was in the parti-coloured paint which the Colonel had hoped to repeat in his new house: the trim of the doors and windows was in light green and the panels in salmon; the walls were a plain tint of French grey paper, divided by gilt mouldings into broad panels with a wide stripe of red velvet paper running up the corners; the chandelier was of massive imitation bronze; the mirror over the mantel rested on a fringed mantel-cover of green reps, and heavy curtains of that stuff hung from gilt lambrequin frames at the window; the carpet was of a small pattern in crude green, which, at the time Mrs. Lapham bought it, covered half the new floors in Boston. In the panelled spaces on the walls were some stone-coloured landscapes, representing the mountains and canyons of the West, which the Colonel and his wife had visited on one of the early official railroad excursions. In front of the long windows looking into the Square were statues, kneeling figures which turned their backs upon the company within-doors, and represented allegories of Faith and Prayer to people without. A white marble group of several figures, expressing an Italian conception of Lincoln Freeing the Slaves, — a Latin negro and his wife, — with our Eagle flapping his wings in approval, at Lincoln’s feet, occupied one corner, and balanced the what-not of an earlier period in another. These phantasms added their chill to that imparted by the tone of the walls, the landscapes, and the carpets, and contributed to the violence of the contrast when the chandelier was lighted up full glare, and the heat of the whole furnace welled up from the registers into the quivering atmosphere on one of the rare occasions when the Laphams invited company.

Corey had not been in this room before; the family had always received him in what they called the sitting-room. Penelope looked into this first, and then she looked into the parlour, with a smile that broke into a laugh as she discovered him standing under the single burner which the second-girl had lighted for him in the chandelier.

“I don’t understand how you came to be put in there,” she said, as she led the way to the cozier place, “unless it was because Alice thought you were only here on probation, anyway. Father hasn’t got home yet, but I’m expecting him every moment; I don’t know what’s keeping him. Did the girl tell you that mother and Irene were out?”

“No, she didn’t say. It’s very good of you to see me.” She had not seen the exaltation which he had been feeling, he perceived with half a sigh; it must all be upon this lower level; perhaps it was best so. “There was something I wished to say to your father —— I hope,” he broke off, “you’re better to-night.”

“Oh yes, thank you,” said Penelope, remembering that she had not been well enough to go to dinner the night before.

“We all missed you very much.”

“Oh, thank you! I’m afraid you wouldn’t have missed me if I had been there.”

“Oh yes, we should,” said Corey, “I assure you.”

They looked at each other.

“I really think I believed I was saying something,” said the girl.

“And so did I,” replied the young man. They laughed rather wildly, and then they both became rather grave.

He took the chair she gave him, and looked across at her, where she sat on the other side of the hearth, in a chair lower than his, with her hands dropped in her lap, and the back of her head on her shoulders as she looked up at him. The soft-coal fire in the grate purred and flickered; the drop-light cast a mellow radiance on her face. She let her eyes fall, and then lifted them for an irrelevant glance at the clock on the mantel.

“Mother and Irene have gone to the Spanish Students’ concert.”

“Oh, have they?” asked Corey; and he put his hat, which he had been holding in his hand, on the floor beside his chair.

She looked down at it for no reason, and then looked up at his face for no other, and turned a little red. Corey turned a little red himself. She who had always been so easy with him now became a little constrained.

“Do you know how warm it is out-of-doors?” he asked.

“No, is it warm? I haven’t been out all day.”

“It’s like a summer night.”

She turned her face towards the fire, and then started abruptly. “Perhaps it’s too warm for you here?”

“Oh no, it’s very comfortable.”

“I suppose it’s the cold of the last few days that’s still in the house. I was reading with a shawl on when you came.”

“I interrupted you.”

“Oh no. I had finished the book. I was just looking over it again.”

“Do you like to read books over?”

“Yes; books that I like at all.”

“That was it?” asked Corey.

The girl hesitated. “It has rather a sentimental name. Did you ever read it? — Tears, Idle Tears.”

“Oh yes; they were talking of that last night; it’s a famous book with ladies. They break their hearts over it. Did it make you cry?”

“Oh, it’s pretty easy to cry over a book,” said Penelope, laughing; “and that one is very natural till you come to the main point. Then the naturalness of all the rest makes that seem natural too; but I guess it’s rather forced.”

“Her giving him up to the other one?”

“Yes; simply because she happened to know that the other one had cared for him first. Why should she have done it? What right had she?”

“I don’t know. I suppose that the self-sacrifice — —”

“But it WASN’T self-sacrifice — or not self-sacrifice alone. She was sacrificing him too; and for some one who couldn’t appreciate him half as much as she could. I’m provoked with myself when I think how I cried over that book — for I did cry. It’s silly — it’s wicked for any one to do what that girl did. Why can’t they let people have a chance to behave reasonably in stories?”

“Perhaps they couldn’t make it so attractive,” suggested Corey, with a smile.

“It would be novel, at any rate,” said the girl. “But so it would in real life, I suppose,” she added.

“I don’t know. Why shouldn’t people in love behave sensibly?”

“That’s a very serious question,” said Penelope gravely. “I couldn’t answer it,” and she left him the embarrassment of supporting an inquiry which she had certainly instigated herself. She seemed to have finally recovered her own ease in doing this. “Do you admire our autumnal display, Mr. Corey?”

“Your display?”

“The trees in the Square. WE think it’s quite equal to an opening at Jordan & Marsh’s.”

“Ah, I’m afraid you wouldn’t let me be serious even about your maples.”

“Oh yes, I should — if you like to be serious.”

“Don’t you?”

“Well not about serious matters. That’s the reason that book made me cry.”

“You make fun of everything. Miss Irene was telling me last night about you.”

“Then it’s no use for me to deny it so soon. I must give Irene a talking to.”

“I hope you won’t forbid her to talk about you!”

She had taken up a fan from the table, and held it, now between her face and the fire, and now between her face and him. Her little visage, with that arch, lazy look in it, topped by its mass of dusky hair, and dwindling from the full cheeks to the small chin, had a Japanese effect in the subdued light, and it had the charm which comes to any woman with happiness. It would be hard to say how much of this she perceived that he felt. They talked about other things a while, and then she came back to what he had said. She glanced at him obliquely round her fan, and stopped moving it. “Does Irene talk about me?” she asked. “I think so — yes. Perhaps it’s only I who talk about you. You must blame me if it’s wrong,” he returned.

“Oh, I didn’t say it was wrong,” she replied. “But I hope if you said anything very bad of me you’ll let me know what it was, so that I can reform — —”

“No, don’t change, please!” cried the young man.

Penelope caught her breath, but went on resolutely,— “or rebuke you for speaking evil of dignities.” She looked down at the fan, now flat in her lap, and tried to govern her head, but it trembled, and she remained looking down. Again they let the talk stray, and then it was he who brought it back to themselves, as if it had not left them.

“I have to talk OF you,” said Corey, “because I get to talk TO you so seldom.”

“You mean that I do all the talking when we’re — together?” She glanced sidewise at him; but she reddened after speaking the last word.

“We’re so seldom together,” he pursued.

“I don’t know what you mean — —”

“Sometimes I’ve thought — I’ve been afraid that you avoided me.”

“Avoided you?”

“Yes! Tried not to be alone with me.”

She might have told him that there was no reason why she should be alone with him, and that it was very strange he should make this complaint of her. But she did not. She kept looking down at the fan, and then she lifted her burning face and looked at the clock again. “Mother and Irene will be sorry to miss you,” she gasped.

He instantly rose and came towards her. She rose too, and mechanically put out her hand. He took it as if to say good-night. “I didn’t mean to send you away,” she besought him.

“Oh, I’m not going,” he answered simply. “I wanted to say — to say that it’s I who make her talk about you. To say I —— There is something I want to say to you; I’ve said it so often to myself that I feel as if you must know it.” She stood quite still, letting him keep her hand, and questioning his face with a bewildered gaze. “You MUST know — she must have told you — she must have guessed — —” Penelope turned white, but outwardly quelled the panic that sent the blood to her heart. “I — I didn’t expect — I hoped to have seen your father — but I must speak now, whatever —— I love you!”

She freed her hand from both of those he had closed upon it, and went back from him across the room with a sinuous spring. “ME!” Whatever potential complicity had lurked in her heart, his words brought her only immeasurable dismay.

He came towards her again. “Yes, you. Who else?”

She fended him off with an imploring gesture. “I thought — I — it was — —”

She shut her lips tight, and stood looking at him where he remained in silent amaze. Then her words came again, shudderingly. “Oh, what have you done?”

“Upon my soul,” he said, with a vague smile, “I don’t know. I hope no harm?”

“Oh, don’t laugh!” she cried, laughing hysterically herself. “Unless you want me to think you the greatest wretch in the world!”

“I?” he responded. “For heaven’s sake tell me what you mean!”

“You know I can’t tell you. Can you say — can you put your hand on your heart and say that — you — say you never meant — that you meant me — all along?”

“Yes! — yes! Who else? I came here to see your father, and to tell him that I wished to tell you this — to ask him —— But what does it matter? You must have known it — you must have seen — and it’s for you to answer me. I’ve been abrupt, I know, and I’ve startled you; but if you love me, you can forgive that to my loving you so long before I spoke.”

She gazed at him with parted lips.

“Oh, mercy! What shall I do? If it’s true — what you say — you must go!” she said. “And you must never come any more. Do you promise that?”

“Certainly not,” said the young man. “Why should I promise such a thing — so abominably wrong? I could obey if you didn’t love me — —”

“Oh, I don’t! Indeed I don’t! Now will you obey.”

“No. I don’t believe you.”

“Oh!”

He possessed himself of her hand again.

“My love — my dearest! What is this trouble, that you can’t tell it? It can’t be anything about yourself. If it is anything about any one else, it wouldn’t make the least difference in the world, no matter what it was. I would be only too glad to show by any act or deed I could that nothing could change me towards you.”

“Oh, you don’t understand!”

“No, I don’t. You must tell me.”

“I will never do that.”

“Then I will stay here till your mother comes, and ask her what it is.”

“Ask HER?”

“Yes! Do you think I will give you up till I know why I must?”

“You force me to it! Will you go if I tell you, and never let any human creature know what you have said to me?”

“Not unless you give me leave.”

“That will be never. Well, then — —” She stopped, and made two or three ineffectual efforts to begin again. “No, no! I can’t. You must go!”

“I will not go!”

“You said you — loved me. If you do, you will go.”

He dropped the hands he had stretched towards her, and she hid her face in her own.

“There!” she said, turning it suddenly upon him. “Sit down there. And will you promise me — on your honour — not to speak — not to try to persuade me — not to — touch me? You won’t touch me?”

“I will obey you, Penelope.”

“As if you were never to see me again? As if I were dying?”

“I will do what you say. But I shall see you again; and don’t talk of dying. This is the beginning of life — —”

“No. It’s the end,” said the girl, resuming at last something of the hoarse drawl which the tumult of her feeling had broken into those half-articulate appeals. She sat down too, and lifted her face towards him. “It’s the end of life for me, because I know now that I must have been playing false from the beginning. You don’t know what I mean, and I can never tell you. It isn’t my secret — it’s some one else’s. You — you must never come here again. I can’t tell you why, and you must never try to know. Do you promise?”

“You can forbid me. I must do what you say.”

“I do forbid you, then. And you shall not think I am cruel — —”

“How could I think that?”

“Oh, how hard you make it!”

Corey laughed for very despair. “Can I make it easier by disobeying you?”

“I know I am talking crazily. But I’m not crazy.”

“No, no,” he said, with some wild notion of comforting her; “but try to tell me this trouble! There is nothing under heaven — no calamity, no sorrow — that I wouldn’t gladly share with you, or take all upon myself if I could!”

“I know! But this you can’t. Oh, my — —”

“Dearest! Wait! Think! Let me ask your mother — your father — —”

She gave a cry.

“No! If you do that, you will make me hate you! Will you — —”

The rattling of a latch-key was heard in the outer door.

“Promise!” cried Penelope.

“Oh, I promise!”

“Good-bye!” She suddenly flung her arms round his neck, and, pressing her cheek tight against his, flashed out of the room by one door as her father entered it by another.

Corey turned to him in a daze. “I — I called to speak with you — about a matter —— But it’s so late now. I’ll — I’ll see you to-morrow.”

“No time like the present,” said Lapham, with a fierceness that did not seem referable to Corey. He had his hat still on, and he glared at the young man out of his blue eyes with a fire that something else must have kindled there.

“I really can’t now,” said Corey weakly. “It will do quite as well to-morrow. Good night, sir.”

“Good night,” answered Lapham abruptly, following him to the door, and shutting it after him. “I think the devil must have got into pretty much everybody to-night,” he muttered, coming back to the room, where he put down his hat. Then he went to the kitchen-stairs and called down, “Hello, Alice! I want something to eat!”

XVII.

“WHAT’s the reason the girls never get down to breakfast any more?” asked Lapham, when he met his wife at the table in the morning. He had been up an hour and a half, and he spoke with the severity of a hungry man. “It seems to me they don’t amount to ANYthing. Here I am, at my time of life, up the first one in the house. I ring the bell for the cook at quarter-past six every morning, and the breakfast is on the table at half-past seven right along, like clockwork, but I never see anybody but you till I go to the office.”

“Oh yes, you do, Si,” said his wife soothingly. “The girls are nearly always down. But they’re young, and it tires them more than it does us to get up early.”

“They can rest afterwards. They don’t do anything after they ARE up,” grumbled Lapham.

“Well, that’s your fault, ain’t it? You oughtn’t to have made so much money, and then they’d have had to work.” She laughed at Lapham’s Spartan mood, and went on to excuse the young people. “Irene’s been up two nights hand running, and Penelope says she ain’t well. What makes you so cross about the girls? Been doing something you’re ashamed of?”

“I’ll tell you when I’ve been doing anything to be ashamed of,” growled Lapham.

“Oh no, you won’t!” said his wife jollily. “You’ll only be hard on the rest of us. Come now, Si; what is it?”

Lapham frowned into his coffee with sulky dignity, and said, without looking up, “I wonder what that fellow wanted here last night?”

“What fellow?”

“Corey. I found him here when I came home, and he said he wanted to see me; but he wouldn’t stop.”

“Where was he?”

“In the sitting-room.”

“Was Pen there?”

“I didn’t see her.”

Mrs. Lapham paused, with her hand on the cream-jug. “Why, what in the land did he want? Did he say he wanted you?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And then he wouldn’t stay?”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you just what it is, Silas Lapham. He came here” — she looked about the room and lowered her voice— “to see you about Irene, and then he hadn’t the courage.”

“I guess he’s got courage enough to do pretty much what he wants to,” said Lapham glumly. “All I know is, he was here. You better ask Pen about it, if she ever gets down.”

“I guess I shan’t wait for her,” said Mrs. Lapham; and, as her husband closed the front door after him, she opened that of her daughter’s room and entered abruptly.

The girl sat at the window, fully dressed, and as if she had been sitting there a long time. Without rising, she turned her face towards her mother. It merely showed black against the light, and revealed nothing till her mother came close to her with successive questions. “Why, how long have you been up, Pen? Why don’t you come to your breakfast? Did you see Mr. Corey when he called last night? Why, what’s the matter with you? What have you been crying about?”

“Have I been crying?”

“Yes! Your cheeks are all wet!”

“I thought they were on fire. Well, I’ll tell you what’s happened.” She rose, and then fell back in her chair. “Lock the door!” she ordered, and her mother mechanically obeyed. “I don’t want Irene in here. There’s nothing the matter. Only, Mr. Corey offered himself to me last night.”

Her mother remained looking at her, helpless, not so much with amaze, perhaps, as dismay. “Oh, I’m not a ghost! I wish I was! You had better sit down, mother. You have got to know all about it.”

Mrs. Lapham dropped nervelessly into the chair at the other window, and while the girl went slowly but briefly on, touching only the vital points of the story, and breaking at times into a bitter drollery, she sat as if without the power to speak or stir.

“Well, that’s all, mother. I should say I had dreamt, it, if I had slept any last night; but I guess it really happened.”

The mother glanced round at the bed, and said, glad to occupy herself delayingly with the minor care: “Why, you have been sitting up all night! You will kill yourself.”

“I don’t know about killing myself, but I’ve been sitting up all night,” answered the girl. Then, seeing that her mother remained blankly silent again, she demanded, “Why don’t you blame me, mother? Why don’t you say that I led him on, and tried to get him away from her? Don’t you believe I did?”

Her mother made her no answer, as if these ravings of self-accusal needed none. “Do you think,” she asked simply, “that he got the idea you cared for him?”

“He knew it! How could I keep it from him? I said I didn’t — at first!”

“It was no use,” sighed the mother. “You might as well said you did. It couldn’t help Irene any, if you didn’t.”

“I always tried to help her with him, even when I — —”

“Yes, I know. But she never was equal to him. I saw that from the start; but I tried to blind myself to it. And when he kept coming — —”

“You never thought of me!” cried the girl, with a bitterness that reached her mother’s heart. “I was nobody! I couldn’t feel! No one could care for me!” The turmoil of despair, of triumph, of remorse and resentment, which filled her soul, tried to express itself in the words.

“No,” said the mother humbly. “I didn’t think of you. Or I didn’t think of you enough. It did come across me sometimes that may be —— But it didn’t seem as if —— And your going on so for Irene — —”

“You let me go on. You made me always go and talk with him for her, and you didn’t think I would talk to him for myself. Well, I didn’t!”

“I’m punished for it. When did you — begin to care for him!”

“How do I know? What difference does it make? It’s all over now, no matter when it began. He won’t come here any more, unless I let him.” She could not help betraying her pride in this authority of hers, but she went on anxiously enough, “What will you say to Irene? She’s safe as far as I’m concerned; but if he don’t care for her, what will you do?”

“I don’t know what to do,” said Mrs. Lapham. She sat in an apathy from which she apparently could not rouse herself. “I don’t see as anything can be done.”

Penelope laughed in a pitying derision.

“Well, let things go on then. But they won’t go on.”

“No, they won’t go on,” echoed her mother. “She’s pretty enough, and she’s capable; and your father’s got the money — I don’t know what I’m saying! She ain’t equal to him, and she never was. I kept feeling it all the time, and yet I kept blinding myself.”

“If he had ever cared for her,” said Penelope, “it wouldn’t have mattered whether she was equal to him or not. I’M not equal to him either.”

Her mother went on: “I might have thought it was you; but I had got set —— Well! I can see it all clear enough, now it’s too late. I don’t know what to do.”

“And what do you expect me to do?” demanded the girl. “Do you want ME to go to Irene and tell her that I’ve got him away from her?”

“O good Lord!” cried Mrs. Lapham. “What shall I do? What do you want I should do, Pen?”

“Nothing for me,” said Penelope. “I’ve had it out with myself. Now do the best you can for Irene.”

“I couldn’t say you had done wrong, if you was to marry him to-day.”

“Mother!”

“No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t say but what you had been good and faithfull all through, and you had a perfect right to do it. There ain’t any one to blame. He’s behaved like a gentleman, and I can see now that he never thought of her, and that it was you all the while. Well, marry him, then! He’s got the right, and so have you.”

“What about Irene? I don’t want you to talk about me. I can take care of myself.”

“She’s nothing but a child. It’s only a fancy with her. She’ll get over it. She hain’t really got her heart set on him.”

“She’s got her heart set on him, mother. She’s got her whole life set on him. You know that.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said the mother, as promptly as if she had been arguing to that rather than the contrary effect.

“If I could give him to her, I would. But he isn’t mine to give.” She added in a burst of despair, “He isn’t mine to keep!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Lapham, “she has got to bear it. I don’t know what’s to come of it all. But she’s got to bear her share of it.” She rose and went toward the door.

Penelope ran after her in a sort of terror. “You’re not going to tell Irene?” she gasped, seizing her mother by either shoulder.

“Yes, I am,” said Mrs. Lapham. “If she’s a woman grown, she can bear a woman’s burden.”

“I can’t let you tell Irene,” said the girl, letting fall her face on her mother’s neck. “Not Irene,” she moaned. “I’m afraid to let you. How can I ever look at her again?”

“Why, you haven’t done anything, Pen,” said her mother soothingly.

“I wanted to! Yes, I must have done something. How could I help it? I did care for him from the first, and I must have tried to make him like me. Do you think I did? No, no! You mustn’t tell Irene! Not — not — yet! Mother! Yes! I did try to get him from her!” she cried, lifting her head, and suddenly looking her mother in the face with those large dim eyes of hers. “What do you think? Even last night! It was the first time I ever had him all to myself, for myself, and I know now that I tried to make him think that I was pretty and — funny. And I didn’t try to make him think of her. I knew that I pleased him, and I tried to please him more. Perhaps I could have kept him from saying that he cared for me; but when I saw he did — I must have seen it — I couldn’t. I had never had him to myself, and for myself before. I needn’t have seen him at all, but I wanted to see him; and when I was sitting there alone with him, how do I know what I did to let him feel that I cared for him? Now, will you tell Irene? I never thought he did care for me, and never expected him to. But I liked him. Yes — I did like him! Tell her that! Or else I will.”

“If it was to tell her he was dead,” began Mrs. Lapham absently.

“How easy it would be!” cried the girl in self-mockery. “But he’s worse than dead to her; and so am I. I’ve turned it over a million ways, mother; I’ve looked at it in every light you can put it in, and I can’t make anything but misery out of it. You can see the misery at the first glance, and you can’t see more or less if you spend your life looking at it.” She laughed again, as if the hopelessness of the thing amused her. Then she flew to the extreme of self-assertion. “Well, I HAVE a right to him, and he has a right to me. If he’s never done anything to make her think he cared for her, — and I know he hasn’t; it’s all been our doing, then he’s free and I’m free. We can’t make her happy whatever we do; and why shouldn’t I —— No, that won’t do! I reached that point before!” She broke again into her desperate laugh. “You may try now, mother!”

“I’d best speak to your father first — —”

Penelope smiled a little more forlornly than she had laughed.

“Well, yes; the Colonel will have to know. It isn’t a trouble that I can keep to myself exactly. It seems to belong to too many other people.”

Her mother took a crazy encouragement from her return to her old way of saying things. “Perhaps he can think of something.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt but the Colonel will know just what to do!”

“You mustn’t be too down-hearted about it. It — it’ll all come right — —”

“You tell Irene that, mother.”

Mrs. Lapham had put her hand on the door-key; she dropped it, and looked at the girl with a sort of beseeching appeal for the comfort she could not imagine herself. “Don’t look at me, mother,” said Penelope, shaking her head. “You know that if Irene were to die without knowing it, it wouldn’t come right for me.”

“Pen!”

“I’ve read of cases where a girl gives up the man that loves her so as to make some other girl happy that the man doesn’t love. That might be done.”

“Your father would think you were a fool,” said Mrs. Lapham, finding a sort of refuge in her strong disgust for the pseudo heroism. “No! If there’s to be any giving up, let it be by the one that shan’t make anybody but herself suffer. There’s trouble and sorrow enough in the world, without MAKING it on purpose!”

She unlocked the door, but Penelope slipped round and set herself against it. “Irene shall not give up!”

“I will see your father about it,” said the mother. “Let me out now — —”

“Don’t let Irene come here!”

“No. I will tell her that you haven’t slept. Go to bed now, and try to get some rest. She isn’t up herself yet. You must have some breakfast.”

“No; let me sleep if I can. I can get something when I wake up. I’ll come down if I can’t sleep. Life has got to go on. It does when there’s a death in the house, and this is only a little worse.”

“Don’t you talk nonsense!” cried Mrs. Lapham, with angry authority.

“Well, a little better, then,” said Penelope, with meek concession.

Mrs. Lapham attempted to say something, and could not. She went out and opened Irene’s door. The girl lifted her head drowsily from her pillow “Don’t disturb your sister when you get up, Irene. She hasn’t slept well — —”

“PLEASE don’t talk! I’m almost DEAD with sleep!” returned Irene. “Do go, mamma! I shan’t disturb her.” She turned her face down in the pillow, and pulled the covering up over her ears.

The mother slowly closed the door and went downstairs, feeling bewildered and baffled almost beyond the power to move. The time had been when she would have tried to find out why this judgment had been sent upon her. But now she could not feel that the innocent suffering of others was inflicted for her fault; she shrank instinctively from that cruel and egotistic misinterpretation of the mystery of pain and loss. She saw her two children, equally if differently dear to her, destined to trouble that nothing could avert, and she could not blame either of them; she could not blame the means of this misery to them; he was as innocent as they, and though her heart was sore against him in this first moment, she could still be just to him in it. She was a woman who had been used to seek the light by striving; she had hitherto literally worked to it. But it is the curse of prosperity that it takes work away from us, and shuts that door to hope and health of spirit. In this house, where everything had come to be done for her, she had no tasks to interpose between her and her despair. She sat down in her own room and let her hands fall in her lap, — the hands that had once been so helpful and busy, — and tried to think it all out. She had never heard of the fate that was once supposed to appoint the sorrows of men irrespective of their blamelessness or blame, before the time when it came to be believed that sorrows were penalties; but in her simple way she recognised something like that mythic power when she rose from her struggle with the problem, and said aloud to herself, “Well, the witch is in it.” Turn which way she would, she saw no escape from the misery to come — the misery which had come already to Penelope and herself, and that must come to Irene and her father. She started when she definitely thought of her husband, and thought with what violence it would work in every fibre of his rude strength. She feared that, and she feared something worse — the effect which his pride and ambition might seek to give it; and it was with terror of this, as well as the natural trust with which a woman must turn to her husband in any anxiety at last, that she felt she could not wait for evening to take counsel with him. When she considered how wrongly he might take it all, it seemed as if it were already known to him, and she was impatient to prevent his error.

She sent out for a messenger, whom she despatched with a note to his place of business: “Silas, I should like to ride with you this afternoon. Can’t you come home early? Persis.” And she was at dinner with Irene, evading her questions about Penelope, when answer came that he would be at the house with the buggy at half-past two. It is easy to put off a girl who has but one thing in her head; but though Mrs. Lapham could escape without telling anything of Penelope, she could not escape seeing how wholly Irene was engrossed with hopes now turned so vain and impossible. She was still talking of that dinner, of nothing but that dinner, and begging for flattery of herself and praise of him, which her mother had till now been so ready to give.

“Seems to me you don’t take very much interest, mamma!” she said, laughing and blushing at one point.

“Yes, — yes, I do,” protested Mrs. Lapham, and then the girl prattled on.

“I guess I shall get one of those pins that Nanny Corey had in her hair. I think it would become me, don’t you?”

“Yes; but Irene — I don’t like to have you go on so, till — unless he’s said something to show — You oughtn’t to give yourself up to thinking — —” But at this the girl turned so white, and looked such reproach at her, that she added frantically: “Yes, get the pin. It is just the thing for you! But don’t disturb Penelope. Let her alone till I get back. I’m going out to ride with your father. He’ll be here in half an hour. Are you through? Ring, then. Get yourself that fan you saw the other day. Your father won’t say anything; he likes to have you look well. I could see his eyes on you half the time the other night.”

“I should have liked to have Pen go with me,” said Irene, restored to her normal state of innocent selfishness by these flatteries. “Don’t you suppose she’ll be up in time? What’s the matter with her that she didn’t sleep?”

“I don’t know. Better let her alone.”

“Well,” submitted Irene.

XVIII.

MRS. LAPHAM went away to put on her bonnet and cloak, and she was waiting at the window when her husband drove up. She opened the door and ran down the steps. “Don’t get out; I can help myself in,” and she clambered to his side, while he kept the fidgeting mare still with voice and touch.

“Where do you want I should go?” he asked, turning the buggy.

“Oh, I don’t care. Out Brookline way, I guess. I wish you hadn’t brought this fool of a horse,” she gave way petulantly. “I wanted to have a talk.”

“When I can’t drive this mare and talk too, I’ll sell out altogether,” said Lapham. “She’ll be quiet enough when she’s had her spin.”

“Well,” said his wife; and while they were making their way across the city to the Milldam she answered certain questions he asked about some points in the new house.

“I should have liked to have you stop there,” he began; but she answered so quickly, “Not to-day,” that he gave it up and turned his horse’s head westward when they struck Beacon Street.

He let the mare out, and he did not pull her in till he left the Brighton road and struck off under the low boughs that met above one of the quiet streets of Brookline, where the stone cottages, with here and there a patch of determined ivy on their northern walls, did what they could to look English amid the glare of the autumnal foliage. The smooth earthen track under the mare’s hoofs was scattered with flakes of the red and yellow gold that made the air luminous around them, and the perspective was gay with innumerable tints and tones.

“Pretty sightly,” said Lapham, with a long sigh, letting the reins lie loose in his vigilant hand, to which he seemed to relegate the whole charge of the mare. “I want to talk with you about Rogers, Persis. He’s been getting in deeper and deeper with me; and last night he pestered me half to death to go in with him in one of his schemes. I ain’t going to blame anybody, but I hain’t got very much confidence in Rogers. And I told him so last night.”

“Oh, don’t talk to me about Rogers!” his wife broke in. “There’s something a good deal more important than Rogers in the world, and more important than your business. It seems as if you couldn’t think of anything else — that and the new house. Did you suppose I wanted to ride so as to talk Rogers with you?” she demanded, yielding to the necessity a wife feels of making her husband pay for her suffering, even if he has not inflicted it. “I declare — —”

“Well, hold on, now!” said Lapham. “What DO you want to talk about? I’m listening.”

His wife began, “Why, it’s just this, Silas Lapham!” and then she broke off to say, “Well, you may wait, now — starting me wrong, when it’s hard enough anyway.”

Lapham silently turned his whip over and over in his hand and waited.

“Did you suppose,” she asked at last, “that that young Corey had been coming to see Irene?”

“I don’t know what I supposed,” replied Lapham sullenly. “You always said so.” He looked sharply at her under his lowering brows.

“Well, he hasn’t,” said Mrs. Lapham; and she replied to the frown that blackened on her husband’s face. “And I can tell you what, if you take it in that way I shan’t speak another word.”

“Who’s takin’ it what way?” retorted Lapham savagely. “What are you drivin’ at?”

“I want you should promise that you’ll hear me out quietly.”

“I’ll hear you out if you’ll give me a chance. I haven’t said a word yet.”

“Well, I’m not going to have you flying into forty furies, and looking like a perfect thunder-cloud at the very start. I’ve had to bear it, and you’ve got to bear it too.”

“Well, let me have a chance at it, then.”

“It’s nothing to blame anybody about, as I can see, and the only question is, what’s the best thing to do about it. There’s only one thing we can do; for if he don’t care for the child, nobody wants to make him. If he hasn’t been coming to see her, he hasn’t, and that’s all there is to it.”

“No, it ain’t!” exclaimed Lapham.

“There!” protested his wife.

“If he hasn’t been coming to see her, what HAS he been coming for?”

“He’s been coming to see Pen!” cried the wife. “NOW are you satisfied?” Her tone implied that he had brought it all upon them; but at the sight of the swift passions working in his face to a perfect comprehension of the whole trouble, she fell to trembling, and her broken voice lost all the spurious indignation she had put into it. “O Silas! what are we going to do about it? I’m afraid it’ll kill Irene.”

Lapham pulled off the loose driving-glove from his right hand with the fingers of his left, in which the reins lay. He passed it over his forehead, and then flicked from it the moisture it had gathered there. He caught his breath once or twice, like a man who meditates a struggle with superior force and then remains passive in its grasp.

His wife felt the need of comforting him, as she had felt the need of afflicting him. “I don’t say but what it can be made to come out all right in the end. All I say is, I don’t see my way clear yet.”

“What makes you think he likes Pen?” he asked quietly.

“He told her so last night, and she told me this morning. Was he at the office to-day?”

“Yes, he was there. I haven’t been there much myself. He didn’t say anything to me. Does Irene know?”

“No; I left her getting ready to go out shopping. She wants to get a pin like the one Nanny Corey had on.”

“O my Lord!” groaned Lapham.

“It’s been Pen from the start, I guess, or almost from the start. I don’t say but what he was attracted some by Irene at the very first; but I guess it’s been Pen ever since he saw her; and we’ve taken up with a notion, and blinded ourselves with it. Time and again I’ve had my doubts whether he cared for Irene any; but I declare to goodness, when he kept coming, I never hardly thought of Pen, and I couldn’t help believing at last he DID care for Irene. Did it ever strike you he might be after Pen?”

“No. I took what you said. I supposed you knew.”

“Do you blame me, Silas?” she asked timidly.

“No. What’s the use of blaming? We don’t either of us want anything but the children’s good. What’s it all of it for, if it ain’t for that? That’s what we’ve both slaved for all our lives.”

“Yes, I know. Plenty of people LOSE their children,” she suggested.

“Yes, but that don’t comfort me any. I never was one to feel good because another man felt bad. How would you have liked it if some one had taken comfort because his boy lived when ours died? No, I can’t do it. And this is worse than death, someways. That comes and it goes; but this looks as if it was one of those things that had come to stay. The way I look at it, there ain’t any hope for anybody. Suppose we don’t want Pen to have him; will that help Irene any, if he don’t want her? Suppose we don’t want to let him have either; does that help either!”

“You talk,” exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, “as if our say was going to settle it. Do you suppose that Penelope Lapham is a girl to take up with a fellow that her sister is in love with, and that she always thought was in love with her sister, and go off and be happy with him? Don’t you believe but what it would come back to her, as long as she breathed the breath of life, how she’d teased her about him, as I’ve heard Pen tease Irene, and helped to make her think he was in love with her, by showing that she thought so herself? It’s ridiculous!”

Lapham seemed quite beaten down by this argument. His huge head hung forward over his breast; the reins lay loose in his moveless hand; the mare took her own way. At last he lifted his face and shut his heavy jaws.

“Well?” quavered his wife.

“Well,” he answered, “if he wants her, and she wants him, I don’t see what that’s got to do with it.” He looked straight forward, and not at his wife.

She laid her hands on the reins. “Now, you stop right here, Silas Lapham! If I thought that — if I really believed you could be willing to break that poor child’s heart, and let Pen disgrace herself by marrying a man that had as good as killed her sister, just because you wanted Bromfield Corey’s son for a son-in-law — —”

Lapham turned his face now, and gave her a look. “You had better NOT believe that, Persis! Get up!” he called to the mare, without glancing at her, and she sprang forward. “I see you’ve got past being any use to yourself on this subject.”

“Hello!” shouted a voice in front of him. “Where the devil you goin’ to?”

“Do you want to KILL somebody!” shrieked his wife.

There was a light crash, and the mare recoiled her length, and separated their wheels from those of the open buggy in front which Lapham had driven into. He made his excuses to the occupant; and the accident relieved the tension of their feelings, and left them far from the point of mutual injury which they had reached in their common trouble and their unselfish will for their children’s good.

It was Lapham who resumed the talk. “I’m afraid we can’t either of us see this thing in the right light. We’re too near to it. I wish to the Lord there was somebody to talk to about it.”

“Yes,” said his wife; “but there ain’t anybody.”

“Well, I dunno,” suggested Lapham, after a moment; “why not talk to the minister of your church? May be he could see some way out of it.”

Mrs. Lapham shook her head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t do. I’ve never taken up my connection with the church, and I don’t feel as if I’d got any claim on him.”

“If he’s anything of a man, or anything of a preacher, you HAVE got a claim on him,” urged Lapham; and he spoiled his argument by adding, “I’ve contributed enough MONEY to his church.”

“Oh, that’s nothing,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I ain’t well enough acquainted with Dr. Langworthy, or else I’m TOO well. No; if I was to ask any one, I should want to ask a total stranger. But what’s the use, Si? Nobody could make us see it any different from what it is, and I don’t know as I should want they should.”

It blotted out the tender beauty of the day, and weighed down their hearts ever more heavily within them. They ceased to talk of it a hundred times, and still came back to it. They drove on and on. It began to be late. “I guess we better go back, Si,” said his wife; and as he turned without speaking, she pulled her veil down and began to cry softly behind it, with low little broken sobs.

Lapham started the mare up and drove swiftly homeward. At last his wife stopped crying and began trying to find her pocket. “Here, take mine, Persis,” he said kindly, offering her his handkerchief, and she took it and dried her eyes with it. “There was one of those fellows there the other night,” he spoke again, when his wife leaned back against the cushions in peaceful despair, “that I liked the looks of about as well as any man I ever saw. I guess he was a pretty good man. It was that Mr. Sewell.”

He looked at his wife, but she did not say anything. “Persis,” he resumed, “I can’t bear to go back with nothing settled in our minds. I can’t bear to let you.”

“We must, Si,” returned his wife, with gentle gratitude. Lapham groaned. “Where does he live?” she asked.

“On Bolingbroke Street. He gave me his number.”

“Well, it wouldn’t do any good. What could he say to us?”

“Oh, I don’t know as he could say anything,” said Lapham hopelessly; and neither of them said anything more till they crossed the Milldam and found themselves between the rows of city houses.

“Don’t drive past the new house, Si,” pleaded his wife. “I couldn’t bear to see it. Drive — drive up Bolingbroke Street. We might as well see where he DOES live.”

“Well,” said Lapham. He drove along slowly. “That’s the place,” he said finally, stopping the mare and pointing with his whip.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” said his wife, in a tone which he understood as well as he understood her words. He turned the mare up to the curbstone.

“You take the reins a minute,” he said, handing them to his wife.

He got down and rang the bell, and waited till the door opened; then he came back and lifted his wife out. “He’s in,” he said.

He got the hitching-weight from under the buggy-seat and made it fast to the mare’s bit.

“Do you think she’ll stand with that?” asked Mrs. Lapham.

“I guess so. If she don’t, no matter.”

“Ain’t you afraid she’ll take cold,” she persisted, trying to make delay.

“Let her!” said Lapham. He took his wife’s trembling hand under his arm, and drew her to the door.

“He’ll think we’re crazy,” she murmured in her broken pride.

“Well, we ARE,” said Lapham. “Tell him we’d like to see him alone a while,” he said to the girl who was holding the door ajar for him, and she showed him into the reception-room, which had been the Protestant confessional for many burdened souls before their time, coming, as they did, with the belief that they were bowed down with the only misery like theirs in the universe; for each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the foundation of the world.

They were as loath to touch their trouble when the minister came in as if it were their disgrace; but Lapham did so at last, and, with a simple dignity which he had wanted in his bungling and apologetic approaches, he laid the affair clearly before the minister’s compassionate and reverent eye. He spared Corey’s name, but he did not pretend that it was not himself and his wife and their daughters who were concerned.

“I don’t know as I’ve got any right to trouble you with this thing,” he said, in the moment while Sewell sat pondering the case, “and I don’t know as I’ve got any warrant for doing it. But, as I told my wife here, there was something about you — I don’t know whether it was anything you SAID exactly — that made me feel as if you could help us. I guess I didn’t say so much as that to her; but that’s the way I felt. And here we are. And if it ain’t all right.”

“Surely,” said Sewell, “it’s all right. I thank you for coming — for trusting your trouble to me. A time comes to every one of us when we can’t help ourselves, and then we must get others to help us. If people turn to me at such a time, I feel sure that I was put into the world for something — if nothing more than to give my pity, my sympathy.”

The brotherly words, so plain, so sincere, had a welcome in them that these poor outcasts of sorrow could not doubt.

“Yes,” said Lapham huskily, and his wife began to wipe the tears again under her veil.

Sewell remained silent, and they waited till he should speak. “We can be of use to one another here, because we can always be wiser for some one else than we can for ourselves. We can see another’s sins and errors in a more merciful light — and that is always a fairer light — than we can our own; and we can look more sanely at others’ afflictions.” He had addressed these words to Lapham; now he turned to his wife. “If some one had come to you, Mrs. Lapham, in just this perplexity, what would you have thought?”

“I don’t know as I understand you,” faltered Mrs. Lapham.

Sewell repeated his words, and added, “I mean, what do you think some one else ought to do in your place?”

“Was there ever any poor creatures in such a strait before?” she asked, with pathetic incredulity.

“There’s no new trouble under the sun,” said the minister.

“Oh, if it was any one else, I should say — I should say — Why, of course! I should say that their duty was to let — —” She paused.

“One suffer instead of three, if none is to blame?” suggested Sewell. “That’s sense, and that’s justice. It’s the economy of pain which naturally suggests itself, and which would insist upon itself, if we were not all perverted by traditions which are the figment of the shallowest sentimentality. Tell me, Mrs. Lapham, didn’t this come into your mind when you first learned how matters stood?”

“Why, yes, it flashed across me. But I didn’t think it could be right.”

“And how was it with you, Mr. Lapham?”

“Why, that’s what I thought, of course. But I didn’t see my way — —”

“No,” cried the minister, “we are all blinded, we are all weakened by a false ideal of self-sacrifice. It wraps us round with its meshes, and we can’t fight our way out of it. Mrs. Lapham, what made you feel that it might be better for three to suffer than one?”

“Why, she did herself. I know she would die sooner than take him away from her.”

“I supposed so!” cried the minister bitterly. “And yet she is a sensible girl, your daughter?”

“She has more common-sense — —”

“Of course! But in such a case we somehow think it must be wrong to use our common-sense. I don’t know where this false ideal comes from, unless it comes from the novels that befool and debauch almost every intelligence in some degree. It certainly doesn’t come from Christianity, which instantly repudiates it when confronted with it. Your daughter believes, in spite of her common-sense, that she ought to make herself and the man who loves her unhappy, in order to assure the life-long wretchedness of her sister, whom he doesn’t love, simply because her sister saw him and fancied him first! And I’m sorry to say that ninety-nine young people out of a hundred — oh, nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand! — would consider that noble and beautiful and heroic; whereas you know at the bottom of your hearts that it would be foolish and cruel and revolting. You know what marriage is! And what it must be without love on both sides.”

The minister had grown quite heated and red in the face.

“I lose all patience!” he went on vehemently. “This poor child of yours has somehow been brought to believe that it will kill her sister if her sister does not have what does not belong to her, and what it is not in the power of all the world, or any soul in the world, to give her. Her sister will suffer — yes, keenly! — in heart and in pride; but she will not die. You will suffer too, in your tenderness for her; but you must do your duty. You must help her to give up. You would be guilty if you did less. Keep clearly in mind that you are doing right, and the only possible good. And God be with you!”

XIX.

“HE talked sense, Persis,” said Lapham gently, as he mounted to his wife’s side in the buggy and drove slowly homeward through the dusk.

“Yes, he talked sense,” she admitted. But she added bitterly, “I guess, if he had it to DO! Oh, he’s right, and it’s got to be done. There ain’t any other way for it. It’s sense; and, yes, it’s justice.” They walked to their door after they left the horse at the livery stable around the corner, where Lapham kept it. “I want you should send Irene up to our room as soon as we get in, Silas.”

“Why, ain’t you going to have any supper first?” faltered Lapham with his latch-key in the lock.

“No. I can’t lose a minute. If I do, I shan’t do it at all.”

“Look here, Persis,” said her husband tenderly, “let me do this thing.”

“Oh, YOU!” said his wife, with a woman’s compassionate scorn for a man’s helplessness in such a case. “Send her right up. And I shall feel — —” She stopped to spare him.

Then she opened the door, and ran up to her room without waiting to speak to Irene, who had come into the hall at the sound of her father’s key in the door.

“I guess your mother wants to see you upstairs,” said Lapham, looking away.

Her mother turned round and faced the girl’s wondering look as Irene entered the chamber, so close upon her that she had not yet had time to lay off her bonnet; she stood with her wraps still on her arm.

“Irene!” she said harshly, “there is something you have got to bear. It’s a mistake we’ve all made. He don’t care anything for you. He never did. He told Pen so last night. He cares for her.”

The sentences had fallen like blows. But the girl had taken them without flinching. She stood up immovable, but the delicate rose-light of her complexion went out and left her colourless. She did not offer to speak.

“Why don’t you say something?” cried her mother. “Do you want to kill me, Irene?”

“Why should I want to hurt you, mamma?” the girl replied steadily, but in an alien voice. “There’s nothing to say. I want to see Pen a minute.”

She turned and left the room. As she mounted the stairs that led to her own and her sister’s rooms on the floor above, her mother helplessly followed. Irene went first to her own room at the front of the house, and then came out leaving the door open and the gas flaring behind her. The mother could see that she had tumbled many things out of the drawers of her bureau upon the marble top.

She passed her mother, where she stood in the entry. “You can come too, if you want to, mamma,” she said.

She opened Penelope’s door without knocking, and went in. Penelope sat at the window, as in the morning. Irene did not go to her; but she went and laid a gold hair-pin on her bureau, and said, without looking at her, “There’s a pin that I got to-day, because it was like his sister’s. It won’t become a dark person so well, but you can have it.”

She stuck a scrap of paper in the side of Penelope’s mirror. “There’s that account of Mr. Stanton’s ranch. You’ll want to read it, I presume.”

She laid a withered boutonniere on the bureau beside the pin. “There’s his button-hole bouquet. He left it by his plate, and I stole it.”

She had a pine-shaving fantastically tied up with a knot of ribbon, in her hand. She held it a moment; then, looking deliberately at Penelope, she went up to her, and dropped it in her lap without a word. She turned, and, advancing a few steps, tottered and seemed about to fall.

Her mother sprang forward with an imploring cry, “O ‘Rene, ‘Rene, ‘Rene!”

Irene recovered herself before her mother could reach her. “Don’t touch me,” she said icily. “Mamma, I’m going to put on my things. I want papa to walk with me. I’m choking here.”

“I — I can’t let you go out, Irene, child,” began her mother.

“You’ve got to,” replied the girl. “Tell papa ta hurry his supper.”

“O poor soul! He doesn’t want any supper. HE knows it too.”

“I don’t want to talk about that. Tell him to get ready.”

She left them once more.

Mrs. Lapham turned a hapless glance upon Penelope.

“Go and tell him, mother,” said the girl. “I would, if I could. If she can walk, let her. It’s the only thing for her.” She sat still; she did not even brush to the floor the fantastic thing that lay in her lap, and that sent up faintly the odour of the sachet powder with which Irene liked to perfume her boxes.

Lapham went out with the unhappy child, and began to talk with her, crazily, incoherently, enough.

She mercifully stopped him. “Don’t talk, papa. I don’t want any one should talk with me.”

He obeyed, and they walked silently on and on. In their aimless course they reached the new house on the water side of Beacon, and she made him stop, and stood looking up at it. The scaffolding which had so long defaced the front was gone, and in the light of the gas-lamp before it all the architectural beauty of the facade was suggested, and much of the finely felt detail was revealed. Seymour had pretty nearly satisfied himself in that rich facade; certainly Lapham had not stinted him of the means.

“Well,” said the girl, “I shall never live in it,” and she began to walk on.

Lapham’s sore heart went down, as he lumbered heavily after her. “Oh yes, you will, Irene. You’ll have lots of good times there yet.”

“No,” she answered, and said nothing more about it. They had not talked of their trouble at all, and they did not speak of it now. Lapham understood that she was trying to walk herself weary, and he was glad to hold his peace and let her have her way. She halted him once more before the red and yellow lights of an apothecary’s window.

“Isn’t there something they give you to make you sleep?” she asked vaguely. “I’ve got to sleep to-night!”

Lapham trembled. “I guess you don’t want anything, Irene.”

“Yes, I do! Get me something!” she retorted wilfully. “If you don’t, I shall die. I MUST sleep.”

They went in, and Lapham asked for something to make a nervous person sleep. Irene stood poring over the show-case full of brushes and trinkets, while the apothecary put up the bromide, which he guessed would be about the best thing. She did not show any emotion; her face was like a stone, while her father’s expressed the anguish of his sympathy. He looked as if he had not slept for a week; his fat eyelids drooped over his glassy eyes, and his cheeks and throat hung flaccid. He started as the apothecary’s cat stole smoothly up and rubbed itself against his leg; and it was to him that the man said, “You want to take a table-spoonful of that, as long as you’re awake. I guess it won’t take a great many to fetch you.”

“All right,” said Lapham, and paid and went out. “I don’t know but I SHALL want some of it,” he said, with a joyless laugh.

Irene came closer up to him and took his arm. He laid his heavy paw on her gloved fingers. After a while she said, “I want you should let me go up to Lapham to-morrow.”

“To Lapham? Why, to-morrow’s Sunday, Irene! You can’t go to-morrow.”

“Well, Monday, then. I can live through one day here.”

“Well,” said the father passively. He made no pretence of asking her why she wished to go, nor any attempt to dissuade her.

“Give me that bottle,” she said, when he opened the door at home for her, and she ran up to her own room.

The next morning Irene came to breakfast with her mother; the Colonel and Penelope did not appear, and Mrs. Lapham looked sleep-broken and careworn.

The girl glanced at her. “Don’t you fret about me, mamma,” she said. “I shall get along.” She seemed herself as steady and strong as rock.

“I don’t like to see you keeping up so, Irene,” replied her mother. “It’ll be all the worse for you when you do break. Better give way a little at the start.”

“I shan’t break, and I’ve given way all I’m going to. I’m going to Lapham to-morrow, — I want you should go with me, mamma, — and I guess I can keep up one day here. All about it is, I don’t want you should say anything, or LOOK anything. And, whatever I do, I don’t want you should try to stop me. And, the first thing, I’m going to take her breakfast up to her. Don’t!” she cried, intercepting the protest on her mother’s lips. “I shall not let it hurt Pen, if I can help it. She’s never done a thing nor thought a thing to wrong me. I had to fly out at her last night; but that’s all over now, and I know just what I’ve got to bear.”

She had her way unmolested. She carried Penelope’s breakfast to her, and omitted no care or attention that could make the sacrifice complete, with an heroic pretence that she was performing no unusual service. They did not speak, beyond her saying, in a clear dry note, “Here’s your breakfast, Pen,” and her sister’s answering, hoarsely and tremulously, “Oh, thank you, Irene.” And, though two or three times they turned their faces toward each other while Irene remained in the room, mechanically putting its confusion to rights, their eyes did not meet. Then Irene descended upon the other rooms, which she set in order, and some of which she fiercely swept and dusted. She made the beds; and she sent the two servants away to church as soon as they had eaten their breakfast, telling them that she would wash their dishes. Throughout the morning her father and mother heard her about the work of getting dinner, with certain silences which represented the moments when she stopped and stood stock-still, and then, readjusting her burden, forced herself forward under it again.

They sat alone in the family room, out of which their two girls seemed to have died. Lapham could not read his Sunday papers, and she had no heart to go to church, as she would have done earlier in life when in trouble. Just then she was obscurely feeling that the church was somehow to blame for that counsel of Mr. Sewell’s on which they had acted.

“I should like to know,” she said, having brought the matter up, “whether he would have thought it was such a light matter if it had been his own children. Do you suppose he’d have been so ready to act on his own advice if it HAD been?”

“He told us the right thing to do, Persis, — the only thing. We couldn’t let it go on,” urged her husband gently.

“Well, it makes me despise Pen! Irene’s showing twice the character that she is, this very minute.”

The mother said this so that the father might defend her daughter to her. He did not fail. “Irene’s got the easiest part, the way I look at it. And you’ll see that Pen’ll know how to behave when the time comes.”

“What do you want she should do?”

“I haven’t got so far as that yet. What are we going to do about Irene?”

“What do you want Pen should do,” repeated Mrs. Lapham, “when it comes to it?”

“Well, I don’t want she should take him, for ONE thing,” said Lapham.

This seemed to satisfy Mrs. Lapham as to her husband, and she said in defence of Corey, “Why, I don’t see what HE’S done. It’s all been our doing.”

“Never mind that now. What about Irene?”

“She says she’s going to Lapham to-morrow. She feels that she’s got to get away somewhere. It’s natural she should.”

“Yes, and I presume it will be about the best thing FOR her. Shall you go with her?”

“Yes.”

“Well.” He comfortlessly took up a newspaper again, and she rose with a sigh, and went to her room to pack some things for the morrow’s journey.

After dinner, when Irene had cleared away the last trace of it in kitchen and dining-room with unsparing punctilio, she came downstairs, dressed to go out, and bade her father come to walk with her again. It was a repetition of the aimlessness of the last night’s wanderings. They came back, and she got tea for them, and after that they heard her stirring about in her own room, as if she were busy about many things; but they did not dare to look in upon her, even after all the noises had ceased, and they knew she had gone to bed.

“Yes; it’s a thing she’s got to fight out by herself,” said Mrs Lapham.

“I guess she’ll get along,” said Lapham. “But I don’t want you should misjudge Pen either. She’s all right too. She ain’t to blame.”

“Yes, I know. But I can’t work round to it all at once. I shan’t misjudge her, but you can’t expect me to get over it right away.”

“Mamma,” said Irene, when she was hurrying their departure the next morning, “what did she tell him when he asked her?”

“Tell him?” echoed the mother; and after a while she added, “She didn’t tell him anything.”

“Did she say anything, about me?”

“She said he mustn’t come here any more.”

Irene turned and went into her sister’s room. “Good-bye, Pen,” she said, kissing her with an effect of not seeing or touching her. “I want you should tell him all about it. If he’s half a man, he won’t give up till he knows why you won’t have him; and he has a right to know.”

“It wouldn’t make any difference. I couldn’t have him after — —”

“That’s for you to say. But if you don’t tell him about me, I will.”

“‘Rene!”

“Yes! You needn’t say I cared for him. But you can say that you all thought he — cared for — me.”

“O Irene — —”

“Don’t!” Irene escaped from the arms that tried to cast themselves about her. “You are all right, Pen. You haven’t done anything. You’ve helped me all you could. But I can’t — yet.”

She went out of the room and summoned Mrs. Lapham with a sharp “Now, mamma!” and went on putting the last things into her trunks.

The Colonel went to the station with them, and put them on the train. He got them a little compartment to themselves in the Pullman car; and as he stood leaning with his lifted hands against the sides of the doorway, he tried to say something consoling and hopeful: “I guess you’ll have an easy ride, Irene. I don’t believe it’ll be dusty, any, after the rain last night.”

“Don’t you stay till the train starts, papa,” returned the girl, in rigid rejection of his futilities. “Get off, now.”

“Well, if you want I should,” he said, glad to be able to please her in anything. He remained on the platform till the cars started. He saw Irene bustling about in the compartment, making her mother comfortable for the journey; but Mrs. Lapham did not lift her head. The train moved off, and he went heavily back to his business.

From time to time during the day, when he caught a glimpse of him, Corey tried to make out from his face whether he knew what had taken place between him and Penelope. When Rogers came in about time of closing, and shut himself up with Lapham in his room, the young man remained till the two came out together and parted in their salutationless fashion.

Lapham showed no surprise at seeing Corey still there, and merely answered, “Well!” when the young man said that he wished to speak with him, and led the way back to his room.

Corey shut the door behind them. “I only wish to speak to you in case you know of the matter already; for otherwise I’m bound by a promise.”

“I guess I know what you mean. It’s about Penelope.”

“Yes, it’s about Miss Lapham. I am greatly attached to her — you’ll excuse my saying it; I couldn’t excuse myself if I were not.”

“Perfectly excusable,” said Lapham. “It’s all right.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that!” cried the young fellow joyfully. “I want you to believe that this isn’t a new thing or an unconsidered thing with me — though it seemed so unexpected to her.”

Lapham fetched a deep sigh. “It’s all right as far as I’m concerned — or her mother. We’ve both liked you first-rate.”

“Yes?”

“But there seems to be something in Penelope’s mind — I don’t know—” The Colonel consciously dropped his eyes.

“She referred to something — I couldn’t make out what — but I hoped — I hoped — that with your leave I might overcome it — the barrier — whatever it was. Miss Lapham — Penelope — gave me the hope — that I was — wasn’t — indifferent to her — —”

“Yes, I guess that’s so,” said Lapham. He suddenly lifted his head, and confronted the young fellow’s honest face with his own face, so different in its honesty. “Sure you never made up to any one else at the same time?”

“NEVER! Who could imagine such a thing? If that’s all, I can easily.”

“I don’t say that’s all, nor that that’s it. I don’t want you should go upon that idea. I just thought, may be — you hadn’t thought of it.”

“No, I certainly hadn’t thought of it! Such a thing would have been so impossible to me that I couldn’t have thought of it; and it’s so shocking to me now that I don’t know what to say to it.”

“Well, don’t take it too much to heart,” said Lapham, alarmed at the feeling he had excited; “I don’t say she thought so. I was trying to guess — trying to — —”

“If there is anything I can say or do to convince you — —”

“Oh, it ain’t necessary to say anything. I’m all right.”

“But Miss Lapham! I may see her again? I may try to convince her that — —”

He stopped in distress, and Lapham afterwards told his wife that he kept seeing the face of Irene as it looked when he parted with her in the car; and whenever he was going to say yes, he could not open his lips. At the same time he could not help feeling that Penelope had a right to what was her own, and Sewell’s words came back to him. Besides, they had already put Irene to the worst suffering. Lapham compromised, as he imagined. “You can come round to-night and see ME, if you want to,” he said; and he bore grimly the gratitude that the young man poured out upon him.

Penelope came down to supper and took her mother’s place at the head of the table.

Lapham sat silent in her presence as long as he could bear it. Then he asked, “How do you feel to-night, Pen?”

“Oh, like a thief,” said the girl. “A thief that hasn’t been arrested yet.”

Lapham waited a while before he said, “Well, now, your mother and I want you should hold up on that a while.”

“It isn’t for you to say. It’s something I can’t hold up on.”

“Yes, I guess you can. If I know what’s happened, then what’s happened is a thing that nobody is to blame for. And we want you should make the best of it and not the worst. Heigh? It ain’t going to help Irene any for you to hurt yourself — or anybody else; and I don’t want you should take up with any such crazy notion. As far as heard from, you haven’t stolen anything, and whatever you’ve got belongs to you.”

“Has he been speaking to you, father?”

“Your mother’s been speaking to me.”

“Has HE been speaking to you?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“Then he’s broken his word, and I will never speak to him again!”

“If he was any such fool as to promise that he wouldn’t talk to me on a subject” — Lapham drew a deep breath, and then made the plunge— “that I brought up — —”

“Did you bring it up?”

“The same as brought up — the quicker he broke his word the better; and I want you should act upon that idea. Recollect that it’s my business, and your mother’s business, as well as yours, and we’re going to have our say. He hain’t done anything wrong, Pen, nor anything that he’s going to be punished for. Understand that. He’s got to have a reason, if you’re not going to have him. I don’t say you’ve got to have him; I want you should feel perfectly free about that; but I DO say you’ve got to give him a reason.”

“Is he coming here?”

“I don’t know as you’d call it COMING — —”

“Yes, you do, father!” said the girl, in forlorn amusement at his shuffling.

“He’s coming here to see ME — —”

“When’s he coming?”

“I don’t know but he’s coming to-night.”

“And you want I should see him?”

“I don’t know but you’d better.”

“All right. I’ll see him.”

Lapham drew a long deep breath of suspicion inspired by this acquiescence. “What you going to do?” he asked presently.

“I don’t know yet,” answered the girl sadly. “It depends a good deal upon what he does.”

“Well,” said Lapham, with the hungriness of unsatisfied anxiety in his tone. When Corey’s card was brought into the family-room where he and Penelope were sitting, he went into the parlour to find him. “I guess Penelope wants to see you,” he said; and, indicating the family-room, he added, “She’s in there,” and did not go back himself.

Corey made his way to the girl’s presence with open trepidation, which was not allayed by her silence and languor. She sat in the chair where she had sat the other night, but she was not playing with a fan now.

He came toward her, and then stood faltering. A faint smile quivered over her face at the spectacle of his subjection. “Sit down, Mr. Corey,” she said. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t talk it over quietly; for I know you will think I’m right.”

“I’m sure of that,” he answered hopefully. “When I saw that your father knew of it to-day, I asked him to let me see you again. I’m afraid that I broke my promise to you — technically — —”

“It had to be broken.” He took more courage at her words. “But I’ve only come to do whatever you say, and not to be an — annoyance to you — —”

“Yes, you have to know; but I couldn’t tell you before. Now they all think I should.”

A tremor of anxiety passed over the young man’s face, on which she kept her eyes steadily fixed.

“We supposed it — it was — Irene — —”

He remained blank a moment, and then he said with a smile of relief, of deprecation, of protest, of amazement, of compassion —

“OH! Never! Never for an instant! How could you think such a thing? It was impossible! I never thought of her. But I see — I see! I can explain — no, there’s nothing to explain! I have never knowingly done or said a thing from first to last to make you think that. I see how terrible it is!” he said; but he still smiled, as if he could not take it seriously. “I admired her beauty — who could help doing that? — and I thought her very good and sensible. Why, last winter in Texas, I told Stanton about our meeting in Canada, and we agreed — I only tell you to show you how far I always was from what you thought — that he must come North and try to see her, and — and — of course, it all sounds very silly! — and he sent her a newspaper with an account of his ranch in it — —”

“She thought it came from you.”

“Oh, good heavens! He didn’t tell me till after he’d done it. But he did it for a part of our foolish joke. And when I met your sister again, I only admired her as before. I can see, now, how I must have seemed to be seeking her out; but it was to talk of you with her — I never talked of anything else if I could help it, except when I changed the subject because I was ashamed to be always talking of you. I see how distressing it is for all of you. But tell me that you believe me!”

“Yes, I must. It’s all been our mistake — —”

“It has indeed! But there’s no mistake about my loving you, Penelope,” he said; and the old-fashioned name, at which she had often mocked, was sweet to her from his lips.

“That only makes it worse!” she answered.

“Oh no!” he gently protested. “It makes it better. It makes it right. How is it worse? How is it wrong?”

“Can’t you see? You must understand all now! Don’t you see that if she believed so too, and if she — —” She could not go on.

“Did she — did your sister — think that too?” gasped Corey.

“She used to talk with me about you; and when you say you care for me now, it makes me feel like the vilest hypocrite in the world. That day you gave her the list of books, and she came down to Nantasket, and went on about you, I helped her to flatter herself — oh! I don’t see how she can forgive me. But she knows I can never forgive myself! That’s the reason she can do it. I can see now,” she went on, “how I must have been trying to get you from her. I can’t endure it! The only way is for me never to see you or speak to you again!” She laughed forlornly. “That would be pretty hard on you, if you cared.”

“I do care — all the world!”

“Well, then, it would if you were going to keep on caring. You won’t long, if you stop coming now.”

“Is this all, then? Is it the end?”

“It’s — whatever it is. I can’t get over the thought of her. Once I thought I could, but now I see that I can’t. It seems to grow worse. Sometimes I feel as if it would drive me crazy.”

He sat looking at her with lacklustre eyes. The light suddenly came back into them. “Do you think I could love you if you had been false to her? I know you have been true to her, and truer still to yourself. I never tried to see her, except with the hope of seeing you too. I supposed she must know that I was in love with you. From the first time I saw you there that afternoon, you filled my fancy. Do you think I was flirting with the child, or — no, you don’t think that! We have not done wrong. We have not harmed any one knowingly. We have a right to each other — —”

“No! no! you must never speak to me of this again. If you do, I shall know that you despise me.”

“But how will that help her? I don’t love HER.”

“Don’t say that to me! I have said that to myself too much.”

“If you forbid me to love you, it won’t make me love her,” he persisted.

She was about to speak, but she caught her breath without doing so, and merely stared at him. “I must do what you say,” he continued. “But what good will it do her? You can’t make her happy by making yourself unhappy.”

“Do you ask me to profit by a wrong?”

“Not for the world. But there is no wrong!”

“There is something — I don’t know what. There’s a wall between us. I shall dash myself against it as long as I live; but that won’t break it.”

“Oh!” he groaned. “We have done no wrong. Why should we suffer from another’s mistake as if it were our sin?”

“I don’t know. But we must suffer.”

“Well, then, I WILL not, for my part, and I will not let you. If you care for me — —”

“You had no right to know it.”

“You make it my privilege to keep you from doing wrong for the right’s sake. I’m sorry, with all my heart and soul, for this error; but I can’t blame myself, and I won’t deny myself the happiness I haven’t done anything to forfeit. I will never give you up. I will wait as long as you please for the time when you shall feel free from this mistake; but you shall be mine at last. Remember that. I might go away for months — a year, even; but that seems a cowardly and guilty thing, and I’m not afraid, and I’m not guilty, and I’m going to stay here and try to see you.”

She shook her head. “It won’t change anything? Don’t you see that there’s no hope for us?”

“When is she coming back?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Mother wants father to come and take her out West for a while.”

“She’s up there in the country with your mother yet?”

“Yes.”

He was silent; then he said desperately —

“Penelope, she is very young; and perhaps — perhaps she might meet — —”

“It would make no difference. It wouldn’t change it for me.”

“You are cruel — cruel to yourself, if you love me, and cruel to me. Don’t you remember that night — before I spoke — you were talking of that book; and you said it was foolish and wicked to do as that girl did. Why is it different with you, except that you give me nothing, and can never give me anything when you take yourself away? If it were anybody else, I am sure you would say — —”

“But it isn’t anybody else, and that makes it impossible. Sometimes I think it might be if I would only say so to myself, and then all that I said to her about you comes up — —”

“I will wait. It can’t always come up. I won’t urge you any longer now. But you will see it differently — more clearly. Good-bye — no! Good night! I shall come again to-morrow. It will surely come right, and, whatever happens, you have done no wrong. Try to keep that in mind. I am so happy, in spite of all!”

He tried to take her hand, but she put it behind her. “No, no! I can’t let you — yet!”

XX.

AFTER a week Mrs. Lapham returned, leaving Irene alone at the old homestead in Vermont. “She’s comfortable there — as comfortable as she can be anywheres, I guess,” she said to her husband as they drove together from the station, where he had met her in obedience to her telegraphic summons. “She keeps herself busy helping about the house; and she goes round amongst the hands in their houses. There’s sickness, and you know how helpful she is where there’s sickness. She don’t complain any. I don’t know as I’ve heard a word out of her mouth since we left home; but I’m afraid it’ll wear on her, Silas.”

“You don’t look over and above well yourself, Persis,” said her husband kindly.

“Oh, don’t talk about me. What I want to know is whether you can’t get the time to run off with her somewhere. I wrote to you about Dubuque. She’ll work herself down, I’m afraid; and THEN I don’t know as she’ll be over it. But if she could go off, and be amused — see new people — —”

“I could MAKE the time,” said Lapham, “if I had to. But, as it happens, I’ve got to go out West on business, — I’ll tell you about it, — and I’ll take Irene along.”

“Good!” said his wife. “That’s about the best thing I’ve heard yet. Where you going?”

“Out Dubuque way.”

“Anything the matter with Bill’s folks?”

“No. It’s business.”

“How’s Pen?”

“I guess she ain’t much better than Irene.”

“He been about any?”

“Yes. But I can’t see as it helps matters much.”

“Tchk!” Mrs. Lapham fell back against the carriage cushions. “I declare, to see her willing to take the man that we all thought wanted her sister! I can’t make it seem right.”

“It’s right,” said Lapham stoutly; “but I guess she ain’t willing; I wish she was. But there don’t seem to be any way out of the thing, anywhere. It’s a perfect snarl. But I don’t want you should be anyways ha’sh with Pen.”

Mrs. Lapham answered nothing; but when she met Penelope she gave the girl’s wan face a sharp look, and began to whimper on her neck.

Penelope’s tears were all spent. “Well, mother,” she said, “you come back almost as cheerful as you went away. I needn’t ask if ‘Rene’s in good spirits. We all seem to be overflowing with them. I suppose this is one way of congratulating me. Mrs. Corey hasn’t been round to do it yet.”

“Are you — are you engaged to him, Pen?” gasped her mother.

“Judging by my feelings, I should say not. I feel as if it was a last will and testament. But you’d better ask him when he comes.”

“I can’t bear to look at him.”

“I guess he’s used to that. He don’t seem to expect to be looked at. Well! we’re all just where we started. I wonder how long it will keep up.”

Mrs. Lapham reported to her husband when he came home at night — he had left his business to go and meet her, and then, after a desolate dinner at the house, had returned to the office again — that Penelope was fully as bad as Irene. “And she don’t know how to work it off. Irene keeps doing; but Pen just sits in her room and mopes. She don’t even read. I went up this afternoon to scold her about the state the house was in — you can see that Irene’s away by the perfect mess; but when I saw her through the crack of the door I hadn’t the heart. She sat there with her hands in her lap, just staring. And, my goodness! she JUMPED so when she saw me; and then she fell back, and began to laugh, and said she, ‘I thought it was my ghost, mother!’ I felt as if I should give way.”

Lapham listened jadedly, and answered far from the point. “I guess I’ve got to start out there pretty soon, Persis.”

“How soon?”

“Well, to-morrow morning.”

Mrs. Lapham sat silent. Then, “All right,” she said. “I’ll get you ready.”

“I shall run up to Lapham for Irene, and then I’ll push on through Canada. I can get there about as quick.”

“Is it anything you can tell me about, Silas?”

“Yes,” said Lapham. “But it’s a long story, and I guess you’ve got your hands pretty full as it is. I’ve been throwing good money after bad, — the usual way, — and now I’ve got to see if I can save the pieces.”

After a moment Mrs. Lapham asked, “Is it — Rogers?”

“It’s Rogers.”

“I didn’t want you should get in any deeper with him.”

“No. You didn’t want I should press him either; and I had to do one or the other. And so I got in deeper.”

“Silas,” said his wife, “I’m afraid I made you!”

“It’s all right, Persis, as far forth as that goes. I was glad to make it up with him — I jumped at the chance. I guess Rogers saw that he had a soft thing in me, and he’s worked it for all it was worth. But it’ll all come out right in the end.”

Lapham said this as if he did not care to talk any more about it. He added casually, “Pretty near everybody but the fellows that owe ME seem to expect me to do a cash business, all of a sudden.”

“Do you mean that you’ve got payments to make, and that people are not paying YOU?”

Lapham winced a little. “Something like that,” he said, and he lighted a cigar. “But when I tell you it’s all right, I mean it, Persis. I ain’t going to let the grass grow under my feet, though, — especially while Rogers digs the ground away from the roots.”

“What are you going to do?”

“If it has to come to that, I’m going to squeeze him.” Lapham’s countenance lighted up with greater joy than had yet visited it since the day they had driven out to Brookline. “Milton K. Rogers is a rascal, if you want to know; or else all the signs fail. But I guess he’ll find he’s got his come-uppance.” Lapham shut his lips so that the short, reddish-grey beard stuck straight out on them.

“What’s he done?”

“What’s he done? Well, now, I’ll tell you what he’s done, Persis, since you think Rogers is such a saint, and that I used him so badly in getting him out of the business. He’s been dabbling in every sort of fool thing you can lay your tongue to, — wild-cat stocks, patent-rights, land speculations, oil claims, — till he’s run through about everything. But he did have a big milling property out on the line of the P. Y. & X., — saw-mills and grist-mills and lands, — and for the last eight years he’s been doing a land-office business with ’em — business that would have made anybody else rich. But you can’t make Milton K. Rogers rich, any more than you can fat a hide-bound colt. It ain’t in him. He’d run through Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Tom Scott rolled into one in less than six months, give him a chance, and come out and want to borrow money of you. Well, he won’t borrow any more money of ME; and if he thinks I don’t know as much about that milling property as he does he’s mistaken. I’ve taken his mills, but I guess I’ve got the inside track; Bill’s kept me posted; and now I’m going out there to see how I can unload; and I shan’t mind a great deal if Rogers is under the load when it’s off once.”

“I don’t understand you, Silas.”

“Why, it’s just this. The Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad has leased the P. Y. & X. for ninety-nine years, — bought it, practically, — and it’s going to build car-works right by those mills, and it may want them. And Milton K. Rogers knew it when he turned ’em in on me.”

“Well, if the road wants them, don’t that make the mills valuable? You can get what you ask for them!”

“Can I? The P. Y. & X. is the only road that runs within fifty miles of the mills, and you can’t get a foot of lumber nor a pound of flour to market any other way. As long as he had a little local road like the P. Y. & X. to deal with, Rogers could manage; but when it come to a big through line like the G. L. & P., he couldn’t stand any chance at all. If such a road as that took a fancy to his mills, do you think it would pay what he asked? No, sir! He would take what the road offered, or else the road would tell him to carry his flour and lumber to market himself.”

“And do you suppose he knew the G. L. & P. wanted the mills when he turned them in on you?” asked Mrs. Lapham aghast, and falling helplessly into his alphabetical parlance.

The Colonel laughed scoffingly. “Well, when Milton K. Rogers don’t know which side his bread’s buttered on! I don’t understand,” he added thoughtfully, “how he’s always letting it fall on the buttered side. But such a man as that is sure to have a screw loose in him somewhere.” Mrs. Lapham sat discomfited. All that she could say was, “Well, I want you should ask yourself whether Rogers would ever have gone wrong, or got into these ways of his, if it hadn’t been for your forcing him out of the business when you did. I want you should think whether you’re not responsible for everything he’s done since.”

“You go and get that bag of mine ready,” said Lapham sullenly. “I guess I can take care of myself. And Milton K. Rogers too,” he added.

That evening Corey spent the time after dinner in his own room, with restless excursions to the library, where his mother sat with his father and sisters, and showed no signs of leaving them. At last, in coming down, he encountered her on the stairs, going up. They both stopped consciously.

“I would like to speak with you, mother. I have been waiting to see you alone.”

“Come to my room,” she said.

“I have a feeling that you know what I want to say,” he began there.

She looked up at him where he stood by the chimney-piece, and tried to put a cheerful note into her questioning “Yes?”

“Yes; and I have a feeling that you won’t like it — that you won’t approve of it. I wish you did — I wish you could!”

“I’m used to liking and approving everything you do, Tom. If I don’t like this at once, I shall try to like it — you know that — for your sake, whatever it is.”

“I’d better be short,” he said, with a quick sigh. “It’s about Miss Lapham.” He hastened to add, “I hope it isn’t surprising to you. I’d have told you before, if I could.”

“No, it isn’t surprising. I was afraid — I suspected something of the kind.”

They were both silent in a painful silence.

“Well, mother?” he asked at last.

“If it’s something you’ve quite made up mind to — —”

“It is!”

“And if you’ve already spoken to her — —”

“I had to do that first, of course.”

“There would be no use of my saying anything, even if I disliked it.”

“You do dislike it!”

“No — no! I can’t say that. Of course I should have preferred it if you had chosen some nice girl among those that you had been brought up with — some friend or associate of your sisters, whose people we had known — —”

“Yes, I understand that, and I can assure you that I haven’t been indifferent to your feelings. I have tried to consider them from the first, and it kept me hesitating in a way that I’m ashamed to think of; for it wasn’t quite right towards — others. But your feelings and my sisters’ have been in my mind, and if I couldn’t yield to what I supposed they must be, entirely — —”

Even so good a son and brother as this, when it came to his love affair, appeared to think that he had yielded much in considering the feelings of his family at all.

His mother hastened to comfort him. “I know — I know. I’ve seen for some time that this might happen, Tom, and I have prepared myself for it. I have talked it over with your father, and we both agreed from the beginning that you were not to be hampered by our feeling. Still — it is a surprise. It must be.”

“I know it. I can understand your feeling. But I’m sure that it’s one that will last only while you don’t know her well.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that, Tom. I’m sure that we shall all be fond of her, — for your sake at first, even — and I hope she’ll like us.”

“I am quite certain of that,” said Corey, with that confidence which experience does not always confirm in such cases. “And your taking it as you do lifts a tremendous load off me.”

But he sighed so heavily, and looked so troubled, that his mother said, “Well, now, you mustn’t think of that any more. We wish what is for your happiness, my son, and we will gladly reconcile ourselves to anything that might have been disagreeable. I suppose we needn’t speak of the family. We must both think alike about them. They have their — drawbacks, but they are thoroughly good people, and I satisfied myself the other night that they were not to be dreaded.” She rose, and put her arm round his neck. “And I wish you joy, Tom! If she’s half as good as you are, you will both be very happy.” She was going to kiss him, but something in his looks stopped her — an absence, a trouble, which broke out in his words.

“I must tell you, mother! There’s been a complication — a mistake — that’s a blight on me yet, and that it sometimes seems as if we couldn’t escape from. I wonder if you can help us! They all thought I meant — the other sister.”

“O Tom! But how COULD they?”

“I don’t know. It seemed so glaringly plain — I was ashamed of making it so outright from the beginning. But they did. Even she did, herself!”

“But where could they have thought your eyes were — your taste? It wouldn’t be surprising if any one were taken with that wonderful beauty; and I’m sure she’s good too. But I’m astonished at them! To think you could prefer that little, black, odd creature, with her joking and — —”

“MOTHER!” cried the young man, turning a ghastly face of warning upon her.

“What do you mean, Tom?”

“Did you — did — did you think so too — that it was IRENE I meant?”

“Why, of course!”

He stared at her hopelessly.

“O my son!” she said, for all comment on the situation.

“Don’t reproach me, mother! I couldn’t stand it.”

“No. I didn’t mean to do that. But how — HOW could it happen?”

“I don’t know. When she first told me that they had understood it so, I laughed — almost — it was so far from me. But now when you seem to have had the same idea — Did you all think so?”

“Yes.”

They remained looking at each other. Then Mrs. Corey began: “It did pass through my mind once — that day I went to call upon them — that it might not be as we thought; but I knew so little of — of — —”

“Penelope,” Corey mechanically supplied.

“Is that her name? — I forgot — that I only thought of you in relation to her long enough to reject the idea; and it was natural after our seeing something of the other one last year, that I might suppose you had formed some — attachment — —”

“Yes; that’s what they thought too. But I never thought of her as anything but a pretty child. I was civil to her because you wished it; and when I met her here again, I only tried to see her so that I could talk with her about her sister.”

“You needn’t defend yourself to ME, Tom,” said his mother, proud to say it to him in his trouble. “It’s a terrible business for them, poor things,” she added. “I don’t know how they could get over it. But, of course, sensible people must see — —”

“They haven’t got over it. At least she hasn’t. Since it’s happened, there’s been nothing that hasn’t made me prouder and fonder of her! At first I WAS charmed with her — my fancy was taken; she delighted me — I don’t know how; but she was simply the most fascinating person I ever saw. Now I never think of that. I only think how good she is — how patient she is with me, and how unsparing she is of herself. If she were concerned alone — if I were not concerned too — it would soon end. She’s never had a thought for anything but her sister’s feeling and mine from the beginning. I go there, — I know that I oughtn’t, but I can’t help it, — and she suffers it, and tries not to let me see that she is suffering it. There never was any one like her — so brave, so true, so noble. I won’t give her up — I can’t. But it breaks my heart when she accuses herself of what was all MY doing. We spend our time trying to reason out of it, but we always come back to it at last, and I have to hear her morbidly blaming herself. Oh!”

Doubtless Mrs. Corey imagined some reliefs to this suffering, some qualifications of this sublimity in a girl she had disliked so distinctly; but she saw none in her son’s behaviour, and she gave him her further sympathy. She tried to praise Penelope, and said that it was not to be expected that she could reconcile herself at once to everything. “I shouldn’t have liked it in her if she had. But time will bring it all right. And if she really cares for you — —”

“I extorted that from her.”

“Well, then, you must look at it in the best light you can. There is no blame anywhere, and the mortification and pain is something that must be lived down. That’s all. And don’t let what I said grieve you, Tom. You know I scarcely knew her, and I — I shall be sure to like any one you like, after all.”

“Yes, I know,” said the young man drearily. “Will you tell father?”

“If you wish.”

“He must know. And I couldn’t stand any more of this, just yet — any more mistake.”

“I will tell him,” said Mrs. Corey; and it was naturally the next thing for a woman who dwelt so much on decencies to propose: “We must go to call on her — your sisters and I. They have never seen her even; and she mustn’t be allowed to think we’re indifferent to her, especially under the circumstances.”

“Oh no! Don’t go — not yet,” cried Corey, with an instinctive perception that nothing could be worse for him. “We must wait — we must be patient. I’m afraid it would be painful to her now.”

He turned away without speaking further; and his mother’s eyes followed him wistfully to the door. There were some questions that she would have liked to ask him; but she had to content herself with trying to answer them when her husband put them to her.

There was this comfort for her always in Bromfield Corey, that he never was much surprised at anything, however shocking or painful. His standpoint in regard to most matters was that of the sympathetic humorist who would be glad to have the victim of circumstance laugh with him, but was not too much vexed when the victim could not. He laughed now when his wife, with careful preparation, got the facts of his son’s predicament fully under his eye.

“Really, Bromfield,” she said, “I don’t see how you can laugh. Do you see any way out of it?”

“It seems to me that the way has been found already. Tom has told his love to the right one, and the wrong one knows it. Time will do the rest.”

“If I had so low an opinion of them all as that, it would make me very unhappy. It’s shocking to think of it.”

“It is upon the theory of ladies and all young people,” said her husband, with a shrug, feeling his way to the matches on the mantel, and then dropping them with a sign, as if recollecting that he must not smoke there. “I’ve no doubt Tom feels himself an awful sinner. But apparently he’s resigned to his sin; he isn’t going to give her up.”

“I’m glad to say, for the sake of human nature, that SHE isn’t resigned — little as I like her,” cried Mrs. Corey.

Her husband shrugged again. “Oh, there mustn’t be any indecent haste. She will instinctively observe the proprieties. But come, now, Anna! you mustn’t pretend to me here, in the sanctuary of home, that practically the human affections don’t reconcile themselves to any situation that the human sentiments condemn. Suppose the wrong sister had died: would the right one have had any scruple in marrying Tom, after they had both ‘waited a proper time,’ as the phrase is?”

“Bromfield, you’re shocking!”

“Not more shocking than reality. You may regard this as a second marriage.” He looked at her with twinkling eyes, full of the triumph the spectator of his species feels in signal exhibitions of human nature. “Depend upon it, the right sister will be reconciled; the wrong one will be consoled; and all will go merry as a marriage bell — a second marriage bell. Why, it’s quite like a romance!” Here he laughed outright again.

“Well,” sighed the wife, “I could almost wish the right one, as you call her, would reject Tom, I dislike her so much.”

“Ah, now you’re talking business, Anna,” said her husband, with his hands spread behind the back he turned comfortably to the fire. “The whole Lapham tribe is distasteful to me. As I don’t happen to have seen our daughter-in-law elect, I have still the hope — which you’re disposed to forbid me — that she may not be quite so unacceptable as the others.”

“Do you really feel so, Bromfield?” anxiously inquired his wife.

“Yes — I think I do;” and he sat down, and stretched out his long legs toward the fire.

“But it’s very inconsistent of you to oppose the matter now, when you’ve shown so much indifference up to this time. You’ve told me, all along, that it was of no use to oppose it.”

“So I have. I was convinced of that at the beginning, or my reason was. You know very well that I am equal to any trial, any sacrifice, day after to-morrow; but when it comes to-day it’s another thing. As long as this crisis decently kept its distance, I could look at it with an impartial eye; but now that it seems at hand, I find that, while my reason is still acquiescent, my nerves are disposed to — excuse the phrase — kick. I ask myself, what have I done nothing for, all my life, and lived as a gentleman should, upon the earnings of somebody else, in the possession of every polite taste and feeling that adorns leisure, if I’m to come to this at last? And I find no satisfactory answer. I say to myself that I might as well have yielded to the pressure all round me, and gone to work, as Tom has.”

Mrs. Corey looked at him forlornly, divining the core of real repugnance that existed in his self-satire.

“I assure you, my dear,” he continued, “that the recollection of what I suffered from the Laphams at that dinner of yours is an anguish still. It wasn’t their behaviour, — they behaved well enough — or ill enough; but their conversation was terrible. Mrs. Lapham’s range was strictly domestic; and when the Colonel got me in the library, he poured mineral paint all over me, till I could have been safely warranted not to crack or scale in any climate. I suppose we shall have to see a good deal of them. They will probably come here every Sunday night to tea. It’s a perspective without a vanishing-point.”

“It may not be so bad, after all,” said his wife; and she suggested for his consolation that he knew very little about the Laphams yet.

He assented to the fact. “I know very little about them, and about my other fellow-beings. I dare say that I should like the Laphams better if I knew them better. But in any case, I resign myself. And we must keep in view the fact that this is mainly Tom’s affair, and if his affections have regulated it to his satisfaction, we must be content.”

“Oh yes,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “And perhaps it won’t turn out so badly. It’s a great comfort to know that you feel just as I do about it.”

“I do,” said her husband, “and more too.”

It was she and her daughters who would be chiefly annoyed by the Lapham connection; she knew that. But she had to begin to bear the burden by helping her husband to bear his light share of it. To see him so depressed dismayed her, and she might well have reproached him more sharply than she did for showing so much indifference, when she was so anxious, at first. But that would not have served any good end now. She even answered him patiently when he asked her, “What did you say to Tom when he told you it was the other one?”

“What could I say? I could do nothing, but try to take back what I had said against her.”

“Yes, you had quite enough to do, I suppose. It’s an awkward business. If it had been the pretty one, her beauty would have been our excuse. But the plain one — what do you suppose attracted him in her?”

Mrs. Corey sighed at the futility of the question. “Perhaps I did her injustice. I only saw her a few moments. Perhaps I got a false impression. I don’t think she’s lacking in sense, and that’s a great thing. She’ll be quick to see that we don’t mean unkindness, and can’t, by anything we say or do, when she’s Tom’s wife.” She pronounced the distasteful word with courage, and went on: “The pretty one might not have been able to see that. She might have got it into her head that we were looking down on her; and those insipid people are terribly stubborn. We can come to some understanding with this one; I’m sure of that.” She ended by declaring that it was now their duty to help Tom out of his terrible predicament.

“Oh, even the Lapham cloud has a silver lining,” said Corey. “In fact, it seems really to have all turned out for the best, Anna; though it’s rather curious to find you the champion of the Lapham side, at last. Confess, now, that the right girl has secretly been your choice all along, and that while you sympathise with the wrong one, you rejoice in the tenacity with which the right one is clinging to her own!” He added with final seriousness, “It’s just that she should, and, so far as I understand the case, I respect her for it.”

“Oh yes,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “It’s natural, and it’s right.” But she added, “I suppose they’re glad of him on any terms.”

“That is what I have been taught to believe,” said her husband. “When shall we see our daughter-in-law elect? I find myself rather impatient to have that part of it over.”

Mrs. Corey hesitated. “Tom thinks we had better not call, just yet.”

“She has told him of your terrible behaviour when you called before?”

“No, Bromfield! She couldn’t be so vulgar as that?”

“But anything short of it?”

XXI.

LAPHAM was gone a fortnight. He was in a sullen humour when he came back, and kept himself shut close within his own den at the office the first day. He entered it in the morning without a word to his clerks as he passed through the outer room, and he made no sign throughout the forenoon, except to strike savagely on his desk-bell from time to time, and send out to Walker for some book of accounts or a letter-file. His boy confidentially reported to Walker that the old man seemed to have got a lot of papers round; and at lunch the book-keeper said to Corey, at the little table which they had taken in a corner together, in default of seats at the counter, “Well, sir, I guess there’s a cold wave coming.”

Corey looked up innocently, and said, “I haven’t read the weather report.”

“Yes, sir,” Walker continued, “it’s coming. Areas of rain along the whole coast, and increased pressure in the region of the private office. Storm-signals up at the old man’s door now.”

Corey perceived that he was speaking figuratively, and that his meteorology was entirely personal to Lapham. “What do you mean?” he asked, without vivid interest in the allegory, his mind being full of his own tragi-comedy.

“Why, just this: I guess the old man’s takin’ in sail. And I guess he’s got to. As I told you the first time we talked about him, there don’t any one know one-quarter as much about the old man’s business as the old man does himself; and I ain’t betraying any confidence when I say that I guess that old partner of his has got pretty deep into his books. I guess he’s over head and ears in ‘em, and the old man’s gone in after him, and he’s got a drownin’ man’s grip round his neck. There seems to be a kind of a lull — kind of a dead calm, I call it — in the paint market just now; and then again a ten-hundred-thousand-dollar man don’t build a hundred-thousand-dollar house without feeling the drain, unless there’s a regular boom. And just now there ain’t any boom at all. Oh, I don’t say but what the old man’s got anchors to windward; guess he HAS; but if he’s GOIN’ to leave me his money, I wish he’d left it six weeks ago. Yes, sir, I guess there’s a cold wave comin’; but you can’t generally ‘most always tell, as a usual thing, where the old man’s concerned, and it’s ONLY a guess.” Walker began to feed in his breaded chop with the same nervous excitement with which he abandoned himself to the slangy and figurative excesses of his talks. Corey had listened with a miserable curiosity and compassion up to a certain moment, when a broad light of hope flashed upon him. It came from Lapham’s potential ruin; and the way out of the labyrinth that had hitherto seemed so hopeless was clear enough, if another’s disaster would befriend him, and give him the opportunity to prove the unselfishness of his constancy. He thought of the sum of money that was his own, and that he might offer to lend, or practically give, if the time came; and with his crude hopes and purposes formlessly exulting in his heart, he kept on listening with an unchanged countenance.

Walker could not rest till he had developed the whole situation, so far as he knew it. “Look at the stock we’ve got on hand. There’s going to be an awful shrinkage on that, now! And when everybody is shutting down, or running half-time, the works up at Lapham are going full chip, just the same as ever. Well, it’s his pride. I don’t say but what it’s a good sort of pride, but he likes to make his brags that the fire’s never been out in the works since they started, and that no man’s work or wages has ever been cut down yet at Lapham, it don’t matter WHAT the times are. Of course,” explained Walker, “I shouldn’t talk so to everybody; don’t know as I should talk so to anybody but you, Mr. Corey.”

“Of course,” assented Corey.

“Little off your feed to-day,” said Walker, glancing at Corey’s plate.

“I got up with a headache.”

“Well, sir, if you’re like me you’ll carry it round all day, then. I don’t know a much meaner thing than a headache — unless it’s earache, or toothache, or some other kind of ache I’m pretty hard to suit, when it comes to diseases. Notice how yellow the old man looked when he came in this morning? I don’t like to see a man of his build look yellow — much.” About the middle of the afternoon the dust-coloured face of Rogers, now familiar to Lapham’s clerks, showed itself among them. “Has Colonel Lapham returned yet?” he asked, in his dry, wooden tones, of Lapham’s boy.

“Yes, he’s in his office,” said the boy; and as Rogers advanced, he rose and added, “I don’t know as you can see him to-day. His orders are not to let anybody in.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Rogers; “I think he will see ME!” and he pressed forward.

“Well, I’ll have to ask,” returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham’s door, and then withdrew it. “Please to sit down,” he said; “he’ll see you pretty soon;” and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere, dull-brown whiskers and the moustache closing over both lips were incongruously and illogically clerical in effect, and the effect was heightened for no reason by the parchment texture of his skin; the baldness extending to the crown of his head was like a baldness made up for the stage. What his face expressed chiefly was a bland and beneficent caution. Here, you must have said to yourself, is a man of just, sober, and prudent views, fixed purposes, and the good citizenship that avoids debt and hazard of every kind.

“What do you want?” asked Lapham, wheeling round in his swivel-chair as Rogers entered his room, and pushing the door shut with his foot, without rising.

Rogers took the chair that was not offered him, and sat with his hat-brim on his knees, and its crown pointed towards Lapham. “I want to know what you are going to do,” he answered with sufficient self-possession.

“I’ll tell you, first, what I’ve done,” said Lapham. “I’ve been to Dubuque, and I’ve found out all about that milling property you turned in on me. Did you know that the G. L. & P. had leased the P. Y. & X.?”

“I some suspected that it might.”

“Did you know it when you turned the property in on me? Did you know that the G. L. & P. wanted to buy the mills?”

“I presumed the road would give a fair price for them,” said Rogers, winking his eyes in outward expression of inwardly blinking the point.

“You lie,” said Lapham, as quietly as if correcting him in a slight error; and Rogers took the word with equal sang froid. “You knew the road wouldn’t give a fair price for the mills. You knew it would give what it chose, and that I couldn’t help myself, when you let me take them. You’re a thief, Milton K. Rogers, and you stole money I lent you.” Rogers sat listening, as if respectfully considering the statements. “You knew how I felt about that old matter — or my wife did; and that I wanted to make it up to you, if you felt anyway badly used. And you took advantage of it. You’ve got money out of me, in the first place, on securities that wa’n’t worth thirty-five cents on the dollar, and you’ve let me in for this thing, and that thing, and you’ve bled me every time. And all I’ve got to show for it is a milling property on a line of road that can squeeze me, whenever it wants to, as dry as it pleases. And you want to know what I’m going to do? I’m going to squeeze YOU. I’m going to sell these collaterals of yours,” — he touched a bundle of papers among others that littered his desk,— “and I’m going to let the mills go for what they’ll fetch. I ain’t going to fight the G. L. & P.”

Lapham wheeled about in his chair and turned his burly back on his visitor, who sat wholly unmoved.

“There are some parties,” he began, with a dry tranquillity ignoring Lapham’s words, as if they had been an outburst against some third person, who probably merited them, but in whom he was so little interested that he had been obliged to use patience in listening to his condemnation,— “there are some English parties who have been making inquiries in regard to those mills.”

“I guess you’re lying, Rogers,” said Lapham, without looking round.

“Well, all that I have to ask is that you will not act hastily.”

“I see you don’t think I’m in earnest!” cried Lapham, facing fiercely about. “You think I’m fooling, do you?” He struck his bell, and “William,” he ordered the boy who answered it, and who stood waiting while he dashed off a note to the brokers and enclosed it with the bundle of securities in a large envelope, “take these down to Gallop & Paddock’s, in State Street, right away. Now go!” he said to Rogers, when the boy had closed the door after him; and he turned once more to his desk.

Rogers rose from his chair, and stood with his hat in his hand. He was not merely dispassionate in his attitude and expression, he was impartial. He wore the air of a man who was ready to return to business whenever the wayward mood of his interlocutor permitted. “Then I understand,” he said, “that you will take no action in regard to the mills till I have seen the parties I speak of.”

Lapham faced about once more, and sat looking up into the visage of Rogers in silence. “I wonder what you’re up to,” he said at last; “I should like to know.” But as Rogers made no sign of gratifying his curiosity, and treated this last remark of Lapham’s as of the irrelevance of all the rest, he said, frowning, “You bring me a party that will give me enough for those mills to clear me of you, and I’ll talk to you. But don’t you come here with any man of straw. And I’ll give you just twenty-four hours to prove yourself a swindler again.”

Once more Lapham turned his back, and Rogers, after looking thoughtfully into his hat a moment, cleared his throat, and quietly withdrew, maintaining to the last his unprejudiced demeanour.

Lapham was not again heard from, as Walker phrased it, during the afternoon, except when the last mail was taken in to him; then the sound of rending envelopes, mixed with that of what seemed suppressed swearing, penetrated to the outer office. Somewhat earlier than the usual hour for closing, he appeared there with his hat on and his overcoat buttoned about him. He said briefly to his boy, “William, I shan’t be back again this afternoon,” and then went to Miss Dewey and left a number of letters on her table to be copied, and went out. Nothing had been said, but a sense of trouble subtly diffused itself through those who saw him go out.

That evening as he sat down with his wife alone at tea, he asked, “Ain’t Pen coming to supper?”

“No, she ain’t,” said his wife. “I don’t know as I like the way she’s going on, any too well. I’m afraid, if she keeps on, she’ll be down sick. She’s got deeper feelings than Irene.”

Lapham said nothing, but having helped himself to the abundance of his table in his usual fashion, he sat and looked at his plate with an indifference that did not escape the notice of his wife. “What’s the matter with YOU?” she asked.

“Nothing. I haven’t got any appetite.”

“What’s the matter?” she persisted.

“Trouble’s the matter; bad luck and lots of it’s the matter,” said Lapham. “I haven’t ever hid anything from you, Persis, well you asked me, and it’s too late to begin now. I’m in a fix. I’ll tell you what kind of a fix, if you think it’ll do you any good; but I guess you’ll be satisfied to know that it’s a fix.”

“How much of a one?” she asked with a look of grave, steady courage in her eyes.

“Well, I don’t know as I can tell, just yet,” said Lapham, avoiding this look. “Things have been dull all the fall, but I thought they’d brisk up come winter. They haven’t. There have been a lot of failures, and some of ’em owed me, and some of ’em had me on their paper; and — —” Lapham stopped.

“And what?” prompted his wife.

He hesitated before he added, “And then — Rogers.”

“I’m to blame for that,” said Mrs. Lapham. “I forced you to it.”

“No; I was as willing to go into it as what you were,” answered Lapham. “I don’t want to blame anybody.”

Mrs. Lapham had a woman’s passion for fixing responsibility; she could not help saying, as soon as acquitted, “I warned you against him, Silas. I told you not to let him get in any deeper with you.”

“Oh yes. I had to help him to try to get my money back. I might as well poured water into a sieve. And now—” Lapham stopped.

“Don’t be afraid to speak out to me, Silas Lapham. If it comes to the worst, I want to know it — I’ve got to know it. What did I ever care for the money? I’ve had a happy home with you ever since we were married, and I guess I shall have as long as you live, whether we go on to the Back Bay, or go back to the old house at Lapham. I know who’s to blame, and I blame myself. It was my forcing Rogers on to you.” She came back to this with her helpless longing, inbred in all Puritan souls, to have some one specifically suffer for the evil in the world, even if it must be herself.

“It hasn’t come to the worst yet, Persis,” said her husband. “But I shall have to hold up on the new house a little while, till I can see where I am.”

“I shouldn’t care if we had to sell it,” cried his wife, in passionate self-condemnation. “I should be GLAD if we had to, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I shouldn’t,” said Lapham.

“I know!” said his wife; and she remembered ruefully how his heart was set on it.

He sat musing. “Well, I guess it’s going to come out all right in the end. Or, if it ain’t,” he sighed, “we can’t help it. May be Pen needn’t worry so much about Corey, after all,” he continued, with a bitter irony new to him. “It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. And there’s a chance,” he ended, with a still bitterer laugh, “that Rogers will come to time, after all.”

“I don’t believe it!” exclaimed Mrs. Lapham, with a gleam of hope in her eyes. “What chance?”

“One in ten million,” said Lapham; and her face fell again. “He says there are some English parties after him to buy these mills.”

“Well?”

“Well, I gave him twenty-four hours to prove himself a liar.”

“You don’t believe there are any such parties?”

“Not in THIS world.”

“But if there were?”

“Well, if there were, Persis —— But pshaw!”

“No, no!” she pleaded eagerly. “It don’t seem as if he COULD be such a villain. What would be the use of his pretending? If he brought the parties to you.”

“Well,” said Lapham scornfully, “I’d let them have the mills at the price Rogers turned ’em in on me at. I don’t want to make anything on ‘em. But guess I shall hear from the G. L. & P. first. And when they make their offer, I guess I’ll have to accept it, whatever it is. I don’t think they’ll have a great many competitors.”

Mrs. Lapham could not give up her hope. “If you could get your price from those English parties before they knew that the G. L. & P. wanted to buy the mills, would it let you out with Rogers?”

“Just about,” said Lapham.

“Then I know he’ll move heaven and earth to bring it about. I KNOW you won’t be allowed to suffer for doing him a kindness, Silas. He CAN’T be so ungrateful! Why, why SHOULD he pretend to have any such parties in view when he hasn’t? Don’t you be down-hearted, Si. You’ll see that he’ll be round with them to-morrow.”

Lapham laughed, but she urged so many reasons for her belief in Rogers that Lapham began to rekindle his own faith a little. He ended by asking for a hot cup of tea; and Mrs. Lapham sent the pot out and had a fresh one steeped for him. After that he made a hearty supper in the revulsion from his entire despair; and they fell asleep that night talking hopefully of his affairs, which he laid before her fully, as he used to do when he first started in business. That brought the old times back, and he said: “If this had happened then, I shouldn’t have cared much. I was young then, and I wasn’t afraid of anything. But I noticed that after I passed fifty I began to get scared easier. I don’t believe I could pick up, now, from a regular knock-down.”

“Pshaw! YOU scared, Silas Lapham?” cried his wife proudly. “I should like to see the thing that ever scared you; or the knockdown that YOU couldn’t pick up from!”

“Is that so, Persis?” he asked, with the joy her courage gave him.

In the middle of the night she called to him, in a voice which the darkness rendered still more deeply troubled: “Are you awake, Silas?”

“Yes; I’m awake.”

“I’ve been thinking about those English parties, Si — —”

“So’ve I.”

“And I can’t make it out but what you’d be just as bad as Rogers, every bit and grain, if you were to let them have the mills — —”

“And not tell ’em what the chances were with the G. L. & P.? I thought of that, and you needn’t be afraid.”

She began to bewail herself, and to sob convulsively: “O Silas! O Silas!” Heaven knows in what measure the passion of her soul was mired with pride in her husband’s honesty, relief from an apprehended struggle, and pity for him.

“Hush, hush, Persis!” he besought her. “You’ll wake Pen if you keep on that way. Don’t cry any more! You mustn’t.”

“Oh, let me cry, Silas! It’ll help me. I shall be all right in a minute. Don’t you mind.” She sobbed herself quiet. “It does seem too hard,” she said, when she could speak again, “that you have to give up this chance when Providence had fairly raised it up for you.”

“I guess it wa’n’t Providence raised it up,” said Lapham. “Any rate, it’s got to go. Most likely Rogers was lyin’, and there ain’t any such parties; but if there were, they couldn’t have the mills from me without the whole story. Don’t you be troubled, Persis. I’m going to pull through all right.”

“Oh, I ain’t afraid. I don’t suppose but what there’s plenty would help you, if they knew you needed it, Si.”

“They would if they knew I DIDN’T need it,” said Lapham sardonically.

“Did you tell Bill how you stood?”

“No, I couldn’t bear to. I’ve been the rich one so long, that I couldn’t bring myself to own up that I was in danger.”

“Yes.”

“Besides, it didn’t look so ugly till to-day. But I guess we shan’t let ugly looks scare us.”

“No.”

XXII.

THE morning postman brought Mrs. Lapham a letter from Irene, which was chiefly significant because it made no reference whatever to the writer or her state of mind. It gave the news of her uncle’s family; it told of their kindness to her; her cousin Will was going to take her and his sisters ice-boating on the river, when it froze.

By the time this letter came, Lapham had gone to his business, and the mother carried it to Penelope to talk over. “What do you make out of it?” she asked; and without waiting to be answered she said, “I don’t know as I believe in cousins marrying, a great deal; but if Irene and Will were to fix it up between ’em — —” She looked vaguely at Penelope.

“It wouldn’t make any difference as far as I was concerned,” replied the girl listlessly.

Mrs. Lapham lost her patience.

“Well, then, I’ll tell you what, Penelope!” she exclaimed. “Perhaps it’ll make a difference to you if you know that your father’s in REAL trouble. He’s harassed to death, and he was awake half the night, talking about it. That abominable Rogers has got a lot of money away from him; and he’s lost by others that he’s helped,” — Mrs. Lapham put it in this way because she had no time to be explicit,— “and I want you should come out of your room now, and try to be of some help and comfort to him when he comes home to-night. I guess Irene wouldn’t mope round much, if she was here,” she could not help adding.

The girl lifted herself on her elbow. “What’s that you say about father?” she demanded eagerly. “Is he in trouble? Is he going to lose his money? Shall we have to stay in this house?”

“We may be very GLAD to stay in this house,” said Mrs. Lapham, half angry with herself for having given cause for the girl’s conjectures, and half with the habit of prosperity in her child, which could conceive no better of what adversity was. “And I want you should get up and show that you’ve got some feeling for somebody in the world besides yourself.”

“Oh, I’ll get UP!” said the girl promptly, almost cheerfully.

“I don’t say it’s as bad now as it looked a little while ago,” said her mother, conscientiously hedging a little from the statement which she had based rather upon her feelings than her facts. “Your father thinks he’ll pull through all right, and I don’t know but what he will. But I want you should see if you can’t do something to cheer him up and keep him from getting so perfectly down-hearted as he seems to get, under the load he’s got to carry. And stop thinking about yourself a while, and behave yourself like a sensible girl.”

“Yes, yes,” said the girl; “I will. You needn’t be troubled about me any more.”

Before she left her room she wrote a note, and when she came down she was dressed to go out-of-doors and post it herself. The note was to Corey: —

“Do not come to see me any more till you hear from me. I have a reason which I cannot give you now; and you must not ask what it is.”

All day she went about in a buoyant desperation, and she came down to meet her father at supper.

“Well, Persis,” he said scornfully, as he sat down, “we might as well saved our good resolutions till they were wanted. I guess those English parties have gone back on Rogers.”

“Do you mean he didn’t come?”

“He hadn’t come up to half-past five,” said Lapham.

“Tchk!” uttered his wife. “But I guess I shall pull through without Mr. Rogers,” continued Lapham. “A firm that I didn’t think COULD weather it is still afloat, and so far forth as the danger goes of being dragged under with it, I’m all right.” Penelope came in. “Hello, Pen!” cried her father. “It ain’t often I meet YOU nowadays.” He put up his hand as she passed his chair, and pulled her down and kissed her.

“No,” she said; “but I thought I’d come down to-night and cheer you up a little. I shall not talk; the sight of me will be enough.”

Her father laughed out. “Mother been telling you? Well, I WAS pretty blue last night; but I guess I was more scared than hurt. How’d you like to go to the theatre to-night? Sellers at the Park. Heigh?”

“Well, I don’t know. Don’t you think they could get along without me there?”

“No; couldn’t work it at all,” cried the Colonel. “Let’s all go. Unless,” he added inquiringly, “there’s somebody coming here?”

“There’s nobody coming,” said Penelope.

“Good! Then we’ll go. Mother, don’t you be late now.”

“Oh, I shan’t keep you waiting,” said Mrs. Lapham. She had thought of telling what a cheerful letter she had got from Irene; but upon the whole it seemed better not to speak of Irene at all just then. After they returned from the theatre, where the Colonel roared through the comedy, with continual reference of his pleasure to Penelope, to make sure that she was enjoying it too, his wife said, as if the whole affair had been for the girl’s distraction rather than his, “I don’t believe but what it’s going to come out all right about the children;” and then she told him of the letter, and the hopes she had founded upon it.

“Well, perhaps you’re right, Persis,” he consented.

“I haven’t seen Pen so much like herself since it happened. I declare, when I see the way she came out to-night, just to please you, I don’t know as I want you should get over all your troubles right away.”

“I guess there’ll be enough to keep Pen going for a while yet,” said the Colonel, winding up his watch.

But for a time there was a relief, which Walker noted, in the atmosphere at the office, and then came another cold wave, slighter than the first, but distinctly felt there, and succeeded by another relief. It was like the winter which was wearing on to the end of the year, with alternations of freezing weather, and mild days stretching to weeks, in which the snow and ice wholly disappeared. It was none the less winter, and none the less harassing for these fluctuations, and Lapham showed in his face and temper the effect of like fluctuations in his affairs. He grew thin and old, and both at home and at his office he was irascible to the point of offence. In these days Penelope shared with her mother the burden of their troubled home, and united with her in supporting the silence or the petulance of the gloomy, secret man who replaced the presence of jolly prosperity there. Lapham had now ceased to talk of his troubles, and savagely resented his wife’s interference. “You mind your own business, Persis,” he said one day, “if you’ve got any;” and after that she left him mainly to Penelope, who did not think of asking him questions.

“It’s pretty hard on you, Pen,” she said.

“That makes it easier for me,” returned the girl, who did not otherwise refer to her own trouble.

In her heart she had wondered a little at the absolute obedience of Corey, who had made no sign since receiving her note. She would have liked to ask her father if Corey was sick; she would have liked him to ask her why Corey did not come any more. Her mother went on —

“I don’t believe your father knows WHERE he stands. He works away at those papers he brings home here at night, as if he didn’t half know what he was about. He always did have that close streak in him, and I don’t suppose but what he’s been going into things he don’t want anybody else to know about, and he’s kept these accounts of his own.”

Sometimes he gave Penelope figures to work at, which he would not submit to his wife’s nimbler arithmetic. Then she went to bed and left them sitting up till midnight, struggling with problems in which they were both weak. But she could see that the girl was a comfort to her father, and that his troubles were a defence and shelter to her. Some nights she could hear them going out together, and then she lay awake for their return from their long walk. When the hour or day of respite came again, the home felt it first. Lapham wanted to know what the news from Irene was; he joined his wife in all her cheerful speculations, and tried to make her amends for his sullen reticence and irritability. Irene was staying on at Dubuque. There came a letter from her, saying that her uncle’s people wanted her to spend the winter there. “Well, let her,” said Lapham. “It’ll be the best thing for her.”

Lapham himself had letters from his brother at frequent intervals. His brother was watching the G. L. & P., which as yet had made no offer for the mills. Once, when one of these letters came, he submitted to his wife whether, in the absence of any positive information that the road wanted the property, he might not, with a good conscience, dispose of it to the best advantage to anybody who came along.

She looked wistfully at him; it was on the rise from a season of deep depression with him. “No, Si,” she said; “I don’t see how you could do that.”

He did not assent and submit, as he had done at first, but began to rail at the unpracticality of women; and then he shut some papers he had been looking over into his desk, and flung out of the room.

One of the papers had slipped through the crevice of the lid, and lay upon the floor. Mrs. Lapham kept on at her sewing, but after a while she picked the paper up to lay it on the desk. Then she glanced at it, and saw that it was a long column of dates and figures, recording successive sums, never large ones, paid regularly to “Wm. M.” The dates covered a year, and the sum amounted at least to several hundreds.

Mrs. Lapham laid the paper down on the desk, and then she took it up again and put it into her work-basket, meaning to give it to him. When he came in she saw him looking absent-mindedly about for something, and then going to work upon his papers, apparently without it. She thought she would wait till he missed it definitely, and then give him the scrap she had picked up. It lay in her basket, and after some days it found its way under the work in it, and she forgot it.

XXIII.

SINCE New Year’s there had scarcely been a mild day, and the streets were full of snow, growing foul under the city feet and hoofs, and renewing its purity from the skies with repeated falls, which in turn lost their whiteness, beaten down, and beaten black and hard into a solid bed like iron. The sleighing was incomparable, and the air was full of the din of bells; but Lapham’s turnout was not of those that thronged the Brighton road every afternoon; the man at the livery-stable sent him word that the mare’s legs were swelling.

He and Corey had little to do with each other. He did not know how Penelope had arranged it with Corey; his wife said she knew no more than he did, and he did not like to ask the girl herself, especially as Corey no longer came to the house. He saw that she was cheerfuller than she had been, and helpfuller with him and her mother. Now and then Lapham opened his troubled soul to her a little, letting his thought break into speech without preamble or conclusion. Once he said —

“Pen, I presume you know I’m in trouble.”

“We all seem to be there,” said the girl.

“Yes, but there’s a difference between being there by your own fault and being there by somebody else’s.”

“I don’t call it his fault,” she said.

“I call it mine,” said the Colonel.

The girl laughed. Her thought was of her own care, and her father’s wholly of his. She must come to his ground. “What have you been doing wrong?”

“I don’t know as you’d call it wrong. It’s what people do all the time. But I wish I’d let stocks alone. It’s what I always promised your mother I would do. But there’s no use cryin’ over spilt milk; or watered stock, either.”

“I don’t think there’s much use crying about anything. If it could have been cried straight, it would have been all right from the start,” said the girl, going back to her own affair; and if Lapham had not been so deeply engrossed in his, he might have seen how little she cared for all that money could do or undo. He did not observe her enough to see how variable her moods were in those days, and how often she sank from some wild gaiety into abject melancholy; how at times she was fiercely defiant of nothing at all, and at others inexplicably humble and patient. But no doubt none of these signs had passed unnoticed by his wife, to whom Lapham said one day, when he came home, “Persis, what’s the reason Pen don’t marry Corey?”

“You know as well as I do, Silas,” said Mrs. Lapham, with an inquiring look at him for what lay behind his words.

“Well, I think it’s all tomfoolery, the way she’s going on. There ain’t any rhyme nor reason to it.” He stopped, and his wife waited. “If she said the word, I could have some help from them.” He hung his head, and would not meet his wife’s eye.

“I guess you’re in a pretty bad way, Si,” she said pityingly, “or you wouldn’t have come to that.”

“I’m in a hole,” said Lapham, “and I don’t know where to turn. You won’t let me do anything about those mills — —”

“Yes, I’ll let you,” said his wife sadly.

He gave a miserable cry. “You know I can’t do anything, if you do. O my Lord!”

She had not seen him so low as that before. She did not know what to say. She was frightened, and could only ask, “Has it come to the worst?”

“The new house has got to go,” he answered evasively.

She did not say anything. She knew that the work on the house had been stopped since the beginning of the year. Lapham had told the architect that he preferred to leave it unfinished till the spring, as there was no prospect of their being able to get into it that winter; and the architect had agreed with him that it would not hurt it to stand. Her heart was heavy for him, though she could not say so. They sat together at the table, where she had come to be with him at his belated meal. She saw that he did not eat, and she waited for him to speak again, without urging him to take anything. They were past that.

“And I’ve sent orders to shut down at the Works,” he added.

“Shut down at the Works!” she echoed with dismay. She could not take it in. The fire at the Works had never been out before since it was first kindled. She knew how he had prided himself upon that; how he had bragged of it to every listener, and had always lugged the fact in as the last expression of his sense of success. “O Silas!”

“What’s the use?” he retorted. “I saw it was coming a month ago. There are some fellows out in West Virginia that have been running the paint as hard as they could. They couldn’t do much; they used to put it on the market raw. But lately they got to baking it, and now they’ve struck a vein of natural gas right by their works, and they pay ten cents for fuel, where I pay a dollar, and they make as good a paint. Anybody can see where it’s going to end. Besides, the market’s over-stocked. It’s glutted. There wa’n’t anything to do but to shut DOWN, and I’ve SHUT down.”

“I don’t know what’s going to become of the hands in the middle of the winter, this way,” said Mrs. Lapham, laying hold of one definite thought which she could grasp in the turmoil of ruin that whirled before her eyes.

“I don’t care what becomes of the hands,” cried Lapham. “They’ve shared my luck; now let ’em share the other thing. And if you’re so very sorry for the hands, I wish you’d keep a little of your pity for ME. Don’t you know what shutting down the Works means?”

“Yes, indeed I do, Silas,” said his wife tenderly.

“Well, then!” He rose, leaving his supper untasted, and went into the sitting-room, where she presently found him, with that everlasting confusion of papers before him on the desk. That made her think of the paper in her work-basket, and she decided not to make the careworn, distracted man ask her for it, after all. She brought it to him.

He glanced blankly at it and then caught it from her, turning red and looking foolish. “Where’d you get that?”

“You dropped it on the floor the other night, and I picked it up. Who is ‘Wm. M.’?”

“‘Wm. M.’!” he repeated, looking confusedly at her, and then at the paper. “Oh, — it’s nothing.” He tore the paper into small pieces, and went and dropped them into the fire. When Mrs. Lapham came into the room in the morning, before he was down, she found a scrap of the paper, which must have fluttered to the hearth; and glancing at it she saw that the words were “Mrs. M.” She wondered what dealings with a woman her husband could have, and she remembered the confusion he had shown about the paper, and which she had thought was because she had surprised one of his business secrets. She was still thinking of it when he came down to breakfast, heavy-eyed, tremulous, with deep seams and wrinkles in his face.

After a silence which he did not seem inclined to break, “Silas,” she asked, “who is ‘Mrs. M.’?”

He stared at her. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t you?” she returned mockingly. “When you do, you tell me. Do you want any more coffee?”

“No.”

“Well, then, you can ring for Alice when you’ve finished. I’ve got some things to attend to.” She rose abruptly, and left the room. Lapham looked after her in a dull way, and then went on with his breakfast. While he still sat at his coffee, she flung into the room again, and dashed some papers down beside his plate. “Here are some more things of yours, and I’ll thank you to lock them up in your desk and not litter my room with them, if you please.” Now he saw that she was angry, and it must be with him. It enraged him that in such a time of trouble she should fly out at him in that way. He left the house without trying to speak to her. That day Corey came just before closing, and, knocking at Lapham’s door, asked if he could speak with him a few moments.

“Yes,” said Lapham, wheeling round in his swivel-chair and kicking another towards Corey. “Sit down. I want to talk to you. I’d ought to tell you you’re wasting your time here. I spoke the other day about your placin’ yourself better, and I can help you to do it, yet. There ain’t going to be the out-come for the paint in the foreign markets that we expected, and I guess you better give it up.”

“I don’t wish to give it up,” said the young fellow, setting his lips. “I’ve as much faith in it as ever; and I want to propose now what I hinted at in the first place. I want to put some money into the business.”

“Some money!” Lapham leaned towards him, and frowned as if he had not quite understood, while he clutched the arms of his chair.

“I’ve got about thirty thousand dollars that I could put in, and if you don’t want to consider me a partner — I remember that you objected to a partner — you can let me regard it as an investment. But I think I see the way to doing something at once in Mexico, and I should like to feel that I had something more than a drummer’s interest in the venture.”

The men sat looking into each other’s eyes. Then Lapham leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his hand hard and slowly over his face. His features were still twisted with some strong emotion when he took it away. “Your family know about this?”

“My Uncle James knows.”

“He thinks it would be a good plan for you?”

“He thought that by this time I ought to be able to trust my own judgment.”

“Do you suppose I could see your uncle at his office?”

“I imagine he’s there.”

“Well, I want to have a talk with him, one of these days.” He sat pondering a while, and then rose, and went with Corey to his door. “I guess I shan’t change my mind about taking you into the business in that way,” he said coldly. “If there was any reason why I shouldn’t at first, there’s more now.”

“Very well, sir,” answered the young man, and went to close his desk. The outer office was empty; but while Corey was putting his papers in order it was suddenly invaded by two women, who pushed by the protesting porter on the stairs and made their way towards Lapham’s room. One of them was Miss Dewey, the type-writer girl, and the other was a woman whom she would resemble in face and figure twenty years hence, if she led a life of hard work varied by paroxysms of hard drinking.

“That his room, Z’rilla?” asked this woman, pointing towards Lapham’s door with a hand that had not freed itself from the fringe of dirty shawl under which it had hung. She went forward without waiting for the answer, but before she could reach it the door opened, and Lapham stood filling its space.

“Look here, Colonel Lapham!” began the woman, in a high key of challenge. “I want to know if this is the way you’re goin’ back on me and Z’rilla?”

“What do you want?” asked Lapham.

“What do I want? What do you s’pose I want? I want the money to pay my month’s rent; there ain’t a bite to eat in the house; and I want some money to market.”

Lapham bent a frown on the woman, under which she shrank back a step. “You’ve taken the wrong way to get it. Clear out!”

“I WON’T clear out!” said the woman, beginning to whimper.

“Corey!” said Lapham, in the peremptory voice of a master, — he had seemed so indifferent to Corey’s presence that the young man thought he must have forgotten he was there,— “Is Dennis anywhere round?”

“Yissor,” said Dennis, answering for himself from the head of the stairs, and appearing in the ware-room.

Lapham spoke to the woman again. “Do you want I should call a hack, or do you want I should call an officer?”

The woman began to cry into an end of her shawl. “I don’t know what we’re goin’ to do.”

“You’re going to clear out,” said Lapham. “Call a hack, Dennis. If you ever come here again, I’ll have you arrested. Mind that! Zerrilla, I shall want you early to-morrow morning.”

“Yes, sir,” said the girl meekly; she and her mother shrank out after the porter.

Lapham shut his door without a word.

At lunch the next day Walker made himself amends for Corey’s reticence by talking a great deal. He talked about Lapham, who seemed to have, more than ever since his apparent difficulties began, the fascination of an enigma for his book-keeper, and he ended by asking, “Did you see that little circus last night?”

“What little circus?” asked Corey in his turn.

“Those two women and the old man. Dennis told me about it. I told him if he liked his place he’d better keep his mouth shut.”

“That was very good advice,” said Corey.

“Oh, all right, if you don’t want to talk. Don’t know as I should in your place,” returned Walker, in the easy security he had long felt that Corey had no intention of putting on airs with him. “But I’ll tell you what: the old man can’t expect it of everybody. If he keeps this thing up much longer, it’s going to be talked about. You can’t have a woman walking into your place of business, and trying to bulldoze you before your porter, without setting your porter to thinking. And the last thing you want a porter to do is to think; for when a porter thinks, he thinks wrong.”

“I don’t see why even a porter couldn’t think right about that affair,” replied Corey. “I don’t know who the woman was, though I believe she was Miss Dewey’s mother; but I couldn’t see that Colonel Lapham showed anything but a natural resentment of her coming to him in that way. I should have said she was some rather worthless person whom he’d been befriending, and that she had presumed upon his kindness.”

“Is that so? What do you think of his never letting Miss Dewey’s name go on the books?”

“That it’s another proof it’s a sort of charity of his. That’s the only way to look at it.”

“Oh, I’M all right.” Walker lighted a cigar and began to smoke, with his eyes closed to a fine straight line. “It won’t do for a book-keeper to think wrong, any more than a porter, I suppose. But I guess you and I don’t think very different about this thing.”

“Not if you think as I do,” replied Corey steadily; “and I know you would do that if you had seen the ‘circus’ yourself. A man doesn’t treat people who have a disgraceful hold upon him as he treated them.”

“It depends upon who he is,” said Walker, taking his cigar from his mouth. “I never said the old man was afraid of anything.”

“And character,” continued Corey, disdaining to touch the matter further, except in generalities, “must go for something. If it’s to be the prey of mere accident and appearance, then it goes for nothing.”

“Accidents will happen in the best regulated families,” said Walker, with vulgar, good-humoured obtuseness that filled Corey with indignation. Nothing, perhaps, removed his matter-of-fact nature further from the commonplace than a certain generosity of instinct, which I should not be ready to say was always infallible.

That evening it was Miss Dewey’s turn to wait for speech with Lapham after the others were gone. He opened his door at her knock, and stood looking at her with a worried air. “Well, what do you want, Zerrilla?” he asked, with a sort of rough kindness.

“I want to know what I’m going to do about Hen. He’s back again; and he and mother have made it up, and they both got to drinking last night after I went home, and carried on so that the neighbours came in.”

Lapham passed his hand over his red and heated face. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. You’re twice the trouble that my own family is, now. But I know what I’d do, mighty quick, if it wasn’t for you, Zerrilla,” he went on relentingly. “I’d shut your mother up somewheres, and if I could get that fellow off for a three years’ voyage — —”

“I declare,” said Miss Dewey, beginning to whimper, “it seems as if he came back just so often to spite me. He’s never gone more than a year at the furthest, and you can’t make it out habitual drunkenness, either, when it’s just sprees. I’m at my wit’s end.”

“Oh, well, you mustn’t cry around here,” said Lapham soothingly.

“I know it,” said Miss Dewey. “If I could get rid of Hen, I could manage well enough with mother. Mr. Wemmel would marry me if I could get the divorce. He’s said so over and over again.”

“I don’t know as I like that very well,” said Lapham, frowning. “I don’t know as I want you should get married in any hurry again. I don’t know as I like your going with anybody else just yet.”

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid but what it’ll be all right. It’ll be the best thing all round, if I can marry him.”

“Well!” said Lapham impatiently; “I can’t think about it now. I suppose they’ve cleaned everything out again?”

“Yes, they have,” said Zerrilla; “there isn’t a cent left.”

“You’re a pretty expensive lot,” said Lapham. “Well, here!” He took out his pocket-book and gave her a note. “I’ll be round to-night and see what can be done.”

He shut himself into his room again, and Zerrilla dried her tears, put the note into her bosom, and went her way.

Lapham kept the porter nearly an hour later. It was then six o’clock, the hour at which the Laphams usually had tea; but all custom had been broken up with him during the past months, and he did not go home now. He determined, perhaps in the extremity in which a man finds relief in combating one care with another, to keep his promise to Miss Dewey, and at the moment when he might otherwise have been sitting down at his own table he was climbing the stairs to her lodging in the old-fashioned dwelling which had been portioned off into flats. It was in a region of depots, and of the cheap hotels, and “ladies’ and gents’” dining-rooms, and restaurants with bars, which abound near depots; and Lapham followed to Miss Dewey’s door a waiter from one of these, who bore on a salver before him a supper covered with a napkin. Zerrilla had admitted them, and at her greeting a young fellow in the shabby shore-suit of a sailor, buttoning imperfectly over the nautical blue flannel of his shirt, got up from where he had been sitting, on one side of the stove, and stood infirmly on his feet, in token of receiving the visitor. The woman who sat on the other side did not rise, but began a shrill, defiant apology.

“Well, I don’t suppose but what you’ll think we’re livin’ on the fat o’ the land, right straight along, all the while. But it’s just like this. When that child came in from her work, she didn’t seem to have the spirit to go to cookin’ anything, and I had such a bad night last night I was feelin’ all broke up, and s’d I, what’s the use, anyway? By the time the butcher’s heaved in a lot o’ bone, and made you pay for the suet he cuts away, it comes to the same thing, and why not GIT it from the rest’rant first off, and save the cost o’ your fire? s’d I.”

“What have you got there under your apron? A bottle?” demanded Lapham, who stood with his hat on and his hands in his pockets, indifferent alike to the ineffective reception of the sailor and the chair Zerrilla had set him.

“Well, yes, it’s a bottle,” said the woman, with an assumption of virtuous frankness. “It’s whisky; I got to have something to rub my rheumatism with.”

“Humph!” grumbled Lapham. “You’ve been rubbing HIS rheumatism too, I see.”

He twisted his head in the direction of the sailor, now softly and rhythmically waving to and fro on his feet.

“He hain’t had a drop to-day in THIS house!” cried the woman.

“What are you doing around here?” said Lapham, turning fiercely upon him. “You’ve got no business ashore. Where’s your ship? Do you think I’m going to let you come here and eat your wife out of house and home, and then give money to keep the concern going?”

“Just the very words I said when he first showed his face here, yist’day. Didn’t I, Z’rilla?” said the woman, eagerly joining in the rebuke of her late boon companion. “You got no business here, Hen, s’d I. You can’t come here to live on me and Z’rilla, s’d I. You want to go back to your ship, s’d I. That’s what I said.”

The sailor mumbled, with a smile of tipsy amiability for Lapham, something about the crew being discharged.

“Yes,” the woman broke in, “that’s always the way with these coasters. Why don’t you go off on some them long v’y’ges? s’d I. It’s pretty hard when Mr. Wemmel stands ready to marry Z’rilla and provide a comfortable home for us both — I hain’t got a great many years more to live, and I SHOULD like to get some satisfaction out of ‘em, and not be beholden and dependent all my days, — to have Hen, here, blockin’ the way. I tell him there’d be more money for him in the end; but he can’t seem to make up his mind to it.”

“Well, now, look here,” said Lapham. “I don’t care anything about all that. It’s your own business, and I’m not going to meddle with it. But it’s my business who lives off me; and so I tell you all three, I’m willing to take care of Zerrilla, and I’m willing to take care of her mother — —”

“I guess if it hadn’t been for that child’s father,” the mother interpolated, “you wouldn’t been here to tell the tale, Colonel Lapham.”

“I know all about that,” said Lapham. “But I’ll tell you what, Mr. Dewey, I’m not going to support YOU.”

“I don’t see what Hen’s done,” said the old woman impartially.

“He hasn’t done anything, and I’m going to stop it. He’s got to get a ship, and he’s got to get out of this. And Zerrilla needn’t come back to work till he does. I’m done with you all.”

“Well, I vow,” said the mother, “if I ever heard anything like it! Didn’t that child’s father lay down his life for you? Hain’t you said it yourself a hundred times? And don’t she work for her money, and slave for it mornin’, noon, and night? You talk as if we was beholden to you for the very bread in our mouths. I guess if it hadn’t been for Jim, you wouldn’t been here crowin’ over us.”

“You mind what I say. I mean business this time,” said Lapham, turning to the door.

The woman rose and followed him, with her bottle in her hand. “Say, Colonel! what should you advise Z’rilla to do about Mr. Wemmel? I tell her there ain’t any use goin’ to the trouble to git a divorce without she’s sure about him. Don’t you think we’d ought to git him to sign a paper, or something, that he’ll marry her if she gits it? I don’t like to have things going at loose ends the way they are. It ain’t sense. It ain’t right.”

Lapham made no answer to the mother anxious for her child’s future, and concerned for the moral questions involved. He went out and down the stairs, and on the pavement at the lower door he almost struck against Rogers, who had a bag in his hand, and seemed to be hurrying towards one of the depots. He halted a little, as if to speak to Lapham; but Lapham turned his back abruptly upon him, and took the other direction.

The days were going by in a monotony of adversity to him, from which he could no longer escape, even at home. He attempted once or twice to talk of his troubles to his wife, but she repulsed him sharply; she seemed to despise and hate him; but he set himself doggedly to make a confession to her, and he stopped her one night, as she came into the room where he sat — hastily upon some errand that was to take her directly away again.

“Persis, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

She stood still, as if fixed against her will, to listen.

“I guess you know something about it already, and I guess it set you against me.”

“Oh, I guess not, Colonel Lapham. You go your way, and I go mine. That’s all.”

She waited for him to speak, listening with a cold, hard smile on her face.

“I don’t say it to make favour with you, because I don’t want you to spare me, and I don’t ask you; but I got into it through Milton K. Rogers.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Lapham contemptuously.

“I always felt the way I said about it — that it wa’n’t any better than gambling, and I say so now. It’s like betting on the turn of a card; and I give you my word of honour, Persis, that I never was in it at all till that scoundrel began to load me up with those wild-cat securities of his. Then it seemed to me as if I ought to try to do something to get somewhere even. I know it’s no excuse; but watching the market to see what the infernal things were worth from day to day, and seeing it go up, and seeing it go down, was too much for me; and, to make a long story short, I began to buy and sell on a margin — just what I told you I never would do. I seemed to make something — I did make something; and I’d have stopped, I do believe, if I could have reached the figure I’d set in my own mind to start with; but I couldn’t fetch it. I began to lose, and then I began to throw good money after bad, just as I always did with everything that Rogers ever came within a mile of. Well, what’s the use? I lost the money that would have carried me out of this, and I shouldn’t have had to shut down the Works, or sell the house, or — —”

Lapham stopped. His wife, who at first had listened with mystification, and then dawning incredulity, changing into a look of relief that was almost triumph, lapsed again into severity. “Silas Lapham, if you was to die the next minute, is this what you started to tell me?”

“Why, of course it is. What did you suppose I started to tell you?”

“And — look me in the eyes! — you haven’t got anything else on your mind now?”

“No! There’s trouble enough, the Lord knows; but there’s nothing else to tell you. I suppose Pen gave you a hint about it. I dropped something to her. I’ve been feeling bad about it, Persis, a good while, but I hain’t had the heart to speak of it. I can’t expect you to say you like it. I’ve been a fool, I’ll allow, and I’ve been something worse, if you choose to say so; but that’s all. I haven’t hurt anybody but myself — and you and the children.”

Mrs. Lapham rose and said, with her face from him, as she turned towards the door, “It’s all right, Silas. I shan’t ever bring it up against you.”

She fled out of the room, but all that evening she was very sweet with him, and seemed to wish in all tacit ways to atone for her past unkindness.

She made him talk of his business, and he told her of Corey’s offer, and what he had done about it. She did not seem to care for his part in it, however; at which Lapham was silently disappointed a little, for he would have liked her to praise him.

“He did it on account of Pen!”

“Well, he didn’t insist upon it, anyway,” said Lapham, who must have obscurely expected that Corey would recognise his own magnanimity by repeating his offer. If the doubt that follows a self-devoted action — the question whether it was not after all a needless folly — is mixed, as it was in Lapham’s case, with the vague belief that we might have done ourselves a good turn without great risk of hurting any one else by being a little less unselfish, it becomes a regret that is hard to bear. Since Corey spoke to him, some things had happened that gave Lapham hope again.

“I’m going to tell her about it,” said his wife, and she showed herself impatient to make up for the time she had lost. “Why didn’t you tell me before, Silas?”

“I didn’t know we were on speaking terms before,” said Lapham sadly.

“Yes, that’s true,” she admitted, with a conscious flush. “I hope he won’t think Pen’s known about it all this while.”

XXIV.

THAT evening James Bellingham came to see Corey after dinner, and went to find him in his own room.

“I’ve come at the instance of Colonel Lapham,” said the uncle. “He was at my office to-day, and I had a long talk with him. Did you know that he was in difficulties?”

“I fancied that he was in some sort of trouble. And I had the book-keeper’s conjectures — he doesn’t really know much about it.”

“Well, he thinks it time — on all accounts — that you should know how he stands, and why he declined that proposition of yours. I must say he has behaved very well — like a gentleman.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I am. It’s hard to behave like a gentleman where your interest is vitally concerned. And Lapham doesn’t strike me as a man who’s in the habit of acting from the best in him always.”

“Do any of us?” asked Corey.

“Not all of us, at any rate,” said Bellingham. “It must have cost him something to say no to you, for he’s just in that state when he believes that this or that chance, however small, would save him.”

Corey was silent. “Is he really in such a bad way?”

“It’s hard to tell just where he stands. I suspect that a hopeful temperament and fondness for round numbers have always caused him to set his figures beyond his actual worth. I don’t say that he’s been dishonest about it, but he’s had a loose way of estimating his assets; he’s reckoned his wealth on the basis of his capital, and some of his capital is borrowed. He’s lost heavily by some of the recent failures, and there’s been a terrible shrinkage in his values. I don’t mean merely in the stock of paint on hand, but in a kind of competition which has become very threatening. You know about that West Virginian paint?”

Corey nodded.

“Well, he tells me that they’ve struck a vein of natural gas out there which will enable them to make as good a paint as his own at a cost of manufacturing so low that they can undersell him everywhere. If this proves to be the case, it will not only drive his paint out of the market, but will reduce the value of his Works — the whole plant — at Lapham to a merely nominal figure.”

“I see,” said Corey dejectedly. “I’ve understood that he had put a great deal of money into his Works.”

“Yes, and he estimated his mine there at a high figure. Of course it will be worth little or nothing if the West Virginia paint drives his out. Then, besides, Lapham has been into several things outside of his own business, and, like a good many other men who try outside things, he’s kept account of them himself; and he’s all mixed up about them. He’s asked me to look into his affairs with him, and I’ve promised to do so. Whether he can be tided over his difficulties remains to be seen. I’m afraid it will take a good deal of money to do it — a great deal more than he thinks, at least. He believes comparatively little would do it. I think differently. I think that anything less than a great deal would be thrown away on him. If it were merely a question of a certain sum — even a large sum — to keep him going, it might be managed; but it’s much more complicated. And, as I say, it must have been a trial to him to refuse your offer.”

This did not seem to be the way in which Bellingham had meant to conclude. But he said no more; and Corey made him no response.

He remained pondering the case, now hopefully, now doubtfully, and wondering, whatever his mood was, whether Penelope knew anything of the fact with which her mother went nearly at the same moment to acquaint her.

“Of course, he’s done it on your account,” Mrs. Lapham could not help saying.

“Then he was very silly. Does he think I would let him give father money? And if father lost it for him, does he suppose it would make it any easier for me? I think father acted twice as well. It was very silly.”

In repeating the censure, her look was not so severe as her tone; she even smiled a little, and her mother reported to her father that she acted more like herself than she had yet since Corey’s offer.

“I think, if he was to repeat his offer, she would have him now,” said Mrs. Lapham.

“Well, I’ll let her know if he does,” said the Colonel.

“I guess he won’t do it to you!” she cried.

“Who else will he do it to?” he demanded.

They perceived that they had each been talking of a different offer.

After Lapham went to his business in the morning the postman brought another letter from Irene, which was full of pleasant things that were happening to her; there was a great deal about her cousin Will, as she called him. At the end she had written, “Tell Pen I don’t want she should be foolish.”

“There!” said Mrs. Lapham. “I guess it’s going to come out right, all round;” and it seemed as if even the Colonel’s difficulties were past. “When your father gets through this, Pen,” she asked impulsively, “what shall you do?”

“What have you been telling Irene about me?”

“Nothing much. What should you do?”

“It would be a good deal easier to say what I should do if father didn’t,” said the girl.

“I know you think it was nice in him to make your father that offer,” urged the mother.

“It was nice, yes; but it was silly,” said the girl. “Most nice things are silly, I suppose,” she added.

She went to her room and wrote a letter. It was very long, and very carefully written; and when she read it over, she tore it into small pieces. She wrote another one, short and hurried, and tore that up too. Then she went back to her mother, in the family room, and asked to see Irene’s letter, and read it over to herself. “Yes, she seems to be having a good time,” she sighed. “Mother, do you think I ought to let Mr. Corey know that I know about it?”

“Well, I should think it would be a pleasure to him,” said Mrs. Lapham judicially.

“I’m not so sure of that the way I should have to tell him. I should begin by giving him a scolding. Of course, he meant well by it, but can’t you see that it wasn’t very flattering! How did he expect it would change me?”

“I don’t believe he ever thought of that.”

“Don’t you? Why?”

“Because you can see that he isn’t one of that kind. He might want to please you without wanting to change you by what he did.”

“Yes. He must have known that nothing would change me, — at least, nothing that he could do. I thought of that. I shouldn’t like him to feel that I couldn’t appreciate it, even if I did think it was silly. Should you write to him?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“It would be too pointed. No, I shall just let it go. I wish he hadn’t done it.”

“Well, he has done it.”

“And I’ve tried to write to him about it — two letters: one so humble and grateful that it couldn’t stand up on its edge, and the other so pert and flippant. Mother, I wish you could have seen those two letters! I wish I had kept them to look at if I ever got to thinking I had any sense again. They would take the conceit out of me.”

“What’s the reason he don’t come here any more?”

“Doesn’t he come?” asked Penelope in turn, as if it were something she had not noticed particularly.

“You’d ought to know.”

“Yes.” She sat silent a while. “If he doesn’t come, I suppose it’s because he’s offended at something I did.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I — wrote to him — a little while ago. I suppose it was very blunt, but I didn’t believe he would be angry at it. But this — this that he’s done shows he was angry, and that he wasn’t just seizing the first chance to get out of it.”

“What have you done, Pen?” demanded her mother sharply.

“Oh, I don’t know. All the mischief in the world, I suppose. I’ll tell you. When you first told me that father was in trouble with his business, I wrote to him not to come any more till I let him. I said I couldn’t tell him why, and he hasn’t been here since. I’m sure I don’t know what it means.”

Her mother looked at her with angry severity. “Well, Penelope Lapham! For a sensible child, you ARE the greatest goose I ever saw. Did you think he would come here and SEE if you wouldn’t let him come?”

“He might have written,” urged the girl.

Her mother made that despairing “Tchk!” with her tongue, and fell back in her chair. “I should have DESPISED him if he had written. He’s acted just exactly right, and you — you’ve acted — I don’t know HOW you’ve acted. I’m ashamed of you. A girl that could be so sensible for her sister, and always say and do just the right thing, and then when it comes to herself to be such a DISGUSTING simpleton!”

“I thought I ought to break with him at once, and not let him suppose that there was any hope for him or me if father was poor. It was my one chance, in this whole business, to do anything heroic, and I jumped at it. You mustn’t think, because I can laugh at it now, that I wasn’t in earnest, mother! I WAS — dead! But the Colonel has gone to ruin so gradually, that he’s spoilt everything. I expected that he would be bankrupt the next day, and that then HE would understand what I meant. But to have it drag along for a fortnight seems to take all the heroism out of it, and leave it as flat!” She looked at her mother with a smile that shone through her tears, and a pathos that quivered round her jesting lips. “It’s easy enough to be sensible for other people. But when it comes to myself, there I am! Especially, when I want to do what I oughtn’t so much that it seems as if doing what I didn’t want to do MUST be doing what I ought! But it’s been a great success one way, mother. It’s helped me to keep up before the Colonel. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Corey’s staying away, and my feeling so indignant with him for having been badly treated by me, I shouldn’t have been worth anything at all.”

The tears started down her cheeks, but her mother said, “Well, now, go along, and write to him. It don’t matter what you say, much; and don’t be so very particular.”

Her third attempt at a letter pleased her scarcely better than the rest, but she sent it, though it seemed so blunt and awkward. She wrote: —

DEAR FRIEND, — I expected when I sent you that note, that you would understand, almost the next day, why I could not see you any more. You must know now, and you must not think that if anything happened to my father, I should wish you to help him. But that is no reason why I should not thank you, and I do thank you, for offering. It was like you, I will say that.

Yours sincerely, PENELOPE LAPHAM.

She posted her letter, and he sent his reply in the evening, by hand: —

DEAREST, — What I did was nothing, till you praised it. Everything I have and am is yours. Won’t you send a line by the bearer, to say that I may come to see you? I know how you feel; but I am sure that I can make you think differently. You must consider that I loved you without a thought of your father’s circumstances, and always shall.

T. C.

The generous words were blurred to her eyes by the tears that sprang into them. But she could only write in answer: —

“Please do not come; I have made up my mind. As long as this trouble is hanging over us, I cannot see you. And if father is unfortunate, all is over between us.”

She brought his letter to her mother, and told her what she had written in reply. Her mother was thoughtful a while before she said, with a sigh, “Well, I hope you’ve begun as you can carry out, Pen.”

“Oh, I shall not have to carry out at all. I shall not have to do anything. That’s one comfort — the only comfort.” She went away to her own room, and when Mrs. Lapham told her husband of the affair, he was silent at first, as she had been. Then he said, “I don’t know as I should have wanted her to done differently; I don’t know as she could. If I ever come right again, she won’t have anything to feel meeching about; and if I don’t, I don’t want she should be beholden to anybody. And I guess that’s the way she feels.”

The Coreys in their turn sat in judgment on the fact which their son felt bound to bring to their knowledge.

“She has behaved very well,” said Mrs. Corey, to whom her son had spoken.

“My dear,” said her husband, with his laugh, “she has behaved TOO well. If she had studied the whole situation with the most artful eye to its mastery, she could not possibly have behaved better.”

The process of Lapham’s financial disintegration was like the course of some chronic disorder, which has fastened itself upon the constitution, but advances with continual reliefs, with apparent amelioration, and at times seems not to advance at all, when it gives hope of final recovery not only to the sufferer, but to the eye of science itself. There were moments when James Bellingham, seeing Lapham pass this crisis and that, began to fancy that he might pull through altogether; and at these moments, when his adviser could not oppose anything but experience and probability to the evidence of the fact, Lapham was buoyant with courage, and imparted his hopefulness to his household. Our theory of disaster, of sorrow, of affliction, borrowed from the poets and novelists, is that it is incessant; but every passage in our own lives and in the lives of others, so far as we have witnessed them, teaches us that this is false. The house of mourning is decorously darkened to the world, but within itself it is also the house of laughing. Bursts of gaiety, as heartfelt as its grief, relieve the gloom, and the stricken survivors have their jests together, in which the thought of the dead is tenderly involved, and a fond sense, not crazier than many others, of sympathy and enjoyment beyond the silence, justifies the sunnier mood before sorrow rushes back, deploring and despairing, and making it all up again with the conventional fitness of things. Lapham’s adversity had this quality in common with bereavement. It was not always like the adversity we figure in allegory; it had its moments of being like prosperity, and if upon the whole it was continual, it was not incessant. Sometimes there was a week of repeated reverses, when he had to keep his teeth set and to hold on hard to all his hopefulness; and then days came of negative result or slight success, when he was full of his jokes at the tea-table, and wanted to go to the theatre, or to do something to cheer Penelope up. In some miraculous way, by some enormous stroke of success which should eclipse the brightest of his past prosperity, he expected to do what would reconcile all difficulties, not only in his own affairs, but in hers too. “You’ll see,” he said to his wife; “it’s going to come out all right. Irene’ll fix it up with Bill’s boy, and then she’ll be off Pen’s mind; and if things go on as they’ve been going for the last two days, I’m going to be in a position to do the favours myself, and Pen can feel that SHE’S makin’ a sacrifice, and then I guess may be she’ll do it. If things turn out as I expect now, and times ever do get any better generally, I can show Corey that I appreciate his offer. I can offer him the partnership myself then.”

Even in the other moods, which came when everything had been going wrong, and there seemed no way out of the net, there were points of consolation to Lapham and his wife. They rejoiced that Irene was safe beyond the range of their anxieties, and they had a proud satisfaction that there had been no engagement between Corey and Penelope, and that it was she who had forbidden it. In the closeness of interest and sympathy in which their troubles had reunited them, they confessed to each other that nothing would have been more galling to their pride than the idea that Lapham should not have been able to do everything for his daughter that the Coreys might have expected. Whatever happened now, the Coreys could not have it to say that the Laphams had tried to bring any such thing about.

Bellingham had lately suggested an assignment to Lapham, as the best way out of his difficulties. It was evident that he had not the money to meet his liabilities at present, and that he could not raise it without ruinous sacrifices, that might still end in ruin after all. If he made the assignment, Bellingham argued, he could gain time and make terms; the state of things generally would probably improve, since it could not be worse, and the market, which he had glutted with his paint, might recover and he could start again. Lapham had not agreed with him. When his reverses first began it had seemed easy for him to give up everything, to let the people he owed take all, so only they would let him go out with clean hands; and he had dramatised this feeling in his talk with his wife, when they spoke together of the mills on the G. L. & P. But ever since then it had been growing harder, and he could not consent even to seem to do it now in the proposed assignment. He had not found other men so very liberal or faithful with him; a good many of them appeared to have combined to hunt him down; a sense of enmity towards all his creditors asserted itself in him; he asked himself why they should not suffer a little too. Above all, he shrank from the publicity of the assignment. It was open confession that he had been a fool in some way; he could not bear to have his family — his brother the judge, especially, to whom he had always appeared the soul of business wisdom — think him imprudent or stupid. He would make any sacrifice before it came to that. He determined in parting with Bellingham to make the sacrifice which he had oftenest in his mind, because it was the hardest, and to sell his new house. That would cause the least comment. Most people would simply think that he had got a splendid offer, and with his usual luck had made a very good thing of it; others who knew a little more about him would say that he was hauling in his horns, but they could not blame him; a great many other men were doing the same in those hard times — the shrewdest and safest men: it might even have a good effect. He went straight from Bellingham’s office to the real-estate broker in whose hands he meant to put his house, for he was not the sort of man to shilly-shally when he had once made up his mind. But he found it hard to get his voice up out of his throat, when he said he guessed he would get the broker to sell that new house of his on the water side of Beacon. The broker answered cheerfully, yes; he supposed Colonel Lapham knew it was a pretty dull time in real estate? and Lapham said yes, he knew that, but he should not sell at a sacrifice, and he did not care to have the broker name him or describe the house definitely unless parties meant business. Again the broker said yes; and he added, as a joke Lapham would appreciate, that he had half a dozen houses on the water side of Beacon, on the same terms; that nobody wanted to be named or to have his property described.

It did, in fact, comfort Lapham a little to find himself in the same boat with so many others; he smiled grimly, and said in his turn, yes, he guessed that was about the size of it with a good many people. But he had not the heart to tell his wife what he had done, and he sat taciturn that whole evening, without even going over his accounts, and went early to bed, where he lay tossing half the night before he fell asleep. He slept at last only upon the promise he made himself that he would withdraw the house from the broker’s hands; but he went heavily to his own business in the morning without doing so. There was no such rush, anyhow, he reflected bitterly; there would be time to do that a month later, probably.

It struck him with a sort of dismay when a boy came with a note from a broker, saying that a party who had been over the house in the fall had come to him to know whether it could be bought, and was willing to pay the cost of the house up to the time he had seen it. Lapham took refuge in trying to think who the party could be; he concluded that it must have been somebody who had gone over it with the architect, and he did not like that; but he was aware that this was not an answer to the broker, and he wrote that he would give him an answer in the morning.

Now that it had come to the point, it did not seem to him that he could part with the house. So much of his hope for himself and his children had gone into it that the thought of selling it made him tremulous and sick. He could not keep about his work steadily, and with his nerves shaken by want of sleep, and the shock of this sudden and unexpected question, he left his office early, and went over to look at the house and try to bring himself to some conclusion here. The long procession of lamps on the beautiful street was flaring in the clear red of the sunset towards which it marched, and Lapham, with a lump in his throat, stopped in front of his house and looked at their multitude. They were not merely a part of the landscape; they were a part of his pride and glory, his success, his triumphant life’s work which was fading into failure in his helpless hands. He ground his teeth to keep down that lump, but the moisture in his eyes blurred the lamps, and the keen pale crimson against which it made them flicker. He turned and looked up, as he had so often done, at the window-spaces, neatly glazed for the winter with white linen, and recalled the night when he had stopped with Irene before the house, and she had said that she should never live there, and he had tried to coax her into courage about it. There was no such facade as that on the whole street, to his thinking. Through his long talks with the architect, he had come to feel almost as intimately and fondly as the architect himself the satisfying simplicity of the whole design and the delicacy of its detail. It appealed to him as an exquisite bit of harmony appeals to the unlearned ear, and he recognised the difference between this fine work and the obstreperous pretentiousness of the many overloaded house-fronts which Seymour had made him notice for his instruction elsewhere on the Back Bay. Now, in the depths of his gloom, he tried to think what Italian city it was where Seymour said he had first got the notion of treating brick-work in that way.

He unlocked the temporary door with the key he always carried, so that he could let himself in and out whenever he liked, and entered the house, dim and very cold with the accumulated frigidity of the whole winter in it, and looking as if the arrest of work upon it had taken place a thousand years before. It smelt of the unpainted woods and the clean, hard surfaces of the plaster, where the experiments in decoration had left it untouched; and mingled with these odours was that of some rank pigments and metallic compositions which Seymour had used in trying to realise a certain daring novelty of finish, which had not proved successful. Above all, Lapham detected the peculiar odour of his own paint, with which the architect had been greatly interested one day, when Lapham showed it to him at the office. He had asked Lapham to let him try the Persis Brand in realising a little idea he had for the finish of Mrs. Lapham’s room. If it succeeded they could tell her what it was, for a surprise.

Lapham glanced at the bay-window in the reception-room, where he sat with his girls on the trestles when Corey first came by; and then he explored the whole house to the attic, in the light faintly admitted through the linen sashes. The floors were strewn with shavings and chips which the carpenters had left, and in the music-room these had been blown into long irregular windrows by the draughts through a wide rent in the linen sash. Lapham tried to pin it up, but failed, and stood looking out of it over the water. The ice had left the river, and the low tide lay smooth and red in the light of the sunset. The Cambridge flats showed the sad, sodden yellow of meadows stripped bare after a long sleep under snow; the hills, the naked trees, the spires and roofs had a black outline, as if they were objects in a landscape of the French school.

The whim seized Lapham to test the chimney in the music-room; it had been tried in the dining-room below, and in his girls’ fireplaces above, but here the hearth was still clean. He gathered some shavings and blocks together, and kindled them, and as the flame mounted gaily from them, he pulled up a nail-keg which he found there and sat down to watch it. Nothing could have been better; the chimney was a perfect success; and as Lapham glanced out of the torn linen sash he said to himself that that party, whoever he was, who had offered to buy his house might go to the devil; he would never sell it as long as he had a dollar. He said that he should pull through yet; and it suddenly came into his mind that, if he could raise the money to buy out those West Virginia fellows, he should be all right, and would have the whole game in his own hand. He slapped himself on the thigh, and wondered that he had never thought of that before; and then, lighting a cigar with a splinter from the fire, he sat down again to work the scheme out in his own mind. He did not hear the feet heavily stamping up the stairs, and coming towards the room where he sat; and the policeman to whom the feet belonged had to call out to him, smoking at his chimney-corner, with his back turned to the door, “Hello! what are you doing here?”

“What’s that to you?” retorted Lapham, wheeling half round on his nail-keg.

“I’ll show you,” said the officer, advancing upon him, and then stopping short as he recognised him. “Why, Colonel Lapham! I thought it was some tramp got in here!”

“Have a cigar?” said Lapham hospitably. “Sorry there ain’t another nail-keg.”

The officer took the cigar. “I’ll smoke it outside. I’ve just come on, and I can’t stop. Tryin’ your chimney?”

“Yes, I thought I’d see how it would draw, in here. It seems to go first-rate.”

The policeman looked about him with an eye of inspection. “You want to get that linen window, there, mended up.”

“Yes, I’ll speak to the builder about that. It can go for one night.”

The policeman went to the window and failed to pin the linen together where Lapham had failed before. “I can’t fix it.” He looked round once more, and saying, “Well, good night,” went out and down the stairs.

Lapham remained by the fire till he had smoked his cigar; then he rose and stamped upon the embers that still burned with his heavy boots, and went home. He was very cheerful at supper. He told his wife that he guessed he had a sure thing of it now, and in another twenty-four hours he should tell her just how. He made Penelope go to the theatre with him, and when they came out, after the play, the night was so fine that he said they must walk round by the new house and take a look at it in the starlight. He said he had been there before he came home, and tried Seymour’s chimney in the music-room, and it worked like a charm.

As they drew near Beacon Street they were aware of unwonted stir and tumult, and presently the still air transmitted a turmoil of sound, through which a powerful and incessant throbbing made itself felt. The sky had reddened above them, and turning the corner at the Public Garden, they saw a black mass of people obstructing the perspective of the brightly-lighted street, and out of this mass a half-dozen engines, whose strong heart-beats had already reached them, sent up volumes of fire-tinged smoke and steam from their funnels. Ladders were planted against the facade of a building, from the roof of which a mass of flame burnt smoothly upward, except where here and there it seemed to pull contemptuously away from the heavy streams of water which the firemen, clinging like great beetles to their ladders, poured in upon it.

Lapham had no need to walk down through the crowd, gazing and gossiping, with shouts and cries and hysterical laughter, before the burning house, to make sure that it was his.

“I guess I done it, Pen,” was all he said.

Among the people who were looking at it were a party who seemed to have run out from dinner in some neighbouring house; the ladies were fantastically wrapped up, as if they had flung on the first things they could seize.

“Isn’t it perfectly magnificent!” cried a pretty girl. “I wouldn’t have missed it on any account. Thank you so much, Mr. Symington, for bringing us out!”

“Ah, I thought you’d like it,” said this Mr. Symington, who must have been the host; “and you can enjoy it without the least compunction, Miss Delano, for I happen to know that the house belongs to a man who could afford to burn one up for you once a year.”

“Oh, do you think he would, if I came again?”

“I haven’t the least doubt of it. We don’t do things by halves in Boston.”

“He ought to have had a coat of his noncombustible paint on it,” said another gentleman of the party.

Penelope pulled her father away toward the first carriage she could reach of a number that had driven up. “Here, father! get into this.”

“No, no; I couldn’t ride,” he answered heavily, and he walked home in silence. He greeted his wife with, “Well, Persis, our house is gone! And I guess I set it on fire myself;” and while he rummaged among the papers in his desk, still with his coat and hat on, his wife got the facts as she could from Penelope. She did not reproach him. Here was a case in which his self-reproach must be sufficiently sharp without any edge from her. Besides, her mind was full of a terrible thought.

“O Silas,” she faltered, “they’ll think you set it on fire to get the insurance!”

Lapham was staring at a paper which he held in his hand. “I had a builder’s risk on it, but it expired last week. It’s a dead loss.”

“Oh, thank the merciful Lord!” cried his wife.

“Merciful!” said Lapham. “Well, it’s a queer way of showing it.”

He went to bed, and fell into the deep sleep which sometimes follows a great moral shock. It was perhaps rather a torpor than a sleep.

XXV.

LAPHAM awoke confused, and in a kind of remoteness from the loss of the night before, through which it loomed mistily. But before he lifted his head from the pillow, it gathered substance and weight against which it needed all his will to bear up and live. In that moment he wished that he had not wakened, that he might never have wakened; but he rose, and faced the day and its cares.

The morning papers brought the report of the fire, and the conjectured loss. The reporters somehow had found out the fact that the loss fell entirely upon Lapham; they lighted up the hackneyed character of their statements with the picturesque interest OF the coincidence that the policy had expired only the week before; heaven knows how they knew it. They said that nothing remained of the building but the walls; and Lapham, on his way to business, walked up past the smoke-stained shell. The windows looked like the eye-sockets of a skull down upon the blackened and trampled snow of the street; the pavement was a sheet of ice, and the water from the engines had frozen, like streams of tears, down the face of the house, and hung in icy tags from the window-sills and copings.

He gathered himself up as well as he could, and went on to his office. The chance of retrieval that had flashed upon him, as he sat smoking by that ruined hearth the evening before, stood him in such stead now as a sole hope may; and he said to himself that, having resolved not to sell his house, he was no more crippled by its loss than he would have been by letting his money lie idle in it; what he might have raised by mortgage on it could be made up in some other way; and if they would sell he could still buy out the whole business of that West Virginia company, mines, plant, stock on hand, good-will, and everything, and unite it with his own. He went early in the afternoon to see Bellingham, whose expressions of condolence for his loss he cut short with as much politeness as he knew how to throw into his impatience. Bellingham seemed at first a little dazzled with the splendid courage of his scheme; it was certainly fine in its way; but then he began to have his misgivings.

“I happen to know that they haven’t got much money behind them,” urged Lapham. “They’ll jump at an offer.”

Bellingham shook his head. “If they can show profit on the old manufacture, and prove they can make their paint still cheaper and better hereafter, they can have all the money they want. And it will be very difficult for you to raise it if you’re threatened by them. With that competition, you know what your plant at Lapham would be worth, and what the shrinkage on your manufactured stock would be. Better sell out to them,” he concluded, “if they will buy.”

“There ain’t money enough in this country to buy out my paint,” said Lapham, buttoning up his coat in a quiver of resentment. “Good afternoon, sir.” Men are but grown-up boys after all. Bellingham watched this perversely proud and obstinate child fling petulantly out of his door, and felt a sympathy for him which was as truly kind as it was helpless.

But Lapham was beginning to see through Bellingham, as he believed. Bellingham was, in his way, part of that conspiracy by which Lapham’s creditors were trying to drive him to the wall. More than ever now he was glad that he had nothing to do with that cold-hearted, self-conceited race, and that the favours so far were all from his side. He was more than ever determined to show them, every one of them, high and low, that he and his children could get along without them, and prosper and triumph without them. He said to himself that if Penelope were engaged to Corey that very minute, he would make her break with him.

He knew what he should do now, and he was going to do it without loss of time. He was going on to New York to see those West Virginia people; they had their principal office there, and he intended to get at their ideas, and then he intended to make them an offer. He managed this business better than could possibly have been expected of a man in his impassioned mood. But when it came really to business, his practical instincts, alert and wary, came to his aid against the passions that lay in wait to betray after they ceased to dominate him. He found the West Virginians full of zeal and hope, but in ten minutes he knew that they had not yet tested their strength in the money market, and had not ascertained how much or how little capital they could command. Lapham himself, if he had had so much, would not have hesitated to put a million dollars into their business. He saw, as they did not see, that they had the game in their own hands, and that if they could raise the money to extend their business, they could ruin him. It was only a question of time, and he was on the ground first. He frankly proposed a union of their interests. He admitted that they had a good thing, and that he should have to fight them hard; but he meant to fight them to the death unless they could come to some sort of terms. Now, the question was whether they had better go on and make a heavy loss for both sides by competition, or whether they had better form a partnership to run both paints and command the whole market. Lapham made them three propositions, each of which was fair and open: to sell out to them altogether; to buy them out altogether; to join facilities and forces with them, and go on in an invulnerable alliance. Let them name a figure at which they would buy, a figure at which they would sell, a figure at which they would combine, — or, in other words, the amount of capital they needed.

They talked all day, going out to lunch together at the Astor House, and sitting with their knees against the counter on a row of stools before it for fifteen minutes of reflection and deglutition, with their hats on, and then returning to the basement from which they emerged. The West Virginia company’s name was lettered in gilt on the wide low window, and its paint, in the form of ore, burnt, and mixed, formed a display on the window shelf Lapham examined it and praised it; from time to time they all recurred to it together; they sent out for some of Lapham’s paint and compared it, the West Virginians admitting its former superiority. They were young fellows, and country persons, like Lapham, by origin, and they looked out with the same amused, undaunted provincial eyes at the myriad metropolitan legs passing on the pavement above the level of their window. He got on well with them. At last, they said what they would do. They said it was nonsense to talk of buying Lapham out, for they had not the money; and as for selling out, they would not do it, for they knew they had a big thing. But they would as soon use his capital to develop it as anybody else’s, and if he could put in a certain sum for this purpose, they would go in with him. He should run the works at Lapham and manage the business in Boston, and they would run the works at Kanawha Falls and manage the business in New York. The two brothers with whom Lapham talked named their figure, subject to the approval of another brother at Kanawha Falls, to whom they would write, and who would telegraph his answer, so that Lapham could have it inside of three days. But they felt perfectly sure that he would approve; and Lapham started back on the eleven o’clock train with an elation that gradually left him as he drew near Boston, where the difficulties of raising this sum were to be over come. It seemed to him, then, that those fellows had put it up on him pretty steep, but he owned to himself that they had a sure thing, and that they were right in believing they could raise the same sum elsewhere; it would take all OF it, he admitted, to make their paint pay on the scale they had the right to expect. At their age, he would not have done differently; but when he emerged, old, sore, and sleep-broken, from the sleeping-car in the Albany depot at Boston, he wished with a pathetic self-pity that they knew how a man felt at his age. A year ago, six months ago, he would have laughed at the notion that it would be hard to raise the money. But he thought ruefully of that immense stock of paint on hand, which was now a drug in the market, of his losses by Rogers and by the failures of other men, of the fire that had licked up so many thousands in a few hours; he thought with bitterness of the tens of thousands that he had gambled away in stocks, and of the commissions that the brokers had pocketed whether he won or lost; and he could not think of any securities on which he could borrow, except his house in Nankeen Square, or the mine and works at Lapham. He set his teeth in helpless rage when he thought of that property out on the G. L. & P., that ought to be worth so much, and was worth so little if the Road chose to say so.

He did not go home, but spent most of the day shining round, as he would have expressed it, and trying to see if he could raise the money. But he found that people of whom he hoped to get it were in the conspiracy which had been formed to drive him to the wall. Somehow, there seemed a sense of his embarrassments abroad. Nobody wanted to lend money on the plant at Lapham without taking time to look into the state of the business; but Lapham had no time to give, and he knew that the state of the business would not bear looking into. He could raise fifteen thousand on his Nankeen Square house, and another fifteen on his Beacon Street lot, and this was all that a man who was worth a million by rights could do! He said a million, and he said it in defiance of Bellingham, who had subjected his figures to an analysis which wounded Lapham more than he chose to show at the time, for it proved that he was not so rich and not so wise as he had seemed. His hurt vanity forbade him to go to Bellingham now for help or advice; and if he could have brought himself to ask his brothers for money, it would have been useless; they were simply well-to-do Western people, but not capitalists on the scale he required.

Lapham stood in the isolation to which adversity so often seems to bring men. When its test was applied, practically or theoretically, to all those who had seemed his friends, there was none who bore it; and he thought with bitter self-contempt of the people whom he had befriended in their time of need. He said to himself that he had been a fool for that; and he scorned himself for certain acts of scrupulosity by which he had lost money in the past. Seeing the moral forces all arrayed against him, Lapham said that he would like to have the chance offered him to get even with them again; he thought he should know how to look out for himself. As he understood it, he had several days to turn about in, and he did not let one day’s failure dishearten him. The morning after his return he had, in fact, a gleam of luck that gave him the greatest encouragement for the moment. A man came in to inquire about one of Rogers’s wild-cat patents, as Lapham called them, and ended by buying it. He got it, of course, for less than Lapham took it for, but Lapham was glad to be rid of it for something, when he had thought it worth nothing; and when the transaction was closed, he asked the purchaser rather eagerly if he knew where Rogers was; it was Lapham’s secret belief that Rogers had found there was money in the thing, and had sent the man to buy it. But it appeared that this was a mistake; the man had not come from Rogers, but had heard of the patent in another way; and Lapham was astonished in the afternoon, when his boy came to tell him that Rogers was in the outer office, and wished to speak with him.

“All right,” said Lapham, and he could not command at once the severity for the reception of Rogers which he would have liked to use. He found himself, in fact, so much relaxed towards him by the morning’s touch of prosperity that he asked him to sit down, gruffly, of course, but distinctly; and when Rogers said in his lifeless way, and with the effect of keeping his appointment of a month before, “Those English parties are in town, and would like to talk with you in reference to the mills,” Lapham did not turn him out-of-doors.

He sat looking at him, and trying to make out what Rogers was after; for he did not believe that the English parties, if they existed, had any notion of buying his mills.

“What if they are not for sale?” he asked. “You know that I’ve been expecting an offer from the G. L. & P.”

“I’ve kept watch of that. They haven’t made you any offer,” said Rogers quietly.

“And did you think,” demanded Lapham, firing up, “that I would turn them in on somebody else as you turned them in on me, when the chances are that they won’t be worth ten cents on the dollar six months from now?”

“I didn’t know what you would do,” said Rogers non-committally. “I’ve come here to tell you that these parties stand ready to take the mills off your hands at a fair valuation — at the value I put upon them when I turned them in.”

“I don’t believe you!” cried Lapham brutally, but a wild predatory hope made his heart leap so that it seemed to turn over in his breast. “I don’t believe there are any such parties to begin with; and in the next place, I don’t believe they would buy at any such figure; unless — unless you’ve lied to them, as you’ve lied to me. Did you tell them about the G. L. & P.?”

Rogers looked compassionately at him, but he answered, with unvaried dryness, “I did not think that necessary.”

Lapham had expected this answer, and he had expected or intended to break out in furious denunciation of Rogers when he got it; but he only found himself saying, in a sort of baffled gasp, “I wonder what your game is!”

Rogers did not reply categorically, but he answered, with his impartial calm, and as if Lapham had said nothing to indicate that he differed at all with him as to disposing of the property in the way he had suggested: “If we should succeed in selling, I should be able to repay you your loans, and should have a little capital for a scheme that I think of going into.”

“And do you think that I am going to steal these men’s money to help you plunder somebody in a new scheme?” answered Lapham. The sneer was on behalf of virtue, but it was still a sneer.

“I suppose the money would be useful to you too, just now.”

“Why?”

“Because I know that you have been trying to borrow.”

At this proof of wicked omniscience in Rogers, the question whether he had better not regard the affair as a fatality, and yield to his destiny, flashed upon Lapham; but he answered, “I shall want money a great deal worse than I’ve ever wanted it yet, before I go into such rascally business with you. Don’t you know that we might as well knock these parties down on the street, and take the money out of their pockets?”

“They have come on,” answered Rogers, “from Portland to see you. I expected them some weeks ago, but they disappointed me. They arrived on the Circassian last night; they expected to have got in five days ago, but the passage was very stormy.”

“Where are they?” asked Lapham, with helpless irrelevance, and feeling himself somehow drifted from his moorings by Rogers’s shipping intelligence.

“They are at Young’s. I told them we would call upon them after dinner this evening; they dine late.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” asked Lapham, trying to drop another anchor for a fresh clutch on his underlying principles. “Well, now, you go and tell them that I said I wouldn’t come.”

“Their stay is limited,” remarked Rogers. “I mentioned this evening because they were not certain they could remain over another night. But if to-morrow would suit you better — —”

“Tell ’em I shan’t come at all,” roared Lapham, as much in terror as defiance, for he felt his anchor dragging. “Tell ’em I shan’t come at all! Do you understand that?”

“I don’t see why you should stickle as to the matter of going to them,” said Rogers; “but if you think it will be better to have them approach you, I suppose I can bring them to you.”

“No, you can’t! I shan’t let you! I shan’t see them! I shan’t have anything to do with them. NOW do you understand?”

“I inferred from our last interview,” persisted Rogers, unmoved by all this violent demonstration of Lapham’s, “that you wished to meet these parties. You told me that you would give me time to produce them; and I have promised them that you would meet them; I have committed myself.”

It was true that Lapham had defied Rogers to bring on his men, and had implied his willingness to negotiate with them. That was before he had talked the matter over with his wife, and perceived his moral responsibility in it; even she had not seen this at once. He could not enter into this explanation with Rogers; he could only say, “I said I’d give you twenty-four hours to prove yourself a liar, and you did it. I didn’t say twenty-four days.”

“I don’t see the difference,” returned Rogers. “The parties are here now, and that proves that I was acting in good faith at the time. There has been no change in the posture of affairs. You don’t know now any more than you knew then that the G. L. & P. is going to want the property. If there’s any difference, it’s in favour of the Road’s having changed its mind.”

There was some sense in this, and Lapham felt it — felt it only too eagerly, as he recognised the next instant.

Rogers went on quietly: “You’re not obliged to sell to these parties when you meet them; but you’ve allowed me to commit myself to them by the promise that you would talk with them.”

“‘Twan’t a promise,” said Lapham.

“It was the same thing; they have come out from England on my guaranty that there was such and such an opening for their capital; and now what am I to say to them? It places me in a ridiculous position.” Rogers urged his grievance calmly, almost impersonally, making his appeal to Lapham’s sense of justice. “I CAN’T go back to those parties and tell them you won’t see them. It’s no answer to make. They’ve got a right to know why you won’t see them.”

“Very well, then!” cried Lapham; “I’ll come and TELL them why. Who shall I ask for? When shall I be there?”

“At eight o’clock, please,” said Rogers, rising, without apparent alarm at his threat, if it was a threat. “And ask for me; I’ve taken a room at the hotel for the present.”

“I won’t keep you five minutes when I get there,” said Lapham; but he did not come away till ten o’clock.

It appeared to him as if the very devil was in it. The Englishmen treated his downright refusal to sell as a piece of bluff, and talked on as though it were merely the opening of the negotiation. When he became plain with them in his anger, and told them why he would not sell, they seemed to have been prepared for this as a stroke of business, and were ready to meet it.

“Has this fellow,” he demanded, twisting his head in the direction of Rogers, but disdaining to notice him otherwise, “been telling you that it’s part of my game to say this? Well, sir, I can tell you, on my side, that there isn’t a slipperier rascal unhung in America than Milton K. Rogers!”

The Englishmen treated this as a piece of genuine American humour, and returned to the charge with unabated courage. They owned now, that a person interested with them had been out to look at the property, and that they were satisfied with the appearance of things. They developed further the fact that they were not acting solely, or even principally, in their own behalf, but were the agents of people in England who had projected the colonisation of a sort of community on the spot, somewhat after the plan of other English dreamers, and that they were satisfied, from a careful inspection, that the resources and facilities were those best calculated to develop the energy and enterprise of the proposed community. They were prepared to meet Mr. Lapham — Colonel, they begged his pardon, at the instance of Rogers — at any reasonable figure, and were quite willing to assume the risks he had pointed out. Something in the eyes of these men, something that lurked at an infinite depth below their speech, and was not really in their eyes when Lapham looked again, had flashed through him a sense of treachery in them. He had thought them the dupes of Rogers; but in that brief instant he had seen them — or thought he had seen them — his accomplices, ready to betray the interests of which they went on to speak with a certain comfortable jocosity, and a certain incredulous slight of his show of integrity. It was a deeper game than Lapham was used to, and he sat looking with a sort of admiration from one Englishman to the other, and then to Rogers, who maintained an exterior of modest neutrality, and whose air said, “I have brought you gentlemen together as the friend of all parties, and I now leave you to settle it among yourselves. I ask nothing, and expect nothing, except the small sum which shall accrue to me after the discharge of my obligations to Colonel Lapham.”

While Rogers’s presence expressed this, one of the Englishmen was saying, “And if you have any scruple in allowin’ us to assume this risk, Colonel Lapham, perhaps you can console yourself with the fact that the loss, if there is to be any, will fall upon people who are able to bear it — upon an association of rich and charitable people. But we’re quite satisfied there will be no loss,” he added savingly. “All you have to do is to name your price, and we will do our best to meet it.”

There was nothing in the Englishman’s sophistry very shocking to Lapham. It addressed itself in him to that easy-going, not evilly intentioned, potential immorality which regards common property as common prey, and gives us the most corrupt municipal governments under the sun — which makes the poorest voter, when he has tricked into place, as unscrupulous in regard to others’ money as an hereditary prince. Lapham met the Englishman’s eye, and with difficulty kept himself from winking. Then he looked away, and tried to find out where he stood, or what he wanted to do. He could hardly tell. He had expected to come into that room and unmask Rogers, and have it over. But he had unmasked Rogers without any effect whatever, and the play had only begun. He had a whimsical and sarcastic sense of its being very different from the plays at the theatre. He could not get up and go away in silent contempt; he could not tell the Englishmen that he believed them a pair of scoundrels and should have nothing to do with them; he could no longer treat them as innocent dupes. He remained baffled and perplexed, and the one who had not spoken hitherto remarked —

“Of course we shan’t ‘aggle about a few pound, more or less. If Colonel Lapham’s figure should be a little larger than ours, I’ve no doubt ‘e’ll not be too ‘ard upon us in the end.”

Lapham appreciated all the intent of this subtle suggestion, and understood as plainly as if it had been said in so many words, that if they paid him a larger price, it was to be expected that a certain portion of the purchase-money was to return to their own hands. Still he could not move; and it seemed to him that he could not speak.

“Ring that bell, Mr. Rogers,” said the Englishman who had last spoken, glancing at the annunciator button in the wall near Rogers’s head, “and ‘ave up something ‘of, can’t you? I should like TO wet me w’istle, as you say ‘ere, and Colonel Lapham seems to find it rather dry work.”

Lapham jumped to his feet, and buttoned his overcoat about him. He remembered with terror the dinner at Corey’s where he had disgraced and betrayed himself, and if he went into this thing at all, he was going into it sober. “I can’t stop,” he said, “I must be going.”

“But you haven’t given us an answer yet, Mr. Lapham,” said the first Englishman with a successful show of dignified surprise.

“The only answer I can give you now is, NO,” said Lapham. “If you want another, you must let me have time to think it over.”

“But ‘ow much time?” said the other Englishman. “We’re pressed for time ourselves, and we hoped for an answer— ‘oped for a hanswer,” he corrected himself, “at once. That was our understandin’ with Mr. Rogers.”

“I can’t let you know till morning, anyway,” said Lapham, and he went out, as his custom often was, without any parting salutation. He thought Rogers might try to detain him; but Rogers had remained seated when the others got to their feet, and paid no attention to his departure.

He walked out into the night air, every pulse throbbing with the strong temptation. He knew very well those men would wait, and gladly wait, till the morning, and that the whole affair was in his hands. It made him groan in spirit to think that it was. If he had hoped that some chance might take the decision from him, there was no such chance, in the present or future, that he could see. It was for him alone to commit this rascality — if it was a rascality — or not.

He walked all the way home, letting one car after another pass him on the street, now so empty of other passing, and it was almost eleven o’clock when he reached home. A carriage stood before his house, and when he let himself in with his key, he heard talking in the family-room. It came into his head that Irene had got back unexpectedly, and that the sight of her was somehow going to make it harder for him; then he thought it might be Corey, come upon some desperate pretext to see Penelope; but when he opened the door he saw, with a certain absence of surprise, that it was Rogers. He was standing with his back to the fireplace, talking to Mrs. Lapham, and he had been shedding tears; dry tears they seemed, and they had left a sort of sandy, glistening trace on his cheeks. Apparently he was not ashamed of them, for the expression with which he met Lapham was that of a man making a desperate appeal in his own cause, which was identical with that of humanity, if not that of justice.

“I some expected,” began Rogers, “to find you here — —”

“No, you didn’t,” interrupted Lapham; “you wanted to come here and make a poor mouth to Mrs. Lapham before I got home.”

“I knew that Mrs. Lapham would know what was going on,” said Rogers more candidly, but not more virtuously, for that he could not, “and I wished her to understand a point that I hadn’t put to you at the hotel, and that I want you should consider. And I want you should consider me a little in this business too; you’re not the only one that’s concerned, I tell you, and I’ve been telling Mrs. Lapham that it’s my one chance; that if you don’t meet me on it, my wife and children will be reduced to beggary.”

“So will mine,” said Lapham, “or the next thing to it.”

“Well, then, I want you to give me this chance to get on my feet again. You’ve no right to deprive me of it; it’s unchristian. In our dealings with each other we should be guided by the Golden Rule, as I was saying to Mrs. Lapham before you came in. I told her that if I knew myself, I should in your place consider the circumstances of a man in mine, who had honourably endeavoured to discharge his obligations to me, and had patiently borne my undeserved suspicions. I should consider that man’s family, I told Mrs. Lapham.”

“Did you tell her that if I went in with you and those fellows, I should be robbing the people who trusted them?”

“I don’t see what you’ve got to do with the people that sent them here. They are rich people, and could bear it if it came to the worst. But there’s no likelihood, now, that it will come to the worst; you can see yourself that the Road has changed its mind about buying. And here am I without a cent in the world; and my wife is an invalid. She needs comforts, she needs little luxuries, and she hasn’t even the necessaries; and you want to sacrifice her to a mere idea! You don’t know in the first place that the Road will ever want to buy; and if it does, the probability is that with a colony like that planted on its line, it would make very different terms from what it would with you or me. These agents are not afraid, and their principals are rich people; and if there was any loss, it would be divided up amongst them so that they wouldn’t any of them feel it.”

Lapham stole a troubled glance at his wife, and saw that there was no help in her. Whether she was daunted and confused in her own conscience by the outcome, so evil and disastrous, of the reparation to Rogers which she had forced her husband to make, or whether her perceptions had been blunted and darkened by the appeals which Rogers had now used, it would be difficult to say. Probably there was a mixture of both causes in the effect which her husband felt in her, and from which he turned, girding himself anew, to Rogers.

“I have no wish to recur to the past,” continued Rogers, with growing superiority. “You have shown a proper spirit in regard to that, and you have done what you could to wipe it out.”

“I should think I had,” said Lapham. “I’ve used up about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars trying.”

“Some of my enterprises,” Rogers admitted, “have been unfortunate, seemingly; but I have hopes that they will yet turn out well — in time. I can’t understand why you should be so mindful of others now, when you showed so little regard for me then. I had come to your aid at a time when you needed help, and when you got on your feet you kicked me out of the business. I don’t complain, but that is the fact; and I had to begin again, after I had supposed myself settled in life, and establish myself elsewhere.”

Lapham glanced again at his wife; her head had fallen; he could see that she was so rooted in her old remorse for that questionable act of his, amply and more than fully atoned for since, that she was helpless, now in the crucial moment, when he had the utmost need of her insight. He had counted upon her; he perceived now that when he had thought it was for him alone to decide, he had counted upon her just spirit to stay his own in its struggle to be just. He had not forgotten how she held out against him only a little while ago, when he asked her whether he might not rightfully sell in some such contingency as this; and it was not now that she said or even looked anything in favour of Rogers, but that she was silent against him, which dismayed Lapham. He swallowed the lump that rose in his throat, the self-pity, the pity for her, the despair, and said gently, “I guess you better go to bed, Persis. It’s pretty late.”

She turned towards the door, when Rogers said, with the obvious intention of detaining her through her curiosity —

“But I let that pass. And I don’t ask now that you should sell to these men.”

Mrs. Lapham paused, irresolute.

“What are you making this bother for, then?” demanded Lapham. “What DO you want?”

“What I’ve been telling your wife here. I want you should sell to me. I don’t say what I’m going to do with the property, and you will not have an iota of responsibility, whatever happens.”

Lapham was staggered, and he saw his wife’s face light up with eager question.

“I want that property,” continued Rogers, “and I’ve got the money to buy it. What will you take for it? If it’s the price you’re standing out for — —”

“Persis,” said Lapham, “go to bed,” and he gave her a look that meant obedience for her. She went out of the door, and left him with his tempter.

“If you think I’m going to help you whip the devil round the stump, you’re mistaken in your man, Milton Rogers,” said Lapham, lighting a cigar. “As soon as I sold to you, you would sell to that other pair of rascals. I smelt ’em out in half a minute.”

“They are Christian gentlemen,” said Rogers. “But I don’t purpose defending them; and I don’t purpose telling you what I shall or shall not do with the property when it is in my hands again. The question is, Will you sell, and, if so, what is your figure? You have got nothing whatever to do with it after you’ve sold.”

It was perfectly true. Any lawyer would have told him the same. He could not help admiring Rogers for his ingenuity, and every selfish interest of his nature joined with many obvious duties to urge him to consent. He did not see why he should refuse. There was no longer a reason. He was standing out alone for nothing, any one else would say. He smoked on as if Rogers were not there, and Rogers remained before the fire as patient as the clock ticking behind his head on the mantel, and showing the gleam of its pendulum beyond his face on either side. But at last he said, “Well?”

“Well,” answered Lapham, “you can’t expect me to give you an answer to-night, any more than before. You know that what you’ve said now hasn’t changed the thing a bit. I wish it had. The Lord knows, I want to be rid of the property fast enough.”

“Then why don’t you sell to me? Can’t you see that you will not be responsible for what happens after you have sold?”

“No, I can’t see that; but if I can by morning, I’ll sell.”

“Why do you expect to know any better by morning? You’re wasting time for nothing!” cried Rogers, in his disappointment. “Why are you so particular? When you drove me out of the business you were not so very particular.”

Lapham winced. It was certainly ridiculous for man who had once so selfishly consulted his own interests to be stickling now about the rights of others.

“I guess nothing’s going to happen overnight,” he answered sullenly. “Anyway, I shan’t say what I shall do till morning.”

“What time can I see you in the morning?”

“Half-past nine.”

Rogers buttoned his coat, and went out of the room without another word. Lapham followed him to close the street-door after him.

His wife called down to him from above as he approached the room again, “Well?”

“I’ve told him I’d let him know in the morning.”

“Want I should come down and talk with you?”

“No,” answered Lapham, in the proud bitterness which his isolation brought, “you couldn’t do any good.” He went in and shut the door, and by and by his wife heard him begin walking up and down; and then the rest of the night she lay awake and listened to him walking up and down. But when the first light whitened the window, the words of the Scripture came into her mind: “And there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day.... And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”

She could not ask him anything when they met, but he raised his dull eyes after the first silence, and said, “I don’t know what I’m going to say to Rogers.”

She could not speak; she did not know what to say, and she saw her husband when she followed him with her eyes from the window, drag heavily down toward the corner, where he was to take, the horse-car.

He arrived rather later than usual at his office, and he found his letters already on his table. There was one, long and official-looking, with a printed letter-heading on the outside, and Lapham had no need to open it in order to know that it was the offer of the Great Lacustrine & Polar Railroad for his mills. But he went mechanically through the verification of his prophetic fear, which was also his sole hope, and then sat looking blankly at it.

Rogers came promptly at the appointed time, and Lapham handed him the letter. He must have taken it all in at a glance, and seen the impossibility of negotiating any further now, even with victims so pliant and willing as those Englishmen.

“You’ve ruined me!” Rogers broke out. “I haven’t a cent left in the world! God help my poor wife!”

He went out, and Lapham remained staring at the door which closed upon him. This was his reward for standing firm for right and justice to his own destruction: to feel like a thief and a murderer.

XXVI.

LATER in the forenoon came the despatch from the West Virginians in New York, saying their brother assented to their agreement; and it now remained for Lapham to fulfil his part of it. He was ludicrously far from able to do this; and unless he could get some extension of time from them, he must lose this chance, his only chance, to retrieve himself. He spent the time in a desperate endeavour to raise the money, but he had not raised the half of it when the banks closed. With shame in his heart he went to Bellingham, from whom he had parted so haughtily, and laid his plan before him. He could not bring himself to ask Bellingham’s help, but he told him what he proposed to do. Bellingham pointed out that the whole thing was an experiment, and that the price asked was enormous, unless a great success were morally certain. He advised delay, he advised prudence; he insisted that Lapham ought at least to go out to Kanawha Falls, and see the mines and works before he put any such sum into the development of the enterprise.

“That’s all well enough,” cried Lapham; “but if I don’t clinch this offer within twenty-four hours, they’ll withdraw it, and go into the market; and then where am I?”

“Go on and see them again,” said Bellingham. “They can’t be so peremptory as that with you. They must give you time to look at what they want to sell. If it turns out what you hope, then — I’ll see what can be done. But look into it thoroughly.”

“Well!” cried Lapham, helplessly submitting. He took out his watch, and saw that he had forty minutes to catch the four o’clock train. He hurried back to his office, and put together some papers preparatory to going, and despatched a note by his boy to Mrs. Lapham saying that he was starting for New York, and did not know just when he should get back.

The early spring day was raw and cold. As he went out through the office he saw the clerks at work with their street-coats and hats on; Miss Dewey had her jacket dragged up on her shoulders, and looked particularly comfortless as she operated her machine with her red fingers. “What’s up?” asked Lapham, stopping a moment.

“Seems to be something the matter with the steam,” she answered, with the air of unmerited wrong habitual with so many pretty women who have to work for a living.

“Well, take your writer into my room. There’s a fire in the stove there,” said Lapham, passing out.

Half an hour later his wife came into the outer office. She had passed the day in a passion of self-reproach, gradually mounting from the mental numbness in which he had left her, and now she could wait no longer to tell him that she saw how she had forsaken him in his hour of trial and left him to bear it alone. She wondered at herself in shame and dismay; she wondered that she could have been so confused as to the real point by that old wretch of a Rogers, that she could have let him hoodwink her so, even for a moment. It astounded her that such a thing should have happened, for if there was any virtue upon which this good woman prided herself, in which she thought herself superior to her husband, it was her instant and steadfast perception of right and wrong, and the ability to choose the right to her own hurt. But she had now to confess, as each of us has had likewise to confess in his own case, that the very virtue on which she had prided herself was the thing that had played her false; that she had kept her mind so long upon that old wrong which she believed her husband had done this man that she could not detach it, but clung to the thought of reparation for it when she ought to have seen that he was proposing a piece of roguery as the means. The suffering which Lapham must inflict on him if he decided against him had been more to her apprehension than the harm he might do if he decided for him. But now she owned her limitations to herself, and above everything in the world she wished the man whom her conscience had roused and driven on whither her intelligence had not followed, to do right, to do what he felt to be right, and nothing else. She admired and revered him for going beyond her, and she wished to tell him that she did not know what he had determined to do about Rogers, but that she knew it was right, and would gladly abide the consequences with him, whatever they were.

She had not been near his place of business for nearly a year, and her heart smote her tenderly as she looked about her there, and thought of the early days when she knew as much about the paint as he did; she wished that those days were back again. She saw Corey at his desk, and she could not bear to speak to him; she dropped her veil that she need not recognise him, and pushed on to Lapham’s room, and opening the door without knocking, shut it behind her.

Then she became aware with intolerable disappointment that her husband was not there. Instead, a very pretty girl sat at his desk, operating a typewriter. She seemed quite at home, and she paid Mrs. Lapham the scant attention which such young women often bestow upon people not personally interesting to them. It vexed the wife that any one else should seem to be helping her husband about business that she had once been so intimate with; and she did not at all like the girl’s indifference to her presence. Her hat and sack hung on a nail in one corner, and Lapham’s office coat, looking intensely like him to his wife’s familiar eye, hung on a nail in the other corner; and Mrs. Lapham liked even less than the girl’s good looks this domestication of her garments in her husband’s office. She began to ask herself excitedly why he should be away from his office when she happened to come; and she had not the strength at the moment to reason herself out of her unreasonableness.

“When will Colonel Lapham be in, do you suppose?” she sharply asked of the girl.

“I couldn’t say exactly,” replied the girl, without looking round.

“Has he been out long?”

“I don’t know as I noticed,” said the girl, looking up at the clock, without looking at Mrs. Lapham. She went on working her machine.

“Well, I can’t wait any longer,” said the wife abruptly. “When Colonel Lapham comes in, you please tell him Mrs. Lapham wants to see him.”

The girl started to her feet and turned toward Mrs. Lapham with a red and startled face, which she did not lift to confront her. “Yes — yes — I will,” she faltered.

The wife went home with a sense of defeat mixed with an irritation about this girl which she could not quell or account for. She found her husband’s message, and it seemed intolerable that he should have gone to New York without seeing her; she asked herself in vain what the mysterious business could be that took him away so suddenly. She said to herself that he was neglecting her; he was leaving her out a little too much; and in demanding of herself why he had never mentioned that girl there in his office, she forgot how much she had left herself out of his business life. That was another curse of their prosperity. Well, she was glad the prosperity was going; it had never been happiness. After this she was going to know everything as she used.

She tried to dismiss the whole matter till Lapham returned; and if there had been anything for her to do in that miserable house, as she called it in her thought, she might have succeeded. But again the curse was on her; there was nothing to do; and the looks of that girl kept coming back to her vacancy, her disoccupation. She tried to make herself something to do, but that beauty, which she had not liked, followed her amid the work of overhauling the summer clothing, which Irene had seen to putting away in the fall. Who was the thing, anyway? It was very strange, her being there; why did she jump up in that frightened way when Mrs. Lapham had named herself?

After dark, that evening, when the question had worn away its poignancy from mere iteration, a note for Mrs. Lapham was left at the door by a messenger who said there was no answer. “A note for me?” she said, staring at the unknown, and somehow artificial-looking, handwriting of the superscription. Then she opened it and read: “Ask your husband about his lady copying-clerk. A Friend and Well-wisher,” who signed the note, gave no other name.

Mrs. Lapham sat helpless with it in her hand. Her brain reeled; she tried to fight the madness off; but before Lapham came back the second morning, it had become, with lessening intervals of sanity and release, a demoniacal possession. She passed the night without sleep, without rest, in the frenzy of the cruellest of the passions, which covers with shame the unhappy soul it possesses, and murderously lusts for the misery of its object. If she had known where to find her husband in New York, she would have followed him; she waited his return in an ecstasy of impatience. In the morning he came back, looking spent and haggard. She saw him drive up to the door, and she ran to let him in herself.

“Who is that girl you’ve got in your office, Silas Lapham?” she demanded, when her husband entered.

“Girl in my office?”

“Yes! Who is she? What is she doing there?”

“Why, what have you heard about her?”

“Never you mind what I’ve heard. Who is she? IS IT MRS. M. THAT YOU GAVE THAT MONEY TO? I want to know who she is! I want to know what a respectable man, with grown-up girls of his own, is doing with such a looking thing as that in his office? I want to know how long she’s been there? I want to know what she’s there at all for?”

He had mechanically pushed her before him into the long, darkened parlour, and he shut himself in there with her now, to keep the household from hearing her lifted voice. For a while he stood bewildered, and could not have answered if he would, and then he would not. He merely asked, “Have I ever accused you of anything wrong, Persis?”

“You no need to!” she answered furiously, placing herself against the closed door.

“Did you ever know me to do anything out of the way?”

“That isn’t what I asked you.”

“Well, I guess you may find out about that girl yourself. Get away from the door.”

“I won’t get away from the door.”

She felt herself set lightly aside, and her husband opened the door and went out. “I WILL find out about her,” she screamed after him. “I’ll find out, and I’ll disgrace you. I’ll teach you how to treat me — —”

The air blackened round her: she reeled to the sofa and then she found herself waking from a faint. She did not know how long she had lain there, she did not care. In a moment her madness came whirling back upon her. She rushed up to his room; it was empty; the closet-doors stood ajar and the drawers were open; he must have packed a bag hastily and fled. She went out and wandered crazily up and down till she found a hack. She gave the driver her husband’s business address, and told him to drive there as fast as he could; and three times she lowered the window to put her head out and ask him if he could not hurry. A thousand things thronged into her mind to support her in her evil will. She remembered how glad and proud that man had been to marry her, and how everybody said she was marrying beneath her when she took him. She remembered how good she had always been to him, how perfectly devoted, slaving early and late to advance him, and looking out for his interests in all things, and sparing herself in nothing. If it had not been for her, he might have been driving stage yet; and since their troubles had begun, the troubles which his own folly and imprudence had brought on them, her conduct had been that of a true and faithful wife. Was HE the sort of man to be allowed to play her false with impunity? She set her teeth and drew her breath sharply through them when she thought how willingly she had let him befool her, and delude her about that memorandum of payments to Mrs. M., because she loved him so much, and pitied him for his cares and anxieties. She recalled his confusion, his guilty looks.

She plunged out of the carriage so hastily when she reached the office that she did not think of paying the driver; and he had to call after her when she had got half-way up the stairs. Then she went straight to Lapham’s room, with outrage in her heart. There was again no one there but that type-writer girl; she jumped to her feet in a fright, as Mrs. Lapham dashed the door to behind her and flung up her veil.

The two women confronted each other.

“Why, the good land!” cried Mrs. Lapham, “ain’t you Zerrilla Millon?”

“I — I’m married,” faltered the girl “My name’s Dewey, now.”

“You’re Jim Millon’s daughter, anyway. How long have you been here?”

“I haven’t been here regularly; I’ve been here off and on ever since last May.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She’s here — in Boston.”

Mrs. Lapham kept her eyes on the girl, but she dropped, trembling, into her husband’s chair, and a sort of amaze and curiosity were in her voice instead of the fury she had meant to put there.

“The Colonel,” continued Zerrilla, “he’s been helping us, and he’s got me a type-writer, so that I can help myself a little. Mother’s doing pretty well now; and when Hen isn’t around we can get along.”

“That your husband?”

“I never wanted to marry him; but he promised to try to get something to do on shore; and mother was all for it, because he had a little property then, and I thought may be I’d better. But it’s turned out just as I said and if he don’t stay away long enough this time to let me get the divorce, — he’s agreed to it, time and again, — I don’t know what we’re going to do.” Zerrilla’s voice fell, and the trouble which she could keep out of her face usually, when she was comfortably warmed and fed and prettily dressed, clouded it in the presence of a sympathetic listener. “I saw it was you, when you came in the other day,” she went on; “but you didn’t seem to know me. I suppose the Colonel’s told you that there’s a gentleman going to marry me — Mr. Wemmel’s his name — as soon as I get the divorce; but sometimes I’m completely discouraged; it don’t seem as if I ever could get it.”

Mrs. Lapham would not let her know that she was ignorant of the fact attributed to her knowledge. She remained listening to Zerrilla, and piecing out the whole history of her presence there from the facts of the past, and the traits of her husband’s character. One of the things she had always had to fight him about was that idea of his that he was bound to take care of Jim Millon’s worthless wife and her child because Millon had got the bullet that was meant for him. It was a perfect superstition of his; she could not beat it out of him; but she had made him promise the last time he had done anything for that woman that it should BE the last time. He had then got her a little house in one of the fishing ports, where she could take the sailors to board and wash for, and earn an honest living if she would keep straight. That was five or six years ago, and Mrs. Lapham had heard nothing of Mrs. Millon since; she had heard quite enough of her before; and had known her idle and baddish ever since she was the worst little girl at school in Lumberville, and all through her shameful girlhood, and the married days which she had made so miserable to the poor fellow who had given her his decent name and a chance to behave herself. Mrs. Lapham had no mercy on Moll Millon, and she had quarrelled often enough with her husband for befriending her. As for the child, if the mother would put Zerrilla out with some respectable family, that would be ONE thing; but as long as she kept Zerrilla with her, she was against letting her husband do anything for either of them. He had done ten times as much for them now as he had any need to, and she had made him give her his solemn word that he would do no more. She saw now that she was wrong to make him give it, and that he must have broken it again and again for the reason that he had given when she once scolded him for throwing away his money on that hussy —

“When I think of Jim Millon, I’ve got to; that’s all.”

She recalled now that whenever she had brought up the subject of Mrs. Millon and her daughter, he had seemed shy of it, and had dropped it with some guess that they were getting along now. She wondered that she had not thought at once of Mrs. Millon when she saw that memorandum about Mrs. M.; but the woman had passed so entirely out of her life, that she had never dreamt of her in connection with it. Her husband had deceived her, yet her heart was no longer hot against him, but rather tenderly grateful that his deceit was in this sort, and not in that other. All cruel and shameful doubt of him went out of it. She looked at this beautiful girl, who had blossomed out of her knowledge since she saw her last, and she knew that she was only a blossomed weed, of the same worthless root as her mother, and saved, if saved, from the same evil destiny, by the good of her father in her; but so far as the girl and her mother were concerned, Mrs. Lapham knew that her husband was to blame for nothing but his wilful, wrong-headed, kind-heartedness, which her own exactions had turned into deceit. She remained a while, questioning the girl quietly about herself and her mother, and then, with a better mind towards Zerrilla, at least, than she had ever had before, she rose up and went out. There must have been some outer hint of the exhaustion in which the subsidence of her excitement had left her within, for before she had reached the head of the stairs, Corey came towards her.

“Can I be of any use to you, Mrs. Lapham? The Colonel was here just before you came in, on his way to the train.”

“Yes, — yes. I didn’t know — I thought perhaps I could catch him here. But it don’t matter. I wish you would let some one go with me to get a carriage,” she begged feebly.

“I’ll go with you myself,” said the young fellow, ignoring the strangeness in her manner. He offered her his arm in the twilight of the staircase, and she was glad to put her trembling hand through it, and keep it there till he helped her into a hack which he found for her. He gave the driver her direction, and stood looking a little anxiously at her.

“I thank you; I am all right now,” she said, and he bade the man drive on.

When she reached home she went to bed, spent with the tumult of her emotions and sick with shame and self-reproach. She understood now, as clearly as if he had told her in as many words, that if he had befriended those worthless jades — the Millons characterised themselves so, even to Mrs. Lapham’s remorse — secretly and in defiance of her, it was because he dreaded her blame, which was so sharp and bitter, for what he could not help doing. It consoled her that he had defied her, deceived her; when he came back she should tell him that; and then it flashed upon her that she did not know where he was gone, or whether he would ever come again. If he never came, it would be no more than she deserved; but she sent for Penelope, and tried to give herself hopes of escape from this just penalty.

Lapham had not told his daughter where he was going; she had heard him packing his bag, and had offered to help him; but he had said he could do it best, and had gone off, as he usually did, without taking leave of any one.

“What were you talking about so loud, down in the parlour,” she asked her mother, “just before he came up. Is there any new trouble?”

“No; it was nothing.”

“I couldn’t tell. Once I thought you were laughing.” She went about, closing the curtains on account of her mother’s headache, and doing awkwardly and imperfectly the things that Irene would have done so skilfully for her comfort.

The day wore away to nightfall, and then Mrs. Lapham said she MUST know. Penelope said there was no one to ask; the clerks would all be gone home, and her mother said yes, there was Mr. Corey; they could send and ask him; he would know.

The girl hesitated. “Very well,” she said, then, scarcely above a whisper, and she presently laughed huskily. “Mr. Corey seems fated to come in, somewhere. I guess it’s a Providence, mother.”

She sent off a note, inquiring whether he could tell her just where her father had expected to be that night; and the answer came quickly back that Corey did not know, but would look up the book-keeper and inquire. This office brought him in person, an hour later, to tell Penelope that the Colonel was to be at Lapham that night and next day.

“He came in from New York, in a great hurry, and rushed off as soon as he could pack his bag,” Penelope explained, “and we hadn’t a chance to ask him where he was to be to-night. And mother wasn’t very well, and — —”

“I thought she wasn’t looking well when she was at the office to-day. And so I thought I would come rather than send,” Corey explained in his turn.

“Oh, thank you!”

“If there is anything I can do — telegraph Colonel Lapham, or anything?”

“Oh no, thank you; mother’s better now. She merely wanted to be sure where he was.”

He did not offer to go, upon this conclusion of his business, but hoped he was not keeping her from her mother. She thanked him once again, and said no, that her mother was much better since she had had a cup of tea; and then they looked at each other, and without any apparent exchange of intelligence he remained, and at eleven o’clock he was still there. He was honest in saying he did not know it was so late; but he made no pretence of being sorry, and she took the blame to herself.

“I oughtn’t to have let you stay,” she said. “But with father gone, and all that trouble hanging over us — —”

She was allowing him to hold her hand a moment at the door, to which she had followed him.

“I’m so glad you could let me!” he said, “and I want to ask you now when I may come again. But if you need me, you’ll — —”

A sharp pull at the door-bell outside made them start asunder, and at a sign from Penelope, who knew that the maids were abed by this time, he opened it.

“Why, Irene!” shrieked the girl.

Irene entered with the hackman, who had driven her unheard to the door, following with her small bags, and kissed her sister with resolute composure. “That’s all,” she said to the hackman. “I gave my checks to the expressman,” she explained to Penelope.

Corey stood helpless. Irene turned upon him, and gave him her hand. “How do you do, Mr. Corey?” she said, with a courage that sent a thrill of admiring gratitude through him. “Where’s mamma, Pen? Papa gone to bed?”

Penelope faltered out some reply embodying the facts, and Irene ran up the stairs to her mother’s room. Mrs. Lapham started up in bed at her apparition.

“Irene Lapham.”

“Uncle William thought he ought to tell me the trouble papa was in; and did you think I was going to stay off there junketing, while you were going through all this at home, and Pen acting so silly, too? You ought to have been ashamed to let me stay so long! I started just as soon as I could pack. Did you get my despatch? I telegraphed from Springfield. But it don’t matter, now. Here I am. And I don’t think I need have hurried on Pen’s account,” she added, with an accent prophetic of the sort of old maid she would become, if she happened not to marry.

“Did you see him?” asked her mother. “It’s the first time he’s been here since she told him he mustn’t come.”

“I guess it isn’t the last time, by the looks,” said Irene, and before she took off her bonnet she began to undo some of Penelope’s mistaken arrangements of the room.

At breakfast, where Corey and his mother met the next morning before his father and sisters came down, he told her, with embarrassment which told much more, that he wished now that she would go and call upon the Laphams.

Mrs. Corey turned a little pale, but shut her lips tight and mourned in silence whatever hopes she had lately permitted herself. She answered with Roman fortitude: “Of course, if there’s anything between you and Miss Lapham, your family ought to recognise it.”

“Yes,” said Corey.

“You were reluctant to have me call at first, but now if the affair is going on — —”

“It is! I hope — yes, it is!”

“Then I ought to go and see her, with your sisters; and she ought to come here and — we ought all to see her and make the matter public. We can’t do so too soon. It will seem as if we were ashamed if we don’t.”

“Yes, you are quite right, mother,” said the young man gratefully, “and I feel how kind and good you are. I have tried to consider you in this matter, though I don’t seem to have done so; I know what your rights are, and I wish with all my heart that I were meeting even your tastes perfectly. But I know you will like her when you come to know her. It’s been very hard for her every way — about her sister, — and she’s made a great sacrifice for me. She’s acted nobly.”

Mrs. Corey, whose thoughts cannot always be reported, said she was sure of it, and that all she desired was her son’s happiness.

“She’s been very unwilling to consider it an engagement on that account, and on account of Colonel Lapham’s difficulties. I should like to have you go, now, for that very reason. I don’t know just how serious the trouble is; but it isn’t a time when we can seem indifferent.”

The logic of this was not perhaps so apparent to the glasses of fifty as to the eyes of twenty-six; but Mrs. Corey, however she viewed it, could not allow herself to blench before the son whom she had taught that to want magnanimity was to be less than gentlemanly. She answered, with what composure she could, “I will take your sisters,” and then she made some natural inquiries about Lapham’s affairs. “Oh, I hope it will come out all right,” Corey said, with a lover’s vague smile, and left her. When his father came down, rubbing his long hands together, and looking aloof from all the cares of the practical world, in an artistic withdrawal, from which his eye ranged over the breakfast-table before he sat down, Mrs. Corey told him what she and their son had been saying.

He laughed, with a delicate impersonal appreciation of the predicament. “Well, Anna, you can’t say but if you ever were guilty of supposing yourself porcelain, this is a just punishment of your arrogance. Here you are bound by the very quality on which you’ve prided yourself to behave well to a bit of earthenware who is apparently in danger of losing the gilding that rendered her tolerable.”

“We never cared for the money,” said Mrs. Corey. “You know that.”

“No; and now we can’t seem to care for the loss of it. That would be still worse. Either horn of the dilemma gores us. Well, we still have the comfort we had in the beginning; we can’t help ourselves; and we should only make bad worse by trying. Unless we can look to Tom’s inamorata herself for help.”

Mrs. Corey shook her head so gloomily that her husband broke off with another laugh. But at the continued trouble of her face, he said, sympathetically: “My dear, I know it’s a very disagreeable affair; and I don’t think either of us has failed to see that it was so from the beginning. I have had my way of expressing my sense of it, and you yours, but we have always been of the same mind about it. We would both have preferred to have Tom marry in his own set; the Laphams are about the last set we could have wished him to marry into. They ARE uncultivated people, and so far as I have seen them, I’m not able to believe that poverty will improve them. Still, it may. Let us hope for the best, and let us behave as well as we know how. I’m sure YOU will behave well, and I shall try. I’m going with you to call on Miss Lapham. This is a thing that can’t be done by halves!”

He cut his orange in the Neapolitan manner, and ate it in quarters.

XXVII.

IRENE did not leave her mother in any illusion concerning her cousin Will and herself. She said they had all been as nice to her as they could be, and when Mrs. Lapham hinted at what had been in her thoughts, — or her hopes, rather, — Irene severely snubbed the notion. She said that he was as good as engaged to a girl out there, and that he had never dreamt of her. Her mother wondered at her severity; in these few months the girl had toughened and hardened; she had lost all her babyish dependence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and there she was sharpened to a cutting edge. It had been a life and death struggle with her; she had conquered, but she had also necessarily lost much. Perhaps what she had lost was not worth keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

She required from her mother a strict and accurate account of her father’s affairs, so far as Mrs Lapham knew them; and she showed a business-like quickness in comprehending them that Penelope had never pretended to. With her sister she ignored the past as completely as it was possible to do; and she treated both Corey and Penelope with the justice which their innocence of voluntary offence deserved. It was a difficult part, and she kept away from them as much as she could. She had been easily excused, on a plea of fatigue from her journey, when Mr. and Mrs. Corey had called the day after her arrival, and Mrs. Lapham being still unwell, Penelope received them alone.

The girl had instinctively judged best that they should know the worst at once, and she let them have the full brunt of the drawing-room, while she was screwing her courage up to come down and see them. She was afterwards — months afterwards — able to report to Corey that when she entered the room his father was sitting with his hat on his knees, a little tilted away from the Emancipation group, as if he expected the Lincoln to hit him, with that lifted hand of benediction; and that Mrs. Corey looked as if she were not sure but the Eagle pecked. But for the time being Penelope was as nearly crazed as might be by the complications of her position, and received her visitors with a piteous distraction which could not fail of touching Bromfield Corey’s Italianised sympatheticism. He was very polite and tender with her at first, and ended by making a joke with her, to which Penelope responded, in her sort. He said he hoped they parted friends, if not quite acquaintances; and she said she hoped they would be able to recognise each other if they ever met again.

“That is what I meant by her pertness,” said Mrs Corey, when they were driving away.

“Was it very pert?” he queried. “The child had to answer something.”

“I would much rather she had answered nothing, under the circumstances,” said Mrs. Corey. “However!” she added hopelessly. “Oh, she’s a merry little grig, you can see that, and there’s no harm in her. I can understand a little why a formal fellow like Tom should be taken with her. She hasn’t the least reverence, I suppose, and joked with the young man from the beginning. You must remember, Anna, that there was a time when you liked my joking.”

“It was a very different thing!”

“But that drawing-room,” pursued Corey; “really, I don’t see how Tom stands that. Anna, a terrible thought occurs to me! Fancy Tom being married in front of that group, with a floral horse-shoe in tuberoses coming down on either side of it!”

“Bromfield!” cried his wife, “you are unmerciful.”

“No, no, my dear,” he argued; “merely imaginative. And I can even imagine that little thing finding Tom just the least bit slow, at times, if it were not for his goodness. Tom is so kind that I’m convinced he sometimes feels your joke in his heart when his head isn’t quite clear about it. Well, we will not despond, my dear.”

“Your father seemed actually to like her,” Mrs. Corey reported to her daughters, very much shaken in her own prejudices by the fact. If the girl were not so offensive to his fastidiousness, there might be some hope that she was not so offensive as Mrs. Corey had thought. “I wonder how she will strike YOU,” she concluded, looking from one daughter to another, as if trying to decide which of them would like Penelope least.

Irene’s return and the visit of the Coreys formed a distraction for the Laphams in which their impending troubles seemed to hang further aloof; but it was only one of those reliefs which mark the course of adversity, and it was not one of the cheerful reliefs. At any other time, either incident would have been an anxiety and care for Mrs. Lapham which she would have found hard to bear; but now she almost welcomed them. At the end of three days Lapham returned, and his wife met him as if nothing unusual had marked their parting; she reserved her atonement for a fitter time; he would know now from the way she acted that she felt all right towards him. He took very little note of her manner, but met his family with an austere quiet that puzzled her, and a sort of pensive dignity that refined his rudeness to an effect that sometimes comes to such natures after long sickness, when the animal strength has been taxed and lowered. He sat silent with her at the table after their girls had left them alone, and seeing that he did not mean to speak, she began to explain why Irene had come home, and to praise her.

“Yes, she done right,” said Lapham. “It was time for her to come,” he added gently.

Then he was silent again, and his wife told him of Corey’s having been there, and of his father’s and mother’s calling. “I guess Pen’s concluded to make it up,” she said.

“Well, we’ll see about that,” said Lapham; and now she could no longer forbear to ask him about his affairs.

“I don’t know as I’ve got any right to know anything about it,” she said humbly, with remote allusion to her treatment of him. “But I can’t help wanting to know. How ARE things going, Si?”

“Bad,” he said, pushing his plate from him, and tilting himself back in his chair. “Or they ain’t going at all. They’ve stopped.”

“What do you mean, Si?” she persisted, tenderly.

“I’ve got to the end of my string. To-morrow I shall call a meeting of my creditors, and put myself in their hands. If there’s enough left to satisfy them, I’m satisfied.” His voice dropped in his throat; he swallowed once or twice, and then did not speak.

“Do you mean that it’s all over with you?” she asked fearfully.

He bowed his big head, wrinkled and grizzled; and after awhile he said, “It’s hard to realise it; but I guess there ain’t any doubt about it.” He drew a long breath, and then he explained to her about the West Virginia people, and how he had got an extension of the first time they had given him, and had got a man to go up to Lapham with him and look at the works, — a man that had turned up in New York, and wanted to put money in the business. His money would have enabled Lapham to close with the West Virginians. “The devil was in it, right straight along,” said Lapham. “All I had to do was to keep quiet about that other company. It was Rogers and his property right over again. He liked the look of things, and he wanted to go into the business, and he had the money — plenty; it would have saved me with those West Virginia folks. But I had to tell him how I stood. I had to tell him all about it, and what I wanted to do. He began to back water in a minute, and the next morning I saw that it was up with him. He’s gone back to New York. I’ve lost my last chance. Now all I’ve got to do is to save the pieces.”

“Will — will — everything go?” she asked.

“I can’t tell, yet. But they shall have a chance at everything — every dollar, every cent. I’m sorry for you, Persis — and the girls.”

“Oh, don’t talk of US!” She was trying to realise that the simple, rude soul to which her heart clove in her youth, but which she had put to such cruel proof, with her unsparing conscience and her unsparing tongue, had been equal to its ordeals, and had come out unscathed and unstained. He was able in his talk to make so little of them; he hardly seemed to see what they were; he was apparently not proud of them, and certainly not glad; if they were victories of any sort, he bore them with the patience of defeat. His wife wished to praise him, but she did not know how; so she offered him a little reproach, in which alone she touched the cause of her behaviour at parting. “Silas,” she asked, after a long gaze at him, “why didn’t you tell me you had Jim Millon’s girl there?”

“I didn’t suppose you’d like it, Persis,” he answered. “I did intend to tell you at first, but then I put — I put it off. I thought you’d come round some day, and find it out for yourself.”

“I’m punished,” said his wife, “for not taking enough interest in your business to even come near it. If we’re brought back to the day of small things, I guess it’s a lesson for me, Silas.”

“Oh, I don’t know about the lesson,” he said wearily.

That night she showed him the anonymous scrawl which had kindled her fury against him. He turned it listlessly over in his hand. “I guess I know who it’s from,” he said, giving it back to her, “and I guess you do too, Persis.”

“But how — how could he — —”

“Mebbe he believed it,” said Lapham, with patience that cut her more keenly than any reproach. “YOU did.”

Perhaps because the process of his ruin had been so gradual, perhaps because the excitement of preceding events had exhausted their capacity for emotion, the actual consummation of his bankruptcy brought a relief, a repose to Lapham and his family, rather than a fresh sensation of calamity. In the shadow of his disaster they returned to something like their old, united life; they were at least all together again; and it will be intelligible to those whom life has blessed with vicissitude, that Lapham should come home the evening after he had given up everything, to his creditors, and should sit down to his supper so cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and tell him that she thought from his looks they had concluded to pay him a hundred cents on every dollar he owed them.

As James Bellingham had taken so much interest in his troubles from the first, Lapham thought he ought to tell him, before taking the final step, just how things stood with him, and what he meant to do. Bellingham made some futile inquiries about his negotiations with the West Virginians, and Lapham told him they had come to nothing. He spoke of the New York man, and the chance that he might have sold out half his business to him. “But, of course, I had to let him know how it was about those fellows.”

“Of course,” said Bellingham, not seeing till afterwards the full significance of Lapham’s action.

Lapham said nothing about Rogers and the Englishmen. He believed that he had acted right in that matter, and he was satisfied; but he did not care to have Bellingham, or anybody, perhaps, think he had been a fool.

All those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved well, and even more than well, when it came to the worst. The prudence, the good sense, which he had shown in the first years of his success, and of which his great prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him; this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity. They gave him time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the old basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the competition of the West Virginia company. He saw himself that it was useless to try to go on in the old way, and he preferred to go back and begin the world anew where he had first begun it, in the hills at Lapham. He put the house at Nankeen Square, with everything else he had, into the payment of his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for the old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from that home of many years to the new house on the water side of Beacon. This thing and that is embittered to us, so that we may be willing to relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embittered to most of us, so that we are glad to have done with them at last; and this home was haunted with such memories to each of those who abandoned it that to go was less exile than escape. Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene’s room without seeing the girl there before her glass, tearing the poor little keep-sakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding-places to take them and fling them in passionate renunciation upon her sister; she could not come into the sitting-room, where her little ones had grown up, without starting at the thought of her husband sitting so many weary nights at his desk there, trying to fight his way back to hope out of the ruin into which he was slipping. When she remembered that night when Rogers came, she hated the place. Irene accepted her release from the house eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare for the family at Lapham. Penelope was always ashamed of her engagement there; it must seem better somewhere else and she was glad to go too. No one but Lapham in fact, felt the pang of parting in all its keenness. Whatever regret the others had was softened to them by the likeness of their flitting to many of those removals for the summer which they made in the late spring when they left Nankeen Square; they were going directly into the country instead of to the seaside first; but Lapham, who usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew all the difference. For his nerves there was no mechanical sense of coming back; this was as much the end of his proud, prosperous life as death itself could have been. He was returning to begin life anew, but he knew as well as he knew that he should not find his vanished youth in his native hills, that it could never again be the triumph that it had been. That was impossible, not only in his stiffened and weakened forces, but in the very nature of things. He was going back, by grace of the man whom he owed money, to make what he could out of the one chance which his successful rivals had left him.

In one phase his paint had held its own against bad times and ruinous competition, and it was with the hope of doing still more with the Persis Brand that he now set himself to work. The West Virginia people confessed that they could not produce those fine grades, and they willingly left the field to him. A strange, not ignoble friendliness existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their ill-will; and he recognised in them without enmity the necessity to which he had yielded. If he succeeded in his efforts to develop his paint in this direction, it must be for a long time on a small scale compared with his former business, which it could never equal, and he brought to them the flagging energies of an elderly man. He was more broken than he knew by his failure; it did not kill, as it often does, but it weakened the spring once so strong and elastic. He lapsed more and more into acquiescence with his changed condition, and that bragging note of his was rarely sounded. He worked faithfully enough in his enterprise, but sometimes he failed to seize occasions that in his younger days he would have turned to golden account. His wife saw in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for him.

One result of his friendly relations with the West Virginia people was that Corey went in with them, and the fact that he did so solely upon Lapham’s advice, and by means of his recommendation, was perhaps the Colonel’s proudest consolation. Corey knew the business thoroughly, and after half a year at Kanawha Falls and in the office at New York, he went out to Mexico and Central America, to see what could be done for them upon the ground which he had theoretically studied with Lapham.

Before he went he came up to Vermont, and urged Penelope to go with him. He was to be first in the city of Mexico, and if his mission was successful he was to be kept there and in South America several years, watching the new railroad enterprises and the development of mechanical agriculture and whatever other undertakings offered an opening for the introduction of the paint. They were all young men together, and Corey, who had put his money into the company, had a proprietary interest in the success which they were eager to achieve.

“There’s no more reason now and no less than ever there was,” mused Penelope, in counsel with her mother, “why I should say Yes, or why I should say No. Everything else changes, but this is just where it was a year ago. It don’t go backward, and it don’t go forward. Mother, I believe I shall take the bit in my teeth — if anybody will put it there!”

“It isn’t the same as it was,” suggested her mother. “You can see that Irene’s all over it.”

“That’s no credit to me,” said Penelope. “I ought to be just as much ashamed as ever.”

“You no need ever to be ashamed.”

“That’s true, too,” said the girl. “And I can sneak off to Mexico with a good conscience if I could make up my mind to it.” She laughed. “Well, if I could be SENTENCED to be married, or somebody would up and forbid the banns! I don’t know what to do about it.”

Her mother left her to carry her hesitation back to Corey, and she said now, they had better go all over it and try to reason it out. “And I hope that whatever I do, it won’t be for my own sake, but for — others!”

Corey said he was sure of that, and looked at her with eyes of patient tenderness.

“I don’t say it is wrong,” she proceeded, rather aimlessly, “but I can’t make it seem right. I don’t know whether I can make you understand, but the idea of being happy, when everybody else is so miserable, is more than I can endure. It makes me wretched.”

“Then perhaps that’s your share of the common suffering,” suggested Corey, smiling.

“Oh, you know it isn’t! You know it’s nothing. Oh! One of the reasons is what I told you once before, that as long as father is in trouble I can’t let you think of me. Now that he’s lost everything — ?” She bent her eyes inquiringly upon him, as if for the effect of this argument.

“I don’t think that’s a very good reason,” he answered seriously, but smiling still. “Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?”

“Why, I suppose I must,” she said, dropping her eyes.

“Then why shouldn’t I think all the more of you on account of your father’s loss? You didn’t suppose I cared for you because he was prosperous?”

There was a shade of reproach, ever so delicate and gentle, in his smiling question, which she felt.

“No, I couldn’t think such a thing of you. I — I don’t know what I meant. I meant that — —” She could not go on and say that she had felt herself more worthy of him because of her father’s money; it would not have been true; yet there was no other explanation. She stopped, and cast a helpless glance at him.

He came to her aid. “I understand why you shouldn’t wish me to suffer by your father’s misfortunes.”

“Yes, that was it; and there is too great a difference every way. We ought to look at that again. You mustn’t pretend that you don’t know it, for that wouldn’t be true. Your mother will never like me, and perhaps — perhaps I shall not like her.”

“Well,” said Corey, a little daunted, “you won’t have to marry my family.”

“Ah, that isn’t the point!”

“I know it,” he admitted. “I won’t pretend that I don’t see what you mean; but I’m sure that all the differences would disappear when you came to know my family better. I’m not afraid but you and my mother will like each other — she can’t help it!” he exclaimed, less judicially than he had hitherto spoken, and he went on to urge some points of doubtful tenability. “We have our ways, and you have yours; and while I don’t say but what you and my mother and sisters would be a little strange together at first, it would soon wear off, on both sides. There can’t be anything hopelessly different in you all, and if there were it wouldn’t be any difference to me.”

“Do you think it would be pleasant to have you on my side against your mother?”

“There won’t be any sides. Tell me just what it is you’re afraid of.”

“Afraid?”

“Thinking of, then.”

“I don’t know. It isn’t anything they say or do,” she explained, with her eyes intent on his. “It’s what they are. I couldn’t be natural with them, and if I can’t be natural with people, I’m disagreeable.”

“Can you be natural with me?”

“Oh, I’m not afraid of you. I never was. That was the trouble, from the beginning.”

“Well, then, that’s all that’s necessary. And it never was the least trouble to me!”

“It made me untrue to Irene.”

“You mustn’t say that! You were always true to her.”

“She cared for you first.”

“Well, but I never cared for her at all!” he besought her.

“She thought you did.”

“That was nobody’s fault, and I can’t let you make it yours. My dear — —”

“Wait. We must understand each other,” said Penelope, rising from her seat to prevent an advance he was making from his; “I want you to realise the whole affair. Should you want a girl who hadn’t a cent in the world, and felt different in your mother’s company, and had cheated and betrayed her own sister?”

“I want you!”

“Very well, then, you can’t have me. I should always despise myself. I ought to give you up for all these reasons. Yes, I must.” She looked at him intently, and there was a tentative quality in her affirmations.

“Is this your answer?” he said. “I must submit. If I asked too much of you, I was wrong. And — good-bye.”

He held out his hand, and she put hers in it. “You think I’m capricious and fickle!” she said. “I can’t help it — I don’t know myself. I can’t keep to one thing for half a day at a time. But it’s right for us to part — yes, it must be. It must be,” she repeated; “and I shall try to remember that. Good-bye! I will try to keep that in my mind, and you will too — you won’t care, very soon! I didn’t mean THAT — no; I know how true you are; but you will soon look at me differently; and see that even IF there hadn’t been this about Irene, I was not the one for you. You do think so, don’t you?” she pleaded, clinging to his hand. “I am not at all what they would like — your family; I felt that. I am little, and black, and homely, and they don’t understand my way of talking, and now that we’ve lost everything — No, I’m not fit. Good-bye. You’re quite right, not to have patience with me any longer. I’ve tried you enough. I ought to be willing to marry you against their wishes if you want me to, but I can’t make the sacrifice — I’m too selfish for that — —” All at once she flung herself on his breast. “I can’t even give you up! I shall never dare look any one in the face again. Go, go! But take me with you! I tried to do without you! I gave it a fair trial, and it was a dead failure. O poor Irene! How could she give you up?”

Corey went back to Boston immediately, and left Penelope, as he must, to tell her sister that they were to be married. She was spared from the first advance toward this by an accident or a misunderstanding. Irene came straight to her after Corey was gone, and demanded, “Penelope Lapham, have you been such a ninny as to send that man away on my account?”

Penelope recoiled from this terrible courage; she did not answer directly, and Irene went on, “Because if you did, I’ll thank you to bring him back again. I’m not going to have him thinking that I’m dying for a man that never cared for me. It’s insulting, and I’m not going to stand it. Now, you just send for him!”

“Oh, I will, ‘Rene,” gasped Penelope. And then she added, shamed out of her prevarication by Irene’s haughty magnanimity, “I have. That is — he’s coming back — —”

Irene looked at her a moment, and then, whatever thought was in her mind, said fiercely, “Well!” and left her to her dismay — her dismay and her relief, for they both knew that this was the last time they should ever speak of that again.

The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble, and the fact was received with so much misgiving for the past and future, that it brought Lapham none of the triumph in which he had once exulted at the thought of an alliance with the Coreys. Adversity had so far been his friend that it had taken from him all hope of the social success for which people crawl and truckle, and restored him, through failure and doubt and heartache, the manhood which his prosperity had so nearly stolen from him. Neither he nor his wife thought now that their daughter was marrying a Corey; they thought only that she was giving herself to the man who loved her, and their acquiescence was sobered still further by the presence of Irene. Their hearts were far more with her.

Again and again Mrs. Lapham said she did not see how she could go through it. “I can’t make it seem right,” she said.

“It IS right,” steadily answered the Colonel.

“Yes, I know. But it don’t SEEM so.”

It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope’s character which finally reconciled all her husband’s family and endeared her to them. These things continually happen in novels; and the Coreys, as they had always promised themselves to do, made the best, and not the worst of Tom’s marriage.

They were people who could value Lapham’s behaviour as Tom reported it to them. They were proud of him, and Bromfield Corey, who found a delicate, aesthetic pleasure in the heroism with which Lapham had withstood Rogers and his temptations — something finely dramatic and unconsciously effective, — wrote him a letter which would once have flattered the rough soul almost to ecstasy, though now he affected to slight it in showing it. “It’s all right if it makes it more comfortable for Pen,” he said to his wife.

But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between the Coreys and Tom Corey’s wife. “If he had only married the Colonel!” subtly suggested Nanny Corey.

There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both sides, when he brought her home before starting for Mexico, and her father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penelope’s way of talking, but it is questionable if even he found it so delightful as her husband did. Lily Corey made a little, ineffectual sketch of her, which she put by with other studies to finish up, sometime, and found her rather picturesque in some ways. Nanny got on with her better than the rest, and saw possibilities for her in the country to which she was going. “As she’s quite unformed, socially,” she explained to her mother, “there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she comes back she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but tortillas, whatever they are: something strange and foreign, even if it’s borrowed. I’m glad she’s going to Mexico. At that distance we can — correspond.”

Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they all got on very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom was.

There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their harmony with Penelope. Having resolved, from the beginning, to make the best of the worst, it might almost be said that they were supported and consoled in their good intentions by a higher power. This marriage had not, thanks to an over-ruling Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas upon Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far off in their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey was obliged to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene; they were not even called upon to make a social demonstration for Penelope at a time when, most people being still out of town, it would have been so easy; she and Tom had both begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and though none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week she spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with her. There were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her father, had glimpses of what Tom had called her humour, but it was perhaps too unlike their own to be easily recognisable.

Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to harmonise, I cannot say. She had much more of the harmonising to do, since they were four to one; but then she had gone through so much greater trials before. When the door of their carriage closed and it drove off with her and her husband to the station, she fetched a long sigh.

“What is it?” asked Corey, who ought to have known better.

“Oh, nothing. I don’t think I shall feel strange amongst the Mexicans now.”

He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little graver, and then he put his arm round her and drew her closer to him. This made her cry on his shoulder. “I only meant that I should have you all to myself.” There is no proof that she meant more, but it is certain that our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities. The price that we pay for civilisation is the fine yet impassable differentiation of these. Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favour that this is so. They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving, the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people’s departure left the Coreys is to be considered. That was the end of their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean or unamiable people.

He remained three years away. Some changes took place in that time. One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines and works at Lapham. The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt which he was still labouring under, and gave him an interest in the vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to grasp all in his own hand. He began to tell of this coincidence as something very striking; and pushing on more actively the special branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way, of its enormous extension. His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in common. Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind. Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!

For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just where the mistakes were — put his finger right on them. But one thing he could say: he had been no man’s enemy but his own; every dollar, every cent had gone to pay his debts; he had come out with clean hands. He said all this, and much more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sold out, when the minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way across from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain; Lapham had found them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.

There were times when Mrs. Lapham had as great pride in the clean-handedness with which Lapham had come out as he had himself, but her satisfaction was not so constant. At those times, knowing the temptations he had resisted, she thought him the noblest and grandest of men; but no woman could endure to live in the same house with a perfect hero, and there were other times when she reminded him that if he had kept his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had looked after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him, they would not be where they were now. He humbly admitted it all, and left her to think of Rogers herself. She did not fail to do so, and the thought did not fail to restore him to her tenderness again.

I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps they can trust their wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish. Sewell had laid before his wife the case of the Laphams after they came to consult with him about Corey’s proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be confirmed in his belief that he had advised them soundly; but he had not given her their names, and he had not known Corey’s himself. Now he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her without the veil of ignorance which she had hitherto assumed, for she declared that as soon as she heard of Corey’s engagement to Penelope, the whole thing had flashed upon her. “And that night at dinner I could have told the child that he was in love with her sister by the way he talked about her; I heard him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him herself, she would have known it too. I must say, I can’t help feeling a sort of contempt for her sister.”

“Oh, but you must not!” cried Sewell. “That is wrong, cruelly wrong. I’m sure that’s out of your novel-reading, my dear, and not out of your heart. Come! It grieves me to hear you say such a thing as that.”

“Oh, I dare say this pretty thing has got over it — how much character she has got! — and I suppose she’ll see somebody else.”

Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession. As a matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian who had come on to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen any one, and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would need a separate inquiry. It is certain that at the end of five years after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still unmarried. But she was even then still very young, and her life at Lapham had been varied by visits to the West. It had also been varied by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same spirit.

Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham presented under his changed conditions. The Colonel, who was more the Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay, kept him and Mrs. Sewell over night at his house; and he showed the minister minutely round the Works and drove him all over his farm. For this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt, after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries, but no luxuries unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so considered. The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying dividends again, — he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the present prevented this, — he should put in steam heat and naphtha-gas. He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three meetings. He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the matter.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble came from that. It was just like starting a row of bricks. I tried to catch up and stop ’em from going, but they all tumbled, one after another. It wa’n’t in the nature of things that they could be stopped till the last brick went. I don’t talk much with my wife, any more about it; but I should like to know how it strikes you.”

“We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world,” replied the minister, “but I’m more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatever. And in your own case, as I understand, you don’t admit — you don’t feel sure — that you ever actually did wrong this man — —”

“Well, no; I don’t. That is to say — —”

He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with that subtle kindness of his, “I should be inclined to think — nothing can be thrown quite away; and it can’t be that our sins only weaken us — that your fear of having possibly behaved selfishly toward this man kept you on your guard, and strengthened you when you were brought face to face with a greater” — he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham’s pride, and said— “emergency.”

“Do you think so?”

“I think that there may be truth in what I suggest.”

“Well, I don’t know what it was,” said Lapham; “all I know is that when it came to the point, although I could see that I’d got to go under unless I did it — that I couldn’t sell out to those Englishmen, and I couldn’t let that man put his money into my business without I told him just how things stood.”

INDIAN SUMMER

This novel was published in 1886, but was composed earlier, before the publication of Howells’s previous novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham. It was one of Howells’s favourite amongst his own books.

The story follows newspaper proprietor Theodore Colville, who decides to travel to Florence after becoming disillusioned with his profession. But an encounter with a face from the past sparks off forgotten memories of a love affair that ended many decades previously and Colville is soon caught in a complex love triangle.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

Boboli Gardens, Florence — one of the Florentine locations mentioned in the novel

I

Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break the lines of the little jewellers’ booths glittering on either hand, and open an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner of a shop and stared out upon the river. It was the late afternoon of a day in January, which had begun bright and warm, but had suffered a change of mood as its hours passed, and now, from a sky dimmed with flying grey clouds, was threatening rain. There must already have been rain in the mountains, for the yellow torrent that seethed and swirled around the piers of the bridge was swelling momently on the wall of the Lung’ Arno, and rolling a threatening flood toward the Cascine, where it lost itself under the ranks of the poplars that seemed to file across its course, and let their delicate tops melt into the pallor of the low horizon.

The city, with the sweep of the Lung’ Arno on either hand, and its domes and towers hung in the dull air, and the country with its white villas and black cypresses breaking the grey stretches of the olive orchards on its hill-sides, had alike been growing more and more insufferable; and Colville was finding a sort of vindictive satisfaction in the power to ignore the surrounding frippery of landscape and architecture. He isolated himself so perfectly from it, as he brooded upon the river, that, for any sensible difference, he might have been standing on the Main Street Bridge at Des Vaches, Indiana, looking down at the tawny sweep of the Wabash. He had no love for that stream, nor for the ambitious town on its banks, but ever since he woke that morning he had felt a growing conviction that he had been a great ass to leave them. He had, in fact, taken the prodigious risk of breaking his life sharp off from the course in which it had been set for many years, and of attempting to renew it in a direction from which it had long been diverted. Such an act could be precipitated only by a strong impulse of conscience or a profound disgust, and with Colville it sprang from disgust. He had experienced a bitter disappointment in the city to whose prosperity he had given the energies of his best years, and in whose favour he imagined that he had triumphantly established himself.

He had certainly made the Des Vaches Democrat-Republican a very good paper; its ability was recognised throughout the State, and in Des Vaches people of all parties were proud of it. They liked every morning to see what Colville said; they believed that in his way he was the smartest man in the State, and they were fond of claiming that there was no such writer on any of the Indianapolis papers. They forgave some political heresies to the talent they admired; they permitted him the whim of free trade, they laughed tolerantly when he came out in favour of civil service reform, and no one had much fault to find when the Democrat-Republican bolted the nomination of a certain politician of its party for Congress. But when Colville permitted his own name to be used by the opposing party, the people arose in their might and defeated him by a tremendous majority. That was what the regular nominee said. It was a withering rebuke to treason, in the opinion of this gentleman; it was a good joke, anyway, with the Democratic managers who had taken Colville up, being all in the Republican family; whichever it was, it was a mortification for Colville which his pride could not brook. He stood disgraced before the community not only as a theorist and unpractical doctrinaire, but as a dangerous man; and what was worse, he could not wholly acquit himself of a measure of bad faith; his conscience troubled him even more than his pride. Money was found, and a printer bought up with it to start a paper in opposition to the Democrat-Republican. Then Colville contemptuously offered to sell out to the Republican committee in charge of the new enterprise, and they accepted his terms.

In private life he found much of the old kindness returning to him; and his successful opponent took the first opportunity of heaping coals of fire on his head in the public street, when he appeared to the outer eye to be shaking hands with Colville. During the months that he remained to close up his affairs after the sale of his paper, the Post-Democrat-Republican (the newspaper had agglutinated the titles of two of its predecessors, after the fashion of American journals) was fulsome in its complimentary allusions to him. It politely invented the fiction that he was going to Europe for his health, impaired by his journalistic labours, and adventurously promised its readers that they might hope to hear from him from time to time in its columns. In some of its allusions to him Colville detected the point of a fine irony, of which he had himself introduced the practice in the Democrat-Republican; and he experienced, with a sense of personal impoverishment, the curious fact that a journalist of strong characteristics leaves the tradition of himself in such degree with the journal he has created that he seems to bring very little away. He was obliged to confess in his own heart that the paper was as good as ever. The assistants, who had trained themselves to write like him, seemed to be writing quite as well, and his honesty would not permit him to receive the consolation offered him by the friends who told him that there was a great falling off in the Post-Democrat-Republican. Except that it was rather more Stalwart in its Republicanism, and had turned quite round on the question of the tariff, it was very much what it had always been. It kept the old decency of tone which he had given it, and it maintained the literary character which he was proud of. The new management must have divined that its popularity, with the women at least, was largely due to its careful selections of verse and fiction, its literary news, and its full and piquant criticisms, with their long extracts from new books. It was some time since he had personally looked after this department, and the young fellow in charge of it under him had remained with the paper. Its continued excellence, which he could not have denied if he had wished, seemed to leave him drained and feeble, and it was partly from the sense of this that he declined the overtures, well backed up with money, to establish an independent paper in Des Vaches. He felt that there was not fight enough in him for the work, even if he had not taken that strong disgust for public life which included the place and its people. He wanted to get away, to get far away, and with the abrupt and total change in his humour he reverted to a period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition of Congress were things undreamed of.

At that period he was a very young architect, with an inclination toward the literary side of his profession, which made it seem profitable to linger, with his Ruskin in his hand, among the masterpieces of Italian Gothic, when perhaps he might have been better employed in designing red-roofed many-verandaed, consciously mullioned seaside cottages on the New England coast. He wrote a magazine paper on the zoology of the Lombardic pillars in Verona, very Ruskinian, very scornful of modern motive. He visited every part of the peninsula, but he gave the greater part of his time to North Italy, and in Venice he met the young girl whom he followed to Florence. His love did not prosper; when she went away she left him in possession of that treasure to a man of his temperament, a broken heart. From that time his vague dreams began to lift, and to let him live in the clear light of common day; but he was still lingering at Florence, ignorant of the good which had befallen him, and cowering within himself under the sting of wounded vanity, when he received a letter from his elder brother suggesting that he should come and see how he liked the architecture of Des Vaches. His brother had been seven years at Des Vaches, where he had lands, and a lead-mine, and a scheme for a railroad, and had lately added a daily newspaper to his other enterprises. He had, in fact, added two newspapers; for having unexpectedly and almost involuntarily become the owner of the Des Vaches Republican, the fancy of building up a great local journal seized him, and he bought the Wabash Valley Democrat, uniting them under the name of the Democrat-Republican. But he had trouble almost from the first with his editors, and he naturally thought of the brother with a turn for writing who had been running to waste for the last year or two in Europe. His real purpose was to work Colville into the management of his paper when he invited him to come out and look at the architecture of Des Vaches.

Colville went, because he was at that moment in the humour to go anywhere, and because his money was running low, and he must begin work somehow. He was still romantic enough to like the notion of the place a little, because it bore the name given to it by the old French voyageurs from a herd of buffalo cows which they had seen grazing on the site of their camp there; but when he came to the place itself he did not like it. He hated it; but he stayed, and as an architect was the last thing any one wanted in Des Vaches since the jail and court-house had been built, he became, half without his willing it, a newspaper man. He learned in time to relish the humorous intimacy of the life about him; and when it was decided that he was no fool — there were doubts, growing out of his Eastern accent and the work of his New York tailor, at first — he found himself the object of a pleasing popularity. In due time he bought his brother out; he became very fond of newspaper life, its constant excitements and its endless variety; and six weeks before he sold his paper he would have scoffed at a prophecy of his return to Europe for the resumption of any artistic purpose whatever. But here he was, lounging on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, whither he had come with the intention of rubbing up his former studies, and of perhaps getting back to put them in practice at New York ultimately. He had said to himself before coming abroad that he was in no hurry; that he should take it very easily — he had money enough for that; yet he would keep architecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in a community where every one was intensely occupied, and he unconsciously paid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an objectless life was disgraceful to a man.

In the meantime he suffered keenly and at every moment the loss of the occupation of which he had bereaved himself; in thinking of quite other things, in talk of totally different matters, from the dreams of night, he woke with a start to the realisation of the fact that he had no longer a newspaper. He perceived now, as never before, that for fifteen years almost every breath of his life had been drawn with reference to his paper, and that without it he was in some sort lost, and, as it were, extinct. A tide of ridiculous home-sickness, which was an expression of this passionate regret for the life he had put behind him, rather than any longing for Des Vaches, swept over him, and the first passages of a letter to the Post-Democrat-Republican began to shape themselves in his mind. He had always, when he left home for New York or Washington, or for his few weeks of summer vacation on the Canadian rivers or the New England coast, written back to his readers, in whom he knew he could count upon quick sympathy in all he saw and felt, and he now found himself addressing them with that frank familiarity which comes to the journalist, in minor communities, from the habit of print. He began by confessing to them the defeat of certain expectations with which he had returned to Florence, and told them that they must not look for anything like the ordinary letters of travel from him. But he was not so singular in his attitude toward the place as he supposed; for any tourist who comes to Florence with the old-fashioned expectation of impressions will probably suffer a disappointment, unless he arrives very young and for the first time. It is a city superficially so well known that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself; they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examined them before, and is disposed to be critical of them. Certain emotions, certain sensations failed to repeat themselves to Colville at sight of the familiar monuments, which seemed to wear a hardy and indifferent air, as if being stared at so many years by so many thousands of travellers had extinguished in them that sensibility which one likes to fancy in objects of interest everywhere.

The life which was as vivid all about him as if caught by the latest instantaneous process made the same comparatively ineffective appeal. The operatic spectacle was still there. The people, with their cloaks statuesquely draped over their left shoulders, moved down the street, or posed in vehement dialogue on the sidewalks; the drama of bargaining, with the customer’s scorn, the shopman’s pathos, came through the open shop door; the handsome, heavy-eyed ladies, the bare-headed girls, thronged the ways; the caffès were full of the well-remembered figures over their newspapers and little cups; the officers were as splendid as of old, with their long cigars in their mouths, their swords kicking against their beautiful legs, and their spurs jingling; the dandies, with their little dogs and their flower-like smiles, were still in front of the confectioners’ for the inspection of the ladies who passed; the old beggar still crouched over her scaldino at the church door, and the young man with one leg, whom he thought to escape by walking fast, had timed him to a second from the other side of the street. There was the wonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stench in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon the crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of the southern winter, gathering in the shade and dispersing in the sun, and denied everywhere by the profusion of fruit and flowers, and by the greenery of gardens showing through the grated portals and over the tops of high walls; the groups of idle poor, permanently or temporarily propped against the bases of edifices with a southern exposure; the priests and monks and nuns in their gliding passage; the impassioned snapping of the cabmen’s whips; the clangour of bells that at some hours inundated the city, and then suddenly subsided and left it to the banging of coppersmiths; the open-air frying of cakes, with its primitive smell of burning fat; the tramp of soldiery, and the fanfare of bugles blown to gay measures — these and a hundred other characteristic traits and facts still found a response in the consciousness where they were once a rapture of novelty; but the response was faint and thin; he could not warm over the old mood in which he once treasured them all away as of equal preciousness.

Of course there was a pleasure in recognising some details of former experience in Florence as they recurred. Colville had been met at once by a festa, when nothing could be done, and he was more than consoled by the caressing sympathy with which he was assured that his broken trunk could not be mended till the day after to-morrow; he had quite forgotten about the festas and the sympathy. That night the piazza on which he lodged seemed full of snow to the casual glance he gave it; then he saw that it was the white Italian moonlight, which he had also forgotten....

II

Colville had readied this point in that sarcastic study of his own condition of mind for the advantage of his late readers in the Post-Democrat-Republican, when he was aware of a polite rustling of draperies, with an ensuing well-bred murmur, which at once ignored him, deprecated intrusion upon him, and asserted a common right to the prospect on which he had been dwelling alone. He looked round with an instinctive expectation of style and poise, in which he was not disappointed. The lady, with a graceful lift of the head and a very erect carriage, almost Bernhardtesque in the backward fling of her shoulders and the strict compression of her elbows to her side, was pointing out the different bridges to the little girl who was with her.

“That first one is the Santa Trinità, and the next is the Carraja, and that one quite down by the Cascine is the iron bridge. The Cascine you remember — the park where we were driving — that clump of woods there — —”

A vagueness expressive of divided interest had crept into the lady’s tone rather than her words. Colville could feel that she was waiting for the right moment to turn her delicate head, sculpturesquely defined by its toque, and steal an imperceptible glance at him: and he involuntarily afforded her the coveted excuse by the slight noise he made in changing his position in order to be able to go away as soon as he had seen whether she was pretty or not. At forty-one the question is still important to every man with regard to every woman.

“Mr. Colville!”

The gentle surprise conveyed in the exclamation, without time for recognition, convinced Colville, upon a cool review of the facts, that the lady had known him before their eyes met.

“Why, Mrs. Bowen!” he said.

She put out her round, slender arm, and gave him a frank clasp of her gloved hand. The glove wrinkled richly up the sleeve of her dress half-way to her elbow. She bent on his face a demand for just what quality and degree of change he found in hers, and apparently she satisfied herself that his inspection was not to her disadvantage, for she smiled brightly, and devoted the rest of her glance to an electric summary of the facts of Colville’s physiognomy; the sufficiently good outline of his visage, with its full, rather close-cut, drabbish-brown beard and moustache, both shaped a little by the ironical self-conscious smile that lurked under them; the non-committal, rather weary-looking eyes; the brown hair, slightly frosted, that showed while he stood with his hat still off. He was a little above the middle height, and if it must be confessed, neither his face nor his figure had quite preserved their youthful lines. They were both much heavier than when Mrs. Bowen saw them last, and the latter here and there swayed beyond the strict bounds of symmetry. She was herself in that moment of life when, to the middle-aged observer, at least, a woman’s looks have a charm which is wanting to her earlier bloom. By that time her character has wrought itself more clearly out in her face, and her heart and mind confront you more directly there. It is the youth of her spirit which has come to the surface.

“I should have known you anywhere,” she exclaimed, with friendly pleasure in seeing him.

“You are very kind,” said Colville. “I didn’t know that I had preserved my youthful beauty to that degree. But I can imagine it — if you say so, Mrs. Bowen.”

“Oh, I assure you that you have!” she protested; and now she began gently to pursue him with one fine question after another about himself, till she had mastered the main facts of his history since they had last met. He would not have known so well how to possess himself of hers, even if he had felt the same necessity; but in fact it had happened that he had heard of her from time to time at not very long intervals. She had married a leading lawyer of her Western city, who in due time had gone to Congress, and after his term was out had “taken up his residence” in Washington, as the newspapers said, “in his elegant mansion at the corner of & Street and Idaho Avenue.” After that he remembered reading that Mrs. Bowen was going abroad for the education of her daughter, from which he made his own inferences concerning her marriage. And “You knew Mr. Bowen was no longer living?” she said, with fit obsequy of tone.

“Yes, I knew,” he answered, with decent sympathy.

“This is my little Effie,” said Mrs. Bowen after a moment; and now the child, hitherto keeping herself discreetly in the background, came forward and promptly gave her hand to Colville, who perceived that she was not so small as he had thought her at first; an effect of infancy had possibly been studied in the brevity of her skirts and the immaturity of her corsage, but both were in good taste, and really to the advantage of her young figure. There was reason and justice in her being dressed as she was, for she really was not so old as she looked by two or three years; and there was reason in Mrs. Bowen’s carrying in the hollow of her left arm the India shawl sacque she had taken off and hung there; the deep cherry silk lining gave life to the sombre tints prevailing in her dress, which its removal left free to express all the grace of her extremely lady-like person. Lady-like was the word for Mrs. Bowen throughout — for the turn of her head, the management of her arm from the elbow, the curve of her hand from wrist to finger-tips, the smile, subdued, but sufficiently sweet, playing about her little mouth, which was yet not too little, and the refined and indefinite perfume which exhaled from the ensemble of her silks, her laces, and her gloves, like an odorous version of that otherwise impalpable quality which women call style. She had, with all her flexibility, a certain charming stiffness, like the stiffness of a very tall feather.

“And have you been here a great while?” she asked, turning her head slowly toward Colville, and looking at him with a little difficulty she had in raising her eyelids; when she was younger the glance that shyly stole from under the covert of their lashes was like a gleam of sunshine, and it was still like a gleam of paler sunshine.

Colville, whose mood was very susceptible to the weather, brightened in the ray. “I only arrived last night,” he said, with a smile.

“How glad you must be to get back! Did you ever see Florence more beautiful than it was this morning?”

“Not for years,” said Colville, with another smile for her pretty enthusiasm. “Not for seventeen years at the least calculation.”

“Is it so many?” cried Mrs. Bowen, with lovely dismay. “Yes, it is,” she sighed, and she did not speak for an appreciable interval.

He knew that she was thinking of that old love affair of his, to which she was privy in some degree, though he never could tell how much; and when she spoke he perceived that she purposely avoided speaking of a certain person, whom a woman of more tact or of less would have insisted upon naming at once. “I never can believe in the lapse of time when I get back to Italy; it always makes me feel as young as when I left it last.”

“I could imagine you’d never left it,” said Colville.

Mrs. Bowen reflected a moment. “Is that a compliment?”

“I had an obscure intention of saying something fine; but I don’t think I’ve quite made it out,” he owned.

Mrs. Bowen gave her small, sweet smile. “It was very nice of you to try. But I haven’t really been away for some time; I’ve taken a house in Florence, and I’ve been here two years. Palazzo Pinti, Lung’ Arno della Zecca. You must come and see me. Thursdays from four till six.”

“Thank you,” said Colville.

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Bowen, remotely preparing to offer her hand in adieu, “that Effie and I broke in upon some very important cogitations of yours.” She shifted the silken burden off her arm a little, and the child stirred from the correct pose she had been keeping, and smiled politely.

“I don’t think they deserve a real dictionary word like that,” said Colville. “I was simply mooning. If there was anything definite in my mind, I was wishing that I was looking down on the Wabash in Dos Vaches, instead of the Arno in Florence.”

“Oh! And I supposed you must be indulging all sorts of historical associations with the place. Effie and I have been walking through the Via de’ Bardi, where Romola lived, and I was bringing her back over the Ponte Vecchio, so as to impress the origin of Florence on her mind.”

“Is that what makes Miss Effie hate it?” asked Colville, looking at the child, whose youthful resemblance to her mother was in all things so perfect that a fantastic question whether she could ever have had any other parent swept through him. Certainly, if Mrs. Bowen were to marry again, there was nothing in this child’s looks to suggest the idea of a predecessor to the second husband.

“Effie doesn’t hate any sort of useful knowledge,” said her mother half jestingly. “She’s just come to me from school at Vevay.”

“Oh, then, I think she might,” persisted Colville. “Don’t you hate the origin of Florence a little?” he asked of the child.

“I don’t know enough about it,” she answered, with a quick look of question at her mother, and checking herself in a possibly indiscreet smile.

“Ah, that accounts for it,” said Colville, and he laughed. It amused him to see the child referring even this point of propriety to her mother, and his thoughts idled off to what Mrs. Bowen’s own untrammelled girlhood must have been in her Western city. For her daughter there were to be no buggy rides, or concerts, or dances at the invitation of young men; no picnics, free and unchaperoned as the casing air; no sitting on the steps at dusk with callers who never dreamed of asking for her mother; no lingering at the gate with her youthful escort home from the ball — nothing of that wild, sweet liberty which once made American girlhood a long rapture. But would she be any the better for her privations, for referring not only every point of conduct, but every thought and feeling, to her mother? He suppressed a sigh for the inevitable change, but rejoiced that his own youth had fallen in the earlier time, and said, “You will hate it as soon as you’ve read a little of it.”

“The difficulty is to read a little of Florentine history. I can’t find anything in less than ten or twelve volumes,” said Mrs. Bowen. “Effie and I were going to Viesseux’s Library again, in desperation, to see if there wasn’t something shorter in French.”

She now offered Colville her hand, and he found himself very reluctant to let it go. Something in her looks did not forbid him, and when she took her hand away, he said, “Let me go to Viesseux’s with you, Mrs. Bowen, and give you the advantage of my unprejudiced ignorance in the choice of a book on Florence.”

“Oh, I was longing to ask you!” said Mrs. Bowen frankly. “It is really such a serious matter, especially when the book is for a young person. Unless it’s very dry, it’s so apt to be — objectionable.”

“Yes,” said Colville, with a smile at her perplexity. He moved off down the slope of the bridge with her, between the jewellers’ shops, and felt a singular satisfaction in her company. Women of fashion always interested him; he liked them; it diverted him that they should take themselves seriously. Their resolution, their suffering for their ideal, such as it was, their energy in dressing and adorning themselves, the pains they were at to achieve the trivialities they passed their lives in, were perpetually delightful to him. He often found them people of great simplicity, and sometimes of singularly good sense; their frequent vein of piety was delicious.

Ten minutes earlier he would have said that nothing could have been less welcome to him than this encounter, but now he felt unwilling to leave Mrs. Bowen.

“Go before, Effie,” she said; and she added, to Colville, “How very Florentine all this is! If you dropped from the clouds on this spot without previous warning, you would know that you were on the Ponte Vecchio, and nowhere else.”

“Yes, it’s very Florentine,” Colville assented. “The bridge is very well as a bridge, but as a street I prefer the Main Street Bridge at Des Vaches. I was looking at the jewellery before you came up, and I don’t think it’s pretty, even the old pieces of peasant jewellery. Why do people come here to look at it? If you were going to buy something for a friend, would you dream of coming here for it?”

“Oh no!” replied Mrs. Bowen, with the deepest feeling.

They quitted the bridge, and turning to the left, moved down the street which with difficulty finds space between the parapet of the river and the shops of the mosaicists and dealers in statuary cramping it on the other hand.

“Here’s something distinctively Florentine too,” said Colville. “These table-tops, and paper-weights, and caskets, and photograph frames, and lockets, and breast-pins; and here, this ghostly glare of undersized Psyches and Hebes and Graces in alabaster.”

“Oh, you mustn’t think of any of them!” Mrs. Bowen broke in with horror. “If your friend wishes you to get her something characteristically Florentine, and at the same time very tasteful, you must go—”

Colville gave a melancholy laugh. “My friend is an abstraction, Mrs. Bowen, without sex or any sort of entity.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Bowen. Some fine drops had begun to sprinkle the pavement. “What a ridiculous blunder! It’s raining! Effie, I’m afraid we must give up your book for to-day. We’re not dressed for damp weather, and we’d better hurry home as soon as possible.” She got promptly into the shelter of a doorway, and gathered her daughter to her, while she flung her sacque over her shoulder and caught her draperies from the ground for the next movement. “Mr. Colville, will you please stop the first closed carriage that comes in sight?”

A figure of primo tenore had witnessed the manoeuvre from the box of his cab; he held up his whip, and at a nod from Colville he drove abreast of the doorway, his broken-kneed, tremulous little horse gay in brass-mounted harness, and with a stiff turkey feather stuck upright at one ear in his head-stall.

Mrs. Bowen had no more scruple than another woman in stopping travel and traffic in a public street for her convenience. She now entered into a brisk parting conversation with Colville, such as ladies love, blocking the narrow sidewalk with herself, her daughter, and her open carriage door, and making people walk round her cab, in the road, which they did meekly enough, with the Florentine submissiveness to the pretensions of any sort of vehicle. She said a dozen important things that seemed to have just come into her head, and, “Why, how stupid I am!” she called out, making Colville check the driver in his first start, after she had got into the cab. “We are to have a few people tonight. If you have no engagement, I should be so glad to have you come. Can’t you?”

“Yes, I can,” said Colville, admiring the whole transaction and the parties to it with a passive smile.

After finding her pocket, she found that her card-case was not in it, but in the purse she had given Effie to carry; but she got her address at last, and gave it to Colville, though he said he should remember it without. “Any time between nine and eleven,” she said. “It’s so nice of you to promise!”

She questioned him from under her half-lifted eyelids, and he added, with a laugh, “I’ll come!” and was rewarded with two pretty smiles, just alike, from mother and daughter, as they drove away.

III

Twenty years earlier, when Mrs. Bowen was Miss Lina Ridgely, she used to be the friend and confidante of the girl who jilted Colville. They were then both so young that they could scarcely have been a year out of school before they left home for the year they were spending in Europe; but to the young man’s inexperience they seemed the wisest and maturest of society women. His heart quaked in his breast when he saw them talking and laughing together, for fear they should be talking and laughing about him; he was even a little more afraid of Miss Ridgely than of her friend, who was dashing and effective, where Miss Ridgely was serene and elegant, according to his feeling at that time; but he never saw her after his rejection, and it was not till he read of her marriage with the Hon. Mr. Bowen that certain vague impressions began to define themselves. He then remembered that Lina Ridgely in many fine little ways had shown a kindness, almost a compassion, for him, as for one whose unconsciousness a hopeless doom impended over. He perceived that she had always seemed to like him — a thing that had not occurred to him in the stupid absorption of his passion for the other — and fragments of proof that she had probably defended and advocated him occurred to him, and inspired a vain and retrospective gratitude; he abandoned himself to regrets, which were proper enough in regard to Miss Ridgely, but were certainly a little unlawful concerning Mrs. Bowen.

As he walked away toward his hotel he amused himself with the conjecture whether he, with his forty-one years and his hundred and eighty five pounds, were not still a pathetic and even a romantic figure to this pretty and kindly woman, who probably imagined him as heart-broken as ever. He was very willing to see more of her, if she wished; but with the rain beginning to fall more thick and chill in the darkening street, he could have postponed their next meeting till a pleasanter evening without great self-denial. He felt a little twinge of rheumatism in his shoulder when he got into his room, for your room in a Florentine hotel is always some degrees colder than outdoors, unless you have fire in it; and with the sun shining on his windows when he went out after lunch, it had seemed to Colville ridiculous to have his morning fire kept up. The sun was what he had taken the room for. It was in it, the landlord assured him, from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon; and so, in fact, it was, when it shone; but even then it was not fully in it, but had a trick of looking in at the sides of the window, and painting the chamber wall with a delusive glow. Colville raked away the ashes of his fire-place, and throwing on two or three fagots of broom and pine sprays, he had a blaze that would be very pretty to dress by after dinner, but that gave out no warmth for the present. He left it, and went down to the reading-room, as it was labelled over the door, in homage to a predominance of English-speaking people among the guests; but there was no fire there; that was kindled only by request, and he shivered at the bare aspect of the apartment, with its cold piano, its locked bookcases, and its table, where the London Times, the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna, and the Italie of Rome exposed their titles, one just beyond the margin of the other. He turned from the door and went into the dining-room, where the stove was ostentatiously roaring over its small logs and its lozenges of peat, But even here the fire had been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than actual. By stooping down before the stove, and pressing his shoulder against its brass doors, Colville managed to lull his enemy, while he studied the figures of the woman-headed, woman-breasted hounds developing into vines and foliage that covered the frescoed trellising of the quadrangularly vaulted ceiling. The waiters, in their veteran dress-coats, were putting the final touches to the table, and the sound of voices outside the door obliged Colville to get up. The effort involved made him still more reluctant about going out to Mrs. Bowen’s.

The door opened, and some English ladies entered, faintly acknowledging, provisionally ignoring, his presence, and talking of what they had been doing since lunch. They agreed that it was really too cold in the churches for any pleasure in the pictures, and that the Pitti Gallery, where they had those braziers, was the only place you could go with comfort. A French lady and her husband came in; a Russian lady followed; an Italian gentleman, an American family, and three or four detached men of the English-speaking race, whose language at once became the law of the table.

As the dinner progressed from soup to fish, and from the entrée to the roast and salad, the combined effect of the pleasant cheer and the increasing earnestness of the stove made the room warmer and warmer. They drank Chianti wine from the wicker-covered flasks, tied with tufts of red and green silk, in which they serve table wine at Florence, and said how pretty the bottles were, but how the wine did not seem very good.

“It certainly isn’t so good as it used to be,” said Colville.

“Ah, then you have been in Florhence before.” said the French lady, whose English proved to be much better than the French that he began to talk to her in.

“Yes, a great while ago; in a state of pre-existence, in fact,” he said.

The lady looked a little puzzled, but interested. “In a state of prhe-existence?” she repeated.

“Yes; when I was young,” he added, catching the gleam in her eye. “When I was twenty-four. A great while ago.”

“You must be an Amerhican,” said the lady, with a laugh.

“Why do you think so? From my accent?”

“Frhom your metaphysics too. The Amerhicans like to talk in that way.”

“I didn’t know it,” said Colville.

“They like to strhike the key of personality; they can’t endure not being interhested. They must rhelate everything to themselves or to those with whom they are talking.”

“And the French, no?” asked Colville.

The lady laughed again. “There is a large Amerhican colony in Parhis. Perhaps we have learned to be like you.”

The lady’s husband did not speak English, and it was probably what they had been saying that she interpreted to him, for he smiled, looking forward to catch Colville’s eye in a friendly way, and as if he would not have him take his wife’s talk too seriously.

The Italian gentleman on Colville’s right was politely offering him the salad, which had been left for the guests to pass to one another. Colville thanked him in Italian, and they began to talk of Italian affairs. One thing led to another, and he found that his new friend, who was not yet his acquaintance, was a member of Parliament, and a republican.

“That interests me as an American,” said Colville. “But why do you want a republic in Italy?”

“When we have a constitutional king, why should we have a king?” asked the Italian.

An Englishman across the table relieved Colville from the difficulty of answering this question by asking him another that formed talk about it between them. He made his tacit observation that the English, since he met them last, seemed to have grown in the grace of facile speech with strangers; it was the American family which kept its talk within itself, and hushed to a tone so low that no one else could hear it. Colville did not like their mumbling; for the honour of the country, which we all have at heart, however little we think it, he would have preferred that they should speak up, and not seem afraid or ashamed; he thought the English manner was better. In fact, he found himself in an unexpectedly social mood; he joined in helping to break the ice; he laughed and hazarded comment with those who were new-comers like himself, and was very respectful of the opinions of people who had been longer in the hotel, when they spoke of the cook’s habit of underdoing the vegetables. The dinner at the Hotel d’Atene made an imposing show on the carte du jour; it looked like ten or twelve courses, but in fact it was five, and even when eked out with roast chestnuts and butter into six, it seemed somehow to stop very abruptly, though one seemed to have had enough. You could have coffee afterward if you ordered it. Colville ordered it, and was sorry when the last of his commensals, slightly bowing him a good-night, left him alone to it.

He had decided that he need not fear the damp in a cab rapidly driven to Mrs. Bowen’s. When he went to his room he had his doubts about his dress-coat; but he put it on, and he took the crush hat with which he had provided himself in coming through London. That was a part of the social panoply unknown in Des Vaches; he had hardly been a dozen times in evening dress there in fifteen years, and his suit was as new as his hat. As he turned to the glass he thought himself personable enough, and in fact he was one of those men who look better in evening dress than in any other: the broad expanse of shirt bosom, with its three small studs of gold dropping, points of light, one below the other, softened his strong, almost harsh face, and balanced his rather large head. In his morning coat, people had to look twice at him to make sure that he did not look common; but now he was not wrong in thinking that he had an air of distinction, as he took his hat under his arm and stood before the pier-glass in his room. He was almost tempted to shave, and wear his moustache alone, as he used to do: he had let his beard grow because he found that under the lax social regimen at Des Vaches he neglected shaving, and went about days at a time with his face in an offensive stubble. Taking his chin between his fingers, and peering closer into the mirror, he wondered how Mrs. Bowen should have known him; she must have remembered him very vividly. He would like to take off his beard and put on the youthfulness that comes of shaving, and see what she would say. Perhaps, he thought, with a last glance at his toilet, he was overdoing it, if she were only to have a few people, as she promised. He put a thick neckerchief over his chest so as not to provoke that abominable rheumatism by any sort of exposure, and he put on his ulster instead of the light spring overcoat that he had gone about with all day.

He found that Palazzo Pinti, when you came to it, was rather a grand affair, with a gold-banded porter eating salad in the lodge at the great doorway, and a handsome gate of iron cutting you off from the regions above till you had rung the bell of Mrs. Bowen’s apartment, when it swung open of itself, and you mounted. At her door a man in modified livery received Colville, and helped him off with his overcoat so skilfully that he did not hurt his rheumatic shoulder at all; there were half a dozen other hats and coats on the carved chests that stood at intervals along the wall, and some gayer wraps that exhaled a faint, fascinating fragrance on the chilly air. Colville experienced the slight exhilaration, the mingled reluctance and eagerness, of a man who formally re-enters an assemblage of society after long absence from it, and rubbing his hands a little nervously together, he put aside the yellow Abruzzi blanket portière, and let himself into the brilliant interior.

Mrs. Bowen stood in front of the fire in a brown silk of subdued splendour, and with her hands and fan and handkerchief tastefully composed before her. At sight of Colville she gave a slight start, which would have betrayed to him, if he had been another woman, that she had not really believed he would come, and came forward with a rustle and murmur of pleasure to meet him; he had politely made a rush upon her, so as to spare her this exertion, and he was tempted to a long-forgotten foppishness of attitude as he stood talking with her during the brief interval before she introduced him to any of the company. She had been honest with him; there were not more than twenty-five or thirty people there; but if he had overdone it in dressing for so small an affair, he was not alone, and he was not sorry. He was sensible of a better personal effect than the men in frock-coats and cut-aways were making, and he perceived with self-satisfaction that his evening dress was of better style than that of the others who wore it; at least no one else carried a crush hat. —

At forty-one a man is still very much of a boy, and Colville was obscurely willing that Mrs. Bowen, whose life since they last met at an evening party had been passed chiefly at New York and Washington, should see that he was a man of the world in spite of Des Vaches. Before she had decided which of the company she should first present him to, her daughter came up to his elbow with a cup of tea and some bread and butter on a tray, and gave him good-evening with charming correctness of manner. “Really,” he said, turning about to take the cup, “I thought it was you, Mrs. Bowen, who had got round to my side with a sash on. How do you and Miss Effie justify yourselves in looking so bewitchingly alike?”

“You notice it, then?” Mrs. Bowen seemed delighted.

“I did every moment you were together to-day. You don’t mind my having been so personal in my observations?”

“Oh, not at all,” said Mrs. Bowen, and Colville laughed.

“It must be true,” he said, “what a French lady said to me at the table-d’hôte dinner to-night: ‘the Amerhicans always strhike the note of perhsonality.’” He neatly imitated the French lady’s guttural accent.

“I suppose we do,” mused Mis. Bowen, “and that we don’t mind it in each other. I wish you would say which I shall introduce you to,” she said, letting her glance stray invisibly over her company, where all the people seemed comfortably talking.

“Oh, there’s no hurry; put it off till to-morrow,” said Colville.

“Oh no; that won’t do,” said Mrs. Bowen, like a woman who has public duties to perform, and is resolute to sacrifice her private pleasure to them. But she postponed them a moment longer. “I hope you got home before the rain,” she said.

“Yes,” returned Colville. “That is, I don’t mind a little sprinkling. Who is the Junonian young person at the end of the room?”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Bowen, “you can’t be introduced to her first. But isn’t she lovely?”

“Yes. It’s a wonderful effect of white and gold.”

“You mustn’t say that to her. She was doubtful about her dress, because she says that the ivory white with her hair makes her look just like white and gold furniture.”

“Present me at once, then, before I forget not to say it to her.”

“No; I must keep you for some other person: anybody can talk to a pretty girl.”

Colville said he did not know whether to smile or shed tears at this embittered compliment, and pretended an eagerness for the acquaintance denied him.

Mrs. Bowen seemed disposed to intensify his misery. “Did you ever see a more statuesque creature — with those superb broad shoulders and that little head, and that thick braid brought round over the top? Doesn’t her face, with that calm look in those starry eyes, and that peculiar fall of the corners of the mouth, remind you of some of those exquisite great Du Maurier women? That style of face is very fashionable now: you might think he had made it so.”

“Is there a fashion in faces?” asked Colville.

“Why, certainly. You must know that.”

“Then why aren’t all the ladies in the fashion?”

“It isn’t one that can be put on. Besides, every one hasn’t got Imogene Graham’s figure to carry it off.”

“That’s her name, then — Imogene Graham. It’s a very pretty name.”

“Yes. She’s staying with me for the winter. Now that’s all I can allow you to know for the present. Come! You must!”

“But this is worse than nothing.” He made a feint of protesting as she led him away, and named him to the lady she wished him to know. But he was not really sorry; he had his modest misgivings whether he were equal to quite so much young lady as Miss Graham seemed. When he no longer looked at her he had a whimsical impression of her being a heroic statue of herself.

The lady whom Mrs. Bowen left him with had not much to say, and she made haste to introduce her husband, who had a great deal to say. He was an Italian, but master of that very efficient English which the Italians get together with unimaginable sufferings from our orthography, and Colville repeated the republican deputy’s saying about a constitutional king, which he had begun to think was neat.

“I might prefer a republic myself,” said the Italian, “but I think that gentleman is wrong to be a republican where he is, and for the present. The monarchy is the condition of our unity; nothing else could hold us together, and we must remain united if we are to exist as a nation. It’s a necessity, like our army of half a million men. We may not like it in itself, but we know that it is our salvation.” He began to speak of the economic state of Italy, of the immense cost of freedom and independence to a people whose political genius enables them to bear quietly burdens of taxation that no other government would venture to impose. He spoke with that fond, that appealing patriotism, which expresses so much to the sympathetic foreigner in Italy: the sense of great and painful uncertainty of Italy’s future through the complications of diplomacy, the memory of her sufferings in the past, the spirit of quiet and inexhaustible patience for trials to come. This resolution, which is almost resignation, poetises the attitude of the whole people; it made Colville feel as if he had done nothing and borne nothing yet.

“I am ashamed,” he said, not without a remote resentment of the unworthiness of the republican voters of Des Vaches, “when I hear of such things, to think of what we are at home, with all our resources and opportunities.”

The Italian would have politely excused us to him, but Colville would have no palliation of our political and moral nakedness; and he framed a continuation of the letter he began on the Ponte Vecchio to the Post-Democrat-Republican, in which he made a bitterly ironical comparison of the achievements of Italy and America in the last ten years.

He forgot about Miss Graham, and had only a vague sense of her splendour as he caught sight of her in the long mirror which she stood before. She was talking to a very handsome young clergyman, and smiling upon him. The company seemed to be mostly Americans, but there were a good many evident English also, and Colville was dimly aware of a question in his mind whether this clergyman was English or American. There were three or four Italians and there were some Germans, who spoke English.

Colville moved about from group to group as his enlarging acquaintance led, and found himself more interested in society than he could ever have dreamed of being again. It was certainly a defect of the life at Des Vaches that people, after the dancing and love-making period, went out rarely or never. He began to see that the time he had spent so busily in that enterprising city had certainly been in some sense wasted.

At a certain moment in the evening, which perhaps marked its advancement, the tea-urn was replaced by a jug of the rum punch, mild or strong according to the custom of the house, which is served at most Florentine receptions. Some of the people went immediately after, but the young clergyman remained talking with Miss Graham.

Colville, with his smoking glass in his hand, found himself at the side of a friendly old gentleman who had refused the punch. They joined in talk by a common impulse, and the old gentleman said, directly, “You are an American, I presume?”

His accent had already established the fact of his own nationality, but he seemed to think it the part of candour to say, when Colville had acknowledged his origin, “I’m an American myself.”

“I’ve met several of our countrymen since I arrived,” suggested Colville.

The old gentleman seemed to like this way of putting it. “Well, yes, we’re not unfairly represented here in numbers, I must confess. But I’m bound to say that I don’t find our countrymen so aggressive, so loud, as our international novelists would make out. I haven’t met any of their peculiar heroines as yet, sir.”

Colville could not help laughing. “I wish I had. But perhaps they avoid people of our years and discretion, or else take such a filial attitude toward us that we can’t recognise them.”

“Perhaps, perhaps,” cried the old gentleman, with cheerful assent.

“I was talking with one of our German friends here just now, and he complained that the American girls — especially the rich ones — seem very calculating and worldly and conventional. I told him I didn’t know how to account for that. I tried to give him some notion of the ennobling influences of society in Newport, as I’ve had glimpses of it.”

The old gentleman caressed his elbows, which he was holding in the palms of his hands, in high enjoyment of Colville’s sarcasm. “Ah! very good! very good!” he said. “I quite agree with you, and I think the other sort are altogether preferable.”

“I think,” continued Colville, dropping his ironical tone, “that we’ve much less to regret in their unsuspecting, unsophisticated freedom than in the type of hard materialism which we produce in young girls, perfectly wide awake, disenchanted, unromantic, who prefer the worldly vanities and advantages deliberately and on principle, recognising something better merely to despise it. I’ve sometimes seen them — —”

Mrs. Bowen came up in her gentle, inquiring way. “I’m glad that you and Mr. Colville have made acquaintance,” she said to the old gentleman.

“Oh, but we haven’t,” said Colville. “We’re entire strangers.”

“Then I’ll introduce you to Rev. Mr. Waters. And take you away,” she added, putting her hand through Colville’s arm with a delicate touch that flattered his whole being, “for your time’s come at last, and I’m going to present you to Miss Graham.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Of course, as there is a Miss Graham, I can’t help being presented to her, but I had almost worked myself up to the point of wishing there were none. I believe I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that at all. A simple schoolgirl like that!” Mrs. Bowen’s sense of humour had not the national acuteness. She liked joking in men, but she did not know how to say funny things back “You’ll see, as you come up to her.”

IV

Miss Graham did, indeed, somehow diminish in the nearer perspective. She ceased to be overwhelming. When Colville lifted his eyes from bowing before her he perceived that she — was neither so very tall nor so very large, but possessed merely a generous amplitude of womanhood. But she was even more beautiful, with a sweet and youthful radiance of look that was very winning. If she had ceased to be the goddess she looked across the length of the salon, she had gained much by becoming an extremely lovely young girl; and her teeth, when she spoke, showed a fascinating little irregularity that gave her the last charm.

Mrs. Bowen glided away with the young clergyman, but Effie remained at Miss Graham’s side, and seemed to have hold of the left hand which the girl let hang carelessly behind her in the volume of her robe. The child’s face expressed an adoration of Miss Graham far beyond her allegiance to her mother.

“I began to doubt whether Mrs. Bowen was going to bring you at all,” she said frankly, with an innocent, nervous laugh, which made favour for her with Colville. “She promised it early in the evening.”

“She has used me much worse, Miss Graham,” said Colville. “She has kept me waiting from the beginning of time. So that I have grown grey on my way up to you,” he added, by an inspiration. “I was a comparatively young man when Mrs. Bowen first told me she was going to introduce me.”

“Oh, how good!” said Miss Graham joyously. And her companion, after a moment’s hesitation, permitted herself a polite little titter. She had made a discovery; she had discovered that Mr. Colville was droll.

“I’m very glad you like it,” he said, with a gravity that did not deceive them.

“Oh yes,” sighed Miss Graham, with generous ardour. “Who but an American could say just such things? There’s the loveliest old lady here in Florence, who’s lived here thirty years, and she’s always going back and never getting back, and she’s so homesick she doesn’t know what to do, and she always says that Americans may not be better than other people, but they are different.”

“That’s very pretty. They’re different in everything but thinking themselves better. Their native modesty prevents that.”

“I don’t exactly know what you mean,” said Miss Graham, after a little hesitation.

“Well,” returned Colville, “I haven’t thought it out very clearly myself yet. I may mean that the Americans differ from other people in not thinking well of themselves, or they may differ from them in not thinking well enough. But what I said had a very epigrammatic sound, and I prefer not to investigate it too closely.”

This made Miss Graham and Miss Effie both cry out “Oh!” in delighted doubt of his intention. They both insensibly drifted a little nearer to him.

“There was a French lady said to me at the table-d’hote this evening that she knew I was an American, because the Americans always strike the key of personality.” He practised these economies of material in conversation quite recklessly, and often made the same incident or suggestion do duty round a whole company.

“Ah, I don’t believe that,” said Miss Graham.

“Believe what?”

“That the Americans always talk about themselves.”

“I’m not sure she meant that. You never can tell what a person means by what he says — or she.”

“How shocking!”.

“Perhaps the French lady meant that we always talk about other people. That’s in the key of personality too.”

“But I don’t believe we do,” said Miss Graham. “At any rate, she was talking about us, then.”

“Oh, she accounted for that by saying there was a large American colony in Paris, who had corrupted the French, and taught them our pernicious habit of introspection.”

“Do you think we’re very introspective?”

“Do you?”

“I know I’m not. I hardly ever think about myself at all. At any rate, not till it’s too late. That’s the great trouble. I wish I could. But I’m always studying other people. They’re so much more interesting.”

“Perhaps if you knew yourself better you wouldn’t think so,” suggested Colville.

“Yes, I know they are. I don’t think any young person can be interesting.”

“Then what becomes of all the novels? They’re full of young persons.”

“They’re ridiculous. If I were going to write a novel, I should take an old person for a hero — thirty-five or forty.” She looked at Colville, and blushing a little, hastened to add, “I don’t believe that they begin to be interesting much before that time. Such flat things as young men are always saying! Don’t you remember that passage somewhere in Heine’s Pictures of Travel, where he sees the hand of a lady coming out from under her mantle, when she’s confessing in a church, and he knows that it’s the hand of a young person who has enjoyed nothing and suffered nothing, it’s so smooth and flower-like? After I read that I hated the look of my hands — I was only sixteen, and it seemed as if I had had no more experience than a child. Oh, I like people to go through something. Don’t you?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do. Other people.”

“No; but don’t you like it for yourself?”

“I can’t tell; I haven’t been through anything worth speaking of yet.”

Miss Graham looked at him dubiously, but pursued with ardour: “Why, just getting back to Florence, after not having been here for so long — I should think it would be so romantic. Oh dear! I wish I were here for the second time.”

“I’m afraid you wouldn’t like it so well,” said Colville. “I wish I were here for the first time. There’s nothing like the first time in everything.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Well, there’s nothing like the first time in Florence.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine it. I should think that recalling the old emotions would be perfectly fascinating.”

“Yes, if they’d come when you do call them. But they’re as contrary-minded as spirits from the vasty deep. I’ve been shouting around here for my old emotions all day, and I haven’t had a responsive squeak.”

“Oh!” cried Miss Graham, staring full-eyed at him. “How delightful!” Effie Bowen turned away her pretty little head and laughed, as if it might not be quite kind to laugh at a person’s joke to his face.

Stimulated by their appreciation, Colville went on with more nonsense. “No; the only way to get at your old emotions in regard to Florence is to borrow them from somebody who’s having them fresh. What do you think about Florence, Miss Graham?”

“I? I’ve been here two months.”

“Then it’s too late?”

“No, I don’t know that it is. I keep feeling the strangeness all the time. But I can’t tell you. It’s very different from Buffalo, I can assure you.”

“Buffalo? I can imagine the difference. And it’s not altogether to the disadvantage of Buffalo.”

“Oh, have you been there?” asked Miss Graham, with a touching little eagerness. “Do you know anybody in Buffalo?”

“Some of the newspaper men; and I pass through there once a year on my way to New York — or used to. It’s a lively place.”

“Yes, it is,” sighed Miss Graham fondly.

“Do the girls of Buffalo still come out at night and dance by the light of the moon?”

“What!”

“Ah, I see,” said Colville, peering at her under his thoughtfully knitted brows, “you do belong to another era. You don’t remember the old negro minstrel song.”

“No,” said Miss Graham. “I can only remember the end of the war.”

“How divinely young!” said Colville. “Well,” he added, “I wish that French lady could have overheard us, Miss Graham. I think she would have changed her mind about Americans striking the note of personality in their talk.”

“Oh!” exclaimed the girl reproachfully, after a moment of swift reflection and recognition, “I don’t see how you could let me do it! You don’t suppose that I should have talked so with every one? It was because you were another American, and such an old friend of Mrs. Bowen’s.”

“That is what I shall certainly tell the French lady if she attacks me about it,” said Colville. He glanced carelessly toward the end of the room, and saw the young clergyman taking leave of Mrs. Bowen; all the rest of the company were gone. “Bless me!” he said, “I must be going.”

Mrs. Bowen had so swiftly advanced upon him that she caught the last words. “Why?” she asked.

“Because it’s to-morrow, I suspect, and the invitation was for one day only.”

“It was a season ticket,” said Mrs. Bowen, with gay hospitality, “and it isn’t to-morrow for half an hour yet. I can’t think of letting you go. Come up to the fire, all, and let’s sit down by it. It’s at its very best.”

Effie looked a pretty surprise and a pleasure in this girlish burst from her mother, whose habitual serenity made it more striking in contrast, and she forsook Miss Graham’s hand and ran forward and disposed the easy-chairs comfortably about the hearth.

Colville and Mrs. Bowen suddenly found themselves upon those terms which often succeed a long separation with people who have felt kindly toward each other at a former meeting and have parted friends: they were much more intimate than they had supposed themselves to be, or had really any reason for being.

“Which one of your guests do you wish me to offer up, Mrs. Bowen?” he asked, from the hollow of the arm-chair, not too low, which he had sunk into. With Mrs. Bowen in a higher chair at his right hand, and Miss Graham intent upon him from the sofa on his left, a sense of delicious satisfaction filled him from head to foot. “There isn’t one I would spare if you said the word.”

“And there isn’t one I want destroyed, I’m sorry to say,” answered Mrs. Bowen. “Don’t you think they were all very agreeable?”

“Yes, yes; agreeable enough — agreeable enough, I suppose. But they stayed too long. When I think we might have been sitting here for the last half-hour, if they’d only gone sooner, I find it pretty hard to forgive them.”

Mrs. Bowen and Miss Graham exchanged glances above his head — a glance which demanded, “Didn’t I tell you?” for a glance that answered, “Oh, he is!” Effie Bowen’s eyes widened; she kept them fastened upon Colville in silent worship.

He asked who were certain of the company that he had noticed, and Mrs. Bowen let him make a little fun of them: the fun was very good-natured. He repeated what the German had said about the worldly ambition of American girls; but she would not allow him so great latitude in this. She said they were no worldlier than other girls. Of course, they were fond of society, and some of them got a little spoiled. But they were in no danger of becoming too conventional.

Colville did not insist. “I missed the military to-night, Mrs. Bowen,” he said. “I thought one couldn’t get through an evening in Florence without officers?”

“We have them when there is dancing,” returned Mrs. Bowen.

“Yes, but they don’t know anything but dancing,” Miss Graham broke in. “I like some one who can talk something besides compliments.”

“You are very peculiar, you know, Imogene,” urged Mrs. Bowen gently. “I don’t think our young men at home do much better in conversation, if you come to that, though.”

“Oh, young men, yes! They’re the same everywhere. But here, even when they’re away along in the thirties, they think that girls can only enjoy flattery. I should like a gentleman to talk to me without a single word or look to show that he thought I was good-looking.”

“Ah, how could he be?” Colville insinuated, and the young girl coloured.

“I mean, if I were pretty. This everlasting adulation is insulting.”

“Mr. Morton doesn’t flatter,” said Mrs. Bowen thoughtfully, turning the feather screen she held at her face, now edgewise, now flatwise, toward Colville.

“Oh no,” owned Miss Graham. “He’s a clergyman.”

Mrs Bowen addressed herself to Colville. “You must go to hear him some day. He’s very interesting, if you don’t mind his being rather Low Church.”

Colville was going to pretend to an advanced degree of ritualism; but it occurred to him that it might be a serious matter to Mrs. Bowen, and he asked instead who was the Rev. Mr. Waters.

“Oh, isn’t he lovely?” cried Miss Graham. “There, Mrs. Bowen! Mr. Waters’s manner is what I call truly complimentary. He always talks to you as if he expected you to be interested in serious matters, and as if you were his intellectual equal. And he’s so happy here in Florence! He gives you the impression of feeling every breath he breathes here a privilege. You ought to hear him talk about Savonarola, Mr. Colville.”

“Well,” said Colville, “I’ve heard a great many people talk about Savonarola, and I’m rather glad he talked to me about American girls.”

“American girls!” uttered Miss Graham, in a little scream. “Did Mr. Waters talk to you about girls?”

“Yes. Why not? He was probably in love with one once.”

“Mr. Waters?” cried the girl. “What nonsense!”

“Well, then, with some old lady. Would you like that better?”

Miss Graham looked at Mrs. Bowen for permission, as it seemed, and then laughed, but did not attempt any reply to Colville.

“You find even that incredible of such pyramidal antiquity,” he resumed. “Well, it is hard to believe. I told him what that German said, and we agreed beautifully about another type of American girl which we said we preferred.”

“Oh! What could it be?” demanded Miss Graham.

“Ah, it wouldn’t be so easy to say right off-hand,” answered Colville indolently.

Mrs. Bowen put her hand under the elbow of the arm holding her screen. “I don’t believe I should agree with you so well,” she said, apparently with a sort of didactic intention.

They entered into a discussion which is always fruitful with Americans — the discussion of American girlhood, and Colville contended for the old national ideal of girlish liberty as wide as the continent, as fast as the Mississippi. Mrs. Bowen withstood him with delicate firmness. “Oh,” he said, “you’re Europeanised.”

“I certainly prefer the European plan of bringing up girls,” she replied steadfastly. “I shouldn’t think of letting a daughter of mine have the freedom I had.”

“Well, perhaps it will come right in the next generation, then; she will let her daughter have the freedom she hadn’t.”

“Not if I’m alive to prevent it,” cried Mrs. Bowen.

Colville laughed. “Which plan do you prefer, Miss Graham?”

“I don’t think it’s quite the same now as it used to be,” answered the girl evasively.

“Well, then, all I can say is that if I had died before this chance, I had lived a blessed time. I perceive more and more that I’m obsolete. I’m in my dotage; I prattle of the good old times, and the new spirit of the age flouts me. Miss Effie, do you prefer the Amer — —”

“No, thank you,” said her mother quickly.

“Effie is out of the question. It’s time you were in bed, Effie.”

The child came with instant submissiveness and kissed her mother good-night; she kissed Miss Graham, and gave her hand to Colville. He held it a moment, letting her pull shyly away from him, while he lolled back in his chair, and laughed at her with his sad eyes. “It’s past the time I should be in bed, my dear, and I’m sitting up merely because there’s nobody to send me. It’s not that I’m really such a very bad boy. Good night. Don’t put me into a disagreeable dream; put me into a nice one.” The child bridled at the mild pleasantry, and when Colville released her hand she suddenly stooped forward and kissed him.

“You’re so funny!” she cried, and ran and escaped beyond the portière.

Mrs. Bowen stared in the same direction, but not with severity. “Really, Effie has been carried a little beyond herself.”

“Well,” said Colville, “that’s one conquest since I came to Florence. And merely by being funny! When I was in Florence before, Mrs. used to go about quite freely with either of them. They were both very pretty, and we were all very young. Don’t you think it was charming?” Mrs. Bowen coloured a lovely red, and smiled, but made no other response. “Florence has changed very much for the worse since that time. There used to be a pretty flower-girl, with a wide-flapping straw hat, who flung a heavy bough full of roses into my lap when she met me driving across the Carraja bridge. I spent an hour looking for that girl to-day, and couldn’t find her. The only flower-girl I could find was a fat one of fifty, who kept me fifteen minutes in Via Tornabuoni while she was fumbling away at my button-hole, trying to poke three second-hand violets and a sickly daisy into it. Ah, youth! youth! I suppose a young fellow could have found that other flower-girl at a glance; but my old eyes! No, we belong, each of us, to our own generation. Mrs. Bowen,” he said, with a touch of tragedy — whether real or affected, he did not well know himself — in his hardiness, “what has become of Mrs. Pilsbury?”

“Mrs. Milbury, you mean?” gasped Mrs. Bowen, in affright at his boldness.

“Milbury, Bilbury, Pilsbury — it’s all one, so long as it isn’t — —”

“They’re living in Chicago!” she hastened to reply, as if she were afraid he was going to say, “so long as it isn’t Colville,” and she could not have borne that.

Colville clasped his hands at the back of his head and looked at Mrs. Bowen with eyes that let her know that he was perfectly aware she had been telling Miss Graham of his youthful romance, and that he had now touched it purposely. “And you wouldn’t,” he said, as if that were quite relevant to what they had been talking about— “you wouldn’t let Miss Graham go out walking alone with a dotard like me?”

“Certainly not,” said Mrs. Bowen.

Colville got to his feet by a surprising activity. “Good-bye, Miss Graham.” He offered his hand to her with burlesque despair, and then turned to Mrs. Bowen. “Thank you for such a pleasant evening! What was your day, did you say?”

“Oh, any day!” said Mrs. Bowen cordially, giving her hand.

“Do you know whom you look like?” he asked, holding it.

“No.”

“Lina Ridgely.”

The ladies stirred softly in their draperies after he was gone. They turned and faced the hearth, where a log burned in a bed of hot ashes, softly purring and ticking to itself, and whilst they stood pressing their hands against the warm fronts of their dresses, as the fashion of women is before a fire, the clock on the mantel began to strike twelve.

“Was that her name?” asked Miss Graham, when the clock had had its say. “Lina Ridgely?”

“No; that was my name,” answered Mrs. Bowen.

“Oh yes!” murmured the young girl apologetically.

“She led him on; she certainly encouraged him. It was shocking. He was quite wild about it.”

“She must have been a cruel girl. How could he speak of it so lightly?”

“It was best to speak of it, and have done with it,” said Mrs. Bowen. “He knew that I must have been telling you something about it.”

“Yes. How bold it was! A young man couldn’t have done it! Yes, he’s fascinating. But how old and sad he looked, as he lay back there in the chair!”

“Old? I don’t think he looked old. He looked sad. Yes, it’s left its mark on him.”

The log burned quite through to its core, and fell asunder, a bristling mass of embers. They had been looking at it with downcast heads. Now they lifted their faces, and saw the pity in each other’s eyes, and the beautiful girl impulsively kissed the pretty woman good-night.

V

Colville fell asleep with the flattered sense which abounds in the heart of a young man after his first successful evening in society, but which can visit maturer life only upon some such conditions of long exile and return as had been realised in his. The looks of these two charming women followed him into his dreams; he knew he must have pleased them, the dramatic homage of the child was evidence of that; and though it had been many years since he had found it sufficient cause of happiness to have pleased a woman, the desire to do so was by no means extinct in him. The eyes of the girl hovered above him like stars; he felt in their soft gaze that he was a romance to her young heart, and this made him laugh; it also made him sigh.

He woke at dawn with a sharp twinge in his shoulder, and he rose to give himself the pleasure of making his own fire with those fagots of broom and pine twigs which he had enjoyed the night before, promising himself to get back into bed when the fire was well going, and sleep late. While he stood before the open stove, the jangling of a small bell outside called him to the window, and he saw a procession which had just issued from the church going to administer the extreme unction to some dying person across the piazza. The parish priest went first, bearing the consecrated wafer in its vessel, and at his side an acolyte holding a yellow silk umbrella over the Eucharist; after them came a number of facchini in white robes and white hoods that hid their faces; their tapers burned sallow and lifeless in the new morning light; the bell jangled dismally.

“They even die dramatically in this country,” thought Colville, in whom the artist was taken with the effectiveness of the spectacle before his human pity was stirred for the poor soul who was passing. He reproached himself for that, and instead of getting back to bed, he dressed and waited for the mature hour which he had ordered his breakfast for. When it came at last, picturesquely borne on the open hand of Giovanni, steaming coffee, hot milk, sweet butter in delicate disks, and two white eggs coyly tucked in the fold of a napkin, and all grouped upon the wide salver, it brought him a measure of the consolation which good cheer imparts to the ridiculous human heart even in the house where death is. But the sad incident tempered his mind with a sort of pensiveness that lasted throughout the morning, and quite till lunch. He spent the time in going about the churches; but the sunshine which the day began with was overcast, as it was the day before, and the churches were rather too dark and cold in the afternoon. He went to Viesseux’s reading-room and looked over the English papers, which he did not care for much; and he also made a diligent search of the catalogue for some book about Florence for little Effie Bowen: he thought he would like to surprise her mother with his interest in the matter. As the day waned toward dark, he felt more and more tempted to take her at her word, when she had said that any day was her day to him, and go to see her. If he had been a younger man he would have anxiously considered this indulgence and denied himself, but after forty a man denies himself no reasonable and harmless indulgence; he has learned by that time that it is a pity and a folly to do so.

Colville found Mrs. Bowen’s room half full of arriving and departing visitors, and then he remembered that it was this day she had named to him on the Ponte Vecchio, and when Miss Graham thanked him for coming his first Thursday, he made a merit of not having forgotten it, and said he was going to come every Thursday during the winter. Miss Graham drew him a cup of tea from the Russian samovar which replaces in some Florentine houses the tea-pot of Occidental civilisation, and Colville smiled upon it and upon her, bending over the brazen urn with a flower-like tilt of her beautiful head. She wore an aesthetic dress of creamy camel’s-hair, whose colour pleased the eye as its softness would have flattered the touch.

“What a very Tourguéneffish effect the samovar gives!” he said, taking a biscuit from the basket Effie Bowen brought him, shrinking with redoubled shyness from the eyebrows which he arched at her. “I wonder you can keep from calling me Fedor Colvillitch. Where is your mother, Effie Bowenovna?” he asked of the child, with a temptation to say Imogene Grahamovna.

They both looked mystified, but Miss Graham said, “I’m sorry to say you won’t see Mrs. Bowen today. She has a very bad headache, and has left Effie and me to receive. We feel very incompetent, but she says it will do us good.”

There were some people there of the night before, and Colville had to talk to them. One of the ladies asked him if he had met the Inglehart boys as he came in.

“The Inglehart boys? No. What are the Inglehart boys?”

“They were here all last winter, and they’ve just got back. It’s rather exciting for Florence.” She gave him a rapid sketch of that interesting exodus of a score of young painters from the art school at Munich, under the head of the singular and fascinating genius by whose name they became known. “They had their own school for a while in Munich, and then they all came down into Italy in a body. They had their studio things with them, and they travelled third class, and they made the greatest excitement everywhere, and had the greatest fun. They were a great sensation in Florence. They went everywhere, and were such favourites. I hope they are going to stay.”

“I hope so too,” said Colville. “I should like to see them.”

“Dear me!” said the lady, with a glance at the clock. “It’s five! I must be going.”

The other ladies went, and Colville approached to take leave, but Miss Graham detained him.

“What is Tourguéneffish?” she demanded.

“The quality of the great Russian novelist, Tourguéneff,” said Colville, perceiving that she had not heard of him.

“Oh!”

“You ought to read him. The samovar sends up its agreeable odour all through his books. Read Lisa if you want your heart really broken.

“I’m glad you approve of heart-breaks in books. So many people won’t read anything but cheerful books. It’s the only quarrel I have with Mrs. Bowen. She says there are so many sad things in life that they ought to be kept out of books.”

“Ah, there I perceive a divided duty,” said Colville. “I should like to agree with both of you. But if Mrs. Bowen were here I should remind her that if there are so many sad things in life that is a very good reason for putting them in books too.”

“Of course I shall tell her what you said.”

“Why, I don’t object to a certain degree of cheerfulness in books; only don’t carry it too far — that’s all.”

This made the young girl laugh, and Colville was encouraged to go on. He told her of the sight he had seen from his window at daybreak, and he depicted it all very graphically, and made her feel its pathos perhaps more keenly than he had felt it. “Now, that little incident kept with me all day, tempering my boisterous joy in the Giottos, and reducing me to a decent composure in the presence of the Cimabues; and it’s pretty hard to keep from laughing at some of them, don’t you think?”

The young people perceived that he was making fun again; but he continued with an air of greater seriousness. “Don’t you see what a very good thing that was to begin one’s day with? Why, even in Santa Croce, with the thermometer ten degrees below zero in the shade of Alfieri’s monument, I was no gayer than I should have been in a church at home. I suppose Mrs. Bowen would object to having that procession go by under one’s window in a book; but I can’t really see how it would hurt the reader, or damp his spirits permanently. A wholesome reaction would ensue, such as you see now in me, whom the thing happened to in real life.”

He stirred his tea, and shook with an inward laugh as he carried it to his lips.

“Yes,” said Miss Graham thoughtfully, and she looked at him searchingly in the interval of silence that ensued. But she only added, “I wish it would get warmer in the churches. I’ve seen hardly anything of them yet.”

“From the way I felt in them to-day,” sighed Colville, “I should think the churches would begin to thaw out about the middle of May. But if one goes well wrapped up in furs, and has a friend along to rouse him and keep him walking when he is about to fall into that lethargy which precedes death by freezing, I think they may be visited even now with safety. Have you been in Santa Maria Novella yet?”

“No,” said Miss Graham, with a shake of the head that expressed her resolution to speak the whole truth if she died for it, “not even in Santa Maria Novella.”

“What a wonderful old place it is! That curious façade, with the dials and its layers of black and white marble soaked golden-red in a hundred thousand sunsets! That exquisite grand portal!” He gesticulated with the hand that the tea-cup left free, to suggest form and measurement as artists do. “Then the inside! The great Cimabue, with all that famous history on its back — the first divine Madonna by the first divine master, carried through the streets in a triumph of art and religion! Those frescoes of Ghirlandajo’s with real Florentine faces and figures in them, and all lavished upon the eternal twilight of that choir — but I suppose that if the full day were let in on them, once, they would vanish like ghosts at cock-crow! You must be sure to see the Spanish chapel; and the old cloister itself is such a pathetic place. There’s a boys’ school, as well as a military college, in the suppressed convent now, and the colonnades were full of boys running and screaming and laughing and making a joyful racket; it was so much more sorrowful than silence would have been there. One of the little scamps came up to me, and the young monk that was showing me round, and bobbed us a mocking bow and bobbed his hat off; then they all burst out laughing again and raced away, and the monk looked after them and said, so sweetly and wearily, ‘They’re at their diversions: we must have patience.’ There are only twelve monks left there; all the rest are scattered and gone.” He gave his cup to Miss Graham for more tea.

“Don’t you think,” she asked, drawing it from the samovar, “that it is very sad having the convents suppressed?”

“It was very sad having slavery abolished — for some people,” suggested Colville; he felt the unfairness of the point he had made.

“Yes,” sighed Miss Graham.

Colville stood stirring his second cup of tea, when the portière parted, and showed Mrs. Bowen wistfully pausing on the threshold. Her face was pale, but she looked extremely pretty there.

“Ah, come in, Mrs. Bowen!” he called gaily to her. “I won’t give you away to the other people. A cup of tea will do you good.”

“Oh, I’m a great deal better,” said Mrs. Bowen, coming forward to give him her hand. “I heard your voice, and I couldn’t resist looking in.”

“That was very kind of you,” said Colville gratefully: and her eyes met his in a glance that flushed her face a deep red. “You find me here — I don’t know why! — in my character of old family friend, doing my best to make life a burden to the young ladies.”

“I wish you would stay to a family dinner with us,” said Mrs. Bowen, and Miss Graham brightened in cordial support of the hospitality. “Why can’t you?”

“I don’t know, unless it’s because I’m a humane person, and have some consideration for your headache.”

“Oh, that’s all gone,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It was one of those convenient headaches — if you ever had them, you’d know — that go off at sunset.”

“But you’d have another to-morrow.”

“No, I’m safe for a whole fortnight from another.”

“Then you leave me without an excuse, and I was just wishing I had none,” said Colville.

After dinner Mrs. Bowen sent Effie to bed early to make up for the late hours of the night before, but she sat before the fire with Miss Graham rather late, talking Colville over, when he was gone.

“He’s very puzzling to me,” said Miss Graham. “Sometimes you think he’s nothing but an old cynic, from his talk, and then something so sweet and fresh comes out that you don’t know what to do. Don’t you think he has really a very poetical mind, and that he’s putting all the rest on?”

“I think he likes to make little effects,” said Mrs. Bowen judiciously. “He always did, rather.”

“Why, was he like this when he was young?”

“I don’t consider him very old now.”

“No, of course not. I meant when you knew him before.” Miss Graham had some needlework in her hand; Mrs. Bowen, who never even pretended to work at that kind of thing, had nothing in hers but the feather screen.

“He is old, compared with you, Imogene; but you’ll find, as you live along, that your contemporaries are always young. Mr. Colville is very much improved. He used to be painfully shy, but he put on a bold front, and now the bold front seems to have become a second nature with him.”

“I like it,” said Miss Graham, to her needle.

“Yes; but I suspect he’s still shy, at heart. He used to be very sentimental, and was always talking Ruskin. I think if he hadn’t talked Ruskin so much, Jenny Milbury might have treated him better. It was very priggish in him.”

“Oh, I can’t imagine Mr. Colville’s being priggish!”

“He’s very much improved. He used to be quite a sloven in his dress; you know how very slovenly most American gentlemen are in their dress, at any rate. I think that influenced her against him too.”

“He isn’t slovenly now,” suggested Miss Graham.

“Oh no; he’s quite swell,” said Mrs. Bowen, depriving the adjective of slanginess by the refinement of her tone.

“Well,” said Miss Graham, “I don’t see how you could have endured her after that. It was atrocious.”

“It was better for her to break with him, if she found out she didn’t love him, than to marry him. That,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a depth of feeling uncommon for her, “would have been a thousand times worse.”

“Yes, but she ought to have found out before she led him on so far.”

“Sometimes girls can’t. They don’t know themselves; they think they’re in love when they’re not. She was very impulsive, and of course she was flattered by it; he was so intellectual. But at last she found that she couldn’t bear it, and she had to tell him so.”

“Did she ever say why she didn’t love him?”

“No; I don’t suppose she could. The only thing I remember her saying was that he was ‘too much of a mixture.’”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

“Do you think he’s insincere?”

“Oh no. Perhaps she meant that he wasn’t single-minded.”

“Fickle?”

“No. He certainly wasn’t that in her case.”

“Undecided?”

“He was decided enough with her — at last.”

Imogene dropped the hopeless quest, “How can a man ever stand such a thing?” she sighed.

“He stood it very nobly. That was the best thing about it; he took it in the most delicate way. She showed me his letter. There wasn’t a word or a hint of reproach in it; he seemed to be anxious about nothing but her feeling badly for him. Of course he couldn’t help showing that he was mortified for having pursued her with attentions that were disagreeable to her; but that was delicate too. Yes, it was a very large-minded letter.”

“It was shocking in her to show it.”

“It wasn’t very nice. But it was a letter that any girl might have been proud to show.”

“Oh, she couldn’t have done it to gratify her vanity!”

“Girls are very queer, my dear,” said Mrs. Bowen, as if the fact were an abstraction. She mused upon the flat of her screen, while Miss Graham plied her needle in silence.

The latter spoke first. “Do you think he was very much broken by it?”

“You never can tell. He went out west then, and there he has stayed ever since. I suppose his life would have been very different if nothing of the kind had happened. He had a great deal of talent. I always thought I should hear of him in some way.”

“Well, it was a heartless, shameless thing! I don’t see how you can speak of it so leniently as you do, Mrs. Bowen. It makes all sorts of coquetry and flirtation more detestable to me than ever. Why, it has ruined his life!”

“Oh, he was young enough then to outlive it. After all, they were a boy and girl.”

“A boy and girl! How old were they?”

“He must have been twenty-three or four, and she was twenty.”

“My age! Do you call that being a girl?”

“She was old enough to know what she was about,” said Mrs. Bowen justly.

Imogene fell back in her chair, drawing out her needle the full length of its thread, and then letting her hand fall. “I don’t know. It seems as if I never should be grown up, or anything but a child. Yes, when I think of the way young men talk, they do seem boys. Why can’t they talk like Mr. Colville? I wish I could talk like him. It makes you forget how old and plain he is.”

She remained with her eyelids dropped in an absent survey of her sewing, while Mrs. Bowen regarded her with a look of vexation, impatience, resentment, on the last refinement of these emotions, which she banished from her face before Miss Graham looked up and said, with a smile “How funny it is to see Effie’s infatuation with him! She can’t take her eyes off him for a moment, and she follows him round the room so as not to lose a word he is saying. It was heroic of her to go to bed without a murmur before he left to-night.”

“Yes, she sees that he is good,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“Oh, she sees that he’s something very much more. Mr. Waters is good.”

Miss Graham had the best of the argument, and so Mrs. Bowen did not reply.

“I feel,” continued the young girl, “as if it were almost a shame to have asked him to go to that silly dancing party with us. It seems as if we didn’t appreciate him. I think we ought to have kept him for high aesthetic occasions and historical researches.”

“Oh, I don’t think Mr. Colville was very deeply offended at being asked to go with us.”

“No,” said Imogene, with another sigh, “he didn’t seem so. I suppose there’s always an undercurrent of sadness — of tragedy — in everything for him.”

“I don’t suppose anything of the kind,” cried Mrs. Bowen gaily. “He’s had time enough to get over it.”

“Do people ever get over such things?”

“Yes — men.”

“It must be because he was young, as you say. But if it had happened now?”

“Oh, it couldn’t happen now. He’s altogether too cool and calculating.”

“Do you think he’s cool and calculating?”

“No. He’s too old for a broken heart — a new one.”

“Mrs. Bowen,” demanded the girl solemnly, “could you forgive yourself for such a thing if you had done it?”

“Yes, perfectly well, if I wasn’t in love with him.”

“But if you’d made him think you were?” pursued the girl breathlessly.

“If I were a flirt — yes.”

“I couldn’t,” said Imogene, with tragic depth.

“Oh, be done with your intensities, and go to bed, Imogene,” said Mrs. Bowen, giving her a playful push.

VI

It was so long since Colville had been at a dancing party that Mrs. Bowen’s offer to take him to Madame Uccelli’s had first struck his sense of the ludicrous. Then it had begun to flatter him; it implied that he was still young enough to dance if he would, though he had stipulated that they were not to expect anything of the kind from him. He liked also the notion of being seen and accepted in Florentine society as the old friend of Mrs. Bowen’s, for he had not been long in discovering that her position in Florence was, among the foreign residents, rather authoritative. She was one of the very few Americans who were asked to Italian houses, and Italian houses lying even beyond the neutral ground of English-speaking intermarriages. She was not, of course, asked to the great Princess Strozzi ball, where the Florentine nobility appeared in the mediaeval pomp — the veritable costumes — of their ancestors; only a rich American banking family went, and their distinction was spoken of under the breath; but any glory short of this was within Mrs. Bowen’s reach. So an old lady who possessed herself of Colville the night before had told him, celebrating Mrs. Bowen at length, and boasting of her acceptance among the best English residents, who, next after the natives, seem to constitute the social ambition of Americans living in Italian cities.

It interested him to find that some geographical distinctions which are fading at home had quite disappeared in Florence. When he was there before, people from quite small towns in the East had made pretty Lina Ridgely and her friend feel the disadvantage of having come from the Western side of an imaginary line; he had himself been at the pains always to let people know, at the American watering-places where he spent his vacations, that though presently from Des Vaches, Indiana, he was really born in Rhode Island; but in Florence it was not at all necessary. He found in Mrs. Bowen’s house people from Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, all meeting as of apparently the same civilisation, and whether Mrs. Bowen’s own origin was, like that of the Etruscan cities, lost in the mists of antiquity, or whether she had sufficiently atoned for the error of her birth by subsequent residence in the national capital and prolonged sojourn in New York, it seemed certainly not to be remembered against her among her Eastern acquaintance. The time had been when the fact that Miss Graham came from Buffalo would have gone far to class her with the animal from which her native city had taken its name; but now it made no difference, unless it was a difference in her favour. The English spoke with the same vague respect of Buffalo and of Philadelphia; and to a family of real Bostonians Colville had the courage to say simply that he lived in Des Vaches, and not to seek to palliate the truth in any sort. If he wished to prevaricate at all, it was rather to attribute himself to Mrs. Bowen’s city in Ohio.

She and Miss Graham called for him with her carriage the next night, when it was time to go to Madame Uccelli’s.

“This gives me a very patronised and effeminate feeling,” said Colville, getting into the odorous dark of the carriage, and settling himself upon the front seat with a skill inspired by his anxiety not to tear any of the silken spreading white wraps that inundated the whole interior. “Being come for by ladies!” They both gave some nervous joyful laughs, as they found his hand in the obscurity, and left the sense of a gloved pressure upon it. “Is this the way you used to do in Vesprucius, Mrs. Bowen?”

“Oh no, indeed!” she answered. “The young gentlemen used to find out whether I was going, and came for me with a hack, and generally, if the weather was good, we walked home.”

“That’s the way we still do in Des Vaches. Sometimes, as a tremendous joke, the ladies come for us in leap-year. How do you go to balls in Buffalo, Miss Graham? Or, no; I withdraw the embarrassing question.” Some gleams from the street lamps, as they drove along, struck in through the carriage windows, and flitted over the ladies’ faces and were gone again. “Ah! this is very trying. Couldn’t you stop him at the next corner, and let me see how radiant you ladies really are? I may be in very great danger; I’d like to know just how much.”

“It wouldn’t be of any use,” cried the young girl gaily. “We’re all wrapped up, and you couldn’t form any idea of us. You must wait, and let us burst upon you when we come out of the dressing-room at Madame Uccelli’s.”

“But then it may be too late,” he urged. “Is it very far?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It’s ridiculously far. It’s outside the Roman Gate. I don’t see why people live at that distance.”

“In order to give the friends you bring the more pleasure of your company, Mrs. Bowen.”

“Ah! that’s very well. But you’re not logical.”

“No,” said Colville; “you can’t be logical and complimentary at the same time. It’s too much to ask. How delicious your flowers are!” The ladies each had a bouquet in her hand, which she was holding in addition to her fan, the edges of her cloak, and the skirt of her train.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen; “we are so much obliged to you for them.”

“Why, I sent you no flowers,” said Colville, startled into untimely earnest.

“Didn’t you?” triumphed Mrs. Bowen. “I thought gentlemen always sent flowers to ladies when they were going to a ball with them. They used to, in Columbus.”

“And in Buffalo they always do,” Miss Graham added.

“Ah! they don’t in Des Vaches,” said Colville. They tried to mystify him further about the bouquets; they succeeded in being very gay, and in making themselves laugh a great deal. Mrs. Bowen was even livelier than the young girl.

Her carriage was one of the few private equipages that drove up to Madame Uccelli’s door; most people had not even come in a remise, but, after the simple Florentine fashion, had taken the little cabs, which stretched in a long line up and down the way; the horses had let their weary heads drop, and were easing their broken knees by extending their forelegs while they drowsed; the drivers, huddled in their great-coats, had assembled around the doorway to see the guests alight, with that amiable, unenvious interest of the Italians in the pleasure of others. The deep sky glittered with stars; in the corner of the next villa garden the black plumes of some cypresses blotted out their space among them.

“Isn’t it Florentine?” demanded Mrs. Bowen, giving the hand which Colville offered in helping her out of the carriage a little vivid pressure, full of reminiscence and confident sympathy. A flush of youth warmed his heart; he did not quail even when the porter of the villa intervened between her and her coachman, whom she was telling when to come back, and said that the carriages were ordered for three o’clock.

“Did you ever sit up so late as that in Des Vaches?” asked Miss Graham mischievously.

“Oh yes; I was editor of a morning paper,” he explained. But he did not like the imputation of her question.

Madame Uccelli accepted him most hospitably among her guests when he was presented. She was an American who had returned with her Italian husband to Italy, and had long survived him in the villa which he had built with her money. Such people grow very queer with the lapse of time. Madame Uccelli’s character remained inalienably American, but her manners and customs had become largely Italian; without having learned the language thoroughly, she spoke it very fluently, and its idioms marked her Philadelphia English. Her house was a menagerie of all the nationalities; she was liked in Italian society, and there were many Italians; English-speaking Russians abounded; there were many genuine English, Germans, Scandinavians, Protestant Irish, American Catholics, and then Americans of all kinds. There was a superstition of her exclusiveness among her compatriots, but one really met every one there sooner or later; she was supposed to be a convert to the religion of her late husband, but no one really knew what religion she was of, probably not even Madame Uccelli herself. One thing you were sure of at her house, and that was a substantial supper; it is the example of such resident foreigners which has corrupted the Florentines, though many native families still hold out against it.

The dancing was just beginning, and the daughter of Madame Uccelli, who spoke both English and Italian much better than her mother, came forward and possessed herself of Miss Graham, after a polite feint of pressing Mrs. Bowen to let her find a partner for her.

Mrs. Bowen cooed a gracious refusal, telling Fanny Uccelli that she knew very well that she never danced now. The girl had not much time for Colville; she welcomed him, but she was full of her business of starting the dance, and she hurried away without asking him whether she should introduce him to some lady for the quadrille that was forming. Her mother, however, asked him if he would not go out and get himself some tea, and she found a lady to go with him to the supper-room. This lady had daughters whom apparently she wished to supervise while they were dancing, and she brought Colville back very soon. He had to stand by the sofa where she sat till Madame Uccelli found him and introduced him to another mother of daughters. Later he joined a group formed by the father of one of the dancers and the non-dancing husband of a dancing wife. Their conversation was perfunctory; they showed one another that they had no pleasure in it.

Presently the father went to see how his daughter looked while dancing; the husband had evidently no such curiosity concerning his wife; and Colville went with the father, and looked at Miss Graham. She was very beautiful, and she obeyed the music as if it were her breath; her face was rapt, intense, full of an unsmiling delight, which shone in her dark eyes, glowing like low stars. Her abandon interested Colville, and then awed him; the spectacle of that young, unjaded capacity for pleasure touched him with a profound sense of loss. Suddenly Imogene caught sight of him, and with the coming of a second look in her eyes the light of an exquisite smile flashed over her face. His heart was in his throat.

“Your daughter?” asked the fond parent at his elbow. “That is mine yonder in red.”

Colville did not answer, nor look at the young lady in red. The dance was ceasing; the fragments of those kaleidoscopic radiations were dispersing themselves; the tormented piano was silent.

The officer whom Imogene had danced with brought her to Mrs. Bowen, and resigned her with the regulation bow, hanging his head down before him as if submitting his neck to the axe. She put her hand in Colville’s arm, where he stood beside Mrs. Bowen. “Oh, do take me to get something to eat!”

In the supper-room she devoured salad and ices with a childish joy in them. The place was jammed, and she laughed from her corner at Colville’s struggles in getting the things for her and bringing them to her. While she was still in the midst of an ice, the faint note of the piano sounded. “Oh, they’re beginning again. It’s the Lancers!” she said, giving him the plate back. She took his arm again; she almost pulled him along on their return.

“Why don’t you dance?” she demanded mockingly.

“I would if you’d let me dance with you.”

“Oh, that’s impossible! I’m engaged ever so many deep.” She dropped his arm instantly at sight of a young Englishman who seemed to be looking for her. This young Englishman had a zeal for dancing that was unsparing; partners were nothing to him except as a means of dancing; his manner expressed a supreme contempt for people who made the slightest mistake, who danced with less science or less conscience than himself. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said, in a tone of cold rebuke, without looking at her. “We’ve been waiting.”

Colville wished to beat him, but Imogene took his rebuke meekly, and murmured some apologies about not hearing the piano before. He hurried her off without recognising Colville’s existence in any way.

The undancing husband of the dancing wife was boring himself in a corner; Colville decided that the chances with him were better than with the fond father, and joined him, just as a polite officer came up and entreated him to complete a set. “Oh, I never danced in my life,” he replied; and then he referred the officer to Colville. “Don’t you dance?”

“I used to dance,” Colville began, while the officer stood looking patiently at him. This was true. He used to dance the Lancers, too, and very badly, seventeen years before. He had danced it with Lina Ridgely and the other one, Mrs. Milbury. His glance wandered to the vacant place on the floor; it was the same set which Miss Graham was in; she smiled and beckoned derisively. A vain and foolish ambition fired him. “Oh yes, I can dance a little,” he said.

A little was quite enough for the eager officer. He had Colville a partner in an instant, and the next he was on the floor.

“Oh, what fun!” cried Miss Graham; but the fun had not really begun yet.

Colville had forgotten everything about the Lancers. He walked round like a bear in a pen: he capered to and fro with a futile absurdity; people poked him hither and thither; his progress was attended by rending noises from the trains over which he found his path. He smiled and cringed, and apologised to the hardening faces of the dancers: even Miss Graham’s face had become very grave.

“This won’t do,” said the Englishman at last, with cold insolence. He did not address himself to any one; he merely stopped; they all stopped, and Colville was effectively expelled the set? another partner was found for his lady, and he wandered giddily away. He did not know where to turn; the whole room must have seen what an incredible ass he had made of himself, but Mrs. Bowen looked as if she had not seen.

He went up to her, resolved to make fun of himself at the first sign she gave of being privy to his disgrace. But she only said, “Have you found your way to the supper-room yet?”

“Oh yes; twice,” he answered, and kept on talking with her and Madame Uccelli. After five minutes or so something occurred to Colville. “Have you found the way to the supper-room yet, Mrs. Bowen?”

“No!” she owned, with a small, pathetic laugh, which expressed a certain physical faintness, and reproached him with insupportable gentleness for his selfish obtuseness.

“Let me show you the way,” he cried.

“Why, I am rather hungry,” said Mrs. Bowen, taking his arm, with a patient arrangement first of her fan, her bouquet, and her train, and then moving along by his side with a delicate footed pace, which insinuated and deprecated her dependence upon him.

There were only a few people in the supper-room, and they had it practically to themselves. She took a cup of tea and a slice of buttered bread, with a little salad, which she excused herself from eating because it was the day after her headache. “I shouldn’t have thought you were hungry, Mrs. Bowen,” he said, “if you hadn’t told me so,” and he recalled that, as a young girl, her friend used to laugh at her for having such a butterfly appetite; she was in fact one of those women who go through life the marvels of such of our brutal sex as observe the ethereal nature of their diet. But in an illogical revulsion of feeling. Colville, who was again cramming himself with all the solids and fluids in reach, and storing up a vain regret against the morrow, preferred her delicacy to the magnificent rapacity of Miss Graham: Imogene had passed from salad to ice, and at his suggestion had frankly reverted to salad again and then taken a second ice, with the robust appetite of perfect health and perfect youth. He felt a desire to speak against her to Mrs. Bowen, he did not know why and he did not know how; he veiled his feeling in an open attack. “Miss Graham has just been the cause of my playing the fool, with her dancing. She dances so superbly that she makes you want to dance too — she made me feel as if I could dance.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen; “it was very kind of you to complete the set. I saw you dancing,” she added, without a glimmer of guilty consciousness in her eyes.

It was very sweet, but Colville had to protest. “Oh no; you didn’t see me dancing; you saw me not dancing. I am a ruined man, and I leave Florence to-morrow; but I have the sad satisfaction of reflecting that I don’t leave an unbroken train among the ladies of that set. And I have made one young Englishman so mad that there is a reasonable hope of his not recovering.”

“Oh no; you don’t think of going away for that!” said Mrs. Bowen, not heeding the rest of his joking.

“Well, the time has been when I have left Florence for loss,” said Colville, with the air of preparing himself to listen to reason.

“You mustn’t,” said Mrs. Bowen briefly.

“Oh, very well, then, I won’t,” said Colville whimsically, as if that settled it.

Mrs. Bowen would not talk of the matter any more; he could see that with her kindness, which was always more than her tact, she was striving to get away from the subject. As he really cared for it no longer, this made him persist in clinging to it; he liked this pretty woman’s being kind to him. “Well,” he said finally, “I consent to stay in Florence on condition that you suggest some means of atonement for me which I can also make a punishment to Miss Graham.”

Mrs. Bowen did not respond to the question of placating and punishing her protégée with sustained interest. They went back to Madame Uccelli, and to the other elderly ladies in the room that opened by archways upon the dancing-room.

Imogene was on the floor, dancing not merely with unabated joy, but with a zest that seemed only to freshen from dance to dance. If she left the dance, it was to go out on her partner’s arm to the supper-room. Colville could not decently keep on talking to Mrs. Bowen the whole evening; it would be too conspicuous; he devolved from frump to frump; he bored himself; he yawned in his passage from one of these mothers or fathers to another. The hours passed; it was two o’clock; Imogene was going out to the supper-room again. He was taking out his watch. She saw him, and “Oh, don’t!” she cried, laughing, as she passed.

The dancing went on; she was waltzing now in the interminable german. Some one had let down, a window in the dancing-room, and he was feeling it in his shoulder. Mrs. Bowen, across the room, looked heroically patient, but weary. He glanced, down at the frump on the sofa near, and realised that she had been making a long speech to him, which, he could see from her look, had ended in some sort of question.

Three o’clock came, and they had to wait till the german was over. He felt that Miss Graham was behaving badly, ungratefully, selfishly; on the way home in the carriage he was silent from utter boredom and fatigue, but Mrs. Bowen was sweetly sympathetic with the girl’s rapture. Imogene did not seem to feel his moodiness; she laughed, she joked, she told a number of things that happened, she hummed the air of the last waltz. “Isn’t it divine?” she asked. “Oh! I feel as if I could dance for a week.” She was still dancing; she gave Colville’s foot an accidental tap in keeping time on the floor of the carriage to the tune she was humming. No one said anything about a next meeting when they parted at the gate of Palazzo Pinti, and Mrs. Bowen bade her coachman drive Colville to his hotel. But both the ladies’ voices called good-night to him as he drove away. He fancied a shade of mocking in Miss Graham’s voice.

The great outer door of the hotel was locked, of course, and the poor little porter kept Colville thumping at it some time before he unlocked it, full of sleepy smiles and apologies. “I’m sorry to wake you up,” said Colville kindly.

“It is my duty,” said the porter, with amiable heroism. He discharged another duty by lighting a whole new candle, which would be set down to Colville’s account, and went before him to his room, up the wide stairs, cold in their white linen path, and on through the crooked corridors haunted by the ghosts of extinct tables d’hôte, and full of goblin shadows. He had recovered a noonday suavity by the time he reached Colville’s door, and bowed himself out, after lighting the candles within, with a sweet plenitude of politeness, which Colville, even in his gloomy mood, could not help admiring in a man in his shirt sleeves, with only one suspender up.

If there had been a fire, Colville would have liked to sit down before it, and take an account of his feelings, but the atmosphere of a bed-chamber in a Florentine hotel at half-past three o’clock on a winter morning is not one that invites to meditation; and he made haste to get into bed, with nothing clearer in his mind than a shapeless sense of having been trifled with. He ought not to have gone to a dancing party, to begin with, and then he certainly ought not to have attempted to dance; so far he might have been master of the situation, and was responsible for it; but he was, over and above this, aware of not having wished to do either, of having been wrought upon against his convictions to do both. He regarded now with supreme loathing a fantastic purpose which he had formed while tramping round on those women’s dresses, of privately taking lessons in dancing, and astonishing Miss Graham at the next ball where they met. Miss Graham? What did he care for that child? Or Mrs. Bowen either, for the matter of that? Had he come four thousand miles to be used, to be played with, by them? At this point Colville was aware of the brutal injustice of his mood. They were ladies, both of them, charming and good, and he had been a fool; that was all. It was not the first time he had been a fool for women. An inexpressible bitterness for that old wrong, which, however he had been used to laugh at it and despise it, had made his life solitary and barren, poured upon his soul; it was as if it had happened to him yesterday.

A band of young men burst from one of the narrow streets leading into the piazza and straggled across it, letting their voices flare out upon the silence, and then drop extinct one by one. A whole world of faded associations flushed again in Colville’s heart. This was Italy; this was Florence; and he execrated the hour in which he had dreamed of returning.

VII

The next morning’s sunshine dispersed the black mood of the night before; but enough of Colville’s self-disgust remained to determine him not to let his return to Florence be altogether vain, or his sojourn so idle as it had begun being. The vague purpose which he had cherished of studying the past life and character of the Florentines in their architecture shaped itself anew in the half-hour which he gave himself over his coffee; and he turned it over in his mind with that mounting joy in its capabilities which attends the contemplation of any sort of artistic endeavour. No people had ever more distinctly left the impress of their whole temper in their architecture, or more sharply distinguished their varying moods from period to period in their palaces and temples. He believed that he could not only supply that brief historical sketch of Florence which Mrs. Bowen had lamented the want of, but he could make her history speak an unintelligible, an unmistakeable tongue in every monument of the past, from the Etruscan wall at Fiesole to the cheap, plain, and tasteless shaft raised to commemorate Italian Unity in the next piazza. With sketches from his own pencil, illustrative of points which he could not otherwise enforce, he could make such a book on Florence as did not exist, such a book as no one had yet thought of making. With this object in his mind, making and keeping him young, he could laugh with any one who liked at the vanity of the middle-aged Hoosier who had spoiled a set in the Lancers at Madame Uccelli’s party; he laughed at him now alone, with a wholly impersonal sense of his absurdity.

After breakfast he went without delay to Viesseux’s reading-room, to examine his catalogue, and see what there was in it to his purpose. While he was waiting his turn to pay his subscription, with the people who surrounded the proprietor, half a dozen of the acquaintances he had made at Mrs. Bowen’s passed in and out. Viesseux’s is a place where sooner or later you meet every one you know among the foreign residents at Florence; the natives in smaller proportion resort there too; and Colville heard a lady asking for a book in that perfect Italian which strikes envy to the heart of the stranger sufficiently versed in the language to know that he never shall master it. He rather rejoiced in his despair, however, as an earnest of his renewed intellectual life. Henceforth his life would be wholly intellectual. He did not regret his little excursion into society; it had shown him with dramatic sharpness how unfit for it he was.

“Good morning!” said some one in a bland undertone full of a pleasant recognition of the claims to quiet of a place where some others were speaking in their ordinary tones.

Colville looked round on the Rev. Mr. Waters, and took his friendly hand. “Good morning — glad to see you,” he answered.

“Are you looking for that short Florentine history for Mrs. Bowen’s little girl?” asked Mr. Waters, inclining his head slightly for the reply. “She mentioned it to me.”

By day Colville remarked more distinctly that the old gentleman was short and slight, with a youthful eagerness in his face surviving on good terms with the grey locks that fell down his temples from under the brim of his soft felt hat. With the boyish sweetness of his looks blended a sort of appreciative shrewdness, which pointed his smiling lips slightly aslant in what seemed the expectation rather than the intention of humour.

“Not exactly,” said Colville, experiencing a difficulty in withholding the fact that in some sort he was just going to write a short Florentine history, and finding a certain pleasure in Mrs. Bowen’s having remembered that he had taken an interest in Effie’s reading. He had a sudden wish to tell Mr. Waters of his plan, but this was hardly the time or place.

They now found themselves face to face with the librarian, and Mr. Waters made a gesture of waiving himself in Colville’s favour.

“No, no!” said the latter; “you had better ask. I am going to put this gentleman through rather an extended course of sprouts.”

The librarian smiled with the helplessness of a foreigner, who knows his interlocutor’s English, but not the meaning of it.

“Oh, I merely wanted to ask,” said Mr. Waters, addressing the librarian, and explaining to Colville, “whether you had received that book on Savonarola yet. The German one.”

“I shall see,” said the librarian, and he went upon a quest that kept him some minutes.

“You’re not thinking of taking Savonarola’s life, I suppose?” suggested Colville.

“Oh no. Villari’s book has covered the whole ground for ever, it seems to me. It’s a wonderful book. You’ve read it?”

“Yes. It’s a thing that makes you feel that, after all, the Italians have only to make a real effort in any direction, and they go ahead of everybody else. What biography of the last twenty years can compare with it?”

“You’re right, sir — you’re right,” cried the old man enthusiastically. “They’re a gifted race, a people of genius.”

“I wish for their own sakes they’d give their minds a little to generalship,” said Colville, pressed by the facts to hedge somewhat. “They did get so badly smashed in their last war, poor fellows.”

“Oh, I don’t think I should like them any better if they were better soldiers. Perhaps the lesson of noble endurance that they’ve given our times is all that we have the right to demand of them in the way of heroism; no one can say they lack courage. And sometimes it seems to me that in simply outgrowing the different sorts of despotism that had fastened upon them, till their broken bonds fell away without positive effort on their part, they showed a greater sublimity than if they had violently conquered their freedom. Most nations sink lower and lower under tyranny; the Italians grew steadily more and more civilised, more noble, more gentle, more grand. It was a wonderful spectacle — like a human soul perfected through suffering and privation. Every period of their history is full of instruction. I find my ancestral puritanism particularly appealed to by the puritanism of Savonarola.”

“Then Villari hasn’t satisfied you that Savonarola wasn’t a Protestant?”

“Oh yes, he has. I said his puritanism. Just now I’m interested in justifying his failure to myself, for it’s one of the things in history that I’ve found it hardest to accept. But no doubt his puritanic state fell because it was dreary and ugly, as the puritanic state always has been. It makes its own virtues intolerable; puritanism won’t let you see how good and beautiful the Puritans often are. It was inevitable that Savonarola’s enemies should misunderstand and hate him.”

“You are one of the last men I should have expected to find among the Arrabiati,” said Colville.

“Oh, there’s a great deal to be said for the Florentine Arrabiati, as well as for the English Malignants, though the Puritans in neither case would have known how to say it. Savonarola perished because he was excessive. I am studying him in this aspect; it is fresh ground. It is very interesting to inquire just at what point a man’s virtues become mischievous and intolerable.”

These ideas interested Colville; he turned to them with relief from the sense of his recent trivialities; in this old man’s earnestness he found support and encouragement in the new course he had marked out for himself. Sometimes it had occurred to him not only that he was too old for the interests of his youth at forty, but that there was no longer time for him to take up new ones. He considered Mr. Waters’s grey hairs, and determined to be wiser. “I should like to talk these things over with you — and some other things,” he said.

The librarian came toward them with the book for Mr. Waters, who was fumbling near-sightedly in his pocket-book for his card. “I shall be very happy to see you at my room,” he said. “Ah, thank you,” he added, taking his book, with a simple relish as if it were something whose pleasantness was sensible to the touch. He gave Colville the scholar’s far-off look as he turned to go: he was already as remote as the fifteenth century through the magic of the book, which he opened and began to read at once. Colville stared after him; he did not wish to come to just that yet, either. Life, active life, life of his own day, called to him; he had been one of its busiest children: could he turn his back upon it for any charm or use that was in the past? Again that unnerving doubt, that paralysing distrust, beset him, and tempted him to curse the day in which he had returned to this outworn Old World. Idler on its modern surface, or delver in its deep-hearted past, could he reconcile himself to it? What did he care for the Italians of to-day, or the history of the Florentines as expressed in their architectural monuments? It was the problems of the vast, tumultuous American life, which he had turned his back on, that really concerned him. Later he might take up the study that fascinated yonder old man, but for the present it was intolerable.

He was no longer young, that was true; but with an ache of old regret he felt that he had not yet lived his life, that his was a baffled destiny, an arrested fate. A lady came up and took his turn with the librarian, and Colville did not stay for another. He went out and walked down the Lung’ Arno toward the Cascine. The sun danced on the river, and bathed the long line of pale buff and grey houses that followed its curve, and ceased in the mist of leafless tree-tops where the Cascine began. It was not the hour of the promenade, and there was little driving; but the sidewalks were peopled thickly enough with persons, in groups, or singly, who had the air of straying aimlessly up or down, with no purpose but to be in the sun, after the rainy weather of the past week. There were faces of invalids, wistful and thin, and here and there a man, muffled to the chin, lounged feebly on the parapet and stared at the river. Colville hastened by them; they seemed to claim him as one of their ailing and aging company, and just then he was in the humour of being very young and strong.

A carriage passed before him through the Cascine gates, and drove down the road next the river. He followed, and when it had got a little way it stopped at the roadside, and a lady and little girl alighted, who looked about and caught sight of him, and then obviously waited for him to come up with them. It was Imogene and Effie Bowen, and the young girl called to him: “We thought it was you. Aren’t you astonished to find us here at this hour?” she demanded, as soon as he came up, and gave him her hand. “Mrs. Bowen sent us for our health — or Effie’s health — and I was just making the man stop and let us out for a little walk.”

“My health is very much broken too, Miss Effie,” said Colville. “Will you let me walk with you?” The child smiled, as she did at Colville’s speeches, which she apparently considered all jokes, but diplomatically referred the decision to Imogene with an upward glance.

“We shall be very glad indeed,” said the girl.

“That’s very polite of you. But Miss Effie makes no effort to conceal her dismay,” said Colville.

The little girl smiled again, and her smile was so like the smile of Lina Ridgely, twenty years ago, that his next words were inevitably tinged with reminiscence.

“Does one still come for one’s health to the Cascine? When I was in Florence before, there was no other place if one went to look for it with young ladies — the Cascine or the Boboli Gardens. Do they keep the fountain of youth turned on here during the winter still?”

“I’ve never seen it,” said Imogene gaily.

“Of course not. You never looked for it. Neither did I when I was here before. But it wouldn’t escape me now.”

Since he had met them he had aged again, in spite of his resolutions to the contrary; somehow, beside their buoyancy and bloom, the youth in his heart faded.

Imogene had started forward as soon as he joined them, and Colville, with Effie’s gloved hand stolen shyly in his, was finding it quite enough to keep up with her in her elastic advance.

She wore a long habit of silk, whose fur-trimmed edge wandered diagonally across her breast and down to the edge of her walking dress. To Colville, whom her girlish slimness in her ball costume had puzzled after his original impressions of Junonian abundance, she did not so much dwindle as seem to vanish from the proportions his visions had assigned her that first night when he saw her standing before the mirror. In this outdoor avatar, this companionship with the sun and breeze, she was new to him again, and he found himself searching his consciousness for his lost acquaintance with her, and feeling as if he knew her less and less. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very distinctive individuality; perhaps at her age no woman has, but waits for it to come to her through life, through experience. She was an expression of youth, of health, of beauty, and of the moral loveliness that comes from a fortunate combination of these; but beyond this she was elusive in a way that seemed to characterise her even materially. He could not make anything more of the mystery as he walked at her side, and he went thinking — formlessly, as people always think — that with the child or with her mother he would have had a community of interest and feeling which he lacked with this splendid girlhood! he was both too young and too old for it; and then, while he answered this or that to Imogene’s talk aptly enough, his mind went back to the time when this mystery was no mystery, or when he was contemporary with it, and if he did not understand it, at least accepted it as if it wore the most natural thing in the world. It seemed a longer time now since it had been in his world than it was since he was a child.

“Should you have thought,” she asked, turning her face back toward him, “that it would be so hot in the sun to-day? Oh, that beautiful river! How it twists and writhes along! Do you remember that sonnet of Longfellow’s — the one he wrote in Italian about the Ponte Vecchio, and the Arno twisting like a dragon underneath it? They say that Hawthorne used to live in a villa just behind the hill over there; we’re going to look it up as soon as the weather is settled. Don’t you think his books are perfectly fascinating?”

“Yes,” said Colville; “only I should want a good while to say it.”

“I shouldn’t!” retorted the girl. “When you’ve said fascinating, you’ve said everything. There’s no other word for them. Don’t you like to talk about the books you’ve read?”

“I would if I could remember the names of the characters. But I get them mixed up.”

“Oh, I never do! I remember the least one of them, and all they do and say.”

“I used to.”

“It seems to me you used to do everything.”

“It seems to me as if I did.”

 “‘I remember, when I think,
   That my youth was half divine.’”

“Oh, Tennyson — yes! He’s fascinating. Don’t you think he’s fascinating?”

“Very,” said Colville. He was wondering whether this were the kind of talk that he thought was literary when he was a young fellow.

“How perfectly weird the ‘Vision of Sin’ is!” Imogene continued. “Don’t you like weird things?”

“Weird things?” Colville reflected. “Yes; but I don’t see very much in them any more. The fact is, they don’t seem to come to anything in particular.”

“Oh, I think they do! I’ve had dreams that I’ve lived on for days. Do you ever have prophetic dreams?”

“Yes; but they never come true. When they do, I know that I didn’t have them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we are all so fond of the marvellous that we can’t trust ourselves about any experience that seems supernatural. If a ghost appeared to me I should want him to prove it by at least two other reliable, disinterested witnesses before I believed my own account of the matter.”

“Oh!” cried the girl, half puzzled, half amused. “Then of course you don’t believe in ghosts?”

“Yes; I expect to be one myself some day. But I’m in no hurry to mingle with them.”

Imogene smiled vaguely, as if the talk pleased her, even when it mocked the fancies and whims which, after so many generations that have indulged them, she was finding so fresh and new in her turn.

“Don’t you like to walk by the side of a river?” she asked, increasing her eager pace a little. “I feel as if it were bearing me along.”

“I feel as if I were carrying it,” said Colville. “It’s as fatiguing as walking on railroad ties.”

“Oh, that’s too bad!” cried the girl. “How can you be so prosaic? Should you ever have believed that the sun could be so hot in January? And look at those ridiculous green hillsides over the river there! Don’t you like it to be winter when it is winter?”

She did not seem to have expected anything from Colville but an impulsive acquiescence, but she listened while he defended the mild weather. “I think it’s very well for Italy,” he said. “It has always seemed to me — that is, it seems to me now for the first time, but one has to begin the other way — as if the seasons here had worn themselves out like the turbulent passions of the people. I dare say the winter was much fiercer in the times of the Bianchi and Neri.”

“Oh, how delightful! Do you really believe that?”

“No, I don’t know that I do. But I shouldn’t have much difficulty in proving it, I think, to the sympathetic understanding.”

“I wish you would prove it to mine. It sounds so pretty, I’m sure it must be true.”

“Oh, then, it isn’t necessary. I’ll reserve my arguments for Mrs. Bowen.”

“You had better. She isn’t at all romantic. She says it’s very well for me she isn’t — that her being matter-of-fact lets me be as romantic as I like.”

“Then Mrs. Bowen isn’t as romantic as she would like to be if she hadn’t charge of a romantic young lady?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. Dear me! I’d no idea it could be so hot in January.” As they strolled along beside the long hedge of laurel, the carriage slowly following them at a little distance, the sun beat strong upon the white road, blotched here and there with the black irregular shadows of the ilexes. The girl undid the pelisse across her breast, with a fine impetuosity, and let it swing open as she walked. She stopped suddenly. “Hark! What bird was that?”

“‘It was the nightingale, and not the lark,’” suggested Colville lazily.

“Oh, don’t you think Romeo and Juliet is divine?” demanded Imogene, promptly dropping the question of the bird.

“I don’t know about Romeo,” returned Colville, “but it’s sometimes occurred to me that Juliet was rather forth-putting.”

“You know she wasn’t. It’s my favourite play. I could go every night. It’s perfectly amazing to me that they can play anything else.”

“You would like it five hundred nights in the year, like Hazel Kirke? That would be a good deal of Romeo, not to say Juliet.”

“They ought to do it out of respect to Shakespeare. Don’t you like Shakespeare?”

“Well, I’ve seen the time when I preferred Alexander Smith,” said Colville evasively.

“Alexander Smith? Who in the world is Alexander Smith?”

“How recent you are! Alexander Smith was an immortal who flourished about the year 1850.”

“That was before I was born. How could I remember him? But I don’t feel so very recent for all that.”

“Neither do I, this morning,” said Colville. “I was up at one of Pharaoh’s balls last night, and I danced too much.”

He gave Imogene a droll glance, and then bent it upon Effie’s discreet face. The child dropped her eyes with a blush like her mother’s, having first sought provisional counsel of Imogene, who turned away. He rightly inferred that they all had been talking him over at breakfast, and he broke into a laugh which they joined in, but Imogene said nothing in recognition of the fact.

With what he felt to be haste for his relief she said, “Don’t you hate to be told to read a book?”

“I used to — quarter of a century ago,” said Colville, recognising that this was the way young people talked, even then.

“Used to?” she repeated. “Don’t you now?”

“No; I’m a great deal more tractable now. I always say that I shall get the book out of the library. I draw the line at buying. I still hate to buy a book that people recommend.”

“What kind of books do you like to buy?”

“Oh, no kind. I think we ought to get all our books out of the library.”

“Do you never like to talk in earnest?”

“Well, not often,” said Colville. “Because, if you do, you can’t say with a good conscience afterward that you were only in fun.”

“Oh! And do you always like to talk so that you can get out of things afterward?”

“No. I didn’t say that, did I?”

“Very nearly, I should think.”

“Then I’m glad I didn’t quite.”

“I like people to be outspoken — to say everything they think,” said the girl, regarding him with a puzzled look.

“Then I foresee that I shall become a favourite,” answered Colville. “I say a great deal more than I think.”

She looked at him again with envy, with admiration, qualifying her perplexity. They had come to a point where some moss-grown, weather-beaten statues stood at the corners of the road that traversed the bosky stretch between the avenues of the Cascine. “Ah, how beautiful they are!” he said, halting, and giving himself to the rapture that a blackened garden statue imparts to one who beholds it from the vantage-ground of sufficient years and experience.

“Do you remember that story of Heine’s,” he resumed, after a moment, “of the boy who steals out of the old castle by moonlight, and kisses the lips of the garden statue, fallen among the rank grass of the ruinous parterres? And long afterward, when he looks down on the sleep of the dying girl where she lies on the green sofa, it seems to him that she and that statue are the same?”

“Oh!” deeply sighed the young girl. “No, I never read it. Tell me what it is. I must read it.”

“The rest is all talk — very good talk; but I doubt whether it would interest you. He goes on to talk of a great many things — of the way Bellini spoke French, for example. He says it was bloodcurdling, horrible, cataclysmal. He brought out the poor French words and broke them upon the wheel, till you thought the whole world must give way with a thunder-crash. A dead hush reigned in the room; the women did not know whether to faint or fly; the men looked down at their pantaloons, and tried to realise what they had on.”

“Oh, how perfectly delightful! how shameful!” cried the girl. “I must read it. What is it in? What is the name of the story?”

“It isn’t a story,” said Colville. “Did you ever see anything lovelier than these statues?”

“No,” said Imogene. “Are they good?”

“They are much better than good — they are the very worst rococo.”

“What makes you say they are beautiful, then?”

“Why, don’t you see? They commemorate youth, gaiety, brilliant, joyous life. That’s what that kind of statues was made for — to look on at rich, young, beautiful people and their gallantries; to be danced before by fine ladies and gentlemen playing at shepherd and shepherdesses; to be driven past by marcheses and contessinas flirting in carriages; to be hung with scarfs and wreaths; to be parts of eternal fétes champêtres. Don’t you see how bored they look? When I first came to Italy I should have detested and ridiculed their bad art; but now they’re exquisite — the worse, the better.”

“I don’t know what in the world you do mean,” said Imogene, laughing uneasily.

“Mrs. Bowen would. It’s a pity Mrs. Bowen isn’t here with us. Miss Effie, if I lift you up to one of those statues, will you kindly ask it if it doesn’t remember a young American signor who was here just before the French Revolution? I don’t believe it’s forgotten me.”

“No, no,” said Imogene. “It’s time we were walking back. Don’t you like Scott!” she added. “I should think you would if you like those romantic things. I used to like Scott so much. When I was fifteen I wouldn’t read anything but Scott. Don’t you like Thackeray? Oh, he’s so cynical! It’s perfectly delightful.”

“Cynical?” repeated Colville thoughtfully. “I was looking into The Newcomes the other day, and I thought he was rather sentimental.”

“Sentimental! Why, what an idea! That is the strangest thing I ever heard of. Oh!” she broke in upon her own amazement, “don’t you think Browning’s ‘Statue and the Bust’ is splendid? Mr. Morton read it to us — to Mrs. Bowen, I mean.”

Colville resented this freedom of Mr. Morion’s, he did not know just why; then his pique was lost in sarcastic recollection of the time when he too used to read poems to ladies. He had read that poem to Lina Ridgely and the other one.

“Mrs. Bowen asked him to read it,” Imogene continued.

“Did she?” asked Colville pensively.

“And then we discussed it afterward. We had a long discussion. And then he read us the ‘Legend of Pornic,’ and we had a discussion about that. Mrs. Bowen says it was real gold they found in the coffin; but I think it was the girl’s ‘gold hair.’ I don’t know which Mr. Morion thought. Which do you? Don’t you think the ‘Legend of Pornic’ is splendid?”

“Yes, it’s a great poem, and deep,” said Colville. They had come to a place where the bank sloped invitingly to the river. “Miss Effie,” he asked, “wouldn’t you like to go down and throw stones into the Arno? That’s what a river is for,” he added, as the child glanced toward Imogene for authorisation, “to have stones thrown into it.”

“Oh, let us!” cried Imogene, rushing down to the brink. “I don’t want to throw stones into it, but to get near it — to get near to any bit of nature. They do pen you up so from it in Europe!” She stood and watched Colville skim stones over the current. “When you stand by the shore of a swift river like this, or near a railroad train when it comes whirling by, don’t you ever have a morbid impulse to fling yourself forward?”

“Not at my time of life,” said Colville, stooping to select a flat stone. “Morbid impulses are one of the luxuries of youth.” He threw the stone, which skipped triumphantly far out into the stream. “That was beautiful, wasn’t it, Miss Effie?”

“Lovely!” murmured the child.

He offered her a flat pebble. “Would you like to try one?”

“It would spoil my gloves,” she said, in deprecating refusal.

“Let me try it!” cried Imogene. “I’m not afraid of my gloves.”

Colville yielded the pebble, looking at her with the thought of how intoxicating he should once have found this bit of wilful abandon, but feeling rather sorry for it now. “Oh, perhaps not?” he said, laying his hand upon hers, and looking into her eyes.

She returned his look, and then she dropped the pebble and put her hand back in her muff, and turned and ran up the bank. “There’s the carriage. It’s time we should be going.” At the top of the bank she became a mirror of dignity, a transparent mirror to his eye. “Are you going back to town, Mr. Colville?” she asked, with formal state. “We could set you down anywhere!”

“Thank you, Miss Graham. I shall be glad to avail myself of your very kind offer. Allow me.” He handed her ceremoniously to the carriage; he handed Effie Bowen even more ceremoniously to the carriage, holding his hat in one hand while he offered the other. Then he mounted to the seat in front of them. “The weather has changed,” he said.

Imogene hid her face in her muff, and Effie Bowen bowed hers against Imogene’s shoulder.

A sense of the girl’s beauty lingered in Colville’s thought all day, and recurred to him again and again; and the ambitious intensity and enthusiasm of her talk came back in touches of amusement and compassion. How divinely young it all was, and how lovely! He patronised it from a height far aloof.

He was not in the frame of mind for the hotel table, and he went to lunch, at a restaurant. He chose a simple trattoria, the first he came to, and he took his seat at one of the bare, rude tables, where the joint saucers for pepper and salt, and a small glass for toothpicks, with a much-scraped porcelain box for matches, expressed an uncorrupted Florentinity of custom. But when he gave his order in offhand Italian, the waiter answered in the French which waiters get together for the traveller’s confusion in Italy, and he resigned himself to whatever chance of acquaintance might befall him. The place had a companionable smell of stale tobacco, and the dim light showed him on the walls of a space dropped a step or two lower, at the end of the room, a variety of sketches and caricatures. A waiter was laying a large table in this space, and when Colville came up to examine the drawings he jostled him, with due apologies, in the haste of a man working against time for masters who will brook no delay. He was hurrying still when a party of young men came in and took their places at the table, and began to rough him for his delay. Colville could recognise several of them in the vigorous burlesques on the walls, and as others dropped in the grotesque portraitures made him feel as if he had seen them before. They all talked at once, each man of his own interests, except when they joined in a shout of mockery and welcome for some new-comer. Colville, at his risotto, almost the room’s length away, could hear what they thought, one and another, of Botticelli and Michelangelo; of old Piloty’s things at Munich; of the dishes they had served to them, and of the quality of the Chianti; of the respective merits of German and Italian tobacco; of whether Inglehart had probably got to Venice yet; of the personal habits of Billings, and of the question whether the want of modelling in Simmons’s nose had anything to do with his style of snoring; of the overrated colouring of some of those Venetian fellows; of the delicacy of Mino da Fiesole, and of the genius of Babson’s tailor. Babson was there to defend the cut of his trousers, and Billings and Simmons were present to answer for themselves at the expense of the pictures of those who had called their habits and features into question. When it came to this all the voices joined in jolly uproar. Derision and denial broke out of the tumult, and presently they were all talking quietly of a reception which some of them were at the day before. Then Colville heard one of them saying that he would like a chance to paint some lady whose name he did not catch, and “She looks awfully sarcastic,” one of the young fellows said.

“They say she is,” said another. “They say she’s awfully intellectual.”

“Boston?” queried a third.

“No, Kalamazoo. The centre of culture is out there now.”

“She knows how to dress, anyhow,” said the first commentator. “I wonder what Parker would talk to her about when he was painting her. He’s never read anything but Poe’s ‘Ullalume.’”

“Well, that’s a good subject— ‘Ullalume.’”

“I suppose she’s read it?”

“She’s read ‘most everything, they say.”

“What’s an Ullalume, anyway, Parker?”

One of the group sprang up from the table and drew on the wall what he labelled “An Ullalume.” Another rapidly depicted Parker in the moment of sketching a young lady; her portrait had got as far as the eyes and nose when some one protested: “Oh, hello! No personalities.”

The draughtsman said, “Well, all right!” and sat down again.

“Hall talked with her the most. What did she say, Hall?”

“Hall can’t remember words in three syllables, but he says it was mighty brilliant and mighty deep.”

“They say she’s a niece of Mrs. Bowen’s. She’s staying with Mrs. Bowen.”

Then it was the wisdom and brilliancy and severity of Imogene Graham that these young men stood in awe of! Colville remembered how the minds of girls of twenty had once dazzled him. “And yes,” he mused, “she must have believed that we were talking literature in the Cascine. Certainly I should have thought it an intellectual time when I was at that age,” he owned to himself with forlorn irony.

The young fellows went on to speak of Mrs. Bowen, whom it seemed they had known the winter before. She had been very polite to them; they praised her as if she were quite an old woman.

“But she must have been a very pretty girl,” one of them put in.

“Well, she has a good deal of style yet.”

“Oh yes, but she never could have been a beauty like the other one.”

On her part, Imogene was very sober when she met Mrs. Bowen, though she had come in flushed and excited from the air and the morning’s adventure. Mrs. Bowen was sitting by the fire, placidly reading; a vase of roses on the little table near her diffused the delicate odour of winter roses through the room; all seemed very still and dim, and of another time, somehow.

Imogene kept away from the fire, sitting down, in the provisional fashion of women, with her things on; but she unbuttoned her pelisse and flung it open. Effie had gone to her room.

“Did you have a pleasant drive?” asked Mrs. Bowen.

“Very,” said the girl.

“Mr. Morton brought you these roses,” continued Mrs. Bowen.

“Oh,” said Imogene, with a cold glance at them.

“The Flemmings have asked us to a party Thursday. There is to be dancing.”

“The Flemmings?”

“Yes.” As if she now saw reason to do so, Mrs. Bowen laid the book face downward in her lap. She yawned a little, with her hand on her mouth. “Did you meet any one you knew?”

“Yes; Mr. Colville.” Mrs. Bowen cut her yawn in half. “We got out to walk in the Cascine, and we saw him coming in at the gate. He came up and asked if he might walk with us.”

“Did you have a pleasant walk?” asked Mrs. Bowen, a breath more chillily than she had asked if they had a pleasant drive.

“Yes, pleasant enough. And then we came back and went down the river bank, and he skipped stones, and we took him to his hotel.”

“Was there anybody you knew in the Cascine?”

“Oh no; the place was a howling wilderness. I never saw it so deserted,” said the girl impatiently. “It was terribly hot walking. I thought I should burn up.”

Mrs. Bowen did not answer anything; she let the book lie in her lap.

“What an odd person Mr. Colville is!” said Imogene, after a moment. “Don’t you think he’s very different from other gentlemen?”

“Why?”

“Oh, he has such a peculiar way of talking.”

“What peculiar way?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Plenty of the young men I see talk cynically, and I do sometimes myself — desperately, don’t you know. But then I know very well we don’t mean anything by it.”

“And do you think Mr. Colville does? Do you think he talks cynically?”

Imogene leaned back in her chair and reflected. “No,” she returned slowly, “I can’t say that he does. But he talks lightly, with a kind of touch and go that makes you feel that he has exhausted all feeling. He doesn’t parade it at all. But you hear between the words, don’t you know, just as you read between the lines in some kinds of poetry. Of course it’s everything in knowing what he’s been through. He’s perfectly unaffected; and don’t you think he’s good?”

“Oh yes,” sighed Mrs. Bowen. “In his way.”

“But he sees through you. Oh, quite! Nothing escapes him, and pretty soon he lets out that he has seen through you, and then you feel so flat! Oh, it’s perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the world to talk as he does.”

“What was your talk all about?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose it would have been called rather intellectual.”

Mrs. Bowen smiled infinitesimally. But after a moment she said gravely, “Mr. Colville is very much older than you. He’s old enough to be your father.”

“Yes, I know that. You feel that he feels old, and it’s perfectly tragical. Sometimes when he turns that slow, dull, melancholy look on you, he seems a thousand years old.”

“I don’t mean that he’s positively old,” said Mrs. Bowen. “He’s only old comparatively.”

“Oh yes; I understand that. And I don’t mean that he really seems a thousand years old. What I meant was, he seems a thousand years off, as if he were still young, and had got left behind somehow. He seems to be on the other side of some impassable barrier, and you want to get over there and help him to our side, but you can’t do it. I suppose his talking in that light way is merely a subterfuge to hide his feeling, to make him forget.”

Mrs. Bowen fingered the edges of her book. “You mustn’t let your fancy run away with you, Imogene,” she said, with a little painful smile.

“Oh, I like to let it run away with me. And when I get such a subject as Mr. Colville, there’s no stopping. I can’t stop, and I don’t wish to stop. Shouldn’t you have thought that he would have been perfectly crushed at the exhibition he made of himself in the Lancers last night? He wasn’t the least embarrassed when he met me, and the only allusion he made to it was to say that he had been up late, and had danced too much. Wasn’t it wonderful he could do it? Oh, if I could do that!”

“I wish he could have avoided the occasion for his bravado,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“I think I was a little to blame, perhaps,” said the girl. “I beckoned him to come and take the vacant place.”

“I don’t see that that was an excuse,” returned Mrs. Bowen primly.

Imogene seemed insensible to the tone, as it concerned herself; it only apparently reminded her of something. “Guess what Mr. Colville said, when I had been silly, and then tried to make up for it by being very dignified all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know. How had you been silly?”

The servant brought in some cards. Imogene caught up the pelisse which she had been gradually shedding as she sat talking to Mrs. Bowen, and ran out of the room by another door.

They did not recur to the subject. But that night, when Mrs. Bowen went to say good night to Effie, after the child had gone to bed, she lingered.

“Effie,” she said at last, in a husky whisper, “what did Imogene say to Mr. Colville to-day that made him laugh?”

“I don’t know,” said the child. “They kept laughing at so many things.”

“Laughing?”

“Yes; he laughed. Do you mean toward the last, when he had been throwing stones into the river?”

“It must have been then.”

The child stretched herself drowsily. “Oh I couldn’t understand it all. She wanted to throw a stone in the river, but he told her she had better not. But that didn’t make him laugh. She was so very stiff just afterward that he said the weather had changed, and that made us laugh.”

“Was that all?”

“We kept laughing ever so long. I never saw any one like Mr. Colville. How queerly the fire shines on your face! It gives you such a beautiful complexion.”

“Does it?”

“Yes, lovely.” The child’s mother stooped over and kissed her. “You’re the prettiest mamma in the world,” she said, throwing her arms round her neck. “Sometimes I can’t tell whether Imogene is prettier or not, but to-night I’m certain you are. Do you like to have me think that?”

“Yes — yes. But don’t pull me down so; you hurt my neck. Good night.”

The child let her go. “I haven’t said my prayer yet, mamma. I was thinking.”

“Well, say it now, then,” said the mother gently.

When the child had finished she turned upon her cheek. “Good night, mamma.”

Mrs. Bowen went about the room a little while, picking up its pretty disorder. Then she sat down in a chair by the hearth, where a log was still burning. The light of the flame flickered upon her face, and threw upon the ceiling a writhing, fantastic shadow, the odious caricature of her gentle beauty.

VIII

In that still air of the Florentine winter, time seems to share the arrest of the natural forces, the repose of the elements. The pale blue sky is frequently overcast, and it rains two days out of five; sometimes, under extraordinary provocation from the north a snow-storm whirls along under the low grey dome, and whitens the brown roofs, where a growth of spindling weeds and grass clothes the tiles the whole year round, and shows its delicate green above the gathered flakes. But for the most part the winds are laid, and the sole change is from quiet sun to quiet shower. This at least is the impression which remains in the senses of the sojourning stranger, whose days slip away with so little difference one from another that they seem really not to have passed, but, like the grass that keeps the hillsides fresh round Florence all the winter long, to be waiting some decisive change of season before they begin.

The first of the Carnival sights that marked the lapse of a month since his arrival took Colville by surprise. He could not have believed that it was February yet if it had not been for the straggling maskers in armour whom he met one day in Via Borgognissanti, with their visors up for their better convenience in smoking. They were part of the chorus at one of the theatres, and they were going about to eke out their salaries with the gifts of people whose windows the festival season privileged them to play under. The silly spectacle stirred Colville’s blood a little, as any sort of holiday preparation was apt to do. He thought that it afforded him a fair occasion to call at Palazzo Pinti, where he had not been so much of late as in the first days of his renewed acquaintance with Mrs. Bowen. He had at one time had the fancy that Mrs. Bowen was cool toward him. He might very well have been mistaken in this; in fact, she had several times addressed him the politest reproaches for not coming, but he made some evasion, and went only on the days when she was receiving other people, and when necessarily he saw very little of the family.

Miss Graham was always very friendly, but always very busy, drawing tea from the samovar, and looking after others. Effie Bowen dropped her eyes in re-established strangeness when she brought the basket of cake to him. There was one moment when he suspected that he had been talked over in family council, and put under a certain regimen. But he had no proof of this, and it had really nothing to do with his keeping away, which was largely accidental. He had taken up, with as much earnestness as he could reasonably expect of himself, that notion of studying the architectural expression of Florentine character at the different periods. He had spent a good deal of money in books, he had revived his youthful familiarity with the city, and he had made what acquaintance he could with people interested in such matters. He met some of these in the limited but very active society in which he mingled daily and nightly. After the first strangeness to any sort of social life had worn off, he found himself very fond of the prompt hospitalities which his introduction at Mrs. Bowen’s had opened to him. His host — or more frequently it was his hostess — had sometimes merely an apartment at a hotel; perhaps the family was established in one of the furnished lodgings which stretch the whole length of the Lung’ Arno on either hand, and abound in all the new streets approaching the Cascine, and had set up the simple and facile housekeeping of the sojourner in Florence for a few months; others had been living in the villa or the palace they had taken for years.

The more recent and transitory people expressed something of the prevailing English and American aestheticism in the decoration of their apartments, but the greater part accepted the Florentine drawing-room as their landlord had imagined it for them, with furniture and curtains in yellow satin, a cheap ingrain carpet thinly covering the stone floor, and a fire of little logs ineffectually blazing on the hearth, and flickering on the carved frames of the pictures on the wall and the nakedness of the frescoed allegories in the ceiling. Whether of longer or shorter stay, the sojourners were bound together by a common language and a common social tradition; they all had a Day, and on that day there was tea and bread and butter for every comer. They had one another to dine; there were evening parties, with dancing and without dancing. Colville even went to a fancy ball, where he was kept in countenance by several other Florentines of the period of Romola. At all these places he met nearly the same people, whose alien life in the midst of the native community struck him as one of the phases of modern civilisation worthy of note, if not particular study; for he fancied it destined to a wider future throughout Europe, as the conditions in England and America grow more tiresome and more onerous. They seemed to see very little of Italian society, and to be shut out from practical knowledge of the local life by the terms upon which they had themselves insisted. Our race finds its simplified and cheapened London or New York in all its Continental resorts now, but nowhere has its taste been so much studied as in Italy, and especially in Florence. It was not, perhaps, the real Englishman or American who had been considered, but a forestière conventionalised from the Florentine’s observation of many Anglo-Saxons. But he had been so well conjectured that he was hemmed round with a very fair illusion of his national circumstances.

It was not that he had his English or American doctor to prescribe for him when sick, and his English or American apothecary to compound his potion; it was not that there was an English tailor and an American dentist, an English bookseller and an English baker, and chapels of every shade of Protestantism, with Catholic preaching in English every Sunday. These things were more or less matters of necessity, but Colville objected that the barbers should offer him an American shampoo; that the groceries should abound in English biscuit and our own canned fruit and vegetables, and that the grocers’ clerks should be ambitious to read the labels of the Boston baked beans. He heard — though he did not prove this by experiment — that the master of a certain trattoria had studied the doughnut of New England till he had actually surpassed the original in the qualities that have undermined our digestion as a people. But above all it interested him to see that intense expression of American civilisation, the horse-car, triumphing along the magnificent avenues that mark the line of the old city walls; and he recognised an instinctive obedience to an abtruse natural law in the fact that whereas the omnibus, which the Italians have derived from the English, was not filled beyond its seating capacity, the horse-car was overcrowded without and within at Florence, just as it is with us who invented it.

“I wouldn’t mind even that,” he said one day to the lady who was drawing him his fifth or sixth cup of tea for that afternoon, and with whom he was naturally making this absurd condition of things a matter of personal question; “but you people here pass your days in a round of unbroken English, except when you talk with your servants. I’m not sure you don’t speak English with the shop people. I can hardly get them to speak Italian to me.”

“Perhaps they think you can speak English better,” said the lady.

This went over Florence; in a week it was told to Colville as something said to some one else. He fearlessly reclaimed it as said to himself, and this again was told. In the houses where he visited he had the friendly acceptance of any intelligent and reasonably agreeable person who comes promptly and willingly when he is asked, and seems always to have enjoyed himself when he goes away. But besides this sort of general favour, he enjoyed a very pleasing little personal popularity which came from his interest in other people, from his good-nature, and from his inertness. He slighted no acquaintance, and talked to every one with the same apparent wish to be entertaining. This was because he was incapable of the cruelty of open indifference when his lot was cast with a dull person, and also because he was mentally too lazy to contrive pretences for getting away; besides he did not really find anybody altogether a bore, and he had no wish to shine. He listened without shrinking to stories that he had heard before, and to things that had already been said to him; as has been noted, he had himself the habit of repeating his ideas with the recklessness of maturity, for he had lived long enough to know that this can be done with almost entire safety.

He haunted the studios a good deal, and through a retrospective affinity with art, and a human sympathy with the sacrifice which it always involves, he was on friendly terms with sculptors and painters who were not in every case so friendly with one another. More than once he saw the scars of old rivalries, and he might easily have been an adherent of two or three parties. But he tried to keep the freedom of the different camps without taking sides; and he felt the pathos of the case when they all told the same story of the disaster which the taste for bric-à-brac had wrought to the cause of art; how people who came abroad no longer gave orders for statues and pictures, but spent their money on curtains and carpets, old chests and chairs, and pots and pans. There were some among these artists whom he had known twenty years before in Florence, ardent and hopeful beginners; and now the backs of their grey or bald heads, as they talked to him with their faces towards their work, and a pencil or a pinch of clay held thoughtfully between their fingers, appealed to him as if he had remained young and prosperous, and they had gone forward to age and hard work. They were very quaint at times. They talked the American slang of the war days and of the days before the war; without a mastery of Italian, they often used the idioms of that tongue in their English speech. They were dim and vague about the country, with whose affairs they had kept up through the newspapers. Here and there one thought he was going home very soon; others had finally relinquished all thoughts of return. These had, perhaps without knowing it, lost the desire to come back; they cowered before the expensiveness of life in America, and doubted of a future with which, indeed, only the young can hopefully grapple. But in spite of their accumulated years, and the evil times on which they had fallen, Colville thought them mostly very happy men, leading simple and innocent lives in a world of the ideal, and rich in the inexhaustible beauty of the city, the sky, the air. They all, whether they were ever going back or not, were fervent Americans, and their ineffaceable nationality marked them, perhaps, all the more strongly for the patches of something alien that overlaid it in places. They knew that he was or had been a newspaper man; but if they secretly cherished the hope that he would bring them to the dolce lume of print, they never betrayed it; and the authorship of his letter about the American artists in Florence, which he printed in the American Register at Paris, was not traced to him for a whole week.

Colville was a frequent visitor of Mr. Waters, who had a lodging in Piazza San Marco, of the poverty which can always be decent in Italy. It was bare, but for the books that furnished it; with a table for his writing, on a corner of which he breakfasted, a wide sofa with cushions in coarse white linen that frankly confessed itself a bed by night, and two chairs of plain Italian walnut; but the windows, which had no sun, looked out upon the church and the convent sacred to the old Socinian for the sake of the meek, heroic mystic whom they keep alive in all the glory of his martyrdom. No two minds could well have been further apart than the New England minister and the Florentine monk, and no two souls nearer together, as Colville recognised with a not irreverent smile.

When the old man was not looking up some point of his saint’s history in his books, he was taking with the hopefulness of youth and the patience of age a lesson in colloquial Italian from his landlady’s daughter, which he pronounced with a scholarly scrupulosity and a sincere atonic Massachusetts accent. He practised the language wherever he could, especially at the trattoria where he dined, and where he made occasions to detain the waiter in conversation. They humoured him, out of their national good-heartedness and sympathy, and they did what they could to realise a strange American dish for him on Sundays — a combination of stockfish and potatoes boiled, and then fried together in small cakes. They revered him as a foreign gentleman of saintly amiability and incomprehensible preferences; and he was held in equal regard at the next green-grocer’s where he spent every morning five centessimi for a bunch of radishes and ten for a little pat of butter to eat with his bread and coffee; he could not yet accustom himself to mere bread and coffee for breakfast, though he conformed as completely as he could to the Italian way of living. He respected the abstemiousness of the race; he held that it came from a spirituality of nature to which the North was still strange, with all its conscience and sense of individual accountability. He contended that he never suffered in his small dealings with these people from the dishonesty which most of his countrymen complained of; and he praised their unfailing gentleness of manner; this could arise only from goodness of heart, which was perhaps the best kind of goodness after all.

None of these humble acquaintance of his could well have accounted for the impression they all had that he was some sort of ecclesiastic. They could never have understood — nor, for that matter, could any one have understood through European tradition — the sort of sacerdotal office that Mr. Waters had filled so long in the little deeply book-clubbed New England village where he had outlived most of his flock, till one day he rose in the midst of the surviving dyspeptics and consumptives and, following the example of Mr. Emerson, renounced his calling for ever. By that time even the pale Unitarianism thinning out into paler doubt was no longer tenable with him. He confessed that while he felt the Divine goodness more and more, he believed that it was a mistake to preach any specific creed or doctrine, and he begged them to release him from their service. A young man came to fill his place in their pulpit, but he kept his place in their hearts. They raised a subscription of seventeen hundred dollars and thirty-five cents; another being submitted to the new button manufacturer, who had founded his industry in the village, he promptly rounded it out to three thousand, and Mr. Waters came to Florence. His people parted with him in terms of regret as delicate as they were awkward, and their love followed him. He corresponded regularly with two or three ladies, and his letters were sometimes read from his pulpit.

Colville took the Piazza San Marco in on his way to Palazzo Pinti on the morning when he had made up his mind to go there, and he stood at the window looking out with the old man, when some more maskers passed through the place — two young fellows in old Florentine dress, with a third habited as a nun.

“Ah,” said the old man gently, “I wish they hadn’t introduced the nun! But I suppose they can’t help signalising their escape from the domination of the Church on all occasions. It’s a natural reaction. It will all come right in time.”

“You preach the true American gospel,” said Colville.

“Of course; there is no other gospel. That is the gospel.”

“Do you suppose that Savonarola would think it had all come out right,” asked Colville, a little maliciously, “if he could look from the window with us here and see the wicked old Carnival, that he tried so hard to kill four hundred years ago, still alive? And kicking?” he added, in cognisance of the caper of one of the maskers.

“Oh yes; why not? By this time he knows that his puritanism was all a mistake, unless as a thing for the moment only. I should rather like to have Savonarola here with us; he would find these costumes familiar; they are of his time. I shall make a point of seeing all I can of the Carnival, as part of my study of Savonarola, if nothing else.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to give yourself limitations,” said Colville, as one of the maskers threw his arm round the mock-nun’s neck. But the old man did not see this, and Colville did not feel it necessary to explain himself.

The maskers had passed out of the piazza, now, and “Have you seen our friends at Palazzo Pinti lately?” said Mr. Waters.

“Not very,” said Colville. “I was just on my way there.”

“I wish you would make them my compliments. Such a beautiful young creature.”

“Yes,” said Colville; “she is certainly a beautiful girl.”

“I meant Mrs. Bowen,” returned the old man quietly.

“Oh, I thought you meant Miss Graham. Mrs. Bowen is my contemporary, and so I didn’t think of her when you said young. I should have called her pretty rather than beautiful.”

“No; she’s beautiful. The young girl is good-looking — I don’t deny that; but she is very crude yet.”

Colville laughed. “Crude in looks? I should have said Miss Graham was rather crude in mind, though I’m not sure I wouldn’t have stopped at saying young.”

“No,” mildly persisted the old man; “she couldn’t be crude in mind without being crude in looks.”

“You mean,” pursued Colville, smiling, but not wholly satisfied, “that she hasn’t a lovely nature?”

“You never can know what sort of nature a young girl has. Her nature depends so much upon that of the man whose fate she shares.”

“The woman is what the man makes her? That is convenient for the woman, and relieves her of all responsibility.”

“The man is what the woman makes him, too, but not so much so. The man was cast into a deep sleep, you know — —”

“And the woman was what he dreamed her. I wish she were.”

“In most cases she is,” said Mr. Waters.

They did not pursue the matter. The truth that floated in the old minister’s words pleased Colville by its vagueness, and flattered the man in him by its implication of the man’s superiority. He wanted to say that if Mrs. Bowen were what the late Mr. Bowen had dreamed her, then the late Mr. Bowen, when cast into his deep sleep, must have had Lina Ridgely in his eye. But this seemed to be personalising the fantasy unwarrantably, and pushing it too far. For like reason he forbore to say that if Mr. Waters’s theory were correct, it would be better to begin with some one whom nobody else had dreamed before; then you could be sure at least of not having a wife to somebody else’s mind rather than your own. Once on his way to Palazzo Pinti, he stopped, arrested by a thought that had not occurred to him before in relation to what Mr. Waters had been saying, and then pushed on with the sense of security which is the compensation the possession of the initiative brings to our sex along with many responsibilities. In the enjoyment of this, no man stops to consider the other side, which must wait his initiative, however they mean to meet it.

In the Por San Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shop windows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in white crossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; several children in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among the crowd. He hurried to the Lung’ Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs. Bowen lived, with these holiday sights fresh in his mind. Imogene turned to meet him at the door of the apartment, running from the window where she had left Effie Bowen still gazing.

“We saw you coming,” she said gaily, without waiting to exchange formal greetings. “We didn’t know at first but it might; be somebody else disguised as you. We’ve been watching the maskers go by. Isn’t it exciting?”

“Awfully,” said Colville, going to the window with her, and putting his arm on Effie’s shoulder, where she knelt in a chair looking out. “What have you seen?”

“Oh, only two Spanish students with mandolins,” said Imogene; “but you can see they’re beginning to come.”

“They’ll stop now,” murmured Effie, with gentle disappointment; “it’s commencing to rain.”

“Oh, too bad!” wailed the young girl. But just then two mediaeval men-at-arms came in sight, carrying umbrellas. “Isn’t that too delicious? Umbrellas and chain-armour!”

“You can’t expect them to let their chain-armour get rusty,” said Colville. “You ought to have been with me — minstrels in scale-armour, Florentines of Savonarola’s times, nuns, clowns, demons, fairies — no end to them.”

“It’s very well saying we ought to have been with you; but we can’t go anywhere alone.”

“I didn’t say alone,” said Colville. “Don’t you think Mrs. Bowen would trust you with me to see these Carnival beginnings?” He had not meant at all to do anything of this kind, but that had not prevented his doing it.

“How do we know, when she hasn’t been asked?” said Imogene, with a touch of burlesque dolor, such as makes a dignified girl enchanting, when she permits it to herself. She took Effie’s hand in hers, the child having faced round from the window, and stood smoothing it, with her lovely head pathetically tilted on one side.

“What haven’t I been asked yet?” demanded Mrs. Bowen, coming lightly toward them from a door at the side of the salon. She gave her hand to Colville with the prettiest grace, and a cordiality that brought a flush to her cheek. There had really been nothing between them but a little unreasoned coolness, if it were even so much as that; say rather a dryness, aggravated by time and absence, and now, as friends do, after a thing of that kind, they were suddenly glad to be good to each other.

“Why, you haven’t been asked how you have been this long time,” said Colville.

“I have been wanting to tell you for a whole week,” returned Mrs. Bowen, seating the rest and taking a chair for herself. “Where have you been?”

“Oh, shut up in my cell at Hotel d’Atene, writing a short history of the Florentine people for Miss Effie.”

“Effie, take Mr. Colville’s hat,” said her mother. “We’re going to make you stay to lunch,” she explained to him.

“Is that so?” he asked, with an effect of polite curiosity.

“Yes.” Imogene softly clapped her hands, unseen by Mrs. Bowen, for Colville’s instruction that all was going well. If it delights women to pet an undangerous friend of our sex, to use him like one of themselves, there are no words to paint the soft and flattered content with which his spirit purrs under their caresses. “You must have nearly finished the history,” added Mrs. Bowen.

“Well, I could have finished it,” said Colville, “if I had only begun it. You see, writing a short history of the Florentine people is such quick work that you have to be careful how you actually put pen to paper, or you’re through with it before you’ve had any fun out of it.”

“I think Effie will like to read that kind of history,” said her mother.

The child hung her head, and would not look at Colville; she was still shy with him; his absence must have seemed longer to a child, of course.

At lunch they talked of the Carnival sights that had begun to appear. He told of his call upon Mr. Waters, and of the old minister’s purpose to see all he could of the Carnival in order to judge intelligently of Savonarola’s opposition to it.

“Mr. Waters is a very good man,” said Mrs. Bowen, with the air of not meaning to approve him quite, nor yet to let any notion of his be made fun of in her presence. “But for my part I wish there were not going to be any Carnival; the city will be in such an uproar for the next two weeks.”

“O Mrs. Bowen!” cried Imogene reproachfully; Effie looked at her mother in apparent anxiety lest she should be meaning to put forth an unquestionable power and stop the Carnival.

“The last Carnival, I thought there was never going to be any end to it; I was so glad when Lent came.”

“Glad when Lent came!” breathed Imogene, in astonishment; but she ventured upon nothing more insubordinate, and Colville admired to see this spirited girl as subject to Mrs. Bowen as her own child. There is no reason why one woman should establish another woman over her, but nearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntary submission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are younger and more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion nor the other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards their husbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colville could see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a protégée but as a devotee.

“Oh, I suppose you will have to go through it all,” said Mrs. Bowen, in reward of the girl’s acquiescence.

“You’re rather out of the way of it up here,” said Colville. “You had better let me go about with the young ladies — if you can trust them to the care of an old fellow like me.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’re so very old, at all times,” replied Mrs. Bowen, with a peculiar look, whether indulgent or reproachful he could not quite make out.

But he replied, boldly, in his turn: “I have certainly my moments of being young still; I don’t deny it. There’s always a danger of their occurrence.”

“I was thinking,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a graceful effect of not listening, “that you would let me go too. It would be quite like old times.”

“Only too much honour and pleasure,” returned Colville, “if you will leave out the old times. I’m not particular about having them along.” Mrs. Bowen joined in laughing at the joke, which they had to themselves. “I was only consulting an explicit abhorrence of yours in not asking you to go at first,” he explained.

“Oh yes; I understand that.”

The excellence of the whole arrangement seemed to grow upon Mrs. Bowen. “Of course,” she said, “Imogene ought to see all she can of the Carnival. She may not have another chance, and perhaps if she had, he wouldn’t consent.”

“I’ll engage to get his consent,” said the girl. “What I was afraid of was that I couldn’t get yours, Mrs. Bowen.”

“Am I so severe as that?” asked Mrs. Bowen softly.

“Quite,” replied Imogene.

“Perhaps,” thought Colville, “it isn’t always silent submission.”

For no very good reason that any one could give, the Carnival that year was not a brilliant one. Colville’s party seemed to be always meeting the same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increase in numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they were then a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladies had gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure of looking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that their fantastic and vivid dresses sympathised in a striking way with the architecture of the city, and gave him an effect of Florence which he could not otherwise have had. There came by and by a little attempt at a corso in Via Cerratani and Via Tornabuoni. There were some masks in carriages, and from one they actually threw plaster confetti; half a dozen bare-legged boys ran before and beat one another with bladders, Some people, but not many, watched the show from the windows, and the footways were crowded.

Having proposed that they should see the Carnival together, Colville had made himself responsible for it to the Bowen household. Imogene said, “Well is this the famous Carnival of Florence?”

“It certainly doesn’t compare with the Carnival last year,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“Your reproach is just, Mrs. Bowen,” he acknowledged. “I’ve managed it badly. But you know I’ve been out of practice a great while there in Des Vaches.”

“Oh, poor Mr. Colville!” cried Imogene. “He isn’t altogether to blame.”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Bowen, humouring the joke in her turn. “It seems to me that if he had consulted us a little earlier, he might have done better.”

He drove home with the ladies, and Mrs. Bowen made him stay to tea. As if she felt that he needed to be consoled for the failure of his Carnival, she was especially indulgent with him. She played to him on the piano some of the songs that were in fashion when they were in Florence together before.

Imogene had never heard them; she had heard her mother speak of them. One or two of them were negro songs, such as very pretty young ladies used to sing without harm to themselves or offence to others; but Imogene decided that they were rather rowdy. “Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did you sing such songs? You wouldn’t let Effie!”

“No, I wouldn’t let Effie. The times are changed. I wouldn’t let Effie go to the theatre alone with a young gentleman.”

“The times are changed for the worse,” Colville began. “What harm ever came to a young man from a young lady’s going alone to the theatre with him?”

He stayed till the candles were brought in, and then went away only because, as he said, they had not asked him to stay to dinner.

He came nearly every day, upon one pretext or another, and he met them oftener than that at the teas and on the days of other ladies in Florence; for he was finding the busy idleness of the life very pleasant, and he went everywhere. He formed the habit of carrying flowers to the Palazzo Pinti, excusing himself on the ground that they were so cheap and so abundant as to be impersonal. He brought violets to Effie and roses to Imogene; to Mrs. Bowen he always brought a bunch of the huge purple anemones which grow so abundantly all winter long about Florence. “I wonder why purple anemones?” he asked her one day in presenting them to her.

“Oh, it is quite time I should be wearing purple,” she said gently.

“Ah, Mrs. Bowen!” he reproached her. “Why do I bring purple violets to Miss Effie?”

“You must ask Effie!” said Mrs. Bowen, with a laugh.

After that he stayed away forty-eight hours, and then appeared with a bunch of the red anemones, as large as tulips, which light up the meadow grass when it begins to stir from its torpor in the spring. “They grew on purpose to set me right with you,” he said, “and I saw them when I was in the country.”

It was a little triumph for him, which she celebrated by putting them in a vase on her table, and telling people who exclaimed over them that they were some Mr. Colville gathered in the country. He enjoyed his privileges at her house with the futureless satisfaction of a man. He liked to go about with the Bowens; he was seen with the ladies driving and walking, in most of their promenades. He directed their visits to the churches and the galleries; he was fond of strolling about with Effie’s daintily-gloved little hand in his. He took her to Giocosa’s and treated her to ices; he let her choose from the confectioner’s prettiest caprices in candy; he was allowed to bring the child presents in his pockets. Perhaps he was not as conscientious as he might have been in his behaviour with the little girl. He did what he could to spoil her, or at least to relax the severity of the training she had received; he liked to see the struggle that went on in the mother’s mind against this, and then the other struggle with which she overcame her opposition to it. The worst he did was to teach Effie some picturesque Western phrases, which she used with innocent effectiveness; she committed the crimes against convention which he taught her with all the conventional elegance of her training. The most that he ever gained for her were some concessions in going out in weather that her mother thought unfit, or sitting up for half-hours after her bed-time. He ordered books for her from Goodban’s, and it was Colville now, and not the Rev. Mr. Morton, who read poetry aloud to the ladies on afternoons when Mrs. Bowen gave orders that she and Miss Graham should be denied to all other comers.

It was an intimacy; and society in Florence is not blind, and especially it is not dumb. The old lady who had celebrated Mrs. Bowen to him the first night at Palazzo Pinti led a life of active questions as to what was the supreme attraction to Colville there, and she referred her doubt to every friend with whom she drank tea. She philosophised the situation very scientifically, and if not very conclusively, how few are the absolute conclusions of science upon any point!

“He is a bachelor, and there is a natural affinity between bachelors and widows — much more than if he were a widower too. If he were a widower I should say it was undoubtedly mademoiselle. If he were a little bit younger, I should have no doubt it was madame; but men of that age have such an ambition to marry young girls! I suppose that they think it proves they are not so very old, after all. And certainly he isn’t too old to marry. If he were wise — which he probably isn’t, if he’s like other men in such matters — there wouldn’t be any question about Mrs. Bowen. Pretty creature! And so much sense! Too much for him. Ah, my dear, how we are wasted upon that sex!”

Mrs. Bowen herself treated the affair with masterly frankness. More than once in varying phrase, she said: “You are very good to give us so much of your time, Mr. Colville, and I won’t pretend I don’t know it. You’re helping me out with a very hazardous experiment. When I undertook to see Imogene through a winter in Florence, I didn’t reflect what a very gay time girls have at home, in Western towns especially. But I haven’t heard her breathe Buffalo once. And I’m sure it’s doing her a great deal of good here. She’s naturally got a very good mind; she’s very ambitious to be cultivated. She’s read a good deal, and she’s anxious to know history and art; and your advice and criticism are the greatest possible advantage to her.”

“Thank you,” said Colville, with a fine, remote dissatisfaction. “I supposed I was merely enjoying myself.”

He had lately begun to haunt his banker’s for information in regard to the Carnival balls, with the hope that something might be made out of them.

But either there were to be no great Carnival balls, or it was a mistake to suppose that his banker ought to know about them. Colville went experimentally to one of the people’s balls at a minor theatre, which he found advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing had not begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks and dirty white gloves; men in women’s dresses, with enormous hands; girls as pages; clowns, pantaloons, old women, and the like. They were all very good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, danced contentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzed with each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery on exhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold. He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as he stayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He came away at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of people at the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have done for the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy.

IX

The next morning Paolo, when he brought up Colville’s breakfast, brought the news that there was to be a veglione at the Pergola Theatre. This news revived Colville’s courage. “Paolo,” he said, “you ought to open a banking-house.” Paolo was used to being joked by foreigners who could not speak Italian very well; he smiled as if he understood.

The banker had his astute doubts of Paolo’s intelligence; the banker in Europe doubts all news not originating in his house; but after a day or two the advertisements in the newspapers carried conviction even to the banker.

When Colville went to the ladies with news of the veglione, he found that they had already heard of it. “Should you like to go?” he asked Mrs. Bowen.

“I don’t know. What do you think?” she asked in turn.

“Oh, it’s for you to do the thinking. I only know what I want.”

Imogene said nothing, while she watched the internal debate as it expressed itself in Mrs. Bowen’s face.

“People go in boxes,” she said thoughtfully; “but you would feel that a box wasn’t the same thing exactly?”

“We went on the floor,” suggested Colville.

“It was very different then. And, besides, Mrs. Finlay had absolutely no sense of propriety.” When a woman has explicitly condemned a given action, she apparently gathers courage for its commission under a little different conditions. “Of course, if we went upon the floor, I shouldn’t wish it to be known at all, though foreigners can do almost anything they like.”

“Really,” said Colville, “when it comes to that, I don’t see any harm in it.”

“And you say go?”

“I say whatever you say.”

Mrs. Bowen looked from him to Imogene. “I don’t either,” she said finally, and they understood that she meant the harm which he had not seen.

“Which of us has been so good as to deserve this?” asked Colville.

“Oh, you have all been good,” she said. “We shall go in masks and dominoes,” she continued. “Nothing will happen, and who should know us if anything did?” They had received tickets to the great Borghese ball, which is still a fashionable and desired event of the Carnival to foreigners in Florence; but their preconceptions of the veglione threw into the shade the entertainment which the gentlemen of Florence offered to favoured sojourners.

“Come,” said Mrs. Bowen, “you must go with us and help us choose our dominoes.”

A prudent woman does not do an imprudent thing by halves. Effie was to be allowed to go to the veglione too, and she went with them to the shop where they were to hire their dominoes. It would be so much more fun, Mrs. Bowen said, to choose the dresses in the shop than to have them sent home for you to look at. Effie was to be in black; Imogene was to have a light blue domino, and Mrs. Bowen chose a purple one; even where their faces were not to be seen they considered their complexions in choosing the colours. If you happened to find a friend, and wanted to unmask, you would not want to look horrid. The shop people took the vividest interest in it all, as if it were a new thing to them, and these were the first foreigners they had ever served with masks and dominoes. They made Mrs. Bowen and Imogene go into an inner room and come out for the mystification of Colville, hulking about in the front shop with his mask and domino on.

“Which is which?” the ladies both challenged him, in the mask’s conventional falsetto, when they came out.

With a man’s severe logic he distinguished them according to their silks, but there had been time for them to think of changing, and they took off their masks to laugh in his face.

They fluttered so airily about among the pendent masks and dominoes, from which they shook a ghostly perfume of old carnivals, that his heart leaped.

“Ah, you’ll never be so fascinating again!” he cried. He wanted to take them in his arms, they were both so delicious; a man has still only that primitive way of expressing his supreme satisfaction in women. “Now, which am I?” he demanded of them, and that made them laugh again. He had really put his arm about Effie.

“Do you think you will know your papa at the veglione?” asked one of the shop-women, with a mounting interest in the amiable family party.

They all laughed; the natural mistake seemed particularly droll to Imogene.

“Come,” cried Mrs. Bowen; “it’s time we should be going.”

That was true; they had passed so long a time in the shop that they did not feel justified in seriously attempting to beat down the price of their dresses. They took them at the first price. The woman said with reason that it was Carnival, and she could get her price for the things.

They went to the veglione at eleven, the ladies calling for Colville, as before, in Mrs. Bowen’s carriage. He felt rather sheepish, coming out of his room in his mask and domino, but the corridors of the hotel were empty, and for the most part dark; there was no one up but the porter, who wished him a pleasant time in as matter-of-fact fashion as if he were going out to an evening party in his dress coat. His spirits mounted in the atmosphere of adventure which the ladies diffused about them in the carriage; Effie Bowen laughed aloud when he entered, in childish gaiety of heart.

The narrow streets roared with the wheels of cabs and carriages coming and going; the street before the theatre was so packed that it was some time before they could reach the door. Masks were passing in and out; the nervous joy of the ladies expressed itself in a deep-drawn quivering sigh. Their carriage door was opened by a servant of the theatre, who wished them a pleasant veglione, and the next moment they were in the crowded vestibule, where they paused a moment, to let Imogene and Effie really feel that they were part of a masquerade.

“Now, keep all together,” said Mrs. Bowen, as they passed through the inner door of the vestibule, and the brilliantly lighted theatre flashed its colours and splendours upon them. The floor of the pit had been levelled to that of the stage, which, stripped of the scenic apparatus, opened vaster spaces for the motley crew already eddying over it in the waltz. The boxes, tier over tier, blazed with the light of candelabra which added their sparkle to that of the gas jets.

“You and Effie go before,” said Mrs. Bowen to Imogene. She made them take hands like children, and mechanically passed her own hand through Colville’s arm.

A mask in red from head to foot attached himself to the party, and began to make love to her in excellent pantomime.

Colville was annoyed. He asked her if he should tell the fellow to take himself off.

“Not on any account!” she answered. “It’s perfectly delightful. It wouldn’t be the veglione without it. Did you ever see such good acting?”

“I don’t think it’s remarkable for anything but its fervour,” said Colville.

“I should like to see you making love to some lady,” she rejoined mischievously.

“I will make love to you, if you like,” he said, but he felt in an instant that his joke was in bad taste.

They went the round of the theatre. “That is Prince Strozzi, Imogene,” said Mrs. Bowen, leaning forward to whisper to the girl. She pointed out other people of historic and aristocratic names in the boxes, where there was a democracy of beauty among the ladies, all painted and powdered to the same marquise effect.

On the floor were gentlemen in evening dress, without masks, and here and there ladies waltzing, who had masks but no dominoes. But for the most part people were in costume; the theatre flushed and flowered in gay variety of tint that teased the eye with its flow through the dance.

Mrs. Bowen had circumscribed the adventure so as to exclude dancing from it. Imogene was not to dance. One might go to the veglione and look on from a box; if one ventured further and went on the floor, decidedly one was not to dance.

This was thoroughly understood beforehand, and there were to be no petitions or murmurs at the theatre. They found a quiet corner, and sat down to look on.

The mask in red followed, and took his place at a little distance, where, whenever Mrs. Bowen looked that way, he continued to protest his passion.

“You’re sure he doesn’t bore you?” suggested Colville.

“No, indeed. He’s very amusing.”

“Oh, all right!”

The waltz ceased; the whirling and winding confusion broke into an irregular streaming hither and thither, up and down. They began to pick out costumes and characters that interested them. Clowns in white, with big noses, and harlequins in their motley, with flat black masks, abounded. There were some admirable grasshoppers in green, with long antennae quivering from their foreheads. Two or three Mephistos reddened through the crowd. Several knights in armour got about with difficulty, apparently burdened by their greaves and breastplates.

A group of leaping and dancing masks gathered around a young man in evening dress, with long hair, who stood leaning against a pillar near them, and who underwent their mockeries with a smile of patience, half amused, half tormented.

When they grew tired of baiting him, and were looking about for other prey, the red mask redoubled his show of devotion to Mrs. Bowen, and the other masks began to flock round and approve.

“Oh, now,” she said, with a little embarrassed laugh, in which there was no displeasure, “I think you may ask him to go away. But don’t be harsh with him,” she added, at a brusque movement which Colville made toward the mask.

“Oh, why should I be harsh with him? We’re not rivals.” This was not in good taste either, Colville felt. “Besides, I’m an Italian too,” he said, to retrieve himself. He made a few paces toward the mask, and said in a low tone, with gentle suggestion, “Madame finds herself a little incommoded.”

The mask threw himself into an attitude of burlesque despair, bowed low with his hand on his heart, in token of submission, and vanished into the crowd. The rest dispersed with cries of applause.

“How very prettily you did it, both of you!” said Mrs. Bowen. “I begin to believe you are an Italian, Mr. Colville. I shall be afraid of you.”

“You weren’t afraid of him.”

“Oh, he was a real Italian.”

“It seems to me that mamma is getting all the good of the veglione,” said Effie, in a plaintive murmur. The well-disciplined child must have suffered deeply before she lifted this seditious voice.

“Why, so I am, Effie,” answered her mother, “and I don’t think it’s fair myself. What shall we do about it?”

“I should like something to eat,” said the child.

“So should I,” said Colville. “That’s reparation your mother owes us all. Let’s make her take us and get us something. Wouldn’t you like an ice, Miss Graham?”

“Yes, an ice,” said Imogene, with an effect of adding, “Nothing more for worlds,” that made Colville laugh. She rose slowly, like one in a dream, and cast a look as impassioned as a look could be made through a mask on the scene she was leaving behind her. The band was playing a waltz again, and the wide floor swam with circling couples.

The corridor where the tables were set was thronged with people, who were drinking beer and eating cold beef and boned turkey and slices of huge round sausages. “Oh, how can they?” cried the girl, shuddering.

“I didn’t know you were so ethereal-minded about these things,” said Colville. “I thought you didn’t object to the salad at Madame Uccelli’s.”

“Oh, but at the veglione!” breathed the girl for all answer. He laughed again, but Mrs. Bowen did not laugh with him; he wondered why.

When they returned to their corner in the theatre they found a mask in a black domino there, who made place for them, and remained standing near. They began talking freely and audibly, as English-speaking people incorrigibly do in Italy, where their tongue is all but the language of the country.

“Really,” said Colville, “I think I shall stifle in this mask. If you ladies will do what you can to surround me and keep me secret, I’ll take it off a moment.”

“I believe I will join you, Mr. Colville,” said the mask near them. He pushed up his little visor of silk, and discovered the mild, benignant features of Mr. Waters.

“Bless my soul!” cried Colville.

Mrs. Bowen was apparently too much shocked to say anything.

“You didn’t expect to meet me here?” asked the old man, as if otherwise it should be the most natural thing in the world. After that they could only unite in suppressing their astonishment. “It’s extremely interesting,” he went on, “extremely! I’ve been here ever since the exercises began, and I have not only been very greatly amused, but greatly instructed. It seems to me the key to a great many anomalies in the history of this wonderful people.”

If Mr. Waters took this philosophical tone about the Carnival, it was not possible for Colville to take any other.

“And have you been able to divine from what you have seen here,” he asked gravely, “the grounds of Savonarola’s objection to the Carnival?”

“Not at all,” said the old man promptly. “I have seen nothing but the most harmless gaiety throughout the evening.”

Colville hung his head. He remembered reading once in a passage from Swedenborg, that the most celestial angels had scarcely any power of perceiving evil.

“Why aren’t you young people dancing?” asked Mr. Waters, in a cheerful general way, of Mrs. Bowen’s party.

Colville was glad to break the silence. “Mrs. Bowen doesn’t approve of dancing at vegliones.”

“No? — why not?” inquired the old man, with invincible simplicity.

Mrs. Bowen smiled her pretty, small smile below her mask.

“The company is apt to be rather mixed,” she said quietly.

“Yes,” pursued Mr. Waters; “but you could dance with one another. The company seems very well behaved.”

“Oh, quite so,” Mrs. Bowen assented.

“Shortly after I came,” said Mr. Waters, “one of the masks asked me to dance. I was really sorry that my age and traditions forbade my doing so. I tried to explain, but I’m afraid I didn’t make myself quite clear.”

“Probably it passed for a joke with her,” said Colville, in order to say something.

“Ah, very likely; but I shall always feel that my impressions of the were a young man like you — —”

Imogens turned and looked at Colville through the eye-holes of her mask; even in that sort of isolation he thought her eyes expressed surprise.

“It never occurred to you before that I was a young man,” he suggested gravely.

She did not reply.

After a little interval, “Imogene,” asked Mrs. Bowen, “would you like to dance?”

Colville was astonished. “The veglione has gone to your head, Mrs. Bowen,” he tacitly made his comment. She had spoken to Imogene, but she glanced at him as if she expected him to be grateful to her for this stroke of liberality.

“What would be the use?” returned the girl.

Colville rose. “After my performance in the Lancers, I can’t expect you to believe me; but I really do know how to waltz.” He had but to extend his arms, and she was hanging upon his shoulder, and they were whirling away through a long orbit of delight to the girl.

“Oh, why have you let me do you such injustice?” she murmured intensely. “I never shall forgive myself.”

“It grieved me that you shouldn’t have divined that I was really a magnificent dancer in disguise, but I bore it as best I could,” said Colville, really amused at her seriousness. “Perhaps you’ll find out after a while that I’m not an old fellow either, but only a ‘Lost Youth.’”

“Hush,” she said; “I don’t like to hear you talk so.”

“How?”

“About — age!” she answered. “It makes me feel —— Don’t to-night!”

Colville laughed. “It isn’t a fact that my blinking is going to change materially. You had better make the most of me as a lost youth. I’m old enough to be two of them.”

She did not answer, and as they wound up and down through the other orbing couples, he remembered the veglione of seventeen years before, when he had dreamed through the waltz with the girl who jilted him; she was very docile and submissive that night; he believed afterward that if he had spoken frankly then, she would not have refused him. But he had veiled his passion in words and phrases that, taken in themselves, had no meaning — that neither committed him nor claimed her. He could not help it; he had not the courage at any moment to risk the loss of her for ever, till it was too late, till he must lose her.

“Do you believe in pre-existence?” he demanded of Imogene.

“Oh yes!” she flashed back. “This very instant it was just as if I had been here before, long ago.”

“Dancing with me?”

“With you? Yes — yes — I think so.”

He had lived long enough to know that she was making herself believe what she said, and that she had not lived long enough to know this.

“Then you remember what I said to you — tried to say to you — that night?” Through one of those psychological juggles which we all practise with ourselves at times, it amused him, it charmed him, to find her striving to realise this past.

“No; it was so long ago? What was it?” she whispered dreamily.

A turn of the waltz brought them near Mrs. Bowen; her mask seemed to wear a dumb reproach.

He began to be weary; one of the differences between youth and later life is that the latter wearies so soon of any given emotion.

“Ah, I can’t remember, either! Aren’t you getting rather tired of the waltz and me?”

“Oh no; go on!” she deeply murmured. “Try to remember.”

The long, pulsating stream of the music broke and fell. The dancers crookedly dispersed in wandering lines. She took his arm; he felt her heart leap against it; those innocent, trustful throbs upbraided him. At the same time his own heart beat with a sort of fond, protecting tenderness; he felt the witchery of his power to make this young, radiant, and beautiful creature hang flattered and bewildered on his talk; he liked the compassionate worship with which his tacit confidence had inspired her, even while he was not without some satirical sense of the crude sort of heart-broken hero he must be in the fancy of a girl of her age.

“Let us go and walk in the corridor a moment,” he said. But they walked there till the alluring melancholy music of the waltz began again. In a mutual caprice, they rejoined the dance.

It came into his head to ask, “Who is he?” and as he had got past denying himself anything, he asked it.

“He? What he?”

“He that Mrs. Bowen thought might object to your seeing the Carnival?”

“Oh! — oh yes! That was the not impossible he.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Then he’s not even the not improbable he?”

“No, indeed.”

They waltzed in silence. Then, “Why did you ask me that?” she murmured.

“I don’t know. Was it such a strange question?”

“I don’t know. You ought to.”

“Yes, if it was wrong, I’m old enough to know better.”

“You promised not to say ‘old’ any more.”

“Then I suppose I mustn’t. But you mustn’t get me to ignore it, and then laugh at me for it.”

“Oh!” she reproached him, “you think I could do that?”

“You could if it was you who were here with me once before.”

“Then I know I wasn’t.”

Again they were silent, and it was he who spoke first. “I wish you would tell me why you object to the interdicted topic?”

“Because — because I like every time to be perfect in itself.”

“Oh! And this wouldn’t be perfect in itself if I were — not so young as some people?”

“I didn’t mean that. No; but if you didn’t mention it, no one else would think of it or care for it.”

“Did any one ever accuse you of flattering, Miss Graham?”

“Not till now. And you are unjust.”

“Well, I withdraw the accusation.”

“And will you ever pretend such a thing again?”

“Oh, never!”

“Then I have your promise.”

The talk was light word-play, such as depends upon the talker’s own mood for its point or its pointlessness. Between two young people of equal years it might have had meanings to penetrate, to sigh over, to question. Colville found it delicious to be pursued by the ingenuous fervour of this young girl, eager to vindicate her sincerity in prohibiting him from his own ironical depreciation. Apparently, she had a sentimental mission of which he was the object; he was to be convinced that he was unnecessarily morbid; he was to be cheered up, to be kept in heart.

“I must believe in you after this,” he said, with a smile which his mask hid.

“Thanks,” she breathed. It seemed to him that her hand closed convulsively upon his in their light clasp.

The pressure sent a real pang to his heart. It forced her name from his lips. “Imogene! Ah, I’ve no right to call you that.”

“Yes.”

“From this out I promise to be twenty years younger. But no one is to know it but you. Do you think you will know it? I shouldn’t like to keep the secret to myself altogether.”

“No; I will help you. It shall be our secret.”

She gave a low laugh of delight. He convinced himself that she had entered into the light spirit of banter in which he believed that he was talking.

The music ceased again. He whirled her to the seat where he had left Mrs. Bowen. She was not there, nor the others.

Colville felt the meanness of a man who has betrayed his trust, and his self-contempt was the sharper because the trust had been as tacit and indefinite as it was generous. The effect of Mrs. Bowen’s absence was as if she had indignantly flown, and left him to the consequences of his treachery.

He sat down rather blankly with Imogene to wait for her return; it was the only thing they could do.

It had grown very hot. The air was thick with dust. The lights burned through it as through a fog.

“I believe I will take off my mask,” she said. “I can scarcely breathe.”

“No, no,” protested Colville; “that won’t do.”

“I feel faint,” she gasped.

His heart sank. “Don’t,” he said incoherently. “Come with me into the vestibule, and get a breath of air.”

He had almost to drag her through the crowd, but in the vestibule she revived, and they returned to their place again. He did not share the easy content with which she recognised the continued absence of Mrs. Bowen.

“Why they must be lost. But isn’t it perfect sitting here and watching the maskers?”

“Perfect,” said Colville distractedly.

“Don’t you like to make romances about the different ones?”

It was on Colville’s tongue to say that he had made all the romances he wished for that evening, but he only answered, “Oh, very.”

“Poor Mrs. Bowen,” laughed the girl. “It will be such a joke on her, with her punctilious notions, getting lost from her protégée at a Carnival ball! I shall tell every one.”

“Oh no, don’t,” said Colville, in horror that big mask scarcely concealed.

“Why not?”

“It wouldn’t be at all the thing.”

“Why, are you becoming Europeanised too?” she demanded. “I thought you went in for all sorts of unconventionalities. Recollect your promise. You must be as impulsive as I am.”

Colville, staring anxiously about in every direction, made for the first time the reflection that most young girls probably conform to the proprieties without in the least knowing why.

“Do you think,” he asked, in desperation, “that you would be afraid to be left here a moment while I went about in the crowd and tried to find them?”

“Not at all,” she said. But she added, “Don’t be gone long.”

“Oh no,” he answered, pulling off his mask. “Be sure not to move from here on any account.”

He plunged into the midst of the crowd that buffeted him from side to side as he struck against its masses. The squeaking and gibbering masks mocked in their falsetto at his wild-eyed, naked face thrusting hither and thither among them.

“I saw your lady wife with another gentleman,” cried one of them, in a subtle misinterpretation of the cause of his distraction.

The throng had immensely increased; the clowns and harlequins ran shrieking up and down, and leaped over one another’s heads.

It was useless. He went back to Imogene with a heart-sickening fear that she too might have vanished.

But she was still there.

“You ought to have come sooner,” she said gaily. “That red mask has been here again. He looked as if he wanted to make love to me this time. But he didn’t. If you’d been here you might have asked him where Mrs. Bowen was.”

Colville sat down. He had done what he could to mend the matter, and the time had come for philosophical submission. It was now his duty to keep up Miss Graham’s spirits. They were both Americans, and from the national standpoint he was simply the young girl’s middle-aged bachelor friend. There was nothing in the situation for him to beat his breast about.

“Well, all that we can do is to wait for them,” he said.

“Oh yes,” she answered easily. “They’ll be sure to come back in the course of time.”

They waited a half-hour, talking somewhat at random, and still the others did not come. But the red mask came again. He approached Colville, and said politely —

“La signora è partita.”

“The lady gone?” repeated Colville, taking this to be part of the red mask’s joke.

“La bambina pareva poco lene.”

“The little one not well?” echoed Colville again, rising. “Are you joking?”

The mask made a deep murmur of polite deprecation. “I am not capable of such a thing in a serious affair. Perhaps you know me?” he said, taking off his mask, and in further sign of good faith he gave the name of a painter sufficiently famous in Florence.

“I beg your pardon, and thank you,” said Colville. He had no need to speak to Imogene — , her hand was already trembling on his arm.

They drove home in silence through the white moonlight of the streets, filled everywhere with the gay voices and figures of the Carnival.

Mrs. Bowen met them at the door of her apartment, and received them with a manner that justly distributed the responsibility and penalty for their escapade. Colville felt that a meaner spirit would have wreaked its displeasure upon the girl alone. She made short, quiet answers to all his eager inquiries. Most probably it was some childish indisposition; Effie had been faint. No, he need not go for the doctor. Mr. Waters had called the doctor, who had just gone away. There was nothing else that he could do for her. She dropped her eyes, and in everything but words dismissed him. She would not even remain with him till he could decently get himself out of the house. She left Imogene to receive his adieux, feigning that she heard Effie calling.

“I’m — I’m very sorry,” faltered the girl, “that we didn’t go back to her at once.”

“Yes; I was to blame,” answered the humiliated hero of her Carnival dream. The clinging regret with which she kept his hand at parting scarcely consoled him for what had happened.

“I will come round in the morning,” he said. “I must know how Effie is.”

“Yes; come.”

X

Colville went to Palazzo Pinti next day with the feeling that he was defying Mrs. Bowen. Upon a review of the facts he could not find himself so very much to blame for the occurrences of the night before, and he had not been able to prove to his reason that Mrs. Bowen had resented his behaviour. She had not made a scene of any sort when he came in with Imogene; it was natural that she should excuse herself, and should wish to be with her sick child: she had done really nothing. But when a woman has done nothing she fills the soul of the man whose conscience troubles him with an instinctive apprehension. There is then no safety, his nerves tell him, except in bringing the affair, whatever it is, to an early issue — in having it out with her. Colville subdued the cowardly impulse of his own heart, which would have deceived him with the suggestion that Mrs. Bowen might be occupied with Effie, and it would be better to ask for Miss Graham. He asked for Mrs. Bowen, and she came in directly.

She smiled in the usual way, and gave her hand, as she always did; but her hand was cold, and she looked tired, though she said Effie was quite herself again, and had been asking for him. “Imogene has been telling her about your adventure last night, and making her laugh.”

If it had been Mrs. Bowen’s purpose to mystify him, she could not have done it more thoroughly than by this bold treatment of the affair. He bent a puzzled gaze upon her. “I’m glad any of you have found it amusing,” he said;— “I confess that I couldn’t let myself off so lightly in regard to it.” She did not reply, and he continued: “The fact is, I don’t think I behaved very well. I abused your kindness to Miss Graham.”

“Abused my kindness to Miss Graham?”

“Yes. When you allowed her to dance at the veglione, I ought to have considered that you were stretching a point. I ought to have taken her back to you very soon, instead of tempting her to go and walk with me in the corridor.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen. “So it was you who proposed it? Imogene was afraid that she had. What exemplary young people you are! The way each of you confesses and assumes all the blame would leave the severest chaperone without a word.”

Her gaiety made Colville uncomfortable. He said gravely, “What I blame myself most for is that I was not there to be of use to you when Effie — —”

“Oh, you mustn’t think of that at all. Mr. Waters was most efficient. My admirer in the red mask was close at hand, and between them they got Effie out without the slightest disturbance. I fancy most people thought it was a Carnival joke. Please don’t think of that again.”

Nothing could be politer than all this.

“And you won’t allow me to punish myself for not being there to give you even a moral support?”

“Certainly not. As I told Imogene, young people will be young people; and I knew how fond you were of dancing.”

Though it pierced him, Colville could not help admiring the neatness of this thrust. “I didn’t know you were so ironical, Mrs. Bowen.”

“Ironical? Not at all.”

“Ah! I see I’m not forgiven.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

Imogene and Effie came in. The child was a little pale, and willingly let him take her on his knee, and lay her languid head on his shoulder. The girl had not aged overnight like himself and Mrs. Bowen; she looked as fresh and strong as yesterday.

“Miss Graham,” said Colville, “if a person to whom you had done a deadly wrong insisted that you hadn’t done any wrong at all, should you consider yourself forgiven?”

“It would depend upon the person,” said the girl, with innocent liveliness, recognising the extravagance in his tone.

“Yes,” he said, with an affected pensiveness, “so very much depends upon the person in such a case.”

Mrs. Bowen rose. “Excuse me a moment; I will be back directly. Don’t get up, please,” she said, and prevented him with a quick withdrawal to another room, which left upon his sense the impression of elegant grace, and a smile and sunny glance. But neither had any warmth in it.

Colville heaved an involuntary sigh. “Do you feel very much used up?” he asked Imogene.

“Not at all,” she laughed. “Do you?”

“Not in the least. My veglione hasn’t ended yet. I’m still practically at the Pergola. It’s easy to keep a thing of that sort up if you don’t sleep after you get home.”

“Didn’t you sleep? I expected to lie awake a long time thinking it over; but I dropped asleep at once. I suppose I was very tired. I didn’t even dream.”

“You must have slept hard. You’re pretty apt to dream when you’re waking.”

“How do you know?”

“Ah, I’ve noticed when you’ve been talking to me. Better not! It’s a bad habit; it gives you false views of things. I used — —”

“But you mustn’t say you used! That’s forbidden now. Remember your promise!”

“My promise? What promise?”

“Oh, if you’ve forgotten already.”

“I remember. But that was last night.”

“No, no! It was for all time. Why should dreams be so very misleading? I think there’s ever so much in dreams. The most wonderful thing is the way you make people talk in dreams. It isn’t strange that you should talk yourself, but that other people should say this and that when you aren’t at all expecting what they say.”

“That’s when you’re sleeping. But when you’re waking, you make people say just what you want. And that’s why day dreams are so bad. If you make people say what you want, they probably don’t mean it.”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Half the time. Do you ever have day dreams?” he asked Effie, pressing her cheek against his own.

“I don’t know what they are,” she murmured, with a soft little note of polite regret for her ignorance, if possibly it incommoded him.

“You will by and by,” he said, “and then you must look out for them. They’re particularly bad in this air. I had one of them in Florence once that lasted three months.”

“What was it about?” asked the child.

Imogene involuntarily bent forward.

“Ah, I can’t tell you now. She’s trying to hear us.”

“No, no,” protested the girl, with a laugh. “I was thinking of something else.”

“Oh, we know her, don’t we?” he said to the child, with a playful appeal to that passion for the joint possession of a mystery which all children have.

“We might whisper it,” she suggested.

“No; better wait for some other time.” They were sitting near a table where a pencil and some loose leaves of paper lay. He pulled his chair a little closer, and, with the child still upon his knee, began to scribble and sketch at random. “Ah, there’s San Miniato,” he said, with a glance from the window. “Must get its outline in. You’ve heard how there came to be a church up there? No? Well, it shows the sort of man San Miniato really was. He was one of the early Christians, and he gave the poor pagans a great deal of trouble. They first threw him to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre, but the moment those animals set eyes on him they saw it would be of no use; they just lay down and died. Very well, then; the pagans determined to see what effect the axe would have upon San Miniato: but as soon as they struck off his head he picked it up, set it back on his shoulders again, waded across the Arno, walked up the hill, and when he came to a convenient little oratory up there he knelt down and expired. Isn’t that a pretty good story? It’s like fairies, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” whispered the child.

“What nonsense!” said Imogene. “You made it up.”

“Oh, did I? Perhaps I built the church that stands there to commemorate the fact. It’s all in the history of Florence. Not in all histories; some of them are too proud to put such stories in, but I’m going to put every one I can find into the history I’m writing for Effie. San Miniato was beheaded where the church of Santa Candida stands now, and he walked all that distance.”

“Did he have to die when he got to the oratory?” asked the child, with gentle regret.

“It appears so,” said Colville, sketching. “He would have been dead by this time, anyway, you know.”

“Yes,” she reluctantly admitted.

“I never quite like those things, either, Effie,” he said, pressing her to him. “There were people cruelly put to death two or three thousand years ago that I can’t help feeling would be alive yet if they had been justly treated. There are a good many fairy stories about Florence; perhaps they used to be true stories; the truth seems to die out of stories after a while, simply because people stop believing them. Saint Ambrose of Milan restored the son of his host to life when he came down here to dedicate the Church of San Giovanni. Then there was another saint, San Zenobi, who worked a very pretty miracle after he was dead. They were carrying his body from the Church of San Giovanni to the Church of Santa Reparata, and in Piazza San Giovanni his bier touched a dead elm-tree that stood there, and the tree instantly sprang into leaf and flower, though it was in the middle of the winter. A great many people took the leaves home with them, and a marble pillar was put up there, with a cross and an elm-tree carved on it. Oh, the case is very well authenticated.”

“I shall really begin to think you believe such things,” said Imogene. “Perhaps you are a Catholic.”

Mrs. Bowen returned to the room, and sat down.

“There’s another fairy story, prettier yet,” said Colville, while the little girl drew a long deep breath of satisfaction and expectation. “You’ve heard of the Buondelmonti?” he asked Imogene.

“Oh, it seems to me as if I’d had nothing but the Buondelmonti dinned into me since I came to Florence!” she answered in lively despair.

“Ah, this happened some centuries before the Buondelmonte you’ve been bored with was born. This was Giovanni Gualberto of the Buondelmonti, and he was riding along one day in 1003, near the Church of San Miniato, when he met a certain man named Ugo, who had killed one of his brothers. Gualberto stopped and drew his sword; Ugo saw no other chance of escape, and he threw himself face downward on the ground, with his arms stretched out in the form of the cross. ‘Gualberto, remember Jesus Christ, who died upon the cross praying for His enemies.’ The story says that these words went to Gualberto’s heart; he got down from his horse, and in sign of pardon lifted his enemy and kissed and embraced him. Then they went together into the church, and fell on their knees before the figure of Christ upon the cross, and the figure bowed its head in sign of approval and pleasure in Gualberto’s noble act of Christian piety.”

“Beautiful!” murmured the girl; the child only sighed.

“Ah, yes; it’s an easy matter to pick up one’s head from the ground, and set it back on one’s shoulders, or to bring the dead to life, or to make a tree put forth leaves and flowers in midwinter; but to melt the heart of a man with forgiveness in the presence of his enemy — that’s a different thing; that’s no fairy story; that’s a real miracle; and I believe this one happened — it’s so impossible.”

“Oh yes, it must have happened,” said the girl.

“Do you think it’s so very hard to forgive, then?” asked Mrs. Bowen gravely.

“Oh, not for ladies,” replied Colville.

She flushed, and her eyes shone when she glanced at him.

“I’m sorry to put you down,” he said to the child; “but I can’t take you with me, and I must be going.”

Mrs. Bowen did not ask him to stay to lunch; he thought afterward that she might have relented as far as that but for the last little thrust, which he would better have spared.

“Effie dear,” said her mother, when the door closed upon Colville, “don’t you think you’d better lie down a while? You look so tired.”

“Shall I lie down on the sofa here?”

“No, on your bed.”

“Well.”

“I’ll go with you, Effie,” said Imogene, “and see that you’re nicely tucked in.”

When she returned alone, Mrs. Bowen was sitting where she had left her, and seemed not to have moved. “I think Effie will drop off to sleep,” she said; “she seems drowsy.” She sat down, and after a pensive moment continued, “I wonder what makes Mr. Colville seem so gloomy.”

“Does he seem gloomy?” asked Mrs. Bowen unsympathetically.

“No, not gloomy exactly. But different from last night. I wish people could always be the same! He was so gay and full of spirits; and now he’s so self-absorbed. He thinks you’re offended with him, Mrs. Bowen.”

“I don’t think he was very much troubled about it. I only thought he was flighty from want of sleep. At your age you don’t mind the loss of a night.”

“Do you think Mr. Colville seems so very old?” asked Imogene anxiously.

Mrs. Bowen appeared not to have heard her. She went to the window and looked out. When she came back, “Isn’t it almost time for you to have a letter from home?” she asked.

“Why, no. I had one from mother day before yesterday. What made you think so?”

“Imogene,” interrupted Mrs. Bowen, with a sudden excitement which she tried to control, but which made her lips tremble, and break a little from her restraint, “you know that I am here in the place of your mother, to advise you and look after you in every way?”

“Why, yes, Mrs. Bowen,” cried the girl, in surprise.

“It’s a position of great responsibility in regard to a young lady. I can’t have anything to reproach myself with afterward.”

“No.”

“Have I always been kind to you, and considerate of your rights and your freedom? Have I ever interfered with you in any way that you think I oughtn’t?”

“What an idea! You’ve been loveliness itself, Mrs. Bowen!”

“Then I want you to listen to me, and answer me frankly, and not suspect my motives.”

“Why, how could I do that?”

“Never mind!” cried Mrs. Bowen impatiently, almost angrily. “People can’t help their suspicions! Do you think Mr. Morton cares for you?”

The girl hung her head.

“Imogene, answer me!”

“I don’t know,” answered Imogene coldly; “but if you’re troubled about that, Mrs. Bowen, you needn’t be; I don’t care anything for Mr. Morton.”

“If I thought you were becoming interested in any one, it would be my duty to write to your mother and tell her.”

“Of course; I should expect you to do it.”

“And if I saw you becoming interested in any one in a way that I thought would make you unhappy, it would be my duty to warn you.”

“Yes.”

“Of course, I don’t mean that any one would knowingly try to make you unhappy?”

“No.”

“Men don’t go about nowadays trying to break girls’ hearts. But very good men can be thoughtless and selfish.”

“Yes; I understand that,” said Imogene, in a falling accent.

“I don’t wish to prejudice you against any one. I should consider it very wrong and wicked. Besides, I don’t care to interfere with you to that degree. You are old enough to see and judge for yourself.”

Imogene sat silent, passing her hand across the front of her dress. The clock ticked audibly from the mantel.

“I will not have it left to me!” cried Mrs. Bowen. “It is hard enough, at any rate. Do you think I like to speak to you?”

“No.”

“Of course it makes me seem inhospitable, and distrustful, and detestable.”

“I never thought of accusing you,” said the girl, slowly lifting her eyes.

“I will never, never speak to you of it again,” said Mrs. Bowen, “and from this time forth I insist upon your feeling just as free as if I hadn’t spoken.” She trembled upon the verge of a sob, from which she repelled herself.

Imogene sat still, with a sort of serious, bewildered look.

“You shall have every proper opportunity of meeting any one you like.”

“Oh yes.”

“And I shall be only too gl-glad to take back everything!”

Imogene sat motionless and silent. Mrs. Bowen broke out again with a sort of violence; the years teach us something of self-control, perhaps, but they weaken and unstring the nerves. In this opposition of silence to silence, the woman of the world was no match for the inexperienced girl.

“Have you nothing to say, Imogene?”

“I never thought of him in that way at all. I don’t know what to say yet. It — confuses me. I — I can’t imagine it. But if you think that he is trying to amuse himself — —”

“I never said that!”

“No, I know it.”

“He likes to make you talk, and to talk with you. But he is perfectly idle here, and — there is too much difference, every way. The very good in him makes it the worse. I suppose that after talking with him every one else seems insipid.”

“Yes.”

Mrs. Bowen rose and ran suddenly from the room.

Imogene remained sitting cold and still.

No one had been named since they spoke of Mr. Morton.

XI

Colville had not done what he meant in going to Mrs. Bowen’s; in fact, he had done just what he had not meant to do, as he distinctly perceived in coming away. It was then that in a luminous retrospect he discovered his motive to have been a wish to atone to her for behaviour that must have distressed her, or at least to explain it to her. She had not let him do this at once; an instant willingness to hear and to condone was not in a woman’s nature; she had to make him feel, by the infliction of a degree of punishment, that she had suffered. But before she ended she had made it clear that she was ready to grant him a tacit pardon, and he had answered with a silly sarcasm the question that was to have led to peace. He could not help seeing that throughout the whole Carnival adventure she had yielded her cherished reluctances to please him, to show him that she was not stiff or prudish, to convince him that she would not be a killjoy through her devotion to conventionalities which she thought he despised. He could not help seeing that he had abused her delicate generosity, insulted her subtle concessions. He strolled along down the Arno, feeling flat and mean, as a man always does after a contest with a woman in which he has got the victory; our sex can preserve its self-respect only through defeat in such a case. It gave him no pleasure to remember that the glamour of the night before seemed still to rest on Imogene unbroken; that, indeed, was rather an added pain. He surprised himself in the midst of his poignant reflections by a yawn. Clearly the time was past when these ideal troubles could keep him awake, and there was, after all, a sort of brutal consolation in the fact. He was forty-one years old, and he was sleepy, whatever capacity for suffering remained to him. He went to his hotel to catch a little nap before lunch. When he woke it was dinner-time. The mists of slumber still hung about him, and the events of the last forty-eight hours showed vast and shapelessly threatening through them.

When the drama of the table d’hôte reached its climax of roast chestnuts and butter, he determined to walk over to San Marco and pay a visit to Mr. Waters. He found the old minister from Haddam East Village, Massachusetts, Italianate outwardly in almost ludicrous degree. He wore a fur-lined overcoat indoors; his feet, cased in thick woollen shoes, rested on a strip of carpet laid before his table; a man who had lived for forty years in the pungent atmosphere of an air-tight stove, succeeding a quarter of a century of roaring hearth fires, contented himself with the spare heat of a scaldino, which he held his clasped hands over in the very Italian manner; the lamp that cast its light on the book open before him was the classic lucerna, with three beaks, fed with olive oil. He looked up at his visitor over his spectacles, without recognising him, till Colville spoke. Then, after their greeting, “Is it snowing heavily?” he asked.

“It isn’t snowing at all. What made you think that?”

“Perhaps I was drowsing over my book and dreamed it. We become very strange and interesting studies to ourselves as we live along.”

He took up the metaphysical consideration with the promptness of a man who has no small-talk, and who speaks of the mind and soul as if they were the gossip of the neighbourhood.

“At times the forty winters that I passed in Haddam East Village seem like an alien experience, and I find myself pitying the life I lived there quite as if it were the life of some one else. It seems incredible that men should still inhabit such climates.”

“Then you’re not homesick for Haddam East Village?”

“Ah! for the good and striving souls there, yes; especially the souls of some women there. They used to think that it was I who gave them consolation and spiritual purpose, but it was they who really imparted it. Women souls — how beautiful they sometimes are! They seem truly like angelic essences. I trust that I shall meet them somewhere some time, but it will never be in Haddam East Village. Yes, I must have been dreaming when you came in. I thought that I was by my fire there, and all round over the hills and in the streets the snow was deep and falling still. How distinctly, he said, closing his eyes, as artists do in looking at a picture, I can see the black wavering lines of the walls in the fields sinking into the drifts! the snow billowed over the graves by the church where I preached! the banks of snow around the houses! the white desolation everywhere! I ask myself at times if the people are still there. Yes, I feel as blessedly remote from that terrible winter as if I had died away from it, and were in the weather of heaven.”

“Then you have no reproach for feeble-spirited fellow-citizens who abandon their native climate and come to live in Italy?”

The old man drew his fur coat closer about him and shrugged his shoulders in true Florentine fashion. “There may be something to say against those who do so in the heyday of life, but I shall not be the one to say it. The race must yet revert in its decrepitude, as I have in mine, to the climates of the South. Since I have been in Italy I have realised what used to occur to me dimly at home — the cruel disproportion between the end gained and the means expended in reclaiming the savage North. Half the human endeavour, half the human suffering, would have made the whole South Protestant and the whole East Christian, and our civilisation would now be there. No, I shall never go back to New England. New England? New Ireland —— New Canada! Half the farms in Haddam are in the hands of our Irish friends, and the labour on the rest is half done by French Canadians. That is all right and well. New England must come to me here, by way of the great middle West and the Pacific coast.”

Colville smiled at the Emersonian touch, but he said gravely, “I can never quite reconcile myself to the thought of dying out of my own country.”

“Why not? It is very unimportant where one dies. A moment after your breath is gone you are in exile for ever — or at home for ever.”

Colville sat musing upon this phase of Americanism, as he had upon many others. At last he broke the silence they had both let fall, far away from the topic they had touched.

“Well,” he asked, “how did you enjoy the veglione?”

“Oh, I’m too old to go to such places for pleasure,” said the minister simply. “But it was very interesting, and certainly very striking: especially when I went back, toward daylight, after seeing Mrs. Bowen home.”

“Did you go back?” demanded Colville, in some amaze.

“Oh yes. I felt that my experience was incomplete without some knowledge of how the Carnival ended at such a place.”

“Oh! And do you still feel that Savonarola was mistaken?”

“There seemed to be rather more boisterousness toward the close, and, if I might judge, the excitement grew a little unwholesome. But I really don’t feel myself very well qualified to decide. My own life has been passed in circumstances so widely different that I am at a certain disadvantage.”

“Yes,” said Colville, with a smile; “I daresay the Carnival at Haddam East Village was quite another tiling.”

The old man smiled responsively. “I suppose that some of my former parishioners might have been scandalised at my presence at a Carnival ball, had they known the fact merely in the abstract; but in my letters home I shall try to set it before them in an instructive light. I should say that the worst thing about such a scene of revelry would be that it took us too much out of our inner quiet. But I suppose the same remark might apply to almost any form of social entertainment.”

“Yes.”

“But human nature is so constituted that some means of expansion must be provided, or a violent explosion takes place. The only question is what means are most innocent. I have been looking about,” added the old man quietly, “at the theatres lately.”

“Have you?” asked Colville, opening his eyes, in suppressed surprise.

“Yes; with a view to determining the degree of harmless amusement that may be derived from them. It’s rather a difficult question. I should be inclined to say, however, that I don’t think the ballet can ever be instrumental for good.”

Colville could not deny himself the pleasure of saying, “Well, not the highest, I suppose.”

“No,” said Mr. Waters, in apparent unconsciousness of the irony. “But I think the Church has made a mistake in condemning the theatre in toto. It appears to me that it might always have countenanced a certain order of comedy, in which the motive and plot are unobjectionable. Though I don’t deny that there are moods when all laughter seems low and unworthy and incompatible with the most advanced state of being. And I confess,” he went on, with a dreamy thoughtfulness, “that I have very great misgivings in regard to tragedy. The glare that it throws upon the play of the passions — jealousy in its anguish, revenge glutting itself, envy eating its heart, hopeless love — their nakedness is terrible. The terror may be salutary; it may be very mischievous. I am afraid that I have left some of my inquiries till it is too late. I seem to have no longer the materials of judgment left in me. If I were still a young man like you — —”

“Am I still a young man?” interrupted Colville sadly.

“You are young enough to respond to the appeals that sometimes find me silent. If I were of your age I should certainly investigate some of these interesting problems.”

“Ah, but if you become personally interested in the problems, it’s as bad as if you hadn’t the materials of judgment left; you’re prejudiced. Besides, I doubt my youthfulness very much.”

“You are fifty, I presume?” suggested Mr. Waters, in a leading way.

“Not very near — only too near,” laughed Colville. “I’m forty-one.”

“You are younger than I supposed. But I remember now that at your age I had the same feeling which you intimate. It seemed to me then that I had really passed the bound which separates us from the further possibility of youth. But I’ve lived long enough since to know that I was mistaken. At forty, one has still a great part of youth before him — perhaps the richest and sweetest part. By that time the turmoil of ideas and sensations is over; we see clearly and feel consciously. We are in a sort of quiet in which we peacefully enjoy. We have enlarged our perspective sufficiently to perceive things in their true proportion and relation; we are no longer tormented with the lurking fear of death, which darkens and embitters our earlier years; we have got into the habit of life; we have often been ailing and we have not died. Then we have time enough behind us to supply us with the materials of reverie and reminiscence; the terrible solitude of inexperience is broken; we have learned to smile at many things besides the fear of death. We ought also to have learned pity and patience. Yes,” the old man concluded, in cheerful self-corroboration, “it is a beautiful age.”

“But it doesn’t look so beautiful as it is,” Colville protested. “People in that rosy prime don’t produce the effect of garlanded striplings upon the world at large. The women laugh at us; they think we are fat old fellows; they don’t recognise the slender and elegant youth that resides in our unwieldy bulk.”

“You take my meaning a little awry. Besides, I doubt if even the ground you assume is tenable. If a woman has lived long enough to be truly young herself, she won’t find a man at forty either decrepit or grotesque. He can even make himself youthful to a girl of thought and imagination.”

“Yes,” Colville assented, with a certain discomfort.

“But to be truly young at forty,” resumed Mr. Waters, “a man should be already married.”

“Yes?”

“I sometimes feel,” continued the old man, “that I made a mistake in yielding to a disappointment that I met with early in life, and in not permitting myself the chance of retrieval. I have missed a beautiful and consoling experience in my devotion to a barren regret.”

Colville said nothing, but he experienced a mixed feeling of amusement, of repulsion, and of curiosity at this.

“We are put into the world to be of it. I am more and more convinced of that. We have scarcely a right to separate ourselves from the common lot in any way. I justify myself for having lived alone only as a widower might. I — lost her. It was a great while ago.”

“Yes,” said Colville, after the pause which ensued; “I agree with you that one has no right to isolate himself, to refuse his portion of the common lot; but the effects of even a rebuff may last so long that one has no heart to put out his hand a second time — for a second rap over the knuckles. Oh, I know how trivial it is in the retrospect, and how what is called a disappointment is something to be humbly grateful for in most cases; but for a while it certainly makes you doubtful whether you were ever really intended to share the common lot.” He was aware of an insincerity in his words; he hoped that it might not be perceptible, but he did not greatly care.

Mr. Waters took no notice of what he had been saying. He resumed from another point. “But I should say that it would be unwise for a man of mature life to seek his happiness with one much younger than himself. I don’t deny that there are cases in which the disparity of years counts for little or nothing, but generally speaking, people ought to be as equally mated in age as possible. They ought to start with the same advantages of ignorance. A young girl can only live her life through a community of feeling, an equality of inexperience in the man she gives her heart to. If he is tired of things that still delight her, the chances of unhappiness are increased.”

“Yes, that’s true,” answered Colville gravely. “It’s apt to be a mistake and a wrong.”

“Oh, not always — not always,” said the old minister. “We mustn’t look at it in that way quite. Wrongs are of the will.” He seemed to lapse into a greater intimacy of feeling with Colville. “Have you seen Mrs. Bowen to-day? Or — ah! true! I think you told me.”

“No,” said Colville. “Have we spoken of her? But I have seen her.”

“And was the little one well?”

“Very much better.”

“Pretty creatures, both of them,” said the minister, with as fresh a pleasure in his recognition of the fact as if he had not said nearly the same thing once before, “You’ve noticed the very remarkable resemblance between mother and daughter?”

“Oh yes.”

“There is a gentleness in Mrs. Bowen which seems to me the last refinement of a gracious spirit,” suggested Mr. Waters. “I have never met any lady who reconciled more exquisitely what is charming in society with what is lovely in nature.”

“Yes,” said Colville. “Mrs. Bowen always had that gentle manner. I used to know her here as a girl a great while ago.”

“Did you? I wonder you allowed her to become Mrs. Bowen.”

This sprightliness of Mr. Waters amused Colville greatly. “At that time I was preoccupied with my great mistake, and I had no eyes for Mrs. Bowen.”

“It isn’t too late yet,” said Mr. Waters, with open insinuation.

A bachelor of forty is always flattered by any suggestion of marriage; the suggestion that a beautiful and charming woman would marry him is too much for whatever reserves of modesty and wisdom he may have stored up Colville took leave of the old minister in better humour with himself than he had been for forty-eight hours, or than he had any very good reason for being now.

Mr. Waters came with him to the head of the stairs and held up the lamp for him to see. The light fell upon the white locks thinly straggling from beneath his velvet skull-cap, and he looked like some mediaeval scholar of those who lived and died for learning in Florence when letters were a passion there almost as strong as love.

The next day Colville would have liked to go at once and ask about Effie, but upon the whole he thought he would not go till after he had been at the reception where he was going in the afternoon. It was an artist who was giving the reception; he had a number of pictures to show, and there was to be tea. There are artists and artists. This painter was one who had a distinct social importance. It was felt to be rather a nice thing to be asked to his reception; one was sure at least to meet the nicest people.

This reason prevailed with Colville so far as it related to Mrs. Bowen, whom he felt that he would like to tell he had been there. He would speak to her of this person and that — very respected and recognised social figures, — so that she might see he was not the outlaw, the Bohemian, he must sometimes have appeared to her. It would not be going too far to say that something like an obscure intention to show himself the next Sunday at the English chapel, where Mrs. Bowen went, was not forming itself in his mind. As he went along it began to seem not impossible that she would be at the reception. If Effie’s indisposition was no more serious than it appeared yesterday, very probably Mrs. Bowen would be there. He even believed that he recognised her carriage among those which were drawn up in front of the old palace, under the painter’s studio windows.

There were a great number of people of the four nationalities that mostly consort in Italy. There were English and Americans and Russians and the sort of Italians resulting from the native intermarriages with them; here and there were Italians of pure blood, borderers upon the foreign life through a literary interest, or an artistic relation, or a matrimonial intention; here and there, also, the large stomach of a German advanced the bounds of the new empire and the new ideal of duty. There were no Frenchmen; one may meet them in more strictly Italian assemblages, but it is as if the sorrows and uncertainties of France in these times discouraged them from the international society in which they were always an infrequent element. It is not, of course, imaginable that as Frenchmen they have doubts of their merits, but that they have their misgivings as to the intelligence of others. The language that prevailed was English — in fact, one heard no other, — and the tea which our civilisation carries everywhere with it steamed from the cups in all hands. This beverage, in fact, becomes a formidable factor in the life of a Florentine winter. One finds it at all houses, and more or less mechanically drinks it.

“I am turning out a terrible tea toper,” said Colville, stirring his cup in front of the old lady whom his relations to the ladies at Palazzo Pinti had interested so much. “I don’t think I drink less than ten cups a day; seventy cups a week is a low average for me. I’m really beginning to look down at my boots a little anxiously.”

Mrs. Amsden laughed. She had not been in America for forty years, but she liked the American way of talking better than any other. “Oh, didn’t you hear about Inglehart when he was here? He was so good-natured that he used to drink all the tea people offered him, and then the young ladies made tea for him in his studio when they went to look at his pictures. It almost killed him. By the time spring came he trembled so that the brush flew out of his hands when he took it up. He had to hurry off to Venice to save his life. It’s just as bad at the Italian houses; they’ve learned to like tea.”

“When I was here before, they never offered you anything but coffee,” said Colville. “They took tea for medicine, and there was an old joke that I thought I should die of, I heard it so often about the Italian that said to the English woman when she offered him tea, ‘Grazie; sto bene.’”

“Oh, that’s all changed now.”

“Yes; I’ve seen the tea, and I haven’t heard the joke.”

The flavour of Colville’s talk apparently encouraged his companion to believe that he would like to make fun of their host’s paintings with her; but whether he liked them, or whether he was principled against that sort of return for hospitality, he chose to reply seriously to some ironical lures she threw out.

“Oh, if you’re going to be good,” she exclaimed, “I shall have nothing more to say to you. Here comes Mr. Thurston; I can make him abuse the pictures. There! You had better go away to a young lady I see alone over yonder, though I don’t know what you will do with one alone.” She laughed and shook her head in a way that had once been arch and lively, but that was now puckery and infirm — it is affecting to see these things in women — and welcomed the old gentleman who came up and superseded Colville.

The latter turned, with his cup still in his hand, and wandered about through the company, hoping he might see Mrs. Bowen among the groups peering at the pictures or solidly blocking the view in front of them. He did not find her, but he found Imogene Graham standing somewhat apart near a window. He saw her face light up at sight of him, and then darken again as he approached.

“Isn’t this rather an unnatural state of things?” he asked when he had come up. “I ought to be obliged to fight my way to you through successive phalanxes of young men crowding round with cups of tea outstretched in their imploring hands. Have you had some tea?”

“Thank you, no; I don’t wish any,” said the young girl, so coldly that he could not help noticing, though commonly he was man enough to notice very few things.

“How is Effie to-day?” he asked quickly.

“Oh, quite well,” said Imogene.

“I don’t see Mrs. Bowen,” he ventured further.

“No,” answered the girl, still very lifelessly; “I came with Mrs. Fleming.” She looked about the room as if not to look at him.

He now perceived a distinct intention to snub him. He smiled. “Have you seen the pictures? There are two or three really lovely ones.”

“Mrs. Fleming will be here in a moment, I suppose,” said Imogene evasively, but not with all her first coldness.

“Let us steal a march on her,” said Colville briskly. “When she comes you can tell her that I showed you the pictures.”

“I don’t know,” faltered the girl.

“Perhaps it isn’t necessary you should,” he suggested.

She glanced at him with questioning trepidation.

“The respective duties of chaperone and protégée are rather undefined. Where the chaperone isn’t there to command, the protégée isn’t there to obey. I suppose you’d know if you were at home?”

“Oh yes!”

“Let me imagine myself at a loan exhibition in Buffalo. Ah! that appeal is irresistible. You’ll come, I see.”

She hesitated; she looked at the nearest picture, then followed him to another. He now did what he had refused to do for the old lady who tempted him to it; he made fun of the pictures a little, but so amiably and with so much justice to their good points that the painter himself would not have minded his jesting. From time to time he made Imogene smile, but in her eyes lurked a look of uneasiness, and her manner expressed a struggle against his will which might have had its pathos for him in different circumstances, but now it only incited him to make her forget herself more and more; he treated her as one does a child that is out of sorts — coaxingly, ironically.

When they had made the round of the rooms Mrs. Fleming was not at the window where she had left Imogene; the girl detected the top of her bonnet still in the next room.

“The chaperone is never there when you come back with the protégée,” said Colville. “It seems to be the nature of the chaperone.”

Imogene turned very grave. “I think I ought to go to her,” she murmured.

“Oh no; she ought to come to you; I stand out for protégée’s rights.”

“I suppose she will come directly.”

“She sees me with you; she knows you are safe.”

“Oh, of course,” said the girl. After a constraint which she marked by rather a long silence, she added, “How strange a roomful of talking sounds, doesn’t it? Just like a great caldron boiling up and bubbling over. Wouldn’t you like to know what they’re all saying?”

“Oh, it’s quite bad enough to see them,” replied Colville frivolously.

“I think a company of gentlemen with their hats off look very queer, don’t you?” she asked, after another interval.

“Well, really,” said Colville, laughing, “I don’t know that the spectacle ever suggested any metaphysical speculations to me. I rather think they look queerer with their hats on.”

“Oh yes.”

“Though there is not very much to choose. We’re a queer-looking set, anyway.”

He got himself another cup of tea, and coming back to her, allowed her to make the efforts to keep up the conversation, and was not without a malicious pleasure in her struggles. They interested him as social exercises which, however abrupt and undexterous now, were destined, with time and practice, to become the finesse of a woman of society, and to be accepted, even while they were still abrupt and undexterous, as touches of character. He had broken up that coldness with which she had met him at first, and now he let her adjust the fragments as she could to the new situation. He wore that air of a gentleman who has been talking a long time to a lady, and who will not dispute her possession with a new-comer.

But no one came, though, as he cast his eyes carelessly over the company, he found that it had been increased by the accession of eight or ten young fellows, with a refreshing light of originality in their faces, and little touches of difference from the other men in their dress.

“Oh, there are the Inglehart boys!” cried the girl, with a flash of excitement.

There was a sensation of interest and friendliness in the company as these young fellows, after their moment of social intimidation, began to gather round the pictures, and to fling their praise and blame about, and talk the delightful shop of the studio.

The sight of their fresh young faces, the sound of their voices, struck a pang of regret that was almost envy to Colville’s heart.

Imogene followed them with eager eyes. “Oh,” she sighed, “shouldn’t you like to be an artist?”

“I should, very much.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon; I forgot. I knew you were an architect.”

“I should say I used to be, if you hadn’t objected to my perfects and preterits.”

What came next seemed almost an accident.

“I didn’t suppose you cared for my objections, so long as I amused you.” She suddenly glanced at him, as if terrified at her own words.

“Have you been trying to amuse me?” he asked.

“Oh no. I thought — —”

“Oh, then,” said Colville sharply, “you meant that I was amusing myself with you?” She glanced at him in terror of his divination, but could not protest. “Has any one told you that?” he pursued, with sudden angry suspicion.

“No, no one,” began Imogene. She glanced about her, frightened. They stood quite alone where they were; the people had mostly wandered off into the other rooms. “Oh, don’t — I didn’t mean — I didn’t intend to say anything — —”

“But you have said something — something that surprises me from you, and hurts me. I wish to know whether you say it from yourself.”

“I don’t know — yes. That is, not —— Oh, I wish Mrs. Fleming — —”

She looked as if another word of pursuit would put it beyond her power to control herself.

“Let me take you to Mrs. Fleming,” said Colville, with freezing hauteur; and led the way where the top of Mrs. Fleming’s bonnet still showed itself. He took leave at once, and hastily parting with his host, found himself in the street, whirled in many emotions. The girl had not said that from herself, but it was from some woman; he knew that by the directness of the phrase and its excess, for he had noticed that women who liked to beat about the bush in small matters have a prodigious straightforwardness in more vital affairs, and will even call grey black in order clearly to establish the presence of the black in that colour. He could hardly keep himself from going to Palazzo Pinti.

But he contrived to go to his hotel instead, where he ate a moody dinner, and then, after an hour’s solitary bitterness in his room, went out and passed the evening at the theatre. The play was one of those fleering comedies which render contemptible for the time all honest and earnest intention, and which surely are a whiff from the bottomless pit itself. It made him laugh at the serious strain of self-question that had mingled with his resentment; it made him laugh even at his resentment, and with its humour in his thoughts, sent him off to sleep in a sottish acceptance of whatever was trivial in himself as the only thing that was real and lasting.

He slept late, and when Paolo brought up his breakfast, he brought with it a letter which he said had been left with the porter an hour before. A faint appealing perfume of violet exhaled from the note, and mingled with the steaming odours of the coffee and boiled milk, when Colville, after a glance at the unfamiliar handwriting of the superscription, broke the seal.

“DEAR MR. COLVILLE, — I don’t know what you will think of my writing to you, but perhaps you can’t think worse of me than you do already, and anything will be better than the misery that I am in. I have not been asleep all night. I hate myself for telling you, but I do want you to understand how I have felt. I would give worlds if I could take back the words that you say wounded you. I didn’t mean to wound you. Nobody is to blame for them but me; nobody ever breathed a word about you that was meant in unkindness.

“I am not ashamed of writing this, whatever you think, and I will sign my name in full. IMOGENE GRAHAM.”

Colville had commonly a good appetite for his breakfast, but now he let his coffee stand long un-tasted. There were several things about this note that touched him — the childlike simplicity and directness, the generous courage, even the imperfection and crudity of the literature. However he saw it afterward, he saw it then in its true intention. He respected that intention; through all the sophistications in which life had wrapped him, it awed him a little. He realised that if he had been younger he would have gone to Imogene herself with her letter. He felt for the moment a rush of the emotion which he would once not have stopped to examine, which he would not have been capable of examining. But now his duty was clear; he must go to Mrs. Bowen. In the noblest human purpose there is always some admixture, however slight, of less noble motive, and Colville was not without the willingness to see whatever embarrassment she might feel when he showed her the letter, and to invoke her finest tact to aid him in re-assuring the child.

She was alone in her drawing-room, and she told him in response to his inquiry for their health that Imogene and Effie had gone out to drive. She looked so pretty in the quiet house dress in which she rose from the sofa and stood, letting him come the whole way to greet her, that he did not think of any other look in her, but afterward he remembered an evidence of inner tumult in her brightened eyes.

He said, smiling, “I’m so glad to see you alone,” and this brought still another look into her face, which also he afterward remembered. She did not reply, but made a sound in her throat like a bird when it stirs itself for flight or song. It was a strange, indefinite little note, in which Colville thought he detected trepidation at the time, and recalled for the sort of expectation suggested in it. She stood waiting for him to go on.

“I have come to get you to help me out of trouble.”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Bowen, with a vague smile. “I always supposed you would be able to help yourself out of trouble. Or perhaps wouldn’t mind it if you were in it.”

“Oh yes, I mind it very much,” returned Colville, refusing her banter, if it were banter. “Especially this sort of trouble, which involves some one else in the discomfort.” He went on abruptly: “I have been held up to a young lady as a person who was amusing himself with her, and I was so absurd as to be angry when she told me, and demanded the name of my friend, whoever it was. My behaviour seems to have given the young lady a bad night, and this morning she writes to tell me so, and to take all the blame on herself, and to assure me that no harm was meant me by any one. Of course I don’t want her to be distressed about it. Perhaps you can guess who has been writing to me.”

Colville said all this looking down, in a fashion he had. When he looked up he saw a severity in Mrs. Bowen’s pretty face, such as he had not seen there before.

“I didn’t know she had been writing to you, but I know that you are talking of Imogene. She told me what she had said to you yesterday, and I blamed her for it, but I’m not sure that it wasn’t best.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Colville. “Perhaps you can tell me who put the idea into her head?”

“Yes; I did.”

A dead silence ensued, in which the fragments of the situation broken by these words revolved before Colville’s thought with kaleidoscopic variety, and he passed through all the phases of anger, resentment, wounded self-love, and accusing shame.

At last, “I suppose you had your reasons,” he said simply.

“I am in her mother’s place here,” she replied, tightening the grip of one little hand upon another, where she held them laid against the side of her waist.

“Yes, I know that,” said Colville; “but what reason had you to warn her against me as a person who was amusing himself with her? I don’t like the phrase; but she seems to have got it from you; I use it at third hand.”

“I don’t like the phrase either; I didn’t invent it.”

“You used it.”

“No; it wasn’t I who used it. I should have been glad to use another, if I could,” said Mrs. Bowen, with perfect steadiness.

“Then you mean to say that you believe I’ve been trifling with the feelings of this child?”

“I mean to say nothing. You are very much older; and she is a romantic girl, very extravagant. You have tried to make her like you.”

“I certainly have. I have tried to make Effie Bowen like me too.”

Mrs. Bowen passed this over in serenity that he felt was not far from contempt.

He gave a laugh that did not express enjoyment.

“You have no right to laugh!” she cried, losing herself a little, and so making her first gain upon him.

“It appears not. Perhaps you will tell me what I am to do about this letter?”

“That is for you to decide.” She recovered herself, and lost ground with him in proportion.

“I thought perhaps that since you were able to judge my motives so clearly, you might be able to advise me.”

“I don’t judge your motives,” Mrs. Bowen began. She added suddenly, as if by an after-thought, “I don’t think you had any.”

“I’m obliged to you.”

“But you are as much to blame as if you had.”

“And perhaps I’m as much to blame as if I had really wronged somebody?”

“Yes.”

“It’s rather paradoxical. You don’t wish me to see her any more?”

“I haven’t any wish about it; you must not say that I have,” said Mrs. Bowen, with dignity.

Colville smiled. “May I ask if you have?”

“Not for myself.”

“You put me on very short allowance of conjecture.”

“I will not let you trifle with the matter!” she cried. “You have made me speak, when a word, a look, ought to have been enough. Oh, I didn’t think you had the miserable vanity to wish it!”

Colville stood thinking a long time and she waiting. “I see that everything is at an end. I am going away from Florence. Good-bye, Mrs. Bowen.” He approached her, holding out his hand. But if he expected to be rewarded for this, nothing of the kind happened. She shrank swiftly back.

“No, no. You shall not touch me.”

He paused a moment, gazing keenly at her face, in which, whatever other feeling showed, there was certainly no fear of him. Then with a slight bow he left the room.

Mrs. Bowen ran from it by another door, and shut herself into her own room. When she returned to the salotto, Imogene and Effie were just coming in. The child went to lay aside her hat and sacque; the girl, after a glance at Mrs. Bowen’s face, lingered inquiringly.

“Mr. Colville came here with your letter, Imogene.”

“Yes,” said Imogene faintly. “Do you think I oughtn’t to have written it?”

“Oh, it makes no difference now. He is going away from Florence.”

“Yes?” breathed the girl.

“I spoke openly with him.”

“Yes?”

“I didn’t spare him. I made him think I hated and despised him.”

Imogene was silent. Then she said, “I know that whatever you have done, you have acted for the best.”

“Yes, I have a right that you should say that — I have a right that you should always say it. I think he has behaved very foolishly, but I don’t blame him — —”

“No! I was to blame.”

“I don’t know that he was to blame, and I won’t let you think he was.”

“Oh, he is the best man in the world!”

“He gave up at once; he didn’t try to defend himself. It’s nothing for you to lose a friend at your age; but at mine — —”

“I know it, Mrs. Bowen.”

“And I wouldn’t even shake hands with him when he was going; I — —”

“Oh, I don’t see how you could be so hard!” cried Imogene. She put up her hands to her face, and broke into tears. Mrs. Bowen watched her, dry eyed, with her lips parted, and an intensity of question in her face.

“Imogene,” she said at last, “I wish you to promise me one thing.”

“Yes.”

“Not to write to Mr. Colville again.”

“No, no; indeed I won’t, Mrs. Bowen!” The girl came up to kiss her; Mrs. Bowen turned her cheek.

wish you to promise me this only because you don’t feel sure of yourself about him. If you care for him — if you think you care for him — then I leave you perfectly free.”

The girl looked up, scared. “No, no; I’d rather you wouldn’t leave me free — you mustn’t; I shouldn’t know what to do.”

“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Bowen.

They both waited a moment, as if each were staying for the other to speak. Then Imogene asked, “Is he — going soon?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Bowen. “Why should he want to delay? He had better go at once. And I hope he will go home — as far from Florence as he can. I should think he would hate the place.”

“Yes,” said the girl, with a quivering sigh; “it must be hateful to him.” She paused, and then she rushed on with bitter self-reproach. “And I — I have helped to make it so! O Mrs. Bowen, perhaps it’s I who have been trifling with him Trying to make him believe — no, not trying to do that, but letting him see that I sympathised — Oh, do you think I have?”

“You know what you have been doing, Imogene,” said Mrs. Bowen, with the hardness it surprises men to know women use with each other, they seem such tender creatures in the abstract. “You have no need to ask me.”

“No, no.”

“As you say, I warned you from the first.”

“Oh yes; you did.”

“I couldn’t do more than hint; it was too much to expect — —”

“Oh, yes, yes.”

“And if you couldn’t take my hints, I was helpless.”

“Yes; I see it.”

“I was only afraid of saying too much, and all through that miserable veglione business I was trying to please you and him, because I was afraid I had said too much — gone too far. I wanted to show you that I disdained to be suspicious, that I was ashamed to suppose that a girl of your age could care for the admiration of a man of his.”

“Oh, I didn’t care for his admiration. I admired him — and pitied him.”

Mrs. Bowen apparently would not be kept now from saying all that had been rankling in her breast. “I didn’t approve of going to the veglione. A great many people would be shocked if they knew I went; I wouldn’t at all like to have it known. But I was not going to have him thinking that I was severe with you, and wanted to deny you any really harmless pleasure.”

“Oh, who could think that? You’re only too good to me. You see,” said the girl, “what a return I have made for your trust. I knew you didn’t want to go to the veglione. If I hadn’t been the most selfish girl in the world I wouldn’t have let you. But I did. I forced you to go, and then, after we got there, I seized every advantage, and abused your kindness till I wonder I didn’t sink through the floor. Yes; I ought to have refused to dance — if I’d had a spark of generosity or gratitude I would have done it; and I ought to have come straight back to you the instant the waltz was done. And now see what has come of it! I’ve made you think he was trifling with me, and I’ve made him think that I’m a false and hollow-hearted thing.”

“You know best what you have done, Imogene,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a smiling tearfulness that was somehow very bitter. She rose from the sofa, as if to indicate that there was no more to be said, and Imogene, with a fresh burst of grief, rushed away to her own room.

She dropped on her knees beside her bed, and stretched out her arms upon it, an image of that desolation of soul which, when we are young, seems limitless, but which in later life we know has comparatively narrow bounds beyond the clouds that rest so blackly around us.

XII

In his room Colville was devouring as best he might the chagrin with which he had come away from Palazzo Pinti, while he packed his trunk for departure. Now that the thing was over, the worst was past. Again he observed that his emotions had no longer the continuity that the emotions of his youth possessed. As he remembered, a painful or pleasant impression used to last indefinitely; but here he was with this humiliating affair hot in his mind, shrugging his shoulders with a sense of relief, almost a sense of escape. Does the soul really wear out with the body? The question flitted across his mind as he took down a pair of trousers, and noticed that they were considerably frayed about the feet; he determined to give them to Paolo, and this reminded him to ring for Paolo, and send word to the office that he was going to take the evening train for Rome.

He went on packing, and putting away with the different garments the unpleasant thoughts that he knew he should be sure to unpack with them in Rome; but they would then have less poignancy.

For the present he was doing the best he could, and he was not making any sort of pretences. When his trunk was locked he kindled himself a fire, and sat down before it to think of Imogene. He began with her, but presently it seemed to be Mrs. Bowen that he was thinking of; then he knew he was dropping off to sleep by the manner in which their two ideas mixed. The fatigues and excitements of the week had been great, but he would not give way; it was too disgraceful.

Some one rapped at his door. He called out “Avanti!” and he would have been less surprised to see either of those ladies than Paolo with the account he had ordered to be made out. It was a long, pendulous, minutely itemed affair, such as the traveller’s recklessness in candles and firewood comes to in the books of the Continental landlord, and it almost swept the floor when its volume was unrolled. But it was not the sum-total that dismayed Colville when he glanced at the final figure; that, indeed, was not so very great, with all the items; it was the conviction, suddenly flashing upon him, that he had not money enough by him to pay it. His watch, held close to the fire, told him that it was five o’clock; the banks had been closed an hour, and this was Saturday afternoon.

The squalid accident had all the effect of intention, as he viewed it from without himself, and considered that the money ought to have been the first thing in his thoughts after he determined to go away. He must get the money somehow, and be off to Rome by the seven o’clock train. A whimsical suggestion, which was so good a bit of irony that it made him smile, flashed across him: he might borrow it of Mrs. Bowen. She was, in fact, the only person in Florence with whom he was at all on borrowing terms, and a sad sense of the sweetness of her lost friendship followed upon the antic notion. No; for once he could not go to Mrs. Bowen. He recollected now the many pleasant talks they had had together, confidential in virtue of their old acquaintance, and harmlessly intimate in many things. He recalled how, when he was feeling dull from the Florentine air, she had told him to take a little quinine, and he had found immediate advantage in it. These memories did strike him as grotesque or ludicrous; he only felt their pathos. He was ashamed even to seem in anywise recreant further. If she should ever hear that he had lingered for thirty-six hours in Florence after he had told her he was going away, what could she think but that he had repented his decision? He determined to go down to the office of the hotel, and see if he could not make some arrangement with the landlord. It would be extremely distasteful, but his ample letter of credit would be at least a voucher of his final ability to pay. As a desperate resort he could go and try to get the money of Mr. Waters.

He put on his coat and hat, and opened the door to some one who was just in act to knock at it, and whom he struck against in the obscurity.

“I beg your pardon,” said the visitor.

“Mr. Waters! Is it possible?” cried Colville, feeling something fateful in the chance. “I was just going to see you.”

“I’m fortunate in meeting you, then. Shall we go to my room?” he asked, at a hesitation in Colville’s manner.

“No, no,” said the latter; “come in here.” He led the way back into his room, and struck a match to light the candles on his chimney. Their dim rays fell upon the disorder his packing had left. “You must excuse the look of things,” he said. “The fact is, I’m just going away. I’m going to Rome at seven o’clock.”

“Isn’t this rather sudden?” asked the minister, with less excitement than the fact might perhaps have been expected to create in a friend. “I thought you intended to pass the winter in Florence.”

“Yes, I did — sit down, please — but I find myself obliged to cut my stay short. Won’t you take off your coat?” he asked, taking off his own.

“Thank you; I’ve formed the habit of keeping it on indoors,” said Mr. Waters. “And I oughtn’t to stay long, if you’re to be off so soon.”

Colville gave a very uncomfortable laugh. “Why, the fact is, I’m not off so very soon unless you help me.”

“Ah?” returned the old gentleman, with polite interest.

“Yes, I find myself in the absurd position of a man who has reckoned without his host. I have made all my plans for going, and have had my hotel bill sent to me in pursuance of that idea, and now I discover that I not only haven’t money enough to pay it and get to Rome, but I haven’t much more than half enough to pay it. I have credit galore,” he said, trying to give the situation a touch of liveliness, “but the bank is shut.”

Mr. Waters listened to the statement with a silence concerning which Colville was obliged to form his conjectures. “That is unfortunate,” he said sympathetically, but not encouragingly.

Colville pushed on desperately. “It is, unless you can help me, Mr. Waters. I want you to lend me fifty dollars for as many hours.”

Mr. Waters shook his head with a compassionate smile. “I haven’t fifty francs in cash. You are welcome to what there is. I’m very forgetful about money matters, and haven’t been to the bankers.”

“Oh, don’t excuse yourself to me, unless you wish to embitter my shame. must try to run my face with the landlord,” said Colville.

“Oh no,” said Mr. Waters gently. “Is there such haste as all that?”

“Yes, I must go at once.”

“I don’t like to have you apply to a stranger,” said the old man, with fatherly kindness. “Can’t you remain over till Monday? I had a little excursion to propose.”

“No, I can’t possibly stay; I must go to-night,” cried Colville.

The minister rose. “Then I really mustn’t detain you, I suppose. Good-bye.” He offered his hand. Colville took it, but could not let it go at once. “I would like extremely to tell you why I’m leaving Florence in such haste. But I don’t see what good it would do, for I don’t want you to persuade me to stay.”

The old gentleman looked at him with friendly interest.

“The fact is,” Colville proceeded, as if he had been encouraged to do so, “I have had the misfortune — yes, I’m afraid I’ve had the fault — to make myself very displeasing to Mrs. Bowen, and in such a way that the very least I can do is to take myself off as far and as soon as I conveniently can.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Waters, with the cheerful note of incredulity in his voice with which one is apt to respond to others’ confession of extremity. “Is it so bad as that? I’ve just seen Mrs. Bowen, and she told me you were going.”

“Oh,” said Colville, with disagreeable sensation, “perhaps she told you why I was going.”

“No,” answered Mr. Waters; “she didn’t do that.” Colville imagined a consciousness in him, which perhaps did not exist. “She didn’t allude to the subject further than to state the fact, when I mentioned that I was coming to see you.”

Colville had dropped his hand. “She was very forbearing,” he said, with bitterness that might well have been incomprehensible to Mr. Waters upon any theory but one.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “you are precipitate; perhaps you have mistaken; perhaps you have been hasty. These things are often the result of impulse in women. I have often wondered how they could make up their minds; I believe they certainly ought to be allowed to change them at least once.”

Colville turned very red. “What in the world do you mean? Do you imagine that I have been offering myself to Mrs. Bowen?”

“Wasn’t it that which you wished to — which you said you would like to tell me?”

Colville was suddenly silent, on the verge of a self-derisive laugh. When he spoke, he said gently: “No; it wasn’t that. I never thought of offering myself to her. We have always been very good friends. But now I’m afraid we can’t be friends any more — at least we can’t be acquaintances.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Mr. Waters. He waited a while as if for Colville to say more, but the latter remained silent, and the old man gave his hand again in farewell. “I must really be going. I hope you won’t think me intrusive in my mistaken conjecture?”

“Oh no.”

“It was what I supposed you had been telling me — —”

“I understand. You mustn’t be troubled,” said Colville, though he had to own to himself that it seemed superfluous to make this request of Mr. Waters, who was taking the affair with all the serenity of age concerning matters of sentiment. “I wish you were going to Rome with me,” he added, to disembarrass the moment of parting.

“Thank you. But I shall not go to Rome for some years. Shall you come back on your way in the spring?”

“No, I shall not come to Florence again,” said Colville sadly.

“Ah, I’m sorry. Good-bye, my dear young friend. It’s been a great pleasure to know you.” Colville walked down to the door of the hotel with his visitor and parted with him there. As he turned back he met the landlord, who asked him if he would have the omnibus for the station. The landlord bowed smilingly, after his kind, and rubbed his hands. He said he hoped Colville was pleased with his hotel, and ran to his desk in the little office to get some cards for him, so that he might recommend it accurately to American families.

Colville looked absently at the cards. “The fact is,” he said, to the little bowing, smiling man; “I don’t know but I shall be obliged to postpone my going till Monday.” He smiled too, trying to give the fact a jocose effect, and added, “I find myself out of money, and I’ve no means of paying your bill till I can see my bankers.”

After all his heroic intention, this was as near as he could come to asking the landlord to let him send the money from Rome.

The little man set his head on one side.

“Oh, well, occupy the room until Monday, then,” he cried hospitably. “It is quite at your disposition. You will not want the omnibus?”

“No, I shall not want the omnibus,” said Colville, with a laugh, doubtless not perfectly intelligible to the landlord, who respectfully joined him in it.

He did not mean to stop that night without writing to Mrs. Bowen, and assuring her that though an accident had kept him in Florence till Monday, she need not be afraid of seeing him again. But he could not go back to his room yet; he wandered about the town, trying to pick himself up from the ruin into which he had fallen again, and wondering with a sort of alien compassion what was to become of his aimless, empty existence. As he passed through the Piazza San Marco he had half a mind to pick a pebble from the gardened margin of the fountain there and toss it against the Rev. Mr. Waters’s window, and when he put his skull-cap out, to ask that optimistic agnostic what a man had best do with a life that had ceased to interest him. But, for the time being, he got rid of himself as he best could by going to the opera. They professed to give Rigoletto, but it was all Mrs. Bowen and Imogene Graham to Colville.

It was so late when he got back to his hotel that the outer gate was shut, and he had to wake up the poor little porter, as on that night when he returned from Madame Uccelli’s. The porter was again equal to his duty, and contrived to light a new candle to show him the way to his room. The repetition, almost mechanical, of this small chicane made Colville smile, and this apparently encouraged the porter to ask, as if he supposed him to have been in society somewhere —

“You have amused yourself this evening?

“Oh, very much.”

“I am glad. There is a letter for you.’

“A letter! Where?”

“I sent it to your room. It came just before midnight.”

XIII

Mrs. Bowen sat before the hearth in her salon, with her hands fallen in her lap. At thirty-eight the emotions engrave themselves more deeply in the face than they do in our first youth, or than they will when we have really aged, and the pretty woman looked haggard.

Imogene came in, wearing a long blue robe, flung on as if with desperate haste; her thick hair fell crazily out of a careless knot, down her back. “I couldn’t sleep,” she said, with quivering lips, at the sight of which Mrs. Bowen’s involuntary smile hardened. “Isn’t it eleven yet?” she added, with a glance at the clock. “It seems years since I went to bed.”

“It’s been a long day,” Mrs. Bowen admitted. She did not ask Imogene why she could not sleep, perhaps because she knew already, and was too honest to affect ignorance.

The girl dropped into a chair opposite her, and began to pull her fingers through the long tangle of her hair, while she drew her breath in sighs that broke at times on her lips; some tears fell down her cheeks unheeded. “Mrs. Bowen,” she said, at length, “I should like to know what right we have to drive any one from Florence? I should think people would call it rather a high-handed proceeding if it were known.”

Mrs. Bowen met this feebleness promptly. “It isn’t likely to be known. But we are not driving Mr. Colville away.”

“He is going.”

“Yes; he said he would go.”

“Don’t you believe he will go?”

“I believe he will do what he says.”

“He has been very kind to us all; he has been as good!”

“No one feels that more than I,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a slight tremor in her voice. She faltered a moment. “I can’t let you say those things to me, Imogene.”

“No; I know it’s wrong. I didn’t know what I was saying. Oh, I wish I could tell what I ought to do! I wish I could make up my mind. Oh, I can’t let him go — so. I — I don’t know what to think any more. Once it was clear, but now I’m not sure; no, I’m not sure.”

“Not sure about what?”

“I think I am the one to go away, if any one.”

“You know you can’t go away,” said Mrs. Bowen, with weary patience.

“No, of course not. Well, I shall never see any one like him.”

Mrs. Bowen made a start in her chair, as if she had no longer the power to remain quiet, but only placed herself a little more rigidly in it.

“No,” the girl went on, as if uttering a hopeless reverie. “He made every moment interesting. He was always thinking of us — he never thought of himself. He did as much for Effie as for any one; he tried just as hard to make himself interesting to her. He was unselfish. I have seen him at places being kind to the stupidest people. You never caught him choosing out the stylish or attractive ones, or trying to shine at anybody’s expense. Oh, he’s a true gentleman — I shall always say it. How delicate he was, never catching you up, or if you said a foolish thing, trying to turn it against you. No, never, never, never! Oh dear! And now, what can he think of me? Oh, how frivolous and fickle and selfish he must think me!”

“Imogene!” Mrs. Bowen cried out, but quelled herself again.

“Yes,” pursued the girl, in the same dreary monotone, “he thinks I couldn’t appreciate him because he was old. He thinks that I cared for his not being handsome! Perhaps — perhaps — —” She began to catch her breath in the effort to keep back the sobs that were coming. “Oh, I can’t bear it! I would rather die than let him think it — such a thing as that!” She bent her head aside, and cried upon the two hands with which she clutched the top of her chair.

Mrs. Bowen sat looking at her distractedly. From time to time she seemed to silence a word upon her lips, and in fact she did not speak.

Imogene lifted her head at last, and softly dried her eyes. Then, as she pushed her handkerchief back into the pocket of her robe, “What sort of looking girl was that other one?”

“That other one?”

“Yes; you know what I mean: the one who behaved so badly to him before.”

“Imogene!” said Mrs. Bowen severely, “this is nonsense, and I can’t let you go on so. I might pretend not to know what you mean; but I won’t do that; and I tell you that there is no sort of likeness — of comparison — —”

“No, no,” wailed the girl, “there is none. I feel that. She had nothing to warn her — he hadn’t suffered then; he was young; he was able to bear it — you said it yourself, Mrs. Bowen. But now — now, what will he do? He could make fun of that, and not hate her so much, because she didn’t know how much harm she was doing. But I did; and what can he think of me?”

Mrs. Bowen looked across the barrier between them, that kept her from taking Imogene into her arms, and laughing and kissing away her craze, with cold dislike, and only said, “You know whether you’ve really anything to accuse yourself of, Imogene. I can’t and won’t consider Mr. Colville in the matter; I didn’t consider him in what I said to-day. And I tell you again that I will not interfere with you in the slightest degree beyond appearances and the responsibility I feel to your mother. And it’s for you to know your own mind. You are old enough. I will do what you say. It’s for you to be sure that you wish what you say.”

“Yes,” said Imogene huskily, and she let an interval that was long to them both elapse before she said anything more. “Have I always done what you thought best, Mrs. Bowen?”

“Yes, I have never complained of you.”

“Then why can’t you tell me now what you think best?”

“Because there is nothing to be done. It is all over.”

“But if it were not, would you tell me?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I — couldn’t.”

“Then I take back my promise not to write to Mr. Colville. I am going to ask him to stay.”

“Have you made up your mind to that, Imogene?” asked Mrs. Bowen, showing no sign of excitement, except to take a faster hold of her own wrists with the slim hands in which she had caught them.

“Yes.”

“You know the position it places you in?”

“What position?”

“Has he offered himself to you?”

“No!” the girl’s face blazed.

“Then, after what’s passed, this is the same as offering yourself to him.”

Imogene turned white. “I must write to him, unless you forbid me.”

“Certainly I shall not forbid you.” Mrs. Bowen rose and went to her writing-desk. “But if you have fully made up your mind to this step, and are ready for the consequences, whatever they are — —” She stopped, before sitting down, and looked back over her shoulder at Imogene.

“Yes,” said the girl, who had also risen.

“Then I will write to Mr. Colville for you, and render the proceeding as little objectionable as possible.”

Imogene made no reply. She stood motionless while Mrs. Bowen wrote.

“Is this what you wished?” asked the latter, offering the sheet: ——

“Dear Mr. Colville, — I have reasons for wishing to recall my consent to your going away. Will you not come and lunch with us to-morrow, and try to forget everything that has passed during a few days?

“Yours very sincerely,

“Evalina Bowen.”

“Yes, that will do,” gasped Imogene.

Mrs. Bowen rang the bell for the porter, and stood with her back to the girl, waiting for him at the salon door. He came after a delay that sufficiently intimated the lateness of the hour. “This letter must go at once to the Hotel d’Atene,” said Mrs. Bowen peremptorily.

“You shall be served,” said the porter, with fortitude.

As Mrs. Bowen turned, Imogene ran toward her with clasped hands. “Oh, how merciful — how good — —”

Mrs. Bowen shrank back. “Don’t touch me, Imogene, please!”

It was her letter which Colville found on his table and read by the struggling light of his newly acquired candle. Then he sat down and replied to it.

“Dear Mrs. Bowen, — I know that you mean some sort of kindness by me, and I hope you will not think me prompted by any poor resentment in declining to-morrow’s lunch. I am satisfied that it is best for me to go; and I am ashamed not to be gone already. But a ridiculous accident has kept me, and when I came in and found your note I was just going to write and ask your patience with my presence in Florence till Monday morning.

“Yours sincerely, THEODORE COLVILLE.”

He took his note down to the porter, who had lain down again in his little booth, but sprang up with a cheerful request to be commanded. Colville consulted him upon the propriety of sending the note to Palazzo Pinti at once, and the porter, with his head laid in deprecation upon one of his lifted shoulders, owned that it was perhaps the very least little bit in the world late.

“Send it the first thing in the morning, then,” said Colville.

Mrs. Bowen received it by the servant who brought her coffee to the room, and she sent it without any word to Imogene. The girl came instantly back with it. She was fully dressed, as if she had been up a long time, and she wore a very plain, dull dress, in which one of her own sex might have read the expression of a potential self-devotion.

“It’s just as I wish it, Mrs. Bowen,” she said, in a low key of impassioned resolution. “Now, my conscience is at rest. And you have done this for me, Mrs. Bowen!” She stood timidly with the door in her hand, watching Mrs. Bowen’s slight smile; then, as if at some sign in it, she flew to the bed and kissed her, and so fled out of the room again.

Colville slept late, and awoke with a vague sense of self-reproach, which faded afterward to such poor satisfaction as comes to us from the consciousness of having made the best of a bad business; some pangs of softer regret mixed with this. At first he felt a stupid obligation to keep indoors, and he really did not go out till after lunch. The sunshine had looked cold from his window, and with the bright fire which he found necessary in his room, he fancied a bitterness in the gusts that caught up the dust in the piazza, and blew it against the line of cabs on the other side; but when he got out into the weather he found the breeze mild and the sun warm. The streets were thronged with people, and at all the corners there were groups of cloaked and overcoated talkers, soaking themselves full of the sunshine. The air throbbed, as always, with the sound of bells, but it was a mellower and opener sound than before, and looking at the purple bulk of one of those hills which seem to rest like clouds at the end of each avenue in Florence, Colville saw that it was clear of snow. He was going up through Via Cavour to find Mr. Waters and propose a walk, but he met him before he had got half-way to San Marco.

The old man was at a momentary stand-still, looking up at the Riccardi Palace, and he received Colville with apparent forgetfulness of anything odd in his being still in Florence. “Upon the whole,” he said, without preliminary of any sort, as Colville turned and joined him in walking on, “I don’t know any homicide that more distinctly proves the futility of assassination as a political measure than that over yonder.” He nodded his head sidewise toward the palace as he shuffled actively along at Colville’s elbow.

“You might say that the moment when Lorenzino killed Alessandro was the most auspicious for a deed of that kind. The Medici had only recently been restored; Alessandro was the first ruler in Florence, who had worn a title; no more reckless, brutal, and insolent tyrant ever lived, and his right, even such as the Medici might have, to play the despot was involved in the doubt of his origin; the heroism of the great siege ought still to have survived in the people who withstood the forces of the whole German Empire for fifteen months; it seems as if the taking off of that single wretch should have ended the whole Medicean domination; but there was not a voice raised to second the homicide’s appeal to the old love of liberty in Florence. The Medici party were able to impose a boy of eighteen upon the most fiery democracy that ever existed, and to hunt down and destroy Alessandro’s murderer at their leisure. No,” added the old man thoughtfully, “I think that the friends of progress must abandon assassination as invariably useless. The trouble was not that Alessandro was alive, but that Florence was dead. Assassination always comes too early or too late in any popular movement. It may be,” said Mr. Waters, with a carefulness to do justice to assassination which made Colville smile, “that the modern scientific spirits may be able to evolve something useful from the principle, but considering the enormous abuses and perversions to which it is liable, I am very doubtful of it — very doubtful.”

Colville laughed. “I like your way of bringing a fresh mind to all these questions in history and morals, whether they are conventionally settled or not. Don’t you think the modern scientific spirit could evolve something useful out of the old classic idea of suicide?”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Waters; “I haven’t yet thought it over. The worst thing about suicide — and this must always rank it below political assassination — is that its interest is purely personal. No man ever kills himself for the good of others.”

“That’s certainly against it. We oughtn’t to countenance such an abominably selfish practice. But you can’t bring that charge against euthanasy. What have you to say of that?”

“I have heard one of the most benevolent and tender-hearted men I ever knew defend it in cases of hopeless suffering. But I don’t know that I should be prepared to take his ground. There appears to be something so sacred about human life that we must respect it even in spite of the prayers of the sufferer who asks us to end his irremediable misery.”

“Well,” said Colville, “I suspect we must at least class murder with the ballet as a means of good. One might say there was still some virtue in the primal, eldest curse against bloodshed.”

“Oh, I don’t by any means deny those things,” said the old man, with the air of wishing to be scrupulously just. “Which way are you walking?”

“Your way, if you will let me,” replied Colville. “I was going to your house to ask you to take a walk with me.”

“Ah, that’s good. I was reading of the great siege last night, and I thought of taking a look at Michelangelo’s bastions. Let us go together, if you don’t think you’ll find it too fatiguing.”

“I shall be ashamed to complain if I do.”

“And you didn’t go to Rome after all?” said Mr. Waters.

“No; I couldn’t face the landlord with a petition so preposterous as mine. I told him that I found I had no money to pay his bill till I had seen my banker, and as he didn’t propose that I should send him the amount back from Rome, I stayed. Landlords have their limitations; they are not imaginative, as a class.”

“Well, a day more will make no great difference to you, I suppose,” said the old man, “and a day less would have been a loss to me. I shall miss you.”

“Shall you, indeed?” asked Colville, with a grateful stir of the heart. “It’s very nice of you to say that.”

“Oh no. I meet few people who are willing to look at life objectively with me, and I have fancied some such willingness in you. What I chiefly miss over here is a philosophic lift in the human mind, but probably that is because my opportunities of meeting the best minds are few, and my means of conversing with them are small. If I had not the whole past with me, I should feel lonely at times.”

“And is the past such good company always?”.

“Yes, in a sense it is. The past is humanity set free from circumstance, and history studied where it was once life is the past rehumanised.”

As if he found this rarefied air too thin for his lungs, Colville made some ineffectual gasps at response, and the old man continued: “What I mean is that I meet here the characters I read of, and commune with them before their errors were committed, before they had condemned themselves to failure, while they were still wise and sane, and still active and vital forces.”

“Did they all fail? I thought some of the bad fellows had a pretty fair worldly success?”

“The blossom of decay.”

“Oh! what black pessimism!”

“Not at all! Men fail, but man succeeds. I don’t know what it all means, or any part of it; but I have had moods in which it seemed as if the whole, secret of the mystery were about to flash upon me. Walking along in the full sun, in the midst of men, or sometimes in the solitude of midnight, poring over a book, and thinking of quite other things, I have felt that I had almost surprised it.”

“But never quite?”

“Oh, it isn’t too late yet.”

“I hope you won’t have your revelation before I get away from Florence, or I shall see them burning you here like the great frate.”

They had been walking down the Via Calzioli from the Duomo, and now they came out into the Piazza della Signoria, suddenly, as one always seems to do, upon the rise of the old palace and the leap of its tower into the blue air. The history of all Florence is there, with memories of every great time in bronze or marble, but the supreme presence is the martyr who hangs for ever from the gibbet over the quenchless fire in the midst.

“Ah, they had to kill him!” sighed the old man. “It has always been so with the benefactors. They have always meant mankind more good than any one generation can bear, and it must turn upon them and destroy them.”

“How will it be with you, then, when you have read us ‘the riddle of the painful earth’?”

“That will be so simple that every one will accept it willingly and gladly, and wonder that no one happened to think of it before. And, perhaps, the world is now grown old enough and docile enough to receive the truth without resentment.”

“I take back my charge of pessimism,” said Colville. “You are an optimist of the deepest dye.”

They walked out of the Piazza and down to the Lung’ Arno, through the corridor of the Uffizzi, where the illustrious Florentines stand in marble under the arches, all reconciled and peaceful and equal at last. Colville shivered a little as he passed between the silent ranks of the statues.

“I can’t stand those fellows, to-day. They seem to feel such a smirk satisfaction at having got out of it all.”

They issued upon the river, and he went to the parapet and looked down on the water. “I wonder,” he mused aloud, “if it has the same Sunday look to these Sabbathless Italians as it has to us.”

“No; Nature isn’t puritan,” replied the old minister.

“Not at Haddam East Village?”

“No; there less than here; for she’s had to make a harder fight for her life there.”

“Ah, then you believe in Nature — you’re a friend of Nature?” asked Colville, following the lines of an oily swirl in the current with indolent eye.

“Only up to a certain point.” Mr. Waters seemed to be patient of any direction which the other might be giving the talk. “Nature is a savage. She has good impulses, but you can’t trust her altogether.”

“Do you know,” said Colville, “I don’t think there’s very much of her left in us after we reach a certain point in life? She drives us on at a great pace for a while, and then some fine morning we wake up and find that Nature has got tired of us and has left us to taste and conscience. And taste and conscience are by no means so certain of what they want you to do as Nature was.”

“Yes,” said the minister, “I see what you mean.” He joined Colville in leaning on the parapet, and he looked out on the river as if he saw his meaning there. “But by the time we reach that point in life most of us have got the direction which Nature meant us to take, and there’s no longer any need of her driving us on.”

“And what about the unlucky fellows who haven’t got the direction, or haven’t kept it?”

“They had better go back to it.”

“But if Nature herself seemed to change her mind about you?”

“Ah, you mean persons of weak will. They are a great curse to themselves and to everybody else.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Colville. “I’ve seen cases in which a strong will looked very much more like the devil.”

“Yes, a perverted will. But there can be no good without a strong will. A weak will means inconstancy. It means, even in good, good attempted and relinquished, which is always a terrible thing, because it is sure to betray some one who relied upon its accomplishment.”

“And in evil? Perhaps the evil, attempted and relinquished, turns into good.”

“Oh, never!” replied the minister fervently. “There is something very mysterious in what we call evil. Apparently it has infinitely greater force and persistence than good. I don’t know why it should be so. But so it appears.”

“You’ll have the reason of that along with the rest of the secret when your revelation comes,” said Colville, with a smile. He lifted his eyes from the river, and looked up over the clustering roofs beyond it to the hills beyond them, flecked to the crest of their purple slopes with the white of villas and villages. As if something in the beauty of the wonderful prospect had suggested the vision of its opposite, he said, dreamily, “I don’t think I shall go to Rome to-morrow, after all. I will go to Des Vaches! Where did you say you were walking, Mr. Waters? Oh yes! You told me. I will cross the bridge with you. But I couldn’t stand anything quite so vigorous as the associations of the siege this afternoon. I’m going to the Boboli Gardens, to debauch myself with a final sense of nerveless despotism, as it expressed itself in marble allegory and formal alleys. The fact is that if I stay with you any longer I shall tell you something that I’m too old to tell and you’re too old to hear.” The old man smiled, but offered no urgence or comment, and at the thither end of the bridge Colville said hastily, “Good-bye. If you ever come to Des Vaches, look me up.”

“Good-bye,” said the minister. “Perhaps we shall meet in Florence again.”

“No, no. Whatever happens, that won’t.”

They shook hands and parted. Colville stood a moment, watching the slight bent figure of the old man as he moved briskly up the Via de’ Bardi, turning his head from, side to side, to look at the palaces as he passed, and so losing himself in the dim, cavernous curve of the street. As soon as he was out of sight, Colville had an impulse to hurry after him and rejoin him; then he felt like turning about and going back to his hotel.

But he shook himself together into the shape of resolution, however slight and transient. “I must do something I intended to do,” he said, between his set teeth, and pushed on up through the Via Guicciardini. “I will go to the Boboli because I said I would.”

As he walked along, he seemed to himself to be merely crumbling away in this impulse and that, in one abortive intent and another. What did it all mean? Had he been his whole life one of these weak wills which are a curse to themselves and others, and most a curse when they mean the best? Was that the secret of his failure in life? But for many years he had seemed to succeed, to be as other men were, hard, practical men; he had once made a good newspaper, which was certainly not a dream of romance. Had he given that up at last because he was a weak will? And now was he running away from Florence because his will was weak? He could look back to that squalid tragedy of his youth, and see that a more violent, a more determined man could have possessed himself of the girl whom he had lost. And now would it not be more manly, if more brutal, to stay here, where a hope, however fleeting, however fitful, of what might have been, had revisited him in the love of this young girl? He felt sure, if anything were sure, that something in him, in spite of their wide disparity of years, had captured her fancy, and now, in his abasement, he felt again the charm of his own power over her. They were no farther apart in years than many a husband and wife; they would grow more and more together; there was youth enough in his heart yet; and who was pushing him away from her, forbidding him this treasure that he had but to put out his hand and make his own? Some one whom through all his thoughts of another he was trying to please, but whom he had made finally and inexorably his enemy. Better stay, then, something said to him; and when he answered, “I will,” something else reminded him that this also was not willing but unwilling.

XIV

When he entered the beautiful old garden, its benison of peace fell upon his tumult, and he began to breathe a freer air, reverting to his purpose to be gone in the morning and resting in it, as he strolled up the broad curve of its alley from the gate. He had not been there since he walked there with one now more like a ghost to him than any of the dead who had since died. It was there that she had refused him; he recalled with a grim smile the awkwardness of getting back with her to the gate from the point, far within the garden, where he had spoken. Except that this had happened in the fall, and now it was early spring, there seemed no change since then; the long years that had elapsed were like a winter between.

He met people in groups and singly loitering through the paths, and chiefly speaking English; but no one spoke to him, and no one invaded the solitude in which he walked. But the garden itself seemed to know him, and to give him a tacit recognition; the great, foolish grotto before the gate, with its statues by Bandinelli, and the fantastic effects of drapery and flesh in party-coloured statues lifted high on either side of the avenue; the vast shoulder of wall, covered thick with ivy and myrtle, which he passed on his way to the amphitheatre behind the palace; the alternate figures and urns on their pedestals in the hemicycle, as if the urns were placed there to receive the ashes of the figures when they became extinct; the white statues or the colossal busts set at the ends of the long, alleys against black curtains of foliage; the big fountain, with its group in the centre of the little lake, and the meadow, quiet and sad, that stretched away on one side from this; the keen light under the levels of the dense pines and ilexes; the paths striking straight on either hand from the avenue through which he sauntered, and the walk that coiled itself through the depths of the plantations; all knew him, and from them and from the winter neglect which was upon the place distilled a subtle influence, a charm, an appeal belonging to that combination of artifice and nature which is perfect only in an Italian garden under an Italian sky. He was right in the name which he mockingly gave the effect before he felt it; it was a debauch, delicate, refined, of unserious pensiveness, a smiling melancholy, in which he walked emancipated from his harassing hopes, and keeping only his shadowy regrets.

Colville did not care to scale the easy height from which you have the magnificent view, conscious of many photographs, of Florence. He wandered about the skirts of that silent meadow, and seeing himself unseen, he invaded its borders far enough to pluck one of those large scarlet anemones, such as he had given his gentle enemy. It was tilting there in the breeze above the unkempt grass, and the grass was beginning to feel the spring, and to stir and stretch itself after its winter sleep; it was sprinkled with violets, but these he did not molest. He came back to a stained and mossy stone bench on the avenue, fronting a pair of rustic youths carved in stone, who had not yet finished some game in which he remembered seeing them engaged when he was there before. He had not walked fast, but he had walked far, and was warm enough to like the whiffs of soft wind on his uncovered head. The spring was coming; that was its breath, which you know unmistakably in Italy after all the kisses that winter gives. Some birds were singing in the trees; down an alley into which he could look, between the high walls of green, he could see two people in flirtation: he waited patiently till the young man should put his arm round the girl’s waist, for the fleeting embrace from which she pushed it and fled further down the path.

“Yes, it’s spring,” thought Colville; and then, with the selfishness of the troubled soul, he wished that it might be winter still and indefinitely. It occurred to him now that he should not go back to Des Vaches, for he did not know what he should do there. He would go to New York: though he did not know what he should do in New York, either.

He became tired of looking at the people who passed, and of speculating about them through the second consciousness which enveloped the sad substance of his misgivings like an atmosphere; and he let his eyelids fall, as he leaned his head back against the tree behind his bench. Then their voices pursued him through the twilight that he had made himself, and forced him to the same weary conjecture as if he had seen their faces. He heard gay laughter, and laughter that affected gaiety; the tones of young men in earnest disquisition reached him through the veil, and the talk, falling to whisper, of girls, with the names of men in it; sums of money, a hundred francs, forty thousand francs, came in high tones; a husband and wife went by quarrelling in the false security of English, and snapping at each other as confidingly as if in the sanctuary of home. The man bade the woman not be a fool, and she asked him how she was to-endure his company if she was not a fool.

Colville opened his eyes to look after them, when a voice that he knew called out, “Why, it is Mr. Colville!”

It was Mrs. Amsden, and pausing with her, as if they had passed him in doubt, and arrested themselves when they had got a little way by, were Effie Bowen and Imogens Graham. The old lady had the child by the hand, and the girl stood a few paces apart from them. She was one of those beauties who have the property of looking very plain at times, and Colville, who had seen her in more than one transformation, now beheld her somehow clumsy of feature, and with the youth gone from her aspect. She seemed a woman of thirty, and she wore an unbecoming walking dress of a fashion that contributed to this effect of age. Colville was aware afterward of having wished that she was really as old and plain as she looked.

He had to come forward, and put on the conventional delight of a gentleman meeting lady friends.

“It’s remarkable how your having your eyes shut estranged you,” said Mrs. Amsden. “Now, if you had let me see you oftener in church, where people close their eyes a good deal for one purpose or another, I should have known you at once.”

“I hope you haven’t lost a great deal of time, as it is, Mrs. Amsden,” said Colville. “Of course I should have had my eyes open if I had known you were going by.”

“Oh, don’t apologise!” cried the old thing, with ready enjoyment of his tone.

“I don’t apologise for not being recognisable; I apologise for being visible,” said Colville, with some shapeless impression that he ought to excuse his continued presence in Florence to Imogene, but keeping his eyes upon Mrs. Amsden, to whom what he said could not be intelligible. “I ought to be in Turin to-day.”

“In Turin! Are you going away from Florence?”

“I’m going home.”

“Why, did you know that?” asked the old lady of Imogene, who slightly nodded, and then of Effie, who also assented. “Really, the silence of the Bowen family in regard to the affairs of others is extraordinary. There never was a family more eminently qualified to live in Florence. I dare say that if I saw a little more of them, I might hope to reach the years of discretion myself some day. Why are you going away? (You see I haven’t reached them yet!) Are you tired of Florence already?”

“No,” said Colville passively; “Florence is tired of me.”

“You’re quite sure?”

“Yes; there’s no mistaking one of her sex on such a point.”

Mrs. Amsden laughed. “Ah, a great many people mistake us, both ways. And you’re really going back to America. What in the world for?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“Is America fonder of you than Florence?”

“She’s never told her love. I suspect it’s merely that she’s more used to me.”

They were walking, without any volition of his, down the slope of the broad avenue to the fountain, where he had already been.

“Is your mother well?” he asked of the little girl. It seemed to him that he had better not speak to Imogene, who still kept that little distance from the rest, and get away as soon as he decently could.

“She has a headache,” said Effie.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” returned Colville.

“Yes, she deputed me to take her young people out for an airing,” said Mrs. Amsden; “and Miss Graham decided us for the Boboli, where she hadn’t been yet. I’ve done what I could to make the place attractive. But what is an old woman to do for a girl in a garden? We ought to have brought some other young people — some of the Inglehart boys. But we’re respectable, we Americans abroad; we’re decorous, above all things; and I don’t know about meeting you here, Mr. Colville. It has a very bad appearance. Are you sure that you didn’t know I was to go by here at exactly half-past four?”

“I was living from breath to breath in the expectation of seeing you. You must have noticed how eagerly I was looking out for you.”

“Yes, and with a single red anemone in your hand, so that I should know you without being obliged to put on my spectacles.”

“You divine everything, Mrs. Amsden,” he said, giving her the flower.

“I shall make my brags to Mrs. Bowen when I see her,” said the old lady. “How far into the country did you walk for this?”

“As far as the meadow yonder.”

They had got down to the sheet of water from which the sea-horses of the fountain sprang, and the old lady sank upon a bench near it. Colville held out his hand toward Effie. “I saw a lot of violets over there in the grass.”

“Did you?” She put her hand eagerly into his, and they strolled off together. After a first motion to accompany them, Imogene sat down beside Mrs. Amsden, answering quietly the talk of the old lady, and seeming in nowise concerned about the expedition for violets. Except for a dull first glance, she did not look that way. Colville stood in the border of the grass, and the child ran quickly hither and thither in it, stooping from time to time upon the flowers. Then she came out to where he stood, and showed her bunch of violets, looking up into the face which he bent upon her, while he trifled with his cane. He had a very fatherly air with her.

“I think I’ll go and see what they’ve found,” said Imogene irrelevantly, to a remark of Mrs. Amsden’s about the expensiveness of Madame Bossi’s bonnets.

“Well,” said the old lady. Imogene started, and the little girl ran to meet her. She detained Effie with her admiration of the violets till Colville lounged reluctantly up. “Go and show them to Mrs. Amsden,” she said, giving back the violets, which she had been smelling. The child ran on. “Mr. Colville, I want to speak with you.”

“Yes,” said Colville helplessly.

“Why are you going away?”

“Why? Oh, I’ve accomplished the objects — or no-objects — I came for,” he said, with dreary triviality, “and I must hurry away to other fields of activity.” He kept his eyes on her face, which he saw full of a passionate intensity, working to some sort of overflow.

“That is not true, and you needn’t say it to spare me. You are going away because Mrs. Bowen said something to you about me.”

“Not quite that,” returned Colville gently.

“No; it was something that she said to me about you. But it’s the same thing. It makes no difference. I ask you not to go for that.”

“Do you know what you are saying, Imogene?”

“Yes.”

am going to-morrow, all the same. But I shan’t forget this; whatever my life is to be, this will make it less unworthy and less unhappy. If it could buy anything to give you joy, to add some little grace to the good that must come to you, I would give it. Some day you’ll meet the young fellow whom you’re to make immortal, and you must tell him of an old fellow who knew you afar off, and understood how to worship you for an angel of pity and unselfishness. Ah, I hope he’ll understand, too! Good-bye.” If he was to fly, that was the sole instant. He took her hand, and said again, “Good-bye.” And then he suddenly cried, “Imogene, do you wish me to stay?”

“Yes!” said the girl, pouring all the intensity of her face into that whisper.

“Even if there had been nothing said to make me go away — should you still wish me to stay?”

“Yes.”

He looked her in the starry, lucid eyes, where a divine fervour deepened. He sighed in nerveless perplexity; it was she who had the courage.

“It’s a mistake! You mustn’t! I am too old for you! It would be a wrong and a cruelty! Yes, you must let me go, and forget me. I have been to blame. If Mrs. Bowen has blamed me, she was right — I deserved it; I deserved all she could say against me.”

“She never said anything against you. Do you think I would have let her? No; it was I that said it, and I blamed you. It was because I thought that you were — you were—”

“Trifling with you? How could you think that?”

“Yes, I know now how it was, and it makes you seem all the grander to me. Did you think I cared for your being older than I was? I never cared for it — I never hardly thought of it after the very first. I tried to make you understand that, and how it hurt me to have you speak of it. Don’t you think that I could see how good you were? Do you suppose that all I want is to be happy? I don’t care for that — I despise it, and I always hate myself for seeking my own pleasure, if I find myself doing it. I have seen enough of life to know what that comes to! And what hurt me worst of all was that you seemed to believe that I cared for nothing but amusing myself, when I wished to be something better, higher! It’s nothing whether you are of my age or not, if — if — you care for me.”

“Imogene!”

“All that I ask is to be with you, and try to make you forget what’s been sad in your life, and try to be of use to you in whatever you are doing, and I shall be prouder and gladder of that than anything that people call happiness.”

Colville stood holding her hand, while she uttered these ideas and incoherent repetitions of them, with a deep sense of powerlessness. “If I believed that I could keep you from regretting this—”

“What should I regret? I won’t let you depreciate yourself — make yourself out not good enough for the best. Oh, I know how it happened! But now you shall never think of it again. No; I will not let you. That is the only way you could make me regret anything.”

“I am going to stay,” said Colville. “But on my own terms. I will be bound to you, but you shall not be bound to me.”

“You doubt me! I would rather have you go! No; stay. And let me prove to you how wrong you are. I mustn’t ask more than that. Only give me the chance to show you how different I am from what you think — how different you are, too.”

“Yes. But you must be free.”

“Well.”

“What are they doing so long there?” asked Mrs. Amsden of Effie, putting her glasses to her eyes. “I can’t see.”

“They are just holding hands,” said the child, with an easy satisfaction in the explanation, which perhaps the old lady did not share. “He always holds my hand when he is with me.”

“Does he, indeed?” exclaimed Mrs. Amsden, with a cackle. She added, “That’s very polite of him, isn’t it? You must be a great favourite with Mr. Colville. You will miss him when he’s gone.”

“Yes. He’s very nice.”

Colville and Imogene returned, coming slowly across the loose, neglected grass toward the old woman’s seat. She rose as they came up.

“You don’t seem to have succeeded so well in getting flowers for Miss Graham as for the other ladies. But perhaps you didn’t find her favourite over there. What is your favourite flower, Miss Graham? Don’t say you have none! I didn’t know that I preferred scarlet anemones. Were there no forget-me-nots over there in the grass?”

“There was no occasion for them,” answered Colville.

“You always did make such pretty speeches!” said the old lady. “And they have such an orphic character, too; you can interpret them in so many different ways. Should you mind saying just what you meant by that one?”

“Yes, very much,” replied Colville.

The old lady laughed with cheerful resignation. She would as lief report that reply of his as another. Even more than a man whom she could entangle in his speech she liked a man who could slip through the toils with unfailing ease. Her talk with such a man was the last consolation which remained to her from a life of harmless coquetries.

“I will refer it to Mrs. Bowen,” she said. “She is a very wise woman, and she used to know you a great while ago.”

“If you like, I will do it for you, Mrs. Amsden. I’m going to see her.”

“To renew your adieux? Well, why not? Parting is such sweet sorrow! And if I were a young man I would go to say good-bye to Mrs. Bowen as often as she would let me. Now tell me honestly, Mr. Colville, did you ever see such an exquisite, perfect creature?”

“Oh, that’s asking a good deal.”

“What?”

“To tell you a thing honestly. How did you come here, Mrs. Amsden?”

“In Mrs. Bowen’s carriage. I sent it round from the Pitti entrance to the Porta Romana. It’s waiting there now, I suppose.”

“I thought you had been corrupted, somehow. Your zeal is carriage-bought. It is a delightful vehicle. Do you think you could give me a lift home in it?”

“Yes, indeed. I’ve always a seat for you in my carriage. To Hotel d’Atene?”

“No, to Palazzo Pinti.”

“This is deliciously mysterious,” said Mrs. Amsden, drawing her shawl up about her shoulders, which, if no longer rounded, had still a charming droop. One realises in looking at such old ladies that there are women who could manage their own skeletons winningly. She put up her glasses, which were an old-fashioned sort, held to the nose by a handle, and perused the different persons of the group. “Mr. Colville concealing an inward trepidation under a bold front; Miss Graham agitated but firm; the child as much puzzled as the old woman. I feel that we are a very interesting group — almost dramatic.”

“Oh, call us a passage from a modern novel,” suggested Colville, “if you’re in the romantic mood. One of Mr. James’s.”

“Don’t you think we ought to be rather more of the great world for that? I hardly feel up to Mr. James. I should have said Howells. Only nothing happens in that case!”

“Oh, very well; that’s the most comfortable way. If it’s only Howells, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go with Miss Graham to show her the view of Florence from the cypress grove up yonder.”

“No; he’s very particular when he’s on Italian ground,” said Mrs. Amsden, rising. “You must come another time with Miss Graham, and bring Mrs. Bowen. It’s quite time we were going home.”

The light under the limbs of the trees had begun to grow more liquid. The currents of warm breeze streaming through the cooler body of the air had ceased to ruffle the lakelet round the fountain, and the naiads rode their sea-horses through a perfect calm. A damp, pierced with the fresh odour of the water and of the springing grass, descended upon them. The saunterers through the different paths and alleys were issuing upon the main avenues, and tending in gathering force toward the gate.

They found Mrs. Bowen’s carriage there, and drove first to her house, beyond which Mrs. Amsden lived in a direct line. On the way Colville kept up with her the bantering talk that they always carried on together, and found in it a respite from the formless future pressing close upon him. He sat with Effie on the front seat, and he would not look at Imogene’s face, which, nevertheless, was present to some inner vision. When the porter opened the iron gate below and rang Mrs. Bowen’s bell, and Effie sprang up the stairs before them to give her mother the news of Mr. Colville’s coming, the girl stole her hand into his.

“Shall you — tell her?”

“Of course. She must know without an instant’s delay.”

“Yes, yes; that is right. Oh! — Shall I go with you?”

“Yes; come!”

XV

Mrs. Bowen came in to them, looking pale and pain-worn, as she did that evening when she would not let Colville go away with the other tea-taking callers to whom she had made her headache an excuse. The eyelids which she had always a little difficulty in lifting were heavy with suffering, and her pretty smile had an effect of very great remoteness. But there was no consciousness of anything unusual or unexpected in his presence expressed in her looks or manner. Colville had meant to take Imogene by the hand and confront Mrs. Bowen with an immediate declaration of what had happened; but he found this impossible, at least in the form of his intention; he took, instead, the hand of conventional welcome which she gave him, and he obeyed her in taking provisionally the seat to which she invited him. At the same time the order of his words was dispersed in that wonder, whether she suspected anything, with which he listened to her placid talk about the weather; she said she had thought it was a chilly day outdoors; but her headaches always made her very sensitive.

“Yes,” said Colville, “I supposed it was cold myself till I went out, for I woke with a tinge of rheumatism.” He felt a strong desire to excuse, to justify what had happened, and he went on, with a painful sense of Imogene’s eyes bent in bewildered deference upon him. “I started out for a walk with Mr. Waters, but I left him after we got across the Ponte Vecchio; he went up to look at the Michelangelo bastions, and I strolled over to the Boboli Gardens — where I found your young people.”

He had certainly brought himself to the point, but he seemed actually further from it than at first, and he made a desperate plunge, trying at the same time to keep something of his habitual nonchalance. “But that doesn’t account for my being here. Imogene accounts for that. She has allowed me to stay in Florence.”

Mrs. Bowen could not turn paler than her headache had left her, and she now underwent no change of complexion. But her throat was not clear enough to say to the end, “Allowed you to stay in—” The trouble in her throat arrested her again.

Colville became very red. He put out his hand and took Imogene’s, and now his eyes and Mrs. Bowen’s met in the kind of glance in which people intercept and turn each other aside before they have reached a resting-place in each other’s souls. But at the girl’s touch his courage revived — in some physical sort. “Yes, and if she will let me stay with her, we are not going to part again.”

Mrs. Bowen did not answer at once, and in the hush Colville heard the breathing of all three.

“Of course,” he said, “we wished you to know at once, and I came in with Imogene to tell you.”

“What do you wish me,” asked Mrs. Bowen, “to do?”

Colville forced a nervous laugh. “Really, I’m so little used to this sort of affair that I don’t know whether I have any wish. Imogene is here with you, and I suppose I supposed you would wish to do something.”

“I will do whatever you think best.”

“Thank you: that’s very kind of you.” He fell into a silence, in which he was able only to wish that he knew what was best, and from which he came to the surface with, “Imogene’s family ought to know, of course.”

“Yes; they put her in my charge. They will have to know. Shall I write to them?”

“Why, if you will.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Thank you.”

He had taken to stroking with his right hand the hand of Imogene which he held in his left, and now he looked round at her with a glance which it was a relief not to have her meet. “And till we can hear from them, I suppose you will let me come to see her?”

“You know you have always been welcome here.”

“Thank you very much.” It seemed as if there ought to be something else to say, but Colville could not think of anything except: “We wish to act in every way with your approval, Mrs. Bowen. And I know that you are very particular in some things” — the words, now that they were said, struck him as unfortunate, and even vulgar— “and I shouldn’t wish to annoy you—”

“Oh, I understand. I think it will be — I have no doubt you will know how to manage all that. It isn’t as if you were both—”

“Young?” asked Colville. “No; one of us is quite old enough to be thoroughly up in the convenances. We are qualified, I’m afraid, as far as that goes,” he added bitterly, “to set all Florence an example of correct behaviour.”

He knew there must be pain in the face which he would not look at; he kept looking at Mrs. Bowen’s face, in which certainly there was not much pleasure, either.

There was another silence, which became very oppressive before it ended in a question from Mrs. Bowen, who stirred slightly in her chair, and bent forward as if about to rise in asking it. “Shall you wish to consider it an engagement?”

Colville felt Imogene’s hand tremble in his, but he received no definite prompting from the tremor. “I don’t believe I know what you mean.”

“I mean, till you have heard from Imogene’s mother.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. Perhaps under the circumstances—” The tremor died out of the hand he held; it lay lax between his. “What do you say, Imogene?”

“I can’t say anything. Whatever you think will be right — for me.”

“I wish to do what will seem right and fair to your mother.”

“Yes.”

Colville heaved a hopeless sigh. Then with a deep inward humiliation, he said, “Perhaps if you know Imogene’s mother, Mrs. Bowen, you can suggest — advise — You—”

“You must excuse me; I can’t suggest or advise anything. I must leave you perfectly free.” She rose from her chair, and they, both rose too from the sofa on which he had seated himself at Imogene’s side. “I shall have to leave you, I’m afraid; my head aches still a little. Imogene!” She advanced toward the girl, who stood passively letting her come the whole distance. As if sensible of the rebuff expressed in this attitude, she halted a very little. Then she added, “I hope you will be very happy,” and suddenly cast her arms round the girl, and stood long pressing her face into her neck. When she released her, Colville trembled lest she should be going to give him her hand in congratulation. But she only bowed slightly to him, with a sidelong, aversive glance, and walked out of the room with a slow, rigid pace, like one that controls a tendency to giddiness.

Imogene threw herself on Colville’s’ breast. It gave him a shock, as if he were letting her do herself some wrong. But she gripped him fast, and began to sob and to cry. “Oh! oh! oh!”

“What is it? — what is it, my poor girl?” he murmured. “Are you unhappy? Are you sorry? Let it all end, then!”

“No, no; it isn’t that! But I am very unhappy — yes, very, very unhappy! Oh, I didn’t suppose I should ever feel so toward any one. I hate her!”

“You hate her?” gasped Colville.

“Yes, I hate her. And she — she is so good to me! It must be that I’ve done her some deadly wrong, without knowing it, or I couldn’t hate her as I know I do.”

“Oh no,” said Colville soothingly; “that’s just your fancy. You haven’t harmed her, and you don’t hate her.”

“Yes, yes, I do! You can’t understand how I feel toward her.”

“But you can’t feel so toward her long,” he urged, dealing as he might with what was wholly a mystery to him. She is so good—”

“It only makes my badness worse, and makes me hate her more.”

“I don’t understand. But you’re excited now. When you’re calmer you’ll feel differently, of course. I’ve kept you restless and nervous a long time, poor child; but now our peace begins, and everything will be bright and—” He stopped: the words had such a very hollow sound.

She pushed herself from him, and dried her eyes. “Oh yes.”

“And, Imogene — perhaps — perhaps — Or, no; never mind, now. I must go away—” She looked at him, frightened but submissive. “But I will be back to-night, or perhaps to-morrow morning. I want to think — to give you time to think. I don’t want to be selfish about you — I want to consider you, all the more because you won’t consider yourself. Good-bye.” He stooped over and kissed her hair. Even in this he felt like a thief; he could not look at the face she lifted to his.

Mrs. Bowen sent word from her room that she was not coming to dinner, and Imogene did not come till the dessert was put on. Then she found Effie Bowen sitting alone at the table, and served in serious formality by the man, whom she had apparently felt it right to repress, for they were both silent. The little girl had not known how to deny herself an excess of the less wholesome dishes, and she was perhaps anticipating the regret which this indulgence was to bring, for she was very pensive.

“Isn’t mamma coming at all?” she asked plaintively, when Imogene sat down, and refused everything but a cup of coffee. “Well,” she went on, “I can’t make out what is coming to this family. You were all crying last night because Mr. Colville was going away, and now, when he’s going to stay, it’s just as bad. I don’t think you make it very pleasant for him. I should think he would be perfectly puzzled by it, after he’s done so much to please you all. I don’t believe he thinks it’s very polite. I suppose it is polite, but it doesn’t seem so. And he’s always so cheerful and nice. I should think he would want to visit in some family where there was more amusement. There used to be plenty in this family, but now it’s as dismal! The first of the winter you and mamma used to be so pleasant when he came, and would try everything to amuse him, and would let me come in to get some of the good of it; but now you seem to fly every way as soon as he comes in sight of the house, and I’m poked off in holes and corners before he can open his lips. And I’ve borne it about as long as I can. I would rather be back in Vevay. Or anywhere.” At this point her own pathos overwhelmed her, and the tears rolling down her cheeks moistened the crumbs of pastry at the corners of her pretty mouth. “What was so strange, I should like to know, about his staying, that mamma should pop up like a ghost, when I told her he had come home with us, and grab me by the wrist, and twitch me about, and ask me all sorts of questions I couldn’t answer, and frighten me almost to death? I haven’t got over it yet. And I don’t think it’s very nice. It used to be a very polite family, and pleasant with each other, and always having something agreeable going on in it; but if it keeps on very much longer in this way, I shall think the Bowens are beginning to lose their good-breeding. I suppose that if Mr. Colville were to go down on his knees to mamma and ask her to let him take me somewhere now, she wouldn’t do it.” She pulled her handkerchief out of her pocket, and dried her eyes on a ball of it. “I don’t see what you’ve been crying about, Imogene. You’ve got nothing to worry you.”

“I’m not very well, Effie,” returned the girl gently. “I haven’t been well all day.”

“It seems to me that nobody is well any more. I don’t believe Florence is a very healthy place. Or at least this house isn’t. I think it must be the drainage. If we keep on, I suppose we shall all have diphtheria. Don’t you, Imogene?”

“Yes,” asserted the girl distractedly.

“The girls had it at Vevay frightfully. And none of them were as strong afterward. Some of the parents came and took them away; but Madame Schebres never let mamma know. Do you think that was right?”

“No; it was very wrong.”

“I suppose Mr. Colville will have it if we do. That is, if he keeps coming here. Is he coming any more?”

“Yes; he’s coming to-morrow morning.”

“Is he?” A smile flickered over the rueful face. “What time is he coming?”

“I don’t know exactly,” said Imogene, listlessly stirring her coffee. “Some time in the forenoon.”

“Do you suppose he’s going to take us anywhere?”

“Yes — I think so. I can’t tell exactly.”

“If he asks me to go somewhere, will you tease mamma? She always lets you, Imogene, and it seems sometimes as if she just took a pleasure in denying me.”

“You mustn’t talk so of your mother, Effie.”

“No; I wouldn’t to everybody. I know that she means for the best; but I don’t believe she understands how much I suffer when she won’t let me go with Mr. Colville. Don’t you think he’s about the nicest gentleman we know, Imogene?”

“Yes; he’s very kind.”

“And I think he’s handsome. A good many people would consider him old-looking, and of course he isn’t so young as Mr. Morton was, or the Inglehart boys; but that makes him all the easier to get along with. And his being just a little fat, that way, seems to suit so well with his character.” The smiles were now playing across the child’s face, and her eyes sparkling. “I think Mr. Colville would make a good Saint Nicholas — the kind they have going down chimneys in America. I’m going to tell him, for the next veglione. It would be such a nice surprise.”

“No, better not tell him that,” suggested Imogene.

“Do you think he wouldn’t like it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it would become him. How old do you suppose he is, Imogene? Seventy-five?”

“What an idea!” cried the girl fiercely. “He’s forty-one.”

“I didn’t know they had those little jiggering lines at the corners of their eyes so quick. But forty-one is pretty old, isn’t it? Is Mr. Waters—”

“Effie,” said her mother’s voice at the door behind her, “will you ring for Giovanni, and tell him to bring me a cup of coffee in here?” She spoke from the portière of the salotto.

“Yes, mamma. I’ll bring it to you myself.”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Bowen called from within.

The little girl softly pressed her hands together. “I hope she’ll let me stay up! I feel so excited, and I hate to lie and think so long before I get to sleep. Couldn’t you just hint a little to her that I might stay up? It’s Sunday night.”

“I can’t, Effie,” said Imogene. “I oughtn’t to interfere with any of your mother’s rules.”

The child sighed submissively and took the coffee that Giovanni brought to her. She and Imogene went into the salotto together. Mrs. Bowen was at her writing-desk. “You can bring the coffee here, Effie,” she said.

“Must I go to bed at once, mamma?” asked the child, setting the cup carefully down.

The mother looked distractedly up from her writing. “No; you may sit up a while,” she said, looking back to her writing.

“How long, mamma?” pleaded the little girl.

“Oh, till you’re sleepy. It doesn’t matter now.”

She went on writing; from time to time she tore up what she had written.

Effie softly took a book from the table, and perching herself on a stiff, high chair, bent over it and began to read.

Imogene sat by the hearth, where a small fire was pleasant in the indoor chill of an Italian house, even after so warm a day as that had been. She took some large beads of the strand she wore about her neck into her mouth, and pulled at the strand listlessly with her hand while she watched the fire. Her eyes wandered once to the child.

“What made you take such an uncomfortable chair, Effie?”

Effie shut her book over her hand. “It keeps me wakeful longer,” she whispered, with a glance at her mother from the corner of her eye.

“I don’t see why any one should wish to be wakeful,” sighed the girl.

When Mrs. Bowen tore up one of her half-written pages Imogene started nervously forward, and then relapsed again into her chair. At last Mrs. Bowen seemed to find the right phrases throughout, and she finished rather a long letter, and read it over to herself. Then she said, without leaving her desk, “Imogene, I’ve been trying to write to your mother. Will you look at this?”

She held the sheet over her shoulder, and Imogene came languidly and took it; Mrs. Bowen dropped her face forward on the desk, into her hands, while Imogene was reading.

“FLORENCE, March 10, 18 —

“Dear Mrs. Graham, — I have some very important news to give you in regard to Imogene, and as there is no way of preparing you for it, I will tell you at once that it relates to her marriage.

“She has met at my house a gentleman whom I knew in Florence when I was here before, and of whom I never knew anything but good. We have seen him very often, and I have seen nothing in him that I could not approve. He is Mr. Theodore Colville, of Prairie des Vaches, Indiana, where he was for many years a newspaper editor; but he was born somewhere in New England. He is a very cultivated, interesting man; and though not exactly a society man, he is very agreeable and refined in his manners. I am sure his character is irreproachable, though he is not a member of any church. In regard to his means I know nothing whatever, and can only infer from his way of life that he is in easy circumstances.

“The whole matter has been a surprise to me, for Mr. Colville is some twenty-one or two years older than Imogene, who is very young in her feelings for a girl of her age. If I could have realised anything like a serious attachment between them sooner, I would have written before. Even now I do not know whether I am to consider them engaged or not. No doubt Imogene will write you more fully.

“Of course I would rather not have had anything of the kind happen while have been careless or imprudent about her. I interfered as far as I could, at the first moment I could, but it appears that it was then too late to prevent what has followed. — Yours sincerely, EVALINA BOWEN.”

Imogene read the letter twice over, and then she said, “Why isn’t he a society man?”

Probably Mrs. Bowen expected this sort of approach. “I don’t think a society man would have undertaken to dance the Lancers as he did at Madam Uccelli’s,” she answered patiently, without lifting her head.

Imogene winced, but “I should despise him if he were merely a society man,” she said. “I have seen enough of them. I think it’s better to be intellectual and good.”

Mrs. Bowen made no reply, and the girl went on. “And as to his being older, I don’t see what difference it makes. If people are in sympathy, then they are of the same age, no difference how much older than one the other is. I have always heard that.” She urged this as if it were a question.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“And how should his having been a newspaper editor be anything against him?”

Mrs. Bowen lifted her face and stared at the girl in astonishment. “Who said it was against him?”

“You hint as much. The whole letter is against him.”

“Imogene!”

“Yes! Every word! You make him out perfectly detestable. I don’t know why you should hate him, He’s done everything he could to satisfy you.”

Mrs. Bowen rose from her desk, putting her hand to her forehead, as if to soften a shock of headache that her change of posture had sent there. “I will leave the letter with you, and you can send it or not as you think best. It’s merely a formality, my writing to your mother. Perhaps you’ll see it differently in the morning. Effie!” she called to the child, who with her book shut upon her hand had been staring at them and listening intently. “It’s time to go to bed now.”

When Effie stood before the glass in her mother’s room, and Mrs. Bowen was braiding her hair and tying it up for the night, she asked ruefully, “What’s the matter with Imogene, mamma?”

“She isn’t very happy to-night.”

“You don’t seem very happy either,” said the child, watching her own face as it quivered in the mirror. “I should think that now Mr. Colville’s concluded to stay, we would all be happy again. But we don’t seem to. We’re — we’re perfectly demoralised!” It was one of the words she had picked up from Colville.

The quivering face in the glass broke in a passion of tears, and Effie sobbed herself to sleep.

Imogene sat down at Mrs. Bowen’s desk, and pushing her letter away, began to write.

“FLORENCE, March 10, 18 — .

“DEAR MOTHER, — I inclose a letter from Mrs. Bowen which will tell you better than I can what I wish to tell. I do not see how I can add anything that would give you more of an idea of him, or less, either. No person can be put down in cold black and white, and not seem like a mere inventory. I do not suppose you expected me to become engaged when you sent me out to Florence, and, as Mrs. Bowen says, I don’t know whether I am engaged or not. I will leave it entirely to Mr. Colville; if he says we are engaged, we are. I am sure he will do what is best. I only know that he was going away from Florence because he thought I supposed he was not in earnest, and I asked him to stay.

“I am a good deal excited to-night, and cannot write very clearly. But I will write soon again, and more at length.

“Perhaps something will be decided by that time. With much love to father,

“Your affectionate daughter,

“Imogene.”

She put this letter into an envelope with Mrs. Bowen’s, and leaving it unsealed to show her in the morning, she began to write again. This time she wrote to a girl with whom she had been on terms so intimate that when they left school they had agreed to know each other by names expressive of their extremely confidential friendship, and to address each other respectively as Diary and Journal. They were going to write every day, if only a line or two; and at the end of a year they were to meet and read over together the records of their lives as set down in these letters. They had never met since, though it was now three years since they parted, and they had not written since Imogene came abroad; that is, Imogene had not answered the only letter she had received from her friend in Florence. This friend was a very serious girl, and had wished to be a minister, but her family would not consent, or even accept the compromise of studying medicine, which she proposed, and she was still living at home in a small city of central New York. Imogene now addressed her —

“DEAR DIARY, — You cannot think how far away the events of this day have pushed the feelings and ideas of the time when I agreed to write to you under this name. Till now it seems to me as if I had not changed in the least thing since we parted, and now I can hardly know myself for the same person. O dear Di! something very wonderful has come into my life, and I feel that it rests with me to make it the greatest blessing to myself and others, or the greatest misery. If I prove unworthy of it or unequal to it, then I am sure that nothing but wretchedness will come of it.

“I am engaged — yes! — and to a man more than twice my own age. It is so easy to tell you this, for I know that your large-mindedness will receive it very differently from most people, and that you will see it as I do. He is the noblest of men, though he tries to conceal it under the light, ironical manner with which he has been faithful to a cruel disappointment. It was here in Florence, twenty years ago, that a girl — I am ashamed to call her a girl — trifled with the priceless treasure that has fallen to me, and flung it away. You, Di, will understand how I was first fascinated with the idea of trying to atone to him here for all the wrong he had suffered. At first it was only the vaguest suggestion — something like what I had read in a poem or a novel — that had nothing to do with me personally, but it grew upon me more and more the more I saw of him, and felt the witchery of his light, indifferent manner, which I learned to see was tense with the anguish he had suffered. She had killed his youth; she had spoiled his life: if I could revive them, restore them! It came upon me like a great flash of light at last, and as soon as this thought took possession of me, I felt my whole being elevated and purified by it, and I was enabled to put aside with contempt the selfish considerations that had occurred to me at first. At first the difference between our ages was very shocking to me; for I had always imagined it would be some one young; but when this light broke upon me, I saw that he was young, younger even than I, as a man is at the same age with a girl. Sometimes with my experiences, the fancies and flirtations that every one has and must have, however one despises them, I felt so old beside him; for he had been true to one love all his life, and he had not wavered for a moment. If I could make him forget it, if I could lift every feather’s weight of sorrow from his breast, if I could help him to complete the destiny, grand and beautiful as it would have been, which another had arrested, broken off — don’t you see, Di dear, how rich my reward would be?

“And he, how forbearing, how considerate, how anxious for me, how full of generous warning he has been! always putting me in mind, at every step, of the difference in years between us; never thinking of himself, and shrinking so much from even seeming to control me or sway me, that I don’t know really whether I have not made all the advances!

“I cannot write his name yet, and you must not ask it till I can; and I cannot tell you anything about his looks or his life without seeming to degrade him, somehow, and make him a common man like others.

“How can I make myself his companion in everything? How can I convince him that there is no sacrifice for me, and that he alone is giving up? shall be helped, and I hope that I shall be tried, for that is the only way for me to be helped. I feel strong enough for anything that people can say. I should welcome criticism and opposition from any quarter. But I can see that he is very sensitive — it comes from his keen sense of the ridiculous — and if I suffer, it will be on account of this grand unselfish nature, and I shall be glad of that.

“I know you will understand me, Di, and I am not afraid of your laughing at these ravings. But if you did I should not care. It is such a comfort to say these things about him, to exalt him, and get him in the true light at last.

“Your faithful JOURNAL.

“I shall tell him about you, one of the first things, and perhaps he can suggest some way out of your trouble, he has had so much experience of every kind. You will worship him, as I do, when you see him; for you will feel at once that he understands you, and that is such a rest.

“J.”

Before Imogene fell asleep, Mrs. Bowen came to her in the dark, and softly closed the door that opened from the girl’s room into Effie’s. She sat down on the bed, and began to speak at once, as if she knew Imogene must be awake. “I thought you would come to me, Imogene; but as you didn’t, I have come to you, for if you can go to sleep with hard thoughts of me to-night, I can’t let you. You need me for your friend, and I wish to be your friend; it would be wicked in me to be anything else; I would give the world if your mother were here; but I tried to make my letter to her everything that it should be. If you don’t think it is, I will write it over in the morning.”

“No,” said the girl coldly; “it will do very well. I don’t wish to trouble you so much.”

“Oh, how can you speak so to me? Do you think that I blame Mr. Colville? Is that it? I don’t ask you — I shall never ask you — how he came to remain, but I know that he has acted truthfully and delicately. I knew him long before you did, and no one need take his part with me.” This was not perhaps what Mrs. Bowen meant to say when she began. “I have told you all along what I thought, but if you imagine that I am not satisfied with Mr. Colville, you are very much mistaken. I can’t burst out into praises of him to your mother: that would be very patronising and very bad taste. Can’t you see that it would?”

“Oh yes.”

Mrs. Bowen lingered, as if she expected Imogene to say something more, but she did not, and Mrs. Bowen rose. “Then I hope we understand each other,” she said, and went out of the room.

XVI

When Colville came in the morning, Mrs. Bowen received him. They shook hands, and their eyes met in the intercepting glance of the night before.

“Imogene will be here in a moment,” she said, with a naturalness that made him awkward and conscious.

“Oh, there is no haste,” he answered uncouthly. “That is, I am very glad of the chance to speak a moment with you, and to ask your — to profit by what you think best. I know you are not very well pleased with me, and I don’t know that I can ever put myself in a better light with you — the true light. It seems that there are some things we must not do even for the truth’s sake. But that’s neither here nor there. What I am most anxious for is not to take a shadow of advantage of this child’s — of Imogene’s inexperience, and her remoteness from her family. I feel that I must in some sort protect her from herself. Yes — that is my idea. But should be very willing, if you thought best, to go away and stay away till she has heard from her people, and let her have that time to think it all over again. She is very young — so much younger than I! Or, if you thought it better, I would stay, and let her remain free while I held myself bound to any decision of hers. I am anxious to do what is right. At the same time” — he smiled ruefully— “there is such a thing as being so disinterested that one may seem uninterested. I may leave her so very free that she may begin to suspect that I want a little freedom myself. What shall I do? I wish to act with your approval.”

Mrs. Bowen had listened with acquiescence and intelligence that might well have looked like sympathy, as she sat fingering the top of her hand-screen, with her eyelids fallen. She lifted them to say, “I have told you that I will not advise yon in any way. I cannot. I have no longer any wish in this matter. I must still remain in the place of Imogene’s mother; but I will do only what you wish. Please understand that, and don’t ask me for advice any more. It is painful.” She drew her lower lip in a little, and let the screen fall into her lap.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bowen, to do anything — say anything — that is painful to you,” Colville began. “You know that I would give the world to please you — —” The words escaped him and left him staring at her.

“What are you saying to me, Theodore Colville?” she exclaimed, flashing a full-eyed glance upon him, and then breaking into a laugh, as unnatural for her. “Really, I don’t believe you know!”

“Heaven knows I meant nothing but what I said,” he answered, struggling stupidly with a confusion of desires which every man but no woman will understand. After eighteen hundred years, the man is still imperfectly monogamous. “Is there anything wrong in it?”

“Oh no! Not for you,” she said scornfully.

“I am very much in earnest,” he went on hopelessly, “in asking your opinion, your help, in regard to how I shall treat this affair.”

“And I am still more in earnest in telling you that I will give you no opinion, no help. I forbid you to recur to the subject.” He was silent, unable to drop his eyes from hers. “But for her,” continued Mrs. Bowen, “I will do anything in my power. If she asks my advice I will give it, and I will give her all the help I can.”

“Thank you,” said Colville vaguely.

“I will not have your thanks,” promptly retorted Mrs. Bowen, “for I mean you no kindness. I am trying to do my duty to Imogene, and when that is ended, all is ended. There is no way now for you to please me — as you call it — except to keep her from regretting what she has done.”

“Do you think I shall fail in that?” he demanded indignantly.

“I can offer you no opinion. I can’t tell what you will do.”

“There are two ways of keeping her from regretting what she has done; and perhaps the simplest and best way would be to free her from the consequences, as far as they’re involved in me,” said Colville.

Mrs. Bowen dropped herself back in her armchair. “If you choose to force these things upon me, I am a woman, and can’t help myself. Especially, I can’t help myself against a guest.”

“Oh, I will relieve you of my presence,” said Colville. “I’ve no wish to force anything upon you — least of all myself.” He rose, and moved toward the door.

She hastily intercepted him. “Do you think I will let you go without seeing Imogene? Do you understand me so little as that? It’s too late for you to go! You know what I think of all this, and I know, better than you, what you think. I shall play my part, and you shall play yours. I have refused to give you advice or help, and I never shall do it. But I know what my duty to her is, and I will fulfil it. No matter how distasteful it is to either of us, you must come here as before. The house is as free to you as ever — freer. And we are to be as good friends as ever — better. You can see Imogene alone or in my presence, and, as far as I am concerned, you shall consider yourself engaged or not, as you choose. Do you understand?”

“Not in the least,” said Colville, in the ghost of his old bantering manner. “But don’t explain, or I shall make still less of it.”

“I mean simply that I do it for Imogene and not for you.”

“Oh, I understand that you don’t do it for me.”

At this moment Imogene appeared between the folds of the portière, and her timid, embarrassed glance from Mrs. Bowen to Colville was the first gleam of consolation that had visited him since he parted with her the night before. A thrill of inexplicable pride and fondness passed through his heart, and even the compunction that followed could not spoil its sweetness. But if Mrs. Bowen discreetly turned her head aside that she need not witness a tender greeting between them, the precaution was unnecessary. He merely went forward and took the girl’s hand, with a sigh of relief. “Good morning, Imogene,” he said, with a kind of compassionate admiration.

“Good morning,” she returned half-inquiringly.

She did not take a seat near him, and turned, as if for instruction, to Mrs. Bowen. It was probably the force of habit. In any case, Mrs. Bowen’s eyes gave no response. She bowed slightly to Colville, and began, “I must leave Imogene to entertain you for the present, Mr.—”

“No!” cried the girl impetuously; “don’t go.” Mrs. Bowen stopped. “I wish to speak with you — with you and Mr. Colville together. I wish to say — I don’t know how to say it exactly; but I wish to know — You asked him last night, Mrs. Bowen, whether he wished to consider it an engagement?”

“I thought perhaps you would rather hear from your mother—”

“Yes, I would be glad to know that my mother approved; but if she didn’t, I couldn’t help it. Mr. Colville said he was bound, but I was not. That can’t be. I wish to be bound, if he is.”

“I don’t quite know what you expect me to say.”

“Nothing,” said Imogene. “I merely wished you to know. And I don’t wish you to sacrifice anything to us. If you think best, Mr. Colville will not see me till I hear from home; though it won’t make any difference with me what I hear.”

“There’s no reason why you shouldn’t meet,” said Mrs. Bowen absently.

“If you wish it to have the same appearance as an Italian engagement — —”

“No,” said Mrs. Bowen, putting her hand to her head with a gesture she had; “that would be quite unnecessary. It would be ridiculous under the circumstances. I have thought of it, and I have decided that the American way is the best.”

“Very well, then,” said Imogene, with the air of summing up; “then the only question is whether we shall make it known or not to other people.”

This point seemed to give Mrs. Bowen greater pause than any. She was a long time silent, and Colville saw that Imogene was beginning to chafe at her indecision. Yet he did not see the moment to intervene in a debate in which he found himself somewhat ludicrously ignored, as if the affair were solely the concern of these two women, and none of his.

“Of course, Mrs. Bowen,” said the girl haughtily, “if it will be disagreeable to you to have it known — —”

Mrs. Bowen blushed delicately — a blush of protest and of generous surprise, or so it seemed to Colville. “I was not thinking of myself, Imogene. I only wish to consider you. And I was thinking whether, at this distance from home, you wouldn’t prefer to have your family’s approval before you made it known.”

“I am sure of their approval. Father will do what mother says, and she has always said that she would never interfere with me in — in — such a thing.”

“Perhaps you would like all the more, then, to show her the deference of waiting for her consent.”

Imogene started as if stopped short in swift career; it was not hard for Colville to perceive that she saw for the first time the reverse side of a magnanimous impulse. She suddenly turned to him.

“I think Mrs. Bowen is right,” he said gravely, in answer to the eyes of Imogene. He continued, with a flicker of his wonted mood: “You must consider me a little in the matter. I have some small shreds of self-respect about me somewhere, and I would rather not be put in the attitude of defying your family, or ignoring them.”

“No,” said Imogene, in the same effect of arrest.

“When it isn’t absolutely necessary,” continued Colville. “Especially as you say there will be no opposition.”

“Of course,” Imogene assented; and in fact what he said was very just, and he knew it; but he could perceive that he had suffered loss with her. A furtive glance at Mrs. Bowen did not assure him that he had made a compensating gain in that direction, where, indeed, he had no right to wish for any.

“Well, then,” the girl went on, “it shall be so. We will wait. It will only be waiting. I ought to have thought of you before; I make a bad beginning,” she said tremulously. “I supposed I was thinking of you; but I see that I was only thinking of myself.” The tears stood in her eyes. Mrs. Bowen, quite overlooked in this apology, slipped from the room.

“Imogene!” said Colville, coming toward her.

She dropped herself upon his shoulder. “Oh, why, why, why am I so miserable?”

“Miserable, Imogene!” he murmured, stroking her beautiful hair.

“Yes, yes! Utterly miserable! It must be because I’m unworthy of you — unequal every way. If you think so, cast me off at once. Don’t be weakly merciful!”

The words pierced his heart. “I would give the world to make you happy, my child!” he said, with perfidious truth, and a sigh that came from the bottom of his soul. “Sit down here by me,” he said, moving to the sofa; and with whatever obscure sense of duty to her innocent self-abandon, he made a space between them, and reduced her embrace to a clasp of the hand she left with him. “Now tell me,” he said, “what is it makes you unhappy?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, drying her averted eyes. “I suppose I am overwrought from not sleeping, and from thinking how we should arrange it all.”

“And now that it’s all arranged, can’t you be cheerful again?”

“Yes.”

“You’re satisfied with the way we’ve arranged it? Because if—”

“Oh, perfectly — perfectly!” She hastily interrupted. “I wouldn’t have it otherwise. Of course,” she added, “it wasn’t very pleasant having some one else suggest what I ought to have thought of myself, and seem more delicate about you than I was.”

“Some one else?”

“You know! Mrs. Bowen.”

“Oh! But I couldn’t see that she was anxious to spare me. It occurred to me that she was concerned about your family.”

“It led up to the other! it’s all the same thing.”

“Well, even in that case, I don’t see why you should mind it. It was certainly very friendly of her, and I know that she has your interest at heart entirely.”

“Yes; she knows how to make it seem so.”

don’t understand this. Don’t you think Mrs. Bowen likes you?”

“She detests me.”

“Oh, no, no, no! That’s too cruel an error. You mustn’t think that. I can’t let you. It’s morbid. I’m sure that she’s devotedly kind and good to you.”

“Being kind and good isn’t liking. I know what she thinks. But of course I can’t expect to convince you of it; no one else could see it.”

“No!” said Colville, with generous fervour.

“Because it doesn’t exist and you mustn’t imagine it. You are as sincerely and unselfishly regarded in this house as you could be in your own home. I’m sure of that. I know Mrs. Bowen. She has her little worldlinesses and unrealities of manner, but she is truth and loyalty itself. She would rather die than be false, or even unfair. I knew her long ago—”

“Yes,” cried the girl, “long before you knew me!”

“And I know her to be the soul of honour,” said Colville, ignoring the childish outburst. “Honour — like a man’s,” he added. “And, Imogene, I want you to promise me that you’ll not think of her any more in that way. I want you to think of her as faithful and loving to you, for she is so. Will you do it?”

Imogene did not answer him at once. Then she turned upon him a face of radiant self-abnegation. “I will do anything you tell me. Only tell me things to do.”

The next time he came he again saw Mrs. Bowen alone before Imogene appeared. The conversation was confined to two sentences.

“Mr. Colville,” she said, with perfectly tranquil point, while she tilted a shut book to and fro on her knee, “I will thank you not to defend me.”

Had she overheard? Had Imogene told her? He answered, in a fury of resentment for her ingratitude that stupefied him. “I will never speak of you again.”

Now they were enemies; he did not know how or why, but he said to himself, in the bitterness of his heart, that it was better so; and when Imogene appeared, and Mrs. Bowen vanished, as she did without another word to him, he folded the girl in a vindictive embrace.

“What is the matter?” she asked, pushing away from him.

“With me?”

“Yes; you seem so excited.”

“Oh, nothing,” he said, shrinking from the sharpness of that scrutiny in a woman’s eyes, which, when it begins the perusal of a man’s soul, astonishes and intimidates him; he never perhaps becomes able to endure it with perfect self-control. “I suppose a slight degree of excitement in meeting you may be forgiven me.” He smiled under the unrelaxed severity of her gaze.

“Was Mrs. Bowen saying anything about me?”

“Not a word,” said Colville, glad of getting back to the firm truth again, even if it were mere literality.

“We have made it up,” she said, her scrutiny changing to a lovely appeal for his approval. “What there was to make up.”

“Yes?”

“I told her what you had said. And now it’s all right between us, and you mustn’t be troubled at that any more. I did it to please you.”

She seemed to ask him with the last words whether she really had pleased him, as if something in his aspect suggested a doubt; and he hastened to reassure her. “That was very good of you. I appreciate it highly. It’s extremely gratifying.”

She broke into a laugh of fond derision. “I don’t believe you really cared about it, or else you’re not thinking about it now. Sit down here; I want to tell you of something I’ve thought out.” She pulled him to the sofa, and put his arm about her waist, with a simple fearlessness and matter-of-course promptness that made him shudder. He felt that he ought to tell her not to do it, but he did not quite know how without wounding her. She took hold of his hand and drew his lax arm taut. Then she looked up into his eyes, as if some sense of his misgiving had conveyed itself to her, but she did not release her hold of his hand.

“Perhaps we oughtn’t, if we’re not engaged?” she suggested, with such utter trust in him as made his heart quake.

“Oh,” he sighed, from a complexity of feeling that no explanation could wholly declare, “we’re engaged enough for that, I suppose.”

“I’m glad you think so,” she answered innocently. “I knew you wouldn’t let me if it were not right.” Having settled the question, “Of course,” she continued, “we shall all do our best to keep our secret; but in spite of everything it may get out. Do you see?”

“Well?”

“Well, of course it will make a great deal of remark.”

“Oh yes; you must be prepared for that, Imogene,” said Colville, with as much gravity as he could make comport with his actual position.

“I am prepared for it, and prepared to despise it,” answered the girl. “I shall have no trouble except the fear that you will mind it.” She pressed his hand as if she expected him to say something to this.

“I shall never care for it,” he said, and this was true enough. “My only care will be to keep you from regretting. I have tried from the first to make you see that I was very much older than you. It would be miserable enough if you came to see it too late.”

“I have never seen it, and I never shall see it, because there’s no such difference between us. It isn’t the years that make us young or old — who is it says that? No matter, it’s true. And I want you to believe it. I want you to feel that I am your youth — the youth you were robbed of — given back to you. Will you do it? Oh, if you could, I should be the happiest girl in the world.” Tears of fervour dimmed the beautiful eyes which looked into his. “Don’t speak!” she hurried on. “I won’t let you till I have said it all. It’s been this idea, this hope, with me always — ever since I knew what happened to you here long ago — that you might go back in my life and take up yours where it was broken off; that I might make your life what it would have been — complete your destiny—”

Colville wrenched himself loose from the hold that had been growing more tenderly close and clinging. “And do you think I could be such a vampire as to let you? Yes, yes; I have had my dreams of such a thing; but I see now how hideous they were. You shall make no such sacrifice to me. You must put away the fancies that could never be fulfilled, or if by some infernal magic they could, would only bring sorrow to you and shame to me. God forbid! And God forgive me, if I have done or said anything to put this in your head! And thank God it isn’t too late yet for you to take yourself back.”

“Oh,” she murmured. “Do you think it is self-sacrifice for me to give myself to you? It’s self-glorification! You don’t understand — I haven’t told you what I mean, or else I’ve told it in such a way that I’ve made it hateful to you. Do you think I don’t care for you except to be something to you? I’m not so generous as that. You are all the world to me. If I take myself back from you, as you say, what shall I do with myself?”

“Has it come to that?” asked Colville. He sat down again with her, and this time he put his arm around her and drew her to him, but it seemed to him he did it as if she were his child. “I was going to tell you just now that each of us lived to himself in this world, and that no one could hope to enter into the life of another and complete it. But now I see that I was partly wrong. We two are bound together, Imogene, and whether we become all in all or nothing to each other, we can have no separate fate.”

The girl’s eyes kindled with rapture. “Then let us never speak of it again. I was going to say something, but now I won’t say it.”

“Yes, say it.”

“No; it will make you think that I am anxious on my own account about appearances before people.”

“You poor child, I shall never think you are anxious on your own account about anything. What were you going to say?”

“Oh, nothing! It was only — are you invited to the Phillipses’ fancy ball?”

“Yes,” said Colville, silently making what he could of the diversion, “I believe so.”

“And are you going — did you mean to go?” she asked timidly.

“Good heavens, no! What in the world should I do at another fancy ball? I walked about with the airy grace of a bull in a china shop at the last one.”

Imogene did not smile. She faintly sighed. “Well, then, I won’t go either.”

“Did you intend to go?”

“Oh no!”

“Why, of course you did, and it’s very right you should. Did you want me to go?”

“It would bore you.”

“Not if you’re there.” She gave his hand a grateful pressure. “Come, I’ll go, of course, Imogene. A fancy ball to please you is a very different thing from a fancy ball in the abstract.”

“Oh, what nice things you say! Do you know, I always admired your compliments? I think they’re the most charming compliments in the world.”

“I don’t think they’re half so pretty as yours; but they’re more sincere.”

“No, honestly. They flatter, and at the same time they make fun of the flattery a little; they make a person feel that you like them, even while you laugh at them.”

“They appear to be rather an intricate kind of compliment — sort of salsa agradolce affair — tutti frutti style — species of moral mayonnaise.”

“No — be quiet! You know what I mean. What were we talking about? Oh! I was going to say that the most fascinating thing about you always was that ironical way of yours.”

“Have I an ironical way? You were going to tell me something more about the fancy ball.”

“I don’t care for it. I would rather talk about you.”

“And I prefer the ball. It’s a fresher topic — to me.”

“Very well, then. But this I will say. No matter how happy you should be, I should always want you to keep that tone of persiflage. You’ve no idea how perfectly intoxicating it is.”

“Oh yes, I have. It seems to have turned the loveliest and wisest head in the world.”

“Oh, do you really think so? I would give anything if you did.”

“What?”

“Think I was pretty,” she pleaded, with full eyes. “Do you?”

“No, but I think you are wise. Fifty per cent, of truth — it’s a large average in compliments. What are you going to wear?”

“Wear? Oh! At the ball! Something Egyptian, I suppose. It’s to be an Egyptian ball. Didn’t you understand that?”

“Oh yes. But I supposed you could go in any sort of dress.”

“You can’t. You must go in some Egyptian character.”

“How would Moses do? In the bulrushes, you know. You could be Pharaoh’s daughter, and recognise me by my three hats. And toward the end of the evening, when I became very much bored, I could go round killing Egyptians.”

“No, no. Be serious. Though I like you to joke, too. I shall always want you to joke. Shall you, always?”

“There may be emergencies when I shall fail — like family prayers, and grace before meat, and dangerous sickness.”

“Why, of course. But I mean when we’re together, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t?”

“Oh, at such times I shall certainly joke.”

“And before people, too! I won’t have them saying that it’s sobered you — that you used to be very gay, and now you’re cross, and never say anything.”

“I will try to keep it up sufficiently to meet the public demand.”

“And I shall want you to joke me, too. You must satirise me. It does more to show me my faults than anything else, and it will show other people how perfectly submissive I am, and how I think everything you do is just right.”

“If I were to beat you a little in company, don’t you think it would serve the same purpose?”

“No, no; be serious.”

“About joking?”

“No, about me. I know that I’m very intense, and you must try to correct that tendency in me.”

“I will, with pleasure. Which of my tendencies are you going to correct?”

“You have none.”

“Well, then, neither have you. I’m not going to be outdone in civilities.”

“Oh, if people could only hear you talk in this light way, and then know what I know!”

Colville broke out into a laugh at the deep sigh which accompanied these words. As a whole, the thing was grotesque and terrible to him, but after a habit of his, he was finding a strange pleasure in its details.

“No, no,” she pleaded. “Don’t laugh. There are girls that would give their eyes for it.”

“As pretty eyes as yours?”

“Do you think they’re nice?”

“Yes, if they were not so mysterious.”

“Mysterious?”

“Yes, I feel that your eyes can’t really be as honest as they look. That was what puzzled me about them the first night I saw you.”

“No — did it, really?”

“I went home saying to myself that no girl could be so sincere as that Miss Graham seemed.”

“Did you say that?”

“Words to that effect.”

“And what do you think now?”

“Ah, I don’t know. You had better go as the Sphinx.”

Imogene laughed in simple gaiety of heart.

“How far we’ve got from the ball!” she said, as if the remote excursion were a triumph. “What shall we really go as?”

“Isis and Osiris.”

“Weren’t they gods of some kind?”

“Little one-horse deities — not very much.”

“It won’t do to go as gods of any kind. They’re always failures. People expect too much of them.”

“Yes,” said Colville. “That’s human nature under all circumstances. But why go to an Egyptian ball at all?”

“Oh, we must go. If we both stayed away it would make talk at once, and my object is to keep people in the dark till the very last moment. Of course it’s unfortunate your having told Mrs. Amsden that you were going away, and then telling her just after you came back with me that you were going to stay. But it can’t be helped now. And I don’t really care for it. But don’t you see why I want you to go to all these things?”

“All these things?”

“Yes, everything you’re invited to after this. It’s not merely for a blind as regards ourselves now, but if they see that you’re very fond of all sorts of gaieties, they will see that you are — they will understand — —”

There was no need for her to complete the sentence. Colville rose. “Come, come, my dear child,” he said, “why don’t you end all this at once? I don’t blame you. Heaven knows I blame no one but myself! I ought to have the strength to break away from this mistake, but I haven’t. I couldn’t bear to see you suffer from pain that I should give you even for your good. But do it yourself, Imogene, and for pity’s sake don’t forbear from any notion of sparing me. I have no wish except for your happiness, and now I tell you clearly that no appearance we can put on before the world will deceive the world. At the end of all our trouble I shall still be forty — —”

She sprang to him and put her hand over his mouth. “I know what you’re going to say, and I won’t let you say it, for you’ve promised over and over again not to speak of that any more. Oh, do you think I care for the world, or what it will think or say?”

“Yes, very much.”

“That shows how little you understand me. It’s because I wish to defy the world—”

“Imogene! Be as honest with yourself as you are with me.”

“I am honest.”

“Look me in the eyes, then.”

She did so for an instant, and then hid her face on his shoulder.

“You silly girl,” he said. “What is it you really do wish?”

“I wish there was no one in the world but you and me.”

“Ah, you’d find it very crowded at times,” said Colville sadly. “Well, well,” he added, “I’ll go to your fandangoes, because you want me to go.”

“That’s all I wished you to say,” she replied, lifting her head, and looking him radiantly in the face. “I don’t want you to go at all! I only want you to promise that you’ll come here every night that you’re invited out, and read to Mrs. Bowen and me.”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” said Colville; “I’m too fond of society. For example, I’ve been invited to an Egyptian fancy ball, and I couldn’t think of giving that up.”

“Oh, how delightful you are! They couldn’t any of them talk like you.”

He had learned to follow the processes of her thought now. “Perhaps they can when they come to my age.”

“There!” she exclaimed, putting her hand on his mouth again, to remind him of another broken promise. “Why can’t you give up the Egyptian ball?”

“Because I expect to meet a young lady there — a very beautiful young lady.”

“But how shall you know her if she’s disguised?”

“Why, I shall be disguised too, you know.”

“Oh, what delicious nonsense you do talk! Sit down here and tell me what you are going to wear.”

She tried to pull him back to the sofa. “What character shall you go in?”

“No, no,” he said, resisting the gentle traction. “I can’t; I have urgent business down-town.”

“Oh! Business in Florence!”

“Well, if I stayed, I should tell you what disguise I’m going to the ball in.”

“I knew it was that. What do you think would be a good character for me?”

“I don’t know. The serpent of old Nile would be pretty good for you.”

“Oh, I know you don’t think it!” she cried fondly. She had now let him take her hand, and he stood holding it at arm’s-length. Effie Bowen came into the room. “Good-bye,” said Imogene, with an instant assumption of society manner.

“Good-bye,” said Colville, and went out.

“Oh, Mr. Colville!” she called, before he got to the outer door.

“Yes,” he said, starting back.

She met him midway of the dim corridor. “Only to—” She put her arms about his neck and sweetly kissed him.

Colville went out into the sunlight feeling like some strange, newly invented kind of scoundrel — a rascal of such recent origin and introduction that he had not yet had time to classify himself and ascertain the exact degree of his turpitude. The task employed his thoughts all that day, and kept him vibrating between an instinctive conviction of monstrous wickedness and a logical and well-reasoned perception that he had all the facts and materials for a perfectly good conscience. He was the betrothed lover of this poor child, whose affection he could not check without a degree of brutality for which only a better man would have the courage. When he thought of perhaps refusing her caresses, he imagined the shock it would give her, and the look of grief and mystification that would come into her eyes, and he found himself incapable of that cruel rectitude. He knew that these were the impulses of a white and loving soul; but at the end of all his argument they remained a terror to him, so that he lacked nothing but the will to fly from Florence and shun her altogether till she had heard from her family. This, he recalled, with bitter self-reproach was what had been his first inspiration; he had spoken of it to Mrs. Bowen, and it had still everything in its favour except that it was impossible.

Imogene returned to the salotto, where the little girl was standing with her face to the window, drearily looking out; her back expressed an inner desolation which revealed itself in her eyes when Imogene caught her head between her hands, and tilted up her face to kiss it.

“What is the matter, Effie?” she demanded gaily.

“Nothing.”

“Oh yes, there is.”

“Nothing that you will care for. As long as he’s pleasant to you, you don’t care what he does to me.”

“What has he done to you?”

“He didn’t take the slightest notice of me when I came into the room. He didn’t speak to me, or even look at me.”

Imogene caught the little grieving, quivering face to her breast “He is a wicked, wicked wretch! And I will give him the awfulest scolding he ever had when he comes here again. I will teach him to neglect my pet. I will let him understand that if he doesn’t notice you, he needn’t notice me. I will tell you, Effie — I’ve just thought of a way. The next time he comes we will both receive him. We will sit up very stiffly on the sofa together, and just answer Yes, No, Yes, No, to everything he says, till he begins to take the hint, and learns how to behave himself. Will you?”

A smile glittered through the little girl’s tears; but she asked, “Do you think it would be very polite?”

“No matter, polite or not, it’s what he deserves. Of course, as soon as he begins to take the hint, we will be just as we always are.”

Imogene despatched a note, which Colville got the next morning, to tell him of his crime, and apprise him of his punishment, and of the sweet compunction that had pleaded for him in the breast of the child. If he did not think he could help play the comedy through, he must come prepared to offer Effie some sort of atonement.

It was easy to do this: to come with his pockets full of presents, and take the little girl on his lap, and pour out all his troubled heart in the caresses and tendernesses which would bring him no remorse. He humbled himself to her thoroughly, and with a strange sincerity in the harmless duplicity, and promised, if she would take him back into favour, that he would never offend again. Mrs. Bowen had sent word that she was not well enough to see him; she had another of her headaches; and he sent back a sympathetic and respectful message by Effie, who stood thoughtfully at her mother’s pillow after she had delivered it, fingering the bouquet Colville had brought her, and putting her head first on this side, and then on that to admire it.

“I think Mr. Colville and Imogene are much more affectionate than they used to be,” she said.

Mrs. Bowen started up on her elbow. “What do you mean, Effie?”

“Oh, they’re both so good to me.”

“Yes,” said her mother, dropping back to her pillow. “Both?”

“Yes; he’s the most affectionate.”

The mother turned her face the other way. “Then he must be,” she murmured.

“What?” asked the child.

“Nothing. I didn’t know I spoke.”

The little girl stood a while still playing with her flowers. “I think Mr. Colville is about the pleasantest gentleman that comes here. Don’t you, mamma?”

“Yes.”

“He’s so interesting, and says such nice things. I don’t know whether children ought to think of such things, but I wish I was going to marry some one like Mr. Colville. Of course I should want to be tolerably old if I did. How old do you think a person ought to be to marry him?”

“You mustn’t talk of such things, Effie,” said her mother.

“No; I suppose it isn’t very nice.” She picked out a bud in her bouquet, and kissed it; then she held the nosegay at arm’s-length before her, and danced away with it.

XVII

In the ensuing fortnight a great many gaieties besides the Egyptian ball took place, and Colville went wherever he and Imogene were both invited. He declined the quiet dinners which he liked, and which his hearty appetite and his habit of talk fitted him to enjoy, and accepted invitations to all sorts of evenings and At Homes, where dancing occupied a modest corner of the card, and usurped the chief place in the pleasures. At these places it was mainly his business to see Imogene danced with by others, but sometimes he waltzed with her himself, and then he was complimented by people of his own age, who had left off dancing, upon his vigour. They said they could not stand that sort of thing, though they supposed, if you kept yourself in practice, it did not come so hard. One of his hostesses, who had made a party for her daughters, told him that he was an example to everybody, and that if middle-aged people at home mingled more in the amusements of the young, American society would not be the silly, insipid, boy-and-girl affair that it was now. He went to these places in the character of a young man, but he was not readily accepted or recognised in that character. They gave him frumps to take out to supper, mothers and maiden aunts, and if the mothers were youngish, they threw off on him, and did not care for his talk.

At one of the parties Imogene seemed to become aware for the first time that the lapels of his dress-coat were not faced with silk.

“Why don’t you have them so?” she asked. “All the other young men have. And you ought to wear a boutonnière.”

“Oh, I think a man looks rather silly in silk lapels at my—” He arrested himself, and then continued: “I’ll see what the tailor can do for me. In the meantime, give me a bud out of your bouquet.”

“How sweet you are!” she sighed. “You do the least thing so that it is ten times as good as if any one else did it.”

The same evening, as he stood leaning against a doorway, behind Imogene and a young fellow with whom she was beginning a quadrille, he heard her taking him to task.

“Why do you say ‘Sir’ to Mr. Colville?”

“Well, I know the English laugh at us for doing it, and say it’s like servants; but I never feel quite right answering just ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to a man of his age.”

This was one of the Inglehart boys, whom he met at nearly all of these parties, and not all of whom were so respectful. Some of them treated him upon an old-boy theory, joking him as freely as if he were one of themselves, laughing his antiquated notions of art to scorn, but condoning them because he was good-natured, and because a man could not help being of his own epoch anyway. They put a caricature of him among the rest on the walls of their trattoria, where he once dined with them.

Mrs. Bowen did not often see him when he went to call upon Imogene, and she was not at more than two or three of the parties. Mrs. Amsden came to chaperon the girl, and apparently suffered an increase of unrequited curiosity in regard to his relations to the Bowen household, and the extraordinary development of his social activity. Colville not only went to all those evening parties, but he was in continual movement during the afternoon at receptions and at “days,” of which he began to think each lady had two or three. Here he drank tea, cup after cup, in reckless excitement, and at night when he came home from the dancing parties, dropping with fatigue, he could not sleep till toward morning. He woke at the usual breakfast-hour, and then went about drowsing throughout the day till the tea began again in the afternoon. He fell asleep whenever he sat down, not only in the reading-room at Viesseux’s, where he disturbed the people over their newspapers by his demonstrations of somnolence, but even at church, whither he went one Sunday to please Imogene, and started awake during the service with the impression that the clergyman had been making a joke. Everybody but Imogene was smiling. At the café he slept without scruple, selecting a corner seat for the purpose, and proportioning his buonamano to the indulgence of the giovane. He could not tell how long he slept at these places, but sometimes it seemed to him hours.

One day he went to see Imogene, and while Effie Bowen stood prattling to him as he sat waiting for Imogene to come in, he faded light-headedly away from himself on the sofa, as if he had been in his corner at the café. Then he was aware of some one saying “Sh!” and he saw Effie Bowen, with her finger on her lip, turned toward Imogene, a figure of beautiful despair in the doorway. He was all tucked up with sofa pillows, and made very comfortable, by the child, no doubt. She slipped out, seeing him awake, so as to leave him and Imogene alone, as she had apparently been generally instructed to do, and Imogene came forward.

“What is the matter, Theodore?” she asked patiently. She had taken to calling him Theodore when they were alone. She owned that she did not like the name, but she said it was right she should call him by it, since it was his. She came and sat down beside him, where he had raised himself to a sitting posture, but she did not offer him any caress.

“Nothing,” he answered. “But this climate is making me insupportably drowsy; or else the spring weather.”

“Oh no; it isn’t that,” she said, with a slight sigh. He had left her in the middle of a german at three o’clock in the morning, but she now looked as fresh and lambent as a star. “It’s the late hours. They’re killing you.”

Colville tried to deny it; his incoherencies dissolved themselves in a yawn, which he did not succeed in passing for a careless laugh.

“It won’t do,” she said, as if speaking to herself; “no, it won’t do.”

“Oh yes, it will,” Colville protested. “I don’t mind being up. I’ve been used to it all my life on the paper. It’s just some temporary thing. It’ll come all right.”

“Well, no matter,” said Imogene. “It makes you ridiculous, going to all those silly places, and I’d rather give it up.”

The tears began to steal down her cheeks, and Colville sighed. It seemed to him that somebody or other was always crying. A man never quite gets used to the tearfulness of women.

“Oh, don’t mind it,” he said. “If you wish me to go, I will go! Or die in the attempt,” he added, with a smile.

Imogene did not smile with him. “I don’t wish you to go any more. It was a mistake in the first place, and from this out I will adapt myself to you.”

“And give up all your pleasures? Do you think I would let you do that? No, indeed! Neither in this nor in anything else. I will not cut off your young life in any way, Imogene — not shorten it or diminish it. If I thought I should do that, or you would try to do it for me, I should wish I had never seen you.”

“It isn’t that. I know how good you are, and that you would do anything for me.”

“Well, then, why don’t you go to these fandangoes alone? I can see that you have me on your mind all the time, when I’m with you.”

“Oughtn’t I?”

“Yes, up to a certain point, but not up to the point of spoiling your fun. I will drop in now and then, but I won’t try to come to all of them, after this; you’ll get along perfectly well with Mrs. Amsden, and I shall be safe from her for a while. That old lady has marked me for her prey: I can see it in her glittering eyeglass. I shall fall asleep some evening between dances, and then she will get it all out of me.”

Imogene still refused to smile. “No; I shall give it up. I don’t think it’s well, going so much without Mrs. Bowen. People will begin to talk.”

“Talk?”

“Yes; they will begin to say that I had better stay with her a little more, if she isn’t well.”

“Why, isn’t Mrs. Bowen well?” asked Colville, with trepidation.

“No; she’s miserable. Haven’t you noticed?”

“She sees me so seldom now. I thought it was only her headaches — —”

“It’s much more than that. She seems to be failing every way. The doctor has told her she ought to get away from Florence.” Colville could not speak; Imogene went on. “She’s always delicate, you know. And I feel that all that’s keeping her here now is the news from home that I — we’re waiting for.”

Colville got up. “This is ghastly! She mustn’t do it!”

“How can you help her doing it? If she thinks anything is right, she can’t help doing it. Who could?”

Colville thought to himself that he could have said; but he was silent. At the moment he was not equal to so much joke or so much truth; and Imogene went on —

“She’d be all the more strenuous about it if it were disagreeable, and rather than accept any relief from me she would die.”

“Is she — unkind to you?” faltered Colville.

“She is only too kind. You can feel that she’s determined to be so — that she’s said she will have nothing to reproach herself with, and she won’t. You don’t suppose Mrs. Bowen would be unkind to any one she disliked?”

“Ah, I didn’t know,” sighed Colville.

“The more she disliked them, the better she would use them. It’s because our engagement is so distasteful to her that she’s determined to feel that she did nothing to oppose it.”

“But how can you tell that it’s distasteful, then?”

“She lets you feel it by — not saying anything about it.”

“I can’t see how—”

“She never speaks of you. I don’t believe she ever mentions your name. She asks me about the places where I’ve been, and about the people — every one but you. It’s very uncomfortable.”

“Yes,” said Colville, “it’s uncomfortable.”

“And if I allude to letters from home, she merely presses her lips together. It’s perfectly wretched.”

“I see. It’s I whom she dislikes, and I would do anything to please her. She must know that,” mused Colville aloud. “Imogene!” he exclaimed, with a sudden inspiration. “Why shouldn’t I go away?”

“Go away?” she palpitated. “What should I do?”

The colours faded from his brilliant proposal. “Oh, I only meant till something was settled — determined — concluded; till this terrible suspense was over.” He added hopelessly, “But nothing can be done!”

“I proposed,” said Imogene, “that we should all go away. I suggested Via Reggio — the doctor said she ought to have sea air — or Venice; but she wouldn’t hear of it. No; we must wait.”

“Yes, we must wait,” repeated Colville hollowly. “Then nothing can be done?”

“Why, haven’t you said it?”

“Oh yes — yes. I can’t go away, and you can’t. But couldn’t we do something — get up something?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, couldn’t we — amuse her somehow? help her to take her mind off herself?”

Imogene stared at him rather a long time. Then, as if she had satisfied herself in her own mind, she shook her head. “She wouldn’t submit to it.”

“No; she seems to take everything amiss that I do,” said Colville.

“She has no right to do that,” cried Imogene. “I’m sure that you’re always considering her, and proposing to do things for her. I won’t let you humble yourself, as if you had wronged her.”

“Oh, I don’t call it humbling. I — I should only be too happy if I could do anything that was agreeable to her.”

“Very well, I will tell her,” said the girl haughtily. “Shall you object to my joining you in your amusements, whatever they are? I assure you I will be very unobtrusive.”

“I don’t understand all this,” replied Colville. “Who has proposed to exclude you? Why did you tell me anything about Mrs. Bowen if you didn’t want me to say or do something? I supposed you did; but I’ll withdraw the offensive proposition, whatever it was.”

“There was nothing offensive. But if you pity her so much, why can’t you pity me a little?”

“I didn’t know anything was the matter with you. I thought you were enjoying yourself — —”

“Enjoying? Keeping you up at dances till you drop asleep whenever you sit down? And then coming home and talking to a person who won’t mention your name! Do you call that enjoying? I can’t speak of you to any one; and no one speaks to me — —”

“If you like, I will talk to you on the subject,” Colville essayed, in dreary jest.

“Oh, don’t joke about it! This perpetual joking, I believe it’s that that’s wearing me out. When I come to you for a little comfort in circumstances that drive me almost distracted, you want to amuse Mrs. Bowen, and when I ask to be allowed to share in the amusement, you laugh at me! If you don’t understand it all, I’m sure I don’t.”

“Imogene!”

“No! It’s very strange. There’s only one explanation. You don’t care for me.”

“Not care for you!” cried Colville, thinking of his sufferings in the past fortnight.

“And I would have made any — any sacrifice for you. At least I wouldn’t have made you show yourself a mean and grudging person if you had come to me for a little sympathy.”

“O poor child!” he cried, and his heart ached with the sense that she really was nothing but an unhappy child. “I do sympathise with you, and I see how hard it is for you to manage with Mrs. Bowen’s dislike for me. But you mustn’t think of it. I dare say it will be different; I’ve no doubt we can get her to look at me in some brighter light. I—” He did not know what he should urge next; but he goaded his invention, and was able to declare that if they loved each other they needed not regard any one else. This flight, when accomplished, did not strike him as very original effect, and it was with a dull surprise that he saw it sufficed for her.

“No; no one!” she exclaimed, accepting the platitude as if it were now uttered for the first time. She dried her eyes and smiled. “I will tell Mrs. Bowen how you feel and what you’ve said, and I know she will appreciate your generosity.”

“Yes,” said Colville pensively; “there’s nothing I won’t propose doing for people.”

She suddenly clung to him, and would not let him go. “Oh, what is the matter?” she moaned afresh. “I show out the worst that is in me, and only the worst. Do you think I shall always be so narrow-minded with you? I thought I loved you enough to be magnanimous. You are. It seemed to me that our lives together would be grand and large; and here I am, grovelling in the lowest selfishness! I am worrying and scolding you because you wish to please some one that has been as good as my own mother to me. Do you call that noble?”

Colville did not venture any reply to a demand evidently addressed to her own conscience.

But when she asked if he really thought he had better go away, he said, “Oh no; that was a mistake.”

“Because, if you do, you shall — to punish me.”

“My dearest girl, why should I wish to punish you?”

“Because I’ve been low and mean. Now I want you to do something for Mrs. don’t want you to sympathise with me at all. When I ask for your sympathy, it’s a sign that I don’t deserve it.”

“Is that so?”

“Oh, be serious with me. I mean it. And I want to beg your pardon for something.”

“Yes; what’s that?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“No.”

“You needn’t have your lapels silk-lined. You needn’t wear boutonnières.”

“Oh, but I’ve had the coat changed.”

“No matter! Change it back! It isn’t for me to make you over. I must make myself over. It’s my right, it’s my sacred privilege to conform to you in every way, and I humble myself in the dust for having forgotten it at the very start. Oh, do you think I can ever be worthy of you? I will try; indeed I will! I shall not wear my light dresses another time! From this out, I shall dress more in keeping with you. I boasted that I should live to comfort and console you, to recompense you for the past, and what have I been doing? Wearying and degrading you!”

“Oh no,” pleaded Colville. “I am very comfortable. I don’t need any compensation for the past. I need — sleep. I’m going to bed tonight at eight o’clock, and I am going to sleep twenty-four hours. Then I shall be fresh for Mrs. Fleming’s ball.”

“I’m not going,” said Imogene briefly.

“Oh yes, you are. I’ll come round to-morrow evening and see.”

“No. There are to be no more parties.”

“Why?”

“I can’t endure them.”

She was looking at him and talking at him, but she seemed far aloof in the abstraction of a sublime regret; she seemed puzzled, bewildered at herself.

Colville got away. He felt the pathos of the confusion and question to which he left her, but he felt himself powerless against it. There was but one solution to it all, and that was impossible. He could only grieve over her trouble, and wait; grieve for the irrevocable loss which made her trouble remote and impersonal to him, and submit.

XVIII

The young clergyman whom Colville saw talking to Imogene on his first evening at Mrs. Bowen’s had come back from Rome, where he had been spending a month or two, and they began to meet at Palazzo Pinti again. If they got on well enough together, they did not get on very far. The suave house-priest manners of the young clergyman offended Colville; he could hardly keep from sneering at his taste in art and books, which in fact was rather conventional; and no doubt Mr. Morton had his own reserves, under which he was perfectly civil, and only too deferential to Colville, as to an older man. Since his return, Mrs. Bowen had come back to her salon. She looked haggard; but she did what she could to look otherwise. She was always polite to Colville, and she was politely cordial with the clergyman. Sometimes Colville saw her driving out with him and Effie; they appeared to make excursions, and he had an impression, very obscure, that Mrs. Bowen lent the young clergyman money; that he was a superstition of hers, and she a patron of his; he must have been ten years younger than she; not more than twenty-five.

The first Sunday after his return, Colville walked home with Mr. Waters from hearing a sermon of Mr. Morton’s, which they agreed was rather well judged, and simply and fitly expressed.

“And he spoke with the authority of the priest,” said the old minister. “His Church alone of all the Protestant Churches has preserved that to its ministers. Sometimes I have thought it was a great thing.”

“Not always?” asked Colville, with a smile.

“These things are matters of mood rather than conviction with me,” returned Mr. Waters. “Once they affected me very deeply; but now I shall so soon know all about it that they don’t move me. But at times I think that if I were to live my life over again, I would prefer to be of some formal, some inflexibly ritualised, religion. At solemnities — weddings and funerals — I have been impressed with the advantage of the Anglican rite: it is the Church speaking to and for humanity — or seems so,” he added, with cheerful indifference. “Something in its favour,” he continued, after a while, “is the influence that every ritualised faith has with women. If they apprehend those mysteries more subtly than we, such a preference of theirs must mean a good deal. Yes; the other Protestant systems are men’s systems. Women must have form. They don’t care for freedom.”

“They appear to like the formalist too, as well as the form,” said Colville, with scorn not obviously necessary.

“Oh yes; they must have everything in the concrete,” said the old gentleman cheerfully.

“I wonder where Mr. Morton met Mrs. Bowen first,” said Colville.

“Here, I think. I believe he had letters to her. Before you came I used often to meet him at her house. I think she has helped him with money at times.”

“Isn’t that rather an unpleasant idea?”

“Yes; it’s disagreeable. And it places the ministry in a dependent attitude. But under our system it’s unavoidable. Young men devoting themselves to the ministry frequently receive gifts of money.”

“I don’t like it,” cried Colville.

“They don’t feel it as others would. I didn’t myself. Even at present I may be said to be living on charity. But sometimes I have fancied that in Mr. Morton’s case there might be peculiarly mitigating circumstances.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I met him first at Mrs. Bowen’s I used to think that it was Miss Graham in whom he was interested — —”

“I can assure you,” interrupted Colville, “that she was never interested in him.”

“Oh no; I didn’t suppose that,” returned the old man tranquilly. “And I’ve since had reason to revise my opinion. I think he is interested in Mrs. Bowen.”

“Mrs. Bowen! And you think that would be a mitigating circumstance in his acceptance of money from her? If he had the spirit of a man at all, it would make it all the more revolting.”

“Oh no, oh no,” softly pleaded Mr. Waters. “We must not look at these things too romantically. He probably reasons that she would give him all her money if they were married.”

“But he has no right to reason in that way,” retorted Colville, with heat. “They are not married; it’s ignoble and unmanly for him to count upon it. It’s preposterous. She must be ten years older than he.”

“Oh, I don’t say that they’re to be married,” Mr. Waters replied. “But these disparities of age frequently occur in marriage. I don’t like them, though sometimes I think the evil is less when it is the wife who is the elder. We look at youth and age in a gross, material way too often. Women remain young longer than men. They keep their youthful sympathies; an old woman understands a young girl. Do you — or do I — understand a young man?”

Colville laughed harshly. “It isn’t quite the same thing, Mr. Waters. But yes; I’ll admit, for the sake of argument, that I don’t understand young men. I’ll go further, and say that I don’t like them; I’m afraid of them. And you wouldn’t think,” he added abruptly, “that it would be well for me to marry a girl twenty years younger than myself.”

The old man glanced up at him with innocent slyness. “I prefer always to discuss these things in an impersonal way.”

“But you can’t discuss them impersonally with me; I’m engaged to Miss Graham. Ever since you first found me here after I told you I was going away I have wished to tell you this, and this seems as good a time as any — or as bad.” The defiance faded from his voice, which dropped to a note of weary sadness. “Yes, we’re engaged — or shall be, as soon as she can hear from her family. I wanted to tell you because it seemed somehow your due, and because I fancied you had a friendly interest in us both.”

“Yes, that is true,” returned Mr. Waters. “I wish you joy.” He went through the form of offering his hand to Colville, who pressed it with anxious fervour.

“I confess,” he said, “that I feel the risks of the affair. It’s not that I have any dread for my own part; I have lived my life, such as it is. But the child is full of fancies about me that can’t be fulfilled. She dreams of restoring my youth somehow, of retrieving the past for me, of avenging me at her own cost for an unlucky love affair that I had here twenty years ago. It’s pretty of her, but it’s terribly pathetic — it’s tragic. I know very well that I’m a middle-aged man, and that there’s no more youth for me. I’m getting grey, and I’m getting fat; I wouldn’t be young if I could; it’s a bore. I suppose I could keep up an illusion of youthfulness for five or six years more; and then if I could be quietly chloroformed out of the way, perhaps it wouldn’t have been so very bad.”

“I have always thought,” said Mr. Waters dreamily, “that a good deal might be said for abbreviating hopeless suffering. I have known some very good people advocate its practice by science.”

“Yes,” answered Colville. “Perhaps I’ve presented that point too prominently. What I wished you to understand was that I don’t care for myself; that I consider only the happiness of this young girl that’s somehow — I hardly know how — been put in my keeping. I haven’t forgotten the talks that we’ve had heretofore on this subject, and it would be affectation and bad taste in me to ignore them. Don’t be troubled at anything you’ve said; it was probably true, and I’m sure it was sincere. Sometimes I think that the kindest — the least cruel — thing I could do would be to break with her, to leave her. But I know that I shall do nothing of the kind; I shall drift. The child is very dear to me. She has great and noble qualities; she’s supremely unselfish; she loves me through her mistaken pity, and because she thinks she can sacrifice herself to me. But she can’t. Everything is against that; she doesn’t know how, and there is no reason why. I don’t express it very well. I think nobody clearly understands it but Mrs. Bowen, and I’ve somehow alienated her.”

He became aware that his self-abnegation was taking the character of self-pity, and he stopped.

Mr. Waters seemed to be giving the subject serious attention in the silence that ensued. “There is this to be remembered,” he began, “which we don’t consider in our mere speculations upon any phase of human affairs; and that is the wonderful degree of amelioration that any given difficulty finds in the realisation. It is the anticipation, not the experience, that is the trial. In a case of this kind, facts of temperament, of mere association, of union, work unexpected mitigations; they not only alleviate, they allay. You say that she cherishes an illusion concerning you: well, with women, nothing is so indestructible as an illusion. Give them any chance at all, and all the forces of their nature combine to preserve it. And if, as you say, she is so dear to you, that in itself is almost sufficient. I can well understand your misgivings, springing as they do from a sensitive conscience; but we may reasonably hope that they are exaggerated. Very probably there will not be the rapture for her that there would be if — if you were younger; but the chances of final happiness are great — yes, very considerable. She will learn to appreciate what is really best in you, and you already understand her. Your love for her is the key to the future. Without that, of course — —”

“Oh, of course,” interrupted Colville hastily. Every touch of this comforter’s hand had been a sting; and he parted with him in that feeling of utter friendlessness involving a man who has taken counsel upon the confession of half his trouble.

Something in Mrs. Bowen’s manner when he met her next made him think that perhaps Imogene had been telling her of the sympathy he had expressed for her ill-health. It was in the evening, and Imogene and Mr. Morton were looking over a copy of The Marble Faun, which he had illustrated with photographs at Rome. Imogene asked Colville to look at it too, but he said he would examine it later; he had his opinion of people who illustrated The Marble Faun with photographs; it surprised him that she seemed to find something novel and brilliant in the idea.

Effie Bowen looked round where she was kneeling on a chair beside the couple with the book, and seeing Colville wandering neglectedly about before he placed himself, she jumped down and ran and caught his hand.

“Well, what now?” he asked, with a dim smile, as she began to pull him toward the sofa. When he should be expelled from Palazzo Pinti he would really miss the worship of that little thing. He knew that her impulse had been to console him for his exclusion from the pleasures that Imogene and Mr. Morton were enjoying.

“Nothing. Just talk,” she said, making him fast in a corner of the sofa by crouching tight against him.

“What about? About which is the pleasantest season?”

“Oh no; we’ve talked about that so often. Besides, of course you’d say spring, now that it’s coming on so nicely.”

“Do you think I’m so changeable as that? Haven’t I always said winter when this question of the seasons was up? And I say it now. Shan’t you be awfully sorry when you can’t have a pleasant little fire on the hearth like this any more?”

“Yes; I know. But it’s very nice having the flowers, too. The grass was all full of daisies to-day — perfectly powdered with them.”

“To-day? Where?”

“At the Cascine. And in under the trees there were millions of violets and crow’s-feet. Mr. Morton helped me to get them for mamma and Imogene. And we stayed so long that when we drove home the daisies had all shut up, and the little pink leaves outside made it look like a field of red clover. Are you never going there any more?”

Mrs. Bowen came in. From the fact that there was no greeting between her and Mr. Morton, Colville inferred that she was returning to the room after having already been there. She stood a moment, with a little uncertainty, when she had shaken hands with him, and then dropped upon the sofa beyond Effie. The little girl ran one hand through Colville’s arm, and the other through her mother’s, and gripped them fast. “Now I have got you both,” she triumphed, and smiled first into her face, and then into his.

“Be quiet, Effie,” said her mother, but she submitted.

“I hope you’re better for your drive to-day, Mrs. Bowen. Effie has been telling me about it.”

“We stayed out a long time. Yes, I think the air did me good; but I’m not an invalid, you know.”

“Oh no.”

“I’m feeling a little fagged. And the weather was tempting. I suppose you’ve been taking one of your long walks.”

“No, I’ve scarcely stirred out. I usually feel like going to meet the spring a little more than half-way; but this year I don’t, somehow.”

“A good many people are feeling rather languid, I believe,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“I hope you’ll get away from Florence,” said Colville.

“Oh,” she returned, with a faint flush, “I’m afraid Imogene exaggerated that a little.” She added, “You are very good.”

She was treating him more kindly than she had ever done since that Sunday afternoon when he came in with Imogene to say that he was going to stay. It might be merely because she had worn out her mood of severity, as people do, returning in good-humour to those with whom they were offended, merely through the reconciling force of time. She did not look at him, but this was better than meeting his eye with that interceptive glance. A strange peace touched his heart. Imogene and the young clergyman at the table across the room were intent on the book still; he was explaining and expatiating, and she listening. Colville saw that he had a fine head, and an intelligent, handsome, gentle face. When he turned again to Mrs. Bowen it was with the illusion that she had been saying something; but she was, in fact, sitting mute, and her face, with its bright colour, showed pathetically thin.

“I should imagine that Venice would be good for you,” he said.

“It’s still very harsh there, I hear. No; when we leave Florence, I think we will go to Switzerland.”

“Oh, not to Madame Schebres’s,” pleaded the child, turning upon her.

“No, not to Madame Schebres,” consented the mother. She continued, addressing Colville: “I was thinking of Lausanne. Do you know Lausanne at all?”

“Only from Gibbon’s report. It’s hardly up to date.”

“I thought of taking a house there for the summer,” said Mrs. Bowen, playing with Effie’s fingers. “It’s pleasant by the lake, I suppose.”

“It’s lovely by the lake!” cried the child. “Oh, do go, mamma! I could get a boat and learn to row. Here you can’t row, the Arno’s so swift.”

“The air would bring you up,” said Colville to Mrs. Bowen. “Switzerland’s the only country where you’re perfectly sure of waking new every morning.”

This idea interested the child. “Waking new!” she repeated.

“Yes; perfectly made over. You wake up another person. Shouldn’t you think that would be nice?”

“No.”

“Well, I shouldn’t, in your place. But in mine, I much prefer to wake up another person. Only it’s pretty hard on the other person.”

“How queer you are!” The child set her teeth for fondness of him, and seizing his cheeks between her hands, squeezed them hard, admiring the effect upon his features, which in some respects was not advantageous.

“Effie!” cried her mother sternly; and she dropped to her place again, and laid hold of Colville’s arm for protection. “You are really very rude. I shall send you to bed.”

“Oh no, don’t, Mrs. Bowen,” he begged. “I’m responsible for these violences. Effie used to be a very well behaved child before she began playing with me. It’s all my fault.”

They remained talking on the sofa together, while Imogene and Mr. Morton continued to interest themselves in the book. From time to time she looked over at them, and then turned again to the young clergyman, who, when he had closed the book, rested his hands on its top and began to give an animated account of something, conjecturably his sojourn in Rome.

In a low voice, and with pauses adjusted to the occasional silences of the young people across the room, Mrs. Bowen told Colville how Mr. Morton was introduced to her by an old friend who was greatly interested in him. She said, frankly, that she had been able to be of use to him, and that he was now going back to America very soon; it was as if she were privy to the conjecture that had come to the surface in his talk with Mr. Waters, and wished him to understand exactly how matters stood with the young clergyman and herself. Colville, indeed, began to be more tolerant of him; he succeeded in praising the sermon he had heard him preach.

“Oh, he has talent,” said Mrs. Bowen.

They fell into the old, almost domestic strain, from which she broke at times with an effort, but returning as if helplessly to it. He had the gift of knowing how not to take an advantage with women; that sense of unconstraint in them fought in his favour; when Effie dropped her head wearily against his arm, her mother even laughed in sending her off to bed; she had hitherto been serious. Imogene said she would go to see her tucked in, and that sent the clergyman to say good-night to Mrs. Bowen, and to put an end to Colville’s audience.

In these days, when Colville came every night to Palazzo Pinti, he got back the tone he had lost in the past fortnight. He thought that it was the complete immunity from his late pleasures, and the regular and sufficient sleep, which had set him firmly on his feet again, but he did not inquire very closely. Imogene went two or three times, after she had declared she would go no more, from the necessity women feel of blunting the edge of comment; but Colville profited instantly and fully by the release from the parties which she offered him. He did not go even to afternoon tea-drinkings; the “days” of the different ladies, which he had been so diligent to observe, knew him no more. At the hours when society assembled in this house or that and inquired for him, or wondered about him, he was commonly taking a nap, and he was punctually in bed every night at eleven, after his return from Mrs. Bowen’s.

He believed, of course, that he went there because he now no longer met Imogene elsewhere, and he found the house pleasanter than it had ever been since the veglione. Mrs. Bowen’s relenting was not continuous, however. There were times that seemed to be times of question and of struggle with her, when she vacillated between the old cordiality and the later alienation; when she went beyond the former, or lapsed into moods colder and more repellent than the latter. It would have been difficult to mark the moment when these struggles ceased altogether, and an evening passed in unbroken kindness between them. But afterwards Colville could remember an emotion of grateful surprise at a subtle word or action of hers in which she appeared to throw all restraint — scruple or rancour, whichever it might be — to the winds, and become perfectly his friend again. It must have been by compliance with some wish or assent to some opinion of his; what he knew was that he was not only permitted, he was invited, to feel himself the most favoured guest. The charming smile, so small and sweet, so very near to bitterness, came back to her lips, the deeply fringed eyelids were lifted to let the sunny eyes stream upon him. She did, now, whatever he asked her. She consulted his taste and judgment on many points; she consented to resume, when she should be a little stronger, their visits to the churches and galleries: it would be a shame to go away from Florence without knowing them thoroughly. It came to her asking him to drive with her and Imogene in the Cascine; and when Imogene made some excuse not to go, Mrs. Bowen did not postpone the drive, but took Colville and Effie.

They drove quite down to the end of the Cascine, and got out there to admire the gay monument, with the painted bust, of the poor young Indian prince who died in Florence. They strolled all about, talking of the old times in the Cascine, twenty years before; and walking up the road beside the canal, while the carriage slowly followed, they stopped to enjoy the peasants lying asleep in the grass on the other bank. Colville and Effie gathered wild-flowers, and piled them in her mother’s lap when she remounted to the carriage and drove along while they made excursions into the little dingles beside the road. Some people who overtook them in these sylvan pleasures reported the fact at a reception to which they were going, and Mrs. Amsden, whose mind had been gradually clearing under the simultaneous withdrawal of Imogene and Colville from society, professed herself again as thickly clouded as a weather-glass before a storm. She appealed to the sympathy of others against this hardship.

Mrs. Bowen took Colville home to dinner; Mr. Morton was coming, she said, and he must come too. At table the young clergyman made her his compliment on her look of health, and she said, Yes; she had been driving, and she believed that she needed nothing but to be in the air a little more, as she very well could, now the spring weather was really coming. She said that they had been talking all winter of going to Fiesole, where Imogene had never been yet; and upon comparison it appeared that none of them had yet been to Fiesole except herself. Then they must all go together, she said; the carriage would hold four very comfortably.

“Ah! that leaves me out,” said Colville, who had caught sight of Effie’s fallen countenance.

“Oh no. How is that? It leaves Effie out.”

“It’s the same thing. But I might ride, and Effie might give me her hand to hold over the side of the carriage; that would sustain me.”

“We could take her between us, Mrs. Bowen,” suggested Imogene. “The back seat is wide.”

“Then the party is made up,” said Colville, “and Effie hasn’t demeaned herself by asking to go where she wasn’t invited.”

The child turned inquiringly toward her mother, who met her with an indulgent smile, which became a little flush of grateful appreciation when it reached Colville; but Mrs. Bowen ignored Imogene in the matter altogether.

The evening passed delightfully. Mr. Morton had another book which he had brought to show Imogene, and Mrs. Bowen sat a long time at the piano, striking this air and that of the songs which she used to sing when she was a girl: Colville was trying to recall them. When he and Imogene were left alone for their adieux, they approached each other in an estrangement through which each tried to break.

“Why don’t you scold me?” she asked. “I have neglected you the whole evening.”

“How have you neglected me?”

“How? Ah! if you don’t know — —”

“No. I dare say I must be very stupid. I saw you talking with Mr. Morton, and you seemed interested. I thought I’d better not intrude.”

She seemed uncertain of his intention, and then satisfied of its simplicity.

“Isn’t it pleasant to have Mrs. Bowen in the old mood again?” he asked.

“Is she in the old mood?”

“Why, yes. Haven’t you noticed how cordial she is?

“I thought she was rather colder than usual.”

“Colder!” The chill of the idea penetrated even through the density of Colville’s selfish content. A very complex emotion, which took itself for indignation, throbbed from his heart. “Is she cold with you, Imogene?”

“Oh, if you saw nothing — —”

“No; and I think you must be mistaken. She never speaks of you without praising you.”

“Does she speak of me?” asked the girl, with her honest eyes wide open upon him.

“Why, no,” Colville acknowledged. “Come to reflect, it’s I who speak of you. But how — how is she cold with you?”

“Oh, I dare say it’s a delusion of mine. Perhaps I’m cold with her.”

“Then don’t be so, my dear! Be sure that she’s your friend — true and good. Good night.”

He caught the girl in his arms, and kissed her tenderly. She drew away, and stood a moment with her repellent fingers on his breast.

“Is it all for me?” she asked.

“For the whole obliging and amiable world,” he answered gaily.

XIX

The next time Colville came he found himself alone with Imogene, who asked him what he had been doing all day.

“Oh, living along till evening. What have you?”

She did not answer at once, nor praise his speech for the devotion implied in it. After a while she said: “Do you believe in courses of reading? Mr. Morton has taken up a course of reading in Italian poetry. He intends to master it.”

“Does he?”

“Yes. Do you think something of the kind would be good for me?”

“Oh, if you thirst for conquest. But I should prefer to rest on my laurels if I were you.”

Imogene did not smile. “Mr. Morton thinks I should enjoy a course of Kingsley. He says he’s very earnest.”

“Oh, immensely. But aren’t you earnest enough already, my dear?”

“Do you think I’m too earnest?”

“No; I should say you were just right.”

“You know better than that. I wish you would criticise me sometimes.”

“Oh, I’d rather not.”

“Why? Don’t you see anything to criticise in me? Are you satisfied with me in every way? You ought to think. You ought to think now. Do you think that I am doing right in all respects? Am I all that I could be to you, and to you alone? If I am wrong in the least thing, criticise me, and I will try to be better.”

“Oh, you might criticise back, and I shouldn’t like that.”

“Then you don’t approve of a course of Kingsley?” asked the girl.

“Does that follow? But if you’re going in for earnestness, why don’t you take up a course of Carlyle?”

“Do you think that would be better than Kingsley?”

“Not a bit. But Carlyle’s so earnest that he can’t talk straight.”

“I can’t make out what you mean. Wouldn’t you like me to improve?”

“Not much,” laughed Colville. “If you did, I don’t know what I should do. I should have to begin to improve too, and I’m very comfortable as I am.”

“I should wish to do it to — to be more worthy of you,” grieved the girl, as if deeply disappointed at his frivolous behaviour.

He could not help laughing, but he was sorry, and would have taken her hand; she kept it from him, and removed to the farthest corner of the sofa. Apparently, however, her ideal did not admit of open pique, and she went on trying to talk seriously with him.

“You think, don’t you, that we oughtn’t to let a day pass without storing away some thought — suggestion — —”

“Oh, there’s no hurry,” he said lazily. “Life is rather a long affair — if you live. There appears to be plenty of time, though people say not, and I think it would be rather odious to make every day of use. Let a few of them go by without doing anything for you! And as for reading, why not read when you’re hungry, just as you eat? Shouldn’t you hate to take up a course of roast beef, or a course of turkey?”

“Very well, then,” said Imogene. “I shall not begin Kingsley.”

“Yes, do it. I dare say Mr. Morton’s quite right. He will look at these things more from your own point of view. All the Kingsley novels are in the Tauchnitz. By all means do what he says.”

“I will do what you say.”

“Oh, but I say nothing.”

“Then I will do nothing.”

Colville laughed at this too, and soon after the clergyman appeared. Imogene met him so coldly that Colville felt obliged to make him some amends by a greater show of cordiality than he felt. But he was glad of the effort, for he began to like him as he talked to him; it was easy for him to like people; the young man showed sense and judgment, and if he was a little academic in his mind and manners, Colville tolerantly reflected that some people seemed to be born so, and that he was probably not artificial, as he had once imagined from the ecclesiastical scrupulosity of his dress.

Imogene ebbed away to the piano in the corner of the room, and struck some chords on it. At each stroke the young clergyman, whose eyes had wandered a little toward her from the first, seemed to vibrate in response. The conversation became incoherent before Mrs. Bowen joined them. Then, by a series of illogical processes, the clergyman was standing beside Imogene at the piano, and Mrs. Bowen was sitting beside Colville on the sofa.

“Isn’t there to be any Effie, to-night?” he asked.

“No. She has been up too much of late. And I wished to speak with you — about Imogene.”

“Yes,” said Colville, not very eagerly. At that moment he could have chosen another topic.

“It is time that her mother should have got my letter. In less than a fortnight we ought to have an answer.”

“Well?” said Colville, with a strange constriction of the heart.

“Her mother is a person of very strong character; her husband is absorbed in business, and defers to her in everything.”

“It isn’t an uncommon American situation,” said Colville, relieving his tension by this excursion.

Mrs. Bowen ignored it. “I don’t know how she may look at the affair. She may give her assent at once, or she may decide that nothing has taken place till — she sees you.”

“I could hardly blame her for that,” he answered submissively.

“It isn’t a question of that,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It’s a question of — others. Mr. Morton was here before you came, and I know he was interested in Imogene — I am certain of it. He has come back, and he sees no reason why he should not renew his attentions.”

“No — o — o,” faltered Colville.

“I wish you to realise the fact.”

“But what would you — —”

“I told you,” said Mrs. Bowen, with a full return of that severity whose recent absence Colville had found so comfortable, “that I can’t advise or suggest anything at all.”

He was long and miserably silent. At last, “Did you ever think,” he asked, “did you ever suppose — that is to say, did you ever suspect that — she — that Imogene was — at all interested in him?”

“I think she was — at one time,” said Mrs. Bowen promptly.

Colville sighed, with a wandering disposition to whistle.

“But that is nothing,” she went on. “People have many passing fancies. The question is, what are you going to do now? I want to know, as Mr. Morton’s friend.”

“Ah, I wish you wanted to know as my friend, Mrs. Bowen!” A sudden thought flashed upon him. “Why shouldn’t I go away from Florence till Imogene hears from her mother? That seemed to me right in the first place. There is no tie that binds her to me. I hold her to nothing. If she finds in my absence that she likes this young man better—” An expression of Mrs. Bowen’s face stopped him. He perceived that he had said something very shocking to her; he perceived that the thing was shocking in itself, but it was not that which he cared for. “I don’t mean that I won’t hold myself true to her as long as she will. I recognise my responsibility fully. I know that I am answerable for all this, and that no one else is; and I am ready to bear any penalty. But what I can’t bear is that you should misunderstand me, that you should — I have been so wretched ever since you first began to blame me for my part in this, and so happy this past fortnight that I can’t — I won’t — go back to that state of things. No; you have no right to relent toward me, and then fling me off as you have tried to do to-night! I have some feeling too — some rights. You shall receive me as a friend, or not at all! How can I live if you — —”

She had been making little efforts as if to rise; now she forced herself to her feet, and ran from the room.

The young people looked up from their music; some wave of the sensation had spread to them, but seeing Colville remain seated, they went on with their playing till he rose. Then Imogene called out, “Isn’t Mrs. Bowen coming back?”

“I don’t know; I think not,” answered Colville stupidly, standing where he had risen.

She hastened questioning toward him. “What is the matter? Isn’t she well?”

Mr. Morton’s face expressed a polite share in her anxiety.

“Oh yes; quite, I believe,” Colville replied.

“She heard Effie call, I suppose,” suggested the girl.

“Yes, yes; I think so; that is — yes. I must be going. Good night.”

He took her hand and went away, leaving the clergyman still there; but he lingered only for a report from Mrs. Bowen, which Imogene hurried to get. She sent word that she would join them presently. But Mr. Morion said that it was late already, and he would beg Miss Graham to say good-night for him. When Mrs. Bowen returned Imogene was alone.

She did not seem surprised or concerned at that. “Imogene, I have been talking to Mr. Colville about you and Mr. Morton.”

The girl started and turned pale.

“It is almost time to hear from your mother, and she may consent to your engagement. Then you must be prepared to act.”

“Act?”

“To make it known. Matters can’t go on as they have been going. I told Mr. Colville that Mr. Morton ought to know at once.”

“Why ought he to know?” asked Imogene, doubtless with that impulse to temporise which is natural to the human soul in questions of right and interest. She sank into the chair beside which she had been standing.

“If your mother consents, you will feel bound to Mr. Colville?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“And if she refuses?”

“He has my word. I will keep my word to him,” replied Imogene huskily. “Nothing shall make me break it.”

“Very well, then!” exclaimed Mrs. Bowen. “We need not wait for your mother’s answer. Mr. Morton ought to know, and he ought to know at once. do. He is in love with you.”

“Oh,” moaned the girl.

“Yes; you can’t deny it. And it’s cruel, it’s treacherous, to let him go on thinking that you are free.”

“I will never see him again.”

“Ah! that isn’t enough. He has a claim to know why. I will not let him be treated so.”

They were both silent. Then, “What did Mr. Colville say?” asked Imogene.

“He? I don’t know that he said anything. He — —” Mrs. Bowen stopped.

Imogene rose from her chair.

“I will not let him tell Mr. Morton. It would be too indelicate.”

“And shall you let it go on so?”

“No. I will tell him myself.”

“How will you tell him?”

“I will tell him if he speaks to me.”

“You will let it come to that?”

“There is no other way. I shall suffer more than he.”

“But you will deserve to suffer, and your suffering will not help him.”

Imogene trembled into her chair again.

“I see,” said Mrs. Bowen bitterly, “how it will be at last. It will be as it has been from the first.” She began to walk up and down the room, mechanically putting the chairs in place, and removing the disorder in which the occupancy of several people leaves a room at the end of an evening. She closed the piano, which Imogene had forgot to shut, with a clash that jarred the strings from their silence. “But I will do it, and I wonder — —”

“You will speak to him?” faltered the girl.

“Yes!” returned Mrs. Bowen vehemently, and arresting herself in her rapid movements. “It won’t do for you to tell him, and you won’t let Mr. Colville.”

“No, I can’t,” said Imogene, slowly shaking her head. “But I will discourage him; I will not see him anymore.” Mrs. Bowen silently confronted her. “I will not see any one now till I have heard from home.”

“And how will that help? He must have some explanation, and I will have to make it. What shall it be?”

Imogene did not answer. She said: “I will not have any one know what is between me and Mr. Colville till I have heard from home. If they try to refuse, then it will be for him to take me against their will. But if he doesn’t choose to do that, then he shall be free, and I won’t have him humiliated a second time before the world. This time he shall be the one to reject. And I don’t care who suffers. The more I prize the person, the gladder I shall be; and if I could suffer before everybody I would. If people ever find it out, I will tell them that it was he who broke it off.” She rose again from her chair, and stood flushed and thrilling with the notion of her self-sacrifice. Out of the tortuous complexity of the situation she had evolved this brief triumph, in which she rejoiced as if it were enduring success. But she suddenly fell from it in the dust. “Oh, what can I do for him? How can I make him feel more and more that I would give up anything, everything, for him! could see that he was unhappy, as I did once! If I could see that he was at all different since — since —— Oh, what I dread is this smooth tranquillity! If our lives could only be stormy and full of cares and anxieties and troubles that I could take on myself, then, then I shouldn’t be afraid of the future! But I’m afraid they won’t be so — no, Mrs. Bowen, do you think he cares for me?”

Mrs Bowen turned white; she did not speak.

had forced myself on him through a mistake, and he had taken me to save me from the shame of knowing that I had made a mistake. Do you think that is true? If you can only tell me that it isn’t — Or, no! If it is true, tell me that! That would be real mercy.”

The other trembled, as if physically beaten upon by this appeal. But she gathered herself together rigidly. “How can I answer you such a thing as that? I mustn’t listen to you; you mustn’t ask me.” She turned and left the girl standing still in her attitude of imploring. But in her own room, where she locked herself in, sobs mingled with the laughter which broke crazily from her lips as she removed this ribbon and that jewel, and pulled the bracelets from her wrists. A man would have plunged from the house and walked the night away; a woman must wear it out in her bed.

XX

In the morning Mrs. Bowen received a note from her banker covering a despatch by cable from America. It was from Imogene’s mother; it acknowledged the letters they had written, and announced that she sailed that day for Liverpool. It was dated at New York, and it was to be inferred that after perhaps writing in answer to their letters, she had suddenly made up her mind to come out.

“Yes, that is it,” said Imogene, to whom Mrs. Bowen hastened with the despatch. “Why should she have telegraphed to you?” she asked coldly, but with a latent fire of resentment in her tone.

“You must ask her when she comes,” returned Mrs. Bowen, with all her gentleness. “It won’t be long now.”

They looked as if they had neither of them slept; but the girl’s vigil seemed to have made her wild and fierce, like some bird that has beat itself all night against its cage, and still from time to time feebly strikes the bars with its wings. Mrs. Bowen was simply worn to apathy.

“What shall you do about this?” she asked.

“Do about it? Oh, I will think. I will try not to trouble you.”

“Imogene!”

“I shall have to tell Mr. Colville. But I don’t know that I shall tell him at once. Give me the despatch, please.” She possessed herself of it greedily, offensively. “I shall ask you not to speak of it.”

“I will do whatever you wish.”

“Thank you.”

Mrs. Bowen left the room, but she turned immediately to re-open the door she had closed behind her.

“We were to have gone to Fiesole to-morrow,” she said inquiringly.

“We can still go if the day is fine,” returned the girl. “Nothing is changed. I wish very much to go. Couldn’t we go to-day?” she added, with eager defiance.

“It’s too late to-day,” said Mrs. Bowen quietly. “I will write to remind the gentlemen.”

“Thank you. I wish we could have gone to-day.”

“You can have the carriage if you wish to drive anywhere,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“I will take Effie to see Mrs. Amsden.” But Imogene changed her mind, and went to call upon two Misses Guicciardi, the result of an international marriage, whom Mrs. Bowen did not like very well. Imogene drove with them to the Cascine, where they bowed to a numerous military acquaintance, and they asked her if Mrs. Bowen would let her join them in a theatre party that evening: they were New-Yorkers by birth, and it was to be a theatre party in the New York style; they were to be chaperoned by a young married lady; two young men cousins of theirs, just out from America, had taken the box.

When Imogene returned home she told Mrs. Bowen that she had accepted this invitation. Mrs. Bowen said nothing, but when one of the young men came up to hand Imogene down to the carriage, which was waiting with the others at the gate, she could not have shown a greater tolerance of his second-rate New Yorkiness if she had been a Boston dowager offering him the scrupulous hospitalities of her city.

Imogene came in at midnight; she hummed an air of the opera as she took off her wraps and ornaments in her room, and this in the quiet of the hour had a terrible, almost profane effect: it was as if some other kind of girl had whistled. She showed the same nonchalance at breakfast, where she was prompt, and answered Mrs. Bowen’s inquiries about her pleasure the night before with a liveliness that ignored the polite resolution that prompted them.

Mr. Morton was the first to arrive, and if his discouragement began at once, the first steps masked themselves in a reckless welcome, which seemed to fill him with joy, and Mrs. Bowen with silent perplexity. The girl ran on about her evening at the opera, and about the weather, and the excursion they were going to make; and after an apparently needless ado over the bouquet which he brought her, together with one for Mrs. Bowen, she put it into her belt, and made Colville notice it when he came: he had not thought to bring flowers.

He turned from her hilarity with anxious question to Mrs. Bowen, who did not meet his eye, and who snubbed Effie when the child found occasion to whisper: “I think Imogene is acting very strangely, for her; don’t you, mamma? It seems as if going with those Guicciardi girls just once had spoiled her.”

“Don’t make remarks about people, Effie,” said her mother sharply. “It isn’t nice in little girls, and I don’t want you to do it. You talk too much lately.”

Effie turned grieving away from this rejection, and her face did not light up even at the whimsical sympathy in Colville’s face, who saw that she had met a check of some sort; he had to take her on his knee and coax and kiss her before her wounded feelings were visibly healed. He put her down with a sighing wish that some one could take him up and soothe his troubled sensibilities too, and kept her hand in his while he sat waiting for the last of those last moments in which the hurrying delays of ladies preparing for an excursion seem never to end.

When they were ready to get into the carriage, the usual contest of self-sacrifice arose, which Imogene terminated by mounting to the front seat; Mr. Morton hastened to take the seat beside her, and Colville was left to sit with Effie and her mother. “You old people will be safer back there,” said Imogene. It was a little joke which she addressed to the child, but a gleam from her eye as she turned to speak to the young man at her side visited Colville in desperate defiance. He wondered what she was about in that allusion to an idea which she had shrunk from so sensitively hitherto. But he found himself in a situation which he could not penetrate at any point. When he spoke with Mrs. Bowen, it was with a dark undercurrent of conjecture as to how and when she expected him to tell Mr. Morton of his relation to Imogene, or whether she still expected him to do it; when his eyes fell upon the face of the young man, he despaired as to the terms in which he should put the fact; any form in which he tacitly dramatised it remained very embarrassing, for he felt bound to say that while he held himself promised in the matter, he did not allow her to feel herself so.

A sky of American blueness and vastness, a mellow sun, and a delicate breeze did all that these things could for them, as they began the long, devious climb of the hills crowned by the ancient Etruscan city. At first they were all in the constraint of their own and one another’s moods, known or imagined, and no talk began till the young clergyman turned to Imogene and asked, after a long look at the smiling landscape, “What sort of weather do you suppose they are having at Buffalo to-day?”

“At Buffalo?” she repeated, as if the place had only a dim existence in her remotest consciousness. “Oh! The ice isn’t near out of the lake yet. You can’t count on it before the first of May.”

“And the first of May comes sooner or later, according to the season,” said Colville. “I remember coming on once in the middle of the month, and the river was so full of ice between Niagara Falls and Buffalo that I had to shut the car window that I’d kept open all the way through Southern Canada. But we have very little of that local weather at home; our weather is as democratic and continental as our political constitution. Here it’s March or May any time from September till June, according as there’s snow on the mountains or not.”

The young man smiled. “But don’t you like,” he asked with deference, “this slow, orderly advance of the Italian spring, where the flowers seem to come out one by one, and every blossom has its appointed time?”

“Oh yes, it’s very well in its way; but I prefer the rush of the American spring; no thought of mild weather this morning; a warm, gusty rain to-morrow night; day after to-morrow a burst of blossoms and flowers and young leaves and birds. I don’t know whether we were made for our climate or our climate was made for us, but its impatience and lavishness seem to answer some inner demand of our go-ahead souls. This happens to be the week of the peach blossoms here, and you see their pink everywhere to-day, and you don’t see anything else in the blossom line. But imagine the American spring abandoning a whole week of her precious time to the exclusive use of peach blossoms! She wouldn’t do it; she’s got too many other things on hand.”

Effie had stretched out over Colville’s lap, and with her elbow sunk deep in his knee, was renting her chin in her hand and taking the facts of the landscape thoroughly in. “Do they have just a week?” she asked.

“Not an hour more or less,” said Colville. “If they found an almond blossom hanging round anywhere after their time came, they would make an awful row; and if any lazy little peach-blow hadn’t got out by the time their week was up, it would have to stay in till next year; the pear blossoms wouldn’t let it come out.”

“Wouldn’t they?” murmured the child, in dreamy sympathy with this belated peach-blow.

“Well, that’s what people say. In America it would be allowed to come out any time. It’s a free country.”

Mrs. Bowen offered to draw Effie back to a posture of more decorum, but Colville put his arm round the little girl. “Oh, let her stay! It doesn’t incommode me, and she must be getting such a novel effect of the landscape.”

The mother fell back into her former attitude of jaded passivity. He wondered whether she had changed her mind about having him speak to Mr. Morton; her quiescence might well have been indifference; one could have said, knowing the whole situation, that she had made up her mind to let things take their course, and struggle with them no longer.

He could not believe that she felt content with him; she must feel far otherwise; and he took refuge, as he had the power of doing, from the discomfort of his own thoughts in jesting with the child, and mocking her with this extravagance and that; the discomfort then became merely a dull ache that insisted upon itself at intervals, like a grumbling tooth.

The prospect was full of that mingled wildness and subordination that gives its supreme charm to the Italian landscape; and without elements of great variety, it combined them in infinite picturesqueness. There were olive orchards and vineyards, and again vineyards and olive orchards. Closer to the farm-houses and cottages there were peaches and other fruit trees and kitchen-gardens; broad ribbons of grain waved between the ranks of trees; around the white villas the spires of the cypresses pierced the blue air. Now and then they came to a villa with weather-beaten statues strutting about its parterres. A mild, pleasant heat brooded upon the fields and roofs, and the city, dropping lower and lower as they mounted, softened and blended its towers and monuments in a sombre mass shot with gleams of white.

Colville spoke to Imogene, who withdrew her eyes from it with a sigh, after long brooding upon the scene. “You can do nothing with it, I see.”

“With what?”

“The landscape. It’s too full of every possible interest. What a history is written all over it, public and private! If you don’t take it simply like any other landscape, it becomes an oppression. It’s well that tourists come to Italy so ignorant, and keep so. Otherwise they couldn’t live to get home again; the past would crush them.”

Imogene scrutinised him as if to extract some personal meaning from his words, and then turned her head away. The clergyman addressed him with what was like a respectful toleration of the drolleries of a gifted but eccentric man, the flavour of whose talk he was beginning to taste.

“You don’t really mean that one shouldn’t come to Italy as well informed as possible?”

“Well, I did,” said Colville, “but I don’t.”

The young man pondered this, and Imogene started up with an air of rescuing them from each other — as if she would not let Mr. Morton think Colville trivial or Colville consider the clergyman stupid, but would do what she could to take their minds off the whole question. Perhaps she was not very clear as to how this was to be done; at any rate she did not speak, and Mrs. Bowen came to her support, from whatever motive of her own. It might have been from a sense of the injustice of letting Mr. Morton suffer from the complications that involved herself and the others. The affair had been going very hitchily ever since they started, with the burden of the conversation left to the two men and that helpless girl; if it were not to be altogether a failure she must interfere.

“Did you ever hear of Gratiano when you were in Venice?” she asked Mr. Morton.

“Is he one of their new water-colourists?” returned the young man. “I heard they had quite a school there now.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bowen, ignoring her failure as well as she could; “he was a famous talker; he loved to speak an infinite deal of nothing more than any man in Venice.”

“An ancestor of mine, Mr. Morton,” said Colville; “a poor, honest man, who did his best to make people forget that the ladies were silent. Thank you, Mrs. Bowen, for mentioning him. I wish he were with us to-day.”

The young man laughed. “Oh, in the Merchant of Venice!”

“No other,” said Colville.

“I confess,” said Mrs. Bowen, “that I am rather stupid this morning. I suppose it’s the softness of the air; it’s been harsh and irritating so long. It makes me drowsy.”

“Don’t mind us,” returned Colville. “We will call you at important points.” They were driving into a village at which people stop sometimes to admire the works of art in its church. “Here, for example, is — What place is this?” he asked of the coachman.

“San Domenico.”

“I should know it again by its beggars.” Of all ages and sexes they swarmed round the carriage, which the driver had instinctively slowed to oblige them, and thrust forward their hands and hats. Colville gave Effie his small change to distribute among them, at sight of which they streamed down the street from every direction. Those who had received brought forward the halt and blind, and did not scruple to propose being rewarded for this service. At the same time they did not mind his laughing in their faces; they laughed too, and went off content, or as nearly so as beggars ever are. He buttoned up his pocket as they drove on more rapidly. “I am the only person of no principle — except Effie — in the carriage, and yet I am at this moment carrying more blessings out of this village than I shall ever know what to do with. Mrs. Bowen, I know, is regarding me with severe disapproval. She thinks that I ought to have sent the beggars of San Domenico to Florence, where they would all be shut up in the Pia Casa di Ricovero, and taught some useful occupation. It’s terrible in Florence. You can walk through Florence now and have no appeal made to your better nature that is not made at the appellant’s risk of imprisonment. When I was there before, you had opportunities of giving at every turn.”

“You can send a cheque to the Pia Casa,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“Ah, but what good would that do me? When I give I want the pleasure of it; I want to see my beneficiary cringe under my bounty. But I’ve tried in vain to convince you that the world has gone wrong in other ways. Do you remember the one-armed man whom we used to give to on the Lung’ Arno? That persevering sufferer has been repeatedly arrested for mendicancy, and obliged to pay a fine out of his hard earnings to escape being sent to your Pia Casa.”

Mrs. Bowen smiled, and said, Was he living yet? in a pensive tone of reminiscence. She was even more than patient of Colville’s nonsense. It seemed to him that the light under her eyelids was sometimes a grateful light. Confronting Imogene and the young man whose hopes of her he was to destroy at the first opportunity, the lurid moral atmosphere which he breathed seemed threatening to become a thing apparent to sense, and to be about to blot the landscape. He fought it back as best he could, and kept the hovering cloud from touching the earth by incessant effort. At times he looked over the side of the carriage, and drew secretly a long breath of fatigue. It began to be borne in upon him that these ladies were using him ill in leaving him the burden of their entertainment. He became angry, but his heart softened, and he forgave them again, for he conjectured that he was the cause of the cares that kept them silent. He felt certain that the affair had taken some new turn. He wondered if Mrs. Bowen had told Imogene what she had demanded of him. But he could only conjecture and wonder in the dreary undercurrent of thought that flowed evenly and darkly on with the talk he kept going. He made the most he could of the varying views of Florence which the turns and mounting levels of the road gave him. He became affectionately grateful to the young clergyman when he replied promptly and fully, and took an interest in the objects or subjects he brought up.

Neither Mrs. Bowen nor Imogene was altogether silent. The one helped on at times wearily, and the other broke at times from her abstraction. Doubtless the girl had undertaken too much in insisting upon a party of pleasure with her mind full of so many things, and doubtless Mrs. Bowen was sore with a rankling resentment at her insistence, and vexed at herself for having yielded to it. If at her time of life and with all her experience of it, she could not rise under this inner load, Imogene must have been crushed by it.

Her starts from the dreamy oppression, if that were what kept her silent, took the form of aggression, when she disagreed with Colville about things he was saying, or attacked him for this or that thing which he had said in times past. It was an unhappy and unamiable self-assertion, which he was not able to compassionate so much when she resisted or defied Mrs. Bowen, as she seemed seeking to do at every point. Perhaps another would not have felt it so; it must have been largely in his consciousness; the young clergyman seemed not to see anything in these bursts but the indulgence of a gay caprice, though his laughing at them did not alleviate the effect to Colville, who, when he turned to Mrs. Bowen for her alliance, was astonished with a prompt snub, unmistakable to himself, however imperceptible to others.

He found what diversion and comfort he could in the party of children who beset them at a point near the town, and followed the carriage, trying to sell them various light and useless trifles made of straw — fans, baskets, parasols, and the like. He bought recklessly of them and gave them to Effie, whom he assured, without the applause of the ladies, and with the grave question of the young clergyman, that the vendors were little Etruscan girls, all at least twenty-five hundred years old. “It’s very hard to find any Etruscans under that age; most of the grown-up people are three thousand.”

The child humoured his extravagance with the faith in fable which children are able to command, and said, “Oh, tell me about them!” while she pushed up closer to him, and began to admire her presents, holding them up before her, and dwelling fondly upon them one by one.

“Oh, there’s very little to tell,” answered Colville. “They’re mighty close people, and always keep themselves very much to themselves. But wouldn’t you like to see a party of Etruscans of all ages, even down to little babies only eleven or twelve hundred years old, come driving into an American town? It would make a great excitement, wouldn’t it?”

“It would be splendid.”

“Yes; we would give them a collation in the basement of the City Hall, and drive them out to the cemetery. The Americans and Etruscans are very much alike in that — they always show you their tombs.”

“Will they in Fiesole?”

“How you always like to burrow into the past!” interrupted Imogene.

“Well, it’s rather difficult burrowing into the future,” returned Colville defensively. Accepting the challenge, he added: “Yes, I should really like to meet a few Etruscans in Fiesole this morning. I should feel as if I’d got amongst my contemporaries at last; they would understand me.”

The girl’s face flushed. “Then no one else can understand you?”

“Apparently not. I am the great American incompris.”

“I’m sorry for you,” she returned feebly; and, in fact, sarcasm was not her strong point.

When they entered the town they found the Etruscans preoccupied with other visitors, whom at various points in the quaint little piazza they surrounded in dense groups, to their own disadvantage as guides and beggars and dealers in straw goods. One of the groups reluctantly dispersed to devote itself to the new arrivals, and these then perceived that it was a party of artists, scattered about and sketching, which had absorbed the attention of the population. Colville went to the restaurant to order lunch, leaving the ladies to the care of Mr. Morton. When he came back he found the carriage surrounded by the artists, who had turned out to be the Inglehart boys. They had walked up to Fiesole the afternoon before, and they had been sketching there all the morning. With the artist’s indifference to the conventional objects of interest, they were still ignorant of what ought to be seen in Fiesole by tourists, and they accepted Colville’s proposition to be of his party in going the rounds of the Cathedral, the Museum, and the view from that point of the wall called the Belvedere. They found that they had been at the Belvedere before without knowing that it merited particular recognition, and some of them had made sketches from it — of bits of architecture and landscape, and of figure amongst the women with straw fans and baskets to sell, who thronged round the whole party again, and interrupted the prospect. In the church they differed amongst themselves as to the best bits for study, and Colville listened in whimsical despair to the enthusiasm of their likings and dislikings. All that was so far from him now; but in the Museum, which had only a thin interest based upon a small collection of art and archeology, he suffered a real affliction in the presence of a young Italian couple, who were probably plighted lovers. They went before a grey-haired pair, who might have been the girl’s father and mother, and they looked at none of the objects, though they regularly stopped before them and waited till their guide had said his say about them. The girl, clinging tight to the young man’s arm, knew nothing but him; her mouth and eyes were set in a passionate concentration of her being upon him, and he seemed to walk in a dream of her. From time to time they peered upon each other’s faces, and then they paused, rapt and indifferent to all besides.

The young painters had their jokes about it; even Mr. Morton smiled, and Mrs. Bowen recognised it. But Imogene did not smile; she regarded the lovers with an interest in them scarcely less intense than their interest in each other; and a cold perspiration of question broke out on Colville’s forehead. Was that her ideal of what her own engagement should be? Had she expected him to behave in that way to her, and to accept from her a devotion like that girl’s? How bitterly he must have disappointed her! It was so impossible to him that the thought of it made him feel that he must break all ties which bound him to anything like it. And yet he reflected that the time was when he could have been equal to that, and even more.

After lunch the painters joined them again, and they all went together to visit the ruins of the Roman theatre and the stretch of Etruscan wall beyond it. The former seems older than the latter, whose huge blocks of stone lie as firmly and evenly in their courses as if placed there a year ago; the turf creeps to the edge at top, and some small trees nod along the crest of the wall, whose ancient face, clean and bare, looks sternly out over a vast prospect, now young and smiling in the first delight of spring. The piety or interest of the community, which guards the entrance to the theatre by a fee of certain centesimi, may be concerned in keeping the wall free from the grass and vines which are stealing the half-excavated arena back to forgetfulness and decay; but whatever agency it was, it weakened the appeal that the wall made to the sympathy of the spectators.

They could do nothing with it; the artists did not take their sketch-blocks from their pockets. But in the theatre, where a few broken columns marked the place of the stage, and the stone benches of the auditorium were here and there reached by a flight of uncovered steps, the human interest returned.

“I suspect that there is such a thing as a ruin’s being too old,” said Colville. “Our Etruscan friends made the mistake of building their wall several thousand years too soon for our purpose.”

“Yes,” consented the young clergyman. “It seems as if our own race became alienated from us through the mere effect of time, don’t you think, sir? I mean, of course, terrestrially.”

The artists looked uneasy, as if they had not counted upon anything of this kind, and they began to scatter about for points of view. Effie got her mother’s leave to run up and down one of the stairways, if she would not fall. Mrs. Bowen sat down on one of the lower steps, and Mr. Morton took his place respectfully near her.

“I wonder how it looks from the top?” Imogene asked this of Colville, with more meaning than seemed to belong to the question properly.

“There is nothing like going to see,” he suggested. He helped her up, giving her his hand from one course of seats to another. When they reached the point which commanded the best view of the whole, she sat down, and he sank at her feet, but they did not speak of the view.

“Theodore, I want to tell you something,” she said abruptly. “I have heard from home.”

“Yes?” he replied, in a tone in which he did his best to express a readiness for any fate.

“Mother has telegraphed. She is coming out. She is on her way now. She will be here very soon.”

Colville did not know exactly what to say to these passionately consecutive statements. “Well?” he said at last.

“Well” — she repeated his word— “what do you intend to do?”

“Intend to do in what event?” he asked, lifting his eyes for the first time to the eyes which he felt burning down upon him.

“If she should refuse?”

Again he could not command an instant answer, but when it came it was a fair one. “It isn’t for me to say what I shall do,” he replied gravely. “Or, if it is, I can only say that I will do whatever you wish.”

“Do you wish nothing?”

“Nothing but your happiness.”

“Nothing but my happiness!” she retorted. “What is my happiness to me? Have I ever sought it?”

“I can’t say,” he answered; “but if I did not think you would find it—”

“I shall find it, if ever I find it, in yours,” she interrupted. “And what shall you do if my mother will not consent to our engagement?”

The experienced and sophisticated man — for that in no ill way was what Colville was — felt himself on trial for his honour and his manhood by this simple girl, this child. He could not endure to fall short of her ideal of him at that moment, no matter what error or calamity the fulfilment involved. “If you feel sure that you love me, Imogene, it will make no difference to me what your mother says. I would be glad of her consent; I should hate to go counter to her will; but I know that I am good enough man to be true and keep you all my life the first in all my thoughts, and that’s enough for me. But if you have any fear, any doubt of yourself, now is the time—”

Imogene rose to her feet as in some turmoil of thought or emotion that would not suffer her to remain quiet.

“Oh, keep still!” “Don’t get up yet!” “Hold on a minute, please!” came from the artists in different parts of the theatre, and half a dozen imploring pencils were waved in the air.

“They are sketching you,” said Colville, and she sank compliantly into her seat again.

“I have no doubt for myself — no,” she said, as if there had been no interruption.

“Then we need have no anxiety in meeting your mother,” said Colville, with a light sigh, after a moment’s pause. “What makes you think she will be unfavourable?”

“I don’t think that; but I thought — I didn’t know but—”

“What?”

“Nothing, now.” Her lips were quivering; he could see her struggle for self-control, but he could not see it unmoved.

“Poor child!” he said, putting out his hand toward her.

“Don’t take my hand; they’re all looking,” she begged.

He forbore, and they remained silent and motionless a little while, before she had recovered herself sufficiently to speak again.

“Then we are promised to each other, whatever happens,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And we will never speak of this again. But there is one thing. Did Mrs. Bowen ask you to tell Mr. Morton of our engagement?”

“She said that I ought to do so.”

“And did you say you would?”

“I don’t know. But I suppose I ought to tell him.”

“I don’t wish you to!” cried the girl.

“You don’t wish me to tell him?”

“No; I will not have it!”

“Oh, very well; it’s much easier not. But it seems to me that it’s only fair to him.”

“Did you think of that yourself?” she demanded fiercely.

“No,” returned Colville, with sad self-recognition. “I’m afraid I’m not apt to think of the comforts and rights of other people. It was Mrs. Bowen who thought of it.”

“I knew it!”

“But I must confess that I agreed with her, though I would have preferred to postpone it till we heard from your family.” He was thoughtfully silent a moment; then he said, “But if their decision is to have no weight with us, I think he ought to be told at once.”

“Do you think that I am flirting with him?”

“Imogene!” exclaimed Colville reproachfully.

“That’s what you imply; that’s what she implies.”

“You’re very unjust to Mrs. Bowen, Imogene.”

“Oh, you always defend her! It isn’t the first time you’ve told me I was unjust to her.”

“I don’t mean that you are willingly unjust, or could be so, to any living creature, least of all to her. But I — we — owe her so much; she has been so patient.”

“What do we owe her? How has she been patient?”

“She has overcome her dislike to me.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“And — and I feel under obligation to her for — in a thousand little ways; and I should be glad to feel that we were acting with her approval; I should like to please her.”

“You wish to tell Mr. Morton?”

“I think I ought.”

“To please Mrs. Bowen! Tell him, then! You always cared more to please her than me. Perhaps you stayed in Florence to please her!”

She rose and ran down the broken seats and ruined steps so recklessly and yet so sure-footedly that it seemed more like a flight than a pace to the place where Mrs. Bowen and Mr. Morton were talking together.

Colville followed as he could, slowly and with a heavy heart. A good thing develops itself in infinite and unexpected shapes of good; a bad thing into manifold and astounding evils. This mistake was whirling away beyond his recall in hopeless mazes of error. He saw this generous young spirit betrayed by it to ignoble and unworthy excess, and he knew that he and not she was to blame.

He was helpless to approach her, to speak with her, to set her right, great as the need of that was, and he could see that she avoided him. But their relations remained outwardly undisturbed. The artists brought their sketches for inspection and comment, and, without speaking to each other, he and Imogene discussed them with the rest.

When they started homeward the painters said they were coming a little way with them for a send-off, and then going back to spend the night in Fiesole. They walked beside the carriage, talking with Mrs. Bowen and Imogene, who had taken their places, with Effie between them, on the back seat; and when they took their leave, Colville and the young clergyman, who had politely walked with them, continued on foot a little further, till they came to the place where the highway to Florence divided into the new road and the old. At this point it steeply overtops the fields on one side, which is shored up by a wall some ten or twelve feet deep; and here round a sharp turn of the hill on the other side came a peasant driving a herd of the black pigs of the country.

Mrs. Bowen’s horses were, perhaps, pampered beyond the habitual resignation of Florentine horses to all manner of natural phenomena; they reared at sight of the sable crew, and backing violently uphill, set the carriage across the road, with its hind wheels a few feet from the brink of the wall. The coachman sprang from his seat, the ladies and the child remained in theirs as if paralysed.

Colville ran forward to the side of the carriage. “Jump, Mrs. Bowen! jump, Effie! Imogene—”

The mother and the little one obeyed. He caught them in his arms and set them down. The girl sat still, staring at him with reproachful, with disdainful eyes.

He leaped forward to drag her out; she shrank away, and then he flew to help the coachman, who had the maddened horses by the bit.

“Let go!” he heard the young clergyman calling to him; “she’s safe!” He caught a glimpse of Imogene, whom Mr. Morton had pulled from the other side of the carriage. He struggled to free his wrist from the curb-bit chain of the horse, through which he had plunged it in his attempt to seize the bridle. The wheels of the carriage went over the wall; he felt himself whirled into the air, and then swung ruining down into the writhing and crashing heap at the bottom of the wall.

XXI

When Colville came to himself his first sensation was delight in the softness and smoothness of the turf on which he lay. Then the strange colour of the grass commended itself to his notice, and presently he perceived that the thing under his head was a pillow, and that he was in bed. He was supported in this conclusion by the opinion of the young man who sat watching him a little way off, and who now smiled cheerfully at the expression in the eyes which Colville turned inquiringly upon him.

“Where am I?” he asked, with what appeared to him very unnecessary feebleness of voice.

The young man begged his pardon in Italian, and when Colville repeated his question in that tongue, he told him that he was in Palazzo Pinti, whither he had been brought from the scene of his accident. He added that Colville must not talk till the doctor had seen him and given him leave, and he explained that he was himself a nurse from the hospital, who had been taking care of him.

Colville moved his head and felt the bandage upon it; he desisted in his attempt to lift his right arm to it before the attendant could interfere in behalf of the broken limb. He recalled dimly and fragmentarily long histories that he had dreamed, but he forbore to ask how long he had been in his present case, and he accepted patiently the apparition of the doctor and other persons who came and went, and were at his bedside or not there, as it seemed to him, between the opening and closing of an eye. As the days passed they acquired greater permanence and maintained a more uninterrupted identity. He was able to make quite sure of Mr. Morton and of Mr. Waters; Mrs. Bowen came in, leading Effie, and this gave him a great pleasure. Mrs. Bowen seemed to have grown younger and better. Imogene was not among the phantoms who visited him; and he accepted her absence as quiescently as he accepted the presence of the others. There was a cheerfulness in those who came that permitted him no anxiety, and he was too weak to invite it by any conjecture. He consented to be spared and to spare himself; and there were some things about the affair which gave him a singular and perhaps not wholly sane content. One of these was the man nurse who had evidently taken care of him throughout. He celebrated, whenever he looked at this capable person, his escape from being, in the odious helplessness of sickness, a burden upon the strength and sympathy of the two women for whom he had otherwise made so much trouble. His satisfaction in this had much to do with his recovery, which, when it once began, progressed rapidly to a point where he was told that Imogene and her mother were at a hotel in Florence, waiting till he should be strong enough to see them. It was Mrs. Bowen who told him this with an air which she visibly strove to render non-committal and impersonal, but which betrayed, nevertheless, a faint apprehension for the effect upon him. The attitude of Imogene and her mother was certainly not one to have been expected of people holding their nominal relation to him, but Colville had been revising his impressions of events on the day of his accident; Imogene’s last look came back to him, and he could not think the situation altogether unaccountable.

“Have I been here a long time?” he asked, as if he had not heeded what she told him.

“About a fortnight,” answered Mrs. Bowen.

“And Imogene — how long has she been away?”

“Since they knew you would get well.”

“I will see them any time,” he said quietly.

“Do you think you are strong enough?”

“I shall never be stronger till I have seen them,” he returned, with a glance at her. “Yes; I want them to come to-day. I shall not be excited; don’t be troubled — if you were going to be,” he added. “Please send to them at once.”

Mrs. Bowen hesitated, but after a moment left the room. She returned in half an hour with a lady who revealed even to Colville’s languid regard evidences of the character which Mrs. Bowen had attributed to Imogene’s mother. She was a large, robust person, laced to sufficient shapeliness, and she was well and simply dressed. She entered the room with a waft of some clean, wholesome perfume, and a quiet temperament and perfect health looked out of her clear, honest eyes — the eyes of Imogene Graham, though the girl’s were dark and the woman’s were blue. When Mrs. Bowen had named them to each other, in withdrawing, Mrs. Graham took Colville’s weak left hand in her fresh, strong, right, and then lifted herself a chair to his bedside, and sat down.

“How do you do to-day, sir?” she said, with a touch of old-fashioned respectfulness in the last word. “Do you think you are quite strong enough to talk with me?”

“I think so,” said Colville, with a faint smile. “At least I can listen with fortitude.”

Mrs. Graham was not apparently a person adapted to joking. “I don’t know whether it will require much fortitude to hear what I have to say or not,” she said, with her keen gaze fixed upon him. “It’s simply this: I am going to take Imogene home.”

She seemed to expect that Colville would make some reply to this, and he said blankly, “Yes?”

“I came out prepared to consent to what she wished, after I had seen you, and satisfied myself that she was not mistaken; for I had always promised myself that her choice should be perfectly untrammelled, and I have tried to bring her up with principles and ideas that would enable her to make a good choice.”

“Yes,” said Colville again. “I’m afraid you didn’t take her temperament and her youth into account, and that she disappointed you.”

“No; I can’t say that she did. It isn’t that at all. I see no reason to blame her for her choice. Her mistake was of another kind.”

It appeared to Colville that this very sensible and judicial lady found an intellectual pleasure in the analysis of the case, which modified the intensity of her maternal feeling in regard to it, and that, like many people who talk well, she liked to hear herself talk in the presence of another appreciative listener. He did not offer to interrupt her, and she went on. “No, sir, I am not disappointed in her choice. I think her chances of happiness would have been greater, in the abstract, with one nearer her own age; but that is a difference which other things affect so much that it did not alarm me greatly. Some people are younger at your age than at hers. No, sir, that is not the point.” Mrs. Graham fetched a sigh, as if she found it easier to say what was not the point than to say what was, and her clear gaze grew troubled. But she apparently girded herself for the struggle. “As far as you are concerned, Mr. Colville, I have not a word to say. Your conduct throughout has been most high-minded and considerate and delicate.”

It is hard for any man to deny merits attributed to him, especially if he has been ascribing to himself the opposite demerits. But Colville summoned his dispersed forces to protest against this.

“Oh, no, no,” he cried. “Anything but that. My conduct has been selfish and shameful. If you could understand all—”

“I think I do understand all — at least far more, I regret to say, than my daughter has been willing to tell me. And I am more than satisfied with you. I thank you and honour you.”

“Oh no; don’t say that,” pleaded Colville. “I really can’t stand it.”

“And when I came here it was with the full intention of approving and confirming Imogene’s decision. But I was met at once by a painful and surprising state of things. You are aware that you have been very sick?”

“Dimly,” said Colville.

“I found you very sick, and I found my daughter frantic at the error which she had discovered in herself — discovered too late, as she felt.” Mrs. Graham hesitated, and then added abruptly, “She had found out that she did not love you.”

“Didn’t love me?” repeated Colville feebly.

“She had been conscious of the truth before, but she had stifled her misgivings insanely, and, as I feel, almost wickedly, pushing on, and saying to herself that when you were married, then there would be no escape, and she must love you.”

“Poor girl! poor child! I see, I see.”

“But the accident that was almost your death saved her from that miserable folly and iniquity. Yes,” she continued, in answer to the protest in his face, “folly and iniquity. I found her half crazed at your bedside. She was fully aware of your danger, but while she was feeling all the remorse that she ought to feel — that any one could feel — she was more and more convinced that she never had loved you and never should. I can give you no idea of her state of mind.”

“Oh, you needn’t! you needn’t! Poor, poor child!”

“Yes, a child indeed. If it had not been for the pity I felt for her — But no matter about that. She saw at last that if your heroic devotion to her” — Colville did his best to hang his pillowed head for shame— “if your present danger did not awaken her to some such feeling for you as she had once imagined she had; if they both only increased her despair and self-abhorrence, then the case was indeed hopeless. She was simply distracted. I had to tear her away almost by force. She has had a narrow escape from brain-fever. And now I have come to implore, to demand” — Mrs. Graham, with all her poise and calm, was rising to the hysterical key— “her release from a fate that would be worse than death for such a girl. I mean marrying without the love of her whole soul. She esteems you, she respects you, she admires you, she likes you; but—” Mrs. Graham pressed her lips together, and her eyes shone.

“She is free,” said Colville, and with the words a mighty load rolled from his heart. “There is no need to demand anything.”

“I know.”

“There hasn’t been an hour, an instant, during — since I — we — spoke together that I wouldn’t have released her if I could have known what you tell me now.”

“Of course! — of course!”

“I have had my fears — my doubts; but whenever I approached the point I found no avenue by which we could reach a clearer understanding. I could not say much without seeming to seek for myself the release I was offering her.”

“Naturally. And what added to her wretchedness was the suspicion at the bottom of all that she had somehow forced herself upon you — misunderstood you, and made you say and do things to spare her that you would not have done voluntarily.” This was advanced tentatively. In the midst of his sophistications Colville had, as most of his sex have, a native, fatal, helpless truthfulness, which betrayed him at the most unexpected moments, and this must now have appeared in his countenance. The lady rose haughtily. She had apparently been considering him, but, after all, she must have been really considering her daughter. “If anything of the kind was the case,” she said, “I will ask you to spare her the killing knowledge. It’s quite enough for me to know it. And allow me to say, Mr. Colville, that it would have been far kinder in you—”

“Ah, think, my dear madam!” he exclaimed. “How could I?”

She did think, evidently, and when she spoke it was with a generous emotion, in which there was no trace of pique.

“You couldn’t. You have done right; I feel that, and I will trust you to say anything you will to my daughter.”

“To your daughter? Shall I see her?”

“She came with me. She wished to beg your forgiveness.”

Colville lay silent. “There is no forgiveness to be asked or granted,” he said, at length. “Why should she suffer the pain of seeing me? — for it would be nothing else. What do you think? Will it do her any good hereafter? I don’t care for myself.”

“I don’t know what to think,” said Mrs. Graham. “She is a strange child. She may have some idea of reparation.”

“Oh, beseech her from me not to imagine that any reparation is due! Where there has been an error there must be blame; but wherever it lies in ours, I am sure it isn’t at her door. Tell her I say this; tell her that I acquit her with all my heart of every shadow of wrong; that I am not unhappy, but glad for her sake and my own that this has ended as it has.” He stretched his left hand across the coverlet to her, and said, with the feebleness of exhaustion, “Good-bye. Bid her good-bye for me.”

Mrs. Graham pressed his hand and went out. A moment after the door was flung open, and Imogene burst into the room. She threw herself on her knees beside his bed. “I will pray to you!” she said, her face intense with the passions working in her soul. She seemed choking with words which would not come; then, with an inarticulate cry that must stand for all, she caught up the hand that lay limp on the coverlet; she crushed it against her lips, and ran out of the room.

He sank into a deathly torpor, the physical refusal of his brain to take account of what had passed. When he woke from it, little Effie Bowen was airily tiptoeing about the room, fondly retouching its perfect order. He closed his eyes, and felt her come to him and smooth the sheet softly under his chin. Then he knew she must be standing with clasped hands admiring the effect. Some one called her in whisper from the door. It closed, and all was still again.

XXII

Colville got himself out of the comfort and quiet of Mrs. Bowen’s house as soon as he could. He made the more haste because he felt that if he could have remained with the smallest trace of self-respect, he would have been glad to stay there for ever.

Even as it was, the spring had advanced to early summer, and the sun was lying hot and bright in the piazzas, and the shade dense and cool in the narrow streets, before he left Palazzo Pinti; the Lung’ Arno was a glare of light that struck back from the curving line of the buff houses; the river had shrivelled to a rill in its bed; the black cypresses were dim in the tremor of the distant air on the hill-slopes beyond; the olives seemed to swelter in the sun, and the villa walls to burn whiter and whiter. At evening the mosquito began to wind his tiny horn. It was the end of May, and nearly everybody but the Florentines had gone out of Florence, dispersing to Villa Reggio by the sea, to the hills of Pistoja, and to the high, cool air of Siena. More than once Colville had said that he was keeping Mrs. Bowen after she ought to have got away, and she had answered that she liked hot weather, and that this was not comparable to the heat of Washington in June. She was looking very well, and younger and prettier than she had since the first days of their renewed acquaintance in the winter. Her southern complexion enriched itself in the sun; sometimes when she came into his room from outdoors the straying brown hair curled into loose rings on her temples, and her cheeks glowed a deep red.

She said those polite things to appease him as long as he was not well enough to go away, but she did not try to detain him after his strength sufficiently returned. It was the blow on the head that kept him longest. After his broken arm and his other bruises were quite healed, he was aware of physical limits to thinking of the future or regretting the past, and this sense of his powerlessness went far to reconcile him to a life of present inaction and oblivion. Theoretically he ought to have been devoured by remorse and chagrin, but as a matter of fact he suffered very little from either. Even in people who are in full possession of their capacity for mental anguish one observes that after they have undergone a certain amount of pain they cease to feel.

Colville amused himself a good deal with Effie’s endeavours to entertain him and take care of him. The child was with him every moment that she could steal from her tasks, and her mother no longer attempted to stem the tide of her devotion. It was understood that Effie should joke and laugh with Mr. Colville as much as she chose; that she should fan him as long as he could stand it; that she should read to him when he woke, and watch him when he slept. She brought him his breakfast, she petted him and caressed him, and wished to make him a monster of dependence and self-indulgence. It seemed to grieve her that he got well so fast.

The last night before he left the house she sat on his knee by the window looking out beyond the firefly twinkle of Oltrarno, to the silence and solid dark of the solemn company of hills beyond. They had not lighted the lamps because of the mosquitoes, and they had talked till her head dropped against his shoulder.

Mrs. Bowen came in to get her. “Why, is she asleep?”

“Yes. Don’t take her yet,” said Colville.

Mrs. Bowen rustled softly into the chair which Effie had left to get into Colville’s lap. Neither of them spoke, and he was so richly content with the peace, the tacit sweetness of the little moment, that he would have been glad to have it silently endure forever. If any troublesome question of his right to such a moment of bliss obtruded itself upon him, he did not concern himself with it.

“We shall have another hot day to-morrow,” said Mrs. Bowen at length. “I hope you will find your room comfortable.”

“Yes: it’s at the back of the hotel, mighty high, and wide, and no sun ever comes into it except when they show it to foreigners in winter. Then they get a few rays to enter as a matter of business, on condition that they won’t detain them. I dare say I shall stay there some time. I suppose you will be getting away from Florence very soon.

“Yes. But I haven’t decided where to go yet.”

“Should you like some general expression of my gratitude for all you’ve done for me, Mrs. Bowen?”

“No; I would rather not. It has been a great pleasure — to Effie.”

“Oh, a luxury beyond the dreams of avarice.” They spoke in low tones, and there was something in the hush that suggested to Colville the feasibility of taking into his unoccupied hand one of the pretty hands which the pale night-light showed him lying in Mrs. Bowen’s lap. But he forbore, and only sighed. “Well, then, I will say nothing. But I shall keep on thinking all my life.”

She made no answer.

“When you are gone, I shall have to make the most of Mr. Waters,” he said.

“He is going to stop all summer, I believe.”

“Oh yes. When I suggested to him the other day that he might find it too hot, he said that he had seventy New England winters to thaw out of his blood, and that all the summers he had left would not be more than he needed. One of his friends told him that he could cook eggs in his piazza in August, and he said that he should like nothing better than to cook eggs there. He’s the most delightfully expatriated compatriot I’ve ever seen.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s well enough for him. Life has no claims on him any more. I think it’s very pleasant over here, now that everybody’s gone,” added Colville, from a confused resentfulness of collectively remembered Days and Afternoons and Evenings. “How still the night is!”

A few feet clapping by on the pavement below alone broke the hush.

“Sometimes I feel very tired of it all, and want to get home,” sighed Mrs. Bowen.

“Well, so do I.”

“I can’t believe it’s right staying away from the country so long.” People often say such things in Europe.

“No, I don’t either, if you’ve got anything to do there.”

“You can always make something to do there.”

“Oh yes.” Some young young men, breaking from a street near by, began to sing. “We shouldn’t have that sort of thing at home.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bowen pensively.

“I heard just such singing before I fell asleep the night after that party at Madame Uccelli’s, and it filled me with fury.”

“Why should it do that?”

“I don’t know. It seemed like voices from our youth — Lina.”

She had no resentment of his use of her name in the tone with which she asked: “Did you hate that so much?”

“No; the loss of it.”

They both fetched a deep breath.

“The Uccellis have a villa near the baths of Lucca,” said Mrs. Bowen. “They have asked me to go.”

“Do you think of going?” inquired Colville. “I’ve always fancied it must be pleasant there.”

“No; I declined. Sometimes I think I will just stay on in Florence.”

“I dare say you’d find it perfectly comfortable. There’s nothing like having the range of one’s own house in summer.” He looked out of the window on the blue-black sky.

 “‘And deepening through their silent spheres,
   Heaven over heaven rose the night,’”

he quoted. “It’s wonderful! Do you remember how I used to read Mariana in the South to you and poor Jenny? How it must have bored her! What an ass I was!”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bowen breathlessly, in sympathy with his reminiscence rather than in agreement with his self-denunciation.

Colville broke into a laugh, and then she began to laugh to; but not quite willingly as it seemed.

Effie started from her sleep. “What — what is it?” she asked, stretching and shivering as half-wakened children do.

“Bed-time,” said her mother promptly, taking her hand to lead her away. “Say good-night to Mr. Colville.”

The child turned and kissed him. “Good night,” she murmured.

“Good night, you sleepy little soul!” It seemed to Colville that he must be a pretty good man, after all, if this little thing loved him so.

“Do you always kiss Mr. Colville good-night?” asked her mother when she began to undo her hair for her in her room.

“Sometimes. Don’t you think it’s nice?”

“Oh yes; nice enough.”

Colville sat by the window a long time thinking Mrs. Bowen might come back; but she did not return.

Mr. Waters came to see him the next afternoon at his hotel.

“Are you pretty comfortable here?” he asked.

“Well, it’s a change,” said Colville. “I miss the little one awfully.”

“She’s a winning child,” admitted the old man. “That combination of conventionality and naïveté is very captivating. I notice it in the mother.”

“Yes, the mother has it too. Have you seen them to-day?”

“Yes; Mrs. Bowen was sorry to be out when you came.”

“I had the misfortune to miss them. I had a great mind to go again to-night.”

The old man said nothing to this. “The fact is,” Colville went on, “I’m so habituated to being there that I’m rather spoiled.”

“Ah, it’s a nice place,” Mr. Waters admitted.

“Of course I made all the haste I could to get away, and I have the reward of a good conscience. But I don’t find that the reward is very great.”

The old gentleman smiled. “The difficulty is to know conscience from self-interest.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt of it in my case,” said Colville. “If I’d consulted my own comfort and advantage, I should still be at Palazzo Pinti.”

“I dare say they would have been glad to keep you.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Colville, with sudden seriousness. “I wish you would tell me why. Have you any reason — grounds? Pshaw! I’m absurd!” He sank back into the easy-chair from whose depths he had pulled himself in the eagerness of his demand, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. “Mr. Waters, you remember my telling you of my engagement to Miss Graham?”

“Yes.”

“That is broken off — if it were ever really on. It was a great mistake for both of us — a tragical one for her, poor child, a ridiculous one for me. My only consolation is that it was a mistake and no more; but I don’t conceal from myself that I might have prevented it altogether if I had behaved with greater wisdom and dignity at the outset. But I’m afraid I was flattered by an illusion of hers that ought to have pained and alarmed me, and the rest followed inevitably, though I was always just on the point of escaping the consequences of my weakness — my wickedness.”

“Ah, there is something extremely interesting in all that,” said the old minister thoughtfully. “The situation used to be figured under the old idea of a compact with the devil. His debtor was always on the point of escaping, as you say, but I recollect no instance in which he did not pay at last. The myth must have arisen from man’s recognition of the inexorable sequence of cause from effect, in the moral world, which even repentance cannot avert. Goethe tries to imagine an atonement for Faust’s trespass against one human soul in his benefactions to the race at large; but it is a very cloudy business.”

“It isn’t quite a parallel case,” said Colville, rather sulkily. He had, in fact, suffered more under Mr. Waters’s generalisation than he could from a more personal philosophy of the affair.

“Oh no; I didn’t think that,” consented the old man.

“And I don’t think I shall undertake any extended scheme of drainage or subsoiling in atonement for my little dream,” Colville continued, resenting the parity of outline that grew upon him in spite of his protest. They were both silent for a while, and then Colville cried out, “Yes, yes; they are alike. I dreamed, too, of recovering and restoring my own lost and broken past in the love of a young soul, and it was in essence the same cruelly egotistic dream; and it’s nothing in my defence that it was all formless and undirected at first, and that as soon as I recognised it I abhorred it.”

“Oh yes, it is,” replied the old man, with perfect equanimity. “Your assertion is the hysterical excess of Puritanism in all times and places. In the moral world we are responsible only for the wrong that we intend. It can’t be otherwise.”

“And the evil that’s suffered from the wrong we didn’t intend?”

“Ah, perhaps that isn’t evil.”

“It’s pain!”

“It’s pain, yes.”

“And to have wrung a young and innocent heart with the anguish of self-doubt, with the fear of wrong to another, with the shame of an error such as I allowed, perhaps encouraged her to make—”

“Yes,” said the old man. “The young suffer terribly. But they recover. Afterward we don’t suffer so much, but we don’t recover. I wouldn’t defend you against yourself if I thought you seriously in the wrong. If you know yourself to be, you shouldn’t let me.”

Thus put upon his honour, Colville was a long time thoughtful. “How can I tell?” he asked. “You know the facts; you can judge.”

“If I were to judge at all, I should say you were likely to do a greater wrong than any you have committed.”

“I don’t understand you.”

“Miss Graham is a young girl, and I have no doubt that the young clergyman — what was his name?”

“Morton. Do you think — do you suppose there was anything in that?” demanded Colville, with eagerness, that a more humorous observer than Mr. Waters might have found ludicrous. “He was an admirable young fellow, with an excellent head and a noble heart. I underrated him at one time, though I recognised his good qualities afterward; but I was afraid she did not appreciate him.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said the old man, with an astuteness of manner which Colville thought authorised by some sort of definite knowledge.

“I would give the world if it were so!” he cried fervently.

“But you are really very much more concerned in something else.”

“In what else?”

“Can’t you imagine?”

“No,” said Colville; but he felt himself growing very red in the face.

“Then I have no more to say.”

“Yes, speak!” And after an interval Colville added, “Is it anything about — you hinted at something long ago — Mrs. Bowen?”

“Yes;” the old man nodded his head. “Do you owe her nothing?”

“Owe her nothing? Everything! My life! What self-respect is left me! Immeasurable gratitude! The homage of a man saved from himself as far as his stupidity and selfishness would permit! Why, I — I love her!” The words gave him courage. “In every breath and pulse! She is the most beautiful and gracious and wisest and best woman in the world! I have loved her ever since I met her here in Florence last winter. Good heavens! I must have always loved her! But,” he added, falling from the rapture of this confession, “she simply loathes me!”

“It was certainly not to your credit that you were willing at the same time to marry some one else.”

“Willing! I wasn’t willing! I was bound hand and foot! Yes — I don’t care what you think of my weakness — I was not a free agent. It’s very well to condemn one’s-self, but it may be carried too far; injustice to others is not the only injustice, or the worst. What I was willing to do was to keep my word — to prevent that poor child, if possible, from ever finding out her mistake.”

If Colville expected this heroic confession to impress his listener he was disappointed. Mr. Waters made him no reply, and he was obliged to ask, with a degree of sarcastic impatience, “I suppose you scarcely blame me for that?”

“Oh, I don’t know that I blame people for things. There are times when it seems as if we were all puppets, pulled this way or that, without control of our own movements. Hamlet was able to browbeat Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with his business of the pipe; but if they had been in a position to answer they might have told him that it required far less skill to play upon a man than any other instrument. Most of us, in fact, go sounding on without any special application of breath or fingers, repeating the tunes that were played originally upon other men. It appears to me that you suffered yourself to do something of the kind in this affair. We are a long time learning to act with common-sense or even common sanity in what are called matters of the affections. A broken engagement may be a bad thing in some cases, but I am inclined to think that it is the very best thing that could happen in most cases where it happens. The evil is done long before; the broken engagement is merely sanative, and so far beneficent.”

The old gentleman rose, and Colville, dazed by the recognition of his own cowardice and absurdity, did not try to detain him. But he followed him down to the outer gate of the hotel. The afternoon sun was pouring into the piazza a sea of glimmering heat, into which Mr. Waters plunged with the security of a salamander. He wore a broad-brimmed Panama hat, a sack coat of black alpaca, and loose trousers of the same material, and Colville fancied him doubly defended against the torrid waves not only by the stored cold of half a century of winters at Haddam East Village, but by an inner coolness of spirit, which appeared to diffuse itself in an appreciable atmosphere about him. It was not till he was gone that Colville found himself steeped in perspiration, and glowing with a strange excitement.

XXIII

Colville went back to his own room, and spent a good deal of time in the contemplation of a suit of clothes, adapted to the season, which had been sent home from the tailor’s just before Mr. Waters came in. The coat was of the lightest serge, the trousers of a pearly grey tending to lavender, the waistcoat of cool white duck. On his way home from Palazzo Pinti he had stopped in Via Tornabuoni and bought some silk gauze neckties of a tasteful gaiety of tint, which he had at the time thought very well of. But now, as he spread out the whole array on his bed, it seemed too emblematic of a light and blameless spirit for his wear. He ought to put on something as nearly analogous to sackcloth as a modern stock of dry-goods afforded; he ought, at least, to wear the grave materials of his winter costume. But they were really insupportable in this sudden access of summer. Besides, he had grown thin during his sickness, and the things bagged about him. If he were going to see Mrs. Bowen that evening, he ought to go in some decent shape. It was perhaps providential that he had failed to find her at home in the morning, when he had ventured thither in the clumsy attire in which he had been loafing about her drawing-room for the past week. He now owed it to her to appear before her as well as he could. How charmingly punctilious she always was herself!

As he put on his new clothes he felt the moral support which the becomingness of dress alone can give. With the blue silk gauze lightly tied under his collar, and the lapels of his thin coat thrown back to admit his thumbs to his waistcoat pockets, he felt almost cheerful before his glass. Should he shave? As once before, this important question occurred to him. His thinness gave him some advantages of figure, but he thought that it made his face older. What effect would cutting off his beard have upon it? He had not seen the lower part of his face for fifteen years. No one could say what recent ruin of a double chin might not be lurking there. He decided not to shave, at least till after dinner, and after dinner he was too impatient for his visit to brook the necessary delay.

He was shown into the salotto alone, but Effie Bowen came running in to meet him. She stopped suddenly, bridling.

“You never expected to see me looking quite so pretty,” said Colville, tracing the cause of her embarrassment to his summer splendour. “Where is your mamma?”

“She is in the dining-room,” replied the child, getting hold of his hand. “She wants you to come and have coffee with us.”

“By all means — not that I haven’t had coffee already, though.”

She led the way, looking up at him shyly over her shoulder as they went.

Mrs. Bowen rose, napkin in lap, and gave him a hand of welcome. “How are you feeling to-day?” she asked, politely ignoring his finery.

“Like a new man,” he said. And then he added, to relieve the strain of the situation, “Of the best tailor’s make in Florence.”

“You look very well,” she smiled.

“Oh, I always do when I take pains,” said Colville. “The trouble is that I don’t always take pains. But I thought I would to-night, in upon a lady.”

“Effie will feel very much flattered,” said Mrs. Bowen.

“Don’t refuse a portion of the satisfaction,” he cried.

“Oh, is it for me too?”

This gave Colville consolation which no religion or philosophy could have brought him, and his pleasure was not marred, but rather heightened, by the little pangs of expectation, bred by long custom, that from moment to moment Imogene would appear. She did not appear, and a thrill of security succeeded upon each alarm. He wished her well with all his heart; such is the human heart that he wished her arrived home the bretrothed of that excellent, that wholly unobjectionable young man, Mr. Morton.

“Will you have a little of the ice before your coffee?” asked Mrs. Bowen, proposing one of the moulded creams with her spoon.

“Yes, thank you. Perhaps I will take it in place of the coffee. They forgot to offer us any ice at the table d’hôte this evening.”

“This is rather luxurious for us,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It’s a compromise with Effie. She wanted me to take her to Giacosa’s this afternoon.”

“I thought you would come,” whispered the child to Colville.

Her mother made a little face of mock surprise at her. “Don’t give yourself away, Effie.”

“Why, let us go to Giacosa’s too,” said Colville, taking the ice. “We shall be the only foreigners there, and we shall not even feel ourselves foreign. It’s astonishing how the hot weather has dispersed the tourists. I didn’t see a Baedeker on the whole way up here, and I walked down Via Tornabuoni across through Porta Rosso and the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizzi. You’ve no idea how comfortable and home-like it was — all the statues loafing about in their shirt sleeves, and the objects of interest stretching and yawning round, and having a good rest after their winter’s work.”

Effie understood Colville’s way of talking well enough to enjoy this; her mother did not laugh.

“Walked?” she asked.

“Certainly. Why not?”

“You are getting well again. You’ll soon be gone too.”

“I’ve got well. But as to being gone, there’s no hurry. I rather think I shall wait now to see how long you stay.”

“We may keep you all summer,” said Mrs. Bowen, dropping her eyelids indifferently.

“Oh, very well. All summer it is, then. Mr. Waters is going to stay, and he is such a very cool old gentleman that I don’t think one need fear the wildest antics of the mercury where he is.”

When Colville had finished his ice, Mrs. Bowen led the way to the salotto; and they all sat down by the window there and watched the sunset die on San Miniato. The bronze copy of Michelangelo’s David, in the Piazzale below the church, blackened in perfect relief against the pink sky and then faded against the grey while they talked. They were so domestic that Colville realised with difficulty that this was an image of what might be rather than what really was; the very ease with which he could apparently close his hand upon the happiness within his grasp unnerved him. The talk strayed hither and thither, and went and came aimlessly. A sound of singing floated in from the kitchen, and Effie eagerly asked her mother if she might go and see Maddalena. Maddalena’s mother had come to see her, and she was from the mountains.

“Yes, go,” said Mrs. Bowen; “but don’t stay too long.”

“Oh, I will be back in time,” said the child, and Colville remembered that he had proposed going to Giacosa’s.

“Yes; don’t forget.” He had forgotten it himself.

“Maddalena is the cook,” explained Mrs. Bowen. “She sings ballads to Effie that she learned from her mother, and I suppose Effie wants to hear them at first hand.”

“Oh yes,” said Colville dreamily.

They were alone now, and each little silence seemed freighted with a meaning deeper than speech.

“Have you seen Mr. Waters to-day?” asked Mrs. Bowen, after one of these lapses.

“Yes; he came this afternoon.”

“He is a very strange old man. I should think he would be lonely here.”

“He seems not to be. He says he finds company in the history of the place. And his satisfaction at having got out of Haddam East Village is perennial.”

“But he will want to go back there before he dies.”

“I don’t know. He thinks not. He’s a strange old man, as you say. He has the art of putting all sorts of ideas into people’s heads. Do you know what we talked about this afternoon?”

“No, I don’t,” murmured Mrs. Bowen.

“About you. And he encouraged me to believe — imagine — that I might speak to you — ask — tell you that — I loved you, Lina.” He leaned forward and took one of the hands that lay in her lap. It trembled with a violence inconceivable in relation to the perfect quiet of her attitude. But she did not try to take it away. “Could you — do you love me?”

“Yes,” she whispered; but here she sprang up and slipped from his hold altogether, as with an inarticulate cry of rapture he released her hand to take her in his arms.

He followed her a pace or two. “And you will — will be my wife?” he pursued eagerly.

“Never!” she answered, and now Colville stopped short, while a cold bewilderment bathed him from head to foot. It must be some sort of jest, though he could not tell where the humour was, and he could not treat it otherwise than seriously.

“Lina, I have loved you from the first moment that I saw you this winter, and Heaven knows how long before!”

“Yes; I know that.”

“And every moment.”

“Oh, I know that too.”

“Even if I had no sort of hope that you cared for me, I loved you so much that I must tell you before we parted—”

“I expected that — I intended it.”

“You intended it! and you do love me! And yet you won’t — Ah, I don’t understand!”

“How could you understand? I love you — I blush and burn for shame to think that I love you. But I will never marry you; I can at least help doing that, and I can still keep some little trace of self-respect. How you must really despise me, to think of anything else, after all that has happened! Did you suppose that I was merely waiting till that poor girl’s back was turned, as you were? Oh, how can you be yourself, and still be yourself? Yes, Jenny Wheelwright was right. You are too much of a mixture, Theodore Colville” — her calling him so showed how often she had thought of him so— “too much for her, too much for Imogene, too much for me; too much for any woman except some wretched creature who enjoys being trampled on and dragged through the dust, as you have dragged me.”

“I dragged you through the dust? There hasn’t been a moment in the past six months when I wouldn’t have rolled myself in it to please you.”

“Oh, I knew that well enough! And do you think that was flattering to me?”

“That has nothing to do with it. I only know that I love you, and that I couldn’t help wishing to show it even when I wouldn’t acknowledge it to myself. That is all. And now when I am free to speak, and you own that you love me, you won’t — I give it up!” he cried desperately. But in the next breath he implored, “Why do you drive me from you, Lina?”

“Because you have humiliated me too much.” She was perfectly steady, but he knew her so well that in the twilight he knew what bitterness there must be in the smile which she must be keeping on her lips. “I was here in the place of her mother, her best friend, and you made me treat her like an enemy. You made me betray her and cast her off.”

“I?”

“Yes, you! I knew from the very first that you did not really care for her, that you were playing with yourself, as you were playing with her, and I ought to have warned her.”

“It appears to me you did warn her,” said Colville, with some resentful return of courage.

“I tried,” she said simply, “and it made it worse. It made it worse because I knew that I was acting for my own sake more than hers, because I wasn’t — disinterested.” There was something in this explanation, serious, tragic, as it was to Mrs. Bowen, which made Colville laugh. She might have had some perception of its effect to him, or it may have been merely from a hysterical helplessness, but she laughed too a little.

“But why,” he gathered courage to ask, “do you still dwell upon that? Mr. Waters told me that Mr. Morton — that there was—”

“He is mistaken. He offered himself, and she refused him. He told me.”

“Oh!”

“Do you think she would do otherwise, with you lying here between life and death? No: you can have no hope from that.”

Colville, in fact, had none. This blow crushed and dispersed him. He had not strength enough to feel resentment against Mr. Waters for misleading him with this ignis fatuus.

“No one warned him, and it came to that,” said Mrs. Bowen. “It was of a piece with the whole affair. I was weak in that too.”

Colville did not attempt to reply on this point. He feebly reverted to the inquiry regarding himself, and was far enough from mirth in resuming it.

“I couldn’t imagine,” he said, “that you cared anything for me when you warned another against me. If I could—”

“You put me in a false position from the beginning. I ought to have sympathised with her and helped her instead of making the poor child feel that somehow I hated her. I couldn’t even put her on guard against herself, though I knew all along that she didn’t really care for you, but was just in love with her own fancy for you, Even after you were engaged I ought to have broken it off; I ought to have been frank with her; it was my duty; but I couldn’t without feeling that I was acting for myself too, and I would not submit to that degradation. No! I would rather have died. I dare say you don’t understand. How could you? You are a man, and the kind of man who couldn’t. At every point you made me violate every principle that was dear to me. I loathed myself for caring for a man who was in love with me when he was engaged to another. Don’t think it was gratifying to me. It was detestable; and yet I did let you see that I cared for you. Yes, I even tried to make you care for me — falsely, cruelly, treacherously.”

“You didn’t have to try very hard,” said Colville, with a sort of cold resignation to his fate.

“Oh no; you were quite ready for any hint. I could have told her for her own sake that she didn’t love you, but that would have been for my sake too; and I would have told you if I hadn’t cared for you and known how you cared for me. I’ve saved at least the consciousness of this from the wreck.”

“I don’t think it’s a great treasure,” said Colville. “I wish that you had saved the consciousness of having been frank even to your own advantage.”

“Do you dare to reproach me, Theodore Colville? But perhaps I’ve deserved this too.”

“No, Lina, you certainly don’t deserve it, if it’s unkindness, from me. go?”

She sank into a chair in sign of assent. He also sat down. He had a dim impression that he could talk better if he took her hand, but he did not venture to ask for it. He contented himself with fixing his eyes upon as much of her face as he could make out in the dusk, a pale blur in a vague outline of dark.

“I want to assure you, Lina — Lina, my love, my dearest, as I shall call you for the first and last time! — that I do understand everything, as delicately and fully as you could wish, all that you have expressed, and all that you have left unsaid. I understand how high and pure your ideals of duty are, and how heroically, angelically, you have struggled to fulfil them, broken and borne down by my clumsy and stupid selfishness from the start. I want you to believe, my dearest love — you must forgive me! — that if I didn’t see everything at the time, I do see it now, and that I prize the love you kept from me far more than any love you could have given me to the loss of your self-respect. It isn’t logic — it sounds more like nonsense, I am afraid — but you know what I mean by it. You are more perfect, more lovely to me, than any being in the world, and I accept whatever fate you choose for me. I would not win you against your will if I could. You are sacred to me. If you say we must part, I know that you speak from a finer discernment than mine, and I submit. I will try to console myself with the thought of your love, if I may not have you. Yes, I submit.”

His instinct of forbearance had served him better than the subtlest art. His submission was the best defence. He rose with a real dignity, and she rose also. “Remember,” he said, “that I confess all you accuse me of, and that I acknowledge the justice of what you do — because you do it.” He put out his hand and took the hand which hung nerveless at her side. “You are quite right. Good-bye.” He hesitated a moment. “May I kiss you, Lina?” He drew her to him, and she let him kiss her on the lips.

“Good-bye,” she whispered. “Go—”

“I am going.”

Effie Bowen ran into the room from the kitchen.

“Aren’t you going to take—” She stopped and turned to her mother. She must not remind Mr. Colville of his invitation; that was what her gesture expressed.

Colville would not say anything. He would not seize his advantage, and play upon the mother’s heart through the feelings of her child, though there is no doubt that he was tempted to prolong the situation by any means. Perhaps Mrs. Bowen divined both the temptation and the resistance. “Tell her,” she said, and turned away.

“I can’t go with you to-night, Effie,” he said, stooping toward her for the inquiring kiss that she gave him. “I am — going away, and I must say good-bye.”

The solemnity of his voice alarmed her. “Going away!” she repeated.

“Yes — away from Florence. I’m afraid I shall not see you again.”

The child turned from him to her mother again, who stood motionless. Then, as if the whole calamitous fact had suddenly flashed upon her, she plunged her face against her mother’s breast. “I can’t bear it!” she sobbed out; and the reticence of her lamentation told more than a storm of cries and prayers.

Colville wavered.

“Oh, you must stay!” said Lina, in the self-contemptuous voice of a woman who falls below her ideal of herself.

XXIV

In the levities which the most undeserving husbands permit themselves with the severest of wives, there were times after their marriage when Colville accused Lina of never really intending to drive him away, but of meaning, after a disciplinary ordeal, to marry him in reward of his tested self-sacrifice and obedience. He said that if the appearance of Effie was not a coup de théâtre contrived beforehand, it was an accident of no consequence whatever; that if she had not come in at that moment, her mother would have found some other pretext for detaining him. This is a point which I would not presume to decide. I only know that they were married early in June before the syndic of Florence, who tied a tricolour sash round his ample waist for the purpose, and never looked more paternal or venerable than when giving the sanction of the Italian state to their union. It is not, of course, to be supposed that Mrs. Colville was contented with the civil rite, though Colville may have thought it quite sufficient. The religious ceremony took place in the English chapel, the assistant clergyman officiating in the absence of the incumbent, who had already gone out of town.

The Rev. Mr. Waters gave away the bride, and then went home to Palazzo Pinti with the party, the single and singularly honoured guest at their wedding feast, for which Effie Bowen went with Colville to Giacosa’s to order the ices in person. She has never regretted her choice of a step father, though when Colville asked her how she would like him in that relation she had a moment of hesitation, in which she reconciled herself to it; as to him she had no misgivings. He has sometimes found himself the object of little jealousies on her part, but by promptly deciding all questions between her and her mother in Effie’s favour he has convinced her of the groundlessness of her suspicions.

In the absence of any social pressure to the contrary, the Colvilles spent the summer in Palazzo Pinti. Before their fellow-sojourners returned from the villeggiatura in the fall, however, they had turned their faces southward, and they are now in Rome, where, arriving as a married couple, there was no inquiry and no interest in their past.

It is best to be honest, and own that the affair with Imogene has been the grain of sand to them. No one was to blame, or very much to blame; even Mrs. Colville says that. It was a thing that happened, but one would rather it had not happened.

Last winter, however, Mrs Colville received a letter from Mrs. Graham which suggested, if it did not impart, consolation. “Mr. Morton was here the other day, and spent the morning. He has a parish at Erie, and there is talk of his coming to Buffalo.”

“Oh, Heaven grant it!” said Colville, with sudden piety.

“Why?” demanded his wife.

“Well, I wish she was married.”

“You have nothing whatever to do with her.”

It took him some time to realise that this was the fact.

“No,” he confessed; “but what do you think about it?”

“There is no telling. We are such simpletons! If a man will keep on long enough — But if it isn’t Mr. Morton, it will be some one else — some young person.”

Colville rose and went round the breakfast table to her. “I hope so,” he said. “I have married a young person, and it would only be fair.”

This magnanimity was irresistible.

THE END

THE MINISTER’S CHARGE

OR, THE APPRENTICESHIP OF LEMUEL BARKER.

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI

I.

On their way back to the farm-house where they were boarding, Sewell’s wife reproached him for what she called his recklessness. “You had no right,” she said, “to give the poor boy false hopes. You ought to have discouraged him — that would have been the most merciful way — if you knew the poetry was bad. Now, he will go on building all sorts of castles in the air on your praise, and sooner or later they will come tumbling about his ears — just to gratify your passion for saying pleasant things to people.”

“I wish you had a passion for saying pleasant things to me, my dear,” suggested her husband evasively.

“Oh, a nice time I should have!”

“I don’t know about your nice time, but I feel pretty certain of my own. How do you know — Oh, do get up, you implacable cripple!” he broke off to the lame mare he was driving, and pulled at the reins.

“Don’t saw her mouth!” cried Mrs. Sewell.

“Well, let her get up, then, and I won’t. I don’t like to saw her mouth; but I have to do something when you come down on me with your interminable consequences. I dare say the boy will never think of my praise again. And besides, as I was saying when this animal interrupted me with her ill-timed attempts at grazing, how do you know that I knew the poetry was bad?”

“How? By the sound of your voice. I could tell you were dishonest in the dark, David.”

“Perhaps the boy knew that I was dishonest too,” suggested Sewell.

“Oh no, he didn’t. I could see that he pinned his faith to every syllable.”

“He used a quantity of pins, then; for I was particularly profuse of syllables. I find that it requires no end of them to make the worse appear the better reason to a poet who reads his own verses to you. But come, now, Lucy, let me off a syllable or two. I — I have a conscience, you know well enough, and if I thought — But pshaw! I’ve merely cheered a lonely hour for the boy, and he’ll go back to hoeing potatoes to-morrow, and that will be the end of it.”

“I hope that will be the end of it,” said Mrs. Sewell, with the darkling reserve of ladies intimate with the designs of Providence.

“Well,” argued her husband, who was trying to keep the matter from being serious, “perhaps he may turn out a poet yet. You never can tell where the lightning is going to strike. He has some idea of rhyme, and some perception of reason, and — yes, some of the lines were musical. His general attitude reminded me of Piers Plowman. Didn’t he recall Piers Plowman to you?”

“I’m glad you can console yourself in that way, David,” said his wife relentlessly.

The mare stopped again, and Sewell looked over his shoulder at the house, now black in the twilight, on the crest of the low hill across the hollow behind them. “I declare,” he said, “the loneliness of that place almost broke my heart. There!” he added, as the faint sickle gleamed in the sky above the roof, “I’ve got the new moon right over my left shoulder for my pains. That’s what comes of having a sympathetic nature.”

The boy was looking at the new moon, across the broken gate which stopped the largest gap in the tumbled stone wall. He still gripped in his hand the manuscript which he had been reading to the minister.

“There, Lem,” called his mother’s voice from the house, “I guess you’ve seen the last of ’em for one while. I’m ‘fraid you’ll take cold out there ‘n the dew. Come in, child.”

The boy obeyed. “I was looking at the new moon, mother. I saw it over my right shoulder. Did you hear — hear him,” he asked, in a broken and husky voice,— “hear how he praised my poetry, mother?”

“Oh, do make her get up, David!” cried Mrs. Sewell. “These mosquitoes are eating me alive!”

“I will saw her mouth all to the finest sort of kindling-wood, if she doesn’t get up this very instant,” said Sewell, jerking the reins so wildly that the mare leaped into a galvanic canter, and continued without further urging for twenty paces. “Of course, Lucy,” he resumed, profiting by the opportunity for conversation which the mare’s temporary activity afforded, “I should feel myself greatly to blame if I thought I had gone beyond mere kindness in my treatment of the poor fellow. But at first I couldn’t realise that the stuff was so bad. Their saying that he read all the books he could get, and was writing every spare moment, gave me the idea that he must be some sort of literary genius in the germ, and I listened on and on, expecting every moment that he was coming to some passage with a little lift or life in it; and when he got to the end, and hadn’t come to it, I couldn’t quite pull myself together to say so. I had gone there so full of the wish to recognise and encourage, that I couldn’t turn about for the other thing. Well! I shall know another time how to value a rural neighbourhood report of the existence of a local poet. Usually there is some hardheaded cynic in the community with native perception enough to enlighten the rest as to the true value of the phenomenon; but there seems to have been none here. I ought to have come sooner to see him, and then I could have had a chance to go again and talk soberly and kindly with him, and show him gently how much he had mistaken himself. Oh, get up!” By this time the mare had lapsed again into her habitual absent-mindedness, and was limping along the dark road with a tendency to come to a full stop, from step to step. The remorse in the minister’s soul was so keen that he could not use her with the cruelty necessary to rouse her flagging energies; as he held the reins he flapped his elbows up toward his face, as if they were wings, and contrived to beat away a few of the mosquitoes with them; Mrs. Sewell, in silent exasperation, fought them from her with the bough which she had torn from an overhanging birch-tree.

In the morning they returned to Boston, and Sewell’s parish duties began again; he was rather faithfuller and busier in these than he might have been if he had not laid so much stress upon duties of all sorts, and so little upon beliefs. He declared that he envied the ministers of the good old times who had only to teach their people that they would be lost if they did not do right; it was much simpler than to make them understand that they were often to be good for reasons not immediately connected with their present or future comfort, and that they could not confidently expect to be lost for any given transgression, or even to be lost at all. He found it necessary to do his work largely in a personal way, by meeting and talking with people, and this took up a great deal of his time, especially after the summer vacation, when he had to get into relations with them anew, and to help them recover themselves from the moral lassitude into which people fall during that season of physical recuperation.

He was occupied with these matters one morning late in October when a letter came addressed in a handwriting of copybook carefulness, but showing in every painstaking stroke the writer’s want of training, which, when he read it, filled Sewell with dismay. It was a letter from Lemuel Barker, whom Sewell remembered, with a pang of self-upbraiding, as the poor fellow he had visited with his wife the evening before they left Willoughby Pastures; and it enclosed passages of a long poem which Barker said he had written since he got the fall work done. The passages were not submitted for Sewell’s criticism, but were offered as examples of the character of the whole poem, for which the author wished to find a publisher. They were not without ideas of a didactic and satirical sort, but they seemed so wanting in literary art beyond a mechanical facility of versification, that Sewell wondered how the writer should have mastered the notion of anything so literary as publication, till he came to that part of the letter in which Barker spoke of their having had so much sickness in the family that he thought he would try to do something to help along. The avowal of this meritorious ambition inflicted another wound upon Sewell’s guilty consciousness; but what made his blood run cold was Barker’s proposal to come down to Boston, if Sewell advised, and find a publisher with Sewell’s assistance.

This would never do, and the minister went to his desk with the intention of despatching a note of prompt and total discouragement. But in crossing the room from the chair into which he had sunk, with a cheerful curiosity, to read the letter, he could not help some natural rebellion against the punishment visited upon him. He could not deny that he deserved punishment, but he thought that this, to say the least, was very ill-timed. He had often warned other sinners who came to him in like resentment that it was this very quality of inopportuneness that was perhaps the most sanative and divine property of retribution; the eternal justice fell upon us, he said, at the very moment when we were least able to bear it, or thought ourselves so; but now in his own case the clear-sighted prophet cried out and revolted in his heart. It was Saturday morning, when every minute was precious to him for his sermon, and it would take him fully an hour to write that letter; it must be done with the greatest sympathy; he had seen that this poor foolish boy was very sensitive, and yet it must be done with such thoroughness as to cut off all hope of anything like literary achievement for him.

At the moment Sewell reached his desk, with a spirit disciplined to the sacrifice required of it, he heard his wife’s step outside his study door, and he had just time to pull open a drawer, throw the letter into it, and shut it again before she entered. He did not mean finally to conceal it from her, but he was willing to give himself breath before he faced her with the fact that he had received such a letter. Nothing in its way was more terrible to this good man than the righteousness of that good woman. In their case, as in that of most other couples who cherish an ideal of dutiful living, she was the custodian of their potential virtue, and he was the instrument, often faltering and imperfect, of its application to circumstances; and without wishing to spare himself too much, he was sometimes aware that she did not spare him enough. She worked his moral forces as mercilessly as a woman uses the physical strength of a man when it is placed at her direction.

“What is the matter, David?” she asked, with a keen glance at the face he turned upon her over his shoulder.

“Nothing that I wish to talk of at present, my dear,” answered Sewell, with a boldness that he knew would not avail him if she persisted in knowing.

“Well, there would be no time if you did,” said his wife. “I’m dreadfully sorry for you, David, but it’s really a case you can’t refuse. Their own minister is taken sick, and it’s appointed for this afternoon at two o’clock, and the poor thing has set her heart upon having you, and you must go. In fact, I promised you would. I’ll see that you’re not disturbed this morning, so that you’ll have the whole forenoon to yourself. But I thought I’d better tell you at once. It’s only a child — a little boy. You won’t have to say much.”

“Oh, of course I must go,” answered Sewell, with impatient resignation; and when his wife left the room, which she did after praising him and pitying him in a way that was always very sweet to him, he saw that he must begin his sermon at once, if he meant to get through with it in time, and must put off all hope of replying to Lemuel Barker till Monday at least. But he chose quite a different theme from that on which he had intended to preach. By an immediate inspiration he wrote a sermon on the text, “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel,” in which he taught how great harm could be done by the habit of saying what are called kind things. He showed that this habit arose not from goodness of heart, or from the desire to make others happy, but from the wish to spare one’s-self the troublesome duty of formulating the truth so that it would perform its heavenly office without wounding those whom it was intended to heal. He warned his hearers that the kind things spoken from this motive were so many sins committed against the soul of the flatterer and the soul of him they were intended to flatter; they were deceits, lies; and he besought all within the sound of his voice to try to practise with one another an affectionate sincerity, which was compatible not only with the brotherliness of Christianity, but the politeness of the world. He enforced his points with many apt illustrations, and he treated the whole subject with so much fulness and fervour, that he fell into the error of the literary temperament, and almost felt that he had atoned for his wrongdoing by the force with which he had portrayed it.

Mrs. Sewell, who did not always go to her husband’s sermons, was at church that day, and joined him when some ladies who had lingered to thank him for the excellent lesson he had given them at last left him to her.

“Really, David,” she said, “I wondered your congregation could keep their countenances while you were going on. Did you think of that poor boy up at Willoughby Pastures when you were writing that sermon?”

“Yes, my dear,” replied Sewell gravely; “he was in my mind the whole time.”

“Well, you were rather hard upon yourself; and I think I was rather too hard upon you, that time, though I was so vexed with you. But nothing has come of it, and I suppose there are cases where people are so lost to common sense that you can’t do anything for them by telling them the truth.”

“But you’d better tell it, all the same,” said Sewell, still in a glow of righteous warmth from his atonement; and now a sudden temptation to play with fire seized him. “You wouldn’t have excused me if any trouble had come of it.”

“No, I certainly shouldn’t,” said his wife. “But I don’t regret it altogether if it’s made you see what danger you run from that tendency of yours. What in the world made you think of it?”

“Oh, it came into my mind.” said Sewell.

He did not find time to write to Barker the next day, and on recurring to his letter he saw that there was no danger of his taking another step without his advice, and he began to postpone it; when he had time he was not in the mood; he waited for the time and the mood to come together, and he also waited for the most favourable moment to tell his wife that he had got that letter from Barker and to ask her advice about answering it. If it had been really a serious matter, he would have told her at once; but being the thing it was, he did not know just how to approach it, after his first concealment. He knew that, to begin with, he would have to account for his mistake in attempting to keep it from her, and would have to bear some just upbraiding for this unmanly course, and would then be miserably led to the distasteful contemplation of the folly by which he had brought this trouble upon himself. Sewell smiled to think how much easier it was to make one’s peace with one’s God than with one’s wife; and before he had brought himself to the point of answering Barker’s letter, there came a busy season in which he forgot him altogether.

II.

One day in the midst of this Sewell was called from his study to see some one who was waiting for him in the reception-room, but who sent in no name by the housemaid.

“I don’t know as you remember me,” the visitor said, rising awkwardly, as Sewell came forward with a smile of inquiry. “My name’s Barker.”

“Barker?” said the minister, with a cold thrill of instant recognition, but playing with a factitious uncertainty till he could catch his breath in the presence of the calamity. “Oh yes! How do you do?” he said; and then planting himself adventurously upon the commandment to love one’s neighbour as one’s-self, he added: “I’m very glad to see you!”

In token of his content, he gave Barker his hand and asked him to be seated.

The young man complied, and while Sewell waited for him to present himself in some shape that he could grapple with morally, he made an involuntary study of his personal appearance. That morning, before starting from home by the milk-train that left Willoughby Pastures at 4.5, Barker had given his Sunday boots a coat of blacking, which he had eked out with stove-polish, and he had put on his best pantaloons, which he had outgrown, and which, having been made very tight a season after tight pantaloons had gone out of fashion in Boston, caught on the tops of his boots and stuck there in spite of his efforts to kick them loose as he stood up, and his secret attempts to smooth them down when he had reseated himself. He wore a single-breasted coat of cheap broadcloth, fastened across his chest with a carnelian clasp-button of his father’s, such as country youth wore thirty years ago, and a belated summer scarf of gingham, tied in a breadth of knot long since abandoned by polite society.

Sewell had never thought his wife’s reception-room very splendidly appointed, but Barker must have been oppressed by it, for he sat in absolute silence after resuming his chair, and made no sign of intending to open the matter upon which he came. In the kindness of his heart Sewell could not refrain from helping him on.

“When did you come to Boston?” he asked with a cheeriness which he was far from feeling.

“This morning,” said Barker briefly, but without the tremor in his voice which Sewell expected.

“You’ve never been here before, I suppose,” suggested Sewell, with the vague intention of generalising or particularising the conversation, as the case might be.

Barker abruptly rejected the overture, whatever it was. “I don’t know as you got a letter from me a spell back,” he said.

“Yes, I did,” confessed Sewell. “I did receive that letter,” he repeated, “and I ought to have answered it long ago. But the fact is—” He corrected himself when it came to his saying this, and said, “I mean that I put it by, intending to answer it when I could do so in the proper way, until, I’m very sorry to say, I forgot it altogether. Yes, I forgot it, and I certainly ask your pardon for my neglect. But I can’t say that as it’s turned out I altogether regret it. I can talk with you a great deal better than I could write to you in regard to your” — Sewell hesitated between the words poems and verses, and finally said— “work. I have blamed myself a great deal,” he continued, wincing under the hurt which he felt that he must be inflicting on the young man as well as himself, “for not being more frank with you when I saw you at home in September. I hope your mother is well?”

“She’s middling,” said Barker, “but my married sister that came to live with us since you was there has had a good deal of sickness in her family. Her husband’s laid up with the rheumatism most of the time.”

“Oh!” murmured Sewell sympathetically. “Well! I ought to have told you at that time that I could not see much hope of your doing acceptable work in a literary way; and if I had supposed that you ever expected to exercise your faculty of versifying to any serious purpose, — for anything but your own pleasure and entertainment, — I should certainly have done so. And I tell you now that the specimens of the long poem you have sent me give me even less reason to encourage you than the things you read me at home.”

Sewell expected the audible crash of Barker’s air-castles to break the silence which the young man suffered to follow upon these words; but nothing of the kind happened, and for all that he could see, Barker remained wholly unaffected by what he had said. It nettled Sewell a little to see him apparently so besotted in his own conceit, and he added: “But I think I had better not ask you to rely altogether upon my opinion in the matter, and I will go with you to a publisher, and you can get a professional judgment. Excuse me a moment.”

He left the room and went slowly upstairs to his wife. It appeared to him a very short journey to the third story, where he knew she was decking the guest-chamber for the visit of a friend whom they expected that evening. He imagined himself saying to her when his trial was well over that he did not see why she complained of those stairs; that he thought they were nothing at all. But this sense of the absurdity of the situation which played upon the surface of his distress flickered and fled at sight of his wife bustling cheerfully about, and he was tempted to go down and get Barker out of the house, and out of Boston if possible, without letting her know anything of his presence.

“Well?” said Mrs. Sewell, meeting his face of perplexity with a penetrating glance. “What is it, David?”

“Nothing. That is — everything! Lemuel Barker is here!”

“Lemuel Barker? Who is Lemuel Barker?” She stood with the pillow-sham in her hand which she was just about to fasten on the pillow, and Sewell involuntarily took note of the fashion in which it was ironed.

“Why, surely you remember! That simpleton at Willoughby Pastures.” If his wife had dropped the pillow-sham, and sunk into a chair beside the bed, fixing him with eyes of speechless reproach; if she had done anything dramatic, or said anything tragic, no matter how unjust or exaggerated, Sewell could have borne it; but she only went on tying the sham on the pillow, without a word. “The fact is, he wrote to me some weeks ago, and sent me some specimens of a long poem.”

“Just before you preached that sermon on the tender mercies of the wicked?”

“Yes,” faltered Sewell. “I had been waiting to show you the letter.”

“You waited a good while, David.”

“I know — I know,” said Sewell miserably. “I was waiting — waiting—” He stopped, and then added with a burst, “I was waiting till I could put it to you in some favourable light.”

“I’m glad you’re honest about it at last, my dear!”

“Yes. And while I was waiting I forgot Barker’s letter altogether. I put it away somewhere — I can’t recollect just where, at the moment. But that makes no difference; he’s here with the whole poem in his pocket, now.” Sewell gained a little courage from his wife’s forbearance; she knew that she could trust him in all great matters, and perhaps she thought that for this little sin she would not add to his punishment. “And what I propose to do is to make a complete thing of it, this time. Of course,” he went on convicting himself, “I see that I shall inflict twice the pain that I should have done if I had spoken frankly to him at first; and of course there will be the added disappointment, and the expense of his coming to Boston. But,” he added brightly, “we can save him any expense while he’s here, and perhaps I can contrive to get him to go home this afternoon.”

“He wouldn’t let you pay for his dinner out of the house anywhere,” said Mrs. Sewell. “You must ask him to dinner here.”

“Well,” said Sewell, with resignation; and suspecting that his wife was too much piqued or hurt by his former concealment to ask what he now meant to do about Barker, he added: “I’m going to take him round to a publisher and let him convince himself that there’s no hope for him in a literary way.”

“David!” cried his wife; and now she left off adjusting the shams, and erecting herself looked at him across the bed, “You don’t intend to do anything so cruel.”

“Cruel?”

“Yes! Why should you go and waste any publisher’s time by getting him to look at such rubbish? Why should you expose the poor fellow to the mortification of a perfectly needless refusal? Do you want to shirk the responsibility — to put it on some one else?”

“No; you know I don’t.”

“Well, then, tell him yourself that it won’t do.”

“I have told him.”

“What does he say?”

“He doesn’t say anything. I can’t make out whether he believes me or not.”

“Very well, then; you’ve done your duty, at any rate.” Mrs. Sewell could not forbear saying also, “If you’d done it at first, David, there wouldn’t have been any of this trouble.”

“That’s true,” owned her husband, so very humbly that her heart smote her.

“Well, go down and tell him he must stay to dinner, and then try to get rid of him the best way you can. Your time is really too precious, David, to be wasted in this way. You must get rid of him, somehow.”

Sewell went back to his guest in the reception-room, who seemed to have remained as immovably in his chair as if he had been a sitting statue of himself. He did not move when Sewell entered.

“On second thoughts,” said the minister, “I believe I will not ask you to go to a publisher with me, as I had intended; it would expose you to unnecessary mortification, and it would be, from my point of view, an unjustifiable intrusion upon very busy people. I must ask you to take my word for it that no publisher would bring out your poem, and it never would pay you a cent if he did.” The boy remained silent as before, and Sewell had no means of knowing whether it was from silent conviction or from mulish obstinacy. “Mrs. Sewell will be down presently. She wished me to ask you to stay to dinner. We have an early dinner, and there will be time enough after that for you to look about the city.”

“I shouldn’t like to put you out,” said Barker.

“Oh, not at all,” returned Sewell, grateful for this sign of animation, and not exigent of a more formal acceptance of his invitation. “You know,” he said, “that literature is a trade, like every other vocation, and that you must serve an apprenticeship if you expect to excel. But first of all you must have some natural aptitude for the business you undertake. You understand?” asked Sewell; for he had begun to doubt whether Barker understood anything. He seemed so much more stupid than he had at home; his faculties were apparently sealed up, and he had lost all the personal picturesqueness which he had when he came in out of the barn, at his mother’s call, to receive Sewell.

“Yes,” said the boy.

“I don’t mean,” continued Sewell, “that I wouldn’t have you continue to make verses whenever you have the leisure for it. I think, on the contrary, that it will give a grace to your life which it might otherwise lack. We are all in daily danger of being barbarised by the sordid details of life; the constantly recurring little duties which must be done, but which we must not allow to become the whole of life.” Sewell was so much pleased with this thought, when it had taken form in words, that he made a mental note of it for future use. “We must put a border of pinks around the potato-patch, as Emerson would say, or else the potato-patch is no better than a field of thistles.” Perhaps because the logic of this figure rang a little false, Sewell hastened to add: “But there are many ways in which we can prevent the encroachment of those little duties without being tempted to neglect them, which would be still worse. I have thought a good deal about the condition of our young men in the country, and I have sympathised with them in what seems their want of opportunity, their lack of room for expansion. I have often wished that I could do something for them — help them in their doubts and misgivings, and perhaps find some way out of the trouble for them. I regret this tendency to the cities of the young men from the country. I am sure that if we could give them some sort of social and intellectual life at home, they would not be so restless and dissatisfied.”

Sewell felt as if he had been preaching to a dead wall; but now the wall opened, and a voice came out of it, saying: “You mean something to occupy their minds?”

“Exactly so!” cried Sewell. “Something to occupy their minds. Now,” he continued, with a hope of getting into some sort of human relations with his guest which he had not felt before, “why shouldn’t a young man on a farm take up some scientific study, like geology, for instance, which makes every inch of earth vocal, every rock historic, and the waste places social?” Barker looked so blankly at him that he asked again, “You understand?”

“Yes,” said Barker; but having answered Sewell’s personal question, he seemed to feel himself in no wise concerned with the general inquiry which Sewell had made, and he let it lie where Sewell had let it drop. But the minister was so well pleased with the fact that Barker had understood anything of what he had said, that he was content to let the notion he had thrown out take its chance of future effect, and rising, said briskly: “Come upstairs with me into my study, and I will show you a picture of Agassiz. It’s a very good photograph.”

He led the way out of the reception-room, and tripped lightly in his slippered feet up the steps against which Barker knocked the toes of his clumsy boots. He was not large, nor naturally loutish, but the heaviness of the country was in every touch and movement. He dropped the photograph twice in his endeavour to hold it between his stiff thumb and finger.

Sewell picked it up each time for him, and restored it to his faltering hold. When he had securely lodged it there, he asked sweetly: “Did you ever hear what Agassiz said when a scheme was once proposed to him by which he could make a great deal of money?”

“I don’t know as I did,” replied Barker.

“‘But, gentlemen, I’ve no time to make money.’” Barker received the anecdote in absolute silence, standing helplessly with the photograph in his hand; and Sewell with a hasty sigh forbore to make the application to the ordinary American ambition to be rich that he had intended. “That’s a photograph of the singer Nilsson,” he said, cataloguing the other objects on the chimney-piece. “She was a peasant, you know, a country girl in Norway. That’s Gr�vy, the President of the French Republic; his father was a peasant. Lincoln, of course. Sforza, throwing his hoe into the oak,” he said, explaining the picture that had caught Barker’s eye on the wall above the mantel. “He was working in the field, when a band of adventurers came by, and he tossed his hoe at the tree. If it fell to the ground, he would keep on hoeing; if it caught in the branches and hung there, he would follow the adventurers. It caught, and he went with the soldiers and became Duke of Milan. I like to keep the pictures of these great Originals about me,” said Sewell, “because in our time, when we refer so constantly to law, we are apt to forget that God is creative as well as operative.” He used these phrases involuntarily; they slipped from his tongue because he was in the habit of saying this about these pictures, and he made no effort to adapt them to Barker’s comprehension, because he could not see that the idea would be of any use to him. He went on pointing out the different objects in the quiet room, and he took down several books from the shelves that covered the whole wall, and showed them to Barker, who, however, made no effort to look at them for himself, and did not say anything about them. He did what Sewell bade him do in admiring this thing or that; but if he had been an Indian he could not have regarded them with a greater reticence. Sewell made him sit down from time to time, but in a sitting posture Barker’s silence became so deathlike that Sewell hastened to get him on his legs again, and to walk him about from one point to another, as if to keep life in him. At the end of one of these otherwise aimless excursions Mrs. Sewell appeared, and infused a gleam of hope into her husband’s breast. Apparently she brought none to Barker; or perhaps he did not conceive it polite to show any sort of liveliness before a lady. He did what he could with the hand she gave him to shake, and answered the brief questions she put to him about his family to precisely the same effect as he had already reported its condition to Sewell.

“Dinner’s ready now,” said Mrs. Sewell, for all comment. She left the expansiveness of sympathy and gratulation to her husband on most occasions, and on this she felt that she had less than the usual obligation to make polite conversation. Her two children came downstairs after her, and as she unfolded her napkin across her lap after grace she said, “This is my son, Alfred, Mr. Barker; and this is Edith.” Barker took the acquaintance offered in silence, the young Sewells smiled with the wise kindliness of children taught to be good to all manner of strange guests, and the girl cumbered the helpless country boy with offers of different dishes.

Mr. Sewell as he cut at the roast beef lengthwise, being denied by his wife a pantomimic prayer to be allowed to cut it crosswise, tried to make talk with Barker about the weather at Willoughby Pastures. It had been a very dry summer, and he asked if the fall rains had filled up the springs. He said he really forgot whether it was an apple year. He also said that he supposed they had dug all their turnips by this time. He had meant to say potatoes when he began, but he remembered that he had seen the farmers digging their potatoes before he came back to town, and so he substituted turnips; afterwards it seemed to him that dig was not just the word to use in regard to the harvesting of turnips. He wished he had said, “got your turnips in,” but it appeared to make no difference to Barker, who answered, “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and “Yes, sir,” and let each subject drop with that.

III.

The silence grew so deep that the young Sewells talked together in murmurs, and the clicking of the knives on the plates became painful. Sewell kept himself from looking at Barker, whom he nevertheless knew to be changing his knife and fork from one hand to the other, as doubt after doubt took him as to their conventional use, and to be getting very little good of his dinner in the process of settling these questions. The door-bell rang, and the sound of a whispered conference between the visitor and the servant at the threshold penetrated to the dining-room. Some one softly entered, and then Mrs. Sewell called out, “Yes, yes! Come in! Come in, Miss Vane!” She jumped from her chair and ran out into the hall, where she was heard to kiss her visitor; she reappeared, still holding her by the hand, and then Miss Vane shook hands with Sewell, saying in a tone of cordial liking, “How d’ye do?” and to each of the young people as she shook hands in turn with them, “How d’ye do, dear?” She was no longer so pretty as she must have once been; but an air of distinction and a delicate charm of manner remained to her from her fascinating youth.

Young Sewell pushed her a chair to the table, and she dropped softly into it, after acknowledging Barker’s presentation by Mrs. Sewell with a kindly glance that probably divined him.

“You must dine with us,” said Mrs. Sewell. “You can call it lunch.”

“No, I can’t, Mrs. Sewell,” said Miss Vane. “I could once, and should have said with great pleasure, when I went away, that I had been lunching at the Sewells; but I can’t now. I’ve reformed. What have you got for dinner?”

“Roast beef,” said Sewell.

“Nothing I dislike more,” replied Miss Vane. “What else?” She put on her glasses, and peered critically about the table.

“Stewed tomatoes, baked sweet potatoes, macaroni.”

“How unimaginative! What are you going to have afterwards?”

“Cottage pudding.”

“The very climax of the commonplace. Well!” Miss Vane began to pull off her gloves, and threw her veil back over her shoulder. “I will dine with you, but when I say dine, and people ask me to explain, I shall have to say, ‘Why, the Sewells still dine at one o’clock, you know,’ and laugh over your old-fashioned habits with them. I should like to do differently, and to respect the sacredness of broken bread and that sort of thing; but I’m trying to practise with every one an affectionate sincerity, which is perfectly compatible not only with the brotherliness of Christianity, but the politeness of the world.” Miss Vane looked demurely at Mrs. Sewell. “I can’t make any exceptions.”

The ladies both broke into a mocking laugh, in which Sewell joined with sheepish reluctance; after all, one does not like to be derided, even by one’s dearest friends.

“As soon as I hear my other little sins denounced from the pulpit, I’m going to stop using profane language and carrying away people’s spoons in my pocket.”

The ladies seemed to think this also a very good joke, and his children laughed in sympathy, but Sewell hung his head; Barker sat bolt upright behind his plate, and stared at Miss Vane. “I never have been all but named in church before,” she concluded, “and I’ve heard others say the same.”

“Why didn’t you come to complain sooner?” asked Sewell.

“Well, I have been away ever since that occasion. I went down the next day to Newport, and I’ve been there ever since, admiring the ribbon-planting.”

“On the lawns or on the ladies?” asked Sewell.

“Both. And sowing broadcast the seeds of plain speaking. I don’t know what Newport will be in another year if they all take root.”

“I dare say it will be different,” said Sewell. “I’m not sure it will be worse.” He plucked up a little spirit, and added: “Now you see of how little importance you really are in the community; you have been gone these three weeks, and your own pastor didn’t know you were out of town.”

“Yes, you did, David,” interposed his wife. “I told you Miss Vane was away two weeks ago.”

“Did you? Well I forgot it immediately; the fact was of no consequence, one way or the other. How do you like that as a bit of affectionate sincerity?”

“I like it immensely,” said Miss Vane. “It’s delicious. I only wish I could believe you were honest.” She leaned back and laughed into her handkerchief, while Sewell regarded her with a face in which his mortification at being laughed at was giving way to a natural pleasure at seeing Miss Vane enjoy herself. “What do you think,” she asked, “since you’re in this mood of exasperated veracity — or pretend to be — of the flower charity?”

“Do you mean by the barrel, or the single sack? The Graham, or the best Haxall, or the health-food cold-blast?” asked Sewell.

Miss Vane lost her power of answering in another peal of laughter, sobering off, and breaking down again before she could say, “I mean cut flowers for patients and prisoners.”

“Oh, that kind! I don’t think a single pansy would have an appreciable effect upon a burglar; perhaps a bunch of forget-me-nots might, or a few lilies of the valley carelessly arranged. As to the influence of a graceful little boutonni�re, in cases of rheumatism or cholera morbus, it might be efficacious but I can’t really say.”

“How perfectly cynical!” cried Miss Vane. “Don’t you know how much good the flower mission has accomplished among the deserving poor? Hundreds of bouquets are distributed every day. They prevent crime.”

“That shows how susceptible the deserving poor are. I don’t find that a bowl of the most expensive and delicate roses in the centre of a dinner-table tempers the asperity of the conversation when it turns upon the absent. But perhaps it oughtn’t to do so.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Miss Vane; “but if you had an impulsive niece to supply with food for the imagination, you would be very glad of anything that seemed to combine practical piety and picturesque effect.”

“Oh, if you mean that,” began Sewell more soberly, and his wife leaned forward with an interest in the question which she had not felt while the mere joking went on.

“Yes. When Sibyl came in this morning with an imperative demand to be allowed to go off and do good with flowers in the homes of virtuous poverty, as well as the hospitals and prisons, I certainly felt as if there had been an interposition, if you will allow me to say so.”

Miss Vane still had her joking air, but a note of anxiety had crept into her voice.

“I don’t think it will do the sick and poor any harm,” said Sewell, “and it may do Sibyl some good.” He smiled a little in adding: “It may afford her varied energies a little scope.”

Miss Vane shook her head, and some lines of age came into her face which had not shown themselves there before. “And you would advise letting her go into it?” she asked.

“By all means,” replied Sewell. “But if she’s going to engage actively in the missionary work, I think you’d better go with her on her errands of mercy.”

“Oh, of course, she’s going to do good in person. What she wants is the sensation of doing good — of seeing and hearing the results of her beneficence. She’d care very little about it if she didn’t.”

“Oh, I don’t know that you can say that,” replied Sewell in deprecation of this extreme view. “I don’t believe,” he continued, “that she would object to doing good for its own sake.”

“Of course she wouldn’t, David! Who in the world supposed she would?” demanded his wife, bringing him up roundly at this sign of wandering, and Miss Vane laughed wildly.

“And is this what your doctrine of sincerity comes to? This fulsomeness! You’re very little better than one of the wicked, it seems to me! Well, I hoped that you would approve of my letting Sibyl take this thing up, but such unbounded encouragement!”

“Oh, I don’t wish to flatter,” said Sewell, in the spirit of her raillery. “It will be very well for her to go round with flowers; but don’t let her,” he continued seriously— “don’t let her imagine it’s more than an innocent amusement. It would be a sort of hideous mockery of the good we ought to do one another if there were supposed to be anything more than a kindly thoughtfulness expressed in such a thing.”

“Oh, if Sibyl doesn’t feel that it’s real, for the time being she won’t care anything about it. She likes to lose herself in the illusion, she says.”

“Well!” said Sewell with a slight shrug, “then we must let her get what good she can out of it as an exercise of the sensibilities.”

“O my dear!” exclaimed his wife, “You don’t mean anything so abominable as that! I’ve heard you say that the worst thing about fiction and the theatre was that they brought emotions into play that ought to be sacred to real occasions.”

“Did I say that? Well, I must have been right. I—”

Barker made a scuffling sound with his boots under the table, and rose to his feet. “I guess,” he said, “I shall have to be going.”

They had all forgotten him, and Sewell felt as if he had neglected this helpless guest. “Why, no, you mustn’t go! I was in hopes we might do something to make the day pleasant to you. I intended proposing—”

“Yes,” his wife interrupted, believing that he meant to give up one of his precious afternoons to Barker, and hastening to prevent the sacrifice, “my son will show you the Public Garden and the Common, and go about the town with you.” She rose too, and young Sewell, accustomed to suffer, silently acquiesced. “If your train isn’t to start very soon—”

“I guess I better be going,” said Barker, and Mrs. Sewell now gave her husband a look conveying her belief that Barker would be happier if they let him go. At the same time she frowned upon the monstrous thought of asking him to stay the night with them, which she detected in Sewell’s face.

She allowed him to say nothing but, “I’m sorry; but if you really must—”

“I guess I better,” persisted Barker. He got himself somehow to the door, where he paused a moment, and contrived to pant, “Well, good day,” and without effort at more cordial leave-taking, passed out.

Sewell followed him, and helped him find his hat, and made him shake hands. He went with him to the door, and, beginning to suffer afresh at the wrong he had done Barker, he detained him at the threshold. “If you still wish to see a publisher, Mr. Barker, I will gladly go with you.”

“Oh, not at all, not at all. I guess I don’t want to see any publisher this afternoon. Well, good afternoon!” He turned away from Sewell’s remorseful pursuit, and clumsily hurrying down the steps, he walked up the street and round the next corner. Sewell stood watching him in rueful perplexity, shading his eyes from the mild October sun with his hand; and some moments after Barker had disappeared, he remained looking after him.

When he rejoined the ladies in the dining-room they fell into a conscious silence.

“Have you been telling, Lucy?” he asked.

“Yes, I’ve been telling, David. It was the only way. Did you offer to go with him to a publisher again?”

“Yes, I did. It was the only way,” said Sewell.

Miss Vane and his wife both broke into a cry of laughter. The former got her breath first. “So that was the origin of the famous sermon that turned all our heads grey with good resolutions.” Sewell assented with a sickly grin. “What in the world made you encourage him?”

“My goodness of heart, which I didn’t take the precaution of mixing with goodness of head before I used it.”

Everything was food for Miss Vane’s laugh, even this confession. “But what is the natural history of the boy? How came he to write poetry? What do you suppose he means by it?”

“That isn’t so easy to say. As to his natural history, he lives with his mother in a tumbledown, unpainted wooden house in the deepest fastness of Willoughby Pastures. Lucy and I used to drive by it and wonder what kind of people inhabited that solitude. There were milk-cans scattered round the door-yard, and the Monday we were there a poverty-stricken wash flapped across it. The thought of the place preyed upon me till one day I asked about it at the post-office, and the postmistress told me that the boy was quite a literary character, and read everything he could lay his hands on, and ‘sat up nights’ writing poetry. It seemed to me a very clear case of genius, and the postmistress’s facts rankled in my mind till I couldn’t stand it any longer. Then I went to see him. I suppose Lucy has told you the rest?”

“Yes, Mrs. Sewell has told me the rest. But still I don’t see how he came to write poetry. I believe it doesn’t pay, even in extreme cases of genius.”

“Ah, but that’s just what this poor fellow didn’t know. He must have read somewhere, in some deleterious newspaper, about the sale of some large edition of a poem, and have had his own wild hopes about it. I don’t say his work didn’t show sense; it even showed some rude strength, of a didactic, satirical sort, but it certainly didn’t show poetry. He might have taken up painting by a little different chance. And when it was once known about the neighbourhood that he wrote poetry, his vanity was flattered—”

“Yes, I see. But wasn’t there any kind soul to tell him that he was throwing his time away?”

“It appears not.”

“And even the kind soul from Boston, who visited him,” suggested Mrs. Sewell. “Go on, David.”

“Visited him in spite of his wife’s omniscience, — even the kind soul from Boston paltered with this plain duty. Even he, to spare himself the pain of hurting the boy’s feelings, tried to find some of the lines better than others, and left him with the impression that he had praised them.”

“Well, that was pretty bad,” said Miss Vane. “You had to tell him to-day, I suppose, that there was no hope for him?”

“Yes, I had to tell him at last, after letting him waste his time and money in writing more stuff and coming to Boston with it. I’ve put him to needless shame, and I’ve inflicted suffering upon him that I can’t lighten in the least by sharing.”

“No, that’s the most discouraging thing about pitying people. It does them no manner of good,” said Miss Vane, “and just hurts you. Don’t you think that in an advanced civilisation we shall cease to feel compassion? Why don’t you preach against common pity, as you did against common politeness?”

“Well, it isn’t quite such a crying sin yet. But really, really,” exclaimed Sewell, “the world seems so put together that I believe we ought to think twice before doing a good action.”

“David!” said his wife warningly.

“Oh, let him go on!” cried Miss Vane, with a laugh. “I’m proof against his monstrous doctrines. Go on, Mr. Sewell.”

“What I mean is this.” Sewell pushed himself back in his chair, and then stopped.

“Is what?” prompted both the ladies.

“Why, suppose the boy really had some literary faculty, should I have had any right to encourage it? He was very well where he was. He fed the cows and milked them, and carried the milk to the crossroads, where the dealer collected it and took it to the train. That was his life, with the incidental facts of cutting the hay and fodder, and bedding the cattle; and his experience never went beyond it. I doubt if his fancy ever did, except in some wild, mistaken excursion. Why shouldn’t he have been left to this condition? He ate, he slept, he fulfilled his use. Which of us does more?”

“How would you like to have been in his place?” asked his wife.

“I couldn’t put myself in his place; and therefore I oughtn’t to have done anything to take him out of it,” answered Sewell.

“It seems to me that’s very un-American,” said Miss Vane. “I thought we had prospered up to the present point by taking people out of their places.”

“Yes, we have,” replied the minister, “and sometimes, it seems to me, the result is hideous. I don’t mind people taking themselves out of their places; but if the particles of this mighty cosmos have been adjusted by the divine wisdom, what are we to say of the temerity that disturbs the least of them?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Miss Vane, rising. “I’m almost afraid to stir, in view of the possible consequences. But I can’t sit here all day, and if Mrs. Sewell will excuse me, I’ll go at once. Yes, ‘I guess I better be going,’ as your particle Barker says. Let us hope he’ll get safely back to his infinitesimal little crevice in the cosmos. He’s a very pretty particle, don’t you think? That thick, coarse, wavy black hair growing in a natural bang over his forehead would make his fortune if he were a certain kind of young lady.”

They followed her to the door, chatting, and Sewell looked quickly out when he opened it for her.

As she shook his hand she broke into another laugh. “Really, you looked as if you were afraid of finding him on the steps!”

“If I could only have got near the poor boy,” said Sewell to his wife, as they returned withindoors. “If I could only have reached him where he lives, as our slang says! But do what I would, I couldn’t find any common ground where we could stand together. We were as unlike as if we were of two different species. I saw that everything I said bewildered him more and more; he couldn’t understand me! Our education is unchristian, our civilisation is pagan. They both ought to bring us in closer relations with our fellow-creatures, and they both only put us more widely apart! Every one of us dwells in an impenetrable solitude! We understand each other a little if our circumstances are similar, but if they are different all our words leave us dumb and unintelligible.”

IV.

Barker walked away from the minister’s door without knowing where he was going, and with a heart full of hot pain. He burned with a confused sense of shame and disappointment and anger. It had turned out just as his mother had said: Mr. Sewell would be mighty different in Boston from what he was that day at Willoughby Pastures. There he made Barker think everything of his poetry, and now he pretended to tell him that it was not worth anything; and he kept hinting round that Barker had better go back home and stay there. Did he think he would have left home if there had been anything for him to do there? Had not he as much as told him that he was obliged to find something to make a living by, and help the rest? What was he afraid of? Was he afraid that Barker wanted to come and live off him? He could show him that there was no great danger. If he had known how, he would have refused even to stay to dinner.

What made him keep the pictures of these people who had got along, if he thought no one else ought to try? Barker guessed to himself that if that Mr. Agassiz had had to get a living off the farm at Willoughby Pastures, he would have found time to make money. What did Mr. Sewell mean by speaking of that Nilsson lady by her surname, without any Miss or Mrs.? Was that the way people talked in Boston?

Mr. Sewell had talked to him as if he were a baby, and did not know anything; and Barker was mad at himself for having stayed half a minute after the minister had owned up that he had got the letter he wrote him. He wished he had said, “Well, that’s all I want of you, sir,” and walked right out; but he had not known how to do it. Did they think it was very polite to go on talking with that woman who laughed so much, and forget all about him? Pretty poor sort of manners to eat with her bonnet on, and tell them she hated their victuals.

Barker tried to rage against them in these thoughts, but at the bottom of all was a simple grief that he should have lost the friend whom he thought he had in the minister; the friend he had talked of and dreamed of ever since he had seen and heard him speak those cordial words; the friend he had trusted through all, and had come down to Boston counting upon so much. The tears came into his eyes as he stumbled and scuffled along the brick pavements with his uncouth country walk.

He was walking up a straight, long street, with houses just alike on both sides and bits of grass before them, that sometimes were gay with late autumn flowers. A horse-car track ran up the middle, and the cars seemed to be tinkling by all the time, and people getting on and off. They were mostly ladies and children, and they were very well dressed. Sometimes they stared at Barker, as they crossed his way in entering or issuing from the houses, but generally no one appeared to notice him. In some of the windows there were flowers in painted pots, and in others little marble images on stands.

There were more images in the garden that Barker came to presently: an image of Washington on horseback, and some orator speaking, with his hand up, and on top of a monument a kind of Turk holding up a man that looked sick. The man was almost naked, but he was not so bad as the image of a woman in a granite basin; it seemed to Barker that it ought not to be allowed there. A great many people of all kinds were passing through the garden, and after some hesitation he went in too, and walked over the bridge that crossed the pond in the middle of the garden, where there were rowboats and boats with images of swans on them. Barker made a sarcastic reflection that Boston seemed to be a great place for images, and passed rather hurriedly through the garden on the other side of the bridge. There were beds of all kinds of flowers scattered about, and they were hardly touched by the cold yet. If he had been in better heart, he would have liked to look round a little; but he felt strange, being there all alone, and he felt very low-spirited.

He wondered if this were the Public Garden that Mrs. Sewell had spoken of, and if that kind of grove across the street were the Common. He felt much more at home in it, as he wandered up and down the walks, and finally sat down on one of the iron benches beside the path. At first he obscurely doubted whether he had any right to do so, unless he had a lady with him; most of the seats were occupied by couples who seemed to be courting, but he ventured finally to take one; nobody disturbed him, and so he remained.

It was a beautiful October afternoon; the wind, warm and dry, caught the yellow leaves from the trees overhead in little whiffs, and blew them about the grass, which the fall rains had made as green as May; and a pensive golden light streamed through the long loose boughs, and struck across the slopes of the Common. Slight buggies flashed by on the street near which he sat, and glistening carriages, with drivers dressed out in uniform like soldiers, rumbled down its slope.

While he sat looking, now at the street and now at the people sauntering and hurrying to and fro in the Common, he tried to decide a question that had mixed itself up with the formless resentment he had felt ever since Mr. Sewell played him false. It had got out in the neighbourhood that he was going to Boston before he left home; his mother must have told it; and people would think he was to be gone a long time. He had warned his mother that he did not know when he should be back, before he started in the morning; and he knew that she would repeat his words to everybody who stopped to ask about him during the day, with what she had said to him in reply: “You better come home to-night, Lem; and I’ll have ye a good hot supper waitin’ for ye.”

The question was whether he should go back on the five o’clock train, which would reach Willoughby Centre after dark, and house himself from public ignominy for one night at least, or whether self-respect did not demand that he should stay in Boston for twenty-four hours at any rate, and see if something would not happen. He had now no distinct hope of anything; but his pride and shame were holding him fast, while the home-sickness tugged at his heart, and made him almost forget the poverty that had spurred him to the adventure of coming to Boston. He could see the cows coming home through the swampy meadow as plain as if they were coming across the Common; his mother was calling them; she and his sister were going to milk in his absence, and he could see her now, how she looked going out to call the cows, in her bare, grey head, gaunt of neck and cheek, in the ugly Bloomer dress in which she was not grotesque to his eyes, though it usually affected strangers with stupefaction or alarm. But it all seemed far away, as far as if it were in another planet that he had dropped out of; he was divided from it by his failure and disgrace. He thought he must stay and try for something, he did not know what; but he could not make up his mind to throw away his money for nothing; at the hotel, down by the depot, where he had left his bag, they were going to make him pay fifty cents for just a room alone.

“Any them beats ‘round here been trying to come their games on you?”

At first Barker could not believe himself accosted, though the young man who spoke stood directly in front of him, and seemed to be speaking to him. He looked up, and the young man added, “Heigh?”

“Beats? I don’t know what you mean,” said Barker.

“Confidence sharps, young feller. They’re ‘round everywheres, and don’t you forget it. Move up a little!”

Barker was sitting in the middle of the bench, and at this he pushed away from the young man, who had dropped himself sociably beside him. He wore a pair of black pantaloons, very tight in the legs, and widening at the foot so as almost to cover his boots. His coat was deeply braided, and his waistcoat was cut low, so that his plastron-scarf hung out from the shirt-bosom, which it would have done well to cover.

“I tell you, Boston’s full of ‘em,” he said excitedly. “One of ’em come up to me just now, and says he, ‘Seems to me I’ve seen you before, but I can’t place you.’ ‘Oh yes,’ says I, ‘I’ll tell you where it was. I happened to be in the police court one morning when they was sendin’ you up for three months.’ I tell you he got round the corner! Might ‘a’ played checkers on his coat tail. Why, what do you suppose would been the next thing if I hadn’t have let him know I saw through him?” demanded the young man of Barker, who listened to this adventure with imperfect intelligence. “He’d ‘a’ said, ‘Hain’t I seen you down Kennebunk way som’eres?’ And when I said, ‘No, I’m from Leominster!’ or where-ever I was from if I was green, he’d say, ‘Oh yes, so it was Leominster. How’s the folks?’ and he’d try to get me to think that he was from Leominster too; and then he’d want me to go off and see the sights with him; and pretty soon he’d meet a feller that ‘ud dun him for that money he owed him; and he’d say he hadn’t got anything with him but a cheque for forty dollars; and the other feller’d say he’d got to have his money, and he’d kind of insinuate it was all a put-up job about the cheque for forty dollars, anyway; and that ‘ud make the first feller mad, and he’d take out the check, and ask him what he thought o’ that; and the other feller’d say, well, it was a good cheque, but it wan’t money, and he wanted money; and then the first feller’d say, ‘Well, come along to the bank and get your money,’ and the other’d say the bank was shut. ‘Well, then,’ the first feller’d say, ‘well, sir, I ain’t a-goin’ to ask any favour of you. How much is your bill?’ and the other feller’d say ten dollars, or fifteen, or may be twenty-five, if they thought I had that much, and the first feller’d say, ‘Well, here’s a gentleman from up my way, and I guess he’ll advance me that much on my cheque if I make it worth his while. He knows me.’ And the first thing you know — he’s been treatin’ you, and so polite, showin’ you round, and ast you to go to the theayter — you advance the money, and you keep on with the first feller, and pretty soon he asks you to hold up a minute, he wants to go back and get a cigar; and he goes round the corner, and you hold up, and hold up, and in about a half an hour, or may be less time, you begin to smell a rat, and you go for a policeman, and the next morning you find your name in the papers, ‘One more unfortunate!’ You look out for ‘em, young feller! Wish I had let that one go on till he done something so I could handed him over to the cops. It’s a shame they’re allowed to go ‘round, when the cops knows ‘em. Hello! There comes my mate, now.” The young man spoke as if they had been talking of his mate and expecting him, and another young man, his counterpart in dress, but of a sullen and heavy demeanour very unlike his own brisk excitement, approached, flapping a bank-note in his hand. “I just been tellin’ this young feller about that beat, you know.”

“Oh, he’s all right,” said the mate. “Just seen him down on Tremont Street, between two cops. Must ha’ caught him in the act.”

“You don’t say so! Well, that’s good, anyway. Why! didn’t you’ get it changed?” demanded the young man with painful surprise as his mate handed him the bank-note.

“No, I didn’t. I been to more’n twenty places, and there ain’t no small bills nowhere. The last place, I offered ’em twenty-five cents if they’d change it.”

“Why didn’t you offer ’em fifty? I’d ‘a’ give fifty, and glad to do it. Why, I’ve got to have this bill changed.”

“Well, I’m sorry for you,” said the mate, with ironical sympathy, “because I don’t see how you’re goin’ to git it done. Won’t you move up a little bit, young feller?” He sat down on the other side of Barker. “I’m about tired out.” He took his head between his hands in sign of extreme fatigue, and drooped forward, with his eyes fixed on the ground.

Lemuel’s heart beat. Fifty cents would pay for his lodging, and he could stay till the next day and prolong the chance of something turning up without too sinful a waste of money.

“How much is the bill?” he asked.

“Ten dollars,” said the young man despondently.

“And will you give me fifty cents if I change it?”

“Well, I said I’d give fifty cents,” replied the young man gloomily, “and I will.”

“It’s a bargain,” said Lemuel promptly, and he took from his pocket the two five-dollar notes that formed his store, and gave them, to the young man.

He looked at them critically. “How do I know they’re good?” he asked. “You’re a stranger to me, young feller, and how do I know you ain’t tryin’ to beat me?” He looked sternly at Lemuel, but here the mate interposed.

“How does he know that you ain’t tryin’ to beat him?” he asked contemptuously. “I never saw such a feller as you are! Here you make me run half over town to change that bill, and now when a gentleman offers to break it for you, you have to go and accuse him of tryin’ to put off counterfeit money on you. If I was him I’d see you furder.”

“Oh, well, I don’t want any words about it. Here, take your money,” said the young man. “As long as I said I’d do it, I’ll do it. Here’s your half a dollar.” He put it, with the bank-note, into Lemuel’s hand, and rose briskly. “You stay here, Jimmy, till I come back. I won’t be gone a minute.”

He walked down the mall, and went out of the gate on Tremont Street. Then the mate came to himself. “Why, I’ve let him go off with both them bills now, and he owes me one of ‘em.” With that he rose from Lemuel’s side and hurried after his vanishing comrade; before he was out of sight he had broken into a run.

Lemuel sat looking after them, his satisfaction in the affair alloyed by dislike of the haste with which it had been transacted. His rustic mind worked slowly; it was not wholly content even with a result in its own favour, where the process had been so rapid; he was scarcely able to fix the point at which the talk ceased to be a warning against beats and became his opportunity for speculation. He did not feel quite right at having taken the fellow’s half-dollar; and yet a bargain was a bargain. Nevertheless, if the fellow wanted to rue it, Lemuel would give him fifteen minutes to come back and get his money; and he sat for that space of time where the others had left him. He was not going to be mean; and he might have waited a little longer if it had not been for the behaviour of two girls who came up and sat down on the same bench with him. They could not have been above fifteen or sixteen years old, and Lemuel thought they were very pretty, but they talked so, and laughed so loud, and scuffled with each other for the paper of chocolate which one of them took out of her pocket, that Lemuel, after first being abashed by the fact that they were city girls, became disgusted with them. He was a stickler for propriety of behaviour among girls; his mother had taught him to despise anything like carrying-on among them, and at twenty he was as severely virginal in his morality as if he had been twelve.

People looked back at these tomboys when they had got by; and some shabby young fellows exchanged saucy speeches with them. When Lemuel got up and walked away in reproving dignity, one of the hoydens bounced into his place, and they both sent a cry of derision after him. But Lemuel would not give them the satisfaction of letting them know that he heard them, and at the same time he was not going to let them suppose that they had driven him away. He went very slowly down to the street where a great many horse-cars were passing to and fro, and waited for one marked “Fitchburg, Lowell, and Eastern Depots.” He was not going to take it; but he meant to follow it on its way to those stations, in the neighbourhood of which was the hotel where he had left his travelling-bag. He had told them that he might take a room there, or he might not; now since he had this half-dollar extra he thought that he would stay for the night; it probably would not be any cheaper at the other hotels.

He ran against a good many people in trying to keep the car in sight, but by leaving the sidewalk from time to time where it was most crowded, he managed not to fall very much behind; the worst was that the track went crooking and turning about so much in different streets, that he began to lose faith in its direction, and to be afraid, in spite of the sign on its side, that the car was not going to the depots after all. But it came in sight of them at last, and then Lemuel, blown with the chase but secure of his ground, stopped and rested himself against the side of a wall to get his breath. The pursuit had been very exhausting, and at times it had been mortifying; for here and there people who saw him running after the car had supposed he wished to board it, and in their good-nature had hailed and stopped it. After this had happened twice or thrice, Lemuel perceived that he was an object of contempt to the passengers in the car; but he did not know what to do about it; he was not going to pay six cents to ride when he could just as well walk, and on the other hand he dared not lose sight of the car, for he had no other means of finding his way back to his hotel.

But he was all right now, as he leaned against the house-wall, panting, and mopping his forehead with his handkerchief; he saw his hotel a little way down the street, and he did not feel anxious about it.

“Gave you the slip after all,” said a passer, who had apparently been interested in Lemuel’s adventure.

“Oh, I didn’t want to catch it,” said Lemuel.

“Ah, merely fond of exercise,” said the stranger. “Well, it’s a very good thing, if you don’t overdo it.” He walked by, and then after a glance at Lemuel over his shoulder, he returned to him. “May I ask why you wanted to chase the car, if you didn’t want to catch it?”

Lemuel hesitated; he did not like to confide in a total stranger; this gentleman looked kind and friendly, but he was all the more likely on that account to be a beat; the expression was probably such as a beat would put on in approaching his intended prey. “Oh, nothing,” said Lemuel evasively.

“I beg your pardon,” said the stranger, and he walked away with what Lemuel could only conjecture was the air of a baffled beat.

He waited till he was safely out of sight, and then followed on down the street towards his hotel. When he reached it he walked boldly up to the clerk’s desk, and said that he guessed he would take a room for the night, and gave him the check for his bag that he had received in leaving it there.

The clerk wrote the number of a room against Lemuel’s name in the register, and then glanced at the bag. It was a large bag of oilcloth, a kind of bag which is by nature lank and hollow, and must be made almost insupportably heavy before it shows any signs of repletion. The shirt and pair of everyday pantaloons which Lemuel had dropped that morning into its voracious maw made no apparent effect there, as the clerk held it up and twirled it on the crook of his thumb.

“I guess I shall have to get the money for that room in advance,” he said, regarding the bag very critically. However he might have been wounded by the doubt of his honesty or his solvency implied in this speech, Lemuel said nothing, but took out his ten-dollar note and handed it to the clerk. The latter said apologetically, “It’s one of our rules, where there isn’t baggage,” and then glancing at the note he flung it quickly across the counter to Lemuel. “That won’t do!”

“Won’t do?” repeated Lemuel, taking up the bill.

“Counterfeit,” said the clerk.

V.

Lemuel stretched the note between his hands, and pored so long upon it that the clerk began to tap impatiently with his finger-tips on the register. “It won’t go?” faltered the boy, looking up at the clerk’s sharp face.

“It won’t go here,” replied the clerk. “Got anything else?”

Lemuel’s head whirled; the air seemed to darken around him, as he pored again upon the note, and turned it over and over. Two tears scalded their way down his cheeks, and his lips twitched, when the clerk added, “Some beats been workin’ you?” but he made no answer. His heart was hot with shame and rage, and heavy with despair. He put the note in his pocket, and took his bag and walked out of the hotel. He had not money enough to get home with now, and besides he could not bear to go back in the disgrace of such calamity. It would be all over the neighbourhood, as soon as his mother could tell it; she might wish to keep it to herself for his sake, but she could not help telling it to the first person and every person she saw; she would have to go over to the neighbours to tell it. In a dreary, homesick longing he saw her crossing the familiar meadows that lay between the houses, bareheaded, in her apron, her face set and rigid with wonder at what had happened to her Lem. He could not bear the thought. He would rather die; he would rather go to sea. This idea flashed into his mind as he lifted his eyes aimlessly and caught sight of the tall masts of the coal-ships lying at the railroad wharves, and he walked quickly in the direction of them, so as not to give himself time to think about it, so as to do it now, quick, right off. But he found his way impeded by all sorts of obstacles; a gate closed across the street to let some trains draw in and out of a station; then a lot of string teams and slow, heavy-laden trucks got before him, with a turmoil of express wagons, herdics, and hacks, in which he was near being run over, and was yelled at, sworn at, and laughed at as he stood bewildered, with his lank bag in his hand. He turned and walked back past the hotel again. He felt it an escape, after all, not to have gone to sea; and now a hopeful thought struck him. He would go back to the Common and watch for those fellows who fooled him, and set the police on them, and get his money from them; they might come prowling round again to fool somebody else. He looked out for a car marked like the one he had followed down from the Common, and began to follow it on its return. He got ahead of the car whenever it stopped, so as to be spared the shame of being seen to chase it; and he managed to keep it in sight till he reached the Common. There he walked about looking for those scamps, and getting pushed and hustled by the people who now thronged the paths. At last he was tired out, and on the Beacon Street mall, where he had first seen those fellows, he found the very seat where they had all sat together, and sank into it. The seats were mostly vacant now; a few persons sat there reading their evening papers. As the light began to wane, they folded up their papers and walked away, and their places were filled by young men, who at once put their arms round the young women with them, and seemed to be courting. They did not say much, if anything; they just sat there. It made Lemuel ashamed to look at them; he thought they ought to have more sense. He looked away, but he could not look away from them all, there were so many of them. He was all the time very hungry, but he thought he ought not to break into his half-dollar as long as he could help it, or till there was no chance left of catching those fellows. The night came on, the gas-lamps were lighted, and some lights higher up, like moonlight off on the other paths, projected long glares into the night and made the gas look sickly and yellow. Sitting still there while it grew later, he did not feel quite so hungry, but he felt more tired than ever. There were not so many people around now, and he did not see why he should not lie down on that seat and rest himself a little. He made feints of reclining on his arm at first, to see if he were noticed; then he stretched himself out, with his bag under his head, and his hands in his pockets clutching the money which he meant to make those fellows take back. He got a gas-lamp in range, to keep him awake, and lay squinting his eyes to meet the path of rays running down from it to him. Then he shivered, and rose up with a sudden start. The dull, rich dawn was hanging under the trees around him, while the electric lamps, like paler moons now, still burned among their tops. The sparrows bickered on the grass and the gravel of the path around him.

He could not tell where he was at first; but presently he remembered, and looked for his bag. It was gone; and the money was gone out of both his pockets. He dropped back upon the seat, and leaning his head against the back, he began to cry for utter despair. He had hardly ever cried since he was a baby; and he would not have done it now, but there was no one there to see him.

When he had his cry out he felt a little better, and he got up and went to the pond in the hollow, and washed his hands and face, and wiped them on the handkerchief his mother had ironed for him to use at the minister’s; it was still in the folds she had given it. As he shook it out, rising up, he saw that people were asleep on all the benches round the pond; he looked hopelessly at them to see if any of them were those fellows, but he could not find them. He seemed to be the only person awake on the Common, and wandered out of it and down through the empty streets, filled at times with the moony light of the waning electrics, and at times merely with the grey dawn. A man came along putting out the gas, and some milk-carts rattled over the pavement. By and by a market-wagon, with the leaves and roots of cabbages sticking out from the edges of the canvas that covered it, came by, and Lemuel followed it; he did not know what else to do, and it went so slow that he could keep up, though the famine that gnawed within him was so sharp sometimes that he felt as if he must fall down. He was going to drop into a doorway and rest, but when he came to it he found on an upper step a man folded forward like a limp bundle, snoring in a fetid, sodden sleep, and, shocked into new strength, he hurried on. At last the wagon came to a place that he saw was a market. There were no buyers yet, but men were flitting round under the long arcades of the market-houses, with lanterns under their arms, among boxes and barrels of melons, apples, potatoes, onions, beans, carrots, and other vegetables, which the country carts as they arrived continually unloaded. The smell of peaches and cantaloupes filled the air, and made Lemuel giddy as he stood and looked at the abundance. The men were not saying much; now and then one of them priced something, the owner pretended to figure on it, and then they fell into a playful scuffle, but all silently. A black cat lay luxuriously asleep on the canvas top of a barrel of melons, and the man who priced the melons asked if the owner would throw the cat in. There was a butcher’s cart laden with carcasses of sheep, and one of the men asked the butcher if he called that stuff mutton. “No; imitation,” said the butcher. They all seemed to be very good-natured. Lemuel thought he would ask for an apple; but he could not.

The neighbouring restaurants began to send forth the smell of breakfast, and he dragged up and down till he could bear it no longer, and then went into one of them, meaning to ask for some job by which he could pay for a meal. But his shame again would not let him. He looked at the fat, white-aproned boy drawing coffee hot from a huge urn, and serving a countryman with a beefsteak. It was close and sultry in there; the open sugar-bowl was black with flies, and a scent of decaying meat came from the next cellar. “Like some nice fresh dough-nuts?” said the boy to Lemuel. He did not answer; he looked around as if he had come in search of some one. Then he went out, and straying away from the market, he found himself after a while in a street that opened upon the Common.

He was glad to sit down, and he said to himself that now he would stay there, and keep a good lookout for the chaps that had robbed him. But again he fell asleep, and he did not wake now till the sun was high, and the paths of the Common were filled with hurrying people. He sat where he had slept, for he did not know what else to do or where to go. Sometimes he thought he would go to Mr. Sewell, and ask him for money enough to get home; but he could not do it; he could more easily starve.

After an hour or two he went to get a drink at a fountain he saw a little way off, and when he came back some people had got his seat. He started to look for another, and on his way he found a cent in the path, and he bought an apple with it — a small one that the dealer especially picked out for cheapness. It seemed pretty queer to Lemuel that a person should want anything for one apple. The apple when he ate it made him sick. His head began to ache, and it ached all day. Late in the afternoon he caught sight of one of those fellows at a distance; but there was no policeman near. Lemuel called out, “Stop there, you!” but the fellow began to run when he recognised Lemuel, and the boy was too weak and faint to run after him.

The day wore away and the evening came again, and he had been twenty-four hours houseless and without food. He must do something; he could not stand it any longer; there was no sense in it. He had read in the newspapers how they gave soup at the police-stations in Boston in the winter; perhaps they gave something in summer. He mustered up courage to ask a gentleman who passed where the nearest station was, and then started in search of it. If the city gave it, then there was no disgrace in it, and Lemuel had as much right to anything that was going as other people; that was the way he silenced his pride.

But he missed the place; he must have gone down the wrong street from Tremont to Washington; the gentleman had said the street that ran along the Common was Tremont, and the next was Washington. The cross-street that Lemuel got into was filled with people, going and coming, and lounging about. There were girls going along two or three together with books under their arms, and other girls talking with young fellows who hung about the doors of brightly lighted shops, and flirting with them. One of the girls, whom he had seen the day before in the Common, turned upon Lemuel as he passed, and said, “There goes my young man now! Good evening, Johnny!” It made Lemuel’s cheek burn; he would have liked to box her ears for her. The fellows all set up a laugh.

Towards the end of the street the crowd thickened, and there the mixture of gas and the white moony lights that glared higher up, and winked and hissed, shone upon the faces of a throng that had gathered about the doors and windows of a store a little way down the other street. Lemuel joined them, and for pure listlessness waited round to see what they were looking at. By and by he was worked inward by the shifting and changing of the crowd, and found himself looking in at the door of a room, splendidly fitted up with mirrors and marble everywhere, and coloured glass and carved mahogany. There was a long counter with three men behind it, and over their heads was a large painting of a woman, worse than that image in the garden. The men were serving out liquor to the people that stood around drinking and smoking, and battening on this picture. Lemuel could not help looking, either. “What place is this?” he asked of the boy next him.

“Why, don’t you know?” said the boy. “It’s Jimmy Baker’s. Just opened.”

“Oh,” said Lemuel. He was not going to let the boy see that he did not know who Jimmy Baker was. Just then something caught his eye that had a more powerful charm for him than that painting. It was a large bowl at the end of the counter, which had broken crackers in it, and near it were two plates, one with cheese, and one with bits of dried fish and smoked meat. The sight made the water come into his mouth; he watched like a hungry dog, with a sympathetic working of the jaws, the men who took a bit of fish, or meat, or cheese, and a cracker, or all four of them, before or after they drank. Presently one of the crowd near him walked in and took some fish and cracker without drinking at all; he merely winked at one of the bartenders, who winked at him in return.

A tremendous tide of daring rose in Lemuel’s breast. He was just going to go in and risk the same thing himself, when a voice in the crowd behind him said, “Hain’t you had ‘most enough, young feller? Some the rest of us would like a chance to see now.”

Lemuel knew the voice, and turning quickly, he knew the impudent face it belonged to. He did not mind the laugh raised at his expense, but launched himself across the intervening spectators, and tried to seize the scamp who had got his money from him. The scamp had recognised Lemuel too, and he fell back beyond his grasp, and then lunged through the crowd, and tore round the corner and up the street. Lemuel followed as fast as he could. In spite of the weakness he had felt before, wrath and the sense of wrong lent him speed, and he was gaining in the chase when he heard a girl’s voice, “There goes one of them now!” and then a man seemed to be calling after him, “Stop, there!” He turned round, and a policeman, looking gigantic in his belted blue flannel blouse and his straw helmet, bore down upon the country boy with his club drawn, and seized him by the collar.

“You come along,” he said.

“I haven’t done anything,” said Lemuel, submitting, as he must, and in his surprise and terror losing the strength his wrath had given him. He could scarcely drag his feet over the pavement, and the policeman had almost to carry him at arm’s length.

A crowd had gathered about them, and was following Lemuel and his captor, but they fell back when they reached the steps of the police-station, and Lemuel was pulled up alone, and pushed in at the door. He was pushed through another door, and found himself in a kind of office. A stout man in his shirt-sleeves was sitting behind a desk within a railing, and a large book lay open on the desk. This man, whose blue waistcoat with brass buttons marked him for some sort of officer, looked impersonally at Lemuel and then at the officer, while he chewed a quill toothpick, rolling it in his lips. “What have you got there?” he asked.

“Assaulting a girl down here, and grabbing her satchel,” said the officer who had arrested Lemuel, releasing his collar and going to the door, whence he called, “You come in here, lady,” and a young girl, her face red with weeping and her hair disordered, came back with him. She held a crumpled straw hat with the brim torn loose, and in spite of her disordered looks she was very pretty, with blue eyes flung very wide open, and rough brown hair, wavy and cut short, almost like a boy’s. This Lemuel saw in the frightened glance they exchanged.

“This the fellow that assaulted you?” asked the man at the desk, nodding his head toward Lemuel, who tried to speak; but it was like a nightmare; he could not make any sound.

“There were three of them,” said the girl with hysterical volubility. “One of them pulled my hat down over my eyes and tore it, and one of them held me by the elbows behind, and they grabbed my satchel away that had a book in it that I had just got out of the library. I hadn’t got it more than — —”

“What name?” asked the man at the desk.

“A Young Man’s Darling,” said the girl, after a bashful hesitation. Lemuel had read that book just before he left home; he had not thought it was much of a book.

“The captain wants to know your name,” said the officer in charge of Lemuel.

“Oh,” said the girl, with mortification. “Statira Dudley.”

“What age?” asked the captain.

“Nineteen last June,” replied the girl with eager promptness, that must have come from shame from the blunder she had made. Lemuel was twenty, the 4th of July.

“Weight?” pursued the captain.

“Well, I hain’t been weighed very lately,” answered the girl, with increasing interest. “I don’t know as I been weighed since I left home.”

The captain looked at her judicially.

“That so? Well, you look pretty solid. Guess I’ll put you down at a hundred and twenty.”

“Well, I guess it’s full as much as that,” said the girl, with a flattered laugh.

“Dunno how high you are?” suggested the captain, glancing at her again.

“Well, yes, I do. I am just five feet two inches and a half.”

“You don’t look it,” said the captain critically.

“Well, I am,” insisted the girl, with a returning gaiety.

The captain apparently checked himself and put on a professional severity.

“What business — occupation?”

“Sales-lady,” said the girl.

“Residence?”

“No. 2334 Pleasant Avenue.”

The captain leaned back in his arm-chair, and turned his toothpick between his lips, as he stared hard at the girl.

“Well, now,” he said, after a moment, “you know you’ve got to come into court and testify to-morrow morning.”

“Yes,” said the girl, rather falteringly, with a sidelong glance at Lemuel.

“You’ve got to promise to do it, or else it will be my duty to have you locked up overnight.”

“Have me locked up?” gasped the girl, her wide blue eyes filling with astonishment.

“Detain you as a witness,” the captain explained. “Of course, we shouldn’t put you in a cell; we should give you a good room, and if you ain’t sure you’ll appear in the morning — —”

The girl was not of the sort whose tongues are paralysed by terror. “Oh, I’ll be sure to appear, captain! Indeed I will, captain! You needn’t lock me up, captain! Lock me up!” she broke off indignantly. “It would be a pretty idea if I was first to be robbed of my satchel and then put in prison for it overnight! A great kind of law that would be! Why, I never heard of such a thing! I think it’s a perfect shame! I want to know if that’s the way you do with poor things that you don’t know about?”

“That’s about the size of it,” said the captain, permitting himself a smile, in which the officer joined.

“Well, it’s a shame!” cried the girl, now carried far beyond her personal interest in the matter.

The captain laughed outright. “It is pretty rough. But what you going to do?”

“Do? Why, I’d — —” But here she stopped for want of science, and added from emotion, “I’d do anything before I’d do that.”

“Well,” said the captain, “then I understand you’ll come round to the police court and give your testimony in the morning?”

“Yes,” said the girl, with a vague, compassionate glance at Lemuel, who had stood there dumb throughout the colloquy.

“If you don’t, I shall have to send for you,” said the captain.

“Oh, I’ll come,” replied the girl, in a sort of disgust, and her eyes still dwelt upon Lemuel.

“That’s all,” returned the captain, and the girl, accepting her dismissal, went out.

Now that it was too late, Lemuel could break from his nightmare. “Oh, don’t let her go! I ain’t the one! I was running after a fellow that passed off a counterfeit ten-dollar bill on me in the Common yesterday. I never touched her satchel. I never saw her before — —”

“What’s that?” demanded the captain sharply.

“You’ve got the wrong one!” cried Lemuel. “I never did anything to the girl.”

“Why, you fool!” retorted the captain angrily; “why didn’t you say that when she was here, instead of standing there like a dumb animal? Heigh?”

Lemuel’s sudden flow of speech was stopped at its source again. His lips were locked; he could not answer a word.

The captain went on angrily. “If you’d spoke up in time, may be I might ‘a’ let you go. I don’t want to do a man any harm if I can’t do him some good. Next time, if you’ve got a tongue in your head, use it. I can’t do anything for you now. I got to commit you.”

He paused between his sentences, as if to let Lemuel speak, but the boy said nothing. The captain pulled his book impatiently toward him, and took up his pen.

“What’s your name?”

“Lemuel Barker.”

“I thought may be there was a mistake all the while,” said the captain to the officer, while he wrote down Lemuel’s name. “But if a man hain’t got sense enough to speak for himself, I can’t put the words in his mouth. Age?” he demanded savagely of Lemuel.

“Twenty.”

“Weight?”

“A hundred and thirty.”

“I could see with half an eye that the girl wan’t very sanguine about it. But what’s the use? I couldn’t tell her she was mistaken. Height?”

“Five feet six.”

“Occupation?”

“I help mother carry on the farm.”

“Just as I expected!” cried the captain. “Slow as a yoke of oxen. Residence?”

“Willoughby Pastures.”

The captain could not contain himself. “Well, Willoughby Pastures, — or whatever your name is, — you’ll get yourself into the papers this time, sure. And I must say it serves you right. If you can’t speak for yourself, who’s going to speak for you, do you suppose? Might send round to the girl’s house —— No, she wouldn’t be there, ten to one. You’ve got to go through now. Next time don’t be such an infernal fool.”

The captain blotted his book and shut it.

“We’ll have to lock him up here to-night,” he said to the policeman. “Last batch has gone round. Better go through him.” But Lemuel had been gone through before, and the officer’s search of his pockets only revealed their emptiness. The captain struck a bell on his desk. “If it ain’t all right, you can make it right with the judge in the morning,” he added to Lemuel.

Lemuel looked up at the policeman who had arrested him. He was an elderly man, with a kindly face, squarely fringed with a chin-beard. The boy tried to speak, but he could only repeat, “I never saw her before. I never touched her.”

The policeman looked at him and then at the captain.

“Too late now,” said the latter. “Got to go through the mill this time. But if it ain’t right, you can make it right.”

Another officer had answered the bell, and the captain indicated with a comprehensive roll of his head that he was to take Lemuel away and lock him up.

“Oh, my!” moaned the boy. As they passed the door of a small room opening on an inner corridor, a smell of coffee gushed out of it; the officer stopped, and Lemuel caught sight of two gentlemen in the room with a policeman, who was saying ——

“Get a cup of coffee here when we want it. Try one?” he suggested hospitably.

“No, thank you,” said one of the gentlemen, with the bland respectfulness of people being shown about an institution. “How many of you are attached to this station?”

“Eighty-one,” said the officer. “Largest station in town. Gang goes on at one in the morning, and another at eight, and another at six P.M.” He looked inquiringly at the officer in charge of Lemuel.

“Any matches?” asked this officer.

“Everything but money,” said the other, taking some matches out of his waistcoat pocket.

Lemuel’s officer went ahead, lighting the gas along the corridor, and the boy followed, while the other officer brought up the rear with the visitor whom he was lecturing. They passed some neat rooms, each with two beds in it, and he answered some question: “Tramps? Not much! Give them a board when they’re drunk; send ’em round to the Wayfarers’ Lodge when they’re sober. These officers’ rooms.”

Lemuel followed his officer downstairs into a basement, where on either side of a white-walled, brilliantly lighted, specklessly clean corridor, there were numbers of cells, very clean, and smelling of fresh whitewash. Each had a broad low shelf in it, and a bench opposite, a little wider than a man’s body. Lemuel suddenly felt himself pushed into one of them, and then a railed door of iron was locked upon him. He stood motionless in the breadth of light and lines of shade which the gas-light cast upon him through the door, and knew the gentlemen were looking at him as their guide talked.

“Well, fill up pretty well, Sunday nights. Most the arrests for drunkenness. But all the arrests before seven o’clock sent to the City Prison. Only keep them that come in afterwards.”

One of the gentlemen looked into the cell opposite Lemuel’s. “There seems to be only one bunk. Do you ever put more into a cell?”

“Well, hardly ever, if they’re men. Lot o’ women brought in ‘most always ask to be locked up together for company.”

“I don’t see where they sleep,” said the visitor. “Do they lie on the floor?”

The officer laughed. “Sleep? They don’t want to sleep. What they want to do is to set up all night, and talk it over.”

Both of the visitors laughed.

“Some of the cells,” resumed the officer, “have two bunks, but we hardly ever put more than one in a cell.”

The visitors noticed that a section of the rail was removed in each door near the floor.

“That’s to put a dipper of water through, or anything,” explained the officer. “There!” he continued, showing them Lemuel’s door; “see how the rails are bent there? You wouldn’t think a man could squeeze through there, but we found a fellow half out o’ that one night — backwards. Captain came down with a rattan and made it hot for him.”

The visitors laughed, and Lemuel, in his cell, shuddered.

“I never saw anything so astonishingly clean,” said one of the gentlemen. “And do you keep the gas burning here all night?”

“Yes; calculate to give ’em plenty of light,” said the officer, with comfortable satisfaction in the visitor’s complimentary tone.

“And the sanitary arrangements seem to be perfect, doctor,” said the other visitor.

“Oh, perfect.”

“Yes,” said the officer, “we do the best we can for ‘em.”

The visitors made a murmur of approbation. Their steps moved away; Lemuel heard the guide saying, “Dunno what that fellow’s in for. Find out in the captain’s room.”

“He didn’t look like a very abandoned ruffian,” said one of the visitors, with both pity and amusement in his voice.

VI.

Lemuel stood and leaned his head against the wall of his cell. The tears that had come to his relief in the morning when he found that he was robbed would not come now. He was trembling with famine and weakness, but he could not lie down; it would be like accepting his fate, and every fibre of his body joined his soul in rebellion against that. The hunger gnawed him incessantly, mixed with an awful sickness.

After a long time a policeman passed his door with another prisoner, a drunken woman, whom he locked into a cell at the end of the corridor. When he came back, Lemuel could endure it no longer. “Say!” he called huskily through his door. “Won’t you give me a cup of that coffee upstairs? I haven’t had anything but an apple to eat for nearly two days. I don’t want you to give me the coffee. You can take my clasp button — —”

The officer went by a few steps, then he came back, and peered in through the door at Lemuel’s face. “Oh! that’s you?” he said: he was the officer who had arrested Lemuel.

“Yes. Please get me the coffee. I’m afraid I shall have a fit of sickness if I go much longer.”

“Well,” said the officer, “I guess I can get you something.” He went away, and came back, after Lemuel had given up the hope of his return, with a saucerless cup of coffee, and a slice of buttered bread laid on the top of it. He passed it in through the opening at the bottom of the door.

“Oh, my!” gasped the starving boy. He thought he should drop the cup, his hand shook so when he took it. He gulped the coffee, and swallowed the bread in a frenzy.

“Here — here’s the button,” he said, as he passed the empty cup out to the officer.

“I don’t want your button,” answered the policeman. He hesitated a moment. “I shall be round at the court in the morning, and I guess if it ain’t right we can make it so.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Lemuel, humbly grateful.

“You lay down now,” said the officer. “We shan’t put anybody in on you to-night.”

“I guess I better,” said Lemuel. He crept in upon the lower shelf, and stretched himself out in his clothes, with his arm under his head for a pillow. The drunken woman at the end of the corridor was clamouring to get out. She wished to get out just half a minute, she said, and settle with that hussy; then she would come back willingly. Sometimes she sang, sometimes she swore; but with the coffee still sensibly hot in his stomach, and the comfort of it in every vein, her uproar turned into an agreeable fantastic medley for Lemuel, and he thought it was the folks singing in church at Willoughby Pastures, and they were all asking him who the new girl in the choir was, and he was saying Statira Dudley; and then it all slipped off into a smooth, yellow nothingness, and he heard some one calling him to get up.

When he woke in the morning he started up so suddenly that he struck his head against the shelf above him, and lay staring stupidly at the iron-work of his door.

He heard the order to turn out repeated at other cells along the corridor, and he crept out of his shelf, and then sat down upon it, waiting for his door to be unlocked. He was very hungry again, and he trembled with faintness. He wondered how he should get his breakfast, and he dreaded the trial in court less than the thought of going through another day with nothing to eat. He heard the stir of the other prisoners in the cells along the corridors, the low groans and sighs with which people pull themselves together after a bad night; and he heard the voice of the drunken woman, now sober, poured out in voluble remorse, and in voluble promise of amendment for the future, to every one who passed, if they would let her off easy. She said aisy, of course, and it was in her native accent that she bewailed the fate of the little ones whom her arrest had left motherless at home. No one seemed to answer her, but presently she broke into a cry of joy and blessing, and from her cell at the other end of the corridor came the clink of crockery. Steps approached with several pauses, and at last they paused at Lemuel’s door, and a man outside stooped and pushed in, through the opening at the bottom, a big bowl of baked beans, a quarter of a loaf of bread, and a tin cup full of coffee. “Coffee’s extra,” he said jocosely. “Comes from the officers. You’re in luck, young feller.”

“I ha’n’t got anything to pay for it with,” faltered Lemuel.

“Guess they’ll trust you,” said the man. “Any-rate, I got orders to leave it.” He passed on, and Lemuel gathered up his breakfast, and arranged it on the shelf where he had slept; then he knelt down before it, and ate.

An hour later an officer came and unbolted his door from the outside. “Hurry up,” he said; “Maria’s waiting.”

“Maria?” repeated Lemuel innocently.

“Yes,” returned the officer. “Other name’s Black. She don’t like to wait. Come out of here.”

Lemuel found himself in the corridor with four or five other prisoners, whom some officers took in charge and conducted upstairs to the door of the station. He saw no woman, but a sort of omnibus without windows was drawn up at the curbstone.

“I thought,” he said to an officer, “that there was a lady waiting to see me. Maria Black,” he added, seeing that the officer did not understand.

The policeman roared, and could not help putting his head in at the office door to tell the joke.

“Well, you must introduce him,” called a voice from within.

“Guess you ha’n’t got the name exactly straight, young man,” said the policeman to Lemuel, as he guarded him down the steps. “It’s Black Maria you’re looking for. There she is,” he continued, pointing to the omnibus, “and don’t you forget it. She’s particular to have folks recognise her. She’s blacker ‘n she’s painted.”

The omnibus was, in fact, a sort of aesthetic drab, relieved with salmon, as Lemuel had time to notice before he was hustled into it with the other prisoners, and locked in.

There were already several there, and as Lemuel’s eyes accustomed themselves to the light that came in through the little panes at the sides of the roof, he could see that they were women; and by and by he saw that two of them were the saucy girls who had driven him from his seat in the Common that day, and laughed so at him. They knew him too, and one of them set up a shrill laugh. “Hello, Johnny! That you? You don’t say so? What you up for this time? Going down to the Island? Well, give us a call there! Do be sociable! Ward 11’s the address.” The other one laughed, and then swore at the first for trying to push her off the seat.

Lemuel broke out involuntarily in all the severity that was native to him. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

This convulsed the bold things with laughter. When they could get their breath, one of them said, “Pshaw! I know what he’s up for: preaching on the Common. Say, young feller! don’t you want to hold a prayer-meetin’ here?”

They burst into another shriek of laughter, so wild and shrill that the driver rapped on the roof, and called down, “Dry up in there!”

“Oh, you mind your horses, and we’ll look after the passengers. Go and set on his knee, Jen, and cheer him up a little.”

Lemuel sat in a quiver of abhorrence. The girl appealed to remained giggling beside her companion.

“I — I pity ye!” said Lemuel.

The Irishwoman had not stopped bewailing herself, and imploring right and left an easy doom. She now addressed herself wholly to Lemuel, whose personal dignity seemed to clothe him with authority in her eyes. She told him about her children, left alone with no one to look after them; the two little girls, the boy only three years old. When the van stopped at a station to take in more passengers, she tried to get out — to tell the gentlemen at the office about it, she said.

After several of these halts they stopped at the basement of a large stone building, that had a wide flight of steps in front, and columns, like the church at Willoughby Pastures, only the church steps were wood, and the columns painted pine. Here more officers took charge of them, and put them in a room where there were already twenty-five or thirty other prisoners, the harvest of the night before; and presently another van-load was brought in.

There were many women among them, but here there was no laughing or joking as there had been in the van. Scarcely any one spoke, except the Irishwoman, who crept up to an officer at the door from time to time, and begged him to tell the judge to let her have it easy this time. Lemuel could not help seeing that she and most of the others were familiar with the place. Those two saucy jades who had mocked him were silent, and had lost their bold looks.

After waiting what seemed a long time, the door was opened, and they were driven up a flight of stairs into a railed enclosure at the corner of a large room, where they remained huddled together, while a man at a long desk rattled over something that ended with “God bless the commonwealth of Massachusetts.” On a platform behind the speaker sat a grey-haired man in spectacles, and Lemuel knew that he was in the court-room, and that this must be the judge. He could not see much of the room over the top of the railing, but there was a buzz of voices and a stir of feet beyond, that made him think the place was full. But full or empty, it was the same to him; his shame could not be greater or less. He waited apathetically while the clerk read off the charges against the vastly greater number of his fellow-prisoners arrested for drunkenness. When these were disposed of, he read from the back of a paper, which he took from a fresh pile, “Bridget Gallagher, complained of for habitual drunkenness. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty, your honour,” answered the Irishwoman who had come from Lemuel’s station. “But make it aisy for me this time, judge, and ye’ll never catch me in it again. I’ve three helpless childer at home, your honour, starvin’ and cryin’ for their mother. Holy Mary, make it aisy, judge!”

A laugh went round the room, which a stern voice checked with “Silence, there!” but which renewed itself when the old woman took the stand at the end of the clerk’s long desk, while a policeman mounted a similar platform outside the rail, and gave his testimony against her. It was very conclusive, and it was not affected by the denials with which the poor woman gave herself away more and more. She had nothing to say when invited to do so except to beg for mercy; the judge made a few inquiries, apparently casual, of the policeman; then after a moment’s silence, in which he sat rubbing his chin, he leaned forward and said quietly to the clerk,

“Give her three months.”

The woman gave a wild Irish cry, “O my poor childer!” and amidst the amusement of the spectators, which the constables could not check at once, was led wailing below.

Before Lemuel could get his breath those bold girls, one after the other, were put upon the stand. The charge against them was not made the subject of public investigation; the judge and some other elderly gentleman talked it over together; and the girls, who had each wept in pleading guilty, were put on probation, as Lemuel understood it, and, weeping still and bridling a little, were left in charge of this elderly gentleman, and Lemuel saw them no more.

One case followed another, and Lemuel listened with the fascination of terror; the sentences seemed terribly severe, and out of all proportion to the offences. Suddenly his own name was called. His name had been called in public places before: at the school exhibitions, where he had taken prizes in elocution and composition; in church, once, when the minister had mentioned him for peculiar efficiency and zeal among other Sabbath-school teachers. It was sacred to him for his father’s sake, who fell in the war, and who was recorded in it on the ugly, pathetic monument on the village green; and hitherto he had made it respected and even honoured, and had tried all the harder to keep it so because his family was poor, and his mother had such queer ways and dressed so. He dragged himself to the stand which he knew he must mount, and stole from under his eyelashes a glance at the court-room, which took it all in. There were some people, whom he did not know for reporters, busy with their pencils next the railings; and there was a semicircular table in the middle of the room at which a large number of policemen sat, and they had their straw helmets piled upon it, with the hats of the lawyers who sat among them. Beyond, the seats which covered the floor were filled with the sodden loafers whom the law offers every morning the best dramatic amusement in the city. Presently, among the stupid eyes fixed upon him, Lemuel was aware of the eyes of that fellow who had passed the counterfeit money on him; and when this scamp got up and coolly sauntered out of the room, Lemuel was held in such a spell that he did not hear the charge read against him, or the clerk’s repeated demand, “Guilty or not guilty?”

He was recalled to himself by the voice of the judge. “Young man, do you understand? Are you guilty of assaulting this lady and taking her satchel, or not?”

“Not guilty,” said Lemuel huskily; and he looked, not at the judge, but at the pretty girl, who confronted him from a stand at the other end of the clerk’s desk, blushing to find herself there up to her wide-flung blue eyes. Lemuel blushed too, and dropped his eyes; and it seemed to him in a crazy kind of way that it was impolite to have pleaded not guilty against her accusation. He stood waiting for the testimony which the judge had to prompt her to offer.

“State the facts in regard to the assault,” he said gravely.

“I don’t know as I can do it, very well,” began the girl.

“We shall be satisfied if you do your best,” said the judge, with the glimmer of a smile, which spread to a laugh among the spectators, unrebuked by the constables, since the judge had invited it.

In this atmosphere of sympathy the girl found her tongue, and with a confiding twist, of her pretty head began again: “Well, now, I’ll tell you just how it was. I’d just got my book out of the Public Library, and I was going down Neponset Street on my way home, hurrying along, because I see it was beginning to be pretty late, and the first thing I know somebody pulled my hat down over my eyes, and tore the brim half off, so I don’t suppose I can ever wear it again, it’s such a lookin’ thing; any rate it ain’t the one I’ve got on, though it’s some like it; and then the next thing, somebody grabbed away the satchel I’d got on my arm; and as soon as I could get my eyes clear again, I see two fellows chasin’ up the street, and I told the officer somebody’d got my book; and I knew it was one of those fellows runnin’ away, and I said, ‘There they go now,’ and the officer caught the hind one, and I guess the other one got away; and the officer told me to follow along to the station-house, and when we got there they took my name, and where I roomed, and my age — —”

“Do you recognise this young man as one of the persons who robbed you?” interrupted the judge, nodding his head toward Lemuel, who now lifted his head and looked his accuser fearlessly in her pretty eyes.

“Why, no!” she promptly replied. “The first thing I knew, he’d pulled my hat over my eyes.”

“But you recognise him as one of those you saw running away?”

“Oh yes, he’s one of them,” said the girl.

“What made you think he had robbed you?”

“Why, because my satchel was gone!” returned the girl, with logic that apparently amused the gentlemen of the bar.

“But why did you think he had taken it?”

“Because I see him running away.”

“You couldn’t swear that he was the one who took your satchel?”

“Why, of course not! I didn’t see him till I saw him running. And I don’t know as he was the one, now,” added the girl, in a sudden burst of generosity.

“And if it was to do over again, I should say as much to the officers at the station. But I got confused when they commenced askin’ me who I was, and how much I weighed, and what my height was; and he didn’t say anything; and I got to thinkin’ may be it was; and when they told me that if I didn’t promise to appear at court in the morning they’d have to lock me up, I was only too glad to get away alive.”

By this time all the blackguard audience were sharing, unchecked, the amusement of the bar. The judge put up his hand to hide a laugh. Then he said to Lemuel, “Do you wish to question the plaintiff?”

The two young things looked at each other, and both blushed. “No,” said Lemuel.

The girl looked at the judge for permission, and at a nod from him left the stand and sat down.

The officer who had arrested Lemuel took the stand on the other side of the rail from him, and corroborated the girl’s story; but he had not seen the assault or robbery, and could not swear to either. Then Lemuel was invited to speak, and told his story with the sort of nervous courage that came to him in extremity. He told it from the beginning, and his adventure with the two beats in the Common made the audience laugh again. Even then, Lemuel could not see the fun of it; he stopped, and the stout ushers in blue flannel sacks commanded silence. Then Lemuel related how he had twice seen one of the beats since that time, but he was ashamed to say how he had let him escape out of that very room half an hour before. He told how he had found the beat in the crowd before the saloon, and how he was chasing him up the street when he heard the young lady hollo out, “There they go now!” and then the officer arrested him.

The judge sat a moment in thought; then said quietly, “The charge is dismissed;” and before Lemuel well knew what it meant, a gate was opened at the stand, and he was invited to pass out. He was free. The officer who had arrested him shook his hand in congratulation and excuse, and the lawyers and the other policemen gave him a friendly glance. The loafers and beats of the audience did not seem to notice him. They were already intent upon a case of coloured assault and battery which had been called, and which opened with the promise of uncommon richness, both of the parties being women.

Lemuel saw that girl who had accused him passing down the aisle on the other side of the room. She was with another girl, who looked older. Lemuel walked fast, to get out of their way; he did not know why, but he did not want to speak to the girl. They walked fast too, and when he got down the stairs on to the ground floor of the courthouse they overtook him.

“Say?” said the older girl, “I want to speak to you. I think it’s a down shame, the way that you’ve been treated; and Statira, she feels jus’ ‘s I do about it; and I tell her she’s got to say so. It’s the least she can do, I tell her, after what she got you in for. My name’s ‘Manda Grier; I room ‘th S’tira; ‘n’ I come ‘th her this mornin’ t’ help keep her up; b’t I didn’t know ‘t was goin’ to be s’ch a perfect flat-out!”

As the young woman rattled on she grew more and more glib; she was what they call whopper-jawed, and spoke a language almost purely consonantal, cutting and clipping her words with a rapid play of her whopper-jaw till there was nothing but the bare bones left of them. Statira was crying, and Lemuel could not bear to see her cry. He tried to say something to comfort her, but all he could think of was, “I hope you’ll get your book back,” and ‘Manda Grier answered for her ——

“Oh, I guess ‘t ain’t the book ‘t she cares for. S’ far forth ‘s the book goes, I guess she can afford to buy another book, well enough. B’t I tell her she’s done ‘n awful thing, and a thing ‘t she’ll carry to her grave ‘th her, ‘n’t she’ll remember to her dyin’ day. That’s what I tell her.”

“She ha’n’t got any call to feel bad about it,” said Lemuel clumsily. “It was just a mistake.” Then, not knowing what more to say, he said, being come to the outer door by this time, “Well, I wish you good morning.”

“Well, good morning,” said ‘Manda Grier, and she thrust her elbow sharply into Statira Dudley’s side, so that she also said faintly —

“Well, good morning!” She was fluent enough on the witness-stand and in the police station, but now she could not find a word to say.

The three stood together on the threshold of the court-house, not knowing how to get away from one another.

‘Manda Grier put out her hand to Lemuel. He took it, and, “Well, good morning,” he said again.

“Well, good morning,” repeated ‘Manda Grier.

Then Statira put out her hand, and she and Lemuel shook hands, and said together, “Well, good morning,” and on these terms of high civility they parted. He went one way and they another. He did not look back, but the two girls, marching off with locked arms and flying tongues, when they came to the corner, turned to look back. They both turned inward, and so bumped their heads together.

“Why, you — coot!” cried ‘Manda Grier, and they broke out laughing.

Lemuel heard their laugh, and he knew they were laughing at him; but he did not care. He wandered on, he did not know whither, and presently he came to the only place he could remember.

VII.

The place was the Common, where his trouble had begun. He looked back to the beginning, and could see that it was his own fault. To be sure, you might say that if a fellow came along and offered to pay you fifty cents for changing a ten-dollar bill, you had a right to take it; but there was a voice in Lemuel’s heart which warned him that greed to another’s hurt was sin, and that if you took too much for a thing from a necessitous person, you oppressed and robbed him. You could make it appear otherwise, but you could not really change the nature of the act. He owned this with a sigh, and he owned himself justly punished. He was still on those terms of personal understanding with the eternal spirit of right which most of us lose later in life, when we have so often seemed to see the effect fail to follow the cause, both in the case of our own misdeeds and the misdeeds of others.

He sat down on a bench, and he sat there all day, except when he went to drink from the tin cup dangling by the chain from the nearest fountain. His good breakfast kept him from being hungry for a while, but he was as aimless and as hopeless as ever, and as destitute. He would have gone home now if he had had the money; he was afraid they would be getting anxious about him there, though he had not made any particular promises about the time of returning. He had dropped a postal card into a box as soon as he reached Boston, to tell of his safe arrival, and they would not expect him to write again.

There were only two ways for him to get home: to turn tramp and walk back, or to go to that Mr. Sewell and borrow the money to pay his passage. To walk home would add intolerably to the public shame he must suffer, and the thought of going to Mr. Sewell was, even in the secret which it would remain between him and the minister, a pang so cruel to his pride that he recoiled from it instantly. He said to himself he would stand it one day more; something might happen, and if nothing happened, he should think of it again. In the meantime he thought of other things: of that girl, among the rest, and how she looked at the different times. As nearly as he could make out, she seemed to be a very fashionable girl; at any rate, she was dressed fashionably, and she was nice-looking. He did not know whether she had behaved very sensibly, but he presumed she was some excited.

Toward dark, when Lemuel was reconciling himself to another night’s sleep in the open air, a policeman sauntered along the mall, and as he drew nearer the boy recognised his friendly captor. He dropped his head, but it was too late. The officer knew him, and stopped before him.

“Well,” he said, “hard at it, I see.”

Lemuel made no answer, but he was aware of a friendly look in the officer’s face, mixed with fatherly severity.

“I was in hopes you had started back to Willoughby Pastures before this. You don’t want to get into the habit of settin’ round on the Common, much. First thing you know you can’t quit it. Where you goin’ to put up to-night?”

“I don’t know,” murmured Lemuel.

“Got no friends in town you can go to?”

“No.”

“Well, now, look here! Do you think you could find your way back to the station?”

“I guess so,” said Lemuel, looking up at the officer questioningly.

“Well, when you get tired of this, you come round, and we’ll provide a bed for you. And you get back home to-morrow, quick as you can.”

“Thank you,” said Lemuel. He was helpless against the advice and its unjust implication, but he could not say anything.

“Get out o’ Boston, anyway, wherever you go or don’t go,” continued the officer. “It’s a bad place.”

He walked on, and left Lemuel to himself again. He thought bitterly that no one knew better than himself how luridly wicked Boston was, and that there was probably not a soul in it more helplessly anxious to get out of it. He thought it hard to be talked to as if it were his fault; as if he wished to become a vagrant and a beggar. He sat there an hour or two longer, and then he took the officer’s advice so far as concerned his going to the station for a bed, swallowing his pride as he must. He must do that, or he must go to Mr. Sewell. It was easier to accept humiliation at the hands of strangers. He found his way there with some difficulty, and slinking in at the front door, he waited at the threshold of the captain’s room while he and two or three officers disposed of a respectably dressed man, whom a policeman was holding up by the collar of his coat. They were searching his pockets and taking away his money, his keys, and his pencil and penknife, which the captain sealed up in a large envelope, and put into his desk.

“There! take him and lock him up. He’s pretty well loaded,” said the captain.

Then he looked up and saw Lemuel. “Hello! Can’t keep away, eh?” he demanded jocosely. “Well, we’ve heard about you. I told you the judge would make it all right. What’s wanted? Bed? Well, here!” The captain filled up a blank which he took from a pigeon-hole, and gave it to Lemuel. “I guess that’ll fix you out for the night. And tomorrow you put back to Willoughby Pastures tight as you can get there. You’re on the wrong track now. First thing you know you’ll be a professional tramp, and then you won’t be worth the powder to blow you. I use plain talk with you because you’re a beginner. I wouldn’t waste my breath on that fellow behind you.”

Lemuel looked round, and almost touched with his a face that shone fiery red through the rusty growth of a week’s beard, and recoiled from a figure that was fouler as to shirt and coat and trousers than anything the boy had seen; though the tramps used to swarm through Willoughby Pastures before the Selectmen began to lock them up in the town poorhouse and set them to breaking stone. There was no ferocity in the loathsome face; it was a vagrant swine that looked from it, no worse in its present mood than greedy and sleepy.

“Bed?” demanded the captain, writing another blank. “Never been here before, I suppose?” he continued with good-natured irony. “I don’t seem to remember you.”

The captain laughed, and the tramp returned a husky “Thank you, sir,” and took himself off into the street.

Then the captain came to Lemuel’s help. “You follow him,” he said, “and you’ll come to a bed by and by.”

He went out, and, since he could do no better, did as he was bid. He had hardly ever seen a drunken man at Willoughby Pastures, where the prohibition law was strictly enforced; there was no such person as a thief in the whole community, and the tramps were gone long ago. Yet here was he, famed at home for the rectitude of his life and the loftiness of his aims, consorting with drunkards and thieves and tramps, and warned against what he was doing by a policeman, as if he was doing it of his own will. It was very strange business. If it was all a punishment for taking that fellow’s half-dollar, it was pretty heavy punishment. He was not going to say that it was unjust, but he would say it was hard. His spirit was now so bruised and broken that he hardly knew what to think.

He followed the tramp as far off as he could and still keep him in sight, and he sometimes thought he had lost him, in the streets that climbed and crooked beyond the Common towards the quarter whither they were going; but he reappeared, slouching and shambling rapidly on, in the glare of some electric lights that stamped the ground with shadows thick and black as if cut in velvet or burnt into the surface. Here and there some girl brushed against the boy, and gave him a joking or jeering word; her face flashed into light for a moment, and then vanished in the darkness she passed into. It was that hot October, and the night was close and still; on the steps of some of the houses groups of fat, weary women were sitting, and children were playing on the sidewalks, using the lamp-posts for goal or tag. The tramp ahead of Lemuel issued upon a brilliantly lighted little square, with a great many horse-cars coming and going in it; a church with stores on the ground floor, and fronting it on one side a row of handsome old stone houses with iron fences, and on another a great hotel, with a high-pillared portico, where men sat talking and smoking.

People were waiting on the sidewalk to take the cars; a druggist’s window threw its mellow lights into the street; from open cellarways came the sound of banjos and violins. At one of these cellar doors his guide lingered so long that Lemuel thought he should have to find the way beyond for himself. But the tramp suddenly commanded himself from the music, the light, and the smell of strong drink, which Lemuel caught a whiff of as he followed, and turning a corner led the way to the side of a lofty building in a dark street, where they met other like shapes tending toward it from different directions.

VIII.

Lemuel entered a lighted doorway from a bricked courtyard, and found himself with twenty or thirty houseless comrades in a large, square room, with benching against the wall for them to sit on. They were all silent and quelled-looking, except a young fellow whom Lemuel sat down beside, and who, ascertaining that he was a new-comer, seemed disposed to do the honours of the place. He was not daunted by the reserve native to Lemuel, or by that distrust of strangers which experience had so soon taught him. He addressed him promptly as mate, and told him that the high, narrow, three-sided tabling in the middle of the room was where they would get their breakfast, if they lived.

“And I guess I shall live,” he said. “I notice I ‘most always live till breakfast-time, whatever else I do, or I don’t do; but sometimes it don’t seem as if I could saw my way through that quarter of a cord of wood.” At a glance of inquiry which Lemuel could not forbear, he continued: “What I mean by a quarter of a cord of wood is that they let you exercise that much free in the morning, before they give you your breakfast: it’s the doctor’s orders. This used to be a school-house, but it’s in better business now. They got a kitchen under here, that beats the Parker House; you’ll smell it pretty soon. No whacking on the knuckles here any more. All serene, I tell you. You’ll see. I don’t know how I should got along without this institution, and I tell the manager so, every time I see him. That’s him, hollering ‘Next,’ out of that room there. It’s a name he gives all of us; he knows it’s a name we’ll answer to. Don’t you forget it when it comes your turn.”

He was younger than Lemuel, apparently, but his swarthy, large-mouthed, droll eyed face affirmed the experience of a sage. He wore a blue flannel shirt, with loose trousers belted round his waist, and he crushed a soft felt hat between his hands; his hair was clipped close to his skull, and as he rubbed it now and then it gave out a pleasant rasping sound.

The tramps disappeared in the order of their vicinity to the manager’s door, and it came in time to this boy and Lemuel.

“You come along with me,” he said, “and do as I do.” When they entered the presence of the manager, who sat at a desk, Lemuel’s guide nodded to him, and handed over his order for a bed.

“Ever been here before?” asked the manager, as if going through the form for a joke.

“Never.” He took a numbered card which the manager gave him, and stood aside to wait for Lemuel, who made the same answer to the same question, and received his numbered card.

“Now,” said the young fellow, as they passed out of another door, “we ain’t either of us ‘Next,’ any more. I’m Thirty-nine, and you’re Forty, and don’t you forget it. All right, boss,” he called back to the manager; “I’ll take care of him! This way,” he said to Lemuel. “The reason why I said I’d never been here before,” he explained on the way down, “was because you got to say something, when he asks you. Most of ’em says last fall or last year, but I say never, because it’s just as true, and he seems to like it better. We’re going down to the dressing-room now, and then we’re going to take a bath. Do you know why?”

“No,” said Lemuel.

“Because we can’t help it. It’s the doctor’s orders. He thinks it’s the best thing you can do, just before you go to bed.”

The basement was brightly lighted with gas everywhere, and a savoury odour of onion-flavoured broth diffused itself through the whole place.

“Smell it? You might think that was supper, but it ain’t. It’s breakfast. You got a bath and a night’s rest as well as the quarter of a cord of wood between you and that stew. Hungry?”

“Not very,” said Lemuel faintly.

“Because if you say you are they’ll give you all the bread and water you can hold, now. But I ruther wait.”

“I guess I don’t want anything to-night,” said Lemuel, shrinking from the act of beggary.

“Well, I guess you won’t lose anything in the long run,” said the other. “You’ll make it up at breakfast.”

They turned into a room where eight or ten tramps were undressing; some of them were old men, quite sodden and stupefied with a life of vagrancy and privation; others were of a dull or cunning middle-age, two or three were as young as Lemuel and his partner, and looked as if they might be poor fellows who had found themselves in a strange city without money or work. But it was against them that they had known where to come for a night’s shelter, Lemuel felt.

There were large iron hooks hanging from the walls and ceiling, and his friend found the numbers on two of them corresponding to those given Lemuel and himself, and brass checks which they hung around their necks.

“You got to hang your things on that hook, all but your shoes and stockings, and you got to hang on to them, yourself. Forty’s your number, and forty’s your hook, and they give you the clothes off’n it in the morning.”

He led the way through the corridor into a large room where a row of bath-tubs flanked the wall, half of them filled with bathers, who chatted in tones of subdued cheerfulness under the pleasant excitement of unlimited hot and cold water. As each new-comer appeared, a black boy, perched on a windowsill, jumped down and dashed his head from a large bottle which he carried.

“Free shampoo,” explained Lemuel’s mate. “Doctor’s orders. Only you have to do the rubbing yourself. I don’t suppose you need it, but some the pardners here couldn’t sleep without it,” he continued, as Lemuel shrank a little from the bottle, and then submitted. “It’s a regular night-cap.”

The tramps recognised the humour of the explanation by a laugh, intended to be respectful to the establishment in its control, which spread along their line, and the black boy grinned.

“There ain’t anything mean about the Wayfarer’s Hotel,” said the mate, and they all laughed again, a little louder.

Each man, having dried himself from his bath, was given a coarse linen night-gown; sometimes it was not quite whole, but it was always clean; and then he gathered up his shoes and stockings and went out.

“Hold on a minute,” said the mate to Lemuel, when they left the bath-room. “You ought to see the kitchen,” and in his night-gown, with his shoes in his hand, he led Lemuel to the open door which that delicious smell of broth came from. A vast copper-topped boiler was bubbling within, and trying to get its lid off. The odour made Lemuel sick with hunger.

“Refrigerator in the next room,” the mate lectured on. “Best beef-chucks in the market; fish for Fridays — we don’t make any man go against his religion, in this house; pots of butter as big as a cheese, — none of your oleomargarine, — the real thing, every time; potatoes and onions and carrots laying around on the floor; barrels of hard-tack; and bread, like sponge, — bounce you up if you was to jump on it, — baked by the women at the Chardon Street Home — oh, I tell you we do things in style here.”

A man who sat reading a newspaper in the corner looked up sharply. “Hello, there! what’s wanted?”

“Just dropped in to wish you good night, Jimmy,” said Lemuel’s mate.

“You clear out!” said the man good-humouredly, as if to an old acquaintance, who must not be allowed to presume upon his familiarity.

“All right, Jimmy,” said the boy. He set his left hand horizontally on its wrist at his left shoulder and cut the air with it in playful menace as the man dropped his eyes again to his paper. “They’re all just so, in this house,” he explained to Lemuel. “No nonsense, but good-natured. They’re all right. They know me.”

He mounted two flights of stairs in front of Lemuel to a corridor, where an attendant stood examining the numbers on the brass checks hung around tramps’ necks as they came up with their shoes in their hands. He instructed them that the numbers corresponded to the cots they were to occupy, as well as the hooks where their clothes hung. Some of them seemed hardly able to master the facts. They looked wistfully, like cowed animals, into his face as he made the case clear.

Two vast rooms, exquisitely clean, like the whole house, opened on the right and left of the corridor, and presented long phalanxes of cots, each furnished with two coarse blankets, a quilt, and a thin pillow.

“Used to be school-rooms,” said Lemuel’s mate, in a low tone.

“Cots thirty-nine and forty,” said the attendant, looking at their checks. “Right over there, in the corner.”

“Come along,” said the mate, leading the way, with the satisfaction of an habitu�. “Best berth in the room, and about the last they reach in the morning. You see, they got to take us as we come, when they call us, and the last feller in at night’s the first feller out in the morning, because his bed’s the nearest the door.”

He did not pull down the blankets of his cot at once, but stretched himself out in the quilt that covered them. “Cool off a little, first,” he explained. “Well, this is what I call comfort, mate, heigh?”

Lemuel did not answer. He was watching the attendant with a group of tramps who could not find their cots.

“Can’t read, I suppose,” said the mate, a little disdainfully. “Well, look at that old chap, will you!” A poor fellow was fumbling with his blankets, as if he did not know quite how to manage them. The attendant had to come to his help, and tuck him in. “Well, there!” exclaimed the mate, lifting himself on his elbow to admire the scene. “I don’t suppose he’s ever been in a decent bed before. Hayloft’s his style, or a board-pile.” He sank down again, and went on: “Well, you do see all kinds of folks here, that’s a fact. Sorry there ain’t more in to-night, so ‘s to give you a specimen. You ought to be here in the winter. Well, it ain’t so lonesome now, in summer, as it used to be. Sometimes I used to have nearly the whole place to myself, summer nights, before they got to passin’ these laws against tramps in the country, and lockin’ ’em up when they ketched ‘em. That drives ’em into the city summers, now; because they’re always sure of a night’s rest and a day’s board here if they ask for it. But winter’s the time. You’ll see all these cots full, then. They let on the steam-heat, and it’s comfortable; and it’s always airy and healthy.” The vast room was, in fact, perfectly ventilated, and the poor who housed themselves that night, and many well-to-do sojourners in hotels, had reason to envy the vagrants their free lodging.

The mate now got under his quilt, and turned his face toward Lemuel, with one hand under his cheek. “They don’t let everybody into this room, ‘s I was tellin’ ye. This room is for the big-bugs, you know. Sometimes a drunk will get in, though, in spite of everything. Why, I’ve seen a drunk at the station-house, when I’ve been gettin’ my order for a bed, stiffen up so ‘t the captain himself thought he was sober; and then I’ve followed him round here, wobblin’ and corkscrewin’ all over the sidewalk; and then I’ve seen him stiffen up in the office again, and go through his bath like a little man, and get into bed as drunk as a fish; and may be wake up in the night with the man with the poker after him, and make things hum. Well, sir, one night there was a drunk in here that thought the man with the poker was after him, and he just up and jumped out of this window behind you — three stories from the ground.”

Lemuel could not help lifting himself in bed to look at it. “Did it kill him?” he asked. “Kill him? No! You can’t kill a drunk. One night there was a drunk got loose, here, and he run downstairs into the wood-yard, and he got hold of an axe down there, and it took five men to get that axe away from that drunk. He was goin’ for the snakes.”

“The snakes,” repeated Lemuel. “Are there snakes in the wood-yard?”

The other gave a laugh so loud that the attendant called out, “Less noise over there!”

“I’ll tell you about the snakes in the morning,” said the mate; and he turned his face away from Lemuel.

The stories of the drunks had made Lemuel a little anxious; but he thought that attendant would keep a sharp lookout, so that there would not really be much danger. He was very drowsy from his bath, in spite of the hunger that tormented him, but he tried to keep awake and think what he should do after breakfast.

IX.

“Come, turn out!” said a voice in his ear, and he started up, to see the great dormitory where he had fallen asleep empty of all but himself and his friend.

“Make out a night’s rest?” asked the latter. “Didn’t I tell you we’d be the last up? Come along!” He preceded Lemuel, still drowsy, down the stairs into the room where they had undressed, and where the tramps were taking each his clothes from their hook, and hustling them on.

“What time is it, Johnny?” asked Lemuel’s mate of the attendant. “I left my watch under my pillow.”

“Five o’clock,” said the man, helping the poor old fellow who had not known how to get into bed to put on his clothes.

“Well, that’s a pretty good start,” said the other. He finished his toilet by belting himself around the waist, and “Come along, mate,” he said to Lemuel. “I’ll show you the way to the tool-room.”

He led him through the corridor into a chamber of the basement where there were bright rows of wood-saws, and ranks of saw-horses, with heaps of the latter in different stages of construction. “House self-supporting, as far as it can. We don’t want to be beholden to anybody if we can help it. We make our own horses here; but we can’t make our saws, or we would. Ever had much practice with the woodsaw?”

“No,” said Lemuel, with a throb of home-sickness, that brought back the hacked log behind the house, and the axe resting against it; “we always chopped our stove-wood.”

“Yes, that’s the way in the country. Well, now,” said the other, “I’ll show you how to choose a saw. Don’t you be took in by no new saw because it’s bright, and looks pretty. You want to take a saw that’s been filed, and filed away till it ain’t more ‘n an inch and a half deep; and then you want to tune it up, just so, — like a banjo — not too tight, and not too slack, — and then it’ll slip through a stick o’ wood like — lyin’.” He selected a saw, and put it in order for Lemuel. “There!” He picked out another. “Here’s my old stand-by!” He took up a saw-horse, at random, to indicate that one need not be critical in that, and led through the open door into the wood-yard, where a score or two of saws were already shrilling and wheezing through the wood.

It was a wide and lofty shed, with piles of cord-wood and slabs at either end, and walled on the farther side with kindling, sawed, split, and piled up with admirable neatness. The place gave out the sweet smell of the woods from the bark of the logs and from the fresh section of their grain. A double rank of saw-horses occupied the middle space, and beside each horse lay a quarter of a cord of wood, at which the men were toiling in sullen silence for the most part, only exchanging a grunt or snarl of dissatisfaction with one another.

“Morning, mates,” said Lemuel’s friend cheerfully, as he entered the shed, and put his horse down beside one of the piles. “Thought we’d look in and see how you was gettin’ along. Just stepped round from the Parker House while our breakfast was a-cookin’. Hope you all rested well?”

The men paused, with their saws at different slopes in the wood, and looked round. The night before, in the nakedness in which Lemuel had first seen them, the worst of them had the inalienable comeliness of nature, and their faces, softened by their relation to their bodies, were not so bad; they were not so bad, looking from their white nightgowns; but now, clad in their filthy rags, and caricatured out of all native dignity by their motley and misshapen attire, they were a hideous gang, and all the more hideous for the grin that overspread their stubbly muzzles at the boy’s persiflage.

“Don’t let me interrupt you, fellows,” he said, flinging a log upon his horse, and dashing his saw gaily into it. “Don’t mind me! I know you hate to lose a minute of this fun; I understand just how you feel about it, and I don’t want you to stand upon ceremony with me. Treat me just like one of yourselves, gents. This beechwood is the regular Nova Scotia thing, ain’t it? Tough and knotty! I can’t bear any of your cheap wood-lot stuff from around here. What I want is Nova Scotia wood, every time. Then I feel that I’m gettin’ the worth of my money.” His log dropped apart on each side of his horse, and he put on another. “Well, mates,” he rattled on, “this is lovely, ain’t it? I wouldn’t give up my little quarter of a cord of green Nova Scotia before breakfast for anything; I’ve got into the way of it, and I can’t live without it.”

The tramps chuckled at these ironies, and the attendant who looked into the yard now and then did not interfere with them.

The mate went through his stint as rapidly as he talked, and he had nearly finished before Lemuel had half done. He did not offer to help him, but he delayed the remnant of his work, and waited for him to catch up, talking all the while with gay volubility, joking this one and that, and keeping the whole company as cheerful as it was in their dull, sodden nature to be. He had a floating eye that harmonised with his queer, mobile face, and played round on the different figures, but mostly upon Lemuel’s dogged, rustic industry as if it really amused him.

“What’s your lay, after breakfast?” he asked, as they came to the last log together.

“Lay?” repeated Lemuel.

“What you goin’ to do?”

“I don’t know; I can’t tell yet.”

“You know,” said the other, “you can come back here, and get your dinner, if you want to saw wood for it from ten till twelve, and you get your supper if you’ll saw from five to six.”

“Are you going to do that?” asked Lemuel cautiously.

“No, sir,” said the other; “I can’t spare the time. I’m goin’ to fill up for all day, at breakfast, and then I’m goin’ up to lay round on the Common till it’s time to go to the Police Court; and when that’s over I’m goin’ back to the Common ag’in, and lay round the rest of the day. I hain’t got any leisure for no such nonsense as wood-sawin’. I don’t mind the work, but I hate to waste the time. It’s the way with most o’ the pardners, unless it’s the green hands. That so, pards?”

Some of them had already gone in to breakfast; the smell of the stew came out to the wood-yard through the open door. Lemuel and his friend finished their last stick at the same time, and went in together, and found places side by side at the table in the waiting-room. The attendant within its oblong was serving the men with heavy quart bowls of the steaming broth. He brought half a loaf of light, elastic bread with each, and there were platters of hard-tack set along the board, which every one helped himself from freely, and broke into his broth.

“Morning, Jimmy,” said the mate, as the man brought him and Lemuel their portions. “I hate to have the dining-room chairs off a paintin’ when there’s so much style about everything else, and I’ve got a visitor with me. But I tell him he’ll have to take us as he finds us, and stand it this mornin’.” He wasted no more words on his joke, but plunging his large tin spoon into his bowl, kept his breath to cool his broth, blowing upon it with easy grace, and swallowing it at a tremendous rate, though Lemuel, after following his example, still found it so hot that it brought the tears into his eyes. It was delicious, and he was ravenous from his twenty-four hours’ fast, but his companion was scraping the bottom of his bowl before Lemuel had got half-way down, and he finished his second as Lemuel finished his first.

“Just oncet more for both of us, Jimmy,” he said, pushing his bowl across the board; and when the man brought them back he said, “Now, I’m goin’ to take it easy and enjoy myself. I can’t never seem to get the good of it, till about the third or fourth bowl. Too much of a hurry.”

“Do they give you four bowls?” gasped Lemuel in astonishment.

“They give you four barrels, if you can hold it,” replied the other proudly; “and some the mates can, pretty near. They got an awful tank, as a general rule, the pards has. There ain’t anything mean about this house. They don’t scamp the broth, and they don’t shab the measure. I do wish you could see that refrigerator, oncet. Never been much at sea, have you, mate?”

Lemuel said he had never been at sea at all.

The other leaned forward with his elbows on each side of his bowl, and lazily broke his hard-tack into it. “Well, I have. I was shipped when I was about eleven years old by a shark that got me drunk. I wanted to ship, but I wanted to ship on an American vessel for New Orleans. First thing I knowed I turned up on a Swedish brig bound for Venice. Ever been to It’ly?”

“No,” said Lemuel.

“Well, I hain’t but oncet. Oncet is enough for me. I run away, while I was in Venice, and went ashore — if you can call it ashore; it’s all water, and you got to go round in boats: gondolas they call ’em there — and went to see the American counsul, and told him I was an American boy, and tried to get him to get me off. But he couldn’t do anything. If you ship under the Swedish flag you’re a Swede, and the whole United States couldn’t get you off. If I’d ‘a’ shipped under the American flag I’d ‘a’ been an American, I don’t care if I was born in Hottentot. That’s what the counsul said. I never want to see that town ag’in. I used to hear songs about Venice— ‘Beautiful Venice, Bride of the Sea;’ but I think it’s a kind of a hole of a place. Well, what I started to say was that when I turn up in Boston, now, — and I most generally do, — I don’t go to no sailor boardin’-house; I break for the Wayfarer’s Lodge, every time. It’s a temperance house, and they give you the worth o’ your money.”

“Come! Hurry up!” said the attendant. He wiped the table impatiently with his towel, and stood waiting for Lemuel and the other to finish. All the rest had gone.

“Don’t you be too fresh, pard,” said the mate, with the effect of standing upon his rights. “Guess if you was on your third bowl, you wouldn’t hurry.”

The attendant smiled. “Don’t you want to lend us a hand with the dishes?” he asked.

“Who’s sick?” asked the other in his turn.

“Johnny’s got a day off.”

The boy shook his head. “No; I couldn’t. If it was a case of sickness, of course I’d do it. But I couldn’t spare the time; I couldn’t really. Why, I ought to be up on the Common now.”

Lemuel had listened with a face of interest.

“Don’t you want to make half a dollar, young feller?” asked the attendant.

“Yes, I do,” said Lemuel eagerly.

“Know how to wash dishes?”

“Yes,” answered the boy, not ashamed of his knowledge, as the boy of another civilisation might have been. Nothing more distinctly marks the rustic New England civilisation than the taming of its men to the performance of certain domestic offices elsewhere held dishonourably womanish. The boy learns not only to milk and to keep the milk cans clean, but to churn, to wash dishes, and to cook.

“Come around here, then,” said the attendant, and Lemuel promptly obeyed.

“Well, now,” said his mate, “that’s right. I’d do it myself, if I had the time.” He pulled his soft wool hat out of his hip pocket. “Well, good morning, pards. I don’t know as I shall see you again much before night.” Lemuel was lifting a large tray, heavy with empty broth-bowls. “What time did you say it was, Jimmy?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“Well, I just got time to get there,” said the other, putting on his hat, and pushing out of the door.

At the moment Lemuel was lifting his tray of empty broth-bowls, Mr. Sewell was waking for the early quarter-to-eight breakfast, which he thought it right to make — not perhaps as an example to his parishioners, most of whom had the leisure to lie later, but as a sacrifice, not too definite, to the lingering ideal of suffering. He could not work before breakfast — his delicate digestion forbade that — or he would have risen still earlier, and he employed the twenty minutes he had between his bath and his breakfast in skimming the morning paper.

Just at present Mr. Sewell was taking two morning papers: the Advertiser which he had always taken, and a cheap little one-cent paper, which had just been started, and which he had subscribed for experimentally, with the vague impression that he ought to encourage the young men who had established it. He did not like it very well. It was made up somewhat upon the Western ideal, and dealt with local matters in a manner that was at once a little more lively and a little more intimate than he had been used to. But before he had quite made up his mind to stop it, his wife had come to like it on that very account. She said it was interesting. On this point she used her conscience a little less actively than usual, and he had to make her observe that to be interesting was not the whole duty of journalism. It had become a matter of personal pride with them respectively to attack and defend The Sunrise, as I shall call the little sheet, though that was not the name; and Mr. Sewell had lately made some gain through the character of the police reports, which The Sunrise had been developing into a feature. It was not that offensive matters were introduced; the worst cases were in fact rather blinked, but Sewell insisted that the tone of flippant gaiety with which many facts, so serious, so tragic for their perpetrators and victims, were treated was odious. He objected to the court being called a Mill, and prisoners Grists, and the procedure Grinding; he objected to the familiar name of Uncle for the worthy gentleman to whose care certain offenders were confided on probation. He now read that department of The Sunrise the first thing every morning, in the hope of finding something with which to put Mrs. Sewell hopelessly in the wrong, but this morning a heading in the foreign news of the Advertiser caught his eye, and he laid The Sunrise aside to read at the breakfast-table. His wife came down in a cotton dress, as a tribute to the continued warmth of the weather, and said that she had not called the children, because it was Saturday, and they might as well have their sleep out. He liked to see her in that dress; it had a leafy rustling that was pleasant to his ear, and as she looked into the library he gaily put out his hand, which she took, and suffered herself to be drawn toward him. Then she gave him a kiss, somewhat less business-like and preoccupied than usual.

“Well, you’ve got Lemuel Barker off your mind at last,” she divined, in recognition of her husband’s cheerfulness.

“Yes, he’s off,” admitted Sewell.

“I hope he’ll stay in Willoughby Pastures after this. Of course it puts an end to our going there next summer.” “Oh, I don’t know,” Sewell feebly demurred.

“I do,” said his wife, but not despising his insincerity enough to insist that he did also. The mellow note of an apostle’s bell — the gift of an aesthetic parishioner — came from below, and she said, “Well, there’s breakfast, David,” and went before him down the stairs.

He brought his papers with him. It would have been her idea of heightened cosiness, at this breakfast, which they had once a week alone together, not to have the newspapers, but she saw that he felt differently, and after a number of years of married life a woman learns to let her husband have his own way in some unimportant matters. It was so much his nature to have some sort of reading always in hand, that he was certainly more himself, and perhaps more companionable with his papers than without them.

She merely said, “Let me take the Sunrise,” when she had poured out his coffee, and he had helped her to cantaloupe and steak, and spread his Advertiser beside his plate. He had the Sunrise in his lap.

“No, you may have the Advertiser” he said, handing it over the table to her. “I was down first, and I got both the papers. I’m not really obliged to make any division, but I’ve seen the Advertiser, and I’m willing to behave unselfishly. If you’re very impatient for the police report in the Sunrise I’ll read it aloud for you. I think that will be a very good test of its quality, don’t you?”

He opened the little sheet, and smiled teasingly at his wife, who said, “Yes, read it aloud; I’m not at all ashamed of it.”

She put the Advertiser in her lap, and leaned defiantly forward, while she stirred her coffee, and Sewell unfolded the little sheet, and glanced up and down its columns. “Go on! If you can’t find it, I can.”

“Never mind! Here it is,” said Sewell, and he began to read —

“‘The mill opened yesterday morning with a smaller number of grists than usual, but they made up in quality what they lacked in quantity.’

“Our friend’s metaphor seems to have weakened under him a little,” commented Sewell, and then he pursued —

“‘A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched—’

“Come, now, Lucy! You’ll admit that this is horrible?” he broke off.

“No,” said his wife, “I will admit nothing of the kind. It’s flippant, I’ll allow. Go on!”

“I can’t,” said Sewell; but he obeyed.

“‘A reasonable supply of drunks were despatched, and an habitual drunk, in the person of a burly dame from Tipperary, who pleaded not guilty and then urged the “poor childer” in extenuation, was sent down the harbour for three months; Uncle Cook had been put in charge of a couple of young frailties whose hind name was woman—’

“How do you like that, my dear?” asked Sewell exultantly.

Mrs. Sewell looked grave, and then burst into a shocked laugh. “You must stop that paper, David! I can’t have it about for the children to get hold of. But it is funny, isn’t it? That will do—”

“No, I think you’d better have it all, now. There can’t be anything worse. It’s funny, yes, with that truly infernal drollery which the newspaper wits seem to have the art of.” He read on—”— ‘when a case was called that brought the breath of clover blossoms and hay-seed into the sultry court-room, and warmed the cockles of the habitu�s’ toughened pericardiums with a touch of real poetry. This was a case of assault, with intent to rob, in which a lithe young blonde, answering to the good old Puritanic name of Statira Dudley, was the complainant, and the defendant an innocent-looking, bucolic youth, yclept—’”

Sewell stopped and put his hand to his forehead.

“What is it, David?” demanded his wife. “Why don’t you go on? Is it too scandalous?”

“No, no,” murmured the minister.

“Well?”

“I can’t go on. But you must read it, Lucy,” he said, in quite a passion of humility. “And you must try to be merciful. That poor boy — that—”

He handed the paper to his wife, and made no attempt to escape from judgment, but sat submissive while she read the report of Lemuel’s trial. The story was told throughout in the poetico-jocular spirit of the opening sentences; the reporter had felt the simple charm of the affair, only to be ashamed of it and the more offensive about it.

When she had finished Mrs. Sewell did not say anything. She merely looked at her husband, who looked really sick.

At last he said, making an effort to rise from his chair, “I must go and see him, I suppose.”

“Yes, if you can find him,” responded his wife, with a sigh.

“Find him?” echoed Sewell.

“Yes. Goodness knows what more trouble the wretched creature’s got into by this time. You saw that he was acquitted, didn’t you?” she demanded, in answer to her husband’s stare.

“No, I didn’t. I supposed he was convicted, of course.”

“Well, you see it isn’t so bad as it might be,” she said, using a pity which she did not perhaps altogether feel. “Eat your breakfast now, David, and then go and try to look him up.”

“Oh, I don’t want any breakfast,” pleaded the minister.

He offered to rise again, but she motioned him down in his chair. “David, you shall! I’m not going to have you going about all day with a headache. Eat! And then when you’ve finished your breakfast, go and find out which station that officer Baker belongs to, and he can tell you something about the boy, if any one can.”

Sewell made what shift he could to grasp these practical ideas, and he obediently ate of whatever his wife bade him. She would not let him hurry his breakfast in the least, and when he had at last finished, she said, “Now you can go, David. And when you’ve found the boy, don’t you let him out of your sight again till you’ve put him aboard the train for Willoughby Pastures, and seen the train start out of the depot with him. Never mind your sermon. I will be setting down the heads of a sermon, while you’re gone, that will do you good, if you write it out, whether it helps any one else or not.”

Sewell was not so sure of that. He had no doubt that his wife would set down the heads of a powerful sermon, but he questioned whether any discourse, however potent, would have force to benefit such an abandoned criminal as he felt himself, in walking down his brown-stone steps, and up the long brick sidewalk of Bolingbroke Street toward the Public Garden. The beds of geraniums and the clumps of scarlet-blossomed salvia in the little grass-plots before the houses, which commonly flattered his eye with their colour, had a suggestion of penal fires in them now, that needed no lingering superstition in his nerves to realise something very like perdition for his troubled soul. It was not wickedness he had been guilty of, but he had allowed a good man to be made the agency of suffering, and he was sorely to blame, for he had sinned against himself. This was what his conscience said, and though his reason protested against his state of mind as a phase of the religious insanity which we have all inherited in some measure from Puritan times, it could not help him. He went along involuntarily framing a vow that if Providence would mercifully permit him to repair the wrong he had done, he would not stop at any sacrifice to get that unhappy boy back to his home, but would gladly take any open shame or obloquy upon himself in order to accomplish this.

He met a policeman on the bridge of the Public Garden, and made bold to ask him at once if he knew an officer named Baker, and which station he could be found at. The policeman was over-rich in the acquaintance of two officers of the name of Baker, and he put his hand on Sewell’s shoulder, in the paternal manner of policemen when they will be friendly, and advised him to go first to the Neponset Street station, to which one of these Bakers was attached, and inquire there first. “Anyway, that’s what I should do in your place.”

Sewell was fulsomely grateful, as we all are in the like case, and at the station he used an urbanity with the captain which was perhaps not thrown away upon him, but which was certainly disproportioned to the trouble he was asking him to take in saying whether he knew where he could find officer Baker.

“Yes, I do,” said the captain. “You can find him in bed, upstairs, but I’d rather you wouldn’t wake a man off duty, if you don’t have to, especially if you don’t know he’s the one. What’s wanted?”

Sewell stopped to say that the captain was quite right, and then he explained why he wished to see officer Baker.

The captain listened with nods of his head at the names and facts given. “Guess you won’t have to get Baker up for that. I can tell you what there is to tell. I don’t know where your young man is now, but I gave him an order for a bed at the Wayfarer’s Lodge last night, and I guess he slept there. You a friend of his?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, much questioning inwardly whether he could be truly described as such. “I wish to befriend him,” he added savingly. “I knew him at home, and I am sure of his innocence.”

“Oh, I guess he’s innocent enough,” said the captain. “Well, now, I tell you what you do, if you want to befriend him; you get him home quick as you can.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, helpless to resent the officer’s authoritative and patronising tone. “That’s what I wish to do. Do you suppose he’s at the Wayfarer’s Lodge now?” asked Sewell.

“Can’t say,” said the captain, tilting himself back in his chair, and putting his quill toothpick between his lips like a cigarette. “The only way is to go and see.”

“Thank you very much,” said the minister, accepting his dismissal meekly, as a man vowed to ignominy should, but feeling keenly that he was dismissed, and dismissed in disgrace.

At the Lodge he was received less curtly. The manager was there with a long morning’s leisure before him, and disposed to friendliness that Sewell found absurdly soothing. He turned over the orders for beds delivered by the vagrants the night before, and “Yes,” he said, coming to Lemuel’s name, “he slept here; but nobody knows where he is by this time. Wait a bit, sir!” he added to Sewell’s fallen countenance. “There was one of the young fellows stayed to help us through with the dishes, this morning. I’ll have him up; or may be you’d like to go down and take a look at our kitchen? You’ll find him there if it’s the one. Here’s our card, We can supply you with all sorts of firewood at less cost than the dealers, and you’ll be helping the poor fellows to earn an honest bed and breakfast. This way, sir!”

Sewell promised to buy his wood there, put the card respectfully into his pocket, and followed the manager downstairs, and through the basement to the kitchen. He arrived just as Lemuel was about to lift a trayful of clean soup-bowls, to carry it upstairs. After a glance at the minister, he stood still with dropped eyes.

Sewell did not know in what form to greet the boy on whom he had unwillingly brought so much evil, and he found the greater difficulty in deciding as he saw Lemuel’s face hardening against him.

“Barker!” he said at last. “I’m very glad to find you — I have been very anxious to find you.”

Lemuel made no sign of sympathy, but stood still in his long check apron, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbow, and the minister was obliged to humble himself still further to this figure of lowly obstinacy.

“I should like to speak with you. Can I speak with you a few moments?”

The manager politely stepped into the storeroom, and affected to employ himself there, leaving Lemuel and the minister alone together.

X.

Sewell lost no time. “I want you to go home, Barker. I feel that I am wholly to blame, and greatly to blame, for your coming to Boston with the expectation that brought you; and that I am indirectly responsible for all the trouble that has befallen you since you came. I want to be the means of your getting home, in any way you can let me.”

This was a very different way of talking from the smooth superiority of address which the minister had used with him the other day at his own house. Lemuel was not insensible to the atonement offered him, and it was not from sulky stubbornness that he continued silent, and left the minister to explore the causes of his reticence unaided.

“I will go home with you, if you like,” pursued the minister, though his mind misgave him that this was an extreme which Mrs. Sewell would not have justified him in. “I will go with you, and explain all the circumstances to your friends, in case there should be any misunderstanding — though in that event I should have to ask you to be my guest till Monday.” Here the unhappy man laid hold of the sheep, which could not bring him greater condemnation than the lamb.

“I guess they won’t know anything about it,” said Lemuel, with whatever intention.

It seemed hardened indifference to the minister, and he felt it his disagreeable duty to say, “I am afraid they will. I read of it in the newspaper this morning, and I’m afraid that an exaggerated report of your misfortunes will reach Willoughby Pastures, and alarm your family.”

A faint pallor came over the boy’s face, and he stood again in his impenetrable, rustic silence. The voice that finally spoke from, it said, “I guess I don’t want to go home, then.”

“You must go home!” said the minister, with more of imploring than imperiousness in his command. “What will they make of your prolonged absence?”

“I sent a postal to mother this morning. They lent me one.”

“But what will you do here, without work and without means? I wish you to go home with me — I feel responsible for you — and remain with me till you can hear from your mother. I’m sorry you came to Boston — it’s no place for you, as you must know by this time, and I am sure your mother will agree with me in desiring your return.”

“I guess I don’t want to go home,” said Lemuel.

“Are you afraid that an uncharitable construction will be placed upon what has happened to you by your neighbours?” Lemuel did not answer. “I assure you that all that can be arranged. I will write to your pastor, and explain it fully. But in any event,” continued Sewell, “it is your duty to yourself and your friends to go home and live it down. It would be your duty to do so, even if you had been guilty of wrong, instead of the victim of misfortune.”

“I don’t know,” said Lemuel, “as I want to go home and be the laughing-stock.”

Against this point Sewell felt himself helpless. He could not pretend that the boy would not be ridiculous in the eyes of his friends, and all the more ridiculous because so wholly innocent. He could only say, “That is a thing you must bear,” and then it occurred to him to ask, “Do you feel that it is right to let your family meet the ridicule alone?”

“I guess nobody will speak to mother about it, more than once,” said Lemuel, with a just pride in his mother’s powers of retort. A woman who, unaided and alone, had worn the Bloomer costume for twenty years in the heart of a commentative community like Willoughby Pastures, was not likely to be without a cutting tongue for her defence.

“But your sister,” urged Sewell; “your brother-in-law,” he feebly added.

“I guess they will have to stand it,” replied Lemuel.

The minister heaved a sigh of hopeless perplexity. “What do you propose to do, then? You can’t remain here without means. Do you expect to sell your poetry?” he asked, goaded to the question by a conscience peculiarly sore on that point.

It made Lemuel blush. “No, I don’t expect to sell it, now. They took it out of my pocket on the Common.”

“I am glad of that,” said the minister as simply, “and I feel bound to warn you solemnly, that there is absolutely no hope for you in that direction.”

Lemuel said nothing.

The minister stood baffled again. After a bad moment he asked, “Have you anything particular in view?”

“I don’t know as I have.”

“How long can you remain here?”

“I don’t know exactly.”

Sewell turned and followed the manager into the refrigerator room, where he had remained patiently whistling throughout this interview.

When he came back, Lemuel had carried one trayful of bowls upstairs, and returned for another load, which he was piling carefully up for safe transportation.

“The manager tells me,” said Sewell, “that practically you can stay here as long as you like, if you work, but he doesn’t think it desirable you should remain, nor do I. But I wish to find you here again, when I come back. I have something in view for you.”

This seemed to be a question, and Lemuel said, “All right,” and went on piling up his bowls. He added, “I shouldn’t want you to take a great deal of trouble.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble,” groaned the minister. “Then I may depend upon seeing you here any time during the day?”

“I don’t know as I’m going away,” Lemuel admitted.

“Well, then, good-bye, for the present,” said Sewell, and after speaking again to the manager, and gratefully ordering some kindling which he did not presently need, he went out, and took his way homeward. But he stopped half a block short of his own door, and rang at Miss Vane’s. To his perturbed and eager spirit, it seemed nothing short of a divine mercy that she should be at home. If he had not been a man bent on repairing his wrong at any cost to others, he would hardly have taken the step he now contemplated without first advising with his wife, who, he felt sure, would have advised against it. His face did not brighten at all when Miss Vane came briskly in, with the “How d’ye do?” which he commonly found so cheering. She pulled up the blind and saw his knotted brow.

“What is the matter? You look as if you had got Lemuel Barker back on your hands.”

“I have,” said the minister briefly.

Miss Vane gave a wild laugh of delight. “You don’t mean it!” she sputtered, sitting down before him, and peering into his face. “What do you mean?”

Sewell was obliged to possess Miss Vane’s entire ignorance of all the facts in detail. From point to point he paused; he began really to be afraid she would do herself an injury with her laughing.

She put her hand on his arm and bowed her head forward, with her face buried in her handkerchief. “What — what — do you suppose-pose — they did with the po-po-poem they stole from him?”

“Well, one thing I’m sure they didn’t do,” said Sewell bitterly. “They didn’t read it.”

Miss Vane hid her face in her handkerchief, and then plucked it away, and shrieked again. She stopped, with the sudden calm that succeeds such a paroxysm, and, “Does Mrs. Sewell know all about this?” she panted.

“She knows everything, except my finding him in the dish-washing department of the Wayfarer’s Lodge,” said Sewell gloomily, “and my coming to you.”

“Why do you come to me?” asked Miss Vane, her face twitching and her eyes brimming.

“Because,” answered Sewell, “I’d rather not go to her till I have done something.”

Miss Vane gave way again, and Sewell sat regarding her ruefully.

“What do you expect me to do?” She looked at him over her handkerchief, which she kept pressed against her mouth.

“I haven’t the least idea what I expected you to do. I expected you to tell me. You have an inventive mind.”

Miss Vane shook her head. Her eyes grew serious, and after a moment she said, “I’m afraid I’m not equal to Lemuel Barker. Besides,” she added, with a tinge of trouble, “I have my problem, already.”

“Yes,” said the minister sympathetically. “How has the flower charity turned out?”

“She went yesterday with one of the ladies, and carried flowers to the city hospital. But she wasn’t at all satisfied with the result. She said the patients were mostly disgusting old men that hadn’t been shaved. I think that now she wants to try her flowers on criminals. She says she wishes to visit the prisons.”

Sewell brightened forlornly. “Why not let her reform Barker?”

This sent Miss Vane off again. “Poor boy!” she sighed, when she had come to herself. “No, there’s nothing that I can do for him, except to order some firewood from his benefactors.”

“I did that,” said Sewell. “But I don’t see how it’s to help Barker exactly.”

“I would gladly join in a public subscription to send him home. But you say he won’t go home?”

“He won’t go home,” sighed the minister. “He’s determined to stay. I suspect he would accept employment, if it were offered him in the right spirit.”

Miss Vane shook her head. “There’s nothing I can think of except shovelling snow. And as yet it’s rather warm October weather.”

“There’s certainly no snow to shovel,” admitted Sewell. He rose disconsolately. “Well, there’s nothing for it, I suppose, but to put him down at the Christian Union, and explain his checkered career to everybody who proposes to employ him.”

Miss Vane could not keep the laughter out of her eyes; she nervously tapped her lips with her handkerchief, to keep it from them. Suddenly she halted Sewell, in his dejected progress toward the door. “I might give him my furnace?”

“Furnace?” echoed Sewell.

“Yes. Jackson has ‘struck’ for twelve dollars a month, and at present there is a ‘lock-out,’ — I believe that’s what it’s called. And I had determined not to yield as long as the fine weather lasted. I knew I should give in at the first frost. I will take Barker now, if you think he can manage the furnace.”

“I’ve no doubt he can. Has Jackson really struck?” Miss Vane nodded. “He hasn’t said anything to me about it.”

“He probably intends to make special terms to the clergy. But he told me he was putting up the rates on all his ‘famblies’ this winter.”

“If he puts them up on me, I will take Barker too,” said the minister boldly. “If he will come,” he added, with less courage. “Well, I will go round to the Lodge, and see what he thinks of it. Of course, he can’t live upon ten dollars a month, and I must look him up something besides.”

“That’s the only thing I can think of at present,” said Miss Vane.

“Oh, you’re indefinitely good to think of so much,” said Sewell. “You must excuse me if my reception of your kindness has been qualified by the reticence with which Barker received mine, this morning.”

“Oh, do tell me about it!” cried Miss Vane.

“Sometime I will. But I can assure you it was such as to make me shrink from another interview. I don’t know but Barker may fling your proffered furnace in my teeth. But I’m sure we both mean well. And I thank you, all the same. Good-bye.”

“Poor Mr. Sewell!” said Miss Vane, following him to the door. “May I run down and tell Mrs. Sewell?”

“Not yet,” said the minister sadly. He was too insecure of Barker’s reception to be able to enjoy the joke.

When he got back to the Wayfarer’s Lodge, whither he made himself walk in penance, he found Lemuel with a book in his hand, reading, while the cook stirred about the kitchen, and the broth, which he had well under way for the mid-day meal, lifted the lid of its boiler from time to time and sent out a joyous whiff of steam. The place had really a cosiness of its own, and Sewell began to fear that his victim had been so far corrupted by its comfort as to be unwilling to leave the Refuge. He had often seen the subtly disastrous effect of bounty, and it was one of the things he trembled for in considering the question of public aid to the poor. Before he addressed Barker, he saw him entered upon the dire life of idleness and dependence, partial or entire, which he had known so many Americans even willing to lead since the first great hard times began; and he spoke to him with the asperity of anticipative censure.

“Barker!” he said, and Lemuel lifted his head from the book he was reading. “I have found something for you to do. I still prefer you should go home, and I advise you to do so. But,” he added, at the look that came into Lemuel’s face, “if you are determined to stay, this is the best I can do for you. It isn’t a full support, but it’s something, and you must look about for yourself, and not rest till you’ve found full work, and something better fitted for you. Do you think you can take care of a furnace?”

“Hot air?” asked Lemuel.

“Yes.”

“I guess so. I took care of the church furnace, last winter.”

“I didn’t know you had one,” said the minister, brightening in the ray of hope. “Would you be willing to take care of a domestic furnace — a furnace in a private house?”

Lemuel pondered the proposal in silence. Whatever objections there were to it in its difference from the aims of his ambition in coming to the city of Boston, he kept to himself; and his ignorance of city prejudices and sophistications probably suggested nothing against the honest work to his pride. “I guess I should,” he said at last. “Well, then, come with me.”

Sewell judged it best not to tell him whose furnace he was to take care of; he had an impression that Miss Vane was included in the resentment which Lemuel seemed to cherish toward him. But when he had him at her door, “It’s the lady whom you saw at my house the other day,” he explained. It was then too late for Lemuel to rebel if he had wished, and they went in.

If there was any such unkindness in Lemuel’s breast toward her, it yielded promptly to her tact. She treated him at once, not like a servant, but like a young person, and yet she used a sort of respect for his independence which was soothing to his rustic pride. She put it on the money basis at once; she told him that she should give him ten dollars a month for taking care of the furnace, keeping the sidewalk clear of snow, shovelling the paths in the backyard for the women to get at their clothes-lines, carrying up and down coal and ashes for the grates, and doing errands. She said that this was what she had always paid, and asked him if he understood and were satisfied.

Lemuel answered with one yes to both her questions, and then Miss Vane said that of course till the weather changed they should want no fire in the furnace, but that it might change, any day, and they should begin at once and count October as a full month. She thought he had better go down and look at the furnace and see if it was in order; she had had the pipes cleaned, but perhaps it needed blacking; the cook would show him how it worked. She went with him to the head of the basement stairs, and calling down, “Jane, here is Lemuel, come to look after the furnace,” left him and Jane to complete the acquaintance upon coming in sight of each other, and went back to the minister. He had risen to go, and she gave him her hand, while a smile rippled into laughter on her lips.

“Do you think,” she asked, struggling with her mirth to keep unheard of those below, “that it is quite the work for a literary man?”

“If he is a man,” said Sewell courageously, “the work won’t keep him from being literary.”

Miss Vane laughed at his sudden recovery of spirit, as she had laughed at his dejection; but he did not care. He hurried home, with a sermon kindling in his mind so obviously, that his wife did not detain him beyond a few vital questions, and let him escape from having foisted his burden upon Miss Vane with the simple comment, “Well, we shall see how that will work.”

As once before, Sewell tacitly took a hint from his own experience, and enlarging to more serious facts from it, preached effort in the erring. He denounced mere remorse. Better not feel that at all, he taught; and he declared that what is ordinarily distinguished from remorse as repentance, was equally a mere corrosion of the spirit unless some attempt at reparation went with it. He maintained that though some mischiefs — perhaps most mischiefs — were irreparable so far as restoring the original status was concerned, yet every mischief was reparable in the good-will and the good deed of its perpetrator. Do what you could to retrieve yourself from error, and then, not leave the rest to Providence, but keep doing. The good, however small, must grow if tended and nurtured like a useful plant, as the evil would certainly grow, like a wild and poisonous weed, if left to itself. Sin, he said, was a terrible mystery; one scarcely knew how to deal with it or to attempt to determine its nature; but perhaps — he threw out the thought while warning those who heard him of its danger in some aspects — sin was not wholly an evil. We were so apt in this world of struggle and ambition to become centred solely in ourselves, that possibly the wrong done to another, — the wrong that turned our thoughts from ourselves, and kept them bent in agony and despair upon the suffering we had caused another, and knew not how to mitigate — possibly this wrong, nay, certainly this wrong, was good in disguise. But, returning to his original point, we were to beware how we rested in this despair. In the very extremity of our anguish, our fear, our shame, we were to gird ourselves up to reparation. Strive to do good, he preached; strive most of all to do good to those you have done harm to. His text was “Cease to do evil.”

He finished his sermon during the afternoon, and in the evening his wife said they would run up to Miss Vane’s. Sewell shrank from this a little, with the obscure dread that Lemuel might have turned his back upon good fortune, and abandoned the place offered him, in which case Sewell would have to give a wholly different turn to his sermon; but he consented, as indeed he must. He was as curious as his wife to know how the experiment had resulted.

Miss Vane did not wait to let them ask. “My dear,” she said, kissing Mrs. Sewell and giving her hand to the minister in one, “he is a pearl! And I’ve kept him from mixing his native lustre with Rising Sun Stove Polish by becoming his creditor in the price of a pair of overalls. I had no idea they were so cheap, and you can see that they will fade, with a few washings, to a perfect Millet blue. They were quite his own idea, when he found the furnace needed blacking, and he wanted to use the fifty cents he earned this morning toward the purchase, but I insisted upon advancing the entire dollar myself. Neatness, self-respect, awe-inspiring deference! — he is each and every one of them in person.”

Sewell could not forbear a glance of triumph at his wife.

“You leave us very little to ask,” said that injured woman.

“But I’ve left myself a great deal to tell, my dear,” retorted Miss Vane, “and I propose to keep the floor; though I don’t really know where to begin.”

“I thought you had got past the necessity of beginning,” said Sewell. “We know that the new pearl sweeps clean,” — Miss Vane applauded his mixed metaphor— “and now you might go on from that point.”

“Well, you may think I’m rash,” said Miss Vane, “but I’ve thoroughly made up my mind to keep him.”

“Dear, dear Miss Vane!” cried the minister. “Mrs. Sewell thinks you’re rash, but I don’t. What do you mean by keeping him?”

“Keeping him as a fixture — a permanency — a continuosity.”

“Oh! A continuosity? I know what that is in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but I’m not sure that I follow your meaning exactly.”

“Why, it’s simply this,” said Miss Vane. “I have long secretly wanted the protection of what Jane calls a man-body in the House, and when I saw how Lemuel had blacked the furnace, I knew I should feel as safe with him as with a whole body of troops.”

“Well,” sighed the minister, “you have not been rash, perhaps, but you’ll allow that you’ve been rapid.”

“No,” said Miss Vane, “I won’t allow that. I have simply been intuitive — nothing more. His functions are not decided yet, but it is decided that he is to stay; he’s to sleep in the little room over the L, and in my tranquillised consciousness he’s been there years already.”

“And has Sibyl undertaken Barker’s reformation?” asked Sewell.

“Don’t interrupt! Don’t anticipate! I admit nothing till I come to it. But after I had arranged with Lemuel I began to think of Sibyl.”

“That was like some ladies I have known of,” said Sewell. “You women commit yourselves to a scheme, in order to show your skill in reconciling circumstances to the irretrievable. Well?”

“Don’t interrupt, David!” cried his wife.

“Oh, let him go on,” said Miss Vane. “It’s all very well, taking people into your house on the spur of the moment, and in obedience to a generous impulse, but when you reflect that the object of your good intentions slept in the Wayfarer’s Lodge the night before, and in the police-station the night before that, and enjoys a newspaper celebrity in connection with a case of assault and battery with intent to rob, — why, then you do reflect!”

“Yes,” said Sewell, “that is just the point where I should begin.”

“I thought,” continued Miss Vane, “I had better tell Sibyl all about it, so if by any chance the neighbours’ kitchens should have heard of the case — they read the police reports very carefully in the kitchens — —”

“They do in some drawing-rooms,” interrupted Sewell.

“It’s well for you they do, David,” said his wife. “Your prot�g� would have been in your Refuge still, if they didn’t.”

“I see!” cried the minister. “I shall have to take the Sunrise another week.”

Miss Vane looked from one to the other in sympathetic ignorance, but they did not explain, and she went on.

“And if they should hear Lemuel’s name, and put two and two together, and the talk should get to Sibyl — well, I thought it all over, until the whole thing became perfectly lurid, and I wished Lemuel Barker was back in the depths of Willoughby Pastures — —”

“I understand,” said Sewell. “Go on!”

Miss Vane did so, after stopping to laugh. “It seemed to me I couldn’t wait for Sibyl to get home — she spent the night in Brookline, and didn’t come till five o’clock — to tell her. I began before she had got her hat or gloves off, and she sat down with them on, and listened like a three-years’ child to the Ancient Mariner, but she lost no time when she understood the facts. She went out immediately and stripped the nasturtium bed. If you could have seen it when you came in, there’s hardly a blossom left. She took the decorations of Lemuel’s room into her own hands at once; and if there is any saving power in nasturtiums, he will be a changed person. She says that now the great object is to keep him from feeling that he has been an outcast, and needs to be reclaimed; she says nothing could be worse for him. I don’t know how she knows.”

“Barker might feel that he was disgraced,” said the minister, “but I don’t believe that a whole system of ethics would make him suspect that he needed to be reclaimed.”

“He makes me suspect that I need to be reclaimed,” said Miss Vane, “when he looks at me with those beautiful honest eyes of his.”

Mrs. Sewell asked, “Has he seen the decorations yet?”

“Not at all. They are to steal upon him when he comes in to-night. The gas is to be turned very low, and he is to notice everything gradually, so as not to get the impression that things have been done with a design upon him.” She laughed in reporting these ideas, which were plainly those of the young girl. “Sh!” she whispered at the end.

A tall girl, with a slim vase in her hand, drifted in upon their group like an apparition. She had heavy black eyebrows with beautiful blue eyes under them, full of an intensity unrelieved by humour.

“Aunty!” she said severely, “have you been telling?”

“Only Mr. and Mrs. Sewell, Sibyl,” said Miss Vane. “Their knowing won’t hurt. He’ll never know it.”

“If he hears you laughing, he’ll know it’s about him. He’s in the kitchen, now. He’s come in the back way. Do be quiet.” She had given her hand without other greeting in her preoccupation to each of the Sewells in turn, and now she passed out of the room.

XI.

“What makes Lemuel such a gift,” said Miss Vane, in a talk which she had with Sewell a month later, “is that he is so supplementary.”

“Do you mean just in the supplementary sense of the term?”

“Well, not in the fifth-wheel sense. I mean that he supplements us, all and singular — if you will excuse the legal exactness.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Sewell; “I should like even more exactness.”

“Yes; but before I particularise I must express my general satisfaction in him as a man-body. I had no idea that man bodies in a house were so perfectly admirable.”

“I’ve sometimes feared that we were not fully appreciated,” said Sewell. “Well?”

“The house is another thing with a man-body in it. I’ve often gone without little things I wanted, simply because I hated to make Sarah bring them, and because I hated still worse to go after them, knowing we were both weakly and tired. Now I deny myself nothing. I make Lemuel fetch and carry without remorse, from morning till night. I never knew it before, but the man-body seems never to be tired, or ill, or sleepy.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, “that is often the idea of the woman-body. I’m not sure that it’s correct.”

“Oh, don’t attack it!” implored Miss Vane. “You don’t know what a blessing it is. Then, the man-body never complains, and I can’t see that he expects anything more in an order than the clear understanding of it. He doesn’t expect it to be accounted for in any way; the fact that you say you want a thing is enough. It is very strange. Then the moral support of the presence of a man-body is enormous. I now know that I have never slept soundly since I have kept house alone — that I have never passed a night without hearing burglars or smelling fire.”

“And now?”

“And now I shouldn’t mind a legion of burglars in the house; I shouldn’t mind being burned in my bed every night. I feel that Lemuel is in charge, and that nothing can happen.”

“Is he really so satisfactory?” asked Sewell, exhaling a deep relief.

“He is, indeed,” said Miss Vane. “I couldn’t, exaggerate it.”

“Well, well! Don’t try. We are finite, after all, you know. Do you think it can last?”

“I have thought of that,” answered Miss Vane. “I don’t see why it shouldn’t last. I have tried to believe that I did a foolish thing in coming to your rescue, but I can’t see that I did. I don’t see why it shouldn’t last as long as Lemuel chooses. And he seems perfectly contented with his lot. He doesn’t seem to regard it as domestic service, but as domestication, and he patronises our inefficiency while he spares it. His common-sense is extraordinary — it’s exemplary; it almost makes one wish to have common-sense one’s-self.” They had now got pretty far from the original proposition, and Sewell returned to it with the question, “Well, and how does he supplement you singularly?”

“Oh! oh, yes!” said Miss Vane. “I could hardly tell you without going into too deep a study of character.”

“I’m rather fond of that,” suggested the minister.

“Yes, and I’ve no doubt we should all work very nicely into a sermon as illustrations; but I can’t more than indicate the different cases. In the first place, Jane’s forgetfulness seems to be growing upon her, and since Lemuel came she’s abandoned herself to ecstasies of oblivion.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. She’s quite given over remembering anything, because she knows that he will remember everything.”

“I see. And you?”

“Well, you have sometimes thought I was a little rash.”

“A little? Did I think it was a little?”

“Well, a good deal. But it was all nothing to what I’ve been since Lemuel came. I used to keep some slight check upon myself for Sibyl’s sake; but I don’t now. I know that Lemuel is there to temper, to delay, to modify the effect of every impulse, and so I am all impulse now. And I’ve quite ceased to rule my temper. I know that Lemuel has self-control enough for all the tempers in the house, and so I feel perfectly calm in my wildest transports of fury.”

“I understand,” said Sewell. “And does Sibyl permit herself a similar excess in her fancies and ambitions?”

“Quite,” said Miss Vane. “I don’t know that she consciously relies upon Lemuel to supplement her, any more than Jane does; but she must be unconsciously aware that no extravagance of hers can be dangerous while Lemuel is in the house.”

“Unconsciously aware is good. She hasn’t got tired of reforming him yet?”

“I don’t know. I sometimes think she wishes he had gone a little farther in crime. Then his reformation would be more obvious.”

“Yes; I can appreciate that. Does she still look after his art and literature?”

“That phase has changed a little. She thinks now that he ought to be stimulated, if anything — that he ought to read George Eliot. She’s put Middlemarch and Romola on his shelf. She says that he looks like Tito Malemma.”

Sewell rose. “Well, I don’t see but what your supplement is a very demoralising element. I shall never dare to tell Mrs. Sewell what you’ve said.”

“Oh, she knows it,” cried Miss Vane. “We’ve agreed that you will counteract any temptation that Lemuel may feel to abuse his advantages by the ferociously self-denying sermons you preach at him every Sunday.”

“Do I preach at him? Do you notice it?” asked Sewell nervously.

“Notice it?” laughed Miss Vane. “I should think your whole congregation would notice it. You seem to look at nobody else.”

“I know it! Since he began to come, I can’t keep my eyes off him. I do deliver my sermons at him. I believe I write them at him! He has an eye of terrible and exacting truth. I feel myself on trial before him. He holds me up to a standard of sincerity that is killing me. Mrs. Sewell was bad enough; I was reasonably bad myself; but this! Couldn’t you keep him away? Do you think it’s exactly decorous to let your man-servant occupy a seat in your family pew? How do you suppose it looks to the Supreme Being?”

Miss Vane was convulsed. “I had precisely those misgivings! But Lemuel hadn’t. He asked me what the number of our pew was, and I hadn’t the heart — or else I hadn’t the face — to tell him he mustn’t sit in it. How could I? Do you think it’s so very scandalous?”

“I don’t know,” said Sewell. “It may lead to great abuses. If we tacitly confess ourselves equal in the sight of God, how much better are we than the Roman Catholics?”

Miss Vane could not suffer these ironies to go on.

“He approves of your preaching. He has talked your sermons over with me. You oughtn’t to complain.”

“Oh, I don’t! Do you think he’s really softening a little toward me?”

“Not personally, that I know,” said Miss Vane. “But he seems to regard you as a channel of the truth.”

“I ought to be glad of so much,” said Sewell. “I confess that I hadn’t supposed he was at all of our way of thinking. They preached a very appreciable orthodoxy at Willoughby Pastures.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Miss Vane. “I only know that he approves your theology, or your ethics.”

“Ethics, I hope. I’m sure they’re right.” After a thoughtful moment the minister asked, “Have you observed that they have softened him socially at all — broken up that terrible rigidity of attitude, that dismaying retentiveness of speech?”

“I know what you mean!” cried Miss Vane delightedly. “I believe Lemuel is a little more supple, a little less like a granite boulder in one of his meadows. But I can’t say that he’s glib yet. He isn’t apparently going to say more than he thinks.”

“I hope he thinks more than he says,” sighed the minister. “My interviews with Lemuel have left me not only exhausted but bruised, as if I had been hurling myself against a dead wall. Yes, I manage him better from the pulpit, and I certainly oughtn’t to complain. I don’t expect him to make any response, and I perceive that I am not quite so sore as after meeting him in private life.”

That evening Lemuel was helping to throng the platform of an overcrowded horse-car. It was Saturday night, and he was going to the provision man up toward the South End, whom Miss Vane was dealing with for the time being, in an economical recoil from her expensive Back Bay provision man, to order a forgotten essential of the Sunday’s supplies. He had already been at the grocer’s, and was carrying home three or four packages to save the cart from going a third time that day to Bolingbroke Street, and he stepped down into the road when two girls came squeezing their way out of the car.

“Well, I’m glad,” said one of them in a voice Lemuel knew at once, “‘t there’s one man’s got the politeness to make a little grain o’ room for you. Thank you, sir!” she added, with more scorn for the others than gratitude for Lemuel. “You’re a gentleman, anyway.”

The hardened offenders on the platform laughed, but Lemuel said simply, “You’re quite welcome.”

“Why, land’s sakes!” shouted the girl. “Well, if ‘tain’t you! S’tira!” she exclaimed to her companion in utter admiration. Then she added to Lemuel, “Why, I didn’t s’pose but what you’d a’ be’n back home long ago. Well, I am glad. Be’n in Boston ever since? Well, I want to know!”

The conductor had halted his car for the girls to get off, but, as he remarked with a vicious jerk at his bell-strap, he could not keep his car standing there while a woman was asking about the folks, and the horses started up and left Lemuel behind. “Well, there!” said ‘Manda Grier. “‘F I hain’t made you lose your car! I never see folks like some them conductors.”

“Oh, I guess I can walk the rest of the way,” said Lemuel, his face bright with a pleasure visible in the light of the lamp that brought out Statira Dudley’s smiles and the forward thrust of ‘Manda Grier’s whopper-jaw as they turned toward the pavement together.

“Well, I guess ‘f I’ve spoke about you once, I have a hundred times, in the last six weeks. I always told S’tira you’d be’n sure to turn up b’fore this ‘f you’d be’n in Boston all the time; ‘n’ ‘t I guessed you’d got a disgust for the place, ‘n’ ‘t you wouldn’t want to see it again for one while.”

Statira did not say anything. She walked on the other side of ‘Manda Grier, who thrust her in the side from time to time with a lift of her elbow, in demand of sympathy and corroboration; but though she only spoke to answer yes or no, Lemuel could see that she was always smiling or else biting her lip to keep herself from it. He thought she looked about as pretty as anybody could, and that she was again very fashionably dressed. She had on a short dolman, and a pretty hat that shaded her forehead but fitted close round, and she wore long gloves that came up on her sleeves. She had a book from the library; she walked with a little bridling movement that he found very ladylike. ‘Manda Grier tilted along between them, and her tongue ran and ran, so that Lemuel, when they came to Miss Vane’s provision man’s, could hardly get in a word to say that he guessed he must stop there.

Statira drifted on a few paces, but ‘Manda Grier halted abruptly with him. “Well, ‘f you’re ever up our way we sh’d be much pleased to have you call, Mr. Barker,” she said formally.

“I should be much pleased to do so,” said Lemuel with equal state.

“‘Tain’t but just a little ways round here on the Avenue,” she added.

Lemuel answered, “I guess I know where it is.” He did not mean it for anything of a joke, but both the girls laughed, and though she had been so silent before, Statira laughed the most.

He could not help laughing either when ‘Manda Grier said, “I guess if you was likely to forget the number you could go round to the station and inquire. They got your address too.”

“‘Manda Grier, you be still!” said Statira.

“S’tira said that’s the way she knew you was from Willoughby Pastures. Her folks is from up that way, themselves. She says the minute she heard the name she knew it couldn’t ‘a’ be’n you, whoever it was done it.”

“‘Manda Grier!” cried Statira again.

“I tell her she don’t believe ‘t any harm can come out the town o’ Willoughby, anywheres.”

“‘Manda!” cried Statira.

Lemuel was pleased, but he could not say a word. He could not look at Statira.

“Well, good evening,” said Amanda Grier.

“Well, good evening,” said Lemuel.

“Well, good evening,” said Statira.

“Well, good evening,” said Lemuel again.

The next moment they were gone round the corner, and he was left standing before the provision man’s, with his packages in his hand. It did not come to him till he had transacted his business within, and was on his way home, that he had been very impolite not to ask if he might not see them home. He did not know but he ought to go back and try to find them, and apologise for his rudeness, and yet he did not see how he could do that, either; he had no excuse for it; he was afraid it would seem queer, and make them laugh. Besides, he had those things for Miss Vane, and the cook wanted some of them at once.

He could hardly get to sleep that night for thinking of his blunder, and at times he cowered under the bedclothes for shame. He decided that the only way for him to do was to keep out of their way after this, and if he ever met them anywhere, to pretend not to see them.

The next morning he went to hear Mr. Sewell preach, as usual, but he found himself wandering far from the sermon, and asking or answering this or that in a talk with those girls that kept going on in his mind. The minister himself seemed to wander, and at times, when Lemuel forced a return to him, he thought he was boggling strangely. For the first time Mr. Sewell’s sermon, in his opinion, did not come to much.

While his place in Miss Vane’s household was indefinitely ascertained, he had the whole of Sunday, and he always wrote home in the afternoon, or brought up the arrears of the journal he had begun keeping; but the Sunday afternoon that followed, he was too excited to stay in and write. He thought he would go and take a walk, and get away from the things that pestered him. He did not watch where he was going, and after a while he turned a corner, and suddenly found himself in a long street, planted with shade-trees, and looking old-fashioned and fallen from a former dignity. He perceived that it could never have been fashionable, like Bolingbroke Street or Beacon; the houses were narrow, and their doors opened from little, cavernous arches let into the brick fronts, and they stood flush upon the pavement. The sidewalks were full of people, mostly girls walking up and down; at the corners young fellows lounged, and there were groups before the cigar stores and the fruit stalls, which were open. It was not very cold yet, and the children who swarmed upon the low door-steps were bareheaded and often summer-clad. The street was not nearly so well kept as the streets on the Back Bay that Lemuel was more used to, but he could see that it was not a rowdy street either. He looked up at a lamp on the first corner he came to, and read Pleasant Avenue on it; then he said that the witch was in it. He dramatised a scene of meeting those girls, and was very glib in it, and they were rather shy, and Miss Dudley kept behind Amanda Grier, who nudged her with her elbow when Lemuel said he had come round to see if anybody had robbed them of their books on the way home after he left them last night.

But all the time, as he hurried along to the next corner, he looked fearfully to the right and left. Presently he began to steal guilty glances at the numbers of the houses. He said to himself that he would see what kind of a looking house they did live in, any way. It was only No. 900 odd when he began, and he could turn off if he wished long before he reached 1334. As he drew nearer he said he would just give a look at it, and then rush by. But 1334 was a house so much larger and nicer than he had expected that he stopped to collect his slow rustic thoughts, and decide whether she really lived there or whether she had just given that number for a blind. He did not know why he should think that, though; she was dressed well enough to come out of any house.

While he lingered before the house an old man with a cane in his hand and his mouth hanging open stopped and peered through his spectacles, whose glare he fixed upon Lemuel, till he began to feel himself a suspicious character. The old man did not say anything, but stood faltering upon his stick and now and then gathering up his lower lip as if he were going to speak, but not speaking. Lemuel cleared his throat. “Hmmn! Is this a boarding-house?”

“I don’t know,” crowed the old man, in a high senile note. “You want table board or rooms?”

“I don’t want board at all,” began Lemuel again.

“What?” crowed the old man; and he put up his hand to his ear.

People were beginning to put their heads out of the neighbouring windows, and to walk slowly as they went by, so as to hear what he and the old man were saying. He could not run away now, and he went boldly up to the door of the large house and rang.

A girl came, and he asked her, with a flushed face, if Miss Amanda Grier boarded there; somehow he could not bear to ask for Miss Dudley.

“Well,” the girl said, “she rooms here,” as if that might be a different thing to Lemuel altogether.

“Oh!” he said. “Is she in?”

“Well, you can walk in,” said the girl, “and I’ll see.” She came back to ask, “Who shall I say called?”

“Mr. Barker,” said Lemuel, and then glowed with shame because he had called himself Mister. The girl did not come back, but she hardly seemed gone before ‘Manda Grier came into the room. He did not know whether she would speak to him, but she was as pleasant as could be, and said he must come right up to her and S’tira’s room. It was pretty high up, but he did not notice the stairs, ‘Manda Grier kept talking so; and when he got to it, and ‘Manda Grier dashed the door open, and told him to walk right in, he would not have known but he was in somebody’s sitting-room. A curtained alcove hid the bed, and the room was heated by a cheerful little kerosene stove; there were bright folding carpet-chairs, and the lid of the washstand had a cloth on it that came down to the floor, and there were plants in the window. There was a mirror on the wall, framed in black walnut with gilt moulding inside, and a family-group photograph in the same kind of frame, and two chromes, and a clock on a bracket.

Statira seemed surprised to see him; the room was pretty warm, and her face was flushed. He said it was quite mild out, and she said, “Was it?” Then she ran and flung up the window, and said, “Why, so it was,” and that she had been in the house all day, and had not noticed the weather.

She excused herself and the room for being in such a state; she said she was ashamed to be caught in such a looking dress, but they were not expecting company, and she did suppose ‘Manda Grier would have given her time to put the room to rights a little. He could not understand why she said all this, for the whole room was clean, and Statira herself was beautifully dressed in the same dress that she had worn the night before, or one just like it; and after she had put up the window, ‘Manda Grier said, “S’tira Dudley, do you want to kill yourself?” and ran and pulled aside the curtain in the corner, and took down the dolman from among other clothes that hung there, and threw it on Statira’s shoulders, who looked as pretty as a pink in it. But she pretended to be too hot, and wanted to shrug it off, and ‘Manda Grier called out, “Mr. Barker! will you make her keep it on?” and Lemuel sat dumb and motionless, but filled through with a sweet pleasure.

He tried several times to ask them if they had been robbed on the way home last night, as he had done in the scene he had dramatised; but he could not get out a word except that it had been pretty warm all day.

Statira said, “I think it’s been a very warm fall,” and ‘Manda Grier said, “I think the summer’s goin’ to spend the winter with us,” and they all three laughed.

“What speeches you do make, ‘Manda Grier,” said Statira.

“Well, anything better than Quaker meetin’, I say,” retorted ‘Manda Grier; and then they were all three silent, and Lemuel thought of his clothes, and how fashionably both of the girls were dressed.

“I guess,” said Statira, “it’ll be a pretty sickly winter, if it keeps along this way. They say a green Christmas makes a fat graveyard.”

“I guess you’ll see the snow fly long before Christmas,” said ‘Manda Grier, “or Thanksgiving either.”

“I guess so too,” said Lemuel, though he did not like to seem to take sides against Statira.

She laughed as if it were a good joke, and said, “‘Tain’t but about a fortnight now till Thanksgiving anyway.”

“If it comes a good fall of snow before Thanksgivin’, won’t you come round and give us a sleigh-ride, Mr. Barker?” asked ‘Manda Grier.

They all laughed at her audacity, and Lemuel said, Yes, he would; and she said, “We’ll give you a piece of real Willoughby Centre Mince-pie, if you will.”

They all laughed again.

“‘Manda Grier!” said Statira, in protest.

“Her folks sent her half a dozen last Thanksgivin’,” persisted ‘Manda Grier.

“‘Manda!” pleaded Statira.

‘Manda Grier sprang up and got Lemuel a folding-chair. “You ain’t a bit comfortable in that stiff old thing, Mr. Barker.”

Lemuel declared that he was perfectly comfortable, but she would not be contented till he had changed, and then she said, “Why don’t you look after your company, S’tira Dudley? I should think you’d be ashamed.”

Lemuel’s face burned with happy shame, and Statira, who was as red as he was, stole a look at him, that seemed to say that there was no use trying to stop ‘Manda Grier. But when she went on, “I don’t know but it’s the fashion to Willoughby Centre,” they both gave way again, and laughed more than ever, and Statira said, “Well, ‘Manda Grier, what do you s’pose Mr. Barker ‘ll think?”

She tried to be sober, but the wild girl set her and Lemuel off laughing when she retorted, “Guess he’ll think what he did when he was brought up in court for highway robbery.”

‘Manda Grier sat upright in her chair, and acted as if she had merely spoken about the weather. He knew that she was talking that way just to break the ice, and though he would have given anything to be able to second her, he could not.

“How you do carry on, ‘Manda Grier,” said Statira, as helpless as he was.

“Guess I got a pretty good load to carry!” said ‘Manda Grier.

They all now began to find their tongues a little, and Statira told how one season when her mother took boarders she had gone over to the Pastures with a party of summer-folks on a straw-ride and picked blueberries. She said she never saw the berries as thick as they were there.

Lemuel said he guessed he knew where the place was; but the fire had got into it last year, and there had not been a berry there this summer.

Statira said, “What a shame!” She said there were some Barkers over East Willoughby way; and she confessed that when he said his name was Barker, and he was from Willoughby Pastures, that night in the station, she thought she should have gone through the floor.

Then they talked a little about how they had both felt, but not very much, and they each took all the blame, and would not allow that the other was the least to blame. Statira said she had behaved like a perfect coot all the way through, and Lemuel said that he guessed he had been the coot, if there was any.

“I guess there was a pair of you,” said ‘Manda Grier; and at this association of them in ‘Manda Grier’s condemnation, he could see that Statira was blushing, though she hid her face in her hands, for her ears were all red.

He now rose and said he guessed he would have to be going; but when ‘Manda Grier interposed and asked, “Why, what’s your hurry?” he said he guessed he had not had any, and Statira laughed at the wit of this till it seemed to him she would perish.

“Well, then, you set right straight down again,” said ‘Manda Grier, with mock severity, as if he were an obstinate little boy; and he obeyed, though he wished that Statira had asked him to stay too.

“Why, the land sakes!” exclaimed ‘Manda Grier, “have you been lettin’ him keep his hat all this while, S’tira Dudley? You take it right away from him!” And Statira rose, all smiling and blushing, and said —

“Will you let me take your hat, Mr. Barker?” as if he had just come in, and made him feel as if she had pressed him to stay. She took it and went and laid it on a stand across the room, and Lemuel thought he had never seen a much more graceful person. She wore a full Breton skirt, which was gathered thickly at the hips, and swung loose and free as she stepped. When she came back and sat down, letting the back of one pretty hand fall into the palm of the other in her lap, it seemed to him impossible that such an elegant young lady should be tolerating a person dressed as he was.

“There!” began ‘Manda Grier. “I guess Mr. Barker won’t object a great deal to our going on, if it is Sunday. ‘S kind of a Sunday game, anyways. You ‘posed to games on Sunday?”

“I don’t know as I am,” said Lemuel.

“Now, ‘Manda Grier, don’t you!” pleaded Statira.

“Shall, too,” persisted ‘Manda. “I guess if there’s any harm in the key, there ain’t any harm in the Bible, and so it comes out even. D’you ever try your fate with a key and a Bible?” she asked Lemuel.

“I don’t know as I did,” he answered.

“Well, it’s real fun, ‘n’ its curious how it comes out, oftentimes. Well, I don’t s’pose there’s anything in it, but it is curious.”

“I guess we hadn’t better,” said Statira. “I don’t believe Mr. Barker ‘ll care for it.”

Lemuel said he would like to see how it was done, anyway.

‘Manda Grier took the key out of the door, and looked at it. “That key ‘ll cut the leaves all to pieces.”

“Can’t you find some other?” suggested Statira.

“I don’t know but may be I could,” said ‘Manda Grier. “You just wait a half a second.”

Before Lemuel knew what she was doing, she flew out of the door, and he could hear her flying down the stairs.

“Well, I must say!” said Statira, and then neither she nor Lemuel said anything for a little while. At last she asked, “That window trouble you any?”

Lemuel said, “Not at all,” and he added, “Perhaps it’s too cold for you?”

“Oh no,” said the girl, “I can’t seem to get anything too cold for me. I’m the greatest person for cold weather! I’m real glad it’s comin’ winter. We had the greatest time, last winter,” continued Statira, “with those English sparrows. Used to feed ’em crumbs, there on the window-sill, and it seemed as if they got to know we girls, and they’d hop right inside, if you’d let ‘em. Used to make me feel kind of creepy to have ‘em. They say it’s a sign of death to have a bird come into your room, and I was always for drivin’ ’em out, but ‘Manda, she said she guessed the Lord didn’t take the trouble to send birds round to every one, and if the rule didn’t work one way it didn’t work the other. You believe in signs?”

“I don’t know as I do, much. Mother likes to see the new moon over her right shoulder, pretty well,” said Lemuel.

“Well, I declare,” said Statira, “that’s just the way with my aunt. Now you’re up here,” she said, springing suddenly to her feet, “I want you should see what a nice view we got from our window.”

Lemuel had it on his tongue to say that he hoped it was not going to be his last chance; he believed he would have said it if ‘Manda Grier had been there; but now he only joined Statira at the window, and looked out. They had to stoop over, and get pretty close together, to see the things she wished to show him, and she kept shrugging her sack on, and once she touched him with her shoulder. He said yes to everything she asked him about the view, but he saw very little of it. He saw that her hair had a shade of gold in its brown, and that it curled in tight little rings where it was cut on her neck, and that her skin was very white under it. When she touched him, that time, it made him feel very strange; and when she glanced at him out of her blue eyes, he did not know what he was doing. He did not laugh as he did when ‘Manda Grier was there.

Statira said, “Oh, excuse me!” when she touched him, and he answered, “Perfectly excusable,” but he said hardly anything else. He liked to hear her talk, and he watched the play of her lips as she spoke. Once her breath came across his cheek, when she turned quickly to see if he was looking where she was pointing.

They sat down and talked, and all at once Statira exclaimed, “Well! I should think ‘Manda Grier was makin’ that key!”

Now, whatever happened, Lemuel was bound to say, “I don’t think she’s been gone very long.”

“Well, you’re pretty patient, I must say,” said Statira, and he did not know whether she was making fun of him or not. He tried to think of something to say, but could not. “I hope she’ll fetch a lamp, too, when she comes,” Statira went on, and now he saw that it was beginning to be a little darker. Perhaps that about the lamp was a hint for him to go; but he did not see exactly how he could go till ‘Manda Grier came back; he felt that it would not be polite.

“Well, there!” said Statira, as if she divined his feeling. I shall give ‘Manda Grier a good talking-to. I’m awfully afraid we’re keeping you, Mr. Barker.”

“Not at all,” said Lemuel; “I’m afraid I’m keeping you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Statira. She became rather quieter, till ‘Manda Grier came back.

‘Manda Grier burst into the room, with a key in one hand and a lamp in the other. “Well, I knew you two’d be holdin’ Quaker’s meetin’.”

“We hain’t at all! How d’you know we have? Have we, Mr. Barker?” returned Statira, in simultaneous admission and denial.

“Well, if you want to know, I listened outside the door,” said ‘Manda Grier, “and you wa’n’t sayin’ a word, either of you. I guess I got a key now that’ll do,” she added, setting down her lamp, “and I borrowed an old Bible ‘t I guess ‘tain’t go’n’ to hurt a great deal.”

“I don’t know as I want to play it much,” said Statira.

“Well, I guess you got to, now,” said ‘Manda Grier, “after all my trouble. Hain’t she, Mr. Barker?”

It flattered Lemuel through and through to be appealed to, but he could not say anything.

“Well,” said Statira, “if I got to, I got to. But you got to hold the Bible.”

“You got to put the key in!” cried ‘Manda Grier. She sat holding the Bible open toward Statira.

She offered to put the key in, and then she stopped. “Well! I’m great! Who are we going to find it for first?”

“Oh, company first,” said ‘Manda Grier.

“You company, Mr. Barker?” asked Statira, looking at Lemuel over her shoulder.

“I hope not,” said Lemuel gallantly, at last.

“Well, I declare!” said Statira.

“Quite one the family,” said ‘Manda Grier, and that made Statira say, “‘Manda!” and Lemuel blush to his hair. “Well, anyway,” continued ‘Manda Grier, “you’re company enough to have your fate found first. Put in the key, S’tira.”

“No, I sha’n’t do it.”

“Well, I shall, then!” She took the key from Statira, and shut the book upon it at the Song of Solomon, and bound it tightly in with a ribbon. Lemuel watched breathlessly; he was not sure that he knew what kind of fate she meant, but he thought he knew, and it made his heart beat quick. ‘Manda Grier had passed the ribbon through the ring of the key, which was left outside of the leaves, and now she took hold of the key with her two forefingers. “You got to be careful not to touch the Bible with your fingers,” she explained, “or the charm won’t work. Now I’ll say over two verses, ‘t where the key’s put in, and Mr. Barker, you got to repeat the alphabet at the same time; and when it comes to the first letter of the right name, the Bible will drop out of my fingers, all I can do. Now then! Set me as a seal on thine heart—”

“A, B, C, D.” began Lemuel. “Pshaw, now, ‘Manda Grier, you stop!” pleaded Statira.

“You be still! Go on, Mr. Barker! — As a seal upon thine arm; for love is as strong as death — don’t say the letters so fast — jealousy as cruel as the grave — don’t look at S’tira; look at me! — the coals thereof are coals of fire — you’re sayin’ it too slow now — which hath a most vehement flame. I declare, S’tira Dudley, if you joggle me! — Many waters cannot quench love; neither can the floods drown it — you must put just so much time between every letter; if you stop on every particular one, it ain’t fair — if a man would give all the substance of his house for love — you stop laughin’, you two! — it would be utterly consumed. Well, there! Now we got to go it all over again, and my arm’s most broke now.”

“I don’t believe Mr. Barker wants to do it again,” said Statira, looking demurely at him; but Lemuel protested that he did, and the game began again. This time the Bible began to shake at the letter D, and Statira cried out, “Now, ‘Manda Grier, you’re making it,” and ‘Manda Grier laughed so that she could scarcely hold the book. Lemuel laughed too; but he kept on repeating the letters. At S the book fell to the floor, and Statira caught it up, and softly beat ‘Manda Grier on the back with it. “Oh you mean thing!” she cried out. “You did it on purpose.”

‘Manda Grier was almost choked with laughing.

“Do you know anybody of the name of Sarah, Mr. Barker?” she gasped, and then they all laughed together till Statira said, “Well, I shall surely die! Now, ‘Manda Grier, it’s your turn. And you see if I don’t pay you up.”

“I guess I ain’t afraid any,” retorted ‘Manda Grier. “The book ‘ll do what it pleases, in spite of you.”

They began again, Statira holding the book this time, and Lemuel repeating as before, and he went quite through the alphabet without anything happening. “Well, I declare!” said Statira, looking grave. “Let’s try it over again.”

“You may try, and you may try, and you may try,” said ‘Manda Grier. “It won’t do you any good. I hain’t got any fate in that line.”

“Well, that’s what we’re goin’ to find out,” said Statira; but again the verses and alphabet were repeated without effect.

“Now you satisfied?” asked ‘Manda Grier.

“No, not yet. Begin again, Mr. Barker!”

He did so, and at the second letter the book dropped. Statira jumped up, and ‘Manda Grier began to chase her round the room, to box her ears for her, she said. Lemuel sat looking on. He did not feel at all severe toward them, as he usually did toward girls that cut up; he did not feel that this was cutting up, in fact.

“Stop, stop!” implored Statira, “and I’ll let you try it over again.”

“No, it’s your turn now!”

“No, I ain’t going to have any,” said Statira, folding her arms.

“You got to,” said ‘Manda Grier. “The rest of us has, and now you’ve got to. Hain’t she got to, Mr. Barker?”

“Yes,” said Lemuel delightedly; “you’ve got to, Miss Dudley.”

“Miss Dudley!” repeated ‘Manda Grier. “How that does sound.”

“I don’t know as it sounds any worse than Mr. Barker,” said Lemuel.

“Well,” said ‘Manda Grier judicially, “I she’d think it was ‘bout time they was both of ’em dropped, ‘T any rate, I don’t want you should call me Miss Grier — Lemuel.”

“Oh!” cried Statira. “Well, you are getting along, ‘Manda Grier!”

“Well, don’t you let yourself be outdone then, S’tira.”

“I guess Mr. Barker’s good enough for me a while yet,” said Statira, and she hastened to add, “The name, I mean,” and at this they all laughed till Statira said, “I shall certainly die!” She suddenly recovered herself — those girls seemed to do everything like lightning, Lemuel observed — and said, “No, I ain’t goin’ to have mine told at all. I don’t like it. Seems kind of wicked. I ruther talk. I never could make it just right to act so with the Bible.”

Lemuel was pleased at that. Statira seemed prettier than ever in this mood of reverence.

“Well, don’t talk too much when I’m gone,” said ‘Manda Grier, and before anybody could stop her, she ran out of the room. But she put her head in again to say, “I’ll be back as soon’s I can take this key home.”

Lemuel did not know what to do. The thought of being alone with Statira again was full of rapture and terror. He was glad when she seized the door and tried to keep ‘Manda Grier.

“I — I — guess I better be going,” he said.

“You sha’n’t go till I get back, anyway,” said ‘Manda Grier hospitably. “You keep him, S’tira!”

She gave Statira a little push, and ran down the stairs.

Statira tottered against Lemuel, with that round, soft shoulder which had touched him before. He put out his arms to save her from falling, and they seemed to close round her of themselves. She threw up her face, and in a moment he had kissed her. He released her and fell back from her aghast.

She looked at him.

“I — I didn’t mean to,” he panted. His heart was thundering in his ears.

She put up her hands to her face, and began to cry.

“Oh, my goodness!” he gasped. He wavered a moment, then he ran out of the room.

On the stairs he met ‘Manda Grier coming up. “Now, Mr. Barker, you’re real mean to go!” she pouted.

“I guess I better be going,” Lemuel called back, in a voice so husky that he hardly knew it for his own.

XII.

Lemuel let himself into Miss Vane’s house with his key to the back gate, and sat down, still throbbing, in his room over the L, and tried to get the nature of his deed, or misdeed, before his mind. He had grown up to manhood in an austere reverence for himself as regarded the other sex, and in a secret fear, as exacting for them as it was worshipful of women. His mother had held all show of love-sickness between young people in scorn; she said they were silly things, when she saw them soft upon one another; and Lemuel had imbibed from her a sense of unlawfulness, of shame, in the love-making he had seen around him all his life. These things are very open in the country. Even in large villages they have kissing-games at the children’s parties, in the church vestries and refectories; and as a little boy Lemuel had taken part in such games. But as he grew older, his reverence and his fear would not let him touch a girl. Once a big girl, much older than he, came up behind him in the play-ground and kissed him; he rubbed the kiss off with his hand, and scoured the place with sand and gravel. One winter all the big boys and girls at school began courting whenever the teacher was out of sight a moment; at the noon-spell some of them sat with their arms round one another. Lemuel wandered off by himself in the snows of the deep woods; the sight of such things, the thought of them put him to shame for those fools, as he tacitly called them; and now what had he done himself? He could not tell. At times he was even proud and glad of it; and then he did not know what would become of him. But mostly it seemed to him that he had been guilty of an enormity that nothing could ever excuse. He must have been crazy to do such a thing to a young lady like that; her tear-stained face looked her wonder at him still.

By this time she had told ‘Manda Grier all about it; and he dared not think what their thoughts of him must be. It seemed to him that he ought to put such a monster as he was out of the world. But all the time there was a sweetness, a joy in his heart, that made him half frantic with fear of himself.

“Lemuel!”

He started up at the sound of Sibyl Vane’s voice calling to him from the dining-room which opened into the L.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered tremulously, going to his door. Miss Vane had been obliged to instruct him to say ma’am to her niece, whom he had at first spoken of by her Christian name.

“Was that you came in a little while ago?”

“Yes, ma’am, I came in.”

“Oh! And have you had your supper?”

“I — I guess I don’t want any supper.”

“Don’t want any supper? You will be ill. Why don’t you?”

“I don’t know as I feel just like eating anything.”

“Well, it won’t do. Will you see, please, if Jane is in the kitchen?”

Lemuel came forward, full of his unfitness for the sight of men, but gathering a little courage when he found the dining-room so dark. He descended to the basement and opened the door of the kitchen, looked in, and shut it again. “Yes, ma’am, she’s there.”

“Oh!” Sibyl seemed to hesitate. Then she said: “Light the gas down there, hadn’t you better?”

“I don’t know but I had,” Lemuel assented.

But before he could obey, “And Lemuel!” she called down again, “come and light it up here too, please.”

“I will as soon as I’ve lit it here,” said Lemuel.

An imperious order came back. “You will light it here now, please.”

“All right,” assented Lemuel. When he appeared in the upper entry and flashed the gas up, he saw Sibyl standing at the reception-room door, with her finger closed into a book which she had been reading.

“You’re not to say that you will do one thing when you’re told to do another.”

Lemuel whitened a little round the lips. “I’m not to do two things at once, either, I suppose.”

Sibyl ignored this reply. “Please go and get your supper, and when you’ve had it come up here again. I’ve some things for you to do.”

“I’ll do them now,” said Lemuel fiercely. “I don’t want any supper, and I sha’n’t eat any.”

“Why, Lemuel, what is the matter with you?” asked the girl, in the sudden effect of motherly solicitude. “You look very strange, you seem so excited.”

“I’m not hungry, that’s all,” said the boy doggedly. “What is it you want done?”

“Won’t you please go up to the third floor,” said Sibyl, in a phase of timorous dependence, “and see if everything is right there? I thought I heard a noise. See if the windows are fast, won’t you?”

Lemuel turned and she followed with her finger in her book, and her book pressed to her heart, talking. “It seemed to me that I heard steps and voices. It’s very mysterious. I suppose any one could plant a ladder on the roof of the L part, and get into the windows if they were not fastened.”

“Have to be a pretty long ladder,” grumbled Lemuel.

“Yes,” Sibyl assented, “it would. And it didn’t sound exactly like burglars.”

She followed him half-way up the second flight of stairs, and stood there while he explored the third story throughout.

“There ain’t anything there,” he reported without looking at her, and was about to pass her on the stairs in going down.

“Oh, thank you very much, Lemuel,” she said, with fervent gratitude in her voice. She fetched a tremulous sigh. “I suppose it was nothing. Yes,” she added hoarsely, “it must have been nothing. Oh, let me go down first!” she cried, putting out her hand to stop him from passing her. She resumed when they reached the ground floor again. “Aunty has gone out, and Jane was in the kitchen, and it began to grow dark while I sat reading in the drawing-room, and all at once I heard the strangest noise.” Her voice dropped deeply on the last word. “Yes, it was very strange indeed! Thank you, Lemuel,” she concluded.

“Quite welcome,” said Lemuel dryly, pushing on towards the basement stairs.

“Oh! And Lemuel! will you let Jane give you your supper in the dining-room, so that you could be here if I heard anything else?”

“I don’t want any supper,” said Lemuel.

The girl scrutinised him with an expression of misgiving. Then, with a little sigh, as of one who will not explore a painful mystery, she asked: “Would you mind sitting in the dining-room, then, till aunty gets back?”

“I’d just as lives sit there,” said Lemuel, walking into the dark dining-room and sitting down.

“Oh, thank you very much. Aunty will be back very soon, I suppose. She’s just gone to the Sewells’ to tea.”

She followed him to the threshold. “You must — I must — light the gas in here for you.”

“Guess I can light the gas,” said Lemuel, getting up to intercept her in this service. She had run into the reception-room for a match, and she would not suffer him to prevent her.

“No, no! I insist! And Lemuel,” she said, turning upon him, “I must ask you to excuse my speaking harshly to you. I was — agitated.”

“Perfectly excusable,” said Lemuel.

“I am afraid,” said the girl, fixing him with her eyes, “that you are not well.”

“Oh yes, I’m well. I’m — pretty tired; that’s all.”

“Have you been walking far?”

“Yes — not very.”

“The walking ought to do you good,” said Sibyl, with serious thoughtfulness. “I think,” she continued, “you had better have some bryonia. Don’t you think you had?”

“No, no! I don’t want anything,” protested Lemuel.

She looked at him with a feeling of baffled anxiety painted on her face; and as she turned away, she beamed with a fresh inspiration. “I will get you a book.” She flew into the reception-room and back again, but she only had the book that she had herself been reading.

“Perhaps you would like to read this? I’ve finished it. I was just looking back through it.”

“Thank you; I guess I don’t want to read any, just now.”

She leaned against the side of the dining-table, beyond which Lemuel sat, and searched his fallen countenance with a glance contrived to be at once piercing and reproachful. “I see,” she said, “you have not forgiven me.”

“Forgiven you?” repeated Lemuel blankly.

“Yes — for giving way to my agitation in speaking to you.”

“I don’t know,” said Lemuel, with a sigh of deep inward trouble, “as I noticed anything.”

“I told you to light the gas in the basement,” suggested Sibyl, “and then I told you to light it up here, and then — I scolded you.”

“Oh yes,” admitted Lemuel: “that.” He dropped his head again.

Sibyl sank upon the edge of a chair. “Lemuel! you have something on your mind?”

The boy looked up with a startled face.

“Yes! I can see that you have,” pursued Sibyl. “What have you been doing?” she demanded sternly.

Lemuel was so full of the truth that it came first to his lips in all cases. He could scarcely force it aside now with the evasion that availed him nothing. “I don’t know as I’ve been doing anything in particular.”

“I see that you don’t wish to tell me!” cried the girl. “But you might have trusted me. I would have defended you, no matter what you had done — the worse the better.”

Lemuel hung his head without answering.

After a while she continued: “If I had been that girl who had you arrested, and I had been the cause of so much suffering to an innocent person, I should never have forgiven myself. I should have devoted my life to expiation. I should have spent my life in going about the prisons, and finding out persons who were unjustly accused. I should have done it as a penance. Yes! even if he had been guilty!”

Lemuel remained insensible to this extreme of self-sacrifice, and she went on: “This book — it is a story — is all one picture of such a nature. There is a girl who’s been brought up as the ward of a young man. He educates her, and she expects to be his wife, and he turns out to be perfectly false and unworthy in every way; but she marries him all the same, although she likes some one else, because she feels that she ought to punish herself for thinking of another, and because she hopes that she will die soon, and when her guardian finds out what she’s done for him, it will reform him. It’s perfectly sublime. It’s — ennobling! If every one could read this book, they would be very different.”

“I don’t see much sense in it,” said Lemuel, goaded to this comment.

“You would if you read it. When she dies — she is killed by a fall from her horse in hunting, and has just time to join the hands of her husband and the man she liked first, and tell them everything — it is wrought up so that you hold your breath. I suppose it was reading that that made me think there were burglars getting in. But perhaps you’re right not to read it now, if you’re excited already. I’ll get you something cheerful.” She whirled out of the room and back in a series of those swift, nervous movements peculiar to her. “There! that will amuse you, I know.” She put the book down on the table before Lemuel, who silently submitted to have it left there. “It will distract your thoughts, if anything will. And I shall ask you to let me sit just here in the reception-room, so that I can call you if I feel alarmed.”

“All right,” said Lemuel, lapsing absently to his own troubled thoughts.

“Thank you very much,” said Sibyl. She went away, and came back directly. “Don’t you think,” she asked, “that it’s very strange you should never have seen or heard anything of her?”

“Heard of who?” he asked, dragging himself painfully up from the depths of his thoughts.

“That heartless girl who had you arrested.”

“She wasn’t heartless!” retorted Lemuel indignantly.

“You think so because you are generous, and can’t imagine such heartlessness. Perhaps,” added Sibyl, with the air of being illumined by a happy thought, “she is dead. That would account for everything. She may have died of remorse. It probably preyed upon her till she couldn’t bear it any longer, and then she killed herself.”

Lemuel began to grow red at the first apprehension of her meaning. As she went on, he changed colour more and more.

“She is alive!” cried Sibyl. “She’s alive, and you have seen her! You needn’t deny it! You’ve seen her to-day!” Lemuel rose in clumsy indignation. “I don’t know as anybody’s got any right to say what I’ve done, or haven’t done.”

“O Lemuel!” cried Sibyl. “Do you think anyone in this house would intrude in your affairs? But if you need a friend — a sister — —”

“I don’t need any sister. I want you should let me alone.”

At these words, so little appreciative of her condescension, her romantic beneficence, her unselfish interest, Sibyl suddenly rebounded to her former level, which she was sensible was far above that of this unworthy object of her kindness. She rose from her chair, and pursued —

“If you need a friend — a sister — I’m sure that you can safely confide in — the cook.” She looked at him a moment, and broke into a malicious laugh very unlike that of a social reformer, which rang shriller at the bovine fury which mounted to Lemuel’s eyes. The rattle of a night-latch made itself heard in the outer door. Sibyl’s voice began to break, as it rose: “I never expected to be treated in my own aunt’s house with such perfect ingratitude and impudence — yes, impudence! — by one of her servants!”

She swept out of the room, and her aunt, who entered it, after calling to her in vain, stood with Lemuel, and heard her mount the stairs, sobbing, to her own room, and lock herself in.

“What is the matter, Lemuel?” asked Miss Vane, breathing quickly. She looked at him with the air of a judge who would not condemn him unheard, but would certainly do so after hearing him. Whether it was Lemuel’s perception of this that kept him silent, or his confusion of spirit from all the late rapidly successive events, or a wish not to inculpate the girl who had insulted him, he remained silent.

“Answer me!” said Miss Vane sharply.

Lemuel cleared his throat. “I don’t know as I’ve got anything to say,” he answered finally.

“But I insist upon your saying something,” said Miss Vane. “What is this impudence?”

“There hasn’t been any impudence,” replied Lemuel, hanging his head.

“Very well, then, you can tell me what Sibyl means,” persisted Miss Vane.

Lemuel seemed to reflect upon it. “No, I can’t tell you,” he said at last, slowly and gently.

“You refuse to make any explanation whatever?”

“Yes.”

Miss Vane rose from the chair which she had mechanically sunk into while waiting for him to speak, and ceased to be the kindly, generous soul she was, in asserting herself as a gentlewoman who had a contumacious servant to treat with. “You will wait here a moment, please.”

“All right,” said Lemuel. She had asked him not to receive instructions from her with that particular answer, but he could not always remember.

She went upstairs, and returned with some banknotes that rustled in her trembling hand. “It is two months since you came, and I’ve paid you one month,” she said, and she set her lips, and tried to govern her head, which nevertheless shook with the vehemence she was struggling to repress. She laid two ten-dollar notes upon the table, and then added a five, a little apart. “This second month was to be twenty instead of ten. I shall not want you any longer, and should be glad to have you go now — at once — to-night! But I had intended to offer you a little present at Christmas, and I will give it you now.”

Lemuel took up the two ten-dollar notes without saying anything, and then after a moment laid one of them down. “It’s only half a month,” he said. “I don’t want to be paid for any more than I’ve done.”

“Lemuel!” cried Miss Vane. “I insist upon your taking it. I employed you by the month.”

“It don’t make any difference about that; I’ve only been here a month and a half.”

He folded the notes, and turned to go out of the room. Miss Vane caught the five-dollar note from the table and intercepted him with it. “Well, then, you shall take it as a present.”

“I don’t want any present,” said Lemuel, patiently waiting her pleasure to release him, but keeping his hands in his pockets.

“You would have taken it at Christmas,” said Miss Vane. “You shall take it now.”

“I shouldn’t take a present any time,” returned Lemuel steadily.

“You are a foolish boy!” cried Miss Vane. “You need it, and I tell you to take it.”

He made no reply whatever.

“You are behaving very stubbornly — ungratefully,” said Miss Vane.

Lemuel lifted his head; his lip quivered a little. “I don’t think you’ve got any right to say I’m ungrateful.”

“I don’t mean ungrateful,” said Miss Vane. “I mean unkind — very silly, indeed. And I wish you to take this money. You are behaving resentfully — wickedly. I am much older than you, and I tell you that you are not behaving rightly. Why don’t you do what I wish?”

“I don’t want any money I haven’t earned.”

“I don’t mean the money. Why don’t you tell me the meaning of what I heard? My niece said you had been impudent to her. Perhaps she didn’t understand.”

She looked wistfully into the boy’s face.

After a long time he said, “I don’t know as I’ve got anything to say about it.”

“Very well, then, you may go,” said Miss Vane, with all her hauteur.

“Well, good evening,” said Lemuel passively, but the eyes that he looked at her with were moist, and conveyed a pathetic reproach. To her unmeasured astonishment, he offered her his hand; her amaze was even greater — more infinite, as she afterwards told Sewell — when she found herself shaking it.

He went out of the room, and she heard him walking about his room in the L, putting together his few belongings. Then she heard him go down and open the furnace door, and she knew he was giving a final conscientious look at the fire. He closed it, and she heard him close the basement door behind him, and knew that he was gone.

She explored the L, and then she descended to the basement and mechanically looked it over. Everything that could be counted hers by the most fastidious sense of property had been left behind him in the utmost neatness. On their accustomed nail, just inside the furnace-room, hung the blue overalls. They looked like a suicidal Lemuel hanging there.

Miss Vane went upstairs slowly, with a heavy heart. Under the hall light stood Sibyl, picturesque in the deep shadow it flung upon her face.

“Aunt Hope,” she began in a tragic voice.

“Don’t speak to me, you wicked girl!” cried her aunt, venting her self-reproach upon this victim. “It is your doing.”

Sibyl turned with the meekness of an ostentatious scape-goat, unjustly bearing the sins of her tribe, and went upstairs into the wilderness of her own thoughts again.

XIII.

The sense of outrage with which Lemuel was boiling when Miss Vane came in upon Sibyl and himself had wholly passed away, and he now saw his dismissal, unjust as between that girl and him, unimpeachably righteous as between him and the moral frame of things. If he had been punished for being ready to take advantage of that fellow’s necessity, and charge him fifty cents for changing ten dollars, he must now be no less obviously suffering for having abused that young lady’s trust and defencelessness; only he was not suffering one-tenth as much. When he recurred to that wrong, in fact, and tried to feel sorry for it and ashamed, his heart thrilled in a curious way; he found himself smiling and exulting, and Miss Vane and her niece went out of his mind, and he could not think of anything but of being with that girl, of hearing her talk and laugh, of touching her. He sighed; he did not know what his mother would say if she knew; he did not know where he was going; it seemed a hundred years since the beginning of the afternoon.

A horse-car came by, and Lemuel stopped it. He set his bag down on the platform, and stood there near the conductor, without trying to go inside, for the bag was pretty large, and he did not believe the conductor would let him take it in.

The conductor said politely after a while, “See, ‘d I get your fare?”

“No,” said Lemuel. He paid, and the conductor went inside and collected the other fares.

When he came back he took advantage of Lemuel’s continued presence to have a little chat. He was a short, plump, stubby-moustached man, and he looked strong and well, but he said, with an introductory sigh, “Well, sir, I get sore all over at this business. There ain’t a bone in me that hain’t got an ache in it. Sometimes I can’t tell but what it’s the ache got a bone in it, ache seems the biggest.”

“Why, what makes it?” asked Lemuel absently.

“Oh, it’s this standin’; it’s the hours, and changin’ the hours so much. You hain’t got a chance to get used to one set o’ hours before they get ’em all shifted round again. Last week I was on from eight to eight; this week it’s from twelve to twelve. Lord knows what it’s going to be next week. And this is one o’ the best lines in town, too.”

“I presume they pay you pretty well,” said Lemuel, with awakening interest.

“Well, they pay a dollar ‘n’ half a day,” said the conductor.

“Why, it’s more than forty dollars a month,” said Lemuel.

“Well, it is,” said the conductor scornfully, “if you work every day in the week. But I can’t stand it more than six days out o’ seven; and if you miss a day, or if you miss a trip, they dock you. No, sir. It’s about the meanest business I ever struck. If I wa’n’t a married man, ‘n’ if I didn’t like to be regular about my meals and get ’em at home ‘th my wife, I wouldn’t stand it a minute. But that’s where it is. It’s regular.”

A lady from within signalled the conductor. He stopped the car, and the lady, who had risen with her escort, remained chatting with a friend before she got out. The conductor snapped his bell for starting, with a look of patient sarcasm. “See that?” he asked Lemuel. “Some these women act as if the cars was their private carriage; and you got to act so too, or the lady complains of you, and the company bounces you in a minute. Stock’s owned along the line, and they think they own you too. You can’t get ’em to set more than ten on a side; they’ll leave the car first. I’d like to catch ’em on some the South End or Cambridge cars. I’d show ’em how to pack live stock once, anyway. Yes, sir, these ladies that ride on this line think they can keep the car standin’ while they talk about the opera. But you’d ought to see how they all look if a poor woman tries their little game. Oh, I tell you, rich people are hard.”

Lemuel reflected upon the generalisation. He regarded Miss Vane as a rich person; but though she had blamed him unjustly, and had used him impatiently, even cruelly, in this last affair, he remembered other things, and he said —

“Well, I don’t know as I should say all of them were hard.”

“Well, may be not,” admitted the conductor. “But I don’t envy ‘em. The way I look at it, and the way I tell my wife, I wouldn’t want their money ‘f I had to have the rest of it. Ain’t any of ’em happy. I saw that when I lived out. No, sir; what me and my wife want to do is to find us a nice little place in the country.”

At the words a vision of Willoughby Pastures rose upon Lemuel, and a lump of home-sickness came into his throat. He saw the old wood-coloured house, crouching black within its walls under the cold November stars. If his mother had not gone to bed yet, she was sitting beside the cooking-stove in the kitchen, and perhaps his sister was brewing something on it, potion or lotion, for her husband’s rheumatism. Miss Vane had talked to him about his mother; she had said he might have her down to visit him, if everything went on right; but of course he knew that Miss Vane did not understand that his mother wore bloomers, and he made up his mind that her invitation was never to be accepted. At the same time he had determined to ask Miss Vane to let him go up and see his mother some Sunday.

“‘S fur’s we go,” said the conductor. “‘F you’re goin’ on, you want to take another car here.”

“I guess I’ll go back with you a little ways,” said Lemuel. “I want to ask you—”

“Guess we’ll have to take a back seat, then,” said the conductor, leading the way through the car to the other platform; “or a standee,” he added, snapping the bell. “What is it you want to ask?”

“Oh, nothing. How do you fellows learn to be conductors? How long does it take you?”

Till other passengers should come the conductor lounged against the guard of the platform in a conversational posture.

“Well, generally it takes you four or five days. You got to learn all the cross streets, and the principal places on all the lines.”

“Yes?”

“It didn’t take me more’n two. Boston boy.”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, with a fine discouragement. “I presume the conductors are mostly from Boston.”

“They’re from everywhere. And some of ’em are pretty streaked, I can tell you; and then the rest of us has got to suffer; throws suspicion on all of us. One fellow gets to stealin’ fares, and then everybody’s got to wear a bell-punch. I never hear mine go without thinkin’ it says, ‘Stop thief!’ Makes me sick, I can tell you.”

After a while Lemuel asked, “How do you get such a position?”

The conductor seemed to be thinking about some thing else. “It’s a pretty queer kind of a world, anyway, the way everybody’s mixed up with everybody else. What’s the reason, if a man wants to steal, he can’t steal and suffer for it himself, without throwin’ the shame and the blame on a lot more people that never thought o’ stealin’? I don’t notice much when a fellow sets out to do right that folks think everybody else is on the square. No, sir, they don’t seem to consider that kind of complaint so catching. Now, you take another thing: A woman goes round with the scarlet fever in her clothes, and a whole carful of people take it home to their children; but let a nice young girl get in, fresh as an apple, and a perfect daisy for wholesomeness every way, and she don’t give it to a single soul on board. No, sir; it’s a world I can’t see through, nor begin to.”

“I never thought of it that way,” said Lemuel, darkened by this black pessimism of the conductor. He had not, practically, found the world so unjust as the conductor implied, but he could not controvert his argument. He only said, “May be the right thing makes us feel good in some way we don’t know of.”

“Well, I don’t want to feel good in some way I don’t know of, myself,” said the conductor very scornfully.

“No, that’s so,” Lemuel admitted. He remained silent, with a vague wonder flitting through his mind whether Mr. Sewell could make anything better of the case, and then settled back to his thoughts of Statira, pierced and confused as they were now with his pain from that trouble with Miss Vane.

“What was that you asked me just now?” said the conductor.

“That I asked you?” Lemuel echoed. “Oh yes! I asked you how you got your place on the cars.”

“Well, sir, you have to have recommendations — they won’t touch you without ‘em; and then you have to have about seventy-five dollars capital to start with. You got to get your coat, and your cap, and your badge, and you got to have about twenty dollars of your own to make change with, first off; company don’t start you with a cent.”

Lemuel made no reply. After a while he asked, “Do you know any good hotel, around here, where I could go for the night?”

“Well, there’s the Brunswick, and there’s the Van-dome,” said the conductor. “They’re both pretty fair houses.” Lemuel looked round at the mention of the aristocratic hostelries to see if the conductor was joking. He owned to something of the kind by adding, “There’s a little hotel, if you want something quieter, that ain’t a great ways from here.” He gave the name of the hotel, and told Lemuel how to find it.

“Thank you,” said Lemuel. “I guess I’ll get off here, then. Well, good evening.”

“Guess I’ll have to get another nickel from you,” said the conductor, snapping his bell. “New trip,” he explained.

“Oh,” said Lemuel, paying. It seemed to him a short ride for five cents.

He got off, and as the conductor started up the car, he called forward through it to the driver, “Wanted to try for conductor, I guess. But I guess the seventy-five dollars capital settled that little point for him.”

Lemuel heard the voice but not the words. He felt his bag heavy in his hand as he walked away in the direction the conductor had given him, and he did not set it down when he stood hesitating in front of the hotel; it looked like too expensive a place for him, with its stained-glass door, and its bulk hoisted high into the air. He walked by the hotel, and then he came back to it, and mustered courage to go in. His bag, if not superb, looked a great deal more like baggage than the lank sack which he had come to Boston with; he had bought it only a few days before, in hopes of going home before long; he set it down with some confidence on the tesselated floor of cheap marble, and when a shirt-sleeved, drowsy-eyed, young man came out of a little room or booth near the door, where there was a desk, and a row of bells, and a board with keys, hanging from the wall above it, Lemuel said quite boldly that he would like a room. The man said, well, they did not much expect transients; it was more of a family-hotel, like; but he guessed they had a vacancy, and they could put him up. He brushed his shirt sleeves down with his hands, and looked apologetically at some ashes on his trousers, and said, well, it was not much use trying to put on style, anyway, when you were taking care of a furnace and had to run the elevator yourself, and look after the whole concern. He said his aunt mostly looked after letting the rooms, but she was at church, and he guessed he should have to see about it himself. He bade Lemuel just get right into the elevator, and he put his bag into a cage that hung in one corner of the hallway, and pulled at the wire rope, and they mounted together. On the way up he had time to explain that the clerk, who usually ran the elevator when they had no elevator-boy, had kicked, and they were just between hay and grass, as you might say. He showed Lemuel into a grandiose parlour or drawing-room, enormously draped and upholstered, and furnished in a composite application of yellow jute and red plush to the ashen easy-chairs and sofa. A folding-bed in the figure of a chiffonier attempted to occupy the whole side of the wall and failed.

“I’m afraid it’s more than I can pay,” said Lemuel. “I guess I better see some other room.” But the man said the room belonged to a boarder that had just gone, and he guessed they would not charge him very much for it; he guessed Lemuel had better stay. He pulled the bed down, and showed him how it worked, and he lighted two bulbous gas-burners, contrived to burn the gas at such a low pressure that they were like two unsnuffed candles for brilliancy. He backed round over the spacious floor and looked about him with an unfamiliar, marauding air, which had a certain boldness, but failed to impart courage to Lemuel, who trembled for fear of the unknown expense. But he was ashamed to go away, and when the man left him he went to bed, after some suspicious investigation of the machine he was to sleep in. He found its comfort unmistakable. He was tired out with what had been happening, and the events of the day recurred in a turmoil that helped rather than hindered slumber; none evolved itself distinctly enough from the mass to pursue him; what he was mainly aware of was the daring question whether he could not get the place of that clerk who had kicked.

In the morning he saw the landlady, who was called Mrs. Harmon, and who took the pay for his lodging, and said he might leave his bag a while there in the office. She was a large, smooth, tranquil person, who seemed ready for any sort of consent; she entered into an easy conversation with Lemuel, and was so sympathetic in regard to the difficulties of getting along in the city, that he had proposed himself as clerk and been accepted almost before he believed the thing had happened. He was getting a little used to the rapidity of urban transactions, but his mind had still a rustic difficulty in keeping up with his experiences.

“I suppose,” said Mrs. Harmon, “it ain’t very usual to take anybody without a reference; I never do it; but so long as you haven’t been a great while in the city — You ever had a place in Boston before?”

“Well, not exactly what you may call a place,” said Lemuel, with a conscience against describing in that way his position at Miss Vane’s. “It was only part work.” He added, “I wasn’t there but a little while.”

“Know anybody in the city?”

“Yes,” said Lemuel reluctantly; “I know Rev. David L. Sewell, some.”

“Oh, all right,” said Mrs. Harmon, with eager satisfaction. “I have to be pretty particular who I have in the house. The boarders are all high-class, and I have to have all the departments accordingly. I’ll see Mr. Sewell about you as soon as I get time, and I guess you can take right hold now, if you want to.”

Mrs. Harmon showed him in half a minute how to manage the elevator, and then left him with general instructions to tell everybody who came upon any errand he did not understand, that she would be back in a very short time. He found pen and paper in the office, and she said he might write the letter that he asked leave to send his mother; when he mentioned his mother, she said, yes, indeed, with a burst of maternal sympathy which was imagined in her case, for she had already told Lemuel that if she had ever had any children she would not have gone into the hotel business, which she believed unfriendly to their right nurture; she said she never liked to take ladies with children.

He enclosed some money to his mother which he had intended to send, but which, before the occurrence of the good fortune that now seemed opening upon him, he thought he must withhold. He made as little as he could of his parting with Miss Vane, whom he had celebrated in earlier letters to his mother; he did not wish to afflict her on his own account, or incense her against Miss Vane, who, he felt, could not help her part in it; but his heart burned anew against Miss Sibyl while he wrote. He dwelt upon his good luck in getting this new position at once, and he let his mother see that he considered it a rise in life. He said he was going to try to get Mrs. Harmon to let him go home for Thanksgiving, though he presumed he might have to come back the same night.

His letter was short, but he was several times interrupted by the lady boarders, many of whom stopped to ask Mrs. Harmon something on their way to their rooms from breakfast. They did not really want anything, in most cases; but they were strict with Lemuel in wanting to know just when they could see Mrs. Harmon; and they delayed somewhat to satisfy a natural curiosity in regard to him. They made talk with him as he took them up in the elevator, and did what they could to find out about him. Most of them had their door-keys in their hands, and dangled them by the triangular pieces of brass which the keys were chained to; they affected some sort of neglig�e breakfast costume, and Lemuel thought them very fashionable. They nearly all snuffled and whined as they spoke; some had a soft, lazy nasal; others broke abruptly from silence to silence, in voices of nervous sharpness, like the cry or the bleat of an animal; one young girl, who was quite pretty, had a high, hoarse voice, like a gander.

Lemuel did not mind all this; he talked through his nose too; and he accepted Mrs. Harmon’s smooth characterisation of her guests, as she called them, which she delivered in a slow, unimpassioned voice. “I never have any but the highest class people in my house — the very nicest; and I never have any jangling going on. In the first place I never allow anybody to have anything to complain of, and then if they do complain, I’m right up and down with them; I tell them their rooms are wanted, and they understand what I mean. And I never allow any trouble among the servants; I tell them, if they are not suited, that I don’t want them to stay; and if they get to quarrelling among themselves, I send them all away, and get a new lot; I pay the highest wages, and I can always do it. If you want to keep up with the times at all, you have got to set a good table, and I mean to set just as good a table as any in Boston; I don’t intend to let any one complain of my house on that score. Well, it’s as broad as it’s long: if you set a good table, you can ask a good price; and if you don’t, you can’t, that’s all. Pay as you go, is my motto.”

Mrs. Harmon sat talking in the little den beside the door which she called the office, when she returned from that absence which she had asked him to say would not be more than fifteen minutes at the outside. It had been something more than two hours, and it had ended almost clandestinely; but knowledge of her return had somehow spread through the house, and several ladies came in while she was talking, to ask when their window-shades were to be put up, or to say that they knew their gas-fixtures must be out of order; or that there were mice in their closets, for they had heard them gnawing; or that they were sure their set-bowls smelt, and that the traps were not working. Mrs. Harmon was prompt in every exigency. She showed the greatest surprise that those shades had not gone up yet; she said she was going to send round for the gasfitter to look at the fixtures all over the house; and that she would get some potash to pour down the bowls, for she knew the drainage was perfect — it was just the pipes down to the traps that smelt; she advised a cat for the mice, and said she would get one. She used the greatest sympathy with the ladies, recognising a real sufferer in each, and not attempting to deny anything. From the dining-room came at times the sound of voices, which blended in a discord loud above the clatter of crockery, but Mrs. Harmon seemed not to hear them. An excited foreigner of some sort finally rushed from this quarter, and thrust his head into the booth where Lemuel and Mrs. Harmon sat, long enough to explode some formula of renunciation upon her, which left her serenity unruffled. She received with the same patience the sarcasm of a boarder who appeared at the office-door with a bag in his hand, and said he would send an express-man for his trunk. He threw down the money for his receipted bill; and when she said she was sorry he was going, he replied that he could not stand the table any longer, and that he believed that French cook of hers had died on the way over; he was tired of the Nova Scotia temporary, who had become permanent. A gentleman waited for the parting guest to be gone, and then said to the tranquil Mrs. Harmon: “So Mellen has kicked, has he?”

“Yes, Mr. Evans,” said Mrs. Harmon; “Mr. Mellen has kicked.”

“And don’t you want to abuse him a little? You can to me, you know,” suggested the gentleman.

He had a full beard, parted at the chin; it was almost white, and looked older than the rest of his face; his eyes were at once sad and whimsical. Lemuel tried to think where he had seen him before.

“Thank you; I don’t know as it would do any good, Mr. Evans. But if he could have waited one week longer, I should have had that cook.”

“Yes, that is what I firmly believe. Do you feel too much broken up to accept a ticket to the Wednesday matin�e at the Museum?”

“No, I don’t,” said Mrs. Harmon. “But I shouldn’t want to deprive Mrs. Evans of it.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t go,” said Mr. Evans, with a slight sigh. “You had better take it. Jefferson’s going to do Bob Acres.”

“Is that so?” asked Mrs. Harmon placidly, taking the ticket. “Well, I’m ever so much obliged to you, Mr. Evans. Mr. Evans, Mr. Barker — our new clerk,” she said, introducing them.

Lemuel rose with rustic awkwardness, and shook hands with Mr. Evans, who looked at him with a friendly smile, but said nothing.

“Now Mr. Barker is here, I guess I can get the time.” Mr. Evans said, well, he was glad she could, and went out of the street door. “He’s just one of the nicest gentlemen I’ve got,” continued Mrs. Harmon, following him with her eye as far as she conveniently could without turning her head, “him and his wife both. Ever heard of the Saturday Afternoon?”

“I don’t know as I have,” said Lemuel.

“Well, he’s one of the editors. It’s a kind of a Sunday paper, I guess, for all it don’t come out that day. I presume he could go every night in the week to every theatre in town, if he wanted to. I don’t know how many tickets he’s give me. Some of the ladies seem to think he’s always makin’ fun of them; but I can’t ever feel that way. He used to board with a great friend of mine, him and his wife. They’ve been with me now ever since Mrs. Hewitt died; she was the one they boarded with before. They say he used to be dreadful easygoing, ‘n’ ‘t his wife was all ‘t saved him. But I guess he’s different now. Well, I must go out and see after the lunch. You watch the office, and say just what I told you before.”

XIV.

Sewell chanced to open his door to go out just as Miss Vane put her hand on the bell-pull, the morning after she had dismissed Lemuel. The cheer of his Monday face died out at the unsmiling severity of hers; but he contrived to ask her in, and said he would call Mrs. Sewell, if she would sit down in the reception-room a moment.

“I don’t know,” she said, with a certain look of inquiry, not unmixed with compassion. “It’s about Lemuel.”

The minister fetched a deep sigh. “Yes, I know it. But she will have to know it sooner or later.” He went to the stairway and called her name, and then returned to Miss Vane in the reception-room.

“Has Lemuel been here?” she asked.

“No.”

“You said you knew it was about him—”

“It was my bad conscience, I suppose, and your face that told me.”

Miss Vane waited for Mrs. Sewell’s presence before she unpacked her heart. Then she left nothing in it. She ended by saying, “I have examined and cross-examined Sibyl, but it’s like cross-questioning a chameleon; she changed colour with every new light she was put into.” Here Miss Vane had got sorrowfully back to something more of her wonted humour, and laughed.

“Poor Sibyl!” said Mrs. Sewell.

“Poor?” retorted Miss Vane. “Not at all! I could get nothing out of either of them; but I feel perfectly sure that Lemuel was not to blame.”

“It’s very possible,” suggested Mrs. Sewell, “that he did say something in his awkward way that she misconstrued into impertinence.”

Miss Vane did not seem to believe this. “If Lemuel had given me the slightest satisfaction,” she began in self-exculpation. “But no,” she broke off. “It had to be!” She rose. “I thought I had better come and tell you at once, Mr. Sewell. I suppose you will want to look him up, and do something more for him. I wish if you find him you would make him take this note.” She gave the minister a ten-dollar bill. “I tried to do so, but he would not have it. I don’t know what I shall do without him! He is the best and most faithful creature in the world. Even in this little time I had got to relying implicitly upon his sense, his judgment, his goodness, his — Well! good morning!”

She ran out of the door, and left Sewell confronted with his wife.

He did not know whether she had left him to hope or to despair, and he waited for his wife to interpret his emotion, but Mrs. Sewell tacitly refused to do this. After a dreary interval he plucked a random cheerfulness out of space, and said: “Well, if Miss Vane feels in that way about it, I don’t see why the whole affair can’t be arranged and Barker reinstated.”

“David,” returned his wife, not vehemently at all, “when you come out with those mannish ideas I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, my dear,” said the minister, “I should be glad to come out with some womanish ideas if I had them. I dare say they would be better. But I do my poor best, under the circumstances. What is the trouble with my ideas, except that the sex is wrong?”

“You think, you men,” replied Mrs. Sewell, “that a thing like that can be mended up and smoothed over, and made just the same as ever. You think that because Miss Vane is sorry she sent Barker away and wants him back, she can take him back.”

“I don’t see why she can’t. I’ve sometimes supposed that the very highest purpose of Christianity was mutual forgiveness — forbearance with one another’s errors.”

“That’s all very well,” said Mrs. Sewell. “But you know that whenever I have taken a cook back, after she had shown temper, it’s been an entire failure; and this is a far worse case, because there is disappointed good-will mixed up with it. I don’t suppose Barker is at all to blame. Whatever has happened, you may be perfectly sure that it has been partly a bit of stage-play in Sibyl and partly a mischievous desire to use her power over him. I foresaw that she would soon be tired of reforming him. But whatever it is, it’s something that you can’t repair. Suppose Barker went back to them; could they ignore what’s happened?”

“Of course not,” Sewell admitted.

“Well, and should he ask her pardon, or she his?”

“The Socratic method is irresistible,” said the minister sadly. “You have proved that nothing can be done for Barker with the Vanes. And now the question is, what can be done for him?”

“That’s something I must leave to you, David,” said his wife dispiritedly. She arose, and as she passed out of the room she added, “You will have to find him, in the first place, and you had better go round to the police stations and the tramps’ lodging-houses and begin looking.”

Sewell sighed heavily under the sarcastic advice, but acted upon it, and set forth upon the useless quest, because he did not know in the least what else to do.

All that week Barker lay, a lurking discomfort, in his soul, though as the days passed the burden grew undeniably lighter; Sewell had a great many things besides Barker to think of. But when Sunday came, and he rose in his pulpit, he could not help casting a glance of guilty fear toward Miss Vane’s pew and drawing a long breath of guilty relief not to see Lemuel in it. We are so made, that in the reaction the minister was able to throw himself into the matter of his discourse with uncommon fervour. It was really very good matter, and he felt the literary joy in it which flatters the author even of a happily worded supplication to the Deity. He let his eyes, freed from their bondage to Lemuel’s attentive face, roam at large in liberal ease over his whole congregation; and when, toward the close of his sermon, one visage began to grow out upon him from the two or three hundred others, and to concentrate in itself the facial expression of all the rest, and become the only countenance there, it was a perceptible moment before he identified it as that of his inalienable charge. Then he began to preach at it as usual, but defiantly, and with yet a haste to be through and to get speech with it that he felt was ludicrous, and must appear unaccountable to his hearers. It seemed to him that he could not bring his sermon to a close; he ended it in a cloudy burst of rhetoric which he feared would please the nervous, elderly ladies — who sometimes blamed him for a want of emotionality — and knew must grieve the judicious. While the choir was singing the closing hymn, he contrived to beckon the sexton to the pulpit, and described and located Lemuel to him as well as he could without actually pointing him out; he said that he wished to see that young man after church, and asked the sexton to bring him to his room. The sexton did so to the best of his ability, but the young man whom he brought was not Lemuel, and had to be got rid of with apologies.

On three or four successive Sundays Lemuel’s face dawned upon the minister from the congregation, and tasked his powers of impersonal appeal and mental concentration to the utmost. It never appeared twice in the same place, and when at last Sewell had tutored the sexton carefully in Lemuel’s dress, he was driven to despair one morning when he saw the boy sliding along between the seats in the gallery, and sitting down with an air of satisfaction in an entirely new suit of clothes.

After this defeat the sexton said with humorous sympathy, “Well, there ain’t anything for it now, Mr. Sewell, but a detective, or else an advertisement in the Personals.”

Sewell laughed with him at his joke, and took what comfort he could from the evidence of prosperity which Lemuel’s new clothes offered. He argued that if Barker could afford to buy them he could not be in immediate need, and for some final encounter with him he trusted in Providence, and was not too much cast down when his wife made him recognise that he was trusting in Luck. It was an ordeal to look forward to finding Lemuel sooner or later among his hearers every Sunday; but having prepared his nerves for the shock, as men adjust their sensibilities to the recurrent pain of a disease, he came to bear it with fortitude, especially as he continually reminded himself that he had his fixed purpose to get at Lemuel at last and befriend him in any and every possible way. He tried hard to keep from getting a grudge against him.

At the hotel, Lemuel remained in much of his original belief in the fashion and social grandeur of the ladies who formed the majority of Mrs. Harmon’s guests. Our womankind are prone to a sort of helpless intimacy with those who serve them; the ladies had an instinctive perception of Lemuel’s trustiness, and readily gave him their confidence and much of their history. He came to know them without being at all able to classify them with reference to society at large, as of that large tribe among us who have revolted from domestic care, and have skilfully unseated the black rider who remains mounted behind the husband of the average lady-boarder. Some of them had never kept house, being young and newly married, though of this sort there were those who had tried it in flats, and had reverted to their natural condition of boarding. They advised Lemuel not to take a flat, whatever he did, unless he wanted to perish at once. Other lady boarders had broken up housekeeping during the first years of the war, and had been boarding round ever since, going from hotels in the city to hotels in the country, and back again with the change of the seasons; these mostly had husbands who had horses, and they talked with equal tenderness of the husbands and the horses, so that you could not always tell which Jim or Bob was; usually they had no children, but occasionally they had a married daughter, or a son who lived West. There were several single ladies: one who seemed to have nothing in this world to do but to come down to her meals, and another a physician who had not been able, in embracing the medical profession, to deny herself the girlish pleasure of her pet name, and was lettered in the list of guests in the entry as Dr. Cissie Bluff. In the attic, which had a north-light favourable to their work, were two girls, who were studying art at the Museum; one of them looked delicate at first sight, and afterwards seemed merely very gentle, with a clear-eyed pallor which was not unhealth. A student in the Law School sat at the table with these girls, and seemed sometimes to go with them to concerts and lectures. From his talk, which was almost the only talk that made itself heard in the dining-room, it appeared that he was from Wyoming Territory; he treated the young ladies as representative of Boston and its prejudices, though apparently they were not Bostonians. There were several serious and retiring couples, of whom one or other was an invalid, and several who were poor, and preferred the plated gentility of Mrs. Harmon’s hotel — it was called the St. Albans; Mrs. Harmon liked the name — to the genuine poverty of such housekeeping as they could have set up. About each of these women a home might have clung, with all its loves and cares; they were naturally like other women; but here they were ignoble particles, without attraction for one another, or apparently joy for themselves, impermanent, idle, listless; they had got rid of the trouble of housekeeping, and of its dignity and usefulness. There were a few children in the house, not at all noisy; the boys played on the sidewalk, and the little girls stayed in their rooms with their mothers, and rarely took the air oftener than they.

They came down rather later to breakfast, and they seemed not to go to school; some of them had piano lessons in their rooms. Their mothers did not go out much; sometimes they went to church or the theatre, and they went shopping. But they had apparently no more social than domestic life. Now and then they had a friend to lunch or dinner; if a lady was absent, it was known to Mrs. Harmon, and through her to the other ladies, that she was spending the day with a friend of hers at an hotel in Newton, or Lexington, or Woburn. In a city full of receptions, of dinner-giving, and party-going, Mrs. Harmon’s guests led the lives of cloistered nuns, so far as such pleasures were concerned; occasionally a transient had rooms for a week or two, and was continually going, and receiving visits. She became the object of a certain unenvious curiosity with the other ladies, who had not much sociability among themselves; they waited a good while before paying visits at one another’s rooms, and then were very punctilious not to go again until their calls had been returned. They were all doctoring themselves; they did not talk gossip or scandal much; they talked of their diseases and physicians, and their married daughters and of Mrs. Harmon, whom they censured for being too easygoing. Certain of them devoured novels, which they carried about clasped to their breasts with their fingers in them at the place where they were reading; they did not often speak of them, and apparently took them as people take opium.

The men were the husbands or fathers of the women, and were wholly without the domestic weight or consequence that belongs to men living in their own houses. There were certain old bachelors, among whom were two or three decayed branches of good Boston families, spendthrifts, or invalided bankrupts. Mr. Evans was practically among the single gentlemen, for his wife never appeared in the parlour or dining-room, and was seen only when she went in or out, heavily veiled, for a walk. Lemuel heard very soon that she had suffered a shock from the death of her son on the cars; the other ladies made much of her inability to get over it, and said nothing would induce them to have a son of theirs go in and out on the cars.

Among these people, such as they were, and far as they might be from a final civilisation, Lemuel began to feel an ambition to move more lightly and quickly than he had yet known how to do, to speak promptly, and to appear well. Our schooling does not train us to graceful or even correct speech; even our colleges often leave that uncouth. Many of Mrs. Harmon’s boarders spoke bad grammar through their noses; but the ladies dressed stylishly, and the men were good arithmeticians. Lemuel obeyed a native impulse rather than a good example in cultivating a better address; but the incentive to thrift and fashion was all about him. He had not been ignorant that his clothes were queer in cut and out of date, and during his stay at Miss Vane’s he had taken much council with himself as to whether he ought not to get a new suit with his first money instead of sending it home. Now he had solved the question, after sending the money home, by the discovery of a place on a degenerate street, in a neighbourhood of Chinese laundries, with the polite name of Misfit Parlours, where they professed to sell the failures of the leading tailors of Boston, New York, and Chicago. After long study of the window of the Parlours, Lemuel ventured within one day, and was told, when he said he could not afford the suit he fancied, that he might pay for it on the instalment plan, which the proprietor explained to him. In the mirror he was almost startled at the stylishness of his own image. The proprietor of the Parlours complimented him. “You see, you’ve got a good figure for a suit of clothes — what I call a ready made figure. You can go into a clothing store anywheres and fit you.”

He took the first instalment of the price, with Lemuel’s name and address, and said he would send the clothes round; but in the evening he brought them himself, and no doubt verified Lemuel’s statement by this device. It was a Saturday night, and the next morning Lemuel rose early to put them on. He meant to go to church in them, and in the afternoon he did not know just what he should do. He had hoped that some chance might bring them together again, and then he could see from the way Miss Dudley and ‘Manda Grier behaved, just what they thought. He had many minds about the matter himself, and had gone from an extreme of self-abhorrence to one of self-vindication, and between these he had halted at every gradation of blame and exculpation. But perhaps what chiefly kept him away was the uncertainty of his future; till he could give some shape to that he had no courage to face the past. Sometimes he wished never to see either of those girls again; but at other times he had a longing to go and explain, to justify himself, or to give himself up to justice.

The new clothes gave him more heart than he had yet had, but the most he could bring himself to do was to walk towards Pleasant Avenue the next Sunday afternoon, which Mrs. Harmon especially gave him, — and to think about walking up and down before the house. It ended in his walking up and down the block, first on one side of the street and then on the other. He knew the girls’ window; Miss Dudley had shown him it was the middle window of the top story when they were looking out of it, and he glanced up at it. Then he hurried away, but he could not leave the street without stopping at the corner, to cast a last look back at the house. There was an apothecary’s at that corner, and while he stood wistfully staring and going round the corner a little way, and coming back to look at the things in the apothecary’s window, he saw ‘Manda Grier come swiftly towards him. He wanted to run away now, but he could not; he felt nailed to the spot, and he felt the colour go out of his face. She pretended not to see him at first; but with a second glance she abandoned the pretence, and at his saying faintly, “Good afternoon,” she said, with freezing surprise, “Oh! Good afternoon, Mr. Barker!” and passed into the apothecary’s.

He could not go now, since he had spoken, and leave all so inconclusive again; and yet ‘Manda Grier had been so repellent, so cutting, in her tone and manner, that he did not know how to face her another time. When she came out he faltered, “I hope there isn’t anybody sick at your house, Miss Grier.”

“Oh, nobody that you’ll care about, Mr. Barker,” she answered airily, and began to tilt rapidly away, with her chin thrust out before her.

He made a few paces after her, and then stopped; she seemed to stop too, and he caught up with her.

“I hope,” he gasped, “there ain’t anything the matter with Miss Dudley?”

“Oh, nothing ‘t you’ll care about,” said ‘Manda Grier, and she added with terrible irony, “You’ve b’en round to inquire so much that you hain’t allowed time for any great change.”

“Has she been sick long?” faltered Lemuel. “I didn’t dare to come!” he cried out. “I’ve been wanting to come, but I didn’t suppose you would speak to me — any of you.” Now his tongue was unlocked, he ran on: “I don’t know as it’s any excuse — there ain’t any excuse for such a thing! I know she must perfectly despise me, and that I’m not fit for her to look at; but I’d give anything if I could take it all back and be just where I was before. You tell her, won’t you, how I feel?”

‘Manda Grier, who had listened with a killingly averted face, turned sharply upon him: “You mean about stayin’ away so long? I don’t know as she cared a great deal, but it’s a pretty queer way of showin’ you cared for her.”

“I didn’t mean that!” retorted Lemuel; and he added by an immense effort, “I meant — the way I behaved when I was there; I meant—”

“Oh!” said ‘Manda Grier, turning her face away again; she turned it so far away that the back of her head was all that Lemuel could see. “I guess you better speak to Statira about that.”

By this time they had reached the door of the boarding-house, and ‘Manda Grier let herself in with her latch-key. “Won’t you walk in, Mr. Barker?” she said in formal tones of invitation.

“Is she well enough to see — company?” murmured Lemuel. “I shouldn’t want to disturb her.”

“I don’t believe but what she can see you,” said ‘Manda Grier, for the first time relentingly.

“All right,” said Lemuel, gulping the lump in his throat, and he followed ‘Manda Grier up the flights of stairs to the door of the girls’ room, which she flung open without knocking.

“S’tira,” she said, “here’s Mr. Barker,” and Lemuel, from the dark landing, where he lurked a moment, could see Statira sitting in the rocking-chair in a pretty blue dressing-gown; after a first flush she looked pale, and now and then put up her hand to hide a hoarse little cough.

XV.

“Walk right in, Mr. Barker,” cried ‘Manda Grier, and Lemuel entered, more awkward and sheepish in his new suit from the Misfit Parlours than he had been before in his Willoughby Pastures best clothes. Statira merely said, “Why, Mr. Barker!” and stood at her chair where she rose. “You’re quite a stranger. Won’t you sit down?”

Lemuel sat down, and ‘Manda Grier said politely, “Won’t you let me take your hat, Mr. Barker?” and they both treated him with so much ceremony and deference that it seemed impossible he could ever have done such a monstrous thing as kiss a young lady like Miss Dudley; and he felt that he never could approach the subject even to accept a just doom at her hands.

They all talked about the weather for a minute, and then ‘Manda Grier said, “Well, I guess I shall have to go down and set this boneset to steep;” and as he rose, and stood to let her pass, she caught his arm, and gave it a clutch. He did not know whether she did it on purpose, or why she did it, but somehow it said to him that she was his friend, and he did not feel so much afraid.

When she was gone, however, he returned to the weather for conversation; but when Statira said it was lucky for her that the winter held off so, he made out to inquire about her sickness, and she told him that she had caught a heavy cold; at first it seemed just to be a head-cold, but afterwards it seemed to settle on the lungs, and it seemed as if she never could throw it off; they had had the doctor twice; but now she was better, and the cough was nearly all gone.

“I guess I took the cold that day, from havin’ the window open,” she concluded; and she passed her hand across her lap, and looked down demurely, and then up at the ceiling, and her head twitched a little and trembled.

Lemuel knew that his hour had come, if ever it were to come, and he said hoarsely: “I guess if I made you take cold that day, it wasn’t all I did. I guess I did worse than that.”

She did not look at him and pretend ignorance, as ‘Manda Grier would have done; but lifting her moist eyes and then dropping them, she said, “Why, Mr. Barker, what can you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” he retorted, with courage astonishing to him. “It was because I liked you so much.” He could not say loved; it seemed too bold. “There’s nothing else can excuse it, and I don’t know as that can.”

She put up her hands to her eyes, and began to cry, and he rose and went to her, and said, “Oh, don’t cry, don’t cry!” and somehow he took hold of her hands, and then her arms went round his neck, and she was crying on his breast.

“You’ll think I’m rather of a silly person, crying so much about nothing,” she said, when she lifted her head from his shoulder to wipe her eyes. “But I can’t seem to help it,” and she broke down again. “I presume it’s because I’ve been sick, and I’m kind of weak yet. I know you wouldn’t have done that, that day, if you hadn’t have cared for me; and I wasn’t mad a bit; not half as mad as I ought to have been; but when you stayed away so long, and never seemed to come near any more, I didn’t know what to think. But now I can understand just how you felt, and I don’t blame you one bit; I should have done just so myself if I’d been a man, I suppose. And now it’s all come right, I don’t mind being sick or anything; only when Thanksgiving came, we felt sure you’d call, and we’d got the pies nicely warmed. Oh dear!” She gave way again, and then pressed her cheek tight against his to revive herself. “‘Manda said she knew it was just because you was kind of ashamed, and I was too sick to eat any of the pies, anyway; and so it all turned out for the best; and I don’t want you to believe that I’m one to cry over spilt milk, especially when it’s all gathered up again!”

Her happy tongue ran on, revealing, divining everything, and he sat down with her in his arms, hardly speaking a word, till her heart was quite poured out. ‘Manda Grier left them a long time together, and before she came back he had told Statira all about himself since their last meeting. She was very angry at the way that girl had behaved at Miss Vane’s, but she was glad he had found such a good place now, without being beholden to any one for it, and she showed that she felt a due pride in his being an hotel clerk. He described the hotel, and told what he had to do there, and about Mrs. Harmon and the fashionableness of all the guests. But he said he did not think any of the ladies went ahead of her in dress, if they came up to her; and Statira pressed her lips gratefully against his cheek, and then lifting her head held herself a little away to see him again, and said, “You’re splendidly dressed too; I noticed it the first thing when you came in. You look just as if you had always lived in Boston.”

“Is that so?” asked Lemuel; and he felt his heart suffused with tender pride and joy. He told her of the Misfit Parlours and the instalment plan, and she said, well, it was just splendid; and she asked him if he knew she wasn’t in the store any more; and “No,” she added delightedly, upon his confession of ignorance, “I’m going to work in the box-factory, after this, where ‘Manda Grier works. It’s better pay, and you have more control of your hours, and you can set down while you work, if you’ve a mind to. I think it’s going to be splendid. What should you say if ‘Manda Grier and me took some rooms and went to housekeepin’?”

“I don’t know,” said Lemuel; but in his soul he felt jealous of her keeping house with ‘Manda Grier.

“Well, I don’t know as we shall do it,” said Statira, as if feeling his tacit reluctance.

‘Manda Grier came in just then, and cast a glance of friendly satire at them. “Well, I declare!” she said, for all recognition of the situation.

Lemuel made an offer to rise, but Statira would not let him. “I guess ‘Manda Grier won’t mind it much.”

“I guess I can stand it if you can,” said ‘Manda Grier; and this seemed such a witty speech that they all laughed, till, as Statira said, she thought she should die. They laughed the more when ‘Manda Grier added dryly, “I presume you won’t want your boneset now.” She set the vessel she had brought it up in on the stove, and covered it with a saucer. “I do’ know as I should if I was in your place. It’s kind o’ curious I should bring both remedies home with me at once.” At this they all laughed a third time, till ‘Manda Grier said, “‘Sh! ‘sh! Do you want to raise the roof?”

She began to bustle about, and to set out a little table, and cover it with a napkin, and as she worked she talked on. “I guess if you don’t want any boneset tea, a little of the other kind won’t hurt any of us, and I kinder want a cup myself.” She set it to steep on the stove, and it went through Lemuel’s mind that she might have steeped the boneset there too, if she had thought of it; but he did not say anything, though it seemed a pretty good joke on ‘Manda Grier. She ran on in that way of hers so that you never could tell whether she really meant a thing or not. “I guess if I have to manage many more cases like yours, S’tira Dudley, I shall want to lay in a whole chest of it. What do you think, Mr. Barker?”

“Mr. Barker!” repeated Statira.

“Well, I’m afraid to say Lemuel any more, for fear he’ll fly off the handle, and never come again. What do you think, Mr. Barker, of havin’ to set at that window every Sunday for the last three weeks, and keep watch of both sidewalks till you get such a crick in your neck, and your eyes so set in your head, you couldn’t move either of ‘em?”

“Now, ‘Manda Grier!” said Statira from Lemuel’s shoulder.

“Well, I don’t say I had to do it, and I don’t say who the young man was that I was put to look out for — —”

“‘Manda!”

“But I do say it’s pretty hard to wait on a sick person one side the room, and keep watch for a young man the other side, both at once.”

“‘Manda Grier, you’re too bad!” pouted Statira. “Don’t you believe a word she says, Mr. Barker.”

“Mr. Barker!” repeated ‘Manda Grier.

“Well, I don’t care!” said Statira, “I know who I mean.”

“I don’t,” said ‘Manda Grier. “And I didn’t know who you meant this afternoon when you was standin’ watch ‘t the window, and says you, ‘There! there he is!’ and I had to run so quick with the dipper of water I had in my hand to water the plants that I poured it all over the front of my dress.”

“Do you believe her?” asked Statira.

“And I didn’t know who you meant,” proceeded ‘Manda Grier, busy with the cups and saucers, “when you kept hurryin’ me up to change it; ‘Oh, quick, quick! How long you are! I know he’ll get away; I know he will!’ and I had to just sling on a shawl and rush out after this boneset.”

“There! Now that shows she’s makin’ it all up!” cried Statira. “She put on a sack, and I helped her on with it myself. So there!”

“Well, if it was a sack! And after all, the young man was gone when I got down int’ the street,” concluded ‘Manda Grier solemnly.

Lemuel had thought she was talking about him; but now a pang of jealousy went through him, and showed at the eyes he fixed on her.

“I don’t know what I sh’d ‘a’ done,” she resumed demurely, “if I hadn’t have found Mr. Barker at the apothecary’s and got him to come home ‘th me; but of course, ‘twan’t the same as if it was the young man!”

Lemuel’s arm fell from Statira’s waist in his torment.

“Why, Lemuel!” she said in tender reproach.

“Why, you coot!” cried ‘Manda Grier in utter amazement at his single-mindedness; and burst into a scream of laughter. She took the teapot from the stove, and set it on the table. “There, young man — if you are the young man — you better pull up to the table, and have something to start your ideas. S’tira! Let him come!” and Lemuel, blushing for shame at his stupidity, did as he was bid.

“I’ve got the greatest mind in the world to set next to S’tira myself,” said ‘Manda Grier, “for fear she should miss that young man!” and now they both laughed together at Lemuel; but the girls let him sit between them, and Statira let him keep one of her hands under the table, as much as she could. “I never saw such a jealous piece! Why, I shall begin to be afraid for myself. What should you think of S’tira’s going to housekeeping with me?”

“I don’t believe he likes the idea one bit,” Statira answered for him.

“Oh yes, I do!” Lemuel protested.

“‘D you tell him?” ‘Manda Grier demanded of her. She nodded with saucy defiance. “Well, you have got along! And about the box-factory?” Statira nodded again, with a look of joyous intelligence at Lemuel. “Well, what hain’t you told, I wonder!” ‘Manda Grier added seriously to Lemuel, “I think it’ll be about the best thing in the world for S’tira. I see for the last six months she’s been killin’ herself in that store. She can’t ever get a chance to set down a minute; and she’s on her feet from mornin’ till night; and I think it’s more ‘n half that that’s made her sick; I don’t say what the other four-fifths was!

“Now, ‘Manda Grier, stop!”

“Well, that’s over with now, and now we want to keep you out that store. I been lookin’ out for this place for S’tira a good while. She can go onto the small boxes, if she wants to, and she can set down all the time; and she’ll have a whole hour for her dinner; and she can work by the piece, and do as much or as little as she’s a mind to; but if she’s a mind to work she can make her five and six dollars a week, easy. Mr. Stevens’s real nice and kind, and he looks out for the girls that ain’t exactly strong — not but what S’tira’s as strong as anybody, when she’s well — and he don’t put ’em on the green paper work, because it’s got arsenic in it, and it makes your head ache, and you’re liable to blood poisonin’. One the girls fainted and had spasms, and as soon as he found it out he took her right off; and he’s just like clockwork to pay. I think it’ll do everything for S’tira to be along ‘th me there, where I can look after her.”

Lemuel said he thought so too; he did not really think at all, he was so flattered at being advised with about Statira, as if she were in his keeping and it was for him to say what was best for her; and when she seemed uncertain about his real opinion, and said she was not going to do anything he did not approve of, he could scarcely speak for rapture, but he protested that he did approve of the scheme entirely.

“But you shouldn’t want we girls to set up housekeeping in rooms?” she suggested; and he said that he should, and that he thought it would be more independent and home-like.

“We’re half doin’ it now,” said ‘Manda Grier, “and I know some rooms — two of ’em — where we could get along first rate, and not cost us much more ‘n half what it does here.”

After she cleared up the tea-things she made another errand downstairs, and Lemuel and Statira went back to their rocking-chair. It still amazed him that she seemed not even to make it a favour to him; she seemed to think it was favour to her. What was stranger yet was that he could not feel that there was anything wrong or foolish about it; he thought of his mother’s severity about young folks’ sickishness, as she called it, and he could not understand it. He knew that he had never had such right and noble thoughts about girls before; perhaps Statira was better than other girls; she must be; she was just like a child; and he must be very good himself to be anyways fit for her; if she cared so much for him, it must be a sign that he was not so bad as he had sometimes thought. A great many things went through his mind, the silent comment and suggestion of their talk, and all the time while he was saying something or listening to her, he was aware of the overwhelming wonder of her being so frank with him, and not too proud or ashamed to have him know how anxious she had been, ever since they first met, for fear he did not care for her. She had always appeared so stylish and reserved, and now she was not proud at all. He tried to tell her how it had been with him the last three weeks; all that he could say was that he had been afraid to come. She laughed, and said, the idea of his being afraid of her! She said that she was glad of everything she had gone through. At times she lifted herself from his shoulder and coughed; but that was when she had been laughing or crying a little. They told each other about their families; Statira said she had not really any folks of her own; she was just brought up by her aunt; and Lemuel had to tell her that his mother wore bloomers. Statira said she guessed she should not care much for the bloomers; and in everything she tried to make out that he was much better than she was, and just exactly right. She already spoke of his sister by her first name, and she entered into his whole life, as if she had always known him. He said she must come with him to hear Mr. Sewell preach, sometime; but she declared that she did not think much of a minister who could behave the way he had done to Lemuel. He defended Sewell, and maintained that if it had not been for him he might not have come to Boston, and so might never have seen her; but she held out that she could not bear Mr. Sewell, and that she knew he was double-faced, and everything. Lemuel said well, he did not know that he should ever have anything more to do with him; but he liked to hear him preach, and he guessed he tried to do what was about right. Statira made him promise that if ever he met Mr. Sewell again, he would not make up to him, any way; and she would not tolerate the thought of Miss Vane.

“What you two quar’lin’ about?” demanded ‘Manda Grier, coming suddenly into the room; and that turned their retrospective griefs into joy again.

“I’m scoldin’ him because he don’t think enough of himself,” cried Statira.

“Well, he seems to take it pretty meekly,” said ‘Manda Grier. “I guess you didn’t scold very hard. Now, young man,” she added to Lemuel, “I guess you better be goin’. It’s five o’clock, and if you should be out after dark, and the bears should get you, I don’t know what S’tira would do.”

“‘Tain’t five yet!” pleaded Statira. “That old watch of yours is always tryin’ to beat the town clock.”

“Well, it’s the clock that’s ahead this time,” said ‘Manda Grier. “My watch says quarter of. Come, now, S’tira, you let him go, or he sha’n’t come back any more.”

They had a parting that Lemuel’s mother would have called sickish without question; but it all seemed heavenly sweet and right. Statira said now he had got to kiss ‘Manda Grier too; and when he insisted, her chin knocked against his, and saved her lips, and she gave him a good box on the ear.

“There, I guess that ‘ll do for one while,” she said, arranging her tumbled hair; “but there’s more kisses where that came from, for both of you if you want ‘em. Coots!”

Once, when Lemuel was little, he had a fever, and he was always seeming to glide down the school-house stairs without touching the steps with his feet. He remembered this dream now, when he reached the street; he felt as if he had floated down on the air; and presently he was back in his little den at the hotel, he did not know how. He ran the elevator up and down for the ladies who called him from the different floors, and he took note of the Sunday difference in their toilet as they passed in to tea; but in the same dreamy way.

After the boarders had supped, he went in as usual with Mrs. Harmon’s nephew, less cindery than on week-days, from the cellar, and Mrs. Harmon, silken smooth for her evening worship at the shrine of a popular preacher from New York. The Sunday evening before, she had heard an agnostic lecture in the Boston Theatre, and she said she wished to compare notes. Her tranquillity was unruffled by the fact that the head-waitress had left, just before tea; she presumed they could get along just as well without her as with her: the boarders had spoiled her, anyway. She looked round at Lemuel’s face, which beamed with his happiness, and said she guessed she should have to get him to open the dining-room doors, and seat the transients the next few days, till she could get another head-waitress. It did not seem to be so much a request as a resolution; but Lemuel willingly assented. Mrs. Harmon’s nephew said that so long as they did not want him to do it he did not care who did it; and if a few of them had his furnace to look after they would not be so anxious to kick.

XVI

Lemuel had to be up early in the morning to get the bills of fare, which Mrs. Harmon called the Meanyous, written in time for the seven o’clock breakfasters; and after opening the dining-room doors with fit ceremony, he had to run backward and forward to answer the rings at the elevator, and to pull out the chairs for the ladies at the table, and slip them back under them as they sat down. The ladies at the St. Albans expected to get their money’s worth; but their exactions in most things were of use to Lemuel. He grew constantly nimbler of hand and foot under them, and he grew quicker-witted; he ceased to hulk in mind and body. He did not employ this new mental agility in devising excuses and delays; he left that to Mrs. Harmon, whose conscience was easy in it; but from seven o’clock in the morning till eleven at night, when the ladies came in from the theatre, he was so promptly, so comfortingly at their service, that they all said they did not see how they had ever got along without him.

His activities took the form of interruptions rather than constant occupation, and he found a good deal of broken-up time on his hands, which he passed in reading, and in reveries of Statira. At the hours when the elevator was mostly in use he kept a book in it with him, and at other times he had it in the office, as Mrs. Harmon called his little booth. He remained there reading every night after the house quieted down after dinner, until it was time to lock up for the night; and several times Mr. Evans stopped and looked in at him where he sat in the bad combustion of the gas that was taking the country tan out of his cheeks. One night when he came in late, and Lemuel put his book down to take him up in the elevator, he said, “Don’t disturb yourself; I’m going to walk up,” but he lingered at the door looking in with the queer smile that always roused the ladies’ fears of tacit ridicule. “I suppose you don’t find it necessary,” he said finally, “to chase a horse-car now, when you want to find your way to a given point?”

Lemuel reddened and dropped his head; he had already recognised in Mr. Evans the gentleman from whose kindly curiosity he had turned, that first day, in the suspicion that he might be a beat. “No,” he said, “I guess I can go pretty near everywhere in Boston now.”

“Well,” said Mr. Evans, “it was an ingenious system. How do you like Boston?”

“I like it first-rate, but I’ve not seen many other places,” answered Lemuel cautiously.

“Well, if you live here long enough you won’t care to see any other places; you’ll know they’re not worth seeing.” Lemuel looked up as if he did not understand exactly, and Mr. Evans stepped in and lifted the book he had been reading. It was one he had bought at second hand while he was with Miss Vane: a tough little epitome of the philosophies in all times, the crabbed English version of a dry German original. Mr. Evans turned its leaves over. “Do you find it a very exciting story?” he asked.

“Why, it isn’t a story,” said Lemuel, in simple surprise.

“No?” asked Mr. Evans. “I thought it must be. Most of the young gentlemen who run the elevators I travel in read stories. Do you like this kind of reading?”

Lemuel reflected, and then he said he thought you ought to find out about such things if you got a chance.

“Yes,” said the editor musingly, “I suppose one oughtn’t to throw any sort of chance away. But you’re sure you don’t prefer the novels? You’ll excuse my asking you?”

“Oh, perfectly excusable,” said Lemuel. He added that he liked a good novel too, when he could get hold of it.

“You must come to my room some day, and see if you can’t get hold of one there. Or if you prefer metaphysics, I’ve got shelves full that you’re welcome to. I suppose,” he added, “you hadn’t been in Boston a great while when I met you that day?”

“No,” said Lemuel, dropping his head again, “I had just come.”

As if he saw that something painful lurked under the remembrance of the time for Lemuel the editor desisted.

The next morning he stopped on his way to breakfast with some books which he handed to Lemuel. “Don’t feel at all obliged to read them,” he said, “because I lend them to you. They won’t be of the least use to you, if you do so.”

“I guess that anything you like will be worth reading,” said Lemuel, flattered by the trouble so chief a boarder as Mr. Evans had taken with him.

“Not if they supplied a want you didn’t feel. You seem to be fond of books, and after a while you’ll be wanting to lend them yourself. I’ll give you a little hint that I’m too old to profit by: remember that you can lend a person more books in a day than he can read in a week.”

His laugh kept Lemuel shy of him still, in spite of a willingness that the editor showed for their better acquaintance. He seemed to wish to know about Lemuel, particularly since he had recognised the pursuer of the horse-car in him, and this made Lemuel close up the more. He would have liked to talk with him about the books Evans had lent him. But when the editor stopped at the office door, where Lemuel sat reading one of them, and asked him what he thought of it, the boy felt that somehow it was not exactly his opinion that Mr. Evans was getting at; and this sense of being inspected and arranged in another’s mind, though he could not formulate the operation in his own, somehow wounded and repelled him. It was not that the editor ever said anything that was not kind and friendly; he was always doing kind and friendly things, and he appeared to take a real interest in Lemuel. At the end of the first week after Lemuel had added the head waitership to his other duties, Evans stopped in going out of the dining-room and put a dollar in his hand.

“What is it for?” asked Lemuel.

“For? Really, I don’t know. It must be tribute-money,” said the editor in surprise, but with a rising curiosity. “I never know what it’s for.”

Lemuel turned red, and handed it back. “I don’t know as I want any money I haven’t earned.”

That night, after dinner, when Evans was passing the office door on his way out of the hotel, Lemuel stopped him and said with embarrassment, “Mr. Evans, I don’t want you should think I didn’t appreciate your kindness this morning.”

“Ah, I’m not sure it was kindness,” said Evans with immediate interest. “Why didn’t you take the money?”

“Well, I told you why,” said Lemuel, overcoming the obscure reluctance he felt at Evans’s manner as best he could. “I’ve been thinking it over, and I guess I was right; but I didn’t know whether I had expressed it the best way.”

“The way couldn’t be improved. But why did you think you hadn’t earned my dollar?”

“I don’t do anything but open the doors, and show people to their places; I don’t call that anything.”

“But if you were a waiter and served at table?”

“I wouldn’t be one,” said Lemuel, with a touch of indignation; “and I shouldn’t take presents, anyway.”

Evans leaned against the door-jamb.

“Have you heard of the college students who wait at the mountain hotels in vacation? They all take fees. Do you think yourself better than they are?”

“Yes, I do!” cried Lemuel.

“Well, I don’t know but you are,” said the editor thoughtfully. “But I think I should distinguish. Perhaps there’s no shame in waiting at table, but there is in taking fees.”

“Yes; that’s what I meant,” said Lemuel, a little sorry for his heat. “I shouldn’t be ashamed to do any kind of work, and to take my pay for it; but I shouldn’t want to have folks giving me money over and above, as if I was a beggar.”

The editor stood looking him absently in the face. After a moment he asked, “What part of New England did you come from, Mr. Barker?”

“I came from the middle part of the State — from Willoughby Pastures.”

“Do those ideas — those principles — of yours prevail there?”

“I don’t know whether they do or not,” said Lemuel.

“If you were sure they did, I should like to engage board there for next summer,” said the editor, going out.

It was Monday night, a leisure time with him, and he was going out to see a friend, a minister, with whom Monday night was also leisure time.

After he was gone, some of the other boarders began to drop in from the lectures and concerts which they frequented in the evening. The ladies had all some favour to ask of Lemuel, some real or fancied need of his help; in return for his promise or performance, they each gave him advice. What they expressed collectively was that they should think that he would put his eyes out reading by that gas, and that he had better look out, or he would ruin his health anyway, reading so much. They asked him how much time he got for sleep; and they said that from twelve till six was not enough, and that he was just killing himself. They had all offered to lend him books; the least literary among them had a sort of house pride in his fondness for books; their sympathy with this taste of his amused their husbands, who tolerated it, but in their hearts regarded it as a womanish weakness, indicating a want of fibre in Lemuel. Mrs. Harmon as a business woman, and therefore occupying a middle ground between the sexes, did not exactly know herself what to make of her clerk’s studiousness; all that she could say was that he kept up with his work. She assumed that before Lemuel’s coming she had been the sole motive power of the house; but it was really a sort of democracy, and was managed by the majority of its inmates. An element of demagoguery tampered with the Irish vote in the person of Jerry, nominally porter, but actually factotum, who had hitherto, pending the strikes of the different functionaries, filled the offices now united in Lemuel. He had never been clerk, because his literature went no further than the ability to write his name, and to read a passage of the constitution in qualifying for the suffrage. He did not like the new order of things, but he was without a party, and helpless to do more than neglect the gong-bell when he had reason to think Lemuel had sounded it.

About eleven o’clock the law-student came in with the two girl art-students, fresh from the outside air, and gay from the opera they had been hearing. The young man told Lemuel he ought to go to see it. After the girls had opened their door, one of them came running back to the elevator, and called down to Lemuel that there was no ice-water, and would he please send some up.

Lemuel brought it up himself, and when he knocked at the door, the same girl opened it and made a pretty outcry over the trouble she had given him. “I supposed, of course, Jerry would bring it,” she said contritely; and as if for some atonement, she added, “Won’t you come in, Mr. Barker, and see my picture?”

Lemuel stood in the gush of the gas-light hesitating, and the law-student called out to him, jollily, “Come in, Mr. Barker, and help me play art-critic.” He was standing before the picture, with his overcoat on and his hat in his hand. “First appearance on any stage,” he added; and as Lemuel entered, “If I were you,” he said, “I’d fire that porter out of the hotel. He’s outlived his usefulness.”

“It’s a shame, your having to bring the water,” said Miss Swan; she was the girl who had spoken before.

The other one came forward and said, “Won’t you sit down?”

She spoke to Lemuel; the law-student answered, “Thank you; I don’t care if I do.”

Lemuel did not know whether to stay, nor what to say of Miss Swan’s picture, and he thanked the young lady and remained standing.

“O Jessie, Jessie, Jessie!” cried Miss Swan.

The other went to her, tranquilly, as if used to such vehement appeals.

“Just see how my poor cow looks since I painted out that grass! She hasn’t got a leg to stand on!”

The law-student did nothing but make jokes about the picture. “I think she looks pretty well for a cow that you must have had to study from a milk-can — nearest you could come to a cow in Boston.”

Miss Carver, the other young lady, ignored his joking, and after some criticisms on the picture, left him and Miss Swan to talk it over. She talked to Lemuel, and asked him if he had read a book he glanced at on the table, and seemed willing to make him feel at ease. But she did not. He thought she was very proud, and he believed she wanted him to go, but he did not know how to go. Her eyes were so still and pure; but they dwelt very coldly upon him. Her voice was like that look put into sound; it was rather high-pitched but very sweet and pure, and cold. He hardly knew what he said; he felt hot, and he waited for some chance to get away.

At last he heard Miss Swan saying, “Must you go, Mr. Berry? So soon!” and saw her giving the student her hand, with a bow of burlesque desolation.

Lemuel prepared to go too. All his rusticity came back upon him, and he said, “Well, I wish you good evening.”

It seemed to him that Miss Carver’s still eyes looked a sort of starry scorn after him. He found that he had brought away the book they had been talking about, and he was a long time in question whether he had better take it back at once, or give it to her when she came to breakfast.

He went to bed in the same trouble of mind. Every night he had fallen asleep with Statira in his thoughts, but now it was Miss Carver that he thought of, and more and more uncomfortably. He asked himself what she would say if she saw his mother in the bloomers. She was herself not dressed so fashionably as Statira, but very nicely.

XVII.

At Sewell’s house the maid told Evans to walk up into the study, without seating him first in the reception-room, as if that were needless with so intimate a friend of the family. He found Sewell at his desk, and he began at once, without the forms of greeting:

“If you don’t like that other subject, I’ve got a new one for you, and you could write a sermon on it that would make talk.”

“You look at it from the newspaper point of view,” returned Sewell, in the same humour. “I’m not an ‘enterprise,’ and I don’t want to make talk in your sense. I don’t know that I want to make talk at all; I should prefer to make thought, to make feeling.”

“Well,” said the editor, “this would do all three.”

“Would you come to hear me, if I wrote the sermon?”

“Ah, that’s asking a good deal.”

“Why don’t you develop your idea in an article? You’re always bragging that you preach to a larger congregation than I.”

“I propose to let you preach to my congregation too, if you’ll write this sermon. I’ve talked to you before about reporting your sermons in Saturday Afternoon. They would be a feature; and if we could open with this one, and have a good ‘incisive’ editorial on it, disputing some of your positions, and treating certain others with a little satire, at the same time maintaining a very respectful attitude towards you on the whole, and calling attention to the fact that there was a strong and increasing interest in your ‘utterances,’ which we were the first to recognise, — it would be a card. We might agree beforehand on the points the editorial was to touch, and so make one hand wash another. See?”

“I see that journalism has eaten into your soul. What is your subject?”

“Well, in general terms, and in a single word, Complicity. Don’t you think that would be rather taking? ‘Mr. Sewell, in his striking sermon on Complicity,’ and so forth. It would be a great hit, and it would stand a chance of sticking, like Emerson’s ‘Compensation.’”

“Delightful! The most amusing part is that you’ve really a grain of business in your bushel of chaff.” Sewell wheeled about in his swivel-chair, and sat facing his guest, deeply sunken in the low easy seat he always took. “When did this famous idea occur to you?” he pursued, swinging his glasses by their cord.

“About three weeks ago, at the theatre. There was one of those pieces on that make you despair of the stage, and ashamed of writing a play even to be rejected by it — a farrago of indecently amusing innuendoes and laughably vile situations, such as, if they were put into a book, would prevent its being sent through the mail. The theatre apparently can still be as filthy in suggestion as it was at the Restoration, and not shock its audiences. There were all sorts of people there that night: young girls who had come with young men for an evening’s polite amusement; families; middle-aged husbands and wives; respectable-looking single women; and average bachelors. I don’t think the ordinary theatrical audience is of a high grade intellectually; it’s third or fourth rate; but morally it seems quite as good as other public assemblages. All the people were nicely dressed, and they sat there before that nasty mess — it was an English comedy where all the jokes turn upon the belief of the characters that their wives and husbands are the parents of illegitimate offspring — and listened with as smooth self-satisfaction as if they were not responsible for it. But all at once it occurred to me that they were responsible, every one of them — as responsible as the players, as the author himself.”

“Did you come out of the theatre at that point?” asked Sewell.

“Oh, I was responsible too; but I seemed to be the only one ashamed of my share in the business.”

“If you were the only one conscious of it, your merit wasn’t very great,” suggested the minister.

“Well, I should like the others to be conscious of it too. That’s why I want you to preach my sermon. I want you to tell your people and my people that the one who buys sin or shame, or corruption of any sort, is as guilty as the one who sells it.”

“It isn’t a new theory,” said Sewell, still refusing to give up his ironical tone. “It was discovered some time ago that this was so before God.”

“Well, I’ve just discovered that it ought to be so before man,” said Evans.

“Still you’re not the first,” said Sewell.

“Yes,” said the editor, “I think I am, from my peculiar standpoint. The other day a friend of mine — an upright, just, worthy man, no one more so — was telling me of a shocking instance of our national corruption. He had just got home from Europe, and he had brought a lot of dutiable things, that a customs inspector passed for a trifling sum. That was all very well, but the inspector afterwards came round with a confidential claim for a hundred dollars, and the figures to show that the legal duties would have been eight or ten times as much. My friend was glad to pay the hundred dollars; but he defied me to name any country in Europe where such a piece of official rascality was possible. He said it made him ashamed of America!” Evans leaned his head back against his chair and laughed.

“Yes,” said Sewell with a sigh, and no longer feigning lightness. “That’s awful.”

“Well, now,” said Evans, “don’t you think it your duty to help people realise that they can’t regard such transactions de haut en bas, if they happen to have taken part in them? I have heard of the shameful condition of things down in Maine, where I’m told the French Canadians who’ve come in regularly expect to sell their votes to the highest bidder at every election. Since my new system of ethics occurred to me, I’ve fancied that there must have always been a shameful state of things there, if Americans could grow up in the willingness to buy votes. I want to have people recognise that there is no superiority for them in such an affair; that there’s nothing but inferiority; that the man who has the money and the wit to corrupt is a far baser rascal than the man who has the ignorance and the poverty to be corrupted. I would make this principle seek out every weak spot, every sore spot in the whole social constitution. I’m sick to death of the frauds that we practise upon ourselves in order to be able to injure others. Just consider the infernal ease of mind in which men remain concerning men’s share in the social evil — —”

“Ah, my dear friend, you can’t expect me to consider that in my pulpit!” cried the minister.

“No; I couldn’t consider it in my paper. I suppose we must leave that where it is, unless we can affect it by analogy, and show that there is infamy for both parties to any sin committed in common. You must select your instances in other directions, but you can find plenty of them — enough and to spare. It would give the series a tremendous send-off,” said Evans, relapsing into his habitual tone, “if you would tackle this subject in your first sermon for publication. There would be money in it. The thing would make a success in the paper, and you could get somebody to reprint it in pamphlet form. Come, what do you say?”

“I should say that you had just been doing something you were ashamed of,” answered Sewell. “People don’t have these tremendous moral awakenings for nothing.”

“And you don’t think my present state of mind is a gradual outgrowth of my first consciousness of the common responsibility of actors and audience in the representation of a shameless comedy?”

“No, I shouldn’t think it was,” said the minister securely.

“Well you’re right.” Evans twisted himself about in his chair, and hung his legs over one of the arms.

“The real reason why I wish you to preach this sermon is because I have just been offering a fee to the head-waiter at our hotel.”

“And you feel degraded with him by his acceptance? For it is a degradation.”

“No, that’s the strangest thing about it. I have a monopoly of the degradation, for he didn’t take my dollar.”

“Ah, then a sermon won’t help you! Why wouldn’t he take it?”

“He said he didn’t know as he wanted any money he hadn’t earned,” said Evans, with a touch of mimicry.

The minister started up from his lounging attitude. “Is his name — Barker?” he asked, with unerring prescience.

“Yes,” said Evans with a little surprise. “Do you know him?”

“Yes,” returned the minister, falling back in his chair helplessly, not luxuriously. “So well that I knew it was he almost as soon as you came into the room to-night.”

“What harm have you been doing him?” demanded the editor, in parody of the minister’s acuteness in guessing the guilty operation of his own mind.

“The greatest. I’m the cause of his being in Boston.”

“This is very interesting,” said Evans. “We are companions in crime — pals. It’s a great honour. But what strikes me as being so interesting is that we appear to feel remorse for our misdeeds; and I was almost persuaded the other day by an observer of our species, that remorse had gone out, or rather had never existed, except in the fancy of innocent people; that real criminals like ourselves were afraid of being found out, but weren’t in the least sorry. Perhaps, if we are sorry, it proves that we needn’t be. Let’s judge each other. I’ve told you what my sin against Barker is, and I know yours in general terms. It’s a fearful thing to be the cause of a human soul’s presence in Boston; but what did you do to bring it about? Who is Barker? Where did he come from? What was his previous condition of servitude? He puzzles me a good deal.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you,” said Sewell; and he gave his personal chapter in Lemuel’s history.

Evans interrupted him at one point. “And what became of the poem he brought down with him?”

“It was stolen out of his pocket, one night when he slept in the common.”

“Ah, then he can’t offer it to me! And he seems very far from writing any more. I can still keep his acquaintance. Go on.”

Sewell told, in amusing detail, of the Wayfarer’s Lodge, where he had found Barker after supposing he had gone home. Evans seemed more interested in the place than in the minister’s meeting with Lemuel there, which Sewell fancied he had painted rather well, describing Lemuel’s severity and his own anxiety.

“There!” said the editor. “There you have it — a practical illustration! Our civilisation has had to come to it!”

“Come to what?”

“Complicity.”

Sewell made an impatient gesture.

“Don’t sacrifice the consideration of a great principle,” cried Evans, “to the petty effect of a good story on an appreciative listener. I realise your predicament. But don’t you see that in establishing and regulating a place like that the city of Boston has instinctively sanctioned my idea? You may say that it is aiding and abetting the tramp-nuisance by giving vagrants food and shelter, but other philosophers will contend that it is — blindly perhaps — fulfilling the destiny of the future State, which will at once employ and support all its citizens; that it is prophetically recognising my new principle of Complicity?”

“Your new principle!” cried Sewell. “You have merely given a new name to one of the oldest principles in the moral world.”

“And that is a good deal to do, I can tell you,” said Evans. “All the principles are pretty old now. But don’t give way to an ignoble resentment of my interruption. Go on about Barker.”

After some feints that there was nothing more important to tell, Sewell went on to the end; and when he had come to it, Evans shook his head. “It looks pretty black for you, but it’s a beautifully perfect case of Complicity. What do you propose to do, now you’ve rediscovered him?”

“Oh, I don’t know! I hope no more mischief. If I could only get him back on his farm!”

“Yes, I suppose that would be the best thing. But I dare say he wouldn’t go back!”

“That’s been my experience with him.”

They talked this aspect of the case over more fully, and Evans said: “Well, I wouldn’t go back to such a place myself after I’d once had a glimpse of Boston, but I suppose it’s right to wish that Barker would. I hope his mother will come to visit him while he’s in the hotel. I would give a good deal to see her. Fancy her coming down in her bloomers, and the poor fellow being ashamed of her? It would be a very good subject for a play. Does she wear a hat or a bonnet? What sort of head-gear goes with that ‘sleek odalisque’ style of dress? A turban, I suppose.”

“Mrs. Barker,” said the minister, unable to deny himself the fleeting comfort of the editor’s humorous view of the situation, “is as far from a ‘sleek odalisque’ as any lady I’ve ever seen, in spite of her oriental costume. If I remember, her yashmak was not gathered at the ankles, but hung loose like occidental trousers; and the day we met she wore simply her own hair. There was not much of it on top, and she had it cut short in the neck. She was rather a terrible figure. Her having ever been married would have been inconceivable, except for her son.”

“I should like to have seen her,” said Evans, laughing back in his chair.

“She was worth seeing as a survival of the superficial fermentation of the period of our social history when it was believed that women could be like men if they chose, and ought to be if they ever meant to show their natural superiority. But she was not picturesque.”

“The son’s very handsome. I can see that the lady boarders think him so.”

“Do you find him at all remarkable otherwise? What dismayed me more than his poetry even was that when he gave that up he seemed to have no particular direction.”

“Oh, he reads a good deal, and pretty serious books; and he goes to hear all the sermons and lectures in town.”

“I thought he came to mine only,” sighed the minister, with, a retrospective suffering. “Well, what can be done for him now? I feel my complicity with Barker as poignantly as you could wish.”

“Ah, you see how the principle applies everywhere!” cried the editor joyously. He added: “But I really think that for the present you can’t do better than let Barker alone. He’s getting on very well at Mrs. Harmon’s, and although the conditions at the St. Albans are more transitory than most sublunary things, Barker appears to be a fixture. Our little system has begun to revolve round him unconsciously; he keeps us going.”

“Well,” said Sewell, consenting to be a little comforted. He was about to go more particularly into the facts; but Mrs. Sewell came in just then, and he obviously left the subject.

Evans did not sit down again after rising to greet her; and presently he said good night.

She turned to her husband: “What were you talking about when I came in?”

“When you came in?”

“Yes. You both had that look — I can always tell it — of having suddenly stopped.”

“Oh!” said Sewell, pretending to arrange the things on his desk. “Evans had been suggesting the subject for a sermon.” He paused a moment, and then he continued hardily, “And he’d been telling me about — Barker. He’s turned up again.”

“Of course!” said Mrs. Sewell. “What’s happened to him now?”

“Nothing, apparently, but some repeated strokes of prosperity. He has become clerk, elevator-boy, and head-waiter at the St. Albans.”

“And what are you going to do about him?”

“Evans advises me to do nothing.”

“Well, that’s sensible, at any rate,” said Mrs. Sewell. “I really think you’ve done quite enough, David, and now he can be left to manage for himself, especially as he seems to be doing well.”

“Oh, he’s doing as well as I could hope, and better. But I’m not sure that I shouldn’t have personally preferred a continued course of calamity for him. I shall never be quite at peace about him till I get him back on his farm at Willoughby Pastures.”

“Well, that you will never do; and you may as well rest easy about it.”

“I don’t know as to never doing it,” said Sewell. “All prosperity, especially the prosperity connected with Mrs. Harmon’s hotel, is transitory; and I may succeed yet.”

“Does everything go on there in the old way, does Mr. Evans say?” Mrs. Sewell did not refer to any former knowledge of the St. Albans, but to a remote acquaintance with the character and methods of Mrs. Harmon, with whom the Sewells had once boarded. She was then freshly widowed by the loss of her first husband, and had launched her earliest boarding-house on that sea of disaster, where she had buoyantly outridden every storm and had floated triumphantly on the top of every ingulfing wave. They recalled the difficult navigation of that primitive craft, in which each of the boarders had taken a hand at the helm, and their reminiscences of her financial embarrassments were mixed with those of the unfailing serenity that seemed not to know defeat, and with fond memories of her goodness of heart, and her ideal devotion in any case of sickness or trouble.

“I should think the prosperity of Mrs. Harmon would convince the most negative of agnostics that there was an overruling Providence, if nothing else did,” said Sewell. “It’s so defiant of all law, so delightfully independent of causation.”

“Well, let Barker alone with her, then,” said his wife, rising to leave him to the hours of late reading which she had never been able to break up.

XVIII.

After agreeing with his wife that he had better leave Barker alone, Sewell did not feel easy in doing so. He had that ten-dollar note which Miss Vane had given him, and though he did not believe, since Evans had reported Barker’s refusal of his fee, that the boy would take it, he was still constrained to do something with it. Before giving it back to her, he decided at least to see Barker and learn about his prospects and expectations. He might find some way of making himself useful to him.

In a state of independence he found Lemuel much more accessible than formerly, and their interview was more nearly amicable. Sewell said that he had been delighted to hear of Lemuel’s whereabouts from his old friend Evans, and to know that they were housed together. He said that he used to know Mrs. Harmon long ago, and that she was a good-hearted, well-meaning woman, though without much forecast. He even assented to Lemuel’s hasty generalisation of her as a perfect lady, though they both felt a certain inaccuracy in this, and Sewell repeated that she was a woman of excellent heart and turned to a more intimate inquest of Lemuel’s life.

He tried to find out how he employed his leisure time, saying that he always sympathised with young men away from home, and suggesting the reading-room and the frequent lectures at the Young Men’s Christian Union for his odd moments. He learned that Lemuel had not many of these during the week, and that on Sundays he spent all the time he could get in hearing the different noted ministers. For the rest, he learned that Lemuel was very much interested in the city, and appeared to be rapidly absorbing both its present civilisation and its past history. He was unsmilingly amused at the comments of mixed shrewdness and crudity which Lemuel was betrayed into at times beyond certain limits of diffidence that he had apparently set himself; at his blunders and misconceptions, at the truth divined by the very innocence of his youth and inexperience. He found out that Lemuel had not been at home since he came to Boston; he had expected to go at Thanksgiving, but it came so soon after he had got his place that he hated to ask; the folks were all well, and he would send the kind remembrances which the minister asked him to give his mother. Sewell tried to find out, in saying that Mrs. Sewell and himself would always be glad to see him, whether Lemuel had any social life outside of the St. Albans, but here he was sensible that a door was shut against him; and finally he had not the courage to do more about that money from Miss Vane than to say that from time to time he had sums intrusted him, and that if Lemuel had any pressing need of money he must borrow of him. He fancied he had managed that rather delicately, for Lemuel thanked him without severity, and said he should get along now, he guessed, but he was much obliged. Neither of them mentioned Miss Vane, and upon the whole the minister was not sure that he had got much nearer the boy, after all.

Certainly he formed no adequate idea of the avidity and thoroughness with which Lemuel was learning his Boston. It was wholly a Public Boston which unfolded itself during the winter to his eager curiosity, and he knew nothing of the social intricacies of which it seems solely to consist for so many of us. To him Boston society was represented by the coteries of homeless sojourners in the St. Albans; Boston life was transacted by the ministers, the lecturers, the public meetings, the concerts, the horse-cars, the policemen, the shop-windows, the newspapers, the theatres, the ships at the docks, the historical landmarks, the charity apparatus.

The effect was a ferment in his mind in which there was nothing clear. It seemed to him that he had to change his opinions every day. He was whirled round and round; he never saw the same object twice the same. He did not know whether he learned or unlearned most. With the pride that comes to youth from the mere novelty of its experiences was mixed a shame for his former ignorance, an exasperation at his inability to grasp their whole meaning.

His activities in acquainting himself with Boston interested Evans, who tried to learn just what his impression was; but this was the last thing that Lemuel could have distinctly imparted.

“Well, upon the whole,” he asked, one day, “what do you think? From what you’ve seen of it, which is the better place, Boston or Willoughby Pastures? If you were friendless and homeless, would you rather be cast away in the city or in the country?”

Lemuel did not hesitate about this. “In the city! They haven’t got any idea in the country what’s done to help folks along in the city!”

“Is that so?” asked Evans. “It’s against tradition,” he suggested.

“Yes, I know that,” Lemuel assented. “And in the country they think the city is a place where nobody cares for you, and everybody is against you, and wants to impose upon you. Well, when I first came to Boston,” he continued with a consciousness of things that Evans did not betray his own knowledge of, “I thought so too, and I had a pretty hard time for a while. It don’t seem as if people did care for you, except to make something out of you; but if any one happens to find out that you’re in trouble, there’s ten times as much done for you in the city as there is in the country.”

“Perhaps that’s because there are ten times as many to do it,” said Evans, in the hope of provoking this impartial spirit further.

“No, it isn’t that altogether. It’s because they’ve seen ten times as much trouble, and know how to take hold of it better. I think our folks in the country have been flattered up too much. If some of them could come down here and see how things are carried on, they would be surprised. They wouldn’t believe it if you told them.”

“I didn’t know we were so exemplary,” said Evans.

“Oh, city folks have their faults too,” said Lemuel, smiling in recognition of the irony.

“No! What?”

Lemuel seemed uncertain whether to say it. “Well, they’re too aristocratic.”

Evans enjoyed this frank simplicity. He professed not to understand, and begged Lemuel to explain.

“Well, at home, in the country, they mightn’t want to do so much for you, or be so polite about it, but they wouldn’t feel themselves so much above you. They’re more on an equality. If I needed help, I’d rather be in town; but if I could help myself, I’d just as soon be in the country. Only,” he added, “there are more chances here.”

“Yes, there are more chances. And do you think it’s better not to be quite so kind, and to be more on an equality?”

“Why, don’t you?” demanded Lemuel.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Evans, with a whimsical affection of seriousness. “Shouldn’t you like an aristocracy if you could be one of the aristocrats? Don’t you think you’re opposed to aristocracy because you don’t want to be under? I have spoken to be a duke when we get an order of nobility, and I find that it’s a great relief. I don’t feel obliged to go in for equality nearly as much as I used.”

Lemuel shyly dropped the subject, not feeling himself able to cope with his elder in these railleries. He always felt his heaviness and clumsiness in talking with the editor, who fascinated him. He did not know but he had said too much about city people being aristocratic. It was not quite what he meant; he had really been thinking of Miss Carver, and how proud she was, when he said it.

Lately he had seemed to see a difference between himself and other people, and he had begun to look for it everywhere, though when he spoke to Evans he was not aware how strongly the poison was working in him. It was as if the girl had made that difference; she made it again, whatever it was, between herself and the black man who once brought her a note and a bunch of flowers from one of her young lady pupils. She was very polite to him, trying to put him at ease, just as she had been with Lemuel that night. If he came into the dining-room to seat a transient when Miss Carver was there, he knew that she was mentally making a difference between him and the boarders. The ladies all had the custom of bidding him good morning when they came in to breakfast, and they all smiled upon him except Miss Carver; she seemed every morning as if more surprised to see him standing there at the door and showing people to their places: she looked puzzled, and sometimes she blushed, as if she were ashamed for him.

He had discovered, in fine, that there were sorts of honest work in the world which one must not do if he would keep his self-respect through the consideration of others. Once all work had been work, but now he had found that there was work which was service, and that service was dishonour. He had learned that the people who did this work were as a class apart, and were spoken of as servants, with slight that was unconscious or conscious, but never absent.

Some of the ladies at the St. Albans had tried to argue with Lemuel about his not taking the fees he refused, and he knew that they talked him over. One day, when he was showing a room to a transient, he heard one of them say to another in the next apartment, “Well, I did hate to offer it to him, just as if he was a common servant;” and the other said, “Well, I don’t see what he can expect if he puts himself in the place of a servant.” And then they debated together whether his quality of clerk was sufficient to redeem him from the reproach of servitude; they did not call his running the elevator anything, because a clerk might do that in a casual way without loss of dignity; they alleged other cases of the kind.

His inner life became a turmoil of suspicions, that attached themselves to every word spoken to him by those who must think themselves above him. He could see now how far behind in everything Willoughby Pastures was, and how the summer folks could not help despising the people that took them to board, and waited on them like servants in cities. He esteemed the boarders at the St. Albans in the degree that he thought them enlightened enough to contemn him for his station; and he had his own ideas of how such a person as Mr. Evans really felt toward him. He felt toward him and was interested in his reading as a person might feel toward and be interested in the attainments of some anomalous animal, a learned pig, or something of that kind.

He could look back, now, on his life at Miss Vane’s, and see that he was treated as a servant there, — a petted servant, but still a servant, — and that was what made that girl behave so to him; he always thought of Sibyl as that girl.

He would have thrown up his place at once, though he knew of nothing else he could do; he would have risked starving rather than keep it; but he felt that it was of no use; that the stain of servitude was indelible; that if he were lifted to the highest station, it would not redeem him in Miss Carver’s eyes. All this time he had scarcely more than spoken with her, to return her good mornings at the dining-room door, or to exchange greetings with her on the stairs, or to receive some charge from her in going out, or to answer some question of hers in coming in, as to whether any of the pupils who had lessons of her had been there in her absence. He made these interviews as brief as possible; he was as stiff and cold as she.

The law-student, whose full name was Alonzo W. Berry, had one joking manner for all manner of men and women, and Lemuel’s suspicion could not find any offensive distinction in it toward himself; but he disabled Berry’s own gentility for that reason, and easily learning much of the law-student’s wild past in the West from so eager an autobiographer, he could not comfort himself with his friendship. While the student poured out his autobiography without stint upon Lemuel, his shyness only deepened upon the boy. There were things in his life for which he was in equal fear of discovery: his arrest and trial in the police court, his mother’s queerness, and his servile condition at Miss Vane’s. The thought that Mr. Sewell knew about them all made him sometimes hate the minister, till he reflected that he had evidently told no one of them. But he was always trembling lest they should somehow become known at the St. Albans; and when Berry was going on about himself, his exploits, his escapes, his loves, — chiefly his loves, — Lemuel’s soul was sealed within him; a vision of his disgraces filled him with horror.

But in the delight of talking about himself, Berry was apparently unaware that Lemuel had not reciprocated his confidences. He celebrated his familiarity with Miss Swan and her friend, though no doubt he had the greater share of the acquaintance, — that was apt to be the case with him, — and from time to time he urged Lemuel to come up and call on them with him.

“I guess they don’t want me to call,” said Lemuel with feeble bitterness at last, one evening after an elaborate argument from Berry to prove that Lemuel had the time, and that he just knew they would be glad to see him.

“Why?” demanded Berry, and he tried to get Lemuel’s reason; but when Lemuel had stated that belief, he could not have given the reason for it on his death-bed. Berry gave the conundrum up for the time, but he did not give Lemuel up; he had an increasing need of him as he advanced in a passion for Miss Swan, which, as he frankly prophesied, was bound to bring him to the popping-point sooner or later; he debated with himself in Lemuel’s presence all the best form’s of popping, and he said that it was simply worth a ranch to be able to sing to him,

 “She’s a darling,

  She’s a daisy,

  She’s a dumpling,

  She’s a lamb,”

and to feel that he knew who she was. He usually sang this refrain to Lemuel when he came in late at night after a little supper with some of the fellows that had left traces of its cheer on his bated breath. Once he came downstairs alone in the elevator, in his shirt-sleeves and stocking-feet, for the purpose of singing it after Lemuel had thought him in bed.

Every Sunday afternoon during the winter Lemuel went to see Statira, and sometimes in the evening he took her to church. But she could not understand why he always wanted to go to a different church; she did not see why he should not pick out one church and stick to it: the ministers seemed to be all alike, and she guessed one was pretty near as good as another. ‘Manda Grier said she guessed they were all Lemuel to her; and Statira said well, she guessed that was pretty much so. She no longer pretended that he was not the whole world to her, either with him or with ‘Manda Grier; she was so happy from morning till night, day in and day out, that ‘Manda Grier said if she were in her place she should be afraid something would happen.

Statira worked in the box-factory now; she liked it a great deal better than the store, and declared that she was ever so much stronger. The cough lingered still, but none of them noticed it much; she called it a cold, and said she kept catching more. ‘Manda Grier told her that she could throw it off soon enough if she would buy a few clothes for warmth and not so many for looks; but they did not talk this over before Lemuel. Before he came Statira took a soothing mixture that she got of the apothecary, and then they were all as bright and gay as could be, and she looked so pretty that he said he could not get used to it. The housekeeping experiment was a great success; she and ‘Manda Grier had two rooms now, and they lived better than ever they had, for less money. Of course, Statira said, it was not up to the St. Albans, which Lemuel had told them of at first a little braggingly. In fact she liked to have him brag of it, and of the splendours of his position and surroundings. She was very curious, but not envious of anything, and it became a joke with her and ‘Manda Grier, who pretended to despise the whole affair.

At first it flattered Lemuel to have her admire his rise in life so simply and ardently; but after a while it became embarrassing, in proportion as it no longer seemed so superb to him. She was always wanting him to talk of it; after a few Sundays, with the long hours they had passed in telling each other all they could think of about themselves, they had not much else to talk of. Now that she had him to employ her fancy, Statira no longer fed it on the novels she used to devour. He brought her books, but she did not read them; she said that she had been so busy with her sewing she had no time to read; and every week she showed him some pretty new thing she had been making, and tried it on for him to see how she looked in it. Often she seemed to care more to rest with her head on his shoulder, and not talk at all; and for a while this was enough for him too, though sometimes he was disappointed that she did not even let him read to her out of the books she neglected. She would not talk over the sermons they heard together; but once when Mr. Evans offered him tickets for the theatre, and Lemuel had got the night off and taken Statira, it seemed as if she would be willing to sit up till morning and talk the play over.

Nothing else ever interested her so much, except what one of the girls in the box-factory had told her about going down to the beach, summers, and waiting on table. This girl had been at Old Orchard, where they had splendid times, with one veranda all to themselves and the gentlemen-help; and in the afternoon the girls got together on the beach — or the grass right in front of the hotel — and sewed. They got nearly as much as they did in the box-factory; and then the boarders all gave you something extra; some of them gave as much as a dollar a week apiece. The head-waiter was a college student, and a perfect gentleman; he was always dressed up in a dress-suit and a white silk neck-tie. Statira said that next summer she wanted they should go off somewhere, she and ‘Manda Grier, and wait on table together; and she knew Lemuel could easily get the head-waiter’s place, after the St. Albans. She should not want he should be clerk, because then they could not have such good times, for they would be more separated.

Lemuel heard her restively through, and then broke out fiercely and told her that he had seen enough of waiting on table at the St. Albans for him never to want her to do it; and that the boarders who gave money to the waiters despised them for taking it. He said that he did not consider just helping Mrs. Harmon out the same as being head-waiter, and that he would not be a regular waiter for any money: he would rather starve.

Statira did not understand; she asked him meekly if he were mad at her, he seemed so; and he had to do what he could to cheer her up.

‘Manda Grier took Statira’s part pretty sharply. She said it was one thing to live out in a private family — that was a disgrace, if you could keep the breath of life in you any other way — and it was quite another to wait in an hotel; and she did not want to have any one hint round that she would let Statira demean herself. Lemuel was offended by her manner, and her assumption of owning Statira. She defended him, but he could not tell her how he had changed; the influences were perhaps too obscure for him to have traced them all himself; after the first time he had hardly mentioned the art-student girls to her. There were a great many things that Statira could not understand. She had been much longer in the city than Lemuel, but she did not seem to appreciate the difference between that and the country. She dressed very stylishly; no one went beyond her in that; but in many things he could see that she remained countrified. Once on a very mild April evening, when they were passing through the Public Garden, she wished him to sit on a vacant seat they came to. All the others were occupied by young couples who sat with their arms around each other.

“No, no!” shuddered Lemuel, “I don’t want people should take you for one of these servant-girls.”

“Why, Lem, how proud you’re getting!” she cried with easy acquiescence. “You’re awfully stuck up! Well, then, you’ve got to take a horse-car; I can’t walk any further.”

XIX.

Lemuel had found out about the art-students from Berry. He said they were no relation to each other, and had not even been acquainted before they met at the art-school; he had first met them at the St. Albans. Miss Swan was from the western part of the State, and Miss Carver from down Plymouth way. The latter took pupils, and sometimes gave lessons at their houses; she was, to Berry’s thinking, not half the genius and not half the duck that Miss Swan was, though she was a duck in her way too. Miss Swan, as nearly as he could explain, was studying art for the fun of it, or the excitement, for she was well enough off; her father was a lawyer out there, and Berry believed that a rising son-in-law in his own profession would be just the thing for the old man’s declining years. He said he should not be very particular about settling down to practice at once; if his wife wanted to go to Europe a while, and kind of tender foot it round for a year or two in the art-centres over there, he would let the old man run the business a little longer; sometimes it did an old man good. There was no hurry; Berry’s own father was not excited about his going to work right away; he had the money to run Berry and a wife too, if it came to that; Miss Swan understood that. He had not told her so in just so many words, but he had let her know that Alonzo W. Berry, senior, was not borrowing money at two per cent. a month any more. He said he did not care to make much of a blow about that part of it till he was ready to act, and he was not going to act till he had a dead-sure thing of it; he was having a very good time as it went along, and he guessed Miss Swan was too; no use to hurry a girl, when she was on the right track.

Berry invented these axioms apparently to put himself in heart; in the abstract he was already courageous enough. He said that these Eastern girls were not used to having any sort of attention; that there was only about a tenth or fifteenth of a fellow to every girl, and that it tickled one of them to death to have a whole man around. He was not meanly exultant at their destitution. He said he just wished one of these pretty Boston girls — nice, well dressed, cultured, and brought up to be snubbed and neglected by the tenths and fifteenths of men they had at home — could be let loose in the West, and have a regular round-up of fellows. Or, no, he would like to have about five thousand fellows from out there, that never expected a woman to look at them, unloaded in Boston, and see them open their eyes. “Wouldn’t one of ’em get home alive, if kindness could kill ‘em. I never saw such a place! I can’t get used to it! It makes me tired. Any sort of fellow could get married in Boston!”

Berry made no attempt to reconcile his uncertainty as to his own chances with this general theory, but he urged it to prove that Miss Swan and Miss Carver would like to have Lemuel call; he said they had both said they wished they could paint him. He had himself sustained various characters in costume for them, and one night he pretended that they had sent him down for Lemuel to help out with a certain group. But they received him with a sort of blankness which convinced him that Berry had exceeded his authority; there was a helplessness at first, and then an indignant determination to save him from a false position even at their own cost, which Lemuel felt rather than saw. Miss Carver was foremost in his rescue; she devoted herself to this, and left Miss Swan to punish Berry, who conveyed from time to time his sense that he was “getting it,” by a wink to Lemuel.

An observer with more social light might have been more puzzled to account for Berry’s toleration by these girls, who apparently associated with him on equal terms. Since he was not a servant, he was their equal in Lemuel’s eyes; perhaps his acceptance might otherwise be explained by the fact that he was very amusing, chivalrously harmless, and extremely kind-hearted and useful to them. One must not leave out of the reckoning his open devotion for Miss Swan, which in itself would do much to approve him to her, and commend him to Miss Carver, if she were a generous girl, and very fond of her friend. It is certain that they did tolerate Berry, who made them laugh even that night in spite of themselves, till Miss Swan said, “Well, what’s the use?” and stopped trying to discipline him. After that they had a very sociable evening, though Lemuel kept his distance, and would not let them include him, knowing what the two girls really thought of him. He would not take part in Berry’s buffooneries, but talked soberly and rather austerely with Miss Carver; and to show that he did not feel himself an inferior, whatever she might think, he was very sarcastic about some of the city ways and customs they spoke of. There were a good many books about — novels mostly, but not the kind Statira used to read, and poems; Miss Carver said she liked to take them up when she was nervous from her work; and if the weather was bad, and she could not get out for a walk, a book seemed to do her almost as much good. Nearly all the pictures about in the room seemed to be Miss Swan’s; in fact, when Lemuel asked about them, and tried to praise them in such a way as not to show his ignorance, Miss Carver said she did very little in colour; her lessons were all in black and white. He would not let her see that he did not know what this was, but he was ashamed, and he determined to find out; he determined to get a drawing-book, and learn something about it himself. To his thinking, the room was pretty harum-scarum. There were shawls hung upon the walls, and rugs, and pieces of cloth, which sometimes had half-finished paintings fastened to them; there were paintings standing round the room on the floor, sometimes right side out, and sometimes faced to the walls; there were two or three fleeces and fox-pelts scattered about instead of a carpet; and there were two easels, and stands with paints all twisted up in lead tubes on them. He compared the room with Statira’s, and did not think much of it at first.

Afterwards it did not seem so bad: he began to feel its picturesqueness, for he went there again, and let the girls sketch him. When Miss Swan asked him that night if he would let them he wished to refuse; but she seemed so modest about it, and made it such a great favour on his part, that he consented; she said she merely wished to make a little sketch in colour, and Miss Carver a little study of his head in black and white; and he imagined it a trifling affair that could be despatched in a single night. They decided to treat his head as a Young Roman head; and at the end of a long sitting, beguiled with talk and with thoughtful voluntaries from Berry on his banjo, he found that Miss Carver had rubbed her study nearly all out with a piece of bread, and Miss Swan said she should want to try a perfectly new sketch with the shoulders draped; the coat had confused her; she would not let any one see what she had done, though Berry tried to make her let him.

Lemuel looked a little blank when she asked him for another sitting; but Berry said, “Oh, you’ll have to come, Barker. Penalty of greatness, you know. Have you in Williams & Everett’s window; notices in all the papers. ‘The exquisite studies, by Miss Swan and Miss Carver, of the head of the gentlemanly and accommodating clerk of the St. Albans, as a Roman Youth.’ Chromoed as a Christmas card by Prang, and photograph copies everywhere. You’re all right, Barker.”

One night Miss Swan said, in rapture with some momentary success, “Oh, I’m perfectly in love with this head!”

Berry looked up from his banjo, which he ceased to strum. “Hello, hello, hel-lo!”

Then the two broke into a laugh, in which Lemuel helplessly joined.

“What — what is it?” asked Miss Carver, looking up absently from her work.

“Nothing; just a little outburst of passion from our young friend here,” said Berry, nodding his head toward Miss Swan.

“What does it mean, Mad?” asked Miss Carver in the same dreamy way, continuing her work.

“Yes, Madeline,” said Berry, “explain yourself.”

“Mr. Berry!” cried Miss Swan warningly.

“That’s me; Alonzo W., Jr. Go on!”

“You forget yourself,” said the girl, with imperfect severity.

“Well, you forgot me first,” said Berry, with affected injury. “Ain’t it hard enough to sit here night after night, strumming on the old banjo, while another fellow is going down to posterity as a Roman Youth with a red shawl round his neck, without having to hear people say they’re in love with that head of his?”

Miss Carver now stopped her work, and looked from her friend, with her head bowed in laughter on the back of her hand, to that of Berry bent in burlesque reproach upon her, and then at Lemuel, who was trying to control himself.

“But I can tell you what, Miss Swan; you spoke too late, as the man said when he swallowed the chicken in the fresh egg. Mr. Barker has a previous engagement. That so, Barker?”

Lemuel turned fire-red, and looked round at Miss Carver, who met his glance with her clear gaze. She turned presently to make some comment on Miss Swan’s sketch, and then, after working a little while longer, she said she was tired, and was going to make some tea.

The girls both pressed Lemuel to stay for a cup, but he would not; and Berry followed him downstairs to explain and apologise.

“It’s all right,” said Lemuel. “What difference would it make to them whether I was engaged or not?”

“Well, I suppose as a general rule a girl would rather a fellow wasn’t,” philosophised Berry. He whistled ruefully, and Lemuel drawing a book toward him in continued silence, he rose from the seat he had taken on the desk in the little office, and said, “Well, I guess it’ll all come out right. Come to think of it, I don’t know anything about your affairs, and I can tell ’em so.”

“Oh, it don’t matter.”

He had pulled the book toward him as if he were going to read, but he could not read; his head was in a whirl. After a first frenzy of resentment against Berry, he was now angry at himself for having been so embarrassed. He thought of a retort that would have passed it all off lightly; then he reflected again that it was of no consequence to these young ladies whether he was engaged or not, and at any rate it was nobody’s business but his own. Of course he was engaged to Statira, but he had hardly thought of it in that way. ‘Manda Grier had joked about the time when she supposed she should have to keep old maid’s hall alone; when she first did this Lemuel thought it delightful, but afterwards he did not like it so much; it began to annoy him that ‘Manda Grier should mix herself up so much with Statira and himself. He believed that Statira would be different, would be more like other ladies (he generalised it in this way, but he meant Miss Swan and Miss Carver), if she had not ‘Manda Grier there all the time to keep her back. He convinced himself that if it were not for ‘Manda Grier, he should have had no trouble in telling Statira that the art-students were sketching him; and that he had not done so yet because he hated to have ‘Manda ask her so much about them, and call them that Swan girl and that Carver girl, as she would be sure to do, and clip away the whole evening with her questions and her guesses. It was now nearly a fortnight since the sketching began, and he had let one Sunday night pass without mentioning it. He could not let another pass, and he knew ‘Manda Grier would say they were a good while about it, and would show her ignorance, and put Statira up to asking all sorts of things. He could not bear to think of it, and he let the next Sunday night pass without saying anything to Statira. The sittings continued; but before the third Sunday came Miss Swan said she did not see how she could do anything more to her sketch, and Miss Carver had already completed her study. They criticised each other’s work with freedom and good humour, and agreed that the next thing was to paint it out and rub it out.

“No,” said Berry; “what you want is a fresh eye on it. I’ve worried over it as much as you have, — suffered more, I believe, — and Barker can’t tell whether he looks like a Roman Youth or not. Why don’t you have up old Evans?”

Miss Swan took no apparent notice of this suggestion; and Miss Carver, who left Berry’s snubbing entirely to her, said nothing. After a minute’s study of the pictures, Miss Swan suggested, “If Mr. Barker had any friends he would like to show them to?”

“Oh no, thank you,” returned Lemuel hastily, “there isn’t anybody,” and again he found himself turning very red.

“Well, I don’t know how we can thank you enough for your patience, Mr. Barker,” said the girl.

“Oh, don’t mention it. I’ve — I’ve enjoyed it,” said Lemuel.

“Game — every time,” said Berry; and their evening broke up with a laugh.

The next morning Lemuel stopped Miss Swan at the door of the breakfast room, and said, “I’ve been thinking over what you said last night, and I should like to bring some one — a lady friend of mine — to see the pictures.”

“Why, certainly, Mr. Barker. Any time. Some evening?” she suggested.

“Should you mind it if I came to-morrow night?” he asked; and he thought it right to remind her, “it’s Sunday night.”

“Oh, not at all! To-morrow night, by all means! We shall both be at home, and very glad to see you.” She hurried after Miss Carver, loitering on her way to their table, and Lemuel saw them put their heads together, as if they were whispering. He knew they were whispering about him, but they did not laugh; probably they kept themselves from laughing. In coming out from breakfast, Miss Swan said, “I hope your friend isn’t very critical, Mr. Barker?” and he answered confusedly, “Oh, not at all, thank you.” But he said to himself that he did not care whether she was trying to make fun of him or not, he knew what he had made up his mind to do.

Statira did not seem to care much about going to see the pictures, when he proposed it to her the next evening. She asked why he had been keeping it such a great secret, and he could not pretend, as he had once thought he could, that he was keeping it as a surprise for her. “Should you like to see ‘em, ‘Manda?” she asked, with languid indifference.

“I d’ know as I care much about Lem’s picture, s’long’s we’ve got him around,” ‘Manda Grier whipped out, “but I should like t’ see those celebrated girls ‘t we’ve heard s’ much about.”

“Well,” said Statira carelessly, and they went into the next room to put on their wraps. Lemuel, vexed to have ‘Manda Grier made one of the party, and helpless to prevent her going, walked up and down, wondering what he should say when he arrived with this unexpected guest.

But Miss Swan received both of the girls very politely, and chatted with ‘Manda Grier, whose conversation, in defiance of any sense of superiority that the Swan girl or the Carver girl might feel, was a succession of laconic snaps, sometimes witty, but mostly rude and contradictory.

Miss Carver made tea, and served it in some pretty cups which Lemuel hoped Statira might admire, but she took it without noticing, and in talking with Miss Carver she drawled, and said “N-y-e-e-e-s,” and “I don’t know as I d-o-o-o,” and “Well, I should think as mu-u-ch,” with a prolongation of all the final syllables in her sentences which he had not observed in her before, and which she must have borrowed for the occasion for the gentility of the effect. She tried to refer everything to him, and she and ‘Manda Grier talked together as much as they could, and when the others spoke of him as Mr. Barker, they called him Lem. They did not look at anything, or do anything to betray that they found the studio, on which Lemuel had once expatiated to them, different from other rooms.

At last Miss Swan abruptly brought out the studies of Lemuel’s head, and put them in a good light; ‘Manda Grier and Statira got into the wrong place to see them.

‘Manda blurted out, “Well, he looks ‘s if he’d had a fit of sickness in that one;” and perhaps, in fact, Miss Carver had refined too much upon a delicate ideal of Lemuel’s looks.

“So he d-o-o-es!” drawled Statira. “And how funny he looks with that red thing o-o-o-n!”

Miss Swan explained that she had thrown that in for the colour, and that they had been fancying him in the character of a young Roman.

“You think he’s got a Roman n-o-o-se?” asked Statira through her own.

“I think Lem’s got a kind of a pug, m’self,” said ‘Manda Grier.

“Well, ‘Manda Grier!” said Statira.

Lemuel could not look at Miss Carver, whom he knew to be gazing at the two girls from the little distance to which she had withdrawn; Miss Swan was biting her lip.

“So that’s the celebrated St. Albans, is it?” said ‘Manda Grier, when they got in the street. “Don’t know ‘s I really ever expected to see the inside ‘f it. You notice the kind of oilcloth they had on that upper entry, S’tira?”

They did not mention Lemuel’s pictures, or the artists; and he scarcely spoke on the way home.

When they parted, Statira broke out crying, and would not let him kiss her.

XX.

“I’m afraid your little friend at the St. Albans isn’t altogether happy of late,” said Evans toward the end of what he called one of his powwows with Sewell. Their talk had taken a vaster range than usual, and they both felt the need, that people know in dealing with abstractions, of finally getting the ground beneath their feet again.

“Ah?” asked Sewell, with a twinge that allayed his satisfaction in this. “What’s the matter with him?”

“Oh, the knowledge of good and evil, I suspect.”

“I hope there’s nothing wrong,” said Sewell anxiously.

“Oh no. I used the phrase because it came easily. Just what I mean is that I’m afraid his view of our social inequalities is widening and deepening, and that he experiences the dissatisfaction of people who don’t command that prospect from the summit. I told you of his censure of our aristocratic constitution?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, with a smile.

“Well, I’m afraid he feels it more and more. If I can judge from the occasional distance and hauteur with which he treats me, he is humiliated by it. Nothing makes a man so proud as humiliation, you know.”

“That’s true!”

“There are a couple of pretty girls at the St. Albans, art-students, who have been painting Barker. So I learn from a reformed cow-boy of the plains who is with us as a law-student and is about with one of the young ladies a good deal. They’re rather nice girls; quite nice, in fact; and there’s no harm in the cow-boy, and a good deal of fun. But if Barker had conceived of being painted as a social inferior, and had been made to feel that he was merely a model; and if he had become at all aware that one of the girls was rather pretty — they both are—”

“I see!”

“I don’t say it’s so. But he seems low-spirited. Why don’t you come round and cheer him up — get into his confidence—”

“Get into the centre of the earth!” cried Sewell. “I never saw such an inapproachable creature!”

Evans laughed. “He is rather remote. The genuine American youth is apt to be so, especially if he thinks you mean him a kindness. But there ought to be some way of convincing him that he need not feel any ignominy in his employment. After so many centuries of Christianity and generations of Democracy, it ought to be very simple to convince him that there is nothing disgraceful in showing people to their places at table.”

“It isn’t,” said the minister soberly.

“No, it isn’t,” said Evans. “I wonder,” he added thoughtfully, “why we despise certain occupations? We don’t despise a man who hammers stone or saws boards; why should we despise a barber? Is the care of the human head intrinsically less honourable than the shaping of such rude material? Why do we still condemn the tailor who clothes us, and honour the painter who portrays us in the same clothes? Why do we despise waiters? I tried to make Barker believe that I respected all kinds of honest work. But I lied; I despised him for having waited on table. Why have all manner of domestics fallen under our scorn, and come to be stigmatised in a lump as servants?”

“Ah, I don’t know,” said the minister. “There is something in personal attendance upon us that dishonours; but the reasons of it are very obscure; I couldn’t give them. Perhaps it’s because it’s work that in a simpler state of things each of us would do for himself, and in this state is too proud to do.”

“That doesn’t cover the whole ground,” said Evans.

“And you think that poor boy is troubled — is really suffering from a sense of inferiority to the other young people?”

“Oh, I don’t say certainly. Perhaps not. But if he were, what should you say was the best thing for him to do? Remain a servant; cast his lot with these outcasts; or try to separate and distinguish himself from them, as we all do? Come; we live in the world, — which isn’t so bad, though it’s pretty stupid. He couldn’t change it. Now, what ought he to do?”

Sewell mused a while without answering anything. Then he said with a smile, “It’s very much simpler to fit people for the other world than for this, don’t you think?”

“Yes, it is. It was a cold day for the clergy when it was imagined that they ought to do both.”

“Well,” said Sewell, rising to follow his friend to the door, “I will come to see Barker, and try to talk with him. He’s a very complicated problem. I supposed that I had merely his material prosperity to provide for, after getting him down here, but if I have to reconcile him to the constitution of society! — —”

“Yes,” said Evans. “I wish you’d let me know the result of your labours. I think I could make a very incisive article on the subject. The topic is always an attractive one. There is nobody who doesn’t feel that somebody else is taking on airs with him, and ought to have his comb cut. Or, if you should happen to prove to Barker that his ignominy is in accordance with the Development Theory, and is a necessary Survival, or something of that sort, don’t you see what a card it would be for us with the better classes?”

They went downstairs together, and at the street door Evans stopped again. “Or, I’ll tell you what. Make it a simple study of Barker’s mind — a sort of psychological interview, and then with what I’ve been able to get from him we can present the impression that Boston makes upon a young, fresh, shrewd mind. That would be something rather new, wouldn’t it? Come! the Afternoon would make it worth your while. And then you could work it into a sermon afterwards.”

“You shameless reprobate!” said Sewell, laying his hand affectionately on his friend’s arm.

There was nothing in Lemuel’s case that seemed to him urgent, and he did not go to see him at once. In the meantime, Fast Day came, and Lemuel got away at last to pay his first visit home.

“Seems to me ye ain’t lookin’ over and above well, Lem,” was the first thing his mother said to him, even before she noticed how well he was dressed.

His new spring overcoat, another prize from the Misfit Parlours, and his new pointed-toe shoes, and Derby hat, with the suit of clothes he had kept so carefully all through the winter, were not the complete disguise he had fancied they might be at Willoughby Pastures. The depot-master had known him as soon as he got out of the cars, and ignored his splendour in recognising him. He said, “Hello, Lem,” and had not time to reconcile himself to the boy’s changed appearance before Lemuel hurried away with the bag he had bought so long before for the visit. He met several people on his way home from the depot: two of them were women, and one of these said she knew as soon as she looked at him who it was, and the other said she should have known it was Lem Barker as far as she could see him. She asked him if he was home for good now.

His mother pushed back his thick hair with her hard old hand as she spoke to him, and then she pressed his head down upon her neck, which was mostly collar-bone. But Lemuel could hear her heart beat, and the tears came into his eyes.

“Oh, I’m all right, mother,” he said huskily, though he tried to say it cheerfully. He let her hold his head there the longer because mixed with his tenderness for her was a horror of her bloomers, which he was not at once able to overcome. When he gained courage to look, he saw that she had them on, but now he had the strength to bear it.

“Ye had any breakfast?” she asked, and when he said that he had got a cup of coffee at Fitchburg, she said, well, she must get him something, and she drew him a cup of Japan tea, and made him some milk toast and picked-fish, talking all the time, and telling him how his sister and her husband had gone to the village to have one of her teeth drawn. They had got along through the winter pretty well; but she guessed that they would have had more to complain of if it had not been for him. This was her way of acknowledging the help Lemuel had given them every week, and it was casually sandwiched between an account of an Indian Spirit treatment which Reuben had tried for his rheumatism, and a question whether Lemuel had seen anything of that Mind Cure down to Boston.

But when he looked about the room, and saw here and there the simple comforts and necessaries which his money had bought the sick man and the two helpless women, his heart swelled with joy and pride; and he realised the pleasure we all feel in being a good genius. At times it had come pretty hard to send the greater part of his week’s wages home, but now he was glad he had done it. The poor, coarse food which his mother had served him as a treat; the low, cracked ceilings; the waving floor, covered with rag carpet; the sagging doors, and the old-fashioned trim of the small-paned windows, were all very different from the luxurious abundance, the tesselated pavement, and the tapestry Brussels, the lofty studding, and the black walnut mouldings of the St. Albans; and Lemuel felt the difference with a curious mixture of pride and remorse in his own escape from the meanness of his home. He felt the self-reproach to which the man who rises without raising with him all those dear to him is destined in some measure all his life. His interests and associations are separated from theirs, but if he is not an ignoble spirit, the ties of affection remain unweakened; he cares for them with a kind of indignant tenderness, and calls himself to account before them in the midst of pleasures which they cannot share, or even imagine.

Lemuel’s mother did not ask him much about his life in Boston; she had not the materials for curiosity about it; but he told her everything that he thought she could understand. She recurred to his hopes when he left home and their disappointment in Sewell, and she asked if Lemuel ever saw him nowadays. She could not reconcile herself to his reconciliation with Sewell, whom she still held to have behaved treacherously. Then she went back to Lemuel’s looks, and asked him if he kept pretty well; and when he answered that he did, she smoothed with her hand the knot between her eyes, and did not question him further.

He had the whole forenoon with his mother, and he helped her to get the dinner, as he used to do, pulling the stove-wood out of the snow-drift that still embedded part of the wood-pile, though the snow was all gone around Boston. It was thawing under the dull, soft April sky, and he saw the first bluebird perched on the clothes-line when he went out for the wood; his mother said there had been lots of them. He walked about the place, and into the barn, taking in the forlornness and shabbiness; and then he went up into the room over the shed, where he used to study and write. His heart ached with self-pity.

He realised as he had not done at a distance how dependent this wretched home was upon him; and after meaning the whole morning to tell his mother about Statira, he decided that he was keeping it from her, not merely because he was ashamed to tell her that he was engaged, but because it seemed such a crazy thing, for a person in his circumstances, if it was really an engagement. He had not seen Statira since that night when he brought her to look at the pictures the art-students had made of him. He felt that he had not parted with her kindly, and he went to see her the night before he started home, though it was not Sunday, but he had found her door locked, and this made him angry with her, he could not have said just why. If he told his mother about Statira now, what should he tell her? He compromised by telling her about the two girls that had painted his likeness.

His mother seemed not to care a great deal about the pictures. She said, “I don’t want you should let any girl make a fool of you, Lem.”

“Oh no,” he answered, and went and looked out of the window.

“I don’t say but what they’re nice girls enough, but in your place you no need to throw yourself away.”

Lemuel thought of the awe of Miss Carver in which he lived, and the difference between them; and he could have laughed at his mother’s ignorant pride. What would she say if she knew that he was engaged to a girl that worked in a box-factory? But probably she would not think that studying art and teaching it was any better. She evidently believed that his position in the St. Albans was superior to that of Miss Carver.

His sister and her husband came home before they had finished dinner. His sister had her face all tied up to keep from taking cold after having her tooth drawn, and Lemuel had to go out and help his rheumatic brother-in-law put up the horse. When they came in, his brother-in-law did not wash his hands before going to the table, and Lemuel could not keep his eyes off his black and broken fingernails; his mother’s and sister’s nails were black too. It must have been so when he lived at home.

His sister could not eat; she took some tea, and went to bed. His brother-in-law pulled off his boots after dinner, and put up his stocking-feet on the stove-hearth to warm them.

There was no longer any chance to talk with his mother indoors, and he asked her if she would not like to come out; it was very mild. She put on her bonnet, and they strolled down the road. All the time Lemuel had to keep from looking at her bloomers. When they met any one driving, he had to keep himself from trying to look as if he were not with her, but was just out walking alone.

The day wore heavily away. His brother-in-law’s rheumatism came on toward evening, and his sister’s face had swollen, so that it would not do for her to go out. Lemuel put on some old clothes he found in his room, and milked the cows himself.

“Like old times, Lem,” said his mother, when he came in.

“Yes,” he assented quietly.

He and his mother had tea together, but pretty soon afterwards she seemed to get sleepy; and Lemuel said he had been up early and he guessed he would go to bed. His mother said she guessed she would go too.

After he had blown out his light, she came in to see if he were comfortable. “I presume it seems a pretty poor place to you, Lem,” she said, holding her lamp up and looking round.

“I guess if it’s good enough for you it is for me,” he answered evasively.

“No, it ain’t,” she said. “I always b’en used to it, and I can see from your talk that you’ve got used to something different already. Well, it’s right, Lem. You’re a good boy, and I want you should get the good of Boston, all you can. We don’t any of us begrutch it to ye; and what I came up to say now was, don’t you scrimp yourself down there to send home to us. We got a roof over our heads, and we can keep soul and body together somehow; we always have, and we don’t need a great deal. But I want you should keep yourself nicely dressed down to Boston, so ‘t you can go with the best; I don’t want you should feel anyways meechin’ on account of your clothes. You got a good figure, Lem; you take after your father. Sometimes I wish you was a little bigger; but he wa’n’t; and he had a big spirit. He wa’n’t afraid of anything; and they said if he’d come out o’ that battle where he was killed, he’d ‘a’ b’en a captain. He was a good man.”

She had hardly ever spoken so much of his father before; he knew now by the sound of her voice in the dim room that the tears must be in her eyes; but she governed herself and went on.

“What I wanted to say was, don’t you keep sendin’ so much o’ your money home, child. It’s yours, and I want you should have it; most of it goes for patent medicines, anyway, when it gets here; we can’t keep Reuben from buying ‘em, and he’s always changin’ doctors. And I want you should hold yourself high, Lem. You’re as good as anybody. And don’t you go with any girls, especially, that ain’t of the best. You’re gettin’ to that time o’ life when you’ll begin to think about ‘em; but don’t you go and fall in love with the first little poppet you see, because she’s got pretty eyes and curly hair.”

It seemed to Lemuel as if she must know about Statira, but of course she did not. He lay still, and she went on.

“Don’t you go and get engaged, or any such foolishness in a hurry, Lem. Them art-student girls you was tellin’ about, I presume they’re all right enough; but you wait a while. Young men think it’s a kind of miracle if a girl likes ‘em, and they’re ready to go crazy over it; but it’s the most natural thing she can do. You just wait a while. When you get along a little further, you can pick and choose for yourself. I don’t know as I should want you should marry for money; but don’t you go and take up with the first thing comes along, because you’re afraid to look higher. What’s become o’ that nasty thing that talked so to you at that Miss Vane’s?”

Lemuel said that he had never seen Sibyl or Miss Vane since; but he did not make any direct response to the anxieties his mother had hinted at. Her pride in him, so ignorant of all the reality of his life in the city, crushed him more than the sight and renewed sense of the mean conditions from which he had sprung. What if he should tell her that Miss Carver, whom she did not want him to marry in a hurry, regarded him as a servant, and treated him as she would treat a black man? What if she knew that he was as good as engaged to marry a girl that could no more meet Miss Carver on the same level than she could fly? He could only tell his mother not to feel troubled about him; that he was not going to get married in any great hurry; and pretend to be sleepy and turn his head away.

She pulled the covering up round his neck and tucked it in with her strong, rough old hand, whose very tenderness hurt.

He had expected to stay the greater part of the next day, but he took an earlier train. His sister was still laid up; she thought she must have taken cold in her jaw; her husband, rumpled, unshaven, with a shawl over his shoulders, cowered about the cook-stove for the heat. He began to hate this poverty and suffering, to long for escape from it to the life which at that distance seemed so rich and easy and pleasant; he trembled lest something might have happened in his absence to have thrown him out of his place.

All the way to Boston he was under the misery of the home that he was leaving; his mother’s pride added to the burden of it. But when the train drew in sight of the city, and he saw the steeples and chimneys, and the thin masts of the ships printed together against the horizon, his heart rose. He felt equal to it, to anything in it.

He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, and he saw no one at the hotel except the Harmons till toward dinner-time. Then the ladies coming in from shopping had a word of welcome for him; some of them stopped and shook hands at the office, and when they began to come down to dinner they spoke to him, and there again some of them offered their hands; they said it seemed an age since he had gone.

The art-students came down with Berry, who shook hands so cordially with him that perhaps they could not help it. Miss Carver seemed to hesitate, but she gave him her hand too, and she asked, as the others had done, whether he had found his family well.

He did not know what to think. Sometimes he felt as if people were trying to make a fool of him almost. He remained blushing and smiling to himself after the last of them had gone in to dinner. He did not know what Miss Carver meant, but her eyes seemed to have lost that cold distance, and to have come nearer to him.

Late at night Berry came to him where he sat at his desk. “Well, Barker, I’m glad you’re back again, old man. Feels as if you’d been gone a month of Sundays. Didn’t know whether we should have you with us this first evening.”

Lemuel grew hot with consciousness, and did not make it better for himself by saying, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, I don’t suppose I should in your place,” returned Berry. “It’s human nature. It’s all right. What did the ladies think of the ‘Roman Youth’ the other night? The distinguished artists weren’t sure exactly, and I thought I could make capital with one of ’em if I could find out. Yes, that’s my little game, Barker; that’s what I dropped in for; Bismarck style of diplomacy. I’ll tell you why they want to know, if you won’t give me away: Miss Swan wanted to give her ‘bit of colour’ — that’s what she calls it — to one of the young ladies; but she’s afraid she didn’t like it.”

“I guess they liked it well enough,” said Lemuel, thinking with shame that Statira had not had the grace to say a word of either of the pictures; he attributed this to ‘Manda Grier’s influence.

“Well that’s good, so far as it goes,” said Berry. “But now, to come down to particulars, what did they say? That’s what Miss Swan will ask me.”

“I don’t remember just what they said,” faltered Lemuel.

“Well, they must have said something,” insisted Berry jocosely. “Give a fellow some little clue, and I can piece it out for myself. What did she say? I don’t ask which she was? but I have my suspicions. All I want to know is what she said. Anything like beautiful middle distance, or splendid chiaroscuro, or fine perspective, or exquisite modelling? Come now! Try to think, Barker.” He gave Lemuel time, but to no purpose. “Well,” he resumed, with affected dejection, “I’ll have to try to imagine it; I guess I can; I haven’t worked my imagination much since I took up the law. But look here, Barker,” he continued more briskly, “now you open up a little. Here I’ve been giving you my confidence ever since I saw you — forcing it on you; and you know just how far I’m gone on Miss Swan, to a hundredth part of an inch; but I don’t know enough of your affections to swear that you’ve got any. Now, which one is it? Don’t be mean about it. I won’t give you away. Honest Injun!”

Lemuel was goaded to desperation. His face burned, and the perspiration began to break out on his forehead. He did not know how to escape from this pursuit.

“Which is it, Barker?” repeated his tormentor. “I know it’s human nature to deny it; though I never could understand why; if I was engaged, the Sunday papers should have it about as quick!”

“I’m not engaged!” cried Lemuel.

“You ain’t?” yelled Berry.

“No!”

“Give me your hand! Neither am I!”

He shook Lemuel’s helpless hand with mock heroic fervour. “We are brothers from this time forth, Barker! You can’t imagine how closely this tie binds you to me, Barker. Barker, we are one; with no particular prospect, as far as I am concerned, of ever being more.”

He offered to dramatise a burst of tears on Lemuel’s shoulder; but Lemuel escaped from him.

“Stop! Quit your fooling! What if somebody should come in?”

“They won’t,” said Berry, desisting, and stretching himself at ease in the only chair besides Lemuel’s with which the office was equipped. “It’s too late for ‘em. Now o’er the one-half world nature seems dead-ah, and wicked dreams abuse the curtained sleep-ah. We are safe here from all intrusion, and I can lay bare my inmost thoughts to you, Barker, if I happen to have any. Barker, I’m awfully glad you’re not engaged to either of those girls, — or both. And it’s not altogether because I enjoy the boon companionship of another unengaged man, but it’s partly because I don’t think — shall I say it?”

“Say what?” asked Lemuel, not without some prescience.

“Well, you can forgive the brotherly frankness, if you don’t like it. I don’t think they’re quite up to you.”

Lemuel gave a sort of start, which Berry interpreted in his own way.

“Now, hold on! I know just how you feel. Been there myself. I have seen the time too when I thought any sort of girl was too good for Alonzo W., Jr. But I don’t now. I think A. W., Jr., is good enough for the best. I may be mistaken; I was the other time. But we all begin that way; and the great object is not to keep on that way. See? Now, I suppose you’re in love — puppy love — with that little thing. Probably the first girl you got acquainted with after you came to Boston, or may be a sweet survival of the Willoughby Pastures period. All right. Perfectly natural, in either case. But don’t you let it go any further, my dear boy; old man, don’t you let it go any further. Pause! Reflect! Consider! Love wisely, but not too well! Take the unsolicited advice of a sufferer.”

Pride, joy, shame, remorse, mixed in Lemuel’s heart, which eased itself in an involuntary laugh at Berry’s nonsense.

“Now, what I want you to do — dear boy, or old man, as the case may be — is to regard yourself in a new light. Regard yourself, for the sake of the experiment, as too good for any girl in Boston. No? Can’t fetch it? Try again!”

Lemuel could only laugh foolishly.

“Well, now, that’s singular,” pursued Berry. “I supposed you could have done it without the least trouble. Well, let’s try something a little less difficult. Look me in the eye, and regard yourself as too good, for example, for Miss Carver. Ha!”

An angry flush spread over Lemuel’s embarrassed face. “I wish you’d behave yourself,” he stammered.

“In any other cause I would,” said Berry solemnly. “But I must be cruel to be kind. Seriously, old man, if you can’t think yourself too good for Miss Carver, I wish you’d think yourself good enough. Now, I’m not saying anything against the Willoughby episode, mind. That has its place in the wise economy of nature, just like anything else. But there ain’t any outcome in it for you. You’ve got a future before you, Barker, and you don’t want to go and load up with a love affair that you’ll keep trying to unload as long as you live. No, sir! Look at me! I know I’m not an example in some things, but in this little business of correctly placed affections I could give points to Solomon. Why am I in love with M. Swan? Because I can’t help it for one thing, and because for another thing she can do more to develop the hidden worth and unsuspected powers of A. W., Jr., than any other woman in the world. She may never feel that it’s her mission, but she can’t shake my conviction that way; and I shall stay undeveloped to prove that I was right. Well, now, what you want, my friend, is development, and you can’t get it where you’ve been going. She hain’t got it on hand. And what you want to do is not to take something else in its place — tender heart, steadfast affections, loyalty; they’ve got ’em at every shop in town; they’re a drug in the market. You’ve got to say ‘No development, heigh? Well, I’ll just look round a while, and if I can’t find it at some of the other stores I’ll come back and take some of that steadfast affection. You say it won’t come off? Or run in washing?’ See?”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Lemuel, trying to summon an indignant feeling, and laughing with a strange pleasure at heart. “You’ve got no right to talk to me that way. I want you should leave me alone!”

“Well, since you’re so pressing, I will go,” said Berry easily. “But if I find you at our next interview sitting under the shade of the mustard-tree whose little seed I have just dropped, I shall feel that I have not laboured in vain. ‘She’s a darling, she’s a daisy, she’s a dumpling, she’s a lamb!’ I refer to Miss Swan, of course; but on other lips the terms are equally applicable to Miss Carver; and don’t you forget it!”

He swung out of the office with a mazurka step. His silk hat, gaily tilted on the side of his head, struck against the door-jamb, and fell rolling across the entry floor. Lemuel laughed wildly. At twenty these things are droll.

XXI.

A week passed, and Lemuel had not tried to see Statira again. He said to himself that even when he had tried to do what was right, and to show those young ladies how much he thought of her by bringing her to see their pictures, she had acted very ungratefully, and had as good as tried to quarrel with him. Then, when he went to see her before his visit home, she was out; she had never been out before when he called.

Now, he had told Berry that they were not engaged. At first, this shocked him as if it were a lie. Then he said to himself that he had a right to make that answer because Berry had no right to ask the questions that led to it. Then he asked himself if he really were engaged to Statira. He had told her that he liked her better than any one else in the world, and she had said as much to him. But he pretended that he did not know whether it could be called an engagement.

There was no one who could solve the question for him, and it kept asking itself that whole week, and especially when he was with Miss Carver, as happened two or three times through Berry’s connivance. Once he had spent the greater part of an evening in the studio, where he talked nearly all the time with Miss Carver, and he found out that she was the daughter of an old ship’s captain at Corbitant; her mother was dead, and her aunt had kept house for her father. It was an old square house that her grandfather built, in the days when Corbitant had direct trade with France. She described it minutely, and told how a French gentleman had died there in exile at the time of the French revolution and who was said to haunt the house; but Miss Carver had never seen any ghosts in it. They all began to talk of ghosts and weird experiences; even Berry had had some strange things happen to him in the West. Then the talk broke in two again, and Lemuel sat apart with Miss Carver, who told at length the plot of a story she had been reading; it was a story called Romola; and she said she would lend it to Lemuel; she said she did not see how any one could bear to be the least selfish or untrue after reading it. That made Lemuel feel cold; but he could not break away from her charm. She sat where the shaded lamp threw its soft light on one side of her face; it looked almost like the face of a spirit, and her eyes were full of a heavenly gentleness.

Lemuel asked himself how he could ever have thought them proud eyes. He asked himself at the same time and perpetually, whether he was really engaged to Statira or not. He thought how different this evening was from those he spent with her. She could not talk about anything but him and her dress; and ‘Manda Grier could not do anything but say saucy things which she thought were smart. Miss Swan was really witty; it was as good as the theatre to hear her and Berry going on together. Berry was pretty bright; there was no denying it. He sang to his banjo that night; one of the songs was Spanish; he had learned it in New Mexico.

Lemuel began to understand better how such nice young ladies could go with Berry. At first, after Berry talked so to him that night in the office against Statira, he determined that he would keep away from him. But Berry was so sociable and good-natured that he could not. The first thing he knew, Lemuel was laughing at something Berry said, and then he could not help himself.

Berry was coming now, every chance he had, to talk about the art-students. He seemed to take it for granted that Lemuel was as much interested in Miss Carver as he was himself in Miss Swan; and Lemuel did begin to speak of her in a shy way. Berry asked him if he had noticed that she looked like that Spanish picture of the Virgin that Miss Swan had pinned up next to the door; and Lemuel admitted that there was some resemblance.

“Notice those eyes of hers, so deep, and sorry for everybody in general? If it was anybody in particular, that fellow would be in luck. Oh, she’s a dumpling, there’s no mistake about it! ‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered!’ That’s Miss Carver’s style. She looks as if she just wanted to forgive somebody something. I’m afraid you ain’t wicked enough, Barker. Look here! What’s the reason we can’t make up a little party for the Easter service at the Catholic cathedral Sunday night? The girls would like to go, I know.”

“No, no, I can’t! I mustn’t!” said Lemuel, and he remained steadfast in his refusal. It would be the second Sunday night that he had not seen Statira, and he felt that he must not let it pass so. Berry went off to the cathedral with the art-students; and he kept out of the way till they were gone.

He said to himself that he would go a little later than usual to see Statira, to let her know that he was not so very anxious; but when he found her alone, and she cried on his neck, and owned that she had not behaved as she should that night when she went to see the pictures, and that she had been afraid he hated her, and was not coming any more, he had stayed away so long, his heart was melted, and he did everything to soothe and comfort her, and they were more loving together than they had been since the first time. ‘Manda Grier came in, and said through her nose, like an old country-woman, “‘The falling out of faithful friends, renewing is of love!’” and Statira exclaimed in the old way, “‘Manda!” that he had once thought so cunning, and rested there in his arms with her cheek tight pressed against his.

She did not talk; except when she was greatly excited about something, she rarely had anything to say. She had certain little tricks, poutings, bridlings, starts, outcries, which had seemed the most bewitching things in the world to Lemuel. She tried all these now, unaffectedly enough, in listening to his account of his visit home, and so far as she could she vividly sympathised with him.

He came away heavy and unhappy. Somehow, these things no longer sufficed for him. He compared this evening with the last he had spent with the art-students, which had left his brain in a glow, and kept him awake for hours with luminous thoughts. But he had got over that unkindness to Statira, and he was glad of that. He pitied her now, and he said to himself that if he could get her away from ‘Manda Grier, and under the influence of such girls as Miss Swan and Miss Carver, it would be much better for her. He did not relent toward ‘Manda Grier; he disliked her more than ever, and in the friendship which he dramatised between Statira and Miss Carver, he saw her cast adrift without remorse.

Sewell had told him that he was always at leisure Monday night, and the next evening Lemuel went to pay his first visit to the minister since his first day in Boston. It was early, and Evans, who usually came that evening, had not arrived yet, but Sewell had him in his thought when he hurried forward to meet his visitor.

“Oh, is it you, Mr. Barker?” he asked in a note of surprise. “I am glad to see you. I had been intending to come and look you up again. Will you sit down? Mr. Evans was here the other night, and we were talking of you. I hope you are all well?”

“Very well, thank you,” said Lemuel, taking the hand the minister offered, and then taking the chair he indicated. Sewell did not know exactly whether to like the greater ease which Lemuel showed in his presence; but there was nothing presumptuous in it, and he could not help seeing the increased refinement of the young man’s beauty. The knot between his eyes gave him interest, while it inflicted a vague pang upon the minister. “I have been at home since I saw you.” Lemuel looked down at his neat shoes to see if they were in fit state for the minister’s study-carpet, and Sewell’s eye sympathetically following, wandered to the various details of Lemuel’s simple and becoming dress, — the light spring suit which he had indulged himself in at the Misfit Parlours since his mother had bidden him keep his money for himself and not send so much of it home.

“Ah, have you?” cried the minister. “I hope you found your people all well? How is the place looking? I suppose the season isn’t quite so advanced as it is with us.”

“There’s some snow in the woods yet,” said Lemuel, laying the stick he carried across the hat-brim on his knees. “Mother was well; but my sister and her husband have had a good deal of sickness.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that,” said Sewell, with the general sympathy which Evans accused him of keeping on tap professionally. “Well, how did you like the looks of Willoughby Pastures compared with Boston? Rather quieter, I suppose.”

“Yes, it was quieter,” answered Lemuel.

“But the first touch of spring must be very lovely there! I find myself very impatient with these sweet, early days in town. I envy you your escape to such a place.”

Lemuel opposed a cold silence to the lurking didacticism of these sentences, and Sewell hastened to add, “And I wish I could have had your experience in contrasting the country and the town, after your long sojourn here, on your first return home. Such a chance can come but once in a lifetime, and to very few.”

“There are some pleasant things about the country,” Lemuel began.

“Oh, I am sure of it!” cried Sewell, with cheerful aimlessness.

“The stillness was a kind of rest, after the noise here; I think any one might be glad to get back to such a place — —”

“I was sure you would,” interrupted Sewell.

“If he was discouraged or broken down any way,” Lemuel calmly added.

“Oh!” said Sewell. “You mean that you found more sympathy among your old friends and neighbours than you do here?”

“No,” said Lemuel bluntly. “That’s what city people think. But it’s all a mistake. There isn’t half the sympathy in the country that there is in the city. Folks pry into each other’s business more, but they don’t really care so much. What I mean is that you could live cheaper, and the fight isn’t so hard. You might have to use your hands more, but you wouldn’t have to use your head hardly at all. There isn’t so much opposition — competition.”

“Oh,” said Sewell a second time. “But this competition — this struggle — in which one or the other must go to the wall, isn’t that painful?”

“I don’t know as it is,” answered Lemuel, “as long as you’re young and strong. And it don’t always follow that one must go to the wall. I’ve seen some things where both got on better.”

Sewell succumbed to this worldly wisdom. He was frequently at the disadvantage men of cloistered lives must be, in having his theories in advance of his facts. He now left this point, and covertly touched another that had come up in his last talk with Evans about Barker. “But you find in the country, don’t you, a greater equality of social condition? People are more on a level, and have fewer artificial distinctions.”

“Yes, there’s that,” admitted Lemuel. “I’ve worried a good deal about that, for I’ve had to take a servant’s place in a good many things, and I’ve thought folks looked down on me for it, even when they didn’t seem to intend to do it. But I guess it isn’t so bad as I thought when I first began to notice it. Do you suppose it is?” His voice was suddenly tense with personal interest in the question which had ceased to be abstract.

“Oh, certainly not,” said the minister, with an ease which he did not feel.

“I presume I had what you may call a servant’s place at Miss Vane’s,” pursued Lemuel unflinchingly, “and I’ve been what you may call head waiter at the St. Albans, since I’ve been there. If a person heard afterwards, when I had made out something, if I ever did, that I had been a servant, would they — they — despise me for it?”

“Not unless they were very silly people,” said Sewell cordially, “I can assure you.”

“But if they had ever seen me doing a servant’s work, wouldn’t they always remember it, no matter what I was afterwards?” Sewell hesitated, and Lemuel hurried to add, “I ask because I’ve made up my mind not to be anything but clerk after this.”

Sewell pitied the simple shame, the simple pride. “That isn’t the question for you to ask, my dear boy,” he answered gently, and with an affection which he had never felt for his charge before. “There’s another question, more important, and one which you must ask yourself: ‘Should I care if they did?’ After all, the matter’s in your own hands. Your soul’s always your own till you do something wrong.”

“Yes, I understand that.” Lemuel sat silently thoughtful, fingering his hat-band. It seemed to Sewell that he wished to ask something else, and was mustering his courage; but if this was so, it exhaled in a sigh, and he remained silent.

“I should be sorry,” pursued the minister, “to have you dwell upon such things. There are certain ignoble facts in life which we can best combat by ignoring them. A slight of almost any sort ceases to be when you cease to consider it.” This did not strike Sewell as wholly true when he had said it, and he was formulating some modification of it in his mind, when Lemuel said —

“I presume a person can help himself some by being ashamed of caring for such things, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant — —”

“I guess I’ve exaggerated the whole thing some. But if a thing is so, thinking it ain’t won’t unmake it.”

“No,” admitted Sewell reluctantly. “But I should be sorry, all the same, if you let it annoy — grieve you. What has pleased me in what I’ve been able to observe in you, has been your willingness to take hold of any kind of honest work. I liked finding you with your coat off washing dishes, that morning, at the Wayfarer’s Lodge, and I liked your going at once to Miss Vane’s in a — as you did — —”

“Of course,” Lemuel interrupted, “I could do it before I knew how it was looked at here.”

“And couldn’t you do it now?”

“Not if there was anything else.”

“Ah, that’s the great curse of it; that’s what I deplore,” Sewell broke out, “in our young people coming from the country to the city. They must all have some genteel occupation! I don’t blame them; but I would gladly have saved you this experience — this knowledge — if I could. I felt that I had done you a kind of wrong in being the means, however indirectly and innocently, of your coming to Boston, and I would willingly have done anything to have you go back to the country. But you seemed to distrust me — to find something hostile in me — and I did not know how to influence you.”

“Yes, I understand that,” said Lemuel. “I couldn’t help it, at first. But I’ve got to see it all in a different light since then. I know that you meant the best by me. I know now that what I wrote wasn’t worth anything, and just how you must have looked at it. I didn’t know some things then that I do now; and since I have got to know a little more I have understood better what you meant by all you said.”

“I am very glad,” said Sewell, with sincere humility, “that you have kept no hard feeling against me.”

“Oh, not at all. It’s all right now. I couldn’t explain very well that I hadn’t come to the city just to be in the city, but because I had to do something to help along at home. You didn’t seem to understand that there wa’n’t anything there for me to take hold of.”

“No, I’m afraid I didn’t, or wouldn’t quite understand that; I was talking and acting, I’m afraid, from a preconceived notion.” Lemuel made no reply, not having learned yet to utter the pleasant generalities with which city people left a subject; and after a while Sewell added, “I am glad to have seen your face so often at church. You have been a great deal in my mind, and I have wished to do something to make your life happy, and useful to you in the best way, here, but I haven’t quite known how.” At this point Sewell realised that it was nearly eight months since Lemuel had come to Boston, and he said contritely, “I have not made the proper effort, I’m afraid; but I did not know exactly how to approach you. You were rather a difficult subject,” he continued, with a smile in which Lemuel consented to join, “but now that we’ve come to a clearer understanding—” He broke off and asked, “Have you many acquaintances in Boston?”

Lemuel hesitated, and cleared his throat, “Not many.”

Something in his manner prompted the minister to say, “That is such a very important thing for young men in a strange place. I wish you would come oftener to see us, hereafter. Young men, in the want of companionship, often form disadvantageous acquaintances, which they can’t shake off afterwards, when they might wish to do so. I don’t mean evil acquaintance; I certainly couldn’t mean that in your case; but frivolous ones, from which nothing high or noble can come — nothing of improvement or development.”

Lemuel started at the word and blushed. It was Berry’s word. Sewell put his own construction on the start and the blush.

“Especially,” he went on, “I should wish any young man whom I was interested in to know refined and noble woman.” He felt that this was perhaps in Lemuel’s case too much like prescribing port wine and carriage exercise to an indigent patient, and he added, “If you cannot know such women, it is better to know none at all. It is not what women say or do, so much as the art they have of inspiring a man to make the best of himself. The accidental acquaintances that young people are so apt to form are in most cases very detrimental. There is no harm in them of themselves, perhaps, but all irregularity in the life of the young is to be deplored.”

“Do you mean,” asked Lemuel, with that concreteness which had alarmed Sewell before, “that they ought to be regularly introduced?”

“I mean that a young girl who allowed a young man to make her acquaintance outside of the — the — social sanctions — would be apt to be a silly or romantic person, at the best. Of course, there are exceptions. But I should be very sorry if any young man I knew — no; why shouldn’t I say you, at once? — should involve himself in any such way. One thing leads to another, especially with the young; and the very fact of irregularity, of romance, of strangeness in an acquaintance, throws a false glamour over the relation, and appeals to the sentiments in an unwarranted degree.”

“Yes, that is so,” said Lemuel.

The admission stimulated Sewell in the belief that he had a clue in his hand which it was his duty to follow up. “The whole affair loses proportion and balance. The fancy becomes excited, and some of the most important interests — the very most important interests of life — are committed to impulse.” Lemuel remained silent, and it seemed the silence of conviction. “A young man is better for knowing women older than himself, more cultivated, devoted to higher things. Of course, young people must see each other, must fall in love and get married; but there need be no haste about such things. If there is haste — if there is rashness, thoughtlessness — there is sure to be unhappiness. Men are apt to outgrow their wives intellectually, if their wives’ minds are set on home and children, as they should be, and allowance for this ought to be made, if possible. I would rather that in the beginning the wife should be the mental superior. I hope it will be several years yet before you think seriously of such things, but when the time comes, I hope you will have seen some young girl — there are such for every one of us — whom it is civilisation and enlightenment, refinement, and elevation, simply to know. On the other hand, a silly girl’s influence is degrading and ruinous. She either drags those attached to her down to her own level; or she remains a weight and a clog upon the life of a man who loves her.”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, with a sigh which Sewell interpreted as that of relief from danger recognised in time.

He pursued eagerly. “I could not warn any one too earnestly against such an entanglement.”

Lemuel rose and looked about with a troubled glance. Sewell continued: “Any such marriage — a marriage upon any such conditions — is sure to be calamitous; and if the conditions are recognised beforehand, it is sure to be iniquitous. So far from urging the fulfilment of even a promise, in such a case, I would have every such engagement broken, in the interest of humanity — of morality — —”

Mrs. Sewell came into the room, and gave a little start of surprise, apparently not mixed with pleasure, at seeing Lemuel. She had never been able to share her husband’s interest in him, while insisting upon his responsibility; she disliked him not logically, but naturally, for the wrong and folly which he had been the means of her husband’s involving himself in; Miss Vane’s kindliness toward Lemuel, which still survived, and which expressed itself in questions about him whenever she met the minister, was something that Mrs. Sewell could not understand. She now said, “Oh! Mr. Barker!” and coldly gave him her hand. “Have you been well? Must you go?”

“Yes, thank you. I have got to be getting back. Well, good evening.” He bowed to the Sewells.

“You must come again to see me,” said the minister, and looked at his wife.

“Yes, it has been a very long time since you were here,” Mrs. Sewell added.

“I haven’t had a great deal of time to myself,” said Lemuel, and he contrived to get himself out of the room.

Sewell followed him down to the door, in the endeavour to say something more on the subject his wife had interrupted, but he only contrived to utter some feeble repetitions. He came back in vexation, which he visited upon Lemuel. “Silly fellow!” he exclaimed.

“What has he been doing now?” asked Mrs. Sewell, with reproachful discouragement.

“Oh, I don’t know! I suspect that he’s been involving himself in some ridiculous love affair!” Mrs. Sewell looked a silent inculpation. “It’s largely conjecture on my part, of course, — he’s about as confiding as an oyster! — but I fancy I have said some things in a conditional way that will give him pause. I suspect from his manner that he has entangled himself with some other young simpleton, and that he’s ashamed of it, or tired of it, already. If that’s the case, I have hit the nail on the head. I told him that a foolish, rash engagement was better broken than kept. The foolish marriages that people rush into are the greatest bane of life!”

“And would you really have advised him, David,” asked his wife, “to break off an engagement if he had made one?”

“Of course I should! I — —”

“Then I am glad I came in in time to prevent your doing anything so wicked.”

“Wicked?” Sewell turned from his desk, where he was about to sit down, in astonishment.

“Yes! Do you think that nobody else is to be considered in such a thing? What about the poor, silly girl if he breaks off with her? Oh, you men are all alike! Even the best! You think it is a dreadful thing for a young man to be burdened with a foolish love affair at the beginning of his career; but you never think of the girl whose whole career is spoiled, perhaps, if the affair is broken off! Hasn’t she any right to be considered?”

“I should think,” said Sewell, distinctly daunted, “that they were equally fortunate, if it were broken off.”

“O my dear, you know you don’t think anything of the kind! If he has more mind than she has, and is capable of doing something in the world, he goes on and forgets her; but she remembers him. Perhaps it’s her one chance in life to get married — to have a home. You know very well that in a case of that kind — a rash engagement, as you call it — both are to blame; and shall one do all the suffering? Very probably his fancy was taken first, and he followed her up, and flattered her into liking him; and now shall he leave her because he’s tired of her?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, recovering from the first confusion which his wife’s unexpected difference of opinion had thrown him into, “I should think that was the very best reason in the world why he should leave her. Would his marrying make matters worse or better if he were tired of her? As for wickedness, I should feel myself guilty if I did not do my utmost to prevent marriages between people when one or other wished to break their engagement, and had not the moral courage to do so. There is no more pernicious delusion than that one’s word ought to be kept in such an affair, after the heart has gone out of it, simply because it’s been given.”

“David!”

But Sewell was not to be restrained. “I am right about this, Lucy, and you know it. Half the miserable marriages in the world could be prevented, if there were only some frank and fearless adviser at hand to say to the foolish things that if they no longer fully and freely love each other they can commit no treason so deadly as being true to their word. I wish,” he now added, “that I could be the means of breaking off every marriage that the slightest element of doubt enters into beforehand. I should leave much less work for the divorce courts. The trouble comes from that crazy and mischievous principle of false self-sacrifice that I’m always crying out against. If a man has ceased to love the woman he has promised to marry — or vice versa — the best possible thing they can do, the only righteous thing, is not to marry.”

Mrs. Sewell could not deny this. She directed an oblique attack from another quarter, as women do, while affecting not to have changed her ground at all. “Very well, then, David, I wish you would have nothing to do with that crazy and mischievous principle yourself. I wish you would let this ridiculous Barker of yours alone from this time forth. He has found a good place, where he is of use, and where he is doing very well. Now I think your responsibility is fairly ended. I hope you won’t meddle with his love affairs, if he has any; for if you do, you will probably have your hands full. He is very good looking, and all sorts of silly little geese will be falling in love with him.”

“Well, so far his love troubles are purely conjectural,” said Sewell with a laugh. “I’m bound to say that Barker himself didn’t say a word to justify the conjecture that he was either in love or wished to be out of it. However, I’ve given him some wholesome advice which he’ll be all the better for taking, merely as a prophylactic, if nothing else.”

“I am tired of him,” sighed Mrs. Sewell. “Is he going to keep perpetually turning up, in this way? I hope you were not very pressing with him in your invitations to him to call again?”

Sewell smiled. “You were not, my dear.”

“You let him take too much of your time. I was so provoked, when I heard you going on with him, that I came down to put an end to it.”

“Well, you succeeded,” said Sewell easily. “Don’t you think he’s greatly improved in the short time he’s been in the city?”

“He’s very well dressed. I hope he isn’t extravagant.”

“He’s not only well dressed, but he’s beginning to be well spoken. I believe he’s beginning to observe that there is such a thing as not talking through the nose. He still says, ‘I don’t know as,’ but most of the men they turn out of Harvard say that; I’ve heard some of the professors say it.”

Mrs. Sewell was not apparently interested in this.

XXII.

That night Lemuel told Mrs. Harmon that she must not expect him to do anything thenceforward but look after the accounts and the general management; she must get a head-waiter, and a boy to run the elevator. She consented to this, as she would have consented to almost anything else that he proposed.

He had become necessary to the management of the St. Albans in every department; and if the lady boarders felt that they could not now get on without him, Mrs. Harmon was even more dependent.

With her still nominally at the head of affairs, and controlling the expenses as a whole, no radical reform could be effected. But there were details of the outlay in which Lemuel was of use, and he had brought greater comfort into the house for less money. He rejected her old and simple device of postponing the payment of debt as an economical measure, and substituted cash dealings with new purveyors. He gradually but inevitably took charge of the storeroom, and stopped the waste there; early in his administration he had observed the gross and foolish prodigality with which the portions were sent from the carving-room, and after replacing Mrs. Harmon’s nephew there, he established a standard portion that gave all the needed variety, and still kept the quantity within bounds. It came to his taking charge of this department entirely, and as steward he carved the meats, and saw that nothing was in a way to become cold before he opened the dining-room doors as head-waiter.

His activities promoted the leisure which Mrs. Harmon had always enjoyed, and which her increasing bulk fitted her to adorn. Her nephew willingly relinquished the dignity of steward. He said that his furnaces were as much as he wanted to take care of; especially as in former years, when it had begun to come spring, he had experienced a stress of mind in keeping the heat just right, when the ladies were all calling down the tubes for more of it or less of it, which he should now be very glad not to have complicated with other cares. He said that now he could look forward to the month of May with some pleasure.

The guests, sensibly or insensibly, according to their several temperaments, shared the increased ease that came from Lemuel’s management. The service was better in every way; their beds were promptly made, their rooms were periodically swept; every night when they came up from dinner they found their pitchers of ice-water at their doors. This change was not accomplished without much of that rebellion and renunciation which was known at the St. Albans as kicking. Chambermaids and table-girls kicked, but they were replaced by Lemuel, who went himself to the intelligence office, and pledged the new ones to his rule beforehand. There was even some kicking among the guests, who objected to the new portions, and to having a second bill sent them if the first remained unpaid for a week; but the general sense of the hotel was in Lemuel’s favour.

He had no great pleasure in the reform he had effected. His heart was not in it, except as waste and disorder and carelessness were painful to him. He suffered to promote a better state of things, as many a woman whose love is for books or pictures or society suffers for the perfection of her housekeeping, and sacrifices her taste to achieve it. He would have liked better to read, to go to lectures, to hear sermons; with the knowledge of Mr. Evans’s life as an editor and the incentive of a writer near him, he would have liked to try again if he could not write something, though the shame of his failure in Mr. Sewell’s eyes had burned so deep. Above all, since he had begun to see how city people regarded the kind of work he had been doing, he would have liked to get out of the hotel business altogether, if he could have been sure of any other.

As the spring advanced his cares grew lighter. Most of the regular boarders went away to country hotels and became regular boarders there. Their places were only partially filled by transients from the South and West, who came and went, and left Lemuel large spaces of leisure, in which he read, or deputed Mrs. Harmon’s nephew to the care of the office and pursued his studies of Boston, sometimes with Mr. Evans, — whose newspaper kept him in town, and who liked to prowl about with him, and to frequent the odd summer entertainments, — but mostly alone. They became friends after a fashion, and were in each other’s confidence as regarded their opinions and ideas, rather than their history; now and then Evans dropped a word about the boy he had lost, or his wife’s health, but Lemuel kept his past locked fast in his breast.

The art-students had gone early in the summer, and Berry had left Boston for Wyoming at the end of the spring term of the law-school. He had not been able to make up his mind to pop before Miss Swan departed, but he thought he should fetch it by another winter; and he had got leave to write to her, on condition, he said, that he should conduct the whole correspondence himself.

Miss Carver had left Lemuel dreaming of her as an ideal, yet true, with a slow, rustic constancy, to Statira. For all that had been said and done, he had not swerved explicitly from her. There was no talk of marriage between them, and could not be; but they were lovers still, and when Miss Carver was gone, and the finer charm of her society was unfelt, he went back to much of the old pleasure he had felt in Statira’s love. The resentment of her narrow-mindedness, the shame for her ignorance passed; the sense of her devotion remained.

‘Manda Grier wanted her to go home with her for part of the summer, but she would not have consented if Lemuel had not insisted. She wrote him back ill-spelt, scrawly little letters, in one of which she told him that her cough was all gone, and she was as well as ever. She took a little more cold when she returned to town in the first harsh September weather, and her cough returned, but she said she did not call it anything now.

The hotel began to fill up again for the winter. Berry preceded the art-students by some nervous weeks, in which he speculated upon what he should do if they did not come at all. Then they came, and the winter passed, with repetitions of the last winter’s events, and a store of common memories that enriched the present, and insensibly deepened the intimacy in which Lemuel found himself. He could not tell whither the present was carrying him; he only knew that he had drifted so far from the squalor of his past, that it seemed like the shadow of a shameful dream.

He did not go to see Statira so often as he used; and she was patient with his absences, and defended him against ‘Manda Grier, who did not scruple to tell her that she believed the fellow was fooling with her, and who could not always keep down a mounting dislike of Lemuel in his presence. One night towards spring, when he returned early from Statira’s, he found Berry in the office at the St. Albans. “That you, old man?” he asked. “Well, I’m glad you’ve come. Just going to leave a little Billy Ducks for you here, but now I needn’t. The young ladies sent me down to ask if you had a copy of Whittier’s poems; they want to find something in it. I told ’em Longfellow would do just as well, but I couldn’t seem to convince ‘em. They say he didn’t write the particular poem they want.”

“Yes, I’ve got Whittier’s poems here,” said Lemuel, unlocking his desk. “It belongs to Mr. Evans; I guess he won’t care if I lend it.”

“Well, now, I tell you what,” said Berry; “don’t you let a borrowed book like that go out of your hands. Heigh? You just bring it up yourself. See?” He winked the eye next Lemuel with exaggerated insinuation. “They’ll respect you all the more for being so scrupulous, and I guess they won’t be very much disappointed on general principles if you come along. There’s lots of human nature in girls — the best of ‘em. I’ll tell ’em I left you lookin’ for it. I don’t mind a lie or two in a good cause. But you hurry along up, now.”

He was gone before Lemuel could stop him; he could not do anything but follow.

It appeared that it was Miss Swan who wished to see the poem; she could not remember the name of it, but she was sure she should know it if she saw it in the index. She mingled these statements with her greetings to Lemuel, and Miss Carver seemed as glad to see him. She had a little more colour than usual, and they were all smiling, so that he knew Berry had been getting off some of his jokes. But he did not care.

Miss Swan found the poem as she had predicted, and, “Now all keep still,” she said, “and I’ll read it.” But she suddenly added, “Or no; you read it, Mr. Barker, won’t you?”

“If Barker ain’t just in voice to-night, I’ll read it,” suggested Berry.

But she would not let him make this diversion. She ignored his offer, and insisted upon Lemuel’s reading. “Jessie says you read beautifully. That passage in Romola,” she reminded him; but Lemuel said it was only a few lines, and tried to excuse himself. At heart he was proud of his reading, and he ended by taking the book.

When he had finished the two girls sighed.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Jessie?” said Miss Swan.

“Beautiful!” answered her friend.

Berry yawned.

“Well, I don’t see much difference between that and a poem of Longfellow’s. Why wouldn’t Longfellow have done just as well? Honestly, now! Why isn’t one poem just as good as another, for all practical purposes?”

“It is, for some people,” said Miss Swan.

Berry figured an extreme anguish by writhing in his chair. Miss Swan laughed in spite of herself, and they began to talk in their usual banter, which Miss Carver never took part in, and which Lemuel was quite incapable of sharing. If it had come to savage sarcasm or a logical encounter, he could have held his own, but he had a natural weight and slowness that disabled him from keeping up with Berry’s light talk; he envied it, because it seemed to make everybody like him, and Lemuel would willingly have been liked.

Miss Carver began to talk to him about the book, and then about Mr. Evans. She asked him if he went much to his rooms, and Lemuel said no, not at all, since the first time Mr. Evans had asked him up. He said, after a pause, that he did not know whether he wanted him to come.

“I should think he would,” said Miss Carver. “It must be very gloomy for him, with his wife such an invalid. He seems naturally such a gay person.”

“Yes, that’s what I think,” said Lemuel.

“I wonder,” said the girl, “if it seems to you harder for a naturally cheerful person to bear things, than for one who has always been rather melancholy?”

“Yes, it does!” he answered with the pleasure and surprise young people have in discovering any community of feeling; they have thought themselves so utterly unlike each other. “I wonder why it should?”

“I don’t know; perhaps it isn’t so. But I always pity the cheerful person the most.”

They recognised an amusing unreason in this, and laughed. Miss Swan across the room had caught the name.

“Are you talking of Mrs. Evans?”

Berry got his banjo down from the wall, where Miss Swan allowed him to keep it as bric-a-brac, and began to tune it.

“I don’t believe it agrees with this banjoseph being an object of virtue,” he said. “What shall it be, ladies? Something light and gay, adapted to disperse gloomy reflections?” He played a fandango. “How do you like that? It has a tinge of melancholy in it, and yet it’s lively too, as a friend of mine used to say about the Dead March.”

“Was his name Berry?” asked Miss Swan.

“Not Alonzo W., Jr.,” returned Berry tranquilly, and he and Miss Swan began to joke together.

“I know a friend of Mr. Evans’s,” said Lemuel to Miss Carver. “Mr. Sewell. Have you ever heard him preach?”

“Oh yes, indeed. We go nearly every Sunday morning.”

“I nearly always go in the evening now,” said Lemuel. “Don’t you like him?”

“Yes,” said the girl. “There’s something about him — I don’t know what — that doesn’t leave you feeling how bad you are, but makes you want to be better. He helps you so; and he’s so clear. And he shows that he’s had all the mean and silly thoughts that you have. I don’t know — it’s as if he were talking for each person alone.”

“Yes, that is exactly the way I feel!” Lemuel was proud of the coincidence. He said, to commend himself further to Miss Carver, “I have just been round to see him.”

“I should think you would value his acquaintance beyond anything,” said the girl. “Is he just as earnest and simple as he is in the pulpit?”

“He’s just the same, every way.” Lemuel went a little further; “I knew him before I came to Boston. He boarded one summer where we lived.” As he spoke he thought of the grey, old, unpainted house, and of his brother-in-law with his stocking-feet on the stove-hearth, and his mother’s bloomers; he thought of his arrest, and his night in the police-station, his trial, and the Wayfarer’s Lodge; and he wondered that he could think of such things and still look such a girl in the face. But he was not without that strange joy in their being unknown to her which reserved and latent natures feel in mere reticence, and which we all experience in some degree when we talk with people and think of our undiscovered lives.

They went on a long time, matching their opinions and feelings about many things, as young people do, and fancying that much of what they said was new with them. When he came away after ten o’clock, he thought of one of the things that Sewell had said about the society of refined and noble women: it was not so much what they said or did that helped; it was something in them that made men say and do their best, and help themselves to be refined and noble men, to make the most of themselves in their presence. He believed that this was what Miss Carver had done, and he thought how different it was with him when he came away from an evening with Statira. Again he experienced that compassion for her, in the midst of his pride and exultation; he asked himself what he could do to help her; he did not see how she could be changed.

Berry followed him downstairs, and wanted to talk the evening over.

“I don’t see how I’m going to stand it much longer, Barker,” he said. “I shall have to pop pretty soon or die, one of the two; and I’m afraid either one ‘ll kill me. Wasn’t she lovely to-night? Honey in the comb, sugar in the gourd, I say! I wonder what it is about popping, anyway, that makes it so hard, Barker? It’s simply a matter of business, if you come to boil it down. You offer a fellow so many cattle, and let him take ’em or leave ‘em. But if the fellow happens to have on a long, slim, olive-green dress of some colour, and holds her head like a whole floral tribute on a stem, and you happen to be the cattle you’re offering, you can’t feel so independent about it, somehow. Well, what’s the use? She’s a daisy, if ever there was one. Ever notice what a peculiar blue her eyes are?”

“Blue?” said Lemuel. “They’re brown.”

“Look here, old man,” said Berry compassionately, “do you think I’ve come down here to fool away my time talking about Miss Carver? We’ll take some Saturday afternoon for that, when we haven’t got anything else to do; but it’s Miss Swan that has the floor at present. What were you two talking about over there, so long? I can’t get along with Miss Carver worth a cent.”

“I hardly know what we did talk about,” said Lemuel dreamily.

“Well, I’ve got the same complaint, I couldn’t tell you ten words that Madeline said — in thine absence let me call thee Madeline, sweet! — but I knew it was making an immortal spirit of me, right straight along, every time. The worst thing about an evening like this is, it don’t seem to last any time at all. Why, when those girls began to put up their hands to hide their yawns, I felt like I was just starting in for a short call. I wish I could have had a good phonograph around. I’d put it on my sleepless pillow, and unwind its precious record all through the watches of the night.” He imitated the thin phantasmal squeak of the instrument in repeating a number of Miss Swan’s characteristic phrases. “Yes, sir, a pocket phonograph is the thing I’m after.”

“I don’t see how you can talk the way you do,” said Lemuel, shuddering inwardly at Berry’s audacious freedom, and yet finding a certain comfort in it.

“That’s just the way I felt myself at first. But you’ll get over it as you go along. The nicest thing about their style of angel is that they’re perfectly human, after all. You don’t believe it now, of course, but you will.”

It only heightened Lemuel’s conception of Miss Carver’s character to have Berry talk so lightly and daringly of her, in her relation to him. He lay long awake after he went to bed, and in the turmoil of his thoughts one thing was clear: so pure and high a being must never know anything of his shameful past, which seemed to dishonour her through his mere vicinity. He must go far from her, and she must not know why; but long afterwards Mr. Sewell would tell her, and then she would understand. He owed her this all the more because he could see now that she was not one of the silly persons, as Mr. Sewell called them, who would think meanly of him for having in his ignorance and inexperience, done a servant’s work. His mind had changed about that, and he wondered that he could ever have suspected her of such a thing.

About noon the next day the street door was opened hesitatingly, as if by some one not used to the place; and when Lemuel looked up from the menus he was writing, he saw the figure of one of those tramps who from time to time presented themselves and pretended to want work. He scanned the vagabond sharply, as he stood moulding a soft hat on his hands, and trying to superinduce an air of piteous appeal upon the natural gaiety of his swarthy face. “Well! what’s wanted?”

A dawning conjecture that had flickered up in the tramp’s eyes flashed into full recognition.

“Why, mate!”

Lemuel’s heart stood still. “What — what do you want here?”

“Why, don’t you know me, mate?”

All his calamity confronted Lemuel.

“No,” he said, but nothing in him supported the lie he had uttered.

“Wayfarer’s Lodge?” suggested the other cheerfully. “Don’t you remember?”

“No — —”

“I guess you do,” said the mate easily. “Anyway, I remember you.”

Lemuel’s feeble defence gave way. “Come in here,” he said, and he shut the door upon the intruder and himself, and submitted to his fate. “What is it?” he asked huskily.

“Why, mate! what’s the matter? Nobody’s goin’ to hurt you,” said the other encouragingly. “What’s your lay here?”

“Lay?”

“Yes. Got a job here?”

“I’m the clerk,” said Lemuel, with the ghost of his former pride of office.

“Clerk?” said the tramp with good-humoured incredulity. “Where’s your diamond pin? Where’s your rings?” He seemed willing to prolong the playful inquiry. “Where’s your patent leather boots?”

“It’s not a common hotel. It’s a sort of a family hotel, and I’m the clerk. What do you want?”

The young fellow lounged back easily in his chair. “Why, I did drop in to beat the house out of a quarter if I could, or may be ten cents. Thank you, sir. God bless you, sir.” He interrupted himself to burlesque a professional gratitude. “That style of thing, you know. But I don’t know about it now. Look here, mate! what’s the reason you couldn’t get me a job here too? I been off on a six months’ cruise since I saw you, and I’d like a job on shore first rate. Couldn’t you kind of ring me in for something? I ain’t afraid of work, although I never did pretend to love it. But I should like to reform now, and get into something steady. Heigh?”

“There isn’t anything to do — there’s no place for you,” Lemuel began.

“Oh, pshaw, now, mate, you think!” pleaded the other. “I’ll take any sort of a job; I don’t care what it is. I ain’t got any o’ that false modesty about me. Been round too much. And I don’t want to go back to the Wayfarer’s Lodge. It’s a good place, and I know my welcome’s warm and waitin’ for me, between two hot plates; but the thing of it is, it’s demoralisin’. That’s what the chaplain said just afore I left the — ship, ‘n’ I promised him I’d give work a try, anyway. Now you just think up something! I ain’t in any hurry.” In proof he threw his soft hat on the desk, and took up one of the menus. “This your bill of fare? Well, it ain’t bad! Vurmiselly soup, boiled holibut, roast beef, roast turkey with cranberry sauce, roast pork with apple sauce, chicken corquettes, ditto patties, three kinds of pie; bread puddin’, both kinds of sauce; ice cream, nuts, and coffee. Why, mate!”

Lemuel sat dumb and motionless. He could see no way out of the net that had entangled him. He began feebly to repeat. “There isn’t anything,” when some one tried the door.

“Mr. Barker!” called Mrs. Harmon. “You in there?”

He made it worse by waiting a moment before he rose and opened the door. “I didn’t know I’d locked it.” The lie came unbidden; he groaned inwardly to think how he was telling nothing but lies. Mrs. Harmon did not come in. She glanced with a little question at the young fellow, who had gathered his hat from the table, and risen with gay politeness.

It was a crisis of the old sort; the elevator boy had kicked, and Mrs. Harmon said, “I just stopped to say that I was going out and I could stop at the intelligence office myself to get an elevator boy—”

The mate took the word with a joyous laugh at the coincidence. “It’s just what me and Mr. Barker was talking about! I’m from up his way, and I’ve just come down to Boston to see if I couldn’t look up a job; and he was tellin’ me, in here, about your wantin’ a telegraph — I mean a elevator-boy, but he didn’t think it would suit me. But I should like to give it a try, anyway. It’s pretty dull up our way, and I got to do something. Mr. Barker ‘ll tell you who I am.”

He winked at Lemuel with the eye not exposed to Mrs. Harmon, and gave her a broad, frank, prepossessing smile.

“Well, of course,” said Mrs. Harmon smoothly, “any friend of Mr. Barker’s — —”

“We just been talkin’ over old times in here,” interrupted the mate. “I guess it was me shoved that bolt in. I didn’t want to have anybody see me talkin’ with him till I’d got some clothes that would be a little more of a credit to him.”

“Well, that’s right,” said Mrs. Harmon appreciatively. “I always like to have everybody around my house looking neat and respectable. I keep a first-class house, and I don’t have any but first-class help, and I expect them to dress accordingly, from the highest to the lowest.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the mate, “that’s the way I felt about it myself, me and Mr. Barker both; and he was just tellin’ me that if I was a mind to give the elevator a try, he’d lend me a suit of his clothes.”

“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Harmon; “if Mr. Barker and you are a mind to fix it up between you — —”

“Oh, we are!” said the mate. “There won’t be any trouble about that.”

“I don’t suppose I need to stop at the intelligence office. I presume Mr. Barker will show you how to work the elevator. He helped us out with it himself at first.”

“Yes, that’s what he said,” the other chimed in. “But I guess I’d better go and change my clothes first. Well, mate,” he added to Lemuel, “I’m ready when you’re ready.”

Lemuel rose trembling from the chair where he had been chained, as it seemed to him, while the mate and Mrs. Harmon arranged their affair with his tacit connivance. He had not spoken a word; he feared so much to open his lips lest another lie should come out of them, that his sense of that danger was hardly less than his terror at the captivity in which he found himself.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Harmon, “I’ll look after the office till you get back. Mr. Barker ‘ll show you where you can sleep.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said the mate, with gratitude that won upon her.

“And I’m glad,” she added, “that it’s a friend of Mr. Barker’s that’s going to have the place. We think everything of Mr. Barker here.”

“Well, you can’t think more of him than what we do up home,” rejoined the other with generous enthusiasm.

In Lemuel’s room he was not less appreciative. “Why, mate, it does me good to see how you’ve got along. I got to write a letter home at once, and tell the folks what friends you’ve got in Boston. I don’t believe they half understand it.” He smiled joyously upon Lemuel, who stood stock still, with such despair in his face that probably the wretch pitied him.

“Look here, mate, don’t you be afraid now! I’m on the reform lay with all my might, and I mean business. I ain’t a-goin’ to do you any harm, you bet your life. These your things?” he asked, taking Lemuel’s winter suit from the hooks where they hung, and beginning to pull off his coat. He talked on while he changed his dress. “I was led away, and I got my come-uppings, or the other fellow’s comeuppings, for I wa’n’t to blame any, and I always said so, and I guess the judge would say so too, if it was to do over again.”

A frightful thought stung Lemuel to life. “The judge? Was it a passenger-ship?”

The other stopped buttoning Lemuel’s trousers round him to slap himself on the thigh. “Why, mate! don’t you know enough to know what a sea voyage is? Why, I’ve been down to the Island for the last six months! Hain’t you never heard it called a sea voyage? Why, we always come off from a cruise when we git back! You don’t mean to say you never been one?”

“Oh, my goodness!” groaned Lemuel. “Have — have you been in prison?”

“Why, of course.”

“Oh, what am I going to do?” whispered the miserable creature to himself.

The other heard him. “Why, you hain’t got to do anything! I’m on the reform, and you might leave everything layin’ around loose, and I shouldn’t touch it. Fact! You ask the ship’s chaplain.”

He laughed in the midst of his assertions of good resolutions, but sobered to the full extent, probably, of his face and nature, and tying Lemuel’s cravat on at the glass, he said solemnly, “Mate, it’s all right. I’m on the reform.”

XXIII.

Lemuel’s friend entered upon his duties with what may also be called artistic zeal. He showed a masterly touch in managing the elevator from the first trip. He was ready, cheerful, and obliging; he lacked nothing but a little more reluctance and a Seaside Library novel to be a perfect elevator-boy.

The ladies liked him at once; he was so pleasant and talkative, and so full of pride in Lemuel that they could not help liking him; and several of them promptly reached that stage of confidence where they told him, as an old friend of Lemuel’s, they thought Lemuel read too much, and was going to kill himself if he kept on a great deal longer. The mate said he thought so too, and had noticed how bad Lemuel looked the minute he set eyes on him. But he asked what was the use? He had said everything he could to him about it. He was always just so, up at home. As he found opportunity he did what he could to console Lemuel with furtive winks and nods.

Lemuel dragged absently and haggardly through the day. In the evening he told Mrs. Harmon that he had to go round and see Mr. Sewell a moment.

It was then nine o’clock, and she readily assented; she guessed Mr. Williams — he had told her his name was Williams — could look after the office while he was gone. Mr. Williams was generously glad to do so. Behind Mrs. Harmon’s smooth large form, he playfully threatened her with his hand levelled at his shoulder; but even this failed to gladden Lemuel.

It was half-past nine when he reached the minister’s house, and the maid had a visible reluctance at the door in owning that Mr. Sewell was at home. Mrs. Sewell had instructed her not to be too eagerly candid with people who came so late; but he was admitted, and Sewell came down from his study to see him in the reception-room.

“What is the matter?” he asked at once, when he caught sight of Lemuel’s face; “has anything gone wrong with you, Mr. Barker?” He could not help being moved by the boy’s looks; he had a fleeting wish that Mrs. Sewell were there to see him, and be moved too; and he prepared himself as he might to treat the trouble which he now expected to be poured out.

“Yes,” said Lemuel, “I want to tell you; I want you to tell me what to do.”

When he had put the case fully before the minister, his listener was aware of wishing that it had been a love-trouble, such as he foreboded at first.

He drew a long and deep breath, and before he began to speak he searched himself for some comfort or encouragement, while Lemuel anxiously scanned his face.

“Yes — yes! I see your — difficulty,” he began, making the futile attempt to disown any share in it. “But perhaps — perhaps it isn’t so bad as it seems. Perhaps no harm will come. Perhaps he really means to do well; and if you are vigilant in — in keeping him out of temptation — —” Sewell stopped, sensible that he was not coming to anything, and rubbed his forehead.

“Do you think,” asked Lemuel, dry mouthed with misery, “that I ought to have told Mrs. Harmon at once?”

“Why, it is always best to be truthful and above-board — as a principle,” said the minister, feeling himself somehow dragged from his moorings.

“Then I had better do it yet!”

“Yes,” said Sewell, and he paused. “Yes. That is to say — As the mischief is done — Perhaps — perhaps there is no haste. If you exercise vigilance — But if he has been in prison — Do you know what he was in for?”

“No. I didn’t know he had been in at all till we got to my room. And then I couldn’t ask him — I was afraid to.”

“Yes,” said Sewell, kindly if helplessly.

“I was afraid, if I sent him off — or tried to — that he would tell about my being in the Wayfarer’s Lodge that night, and they would think I had been a tramp. I could have done it, but I thought he might tell some lie about me; and they might get to know about the trial — —”

“I see,” said Sewell.

“I hated to lie,” said Lemuel piteously, “but I seemed to have to.”

There was another yes on the minister’s tongue; he kept it back; but he was aware of an instant’s relief in the speculation — the question presented itself abstractly — as to whether it was ever justifiable or excusable to lie. Were the Jesuitical casuists possibly right in some slight, shadowy sort? He came back to Lemuel groaning in spirit. “No — no — no!” he sighed; “we mustn’t admit that you had to lie. We must never admit that.” A truth flashed so vividly upon him that it seemed almost escape. “What worse thing could have come from telling the truth than has come from withholding it? And that would have been some sort of end, and this — this is only the miserable beginning.”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, with all desirable humility. “But I couldn’t see it at once.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you; I don’t blame you,” said Sewell. “It was a sore temptation. I blame myself!” he exclaimed, with more comprehensiveness than Lemuel knew; but he limited his self-accusal by adding, “I ought to have told Mrs. Harmon myself what I knew of your history; but I refrained because I knew you had never done any harm, and I thought it cruel that you should be dishonoured by your misfortunes in a relation where you were usefully and prosperously placed; and so — and so I didn’t. But perhaps I was wrong. Yes, I was wrong. I have only allowed the burden to fall more heavily upon you at last.”

It was respite for Lemuel to have some one else accusing himself, and he did not refuse to enjoy it. He left the minister to wring all the bitterness he could for himself out of his final responsibility. The drowning man strangles his rescuer.

Sewell looked up, and loosened his collar as if really stifling. “Well, well. We must find some way out of it. I will see — see what can be done for you to-morrow.”

Lemuel recognised his dismissal. “If you say so, Mr. Sewell, I will go straight back and tell Mrs. Harmon all about it.”

Sewell rose too. “No — no. There is no such haste. You had better leave it to me now. I will see to it — in the morning.”

“Thank you,” said Lemuel. “I hate to give you so much trouble.”

“Oh,” said Sewell, letting him out at the street-door, and putting probably less thought and meaning into the polite words than they had ever contained before, “it’s no trouble.”

He went upstairs to his study, and found Mrs. Sewell waiting there. “Well, now — what, David?”

“Now what?” he feebly echoed.

“Yes. What has that wretched creature come for now?”

“You may well call him a wretched creature,” sighed Sewell.

“Is he really engaged? Has he come to get you to marry him?”

“I think he’d rather have me bury him at present.” Sewell sat down, and, bracing his elbow on his desk, rested his head heavily on his hand.

“Well,” said his wife, with a touch of compassion tempering her curiosity.

He began to tell her what had happened, and he did not spare himself in the statement of the case. “There you have the whole affair now. And a very pretty affair it is. But, I declare,” he concluded, “I can’t see that any one is to blame for it.”

“No one, David?”

“Well, Adam, finally, of course. Or Eve. Or the Serpent,” replied the desperate man.

Seeing him at this reckless pass, his wife forebore reproach, and asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I am going around there in the morning to tell Mrs. Harmon all about Barker.”

“She will send him away instantly.”

“I dare say.”

“And what will the poor thing do?”

“Goodness knows.”

“I’m afraid Badness knows. It will drive him to despair.”

“Well, perhaps not — perhaps not,” sighed the minister. “At any rate, we must not let him be driven to despair. You must help me, Lucy.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Sewell was a good woman, and she liked to make her husband feel it keenly.

“I knew that it must come to that,” she said.

“Of course, we must not let him be ruined. If Mrs. Harmon insists upon his going at once — as I’ve no doubt she will — you must bring him here, and we must keep him till he can find some other home.” She waited, and added, for a final stroke of merciless beneficence, “He can have Alfred’s room, and Alf can take the front attic.”

Sewell only sighed again. He knew she did not mean this.

Barker went back to the St. Albans, and shrunk into as small space in the office as he could. He pulled a book before him and pretended to read, hiding the side of his face toward the door with the hand that supported his head. His hand was cold as ice, and it seemed to him as if his head were in a flame. Williams came and looked in at him once, and then went back to the stool which he occupied just outside the elevator-shaft when not running it. He whistled softly between his teeth, with intervals of respectful silence, and then went on whistling in absence of any whom it might offend.

Suddenly a muffled clamour made itself heard from the depths of the dining-room, like that noise of voices which is heard behind the scenes at the theatre when an armed mob is about to burst upon the stage. Irish tones, high, windy, and angry, yells, and oaths defined themselves, and Mrs. Harmon came obesely hurrying from the dining-room toward the office, closely followed by Jerry, the porter. When upon duty, or, as some of the boarders contended, when in the right humour, he blacked the boots, and made the hard-coal fires, and carried the trunks up and down stairs. When in the wrong humour, he had sometimes been heard to swear at Mrs. Harmon, but she had excused him in this eccentricity because, she said, he had been with her so long. Those who excused it with her on these grounds conjectured arrears of wages as another reason for her patience. His outbreaks of bad temper had the Celtic uncertainty; the most innocent touch excited them, as sometimes the broadest snub failed to do so; and no one could foretell what direction his zigzag fury would take. He had disliked Lemuel from the first, and had chafed at the subordination into which he had necessarily fallen. He was now yelling after Mrs. Harmon, to know if she was not satisfied with wan gutther-snoipe, that she must nades go and pick up another, and whether the new wan was going to be too good to take prisints of money for his worruk from the boarthers, and put all the rest of the help under the caumpliment of refusin’ ut, or else demanin’ themselves by takin’ ut? If this was the case, he’d have her to know that she couldn’t kape anny other help; and the quicker she found it out the betther. Mrs. Harmon was trying to appease him by promising to see Lemuel at once, and ask him about it.

The porter raised his voice an octave. “D’ ye think I’m a loyar, domn ye? Don’t ye think I’m tellin’ the thruth?”

He followed her to the little office, whither she had retreated on a purely mechanical fulfilment of her promise to speak to Lemuel, and crowded in upon them there.

“Here he is now!” he roared in his frenzy. “He’s too good to take the money that’s offered to ‘um! He’s too good to be waither! He wannts to play the gintleman! He thinks ‘umself too good to do what the other servants do, that’s been tin times as lahng in the house!”

At the noise some of the ladies came hurrying out of the public parlour to see what the trouble was. The street-door opened, and Berry entered with the two art-students. They involuntarily joined the group of terrified ladies.

“What’s the row?” demanded Berry. “Is Jerry on the kick?”

No one answered. Lemuel stood pale and silent, fronting the porter, who was shaking his fist in his face. He had not heard anything definite in the outrage that assailed him. He only conjectured that it was exposure of Williams’s character, and the story of his own career in Boston.

“Why don’t you fire him out of there, Barker?” called the law-student. “Don’t be afraid of him!”

Lemuel remained motionless; but his glance sought the pitying eyes of the assembled women, and then dropped before the amaze that looked at him from those of Miss Carver. The porter kept roaring out his infamies.

Berry spoke again.

“Mrs. Harmon, do you want that fellow in there?”

“No, goodness knows I don’t, Mr. Berry.”

“All right.” Berry swung the street-door open with his left hand, and seemed with the same gesture to lay his clutch upon the porter’s collar. “Fire him out myself!” he exclaimed, and with a few swiftly successive jerks and bumps the burly shape of the porter was shot into the night. “I want you to get me an officer, Jerry,” he said, putting his head out after him. “There’s been a blackguard makin’ a row here. Never mind your hat! Go!”

“Oh, my good gracious, Mr. Berry!” gasped Mrs. Harmon, “what have you done?” “If it’s back pay, Mrs. Harmon, we’ll pass round the hat. Don’t you be troubled. That fellow wasn’t fit to be in a decent house.”

Berry stopped a moment and looked at Lemuel. The art-students did not look at him at all; they passed on upstairs with Berry.

The other ladies remained to question and to comment. Mrs. Harmon’s nephew, to whom the uproar seemed to have penetrated in his basement, came up and heard the story from them. He was quite decided. He said that Mr. Berry had done right. He said that he was tired of having folks damn his aunt up hill and down dale; and that if Jerry had kept on a great deal longer, he would have said something to him himself about it.

The ladies justified him in the stand he took; they returned to the parlour to talk it all over, and he went back to his basement. Mrs. Harmon, in tears, retired to her room, and Lemuel was left standing alone in his office. The mate stole softly to him from the background of the elevator, where he had kept himself in safety during the outbreak.

“Look here, mate. This thing been about your ringin’ me in here?”

“Oh, go away, go away!” Lemuel huskily entreated.

“Well, that’s what I intend to do. I don’t want to stay here and git you into no more trouble, and I know that’s what’s been done. You never done me no harm, and I don’t want to do you none. I’m goin’ right up to your room to git my clo’es, and then I’ll skip.”

“It won’t do any good now. It’ll only make it worse. You’d better stay now. You must.”

“Well, if you say so, mate.”

He went back to his elevator, and Lemuel sat down at his desk, and dropped his face upon his arms there. Toward eleven o’clock Evans came in and looked at him, but without speaking; he must have concluded that he was asleep; he went upstairs, but after a while he came down again and stopped again at the office door, and looked in on the haggard boy, hesitating as if for the best words. “Barker, Mr. Berry has been telling me about your difficulty here. I know all about you — from Mr. Sewell.” Lemuel stared at him. “And I will stand your friend, whatever people think. And I don’t blame you for not wanting to be beaten by that ruffian; you could have stood no chance against him; and if you had thrashed him it wouldn’t have been a great triumph.”

“I wish he had killed me,” said Lemuel from his dust-dry throat.

“Oh no; that’s foolish,” said the elder, with patient, sad kindness. “Who knows whether death is the end of trouble? We must live things down, not die them down.” He put his arm caressingly across the boy’s shoulder.

“I can never live this down,” said Lemuel. He added passionately, “I wish I could die!”

“No,” said Evans. “You must cheer up. Think of next Saturday. It will soon be here, and then you’ll be astonished that you felt so bad on Tuesday.”

He gave Lemuel a parting pressure with his arm, and turned to go upstairs.

At the same moment the figure of Mrs. Harmon’s nephew, distracted, violent, burst up through the door leading to the basement.

“Good heavens!” exclaimed the editor, “is Mr. Harmon going to kick?”

“The house is on fire!” yelled the apparition.

A thick cloud of smoke gushed out of the elevator-shaft, and poured into the hall, which it seemed to fill instantly. It grew denser, and in another instant a wild hubbub began. The people appeared from every quarter and ran into the street, where some of the ladies began calling up at the windows to those who were still in their rooms. A stout little old lady came to an open window, and paid out hand over hand a small cable on which she meant to descend to the pavement; she had carried this rope about with her many years against the exigency to which she was now applying it. Within, the halls and the stairway became the scene of frantic encounter between wives and husbands rushing down to save themselves, and then rushing back to save their forgotten friends. Many appeared in the simple white in which they had left their beds, with the addition of such shawls or rugs as chance suggested. A house was opened to the fugitives on the other side of the street, and the crowd that had collected could not repress its applause when one of them escaped from the hotel-door and shot across. It applauded impartially men, women, and children, and, absorbed in the spectacle, no one sounded the fire-alarm; the department began to be severely condemned among the bystanders before the engines appeared.

Most of the ladies, in their escape or their purpose of rescue, tried each to possess herself of Lemuel, and keep him solely in her interest. “Mr. Barker! Mr. Barker! Mr. Barker!” was called for in various sopranos and contraltos, till an outsider took up the cry and shouted, “Barker! Barker! Speech! Speech!” This made him very popular with the crowd, who in their enjoyment of the fugitives were unable to regard the fire seriously. A momentary diversion was caused by an elderly gentleman who came to the hotel-door, completely dressed except that he was in his stockings, and demanded Jerry. The humourist who had called for a speech from Lemuel volunteered the statement that Jerry had just gone round the corner to see a man. “I want him,” said the old gentleman savagely. “I want my boots; I can’t go about in my stockings.”

Cries for Jerry followed; but in fact the porter had forgotten all his grudges and enmities; he had reappeared, in perfect temper, and had joined Lemuel and Berry in helping to get the women and children out of the burning house.

The police had set a guard at the door, in whom Lemuel recognised the friendly old officer who had arrested him. “All out?” asked the policeman.

The smoke, which had reddened and reddened, was now a thin veil drawn over the volume of flame that burned strongly and steadily up the well of the elevator, and darted its tongues out to lick the framework without. The heat was intense. Mrs. Harmon came panting and weeping from the dining-room with some unimportant pieces of silver, driven forward by Jerry and her nephew.

They met the firemen, come at last, and pulling in their hose, who began to play upon the flames; the steam filled the place with a dense mist.

Lemuel heard Berry ask him through the fog, “Barker, where’s old Evans?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” he lamented back.

“He must have gone up to get Mrs. Evans.”

He made a dash towards the stairs. A fireman caught him and pulled him back. “You can’t go up; smoke’s thick as hell up there.” But Lemuel pulled away, and shot up the stairs. He heard the firemen stop Berry.

“You can’t go, I tell you! Who’s runnin’ this fire anyway, I’d like to know?”

He ran along the corridor which Evans’s apartment opened upon. There was not much smoke there; it had drawn up the elevator-well, as if in a chimney.

He burst into the apartment and ran to the inner room, where he had once caught a glimpse of Mrs. Evans sitting by the window.

Evans stood leaning against the wall, with his hand at his breast. He panted, “Help her — help—”

“Where is she? Where is she?” demanded Lemuel.

She came from an alcove in the room, holding a handkerchief drenched with cologne in her hand, which she passed to her husband’s face. “Are you better now? Can you come, dear? Rest on me!”

“I’m — I’m all right! Go — go! I can get along—”

“I’ll go when you go,” said Mrs. Evans. She turned to Lemuel. “Mr. Evans fainted; but he is better now.” She took his hand with a tender tranquillity that ignored all danger or even excitement, and gently chafed it.

“But come — come!” cried Lemuel. “Don’t you know the house is on fire?”

“Yes, I know it,” she replied. “We must get Mr. Evans down. You must help me.” Lemuel had seldom seen her before; but he had so long heard and talked of her hopeless invalidism that she was like one risen from the dead, in her sudden strength and courage, and he stared at the miracle of her restoration. It was she who claimed and bore the greater share of the burden in getting her husband away. He was helpless; but in the open air he caught his breath more fully, and at last could tremulously find his way out of the sympathetic crowd. “Get a carriage,” she said to Lemuel; and then she added, as it drove up and she gave an address, “I can manage him now.”

Evans weakly pressed Lemuel’s hand from the seat to which he had helped him, and the hack drove away. Lemuel looked crazily after it a moment, and then returned to the burning house.

Berry called to him from the top of the outside steps, “Barker, have you seen that partner of yours?”

Lemuel ran up to him. “No!”

“Well, come in here. The elevator’s dropped, and they’re afraid he went down with it.”

“I know he didn’t! He wouldn’t be such a fool!”

“Well, we’ll know when they get the fire under.”

“I thought I saw something in the elevator, and as long as you don’t know where he is—” said a fireman.

“Well,” said Berry, “if you’ve got the upper hands of this thing, I’m going to my room a minute.”

Lemuel followed him upstairs, to see if he could find Williams. The steam had ascended and filled the upper halls; little cascades of water poured down the stairs, falling from step to step; the long strips of carpeting in the corridors swam in the deluge which the hose had poured into the building, and a rain of heavy drops burst through the ceilings.

Most of the room-doors stood open, as the people had flung them wide in their rush for life. At the door of Berry’s room a figure appeared which he promptly seized by the throat.

“Don’t be in a hurry!” he said, as he pushed it into the room. “I want to see you.”

It was Williams.

“I want to see what you’ve got in your pockets. Hold on to him, Barker.”

Lemuel had no choice. He held Williams by the arms while Berry went through him, as he called the search. He found upon him whatever small articles of value there had been in his room.

The thief submitted without a struggle, without a murmur.

Berry turned scornfully to Lemuel. “This a friend of yours, Mr. Barker?”

Still the thief did not speak, but he looked at Lemuel.

“Yes,” he dryly gasped.

“Well!” said Berry, staring fiercely at him for a moment. “If it wasn’t for something old Evans said to me about you, a little while ago, I’d hand you both over to the police.”

Williams seemed to bear the threat with philosophic resignation, but Lemuel shrank back in terror. Berry laughed.

“Why, you are his pal. Go along! I’ll get Jerry to attend to you.”

Lemuel slunk downstairs with Williams. “Look here, mate,” said the rogue; “I guess I ha’n’t used you just right.”

Lemuel expected himself to cast the thief off with bitter rejection. But he heard himself saying hopelessly, “Go away, and try to behave yourself,” and then he saw the thief make the most of the favour of heaven and vanish through the crowd.

He would have liked to steal away too; but he remained, and began mechanically helping again wherever he saw help needed. By and by Berry came out; Lemuel thought that he would tell some policeman to arrest him; but he went away without speaking to any one.

In an hour the firemen had finished their share of the havoc, and had saved the building. They had kept the fire to the elevator-shaft and the adjoining wood-work, and but for the water they had poured into the place the ladies might have returned to their rooms, which were quite untouched by the flames. As it was, Lemuel joined with Jerry in fetching such things to them as their needs or fancies suggested; the refugees across the way were finally clothed by their efforts, and were able to quit their covert indistinguishable in dress from any of the other boarders.

The crowd began to go about its business. The engines had disappeared from the little street with exultant shrieks; in the morning the insurance companies would send their workmen to sweep out the extinct volcano, and mop up the shrunken deluge, preparatory to ascertaining the extent of the damage done; in the meantime the police kept the boys and loafers out of the building, and the order that begins to establish itself as soon as chaos is confessed took possession of the ruin.

But it was all the same a ruin and a calamitous conclusion for the time being. The place that had been in its grotesque and insufficient fashion a home for so many homeless people was uninhabitable; even the Harmons could not go back to it. The boarders had all scattered, but Mrs. Harmon lingered, dwelling volubly upon the scene of disaster. She did not do much else; she was not without a just pride in it, but she was not puffed up by all the sympathy and consolation that had been offered her. She thought of others in the midst of her own troubles, and she said to Lemuel, who had remained working with Jerry under her direction in putting together such things as she felt she must take away with her —

“Well, I don’t know as I feel much worse about myself than I do about poor Mr. Evans. Why, I’ve got the ticket in my pocket now that he gave me for the Wednesday matinee! I do wonder how he’s gettin’ along! I guess they’ve got you to thank, if they’re alive to tell the tale. What did you do to get that woman out alive?” Lemuel looked blankly at her, and did not answer. “And Mr. Evans too! You must have had your hands full, and that’s what I told the reporters; but I told ’em I guessed you’d be equal to it if any one would. Why, I don’t suppose Mrs. Evans has been out of her room for a month, or hardly stepped her foot to the floor. Well, I don’t want to see many people look as he did when you first got him out of the house.”

“Well, I don’t know as I want to see many more fires where I live,” said her nephew, as if with the wish to be a little more accurate.

Jerry asked Lemuel to watch Mrs. Harmon’s goods while he went for a carriage, and said sir to him. It seemed to Lemuel that this respect, and Mrs. Harmon’s unmerited praises, together with the doom that was secretly upon him, would drive him wild.

XXIV.

The evening after the fire Mrs. Sewell sat talking it over with her husband, in the light of the newspaper reports, which made very much more of Lemuel’s part in it than she liked. The reporters had flattered the popular love of the heroic in using Mrs. Harmon’s version of his exploits, and represented him as having been most efficient and daring throughout, and especially so in regard to the Evanses.

“Well, that doesn’t differ materially from what they told us themselves,” said Sewell.

“You know very well, David,” retorted his wife, “that there couldn’t have been the least danger at any time; and when he helped her to get Mr. Evans downstairs, the fire was nearly all out.”

“Very well, then; he would have saved their lives if it had been necessary. It was a case of potential heroism, that contained all the elements of self-sacrifice.”

Mrs. Sewell could not deny this, but she was not satisfied. She was silent a moment before she asked, “What do you suppose that wretched creature will do now?”

“I think very likely he will come to me,” answered Sewell.

“I dare say.” The bell rang. “And I suppose that’s he now!”

They listened and heard Miss Vane’s voice at the door, asking for them.

Mrs. Sewell ran down the stairs and kissed her. “Oh, I’m so glad you came. Isn’t it wonderful? I’ve just come from them, and she’s taking the whole care of him, as if he had always been the sick one, and she strong and well.”

“What do you mean, Lucy? He isn’t ill!”

“Who isn’t?”

“What are you talking about?”

“About Mr. Evans—”

“Oh!” said Miss Vane, with cold toleration. She arrived at the study door and gave Sewell her hand. “I scarcely knew him, you know; I only met him casually here. I’ve come to see,” she added nervously, “if you know where Lemuel is, Mr. Sewell. Have you seen anything of him since the fire? How nobly he behaved! But I never saw anything he wasn’t equal to!”

“Mrs. Sewell objects to his saving human life,” said Sewell, not able to deny himself.

“I don’t see how you can take the slightest interest in him,” began Mrs. Sewell, saying a little more than she meant.

“You would, my dear,” returned Miss Vane, “if you had wronged him as I have.”

“Or as I,” said Sewell.

“I’m thankful I haven’t, then,” said his wife. “It seems to me that there’s nothing else of him. As to his noble behaviour, it isn’t possible you believe those newspaper accounts? He didn’t save any one’s life; there was no danger!”

Miss Vane, preoccupied with her own ideal of the facts, stared at her without replying, and then turned to Sewell.

“I want to find him and ask him to stay with me till he can get something else to do.” Sewell’s eyebrows arched themselves involuntarily. “Sibyl has gone to New York for a fortnight; I shall be quite alone in the house, and I shall be very glad of his company,” she explained to the eyebrows, while ignoring them. Her chin quivered a little, as she added, “I shall be proud of his company. I wish him to understand that he is my guest.”

“I suppose I shall see him soon,” said Sewell, “and I will give him your message.”

“Will you tell him,” persisted Miss Vane, a little hysterically, “that if he is in any way embarrassed, I insist upon his coming to me immediately — at once?”

Sewell smiled, “Yes.”

“I know that I’m rather ridiculous,” said Miss Vane, smiling in sympathy, “and I don’t blame Mrs. Sewell for not entering into my feelings. Nobody could, who hadn’t felt the peculiar Lemuel glamour.”

“I don’t imagine he’s embarrassed in any way,” said Sewell. “He seems to have the gift of lighting on his feet. But I’ll tell him how peremptory you are, Miss Vane.”

“Well, upon my word,” cried Mrs. Sewell, when Miss Vane had taken leave of them in an exaltation precluding every recurrent attempt to enlighten her as to the true proportions of Lemuel’s part in the fire, “I really believe people like to be made fools of. Why didn’t you tell her, David, that he had done nothing?”

“What would have been the use? She has her own theory of the affair. Besides, he did do something; he did his duty, and my experience is that it’s no small thing to do. It wasn’t his fault that he didn’t do more.”

He waited some days for Lemuel to come to him, and he inquired each time he went to see the Evanses if they knew where he was. But they had not heard of him since the night of the fire.

“It’s his shyness,” said Evans; “I can understand how if he thought he had put me under an obligation he wouldn’t come near me — and couldn’t.”

Evans was to go out of town for a little while; the proprietors of the Saturday Afternoon insisted upon his taking a rest, and they behaved handsomely about his salary. He did not want to go, but his wife got him away finally, after he had failed in two or three attempts at writing.

Lemuel did not appear to Sewell till the evening of the day when the Evanses left town. It seemed as if he had waited till they were gone, so that he could not be urged to visit them. At first the minister scolded him a little for his neglect; but Lemuel said he had heard about them, and knew they were getting along all right. He looked as if he had not been getting along very well himself; his face was thin, and had an air at once dogged and apprehensive. He abruptly left talking of Evans, and said, “I don’t know as you heard what happened that night before the fire just after I got back from your house?”

“No, I hadn’t.”

Lemuel stopped. Then he related briefly and cleanly the whole affair, Sewell interrupting him from time to time with murmurs of sympathy, and “Tchk, tchk, tchk!” and “Shocking, shocking!” At the end he said, “I had hoped somehow that the general calamity had swallowed up your particular trouble in it. Though I don’t know that general calamities ever do that with particular troubles,” he added, more to himself than to Lemuel; and he put the idea away for some future sermon.

“Mr. Evans stopped and said something to me that night. He said we had to live things down, and not die them down; he wanted I should wait till Saturday before I was sure that I couldn’t get through Tuesday. He said, How did we know that death was the end of trouble?”

“Yes,” said the minister, with a smile of fondness for his friend; “that was like Evans all over.”

“I sha’n’t forget those things,” said Lemuel. “They’ve been in my head ever since. If it hadn’t been for them, I don’t know what I should have done.”

He stopped, and after a moment’s inattention Sewell perceived that he wished to be asked something more. “I hope,” he said, “that nothing more has been going wrong with you?” and as he asked this he laid his hand affectionately on the young man’s shoulder, just as Evans had done. Lemuel’s eyes dimmed and his breath thickened. “What has become of the person — the discharged convict?”

“I guess I had better tell you,” he said; and he told him of the adventure with Berry and Williams.

Sewell listened in silence, and then seemed quite at a loss what to say; but Lemuel saw that he was deeply afflicted. At last he asked, lifting his eyes anxiously to Sewell’s, “Do you think I did wrong to say the thief was a friend of mine, and get him off that way?”

“That’s a very difficult question,” sighed Sewell. “You had a duty to society.”

“Yes, I’ve thought of that since!”

“If I had been in your place, I’m afraid I should be glad not to have thought of it in time; and I’m afraid I’m glad that, as it is, it’s too late. But doesn’t it involve you with him in the eyes of the other young man?” “Yes, I presume it does,” said Lemuel. “I shall have to go away.”

“Back to Willoughby Pastures?” asked Sewell, with not so much faith in that panacea for Lemuel’s troubles as he had once had.

“No, to some other town. Do you know of anything I could get to do in New York?”

“Oh, no, no!” said the minister. “You needn’t let this banish you. We must seek this young Mr.—”

“Berry.”

“ — Mr. Berry out, and explain the matter to him.”

“Then you’ll have to tell him all about me?”

“Yes. Why not?”

Lemuel was silent, and looked down.

“In the meantime,” pursued the minister, “I have a message for you from Miss Vane. She has heard, as we all have, of your behaviour during the fire—”

“It wasn’t anything,” Lemuel interrupted. “There wasn’t the least danger; and Mrs. Evans did it all herself, anyway. It made me sick to see how the papers had it. It’s a shame!”

Sewell smiled. “I’m afraid you couldn’t make Miss Vane think so; but I can understand what you mean. She has never felt quite easy about the way — the terms — on which she parted with you. She has spoken to me several times of it, and — ah — expressed her regret; and now, knowing that you have been — interrupted in your life, she is anxious to have you come to her—”

An angry flash lighted up Lemuel’s face.

“I couldn’t go back there! I wouldn’t do any such work again.”

“I don’t mean that,” Sewell hastened to say “Miss Vane wished me to ask you to come as her guest until you could find something — Miss Sibyl Vane has gone to New York—”

“I’m very much obliged to her,” said Lemuel, “but I shouldn’t want to give her so much trouble, or any one. I — I liked her very much, and I shouldn’t want she should think I didn’t appreciate her invitation.”

“I will tell her,” said the minister. “I had no great hope you would see your way to accepting it. But she will be glad to know that you received it.” He added, rather interrogatively than affirmatively, “In the right spirit.”

“Oh yes,” said Lemuel. “Please to tell her I did.”

“Thank you,” said Sewell, with bland vagueness. “I don’t know that I’ve asked yet where you are staying at present?”

“I’m at Mrs. Nash’s, 13 Canary Place. Mrs. Harmon went there first.”

“Oh! And are you looking forward to rejoining her in a new place?”

“I don’t know as I am. I don’t know as I should want to go into an hotel again.”

Sewell manifested a little embarrassment. “Well, you won’t forget your promise to let me be of use to you — pecuniarily, if you should be in need of a small advance at any time.”

“Oh no! But I’ve got enough money for a while yet — till I can get something to do.” He rose, and after a moment’s hesitation he said, “I don’t know as I want you should say anything to that fellow about me. To Mr. Berry, I mean.”

“Oh! certainly not,” said Sewell, “if you don’t wish it.”

Whatever it was in that reticent and elusive soul which prompted his request, the minister now felt that he could not know; but perhaps the pang that Lemuel inflicted on himself had as much transport as anguish in it. He believed that he had for ever cut himself off from the companionship that seemed highest and holiest on earth to him; he should never see that girl again; Berry must have told Miss Swan, and long before this Miss Carver had shuddered at the thought of him as the accomplice of a thief. But he proudly said to himself that he must let it all go; for if he had not been a thief, he had been a beggar and a menial, he had come out of a hovel at home, and his mother went about like a scarecrow, and it mattered little what kind of shame she remembered him in.

He thought of her perpetually now, and, in those dialogues which we hold in reverie with the people we think much about, he talked with her all day long. At first, when he began to do this, it seemed a wrong to Statira; but now, since the other was lost to him beyond other approach, he gave himself freely up to the mystical colloquies he held with her, as the devotee abandons himself to imagined converse with a saint. Besides, if he was in love with Statira, he was not in love with Jessie; that he had made clear to himself; for his feeling toward her was wholly different.

Most of the time, in these communings, he was with her in her own home, down at Corbitant, where he fancied she had gone, after the catastrophe at the St. Albans, and he sat there with her on a porch at the front door, which she had once described to him, and looked out under the silver poplars at the vessels in the bay. He formed himself some image of it all from pictures of the seaside which he had seen; and there were times when he tried to go back with her into the life she had led there as a child. Perhaps his ardent guesses at this were as near reality as anything that could be made to appear, for, after her mother and brothers and sisters had died out of the wide old house, her existence there was as lonely as if she had been a little ghost haunting it. She had inherited her mother’s temperament with her father’s constitution; she was the child born to his last long absence at sea and her mother’s last solitude at home. When he returned, he found his wife dead and his maiden sister caring for the child in the desolate house.

This sister of Captain Carver’s had been disappointed, as the phrase is, when a young girl; another girl had won her lover from her. Her disappointment had hardened her to the perception of the neighbours; and, by a strange perversion of the sympathies and faculties, she had turned from gossip and censure, from religion, and from all the sources of comfort that the bruised heart of Corbitant naturally turned to, and found such consolation as came to her in books, that is to say romances, and especially the romances that celebrated and deified such sorrow as her own. She had been a pretty little thing when young, and Jessie remembered her as pretty in her early old age. At heart she must still have been young when her hair was grey, for she made a friend and companion of the child, and they fed upon her romances together. When the aunt died, the child, who had known no mother but her, was stricken with a grief so deep and wild that at first her life and then her mind was feared for. To get her away from the associations and influences of the place, her father sent her to school in the western part of the State, where she met Madeline Swan, and formed one of those friendships which are like passions between young girls. During her long absence, her father married again; and she was called home to his deathbed. He was dead when she arrived; he had left a will that made her dependent on her stepmother. When Madeline Swan wrote to announce that she was coming to Boston to study art, Jessie Carver had no trouble in arranging with her stepmother, by the sacrifice of her final claim on her father’s estate, to join her friend there, with a little sum of money on which she was to live till she should begin to earn something.

Her life had been a series of romantic episodes; Madeline said that if it could be written out it would be fascinating; but she went to work very practically, and worked hard. She had not much feeling for colour; but she drew better than her friend, and what she hoped to do was to learn to illustrate books.

One evening, after a day of bitter-sweet reveries of Jessie, Lemuel went to see Statira. She and ‘Manda Grier were both very gay, and made him very welcome. They had tea for him; Statira tried all her little arts, and ‘Manda Grier told some things that had happened in the box-factory. He could not help laughing at them; they were really very funny; but he felt somehow that it was all a preparation for something else. At last the two girls made a set at him, as ‘Manda Grier called it, and tried to talk him into their old scheme of going to wait on table at some of the country hotels, or the seaside. They urged that now, while he was out of a place, it was just the time to look up a chance.

He refused, at first kindly, and at last angrily; and he would have gone away in this mood if Statira had not said that she would never say another word to him about it, and hung upon his neck, while ‘Manda Grier looked on in sullen resentment. He came away sick and heavy at heart. He said to himself that they would be willing to drag him into the mire; they had no pride; they had no sense; they did not know anything and they could not learn. He tried to get away from them to Miss Carver in his thoughts; but the place where he had left her was vacant, and he could not conjure her back. Out of the void, he was haunted by a look of grieving reproach and wonder from her eyes.

XXV.

That evening Sewell went to see an old parishioner of his who lived on the Hill, and who among his eccentricities had the habit of occupying his city house all summer long, while his family flitted with other people of fashion to the seashore. That year they talked of taking a cottage for the first time since they had sold their own cottage at Nahant, in a day of narrow things now past. The ladies urged that he ought to come with them, and not think of staying in Boston now that he had a trouble of the eyes which had befallen him, and Boston would be so dull if he could not get about freely and read as usual.

He answered that he would rather be blind in Boston than telescopic at Beverly, or any other summer resort; and that as for the want of proper care, which they urged, he did not think he should lack in his own house, if they left him where he could reach a bell. His youngest daughter, a lively little blonde, laughed with a cousin of his wife’s who was present, and his wife decorously despaired. The discussion of the topic was rather premature, for they were not thinking of going to Beverly before middle of May, if they took the cottage; but an accident had precipitated it, and they were having it out, as people do, each party in the hope that the other would yield if kept at long enough before the time of final decision came.

“Do you think,” said the husband and father, who looked a whimsical tyrant at the worst, but was probably no easier to manage for his whimsicality, “that I am going to fly in the face of prosperity, and begin to do as other people wish because I’m pecuniarily able to do as I please?”

The little blonde rose decisively from the low chair where she had been sitting. “If papa has begun to reason about it, we may as well yield the point for the present, mamma. Come, Lily! Let us leave him to Cousin Charles.”

“Oh, but I say!” cried Cousin Charles, “if I’m to stay and fight it out with him, I’ve got to know which side I’m on.”

“You’re on the right side,” said the young lady over her shoulder; “you always are, Cousin Charles.”

Cousin Charles, in the attempt to kiss his hand toward his flatterer, pulled his glasses off his nose by their cord. “Bromfield,” he said, “I don’t see but this commits me against you.” And then, the ladies having withdrawn, the two men put on that business air with which our sex tries to atone to itself for having unbent to the lighter minds of the other; heaven knows what women do when the men with whom they have been talking go away.

“If you should happen to stay in town,” continued the cousin treacherously, “I shall be very glad, for I don’t know but I shall be here the greater part of the summer myself.”

“I shall stay,” said the other, “but there won’t be anything casual about it.”

“What do you hear from Tom?” asked the cousin, feeling about on the mantel for a match. He was a full-bodied, handsome, amiable-looking old fellow, whose breath came in quick sighs with this light exertion. He had a blond complexion, and what was left of his hair, a sort of ethereal down on the top of his head, and some cherished fringes at the temples, was turning the yellowish grey that blond hair becomes.

The other gentleman, stretched at ease in a deep chair, with one leg propped on a cricket, had the distinction of long forms, which the years had left in their youthful gracility; his snow-white moustache had been allowed to droop over the handsome mouth, whose teeth were beginning to go. “They’re on the other side of the clock,” he said, referring to the matches. He added, with another glance at his relative, “Charles, you ought to bant. It’s beginning to affect your wind.”

“Beginning! Your memory’s going, Bromfield. But they say there’s a new system that allows you to eat everything. I’m waiting for that. In the meantime, I’ve gone back to my baccy.”

“They’ve cut mine off,” sighed the other. “Doesn’t it affect your heart?”

“Not a bit. But what do you do, now you can’t smoke and your eyes have given out?”

“I bore myself. I had a letter from Tom yesterday,” said the sufferer, returning to the question that his cousin’s obesity had diverted him from. “He’s coming on in the summer.”

“Tom’s a lucky fellow,” said the cousin. “I wish you had insisted on my taking some of that stock of his when you bought in.”

“Yes, you made a great mistake,” said the other, with whimsical superiority. “You should have taken my advice. You would now be rolling in riches, as I am, with a much better figure for it.”

The cousin smoked a while. “Do you know, I think Tom’s about the best fellow I ever knew.”

“He’s a good boy,” said the other, with the accent of a father’s pride and tenderness.

“Going to bring his pretty chickens and their dam?” asked the cousin, parting his coat-skirts to the genial influence of the fire.

“No; it’s a short visit. They’re going into the Virginia mountains for the summer.” A manservant came in and said something in a low voice. “Heigh? What? Why, of course! Certainly! By all means! Show him in! Come in, parson; come in!” called the host to his yet unseen visitor, and he held out his hand for Sewell to take when he appeared at the door. “Glad to see you! I can’t get up, — a little gouty to-day, — but Bellingham’s on foot. His difficulty is sitting down.”

Bellingham gave the minister a near-sighted man’s glare through his glasses, and then came eagerly forward and shook hands. “Oh, Mr. Sewell! I hope you’ve come to put up some job on Corey. Don’t spare him! With Kanawha Paint Co. at the present figures he merits any demand that Christian charity can make upon him. The man’s prosperity is disgraceful.”

“I’m glad to find you here, Mr. Bellingham,” said Sewell, sitting down.

“Oh, is it double-barrelled?” pleaded Bellingham.

“I don’t know that it’s a deadly weapon of any kind,” returned the minister. “But if one of you can’t help me, perhaps the other can.”

“Well, let us know what the job is,” said Corey. “We refuse to commit ourselves beforehand.”

“I shall have to begin at the beginning,” said Sewell warningly, “and the beginning is a long way off.”

“No matter,” said Bellingham adventurously. “The further off, the better. I’ve been dining with Corey — he gives you a very good dinner now, Corey does — and I’m just in the mood for a deserving case.”

“The trouble with Sewell is,” said Corey, “that he doesn’t always take the trouble to have them deserving. I hope this is interesting, at least.”

“I suspect you’ll find it more interesting than I shall,” said the minister, inwardly preparing himself for the amusement which Lemuel’s history always created in his hearers. It seemed to him, as he began, that he was always telling this story, and that his part in the affair was always becoming less and less respectable. No point was lost upon his hearers; they laughed till the ladies in the drawing-room above wondered what the joke could be.

“At any rate,” said Bellingham, “the fellow behaved magnificently at the fire. I read the accounts of it.”

“I think his exploits owe something to the imagination of the reporters,” said Sewell. “He tells a different story himself.”

“Oh, of course!” said Bellingham.

“Well; and what else?” asked Corey.

“There isn’t any more. Simply he’s out of work, and wants something to do — anything to do — anything that isn’t menial.”

“Ah, that’s a queer start of his,” said Bellingham thoughtfully. “I don’t know but I like that.”

“And do you come to such effete posterity as we are for help in a case like that?” demanded Corey. “Why, the boy’s an Ancestor!”

“So he is! Why, so he is — so he is!” said Bellingham, with delight in the discovery. “Of course he is!”

“All you have to do,” pursued Corey, “is to give him time, and he’ll found a fortune and a family, and his children’s children will be cutting ours in society. Half of our great people have come up in that way. Look at the Blue-book, where our nobility is enrolled; it’s the apotheosis of farm-boys, mechanics, insidemen, and I don’t know what!”

“But in the meantime this ancestor is now so remote that he has nothing to do,” suggested Sewell. “If you give him time you kill him.”

“Well, what do you want me to do? Mrs. Corey is thinking of setting up a Buttons. But you say this boy has a soul above buttons. And besides, he’s too old.”

“Yes.”

“Look here, Bromfield,” said Bellingham, “why don’t you get him to read to you?”

Corey glanced from his cousin to the minister, whose face betrayed that this was precisely what he had had in his own mind.

“Is that the job?” asked Corey.

Sewell nodded boldly.

“He would read through his nose, wouldn’t he? I couldn’t stand that. I’ve stopped talking through mine, you know.”

“Why, look here, Bromfield!” said Bellingham for the second time. “Why don’t you let me manage this affair for you? I’m not of much use in the world, but from time to time I like to do my poor best; and this is just one of the kind of things I think I’m fitted for. I should like to see this young man. When I read in the newspapers of some fellow who has done a fine thing, I always want to see what manner of man he is; and I’m glad of any chance that throws him in my way.”

“Your foible’s notorious, Charles. But I don’t see why you keep my cigars all to yourself,” said Corey.

“My dear fellow,” said Bellingham, making a hospitable offer of the cigar-box from the mantel, “you said they’d cut you off.”

“Ah, so they have. I forgot. Well, what’s your plan?”

“My plan,” said Bellingham, “is to have him to breakfast with me, and interview him generally, and get him to read me a few passages, without rousing his suspicions. Heigh?”

“I don’t know that I believe much in your plan,” said Corey. “I should like to hear what my spiritual adviser has to say.”

“I shouldn’t know what to advise, exactly,” said Sewell. “But I won’t reject any plan that gives my client a chance.”

“Isn’t client rather euphuistic?” asked Corey.

“It is, rather. But I’ve got into the habit of handling Barker very delicately, even in thought. I’m not sure he’ll come,” added Sewell, turning to Bellingham.

“Oh yes, he will,” said Bellingham. “Tell him it’s business. There won’t be anybody there. Will nine be too late for him?”

“I imagine he’s more accustomed to half-past five at home, and seven here.”

“Well, we’ll say nine, anyway. I can’t imagine the cause that would get me up earlier. Here!” He turned to the mantel and wrote an invitation upon his card, and handed it to Sewell. “Please give him that from me, and beg him to come. I really want to see him, and if he can’t read well enough for this fastidious old gentleman, we’ll see what else he can do. Corey tells me he expects Tom on this summer,” he concluded, in dismissal of Lemuel as a topic.

“Ah,” said Sewell, putting the card in his pocket, “I’m very glad to hear that.”

He had something, but not so much, of the difficulty in overcoming Lemuel’s reluctance that he had feared, and on the morning named Lemuel presented himself at the address on Bellingham’s card exactly at nine. He had the card in his hand, and he gave it to the man who opened the street door of the bachelors’ apartment house where Bellingham lived. The man read it carefully over, and then said, “Oh yes; second floor,” and, handing it back, left Lemuel to wander upstairs alone. He was going to offer the card again at Bellingham’s door, but he had a dawning misgiving. Bellingham had opened the door himself, and, feigning to regard the card as offered by way of introduction, he gave his hand cordially, and led him into the cozy room, where the table was already laid for breakfast.

“Glad to see you, glad to see you, Mr. Barker. Give me your coat. Ah, I see you scorn the effeminacy of half-season things. Put your hat anywhere. The advantage of bachelors’ quarters is that you can put anything anywhere. We haven’t a woman on the premises, and you can fancy how unmolested we are.”

Lemuel had caught sight of one over the mantel, who had nothing but her water-colours on, and was called an “Etude;” but he no longer trembled, for evil or for good, in such presences. “That’s one of those Romano-Spanish things,” said Bellingham, catching the direction of his eye. “I forget the fellow’s name; but it isn’t bad. We’re pretty snug here,” he added, throwing open two doors in succession, to show the extent of his apartment.

“Here you have the dining-room and drawing-room and library in one; and here’s my bedroom, and here’s my bath.”

He pulled an easy-chair up toward the low fire for Lemuel. “But perhaps you’re hot from walking? Sit wherever you like.”

Lemuel chose to sit by the window. “It’s very mild out,” he said, and Bellingham did not exact anything more of him. He talked at him, and left Lemuel to make his mental inventory of the dense Turkey rugs on the slippery hardwood floor, the pictures on the Avails, the deep, leather-lined seats, the bric-a-brac on the mantel, the tall, coloured chests of drawers in two corners, the delicate china and quaint silver on the table.

Presently steps were heard outside, and Bellingham threw open the door as he had to Lemuel, and gave a hand to each of the two guests whom he met on his threshold.

“Ah, Meredith! Good morning, venerable father!” He drew them in. “Let me introduce you to Mr. Barker, Mr. Meredith. Mr. Barker, the Rev. Mr. Seyton. You fellows are pretty prompt.”

“We’re pretty hungry,” said Mr. Meredith. “I don’t know that we should have got here if we hadn’t leaned up against each other as we came along. Several policemen regarded us suspiciously, but Seyton’s cloth protected us.”

“It was terrible, coming up Beacon Street with an old offender like Meredith, at what he considered the dead hour of the night,” said Mr. Seyton. “I don’t know what I should have done if any one had been awake to see us.”

“You shall have breakfast instantly,” said Bellingham, touching an annunciator, and awakening a distant electric titter somewhere.

Mr. Seyton came toward Lemuel, who took the young Ritualist for a Catholic priest, but was not proof against the sweet friendliness which charmed every one with him, and was soon talking at more ease than he had felt from all Bellingham’s cordial intention. He was put at his host’s right hand when they sat down, and Mr. Seyton was given the foot, so that they continued their talk.

“Mr. Bellingham tells me you know my friend Sewell,” said the clergyman.

Lemuel’s face kindled. “Oh yes! Do you know him too?”

“Yes, I’ve known him a long time. He’s a capital fellow, Sewell is.”

“I think he’s a great preacher,” ventured Lemuel.

“Ah — well — yes? Is he? I’ve never heard him lecture,” said Mr. Seyton, looking down at his bread.

“I swear, Seyton,” said Meredith across the table, “when you put on that ecclesiastical superciliousness of yours, I want to cuff you.”

“I’ve no doubt he’d receive it in a proper spirit,” said Bellingham, who was eating himself hot and red from the planked shad before him. “But you mustn’t do it here.”

“Of course,” said Mr. Seyton, “Sewell is a very able man, and no end of a good fellow, but you can’t expect me to admit he’s a priest.”

He smiled in sweet enjoyment of his friend’s wrath. Lemuel observed that he spoke with an accent different from the others, which he thought very pleasant, but he did not know it for that neat utterance which the Anglican Church bestows upon its servants.

“He’s no Jesuit,” growled Meredith.

“I’m bound to say he’s not a pagan, either,” laughed the clergyman.

“These gentlemen exchange these little knocks,” Bellingham explained to Lemuel’s somewhat puzzled look, “because they were boys together at school and college, and can’t realise that they’ve grown up to be lights of the bar and the pulpit.” He looked round at the different plates. “Have some more shad?” No one wanted more, it seemed, and Bellingham sent it away by the man, who replaced it with broiled chicken before Bellingham, and lamb chops in front of Mr. Seyton. “This is all there is,” the host said.

“It’s enough for me,” said Meredith, “if no one else takes anything.”

But in fact there was also an omelet, and bread and butter delicious beyond anything that Lemuel had tasted; and there was a bouquet of pink radishes with fragments of ice dropped among olives, and other facts of a polite breakfast. At the close came a dish of what Bellingham called premature strawberries.

“Why! they’re actually sweet!” said Meredith, “and they’re as natural as emery-bags.”

“Yes, they’re all you say,” said Bellingham. “You can have strawberries any time nowadays after New Year’s, if you send far enough for them; but to get them ripe and sound, or distinguishable from small turnips in taste, is another thing.”

Lemuel had never imagined a breakfast like that; he wondered at himself for having respected the cuisine of the St. Albans. It seemed to him that he and the person he had been — the farm-boy, the captive of the police, the guest of the Wayfarer’s Lodge, the servant of Miss Vane, and the head-waiter at the hotel — could not be the same person. He fell into a strange reverie, while the talk, in which he had shared so little, took a range far beyond him. Then he looked up and found all the others’ eyes upon him, and heard Bellingham saying, “I fancy Mr. Barker can tell us something about that,” and at Lemuel’s mystified stare he added, “About the amount of smoke at a fire that a man could fight through. Mr. Seyton was speaking of the train that was caught in the forest fires down in Maine the other day. How was it with you at the St. Albans?”

Lemuel blushed. It was clear that Mr. Bellingham had been reading that ridiculous newspaper version of his exploit. “There was hardly any smoke at all where I was. It didn’t seem to have got into the upper entries much.”

“That’s just what I was saying!” triumphed Bellingham. “If a man has anything to do, he can get on. That’s the way with the firemen. It’s the rat-in-a-trap idea that paralyses. Do you remember your sensations at all, when you were coming through the fire? Those things are very curious sometimes,” Bellingham suggested.

“There was no fire where I was,” said Lemuel stoutly, but helpless to make a more comprehensive disclaimer.

“I imagine you wouldn’t notice that, any more than the smoke,” said Bellingham, with a look of satisfaction in his hero for his other guests. “It’s a sort of ecstasy. Do you remember that fellow of Bret Harte’s, in How Christmas came to Simpson’s Bar, who gets a shot in his leg, or something, when he’s riding to get the sick boy a Christmas present, and doesn’t know it till he drops off his horse in a faint when he gets back?” He jumped actively up from the table, and found the book on his shelf. “There!” He fumbled for his glasses without finding them. “Will you be kind enough to read the passage, Mr. Barker? I think I’ve found the page. It’s marked.” He sat down again, and the others waited.

Lemuel read, as he needs must, and he did his best.

“Ah, that’s very nice. Glad you didn’t dramatise it; the drama ought to be in the words, not the reader. I like your quiet way.”

“Harte seems to have been about the last of the story-tellers to give us the great, simple heroes,” said Seyton.

When the others were gone, and Lemuel, who had been afraid to go first, rose to take himself away, Bellingham shook his hand cordially and said, “I hope you weren’t bored? The fact is, I rather promised myself a t�te-�-t�te with you, and I told Mr. Sewell so; but I fell in with Seyton and Meredith yesterday — you can’t help falling in with one when you fall in with the other; they’re inseparable when Seyton’s in town and I couldn’t resist the temptation to ask them.”

“Oh no, I wasn’t bored at all,” said Lemuel.

“I’m very glad. But — sit down a moment. I want to speak to you about a little matter of business. Mr. Sewell was telling us something of you the other night, at my cousin Bromfield Corey’s, and it occurred to me that you might be willing to come and read to him. His eyes seem to be on the wane, some way, and he’s rather sleepless. He’d give you a bed, and sometimes you’d have to read to him in the night; you’d take your meals where you like. How does it strike you, supposing the ‘harnsome pittance’ can be arranged?”

“Why, if you think I can do it,” began Lemuel.

“Of course I do. You don’t happen to read French?”

Lemuel shook his head hopelessly. “I studied Latin some at school—”

“Ah! Well! I don’t think he’d care for Latin. I think we’d better stick to English for the present.”

Bellingham arranged for Lemuel to go with him that afternoon to his cousin’s and make, as he phrased it, a stagger at the job.

XXVI.

The stagger seemed to be sufficiently satisfactory. Corey could not repress some twinges at certain characteristics of Lemuel’s accent, but he seemed, in a critical way, to take a fancy to him, and he was conditionally installed for a week.

Corey was pleased from the beginning with Lemuel’s good looks, and justified himself to his wife with an Italian proverb: “Novanta su cento, chi � bello difuori � buono di dentro.” She had heard that proverb before, and she had always considered it shocking; but he insisted that most people married upon no better grounds, and that what sufficed in the choice of a husband or wife was enough for the choice of an intellectual nurse. He corrected Lemuel’s pronunciation where he found it faulty, and amused himself with Lemuel’s struggles to conceal his hurt vanity, and his final good sense in profiting by the correction. But Lemuel’s reading was really very good; it was what, even more than his writing, had given him a literary reputation in Willoughby Pastures; and the old man made him exercise it in widely different directions. Chiefly, however, it was novels that he read, which, indeed, are the chief reading of most people in our time; and as they were necessarily the novels of our language, his elder was not obliged to use that care in choosing them which he must have exacted of himself in the fiction of other tongues. He liked to hear Lemuel talk, and he used the art of getting at the boy’s life by being frank with his own experience. But this was not always successful, and he was interested to find Lemuel keeping doors that Sewell’s narrative had opened carefully closed against him. He betrayed no consciousness that they existed, and Lemuel maintained intact the dignity and pride which come from the sense of ignominy well hidden.

The week of probation had passed without interrupting their relation, and Lemuel was regularly installed, and began to lead a life which was so cut off from his past in most things that it seemed to belie it. He found himself dropped in the midst of luxury stranger to him than the things they read of in those innumerable novels. The dull, rich colours in the walls, and the heavily rugged floors and dark-wooded leathern seats of the library where he read to the old man; the beautiful forms of the famous bronzes, and the Italian saints and martyrs in their baroque or Gothic frames of dim gold; the low shelves with their ranks of luxurious bindings, and all the seriously elegant keeping of the place, flattered him out of his strangeness; and the footing on which he was received in this house, the low-voiced respect with which the man-servant treated him, the master’s light, cordial frankness, the distant graciousness of the mistress, and the unembarrassed, unembarrassing kindliness of the young ladies, both so much older than himself, contributed to an effect that afterwards deepened more and more, and became a vital part of the struggle which he was finally to hold with himself. The first two or three days he saw no one but Mr. Corey, and but for the women’s voices in the other parts of the house, he might have supposed himself in another bachelor’s apartments, finer and grander than Bellingham’s. He was presented to Mrs. Corey when she came into the library, but he did not see the daughters of the house till he was installed in it. After that, his acquaintance with them seemed to go no further. They were all polite and kind when they met him, in the library or on the stairs, but they showed no curiosity about him; and his never meeting them at table helped to keep him a stranger to them under the same roof. He ate at a boarding-house in a neighbouring street, but he slept at the Coreys’ after he had read their father asleep, and then, going out to his late breakfast, he did not return till Mr. Corey had eaten his own, much later.

He wondered at first that neither of those young ladies read to their father, not knowing the disability for mutual help that riches bring. Later, he saw how much Miss Lily Corey was engrossed with charity and art, and how constantly Miss Nannie Corey was occupied with social cares, and was perpetually going and coming in their performance. Then he saw that they could not have rendered nor their father have received from his family the duty which he was paid to do, as they must have done if they had been poorer. But they were all fond of one another, and the father had a way of joking with his daughters, especially the youngest; and they talked with a freedom of themselves which puzzled Lemuel. It appeared from what they said at different times that they had not always been so rich, or that they had once had money, and then less, and now much more. It appeared also that their prosperity was due to a piece of luck, and that the young Mr. Corey, whom they expected in the summer, had brought it about. His father was very proud of him, and, getting more and more used to Lemuel’s companionship, he talked a great deal about his Tom, as he called him, and about Tom’s wife, and his wife’s family, who were somehow, Lemuel inferred, not all that his own family could wish them, but very good people. Once when Mr. Corey was talking of them, Mrs. Corey came in upon them, and seemed to be uneasy, as if she thought he was saying too much. But the daughters did not seem to care, especially the youngest.

He found out that Mr. Corey used to be a painter, and had lived a long time in Italy when he was young, and he recalled with a voluptuous thrill of secrecy that Williams had once been in Italy. Mr. Corey seemed to think better of it than Williams; he liked to talk of Rome and Florence, and of Venice, which Williams had said was a kind of hole. The old man said this or that picture was of this or that school, and vague lights of knowledge and senses of difference that flattered Lemuel’s intellectual vanity stole in upon him. He began to feel that the things Mr. Corey had lived for were the great and high objects of life.

He now perceived how far from really fine or fashionable anything at the St. Albans had been, and that the simplicity of Miss Vane’s little house, which the splendour of the hotel had eclipsed in his crude fancy, was much more in harmony with the richness of Mr. Corey’s. He oriented himself anew, and got another view of the world which he had dropped into. Occasionally he had glimpses of people who came to see the Coreys, and it puzzled him that this family, which he knew so kind and good, took with others the tone hard and even cynical which seemed the prevailing tone of society; when their acquaintances went away they dropped back, as if with relief, into their sincere and amiable fashions of speech. Lemuel asked himself if every one in the world was playing a part; it did not seem to him that Miss Carver had been; she was always the same, and always herself. To be one’s-self appeared to him the best thing in the world, and he longed for it the more as he felt that he too was insensibly beginning to play a part. Being so much in this beautiful and luxurious house, where every one was so well dressed and well mannered, and well kept in body and mind, and passing from his amazement at all its appointments into the habit of its comfortable beauty, he forgot more and more the humility and the humiliations of his past. He did not forget its claims upon him; he sent home every week the greater part of his earnings, and he wrote often to his mother; but now, when he could have got the time to go home and see her, he did not go. In the exquisite taste of his present environment, he could scarcely believe in that figure, grizzled, leathern, and gaunt, and costumed in a grotesque unlikeness to either sex. Sometimes he played with the fantastic supposition of some other origin for himself, romantic and involved like that of some of the heroes he was always reading of, which excluded her.

Another effect of this multifarious literature through which his duties led him was the awakening of the ambition to write, stunned by his first disastrous adventures in Boston, and dormant almost ever since, except as it had stirred under the promptings of Evans’s kindly interest. But now it did not take the form of verse; he began to write moralistic essays, never finished, but full of severe comment on the folly of the world as he saw it. Sometimes they were examinations of himself, and his ideas and principles, his doctrines and practice, penetrating quests such as the theologians of an earlier day used to address to their consciences.

Meantime, the deeply underlying mass of his rustic crudity and raw youth took on a far higher polish than it had yet worn. Words dropped at random in the talk he now heard supplied him with motives and shaped his actions. Once Mr. Bellingham came in laughing about a sign which he saw in a back street, of Misfit Parlours, and Lemuel spent the next week’s salary for a suit at a large clothing store, to replace the dress Sewell had thought him so well in. He began insensibly to ape the manners of those about him.

It drew near the time when the ladies of the Corey family were to leave town, where they had lingered much longer than they meant, in the hope that Mr. Corey might be so much better, or so much worse, that he would consent to go to the shore with them. But his disabilities remained much the same, and his inveterate habits indomitable. By this time that trust in Lemuel, which never failed to grow up in those near him, reconciled the ladies to the obstinate resolution of the master of the house to stay in it as usual. They gave up the notion of a cottage, and they were not going far away, nor for long at any one time; in fact, one or other of them was always in the house. Mrs. Corey had grown into the habit of confidence with Lemuel concerning her husband’s whims and foibles; and this motherly frankness from a lady so stately and distant at first was a flattery more poisonous to his soul than any other circumstance of his changed life.

It came July, and even Sewell went away then. He went with a mind at rest concerning Lemuel’s material prospects, and his unquestionable usefulness and acceptability; but something, at the bottom of his satisfaction, teased him still: a dumb fear that the boy was extravagant, a sense that he was somehow different, and not wholly for the better, from what he had been. He had seen, perhaps, nothing worse in him than that growth of manner which amused Corey.

“He is putting us on,” he said to Bellingham one day, “and making us fit as well as he can. I don’t think we’re altogether becoming, but that’s our fault, probably. I can’t help thinking that if we were of better cut and material we should show to better effect upon that granite soul. I wish Tom were here. I’ve an idea that Tom would fit him like a glove. Charles, why don’t you pose as a model for Barker?”

“I don’t see why I’m not a very good model without posing,” said Bellingham. “What do you want me to do for him? Take him to the club? Barker’s not very conversational.”

“You don’t take him on the right topics,” said Corey, not minding that he had left the point. “I assure you that Barker, on any serious question that comes up in our reading, has a clear head and an apt tongue of his own. It isn’t our manners alone that he emulates. I can’t find that any of us ever dropped an idea or suggestion of value that Barker didn’t pick it up, and turn it to much more account than the owner. He’s as true as a Tuscan peasant, as proud as an Indian, and as quick as a Yankee.”

“Ah! I hoped you wouldn’t go abroad for that last,” said Bellingham.

“No; and it’s delightful, seeing the great variety of human nature there is in every human being here. Our life isn’t stratified; perhaps it never will be. At any rate, for the present, we’re all in vertical sections. But I always go back to my first notion of Barker: he’s ancestral, and he makes me feel like degenerate posterity. I’ve had the same sensation with Tom; but Barker seems to go a little further back. I suppose there’s such a thing as getting too far back in these Origin of Species days; but he isn’t excessive in that or in anything. He’s confoundedly temperate, in fact; and he’s reticent; he doesn’t allow any unseemly intimacy. He’s always turning me out-of-doors.”

“Of course! But what can we old fellows hope to know of what’s going on in any young one? Talk of strangeness! I’d undertake to find more in common with a florid old fellow of fifty from the red planet Mars than with any young Bostonian of twenty.”

“Yes; but it’s the youth of my sires that I find so strange in Barker. Only, theoretically, there’s no Puritanism. He’s a thorough believer in Sewell. I suspect he could formulate Sewell’s theology a great deal better than Sewell could.”

XXVII

Statira and ‘Manda Grier had given up their plan of getting places in a summer hotel when Lemuel absolutely refused to take part in it, and were working through the summer in the box-factory. Lemuel came less regularly to see them now, for his Sunday nights had to be at Mr. Corey’s disposition; but Statira was always happy in his coming, and made him more excuses than he had thought of, if he had let a longer interval than usual pass. He could not help feeling the loveliness of her patience, the sweetness of her constancy; but he disliked ‘Manda Grier more and more, and she grew stiffer and sharper with him. Sometimes the aimlessness of his relation to Statira hung round him like a cloud, which he could not see beyond. When he was with her he contented himself with the pleasure he felt in her devotion, and the tenderness this awakened in his own heart; but when he was away from her there was a strange disgust and bitterness in these.

Sometimes, when Statira and ‘Manda Grier took a Saturday afternoon off, he went with them into the country on one of the horse-car lines, or else to some matinee at a garden-theatre in the suburbs. Statira liked the theatre better than anything else; and she used to meet other girls whom she knew there, and had a gay time. She introduced Lemuel to them, and after a few moments of high civility and distance they treated him familiarly, as Statira’s beau. Their talk, after that he was now used to, was flat and foolish, and their pert ease incensed him. He came away bruised and burning, and feeling himself unfit to breathe the refined and gentle air to which he returned in Mr. Corey’s presence. Then he would vow in his heart never to expose himself to such things again; but he could not tell Statira that he despised the friends she was happy with; he could only go with a reluctance it was not easy to hide, and atone by greater tenderness for a manner that wounded her. One day toward the end of August, when they were together at a suburban theatre, Statira wandered off to a pond there was in the grounds with some other girls, who had asked him to go and row them, and had called him a bear for refusing, and told him to look out for Barnum. They left him sitting alone with ‘Manda Grier, at a table where they had all been having ice-cream at his expense; and though it was no longer any pleasure to be with her, it was better than to be with them, for she was not a fool, at any rate. Statira turned round at a little distance to mock them with a gesture and a laugh, and the laugh ended in a cough, long and shattering, so that one of her companions had to stop with her, and put her arm round her till she could recover herself and go on.

It sent a cold thrill through Lemuel, and then he turned angry. “What is it Statira does to keep taking more cold?”

“Oh, I guess ‘tain’t ‘ny more cold,” said ‘Manda Grier.

“What do you mean?”

“I guess ‘f you cared a great deal you’d noticed that cough ‘f hers before now. ‘Tain’t done it any too much good workin’ in that arsenic paper all summer long.”

‘Manda Grier talked with her face turned away from him.

It provoked him more and more. “I do care,” he retorted, eager to quarrel, “and you know it. Who got her into the box-factory, I should like to know?”

“I did!” said ‘Manda Grier, turning sharply on him, “and you kept her there; and between us we’ve killed her.”

“How have I kept her there, I should like to know?”

“‘F you’d done’s she wanted you should, she might ‘a’ been at some pleasant place in the country — the mount’ns, or somewhere ‘t she’d been ov’r her cough by this time. But no! You was too nasty proud for that, Lemuel Barker!”

A heavy load of guilt dropped upon Lemuel’s heart, but he flung it off, and he retorted furiously,

“You ought to have been ashamed of yourself to ever want her to take a servant’s place.”

“Oh, a servant’s place! If she’d been ashamed of a servant when you came meechin’ round her, where’d you been, I sh’d like to know? And now I wish she had; ‘n’ if she wa’n’t such a little fool, ‘n’ all wrapped in you, the way ‘t she is, I could wish ‘t she’d never set eyes on you again, servant or no servant. But I presume it’s too late now, and I presume she’s got to go on suff’rin’ for you and wonderin’ what she’s done to offend you when you don’t come, and what she’s done when you do, with your stuck-up, masterful airs, and your double-faced ways. But don’t you try to pretend to me, Lemuel Barker, ‘t you care the least mite for her any more, ‘f you ever did, because it won’t go down! ‘N’ if S’tira wa’n’t such a perfect little blind fool, she could see ‘t you didn’t care for her any more than the ground ‘t you walk on, ‘n’ ‘t you’d be glad enough if she was under it, if you couldn’t be rid of her any other way!” ‘Manda Grier pulled her handkerchief out and began to cry into it.

Lemuel was powerfully shaken by this attack; he did feel responsible for Statira’s staying in town all summer; but the spectacle of ‘Manda Grier publicly crying at his side in a place like that helped to counteract the effect of her words. “‘Sh! Don’t cry!” he began, looking fearfully round him. “Everybody ‘ll see you!”

“I don’t care! Let them!” sobbed the girl. “If they knowed what I know, and could see you not cryin’, I guess they’d think you looked worse than I do!”

“You don’t understand — I can explain—”

“No, you can’t explain, Mr. Barker!” said ‘Manda Grier, whipping down her handkerchief, and fiercely confronting him across the table. “You can’t explain anything so ‘s to blind me any longer! I was a big fool to ever suppose you had any heart in you; but when you came round at first, and was so meek you couldn’t say your soul was your own, and was so glad if S’tira spoke to you, or looked at you, that you was ready to go crazy, I did suppose there was some little something to you! And yes, I helped you on all I could, and helped you to fool that poor thing that you ain’t worthy to kiss the ground she walks on, Lord forgive me for it! But it’s all changed now! You seem to think it’s the greatest favour if you come round once a fortnight, and set and let her talk to you, and show you how she dotes upon you, the poor little silly coot! And if you ever speak a word, it’s like the Lord unto Moses, it’s so grand! But I understand! You’ve got other friends now! You after that art-student? Oh, you can blush and try to turn it off! I’ve seen you blush before, and I know you! And I know you’re in love with that girl, and you’re just waitin’ to break off with S’tira; but you hain’t got the spirit to up and do it like a man! You want to let it lag along, and lag along, and see ‘f something won’t happen to get you out of it! You waitin’ for her to die? Well, you won’t have to wait long! But if I was a man, I’d spoil your beauty for you first.”

The torrent of her words rolled him on, bruising and tearing his soul, which their truth pierced like jagged points. From time to time he opened his lips to protest or deny, but no words came, and in his silence a fury of scorn for the poor, faithful, scolding thing, so just, so wildly unjust, gathered head in him.

“Be still!” he ground between his teeth. “Be still, you—” He stopped for the word, and that saved him from the outrage he had meant to pay her back with. He rose from the table. “You can tell Statira what you’ve said to me. I’m going home.”

He rushed away; the anger was like strong drink in his brain; he was like one drunk all the way back to the city in the car.

He could not go to Mr. Corey’s at once; he felt as if physically besmeared with shame; he could not go to his boarding-house; it would have been as if he had shown himself there in a coat of tar and feathers. Those insolent, true, degrading words hissed in his ears, and stung him incessantly. They accused, they condemned with pitiless iteration; and yet there were instants when he knew himself guiltless of all the wrong of which in another sense he knew himself guilty. In his room he renewed the battle within himself that he had fought so long in his wanderings up and down the street, and he conquered himself at last into the theory that Statira had authorised or permitted ‘Manda Grier to talk to him in that way. This simplified the whole affair; it offered him the release which he now knew he had longed for. As he stretched himself in the sheets at daybreak, he told himself that he need never see either of them again. He was free.

XXVIII.

Lemuel went through the next day in that licence of revolt which every human soul has experienced in some measure at some time. We look back at it afterwards, and see it a hideous bondage. But for the moment Lemuel rejoiced in it; and he abandoned himself boldly to thoughts that had hitherto been a furtive and trembling rapture.

In the afternoon, when he was most at leisure, he walked down to the Public Garden, and found a seat on a bench near the fountain where the Venus had shocked his inexperience the first time he saw her; he remembered that simple boy with a smile of pity, and then went back into his cloud of reverie. There, safely hid from trouble and wrong, he told his ideal how dear she was to him, and how she had shaped and governed his life, and made it better and nobler from the first moment they had met. The fumes of the romances which he had read mixed with the love-born delirium in his brain; he was no longer low, but a hero of lofty line, kept from his rightful place by machinations that had failed at last, and now he was leading her, his bride, into the ancient halls which were to be their home, and the source of beneficence and hope to all the poor and humbly-born around them. His eyes were so full of this fantastic vision, the soul of his youth dwelt so deeply within this dream-built tabernacle, that it was with a shock of anguish he saw coming up the walk towards him the young girl herself. His airy structure fell in ruins around him; he was again common and immeasurably beneath her; she was again in her own world, where, if she thought of him at all, it must be as a squalid vagabond and the accomplice of a thief. If he could have escaped, he would, but he could not move; he sat still and waited with fallen eyes for her to pass him.

At sight of him she hesitated and wavered; then she came towards him, and at a second impulse held out her hand, smiling with a radiant pleasure.

“I didn’t know it was you at first,” she said. “It seems so strange to see any one that I know!”

“I didn’t expect to see you, either,” he stammered out, getting somehow upon his feet, and taking her hand, while his face burned, and he could not keep his eyes on hers; “I — didn’t know you were here.”

“I’ve only been here a few days. I’m drawing at the Museum. I’ve just got back. Have you been here all summer?”

“Yes — all summer. I hope you’ve been well — I suppose you’ve been away—”

“Yes, I’ve just got back,” she repeated.

“Oh yes! I meant that!”

She smiled at his confusion, as kindly as the ideal of his day-dream. “I’ve been spending the summer with Madeline, and I’ve spent most of it out-of-doors, sketching. Have you been well?”

“Yes — not very; oh yes, I’m well—” She had begun to move forward with the last question, and he found himself walking with her. “Did she — has Miss Swan come back with you?” he asked, looking her in the eyes with more question than he had put into his words.

“No, I don’t think she’ll come back this winter,” said the girl. “You know,” she went on, colouring a little, “that she’s married now?”

“No,” said Lemuel.

“Yes. To Mr. Berry. And I have a letter from him for you.”

“Was he there with you, this summer?” asked Lemuel, ignoring alike Berry’s marriage and the letter from him.

“Oh yes; of course! And I liked him better than I used to. He is very good, and if Madeline didn’t have to go so far West to live! He will know how to appreciate her, and there are not many who can do that! Her father thinks he has a great deal of ability. Yes, if Madeline had to get married!”

She talked as if convincing and consoling herself, and there was an accent of loneliness in it all that pierced Lemuel’s preoccupation; he had hardly noted how almost pathetically glad she was to see him. “You’ll miss her here,” he ventured.

“Oh, I don’t dare to think of it,” cried the girl. “I don’t know what I shall do! When I first saw you, just now, it brought up Madeline and last winter so that it seemed too much to bear!”

They had walked out of the garden across Charles Street, and were climbing the slope of Beacon Street Mall, in the Common. “I suppose,” she continued, “the only way will be to work harder, and try to forget it. They wanted me to go out and stay with them; but of course I couldn’t. I shall work, and I shall read. I shall not find another Madeline Swan! You must have been reading a great deal this summer, Mr. Barker,” she said, in turning upon him from her bereavement. “Have you seen any of the old boarders? Or Mrs. Harmon? I shall never have another winter like that at the poor old St. Albans!”

Lemuel made what answer he could. There was happiness enough in merely being with her to have counterbalanced all the pain he was suffering; and when she made him partner of her interests and associations, and appealed to their common memories in confidence of his sympathy, his heavy heart stirred with strange joy. He had supposed that Berry must have warned her against him; but she was treating him as if he had not. Perhaps he had not, and perhaps he had done so, and this was her way of showing that she did not believe it. He tried to think so; he knew it was a subterfuge, but he lingered in it with a fleeting, fearful pleasure. They had crossed from the Common and were walking up under the lindens of Chestnut Street, and from time to time they stopped, in the earnestness of their parley, and stood talking, and then loitered on again in the summer security from oversight which they were too rapt to recognise. They reached the top of the hill, and came to a door where she stopped. He fell back a pace. “Good-bye—” It was eternal loss, but it was escape.

She smiled in timorous hesitation. “Won’t you come in? And I will get Mr. Berry’s letter.”

She opened the door with a latch-key, and he followed her within; a servant-girl came half-way up the basement stairs to see who it was, and then went down. She left him in the dim parlour a moment, while she went to get the letter. When she returned, “I have a little room for my work at the top of the house,” she said, “but it will never be like the St. Albans. There’s no one else here yet, and it’s pretty lonesome — without Madeline.”

She sank into a chair, but he remained standing, and seemed not to heed her when she asked him to sit down. He put Berry’s letter into his pocket without looking at it, and she rose again.

She must have thought he was going, and she said with a smile of gentle trust, “It’s been like having last winter back again to see you. We thought you must have gone home right after the fire; we didn’t see anything of you again. We went ourselves in about a week.”

Then she did not know, and he must tell her himself.

“Did Mr. Berry say anything about me — at the fire — that last day?” he began bluntly.

“No!” she said, looking at him with surprise; there was a new sound in his voice. “He had no need to say anything! I wanted to tell you — to write and tell you — how much I honoured you for it — how ashamed I was for misunderstanding you just before, when—”

He knew that she meant when they all pitied him for a coward.

Her voice trembled; he could tell that the tears were in her eyes. He tried to put the sweetness of her praise from him. “Oh, it wasn’t that that I meant,” he groaned; and he wrenched the words out. “That fellow, who said he was a friend of mine, and got into the house that way, was a thief; and Mr. Berry caught him robbing his room the day of the fire, and treated me as if I knew it and was helping him on—”

“Oh!” cried the girl. “How cruel! How could he do that?”

Lemuel could not suffer himself to take refuge in her generous faith now.

“When I first came to Boston, I had my money stolen, and there were two days when I had nothing to eat; and then I was arrested by mistake for stealing a girl’s satchel; and when I was acquitted, I slept the next night in the tramp’s lodging-house, and that fellow was there, and when he came to the St. Albans I was ashamed to tell where I had known him, and so I let him pass himself off for my friend.”

He kept his eyes fixed on hers, but he could not see them change from their pity of him, or light up with a sense of any squalor in his history.

“And I used to think that my life had been hard!” she cried. “Oh, how much you have been through!”

“And after that,” he pursued, “Mr. Sewell got me a place, a sort of servant’s place, and when I lost that I came to be the man-of-all work at the St. Albans.”

In her eyes the pity was changing to admiration; his confession which he had meant to be so abject had kindled her fancy like a boastful tale.

“How little we know about people and what they have suffered! But I thank you for telling me this — oh yes! — and I shall always think of myself with contempt. How easy and pleasant my life has been! And you—”

She stopped, and he stood helpless against her misconception. He told her about the poverty he had left at home, and the wretched circumstance of his life, but she could not see it as anything but honourable to his present endeavour. She listened with breathless interest to it all, and, “Well,” she sighed at last, “it will always be something for you to look back to, and be proud of. And that girl — did she never say or do anything to show that she was sorry for that cruel mistake? Did you ever see her afterwards?”

“Yes,” said Lemuel, sick at heart, and feeling how much more triumphantly he could have borne ignominy and rejection than this sweet sympathy.

She seemed to think he would say something more, but he turned away from her, and after a little silence of expectance she let him go, with promises to come again, which she seemed to win from him for his own sake.

In the street he took out Berry’s letter and read it.

“DEAR OLD MAN, — I’ve been trying to get off a letter to you almost any time the last three months; but I’ve been round so much, and upside down so much since I saw you — out to W. T. and on my head in Western Mass. — that I’ve not been able to fetch it. I don’t know as I could fetch it now, if it wasn’t for the prospective Mrs. A. W. B., Jr., standing over me with a revolver, and waiting to see me do it. I’ve just been telling her about that little interview of ours with Williams, that day, and she thinks I ought to be man enough to write and say that I guess I was all wrong about you; I had a sneaking idea of the kind from the start almost, but if a fellow’s proud at all, he’s proud of his mistakes, and he hates to give them up. I’m pretty badly balled up now, and I can’t seem to get the right words about remorse, and so forth; but you know how it is yourself. I am sorry, there’s no two ways about that; but I’ve kept my suspicions as well as my regrets to myself, and now I do the best thing I can by way of reparation. I send this letter by Miss Carver. She hasn’t read it, and she don’t know what it’s all about; but I guess you’d better tell her. Don’t spare, yours truly, A. W. BERRY, JR.”

The letter did not soften Lemuel at all towards Berry, and he was bitterly proud that he had spoken without this bidding, though he had seemed to speak to no end that he had expected. After a while he lost himself in his day-dreams again, and in the fantastic future which he built up this became a great source of comfort to him and to his ideal. Now he parted with her in sublime renunciation, and now he triumphed over all the obstacles between them; but whatever turn he willed his fortunes to take, she still praised him, and he prided himself that he had shown himself at his worst to her of his own free impulse. Sewell praised him for it in his reverie; Mr. Corey and Mr. Bellingham both made him delicate compliments upon his noble behaviour, which he feigned had somehow become known to them.

XXIX.

At the usual hour he was at Mr. Corey’s house, where he arrived footsore, and empty from supperless wanderings, but not hungry and not weary. The serving-man at the door met him with the message that Mr. Corey had gone to dine at his club, and would not be at home till late. He gave Lemuel a letter, which had all the greater effect from being presented to him on the little silver tray employed to bring up the cards and notes of the visitors and correspondents of the family. The envelope was stamped in that ephemeral taste which configured the stationery of a few years ago, with the lines of alligator leather, and it exhaled a perfume so characteristic that it seemed to breathe Statira visibly before him. He knew this far better than the poor, scrawly, uncultivated handwriting which he had seen so little. He took the letter, and turning from the door read it by the light of the next street lamp.

“DEAR LEMUEL — Manda Grier has told me what she said to you and Ime about crazy about it dear Lem I want you should come and see mee O Lem you dont Suppose i could of let Manda Grier talk to you that way if I had of none it but of course you dident only do Say so I give her a real good goen over and she says shes sory she done it i dont want any body should care for mee without itse there free will but I shall alwayes care for you if you dont care for me dont come but if you do Care I want you should come as soon as ever you can I can explane everything Manda Grier dident mean anything but for the best but sometimes she dont know what she is sayin O Lem you mussent be mad But if you are and you dont want to come ennymore dont come But O i hope you wouldent let such a thing set you againste mee recollect that I never done or Said anything to set you against me,

“STATIRA.”

A cruel disgust mingled with the remorse that this letter brought him. Its illiteracy made him ashamed, and the helpless fondness it expressed was like a millstone hanged about his neck. He felt the deadly burden of it drag him down.

A passer-by on the other side of the street coughed slightly in the night air, and a thought flashed through Lemuel, from which he cowered, as if he had found himself lifting his hand against another’s life.

His impulse was to turn and run, but there was no escape on any side. It seemed to him that he was like that prisoner he had read of, who saw the walls of his cell slowly closing together upon him, and drawing nearer and nearer till they should crush him between them. The inexperience of youth denies it perspective; in that season of fleeting and unsubstantial joys, of feverish hopes, despair wholly darkens a world which after years find full of chances and expedients.

If Mr. Sewell had been in town there might have been some hope through him; or if Mr. Evans were there; or even if Berry were at hand, it would be some one to advise with, to open his heart to in his extremity. He walked down into Bolingbroke Street, knowing well that Mr. Sewell was not at home, but pretending to himself, after the fashion of the young, that if he should see a light in his house it would be a sign that all should come out right with him, and if not, it would come out wrong. He would not let himself lift his eyes to the house front till he arrived before it. When he looked his heart stood still; a light streamed bright and strong from the drawing-room window.

He hurried across the street, and rang; and after some delay, in which the person coming to the door took time to light the gas in the hall, Mr. Sewell himself opened to him. They stood confronted in mutual amazement, and then Sewell said, with a cordiality which he did not keep free from reluctance, “Oh — Mr. Barker! Come in! Come in!” But after they had shaken hands, and Lemuel had come in, he stood there in the hall with him, and did not offer to take him up to his study. “I’m so glad to have this glimpse of you! How in the world did you happen to come?”

“I was passing and saw the light,” said Lemuel.

Sewell laughed. “To be sure! We never have any idea how far our little candle throws its beams! I’m just here for the night, on my way from the mountains to the sea; I’m to be the ‘supply’ in a friend’s pulpit at New Bedford; and I’m here quite alone in the house, scrambling a sermon together. But I’m so glad to see you! You’re well, I hope? You’re looking a little thin, but that’s no harm. Do you enjoy your life with Mr. Corey? I was sure you would! When you come to know him, you will find him one of the best of men — kindly, thoughtful, and sympathetic. I’ve felt very comfortable about your being with him whenever I’ve thought of you, and you may be sure that I’ve thought of you often. What about our friends of the St. Albans? Do you see Mrs. Harmon? You knew the Evanses had gone to Europe.”

“Yes; I got a letter from him yesterday.”

“He didn’t pick up so fast as they hoped, and he concluded to try the voyage. I hear very good accounts of him. He said he was going to write you. Well! And Mr. Corey is well?” He smiled more beamingly upon Lemuel, who felt that he wished him to go, and stood haplessly trying to get away.

In the midst of his own uneasiness Sewell noted Lemuel’s. “Is there anything — something — you wished to speak with me about?”

“No. No, not anything in particular. I just saw the light, and—”

Sewell took his hand and wrung it with affection.

“It was so good of you to run in and see me. Don’t fancy it’s been any disturbance. I’d got into rather a dim place in my work, but since I’ve been standing here with you — ha, ha, ha! those things do happen so curiously! — the whole thing has become perfectly luminous. I’m delighted you’re getting on so nicely. Give my love to Mr. Corey. I shall see you soon again. We shall all be back in a little over a fortnight. Glad of this moment with you, if it’s only a moment! Good-bye!”

He wrung Lemuel’s hand again, this time in perfect sincerity, and eagerly shut him out into the night.

The dim place had not become so luminous to him as it had to the minister. A darkness, which the obscurity of the night faintly typified, closed round him, pierced by one ray only, and from this he tried to turn his face. It was the gleam that lights up every labyrinth where our feet wander and stumble, but it is not always easy to know it from those false lights of feeble-hearted pity, of mock-sacrifice, of sick conscience, which dance before us to betray to worse misery yet.

Some sense of this, broken and faltering, reached Lemuel where he stood, and tried to deal faithfully with his problem. In that one steadfast ray he saw that whatever he did he must not do it for himself; but what his duty was he could not make out. He knew now, if he had not known before, that whatever his feeling for Statira was, he had not released himself from her, and it seemed to him that he could not release himself by any concern for his own advantage. That notion with which he had so long played, her insufficiency for his life now and for the needs of his mind hereafter, revealed itself in its real cruelty. The things that Mr. Sewell had said, that his mother had said, that Berry had said, in what seemed a fatal succession, and all to the same effect, against throwing himself away upon some one inadequate to him at his best, fell to the ground like withered leaves, and the fire of that steadfast ray consumed them.

But whom to turn to for counsel now? The one friend in whom he had trusted, to whom he had just gone, ready to fling down his whole heart before him, had failed him, failed him unwittingly, unwillingly, as he had failed him once before, but this time in infinitely greater stress. He did not blame him now, fiercely, proudly, as he had once blamed him, but again he wandered up and down the city streets, famished and outcast through his defection.

It was late when he went home, but Mr. Corey had not yet returned, and he had time to sit down and write the letter which he had decided to send to Statira, instead of going to see her. It was not easy to write, but after many attempts he wrote it.

Dear Statira, — You must not be troubled, at what Amanda said to me. I assure you that, although I was angry at first, I am entirely willing to overlook it at your request. She probably spoke hastily, and I am now convinced that she spoke without your authority. You must not think that I am provoked at you.

“I received your letter this evening; and I will come to see you very soon. Lemuel Barker.”

The letter was colder than he meant to make it, but he felt that he must above all be honest, and he did not see how he could honestly make it less cold. When it came to Statira’s hands she read it silently to herself, over and over again, while her tears dripped upon it.

‘Manda Grier was by, and she watched her till she could bear the sight no longer. She snatched the letter from the girl’s hands and ran it through, and then she flung it on the ground. “Nasty, cold-hearted, stuck-up, shameless thing!”

“Oh, don’t, ‘Manda; don’t, ‘Manda!” sobbed Statira, and she plunged her face into the pillows of the bed, where she sat.

“Shameless, cold-hearted, stuck-up, nasty thing!” said ‘Manda Grier, varying her denunciation in the repetition, and apparently getting fresh satisfaction out of it in that way. “Don’t? St’ira Dudley, if you was a woman — if you was half a woman — you’d never speak to that little corpse-on-ice again.”

“O ‘Manda, don’t call him names-! I can’t bear to have you!”

“Names? If you was anybody at all, you wouldn’t look at him! You wouldn’t think of him!”

“O ‘Manda, ‘Manda! You know I can’t let you talk so,” moaned Statira.

“Talk? I could talk my head off! ‘You must not think I was provoked with you,’” she mimicked Lemuel’s dignity of diction in mincing falsetto. “‘I will come to see you very soon.’ Miserable, worthless, conceited whipper-snapper!”

“O ‘Manda, you’ll break my heart if you go on so!”

“Well, then, give him up! He’s goin’ to give you up.”

“Oh, he ain’t; you know he ain’t! He’s just busy, and I know he’ll come. I’ll bet you he’ll be here to-morrow. It’ll kill me to give him up.”

She had lifted herself from the pillow, and she began to cough.

“He’ll kill you anyway,” cried ‘Manda Grier, in a passion of pity and remorse. She ran across the room to get the medicine which Statira had to take in these paroxysms. “There, there! Take it! I sha’n’t say anything more about him.”

“And do you take it all back?” gasped Statira, holding the proffered spoon away.

“Yes, yes! But do take your med’cine, St’ira, ‘f you don’t want to die where you set.”

“And do you think he’ll come?”

“Yes, he’ll come.”

“Do you say it just to get me to take the medicine?”

“No, I really do believe he’ll come.”

“O ‘Manda, ‘Manda!” Statira took her medicine, and then wildly flung her arms round ‘Manda Grier’s neck, and began to sob and to cry there. “Oh, how hard I am with you, Manda! I should think if I was as hard with everybody else, they’d perfectly hate me.”

“You hard!”

“Yes, and that’s why he hate me. He does hate me. You said he did.”

“No, St’ira, I didn’t. You never was hard to anybody, and the meanest old iceberg in creation couldn’t hate you.”

“Then you think he does care for me?”

“Yes.”

“And you know he’ll come soon?”

“Yes.”

“To-morrow?”

“Yes, to-morrow.”

“O’Manda, O’Manda!”

XXX.

Lemuel had promised himself that if he could gain a little time he should be able better to decide what it was right for him to do. His heart lifted as he dropped the letter into the box, and he went through the chapters which Mr. Corey asked him to read, after he came in, with an ease incredible to himself. In the morning he woke with a mind that was almost cheerful. He had been honest in writing that letter, and so far he had done right; he should keep his word about going soon to see Statira, and that would be honest too. He did not look beyond this decision, and he felt, as we all do, more or less vaguely when we have resolved to do right, that he had the merit of a good action.

Statira showed herself so glad to see him that he could not do less than seem to share her joy in their making-up, as she called it, though he insisted that there had been no quarrel between them; and now there began for him a strange double life, the fact of which each reader must reject or accept according to the witness of his own knowledge.

He renewed as far as he could the old warmth of his feeling for Statira, and in his compunction experienced a tenderness for her that he had not known before, the strange tenderness that some spirits feel for those they injure. He went oftener than ever to see her, he was very good to her, and cheered her with his interest in all her little interests; he petted her and comforted her; but he escaped from her as soon as he could, and when he shut her door behind him he shut her within it. He made haste to forget her, and to lose himself in thoughts that were never wholly absent even in her presence. Sometimes he went directly from her to Jessie, whose innocent Bohemianism kept later hours, and who was always glad to see him whenever he came. She welcomed him with talk that they thought related wholly to the books they had been reading, and to the things of deep psychological import which they suggested. He seldom came to her without the excuse of a book to be lent or borrowed; and he never quitted her without feeling inspired with the wish to know more, and to be more; he seemed to be lifted to purer and clearer regions of thought. She received him in the parlour, but their evenings commonly ended in her little studio, whither some errand took them, or some intrusion of the other boarders banished them. There he read to her poems or long chapters out of the essayists or romancers; or else they sat and talked about the strange things they had noticed in themselves that were like the things they found in their books. Once when they had talked a long while in this strain, he told how when he first saw her he thought she was very proud and cold.

She laughed gaily. “And I used to be afraid of you,” she said. “You used to be always reading there in your little office. Do you think I’m very proud now?”

“Are you very much afraid of me now?” he retorted.

They laughed together.

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, “how little we really know about people in the world?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I wonder if it will ever be different. I’ve been wrong about nearly every one I’ve met since I came to Boston.”

“And I have too!” she cried, with that delight in the coincidence of experience which the young feel so keenly.

He had got the habit, with his growing ease in her presence, of walking up and down the room, while she sat, with her arms lifted and clasped above her head, forgetful of everything but the things they were saying, and followed him with her eyes. As he turned about in his walk, he saw how pretty she was, with her slender form cased in the black silk she wore, and thrown into full relief by the lifted arms; he saw the little hands knit above her head, and white as flowers on her dark hair. Her eyes were very bright, and her soft lips, small and fine, were red.

He faltered, and lost the thread of his speech. “I forgot what I was going to say!”

She took down her hands to clasp them over her laughing face a moment. “And I don’t remember what you were saying!” They both laughed a long time at this; it seemed incomparably droll, and they became better comrades.

They spent the rest of the evening in laughing and joking.

“I didn’t know you were so fond of laughing,” he said, when he went away.

“And I always supposed you were very solemn,” she replied.

This again seemed the drollest thing in the world. “Well, I always was,” he said.

“And I don’t know when I’ve laughed so much before!” She stood at the head of the stairs, and held her lamp up for him to find his way down.

Again looking back, he saw her in the undefended grace that had bewildered him before.

When he came next they met very seriously, but before the evening was past they were laughing together; and so it happened now whenever he came. They both said how strange it was that laughing with any one seemed to make you feel so much better acquainted. She told of a girl at school that she had always disliked till one day something made them laugh, and after that they became the greatest friends.

He tried to think of some experience to match this, but he could not; he asked her if she did not think that you always felt a little gloomy after you had been laughing a great deal. She said yes; after that first night when they laughed so, she felt so depressed that she was sure she was going to have bad news from Madeline. Then she said she had received a letter from Madeline that morning, and she and Mr. Berry had both wished her to give him their regards if she ever saw him. This, when she had said it, seemed a very good joke too; and they laughed at it a little consciously, till he boldly bade her tell them he came so very seldom that she did not know when she could deliver their message.

She answered that she was afraid Madeline would not believe that; and then it came out that he had never replied to Berry’s letter.

She said, “Oh! Is that the way you treat your correspondents?” and he was ashamed to confess that he had not forgiven Berry.

“I will write to him to-night, if you say so,” he answered hardily.

“Oh, you must do what you think best,” she said, lightly refusing the responsibility.

“Whatever you say will be best,” he said, with a sudden, passionate fervour that surprised himself.

She tried to escape from it. “Am I so infallible as that?”

“You are for me!” he retorted.

A silence followed, which she endeavoured to break, but she sat still across the little table from him where the shaded lamp spread its glow, leaving the rest of the room, with its red curtains and its sketches pinned about, in a warm, luxurious shadow. Her eyes fell, and she did not speak.

“It must sound very strange to you, I know,” he went on; “and it’s strange to me, too; but it seems to me that there isn’t anything I’ve done without my thinking whether you would like me to do it.”

She rose involuntarily. “You make me ashamed to think that you’re so much mistaken about me! I know how we all influence each other — I know I always try to be what I think people expect me to be — I can’t be myself — I know what you mean; but you — you must be yourself, and not let—” She stopped in her wandering speech, in strange agitation, and he rose too.

“I hope you’re not offended with me!”

“Offended? Why? Why do you — go so soon?”

“I thought you were going,” he answered stupidly.

“Why, I’m at home!”

They looked at each other, and then they broke into a happy laugh.

“Sit down again! I don’t know what I got up for. It must have been to make some tea. Did you know Madeline had bequeathed me her tea-kettle — the one we had at the St. Albans?” She bustled about, and lit the spirit-lamp under the kettle.

“Blow out that match!” he cried. “You’ll set your dress on fire!” He caught her hand, which she was holding with the lighted match in it at her side, after the manner of women with lighted matches, and blew it out himself.

“Oh, thank you!” she said indifferently. “Can you take it without milk?”

“Yes, I like it so.”

She got out two of the cups he remembered, and he said, “How much like last winter that seems!”

And “Yes, doesn’t it?” she sighed.

The lamp purred and fretted under the kettle, and in the silence in which they waited, the elm tree that rose from the pavement outside seemed to look in consciously upon them.

When the kettle began to sing, she poured out the two cups of tea, and in handing him his their fingers touched, and she gave a little outcry. “Oh! Madeline’s precious cup! I thought it was going to drop!”

The soft night-wind blew in through the elm leaves, and their rustling seemed the expression of a profound repose, an endless content.

XXXI.

The next night Lemuel went to see Statira, without promising himself what he should say or do, but if he were to tell her everything, he felt that she would forgive him more easily than ‘Manda Grier. He was aware that ‘Manda always lay in wait for him, to pierce him at every undefended hint of conscience. Since the first break with her, there had never been peace between them, and perhaps not kindness for long before that. Whether or not she felt responsible for having promoted Statira’s affair with him, and therefore bound to guard her to the utmost from suffering by it, she seemed always to be on the alert to seize any advantage against him. Sometimes Statira accused her of trying to act so hatefully to him that he would never come any more; she wildly blamed her; but the faithful creature was none the less constant and vigilant on that account. She took patiently the unjust reproaches which Statira heaped upon her like a wayward child, and remitted nothing of her suspicion or enmity towards Lemuel. Once, when she had been very bitter with him, so bitter that it had ended in an open quarrel between them, Statira sided with him against her, and when ‘Manda Grier flounced out of the room she offered him, if he wished, to break with her, and never to speak to her again, or have anything more to do with such a person. But at this his anger somehow fell; and he said no, she must not think of such a thing; that ‘Manda Grier had been her friend long before he was, and that, whatever she said to him, she was always good and true to her. Then Statira fell upon his neck and cried, and praised him, and said he was a million times more to her than ‘Manda Grier, but she would do whatever he said; and he went away sick at heart.

When he came now, with his thoughts clinging to Jessie, ‘Manda Grier hardly gave him time for the decencies of greeting. She was in a high nervous exaltation, and Statira looked as if she had been crying.

“What’s become o’ them art-students you used to have ‘t the St. Albans?” she began, her whopper-jaw twitching with excitement, and her eyes glaring vindictively upon Lemuel.

He had sat down near Statira on the lounge, but she drew a little away from him in a provisional fashion, as if she would first see what came of ‘Manda Grier’s inquisition.

“Art-students?” he repeated aimlessly while he felt his colour go.

“Yes!” she snapped. “Them girls ‘t used to be ‘t the St. Albans, ‘t you thought so wonderful!”

“I didn’t know I thought they were very wonderful!”

“Can’t you answer a civil question?” she demanded, raising her voice.

“I haven’t heard any,” said Lemuel, with sullen scorn.

“Oh! Well!” she sneered. “I forgot that you’ve b’en used to goin’ with such fine folks that you can’t bear to be spoken to in plain English.”

“‘Manda!” began Statira, with an incipient whimper.

“You be still, S’tira Dudley! Mr. Barker,” said the poor foolish thing in the mincing falsetto which she thought so cutting, “have you any idea what’s become of your young lady artist friends, — them that took your portrait as a Roman youth, you know?”

Lemuel made no answer whatever for a time. Then, whether he judged it best to do so, or was goaded to the defiance by ‘Manda Grier’s manner, he replied, “Miss Swan and Miss Carver? Miss Swan is married, and lives in Wyoming Territory now.” Before he had reached the close of the sentence he had controlled himself sufficiently to be speaking quite calmly.

“Oh indeed, Mr. Barker! And may I ask where Miss Carver is? She merried and living in Wyoming Territory too?”

“No,” said Lemuel quietly. “She’s not married. She’s in Boston.”

“Indeed! Then it was her I see in the Garden to-day, S’tira! She b’en back long, Mr. Barker?”

“About a month, I think,” said Lemuel.

“Quite a spell! You seen her, Mr. Barker?”

“Yes, quite often.”

“I want to know! She still paintin’ Roman boys, Mr. Barker? Didn’t seem to make any great out at it last winter! But practice makes perfect, they say. I s’pose you seen her in the Garden, too?”

“I usually see her at home,” said Lemuel. “You probably receive your friends on the benches in the Garden, but young ladies prefer to have them call at their residences.” He astonished himself by this brutality, he who was all gentleness with Miss Carver.

“Very well, Mr. Barker! That’s all right. That’s all I wanted to know. Never mind about where I meet my friends. Wherever it is, they’re gentlemen; and they ain’t generally goin’ with three or four girls ‘t the same time.”

“No, one like you would be enough,” retorted Lemuel.

Statira sat cowering away from the quarrel, and making little ineffectual starts as if to stay it. Heretofore their enmity had been covert, if not tacit, in her presence.

Lemuel saw her wavering, and the wish to show ‘Manda his superior power triumphed over every other interest and impulse in him. He got upon his feet. “There is no use in this sort of thing going on any longer. I came here because I thought I was wanted. If it’s a mistake, it’s easy enough to mend it, and it’s easy not to make it again. I wish you good evening.”

Statira sprang from the lounge, and flung her arms around his neck. “No, no! You sha’n’t go! You mustn’t go, Lem! I know your all right, and I won’t have you talked to so! I ain’t a bit jealous, Lem; indeed I ain’t. I know you wouldn’t fool with me, any more than I would with you; and that’s what I tell ‘Manda Grier, I’ll leave it to her if I don’t. I don’t care who you go with, and I hain’t, never since that first time. I know you ain’t goin’ to do anything underhanded. Don’t go, Lem; oh, don’t go!”

He was pulling towards the door; her trust, her fond generosity drove him more than ‘Manda Grier’s cutting tongue: that hurt his pride, his vanity, but this pierced his soul; he had only a blind, stupid will to escape from it.

Statira was crying; she began to cough; she released his neck from her clasp, and reeled backward to the lounge, where she would have fallen, if ‘Manda Grier had not caught her. The paroxysm grew more violent; a bright stream of blood sprang from her lips.

“Run! Run for the doctor! Quick, Lemuel! Oh, quick!” implored ‘Manda Grier, forgetting all enmity in her terror.

Statira’s arms wavered towards him, as if to keep him, but he turned and ran from the house, cowed and conscience-stricken by the sight of that blood, as if he had shed it.

He did not expect to see Statira alive when he came back with the doctor whom he found at the next apothecary’s. She was lying on the lounge, white as death, but breathing quietly, and her eyes sought him with an eagerness that turned to a look of tender gratitude at the look they found in his.

The doctor bent over her for her pulse and her respiration; then when he turned to examine the crimson handkerchief which ‘Manda Grier showed him, Lemuel dropped on his knees beside her and put his face down to hers.

With her lips against his cheek she made, “Don’t go!”

And he whispered, “No, I’ll not leave you now!”

The doctor looked round with the handkerchief still in his hand, as if doubting whether to order him away from her. Then he mutely questioned ‘Manda Grier with a glance which her glance answered. He shrugged his shoulders, with a puzzled sigh. An expression of pity crossed his face which he hardened into one of purely professional interest, and he went on questioning ‘Manda Grier in a low tone.

Statira had slipped her hand into Lemuel’s, and she held it fast, as if in that clasp she were holding on to her chance of life.

XXXII.

Sewell returned to town for the last time in the third week of September, bringing his family with him.

This was before the greater part of his oddly assorted congregation had thought of leaving the country, either the rich cottagers whose family tradition or liberal opinions kept them in his church, or the boarding and camping elements who were uniting a love of cheapness with a love of nature in their prolonged sojourn among the woods and fields. Certain families, perhaps half of his parish in all, were returning because the schools were opening, and they must put their children into them; and it was both to minister to the spiritual needs of these and to get his own children back to their studies that the minister was at home so early.

It was, as I have hinted already, a difficult and laborious season with him; he himself was always a little rusty in his vocation after his summer’s outing, and felt weakened rather than strengthened by his rest. The domestic machine started reluctantly; there was a new cook to be got in, and Mrs. Sewell had to fight a battle with herself, in which she invited him to share, before she could settle down for the winter to the cares of housekeeping. The wide skies, the dim mountain slopes, the long, delicious drives, the fresh mornings, the sweet, silvery afternoons of their idle country life, haunted their nerves and enfeebled their wills.

One evening in the first days of this moral disability, while Sewell sat at his desk trying to get himself together for a sermon, Barker’s name was brought up to him.

“Really,” said his wife, who had transmitted it from the maid, “I think it’s time you protected yourself, David. You can’t let this go on for ever. He has been in Boston nearly two years now; he has regular employment, where if there’s anything in him at all, he ought to prosper and improve without coming to you every other night. What can he want now?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the minister, leaning back in his chair, and passing his hand wearily over his forehead.

“Then send down and excuse yourself. Tell him you’re busy, and ask him to come another time!”

“Ah, you know I can’t do that, my dear.”

“Very well, then; I will go down and see him. You sha’n’t be interrupted.”

“Would you, my dear? That would be very kind of you! Do get me off some way; tell him I’m coming to see him very soon.” He went stupidly back to his writing, without looking to see whether his wife had meant all she said; and after a moment’s hesitation she descended in fulfilment of her promise; or, perhaps rather it was a threat.

She met Lemuel not unkindly, for she was a kind-hearted woman; but she placed duty before charity even, and she could not help making him feel that she was there in the discharge of a duty. She explained that Mr. Sewell was very unusually busy that evening, and had sent her in his place, and hoped soon to see him. She bade Lemuel sit down, and he obeyed, answering all the questions as to the summer and his occupations and health, and his mother’s health, which she put to him in proof of her interest in him; in further evidence of it, she gave him an account of the Sewell family’s doings since they last met. He did not stay long, and she returned slowly and pensively to her husband.

“Well?” he asked, without looking round.

“Well; it’s all right,” she answered, with rather a deep breath. “He didn’t seem to have come for anything in particular; I told him that if he wished specially to speak with you, you would come down.”

Sewell went on with his writing, and after a moment his wife said, “But you must go and see him very soon, David; you must go to-morrow.”

“Why?”

“He looks wretchedly, though he says he’s very well. It made my heart ache. He looks perfectly wan and haggard. I wish,” she burst out, “I wish I had let you go down and see him!”

“Why — why, what was the matter?” asked Sewell, turning about now. “Did you think he had something on his mind?”

“No, but he looked fairly sick. Oh, I wish he had never come into our lives!”

“I’m afraid he hasn’t got much good from us,” sighed the minister. “But I’ll go round and look him up in the morning. His trouble will keep overnight, if it’s a real trouble. There’s that comfort, at least. And now, do go away, my dear, and leave me to my writing.”

Mrs. Sewell looked at him, but turned and left him, apparently reserving whatever sermon she might have in her mind till he should have finished his.

The next morning he went to inquire for Lemuel at Mr. Corey’s. The man was sending him away from the door with the fact merely that Lemuel was not then in the house, when the voice of Mr. Corey descending the stairs called from within: “Is that you, Sewell? Don’t go away! Come in!”

The old gentleman took him into the library and confessed in a bit of new slang, which he said was delightful, that he was all balled up by Lemuel’s leaving him, and asked Sewell what he supposed it meant.

“Left you? Meant?” echoed Sewell.

When they got at each other it was understood that Lemuel, the day before, had given up his employment with Mr. Corey, expressing a fit sense of all his kindness and a fit regret at leaving him, but alleging no reasons for his course; and that this was the first that Sewell knew of the affair.

“It must have been that which he came to see me about last night,” he said, with a sort of anticipative remorse. “Mrs. Sewell saw him — I was busy.”

“Well! Get him to come back, Sewell,” said Mr. Corey, with his whimsical imperiousness; “I can’t get on without him. All my moral and intellectual being has stopped like a watch.”

Sewell went to the boarding-house where Lemuel took his meals, but found that he no longer came there, and had left no other address. He knew nowhere else to ask, and he went home to a day of latent trouble of mind, which whenever it came to the light defined itself as helpless question and self-reproach in regard to Barker.

That evening as he sat at tea, the maid came with the announcement that there was a person in the reception-room who would not send in any name, but wished to see Mr. Sewell, and would wait.

Sewell threw down his napkin, and said, “I’ll bring him in to tea.”

Mrs. Sewell did not resist; she bade the girl lay another plate.

Sewell was so sure of finding Lemuel in the reception-room, that he recoiled in dismay from the girlish figure that turned timidly from the window to meet him with a face thickly veiled. He was vexed, too; here, he knew from the mystery put on, was one of those cases of feminine trouble, real or unreal, which he most disliked to meddle with.

“Will you sit down?” he said, as kindly as he could, and the girl obeyed.

“I thought they would let me wait. I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” she began, in a voice singularly gentle and unaffected.

“Oh, no matter!” cried Sewell. “I’m very glad to see you.”

“I thought you could help me. I’m in great trouble — doubt—”

The voice was almost childlike in its appealing innocence. Sewell sat down opposite the girl and bent sympathetically forward. “Well?”

She waited a moment. Then, “I don’t know how to begin,” she said hoarsely, and stopped again.

Sewell was touched. He forgot Lemuel; he forgot everything but the heartache which he divined before him, and his Christ-derived office, his holy privilege, of helping any in want of comfort or guidance. “Perhaps,” he said, in his loveliest way, — the way that had won his wife’s heart, and that still provoked her severest criticism for its insincerity; it was so purely impersonal,— “perhaps that isn’t necessary, if you mean beginning at the beginning. If you’ve any trouble that you think I can advise you in, perhaps it’s better for both of us that I shouldn’t know very much of it.”

“Yes?” murmured the girl questioningly.

“I mean that if you tell me much, you will go away feeling that you have somehow parted with yourself, that you’re no longer in your own keeping, but in mine; and you know that in everything our help must really come from within our own free consciences.”

“Yes,” said the girl again, from behind the veil which completely hid her face. She now hesitated a long time. She put her handkerchief under her veil; and at last she said: “I know what you mean.” Her voice quivered pathetically; she tried to control it. “Perhaps,” she whispered huskily, after another interval, “I can put it in the form of a question.”

“That would be best,” said Sewell.

She hesitated; the tears fell down upon her hands behind her veil; she no longer wiped them. “It’s because I’ve often — heard you; because I know you will tell me what’s true and right—”

“Your own heart must do that,” said the minister, “but I will gladly help you all I can.”

She did not heed him now, but continued as if rapt quite away from him.

“If there was some one — something — if there was something that it would be right for you to do — to have, if there was no one else; but if there were some else that had a right first—” She broke off and asked abruptly, “Don’t you think it is always right to prefer another — the interest of another to your own?”

Sewell could not help smiling. “There is only one thing for us to do when we are in any doubt or perplexity,” he said cheerily, “and that is the unselfish thing.”

“Yes,” she gasped; she seemed to be speaking to herself. “I saw it, I knew it! Even if it kills us, we must do it! Nothing ought to weigh against it! Oh, I thank you!”

Sewell was puzzled. He felt dimly that she was thanking him for anguish and despair. “I’m afraid that I don’t quite understand you.”

“I thought I told you,” she answered, with a certain reproach, and a fall of courage in view of the fresh effort she must make. It was some moments before she could say, “If you knew that some one — some one who was — everything to you — and that you knew — believed—”

At fifty it is hard to be serious about these things, and it was well for the girl that she was no longer conscious of Sewell’s mood.

“ — Cared for you; and if you knew that before he had cared for you there had been some else — some else that he was as much to as he was to you, and that couldn’t give him up, what — should you—”

Sewell fetched a long sigh of relief; he had been afraid of a much darker problem than this. He almost smiled.

“My dear child,” — she seemed but a child there before the mature man with her poor little love-trouble, so intricate and hopeless to her, so simple and easy to him— “that depends upon a great many circumstances.”

He could feel through her veil the surprise with which she turned to him: “You said, whenever we are in doubt, we must act unselfishly.”

“Yes, I said that. But you must first be sure what is really selfish—”

“I know what is selfish in this case,” said the girl with a sublimity which, if foolish, was still sublimity. “She is sick — it will kill her to lose him — You have said what I expected, and I thank you, thank you, thank you! And I will do it! Oh, don’t fear now but I shall; I have done it! No matter,” she went on in her exaltation, “no matter how much we care for each other, now!”

“No,” said Sewell decidedly. “That doesn’t follow. I have thought of such things; there was such a case within my experience once,” — he could not help alleging this case, in which he had long triumphed,— “and I have always felt that I did right in advising against a romantic notion of self-sacrifice in such matters. You may commit a greater wrong in that than in an act of apparent self-interest. You have not put the case fully before me, and it isn’t necessary that you should, but if you contemplate any rash sacrifice, I warn you against it.”

“You said that we ought to act unselfishly.”

“Yes, but you must beware of the refined selfishness which shrinks from righteous self-assertion because it is painful. You must make sure of your real motive; you must consider whether your sacrifice is not going to do more harm than good. But why do you come to me with your trouble? Why don’t you go to your father — your mother?”

“I have none.”

“Ah—”

She had risen and pushed by him to the outer door, though he tried to keep her. “Don’t be rash,” he urged. “I advise you to take time to think of this—”

She did not answer; she seemed now only to wish to escape, as if in terror of him.

She pulled open the door, and was gone.

Sewell went back to his tea, bewildered, confounded.

“What’s the matter? Why didn’t he come in to tea with you?” asked his wife.

“Who?”

“Barker.”

“What Barker?”

“David, what is the matter?”

Sewell started from his daze, and glanced at his children: “I’ll tell you by and by, Lucy.”

XXXIII

A month passed, and Sewell heard nothing of Lemuel. His charge, always elusive and evanescent, had now completely vanished, and he could find no trace of him. Mr. Corey suggested advertising. Bellingham said, why not put it in the hands of a detective? He said he had never helped work anything up with a detective; he rather thought he should like to do it. Sewell thought of writing to Barker’s mother at Willoughby Pastures, but he postponed it; perhaps it would alarm her if Barker were not there; Sewell had many other cares and duties; Lemuel became more and more a good intention of the indefinite future. After all, he had always shown the ability to take care of himself, and except that he had mysteriously disappeared there was no reason for anxiety about him.

One night his name came up at a moment when Sewell was least prepared by interest or expectation to see him. He smiled to himself in running downstairs, at the reflection that he never seemed quite ready for Barker. But it was a relief to have him turn up again; there was no question of that, and Sewell showed him a face of welcome that dropped at sight of him. He scarcely new the gaunt, careworn face or the shabby figure before him, in place of the handsome, well-dressed young fellow whom he had come to greet. There seemed a sort of reversion in Barker’s whole presence to the time when Sewell first found him in that room; and in whatever trouble he now was, the effect was that of his original rustic constraint.

Trouble there was of some kind, Sewell could see at a glance, and his kind heart prompted him to take Lemuel’s hand between both of his. “Why, my dear boy!” he began; but he stopped and made Lemuel sit down, waited for him to speak, without further question or comment.

“Mr. Sewell,” the young man said abruptly, “you told me once you — that you sometimes had money put into your hands that you could lend.”

“Yes,” replied Sewell, with eager cordiality.

“Could I borrow about seventy-five dollars of you?”

“Why, certainly, Barker!” Sewell had not so much of what he called his flying-charity fund by him, but he instantly resolved to advance the difference out of his own pocket.

“It’s to get me an outfit for horse-car conductor,” said Lemuel. “I can have the place if I can get the outfit.”

“Horse-car conductor!” reverberated Sewell. “What in the world for?”

“It’s work I can do,” answered Lemuel briefly, but not resentfully.

“But there are so many other things — better — fitter — more profitable! Why did you leave Mr. Corey? I assure you that you have been a great loss to him — in every way. You don’t know how much he valued you, personally. He will be only too glad to have you come back.”

“I can’t go back,” said Lemuel. “I’m going to get married.”

“Married!” cried Sewell in consternation.

“My — the lady that I’m going to marry — has been sick, ever since the first of October, and I haven’t had a chance to look up any kind of work. But she’s better now; and I’ve heard of this place I can get. I don’t like to trouble you; but — everything’s gone — I’ve got my mother down here helping take care of her; and I must do something. I don’t know just when I can pay you back; but I’ll do it sometime.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that,” said Sewell, from the abyss of hopeless conjecture into which these facts had plunged him; his wandering fancy was dominated by the presence of Lemuel’s mother with her bloomers in Boston. “I — I hope there’s nothing serious the trouble with your — the lady?” he said, rubbing away with his hand the smile that came to his lips in spite of him.

“It’s lung trouble,” said Lemuel quietly.

“Oh!” responded Sewell. “Well! Well!” He shook himself together, and wondered what had become of the impulse he had felt to scold Barker for the idea of getting married. But such a course now seemed not only far beyond his province, — he heard himself saying that to Mrs. Sewell in self-defence when she should censure him for not doing it, — but utterly useless in view of the further complications. “Well! This is great news you tell me — a great surprise. You’re — you’re going to take an important step — You — you — Of course, of course! You must have a great many demands upon you, under the circumstances. Yes, yes! And I’m very glad you came to me. If your mind is quite made up about — —”

“Yes, I’ve thought it over,” said Lemuel. “The lady has had to work all her life, and she — she isn’t used to what I thought — what I intended — any other kind of people; and it’s better for us both that I should get some kind of work that won’t take me away from her too much — —” He dropped his head, and Sewell with a flash of intelligence felt a thrill of compassionate admiration for the poor, foolish, generous creature, for so Lemuel complexly appeared to him.

Again he forbore question or comment.

“Well — well! we must look you up, Mrs. Sewell and I. We must come to see your — the lady.” He found himself falling helplessly into Lemuel’s way of describing her. “Just write me your address here,” — he put a scrap of paper before Lemuel on the davenport,— “and I’ll go and get you the money.”

He brought it back in an envelope which held a very little more than Lemuel had asked for — Sewell had not dared to add much — and Lemuel put it in his pocket.

He tried to say something; he could only make a husky noise in his throat.

“Good night!” said Sewell pressing his hand with both of his again, at the door. “We shall come very soon.”

“Married!” said Mrs. Sewell, when he returned to her; and then she suffered a silence to ensue, in which it seemed to Sewell that his inculpation was visibly accumulating mountains vast and high. “What did you say?”

“Nothing,” he answered almost gaily; the case was so far beyond despair. “What should you have said?”

XXXIV.

Lemuel got a conductor’s overcoat and cap at half-price from a man who had been discharged, and put by the money saved to return to Sewell when he should come. He entered upon his duties the next morning, under the instruction of an old conductor, who said, “Hain’t I seen you som’ere’s before?” and he worked all day, taking money and tickets, registering fares, helping ladies on and off the car, and monotonously journeying back and forth over his route. He went on duty at six o’clock in the morning, after an early breakfast that ‘Manda Grier and his mother got him, for Statira was not strong enough yet to do much, and he was to be relieved at eight. At nightfall, after two half-hour respites for dinner and tea, he was so tired that he could scarcely stand.

“Well, how do you like it, as fur’s you’ve gone?” asked the instructing conductor, in whom Lemuel had recognised an old acquaintance. “Sweet life, ain’t it? There! That switch hain’t worked again! Jump off, young man, and put your shoulder to the wheel!”

The car had failed to take the right-hand turn where the line divided; it had to be pushed back, and while the driver tugged and swore under his breath at his horses, Lemuel set himself to push the car.

“‘S no use!” said the driver finally. “I got to hitch ’em on at the other end, and pull her back.”

He uncoupled the team from the front of the car, and swung round with it. Lemuel felt something strike him, on the leg, and he fell down. He scrambled to his feet again, but his left leg doubled under him; it went through his mind that one of the horses must have lashed out and broken it; then everything seemed to stop.

The world began again for him in the apothecary’s shop where he had been carried, and from which he was put into an ambulance, by a policeman. It stopped again, as he whirled away; it renewed itself in anguish, and ceased in bliss as he fainted from the pain or came to.

They lifted him up some steps, at last, and carried him into a high, bright room, where there were two or three cots, and a long glass case full of surgical instruments. They laid him on a cot, and some one swiftly and skilfully undressed him. A surgeon had come in, and now he examined Lemuel’s leg. He looked once or twice at his face.

“This is a pretty bad job, I can’t tell how bad till you have had the ether. Will you leave it with me?”

“Yes. But do the best you can for me.”

“You may be sure I will.”

Lemuel believed that they meant to cut off his leg. He knew that he had a right to refuse and to take the consequences, but he would not; he had no right to choose death, when he had others to live for.

He woke deathly sick at first, and found himself lying in bed, one of the two rows in a long room, where there were some quiet women in neat caps and seersucker dresses going about, with bowls of food and bottles of medicine.

Lemuel still felt his leg, and the pain in it, but he had heard how mutilated men felt their lost limbs all their lives, and he was afraid to make sure by the touch of his hand.

A nurse who saw his eyes open came to him. He turned them upon her, but he could not speak. She must have understood. “The doctor thinks he can save your leg for you; but it’s a bad fracture. You must be careful to keep very still.”

He fell asleep; and life began again for him, in the midst of suffering and death. He saw every day broken and mangled men, drunk with ether, brought up as he had been, and laid in beds; he saw the priest of the religion to which most of the poor and lowly still belong, go and come among the cots, and stand by the pillows where the sick feebly followed him in the mystical gestures which he made on his brow and breast; he learned to know the use of the white linen screen which was drawn about a bed to hide the passing of a soul; he became familiar with the helpless sympathy, the despair of the friends who came to visit the sick and dying.

He had not lacked for more attention and interest from his own than the rules of the hospital allowed. His mother and ‘Manda Grier came first, and then Statira when they would let her. She thought it hard that she was not suffered to do the least thing for him; she wished to take him away to their own rooms, where she could nurse him twice as well. At first she cried whenever she saw him, and lamented over him, so that the head nurse was obliged to explain to her that she disturbed the patients, and could not come any more unless she controlled herself. She promised, and kept her word; she sat quietly by his pillow and held his hand, when she came, except when she put up her own to hide the cough which she could not always restrain. The nurse told her that, of course, she was not accountable for the cough, but she had better try to check it. Statira brought troches with her, and held them in her mouth for this purpose.

Lemuel’s family was taken care of in this time of disaster. The newspapers had made his accident promptly known; and not only Sewell, but Miss Vane and Mrs. Corey had come to see if they could be of any use.

One day a young girl brought a bouquet of flowers and set it by Lemuel’s bed, when he seemed asleep. He suddenly opened his eyes, and saw Sybil Vane for the first time since their quarrel.

She put her finger to her lip, and smiled with the air of a lady benefactress; then, with a few words of official sympathy, she encouraged him to get well, and flitted to the next bed, where she bestowed a jacqueminot rosebud on a Chinaman dying of cancer.

Sewell came often to see him, at first in the teeth of his mother’s obvious hostility, but with her greater and greater relenting. Nothing seemed gloomier than the outlook for Lemuel, but Sewell had lived too long not to know that the gloom of an outlook has nothing to do with a man’s real future. It was impossible, of course, for Lemuel to go back to Mr. Corey’s now with a sick wife, who would need so much of his care. Besides, he did not think it desirable on other accounts. He recurred to what Lemuel had said about getting work that should not take him too far away from the kind of people his betrothed was used to, and he felt a pity and respect for the boy whom life had already taught this wisdom, this resignation. He could see that before his last calamity had come upon him, Barker was trying to adjust his ambition to his next duty, or rather to subordinate it; and the conviction that he was right gave Sewell courage to think that he would yet somehow succeed. It also gave him courage to resist, on Barker’s behalf, the generous importunities of some who would have befriended him. Mr. Corey and Charles Bellingham drove up to the hospital one day, to see Lemuel; and when Sewell met them the same evening, they were full of enthusiasm. Corey said that the effect of the hospital, with its wards branching from the classistic building in the centre, was delightfully Italian; it was like St. Peter’s on a small scale, and he had no idea how interesting the South End was; it was quite a bit of foreign travel to go up there. Bellingham had explored the hospital throughout; he said he had found it the thing to do — it was a thing for everybody to do; he was astonished that he had never done it before. They united in praising Barker, and they asked what could be done for him. Corey was strenuous for his coming back to him; at any rate they must find something for him. Bellingham favoured the notion of doing something for his education; a fellow like that could come to almost anything.

Sewell shook his head. “All that’s impossible, now. With that girl — —”

“Oh, confound her!” cried Bellingham.

“I was rather disappointed at not seeing his mother,” said Corey. “I had counted a good deal, I find, upon Mrs. Barker’s bloomers.”

“With a girl like that for his wife,” pursued Sewell, “the conditions are all changed. He must cleave to her in mind as well as body, and he must seek the kind of life that will unite them more and more, not less and less. In fact, he was instinctively doing so when this accident happened. That’s what marriage means.”

“Oh, not always,” suggested Corey.

“He must go back to Willoughby Pastures,” Sewell concluded, “to his farm.”

“Oh, come now!” said Bellingham, with disgust.

“If that sort of thing is to go on,” said Corey, “what is to become of the ancestry of the future �lite of Boston? I counted upon Barker to found one of our first families. Besides, any Irishman could take his farm and do better with it. The farm would be meat to the Irishman, and poison to Barker, now that he’s once tasted town.”

“Yes, I know all that,” said Sewell sadly. “I once thought the greatest possible good I could do Barker, after getting him to Boston, was to get him back to Willoughby Pastures; but if that was ever true, the time is past. Now, it merely seems the only thing possible. When he gets well, he will still have an invalid wife on his hands; he must provide her a home; she could have helped him once, and would have done so, I’ve no doubt; but now she must be taken care of.”

“Look here!” said Bellingham. “What’s the reason these things can’t be managed as they are in the novels? In any well-regulated romance that cough of hers would run into quick consumption and carry Barker’s fiancee off in six weeks; and then he could resume his career of usefulness and prosperity here, don’t you know. He could marry some one else, and found that family that Corey wants.”

They all laughed, Sewell ruefully.

“As it is,” said Corey, “I suppose she’ll go on having hemorrhages to a good old age, and outlive him, after being a clog and burden to him all his life. Poor devil! What in the world possesses him to want to marry her? But I suppose the usual thing.”

This gave Sewell greater discomfort than the question of Lemuel’s material future. He said listlessly, “Oh, I suppose so,” but he was far from thinking precisely that. He had seen Lemuel and the young girl together a great deal, and a painful misgiving had grown up in his mind. It seemed to him that while he had seen no want of patience and kindness towards her in Lemuel, he had not seen the return of her fondness, which, silly as it was in some of its manifestations, he thought he should be glad of in him. Yet he was not sure. Barker was always so self-contained that he might very well feel more love for her than he showed; and, after all, Sewell rather weakly asked himself, was the love so absolutely necessary?

When he repeated this question in his wife’s presence, she told him she was astonished at him.

“You know that it is vitally necessary! It’s all the more necessary, if he’s so superior to her, as you say. I can’t think what’s become of your principles, my dear!”

“I do, you’ve got them,” said Sewell.

“I really believe I have,” said his wife, with that full conviction of righteousness which her sex alone can feel. “I have always heard you say that marriage without love was not only sinful in itself, but the beginning of sorrow. Why do you think now that it makes no difference?”

“I suppose I was trying to adapt myself to circumstances,” answered Sewell, frankly at least. “Let’s hope that my facts are as wrong as my conclusions. I’m not sure of either. I suppose, if I saw him idolising so slight and light a person as she seems to be, I should be more disheartened about his future than I am now. If he overvalued her, it would only drag him lower down.”

“Oh, his future! Drag him down! Why don’t you think of her, going up there to that dismal wilderness, to spend her days in toil and poverty, with a half-crazy mother-in-law, and a rheumatic brother-in-law, in such a looking hovel?” Mrs. Sewell did not group these disadvantages conventionally, but they were effective. “You have allowed your feelings about that baffling creature to blind you to everything else, David. Why should you care so much for his future, and nothing for hers? Is that so very bright?”

“I don’t think that either is dazzling,” sighed the minister. Yet Barker’s grew a little lighter as he familiarised himself with it, or rather with Barker. He found that he had a plan for getting a teacher’s place in the Academy, if they reopened it at Willoughby Pastures, as they talked of doing, under the impulse of such a course in one of the neighbouring towns, and that he was going home, in fancy at least, with purposes of enlightenment and elevation which would go far to console him under such measure of disappointment as they must bring. Sewell hinted to Barker that he must not be too confident of remodelling Willoughby Pastures upon the pattern of Boston.

“Oh no; I don’t expect that,” said Lemuel. “What I mean is that I shall always try to remember myself what I’ve learnt here — from the kind of men I’ve seen, and the things that I know people are all the time doing for others. I told you once that they haven’t got any idea of that in the country. I don’t expect to preach it into them; they wouldn’t like it if I did; and they’d make fun of it; but if I could try to live it?”

“Yes,” said Sewell, touched by this young enthusiasm.

“I don’t know as I can all the time,” said Lemuel. “But it seems to me that that’s what I’ve learnt here, if I’ve learnt anything. I think the world’s a good deal better than I used to.”

“Do you indeed, my dear boy?” asked Sewell, greatly interested. “It’s a pretty well-meaning world — I hope it is.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Lemuel. “I presume it ain’t perfect — isn’t, I should say,” and Sewell smiled. “Mr. Corey was always correcting me on that. But if I were to do nothing but pass along the good that’s been done me since I came here, I should be kept busy the rest of my life.”

Sewell knew that this emotion was largely the physical optimism of convalescence; but he could not refuse the comfort it gave him to find Barker in such a mood, and he did not conceive it his duty to discourage it. Lofty ideals, if not indulged at the expense of lowly realities, he had never found hurtful to any; and it was certainly better for Barker to think too well than too ill of Boston, if it furnished him incentives to unselfish living. He could think of enough things in the city to warrant a different judgment, but if Barker’s lesson from his experience there was this, Sewell was not the person to weaken its force with him. He said, with a smile of reserved comment, “Well, perhaps you’ll be coming back to us, some day.”

“I don’t look forward to that,” said Lemuel soberly; and then his face took a sterner cast, as if from the force of his resolution. “The first thing I’ve got to do after I’ve made a home for her is to get Statira away from the town where she can have some better air, and see if she can’t get her health back. It’ll be time enough to talk of Boston again when she’s fit to live here.”

The minister’s sympathetic spirit sank again. But his final parting with Barker was not unhopeful. Lemuel consented to accept from him a small loan, to the compass of which he reduced the eager bounty of Miss Vane and Mr. Corey, representing that more would be a burden and an offence to Barker. Statira and his mother came with him to take leave of the Sewells.

They dismounted from the horse-car at the minister’s door; and he saw, with sensibility, the two women helping Lemuel off; he walked with a cane, and they went carefully on either side of him. Sewell hastened to meet them at the door himself, and he was so much interested in the spectacle of this mutual affection that he failed at first to observe that Mrs. Barker wore the skirts of occidental civilisation instead of the bloomers which he had identified her with.

“She says she’s goin’ to put ’em on again as soon as she gets back to Willoughby,” the younger woman explained to Mrs. Sewell in an aside, while the minister was engaged with Lemuel and his mother. “But I tell her as long as it ain’t the fashion in Boston, I guess she hadn’t better, he-e-e-re.” Statira had got on her genteel prolongation of her last syllables again. “I guess I shall get along with her. She’s kind of queer when you first get acquainted; but she’s real good-heart-e-e-d.” She was herself very prettily dressed, and though she looked thin, and at times gave a deep, dismal cough, she was so bright and gay that it was impossible not to feel hopeful about her. She became very confidential with Mrs. Sewell, whom she apparently brevetted Lemuel’s best friend, and obliged to a greater show of interest in him than she had ever felt. She told her the whole history of her love affair, and of how much ‘Manda Grier had done to help it on at first, and then how she had wanted her to break off with Lemuel. “But,” she concluded, “I think we’re goin’ to get along real nice together. I don’t know as we shall live all in the same hou-ou-se; I guess it’ll be the best thing for Lem and I if we can board till we get some little of our health back; I’m more scared for him than what I am for my-se-e-lf. I don’t presume but what we shall both miss the city some; but he might be out of a job all winter in town; I shouldn’t want he should go back on them ca-a-rs. Most I hate is leavin’ ‘Manda Grier, she is the one that I’ve roomed with ever since I first came to Boston; but Lem and her don’t get on very well; they hain’t really either of ’em got anything against each other now, but they don’t like very we-e-ll; and, of course, I got to have the friends that he wants me to have, and that’s what ‘Manda Grier says, to-o-o; and so it’s just as well we’re goin’ to be where they won’t cla-a-sh.”

She talked to Mrs. Sewell in a low voice; but she kept her eyes upon Lemuel all the time; and when Sewell took him and his mother the length of the front drawing-room away, she was quite distraught, and answered at random till he came back.

Sewell did not know what to think. Would this dependence warm her betrothed to greater tenderness than he now showed, or would its excess disgust him? He was not afraid that Lemuel would ever be unkind to her; but he knew that in marriage kindness was not enough. He looked at Lemuel, serious, thoughtful, refined in his beauty by suffering; and then his eye wandered to Statira’s delicate prettiness, so sweet, so full of amiable cheerfulness, so undeniably light and silly. What chiefly comforted him was the fact of an ally whom the young thing had apparently found in Lemuel’s mother. Whether that grim personage’s ignorant pride in her son had been satisfied with a girl of Statira’s style and fashion, and proven capableness in housekeeping, or whether some fancy for butterfly prettiness lurking in the fastnesses of the old woman’s rugged nature had been snared by the gay face and dancing eyes, it was apparent that she at least was in love with Statira. She allowed herself to be poked about and rearranged as to her shawl and the narrow-brimmed youthful hat which she wore on the peak of her skull, and she softened to something like a smile at the touch of Statira’s quick hands.

They had all come rather early to make their parting visit at the Sewells, for the Barkers were going to take the two o’clock train for Willoughby Pastures, while Statira was to remain in Boston till he could make a home for her. Lemuel promised to write, as soon as he should be settled, and tell Sewell about his life and his work; and Sewell, beyond earshot of his wife, told him he might certainly count upon seeing them at Willoughby in the course of the next summer. They all shook hands several times. Lemuel’s mother gave her hand from under the fringe of her shawl, standing bolt upright at arm’s-length off, and Sewell said it felt like a collection of corn-cobs.

XXXV.

“Well?” said Sewell’s wife, when they were gone.

“Well,” he responded; and after a moment he said, “There’s this comfort about it which we don’t always have in such cases: there doesn’t seem to be anybody else. It would be indefinitely worse if there were.”

“Why, of course. What in the world are you thinking about?”

“About that foolish girl who came to me with her miserable love-trouble. I declare, I can’t get rid of it. I feel morally certain that she went away from me and dismissed the poor fellow who was looking to her love to save him.”

“At the cost of some other poor creature who’d trusted and believed in him till his silly fancy changed? I hope for the credit of women that she did. But you may be morally certain she did nothing of the kind. Girls don’t give up all their hopes in life so easily as that. She might think she would do it, because she had read of such things, and thought it was fine, but when it came to the pinch, she wouldn’t.”

“I hope not. If she did she would commit a great error, a criminal error.”

“Well, you needn’t be afraid. Look at Mrs. Tom Corey. And that was her own sister!”

“That was different. Corey had never thought of her sister, much less made love to her, or promised to marry her. Besides, Mrs. Corey had her father and mother to advise her, and support her in behaving sensibly. And this poor creature had nothing but her own novel fed fancies, and her crazy conscience. She thought that because she inflicted suffering upon herself she was acting unselfishly. Really the fakirs of India and the Penitentes of New Mexico are more harmless; for they don’t hurt any one else. If she has forced some poor fellow into a marriage like this of Barker’s she’s committed a deadly sin. She’d better driven him to suicide, than condemned him to live a lie to the end of his days. No doubt she regarded it as a momentary act of expiation. That’s the way her romances taught her to look at loveless marriage — as something spectacular, transitory, instead of the enduring, degrading squalor that it is!”

“What in the world are you talking about, David? I should think you were a novelist yourself, by the wild way you go on! You have no proof whatever that Barker isn’t happily engaged. I’m sure he’s got a much better girl than he deserves, and one that’s fully his equal. She’s only too fond of that dry stick. Such a girl as the one you described, — like that mysterious visitor of yours, — what possible relation could she have with him? She was a lady!”

“Yes, yes! Of course, it’s absurd. But everybody seems to be tangled up with everybody else. My dear, will you give me a cup of tea? I think I’ll go to writing at once.”

Before she left her husband to order his tea Mrs. Sewell asked, “And do you think you have got through with him now?”

“I have just begun with him,” replied Sewell.

His mind, naturally enough in connection with Lemuel, was running upon his friend Evans, and the subject they had once talked of in that room. It was primarily in thinking of him that he begun to write his sermon on Complicity, which made a great impression at the time, and had a more lasting effect as enlarged from the newspaper reports, and reprinted in pamphlet form. His evolution from the text, “Remember them that are in bonds as bound with them,” of a complete philosophy of life, was humorously treated by some of his critics as a phase of Darwinism, but upon the whole the sermon met with great favour. It not only strengthened Sewell’s hold upon the affections of his own congregation, but carried his name beyond Boston, and made him the topic of editorials in the Sunday editions of leading newspapers as far off as Chicago. It struck one of those popular moods of intelligent sympathy when the failure of a large class of underpaid and worthy workers to assert their right to a living wage against a powerful monopoly had sent a thrill of respectful pity through every generous heart in the country; and it was largely supposed that Sewell’s sermon referred indirectly to the telegraphers’ strike. Those who were aware of his habit of seeking to produce a personal rather than a general effect, of his belief that you can have a righteous public only by the slow process of having righteous men and women, knew that he meant something much nearer home to each of his hearers when he preached the old Christ-humanity to them, and enforced again the lessons that no one for good or for evil, for sorrow or joy, for sickness or health, stood apart from his fellows, but each was bound to the highest and the lowest by ties that centred in the hand of God. No man, he said, sinned or suffered to himself alone; his error and his pain darkened and afflicted men who never heard of his name. If a community was corrupt, if an age was immoral, it was not because of the vicious, but the virtuous who fancied themselves indifferent spectators. It was not the tyrant who oppressed, it was the wickedness that had made him possible. The gospel — Christ — God, so far as men had imagined him, — was but a lesson, a type, a witness from everlasting to everlasting of the spiritual unity of man. As we grew in grace, in humanity, in civilisation, our recognition of this truth would be transfigured from a duty to a privilege, a joy, a heavenly rapture. Many men might go through life harmlessly without realising this, perhaps, but sterilely; only those who had had the care of others laid upon them, lived usefully, fruitfully. Let no one shrink from such a burden, or seek to rid himself of it. Rather let him bind it fast upon his neck, and rejoice in it. The wretched, the foolish, the ignorant whom we found at every turn, were something more; they were the messengers of God, sent to tell his secret to any that would hear it. Happy he in whose ears their cry for help was a perpetual voice, for that man, whatever his creed, knew God and could never forget him. In his responsibility for his weaker brethren he was Godlike, for God was but the impersonation of loving responsibility, of infinite and never-ceasing care for us all.

When Sewell came down from his pulpit, many people came up to speak to him of his sermon. Some of the women’s faces showed the traces of tears, and each person had made its application to himself. There were two or three who had heard between the words. Old Bromfield Corey, who was coming a good deal more to church since his eyes began to fail him, because it was a change and a sort of relief from being read to, said —

“I didn’t know that they had translated it Barker in the revised version. Well, you must let me know how he’s getting on, Sewell, and give me a chance at the revelation, too, if he ever gets troublesome to you again.”

Miss Vane was standing at the door with his wife when Sewell came out. She took his hand and pressed it.

“Do you think I threw away my chance?” she demanded. She had her veil down, and at first Sewell thought it was laughter that shook her voice, but it was not that.

He did not know quite what to say, but he did say, “He was sent to me.’”

As they walked off alone, his wife said —

“Well, David, I hope you haven’t preached away all your truth and righteousness.”

“I know what you mean, my dear,” answered Sewell humbly. He added, “You shall remind me if I seem likely to forget.” But he concluded seriously, “If I thought I could never do anything more for Barker, I should be very unhappy; I should take it as a sign that I had been recreant to my charge.”

XXXVI

The minister heard directly from Barker two or three times during the winter, and as often through Statira, who came to see Mrs. Sewell. Barker had not got the place he had hoped for at once, but he had got a school in the country a little way off, and he was doing something; and he expected to do better.

The winter proved a very severe one. “I guess it’s just as well I stayed in town,” said Statira, the last time she came, with a resignation which Mrs. Sewell, fond of the ideal in others as most ladies are, did not like. “‘Manda Grier says ’twould killed me up there; and I d’ know but what it would. I done so well here, since the cold weather set in that ‘Manda Grier she thinks I hadn’t better get married right away; well, not till it comes summer, anyway. I tell her I guess she don’t want I should get married at all, after all she done to help it along first off. Her and Mr. Barker don’t seem to get along very well.”

Now that Statira felt a little better acquainted with Mrs. Sewell, she dropped the genteel elongation of her final syllables, and used such vernacular forms of speech as came first to her. The name of ‘Manda Grier seemed to come in at every fourth word with her, and she tired Mrs. Sewell with visits which she appeared unable to bring to a close of herself.

A long relief from them ended in an alarm for her health with Mrs. Sewell, who went to find her. She found her still better than before, and Statira frankly accounted for her absence by saying that ‘Manda thought she had better not come any more till Mrs. Sewell returned some of her calls. She laughed, and then she said —

“I don’t know as you’d found me here if you’d come much later. ‘Manda Grier don’t want I should be here in the east winds, now it’s coming spring so soon; and she’s heard of a chance at a box factory in Philadelphia. She wants I should go there with her, and I don’t know but what it would be about the best thing.”

Mrs. Sewell could not deny the good sense of the plan, though she was sensible of liking Statira less and less for it.

The girl continued: “Lem — Mr. Barker, I should say — wants I should come up there, out the east winds. But ‘Manda Grier she’s opposed to it: she thinks I’d ought to have more of a mild climate, and he better come down there and get a school if he wants me too,” Statira broke into an impartial little titter. “I’m sure I don’t know which of ’em ‘ll win the day!”

Mrs. Sewell’s report of this speech brought a radiant smile of relief to Sewell’s face. “Ah, well, then! That settles it! I feel perfectly sure that ‘Manda Grier will win the day. That poor, sick, flimsy little Statira is completely under ‘Manda Grier’s thumb, and will do just what she says, now that there’s no direct appeal from her will to Barker’s; they will never be married. Don’t you see that it was ‘Manda Grier’s romance in the beginning, and that when she came to distrust, to dislike Barker, she came to dislike her romance too — to hate it?”

“Well, don’t you romance him, David,” said Mrs. Sewell, only conditionally accepting his theory.

Yet it may be offered to the reader as founded in probability and human nature. In fact, he may be assured here that the marriage which eventually took place was not that of Lemuel with Statira; though how the union, which was not only happiness for those it joined, but whatever is worthier and better in life than happiness, came about, it is aside from the purpose of this story to tell, and must be left for some future inquiry.

THE END

ANNIE KILBURN

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

I.

After the death of Judge Kilburn his daughter came back to America. They had been eleven winters in Rome, always meaning to return, but staying on from year to year, as people do who have nothing definite to call them home. Toward the last Miss Kilburn tacitly gave up the expectation of getting her father away, though they both continued to say that they were going to take passage as soon as the weather was settled in the spring. At the date they had talked of for sailing he was lying in the Protestant cemetery, and she was trying to gather herself together, and adjust her life to his loss. This would have been easier with a younger person, for she had been her father’s pet so long, and then had taken care of his helplessness with a devotion which was finally so motherly, that it was like losing at once a parent and a child when he died, and she remained with the habit of giving herself when there was no longer any one to receive the sacrifice. He had married late, and in her thirty-first year he was seventy-eight; but the disparity of their ages, increasing toward the end through his infirmities, had not loosened for her the ties of custom and affection that bound them; she had seen him grow more and more fitfully cognisant of what they had been to each other since her mother’s death, while she grew the more tender and fond with him. People who came to condole with her seemed not to understand this, or else they thought it would help her to bear up if they treated her bereavement as a relief from hopeless anxiety. They were all surprised when she told them she still meant to go home.

“Why, my dear,” said one old lady, who had been away from America twenty years, “this is home! You’ve lived in this apartment longer now than the oldest inhabitant has lived in most American towns. What are you talking about? Do you mean that you are going back to Washington?”

“Oh no. We were merely staying on in Washington from force of habit, after father gave up practice. I think we shall go back to the old homestead, where we used to spend our summers, ever since I can remember.”

“And where is that?” the old lady asked, with the sharpness which people believe must somehow be good for a broken spirit.

“It’s in the interior of Massachusetts — you wouldn’t know it: a place called Hatboro’.”

“No, I certainly shouldn’t,” said the old lady, with superiority. “Why Hatboro’, of all the ridiculous reasons?”

“It was one of the first places where they began to make straw hats; it was a nickname at first, and then they adopted it. The old name was Dorchester Farms. Father fought the change, but it was of no use; the people wouldn’t have it Farms after the place began to grow; and by that time they had got used to Hatboro’. Besides, I don’t see how it’s any worse than Hatfield, in England.”

“It’s very American.”

“Oh, it’s American. We have Boxboro’ too, you know, in Massachusetts.”

“And you are going from Rome to Hatboro’, Mass.,” said the old lady, trying to present the idea in the strongest light by abbreviating the name of the State.

“Yes,” said Miss Kilburn. “It will be a change, but not so much of a change as you would think. It was father’s wish to go back.”

“Ah, my dear!” cried the old lady. “You’re letting that weigh with you, I see. Don’t do it! If it wasn’t wise, don’t you suppose that the last thing he could wish you to do would be to sacrifice yourself to a sick whim of his?”

The kindness expressed in the words touched Annie Kilburn. She had a certain beauty of feature; she was near-sighted; but her eyes were brown and soft, her lips red and full; her dark hair grew low, and played in little wisps and rings on her temples, where her complexion was clearest; the bold contour of her face, with its decided chin and the rather large salient nose, was like her father’s; it was this, probably, that gave an impression of strength, with a wistful qualification. She was at that time rather thin, and it could have been seen that she would be handsomer when her frame had rounded out in fulfilment of its generous design. She opened her lips to speak, but shut them again in an effort at self-control before she said —

“But I really wish to do it. At this moment I would rather be in Hatboro’ than in Rome.”

“Oh, very well,” said the old lady, gathering herself up as one does from throwing away one’s sympathy upon an unworthy object; “if you really wish it—”

“I know that it must seem preposterous and — and almost ungrateful that I should think of going back, when I might just as well stay. Why, I’ve a great many more friends here than I have there; I suppose I shall be almost a stranger when I get there, and there’s no comparison in congeniality; and yet I feel that I must go back. I can’t tell you why. But I have a longing; I feel that I must try to be of some use in the world — try to do some good — and in Hatboro’ I think I shall know how.” She put on her glasses, and looked at the old lady as if she might attempt an explanation, but, as if a clearer vision of the veteran worldling discouraged her, she did not make the effort.

“Oh!” said the old lady. “If you want to be of use, and do good—” She stopped, as if then there were no more to be said by a sensible person. “And shall you be going soon?” she asked. The idea seemed to suggest her own departure, and she rose after speaking.

“Just as soon as possible,” answered Miss Kilburn. Words take on a colour of something more than their explicit meaning from the mood in which they are spoken: Miss Kilburn had a sense of hurrying her visitor away, and the old lady had a sense of being turned out-of-doors, that the preparations for the homeward voyage might begin instantly.

II.

Many times after the preparations began, and many times after they were ended, Miss Kilburn faltered in doubt of her decision; and if there had been any will stronger than her own to oppose it, she might have reversed it, and stayed in Rome. All the way home there was a strain of misgiving in her satisfaction at doing what she believed to be for the best, and the first sight of her native land gave her a shock of emotion which was not unmixed joy. She felt forlorn among people who were coming home with all sorts of high expectations, while she only had high intentions.

These dated back a good many years; in fact, they dated back to the time when the first flush of her unthinking girlhood was over, and she began to question herself as to the life she was living. It was a very pleasant life, ostensibly. Her father had been elected from the bench to Congress, and had kept his title and his repute as a lawyer through several terms in the House before he settled down to the practice of his profession in the courts at Washington, where he made a good deal of money. They passed from boarding to house-keeping, in the easy Washington way, after their impermanent Congressional years, and divided their time between a comfortable little place in Nevada Circle and the old homestead in Hatboro’. He was fond of Washington, and robustly content with the world as he found it there and elsewhere. If his daughter’s compunctions came to her through him, it must have been from some remoter ancestry; he was not apparently characterised by their transmission, and probably she derived them from her mother, who died when she was a little girl, and of whom she had no recollection. Till he began to break, after they went abroad, he had his own way in everything; but as men grow old or infirm they fall into subjection to their womenkind; their rude wills yield in the suppler insistence of the feminine purpose; they take the colour of the feminine moods and emotions; the cycle of life completes itself where it began, in helpless dependence upon the sex; and Rufus Kilburn did not escape the common lot. He was often complaining and unlovely, as aged and ailing men must be; perhaps he was usually so; but he had moments when he recognised the beauty of his daughter’s aspiration with a spiritual sympathy, which showed that he must always have had an intellectual perception of it. He expressed with rhetorical largeness and looseness the longing which was not very definite in her own heart, and mingled with it a strain of homesickness poignantly simple and direct for the places, the scenes, the persons, the things, of his early days. As he failed more and more, his homesickness was for natural aspects which had wholly ceased to exist through modern changes and improvements, and for people long since dead, whom he could find only in an illusion of that environment in some other world. In the pathos of this situation it was easy for his daughter to keep him ignorant of the passionate rebellion against her own ideals in which she sometimes surprised herself. When he died, all counter-currents were lost in the tidal revulsion of feeling which swept her to the fulfilment of what she hoped was deepest and strongest in her nature, with shame for what she hoped was shallowest, till that moment of repulsion in which she saw the thickly roofed and many towered hills of Boston grow up out of the western waves.

She had always regarded her soul as the battlefield of two opposite principles, the good and the bad, the high and the low. God made her, she thought, and He alone; He made everything that she was; but she would not have said that He made the evil in her. Yet her belief did not admit the existence of Creative Evil; and so she said to herself that she herself was that evil, and she must struggle against herself; she must question whatever she strongly wished because she strongly wished it. It was not logical; she did not push her postulates to their obvious conclusions; and there was apt to be the same kind of break between her conclusions and her actions as between her reasons and her conclusions. She acted impulsively, and from a force which she could not analyse. She indulged reveries so vivid that they seemed to weaken and exhaust her for the grapple with realities; the recollection of them abashed her in the presence of facts.

With all this, it must not be supposed that she was morbidly introspective. Her life had been apparently a life of cheerful acquiescence in worldly conditions; it had been, in some measure, a life of fashion, or at least of society. It had not been without the interests of other girls’ lives, by any means; she had sometimes had fancies, flirtations, but she did not think she had been really in love, and she had refused some offers of marriage for that reason.

III.

The industry of making straw hats began at Hatboro’, as many other industries have begun in New England, with no great local advantages, but simply because its founder happened to live there, and to believe that it would pay. There was a railroad, and labour of the sort he wanted was cheap and abundant in the village and the outlying farms. In time the work came to be done more and more by machinery, and to be gathered into large shops. The buildings increased in size and number; the single line of the railroad was multiplied into four, and in the region of the tracks several large, ugly, windowy wooden bulks grew up for shoe shops; a stocking factory followed; yet this business activity did not warp the old village from its picturesqueness or quiet. The railroad tracks crossed its main street; but the shops were all on one side of them, with the work-people’s cottages and boarding-houses, and on the other were the simple, square, roomy old mansions, with their white paint and their green blinds, varied by the modern colour and carpentry of French-roofed villas. The old houses stood quite close to the street, with a strip of narrow door-yard before them; the new ones affected a certain depth of lawn, over which their owners personally pushed a clucking hand-mower in the summer evenings after tea. The fences had been taken away from the new houses, in the taste of some of the Boston suburbs; they generally remained before the old ones, whose inmates resented the ragged effect that their absence gave the street. The irregularity had hitherto been of an orderly and harmonious kind, such as naturally follows the growth of a country road into a village thoroughfare. The dwellings were placed nearer or further from the sidewalk as their builders fancied, and the elms that met in a low arch above the street had an illusive symmetry in the perspective; they were really set at uneven intervals, and in a line that wavered capriciously in and out. The street itself lounged and curved along, widening and contracting like a river, and then suddenly lost itself over the brow of an upland which formed a natural boundary of the village. Beyond this was South Hatboro’, a group of cottages built by city people who had lately come in — idlers and invalids, the former for the cool summer, and the latter for the dry winter. At chance intervals in the old village new side streets branched from the thoroughfare to the right and the left, and here and there a Queen Anne cottage showed its chimneys and gables on them. The roadway under the elms that kept it dark and cool with their hovering shade, and swept the wagon-tops with their pendulous boughs at places, was unpaved; but the sidewalks were asphalted to the last dwelling in every direction, and they were promptly broken out in winter by the public snow-plough.

Miss Kilburn saw them in the spring, when their usefulness was least apparent, and she did not know whether to praise the spirit of progress which showed itself in them as well as in other things at Hatboro’. She had come prepared to have misgivings, but she had promised herself to be just; she thought she could bear the old ugliness, if not the new. Some of the new things, however, were not so ugly; the young station-master was handsome in his railroad uniform, and pleasanter to the eye than the veteran baggage-master, incongruous in his stiff silk cap and his shirt sleeves and spectacles. The station itself, one of Richardson’s, massive and low, with red-tiled, spreading veranda roofs, impressed her with its fitness, and strengthened her for her encounter with the business architecture of Hatboro’, which was of the florid, ambitious New York type, prevalent with every American town in the early stages of its prosperity. The buildings were of pink brick, faced with granite, and supported in the first story by columns of painted iron; flat-roofed blocks looked down over the low-wooden structures of earlier Hatboro’, and a large hotel had pushed back the old-time tavern, and planted itself flush upon the sidewalk. But the stores seemed very good, as she glanced at them from her carriage, and their show-windows were tastefully arranged; the apothecary’s had an interior of glittering neatness unsurpassed by an Italian apothecary’s; and the provision-man’s, besides its symmetrical array of pendent sides and quarters indoors, had banks of fruit and vegetables without, and a large aquarium with a spraying fountain in its window.

Bolton, the farmer who had always taken care of the Kilburn place, came to meet her at the station and drive her home. Miss Kilburn had bidden him drive slowly, so that she could see all the changes, and she noticed the new town-hall, with which she could find no fault; the Baptist and Methodist churches were the same as of old; the Unitarian church seemed to have shrunk as if the architecture had sympathised with its dwindling body of worshippers; just beyond it was the village green, with the soldiers’ monument, and the tall white-painted flag-pole, and the four small brass cannon threatening the points of the compass at its base.

“Stop a moment, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn; and she put her head quite out of the carriage, and stared at the figure on the monument.

It was strange that the first misgiving she could really make sure of concerning Hatboro’ should relate to this figure, which she herself was mainly responsible for placing there. When the money was subscribed and voted for the statue, the committee wrote out to her at Rome as one who would naturally feel an interest in getting something fit and economical for them. She accepted the trust with zeal and pleasure; but she overruled their simple notion of an American volunteer at rest, with his hands folded on the muzzle of his gun, as intolerably hackneyed and commonplace. Her conscience, she said, would not let her add another recruit to the regiment of stone soldiers standing about in that posture on the tops of pedestals all over the country; and so, instead of going to an Italian statuary with her fellow-townsmen’s letter, and getting him to make the figure they wanted, she doubled the money and gave the commission to a young girl from Kansas, who had come out to develop at Rome the genius recognised at Topeka. They decided together that it would be best to have something ideal, and the sculptor promptly imagined and rapidly executed a design for a winged Victory, poising on the summit of a white marble shaft, and clasping its hands under its chin, in expression of the grief that mingled with the popular exultation. Miss Kilburn had her doubts while the work went on, but she silenced them with the theory that when the figure was in position it would be all right.

Now that she saw it in position she wished to ask Mr. Bolton what was thought of it, but she could not nerve herself to the question. He remained silent, and she felt that he was sorry for her. “Oh, may I be very humble; may I be helped to be very humble!” she prayed under her breath. It seemed as if she could not take her eyes from the figure; it was such a modern, such an American shape, so youthfully inadequate, so simple, so sophisticated, so like a young lady in society indecorously exposed for a tableau vivant. She wondered if the people in Hatboro’ felt all this about it; if they realised how its involuntary frivolity insulted the solemn memory of the slain.

“Drive on, please,” she said gently.

Bolton pulled the reins, and as the horses started he pointed with his whip to a church at the other side of the green. “That’s the new Orthodox church,” he explained.

“Oh, is it?” asked Miss Kilburn. “It’s very handsome, I’m sure.” She was not sensible of admiring the large Romanesque pile very much, though it was certainly not bad, but she remembered that Bolton was a member of the Orthodox church, and she was grateful to him for not saying anything about the soldiers’ monument.

“We sold the old buildin’ to the Catholics, and they moved it down ont’ the side street.”

Miss Kilburn caught the glimmer of a cross where he beckoned, through the flutter of the foliage.

“They had to razee the steeple some to git their cross on,” he added; and then he showed her the high-school building as they passed, and the Episcopal chapel, of blameless church-warden’s Gothic, half hidden by its Japanese ivy, under a branching elm, on another side street.

“Yes,” she said, “that was built before we went abroad.”

“I disremember,” he said absently. He let the horses walk on the soft, darkly shaded road, where the wheels made a pleasant grinding sound, and set himself sidewise on his front seat, so as to talk to Miss Kilburn more at his ease.

“I d’know,” he began, after clearing his throat, with a conscious air, “as you know we’d got a new minister to our church.”

“No, I hadn’t heard of it,” said Miss Kilburn, with her mind full of the monument still. “But I might have heard and forgotten it,” she added. “I was very much taken up toward the last before I left Rome.”

“Well, come to think,” said Bolton; “I don’t know’s you’d had time to heard. He hain’t been here a great while.”

“Is he — satisfactory?” asked Miss Kilburn, feeling how far from satisfactory the Victory was, and formulating an explanatory apology to the committee in her mind.

“Oh yes, he’s satisfactory enough, as far forth as that goes. He’s talented, and he’s right up with the times. Yes, he’s progressive. I guess they got pretty tired of Mr. Rogers, even before he died; and they kept the supply a-goin’ till — all was blue, before they could settle on anybody. In fact they couldn’t seem to agree on anybody till Mr. Peck come.”

Miss Kilburn had got as far, in her tacit interview with the committee, as to have offered to replace at her own expense the Victory with a Volunteer, and she seemed to be listening to Bolton with rapt attention.

“Well, it’s like this,” continued the farmer. “He’s progressive in his idees, ‘n’ at the same time he’s spiritual-minded; and so I guess he suits pretty well all round. Of course you can’t suit everybody. There’s always got to be a dog in the manger, it don’t matter where you go. But if anybody was to ask me, I should say Mr. Peck suited. Yes, I don’t know but what I should.”

Miss Kilburn instantaneously closed her transaction with the committee, removed the Victory, and had the Volunteer unveiled with appropriate ceremonies, opened with prayer by the Rev. Mr. Peck.

“Peck?” she said. “Did you tell me his name was Peck?”

“Yes, ma’am; Rev. Julius W. Peck. He’s from down Penobscotport way, in Maine. I guess he’s all right.”

Miss Kilburn did not reply. Her mind had been taken off the monument for the moment by her dislike for the name of the new minister, and the Victory had seized the opportunity to get back.

Bolton sighed deeply, and continued in a strain whose diffusiveness at last became perceptible to Miss Kilburn through her own humiliation. “There’s some in every community that’s bound to complain, I don’t care what you do to accommodate ‘em; and what I done, I done as much to stop their clack as anything, and give him the right sort of a start off, an’ I guess I did. But Mis’ Bolton she didn’t know but what you’d look at it in the light of a libbutty, and I didn’t know but what you would think I no business to done it.”

He seemed to be addressing a question to her, but she only replied with a dazed frown, and Bolton was obliged to go on.

“I didn’t let him room in your part of the house; that is to say, not sleep there; but I thought, as you was comin’ home, and I better be airin’ it up some, anyway, I might as well let him set in the old Judge’s room. If you think it was more than I had a right to do, I’m willin’ to pay for it. Git up!” Bolton turned fully round toward his horses, to hide the workings of emotion in his face, and shook the reins like a desperate man.

“What are you talking about, Mr. Bolton?” cried Miss Kilburn. “Whom are you talking about?”

Bolton answered, with a kind of violence, “Mr. Peck; I took him to board, first off.”

“You took him to board?”

“Yes. I know it wa’n’t just accordin’ to the letter o’ the law, and the old Judge was always pootty p’tic’lah. But I’ve took care of the place goin’ on twenty years now, and I hain’t never had a chick nor a child in it before. The child,” he continued, partly turning his face round again, and beginning to look Miss Kilburn in the eye, “wa’n’t one to touch anything, anyway, and we kep’ her in our part all the while; Mis’ Bolton she couldn’t seem to let her out of her sight, she got so fond of her, and she used to follow me round among the hosses like a kitten. I declare, I miss her.”

Bolton’s face, the colour of one of the lean ploughed fields of Hatboro’, and deeply furrowed, lighted up with real feeling, which he tried to make go as far in the work of reconciling Miss Kilburn as if it had been factitious.

“But I don’t understand,” she said. “What child are you talking about?”

“Mr. Peck’s.”

“Was he married?” she asked, with displeasure, she did not know why.

“Well, yes, he had been,” answered Bolton. “But she’d be’n in the asylum ever since the child was born.”

“Oh,” said Miss Kilburn, with relief; and she fell back upon the seat from which she had started forward.

Bolton might easily have taken her tone for that of disgust. He faced round upon her once more. “It was kind of queer, his havin’ the child with him, an’ takin’ most the care of her himself; and so, as I say, Mis’ Bolton and me we took him in, as much to stop folks’ mouths as anything, till they got kinder used to it. But we didn’t take him into your part, as I say; and as I say, I’m willin’ to pay you whatever you say for the use of the old Judge’s study. I presume that part of it was a libbutty.”

“It was all perfectly right, Mr. Bolton,” said Miss Kilburn.

“His wife died anyway, more than a year ago,” said Bolton, as if the fact completed his atonement to Miss Kilburn, “Git ep! I told him from the start that it had got to be a temporary thing, an’ ‘t I only took him till he could git settled somehow. I guess he means to go to house-keepin’, if he can git the right kind of a house-keeper; he wants an old one. If it was a young one, I guess he wouldn’t have any great trouble, if he went about it the right way.” Bolton’s sarcasm was merely a race sarcasm. He was a very mild man, and his thick-growing eyelashes softened and shadowed his grey eyes, and gave his lean face pathos.

“You could have let him stay till he had found a suitable place,” said Miss Kilburn.

“Oh, I wa’n’t goin’ to do that,” said Bolton. “But I’m ‘bliged to you just the same.”

They came up in sight of the old square house, standing back a good distance from the road, with a broad sweep of grass sloping down before it into a little valley, and rising again to the wall fencing the grounds from the street. The wall was overhung there by a company of magnificent elms, which turned and formed one side of the avenue leading to the house. Their tops met and mixed somewhat incongruously with those of the stiff dark maples which more densely shaded the other side of the lane.

Bolton drove into their gloom, and then out into the wide sunny space at the side of the house where Miss Kilburn had alighted so often with her father. Bolton’s dog, grown now so very old as to be weak-minded, barked crazily at his master, and then, recognising him, broke into an imbecile whimper, and went back and coiled his rheumatism up in the sun on a warm stone before the door. Mrs. Bolton had to step over him as she came out, formally supporting her right elbow with her left hand as she offered the other in greeting to Miss Kilburn, with a look of question at her husband.

Miss Kilburn intercepted the look, and began to laugh.

All was unchanged, and all so strange; it seemed as if her father must both get down with her from the carriage and come to meet her from the house. Her glance involuntarily took in the familiar masses and details; the patches of short tough grass mixed with decaying chips and small weeds underfoot, and the spacious June sky overhead; the fine network and blisters of the cracking and warping white paint on the clapboarding, and the hills beyond the bulks of the village houses and trees; the woodshed stretching with its low board arches to the barn, and the milk-pans tilted to sun against the underpinning of the L, and Mrs. Bolton’s pot plants in the kitchen window.

“Did you think I could be hard about such a thing as that? It was perfectly right. O Mrs. Bolton!” She stopped laughing and began to cry; she put away Mrs. Bolton’s carefully offered hand, she threw herself upon the bony structure of her bosom, and buried her face sobbing in the leathery folds of her neck.

Mrs. Bolton suffered her embrace above the old dog, who fled with a cry of rheumatic apprehension from the sweep of Miss Kilburn’s skirts, and then came back and snuffed at them in a vain effort to recall her.

“Well, go in and lay down by the stove,” said Mrs. Bolton, with a divided interest, while she beat Miss Kilburn’s back with her bony palm in sign of sympathy. But the dog went off up the lane, and stood there by the pasture bars, barking abstractedly at intervals.

IV.

Miss Kilburn found that the house had been well aired for her coming, but an old earthy and mouldy smell, which it took days and nights of open doors and windows to drive out, stole back again with the first turn of rainy weather. She had fires built on the hearths and in the stoves, and after opening her trunks and scattering her dresses on beds and chairs, she spent most of the first week outside of the house, wandering about the fields and orchards to adjust herself anew to the estranged features of the place. The house she found lower-ceiled and smaller than she remembered it. The Boltons had kept it up very well, and in spite of the earthy and mouldy smell, it was conscientiously clean. There was not a speck of dust anywhere; the old yellowish-white paint was spotless; the windows shone. But there was a sort of frigidity in the perfect order and repair which repelled her, and she left her things tossed about, as if to break the ice of this propriety. In several places, within and without, she found marks of the faithful hand of Bolton in economical patches of the woodwork; but she was not sure that they had not been there eleven years before; and there were darnings in the carpets and curtains, which affected her with the same mixture of novelty and familiarity. Certain stale smells about the place (minor smells as compared with the prevalent odour) confused her; she could not decide whether she remembered them of old, or was reminded of the odours she used to catch in passing the pantry on the steamer.

Her father had never been sure that he would not return any next year or month, and the house had always been ready to receive them. In his study everything was as he left it. His daughter looked for signs of Mr. Peck’s occupation, but there were none; Mrs. Bolton explained that she had put him in a table from her own sitting-room to write at. The Judge’s desk was untouched, and his heavy wooden arm-chair stood pulled up to it as if he were in it. The ranks of law-books, in their yellow sheepskin, with their red titles above and their black titles below, were in the order he had taught Mrs. Bolton to replace them in after dusting; the stuffed owl on a shelf above the mantel looked down with a clear solemnity in its gum-copal eyes, and Mrs. Bolton took it from its perch to show Miss Kilburn that there was not a moth on it, nor the sign of a moth.

Miss Kilburn experienced here that refusal of the old associations to take the form of welcome which she had already felt in the earth and sky and air outside; in everything there was a sense of impassable separation. Her dead father was no nearer in his wonted place than the trees of the orchard, or the outline of the well-known hills, or the pink of the familiar sunsets. In her rummaging about the house she pulled open a chest of drawers which used to stand in the room where she slept when a child. It was full of her own childish clothing, a little girl’s linen and muslin; and she thought with a throe of despair that she could as well hope to get back into these outgrown garments, which the helpless piety of Mrs. Bolton had kept from the rag-bag, as to think of re-entering the relations of the life so long left off.

It surprised her to find how cold the Boltons were; she had remembered them as always very kind and willing; but she was so used now to the ways of the Italians and their showy affection, it was hard for her to realise that people could be both kind and cold. The Boltons seemed ashamed of their feelings, and hid them; it was the same in some degree with all the villagers when she began to meet them, and the fact slowly worked back into her consciousness, wounding its way in. People did not come to see her at once. They waited, as they told her, till she got settled, before they called, and then they did not appear very glad to have her back.

But this was not altogether the effect of their temperament. The Kilburns had made a long summer always in Hatboro’, and they had always talked of it as home; but they had never passed a whole year there since Judge Kilburn first went to Congress, and they were not regarded as full neighbours or permanent citizens. Miss Kilburn, however, kept up her childhood friendships, and she and some of the ladies called one another by their Christian names, but they believed that she met people in Washington whom she liked better; the winters she spent there certainly weakened the ties between them, and when it came to those eleven years in Rome, the letters they exchanged grew rarer and rarer, till they stopped altogether. Some of the girls went away; some died; others became dead and absent to her in their marriages and household cares.

After waiting for one another, three of them came together to see her one day. They all kissed her, after a questioning glance at her face and dress, as if they wanted to see whether she had grown proud or too fashionable. But they were themselves apparently much better dressed, and certainly more richly dressed. In a place like Hatboro’, where there is no dinner-giving, and evening parties are few, the best dress is a street costume, which may be worn for calls and shopping, and for church and all public entertainments. The well-to-do ladies make an effect of outdoor fashion, in which the poorest shop hand has her part; and in their turn they share her indoor simplicity. These old friends of Annie’s wore bonnets and frocks of the latest style and costly material.

They let her make the advances, receiving them with blank passivity, or repelling them with irony, according to the several needs of their self-respect, and talking to one another across her. One of them asked her when her hair had begun to turn, and they each told her how thin she was, but promised her that Hatboro’ air would bring her up. At the same time they feigned humility in regard to everything about Hatboro’ but the air; they laughed when she said she intended now to make it her home the whole year round, and said they guessed she would be tired of it long before fall; there were plenty of summer folks that passed the winter as long as the June weather lasted. As they grew more secure of themselves, or less afraid of one another in her presence, their voices rose; they laughed loudly at nothing, and they yelled in a nervous chorus at times, each trying to make herself heard above the others.

She asked them about the social life in the village, and they told her that a good many new people had really settled there, but they did not know whether she would like them; they were not the old Hatboro’ style. Annie showed them some of the things she had brought home, especially Roman views, and they said now she ought to give an evening in the church parlour with them.

“You’ll have to come to our church, Annie,” said Mrs. Putney. “The Unitarian doesn’t have preaching once in a month, and Mr. Peck is very liberal.”

“He’s ‘most too liberal for some,” said Emmeline Gerrish. Of the three she had grown the stoutest, and from being a slight, light-minded girl, she had become a heavy matron, habitually censorious in her speech. She did not mean any more by it, however, than she did by her girlish frivolity, and if she was not supported in her severity, she was apt to break down and disown it with a giggle, as she now did.

“Well, I don’t know about his being too liberal,” said Mrs. Wilmington, a large red-haired blonde, with a lazy laugh. “He makes you feel that you’re a pretty miserable sinner.” She made a grimace of humorous disgust.

“Mr. Gerrish says that’s just the trouble,” Mrs. Gerrish broke in. “Mr. Peck don’t put stress enough on the promises. That’s what Mr. Gerrish says. You must have been surprised, Annie,” she added, “to find that he’d been staying in your house.”

“I was glad Mrs. Bolton invited him,” answered Annie sincerely, but not instantly.

The ladies waited, with an exchange of glances, for her reply, as if they had talked the matter over beforehand, and had agreed to find out just how Annie Kilburn felt about it.

“Oh, I guess he paid his board,” said Mrs. Wilmington, jocosely rejecting the implication that he had been the guest of the Boltons.

“I don’t see what he expects to do with that little girl of his, without any mother, that way,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “He ought to get married.”

“Perhaps he will, when he’s waited a proper time,” suggested Mrs. Putney demurely.

“Well, his wife’s been the same as dead ever since the child was born. I don’t know what you call a proper time, Ellen,” argued Mrs. Gerrish.

“I presume a minister feels differently about such things,” Mrs. Wilmington remarked indolently.

“I don’t see why a minister should feel any different from anybody else,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “It’s his duty to do it on his child’s account. I don’t see why he don’t have the remains brought to Hatboro’, anyway.”

They debated this point at some length, and they seemed to forget Annie. She listened with more interest than her concern in the last resting-place of the minister’s dead wife really inspired. These old friends of hers seemed to have lost the sensitiveness of their girlhood without having gained tenderness in its place. They treated the affair with a nakedness that shocked her. In the country and in small towns people come face to face with life, especially women. It means marrying, child-bearing, household cares and burdens, neighbourhood gossip, sickness, death, burial, and whether the corpse appeared natural. But ever so much kindness goes with their disillusion; they are blunted, but not embittered.

They ended by recalling Annie to mind, and Mrs. Putney said: “I suppose you haven’t been to the cemetery yet? They’ve got it all fixed up since you went away — drives laid out, and paths cut through, and everything. A good many have put up family tombs, and they’ve taken away the old iron fences round the lots, and put granite curbing. They mow the grass all the time. It’s a perfect garden.” Mrs. Putney was a small woman, already beginning to wrinkle. She had married a man whom Annie remembered as a mischievous little boy, with a sharp tongue and a nervous temperament; her father had always liked him when he came about the house, but Annie had lost sight of him in the years that make small boys and girls large ones, and he was at college when she went abroad. She had an impression of something unhappy in her friend’s marriage.

“I think it’s too much fixed up myself,” said Mrs. Gerrish. She turned suddenly to Annie: “You going to have your father fetched home?”

The other ladies started a little at the question and looked at Annie; it was not that they were shocked, but they wanted to see whether she would not be so.

“No,” she said briefly. She added, helplessly, “It wasn’t his wish.”

“I should have thought he would have liked to be buried alongside of your mother,” said Mrs. Gerrish. “But the Judge always was a little peculiar. I presume you can have the name and the date put on the monument just the same.”

Annie flushed at this intimate comment and suggestion from a woman whom as a girl she had never admitted to familiarity with her, but had tolerated her because she was such a harmless simpleton, and hung upon other girls whom she liked better. The word monument cowed her, however. She was afraid they might begin to talk about the soldiers’ monument. She answered hastily, and began to ask them about their families.

Mrs. Wilmington, who had no children, and Mrs. Putney, who had one, spoke of Mrs. Gerrish’s large family. She had four children, and she refused the praises of her friends for them, though she celebrated them herself. “You ought to have seen the two little girls that Ellen lost, Annie,” she said. “Ellen Putney, I don’t see how you ever got over that. Those two lovely, healthy children gone, and poor little Winthrop left! I always did say it was too hard.”

She had married a clerk in the principal dry-goods store, who had prospered rapidly, and was now one of the first business men of the place, and had an ambition to be a leading citizen. She believed in his fitness to deal with the questions of religion and education which he took part in, and was always quoting Mr. Gerrish. She called him Mr. Gerrish so much that other people began to call him so too. But Mrs. Putney’s husband held out against it, and had the habit of returning the little man’s ceremonious salutations with an easy, “Hello, Billy,” “Good morning, Billy.” It was his theory that this was good for Gerrish, who might otherwise have forgotten when everybody called him Billy. He was one of the old Putneys; and he was a lawyer by profession.

Mrs. Wilmington’s husband had come to Hatboro’ since Annie’s long absence began; he had capital, and he had started a stocking-mill in Hatboro’. He was much older than his wife, whom he had married after a protracted widowerhood. She had one of the best houses and the most richly furnished in Hatboro’. She and Mrs. Putney saw Mrs. Gerrish at rare intervals, and in observance of some notable fact of their girlish friendship like the present.

In pursuance of the subject of children, Mrs. Gerrish said that she sometimes had a notion to offer to take Mr. Peck’s little girl herself till he could get fixed somehow, but Mr. Gerrish would not let her. Mr. Gerrish said Mr. Peck had better get married himself if he wanted a step-mother for his little girl. Mr. Gerrish was peculiar about keeping a family to itself.

“Well, you’ll think we’ve come to board with you too,” said Mrs. Putney, in reference to Mr. Peck.

The ladies all rose, and having got upon their feet, began to shout and laugh again — like girls, they implied.

They stayed and talked a long time after rising, with the same note of unsparing personality in their talk. Where there are few public interests and few events, as in such places, there can be no small-talk, nothing of the careless touch-and-go of larger societies. Every one knows all the others, and knows the worst of them. People are not unkind; they are mutually and freely helpful; but they have only themselves to occupy their minds. Annie’s friends had also to distinguish themselves to her from the rest of the villagers, and it was easiest to do this by an attitude of criticism mingled with large allowance. They ended a dissection of the community by saying that they believed there was no place like Hatboro’, after all.

In the contagion of their perfunctory gaiety Annie began to scream and laugh too, as she followed them to the door, and stood talking to them while they got into Mrs. Wilmington’s extension-top carry-all. She answered with deafening promises, when they put their bonnets out of the carry-all and called back to her to be sure to come soon to see them soon.

V.

Mrs. Bolton made no advances with Annie toward the discussion of her friends; but when Annie asked about their families, she answered with the incisive directness of a country-bred woman. She delivered her judgments as she went about her work, the morning after the ladies’ visit, while Annie sat before the breakfast-table, which she had given her leave to clear. As she passed in and out from the dining-room to the kitchen she kept talking; she raised her voice in the further room, and lowered it when she drew near again. She wore a dismal calico wrapper, which made no compromise with the gauntness of her figure; her reddish-brown hair, which grew in a fringe below her crown, was plaited into small tags or tails, pulled up and tied across the top of her head, the bare surfaces of which were curiously mottled with the dye which she sometimes put on her hair. Behind, this was gathered up into a small knob pierced with a single hair-pin; the arrangement left Mrs. Bolton’s visage to the unrestricted expression of character. She did not let it express toward Annie any expectation of the confidential relations that are supposed to exist between people who have been a long time master and servant. She had never recognised her relations with the Kilburns in these terms. She was a mature Yankee single woman, of confirmed self-respect, when she first came as house-keeper to Judge Kilburn, twenty years ago, and she had not changed her nature in changing her condition by her marriage with Oliver Bolton; she was childless, unless his comparative youth conferred a sort of adoptive maternity upon her.

Annie went into her father’s study, where she had lit the fire in the Franklin-stove on her way to breakfast. It had come on to rain during the night, after the fine yesterday which Mrs. Gerrish had denounced to its face as a weather-breeder. At first it rained silently, stealthily; but toward morning Annie heard the wind rising, and when she looked out of her window after daylight she found a fierce north-easterly storm drenching and chilling the landscape. Now across the flattened and tangled grass of the lawn the elms were writhing in the gale, and swinging their long lean boughs to and fro; from another window she saw the cuffed and hustled maples ruffling their stiff masses of foliage, and shuddering in the storm. She turned away, with a sigh of the luxurious melancholy which a northeaster inspires in people safely sheltered from it, and sat down before her fire. She recalled the three women who had visited her the day before, in the better-remembered figures of their childhood and young girlhood; and their present character did not seem a broken promise. Nothing was really disappointed in it but the animal joy, the hopeful riot of their young blood, which must fade and die with the happiest fate. She perceived that what they had come to was not unjust to what they had been; and as our own fate always appears to us unaccomplished, a thing for the distant future to fulfil, she began to ask herself what was to be the natural sequence of such a temperament, such mental and moral traits, as hers. Had her life been so noble in anything but vague aspirations that she could ever reasonably expect the destiny of grand usefulness which she had always unreasonably expected? The question came home to her with such pain, in the light of what her old playmates had become, that she suddenly ceased to enjoy the misery of the storm out-of-doors, or the purring content of the fire on the hearth of the stove at her feet; the book she had taken down to read fell unopened into her lap, and she gave herself up to a half-hour of such piercing self-question as only a high-minded woman can endure when the flattering promises of youth have grown vague and few.

There is no condition of life that is wholly acceptable, but none that is not tolerable when once it establishes itself; and while Annie Kilburn had never consented to be an old maid, she had become one without great suffering. At thirty-one she could not call herself anything else; she often called herself an old maid, with the mental reservation that she was not one. She was merely unmarried; she might marry any time. Now, when she assured herself of this, as she had done many times before, she suddenly wondered if she should ever marry; she wondered if she had seemed to her friends yesterday like a person who would never marry. Did one carry such a thing in one’s looks? Perhaps they idealised her; they had not seen her since she was twenty, and perhaps they still thought of her as a young girl. It now seemed to her as if she had left her youth in Rome, as in Rome it had seemed to her that she should find it again in Hatboro’. A pang of aimless, unlocalised homesickness passed through her; she realised that she was alone in the world. She rose to escape the pang, and went to the window of the parlour which looked toward the street, where she saw the figure of a young man draped in a long indiarubber gossamer coat fluttering in the wind that pushed him along as he tacked on a southerly course; he bowed and twisted his head to escape the lash of the rain. She watched him till he turned into the lane leading to the house, and then, at a discreeter distance, she watched him through the window at the other corner, making his way up to the front door in the teeth of the gale. He seemed to have a bundle under his arm, and as he stepped into the shelter of the portico, and freed his arm to ring, she discovered that it was a bundle of books. Whether Mrs. Bolton did not hear the bell, or whether she heard it and decided that it would be absurd to leave her work for it, when Miss Kilburn, who was so much nearer, could answer it, she did not come, even at a second ring, and Annie was forced to go to the door herself, or leave the poor man dripping in the cold wind outside.

She had made up her mind, at sight of the books, that he was a canvasser for some subscription book, such as used to come in her father’s time, but when she opened to him he took off his hat with a great deal of manner, and said “Miss Kilburn?” with so much insinuation of gentle disinterestedness, that it flashed upon her that it might be Mr. Peck.

“Yes,” she said, with confusion, while the flash of conjecture faded away.

“Mr. Brandreth,” said her visitor, whom she now saw to be much younger than Mr. Peck could be. He looked not much more than twenty-two or twenty-three; his damp hair waved and curled upon his temples and forehead, and his blue eyes lightened from a beardless and freshly shaven face. “I called this morning because I felt sure of finding you at home.”

He smiled at his reference to the weather, and Annie smiled too as she again answered, “Yes?” She did not want his books, but she liked something that was cheerful and enthusiastic in him; she added, “Won’t you step into the study?”

“Thanks, yes,” said the young man, flinging off his gossamer, and hanging it up to drip into the pan of the hat rack. He gathered up his books from the chair where he had laid them, and held them at his waist with both hands, while he bowed her precedence beside the study door.

“I don’t know,” he began, “but I ought to apologise for coming on a day like this, when you were not expecting to be interrupted.”

“Oh no; I’m not at all busy. But you must have had courage to brave a storm like this.”

“No. The truth is, Miss Kilburn, I was very anxious to see you about a matter I have at heart — that I desire your help with.”

“He wants me,” Annie thought, “to give him the use of my name as a subscriber to his book” — there seemed really to be a half-dozen books in his bundle— “and he’s come to me first.”

“I had expected to come with Mrs. Munger — she’s a great friend of mine; you haven’t met her yet, but you’ll like her; she’s the leading spirit in South Hatboro’ — and we were coming together this morning; but she was unexpectedly called away yesterday, and so I ventured to call alone.”

“I’m very glad to see you, Mr. Brandreth,” Annie said. “Then Mrs. Munger has subscribed already, and I’m only second fiddle, after all,” she thought.

“The truth is,” said Mr. Brandreth, “I’m the factotum, or teetotum, of the South Hatboro’ ladies’ book club, and I’ve been deputed to come and see if you wouldn’t like to join it.”

“Oh!” said Annie, and with a thrill of dismay she asked herself how much she had let her manner betray that she had supposed he was a book agent. “I shall be very glad indeed, Mr. Brandreth.”

“Mrs. Munger was sure you would,” said Mr. Brandreth joyously. “I’ve brought some of the books with me — the last,” he said; and Annie had time to get into a new social attitude toward him during their discussion of the books. She chose one, and Mr. Brandreth took her subscription, and wrote her name in the club book.

“One of the reasons,” he said, “why I would have preferred to come with Mrs. Munger is that she is so heart and soul with me in my little scheme. She could have put it before you in so much better light than I can. But she was called away so suddenly.”

“I hope for no serious cause,” said Annie.

“Oh no! It’s just to Cambridge. Her son is one of the Freshman Nine, and he’s been hit by a ball.”

“Oh!” said Annie.

“Yes; it’s a great pity for Mrs. Munger. But I come to you for advice as well as co-operation, Miss Kilburn. You must have met a great many English people in Rome, and heard some of them talk about it. We’re thinking, some of the young people here, about getting up some outdoor theatricals, like Lady Archibald Campbell’s, don’t you know. You know about them?” he added, at the blankness in her face.

“I read accounts of them in the English papers. They must have been very — original. But do you think that in a community like Hatboro’ — Are there enough who could — enter into the spirit?”

“Oh yes, indeed!” cried Mr. Brandreth ardently. “You’ve no idea what a place Hatboro’ has got to be. You’ve not been about much yet, Miss Kilburn?”

“No,” said Annie; “I haven’t really been off our own place since I came. I’ve seen nobody but two or three old friends, and we naturally talked more about old times than anything else. But I hear that there are great changes.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth. “The social growth has been even greater than the business growth. You’ve no idea! People have come in for the winter as well as the summer. South Hatboro’, where we live — you must see South Hatboro’, Miss Kilburn! — is quite a famous health resort. A great many Boston doctors send their patients to us now, instead of Colorado or the Adirondacks. In fact, that’s what brought us to Hatboro’. My mother couldn’t have lived, if she had tried to stay in Melrose. One lung all gone, and the other seriously affected. And people have found out what a charming place it is for the summer. It’s cool; and it’s so near, you know; the gentlemen can run out every night — only an hour and a quarter from town, and expresses both ways. All very agreeable people, too; and cultivated. Mr. Fellows, the painter, makes a long summer; he bought an old farm-house, and built a studio; Miss Jennings, the flower-painter, has a little box there, too; Mr. Chapley, the publisher, of New York, has built; the Misses Clevinger, and Mrs. Valence, are all near us. There’s one family from Chicago — quite nice — New England by birth, you know; and Mrs. Munger, of course; so that there’s a very pleasant variety.”

“I certainly had no idea of it,” said Annie.

“I knew you couldn’t have,” said Mr. Brandreth, “or you wouldn’t have felt any doubt about our having the material for the theatricals. You see, I want to interest all the nice people in it, and make it a whole-town affair. I think it’s a great pity for some of the old village families and the summer folks, as they call us, not to mingle more than they do, and Mrs. Munger thinks so too; and we’ve been talking you over, Miss Kilburn, and we’ve decided that you could do more than anybody else to help on a scheme that’s meant to bring them together.”

“Because I’m neither summer folks nor old village families?” asked Annie.

“Because you’re both,” retorted Mr. Brandreth.

“I don’t see that,” said Annie; “but we’ll suppose the case, for the sake of argument. What do you expect me to do in theatricals, in-doors or out? I never took part in anything of the kind; I can’t see an inch beyond the end of my nose without glasses; I never could learn the simplest thing by heart; I’m clumsy and awkward; I get confused.”

“Oh, my dear Miss Kilburn, spare yourself! We don’t expect you to take part in the play. I don’t admit that you’re what you say at all; but we only want you to lend us your countenance.”

“Oh, is that all? And what do you expect to do with my countenance?” Annie said, with a laugh of misgiving.

“Everything. We know how much influence your name has — one of the old Hatboro’ names — in the community, and all that; and we do want to interest the whole community in our scheme. We want to establish a Social Union for the work-people, don’t you know, and we think it would be much nicer if it seemed to originate with the old village people.”

Annie could not resist an impression in favour of the scheme. It gave definition to the vague intentions with which she had returned to Hatboro’; it might afford her a chance to make reparation for the figure on the soldiers’ monument.

“I’m not sure,” she began. “If I knew just what a Social Union is—”

“Well, at first,” Mr. Brandreth interposed, “it will only be a reading-room, supplied with the magazines and papers, and well lighted and heated, where the work-people — those who have no families especially — could spend their evenings. Afterward we should hope to have a kitchen, and supply tea and coffee — and oysters, perhaps — at a nominal cost; and ice-cream in the summer.”

“But what have your outdoor theatricals to do — But of course. You intend to give the proceeds—”

“Exactly. And we want the proceeds to be as large as possible. We propose to give our time and money to getting the thing up in the best shape, and then we want all the villagers to give their half-dollars and make it a success every way.”

“I see,” said Annie.

“We want it to be successful, and we want it to be distinguished; we want to make it unique. Mrs. Munger is going to give her grounds and the decorations, and there will be a supper afterward, and a little dance.”

“Such things are a great deal of trouble,” said Annie, with a smile, from the vantage-ground of her larger experience. “What do you propose to do — what play?”

“Well, we’ve about decided upon some scenes from Romeo and Juliet. They would be very easy to set, outdoors, don’t you know, and everybody knows them, and they wouldn’t be hard to do. The ballroom in the house of the Capulets could be made to open on a kind of garden terrace — Mrs. Munger has a lovely terrace in her grounds for lawn-tennis — and then we could have a minuet on the grass. You know Miss Mather introduces a minuet in that scene, and makes a great deal of it. Or, I forgot. She’s come up since you went away.”

“Yes; I hadn’t heard of her. Isn’t a minuet at Verona in the time of the Scaligeri rather—”

“Well, yes, it is, rather. But you’ve no idea how pretty it is. And then, you know, we could have the whole of the balcony scene, and other bits that we choose to work in — perhaps parts of other acts that would suit the scene.”

“Yes, it would be charming; I can see how very charming it could be made.”

“Then we may count upon you?” he asked.

“Yes, yes,” she said; “but I don’t really know what I’m to do.”

Mr. Brandreth had risen; but he sat down again, as if glad to afford her any light he could throw upon the subject.

“How am I to ‘influence people,’ as you say?” she continued. “I’m quite a stranger in Hatboro’; I hardly know anybody.”

“But a great many people know you, Miss Kilburn. Your name is associated with the history of the place, and you could do everything for us. You won’t refuse!” cried Mr. Brandreth winningly. “For instance, you know Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Oh yes; she’s an old girl-friend of mine.”

“Then you know how enormously clever she is. She can do anything. We want her to take an active part — the part of the Nurse. She’s delightfully funny. But you know her peculiar temperament — how she hates initiative of all kinds; and we want somebody to bring Mr. Wilmington round. If we could get them committed to the scheme, and a man like Mr. Putney — he’d make a capital Mercutio — it would go like wildfire. We want to interest the churches, too. The object is so worthy, and the theatricals will be so entirely unobjectionable in every respect. We have the Unitarians and Universalists, of course. The Baptists and Methodists will be hard to manage; but the Orthodox are of so many different shades; and I understand the new minister, Mr. Peck, is very liberal. He was here in your house, I believe.”

“Yes; but I never saw him,” said Annie. “He boarded with the farmer. I’m a Unitarian myself.”

“Of course. It would be a great point gained if we could interest him. Every care will be taken to have the affair unobjectionable. You see, the design is to let everybody come to the theatricals, and only those remain to the supper and dance whom we invite. That will keep out the socially objectionable element — the shoe-shop hands and the straw-shop girls.”

“Oh,” said Annie. “But isn’t the — the Social Union for just that class?”

“Yes, it’s expressly for them, and we intend to organise a system of entertainments — lectures, concerts, readings — for the winter, and keep them interested the whole year round in it. The object is to show them that the best people in the community have their interests at heart, and wish to get on common ground with them.”

“Yes,” said Annie, “the object is certainly very good.”

Mr. Brandreth rose again, and put out his hand. “Then you will help us?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that yet.”

“At least you won’t hinder us?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then I consider you in a very hopeful condition, Miss Kilburn, and I feel that I can safely leave you to Mrs. Munger. She is coming to see you as soon as she gets back.”

Annie found herself sadder when he was gone, and she threw herself upon the old feather-cushioned lounge to enjoy a reverie in keeping with the dreary storm outside. Was it for this that she had left Rome? She had felt, as every American of conscience feels abroad, the drawings of a duty, obscure and indefinable, toward her country, the duty to come home and do something for it, be something in it. This is the impulse of no common patriotism; it is perhaps a sense of the opportunity which America supremely affords for the race to help itself, and for each member of it to help all the rest.

But from the moment Annie arrived in Hatboro’ the difficulty of being helpful to anything or any one had increased upon her with every new fact that she had learned about it and the people in it. To her they seemed terribly self-sufficing. They seemed occupied and prosperous, from her front parlour window; she did not see anybody going by who appeared to be in need of her; and she shrank from a more thorough exploration of the place. She found she had fancied necessity coming to her and taking away her good works, as it were, in a basket; but till Mr. Brandreth appeared with his scheme, nothing had applied for her help. She had always hated theatricals; they bored her; and yet the Social Union was a good object, and if this scheme would bring her acquainted in Hatboro’ it might be the stepping-stone to something better, something really or more ideally useful. She wondered what South Hatboro’ was like; she would get Mrs. Bolton’s opinion, which, if severe, would be just. She would ask Mrs. Bolton about Mrs. Munger, too. She would tell Mrs. Bolton to tell Mr. Peck to call to dine. Would it be thought patronising to Mr. Peck?

The fire from the Franklin-stove diffused a drowsy comfort through the room, the rain lashed the window-panes, and the wind shrilled in the gable. Annie fell off to sleep. When she woke up she heard Mrs. Bolton laying the table for her one o’clock dinner, and she knew it was half-past twelve, because Mrs. Bolton always laid the table just half an hour beforehand. She went out to speak to Mrs. Bolton.

There was no want of distinctness in Mrs. Bolton’s opinion, but Annie felt that there was a want of perspective and proportion in it, arising from the narrowness of Mrs. Bolton’s experience and her ignorance of the world; she was farm-bred, and she had always lived upon the outskirts of Hatboro’, even when it was a much smaller place than now. But Mrs. Bolton had her criterions, and she believed in them firmly; in a time when agnosticism extends among cultivated people to every region of conjecture, the social convictions of Mrs. Bolton were untainted by misgiving. In the first place, she despised laziness, and as South Hatboro’ was the summer home of open and avowed disoccupation, of an idleness so entire that it had to seek refuge from itself in all manner of pastimes, she held its population in a contempt to which her meagre phrase did imperfect justice. From time to time she had to stop altogether, and vent it in “Wells!” of varying accents and inflections, but all expressive of aversion, and in snorts and sniffs still more intense in purport.

Then she held that people who had nothing else to do ought at least to be exemplary in their lives, and she was merciless to the goings-on in South Hatboro’, which had penetrated on the breath of scandal to the elder village. When Annie came to find out what these were, she did not think them dreadful; they were small flirtations and harmless intimacies between the members of the summer community, which in the imagination of the village blackened into guilty intrigue. On the tongues of some, South Hatboro’ was another Gomorrah; Mrs. Bolton believed the worst, especially of the women.

“I hear,” said Mrs. Bolton, “that them women come up here for rest. I don’t know what they want to rest from; but if it’s from doin’ nothin’ all winter long, I guess they go back to the city poot’ near’s tired’s they come.”

Perhaps Annie felt that it was useless to try to enlighten her in regard to the fatigues from which the summer sojourner in the country escapes so eagerly; the cares of giving and going to lunches and dinners; the labour of afternoon teas; the late hours and the heavy suppers of evening receptions; the drain of charity-doing and play-going; the slavery of amateur art study, and parlour readings, and musicales; the writing of invitations and acceptances and refusals; the trying on of dresses; the calls made and received. She let her talk on, and tried to figure, as well as she could from her talk, the form and magnitude of the task laid upon her by Mr. Brandreth, of reconciling Old Hatboro’ to South Hatboro’, and uniting them in a common enterprise.

“Mrs. Bolton,” she said, abruptly leaving the subject at last, “I’ve been thinking whether I oughtn’t to do something about Mr. Peck. I don’t want him to feel that he was unwelcome to me in my house; I should like him to feel that I approved of his having been here.”

As this was not a question, Mrs. Bolton, after the fashion of country people, held her peace, and Annie went on —

“Does he never come to see you?”

“Well, he was here last night,” said Mrs. Bolton.

“Last night!” cried Annie. “Why in the world didn’t you let me know?”

“I didn’t know as you wanted to know,” began Mrs. Bolton, with a sullen defiance mixed with pleasure in Annie’s reproach. “He was out there in my settin’-room with his little girl.”

“But don’t you see that if you didn’t let me know he was here it would look to him as if I didn’t wish to meet him — as if I had told you that you were not to introduce him?”

Probably Mrs. Bolton believed too that a man’s mind was agile enough for these conjectures; but she said she did not suppose he would take it in that way; she added that he stayed longer than she expected, because the little girl seemed to like it so much; she always cried when she had to go away.

“Do you mean that she’s attached to the place?” demanded Annie.

“Well, yes, she is,” Mrs. Bolton admitted. “And the cat.”

Annie had a great desire to tell Mrs. Bolton that she had behaved very stupidly. But she knew Mrs. Bolton would not stand that, and she had to content herself with saying, severely, “The next time he comes, let me know without fail, please. What is the child like?” she asked.

“Well, I guess it must favour the mother, if anything. It don’t seem to take after him any.”

“Why don’t you have it here often, then,” asked Annie, “if it’s so much attached to the place?”

“Well I didn’t know as you wanted to have it round,” replied Mrs. Bolton bluntly.

Annie made a “Tchk!” of impatience with her obtuseness, and asked, “Where is Mr. Peck staying?”

“Well, he’s staying at Mis’ Warner’s till he can get settled.”

“Is it far from here?”

“It’s down in the north part of the village — Over the Track.”

“Is Mr. Bolton at home?”

“Yes, he is,” said Mrs. Bolton, with the effect of not intending to deny it.

“Then I want him to hitch up — now — at once — right away — and go and get the child and bring her here to dinner with me.” Annie got so far with her severity, feeling that it was needed to mask a proceeding so romantic, perhaps so silly. She added timidly, “Can he do it?”

“I d’know but what he can,” said Mrs. Bolton, dryly, and whatever her feeling really was in regard to the matter, her manner gave no hint of it. Annie did not know whether Bolton was going on her errand or not, from Mrs. Bolton, but in ten or twelve minutes she saw him emerge from the avenue into the street, in the carry-all, tightly curtained against the storm. Half an hour later he returned, and his wife set down in the library a shabbily dressed little girl, with her cheeks bright and her hair curling from the weather, and staring at Annie, and rather disposed to cry. She said hastily, “Bring in the cat, Mrs. Bolton; we’re going to have the cat to dinner with us.”

This inspiration seemed to decide the little girl against crying. The cat was equipped with a doily, and actually provided with dinner at a small table apart; the child did not look at it as Annie had expected she would, but remained with her eyes fastened on Annie herself: She did not stir from the spot where Mrs. Bolton had put her down, but she let Annie take her up and arrange her in a chair, with large books graduated to the desired height under her, and made no sign of satisfaction or disapproval. Once she looked round, when Mrs. Bolton finally went out after bringing in the last dish for dinner, and then fastened her eyes on Annie again, twisting her head shyly round to follow her in every gesture and expression as Annie fitted on a napkin under her chin, cut up her meat, poured her milk, and buttered her bread. She answered nothing to the chatter which Annie tried to make lively and entertaining, and made no sound but that of a broken and suppressed breathing. Annie had forgotten to ask her name of Mrs. Bolton, and she asked it in vain of the child herself, with a great variety of circumlocution; she was so unused to children that she was ashamed to invent any pet name for her; she called her, in what she felt to be a stiff and school-mistressly fashion, “Little Girl,” and talked on at her, growing more and more nervous herself without perceiving that the child’s condition was approaching a climax. She had taken off her glasses, from the notion that they embarrassed her guest, and she did not see the pretty lips beginning to curl, nor the searching eyes clouding with tears; the storm of sobs that suddenly burst upon her astounded her.

“Mrs. Bolton! Mrs. Bolton!” she screamed, in hysterical helplessness. Mrs. Bolton rushed in, and with an instant perception of the situation, caught the child to her bony breast, and fled with it to her own room, where Annie heard its wails die gradually away amid murmurs of comfort and reassurance from Mrs. Bolton.

She felt like a great criminal and a great fool; at the same time she was vexed with the stupid child which she had meant so well by, and indignant with Mrs. Bolton, whose flight with it had somehow implied a reproach of her behaviour. When she could govern herself, she went out to Mrs. Bolton’s room, where she found the little one quiet enough, and Mrs. Bolton tying on the long apron in which she cleared up the dinner and washed the dishes.

“I guess she’ll get along now,” she said, without the critical tone which Annie was prepared to resent. “She was scared some, and she felt kind of strange, I presume.”

“Yes, and I behaved like a simpleton, dressing up the cat, I suppose,” answered Annie. “But I thought it would amuse her.”

“You can’t tell how children will take a thing. I don’t believe they like anything that’s out of the common — well, not a great deal.”

There was a leniency in Mrs. Bolton’s manner which encouraged Annie to go on and accuse herself more and more, and then an unresponsive blankness that silenced her. She went back to her own rooms; and to get away from her shame, she began to write a letter.

It was to a friend in Rome, and from the sense we all have that a letter which is to go such a great distance ought to be a long letter, and from finding that she had really a good deal to say, she let it grow so that she began apologising for its length half a dozen pages before the end. It took her nearly the whole afternoon, and she regained a little of her self-respect by ridiculing the people she had met.

VI.

Toward five o’clock Annie was interrupted by a knock at her door, which ought to have prepared her for something unusual, for it was Mrs. Bolton’s habit to come and go without knocking. But she called “Come in!” without rising from her letter, and Mrs. Bolton entered with a stranger. The little girl clung to his forefinger, pressing her head against his leg, and glancing shyly up at Annie. She sprang up, and, “This is Mr. Peck, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton.

“How do you do?” said Mr. Peck, taking the hand she gave him.

He was gaunt, without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely about him, as if he had fallen away in them since they were made. His face was almost the face of the caricature American: deep, slightly curved vertical lines enclosed his mouth in their parenthesis; a thin, dust-coloured beard fell from his cheeks and chin; his upper lip was shaven. But instead of the slight frown of challenge and self-assertion which marks this face in the type, his large blue eyes, set near together, gazed sadly from under a smooth forehead, extending itself well up toward the crown, where his dry hair dropped over it.

“I am very glad to see you, Mr. Peck,” said Annie; “I’ve wanted to tell you how pleased I am that you found shelter in my old home when you first came to Hatboro’.”

Mr. Peck’s trousers were short and badly kneed, and his long coat hung formlessly from his shoulders; she involuntarily took a patronising tone toward him which was not habitual with her.

“Thank you,” he said, with the dry, serious voice which seemed the fit vocal expression of his presence; “I have been afraid that it seemed like an intrusion to you.”

“Oh, not the least,” retorted Annie. “You were very welcome. I hope you’re comfortably placed where you are now?”

“Quite so,” said the minister.

“I’d heard so much of your little girl from Mrs. Bolton, and her attachment to the house, that I ventured to send for her to-day. But I believe I gave her rather a bad quarter of an hour, and that she liked the place better under Mrs. Bolton’s régime.”

She expected some deprecatory expression of gratitude from him, which would relieve her of the lingering shame she felt for having managed so badly, but he made none.

“It was my fault. I’m not used to children, and I hadn’t taken the precaution to ask her name—”

“Her name is Idella,” said the minister.

Annie thought it very ugly, but, with the intention of saying something kind, she said, “What a quaint name!”

“It was her mother’s choice,” returned the minister. “Her own name was Ella, and my mother’s name was Ida; she combined the two.”

“Oh!” said Annie. She abhorred those made-up names in which the New England country people sometimes indulge their fancy, and Idella struck her as a particularly repulsive invention; but she felt that she must not visit the fault upon the little creature. “Don’t you think you could give me another trial some time, Idella?” She stooped down and took the child’s unoccupied hand, which she let her keep, only twisting her face away to hide it in her father’s pantaloon leg. “Come now, won’t you give me a forgiving little kiss?” Idella looked round, and Annie made bold to gather her up.

Idella broke into a laugh, and took Annie’s cheeks between her hands.

“Well, I declare!” said Mrs. Bolton. “You never can tell what that child will do next.”

“I never can tell what I will do next myself,” said Annie. She liked the feeling of the little, warm, soft body in her arms, against her breast, and it was flattering to have triumphed where she had seemed to fail so desperately. They had all been standing, and she now said, “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Peck?” She added, by an impulse which she instantly thought ill-advised, “There is something I would like to speak to you about.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Peck, seating himself beyond the stove. “We must be getting home before a great while. It is nearly tea-time.”

“I won’t detain you unduly,” said Annie.

Mrs. Bolton left them at her hint of something special to say to the minister. Annie could not have had the face to speak of Mr. Brandreth’s theatricals in that grim presence; and as it was, she resolved to put forward their serious object. She began abruptly: “Mr. Peck, I’ve been asked to interest myself for a Social Union which the ladies of South Hatboro’ are trying to establish for the operatives. I suppose you haven’t heard anything of the scheme?”

“No, I hadn’t,” said Mr. Peck.

He was one of those people who sit very high, and he now seemed taller and more impressive than when he stood.

“It is certainly a very good object,” Annie resumed; and she went on to explain it at second-hand from Mr. Brandreth as well as she could. The little girl was standing in her lap, and got between her and Mr. Peck, so that she had to look first around one side of her and then another to see how he was taking it.

He nodded his head, and said gravely, “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Yes,” at each significant point of her statement. At the end he asked: “And are the means forthcoming? Have they raised the money for renting and furnishing the rooms?”

“Well, no, they haven’t yet, or not quite, as I understand.”

“Have they tried to interest the working people themselves in it? If they are to value its benefits, it ought to cost them something — self-denial, privation even.”

“Yes, I know,” Annie began.

“I’m not satisfied,” the minister pursued, “that it is wise to provide people with even harmless amusements that take them much away from their homes. These things are invented by well-to-do people who have no occupation, and think that others want pastimes as much as themselves. But what working people want is rest, and what they need are decent homes where they can take it. Besides, unless they help to support this union out of their own means, the better sort among them will feel wounded by its existence, as a sort of superfluous charity.”

“Yes, I see,” said Annie. She saw this side of the affair with surprise. The minister seemed to have thought more about such matters than she had, and she insensibly receded from her first hasty generalisation of him, and paused to reapproach him on another level. The little girl began to play with her glasses, and accidentally knocked them from her nose. The minister’s face and figure became a blur, and in the purblindness to which she was reduced she had a moment of clouded volition in which she was tempted to renounce, and even oppose, the scheme for a Social Union, in spite of her promise to Mr. Brandreth. But she remembered that she was a consistent and faithful person, and she said: “The ladies have a plan for raising the money, and they’ve applied to me to second it — to use my influence somehow among the villagers to get them interested; and the working people can help too if they choose. But I’m quite a stranger amongst those I’m expected to influence, and I don’t at all know how they will take it.” The minister listened, neither prompting nor interrupting. “The ladies’ plan is to have an entertainment at one of the cottages, and charge an admission, and devote the proceeds to the union.” She paused. Mr. Peck still remained silent, but she knew he was attentive. She pushed on. “They intend to have a — a representation, in the open air, of one of Shakespeare’s plays, or scenes from one—”

“Do you wish me,” interrupted the minister, “to promote the establishment of this union? Is that why you speak to me of it?”

“Why, I don’t know why I speak to you of it,” she replied with a laugh of embarrassment, to which he was cold, apparently. “I certainly couldn’t ask you to take part in an affair that you didn’t approve.”

“I don’t know that I disapprove of it. Properly managed, it might be a good thing.”

“Yes, of course. But I understand why you might not sympathise with that part of it, and that is why I told you of it,” said Annie.

“What part?”

“The — the — theatricals.”

“Why not?” asked the minister.

“I know — Mrs. Bolton told me you were very liberal,” Annie faltered on; “but I didn’t expect you as a — But of course—”

“I read Shakespeare a great deal,” said Mr. Peck. “I have never been in the theatre; but I should like to see one of his plays represented where it could cause no one to offend.”

“Yes,” said Annie, “and this would be by amateurs, and there could be no possible ‘offence in it.’ I wished to know how the general idea would strike you. Of course the ladies would be only too glad of your advice and co-operation. Their plan is to sell tickets to every one for the theatricals, and to a certain number of invited persons for a supper, and a little dance afterward on the lawn.”

“I don’t know if I understand exactly,” said the minister.

Annie repeated her statement more definitely, and explained, from Mr. Brandreth, as before, that the invitations were to be given so as to eliminate the shop-hand element from the supper and dance.

Mr. Peck listened quietly. “That would prevent my taking part in the affair,” he said, as quietly as he had listened.

“Of course — dancing,” Annie began.

“It is not that. Many people who hold strictly to the old opinions now allow their children to learn dancing. But I could not join at all with those who were willing to lay the foundations of a Social Union in a social disunion — in the exclusion of its beneficiaries from the society of their benefactors.”

He was not sarcastic, but the grotesqueness of the situation as he had sketched it was apparent. She remembered now that she had felt something incongruous in it when Mr. Brandreth exposed it, but not deeply.

The minister continued gently: “The ladies who are trying to get up this Social Union proceed upon the assumption that working people can neither see nor feel a slight; but it is a great mistake to do so.”

Annie had the obtuseness about those she fancied below her which is one of the consequences of being brought up in a superior station. She believed that there was something to say on the other side, and she attempted to say it.

“I don’t know that you could call it a slight exactly. People can ask those they prefer to a social entertainment.”

“Yes — if it is for their own pleasure.”

“But even in a public affair like this the work-people would feel uncomfortable and out of place, wouldn’t they, if they stayed to the supper and the dance? They might be exposed to greater suffering among those whose manners and breeding were different, and it might be very embarrassing all round. Isn’t there that side to be regarded?”

“You beg the question,” said the minister, as unsparingly as if she were a man. “The point is whether a Social Union beginning in social exclusion could ever do any good. What part do these ladies expect to take in maintaining it? Do they intend to spend their evenings there, to associate on equal terms with the shoe-shop and straw-shop hands?”

“I don’t suppose they do, but I don’t know,” said Annie dryly; and she replied by helplessly quoting Mr. Brandreth: “They intend to organise a system of lectures, concerts, and readings. They wish to get on common ground with them.”

“They can never get on common ground with them in that way,” said the minister. “No doubt they think they want to do them good; but good is from the heart, and there is no heart in what they propose. The working people would know that at once.”

“Then you mean to say,” Annie asked, half alarmed and half amused, “that there can be no friendly intercourse with the poor and the well-to-do unless it is based upon social equality?”

“I will answer your question by asking another. Suppose you were one of the poor, and the well-to-do offered to be friendly with you on such terms as you have mentioned, how should you feel toward them?”

“If you make it a personal question—”

“It makes itself a personal question,” said the minister dispassionately.

“Well, then, I trust I should have the good sense to see that social equality between people who were better dressed, better taught, and better bred than myself was impossible, and that for me to force myself into their company was not only bad taste, but it was foolish, I have often heard my father say that the great superiority of the American practice of democracy over the French ideal was that it didn’t involve any assumption of social equality. He said that equality before the law and in politics was sacred, but that the principle could never govern society, and that Americans all instinctively recognised it. And I believe that to try to mix the different classes would be un-American.”

Mr. Peck smiled, and this was the first break in his seriousness. “We don’t know what is or will be American yet. But we will suppose you are quite right. The question is, how would you feel toward the people whose company you wouldn’t force yourself into?”

“Why, of course,” Annie was surprised into saying, “I suppose I shouldn’t feel very kindly toward them.”

“Even if you knew that they felt kindly toward you?”

“I’m afraid that would only make the matter worse,” she said, with an uneasy laugh.

The minister was silent on his side of the stove.

“But do I understand you to say,” she demanded, “that there can be no love at all, no kindness, between the rich and the poor? God tells us all to love one another.”

“Surely,” said the minister. “Would you suffer such a slight as your friends propose, to be offered to any one you loved?”

She did not answer, and he continued, thoughtfully: “I suppose that if a poor person could do a rich person a kindness which cost him some sacrifice, he might love him. In that case there could be love between the rich and the poor.”

“And there could be no love if a rich man did the same?”

“Oh yes,” the minister said— “upon the same ground. Only, the rich man would have to make a sacrifice first that he would really feel.”

“Then you mean to say that people can’t do any good at all with their money?” Annie asked.

“Money is a palliative, but it can’t cure. It can sometimes create a bond of gratitude perhaps, but it can’t create sympathy between rich and poor.”

“But why can’t it?”

“Because sympathy — common feeling — the sense of fraternity — can spring only from like experiences, like hopes, like fears. And money cannot buy these.”

He rose, and looked a moment about him, as if trying to recall something. Then, with a stiff obeisance, he said, “Good evening,” and went out, while she remained daunted and bewildered, with the child in her arms, as unconscious of having kept it as he of having left it with her.

Mrs. Bolton must have reminded him of his oversight, for after being gone so long as it would have taken him to walk to her parlour and back, he returned, and said simply, “I forgot Idella.”

He put out his hands to take her, but she turned perversely from him, and hid her face in Annie’s neck, pushing his hands away with a backward reach of her little arm.

“Come, Idella!” he said. Idella only snuggled the closer.

Mrs. Bolton came in with the little girl’s wraps; they were very common and poor, and the thought of getting her something prettier went through Annie’s mind.

At sight of Mrs. Bolton the child turned from Annie to her older friend.

“I’m afraid you have a woman-child for your daughter, Mr. Peck,” said Annie, remotely hurt at the little one’s fickleness.

Neither Mr. Peck nor Mrs. Bolton smiled, and with some vague intention of showing him that she could meet the poor on common ground by sharing their labours, she knelt down and helped Mrs. Bolton tie on and button on Idella’s things.

VII.

Next morning the day broke clear after the long storm, and Annie woke in revolt against the sort of subjection in which she had parted from Mr. Peck. She felt the need of showing Mrs. Bolton that, although she had been civil to him, she had no sympathy with his ideas; but she could not think of any way to formulate her opposition, and all she could say in offence was, “Does Mr. Peck usually forget his child when he starts home?”

“I don’t know as he does,” answered Mrs. Bolton simply. “He’s rather of an absent-minded man, and I suppose he’s like other men when he gets talking.”

“The child’s clothes were disgracefully shabby!” said Annie, vexed that her attack could come to no more than this.

“I presume,” said Mrs. Bolton, “that if he kept more of his money for himself, he could dress her better.”

“Oh, that’s the way with these philanthropists,” said Annie, thinking of Hollingsworth, in The Blithedale Romance, the only philanthropist whom she had really ever known, “They are always ready to sacrifice the happiness and comfort of any one to the general good.”

Mrs. Bolton stood a moment, and then went out without replying; but she looked as offended as Annie could have wished. About ten o’clock the bell rang, and she came gloomily into the study, and announced that Mrs. Munger was in the parlour.

Annie had already heard an authoritative rustling of skirts, and she was instinctively prepared for the large, vigorous woman who turned upon her from the picture she had been looking at on the wall, and came toward her with the confident air of one sure they must be friends. Mrs. Munger was dressed in a dark, firm woollen stuff, which communicated its colour, if not its material, to the matter-of-fact bonnet which she wore on her plainly dressed hair. In one of her hands, which were cased in driving gloves of somewhat insistent evidence, she carried a robust black silk sun-umbrella, and the effect of her dress otherwise might be summarised in the statement that where other women would have worn lace, she seemed to wear leather. She had not only leather gloves, and a broad leather belt at her waist, but a leather collar; her watch was secured by a leather cord, passing round her neck, and the stubby tassel of her umbrella stick was leather: she might be said to be in harness. She had a large, handsome face, no longer fresh, but with an effect of exemplary cleanness, and a pair of large grey eyes that suggested the notion of being newly washed, and that now looked at Annie with the assumption of fully understanding her.

“Ah, Miss Kilburn!” she said, without any of the wonted preliminaries of introduction and greeting. “I should have come long ago to see you, but I’ve been dispersed over the four quarters of the globe ever since you came, my dear. I got home last night on the nine o’clock train, in the last agonies of that howling tempest. Did you ever know anything like it? I see your trees have escaped. I wonder they weren’t torn to shreds.”

Annie took her on her own ground of ignoring their past non-acquaintance. “Yes, it was awful. And your son — how did you leave him? Mr. Brandreth—”

“Oh yes, poor little man! I found him waiting for me at home last night, and he told me he had been here. He was blowing about in the storm all day. Such a spirit! There was nothing serious the matter; the bridge of the nose was all right; merely the cartilage pushed aside by the ball.”

She had passed so lightly from Mr. Brandreth’s heroic spirit to her son’s nose that Annie, woman as she was, and born to these bold bounds over sequence, was not sure where they had arrived, till Mrs. Munger added: “Jim’s used to these things. I’m thankful it wasn’t a finger, or an eye. What is that?” She jumped from her chair, and swooped upon the Spanish-Roman water-colour Annie had stood against some books on the table, pending its final disposition.

“It’s only a Guerra,” said Annie. “My things are all scattered about still; I have scarcely tried to get into shape yet.”

Mrs. Munger would not let her interpose any idea of there being a past between them. She merely said: “You knew the Herricks at Rome, of course. I’m in hopes I shall get them here when they come back. I want you to help me colonise Hatboro’ with the right sort of people: it’s so easy to get the wrong sort! But, so far, I think we’ve succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. It’s easy enough to get nice people together at the seaside; but inland! No; it’s only a very few nice people who will come into the country for the summer; and we propose to make Hatboro’ a winter colony too; that gives us agreeable invalids, you know; it gave us the Brandreths. He told you of our projected theatricals, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Annie non-committally, “he did.”

“I know just how you feel about it, my dear,” said Mrs. Munger. “‘Been there myself,’ as Jim says. But it grows upon you. I’m glad you didn’t refuse outright;” and Mrs. Munger looked at her with eyes of large expectance.

“No, I didn’t,” said Annie, obliged by this expectance to say something. “But to tell you the truth, Mrs. Munger, I don’t see how I’m to be of any use to you or to Mr. Brandreth.”

“Oh, take a cab and go about, like Boots and Brewer, you know, for the Veneerings.” She said this as if she knew about the humour rather than felt it. “We are placing all our hopes of bringing round the Old Hatborians in you.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken about my influence,” said Annie. “Mr. Brandreth spoke of it, and I had an opportunity of trying it last night, and seeing just what it amounted to.”

“Yes?” Mrs. Munger prompted, with an increase of expectance in her large clear eyes, and of impartiality in her whole face.

“Mr. Peck was here,” said Annie reluctantly, “and I tried it on him.”

“Yes?” repeated Mrs. Munger, as immutably as if she were sitting for her photograph and keeping the expression.

Annie broke from her reluctance with a sort of violence which carried her further than she would have gone otherwise. She ridiculed Mr. Peck’s appearance and manner, and laughed at his ideas to Mrs. Munger. She had not a good conscience in it, but the perverse impulse persisted in her. There seemed no other way in which she could assert herself against him.

Mrs. Munger listened judicially, but she seemed to take in only what Mr. Peck had thought of the dance and supper; at the end she said, rather vacantly, “What nonsense!”

“Yes; but I’m afraid he thinks it’s wisdom, and for all practical purposes it amounts to that. You see what my ‘influence’ has done at the outset, Mrs. Munger. He’ll never give way on such a point.”

“Oh, very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, with the utmost lightness and indifference, “we’ll drop the idea of the invited supper and dance.”

“Do you think that would be well?” asked Annie.

“Yes; why not? It’s only an idea. I don’t think you’ve made at all a bad beginning. It was very well to try the idea on some one who would be frank about it, and wouldn’t go away and talk against it,” said Mrs. Munger, rising. “I want you to come with me, my dear.”

“To see Mr. Peck? Excuse me. I don’t think I could,” said Annie.

“No; to see some of his parishioners,” said Mrs. Munger. “His deacons, to begin with, or his deacons’ wives.”

This seemed so much less than calling on Mr. Peck that Annie looked out at Mrs. Munger’s basket-phaeton at her gate, and knew that she would go with very little more urgence.

“After all, you know, you’re not one of his congregation; he may yield to them,” said Mrs. Munger. “We must have him — if only because he’s hard to get. It’ll give us an idea of what we’ve got to contend with.”

It had a very practical sound; it was really like meeting the difficulties on their own ground, and it overcame the question of taste which was rising in Annie’s mind. She demurred a little more upon the theory of her uselessness; but Mrs. Munger insisted, and carried her off down the village street.

The air sparkled full of sun, and a breeze from the south-west frolicked with the twinkling leaves of the overarching elms, and made their shadows dance on the crisp roadway, packed hard by the rain, and faced with clean sand, which crackled pleasantly under Mrs. Munger’s phaeton wheels. She talked incessantly. “I think we’ll go first to Mrs. Gerrish’s, and then to Mrs. Wilmington’s. You know them?”

“Oh yes; they were old girl friends.”

“Then you know why I go to Mrs. Gerrish’s first. She’ll care a great deal, and Mrs. Wilmington won’t care at all. She’s a delicious creature, Mrs. Wilmington — don’t you think? That large, indolent nature; Mr. Brandreth says she makes him think of ‘the land in which it seemed always afternoon.’”

Annie remembered Lyra Goodman as a long, lazy, red-haired girl who laughed easily; and she could not readily realise her in the character of a Titian-esque beauty with a gift for humorous dramatics, which she had filled out into during the years of her absence from Hatboro’; but she said “Oh yes,” in the necessity of polite acquiescence, and Mrs. Munger went on talking —

“She’s the only one of the Old Hatboro’ people, so far as I know them, who has any breadth of view. Whoa!” She pulled up suddenly beside a stout, short lady in a fashionable walking dress, who was pushing an elegant perambulator with one hand, and shielding her complexion with a crimson sun-umbrella in the other.

“Mrs. Gerrish!” Mrs. Munger called; and Mrs. Gerrish, who had already looked around at the approaching phaeton, and then looked away, so as not to have seemed to look, stopped abruptly, and after some exploration of the vicinity, discovered where the voice came from.

“Oh, Mrs. Munger!” she called back, bridling with pleasure at being greeted in that way by the chief lady of South Hatboro’, and struggling to keep up a dignified indifference at the same time. “Why, Annie!” she added.

“Good morning, Emmeline,” said Annie; she annexed some irrelevancies about the weather, which Mrs. Munger swept away with business-like robustness.

“We were driving down to your house to find you. I want to see the principal ladies of your church, and talk with them about our Social Union. You’ve heard about it?”

“Well, nothing very particular,” said Mrs. Gerrish; she had probably heard nothing at all. After a moment she asked, “Have you seen Mrs. Wilmington yet?”

“No, I haven’t,” cried Mrs. Munger. “The fact is, I wanted to talk it over with you and Mr. Gerrish first.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gerrish, brightening. “Well, I was just going right there. I guess he’s in.”

“Well, we shall meet there, then. Sorry I can’t offer you a seat. But there’s nothing but the rumble, and that wouldn’t hold you all.”

Mrs. Munger called this back after starting her pony. Mrs. Gerrish did not understand, and screamed, “What?”

Mrs. Munger repeated her joke at the top of her voice.

“Oh, I can walk!” Mrs. Gerrish yelled at the top of hers. Both the ladies laughed at their repartee.

“She’s as jealous of Mrs. Wilmington as a cat,” Mrs. Munger confided to Annie as they drove away; “and she’s just as pleased as Punch that I’ve spoken to her first. Mrs. Wilmington won’t mind. She’s so delightfully indifferent, it really renders her almost superior; you might forget that she was a village person. But this has been an immense stroke. I don’t know,” she mused, “whether I’d better let her get there first and prepare her husband, or do it myself. No; I’ll let her. I’ll stop here at Gates’s.”

She stopped at the pavement in front of a provision store, and a pale, stout man, in the long over-shirt of his business, came out to receive her orders. He stood, passing his hand through the top of a barrel of beans, and listened to Mrs. Munger with a humorous, patient smile.

“Mr. Gates, I want you to send me up a leg of lamb for dinner — a large one.”

“Last year’s, then,” suggested Gates.

“No; this year’s,” insisted Mrs. Munger; and Gates gave way with the air of pacifying a wilful child, which would get, after all, only what he chose to allow it.

“All right, ma’am; a large leg of this year’s lamb — grown to order. Any peas, spinnage, cucumbers, sparrowgrass?”

“Southern, I suppose?” said Mrs. Munger.

“Well, not if you want to call ’em native,” said Gates.

“Yes, I’ll take two bunches of asparagus, and some peas.”

“Any strawberries? — natives?” suggested Gates.

“Nonsense!”

“Same thing; natives of Norfolk.”

“You had better be honest with me, Mr. Gates,” said Mrs. Munger. “Yes, I’ll take a couple of boxes.”

“All right! Want ’em nice, and the biggest ones at the bottom of the box?”

“Yes, I do.”

“That’s what I thought. Some customers wants the big ones on top; but I tell ’em it’s all foolishness; just vanity.” Gates laughed a dry, hacking little laugh at his drollery, and kept his eyes on Annie. She smiled at last, with permissive recognition, and Gates came forward. “Used to know your father pretty well; but I can’t keep up with the young folks any more.” He was really not many years older than Annie; he rubbed his right hand on the inside of his long shirt, and gave it her to shake. “Well, you haven’t been about much for the last nine or ten years, that’s a fact.”

“Eleven,” said Annie, trying to be gay with the hand-shaking, and wondering if this were meeting the lower classes on common ground, and what Mr. Peck would think of it.

“That so?” queried Gates. “Well, I declare! No wonder you’ve grown!” He hacked out another laugh, and stood on the curb-stone looking at Annie a moment. Then he asked, “Anything else, Mrs. Munger?”

“No; that’s all. Tell me, Mr. Gates, how do Mr. Peck and Mr. Gerrish get on?” asked Mrs. Munger in a lower tone.

“Well,” said Gates, “he’s workin’ round — the deacon’s workin’ round gradually, I guess. I guess if Mr. Peck was to put in a little more brimstone, the deacon’d be all right. He’s a great hand for brimstone, you know, the deacon is.”

Mrs. Munger laughed again, and then she said, with a proselyting sigh, “It’s a pity you couldn’t all find your way into the Church.”

“Well, may be it would be a good thing,” said Gates, as Mrs. Munger gathered up her reins and chirped to her pony.

“He isn’t a member of Mr. Peck’s church,” she explained to Annie; “but he’s one of the society, and his wife’s very devout Orthodox. He’s a great character, we think, and he’ll treat you very well, if you keep on the right side of him. They say he cheats awfully in the weight, though.”

VIII.

Mrs. Munger drove across the street, and drew up before a large, handsomely ugly brick dry-goods store, whose showy windows had caught Annie’s eye the day she arrived in Hatboro’.

“I see Mrs. Gerrish has got here first,” Mrs. Munger said, indicating the perambulator at the door, and she dismounted and fastened her pony with a weight, which she took from the front of the phaeton. On either door jamb of the store was a curved plate of polished metal, with the name GERRISH cut into it in black letters; the sills of the wide windows were of metal, and bore the same legend. At the threshold a very prim, ceremonious little man, spare and straight, met Mrs. Munger with a ceremonious bow, and a solemn “How do you do, ma’am? how do you do? I hope I see you well,” and he put a small dry hand into the ample clasp of Mrs. Munger’s gauntlet.

“Very well indeed, Mr. Gerrish. Isn’t it a lovely morning? You know Miss Kilburn, Mr. Gerrish.”

He took Annie’s hand into his right and covered it with his left, lifting his eyes to look her in the face with an old-merchant-like cordiality.

“Why, yes, indeed! Delighted to see her. Her father was one of my best friends. I may say that I owe everything that I am to Squire Kilburn; he advised me to stick to commerce when I once thought of studying law. Glad to welcome you back to Hatboro’, Miss Kilburn. You see changes on the surface, no doubt, but you’ll find the genuine old feeling here. Walk right back, ladies,” he continued, releasing Annie’s hand to waft them before him toward the rear of the store. “You’ll find Mrs. Gerrish in my room there — my Growlery, as I call it.” He seemed to think he had invented the name. “And Mrs. Gerrish tells me that you’ve really come back,” he said, leaning decorously toward Annie as they walked, “with the intention of taking up your residence permanently among us. You will find very few places like Hatboro’.”

As he spoke, walking with his hands clasped behind him, he glanced to right and left at the shop-girls on foot behind the counter, who dropped their eyes under their different bangs as they caught his glance, and bridled nervously. He denied them the use of chewing-gum; he permitted no conversation, as he called it, among them; and he addressed no jokes or idle speeches to them himself. A system of grooves overhead brought to his counting-room the cash from the clerks in wooden balls, and he returned the change, and kept the accounts, with a pitiless eye for errors. The women were afraid of him, and hated him with bitterness, which exploded at crises in excesses of hysterical impudence.

His store was an example of variety, punctuality, and quality. Upon the theory, for which he deserved the credit, of giving to a country place the advantages of one of the great city establishments, he was gradually gathering, in their fashion, the small commerce into his hands. He had already opened his bazaar through into the adjoining store, which he had bought out, and he kept every sort of thing desired or needed in a country town, with a tempting stock of articles before unknown to the shopkeepers of Hatboro’. Everything was of the very quality represented; the prices were low, but inflexible, and cash payments, except in the case of some rich customers of unimpeachable credit, were invariably exacted; at the same time every reasonable facility for the exchange or return of goods was afforded. Nothing could exceed the justice and fidelity of his dealing with the public. He had even some effects of generosity in his dealing with his dependants; he furnished them free seats in the churches of their different persuasions, and he closed every night at six o’clock, except Saturday, when the shop hands were paid off, and made their purchases for the coming week.

He stepped lightly before Annie and Mrs. Munger, and pushed open the ground-glass door of his office for them. It was like a bank parlour, except for Mrs. Gerrish sitting in her husband’s leather-cushioned swivel chair, with her last-born in her lap; she greeted the others noisily, without trying to rise.

“You see we are quite at home here,” said Mr. Gerrish.

“Yes, and very snug you are, too,” said Mrs. Munger, taking one half of the leather lounge, and leaving the other half to Annie. “I don’t wonder Mrs. Gerrish likes to visit you here.”

Mr. Gerrish laughed, and said to his wife, who moved provisionally in her chair, seeing he had none, “Sit still, my dear; I prefer my usual perch.” He took a high stool beside a desk, and gathered a ruler in his hand.

“Well, I may as well begin at the beginning,” said Mrs. Munger, “and I’ll try to be short, for I know that these are business hours.”

“Take all the time you want, Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish affably. “It’s my idea that a good business man’s business can go on without him, when necessary.”

“Of course!” Mrs. Munger sighed. “If everybody had your system, Mr. Gerrish!” She went on and succinctly expounded the scheme of the Social Union. “I suppose I can’t deny that the idea occurred to me,” she concluded, “but we can’t hope to develop it without the co-operation of the ladies of Old Hatboro’, and I’ve come, first of all, to Mrs. Gerrish.”

Mr. Gerrish bowed his acknowledgments of the honour done his wife, with a gravity which she misinterpreted.

“I think,” she began, with her censorious manner and accent, “that these people have too much done for them now. They’re perfectly spoiled. Don’t you, Annie?”

Mr. Gerrish did not give Annie time to answer. “I differ with you, my dear,” he cut in. “It is my opinion — Or I don’t know but you wish to confine this matter entirely to the ladies?” he suggested to Mrs. Munger.

“Oh, I’m only too proud and glad that you feel interested in the matter!” cried Mrs. Munger. “Without the gentlemen’s practical views, we ladies are such feeble folk — mere conies in the rocks.”

“I am as much opposed as Mrs. Gerrish — or any one — to acceding to unjust demands on the part of my clerks or other employees,” Mr. Gerrish began.

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said his wife, and broke down with a giggle.

He went on, without regarding her: “I have always made it a rule, as far as business went, to keep my own affairs entirely in my own hands. I fix the hours, and I fix the wages, and I fix all the other conditions, and I say plainly, ‘If you don’t like them, ‘don’t come,’ or ‘don’t stay,’ and I never have any difficulty.”

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Munger, “that if all the employers in the country would take such a stand, there would soon be an end of labour troubles. I think we’re too concessive.”

“And I do too, Mrs. Munger!” cried Mrs. Gerrish, glad of the occasion to be censorious and of the finer lady’s opinion at the same time. “That’s what I meant. Don’t you, Annie?”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand exactly,” Annie replied.

Mr. Gerrish kept his eye on Mrs. Munger’s face, now arranged for indefinite photography, as he went on. “That is exactly what I say to them. That is what I said to Mr. Marvin one year ago, when he had that trouble in his shoe shop. I said, ‘You’re too concessive.’ I said, ‘Mr. Marvin, if you give those fellows an inch, they’ll take an ell. Mr. Marvin,’ said I, ‘you’ve got to begin by being your own master, if you want to be master of anybody else. You’ve got to put your foot down, as Mr. Lincoln said; and as I say, you’ve got to keep it down.’”

Mrs. Gerrish looked at the other ladies for admiration, and Mrs. Munger said, rapidly, without disarranging her face —

“Oh yes. And how much misery could be saved in such cases by a little firmness at the outset!”

“Mr. Marvin differed with me,” said Mr. Gerrish sorrowfully. “He agreed with me on the main point, but he said that too many of his hands had been in his regiment, and he couldn’t lock them out. He submitted to arbitration. And what is arbitration?” asked Mr. Gerrish, levelling his ruler at Mrs. Munger. “It is postponing the evil day.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Munger, without winking.

“Mr. Marvin,” Mr. Gerrish proceeded, “may be running very smoothly now, and sailing before the wind all — all — nicely; but I tell you his house is built upon the sand,” He put his ruler by on the desk very softly, and resumed with impressive quiet: “I never had any trouble but once. I had a porter in this store who wanted his pay raised. I simply said that I made it a rule to propose all advances of salary myself, and I should submit to no dictation from any one. He told me to go to — a place that I will not repeat, and I told him to walk out of my store. He was under the influence of liquor at the time, I suppose. I understand that he is drinking very hard. He does nothing to support his family whatever, and from all that I can gather, he bids fair to fill a drunkard’s grave inside of six months.”

Mrs. Munger seized her opportunity. “Yes; and it is just such cases as this that the Social Union is designed to meet. If this man had some such place to spend his evenings — and bring his family if he chose — where he could get a cup of good coffee for the same price as a glass of rum — Don’t you see?”

She looked round at the different faces, and Mr. Gerrish slightly frowned, as if the vision of the Social Union interposing between his late porter and a drunkard’s grave, with a cup of good coffee, were not to his taste altogether; but he said: “Precisely so! And I was about to make the remark that while I am very strict — and obliged to be — with those under me in business, no one is more disposed to promote such objects as this of yours.”

“I was sure you would approve of it,” said Mrs. Munger. “That is why I came to you — to you and Mrs. Gerrish — first,” said Mrs. Munger. “I was sure you would see it in the right light.” She looked round at Annie for corroboration, and Annie was in the social necessity of making a confirmatory murmur.

Mr. Gerrish ignored them both in the more interesting work of celebrating himself. “I may say that there is not an institution in this town which I have not contributed my humble efforts to — to — establish, from the drinking fountain in front of this store, to the soldiers’ monument on the village green.”

Annie turned red; Mrs. Munger said shamelessly, “That beautiful monument!” and looked at Annie with eyes full of gratitude to Mr. Gerrish.

“The schools, the sidewalks, the water-works, the free library, the introduction of electricity, the projected system of drainage, and all the various religious enterprises at various times, I am proud — I am humbly proud — that I have been allowed to be the means of doing — sustaining—”

He lost himself in the labyrinths of his sentence, and Mrs. Munger came to his rescue: “I fancy Hatboro’ wouldn’t be Hatboro’ without you, Mr. Gerrish! And you don’t think that Mr. Peck’s objection will be seriously felt by other leading citizens?”

“What is Mr. Peck’s objection?” demanded Mr. Gerrish, perceptibly bristling up at the name of his pastor.

“Why, he talked it over with Miss Kilburn last night, and he objected to an entertainment which wouldn’t be open to all — to the shop hands and everybody.” Mrs. Munger explained the point fully. She repeated some things that Annie had said in ridicule of Mr. Peck’s position regarding it. “If you do think that part would be bad or impolitic,” Mrs. Munger concluded, “we could drop the invited supper and the dance, and simply have the theatricals.”

She bent upon Mr. Gerrish a face of candid deference that filled him with self-importance almost to bursting.

“No!” he said, shaking his head, and “No!” closing his lips abruptly, and opening them again to emit a final “No!” with an explosive force which alone seemed to save him. “Not at all, Mrs. Munger; not on any account! I am surprised at Mr. Peck, or rather I am not surprised. He is not a practical man — not a man of the world; and I should have much preferred to hear that he objected to the dancing and the play; I could have understood that; I could have gone with him in that to a certain extent, though I can see no harm in such things when properly conducted. I have a great respect for Mr. Peck; I was largely instrumental in getting him here; but he is altogether wrong in this matter. We are not obliged to go out into the highways and the hedges until the bidden guests have — er — declined.”

“Exactly,” said Mrs. Munger. “I never thought of that.”

Mrs. Gerrish shifted her baby to another knee, and followed her husband with her eyes, as he dismounted from his stool and began to pace the room.

“I came into this town a poor boy, without a penny in my pocket, and I have made my own way, every inch of it, unaided and alone. I am a thorough believer in giving every one an equal chance to rise and to — get along; I would not throw an obstacle in anybody’s way; but I do not believe — I do not believe — in pampering those who have not risen, or have made no effort to rise.”

“It’s their wastefulness, in nine cases out of ten, that keeps them down,” said Mrs. Gerrish.

“I don’t care what it is, I don’t ask what it is, that keeps them down. I don’t expect to invite my clerks or Mrs. Gerrish’s servants into my parlour. I will meet them at the polls, or the communion table, or on any proper occasion; but a man’s home is sacred. I will not allow my wife or my children to associate with those whose — whose — whose idleness, or vice, or whatever, has kept them down in a country where — where everybody stands on an equality; and what I will not do myself, I will not ask others to do. I make it a rule to do unto others as I would have them do unto me. It is all nonsense to attempt to introduce those one-ideaed notions into — put them in practice.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep conviction, “that is my own feeling, Mr. Gerrish, and I’m glad to have it corroborated by your experience. Then you wouldn’t drop the little invited dance and supper?”

“I will tell you how I feel about it, Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish, pausing in his walk, and putting on a fine, patronising, gentleman-of-the-old-school smile. “You may put me down for any number of tickets — five, ten, fifteen — and you may command me in anything I can do to further the objects of your enterprise, if you will keep the invited supper and dance. But I should not be prepared to do anything if they are dropped.”

“What a comfort it is to meet a person who knows his own mind!” exclaimed Mrs. Munger.

“Got company, Billy?” asked a voice at the door; and it added, “Glad to see you here, Mrs. Gerrish.”

“Ah, Mr. Putney! Come in. Hope I see you well, sir!” cried Mr. Gerrish. “Come in!” he repeated, with jovial frankness. “Nobody but friends here.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Mr. Putney, with whimsical perversity, holding the door ajar. “I see that arch-conspirator from South Hatboro’,” he said, looking at Mrs. Munger.

He showed himself, as he stood holding the door ajar, a lank little figure, dressed with reckless slovenliness in a suit of old-fashioned black; a loose neck-cloth fell stringing down his shirt front, which his unbuttoned waistcoat exposed, with its stains from the tobacco upon which his thin little jaws worked mechanically, as he stared into the room with flamy blue eyes; his silk hat was pushed back from a high, clear forehead; he had yesterday’s stubble on his beardless cheeks; a heavy moustache and imperial gave dash to a cast of countenance that might otherwise have seemed slight and effeminate.

“Yes; but I’m in charge of Miss Kilburn, and you needn’t be afraid of me. Come in. We wish to consult you,” cried Mrs. Munger. Mrs. Gerrish cackled some applausive incoherencies.

Putney advanced into the room, and dropped his burlesque air as he approached Annie.

“Miss Kilburn, I must apologise for not having called with Mrs. Putney to pay my respects. I have been away; when I got back I found she had stolen a march on me. But I’m going to make Ellen bring me at once. I don’t think I’ve been in your house since the old Judge’s time. Well, he was an able man, and a good man; I was awfully fond of the old Judge, in a boy’s way.”

“Thank you,” said Annie, touched by something gentle and honest in his words.

“He was a Christian gentleman,” said Mr. Gerrish with authority.

Putney said, without noticing Mr. Gerrish, “Well, I’m glad you’ve come back to the old place, Miss Kilburn — I almost said Annie.”

“I shouldn’t have minded, Ralph,” she retorted.

“Shouldn’t you? Well, that’s right.” Putney continued, ignoring the laugh of the others at Annie’s sally: “You’ll find Hatboro’ pretty exciting, after Rome, for a while, I suppose. But you’ll get used to it. It’s got more of the modern improvements, I’m told, and it’s more public-spirited — more snap to it. I’m told that there’s more enterprise in Hatboro’, more real crowd in South Hatboro’ alone, than there is in the Quirinal and the Vatican put together.”

“You had better come and live at South Hatboro’, Mr. Putney; that would be just the atmosphere for you,” said Mrs. Munger, with aimless hospitality. She said this to every one.

“Is it about coming to South Hatboro’ you want to consult me?” asked Putney.

“Well, it is, and it isn’t,” she began.

“Better be honest, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “You can’t do anything for a client who won’t be honest with his attorney. That’s what I have to continually impress upon the reprobates who come to me. I say, ‘It don’t matter what you’ve done; if you expect me to get you off, you’ve got to make a clean breast of it.’ They generally do; they see the sense of it.”

They all laughed, and Mr. Gerrish said, “Mr. Putney is one of Hatboro’s privileged characters, Miss Kilburn.”

“Thank you, Billy,” returned the lawyer, with mock-tenderness. “Now, Mrs. Munger, out with it!”

“You’ll have to tell him sooner or later, Mrs. Munger!” said Mrs. Gerrish, with overweening pleasure in her acquaintance with both of these superior people. “He’ll get it out of you anyway.” Her husband looked at her, and she fell silent.

Mrs. Munger swept her with a tolerant smile as she looked up at Putney. “Why, it’s really Miss Kilburn’s affair,” she began; and she laid the case before the lawyer with a fulness that made Annie wince.

Putney took a piece of tobacco from his pocket, and tore off a morsel with his teeth. “Excuse me, Annie! It’s a beastly habit. But it’s saved me from something worse. You don’t know what I’ve been; but anybody in Hatboro’ can tell you. I made my shame so public that it’s no use trying to blink the past. You don’t have to be a hypocrite in a place where everybody’s seen you in the gutter; that’s the only advantage I’ve got over my fellow-citizens, and of course I abuse it; that’s nature, you know. When I began to pull up I found that tobacco helped me; I smoked and chewed both; now I only chew. Well,” he said, dropping the pathetic simplicity with which he had spoken, and turning with a fierce jocularity from the shocked and pitying look in Annie’s face to Mrs. Munger, “what do you propose to do? Brother Peck’s head seems to be pretty level, in the abstract.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, willing to put the case impartially; “and I should be perfectly willing to drop the invited dance and supper, if it was thought best, though I must say I don’t at all agree with Mr. Peck in principle. I don’t see what would become of society.”

“You ought to be in politics, Mrs. Munger,” said Putney. “Your readiness to sacrifice principle to expediency shows what a reform will be wrought when you ladies get the suffrage. What does Brother Gerrish think?”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Munger. “We want an impartial opinion.”

“I always think as Brother Gerrish thinks,” said Putney. “I guess you better give up the fandango; hey, Billy?”

“No, sir; no, Mr. Putney,” answered the merchant nervously. “I can’t agree with you. And I will tell you why, sir.”

He gave his reasons, with some abatement of pomp and detail, and with the tremulous eagerness of a solemn man who expects a sarcastic rejoinder. “It would be a bad precedent. This town is full now of a class of persons who are using every opportunity to — to abuse their privileges. And this would be simply adding fuel to the flame.”

“Do you really think so, Billy?” asked the lawyer, with cool derision. “Well, we all abuse our privileges at every opportunity, of course; I was just saying that I abused mine; and I suppose those fellows would abuse theirs if you happened to hurt their wives’ and daughters’ feelings. And how are you going to manage? Aren’t you afraid that they will hang around, after the show, indefinitely, unless you ask all those who have not received invitations to the dance and supper to clear the grounds, as they do in the circus when the minstrels are going to give a performance not included in the price of admission? Mind, I don’t care anything about your Social Union.”

“Oh, but surely!” cried Mrs. Munger, “you must allow that it’s a good object.”

“Well, perhaps it is, if it will keep the men away from the rum-holes. Yes, I guess it is. You won’t sell liquor?”

“We expect to furnish coffee at cost price,” said Mrs. Munger, smiling at Putney’s joke.

“And good navy-plug too, I hope. But you see it would be rather awkward, don’t you? You see, Annie?”

“Yes, I see,” said Annie. “I hadn’t thought of that part before.”

“And you didn’t agree with Brother Peck on general principles? There we see the effect of residence abroad,” said Putney. “The uncorrupted — or I will say the uninterrupted — Hatborian has none of those aristocratic predilections of yours, Annie. He grows up in a community where there is neither poverty nor richness, and where political economy can show by the figures that the profligate shop hands get nine-tenths of the profits, and starve on ‘em, while the good little company rolls in luxury on the other tenth. But you’ve got used to something different over there, and of course Brother Peck’s ideas startled you. Well, I suppose I should have been just so myself.”

“Mr. Putney has never felt just right about the working-men since he lost the boycotters’ case,” said Mr. Gerrish, with a snicker.

“Oh, come now, Billy, why did you give me away?” said Putney, with mock suffering. “Well, I suppose I might as well own up, Mrs. Munger; it’s no use trying to keep it from you; you know it already. Yes, Annie, I defended some poor devils here for combining to injure a non-union man — for doing once just what the big manufacturing Trusts do every day of the year with impunity; and I lost the case. I expected to. I told ’em they were wrong, but I did my best for ‘em. ‘Why, you fools,’ said I — that’s the way I talk to ‘em, Annie; I call ’em pet names; they like it; they’re used to ‘em; they get ’em every day in the newspapers— ‘you fools,’ said I, ‘what do you want to boycott for, when you can vote? What do you want to break the laws for, when you can make ‘em? You idiots, you,’ said I, ‘what do you putter round for, persecuting non-union men, that have as good a right to earn their bread as you, when you might make the whole United States of America a Labour Union?’ Of course I didn’t say that in court.”

“Oh, how delicious you are, Mr. Putney!” said Mrs. Munger.

“Glad you like me, Mrs. Munger,” Putney replied.

“Yes, you’re delightful,” said the lady, recovering from the effects of the drollery which they had all pretended to enjoy, Mr. Gerrish, and Mrs. Gerrish by his leave, even more than the others. “But you’re not candid. All this doesn’t help us to a conclusion. Would you give up the invited dance and supper, or wouldn’t you? That’s the question.”

“And no shirking, hey?” asked Putney.

“No shirking.”

Putney glanced through a little transparent space in the ground-glass windows framing the room, which Mr. Gerrish used for keeping an eye on his sales-ladies to see that they did not sit down.

“Hello!” he exclaimed. “There’s Dr. Morrell. Let’s put the case to him.” He opened the door and called down the store, “Come in here, Doc!”

“What?” called back an amused voice; and after a moment steps approached, and Dr. Morrell hesitated at the open door. He was a tall man, with a slight stoop; well dressed; full bearded; with kind, boyish blue eyes that twinkled in fascinating friendliness upon the group. “Nobody sick here, I hope?”

“Walk right in, sir! come in, Dr. Morrell,” said Mr. Gerrish. “Mrs. Munger and Mrs. Gerrish you know. Present you to Miss Kilburn, who has come to make her home among us after a prolonged residence abroad. Dr. Morrell, Miss Kilburn.”

“No, there’s nobody sick here, in one sense,” said Putney, when the doctor had greeted the ladies. “But we want your advice all the same. Mrs. Munger is in a pretty bad way morally, Doc.”

“Don’t you mind Mr. Putney, doctor!” screamed Mrs. Gerrish.

Putney said, with respectful recognition of the poor woman’s attempt to be arch, “I’ll try to keep within the bounds of truth in stating the case, Mrs. Gerrish.”

He went on to state it, with so much gravity and scrupulosity, and with so many appeals to Mrs. Munger to correct him if he were wrong, that the doctor was shaking with laughter when Putney came to an end with unbroken seriousness. At each repetition of the facts, Annie’s relation to them grew more intolerable; and she suspected Putney of an intention to punish her. “Well, what do you say?” he demanded of the doctor.

“Ha, ha, ha! ah, ha, ha.” laughed the doctor, shutting his eyes and throwing back his head.

“Seems to consider it a laughing matter,” said Putney to Mrs. Munger.

“Yes; and that is all your fault,” said Mrs. Munger, trying, with the ineffectiveness of a large woman, to pout.

“No, no, I’m not laughing.” began the doctor.

“Smiling, perhaps,” suggested Putney.

The doctor went off again. Then, “I beg — I beg your pardon, Mrs. Munger,” he resumed. “But it isn’t a professional question, you know; and I — I really couldn’t judge — have any opinion on such a matter.”

“No shirking,” said Putney. “That’s what Mrs. Munger said to me.”

“Of course not,” gurgled the doctor. “You ladies will know what to do. I’m sure I shouldn’t,” he added.

“Well, I must be going,” said Putney. “Sorry to leave you in this fix, Doc.” He flashed out of the door, and suddenly came back to offer Annie his hand. “I beg your pardon, Annie. I’m going to make Ellen bring me round. Good morning.” He bowed cursorily to the rest.

“Wait — I’ll go with you, Putney,” said the doctor.

Mrs. Munger rose, and Annie with her. “We must go too,” she said. “We’ve taken up Mr. Gerrish’s time most unconscionably,” and now Mr. Gerrish did not urge her to remain.

“Well, good-bye,” said Mrs. Gerrish, with a genteel prolongation of the last syllable.

Mr. Gerrish followed his guests down the store, and even out upon the sidewalk, where he presided with unheeded hospitality over the superfluous politeness of Putney and Dr. Morrell in putting Mrs. Munger and Annie into the phaeton. Mrs. Munger attempted to drive away without having taken up her hitching weight.

“I suppose that there isn’t a post in this town that my wife hasn’t tried to pull up in that way,” said Putney gravely.

The doctor doubled himself down with another fit of laughing.

Annie wanted to laugh too, but she did not like his laughing. She questioned if it were not undignified. She felt that it might be disrespectful. Then she asked herself why he should respect her.

IX.

“That was a great success,” said Mrs. Munger, as they drove away. Annie said nothing, and she added, “Don’t you think so?”

“Well, I confess,” said Annie, “I don’t see how, exactly. Do you mean with regard to Mr. Gerrish?”

“Oh no; I don’t care anything about him,” said Mrs. Munger, touching her pony with the tip of her whip-lash. “He’s an odious little creature, and I knew that he would go for the dance and supper because Mr. Peck was opposed to them. He’s one of the anti-Peck party in his church, and that is the reason I spoke to him. But I meant the other gentlemen. You saw how they took it.”

“I saw that they both made fun of it,” said Annie.

“Yes; that’s just the point. It’s so fortunate they were frank about it. It throws a new light on it; and if that’s the way nice people are going to look at it, why, we must give up the idea. I’m quite prepared to do so. But I want to see Mrs. Wilmington first.”

“Mrs. Munger,” said Annie uneasily, “I would rather not see Mrs. Wilmington with you on this subject; I should be of no use.”

“My dear, you would be of the greatest use,” persisted Munger, and she laid her arm across Annie’s lap, as if to prevent her jumping out of the phaeton. “As Mrs. Wilmington’s old friend, you will have the greatest influence with her.”

“But I don’t know that I wish to influence her in favour of the supper and dance; I don’t know that I believe in them,” said Annie, cowed and troubled by the affair.

“That doesn’t make the slightest difference,” said Mrs. Munger impartially. “All you will have to do is to keep still. I will put the case to her.”

She checked the pony before the bar which the flagman at the railroad crossing had let down, while a long freight train clattered deafeningly by, and then drove bumping and jouncing across the tracks. “I suppose you remember what ‘Over the Track’ means in Hatboro’?”

“Oh yes,” said Annie, with a smile. “Social perdition at the least. You don’t mean that Mrs. Wilmington lives ‘Over the Track’?”

“Yes. It isn’t so bad as it used to be, socially. Mr. Wilmington has built a very fine house on this side, and there are several pretty Queen Anne cottages going up.”

They drove along under the elms which here stood somewhat at random about the wide, grassless street, between the high, windowy bulks of the shoe shops and hat shops. The dust gradually freed itself from the cinders about the tracks, and it hardened into a handsome, newly made road beyond the houses of the shop hands. They passed some open lots, and then, on a pleasant rise of ground, they came to a stately residence, lifted still higher on its underpinning of granite blocks. It was built in a Boston suburban taste of twenty years ago, with a lofty mansard-roof, and it was painted the stone-grey colour which was once esteemed for being so quiet. The lawn before it sloped down to the road, where it ended smoothly at the brink of a neat stone wall. A black asphalt path curved from the steps by which you mounted from the street to the steps by which you mounted to the heavy portico before the massive black walnut doors.

The ladies were shown into the music-room, from which the notes of a piano were sounding when they rang, and Mrs. Wilmington rose from the instrument to meet them. A young man who had been standing beside her turned away. Mrs. Wilmington was dressed in a light morning dress with a Watteau fall, whose delicate russets and faded reds and yellows heightened the richness of her complexion and hair.

“Why, Annie,” she said, “how glad I am to see you! And you too, Mrs. Munger. How vurry nice!” Her words took value from the thick mellow tones of her voice, and passed for much more than they were worth intrinsically. She moved lazily about and got them into chairs, and was not resentful when Mrs. Munger broke out with “How hot you have it!” “Have we? We had the furnace lighted yesterday, and we’ve been in all the morning, and so we hadn’t noticed. Jack, won’t you shut the register?” she drawled over her shoulder. “This is my nephew, Mr. Jack Wilmington, Miss Kilburn. Mr. Wilmington and Mrs. Munger are old friends.”

The young fellow bowed silently, and Annie instantly took a dislike to him, his heavy jaw, long eyes, and low forehead almost hidden under a thick bang. He sat down cornerwise on a chair, and listened, with a scornful thrust of his thick lips, to their talk.

Mrs. Munger was not abashed by him. She opened her budget with all her robust authority, and once more put Annie to shame. When she came to the question of the invited supper and dance, and having previously committed Mrs. Wilmington in favour of the general scheme, asked her what she thought of that part, Mr. Jack Wilmington answered for her —

“I should think you had a right to do what you please about it. It’s none of the hands’ business if you don’t choose to ask them.”

“Yes, that’s what any one would think — in the abstract,” said Mrs. Munger.

“Now, little boy,” said Mrs. Wilmington, with indolent amusement, putting out a silencing hand in the direction of the young man, “don’t you be so fast. You let your aunty speak for herself. I don’t know about not letting the hands stay to the dance and supper, Mrs. Munger. You know I might feel ‘put upon.’ I used to be one of the hands myself. Yes, Annie, there was a time after you went away, and after father died, when I actually fell so low as to work for an honest living.”

“I think I heard, Lyra,” said Annie; “but I had forgotten.” The fact, in connection with what had been said, made her still more uncomfortable.

“Well, I didn’t work very hard, and I didn’t have to work long. But I was a hand, and there’s no use trying to deny it. As Mr. Putney says, he and I have our record, and we don’t have to make any pretences. And the question is, whether I ought to go back on my fellow-hands.”

“Oh, but Mrs. Wilmington!” said Mrs. Munger, with intense deprecation, “that’s such a very different thing. You were not brought up to it; it was just temporary; and besides—”

“And besides, there was Mr. Wilmington, I know. He was very opportune. I might have been a hand at this moment if Mr. Wilmington had not come along and invited me to be a head — the head of his house. But I don’t know, Annie, whether I oughtn’t to remember my low beginnings.”

“I suppose we all like to be consistent,” answered Annie aimlessly, uneasily.

“Yes,” Mrs. Munger broke in; “but they were not your beginnings, Mrs. Wilmington; they were your incidents — your accidents.”

“It’s very pretty of you to say so, Mrs. Munger,” drawled Mrs. Wilmington. “But I guess I must oppose the little invited dance and supper, on principle. We all like to be consistent, as Annie says — even if we’re inconsistent in the attempt,” she added, with a laugh.

“Very well, then,” exclaimed Mrs. Munger, “we’ll drop them. As I said to Miss Kilburn on our way here, ‘if Mrs. Wilmington is opposed to them, we’ll drop them.’”

“Oh, am I such an influential person?” said Mrs. Wilmington, with a shrug. “It’s rather awful — isn’t it, Annie?”

“Not at all!” Mrs. Munger answered for Annie. “We’ve just been talking the matter over with Mr. Putney and Dr. Morrell, and they’re both opposed. You’re merely the straw that breaks the camel’s back, Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Oh, thank you! That’s a great relief.”

“Well — and now the question is, will you take the part of the Nurse or not in the dramatics?” asked Mrs. Munger, returning to business.

“Well, I must think about that, and I must ask Mr. Wilmington. Jack,” she called over her shoulder to the young man at the window, “do you think your uncle would approve of me as Juliet’s Nurse?”

“You’d better ask him,” growled the young fellow.

“Well,” said Mrs. Wilmington, with another laugh, “I’ll think it over, Mrs. Munger.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Munger. “And now we must really be going,” she added, pulling out her watch by its leathern guard.

“Not till you’ve had lunch,” said Mrs. Wilmington, rising with the ladies. “You must stay. Annie, I shall not excuse you.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Munger, complying without regard to Annie, “all this diplomacy is certainly very exhausting.”

“Lunch will be on the table in one moment,” returned Mrs. Wilmington, as the ladies sat down again provisionally. “Will you join us, Jack?”

“No; I’m going to the office,” said the nephew, bowing himself out of the room.

“Jack’s learning to be superintendent,” said Mrs. Wilmington, lifting her teasing voice to make him hear her in the hall, “and he’s been spending the whole morning here.”

In the richly appointed dining-room — a glitter of china and glass and a mass of carven oak — the table was laid for two.

“Put another plate, Norah,” said Mrs. Wilmington carelessly.

There was bouillon in teacups, chicken cutlets in white sauce, and luscious strawberries.

“What a cook!” cried Mrs. Munger, over the cutlets.

“Yes, she’s a treasure; I don’t deny it,” said Mrs. Wilmington.

X.

By the end of May most of the summer folk had come to their cottages in South Hatboro’. One after another the ladies called upon Annie. They all talked to her of the Social Union, and it seemed to be agreed that it was fully in train, though what was really in train was the entertainment to be given at Mrs. Munger’s for the benefit of the Union; the Union always dropped out of the talk as soon as the theatricals were mentioned.

When Annie went to return these visits she scarcely recognised even the shape of the country, once so familiar to her, of which the summer settlement had possessed itself. She found herself in a strange world — a world of colonial and Queen Anne architecture, where conscious lines and insistent colours contributed to an effect of posing which she had never seen off the stage. But it was not a very large world, and after the young trees and hedges should have grown up and helped to hide it, she felt sure that it would be a better world. In detail it was not so bad now, but the whole was a violent effect of porches, gables, chimneys, galleries, loggias, balconies, and jalousies, which nature had not yet had time to palliate.

Mrs. Munger was at home, and wanted her to spend the day, to drive out with her, to stay to lunch. When Annie would not do any of these things, she invited herself to go with her to call at the Brandreths’. But first she ordered her to go out with her to see the place where they intended to have the theatricals: a pretty bit of natural boscage — white birches, pines, and oaks — faced by a stretch of smooth turf, where a young man in a flannel blazer was painting a tennis-court in the grass. Mrs. Munger introduced him as her Jim, and the young fellow paused from his work long enough to bow to her: his nose now seemed in perfect repair.

Mr. Brandreth met them at the door of his mother’s cottage. It was a very small cottage on the outside, with a good deal of stained glass en évidence in leaded sashes; where the sashes were not leaded and the glass not stained, the panes were cut up into very large ones, with little ones round them. Everything was very old-fashioned inside. The door opened directly into a wainscoted square hall, which had a large fireplace with gleaming brass andirons, and a carved mantel carried to the ceiling. It was both baronial and colonial in its decoration; there was part of a suit of imitation armour under a pair of moose antlers on one wall, and at one side of the fireplace there was a spinning-wheel, with a tuft of flax ready to be spun. There were Japanese swords on the lowest mantel-shelf, together with fans and vases; a long old flint-lock musket stretched across the panel above. Mr. Brandreth began to show things to Annie, and to tell how little they cost, as soon as the ladies entered. His mother’s voice called from above, “Now, Percy, you stop till I get there!” and in a moment or two she appeared from behind a portière in one corner. Before she shook hands with the ladies, or allowed any kind of greeting, she pulled the portière aside, and made Annie admire the snug concealment of the staircase. Then she made her go upstairs and see the chambers, and the second-hand colonial bedsteads, and the andirons everywhere, and the old chests of drawers and their brasses; and she told her some story about each, and how Percy picked it up and had it repaired. When they came down, the son took Annie in hand again and walked her over the ground-floor, ending with the kitchen, which was in the taste of an old New England kitchen, with hard-seated high-backed chairs, and a kitchen table with curiously turned legs, which he had picked up in the hen-house of a neighbouring farmer for a song. There was an authentic crane in the dining-room fireplace, which he had found in a heap of scrap-iron at a blacksmith’s shop, and had got for next to nothing. The sideboard he had got at an old second-hand shop in the North End; and he believed it was an heirloom from the house of one of the old ministers of the North End Church. Everything, nearly, in the Brandreth cottage was an heirloom, though Annie could not remember afterward any object that had been an heirloom in the Brandreth family.

When she went back with Mr. Brandreth to the hall, which seemed to be also the drawing-room, she found that Mrs. Brandreth had lighted the fire on the hearth, though it was rather a warm day without, for the sake of the effect. She was sitting in the chimney-seat, and shielding her face from the blaze with an old-fashioned feather hand-screen.

“Now don’t you think we have a lovely little home?” she demanded.

Mrs. Munger began to break out in its praise, but she shook the screen silencingly at her.

“No, no! I want Miss Kilburn’s unbiassed opinion. Don’t you speak, Mrs. Munger! Now haven’t we?”

Mrs. Brandreth made Annie assent to the superiority of her cottage in detail. She recapitulated the different facts of the architecture and furnishing, from each of which she seemed to acquire personal merit, and she insisted that Percy should show some of them again. “We think it’s a little picture,” she concluded, and once more Annie felt obliged to murmur her acquiescence.

At last Mrs. Munger said that she must go to lunch, and was going to take Annie with her; Annie said she must lunch at home; and then Mrs. Brandreth pressed them both to stay to lunch with her. “You shall have a cup of tea out of a piece of real Satsuma,” she said; but they resisted. “I don’t believe,” she added, apparently relieved by their persistence, and losing a little anxiety of manner, “that Percy’s had any chance to consult you on a very important point about your theatricals, Miss Kilburn.”

“Oh, that will do some other time, mother,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“No, no! Now! And you can have Mrs. Munger’s opinion too. You know Miss Sue Northwick is going to be Juliet?”

“No!” shouted Mrs. Munger. “I thought she had refused positively. When did she change her mind?”

“She’s just sent Percy a note. We were talking it over when you came, and Percy was going over to tell you.”

“Then it is sure to be a success,” said Mrs. Munger, with a solemnity of triumph.

“Yes, but Percy feels that it complicates one point more than ever—”

“It’s a question that always comes up in amateur dramatics,” said Mr. Brandreth, with reluctance, “and it always will; and of course it’s particularly embarrassing in Romeo and Juliet. If they don’t show any affection — it’s very awkward and stiff; and if—”

“I never approved of those liberties on the stage,” said Mrs. Brandreth. “I tell Percy that it’s my principal objection to it. I can’t make it seem nice. But he says that it’s essential to the effect. Now I say that they might just incline their heads toward each other without actually, you know. But Percy is afraid that it won’t do, especially in the parting scene on the balcony — so passionate, you know — it won’t do simply to — They must act like lovers. And it’s such a great point to get Miss Sue Northwick to take the part, that he mustn’t risk losing her by anything that might seem—”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Munger, with deep concern.

Mr. Brandreth looked very unhappy. “It’s an embarrassing point. We can’t change the play, and so the difficulty must be met and disposed of at once.”

He did not look at either of the ladies, but Mrs. Munger referred the matter to Annie with a glance of impartiality. His mother also turned her eyes upon Annie. “Percy thought that you must have seen so much of amateur dramatics in Europe that you could tell him just how to do.”

“Perhaps you could consult Miss Northwick herself,” said Annie dryly, after a moment of indignation, and another of amusement.

“I thought of that,” said Mrs. Brandreth; “but as Percy’s to be Romeo — You see he wishes the play to be a success artistically; but if it’s to succeed socially, he must have Miss Northwick, and she might resign at the first suggestion of—”

“Bessie Chapley would certainly have been better. She’s so outspoken you could have put the case right to her,” said Mrs. Munger.

“Yes,” said Mr. Brandreth gloomily.

“But we shall find out a way. Why, you can settle it at rehearsal!”

“Perhaps at rehearsal,” said Mr. Brandreth, with a pensive absence of mind.

Mrs. Munger crushed his hand and his mother’s in her leathern grasp, and took Annie away with her. “It isn’t lunch-time yet,” she explained, when they were out of earshot, “but I saw she was simply killing you, and so I made the excuse. She has no mercy. There’s time enough for you to make your calls before lunch, and then you can come home with me.”

Annie suggested that this would not do after refusing Mrs. Brandreth.

“Why, it would never have done to accept!” Mrs. Munger cried. “They didn’t dream of it!” At the next place she said: “This is the Clevingers’. They’re some of our all-the-year-round people too.” She opened the door without ringing, and let herself noisily in. “This is the way we run in, without ceremony, everywhere. It’s quite one family. That’s the charm of the place. We expect to take each other as we find them.”

Her freedom did not find the ladies off their guard anywhere. At all the houses there was a skurrying of feet and a flashing of skirts out of the room or up the stairs, and there was an interval for a thorough study of the features of the room before the hostess came in, with the effect of coming in just as she was. She had naturally always made some change in her dress, and Annie felt that she had not really liked being run in upon. Everywhere they talked to her about the theatricals; and they talked across her to Mrs. Munger, about one another, pretty freely.

“Well, that’s all there is of us at present,” said Mrs. Munger, coming down the main road with her from the last place, “and you see just what we are. It’s a neighbourhood where everybody’s just adapted to everybody else. It’s not a mere mush of concession, as Emerson says; people are perfectly outspoken; but there’s the greatest good feeling, and no vulgar display, or lavish expenditure, or — anything.”

Annie walked slowly homeward. She was tired, and she was now aware of having been extremely bored by the South Hatboro’ people. She was very censorious of them, as we are of other people when we have reason to be discontented with ourselves. They were making a pretence of simplicity and unconventionality; but they had brought each her full complement of servants with her, and each was apparently giving herself in the summer to the unrealities that occupied her during the winter. Everywhere Annie had found the affectation of intellectual interests, and the assumption that these were the highest interests of life: there could be no doubt that culture was the ideal of South Hatboro’, and several of the ladies complained that in the summer they got behind with their reading, or their art, or their music. They said it was even more trouble to keep house in the country than it was in town; sometimes your servants would not come with you; or, if they did, they were always discontented, and you did not know what moment they would leave you.

Annie asked herself how her own life was in any wise different from that of these people. It had received a little more light into it, but as yet it had not conformed itself to any ideal of duty. She too was idle and vapid, like the society of which her whole past had made her a part, and she owned to herself, groaning in spirit, that it was no easier to escape from her tradition at Hatboro’ than it was at Rome.

When she reached her own house again, Mrs. Bolton called to her from the kitchen threshold as she was passing the corner on her way to the front door: “Mis’ Putney’s b’en here. I guess you’ll find a note from her on the parlour table.”

Annie fired in resentment of the uncouthness. It was Mrs. Bolton’s business to come into the parlour and give her the note, with a respectful statement of the facts. But she did not tell her so; it would have been useless.

Mrs. Putney’s note was an invitation to a family tea for the next evening.

XI.

Putney met Annie at the door, and led her into the parlour beside the hall. He had a little crippled boy on his right arm, and he gave her his left hand. In the parlour he set his burden down in a chair, and the child drew up under his thin arms a pair of crutches that stood beside it. His white face had the eager purity and the waxen translucence which we see in sufferers from hip-disease.

“This is our Winthrop,” said his father, beginning to talk at once. “We receive the company and do the honours while mother’s looking after the tea. We only keep one undersized girl,” he explained more directly to Annie, “and Ellen has to be chief cook and bottlewasher herself. She’ll be in directly. Just lay off your bonnet anywhere.”

She was taking in the humility of the house and its belongings while she received the impression of an unimagined simplicity in its life from his easy explanations. The furniture was in green terry, the carpet a harsh, brilliant tapestry; on the marble-topped centre table was a big clasp Bible and a basket with a stereoscope and views; the marbleised iron shelf above the stove-pipe hole supported two glass vases and a French clock under a glass bell; through the open door, across the oil-cloth of the hallway, she saw the white-painted pine balusters of the steep, cramped stairs. It was clear that neither Putney nor his wife had been touched by the aesthetic craze; the parlour was in the tastelessness of fifteen years before; but after the decoration of South Hatboro’, she found a delicious repose in it. Her eyes dwelt with relief on the wall-paper of French grey, sprigged with small gilt flowers, and broken by a few cold engravings and framed photographs.

Putney himself was as little decorated as the parlour. He had put on a clean shirt, but the bulging bosom had broken away from its single button, and showed two serrated edges of ragged linen; his collar lost itself from time to time under the rise of his plastron scarf band, which kept escaping from the stud that ought to have held it down behind. His hair was brushed smoothly across a forehead which looked as innocent and gentle as the little boy’s.

“We don’t often give these festivities,” he went on, “but you don’t come home once in twelve years every day, Annie. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you in our house; and Ellen’s just as excited as the rest of us; she was sorry to miss you when she called.”

“You’re very kind, Ralph. I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to come, and I’m not going to let the trouble I’m giving spoil my pleasure.”

“Well, that’s right,” said Putney. “We sha’n’t either.” He took out a cigar and put it into his mouth. “It’s only a dry smoke. Ellen makes me let up on my chewing when we have company, and I must have something in my mouth, so I get a cigar. It’s a sort of compromise. I’m a terribly nervous man, Annie; you can’t imagine. If it wasn’t for the grace of God, I think I should fly to pieces sometimes. But I guess that’s what holds me together — that and Winthy here. I dropped him on the stairs out there, when I was drunk, one night. I saw you looking at them; I suppose you’ve been told; it’s all right. I presume the Almighty knows what He’s about; but sometimes He appears to save at the spigot and waste at the bung-hole, like the rest of us. He let me cripple my boy to reform me.”

“Don’t, Ralph!” said Annie, with a voice of low entreaty. She turned and spoke to the child, and asked him if he would not come to see her.

“What?” he asked, breaking with a sort of absent-minded start from his intentness upon his father’s words.

She repeated her invitation.

“Thanks!” he said, in the prompt, clear little pipe which startles by its distinctness and decision on the lips of crippled children. “I guess father’ll bring me some day. Don’t you want I should go out and tell mother she’s here?” he asked his father.

“Well, if you want to, Winthrop,” said his father.

The boy swung himself lightly out of the room on his crutches, and his father turned to her. “Well, how does Hatboro’ strike you, anyway, Annie? You needn’t mind being honest with me, you know.”

He did not give her a chance to say, and she was willing to let him talk on, and tell her what he thought of Hatboro’ himself. “Well, it’s like every other place in the world, at every moment of history — it’s in a transition state. The theory is, you know, that most places are at a standstill the greatest part of the time; they haven’t begun to move, or they’ve stopped moving; but I guess that’s a mistake; they’re moving all the while. I suppose Rome itself was in a transition state when you left?”

“Oh, very decidedly. It had ceased to be old and was becoming new.”

“Well, that’s just the way with Hatboro’. There is no old Hatboro’ any more; and there never was, as your father and mine could tell us if they were here. They lived in a painfully transitional period, poor old fellows! But, for all that, there is a difference. They lived in what was really a New England village, and we live now in a sprawling American town; and by American of course I mean a town where at least one-third of the people are raw foreigners or rawly extracted natives. The old New England ideal characterises them all, up to a certain point, socially; it puts a decent outside on most of ‘em; it makes ’em keep Sunday, and drink on the sly. We got in the Irish long ago, and now they’re part of the conservative element. We got in the French Canadians, and some of them are our best mechanics and citizens. We’re getting in the Italians, and as soon as they want something better than bread and vinegar to eat, they’ll begin going to Congress and boycotting and striking and forming pools and trusts just like any other class of law-abiding Americans. There used to be some talk of the Chinese, but I guess they’ve pretty much blown over. We’ve got Ah Lee and Sam Lung here, just as they have everywhere, but their laundries don’t seem to increase. The Irish are spreading out into the country and scooping in the farms that are not picturesque enough for the summer folks. You can buy a farm anywhere round Hatboro’ for less than the buildings on it cost. I’d rather the Irish would have the land than the summer folks. They make an honest living off it, and the other fellows that come out to roost here from June till October simply keep somebody else from making a living off it, and corrupt all the poor people in sight by their idleness and luxury. That’s what I tell ’em at South Hatboro’. They don’t like it, but I guess they believe it; anyhow they have to hear it. They’ll tell you in self-defence that J. Milton Northwick is a practical farmer, and sells his butter for a dollar a pound. He’s done more than anybody else to improve the breeds of cattle and horses; and he spends fifteen thousand a year on his place. It can’t return him five; and that’s the reason he’s a curse and a fraud.”

“Who is Mr. Northwick, Ralph?” Annie interposed. “Everybody at South Hatboro’ asked me if I’d met the Northwicks.”

“He’s a very great and good man,” said Putney. “He’s worth a million, and he runs a big manufacturing company at Ponkwasset Falls, and he owns a fancy farm just beyond South Hatboro’. He lives in Boston, but he comes out here early enough to dodge his tax there, and let poorer people pay it. He’s got miles of cut stone wall round his place, and conservatories and gardens and villas and drives inside of it, and he keeps up the town roads outside at his own expense. Yes, we feel it such an honour and advantage to have J. Milton in Hatboro’ that our assessors practically allow him to fix the amount of tax here himself. People who can pay only a little at the highest valuation are assessed to the last dollar of their property and income; but the assessors know that this wouldn’t do with Mr. Northwick. They make a guess at his income, and he always pays their bills without asking for abatement; they think themselves wise and public-spirited men for doing it, and most of their fellow-citizens think so too. You see it’s not only difficult for a rich man to get into the kingdom of heaven, Annie, but he makes it hard for other people.

“Well, as I was saying, socially, the old New England element is at the top of the heap here. That’s so everywhere. The people that are on the ground first, it don’t matter much who they are, have to manage pretty badly not to leave their descendants in social ascendency over all newer comers for ever. Why, I can see it in my own case. I can see that I was a sort of fetich to the bedevilled fancy of the people here when I was seen drunk in the streets every day, just because I was one of the old Hatboro’ Putneys; and when I began to hold up, there wasn’t a man in the community that wasn’t proud and flattered to help me. Curious, isn’t it? It made me sick of myself and ashamed of them, and I just made up my mind, as soon as I got straight again, I’d give all my help to the men that hadn’t a tradition. That’s what I’ve done, Annie. There isn’t any low, friendless rapscallion in this town that hasn’t got me for his friend — and Ellen. We’ve been in all the strikes with the men, and all their fool boycottings and kicking over the traces generally. Anybody else would have been turned out of respectable society for one-half that I’ve done, but it tolerates me because I’m one of the old Hatboro’ Putneys. You’re one of the old Hatboro’ Kilburns, and if you want to have a mind of your own and a heart of your own, all you’ve got to do is to have it. They’ll like it; they’ll think it’s original. That’s the reason South Hatboro’ got after you with that Social Union scheme. They were right in thinking you would have a great deal of influence. I was sorry you had to throw it against Brother Peck.”

Annie felt herself jump at this climax, as if she had been touched on an exposed nerve. She grew red, and tried to be angry, but she was only ashamed and tempted to lie out of the part she had taken. “Mrs. Munger,” she said, “gave that a very unfair turn. I didn’t mean to ridicule Mr. Peck. I think he was perfectly sincere. The scheme of the invited dance and supper has been entirely given up. And I don’t care for the project of the Social Union at all.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear it,” said Putney, indifferently, and he resumed his analysis of Hatboro’ —

“We’ve got all the modern improvements here, Annie. I suppose you’d find the modern improvements, most of ‘em, in Sheol: electric light, Bell telephone, asphalt sidewalks, and city water — though I don’t know about the water; and I presume they haven’t got a public library or an opera-house — perhaps they have got an opera-house in Sheol: you see I use the Revised Version, it don’t sound so much like swearing. But, as I was saying—”

Mrs. Putney came in, and he stopped with the laugh of a man who knows that his wife will find it necessary to account for him and apologise for him.

The ladies kissed each other. Mrs. Putney was dressed in the black silk of a woman who has one silk; she was red from the kitchen, but all was neat and orderly in the hasty toilet which she must have made since leaving the cook-stove. A faint, mixed perfume of violet sachet and fricasseed chicken attended her.

“Well, as you were saying, Ralph?” she suggested.

“Oh, I was just tracing a little parallel between Hatboro’ and Sheol,” replied her husband.

Mrs. Putney made a tchk of humorous patience, and laughed toward Annie for sympathy. “Well, then, I guess you needn’t go on. Tea’s ready. Shall we wait for the doctor?”

“No; doctors are too uncertain. We’ll wait for him while we’re eating. That’s what fetches him the soonest. I’m hungry. Ain’t you, Win?”

“Not so very,” said the boy, with his queer promptness. He stood resting himself on his crutches at the door, and he now wheeled about, and led the way out to the living-room, swinging himself actively forward. It seemed that his haste was to get to the dumb-waiter in the little china closet opening off the dining-room, which was like the papered inside of a square box. He called to the girl below, and helped pull it up, as Annie could tell by the creaking of the rope, and the light jar of the finally arriving crockery. A half-grown girl then appeared, and put the dishes on at the places indicated with nods and looks by Mrs. Putney, who had taken her place at the table. There was a platter of stewed fowl, and a plate of high-piled waffles, sweltering in successive courses of butter and sugar. In cut-glass dishes, one at each end of the table, there were canned cherries and pine-apple. There was a square of old-fashioned soda biscuit, not broken apart, which sent up a pleasant smell; in the centre of the table was a shallow vase of strawberries.

It was all very good and appetising; but to Annie it was pathetically old-fashioned, and helped her to realise how wholly out of the world was the life which her friends led.

“Winthrop,” said Putney, and the father and mother bowed their heads.

The boy dropped his over his folded hands, and piped up clearly: “Our Father, which art in heaven, help us to remember those who have nothing to eat. Amen!”

“That’s a grace that Win got up himself,” his father explained, beginning to heap a plate with chicken and mashed potato, which he then handed to Annie, passing her the biscuit and the butter. “We think it suits the Almighty about as well as anything.”

“I suppose you know Ralph of old, Annie?” said Mrs. Putney. “The only way he keeps within bounds at all is by letting himself perfectly loose.”

Putney laughed out his acquiescence, and they began to talk together about old times. Mrs. Putney and Annie recalled the childish plays and adventures they had together, and one dreadful quarrel. Putney told of the first time he saw Annie, when his father took him one day for a call on the old judge, and how the old judge put him through his paces in American history, and would not admit the theory that the battle of Bunker’s Hill could have been fought on Breed’s Hill. Putney said that it was years before it occurred to him that the judge must have been joking: he had always thought he was simply ignorant.

“I used to set a good deal by the battle of Bunker’s Hill,” he continued. “I thought the whole Revolution and subsequent history revolved round it, and that it gave us all liberty, equality, and fraternity at a clip. But the Lord always finds some odd jobs to look after next day, and I guess He didn’t clear ’em all up at Bunker’s Hill.”

Putney’s irony and piety were very much of a piece apparently, and Annie was not quite sure which this conclusion was. She glanced at his wife, who seemed satisfied with it in either case. She was waiting patiently for him to wake up to the fact that he had not yet given her anything to eat; after helping Annie and the boy, he helped himself, and pending his wife’s pre-occupation with the tea, he forgot her.

“Why didn’t you throw something at me,” he roared, in grief and self-reproach. “There wouldn’t have been a loose piece of crockery on this side of the table if I hadn’t got my tea in time.”

“Oh, I was listening to Annie’s share in the conversation,” said Mrs. Putney; and her husband was about to say something in retort of her thrust when a tap on the front door was heard.

“Come in, come in, Doc!” he shouted. “Mrs. Putney’s just been helped, and the tea is going to begin.”

Dr. Morrell’s chuckle made answer for him, and after time enough to put down his hat, he came in, rubbing his hands and smiling, and making short nods round the table. “How d’ye do, Mrs. Putney? How d’ye do, Miss Kilburn? Winthrop?” He passed his hand over the boy’s smooth hair and slipped into the chair beside him.

“You see, the reason why we always wait for the doctor in this formal way,” said Putney, “is that he isn’t in here more than seven nights of the week, and he rather stands on his dignity. Hand round the doctor’s plate, my son,” he added to the boy, and he took it from Annie, to whom the boy gave it, and began to heap it from the various dishes. “Think you can lift that much back to the doctor, Win?”

“I guess so,” said the boy coolly.

“What is flooring Win at present,” said his father, “and getting him down and rolling him over, is that problem of the robin that eats half a pint of grasshoppers and then doesn’t weigh a bit more than he did before.”

“When he gets a little older,” said the doctor, shaking over his plateful, “he’ll be interested to trace the processes of his father’s thought from a guest and half a peck of stewed chicken, to a robin and half a pint of—”

“Don’t, doctor!” pleaded Mrs. Putney. “He won’t have the least trouble if he’ll keep to the surface.”

Putney laughed impartially, and said: “Well, we’ll take the doctor out and weigh him when he gets done. We expected Brother Peck here this evening,” he explained to Dr. Morrell. “You’re our sober second thought — Well,” he broke off, looking across the table at his wife with mock anxiety. “Anything wrong about that, Ellen?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned, Mrs. Putney,” interposed the doctor. “I’m glad to be here on any terms. Go on, Putney.”

“Oh, there isn’t anything more. You know how Miss Kilburn here has been round throwing ridicule on Brother Peck, because he wants the shop-hands treated with common decency, and my idea was to get the two together and see how she would feel.”

Dr. Morrell laughed at this with what Annie thought was unnecessary malice; but he stopped suddenly, after a glance at her, and Putney went on —

“Brother Peck pleaded another engagement. Said he had to go off into the country to see a sick woman that wasn’t expected to live. You don’t remember the Merrifields, do you, Annie? Well, it doesn’t matter. One of ’em married West, and her husband left her, and she came home here and got a divorce; I got it for her. She’s the one. As a consumptive, she had superior attractions for Brother Peck. It isn’t a case that admits of jealousy exactly, but it wouldn’t matter to Brother Peck anyway. If he saw a chance to do a good action, he’d wade through blood.”

“Now look here, Ralph,” said Mrs. Putney, “there’s such a thing as letting yourself too loose.”

“Well, gore, then,” said Putney, buttering himself a biscuit.

The boy, who had kept quiet till now, seemed reached by this last touch, and broke into a high, crowing laugh, in which they all joined except his father.

“Gore suits Winthy, anyway,” he said, beginning to eat his biscuit. “I met one of the deacons from Brother Peck’s last parish, in Boston, yesterday. He asked me if we considered Brother Peck anyways peculiar in Hatboro’, and when I said we thought he was a little too luxurious, the deacon came out with a lot of things. The way Brother Peck behaved toward the needy in that last parish of his made it simply uninhabitable to the standard Christian. They had to get rid of him somehow — send him away or kill him. Of course the deacon said they didn’t want to kill him.”

“Where was his last parish?” asked the doctor.

“Down on the Maine coast somewhere. Penobscotport, I believe.”

“And was he indigenous there?”

“No, I believe not; he’s from Massachusetts. Farm-boy and then mill-hand, I understand. Self-helped to an education; divinity student with summer intervals of waiting at table in the mountain hotels probably. Drifted down Maine way on his first call and stuck; but I guess he won’t stick here very long. Annie’s friend Mr. Gerrish is going to look after Brother Peck before a great while.” He laughed, to see her blush, and went on. “You see, Brother Gerrish has got a high ideal of what a Christian minister ought to be; he hasn’t said much about it, but I can see that Brother Peck doesn’t come up to it. Well, Brother Gerrish has got a good many ideals. He likes to get anybody he can by the throat, and squeeze the difference of opinion out of ‘em.”

“There, now, Ralph,” his wife interposed, “you let Mr. Gerrish alone. You don’t like people to differ with you, either. Is your cup out, doctor?”

“Thank you,” said the doctor, handing it up to her. “And you mean Mr. Gerrish doesn’t like Mr. Peck’s doctrine?” he asked of Putney.

“Oh, I don’t know that he objects to his doctrine; he can’t very well; it’s ‘between the leds of the Bible,’ as the Hard-shell Baptist said. But he objects to Brother Peck’s walk and conversation. He thinks he walks too much with the poor, and converses too much with the lowly. He says he thinks that the pew-owners in Mr. Peck’s church and the people who pay his salary have some rights to his company that he’s bound to respect.”

The doctor relished the irony, but he asked, “Isn’t there something to say on that side?”

“Oh yes, a good deal. There’s always something to say on both sides, even when one’s a wrong side. That’s what makes it all so tiresome — makes you wish you were dead.” He looked up, and caught his boy’s eye fixed with melancholy intensity upon him. “I hope you’ll never look at both sides when you grow up, Win. It’s mighty uncomfortable. You take the right side, and stick to that. Brother Gerrish,” he resumed, to the doctor, “goes round taking the credit of Brother Peck’s call here; but the fact is he opposed it. He didn’t like his being so indifferent about the salary. Brother Gerrish held that the labourer was worthy of his hire, and if he didn’t inquire what his wages were going to be, it was a pretty good sign that he wasn’t going to earn them.”

“Well, there was some logic in that,” said the doctor, smiling as before.

“Plenty. And now it worries Brother Gerrish to see Brother Peck going round in the same old suit of clothes he came here in, and dressing his child like a shabby little Irish girl. He says that he who provideth not for those of his own household is worse than a heathen. That’s perfectly true. And he would like to know what Brother Peck does with his money, anyway. He would like to insinuate that he loses it at poker, I guess; at any rate, he can’t find out whom he gives it to, and he certainly doesn’t spend it on himself.”

“From your account of Mr. Peck.” said the doctor, “I should think Brother Gerrish might safely object to him as a certain kind of sentimentalist.”

“Well, yes, he might, looking at him from the outside. But when you come to talk with Brother Peck, you find yourself sort of frozen out with a most unexpected, hard-headed cold-bloodedness. Brother Peck is plain common-sense itself. He seems to be a man without an illusion, without an emotion.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” laughed the doctor.

“Ask Miss Kilburn. She’s talked with him, and she hates him.”

“No, I don’t, Ralph,” Annie began.

“Oh, well, then, perhaps he only made you hate yourself,” said Putney. There was something charming in his mockery, like the teasing of a brother with a sister; and Annie did not find the atonement to which he brought her altogether painful. It seemed to her really that she was getting off pretty easily, and she laughed with hearty consent at last.

Winthrop asked solemnly, “How did he do that?”

“Oh, I can’t tell exactly, Winthrop,” she said, touched by the boy’s simple interest in this abstruse point. “He made me feel that I had been rather mean and cruel when I thought I had only been practical. I can’t explain; but it wasn’t a comfortable feeling, my dear.”

“I guess that’s the trouble with Brother Peck,” said Putney. “He doesn’t make you feel comfortable. He doesn’t flatter you up worth a cent. There was Annie expecting him to take the most fervent interest in her theatricals, and her Social Union, and coo round, and tell her what a noble woman she was, and beg her to consider her health, and not overwork herself in doing good; but instead of that he simply showed her that she was a moral Cave-Dweller, and that she was living in a Stone Age of social brutalities; and of course she hated him.”

“Yes, that was the way, Winthrop,” said Annie; and they all laughed with her.

“Now you take them into the parlour, Ralph,” said his wife, rising, “and tell them how he made you hate him.”

“I shouldn’t like anything better,” replied Putney. He lifted the large ugly kerosene lamp that had been set on the table when it grew dark during tea, and carried it into the parlour with him. His wife remained to speak with her little helper, but she sent Annie with the gentlemen.

“Why, there isn’t a great deal of it — more spirit than letter, so to speak,” said Putney, when he put down the lamp in the parlour. “You know how I like to go on about other people’s sins, and the world’s wickedness generally; but one day Brother Peck, in that cool, impersonal way of his, suggested that it was not a wholly meritorious thing to hate evil. He went so far as to say that perhaps we could not love them that despitefully used us if we hated their evil so furiously. He said it was a good deal more desirable to understand evil than to hate it, for then we could begin to cure it. Yes, Brother Peck let in a good deal of light on me. He rather insinuated that I must be possessed by the very evils I hated, and that was the reason I was so violent about them. I had always supposed that I hated other people’s cruelty because I was merciful, and their meanness because I was magnanimous, and their intolerance because I was generous, and their conceit because I was modest, and their selfishness because I was disinterested; but after listening to Brother Peck a while I came to the conclusion that I hated these things in others because I was cruel myself, and mean, and bigoted, and conceited, and piggish; and that’s why I’ve hated Brother Peck ever since — just like you, Annie. But he didn’t reform me, I’m thankful to say, any more than he did you. I’ve gone on just the same, and I suppose I hate more infernal scoundrels and loathe more infernal idiots to-day than ever; but I perceive that I’m no part of the power that makes for righteousness as long as I work that racket; and now I sin with light and knowledge, anyway. No, Annie,” he went on, “I can understand why Brother Peck is not the success with women, and feminine temperaments like me, that his virtues entitle him to be. What we feminine temperaments want is a prophet, and Brother Peck doesn’t prophesy worth a cent. He doesn’t pretend to be authorised in any sort of way; he has a sneaking style of being no better than you are, and of being rather stumped by some of the truths he finds out. No, women like a good prophet about as well as they do a good doctor. Now if you, if you could unite the two functions, Doc—”

“Sort of medicine-man?” suggested Morrell.

“Exactly! The aborigines understood the thing. Why, I suppose that a real live medicine-man could go through a community like this and not leave a sinful soul nor a sore body in it among the ladies — perfect faith cure.”

“But what did you say to Mr. Peck, Ralph?” asked Annie. “Didn’t you attempt any defence?”

“No,” said Putney. “He had the advantage of me. You can’t talk back at a man in the pulpit.”

“Oh, it was a sermon?”

“I suppose the other people thought so. But I knew it was a private conversation that he was publicly holding with me.”

Putney and the doctor began to talk of the nature and origin of evil, and Annie and the boy listened. Putney took high ground, and attributed it to Adam. “You know, Annie,” he explained, “I don’t believe this; but I like to get a scientific man that won’t quite deny Scripture or the good old Bible premises, and see him suffer. Hello! you up yet, Winthrop? I guess I’ll go through the form of carrying you to bed, my son.”

When Mrs. Putney rejoined them, Annie said she must go, and Mrs. Putney went upstairs with her, apparently to help her put on her things, but really to have that talk before parting which guest and hostess value above the whole evening’s pleasure. She showed Annie the pictures of the little girls that had died, and talked a great deal about their sickness and their loveliness in death. Then they spoke of others, and Mrs. Putney asked Annie if she had seen Lyra Wilmington lately. Annie told of her call with Mrs. Munger, and Mrs. Putney said: “I like Lyra, and I always did. I presume she isn’t very happily married; he’s too old; there couldn’t have been any love on her part. But she would be a better woman than she is if she had children. Ralph says,” added Mrs. Putney, smiling, “that he knows she would be a good mother, she’s such a good aunt.”

Annie put her two hands impressively on the hands of her friend folded at her waist. “Ellen, what does it mean?”

“Nothing more than what you saw, Annie. She must have — or she will have — some one to amuse her; to be at her beck and call; and it’s best to have it all in the family, Ralph says.”

“But isn’t it — doesn’t he think it’s — odd?”

“It makes talk.”

They moved a little toward the door, holding each other’s hands. “Ellen, I’ve had a lovely time!”

“And so have I, Annie. I thought you’d like to meet Dr. Morrell.”

“Oh yes, indeed!”

“And I can’t tell you what a night this has been for Ralph. He likes you so much, and it isn’t often that he has a chance to talk to two such people as you and Dr. Morrell.”

“How brilliant he is!” Annie sighed.

“Yes, he’s a very able man. It’s very fortunate for Hatboro’ to have such a doctor. He and Ralph are great cronies. I never feel uneasy now when Ralph’s out late — I know he’s been up at the doctor’s office, talking. I—”

Annie broke in with a laugh. “I’ve no doubt Dr. Morrell is all you say, Ellen, but I meant Ralph when I spoke of brilliancy. He has a great future, I’m sure.”

Mrs. Putney was silent for a moment. “I’m satisfied with the present, so long as Ralph—” The tears suddenly gushed out of her eyes, and ran down over the fine wrinkles of her plump little cheeks.

“Not quite so much loud talking, please,” piped a thin, high voice from a room across the stairs landing.

“Why, dear little soul!” cried Annie. “I forgot he’d gone to bed.”

“Would you like to see him?” asked his mother.

She led the way into the room where the boy lay in a low bed near a larger one. His crutches lay beside it. “Win sleeps in our room yet. He can take care of himself quite well. But when he wakes in the night he likes to reach out and touch his father’s hand.”

The child looked mortified.

“I wish I could reach out and touch my father’s hand when I wake in the night,” said Annie.

The cloud left the boy’s face. “I can’t remember whether I said my prayers, mother, I’ve been thinking so.”

“Well, say them over again, to me.”

The men’s voices sounded in the hall below, and the ladies found them there. Dr. Morrell had his hat in his hand.

“Look here, Annie,” said Putney, “I expected to walk home with you, but Doc Morrell says he’s going to cut me out. It looks like a put-up job. I don’t know whether you’re in it or not, but there’s no doubt about Morrell.”

Mrs. Putney gave a sort of gasp, and then they all shouted with laughter, and Annie and the doctor went out into the night. In the imperfect light which the electrics of the main street flung afar into the little avenue where Putney lived, and the moon sent through the sidewalk trees, they struck against each other as they walked, and the doctor said, “Hadn’t you better take my arm, Miss Kilburn, till we get used to the dark?”

“Yes, I think I had, decidedly,” she answered; and she hurried to add: “Dr. Morrell, there is something I want to ask you. You’re their physician, aren’t you?”

“The Putneys? Yes.”

“Well, then, you can tell me—”

“Oh no, I can’t, if you ask me as their physician,” he interrupted.

“Well, then, as their friend. Mrs. Putney said something to me that makes me very unhappy. I thought Mr. Putney was out of all danger of his — trouble. Hasn’t he perfectly reformed? Does he ever—”

She stopped, and Dr. Morrell did not answer at once. Then he said seriously: “It’s a continual fight with a man of Putney’s temperament, and sometimes he gets beaten. Yes, I guess you’d better know it.”

“Poor Ellen!”

“They don’t allow themselves to be discouraged. As soon as he’s on his feet they begin the fight again. But of course it prevents his success in his profession, and he’ll always be a second-rate country lawyer.”

“Poor Ralph! And so brilliant as he is! He could be anything.”

“We must be glad if he can be something, as it is.”

“Yes, and how happy they seem together, all three of them! That child worships his father; and how tender Ralph is of him! How good he is to his wife; and how proud she is of him! And that awful shadow over them all the time! I don’t see how they live!”

The doctor was silent for a moment, and finally said: “They have the peace that seems to come to people from the presence of a common peril, and they have the comfort of people who never blink the facts.”

“I think Ralph is terrible. I wish he’d let other people blink the facts a little.”

“Of course,” said the doctor, “it’s become a habit with him now, or a mania. He seems to speak of his trouble as if mentioning it were a sort of conjuration to prevent it. I wouldn’t venture to check him in his way of talking. He may find strength in it.”

“It’s all terrible!”

“But it isn’t by any means hopeless.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say so. You see a great deal of them, I believe?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, getting back from their seriousness, with apparent relief. “Pretty nearly every day. Putney and I consider the ways of God to man a good deal together. You can imagine that in a place like Hatboro’ one would make the most of such a friend. In fact, anywhere.”

“Yes, of course,” Annie assented. “Dr. Morrell,” she added, in that effect of continuing the subject with which one breaks away from it, “do you know much about South Hatboro’?”

“I have some patients there.”

“I was there this morning—”

“I heard of you. They all take a great interest in your theatricals.”

“In my theatricals? Really this is too much! Who has made them my theatricals, I should like to know? Everybody at South Hatboro’ talked as if I had got them up.”

“And haven’t you?”

“No. I’ve had nothing to do with them. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about them a week ago, and I was foolish enough to go round with Mrs. Munger to collect public opinion about her invited dance and supper; and now it appears that I have invented the whole affair.”

“I certainly got that impression,” said the doctor, with a laugh lurking under his gravity.

“Well, it’s simply atrocious,” said Annie. “I’ve nothing at all to do with either. I don’t even know that I approve of their object.”

“Their object?”

“Yes. The Social Union.”

“Oh! Oh yes. I had forgot about the object,” and now the doctor laughed outright.

“It seems to have dropped into the background with everybody,” said Annie, laughing too.

“You like the unconventionality of South Hatboro’?” suggested the doctor, after a little silence.

“Oh, very much,” said Annie. “I was used to the same thing abroad. It might be an American colony anywhere on the Continent.”

“I suppose,” said the doctor musingly, “that the same conditions of sojourn and disoccupation would produce the same social effects anywhere. Then you must feel quite at home in South Hatboro’!”

“Quite! It’s what I came back to avoid. I was sick of the life over there, and I wanted to be of some use here, instead of wasting all my days.”

She stopped, resolved not to go on if he took this lightly, but the doctor answered her with sufficient gravity: “Well?”

“It seemed to me that if I could be of any use in the world anywhere, I could in the place where I was born, and where my whole childhood was spent. I’ve been at home a month now, the most useless person in Hatboro’. I did catch at the first thing that offered — at Mr. Brandreth and his ridiculous Social Union and theatricals, and brought all this trouble on myself. I talked to Mr. Peck about them. You know what his views are?”

“Only from Putney’s talk,” said the doctor.

“He didn’t merely disapprove of the dance and supper, but he had some very peculiar notions about the relations of the different classes in general,” said Annie; and this was the point she had meant circuitously to lead up to when she began to speak of South Hatboro’, though she theoretically despised all sorts of feminine indirectness.

“Yes?” said the doctor. “What notions?”

“Well, he thinks that if you have money, you can’t do good with it.”

“That’s rather odd,” said Dr. Morrell.

“I don’t state it quite fairly. He meant that you can’t make any kindness with it between yourself and the — the poor.”

“That’s odd too.”

“Yes,” said Annie anxiously. “You can impose an obligation, he says, but you can’t create sympathy. Of course Ralph exaggerates what I said about him in connection with the invited dance and supper, though I don’t justify what I did say; and if I’d known then, as I do now, what his history had been, I should have been more careful in my talk with him. I should be very sorry to have hurt his feelings, and I suppose people who’ve come up in that way are sensitive?”

She suggested this, and it was not the reassurance she was seeking to have Dr. Morrell say, “Naturally.”

She continued with an effort: “I’m afraid I didn’t respect his sincerity, and I ought to have done that, though I don’t at all agree with him on the other points. It seems to me that what he said was shocking, and perfectly — impossible.”

“Why, what was it?” asked the doctor.

“He said there could be no real kindness between the rich and poor, because all their experiences of life were different. It amounted to saying that there ought not to be any wealth. Don’t you think so?”

“Really, I’ve never thought about it,” returned Dr. Morrell. After a moment he asked, “Isn’t it rather an abstraction?”

“Don’t say that!” said Annie nervously. “It’s the most concrete thing in the world!”

The doctor laughed with enjoyment of her convulsive emphasis; but she went on: “I don’t think life’s worth living if you’re to be shut up all your days to the intelligence merely of your own class.”

“Who said you were?”

“Mr. Peck.”

“And what was your inference from the fact? That there oughtn’t to be any classes?”

“Of course it won’t do to say that. There must be social differences. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know,” said Dr. Morrell. “I never thought of it in that light before. It’s a very curious question.” He asked, brightening gaily after a moment of sober pause, “Is that the whole trouble?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“No; I don’t think it is. Why didn’t you tell him that you didn’t want any gratitude?”.

“Not want any?” she demanded.

“Oh!” said Dr. Morrell, “I didn’t know but you thought it was enough to give.”

Annie believed that he was making fun of her, and she tried to make her resentful silence dignified; but she only answered sadly: “No; it isn’t enough for me. Besides, he made me see that you can’t give sympathy where you can’t receive it.”

“Well, that is bad,” said the doctor, and he laughed again. “Excuse me,” he added. “I see the point. But why don’t you forget it?”

“Forget it!”

“Yes. If you can’t help it, why need you worry about it?”

She gave a kind of gasp of astonishment. “Do you really think that would be right?” She edged a little away from Dr. Morrell, as if with distrust.

“Well, no; I can’t say that I do,” he returned thoughtfully, without seeming to have noticed her withdrawal. “I don’t suppose I was looking at the moral side. It’s rather out of my way to do that. If a physician let himself get into the habit of doing that, he might regard nine-tenths of the diseases he has to treat as just penalties, and decline to interfere.”

She fancied that he was amused again, rather than deeply concerned, and she determined to make him own his personal complicity in the matter if she could. “Then you do feel sympathy with your patients? You find it necessary to do so?”

The doctor thought a moment. “I take an interest in their diseases.”

“But you want them to get well?”

“Oh, certainly. I’m bound to do all I can for them as a physician.”

“Nothing more?”

“Yes; I’m sorry for them — for their families, if it seems to be going badly with them.”

“And — and as — as — Don’t you care at all for your work as a part of what every one ought to do for others — as humanity, philan—” She stopped the offensive word.

“Well, I can’t say that I’ve looked at it in that light exactly,” he answered. “I suspect I’m not very good at generalising my own relations to others, though I like well enough to speculate in the abstract. But don’t you think Mr. Peck has overlooked one important fact in his theory? What about the people who have grown rich from being poor, as most Americans have? They have the same experiences, and why can’t they sympathise with those who have remained poor?”

“I never thought of that. Why didn’t I ask him that?” She lamented so sincerely that the doctor laughed again. “I think that Mr. Peck—”

“Oh no! oh no!” said the doctor, in an entreating, coaxing tone, expressive of a satiety with the subject that he might very well have felt; and he ended with another laugh, in which, after a moment of indignant self-question, she joined him.

“Isn’t that delicious?” he exclaimed; and she involuntarily slowed her pace with his.

The spicy scent of sweet-currant blossoms hung in the dewy air that wrapped one of the darkened village houses. From a syringa bush before another, as they moved on, a denser perfume stole out with the wild song of a cat-bird hidden in it; the music and the odour seemed braided together. The shadows of the trees cast by the electrics on the walks were so thick and black that they looked palpable; it seemed as if she could stoop down and lift them from the ground. A broad bath of moonlight washed one of the house fronts, and the white-painted clapboards looked wet with it.

They talked of these things, of themselves, and of their own traits and peculiarities; and at her door they ended far from Mr. Peck and all the perplexities he had suggested.

She had told Dr. Morrell of some things she had brought home with her, and had said she hoped he would find time to come and see them. It would have been stiff not to do it, and she believed she had done it in a very off-hand, business-like way. But she continued to question whether she had.

XII.

Miss Northwick called upon Annie during the week, with excuses for her delay and for coming alone. She seemed to have intentions of being polite; but she constantly betrayed her want of interest in Annie, and disappointed an expectation of refinement which her physical delicacy awakened. She asked her how she ever came to take up the Social Union, and answered for her that of course it had the attraction of the theatricals, and went on to talk of her sister’s part in them. The relation of the Northwick family to the coming entertainment, and an impression of frail mottled wrists and high thin cheeks, and an absence of modelling under affluent drapery, was the main effect of Miss Northwick’s visit.

When Annie returned it, she met the younger sister, whom she found a great beauty. She seemed very cold, and of a hauteur which she subdued with difficulty; but she was more consecutively polite than her sister, and Annie watched with fascination her turns of the head, her movements of leopard swiftness and elasticity, the changing lights of her complexion, the curves of her fine lips, the fluttering of her thin nostrils.

A very new basket phaeton stood glittering at Annie’s door when she got home, and Mrs. Wilmington put her head out of the open parlour window.

“How d’ye do, Annie?” she drawled, in her tender voice. “Won’t you come in? You see I’m in possession. I’ve just got my new phaeton, and I drove up at once to crush you with it. Isn’t it a beauty?”

“You’re too late, Lyra,” said Annie. “I’ve just come from the Northwicks, and another crushing beauty has got in ahead of your phaeton.”

“Oh, poor Annie!” Lyra began to laugh with agreeable intelligence. “Do come in and tell me about it!”

“Why is that girl going to take part in the theatricals? She doesn’t care to please any one, does she?”

“I didn’t know that people took part in theatricals for that, Annie. I thought they wanted to please themselves and mortify others. I do. But then I may be different. Perhaps Miss Northwick wants to please Mr. Brandreth.”

“Do you mean it, Lyra?” demanded Annie, arrested on her threshold by the charm of this improbability.

“Well, I don’t know; they’re opposites. But, upon second thoughts, you needn’t come in, Annie. I want you to take a drive with me, and try my new phaeton,” said Lyra, coming out.

Annie now looked at it with that irresolution of hers, and Lyra commanded: “Get right in. We’ll go down to the Works. You’ve never met my husband yet; have you, Annie?”

“No, I haven’t, Lyra. I’ve always just missed him somehow. He seems to have been perpetually just gone to town, or not got back.”

“Well, he’s really at home now. And I don’t mean at the house, which isn’t home to him, but the Works. You’ve never seen the Works either, have you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, then, we’ll just go round there, and kill two birds with one stone. I ought to show off my new phaeton to Mr. Wilmington first of all; he gave it to me. It would be kind of conjugal, or filial, or something. You know Mr. Wilmington and I are not exactly contemporaries, Annie?”

“I heard he was somewhat your senior,” said Annie reluctantly.

Lyra laughed. “Well, I always say we were born in the same century, anyway.”

They came round into the region of the shops, and Lyra checked her pony in front of her husband’s factory. It was not imposingly large, but, as Mrs. Wilmington caused Annie to observe, it was as big as the hat shops and as ugly as the shoe shops.

The structure trembled with the operation of its industry, and as they mounted the wooden steps to the open outside door, an inner door swung ajar for a moment, and let out a roar mingled of the hum and whirl and clash of machinery and fragments of voice, borne to them on a whiff of warm, greasy air. “Of course it doesn’t smell very nice,” said Lyra.

She pushed open the door of the office, and finding its first apartment empty, led the way with Annie to the inner room, where her husband sat writing at a table.

“George, I want to introduce you to Miss Kilburn.”

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” said her husband, scrambling to his feet, and coming round to greet Annie. He was a small man, very bald, with a serious and wrinkled forehead, and rather austere brows; but his mouth had a furtive curl at one corner, which, with the habit he had of touching it there with the tip of his tongue, made Annie think of a cat that had been at the cream. “I’ve been hoping to call with Mrs. Wilmington to pay my respects; but I’ve been away a great deal this season, and — and — We’re all very happy to have you home again, Miss Kilburn. I’ve often heard my wife speak of your old days together at Hatboro’.”

They fenced with some polite feints of interest in each other, the old man standing beside his writing-table, and staying himself with a shaking hand upon it.

Lyra interrupted them. “Well, I think now that Annie is here, we’d better not let her get away without showing her the Works.”

“Oh — oh — decidedly! I’ll go with you, with great pleasure. Ah!” He bustled about, putting the things together on his table, and then reaching for the Panama hat on a hook behind it. There was something pathetic in his eagerness to do what Lyra bade him, and Annie fancied in him the uneasy consciousness which an elderly husband might feel in the presence of those who met him for the first time with his young wife. At the outer office door they encountered Jack Wilmington.

“I’ll show them through,” he said to his uncle; and the old man assented with, “Well, perhaps you’d better, Jack,” and went back to his room.

The Wilmington Stocking-Mills spun their own threads, and the first room was like what Annie had seen before in cotton factories, with a faint smell of oil from the machinery, and a fine snow of fluff in the air, and catching to the white-washed walls and the foul window sashes. The tireless machines marched back and forth across the floor, and the men who watched them with suicidal intensity ran after them barefooted when they made off with a broken thread, spliced it, and then escaped from them to their stations again. In other rooms, where there was a stunning whir of spindles, girls and women were at work; they looked after Lyra and her nephew from under cotton-frowsed bangs; they all seemed to know her, and returned her easy, kindly greetings with an effect of liking. From time to time, at Lyra’s bidding, the young fellow explained to Annie some curious feature of the processes; in the room where the stockings were knitted she tried to understand the machinery that wrought and seemed to live before her eyes. But her mind wandered to the men and women who were operating it, and who seemed no more a voluntary part of it than all the rest, except when Jack Wilmington curtly ordered them to do this or that in illustration of some point he was explaining. She wearied herself, as people do in such places, in expressing her wonder at the ingenuity of the machinery; it was a relief to get away from it all into the room, cool and quiet, where half a dozen neat girls were counting and stamping the stockings with different numbers. “Here’s where I used to work,” said Lyra, “and here’s where I first met Mr. Wilmington. The place is full of romantic associations. The stockings are all one size, Annie; but people like to wear different numbers, and so we try to gratify them. Which number do you wear? Or don’t you wear the Wilmington machine-knit? I don’t. Well, they’re not dreams exactly, Annie, when all’s said and done for them.”

When they left the mill she asked Annie to come home to tea with her, saying, as if from a perception of her dislike for the young fellow, that Jack was going to Boston.

They had a long evening together, after Mr. Wilmington took himself off after tea to his study, as he called it, and remained shut in there. Annie was uneasily aware of him from time to time, but Lyra had apparently no more disturbance from his absence than from his presence, which she had managed with a frank acceptance of everything it suggested. She talked freely of her marriage, not as if it were like others, but for what it was. She showed Annie over the house, and she ended with a display of the rich dresses which he was always buying her, and which she never wore, because she never went anywhere.

Annie said she thought she would at least like to go to the seaside somewhere during the summer, but “No,” Lyra said; “it would be too much trouble, and you know, Annie, I always did hate trouble. I don’t want the care of a cottage, and I don’t want to be poked into a hotel, so I stay in Hatboro’.” She said that she had always been a village girl, and did not miss the interests of a larger life, as she caught glimpses of them in South Hatboro’, or want the bother of them. She said she studied music a little, and confessed that she read a good deal, novels mostly, though the library was handsomely equipped with well-bound general literature.

At moments it all seemed no harm; at others, the luxury in which this life was so contentedly sunk oppressed Annie like a thick, close air. Yet she knew that Lyra was kind to many of the poor people about her, and did a great deal of good, as the phrase is, with the superfluity which it involved no self-denial to give from. But Mr. Peck had given her a point of view, and though she believed she did not agree with him, she could not escape from it.

Lyra told her much about people in Hatboro’, and characterised them all so humorously, and she seemed so good-natured, in her ridicule which spared nobody.

She shrieked with laughter about Mr. Brandreth when Annie told her of his mother’s doubt whether his love-making with Miss Northwick ought to be tacit or explicit in the kissing and embracing between Romeo and Juliet.

“Don’t you think, Annie, we’d better refer him to Mr. Peck? I should like to hear Mr. Brandreth and Mr. Peek discussing it. I must tell Jack about it. I might get him to ask Sue Northwick, and get her ideas.”

“Has Mr. Wilmington known the Northwicks long?” Annie asked.

“He used to go to their Boston house when he was at Harvard.”

“Oh, then,” said Annie, “perhaps he accounts for her playing Juliet; though, as Tybalt, I don’t see exactly how he—”

“Oh, it’s at the rehearsals, you know, that the fun is, and then it don’t matter what part you have.”

Annie lay awake a long time that night. She was sure that she ought not to like Lyra if she did not approve of her, and that she ought not to have gone home to tea with her and spent the evening with her unless she fully respected her. But she had to own to herself that she did like her, and enjoyed hearing her soft drawl. She tried to think how Jack Wilmington’s having gone to Boston for the evening made it somehow less censurable for her to spend it with Lyra, even if she did not approve of her. As she drowsed, this became perfectly clear.

XIII.

In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro’ had suffered one kind of deterioration which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still not old. But now the grandmothers had died out, and the maiden aunts had faded in, and she could not find just such houses anywhere in Hatboro’. The decay of the Unitarians as a sect perhaps had something to do with the literary lapse of the place: their highly intellectualised belief had favoured taste in a direction where the more ritualistic and emotional religions did not promote it: and it is certain that they were no longer the leading people.

It would have been hard to say just who these leading people were. The old political and juristic pre-eminence which the lawyers had once enjoyed was a tradition; the learned professions yielded in distinction to the growing wealth and plutocratic influence of the prosperous manufacturers; the situation might be summed up in the fact that Colonel Marvin of the shoe interest and Mr. Wilmington now filled the place once held by Judge Kilburn and Squire Putney. The social life in private houses had undoubtedly shrunk; but it had expanded in the direction of church sociables, and it had become much more ecclesiastical in every way, without becoming more religious. As formerly, some people were acceptable, and some were not; but it was, as everywhere else, more a question of money; there was an aristocracy and a commonalty, but there was a confusion and a more ready convertibility in the materials of each.

The social authority of such a person as Mrs. Gerrish was not the only change that bewildered Annie, and the effort to extend her relations with the village people was one from which she shrank till her consciousness had more perfectly adjusted itself to the new conditions. Meanwhile Dr. Morrell came to call the night after their tea at the Putneys’, and he fell into the habit of coming several nights in the week, and staying late. Sometimes he was sent for at her house by sick people, and he must have left word at his office where he was to be found.

He had spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro’, gave her a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing to live in Hatboro’ at all, and he seemed incredulous about her staying after summer was over. She felt that she mystified him, and sometimes she felt the pursuit of a curiosity which was a little too like a psychical diagnosis. He had a way of sitting beside her table and playing with her paper-cutter, while he submitted with a quizzical smile to her endeavours to turn him to account. She did not mind his laughing at her eagerness (a woman is willing enough to join a man in making fun of her femininity if she believes that he respects her), and she tried to make him talk about Hatboro’, and tell her how she could be of use among the working people. She would have liked very much to know whether he gave his medical service gratis among them, and whether he found it a pleasure and a privilege to do so. There was one moment when she would have liked to ask him to let her be at the charges of his more indigent patients, but with the words behind her lips she perceived that it would not do. At the best, it would be taking his opportunity from him and making it hers. She began to see that one ought to have a conscience about doing good.

She let the chance of proposing this impossibility go by; and after a little silence Dr. Morrell seemed to revert, in her interest, to the economical situation in Hatboro’.

“You know that most of the hands in the hat-shops are from the farms around; and some of them own property here in the village. I know the owner of three small houses who’s always worked in the shops. You couldn’t very well offer help to a landed proprietor like that?”

“No,” said Annie, abashed in view of him.

“I suppose you ought to go to a factory town like Fall River, if you really wanted to deal with overwork and squalor.”

“I’m beginning to think there’s no such thing anywhere,” she said desperately.

The doctor’s eyes twinkled sympathetically. “I don’t know whether Benson earned his three houses altogether in the hat-shops. He ‘likes a good horse,’ as he says; and he likes to trade it for a better; I know that from experience. But he’s a great friend of mine. Well, then, there are more women than men in the shops, and they earn more. I suppose that’s rather disappointing too.”

“It is, rather.”

“But, on the other hand, the work only lasts eight months of the year, and that cuts wages down to an average of a dollar a day.”

“Ah!” cried Annie. “There’s some hope in that! What do they do when the work stops?”

“Oh, they go back to their country-seats.”

“All?”

“Perhaps not all.”

“I thought so!”

“Well, you’d better look round among those that stay.”

Even among these she looked in vain for destitution; she could find that in satisfactory degree only in straggling veterans of the great army of tramps which once overran country places in the summer.

She would have preferred not to see or know the objects of her charity, and because she preferred this she forced herself to face their distasteful misery. Mrs. Bolton had orders to send no one from the door who asked for food or work, but to call Annie and let her judge the case. She knew that it was folly, and she was afraid it was worse, but she could not send the homeless creatures away as hungry or poor as they came. They filled her gentlewoman’s soul with loathing; but if she kept beyond the range of the powerful corporeal odour that enveloped them, she could experience the luxury of pity for them. The filthy rags that caricatured them, their sick or sodden faces, always frowsed with a week’s beard, represented typical poverty to her, and accused her comfortable state with a poignant contrast; and she consoled herself as far as she could with the superstition that in meeting them she was fulfilling a duty sacred in proportion to the disgust she felt in the encounter.

The work at the hat-shops fell off after the spring orders, and did not revive till the beginning of August. If there was less money among the hands and their families who remained than there was in time of full work, the weather made less demand upon their resources. The children lived mostly out-of-doors, and seemed to have always what they wanted of the season’s fruit and vegetables. They got these too late from the decaying lots at the provision stores, and too early from the nearest orchards; and Dr. Morrell admitted that there was a good deal of sickness, especially among the little ones, from this diet. Annie wondered whether she ought not to offer herself as a nurse among them; she asked him whether she could not be of use in that way, and had to confess that she knew nothing about the prevailing disease.

“Then, I don’t think you’d better undertake it,” he said. “There are too many nurses there already, such as they are. It’s the dull time in most of the shops, you know, and the women have plenty of leisure. There are about five volunteer nurses for every patient, not counting the grandmothers on both sides. I think they would resent any outside aid.”

“Ah, I’m always on the outside! But can’t I send — I mean carry — them anything nourishing, any little dishes—”

“Arrowroot is about all the convalescents can manage.” She made a note of it. “But jelly and chicken broth are always relished by their friends.”

“Dr. Morrell, I must ask you not to turn me into ridicule, if you please. I cannot permit it.”

“I beg your pardon — I do indeed, Miss Kilburn. I didn’t mean to ridicule you. I began seriously, but I was led astray by remembering what becomes of most of the good things sent to sick people.”

“I know,” she said, breaking into a laugh. “I have eaten lots of them for my father. And is arrowroot the only thing?”

The doctor reflected gravely. “Why, no. There’s a poor little life now and then that might be saved by the sea-air. Yes, if you care to send some of my patients, with a mother and a grandmother apiece, to the seaside—”

“Don’t say another word, doctor,” cried Annie. “You make me so happy! I will — I will send their whole families. And you won’t, you won’t let a case escape, will you, doctor?” It was a break in the iron wall of uselessness which had closed her in; she behaved like a young girl with an invitation to a ball.

When the first patient came back well from the seaside her rejoicing overflowed in exultation before the friends to whom she confessed her agency in the affair. Putney pretended that he could not see what pleasure she could reasonably take in restoring the child to the sort of life it had been born to; but that was a matter she would not consider, theoretically or practically.

She began to go outside of Dr. Morrell’s authority; she looked up two cases herself, and, upon advising with their grandmothers, sent them to the seaside, and she was at the station when the train came in with the young mother and the still younger aunt of one of the sick children. She did not see the baby, and the mother passed her with a stare of impassioned reproach, and fell sobbing on the neck of her husband, waiting for her on the platform. Annie felt the blood drop back upon her heart. She caught at the girlish aunt, who was looking about her with a sense of the interest which attached to herself as a party to the spectacle.

“Oh, Rebecca, where is the child?”

“Well, there, Miss Kilburn, I’m ril sorry to tell you, but I guess the sea-air didn’t do it a great deal of good, if any. I tell Maria she’ll see it in the right light after a while, but of course she can’t, first off. Well, there! Somebody’s got to look after it. You’ll excuse me, Miss Kilburn.”

Annie saw her run off to the baggage-car, from which the baggage-man was handing out a narrow box. The ground reeled under her feet; she got the public depot carriage and drove home.

She sent for Dr. Morrell, and poured out the confession of her error upon him before he could speak. “I am a murderess,” she ended hysterically. “Don’t deny it!”

“I think you can be got off on the ground of insanity, Miss Kilburn, if you go on in this way,” he answered.

Her desperation broke in tears. “Oh, what shall I do — what shall I do? I’ve killed the child!”

“Oh no, you haven’t,” he retorted. “I know the case. The only hope for it was the sea-air; I was going to ask you to send it—”

She took down her handkerchief and gave him a piercing look. “Dr. Morrell, if you are lying to me—”

“I’m not lying, Miss Kilburn,” he answered. “You’ve done a very unwarrantable thing in both of the cases that you sent to the seaside on your own responsibility. One of them I certainly shouldn’t have advised sending, but it’s turned out well. You’ve no more credit for it, though, than for this that died; and you won’t think I’m lying, perhaps, when I say you’re equally to blame in both instances.”

“I — I beg your pardon,” she faltered, with dawning comfort in his severity. “I didn’t mean — I didn’t intend to say—”

“I know it,” said Dr. Morrell, allowing himself to smile. “Just remember that you blundered into doing the only thing left to be done for Mrs. Savor’s child; and — don’t try it again. That’s all.”

He smiled once more, and at some permissive light in her face, he began even to laugh.

“You — you’re horrible!”

“Oh no, I’m not,” he gasped. “All the tears in the world wouldn’t help; and my laughing hurts nobody. I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for the mother; but I’ve told you the truth — I have indeed; and you must believe me.”

The child’s father came to see her the next night. “Rebecca she seemed to think that you felt kind of bad, may be, because Maria wouldn’t speak to you when she first got off the cars yesterday, and I don’t say she done exactly right, myself. The way I look at it, and the way I tell Maria she’d ought to, is like this: You done what you done for the best, and we wa’n’t obliged to take your advice anyway. But of course Maria she’d kind of set her heart on savin’ it, and she can’t seem to get over it right away.” He talked on much longer to the same effect, tilted back in his chair, and looking down, while he covered and uncovered one of his knees with his straw hat. He had the usual rustic difficulty in getting away, but Annie was glad to keep him, in her gratitude for his kindness. Besides, she could not let him go without satisfying a suspicion she had.

“And Dr. Morrell — have you seen him for Mrs. Savor — have you—” She stopped, for shame of her hypocrisy.

“No, ‘m. We hain’t seen him sence. I guess she’ll get along.”

It needed this stroke to complete her humiliation before the single-hearted fellow.

“I — I suppose,” she stammered out, “that you — your wife, wouldn’t like me to come to the — I can understand that; but oh! if there is anything I can do for you — flowers — or my carriage — or helping anyway—”

Mr. Savor stood up. “I’m much obliged to you, Miss Kilburn; but we thought we hadn’t better wait, well not a great while, and — the funeral was this afternoon. Well, I wish you good evening.”

She met the mother, a few days after, in the street; with an impulse to cross over to the other side she advanced straight upon her.

“Mrs. Savor! What can I say to you?”

“Oh, I don’t presume but what you meant for the best, Miss Kilburn. But I guess I shall know what to do next time. I kind of felt the whole while that it was a resk. But it’s all right now.”

Annie realised, in her resentment of the poor thing’s uncouth sorrow, that she had spoken to her with the hope of getting, not giving, comfort.

“Yes, yes,” she confessed. “I was to blame.” The bereaved mother did not gainsay her, and she felt that, whatever was the justice of the case, she had met her present deserts.

She had to bear the discredit into which the seaside fell with the mothers of all the other sick children. She tried to bring Dr. Morrell once to the consideration of her culpability in the case of those who might have lived if the case of Mrs. Savor’s baby had not frightened their mothers from sending them to the seaside; but he refused to grapple with the problem. She was obliged to believe him when he said he should not have advised sending any of the recent cases there; that the disease was changing its character, and such a course could have done no good.

“Look here, Miss Kilburn,” he said, after scanning her face sharply, “I’m going to leave you a little tonic. I think you’re rather run down.”

“Well,” she said passively.

XIV.

It was in her revulsion from the direct beneficence which had proved so dangerous that Annie was able to give herself to the more general interests of the Social Union. She had not the courage to test her influence for it among the workpeople whom it was to entertain and elevate, and whose co-operation Mr. Peck had thought important; but she went about among the other classes, and found a degree of favour and deference which surprised her, and an ignorance of what lay so heavy on her heart which was still more comforting. She was nowhere treated as the guilty wretch she called herself; some who knew of the facts had got them wrong; and she discovered what must always astonish the inquirer below the pretentious surface of our democracy — an indifference and an incredulity concerning the feelings of people of lower station which could not be surpassed in another civilisation. Her concern for Mrs. Savor was treated as a great trial for Miss Kilburn; but the mother’s bereavement was regarded as something those people were used to, and got over more easily than one could imagine.

Annie’s mission took her to the ministers of the various denominations, and she was able to overcome any scruples they might have about the theatricals by urging the excellence of their object. As a Unitarian, she was not prepared for the liberality with which the matter was considered; the Episcopalians of course were with her; but the Universalist minister himself was not more friendly than the young Methodist preacher, who volunteered to call with her on the pastor of the Baptist church, and help present the affair in the right light; she had expected a degree of narrow-mindedness, of bigotry, which her sect learned to attribute to others in the militant period before they had imbibed so much of its own tolerance.

But the recollection of what had passed with Mr. Peck remained a reproach in her mind, and nothing that she accomplished for the Social Union with the other ministers was important. In her vivid reveries she often met him, and combated his peculiar ideas, while she admitted a wrong in her own position, and made every expression of regret, and parted from him on the best terms, esteemed and complimented in high degree; in reality she saw him seldom, and still more rarely spoke to him, and then with a distance and consciousness altogether different from the effects dramatised in her fancy. Sometimes during the period of her interest in the sick children of the hands, she saw him in their houses, or coming and going outside; but she had no chance to speak with him, or else said to herself that she had none, because she was ashamed before him. She thought he avoided her; but this was probably only a phase of the impersonality which seemed characteristic of him in everything. At these times she felt a strange pathos in the lonely man whom she knew to be at odds with many of his own people, and she longed to interpret herself more sympathetically to him, but actually confronted with him she was sensible of something cold and even hard in the nimbus her compassion cast about him. Yet even this added to the mystery that piqued her, and that loosed her fancy to play, as soon as they parted, in conjecture about his past life, his marriage, and the mad wife who had left him with the child he seemed so ill-fitted to care for. Then, the next time they met she was abashed with the recollection of having unwarrantably romanced the plain, simple, homely little man, and she added an embarrassment of her own to that shyness of his which kept them apart.

Except for what she had heard Putney say, and what she learned casually from the people themselves, she could not have believed he ever did anything for them. He came and went so elusively, as far as Annie was concerned, that she knew of his presence in the houses of sickness and death usually by his little girl, whom she found playing about in the street before the door with the children of the hands. She seemed to hold her own among the others in their plays and their squabbles; if she tried to make up to her, Idella smiled, but she would not be approached, and Annie’s heart went out to the little mischief in as helpless goodwill as toward the minister himself.

She used to hear his voice through the summer-open windows when he called upon the Boltons, and wondered if some accident would not bring them together, but she had to send for Mrs. Bolton at last, and bid her tell Mr. Peck that she would like to see him before he went away, one night. He came, and then she began a parrying parley of preliminary nothings before she could say that she supposed he knew the ladies were going on with their scheme for the establishment of the Social Union; he admitted vaguely that he had heard something to that effect, and she added that the invited dance and supper had been given up.

He remained apparently indifferent to the fact, and she hurried on: “And I ought to say, Mr. Peck, that nearly every one — every one whose opinion you would value — agreed with you that it would have been extremely ill-advised, and — and shocking. And I’m quite ashamed that I should not have seen it from the beginning; and I hope — I hope you will forgive me if I said things in my — my excitement that must have — I mean not only what I said to you, but what I said to others; and I assure you that I regret them, and—”

She went on and repeated herself at length, and he listened patiently, but as if the matter had not really concerned either of them personally. She had to conclude that what she had said of him had not reached him, and she ended by confessing that she had clung to the Social Union project because it seemed the only thing in which her attempts to do good were not mischievous.

Mr. Peck’s thin face kindled with a friendlier interest than it had shown while the question at all related to himself, and a light of something that she took for humorous compassion came into his large, pale blue eyes. At least it was intelligence; and perhaps the woman nature craves this as much as it is supposed to crave sympathy; perhaps the two are finally one.

“I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck — an experience of mine,” she said abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors. He listened intently, and at the end he said: “I understand. But that is sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it.”

“Oh, I thank you!” she gasped. “You don’t know what a load you have lifted from me!”

Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.

“If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it is, what a responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any harm, but if I try it—”

“Yes,” said the minister, “it is difficult to help others when we cease to need help ourselves. A man begins poor, or his father or grandfather before him — it doesn’t matter how far back he begins — and then he is in accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron, an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong.”

“Yes,” said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. “And I assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that I had no idea then that — that — you were speaking from your own experience when you — you said how working people looked at things. I didn’t know that you had been — that is, that—”

“Yes,” said the minister, coming to her relief, “I once worked in a cotton-mill. Then,” he continued, dismissing the personal concern, “it seems to me that I saw things in their right light, as I have never been able to see them since—”

“And how brutal,” she broke in, “how cruel and vulgar, what I said must have seemed to you!”

“I fancied,” he continued evasively, “that I had authority to set myself apart from my fellow-workmen, to be a teacher and guide to the true life. But it was a great error. The true life was the life of work, and no one ever had authority to turn from it. Christ Himself came as a labouring man.”

“That is true,” said Annie; and his words transfigured the man who spoke them, so that her heart turned reverently toward him. “But if you had been meant to work in a mill all your life,” she pursued, “would you have been given the powers you have, and that you have just used to save me from despair?”

The minister rose, and said, with a sigh: “No one was meant to work in a mill all his life. Good night.”

She would have liked to keep him longer, but she could not think how, at once. As he turned to go out through the Boltons’ part of the house, “Won’t you go out through my door?” she asked, with a helpless effort at hospitality.

“Oh, if you wish,” he answered submissively.

When she had closed the door upon him she went to speak with Mrs. Bolton. She was in the kitchen mixing flour to make bread, and Annie traced her by following the lamp-light through the open door. It discovered Bolton sitting in the outer doorway, his back against one jamb and his stocking-feet resting against the base of the other.

“Mrs. Bolton,” Annie began at once, making herself free of one of the hard kitchen chairs, “how is Mr. Peck getting on in Hatboro’?”

“I d’know as I know just what you mean, Miss Kilburn,” said Mrs. Bolton, on the defensive.

“I mean, is there a party against him in his church? Is he unpopular?”

Mrs. Bolton took some flour and sprinkled it on her bread-board; then she lifted the mass of dough out of the trough before her, and let it sink softly upon the board.

“I d’know as you can say he’s unpoplah. He ain’t poplah with some. Yes, there’s a party — the Gerrish party.”

“Is it a strong one?”

“It’s pretty strong.”

“Do you think it will prevail?”

“Well, most o’ folks don’t know what they want; and if there’s some folks that know what they don’t want, they can generally keep from havin’ it.”

Bolton made a soft husky prefatory noise of protest in his throat, which seemed to stimulate his wife to a more definite assertion, and she cut in before he could speak —

“I should say that unless them that stood Mr. Peck’s friends first off, and got him here, done something to keep him, his enemies wa’n’t goin’ to take up his cause.”

Annie divined a personal reproach for Bolton in the apparent abstraction.

“Oh, now, you’ll see it’ll all come out right in the end, Pauliny,” he mildly opposed. “There ain’t any such great feelin’ about Mr. Peck; nothin’ but what’ll work itself off perfec’ly natural, give it time. It’s goin’ to come out all right.”

“Yes, at the day o’ jedgment,” Mrs. Bolton assented, plunging her fists into the dough, and beginning to work a contempt for her husband’s optimism into it.

“Yes, an’ a good deal before,” he returned. “There’s always somethin’ to objec’ to every minister; we ain’t any of us perfect, and Mr. Peck’s got his failin’s; he hain’t built up the church quite so much as some on ’em expected but what he would; and there’s some that don’t like his prayers; and some of ’em thinks he ain’t doctrinal enough. But I guess, take it all round, he suits pretty well. It’ll come out all right, Pauliny. You’ll see.”

A pause ensued, of which Annie felt the awfulness. It seemed to her that Mrs. Bolton’s impatience with this intolerable hopefulness must burst violently. She hastened to interpose. “I think the trouble is that people don’t fully understand Mr. Peck at first. But they do finally.”

“Yes; take time,” said Bolton.

“Take eternity, I guess, for some,” retorted his wife. “If you think William B. Gerrish is goin’ to work round with time—” She stopped for want of some sufficiently rejectional phrase, and did not go on.

“The way I look at it,” said Bolton, with incorrigible courage, “is like this: When it comes to anything like askin’ Mr. Peck to resign, it’ll develop his strength. You can’t tell how strong he is without you try to git red of him. I ‘most wish it would come, once, fair and square.”

“I’m sure you’re right, Mr. Bolton,” said Annie. “I don’t believe that your church would let such a man go when it really came to it. Don’t they all feel that he has great ability?”

“Oh, I guess they appreciate him as far forth as ability goes. Some on ’em complains that he’s a little too intellectial, if anything. But I tell ’em it’s a good fault; it’s a thing that can be got over in time.”

Mrs. Bolton had ceased to take part in the discussion. She finished kneading her dough, and having fitted it into two baking-pans and dusted it with flour, she laid a clean towel over both. But when Annie rose she took the lamp from the mantel-shelf, where it stood, and held it up for her to find her way back to her own door.

Annie went to bed with a spirit lightened as well as chastened, and kept saying over the words of Mr. Peck, so as to keep fast hold of the consolation they had given her. They humbled her with, a sense of his wisdom and insight; the thought of them kept her awake. She remembered the tonic that Dr. Morrell had left with her, and after questioning whether she really needed it now, she made sure by getting up and taking it.

XV.

The spring had filled and flushed into summer. Bolton had gone over the grass on the slope before the house, and it was growing thick again, dark green above the yellow of its stubble, and the young generation of robins was foraging in it for the callow grasshoppers. Some boughs of the maples were beginning to lose the elastic upward lift of their prime, and to hang looser and limper with the burden of their foliage. The elms drooped lower toward the grass, and swept the straggling tops left standing in their shade.

The early part of September had been fixed for the theatricals. Annie refused to have anything to do with them, and the preparations remained altogether with Brandreth. “The minuet,” he said to her one afternoon, when he had come to report to her as a co-ordinate authority, “is going to be something exquisite, I assure you. A good many of the ladies studied it in the Continental times, you know, when we had all those Martha Washington parties — or, I forgot you were out of the country — and it will be done perfectly. We’re going to have the ball-room scene on the tennis-court just in front of the evergreens, don’t you know, and then the balcony scene in the same place. We have to cut some of the business between Romeo and Juliet, because it’s too long, you know, and some of it’s too — too passionate; we couldn’t do it properly, and we’ve decided to leave it out. But we sketch along through the play, and we have Friar Laurence coming with Juliet out of his cell onto the tennis-court and meeting Romeo; so that tells the story of the marriage. You can’t imagine what a Mercutio Mr. Putney makes; he throws himself into it heart and soul, especially where he fights with Tybalt and gets killed. I give him lines there out of other scenes too; the tennis-court sets that part admirably; they come out of a street at the side. I think the scenery will surprise you, Miss Kilburn. Well, and then we have the Nurse and Juliet, and the poison scene — we put it into the garden, on the tennis-court, and we condense the different acts so as to give an idea of all that’s happened, with Romeo banished, and all that. Then he comes back from Mantua, and we have the tomb scene set at one side of the tennis-court just opposite the street scene; and he fights with Paris; and then we have Juliet come to the door of the tomb — it’s a liberty, of course; but we couldn’t arrange the light inside — and she stabs herself and falls on Romeo’s body, and that ends the play. You see, it gives a notion of the whole action, and tells the story pretty well. I think you’ll be pleased.”

“I’ve no doubt I shall,” said Annie. “Did you make the adaptation yourself, Mr. Brandreth?”

“Well, yes, I did,” Mr. Brandreth modestly admitted. “It’s been a good deal of work, but it’s been a pleasure too. You know how that is, Miss Kilburn, in your charities.”

“Don’t speak of my charities, Mr. Brandreth. I’m not a charitable person.”

“You won’t get people to believe that” said Mr. Brandreth. “Everybody knows how much good you do. But, as I was saying, my idea was to give a notion of the whole play in a series of passages or tableaux. Some of my friends think I’ve succeeded so well in telling the story, don’t you know, without a change of scene, that they’re urging me to publish my arrangement for the use of out-of-door theatricals.”

“I should think it would be a very good idea,” said Annie. “I suppose Mr. Chapley would do it?”

“Well, I don’t know — I don’t know,” Mr. Brandreth answered, with a note of trouble in his voice. “I’m afraid not,” he added sadly. “Miss Kilburn, I’ve been put in a very unfair position by Miss Northwick’s changing her mind about Juliet, after the part had been offered to Miss Chapley. I’ve been made the means of a seeming slight to Miss Chapley, when, if it hadn’t been for the cause, I’d rather have thrown up the whole affair. She gave up the part instantly when she heard that Miss Northwick wished to change her mind, but all the same I know — .”

He stopped, and Annie said encouragingly: “Yes, I see. But perhaps she doesn’t really care.”

“That’s what she said,” returned Mr. Brandreth ruefully. “But I don’t know. I have never spoken of it with her since I went to tell her about it, after I got Miss Northwick’s note.”

“Well, Mr. Brandreth, I think you’ve really been victimised; and I don’t believe the Social Union will ever be worth what it’s costing.”

“I was sure you would appreciate — would understand;” and Mr. Brandreth pressed her hand gratefully in leave-taking.

She heard him talking with some one at the gate, whose sharp, “All right, my son!” identified Putney.

She ran to the door to welcome him.

“Oh, you’re both here!” she rejoiced, at sight of Mrs. Putney too.

“I can send Ellen home,” suggested Putney.

“Oh no, indeed!” said Annie, with single-mindedness at which she laughed with Mrs. Putney. “Only it seemed too good to have you both,” she explained, kissing Mrs. Putney. “I’m so glad to see you!”

“Well, what’s the reason?” Putney dropped into a chair and began to rock nervously. “Don’t be ashamed: we’re all selfish. Has Brandreth been putting up any more jobs on you?”

“No, no! Only giving me a hint of his troubles and sorrows with those wretched Social Union theatricals. Poor young fellow! I’m sorry for him. He is really very sweet and unselfish. I like him.”

“Yes, Brandreth is one of the most lady-like fellows I ever saw,” said Putney. “That Juliet business has pretty near been the death of him. I told him to offer Miss Chapley some other part — Rosaline, the part of the young lady who was dropped; but he couldn’t seem to see it. Well, and how come on the good works, Annie?”

“The good works! Ralph, tell me: do people think me a charitable person? Do they suppose I’ve done or can do any good whatever?” She looked from Putney to his wife, and back again with comic entreaty.

“Why, aren’t you a charitable person? Don’t you do any good?” he asked.

“No!” she shouted. “Not the least in the world!”

“It is pretty rough,” said Putney, taking out a cigar for a dry smoke; “and nobody will believe me when I report what you say, Annie. Mrs. Munger is telling round that she don’t see how you can live through the summer at the rate you’re going. She’s got it down pretty cold about your taking Brother Peck’s idea of the invited dance and supper, and joining hands with him to save the vanity of the self-respecting poor. She says that your suppression of that one unpopular feature has done more than anything else to promote the success of the Social Union. You ought to be glad Brother Peck is coming to the show.”

“To the theatricals?”

Putney nodded his head. “That’s what he says. I believe Brother Peck is coming to see how the upper classes amuse themselves when they really try to benefit the lower classes.”

Annie would not laugh at his joke. “Ralph,” she asked, “is it true that Mr. Peck is so unpopular in his church? Is he really going to be turned out — dismissed?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. But they’ll bounce him if they can.”

“And can nothing be done? Can’t his friends unite?”

“Oh, they’re united enough now; what they’re afraid of is that they’re not numerous enough. Why don’t you buy in, Annie, and help control the stock? That old Unitarian concern of yours isn’t ever going to get into running order again, and if you owned a pew in Ellen’s church you could have a vote in church meeting, after a while, and you could lend Brother Peck your moral support now.”

“I never liked that sort of thing, Ralph. I shouldn’t believe with your people.”

“Ellen’s people, please. I don’t believe with them either. But I always vote right. Now you think it over.”

“No, I shall not think it over. I don’t approve of it. If I should take a pew in your church it would be simply to hear Mr. Peck preach, and contribute toward his—”

“Salary? Yes, that’s the way to look at it in the beginning. I knew you’d work round. Why, Annie, in a year’s time you’ll be trying to buy votes for Brother Peck.”

“I should never vote,” she retorted. “And I shall keep myself out of all temptation by not going to your church.”

“Ellen’s church,” Putney corrected.

She went the next Sunday to hear Mr. Peck preach, and Putney, who seemed to see her the moment she entered the church, rose, as the sexton was showing her up the aisle, and opened the door of his pew for her with ironical welcome.

“You can always have a seat with us, Annie,” he mocked, on their way out of the church together.

“Thank you, Ralph,” she answered boldly. “I’m going to speak to the sexton for a pew.”

XVI.

A wire had been carried from the village to the scene of the play at South Hatboro’, and electric globes fizzed and hissed overhead, flooding the open tennis-court with the radiance of sharper moonlight, and stamping the thick velvety shadows of the shrubbery and tree-tops deep into the raw green of the grass along its borders.

The spectators were seated on the verandas and terraced turf at the rear of the house, and they crowded the sides of the court up to a certain point, where a cord stretched across it kept them from encroaching upon the space intended for the action. Another rope enclosed an area all round them, where chairs and benches were placed for those who had tickets. After the rejection of the exclusive feature of the original plan, Mrs. Munger had liberalised more and more: she caused it to be known that all who could get into her grounds would be welcome on the outside of that rope, even though they did not pay anything; but a large number of tickets had been sold to the hands, as well as to the other villagers, and the area within the rope was closely packed. Some of the boys climbed the neighbouring trees, where from time to time the town authorities threatened them, but did not really dislodge them.

Annie, with other friends of Mrs. Munger, gained a reserved seat on the veranda through the drawing-room windows; but once there, she found herself in the midst of a sufficiently mixed company.

“How do, Miss Kilburn? That you? Well, I declare!” said a voice that she seemed to know, in a key of nervous excitement. Mrs. Savor’s husband leaned across his wife’s lap and shook hands with Annie. “William thought I better come,” Mrs. Savor seemed called upon to explain. “I got to do something. Ain’t it just too cute for anything the way they got them screens worked into the shrubbery down they-ar? It’s like the cycloraymy to Boston; you can’t tell where the ground ends and the paintin’ commences. Oh, I do want ’em to begin!”

Mr. Savor laughed at his wife’s impatience, and she said playfully: “What you laughin’ at? I guess you’re full as excited as what I be, when all’s said and done.”

There were other acquaintances of Annie’s from Over the Track, in the group about her, and upon the example of the Savors they all greeted her. The wives and sweethearts tittered with self-derisive expectation; the men were gravely jocose, like all Americans in unwonted circumstances, but they were respectful to the coming performance, perhaps as a tribute to Annie. She wondered how some of them came to have those seats, which were reserved at an extra price; she did not allow for that self-respect which causes the American workman to supply himself with the best his money can buy while his money lasts.

She turned to see who was on her other hand. A row of three small children stretched from her to Mrs. Gerrish, whom she did not recognise at first. “Oh, Emmeline!” she said; and then, for want of something else, she added, “Where is Mr. Gerrish? Isn’t he coming?”

“He was detained at the store,” said Mrs. Gerrish, with cold importance; “but he will be here. May I ask, Annie,” she pursued solemnly, “how you got here?”

“How did I get here? Why, through the windows. Didn’t you?”

“May I ask who had charge of the arrangements?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Annie. “I suppose Mrs. Munger.”

A burst of music came from the dense shadow into which the group of evergreens at the bottom of the tennis-court deepened away from the glister of the electrics. There was a deeper hush; then a slight jarring and scraping of a chair beyond Mrs. Gerrish, who leaned across her children and said, “He’s come, Annie — right through the parlour window!” Her voice was lifted to carry above the music, and all the people near were able to share the fact that righted Mrs. Gerrish in her own esteem.

From the covert of the low pines in the middle of the scene Miss Northwick and Mr. Brandreth appeared hand in hand, and then the place filled with figures from other apertures of the little grove and through the artificial wings at the sides, and walked the minuet. Mr. Fellows, the painter, had helped with the costumes, supplying some from his own artistic properties, and mediævalising others; the Boston costumers had been drawn upon by the men; and they all moved through the stately figures with a security which discipline had given them. The broad solid colours which they wore took the light and shadow with picturesque effectiveness; the masks contributed a sense of mystery novel in Hatboro’, and kept the friends of the dancers in exciting doubt of their identity; the strangeness of the audience to all spectacles of the sort held its judgment in suspense. The minuet was encored, and had to be given again, and it was some time before the applause of the repetition allowed the characters to be heard when the partners of the minuet began to move about arm in arm, and the drama properly began. When the applause died away it was still not easy to hear; a boy in one of the trees called, “Louder!” and made some of the people laugh, but for the rest they were very orderly throughout.

Toward the end of the fourth act Annie was startled by a child dashing itself against her knees, and breaking into a gurgle of shy laughter as children do.

“Why, you little witch!” she said to the uplifted face of Idella Peck. “Where is your father?”

“Oh, somewhere,” said the child, with entire ease of mind.

“And your hat?” said Annie, putting her hand on the curly bare head— “where’s your hat?”

“On the ground.”

“On the ground — where?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Idella lightly, as if the pursuit bored her.

Annie pulled her up on her lap. “Well, now, you stay here with me, if you please, till your papa or your hat comes after you.”

“My — hat — can’t — come — after — me!” said the child, turning back her head, so as to laugh her sense of the joke in Annie’s face.

“No matter; your papa can, and I’m going to keep you.”

Idella let her head fall back against Annie’s breast, and began to finger the rings on the hand which Annie laid across her lap to keep her.

“For goodness gracious!” said Mrs. Savor, “who you got there, Miss Kilburn?”

“Mr. Peck’s little girl.”

“Where’d she spring from?”

Mrs. Gerrish leaned forward and spoke across the six legs of her children, who were all three standing up in their chairs: “You don’t mean to say that’s Idella Peck? Where’s her father?”

“Somewhere, she says,” said Annie, willing to answer Mrs. Gerrish with the child’s nonchalance.

“Well, that’s great!” said Mrs. Gerrish. “I should think he better be looking after her — or some one.”

The music ceased, and the last act of the play began. Before it ended, Idella had fallen asleep, and Annie sat still with her after the crowd around her began to break up. Mrs. Savor kept her seat beside Annie. She said, “Don’t you want I should spell you a little while, Miss Kilburn?” She leaned over the face of the sleeping child. “Why, she ain’t much more than a baby! William, you go and see if you can’t find Mr. Peck. I’m goin’ to stay here with Miss Kilburn.” Her husband humoured her whim, and made his way through the knots and clumps of people toward the rope enclosing the tennis-court. “Won’t you let me hold her, Miss Kilburn?” she pleaded again.

“No, no; she isn’t heavy; I like to hold her,” replied Annie. Then something occurred to her, and she started in amazement at herself.

“Or yes, Mrs. Savor, you may take her a while;” and she put the child into the arms of the bereaved creature, who had fallen desolately back in her chair. She hugged Idella up to her breast, and hungrily mumbled her with kisses, and moaned out over her, “Oh dear! Oh my! Oh my!”

XVII.

The people beyond the rope had nearly all gone away, and Mr. Savor was coming back across the court with Mr. Peck. The players appeared from the grove at the other end of the court in their vivid costumes, chatting and laughing with their friends, who went down from the piazzas and terraces to congratulate them. Mrs. Munger hurried about among them, saying something to each group. She caught sight of Mr. Peck and Mr. Savor, and she ran after them, arriving with them where Annie sat.

“I hope you were not anxious about Idella,” Annie said, laughing.

“No; I didn’t miss her at once,” said the minister simply; “and then I thought she had merely gone off with some of the other children who were playing about.”

“You shall talk all that over later,” said Mrs. Munger. “Now, Miss Kilburn, I want you and Mr. Peck and Mr. and Mrs. Savor to stay for a cup of coffee that I’m going to give our friends out there. Don’t you think they deserve it? Wasn’t it a wonderful success? They must be frightfully exhausted. Just go right out to them. I’ll be with you in one moment. Oh yes, the child! Well, bring her into the house, Mrs. Savor; I’ll find a place for her, and then you can go out with me.”

“I guess you won’t get Maria away from her very easy,” said Mr. Savor, laughing. His wife stood with the child’s cheek pressed tight against hers.

“Oh, I’ll manage that,” said Mrs. Munger. “I’m counting on Mrs. Savor.” She added in a hurried undertone to Annie: “I’ve asked a number of the workpeople to stay — representative workpeople, the foremen in the different shops and their families — and you’ll find your friends of all classes together. It’s a great day for the Social Union!” she said aloud. “I’m sure you must feel that, Mr. Peck. Miss Kilburn and I have to thank you for saving us from a great mistake at the outset, and now your staying,” she continued, “will give it just the appearance we want. I’m going to keep your little girl as a hostage, and you shall not go till I let you. Come, Mrs. Savor!” She bustled away with Mrs. Savor, and Mr. Peck reluctantly accompanied Annie down over the lawn.

He was silent, but Mr. Savor was hilarious. “Well, Mr. Putney,” he said, when he joined the group of which Putney was the centre, “you done that in apple-pie order. I never see anything much better than the way you carried on with Mrs. Wilmington.”

“Thank you, Mr. Savor,” said Putney; “I’m glad you liked it. You couldn’t say I was trying to flatter her up much, anyway.”

“No, no!” Mr. Savor assented, with delight in the joke.

“Well, Annie,” said Putney. He shook hands with her, and Mrs. Putney, who was there with Dr. Morrell, asked her where she had sat.

“We kept looking all round for you.”

“Yes,” said Putney, with his hand on his boy’s shoulder, “we wanted to know how you liked the Mercutio.”

“Ralph, it was incomparable!”

“Well, that will do for a beginning. It’s a little cold, but it’s in the right spirit. You mean that the Mercutio wasn’t comparable to the Nurse.”

“Oh, Lyra was wonderful!” said Annie. “Don’t you think so, Ellen?”

“She was Lyra,” said Mrs. Putney definitely.

“No; she wasn’t Lyra at all!” retorted Annie. “That was the marvel of it. She was Juliet’s nurse.”

“Perhaps she was a little of both,” suggested Putney. “What did you think of the performance, Mr. Peck? I don’t want a personal tribute, but if you offer it, I shall not be ungrateful.”

“I have been very much interested,” said the minister. “It was all very new to me. I realised for the first time in my life the great power that the theatre must be. I felt how much the drama could do — how much good.”

“Well, that’s what we’re after,” said Putney. “We had no personal motive; good, right straight along, was our motto. Nobody wanted to outshine anybody else. I kept my Mercutio down all through, so’s not to get ahead of Romeo or Tybalt in the public esteem. Did our friends outside the rope catch on to my idea?” Mr. Peck smiled at the banter, but he seemed not to know just what to say, and Putney went on: “That’s why I made it so bad. I didn’t want anybody to go home feeling sorry that Mercutio was killed. I don’t suppose Winthrop could have slept.”

“You won’t sleep yourself to-night, I’m afraid,” said his wife.

“Oh, Mrs. Munger has promised me a particularly weak cup of coffee. She has got us all in, it seems, for a sort of supper, in spite of everything. I understand it includes representatives of all the stations and conditions present except the outcasts beyond the rope. I don’t see what you’re doing here, Mr. Peck.”

“Was Mr. Peck really outside the rope?” Annie asked Dr. Morrell, as they dropped apart from the others a little.

“I believe he gave his chair to one of the women from the outside,” said the doctor.

Annie moved with him toward Lyra, who was joking with some of the hands.

With all her good-nature, she had the effect of patronising them, as she stood talking about the play with them in her drawl, which she had got back to again. They were admiring her, in her dress of the querulous old nurse, and told her how they never would have known her. But there was an insincerity in the effusion of some of the more nervous women, and in the reticence of the others, who were holding back out of self-respect.

She met Annie and Morrell with eager relief. “Well, Annie?”

“Perfect!”

“Well, now, that’s very nice; you can’t go beyond perfect, you know. I did do it pretty well, didn’t I? Poor Mr. Brandreth! Have you seen him? You must say something comforting to him. He’s really been sacrificed in this business. You know he wanted Miss Chapley. She would have made a lovely Juliet. Of course she blames him for it. She thinks he wanted to make up to Miss Northwick, when Miss Northwick was just flinging herself at Jack. Look at her!”

Jack Wilmington and Miss Sue Northwick were standing together near her father and a party of her friends, and she was smiling and talking at him. Eyes, lips, gestures, attitude expressed in the proud girl a fawning eagerness to please the man, who received her homage rather as if it bored him. His indifferent manner may have been one secret of his power over her, and perhaps she was not capable of all the suffering she was capable of inflicting.

Lyra turned to walk toward the house, deflecting a little in the direction of her nephew and Miss Northwick. “Jack!” she drawled over the shoulder next them as she passed, “I wish you’d bring your aunty’s wrap to her on the piazza.”

“Why, stay here!” Putney called after her. “They’re going to fetch the refreshments out here.”

“Yes, but I’m tired, Ralph, and I can’t sit on the grass, at my age.”

She moved on, with her sweeping, lounging pace, and Jack Wilmington, after a moment’s hesitation, bowed to Miss Northwick and went after her.

The girl remained apart from her friends, as if expecting his return.

Silhouetted against the bright windows, Lyra waited till Jack Wilmington reappeared with a shawl and laid it on her shoulders. Then she sank into a chair. The young man stood beside her talking down upon her. Something restive and insistent expressed itself in their respective attitudes. He sat down at her side.

Miss Northwick joined her friends carelessly.

“Ah, Miss Kilburn,” said Mr. Brandreth’s voice at Annie’s ear, “I’m glad to find you. I’ve just run home with mother — she feels the night air — and I was afraid you would slip through our fingers before I got back. This little business of the refreshments was an afterthought of Mrs. Munger’s, and we meant it for a surprise — we knew you’d approve of it in the form it took.” He looked round at the straggling workpeople, who represented the harmonisation of classes, keeping to themselves as if they had been there alone.

“Yes,” Annie was obliged to say; “it’s very pleasant.” She added: “You must all be rather hungry, Mr. Brandreth. If the Social Union ever gets on its feet, it will have you to thank more than any one.”

“Oh, don’t speak of me, Miss Kilburn! Do you know, we’ve netted about two hundred dollars. Isn’t that pretty good, doctor?”

“Very,” said the doctor. “Hadn’t we better follow Mrs. Wilmington’s example, and get up under the piazza roof? I’m afraid you’ll be the worse for the night air, Miss Kilburn. Putney,” he called to his friend, “we’re going up to the house.”

“All right. I guess that’s a good idea.”

The doctor called to the different knots and groups, telling them to come up to the house. Some of the workpeople slipped away through the grounds and did not come. The Northwicks and their friends moved toward the house.

Mrs. Munger came down the lawn to meet her guests. “Ah, that’s right. It’s much better indoors. I was just coming for you.” She addressed herself more particularly to the Northwicks. “Coffee will be ready in a few moments. We’ve met with a little delay.”

“I’m afraid we must say good night at once,” said Mr. Northwick. “We had arranged to have our friends and some other guests with us at home. And we’re quite late now.”

Mrs. Munger protested. “Take our Juliet from us! Oh, Miss Northwick, how can I thank you enough? The whole play turned upon you!”

“It’s just as well,” she said to Annie, as the Northwicks and their friends walked across the lawn to the gate, where they had carriages waiting. “They’d have been difficult to manage, and everybody else will feel a little more at home without them. Poor Mr. Brandreth, I’m sure you will! I did pity you so, with such a Juliet on your hands!”

In-doors the representatives of the lower classes were less at ease than they were without. Some of the ministers mingled with them, and tried to form a bond between them and the other villagers. Mr. Peck took no part in this work; he stood holding his elbows with his hands, and talking with a perfunctory air to an old lady of his congregation.

The young ladies of South Hatboro’, as Mrs. Munger’s assistants, went about impartially to high and low with trays of refreshments. Annie saw Putney, where he stood with his wife and boy, refuse coffee, and she watched him anxiously when the claret-cup came. He waved his hand over it, and said, “No; I’ll take some of the lemonade.” As he lifted a glass of it toward his lips he stopped and made as if to put it down again, and his hand shook so that he spilled some of it. Then he dashed it off, and reached for another glass. “I want some more,” he said, with a laugh; “I’m thirsty.” He drank a second glass, and when he saw a tray coming toward Annie, where Dr. Morrell had joined her, he came over and exchanged his empty glass for a full one.

“Not much to brag of as lemonade,” he said, “but first-rate rum punch.”

“Look here, Putney,” whispered the doctor, laying his hand on his arm, “don’t you take any more of that. Give me that glass!”

“Oh, all right!” laughed Putney, dashing it off. “You’re welcome to the tumbler, if you want it, Doc.”

XVIII.

Mrs. Munger’s guests kept on talking and laughing. With the coffee and the punch there began to be a little more freedom. Some prohibitionists among the working people went away when they found that the lemonade was punch; but Mrs. Munger did not know it, and she saw the ideal of a Social Union figuratively accomplished in her own house. She stirred about among her guests till she produced a fleeting, empty good-fellowship among them. One of the shoe-shop hands, with an inextinguishable scent of leather and the character of a droll, seconded her efforts with noisy jokes. He proposed games, and would not be snubbed by the refusal of his boss to countenance him, he had the applause of so many others. Mrs. Munger approved of the idea.

“Don’t you think it would be great fun, Mrs. Gerrish?” she asked.

“Well, now, if Squire Putney would lead off,” said the joker, looking round.

Putney could not be found, nor Dr. Morrell.

“They’re off somewhere for a smoke,” said Mrs. Munger. “Well, that’s right. I want everybody to feel that my house is their own to-night, and to come and go just as they like. Do you suppose Mr. Peck is offended?” she asked, under her breath, as she passed Annie. “He couldn’t feel that this is the same thing; but I can’t see him anywhere. He wouldn’t go without taking leave, you don’t suppose?”

Annie joined Mrs. Putney. They talked at first with those who came to ask where Putney and the doctor were; but finally they withdrew into a little alcove from the parlour, where Mrs. Munger approved of their being when she discovered them; they must be very tired, and ought to rest on the lounge there. Her theory of the exhaustion of those who had taken part in the play embraced their families.

The time wore on toward midnight, and her guests got themselves away with more or less difficulty as they attempted the formality of leave-taking or not. Some of the hands who thought this necessary found it a serious affair; but most of them slipped off without saying good night to Mrs. Munger or expressing that rapture with the whole evening from beginning to end which the ladies of South Hatboro’ professed. The ladies of South Hatboro’ and Old Hatboro’ had met in a general intimacy not approached before, and they parted with a flow of mutual esteem. The Gerrish children had dropped asleep in nooks and corners, from which Mr. Gerrish hunted them up and put them together for departure, while his wife remained with Mrs. Munger, unable to stop talking, and no longer amenable to the looks with which he governed her in public.

Lyra came downstairs, hooded and wrapped for departure, with Jack Wilmington by her side. “Why, Ellen!” she said, looking into the little alcove from the hall. “Are you here yet? And Annie! Where in the world is Ralph?” At the pleading look with which Mrs. Putney replied, she exclaimed: “Oh, it’s what I was afraid of! I don’t see what the woman could have been about! But of course she didn’t think of poor Ralph. Ellen, let me take you and Winthrop home! Dr. Morrell will be sure to bring Ralph.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Putney passively, but without rising.

“Annie can come too. There’s plenty of room. Jack can walk.”

Jack Wilmington joined Lyra in urging Annie to take his place. He said to her, apart, “Young Munger has been telling me that Putney got at the sideboard and carried off the rum. I’ll stay and help look after him.”

A crazy laugh came into the parlour from the piazza outside, and the group in the alcove started forward. Putney stood at a window, resting one arm on the bar of the long lower sash, which was raised to its full height, and looking ironically in upon Mrs. Munger and her remaining guests. He was still in his Mercutio dress, but he had lost his plumed cap, and was bareheaded. A pace or two behind him stood Mr. Peck, regarding the effect of this apparition upon the company with the same dreamy, indrawn presence he had in the pulpit.

“Well, Mrs. Munger, I’m glad I got back in time to tell you how much I’ve enjoyed it. Brother Peck wanted me to go home, but I told him, Not till I’ve thanked Mrs. Munger, Brother Peck; not till I’ve drunk her health in her own old particular Jamaica.” He put to his lips the black bottle which he had been holding in his right hand behind him; then he took it away, looked at it, and flung it rolling-along the piazza floor. “Didn’t get hold of the inexhaustible bottle that time; never do. But it’s a good article; a better article than you used to sell on the sly, Bill Gerrish. You’ll excuse my helping myself, Mrs. Munger; I knew you’d want me to. Well, it’s been a great occasion, Mrs. Munger.” He winked at the hostess. “You’ve had your little invited supper, after all. You’re a manager, Mrs. Munger. You’ve made even the wrath of Brother Peck to praise you.”

The ladies involuntarily shrank backward as Putney suddenly entered through the window and gained the corner of the piano at a dash. He stayed himself against it, slightly swaying, and turned his flaming eyes from one to another, as if questioning whom he should attack next.

Except for the wild look in them, which was not so much wilder than they wore in all times of excitement, and an occasional halt at a difficult word, he gave no sign of being drunk. The liquor had as yet merely intensified him.

Mrs. Munger had the inspiration to treat him as one caresses a dangerous lunatic. “I’m sure you’re very kind, Mr. Putney, to come back. Do sit down!”

“Why?” demanded Putney. “Everybody else standing.”

“That’s true,” said Mrs. Munger. “I’m sure I don’t know why—”

“Oh yes, you do, Mrs. Munger. It’s because they want to have a good view of a man who’s made a fool of himself—”

“Oh, now, Mr. Putney!” said Mrs. Munger, with hospitable deprecation. “I’m sure no one wants to do anything of the kind.” She looked round at the company for corroboration, but no one cared to attract Putney’s attention by any sound or sign.

“But I’ll tell you what,” said Putney, with a savage burst, “that a woman who puts hell-fire before a poor devil who can’t keep out of it when he sees it, is better worth looking at.”

“Mr. Putney, I assure you,” said Mrs. Munger, “that it was the mildest punch! And I really didn’t think — I didn’t remember—”

She turned toward Mrs. Putney with her explanation, but Putney seemed to have forgotten her, and he turned upon Mr. Gerrish, “How’s that drunkard’s grave getting along that you’ve dug for your porter?” Gerrish remained prudently silent. “I know you, Billy. You’re all right. You’ve got the pull on your conscience; we all have, one way or another. Here’s Annie Kilburn, come back from Rome, where she couldn’t seem to fix it up with hers to suit her, and she’s trying to get round it in Hatboro’ with good works. Why, there isn’t any occasion for good works in Hatboro’. I could have told you that before you came,” he said, addressing Annie directly. “What we want is faith, and lots of it. The church is going to pieces because we haven’t got any faith.”

His hand slipped from the piano, and he dropped heavily back upon a chair that stood near. The concussion seemed to complete in his brain the transition from his normal dispositions to their opposite, which had already begun. “Bill Gerrish has done more for Hatboro’ than any other man in the place. He’s the only man that holds the church together, because he knows the value of faith.” He said this without a trace of irony, glaring at Annie with fierce defiance. “You come back here, and try to set up for a saint in a town where William B. Gerrish has done — has done more to establish the dry-goods business on a metro-me-tro-politan basis than any other man out of New York or Boston.”

He stopped and looked round, mystified, as if this were not the point which he had been aiming at.

Lyra broke into a spluttering laugh, and suddenly checked herself. Putney smiled slightly. “Pretty good, eh? Say, where was I?” he asked slyly. Lyra hid her face behind Annie’s shoulder. “What’s that dress you got on? What’s all this about, anyway? Oh yes, I know. Romeo and Juliet — Social Union. Well,” he resumed, with a frown, “there’s too much Romeo and Juliet, too much Social Union, in this town already.” He stopped, and seemed preparing to launch some deadly phrase at Mrs. Wilmington, but he only said, “You’re all right, Lyra.”

“Mrs. Munger,” said Mr. Gerrish, “we must be going. Good night, ma’am. Mrs. Gerrish, it’s time the children were at home.”

“Of course it is,” said Putney, watching the Gerrishes getting their children together. He waved his hand after them, and called out, “William Gerrish, you’re a man; I honour you.”

He laid hold of the piano and pulled himself to his feet, and seemed to become aware, for the first time, of his wife, where she stood with their boy beside her.

“What you doing here with that child at this time of night?” he shouted at her, all that was left of the man in his eyes changing into the glare of a pitiless brute. “Why don’t you go home? You want to show people what I did to him? You want to publish my shame, do you? Is that it? Look here!”

He began to work himself along toward her by help of the piano. A step was heard on the piazza without, and Dr. Morrell entered through the open window.

“Come now, Putney,” he said gently. The other men closed round them.

Putney stopped. “What’s this? Interfering in family matters? You better go home and look after your own wives, if you got any. Get out the way, ‘n’ you mind your own business, Doc. Morrell. You meddle too much.” His speech was thickening and breaking. “You think science going do everything — evolution! Talk me about evolution! What’s evolution done for Hatboro’? ‘Volved Gerrish’s store. One day of Christianity — real Christianity — Where’s that boy? If I get hold of him—”

He lunged forward, and Jack Wilmington and young Munger stepped before him.

Mrs. Putney had not moved, nor lost the look of sad, passive vigilance which she had worn since her husband reappeared.

She pushed the men aside.

“Ralph, behave yourself! Here’s Winthrop, and we want you to take us home. Come now!” She passed her arm through his, and the boy took his other hand. The action, so full of fearless custom and wonted affection from them both, seemed with her words to operate another total change in his mood.

“All right; I’m going, Ellen. Got to say good night Mrs. Munger, that’s all.” He managed to get to her, with his wife on his arm and his boy at his side. “Want to thank you for a pleasant evening, Mrs. Munger — want to thank you—”

“And I want to thank you too, Mrs. Munger,” said Mrs. Putney, with an intensity of bitterness no repetition of the words could give, “It’s been a pleasant evening for me!”

Putney wished to stop and explain, but his wife pulled him away.

Dr. Morrell and Annie followed to get them safely into the carriage; he went with them, and when she came back Mrs. Munger was saying: “I will leave it to Mr. Wilmington, or any one, if I’m to blame. It had quite gone out of my head about Mr. Putney. There was plenty of coffee, besides, and if everything that could harm particular persons had to be kept out of the way, society couldn’t go on. We ought to consider the greatest good of the greatest number.” She looked round from one to another for support. No one said anything, and Mrs. Munger, trembling on the verge of a collapse, made a direct appeal: “Don’t you think so, Mr. Peck?”

The minister broke his silence with reluctance. “It’s sometimes best to have the effect of error unmistakable. Then we are sure it’s error.”

Mrs. Munger gave a sob of relief into her handkerchief. “Yes, that’s just what I say.”

Lyra bent her face on her arm, and Jack Wilmington put his head out of the window where he stood.

Mr. Peck remained staring at Mrs. Munger, as if doubtful what to do. Then he said: “You seem not to have understood me, ma’am. I should be to blame if I left you in doubt. You have been guilty of forgetting your brother’s weakness, and if the consequence has promptly followed in his shame, it is for you to realise it. I wish you a good evening.”

He went out with a dignity that thrilled Annie. Lyra leaned toward her and said, choking with laughter, “He’s left Idella asleep upstairs. We haven’t any of us got perfect memories, have we?”

“Run after him!” Annie said to Jack Wilmington, in undertone, “and get him into my carriage. I’ll get the little girl. Lyra, don’t speak of it.”

“Never!” said Mrs. Wilmington, with delight. “I’m solid for Mr. Peck every time.”

XIX.

Annie made up a bed for Idella on a wide, old-fashioned lounge in her room, and put her away in it, swathed in a night-gown which she found among the survivals of her own childish clothing in that old chest of drawers. When she woke in the morning she looked across at the little creature, with a tender sense of possession and protection suffusing her troubled recollections of the night before. Idella stirred, stretched herself with a long sigh, and then sat up and stared round the strange place as if she were still in a dream.

“Would you like to come in here with me?” Annie suggested from her bed.

The child pushed back her hair with her little hands, and after waiting to realise the situation to the limit of her small experience, she said, with a smile that showed her pretty teeth, “Yes.”

“Then come.”

Idella tumbled out of bed, pulling up the nightgown, which was too long for her, and softly thumped across the carpet. Annie leaned over and lifted her up, and pressed the little face to her own, and felt the play of the quick, light breath over her cheek.

“Would you like to stay with me — live with me — Idella?” she asked.

The child turned her face away, and hid a roguish smile in the pillow. “I don’t know.”

“Would you like to be my little girl?”

“No.”

“No? Why not?”

“Because — because” — she seemed to search her mind— “because your night-gowns are too long.”

“Oh, is that all? That’s no reason. Think of something else.”

Idella rubbed her face hard on the pillow. “You dress up cats.”

She lifted her face, and looked with eyes of laughing malice into Annie’s, and Annie pushed her face against Idella’s neck and cried, “You’re a rogue!”

The little one screamed with laughter and gurgled: “Oh, you tickle! You tickle!”

They had a childish romp, prolonged through the details of Idella’s washing and dressing, and Annie tried to lose, in her frolic with the child, the anxieties that had beset her waking; she succeeded in confusing them with one another in one dull, indefinite pain.

She wondered when Mr. Peck would come for Idella, but they were still at their belated breakfast when Mrs. Bolton came in to say that Bolton had met the minister on his way up, and had asked him if Idella might not stay the week out with them.

“I don’ know but he done more’n he’d ought.

“But she can be with us the rest part, when you’ve got done with her.”

“I haven’t begun to get done with her,” said Annie. “I’m glad Mr. Bolton asked.”

After breakfast Bolton himself appeared, to ask if Idella might go up to the orchard with him. Idella ran out of the room and came back with her hat on, and tugging to get into her shabby little sack. Annie helped her with it, and Idella tucked her hand into Bolton’s loose, hard fist, and gave it a pull toward the door.

“Well, I don’t see but what she’s goin’,” he said.

“Yes; you’d better ask her the next time if I can go,” said Annie.

“Well, why don’t you?” asked Bolton, humouring the joke. “I guess you’d enjoy it about as well as any. We’re just goin’ for a basket of wind-falls for pies. I guess we ain’t a-goin’ to be gone a great while.”

Annie watched them up the lane from the library window with a queer grudge at heart; Bolton stiffly lumbering forward at an angle of forty-five degrees, the child whirling and dancing at his side, and now before and now after him.

At the sound of wheels on the gravel before the front door, Annie turned away with such an imperative need of its being Dr. Morrell’s buggy that it was almost an intolerable disappointment to find it Mrs. Munger’s phaeton.

Mrs. Munger burst in upon her in an excitement which somehow had an effect of premeditation.

“Miss Kilburn, I wish to know what you think of Mr. and Mrs. Putney’s behaviour to me, and Mr. Peck’s, in my own house, last night. They are friends of yours, and I wish to know if you approve of it. I come to you as their friend, and I am sure you will feel as I do that my hospitality has been abused. It was an outrage for Mr. Putney to get intoxicated in my house; and for Mr. Peck to attack me as he did before everybody, because Mr. Putney had taken advantage of his privileges, was abominable. I am not a member of his church; and even if I were, he would have had no right to speak so to me.”

Annie felt the blood fly to her head, and she waited a moment to regain her coolness. “I wonder you came to ask me, Mrs. Munger, if you were so sure that I agreed with you. I’m certainly Mr. and Mrs. Putney’s friend, and so far as admiring Mr. Peck’s sincerity and goodness is concerned, I’m his friend. But I’m obliged to say that you’re mistaken about the rest.”

She folded her hands at her waist, and stood up very straight, looking firmly at Mrs. Munger, who made a show of taking a new grip of her senses as she sank unbidden into a chair.

“Why, what do you mean, Miss Kilburn?”

“It seems to me that I needn’t say.”

“Why, but you must! You must, you know. I can’t be left so! I must know where I stand! I must be sure of my ground! I can’t go on without understanding just how much you mean by my being mistaken.”

She looked Annie in the face with eyes superficially expressive of indignant surprise, and Annie perceived that she wished to restore herself in her own esteem by browbeating some one else into the affirmation of her innocence.

“Well, if you must know, Mrs. Munger, I mean that you ought to have remembered Mr. Putney’s infirmity, and that it was cruel to put temptation in his way. Everybody knows that he can’t resist it, and that he is making such a hard fight to keep out of it. And then, if you press me for an opinion, I must say that you were not justifiable in asking Mr. Peck to take part in a social entertainment when we had explicitly dropped that part of the affair.”

Mrs. Munger had not pressed Annie for an opinion on this point at all; but in their interest in it they both ignored the fact. Mrs. Munger tacitly admitted her position in retorting, “He needn’t have stayed.”

“You made him stay — you remember how — and he couldn’t have got away without being rude.”

“And you think he wasn’t rude to scold me before my guests?”

“He told you the truth. He didn’t wish to say anything, but you forced him to speak, just as you have forced me.”

“Forced you? Miss Kilburn!”

“Yes. I don’t at all agree with Mr. Peck in many things, but he is a good man, and last night he spoke the truth. I shouldn’t be speaking it if I didn’t tell you I thought so.”

“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Munger, rising.

“After this you can’t expect me to have anything to do with the Social Union; you couldn’t wish me to, if that’s your opinion of my character.”

“I haven’t expressed any opinion of your character, Mrs. Munger, if you’ll remember, please; and as for the Social Union, I shall have nothing further to do with it myself.”

Annie drew herself up a little higher, and silently waited for her visitor to go.

But Mrs. Munger remained.

“I don’t believe Mrs. Putney herself would say what you have said,” she remarked, after an embarrassing moment. “If it were really so I should be willing to make any reparation — to acknowledge it. Will you go with me to Mrs. Putney’s? I have my phaeton here, and—”

“I shouldn’t dream of going to Mrs. Putney’s with you.”

Mrs. Munger urged, with the effect of invincible argument: “I’ve been down in the village, and I’ve talked to a good many about it — some of them hadn’t heard of it before — and I must say, Miss Kilburn, that people generally take a very different view of it from what you do. They think that my hospitality has been shamefully abused. Mr. Gates said he should think I would have Mr. Putney arrested. But I don’t care for all that. What I wish is to prove to you that I am right; and if I can go with you to call on Mrs. Putney, I shall not care what any one else says. Will you come?”

“Certainly not,” cried Annie.

They both stood a moment, and in this moment Dr. Morrell drove up, and dropped his hitching-weight beyond Mrs. Munger’s phaeton.

As he entered she said: “We will let Dr. Morrell decide. I’ve been asking Miss Kilburn to go with me to Mrs. Putney’s. I think it would be a graceful and proper thing for me to do, to express my sympathy and interest, and to hear what Mrs. Putney really has to say. Don’t you think I ought to go to see her, doctor?”

The doctor laughed. “I can’t prescribe in matters of social duty. But what do you want to see Mrs. Putney for?”

“What for? Why, doctor, on account of Mr. Putney — what took place last night.”

“Yes? What was that?”

“What was that? Why, his strange behaviour — his — his intoxication.”

“Was he intoxicated? Did you think so?”

“Why, you were there, doctor. Didn’t you think so?”

Annie looked at him with as much astonishment as Mrs. Munger.

The doctor laughed again. “You can’t always tell when Putney’s joking; he’s a great joker. Perhaps he was hoaxing.”

“Oh doctor, do you think he could have been?” said Mrs. Munger, with clasped hands. “It would make me the happiest woman in the world! I’d forgive him all he’s made me suffer. But you’re joking now, doctor?”

“You can’t tell when people are joking. If I’m not, does it follow that I’m really intoxicated?”

“Oh, but that’s nonsense, Dr. Morrell. That’s mere — what do you call it? — chop logic. But I don’t mind it. I grasp at a straw.” Mrs. Munger grasped at a straw of the mind, to show how. “But what do you mean?”

“Well, Mrs. Putney wasn’t intoxicated last night, but she’s not well this morning. I’m afraid she couldn’t see you.”

“Just as you say, doctor,” cried Mrs. Munger, with mounting cheerfulness. “I wish I knew just how much you meant, and how little.” She moved closer to the doctor, and bent a look of candid fondness upon him. “But I know you’re trying to mystify me.”

She pursued him with questions which he easily parried, smiling and laughing. At the end she left him to Annie, with adieux that were almost radiant. “Anyhow, I shall take the benefit of the doubt, and if Mr. Putney was hoaxing, I shall not give myself away. Do find out what he means, Miss Kilburn, won’t you?” She took hold of Annie’s unoffered hand, and pressed it in a double leathern grasp, and ran out of the room with a lightness of spirit which her physical bulk imperfectly expressed.

XX.

“Well?” said Annie, to the change which came over Morrell’s face when Mrs. Munger was gone.

“Oh, it’s a miserable business! He must go on now to the end of his debauch. He’s got past doing any mischief, I’m thankful to say. But I had hoped to tide him over a while longer, and now that fool has spoiled everything. Well!”

Annie’s heart warmed to his vexation, and she postponed another emotion. “Yes, she is a fool. I wish you had qualified the term, doctor.”

They looked at each other solemnly, and then laughed. “It won’t do for a physician to swear,” said Morrell. “I wish you’d give me a cup of coffee. I’ve been up all night.”

“With Ralph?”

“With Putney.”

“You shall have it instantly; that is, as instantly as Mrs. Bolton can kindle up a fire and make it.” She went out to the kitchen, and gave the order with an imperiousness which she softened in Dr. Morrell’s interest by explaining rather fully to Mrs. Bolton.

When she came back she wanted to talk seriously, tragically, about Putney. But the doctor would not. He said that it paid to sit up with Putney, drunk or sober, and hear him go on. He repeated some things Putney said about Mr. Peck, about Gerrish, about Mrs. Munger.

“But why did you try to put her off in that way — to make her believe he wasn’t intoxicated?” asked Annie, venting her postponed emotion, which was of disapproval.

“I don’t know. It came into my head. But she knows better.”

“It was rather cruel; not that she deserves any mercy. She caught so at the idea.”

“Oh yes, I saw that. She’ll humbug herself with it, and you’ll see that before night there’ll be two theories of Putney’s escapade. I think the last will be the popular one. It will jump with the general opinion of Putney’s ability to carry anything out. And Mrs. Munger will do all she can to support it.”

Mrs. Bolton brought in the coffee-pot, and Annie hesitated a moment, with her hand on it, before pouring out a cup.

“I don’t like it,” she said.

“I know you don’t. But you can say that it wasn’t Putney who hoaxed Mrs. Munger, but Dr. Morrell.”

“Oh, you didn’t either of you hoax her.”

“Well, then, there’s no harm done.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“And you won’t give me any coffee?”

“Oh yes, I’ll give you some coffee,” said Annie, with a sigh of baffled scrupulosity that made them both laugh.

He broke out again after he had begun to drink his coffee.

“Well?” she demanded, from her own lapse into silence.

“Oh, nothing! Only Putney. He wants Brother Peck, as he calls him, to unite all the religious elements of Hatboro’ in a church of his own, and send out missionaries to the heathen of South Hatboro’ to preach a practical Christianity. He makes South Hatboro’ stand for all that’s worldly and depraved.”

“Poor Ralph! Is that the way he talks?”

“Oh, not all the time. He talks a great many other ways.”

“I wonder you can laugh.”

“He’s been very severe on Brother Peck for neglecting the discipline of his child. He says he ought to remember his duty to others, and save the community from having the child grow up into a capricious, wilful woman. Putney was very hard upon your sex, Miss Kilburn. He attributed nearly all the trouble in the world to women’s wilfulness and caprice.”

He looked across the table at her with his merry eyes, whose sweetness she felt even in her sudden preoccupation with the notion which she now launched upon him, leaning forward and pushing some books and magazines aside, as if she wished to have nothing between her need and his response.

“Dr. Morrell, what should you think of my asking Mr. Peck to give me his little girl?”

“To give you his—”

“Yes. Let me take Idella — keep her — adopt her! I’ve nothing to do, as you know very well, and she’d be an occupation; and it would be far better for her. What Ralph says is true. She’s growing up without any sort of training; and I think if she keeps on she will be mischievous to herself and every one else.”

“Really?” asked the doctor. “Is it so bad as that?”

“Of course not. And of course I don’t want Mr. Peck to renounce all claim to his child; but to let me have her for the present, or indefinitely, and get her some decent clothes, and trim her hair properly, and give her some sort of instruction—”

“May I come in?” drawled Mrs. Wilmington’s mellow voice, and Annie turned and saw Lyra peering round the edge of the half-opened library door. “I’ve been discreetly hemming and scraping and hammering on the wood-work so as not to overhear, and I’d have gone away if I hadn’t been afraid of being overheard.”

“Oh, come in, Lyra,” said Annie; and she hoped that she had kept the spirit of resignation with which she spoke out of her voice.

Dr. Morrell jumped up with an apparent desire to escape that wounded and exasperated her. She put out her hand quite haughtily to him and asked, “Oh, must you go?”

“Yes. How do you do, Mrs. Wilmington? You’d better get Miss Kilburn to give you a cup of her coffee.”

“Oh, I will,” said Lyra. She forbore any reference, even by a look, to the intimate little situation she had disturbed.

Morrell added to Annie: “I like your plan. It’s the best thing you could do.”

She found she had been keeping his hand, and in the revulsion from wrath to joy she violently wrung it.

“I’m so glad!” She could not help following him to the door, in the hope that he would say something more, but he did not, and she could only repeat her rapturous gratitude in several forms of incoherency.

She ran back to Mrs. Wilmington. “Lyra, what do you think of my taking Mr. Peck’s little girl?”

Mrs. Wilmington never allowed herself to seem surprised at anything; she was, in fact, surprised at very few things. She had got into the easiest chair in the room, and she answered from it, with a luxurious interest in the affair, “Well, you know what people will say, Annie.”

“No, I don’t. What will they say?”

“That you’re after Mr. Peck pretty openly.”

Annie turned scarlet. “And when they find I’m not?” she demanded with severity, that had no effect upon Lyra.

“Then they’ll say you couldn’t get him.”

“They may say what they please. What do you think of the plan?”

“I think it would be the greatest blessing for the poor little thing,” said Lyra, with a nearer approach to seriousness than she usually made. “And the greatest care for you,” she added, after a moment.

“I shall not care for the care. I shall be glad of it — thankful for it,” cried Annie fervidly.

“If you can get it,” Lyra suggested.

“I believe I can get it. I believe I can make Mr. Peck see that it’s a duty. I shall ask him to regard it as a charity to me — as a mercy.”

“Well, that’s a good way to work upon Mr. Peck’s feelings,” said Lyra demurely. “Was that the plan that Dr. Morrell approved of so highly?”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know but it was some course of treatment. You pressed his hand so affectionately. I said to myself, Well, Annie’s either an enthusiastic patient, or else—”

“What?” demanded Annie, at the little stop Lyra made.

“Well, you know what people do say, Annie.”

“What?”

“Why, that you’re very much out of health, or—” Lyra made another of her tantalising stops.

“Or what?”

“Or Dr. Morrell is very much in love.”

“Lyra, I can’t allow you to say such things to me.”

“No; that’s what I’ve kept saying to myself all the time. But you would have it out of me. I didn’t want to say it.”

It was impossible to resist Lyra’s pretended deprecation. Annie laughed. “I suppose I can’t help people’s talking, and I ought to be too old to care.”

“You ought, but you’re not,” said Lyra flatteringly. “Well, Annie, what do you think of our little evening at Mrs. Munger’s in the dim retrospect? Poor Ralph! What did the doctor say about him?” She listened with so keen a relish for the report of Putney’s sayings that Annie felt as if she had been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra’s amusement. “Oh dear, I wish I could hear him! I thought I should have died last night when he came back, and began to scare everybody blue with his highly personal remarks. I wish he’d had time to get round to the Northwicks.”

“Lyra,” said Annie, nerving herself to the office; “don’t you think it was wicked to treat that poor girl as you did?”

“Well, I suppose that’s the way some people might look at it,” said Lyra dispassionately.

“Then how — how could you do it?”

“Oh, it’s easy enough to behave wickedly, Annie, when you feel like it,” said Lyra, much amused by Annie’s fervour, apparently. “Besides, I don’t know that it was so very wicked. What makes you think it was?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that merely. Lyra, may I — may I speak to you plainly, frankly — like a sister?” Annie’s heart filled with tenderness for Lyra, with the wish to help her, to save a person who charmed her so much.

“Well, like a step-sister, you may,” said Lyra demurely.

“It wasn’t for her sake alone that I hated to see it. It was for your sake — for his sake.”

“Well, that’s very kind of you, Annie,” said Lyra, without the least resentment. “And I know what you mean. But it really doesn’t hurt either Jack or me. I’m not very goody-goody, Annie; I don’t pretend to be; but I’m not very baddy-baddy either. I assure you” — Lyra laughed mischievously— “I’m one of the very few persons in Hatboro’ who are better than they should be.”

“I know it, Lyra — I know it. But you have no right to keep him from taking a fancy to some young girl — and marrying her; to keep him to yourself; to make people talk.”

“There’s something in that,” Lyra assented, with impartiality. “But I don’t think it would be well for Jack to marry yet; and if I see him taking a fancy to any real nice girl, I sha’n’t interfere with him. But I shall be very particular, Annie.”

She looked at Annie with such a droll mock earnest, and shook her head with such a burlesque of grandmotherly solicitude, that Annie laughed in spite of herself. “Oh, Lyra, Lyra!”

“And as for me,” Lyra went on, “I assure you I don’t care for the little bit of harm it does me.”

“But you ought — you ought!” cried Annie. “You ought to respect yourself enough to care. You ought to respect other women enough.”

“Oh, I guess I’d let the balance of the sex slide, Annie,” said Lyra.

“No, you mustn’t; you can’t. We are all bound together; we owe everything to each other.”

“Isn’t that rather Peckish?” Lyra suggested.

“I don’t know. But it’s true, Lyra. And I shouldn’t be ashamed of getting it from Mr. Peck.”

“Oh, I didn’t say you would be.”

“And I hope you won’t be hurt with me. I know that it’s a most unwarrantable thing to speak to you about such a matter; but you know why I do it.”

“Yes, I suppose it’s because you like me; and I appreciate that, I assure you, Annie.”

Lyra was soberer than she had yet been, and Annie felt that she was really gaining ground. “And your husband; you ought to respect him—”

Lyra laughed out with great relish. “Oh, now, Annie, you are joking! Why in the world should I respect Mr. Wilmington? An old man like him marrying a young girl like me!” She jumped up and laughed at the look in Annie’s face. “Will you go round with me to the Putneys? thought Ellen might like to see us.”

“No, no. I can’t go,” said Annie, finding it impossible to recover at once from the quite unanswerable blow her sense of decorum — she thought it her moral sense — had received.

“Well, you’ll be glad to have me go, anyway,” said Lyra. She saw Annie shrinking from her, and she took hold of her, and pulled her up and kissed her. “You dear old thing! I wouldn’t hurt your feelings for the world. And whichever it is, Annie, the parson or the doctor, I wish him joy.”

That afternoon, as Annie was walking to the village, the doctor drove up to the sidewalk, and stopped near her. “Miss Kilburn, I’ve got a letter from home. They write me about my mother in a way that makes me rather anxious, and I shall run down to Chelsea this evening.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for your bad news. I hope it’s nothing serious.”

“She’s old; that’s the only cause for anxiety. But of course I must go.”

“Oh yes, indeed. I do hope you’ll find all right with her.”

“Thank you very much. I’m sorry that I must leave Putney at such a time. But I leave him with Mr. Peck, who’s promised to be with him. I thought you’d like to know.”

“Yes, I do; it’s very kind of you — very kind indeed.”

“Thank you,” said the doctor. It was not the phrase exactly, but it served the purpose of the cordial interest in which they parted as well as another.

XXI.

During the days that Mr. Peck had consented to leave Idella with her Annie took the whole charge of the child, and grew into an intimacy with her that was very sweet. It was not necessary to this that Idella should be always tractable and docile, which she was not, but only that she should be affectionate and dependent; Annie found that she even liked her to be a little baddish; it gave her something to forgive; and she experienced a perverse pleasure in discovering that the child of a man so self-forgetful as Mr. Peck was rather more covetous than most children. It also amused her that when some of Idella’s shabby playmates from Over the Track casually found their way to the woods past Annie’s house, and tried to tempt Idella to go with them, the child disowned them, and ran into the house from them; so soon was she alienated from her former life by her present social advantages. She apparently distinguished between Annie and the Boltons, or if not quite this, she showed a distinct preference for her company, and for her part of the house. She hung about Annie with a flattering curiosity and interest in all she did. She lost every trace of shyness with her, but developed an intense admiration for her in every way — for her dresses, her rings, her laces, for the elegancies that marked her a gentlewoman. She pronounced them prettier than Mrs. Warner’s things, and the house prettier and larger.

“Should you like to live with me?” Annie asked.

The child seemed to reflect. Then she said, with the indirection of her age and sex, pushing against Annie’s knee, “I don’t know what your name is.”

“Have you never heard my name? It’s Annie. How do you like it?”

“It’s — it’s too short,” said the child, from her readiness always to answer something that charmed Annie.

“Well, then you can make it longer. You can call me Aunt Annie. I think that will be better for a little girl; don’t you?”

“Mothers can whip, but aunts can’t,” said Idella, bringing a practical knowledge, acquired from her observation of life Over the Track, to a consideration of the proposed relation.

“I know one aunt who won’t,” said Annie, touched by the reply.

Saturday evening Idella’s father came for her; and with a preamble which seemed to have been unnecessary when he understood it, Annie asked him to let her keep the child, at least till he had settled himself in a house of his own, or, she hinted, in some way more comfortable for Idella than he was now living. In her anxiety to make him believe that she was not taking too great a burden on her hands, she became slowly aware that no fear of this had apparently troubled him, and that he was looking at the whole matter from a point outside of questions of polite ceremonial, even of personal feeling.

She was vexed a little with his insensibility to the favour she meant the child, and she could not help trying to make him realise it. “I don’t promise always to be the best guide, philosopher, and friend that Idella could have” — she took this light tone because she found herself afraid of him— “but I think I shall be a little improvement on some of her friends Over the Track. At least, if she wants my cat, she shall have it without fighting for it.”

Mr. Peck looked up with question, and she went on to tell him of a struggle which she had seen one day between Idella and a small Irish boy for a kitten; it really belonged to the boy, but Idella carried it off.

The minister listened attentively. At the end: “Yes,” he said, “that lust of possession is something all but impossible, even with constant care, to root out of children. I have tried to teach Idella that nothing is rightfully hers except while she can use it; but it is hard to make her understand, and when she is with other children she forgets.”

Annie could not believe at first that he was serious, and then she was disposed to laugh. “Really, Mr. Peck,” she began, “I can’t think it’s so important that a little thing like Idella should be kept from coveting a kitten as that she should be kept from using naughty words and from scratching and biting.”

“I know,” Mr. Peck consented. “That is the usual way of looking at such things.”

“It seems to me,” said Annie, “that it’s the common-sense way.”

“Perhaps. But upon the whole, I don’t agree with you. It is bad for the child to use naughty words and to scratch and bite; that’s part of the warfare in which we all live; but it’s worse for her to covet, and to wish to keep others from having.”

“I don’t wonder you find it hard to make her understand that.”

“Yes, it’s hard with all of us. But if it is ever to be easier we must begin with the children.”

He was silent, and Annie did not say anything. She was afraid that she had not helped her cause. “At least,” she finally ventured, “you can’t object to giving Idella a little rest from the fray. Perhaps if she finds that she can get things without fighting for them, she’ll not covet them so much.”

“Yes,” he said, with a dim smile that left him sad again, “there is some truth in that. But I’m not sure that I have the right to give her advantages of any kind, to lift her above the lot, the chance, of the least fortunate—”

“Surely, we are bound to provide for those of our own household,” said Annie.

“Who are those of our own household?” asked the minister. “All mankind are those of our own household. These are my mother and my brother and my sister.”

“Yes, I know,” said Annie, somewhat eagerly quitting this difficult ground. “But you can leave her with me at least till you get settled,” she faltered, “if you don’t wish it to be for longer.”

“Perhaps it may not be for long,” he answered, “if you mean my settlement in Hatboro’. I doubt,” he continued, lifting his eyes to the question in hers, “whether I shall remain here.”

“Oh, I hope you will,” cried Annie. She thought she must make a pretence of misunderstanding him. “I supposed you were very much satisfied with your work here.”

“I am not satisfied with myself in my work,” replied the minister; “and I know that I am far from acceptable to many others in it.”

“You are acceptable to those who are best able to appreciate you, Mr. Peck,” she protested, “and to people of every kind. I’m sure it’s only a question of time when you will be thoroughly acceptable to all. I want you to understand, Mr. Peck,” she added, “that I was shocked and ashamed the other night at your being tricked into countenancing a part of the entertainment you were promised should be dropped. I had nothing to do with it.”

“It was very unimportant, after all,” the minister said, “as far as I was concerned. In fact, I was interested to see the experiment of bringing the different grades of society together.”

“It seems to me it was an utter failure,” suggested Annie.

“Quite. But it was what I expected.”

There appeared an uncandour in this which Annie could not let pass even if it imperilled her present object to bring up the matter of past contention. “But when we first talked of the Social Union you opposed it because it wouldn’t bring the different classes together.”

“Did you understand that? Then I failed to make myself clear. I wished merely to argue that the well-meaning ladies who suggested it were not intending a social union at all. In fact, such a union in our present condition of things, with its division of classes, is impossible — as Mrs. Munger’s experiment showed — with the best will on both sides. But, as I said, the experiment was interesting, though unimportant, except as it resulted in heart-burning and offence.”

They were on the same ground, but they had reached it from starting-points so opposite that Annie felt it very unsafe. In her fear of getting into some controversy with Mr. Peck that might interfere with her designs regarding Idella, she had a little insincerity in saying: “Mrs. Munger’s bad faith in that was certainly unimportant compared with her part in poor Mr. Putney’s misfortune. That was the worst thing; that’s what I can’t forgive.”

Mr. Peck said nothing to this, and Annie, somewhat daunted by his silence, proceeded. “I’ve had the satisfaction of telling her what I thought on both points. But Ralph — Mr. Putney — I hear, has escaped this time with less than his usual—”

She did not know what lady-like word to use for spree, and so she stopped.

Mr. Peck merely said, “He has shown great self-control;” and she perceived that he was not going to say more. He listened patiently to the reasons she gave for not having offered Mrs. Putney anything more than passive sympathy at a time when help could only have cumbered and kindness wounded her, but he made no sign of thinking them either necessary or sufficient. In the meantime he had not formally consented to Idella’s remaining with her, and Annie prepared to lead back to that affair as artfully as she could.

“I really want you to believe, Mr. Peck, that I think very differently on some points from what I did when we first talked about the Social Union, and I have you to thank for seeing things in a new light. And you needn’t,” she added lightly, “be afraid of my contaminating Idella’s mind with any wicked ideas. I’ll do my best to keep her from coveting kittens or property of any kind; though I’ve always heard my father say that civilisation was founded upon the instinct of ownership, and that it was the only thing that had advanced the world. And if you dread the danger of giving her advantages, as you say, or bettering her worldly lot,” she continued, with a smile for his quixotic scruples, “why, I’ll do my best to reduce her blessings to a minimum; though I don’t see why the poor little thing shouldn’t get some good from the inequalities that there always must be in the world.”

“I am not sure there always must be inequalities in the world,” answered the minister.

“There always have been,” cried Annie.

“There always had been slavery, up to a certain time,” he replied.

“Oh, but surely you don’t compare the two!” Annie pleaded with what she really regarded as a kind of lunacy in the good man. “In the freest society, I’ve heard my father say, there is naturally an upward and downward tendency; a perfect level is impossible. Some must rise, and some must sink.”

“But what do you mean by rising? If you mean in material things, in wealth and the power over others that it gives—”

“I don’t mean that altogether. But there are other ways — in cultivation, refinement, higher tastes and aims than the great mass of people can have. You have risen yourself, Mr. Peck.”

“I have risen, as you call it,” he said, with a meek sufferance of the application of the point to himself. “Those who rise above the necessity of work for daily bread are in great danger of losing their right relation to other men, as I said when we talked of this before.”

A point had remained in Annie’s mind from her first talk with Dr. Morrell. “Yes; and you said once that there could be no sympathy between the rich and the poor — no real love — because they had not had the same experience of life. But how is it about the poor who become rich? They have had the same experience.”

“Too often they make haste to forget that they were poor; they become hard masters to those they have left behind them. They are eager to identify themselves with those who have been rich longer than they. Some working-men who now see this clearly have the courage to refuse to rise. Miss Kilburn, why should I let you take my child out of the conditions of self-denial and self-help to which she was born?”

“I don’t know,” said Annie rather blankly. Then she added impetuously: “Because I love her and want her. I don’t — I won’t — pretend that it’s for her sake. It’s for my sake, though I can take better care of her than you can. But I’m all alone in the world; I’ve neither kith nor kin; nothing but my miserable money. I’ve set my heart on the child; I must have her. At least let me keep her a while. I will be honest with you, Mr. Peck. If I find I’m doing her harm and not good, I’ll give her up. I should wish you to feel that she is yours as much as ever, and if you will feel so, and come often to see her — I — I shall — be very glad, and—” she stopped, and Mr. Peck rose.

“Where is the child?” he asked, with a troubled air; and she silently led the way to the kitchen, and left him at the door to Idella and the Boltons. When she ventured back later he was gone, but the child remained.

Half exultant and half ashamed, she promised herself that she really would be true as far as possible to the odd notions of the minister in her treatment of his child. When she undressed Idella for bed she noticed again the shabbiness of her poor little clothes. She went through the bureau that held her own childish things once more, but found them all too large for Idella, and too hopelessly antiquated. She said to herself that on this point at least she must be a law to herself.

She went down to see Mrs. Bolton. “Isn’t there some place in the village where they have children’s ready-made clothes for sale?” she asked.

“Mr. Gerrish’s,” said Mrs. Bolton briefly.

Annie shook her head, drawing in her breath. “I shouldn’t want to go there. Is there nowhere else?”

“There’s a Jew place. They say he cheats.”

“I dare say he doesn’t cheat more than most Christians,” said Annie, jumping from her chair. “I’ll try the Jew place. I want you to come with me, Mrs. Bolton.”

They went together, and found a dress that they both decided would fit Idella, and a hat that matched it.

“I don’t know as he’d like to have anything quite so nice,” said Mrs. Bolton coldly.

“I don’t know as he has anything to say about it,” said Annie, mimicking Mrs. Bolton’s accent and syntax.

They both meant Mr. Peck. Mrs. Bolton turned away to hide her pleasure in Annie’s audacity and extravagance.

“Want I should carry ‘em?” she asked, when they were out of the store.

“No, I can carry them,” said Annie.

She put them where Idella must see them as soon as she woke.

It was late before she slept, and Idella’s voice broke upon her dreams. The child was sitting up in her bed, gloating upon the dress and hat hung and perched upon the chair-back in the middle of the room. “Oh, whose is it? Whose is it? Whose is it?” she screamed; and as Annie lifted herself on her elbow, and looked over at her: “Is it mine? Is it mine?”

Annie had thought of playing some joke; of pretending not to understand; of delaying the child’s pleasure; playing with it; teasing. But in the face of this rapturous longing, she could only answer, “Yes.”

“Mine? My very own? To have? To keep always?”

“Yes.”

Idella sprang from her bed, and flew upon the things with a primitive, greedy transport in their possession. She could scarcely be held long enough to be washed before the dress could be put on.

“Be careful — be careful not to get it soiled now,” said Annie.

“No; I won’t spoil it.” She went quietly downstairs, and when Annie followed, she found her posing before the long pier-glass in the parlour, and twisting and turning for this effect and that. All the morning she moved about prim and anxious; the wild-wood flower was like a hot-house blossom wired for a bouquet. At the church door she asked Idella, “Would you rather sit with Mrs. Bolton?”

“No, no,” gasped the child intensely; “with you!” and she pushed her hand into Annie’s, and held fast to it.

Annie’s question had been suggested by a belated reluctance to appear before so much of Hatboro’ in charge of the minister’s child. But now she could not retreat, and with Idella’s hand in hers she advanced blushing up the aisle to her pew.

XXII.

The farmers’ carry-alls filled the long shed beside the church, and their leathern faces looked up, with their wives’ and children’s, at Mr. Peck where he sat high behind the pulpit; a patient expectance suggested itself in the men’s bald or grizzled crowns, and in the fantastic hats and bonnets of their women folks. The village ladies were all in the perfection of their street costumes, and they compared well with three or four of the ladies from South Hatboro’, but the men with them spoiled all by the inadequacy of their fashion. Mrs. Gates, the second of her name, was very stylish, but the provision-man had honestly the effect of having got for the day only into the black coat which he had bought ready-made for his first wife’s funeral. Mr. Wilmington, who appeared much shorter than his wife as he sat beside her, was as much inferior to her in dress; he wore, with the carelessness of a rich man who could afford simplicity, a loose alpaca coat and a cambric neckcloth, over which he twisted his shrivelled neck to catch sight of Annie, as she rustled up the aisle. Mrs. Gerrish — so much as could be seen of her — was a mound of bugled velvet, topped by a small bonnet, which seemed to have gone much to a fat black pompon; she sat far within her pew, and their children stretched in a row from her side to that of Mr. Gerrish, next the door. He did not look round at Annie, but kept an attitude of fixed self-concentration, in harmony with the severe old-school respectability of his dress; his wife leaned well forward to see, and let all her censure appear in her eyes.

Colonel Marvin, of the largest shoe-shop, showed the side of his large florid face, with the kindly smile that seemed to hang loosely upon it; and there was a good number of the hat-shop and shoe-shop hands of different ages and sexes scattered about. The gallery, commonly empty or almost so, showed groups and single figures dropped about here and there on its seats.

The Putneys were in their pew, the little lame boy between the father and mother, as their custom was. They each looked up at her as she passed, and smiled in the slight measure of recognition which people permit themselves in church. Putney was sitting with his head hanging forward in pathetic dejection; his face, when he first lifted it to look at Annie in passing, was haggard, but otherwise there was no consciousness in it of what had passed since they had sat there the Sunday before. When his glance took in Idella too, in her sudden finery, a light of friendly mocking came into it, and seemed to comment the relation Annie had assumed to the child.

Annie’s pew was just in front of Lyra’s, and Lyra pursed her mouth in burlesque surprise as Annie got into it with Idella and turned round to lift the child to the seat. While Mr. Peck was giving out the hymn, Lyra leaned forward and whispered —

“Don’t imagine that this turnout is all on your account, Annie. He’s going to preach against the Social Union and the social glass.”

The banter echoed a mechanical expectation in Annie’s heart, which was probably present in many others there. It was some time before she could cast it out, even after he had taken his text, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and she followed him with a mechanical disappointment at his failure to meet it.

He began by saying that he wished to dissociate his text in his hearers’ minds from the scent of the upturned earth, and the fall of clods upon the coffin lid, and he asked them to join him in attempting to find in it another meaning beside that which it usually carried. He believed that those words of Christ ought to speak to us of this world as well as the next, and enjoin upon us the example which we might all find in Him, as well as promise us immortality with Him. As the minister went on, Annie followed him with the interest which her belief that she heard between the words inspired, and occasionally in a discontent with what seemed a mystical, almost a fantastical, quality of his thought.

“There is an evolution,” he continued, “in the moral as well as in the material world, and good unfolds in greater good; that which was once best ceases to be in that which is better. In the political world we have striven forward to liberty as to the final good, but with this achieved we find that liberty is only a means and not an end, and that we shall abuse it as a means if we do not use it, even sacrifice it, to promote equality; or in other words, equality is the perfect work, the evolution of liberty. Patriotism has been the virtue which has secured an image of brotherhood, rude and imperfect, to large numbers of men within certain limits, but nationality must perish before the universal ideal of fraternity is realised. Charity is the holiest of the agencies which have hitherto wrought to redeem the race from savagery and despair; but there is something holier yet than charity, something higher, something purer and further from selfishness, something into which charity shall willingly grow and cease, and that is justice. Not the justice of our Christless codes, with their penalties, but the instinct of righteous shame which, however dumbly, however obscurely, stirs in every honest man’s heart when his superfluity is confronted with another’s destitution, and which is destined to increase in power till it becomes the social as well as the individual conscience. Then, in the truly Christian state, there shall be no more asking and no more giving, no more gratitude and no more merit, no more charity, but only and evermore justice; all shall share alike, and want and luxury and killing toil and heartless indolence shall all cease together.

“It is in the spirit of this justice that I believe Christ shall come to judge the world; not to condemn and punish so much as to reconcile and to right. We live in an age of seeming preparation for indefinite war. The lines are drawn harder and faster between the rich and the poor, and on either side the forces are embattled. The working-men are combined in vast organisations to withstand the strength of the capitalists, and these are taking the lesson and uniting in trusts. The smaller industries are gone, and the smaller commerce is being devoured by the larger. Where many little shops existed one huge factory assembles manufacture; one large store, in which many different branches of trade are united, swallows up the small dealers. Yet in the labour organisations, which have their bad side, their weak side, through which the forces of hell enter, I see evidence of the fact that the poor have at last had pity on the poor, and will no more betray and underbid and desert one another, but will stand and fall together as brothers; and the monopolies, though they are founded upon ruin, though they know no pity and no relenting, have a final significance which we must not lose sight of. They prophesy the end of competition; they eliminate one element of strife, of rivalry, of warfare. But woe to them through whose evil this good comes, to any man who prospers on to ease and fortune, forgetful or ignorant of the ruin on which his success is built. For that death the resurrection and the life seem not to be. Whatever his creed or his religious profession, his state is more pitiable than that of the sceptic, whose words perhaps deny Christ, but whose works affirm Him. There has been much anxiety in the Church for the future of the world abandoned to the godlessness of science, but I cannot share it. If God is, nothing exists but from Him. He directs the very reason that questions Him, and Christ rises anew in the doubt of him that the sins of Christendom inspire. So far from dreading such misgiving as comes from contemplating the disparity between the Church’s profession and her performance, I welcome it as another resurrection and a new life.”

The minister paused and seemed about to resume, when a scuffling and knocking noise drew all eyes toward the pew of the Gerrish family. Mr. Gerrish had risen and flung open the door so sharply that it struck against the frame-work of the pew, and he stood pulling his children, whom Mrs. Gerrish urged from behind, one after another, into the aisle beside him. One of them had been asleep, and he now gave way to the alarm which seizes a small boy suddenly awakened. His mother tried to still him, stooping over him and twitching him by the hand, with repeated “Sh! ‘sh’s!” as mothers do, till her husband got her before him, and marched his family down the aisle and out of the door. The noise of their feet over the floor of the vestibule died away upon the stone steps outside. The minister allowed the pause he had made to prolong itself painfully. He wavered, after clearing his throat, as if to go on with his sermon, and then he said sadly, “Let us pray!”

XXIII.

Putney stopped with his wife and boy and waited for Annie at the corner of the street where their ways parted. She had eluded Lyra Wilmington in coming down the aisle, and she had hurried to escape the sensation which broke into eager talk among the people before they got out of church, and which began with question whether one of the Gerrish children was sick, and ended in the more satisfactory conviction that Mr. Gerrish was offended at something in the sermon.

“Well, Annie,” said Putney, with a satirical smile.

“Oh, Ralph — Ellen — what does it mean?”

“It means that Brother Gerrish thought Mr. Peck was hitting at him in that talk about the large commerce, and it means business,” said Putney. “Brother Gerrish has made a beginning, and I guess it’s the beginning of the end, unless we’re all ready to take hold against him. What are you going to do?”

“Do? Anything! Everything! It was abominable! It was atrocious!” she shuddered out with disgust. “How could he imagine that Mr. Peck would do such a thing?”

“Well, he’s imagined it. But he doesn’t mean to stay out of church; he means to put Brother Peck out.”

“We mustn’t let him. That would be outrageous.”

“That’s the way Ellen and I feel about it,” said Putney; “but we don’t know how much of a party there is with us.”

“But everybody — everybody must feel the same way about Mr. Gerrish’s behaviour? I don’t see how you can be so quiet about it — you and Ellen!”

Annie looked from one to another indignantly, and Putney laughed.

“We’re not feeling quietly about it,” said Mrs. Putney.

Putney took out a piece of tobacco, and bit off a large corner, and began to chew vehemently upon it. “Hello, Idella!” he said to the little girl, holding by Annie’s hand and looking up intently at him, with childish interest in what he was eating. “What a pretty dress you’ve got on!”

“It’s mine,” said the child. “To keep.”

“Is that so? Well, it’s a beauty.”

“I’m going to wear it all the time.”

“Is that so? Well, now, you and Winthrop step on ahead a little; I want to see how you look in it. Splendid!” he said, as she took the boy’s hand and looked back over her shoulder for Putney’s applause. “Lyra tells us you’ve adopted her for the time being, Annie. I guess you’ll have your hands full. But, as I was going to say, about feeling differently, my experience is that there’s always a good-sized party for the perverse, simply because it seems to answer a need in human nature. There’s a fascination in it; a man feels as if there must be something in it besides the perversity, and because it’s so obviously wrong it must be right. Don’t you believe but what a good half of the people in church to-day are pretty sure that Gerrish had a good reason for behaving indecently. The very fact that he did so carries conviction to some minds, and those are the minds we have got to deal with. When he gets up in the next Society meeting there’s a mighty great danger that he’ll have a strong party to back him.”

“I can’t believe it,” Annie broke out, but she was greatly troubled. “What do you think, Ellen; that there’s any danger of his carrying the day against Mr. Peck?”

“There’s a great deal of dissatisfaction with Mr. Peck already, you know, and I guess Ralph’s right about the rest of it.”

“Well, I’m glad I’ve taken a pew. I’m with you for Mr. Peck, Ralph, heart and soul.”

“As Brother Brandreth says about the Social Union. Well, that’s right. I shall count upon you. And speaking of the Social Union, I haven’t seen you, Annie, since that night at Mrs. Munger’s. I suppose you don’t expect me to say anything in self-defence?”

“No, Ralph, and you needn’t; I’ve defended you sufficiently — justified you.”

“That won’t do,” said Putney. “Ellen and I have thought that all out, and we find that I — or something that stood for me — was to blame, whoever else was to blame, too; we won’t mention the hospitable Mrs. Munger. When Dr. Morrell had to go away Brother Peck took hold with me, and he suggested good resolutions. I told him I’d tried ‘em, and they never did me the least good; but his sort really seemed to work. I don’t know whether they would work again; Ellen thinks they would. I think we sha’n’t ever need anything again; but that’s what I always think when I come out of it — like a man with chills and fever.”

“It was Dr. Morrell who asked Mr. Peck to come,” said Mrs. Putney; “and it turned out for the best. Ralph got well quicker than he ever did before. Of course, Annie,” she explained, “it must seem strange to you hearing us talk of it as if it were a disease; but that’s just like what it is — a raging disease; and I can’t feel differently about anything that happens in it, though I do blame people for it.” Annie followed with tender interest the loving pride that exonerated and idealised Putney in the words of the woman who had suffered so much with him, and must suffer. “I couldn’t help speaking as I did to Mrs. Munger.”

“She deserved it every word,” said Annie. “I wonder you didn’t say more.”

“Oh, hold on!” Putney interposed. “We’ll allow that the local influences were malarial, but I guess we can’t excuse the invalid altogether. That’s Brother Peck’s view; and I must say I found it decidedly tonic; it helped to brace me up.”

“I think he was too severe with you altogether,” said his wife.

Putney laughed. “It was all I could do to keep Ellen from getting up and going out of church too, when Brother Gerrish set the example. She’s a Gerrishite at heart.”

“Well, remember, Ralph,” said Annie, “that I’m with you in whatever you do to defeat that man. It’s a good cause — a righteous cause — the cause of justice; and we must do everything for it,” she said fervently.

“Yes, any enormity is justifiable against injustice,” he suggested, “or the unjust; it’s the same thing.”

“You know I don’t mean that. I can trust you.”

“I shall keep within the law, at any rate,” said Putney.

“Well, Mrs. Bolton!” Annie called out, when she entered her house, and she pushed on into the kitchen; she had not the patience to wait for her to bring in the dinner before speaking about the exciting event at church. But Mrs. Bolton would not be led up to the subject by a tacit invitation, and after a suspense in which her zeal for Mr. Peck began to take a colour of resentment toward Mrs. Bolton, Annie demanded, “What do you think of Mr. Gerrish’s scandalous behaviour?”

Mrs. Bolton gave herself time to put a stick of wood into the stove, and to punch it with the stove-lid handle before answering. “I don’t know as it’s anything more than I expected.”

Annie went on: “It was shameful! Do you suppose he really thought Mr. Peck was referring to him in his sermon?”

“I presume he felt the cap fit. But if it hadn’t b’en one thing, ’twould b’en another. Mr. Peck was bound to roil the brook for Mr. Gerrish’s drinkin’, wherever he stood, up stream or down.”

“Yes. He is a wolf! A wolf in sheep’s clothing,” said Annie excitedly.

“I d’know as you can call him a wolf, exactly,” returned Mrs. Bolton dryly. “He’s got his good points, I presume.”

Annie was astounded. “Why, Mrs. Bolton, you’re surely not going to justify him?”

Mrs. Bolton erected herself from cutting a loaf of her best bread into slices, and stood with the knife in her hand, like a figure of Justice. “Well, I guess you no need to ask me a question like that, Miss Kilburn. I hain’t obliged to make up to Mr. Peck, though, for what I done in the beginnin’ by condemnin’ everybuddy else without mercy now.” Mrs. Bolton’s eyes did not flash fire, but they sent out an icy gleam that went as sharply to Annie’s heart.

Bolton came in from feeding the horse and cow in the barn, with a mealy tin pan in his hand, from which came a mild, subdued radiance like that of his countenance. He was not sensible of arriving upon a dramatic moment, and he said, without noticing the attitude of either lady: “I see you walkin’ home with Mr. Putney, Miss Kilburn. What’d he say?”

“You mean about Mr. Gerrish? He thinks as we all do; that it was a challenge to Mr. Peck’s friends, and that we must take it up.”

A light of melancholy satisfaction shone from Bolton’s deeply shaded eyes. “Well, he ain’t one to lose time, not a great deal. I presume he’s goin’ to work?”

“At once,” said Annie. “He says Mr. Gerrish will be sure to bring his grievance up at the next Society meeting, and we must be ready to meet him, and out-talk him and out-vote him.” She reported these phrases from Putney’s lips.

“Well, I guess if it was out-talkin’, Mr. Putney wouldn’t have much trouble about it. And as far forth as votin’ goes, I don’t believe but what we can carry the day.”

“We couldn’t,” said Mrs. Bolton from the pantry, where she had gone to put the bread away in its stone jar, “if it was left to the church.” She accented the last word with the click of the jar lid, and came out.

“Well, it ain’t a church question. It’s a Society question.”

Mrs. Bolton replied, on her passage to the dining-room with the plate of sliced bread: “I can’t make it seem right to have the minister a Society question. Seems to me that the church members’d ought have the say.”

“Well, you can’t make the discipline over to suit everybody,” said Bolton. “I presume it was ordered for a wise purpose.”

“Why, land alive, Oliver Bolton,” his wife shouted back from the remoteness to which his words had followed her, “the statute provisions and rules of the Society wa’n’t ordered by Providence.”

“Well, not directly, as you may say,” said Bolton, beginning high, and lowering his voice as she rejoined them, “but I presume the hearts of them that made them was moved.”

Mrs. Bolton could not combat a position of such unimpregnable piety in words, but she permitted herself a contemptuous sniff, and went on getting the things into the dining-room.

“And I guess it’s all goin’ to work together for good. I ain’t afraid any but what it’s goin’ to come out all right. But we got to be up and doin’, as they say about ‘lection times. The Lord helps them that helps themselves,” said Bolton, and then, as if he felt the weakness of this position as compared with that of entire trust in Providence, he winked his mild eyes, and added, “if they’re on the right side, and put their faith in His promises.”

“Well, your dinner’s ready now,” Mrs. Bolton said to Annie.

Idella had clung fast to Annie’s hand; as Annie started toward the dining-room she got before her, and whispered vehemently.

“What?” asked Annie, bending down; she laughed, in lifting her head, “I promised Idella you’d let us have some preserves to-day, Mrs. Bolton.”

Mrs. Bolton smiled with grim pleasure. “I see all the while her mind was set on something. She ain’t one to let you forget your promises. Well, I guess if Mr. Peck had a little more of her disposition there wouldn’t be much doubt about the way it would all come out.”

“Well, you don’t often see pairents take after their children,” said Bolton, venturing a small joke.

“No, nor husbands after their wives, either,” said Mrs. Bolton sharply. “The more’s the pity.”

XXIV.

Dr. Morrell came to see Annie late the next Wednesday evening.

“I didn’t know you’d come back,” she said. She returned to the rocking-chair, from which she came forward to greet him, and he dropped into an easy seat near the table piled with books and sewing.

“I didn’t know it myself half an hour ago.”

“Really? And is this your first visit? I must be a very interesting case.”

“You are — always. How have you been?”

“I? I hardly know whether I’ve been at all,” she answered, in mechanical parody of his own reply. “So many other things have been of so much more importance.”

She let her eyes rest full upon his, with a sense of returning comfort and safety in his presence, and after a deep breath of satisfaction, she asked, “How did you leave your mother?”

“Very much better — entirely out of danger.”

“It’s so odd to think of any one’s having a family. To me it seems the normal condition not to have any relatives.”

“Well, we can’t very well dispense with mothers,” said the doctor. “We have to begin with them, at any rate.”

“Oh, I don’t object to them. I only wonder at them.”

They fell into a cosy and mutually interesting talk about their separate past, and he gave her glimpses of the life, simple and studious, he had led before he went abroad. She confessed to two mistakes in which she had mechanically persisted concerning him; one that he came from Charlestown instead of Chelsea, and the other that his first name was Joseph instead of James. She did not own that she had always thought it odd he should be willing to remain in a place like Hatboro’, and that it must argue a strangely unambitious temperament in a man of his ability. She diverted the impulse to a general satire of village life, and ended by saying that she was getting to be a perfect villager herself.

He laughed, and then, “How has Hatboro’ been getting along?” he asked.

“Simply seething with excitement,” she answered. “But I should hardly know where to begin if I tried to tell you,” she added. “It seems such an age since I saw you.”

“Thank you,” said the doctor.

“I didn’t mean to be quite so flattering; but you have certainly marked an epoch. Really, I don’t know where to begin. I wish you’d seen somebody else first — Ralph and Ellen, or Mrs. Wilmington.”

“I might go and see them now.”

“No; stay, now you’re here, though I know I shall not do justice to the situation.” But she was able to possess him of it with impartiality, even with a little humour, all the more because she was at heart intensely partisan and serious. “No one knows what Mr. Gerrish intends to do next. He has kept quietly about his business; and he told some of the ladies who tried to interview him that he was not prepared to talk about the course he had taken. He doesn’t seem to be ashamed of his behaviour; and Ralph thinks that he’s either satisfied with it, and intends to let it stand as a protest, or else he’s going to strike another blow on the next business meeting. But he’s even kept Mrs. Gerrish quiet, and all we can do is to unite Mr. Peck’s friends provisionally. Ralph’s devoted himself to that, and he says he has talked forty-eight hours to the day ever since.”

Is he—”

“Yes; perfectly! I could hardly believe it when I saw him at church on Sunday. It was like seeing one risen from the dead. What he must have gone through, and Ellen! She told me how Mr. Peck had helped him in the struggle. She attributes everything to him. But of course you think he had nothing to do with it.”

“What makes you think that?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know. Wouldn’t that naturally be the attitude of Science?”

“Toward religion? Perhaps. But I’m not Science — with a large S. May be that’s the reason why I left the case with Mr. Peck,” said the doctor, smiling. “Putney didn’t leave off my medicine, did he?”

“He never got well so soon before. They both say that. I didn’t think you could be so narrow-minded, Dr. Morrell. But of course your scientific bigotry couldn’t admit the effect of the moral influence. It would be too much like a miracle; you would have to allow for a mystery.”

“I have to allow for a good many,” said the doctor. “The world is full of mysteries for me, if you mean things that science hasn’t explored yet. But I hope that they’ll all yield to the light, and that somewhere there’ll be light enough to clear up even the spiritual mysteries.”

“Do you really?” she demanded eagerly. “Then you believe in a life hereafter? You believe in a moral government of the—”

He retreated, laughing, from her ardent pursuit. “Oh, I’m not going to commit myself. But I’ll go so far as to say that I like to hear Mr. Peck preach, and that I want him to stay. I don’t say he had nothing to do with Putney’s straightening up. Putney had a great deal to do with it himself. What does he think Mr. Peck’s chances are?”

“If Mr. Gerrish tries to get him dismissed? He doesn’t know; he’s quite in the dark. He says the party of the perverse — the people who think Mr. Gerrish must have had some good reason for his behaviour, simply because they can’t see any — is unexpectedly large; and it doesn’t help matters with the more respectable people that the most respectable, like Mr. Wilmington and Colonel Marvin, are Mr. Peck’s friends. They think there must be something wrong if such good men are opposed to Mr. Gerrish.”

“And I suspect,” said Dr. Morrell soberly, “that Putney’s championship isn’t altogether an advantage. The people all concede his brilliancy, and they are prouder of him on account of his infirmity; but I guess they like to feel their superiority to him in practical matters. They admire him, but they don’t want to follow him.”

“Oh, I suppose so,” said Annie disconsolately. “And I imagine that Mr. Wilmington’s course is attributed to Lyra, and that doesn’t help Mr. Peck much with the husbands of the ladies who don’t approve of her.”

The doctor tacitly declined to touch this delicate point. He asked, after a pause, “You’ll be at the meeting?”

“I couldn’t keep away. But I’ve no vote, that’s the worst. I can only suffer in the cause.” The doctor smiled. “You must go, too,” she added eagerly.

“Oh, I shall go; I couldn’t keep away either. Besides, I can vote. How are you getting on with your little protégée?

“Idella? Well, it isn’t such a simple matter as I supposed, quite. Did you ever hear anything about her mother?”

“Nothing more than what every one has. Why?” asked the doctor, with scientific curiosity. “Do you find traits that the father doesn’t account for?”

“Yes. She is very vain and greedy and quick-tempered.”

“Are those traits uncommon in children?”

“In such a degree I should think they were. But she’s very affectionate, too, and you can do anything with her through her love of praise. She puzzles me a good deal. I wish I knew something about her mother. But Mr. Peck himself is a puzzle. With all my respect for him and regard and admiration, I can’t help seeing that he’s a very imperfect character.”

Doctor Morrell laughed. “There’s a great deal of human nature in man.”

“There isn’t enough in Mr. Peck,” Annie retorted. “From the very first he has said things that have stirred me up and put me in a fever; but he always seems to be cold and passive himself.”

“Perhaps he is cold,” said the doctor.

“But has he any right to be so?” retorted Annie, with certainly no coldness of her own.

“Well, I don’t know. I never thought of the right or wrong of a man’s being what he was born. Perhaps we might justly blame his ancestors.”

Annie broke into a laugh at herself: “Of course. But don’t you think that a man who is able to put things as he does — who can make you see, for example, the stupidity and cruelty of things that always seemed right and proper before — don’t you think that he’s guilty of a kind of hypocrisy if he doesn’t feel as well as see?”

“No, I can’t say that I do,” said the doctor, with pleasure in the feminine excess of her demand. “And there are so many ways of feeling. We’re apt to think that our own way is the only way, of course; but I suppose that most philanthropists — men who have done the most to better conditions — have been people of cold temperaments; and yet you can’t say they are unfeeling.”

“No, certainly. Do you think Mr. Peck is a real philanthropist?”

“How you do get back to the personal always!” said Dr. Morrell. “What makes you ask?”

“Because I can’t understand his indifference to his child. It seems to me that real philanthropy would begin at home. But twice he has distinctly forgotten her existence, and he always seems bored with it. Or not that quite; but she seems no more to him than any other child.”

“There’s something very curious about all that,” said the doctor. “In most things the greater includes the less, but in philanthropy it seems to exclude it. If a man’s heart is open to the whole world, to all men, it’s shut sometimes against the individual, even the nearest and dearest. You see I’m willing to admit all you can say against a rival practitioner.”

“Oh, I understand,” said Annie. “But I’m not going to gratify your spite.” At the same time she tacitly consented to the slight for Mr. Peck which their joking about him involved. In such cases we excuse our disloyalty as merely temporary, and intend to turn serious again and make full amends for it. “He made very short work,” she continued, “of that notion of yours that there could be any good feeling between the poor and the rich who had once been poor themselves.”

“Did I have any such notion as that?”

She recalled the time and place of its expression to him, and he said, “Oh yes! Well?”

“He says that rich people like that are apt to be the hardest masters, and are eager to forget they ever were poor, and are only anxious to identify themselves with the rich.”

Dr. Morrell seemed to enjoy this immensely. “That does rather settle it,” he said recreantly.

She tried to be severe with him, but she only kept on laughing and joking; she was aware that he was luring her away from her seriousness.

Mrs. Bolton brought in the lamp, and set it on the library table, showing her gaunt outline a moment against it before she left it to throw its softened light into the parlour where they sat. The autumn moonshine, almost as mellow, fell in through the open windows, which let in the shrilling of the crickets and grasshoppers, and wafts of the warm night wind.

“Does life,” Annie was asking, at the end of half an hour, “seem more simple or more complicated as you live on? That sounds awfully abstruse, doesn’t it? And I don’t know why I’m always asking you abstruse things, but I am.”

“Oh, I don’t mind it,” said the doctor. “Perhaps I haven’t lived on long enough to answer this particular question; I’m only thirty-six, you know.”

“Only? I’m thirty-one, and I feel a hundred!” she broke in.

“You don’t look it. But I believe I rather like abstruse questions. You know Putney and I have discussed a great many. But just what do you mean by this particular abstraction?”

He took from the table a large ivory paper-knife which he was in the habit of playing with in his visits, and laid first one side and then the other side of its smooth cool blade in the palm of his left hand, as he leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and bent his smiling eyes keenly upon her.

She stopped rocking herself, and said imperatively, “Will you please put that back, Dr. Morrell?”

“This paper-knife?”

“Yes. And not look at me just in that way? When you get that knife and that look, I feel a little too much as if you were diagnosing me.”

“Diagnosticating,” suggested the doctor.

“Is it? I always supposed it was diagnosing. But it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t the name I was objecting to.”

He put the knife back and changed his posture, with a smile that left nothing of professional scrutiny in his look. “Very well, then; you shall diagnose yourself.”

“Diagnosticate, please.”

“Oh, I thought you preferred the other.”

“No, it sounds undignified, now that I know there’s a larger word. Where was I?”

“The personal bearing of the question whether life isn’t more and more complicated?”

“How did you know it had a personal bearing?”

“I suspected as much.”

“Yes, it has. I mean that within the last four or five months — since I’ve been in Hatboro’ — I seem to have lost my old point of view; or, rather, I don’t find it satisfactory any more. I’m ashamed to think of the simple plans, or dreams, that I came home with. I hardly remember what they were; but I must have expected to be a sort of Lady Bountiful here; and now I think a Lady Bountiful one of the most mischievous persons that could infest any community.”

“You don’t mean that charity is played out?” asked the doctor.

“In the old-fashioned way, yes.”

“But they say poverty is on the increase. What is to be done?”

“Justice,” said Annie. “Those who do most of the work in the world ought to share in its comforts as a right, and not be put off with what we idlers have a mind to give them from our superfluity as a grace.”

“Yes, that’s all very true. But what till justice is done?”

“Oh, we must continue to do charity,” cried Annie, with self-contempt that amused him. “But don’t you see how much more complicated it is? That’s what I meant by life not being simple any more. It was easy enough to do charity when it used to seem the right and proper remedy for suffering; but now, when I can’t make it appear a finality, but only something provisional, temporary — Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see. But I don’t see how you’re going to help it At the same time, I’ll allow that it makes life more difficult.”

For a moment they were both serious and silent. Then she said: “Sometimes I think the fault is all in myself, and that if I were not so sophisticated and — and — selfish, I should find the old way of doing good just as effective and natural as ever. Then again, I think the conditions are all wrong, and that we ought to be fairer to people, and then we needn’t be so good to them. I should prefer that. I hate being good to people I don’t like, and I can’t like people who don’t interest me. I think I must be very hard-hearted.”

The doctor laughed at this.

“Oh, I know,” said Annie, “I know the fraudulent reputation I’ve got for good works.”

“Your charity to tramps is the opprobrium of Hatboro’,” the doctor consented.

“Oh, I don’t mind that. It’s easy when people ask you for food or money, but the horrible thing is when they ask you for work. Think of me, who never did anything to earn a cent in my life, being humbly asked by a fellow-creature to let him work for something to eat and drink! It’s hideous! It’s abominable! At first I used to be flattered by it, and try to conjure up something for them to do, and to believe that I was helping the deserving poor. Now I give all of them money, and tell them that they needn’t even pretend to work for it. I don’t work for my money, and I don’t see why they should.”

“They’d find that an unanswerable argument if you put it to them,” said the doctor. He reached out his hand for the paper-cutter, and then withdrew it in a way that made her laugh.

“But the worst of it is,” she resumed, “that I don’t love any of the people that I help, or hurt, whichever it is. I did feel remorseful toward Mrs. Savor for a while, but I didn’t love her, and I knew that I only pitied myself through her. Don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t,” said the doctor.

“You don’t, because you’re too polite. The only kind of creature that I can have any sympathy with is some little wretch like Idella, who is perfectly selfish and naughty every way, but seems to want me to like her, and a reprobate like Lyra, or some broken creature like poor Ralph. I think there’s something in the air, the atmosphere, that won’t allow you to live in the old way if you’ve got a grain of conscience or humanity. I don’t mean that I have. But it seems to me as if the world couldn’t go on as it has been doing. Even here in America, where I used to think we had the millennium because slavery was abolished, people have more liberty, but they seem just as far off as ever from justice. That is what paralyses me and mocks me and laughs in my face when I remember how I used to dream of doing good after I came home. I had better stayed at Rome.”

The doctor said vaguely, “I’m glad you didn’t,” and he let his eyes dwell on her with a return of the professional interest which she was too lost in her self reproach to be able to resent.

“I blame myself for trying to excuse my own failure on the plea that things generally have gone wrong. At times it seems to me that I’m responsible for having lost my faith in what I used to think was the right thing to do; and then again it seems as if the world were all so bad that no real good could be done in the old way, and that my faith is gone because there’s nothing for it to rest on any longer. I feel that something must be done; but I don’t know what.”

“It would be hard to say,” said the doctor.

She perceived that her exaltation amused him, but she was too much in earnest to care. “Then we are guilty — all guilty — till we find out and begin to do it. If the world has come to such a pass that you can’t do anything but harm in it—”

“Oh, is it so bad as that?” he protested.

“It’s quite as bad,” she insisted. “Just see what mischief I’ve done since I came back to Hatboro’. I took hold of that miserable Social Union because I was outside of all the life about me, and it seemed my only chance of getting into it; and I’ve done more harm by it in one summer than I could undo in a lifetime. Just think of poor Mr. Brandreth’s love affair with Miss Chapley broken off, and Lyra’s lamentable triumph over Miss Northwick, and Mrs. Munger’s duplicity, and Ralph’s escapade — all because I wanted to do good!”

A note of exaggeration had begun to prevail in her self-upbraiding, which was real enough, and the time came for him to suggest, “I think you’re a little morbid, Miss Kilburn.”

“Morbid! Of course I am! But that doesn’t alter the fact that everything is wrong, does it?”

“Everything!”

“Why, you don’t pretend yourself, do you, that everything is right?”

“A true American ought to do so, oughtn’t he?” teased the doctor. “One mustn’t be a bad citizen.”

“But if you were a bad citizen?” she persisted.

“Oh, then I might agree with you on some points. But I shouldn’t say such things to my patients, Miss Kilburn.”

“It would be a great comfort to them if you did,” she sighed.

The doctor broke out in a laugh of delight at her perfervid concentration. “Oh, no, no! They’re mostly nervous women, and it would be the death of them — if they understood me. In fact, what’s the use of brooding upon such ideas? We can’t hurry any change, but we can make ourselves uncomfortable.”

“Why should I be comfortable?” she asked, with a solemnity that made him laugh again.

“Why shouldn’t you be?”

“Yes, that’s what I often ask myself. But I can’t be,” she said sadly.

They had risen, and he looked at her with his professional interest now openly dominant, as he stood holding her hand. “I’m going to send you a little more of that tonic, Miss Kilburn.”

She pulled her hand away. “No, I shall not take any more medicine. You think everything is physical. Why don’t you ask at once to see my tongue?”

He went out laughing, and she stood looking wistfully at the door he had passed through.

XXV.

The bell on the orthodox church called the members of Mr. Peck’s society together for the business meeting with the same plangent, lacerant note that summoned them to worship on Sundays. Among those who crowded the house were many who had not been there before, and seldom in any place of the kind. There were admirers of Putney: workmen of rebellious repute and of advanced opinions on social and religious questions; nonsuited plaintiffs and defendants of shady record, for whom he had at one time or another done what he could. A good number of the summer folk from South Hatboro’ were present, with the expectation of something dramatic, which every one felt, and every one hid with the discipline that subdues the outside of life in a New England town to a decorous passivity.

At the appointed time Mr. Peck rose to open the meeting with prayer; then, as if nothing unusual were likely to come before it, he declared it ready to proceed to business. Some people who had been gathering in the vestibule during his prayer came in; and the electric globes, which had been recently hung above the pulpit and on the front of the gallery in substitution of the old gas chandelier, shed their moony glare upon a house in which few places were vacant. Mr. Gerrish, sitting erect and solemn beside his wife in their pew, shared with the minister and Putney the tacit interest of the audience.

He permitted the transaction of several minor affairs, and Mr. Peck, as Moderator, conducted the business with his habitual exactness and effect of far-off impersonality. The people waited with exemplary patience, and Putney, who lounged in one corner of his pew, gave no more sign of excitement, with his chin sunk in his rumpled shirt-front, than his sad-faced wife at the other end of the seat.

Mr. Gerrish rose, with the air of rising in his own good time, and said, with dry pomp, “Mr. Moderator, I have prepared a resolution, which I will ask you to read to this meeting.”

He held up a paper as he spoke, and then passed it to the minister, who opened and read it —

“Whereas, It is indispensable to the prosperity and well-being of any and every organisation, and especially of a Christian church, that the teachings of its minister be in accord with the convictions of a majority of its members upon vital questions of eternal interest, with the end and aim of securing the greatest efficiency of that body in the community, as an example and a shining light before men to guide their steps in the strait and narrow path; therefore,

“Resolved, That a committee of this society be appointed to inquire if such is the case in the instance of the Rev. Julius W. Peck, and be instructed to report upon the same.”

A satisfied expectation expressed itself in the silence that followed the reading of the paper, whatever pain and shame were mixed with the satisfaction. If the contempt of kindly usage shown in offering such a resolution without warning or private notice to the minister shocked many by its brutality, still it was satisfactory to find that Mr. Gerrish had intended to seize the first chance of airing his grievance, as everybody had said he would do.

Mr. Peck looked up from the paper and across the intervening pews at Mr. Gerrish. “Do I understand that you move the adoption of this resolution?”

“Why, certainly, sir,” said Mr. Gerrish, with an accent of supercilious surprise.

“You did not say so,” said the minister gently. “Does any one second Brother Gerrish’s motion?”

A murmur of amusement followed Mr. Peck’s reminder to Mr. Gerrish, and an ironical voice called out —

“Mr. Moderator!”

“Mr. Putney.”

“I think it important that the sense of the meeting should be taken on the question the resolution raises. I therefore second the motion for its adoption.”

Putney sat down, and the murmur now broadened into something like a general laugh, hushed as with a sudden sense of the impropriety.

Mr. Gerrish had gradually sunk into his seat, but now he rose again, and when the minister formally announced the motion before the meeting, he called, sharply, “Mr. Moderator!”

“Brother Gerrish,” responded the minister, in recognition.

“I wish to offer a few remarks in support of the resolution which I have had the honour — the duty, I would say — of laying before this meeting.” He jerked his head forward at the last word, and slid the fingers of his right hand into the breast of his coat like an orator, and stood very straight. “I have no desire, sir, to make this the occasion of a personal question between myself and my pastor. But, sir, the question has been forced upon me against my will and my — my consent; and I was obliged on the last ensuing Sabbath, when I sat in this place, to enter my public protest against it.

“Sir, I came into this community a poor boy, without a penny in my pocket, and unaided and alone and by my own exertions I have built up one of the business interests of the place. I will not stoop to boast of the part I have taken in the prosperity of this place; but I will say that no public object has been wanting — that my support has not been wanting — from the first proposition to concrete the sidewalks of this village to the introduction of city waterworks and an improved system of drainage, and — er — electric lighting. So much for my standing in a public capacity! As for my business capacity, I would gladly let that speak for itself, if that capacity had not been turned in the sanctuary itself against the personal reputation which every man holds dearer than life itself, and which has had a deadly blow aimed at it through that — that very capacity. Sir, I have established in this town a business which I may humbly say that in no other place of the same numerical size throughout the commonwealth will you find another establishment so nearly corresponding to the wants and the — er — facilities of a great city. In no other establishment in a place of the same importance will you find the interests and the demands and the necessities of the whole community so carefully considered. In no other—”

Putney got upon his feet and called out, “Mr. Moderator, will Brother Gerrish allow me to ask him a single question?”

Mr. Peck put the request, and Mr. Gerrish involuntarily made a pause, in which Putney pursued —

“My question is simply this: doesn’t Brother Gerrish think it would help us to get at the business in hand sooner if he would print the rest of his advertisement in the Hatboro’ Register?”

A laugh broke out all over the house as Putney dropped back into his seat. Mr. Gerrish stood apparently undaunted.

“I will attend to you presently, sir,” he said, with a schoolmasterly authority which made an impression in his favour with some. “And I thank the gentleman,” he continued, turning again to address the minister, “for recalling me from a side issue. As he acknowledges in the suggestion which he intended to wound my feelings, but I can assure him that my self-respect is beyond the reach of slurs and innuendoes; I care little for them; I care not what quarter they originate from, or have their — their origin; and still less when they spring from a source notoriously incompetent and unworthy to command the respect of this community, which has abused all its privileges and trampled the forbearance of its fellow-citizens under foot, until it has become a — a byword in this place, sir.”

Putney sprang up again with, “Mr. Moderator—”

“No, sir! no, sir!” pursued Gerrish; “I will not submit to your interruptions. I have the floor, and I intend to keep it. I intend to challenge a full and fearless scrutiny of my motives in this matter, and I intend to probe those motives in others. Why do we find, sir, on the one side of this question as its most active exponent a man outside of the church in organising a force within this society to antagonise the most cherished convictions of that church? We do not asperse his motives; but we ask if these motives coincide with the relations which a Christian minister should sustain to his flock as expressed in the resolution which I have had the privilege to offer, more in sorrow than in anger.”

Putney made some starts to rise, but quelled himself, and finally sank back with an air of ironical patience. Gerrish’s personalities had turned public sentiment in his favour. Colonel Marvin came over to Putney’s pew and shook hands with him before sitting down by his side. He began to talk with him in whisper while Gerrish went on —

“But on the other hand, sir, what do we see? I will not allude to myself in this connection, but I am well aware, sir, that I represent a large and growing majority of this church in the stand I have taken. We are tired, sir — and I say it to you openly, sir, what has been bruited about in secret long enough — of having what I may call a one-sided gospel preached in this church and from this pulpit. We enter our protest against the neglect of very essential elements of Christianity — not to say the essential — the representation of Christ as — a — a spirit as well as a life. Understand me, sir, we do not object, neither I nor any of those who agree with me, to the preaching of Christ as a life. That is all very well in its place, and it is the wish of every true Christian to conform and adapt his own life as far as — as circumstances will permit of. But when I come to this sanctuary, and they come, Sabbath after Sabbath, and hear nothing said of my Redeemer as a — means of salvation, and nothing of Him crucified; and when I find the precious promises of the gospel ignored and neglected continually and — and all the time, and each discourse from yonder pulpit filled up with generalities — glittering generalities, as has been well said by another — in relation to and connection with mere conduct, I am disappointed, sir, and dissatisfied, and I feel to protest against that line of — of preaching. During the last six months, Sabbath after Sabbath, I have listened in vain for the ministrations of the plain gospel and the tenets under which we have been blessed as a church and as — a — people. Instead of this I have heard, as I have said — and I repeat it without fear of contradiction — nothing but one-idea appeals and mere moralisings upon duty to others, which a child and the veriest tyro could not fail therein; and I have culminated — or rather it has been culminated to me — in a covert attack upon my private affairs and my way of conducting my private business in a manner which I could not overlook. For that reason, and for the reasons which I have recapitulated — and I challenge the closest scrutiny — I felt it my duty to enter my public protest and to leave this sanctuary, where I have worshipped ever since it was erected, with my family. And I now urge the adoption of the foregoing resolution because I believe that your usefulness has come to an end to the vast majority of the constituent members of this church; and — and that is all.”

Mr. Gerrish stopped so abruptly that Putney, who was engaged in talk with Colonel Marvin, looked up with a startled air, too late to secure the floor. Mr. Peck recognised Mr. Gates, who stood with his wrists caught in either hand across his middle, and looked round with a quizzical glance before he began to speak. Putney lifted his hand in playful threatening toward Colonel Marvin, who got away from him with a face of noiseless laughter, and went and joined Mr. Wilmington where he sat with his wife, who entered into the talk between the men.

“Mr. Moderator,” said Gates, “I don’t know as I expected to take part in this debate; but you can’t always tell what’s going to happen to you, even if you’re only a member of the church by marriage, as you might say. I presume, though, that I have a right to speak in a meeting like this, because I am a member of the society in my own right, and I’ve got its interests at heart as much as any one. I don’t know but what I got the interests of Hatboro’ at heart too, but I can’t be certain; sometimes you can’t; sometimes you think you’ve got the common good in view, and you come to look a little closer and you find it’s the uncommon good; that is to say, it’s not so much the public weal you’re after as what it is the private weal. But that’s neither here nor there. I haven’t got anything to say against identifying yourself with things in general; I don’t know but what it’s a good way; all is, it’s apt to make you think you’re personally attacked when nobody is meant in particular. I think that’s what’s partly the matter with Brother Gerrish here. I heard that sermon, and I didn’t suppose there was anything in it to hurt any one especially; and I was consid’ably surprised to see that Mr. Gerrish seemed to take it to himself, somehow, and worry over it; but I didn’t really know just what the trouble was till he explained here tonight. All I was thinking was when it come to that about large commerce devouring the small — sort of lean and fat kine — I wished Jordan and Marsh could hear that, or Stewart’s in New York, or Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia. I never thought of Brother Gerrish once; and I don’t presume one out of a hundred did either. I—” The electric light immediately over Gates’s head began to hiss and sputter, and to suffer the sort of syncope which overtakes electric lights at such times, and to leave the house in darkness. Gates waited, standing, till it revived, and then added: “I guess I hain’t got anything more to say, Mr. Moderator. If I had it’s gone from me now. I’m more used to speaking by kerosene, and I always lose my breath when an electric light begins that way.”

Putney was on his legs in good time now, and secured recognition before Mr. Wilmington, who made an effort to catch the moderator’s eye. Gates had put the meeting in good-humoured expectation of what they might now have from Putney. They liked Gates’s points very well, but they hoped from Putney something more cruel and unsparing, and the greater part of those present must have shared his impatience with Mr. Wilmington’s request that he would give way to him for a moment. Yet they all probably felt the same curiosity about what was going forward, for it was plain that Mr. Wilmington and Colonel Marvin were conniving at the same point. Marvin had now gone to Mr. Gerrish, and had slipped into the pew beside him with the same sort of hand-shake he had given Putney.

“Will my friend Mr. Putney give way to me for a moment?” asked Mr. Wilmington.

“I don’t see why I should do that,” said Putney.

“I assure him that I will not abuse his courtesy, and that I will yield the floor to him at any moment.”

Putney hesitated a moment, and then, with the contented laugh of one who securely bides his time, said, “Go ahead.”

“It is simply this,” said Mr. Wilmington, with a certain formal neatness of speech: “The point has been touched by the last speaker, which I think suggested itself to all who heard the remarks of Brother Gerrish in support of his resolution, and the point is simply this — whether he has not misapplied the words of the discourse by which he felt himself aggrieved, and whether he has not given them a particular bearing foreign to the intention of their author. If, as I believe, this is the case, the whole matter can be easily settled by a private conference between the parties, and we can be saved the public appearance of disagreement in our society. And I would now ask Brother Gerrish, in behalf of many who take this view with me, whether he will not consent to reconsider the matter, and whether, in order to arrive at the end proposed, he will not, for the present at least, withdraw the resolution he has offered?”

Mr. Wilmington sat down amidst a general sensation, which was heightened by Putney’s failure to anticipate any action on Gerrish’s part. Gerrish rapidly finished something he was saying to Colonel Marvin, and then half rose, and said, “Mr. Moderator, I withdraw my resolution — for the time being, and — for the present, sir,” and sat down again.

“Mr. Moderator,” Putney called sharply, from his place, “this is altogether unparliamentary. That resolution is properly before the meeting. Its adoption has been moved and seconded, and it cannot be withdrawn without leave granted by a vote of the meeting. I wish to discuss the resolution in all its bearings, and I think there are a great many present who share with me a desire to know how far it represents the sense of this society. I don’t mean as to the supposed personal reflections which it was intended to punish; that is a very small matter, and as compared with the other questions involved, of no consequence whatever.” Putney tossed his head with insolent pleasure in his contempt of Gerrish. His nostrils swelled, and he closed his little jaws with a firmness that made his heavy black moustache hang down below the corners of his chin. He went on with a wicked twinkle in his eye, and a look all round to see that people were waiting to take his next point. “I judge my old friend Brother Gerrish by myself. My old friend Gerrish cares no more really about personal allusions than I do. What he really had at heart in offering his resolution was not any supposed attack upon himself or his shop from the pulpit of this church. He cared no more for that than I should care for a reference to my notorious habits. These are things that we feel may be safely left to the judgment, the charitable judgment, of the community, which will be equally merciful to the man who devours widows’ houses and to the man who ‘puts an enemy in his mouth to steal away his brains.’”

“Mr. Moderator,” said Colonel Marvin, getting upon his feet.

“No, sir!” shouted Putney fiercely; “I can’t allow you to speak. Wait till I get done!” He stopped, and then said gently “Excuse me, Colonel; I really must go on. I’m speaking now in behalf of Brother Gerrish, and he doesn’t like to have the speaking on his side interrupted.”

“Oh, all right,” said Colonel Marvin amiably; “go on.”

“What my old friend William Gerrish really designed in offering that resolution was to bring into question the kind of Christianity which has been preached in this place by our pastor — the one-sided gospel, as he aptly called it — and what he and I want to get at is the opinion of the society on that question. Has the gospel preached to us here been one-sided or hasn’t it? Brother Gerrish says it has, and Brother Gerrish, as I understand, doesn’t change his mind on that point, if he does on any, in asking to withdraw his resolution. He doesn’t expect Mr. Peck to convince him in a private conference that he has been preaching an all-round gospel. I don’t contend that he has; but I suppose I’m not a very competent judge. I don’t propose to give you the opinion of one very fallible and erring man, and I don’t set myself up in judgment of others; but I think it’s important for all parties concerned to know what the majority of this society think on a question involving its future. That importance must excuse — if anything can excuse — the apparent want of taste, of humanity, of decency, in proposing the inquiry at a meeting over which the person chiefly concerned would naturally preside, unless he were warned to absent himself. Nobody cares for the contemptible point, the wholly insignificant question, whether allusion to Mr. Gerrish’s variety store was intended or not. What we are all anxious to know is whether he represents any considerable portion of this society in his general attack upon its pastor. I want a vote on that, and I move the previous question.”

No one stopped to inquire whether this was parliamentary or not. Putney sat down, and Colonel Marvin rose to say that if a vote was to be taken, it was only right and just that Mr. Peck should somehow be heard in his own behalf, and half a dozen voices from all parts of the church supported him Mr. Peck, after a moment, said, “I think I have nothing to say;” and he added, “Shall I put the question?”

“Question!” “Question!” came from different quarters.

“It is moved and seconded that the resolution before the meeting be adopted,” said the minister formally. “All those in favour will say ay.” He waited for a distinct space, but there was no response; Mr. Gerrish himself did not vote. The minister proceeded, “Those opposed will say no.”

The word burst forth everywhere, and it was followed by laughter and inarticulate expressions of triumph and mocking. “Order! order!” called the minister gravely, and he announced, “The noes have it.”

The electric light began to suffer another syncope. When it recovered, with the usual fizzing and sputtering, Mr. Peck was on his feet, asking to be relieved from his duties as moderator, so that he might make a statement to the meeting. Colonel Marvin was voted into the chair, but refused formally to take possession of it. He stood up and said, “There is no place where we would rather hear you than in that pulpit, Mr. Peck.”

“I thank you,” said the minister, making himself heard through the approving murmur; “but I stand in this place only to ask to be allowed to leave it. The friendly feeling which has been expressed toward me in the vote upon the resolution you have just rejected is all that reconciles me to its defeat. Its adoption might have spared me a duty which I find painful. But perhaps it is best that I should discharge it. As to the sermon which called forth that resolution it is only just to say that I intended no personalities in it, and I humbly entreat any one who felt himself aggrieved to believe me.” Every one looked at Gerrish to see how he took this; he must have felt it the part of self-respect not to change countenance. “My desire in that discourse was, as always, to present the truth as I had seen it, and try to make it a help to all. But I am by no means sure that the author of the resolution was wrong in arraigning me before you for neglecting a very vital part of Christianity in my ministrations here. I think with him, that those who have made an open profession of Christ have a claim to the consolation of His promises, and to the support which good men have found in the mysteries of faith; and I ask his patience and that of others who feel that I have not laid sufficient stress upon these. My shortcoming is something that I would not have you overlook in any survey of my ministry among you; and I am not here now to defend that ministry in any point of view. As I look back over it, by the light of the one ineffable ideal, it seems only a record of failure and defeat.” He stopped, and a sympathetic dissent ran through the meeting. “There have been times when I was ready to think that the fault was not in me, but in my office, in the church, in religion. We all have these moments of clouded vision, in which we ourselves loom up in illusory grandeur above the work we have failed to do. But it is in no such error that I stand before you now. Day after day it has been borne in upon me that I had mistaken my work here, and that I ought, if there was any truth in me, to turn from it for reasons which I will give at length should I be spared to preach in this place next Sabbath. I should have willingly acquiesced if our parting had come in the form of my dismissal at your hands. Yet I cannot wholly regret that it has not taken that form, and that in offering my resignation, as I shall formally do to those empowered by the rules of our society to receive it, I can make it a means of restoring concord among you. It would be affectation in me to pretend that I did not know of the dissension which has had my ministry for its object if not its cause; and I earnestly hope that with my withdrawal that dissension may cease, and that this church may become a symbol before the world of the peace of Christ. I conjure such of my friends as have been active in my behalf to unite with their brethren in a cause which can alone merit their devotion. Above all things I beseech you to be at peace one with another. Forbear, forgive, submit, remembering that strife for the better part can only make it the worse, and that for Christians there can be no rivalry but in concession and self-sacrifice.”

Colonel Marvin forgot his office and all parliamentary proprieties in the tide of emotion that swept over the meeting when the minister sat down. “I am glad,” he said, “that no sort of action need be taken now upon Mr. Peck’s proposed resignation, which I for one cannot believe this society will ever agree to accept.”

Others echoed his sentiment; they spoke out, sitting and standing, and addressed themselves to no one, till Putney moved an adjournment, which Colonel Marvin sufficiently recollected himself to put to a vote, and declare carried.

Annie walked home with the Putneys and Dr. Morrell. She was aware of something unwholesome in the excitement which ran so wholly in Mr. Peck’s favour, but abandoned herself to it with feverish helplessness.

“Ah-h-h!” cried Putney, when they were free of the crowd which pressed upon him with questions and conjectures and comments. “What a slump! — what a slump! That blessed, short-legged little seraph has spoilt the best sport that ever was. Why, he’s sent that fool of a Gerrish home with the conviction that he was right in the part of his attack that was the most vilely hypocritical, and he’s given that heartless scoundrel the pleasure of feeling like an honest man. I should like to rap Mr. Peck’s head up against the back of his pulpit, and I should like to knock the skulls of Colonel Marvin and Mr. Wilmington together and see which was the thickest. Why, I had Gerrish fairly by the throat at last, and I was just reaching for the balm of Gilead with my other hand to give him a dose that would have done him for one while! Ah, it’s too bad, too bad! Well! well! But — haw! haw! haw! — didn’t Gerrish tangle himself up beautifully in his rhetoric? I guess we shall fix Brother Gerrish yet, and I don’t think we shall let Brother Peck off without a tussle. I’m going to try print on Brother Gerrish. I’m going to ask him in the Hatboro’ Register — he doesn’t advertise, and the editor’s as independent as a lion where a man don’t advertise—”

“Indeed he’s not going to do anything of the kind, Annie,” said Mrs. Putney. “I shall not let him. I shall make him drop the whole affair now, and let it die out, and let us be at peace again, as Mr. Peck says.”

“There seemed to be a good deal of sense in that part of it,” said Dr. Morrell. “I don’t know but he was right to propose himself as a peace-offering; perhaps there’s no other way out.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Putney, “whether he goes or stays, I think we owe him that much. Don’t you, Annie?”

“Oh yes!” sighed Annie, from the exaltation to which the events of the evening had borne her. “And we mustn’t let him go. It would be a loss that every one would feel; that—”

“I’m tired of this fighting,” Mrs. Putney broke in, “and I think it’s ruining Ralph every way. He hasn’t slept the last two nights, and he’s been all in a quiver for the last fortnight. For my part I don’t care what happens now, I’m not going to have Ralph mixed up in it any more. I think we ought all to forgive and forget. I’m willing to overlook everything, and I believe others are the same.”

“You’d better ask Mrs. Gerrish the next time she calls,” Putney interposed.

Mrs. Putney stopped, and took her hand from her husband’s arm. “Well, after what Mr. Gerrish said to-night about you, I don’t think Emmeline had better call very soon!”

“Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha!” shrieked Putney, and his laugh flapped back at them in derisive echo from the house-front they were passing. “I guess Brother Peck had better stay and help fight it out. It won’t be all brotherly love after he goes — or sisterly either.”

XXVI.

Annie knew from the light in the kitchen window that Mrs. Bolton, who had not gone to the meeting, was there, and she inferred from the silence of the house that Bolton had not yet come home. She went up to her room, and after a glance at Idella asleep in her crib, she began to lay off her things. Then she sat down provisionally by the open window, and looked out into the still autumnal night. The air was soft and humid, with a scent of smoke in it from remote forest fires. The village lights showed themselves dimmed by the haze that thickened the moonless dark.

She heard steps on the gravel of the lane, and then two men talking, one of whom she knew to be Bolton. In a little while the back entry door was opened and shut, and after a brief murmur of voices in the library Mrs. Bolton knocked on the door-jamb of the room where Annie sat.

“What is it, Mrs. Bolton?”

“You in bed yet?”

“No; I’m here by the window. What is it?”

“Well, I don’t know but what you’ll think it’s pretty late for callers, but Mr. Peck is down in the library. I guess he wants to speak with you about Idella. I told him he better see you.”

“I will come right down.”

She followed Mrs. Bolton to the foot of the stairs, where she kept on to the kitchen, while Annie turned into the library. Mr. Peck stood beside her father’s desk, resting one hand on it and holding his hat in the other.

“Won’t you be seated, Mr. Peck?”

“I thank you. It’s only for a moment. I am going away to-morrow, and I wish to speak with you about Idella.”

“Yes, certainly. But surely you are not going to leave Hatboro’, Mr. Peck! I hoped — we all did — that after what you had seen of the strong feeling in your favour to-night you would reconsider your determination and stay with us!” She went on impetuously. “You must know — you must understand now — how much good you can do here — more than any one else — more than you could do anywhere else. I don’t believe that you realise how much depends upon your staying here. You can’t stop the dissensions by going away; it will only make them worse. You saw how Colonel Marvin and Mr. Wilmington were with you; and Mr. Gates — all classes. I oughtn’t to speak — to attempt to teach you your duty; I’m not of your church; and I can only tell you how it seems to me: that you never can find another place where your principles — your views—”

He waited for her to go on; but she really had nothing more to say, and he began: “I am not hoping for another charge elsewhere, at least not for the present; but I am satisfied that my usefulness here is at an end, and I do not think that my going away will make matters worse. Whether I go or stay, the dissensions will continue. At any rate, I believe that there are those who need help more, and whom I can help more, in another field—”

“Yes,” she broke in, with a woman’s relevancy to the immediate point, “there is nothing to do here.”

He went on as if she had not spoken: “I am going to Fall River to-morrow, where I have heard that there is work for me—”

“In the mills!” she exclaimed, recurring in thought to what he had once said of his work in them. “Surely you don’t mean that!” The sight, the smell, the tumult of the work she had seen that day in the mill with Lyra came upon her with all their offence. “To throw away all that you have learnt, all that you have become to others!”

“I am less and less confident that I have become anything useful to others in turning aside from the life of toil and presuming to attempt the guidance of those who remained in it. But I don’t mean work in the mills,” he continued, “or not at first, or not unless it seems necessary to my work with those who work in them. I have a plan — or if it hardly deserves that name, a design — of being useful to them in such ways as my own experience of their life in the past shall show me in the light of what I shall see among them now. I needn’t trouble you with it.”

“Oh yes!” she interposed.

“I do not expect to preach at once, but only to teach in one of the public schools, where I have heard of a vacancy, and — and — perhaps otherwise. With those whose lives are made up of hard work there must be room for willing and peaceful service. And if it should be necessary that I should work in the mills in order to render this, then I will do so; but at present I have another way in view — a social way that shall bring me into immediate relations with the people.” She still tried to argue with him, to prove him wrong in going away, but they both ended where they began. He would not or could not explain himself further. At last he said: “But I did not come to urge this matter. I have no wish to impose my will, my theory, upon any one, even my own child.”

“Oh yes — Idella!” Annie broke in anxiously. “You will leave her with me, Mr. Peck, won’t you? You don’t know how much I’m attached to her. I see her faults, and I shall not spoil her. Leave her with me at least till you see your way clear to having her with you, and then I will send her to you.”

A trouble showed itself in his face, ordinarily so impassive, and he seemed at a loss how to answer her; but he said: “I — appreciate your kindness to her, but I shall not ask you to be at the inconvenience longer than till to-morrow. I have arranged with another to take her until I am settled, and then bring her to me.”

Annie sat intensely searching his face, with her lips parted to speak. “Another!” she said, and the wounded feeling, the resentment of his insensibility to her good-will, that mingled in her heart, must have made itself felt in her voice, for he went on reluctantly —

“It is a family in which she will be brought up to work and to be helpful to herself. They will join me with her. You know the mother — she has lost her own child — Mrs. Savor.”

At the name, Annie’s spirit fell; the tears started from her eyes. “Yes, she must have her. It is just — it is the only expiation. Don’t you remember that it was I who sent Mrs. Savor’s baby to the sea-shore, where it died?”

“No; I had forgotten,” said the minister, aghast. “I am sorry—”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Annie lifelessly; “it had to be.” After a pause, she asked quietly, “If Mrs. Savor is going to work in the mills, how can she make a home for the child?”

“She is not going into the mills,” he answered. “She will keep house for us all, and we hope to have others who are without homes of their own join us in paying the expenses and doing the work, so that all may share its comfort without gain to any one upon their necessity of food and shelter.”

She did not heed his explanation, but suddenly entreated: “Let me go with you. I will not be a trouble to you, and I will help as well as I can. I can’t give the child up! Why — why” — the thought, crazy as it would have once seemed, was now such a happy solution of the trouble that she smiled hopefully— “why shouldn’t I go with Mr. and Mrs. Savor, and help to make a home for Idella there? You will need money to begin your work; I will give you mine. I will give it up — I will give it all up. I will give it to any good object that you approve; or you may have it, to do what you think best with; and I will go with Idella and I will work in the mills there — or anything.”

He shook his head, and for the first time in their acquaintance he seemed to feel compassion for her. “It isn’t possible. I couldn’t take your money; I shouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“You know what to do with your own,” she broke in. “You do good with that!”

“I’m afraid I do harm with it too,” he returned. “It’s only a little, but little as it has been, I can no longer meet the responsibility it brings.”

“But if you took my money,” she urged, “you could devote your life to preaching the truth, to writing and publishing books, and all that; and so could others: don’t you see?”

He shook his head. “Perhaps others; but I have done with preaching for the present. Later I may have something to say. Now I feel sure of nothing, not even of what I’ve been saying here.”

“Will you send for Idella? When she goes with the Savors I will come too!”

He looked at her sorrowfully. “I think you are a good woman, and you mean what you say. But I am sorry you say it, if any words of mine have caused you to say it, for I know you cannot do it. Even for me it is hard to go back to those associations, and for you they would be impossible.”

“You will see,” she returned, with exaltation. “I will take Idella to the Savors’ to-morrow — or no; I’ll have them come here!”

He stood looking at her in perplexity. At last he asked, “Could I see the child?”

“Certainly!” said Annie, with the lofty passion that possessed her, and she led him up into the chamber where Idella lay sleeping in Annie’s own crib.

He stood beside it, gazing long at the little one, from whose eyes he shaded the lamp. Then he said, “I thank you,” and turned away.

She followed him down-stairs, and at the door she said: “You think I will not come; but I will come. Don’t you believe that?”

He turned sadly from her. “You might come, but you couldn’t stay. You don’t know what it is; you can’t imagine it, and you couldn’t bear it.”

“I will come, and I will stay,” she answered; and when he was gone she fell into one of those intense reveries of hers — a rapture in which she prefigured what should happen in that new life before her. At its end Mr. Peck stood beside her grave, reading the lesson of her work to the multitude of grateful and loving poor who thronged to pay the last tribute to her memory. Putney was there with his wife, and Lyra regretful of her lightness, and Mrs. Munger repentant of her mendacities. They talked together in awe-stricken murmurs of the noble career just ended. She heard their voices, and then she began to ask herself what they would really say of her proposing to go to Fall River with the Savors and be a mill-hand.

XXVII.

Annie did not sleep. After lying a long time awake she took some of the tonic that Dr. Morrell had left her, upon the chance that it might quiet her; but it did no good. She dressed herself, and sat by the window till morning.

The breaking day showed her purposes grotesque and monstrous. The revulsion that must come, came with a tide that swept before it all prepossessions, all affections. It seemed as if the child, still asleep in her crib, had heard what she said, and would help to hold her to her word.

She choked down a crust of bread with the coffee she drank at breakfast, and instead of romping with Idella at her bath, she dressed the little one silently, and sent her out to Mrs. Bolton. Then she sat down again in the sort of daze in which she had spent the night, and as the day passed, her revolt from what she had pledged herself to do mounted and mounted. It was like the sort of woman she was, not to think of any withdrawal from her pledges; they were all the more sacred with her because they had been purely voluntary, insistent; the fact that they had been refused made them the more obligatory.

She thought some one would come to break in upon the heavy monotony of the time; she expected Ralph or Ellen, or at least Lyra; but she only saw Mrs. Bolton, and heard her about her work. Sometimes the child stole back from the kitchen or the barn, and peeped in upon her with a roguish expectance which her gloomy stare defeated, and then it ran off again.

She lay down in the afternoon and tried to sleep; but her brain was inexorably alert, and she lay making inventory of all the pleasant things she was to leave for that ugly fate she had insisted on. A swarm of fancies gave every detail of the parting dramatic intensity. Amidst the poignancy of her regrets, her shame for her recreancy was sharper still.

By night she could bear it no longer. It was Dr. Morrell’s custom to come nearly every night; but she was afraid, because he had walked home with her from the meeting the night before, he might not come now, and she sent for him. It was in quality of medicine-man, as well as physician, that she wished to see him; she meant to tell him all that had passed with Mr. Peck; and this was perfectly easy in the interview she forecast; but at the sound of his buggy wheels in the lane a thought came that seemed to forbid her even to speak of Mr. Peck to him. For the first time it occurred to her that the minister might have inferred a meaning from her eagerness and persistence infinitely more preposterous than even the preposterous letter of her words. A number of little proofs of the conjecture flashed upon her: his anxiety to get away from her, his refusal to let her believe in her own constancy of purpose, his moments of bewilderment and dismay. It needed nothing but this to add the touch of intolerable absurdity to the horror of the whole affair, and to snatch the last hope of help from her.

She let Mrs. Bolton go to the door, and she did not rise to meet the doctor; she saw from his smile that he knew he had a moral rather than a physical trouble to deal with, but she did not relax the severity of her glare in sympathy, as she was tempted from some infinite remoteness to do.

When he said, “You’re not well,” she whispered solemnly back, “Not at all.”

He did not pursue his inquiry into her condition, but said, with an irrelevant cheerfulness that piqued her, “I was coming here this evening at any rate, and I got your message on the way up from my office.”

“You are very kind,” she said, a little more audibly.

“I wanted to tell you,” he went on, “of what a time Putney and I have had to-day working up public sentiment for Mr. Peck, so as to keep him here.”

Annie did not change her position, but the expression of her glance changed.

“We’ve been round in the enemy’s camp, everywhere; and I’ve committed Gerrish himself to an armed neutrality. That wasn’t difficult. The difficulty was in another quarter — with Mr. Peck himself. He’s more opposed than any one else to his stay in Hatboro’. You know he intended going away this morning?”

“Did he?” Annie asked dishonestly. The question obliged her to say something.

“Yes. He came to Putney before breakfast to thank him and take leave of him, and to tell him of the plan he had for — Imagine what!”

“I don’t know,” said Annie, hoarsely, after an effort, as if the untruth would not come easily. “I am worse than Mrs. Munger,” she thought.

“For going to Fall River to teach school among the mill-hands’ children! And to open a night-school for the hands themselves.”

The doctor waited for her sensation, and in its absence he looked so disappointed that she was forced to say, “To teach school?”

Then he went on briskly again. “Yes. Putney laboured with him on his knees, so to speak, and got him to postpone his going till to-morrow morning; and then he came to me for help. We enlisted Mrs. Wilmington in the cause, and we’ve spent the day working up the Peck sentiment to a fever-heat. It’s been a very queer campaign; three Gentiles toiling for a saint against the elect, and bringing them all over at last. We’ve got a paper, signed by a large majority of the members of the church — the church, not the society — asking Mr. Peck to remain; and Putney’s gone to him with the paper, and he’s coming round here to report Mr. Peck’s decision. We all agreed that it wouldn’t do to say anything about his plan for the future, and I fancy some of his people signed our petition under the impression that they were keeping a valuable man out of another pulpit.”

Annie accompanied the doctor’s words, which she took in to the last syllable, with a symphony of conjecture as to how the change in Mr. Peck’s plans, if they prevailed with him, would affect her, and the doctor had not ceased to speak before she perceived that it would be deliverance perfect and complete, however inglorious. But the tacit drama so vividly preoccupied her with its minor questions of how to descend to this escape with dignity that still she did not speak, and he took up the word again.

“I confess I’ve had my misgivings about Mr. Peck, and about his final usefulness in a community like this. In spite of all that Putney can say of his hard-headedness, I’m afraid that he’s a good deal of a dreamer. But I gave way to Putney, and I hope you’ll appreciate what I’ve done for your favourite.”

“You are very good,” she said, in mechanical acknowledgment: her mind was set so strenuously to break from her dishonest reticence that she did not know really what she was saying. “Why — why do you call him a dreamer?” She cast about in that direction at random.

“Why? Well, for one thing, the reason he gave Putney for giving up his luxuries here: that as long as there was hardship and overwork for underpay in the world, he must share them. It seems to me that I might as well say that as long as there were dyspepsia and rheumatism in the world, I must share them. Then he has a queer notion that he can go back and find instruction in the working-men — that they alone have the light and the truth, and know the meaning of life. I don’t say anything against them. My observation and my experience is that if others were as good as they are in the ratio of their advantages, Mr. Peck needn’t go to them for his ideal. But their conditions warp and dull them; they see things askew, and they don’t see them clearly. I might as well expose myself to the small-pox in hopes of treating my fellow-sufferers more intelligently.”

She could not perceive where his analogies rang false; they only overwhelmed her with a deeper sense of her own folly.

“But I don’t know,” he went on, “that a dreamer is such a desperate character, if you can only keep him from trying to realise his dreams; and if Mr. Peck consents to stay in Hatboro’, perhaps we can manage it.” He drew his chair a little toward the lounge where she reclined, and asked, with the kindliness that was both personal and professional, “What seems to be the matter?”

She started up. “There is nothing — nothing that medicine can help. Why do you call him my favourite?” she demanded violently. “But you have wasted your time. If he had made up his mind to what you say, he would never give it up — never in the world!” she added hysterically. “If you’ve interfered between any one and his duty in this world, where it seems as if hardly any one had any duty, you’ve done a very unwarrantable thing.” She was aware from his stare that her words were incoherent, if not from the words themselves, but she hurried on: “I am going with him. He was here last night, and I told him I would. I will go with the Savors, and we will keep the child together; and if they will take me, I shall go to work in the mills; and I shall not care what people think, if it’s right—”

She stopped and weakly dropped back on the lounge, and hid her face in the pillow.

“I really don’t understand.” The doctor began, with a physician’s carefulness, to unwind the coil she had flung down to him. “Are the Savors going, and the child?”

“He will give her the child for the one they lost — you know how! And they will take it with them.”

“But you — what have you—”

“I must have the child too! I can’t give it up, and I shall go with them. There’s no other way. You don’t know. I’ve given him my word, and there is no hope!”

“He asked you,” said the doctor, to make sure he had heard aright— “he asked you — advised you — to go to work in a cotton-mill?”

“No;” she lifted her face to confront him. “He told me not to go; but I said I would.”

They sat staring at each other in a silence which neither of them broke, and which promised to last indefinitely. They were still in their daze when Putney’s voice came through the open hall door.

“Hello! hello! hello! Hello, Central! Can’t I make you hear, any one?” His steps advanced into the hall, and he put his head in at the library doorway. “Thought you’d be here,” he said, nodding at the doctor. “Well, doctor, Brother Peck’s beaten us again. He’s going.”

“Going?” the doctor echoed.

“Yes. It’s no use. I put the whole case before him, and I argued it with a force of logic that would have fetched the twelfth man with eleven stubborn fellows against him on a jury; but it didn’t fetch Brother Peck. He was very appreciative and grateful, but he believes he’s got a call to give up the ministry, for the present at least. Well, there’s some consolation in supposing he may know best, after all. It seemed to us that he had a great opportunity in Hatboro’, but if he turns his back on it, perhaps it’s a sign he wasn’t equal to it. The doctor told you what we’ve been up to, Annie?”

“Yes,” she answered faintly, from the depths of the labyrinth in which she was plunged again.

“I’m sorry for your news about him,” said the doctor. “I hoped he was going to stay. It’s always a pity when such a man lets his sympathies use him instead of using them. But we must always judge that kind of crank leniently, if he doesn’t involve other people in his erase.”

She knew that he was shielding and trying to spare her, and she felt inexpressibly degraded by the terms of his forbearance. She could not accept, and she had not the strength to refuse it; and Putney said: “I’ve not seen anything to make me doubt his sanity; but I must say the present racket shakes my faith in his common-sense, and I rather held by that, you know. But I suppose no man, except the kind of a man that a woman would be if she were a man — excuse me, Annie — is ever absolutely right. I suppose the truth is a constitutional thing, and you can’t separate it from the personal consciousness, and so you get it coloured and heated by personality when you get it fresh. That is, we can see what the absolute truth was, but never what it is.”

Putney amused himself in speculating on these lines with more or less reference to Mr. Peck, and did not notice that the doctor and Annie gave him only a silent assent. “As to misleading any one else, Mr. Peck’s following in his new religion seems to be confined to the Savors, as I understand. They are going with him to help him set up a sort of cooperative boarding-house. Well, I don’t know where we shall get a hotter gospeller than Brother Peck. Poor old fellow! I hope he’ll get along better in Fall River. It is something to be out of reach of Gerrish.”

The doctor asked, “When is he going?”

“Why, he’s gone by this time, I suppose,” said Putney. “I tried to get him to think about it overnight, but he wouldn’t. He’s anxious to go and get back, so as to preach his last sermon here Sunday, and he’s taken the 9.10, if he hasn’t changed his mind.” Putney looked at his watch.

“Let’s hope he hasn’t,” said Dr. Morrell.

“Which?” asked Putney.

“Changed his mind. I’m sorry he’s coming back.”

Annie knew that he was talking at her, though he spoke to Putney; but she was powerless to protest.

XXVIII.

They went away together, leaving her to her despair, which had passed into a sort of torpor by the following night, when Dr. Morrell came again, out of what she knew must be mere humanity; he could not respect her any longer. He told her, as if for her comfort, that Putney had gone to the depot to meet Mr. Peck, who was expected back in the eight-o’clock train, and was to labour with him all night long if necessary to get him to change, or at least postpone, his purpose. The feeling in his favour was growing. Putney hoped to put it so strongly to him as a proof of duty that he could not resist it.

Annie listened comfortlessly. Whatever happened, nothing could take away the shame of her weakness now. She even wished, feebly, vaguely, that she might be forced to keep her word.

A sound of running on the gravel-walk outside and a sharp pull at the door-bell seemed to jerk them both to their feet.

Some one stepped into the hall panting, and the face of William Savor showed itself at the door of the room where they stood. “Doc — Doctor Morrell, come — come quick! There’s been an accident — at — the depot. Mr. — Peck—” He panted out the story, and Annie saw rather than heard how the minister tried to cross the track from his train, where it had halted short of the station, and the flying express from the other quarter caught him from his feet, and dropped the bleeding fragment that still held his life beside the rail a hundred yards away, and then kept on in brute ignorance into the night.

“Where is he? Where have you got him?” the doctor demanded of Savor.

“At my house.”

The doctor ran out of the house, and she heard his buggy whirl away, followed by the fainter sound of Savor’s feet as he followed running, after he had stopped to repeat his story to the Boltons. Annie turned to the farmer. “Mr. Bolton, get the carry-all. I must go.”

“And me too,” said his wife.

“Why, no, Pauliny; I guess you better stay. I guess it’ll come out all right in the end,” Bolton began. “I guess William has exaggerated some may be. Anyrate, who’s goin’ to look after the little girl if you come?”

“I am,” Mrs. Bolton snapped back. “She’s goin’ with me.”

“Of course she is. Be quick, Mr. Bolton!” Annie called from the stairs, which she had already mounted half-way.

She caught up the child, limp with sleep, from its crib, and began to dress it. Idella cried, and fought away the hands that tormented her, and made herself now very stiff and now very lax; but Annie and Mrs. Bolton together prevailed against her, and she was dressed, and had fallen asleep again in her clothes while the women were putting on their hats and sacks, and Bolton was driving up to the door with the carry-all.

“Why, I can see,” he said, when he got out to help them in, “just how William’s got his idee about it. His wife’s an excitable kind of a woman, and she’s sent him off lickety-split after the doctor without looking to see what the matter was. There hain’t never been anybody hurt at our depot, and it don’t stand to reason—”

“Oliver Bolton, will you hush that noise?” shrieked his wife. “If the world was burnin’ up you’d say it was nothing but a chimbley on fire som’er’s.”

“Well, well, Pauliny, have it your own way, have it your own way,” said Bolton. “I ain’t sayin’ but what there’s somethin’ in William’s story; but you’ll see’t he’s exaggerated. Git up!”

“Well, do hurry, and do be still!” said his wife.

“Yes, yes. It’s all right, Pauliny; all right. Soon’s I’m out the lane, you’ll see’t I’ll drive fast enough.”

Mrs. Bolton kept a grim silence, against which her husband’s babble of optimism played like heat-lightning on a night sky.

Idella woke with the rush of cold air, and in the dark and strangeness began to cry, and wailed heart-breakingly between her fits of louder sobbing, and then fell asleep again before they reached the house where her father lay dying.

They had put him in the best bed in Mrs. Savor’s little guest-room, and when Annie entered, the minister was apologising to her for spoiling it.

“Now don’t you say one word, Mr. Peck,” she answered him. “It’s all right. I ruthah see you layin’ there just’s you be than plenty of folks that—” She stopped for want of an apt comparison, and at sight of Annie she said, as if he were a child whose mind was wandering: “Well, I declare, if here ain’t Miss Kilburn come to see you, Mr. Peck! And Mis’ Bolton! Well, the land!”

Mrs. Savor came and shook hands with them, and in her character of hostess urged them forward from the door, where they had halted. “Want to see Mr. Peck? Well, he’s real comf’table now; ain’t he, Dr. Morrell? We got him all fixed up nicely, and he ain’t in a bit o’ pain. It’s his spine that’s hurt, so’t he don’t feel nothin’; but he’s just as clear in his mind as what you or I be. Ain’t he, doctor?”

“He’s not suffering,” said Dr. Morrell, to whom Annie’s eye wandered from Mrs. Savor, and there was something in his manner that made her think the minister was not badly hurt. She went forward with Mr. and Mrs. Bolton, and after they had both taken the limp hand that lay outside the covering, she touched it too. It returned no pressure, but his large, wan eyes looked at her with such gentle dignity and intelligence that she began to frame in her mind an excuse for what seemed almost an intrusion.

“We were afraid you were hurt badly, and we thought — we thought you might like to see Idella — and so — we came. She is in the next room.”

“Thank you,” said the minister. “I presume that I am dying; the doctor tells me that I have but a few hours to live.”

Mrs. Savor protested, “Oh, I guess you ain’t a-goin’ to die this time, Mr. Peck.” Annie looked from Dr. Morrell to Putney, who stood with him on the other side of the bed, and experienced a shock from their gravity without yet being able to accept the fact it implied. “There’s plenty of folks,” continued Mrs. Savor, “hurt worse’n what you be that’s alive to-day and as well as ever they was.”

Bolton seized his chance. “It’s just what I said to Pauliny, comin’ along. ‘You’ll see,’ said I, ‘Mr. Peck’ll be out as spry as any of us before a great while.’ That’s the way I felt about it from the start.”

“All you got to do is to keep up courage,” said Mrs. Savor.

“That’s so; that’s half the battle,” said Bolton.

There were numbers of people in the room and at the door of the next. Annie saw Colonel Marvin and Jack Wilmington. She heard afterward that he was going to take the same train to Boston with Mr. Peck, and had helped to bring him to the Savors’ house. The stationmaster was there, and some other railroad employes.

The doctor leaned across the bed and lifted slightly the arm that lay there, taking the wrist between his thumb and finger. “I think we had better let Mr. Peck rest a while,” he said to the company generally, “We’re doing him no good.”

The people began to go; some of them said, “Well, good night!” as if they would meet again in the morning. They all made the pretence that it was a slight matter, and treated the wounded man as if he were a child. He did not humour the pretence, but said “Good-bye” in return for their “Good night” with a quiet patience.

Mrs. Savor hastened after her retreating guests. “I ain’t a-goin’ to let you go without a sup of coffee,” she said. “I want you should all stay and git some, and I don’t believe but what a little of it would do Mr. Peck good.”

The surface of her lugubrious nature was broken up, and whatever was kindly and cheerful in its depths floated to the top; she was almost gay in the demand which the calamity made upon her. Annie knew that she must have seen and helped to soothe the horror of mutilation which she could not even let her fancy figure, and she followed her foolish bustle and chatter with respectful awe.

“Rebecca’ll have it right off the stove in half a minute now,” Mrs. Savor concluded; and from a further room came the cheerful click of cups, and then a wandering whiff of the coffee; life in its vulgar kindliness touched and made friends with death, claiming it a part of nature too.

The night at Mrs. Munger’s came back to Annie from the immeasurable remoteness into which all the past had lapsed. She looked up at Dr. Morrell across the bed.

“Would you like to speak with Mr. Peck?” he asked officially. “Better do it now,” he said, with one of his short nods.

Putney came and set her a chair. She would have liked to fall on her knees beside the bed; but she took the chair, and drew the minister’s hand into hers, stretching her arm above his head on the pillow. He lay like some poor little wounded boy, like Putney’s Winthrop; the mother that is in every woman’s heart gushed out of hers in pity upon him, mixed with filial reverence. She had thought that she should confess her baseness to him, and ask his forgiveness, and offer to fulfil with the people he had chosen for the guardians of his child that interrupted purpose of his. But in the presence of death, so august, so simple, all the concerns of life seemed trivial, and she found herself without words. She sobbed over the poor hand she held. He turned his eyes upon her and tried to speak, but his lips only let out a moaning, shuddering sound, inarticulate of all that she hoped or feared he might prophesy to shape her future.

Life alone has any message for life, but from the beginning of time it has put its ear to the cold lips that must for ever remain dumb.

XXIX.

The evening after the funeral Annie took Idella, with the child’s clothes and toys in a bundle, and Bolton drove them down Over the Track to the Savors’. She had thought it all out, and she perceived that whatever the minister’s final intention might have been, she was bound by the purpose he had expressed to her, and must give up the child. For fear she might be acting from the false conscientiousness of which she was beginning to have some notion in herself, she put the case to Mrs. Bolton. She knew what she must do in any event, but it was a comfort to be stayed so firmly in her duty by Mrs. Bolton, who did not spare some doubts of Mrs. Savor’s fitness for the charge, and reflected a subdued censure even upon the judgment of Mr. Peck himself, as she bustled about and helped Annie get Idella and her belongings ready. The child watched the preparations with suspicion. At the end, when she was dressed, and Annie tried to lift her into the carriage, she broke out in sudden rebellion; she cried, she shrieked, she fought; the two good women who were obeying the dead minister’s behest were obliged to descend to the foolish lies of the nursery; they told her she was going on a visit to the Savors, who would take her on the cars with them, and then bring her back to Aunt Annie’s house. Before they could reconcile her to this fabled prospect they had to give it verisimilitude by taking off her everyday clothes and putting on her best dress.

She did not like Mrs. Savor’s house when she came to it, nor Mrs. Savor, who stopped, all blowzed and work-deranged from trying to put it in order after the death in it, and gave Idella a motherly welcome. Annie fancied a certain surprise in her manner, and her own ideal of duty was put to proof by Mrs. Savor’s owning that she had not expected Annie to bring Idella to her right away.

“If I had not done it at once, I never could have done it,” Annie explained.

“Well, I presume it’s a cross,” said Mrs. Savor, “and I don’t feel right to take her. If it wa’n’t for what her father—”

“‘Sh!” Annie said, with a significant glance.

“It’s an ugly house!” screamed the child. “I want to go back to my Aunt Annie’s house. I want to go on the cars.”

“Yes, yes,” answered Mrs. Savor, blindly groping to share in whatever cheat had been practised on the child, “just as soon as the cars starts. Here, William, you take her out and show her the pretty coop you be’n makin’ the pigeons, to keep the cats out.”

They got rid of her with Savor’s connivance for the moment, and Annie hastened to escape.

“We had to tell her she was going a journey, or we never could have got her into the carriage,” she explained, feeling like a thief.

“Yes, yes. It’s all right,” said Mrs. Savor. “I see you’d be’n putting up some kind of job on her the minute she mentioned the cars. Don’t you fret any, Miss Kilburn. Rebecca and me’ll get along with her, you needn’t be afraid.”

Annie could not look at the empty crib where it stood in its alcove when she went to bed; and she cried upon her own pillow with heart-sickness for the child, and with a humiliating doubt of her own part in hurrying to give it up without thought of Mrs. Savor’s convenience. What had seemed so noble, so exemplary, began to wear another colour; and she drowsed, worn out at last by the swarming fears, shames, and despairs, which resolved themselves into a fantastic medley of dream images. There was a cat trying to get at the pigeons in the coop which Mr. Savor had carried Idella to see. It clawed and miauled at the lattice-work of lath, and its caterwauling became like the cry of a child, so like that it woke Annie from her sleep, and still kept on. She lay shuddering a moment; it seemed as if the dead minister’s ghost flitted from the room, while the crying defined and located itself more and more, till she knew it a child’s wail at the door of her house. Then she heard, “Aunt Annie! Aunt Annie!” and soft, faint thumps as of a little fist upon the door panels.

She had no experience of more than one motion from her bed to the door, which the same impulse flung open and let her crush to her breast the little tumult of sobs and moans from the threshold.

“Oh, wicked, selfish, heartless wretch!” she stormed out over the child. “But now I will never, never, never give you up! Oh, my poor little baby! my darling! God has sent you back to me, and I will keep you, I don’t care what happens! What a cruel wretch I have been — oh, what a cruel wretch, my pretty! — to tear you from your home! But now you shall never leave it; no one shall take you away.” She gripped it in a succession of fierce hugs, and mumbled it — face and neck, and little cold wet hands and feet — with her kisses; and all the time she did not know the child was in its night-dress like herself, or that her own feet were bare, and her drapery as scanty as Idella’s.

A sense of the fact evanescently gleamed upon her with the appearance of Mrs. Bolton, lamp in hand, and the instantaneous appearance and disappearance of her husband at the back door through which she emerged. The two women spent the first moments of the lamp-light in making certain that Idella was sound and whole in every part, and then in making uncertain for ever how she came to be there. Whether she had wandered out in her sleep, and found her way home with dream-led feet, or whether she had watched till the house was quiet, and then stolen away, was what she could not tell them, and must always remain a mystery.

“I don’t believe but what Mr. Bolton had better go and wake up the Savors. You got to keep her for the night, I presume, but they’d ought to know where she is, and you can take her over there agin, come daylight.”

“Mrs. Bolton!” shouted Annie, in a voice so deep and hoarse that it shook the heart of a woman who had never known fear of man. “If you say such a thing to me — if you ever say such a thing again — I — I — I will hit you! Send Mr. Bolton for Idella’s things — right away!”

“Land!” said Mrs. Savor, when Bolton, after a long conciliatory preamble, explained that he did not believe Miss Kilburn felt a great deal like giving the child up again. “I don’t want it without it’s satisfied to stay. I see last night it was just breakin’ its heart for her, and I told William when we first missed her this mornin’, and he was in such a pucker about her, I bet anything he was a mind to that the child had gone back to Miss Kilburn’s. That’s just the words I used; didn’t I, Rebecca? I couldn’t stand it to have no child grievin’ around.”

Beyond this sentimental reluctance, Mrs. Savor later confessed to Annie herself that she was really accepting the charge of Idella in the same spirit of self-sacrifice as that in which Annie was surrendering it, and that she felt, when Mr. Peck first suggested it, that the child was better off with Miss Kilburn; only she hated to say so. Her husband seemed to think it would make up to her for the one they lost, but nothing could really do that.

XXX.

In a reverie of rare vividness following her recovery of the minister’s child, Annie Kilburn dramatised an escape from all the failures and humiliations of her life in Hatboro’. She took Idella with her and went back to Rome, accomplishing the whole affair so smoothly and rapidly that she wondered at herself for not having thought of such a simple solution of her difficulties before. She even began to put some little things together for her flight, while she explained to old friends in the American colony that Idella was the orphan child of a country minister, which she had adopted. That old lady who had found her motives in returning to Hatboro’ insufficient questioned her sharply why she had adopted the minister’s child, and did not find her answers satisfactory. They were such as also failed to pacify inquiry in Hatboro’, where Annie remained, in spite of her reverie; but people accepted the fact, and accounted for it in their own way, and approved it, even though they could not quite approve her.

The dramatic impressiveness of the minister’s death won him undisputed favour, yet it failed to establish unity in his society. Supply after supply filled his pulpit, but the people found them all unsatisfactory when they remembered his preaching, and could not make up their minds to any one of them. They were more divided than ever, except upon the point of regretting Mr. Peck. But they distinguished, in honouring his memory. They revered his goodness and his wisdom, but they regarded his conduct of life as unpractical. They said there never was a more inspired teacher, but it was impossible to follow him, and he could not himself have kept the course he had marked out. They said, now that he was beyond recall, no one else could have built up the church in Hatboro’ as he could, if he could only have let impracticable theories alone. Mr. Gerrish called many people to witness that this was what he had always said. He contended that it was the spirit of the gospel which you were to follow. He said that if Mr. Peck had gone to teaching among the mill hands, he would have been sick of it inside of six weeks; but he was a good Christian man, and no one wished less than Mr. Gerrish to reproach him for what was, after all, more an error of the head than the heart. His critics had it their own way in this, for he had not lived to offer that full exposition of his theory and justification of his purpose which he had been expected to give on the Sunday after he was killed; and his death was in no wise exegetic. It said no more to his people than it had said to Annie; it was a mere casualty; and his past life, broken and unfulfilled, with only its intimations and intentions of performance, alone remained.

When people learned, as they could hardly help doing from Mrs. Savor’s volubility, what his plan with regard to Idella had been, they instanced that in proof of the injuriousness of his idealism as applied to real life; and they held that she had been remanded in that strange way to Miss Kilburn’s charge for some purpose which she must not attempt to cross. As the minister had been thwarted in another intent by death, it was a sign that he was wrong in this too, and that she could do better by the child than he had proposed.

This was the sum of popular opinion; and it was further the opinion of Mrs. Gerrish, who gave more attention to the case than many others, that Annie had first taken the child because she hoped to get Mr. Peck, when she found she could not get Dr. Morrell; and that she would have been very glad to be rid of it if she had known how, but that she would have to keep it now for shame’s sake.

For shame’s sake certainly, Annie would have done several other things, and chief of these would have been never to see Dr. Morrell again. She believed that he not only knew the folly she had confessed to him, but that he had divined the cowardice and meanness in which she had repented it, and she felt intolerably disgraced before the thought of him. She had imagined mainly because of him that escape to Rome which never has yet been effected, though it might have been attempted if Idella had not wakened ill from the sleep she sobbed herself into when she found herself safe in Annie’s crib again.

She had taken a heavy cold, and she moped lifelessly about during the day, and drowsed early again in the troubled cough-broken slumber.

“That child ought to have the doctor,” said Mrs. Bolton, with the grim impartiality in which she masked her interference.

“Well,” said Annie helplessly.

At the end of the lung fever which followed, “It was a narrow chance,” said the doctor one morning; “but now I needn’t come any more unless you send for me.”

Annie stood at the door, where he spoke with his hand on the dash-board of his buggy before getting into it.

She answered with one of those impulses that come from something deeper than intention. “I will send for you, then — to tell you how generous you are,” and in the look with which she spoke she uttered the full meaning that her words withheld.

He flushed for pleasure of conscious desert, but he had to laugh and turn it off lightly. “I don’t think I could come for that. But I’ll look in to see Idella unprofessionally.”

He drove away, and she remained at her door looking up at the summer blue sky that held a few soft white clouds, such as might have overhung the same place at the same hour thousands of years before, and such as would lazily drift over it in a thousand years to come. The morning had an immeasurable vastness, through which some crows flying across the pasture above the house sent their voices on the spacious stillness. A perception of the unity of all things under the sun flashed and faded upon her, as such glimpses do. Of her high intentions, nothing had resulted. An inexorable centrifugality had thrown her off at every point where she tried to cling. Nothing of what was established and regulated had desired her intervention; a few accidents and irregularities had alone accepted it. But now she felt that nothing withal had been lost; a magnitude, a serenity, a tolerance, intimated itself in the universal frame of things, where her failure, her recreancy, her folly, seemed for the moment to come into true perspective, and to show venial and unimportant, to be limited to itself, and to be even good in its effect of humbling her to patience with all imperfection and shortcoming, even her own. She was aware of the cessation of a struggle that has never since renewed itself with the old intensity; her wishes, her propensities, ceased in that degree to represent evil in conflict with the portion of good in her; they seemed so mixed and interwoven with the good that they could no longer be antagonised; for the moment they seemed in their way even wiser and better, and ever after to be the nature out of which good as well as evil might come.

As she remained standing there, Mr. Brandreth came round the corner of the house, looking very bright and happy.

“Miss Kilburn,” he said abruptly, “I want you to congratulate me. I’m engaged to Miss Chapley.”

“Are you indeed, Mr. Brandreth? I do congratulate you with all my heart. She is a lovely girl.”

“Yes, it’s all right now,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I’ve come to tell you the first one, because you seemed to take an interest in it when I told you of the trouble about the Juliet. We hadn’t come to any understanding before that, but that seemed to bring us both to the point, and — and we’re engaged. Mother and I are going to New York for the winter; we think she can risk it; and at any rate she won’t be separated from me; and we shall be back in our little home next May. You know that I’m to be with Mr. Chapley in his business?”

“Why, no! This is great news, Mr. Brandreth! I don’t know what to say.”

“You’re very kind,” said the young man, and for the third or fourth time he wrung her hand. “It isn’t a partnership, of course; but he thinks I can be of use to him.”

“I know you can!” Annie adventured.

“We are very busy getting ready — nearly everybody else is gone — and mother sent her kindest regards — you know she don’t make calls — and I just ran up to tell you. Well, good-bye!”

“Good-bye! Give my love to your mother, and to your-to Miss Chapley.”

“I will.” He hurried off, and then came running back. “Oh, I forgot! About the Social Union fund. You know we’ve got about two hundred dollars from the theatricals, but the matter seems to have stopped there, and some of us think there’d better be some other disposition of the money. Have you any suggestion to make?”

“No, none.”

“Then I’ll tell you. It’s proposed to devote the money to beautifying the grounds around the soldiers’ monument. They ought to be fenced and planted with flowers — turned into a little public garden. Everybody appreciates the interest you took in the Union, and we hoped you’d be pleased with that disposition of the money.”

“It is very kind,” said Annie, with a meek submission that must have made him believe she was deeply touched.

“As I’m not to be here this winter,” he continued, “we thought we had better leave the whole matter in your hands, and the money has been deposited in the bank subject to your order. It was Mrs. Munger’s idea. I don’t think she’s ever felt just right about that evening of the dramatics, don’t you know. Good-bye!”

He ran off to escape her thanks for this proof of confidence in her taste and judgment, and he was gone beyond her protest before she emerged from her daze into a full sense of the absurdity of the situation.

“Well, it’s a very simple matter to let the money lie in the bank,” said Dr. Morrell, who came that evening to make his first unprofessional visit, and received with pure amusement the account of the affair, which she gave him with a strong infusion of vexation.

“The way I was involved in this odious Social Union business from the first, and now have it left on my hands in the end, is maddening. Why, I can’t get rid of it!” she replied.

“Then, perhaps,” he comfortably suggested, “it’s a sign you’re not intended to get rid of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why don’t you go on,” he irresponsibly adventured further, “and establish a Social Union?”

“Do you mean it?”

“What was that notion of his” — they usually spoke of the minister pronominally— “about getting the Savors going in a co-operative boarding-house at Fall River? Putney said something about it.”

Annie explained, as she had heard it from him, and from the Savors since his death, the minister’s scheme for a club, in which the members should contribute the labour and the provisions, and should live cheaply and wholesomely under the management of the Savors at first, and afterward should continue them in charge, or not, as they chose. “He seemed to have thought it out very carefully. But I supposed, of course, it was unpractical.”

“Was that why you were going in for it?” asked the doctor; and then he spared her confusion in adding: “I don’t see why it was unpractical. It seems to me a very good notion for a Social Union. Why not try it here? There isn’t the same pressing necessity that there is in a big factory town; but you have the money, and you have the Savors to make a beginning.”

His tone was still half bantering; but it had become more and more serious, so that she could say in earnest: “But the money is one of the drawbacks. It was Mr. Peck’s idea that the working people ought to do it all themselves.”

“Well, I should say that two-thirds of that money in the bank had come from them. They turned out in great force to Mr. Brandreth’s theatricals. And wouldn’t it be rather high-handed to use their money for anything but the Union?”

“You don’t suppose,” said Annie hotly, “that I would spend a cent of it on the grounds of that idiotic monument? I would pay for having it blown up with dynamite! No, I can’t have anything more to do with the wretched affair. My touch is fatal.” The doctor laughed, and she added: “Besides, I believe most heartily with Mr. Peck that no person of means and leisure can meet working people except in the odious character of a patron, and if I didn’t respect them, I respect myself too much for that. If I were ready to go in with them and start the Social Union on his basis, by helping do house-work — scullion-work — for it, and eating and living with them, I might try; but I know from experience I’m not. I haven’t the need, and to pretend that I have, to forego my comforts and luxuries in a make-believe that I haven’t them, would be too ghastly a farce, and I won’t.”

“Well, then, don’t,” said the doctor, bent more perhaps on carrying his point in argument than on promoting the actual establishment of the Social Union. “But my idea is this: Take two-thirds or one-half of that money, and go to Savor, and say: ‘Here! This is what Mr. Brandreth’s theatricals swindled the shop-hands out of. It’s honestly theirs, at least to control; and if you want to try that experiment of Mr. Peck’s here in Hatboro’, it’s yours. We people of leisure, or comparative leisure, have really nothing in common with you people who work with your hands for a living; and as we really can’t be friends with you, we won’t patronise you. We won’t advise you, and we won’t help you; but here’s the money. If you fail, you fail; and if you succeed, you won’t succeed by our aid and comfort.’”

The plan that Annie and Doctor Morrell talked over half in joke took a more and more serious character in her sense of duty to the minister’s memory and the wish to be of use, which was not extinct in her, however she mocked and defied it. It was part of the irony of her fate that the people who were best able to counsel with her in regard to it were Lyra, whom she could not approve, and Jack Wilmington, whom she had always disliked. He was able to contribute some facts about the working of the Thayer Club at the Harvard Memorial Hall in Cambridge, and Lyra because she had been herself a hand, and would not forget it, was of use in bringing the scheme into favour with the hands. They felt easy with her, as they did with Putney, and for much the same reason: it is one of the pleasing facts of our conditions that people who are socially inferior like best those above them who are morally anomalous. It was really through Lyra that Annie got at the working people, and when it came to a formal conference, there was no one who could command their confidence like Putney, whom they saw mad-drunk two or three times a year, but always pulling up and fighting back to sanity against the enemy whose power some of them had felt too.

No theory is so perfect as not to be subject to exceptions in the experiment, and in spite of her conviction of the truth of Mr. Peck’s social philosophy, Annie is aware, through her simple and frank relations with the hands in a business matter, of mutual kindness which it does not account for. But perhaps the philosophy and the experiment were not contradictory; perhaps it was intended to cover only the cases in which they had no common interest. At anyrate, when the Peck Social Union, as its members voted to call it, at the suggestion of one of their own number, got in working order, she was as cordially welcomed to the charge of its funds and accounts as if she had been a hat-shop hand or a shoe-binder. She is really of use, for its working is by no means ideal, and with her wider knowledge she has suggested improvements and expedients for making both ends meet which were sometimes so reluctant to meet. She has kept a conscience against subsidising the Union from her own means; and she even accepts for her services a small salary, which its members think they ought to pay her. She owns this ridiculous, like all the make-believe work of rich people; a travesty which has no reality except the little sum it added to the greater sum of her superabundance. She is aware that she is a pensioner upon the real members of the Social Union for a chance to be useful, and that the work they let her do is the right of some one who needs it. She has thought of doing the work and giving the pay to another; but she sees that this would be pauperising and degrading another. So she dwells in a vicious circle, and waits, and mostly forgets, and is mostly happy.

The Social Union itself, though not a brilliant success in all points, is still not a failure; and the promise of its future is in the fact that it continues to have a present. The people of Hatboro’ are rather proud of it, and strangers visit it as one of the possible solutions of one of the social problems. It is predicted that it cannot go on; that it must either do better or do worse; but it goes on the same.

Putney studies its existence in the light of his own infirmity, to which he still yields from time to time, as he has always done. He professes to find there a law which would account for a great many facts of human experience otherwise inexplicable. He does not attempt to define this occult preservative principle, but he offers himself and the Social Union as proofs of its existence; and he argues that if they can only last long enough they will finally be established in a virtue and prosperity as great as those of Mr. Gerrish and his store.

Annie sometimes feels that nothing else can explain the maintenance of Lyra Wilmington’s peculiar domestic relations at the point which perpetually invites comment and never justifies scandal. The situation seems to her as lamentable as ever. She grieves over Lyra, and likes her, and laughs with her; she no longer detests Jack Wilmington so much since he showed himself so willing and helpful about the Social Union; she thinks there must be a great deal of good in him, and sometimes she is sorry for him, and longs to speak again to Lyra about the wrong she is doing him. One of the dangers of having a very definite point of view is the temptation of abusing it to read the whole riddle of the painful earth. Annie has permitted herself to think of Lyra’s position as one which would be impossible in a state of things where there was neither poverty nor riches, and there was neither luxury on one hand to allure, nor the fear of want to constrain on the other.

When her recoil from the fulfilment of her volunteer pledge to Mr. Peck brought her face to face with her own weakness, there were two ways back to self-respect, either of which she might take. She might revert to her first opinion of him, and fortify herself in that contempt and rejection of his ideas, or she might abandon herself to them, with a vague intention of reparation to him, and accept them to the last insinuation of their logic. This was what she did, and while her life remained the same outwardly, it was inwardly all changed. She never could tell by what steps she reached her agreement with the minister’s philosophy; perhaps, as a woman, it was not possible she should; but she had a faith concerning it to which she bore unswerving allegiance, and it was Putney’s delight to witness its revolutionary effect on an old Hatboro’ Kilburn, the daughter of a shrewd lawyer and canny politician like her father, and the heir of an aristocratic tradition, a gentlewoman born and bred. He declared himself a reactionary in comparison with her, and had the habit of taking the conservative side against her. She was in the joke of this; but it was a real trouble to her for a time that Dr. Morrell, after admitting the force of her reasons, should be content to rest in a comfortable inconclusion as to his conduct, till one day she reflected that this was what she was herself doing, and that she differed from him only in the openness with which she proclaimed her opinions. Being a woman, her opinions were treated by the magnates of Hatboro’ as a good joke, the harmless fantasies of an old maid, which she would get rid of if she could get anybody to marry her; being a lady, and very well off, they were received with deference, and she was left to their uninterrupted enjoyment. Putney amused himself by saying that she was the fiercest apostle of labour that never did a stroke of work; but no one cared half so much for all that as for the question whether her affair with Dr. Morrell was a friendship or a courtship. They saw an activity of attention on his part which would justify the most devout belief in the latter, and yet they were confronted with the fact that it so long remained eventless. The two theories, one that she was amusing herself with him, and the other that he was just playing with her, divided public opinion, but they did not molest either of the parties to the mystery; and the village, after a season of acute conjecture, quiesced into that sarcastic sufferance of the anomaly into which it may have been noticed that small communities are apt to subside from such occasions. Except for some such irreconcilable as Mrs. Gerrish, it was a good joke that if you could not find Dr. Morrell in his office after tea, you could always find him at Miss Kilburn’s. Perhaps it might have helped solve the mystery if it had been known that she could not accept the situation, whatever it really was, without satisfying herself upon two points, which resolved themselves into one in the process of the inquiry.

She asked, apparently as preliminary to answering a question of his, “Have you heard that gossip about my — being in — caring for the poor man?”

“Yes.”

“And did you — what did you think?”

“That it wasn’t true. I knew if there were anything in it, you couldn’t have talked him over with me.”

She was silent. Then she said, in a low voice: “No, there couldn’t have been. But not for that reason alone, though it’s very delicate and generous of you to think of it, very large-minded; but because it couldn’t have been. I could have worshipped him, but I couldn’t have loved him — any more,” she added, with an implication that entirely satisfied him, “than I could have worshipped you.”

THE END

APRIL HOPES

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII:

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII

XLIV.

XLV.

XLVI.

XLVII.

XLVIII.

XLIX.

L.

I.

From his place on the floor of the Hemenway Gymnasium Mr. Elbridge G. Mavering looked on at the Class Day gaiety with the advantage which his stature, gave him over most people there. Hundreds of these were pretty girls, in a great variety of charming costumes, such as the eclecticism of modern fashion permits, and all sorts of ingenious compromises between walking dress and ball dress. It struck him that the young men on whose arms they hung, in promenading around the long oval within the crowd of stationary spectators, were very much younger than students used to be, whether they wore the dress-coats of the Seniors or the cut-away of the Juniors and Sophomores; and the young girls themselves did not look so old as he remembered them in his day. There was a band playing somewhere, and the galleries were well filled with spectators seated at their ease, and intent on the party-coloured turmoil of the floor, where from time to time the younger promenaders broke away from the ranks into a waltz, and after some turns drifted back, smiling and controlling their quick breath, and resumed their promenade. The place was intensely light, in the candour of a summer day which had no reserves; and the brilliancy was not broken by the simple decorations. Ropes of wild laurel twisted up the pine posts of the aisles, and swung in festoons overhead; masses of tropical plants in pots were set along between the posts on one side of the room; and on the other were the lunch tables, where a great many people were standing about, eating chicken and salmon salads, or strawberries and ice-cream, and drinking claret-cup. From the whole rose that blended odour of viands, of flowers, of stuff’s, of toilet perfumes, which is the characteristic expression of, all social festivities, and which exhilarates or depresses — according as one is new or old to it.

Elbridge Mavering kept looking at the faces of the young men as if he expected to see a certain one; then he turned his eyes patiently upon. the faces around him. He had been introduced to a good many persons, but he had come to that time of life when an introduction; unless charged with some special interest, only adds the pain of doubt to the wearisome encounter of unfamiliar people; and he had unconsciously put on the severity of a man who finds himself without acquaintance where others are meeting friends, when a small man, with a neatly trimmed reddish-grey beard and prominent eyes, stepped in front of him, and saluted him with the “Hello, Mavering!” of a contemporary.

His face, after a moment of question, relaxed into joyful recognition. “Why, John Munt! is that you?” he said, and he took into his large moist palm the dry little hand of his friend, while they both broke out into the incoherencies of people meeting after a long time. Mr. Mavering spoke in it voice soft yet firm, and with a certain thickness of tongue; which gave a boyish charm to his slow, utterance, and Mr. Munt used the sort of bronchial snuffle sometimes cultivated among us as a chest tone. But they were cut short in their intersecting questions and exclamations by the presence of the lady who detached herself from Mr. Munt’s arm as if to leave him the freer for his hand-shaking.

“Oh!” he said, suddenly recurring to her; “let me introduce you to Mrs. Pasmer, Mr. Mavering,” and the latter made a bow that creased his waistcoat at about the height of Mrs. Pasmer’s pretty little nose.

His waistcoat had the curve which waistcoats often describe at his age; and his heavy shoulders were thrown well back to balance this curve. His coat hung carelessly open; the Panama hat in his hand suggested a certain habitual informality of dress, but his smoothly shaven large handsome face, with its jaws slowly ruminant upon nothing, intimated the consequence of a man accustomed to supremacy in a subordinate place.

Mrs. Pasmer looked up to acknowledge the introduction with a sort of pseudo-respectfulness which it would be hard otherwise to describe. Whether she divined or not that she was in the presence of a magnate of some sort, she was rather superfluously demure in the first two or three things she said, and was all sympathy and interest in the meeting of these old friends. They declared that they had not seen each other for twenty years, or, at any rate, not since ‘59. She listened while they disputed about the exact date, and looked from time to time at Mr. Munt, as if for some explanation of Mr. Mavering; but Munt himself, when she saw him last, had only just begun to commend himself to society, which had since so fully accepted him, and she had so suddenly, the moment before, found her self hand in glove with him that she might well have appealed to a third person for some explanation of Munt. But she was not a woman to be troubled much by this momentary mystification, and she was not embarrassed at all when Munt said, as if it had all been pre-arranged, “Well, now, Mrs. Pasmer, if you’ll let me leave you with Mr. Mavering a moment, I’ll go off and bring that unnatural child to you; no use dragging you round through this crowd longer.”

He made a gesture intended, in the American manner, to be at once polite and jocose, and was gone, leaving Mrs. Pasmer a little surprised, and Mr. Mavering in some misgiving, which he tried to overcome pressing his jaws together two or three times without speaking. She had no trouble in getting in the first remark. “Isn’t all this charming, Mr. Mavering?” She spoke in a deep low voice, with a caressing manner, and stood looking up, at Mr. Mavering with one shoulder shrugged and the other drooped, and a tasteful composition of her fan and hands and handkerchief at her waist.

“Yes, ma’am, it is,” said Mr. Mavering. He seemed to say ma’am to her with a public or official accent, which sent Mrs. Primer’s mind fluttering forth to poise briefly at such conjectures as, “Congressman from a country district? judge of the Common Pleas? bank president? railroad superintendent? leading physician in a large town? — no, Mr. Munt said Mister,” and then to return to her pretty blue eyes, and to centre there in that pseudo-respectful attention under the arch of her neat brows and her soberly crinkled grey-threaded brown hair and her very appropriate bonnet. A bonnet, she said, was much more than half the battle after forty, and it was now quite after forty with Mrs. Pasmer; but she was very well dressed otherwise. Mr. Mavering went on to say, with a deliberation that seemed an element of his unknown dignity, whatever it might be, “A number of the young fellows together can give a much finer spread, and make more of the day, in a place like this, than we used to do in our rooms.”

“Ah, then you’re a Harvard man too!” said Mrs. Primer to herself, with surprise, which she kept to herself, and she said to Mavering: “Oh yes, indeed! It’s altogether better. Aren’t they nice looking fellows?” she said, putting up her glass to look at the promenaders.

“Yes,” Mr. Mavering assented. “I suppose,” he added, out of the consciousness of his own relation to the affair— “I suppose you’ve a son somewhere here?”

“Oh dear, no!” cried Mrs. Primer, with a mingling, superhuman, but for her of ironical deprecation and derision. “Only a daughter, Mr. Mavering.”

At this feat of Mrs. Pasmer’s, Mr. Mavering looked at her with question as to her precise intention, and ended by repeating, hopelessly, “Only a daughter?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of the same irony, “only a poor, despised young girl, Mr. Mavering.”

“You speak,” said Mr. Mavering, beginning to catch on a little, “as if it were a misfortune,” and his, dignity broke up into a smile that had its queer fascination.

“Why, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Well, I shouldn’t have thought so.”

“Then you don’t believe that all that old-fashioned chivalry and devotion have gone out? You don’t think the young men are all spoiled nowadays, and expect the young ladies to offer them attentions?”

“No,” said Mr. Mavering slowly, as if recovering from the shock of the novel ideas. “Do you?”

“Oh, I’m such a stranger in Boston — I’ve lived abroad so long — that I don’t know. One hears all kinds of things. But I’m so glad you’re not one of those — pessimists!”

“Well,” said Mr. Mavering, still thoughtfully, “I don’t know that I can speak by the card exactly. I can’t say how it is now. I haven’t been at a Class Day spread since my own Class Day; I haven’t even been at Commencement more than once or twice. But in my time here we didn’t expect the young ladies to show us attentions; at any rate, we didn’t wait for them to do it. We were very glad, to be asked to meet them, and we thought it an honour if the young ladies would let us talk or dance with them, or take them to picnics. I don’t think that any of them could complain of want of attention.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, “that’s what I preached, that’s what I prophesied, when I brought my daughter home from Europe. I told her that a girl’s life in America was one long triumph; but they say now that girls have more attention in London even than in Cambridge. One hears such dreadful things!”

“Like what?” asked Mr. Mavering, with the unserious interest which Mrs. Primer made most people feel in her talk.

“Oh; it’s too vast a subject. But they tell you about charming girls moping the whole evening through at Boston parties, with no young men to talk with, and sitting from the beginning to the end of an assembly and not going on the floor once. They say that unless a girl fairly throws herself at the young men’s heads she isn’t noticed. It’s this terrible disproportion of the sexes that’s at the root of it, I suppose; it reverses everything. There aren’t enough young men to go half round, and they know it, and take advantage of it. I suppose it began in the war.”

He laughed, and, “I should think,” he said, laying hold of a single idea out of several which she had presented, “that there would always be enough young men in Cambridge to go round.”

Mrs. Pasmer gave a little cry. “In Cambridge!”

“Yes; when I was in college our superiority was entirely numerical.”

“But that’s all passed long ago, from what I hear,” retorted Mrs. Pasmer. “I know very well that it used to be thought a great advantage for a girl to be brought up in Cambridge, because it gave her independence and ease of manner to have so many young men attentive to her. But they say the students all go into Boston now, and if the Cambridge girls want to meet them, they have to go there too. Oh, I assure you that, from what I hear, they’ve changed all that since our time, Mr. Mavering.”

Mrs. Pasmer was certainly letting herself go a little more than she would have approved of in another. The result was apparent in the jocosity of this heavy Mr. Mavering’s reply.

“Well, then, I’m glad that I was of our time, and not of this wicked generation. But I presume that unnatural supremacy of the young men is brought low, so to speak, after marriage?”

Mrs. Primer let herself go a little further. “Oh, give us an equal chance,” she laughed, “and we can always take care of ourselves, and something more. They say,” she added, “that the young married women now have all the attention that girls could wish.”

“H’m!” said Mr. Mavering, frowning. “I think I should be tempted to box my boy’s ears if I saw him paying another man’s wife attention.”

“What a Roman father!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, greatly amused, and letting herself go a little further yet. She said to herself that she really must find out who this remarkable Mr. Mavering was, and she cast her eye over the hall for some glimpse of the absent Munt, whose arm she meant to take, and whose ear she meant to fill with questions. But she did not see him, and something else suggested itself. “He probably wouldn’t let you see him, or if he did, you wouldn’t know it.”

“How not know it?”

Mrs. Primer did not answer. “One hears such dreadful things. What do you say — or you’ll think I’m a terrible gossip—”

“Oh no;” said Mr. Mavering, impatient for the dreadful thing, whatever it was.

Mrs. Primer resumed: “ — to the young married women meeting last winter just after a lot of pretty girls had came out, and magnanimously resolving to give the Buds a chance in society?”

“The Buds?”

“Yes, the Rose-buds — the debutantes; it’s an odious little word, but everybody uses it. Don’t you think that’s a strange state of things for America? But I can’t believe all those things,” said Mrs. Pasmer, flinging off the shadow of this lurid social condition. “Isn’t this a pretty scene?”

“Yes, it is,” Mr. Mavering admitted, withdrawing his mind gradually from a consideration of Mrs. Pasmer’s awful instances. “Yes!” he added, in final self-possession. “The young fellows certainly do things in a great deal better style nowadays than we used to.”

“Oh yes, indeed! And all those pretty girls do seem to be having such a good time!”

“Yes; they don’t have the despised and rejected appearance that you’d like to have one believe.”

“Not in the least!” Mrs. Pasmer readily consented. “They look radiantly happy. It shows that you can’t trust anything that people say to you.” She abandoned the ground she had just been taking without apparent shame for her inconsistency. “I fancy it’s pretty much as it’s always been: if a girl is attractive, the young men find it out.”

“Perhaps,” said Mr. Mavering, unbending with dignity, “the young married women have held another meeting, and resolved to give the Buds one more chance.”

“Oh, there are some pretty mature Roses here,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laughing evasively. “But I suppose Class Day can never be taken from the young girls.”

“I hope not,” said Mr. Mavering. His wandering eye fell upon some young men bringing refreshments across the nave toward them, and he was reminded to ask Mrs. Pasmer, “Will you have something to eat?” He had himself had a good deal to eat, before he took up his position at the advantageous point where John Munt had found him.

“Why, yes, thank you,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I ought to say, ‘An ice, please,’ but I’m really hungry, and—”

“I’ll get you some of the salad,” said Mr. Mavering, with the increased liking a man feels for a woman when she owns to an appetite. “Sit down here,” he added, and he caught a vacant chair toward her. When he turned about from doing so, he confronted a young gentleman coming up to Mrs. Pasmer with a young lady on his arm, and making a very low bow of relinquishment.

II.

The men looked smilingly at each other without saying anything; and the younger took in due form the introduction which the young lady gave him.

“My mother, Mr. Mavering.”

“Mr. Mavering!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, in a pure astonishment, before she had time to colour it with a polite variety of more conventional emotions. She glanced at the two men, and gave a little “Oh?” of inquiry and resignation, and then said, demurely, “Let me introduce you to Mr. Mavering, Alice,” while the young fellow laughed nervously, and pulled out his handkerchief, partly to hide the play of his laughter, and partly to wipe away the perspiration which a great deal more laughing had already gathered on his forehead. He had a vein that showed prominently down its centre, and large, mobile, girlish blue eyes under good brows, an arched nose, and rather a long face and narrow chin. He had beautiful white teeth; as he laughed these were seen set in a jaw that contracted very much toward the front. He was tall and slim, and he wore with elegance the evening dress which Class Day custom prescribes for the Seniors; in his button-hole he had a club button.

“I shall not have to ask an introduction to Mr. Mavering; and you’ve robbed me of the pleasure of giving him one to you, Mrs. Pasmer,” he said.

She heard the young man in the course of a swift review of what she had said to his father, and with a formless resentment of the father’s not having told her he had a son there; but she answered with the flattering sympathy she had the use of, “Oh, but you won’t miss one pleasure out of so many to-day, Mr. Mavering; and think of the little dramatic surprise!”

“Oh, perfect,” he said, with another laugh. “I told Miss Pasmer as we came up.”

“Oh, then you were in the surprise, Alice!” said Mrs. Pasmer, searching her daughter’s eyes for confession or denial of this little community of interest. The girl smiled slightly upon the young man, but not disapprovingly, and made no other answer to her mother, who went on: “Where in the world have you been? Did Mr. Munt find you? Who told you where I was? Did you see me? How did you know I was here? Was there ever anything so droll?” She did not mean her questions to be answered, or at least not then; for, while her daughter continued to smile rather more absently, and young Mavering broke out continuously in his nervous laugh, and his father stood regarding him with visible satisfaction, she hummed on, turning to the young man: “But I’m quite appalled at Alice’s having monopolised even for a few minutes a whole Senior — and probably an official Senior at that,” she said, with a glance at the pink and white club button in his coat lapel, “and I can’t let you stay another instant, Mr. Mavering. I know very well how many demands you have upon you and you must go back directly to your sisters and your cousins and your aunts, and all the rest of them; you must indeed.”

“Oh no! Don’t drive me away, Mrs. Pasmer,” pleaded the young man, laughing violently, and then wiping his face. “I assure you that I’ve no encumbrances of any kind here except my father, and he seems to have been taking very good care of himself.” They all laughed at this, and the young fellow hurried on: “Don’t be alarmed at my button; it only means a love of personal decoration, if that’s where you got the notion of my being an official Senior. This isn’t my spread; I shall hope to welcome you at Beck Hall after the Tree; and I wish you’d let me be of use to you. Wouldn’t you like to go round to some of the smaller spreads? I think it would amuse you. And have you got tickets to the Tree, to see us make fools of ourselves? It’s worth seeing, Mrs. Pasmer, I assure you.”

He rattled on very rapidly but with such a frankness in his urgency, such amiable kindliness, that Mrs. Pasmer could not feel that it was pushing. She looked at her daughter, but she stood as passive in the transaction as the elder Mavering. She was taller than her mother, and as she waited, her supple figure described that fine lateral curve which one sees in some Louis Quinze portraits; this effect was enhanced by the fashion of her dress of pale sage green, with a wide stripe or sash of white dropping down the front, from her delicate waist. The same simple combination of colours was carried up into her hat, which surmounted darker hair than Mrs. Pasmer’s, and a complexion of wholesome pallor; her eyes were grey and grave, with black brows, and her face, which was rather narrow, had a pleasing irregularity in the sharp jut of the nose; in profile the parting of the red lips showed well back into the cheek.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pasmer, in her own behalf; and she added in his, “about letting you take so much trouble,” so smoothly that it would have been quite impossible to detect the point of union in the two utterances.

“Well, don’t call it names, anyway, Mrs. Pasmer,” pleaded the young man. “I thought it was nothing but a pleasure and a privilege—”

“The fact is,” she explained, neither consenting nor refusing, “that we were expecting to meet some friends who had tickets for us” — young Mavering’s face fell— “and I can’t imagine what’s happened.”

“Oh, let’s hope something dreadful,” he cried.

“Perhaps you know them,” she delayed further. “Professor Saintsbury!”

“Well, rather! Why, they were here about an hour ago — both of them. They must have been looking for you.”

“Yes; we were to meet them here. We waited to come out with other friends, and I was afraid we were late.” Mrs. Pasmer’s face expressed a tempered disappointment, and she looked at her daughter for indications of her wishes in the circumstances; seeing in her eye a willingness to accept young Mavering’s invitation, she hesitated more decidedly than she had yet done, for she was, other things being equal, quite willing to accept it herself. But other things were not equal, and the whole situation was very odd. All that she knew of Mr. Mavering the elder was that he was the old friend of John Munt, and she knew far too little of John Munt, except that he seemed to go everywhere, and to be welcome, not to feel that his introduction was hardly a warrant for what looked like an impending intimacy. She did not dislike Mr. Mavering; he was evidently a country person of great self-respect, and no doubt of entire respectability. He seemed very intelligent, too. He was a Harvard man; he had rather a cultivated manner, or else naturally a clever way of saying things. But all that was really nothing, if she knew no more about him, and she certainly did not. If she could only have asked her daughter who it was that presented young Mavering to her, that might have formed some clew, but there was no earthly chance of asking this, and, besides, it was probably one of those haphazard introductions that people give on such occasions. Young Mavering’s behaviour gave her still greater question: his self-possession, his entire absence of anxiety; or any expectation of rebuff or snub, might be the ease of unimpeachable social acceptance, or it might be merely adventurous effrontery; only something ingenuous and good in the young fellow’s handsome face forbade this conclusion. That his face was so handsome was another of the complications. She recalled, in the dreamlike swiftness with which all these things passed through her mind, what her friends had said to Alice about her being sure to meet her fate on Class Day, and she looked at her again to see if she had met it.

“Well, mamma?” said the girl, smiling at her mother’s look.

Mrs. Pasmer thought she must have been keeping young Mavering waiting a long time for his answer. “Why, of course, Alice. But I really don’t know what to do about the Saintsburys.” This was not in the least true, but it instantly seemed so to Mrs. Pasmer, as a plausible excuse will when we make it.

“Why, I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Pasmer,” said young Mavering, with a cordial unsuspicion that both won and reassured her, “we’ll be sure to find them at some of the spreads. Let me be of that much use, anyway; you must.”

“We really oughtn’t to let you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, making a last effort to cling to her reluctance, but feeling it fail, with a sensation that was not disagreeable. She could not help being pleased with the pleasure that she saw in her daughter’s face.

Young Mavering’s was radiant. “I’ll be back in just half a minute,” he said, and he took a gay leave of them in running to speak to another student at the opposite end of the hall.

III.

“You must allow me to get you something to eat first, Mrs. Pasmer,” said the elder Mavering.

“Oh no, thank you,” Mrs. Pasmer began. But she changed her mind and said, “Or, yes; I will, Mr. Mavering: a very little salad, please.” She had really forgotten her hunger, as a woman will in the presence of any social interest; but she suddenly thought his going would give her a chance for two words with her daughter, and so she sent him. As he creaked heavily across the smooth floor of the nave; “Alice,” she whispered, “I don’t know exactly what I’ve done: Who introduced this young Mr. Mavering to you?”

“Mr. Munt.”

“Mr. Munt!”

“Yes; he came for me; he said you sent him. He introduced Mr. Mavering, and he was very polite. Mr. Mavering said we ought to go up into the gallery and see how it looked; and Mr. Munt said he’d been up, and Mr. Mavering promised to bring me back to him, but he was not there when we got back. Mr. Mavering got me some ice cream first, and then he found you for me.”

“Really,” said Mrs. Pasmer to herself, “the combat thickens!” To her daughter she said, “He’s very handsome.”

“He laughs too much,” said the daughter. Her mother recognised her uncandour with a glance. “But he waltzes well,” added the girl.

“Waltzes?” echoed the mother. “Did you waltz with him, Alice?”

“Everybody else was dancing. He asked me for a turn or two, and of course I did it. What difference?”

“Oh, none — none. Only — I didn’t see you.”

“Perhaps you weren’t looking.”

“Yes, I was looking all the time.”

“What do you mean, mamma?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Pasmer, in a final despair, “we don’t know anything about them.”

“We’re the only people here who don’t, then,” said her daughter. “The ladies were bowing right left to him all the time, and he kept asking if I knew this one and that one, and all I could say was that some of them were distant cousins, but I wasn’t acquainted with them. I would think he’d wonder who we were.”

“Yes,” said the mother thoughtfully.

“There! he’s laughing with that other student. But don’t look!”

Mrs. Pasmer saw well enough out of the corner of her eye the joking that went on between Mavering and his friend, and it did not displease her to think that it probably referred to Alice. While the young man came hurrying back to them she glanced at the girl standing near her with a keenly critical inspection, from which she was able to exclude all maternal partiality, and justly decided that she was one of the most effective girls in the place. That costume of hers was perfect. Mrs. Pasmer wished now that she could have compared it more carefully with other costumes; she had noticed some very pretty ones; and a feeling of vexation that Alice should have prevented this by being away so long just when the crowd was densest qualified her satisfaction. The people were going very fast now. The line of the oval in the nave was broken into groups of lingering talkers, who were conspicuous to each other, and Mrs. Pasmer felt that she and her daughter were conspicuous to all the rest where they stood apart, with the two Maverings converging upon them from different points, the son nodding and laughing to friends of both sexes as he came, the father wholly absorbed in not spilling the glass of claret punch which he carried in one hand, and not falling down on the slippery floor with the plate of salad which he bore in the other. She had thoughts of feigning unconsciousness; she would have had no scruple in practising this or any other social stratagem, for though she kept a conscience in regard to certain matters — what she considered essentials — she lived a thousand little lies every day, and taught her daughter by precept and example to do the same. You must seem to be looking one way when you were really looking another; you must say this when you meant that; you must act as if you were thinking one thing when you were thinking something quite different; and all to no end, for, as she constantly said, people always know perfectly well what you were about, whichever way you looked or whatever you said, or no matter how well you acted the part of thinking what you did not think. Now, although she seemed not to look, she saw all that has been described at a glance, and at another she saw young Mavering slide easily up to his father and relieve him of the plate and glass, with a laugh as pleasant and a show of teeth as dazzling as he bestowed upon any of the ladies he had passed. She owned to her recondite heart that she liked this in young Mavering, though at the same time she asked herself what motive he really had in being so polite to his father before people. But she had no time to decide; she had only time to pack the question hurriedly away for future consideration, when young Mavering arrived at her elbow, and she turned with a little “Oh!” of surprise so perfectly acted that it gave her the greatest pleasure.

IV.

“I don’t think my father would have got here alive with these things,” said young Mavering. “Did you see how I came to his rescue?”

Mrs. Pasmer instantly threw away all pretext of not having seen. “Oh yes! my heart was in my mouth when you bore down upon him, Mr. Mavering. It was a beautiful instance of filial devotion.”

“Well, do sit down now, Mrs. Pasmer, and take it comfortably,” said the young fellow; and he got her one of the many empty chairs, and would not give her the things, which he put in another, till she sat down and let him spread a napkin over her lap.

“Really,” she said, “I feel as if I were stopping all the wheels of Class Day. Am I keeping them from closing the Gymnasium, Mr. Mavering?”

“Not quite,” said the young man, with one of his laughs. “I don’t believe they will turn us out, and I’ll see that they don’t lock us in. Don’t hurry, Mrs. Pasmer. I’m only sorry you hadn’t something sooner.”

“Oh, your father proposed getting me something a good while ago.”

“Did he? Then I wonder you haven’t had it. He’s usually on time.”

“You’re both very energetic, I think,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“He’s the father of his son,” said the young fellow, assuming the merit with a bow of burlesque modesty.

It went to Mrs. Pasmer’s heart. “Let’s hope he’ll never forget that,” she said, in an enjoyment of the excitement and the salad that was beginning to leave her question of these Maverings a light, diaphanous cloud on the verge of the horizon.

The elder Mavering had been trying, without success, to think of something to say to Miss Pasmer, he had twice cleared his throat for that purpose. But this comedy between his son and the young lady’s mother seemed so much lighter and brighter than anything he could have said, that he said nothing, and looked on with his mouth set in its queer smile, while the girl listened with the gravity of a daughter who sees that her mother is losing her head. Mrs. Pasmer buzzed on in her badinage with the young man, and allowed him to go for a cup of coffee before she rose from her chair, and shook out her skirts with an air of pleasant expectation of whatever should come next.

He came back without it. “The coffee urn has dried up here, Mrs. Pasmer. But you can get some at the other spreads; they’d be inconsolable if you didn’t take something everywhere.”

They all started toward the door, but the elder Mavering said, holding back a little, “Dan, I think I’ll go and see—”

“Oh no, you mustn’t, father,” cried the young man, laying his hand with caressing entreaty on his father’s coat sleeve. “I don’t want you to go anywhere till you’ve seen Professor Saintsbury. We shall be sure to meet him at some of the spreads. I want you to have that talk with him—” He corrected himself for the instant’s deflection from the interests of his guest, and added, “I want you to help me hunt him up for Mrs. Pasmer. Now, Mrs. Pasmer, you’re not to think it’s the least trouble, or anything but a boon, much less say it,” he cried, turning to the deprecation in Mrs. Pasmer’s face. He turned away from it to acknowledge the smiles and bows of people going out of the place, and he returned their salutations with charming heartiness.

In the vestibule they met the friends they were going in search of.

V.

“With Mr. Mavering, of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Saintsbury: “I might have known it.” Mrs. Pasmer would have given anything she could think of to be able to ask why her friend might have known it; but for the present they could only fall upon each other with flashes of self-accusal and explanation, and rejoicing for their deferred and now accomplished meeting. The Professor stood by with the satirical smile with which men witness the effusion of women. Young Mavering, after sharing the ladies’ excitement fully with them, rewarded himself by an exclusive moment with Miss Pasmer.

“You must get Mrs. Pasmer to let me show you all of Class Day that a Senior can. I didn’t know what a perfect serpent’s tooth it was to be one before. Mrs. Saintsbury,” he broke off, “have you got tickets for the Tree? Ah, she doesn’t hear me!”

Mrs. Saintsbury was just then saying to the elder Mavering, “I’m so glad you decided to come today. It would have been a shame if none of you were here.” She made a feint of dropping her voice, with a glance at Dan Mavering. “He’s such a nice boy,” which made him laugh, and cry out —

“Oh, now? Don’t poison my father’s mind, Mrs. Saintsbury.”

“Oh, some one would be sure to tell him,” retorted the Professor’s wife, “and he’d better hear it from a friend.”

The young fellow laughed again, and then he shook hands with some ladies going out, and asked were they going so soon, from an abstract hospitality, apparently, for he was not one of the hosts; and so turned once more to Miss Pasmer. “We must get away from here, or the afternoon will get away from us, and leave us nothing to show for it. Suppose we make a start, Miss Pasmer?”

He led the way with her out of the vestibule, banked round with pots of palm and fern, and down the steps into the glare of the Cambridge sunshine, blown full, as is the case on Class Day, of fine Cambridge dust, which had drawn a delicate grey veil over the grass of the Gymnasium lawn, and mounted in light clouds from the wheels powdering it finer and finer in the street. Along the sidewalks dusty hacks and carriages were ranged, and others were driving up to let people dismount at the entrances to the college yard. Within the temporary picket-fences, secluding a part of the grounds for the students and their friends, were seen stretching from dormitory to dormitory long lines of Chinese lanterns, to be lit after nightfall, swung between the elms. Groups of ladies came and went, nearly always under the escort of some student; the caterers’ carts, disburdened of their ice-creams and salads, were withdrawn under the shade in the street, and their drivers lounged or drowsed upon the seats; now and then a black waiter, brilliant as a bobolink in his white jacket and apron, appeared on some errand; the large, mild Cambridge policemen kept the entrances to the yard with a benevolent vigilance which was not harsh with the little Irish children coming up from the Marsh in their best to enjoy the sight of other people’s pleasure.

“Isn’t it a perfect Class Day?” cried young Mavering, as he crossed Kirkland Street with Miss Pasmer, and glanced down its vaulted perspective of elms, through which the sunlight broke, and lay in the road in pools and washes as far as the eye reached. “Did you ever see anything bluer than the sky to-day? I feel as if we’d ordered the weather, with the rest of the things, and I had some credit for it as host. Do make it a little compliment, Miss Pasmer; I assure you I’ll be very modest about it.”

“Ah, I think it’s fully up to the occasion,” said the girl, catching the spirit of his amiable satisfaction. “Is it the usual Class Day weather?”

“You spoil everything by asking that,” cried the young man; “it obliges me to make a confession — it’s always good weather on Class Day. There haven’t been more than a dozen bad Class Days in the century. But you’ll admit that there can’t have been a better Class Day than this?”

“Oh yes; it’s certainly the pleasantest Class Day I’ve seen;” said the girl; and now when Mavering laughed she laughed too.

“Thank you so much for saying that! I hope it will pass off in unclouded brilliancy; it will, if I can make it. Why, hallo! They’re on the other side of the street yet, and looking about as if they were lost.”

He pulled his handkerchief from his pocket, and waved it at the others of their party.

They caught sight of it, and came hurrying over through the dust.

Mrs. Saintsbury said, apparently as the sum of her consultations with Mrs. Pasmer: “The Tree is to be at half-past five; and after we’ve seen a few spreads, I’m going to take the ladies hone for a little rest.”

“Oh no; don’t do that,” pleaded the young man. After making this protest he seemed not to have anything to say immediately in support of it. He merely added: “This is Miss Pasmer’s first Class Day, and I want her to see it all.”

“But you’ll have to leave us very soon to get yourself ready for the Tree,” suggested the Professor’s lady, with a motherly prevision.

“I shall want just fifteen minutes for that.”

“I know, better, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, with finality. “You will want a good three-quarters of an hour to make yourself as disreputable as you’ll look at the Tree; and you’ll have to take time for counsel and meditation. You may stay with us just half an hour, and then we shall part inexorably. I’ve seen a great many more Class Days than you have, and I know what they are in their demands upon the Seniors.”

“Oh; well! Then we won’t think about the time,” said the young man, starting on with Miss Pasmer.

“Well, don’t undertake too much,” said the lady. She came last in the little procession, with the elder Mavering, and her husband and Mrs Pasmer preceded her.

“What?” young Mavering called back, with his smiling face over his shoulder.

“She says not to bite off more than you can chew,” the professor answered for her.

Mavering broke into a conscious laugh, but full of delight, and with his handkerchief to his face had almost missed the greeting of some ladies who bowed to him. He had to turn round to acknowledge it, and he was saluting and returning salutations pretty well all along the line of their progress.

“I’m afraid you’ll think I’m everybody’s friend but my own, Miss Pasmer, but I assure you all this is purely accidental. I don’t know so many people, after all; only all that I do know seem to be here this morning.”

“I don’t think it’s a thing to be sorry for,” said the girl. “I wish we knew more people. It’s rather forlorn—”

“Oh, will you let me introduce some of the fellows to you? They’ll be so glad.”

“If you’ll tell them how forlorn I said I was,” said the girl, with a smile.

“Oh, no, no, no! I understand that. And I assure you that I didn’t suppose — But of course!” he arrested himself in the superfluous reassurance he was offering, “All that goes without saying. Only there are some of the fellows coming back to the law school, and if you’ll allow me—”

“We shall be very happy indeed, Mr. Mavering,” said Mrs. Pasmer, behind him.

“Oh, thank you ever so much, Mrs. Pasmer.” This was occasion for another burst of laughter with him. He seemed filled with the intoxication of youth, whose spirit was in the bright air of the day and radiant in the young faces everywhere. The paths intersecting one another between the different dormitories under the drooping elms were thronged with people coming and going in pairs and groups; and the academic fete, the prettiest flower of our tough old Puritan stem, had that charm, at once sylvan and elegant, which enraptures in the pictured fables of the Renaissance. It falls at that moment of the year when the old university town, often so commonplace and sometimes so ugly, becomes briefly and almost pathetically beautiful under the leafage of her hovering elms and in, the perfume of her syringas, and bathed in this joyful tide of youth that overflows her heart. She seems fit then to be the home of the poets who have loved her and sung her, and the regret of any friend of the humanities who has left her.

“Alice,” said Mrs. Pasmer, leaning forward a little to speak to her daughter, and ignoring a remark of the Professor’s, “did you ever see so many pretty costumes?”

“Never,” said the girl, with equal intensity.

“Well, it makes you feel that you have got a country, after all,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, in a sort of apostrophe to her European self. “You see splendid dressing abroad, but it’s mostly upon old people who ought to be sick and ashamed of their pomps and vanities. But here it’s the young girls who dress; and how lovely they are! I thought they were charming in the Gymnasium, but I see you must get them out-of-doors to have the full effect. Mr. Mavering, are they always so prettily dressed on Class Day?”

“Well, I’m beginning to feel as if it wouldn’t be exactly modest for me to say so, whatever I think. You’d better ask Mrs. Saintsbury; she pretends to know all about it.”

“No, I’m bound to say they’re not,” said the Professor’s wife candidly. “Your daughter,” she added, in a low tone for all to hear, “decides that question.”

“I’m so glad you said that, Mrs. Saintsbury,” said the young man. He looked at the girl; who blushed with a pleasure that seemed to thrill to the last fibre of her pretty costume.

She could not say anything, but her mother asked, with an effort at self-denial: “Do you think so really? It’s one of those London things. They have so much taste there now,” she added yielding to her own pride in the dress.

“Yes; I supposed it must be,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, “We used to come in muslins and tremendous hoops — don’t you remember?”

“Did you look like your photographs?” asked young Mavering, over his shoulder.

“Yes; but we didn’t know it then,” said the Professor’s wife.

“Neither did we,” said the Professor. “We supposed that there had never been anything equal to those hoops and white muslins.”

“Thank you, my dear,” said his wife, tapping him between the shoulders with her fan. “Now don’t go any further.”

“Do you mean about our first meeting here on Class Day?” asked her husband.

“They’ll think so now,” said Mrs. Saintsbury patiently, with a playful threat of consequences in her tone.

“When I first saw the present Mrs. Saintsbury,” pursued the Professor — it was his joking way, of describing her, as if there had been several other Mrs. Saintsburys— “she was dancing on the green here.”

“Ah, they don’t dance on the green any more, I hear,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer.

“No, they don’t,” said the other lady; “and I think it’s just as well. It was always a ridiculous affectation of simplicity.”

“It must have been rather public,” said young Mavering, in a low voice, to Miss Pasmer.

“It doesn’t seem as if it could ever have been in character quite,” she answered.

“We’re a thoroughly indoors people,” said the Professor. “And it seems as if we hadn’t really begun to get well as a race till we had come in out of the weather.”

“How can you say that on a day like this?” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “I didn’t suppose any one could be so unromantic.”

“Don’t flatter him,” cried his wife.

“Does he consider that a compliment?”

“Not personally,” he answered: “But it’s the first duty of a Professor of Comparative Literature to be unromantic.”

“I don’t understand,” faltered Mrs. Pasmer.

“He will be happy to explain, at the greatest possible length,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “But you shan’t spoil our pleasure now, John.”

They all laughed, and the Professor looked proud of the wit at his expense; the American husband is so, and the public attitude of the American husband and wife toward each other is apt to be amiably satirical; their relation seems never to have lost its novelty, or to lack droll and surprising contrasts for them.

Besides these passages with her husband, Mrs. Saintsbury kept up a full flow of talk with the elder Mavering, which Mrs. Pasmer did her best to overhear, for it related largely to his son, whom, it seemed, from the father’s expressions, the Saintsburys had been especially kind to.

“No, I assure you,” Mrs. Pasmer heard her protest, “Mr. Saintsbury has, been very much interested in him. I hope he has not put any troublesome ideas into his head. Of course he’s very much interested in literature, from his point of view, and he’s glad to find any of the young men interested in it, and that’s apt to make him overdo matters a little.”

“Dan wished me to talk with him, and I shall certainly be glad to do so,” said the father, but in a tone which conveyed to Mrs. Pasmer the impression that though he was always open to conviction, his mind was made up on this point, whatever it was.

VI.

The party went to half a dozen spreads, some of which were on a scale of public grandeur approaching that of the Gymnasium, and others of a subdued elegance befitting the more private hospitalities in the students’ rooms. Mrs. Pasmer was very much interested in these rooms, whose luxurious appointments testified to the advance of riches and of the taste to apply them since she used to visit students’ rooms in far-off Class Days. The deep window nooks and easy-chairs upholstered in the leather that seems sacred alike to the seats and the shelves of libraries; the aesthetic bookcases, low and topped with bric-a-brac; the etchings and prints on the walls, which the elder Mavering went up to look at with a mystifying air of understanding such things; the foils crossed over the chimney, and the mantel with its pipes, and its photographs of theatrical celebrities tilted about over it — spoke of conditions mostly foreign to Mrs. Pasmer’s memories of Harvard. The photographed celebrities seemed to be chosen chiefly for their beauty, and for as much of their beauty as possible, Mrs. Pasmer perceived, with an obscure misgiving of the sort which an older generation always likes to feel concerning the younger, but with a tolerance, too, which was personal to herself; it was to be considered that the massive thought and honest amiability of Salvini’s face, and the deep and spiritualized power of Booth’s, varied the effect of these companies of posturing nymphs.

At many places she either met old friends with whom she clamoured over the wonder of their encounter there, or was made acquainted with new people by the Saintsburys. She kept a mother’s eye on her daughter, to whom young Mavering presented everybody within hail or reach, and whom she could see, whenever she looked at her, a radiant centre of admiration. She could hear her talk sometimes, and she said to herself that really Alice was coming out; she had never heard her say so many good things before; she did not know it was in her. She was very glad then that she had let her wear that dress; it was certainly distinguished, and the girl carried it off, to her mother’s amusement, with the air of a superb lady of the period from which it dated. She thought what a simple child Alice really was, all the time those other children, the Seniors, were stealing their glances of bold or timid worship at her, and doubtless thinking her a brilliant woman of the world. But there could be no mistake that she was a success.

Part of her triumph was of course due to Mrs. Saintsbury; whose chaperonage; Mrs. Pasmer could see, was everywhere of effect. But it was also largely due to the vigilant politeness of young Mavering, who seemed bent on making her have good time, and who let no chance slip him. Mrs. Pasmer felt his kindness truly; and she did not feel it the less because she knew that there was but one thing that could, at his frankly selfish age, make a young fellow wish to make a girl have a good time; except for that reason he must be bending the whole soul of egotistic youth to making some other girl have a good time. But all the same, it gave her pause when some one to whom she was introduced spoke to her of her friends the Maverings, as if they were friends of the oldest standing instead of acquaintances of very recent accident. She did not think of disclaiming the intimacy, but “Really I shall die of these Maverings,” she said to herself, “unless I find out something about them pretty soon.”

“I’m not going to take you to the Omicron spread, Mrs. Pasmer,” said young Mavering, coming up to her with such an effect of sympathetic devotion that she had to ask herself, “Are they my friends, the Maverings?” “The Saintsburys have been there already, and it is a little too common.” The tone of superiority gave Mrs. Pasmer courage. “They’re good fellows; and all that, but I want you to see the best. I suppose it will get back to giving the spreads all in the fellows’ rooms again. It’s a good deal pleasanter, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes, indeed,” assented Mrs. Pasmer, though she had really been thinking the private spreads were not nearly so amusing as the large spread she had seen at the Gymnasium. She had also wondered where all Mr. Mavering’s relations and friends were, and the people who had social claims on him, that he could be giving up his Class Day in this reckless fashion to strangers. Alice would account for a good deal, but she would not account for everything. Mrs. Pasmer would have been willing to take him from others, but if he were so anomalous as to have no one to be taken from, of course it lessened his value as a trophy. These things went in and out of her mind, with a final resolution to get a full explanation from Mrs. Saintsbury, while she stood and smiled her winning assent up into the young man’s handsome face.

Mrs. Saintsbury, caught sight of them, and as if suddenly reminded of a forgotten duty, rushed vividly upon him.

“Mr. Mavering, I shall not let you stay with us another minute. You must go to your room now and get ready. You ought to have a little rest.”

He broke out in his laugh. “Do you think I want to go and lie down awhile, like a lady before a party?”

“I’m sure you’d be the stronger for it,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “But go, upon any theory. Don’t you see there isn’t a Senior left?”

He would not look round. “They’ve gone to other spreads,” he said. “But now I’ll tell you: it is pretty, near time, and if you’ll take me to my room, I’ll go.”

“You’re a spoiled boy,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.

“But I want Mrs. Pasmer to see the room of a real student — a reading man, and all that — and we’ll come, to humour you.”

“Well, come upon any theory,” said young Mavering.

His father, and Professor Saintsbury, who had been instructed by his wife not to lose sight of her, were at hand, and they crossed to that old hall which keeps its favour with the students in spite of the rivalry of the newer dormitories — it would be hard to say why.

Mrs. Pasmer willingly assented to its being much better, out of pure complaisance, though the ceilings were low and the windows small, and it did not seem to her that the Franklin stove and the aesthetic papering and painting of young Mavering’s room brought it up to the level of those others that she had seen. But with her habit of saying some friendly lying thing, no matter what her impressions were, she exclaimed; “Oh, how cosy!” and glad of the word, she went about from one to another, asking, “Isn’t this cosy?”

Mrs. Saintsbury said: “It’s supposed to be the cell of a recluse; but it is cosy — yes.”

“It looks as if some hermit had been using it as a store-room,” said her husband; for there were odds and ends of furniture and clothes and boxes and handbags scattered about the floor.

“I forgot all about them when I asked you,” cried Mavering, laughing out his delight. “They belong to some fellows that are giving spreads in their rooms, and I let them put them in here.”

“Do you commonly let people put things in your room that they want to get rid off?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Well, not when I’m expecting company.”

“He couldn’t refuse even then, if they pressed the matter,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, lecturing upon him to her friend.

“I’m afraid you’re too amiable altogether, Mr. Mavering. I’m sure you let people impose upon you,” said the other lady. “You have been letting us impose upon you.”

“Ah! now that proves you’re all wrong, Mrs. Pasmer.”

“It proves that you know how to say things very prettily.”

“Oh, thank you. I know when I’m having a good time, and I do my best to enjoy it.” He ended with the nervous laugh which seemed habitual with him.

“He, does laugh a good deal;” thought Mrs. Pasmer, surveying him with smiling steadiness. “I suppose it tires Alice. Some of his teeth are filled at the sides. That vein in his forehead — they say that means genius.” She said to him: “I hope you know when others are having a good time too, Mr. Mavering? You ought to have that reward.”

They both looked at Alice. “Oh, I should be so happy to think you hadn’t been bored with it all, Mrs. Pasmer,” he returned; — with-deep feeling.

Alice was looking at one of the sketches which were pretty plentifully pinned about the wall, and apparently seeing it and apparently listening to what Professor Saintsbury was saying; but her mother believed from a tremor of the ribbons on her hat that she was conscious of nothing but young Mavering’s gaze and the sound of his voice.

“We’ve been delighted, simply enchanted,” said Mrs. Pasmer. And she thought; “Now if Alice were to turn round just as she stands, he could see all the best points of her face. I wonder what she really thinks of him? What is it you have there; Alice?” she asked aloud.

The girl turned her face over her shoulder so exactly in the way her mother wished that Mrs. Pasmer could scarcely repress a cry of joy. “A sketch of Mr. Mavering’s.”

“Oh, how very interesting!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Do you sketch, Mr. Mavering? But of course.” She pressed forward, and studied the sketch inattentively. “How very, very good!” she buzzed deep in her throat, while, with a glance at her daughter, she thought, “How impassive Alice is! But she behaves with great dignity. Yes. Perhaps that’s best. And are you going to be an artist?” she asked of Mavering.

“Not if it can be prevented,” he answered, laughing again.

“But his laugh is very pleasant,” reflected Mrs. Pasmer. “Does Alice dislike it so much?” She repeated aloud, “If it can be prevented?”

“They think I might spoil a great lawyer in the attempt.”

“Oh, I see. And are you going to be a lawyer? But to be a great painter! And America has so few of them.” She knew quite well that she was talking nonsense, but she was aware, through her own indifference to the topic that he was not minding what she said, but was trying to bring himself into talk with Alice again. The girl persistently listened to Professor Saintsbury.

“Is she punishing him for something?” her mother asked herself. “What can it be for. Does she think he’s a little too pushing? Perhaps, he is a little pushing.” She reflected, with an inward sigh, that she would know whether he was if she only knew more about him.

He did the honours of his room very simply and nicely, and he said it was pretty rough to think this was the last of it. After which he faltered, and something occurred to Mrs Saintsbury.

“Why, we’re keeping you! It’s time for you to dress for the Tree. John” — she reproached her husband— “how could you let us do it?”

“Far be it from me to hurry ladies out of other people’s houses — especially ladies who have put themselves in charge of other people.”

“No, don’t hurry,” pleaded Mavering; “there’s plenty of time.”

“How much time?” asked Mrs. Saintsbury.

He looked at his watch. “Well, a good quarter of an hour.”

“And I was to have taken Mrs. Pasmer and Alice home for a little rest before the Tree!” cried Mrs Saintsbury. “And now we must go at once, or we shall get no sort of places.”

In the civil and satirical parley which followed, no one answered another, but young Mavering bore as full a part as the elder ladies, and only his father and Alice were silent: his guests got themselves out of his room. They met at the threshold a young fellow, short and dark and stout, in an old tennis suit. He fell back at sight of them, and took off his hat to Mrs. Saintsbury.

“Why, Mr. Boardman!”

“Don’t be bashful, Boardman?” young Mavering called out. “Come in and show them how I shall look in five minutes.”

Mr. Boardman took his introductions with a sort of main-force self-possession, and then said, “You’ll have to look it in less than five minutes now, Mavering. You’re come for.”

“What? Are they ready?”

“We must fly,” panted Mrs. Saintsbury, without waiting for the answer, which was lost in the incoherencies of all sorts of au revoirs called after and called back.

VII.

“That is one thing,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, looking swiftly round to see that the elder Mavering was not within hearing, as she hurried ahead with Mrs. Pasmer, “that I can’t stand in Dan Mavering. Why couldn’t he have warned us that it was getting near the time? Why should he have gone on pretending that there was no hurry? It isn’t insincerity exactly, but it isn’t candour; no, it’s uncandid. Oh, I suppose it’s the artistic temperament — never coming straight to the point.”

“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Pasmer eagerly.

“I’ll tell you sometime.” She looked round and halted a little for Alice, who was walking detached and neglected by the preoccupation of the two elderly men. “I’m afraid you’re tired,” she said to the girl.

“Oh no.”

“Of course not, on Class Day. But I hope we shall get seats. What weather!”

The sun had not been oppressive at any time during the day, though the crowded building had been close and warm, and now it lay like a painted light on the grass and paths over which they passed to the entrance of the grounds around the Tree. Holden Chapel, which enclosed the space on the right as they went in, shed back the sun from its brick-red flank, rising unrelieved in its venerable ugliness by any touch of the festive preparations; but to their left and diagonally across from them high stagings supported tiers of seats along the equally unlovely red bulks of Hollis and of Harvard. These seats, and the windows in the stories above them, were densely packed with people, mostly young girls dressed in a thousand enchanting shades and colours, and bonneted and hatted to the last effect of fashion. They were like vast terraces of flowers to the swift glance, and here and there some brilliant parasol, spread to catch the sun on the higher ranks, was like a flaunting poppy, rising to the light and lolling out above the blooms of lower stature. But the parasols were few, for the two halls flung wide curtains of shade over the greater part of the spectators, and across to the foot of the chapel, while a piece of the carpentry whose simplicity seems part of the Class Day tradition shut out the glare and the uninvited public, striving to penetrate the enclosure next the street. In front of this yellow pine wall; with its ranks of benches, stood the Class Day Tree, girded at ten or fifteen feet from the ground with a wide band of flowers.

Mrs. Pasmer and her friends found themselves so late that if some gentlemen who knew Professor Saintsbury had not given up their places they could have got no seats. But this happened, and the three ladies had harmoniously blended their hues with those of the others in that bank of bloom, and the gentlemen had somehow made away with their obstructiveness in different crouching and stooping postures at their feet, when the Junior Class filed into the green enclosure amidst the ‘rahs of their friends; and sank in long ranks on the grass beside the chapel. Then the Sophomores appeared, and were received with cheers by the Juniors, with whom they joined, as soon as they were placed, in heaping ignominy upon the freshmen. The Seniors came last, grotesque in the variety of their old clothes, and a fierce uproar of ‘rahs and yells met them from the students squatted upon the grass as they loosely grouped themselves in front of the Tree; the men of the younger classes formed in three rings, and began circling in different directions around them.

Mrs. Pasmer bent across Mrs. Saintsbury to her daughter: “Can you make out Mr. Mavering among them, Alice?”

“No. Hush, mamma!” pleaded the girl.

With the subsidence of the tumult in the other classes, the Seniors had broken from the stoical silence they kept through it, and were now with an equally serious clamour applauding the first of a long list of personages, beginning with the President, and ranging through their favourites in the Faculty down to Billy the Postman. The leader who invited them to this expression of good feeling exacted the full tale of nine cheers for each person he named, and before he reached the last the ‘rahs came in gasps from their dry throats.

In the midst of the tumult the marshal flung his hat at the elm; then the rush upon the tree took place, and the scramble for the flowers. The first who swarmed up the trunk were promptly plucked down by the legs and flung upon the ground, as if to form a base there for the operations of the rest; who surged and built themselves up around the elm in an irregular mass. From time to time some one appeared clambering over heads and shoulders to make a desperate lunge and snatch at the flowers, and then fall back into the fluctuant heap again. Yells, cries, and clappings of hands came from the other students, and the spectators in the seats, involuntarily dying away almost to silence as some stronger or wilfuler aspirant held his own on the heads and shoulders of the others, or was stayed there by his friends among them till he could make sure of a handful of the flowers. A rush was made upon him when he reached the ground; if he could keep his flowers from the hands that snatched at them, he staggered away with the fragments. The wreath began to show wide patches of the bark under it; the surging and struggling crowd below grew less dense; here and there one struggled out of it and walked slowly about, panting pitiably.

“Oh, I wonder they don’t kill each other!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “Isn’t it terrible?” She would not have missed it on any account; but she liked to get all she could out of her emotions.

“They never get hurt,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “Oh, look! There’s Dan Mavering!”

The crowd at the foot of the tree had closed densely, and a wilder roar went up from all the students. A tall, slim young fellow, lifted on the shoulders of the mass below, and staying himself with one hand against the tree, rapidly stripped away the remnants of the wreath, and flung them into the crowd under him. A single tuft remained; the crowd was melting away under him in a scramble for the fallen flowers; he made a crooked leap, caught the tuft, and tumbled with it headlong.

“Oh!” breathed the ladies on the Benches, with a general suspiration lost in the ‘rahs and clappings, as Mavering reappeared with the bunch of flowers in his hand. He looked dizzily about, as if not sure, of his course; then his face, flushed and heated, with the hair pulled over the eyes, brightened with recognition, and he advanced upon Mrs. Saintsbury’s party with rapid paces, each of which Mrs. Pasmer commentated with inward conjecture.

“Is he bringing the flowers to Alice? Isn’t it altogether too conspicuous? Has he really the right to do it? What will people think? Will he give them to me for her, or will he hand them directly to her? Which should I prefer him to do? I wonder if I know?”

When she looked up with the air of surprise mixed with deprecation and ironical disclaimer which she had prepared while these things were passing through her mind, young Mavering had reached them, and had paused in a moment’s hesitation before his father. With a bow of affectionate burlesque, from which he lifted his face to break into laughter at the look in all their eyes, he handed the tattered nosegay to his father.

“Oh, how delightful! how delicate! how perfect!” Mrs. Pasmer confided to herself.

“I think this must be for you, Mrs. Pasmer,” said the elder Mavering, offering her the bouquet, with a grave smile at his son’s whim.

“Oh no, indeed!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “For Mrs. Saintsbury, of course.”

She gave it to her, and Mrs. Saintsbury at once transferred it to Miss Pasmer.

“They wished me to pass this to you, Alice;” and at this consummation Dan Mavering broke into another happy laugh.

“Mrs. Saintsbury, you always do the right thing at once,” he cried.

“That’s more than I can say of you, Mr. Mavering,” she retorted.

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Mavering!” said the girl, receiving the flowers. It was as if she had been too intent upon them and him to have noticed the little comedy that had conveyed them to her.

VIII.

As soon after Class Day as Mrs. Pasmer’s complaisant sense of the decencies would let her, she went out from Boston to call on Mrs. Saintsbury in Cambridge, and thank her for her kindness to Alice and herself. “She will know well enough what I come for,” she said to herself, and she felt it the more important to ignore Mrs. Saintsbury’s penetration by every polite futility; this was due to them both: and she did not go till the second day after.

Mrs. Saintsbury came down into the darkened, syringa-scented library to find her, and give her a fan.

“You still live, Jenny,” she said, kissing her gaily.

They called each other by their girl names, as is rather the custom in Boston with ladies who are in the same set, whether they are great friends or not. In the more changeful society of Cambridge, where so many new people are constantly coming and going in connection with the college, it is not so much the custom; but Mrs. Saintsbury was Boston born, as well as Mrs. Pasmer, and was Cantabrigian by marriage — though this is not saying that she was not also thoroughly so by convincement and usage she now rarely went into Boston society.

“Yes, Etta — just. But I wasn’t sure of it,” said Mrs. Pasmer, “when I woke yesterday. I was a mere aching jelly!”

“And Alice?”

“Oh; I don’t think she had any physical consciousness. She was a mere rapturous memory!”

“She did have a good time, didn’t she?” said Mrs. Saintsbury, in a generous retrospect. “I think she was on her feet every moment in the evening. It kept me from getting tired, to watch her.”

“I was afraid you’d be quite worn out. I’d no idea it was so late. It must have been nearly half past seven before we got away from the Beck Hall spread, and then by the time we had walked round the college grounds — how extremely pretty the lanterns were, and how charming the whole effect was! — it must have been nine before the dancing began. Well, we owe it all to you, Etta.”

“I don’t know what you mean by owing. I’m always glad of an excuse for Class Day. And it was Dan Mavering who really managed the affair.”

“He was very kind,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a feeling which was chiefly gratitude to her friend for bringing in his name so soon. Now that it had been spoken, she felt it decorous to throw aside the outer integument of pretense, which if it could have been entirely exfoliated would have caused Mrs. Pasmer morally to disappear, like an onion stripped of its successive laminae.

“What did you mean,” she asked, leaning forward, with, her face averted, “about his having the artistic temperament? Is he going to be an artist? I should hope not.” She remembered without shame that she had strongly urged him to consider how much better it would be to be a painter than a lawyer, in the dearth of great American painters.

“He could be a painter if he liked — up to a certain point,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “Or he could be any one of half-a-dozen other things — his last craze was journalism; but you know what I mean by the artistic temperament: it’s that inability to be explicit; that habit of leaving things vague and undefined, and hoping they’ll somehow come out as you want them of themselves; that way of taking the line of beauty to get at what you wish to do or say, and of being very finicking about little things and lag about essentials. That’s what I mean by the artistic temperament.”

“Yes; that’s terrible,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, with the abstractly severe yet personally pitying perception of one whose every word and act was sincere and direct. “I know just what you mean. But how does it apply to Mr. Mavering?”

“It doesn’t, exactly,” returned her friend. “And I’m always ashamed when I say, or even think, anything against Dan Mavering. He’s sweetness itself. We’ve known him ever since he came to Harvard, and I must say that a more constant and lovely follow I never saw. It wasn’t merely when he was a Freshman, and he had that home feeling hanging about him still that makes all the Freshmen so appreciative of anything you do for them; but all through the Sophomore and Junior years, when they’re so taken up with their athletics and their societies and their college life generally that they haven’t a moment for people that have been kind to them, he was just as faithful as ever.”

“How nice!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

“Yes, indeed! And all the allurements of Boston society haven’t taken him from us altogether. You can’t imagine how much this means till you’ve been at home a while and seen how the students are petted and spoiled nowadays in the young society.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of it,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “And is it his versatility and brilliancy, or his amiability, that makes him such a universal favourite?”

“Universal favourite? I don’t know that he’s that.”

“Well, popular, then.”

“Oh, he’s certainly very much liked. But, Jenny, there are no universal favourites in Harvard now, if there ever were: the classes are altogether too big. And it wouldn’t be ability, and it wouldn’t be amiability alone, that would give a man any sort of leadership.”

“What in the world would it be?”

“That question, more than anything else, shows how long you’ve been away, Jenny. It would be family — family, with a judicious mixture of the others, and with money.”

“Is it possible? But of course — I remember! Only at their age one thinks of students as being all hail-fellow-well-met with each other—”

“Yes; it’s hard to realise how conventional they are — how very much worldlier than the world — till one sees it as one does in Cambridge. They pique themselves on it. And Mr. Saintsbury” — she was one of those women whom everything reminds of their husbands “says that it isn’t a bad thing altogether. He says that Harvard is just like the world; and even if it’s a little more so, these boys have got to live in the world, and they had better know what it is. You may not approve of the Harvard spirit, and Mr. Saintsbury doesn’t sympathise with it; he only says it’s the world’s spirit. Harvard men — the swells — are far more exclusive than Oxford men. A student, ‘comme il faut’, wouldn’t at all like to be supposed to know another student whom we valued for his brilliancy, unless he was popular and well known in college.”

“Dear me!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “But of course! It’s perfectly natural, with young people. And it’s well enough that they should begin to understand how things really are in the world early; it will save them from a great many disappointments.”

“I assure you we have very little to teach Harvard men in those matters. They could give any of us points. Those who are of good family and station know how to protect themselves by reserves that the others wouldn’t dare to transgress. But a merely rich man couldn’t rise in their set any more than a merely gifted man. He could get on to a certain point by toadying, and some do; but he would never get to be popular, like Dan Mavering.”

“And what makes him popular? — to go back to the point we started from,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“Ah, that’s hard to say. It’s — quality, I suppose. I don’t mean social quality, exactly; but personal charm. He never had a mean thought; of course we’re all full of mean thoughts, and Dan is too; but his first impulse is always generous and sweet, and at his age people act a great deal from impulse. I don’t suppose he ever met a human being without wanting to make him like him, and trying to do it.”

“Yes, he certainly makes you like him,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer. “But I understand that he can’t make people like him without family or money; and I don’t understand that he’s one of those ‘nouveaux riches’ who are giving Harvard such a reputation for extravagance nowadays.”

There was an inquiring note in Mrs. Pasmer’s voice; and in the syringa-scented obscurity, which protected the ladies from the expression of each other’s faces, Mrs. Saintsbury gave a little laugh of intelligence, to which Mrs. Pasmer responded by a murmur of humorous enjoyment at being understood.

“Oh no! He isn’t one of those. But the Maverings have plenty of money,” said Mrs. Saintsbury, “and Dan’s been very free with it, though not lavish. And he came here with a reputation for popularity from a very good school, and that always goes a very great way in college.”

“Yes?” said Mrs. Pasmer, feeling herself getting hopelessly adrift in these unknown waters; but reposing a pious confidence in her pilot.

“Yes; if a sufficient number of his class said he was the best fellow in the world, he would be pretty sure to be chosen one of the First Ten in the ‘Dickey’.”

“What mysteries!” gasped Mrs. Pasmer, disposed to make fun of them, but a little overawed all the same. “What in the world is the ‘Dickey’?”

“It’s the society that the Freshmen are the most eager to get into. They’re chosen, ten at a time, by the old members, and to be one of the first ten — the only Freshmen chosen — is something quite ineffable.”

“I see.” Mrs. Pasmer fanned herself, after taking a long breath. “And when he had got into the —— —”

“Then it would depend upon himself, how he spent his money, and all that, and what sort of society success he was in Boston. That has a great deal to do with it from the first. Then another thing is caution — discreetness; not saying anything censorious or critical of other men, no matter what they do. And Dan Mavering is the perfection of prudence, because he’s the perfection of good-nature.”

Mrs. Pasmer had apparently got all of these facts that she could digest. “And who are the Maverings?”

“Why, it’s an old Boston name—”

“It’s too old, isn’t it? Like Pasmer. There are no Maverings in Boston that I ever heard of.”

“No; the name’s quite died out just here, I believe: but it’s old, and it bids fair to be replated at Ponkwasset Falls.”

“At Ponk—”

“That’s where they have their mills, or factories, or shops, or whatever institution they make wall-paper in.”

“Wall-paper!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, austerely. After a moment she asked: “And is wall-paper the ‘thing’ now? I mean—” She tried to think of some way of modifying the commonness of her phrase, but did not. After all, it expressed her meaning.

“It isn’t the extreme of fashion, of course. But it’s manufacturing, and it isn’t disgraceful. And the Mavering papers are very pretty, and you can live with them without becoming anaemic, or having your face twitch.”

“Face twitch?” echoed Mrs. Pasmer.

“Yes; arsenical poisoning.”

“Oh! Conscientious as well as aesthetic. I see. And does Mr. Mavering put his artistic temperament into them?”

“His father does. He’s a very interesting man. He has the best taste in certain things — he knows more about etchings, I suppose, than any one else in Boston.”

“Is it possible! And does he live at Ponkwasset Falls? It’s in Rhode Island, isn’t it?”

“New Hampshire. Yes; the whole family live there.”

“The whole family? Are there many of them? I’d fancied, somehow, that Mr. Mavering was the only —— Do tell me about them, Etta,” said Mrs. Pasmer, leaning back in her chair, and fanning herself with an effect of impartial interest, to which the dim light of the room lent itself.

“He’s the only son. But there are daughters, of course — very cultivated girls.”

“And is he — is the elder Mr. Mavering a — I don’t know what made me think so — a widower?”

“Well, no — not exactly.”

“Not exactly! He’s not a grass-widower, I hope?”

“No, indeed. But his wife’s a helpless invalid, and always has been. He’s perfectly devoted to her; and he hurried home yesterday, though he wanted very much to stay for Commencement. He’s never away from her longer than he can help. She’s bedridden; and you can see from the moment you enter it that it’s a man’s house. Daughters can’t change that, you know.”

“Have you been there?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, surprised that she was getting so much information, but eager for more. “Why, how long have you known them, Etta?”

“Only since Dan came to Harvard. Mr. Saintsbury took a fancy to him from the start, and the boy was so fond of him that they were always insisting upon a visit; and last summer we stopped there on our way to the mountains.”

“And the sisters — do they stay there the whole year round? Are they countrified?”

“One doesn’t live in the country without being countrified,” said Mrs. Saintsbury. “They’re rather quiet girls, though they’ve been about a good deal — to Europe with friends, and to New York in the winter. They’re older than Dan; they’re more like their father. Are you afraid of that draught at the windows?”

“Oh no; it’s delicious. And he’s like the mother?”

“Yes.”

“Then it’s the father who has the artistic taste — he gets that from him; and the mother who has the—”

“Temperament — yes.”

“How extremely interesting! And so he’s going to be a lawyer. Why lawyer, if he’s got the talent and the temperament of an artist? Does his father wish him to be a lawyer?”

“His father wishes him to be a wall-paper maker.”

“And the young man compromises on the law. I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “And you say he’s been going into Boston a great deal? Where does he go?”

The ladies entered into this social inquiry with a zest which it would be hard to make the reader share, or perhaps to feel the importance of. It is enough that it ended in the social vindication of Dan Mavering. It would not have been enough for Mrs Pasmer that he was accepted in the best Cambridge houses; she knew of old how people were accepted in Cambridge for their intellectual brilliancy or solidity, their personal worth, and all sorts of things, without consideration of the mystical something which gives vogue in Boston.

“How superb Alice was!” Mrs. Saintsbury broke off abruptly. “She has such a beautiful manner. Such repose.”

“Repose! Yes,” said her mother, thoughtfully. “But she’s very intense. And I don’t see where she gets it. Her father has repose enough, but he has no intensity; and I’m all intensity, and no repose. But I’m no more like my mother than Alice is like me.”

“I think she has the Hibbins face,” said Mrs. Saintsbury.

“Oh! she’s got the Hibbins face,” said Mrs Pasmer, with a disdain of tone which she did not at all feel; the tone was mere absent-mindedness.

She was about to revert to the question of Mavering’s family, when the door-bell rang, and another visitor interrupted her talk with Mrs. Saintsbury.

IX.

Mrs. Pasmer’s husband looked a great deal older than herself, and, by operation of a well-known law of compensation, he was lean and silent, while she was plump and voluble. He had thick eyebrows, which remained black after his hair and beard had become white, and which gave him an aspect of fierceness, expressive of nothing in his character. It was from him that their daughter got her height, and, as Mrs. Pasmer freely owned, her distinction.

Soon after their marriage the Pasmers had gone to live in Paris, where they remained faithful to the fortunes of the Second Empire till its fall, with intervals of return to their own country of a year or two years at a time. After the fall of the Empire they made their sojourn in England, where they lived upon the edges and surfaces of things, as Americans must in Europe everywhere, but had more permanency of feeling than they had known in France, and something like a real social status. At one time it seemed as if they might end their days there; but that which makes Americans different from all other peoples, and which finally claims their allegiance for their own land, made them wish to come back to America, and to come back to Boston. After all, their place in England was strictly inferior, and must be. They knew titles, and consorted with them, but they had none themselves, and the English constancy which kept their friends faithful to them after they had become an old story, was correlated with the English honesty which never permitted them to mistake themselves for even the lowest of the nobility. They went out last, and they did not come in first, ever.

The invitations, upon these conditions, might have gone on indefinitely, but they did not imply a future for the young girl in whom the interests of her parents centred. After being so long a little girl, she had become a great girl, and then all at once she had become a young lady. They had to ask themselves, the mother definitely and the father formlessly, whether they wished their daughter to marry an Englishman, and their hearts answered them, like true Republican hearts, Not an untitled Englishman, while they saw no prospect of her getting any other. Mrs. Pasmer philosophised the case with a clearness and a courage which gave her husband a series of twinges analogous to the toothache, for a man naturally shrinks from such bold realisations. She said Alice had the beauty of a beauty, and she had the distinction of a beauty, but she had not the principles of a beauty; there was no use pretending that she had. For this reason the Prince of Wales’s set, so accessible to American loveliness with the courage of its convictions, was beyond her; and the question was whether there was money enough for a younger son, or whether, if there was, a younger son was worth it.

However this might be, there was no question but there was now less money than there had been, and a great deal less. The investments had not turned out as they promised; not only had dividends been passed, but there had been permanent shrinkages. What was once an amiable competency from the pooling of their joint resources had dwindled to a sum that needed a careful eye both to the income and the outgo. Alice’s becoming a young lady had increased their expenses by the suddenly mounting cost of her dresses, and of the dresses which her mother must now buy for the different role she had to sustain in society. They began to ask themselves what it was for, and to question whether, if she could not marry a noble Englishman, Alice had not better marry a good American.

Even with Mrs. Pasmer this question was tacit, and it need not be explained to any one who knows our life that in her most worldly dreams she intended at the bottom of her heart that her daughter should marry for love. It is the rule that Americans marry for love, and the very rare exception that they marry for anything else; and if our divorce courts are so busy in spite of this fact, it is perhaps because the Americans also unmarry for love, or perhaps because love is not so sufficient in matters of the heart as has been represented in the literature of people who have not been able to give it so fair a trial. But whether it is all in all in marriage, or only a very marked essential, it is certain that Mrs. Pasmer expected her daughter’s marriage to involve it. She would have shrunk from intimating anything else to her as from a gross indecency; and she could not possibly, by any finest insinuation, have made her a partner in her design for her happiness. That, so far as Alice was concerned, was a thing which was to fall to her as from heaven; for this also is part of the American plan. We are the children of the poets, the devotees of the romancers, so far as that goes; and however material and practical we are in other things, in this we are a republic of shepherds and shepherdesses, and we live in a golden age; which if it sometimes seems an age of inconvertible paper, is certainly so through no want of faith in us.

Though the Pasmers said that they ought to go home for Alice’s sake, they both understood that they were going home experimentally, and not with the intention of laying their bones in their native soil, unless they liked it, or found they could afford it. Mrs. Pasmer had no illusions in regard to it. She had learned from her former visits home that it was frightfully expensive; and, during the fifteen years which they had spent chiefly abroad, she had observed the decay of that distinction which formerly attended returning sojourners from Europe. She had seen them cease gradually from the romantic reverence which once clothed them, and decline through a gathering indifference into something like slight and compassion, as people who have not been able to make their place or hold their own at home; and she had taught herself so well how to pocket the superiority natural to the Europeanised American before arriving at consciousness of this disesteem, that she paid a ready tribute to people who had always stayed at home.

In fact Mrs. Pasmer was a flatterer, and it cannot be claimed for her that she flattered adroitly always. But adroitness in flattery is not necessary for its successful use. There is no morsel of it too gross for the condor gullet and the ostrich stomach of human vanity; there is no society in which it does not give the utterer instant honour and acceptance in greater or less degree. Mrs. Pasmer, who was very good-natured, employed it because she liked it herself, and knowing how absolutely worthless it was from her own tongue, prized it from others. She could have rested perfectly safe without it in her social position, which she found unchanged by years of absence. She had not been a Hibbins for nothing, and she was not a Pasmer for nothing, though why she should have been either for something it would not be easy to say.

But while confessing the foibles of Mrs. Pasmer, it would not be fair to omit from the tale of her many virtues the final conscientiousness of her openly involuted character. Not to mention other things, she instituted and practised economies as alien to her nature as to her husband’s, and in their narrowing affairs she kept him out of debt. She was prudent; she was alert; and while presenting to the world all the outward effect of a butterfly, she possessed some of the best qualities of the bee.

With his senatorial presence, his distinction of person and manner, Mr. Pasmer was inveterately selfish in that province of small personal things where his wife left him unmolested. In what related to his own comfort and convenience he was undisputed lord of himself. It was she who ordered their comings and goings, and decided in which hemisphere they should sojourn from time to time, and in what city, street, and house, but always with the understanding that the kitchen and all the domestic appointments were to her husband’s mind. He was sensitive to degrees of heat and cold, and luxurious in the matter of lighting, and he had a fine nose for plumbing. If he had not occupied himself so much with these details, he was the sort of man to have thought Mrs. Pasmer, with her buzz of activities and pretences, rather a tedious little woman. He had some delicate tastes, if not refined interests, and was expensively fond of certain sorts of bric-a-brac: he spent a great deal of time in packing and unpacking it, and he had cases stored in Rome and London and Paris; it had been one of his motives in consenting to come home that he might get them out, and set up the various objects of bronze and porcelain in cabinets. He had no vices, unless absolute idleness ensuing uninterruptedly upon a remotely demonstrated unfitness for business can be called a vice. Like other people who have always been idle, he did not consider his idleness a vice. He rather plumed himself upon it, for the man who has done nothing all his life naturally looks down upon people who have done or are doing something. In Europe he had not all the advantage of this superiority which such a man has here; he was often thrown with other idle people, who had been useless for so many generations that they had almost ceased to have any consciousness of it. In their presence Pasmer felt that his uselessness had not that passive elegance which only ancestral uselessness can give; that it was positive, and to that degree vulgar.

A life like this was not one which would probably involve great passions or affections, and it would be hard to describe exactly the feeling with which he regarded his daughter. He liked her, of course, and he had naturally expected certain things of her, as a ladylike intelligence, behaviour, and appearance; but he had never shown any great tenderness for her, or even pride in her. She had never given him any displeasure, however, and he had not shared his wife’s question of mind at a temporary phase of Alice’s development when she showed a decided inclination for a religious life. He had apparently not observed that the girl had a pensive temperament in spite of the effect of worldly splendour which her mother contrived for her, and that this pensiveness occasionally deepened to gloom. He had certainly never seen that in a way of her own she was very romantic. Mrs. Pasmer had seen it, with amusement sometimes, and sometimes with anxiety, but always with the courage to believe that she could cope with it when it was necessary.

Whenever it was necessary she had all the moral courage she wanted; it seemed as if she could have it or not as she liked; and in coming home she had taken a flat instead of a house, though she had not talked with her friends three minutes without perceiving that the moment when flats had promised to assert their social equality with houses in Boston was past for ever. There were, of course, cases in which there could be no question of them; but for the most part they were plainly regarded as makeshifts, the resorts of people of small means, or the defiances or errors of people who had lived too much abroad. They stamped their occupants as of transitory and fluctuant character; good people might live in them, and did, as good people sometimes boarded; but they could not be regarded as forming a social base, except in rare instances. They presented peculiar difficulties in calling, and for any sort of entertainment they were too — not public, perhaps, but — evident.

In spite of these objections Mrs. Pasmer took a flat in the Cavendish, and she took it furnished from people who were going abroad for a year.

X.

Mrs. Pasmer stood at the drawing-room window of this apartment, the morning after her call upon Mrs. Saintsbury, looking out on the passage of an express-wagon load of trunks through Cavendish Square, and commenting the fact with the tacit reflection that it was quite time she should be getting away from Boston too, when her daughter, who was looking out of the other window, started significantly back.

“What is it, Alice?”

“Nothing! Mr. Mavering, I think, and that friend of his — —”

“Which friend? But where? Don’t look! They will think we were watching them. I can’t see them at all. Which way were they going?” Mrs. Pasmer dramatised a careless unconsciousness to the square, while vividly betraying this anxiety to her daughter.

Alice walked away to the furthest part of the room. “They are coming this way,” she said indifferently.

Before Mrs. Pasmer had time to prepare a conditional mood, adapted either to their coming that way or going some other, she heard the janitor below in colloquy with her maid in the kitchen, and then the maid came in to ask if she should say the ladies were at home. “Oh, certainly,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a caressing politeness that anticipated the tone she meant to use with Mavering and his friend. “Were you going, Alice? Better stay. It would be awkward sending out for you. You look well enough.”

“Well!”

The young men came in, Mavering with his nervous laugh first, and then Boardman with his twinkling black eyes, and his main-force self-possession.

“We couldn’t go away as far as New London without coming to see whether you had really survived Class Day,” said the former, addressing his solicitude to Mrs. Pasmer. “I tried to find out from, Mrs. Saintsbury, but she was very noncommittal.” He laughed again, and shook hands with Alice, whom he now included in his inquiry.

“I’m glad she was,” said Mrs. Pasmer — inwardly wondering what he meant by going to New London— “if it sent you to ask in person.” She made them sit down; and she made as little as possible of the young ceremony they threw into the transaction. To be cosy, to be at ease instantly, was Mrs. Pasmer’s way. “We’ve not only survived, we’ve taken a new lease of life from Class Day. I’d for gotten how charming it always was. Or perhaps it didn’t use to be so charming? I don’t believe they have anything like it in Europe. Is it always so brilliant?”

“I don’t know,” said Mavering. “I really believe it was rather a nice one.”

“Oh, we were both enraptured,” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

Alice added a quiet “Yes, indeed,” and her mother went on —

“And we thought the Beck Hall spread was the crowning glory of the whole affair. We owe ever so much to your kindness.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Mavering.

“But we were talking afterward, Alice and I, about the sudden transformation of all that disheveled crew around the Tree into the imposing swells — may I say howling swells?—”

“Yes, do say ‘howling,’ Mrs. Pasmer!” implored the young man.

“ — whom we met afterward at the spread,” she concluded. “How did you manage it all? Mr. Irving in the ‘Lyons Mail’ was nothing to it. We thought we had walked directly over from the Tree; and there you were, all ready to receive us, in immaculate evening dress.”

“It was pretty quick work,” modestly admitted the young man. “Could you recognise any one in that hurly-burly round the Tree?”

“We didn’t till you rose, like a statue of Victory, and began grabbing for the spoils from the heads and shoulders of your friends. Who was your pedestal?”

Mavering put his hand on his friend’s broad shoulder, and gave him a playful push.

Boardman turned up his little black eyes at him, with a funny gleam in them.

“Poor Mr. Boardman!” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“It didn’t hurt him a bit,” said Mavering, pushing him. “He liked it.”

“Of course he did,” said Mrs. Pasmer, implying, in flattery of Mavering, that Boardman might be glad of the distinction; and now Boardman looked as if he were not. She began to get away in adding, “But I wonder you don’t kill each other.”

“Oh, we’re not so easily killed,” said Mavering.

“And what a fairy scene it was at the spread!” said Mrs. Pasmer, turning to Boardman. She had already talked its splendours over with Mavering the same evening. “I thought we should never get out of the Hall; but when we did get out of the window upon that tapestried platform, and down on the tennis-ground, with Turkey rugs to hide the bare spots in it—” She stopped as people do when it is better to leave the effect to the listener’s imagination.

“Yes, I think it was rather nice,” said Boardman.

“Nice?” repeated Mrs. Pasmer; and she looked at Mavering. “Is that the famous Harvard Indifferentism?”

“No, no, Mrs. Pasmer! It’s just his personal envy. He wasn’t in the spread, and of course he doesn’t like to hear any one praise it. Go on!” They all laughed.

“Well, even Mr. Boardman will admit,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “that nothing could have been prettier than that pavilion at the bottom of the lawn, and the little tables scattered about over it, and all those charming young creatures under that lovely evening sky.”

“Ah! Even Boardman can’t deny that. We did have the nicest crowd; didn’t we?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Pasmer, playfully checking herself in a ready adhesion, “that depends a good deal upon where Mr. Boardman’s spread was.”

“Thank you,” said Boardman.

“He wasn’t spreading anywhere,” cried his friend. “Except himself — he was spreading himself everywhere.”

“Then I think I should prefer to remain neutral,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a mock prudence which pleased the young men. In the midst of the pleasure the was giving and feeling she was all the time aware that her daughter had contributed but one remark to the conversation, and that she must be seeming very stiff and cold. She wondered what that meant, and whether she disliked this little Mr. Boardman, or whether she was again trying to punish Mr. Mavering for something, and, if so, what it was. Had he offended her in some way the other day? At any rate, she had no right to show it. She longed for some chance to scold the girl, and tell her that it would not do, and make her talk. Mr. Mavering was merely a friendly acquaintance, and there could be no question of anything personal. She forgot that between young people the social affair is always trembling to the personal affair.

In the little pause which these reflections gave her mother, the girl struck in, with the coolness that always astonished Mrs. Pasmer, and as if she had been merely waiting till some phase of the talk interested her.

“Are many of the students going to the race?” she asked Boardman.

“Yes; nearly everybody. That is—”

“The race?” queried Mrs. Pasmer.

“Yes, at New London,” Mavering broke in. “Don’t you know? The University race — Harvard and Yale.”

“Oh — oh yes,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, wondering how her daughter should know about the race, and she not. “Had they talked it over together on Class Day?” she asked herself. She felt herself, in spite of her efforts to keep even with them; left behind and left out, as later age must be distanced and excluded by youth. “Are you gentlemen going to row?” she asked Mavering.

“No; they’ve ruled the tubs out this time; and we should send anything else to the bottom.”

Mrs. Pasmer perceived that he was joking, but also that they were not of the crew; and she said that if that was the case the should not go.

“Oh, don’t let that keep you away! Aren’t you going? I hoped you were going,” continued the young man, speaking with his eyes on Mrs. Pasmer, but with his mind, as she could see by his eyes, on her daughter.

“No, no.”

“Oh, do go, Mrs. Pasmer!” he urged: “I wish you’d go along to chaperon us.”

Mrs. Pasmer accepted the notion with amusement. “I should think you might look after each other. At any rate, I think I must trust you to Mr. Boardman this time.”

“Yes; but he’s going on business,” persisted Mavering, as if for the pleasure he found in fencing with the air, “and he can’t look after me.”

“On business?” said Mrs. Pasmer, dropping her outspread fan on her lap, incredulously.

“Yes; he’s going into journalism — he’s gone into it,” laughed Mavering; “and he’s going down to report the race for the ‘Events’.”

“Really!” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with a glance at Boardman, whose droll embarrassment did not contradict his friend’s words. “How splendid!” she cried. “I had, heard that a great many Harvard men were taking up journalism. I’m so glad of it! It will do everything to elevate its tone.”

Boardman seemed to suffer under these expectations a little, and he stole a glance of comical menace at his friend.

“Yes,” said Mavering; “you’ll see a very different tone about the fires, and the fights, and the distressing accidents, in the ‘Events’ after this.”

“What does he mean?” she asked Boardman, giving him unavoidably the advantage of the caressing manner which was in her mind for Mavering.

“Well, you see,” said Boardman, “we have to begin pretty low down.”

“Oh, but all departments of our press need reforming, don’t they?” she inquired consolingly. “One hears such shocking things about our papers abroad. I’m sure that the more Harvard men go into them the better. And how splendid it is to have them going into politics the way they are! They’re going into politics too, aren’t they?” She looked from one young man to the other with an idea that she was perhaps shooting rather wild, and an amiable willingness to be laughed at if she were. “Why don’t you go into politics, Mr. Mavering?”

“Well, the fact is—”

“So many of the young University men do in England,” said Mrs. Pasmer, fortifying her position.

“Well, you see, they haven’t got such a complete machine in England—”

“Oh yes, that dreadful machine!” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, who had heard of it, but did not know in the least what it was.

“Do you think the Harvard crew will beat this time?” Alice asked of Boardman.

“Well, to tell you the truth—”

“Oh, but you must never believe him when he begins that way!” cried Mavering. “To be sure they will beat. And you ought to be there to see it. Now, why won’t you come, Mrs. Pasmer?” he pleaded, turning to her mother.

“Oh, I’m afraid we must be getting away from Boston by that time. It’s very tiresome, but there seems to be nobody left; and one can’t stay quite alone, even if you’re sick of moving about. Have you ever been — we think of going there — to Campobello?”

“No; but I hear that it’s charming, there. I had a friend who was there last year, and he said it was charming. The only trouble is it’s so far. You’re pretty well on the way to Europe when you get there. You know it’s all hotel life?”

“Yes. It’s quite a new place, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s been opened up several years. And they say it isn’t like the hotel life anywhere else; it’s charming. And there’s the very nicest class of people.”

“Very nice Philadelphia people, I hear,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and Baltimore. Don’t you think it’s well;” she asked deferentially, and under correction, if she were hazarding too much, “to see somebody besides Boston people sometimes — if they’re nice? That seems to be one of the great advantages of living abroad.”

“Oh, I think there are nice people everywhere,” said the young man, with the bold expansion of youth.

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer. “We saw two such delightful young people coming in and out of the hotel in Rome. We were sure they were English. And they were from Chicago! But there are not many Western people at Campobello, are there?”

“I really don’t know,” said Mavering. “How is it, Boardman? Do many of your people go there?”

“You know you do make it so frightfully expensive with your money,” said Mrs. Pasmer, explaining with a prompt effect of having known all along that Boardman was from the West, “You drive us poor people all away.”

“I don’t think my money would do it,” said Boardman quietly.

“Oh, you wait till you’re a Syndicate Correspondent,” said, Mavering, putting his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and rising by aid of it. He left Mrs. Pasmer to fill the chasm that had so suddenly yawned between her and Boardman; and while she tumbled into every sort of flowery friendliness and compliment, telling him she should look out for his account of the race with the greatest interest, and expressing the hope that he would get as far as Campobello during the summer, Mavering found some minutes for talk with Alice. He was graver with her — far graver than with her mother — not only because she was a more serious nature, but because they were both young, and youth is not free with youth except by slow and cautious degrees. In that little space of time they talked of pictures, ‘a propos’ of some on the wall, and of books, because of those on the table.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer when they paused, and she felt that her piece of difficult engineering had been quite successful, “Mrs. Saintsbury was telling me what a wonderful connoisseur of etchings your father is.”

“I believe he does know something about them,” said the young man modestly.

“And he’s gone back already?”

“Oh yes. He never stays long away from my mother. I shall be going home myself as soon as I get back from the race.”

“And shall you spend the summer there?”

“Part of it. I always like to do that.”

“Perhaps when you get away you’ll come as far as Campobello — with Mr. Boardman,” she added.

“Has Boardman promised to go?” laughed Mavering. “He will promise anything. Well, I’ll come to Campobello if you’ll come to New London. Do come, Mrs. Pasmer!”

The mother stood watching the two young men from the window as they made their way across the square together. She had now, for some reason; no apparent scruple in being seen to do so.

“How ridiculous that stout little Mr. Boardman is with him!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “He hardly comes up to his shoulder. Why in the world should he have brought him?”

“I thought he was very pleasant,” said the girl.

“Yes, yes, of course. And I suppose he’d have felt that it was rather pointed coming alone.”

“Pointed?”

“Young men are so queer! Did you like that kind of collar he had on?”

“I didn’t notice it.”

“So very, very high.”

“I suppose he has rather a long neck.”

“Well, what did you think of his urging us to go to the race? Do you think he meant it? Do you think he intended it for an invitation?”

“I don’t think he meant anything; or, if he did, I think he didn’t know what.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer vaguely; “that must be what Mrs. Saintsbury meant by the artistic temperament.”

“I like people to be sincere, and not to say things they don’t mean, or don’t know whether they mean or not,” said Alice.

“Yes, of course, that’s the best way,” admitted Mrs. Pasmer. “It’s the only way,” she added, as if it were her own invariable practice. Then she added further, “I wonder what he did mean?”

She began to yawn, for after her simulation of vivid interest in them the visit of the young men had fatigued her. In the midst of her yawn her daughter went out of the room, with an impatient gesture, and she suspended the yawn long enough to smile, and then finished it.

XI.

After first going to the Owen, at Campobello, the Pasmers took rooms at the Ty’n-y-Coed, which is so much gayer, even if it is not so characteristic of the old Welsh Admiral’s baronial possession of the island. It is characteristic enough, and perched on its bluff overlooking the bay, or whatever the body of water is, it sees a score of pretty isles and long reaches of mainland coast, with a white marble effect of white-painted wooden Eastport, nestled in the wide lap of the shore, in apparent luxury and apparent innocence of smuggling and the manufacture of herring sardines. The waters that wrap the island in morning and evening fog temper the air of the latitude to a Newport softness in summer, with a sort of inner coolness that is peculiarly delicious, lulling the day with long calms and light breezes, and after nightfall commonly sending a stiff gale to try the stops of the hotel’s gables and casements, and to make the cheerful blaze on its public hearths acceptable. Once or twice a day the Eastport ferry-boat arrives, with passengers from the southward, at a floating wharf that sinks or swims half a hundred feet on the mighty tides of the Northeast; but all night long the island is shut up to its own memories and devices. The pretty romance of the old sailor who left England to become a sort of feudal seigneur here, with a holding of the entire island, and its fisher-folk for his villeins, forms a picturesque background for the aesthetic leisure and society in the three hotels remembering him and his language in their names, and housing with a few cottages all the sojourners on the island. By day the broad hotel piazzas shelter such of the guests as prefer to let others make their excursions into the heart of the island, and around its rocky, sea-beaten borders; and at night, when the falling mists have brought the early dark, and from lighthouse to lighthouse the fog-horns moan and low to one another, the piazzas cede to the corridors and the parlours and smoking-rooms. The life does not greatly differ from other seaside hotel life on the surface, and if one were to make distinctions one would perhaps begin by saying that hotel society there has much of the tone of cottage society elsewhere, with a little more accessibility. As the reader doubtless knows, the great mass of Boston society, thoughtful of its own weight and bulk, transports itself down the North Shore scarcely further than Manchester at the furthest; but there are more courageous or more detachable spirits who venture into more distant regions. These contribute somewhat toward peopling Bar Harbour in the summer, but they scarcely characterise it in any degree; while at Campobello they settle in little daring colonies, whose self-reliance will enlist the admiration of the sympathetic observer. They do not refuse the knowledge of other colonies of other stirps and origins, and they even combine in temporary alliance with them. But, after all, Boston speaks one language, and New York another, and Washington a third, and though the several dialects have only slight differences of inflection, their moral accents render each a little difficult for the others. In fact every society is repellant of strangers in the degree that it is sufficient to itself, and is incurious concerning the rest of the world. If it has not the elements of self-satisfaction in it, if it is uninformed and new and restless, it is more hospitable than an older society which has a sense of merit founded upon historical documents, and need no longer go out of itself for comparisons of any sort, knowing that if it seeks anything better it will probably be disappointed. The natural man, the savage, is as indifferent to others as the exclusive, and those who accuse the coldness of the Bostonians, and their reluctant or repellant behaviour toward unknown people, accuse not only civilisation, but nature itself.

That love of independence which is notable in us even in our most acquiescent phases at home is perhaps what brings these cultivated and agreeable people so far away, where they can achieve a sort of sylvan urbanity without responsibility, and without that measuring of purses which attends the summer display elsewhere. At Campobello one might be poor with almost as little shame as in Cambridge if one were cultivated. Mrs. Pasmer, who seldom failed of doing just the right thing for herself, had promptly divined the advantages of Campobello for her family. She knew, by dint of a little inquiry, and from the volunteer information of enthusiasts who had been there the summer before, just who was likely to be there during the summer with which she now found herself confronted. Campobello being yet a new thing, it was not open to the objection that you were sure to meet such and such people, more or less common or disagreeable, there; whatever happened, it could be lightly handled in the retrospect as the adventure of a partial and fragmentary summer when really she hardly cared where they went.

They did not get away from Boston before the middle of July, and after the solitude they left behind them there, the Owen at first seemed very gay. But when they had once or twice compared it with the Ty’n-y-Coed, riding to and fro in the barge which formed the connecting link with the Saturday evening hops of the latter hotel, Mrs. Pasmer decided that, from Alice’s point of view, they had made a mistake, and she repaired it without delay. The young people were, in fact, all at the Ty’n-y-Coed, and though she found the Owen perfectly satisfying for herself and Mr. Pasmer, she was willing to make the sacrifice of going to a new place: it was not a great sacrifice for one who had dwelt so long in tents.

There were scarcely any young girls at the Owen, and no young men, of course. Even at the Ty’n-y-Coed, where young girls abounded, it would not be right to pretend that there were young men enough. Nowhere, perhaps, except at Bar Harbour, is the long-lost balance of the sexes trimmed in New England; and even there the observer, abstractly delighting in the young girls and their dresses at that grand love-exchange of Rodick’s, must question whether the adjustment is perfectly accurate.

At Campobello there were not more than half enough young men, and there was not enough flirtation to affect the prevailing social mood of the place: an unfevered, expectationless tranquillity, in which to-day is like yesterday, and to-morrow cannot be different. It is a quiet of light reading, and slowly, brokenly murmured, contented gossip for the ladies, of old newspapers and old stories and luxuriously meditated cigars for the men, with occasional combinations for a steam-launch cruise among the eddies and islands of the nearer waters, or a voyage further off in the Bay of Fundy to the Grand Menan, and a return for the late dinner which marks the high civilisation of Campobello, and then an evening of more reading and gossip and cigars, while the night wind whistles outside, and the brawl and crash of the balls among the tenpins comes softened from the distant alleys. There are pleasant walks, which people seldom take, in many directions, and there are drives and bridle-paths all through the dense, sad, Northern woods which still savagely clothe the greater part of the island to its further shores, where there are shelves and plateaus of rock incomparable for picnicking.

One need ask nothing better, in fact, than to stroll down the sylvan road that leads to the Owen, past the little fishing-village with its sheds for curing herring; and the pale blue smoke and appetising savour escaping from them; and past the little chapel with which the old Admiral attested his love of the Established rite. On this road you may sometimes meet a little English bishop from the Provinces, in his apron and knee-breeches; and there is a certain bridge over a narrow estuary, where in the shallow land-locked pools of the deeply ebbing tide you may throw stones at sculpin, and witness the admirable indifference of those fish to human cruelty and folly. In the middle distance you will see a group of herring weirs, which with their coronals of tufted saplings form the very most picturesque aspect of any fishing industry. You may, now and then find an artist at this point, who, crouched over his easel, or hers, seems to agree with you about the village and the weirs.

But Alice Pasmer cared little more for such things than her mother did, and Mrs. Pasmer regarded Nature in all her aspects simply as an adjunct of society, or an occasional feature of the entourage. The girl had no such worldly feeling about it, but she found slight sympathy in the moods of earth and sky with her peculiar temperament. This temperament, whose recondite origin had almost wholly broken up Mrs. Pasmer’s faith in heredity, was like other temperaments, not always in evidence, and Alice was variously regarded as cold, of shy, or proud, or insipid, by the various other temperaments brought in contact with her own. She was apt to be liked because she was as careful of others as she was of herself, and she never was childishly greedy about such admiration as she won, as girls often are, perhaps because she did not care for it. Up to this time it is doubtful if her heart had been touched even by the fancies that shake the surface of the soul of youth, and perhaps it was for this reason that her seriousness at first fretted Mrs. Pasmer with a vague anxiety for her future.

Mrs. Pasmer herself remained inalienably Unitarian, but she was aware of the prodigious-growth which the Church had been making in society, and when Alice showed her inclination for it, she felt that it was not at all as if she had developed a taste for orthodoxy; when finally it did not seem likely to go too far, it amused Mrs. Pasmer that her daughter should have taken so intensely to the Anglican rite.

In the hotel it attached to her by a common interest several of the ladies who had seen her earnestly responsive at the little Owen chapel — ladies left to that affectional solitude which awaits long widowhood through the death or marriage of children; and other ladies, younger, but yet beginning to grow old with touching courage. Alice was especially a favourite with the three or four who represented their class and condition at the Ty’n-y Coed, and who read the best books read there, and had the gentlest manners. There was a tacit agreement among these ladies, who could not help seeing the difference in the temperaments of the mother and daughter, that Mrs. Pasmer did not understand Alice; but probably there were very few people except herself whom Mrs. Pasmer did not understand quite well. She understood these ladies and their compassion for Alice, and she did not in the least resent it. She was willing that people should like Alice for any reason they chose, if they did not go too far. With her little flutter of futile deceits, her irreverence for every form of human worth and her trust in a providence which had seldom failed her, she smiled at the cult of Alice’s friends, as she did at the girl’s seriousness, which also she felt herself able to keep from going too far.

While she did not object to the sympathy of these ladies, whatever inspired it, she encouraged another intimacy which grew up contemporaneously with theirs, and which was frankly secular and practical, though the girl who attached herself to Alice with one of those instant passions of girlhood was also in every exterior observance a strict and diligent Churchwoman. The difference was through the difference of Boston and New York in everything: the difference between idealising and the realising tendency. The elderly and middle-aged Boston women who liked Alice had been touched by something high yet sad in the beauty of her face at church; the New York girl promptly owned that she had liked her effect the first Sunday she saw her there, and she knew in a minute she never got those things on this side; her obeisances and genuflections throughout the service, much more profound and punctilious than those of any one else there, had apparently not prevented her from making a thorough study of Alice’s costume and a correct conjecture as to its authorship.

Miss Anderson, who claimed a collateral Dutch ancestry by the Van Hook, tucked in between her non-committal family name and the Julia given her in christening, was of the ordinary slender make of American girlhood, with dull blond hair, and a dull blond complexion, which would have left her face uninteresting if it had not been for the caprice of her nose in suddenly changing from the ordinary American regularity, after getting over its bridge, and turning out distinctly ‘retrousse’. This gave her profile animation and character; you could not expect a girl with that nose to be either irresolute or commonplace, and for good or for ill Miss Anderson was decided and original. She carried her figure, which was no great things of a figure as to height, with vigorous erectness; she walked with long strides, knocking her skirts into fine eddies and tangles as she went; and she spoke in a bold, deep voice, with tones like a man in it, all the more amusing and fascinating because of the perfectly feminine eyes with which she looked at you, and the nervous, feminine gestures which she used while she spoke.

She took Mrs. Pasmer into her confidence with regard to Alice at an early stage of their acquaintance, which from the first had a patronising or rather protecting quality in it; if she owned herself less fine, she knew herself shrewder, and more capable of coping with actualities.

“I think she’s moybid, Alice is,” she said. “She isn’t moybid in the usual sense of the word, but she expects more of herself and of the woyld generally than anybody’s going to get out of it. She thinks she’s going to get as much as she gives, and that’s a great mistake, Mrs. Pasmer,” she said, with that peculiar liquefaction of the canine letter which the New-Yorkers alone have the trick of, and which it would be tiresome and futile to try to represent throughout her talk.

“Oh yes, I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Pasmer, deep in her throat, and reserving deeper still her enjoyment of this early wisdom of Miss Anderson’s.

“Now, even at church — she carries the same spirit into the church. She doesn’t make allowance for human nature, and the church does.”

“Oh, certainly!” Mrs. Pasmer agreed.

“She isn’t like a person that’s been brought up in the church. It’s more like the old Puritan spirit. — Excuse me, Mrs. Pasmer!”

“Yes, indeed! Say anything you like about the Puritans!” said Mrs. Pasmer, delighted that, as a Bostonian, she should be thought to care for them.

“I always forget that you’re a Bostonian,” Miss Anderson apologized.

“Oh, thank you!” cried Mrs. Pasmer.

“I’m going to try to make her like other girls,” continued Miss Anderson.

“Do,” said Alice’s mother, with the effect of wishing her joy of the undertaking.

“If there were a few young men about, a little over seventeen and a little under fifty, it would be easier,” said Miss Anderson thoughtfully. “But how are you going to make a girl like other girls when there are no young men?”

“That’s very true,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an interest which she of course did her best to make impersonal. “Do you think there will be more, later on?”

“They will have to Huey up if they are comin’,” said Miss Anderson. “It’s the middle of August now, and the hotel closes the second week in September.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, vaguely looking at Alice. She had just appeared over the brow of the precipice, along whose face the arrivals and departures by the ferry-boat at Campobello obliquely ascend and descend.

She came walking swiftly toward the hotel, and, for her, so excitedly that Mrs. Pasmer involuntarily rose and went to meet her at the top of the broad hotel steps.

“What is it, Alice?”

“Oh, nothing! I thought I saw Mr. Munt coming off the boat.”

“Mr. Munt?”

“Yes.” She would not stay for further question.

Her mother looked after her with the edge of her fan over her mouth till she disappeared in the depths of the hotel corridor; then she sat down near the steps, and chatted with some half-grown boys lounging on the balustrade, and waited for Munt to come up over the brink of the precipice. Dan Mavering came with him, running forward with a polite eagerness at sight of Mrs. Pasmer. She distributed a skillful astonishment equally between the two men she had equally expected to see, and was extremely cordial with them, not only because she was pleased with them, but because she was still more pleased with her daughter’s being, after all, like other girls, when it came to essentials.

XII.

Alice came down to lunch in a dress which reconciled the seaside and the drawing-room in an effect entirely satisfactory to her mother, and gave her hand to both the gentlemen without the affectation of surprise at seeing either.

“I saw Mr. Munt coning up from the boat,” she said in answer to Mavering’s demand for some sort of astonishment from her. “I wasn’t certain that it was you.”

Mrs. Pasmer, whose pretences had been all given away by this simple confession, did not resent it, she was so much pleased with her daughter’s evident excitement at the young man’s having come. Without being conscious of it, perhaps, Alice prettily assumed the part of hostess from the moment of their meeting, and did the honours of the hotel with a tacit implication of knowing that he had come to see her there. They had only met twice, but now, the third time, meeting after a little separation, their manner toward each other was as if their acquaintance had been making progress in the interval. She took him about quite as if he had joined their family party, and introduced him to Miss Anderson and to all her particular friends, for each of whom, within five minutes after his presentation, he contrived to do some winning service. She introduced him to her father, whom he treated with deep respect and said “Sir” to. She showed him the bowling alley, and began to play tennis with him.

Her mother, sitting with John Munt on the piazza, followed these polite attentions to Mavering with humorous satisfaction, which was qualified as they went on.

“Alice,” she said to her, at a chance which offered itself during the evening, and then she hesitated for the right word.

“Well; mamma?” said the girl impatiently, stopping on her way to walk up and down the piazza with Mavering; she had run in to get a wrap and a Tam-o’-Shanter cap.

“Don’t — overdo — the honours.”

“What do you mean, mamma?” asked the girl; dropping her arms before her, and letting the shawl trail on the floor.

“Don’t you think he was very kind to us on Class Day?”

Her mother laughed. “But every one mayn’t know it’s gratitude.”

Alice went out, but she came back in a little while, and went up to her room without speaking to any one.

The fits of elation and depression with which this first day passed for her succeeded one another during Mavering’s stay. He did not need Alice’s chaperonage long. By the next morning he seemed to know and to like everybody in the hotel, where he enjoyed a general favour which at that moment had no exceptions. In the afternoon he began to organise excursions and amusements with the help of Miss Anderson.

The plans all referred to Alice, who accepted and approved with an authority which every one tacitly admitted, just as every one recognised that Mavering had come to Campobello because she was there. Such a phase is perhaps the prettiest in the history of a love affair. All is yet in solution; nothing has been precipitated in word or fact. The parties to it even reserve a final construction of what they themselves say or do; they will not own to their hearts that they mean exactly this or that. It is this phase which in its perfect freedom is the most American of all; under other conditions it is an instant, perceptible or imperceptible; under ours it is a distinct stage, unhurried by any outside influences.

The nearest approach to a definition of the situation was in a walk between Mavering and Mrs. Pasmer, and this talk, too, light and brief, might have had no such intention as her fancy assigned his part of it.

She recurred to something that had been said on Class Day about his taking up the law immediately, or going abroad first for a year.

“Oh, I’ve abandoned Europe altogether for the present,” he said laughing. “And I don’t know but I may go back on the law too.”

“Indeed! Then you are going to be an artist?”

“Oh no; not so bad as that. It isn’t settled yet, and I’m off here to think it over a while before the law school opens in September. My father wants me to go into his business and turn my powers to account in designing wall-papers.”

“Oh, how very interesting!” At the same time Mrs. Pasmer ran over the whole field of her acquaintance without finding another wall-paper maker in it. But she remembered what Mrs. Saintsbury had said: it was manufacturing. This reminded her to ask if he had seen the Saintsburys lately, and he said, No; he believed they were still in Cambridge, though.

“And we shall actually see a young man,” she said finally, “in the act of deciding his own destiny!”

He laughed for pleasure in her persiflage. “Yes; only don’t give me away. Nobody else knows it.”

“Oh no, indeed. Too much flattered, Mr. Mavering. Shall you let me know when you’ve decided? I shall be dying to know, and I shall be too high-minded to ask.”

It was not then too late to adapt ‘Pinafore’ to any exigency of life, and Mavering said, “You will learn from the expression of my eyes.”

XIII.

The witnesses of Mavering’s successful efforts to make everybody like him were interested in his differentiation of the attentions he offered every age and sex from those he paid Alice. But while they all agreed that there never was a sweeter fellow, they would have been puzzled to say in just what this difference consisted, and much as they liked him, the ladies of her cult were not quite satisfied with him till they decided that it was marked by an anxiety, a timidity, which was perfectly fascinating in a man so far from bashfulness as he. That is, he did nice things for others without asking; but with her there was always an explicit pause, and an implicit prayer and permission, first. Upon this condition they consented to the glamour which he had for her, and which was evident to every one probably but him.

Once agreeing that no one was good enough for Alice Pasmer, whose qualities they felt that only women could really appreciate, they were interested to see how near Mavering could come to being good enough; and as the drama played itself before their eyes, they pleased themselves in analysing its hero.

“He is not bashful, certainly,” said one of a little group who sat midway of the piazza while Alice and Mavering walked up and down together. “But don’t you think he’s modest? There’s that difference, you know.”

The lady addressed waited so long before answering that the young couple came abreast of the group, and then she had to wait till they were out of hearing. “Yes,” she said then, with a tender, sighing thoughtfulness, “I’ve felt that in him. And really think he is a very loveable nature. The only question would be whether he wasn’t too loveable.”

“Yes,” said the first lady, with the same kind of suspiration, “I know what you mean. And I suppose they ought to be something more alike in disposition.”

“Or sympathies?” suggested the other.

“Yes, or sympathies.”

A third lady laughed a little. “Mr. Mavering has so many sympathies that he ought to be like her in some of them.”

“Do you mean that he’s too sympathetic — that he isn’t sincere?” asked the first — a single lady of forty-nine, a Miss Cotton, who had a little knot of conscience between her pretty eyebrows, tied there by the unremitting effort of half a century to do and say exactly the truth, and to find it out.

Mrs. Brinkley, whom she addressed, was of that obesity which seems often to incline people to sarcasm. “No, I don’t think he’s insincere. I think he always means what he says and does — Well, do you think a little more concentration of good-will would hurt him for Miss Pasmer’s purpose — if she has it?”

“Yes, I see,” said Miss Cotton. She waited, with her kind eyes fixed wistfully upon Alice, for the young people to approach and get by. “I wonder what the men think of him?”

“You might ask Miss Anderson,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“Oh, do you think they tell her?”

“Not that exactly,” said Mrs. Brinkley, shaking with good-humoured pleasure in her joke.

“Her voice — oh yes. She and Alice are great friends, of course.”

“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, the second speaker, “that Mr. Mavering would be jealous sometimes — till he looked twice.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cotton, obliged to admit the force of the remark, but feeling that Mr. Mavering had been carried out of the field of her vision by the turn of the talk. “I suppose,” she continued, “that he wouldn’t be so well liked by other young men as she is by other girls, do you think?”

“I don’t think, as a rule,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “that men are half so appreciative of one another as women are. It’s most amusing to see the open scorn with which two young fellows treat each other if a pretty girl introduces them.”

All the ladies joined in the laugh with which Mrs. Brinkley herself led off. But Miss Cotton stopped laughing first.

“Do you mean,”, she asked, “that if a gentleman were generally popular with gentlemen it would be—”

“Because he wasn’t generally so with women? Something like that — if you’ll leave Mr. Mavering out of the question. Oh, how very good of them!” she broke off, and all the ladies glanced at Mavering and Alice where they had stopped at the further end of the piazza, and were looking off. “Now I can probably finish before they get back here again. What I do mean, Miss Cotton, is that neither sex willingly accepts the favourites of the other.”

“Yes,” said Miss Cotton admissively.

“And all that saves Miss Pasmer is that she has not only the qualities that women like in women, but some of the qualities that men, like in them. She’s thoroughly human.”

A little sensation, almost a murmur, not wholly of assent, went round that circle which had so nearly voted Alice a saint.

“In the first place, she likes to please men.”

“Oh!” came from the group.

“And that makes them like her — if it doesn’t go too far, as her mother says.”

The ladies all laughed, recognising a common turn of phrase in Mrs. Pasmer.

“I should think,” said Mrs. Stamwell, “that she would believe a little in heredity if she noticed that in her daughter;” and the ladies laughed again.

“Then,” Mrs. Brinkley resumed concerning Alice, “she has a very pretty face — an extremely pretty face; she has a tender voice, and she’s very, very graceful — in rather an odd way; perhaps it’s only a fascinating awkwardness. Then she dresses — or her mother dresses her — exquisitely.” The ladies, with another sensation, admitted the perfect accuracy with which these points had been touched.

“That’s what men like, what they fall in love with, what Mr. Mavering’s in love with this instant. It’s no use women’s flattering themselves that they don’t, for they do. The rest of the virtues and graces and charms are for women. If that serious girl could only know the silly things that that amiable simpleton is taken with in her, she’d—”

“Never speak to him again?” suggested Miss Cotton.

“No, I don’t say that. But she would think twice before marrying him.”

“And then do it,” said Mrs. Stamwell pensively, with eyes that seemed looking far into the past.

“Yes, and quite right to do it,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I don’t know that we should be very proud ourselves if we confessed just what caught our fancy in our husbands. For my part I shouldn’t like to say how much a light hat that Mr. Brinkley happened to be wearing had to do with the matter.”

The ladies broke into another laugh, and then checked themselves, so that Mrs. Pasmer, coming out of the corridor upon them, naturally thought they were laughing at her. She reflected that if she had been in their place she would have shown greater tact by not stopping just at that instant.

But she did not mind. She knew that they talked her over, but having a very good conscience, she simply talked them over in return. “Have you seen my daughter within a few minutes?” she asked.

“She was with Mr. Mavering at the end of the piazza a moment ago,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They must leave just gone round the corner of the building.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She had a novel, with her finger between its leaves, pressed against her heart, after the manner of ladies coming out on hotel piazzas. She sat down and rested it on her knee, with her hand over the top.

Miss Cotton bent forward, and Mrs. Pasmer lifted her fingers to let her see the name of the book.

“Oh yes,” said Miss Cotton. “But he’s so terribly pessimistic, don’t you think?”

“What is it?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.

“Fumee,” said Mrs. Pasmer, laying the book title upward on her lap for every one to see.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, fanning herself. “Tourguenief. That man gave me the worst quarter of an hour with his ‘Lisa’ that I ever had.”

“That’s the same as the ‘Nichee des Gentilshommes’, isn’t it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, with the involuntary superiority of a woman who reads her Tourguenief in French.

“I don’t know. I had it in English. I don’t build my ships to cross the sea in, as Emerson says; I take those I find built.”

“Ah! I was already on the other side,” said Mrs. Pasmer softly. She added: “I must get Lisa. I like a good heart-break; don’t you? If that’s what gave you the bad moment.”

“Heart-break? Heart-crush! Where Lavretsky comes back old to the scene of his love for Lisa, and strikes that chord on the piano — well, I simply wonder that I’m alive to recommend the book to you.

“Do you know,” said Miss Cotton, very deferentially, “that your daughter always made me think of Lisa?”

“Indeed!” cried Mrs. Pasmer, not wholly pleased, but gratified that she was able to hide her displeasure. “You make me very curious.”

“Oh, I doubt if you’ll see more than a mere likeness of temperament,” Mrs. Brinkley interfered bluntly. “All the conditions are so different. There couldn’t be an American Lisa. That’s the charm of these Russian tragedies. You feel that they’re so perfectly true there, and so perfectly impossible here. Lavretsky would simply have got himself divorced from Varvara Pavlovna, and no clergyman could have objected to marrying him to Lisa.”

“That’s what I mean by his pessimism,” said Miss Cotton. “He leaves you no hope. And I think that despair should never be used in a novel except for some good purpose; don’t you, Mrs. Brinkley?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “I was trying to think what good purpose despair could be put to, in a book or out of it.”

“I don’t think,” said Mrs. Pasmer, referring to the book in her lap, “that he leaves you altogether in despair here, unless you’d rather he’d run off with Irene than married Tatiana.”

“Oh, I certainly didn’t wish that;” said Miss Cotton, in self-defence, as if the shot had been aimed at her.

“The book ends with a marriage; there’s no denying that,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a reserve in her tone which caused Mrs. Pasmer to continue for her —

“And marriage means happiness — in a book.”

“I’m not sure that it does in this case. The time would come, after Litvinof had told Tatiana everything, when she would have to ask herself, and not once only, what sort of man it really was who was willing to break his engagement and run off with another man’s wife, and whether he could ever repent enough for it. She could make excuses for him, and would, but at the bottom of her heart — No, it seems to me that there, almost for the only time, Tourguenief permitted himself an amiable weakness. All that part of the book has the air of begging the question.”

“But don’t you see,” said Miss Cotton, leaning forward in the way she had when very earnest, “that he means to show that her love is strong enough for all that?”

“But he doesn’t, because it isn’t. Love isn’t strong enough to save people from unhappiness through each other’s faults. Do you suppose that so many married people are unhappy in each other because they don’t love each other? No; it’s because they do love each other that their faults are such a mutual torment. If they were indifferent, they wouldn’t mind each other’s faults. Perhaps that’s the reason why there are so many American divorces; if they didn’t care, like Europeans, who don’t marry for love, they could stand it.”

“Then the moral is,” said Mrs. Pasmer, at her lightest through the surrounding gravity, “that as all Americans marry for love, only Americans who have been very good ought to get married.”

“I’m not sure that the have-been goodness is enough either,” said Mrs. Brinkley, willing to push it to the absurd. “You marry a man’s future as well as his past.”

“Dear me! You are terribly exigeante, Mrs. Brinkley,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“One can afford to be so — in the abstract,” answered Mrs. Brinkley.

They all stopped talking and looked at John Munt, who was coming toward them, and each felt a longing to lay the matter before him.

There was probably not a woman among them but had felt more, read more, and thought more than John Munt, but he was a man, and the mind of a man is the court of final appeal for the wisest women. Till some man has pronounced upon their wisdom, they do not know whether it is wisdom or not.

Munt drew up his chair, and addressed himself to the whole group through Mrs. Pasmer: “We are thinking of getting up a little picnic to-morrow.”

XIV.

The day of the picnic struggled till ten o’clock to peer through the fog that wrapt it with that remote damp and coolness and that nearer drouth and warmth which some fogs have. The low pine groves hung full of it, and it gave a silvery definition to the gossamer threads running from one grass spear to another in spacious networks over the open levels of the old fields that stretch back from the bluff to the woods. At last it grew thinner, somewhere over the bay; then you could see the smooth water through it; then it drifted off in ragged fringes before a light breeze: when you looked landward again it was all gone there, and seaward it had gathered itself in a low, dun bank along the horizon. It was the kind of fog that people interested in Campobello admitted as apt to be common there, but claimed as a kind of local virtue when it began to break away. They said that it was a very dry fog, not like Newport, and asked you to notice that it did not wet you at all.

Four or five carriages, driven by the gentlemen of the party, held the picnic, which was destined for that beautiful cove on the Bay of Fundy where the red granite ledges, smooth-washed by ages of storm and sun, lend themselves to such festivities as if they had been artificially fashioned into shelves and tables. The whole place is yet so new to men that this haunt has not acquired that air of repulsive custom which the egg shells and broken bottles and sardine boxes of many seasons give. Or perhaps the winter tempests heap the tides of the bay over the ledge, and wash it clean of these vulgar traces of human resort, and enable it to offer as fresh a welcome to the picnics of each successive summer as if there had never been a picnic in that place before.

This was the sense that Mavering professed to have received from it, when he jumped out of the beach wagon in which he had preceded the other carriages through the weird forest lying between the fringe of farm fields and fishing-villages on the western shore of the island and these lonely coasts of the bay. As far as the signs of settled human habitation last, the road is the good hard country road of New England, climbing steep little hills, and presently leading through long tracts of woodland. But at a certain point beyond the furthest cottage you leave it, and plunge deep into the heart of the forest, vaguely traversed by the wheel-path carried through since the island was opened to summer sojourn. Road you can hardly call it, remembering its curious pauses and hesitations when confronted with stretches of marshy ground, and its staggering progress over the thick stubble of saplings through which it is cut. The progress of teams over it is slow, but there is such joy of wildness in the solitudes it penetrates that; if the horses had any gait slower than a walk, one might still wish to stay them. It is a Northern forest, with the air of having sprang quickly up in the fierce heat and haste of the Northern summers. The small firs are set almost as dense as rye in a field, and in their struggle to the light they have choked one another so that there is a strange blight of death and defeat on all that vigour of life. Few of the trees have won any lofty growth; they seem to have died and fallen when they were about to outstrip the others in size, and from their decay a new sylvan generation riots rankly upward. The surface of the ground is thinly clothed with a deciduous undergrowth, above which are the bare, spare stems of the evergreens, and then their limbs thrusting into one another in a sombre tangle, with locks of long yellowish-white moss, like the grey pendants of the Southern pines, dripping from them and draining their brief life.

In such a place you must surrender yourself to its influences, profoundly yet vaguely melancholy, or you must resist them with whatever gaiety is in you, or may be conjured out of others. It was conceded that Mavering was the life of the party, as the phrase goes. His light-heartedness, as kindly and sympathetic as it was inexhaustible, served to carry them over the worst places in the road of itself. He jumped down and ran back, when he had passed a bad bit, to see if the others were getting through safely; the least interesting of the party had some proof of his impartial friendliness; he promised an early and triumphant emergence from all difficulties; he started singing, and sacrificed himself in several tunes, for he could not sing well; his laugh seemed to be always coming back to Alice, where she rode late in the little procession; several times, with the deference which he delicately qualified for her, he came himself to see if he could not do something for her.

“Miss Pasmer,” croaked her friend Miss Anderson, who always began in that ceremonious way with her, and got to calling her Alice further along in the conversation, “if you don’t drop something for that poor fellow to run back two or three miles and get, pretty soon, I’ll do it myself. It’s peyfectly disheaytening to see his disappointment when you tell him theye’s nothing to be done.”

“He seems to get over it,” said Alice evasively. She smiled with pleasure in Miss Anderson’s impeachment, however.

“Oh, he keeps coming, if that’s what you mean. But do drop an umbrella, or a rubber, or something, next time, just to show a proper appreciation.”

But Mavering did not come any more. Just before they got to the cove, Miss Anderson leaned over again to whisper in Alice’s ear, “I told you he was huyt. Now you must be very good to him the rest of the time.”

Upon theory a girl of Alice Pasmer’s reserve ought to have resented this intervention, but it is not probable she did. She flushed a little, but not with offence, apparently; and she was kinder to Mavering, and let him do everything for her that he could invent in transferring the things from the wagons to the rocks.

The party gave a gaiety to the wild place which accented its proper charm, as they scattered themselves over the ledges on the bright shawls spread upon the level spaces. On either hand craggy bluffs hemmed the cove in, but below the ledge it had a pebbly beach strewn with drift-wood, and the Bay of Fundy gloomed before it with small fishing craft tipping and tilting on the swell in the foreground, and dim sail melting into the dun fog bank at the horizon’s edge.

The elder ladies of the party stood up, or stretched themselves on the shawls, as they found this or that posture more restful after their long drive; one, who was skilled in making coffee, had taken possession of the pot, and was demanding fire and water for it. The men scattered themselves over the beach, and brought her drift enough to roast an ox; two of them fetched water from the spring at the back of the ledge, whither they then carried the bottles of ale to cool in its thrilling pool. Each after his or her fashion symbolised a return to nature by some act or word of self-abandon.

“You ought to have brought heavier shoes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a serious glance at her daughter’s feet. “Well, never mind,” she added. “It doesn’t matter if you do spoil them.”

“Really,” cried Mrs Brinkley, casting her sandals from her, “I will not be enslaved to rubbers in such a sylvan scene as this, at any rate.”

“Look at Mrs. Stamwell!” said Miss Cotton. “She’s actually taken her hat off.”

Mrs. Stamwell had not only gone to this extreme, but had tied a lightly fluttering handkerchief round her hair. She said she should certainly not put on that heavy thing again till she got in sight of civilisation.

At these words Miss Cotton boldly drew off her gloves, and put them in her pocket.

The young girls, slim in their blues flannel skirts and their broad white canvas belts, went and came over the rocks. There were some children in the party, who were allowed to scream uninterruptedly in the games which they began to play as soon as they found their feet after getting out of the wagons.

Some of the gentlemen drove a stake into the beach, and threw stones at it, to see which could knock off the pebble balanced on its top. Several of the ladies joined them in the sport, and shrieked and laughed when they made wild shots with the missiles the men politely gathered for them.

Alice had remained with Mavering to help the hostess of the picnic lay the tables, but her mother had followed those who went down to the beach. At first Mrs. Pasmer looked on at the practice of the stone-throwers with disapproval; but suddenly she let herself go in this, as she did in other matters that her judgment condemned, and began to throw stones herself; she became excited, and made the wildest shots of any, accepting missiles right and left, and making herself dangerous to everybody within a wide circle. A gentleman who had fallen a victim to her skill said, “Just wait, Mrs. Pasmer, till I get in front of the stake.”

The men became seriously interested, and worked themselves red and hot; the ladies soon gave it up, and sat down on the sand and began to talk. They all owned themselves hungry, and from time to time they looked up anxiously at the preparations for lunch on the ledge, where white napkins were spread, with bottles at the four corners to keep them from blowing away. This use of the bottles was considered very amusing; the ladies tried to make jokes about it, and the desire to be funny spread to certain of the men who had quietly left off throwing at the stake because they had wrenched their shoulders; they succeeded in being merry. They said they thought that coffee took a long time to boil.

A lull of expectation fell upon all; even Mavering sat down on the rocks near the fire, and was at rest a few minutes, by order of Miss Anderson, who said that the sight of his activity tired her to death.

“I wonder why always boiled ham at a picnic!” said the lady who took a final plate of it from a basket. “Under the ordinary conditions, few of us can be persuaded to touch it.”

“It seems to be dear to nature, and to nature’s children,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “Perhaps because their digestions are strong.”

“Don’t you wish that something could be substituted for it?” asked Miss. Cotton.

“There have been efforts to replace it with chicken and tongue in sandwiches;” said Mrs. Brinkley; “but I think they’ve only measurably succeeded — about as temperance drinks have in place of the real strong waters.”

“On the boat coming up,” said Mavering, “we had a troupe of genuine darky minstrels. One of them sang a song about ham that rather took me —

“‘Ham, good old ham! Ham is de best ob meat; It’s always good and sweet; You can bake it, you can boil it, You can fry it, you can broil it — Ham, good old ham!’”

“Oh, how good!” sighed Mrs. Brinkley. “How sincere! How native! Go on, Mr. Mavering, for ever.”

“I haven’t the materials,” said Mavering, with his laugh. “The rest was da capo. But there was another song, about a coloured lady—”

“‘Six foot high and eight foot round, Holler ob her foot made a hole in de ground.’”

“Ah, that’s an old friend,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I remember hearing of that coloured lady when I was a girl. But it’s a fine flight of the imagination. What else did they sing?”

“I can’t remember. But there was something they danced — to show how a rheumatic old coloured uncle dances.”

He jumped nimbly up, and sketched the stiff and limping figure he had seen. It was over in a flash. He dropped down again, laughing.

“Oh, how wonderfully good!” cried Mrs. Brinkley, with frank joy. “Do it again.”

“Encore! Oh, encore!” came from the people on the beach.

Mavering jumped to his feet, and burlesqued the profuse bows of an actor who refuses to repeat; he was about to drop down again amidst their wails of protest.

“No, don’t sit down, Mr. Mavering,” said the lady who had introduced the subject of ham. “Get some of the young ladies, and go and gather some blueberries for the dessert. There are all the necessaries of life here, but none of the luxuries.”

“I’m at the service of the young ladies as an escort,” said Mavering gallantly, with an infusion of joke. “Will you come and pick blueberries under my watchful eyes, Miss Pasmer?”

“They’ve gone to pick blueberries,” called the lady through her tubed hand to the people on the beach, and the younger among them scrambled up the rocks for cups and bowls to follow them.

Mrs. Pasmer had an impulse to call her daughter back, and to make some excuse to keep her from going. She was in an access of decorum, naturally following upon her late outbreak, and it seemed a very pronounced thing for Alice to be going off into the woods with the young man; but it would have been a pronounced thing to prevent her, and so Mrs. Pasmer submitted.

“Isn’t it delightful,” asked Mrs. Brinkley, following them with her eyes, “to see the charm that gay young fellow has for that serious girl? She looked at him while he was dancing as if she couldn’t take her eyes off him, and she followed him as if he drew her by an invisible spell. Not that spells are ever visible,” she added, saving herself. “Though this one seems to be,” she added further, again saving herself.

“Do you really think so?” pleaded Miss Cotton.

“Well, I say so, whatever I think. And I’m not going to be caught up on the tenter-hooks of conscience as to all my meanings, Miss Cotton. I don’t know them all. But I’m not one of the Aliceolaters, you know.”

“No; of course not. But shouldn’t you — Don’t you think it would be a great pity — She’s so superior, so very uncommon in every way, that it hardly seems — Ah, I should so like to see some one really fine — not a coarse fibre in him, don’t you know. Not that Mr. Mavering’s coarse. But beside her he does seem so light!”

“Perhaps that’s the reason she likes him.”

“No, no! I can’t believe that. She must see more in him than we can.”

“I dare say she thinks she does. At any rate, it’s a perfectly evident case on both sides; and the frank way he’s followed her up here, and devoted himself to her, as if — well, not as if she were the only girl in the world, but incomparably the best — is certainly not common.”

“No,” sighed Miss Cotton, glad to admit it; “that’s beautiful.”

XV.

In the edge of the woods and the open spaces among the trees the blueberries grew larger and sweeter in the late Northern summer than a more southern sun seems to make them. They hung dense upon the low bushes, and gave them their tint through the soft grey bloom that veiled their blue. Sweet-fern in patches broke their mass here and there, and exhaled its wild perfume to the foot or skirt brushing through it.

“I don’t think there’s anything much prettier than these clusters; do you, Miss Pasmer?” asked Mavering, as he lifted a bunch pendent from the little tree before he stripped it into the bowl he carried. “And see! it spoils the bloom to gather them.” He held out a handful, and then tossed them away. “It ought to be managed more aesthetically for an occasion like this. I’ll tell you what, Miss Pasmer: are you used to blueberrying?”

“No,” she said; “I don’t know that I ever went blueberrying before. Why?” she asked.

“Because, if you haven’t, you wouldn’t be very efficient perhaps, and so you might resign yourself to sitting on that log and holding the berries in your lap, while I pick them.”

“But what about the bowls, then?”

“Oh, never mind them. I’ve got an idea. See here!” He clipped off a bunch with his knife, and held it up before her, tilting it this way and that. “Could anything be more graceful! My idea is to serve the blueberry on its native stem at this picnic. What do you think? Sugar would profane it, and of course they’ve only got milk enough for the coffee.”

“Delightful!” Alice arranged herself on the log, and made a lap for the bunch. He would not allow that the arrangement was perfect till he had cushioned the seat and carpeted the ground for her feet with sweet-fern.

“Now you’re something like a wood-nymph,” he laughed. “Only, wouldn’t a real wood-nymph have an apron?” he asked, looking down at her dress.

“Oh, it won’t hurt the dress. You must begin now, or they’ll be calling us.”

He was standing and gazing at her with a distracted enjoyment of her pose. “Oh yes, yes,” he answered, coming to himself, and he set about his work.

He might have got on faster if he had not come to her with nearly every bunch he cut at first, and when he began to deny himself this pleasure he stopped to admire an idea of hers.

“Well, that’s charming — making them into bouquets.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” she cried delightedly, holding a bunch of the berries up at arm’s-length to get the effect.

“Ah, but you must have some of this fern and this tall grass to go with it. Why, it’s sweet-grass — the sweet-grass of the Indian baskets!”

“Is it?” She looked up at him. “And do you think that the mixture would be better than the modest simplicity of the berries, with a few leaves of the same?”

“No; you’re right; it wouldn’t,” he said, throwing away his ferns. “But you’ll want something to tie the stems with; you must use the grass.” He left that with her, and went back to his bushes. He added, from beyond a little thicket, as if what he said were part of the subject, “I was afraid you wouldn’t like my skipping about there on the rocks, doing the coloured uncle.”

“Like it?”

“I mean — I — you thought it undignified — trivial—”

She said, after a moment: “It was very funny; and people do all sorts of things at picnics. That’s the pleasure of it, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is; but I know you don’t always like that kind of thing.”

“Do I seem so very severe?” she asked.

“Oh no, not severe. I should be afraid of you if you were. I shouldn’t have dared to come to Campobello.”

He looked at her across the blueberry bushes. His gay speech meant everything or nothing. She could parry it with a jest, and then it would mean nothing. She let her head droop over her work, and made no answer.

“I wish you could have seen those fellows on the boat,” said Mavering.

“Hello, Mavering!” called the voice of John Munt, from another part of the woods.

“Alice! — Miss Pasmer!” came that of Miss Anderson.

He was going to answer, when he looked at Alice. “We’ll let them see if they can find us,” he said, and smiled.

Alice said nothing at first; she smiled too. “You know more about the woods than I do. I suppose if they keep looking—”

“Oh yes.” He came toward her with a mass of clusters which he had clipped. “How fast you do them!” he said, standing and looking down at her. “I wish you’d let me come and make up the withes for you when you need them.”

“No, I couldn’t allow that on any account,” she answered, twisting some stems of the grass together.

“Well, will you let me hold the bunches while you tie them; or tie them when you hold them?”

“No.”

“This once, then?”

“This once, perhaps.”

“How little you let me do for you!” he sighed.

“That gives you a chance to do more for other people,” she answered; and then she dropped her eyes, as if she had been surprised into that answer. She made haste to add: “That’s what makes you so popular with — everybody!”

“Ah, but I’d rather be popular with somebody!”

He laughed, and then they both laughed together consciously; and still nothing or everything had been said. A little silly silence followed, and he said, for escape from it, “I never saw such berries before, even in September, on the top of Ponkwasset.”

“Why, is it a mountain?” she asked. “I thought it was a — falls.”

“It’s both,” he said.

“I suppose it’s very beautiful, isn’t it! All America seems so lovely, so large.”

“It’s pretty in the summer. I don’t know that I shall like it there in the winter if I conclude to — Did your — did Mrs. Pasmer tell you what my father wants me to do?”

“About going there to — manufacture?”

Mavering nodded. “He’s given me three weeks to decide whether I would like to do that or go in for law. That’s what I came up here for.”

There was a little pause. She bent her head down over the clusters she was grouping. “Is the light of Campobello particularly good on such questions?” she asked.

“I don’t mean that exactly, but I wish you could help me to some conclusion.”

“Yes; why not?”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever had a business question referred to me.”

“Well, then, you can bring a perfectly fresh mind to it.”

“Let me see,” she said, affecting to consider. “It’s really a very important matter?”

“It is to me.”

After a moment she looked up at him. “I should think that you wouldn’t mind living there if your business was there. I suppose it’s being idle in places that makes them dull. I thought it was dull in London. One ought to be glad — oughtn’t he? — to live in any place where there’s something to do.”

“Well, that isn’t the way people usually feel,” said Mavering. “That’s the kind of a place most of them fight shy of.”

Alice laughed with an undercurrent of protest, perhaps because she had seen her parents’ whole life, so far as she knew it, passed in this sort of struggle. “I mean that I hate my own life because there seems nothing for me to do with it. I like to have people do something.”

“Do you really?” asked Mavering soberly, as if struck by the novelty of the idea.

“Yes!” she said, with exaltation. “If I were a man—”

He burst into a ringing laugh. “Oh no; don’t!”

“Why?” she demanded, with provisional indignation.

“Because then there wouldn’t be any Miss Pasmer.”

It seemed to Alice that this joking was rather an unwarranted liberty. Again she could not help joining in his light-heartedness; but she checked herself so abruptly, and put on a look so austere, that he was quelled by it.

“I mean,” he began— “that is to say — I mean that I don’t understand why ladies are always saying that. I am sure they can do what they like, as it is.”

“Do you mean that everything is open to them now?” she asked, disentangling a cluster of the berries from those in her lap, and beginning a fresh bunch.

“Yes,” said Mavering. “Something like that — yes. They can do anything they like. Lots of them do.”

“Oh yes, I know,” said the girl. “But people don’t like them to.”

“Why, what would you like to be?” he asked.

She did not answer, but sorted over the clusters in her lap. “We’ve got enough now, haven’t we?” she said.

“Oh, not half,” he said. “But if you’re tired you must let me make up some of the bunches.”

“No, no! I want to do them all myself,” she said, gesturing his offered hands away, with a little nether appeal in her laughing refusal.

“So as to feel that you’ve been of some use in the world?” he said, dropping contentedly on the ground near her, and watching her industry.

“Do you think that would be very wrong?” she asked. “What made that friend of yours — Mr. Boardman — go into journalism?”

“Oh, virtuous poverty. You’re not thinking of becoming a newspaper woman, Miss Pasmer!”

“Why not?” She put the final cluster into the bunch in hand, and began to wind a withe of sweet-grass around the stems. He dropped forward on his knees to help her, and together they managed the knot. They were both flushed a little when it was tied, and were serious.

“Why shouldn’t one be a newspaper woman, if Harvard graduates are to be journalists?”

“Well, you know, only a certain kind are.”

“What kind?”

“Well, not exactly what you’d call the gentlemanly sort.”

“I thought Mr. Boardman was a great friend of yours?”

“He is. He is one of the best fellows in the world. But you must have seen that he wasn’t a swell.”

“I should think he’d be glad he was doing something at once. If I were a—” She stopped, and they laughed together. “I mean that I should hate to be so long getting ready to do something as men are.”

“Then you’d rather begin making wall-paper at once than studying law?”

“Oh, I don’t say that. I’m not competent to advise. But I should like to feel that I was doing something. I suppose it’s hereditary.” Mavering stared a little. “One of my father’s sisters has gone into a sisterhood. She’s in England.”

“Is she a — Catholic?” asked Mavering.

“She isn’t a Roman Catholic.”

“Oh yes!” He dropped forward on his knees again to help her tie the bunch she had finished. It was not so easy as the first.

“Oh, thank you!” she said, with unnecessary fervour.

“But you shouldn’t like to go into a sisterhood, I suppose?” said Mavering, ready to laugh.

“Oh, I don’t know. Why not?” She looked at him with a flying glance, and dropped her eyes.

“Oh, no reason, if you have a fancy for that kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing?” repeated Alice severely.

“Oh, I don’t mean anything disrespectful to it,” said Mavering, throwing his anxiety off in the laugh he had been holding back. “And I beg your pardon. But I don’t suppose you’re in earnest.”

“Oh no, I’m not in earnest,” said the girl, letting her wrists fall upon her knees, and the clusters drop from her hands. “I’m not in earnest about anything; that’s the truth — that’s the shame. Wouldn’t you like,” she broke off, “to be a priest, and go round among these people up here on their frozen islands in the winter?”

“No,” shouted Mavering, “I certainly shouldn’t. I don’t see how anybody stands it. Ponkwasset Falls is bad enough in the winter, and compared to this region Ponkwasset Falls is a metropolis. I believe in getting all the good you can out of the world you were born in — of course without hurting anybody else.” He stretched his legs out on the bed of sweet-fern, where he had thrown himself, and rested his head on his hand lifted on his elbow. “I think this is what this place is fit for — a picnic; and I wish every one well out of it for nine months of the year.”

“I don’t,” said the girl, with a passionate regret in her voice. “It would be heavenly here with — But you — no, you’re different. You always want to share your happiness.”

“I shouldn’t call that happiness. But don’t you?” asked Mavering.

“No. I’m selfish.”

“You don’t expect me to be believe that, I suppose.”

“Yes,” she went on, “it must be selfishness. You don’t believe I’m so, because you can’t imagine it. But it’s true. If I were to be happy, I should be very greedy about it; I couldn’t endure to let any one else have a part in it. So it’s best for me to be wretched, don’t you see — to give myself up entirely to doing for others, and not expect any one to do anything for me; then I can be of some use in the world. That’s why I should like to go into a sisterhood.”

Mavering treated it as the best kind of joke, and he was confirmed in this view of it by her laughing with him, after a first glance of what he thought mock piteousness.

XVI.

The clouds sailed across the irregular space of pale blue Northern sky which the break in the woods opened for them overhead. It was so still that they heard, and smiled to hear, the broken voices of the others, who had gone to get berries in another direction — Miss Anderson’s hoarse murmur and Munt’s artificial bass. Some words came from the party on the rocks.

“Isn’t it perfect?” cried the young fellow in utter content.

“Yes, too perfect,” answered the girl, rousing herself from the reverie in which they had both lost themselves, she did not know how long. “Shall you gather any more?”

“No; I guess there’s enough. Let’s count them.” He stooped over on his hand’s and knees, and made as much of counting the bunches as he could. “There’s about one bunch and a half a piece. How shall we carry them? We ought to come into camp as impressively as possible.”

“Yes,” said Alice, looking into his face with dreamy absence. It was going through her mind, from some romance she had read, What if he were some sylvan creature, with that gaiety, that natural gladness and sweetness of his, so far from any happiness that was possible to her? Ought not she to be afraid of him? She was thinking she was not afraid.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “Tie the stems of all the bunches together, and swing them over a pole, like grapes of Eshcol. Don’t you know the picture?”

“Oh yes.”

“Hold on! I’ll get the pole.” He cut a white birch sapling, and swept off its twigs and leaves, then he tied the bunches together, and slung them over the middle of the pole.

“Well?” she asked.

“Now we must rest the ends on our shoulders.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, with the reluctance that complies.

“Yes, but not right away. I’ll carry them out of the woods, and we’ll form the procession just before we come in sight.”

Every one on the ledge recognised the tableau when it appeared, and saluted it with cheers and hand-clapping. Mrs. Pasmer bent a look on her daughter which she faced impenetrably.

“Where have you been?” “We thought you were lost!” “We were just organising a search expedition!” different ones shouted at them.

The lady with the coffee-pot was kneeling over it with her hand on it. “Have some coffee, you poor things! You must be almost starved.”

“We looked about for you everywhere,” said Munt, “and shouted ourselves dumb.”

Miss Anderson passed near Alice. “I knew where you were all the time!”

Then the whole party fell to praising the novel conception of the bouquets of blueberries, and the talk began to flow away from Alice and Mavering in various channels.

All that had happened a few minutes ago in the blueberry patch seemed a far-off dream; the reality had died out of the looks and words.

He ran about from one to another, serving every one; in a little while the whole affair was in his hospitable hands, and his laugh interspersed and brightened the talk.

She got a little back of the others, and sat looking wistfully out over the bay, with her hands in her lap.

“Hold on just half a minute, Miss Pasmer! don’t move!” exclaimed the amateur photographer, who is now of all excursions; he jumped to his feet, and ran for his apparatus. She sat still, to please him; but when he had developed his picture, in a dark corner of the rocks, roofed with a waterproof, he accused her of having changed her position. “But it’s going to be splendid,” he said, with another look at it.

He took several pictures of the whole party, for which they fell into various attitudes of consciousness. Then he shouted to a boat-load of sailors who had beached their craft while they gathered some drift for their galley fire. They had flung their arm-loads into the boat, and had bent themselves to shove it into the water.

“Keep still! don’t move!” he yelled at them, with the imperiousness of the amateur photographer, and they obeyed with the helplessness of his victims. But they looked round.

“Oh, idiots!” groaned the artist.

“I always wonder what that kind of people think of us kind of people,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with her eye on the photographer’s subjects.

“Yes, I wonder what they do?” said Miss Cotton, pleased with the speculative turn which the talk might take from this. “I suppose they envy us?” she suggested.

“Well, not all of them; and those that do, not respectfully. They view, us as the possessors of ill-gotten gains, who would be in a very different place if we had our deserts.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I think so; but I don’t know that I really think so. That’s another matter,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with the whimsical resentment which Miss Cotton’s conscientious pursuit seemed always to rouse in her.

“I supposed,” continued Miss Cotton, “that it was only among the poor in the cities, who have begin misled by agitators, that the-well-to-do classes were regarded with suspicion.”

“It seems to have begun a great while ago,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and not exactly with agitators. It was considered very difficult for us to get into the kingdom of heaven, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” assented Miss Cotton.

“And there certainly are some things against us. Even when the chance was given us to sell all we had and give it to the poor, we couldn’t bring our minds to it, and went away exceeding sorrowful.”

“I wonder,” said Miss Cotton, “whether those things were ever intended to be taken literally?”

“Let’s hope not,” said John Munt, seeing his chance to make a laugh.

Mrs. Stamwell said, “Well, I shall take another cup of coffee, at any rate,” and her hardihood raised another laugh.

“That always seems to me the most pitiful thing in the whole Bible,” said Alice, from her place. “To see the right so clearly, and not to be strong enough to do it.”

“My dear, it happens every day,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“I always felt sorry for that poor fellow, too,” said Mavering. “He seemed to be a good fellow, and it was pretty hard lines for him.”

Alice looked round at him with deepening gravity.

“Confound those fellows!” said the photographer, glancing at his hastily developed plate. “They moved.”

XVII.

The picnic party gathered itself up after the lunch, and while some of the men, emulous of Mavering’s public spirit, helped some of the ladies to pack the dishes and baskets away under the wagon seats, others threw a corked bottle into the water, and threw stones at it. A few of the ladies joined them, but nobody hit the bottle, which was finally left bobbing about on the tide.

Mrs. Brinkley addressed the defeated group, of whom her husband was one, as they came up the beach toward the wagons. “Do you think that display was calculated to inspire the lower middle classes with respectful envy?”

Her husband made himself spokesman for the rest: “No; but you can’t tell how they’d have felt if we’d hit it.”

They all now climbed to a higher level, grassy and smooth, on the bluff, from which there was a particular view; and Mavering came, carrying the wraps of Mrs. Pasmer and Alice, with which he associated his overcoat. A book fell out of one of the pockets when he threw it down.

Miss Anderson picked the volume up. “Browning! He reads Browning! Superior young man!”

“Oh, don’t say that!” pleaded Mavering.

“Oh, read something aloud!” cried another of the young ladies.

“Isn’t Browning rather serious for a picnic?” he asked, with a glance at Alice; he still had a doubt of the effect of the rheumatic uncle’s dance upon her, and would have been glad to give her some other aesthetic impression of him.

“Oh no!” said Mrs. Brinkley, “nothing is more appropriate to a picnic than conundrums; they always have them. Choose a good tough one.”

“I don’t know anything tougher than the ‘Legend of Pernik’ — or lovelier,” he said, and he began to read, simply, and with a passionate pleasure in the subtle study, feeling its control over his hearers.

The gentlemen lay smoking about at their ease; at the end a deep sigh went up from the ladies, cut short by the question which they immediately fell into.

They could not agree, but they said, one after another: “But you read beautifully, Mr. Mavering!” “Beautifully!” “Yes, indeed!”

“Well, I’m glad there is one point clear,” he said, putting the book away, and “I’m afraid you’ll think I’m rather sentimental,” he added, in a low voice to Alice, “carrying poetry around with me.”

“Oh no!” she replied intensely; “I thank you.”

“I thank you,” he retorted, and their eyes met in a deep look.

One of the outer circle of smokers came up with his watch in his hand, and addressed the company, “Do you know what time it’s got to be? It’s four o’clock.”

They all sprang up with a clamour of surprise.

Mrs. Pasmer, under cover of the noise, said, in a low tone, to her daughter, “Alice, I think you’d better keep a little more with me now.”

“Yes,” said the girl, in a sympathy with her mother in which she did not always find herself.

But when Mavering, whom their tacit treaty concerned, turned toward them, and put himself in charge of Alice, Mrs. Pasmer found herself dispossessed by the charm of his confidence, and relinquished her to him. They were going to walk to the Castle Rocks by the path that now loses and now finds itself among the fastnesses of the forest, stretching to the loftiest outlook on the bay. The savage woodland is penetrated only by this forgetful path, that passes now and then aver the bridge of a ravine, and offers to the eye on either hand the mystery deepening into wilder and weirder tracts of solitude. The party resolved itself into twos and threes, and these straggled far apart, out of conversational reach of one another. Mrs. Pasmer found herself walking and talking with John Munt.

“Mr. Pasmer hasn’t much interest in these excursions,” he suggested.

“No; he never goes,” she answered, and, by one of the agile intellectual processes natural to women, she arrived at the question, “You and the Maverings are old friends, Mr. Munt?”

“I can’t say about the son, but I’m his father’s friend, and I suppose that I’m his friend too. Everybody seems to be so,” suggested Munt.

“Oh Yes,” Mrs. Pasmer assented; “he appears to be a universal favourite.”

“We used to expect great things of Elbridge Mavering in college. We were rather more romantic than the Harvard men are nowadays, and we believed in one another more than they do. Perhaps we idealised one another. But, anyway, our class thought Mavering could do anything. You know about his taste for etchings?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of deep appreciation. “What gifted people!”

“I understand that the son inherits all his father’s talent.”

“He sketches delightfully.”

“And Mavering wrote. Why, he was our class poet!” cried Munt, remembering the fact with surprise and gratification to himself. “He was a tremendous satirist.”

“Really? And he seems so amiable now.”

“Oh, it was only on paper.”

“Perhaps he still keeps it up — on wall-paper?” suggested Mrs. Pasmer.

Munt laughed at the little joke with a good-will that flattered the veteran flatterer. “I should like to ask him that some time. Will you lend it to me?”

“Yes, if such a sayer of good things will deign to borrow—”

“Oh, Mrs. Pasmer!” cried Munt, otherwise speechless.

“And the mother? Do you know Mrs. Mavering?”

“Mrs. Mavering I’ve never seen.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a disappointment for which Munt tried to console her.

“I’ve never even been at their place. He asked me once a great while ago; but you know how those things are. I’ve heard that she used to be very pretty and very gay. They went about a great deal, to Saratoga and Cape May and such places — rather out of our beat.”

“And now?”

“And now she’s been an invalid for a great many years. Bedridden, I believe. Paralysis, I think.”

“Yes; Mrs. Saintsbury said something of the kind.”

“Well,” said Munt, anxious to add to the store of knowledge which this remark let him understand he had not materially increased, “I think Mrs. Mavering was the origin of the wall-paper — or her money. Mavering was poor; her father had started it, and Mavering turned in his talent.”

“How very interesting! And is that the reason — its being ancestral — that Mr. Mavering wishes his son to go into it?”

“Is he going into it?” asked Munt.

“He’s come up here to think about it.”

“I should suppose it would be a very good thing,” said Munt.

“What a very remarkable forest!” said Mrs. Pasmer, examining it on either side, and turning quite round. This gave her, from her place in the van of the straggling procession, a glimpse of Alice and Dan Mavering far in the rear.

“Don’t you know,” he was saying to the girl at the same moment, “it’s like some of those Dore illustrations to the Inferno, or the Wandering Jew.”

“Oh yes. I was trying to think what it was made me think I had seen it before,” she answered. “It must be that. But how strange it is!” she exclaimed, “that sensation of having been there before — in some place before where you can’t possibly have been.”

“And do you feel it here?” he asked, as vividly interested as if they two had been the first to notice the phenomenon which has been a psychical consolation to so many young observers.

“Yes,” she cried.

“I hope I was with you,” he said, with a sudden turn of levity, which did not displease her, for there seemed to be a tender earnestness lurking in it. “I couldn’t bear to think of your being alone in such a howling wilderness.”

“Oh, I was with a large picnic,” she retorted gaily. “You might have been among the rest. I didn’t notice.”

“Well, the next time, I wish you’d look closer. I don’t like being left out.” They were so far behind the rest that he devoted himself entirely to her, and they had grown more and more confidential.

They came to a narrow foot-bridge over a deep gorge. The hand-rail had fallen away. He sprang forward and gave her his hand for the passage. “Who helped you over here?” he demanded. “Don’t say I didn’t.”

“Perhaps it was you,” she murmured, letting him keep the fingers to which he clung a moment after they had crossed the bridge. Then she took them away, and said: “But I can’t be sure. There were so many others.”

“Other fellows?” he demanded, placing himself before her on the narrow path, so that she could not get by. “Try to remember, Miss Pasmer. This is very important. It would break my heart if it was really some one else.” She stole a glance at his face, but it was smiling, though his voice was so earnest. “I want to help you over all the bad places, and I don’t want any one else to have a hand in it.”

The voice and the face still belied each other, and between them the girl chose to feel herself trifled with by the artistic temperament. “If you’ll please step out of the way, Mr. Mavering,” she said severely, “I shall not need anybody’s help just here.”

He instantly moved aside, and they were both silent, till she said, as she quickened her pace to overtake the others in front, “I don’t see how you can help liking nature in such a place as this.”

“I can’t — human nature,” he said. It was mere folly; and an abstract folly at that; but the face that she held down and away from him flushed with sweet consciousness as she laughed.

On the cliff beetling above the bay, where she sat to look out over the sad northern sea, lit with the fishing sail they had seen before, and the surge washed into the rocky coves far beneath them, he threw himself at her feet, and made her alone in the company that came and went and tried this view and that from the different points where the picnic hostess insisted they should enjoy it. She left the young couple to themselves, and Mrs. Pasmer seemed to have forgotten that she had bidden Alice to be a little more with her.

Alice had forgotten it too. She sat listening to Mavering’s talk with a certain fascination, but not so much apparently because the meaning of the words pleased her as the sound of his voice, the motion of his lips in speaking, charmed her. At first he was serious, and even melancholy, as if he were afraid he had offended her; but apparently he soon believed that he had been forgiven, and began to burlesque his own mood, but still with a deference and a watchful observance of her changes of feeling which was delicately flattering in its way. Now and then when she answered something it was not always to the purpose; he accused her of not hearing what he said, but she would have it that she did, and then he tried to test her by proofs and questions. It did not matter for anything that was spoken or done; speech and action of whatever sort were mere masks of their young joy in each other, so that when he said, after he had quoted some lines befitting the scene they looked out on; “Now was that from Tennyson or from Tupper?” and she answered, “Neither; it was from Shakespeare,” they joined, in the same happy laugh, and they laughed now and then without saying anything. Neither this nor that made them more glad or less; they were in a trance, vulnerable to nothing but the summons which must come to leave their dream behind, and issue into the waking world.

In hope or in experience such a moment has come to all, and it is so pretty to those who recognise it from the outside that no one has the heart to hurry it away while it can be helped. The affair between Alice and Mavering had evidently her mother’s sanction, and all the rest were eager to help it on. When the party had started to return, they called to them, and let them come behind together. At the carriages they had what Miss Anderson called a new deal, and Alice and Mavering found themselves together in the rear seat of the last.

The fog began to come in from the sea, and followed them through the woods. When they emerged upon the highway it wrapped them densely round, and formed a little world, cosy, intimate, where they two dwelt alone with these friends of theirs, each of whom they praised for delightful qualities. The horses beat along through the mist, in which there seemed no progress, and they lived in a blissful arrest of time. Miss Anderson called back from the front seat, “My ear buyns; you’re talkin’ about me.”

“Which ear?” cried Mavering.

“Oh, the left, of couyse.”

“Then it’s merely habit, Julie. You ought to have heard the nice things we were saying about you,” Alice called.

“I’d like to hear all the nice things you’ve been saying.”

This seemed the last effect of subtle wit. Mavering broke out in his laugh, and Alice’s laugh rang above it.

Mrs. Pasmer looked involuntarily round from the carriage ahead.

“They seem to be having a good time,” said Mrs. Brinkley at her side.

“Yes; I hope Alice isn’t overdoing.”

“I’m afraid you’re dreadfully tired,” said Mavering to the girl, in a low voice, as he lifted her from her place when they reached the hotel through the provisional darkness, and found that after all it was only dinner-time.

“Oh no. I feel as if the picnic were just beginning.”

“Then you will come to-night?”

“I will see what mamma says.”

“Shall I ask her?”

“Oh, perhaps not,” said the girl, repressing his ardour, but not severely.

XVIII.

They were going to have some theatricals at one of the cottages, and the lady at whose house they were to be given made haste to invite all the picnic party before it dispersed. Mrs. Pasmer accepted with a mental reservation, meaning to send an excuse later if she chose; and before she decided the point she kept her husband from going after dinner into the reading-room, where he spent nearly all his time over a paper and a cigar, or in sitting absolutely silent and unoccupied, and made him go to their own room with her.

“There is something that I must speak to you about,” she said, closing the door, “and you must decide for yourself whether you wish to let it go any further.”

“What go any further?” asked Mr. Pasmer, sitting down and putting his hand to the pocket that held his cigar-case with the same series of motions.

“No, don’t smoke,” she said, staying his hand impatiently. “I want you to think.”

“How can I think if I don’t smoke?”

“Very well; smoke, then. Do you want this affair with young Mavering to go any farther?”

“Oh!” said Pasmer, “I thought you had been looking after that.” He had in fact relegated that to the company of the great questions exterior to his personal comfort which she always decided.

“I have been looking after it, but now the time has come when you must, as a father, take some interest in it.”

Pasmer’s noble mask of a face, from the point of his full white beard to his fine forehead, crossed by his impressive black eyebrows, expressed all the dignified concern which a father ought to feel in such an affair; but what he was really feeling was a grave reluctance to have to intervene in any way. “What do you want me to say to him?” he asked.

“Why, I don’t know that he’s going to ask you anything. I don’t know whether he’s said anything to Alice yet,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with some exasperation.

Her husband was silent, but his silence insinuated a degree of wonder that she should approach him prematurely on such a point.

“They have been thrown together all day, and there is no use to conceal from ourselves that they are very much taken with each other?”

“I thought,” Pasmer said, “that you said that from the beginning. Didn’t you want them to be taken with each other?”

“That is what you are to decide.”

Pasmer silently refused to assume the responsibility.

“Well?” demanded his wife, after waiting for him to speak.

“Well what?”

“What do you decide?”

“What is the use of deciding a thing when it is all over?”

“It isn’t over at all. It can be broken off at any moment.”

“Well, break it off, then, if you like.”

Mrs. Pasmer resumed the responsibility with a sigh. She felt the burden, the penalty, of power, after having so long enjoyed its sweets, and she would willingly have abdicated the sovereignty which she had spent her whole married life in establishing. But there was no one to take it up. “No, I shall not break it off,” she said resentfully; “I shall let it go on.” Then seeing that her husband was not shaken by her threat from his long-confirmed subjection, she added: “It isn’t an ideal affair, but I think it will be a very good thing for Alice. He is not what I expected, but he is thoroughly nice, and I should think his family was nice. I’ve been talking with Mr. Munt about them to-day, and he confirms all that Etta Saintsbury said. I don’t think there can be any doubt of his intentions in coming here. He isn’t a particularly artless young man, but he’s been sufficiently frank about Alice since he’s been here.” Her husband smoked on. “His father seems to have taken up the business from the artistic side, and Mr. Mavering won’t be expected to enter into the commercial part at once. If it wasn’t for Alice, I don’t believe he would think of the business for a moment; he would study law. Of course it’s a little embarrassing to have her engaged at once before she’s seen anything of society here, but perhaps it’s all for the best, after all: the main thing is that she should be satisfied, and I can see that she’s only too much so. Yes, she’s very much taken with him; and I don’t wonder. He is charming.”

It was not the first time that Mrs. Pasmer had reasoned in this round; but the utterance of her thoughts seemed to throw a new light on them, and she took a courage from them that they did not always impart. She arrived at the final opinion expressed, with a throb of tenderness for the young fellow whom she believed eager to take her daughter from her, and now for the first time she experienced a desolation in the prospect, as if it were an accomplished fact. She was morally a bundle of finesses, but at the bottom of her heart her daughter was all the world to her. She had made the girl her idol, and if, like some other heathen, she had not always used her idol with the greatest deference, if she had often expected the impossible from it, and made it pay for her disappointment, still she had never swerved from her worship of it. She suddenly asked herself, What if this young fellow, so charming and so good, should so wholly monopolise her child that she should no longer have any share in her? What if Alice, who had so long formed her first care and chief object in life, should contentedly lose herself in the love and care of another, and both should ignore her right to her? She answered herself with a pang that this might happen with any one Alice married, and that it would be no worse, at the worst, with Dan Mavering than with another, while her husband remained impartially silent. Always keeping within the lines to which his wife’s supremacy had driven him, he felt safe there, and was not to be easily coaxed out of them.

Mrs. Pasmer rose and left him, with his perfect acquiescence, and went into her daughter’s room. She found Alice there, with a pretty evening dress laid out on her bed. Mrs. Pasmer was very fond of that dress, and at the thought of Alice in it her spirits rose again.

“Oh, are you going, Alice?”

“Why, yes,” answered the girl. “Didn’t you accept?”

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Pasmer admitted. “But aren’t you tired?”

“Oh, not in the least. I feel as fresh as I did this morning. Don’t you want me to go?”

“Oh yes, certainly, I want you to go — if you think you’ll enjoy it.”

“Enjoy it? Why, why shouldn’t I enjoy it, mamma!”

“What are you thinking about? It’s going to be the greatest kind of fun.”

“But do you think you ought to look at everything simply as fun?” asked the mother, with unwonted didacticism.

“How everything? What are you thinking about, mamma?”

“Oh, nothing! I’m so glad you’re going to wear that dress.”

“Why, of course! It’s my best. But what are you driving at, mamma?”

Mrs. Pasmer was really seeking in her daughter that comfort of a distinct volition which she had failed to find in her husband, and she wished to assure herself of it more and more, that she might share with some one the responsibility which he had refused any part in.

“Nothing. But I’m glad you wish so much to go.” The girl dropped her hands and stared. “You must have enjoyed yourself to-day,” she added, as if that were an explanation.

“Of course I enjoyed myself! But what has that to do with my wanting to go to-night?”

“Oh, nothing. But I hope, Alice, that there is one thing you have looked fully in the face.”

“What thing?” faltered the girl, and now showed herself unable to confront it by dropping her eyes.

“Well, whatever you may have heard or seen, nobody else is in doubt about it. What do you suppose has brought Mr. Mavering here!”

“I don’t know.” The denial not only confessed that she did know, but it informed her mother that all was as yet tacit between the young people.

“Very well, then, I know,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “and there is one thing that you must know before long, Alice.”

“What?” she asked faintly.

“Your own mind,” said her mother. “I don’t ask you what it is, and I shall wait till you tell me. Of course I shouldn’t have let him stay here if I had objected—”

“O mamma!” murmured the girl, dyed with shame to have the facts so boldly touched, but not, probably, too deeply displeased.

“Yes. And I know that he would never have thought of going into that business if he had not expected — hoped—”

“Mamma!”

“And you ought to consider—”

“Oh, don’t! don’t! don’t!” implored the girl.

“That’s all,” said her mother, turning from Alice, who had hidden her face in her hands, to inspect the costume on the bed. She lifted one piece of it after another, turned it over, looked at it, and laid it down. “You can never get such a dress in this country.”

She went out of the room, as the girl dropped her face in the pillow. An hour later they met equipped for the evening’s pleasure. To the keen glance that her mother gave her, the daughter’s eyes had the brightness of eyes that have been weeping, but they were also bright with that knowledge of her own mind which Mrs. Pasmer had desired for her. She met her mother’s glance fearlessly, even proudly, and she carried her stylish costume with a splendour to which only occasions could stimulate her. They dramatised a perfect unconsciousness to each other, but Mrs. Pasmer was by no means satisfied with the decision which she had read in her daughter’s looks. Somehow it did not relieve her of the responsibility, and it did not change the nature of the case. It was gratifying, of course, to see Alice the object of a passion so sincere and so ardent; so far the triumph was complete, and there was really nothing objectionable in the young man and his circumstances, though there was nothing very distinguished. But the affair was altogether different from anything that Mrs. Pasmer had imagined. She had supposed and intended that Alice should meet some one in Boston, and go through a course of society before reaching any decisive step. There was to be a whole season in which to look the ground carefully over, and the ground was to be all within certain well-ascertained and guarded precincts. But this that had happened was outside of these precincts, of at least on their mere outskirts. Class Day, of course, was all right; and she could not say that the summer colony at Campobello was not thoroughly and essentially Boston; and yet she felt that certain influences, certain sanctions, were absent. To tell the truth, she would not have cared for the feelings of Mavering’s family in regard to the matter, except as they might afterward concern Alice, and the time had not come when she could recognise their existence in regard to the affair; and yet she could have wished that even as it was his family could have seen and approved it from the start. It would have been more regular.

With Alice it was a simpler matter, and of course deeper. For her it was only a question of himself and herself; no one else existed to the sublime egotism of her love. She did not call it by that name; she did not permit it to assert itself by any name; it was a mere formless joy in her soul, a trustful and blissful expectance, which she now no more believed he could disappoint than that she could die within that hour. All the rebellion that she had sometimes felt at the anomalous attitude exacted of her sex in regard to such matters was gone. She no longer thought it strange that a girl should be expected to ignore the admiration of a young man till he explicitly declared it, and should then be fully possessed of all the materials of a decision on the most momentous question in life; for she knew that this state of ignorance could never really exist; she had known from the first moment that he had thought her beautiful. To-night she was radiant for him. Her eyes shone with the look in which they should meet and give themselves to each other before they spoke — the look in which they had met already, in which they had lived that whole day.

XIX.

The evening’s entertainment was something that must fail before an audience which was not very kind. They were to present a burlesque of classic fable, and the parts, with their general intention, had been distributed to the different actors; but nothing had been written down, and, beyond the situations and a few points of dialogue, all had to be improvised. The costumes and properties had been invented from such things as came to hand. Sheets sculpturesquely draped the deities who took part; a fox-pelt from the hearth did duty as the leopard skin of Bacchus; a feather duster served Neptune for a trident; the lyre of Apollo was a dust-pan; a gull’s breast furnished Jove with his grey beard.

The fable was adapted to modern life, and the scene had been laid in Campobello, the peculiarities of which were to be satirised throughout. The principal situation was to be a passage between Jupiter, represented by Mavering, and Juno, whom Miss Anderson personated; it was to be a scene of conjugal reproaches and reprisals, and to end in reconciliation, in which the father of the gods sacrificed himself on the altar of domestic peace by promising to bring his family to Campobello every year.

This was to be followed by a sketch of the Judgment of Paris, in which Juno and Pallas were to be personated by two young men, and Miss Anderson took the part of Venus.

The pretty drawing-room of the Trevors — young people from Albany, and cousins of Miss Anderson — was curtained off at one end for a stage, and beyond the sliding doors which divided it in half were set chairs for the spectators. People had come in whatever dress they liked; the men were mostly in morning coats; the ladies had generally made some attempt at evening toilet, but they joined in admiring Alice Pasmer’s costume, and one of them said that they would let it represent them all, and express what each might have done if she would. There was not much time for their tributes; all the lamps were presently taken away and set along the floor in front of the curtain as foot-lights, leaving the company in a darkness which Mrs. Brinkley pronounced sepulchral. She made her reproaches to the master of the house, who had effected this transposition of the lamps. “I was just thinking some very pretty and valuable things about your charming cottage, Mr. Trevor: a rug on a bare floor, a trim of varnished pine, a wall with half a dozen simple etchings on it, an open fire, and a mantelpiece without bric-a-brac, how entirely satisfying it all is! And how it upbraids us for heaping up upholstery as we do in town!”

“Go on,” said the host. “Those are beautiful thoughts.”

“But I can’t go on in the dark,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “You can’t think in the dark, much less talk! Can you, Mrs. Pasmer?” Mrs. Pasmer, with Alice next to her, sat just in front of Mrs. Brinkley.

“No,” she assented; “but if I could — YOU can thick anywhere, Mrs. Brinkley — Mrs. Trevor’s lovely house would inspire me to it.”

“Two birds with one stone — thank you, Mrs. Pasmer, for my part of the compliment. Pick yourself up, Mr. Trevor.”

“Oh, thank you, I’m all right,” said Trevor, panting after the ladies’ meanings, as a man must. “I suppose thinking and talking in the dark is a good deal like smoking in the dark.”

“No; thinking and talking are not at all like smoking under any conditions. Why in the world should they be?”

“Oh, I can’t get any fun out of a cigar unless I can see the smoke,” the host explained.

“Do you follow him, Mrs. Pasmer?”

“Yes, perfectly.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Pasmer,” said Trevor.

“I’ll get you to tell me how you did it some time,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But your house is a gem, Mr. Trevor.”

“Isn’t it?” cried Trevor. “I want my wife to live here the year round.” It was the Trevors’ first summer in their cottage, and the experienced reader will easily recognise his mood. “But she’s such a worldly spirit, she won’t.”

“Oh, I don’t know about the year round. Do you, Mrs. Pasmer?”

“I should,” said Alice, with the suddenness of youth, breaking into the talk which she had not been supposed to take any interest in.

“Is it proper to kiss a young lady’s hand?” said Trevor gratefully, appealing to Mrs. Brinkley.

“It isn’t very customary in the nineteenth century,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But you might kiss her fan. He might kiss her fan, mightn’t he, Mrs. Pasmer?”

“Certainly. Alice, hold out your fan instantly.”

The girl humoured the joke, laughing.

Trevor pressed his lips to the perfumed sticks. “I will tell Mrs. Trevor,” he said, “and that will decide her.”

“It will decide her not to come here at all next year if you tell her all.”

“He never tells me all,” said Mrs. Trevor, catching so much of the talk as she came in from some hospitable cares in the dining-room. “They’re incapable of it. What has he been doing now?”

“Nothing. Or I will tell you when we are alone, Mrs. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with burlesque sympathy. “We oughtn’t to have a scene on both sides of the foot-lights.”

A boyish face, all excitement, was thrust out between the curtains forming the proscenium of the little theatre. “All ready, Mrs. Trevor?”

“Yes, all ready, Jim.”

He dashed the curtains apart, and marred the effect of his own disappearance from the scene by tripping over the long legs of Jove, stretched out to the front, where he sat on Mrs. Trevor’s richest rug, propped with sofa cushions on either hand.

“So perish all the impious race of titans, enemies of the gods!” said Mavering solemnly, as the boy fell sprawling. “Pick the earth-born giant up, Vulcan, my son.”

The boy was very small for his age; every one saw that the accident had not been premeditated, and when Vulcan appeared, with an exaggerated limp, and carried the boy off, a burst of laughter went up from the company.

It did not matter what the play was to have been after that; it all turned upon the accident. Juno came on, and began to reproach Jupiter for his carelessness. “I’ve sent Mercury upstairs for the aynica; but he says it’s no use: that boy won’t be able to pass ball for a week. How often have I told you not to sit with your feet out that way! I knew you’d hurt somebody.”

“I didn’t have my feet out,” retorted Jupiter. “Besides,” he added, with dignity, and a burlesque of marital special pleading which every wife and husband recognised, “I always sit with my feet out so, and I always will, so long as I’ve the spirit of a god.”

“Isn’t he delicious?” buzzed Mrs. Pasmer, leaning backward to whisper to Mrs. Brinkley; it was not that she thought what Dan had just said was so very fanny, but people are immoderately applausive of amateur dramatics, and she was feeling very fond of the young fellow.

The improvisation went wildly and adventurously on, and the curtains dropped together amidst the facile acclaim of the audience:

“It’s very well for Jupiter that he happened to think of the curtain,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “They couldn’t have kept it up at that level much longer.”

“Oh, do you think so?” softly murmured Mrs. Pasmer. “It seemed as if they could have kept it up all night if they liked.”

“I doubt it. Mr. Trevor,” said Mrs. Brinkley to the host, who had come up for her congratulations, “do you always have such brilliant performances?”

“Well, we have so far,” he answered modestly; and Mrs. Brinkley laughed with him. This was the first entertainment at Trevor cottage.

“‘Sh!” went up all round them, and Mrs. Trevor called across the room, in a reproachful whisper loud enough for every one to hear, “My dear! — enjoying yourself!” while Mavering stood between the parted curtains waiting for the attention of the company.

“On account of an accident to the call-boy and the mental exhaustion of some of the deities, the next piece will be omitted, and the performance will begin with the one after. While the audience is waiting, Mercury will go round and take up a collection for the victim of the recent accident, who will probably be indisposed for life. The collector will be accompanied by a policeman, and may be safely trusted.”

He disappeared behind the curtain with a pas and r swirl of his draperies like the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, and the audience again abandoned itself to applause.

“How very witty he is!” said Miss Cotton, who sat near John Munt. “Don’t you think he’s really witty?”

“Yes,” Munt assented critically. “But you should have known his father.”

“Oh, do you know his father?”

“I was in college with him.”

“Oh, do tell me about him, and all Mr. Mavering’s family. We’re so interested, you know, on account of — Isn’t it pretty to have that little love idyl going on here? I wonder — I’ve been wondering all the time — what she thinks of all this. Do you suppose she quite likes it? His costume is so very remarkable!” Miss Cotton, in the absence of any lady of her intimate circle, was appealing confidentially to John Munt.

“Why, do you think there’s anything serious between them?” he asked, dropping his head forward as people do in church when they wish to whisper to some one in the same pew.

“Why, yes, it seems so,” murmured Miss Cotton. “His admiration is quite undisguised, isn’t it?”

“A man never can tell,” said Munt. “We have to leave those things to you ladies.”

“Oh, every one’s talking of it, I assure you. And you know his family?”

“I knew his father once rather better than anybody else.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes.” Munt sketched rather a flattered portrait of the elder Mavering, his ability, his goodness, his shyness, which he had always had to make such a hard fight with. Munt was sensible of an access of popularity in knowing Dan Mavering’s people, and he did not spare his colours.

“Then it isn’t from his father that he gets everything. He isn’t in the least shy,” said Miss Cotton.

“That must be the mother.”

“And the mother?”

“The mother I don’t know.”

Miss Cotton sighed. “Sometimes I wish that he did show a little more trepidation. It would seem as if he were more alive to the great difference that there is between Alice Pasmer and other girls.”

Munt laughed a man’s laugh. “I guess he’s pretty well alive to that, if he’s in love with her.”

“Oh, in a certain way, of course, but not in the highest way. Now, for instance, if he felt all her fineness as — as we do, I don’t believe he’d be willing to appear before her just like that.” The father of the gods wore a damask tablecloth of a pale golden hue and a classic pattern; his arms were bare, and rather absurdly white; on his feet a pair of lawn-tennis shoes had a very striking effect of sandals.

“It seems to me,” Miss Cotton pursued; “that if he really appreciated her in the highest way, he would wish never to do an undignified or trivial thing in her presence.”

“Oh, perhaps it’s that that pleases her in him. They say we’re always taken with opposites.”

“Yes — do you think so?” asked Miss Cotton.

The curtains were flung apart, and the Judgment of Paris followed rather tamely upon what had gone before, though the two young fellows who did Juno and Minerva were very amusing, and the dialogue was full of hits. Some of the audience, an appreciative minority, were of opinion that Mavering and Miss Anderson surpassed themselves in it; she promised him the most beautiful and cultured wife in Greece. “That settles it,” he answered. They came out arm in arm, and Paris, having put on a striped tennis coat over his short-sleeved Greek tunic, moved round among the company for their congratulations, Venus ostentatiously showing the apple she had won.

“I can haydly keep from eating it,” she explained to Alice; before whom she dropped Mavering’s arm. “I’m awfully hungry. It’s hayd woyk.”

Alice stood with her head drawn back, looking at the excited girl with a smile, in which seemed to hover somewhere a latent bitterness.

Mavering, with a flushed face and a flying tongue, was exchanging sallies with her mother, who smothered him in flatteries.

Mrs. Trevor came toward the group, and announced supper. “Mr. Paris, will you take Miss Aphrodite out?”

Miss Anderson swept a low bow of renunciation, and tacitly relinquished Mavering to Alice.

“Oh, no, no!” said Alice, shrinking back from him, with an intensification of her uncertain smile. “A mere mortal?”

“Oh, how very good!” said Mrs. Trevor.

There began to be, without any one’s intending it, that sort of tacit misunderstanding which is all the worse because it can only follow upon a tacit understanding like that which had established itself between Alice and Mavering. They laughed and joked together gaily about all that went on; they were perfectly good friends; he saw that she and her mother were promptly served; he brought them salad and ice-cream and coffee himself, only waiting officially upon Miss Anderson first, and Alice thanked him, with the politest deprecation of his devotion; but if their eyes met, it was defensively, and the security between them was gone. Mavering vaguely felt the loss, without knowing how to retrieve it, and it made him go on more desperately with Miss Anderson. He laughed and joked recklessly, and Alice began to mark a more explicit displeasure with her. She made her mother go rather early.

On her part, Miss Anderson seemed to find reason for resentment in Alice’s bearing toward her. As if she had said to herself that her frank loyalty had been thrown away upon a cold and unresponsive nature, and that her harmless follies in the play had been met with unjust suspicions, she began to make reprisals, she began in dead earnest to flirt with Mavering. Before the evening passed she had made him seem taken with her; but how justly she had done this, and with how much fault of his, no one could have said. There were some who did not notice it at all, but these were not people who knew Mavering, or knew Alice very well.

XX.

The next morning Alice was walking slowly along the road toward the fishing village, when she heard rapid, plunging strides down the wooded hillside on her right. She knew them for Mavering’s, and she did not affect surprise when he made a final leap into the road, and shortened his pace beside her.

“May I join you, Miss Pasmer?”

“I am only going down to the herring-houses,” she began.

“And you’ll let me go with you?” said the young fellow. “The fact is — you’re always so frank that you make everything else seem silly — I’ve been waiting up there in the woods for you to come by. Mrs. Pasmer told me you had started this way, and I cut across lots to overtake you, and then, when you came in sight, I had to let you pass before I could screw my courage up to the point of running after you. How is that for open-mindedness?”

“It’s a very good beginning, I should think.”

“Well, don’t you think you ought to say now that you’re sorry you were so formidable?”

“Am I so formidable?” she asked, and then recognised that she had been trapped into a leading question.

“You are to me. Because I would like always to be sure that I had pleased you, and for the last twelve hours I’ve only been able to make sure that I hadn’t. That’s the consolation I’m going away with. I thought I’d get you to confirm my impression explicitly. That’s why I wished to join you.”

“Are you — were you going away?”

“I’m going by the next boat. What’s the use of staying? I should only make bad worse. Yesterday I hoped But last night spoiled everything. ‘Miss Pasmer,’” he broke out, with a rush of feeling, “you must know why I came up here to Campobello.”

His steps took him a little ahead of her, and he could look back into her face as he spoke. But apparently he saw nothing in it to give him courage to go on, for he stopped, and then continued, lightly: “And I’m going away because I feel that I’ve made a failure of the expedition. I knew that you were supremely disgusted with me last night; but it will be a sort of comfort if you’ll tell me so.”

“Oh,” said Alice, “everybody thought it was very brilliant, I’m sure.”

“And you thought it was a piece of buffoonery. Well, it was. I wish you’d say so, Miss Pasmer; though I didn’t mean the playing entirely. It would be something to start from, and I want to make a beginning — turn over a new leaf. Can’t you help me to inscribe a good resolution of the most iron-clad description on the stainless page? I’ve lain awake all night composing one. Wouldn’t you like to hear it?”

“I can’t see what good that would do,” she said, with some relenting toward a smile, in which he instantly prepared himself to bask.

“But you will when I’ve done it. Now listen!”

“Please don’t go on.” She cut him short with a return to her severity, which he would not recognise.

“Well, perhaps I’d better not,” he consented. “It’s rather a long resolution, and I don’t know that I’ve committed it perfectly yet. But I do assure you that if you were disgusted last night, you were not the only one. I was immensely disgusted myself; and why I wanted you to tell me so, was because when I have a strong pressure brought to bear I can brace up, and do almost anything,” he said, dropping into earnest. Then he rose lightly again, and added, “You have no idea how unpleasant it is to lie awake all night throwing dust in the eyes of an accusing conscience.”

“It must have been, if you didn’t succeed,” said Alice drily.

“Yes, that’s it — that’s just the point. If I’d succeeded, I should be all right, don’t you see. But it was a difficult case.” She turned her face away, but he saw the smile on her cheek, and he laughed as if this were what he had been trying to make her do. “I got beaten. I had to give up, and own it. I had to say that I had thrown my chance away, and I had better take myself off.” He looked at her with a real anxiety in his gay eyes.

“The boat goes just after lunch, I believe,” she said indifferently.

“Oh yes, I shall have time to get lunch before I go,” he said, with bitterness. “But lunch isn’t the only thing; it isn’t even the main thing, Miss Pasmer.”

“No?” She hardened her heart.

He waited for her to say something more, and then he went on. “The question is whether there’s time to undo last night, abolish it, erase it from the calendar of recorded time — sponge it out, in short — and get back to yesterday afternoon.” She made no reply to this. “Don’t you think it was a very pleasant picnic, Miss Pasmer?” he asked, with pensive respectfulness.

“Very,” she answered drily.

He cast a glance at the woods that bordered the road on either side. “That weird forest — I shall never forget it.”

“No; it was something to remember,” she said.

“And the blueberry patch? We mustn’t forget the blueberry patch.”

“There were a great many blueberries.”

She walked on, and he said, “And that bridge — you don’t have that feeling of having been here before?”

“No.”

“Am I walking too fast for you, Miss Pasmer?”

“No; I like to walk fast.”

“But wouldn’t you like to sit down? On this wayside log, for example?” He pointed it out with his stick. “It seems to invite repose, and I know you must be tired.”

“I’m not tired.”

“Ah, that shows that you didn’t lie awake grieving over your follies all night. I hope you rested well, Miss Pasmer.” She said nothing. “If I thought — if I could hope that you hadn’t, it would be a bond of sympathy, and I would give almost anything for a bond of sympathy just now, Miss Pasmer. Alice!” he said, with sudden seriousness. “I know that I’m not worthy even to think of you, and that you’re whole worlds above me in every way. It’s that that takes all heart out of me, and leaves me without a word to say when I’d like to say so much. I would like to speak — tell you—”

She interrupted him. “I wish to speak to you, Mr. Mavering, and tell you that — I’m very tired, and I’m going back to the hotel. I must ask you to let me go back alone.”

“Alice, I love you.”

“I’m sorry you said it — sorry, sorry.”

“Why?” he asked, with hopeless futility.

“Because there can be no love between us — not friendship even — not acquaintance.”

“I shouldn’t have asked for your acquaintance, your friendship, if—” His words conveyed a delicate reproach, and they stung her, because they put her in the wrong.

“No matter,” she began wildly. “I didn’t mean to wound you. But we must part, and we must never see each other again:”

He stood confused, as if he could not make it out or believe it. “But yesterday—”

“It’s to-day now.”

“Ah, no! It’s last night. And I can explain.”

“No!” she cried. “You shall not make me out so mean and vindictive. I don’t care for last night, nor for anything that happened.” This was not true, but it seemed so to her at the moment; she thought that she really no longer resented his association with Miss Anderson and his separation from herself in all that had taken place.

“Then what is it?”

“I can’t tell you. But everything is over between us — that’s all.”

“But yesterday — and all these days past — you seemed—”

“It’s unfair of you to insist — it’s ungenerous, ungentlemanly.”

That word, which from a woman’s tongue always strikes a man like a blow in the face, silenced Mavering. He set his lips and bowed, and they parted. She turned upon her way, and he kept the path which she had been going.

It was not the hour when the piazzas were very full, and she slipped into the dim hotel corridor undetected, or at least undetained. She flung into her room, and confronted her mother.

Mrs. Pasmer was there looking into a trunk that had overflowed from her own chamber. “What is the matter?” she said to her daughter’s excited face.

“Mr. Mavering—”

“Well?”

“And I refused him.”

Mrs. Pasmer was one of those ladies who in any finality have a keen retrovision of all the advantages of a different conclusion. She had been thinking, since she told Dan Mavering which way Alice had gone to walk, that if he were to speak to her now, and she were to accept him, it would involve a great many embarrassing consequences; but she had consoled herself with the probability that he would not speak so soon after the effects of last night, but would only try at the furthest to make his peace with Alice. Since he had spoken, though, and she had refused him, Mrs. Pasmer instantly saw all the pleasant things that would have followed in another event. “Refused him?” she repeated provisionally, while she gathered herself for a full exploration of all the facts.

“Yes, mamma; and I can’t talk about it. I wish never to hear his name again, or to see him, or to speak to him.”

“Why, of course not,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a fine smile, from the vantage-ground of her superior years, “if you’ve refused him.” She left the trunk which she had been standing over, and sat down, while Alice swept to and fro before her excitedly. “But why did you refuse him, my dear?”

“Why? Because he’s detestable — perfectly ignoble.”

Her mother probably knew how to translate these exalted expressions into the more accurate language of maturer life. “Do you mean last night?”

“Last night?” cried Alice tragically. “No. Why should I care for last night?”

“Then I don’t understand what you mean,” retorted Mrs. Pasmer. “What did he say?” she demanded, with authority.

“Mamma, I can’t talk about it — I won’t.”

“But you must, Alice. It’s your duty. Of course I must know about it. What did he say?”

Alice walked up and down the room with her lips firmly closed — like Mavering’s lips, it occurred to her; and then she opened them, but without speaking.

“What did he say?” persisted her mother, and her persistence had its effect.

“Say?” exclaimed the girl indignantly. “He tried to make me say.”

“I see,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Well?”

“But I forced him to speak, and then — I rejected him. That’s all.”

“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “He was afraid of you.”

“And that’s what made it the more odious. Do you think I wished him to be afraid of me? Would that be any pleasure? I should hate myself if I had to quell anybody into being unlike themselves.” She sat down for a moment, and then jumped up again, and went to the window, for no reason, and came back.

“Yes,” said her mother impartially, “he’s light, and he’s roundabout. He couldn’t come straight at anything.”

“And would you have me accept such a — being?”

Mrs. Pasmer smiled a little at the literary word, and continued: “But he’s very sweet, and he’s as good as the day’s long, and he’s very fond of you, and — I thought you liked him.”

The girl threw up her arms across her eyes. “Oh, how can you say such a thing, mamma?”

She dropped into a chair at the bedside, and let her face fall into her hands, and cried.

Her mother waited for the gust of tears to pass before she said, “But if you feel so about it—”

“Mamma!” Alice sprang to her feet.

“It needn’t come from you. I could make some excuse to see him — write him a little note—”

“Never!” exclaimed Alice grandly. “What I’ve done I’ve done from my reason, and my feelings have nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, very well,” said her mother, going out of the room, not wholly disappointed with what she viewed as a respite, and amused by her daughter’s tragics. “But if you think that the feelings have nothing to do with such a matter, you’re very much mistaken.” If she believed that her daughter did not know her real motives in rejecting Dan Mavering, or had not been able to give them, she did not say so.

The little group of Aliceolaters on the piazza, who began to canvass the causes of Mavering’s going before the top of his hat disappeared below the bank on the path leading to the ferry-boat, were of two minds. One faction held that he was going because Alice had refused him, and that his gaiety up to the last moment was only a mask to hide his despair. The other side contended that, if he and Alice were not actually engaged, they understood each other, and he was going away because he wanted to tell his family, or something of that kind. Between the two opinions Miss Cotton wavered with a sentimental attraction to either. “What do you really think?” she asked Mrs. Brinkley, arriving from lunch at the corner of the piazza where the group was seated.

“Oh, what does it matter, at their age?” she demanded.

“But they’re just of the age when it does happen to matter,” suggested Mrs. Stamwell.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and that’s what makes the whole thing so perfectly ridiculous. Just think of two children, one of twenty and the other of twenty-three, proposing to decide their lifelong destiny in such a vital matter! Should we trust their judgment in regard to the smallest business affair? Of course not. They’re babes in arms, morally and mentally speaking. People haven’t the data for being wisely in love till they’ve reached the age when they haven’t the least wish to be so. Oh, I suppose I thought that I was a grown woman too when I was twenty; I can look back and see that I did; and, what’s more preposterous still, I thought Mr. Brinkley was a man at twenty-four. But we were no more fit to accept or reject each other at that infantile period—”

“Do you really think so?” asked Miss Cotton, only partially credulous of Mrs. Brinkley’s irony.

“Yes, it does seem out of all reason,” admitted Mrs. Stamwell.

“Of course it is,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “If she has rejected him, she’s done a very safe thing. Nobody should be allowed to marry before fifty. Then, if people married, it would be because they knew that they loved each other.”

Miss Cotton reflected a moment. “It is strange that such an important question should have to be decided at an age when the judgment is so far from mature. I never happened to look at it in that light before.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley — and she made herself comfortable in an arm chair commanding a stretch of the bay over which the ferry-boat must pass— “but it’s only part and parcel of the whole affair. I’m sure that no grown person can see the ridiculous young things — inexperienced, ignorant, featherbrained — that nature intrusts with children, their immortal little souls and their extremely perishable little bodies, without rebelling at the whole system. When you see what most young mothers are, how perfectly unfit and incapable, you wonder that the whole race doesn’t teeth and die. Yes, there’s one thing I feel pretty sure of — that, as matters are arranged now, there oughtn’t to be mothers at all, there ought to be only grandmothers.”

The group all laughed, even Miss Cotton, but she was the first to become grave. At the bottom of her heart there was a doubt whether so light a way of treating serious things was not a little wicked.

“Perhaps,” she said, “we shall have to go back to the idea that engagements and marriages are not intended to be regulated by the judgment, but by the affections.”

“I don’t know what’s intended,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “but I know what is. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the affections have it their own way, and I must say I don’t think the judgment could make a greater mess of it. In fact,” she continued, perhaps provoked to the excess by the deprecation she saw in Miss Cotton’s eye, “I consider every broken engagement nowadays a blessing in disguise.”

Miss Cotton said nothing. The other ladies said, “Why, Mrs. Brinkley!”

“Yes. The thing has gone altogether too far. The pendulum has swung in that direction out of all measure. We are married too much. And as a natural consequence we are divorced too much. The whole case is in a nutshell: if there were no marriages, there would be no divorces, and that great abuse would be corrected, at any rate.”

All the ladies laughed, Miss Cotton more and more sorrowfully. She liked to have people talk as they do in genteel novels. Mrs. Brinkley’s bold expressions were a series of violent shocks to her nature, and imparted a terrible vibration to the fabric of her whole little rose-coloured ideal world; if they had not been the expressions of a person whom a great many unquestionable persons accepted, who had such an undoubted standing, she would have thought them very coarse. As it was, they had a great fascination for her. “But in a case like that of” — she looked round and lowered her voice— “our young friends, I’m sure you couldn’t rejoice if the engagement were broken off.”

“Well, I’m not going to be ‘a mush of concession,’ as Emerson says, Miss Cotton. And, in the first place, how do you know they’re engaged?”

“Ah, I don’t; I didn’t mean that they were. But wouldn’t it be a little pathetic if, after all that we’ve seen going on, his coming here expressly on her account, and his perfect devotion to her for the past two weeks, it should end in nothing?”

“Two weeks isn’t a very long time to settle the business of a lifetime.”

“No.”

“Perhaps she’s proposed delay; a little further acquaintance.”

“Oh, of course that would be perfectly right. Do you think she did?”

“Not if she’s as wise as the rest of us would have been at her age. But I think she ought.”

“Yes?” said Miss Cotton semi-interrogatively.

“Do you think his behaviour last night would naturally impress her with his wisdom and constancy?”

“No, I can’t say that it would, but—”

“And this Alice of yours is rather a severe young person. She has her ideas, and I’m afraid they’re rather heroic. She’d be just with him, of course. But there’s nothing a man dreads so much as justice — some men.”

“Yes,” pursued Miss Cotton, “but that very disparity — I know they’re very unlike — don’t you think—”

“Oh yes, I know the theory about that. But if they were exactly alike in temperament, they’d be sufficiently unlike for the purposes of counterparts. That was arranged once for all when ‘male and female created He them.’ I’ve no doubt their fancy was caught by all the kinds of difference they find in each other; that’s just as natural as it’s silly. But the misunderstanding, the trouble, the quarrelling, the wear and tear of spirit, that they’d have to go through before they assimilated — it makes me tired, as the boys say. No: I hope, for the young man’s own sake, he’s got his conge.”

“But he’s so kind, so good—”

“My dear, the world is surfeited with kind, good men. There are half a dozen of them at the other end of the piazza smoking; and there comes another to join them,” she added, as a large figure, semicircular in profile, advanced itself from a doorway toward a vacant chair among the smokers. “The very soul of kindness and goodness.” She beckoned toward her husband, who caught sight of her gesture. “Now I can tell you all his mental processes. First, surprise at seeing some one beckoning; then astonishment that it’s I, though who else should beckon him? — then wonder what I can want; then conjecture that I may want him to come here; then pride in his conjecture; rebellion; compliance.”

The ladies were in a scream of laughter as Mr. Brinkley lumbered heavily to their group.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Do you believe in broken engagements? Now quick — off-hand!”

“Who’s engaged?”

“No matter.”

“Well, you know Punch’s advice to those about to marry?”

“I know — chestnuts,” said his wife scornfully. They dismissed each other with tender bluntness, and he went in to get a match.

“Ah, Mrs. Brinkley,” said one of the ladies, “it would be of no use for you to preach broken engagements to any one who saw you and Mr. Brinkley together.” They fell upon her, one after another, and mocked her with the difference between her doctrine and practice; and they were all the more against her because they had been perhaps a little put down by her whimsical sayings.

“Yes,” she admitted. “But we’ve been thirty years coming to the understanding that you all admire so much; and do you think it was worth the time?”

XXI.

Mavering kept up until he took leave of the party of young people who had come over on the ferry-boat to Eastport for the frolic of seeing him off. It was a tremendous tour de force to accept their company as if he were glad of it, and to respond to all their gay nothings gaily; to maintain a sunny surface on his turbid misery. They had tried to make Alice come with them, but her mother pleaded a bad headache for her; and he had to parry a hundred sallies about her, and from his sick heart humour the popular insinuation that there was an understanding between them, and that they had agreed together she should not come. He had to stand about on the steamboat wharf and listen to amiable innuendoes for nearly an hour before the steamer came in from St. John. The fond adieux of his friends, their offers to take any message back, lasted during the interminable fifteen minutes that she lay at her moorings, and then he showed himself at the stern of the boat, and waved his handkerchief in acknowledgment of the last parting salutations on shore.

When it was all over, he went down into his state-room, and shut himself in, and let his misery rollover him. He felt as if there were a flood of it, and it washed him to and fro, one gall of shame, of self-accusal, of bitterness, from head to foot. But in it all he felt no resentment toward Alice, no wish to wreak any smallest part of his suffering upon her. Even while he had hoped for her love, it seemed to him that he had not seen her in all that perfection which she now had in irreparable loss. His soul bowed itself fondly over the thought of her; and, stung as he was by that last cruel word of hers, he could not upbraid her. That humility which is love casting out selfishness, the most egotistic of the passions triumphing over itself — Mavering experienced it to the full. He took all the blame. He could not see that she had ever encouraged him to hope for her love, which now appeared a treasure heaven — far beyond his scope; he could only call himself fool, and fool, and fool, and wonder that he could have met her in the remoteness of that morning with the belief that but for the follies of last night she might have answered him differently. He believed now that, whatever had gone before, she must still have rejected him. She had treated his presumption very leniently; she had really spared him.

It went on, over and over. Sometimes it varied a little, as when he thought of how, when she should tell her mother, Mrs. Pasmer must laugh. He pictured them both laughing at him; and then Mr. Pasmer — he had scarcely passed a dozen words with him-coming in and asking what they were laughing at, and their saying, and his laughing too.

At other times he figured them as incensed at his temerity, which must seem to them greater and greater, as now it seemed to him. He had never thought meanly of himself, and the world so far had seemed to think well of him; but because Alice Pasmer was impossible to him, he felt that it was an unpardonable boldness in him to have dreamed of her. What must they be saying of his having passed from the ground of society compliments and light flirtation to actually telling Alice that he loved her?

He wondered what Mrs. Pasmer had thought of his telling her that he had come to Campobello to consider the question whether he should study law or go into business, and what motive she had supposed he had in telling her that. He asked himself what motive he had, and tried to pretend that he had none. He dramatised conversations with Mrs. Pasmer in which he laughed it off.

He tried to remember all that had passed the day before at the picnic, and whether Alice had done or said anything to encourage him, and he could not find that she had. All her trust and freedom was because she felt perfectly safe with him from any such disgusting absurdity as he had been guilty of. The ride home through the mist, with its sweet intimacy, that parting which had seemed so full of tender intelligence, were parts of the same illusion. There had been nothing of it on her side from the beginning but a kindliness which he had now flung away for ever.

He went back to the beginning, and tried to remember the point where he had started in this fatal labyrinth of error. She had never misled him, but he had misled himself from the first glimpse of her.

Whatever was best in his light nature, whatever was generous and self-denying, came out in this humiliation. From the vision of her derision he passed to a picture of her suffering from pity for him, and wrung with a sense of the pain she had given him. He promised himself to write to her, and beg her not to care for him, because he was not worthy of that. He framed a letter in his mind, in which he posed in some noble attitudes, and brought tears into his eyes by his magnanimous appeal to her not to suffer for the sake of one so unworthy of her serious thought. He pictured her greatly moved by some of the phrases, and he composed for her a reply, which led to another letter from him, and so to a correspondence and a long and tender friendship. In the end he died suddenly, and then she discovered that she had always loved him. He discovered that he was playing the fool again, and he rose from the berth where he had tumbled himself. The state-room had that smell of parboiled paint which state-rooms have, and reminded him of the steamer in which he had gone to Europe when a boy, with the family, just after his mother’s health began to fail.

He went down on the deck near the ladies’ saloon, where the second-class passengers were gathered listening to the same band of plantation negroes who had amused him so much on the eastward trip. The passengers were mostly pock marked Provincials, and many of them were women; they lounged on the barrels of apples neatly piled up, and listened to the music without smiling. One of the negroes was singing to the banjo, and another began to do the rheumatic uncle’s breakdown. Mavering said to himself: “I can’t stand that. Oh, what a fool I am! Alice, I love you. O merciful heavens! O infernal jackass! Ow! Gaw!”

At the bow of the boat he found a gang of Italian labourers returning to the States after some job in the Provinces. They smoked their pipes and whined their Neapolitan dialect together. It made Mavering think of Dante, of the Inferno, to which he passed naturally from his self-denunciation for having been an infernal jackass. The inscription on the gate of hell ran through his mind. He thought he would make his life — his desolate, broken life — a perpetual exile, like Dante’s. At the same time he ground his teeth, and muttered: “Oh, what a fool I am! Oh, idiot! beast! Oh! oh!” The pipes reminded him to smoke, and he took out his cigarette case. The Italians looked at him; he gave all the cigarettes among them, without keeping any for himself. He determined to spend the miserable remnant of his life in going about doing good and bestowing alms.

He groaned aloud, so that the Italians noticed it, and doubtless spoke of it among themselves. He could not understand their dialect, but he feigned them saying respectfully compassionate things. Then he gnashed his teeth again, and cursed his folly. When the bell rang for supper he found himself very hungry, and ate heavily. After that he went out in front of the cabin, and walked up and down, thinking, and trying not to think. The turmoil in his mind tired him like a prodigious physical exertion.

Toward ten o’clock the night grew rougher. The sea was so phosphorescent that it broke in sheets and flakes of pale bluish flame from the bows and wheel-houses, and out in the dark the waves revealed themselves in flashes and long gleams of fire. One of the officers of the boat came and hung with Mavering over the guard. The weird light from the water was reflected on their faces, and showed them to each other.

“Well, I never saw anything like this before. Looks like hell; don’t it?” said the officer.

“Yes,” said Mavering. “Is it uncommon?”

“Well, I should say so. I guess we’re going to have a picnic.”

Mavering thought of blueberries, but he did not say anything.

“I guess it’s going to be a regular circus.”

Mavering did not care. He asked incuriously, “How do you find your course in such weather?”

“Well, we guess where we are, and then give her so many turns of the wheel.” The officer laughed, and Mavering laughed too. He was struck by the hollow note in his laugh; it seemed to him pathetic; he wondered if he should now always laugh so, and if people would remark it. He tried another laugh; it sounded mechanical.

He went to bed, and was so worn out that he fell asleep and began to dream. A face came up out of the sea, and brooded over the waters, as in that picture of Vedder’s which he calls “Memory,” but the hair was not blond; it was the colour of those phosphorescent flames, and the eyes were like it. “Horrible! horrible!” he tried to shriek, but he cried, “Alice, I love you.” There was a burglar in the room, and he was running after Miss Pasmer. Mavering caught him, and tried to beat him; his fists fell like bolls of cotton; the burglar drew his breath in with a long, washing sound like water.

Mavering woke deathly sick, and heard the sweep of the waves. The boat was pitching frightfully. He struggled out into the saloon, and saw that it was five o’clock. In five hours more it would be a day since he told Alice that he loved her; it now seemed very improbable. There were a good many half-dressed people in the saloon, and a woman came running out of her state-room straight to Mavering. She was in her stocking feet, and her hair hung down her back.

“Oh! are we going down?” she implored him. “Have we struck? Oughtn’t we to pray — somebody? Shall I wake the children?”

“Mavering reassured her, and told her there was no danger.

“Well, then,” she said, “I’ll go back for my shoes.”

“Yes, better get your shoes.”

The saloon rose round him and sank. He controlled his sickness by planting a chair in the centre and sitting in it with his eyes shut. As he grew more comfortable he reflected how he had calmed that woman, and he resolved again to spend his life in doing good. “Yes, that’s the only ticket,” he said to himself, with involuntary frivolity. He thought of what the officer had said, and he helplessly added, “Circus ticket — reserved seat.” Then he began again, and loaded himself with execration.

The boat got into Portland at nine o’clock, and Mavering left her, taking his hand-bag with him, and letting his trunk go on to Boston.

The officer who received his ticket at the gangplank noticed the destination on it, and said, “Got enough?”

“Yes, for one while.” Mavering recognised his acquaintance of the night before.

“Don’t like picnics very much.”

“No,” said Mavering, with abysmal gloom. “They don’t agree with me. Never did.” He was aware of trying to make his laugh bitter. The officer did not notice.

Mavering was surprised, after the chill of the storm at sea, to find it rather a warm, close morning in Portland. The restaurant to which the hackman took him as the best in town was full of flies; they bit him awake out of the dreary reveries he fell into while waiting for his breakfast. In a mirror opposite he saw his face. It did not look haggard; it looked very much as it always did. He fancied playing a part through life — hiding a broken heart under a smile. “O you incorrigible ass!” he said to himself, and was afraid he had said it to the young lady who brought him his breakfast, and looked haughtily at him from under her bang. She was very thin, and wore a black jersey.

He tried to find out whether he had spoken aloud by addressing her pleasantly. “It’s pretty cold this morning.”

“What say?”

“Pretty cool.”

“Oh yes. But it’s pretty clo-ose,” she replied, in her Yankee cantillation. She went away and left him to the bacon and eggs he had ordered at random. There was a fly under one of the slices of bacon, and Mavering confined himself to the coffee.

A man came up in a white cap and jacket from a basement in the front of the restaurant, where confectionery was sold, and threw down a mass of malleable candy on a marble slab, and began to work it. Mavering watched him, thinking fuzzily all the time of Alice, and holding long, fatiguing dialogues with the people at the Ty’n-y-Coed, whose several voices he heard.

He said to himself that it was worse than yesterday. He wondered if it would go on getting worse every day.

He saw a man pass the door of the restaurant who looked exactly like Boardman as he glanced in. The resemblance was explained by the man’s coming back, and proving to be really Boardman.

XXII.

Mavering sprang at him with a demand for the reason of his being there.

“I thought it was you as I passed,” said Boardman, “but I couldn’t make sure — so dark back here.”

“And I thought it was you, but I couldn’t believe it,” said Mavering, with equal force, cutting short an interior conversation with Mr. Pasmer, which had begun to hold itself since his first glimpse of Boardman.

“I came down here to do a sort of one-horse yacht race to-day,” Boardman explained.

“Going to be a yacht race? Better have some breakfast. Or better not — here. Flies under your bacon.”

“Rough on the flies,” said Boardman, snapping the bell which summoned the spectre in the black jersey, and he sat down. “What are you doing in Portland?”

Mavering told him, and then Boardman asked him how he had left the Pasmers. Mavering needed no other hint to speak, and he spoke fully, while Boardman listened with an agreeable silence, letting the hero of the tale break into self-scornful groans and doleful laughs, and ease his heart with grotesque, inarticulate noises, and made little or no comments.

By the time his breakfast came, Boardman was ready to say, “I didn’t suppose it was so much of a mash.”

“I didn’t either,” said Mavering, “when I left Boston. Of course I knew I was going down there to see her, but when I got there it kept going on, just like anything else, up to the last moment. I didn’t realise till it came to the worst that I had become a mere pulp.”

“Well, you won’t stay so,” said Boardman, making the first vain attempt at consolation. He lifted the steak he had ordered, and peered beneath it. “All right this time, any way.”

“I don’t know what you mean by staying so,” replied Mavering, with gloomy rejection of the comfort offered.

“You’ll see that it’s all for the best; that you’re well out of it. If she could throw you over, after leading you on—”

“But she didn’t lead me on!” exclaimed Mavering. “Don’t you understand that it was all my mistake from the first? If I hadn’t been perfectly besotted I should have seen that she was only tolerating me. Don’t you see? Why, hang it, Boardman, I must have had a kind of consciousness of it under my thick-skinned conceit, after all, for when I came to the point — when I did come to the point — I hadn’t the sand to stick to it like a man, and I tried to get her to help me. Yes, I can see that I did now. I kept fooling about, and fooling about, and it was because I had that sort of prescience — of whatever you call it — that I was mistaken about it from the very beginning.”

He wished to tell Boardman about the events of the night before; but he could not. He said to himself that he did not care about their being hardly to his credit; but he did not choose to let Alice seem to have resented anything in them; it belittled her, and claimed too much for him. So Boardman had to proceed upon a partial knowledge of the facts.

“I don’t suppose that boomerang way of yours, if that’s what you mean, was of much use,” he said.

“Use? It ruined me! But what are you going to do? How are you going to presuppose that a girl like Miss Pasmer is interested in an idiot like you? I mean me, of course.” Mavering broke off with a dolorous laugh. “And if you can’t presuppose it, what are you going to do when it comes to the point? You’ve got to shillyshally, and then you’ve got to go it blind. I tell you it’s a leap in the dark.”

“Well, then, if you’ve got yourself to blame—”

“How am I to blame, I should like to know?” retorted Mavering, rejecting the first offer from another of the censure which he had been heaping upon himself: the irritation of his nerves spoke. “I did speak out at last — when it was too late. Well, let it all go,” he groaned aimlessly. “I don’t care. But she isn’t to blame. I don’t think I could admire anybody very much who admired me. No, sir. She did just right. I was a fool, and she couldn’t have treated me differently.”

“Oh, I guess it’ll come out all right,” said Boardman, abandoning himself to mere optimism.

“How come all right?” demanded Mavering, flattered by the hope he refused. “It’s come right now. I’ve got my deserts; that’s all.”

“Oh no, you haven’t. What harm have you done? It’s all right for you to think small beer of yourself, and I don’t see how you could think anything else just at present. But you wait awhile. When did it happen?”

Mavering took out his watch. “One day, one hour, twenty minutes, and fifteen seconds ago.”

“Sure about the seconds? I suppose you didn’t hang round a great while afterward?”

“Well, people don’t, generally,” said Mavering, with scorn.

“Never tried it,” said Boardman, looking critically at his fried potatoes before venturing upon them. “If you had stayed, perhaps she might have changed her mind,” he added, as if encouraged to this hopeful view by the result of his scrutiny.

“Where did you get your fraudulent reputation for common-sense, Boardman?” retorted Mavering, who had followed his examination of the potatoes with involuntary interest. “She won’t change her mind; she isn’t one of that kind. But she’s the one woman in this world who could have made a man of me, Boardman.”

“Is that so?” asked Boardman lightly. “Well, she is a good-looking girl.”

“She’s divine!”

“What a dress that was she had on Class Day!”

“I never think what she has on. She makes everything perfect, and then makes you forget it.”

“She’s got style; there’s no mistake about that.”

“Style!” sighed Mavering; but he attempted no exemplification.

“She’s awfully graceful. What a walk she’s got!”

“Oh, don’t, don’t, Boardman! All that’s true, and all that’s nothing — nothing to her goodness. She’s so good, Boardman! Well, I give it up! She’s religious. You wouldn’t think that, may be; you can’t imagine a pretty girl religious. And she’s all the more intoxicating when she’s serious; and when she’s forgotten your whole worthless existence she’s ten thousand times more fascinating than and other girl when she’s going right for you. There’s a kind of look comes into her eyes — kind of absence, rapture, don’t you know — when she’s serious, that brings your heart right into your mouth. She makes you think of some of those pictures — I want to tell you what she said the other day at a picnic when we were off getting blueberries, and you’ll understand that she isn’t like other girls — that she has a soul fall of — of — you know what, Boardman. She has high thoughts about everything. I don’t believe she’s ever had a mean or ignoble impulse — she couldn’t have.” In the business of imparting his ideas confidentially, Mavering had drawn himself across the table toward Boardman, without heed to what was on it.

“Look out! You’ll be into my steak first thing you know.”

“Oh, confound your steak?” cried Mavering, pushing the dish away. “What difference does it make? I’ve lost her, anyway.”

“I don’t believe you’ve lost her,” said Boardman.

“What’s the reason you don’t?” retorted Mavering, with contempt.

“Because, if she’s the serious kind of a girl you say she is, she wouldn’t let you come up there and dangle round a whole fortnight without letting you know she didn’t like it, unless she did like it. Now you just go a little into detail.”

Mavering was quite willing. He went so much into detail that he left nothing to Boardman’s imagination. He lost the sense of its calamitous close in recounting the facts of his story at Campobello; he smiled and blushed and laughed in telling certain things; he described Miss Anderson and imitated her voice; he drew heads of some of the ladies on the margin of a newspaper, and the tears came into his eyes when he repeated the cruel words which Alice had used at their last meeting.

“Oh, well, you must brace up,” said Boardman. “I’ve got to go now. She didn’t mean it, of course.”

“Mean what?”

“That you were ungentlemanly. Women don’t know half the time how hard they’re hitting.”

“I guess she meant that she didn’t want me, anyway,” said Mavering gloomily.

“Ah, I don’t know about that. You’d better ask her the next time you see her. Good-bye.” He had risen, and he offered his hand to Mavering, who was still seated.

“Why, I’ve half a mind to go with you.”

“All right, come along. But I thought you might be going right on to Boston.”

“No; I’ll wait and go on with you. How, do you go to the race?”

“In the press boat.”

“Any women?”

“No; we don’t send them on this sort of duty.”

“That settles it. I have got all I want of that particular sex for the time being.” Mavering wore a very bitter air as he said this; it seemed to him that he would always be cynical; he rose, and arranged to leave his bag with the restaurateur, who put it under the counter, and then he went out with his friend.

The sun had come out, and the fog was burning away; there was life and lift in the air, which the rejected lover could not refuse to feel, and he said, looking round, and up and down the animated street. “I guess you’re going to have a good day for it.”

The pavement was pretty well filled with women who had begun shopping. Carriages were standing beside the pavement; a lady crossed the pavement from a shop door toward a coupe just in front of them, with her hand full of light packages; she dropped one of them, and Mavering sprang forward instinctively and picked it up for her.

“Oh, thank you!” she said, with the deep gratitude which society cultivates for the smallest services. Then she lifted her drooped eyelashes, and, with a flash of surprise, exclaimed, “Mr. Mavering!” and dropped all her packages that she might shake hands with him.

Boardman sauntered slowly on, but saw with a backward glance Mavering carrying the lady’s packages to the coupe for her; saw him lift his hat there, and shake hands with somebody in the coupe, and then stand talking beside it. He waited at the corner of the block for Mavering to come up, affecting an interest in the neck-wear of a furnisher’s window.

In about five minutes Mavering joined him.

“Look here, Boardman! Those ladies have snagged onto me.”

“Are there two of them?”

“Yes, one inside. And they want me to go with then to see the race. Their father’s got a little steam-yacht. They want you to go too.”

Boardman shook his head.

“Well, that’s what I told them — told them that you had to go on the press boat. They said they wished they were going on the press boat too. But I don’t see how I can refuse. They’re ladies that I met Class Day, and I ought to have shown them a little more attention then; but I got so taken up with—”

“I see,” said Boardman, showing his teeth, fine and even as grains of pop-corn, in a slight sarcastic smile. “Sort of poetical justice,” he suggested.

“Well, it is — sort of,” said Mavering, with a shamefaced consciousness. “What train are you going back on?”

“Seven o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

He hurried back to rejoin the ladies, and Boardman saw him, after some parley and laughter, get into the coupe, from which he inferred that they had turned down the little seat in front, and made him take it; and he inferred that they must be very jolly, sociable girls.

He did not see Mavering again till the train was on its way, when he came in, looking distraughtly about for his friend. He was again very melancholy, and said dejectedly that they had made him stay to dinner, and had then driven him down to the station, bag and all. “The old gentleman came too. I was in hopes I’d find you hanging round somewhere, so that I could introduce you. They’re awfully nice. None of that infernal Boston stiffness. The one you saw me talking with is married, though.”

Boardman was writing out his report from a little book with shorthand notes in it. There were half a dozen other reporters in the car busy with their work. A man who seemed to be in authority said to one of them, “Try to throw in a little humour.”

Mavering pulled his hat over his eyes, and leaned his head on the back of his seat, and tried to sleep.

XXIII.

At his father’s agency in Boston he found, the next morning, a letter from him saying that he expected to be down that day, and asking Dan to meet him at the Parker House for dinner. The letter intimated the elder Mavering’s expectation that his son had reached some conclusion in the matter they had talked of before he left for Campobello.

It gave Dan a shiver of self-disgust and a sick feeling of hopelessness. He was quite willing now to do whatever his father wished, but he did not see haw he could face him and own his defeat.

When they met, his father did not seem to notice his despondency, and he asked him nothing about the Pasmers, of course. That would not have been the American way. Nothing had been said between the father and son as to the special advantages of Campobello for the decision of the question pending when they saw each other last; but the son knew that the father guessed why he chose that island for the purpose; and now the elder knew that if the younger had anything to tell him he would tell it, and if he had not he would keep it. It was tacitly understood that there was no objection on the father’s part to Miss Pasmer; in fact, there had been a glimmer of humorous intelligence in his eye when the son said he thought he should run down to Bar Harbour, and perhaps to Campobello, but he had said nothing to betray his consciousness.

They met in the reading-room at Parker’s, and Dan said, “Hello, father,” and his father answered, “Well, Dan;” and they shyly touched the hands dropped at their sides as they pressed together in the crowd. The father gave his boy a keen glance, and then took the lead into the dining-room, where he chose a corner table, and they disposed of their hats on the window-seat.

“All well at home?” asked the young fellow, as he took up the bill of fare to order the dinner. His father hated that, and always made him do it.

“Yes, yes; as usual, I believe. Minnie is off for a week at the mountains; Eunice is at home.”

“Oh! How would you like some green goose, with apple-sauce, sweet-potatoes, and succotash?”

“It seems to me that was pretty good, the last time. All right, if you like it.”

“I don’t know that I care for anything much. I’m a little off my feed. No soup,” he said, looking up at the waiter bending over him; and then he gave the order. “I think you may bring me half a dozen Blue Points, if they’re good,” he called after him.

“Didn’t Bar Harbour agree with you — or Campobello?” asked Mr. Mavering, taking the opening offered him.

“No, not very well,” said Dan; and he said no more about it, leaving his father to make his own inferences as to the kind or degree of the disagreement.

“Well, have you made up your mind?” asked the father, resting his elbows on either side of his plate, and putting his hands together softly, while he looked across them with a cheery kindness at his boy.

“Yes, I have,” said Dan slowly.

“Well?”

“I don’t believe I care to go into the law.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s all right, then. I wished you to choose freely, and I suppose you’ve done so.”

“Oh Yes.”

“I think you’ve chosen wisely, and I’m very glad. It’s a weight off my mind. I think you’ll be happier in the business than you would in the law; I think you’ll enjoy it. You needn’t look forward to a great deal of Ponkwasset Falls, unless you like.”

“I shouldn’t mind going there,” said Dan listlessly.

“It won’t be necessary — at first. In fact, it won’t be desirable. I want you to look up the business at this end a little.”

Dan gave a start. “In Boston?”

“Yes. It isn’t in the shape I want to have it. I propose to open a place of our own, and to put you in charge.” Something in the young man’s face expressed reluctance, and his father asked kindly, “Would that be distasteful to you?”

“Oh no. It isn’t the thing I object to, but I don’t know that I care to be in Boston.” He lifted his face and looked his father full in the eyes, but with a gaze that refused to convey anything definite. Then the father knew that the boy’s love affair had gone seriously wrong.

The waiter came with the dinner, and made an interruption in which they could be naturally silent. When he had put the dinner before them, and cumbered them with superfluous service, after the fashion of his kind, he withdrew a little way, and left them to resume their talk.

“Well,” said the elder lightly, as if Dan’s not caring to be in Boston had no particular significance for him, “I don’t know that I care to have you settle down to it immediately. I rather think I’d like to have you look about first a little. Go to New York, go to Philadelphia, and see their processes there. We can’t afford to get old-fashioned in our ways. I’ve always been more interested by the aesthetic side of the business, but you ought to have a taste for the mechanism, from your grandfather; your mother has it.”

“Oh yes, sir. I think all that’s very interesting,” said Dan.

“Well, go to France, and see how those fellows do it. Go to London, and look up William Morris.”

“Yes, that would be very nice,” admitted the young fellow, beginning to catch on. “But I didn’t suppose — I didn’t expect to begin life with a picnic.” He entered upon his sentence with a jocular buoyancy, but at the last word, which he fatally drifted upon, his voice fell. He said to himself that he was greatly changed; that, he should never be gay and bright again; there would always be this undercurrent of sadness; he had noticed the undercurrent yesterday when he was laughing and joking with those girls at Portland.

“Oh, I don’t want you to buckle down at once,” said his father, smiling. “If you’d decided upon the law, I should have felt that you’d better not lose time. But as you’re going into the business, I don’t mind your taking a year off. It won’t be lost time if you keep your eyes open. I think you’d better go down into Italy and Spain. Look up the old tapestries and stamped leathers. You may get some ideas. How would you like it?”

“First-rate. I should like it,” said Dan, rising on the waft of his father’s suggestion, but gloomily lapsing again. Still, it was pleasing to picture himself going about through Europe with a broken heart, and he did not deny himself the consolation of the vision.

“Well, there’s nobody to dislike it,” said his father cheerily. He was sure now that Dan had been jilted; otherwise he would have put forth some objection to a scheme which must interrupt his lovemaking. “There’s no reason why, with our resources, we shouldn’t take the lead in this business.”

He went on to speak more fully of his plans, and Dan listened with a nether reference of it all to Alice, but still with a surface intelligence on which nothing was lost.

“Are you going home with me to-morrow?” asked his father as they rose from the table.

“Well, perhaps not to-morrow. I’ve got some of my things to put together in Cambridge yet, and perhaps I’d better look after them. But I’ve a notion I’d better spend the winter at home, and get an idea of the manufacture before I go abroad. I might sail in January; they say it’s a good month.”

“Yes, there’s sense in that,” said his father.

“And perhaps I won’t break up in Cambridge till I’ve been to New York and Philadelphia. What do you think? It’s easier striking them from here.”

“I don’t know but you’re right,” said his father easily.

They had come out of the dining-room, and Dan stopped to get some cigarettes in the office. He looked mechanically at the theatre bills over the cigar case. “I see Irving’s at the ‘Boston.’”

“Oh, you don’t say!” said his father. “Let’s go and see him.”

“If you wish it, sir,” said Dan, with pensive acquiescence. All the Maverings were fond of the theatre, and made any mood the occasion or the pretext of going to the play. If they were sad, they went; if they were gay, they went. As long as Dan’s mother could get out-of-doors she used to have herself carried to a box in the theatre whenever she was in town; now that she no longer left her room, she had a dominant passion for hearing about actors and acting; it was almost a work of piety in her husband and children to see them and report to her.

His father left him the next afternoon, and Dan, who had spent the day with him looking into business for the first time, with a running accompaniment of Alice in all the details, remained to uninterrupted misery. He spent the evening in his room, too wretched even for the theatre. It is true that he tried to find Boardman, but Boardman was again off on some newspaper duty; and after trying at several houses in the hope, which he knew was vain, of finding any one in town yet, he shut himself up with his thoughts. They did not differ from the thoughts of the night before, and the night before that, but they were calmer, and they portended more distinctly a life of self-abnegation and solitude from that time forth. He tested his feelings, and found that it was not hurt vanity that he was suffering from: it was really wounded affection. He did not resent Alice’s cruelty; he wished that she might be happy; he could endure to see her happy.

He wrote a letter to the married one of the two ladies he had spent the day with in Portland, and thanked them for making pass pleasantly a day which he would not otherwise have known how to get through. He let a soft, mysterious melancholy pervade his letter; he hinted darkly at trouble and sorrow of which he could not definitely speak. He had the good sense to tear his letter up when he had finished it, and to send a short, sprightly note instead, saying that if Mrs. Frobisher and her sister came to Boston at the end of the month, as they had spoken of doing, they must be sure to let him know. Upon the impulse given him by this letter he went more cheerfully to bed, and fell instantly asleep.

During the next three weeks he bent himself faithfully to the schemes of work his father had outlined for him. He visited New York and Philadelphia, and looked into the business and the processes there; and he returned to Ponkwasset Falls to report and compare his facts intelligently with those which he now examined in his father’s manufactory for the first time. He began to understand how his father, who was a man of intellectual and artistic interests, should be fond of the work.

He spent a good deal of time with his mother, and read to her, and got upon better terms with her than they usually were. They were very much alike, and she objected to him that he was too light and frivolous. He sat with his sisters, and took an interest in their pursuits. He drove them about with his father’s sorrels, and resumed something of the old relations with them which the selfish years of his college life had broken off. As yet he could not speak of Campobello or of what had happened there; and his mother and sisters, whatever they thought, made no more allusion to it than his father had done.

They mercifully took it for granted that matters must have gone wrong there, or else he would speak about them, for there had been some gay banter among them concerning the objects of his expedition before he left home. They had heard of the heroine of his Class Day, and they had their doubts of her, such as girls have of their brothers’ heroines. They were not inconsolably sorry to have her prove unkind; and their mother found in the probable event another proof of their father’s total want of discernment where women were concerned, for the elder Mavering had come home from Class Day about as much smitten with this mysterious Miss Pasmer as Dan was. She talked it over indignantly with her daughters; they were glad of Dan’s escape, but they were incensed with the girl who could let him escape, and they inculpated her in a high degree of heartless flirtation. They knew how sweet Dan was, and they believed him most sincere and good. He had been brilliantly popular in college, and he was as bright as he could be. What was it she chose not to like in him? They vexed themselves with asking how or in what way she thought herself better. They would not have had her love Dan, but they were hot against her for not loving him.

They did not question him, but they tried in every way to find out how much he was hurt, and they watched him in every word and look for signs of change to better or worse, with a growing belief that he was not very much hurt.

It could not be said that in three weeks he forgot Alice, or had begun to forget her; but he had begun to reconcile himself to his fate, as people do in their bereavements by death. His consciousness habituated itself to the facts as something irretrievable. He no longer framed in his mind situations in which the past was restored. He knew that he should never love again, but he had moments, and more and more of them, in which he experienced that life had objects besides love. There were times when he tingled with all the anguish of the first moment of his rejection, when he stopped in whatever he was doing, or stood stock-still, as a man does when arrested by a physical pang, breathless, waiting. There were other times when he went about steeped in gloom so black that all the world darkened with it, and some mornings when he woke he wished that the night had lasted for ever, and felt as if the daylight had uncovered his misery and his shame to every one. He never knew when he should have these moods, and he thought he should have them as long as he lived. He thought this would be something rather fine. He had still other moods, in which he saw an old man with a grey moustache, like Colonel Newcome, meeting a beautiful white-haired lady; the man had never married, and he had not seen this lady for fifty years. He bent over, and kissed her hand.

“You idiot!” said Mavering to himself. Throughout he kept a good appetite. In fact, after that first morning in Portland, he had been hungry three times a day with perfect regularity. He lost the idea of being sick; he had not even a furred tongue. He fell asleep pretty early, and he slept through the night without a break. He had to laugh a great deal with his mother and sisters, since he could not very well mope without expecting them to ask why, and he did not wish to say why. But there were some laughs which he really enjoyed with the Yankee foreman of the works, who was a droll, after a common American pattern, and said things that were killingly funny, especially about women, of whom his opinions were sarcastic.

Dan Mavering suffered, but not solidly. His suffering was short, and crossed with many gleams of respite and even joy. His disappointment made him really unhappy, but not wholly so; it was a genuine sorrow, but a sorrow to which he began to resign himself even in the monotony of Ponkwasset Falls, and which admitted the thought of Mrs. Frobisher’s sister by the time business called him to Boston.

XXIV.

Before the end of the first week after Dan came back to town, that which was likely to happen whenever chance brought him and Alice together had taken place.

It was one of the soft days that fall in late October, when the impending winter seems stayed, and the warm breath of the land draws seaward and over a thousand miles of Indian summer. The bloom came and went in quick pulses over the girl’s temples as she sat with her head thrown back in the corner of the car, and from moment to moment she stirred slightly as if some stress of rapture made it hard for her to get her breath; a little gleam of light fell from under her fallen eyelids into the eyes of the young man beside her, who leaned forward slightly and slanted his face upward to meet her glances. They said some words, now and then, indistinguishable to the others; in speaking they smiled slightly. Sometimes her hand wavered across her lap; in both their faces there was something beyond happiness — a transport, a passion, the brief splendour of a supreme moment.

They left the car at the Arlington Street corner of the Public Garden, and followed the winding paths diagonally to the further corner on Charles Street.

“How stupid we were to get into that ridiculous horse-car!” she said. “What in the world possessed us to do it?”

“I can’t imagine,” he answered. “What a waste of time it was! If we had walked, we might have been twice as long coming. And now you’re going to send me off so soon!”

“I don’t send you,” she murmured.

“But you want me to go.”

“Oh no! But you’d better.”

“I can’t do anything against your wish.”

“I wish it — for your own good.”

“Ah, do let me go home with you, Alice?”

“Don’t ask it, or I must say yes.”

“Part of the way, then?”

“No; not a step! You must take the first car for Cambridge. What time is it now?”

“You can see by the clock on the Providence Depot.”

“But I wish you to go by your watch, now. Look!”

“Alice!” he cried, in pure rapture.

“Look!”

“It’s a quarter of one.”

“And we’ve been three hours together already! Now you must simply fly. If you came home with me I should be sure to let you come in, and if I don’t see mamma alone first, I shall die. Can’t you understand?”

“No; but I can do the next best thing: I can misunderstand. You want to be rid of me.”

“Shall you be rid of me when we’ve parted?” she asked, with an inner thrill of earnestness in her gay tone.

“Alice!”

“You know I didn’t mean it, Dan.”

“Say it again.”

“What?”

“Dan.”

“Dan, love! Dan, dearest!”

“Will that car of yours never come? I’ve promised myself not to leave you till it does, and if I stay here any longer I shall go wild. I can’t believe it’s happened. Say it again!”

“Say what?”

“That—”

“That I love you? That we’re engaged?”

“I don’t believe it. I can’t.” She looked impatiently up the street. “Oh, there comes your car! Run! Stop it!”

“I don’t run to stop cars.” He made a sign, which the conductor obeyed, and the car halted at the further crossing.

She seemed to have forgotten it, and made no movement to dismiss him. “Oh, doesn’t it seem too good to be standing here talking in this way, and people think it’s about the weather, or society?” She set her head a little on one side, and twirled the open parasol on her shoulder.

“Yes, it does. Tell me it’s true, love!”

“It’s true. How splendid you are!” She said it with an effect for the world outside of saying it was a lovely day.

He retorted, with the same apparent nonchalance, “How beautiful you are! How good! How divine!”

The conductor, seeing himself apparently forgotten, gave his bell a vicious snap, and his car jolted away.

She started nervously. “There! you’ve lost your car, Dan.”

“Have I?” asked Mavering, without troubling himself to look after it.

She laughed now, with a faint suggestion of unwillingness in her laugh. “What are you going to do?”

“Walk home with you.”

“No, indeed; you know I can’t let you.”

“And are you going to leave me here alone on the street corner, to be run over by the first bicycle that comes along?”

“You can sit down in the Garden, and wait for the next car.”

“No; I would rather go back to the Art Museum, and make a fresh start.”

“To the Art Museum?” she murmured, tenderly.

“Yes. Wouldn’t you like to see it again?”

“Again? I should like to pass my whole life in it!”

“Well, walk back with me a little way. There’s no hurry about the car.”

“Dan!” she said, in a helpless compliance, and they paced very, very slowly along the Beacon Street path in the Garden. “This is ridiculous.”

“Yes, but it’s delightful.”

“Yes, that’s what I meant. Do you suppose any one ever — ever—”

“Made love there before?”

“How can you say such things? Yes. I always supposed it would be — somewhere else.”

“It was somewhere else — once.”

“Oh, I meant — the second time.”

“Then you did think there was going to be a second time?”

“How do I know? I wished it. Do you like me to say that?”

“I wish you would never say anything else.”

“Yes; there can’t be any harm in it now. I thought that if you had ever — liked me, you would still—”

“So did I; but I couldn’t believe that you—”

“Oh, I could.”

“Alice!”

“Don’t you like my confessing it! You asked me to.”

“Like it!”

“How silly we are!”

“Not half so silly as we’ve been for the last two months. I think we’ve just come to our senses. At least I have.”

“Two months!” she sighed. “Has it really been so long as that?”

“Two years! Two centuries! It was back in the Dark Ages when you refused me.”

“Dark Ages! I should think so! But don’t say refused. It wasn’t refusing, exactly.”

“What was it, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Don’t speak of it now.”

“But, Alice, why did you refuse me?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You mustn’t ask me now. I’ll tell you some time.”

“Well, come to think of it,” said Mavering, laughing it all lightly away, “there’s no hurry. Tell me why you accepted me to-day.”

“I — I couldn’t help it. When I saw you I wanted to fall at your feet.”

“What an idea! I didn’t want to fall at yours. I was awfully mad. I shouldn’t have spoken to you if you hadn’t stopped me and held out your hand.”

“Really? Did you really hate me, Dan?”

“Well, I haven’t exactly doted on you since we last met.”

She did not seem offended at this. “Yes, I suppose so. And I’ve gone on being fonder and fonder of you every minute since that day. I wanted to call you back when you had got half-way to Eastport.”

“I wouldn’t have come. It’s bad luck to turn back.”

She laughed at his drolling. “How funny you are! Now I’m of rather a gloomy temperament. Did, you know it?”

“You don’t look it.”

“Oh, but I am. Just now I’m rather excited and — happy.”

“So glad!”

“Go on! go on! I like you to make fun of me.”

The benches on either side were filled with nursemaids in charge of baby-carriages, and of young children who were digging in the sand with their little beach shovels, and playing their games back and forth across the walk unrebuked by the indulgent policemen. A number of them had enclosed a square in the middle of the path with four of the benches, which they made believe was a fort. The lovers had to walk round it; and the children, chasing one another, dashed into them headlong, or, backing off from pursuit, bumped up against them. They did not seem to know it, but walked slowly on without noticing: they were not aware of an occasional benchful of rather shabby young fellows who stared hard at the stylish girl and well-dressed young man talking together in such intense low tones, with rapid interchange of radiant glances.

“Oh, as to making fun of you, I was going to say—” Mavering began, and after a pause he broke off with a laugh. “I forget what I was going to say.”

“Try to remember.”

“I can’t.”

“How strange that we should have both happened to go to the Museum this morning!” she sighed. Then, “Dan,” she broke in, “do you suppose that heaven is any different from this?”

“I hope not — if I’m to go there.”

“Hush, dear; you mustn’t talk so.”

“Why, you provoked me to it.”

“Did I? Did I really? Do you think I tempted you to do it? Then I must be wicked, whether I knew I was doing it or not. Yes.”

The break in her voice made him look more keenly at her, and he saw the tears glimmer in her eyes. “Alice!”

“No; I’m not good enough for you. I always said that.”

“Then don’t say it any more. That’s the only thing I won’t let you say.”

“Do you forbid it, really? Won’t you let me even think it?”

“No, not even think it.”

“How lovely you are! Oh! I like to be commanded by you.”

“Do you? You’ll have lots of fun, then. I’m an awfully commanding spirit.”

“I didn’t suppose you were so humorous — always. I’m afraid you won’t like me. I’ve no sense of fun.”

“And I’m a little too funny sometimes, I’m afraid.”

“No, you never are. When?”

“That night at the Trevors’. You didn’t like it.”

“I thought Miss Anderson was rather ridiculous,” said Alice. “I don’t like buffoonery in women.”

“Nor I in men,” said Mavering, smiling. “I’ve dropped it.”

“Well, now we must part. I must go home at once,” said Alice. “It’s perfectly insane.”

“Oh no, not yet; not till we’ve said something else; not till we’ve changed the subject.”

“What subject?”

“Miss Anderson.”

Alice laughed and blushed, but she was not vexed. She liked to have him understand her. “Well, now,” she said, as if that were the next thing, “I’m going to cross here at once and walk up the other pavement, and you must go back through the Garden; or else I shall never get away from you.”

“May I look over at you?”

“You may glance, but you needn’t expect me to return your glance.”

“Oh no.”

“And I want you to take the very first Cambridge car that comes along. I command you to.”

“I thought you wanted me to do the commanding.”

“So I do — in essentials. If you command me not to cry when I get home, I won’t.”

She looked at him with an ecstasy of self-sacrifice in her eyes.

“Ah, I sha’n’t do that. I can’t tell what would open. But — Alice!”

“Well, what?” She drifted closely to him, and looked fondly up into his face. In walking they had insensibly drawn nearer together, and she had been obliged constantly to put space between them. Now, standing at the corner of Arlington Street, and looking tentatively across Beacon, she abandoned all precautions.

“What! I forget. Oh yes! I love you!”

“But you said that before, dearest!”

“Yes; but just now it struck me as a very novel idea. What if your mother shouldn’t like the idea?”

“Nonsense! you know she perfectly idolises you. She did from the first. And doesn’t she know how I’ve begin behaving about you ever since I — lost you?”

“How have you behaved? Do tell me, Alice?”

“Some time; not now,” she said; and with something that was like a gasp, and threatened to be a sob, she suddenly whipped across the road. He walked back to Charles Street by the Garden path, keeping abreast of her, and not losing sight of her for a moment, except when the bulk of a string team watering at the trough beside the pavement intervened. He hurried by, and when he had passed it he found himself exactly abreast of her again. Her face was turned toward him; they exchanged a smile, lost in space. At the corner of Charles Street he deliberately crossed over to her.

“O dearest love! why did you come?” she implored.

“Because you signed to me.”

“I hoped you wouldn’t see it. If we’re both to be so weak as this, what are we going to do?”

“But I’m glad you came. Yes: I was frightened. They must have overheard us there when we were talking.”

“Well, I didn’t say anything I’m ashamed of. Besides, I shouldn’t care much for the opinion of those nurses and babies.”

“Of course not. But people must have seen us. Don’t stand here talking, Dan! Do come on!” She hurried him across the street, and walked him swiftly up the incline of Beacon Street. There, in her new fall suit, with him, glossy-hatted, faultlessly gloved, at a fit distance from her side, she felt more in keeping with the social frame of things than in the Garden path, which was really only a shade better than the Beacon Street Mall of the Common. “Do you suppose anybody saw us that knew us?”

“I hope so! Don’t you want people to know it?”

“Yes, of course. They will have to know it — in the right way. Can you believe that it’s only half a year since we met? It won’t be a year till Class Day.”

“I don’t believe it, Alice. I can’t recollect anything before I knew you.”

“Well, now, as time is so confused, we must try to live for eternity. We must try to help each other to be good. Oh, when I think what a happy girl I am, I feel that I should be the most ungrateful person under the sun not to be good. Let’s try to make our lives perfect — perfect! They can be. And we mustn’t live for each other alone. We must try to do good as well as be good. We must be kind and forbearing with every one.”

He answered, with tender seriousness, “My life’s in your hands, Alice. It shall be whatever you wish.”

They were both silent in their deep belief of this. When they spoke again, she began gaily: “I shall never get over the wonder of it. How strange that we should meet at the Museum!” They had both said this already, but that did not matter; they had said nearly everything two or three times. “How did you happen to be there?” she asked, and the question was so novel that she added, “I haven’t asked you before.”

He stopped, with a look of dismay that broke up in a hopeless laugh. “Why, I went there to meet some people — some ladies. And when I saw you I forgot all about them.”

Alice laughed to; this was a part of their joy, their triumph.

“Who are they?” she asked indifferently, and only to heighten the absurdity by realising the persons.

“You don’t know them,” he said. “Mrs. Frobisher and her sister, of Portland. I promised to meet them there and go out to Cambridge with them.”

“What will they think?” asked Alice. “It’s too amusing.”

“They’ll think I didn’t come,” said Mavering, with the easy conscience of youth and love; and again they laughed at the ridiculous position together. “I remember now I was to be at the door, and they were to take me up in their carriage. I wonder how long they waited? You put everything else out of my head.”

“Do you think I’ll keep it out?” she asked archly.

“Oh yes; there is nothing else but you now.”

The eyes that she dropped, after a glance at him, glistened with tears.

A lump came into his throat. “Do you suppose,” he asked huskily, “that we can ever misunderstand each other again?”

“Never. I see everything clearly now. We shall trust each other implicitly, and at the least thing that isn’t clear we can speak. Promise me that you’ll speak.”

“I will, Alice. But after this all will be clear. We shall deal with each other as we do with ourselves.”

“Yes; that will be the way.”

“And we mustn’t wait for question from each other. We shall know — we shall feel — when there’s any misgiving, and then the one that’s caused it will speak.”

“Yes,” she sighed emphatically. “How perfectly you say it? But that’s because you feel it, because you are good.”

They walked on, treading the air in a transport of fondness for each other. Suddenly he stopped.

“Miss Pasmer, I feel it my duty to warn you that you’re letting me go home with you.”

“Am I? How noble of you to tell me, Dan; for I know you don’t want to tell. Well, I might as well. But I sha’n’t let you come in. You won’t try, will you? Promise me you won’t try.”

“I shall only want to come in the first door.”

“What for?”

“What for? Oh, for half a second.”

She turned away her face.

He went on. “This engagement has been such a very public affair, so far, that I think I’d like to see my fiancee alone for a moment.”

“I don’t know what in the world you can have to say more.”

He went into the first door with her, and then he went with her upstairs to the door of Mrs. Pasmer’s apartment. The passages of the Cavendish were not well lighted; the little lane or alley that led down to this door from the stairs landing was very dim.

“So dark here!” murmured Alice, in a low voice, somewhat tremulous.

“But not too dark.”

XXV.

She burst into the room where her mother sat looking over some housekeeping accounts. His kiss and his name were upon her lips; her soul was full of him.

“Mamma!” she panted.

Her mother did not look round. She could have had no premonition of the vital news that her daughter was bringing, and she went on comparing the first autumn month’s provision bill with that of the last spring month, and trying to account for the difference.

The silence, broken by the rattling of the two bills in her mother’s hands as she glanced from one to the other through her glasses, seemed suddenly impenetrable, and the prismatic world of the girl’s rapture burst like a bubble against it. There is no explanation of the effect outside of temperament and overwrought sensibilities. She stared across the room at her mother, who had not heard her, and then she broke into a storm of tears.

“Alice!” cried her mother, with that sanative anger which comes to rescue women from the terror of any sudden shock. “What is the matter with you? — what do you mean?” She dropped both of the provision bills to the floor, and started toward her daughter.

“Nothing — nothing! Let me go. I want to go to my room.” She tried to reach the door beyond her mother.

“Indeed you shall not!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “I will not have you behaving so! What has happened to you? Tell me. You have frightened me half out of my senses.”

The girl gave up her efforts to escape, and flung herself on the sofa, with her face in the pillow, where she continued to sob. Her mother began to relent at the sight of her passion. As a woman and as a mother she knew her daughter, and she knew that this passion, whatever it was, must have vent before there could be anything intelligible between them. She did not press her with further question, but set about making her a little more comfortable on the sofa; she pulled the pillow straight, and dropped a light shawl over the girl’s shoulders, so that she should not take cold.

Then Mrs. Pasmer had made up her mind that Alice had met Mavering somewhere, and that this outburst was the retarded effect of seeing him. During the last six weeks she had assisted at many phases of feeling in regard to him, and knew more clearly than Alice herself the meaning of them all. She had been patient and kind, with the resources that every woman finds in herself when it is the question of a daughter’s ordeal in an affair of the heart which she has favoured.

The storm passed as quickly as it came, and Alice sat upright casting off the wraps. But once checked with the fact on her tongue, she found it hard to utter it.

“What is it, Alice? — what is it?” urged her mother.

“Nothing. I — Mr. Mavering — we met — I met him at the Museum, and — we’re engaged! It’s really so. It seems like raving, but it’s true. He came with me to the door; I wouldn’t let him come in. Don’t you believe it? Oh, we are! indeed we are! Are you glad, mamma? You know I couldn’t have lived without him.”

She trembled on the verge of another outbreak.

Mrs. Pasmer sacrificed her astonishment in the interest of sanity, and returned quietly: “Glad, Alice! You know that I think he’s the sweetest and best fellow in the world.”

“O mamma!”

“But are you sure—”

“Yes, Yes. I’m not crazy; it isn’t a dream he was there — and I met him — I couldn’t run away — I put out my hand; I couldn’t help it — I thought I should give way; and he took it; and then — then we were engaged. I don’t know what we said: I went in to look at the ‘Joan of Arc’ again, and there was no one else there. He seemed to feel just as I did. I don’t know whether either of us spoke. But we, knew we were engaged, and we began to talk.”

Mrs. Pasmer began to laugh. To her irreverent soul only the droll side of the statement appeared.

“Don’t, mamma!” pleaded Alice piteously.

“No, no; I won’t. But I hope Dan Mavering will be a little more definite about it when I’m allowed to see him. Why couldn’t he have come in with you?”

“It would have killed me. I couldn’t let him see me cry, and I knew I should break down.”

“He’ll have to see you cry a great many times, Alice,” said her mother, with almost unexampled seriousness.

“Yes, but not yet — not so soon. He must think I’m very gloomy, and I want to be always bright and cheerful with him. He knows why I wouldn’t let him come in; he knew I was going to have a cry.”

Mrs. Pasmer continued to laugh.

“Don’t, mamma!” pleaded Alice.

“No, I won’t,” replied her mother, as before. “I suppose he was mystified. But now, if it’s really settled between you, he’ll be coming here soon to see your papa and me.”

“Yes — to-night.”

“Well, it’s very sudden,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Though I suppose these things always seem so.”

“Is it too sudden?” asked Alice, with misgiving. “It seemed so to me when it was going on, but I couldn’t stop it.”

Her mother laughed at her simplicity. “No, when it begins once, nothing can stop it. But you’ve really known each other a good while, and for the last six weeks at least you’ve known you own mind about him pretty clearly. It’s a pity you couldn’t have known it before.”

“Yes, that’s what he says. He says it was such a waste of time. Oh, everything he says is perfectly fascinating!”

Her mother laughed and laughed again.

“What is it, mamma? Are you laughing at me?”

“Oh no. What an idea!”

“He couldn’t seem to understand why I didn’t say Yes the first time, if I meant it.” She looked down dreamily at her hands in her lap, and then she said, with a blush and a start, “They’re very queer, don’t you think?”

“Who?”

“Young men.”

“Oh, very.”

“Yes,” Alice went on musingly. “Their minds are so different. Everything they say and do is so unexpected, and yet it seems to be just right.”

Mrs. Pasmer asked herself if this single-mindedness was to go on for ever, but she had not the heart to treat it with her natural levity. Probably it was what charmed Mavering with the child. Mrs. Pasmer had the firm belief that Mavering was not single-minded, and she respected him for it. She would not spoil her daughter’s perfect trust and hope by any of the cynical suggestions of her own dark wisdom, but entered into her mood, as such women are able to do, and flattered out of her every detail of the morning’s history. This was a feat which Mrs. Pasmer enjoyed for its own sake, and it fully satisfied the curiosity which she naturally felt to know all. She did not comment upon many of the particulars; she opened her eyes a little at the notion of her daughter sitting for two or three hours and talking with a young man in the galleries of the Museum, and she asked if anybody they knew had come in. When she heard that there were only strangers, and very few of them, she said nothing; and she had the same consolation in regard to the walking back and forth in the Garden. She was so full of potential escapades herself, so apt to let herself go at times, that the fact of Alice’s innocent self-forgetfulness rather satisfied a need of her mother’s nature; she exulted in it when she learned that there were only nurses and children in the Garden.

“And so you think you won’t take up art this winter?” she said, when, in the process of her cross-examination, Alice had left the sofa and got as far as the door, with her hat in her hand and her sacque on her arm.

“No.”

“And the Sisters of St. James — you won’t join them either?”

The girl escaped from the room.

“Alice! Alice!” her mother called after her; she came back. “You haven’t told me how he happened to be there.”

“Oh, that was the most amusing part of it. He had gone there to keep an appointment with two ladies from Portland. They were to take him up in their carriage and drive out to Cambridge, and when he saw me he forgot all about them.”

“And what became of them?”

“We don’t know. Isn’t it ridiculous?”

If it appeared other or more than this to Mrs. Pasmer, she did not say. She merely said, after a moment, “Well, it was certainly devoted, Alice,” and let her go.

XXVI.

Mavering came in the evening, rather excessively well dressed, and with a hot face and cold hands. While he waited, nominally alone, in the little drawing room for Mr. Pasmer, Alice flew in upon him for a swift embrace, which prolonged itself till the father’s step was heard outside the door, and then she still had time to vanish by another: the affair was so nicely adjusted that if Mavering had been in his usual mind he might have fancied the connivance of Mrs. Pasmer.

He did not say what he had meant to say to Alice’s father, but it seemed to serve the purpose, for he emerged presently from the sound of his own voice, unnaturally clamorous, and found Mr. Pasmer saying some very civil things to him about his character and disposition, so far as they had been able to observe it, and their belief and trust in him. There seemed to be something provisional or probational intended, but Dan could not make out what it was, and finally it proved of no practical effect. He merely inferred that the approval of his family was respectfully expected, and he hastened to say, “Oh, that’s all right, sir.” Mr. Pasmer went on with more civilities, and lost himself in dumb conjecture as to whether Mavering’s father had been in the class before him or the class after him in Harvard. He used his black eyebrows a good deal during the interview, and Mavering conceived an awe of him greater than he had felt at Campobello, yet not unmixed with the affection in which the newly accepted lover embraces even the relations of his betrothed. From time to time Mr. Pasmer looked about with the vague glance of a man unused to being so long left to his own guidance; and one of these appeals seemed at last to bring Mrs. Pasmer through the door, to the relief of both the men, for they had improvidently despatched their business, and were getting out of talk. Mr. Pasmer had, in fact, already asked Dan about the weather outside when his wife appeared.

Dan did not know whether he ought to kiss her or not, but Mrs. Pasmer did not in the abstract seem like a very kissing kind of person, and he let himself be guided by this impression, in the absence of any fixed principle applying to the case. She made some neat remark concerning the probable settlement of the affair with her husband, and began to laugh and joke about it in a manner that was very welcome to Dan; it did not seem to him that it ought to be treated so solemnly.

But though Mrs. Pasmer laughed and joked; he was aware of her meaning business — business in the nicest sort of a way, but business after all, and he liked her for it. He was glad to be explicit about his hopes and plans, and told what his circumstances were so fully that Mrs. Pasmer, whom his frankness gratified and amused, felt obliged to say that she had not meant to ask so much about his affairs, and he must excuse her if she had seemed to do so. She had her own belief that Mavering would understand, but she did not mind that. She said that, of course, till his own family had been consulted, it must not be considered seriously — that Mr. Pasmer insisted upon that point; and when Dan vehemently asserted the acquiescence of his family beforehand, and urged his father’s admiration for Alice in proof, she reminded him that his mother was to be considered, and put Mr. Pasmer’s scruples forward as her own reason for obduracy. In her husband’s presence she attributed to him, with his silent assent, all sorts of reluctances and delicate compunctions; she gave him the importance which would have been naturally a husband’s due in such an affair, and ingratiated herself more and more with the young man. She ignored Mr. Pasmer’s withdrawal when it took place, after a certain lapse of time, and as the moment had come for that, she began to let herself go. She especially approved of the idea of going abroad and confessed her disappointment with her present experiment of America, where it appeared there was no leisure class of men sufficiently large to satisfy the social needs of Mr. Pasmer’s nature, and she told Dan that he might expect them in Europe before long. Perhaps they might all three meet him there. At this he betrayed so clearly that he now intended his going to Europe merely as a sequel to his marrying Alice, while he affected to fall in with all Mrs. Pasmer said, that she grew fonder than ever of him for his ardour and his futile duplicity. If it had been in Dan’s mind to take part in the rite, Mrs. Pasmer was quite ready at this point to embrace him with motherly tenderness. Her tough little heart was really in her throat with sympathy when she made an errand for the photograph of an English vicarage, which they had hired the summer of the year before, and she sent Alice back with it alone.

It seemed so long since they had met that the change in Alice did not strike him as strange or as too rapidly operated. They met with the fervour natural after such a separation, and she did not so much assume as resume possession of him. It was charming to have her do it, to have her act as if they had always been engaged, to have her try to press down the cowlick that started capriciously across his crown, and to straighten his necktie, and then to drop beside him on the sofa; it thrilled and awed him; and he silently worshipped the superior composure which her sex has in such matters. Whatever was the provisional interpretation which her father and mother pretended to put upon the affair, she apparently had no reservations, and they talked of their future as a thing assured. The Dark Ages, as they agreed to call the period of despair for ever closed that morning, had matured their love till now it was a rapture of pure trust. They talked as if nothing could prevent its fulfilment, and they did not even affect to consider the question of his family’s liking it or not liking it. She said that she thought his father was delightful, and he told her that his father had taken the greatest fancy to her at the beginning, and knew that Dan was in love with her. She asked him about his mother, and she said just what he could have wished her to say about his mother’s sufferings, and the way she bore them. They talked about Alice’s going to see her.

“Of course your father will bring your sisters to see me first.”

“Is that the way?” he asked: “You may depend upon his doing the right thing, whatever it is.”

“Well, that’s the right thing,” she said. “I’ve thought it out; and that reminds me of a duty of ours, Dan!”

“A duty?” he repeated, with a note of reluctance for its untimeliness.

“Yes. Can’t you think what?”

“No; I didn’t know there was a duty left in the world.”

“It’s full of them.”

“Oh, don’t say that, Alice!” He did not like this mood so well as that of the morning, but his dislike was only a vague discomfort — nothing formulated or distinct.

“Yes,” she persisted; “and we must do them. You must go to those ladies you disappointed so this morning, and apologise — explain.”

Dan laughed. “Why, it wasn’t such a very ironclad engagement as all that, Alice. They said they were going to drive out to Cambridge over the Milldam, and I said I was going out there to get some of my traps together, and they could pick me up at the Art Museum if they liked. Besides, how could I explain?”

She laughed consciously with him. “Of course. But,” she added ruefully, “I wish you hadn’t disappointed them.”

“Oh, they’ll get over it. If I hadn’t disappointed them, I shouldn’t be here, and I shouldn’t like that. Should you?”

“No; but I wish it hadn’t happened. It’s a blot, and I didn’t want a blot on this day.”

“Oh, well, it isn’t very much of a blot, and I can easily wipe it off. I’ll tell you what, Alice! I can write to Mrs. Frobisher, when our engagement comes out, and tell her how it was. She’ll enjoy the joke, and so will Miss Wrayne. They’re jolly and easygoing; they won’t mind.”

“How long have you known them?”

“I met them on Class Day, and then I saw them — the day after I left Campobello.” Dan laughed a little.

“How, saw them?”

“Well, I went to a yacht race with them. I happened to meet them in the street, and they wanted me to go; and I was all broken up, and — I Went.”

“Oh!” said Alice. “The day after I — you left Campobello?”

“Well — yes.”

“And I was thinking of you all that day as — And I couldn’t bear to look at anybody that day, or speak!”

“Well, the fact is, I — I was distracted, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I was desperate; I didn’t care.”

“How did you find out about the yacht race?”

“Boardman told me. Boardman was there.”

“Did he know the ladies? Did he go too?”

“No. He was there to report the race for the Events. He went on the press boat.”

“Oh!” said Alice. “Was there a large party?”

“No, no. Not very. Just ourselves, in fact. They were awfully kind. And they made me go home to dinner with them.”

“They must have been rather peculiar people,” said Alice. “And I don’t see how — so soon—” She could not realise that Mavering was then a rejected man, on whom she had voluntarily renounced all claim. A retroactive resentment which she could not control possessed her with the wish to punish those bold women for being agreeable to one who had since become everything to her, though then he was ostensibly nothing.

In a vague way, Dan felt her displeasure with that passage of his history, but no man could have fully imagined it.

“I couldn’t tell half the time what I was saying or eating. I talked at random and ate at random. I guess they thought something was wrong; they asked me who was at Campobello.”

“Indeed!”

“But you may be sure I didn’t give myself away. I was awfully broken up,” he concluded inconsequently.

She liked his being broken up, but she did not like the rest. She would not press the question further now. She only said rather gravely, “If it’s such a short acquaintance, can you write to them in that familiar way?”

“Oh yes! Mrs. Frobisher is one of that kind.”

Alice was silent a moment before she said, “I think you’d better not write. Let it go,” she sighed.

“Yes, that’s what I think,” said Dan. “Better let it go. I guess it will explain itself in the course of time. But I don’t want any blots around.” He leaned over and looked her smilingly in the face.

“Oh no,” she murmured; and then suddenly she caught him round the neck, crying and sobbing. “It’s only — because I wanted it to be — perfect. Oh, I wonder if I’ve done right? Perhaps I oughtn’t to have taken you, after all; but I do love you — dearly, dearly! And I was so unhappy when I’d lost you. And now I’m afraid I shall be a trial to you — nothing but a trial.”

The first tears that a young man sees a woman shed for love of him are inexpressibly sweeter than her smiles. Dan choked with tender pride and pity. When he found his voice, he raved out with incoherent endearments that she only made him more and more happy by her wish to have the affair perfect, and that he wished her always to be exacting with him, for that would give him a chance to do something for her, and all that he desired, as long as he lived, was to do just what she wished.

At the end of his vows and entreaties, she lifted her face radiantly, and bent a smile upon him as sunny as that with which the sky after a summer storm denies that there has ever been rain in the world.

“Ah! you—” He could say no more. He could not be more enraptured than he was. He could only pass from surprise to surprise, from delight to delight. It was her love of him which wrought these miracles. It was all a miracle, and no part more wonderful than another. That she, who had seemed as distant as a star, and divinely sacred from human touch, should be there in his arms, with her head on his shoulder, where his kiss could reach her lips, not only unforbidden, but eagerly welcome, was impossible, and yet it was true.. But it was no more impossible and no truer, than that a being so poised, so perfectly self-centred as she, should already be so helplessly dependent upon him for her happiness. In the depths of his soul he invoked awful penalties upon himself if ever he should betray her trust, if ever he should grieve that tender heart in the slightest thing, if from that moment he did not make his whole life a sacrifice and an expiation.

He uttered some of these exalted thoughts, and they did not seem to appear crazy to her. She said yes, they must make their separate lives offerings to each other, and their joint lives an offering to God. The tears came into his eyes at these words of hers: they were so beautiful and holy and wise. He agreed that one ought always to go to church, and that now he should never miss a service. He owned that he had been culpable in the past. He drew her closer to him — if that were possible — and sealed his words with a kiss.

But he could not realise his happiness then, or afterward, when he walked the streets under the thinly misted moon of that Indian summer night.

He went down to the Events office when he left Alice, and found Boardman, and told him that he was engaged, and tried to work Boardman up to some sense of the greatness of the fact. Boardman shoved his fine white teeth under his spare moustache, and made acceptable jokes, but he did not ask indiscreet questions, and Dan’s statement of the fact did not seem to give it any more verity than it had before. He tried to get Boardman to come and walk with him and talk it over; but Boardman said he had just been detailed to go and work up the case of a Chinaman who had suicided a little earlier in the evening.

“Very well, then; I’ll go with you,” said Mavering. “How can you live in such a den as this?” he asked, looking about the little room before Boardman turned down his incandescent electric. “There isn’t anything big enough to hold me but all outdoors.”

In the street he linked his arm through his friend’s, and said he felt that he had a right to know all about the happy ending of the affair, since he had been told of that miserable phase of it at Portland. But when he came to the facts he found himself unable to give them with the fulness he had promised. He only imparted a succinct statement as to the where and when of the whole matter, leaving the how of it untold.

The sketch was apparently enough for Boardman. For all comment, he reminded Mavering that he had told him at Portland it would come out all right.

“Yes, you did, Boardman; that’s a fact,” said Dan; and he conceived a higher respect for the penetration of Boardman than he had before.

They stopped at a door in a poor court which they had somehow reached without Mavering’s privity. “Will you come in?” asked Boardman.

“What for?”

“Chinaman.”

“Chinaman?” Then Mavering remembered. “Good heavens! no. What have I got to do with him?”

“Both mortal,” suggested the reporter.

The absurdity of this idea, though a little grisly, struck Dan as a good joke. He hit the companionable Boardman on the shoulder, and then gave him a little hug, and remounted his path of air, and walked off in it.

XXVII.

Mavering first woke in the morning with the mechanical recurrence of that shame and grief which each day had brought him since Alice refused him. Then with a leap of the heart came the recollection of all that had happened yesterday. Yet lurking within his rapture was a mystery of regret: a reasonless sense of loss, as if the old feeling had been something he would have kept. Then this faded, and he had only the longing to see her, to realise in her presence and with her help the fact that she was his. An unspeakable pride filled him, and a joy in her love. He tried to see some outward vision of his bliss in the glass; but, like the mirror which had refused to interpret his tragedy in the Portland restaurant, it gave back no image of his transport: his face looked as it always did, and he and the refection laughed at each other:

He asked himself how soon he could go and see her. It was now seven o’clock: eight would be too early, of course — it would be ridiculous; and nine — he wondered if he might go to see her at nine. Would they have done breakfast? Had he any right to call before ten? He was miserable at the thought of waiting till ten: it would be three hours. He thought of pretexts — of inviting her to go somewhere, but that was absurd, for he could see her at home all day if he liked; of carrying her a book, but there could be no such haste about a book; of going to ask if he had left his cane, but why should he be in such a hurry for his cane? All at once he thought he could take her some flowers — a bouquet to lay beside her plate at breakfast. He dramatised himself charging the servant who should take it from him at the door not to say who left it; but Alice would know, of course, and they would all know; it would be very pretty. He made Mrs. Pasmer say some flattering things of him; and he made Alice blush deliciously to hear them. He could not manage Mr. Pasmer very well, and he left him out of the scene: he imagined him shaving in another room; then he remembered his wearing a full beard.

He dressed himself as quickly as he could, and went down into the hotel vestibule, where he had noticed people selling flowers the evening before, but there was no one there with them now, and none of the florists’ shops on the street were open yet. He could not find anything till he went to the Providence Depot, and the man there had to take some of his yesterday’s flowers out of the refrigerator where he kept them; he was not sure they would be very fresh; but the heavy rosebuds had fallen open, and they were superb. Dan took all there were, and when they had been sprinkled with water, and wrapped in cotton batting, and tied round with paper, it was still only quarter of eight, and he left them with the man till he could get his breakfast at the Depot restaurant. There it had a consoling effect of not being so early; many people were already breakfasting, and when Dan said, with his order, “Hurry it up, please,” he knew that he was taken for a passenger just arrived or departing. By a fantastic impulse he ordered eggs and bacon again; he felt, it a fine derision of the past and a seal of triumph upon the present to have the same breakfast after his acceptance as he had ordered after his rejection; he would tell Alice about it, and it would amuse her. He imagined how he would say it, and she would laugh; but she would be full of a ravishing compassion for his past suffering. They were long bringing the breakfast; when it came he despatched it so quickly that it was only half after eight when he paid his check at the counter. He tried to be five minutes more getting his flowers, but the man had them all ready for him, and it did not take him ten seconds. He had said he would carry them at half-past nine; but thinking it over on a bench in the Garden, he decided that he had better go sooner; they might breakfast earlier, and there would be no fun if Alice did not find the roses beside her plate: that was the whole idea. It was not till he stood at the door of the Pasmer apartment that he reflected that he was not accomplishing his wish to see Alice by leaving her those flowers; he was a fool, for now he would have to postpone coming a little, because he had already come.

The girl who answered the bell did not understand the charge he gave her about the roses, and he repeated his words. Some one passing through the room beyond seemed to hesitate and pause at the sound of his voice. Could it be Alice? Then he should see her, after all! The girl looked over her shoulder, and said, “Mrs. Pasmer.”

Mrs. Pasmer came forward, and he fell into a complicated explanation and apology. At the end she said, “You had better give them yourself. She will be here directly.” They were in the room now, and Mrs. Pasmer made the time pass in rapid talk; but Dan felt that he ought to apologise from time to time. “No!” she said, letting herself go. “Stay and breakfast with us, Mr. Mavering. We shall be so glad to have you.”

At last Alice came in, and they decorously shook hands. Mrs. Pasmer turned away a smile at their decorum. “I will see that there’s a place for you,” she said, leaving them.

They were instantly in each other’s arms. It seemed to him that all this had happened because he had so strongly wished it.

“What is it, Dan? What did you come for?” she asked.

“To see if it was really true, Alice. I couldn’t believe it.”

“Well — let me go — you mustn’t — it’s too silly. Of course it’s true.” She pulled herself free. “Is my hair tumbled? You oughtn’t to have come; it’s ridiculous; but I’m glad you came. I’ve been thinking it all over, and I’ve got a great many things to say to you. But come to breakfast now.”

She had a business-like way of treating the situation that was more intoxicating than sentiment would have been, and gave it more actuality.

Mrs. Pasmer was alone at the table, and explained that Alice’s father never breakfasted with them, or very seldom. “Where are your flowers?” she asked Alice.

“Flowers? What flowers?”

“That Mr. Mavering brought.”

They all looked at one another. Dan ran out and brought in his roses.

“They were trying to get away in the excitement, I guess, Mrs. Pasmer; I found them behind the door.” He had flung them there, without knowing it, when Mrs. Pasmer left him with Alice.

He expected her to join him and her mother in being amused at this, but he was as well pleased to have her touched at his having brought them, and to turn their gaiety off in praise of the roses. She got a vase for them, and set it on the table. He noticed for the first time the pretty house-dress she had on, with its barred corsage and under-skirt, and the heavy silken rope knotted round it at the waist, and dropping in heavy tufts or balls in front.

The breakfast was Continental in its simplicity, and Mrs. Pasmer said that they had always kept up their Paris habit of a light breakfast, even in London, where it was not so easy to follow foreign customs as it was in America. She was afraid he might find it too light. Then he told all about his morning’s adventure, ending with his breakfast at the Providence Depot. Mrs. Pasmer entered into the fun of it, but she said it was for only once in a way, and he must not expect to be let in if he came at that hour another morning. He said no; he understood what an extraordinary piece of luck it was for him to be there; and he was there to be bidden to do whatever they wished. He said so much in recognition of their goodness, that he became abashed by it. Mrs. Pasmer sat at the head of the table, and Alice across it from him, so far off that she seemed parted from him by an insuperable moral distance. A warm flush seemed to rise from his heart into his throat and stifle him. He wished to shed tears. His eyes were wet with grateful happiness in answering Mrs. Pasmer that he would not have any more coffee. “Then,” she said, “we will go into the drawing-room;” but she allowed him and Alice to go alone.

He was still in that illusion of awe and of distance, and he submitted to the interposition of another table between their chairs.

“I wish to talk with you,” she said, so seriously that he was frightened, and said to himself: “Now she is going to break it off. She has thought it over, and she finds she can’t endure me.”

“Well?” he said huskily.

“You oughtn’t to have come here, you know, this morning.”

“I know it,” he vaguely conceded. “But I didn’t expect to get in.”

“Well, now you’re here, we may as well talk. You must tell your family at once.”

“Yes; I’m going to write to them as soon as I get back to my room. I couldn’t last night.”

“But you mustn’t write; you must go — and prepare their minds.”

“Go?” he echoed. “Oh, that isn’t necessary! My father knew about it from the beginning, and I guess they’ve all talked it over. Their minds are prepared.” The sense of his immeasurable superiority to any one’s opposition began to dissipate Dan’s unnatural awe; at the pleading face which Alice put on, resting one cheek against the back of one of her clasped hands, and leaning on the table with her elbows, he began to be teased by that silken rope round her waist.

“But you don’t understand, dear,” she said; and she said “dear” as if they were old married people. “You must go to see them, and tell them; and then some of them must come to see me — your father and sisters.”

“Why, of course.” His eye now became fastened to one of the fluffy silken balls.

“And then mamma and I must go to see your mother, mustn’t we?”

“It’ll be very nice of you — yes. You know she can’t come to you.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought, and — What are you looking at?” she drew herself back from the table and followed the direction of his eye with a woman’s instinctive apprehension of disarray.

He was ashamed to tell. “Oh, nothing. I was just thinking.”

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know. That it seems so strange any one else should have any to do with it — my family and yours. But I suppose they must. Yes, it’s all right.”

“Why, of course. If your family didn’t like it—”

“It wouldn’t make any difference to me,” said Dan resolutely.

“It would to me,” she retorted, with tender reproach. “Do you suppose it would be pleasant to go into a family that didn’t like you? Suppose papa and mamma didn’t like you?”

“But I thought they did,” said Mavering, with his mind still partly on the rope and the fluffy ball, but keeping his eyes away.

“Yes, they do,” said Alice. “But your family don’t know me at all; and your father’s only seen me once. Can’t you understand? I’m afraid we don’t look at it seriously enough — earnestly — and oh, I do wish to have everything done as it should be! Sometimes, when I think of it, it makes me tremble. I’ve been thinking about it all the morning, and — and — praying.”

Dan wanted to fall on his knees to her. The idea of Alice in prayer was fascinating.

“I wish our life to begin with others, and not with ourselves. If we’re intrusted with so much happiness, doesn’t it mean that we’re to do good with it — to give it to others as if it were money?”

The nobleness of this thought stirred Dan greatly; his eyes wandered back to the silken rope; but now it seemed to him an emblem of voluntary suffering and self-sacrifice, like a devotee’s hempen girdle. He perceived that the love of this angelic girl would elevate him and hallow his whole life if he would let it. He answered her, fervently, that he would be guided by her in this as in everything; that he knew he was selfish, and he was afraid he was not very good; but it was not because he had not wished to be so; it was because he had not had any incentive. He thought how much nobler and better this was than the talk he had usually had with girls. He said that of course he would go home and tell his people; he saw now that it would make them happier if they could hear it directly from him. He had only thought of writing because he could not bear to think of letting a day pass without seeing her; but if he took the early morning train he could get back the same night, and still have three hours at Ponkwasset Falls, and he would go the next day, if she said so.

“Go to-day, Dan,” she said, and she stretched out her hand impressively across the table toward him. He seized it with a gush of tenderness, and they drew together in their resolution to live for others. He said he would go at once. But the next train did not leave till two o’clock, and there was plenty of time. In the meanwhile it was in the accomplishment of their high aims that they sat down on the sofa together and talked of their future; Alice conditioned it wholly upon his people’s approval of her, which seemed wildly unnecessary to Mavering, and amused him immensely.

“Yes,” she said, “I know you will think me strange in a great many things; but I shall never keep anything from you, and I’m going to tell you that I went to matins this morning.”

“To matins?” echoed Dan. He would not quite have liked her a Catholic; he remembered with relief that she had said she was not a Roman Catholic; though when he came to think, he would not have cared a great deal. Nothing could have changed her from being Alice.

“Yes, I wished to consecrate the first morning of our engagement; and I’m always going. I determined that I would go before breakfast — that was what made breakfast so late. Don’t you like it?” she asked timidly.

“Like it!” he said. “I’m going with you:”

“Oh no!” she turned upon him. “That wouldn’t do.” She became grave again. “I’m glad you approve of it, for I should feel that there was something wanting to our happiness. If marriage is a sacrament, why shouldn’t an engagement be?”

“It is,” said Dan, and he felt that it was holy; till then he had never realised that marriage was a sacrament, though he had often heard the phrase.

At the end of an hour they took a tender leave of each other, hastened by the sound of Mrs. Pasmer’s voice without. Alice escaped from one door before her mother entered by the other. Dan remained, trying to look unconcerned, but he was sensible of succeeding so poorly that he thought he had better offer his hand to Mrs. Pasmer at once. He told her that he was going up to Ponkwasset Falls at two o’clock, and asked her to please remember him to Mr. Pasmer.

She said she would, and asked him if he were to be gone long.

“Oh no; just overnight — till I can tell them what’s happened.” He felt it a comfort to be trivial with Mrs. Pasmer, after bracing up to Alice’s ideals. “I suppose they’ll have to know.”

“What an exemplary son!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Yes, I suppose they will.”

“I supposed it would be enough if I wrote, but Alice thinks I’d better report in person.”

“I think you had, indeed! And it will be a good thing for you both to have the time for clarifying your ideas. Did she tell you she had been at matins this morning?” A light of laughter trembled in Mrs. Pasmer’s eyes, and Mavering could not keep a responsive gleam out of his own. In an instant the dedication of his engagement by morning prayer ceased to be a high and solemn thought, and became deliciously amusing; and this laughing Alice over with her mother did more to realise the fact that she was his than anything else had yet done.

In that dark passage outside he felt two arms go tenderly round his neck; and a soft shape strain itself to his heart. “I know you have been laughing about me. But you may. I’m yours now, even to laugh at, if you want.”

“You are mine to fall down and worship,” he vowed, with an instant revulsion of feeling.

Alice didn’t say anything; he felt her hand fumbling about his coat lapel. “Where is your breast pocket?” she asked; and he took hold of her hand, which left a carte-de-visite-shaped something in his.

“It isn’t very good,” she murmured, as well as she could, with her lips against his cheek, “but I thought you’d like to show them some proof of my existence. I shall have none of yours while you’re gone.”

“O Alice! you think of everything!”

His heart was pierced by the soft reproach implied in her words; he had not thought to ask her for her photograph, but she had thought to give it; she must have felt it strange that he had not asked for it, and she had meant to slip it in his pocket and let him find it there. But even his pang of self-upbraiding was a part of his transport. He seemed to float down the stairs; his mind was in a delirious whirl. “I shall go mad,” he said to himself in the excess of his joy— “I shall die!”

XXVIII.

The parting scene with Alice persisted in Mavering’s thought far on the way to Ponkwasset Falls. He now succeeded in saying everything to her: how deeply he felt her giving him her photograph to cheer him in his separation from her; how much he appreciated her forethought in providing him with some answer when his mother and sisters should ask him about her looks. He took out the picture, and pretended to the other passengers to be looking very closely at it, and so managed to kiss it. He told her that now he understood what love really was; how powerful; how it did conquer everything; that it had changed him and made him already a better man. He made her refuse all merit in the work.

When he began to formulate the facts for communication to his family, love did not seem so potent; he found himself ashamed of his passion, or at least unwilling to let it be its own excuse even; he had a wish to give it almost any other appearance. Until he came in sight of the station and the Works, it had not seemed possible for any one to object to Alice. He had been going home as a matter of form to receive the adhesion of his family. But now he was forced to see that she might be considered critically, even reluctantly. This would only be because his family did not understand how perfect Alice was; but they might not understand.

With his father there would be no difficulty. His father had seen Alice and admired her; he would be all right. Dan found himself hoping this rather anxiously, as if from the instinctive need of his father’s support with his mother and sisters. He stopped at the Works when he left the train, and found his father in his private office beyond the book-keeper’s picket-fence, which he penetrated, with a nod to the accountant.

“Hello, Dan!” said his father, looking up; and “Hello, father!” said Dan. Being alone, the father and son not only shook hands, but kissed each other, as they used to do in meeting after an absence when Dan was younger.

He had closed his father’s door with his left hand in giving his right, and now he said at once, “Father, I’ve come home to tell you that I’m engaged to be married.”

Dan had prearranged his father’s behaviour at this announcement, but he now perceived that he would have to modify the scene if it were to represent the facts. His father did not brighten all over and demand, “Miss Pasmer, of course?” he contrived to hide whatever start the news had given him, and was some time in asking, with his soft lisp, “Isn’t that rather sudden, Dan?”

“Well, not for me,” said Dan, laughing uneasily. “It’s — you know her, father — Miss Pasmer.”

“Oh yes,” said his father, certainly not with displeasure, and yet not with enthusiasm.

“I’ve had ever since Class Day to think it over, and it — came to a climax yesterday.”

“And then you stopped thinking,” said his father — to gain time, it appeared to Dan.

“Yes, sir,” said Dan. “I haven’t thought since.”

“Well,” said his father, with an amusement which was not unfriendly. He added, after a moment, “But I thought that had been broken off,” and Dan’s instinct penetrated to the lurking fact that his father must have talked the rupture over with his mother, and not wholly regretted it.

“There was a kind of — hitch at one time,” he admitted; “but it’s all right now.”

“Well, well,” said his father, “this is great news — great news,” and he seemed to be shaping himself to the new posture of affairs, while giving it a conditional recognition. “She’s a beautiful creature.”

“Isn’t she?” cried Dan, with a little break in his voice, for he had found his father’s manner rather trying. “And she’s good too. I assure you that she is — she is simply perfect every way.”

“Well,” said the elder Mavering, rising and pulling down the rolling top of his desk, “I’m glad to hear it, for your sake, Dan. Have you been up at the house yet?”

“No; I’m just off the train.”

“How is her mother — how is Mrs. Pasmer? All well?”

“Yes, sir,” said Dan; “they’re all very well. You don’t know Mr. Pasmer, I believe, sir, do you?”

“Not since college. What sort of person is he?”

“He’s very refined and quiet. Very handsome. Very courteous. Very nice indeed.”

“Ah! that’s good,” said Elbridge Mavering, with the effect of not having been very attentive to his son’s answer.

They walked up the long slope of the hillside on which the house stood, overlooking the valley where the Works were, and fronting the plateau across the river where the village of operatives’ houses was scattered. The paling light of what had been a very red sunset flushed them, and brought out the picturesqueness which the architect, who designed them for a particular effect in the view from the owner’s mansion, had intended.

A good carriage road followed the easiest line of ascent towards this edifice, and reached a gateway. Within it began to describe a curve bordered with asphalted footways to the broad verandah of the house, and then descended again to the gate. The grounds enclosed were planted with deciduous shrubs, which had now mostly dropped their leaves, and clumps of firs darkening in the evening light with the gleam of some garden statues shivering about the lawn next the house. The breeze grew colder and stiffer as the father and son mounted toward the mansion which Dan used to believe was like a chateau, with its Mansard-roof and dormer windows and chimneys. It now blocked its space sharply out of the thin pink of the western sky, and its lights sparkled with a wintry keenness which had often thrilled Dan when he climbed the hill from the station in former homecomings. Their brilliancy gave him a strange sinking of the heart for no reason. He and his father had kept up a sort of desultory talk about Alice, and he could not have said that his father had seemed indifferent; he had touched the affair only too acquiescently; it was painfully like everything else. When they came in full sight of the house, Dan left the subject, as he realised presently, from a reasonless fear of being overheard.

“It seems much later here, sir, than it does in Boston,” he said, glancing round at the maples, which stood ragged, with half their leaves blown from them.

“Yes; we’re in the hills, and we’re further north,” answered his father. “There’s Minnie.”

Dan had seen his sister on the verandah, pausing at sight of him, and puzzled to make out who was with her father. He had an impulse to hail her with a shout, but he could not. In his last walk with her he had told her that he should never marry, and they had planned to live together. It was a joke; but now he felt as if he had come to rob her of something, and he walked soberly on with his father.

“Why, Dan, you good-for-nothing fellow!” she called out when he came near enough to be unmistakable, and ran down the steps to kiss him. “What in the world are you doing here? When did you come? Why didn’t you hollo, instead of letting me stand here guessing? You’re not sick, are you?”

The father got himself indoors unnoticed in the excitement of the brother’s arrival. This would have been the best moment for Dan to tell his sister of his engagement; he knew it, but he parried her curiosity about his coming; and then his sister Eunice came out, and he could not speak. They all went together into the house flaming with naphtha gas, and with the steam heat already on, and Dan said he would take his bag to his room, and then come down again. He knew that he had left them to think that there was something very mysterious in his coming, and while he washed away the grime of his journey he was planning how to appear perfectly natural when he should get back to his sisters. He recollected that he had not asked either them or his father how his mother was, but it was certainly not because his mind was not full of her. Alice now seemed very remote from him, further even than his gun, or his boyish collection of moths and butterflies, on which his eye fell in roving about his room. For a bitter instant it seemed to him as if they were all alike toys, and in a sudden despair he asked himself what had become of his happiness. It was scarcely half a day since he had parted in transport from Alice.

He made pretexts to keep from returning at once to his sisters, and it was nearly half an hour before he went down to them. By that time his father was with them in the library, and they were waiting tea for him.

XXIX.

A family of rich people in the country, apart from intellectual interests, is apt to gormandise; and the Maverings always sat down to a luxurious table, which was most abundant and tempting at the meal they called tea, when the invention of the Portuguese man-cook was taxed to supply the demands of appetites at once eager and fastidious. They prolonged the meal as much as possible in winter, and Dan used to like to get home just in time for tea when he came up from Harvard; it was always very jolly, and he brought a boy’s hunger to its abundance. The dining-room, full of shining light, and treated from the low-down grate, was a pleasant place. But now his spirits failed to rise with the physical cheer; he was almost bashfully silent; he sat cowed in the presence of his sisters, and careworn in the place where he used to be so gay and bold. They were waiting to have him begin about himself, as he always did when he had been away, and were ready to sympathise with his egotism, whatever new turn it took. He mystified them by asking about them and their affairs, and by dealing in futile generalities, instead of launching out with any business that he happened at the time to be full of. But he did not attend to their answers to his questions; he was absent-minded, and only knew that his face was flushed, and that he was obviously ill at ease.

His younger sister turned from him impatiently at last. “Father, what is the matter with Dan?”

Her bold recognition of their common constraint broke it down. Dan looked at his father with helpless consent, and his father said quietly, “He tells me he’s engaged.”

“What nonsense!” said his sister Eunice.

“Why, Dan!” cried Minnie; and he felt a reproach in her words which the words did not express. A silence followed, in which the father along went on with his supper. The girls sat staring at Dan with incredulous eyes. He became suddenly angry.

“I don’t know what’s so very extraordinary about it, or why there should be such a pother,” he began; and he knew that he was insolently ignoring abundant reasons for pother, if there had been any pother. “Yes, I’m engaged.”

He expected now that they would believe him, and ask whom he was engaged to; but apparently they were still unable to realise it. He was obliged to go on. “I’m engaged to Miss Pasmer.”

“To Miss Pasmer!” repeated Eunice.

“But I thought—” Minnie began, and then stopped.

Dan commanded his temper by a strong effort, and condescended to explain. “There was a misunderstanding, but it’s all right now; I only met her yesterday, and — it’s all right.” He had to keep on ignoring what had passed between him and his sisters during the month he spent at home after his return from Campobello. He did not wish to do so; he would have been glad to laugh over that epoch of ill-concealed heart-break with them; but the way they had taken the fact of his engagement made it impossible. He was forced to keep them at a distance; they forced him. “I’m glad,” he added bitterly, “that the news seems to be so agreeable to my family. Thank you for your cordial congratulations.” He swallowed a large cup of tea, and kept looking down.

“How silly!” said Eunice, who was much the oldest of the three. “Did you expect us to fall upon your neck before we could believe it wasn’t a hoax of father’s?”

“A hoax!” Dan burst out.

“I suppose,” said Minnie, with mock meekness, “that if we’re to be devoured, it’s no use saying we didn’t roil the brook. I’m sure I congratulate you, Dan, with all my heart,” she added, with a trembling voice.

“I congratulate Miss Pasmer,” said Eunice, “on securing such a very reasonable husband.”

When Eunice first became a young lady she was so much older than Dan that in his mother’s absence she sometimes authorised herself to box his ears, till she was finally overthrown in battle by the growing boy. She still felt herself so much his tutelary genius that she could not let the idea of his engagement awe her, or keep her from giving him a needed lesson. Dan jumped to his feet, and passionately threw his napkin on his chair.

“There, that will do, Eunice!” interposed the father. “Sit down, Dan, and don’t be an ass, if you are engaged. Do you expect to come up here with a bombshell in your pocket, and explode it among us without causing any commotion? We all desire your happiness, and we are glad if you think you’ve found it, but we want to have time to realise it. We had only adjusted our minds to the apparent fact that you hadn’t found it when you were here before.” His father began very severely, but when he ended with this recognition of what they had all blinked till then, they laughed together.

“My pillow isn’t dry yet, with the tears I shed for you, Dan,” said Minnie demurely.

“I shall have to countermand my mourning,” said Eunice, “and wear louder colours than ever. Unless,” she added, “Miss Pasmer changes her mind again.”

This divination of the past gave them all a chance for another laugh, and Dan’s sisters began to reconcile themselves to the fact of his engagement, if not to Miss Pasmer. In what was abstractly so disagreeable there was the comfort that they could joke about his happiness; they had not felt free to make light of his misery when he was at home before. They began to ask all the questions they could think of as to how and when, and they assimilated the fact more and more in acquiring these particulars and making a mock of them and him.

“Of course you haven’t got her photograph,” suggested Eunice. “You know we’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the young lady yet.”

“Yes,” Dan owned, blushing, “I have. She thought I might like to show it to mother: But it isn’t—”

“A very good one — they never are,” said Minnie.

“And it was taken several years ago — they always are,” said Eunice.

“And she doesn’t photograph well, anyway.”

“And this one was just after a long fit of sickness.”

Dan drew it out of his pocket, after some fumbling for it, while he tolerated their gibes.

Eunice put her nose to it. “I hope it’s your cigarettes it smells of,” she said.

“Yes; she doesn’t use the weed,” answered Dan.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that, exactly,” returned his sister, holding the picture off at arm’s length, and viewing it critically with contracted eyes.

Dan could not help laughing. “I don’t think it’s been near any other cigar-case,” he answered tranquilly.

Minnie looked at it very near to, covering all but the face with her hand. “Dan, she’s lovely!” she cried, and Dan’s heart leaped into his throat As he gratefully met his sister’s eyes.

“You’ll like her, Min.”

Eunice took the photograph from her for a second scrutiny. “She’s certainly very stylish. Rather a beak of a nose, and a little too bird — like on the whole. But she isn’t so bad. Is it like her?” she asked with a glance at her father.

“I might say — after looking,” he replied.

“True! I didn’t know but Dan had shown it to you as soon as you met. He seemed to be in such a hurry to let us all know.”

The father said, “I don’t think it flatters her,” and he looked at it more carefully. “Not much of her mother there?” he suggested to Dan.

“No, sir; she’s more like her father.”

“Well, after all this excitement, I believe I’ll have another cup of tea, and take something to eat, if Miss Pasmer’s photograph doesn’t object,” said Eunice, and she replenished her cup and plate.

“What coloured hair and eyes has she, Dan?” asked Minnie.

He had to think so as to be exact. “Well, you might say they were black, her eyebrows are so dark. But I believe they’re a sort of greyish-blue.”

“Not an uncommon colour for eyes,” said Eunice, “but rather peculiar for hair.”

They got to making fun of the picture, and Dan told them about Alice and her family; the father left them at the table, and then came back with word from Dan’s mother that she was ready to see him.

XXX.

By eight o’clock in the evening the pain with which every day began for Mrs. Mavering was lulled, and her jarred nerves were stayed by the opiates till she fell asleep about midnight. In this interval the family gathered into her room, and brought her their news and the cheer of their health. The girls chattered on one side of her bed, and their father sat with his newspaper on the other, and read aloud the passages which he thought would interest her, while she lay propped among her pillows, brilliantly eager for the world opening this glimpse of itself to her shining eyes. That was on her good nights, when the drugs did their work, but there were times when they failed, and the day’s agony prolonged itself through the evening, and the sleep won at last was a heavy stupor. Then the sufferer’s temper gave way under the stress; she became the torment she suffered, and tore the hearts she loved. Most of all, she afflicted the man who had been so faithful to her misery, and maddened him to reprisals, of which he afterward abjectly repented. Her tongue was sharpened by pain, and pitilessly skilled to inculpate and to punish; it pierced and burned like fire but when a good day came again she made it up to the victims by the angelic sweetness and sanity which they felt was her real self; the cruelty was only the mask of her suffering.

When she was better they brought to her room anybody who was staying with them, and she liked them to be jolly in the spacious chamber. The pleasantest things of the house were assembled, and all its comforts concentrated, in the place which she and they knew she should quit but once. It was made gay with flowers and pictures; it was the salon for those fortunate hours when she became the lightest and blithest of the company in it, and made the youngest guest forget that there was sickness or pain in the world by the spirit with which she ignored her own. Her laugh became young again; she joked; she entered into what they were doing and reading and thinking, and sent them away full of the sympathy which in this mood of hers she had for every mood in others. Girls sighed out their wonder and envy to her daughters when they left her; the young men whom she captivated with her divination of their passions or ambitions went away celebrating her supernatural knowledge of human nature. The next evening after some night of rare and happy excitement, the family saw her nurse carrying the pictures and flowers and vases out of her room, in sign of her renunciation of them all, and assembled silently, shrinkingly, in her chamber, to take each their portion of her anguish, of the blame and the penalty. The household adjusted itself to her humours, for she was supreme in it.

When Dan used to come home from Harvard she put on a pretty cap for him, and distinguished him as company by certain laces hiding her wasted frame, and giving their pathetic coquetry to her transparent wrists. He was her favourite, and the girls acknowledged him so, and made their fun of her for spoiling him. He found out as he grew up that her broken health dated from his birth, and at first this deeply affected him; but his young life soon lost the keenness of the impression, and he loved his mother because she loved him, and not because she had been dying for him so many years.

As he now came into her room, and the waiting-woman went out of it with her usual, “Well, Mr. Dan!” the tenderness which filled him at sight of his mother was mixed with that sense of guilt which had tormented him at times ever since he met his sisters. He was going to take himself from her; he realised that.

“Well, Dan!” she called, so gaily that he said to himself, “No, father hasn’t told her anything about it,” and was instantly able to answer her as cheerfully, “Well, mother!”

He bent over her to kiss her, and the odour of the clean linen mingling with that of the opium, and the cologne with which she had tried to banish its scent, opened to him one of those vast reaches of associations which perfumes can unlock, and he saw her lying there through those years of pain, as many as half his life, and suddenly the tears gushed into his eyes, and he fell on his knees, and hid his face in the bed-clothes and sobbed.

She kept smoothing his head, which shook under her thin hand, and saying, “Poor Dan! poor Dan!” but did not question him. He knew that she knew what he had come to tell her, and that his tears, which had not been meant for that, had made interest with her for him and his cause, and that she was already on his side.

He tried boyishly to dignify the situation when he lifted his face, and he said, “I didn’t mean to come boohooing to you in this way, and I’m ashamed of myself.”

“I know, Dan; but you’ve been wrought up, and I don’t wonder. You mustn’t mind your father and your sisters. Of course, they’re rather surprised, and they don’t like your taking yourself from them — we, none of us do.”

At these honest words Dan tried to become honest too. At least he dropped his pretence of dignity, and became as a little child in his simple greed for sympathy. “But it isn’t necessarily that; is it, mother?”

“Yes, it’s all that, Dan; and it’s all right, because it’s that. We don’t like it, but our not liking it has nothing to do with its being right or wrong.”

“I supposed that father would have been pleased, anyway; for he has seen her, and — and. Of course the girls haven’t, but I think they might have trusted my judgment a little. I’m not quite a fool.”

His mother smiled. “Oh, it isn’t a question of the wisdom of your choice; it’s the unexpectedness. We all saw that you were very unhappy when you were here before, and we supposed it had gone wrong.”

“It had, mother,” said Dan. “She refused me at Campobello. But it was a misunderstanding, and as soon as we met—”

“I knew you had met again, and what you had come home for, and I told your father so, when he came to say you were here.”

“Did you, mother?” he asked, charmed at her having guessed that.

“Yes. She must be a good girl to send you straight home to tell us.”

“You knew I wouldn’t have thought of that myself,” said Dan joyously. “I wanted to write; I thought that would do just as well. I hated to leave her, but she made me come. She is the best, and the wisest, and the most unselfish — O mother, I can’t tell you about her! You must see her. You can’t realise her till you see her, mother. You’ll like each other, I’m sure of that. You’re just alike.” It seemed to Dan that they were exactly alike.

“Then perhaps we sha’n’t,” suggested his mother. “Let me see her picture.”

“How did you know I had it? If it hadn’t been for her, I shouldn’t have brought any. She put it into my pocket just as I was leaving. She said you would all want to see what she looked like.”

He had taken it out of his pocket, and he held it, smiling fondly upon it. Alice seemed to smile back at him. He had lost her in the reluctance of his father and sisters; and now his mother — it was his mother who had given her to him again. He thought how tenderly he loved his mother.

When he could yield her the photograph, she looked long and silently at it. “She has a great deal of character, Dan.”

“There you’ve hit it, mother! I’d rather you would have said that than anything else. But don’t you think she’s beautiful? She’s the gentlest creature, when you come to know her! I was awfully afraid of her at first. I thought she was very haughty. But she isn’t at all. She’s really very self-depreciatory; she thinks she isn’t good enough for me. You ought to hear her talk, mother, as I have. She’s full of the noblest ideals — of being of some use in the world, of being self-devoted, and — all that kind of thing. And you can see that she’s capable of it. Her aunt’s in a Protestant sisterhood,” he said, with a solemnity which did not seem to communicate itself to his mother, for Mrs. Mavering smiled. Dan smiled too, and said: “But I can’t tell you about Alice, mother. She’s perfect.” His heart overflowed with proud delight in her, and he was fool enough to add, “She’s so affectionate!”

His mother kept herself from laughing. “I dare say she is, Dan — with you.” Then she hid all but her eyes with the photograph, and gave way.

“What a donkey!” said Dan, meaning himself. “If I go on, I shall disgust you with her. What I mean is that she isn’t at all proud, as I used to think she was.”

“No girl is, under the circumstances. She has all she can do to be proud of you.”

“Do you think so, mother?” he said, enraptured with the notion. “I’ve done my best — or my worst — not to give her any reason to be so.”

“She doesn’t ‘want any — the less the better. You silly boy! Don’t you suppose she wants to make you out of whole cloth just as you do with her? She doesn’t want any facts to start with; they’d be in the way. Well, now, I can make out, with your help, what the young lady is; but what are the father and mother? They’re rather important in these cases.”

“Oh, they’re the nicest kind of people,” said Dan, in optimistic generalisation. “You’d like Mrs. Pasmer. She’s awfully nice.”

“Do you say that because you think I wouldn’t?” asked his mother. “Isn’t she rather sly and hum-bugging?”

“Well, yes, she is, to a certain extent,” Dan admitted, with a laugh. “But she doesn’t mean any harm by it. She’s extremely kind-hearted.”

“To you? I dare say. And Mr. Pasmer is rather under her thumb?”

“Well, yes, you might say thumb,” Dan consented, feeling it useless to defend the Pasmers against this analysis.

“We won’t say heel,” returned his mother; “we’re too polite. And your father says he had the reputation in college of being one of the most selfish fellows in the world. He’s never done anything since but lose most of his money. He’s been absolutely idle and useless all his days.” She turned her vivid blue eyes suddenly upon her son’s.

Dan winced. “You know how hard father is upon people who haven’t done anything. It’s a mania of his. Of course Mr. Pasmer doesn’t show to advantage where there’s no — no leisure class.”

“Poor man!”

Dan was going to say, “He’s very amiable, though,” but he was afraid of his mother’s retorting, “To you?” and he held his peace, looking chapfallen.

Whether his mother took pity on him or not, her next sally was consoling. “But your Alice may not take after either of them. Her father is the worst of his breed, it seems; the rest are useful people, from what your father knows, and there’s a great deal to be hoped for collaterally. She had an uncle in college at the same time who was everything that her father was not.”

“One of her aunts is in one of those Protestant religious houses in England,” repeated Dan.

“Oh!” said his mother shortly, “I don’t know that I like that particularly. But probably she isn’t useless there. Is Alice very religious?”

“Well, I suppose,” said Dan, with a smile for the devotions that came into his thought, “she’s what would be called ‘Piscopal pious.”

Mrs. Mavering referred to the photograph, which she still held in her hand. “Well, she’s pure and good, at any rate. I suppose you look forward to a long engagement?”

Dan was somewhat taken aback at a supposition so very contrary to what was in his mind. “Well, I don’t know. Why?”

“It might be said that you are very young. How old is Agnes — Alice, I mean?”

“Twenty-one. But now, look here, mother! It’s no use considering such a thing in the abstract, is it?”

“No,” said his mother, with a smile for what might be coming.

“This is the way I’ve been viewing it; I may say it’s the way Alice has been viewing it — or Mrs. Pasmer, rather.”

“Decidedly Mrs. Pasmer, rather. Better be honest, Dan.”

“I’ll do my best. I was thinking, hoping, that is, that as I’m going right into the business — have gone into it already, in fact — and could begin life at once, that perhaps there wouldn’t be much sense in waiting a great while.”

“Yes?”

“That’s all. That is, if you and father are agreed.” He reflected upon this provision, and added, with a laugh of confusion and pleasure: “It seems to be so very much more of a family affair than I used to think it was.”

“You thought it concerned just you and her?” said his mother, with arch sympathy.

“Well, yes.”

“Poor fellow! She knew better than that, you may be sure. At any rate, her mother did.”

“What Mrs. Pasmer doesn’t know isn’t probably worth knowing,” said Dan, with an amused sense of her omniscience.

“I thought so,” sighed his mother, smiling too. “And now you begin to find out that it concerns the families in all their branches on both sides.”

“Oh, if it stopped at the families and their ramifications! But it seems to take in society and the general public.”

“So it does — more than you can realise. You can’t get married to yourself alone, as young people think; and if you don’t marry happily, you sin against the peace and comfort of the whole community.”

“Yes, that’s what I’m chiefly looking out for now. I don’t want any of those people in Central Africa to suffer. That’s the reason I want to marry Alice at the earliest opportunity. But I suppose there’ll have to be a Mavering embassy to the high contracting powers of the other part now?”

“Your father and one of the girls had better go down.”

“Yes?”

“And invite Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer and their daughter to come up here.”

“All on probation?”

“Oh no. If you’re pleased, Dan—”

“I am, mother — measurably.” They both laughed at this mild way of putting it.

“Why, then it’s to be supposed that we’re all pleased. You needn’t bring the whole Pasmer family home to live with you, if you do marry them all.”

“No,” said Dan, and suddenly he became very distraught. It flashed through him that his mother was expecting him to come home with Alice to live, and that she would not be at all pleased with his scheme of a European sojourn, which Mrs. Pasmer had so cordially adopted. He was amazed that he had not thought of that, but he refused to see any difficulty which his happiness could not cope with.

“No, there’s that view of it,” he said jollily; and he buried his momentary anxiety out of sight, and, as it were, danced upon its grave. Nevertheless, he had a desire to get quickly away from the spot. “I hope the Mavering embassy won’t be a great while getting ready to go,” he said. “Of course it’s all right; but I shouldn’t want an appearance of reluctance exactly, you know, mother; and if there should be much of an interval between my getting back and their coming on, don’t you know, why, the cat might let herself out of the bag.”

“What cat?” asked his mother demurely.

“Well, you know, you haven’t received my engagement with unmingled enthusiasm, and — and I suppose they would find it out from me — from my manner; and — and I wish they’d come along pretty soon, mother.”

“Poor boy! I’m afraid the cat got out of the bag when Mrs. Pasmer came to the years of discretion. But you sha’n’t be left a prey to her. They shall go back with you. Ring the bell, and let’s talk it over with them now.”

Dan joyfully obeyed. He could see that his mother was all on fire with interest in his affair, and that the idea of somehow circumventing Mrs. Pasmer by prompt action was fascinating her.

His sisters came up at once, and his father followed a moment later. They all took their cue from the mother’s gaiety, and began talking and laughing, except the father, who sat looking on with a smile at their lively spirits and the jokes of which Dan became the victim. Each family has its own fantastic medium, in which it gets affairs to relieve them of their concrete seriousness, and the Maverings now did this with Dan’s engagement, and played with it as an airy abstraction. They debated the character of the embassy which was to be sent down to Boston on their behalf, and it was decided that Eunice had better go with her father, as representing more fully the age and respectability of the family: at first glance the Pasmers would take her for Dan’s mother, and this would be a tremendous advantage.

“And if I like the ridiculous little chit,” said Eunice, “I think I shall let Dan marry her at once. I see no reason why he shouldn’t and I couldn’t stand a long engagement; I should break it off.”

“I guess there are others who will have something to say about that,” retorted the younger sister. “I’ve always wanted a long engagement in this family, and as there seems to be no chance for it with the ladies, I wish to make the most of Dan’s. I always like it where the hero gets sick and the heroine nurses him. I want Dan to get sick, and have Alice come here and take care of him.”

“No; this marriage must take place at once. What do you say, father?” asked Eunice.

Her father sat, enjoying the talk, at the foot of the bed, with a tendency to doze. “You might ask Dan,” he said, with a lazy cast of his eye toward his son.

“Dan has nothing to do with it.”

“Dan shall not be consulted.”

The two girls stormed upon their father with their different reasons.

“Now I will tell you Girls, be still!” their mother broke in. “Listen to me: I have an idea.”

“Listen to her: she has an idea!” echoed Eunice, in recitative.

“Will you be quiet?” demanded the mother.

“We will be du-u-mb!”

When they became so, at the verge of their mother’s patience, of which they knew the limits, she went on: “I think Dan had better get married at once.”

“There, Minnie!”

“But what does Dan say?”

“I will — make the sacrifice,” said Dan meekly.

“Noble boy! That’s exactly what Washington said to his mother when she asked him not to go to sea,” said Minnie.

“And then he went into the militia, and made it all right with himself that way,” said Eunice. “Dan can’t play his filial piety on this family. Go on, mother.”

“I want him to bring his wife home, and live with us,” continued his mother.

“In the L part!” cried Minnie, clasping her hands in rapture. “I’ve always said what a perfect little apartment it was by itself.”

“Well, don’t say it again, then,” returned her sister. “Always is often enough. Well, in the L part Go on, mother! Don’t ask where you were, when it’s so exciting.”

“I don’t care whether it’s in the L part or not. There’s plenty of room in the great barn of a place everywhere.”

“But what about his taking care of the business in Boston?” suggested Eunice, looking at her father.

“There’s no hurry about that.”

“And about the excursion to aesthetic centres abroad?” Minnie added.

“That could be managed,” said her father, with the same ironical smile.

The mother and the girls went on wildly planning Dan’s future for him. It was all in a strain of extravagant burlesque. But he could not take his part in it with his usual zest. He laughed and joked too, but at the bottom of his heart was an uneasy remembrance of the different future he had talked over with Mrs. Pasmer so confidently. But he said to himself buoyantly at last that it would come out all right. His mother would give in, or else Alice could reconcile her mother to whatever seemed really best.

He parted from his mother with fond gaiety. His sisters came out of the room with him.

“I’m perfectly sore with laughing,” said Minnie. “It seems like old times — doesn’t it, Dan? — such a gale with mother.”

XXXI.

An engagement must always be a little incredible at first to the families of the betrothed, and especially to the family of the young man; in the girl’s, the mother, at least, will have a more realising sense of the situation. If there are elder sisters who have been accustomed to regard their brother as very young, he will seem all the younger because in such a matter he has treated himself as if he were a man; and Eunice Mavering said, after seeing the Pasmers, “Well, Dan, it’s all well enough, I suppose, but it seems too ridiculous.”

“What’s ridiculous about it, I should like to know?” he demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know. Who’ll look after you when you’re married? Oh, I forgot Ma’am Pasmer!”

“I guess we shall be able to look after ourselves,” said Dan; a little sulkily.

“Yes, if you’ll be allowed to,” insinuated his sister.

They spoke at the end of a talk in which he had fretted at the reticence of both his sister and his father concerning the Pasmers, whom they had just been to see. He was vexed with his father, because he felt that he had been influenced by Eunice, and had somehow gone back on him. He was vexed and he was grieved because his father had left them at the door of the hotel without saying anything in praise of Alice, beyond the generalities that would not carry favour with Eunice; and he was depressed with a certain sense of Alice’s father and mother, which seemed to have imparted itself to him from the others, and to be the Mavering opinion of them. He could no longer see Mrs. Pasmer harmless if trivial, and good-hearted if inveterately scheming; he could not see the dignity and refinement which he had believed in Mr. Pasmer; they had both suffered a sort of shrinkage or collapse, from which he could not rehabilitate them. But this would have been nothing if his sister’s and his father’s eyes, through which he seemed to have been looking, had not shown him Alice in a light in which she appeared strange and queer almost to eccentricity. He was hurt at this effect from their want of sympathy, his pride was touched, and he said to himself that he should not fish for Eunice’s praise; but he found himself saying, without surprise, “I suppose you will do what you can to prejudice mother and Min.”

“Isn’t that a little previous?” asked Eunice. “Have I said anything against Miss Pasmer?”

“You haven’t because you couldn’t,” said Dan, with foolish bitterness.

“Oh, I don’t know about that. She’s a human being, I suppose — at least that was the impression I got from her parentage.”

“What have you got to say against her parents?” demanded Dan savagely.

“Oh, nothing. I didn’t come down to Boston to denounce the Pasmer family.”

“I suppose you didn’t like their being in a flat; you’d have liked to find them in a house on Commonwealth Avenue or Beacon Street.”

“I’ll own I’m a snob,” said Eunice, with maddening meekness. “So’s father.”

“They are connected with the best families in the city, and they are in the best society. They do what they please, and they live where they like. They have been so long in Europe that they don’t care for those silly distinctions. But what you say doesn’t harm them. It’s simply disgraceful to you; that’s all,” said Dan furiously.

“I’m glad it’s no worse, Dan,” said his sister, with a tranquil smile. “And if you’ll stop prancing up and down the room, and take a seat, and behave yourself in a Christian manner, I’ll talk with you; and if you don’t, I won’t. Do you suppose I’m going to be bullied into liking them?”

“You can like them or not, as you please,” said Dan sullenly; but he sat down, and waited decently for his sister to speak. “But you can’t abuse them — at least in my presence.”

“I didn’t know men lost their heads as well as their hearts,” said Eunice. “Perhaps it’s only an exchange, though, and it’s Miss Pasmer’s head.” Dan started, but did not say anything, and Eunice smoothly continued: “No, I don’t believe it is. She looked like a sensible girl, and she talked sensibly. I should think she had a very good head. She has good manners, and she’s extremely pretty, and very graceful. I’m surprised she should be in love with such a simpleton.”

“Oh, go on! Abuse me as much as you like,” said Dan. He was at once soothed by her praise of Alice.

“No, it isn’t necessary to go on; the case is a little too obvious. But I think she will do very well. I hope you’re not marrying the whole family, though. I suppose that it’s always a question of which shall be scooped up. They will want to scoop you up, and we shall want to scoop her up. I dare say Ma’am Pasmer has her little plan; what is it?”

Dan started at this touch on the quick, but he controlled himself, and said, with dignity, “I have my own plans.”

“Well, you know what mother’s are,” returned Eunice easily. “You seem so cheerful that I suppose yours are quite the same, and you’re just keeping them for a surprise.” She laughed provokingly, and Dan burst forth again —

“You seem to live to give people pain. You take a fiendish delight in torturing others. But if you think you can influence me in the slightest degree, you’re very much mistaken.”

“Well, well, there! It sha’n’t be teased any more, so it sha’n’t! It shall have its own way, it shall, and nobody shall say a word against its little girly’s mother.” Eunice rose from her chair, and patted Dan on the head as she passed to the adjoining room. He caught her hand, and flung it violently away; she shrieked with delight in his childish resentment, and left him sulking. She was gone two or three minutes, and when she came back it was in quite a different mood, as often happens with women in a little lapse of time.

“Dan, I think Miss Pasmer is a beautiful girl, and I know we shall all like her, if you don’t set us against her by your arrogance. Of course we don’t know anything about her yet, and you don’t, really; but she seems a very lovable little thing, and if she’s rather silent and undemonstrative, why, she’ll be all the better for you: you’ve got demonstration enough for twenty. And I think the family are well enough. Mrs. Pasmer is thoroughly harmless; and Mr. Pasmer is a most dignified personage; his eyebrows alone are worth the price of admission.” Dan could not help smiling. “All that there is about it is, you mustn’t expect to drive people into raptures about them, and expect them to go grovelling round on their knees because you do.”

“Oh, I know I’m an infernal idiot,” said Dan, yielding to the mingled sarcasm and flattery. “It’s because I’m so anxious; and you all seem so confoundedly provisional about it. Eunice, what do you suppose father really thinks?”

Eunice seemed tempted to a relapse into her teasing, but she did not yield. “Oh, father’s all right — from your point of view. He’s been ridiculous from the first; perhaps that’s the reason he doesn’t feel obliged to expatiate and expand a great deal at present.”

“Do you think so?” cried Dan, instantly adopting her as an ally.

“Well, if I sad so, oughtn’t it to be enough?”

“It depends upon what else you say. Look here, now, Eunice!” Dan said, with a laughing mixture of fun and earnest, “what are you going to say to mother? It’s no use, being disagreeable, is it? Of course, I don’t contend for ideal perfection anywhere, and I don’t expect it. But there isn’t anything experimental about this thing, and don’t you think we had better all make the best of it?”

“That sounds very impartial.”

“It is impartial. I’m a purely disinterested spectator.”

“Oh, quite.”

“And don’t you suppose I understand Mr. and Mrs. Pasmer quite as well as you do? All I say is that Alice is simply the noblest girl that ever breathed, and—”

“Now you’re talking sense, Dan!”

“Well, what are you going to say when you get home, Eunice? Come!”

“That we had better make the best of it.”

“And what else?”

“That you’re hopelessly infatuated; and that she will twist you round her finger.”

“Well?”

“But that you’ve had your own way so much, it will do you good to have somebody else’s a while.”

“I guess you’re pretty solid,” said Dan, after thinking it over for a moment. “I don’t believe you’re going to make it hard for me, and I know you can make it just what you please. But I want you to be frank with mother. Of course I wish you felt about the whole affair just as I do, but if you’re right on the main question, I don’t care for the rest. I’d rather mother would know just how you feel about it,” said Dan, with a sigh for the honesty which he felt to be not immediately attainable in his own case.

“Well, I’ll see what can be done,” Eunice finally assented.

Whatever her feelings were in regard to the matter, she must have satisfied herself that the situation was not to be changed by her disliking it, and she began to talk so sympathetically with Dan that she soon had the whole story of his love out of him. They laughed a good deal together at it, but it convinced her that he had not been hoodwinked into the engagement. It is always the belief of a young man’s family, especially his mother and sisters, that unfair means have been used to win him, if the family of his betrothed are unknown to them; and it was a relief, if not exactly a comfort, for Eunice Mavering to find that Alice was as great a simpleton as Dan, and perhaps a sincerer simpleton.

XXXII.

A week later, in fulfilment of the arrangement made by Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice Mavering, Alice and her mother returned the formal visit of Dan’s people.

While Alice stood before the mirror in one of the sumptuously furnished rooms assigned them, arranging a ribbon for the effect upon Dan’s mother after dinner, and regarding its relation to her serious beauty, Mrs. Pasmer came out of her chamber adjoining, and began to inspect the formal splendour of the place.

“What a perfect man’s house!” she said, peering about. “You can see that everything has been done to order. They have their own taste; they’re artistic enough for that — or the father is — and they’ve given orders to have things done so and so, and the New York upholsterer has come up and taken the measure of the rooms and done it. But it isn’t like New York, and it isn’t individual. The whole house is just like those girls’ tailor-made costumes in character. They were made in New York, but they don’t wear them with the New York style; there’s no more atmosphere about them than if they were young men dressed up. There isn’t a thing lacking in the house here; there’s an awful completeness; but even the ornaments seem laid on, like the hot and cold water. I never saw a handsomer, more uninviting room than that drawing room. I suppose the etching will come some time after supper. What do you think of it all, Alice?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They must be very rich,” said the girl indifferently.

“You can’t tell. Country people of a certain kind are apt to put everything on their backs and their walls and floors. Of course such a house here doesn’t mean what it would in town.” She examined the texture of the carpet more critically, and the curtains; she had no shame about a curiosity that made her daughter shrink.

“Don’t, mamma!” pleaded the girl. “What if they should come?”

“They won’t come,” said Mrs. Pasmer; and her notice being called to Alice, she made her take off the ribbon. “You’re better without it.”

“I’m so nervous I don’t know what I’m doing,” said Alice, removing it, with a whimper.

“Well, I can’t have you breaking down!” cried her mother warningly: she really wished to shake her, as a culmination of her own conflicting emotions. “Alice, stop this instant! Stop it, I say!”

“But if I don’t like her?” whimpered Alice.

“You’re not going to marry her. Now stop! Here, bathe your eyes; they’re all red. Though I don’t know that it matters. Yes, they’ll expect you to have been crying,” said Mrs. Pasmer, seeing the situation more and more clearly. “It’s perfectly natural.” But she took some cologne on a handkerchief, and recomposed Alice’s countenance for her. “There, the colour becomes you, and I never saw your eyes look so bright.”

There was a pathos in their brilliancy which of course betrayed her to the Mavering girls. It softened Eunice, and encouraged Minnie, who had been a little afraid of the Pasmers. They both kissed Alice with sisterly affection. Their father merely saw how handsome she looked, and Dan’s heart seemed to melt in his breast with tenderness.

In recognition of the different habits of their guests, they had dinner instead of tea. The Portuguese cook had outdone himself, and course followed course in triumphal succession. Mrs. Pasmer praised it all with a sincerity that took away a little of the zest she felt in making flattering speeches.

Everything about the table was perfect, but in a man’s fashion, like the rest of the house. It lacked the atmospheric charm, the otherwise indefinable grace, which a woman’s taste gives. It was in fact Elbridge Mavering’s taste which had characterised the whole; the daughters simply accepted and approved.

“Yes,” said Eunice, “we haven’t much else to do; so we eat. And Joe does his best to spoil us.”

“Joe?”

“Joe’s the cook. All Portuguese cooks are Joe.”

“How very amusing!” said Mrs. Pasmer. “You must let me speak of your grapes. I never saw anything so — well! — except your roses.”

“There you touched father in two tender spots. He cultivates both.”

“Really? Alice, did you ever see anything like these roses?”

Alice looked away from Dan a moment, and blushed to find that she had been looking so long at him.

“Ah, I have,” said Mavering gallantly.

“Does he often do it?” asked Mrs. Pasmer, in an obvious aside to Eunice.

Dan answered for him. “He never had such a chance before.”

Between coffee, which they drank at table, and tea, which they were to take in Mrs. Mavering’s room, they acted upon a suggestion from Eunice that her father should show Mrs. Pasmer his rose-house. At one end of the dining-room was a little apse of glass full of flowering plants growing out of the ground, and with a delicate fountain tinkling in their midst. Dan ran before the rest, and opened two glass doors in the further side of this half-bubble, and at the same time with a touch flashed up a succession of brilliant lights in some space beyond, from which there gushed in a wave of hothouse fragrance, warm, heavy, humid. It was a pretty little effect for guests new to the house, and was part of Elbridge Mavering’s pleasure in this feature of his place. Mrs. Pasmer responded with generous sympathy, for if she really liked anything with her whole heart, it was an effect, and she traversed the half-bubble by its pebbled path, showering praises right and left with a fulness and accuracy that missed no detail, while Alice followed silently, her hand in Minnie Mavering’s, and cold with suppressed excitement. The rose-house was divided by a wall, pierced with frequent doorways, over which the trees were trained and the roses hung; and on either side were ranks of rare and costly kinds, weighed down with bud and bloom. The air was thick with their breath and the pungent odours of the rich soil from which they grew, and the glass roof was misted with the mingled exhalations.

Mr. Mavering walked beside Alice, modestly explaining the difficulties of rose culture, and his method of dealing with the red spider. He had a stout knife in his hand, and he cropped long, heavy-laden stems of roses from the walls and the beds, casually giving her their different names, and laying them along his arm in a massive sheaf.

Mrs. Pasmer and Eunice had gone forward with Dan, and were waiting for them at the thither end of the rose-house.

“Alice! just imagine: the grapery is beyond this,” cried the girl’s mother.

“It’s a cold grapery,” said Mr. Mavering. “I hope you’ll see it to-morrow.”

“Oh, why not to-night?” shouted Dan.

“Because it’s a cold grapery,” said Eunice; “and after this rose-house, it’s an Arctic grapery. You’re crazy, Dan.”

“Well, I want Alice to see it anyway,” he persisted wilfully. “There’s nothing like a cold grapery by starlight. I’ll get some wraps.” They all knew that he wished to be alone with her a moment, and the three women, consenting with their hearts, protested with their tongues, following him in his flight with their chorus, and greeting his return. He muffled her to the chin in a fur-lined overcoat, which he had laid hands on the first thing; and her mother, still protesting, helped to tie a scarf over her hair so as not to disarrange it. “Here,” he pointed, “we can run through it, and it’s worth seeing. Better come,” he said to the others as he opened the door, and hurried Alice down the path under the keen sparkle of the crystal roof, blotched with the leaves and bunches of the vines. Coming out of the dense, sensuous, vaporous air of the rose-house into this clear, thin atmosphere, delicately penetrated with the fragrance, pure and cold, of the fruit, it was as if they had entered another world. His arm crept round her in the odorous obscurity.

“Look up! See the stars through the vines! But when she lifted her face he bent his upon it for a wild kiss.

“Don’t! don’t!” she murmured. “I want to think; I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Neither do I. I feel as if I were a blessed ghost.”

Perhaps it is only in these ecstasies of the senses that the soul ever reaches self-consciousness on earth; and it seems to be only the man-soul which finds itself even in this abandon. The woman-soul has always something else to think of.

“What shall we do,” said the girl, “if we — Oh, I dread to meet your mother! Is she like either of your sisters?”

“No,” he cried joyously; “she’s like me. If you’re not afraid of me, and you don’t seem to be—”

“You’re all I have — you’re all I have in the world. Do you think she’ll like me? Oh, do you love me, Dan?”

“You darling! you divine—” The rest was a mad embrace. “If you’re not afraid of me, you won’t mind mother. I wanted you here alone for just a last word, to tell you you needn’t be afraid; to tell you to — But I needn’t tell you how to act. You mustn’t treat her as an invalid — you must treat her like any one else; that’s what she likes. But you’ll know what’s best, Alice. Be yourself, and she’ll like you well enough. I’m not afraid.”

XXXIII:

When she entered Mrs. Mavering’s room Alice first saw the pictures, the bric-a-brac, the flowers, the dazzle of lights, and then the invalid propped among her pillows, and vividly expectant of her. She seemed all eager eyes to the girl, aware next of the strong resemblance to Dan in her features, and of the careful toilet the sick woman had made for her. To youth all forms of suffering are abhorrent, and Alice had to hide a repugnance at sight of this spectre of what had once been a pretty woman. Through the egotism with which so many years of flattering subjection in her little world had armed her, Mrs. Mavering probably did not feel the girl’s shrinking, or, if she did, took it for the natural embarrassment which she would feel. She had satisfied herself that she was looking her best, and that her cap and the lace jacket she wore were very becoming, and softened her worst points; the hangings of her bed and the richly embroidered crimson silk coverlet were part of the coquetry of her costume, from which habit had taken all sense of ghastliness; she was proud of them, and she was not aware of the scent of drugs that insisted through the odour of the flowers.

She lifted herself on her elbow as Dan approached with Alice, and the girl felt as if an intense light had been thrown upon her from head to foot in the moment of searching scrutiny that followed. The invalid’s set look broke into a smile, and she put out her hand, neither hot nor cold, but of a dry neutral, spiritual temperature, and pulled Alice down and kissed her.

“Why, child, your hand’s like ice!” she exclaimed without preamble. “We used to say that came from a warm heart.”

“I guess it comes from a cold grapery in this case, mother,” said Dan, with his laugh. “I’ve just been running Alice through it. And perhaps a little excitement—”

“Excitement?” echoed his mother. “Cold grapery, I dare say, and very silly of you, Dan; but there’s no occasion for excitement, as if we were strangers. Sit down in that chair, my dear. And, Dan, you go round to the other side of the bed; I want Alice all to myself. I saw your photograph a week ago, and I’ve thought about you for ages since, and wondered whether you would approve of your old friend.”

“Oh yes,” whispered the girl, suppressing a tremor; and Dan’s eyes were suffused with grateful tears at his mother’s graciousness.

Alice’s reticence seemed to please the invalid. “I hope you’ll like all your old friends here; you’ve begun with the worst among us, but perhaps you like him the best because he is the worst; I do.”

“You may believe just half of that, Alice,” cried Dan.

“Then believe the best half, or the half you like best,” said Mrs. Mavering. “There must be something good in him if you like him. Have they welcomed you home, my dear?”

“We’ve all made a stagger at it,” said Dan, while Alice was faltering over the words which were so slow to come.

“Don’t try to answer my formal stupidities. You are welcome, and that’s enough, and more than enough of speeches. Did you have a comfortable journey up?”

“Oh, very.”

“Was it cold?”

“Not at all. The cars were very hot.”

“Have you had any snow yet at Boston?”

“No, none at all yet.”

“Now I feel that we’re talking sense. I hope you found everything in your room? I can’t look after things as I would like, and so I inquire.”

“There’s everything,” said Alice. “We’re very comfortable.”

“I’m very glad. I had Dan look, he’s my housekeeper; he understands me better than my girls; he’s like me, more. That’s what makes us so fond of each other; it’s a kind of personal vanity. But he has his good points, Dan has. He’s very amiable, and I was too, at his age — and till I came here. But I’m not going to tell you of his good points; I dare say you’ve found them out. I’ll tell you about his bad ones. He says you’re very serious. Are you?” She pressed the girl’s hand, which she had kept in hers, and regarded her keenly.

Alice dropped her eyes at the odd question. “I don’t know,” she faltered. “Sometimes.”

“Well, that’s good. Dan’s frivolous.”

“Oh, sometimes — only sometimes!” he interposed.

“He’s frivolous, and he’s very light-minded; but he’s none the worse for that.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Dan; and Alice, still puzzled, laughed provisionally.

“No; I want you to understand that. He’s light-hearted too, and that’s a great thing in this world. If you’re serious you’ll be apt to be heavyhearted, and then you’ll find Dan of use. And I hope he’ll know how, to turn your seriousness to account too, he needs something to keep him down — to keep him from blowing away. Yes, it’s very well for people to be opposites. Only they must understand each other, If they do that, then they get along. Light-heartedness or heavy-heartedness comes to the same thing if they know how to use it for each other. You see, I’ve got to be a great philosopher lying here; nobody dares contradict me or interrupt me when I’m constructing my theories, and so I get them perfect.”

“I wish I could hear them all,” said Alice, with sincerity that made Mrs. Mavering laugh as light-heartedly as Dan himself, and that seemed to suggest the nest thing to her.

“You can for the asking, almost any time. Are you a very truthful person, my dear? Don’t take the trouble to deny it if you are,” she added, at Alice’s stare. “You see, I’m not at all conventional and you needn’t be. Come! tell the truth for once, at any rate. Are you habitually truthful?”

“Yes, I think I am,” said Alice, still staring.

“Dan’s not,” said his mother quietly.

“Oh, see here, now, mother! Don’t give me away!”

“He’ll tell the truth in extremity, of course, and he’ll tell it if it’s pleasant, always; but if you don’t expect much more of him you won’t be disappointed; and you can make him of great use.”

“You see where I got it, anyway, Alice,” said Dan, laughing across the bed at her.

“Yes, you got it from me: I own it. A great part of my life was made up of making life pleasant to others by fibbing. I stopped it when I came here.”

“Oh, not altogether, mother!” urged her son. “You mustn’t be too hard on yourself.”

She ignored his interruption: “You’ll find Dan a great convenience with that agreeable habit of his. You can get him to make all your verbal excuses for you (he’ll, do it beautifully), and dictate all the thousand and one little lying notes you’ll have to write; he won’t mind it in the least, and it will save you a great wear-and-tear of conscience.”

“Go on, mother, go on,” said Dan, with delighted eyes, that asked of Alice if it were not all perfectly charming.

“And you can come in with your habitual truthfulness where Dan wouldn’t know what to do, poor fellow. You’ll have the moral courage to come right to the point when he would like to shillyshally, and you can be frank while he’s trying to think how to make y-e-s spell no.”

“Any other little compliments, mother?” suggested Dan.

“No,” said Mrs. Mavering; “that’s all. I thought I’d better have it off my mind; I knew you’d never get it off yours, and Alice had better know the worst. It is the worst, my dear, and if I talked of him till doomsday I couldn’t say any more harm of him. I needn’t tell you how sweet he is; you know that, I’m sure; but you can’t know yet how gentle and forbearing he is, how patient, how full of kindness to every living soul, how unselfish, how—”

She lost her voice. “Oh, come now, mother,” Dan protested huskily.

Alice did not say anything; she bent over, without repugnance, and gathered the shadowy shape into her strong young arms, and kissed the wasted face whose unearthly coolness was like the leaf of a flower against her lips. “He never gave me a moment’s trouble,” said the mother, “and I’m sure he’ll make you happy. How kind of you not to be afraid of me—”

“Afraid!” cried the girl, with passionate solemnity. “I shall never feel safe away from you!”

The door opened upon the sound of voices, and the others came in.

Mrs. Pasmer did not wait for an introduction, but with an affectation of impulse which she felt Mrs. Mavering would penetrate and respect, she went up to the bed and presented herself. Dan’s mother smiled hospitably upon her, and they had some playful words about their children. Mrs. Pasmer neatly conveyed the regrets of her husband, who had hoped up to the last moment that the heavy cold he had taken would let him come with her; and the invalid made her guest sit down on the right hand of her bed, which seemed to be the place of honour, while her husband took Dan’s place on the left, and admired his wife’s skill in fence. At the end of her encounter with Mrs. Pasmer she called out with her strong voice, “Why don’t you get your banjo, Molly, and play something?”

“A banjo? Oh, do!” cried Mrs. Pasmer. “It’s so picturesque and interesting! I heard that young ladies had taken it up, and I should so like to hear it!” She had turned to Mrs. Mavering again, and she now beamed winningly upon her.

Alice regarded the girl with a puzzled frown as she brought her banjo in from another room and sat down with it. She relaxed the severity of her stare a little as Molly played one wild air after another, singing some of them with an evidence of training in her naive effectiveness. There were some Mexican songs which she had learned in a late visit to their country, and some Creole melodies caught up in a winter’s sojourn to Louisiana. The elder sister accompanied her on the piano, not with the hard, resolute proficiency which one might have expected of Eunice Mavering, but with a sympathy which was perhaps the expression of her share of the family kindliness.

“Your children seem to have been everywhere,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a sigh of flattering envy. “Oh, you’re not going to stop!” she pleaded, turning from Mrs. Mavering to Molly.

“I think Dan had better do the rheumatic uncle now,” said Eunice, from the piano.

“Oh yes! the rheumatic uncle — do,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “We know the rheumatic uncle,” she added, with a glance at Alice. Dan looked at her too, as if doubtful of her approval; and then he told in character a Yankee story which he had worked up from the talk of his friend the foreman. It made them all laugh.

Mrs. Pasmer was the gayest; she let herself go, and throughout the evening she flattered right and left, and said, in her good-night to Mrs. Mavering, that she had never imagined so delightful a time. “O Mrs. Mavering, I don’t wonder your children love their home. It’s a revelation.”

XXXIV.

“She’s a cat, Dan,” said his mother quietly, and not without liking, when he looked in for his goodnight kiss after the rest were gone; “a perfect tabby. But your Alice is sublime.”

“O mother—”

“She’s a little too sublime for me. But you’re young, and you can stand it.”

Dan laughed with delight. “Yes, I think I can, mother. All I ask is the chance.”

“Oh, you’re very much in love, both of you; there’s no doubt about that. What I mean is that she’s very high strung, very intense. She has ideals — any one can see that.”

Dan took it all for praise. “Yes,” he said eagerly, “that’s what I told you. And that will be the best thing about it for me. I have no ideals.”

“Well, you must find out what hers are, and live up to them.”

“Oh, there won’t be any trouble about that,” said Dan buoyantly.

“You must help her to find them out too.” He looked puzzled. “You mustn’t expect the child to be too definite at first, nor to be always right, even when she’s full of ideals. You must be very patient with her, Dan.”

“Oh, I will, mother! You know that. How could I ever be impatient with Alice?”

“Very forbearing, and very kind, and indefatigably forgiving. Ask your father how to behave.”

Dan promised to do so, with a laugh at the joke. It had never occurred to him that his father was particularly exemplary in these things, or that his mother idolised him for what seemed to Dan simply a matter-of-course endurance of her sick whims and freaks and moods. He broke forth into a vehement protest of his good intentions, to which his mother did not seem very attentive. After a while she asked —

“Is she always so silent, Dan?”

“Well, not with me, mother. Of course she was a little embarrassed; she didn’t know exactly what to say, I suppose—”

“Oh, I rather liked that. At least she isn’t a rattle-pate. And we shall get acquainted; we shall like each other. She will understand me when you bring her home here to live with us, and—”

“Yes,” said Dan, rising rather hastily, and stooping over to his mother. “I’m not going to let you talk any more now, or we shall have to suffer for it to-morrow night.”

He got gaily away before his mother could amplify a suggestion which spoiled a little of his pleasure in the praises — he thought they were unqualified and enthusiastic praises — she had been heaping upon Alice. He wished to go to bed with them all sweet and unalloyed in his thought, to sleep, to dream upon his perfect triumph.

Mrs. Pasmer was a long time in undressing, and in calming down after the demands which the different events of the evening had made upon her resources.

“It has certainly been a very mixed evening, Alice,” she said, as she took the pins out of her back hair and let it fall; and she continued to talk as she went back and forth between their rooms. “What do you think of banjo-playing for young ladies? Isn’t it rather rowdy? Decidedly rowdy, I think. And Dan’s Yankee story! I expected to see the old gentleman get up and perform some trick.”

“I suppose they do it to amuse Mrs. Mavering,” said Alice, with cold displeasure.

“Oh, it’s quite right,” tittered Mrs. Pasmer. “It would be as much as their lives are worth if they didn’t. You can see that she rules them with a rod of iron. What a will! I’m glad you’re not going to come under her sway; I really think you couldn’t be safe from her in the same hemisphere; it’s well you’re going abroad at once. They’re a very self-concentrated family, don’t you think — very self-satisfied? Of course that’s the danger of living off by themselves as they do: they get to thinking there’s nobody else in the world. You would simply be absorbed by them: it’s a hair-breadth escape.

“How splendidly Dan contrasts with the others! Oh, he’s delightful; he’s a man of the world. Give me the world, after all! And he’s so considerate of their rustic conceit! What a house! It’s perfectly baronial — and ridiculous. In any other country it would mean something — society, entertainments, troops of guests; but here it doesn’t mean anything but money. Not that money isn’t a very good thing; I wish we had more of it. But now you see how very little it can do by itself. You looked very well, Alice, and behaved with great dignity; perhaps too much. You ought to enter a little more into the spirit of things, even if you don’t respect them. That oldest girl isn’t particularly pleased, I fancy, though it doesn’t matter really.”

Alice replied to her mother from time to time with absent Yeses and Noes; she sat by the window looking out on the hillside lawn before the house; the moon had risen, and poured a flood of snowy light over it, in which the cold statues dimly shone, and the firs, in clumps and singly, blackened with an inky solidity. Beyond wandered the hills, their bare pasturage broken here and there by blotches of woodland.

After her mother had gone to bed she turned her light down and resumed her seat by the window, pressing her hot forehead against the pane, and losing all sense of the scene without in the whirl of her thoughts.

After this, evening of gay welcome in Dan’s family, and those moments of tenderness with him, her heart was troubled. She now realised her engagement as something exterior to herself and her own family, and confronted for the first time its responsibilities, its ties, and its claims. It was not enough to be everything to Dan; she could not be that unless she were something to his family. She did not realise this vividly, but with the remoteness which all verities except those of sensation have for youth.

Her uneasiness was full of exultation, of triumph; she knew she had been admired by Dan’s family, and she experienced the sweetness of having pleased them for his sake; his happy eyes shone before her; but she was touched in her self-love by what her mother had coarsely characterised in them. They had regarded her liking them as a matter of course; his mother had ignored her even in pretending to decry Dan to her. But again this was very remote, very momentary. It was no nearer, no more lasting on the surface of her happiness, than the flying whiff’s of thin cloud that chased across the moon and lost themselves in the vast blue around it.

XXXV.

People came to the first of Mrs. James Bellingham’s receptions with the expectation of pleasure which the earlier receptions of the season awaken even in the oldest and wisest. But they tried to dissemble their eagerness in a fashionable tardiness. “We get later and later,” said Mrs. Brinkley to John Munt, as she sat watching the slow gathering of the crowd. By half-past eleven it had not yet hidden Mrs. Bellingham, where she stood near the middle of the room, from the pleasant corner they had found after accidentally arriving together. Mr. Brinkley had not come; he said he might not be too old for receptions, but he was too good; in either case he preferred to stay at home. “We used to come at nine o’clock, and now we come at I’m getting into a quotation from Mother Goose, I think.”

“I thought it was Browning,” said Munt, with his witticism manner. Neither he nor Mrs. Brinkley was particularly glad to be together, but at Mrs. James Bellingham’s it was well not to fling any companionship away till you were sure of something else. Besides, Mrs. Brinkley was indolent and good-natured, and Munt was active and good-natured, and they were well fitted to get on for ten or fifteen minutes. While they talked she kept an eye out for other acquaintance, and he stood alert to escape at the first chance. “How is it we are here so early — or rather you are?” she pursued irrelevantly.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Munt, accepting the implication of his superior fashion with pleasure. “I never mind being among the first. It’s rather interesting to see people come in — don’t you think?”

“That depends a good deal on the people. I don’t find a great variety in their smirks and smiles to Mrs. Bellingham; I seem to be doing them all myself. And there’s a monotony about their apprehension and helplessness when they’re turned adrift that’s altogether too much like my own. No, Mr. Munt, I can’t agree with you that it’s interesting to see people come in. It’s altogether too autobiographical. What else have you to suggest?”

“I’m afraid I’m at the end of my string,” said Munt. “I suppose we shall see the Pasmers and young Mavering here to-night.”

Mrs. Brinkley turned and looked sharply at him.

“You’ve heard of the engagement?” he asked.

“No, decidedly, I haven’t. And after his flight from Campobello it’s the last thing I expected to hear of. When did it come out?”

“Only within a few days. They’ve been keeping it rather quiet. Mrs. Pasmer told me herself.”

Mrs. Brinkley gave herself a moment for reflection. “Well, if he can stand it, I suppose I can.”

“That isn’t exactly what people are saying to Mrs. Pasmer, Mrs. Brinkley,” suggested Munt, with his humorous manner.

“I dare say they’re trying to make her believe that her daughter is sacrificed. That’s the way. But she knows better.”

“There’s no doubt but she’s informed herself. She put me through my catechism about the Maverings the day of the picnic down there.”

“Do you know them?”

“Bridge Mavering and I were at Harvard together.”

“Tell me about them.” Mrs. Brinkley listened to Munt’s praises of his old friend with an attention superficially divided with the people to whom she bowed and smiled. The room was filling up. “Well,” she said at the end, “he’s a sweet young fellow. I hope he likes his Pasmers.”

“I guess there’s no doubt about his liking one of them — the principal one.”

“Yes, if she is the principal one.” There was an implication in everything she said that Dan Mavering had been hoodwinked by Mrs. Pasmer. Mature ladies always like to imply something of the sort in these cases. They like to ignore the prime agency of youth and love, and pretend that marriage is a game that parents play at with us, as if we were in an old comedy; it is a tradition. “Will he take her home to live?”

“No. I heard that they’re all going abroad — for a year, or two at least.”

“Ah! I thought so,” cried Mrs. Brinkley. She looked up with whimsical pleasure in the uncertainty of an old gentleman who is staring hard at her through his glasses. “Well,” she said with a pleasant sharpness, “do you make me out?”

“As nearly as my belief in your wisdom will allow,” said the old gentleman, as distinctly as his long white moustache and an apparent absence of teeth behind it would let him. John Munt had eagerly abandoned the seat he was keeping at Mrs. Brinkley’s side, and had launched himself into the thickening crowd. The old gentleman, who was lank and tall, folded himself down into it, He continued as tranquilly as if seated quite alone with Mrs. Brinkley, and not minding that his voice, with the senile crow in it, made itself heard by others. “I’m always surprised to find sensible people at these things of Jane’s. They’re most extraordinary things. Jane’s idea of society is to turn a herd of human beings loose in her house, and see what will come of it. She has no more sense of hospitality or responsibility than the Elements or Divine Providence. You may come here and have a good time — if you can get it; she won’t object; or you may die of solitude and inanition; she’d never know it. I don’t know but it’s rather sublime in her. It’s like the indifference of fate; but it’s rather rough on those who don’t understand it. She likes to see her rooms filled with pretty dresses, but she has no social instincts and no social inspiration whatever. She lights and heats and feeds her guests, and then she leaves them to themselves. She’s a kind woman — Jane is a very good-natured woman, and I really think she’d be grieved if she thought any one went away unhappy, but she does nothing to make them at home in her house — absolutely nothing.”

“Perhaps she does all they deserve for them. I don’t know that any one acquires merit by coming to an evening party; and it’s impossible to be personally hospitable to everybody in such a crowd.”

“Yes, I’ve sometimes taken that view of it. And yet if you ask a stranger to your house, you establish a tacit understanding with him that you won’t forget him after you have him there. I like to go about and note the mystification of strangers who’ve come here with some notion of a little attention. It’s delightfully poignant; I suffer with them; it’s a cheap luxury of woe; I follow them through all the turns and windings of their experience. Of course the theory is that, being turned loose here with the rest, they may speak to anybody; but the fact is, they can’t. Sometimes I should like to hail some of these unfriended spirits, but I haven’t the courage. I’m not individually bashful, but I have a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon civilisation behind me. There ought to be policemen, to show strangers about and be kind to them. I’ve just seen two pretty women cast away in a corner, and clinging to a small water-colour on the wall with a show of interest that would melt a heart of stone. Why do you come, Mrs. Brinkley? I should like to know. You’re not obliged to.”

“No,” said Mrs. Brinkley, lowering her voice instinctively, as if to bring his down. “I suppose I come from force of habit I’ve been coming a long time, you know. Why do you come?”

“Because I can’t sleep. If I could sleep, I should be at home in bed.” A weariness came into his thin face and dim eyes that was pathetic, and passed into a whimsical sarcasm. “I’m not one of the great leisure class, you know, that voluntarily turns night into day. Do you know what I go about saying now?”

“Something amusing, I suppose.”

“You’d better not be so sure of that. I’ve discovered a fact, or rather I’ve formulated an old one. I’ve always been troubled how to classify people here, there are so many exceptions; and I’ve ended by broadly generalising them as women and men.”

Mrs. Brinkley was certainly amused at this. “It seems to me that there you’ve been anticipated by nature — not to mention art.”

“Oh, not in my particular view. The women in America represent the aristocracy which exists everywhere else in both sexes. You are born to the patrician leisure; you have the accomplishments and the clothes and manners and ideals; and we men are a natural commonalty, born to business, to newspapers, to cigars, and horses. This natural female aristocracy of ours establishes the forms, usages, places, and times of society. The epicene aristocracies of other countries turn night into day in their social pleasures, and our noblesse sympathetically follows their example. You ladies, who can lie till noon next day, come to Jane’s reception at eleven o’clock, and you drag along with you a herd of us brokers, bankers, merchants, lawyers, and doctors, who must be at our offices and counting-rooms before nine in the morning. The hours of us work-people are regulated by the wholesome industries of the great democracy which we’re a part of; and the hours of our wives and daughters by the deleterious pleasures of the Old World aristocracy. That’s the reason we’re not all at home in bed.”

“I thought you were not at home in bed because you couldn’t sleep.”

“I know it. And you’ve no idea how horrible a bed is that you can’t sleep in.” The old man’s voice broke in a tremor. “Ah, it’s a bed of torture! I spend many a wicked hour in mine, envying St. Lawrence his gridiron. But what do you think of my theory?”

“It’s a very pretty theory. My only objection to it is that it’s too flattering. You know I rather prefer to abuse my sex; and to be set up as a natural aristocracy — I don’t know that I can quite agree to that, even to account satisfactorily for being at your sister-in-law’s reception.”

“You’re too modest, Mrs. Brinkley.”

“No, really. There ought to be some men among us — men without morrows. Now, why don’t you and my husband set an example to your sex? Why don’t you relax your severe sense of duty? Why need you insist upon being at your offices every morning at nine? Why don’t you fling off these habits of lifelong industry, and be gracefully indolent in the interest of the higher civilisation?”

Bromfield Corey looked round at her with a smile of relish for her satire. Her husband was a notoriously lazy man, who had chosen to live restrictedly upon an inherited property rather than increase it by the smallest exertion.

“Do you think we could get Andy Pasmer to join us?”

“No, I can’t encourage you with that idea. You must get on without Mr. Pasmer; he’s going back to Europe with his son-in-law.”

“Do you mean that their girl’s married?”

“No-engaged. It’s just out.”

“Well, I must say Mrs. Pasmer has made use of her time.” He too liked to imply that it was all an effect of her manoeuvring, and that the young people had nothing to do with it; this survival from European fiction dies hard. “Who is the young man?”

Mrs. Brinkley gave him an account of Dan Mavering as she had seen him at Campobello, and of his family as she just heard of them. “Mr. Munt was telling me about them as you came up.”

“Why, was that John Munt?”

“Yes; didn’t you know him?”

“No,” said Corey sadly. “I don’t know anybody nowadays. I seem to be going to pieces every way. I don’t call sixty-nine such a very great age.”

“Not at all!” cried Mrs. Brinkley. “I’m fifty-four myself, and Brinkley’s sixty.”

“But I feel a thousand years old. I don’t see people, and when I do I don’t know ‘em. My head’s in a cloud.” He let it hang heavily; then he lifted it, and said: “He’s a nice, comfortable fellow, Munt is. Why didn’t he stop and talk a bit?”

“Well, Munt’s modest, you know; and I suppose he thought he might be the third that makes company a crowd. Besides, nobody stops and talks a bit at these things. They’re afraid of boring or being bored.”

“Yes, they’re all in as unnatural a mood as if they were posing for a photograph. I wonder who invented this sort of thing? Do you know,” said the old man, “that I think it’s rather worse with us than with any other people? We’re a simple, sincere folk, domestic in our instincts, not gregarious or frivolous in any way; and when we’re wrenched away from our firesides, and packed in our best clothes into Jane’s gilded saloons, we feel vindictive; we feel wicked. When the Boston being abandons himself — or herself — to fashion, she suffers a depravation into something quite lurid. She has a bad conscience, and she hardens her heart with talk that’s tremendously cynical. It’s amusing,” said Corey, staring round him purblindly at the groups and files of people surging and eddying past the corner where he sat with Mrs. Brinkley.

“No; it’s shocking,” said his companion. “At any rate, you mustn’t say such things, even if you think them. I can’t let you go too far, you know. These young people think it heavenly, here.”

She took with him the tone that elderly people use with those older than themselves who have begun to break; there were authority and patronage in it. At the bottom of her heart she thought that Bromfield Corey should not have been allowed to come; but she determined to keep him safe and harmless as far as she could.

From time to time the crowd was a stationary mass in front of them; then it dissolved and flowed away, to gather anew; there were moments when the floor near them was quite vacant; then it was inundated again with silken trains. From another part of the house came the sound of music, and most of the young people who passed went two and two, as if they were partners in the dance, and had come out of the ball-room between dances. There was a good deal of nervous talk, politely subdued among them; but it was not the note of unearthly rapture which Mrs. Brinkley’s conventional claim had implied; it was self-interested, eager, anxious; and was probably not different from the voice of good society anywhere.

XXXVI.

“Why, there’s Dan Mavering now!” said Mrs. Brinkley, rather to herself than to her companion. “And alone!”

Dan’s face showed above most of the heads and shoulders about him; it was flushed, and looked troubled and excited. He caught sight of Mrs. Brinkley, and his eyes brightened joyfully. He slipped quickly through the crowd, and bowed over her hand, while he stammered out, without giving her a chance for reply till the end: “O Mrs. Brinkley, I’m so glad to see you! I’m going — I want to ask a great favour of you, Mrs. Brinkley. I want to bring — I want to introduce some friends of mine to you — some ladies, Mrs. Brinkley; very nice people I met last summer at Portland. Their father — General Wrayne — has been building some railroads down East, and they’re very nice people; but they don’t know any one — any ladies — and they’ve been looking at the pictures ever since they came. They’re very good pictures; but it isn’t an exhibition!” He broke down with a laugh.

“Why, of course, Mr. Mavering; I shall be delighted,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a hospitality rendered reckless by her sympathy with the young fellow. “By all means!”

“Oh; thanks! — thank you aver so much!” said Dan. “I’ll bring them to you — they’ll understand!” He slipped into the crowd again.

Corey made an offer of going. Mrs. Brinkley stopped him with her fan. “No — stay, Mr. Corey. Unless you wish to go. I fancy it’s the people you were talking about, and you must help me through with them.”

“I ask nothing better,” said the old man, unresentful of Dan’s having not even seemed to see him, in his generous preoccupation. “I should like to see how you’ll get on, and perhaps I can be of use.”

“Of course you can — the greatest.”

“But why hasn’t he introduced them to his Pasmers? What? Eh? Oh!” Corey made these utterances in response to a sharper pressure of Mrs. Brinkley’s fan on his arm.

Dan was opening a way through the crowd before them for two ladies, whom he now introduced. “Mrs. Frobisher, Mrs. Brinkley; and Miss Wrayne.”

Mrs. Brinkley cordially gave her hand to the ladies, and said, “May I introduce Mr. Corey? Mr. Mavering, let me introduce you to Mr. Corey.” The old man rose and stood with the little group.

Dan’s face shone with flattered pride and joyous triumph. He bubbled out some happy incoherencies about the honour and pleasure, while at the same time he beamed with tender gratitude upon Mrs. Brinkley, who was behaving with a gracious, humorous kindliness to the aliens cast upon her mercies. Mrs. Frobisher, after a half-hour of Boston society, was not that presence of easy gaiety which crossed Dan’s path on the Portland pavement the morning of his arrival from Campobello; but she was still a handsome, effective woman, of whom you would have hesitated to say whether she was showy or distinguished. Perhaps she was a little of both, with an air of command bred of supremacy in frontier garrisons; her sister was like her in the way that a young girl may be like a young matron. They blossomed alike in the genial atmosphere of Mrs. Brinkley and of Mr. Corey. He began at once to make bantering speeches with them both. The friendliness of an old man and a stout elderly woman might not have been their ideal of success at an evening party, used as they were to the unstinted homage of young captains and lieutenants, but a brief experience of Mrs. Bellingham’s hospitality must have taught them humility; and when a stout, elderly gentleman, whose baldness was still trying to be blond, joined the group, the spectacle was not without its points of resemblance to a social ovation. Perhaps it was a Boston social ovation.

“Hallo, Corey!” said this stout gentleman, whom Mrs. Brinkley at once introduced as Mr. Bellingham, and whose salutation Corey returned with “Hallo, Charles!” of equal intimacy.

Mr. Bellingham caught at the name of Frobisher. “Mrs. Major Dick Frobisher?”

“Mrs. Colonel now, but Dick always,” said the lady, with immediate comradery. “Do you know my husband?”

“I should think so!” said Bellingham; and a talk of common interest and mutual reminiscence sprang up between them. Bellingham graphically depicted his meeting with Colonel Frobisher the last time he was out on the Plains, and Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne discovered to their great satisfaction that he was the brother of Mrs. Stephen Blake, of Omaba, who had come out to the fort once with her husband, and captured the garrison, as they said. Mrs. Frobisher accounted for her present separation from her husband, and said she had come on for a while to be with her father and sister, who both needed more looking after than the Indians. Her father had left the army, and was building railroads.

Miss Wrayne, when she was not appealed to for confirmation or recollection by her sister, was having a lively talk with Corey and Mrs. Brinkley; she seemed to enter into their humour; and no one paid much attention to Dan Mavering. He hung upon the outskirts of the little group; proffering unrequited sympathy and applause; and at last he murmured something about having to go back to some friends, and took himself off. Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne let him go with a certain shade — the lightest, and yet evident — of not wholly satisfied pique: women know how to accept a reparation on account, and without giving a receipt in full.

Mrs. Brinkley gave him her hand with an effect of compassionate intelligence and appreciation of the sacrifice he must have made in leaving Alice. “May I congratulate you?” she murmured.

“Oh yes, indeed; thank you, Mrs. Brinkley,” he gushed tremulously; and he pressed her hand hard, and clung to it, as if he would like to take her with him.

Neither of the older men noticed his going. They were both taken in their elderly way with these two handsome young women, and they professed regret — Bellingham that his mother was not there, and Corey that neither his wife nor daughters had come, whom they might otherwise have introduced. They did not offer to share their acquaintance with any one else, but they made the most of it themselves, as if knowing a good thing when they had it. Their devotion to Mrs. Frobisher and her sister heightened the curiosity of such people as noticed it, but it would be wrong to say that it moved any in that self-limited company with a strong wish to know the ladies. The time comes to every man, no matter how great a power he may be in society, when the general social opinion retires him for senility, and this time had come for Bromfield Corey. He could no longer make or mar any success; and Charles Bellingham was so notoriously amiable, so deeply compromised by his inveterate habit of liking nearly every one, that his notice could not distinguish or advantage a newcomer.

He and Corey took the ladies down to supper. Mrs. Brinkley saw them there together, and a little later she saw old Corey wander off; forgetful of Miss Wrayne. She saw Dan Mavering, but not the Pasmers, and then, when Corey forgot Miss Wrayne, she saw Dan, forlorn and bewildered looking, approach the girl, and offer her his arm for the return to the drawing-room; she took it with a bright, cold smile, making white rings of ironical deprecation around the pupils of her eyes.

“What is that poor boy doing, I wonder?” said Mrs. Brinkley to herself.

XXXVII.

The next morning Dan Mavering knocked at Boardman’s door before the reporter was up. This might have been any time before one o’clock, but it was really at half-past nine. Boardman wanted to know who was there, and when Mavering had said it was he, Boardman seemed to ponder the fact awhile before Mavering heard him getting out of bed and coming barefooted to the door. He unlocked it, and got back into bed; then he called out, “Come in,” and Mavering pushed the door open impatiently. But he stood blank and silent, looking helplessly at his friend. A strong glare of winter light came in through the naked sash — for Boardman apparently not only did not close his window-blinds, but did not pull down his curtains, when he went to bed — and shone upon his gay, shrewd face where he lay, showing his pop-corn teeth in a smile at Mavering.

“Prefer to stand?” he asked by and by, after Mavering had remained standing in silence, with no signs of proposing to sit down or speak. Mavering glanced at the only chair in the room: Boardman’s clothes dripped and dangled over it. “Throw ’em on the bed,” he said, following Mavering’s glance.

“I’ll take the bed myself,” said Mavering; and he sat down on the side of it, and was again suggestively silent.

Boardman moved his head on the pillow, as he watched Mavering’s face, with the agreeable sense of personal security which we all feel in viewing trouble from the outside: “You seem balled up about something.”

Mavering sighed heavily. “Balled up? It’s no word for it. Boardman, I’m done for. Yesterday I was the happiest fellow in the world, and now — Yes, it’s all over with me, and it’s my own fault, as usual. Look; at that!” He jerked Boardman a note which he had been holding fast in his band, and got up and went to look himself at the wide range of chimney-pots and slated roofs which Boardman’s dormer-window commanded.

“Want me to read it?” Boardman asked; and Mavering nodded without glancing round. It dispersed through the air of Boardman’s room, as he unfolded it, a thin, elect perfume, like a feminine presence, refined and strict; and Boardman involuntarily passed his hand over his rumpled hair, as if to make himself a little more personable before reading the letter.

“DEAR MR. MAVERING, — I enclose the ring you gave me the other day, and I release you from the promise you gave with it. I am convinced that you wronged yourself in offering either without your whole heart, and I care too much for your happiness to let you persist in your sacrifice.

“In begging that you will not uselessly attempt to see me, but that you will consider this note final, I know you will do me the justice not to attribute an ungenerous motive to me. I shall rejoice to hear of any good that may befall you; and I shall try not to envy any one through whom it comes. — Yours sincerely,”

“ALICE PASMER.

“P.S. — I say nothing of circumstances or of persons; I feel that any comment of mine upon them would be idle.”

Mavering looked up at the sound Boardman made in refolding the letter. Boardman grinned, with sparkling eyes. “Pretty neat,” he said.

“Pretty infernally neat,” roared Mavering.

“Do you suppose she means business?”

“Of course she means business. Why shouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know. Why should she?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Boardman. I suppose I shall have to tell you if I’m going to get any good out of you; but it’s a dose.” He came away from the window, and swept Boardman’s clothes off the chair preparatory to taking it.

Boardman lifted his head nervously from the pillow.

“Oh; I’ll put them on the bed, if you’re so punctilious!” cried Mavering.

“I don’t mind the clothes,” said Boardman. “I thought I heard my watch knock on the floor in my vest pocket. Just take it out, will you, and see if you’ve stopped it?”

“Oh, confound your old Waterbury! All the world’s stopped; why shouldn’t your watch stop too?” Mavering tugged it out of the pocket, and then shoved it back disdainfully. “You couldn’t stop that thing with anything short of a sledgehammer; it’s rattling away like a mowing-machine. You know those Portland women — those ladies I spent the day with when you were down there at the regatta — the day I came from Campobello — Mrs. Frobisher and her sister?” He agglutinated one query to another till he saw a light of intelligence dawn in Boardman’s eye. “Well, they’re at the bottom of it, I suppose. I was introduced to them on Class Day, and I ought to have shown them some attention there; but the moment I saw Alice — Miss Pasmer — I forgot all about ‘em. But they didn’t seem to have noticed it much, and I made it all right with ’em that day at Portland; and they came up in the fall, and I made an appointment with them to drive out to Cambridge and show them the place. They were to take me up at the Art Museum; but that was the day I met Miss Pasmer, and I — I forgot about those women again.”

Boardman was one of those who seldom laugh; but his grin expressed all the malicious enjoyment he felt. He said nothing in the impressive silence which Mavering let follow at this point.

“Oh, you think it was funny?” cried Mavering. “I thought it was funny too; but Alice herself opened my eyes to what I’d done, and I always intended to make it all right with them when I got the chance. I supposed she wished me too.”

Boardman grinned afresh.

“She told me I must; though she seemed to dislike my having been with them the day after she’d thrown me over. But if” — Mavering interrupted himself to say, as the grin widened on Boardman’s face— “if you think it was any case of vulgar jealousy, you’re very much mistaken, Boardman. She isn’t capable of it, and she was so magnanimous about it that I made up my mind to do all I could to retrieve myself. I felt that it was my duty to her. Well, last night at Mrs. Jim Bellingham’s reception—”

A look of professional interest replaced the derision in Boardman’s eyes. “Any particular occasion for the reception? Given in honour of anybody?”

“I’ll contribute to your society notes some other time, Boardman,” said Mavering haughtily. “I’m speaking to a friend, not an interviewer. Well, whom should I see after the first waltz — I’d been dancing with Alice, and we were taking a turn through the drawing-room, and she hanging on my arm, and I knew everybody saw how it was, and I was feeling well — whom should I see but these women. They were in a corner by themselves, looking at a picture, and trying to look as if they were doing it voluntarily. But I could see at a glance that they didn’t know anybody; and I knew they had better be in the heart of the Sahara without acquaintances than where they were; and when they bowed forlornly across the room to me, my heart was in my mouth, I felt so sorry for them; and I told Alice who they were; and I supposed she’d want to rush right over to them with me—”

“And did she rush?” asked Boardman, filling up a pause which Mavering made in wiping his face.

“How infernally hot you have it in here!” He went to the window and threw it up; and then did not sit down again, but continued to walk back and forth as he talked. “She didn’t seem to know who they were at first, and when I made her understand she hung back, and said, ‘Those showy things?’ and I must say I think she was wrong; they were dressed as quietly as nine-tenths of the people there; only they are rather large, handsome women. I said I thought we ought to go and speak to them, they seemed stranded there; but she didn’t seem to see it; and, when I persisted, she said, ‘Well, you go if you think best; but take me to mamma.’ And I supposed it was all right; and I told Mrs. Pasmer I’d be back in a minute, and then I went off to those women. And after I’d talked with them a while I saw Mrs. Brinkley sitting with old Bromfield Corey in another corner, and I got them across and introduced them; after I’d explained to Mrs. Brinkley who they were; and they began to have a good time, and I — didn’t.”

“Just so,” said Boardman.

“I thought I hadn’t been gone any while at all from Alice; but the weather had changed by the time I had got back. Alice was pretty serious, and she was engaged two or three dances deep; and I could see her looking over the fellows’ shoulders, as she went round and round, pretty pale. I hung about till she was free; but then she couldn’t dance with me; she said her head ached, and she made her mother take her home before supper; and I mooned round like my own ghost a while, and then I went home. And as if that wasn’t enough, I could see by the looks of those other women — old Corey forgot Miss Wrayne in the supper-room, and I had to take her back — that I hadn’t made it right with them, even; they were as hard and smooth as glass. I’d ruined myself, and ruined myself for nothing.”

Mavering flung Boardman’s chair over, and seated himself on its rungs.

“I went to bed, and waited for the next thing to happen. I found my thunderbolt waiting for me when I woke up. I didn’t know what it was going to be, but when I felt a ring through the envelope of that note I knew what it was. I mind-read that note before I opened it.”

“Give it to the Society for Psychical Research,” suggested Boardman. “Been to breakfast?”

“Breakfast!” echoed Mavering. “Well, now, Boardman, what use do you suppose I’ve got for breakfast under the circumstances?”

“Well, not very much; but your story’s made me pretty hungry. Would you mind turning your back, or going out and sitting on the top step of the stairs’ landing, or something, while I get up and dress?”

“Oh, I can go, if you want to get rid of me,” said Mavering, with unresentful sadness. “But I hoped you might have something to suggest, Boardy.’

“Well, I’ve suggested two things, and you don’t like either. Why not go round and ask to see the old lady?”

“Mrs. Pasmer?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I thought of that. But I didn’t like to mention it, for fear you’d sit on it. When would you go?”

“Well, about as quick as I could get there. It’s early for a call, but it’s a peculiar occasion, and it’ll show your interest in the thing. You can’t very well let it cool on your hands, unless you mean to accept the situation.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Mavering, getting up and standing over Boardman. “Do you think I could accept the situation, as you call it, and live?”

“You did once,” said Boardman. “You couldn’t, unless you could fix it up with Mrs. Frobisher’s sister.”

Mavering blushed. “It was a different thing altogether then. I could have broken off then, but I tell you it would kill me now. I’ve got in too deep. My whole life’s set on that girl. You can’t understand, Boardman, because you’ve never been there; but I couldn’t give her up.”

“All right. Better go and see the old lady without loss of time; or the old man, if you prefer.”

Mavering sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Look here, Boardman, what do you mean?”

“By what?”

“By being so confoundedly heartless. Did you suppose that I wanted to pay those women any attention last night from an interested motive?”

“Seems to have been Miss Pasmer’s impression.”

“Well, you’re mistaken. She had no such impression. She would have too much self-respect, too much pride — magnanimity. She would know that after such a girl as she is I couldn’t think of any other woman; the thing is simply impossible.”

“That’s the theory.”

“Theory? It’s the practice!”

“Certain exceptions.”

“There’s no exception in my case. No, sir! I tell you this thing is for all time — for eternity. It makes me or it mars me, once for all. She may listen to me or she may not listen, but as long as she lives there’s no other woman alive for me.”

“Better go and tell her so. You’re wasting your arguments on me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m convinced already. Because people always marry their first and only loves. Because people never marry twice for love. Because I’ve never seen you hit before, and I know you never could be again. Now go and convince Miss Pasmer. She’ll believe you, because she’ll know that she can never care for any one but you, and you naturally can’t care for anybody but her. It’s a perfectly clear case. All you’ve got to do is to set it before her.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t try to work that cynical racket, Boardman,” said Mavering. He rose, but he sighed drearily, and regarded Boardman’s grin with lack-lustre absence. But he went away without saying anything more; and walked mechanically toward the Cavendish. As he rang at the door of Mrs. Pasmer’s apartments he recalled another early visit he had paid there; he thought how joyful and exuberant he was then, and how crushed and desperate now. He was not without youthful satisfaction in the disparity of his different moods; it seemed to stamp him as a man of large and varied experience.

XXXVIII.

Mrs. Pasmer was genuinely surprised to see Mavering, and he pursued his advantage — if it was an advantage — by coming directly to the point. He took it for granted that she knew all about the matter, and he threw himself upon her mercy without delay.

“Mrs. Pasmer, you must help me about this business with Alice,” he broke out at once. “I don’t know what to make of it; but I know I can explain it. Of course,” he added, smiling ruefully, “the two statements don’t hang together; but what I mean is that if I can find out what the trouble is, I can make it all right, because there’s nothing wrong about it; don’t you see?”

Mrs. Pasmer tried to keep the mystification out of her eye; but she could not even succeed in seeming to do so, which she would have liked almost as well.

“Don’t you know what I mean?” asked Dan.

Mrs. Pasmer chanced it. “That Alice was a little out of sorts last night?” she queried leadingly.

“Yes,” said Mavering fervently. “And about her — her writing to me.”

“Writing to you?” Mrs. Pasmer was going to ask, when Dan gave her the letter.

“I don’t know whether I ought to show it, but I must. I must have your help, and I can’t, unless you understand the case.”

Mrs. Pasmer had begun to read the note. It explained what the girl herself had refused to give any satisfactory reason for — her early retirement from the reception, her mysterious disappearance into her own room on reaching home, and her resolute silence on the way. Mrs. Pasmer had known that there must be some trouble with Dan, and she had suspected that Alice was vexed with him on account of those women; but it was beyond her cheerful imagination that she should go to such lengths in her resentment. She could conceive of her wishing to punish him, to retaliate her suffering on him; but to renounce him for it was another thing; and she did not attribute to her daughter any other motive than she would have felt herself. It was always this way with Mrs. Pasmer: she followed her daughter accurately up to a certain point; beyond that she did not believe the girl knew herself what she meant; and perhaps she was not altogether wrong. Girlhood is often a turmoil of wild impulses, ignorant exaltations, mistaken ideals, which really represent no intelligent purpose, and come from disordered nerves, ill-advised reading, and the erroneous perspective of inexperience. Mrs. Pasmer felt this, and she was tempted to break into a laugh over Alice’s heroics; but she preferred to keep a serious countenance, partly because she did not feel the least seriously. She was instantly resolved not to let this letter accomplish anything more than Dan’s temporary abasement, and she would have preferred to shorten this to the briefest moment possible. She liked him, and she was convinced that Alice could never do better, if half so well. She would now have preferred to treat him with familiar confidence, to tell him that she had no idea of Alice’s writing him that nonsensical letter, and he was not to pay the least attention to it; for of course it meant nothing; but another principle of her complex nature came into play, and she silently folded the note and returned it to Dan, trembling before her.

“Well?” he quavered.

“Well,” returned Mrs. Pasmer judicially, while she enjoyed his tremor, whose needlessness inwardly amused her— “well, of course, Alice was—”

“Annoyed, I know. And it was all my fault — or my misfortune. But I assure you, Mrs. Pasmer, that I thought I was doing something that would please her — in the highest and noblest way. Now don’t you know I did?”

Mrs. Pasmer again wished to laugh, but in the face of Dan’s tragedy she had to forbear. She contented herself with saying: “Of course. But perhaps it wasn’t the best time for pleasing her just in that way.”

“It was then or never. I can see now — why, I could see all the time — just how it might look; but I supposed Alice wouldn’t care for that, and if I hadn’t tried to make some reparation then to Mrs. Frobisher and her sister, I never could. Don’t you see?”

“Yes, certainly. But—”

“And Alice herself told me to go and look after them,” interposed Mavering. He suppressed, a little uncandidly, the fact of her first reluctance.

“But you know it was the first time you had been out together?”

“Yes.”

“And naturally she would wish to have you a good deal to herself, or at least not seeming to run after other people.”

“Yes, yes; I know that.”

“And no one ever likes to be taken at their word in a thing like that.”

“I ought to have thought of that, but I didn’t. I wish I had gone to you first, Mrs. Pasmer. Somehow it seems to me as if I were very young and inexperienced; I didn’t use to feel so. I wish you were always on hand to advise me, Mrs. Pasmer.” Dan hung his head, and his face, usually so gay, was blotted with gloom.

“Will you take my advice now?” asked Mrs. Pasmer.

“Indeed I will!” cried the young fellow, lifting his head. “What is it?”

“See Alice about this.”

Dan jumped to his feet, and the sunshine broke out over his face again. “Mrs. Pasmer, I promised to take your advice, and I’ll do it. I will see her. But how? Where? Let me have your advice on that point too.”

They began to laugh together, and Dan was at once inexpressibly happy. Those two light natures thoroughly comprehended each other.

Mrs. Pasmer had proposed his seeing Alice with due seriousness, but now she had a longing to let herself go; she felt all the pleasure that other people felt in doing Dan Mavering a pleasure, and something more, because he was so perfectly intelligible to her. She let herself go.

“You might stay to breakfast.”

“Mrs. Pasmer, I will — I will do that too. I’m awfully hungry, and I put myself in your hands.”

“Let me see,” said Mrs. Pasmer thoughtfully, “how it can be contrived.”

“Yes;” said Mavering, ready for a panic. “How? She wouldn’t stand a surprise?”

“No; I had thought of that.”

“No behind-a-screen or next-room business?”

“No,” said Mrs. Pasmer, with a light sigh. “Alice is peculiar. I’m afraid she wouldn’t like it.”

“Isn’t there any little ruse she would like?”

“I can’t think of any. Perhaps I’d better go and tell her you’re here and wish to see her.”

“Do you think you’d better?” asked Dan doubtfully. “Perhaps she won’t come.”

“She will come,” said Mrs. Pasmer confidently.

She did not say that she thought Alice would be curious to know why he had come, and that she was too just to condemn him unheard.

But she was right about the main point. Alice came, and Dan could see with his own weary eyes that she had not slept either.

She stopped just inside the portiere, and waited for him to speak. But he could not, though a smile from his sense of the absurdity of their seriousness hovered about his lips. His first impulse was to rush upon her and catch her in his arms, and perhaps this might have been well, but the moment for it passed, and then it became impossible.

“Well?” she said at last, lifting her head, and looking at him with impassioned solemnity. “You wished to see me? I hoped you wouldn’t. It would have spared me something. But perhaps I had no right to your forbearance.”

“Alice, how can you say such things to me?” asked the young fellow, deeply hurt.

She responded to his tone. “I’m sorry if it wounds you. But I only mean what I say.”

“You’ve a right to my forbearance, and not only that, but to my — my life; to everything that I am,” cried Dan, in a quiver of tenderness at the sight of her and the sound of her voice. “Alice, why did you write me that letter? — why did you send me back my ring?”

“Because,” she said, looking him seriously in the face— “because I wished you to be free, to be happy.”

“Well, you’ve gone the wrong way about it. I can never be free from you; I never can be happy without you.”

“I did it for your good, then, which ought to be above your happiness. Don’t think I acted hastily. I thought it over all night long. I didn’t sleep—”

“Neither did I,” interposed Dan.

“And I saw that I had no claim to you; that you never could be truly happy with me—”

“I’ll take the chances,” he interrupted. “Alice, you don’t suppose I cared for those women any more than the ground under your feet, do you? I don’t suppose I should ever have given them a second thought if you hadn’t seemed to feel so badly about my neglecting them; and I thought you’d be pleased to have me try to make it up to them if I could.”

“I know your motive was good — the noblest. Don’t think that I did you injustice, or that I was vexed because you went away with them.”

“You sent me.”

“Yes; and now I give you up to them altogether. It was a mistake, a crime, for me to think we could be anything to each other when our love began with a wrong to some one else.”

“With a wrong to some one else?”

“You neglected them on Class Day after you saw me.”

“Why, of course I did. How could I help it?”

A flush of pleasure came into the girl’s pale face; but she banished it, and continued gravely, “Then at Portland you were with them all day.”

“You’d given me up — you’d thrown me over, Alice,” he pleaded.

“I know that; I don’t blame you. But you made them believe that you were very much interested in them.”

“I don’t know what I did. I was perfectly desperate.”

“Yes; it was my fault. And then, when they came to meet you at the Museum, I had made you forget them; I’d made you wound them and insult them again. No. I’ve thought it all out, and we never could be happy. Don’t think that I do it from any resentful motive.”

“Alice? how could I think that? — Of you!”

“I have tried — prayed — to be purified from that, and I believe that I have been.”

“You never had a selfish thought.”

“And I have come to see that you were perfectly right in what you did last night. At first I was wounded.”

“Oh, did I wound you, Alice?” he grieved.

“But afterward I could see that you belonged to them, and not me, and — and I give you up to them. Yes, freely, fully.”

Alice stood there, beautiful, pathetic, austere; and Dan had halted in the spot to which he had advanced, when her eye forbade him to approach nearer. He did not mean to joke, and it was in despair that he cried out: “But which, Alice? There are two of them.”

“Two?” she repeated vaguely.

“Yes; Mrs. Frobisher and Miss Wrayne. You can’t give me up to both of them.”

“Both?” she repeated again. She could not condescend to specify; it would be ridiculous, and as it was, she felt her dignity hopelessly shaken. The tears came into her eyes.

“Yes. And neither of them wants me — they haven’t got any use for me. Mrs. Frobisher is married already, and Miss Wrayne took the trouble last night to let me feel that, so far as she was concerned, I hadn’t made it all right, and couldn’t. I thought I had rather a cold parting with you, Alice, but it was quite tropical to what you left me to.” A faint smile, mingled with a blush of relenting, stole into her face, and he hurried on. “I don’t suppose I tried very hard to thaw her out. I wasn’t much interested. If you must give me up, you must give me up to some one else, for they don’t want me, and I don’t want them.” Alice’s head dropped lover, and he could come nearer now without her seeming to know it. “But why need you give me up? There’s really no occasion for it, I assure you.”

“I wished,” she explained, “to show you that I loved you for something above yourself and myself — far above either—”

She stopped and dropped the hand which she had raised to fend him off; and he profited by the little pause she made to take her in his arms without seeming to do so. “Well,” he said, “I don’t believe I was formed to be loved on a very high plane. But I’m not too proud to be loved for my own sake; and I don’t think there’s anything above you, Alice.”

“Oh yes, there is! I don’t deserve to be happy, and that’s the reason why I’m not allowed to be happy in any noble way. I can’t bear to give you up; you know I can’t; but you ought to give me up — indeed you ought. I have ideals, but I can’t live up to them. You ought to go. You ought to leave me.” She accented each little sentence by vividly pressing herself to his heart, and he had the wisdom or the instinct to treat their reconciliation as nothing settled, but merely provisional in its nature.

“Well, we’ll see about that. I don’t want to go till after breakfast, anyway; your mother says I may stay, and I’m awfully hungry. If I see anything particularly base in you, perhaps I sha’n’t come back to lunch.”

Dan would have liked to turn it alt off into a joke, now that the worst was apparently over; but Alice freed herself from him, and held him off with her hand set against his breast. “Does mamma know about it?” she demanded sternly.

“Well, she knows there’s been some misunderstanding,” said Dan, with a laugh that was anxious, in view of the clouds possibly gathering again.

“How much?”

“Well, I can’t say exactly.” He would not say that he did not know, but he felt that he could truly say that he could not say.

She dropped her hand, and consented to be deceived. Dan caught her again to his breast; but he had an odd, vague sense of doing it carefully, of using a little of the caution with which one seizes the stem of a rose between the thorns.

“I can bear to be ridiculous with you,” she whispered, with an implication which he understood.

“You haven’t been ridiculous, dearest,” he said; and his tension gave way in a convulsive laugh, which partially expressed his feeling of restored security, and partly his amusement in realising how the situation would have pleased Mrs. Pasmer if she could have known it.

Mrs. Pasmer was seated behind her coffee biggin at the breakfast-table when he came into the room with Alice, and she lifted an eye from its glass bulb long enough to catch his flying glance of exultation and admonition. Then, while she regarded the chemical struggle in the bulb, with the rapt eye of a magician reading fate in his crystal ball, she questioned herself how much she should know, and how much she should ignore. It was a great moment for Mrs. Pasmer, full of delicious choice. “Do you understand this process, Mr. Mavering?” she said, glancing up at him warily for farther instruction.

“I’ve seen it done,” said Dan, “but I never knew how it was managed. I always thought it was going to blow up; but it seemed to me that if you were good and true and very meek, and had a conscience void of offence, it wouldn’t.”

“Yes, that’s what it seems to depend upon,” said Mrs. Pasmer, keeping her eye on the bulb. She dodged suddenly forward, and put out the spirit-lamp. “Now have your coffee!” she cried, with a great air of relief. “You must need it by this time,” she said with a low cynical laugh— “both of you!”

“Did you always make coffee with a biggin in France, Mrs. Pasmer?” asked Dan; and he laughed out the last burden that lurked in his heart.

Mrs. Pasmer joined him. “No, Mr. Mavering. In France you don’t need a biggin. I set mine up when we went to England.”

Alice looked darkly from one of these light spirits to the other, and then they all shrieked together.

They went on talking volubly from that, and they talked as far away from what they were thinking about as possible. They talked of Europe, and Mrs. Pasmer said where they would live and what they would do when they all got back there together. Dan abetted her, and said that they must cross in June. Mrs. Pasmer said that she thought June was a good month. He asked if it were not the month of the marriages too, and she answered that he must ask Alice about that. Alice blushed and laughed her sweet reluctant laugh, and said she did not know; she had never been married.

It was silly, but it was delicious; it made them really one family. Deep in his consciousness a compunction pierced and teased Dan. But he said to himself that it was all a joke about their European plans, or else his people would consent to it if he really wished it.

XXXIX.

A period of entire harmony and tenderness followed the episode which seemed to threaten the lovers with the loss of each other. Mavering forbore to make Alice feel that in attempting a sacrifice which consulted only his good and ignored his happiness, and then failing in it so promptly, she had played rather a silly part. After one or two tentative jokes in that direction he found the ground unsafe, and with the instinct which served him in place of more premeditated piety he withdrew, and was able to treat the affair with something like religious awe. He was obliged, in fact, to steady Alice’s own faith in it, and to keep her from falling under dangerous self-condemnation in that and other excesses of uninstructed self-devotion. This brought no fatigue to his robust affection, whatever it might have done to a heart more tried in such exercises. Love acquaints youth with many things in character and temperament which are none the less interesting because it never explains them; and Dan was of such a make that its revelations of Alice were charming to him because they were novel. He had thought her a person of such serene and flawless wisdom that it was rather a relief to find her subject to gusts of imprudence, to unexpected passions and resentments, to foibles and errors, like other people. Her power of cold reticence; which she could employ at will, was something that fascinated him almost as much as that habit of impulsive concession which seemed to came neither from her will nor her reason. He was a person himself who was so eager to give other people pleasure that he quivered with impatience to see them happy through his words or acts; he could not bear to think that any one to whom he was speaking was not perfectly comfortable in regard to him; and it was for this reason perhaps that he admired a girl who could prescribe herself a line of social conduct, and follow it out regardless of individual pangs — who could act from ideals and principles, and not from emotions and sympathies. He knew that she had the emotions and sympathies, for there were times when she lavished them on him; and that she could seem without them was another proof of that depth of nature which he liked to imagine had first attracted him to her. Dan Mavering had never been able to snub any one in his life; it gave him a great respect for Alice that it seemed not to cost her an effort or a regret, and it charmed him to think that her severity was part of the unconscious sham which imposed her upon the world for a person of inflexible design and invariable constancy to it. He was not long in seeing that she shared this illusion, if it was an illusion, and that perhaps the only person besides himself who was in the joke was her mother. Mrs. Pasmer and he grew more and more into each other’s confidence in talking Alice over, and he admired the intrepidity of this lady, who was not afraid of her daughter even in the girl’s most topping moments of self-abasement. For his own part, these moods of hers never failed to cause him confusion and anxiety. They commonly intimated themselves parenthetically in the midst of some blissful talk they were having, and overcast his clear sky with retrospective ideals of conduct or presentimental plans for contingencies that might never occur. He found himself suddenly under condemnation for not having reproved her at a given time when she forced him to admit she had seemed unkind or cold to others; she made him promise that even at the risk of alienating her affections he would make up for her deficiencies of behaviour in such matters whenever he noticed them. She now praised him for what he had done for Mrs. Frobisher and her sister at Mrs. Bellingham’s reception; she said it was generous, heroic. But Mavering rested satisfied with his achievement in that instance, and did not attempt anything else of the kind. He did not reason from cause to effect in regard to it: a man’s love is such that while it lasts he cannot project its object far enough from him to judge it reasonable or unreasonable; but Dan’s instincts had been disciplined and his perceptions sharpened by that experience. Besides, in bidding him take this impartial and even admonitory course toward her, she stipulated that they should maintain to the world a perfect harmony of conduct which should be an outward image of the union of their lives. She said that anything less than a continued self-sacrifice of one to the other was not worthy of the name of love, and that she should not be happy unless he required this of her. She said that they ought each to find out what was the most distasteful thing which they could mutually require, and then do it; she asked him to try to think what she most hated, and let her do that for him; as for her, she only asked to ask nothing of him.

Mavering could not worship enough this nobility of soul in her, and he celebrated it to Boardman with the passionate need of imparting his rapture which a lover feel. Boardman acquiesced in silence, with a glance of reserved sarcasm, or contented himself with laconic satire of his friend’s general condition, and avoided any comment that might specifically apply to the points Dan made. Alice allowed him to have this confidant, and did not demand of him a report of all he said to Boardman. A main fact of their love, she said, must be their utter faith in each other. She had her own confidante, and the disparity of years between her and Miss Cotton counted for nothing in the friendship which their exchange of trust and sympathy cemented. Miss Cotton, in the freshness of her sympathy and the ideality of her inexperience, was in fact younger than Alice, at whose feet, in the things of soul and character, she loved to sit. She never said to her what she believed: that a girl of her exemplary principles, a nature conscious of such noble ideals, so superior to other girls, who in her place would be given up to the happiness of the moment, and indifferent to the sense of duty to herself and to others, was sacrificed to a person of Mavering’s gay, bright nature and trivial conception of life. She did not deny his sweetness; that was perhaps the one saving thing about him; and she confessed that he simply adored Alice; that counted for everything, and it was everything in his favour that he could appreciate such a girl. She hoped, she prayed, that Alice might never realise how little depth he had; that she might go through life and never suspect it. If she did so, then they might be happy together to the end, or at least Alice might never know she was unhappy.

Miss Cotton never said these things in so many words; it is doubtful if she ever said them in any form of words; with her sensitive anxiety not to do injustice to any one, she took Dan’s part against those who viewed the engagement as she allowed it to appear only to her secret heart. She defended him the more eagerly because she felt that it was for Alice’s sake, and that everything must be done to keep her from knowing how people looked at the affair, even to changing people’s minds. She said to all who spoke to her of it that of course Alice was superior to him, but he was devoted to her, and he would grow into an equality with her. He was naturally very refined, she said, and, if he was not a very serious person, he was amiable beyond anything. She alleged many little incidents of their acquaintance at Campobello in proof of her theory that he had an instinctive appreciation of Alice, and she was sure that no one could value her nobleness of character more than he. She had seen them a good deal together since their engagement, and it was beautiful to see his manner with her. They were opposites, but she counted a good deal upon that very difference in their temperaments to draw them to each other.

It was an easy matter to see Dan and Alice together. Their engagement came out in the usual way: it had been announced to a few of their nearest friends, and intelligence of it soon spread from their own set through society generally; it had been published in the Sunday papers while it was still in the tender condition of a rumour, and had been denied by some of their acquaintance and believed by all.

The Pasmer cousinship had been just in the performance of the duties of blood toward Alice since the return of her family from Europe, and now did what was proper in the circumstances. All who were connected with her called upon her and congratulated her; they knew Dan, the younger of them, much better than they knew her; and though he had shrunk from the nebulous bulk of social potentiality which every young man is to that much smaller nucleus to which definite betrothal reduces him, they could be perfectly sincere in calling him the sweetest fellow that ever was, and too lovely to live.

In such a matter Mr. Pasmer was naturally nothing; he could not be less than he was at other times, but he was not more; and it was Mrs. Pasmer who shared fully with her daughter the momentary interest which the engagement gave Alice with all her kindred. They believed, of course, that they recognised in it an effect of her skill in managing; they agreed to suppose that she had got Mavering for Alice, and to ignore the beauty and passion of youth as factors in the case. The closest of the kindred, with the romantic delicacy of Americans in such things, approached the question of Dan’s position and prospects, and heard with satisfaction the good accounts which Mrs. Pasmer was able to give of his father’s prosperity. There had always been more or less apprehension among them of a time when a family subscription would be necessary for Bob Pasmer, and in the relief which the new situation gave them some of them tried to remember having known Dan’s father in College, but it finally came to their guessing that they must have heard John Munt speak of him.

Mrs. Pasmer had a supreme control in the affair. She believed with the rest — so deeply is this delusion seated — that she had made the match; but knowing herself to have used no dishonest magic in the process, she was able to enjoy it with a clean conscience. She grew fonder of Dan; they understood each other; she was his refuge from Alice’s ideals, and helped him laugh off his perplexity with them. They were none the less sincere because they were not in the least frank with each other. She let Dan beat about the bush to his heart’s content, and waited for him at the point which she knew he was coming to, with an unconsciousness which he knew was factitious; neither of them got tired of this, or failed freshly to admire the other’s strategy.

XL.

It cannot be pretended that Alice was quite pleased with the way her friends took her engagement, or rather the way in which they spoke of Dan. It seemed to her that she alone, or she chiefly, ought to feel that sweetness and loveliness of which every one told her, as if she could not have known it. If he was sweet and lovely to every one, how was he different to her except in degree? Ought he not to be different in kind? She put the case to Miss Cotton, whom it puzzled, while she assured Alice that he was different in kind to her, though he might not seem so; the very fact that he was different in degree proved that he was different in kind. This logic sufficed for the moment of its expression, but it did not prevent Alice from putting the case to Dan himself. At one of those little times when she sat beside him alone and rearranged his necktie, or played with his watch chain, or passed a critical hand over his cowlick, she asked him if he did not think they ought to have an ideal in their engagement. “What ideal?” he asked. He thought it was all solid ideal through and through. “Oh,” she said, “be more and more to each other.” He said he did not see how that could be; if there was anything more of him, she was welcome to it, but he rather thought she had it all. She explained that she meant being less to others; and he asked her to explain that.

“Well, when we’re anywhere together, don’t you think we ought to show how different we are to each other from what we are to any one else.”

Dan laughed. “I’m afraid we do, Alice; I always supposed one ought to hide that little preference as much as possible. You don’t want me to be dangling after you every moment?”

“No-o-o. But not — dangle after others.”

Dan sighed a little — a little impatiently. “Do I dangle after others?”

“Of course not. But show that we’re thoroughly united in all our tastes and feelings, and — like and dislike the same persons.”

“I don’t think that will be difficult,” said Dan.

She was silent a moment, and then she said; “You don’t like to have me bring up such things?”

“Oh yes, I do. I wish to be and do just what you wish.”

“But I can see, I can understand, that you would sooner pass the time without talking of them. You like to be perfectly happy, and not to have any cares when — when you’re with me this way?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I do,” said Dan, laughing again. “I suppose I rather do like to keep pleasure and duty apart. But there’s nothing you can wish, Alice, that isn’t a pleasure to me.”

“I’m very different,” said the girl. “I can’t be at peace unless I know that I have a right to be so. But now, after this, I’m going to do your way. If it’s your way, it’ll be the right way — for me.” She looked sublimely resolved, with a grand lift of the eyes, and Dan caught her to him in a rapture, breaking into laughter.

“Oh, don’t! Mine’s a bad way — the worst kind of a way,” he cried.

“It makes everybody like you, and mine makes nobody like me.”

“It makes me like you, and that’s quite enough. I don’t want other people to like you!”

“Yes, that’s what I mean!” cried Alice; and now she flung herself on his neck, and the tears came. “Do you suppose it can be very pleasant to have everybody talking of you as if everybody loved you as much — as much as I do?” She clutched him tighter and sobbed.

“O Alice! Alice! Alice! Nobody could ever be what you are to me!” He soothed and comforted her with endearing words and touches; but before he could have believed her half consoled she pulled away from him, and asked, with shining eyes, “Do you think Mr. Boardman is a good influence in your life?”

“Boardman!” cried Mavering, in astonishment. “Why, I thought you liked Boardman?”

“I do; and I respect him very much. But that isn’t the question. Don’t you think we ought to ask ourselves how others influence us?”

“Well, I don’t see much of Boardy nowadays; but I like to drop down and touch earth in Boardy once in a while — I’m in the air so much. Board has more common-sense, more solid chunk-wisdom, than anybody I know. He’s kept me from making a fool of myself more times—”

“Wasn’t he with you that day with — with those women in Portland?”

Dan winced a little, and then laughed. “No, he wasn’t. That was the trouble. Boardman was off on the press boat. I thought I told you. But if you object to Boardman—”

“I don’t. You mustn’t think I object to people when I ask you about them. All that I wished was that you should think yourself what sort of influence he was. I think he’s a very good influence.”

“He’s a splendid fellow, Boardman is, Alice!” cried Dan. “You ought to have seen how he fought his way through college on such a little money, and never skulked or felt mean. He wasn’t appreciated for it; the men don’t notice these things much; but he didn’t want to have it noticed; always acted as if it was neither here nor there; and now I guess he sends out home whatever he has left after keeping soul and body together every week.”

He spoke, perhaps, with too great an effect of relief. Alice listened, as it seemed, to his tone rather than his words, and said absently —

“Yes, that’s grand. But I don’t want you to act as if you were afraid of me in such things.”

“Afraid?” Dan echoed.

“I don’t mean actually afraid, but as if you thought I couldn’t be reasonable; as if you supposed I didn’t expect you to make mistakes or to be imperfect.”

“Yes, I know you’re very reasonable, and you’re more patient with me than I deserve; I know all that, and it’s only my wish to come up to your standard, I suppose, that gives me that apprehensive appearance.”

“That was what vexed me with you there at Campobello, when you — asked me—”

“Yes, I know.”

“You ought to have understood me better. You ought to know now that I don’t wish you to do anything on my account, but because it’s something we owe to others.”

“Oh, excuse me! I’d much rather do it for you,” cried Dan; but Alice looked so grave, so hurt, that he hastened on: “How in the world does it concern others whether we are devoted or not, whether we’re harmonious and two-souls-with-but-a-single-thought, and all that?” He could not help being light about it.

“How?” Alice repeated. “Won’t it give them an idea of what — what — of how much — how truly — if we care for each other — how people ought to care? We don’t do it for ourselves. That would be selfish and disgusting. We do it because it’s something that we owe to the idea of being engaged — of having devoted our lives to each other, and would show — would teach—”

“Oh yes! I know what you mean,” said Dan, and he gave way in a sputtering laugh. “But they wouldn’t understand. They’d only think we were spoons on each other; and if they noticed that I cooled off toward people I’d liked, and warmed up toward those you liked, they’d say you made me.”

“Should you care?” asked Alice sublimely, withdrawing a little from his arm.

“Oh no! only on your account,” he answered, checking his laugh.

“You needn’t on my account,” she returned. “If we sacrifice some little preferences to each other, isn’t that right? I shall be glad to sacrifice all of mine to you. Isn’t our — marriage to be full of such sacrifices? I expect to give up everything to you.” She looked at him with a sad severity.

He began to laugh again. “Oh no, Alice! Don’t do that! I couldn’t stand it. I want some little chance at the renunciations myself.”

She withdrew still further from his side, and said, with a cold anger, “It’s that detestable Mrs. Brinkley.”

“Mrs. Brinkley!” shouted Dan.

“Yes; with her pessimism. I have heard her talk. She influences you. Nothing is sacred to her. It was she who took up with those army women that night.”

“Well, Alice, I must say you can give things as ugly names as the next one. I haven’t seen Mrs. Brinkley the whole winter, except in your company. But she has more sense than all the other women I know.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“You know I don’t mean you,” he pushed on. “And she isn’t a pessimist. She’s very kindhearted, and that night she was very polite and good to those army women, as you call them, when you had refused to say a word or do anything for them.”

“I knew it had been rankling in your mind all along,” said the girl “I expected it to coma out sooner or later. And you talk about renunciation! You never forget nor forgive the slightest thing. But I don’t ask your forgiveness.”

“Alice!”

“No. You are as hard as iron. You have that pleasant outside manner that makes people think you’re very gentle and yielding, but all the time you’re like adamant. I would rather die than ask your forgiveness for anything, and you’d rather let me than give it.”

“Well, then, I ask your forgiveness, Alice, and I’m sure you won’t let me die without it.”

They regarded each other a moment. Then the tenderness gushed up in their hearts, a passionate tide, and swept them into each other’s arms.

“O Dan,” she cried, “how sweet you are! how good! how lovely! Oh, how wonderful it is! I wanted to hate you, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but love you. Yes, now I understand what love is, and how it can do everything, and last for ever.”

XLI.

Mavering came to lunch the next day, and had a word with Mrs. Pasmer before Alice came in. Mr. Pasmer usually lunched at the club.

“We don’t see much of Mrs. Saintsbury nowadays,” he suggested.

“No; it’s a great way to Cambridge,” said Mrs. Pasmer, stifling, in a little sigh of apparent regret for the separation, the curiosity she felt as to Dan’s motive in mentioning Mrs. Saintsbury. She was very patient with him when he went on.

“Yes, it is a great way. And a strange thing about it is that when you’re living here it’s a good deal further from Boston to Cambridge than it is from Cambridge to Boston.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “every one notices that.”

Dan sat absently silent for a time before he said, “Yes, I guess I must go out and see Mrs. Saintsbury.”

“Yes, you ought. She’s very fond of you. You and Alice ought both to go.”

“Does Mrs. Saintsbury like me?” asked Dan. “Well, she’s awfully nice. Don’t you think she’s awfully fond of formulating people?”

“Oh, everybody in Cambridge does that. They don’t gossip; they merely accumulate materials for the formulation of character.”

“And they get there just the same!” cried Dan. “Mrs. Saintsbury used to think she had got me down pretty fine,” he suggested.

“Yes!” said Mrs. Pasmer, with an indifference which they both knew she did not feel.

“Yes. She used to accuse me of preferring to tack, even in a fair wind.”

He looked inquiringly at Mrs. Pasmer; and she said, “How ridiculous!”

“Yes, it was. Well, I suppose I am rather circuitous about some things.”

“Oh, not at all!”

“And I suppose I’m rather a trial to Alice in that way.”

He looked at Mrs. Pasmer again, and she said: “I don’t believe you are, in the least. You can’t tell what is trying to a girl.”

“No,” said Dan pensively, “I can’t.” Mrs. Pasmer tried to render the interest in her face less vivid. “I can’t tell where she’s going to bring up. Talk about tacking!”

“Do you mean the abstract girl; or Alice?”

“Oh, the abstract girl,” said Dan, and they laughed together. “You think Alice is very straightforward, don’t you?”

“Very,” said Mrs. Pasmer, looking down with a smile— “for a girl.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. And don’t you think the most circuitous kind of fellow would be pretty direct compared with the straight-forwardest kind of girl?”

There was a rueful defeat and bewilderment in Dan’s face that made Mrs. Pasmer laugh. “What has she been doing now?” she asked.

“Mrs. Pasmer,” said Dan, “you and I are the only frank and open people I know. Well, she began to talk last night about influence — the influence of other people on us; and she killed off nearly all the people I like before I knew what she was up to, and she finished with Mrs. Brinkley. I’m glad she didn’t happen to think of you, Mrs. Pasmer, or I shouldn’t be associating with you at the present moment.” This idea seemed to give Mrs. Pasmer inexpressible pleasure. Dan went on: “Do you quite see the connection between our being entirely devoted to each other and my dropping Mrs. Brinkley?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Alice doesn’t like satirical people.”

“Well, of course not. But Mrs. Brinkley is such an admirer of hers.”

“I dare say she tells you so.”

“Oh, but she is!”

“I don’t deny it,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “But if Alice feels something inimical — antipatico — in her atmosphere, it’s no use talking.”

“Oh no, it’s no use talking, and I don’t know that I want to talk.” After a pause, Mavering asked, “Mrs. Pasmer, don’t you think that where two people are going to be entirely devoted to each other, and self-sacrificing to each other, they ought to divide, and one do all the devotion, and the other all the self-sacrifice?”

Mrs. Pasmer was amused by the droll look in Dan’s eyes. “I think they ought to be willing to share evenly,” she said.

“Yes; that’s what I say — share and share alike. I’m not selfish about those little things.” He blew off a long sighing breath. “Mrs. Pasmer, don’t you think we ought to have an ideal of conduct?”

Mrs. Pasmer abandoned herself to laughter. “O Dan! Dan! You will be the death of me.”

“We will die together, then, Mrs. Pasmer. Alice will kill me.” He regarded her with a sad sympathy in his eye as she laughed and laughed with delicious intelligence of the case. The intelligence was perfect, from their point of view; but whether it fathomed the girl’s whole intention or aspiration is another matter. Perhaps this was not very clear to herself. At any rate, Mavering did not go any more to see Mrs. Brinkley, whose house he had liked to drop into. Alice went several times, to show, she said, that she had no feeling in the matter; and Mrs. Brinkley, when she met Dan, forbore to embarrass him with questions or reproaches; she only praised Alice to him.

There were not many other influences that Alice cut him off from; she even exposed him to some influences that might have been thought deleterious. She made him go and call alone upon certain young ladies whom she specified, and she praised several others to him, though she did not praise them for the same things that he did. One of them was a girl to whom Alice had taken a great fancy, such as often buds into a romantic passion between women; she was very gentle and mild, and she had none of that strength of will which she admired in Alice. One night there was a sleighing party to a hotel in the suburbs, where they had dancing and then supper. After the supper they danced “Little Sally Waters” for a finale, instead of the Virginia Reel, and Alice would not go on the floor with Dan; she said she disliked that dance; but she told him to dance with Miss Langham. It became a gale of fun, and in the height of it Dan slipped and fell with his partner. They laughed it off, with the rest, but after a while the girl began to cry; she had received a painful bruise. All the way home, while the others laughed and sang and chattered, Dan was troubled about this poor girl; his anxiety became a joke with the whole sleighful of people.

When he parted with Alice at her door, he said, “I’m afraid I hurt Miss Langham; I feel awfully about it.”

“Yes; there’s no doubt of that. Good night!”

She left him to go off to his lodging, hot and tingling with indignation at her injustice. But kindlier thoughts came to him before he slept, and he fell asleep with a smile of tenderness for her on his lips. He could see how he was wrong to go out with any one else when Alice said she disliked the dance; he ought not to have taken advantage of her generosity in appointing him a partner; it was trying for her to see him make that ludicrous tumble, of course; and perhaps he had overdone the attentive sympathy on the way home. It flattered him that she could not help showing her jealousy — that is flattering, at first; and Dan was able to go and confess all but this to Alice. She received his submission magnanimously, and said that she was glad it had happened, because his saying this showed that now they understood each other perfectly. Then she fixed her eyes on his, and said, “I’ve just been round to see Lilly, and she’s as well as ever; it was only a nervous shock.”

Whether Mavering was really indifferent to Miss Langham’s condition, or whether the education of his perceptions had gone so far that he consciously ignored her, he answered, “That was splendid of you, Alice.”

“No,” she said; “it’s you that are splendid; and you always are. Oh, I wonder if I can ever be worthy of you!”

Their mutual forgiveness was very sweet to them, and they went on praising each other. Alice suddenly broke away from this weakening exchange of worship, and said, with that air of coming to business which he lad learned to recognise and dread a little, “Dan, don’t you think I ought to write to your mother?”

“Write to my mother?”

“Why, you have written to her. You wrote as soon as you got back, and she answered you.”

“Yes; but write regularly? — Show that I think of her all the time? When I really think I’m going to take you from her, I seem so cruel and heartless!”

“Oh, I don’t look at it in that light, Alice.”

“Don’t joke! And when I think that we’re going away to leave her, for several years, perhaps, as soon as we’re married, I can’t make it seem right. I know how she depends upon your being near her, and seeing her every now and then; and to go off to Europe for years, perhaps — Of course you can be of use to your father there; but do you think it’s right toward your mother? I want you to think.”

Dan thought, but his thinking was mainly to the effect that he did not know what she was driving at. Had she got any inkling of that plan of his mother’s for them to come and stay a year or two at the Falls after their marriage? He always expected to be able to reconcile that plan with the Pasmer plan of going at once; to his optimism the two were not really incompatible; but he did not wish them prematurely confronted in Alice’s mind. Was this her way of letting him know that she knew what his mother wished, and that she was willing to make the sacrifice? Or was it just some vague longing to please him by a show of affection toward his family, an unmeditated impulse of reparation? He had an impulse himself to be frank with Alice, to take her at her word, and to allow that he did not like the notion of going abroad. This was Dan’s notion of being frank; he could still reserve the fact that he had given his mother a tacit promise to bring Alice home to live, but he postponed even this. He said: “Oh, I guess that’ll be all right, Alice. At any rate, there’s no need to think about it yet awhile. That can be arranged.”

“Yes,” said Alice; “but don’t you think I’d better get into the habit of writing regularly to your mother now, so that there needn’t be any break when we go abroad?” He could see now that she had no idea of giving that plan up, and he was glad that he had not said anything. “I think,” she continued, “that I shall write to her once a week, and give her a full account of our life from day to day; it’ll be more like a diary; and then, when we get over there, I can keep it up without any effort, and she won’t feel so much that you’ve gone.”

She seemed to refer the plan to him, and he said it was capital. In fact, he did like the notion of a diary; that sort of historical view would involve less danger of precipitating a discussion of the two schemes of life for the future. “It’s awfully kind of you, Alice, to propose such a thing, and you mustn’t make it a burden. Any sort of little sketchy record will do; mother can read between the lines, you know.”

“It won’t be a burden,” said the girl tenderly. “I shall seem to be doing it for your mother, but I know I shall be doing it for you. I do everything for you. Do you think it’s right?”

“Oh; it must be,” said Dan, laughing. “It’s so pleasant.”

“Oh,” said the girl gloomily; “that’s what makes me doubt it.”

XLII.

Eunice Mavering acknowledged Alice’s first letter. She said that her mother read it aloud to them all, and had been delighted with the good account she gave of Dan, and fascinated with all the story of their daily doings and sayings. She wished Eunice to tell Alice how fully she appreciated her thoughtfulness of a sick old woman, and that she was going to write herself and thank her. But Eunice added that Alice must not be surprised if her mother was not very prompt in this, and she sent messages from all the family, affectionate for Alice, and polite for her father and mother.

Alice showed Dan the letter, and he seemed to find nothing noticeable in it. “She says your mother will write later,” Alice suggested.

“Yes. You ought to feel very much complimented by that. Mother’s autographs are pretty uncommon,” he said, smiling.

“Why, doesn’t she write? Can’t she? Does it tire her?” asked Alice.

“Oh yes, she can write, but she hates to. She gets Eunice or Minnie to write usually.”

“Dan,” cried Alice intensely, “why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why, I thought you knew it,” he explained easily. “She likes to read, and likes to talk, but it bores her to write. I don’t suppose I get more than two or three pencil scratches from her in the course of a year. She makes the girls write. But you needn’t mind her not writing. You may be sure she’s glad of your letters.”

“It makes me seem very presumptuous to be writing to her when there’s no chance of her answering,” Alice grieved. “It’s as if I had passed over your sisters’ heads. I ought to have written to them.”

“Oh, well, you can do that now,” said Dan soothingly.

“No. No, I can’t do it now. It would be ridiculous.” She was silent, and presently she asked, “Is there anything else about your mother that I ought to know?” She looked at him with a sort of impending discipline in her eyes which he had learned to dread; it meant such a long course of things, such a very great variety of atonement and expiation for him, that he could not bring himself to confront it steadily.

His heart gave a feeble leap; he would have gladly told her all that was in it, and he meant to do so at the right time, but this did not seem the moment. “I can’t say that there is,” he answered coldly.

In that need of consecrating her happiness which Alice felt, she went a great deal to church in those days. Sometimes she felt the need almost of defence against her happiness, and a vague apprehension mixed with it. Could it be right to let it claim her whole being, as it seemed to do? Than was the question which she once asked Dan, and it made him laugh, and catch her to him in a rapture that served for the time, and then left her to more morbid doubts. Evidently he could not follow her in them; he could not even imagine them; and while he was with her they seemed to have no verity or value. But she talked them over very hypothetically and impersonally with Miss Cotton, in whose sympathy they resumed all their import, and gained something more. In the idealisation which the girl underwent in this atmosphere all her thoughts and purposes had a significance which she would not of herself, perhaps, have attached to them. They discussed them and analysed them with a satisfaction in the result which could not be represented without an effect of caricature. They measured Alice’s romance together, and evolved from it a sublimation of responsibility, of duty, of devotion, which Alice found it impossible to submit to Dan when he came with his simple-hearted, single-minded purpose of getting Mrs. Pasmer out of the room, and sitting down with his arm around Alice’s waist. When he had accomplished this it seemed sufficient in itself, and she had to think, to struggle to recall things beyond it, above it. He could not be made to see at such times how their lives could be more in unison than they were. When she proposed doing something for him which he knew was disagreeable to her, he would not let her; and when she hinted at anything she wished him to do for her because she knew it was disagreeable to him, he consented so promptly, so joyously, that she perceived he could not have given the least thought to it.

She felt every day that they were alien in their tastes and aims; their pleasures were not the same, and though it was sweet, though it was charming, to have him give up so willingly all his preferences, she felt, without knowing that the time must come when this could not be so, that it was all wrong.

“But these very differences, these antagonisms, if you wish to call them so,” suggested Miss Cotton, in talking Alice’s misgivings over with her, “aren’t they just what will draw you together more and more? Isn’t it what attracted you to each other? The very fact that you are such perfect counterparts—”

“Yes,” the girl assented, “that’s what we’re taught to believe.” She meant by the novels, to which we all trust our instruction in such matters, and her doubt doubly rankled after she had put it to silence.

She kept on writing to Dan’s mother, though more and more perfunctorily; and now Eunice and now Minnie Mavering acknowledged her letters. She knew that they must think she was silly, but having entered by Dan’s connivance upon her folly, she was too proud to abandon it.

At last, after she had ceased to expect it, came a letter from his mother, not a brief note, but a letter which the invalid had evidently tasked herself to make long and full, in recognition of Alice’s kindness in writing to her so much. The girl opened it, and, after a verifying glance at the signature, began to read it with a thrill of tender triumph, and the fond prevision of the greater pleasure of reading it again with Dan.

But after reading it once through, she did not wait for him before reading it again and again. She did this with bewilderment, intershot with flashes of conviction, and then doubts of this conviction. When she could misunderstand no longer, she rose quietly and folded the letter, and put it carefully back into its envelope and into her writing desk, where she sat down and wrote, in her clearest and firmest hand, this note to Mavering —

“I wish to see you immediately.

“ALICE PASMER.”

XLIII

Dan had learned, with a lover’s keenness, to read Alice’s moods in the most colourless wording of her notes. She was rather apt to write him notes, taking back or reaffirming the effect of something that had just passed between them. Her note were tempered to varying degrees of heat and cold, so fine that no one else would have felt the difference, but sensible to him in their subtlest intention.

Perhaps a mere witness of the fact would have been alarmed by a note which began without an address, except that on the envelope, and ended its peremptory brevity with the writer’s name signed in full. Dan read calamity in it, and he had all the more trouble to pull himself together to meet it because he had parted with unusual tenderness from Alice the night before, after an evening in which it seemed to him that their ideals had been completely reconciled.

The note came, as her notes were apt to come, while Dan was at breakfast, which he was rather luxurious about for so young a man, and he felt formlessly glad afterward that he had drunk his first cup of coffee before he opened it, for it chilled the second cup, and seemed to take all character out of the omelet.

He obeyed it, wondering what the doom menaced in it might be, but knowing that it was doom, and leaving his breakfast half-finished, with a dull sense of the tragedy of doing so.

He would have liked to ask for Mrs. Pasmer first, and interpose a moment of her cheerful unreality between himself and his interview with Alice, but he decided that he had better not do this, and they met at once, with the width of the room between them. Her look was one that made it impassable to the simple impulse he usually had to take her in his arms and kiss her. But as she stood holding out a letter to him, with the apparent intention that he should come and take it, he traversed the intervening space and took it.

“Why, it’s from mother!” he said joyously, with a glance at the handwriting.

“Will you please explain it?” said Alice, and Dan began to read it.

It began with a good many excuses for not having written before, and went on with a pretty expression of interest in Alice’s letters and gratitude for them; Mrs. Mavering assured the girl that she could not imagine what a pleasure they had been to her. She promised herself that they should be great friends, and she said that she looked forward eagerly to the time, now drawing near, when Dan should bring her home to them. She said she knew Alice would find it dull at the Falls except for him, but they would all do their best, and she would find the place very different from what she had seen it in the winter. Alice could make believe that she was there just for the summer, and Mrs. Mavering hoped that before the summer was gone she would be so sorry for a sick old woman that she would not even wish to go with it. This part of the letter, which gave Dan away so hopelessly, as he felt, was phrased so touchingly, that he looked up from it with moist eyes to the hard cold judgment in the eyes of Alice.

“Will you please explain it?” she repeated.

He tried to temporise. “Explain what?”

Alice was prompt to say, “Had you promised your mother to take me home to live?”

Dan did not answer.

“You promised my mother to go abroad. What else have you promised?” He continued silent, and she added, “You are a faithless man.” They were the words of Romola, in the romance, to Tito; she had often admired them; and they seemed to her equally the measure of Dan’s offence.

“Alice—”

“Here are your letters and remembrances, Mr. Mavering.” Dan mechanically received the packet she had been holding behind her; with a perverse freak of intelligence he observed that, though much larger now, it was tied up with the same ribbon which had fastened it when Alice returned his letters and gifts before. “Good-bye. I wish you every happiness consistent with your nature.”

She bowed coldly, and was about to leave him, as she had planned; but she had not arranged that he should be standing in front of the door, and he was there, with no apparent intention of moving.

“Will you allow me to pass?” she was forced to ask, however, haughtily.

“No!” he retorted, with a violence that surprised him. “I will not let you pass till you have listened to me — till you tell me why you treat me so. I won’t stand it — I’ve had enough of this kind of thing.”

It surprised Alice too a little, and after a moment’s hesitation she said, “I will listen to you,” so much more gently than she had spoken before that Dan relaxed his imperative tone, and began to laugh. “But,” she added, and her face clouded again, “it will be of no use. My mind is made up this time. Why should we talk?”

“Why, because mine isn’t,” said Dan. “What is the matter, Alice? Do you think I would force you, or even ask you, to go home with me to live unless you were entirely willing? It could only be a temporary arrangement anyway.”

“That isn’t the question,” she retorted. “The question is whether you’ve promised your mother one thing and me another.”

“Well, I don’t know about promising,” said Dan, laughing a little more uneasily, but still laughing. “As nearly as I can remember, I wasn’t consulted about the matter. Your mother proposed one thing, and my mother proposed another.”

“And you agreed to both. That is quite enough — quite characteristic!”

Dan flushed, and stopped laughing. “I don’t know what you mean by characteristic. The thing didn’t have to be decided at once, and I didn’t suppose it would be difficult for either side to give way, if it was judged best. I was sure my mother wouldn’t insist.”

“It seems very easy for your family to make sacrifices that are not likely to be required of them.”

“You mustn’t criticise my mother!” cried Dan.

“I have not criticised her. You insinuate that we would be too selfish to give up, if it were for the best.”

“I do nothing of the kind, and unless you are determined to quarrel with me you wouldn’t say so.”

“I don’t wish a quarrel; none is necessary,” said Alice coldly.

“You accuse me of being treacherous—”

“I didn’t say treacherous!”

“Faithless, then. It’s a mere quibble about words. I want you to take that back.”

“I can’t take it back; it’s the truth. Aren’t you faithless, if you let us go on thinking that you’re going to Europe, and let your mother think that we’re coming home to live after we’re married?”

“No! I’m simply leaving the question open!”

“Yes,” said the girl — sadly, “you like to leave questions open. That’s your way.”

“Well, I suppose I do till it’s necessary to decide them. It saves the needless effusion of talk,” said Dan, with a laugh; and then, as people do in a quarrel, he went back to his angry mood, and said “Besides, I supposed you would be glad of the chance to make some sacrifice for me. You’re always asking for it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mavering,” said Alice, “for reminding me of it; nothing is sacred to you, it seems. I can’t say that you have ever sought any opportunities of self-sacrifice.”

“I wasn’t allowed time to do so; they were always presented.”

“Thank you again, Mr. Mavering. All this is quite a revelation. I’m glad to know how you really felt about things that you seemed so eager for.”

“Alice, you know that I would do anything for you!” cried Dan, rueing his precipitate words.

“Yes; that’s what you’ve repeatedly told me. I used to believe it.”

“And I always believed what you said. You said at the picnic that day that you thought I would like to live at Ponkwasset Falls if my business was there—”

“That is not the point!”

“And now you quarrel with me because my mother wishes me to do so.”

Alice merely said: “I don’t know why I stand here allowing you to intimidate me in my father’s house. I demand that you shall stand aside and let me pass.”

“I’ll not oblige you to leave the room,” said Dan. “I will go. But if I go, you will understand that I don’t come back.”

“I hope that,” said the girl.

“Very well. Good morning, Miss Pasmer.”

She inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment of his bow, and he whirled out of the room and down the dim narrow passageway into the arms of Mrs. Pasmer, who had resisted as long as she could her curiosity to know what the angry voices of himself and Alice meant.

“O Mr. Mavering, is it you?” she buzzed; and she flung aside one pretence for another in adding, “Couldn’t Alice make you stay to breakfast?”

Dan felt a rush of tenderness in his heart at the sound of the kind, humbugging little voice. “No, thank you, Mrs. Pasmer, I couldn’t stay, thank you. I — I thank you very much. I — good-bye, Mrs. Pasmer.” He wrung her hand, and found his way out of the apartment door, leaving her to clear up the mystery of his flight and his broken words as she could.

“Alice,” she said, as she entered the room, where the girl had remained, “what have you been doing now?”

“Oh, nothing,” she said, with a remnant of her scorn for Dan qualifying her tone and manner to her mother. “I’ve dismissed Mr. Mavering.”

“Then you want him to come to lunch?” asked her mother. “I should advise him to refuse.”

“I don’t think he’d accept,” said Alice. Then, as Mrs. Pasmer stood in the door, preventing her egress, as Dan had done before, she asked meekly “Will you let me pass, mamma? My head aches.”

Mrs. Pasmer, whose easy triumphs in so many difficult circumstances kept her nearly always in good temper, let herself go, at these words, in vexation very uncommon with her. “Indeed I shall not!” she retorted. “And you will please sit down here and tell me what you mean by dismissing Mr. Mavering. I’m tired of your whims and caprices.”

“I can’t talk,” began the girl stubbornly.

“Yes, I think you can,” said her mother. “At any rate, I can. Now what is it all?”

“Perhaps this letter, will explain,” said Alice, continuing to dignify her enforced submission with a tone of unabated hauteur; and she gave her mother Mrs. Mavering’s letter, which Dan had mechanically restored to her.

Mrs. Pasmer read it, not only without indignation, but apparently without displeasure. But, she understood perfectly what the trouble was, when she looked up and asked, cheerfully, “Well?”

“Well!” repeated Alice, with a frown of astonishment. “Don’t you see that he’s promised us one thing and her another, and that he’s false to both?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pasmer, recovering her good-humour in view of a situation that she felt herself able to cope with. “Of course he has to temporise, to manage a little. She’s an invalid, and of course she’s very exacting. He has to humour her. How do you know he has promised her? He hasn’t promised us.”

“Hasn’t promised us?” Alice gasped.

“No. He’s simply fallen in with what we’ve said. It’s because he’s so sweet and yielding, and can’t bear to refuse. I can understand it perfectly.”

“Then if he hasn’t promised us, he’s deceived us all the more shamefully, for he’s made us think he had.”

“He hasn’t me,” said Mrs. Pasmer, smiling at the stormy virtue in her daughter’s face. “And what if you should go home awhile with him — for the summer, say? It couldn’t last longer, much; and it wouldn’t hurt us to wait. I suppose he hoped for something of that kind.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” groaned the girl, in a kind of bewilderment. “I could have gone there with him joyfully, and lived all my days, if he’d only been frank with me.”

“Oh no, you couldn’t,” said her mother, with cosy security. “When it comes to it, you don’t like giving up any more than other people. It’s very hard for you to give up; he sees that — he knows it, and he doesn’t really like to ask any sort of sacrifice from you. He’s afraid of you.”

“Don’t I know that?” demanded Alice desolately: “I’ve known it from the first, and I’ve felt it all the time. It’s all a mistake, and has been. We never could understand each other. We’re too different.”

“That needn’t prevent you understanding him. It needn’t prevent you from seeing how really kind and good he is — how faithful and constant he is.”

“Oh, you say that — you praise him — because you like him.”

“Of course I do. And can’t you?”

“No. The least grain of deceit — of temporising, you call it — spoils everything. It’s over,” said the girl, rising, with a sigh, from the chair she had dropped into. “We’re best apart; we could only have been wretched and wicked together.”

“What did you say to him, Alice?” asked her mother, unshaken by her rhetoric.

“I told him he was a faithless person.”

“Then you were a cruel girl,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, with sudden indignation; “and if you were not my daughter I could be glad he had escaped you. I don’t know where you got all those silly, romantic notions of yours about these things. You certainly didn’t get them from me,” she continued, with undeniable truth, “and I don’t believe you get them from your Church, It’s just as Miss Anderson said: your Church makes allowance for human nature, but you make none.”

“I shouldn’t go to Julia Anderson for instruction in such matters,” said the girl, with cold resentment.

“I wish you would go to her for a little commonsense — or somebody,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “Do you know what talk this will make?”

“I don’t care for the talk. It would be worse than talk to marry a man whom I couldn’t trust — who wanted to please me so much that he had to deceive me, and was too much afraid of me to tell me the truth.”

“You headstrong girl!” said her mother impartially, admiring at the same time the girl’s haughty beauty.

There was an argument in reserve in Mrs. Pasmer’s mind which perhaps none but an American mother would have hesitated to urge; but it is so wholly our tradition to treat the important business of marriage as a romantic episode that even she could not bring herself to insist that her daughter should not throw away a chance so advantageous from every worldly point of view. She could only ask, “If you break this engagement, what do you expect to do?”

“The engagement is broken. I shall go into a sisterhood.”

“You will do nothing of the kind, with my consent,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “I will have no such nonsense. Don’t flatter yourself that I will. Even if I approved of such a thing, I should think it wicked to let you do it. You’re always fancying yourself doing something very devoted, but I’ve never seen you ready to give up your own will, or your own comfort even, in the slightest degree. And Dan Mavering, if he were twice as temporising and circuitous” — the word came to her from her talk with him— “would be twice too good for you. I’m going to breakfast.”

XLIV.

The difficulty in life is to bring experience to the level of expectation, to match our real emotions in view of any great occasion with the ideal emotions which we have taught ourselves that we ought to feel. This is all the truer when the occasion is tragical: we surprise ourselves in a helplessness to which the great event, death, ruin, lost love, reveals itself slowly, and at first wears the aspect of an unbroken continuance of what has been, or at most of another incident in the habitual sequence.

Dan Mavering came out into the bright winter morning knowing that his engagement was broken, but feeling it so little that he could not believe it. He failed to realise it, to seize it for a fact, and he could not let it remain that dumb and formless wretchedness, without proportion or dimensions, which it now seemed to be, weighing his life down. To verify it, to begin to outlive it, he must instantly impart it, he must tell it, he must see it with others’ eyes. This was the necessity of his youth and of his sympathy, which included himself as well as the rest of the race in its activity. He had the usual environment of a young man who has money. He belonged to clubs, and he had a large acquaintance among men of his own age, who lived a life of greater leisure; or were more absorbed in business, but whom he met constantly in society. For one reason or another, or for no other reason than that he was Dan Mavering and liked every one, he liked them all. He thought himself great friends with them; he dined and lunched with them; and they knew the Pasmers, and all about his engagement. But he did not go to any of them now, with the need he felt to impart his calamity, to get the support of come other’s credence and opinion of it. He went to a friend whom, in the way of his world, he met very seldom, but whom he always found, as he said, just where he had left him.

Boardman never made any sign of suspecting that he was put on and off, according to Dan’s necessity or desire for comfort or congratulation; but it was part of their joke that Dan’s coming to him always meant something decisive in his experiences. The reporter was at his late breakfast, which his landlady furnished him in his room, though, as Mrs. Mash said, she never gave meals, but a cup of coffee and an egg or two, yes.

“Well?” he said, without looking up.

“Well, I’m done for!” cried Dan.

“Again?” asked Boardman.

“Again! The other time was nothing, Boardman — I knew it wasn’t anything; but this — this is final.”

“Go on,” said Boardman, looking about for his individual salt-cellar, which he found under the edge of his plate; and Mavering laid the whole case before him. As he made no comment on it for a while, Dan was obliged to ask him what he thought of it. “Well,” he said, with the smile that showed the evenness of his pretty teeth, “there’s a kind of wild justice in it.” He admitted this, with the object of meeting Dan’s views in an opinion.

“So you think I’m a faithless man too, do you?” demanded Mavering stormily.

“Not from your point of view,” said Boardman, who kept on quietly eating and drinking.

Mavering was too amiable not to feel Boardman’s innocence of offence in his unperturbed behaviour. “There was no faithlessness about it, and you know it,” he went on, half laughing, half crying, in his excitement, and making Boardman the avenue of an appeal really addressed to Alice. “I was ready to do what either side decided.”

“Or both,” suggested Boardman.

“Yes, or both,” said Dan, boldly accepting the suggestion. “It wouldn’t have cost me a pang to give up if I’d been in the place of either.”

“I guess that’s what she could never understand,” Boardman mused aloud.

“And I could never understand how any one could fail to see that that was what I intended — expected: that it would all come out right of itself — naturally.” Dan was still addressing Alice in this belated reasoning. “But to be accused of bad faith — of trying to deceive any one—”

“Pretty rough,” said Boardman.

“Rough? It’s more than I can stand!”

“Well, you don’t seem to be asked to stand it,” said Boardman, and Mavering laughed forlornly with him at his joke, and then walked away and looked out of Boardman’s dormer-window on the roofs below, with their dirty, smoke-stained February snow. He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped his face with it. When he turned round, Boardman looked keenly at him, and asked, with an air of caution, “And so it’s all up?”

“Yes, it’s all up,” said Dan hoarsely.

“No danger of a relapse?”

“What do you mean?”

“No danger of having my sympathy handed over later to Miss Pasmer for examination?”

“I guess you can speak up freely, Boardman,” said Dan, “if that’s what you mean. Miss Pasmer and I are quits.”

“Well, then, I’m glad of it. She wasn’t the one for you. She isn’t fit for you.”

“What’s the reason she isn’t?” cried Dan. “She’s the most beautiful and noble girl in the world, and the most conscientious, and the best — if she is unjust to me.”

“No doubt of that. I’m not attacking her, and I’m not defending you.”

“What are you doing then?”

“Simply saying that I don’t believe you two would ever understand each other. You haven’t got the same point of view, and you couldn’t make it go. Both out of a scrape.”

“I don’t know what you mean by a scrape,” said Dan, resenting the word more than the idea. Boardman tacitly refused to modify or withdraw it, and Dan said, after a sulky silence, in which he began to dramatise a meeting with his family: “I’m going home; I can’t stand it here. What’s the reason you can’t come with me, Boardman?”

“Do you mean to your rooms?”

“No; to the Falls.”

“Thanks. Guess not.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t care about being a fifth wheel.”

“Oh, pshaw, now, Boardman! Look here, you must go. I want you to go. I — I want your support. That’s it. I’m all broken up, and I couldn’t stand that three hours’ pull alone. They’ll be glad to see you — all of them. Don’t you suppose they’ll be glad to see you? They’re always glad; and they’ll understand.”

“I don’t believe you want me to go yourself. You just think you do.”

“No. I really do want you, Boardman. I want to talk it over with you. I do want you. I’m not fooling.”

“Don’t think I could get away.” Yet he seemed to be pleased with the notion of the Falls; it made him smile.

“Well, see,” said Mavering disconsolately. “I’m going round to my rooms now, and I’ll be there till two o’clock; train’s at 2.30.” He went towards the door, where he faced about. “And you don’t think it would be of any use?”

“Any use — what?”

“Trying to — to — to make it up.”

“How should I know?”

“No, no; of course you couldn’t,” said Dan, miserably downcast. All the resentment which Alice’s injustice had roused in him had died out; he was suffering as helplessly and hopelessly as a child. “Well,” he sighed, as he swung out of the door.

Boardman found him seated at his writing-desk in his smoking-jacket when he came to him, rather early, and on the desk were laid out the properties of the little play which had come to a tragic close. There were some small bits of jewellery, among the rest a ring of hers which Alice had been letting him wear; a lock of her hair which he had kept, for the greater convenience of kissing, in the original parcel, tied with crimson ribbon; a succession of flowers which she had worn, more and more dry and brown with age; one of her gloves, which he had found and kept from the day they first met in Cambridge; a bunch of withered bluebells tied with sweet-grass, whose odour filled the room, from the picnic at Campobello; scraps of paper with her writing on them, and cards; several photographs of her, and piles of notes and letters.

“Look here,” said Dan, knowing it was Boardman without turning round, “what am I to do about these things?”

Boardman respectfully examined them over his shoulder. “Don’t know what the usual ceremony is,” he said, he ventured to add, referring to the heaps of letters, “Seems to have been rather epistolary, doesn’t she?”

“Oh, don’t talk of her as if she were dead!” cried Dan. “I’ve been feeling as if she were.” All at once he dropped his head among these witnesses of his loss, and sobbed.

Boardman appeared shocked, and yet somewhat amused; he made a soft low sibilation between his teeth.

Dan lifted his head. “Boardman, if you ever give me away!”

“Oh, I don’t suppose it’s very hilarious,” said Boardman, with vague kindness. “Packed yet?” he asked, getting away from the subject as something he did not feel himself fitted to deal with consecutively.

“I’m only going to take a bag,” said Mavering, going to get some clothes down from a closet where his words had a sepulchral reverberation.

“Can’t I help?” asked Boardman, keeping away from the sad memorials of Dan’s love strewn about on the desk, and yet not able to keep his eyes off them across the room.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Dan. He came out with his armful of coats and trousers, and threw them on the bed. “Are you going?”

“If I could believe you wanted me to.”

“Good!” cried Mavering, and the fact seemed to brighten him immediately. “If you want to, stuff these things in, while I’m doing up these other things.” He nodded his head side-wise toward the desk.

“All right,” said Boardman.

His burst of grief must have relieved Dan greatly. He set about gathering up the relics on the desk, and getting a suitable piece of paper to wrap them in. He rejected several pieces as inappropriate.

“I don’t know what kind of paper to do these things up in,” he said at last.

“Any special kind of paper required?” Boardman asked, pausing in the act of folding a pair of pantaloons so as not to break the fall over the boot.

“I didn’t know there was, but there seems to be,” said Dan.

“Silver paper seems to be rather more for cake and that sort of thing,” suggested Boardman. “Kind of mourning too, isn’t it — silver?”

“I don’t know,” said Dan. “But I haven’t got any silver paper.”

“Newspaper wouldn’t do?”

“Well, hardly, Boardman,” said Dan, with sarcasm.

“Well,” said Boardman, “I should have supposed that nothing could be simpler than to send back a lot of love-letters; but the question of paper seems insuperable. Manila paper wouldn’t do either. And then comes string. What kind of string are you going to tie it up with?”

“Well, we won’t start that question till we get to it,” answered Dan, looking about. “If I could find some kind of a box—”

“Haven’t you got a collar box? Be the very thing!” Boardman had gone back to the coats and trousers, abandoning Dan to the subtler difficulties in which he was involved.

“They’ve all got labels,” said Mavering, getting down one marked “The Tennyson” and another lettered “The Clarion,” and looking at them with cold rejection.

“Don’t see how you’re going to send these things back at all, then. Have to keep them, I guess.” Boardman finished his task, and came back to Dan.

“I guess I’ve got it now,” said Mavering, lifting the lid of his desk, and taking out a large stiff envelope, in which a set of photographic views had come.

“Seems to have been made for it,” Boardman exulted, watching the envelope, as it filled up, expand into a kind of shapely packet. Dan put the things silently in, and sealed the parcel with his ring. Then he turned it over to address it, but the writing of Alice’s name for this purpose seemed too much for him, in spite of Boardman’s humorous support throughout.

“Oh, I can’t do it,” he said, falling back in his chair.

“Let me,” said his friend, cheerfully ignoring his despair. He philosophised the whole transaction, as he addressed the package, rang for a messenger, and sent it away, telling him to call a cab for ten minutes past two.

“Mighty good thing in life that we move by steps. Now on the stage, or in a novel, you’d have got those things together and addressed ‘em, and despatched ‘em, in just the right kind of paper, with just the right kind of string round it, at a dash; and then you’d have had time to go up and lean your head against something and soliloquise, or else think unutterable things. But here you see how a merciful Providence blocks your way all along. You’ve had to fight through all sort of sordid little details to the grand tragic result of getting off Miss Pasmer’s letters, and when you reach it you don’t mind it a bit.”

“Don’t I?” demanded Dan, in as hollow a voice as he could. “You’d joke at a funeral, Boardman.”

“I’ve seen some pretty cheerful funerals,” said Boardman. “And it’s this principle of steps, of degrees, of having to do this little thing, and that little thing, that keeps funerals from killing the survivors. I suppose this is worse than a funeral — look at it in the right light. You mourn as one without hope, don’t you? Live through it too, I suppose.”

He made Dan help get the rest of his things into his bag, and with one little artifice and another prevented him from stagnating in despair. He dissented from the idea of waiting over another day to see if Alice would not relent when she got her letters back, and send for Dan to come and see her.

“Relent a good deal more when she finds you’ve gone out of town, if she sends for you,” he argued; and he got Dan into the cab and off to the station, carefully making him an active partner in the whole undertaking, even to checking his own bag.

Before he bought his own ticket he appealed once more to Dan.

“Look here! I feel like a fool going off with you on this expedition. Be honest for once, now, Mavering, and tell me you’ve thought better of it, and don’t want me to go!”

“Yes — yes, I do. Oh yes, you’ve got to go. I I do want you. I — you make me see things in just the right light, don’t you know. That idea of yours about little steps — it’s braced me all up. Yes—”

“You’re such an infernal humbug,” said Boardman, “I can’t tell whether you want me or not. But I’m in for it now, and I’ll go.” Then he bought his ticket.

XLV.

Boardman put himself in charge of Mavering, and took him into the smoking car. It was impossible to indulge a poetic gloom there without becoming unpleasantly conspicuous in the smoking and euchre and profanity. Some of the men were silent and dull, but no one was apparently very unhappy, and perhaps if Dan had dealt in absolute sincerity with himself, even he would not have found himself wholly so. He did not feel as he had felt when Alice rejected him. Then he was wounded to the quick through his vanity, and now; in spite of all, in spite of the involuntary tender swaying of his heart toward her through the mere force of habit, in spite of some remote compunctions for his want of candour with her, he was supported by a sense of her injustice, her hardness. Related with this was an obscure sense of escape, of liberation, which, however he might silence and disown it, was still there. He could not help being aware that he had long relinquished tastes customs, purposes, ideals, to gain a peace that seemed more and more fleeting and uncertain, and that he had submitted to others which, now that the moment of giving pleasure by his submission was past, he recognised as disagreeable. He felt a sort of guilt in his enlargement; he knew, by all that he had, ever heard or read of people in his position, that he ought to be altogether miserable; and yet this consciousness of relief persisted. He told himself that a very tragical thing had befallen him; that this broken engagement was the ruin of his life and the end of his youth, and that he must live on an old and joyless man, wise with the knowledge that comes to decrepitude and despair; he imagined a certain look for himself, a gait, a name, that would express this; but all the same he was aware of having got out of something. Was it a bondage, a scrape, as Boardman called it? He thought he must be a very light, shallow, and frivolous nature not to be utterly broken up by his disaster.

“I don’t know what I’m going home for,” he said hoarsely to Boardman.

“Kind of a rest, I suppose,” suggested his friend.

“Yes, I guess that’s it,” said Dan. “I’m tired.”

It seemed to him that this was rather fine; it was a fatigue of the soul that he was to rest from. He remembered the apostrophic close of a novel in which the heroine dies after much emotional suffering. “Quiet, quiet heart!” he repeated to himself. Yes, he too had died to hope, to love, to happiness.

As they drew near their journey’s end he said, “I don’t know how I’m going to break it to them.”

“Oh, probably break itself,” said Boardman. “These things usually do.”

“Yes, of course,” Dan assented.

“Know from your looks that something’s up. Or you might let me go ahead a little and prepare them.”

Dan laughed. “It was awfully good of you to come, Boardman. I don’t know what I should have done without you.”

“Nothing I like more than these little trips. Brightens you up to sere the misery of others; makes you feel that you’re on peculiarly good terms with Providence. Haven’t enjoyed myself so much since that day in Portland.” Boardman’s eyes twinkled.

“Yes,” said Dan, with a deep sigh, “it’s a pity it hadn’t ended there.”

“Oh, I don’t know. You won’t have to go through with it again. Something that had to come, wasn’t it? Never been satisfied if you hadn’t tried it. Kind of aching void before, and now you’ve got enough.”

“Yes, I’ve got enough,” said Dan, “if that’s all.”

When they got out of the train at Ponkwasset Falls, and the conductor and the brakeman, who knew Dan as his father’s son, and treated him with the distinction due a representative of an interest valued by the road, had bidden him a respectfully intimate good-night, and he began to climb the hill to his father’s house, he recurred to the difficulty before him in breaking the news to his family. “I wish I could have it over in a flash. I wish I’d thought to telegraph it to them.”

“Wouldn’t have done,” said Boardman. “It would have given ’em time to formulate questions and conjectures, and now the astonishment will take their breath away till you can get your second wind, and then — you’ll be all right.”

“You think so?” asked Dan submissively.

“Know so. You see, if you could have had it over in a flash, it would have knocked you flat. But now you’ve taken all the little steps, and you’ve got a lot more to take, and you’re all braced up. See? You’re like rock, now — adamant.” Dan laughed in forlorn perception of Boardman’s affectionate irony. “Little steps are the thing. You’ll have to go in now and meet your family, and pass the time of day with each one, and talk about the weather, and account for my being along, and ask how they all are; and by the time you’ve had dinner, and got settled with your legs out in front of the fire, you’ll be just in the mood for it. Enjoy telling them all about it.”

“Don’t, Boardman,” pleaded Dan. “Boardy, I believe if I could get in and up to my room without anybody’s seeing me, I’d let you tell them. There don’t seem to be anybody about, and I think we could manage it.”

“It wouldn’t work,” said Boardman. “Got to do it yourself.”

“Well, then, wait a minute,” said Dan desperately; and Boardman knew that he was to stay outside while Dan reconnoitred the interior. Dan opened one door after another till he stood within the hot brilliantly lighted hall. Eunice Mavering was coming down the stairs, hooded and wrapped for a walk on the long verandahs before supper.

“Dan!” she cried.

“It’s all up, Eunice,” he said at once, as if she had asked him about it. “My engagement’s off.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” She descended upon him with outstretched arms, but stopped herself before she reached him. “It’s a hoax. What do you mean? Do you really mean it, Dan?”

“I guess I mean it. But don’t — Hold on! Where’s Minnie?”

Eunice turned, and ran back upstairs. “Minnie! Min!” she called on her way. “Dan’s engagement’s off.”

“I don’t believe it!” answered Minnie’s voice joyously, from within some room. It was followed by her presence, with successive inquiries. “How do you know? Did you get a letter? When did it happen? Oh, isn’t it too good?”

Minnie was also dressed for the verandah promenade, which they always took when the snow was too deep. She caught sight of her brother as she came down. “Why, Dan’s here! Dan, I’ve been thinking about you all day.” She kissed him, which Eunice was now reminded to do too.

“Yes, it’s true, Minnie,” said Dan gravely. “I came up to tell you. It don’t seem to distress you much.”

“Dan!” said his sister reproachfully. “You know I didn’t mean to say anything I only felt so glad to have you back again.”

“I understand, Minnie — I don’t blame you. It’s all right. How’s mother? Father up from the works yet? I’m going to my room.”

“Indeed you’re not!” cried Eunice, with elder sisterly authority. “You shall tell us about it first.”

“Oh no! Let him go, Eunice!” pleaded Minnie, “Poor Dan! And I don’t think we ought to go to walk when—”

Dan’s eyes dimmed, and his voice weakened a little at her sympathy. “Yes, go. I’m tired — that’s all. There isn’t anything to tell you, hardly. Miss Pasmer—”

“Why, he’s pale!” cried Minnie. “Eunice!”

“Oh, it’s just the heat in here.” Dan really felt a little sick and faint with it, but he was not sorry to seem affected by the day’s strain upon his nerves.

The girls began to take off their wraps. “Don’t. I’ll go with you. Boardman’s out there.”

“Boardman! What nonsense!” exclaimed Eunice.

“He’ll like to hear your opinion of it,” Dan began; but his sister pulled the doors open, and ran out to see if he really meant that too.

Whether Boardman had heard her, or had discreetly withdrawn out of earshot at the first sound of voices, she could not tell, but she found him some distance away from the snow-box on the piazza. “Dan’s just managed to tell us you were here,” she said, giving him her hand. “I’m glad to see you. Do come in.”

“Come along as a sort of Job’s comforter,” Boardman explained, as he followed her in; and he had the silly look that the man who feels himself superfluous must wear.

“Then you know about it?” said Eunice, while Minnie Mavering and he were shaking hands.

“Yes, Boardman knows; he can tell you about it,” said Dan, from the hall chair he had dropped into. He rose and made his way to the stairs, with the effect of leaving the whole thing to them.

His sisters ran after him, and got him upstairs and into his room, with Boardman’s semi-satirical connivance, and Eunice put up the window, while Minnie went to get some cologne to wet his forehead. Their efforts were so successful that he revived sufficiently to drive them out of his room, and make them go and show Boardman to his.

“You know the way, Mr. Boardman,” said Eunice, going before him, while Minnie followed timorously, but curious for what he should say. She lingered on the threshold, while her sister went in and pulled the electric apparatus which lighted the gas-burners. “I suppose Dan didn’t break it?” she said, turning sharply upon him.

“No; and I don’t think he was to blame,” said Boardman, inferring her reserved anxiety.

“Oh, I’m quite sure of that,” said Eunice, rejecting what she had asked for. “You’ll find everything, Mr. Boardman. It was kind of you to come with Dan. Supper’s at seven.”

“How severe you were with him!” murmured Minnie, following her away.

“Severe with Dan?”

“No — with Mr. Boardman.”

“What nonsense! I had to be. I couldn’t let him defend Dan to me. Couple of silly boys!”

After a moment Minnie said, “I don’t think he’s silly.”

“Who?”

“Mr. Boardman.”

“Well, Dan is, then, to bring him at such a time. But I suppose he felt that he couldn’t get here without him. What a boy! Think of such a child being engaged! I hope we shan’t hear any more of such nonsense for one while again — at least till Dan’s got his growth.”

They went down into the library, where, in their excitement, they sat down with most of their outdoor things on.

Minnie had the soft contrary-mindedness of gentle natures. “I should like to know how you would have had Dan bear it,” she said rebelliously.

“How? Like a man. Or like a woman. How do you suppose Miss Pasmer’s bearing it? Do you suppose she’s got some friend to help her?”

“If she’s broken it, she doesn’t need any one,” urged Minnie.

“Well,” said Eunice, with her high scorn of Dan unabated, “I never could have liked that girl, but I certainly begin to respect her. I think I could have got on with her — now that it’s no use. I declare,” she broke off, “we’re sitting here sweltering to death! What are we keeping our things on for?” She began to tear hers violently off and to fling them on chairs, scolding, and laughing at the same time with Minnie, at their absent-mindedness.

A heavy step sounded on the verandah without.

“There’s father!” she cried vividly, jumping to her feet and running to the door, while Minnie, in a nervous bewilderment, ran off upstairs to her room. Eunice flung the door open. “Well, father, we’ve got Dan back again.” And at a look of quiet question in his eye she hurried on: “His engagement’s broken, and he’s come up here to tell us, and brought Mr. Boardman along to help.”

“Where is he?” asked the father, with his ruminant quiet, pulling off first one sleeve of his overcoat, and pausing for Eunice’s answer before he pulled off the other.

XLVI.

“He’s up in his room, resting from the effort.” She laughed nervously, and her father made no comment. He took off his articles, and then went creaking upstairs to Dan’s room. But at the door he paused, with his hand on the knob, and turned away to his own room without entering.

Dan must have heard him; in a few minutes he came to him.

“Well, Dan,” said his father, shaking hands.

“I suppose Eunice has told you? Well, I want to tell you why it happened.”

There was something in his father that always steadied Dan and kept him to the point. He now put the whole case fairly and squarely, and his candour and openness seemed to him to react and characterise his conduct throughout. He did not realise that this was not so till his father said at the close, with mild justice, “You were to blame for letting the thing run on so at loose ends.”

“Yes, of course,” said Dan, seeing that he was. “But there was no intention of deceiving any one of bad faith—”

“Of course not.”

“I thought it could be easily arranged whenever it came to the point.”

“If you’d been older, you wouldn’t have thought that. You had women to deal with on both sides. But if it’s all over, I’m not sorry. I always admired Miss Pasmer, but I’ve been more and more afraid you were not suited to each other. Your mother doesn’t know you’re here?”

“No, sir, I suppose not. Do you think it will distress her?”

“How did your sisters take it?”

Dan gave a rueful laugh. “It seemed to be rather a popular move with them.”

“I will see your mother first,” said the father.

He left them when they went into the library after supper, and a little later Dan and Eunice left Boardman in charge of Minnie there.

He looked after their unannounced withdrawal in comic consciousness. “It’s no use pretending that I’m not a pretty large plurality here,” he said to Minnie.

“Oh, I’m so glad you came!” she cried, with a kindness which was as real as if it had been more sincere.

“Do you think mother will feel it much?” asked Dan anxiously, as he went upstairs with Eunice.

“Well, she’ll hate to lose a correspondent — such a regular one,” said Eunice, and the affair being so far beyond any other comment, she laughed the rest of the way to their mother’s room.

The whole family had in some degree that foible which affects people who lead isolated lives; they come to think that they are the only people who have their virtues; they exaggerate these, and they conceive a kindness even for the qualities which are not their virtues. Mrs. Mavering’s life was secluded again from the family seclusion, and their peculiarities were intensified in her. Besides, she had some very marked peculiarities of her own, and these were also intensified by the solitude to which she was necessarily left so much. She meditated a great deal upon the character of her children, and she liked to analyse and censure it both in her own mind and openly in their presence. She was very trenchant and definite in these estimates of them; she liked to ticket them, and then ticket them anew. She explored their ancestral history on both sides for the origin of their traits, and there were times when she reduced them in formula to mere congeries of inherited characteristics. If Eunice was self-willed and despotic, she was just like her grandmother Mavering; if Minnie was all sentiment and gentle stubbornness, it was because two aunts of hers, one on either side, were exactly so; if Dan loved pleasure and beauty, and was sinuous and uncertain in so many ways, and yet was so kind and faithful and good, as well as shilly-shallying and undecided, it was because her mother, and her mother’s father, had these qualities in the same combination.

When she took her children to pieces before their faces, she was sharp and admonitory enough with them. She warned them to what their characters would bring them to if they did not look out; but perhaps because she beheld them so hopelessly the present effect of the accumulated tendencies of the family past, she was tender and forgiving to their actions. The mother came in there, and superseded the student of heredity: she found excuse for them in the perversity of circumstance, in the peculiar hardship of the case, in the malignant misbehaviour of others.

As Dan entered, with the precedence his father and sister yielded him as the principal actor in the scene which must follow, she lifted herself vigorously in bed, and propped herself on the elbow of one arm while she stretched the other towards him.

“I’m glad of it, Dan!” she called, at the moment he opened the door, and as he came toward her she continued, with the amazing velocity of utterance peculiar to nervous sufferers of her sex: “I know all about it, and I don’t blame you a bit! And I don’t blame her! Poor helpless young things! But it’s a perfect mercy it’s all over; it’s the greatest deliverance I ever heard of! You’d have been eaten up alive. I saw it, and I knew it from the very first moment, and I’ve lived in fear and trembling for you. You could have got on well enough if you’d been left to yourselves, but that you couldn’t have been nor hope to be as long as you breathed, from the meddling and the machinations and the malice of that unscrupulous and unconscionable old Cat!”

By the time Mrs. Mavering had hissed out the last word she had her arm round her boy’s neck and was clutching him, safe and sound after his peril, to her breast; and between her kissing and crying she repeated her accusals and denunciations with violent volubility.

Dan could not have replied to them in that effusion of gratitude and tenderness he felt for his mother’s partisanship; and when she went on in almost the very terms of his self-defence, and told him that he had done as he had because it was easy for him to yield, and he could not imagine a Cat who would put her daughter up to entrapping him into a promise that she knew must break his mother’s heart, he found her so right on the main point that he could not help some question of Mrs. Pasmer in his soul. Could she really have been at the bottom of it all? She was very sly, and she might be very false, and it was certainly she who had first proposed their going abroad together. It looked as if it might be as his mother said, and at any rate it was no time to dispute her, and he did not say a word in behalf of Mrs. Pasmer, whom she continued to rend in a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds till she had to stop breathless.

“Yes! it’s quite as I expected! She did everything she could to trap you into it. She fairly flung that poor girl at you. She laid her plans so that you couldn’t say no — she understood your character from the start! — and then, when it came out by accident, and she saw that she had older heads to deal with, and you were not going to be quite at her mercy, she dropped the mask in an instant, and made Alice break with you. Oh, I could see through her from the beginning! And the next time, Dan, I advise you, as you never suspect anybody yourself, to consult with somebody who doesn’t take people for what they seem, and not to let yourself be flattered out of your sensor, even if you see your father is.”

Mrs. Mavering dropped back on her pillow, and her husband smiled patiently at their daughter.

Dan saw his patient smile and understood it; and the injustice which his father bore made him finally unwilling to let another remain under it. Hard as it was to oppose his mother in anything when she was praising him so sweetly and comforting him in the moment of his need, he pulled himself together to protest: “No, no, mother! I don’t think Mrs. Pasmer was to blame; I don’t believe she had anything to do with it. She’s always stood my friend—”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt she’s made you think so, Dan,” said his mother, with unabated fondness for him; “and you think so because you’re so simple and good, and never suspect evil of any one. It’s this hideous optimism that’s killing everything—”

A certain note in the invalid’s falling voice seemed to warn her hearers of an impending change that could do no one good. Eunice rose hastily and interrupted: “Mother, Mr. Boardman’s here. He came up with Dan. May Minnie come in with him?”

Mrs. Mavering shot a glance of inquiry at Dan, and then let a swift inspection range over all the details of the room, and finally concentrate itself on the silk and lace of her bed, over which she passed a smoothing hand. “Mr. Boardman?” she cried, with instantly recovered amiability. “Of course she may!”

XLVII.

In Boston the rumour of Dan’s broken engagement was followed promptly by a denial of it; both the rumour and the denial were apparently authoritative; but it gives the effect of a little greater sagacity to distrust rumours of all kinds, and most people went to bed, after the teas and dinners and receptions and clubs at which the fact was first debated, in the self-persuasion that it was not so. The next day they found the rumour still persistent; the denial was still in the air too, but it seemed weaker; at the end of the third day it had become a question as to which broke the engagement, and why; by the end of a week it was known that Alice had broken the engagement, but the reason could not be ascertained.

This was not for want of asking, more or less direct. Pasmer, of course, went and came at his club with perfect immunity. Men are quite as curious as women, but they set business bounds to their curiosity, and do not dream of passing these. With women who have no business of their own, and can not quell themselves with the reflection that this thing or that is not their affair, there is no question so intimate that they will not put it to some other woman; perhaps it is not so intimate, or perhaps it will not seem so; at any rate, they chance it. Mrs. Pasmer was given every opportunity to explain the facts to the ladies whom she met, and if she was much afflicted by Alice’s behaviour, she had a measure of consolation in using her skill to baffle the research of her acquaintance. After each encounter of the kind she had the pleasure of reflecting that absolutely nothing more than she meant had become known. The case never became fully known through her; it was the girl herself who told it to Miss Cotton in one of those moments of confidence which are necessary to burdened minds; and it is doubtful if more than two or three people ever clearly understood it; most preferred one or other of several mistaken versions which society finally settled down to.

The paroxysm of self-doubt, almost self-accusal, in which Alice came to Miss Cotton, moved the latter to the deepest sympathy, and left her with misgivings which became an intolerable anguish to her conscience. The child was so afflicted at what she had done, not because she wished to be reconciled with her lover, but because she was afraid she had been unjust, been cruelly impatient and peremptory with him; she seemed to Miss Cotton so absolutely alone and friendless with her great trouble, she was so helpless, so hopeless, she was so anxious to do right, and so fearful she had done wrong, that Miss Cotton would not have been Miss Cotton if she had not taken her in her arms and assured her that in everything she had done she had been sublimely and nobly right, a lesson to all her sex in such matters for ever. She told her that she had always admired her, but that now she idolised her; that she felt like going down on her knees and simply worshipping her.

“Oh, don’t say that, Miss Cotton!” pleaded Alice, pulling away from her embrace, but still clinging to her with her tremulous, cold little hands. “I can’t bear it! I’m wicked and hard you don’t know how bad I am; and I’m afraid of being weak, of doing more harm yet. Oh, I wronged him cruelly in ever letting him get engaged to me! But now what you’ve said will support me. If you think I’ve done right — It must seem strange to you that I should come to you with my trouble instead of my mother; but I’ve been to her, and — and we think alike on so few subjects, don’t you know—”

“Yes, yes; I know, dear!” said Miss Cotton, in the tender folly of her heart, with the satisfaction which every woman feels in being more sufficient to another in trouble than her natural comforters.

“And I wanted to know how you saw it; and now, if you feel as you say, I can never doubt myself again.”

She tempested out of Miss Cotton’s house, all tearful under the veil she had pulled down, and as she shut the door of her coupe, Miss Cotton’s heart jumped into her throat with an impulse to run after her, to recall her, to recant, to modify everything.

From that moment Miss Cotton’s trouble began, and it became a torment that mounted and gave her no peace till she imparted it. She said to herself that she should suffer to the utmost in this matter, and if she spoke to any one, it must not be to same one who had agreed with her about Alice, but to some hard, skeptical nature, some one who would look at it from a totally different point of view, and would punish her for her error, if she had committed an error, in supporting and consoling Alice. All the time she was thinking of Mrs. Brinkley; Mrs. Brinkley had come into her mind at once; but it was only after repeated struggles that she could get the strength to go to her.

Mrs. Brinkley, sacredly pledged to secrecy, listened with a sufficiently dismaying air to the story which Miss Cotton told her in the extremity of her fear and doubt.

“Well,” she said at the end, “have you written to Mr. Mavering?”

“Written to Mr. Mavering?” gasped Miss Cotton.

“Yes — to tell him she wants him back.”

“Wants him back?” Miss Cotton echoed again.

“That’s what she came to you for.”

“Oh, Mrs. Brinkley!” moaned Miss Cotton, and she stared at her in mute reproach.

Mrs. Brinkley laughed. “I don’t say she knew that she came for that; but there’s no doubt that she did; and she went away bitterly disappointed with your consolation and support. She didn’t want anything of the kind — you may comfort yourself with that reflection, Miss Cotton.”

“Mrs. Brinkley,” said Miss Cotton, with a severity which ought to have been extremely effective from so mild a person, “do you mean to accuse that poor child of dissimulation — of deceit — in such — a — a—”

“No!” shouted Mrs. Brinkley; “she didn’t know what she was doing any more than you did; and she went home perfectly heart-broken; and I hope she’ll stay so, for the good of all parties concerned.”

Miss Cotton was so bewildered by Mrs. Brinkley’s interpretation of Alice’s latent motives that she let the truculent hostility of her aspiration pass unheeded. She looked helplessly about, and seemed faint, so that Mrs. Brinkley, without appearing to notice her state, interposed the question of a little sherry. When it had been brought, and Miss Cotton had sipped the glass that trembled in one hand while her emotion shattered a biscuit with the other, Mrs. Brinkley went on: “I’m glad the engagement is broken, and I hope it will never be mended. If what you tell me of her reason for breaking it is true—”

“Oh, I feel so guilty for telling you! I’d no right to! Please never speak of it!” pleaded Miss Cotton.

“Then I feel more than ever that it was all a mistake, and that to help it on again would be a — crime.”

Miss Cotton gave a small jump at the word, as if she had already committed the crime: she had longed to do it.

“Yes; I mean to say that they are better parted than plighted. If matches are made in heaven, I believe some of them are unmade there too. They’re not adapted to each other; there’s too great a disparity.”

“You mean,” began Miss Cotton, from her prepossession of Alice’s superiority, “that she’s altogether his inferior, intellectually and morally.”

“Oh, I can’t admit that!” cried Miss Cotton, glad to have Mrs. Brinkley go too far, and plucking up courage from her excess.

“Intellectually and morally,” repeated Mrs. Brinkley, with the mounting conviction which ladies seem to get from mere persistence. “I saw that girl at Campobello; I watched her.”

“I never felt that you did her justice!” cried Miss Cotton, with the valour of a hen-sparrow. “There was an antipathy.”

“There certainly wasn’t a sympathy, I’m happy to say,” retorted Mrs. Brinkley. “I know her, and I know her family, root and branch. The Pasmers are the dullest and most selfish people in the world.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s her character,” said Miss Cotton, ruffling her feathers defensively.

“Neither do I. She has no fixed character. No girl has. Nobody has. We all have twenty different characters — more characters than gowns — and we put them on and take them off just as often for different occasions. I know you think each person is permanently this or that; but my experience is that half the time they’re the other thing.”

“Then why,” said Miss Cotton, winking hard, as some weak people do when they thick they are making a point, “do you say that Alice is dull and selfish?”

“I don’t — not always, or not simply so. That’s the character of the Pasmer blood, but it’s crossed with twenty different currents in her; and from some body that the Pasmer dulness and selfishness must have driven mad she got a crazy streak of piety; and that’s got mixed up in her again with a nonsensical ideal of duty; and everything she does she not only thinks is right, but she thinks it’s religious, and she thinks it’s unselfish.”

“If you’d seen her, if you’d heard her, this morning,” said Miss Cotton, “you wouldn’t say that, Mrs. Brinkley.”

Mrs. Brinkley refused this with an impatient gesture. “It isn’t what she is now, or seems to be, or thinks she is. It’s what she’s going to finally harden into — what’s going to be her prevailing character. Now Dan Mavering has just the faults that will make such a girl think her own defects are virtues, because they’re so different. I tell you Alice Pasmer has neither the head nor the heart to appreciate the goodness, the loveliness, of a fellow like Dan Mavering.”

“I think she feels his sweetness fully,” urged Miss Cotton. “But she couldn’t endure his uncertainty. With her the truth is first of all things.”

“Then she’s a little goose. If she had the sense to know it, she would know that he might delay and temporise and beat about the bush, but he would be true when it was necessary. I haven’t the least doubt in the world but that poor fellow was going on in perfect security, because he felt that it would be so easy for him to give up, and supposed it would be just as easy for her. I don’t suppose he had a misgiving, and it must have come upon him like a thunder-clap.”

“Don’t you think,” timidly suggested Miss Cotton, “that truth is the first essential in marriage?”

“Of course it is. And if this girl was worthy of Dan Mavering, if she were capable of loving him or anybody else unselfishly, she would have felt his truth even if she couldn’t have seen it. I believe this minute that that manoeuvring, humbugging mother of hers is a better woman, a kinder woman, than she is.”

“Alice says her mother took his part,” said Miss Cotton, with a sigh. “She took your view of it.”

“She’s a sensible woman. But I hope she won’t be able to get him into her toils again,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, recurring to the conventional estimate of Mrs. Pasmer.

“I can’t help feeling — believing — that they’ll come together somehow still,” murmured Miss Cotton. It seemed to her that she had all along wished this; and she tried to remember if what she had said to comfort Alice might be construed as adverse to a reconciliation.

“I hope they won’t, then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “for they couldn’t help being unhappy together, with their temperaments. There’s one thing, Miss Cotton, that’s more essential in marriage than Miss Pasmer’s instantaneous honesty, and that’s patience.”

“Patience with wrong?” demanded Miss Cotton.

“Yes, even with wrong; but I meant patience with each other. Marriage is a perpetual pardon, concession, surrender; it’s an everlasting giving up; that’s the divine thing about it; and that’s just what Miss Passer could never conceive of, because she is self-righteous and conceited and unyielding. She would make him miserable.”

Miss Cotton rose in a bewilderment which did not permit her to go at once. There was something in her mind which she wished to urge, but she could not make it out, though she fingered in vague generalities. When she got a block away from the house it suddenly came to her. Love! If they loved each other, would not all be well with them? She would have liked to run back and put that question to Mrs. Brinkley; but just then she met Brinkley lumbering heavily homeward; she heard his hard breathing from the exertion of bowing to her as he passed.

His wife met him in the hall, and went up to kiss him. He smelt abominably of tobacco smoke.

“Hullo!” said her husband. “What are you after?”

“Nothing,” said his wife, enjoying his joke. “Come in here; I want to tell you how I have just sat upon Miss Cotton.”

XLVIII.

The relations between Dan and his father had always been kindly and trustful; they now became, in a degree that touched and flattered the young fellow, confidential. With the rest of the family there soon ceased to be any reference to his engagement; his sisters were glad, each in her way, to have him back again; and, whatever they may have said between themselves, they said nothing to him about Alice. His mother appeared to have finished with the matter the first night; she had her theory, and she did it justice; and when Mrs. Mavering had once done a thing justice, she did not bring it up again unless somebody disputed it. But nobody had defended Mrs. Pasmer after Dan’s feeble protest in her behalf; Mrs. Mavering’s theory was accepted with obedience if not conviction; the whole affair dropped, except between Dan and his father.

Dan was certainly not so gay as he used to be; he was glad to find that he was not so gay. There had been a sort of mercy in the suddenness of the shock; it benumbed him, and the real stress and pain came during the long weeks that followed, when nothing occurred to vary the situation in any manner; he did not hear a word about Alice from Boston, nor any rumour of her people.

At first he had intended to go back with Boardman and face it out; but there seemed no use in this, and when it came to the point he found it impossible. Boardman went back alone, and he put Dan’s things together in his rooms at Boston and sent them to him, so that Dan remained at home.

He set about helping his father at the business with unaffected docility. He tried not to pose, and he did his best to bear his loss and humiliation with manly fortitude. But his whole life had not set so strongly in one direction that it could be sharply turned aside now, and not in moments of forgetfulness press against the barriers almost to bursting. Now and then, when he came to himself from the wonted tendency, and remembered that Alice and he, who had been all in all to each other, were now nothing, the pain was so sharp, so astonishing, that he could not keep down a groan, which he then tried to turn off with a cough, or a snatch of song, or a whistle, looking wildly round to see if any one had noticed.

Once this happened when his father and he were walking silently home from the works, and his father said, without touching him or showing his sympathy except in his tone of humorously frank recognition, “Does it still hurt a little occasionally, Dan?”

“Yes, sir, it hurts,” said the son; and he turned his face aside, and whistled through his teeth.

“Well, it’s a trial, I suppose,” said his father, with his gentle, soft half-lisp. “But there are greater trials.”

“How, greater?” asked Dan, with sad incredulity. “I’ve lost all that made life worth living; and it’s all my own fault, too.”

“Yes,” said his father; “I think she was a good girl.”

“Good!” cried Dan; the word seemed to choke him.

“Still, I doubt if it’s all your fault.” Dan looked round at him. He added, “And I think it’s perhaps for the best as it is.”

Dan halted, and then said, “Oh, I suppose so,” with dreary resignation, as they walked on.

“Let us go round by the paddock,” said his father, “and see if Pat’s put the horses up yet. You can hardly remember your mother, before she became an invalid, I suppose,” he added, as Dan mechanically turned aside with him from the path that led to the house into that leading to the barn.

“No; I was such a little fellow,” said Dan.

“Women give up a great deal when they marry,” said the elder. “It’s not strange that they exaggerate the sacrifice, and expect more in return than it’s in the nature of men to give them. I should have been sorry to have you marry a woman of an exacting disposition.”

“I’m afraid she was exacting,” said Dan. “But she never asked more than was right.”

“And it’s difficult to do all that’s right,” suggested the elder.

“I’m sure you always have, father,” said the son.

The father did not respond. “I wish you could remember your mother when she was well,” he said. Presently he added, “I think it isn’t best for a woman to be too much in love with her husband.”

Dan took this to himself, and he laughed harshly. “She’s been able to dissemble her love at last.”

His father went on, “Women keep the romantic feeling longer than men; it dies out of us very soon — perhaps too soon.”

“You think I couldn’t have come to time?” asked Dan. “Well, as it’s turned out, I won’t have to.”

“No man can be all a woman wishes him to be,” said his father. “It’s better for the disappointment to come before it’s too late.”

“I was to blame,” said Dan stoutly. “She was all right.”

“You were to blame in the particular instance,” his father answered. “But in general the fault was in her — or her temperament. As long as the romance lasted she might have deluded herself, and believed you were all she imagined you; but romance can’t last, even with women. I don like your faults, and I don’t want you to excuse them to yourself. I don’t like your chancing things, and leaving them to come out all right of themselves; but I’ve always tried to make you children see all your qualities in their true proportion and relation.”

“Yes; I know that, sir,” said Dan.

“Perhaps,” continued his father, as they swung easily along, shoulder to shoulder, “I may have gone too far in that direction because I was afraid that you might take your mother too seriously in the other — that you might not understand that she judged you from her nerves and not her convictions. It’s part of her malady, of her suffering, that her inherited Puritanism clouds her judgment, and makes her see all faults as of one size and equally damning. I wish you to know that she was not always so, but was once able to distinguish differences in error, and to realise that evil is of ill-will.”

“Yes; I know that,” said Dan. “She is now — when she feels well.”

“Harm comes from many things, but evil is of the heart. I wouldn’t have you condemn yourself too severely for harm that you didn’t intend — that’s remorse — that’s insanity; and I wouldn’t have you fall under the condemnation of another’s invalid judgment.”

“Thank you, father,” said Dan.

They had come up to the paddock behind the barn, and they laid their arms on the fence while they looked over at the horses, which were still there. The beasts, in their rough winter coats, some bedaubed with frozen clots of the mud in which they had been rolling earlier in the afternoon, stood motionless in the thin, keen breeze that crept over the hillside from the March sunset, and blew their manes and tails out toward Dan and his father. Dan’s pony sent him a gleam of recognition from under his frowsy bangs, but did not stir.

“Bunch looks like a caterpillar,” he said, recalling the time when his father had given him the pony; he was a boy then, and the pony was as much to him, it went through his mind, as Alice had ever been. Was it all a jest, an irony? he asked himself.

“He’s getting pretty old,” said his father. “Let’s see: you were only twelve.”

“Ten,” said Dan. “We’ve had him thirteen years.”

Some of the horses pricked up their ears at the sound of their voices. One of them bit another’s neck; the victim threw up his heels and squealed.

Pat called from the stable, “Heigh, you divils!”

“I think he’d better take them in,” said Dan’s father; and he continued, as if it were all the same subject, “I hope you’ll have seen something more of the world before you fall in love the next time.”

“Thank you; there won’t be any next time. But do you consider the world such a school of morals; then? I supposed it was a very bad place.”

“We seem to have been all born into it,” said the father. He lifted his arms from the fence, and Dan mechanically followed him into the stable. A warm, homely smell of hay and of horses filled the place; a lantern glimmered, a faint blot, in the loft where Pat was pitching some hay forward to the edge of the boards; the naphtha gas weakly flared from the jets beside the harness-room, whence a smell of leather issued and mingled with the other smell. The simple, earthy wholesomeness of the place appealed to Dan and comforted him. The hay began to tumble from the loft with a pleasant rustling sound.

His father called up to Pat, “I think you’d better take the horses in now.”

“Yes, sir: I’ve got the box-stalls ready for ‘em.”

Dan remembered how he and Eunice used to get into the box-stall with his pony, and play at circus with it; he stood up on the pony, and his sister was the ring-master. The picture of his careless childhood reflected a deeper pathos upon his troubled present, and he sighed again.

His father said, as they moved on through the barn: “Some of the best people I’ve ever known were what were called worldly people. They are apt to be sincere, and they have none of the spiritual pride, the conceit of self-righteousness, which often comes to people who are shut up by conscience or circumstance to the study of their own motives and actions.”

“I don’t think she was one of that kind,” said Dan.

“Oh, I don’t know that she was. But the chances of happiness, of goodness, would be greater with a less self-centred person — for you.”

“Ah, Yes! For me!” said Dan bitterly. “Because I hadn’t it in me to be frank with her. With a man like me, a woman had better be a little scampish, too! Father, I could get over the loss; she might have died, and I could have got over that; but I can’t get over being to blame.”

“I don’t think I’d indulge in any remorse,” said his father. “There’s nothing so useless, so depraving, as that. If you see you’re wrong, it’s for your warning, not for your destruction.”

Dan was not really feeling very remorseful; he had never felt that he was much to blame; but he had an intellectual perception of the case, and he thought that he ought to feel remorseful; it was this persuasion that he took for an emotion. He continued to look very disconsolate.

“Come,” said his father, touching his arm, “I don’t want you to brood upon these things. It can do no manner of good. I want you to go to New York next week and look after that Lafflin process. If it’s what he thinks — if he can really cast his brass patterns without air-holes — it will revolutionise our business. I want to get hold of him.”

The Portuguese cook was standing in the basement door which they passed at the back of the house. He saluted father and son with a glittering smile.

“Hello, Joe!” said Dan.

“Ah, Joe!” said his father; he touched his hat to the cook, who snatched his cap off.

“What a brick you are, father!” thought Dan. His heart leaped at the notion of getting away from Ponkwasset; he perceived how it had been irking him to stay. “If you think I could manage it with Lafflin—”

“Oh, I think you could. He’s another slippery chap.”

Dan laughed for pleasure and pain at his father’s joke.

XLIX.

In New York Dan found that Lafflin had gone to Washington to look up something in connection with his patent. In his eagerness to get away from home, Dan had supposed that his father meant to make a holiday for him, and he learned with a little surprise that he was quite in earnest about getting hold of the invention he wrote home of Lafflin’s absence; and he got a telegram in reply ordering him to follow on to Washington.

The sun was shining warm on the asphalt when he stepped out of the Pennsylvania Depot with his bag in his hand, and put it into the hansom that drove up for him. The sky overhead was of an intense blue that made him remember the Boston sky as pale and grey; when the hansom tilted out into the Avenue he had a joyous glimpse of the White House; of the Capitol swimming like a balloon in the cloudless air. A keen March breeze swept the dust before him, and through its veil the classic Treasury Building showed like one edifice standing perfect amid ruin represented by the jag-tooth irregularities of the business architecture along the wide street.

He had never been in Washington before, and he had a confused sense of having got back to Rome, which he remembered from his boyish visit. Throughout his stay he seemed to be coming up against the facade of the Temple of Neptune; but it was the Patent Office, or the Treasury Building, or the White House, and under the gay Southern sky this reversion to the sensations of a happier time began at once, and made itself a lasting relief. He felt a lift in his spirits from the first. They gave him a room at Wormley’s, where the chairs comported themselves as self-respectfully upon two or three legs as they would have done at Boston upon four; the cooking was excellent, and a mercenary welcome glittered from all the kind black faces around him. After the quiet of Ponkwasset and the rush of New York, the lazy ease of the hotel pleased him; the clack of boots over its pavements, the clouds of tobacco smoke, the Southern and Western accents, the spectacle of people unexpectedly encountering and recognising each other in the office and the dining-room, all helped to restore him to a hopefuller mood. Without asking his heart too curiously why, he found it lighter; he felt that he was still young.

In the weather he had struck a cold wave, and the wind was bitter in the streets, but they were full of sun; he found the grass green in sheltered places, and in one of the Circles he plucked a blossomed spray from an adventurous forceythia. This happened when he was walking from Wormley’s to the Arlington by a roundabout way of his own involuntary invention, and he had the flowers in his button-hole when Lafflin was pointed out to him in the reading room there, and he introduced himself. Lafflin had put his hat far back on his head, and was intensely chewing a toothpick, with an air of rapture from everything about him. He seemed a very simple soul to Dan’s inexperience of men, and the young fellow had no difficulty in committing him to a fair conditional arrangement. He was going to stay some days in Washington, and he promised other interviews, so that Dan thought it best to stay too. He used a sheet of the Arlington letter-paper in writing his father of what he had done; and then, as Lafflin had left him, he posted his letter at the clerk’s desk, and wandered out through a corridor different from that which he had come in by. It led by the door of the ladies parlour, and at the sound of women’s voices Dan halted. For no other reason than that such voices always irresistibly allured him, he went in, putting on an air of having come to look for some one. There were two or three groups of ladies receiving friends in different parts of the room. At the window a girl’s figure silhouetted itself against the keen light, and as he advanced into the room, peering about, it turned with a certain vividness that seemed familiar. This young lady, whoever she was, had the advantage of Dan in seeing him with the light on his face, and he was still in the dark about her, when she advanced swiftly upon him, holding out her hand.

“You don’t seem to know your old friends, Mr. Mavering,” and the manly tones left him no doubt.

He felt a rush of gladness, and he clasped her hand and clung to it as if he were not going to let it go again, bubbling out incoherencies of pleasure at meeting her. “Why, Miss Anderson! You here? What a piece of luck! Of course I couldn’t see you against the window — make you out! But something looked familiar — and the way you turned! And when you started toward me! I’m awfully glad! When — where are you — that is—”

Miss Anderson kept laughing with him, and bubbled back that she was very glad too, and she was staying with her aunt in that hotel, and they had been there a month, and didn’t he think Washington was charming? But it was too bad he had just got there with that blizzard. The weather had been perfectly divine till the day before yesterday.

He took the spray of forceythia out of his buttonhole. “I can believe it. I found this in one, of the squares, and I think it belongs to you.” He offered it with a bow and a laugh, and she took it in the same humour.

“What is the language of forceythia?” she asked.

“It has none — only expressive silence, you know.”

A middle-aged lady came in, and Miss Anderson said, “My aunt, Mr. Mavering.”

“Mr. Mavering will hardly remember me,” said the lady, giving him her hand. He protested that he should indeed, but she had really made but a vague impression upon him at Campobello. He knew that she was there with Miss Anderson; he had been polite to her as he was to all women; but he had not noticed her much, and in his heart he had a slight for her, as compared with the Boston people he was more naturally thrown with; he certainly had not remembered that she was a little hard of hearing.

Miss Van Hook was in a steel-grey effect of dress, and, she had carried this up into her hair, of which she worn two short vertical curls on each temple.

She did not sit down, and Dan perceived that the ladies were going out. In her tailor-made suit of close-fitting serge and her Paris bonnet, carried like a crest on her pretty little head, Miss Anderson was charming. She had a short veil that came across the base of her lively nose, and left her mouth and chin to make the most of themselves, unprejudiced by its irregularity.

Dan felt it a hardship to part with them, but he prepared to take himself off. Miss Anderson asked him how long he was to be in Washington, and said he must come to see them; they meant to stay two weeks yet, and then they were going to Old Point Comfort; they had their rooms engaged.

He walked down to their carriage with the ladies and put them into it, and Miss Anderson still kept him talking there.

Her aunt said: “Why shouldn’t you come with us, Mr. Mavering? We’re going to Mrs. Secretary Miller’s reception.”

Dan gave himself a glance. “I don’t know — if you want me?”

“We want you,” said Miss Anderson. “Very well, then, I’ll go.”

He got in, and they began rolling over that smooth Washington asphalt which makes talk in a carriage as easy as in a drawing-room. Dan kept saying to himself, “Now she’s going to bring up Campobello;” but Miss Anderson never recurred to their former meeting, and except for the sense of old acquaintance which was manifest in her treatment of him he might have thought that they had never met before. She talked of Washington and its informal delights; and of those plans which her aunt had made, like every one who spends a month in Washington, to spend all the remaining winters of her life there.

It seemed to Dan that Miss Anderson was avoiding Campobello on his account; he knew from what Alice had told him that there had been much surmise about their affair after he had left the island, and he suspected that Miss Anderson thought the subject was painful to him. He wished to reassure her. He asked at the first break in the talk about Washington, “How are the Trevors?”

“Oh, quite well,” she said, promptly availing herself of the opening. “Have you seen any of our Campobello friends lately in Boston?”

“No; I’ve been at home for the last month — in the country.” He scanned her face to see if she knew anything of his engagement. But she seemed honestly ignorant of everything since Campobello; she was not just the kind of New York girl who would visit in Boston, or have friends living there; probably she had never heard of his engagement. Somehow this seemed to simplify matters for Dan. She did not ask specifically after the Pasmers; but that might have been because of the sort of break in her friendship with Alice after that night at the Trevors’; she did not ask specifically after Mrs. Brinkley or any of the others.

At Mrs. Secretary Miller’s door there was a rapid arrival and departure of carriages, of coupes, of hansoms, and of herdics, all managed by a man in plain livery, who opened and shut the doors, and sent the drivers off without the intervention of a policeman; it is the genius of Washington, which distinguishes it from every other capital, from every other city, to make no show of formality, of any manner of constraint anywhere. People were swarming in and out; coming and going on foot as well as by carriage. The blandest of coloured uncles received their cards in the hall and put them into a vast tray heaped up with pasteboard, smiling affectionately upon them as if they had done him a favour.

“Don’t you like them?” asked Dan of Miss Anderson; he meant the Southern negroes.

“I adoye them,” she responded, with equal fervour. “You must study some new types here for next summer,” she added.

Dan laughed and winced too. “Yes!” Then he said solemnly, “I am not going to Campobello next summer.”

They felt into a stream of people tending toward an archway between the drawing-rooms, where Mrs. Secretary Miller stood with two lady friends who were helping her receive. They smiled wearily but kindly upon the crowd, for whom the Secretary’s wife had a look of impartial hospitality. She could not have known more than one in fifty; and she met them all with this look at first, breaking into incredulous recognition when she found a friend. “Don’t go away yet,” she said cordially, to Miss Van Hook and her niece, and she held their hands for a moment with a gentle look of relief and appeal which included Dan. “Let me introduce you to Mrs. Tolliver and to Miss Dixon.”

These ladies said that it was not necessary in regard to Miss Anderson and Miss Van Hook; and as the crowd pushed them on, Dan felt that they had been received with distinction.

The crowd expressed the national variety of rich and poor, plain and fashionable, urbane and rustic; they elbowed and shouldered each other upon a perfect equality in a place where all were as free to come as to the White House, and they jostled quaint groups of almond-eyed legations in the yellows and purples of the East, who looked dreamily on as if puzzled past all surmise by the scene. Certain young gentlemen with the unmistakable air of being European or South American attaches found their way about on their little feet, which the stalwart boots of the republican masses must have imperilled; and smiled with a faint diplomatic superiority, not visibly admitted, but all the same indisputable. Several of these seemed to know Miss Anderson, and took her presentation of Mavering with exaggerated effusion.

“I want to introduce you to my cousin over yonder,” she said, getting rid of a minute Brazilian under-secretary, and putting her hand on Dan’s arm to direct him: “Mrs. Justice Averill.”

Miss Van Hook, keeping her look of severe vigilance, really followed her energetic niece, who took the lead, as a young lady must whenever she and her chaperon meet on equal terms.

Mrs. Justice Averill, who was from the far West somewhere, received Dan with the ease of the far East, and was talking London and Paris to him before the end of the third minute. It gave Dan a sense of liberation, of expansion; he filled his lungs with the cosmopolitan air in a sort of intoxication; without formulating it, he felt, with the astonishment which must always attend the Bostonian’s perception of the fact, that there is a great social life in America outside of Boston. At Campobello he had thought Miss Anderson a very jolly girl, bright, and up to all sorts of things; but in the presence of the portable Boston there he could not help regarding her with a sort of tolerance which he now blushed for; he thought he had been a great ass. She seemed to know all sorts of nice people, and she strove with generous hospitality to make him have a good time. She said it was Cabinet Day, and that all the secretaries’ wives were receiving, and she told him he had better make the rounds with them. He assented very willingly, and at six o’clock he was already so much in the spirit of this free and simple society, so much opener and therefore so much wiser than any other, that he professed a profound disappointment with the two or three Cabinet ladies whose failure to receive brought his pleasure to a premature close.

“But I suppose you’re going to Mrs. Whittington’s to-night!” Miss Anderson said to him, as they drove up to Wormley’s, where she set him down. Miss Van Hook had long ceased to say anything; Dan thought her a perfect duenna. “You know you can go late there,” she added.

“No, I can’t go at all,” said Dan. “I don’t know them.”

“They’re New England people,” urged Miss Anderson; as if to make him try to think that he was asked to Mrs. Whittington’s.

“I don’t know more than half the population of New England,” said Dan, with apparent levity, but real forlornness.

“If you’d like to go — if you’re sure you’ve no other engagement—”

“Oh, I’m certain of that?”

“ — we would come for you.”

“Do!”

“At half-past ten, then.”

Miss Anderson explained to her aunt, who cordially confirmed her invitation, and they both shook hands with him upon it, and he backed out of the carriage with a grin of happiness on his face; it remained there while he wrote out the order for his dinner, which they require at Wormley’s in holograph. The waiter reflected his smile with ethnical warm-heartedness. For a moment Dan tried to think what it was he had forgotten; he thought it was some other dish; then he remembered that it was his broken heart. He tried to subdue himself; but there was something in the air of the place, the climate, perhaps, or a pleasant sense of its facile social life, that kept him buoyant in spite of himself. He went out after dinner, and saw part of a poor play, and returned in time to dress for his appointment with Miss Anderson. Her aunt was with her, of course; she seemed to Dan more indefatigable than she was by day. He could not think her superfluous; and she was very good-natured. She made little remarks full of conventional wisdom, and appealed to his judgment on several points as they drove along. When they came to a street lamp where she could see him, he nodded and said yes, or no, respectfully. Between times he talked with Miss Anderson, who lectured him upon Washington society, and prepared him for the difference he was to find between Mrs. Whittington’s evening of invited guests and the Cabinet ladies’ afternoon of volunteer guests.

“Volunteer guests is good,” he laughed. “Do you mean that anybody can go?”

“Anybody that is able to be about. This is Cabinet Day. There’s a Supreme Court Day and a Senators’ Day, and a Representatives’ Day. Do you mean to say you weren’t going to call upon your Senator?”

“I didn’t know I had any.”

“Neither did I till I came here. But you’ve got two; everybody’s got two. And the President’s wife receives three times a week, and the President has two or three days. They say the public days at the White House are great fun. I’ve been to some of the invited, or semi-invited or official evenings.”

He could not see that difference from the great public receptions which Miss Anderson had promised him at Mrs. Whittington’s, though he pretended afterward that he had done so. The people were more uniformly well dressed, there were not so many of them, and the hostess was sure of knowing her acquaintances at first glance; but there was the same ease, the same unconstraint, the same absence of provincial anxiety which makes a Washington a lighter and friendlier London. There were rather more sallow attaches; in their low-cut white waistcoats, with small brass buttons, they moved more consciously about, and looked weightier personages than several foreign ministers who were present.

Dan was soon lost from the side of Miss Anderson, who more and more seemed to him important socially. She seemed, in her present leadership; to know more of life, than he; to be maturer. But she did not abuse her superiority; she kept an effect of her last summer’s friendliness for him throughout. Several times, finding herself near him; she introduced him to people.

Guests kept arriving till midnight. Among the latest, when Dan had lost himself far from Boston in talk with a young lady from Richmond, who spoke with a slur of her vowels that fascinated him, came Mr. and Mrs. Brinkley. He felt himself grow pale and inattentive to his pretty Virginian. That accent of Mrs. Brinkley’s recalled him to his history. He hoped that she would not see him; but in another moment he was greeting her with a warmth which Bostonians seldom show in meeting at Boston.

“When did you come to Washington?” she asked, trying to keep her consciousness out of her eyes, which she let dwell kindly upon him.

“Day before yesterday — no, yesterday. It seems a month, I’ve seen and done so much,” he said, with his laugh. “Miss Anderson’s been showing me the whole of Washington society. Have you been here long?”

“Since morning,” said Mrs. Brinkley. And she added, “Miss Anderson?”

“Yes — Campobello, don’t you know?”

“Oh yes. Is she here to-night?”

“I came with her and her aunt.”

“Oh yes.”

“How is all Boston?” asked Dan boldly.

“I don’t know; I’m just going down to Old Point Comfort to ask. Every other house on the Back Bay has been abandoned for the Hygeia.” Mrs. Brinkley stopped, and then she asked. “Are you just up from there?”

“No; but I don’t know but I shall go.”

“Hello, Mavering!” said Mr. Brinkley, coming up and taking his hand into his fat grasp. “On your way to Fortress Monroe? Better come with us. Why; Munt!”

He turned to greet this other Bostonian, who had hardly expressed his joy at meeting with his fellow-townsmen when the hostess rustled softly up, and said, with the irony more or less friendly, which everybody uses in speaking of Boston, or recognising the intellectual pre-eminence of its people, “I’m not going to let you keep this feast of reason all to your selves. I want you to leaven the whole lump,” and she began to disperse them, and to introduce them about right and left.

Dan tried to find his Virginian again, but she was gone. He found Miss Anderson; she was with her aunt. “Shall we be tearing you away?” she asked.

“Oh no. I’m quite ready to go.”

His nerves were in a tremble. Those Boston faces and voices had brought it all back again; it seemed as if he had met Alice. He was silent and incoherent as they drove home, but Miss Anderson apparently did not want to talk much, and apparently did not notice his reticence.

He fell asleep with the pang in his heart which had been there so often.

When Dan came down to breakfast he found the Brinkleys at a pleasant place by one of the windows, and after they had exchanged a pleased surprise with him that they should all happen to be in the same hotel, they asked him to sit at their table.

There was a bright sun shining, and the ache was gone out of Dan’s heart. He began to chatter gaily with Mrs. Brinkley about Washington.

“Oh, better come on to Fortress Monroe,” said her husband. “Better come on with us.”

“No, I can’t just yet,” said Dan. “I’ve got some business here that will keep me for awhile. Perhaps I may run down there a little later.”

“Miss Anderson seems to have a good deal of business in Washington too,” observed Brinkley, with some hazy notion of saying a pleasant rallying thing to the young man. He wondered at the glare his wife gave him. With those panned oysters before him he had forgotten all about Dan’s love affair with Miss Pasmer.

Mrs. Brinkley hastened to make the mention of Miss Anderson as impersonal as possible.

“It was so nice to meet her again. She is such an honest, wholesome creature, and so bright and full of sense. She always made me think of the broad daylight. I always liked that girl.”

“Yes; isn’t she jolly?” said Dan joyously. “She seems to know everybody here. It’s a great piece of luck for me. They’re going to take a house in Washington next winter.”

“Yes; I know that stage,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “Her aunt’s an amusingly New-York respectability. I don’t think you’d find just such Miss Mitford curls as hers in all Boston.”

“Yes, they are like the portraits, aren’t they?” said Dan; delighted. “She’s very nice, don’t you think?”

“Very. But Miss Anderson is more than that. I was disposed to be critical of her at Campobello for a while, but she wore extremely well. All at once you found yourself admiring her uncommon common-sense.

“Yes. That’s just it,” cried Dan. “She is so sensible!”

“I think she’s very pretty,” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“Well, her nose,” suggested Dan. “It seems a little capricious.”

“It’s a trifle bizarre, I suppose. But what beautiful eyes! And her figure! I declare that girl’s carriage is something superb.”

“Yes, she has a magnificent walk.”

“Walks with her carriage,” mused Brinkley aloud.

His wife did not regard him. “I don’t know what Miss Anderson’s principles are, but her practices are perfect. I never knew her do an unkind or shabby thing. She seems very good and very wise. And that deep voice of hers has such a charm. It’s so restful. You feel as if you could repose upon it for a thousand years. Well! You will get down before we leave?”

“Yes, I will,” said Dan. “I’m here after a man who’s after a patent, and as soon as I can finish up my business with him I believe I will run down to Fortress Monroe.”

“This eleven-o’clock train will get you there at six,” said Brinkley. “Better telegraph for your rooms.”

“Or, let us know,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “and we’ll secure them for you.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Dan.

He went away, feeling that Mrs. Brinkley was the pleasantest woman he ever met. He knew that she had talked Miss Anderson so fully in order to take away the implication of her husband’s joke, and he admired her tact. He thought of this as he loitered along the street from Wormley’s to the Arlington, where he was going to find Miss Anderson, by an appointment of the night before, and take a walk with her; and thinking of tact made him think of Mrs. Pasmer. Mrs. Pasmer was full of tact; and how kind she had always been to him! She had really been like a mother to him; he was sure she had understood him; he believed she had defended him; with a futility of which he felt the pathos, he made her defend him now to Alice. Alice was very hard and cold, as when he saw her last; her mother’s words fell upon her as upon a stone; even Mrs. Pasmer’s tears, which Dan made her shed, had no effect upon the haughty girl. Not that he cared now.

The blizzard of the previous days had whirled away; the sunshine lay still, with a warm glisten and sparkle, on the asphalt which seemed to bask in it, and which it softened to the foot. He loitered by the gate of the little park or plantation where the statue of General Jackson is riding a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, and looked over at the French-Italian classicism of the White House architecture with a pensive joy at finding pleasure in it, and then he went on to the Arlington.

Miss Anderson was waiting for him in the parlour, and they went a long walk up the avenues and across half the alphabet in the streets, and through the pretty squares and circles, where the statues were sometimes beautiful and always picturesque; and the sparrows made a vernal chirping in the naked trees and on the green grass. In two or three they sat down on the iron benches and rested.

They talked and talked — about the people they knew, and of whom they found that they thought surprisingly alike, and about themselves, whom they found surprisingly alike in a great many things, and then surprisingly unlike. Dan brought forward some points of identity which he, and Alice had found in themselves; it was just the same with Miss Anderson. She found herself rather warm with the seal-skin sacque she had put on; she let him carry it on his arm while they walked, and then lay it over her shoulders when they sat down. He felt a pang of self-reproach, as if he had been inconstant to Alice. This was an old habit of feeling, formed during the months of their engagement, when, at her inspiration, he was always bringing himself to book about something. He replied to her bitterly, in the colloquy which began to hold itself in his mind, and told her that she had no claim upon him now; that if his thoughts wandered from her it was her fault, not his; that she herself had set them free. But in fact he was like all young men, with a thousand, potentialities of loving. There was no aspect of beauty that did not tenderly move him; he could not help a soft thrill at the sight of any pretty shape, the sound of any piquant voice; and Alice had merely been the synthesis of all that was most charming to this fancy. This is a truth which it is the convention of the poets and the novelists to deny; but it is also true that she might have remained the sum of all that was loveliest if she would; or if she could.

It was chiefly because she would not or could not that his glance recognised the charm of Miss Anderson’s back hair, both in its straying gossamer and in the loose mass in which it was caught up under her hat, when he laid her sacque on her shoulders. They met that afternoon at a Senator’s, and in the house of a distinguished citizen, to whose wife Dan had been presented at Mrs. Whittington’s, and who had somehow got his address, and sent him a card for her evening. They encountered here with a jocose old friendliness, and a profession of being tired of always meeting Miss Anderson and Mr. Mavering. He brought her salad and ice, and they made an appointment for another walk in the morning, if it was fine.

He carried her some flowers. A succession of fine days followed, and they walked every morning. Sometimes Dan was late, and explained that it was his patent-right man had kept him. She was interested in the patent-right man, whom Dan began to find not quite so simple as at first, but she was not exacting with him about his want of punctuality; she was very easy-going; she was not always ready herself. When he began to beat about the bush, to talk insincerities, and to lose himself in intentionless plausibilities, she waited with serene patience for him to have done, and met him on their habitual ground of frankness and reality as if he had not left it. He got to telling her all his steps with his patent-right man, who seemed to be growing mote and more slippery, and who presently developed a demand for funds. Then she gave him some very shrewd, practical advice, and told him to go right into the hotel office and telegraph to his father while she was putting on her bonnet.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I thought of doing.” But he admired her for advising him; he said to himself that Miss Anderson was the kind of girl his father would admire. She was good, and she was of the world too; that was what his father meant. He imagined himself arriving home and saying, “Well father, you know that despatch I sent you, about Lafflin’s wanting money?” and telling him about Miss Anderson. Then he fancied her acquainted with his sisters and visiting them, and his father more and more fond of her, and perhaps in declining health, and eager to see his son settled in life; and he pictured himself telling her that he had done with love for ever, but if she could accept respect, fidelity, gratitude, he was ready to devote his life to her. She refused him, but they always remained good friends and comrades; she married another, perhaps Boardman, while Dan was writing out his telegram, and he broke into whispered maledictions on his folly, which attracted the notice of the operator.

One morning when he sent up his name to Miss Anderson, whom he did not find in the hotel parlour, the servant came back with word that Miss Van Hook would like to have him come up to their rooms. But it was Miss Anderson who met him at the door.

“It seemed rather formal to send you word that Miss Van Hook was indisposed, and Miss Anderson would be unable to walk this morning, and I thought perhaps you’d rather come up and get my regrets in person. And I wanted you to see our view.”

She led the way to the window for it, but they did not look at it, though they sat down there apparently for the purpose. Dan put his hat beside his chair, and observed some inattentive civilities in inquiring after Miss Van Hook’s health, and in hearing that it was merely a bad headache, one of a sort in which her niece hated to leave her to serve herself with the wet compresses which Miss Van Hook always bore on her forehead for it.

“One thing: it’s decided us to be off for Fortress Monroe at last. We shall go by the boat to-morrow, if my aunt’s better.”

“To-morrow?” said Dan. “What’s to become of me when you’re gone?”

“Oh, we shall not take the whole population with us,” suggested Miss Anderson.

“I wish you would take me. I told Mrs. Brinkley I would come while she was there, but I’m afraid I can’t get off. Lafflin is developing into all sorts of strange propositions.”

“I think you’d better look out for that man,” said Miss Anderson.

“Oh, I do nothing without consulting my father. But I shall miss you.”

“Thank you,” said the girl gravely.

“I don’t mean in a business capacity only.”

They both laughed, and Dan looked about the room, which he found was a private hotel parlour, softened to a more domestic effect by the signs of its prolonged occupation by two refined women. On a table stood a leather photograph envelope with three cabinet pictures in it. Along the top lay a spray of withered forceythia. Dan’s wandering eyes rested on it. Miss Anderson went and softly closed the door opening into the next room.

“I was afraid our talking might disturb my aunt,” she said, and on her way back to him she picked up the photograph case and brought it to the light. “These are my father and mother. We live at Yonkers; but I’m with my aunt a good deal of the time in town — even when I’m at home.” She laughed at her own contradictory statement, and put the case back without explaining the third figure — a figure in uniform. Dan conjectured a military brother, or from her indifference perhaps a militia brother, and then forgot about him. But the partial Yonkers residence accounted for traits of unconventionality in Miss Anderson which he had not been able to reconcile with the notion of an exclusively New York breeding. He felt the relief, the sympathy, the certainty of intelligence which every person whose life has been partly spent in the country feels at finding that a suspected cockney has also had the outlook into nature and simplicity.

On the Yonkers basis they became more intimate, more personal, and Dan told her about Ponkwasset Falls and his mother and sisters; he told her about his father, and she said she should like to see his father; she thought he must be like her father.

All at once, and for no reason that he could think of afterward, except, perhaps, the desire to see the case with her eyes, he began to tell her of his affair with Alice, and how and why it was broken off; he told the whole truth in regard to that, and did not spare himself.

She listened without once speaking, but without apparent surprise at the confidence, though she may have felt surprised. At times she looked as if her thoughts were away from what he was saying.

He ended with, “I’m sure I don’t know why I’ve told you all this. But I wanted you to know about me. The worst.”

Miss Anderson said, looking down, “I always thought she was a very conscientious giyl.” Then after a pause, in which she seemed to be overcoming an embarrassment in being obliged to speak of another in such a conviction, “I think she was very moybid. She was like ever so many New England giyls that I’ve met. They seem to want some excuse for suffering; and they must suffer even if it’s through somebody else. I don’t know; they’re romantic, New England giyls are; they have too many ideals.”

Dan felt a balm in this; he too had noticed a superfluity of ideals in Alice, he had borne the burden of realising some of them; they all seemed to relate in objectionable degree to his perfectionation. So he said gloomily, “She was very good. And I was to blame.”

“Oh yes!” said Miss Anderson, catching her breath in a queer way; “she seyved you right.”

She rose abruptly, as if she heard her aunt speak, and Dan perceived that he had been making a long call.

He went away dazed and dissatisfied; he knew now that he ought not to have told Miss Anderson about his affair, unless he meant more by his confidence than he really did — unless he meant to follow it up.

He took leave of her, and asked her to make his adieux to her aunt; but the next day he came down to the boat to see them off. It seemed to him that their interview had ended too hastily; he felt sore and restless over it; he hoped that something more conclusive might happen. But at the boat Miss Anderson and her aunt were inseparable. Miss Van Hook said she hoped they should soon see him at the Hygeia, and he replied that he was not sure that he should be able to come after all.

Miss Anderson called something after him as he turned from them to go ashore. He ran back eagerly to know what it was. “Better lookout for that Mr. Lafflin of yours,” she repeated.

“Oh! oh yes,” he said, indefinitely disappointed. “I shall keep a sharp eye on him.” He was disappointed, but he could not have said what he had hoped or expected her to say. He was humbled before himself for having told Miss Anderson about his affair with Alice, and had wished she would say something that he might scramble back to his self-esteem upon. He had told her all that partly from mere weakness, from his longing for the sympathy which he was always so ready to give, and partly from the willingness to pose before her as a broken heart, to dazzle her by the irony and persiflage with which he could treat such a tragical matter; but he could not feel that he had succeeded. The sum of her comment had been that Alice had served him right. He did not know whether she really believed that or merely said it to punish him for some reason; but he could never let it be the last word. He tingled as he turned to wave his handkerchief to her on the boat, with the suspicion that she was laughing at him; and he could not console himself with any hero of a novel who had got himself into just such a box. There were always circumstances, incidents, mitigations, that kept the hero still a hero, and ennobled the box into an unjust prison cell.

L.

On the long sunny piazza of the Hygeia Mrs. Brinkley and Miss Van Hook sat and talked in a community of interest which they had not discovered during the summer before at Campobello, and with an equality of hearing which the sound of the waves washing almost at their feet established between them. In this pleasant noise Miss Van Hook heard as well as any one, and Mrs. Brinkley gradually realised that it was the trouble of having to lift her voice that had kept her from cultivating a very agreeable acquaintance before. The ladies sat in a secluded corner, wearing light wraps that they had often found comfortable at Campobello in August, and from time to time attested to each other their astonishment that they needed no more at Old Point in early April.

They did this not only as a just tribute to the amiable climate, but as a relief from the topic which had been absorbing them, and to which they constantly returned.

“No,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a sort of finality, “I think it is the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. He is bearing it in a very manly way, but I fancy he has felt it deeply, poor fellow. He’s never been in Boston since, and I don’t believe he’d come here if he’d any idea how many Boston people there were in the hotel — we swarm! It would be very painful to him.”

“Yes,” said Miss Van Hook, “young people seem to feel those things.”

“Of course he’s going to get over it. That’s what young people do too. At his age he can’t help being caught with every pretty face and every pretty figure, even in the midst of his woe, and it’s only a question of time till he seizes some pretty hand and gets drawn out of it altogether.”

“I think that would be the case with my niece, too,” said Miss Van Hook, “if she wasn’t kept in it by a sense of loyalty. I don’t believe she really dares much for Lieutenant Willing any more; but he sees no society where he’s stationed, of course, and his constancy is a — a rebuke and a — a — an incentive to her. They were engaged a long time ago just after he left West Point — and we’ve always been in hopes that he would be removed to some post where he could meet other ladies and become interested in some one else. But he never has, and so the affair remains. It’s most undesirable they should marry, and in the meantime she won’t break it off, and it’s spoiling her chances in life.”

“It is too bad,” sighed Mrs. Brinkley, “but of course you can do nothing. I see that.”

“No, we can do nothing. We have tried everything. I used to think it was because she was so dull there at Yonkers with her family, and brooded upon the one idea all the time, that she could not get over it; and at first it did seem when she came to me that she would get over it. She is very fond of gaiety — of young men’s society, and she’s had plenty of little flirtations that didn’t mean anything, and never amounted to anything. Every now and then a letter would come from the wilds where he was stationed, and spoil it all. She seemed to feel a sort of chivalrous obligation because he was so far off and helpless and lonely.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “What a pity she couldn’t be made to feel that that didn’t deepen the obligation at all.”

“I’ve tried to make her,” said Miss Van Hook, “and I’ve been everywhere with her. One winter we were up the Nile, and another in Nice, and last winter we were in Rome. She met young men everywhere, and had offers upon offers; but it was of no use. She remained just the same, and till she met Mr. Mavering in Washington I don’t believe—”

Miss Van Hook stopped, and Mrs. Brinkley said, “And yet she always seemed to me particularly practical and level-headed — as the men say.”

“So she is. But she is really very romantic about some things; and when it comes to a matter of that kind, girls are about all alike, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley hopelessly, and both ladies looked out over the water, where the waves came rolling in one after another to waste themselves on the shore as futilely as if they had been lives.

In the evening Miss Anderson got two letters from the clerk, at the hour when the ladies all flocked to his desk with the eagerness for letters which is so engaging in them. One she pulled open and glanced at with a sort of impassioned indifference; the other she read in one intense moment, and then ran it into her pocket, and with her hand still on it hurried vividly flushing to her room, and read and read it again with constantly mounting emotion.

“WORMLEY’s HOTEL, Washington, April 7, 188-.

“DEAR MISS ANDERSON, — I have been acting on your parting advice to look out for that Mr. Lafflin of mine, and I have discovered that he is an unmitigated scamp. Consequently there is nothing more to keep me in Washington, and I should now like your advice about coming to Fortress Monroe. Do you find it malarial? On the boat your aunt asked me to come, but you said nothing about it, and I was left to suppose that you did not think it would agree with me. Do you still think so? or what do you think? I know you think it was uncalled for and in extremely bad taste for me to tell you what I did the other day; and I have thought so too. There is only one thing that could justify it — that is, I think it might justify it — if you thought so. But I do not feel sure that you would like to know it, or, if you knew it, would like it. I’ve been rather slow coming to the conclusion myself, and perhaps it’s only the beginning of the end; and not the conclusion — if there is such a difference. But the question now is whether I may come and tell you what I think it is — justify myself, or make things worse than they are now. I don’t know that they can be worse, but I think I should like to try. I think your presence would inspire me.

“Washington is a wilderness since Miss — Van Hook left. It is not a howling wilderness simply because it has not enough left in it to howl; but it has all the other merits of a wilderness.

“Yours sincerely,

“D. F. MAVERING.”

After a second perusal of this note, Miss Anderson recurred to the other letter which she had neglected for it, and read it with eyes from which the tears slowly fell upon it. Then she sat a long time at her table with both letters before her, and did not move, except to take her handkerchief out of her pocket and dry her eyes, from which the tears began at once to drip again. At last she started forward, and caught pen and paper toward her, biting her lip and frowning as if to keep herself firm, and she said to the central figure in the photograph case which stood at the back of the table, “I will, I will! You are a man, anyway.”

She sat down, and by a series of impulses she wrote a letter, with which she gave herself no pause till she put it in the clerk’s hands, to whom she ran downstairs with it, kicking her skirt into wild whirls as she ran, and catching her foot in it and stumbling.

“Will it go — go to-night?” she demanded tragically.

“Just in time,” said the clerk, without looking up, and apparently not thinking that her tone betrayed any unusual amount of emotion in a lady posting a letter; he was used to intensity on such occasions.

The letter ran —

“DEAR MR. MAVERING, — We shall now be here so short a time that I do not think it advisable for you to come.

“Your letter was rather enigmatical, and I do not know whether I understood it exactly. I suppose you told me what you did for good reasons of your own, and I did not think much about it. I believe the question of taste did not come up in my mind.

“My aunt joins me in kindest regards.

“Yours very sincerely,

“JULIA V. H. ANDERSON.

“P.S. — I think that I ought to return your letter. I know that you would not object to my keeping it, but it does not seem right. I wish to ask your congratulations. I have been engaged for several years to Lieutenant Willing, of the Army. He has been transferred from his post in Montana to Fort Hamilton at New York, and we are to be married in June.”

The next morning Mrs. Brinkley came up from breakfast in a sort of duplex excitement, which she tried to impart to her husband; he stood with his back toward the door, bending forward to the glass for a more accurate view of his face, from which he had scraped half the lather in shaving.

She had two cards in her hand: “Miss Van Hook and Miss Anderson have gone. They went this morning. I found their P. P. C.’s by my plate.”

Mr. Brinkley made an inarticulate noise for comment, and assumed the contemptuous sneer which some men find convenient for shaving the lower lip.

“And guess who’s come, of all people in the world?”

“I don’t know,” said Brinkley, seizing his chance to speak.

“The Pasmers! — Alice and her mother! Isn’t it awful?”

Mr. Brinkley had entered upon a very difficult spot at the corner of his left jaw. He finished it before he said, “I don’t see anything awful about it, so long as Pasmer hasn’t come too.”

“But Dan Mavering! He’s in Washington, and he may come down here any day. Just think how shocking that would be!”

“Isn’t that rather a theory?” asked Mr. Brinkley, finding such opportunities for conversation as he could. “I dare say Mrs. Pasmer would be very glad to see him.”

“I’ve no doubt she would,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “But it’s the worst thing that could happen — for him. And I feel like writing him not to come — telegraphing him.”

“You know how the man made a fortune in Chicago,” said her husband, drying his razor tenderly on a towel before beginning to strop it. “I advise you to let the whole thing alone. It doesn’t concern us in any way whatever.”

“Then,” said Mrs. Brinkley, “there ought to be a committee to take it in hand and warn him.”

“I dare say you could make one up among the ladies. But don’t be the first to move in the matter.”

“I really believe,” said his wife, with her mind taken off the point by the attractiveness of a surmise which had just occurred to her, “that Mrs. Pasmer would be capable of following him down if she knew he was in Washington.”

“Yes, if she know. But she probably doesn’t.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Brinkley disappointedly. “I think the sudden departure of the Van Hooks must have had something to do with Dan Mavering.”

“Seems a very influential young man,” said her husband. “He attracts and repels people right and left. Did you speak to the Pasmers?”

“No; you’d better, when you go down. They’ve just come into the dining-room. The girl looks like death.”

“Well, I’ll talk to her about Mavering. That’ll cheer her up.”

Mrs. Brinkley looked at him for an instant as if she really thought him capable of it. Then she joined him in his laugh.

Mrs. Brinkley had theorised Alice Pasmer as simply and primitively selfish, like the rest of the Pasmers in whom the family traits prevailed.

When Mavering stopped coming to her house after his engagement she justly suspected that it was because Alice had forbidden him, and she had rejoiced at the broken engagement as an escape for Dan; she had frankly said so, and she had received him back into full favour at the first moment in Washington. She liked Miss Anderson, and she had hoped, with the interest which women feel in every such affair, that her flirtation with him might become serious. But now this had apparently not happened. Julia Anderson was gone with mystifying precipitation, and Alice Pasmer had come with an unexpectedness which had the aspect of fatality.

Mrs. Brinkley felt bound, of course, since there was no open enmity between them, to meet the Pasmers on the neutral ground of the Hygeia with conventional amiability. She was really touched by the absent wanness of the girls look, and by the later-coming recognition which shaped her mouth into a pathetic snide. Alice did not look like death quite, as Mrs. Brinkley had told her husband, with the necessity her sex has for putting its superlatives before its positives; but she was pale and thin, and she moved with a languid step when they all met at night after Mrs. Brinkley had kept out of the Pasmers’ way during the day.

“She has been ill all the latter part of the winter,” said Mrs. Pasmer to Mrs. Brinkley that night in the corner of the spreading hotel parlours, where they found themselves. Mrs. Pasmer did not look well herself; she spoke with her eyes fixed anxiously on the door Alice had just passed out of. “She is going to bed, but I know I shall find her awake whenever I go.”

“Perhaps,” suggested Mrs. Brinkley, “this soft, heavy sea air will put her to sleep.” She tried to speak drily and indifferently, but she could not; she was, in fact, very much interested by the situation, and she was touched, in spite of her distaste for them both, by the evident unhappiness of mother and daughter. She knew what it came from, and she said to herself that they deserved it; but this did not altogether fortify her against their pathos. “I can hardly keep awake myself,” she added gruffly.

“I hope it may help her,” said Mrs. Pasmer; “the doctor strongly urged our coming.”

“Mr. Pasmer isn’t with you,” said Mrs. Brinkley, feeling that it was decent to say something about him.

“No; he was detained.” Mrs. Pasmer did not explain the cause of his detention, and the two ladies slowly waved their fans a moment in silence. “Are there many Boston People in the house?” Mrs. Pasmer asked.

“It’s full of them,” cried Mrs. Brinkley.

“I had scarcely noticed,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer; and Mrs. Brinkley knew that this was not true. “Alice takes up all my thoughts,” she added; and this might be true enough. She leaned a little forward and asked, in a low, entreating voice over her fan, “Mrs. Brinkley, have you seen Mr. Mavering lately?”

Mrs. Brinkley considered this a little too bold, a little too brazen. Had they actually come South in pursuit of him? It was shameless, and she let Mrs. Pasmer know something of her feeling in the shortness with which she answered, “I saw him in Washington the other day — for a moment.” She shortened the time she had spent in Dan’s company so as to cut Mrs. Pasmer off from as much comfort as possible, and she stared at her in open astonishment.

Mrs. Pasmer dropped her eyes and fingered the edge of her fan with a submissiveness that seemed to Mrs. Brinkley the perfection of duplicity; she wanted to shake her. “I knew,” sighed Mrs. Pasmer, “that you had always been such a friend of his.”

It is the last straw which breaks the camel’s back; Mrs. Brinkley felt her moral vertebrae give way; she almost heard them crack; but if there was really a detonation, the drowned the noise with a harsh laugh. “Oh, he had other friends in Washington. I met him everywhere with Miss Anderson.” This statement conflicted with the theory of her single instant with Dan, but she felt that in such a cause, in the cause of giving pain to a woman like Mrs. Pasmer, the deflection from exact truth was justifiable. She hurried on: “I rather expected he might run down here, but now that they’re gone, I don’t suppose he’ll come. You remember Miss Anderson’s aunt, Miss Van Hook?”

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Pasmer.

“She was here with her.”

“Miss Van Hook was such a New York type — of a certain kind,” said Mrs. Pasmer. She rose, with a smile at once so conventional, so heroic, and so pitiful that Mrs. Brinkley felt the remorse of a generous victor.

She went to her room, hardening her heart, and she burst in with a flood of voluble exasperation that threatened all the neighbouring rooms with overflow.

“Well,” she cried, “they have shown their hands completely. They have come here to hound Dan Mavering down, and get him into their toils again. Why, the woman actually said as much! But I fancy I have given her a fit of insomnia that will enable her to share her daughter’s vigils. Really such impudence I never heard of!”

“Do you want everybody in the corridor to hear of it?” asked Brinkley, from behind a newspaper.

“I know one thing,” continued Mrs. Brinkley, dropping her voice a couple of octaves. “They will never get him here if I can help it. He won’t come, anyway, now Miss Anderson is gone; but I’ll make assurance doubly sure by writing him not to come; I’ll tell him they’ve gone; and than we are going too.”

“You had better remember the man in Chicago,” said her husband.

“Well, this is my business — or I’ll make it my business!” cried Mrs. Brinkley. She went on talking rapidly, rising with great excitement in her voice at times, and then remembering to speak lower; and her husband apparently read on through most of her talk, though now and then he made some comment that seemed of almost inspired aptness.

“The way they both made up to me was disgusting. But I know the girl is just a tool in her mother’s hands. Her mother seemed actually passive in comparison. For skilful wheedling I could fall down and worship that woman; I really admire her. As long as the girl was with us she kept herself in the background and put the girl at me. It was simply a masterpiece.”

“How do you know she put her at you?” asked Brinkley.

“How? By the way she seemed not to do it! And because from what I know of that stupid Pasmer pride it would be perfectly impossible for any one who was a Pasmer to take her deprecatory manner toward me of herself. You ought to have seen it! It was simply perfect.”

“Perhaps,” said Brinkley, with a remote dreaminess, “she was truly sorry.”

“Truly stuff! No, indeed; she hates me as much as ever — more!”

“Well, then, may be she’s doing it because she hates you — doing it for her soul’s good — sort of penance, sort of atonement to Mavering.”

Mrs. Brinkley turned round from her dressing-table to see what her husband meant, but the newspaper hid him. We all know that our own natures are mixed and contradictory, but we each attribute to others a logical consistency which we never find in any one out of the novels. Alice Pasmer was cold and reticent, and Mrs. Brinkley, who had lived half a century in a world full of paradoxes, could not imagine her subject to gusts of passionate frankness; she knew the girl to be proud and distant, and she could not conceive of an abject humility and longing for sympathy in her heart. If Alice felt, when she saw Mrs. Brinkley, that she had a providential opportunity to punish herself for her injustice to Dan, the fact could not be established upon Mrs. Brinkley’s theory of her. If the ascetic impulse is the most purely selfish impulse in human nature, Mrs. Brinkley might not have been mistaken in suspecting her of an ignoble motive, though it might have had for the girl the last sublimity of self-sacrifice. The woman who disliked her and pitied her knew that she had no arts, and rather than adopt so simple a theory of her behaviour as her husband had advanced she held all the more strenuously to her own theory that Alice was practising her mother’s arts. This was inevitable, partly from the sense of Mrs. Pasmer’s artfulness which everybody had, and partly from the allegiance which we pay — and women especially like to pay — to the tradition of the playwrights and the novelists, that social results of all kinds are the work of deep, and more or less darkling, design on the part of other women — such other women as Mrs. Pasmer.

Mrs. Brinkley continued to talk, but the god spoke no more from behind the newspaper; and afterward Mrs. Brinkley lay a long time awake; hardening her heart. But she was haunted to the verge of her dreams by that girl’s sick look, by her languid walk, and by the effect which she had seen her own words take upon Mrs. Pasmer — an effect so admirably disowned, so perfectly obvious. Before she could get to sleep she was obliged to make a compromise with her heart, in pursuance of which, when she found Mrs. Pasmer at breakfast alone in the morning, she went up to her, and said, holding her hand a moment, “I hope your daughter slept well last night.”

“No,” said Mrs. Pasmer, slipping her hand away, “I can’t say that she did.” There was probably no resentment expressed in the way she withdrew her hand, but the other thought there was.

“I wish I could do something for her,” she cried.

“Oh, thank you,” said Mrs. Pasmer. “It’s very good of you.” And Mrs. Brinkley fancied she smiled rather bitterly.

Mrs. Brinkley went out upon the seaward verandah of the hotel with this bitterness of Mrs. Pasmer’s smile in her thoughts; and it disposed her to feel more keenly the quality of Miss Pasmer’s smile. She found the girl standing there at a remote point of that long stretch of planking, and looking out over the water; she held with both hands across her breast the soft chuddah shawl which the wind caught and fluttered away from her waist. She was alone, said as Mrs. Brinkley’s compunctions goaded her nearer, she fancied that the saw Alice master a primary dislike in her face, and put on a look of pathetic propitiation. She did not come forward to meet Mrs. Brinkley, who liked better her waiting to be approached; but she smiled gratefully when Mrs. Brinkley put out her hand, and she took it with a very cold one.

“You must find it chilly here,” said the elder woman.

“I had better be out in the air all I could, the doctor said,” answered Alice.

“Well, then, come with me round the corner; there’s a sort of recess there, and you won’t be blown to pierces,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with authority. They sat down together in the recess, and she added: “I used to sit here with Miss Van Hook; she could hear better in the noise the waves made. I hope it isn’t too much for you.”

“Oh no,” said Alice. “Mamma said you told her they were here.” Mrs. Brinkley reassured herself from this; Miss Van Hook’s name had rather slipped out; but of course Mrs. Pasmer had not repeated what she had said about Dan in this connection. “I wish I could have seen Julia,” Alice went on. “It would have been quite like Campobello again.”

“Oh, quite,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a short breath, and not knowing whither this tended. Alice did not leave her in doubt.

“I should like to have seen her, and begged her for the way I treated her the last part of the time there. I feel as if I could make my whole life a reparation,” she added passionately.

Mrs. Brinkley believed that this was the mere frenzy of sentimentality, the exaltation of a selfish asceticism; but at the break in the girl’s voice and the aversion of her face she could not help a thrill of motherly tenderness for her. She wanted to tell her she was an unconscious humbug, bent now as always on her own advantage, and really indifferent to others she also wanted to comfort her, and tell her that she exaggerated, and was not to blame. She did neither, but when Alice turned her face back she seemed encouraged by Mrs. Brinkley’s look to go on: “I didn’t appreciate her then; she was very generous and high-minded — too high-minded for me to understand, even. But we don’t seem to know how good others are till we wrong them.”

“Yes, that is very true,” said Mrs. Brinkley. She knew that Alice was obviously referring to the breach between herself and Miss Anderson following the night of the Trevor theatricals, and the dislike for her that she had shown with a frankness some of the ladies had thought brutal. Mrs. Brinkley also believed that her words had a tacit meaning, and she would have liked to have the hardness to say she had seen an unnamed victim of Alice doing his best to console the other she had specified. But she merely said drily, “Yes, perhaps that’s the reason why we’re allowed to injure people.”

“It must be,” said Alice simply. “Did Miss Anderson ever speak of me?”

“No; I can’t remember that she ever did.” Mrs. Brinkley did not feel bound to say that she and Miss Van Hook had discussed her at large, and agreed perfectly about her.

“I should like to see her; I should like to write to her.”

Mrs. Brinkley felt that she ought not to suffer this intimate tendency in the talk:

“You must find a great many other acquaintances in the hotel, Miss Pasmer.”

“Some of the Frankland girds are here, and the two Bellinghams. I have hardly spoken to them yet. Do you think that where you have even been in the right, if you have been harsh, if you have been hasty, if you haven’t made allowances, you ought to offer some atonement?”

“Really, I can’t say,” said Mrs. Brinkley, with a smile of distaste. “I’m afraid your question isn’t quite in my line of thinking; it’s more in Miss Cotton’s way. You’d better ask her some time.”

“No,” said Alice sadly; “she would flatter me.”

“Ah! I always supposed she was very conscientious.”

“She’s conscientious, but she likes me too well.”

“Oh!” commented Mrs. Brinkley to herself, “then you know I don’t like you, and you’ll use me in one way, if you can’t in another. Very well!” But she found the girl’s trust touching somehow, though the sentimentality of her appeal seemed as tawdry as ever.

“I knew you would be just,” added Alice wistfully.

“Oh, I don’t know about atonements!” said Mrs. Brinkley, with an effect of carelessness. “It seems to me that we usually make them for our own sake.”

“I have thought of that,” said Alice, with a look of expectation.

“And we usually astonish other people when we offer them.”

“Either they don’t like it, or else they don’t feel so much injured as we had supposed.”

“Oh, but there’s no question—”

“If Miss Anderson—”

“Miss Anderson? Oh — oh yes!”

“If Miss Anderson for example,” pursued Mrs. Brinkley, “felt aggrieved with you. But really I’ve no right to enter into your affairs, Miss Pasmer.”

“Oh Yes, yes! — do! I asked you to,” the girl implored.

“I doubt if it will help matters for her to know that you regret anything; and if she shouldn’t happen to have thought that you were unjust to her, it would make her uncomfortable for nothing.”

“Do you think so?” asked the girl, with a disappointment that betrayed itself in her voice and eyes.

“I never feel I myself competent to advise,” said Mrs. Brinkley. “I can criticise — anybody can — and I do, pretty freely; but advice is a more serious matter. Each of us must act from herself — from what she thinks is right.”

“Yes, I see. Thank you so much, Mrs. Brinkley.”

“After all, we have a right to do ourselves good, even when we pretend that it’s good to others, if we don’t do them any harm.”

“Yes, I see.” Alice looked away, and then seemed about to speak again; but one of Mrs. Brinkley’s acquaintance came up, and the girl rose with a frightened air and went away.

“Alice’s talk with you this morning did her so much good!” said Mrs. Pasmer, later. “She has always felt so badly about Miss Anderson!”

Mrs. Brinkley saw that Mrs. Pasmer wished to confine the meaning of their talk to Miss Anderson, and she assented, with a penetration of which she saw that Mrs. Pasmer was gratefully aware.

She grew more tolerant of both the Pasmers as the danger of greater intimacy from them, which seemed to threaten at first seemed to pass away. She had not responded to their advances, but there was no reason why she should not be civil to them; there had never been any open quarrel with them. She often found herself in talk with them, and was amused to note that she was the only Bostonian whom they did not keep aloof from.

It could not be said that she came to like either of them better. She still suspected Mrs. Pasmer of design, though she developed none beyond manoeuvring Alice out of the way of people whom she wished to avoid; and she still found the girl, as she always thought her, as egotist, whose best impulses toward others had a final aim in herself. She thought her very crude in her ideas — cruder than she had seemed at Campobello, where she had perhaps been softened by her affinition with the gentler and kindlier nature of Dan Mavering. Mrs. Brinkley was never tired of saying that he had made the most fortunate escape in the world, and though Brinkley owned he was tired of hearing it, she continued to say it with a great variety of speculation. She recognised that in most girls of Alice’s age many traits are in solution, waiting their precipitation into character by the chemical contact which time and chances must bring, and that it was not fair to judge her by the present ferment of hereditary tendencies; but she rejoiced all the same that it was not Dan Mavering’s character which was to give fixity to hers. The more she saw of the girl the more she was convinced that two such people could only make each other unhappy; from day to day, almost from hour to hour, she resolved to write to Mavering and tell him not to come.

She was sure that the Pasmers wished to have the affair on again, and part of her fascination with a girl whom she neither liked nor approved was her belief that Alice’s health had broken under the strain of her regrets and her despair. She did not get better from the change of air; she grew more listless and languid, and more dependent upon Mrs. Brinkley’s chary sympathy. The older woman asked herself again and again what made the girl cling to her? Was she going to ask her finally to intercede with Dan? or was it really a despairing atonement to him, the most disagreeable sacrifice she could offer, as Mr. Brinkley had stupidly suggested? She believed that Alice’s selfishness and morbid sentiment were equal to either.

Brinkley generally took the girl’s part against his wife, and in a heavy jocose way tried to cheer her up. He did little things for her; fetched and carried chairs and cushions and rugs, and gave his attentions the air of pleasantries. One of his offices was to get the ladies’ letters for them in the evening, and one night he came in beaming with a letter for each of them where they sat together in the parlour. He distributed them into their laps.

“Hello! I’ve made a mistake,” he said, putting down his head to take back the letter he had dropped in Miss Pasmer’s lap. “I’ve given you my wife’s letter.”

The girl glanced at it, gave a moaning kind of cry, and fell beak in her chair, hiding her face in her hands.

Mrs. Brinkley, possessed herself of the other letter, and, though past the age when ladies wish to kill their husbands for their stupidity, she gave Brinkley a look of massacre which mystified even more than it murdered his innocence. He had to learn later from his wife’s more elicit fury what the women had all known instantly.

He showed his usefulness in gathering Alice up and getting her to her mother’s room.

“Oh, Mrs. Brinkley,” implored Mrs. Pasmer, following her to the door, “is Mr. Mavering coming here?”

“I don’t know — I can’t say — I haven’t read the letter yet.”

“Oh, do let me know when you’ve read it, won’t you? I don’t know what we shall do.”

Mrs. Brinkley read the letter in her own room. “You go down,” she said to her husband, with unabated ferocity; “and telegraph Dan Mavering at Wormley’s not to came. Say we’re going away at once.”

Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, “Not coming.”

It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his own. This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part, we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we cannot break.

Mrs. Brinkley lay awake and raged impotently against her complicity with the unhappiness of that distasteful girl and her more than distasteful mother. In her revolt against it she renounced the interest she had felt in that silly boy, and his ridiculous love business, so really unimportant to her whatever turn it took. She asked herself what it mattered to her whether those children marred their lives one way or another way. There was a lurid moment before she slept when she wished Brinkley to go down and recall her telegram; but he refused to be a fool at so much inconvenience to himself.

Mrs. Brinkley came to breakfast feeling so much more haggard than she found either of the Pasmers looking, that she was able to throw off her lingering remorse for having told Mavering not to come. She had the advantage also of doubt as to her precise motive in having done so; she had either done so because she had judged it best for him not to see Miss Pasmer again, or else she had done so to relieve the girl from the pain of an encounter which her mother evidently dreaded for her. If one motive seemed at moments outrageously meddling and presumptuous, the other was so nobly good and kind that it more than counterbalanced it in Mrs. Brinkley’s mind, who knew very well in spite of her doubt that she had, acted from a mixture of both. With this conviction, it was both a comfort and a pang to find by the register of the hotel, which she furtively consulted, that Dan had not arrived by the morning boat, as she groundlessly feared and hoped he might have done.

In any case, however, and at the end of all the ends, she had that girl on her hands more than ever; and believing as she did that Dan and Alice had only to meet in order to be reconciled, she felt that the girl whom she had balked of her prey was her innocent victim. What right had she to interfere? Was he not her natural prey? If he liked being a prey, who was lawfully to forbid him? He was not perfect; he would know how to take care of himself probably; in marriage things equalised themselves. She looked at the girl’s thin cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, and pitied and hated her with that strange mixture of feeling which our victims aspire in us.

She walked out on the verandah with the Pasmers after breakfast, and chatted a while about indifferent things; and Alice made an effort to ignore the event of the night before with a pathos which wrung Mrs. Brinkley’s heart, and with a gay resolution which ought to have been a great pleasure to such a veteran dissembler as her mother. She said she had never found the air so delicious; she really believed it would begin to do her good now; but it was a little fresh just there, and with her eyes she invited her mother to come with her round the corner into that sheltered recess, and invited Mrs. Brinkley not to come.

It was that effect of resentment which is lighter even than a touch, the waft of the arrow’s feather; but it could wound a guilty heart, and Mrs. Brinkley sat down where she was, realising with a pang that the time when she might have been everything to this unhappy girl had just passed for ever, and henceforth she could be nothing. She remained musing sadly upon the contradictions she had felt in the girl’s character, the confusion of good and evil, the potentialities of misery and harm, the potentialities of bliss and good; and she felt less and less satisfied with herself. She had really presumed to interfere with Fate; perhaps she had interfered with Providence. She would have given anything to recall her act; and then with a flash she realised that it was quite possible to recall it. She could telegraph Mavering to come; and she rose, humbly and gratefully, as if from an answered prayer, to go and do so.

She was not at all a young woman, and many things had come and gone in her life that ought to have fortified her against surprise; but she wanted to scream like a little frightened girl as Dan Mavering stepped out of the parlour door toward her. The habit of not screaming, however, prevailed, and she made a tolerably successful effort to treat him with decent composure. She gave him a rigid hand. “Where in the world did you come from? Did you get my telegram?”

“No. Did you get my letter?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I took a notion to come right on after I wrote, and I started on the same train with it. But they said it was no use trying to get into the Hygeia, and I stopped last night at the little hotel in Hampton. I’ve just walked over, and Mr. Brinkley told me you were out here somewhere. That’s the whole story, I believe.” He gave his nervous laugh, but it seemed to Mrs. Brinkley that it had not much joy in it.

“Hush!” she said involuntarily, receding to her chair and sinking back into it again. He looked surprised. “You know the Van Hooks are gone?”

He laughed harshly. “I should think they were dead from your manner, Mrs. Brinkley. But I didn’t come to see the Van Hooks. What made you think I did?”

He gave her a look which she found so dishonest, so really insincere, that she resolved to abandon him to Providence as soon as she could. “Oh, I didn’t know but there had been some little understanding at Washington.”

“Perhaps on their part. They were people who seemed to take a good many things for granted, but they could hardly expect to control other people’s movements.”

He looked sharply at Mrs. Brinkley, as if to question how much she knew; but she had now measured him, and she said, “Oh! then the visit’s to me?”

“Entirely,” cried Dan. The old sweetness came into his laughing eyes again, and went to Mrs. Brinkley’s heart. She wished him to be happy, somehow; she would have done anything for him; she wished she knew what to do. Ought she to tell him the Pasmers were there? Ought she to make up some excuse and get him away before he met them? She felt herself getting more and more bewildered and helpless. Those women might come round that corner any moment and then she know the first sight of Alice’s face would do or undo everything with Dan. Did she wish them reconciled? Did she wish them for ever parted? She no longer knew what she wished; she only knew that she had no right to wish anything. She continued to talk on with Dan, who grew more and more at ease, and did most of the talking, while Mrs. Brinkley’s whole being narrowed itself to the question. Would the Pasmers come back that way, or would they go round the further corner, and get into the hotel by another door?

The suspense seemed interminable; they must have already gone that other way. Suddenly she heard the pushing back of chairs in that recess. She could not bear it. She jumped to her feet.

“Just wait a moment, Mr. Mavering! I’ll join you again. Mr. Brinkley is expecting — I must—”

One morning of the following June Mrs. Brinkley sat well forward in the beautiful church where Dan and Alice were to be married. The lovely day became a still lovelier day within, enriched by the dyes of the stained windows through which it streamed; the still place was dim yet bright with it; the figures painted on the walls had a soft distinctness; a body of light seemed to irradiate from the depths of the dome like lamp-light.

There was a subdued murmur of voices among the people in the pews: they were in a sacred edifice without being exactly at church, and they might talk; now and then a muffled, nervous laugh escaped. A delicate scent of flowers from the masses in the chancel mixed with the light and the prevailing silence. There was a soft, continuous rustle of drapery as the ladies advanced up the thickly carpeted aisles on the arms of the young ushers and compressed themselves into place in the pews.

Two or three people whom she did not know were put into the pew with Mrs. Brinkley, but she kept her seat next the aisle; presently an usher brought up a lady who sat down beside her, and then for a moment or two seemed to sink and rise, as if on the springs of an intense excitement.

It was Miss Cotton, who, while this process of quiescing lasted, appeared not to know Mrs. Brinkley. When she became aware of her, all was lost again. “Mrs. Brinkley!” she cried, as well as one can cry in whisper. “Is it possible?”

“I have my doubts,” Mrs. Brinkley whispered back. “But we’ll suppose the case.”

“Oh, it’s all too good to be true! How I envy you being the means of bringing them together, Mrs. Brinkley!”

“Means?”

“Yes — they owe it all to you; you needn’t try to deny it; he’s told every one!”

“I was sure she hadn’t,” said Mrs. Brinkley, remembering how Alice had marked an increasing ignorance of any part she might have had in the affair from the first moment of her reconciliation with Dan; she had the effect of feeling that she had sacrificed enough to Mrs. Brinkley; and Mrs. Brinkley had been restored to all the original strength of her conviction that she was a solemn little unconscious egotist, and Dan was as unselfish and good as he was unequal to her exactions.

“Oh no?” said Miss Cotton. “She couldn’t!” implying that Alice would be too delicate to speak of it.

“Do you see any of his family here?” asked Mrs. Brinkley.

“Yes; over there — up front.” Miss Cotton motioned, with her eyes toward a pew in which Mrs. Brinkley distinguished an elderly gentleman’s down-misted bald head and the back of a young lady’s bonnet. “His father and sister; the other’s a bridemaid; mother bed-ridden and couldn’t come.”

“They might have brought her in an-arm-chair,” suggested Mrs. Brinkley ironically, “on such an occasion. But perhaps they don’t take much interest in such a patched-up affair.”

“Oh yes, they do!” exclaimed Miss Cotton. “They idolise Alice.”

“And Mrs. Pasmer and Mister, too?”

“I don’t suppose that so much matters.”

“They know how to acquiesce, I’ve no doubt.”

“Oh yes! You’ve heard? The young people are going abroad first with her family for a year, and then they come back to live with his — where the Works are.”

“Poor fellow!” said Mrs. Brinkley.

“Why, Mrs. Brinkley, do you still feel that way?” asked Miss Cotton, with a certain distress. “It seems to me that if ever two young people had the promise of happiness, they have. Just see what their love has done for them already!”

“And you still think that in these cases love can do everything?”

Miss Cotton was about to reply, when she observed that the people about her had stopped talking. The bridegroom, with his best man, in whom his few acquaintances there recognised Boardman with some surprise, came over the chancel from one side.

Miss Cotton bent close to Mrs. Brinkley and whispered rapidly: “Alice found out Mr. Mavering wished it, and insisted on his having him. It was a great concession, but she’s perfectly magnanimous. Poor fellow! how he does look!”

Alice, on her father’s arm, with her bridemaids, of whom the first was Minnie Mavering, mounted the chancel steps, where Mr. Pasmer remained standing till he advanced to give away the bride. He behaved with great dignity, but seemed deeply affected; the ladies in the front pews said they could see his face twitch; but he never looked handsomer.

The five clergymen came from the back of the chancel in their white surplices. The ceremony proceeded to the end.

The young couple drove at once to the station, where they were to take the train for New York, and wait there a day or two for Mrs. and Mr. Pasmer before they all sailed.

As they drove along, Alice held Dan’s wrist in the cold clutch of her trembling little ungloved hand, on which her wedding ring shone. “O dearest! let us be good!” she said. “I will try my best. I will try not to be exacting and unreasonable, and I know I can. I won’t even make any conditions, if you will always be frank and open with me, and tell me everything.”

He leaned over and kissed her behind the drawn curtains. “I will, Alice! I will indeed! I won’t keep anything from you after this.”

He resolved to tell her all about Julia Anderson at the right moment, when Alice was in the mood, and as soon as he thoroughly understood what he had really meant himself.

If he had been different she would not have asked him to be frank and open; if she had been different, he might have been frank and open. This was the beginning of their married life.

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES

First published in two volumes in 1890, this novel was well-received for its portrayal of social injustice. Considered by many to be Howells’s best work, the novel is also considered to be the first American novel to portray New York City in detail. Some argue that the novel was the first of three Howells wrote with Socialist and Utopian ideals in mind (the other two being The Quality of Mercy in 1892, and An Imperative Duty in 1893).

The narrative focuses on the dispute between Basil March, who finds himself caught in the middle of a dispute between his employer, the self-made millionaire Dryfoos, and his old teacher Lindau, an advocate of workers’ rights. March and his wife had already featured in Howells’s first novel, Their Wedding Journey.

Through this central story, the novel tackles several important issues of post-Civil-War “Gilded Age” America; issues such as labor disputes, the rise of the self-made millionaire, the consequences of urban growth, the influx of immigrants and other industrial-era problems. Many critics consider A Hazard of New Fortunes to be one of Howells’ most important examples of American literary Realism, portraying a panoply of different individuals of varied backgrounds.

The novel’s title is a reference to William Shakespeare’s King John, a play which portrays themes of uncertainty, change, and violence, which are also important to A Hazard of New Fortunes.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

PART FIRST

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

PART SECOND

I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VII.

IX.

X

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

PART THIRD

I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII

VIII.

IX.

PART FOURTH

I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

PART FIFTH

I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

William Dean Howells in 1887

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The following story was the first fruit of my New York life when I began to live it after my quarter of a century in Cambridge and Boston, ending in 1889; and I used my own transition to the commercial metropolis in framing the experience which was wholly that of my supposititious literary adventurer. He was a character whom, with his wife, I have employed in some six or eight other stories, and whom I made as much the hero and heroine of ‘Their Wedding Journey’ as the slight fable would bear. In venturing out of my adoptive New England, where I had found myself at home with many imaginary friends, I found it natural to ask the company of these familiar acquaintances, but their company was not to be had at once for the asking. When I began speaking of them as Basil and Isabel, in the fashion of ‘Their Wedding Journey,’ they would not respond with the effect of early middle age which I desired in them. They remained wilfully, not to say woodenly, the young bridal pair of that romance, without the promise of novel functioning. It was not till I tried addressing them as March and Mrs. March that they stirred under my hand with fresh impulse, and set about the work assigned them as people in something more than their second youth.

The scene into which I had invited them to figure filled the largest canvas I had yet allowed myself; and, though ‘A Hazard of New Fortunes was not the first story I had written with the printer at my heels, it was the first which took its own time to prescribe its own dimensions. I had the general design well in mind when I began to write it, but as it advanced it compelled into its course incidents, interests, individualities, which I had not known lay near, and it specialized and amplified at points which I had not always meant to touch, though I should not like to intimate anything mystical in the fact. It became, to my thinking, the most vital of my fictions, through my quickened interest in the life about me, at a moment of great psychological import. We had passed through a period of strong emotioning in the direction of the humaner economics, if I may phrase it so; the rich seemed not so much to despise the poor, the poor did not so hopelessly repine. The solution of the riddle of the painful earth through the dreams of Henry George, through the dreams of Edward Bellamy, through the dreams of all the generous visionaries of the past, seemed not impossibly far off. That shedding of blood which is for the remission of sins had been symbolized by the bombs and scaffolds of Chicago, and the hearts of those who felt the wrongs bound up with our rights, the slavery implicated in our liberty, were thrilling with griefs and hopes hitherto strange to the average American breast. Opportunely for me there was a great street-car strike in New York, and the story began to find its way to issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction. I was in my fifty-second year when I took it up, and in the prime, such as it was, of my powers. The scene which I had chosen appealed prodigiously to me, and the action passed as nearly without my conscious agency as I ever allow myself to think such things happen.

The opening chapters were written in a fine, old fashioned apartment house which had once been a family house, and in an uppermost room of which I could look from my work across the trees of the little park in Stuyvesant Square to the towers of St. George’s Church. Then later in the spring of 1889 the unfinished novel was carried to a country house on the Belmont border of Cambridge. There I must have written very rapidly to have pressed it to conclusion before the summer ended. It came, indeed, so easily from the pen that I had the misgiving which I always have of things which do not cost me great trouble.

There is nothing in the book with which I amused myself more than the house-hunting of the Marches when they were placing themselves in New York; and if the contemporary reader should turn for instruction to the pages in which their experience is detailed I assure him that he may trust their fidelity and accuracy in the article of New York housing as it was early in the last decade of the last century: I mean, the housing of people of such moderate means as the Marches. In my zeal for truth I did not distinguish between reality and actuality in this or other matters — that is, one was as precious to me as the other. But the types here portrayed are as true as ever they were, though the world in which they were finding their habitat is wonderfully, almost incredibly different. Yet it is not wholly different, for a young literary pair now adventuring in New York might easily parallel the experience of the Marches with their own, if not for so little money; many phases of New York housing are better, but all are dearer. Other aspects of the material city have undergone a transformation much more wonderful. I find that in my book its population is once modestly spoken of as two millions, but now in twenty years it is twice as great, and the grandeur as well as grandiosity of its forms is doubly apparent. The transitional public that then moped about in mildly tinkling horse-cars is now hurried back and forth in clanging trolleys, in honking and whirring motors; the Elevated road which was the last word of speed is undermined by the Subway, shooting its swift shuttles through the subterranean woof of the city’s haste. From these feet let the witness infer our whole massive Hercules, a bulk that sprawls and stretches beyond the rivers through the tunnels piercing their beds and that towers into the skies with innumerable tops — a Hercules blent of Briareus and Cerberus, but not so bad a monster as it seemed then to threaten becoming.

Certain hopes of truer and better conditions on which my heart was fixed twenty years ago are not less dear, and they are by no means touched with despair, though they have not yet found the fulfilment which I would then have prophesied for them. Events have not wholly played them false; events have not halted, though they have marched with a slowness that might affect a younger observer as marking time. They who were then mindful of the poor have not forgotten them, and what is better the poor have not often forgotten themselves in violences such as offered me the material of tragedy and pathos in my story. In my quality of artist I could not regret these, and I gratefully realize that they offered me the opportunity of a more strenuous action, a more impressive catastrophe than I could have achieved without them. They tended to give the whole fable dignity and doubtless made for its success as a book. As a serial it had crept a sluggish course before a public apparently so unmindful of it that no rumor of its acceptance or rejection reached the writer during the half year of its publication; but it rose in book form from that failure and stood upon its feet and went its way to greater favor than any book of his had yet enjoyed. I hope that my recognition of the fact will not seem like boasting, but that the reader will regard it as a special confidence from the author and will let it go no farther.

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

PART FIRST

A HAZARD OF NEW FORTUNES I.

“Now, you think this thing over, March, and let me know the last of next week,” said Fulkerson. He got up from the chair which he had been sitting astride, with his face to its back, and tilting toward March on its hind-legs, and came and rapped upon his table with his thin bamboo stick. “What you want to do is to get out of the insurance business, anyway. You acknowledge that yourself. You never liked it, and now it makes you sick; in other words, it’s killing you. You ain’t an insurance man by nature. You’re a natural-born literary man, and you’ve been going against the grain. Now, I offer you a chance to go with the grain. I don’t say you’re going to make your everlasting fortune, but I’ll give you a living salary, and if the thing succeeds you’ll share in its success. We’ll all share in its success. That’s the beauty of it. I tell you, March, this is the greatest idea that has been struck since” — Fulkerson stopped and searched his mind for a fit image— “since the creation of man.”

He put his leg up over the corner of March’s table and gave himself a sharp cut on the thigh, and leaned forward to get the full effect of his words upon his listener.

March had his hands clasped together behind his head, and he took one of them down long enough to put his inkstand and mucilage-bottle out of Fulkerson’s way. After many years’ experiment of a mustache and whiskers, he now wore his grizzled beard full, but cropped close; it gave him a certain grimness, corrected by the gentleness of his eyes.

“Some people don’t think much of the creation of man nowadays. Why stop at that? Why not say since the morning stars sang together?”

“No, sir; no, sir! I don’t want to claim too much, and I draw the line at the creation of man. I’m satisfied with that. But if you want to ring the morning stars into the prospectus all right; I won’t go back on you.”

“But I don’t understand why you’ve set your mind on me,” March said. “I haven’t had, any magazine experience, you know that; and I haven’t seriously attempted to do anything in literature since I was married. I gave up smoking and the Muse together. I suppose I could still manage a cigar, but I don’t believe I could—”

“Muse worth a cent.” Fulkerson took the thought out of his mouth and put it into his own words. “I know. Well, I don’t want you to. I don’t care if you never write a line for the thing, though you needn’t reject anything of yours, if it happens to be good, on that account. And I don’t want much experience in my editor; rather not have it. You told me, didn’t you, that you used to do some newspaper work before you settled down?”

“Yes; I thought my lines were permanently cast in those places once. It was more an accident than anything else that I got into the insurance business. I suppose I secretly hoped that if I made my living by something utterly different, I could come more freshly to literature proper in my leisure.”

“I see; and you found the insurance business too many, for you. Well, anyway, you’ve always had a hankering for the inkpots; and the fact that you first gave me the idea of this thing shows that you’ve done more or less thinking about magazines.”

“Yes — less.”

“Well, all right. Now don’t you be troubled. I know what I want, generally, speaking, and in this particular instance I want you. I might get a man of more experience, but I should probably get a man of more prejudice and self-conceit along with him, and a man with a following of the literary hangers-on that are sure to get round an editor sooner or later. I want to start fair, and I’ve found out in the syndicate business all the men that are worth having. But they know me, and they don’t know you, and that’s where we shall have the pull on them. They won’t be able to work the thing. Don’t you be anxious about the experience. I’ve got experience enough of my own to run a dozen editors. What I want is an editor who has taste, and you’ve got it; and conscience, and you’ve got it; and horse sense, and you’ve got that. And I like you because you’re a Western man, and I’m another. I do cotton to a Western man when I find him off East here, holding his own with the best of ‘em, and showing ’em that he’s just as much civilized as they are. We both know what it is to have our bright home in the setting sun; heigh?”

“I think we Western men who’ve come East are apt to take ourselves a little too objectively and to feel ourselves rather more representative than we need,” March remarked.

Fulkerson was delighted. “You’ve hit it! We do! We are!”

“And as for holding my own, I’m not very proud of what I’ve done in that way; it’s been very little to hold. But I know what you mean, Fulkerson, and I’ve felt the same thing myself; it warmed me toward you when we first met. I can’t help suffusing a little to any man when I hear that he was born on the other side of the Alleghanies. It’s perfectly stupid. I despise the same thing when I see it in Boston people.”

Fulkerson pulled first one of his blond whiskers and then the other, and twisted the end of each into a point, which he left to untwine itself. He fixed March with his little eyes, which had a curious innocence in their cunning, and tapped the desk immediately in front of him. “What I like about you is that you’re broad in your sympathies. The first time I saw you, that night on the Quebec boat, I said to myself: ‘There’s a man I want to know. There’s a human being.’ I was a little afraid of Mrs. March and the children, but I felt at home with you — thoroughly domesticated — before I passed a word with you; and when you spoke first, and opened up with a joke over that fellow’s tableful of light literature and Indian moccasins and birch-bark toy canoes and stereoscopic views, I knew that we were brothers-spiritual twins. I recognized the Western style of fun, and I thought, when you said you were from Boston, that it was some of the same. But I see now that its being a cold fact, as far as the last fifteen or twenty years count, is just so much gain. You know both sections, and you can make this thing go, from ocean to ocean.”

“We might ring that into the prospectus, too,” March suggested, with a smile. “You might call the thing ‘From Sea to Sea.’ By-the-way, what are you going to call it?”

“I haven’t decided yet; that’s one of the things I wanted to talk with you about. I had thought of ‘The Syndicate’; but it sounds kind of dry, and doesn’t seem to cover the ground exactly. I should like something that would express the co-operative character of the thing, but I don’t know as I can get it.”

“Might call it ‘The Mutual’.”

“They’d think it was an insurance paper. No, that won’t do. But Mutual comes pretty near the idea. If we could get something like that, it would pique curiosity; and then if we could get paragraphs afloat explaining that the contributors were to be paid according to the sales, it would be a first-rate ad.”

He bent a wide, anxious, inquiring smile upon March, who suggested, lazily: “You might call it ‘The Round-Robin’. That would express the central idea of irresponsibility. As I understand, everybody is to share the profits and be exempt from the losses. Or, if I’m wrong, and the reverse is true, you might call it ‘The Army of Martyrs’. Come, that sounds attractive, Fulkerson! Or what do you think of ‘The Fifth Wheel’? That would forestall the criticism that there are too many literary periodicals already. Or, if you want to put forward the idea of complete independence, you could call it ‘The Free Lance’; or—”

“Or ‘The Hog on Ice’ — either stand up or fall down, you know,” Fulkerson broke in coarsely. “But we’ll leave the name of the magazine till we get the editor. I see the poison’s beginning to work in you, March; and if I had time I’d leave the result to time. But I haven’t. I’ve got to know inside of the next week. To come down to business with you, March, I sha’n’t start this thing unless I can get you to take hold of it.”

He seemed to expect some acknowledgment, and March said, “Well, that’s very nice of you, Fulkerson.”

“No, sir; no, sir! I’ve always liked you and wanted you ever since we met that first night. I had this thing inchoately in my mind then, when I was telling you about the newspaper syndicate business — beautiful vision of a lot of literary fellows breaking loose from the bondage of publishers and playing it alone—”

“You might call it ‘The Lone Hand’; that would be attractive,” March interrupted. “The whole West would know what you meant.”

Fulkerson was talking seriously, and March was listening seriously; but they both broke off and laughed. Fulkerson got down off the table and made some turns about the room. It was growing late; the October sun had left the top of the tall windows; it was still clear day, but it would soon be twilight; they had been talking a long time. Fulkerson came and stood with his little feet wide apart, and bent his little lean, square face on March. “See here! How much do you get out of this thing here, anyway?”

“The insurance business?” March hesitated a moment and then said, with a certain effort of reserve, “At present about three thousand.” He looked up at Fulkerson with a glance, as if he had a mind to enlarge upon the fact, and then dropped his eyes without saying more.

Whether Fulkerson had not thought it so much or not, he said: “Well, I’ll give you thirty-five hundred. Come! And your chances in the success.”

“We won’t count the chances in the success. And I don’t believe thirty-five hundred would go any further in New York than three thousand in Boston.”

“But you don’t live on three thousand here?”

“No; my wife has a little property.”

“Well, she won’t lose the income if you go to New York. I suppose you pay ten or twelve hundred a year for your house here. You can get plenty of flats in New York for the same money; and I understand you can get all sorts of provisions for less than you pay now — three or four cents on the pound. Come!”

This was by no means the first talk they had had about the matter; every three or four months during the past two years the syndicate man had dropped in upon March to air the scheme and to get his impressions of it. This had happened so often that it had come to be a sort of joke between them. But now Fulkerson clearly meant business, and March had a struggle to maintain himself in a firm poise of refusal.

“I dare say it wouldn’t — or it needn’t-cost so very much more, but I don’t want to go to New York; or my wife doesn’t. It’s the same thing.”

“A good deal samer,” Fulkerson admitted.

March did not quite like his candor, and he went on with dignity. “It’s very natural she shouldn’t. She has always lived in Boston; she’s attached to the place. Now, if you were going to start ‘The Fifth Wheel’ in Boston—”

Fulkerson slowly and sadly shook his head, but decidedly. “Wouldn’t do. You might as well say St. Louis or Cincinnati. There’s only one city that belongs to the whole country, and that’s New York.”

“Yes, I know,” sighed March; “and Boston belongs to the Bostonians, but they like you to make yourself at home while you’re visiting.”

“If you’ll agree to make phrases like that, right along, and get them into ‘The Round-Robin’ somehow, I’ll say four thousand,” said Fulkerson. “You think it over now, March. You talk it over with Mrs. March; I know you will, anyway; and I might as well make a virtue of advising you to do it. Tell her I advised you to do it, and you let me know before next Saturday what you’ve decided.”

March shut down the rolling top of his desk in the corner of the room, and walked Fulkerson out before him. It was so late that the last of the chore-women who washed down the marble halls and stairs of the great building had wrung out her floor-cloth and departed, leaving spotless stone and a clean, damp smell in the darkening corridors behind her.

“Couldn’t offer you such swell quarters in New York, March,” Fulkerson said, as he went tack-tacking down the steps with his small boot-heels. “But I’ve got my eye on a little house round in West Eleventh Street that I’m going to fit up for my bachelor’s hall in the third story, and adapt for ‘The Lone Hand’ in the first and second, if this thing goes through; and I guess we’ll be pretty comfortable. It’s right on the Sand Strip — no malaria of any kind.”

“I don’t know that I’m going to share its salubrity with you yet,” March sighed, in an obvious travail which gave Fulkerson hopes.

“Oh yes, you are,” he coaxed. “Now, you talk it over with your wife. You give her a fair, unprejudiced chance at the thing on its merits, and I’m very much mistaken in Mrs. March if she doesn’t tell you to go in and win. We’re bound to win!”

They stood on the outside steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years’ familiarity, and so was the well-known street in its Saturday-evening solitude. He asked himself, with prophetic homesickness, if it were an omen of what was to be. But he only said, musingly: “A fortnightly. You know that didn’t work in England. The fortnightly is published once a month now.”

“It works in France,” Fulkerson retorted. “The ‘Revue des Deux Mondes’ is still published twice a month. I guess we can make it work in America — with illustrations.”

“Going to have illustrations?”

“My dear boy! What are you giving me? Do I look like the sort of lunatic who would start a thing in the twilight of the nineteenth century without illustrations? Come off!”

“Ah, that complicates it! I don’t know anything about art.” March’s look of discouragement confessed the hold the scheme had taken upon him.

“I don’t want you to!” Fulkerson retorted. “Don’t you suppose I shall have an art man?”

“And will they — the artists — work at a reduced rate, too, like the writers, with the hopes of a share in the success?”

“Of course they will! And if I want any particular man, for a card, I’ll pay him big money besides. But I can get plenty of first-rate sketches on my own terms. You’ll see! They’ll pour in!”

“Look here, Fulkerson,” said March, “you’d better call this fortnightly of yours ‘The Madness of the Half-Moon’; or ‘Bedlam Broke Loose’ wouldn’t be bad! Why do you throw away all your hard earnings on such a crazy venture? Don’t do it!” The kindness which March had always felt, in spite of his wife’s first misgivings and reservations, for the merry, hopeful, slangy, energetic little creature trembled in his voice. They had both formed a friendship for Fulkerson during the week they were together in Quebec. When he was not working the newspapers there, he went about with them over the familiar ground they were showing their children, and was simply grateful for the chance, as well as very entertaining about it all. The children liked him, too; when they got the clew to his intention, and found that he was not quite serious in many of the things he said, they thought he was great fun. They were always glad when their father brought him home on the occasion of Fulkerson’s visits to Boston; and Mrs. March, though of a charier hospitality, welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of his admiration for her husband. He had a way of treating March with deference, as an older and abler man, and of qualifying the freedom he used toward every one with an implication that March tolerated it voluntarily, which she thought very sweet and even refined.

“Ah, now you’re talking like a man and a brother,” said Fulkerson. “Why, March, old man, do you suppose I’d come on here and try to talk you into this thing if I wasn’t morally, if I wasn’t perfectly, sure of success? There isn’t any if or and about it. I know my ground, every inch; and I don’t stand alone on it,” he added, with a significance which did not escape March. “When you’ve made up your mind I can give you the proof; but I’m not at liberty now to say anything more. I tell you it’s going to be a triumphal march from the word go, with coffee and lemonade for the procession along the whole line. All you’ve got to do is to fall in.” He stretched out his hand to March. “You let me know as soon as you can.”

March deferred taking his hand till he could ask, “Where are you going?”

“Parker House. Take the eleven for New York to-night.”

“I thought I might walk your way.” March looked at his watch. “But I shouldn’t have time. Goodbye!”

He now let Fulkerson have his hand, and they exchanged a cordial pressure. Fulkerson started away at a quick, light pace. Half a block off he stopped, turned round, and, seeing March still standing where he had left him, he called back, joyously, “I’ve got the name!”

“What?”

“Every Other Week.”

“It isn’t bad.”

“Ta-ta!”

II.

All the way up to the South End March mentally prolonged his talk with Fulkerson, and at his door in Nankeen Square he closed the parley with a plump refusal to go to New York on any terms. His daughter Bella was lying in wait for him in the hall, and she threw her arms round his neck with the exuberance of her fourteen years and with something of the histrionic intention of her sex. He pressed on, with her clinging about him, to the library, and, in the glow of his decision against Fulkerson, kissed his wife, where she sat by the study lamp reading the Transcript through her first pair of eye-glasses: it was agreed in the family that she looked distinguished in them, or, at any rate, cultivated. She took them off to give him a glance of question, and their son Tom looked up from his book for a moment; he was in his last year at the high school, and was preparing for Harvard.

“I didn’t get away from the office till half-past five,” March explained to his wife’s glance, “and then I walked. I suppose dinner’s waiting. I’m sorry, but I won’t do it any more.”

At table he tried to be gay with Bella, who babbled at him with a voluble pertness which her brother had often advised her parents to check in her, unless they wanted her to be universally despised.

“Papa!” she shouted at last, “you’re not listening!” As soon as possible his wife told the children they might be excused. Then she asked, “What is it, Basil?”

“What is what?” he retorted, with a specious brightness that did not avail.

“What is on your mind?”

“How do you know there’s anything?”

“Your kissing me so when you came in, for one thing.”

“Don’t I always kiss you when I come in?”

“Not now. I suppose it isn’t necessary any more. ‘Cela va sans baiser.’”

“Yes, I guess it’s so; we get along without the symbolism now.” He stopped, but she knew that he had not finished.

“Is it about your business? Have they done anything more?”

“No; I’m still in the dark. I don’t know whether they mean to supplant me, or whether they ever did. But I wasn’t thinking about that. Fulkerson has been to see me again.”

“Fulkerson?” She brightened at the name, and March smiled, too. “Why didn’t you bring him to dinner?”

“I wanted to talk with you. Then you do like him?”

“What has that got to do with it, Basil?”

“Nothing! nothing! That is, he was boring away about that scheme of his again. He’s got it into definite shape at last.”

“What shape?”

March outlined it for her, and his wife seized its main features with the intuitive sense of affairs which makes women such good business-men when they will let it.

“It sounds perfectly crazy,” she said, finally. “But it mayn’t be. The only thing I didn’t like about Mr. Fulkerson was his always wanting to chance things. But what have you got to do with it?”

“What have I got to do with it?” March toyed with the delay the question gave him; then he said, with a sort of deprecatory laugh: “It seems that Fulkerson has had his eye on me ever since we met that night on the Quebec boat. I opened up pretty freely to him, as you do to a man you never expect to see again, and when I found he was in that newspaper syndicate business I told him about my early literary ambitions—”

“You can’t say that I ever discouraged them, Basil,” his wife put in. “I should have been willing, any time, to give up everything for them.”

“Well, he says that I first suggested this brilliant idea to him. Perhaps I did; I don’t remember. When he told me about his supplying literature to newspapers for simultaneous publication, he says I asked: ‘Why not apply the principle of co-operation to a magazine, and run it in the interest of the contributors?’ and that set him to thinking, and he thought out his plan of a periodical which should pay authors and artists a low price outright for their work and give them a chance of the profits in the way of a percentage. After all, it isn’t so very different from the chances an author takes when he publishes a book. And Fulkerson thinks that the novelty of the thing would pique public curiosity, if it didn’t arouse public sympathy. And the long and short of it is, Isabel, that he wants me to help edit it.”

“To edit it?” His wife caught her breath, and she took a little time to realize the fact, while she stared hard at her husband to make sure he was not joking.

“Yes. He says he owes it all to me; that I invented the idea — the germ — the microbe.”

His wife had now realized the fact, at least in a degree that excluded trifling with it. “That is very honorable of Mr. Fulkerson; and if he owes it to you, it was the least he could do.” Having recognized her husband’s claim to the honor done him, she began to kindle with a sense of the honor itself and the value of the opportunity. “It’s a very high compliment to you, Basil — a very high compliment. And you could give up this wretched insurance business that you’ve always hated so, and that’s making you so unhappy now that you think they’re going to take it from you. Give it up and take Mr. Fulkerson’s offer! It’s a perfect interposition, coming just at this time! Why, do it! Mercy!” she suddenly arrested herself, “he wouldn’t expect you to get along on the possible profits?” Her face expressed the awfulness of the notion.

March smiled reassuringly, and waited to give himself the pleasure of the sensation he meant to give her. “If I’ll make striking phrases for it and edit it, too, he’ll give me four thousand dollars.”

He leaned back in his chair, and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, and watched his wife’s face, luminous with the emotions that flashed through her mind — doubt, joy, anxiety.

“Basil! You don’t mean it! Why, take it! Take it instantly! Oh, what a thing to happen! Oh, what luck! But you deserve it, if you first suggested it. What an escape, what a triumph over all those hateful insurance people! Oh, Basil, I’m afraid he’ll change his mind! You ought to have accepted on the spot. You might have known I would approve, and you could so easily have taken it back if I didn’t. Telegraph him now! Run right out with the despatch — Or we can send Tom!”

In these imperatives of Mrs. March’s there was always much of the conditional. She meant that he should do what she said, if it were entirely right; and she never meant to be considered as having urged him.

“And suppose his enterprise went wrong?” her husband suggested.

“It won’t go wrong. Hasn’t he made a success of his syndicate?”

“He says so — yes.”

“Very well, then, it stands to reason that he’ll succeed in this, too. He wouldn’t undertake it if he didn’t know it would succeed; he must have capital.”

“It will take a great deal to get such a thing going; and even if he’s got an Angel behind him—”

She caught at the word— “An Angel?”

“It’s what the theatrical people call a financial backer. He dropped a hint of something of that kind.”

“Of course, he’s got an Angel,” said his wife, promptly adopting the word. “And even if he hadn’t, still, Basil, I should be willing to have you risk it. The risk isn’t so great, is it? We shouldn’t be ruined if it failed altogether. With our stocks we have two thousand a year, anyway, and we could pinch through on that till you got into some other business afterward, especially if we’d saved something out of your salary while it lasted. Basil, I want you to try it! I know it will give you a new lease of life to have a congenial occupation.” March laughed, but his wife persisted. “I’m all for your trying it, Basil; indeed I am. If it’s an experiment, you can give it up.”

“It can give me up, too.”

“Oh, nonsense! I guess there’s not much fear of that. Now, I want you to telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, so that he’ll find the despatch waiting for him when he gets to New York. I’ll take the whole responsibility, Basil, and I’ll risk all the consequences.”

III.

March’s face had sobered more and more as she followed one hopeful burst with another, and now it expressed a positive pain. But he forced a smile and said: “There’s a little condition attached. Where did you suppose it was to be published?”

“Why, in Boston, of course. Where else should it be published?”

She looked at him for the intention of his question so searchingly that he quite gave up the attempt to be gay about it. “No,” he said, gravely, “it’s to be published in New York.”

She fell back in her chair. “In New York?” She leaned forward over the table toward him, as if to make sure that she heard aright, and said, with all the keen reproach that he could have expected: “In New York, Basil! Oh, how could you have let me go on?”

He had a sufficiently rueful face in owning: “I oughtn’t to have done it, but I got started wrong. I couldn’t help putting the best foot, forward at first — or as long as the whole thing was in the air. I didn’t know that you would take so much to the general enterprise, or else I should have mentioned the New York condition at once; but, of course, that puts an end to it.”

“Oh, of course,” she assented, sadly. “We COULDN’T go to New York.”

“No, I know that,” he said; and with this a perverse desire to tempt her to the impossibility awoke in him, though he was really quite cold about the affair himself now. “Fulkerson thought we could get a nice flat in New York for about what the interest and taxes came to here, and provisions are cheaper. But I should rather not experiment at my time of life. If I could have been caught younger, I might have been inured to New York, but I don’t believe I could stand it now.”

“How I hate to have you talk that way, Basil! You are young enough to try anything — anywhere; but you know I don’t like New York. I don’t approve of it. It’s so big, and so hideous! Of course I shouldn’t mind that; but I’ve always lived in Boston, and the children were born and have all their friendships and associations here.” She added, with the helplessness that discredited her good sense and did her injustice, “I have just got them both into the Friday afternoon class at Papanti’s, and you know how difficult that is.”

March could not fail to take advantage of an occasion like this. “Well, that alone ought to settle it. Under the circumstances, it would be flying in the face of Providence to leave Boston. The mere fact of a brilliant opening like that offered me on ‘The Microbe,’ and the halcyon future which Fulkerson promises if we’ll come to New York, is as dust in the balance against the advantages of the Friday afternoon class.”

“Basil,” she appealed, solemnly, “have I ever interfered with your career?”

“I never had any for you to interfere with, my dear.”

“Basil! Haven’t I always had faith in you? And don’t you suppose that if I thought it would really be for your advancement I would go to New York or anywhere with you?”

“No, my dear, I don’t,” he teased. “If it would be for my salvation, yes, perhaps; but not short of that; and I should have to prove by a cloud of witnesses that it would. I don’t blame you. I wasn’t born in Boston, but I understand how you feel. And really, my dear,” he added, without irony, “I never seriously thought of asking you to go to New York. I was dazzled by Fulkerson’s offer, I’ll own that; but his choice of me as editor sapped my confidence in him.”

“I don’t like to hear you say that, Basil,” she entreated.

“Well, of course there were mitigating circumstances. I could see that Fulkerson meant to keep the whip-hand himself, and that was reassuring. And, besides, if the Reciprocity Life should happen not to want my services any longer, it wouldn’t be quite like giving up a certainty; though, as a matter of business, I let Fulkerson get that impression; I felt rather sneaking to do it. But if the worst comes to the worst, I can look about for something to do in Boston; and, anyhow, people don’t starve on two thousand a year, though it’s convenient to have five. The fact is, I’m too old to change so radically. If you don’t like my saying that, then you are, Isabel, and so are the children. I’ve no right to take them from the home we’ve made, and to change the whole course of their lives, unless I can assure them of something, and I can’t assure them of anything. Boston is big enough for us, and it’s certainly prettier than New York. I always feel a little proud of hailing from Boston; my pleasure in the place mounts the farther I get away from it. But I do appreciate it, my dear; I’ve no more desire to leave it than you have. You may be sure that if you don’t want to take the children out of the Friday afternoon class, I don’t want to leave my library here, and all the ways I’ve got set in. We’ll keep on. Very likely the company won’t supplant me, and if it does, and Watkins gets the place, he’ll give me a subordinate position of some sort. Cheer up, Isabel! I have put Satan and his angel, Fulkerson, behind me, and it’s all right. Let’s go in to the children.”

He came round the table to Isabel, where she sat in a growing distraction, and lifted her by the waist from her chair.

She sighed deeply. “Shall we tell the children about it?”

“No. What’s the use, now?”

“There wouldn’t be any,” she assented. When they entered the family room, where the boy and girl sat on either side of the lamp working out the lessons for Monday which they had left over from the day before, she asked, “Children, how would you like to live in New York?”

Bella made haste to get in her word first. “And give up the Friday afternoon class?” she wailed.

Tom growled from his book, without lifting his eyes: “I shouldn’t want to go to Columbia. They haven’t got any dormitories, and you have to board round anywhere. Are you going to New York?” He now deigned to look up at his father.

“No, Tom. You and Bella have decided me against it. Your perspective shows the affair in its true proportions. I had an offer to go to New York, but I’ve refused it.”

IV

March’s irony fell harmless from the children’s preoccupation with their own affairs, but he knew that his wife felt it, and this added to the bitterness which prompted it. He blamed her for letting her provincial narrowness prevent his accepting Fulkerson’s offer quite as much as if he had otherwise entirely wished to accept it. His world, like most worlds, had been superficially a disappointment. He was no richer than at the beginning, though in marrying he had given up some tastes, some preferences, some aspirations, in the hope of indulging them later, with larger means and larger leisure. His wife had not urged him to do it; in fact, her pride, as she said, was in his fitness for the life he had renounced; but she had acquiesced, and they had been very happy together. That is to say, they made up their quarrels or ignored them.

They often accused each other of being selfish and indifferent, but she knew that he would always sacrifice himself for her and the children; and he, on his part, with many gibes and mockeries, wholly trusted in her. They had grown practically tolerant of each other’s disagreeable traits; and the danger that really threatened them was that they should grow too well satisfied with themselves, if not with each other. They were not sentimental, they were rather matter-of-fact in their motives; but they had both a sort of humorous fondness for sentimentality. They liked to play with the romantic, from the safe vantage-ground of their real practicality, and to divine the poetry of the commonplace. Their peculiar point of view separated them from most other people, with whom their means of self-comparison were not so good since their marriage as before. Then they had travelled and seen much of the world, and they had formed tastes which they had not always been able to indulge, but of which they felt that the possession reflected distinction on them. It enabled them to look down upon those who were without such tastes; but they were not ill-natured, and so they did not look down so much with contempt as with amusement. In their unfashionable neighborhood they had the fame of being not exclusive precisely, but very much wrapped up in themselves and their children.

Mrs. March was reputed to be very cultivated, and Mr. March even more so, among the simpler folk around them. Their house had some good pictures, which her aunt had brought home from Europe in more affluent days, and it abounded in books on which he spent more than he ought. They had beautified it in every way, and had unconsciously taken credit to them selves for it. They felt, with a glow almost of virtue, how perfectly it fitted their lives and their children’s, and they believed that somehow it expressed their characters — that it was like them. They went out very little; she remained shut up in its refinement, working the good of her own; and he went to his business, and hurried back to forget it, and dream his dream of intellectual achievement in the flattering atmosphere of her sympathy. He could not conceal from himself that his divided life was somewhat like Charles Lamb’s, and there were times when, as he had expressed to Fulkerson, he believed that its division was favorable to the freshness of his interest in literature. It certainly kept it a high privilege, a sacred refuge. Now and then he wrote something, and got it printed after long delays, and when they met on the St. Lawrence Fulkerson had some of March’s verses in his pocket-book, which he had cut out of astray newspaper and carried about for years, because they pleased his fancy so much; they formed an immediate bond of union between the men when their authorship was traced and owned, and this gave a pretty color of romance to their acquaintance. But, for the most part, March was satisfied to read. He was proud of reading critically, and he kept in the current of literary interests and controversies. It all seemed to him, and to his wife at second-hand, very meritorious; he could not help contrasting his life and its inner elegance with that of other men who had no such resources. He thought that he was not arrogant about it, because he did full justice to the good qualities of those other people; he congratulated himself upon the democratic instincts which enabled him to do this; and neither he nor his wife supposed that they were selfish persons. On the contrary, they were very sympathetic; there was no good cause that they did not wish well; they had a generous scorn of all kinds of narrow-heartedness; if it had ever come into their way to sacrifice themselves for others, they thought they would have done so, but they never asked why it had not come in their way. They were very gentle and kind, even when most elusive; and they taught their children to loathe all manner of social cruelty. March was of so watchful a conscience in some respects that he denied himself the pensive pleasure of lapsing into the melancholy of unfulfilled aspirations; but he did not see that, if he had abandoned them, it had been for what he held dearer; generally he felt as if he had turned from them with a high, altruistic aim. The practical expression of his life was that it was enough to provide well for his family; to have cultivated tastes, and to gratify them to the extent of his means; to be rather distinguished, even in the simplification of his desires. He believed, and his wife believed, that if the time ever came when he really wished to make a sacrifice to the fulfilment of the aspirations so long postponed, she would be ready to join with heart and hand.

When he went to her room from his library, where she left him the whole evening with the children, he found her before the glass thoughtfully removing the first dismantling pin from her back hair.

“I can’t help feeling,” she grieved into the mirror, “that it’s I who keep you from accepting that offer. I know it is! I could go West with you, or into a new country — anywhere; but New York terrifies me. I don’t like New York, I never did; it disheartens and distracts me; I can’t find myself in it; I shouldn’t know how to shop. I know I’m foolish and narrow and provincial,” she went on, “but I could never have any inner quiet in New York; I couldn’t live in the spirit there. I suppose people do. It can’t be that all these millions—’

“Oh, not so bad as that!” March interposed, laughing. “There aren’t quite two.”

“I thought there were four or five. Well, no matter. You see what I am, Basil. I’m terribly limited. I couldn’t make my sympathies go round two million people; I should be wretched. I suppose I’m standing in the way of your highest interest, but I can’t help it. We took each other for better or worse, and you must try to bear with me—” She broke off and began to cry.

“Stop it!” shouted March. “I tell you I never cared anything for Fulkerson’s scheme or entertained it seriously, and I shouldn’t if he’d proposed to carry it out in Boston.” This was not quite true, but in the retrospect it seemed sufficiently so for the purposes of argument. “Don’t say another word about it. The thing’s over now, and I don’t want to think of it any more. We couldn’t change its nature if we talked all night. But I want you to understand that it isn’t your limitations that are in the way. It’s mine. I shouldn’t have the courage to take such a place; I don’t think I’m fit for it, and that’s the long and short of it.”

“Oh, you don’t know how it hurts me to have you say that, Basil.”

The next morning, as they sat together at breakfast, without the children, whom they let lie late on Sunday, Mrs. March said to her husband, silent over his fish-balls and baked beans: “We will go to New York. I’ve decided it.”

“Well, it takes two to decide that,” March retorted. “We are not going to
New York.”

“Yes, we are. I’ve thought it out. Now, listen.”

“Oh, I’m willing to listen,” he consented, airily.

“You’ve always wanted to get out of the insurance business, and now with that fear of being turned out which you have you mustn’t neglect this offer. I suppose it has its risks, but it’s a risk keeping on as we are; and perhaps you will make a great success of it. I do want you to try, Basil. If I could once feel that you had fairly seen what you could do in literature, I should die happy.”

“Not immediately after, I hope,” he suggested, taking the second cup of coffee she had been pouring out for him. “And Boston?”

“We needn’t make a complete break. We can keep this place for the present, anyway; we could let it for the winter, and come back in the summer next year. It would be change enough from New York.”

“Fulkerson and I hadn’t got as far as to talk of a vacation.”

“No matter. The children and I could come. And if you didn’t like New York, or the enterprise failed, you could get into something in Boston again; and we have enough to live on till you did. Yes, Basil, I’m going.”

“I can see by the way your chin trembles that nothing could stop you. You may go to New York if you wish, Isabel, but I shall stay here.”

“Be serious, Basil. I’m in earnest.”

“Serious? If I were any more serious I should shed tears. Come, my dear, I know what you mean, and if I had my heart set on this thing — Fulkerson always calls it ‘this thing’ I would cheerfully accept any sacrifice you could make to it. But I’d rather not offer you up on a shrine I don’t feel any particular faith in. I’m very comfortable where I am; that is, I know just where the pinch comes, and if it comes harder, why, I’ve got used to bearing that kind of pinch. I’m too old to change pinches.”

“Now, that does decide me.”

“It decides me, too.”

“I will take all the responsibility, Basil,” she pleaded.

“Oh yes; but you’ll hand it back to me as soon as you’ve carried your point with it. There’s nothing mean about you, Isabel, where responsibility is concerned. No; if I do this thing — Fulkerson again? I can’t get away from ‘this thing’; it’s ominous — I must do it because I want to do it, and not because you wish that you wanted me to do it. I understand your position, Isabel, and that you’re really acting from a generous impulse, but there’s nothing so precarious at our time of life as a generous impulse. When we were younger we could stand it; we could give way to it and take the consequences. But now we can’t bear it. We must act from cold reason even in the ardor of self-sacrifice.”

“Oh, as if you did that!” his wife retorted.

“Is that any cause why you shouldn’t?” She could not say that it was, and he went on triumphantly:

“No, I won’t take you away from the only safe place on the planet and plunge you into the most perilous, and then have you say in your revulsion of feeling that you were all against it from the first, and you gave way because you saw I had my heart set on it.” He supposed he was treating the matter humorously, but in this sort of banter between husband and wife there is always much more than the joking. March had seen some pretty feminine inconsistencies and trepidations which once charmed him in his wife hardening into traits of middle-age which were very like those of less interesting older women. The sight moved him with a kind of pathos, but he felt the result hindering and vexatious.

She now retorted that if he did not choose to take her at her word he need not, but that whatever he did she should have nothing to reproach herself with; and, at least, he could not say that she had trapped him into anything.

“What do you mean by trapping?” he demanded.

“I don’t know what you call it,” she answered; “but when you get me to commit myself to a thing by leaving out the most essential point, I call it trapping.”

“I wonder you stop at trapping, if you think I got you to favor Fulkerson’s scheme and then sprung New York on you. I don’t suppose you do, though. But I guess we won’t talk about it any more.”

He went out for a long walk, and she went to her room. They lunched silently together in the presence of their children, who knew that they had been quarrelling, but were easily indifferent to the fact, as children get to be in such cases; nature defends their youth, and the unhappiness which they behold does not infect them. In the evening, after the boy and girl had gone to bed, the father and mother resumed their talk. He would have liked to take it up at the point from which it wandered into hostilities, for he felt it lamentable that a matter which so seriously concerned them should be confused in the fumes of senseless anger; and he was willing to make a tacit acknowledgment of his own error by recurring to the question, but she would not be content with this, and he had to concede explicitly to her weakness that she really meant it when she had asked him to accept Fulkerson’s offer. He said he knew that; and he began soberly to talk over their prospects in the event of their going to New York.

“Oh, I see you are going!” she twitted.

“I’m going to stay,” he answered, “and let them turn me out of my agency here,” and in this bitterness their talk ended.

V.

His wife made no attempt to renew their talk before March went to his business in the morning, and they parted in dry offence. Their experience was that these things always came right of themselves at last, and they usually let them. He knew that she had really tried to consent to a thing that was repugnant to her, and in his heart he gave her more credit for the effort than he had allowed her openly. She knew that she had made it with the reservation he accused her of, and that he had a right to feel sore at what she could not help. But he left her to brood over his ingratitude, and she suffered him to go heavy and unfriended to meet the chances of the day. He said to himself that if she had assented cordially to the conditions of Fulkerson’s offer, he would have had the courage to take all the other risks himself, and would have had the satisfaction of resigning his place. As it was, he must wait till he was removed; and he figured with bitter pleasure the pain she would feel when he came home some day and told her he had been supplanted, after it was too late to close with Fulkerson.

He found a letter on his desk from the secretary, “Dictated,” in typewriting, which briefly informed him that Mr. Hubbell, the Inspector of Agencies, would be in Boston on Wednesday, and would call at his office during the forenoon. The letter was not different in tone from many that he had formerly received; but the visit announced was out of the usual order, and March believed he read his fate in it. During the eighteen years of his connection with it — first as a subordinate in the Boston office, and finally as its general agent there — he had seen a good many changes in the Reciprocity; presidents, vice-presidents, actuaries, and general agents had come and gone, but there had always seemed to be a recognition of his efficiency, or at least sufficiency, and there had never been any manner of trouble, no question of accounts, no apparent dissatisfaction with his management, until latterly, when there had begun to come from headquarters some suggestions of enterprise in certain ways, which gave him his first suspicions of his clerk Watkins’s willingness to succeed him; they embodied some of Watkins’s ideas. The things proposed seemed to March undignified, and even vulgar; he had never thought himself wanting in energy, though probably he had left the business to take its own course in the old lines more than he realized. Things had always gone so smoothly that he had sometimes fancied a peculiar regard for him in the management, which he had the weakness to attribute to an appreciation of what he occasionally did in literature, though in saner moments he felt how impossible this was. Beyond a reference from Mr. Hubbell to some piece of March’s which had happened to meet his eye, no one in the management ever gave a sign of consciousness that their service was adorned by an obscure literary man; and Mr. Hubbell himself had the effect of regarding the excursions of March’s pen as a sort of joke, and of winking at them; as he might have winked if once in a way he had found him a little the gayer for dining.

March wore through the day gloomily, but he had it on his conscience not to show any resentment toward Watkins, whom he suspected of wishing to supplant him, and even of working to do so. Through this self-denial he reached a better mind concerning his wife. He determined not to make her suffer needlessly, if the worst came to the worst; she would suffer enough, at the best, and till the worst came he would spare her, and not say anything about the letter he had got.

But when they met, her first glance divined that something had happened, and her first question frustrated his generous intention. He had to tell her about the letter. She would not allow that it had any significance, but she wished him to make an end of his anxieties and forestall whatever it might portend by resigning his place at once. She said she was quite ready to go to New York; she had been thinking it all over, and now she really wanted to go. He answered, soberly, that he had thought it over, too; and he did not wish to leave Boston, where he had lived so long, or try a new way of life if he could help it. He insisted that he was quite selfish in this; in their concessions their quarrel vanished; they agreed that whatever happened would be for the best; and the next day he went to his office fortified for any event.

His destiny, if tragical, presented itself with an aspect which he might have found comic if it had been another’s destiny. Mr. Hubbell brought March’s removal, softened in the guise of a promotion. The management at New York, it appeared, had acted upon a suggestion of Mr. Hubbell’s, and now authorized him to offer March the editorship of the monthly paper published in the interest of the company; his office would include the authorship of circulars and leaflets in behalf of life-insurance, and would give play to the literary talent which Mr. Hubbell had brought to the attention of the management; his salary would be nearly as much as at present, but the work would not take his whole time, and in a place like New York he could get a great deal of outside writing, which they would not object to his doing.

Mr. Hubbell seemed so sure of his acceptance of a place in every way congenial to a man of literary tastes that March was afterward sorry he dismissed the proposition with obvious irony, and had needlessly hurt Hubbell’s feelings; but Mrs. March had no such regrets. She was only afraid that he had not made his rejection contemptuous enough. “And now,” she said, “telegraph Mr. Fulkerson, and we will go at once.”

“I suppose I could still get Watkins’s former place,” March suggested.

“Never!” she retorted. “Telegraph instantly!”

They were only afraid now that Fulkerson might have changed his mind, and they had a wretched day in which they heard nothing from him. It ended with his answering March’s telegram in person. They were so glad of his coming, and so touched by his satisfaction with his bargain, that they laid all the facts of the case before him. He entered fully into March’s sense of the joke latent in Mr. Hubbell’s proposition, and he tried to make Mrs. March believe that he shared her resentment of the indignity offered her husband.

March made a show of willingness to release him in view of the changed situation, saying that he held him to nothing. Fulkerson laughed, and asked him how soon he thought he could come on to New York. He refused to reopen the question of March’s fitness with him; he said they had gone into that thoroughly, but he recurred to it with Mrs. March, and confirmed her belief in his good sense on all points. She had been from the first moment defiantly confident of her husband’s ability, but till she had talked the matter over with Fulkerson she was secretly not sure of it; or, at least, she was not sure that March was not right in distrusting himself. When she clearly understood, now, what Fulkerson intended, she had no longer a doubt. He explained how the enterprise differed from others, and how he needed for its direction a man who combined general business experience and business ideas with a love for the thing and a natural aptness for it. He did not want a young man, and yet he wanted youth — its freshness, its zest — such as March would feel in a thing he could put his whole heart into. He would not run in ruts, like an old fellow who had got hackneyed; he would not have any hobbies; he would not have any friends or any enemies. Besides, he would have to meet people, and March was a man that people took to; she knew that herself; he had a kind of charm. The editorial management was going to be kept in the background, as far as the public was concerned; the public was to suppose that the thing ran itself. Fulkerson did not care for a great literary reputation in his editor — he implied that March had a very pretty little one. At the same time the relations between the contributors and the management were to be much more, intimate than usual. Fulkerson felt his personal disqualification for working the thing socially, and he counted upon Mr. March for that; that was to say, he counted upon Mrs. March.

She protested he must not count upon her; but it by no means disabled Fulkerson’s judgment in her view that March really seemed more than anything else a fancy of his. He had been a fancy of hers; and the sort of affectionate respect with which Fulkerson spoke of him laid forever some doubt she had of the fineness of Fulkerson’s manners and reconciled her to the graphic slanginess of his speech.

The affair was now irretrievable, but she gave her approval to it as superbly as if it were submitted in its inception. Only, Mr. Fulkerson must not suppose she should ever like New York. She would not deceive him on that point. She never should like it. She did not conceal, either, that she did not like taking the children out of the Friday afternoon class; and she did not believe that Tom would ever be reconciled to going to Columbia. She took courage from Fulkerson’s suggestion that it was possible for Tom to come to Harvard even from New York; and she heaped him with questions concerning the domiciliation of the family in that city. He tried to know something about the matter, and he succeeded in seeming interested in points necessarily indifferent to him.

VI.

In the uprooting and transplanting of their home that followed, Mrs. March often trembled before distant problems and possible contingencies, but she was never troubled by present difficulties. She kept up with tireless energy; and in the moments of dejection and misgiving which harassed her husband she remained dauntless, and put heart into him when he had lost it altogether.

She arranged to leave the children in the house with the servants, while she went on with March to look up a dwelling of some sort in New York. It made him sick to think of it; and, when it came to the point, he would rather have given up the whole enterprise. She had to nerve him to it, to represent more than once that now they had no choice but to make this experiment. Every detail of parting was anguish to him. He got consolation out of the notion of letting the house furnished for the winter; that implied their return to it, but it cost him pangs of the keenest misery to advertise it; and, when a tenant was actually found, it was all he could do to give him the lease. He tried his wife’s love and patience as a man must to whom the future is easy in the mass but terrible as it translates itself piecemeal into the present. He experienced remorse in the presence of inanimate things he was going to leave as if they had sensibly reproached him, and an anticipative homesickness that seemed to stop his heart. Again and again his wife had to make him reflect that his depression was not prophetic. She convinced him of what he already knew, and persuaded him against his knowledge that he could be keeping an eye out for something to take hold of in Boston if they could not stand New York. She ended by telling him that it was too bad to make her comfort him in a trial that was really so much more a trial to her. She had to support him in a last access of despair on their way to the Albany depot the morning they started to New York; but when the final details had been dealt with, the tickets bought, the trunks checked, and the handbags hung up in their car, and the future had massed itself again at a safe distance and was seven hours and two hundred miles away, his spirits began to rise and hers to sink. He would have been willing to celebrate the taste, the domestic refinement, of the ladies’ waiting-room in the depot, where they had spent a quarter of an hour before the train started. He said he did not believe there was another station in the world where mahogany rocking-chairs were provided; that the dull-red warmth of the walls was as cozy as an evening lamp, and that he always hoped to see a fire kindled on that vast hearth and under that aesthetic mantel, but he supposed now he never should. He said it was all very different from that tunnel, the old Albany depot, where they had waited the morning they went to New York when they were starting on their wedding journey.

“The morning, Basil!” cried his wife. “We went at night; and we were going to take the boat, but it stormed so!” She gave him a glance of such reproach that he could not answer anything, and now she asked him whether he supposed their cook and second girl would be contented with one of those dark holes where they put girls to sleep in New York flats, and what she should do if Margaret, especially, left her. He ventured to suggest that Margaret would probably like the city; but, if she left, there were plenty of other girls to be had in New York. She replied that there were none she could trust, and that she knew Margaret would not stay. He asked her why she took her, then — why she did not give her up at once; and she answered that it would be inhuman to give her up just in the edge of the winter. She had promised to keep her; and Margaret was pleased with the notion of going to New York, where she had a cousin.

“Then perhaps she’ll be pleased with the notion of staying,” he said.

“Oh, much you know about it!” she retorted; and, in view of the hypothetical difficulty and his want of sympathy, she fell into a gloom, from which she roused herself at last by declaring that, if there was nothing else in the flat they took, there should be a light kitchen and a bright, sunny bedroom for Margaret. He expressed the belief that they could easily find such a flat as that, and she denounced his fatal optimism, which buoyed him up in the absence of an undertaking and let him drop into the depths of despair in its presence.

He owned this defect of temperament, but he said that it compensated the opposite in her character. “I suppose that’s one of the chief uses of marriage; people supplement one another, and form a pretty fair sort of human being together. The only drawback to the theory is that unmarried people seem each as complete and whole as a married pair.”

She refused to be amused; she turned her face to the window and put her handkerchief up under her veil.

It was not till the dining-car was attached to their train that they were both able to escape for an hour into the care-free mood of their earlier travels, when they were so easily taken out of themselves. The time had been when they could have found enough in the conjectural fortunes and characters of their fellow-passengers to occupy them. This phase of their youth had lasted long, and the world was still full of novelty and interest for them; but it required all the charm of the dining-car now to lay the anxieties that beset them. It was so potent for the moment, however, that they could take an objective view at their sitting cozily down there together, as if they had only themselves in the world. They wondered what the children were doing, the children who possessed them so intensely when present, and now, by a fantastic operation of absence, seemed almost non-existents. They tried to be homesick for them, but failed; they recognized with comfortable self-abhorrence that this was terrible, but owned a fascination in being alone; at the same time, they could not imagine how people felt who never had any children. They contrasted the luxury of dining that way, with every advantage except a band of music, and the old way of rushing out to snatch a fearful joy at the lunch-counters of the Worcesier and Springfield and New Haven stations. They had not gone often to New York since their wedding journey, but they had gone often enough to have noted the change from the lunch-counter to the lunch-basket brought in the train, from which you could subsist with more ease and dignity, but seemed destined to a superabundance of pickles, whatever you ordered.

They thought well of themselves now that they could be both critical and tolerant of flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another in their dinner, and they lingered over their coffee and watched the autumn landscape through the windows.

“Not quite so loud a pattern of calico this year,” he said, with patronizing forbearance toward the painted woodlands whirling by. “Do you see how the foreground next the train rushes from us and the background keeps ahead of us, while the middle distance seems stationary? I don’t think I ever noticed that effect before. There ought to be something literary in it: retreating past and advancing future and deceitfully permanent present — something like that?”

His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap before rising. “Yes. You mustn’t waste any of these ideas now.”

“Oh no; it would be money out of Fulkerson’s pocket.”

VII.

They went to a quiet hotel far down-town, and took a small apartment which they thought they could easily afford for the day or two they need spend in looking up a furnished flat. They were used to staying at this hotel when they came on for a little outing in New York, after some rigid winter in Boston, at the time of the spring exhibitions. They were remembered there from year to year; the colored call-boys, who never seemed to get any older, smiled upon them, and the clerk called March by name even before he registered. He asked if Mrs. March were with him, and said then he supposed they would want their usual quarters; and in a moment they were domesticated in a far interior that seemed to have been waiting for them in a clean, quiet, patient disoccupation ever since they left it two years before. The little parlor, with its gilt paper and ebonized furniture, was the lightest of the rooms, but it was not very light at noonday without the gas, which the bell-boy now flared up for them. The uproar of the city came to it in a soothing murmur, and they took possession of its peace and comfort with open celebration. After all, they agreed, there was no place in the world so delightful as a hotel apartment like that; the boasted charms of home were nothing to it; and then the magic of its being always there, ready for any one, every one, just as if it were for some one alone: it was like the experience of an Arabian Nights hero come true for all the race.

“Oh, why can’t we always stay here, just we two!” Mrs. March sighed to her husband, as he came out of his room rubbing his face red with the towel, while she studied a new arrangement of her bonnet and handbag on the mantel.

“And ignore the past? I’m willing. I’ve no doubt that the children could get on perfectly well without us, and could find some lot in the scheme of Providence that would really be just as well for them.”

“Yes; or could contrive somehow never to have existed. I should insist upon that. If they are, don’t you see that we couldn’t wish them not to be?”

“Oh yes; I see your point; it’s simply incontrovertible.”

She laughed and said: “Well, at any rate, if we can’t find a flat to suit us we can all crowd into these three rooms somehow, for the winter, and then browse about for meals. By the week we could get them much cheaper; and we could save on the eating, as they do in Europe. Or on something else.”

“Something else, probably,” said March. “But we won’t take this apartment till the ideal furnished flat winks out altogether. We shall not have any trouble. We can easily find some one who is going South for the winter and will be glad to give up their flat ‘to the right party’ at a nominal rent. That’s my notion. That’s what the Evanses did one winter when they came on here in February. All but the nominality of the rent.”

“Yes, and we could pay a very good rent and still save something on letting our house. You can settle yourselves in a hundred different ways in New York, that is one merit of the place. But if everything else fails, we can come back to this. I want you to take the refusal of it, Basil. And we’ll commence looking this very evening as soon as we’ve had dinner. I cut a lot of things out of the Herald as we came on. See here!”

She took a long strip of paper out of her hand-bag with minute advertisements pinned transversely upon it, and forming the effect of some glittering nondescript vertebrate.

“Looks something like the sea-serpent,” said March, drying his hands on the towel, while he glanced up and down the list. “But we sha’n’t have any trouble. I’ve no doubt there are half a dozen things there that will do. You haven’t gone up-town? Because we must be near the ‘Every Other Week’ office.”

“No; but I wish Mr. Fulkerson hadn’t called it that! It always makes one think of ‘jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam to-day,’ in ‘Through the Looking-Glass.’ They’re all in this region.”

They were still at their table, beside a low window, where some sort of never-blooming shrub symmetrically balanced itself in a large pot, with a leaf to the right and a leaf to the left and a spear up the middle, when Fulkerson came stepping square-footedly over the thick dining-room carpet. He wagged in the air a gay hand of salutation at sight of them, and of repression when they offered to rise to meet him; then, with an apparent simultaneity of action he gave a hand to each, pulled up a chair from the next table, put his hat and stick on the floor beside it, and seated himself.

“Well, you’ve burned your ships behind you, sure enough,” he said, beaming his satisfaction upon them from eyes and teeth.

“The ships are burned,” said March, “though I’m not sure we alone did it. But here we are, looking for shelter, and a little anxious about the disposition of the natives.”

“Oh, they’re an awful peaceable lot,” said Fulkerson. “I’ve been round among the caciques a little, and I think I’ve got two or three places that will just suit you, Mrs. March. How did you leave the children?”

“Oh, how kind of you! Very well, and very proud to be left in charge of the smoking wrecks.”

Fulkerson naturally paid no attention to what she said, being but secondarily interested in the children at the best. “Here are some things right in this neighborhood, within gunshot of the office, and if you want you can go and look at them to-night; the agents gave me houses where the people would be in.”

“We will go and look at them instantly,” said Mrs. March. “Or, as soon as you’ve had coffee with us.”

“Never do,” Fulkerson replied. He gathered up his hat and stick. “Just rushed in to say Hello, and got to run right away again. I tell you, March, things are humming. I’m after those fellows with a sharp stick all the while to keep them from loafing on my house, and at the same time I’m just bubbling over with ideas about ‘The Lone Hand’ — wish we could call it that! — that I want to talk up with you.”

“Well, come to breakfast,” said Mrs. March, cordially.

“No; the ideas will keep till you’ve secured your lodge in this vast wilderness. Good-bye.”

“You’re as nice as you can be, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, “to keep us in mind when you have so much to occupy you.”

“I wouldn’t have anything to occupy me if I hadn’t kept you in mind, Mrs. March,” said Fulkerson, going off upon as good a speech as he could apparently hope to make.

“Why, Basil,” said Mrs. March, when he was gone, “he’s charming! But now we mustn’t lose an instant. Let’s see where the places are.” She ran over the half-dozen agents’ permits. “Capital — first-rate — the very thing — every one. Well, I consider ourselves settled! We can go back to the children to-morrow if we like, though I rather think I should like to stay over another day and get a little rested for the final pulling up that’s got to come. But this simplifies everything enormously, and Mr. Fulkerson is as thoughtful and as sweet as he can be. I know you will get on well with him. He has such a good heart. And his attitude toward you, Basil, is beautiful always — so respectful; or not that so much as appreciative. Yes, appreciative — that’s the word; I must always keep that in mind.”

“It’s quite important to do so,” said March.

“Yes,” she assented, seriously, “and we must not forget just what kind of flat we are going to look for. The ‘sine qua nons’ are an elevator and steam heat, not above the third floor, to begin with. Then we must each have a room, and you must have your study and I must have my parlor; and the two girls must each have a room. With the kitchen and dining room, how many does that make?”

“Ten.”

“I thought eight. Well, no matter. You can work in the parlor, and run into your bedroom when anybody comes; and I can sit in mine, and the girls must put up with one, if it’s large and sunny, though I’ve always given them two at home. And the kitchen must be sunny, so they can sit in it. And the rooms must all have outside light. And the rent must not be over eight hundred for the winter. We only get a thousand for our whole house, and we must save something out of that, so as to cover the expenses of moving. Now, do you think you can remember all that?”

“Not the half of it,” said March. “But you can; or if you forget a third of it, I can come in with my partial half and more than make it up.”

She had brought her bonnet and sacque down-stairs with her, and was transferring them from the hatrack to her person while she talked. The friendly door-boy let them into the street, and the clear October evening air brightened her so that as she tucked her hand under her husband’s arm and began to pull him along she said, “If we find something right away — and we’re just as likely to get the right flat soon as late; it’s all a lottery — we’ll go to the theatre somewhere.”

She had a moment’s panic about having left the agents’ permits on the table, and after remembering that she had put them into her little shopping-bag, where she kept her money (each note crushed into a round wad), and had left it on the hat-rack, where it would certainly be stolen, she found it on her wrist. She did not think that very funny; but after a first impulse to inculpate her husband, she let him laugh, while they stopped under a lamp and she held the permits half a yard away to read the numbers on them.

“Where are your glasses, Isabel?”

“On the mantel in our room, of course.”

“Then you ought to have brought a pair of tongs.”

“I wouldn’t get off second-hand jokes, Basil,” she said; and “Why, here!” she cried, whirling round to the door before which they had halted, “this is the very number. Well, I do believe it’s a sign!”

One of those colored men who soften the trade of janitor in many of the smaller apartment-houses in New York by the sweetness of their race let the Marches in, or, rather, welcomed them to the possession of the premises by the bow with which he acknowledged their permit. It was a large, old mansion cut up into five or six dwellings, but it had kept some traits of its former dignity, which pleased people of their sympathetic tastes. The dark-mahogany trim, of sufficiently ugly design, gave a rich gloom to the hallway, which was wide and paved with marble; the carpeted stairs curved aloft through a generous space.

“There is no elevator?” Mrs. March asked of the janitor.

He answered, “No, ma’am; only two flights up,” so winningly that she said,

“Oh!” in courteous apology, and whispered to her husband, as she followed lightly up, “We’ll take it, Basil, if it’s like the rest.”

“If it’s like him, you mean.”

“I don’t wonder they wanted to own them,” she hurriedly philosophized. “If I had such a creature, nothing but death should part us, and I should no more think of giving him his freedom!”

“No; we couldn’t afford it,” returned her husband.

The apartment which the janitor unlocked for them, and lit up from those chandeliers and brackets of gilt brass in the form of vine bunches, leaves, and tendrils in which the early gas-fitter realized most of his conceptions of beauty, had rather more of the ugliness than the dignity of the hall. But the rooms were large, and they grouped themselves in a reminiscence of the time when they were part of a dwelling that had its charm, its pathos, its impressiveness. Where they were cut up into smaller spaces, it had been done with the frankness with which a proud old family of fallen fortunes practises its economies. The rough pine-floors showed a black border of tack-heads where carpets had been lifted and put down for generations; the white paint was yellow with age; the apartment had light at the front and at the back, and two or three rooms had glimpses of the day through small windows let into their corners; another one seemed lifting an appealing eye to heaven through a glass circle in its ceiling; the rest must darkle in perpetual twilight. Yet something pleased in it all, and Mrs. March had gone far to adapt the different rooms to the members of her family, when she suddenly thought (and for her to think was to say), “Why, but there’s no steam heat!”

“No, ma’am,” the janitor admitted; “but dere’s grates in most o’ de rooms, and dere’s furnace heat in de halls.”

“That’s true,” she admitted, and, having placed her family in the apartments, it was hard to get them out again. “Could we manage?” she referred to her husband.

“Why, I shouldn’t care for the steam heat if — What is the rent?” he broke off to ask the janitor.

“Nine hundred, sir.”

March concluded to his wife, “If it were furnished.”

“Why, of course! What could I have been thinking of? We’re looking for a furnished flat,” she explained to the janitor, “and this was so pleasant and homelike that I never thought whether it was furnished or not.”

She smiled upon the janitor, and he entered into the joke and chuckled so amiably at her flattering oversight on the way down-stairs that she said, as she pinched her husband’s arm, “Now, if you don’t give him a quarter I’ll never speak to you again, Basil!”

“I would have given half a dollar willingly to get you beyond his glamour,” said March, when they were safely on the pavement outside. “If it hadn’t been for my strength of character, you’d have taken an unfurnished flat without heat and with no elevator, at nine hundred a year, when you had just sworn me to steam heat, an elevator, furniture, and eight hundred.”

“Yes! How could I have lost my head so completely?” she said, with a lenient amusement in her aberration which she was not always able to feel in her husband’s.

“The next time a colored janitor opens the door to us, I’ll tell him the apartment doesn’t suit at the threshold. It’s the only way to manage you, Isabel.”

“It’s true. I am in love with the whole race. I never saw one of them that didn’t have perfectly angelic manners. I think we shall all be black in heaven — that is, black-souled.”

“That isn’t the usual theory,” said March.

“Well, perhaps not,” she assented. “Where are we going now? Oh yes, to the Xenophon!”

She pulled him gayly along again, and after they had walked a block down and half a block over they stood before the apartment-house of that name, which was cut on the gas-lamps on either side of the heavily spiked, aesthetic-hinged black door. The titter of an electric-bell brought a large, fat Buttons, with a stage effect of being dressed to look small, who said he would call the janitor, and they waited in the dimly splendid, copper-colored interior, admiring the whorls and waves into which the wallpaint was combed, till the janitor came in his gold-banded cap, like a Continental porker. When they said they would like to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, he owned his inability to cope with the affair, and said he must send for the superintendent; he was either in the Herodotus or the Thucydides, and would be there in a minute. The Buttons brought him — a Yankee of browbeating presence in plain clothes — almost before they had time to exchange a frightened whisper in recognition of the fact that there could be no doubt of the steam heat and elevator in this case. Half stifled in the one, they mounted in the other eight stories, while they tried to keep their self-respect under the gaze of the superintendent, which they felt was classing and assessing them with unfriendly accuracy. They could not, and they faltered abashed at the threshold of Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, while the superintendent lit the gas in the gangway that he called a private hall, and in the drawing-room and the succession of chambers stretching rearward to the kitchen. Everything had been done by the architect to save space, and everything, to waste it by Mrs. Grosvenor Green. She had conformed to a law for the necessity of turning round in each room, and had folding-beds in the chambers, but there her subordination had ended, and wherever you might have turned round she had put a gimcrack so that you would knock it over if you did turn. The place was rather pretty and even imposing at first glance, and it took several joint ballots for March and his wife to make sure that with the kitchen there were only six rooms. At every door hung a portiere from large rings on a brass rod; every shelf and dressing-case and mantel was littered with gimcracks, and the corners of the tiny rooms were curtained off, and behind these portieres swarmed more gimcracks. The front of the upright piano had what March called a short-skirted portiere on it, and the top was covered with vases, with dragon candlesticks and with Jap fans, which also expanded themselves bat wise on the walls between the etchings and the water colors. The floors were covered with filling, and then rugs and then skins; the easy-chairs all had tidies, Armenian and Turkish and Persian; the lounges and sofas had embroidered cushions hidden under tidies.

The radiator was concealed by a Jap screen, and over the top of this some Arab scarfs were flung. There was a superabundance of clocks. China pugs guarded the hearth; a brass sunflower smiled from the top of either andiron, and a brass peacock spread its tail before them inside a high filigree fender; on one side was a coalhod in ‘repousse’ brass, and on the other a wrought iron wood-basket. Some red Japanese bird-kites were stuck about in the necks of spelter vases, a crimson Jap umbrella hung opened beneath the chandelier, and each globe had a shade of yellow silk.

March, when he had recovered his self-command a little in the presence of the agglomeration, comforted himself by calling the bric-a-brac Jamescracks, as if this was their full name.

The disrespect he was able to show the whole apartment by means of this joke strengthened him to say boldly to the superintendent that it was altogether too small; then he asked carelessly what the rent was.

“Two hundred and fifty.”

The Marches gave a start, and looked at each other.

“Don’t you think we could make it do?” she asked him, and he could see that she had mentally saved five hundred dollars as the difference between the rent of their house and that of this flat. “It has some very pretty features, and we could manage to squeeze in, couldn’t we?”

“You won’t find another furnished flat like it for no two-fifty a month in the whole city,” the superintendent put in.

They exchanged glances again, and March said, carelessly, “It’s too small.”

“There’s a vacant flat in the Herodotus for eighteen hundred a year, and one in the Thucydides for fifteen,” the superintendent suggested, clicking his keys together as they sank down in the elevator; “seven rooms and bath.”

“Thank you,” said March; “we’re looking for a furnished flat.”

They felt that the superintendent parted from them with repressed sarcasm.

“Oh, Basil, do you think we really made him think it was the smallness and not the dearness?”

“No, but we saved our self-respect in the attempt; and that’s a great deal.”

“Of course, I wouldn’t have taken it, anyway, with only six rooms, and so high up. But what prices! Now, we must be very circumspect about the next place.”

It was a janitress, large, fat, with her arms wound up in her apron, who received them there. Mrs. March gave her a succinct but perfect statement of their needs. She failed to grasp the nature of them, or feigned to do so. She shook her head, and said that her son would show them the flat. There was a radiator visible in the narrow hall, and Isabel tacitly compromised on steam heat without an elevator, as the flat was only one flight up. When the son appeared from below with a small kerosene hand-lamp, it appeared that the flat was unfurnished, but there was no stopping him till he had shown it in all its impossibility. When they got safely away from it and into the street March said: “Well, have you had enough for to-night, Isabel? Shall we go to the theatre now?”

“Not on any account. I want to see the whole list of flats that Mr. Fulkerson thought would be the very thing for us.” She laughed, but with a certain bitterness.

“You’ll be calling him my Mr. Fulkerson next, Isabel.”

“Oh no!”

The fourth address was a furnished flat without a kitchen, in a house with a general restaurant. The fifth was a furnished house. At the sixth a pathetic widow and her pretty daughter wanted to take a family to board, and would give them a private table at a rate which the Marches would have thought low in Boston.

Mrs. March came away tingling with compassion for their evident anxiety, and this pity naturally soured into a sense of injury. “Well, I must say I have completely lost confidence in Mr. Fulkerson’s judgment. Anything more utterly different from what I told him we wanted I couldn’t imagine. If he doesn’t manage any better about his business than he has done about this, it will be a perfect failure.”

“Well, well, let’s hope he’ll be more circumspect about that,” her husband returned, with ironical propitiation. “But I don’t think it’s Fulkerson’s fault altogether. Perhaps it’s the house-agents’. They’re a very illusory generation. There seems to be something in the human habitation that corrupts the natures of those who deal in it, to buy or sell it, to hire or let it. You go to an agent and tell him what kind of a house you want. He has no such house, and he sends you to look at something altogether different, upon the well-ascertained principle that if you can’t get what you want you will take what you can get. You don’t suppose the ‘party’ that took our house in Boston was looking for any such house? He was looking for a totally different kind of house in another part of the town.”

“I don’t believe that!” his wife broke in.

“Well, no matter. But see what a scandalous rent you asked for it.”

“We didn’t get much more than half; and, besides, the agent told me to ask fourteen hundred.”

“Oh, I’m not blaming you, Isabel. I’m only analyzing the house-agent and exonerating Fulkerson.”

“Well, I don’t believe he told them just what we wanted; and, at any rate, I’m done with agents. Tomorrow I’m going entirely by advertisements.”

VIII.

Mrs. March took the vertebrate with her to the Vienna Coffee-House, where they went to breakfast next morning. She made March buy her the Herald and the World, and she added to its spiny convolutions from them. She read the new advertisements aloud with ardor and with faith to believe that the apartments described in them were every one truthfully represented, and that any one of them was richly responsive to their needs. “Elegant, light, large, single and outside flats” were offered with “all improvements — bath, ice-box, etc.” — for twenty-five to thirty dollars a month. The cheapness was amazing. The Wagram, the Esmeralda, the Jacinth, advertised them for forty dollars and sixty dollars, “with steam heat and elevator,” rent free till November. Others, attractive from their air of conscientious scruple, announced “first-class flats; good order; reasonable rents.” The Helena asked the reader if she had seen the “cabinet finish, hard-wood floors, and frescoed ceilings” of its fifty-dollar flats; the Asteroid affirmed that such apartments, with “six light rooms and bath, porcelain wash-tubs, electric bells, and hall-boy,” as it offered for seventy-five dollars were unapproached by competition. There was a sameness in the jargon which tended to confusion. Mrs. March got several flats on her list which promised neither steam heat nor elevators; she forgot herself so far as to include two or three as remote from the down-town region of her choice as Harlem. But after she had rejected these the nondescript vertebrate was still voluminous enough to sustain her buoyant hopes.

The waiter, who remembered them from year to year, had put them at a window giving a pretty good section of Broadway, and before they set out on their search they had a moment of reminiscence. They recalled the Broadway of five, of ten, of twenty years ago, swelling and roaring with a tide of gayly painted omnibuses and of picturesque traffic that the horsecars have now banished from it. The grind of their wheels and the clash of their harsh bells imperfectly fill the silence that the omnibuses have left, and the eye misses the tumultuous perspective of former times.

They went out and stood for a moment before Grace Church, and looked down the stately thoroughfare, and found it no longer impressive, no longer characteristic. It is still Broadway in name, but now it is like any other street. You do not now take your life in your hand when you attempt to cross it; the Broadway policeman who supported the elbow of timorous beauty in the hollow of his cotton-gloved palm and guided its little fearful boots over the crossing, while he arrested the billowy omnibuses on either side with an imperious glance, is gone, and all that certain processional, barbaric gayety of the place is gone.

“Palmyra, Baalbec, Timour of the Desert,” said March, voicing their common feeling of the change.

They turned and went into the beautiful church, and found themselves in time for the matin service. Rapt far from New York, if not from earth, in the dim richness of the painted light, the hallowed music took them with solemn ecstasy; the aerial, aspiring Gothic forms seemed to lift them heavenward. They came out, reluctant, into the dazzle and bustle of the street, with a feeling that they were too good for it, which they confessed to each other with whimsical consciousness.

“But no matter how consecrated we feel now,” he said, “we mustn’t forget that we went into the church for precisely the same reason that we went to the Vienna Cafe for breakfast — to gratify an aesthetic sense, to renew the faded pleasure of travel for a moment, to get back into the Europe of our youth. It was a purely Pagan impulse, Isabel, and we’d better own it.”

“I don’t know,” she returned. “I think we reduce ourselves to the bare bones too much. I wish we didn’t always recognize the facts as we do. Sometimes I should like to blink them. I should like to think I was devouter than I am, and younger and prettier.”

“Better not; you couldn’t keep it up. Honesty is the best policy even in such things.”

“No; I don’t like it, Basil. I should rather wait till the last day for some of my motives to come to the top. I know they’re always mixed, but do let me give them the benefit of a doubt sometimes.”

“Well, well, have it your own way, my dear. But I prefer not to lay up so many disagreeable surprises for myself at that time.”

She would not consent. “I know I am a good deal younger than I was. I feel quite in the mood of that morning when we walked down Broadway on our wedding journey. Don’t you?”

“Oh yes. But I know I’m not younger; I’m only prettier.”

She laughed for pleasure in his joke, and also for unconscious joy in the gay New York weather, in which there was no ‘arriere pensee’ of the east wind. They had crossed Broadway, and were walking over to Washington Square, in the region of which they now hoped to place themselves. The ‘primo tenore’ statue of Garibaldi had already taken possession of the place in the name of Latin progress, and they met Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces, as they strolled over the asphalt walks, under the thinning shadows of the autumn-stricken sycamores. They met the familiar picturesque raggedness of Southern Europe with the old kindly illusion that somehow it existed for their appreciation, and that it found adequate compensation for poverty in this. March thought he sufficiently expressed his tacit sympathy in sitting down on one of the iron benches with his wife and letting a little Neapolitan put a superfluous shine on his boots, while their desultory comment wandered with equal esteem to the old-fashioned American respectability which keeps the north side of the square in vast mansions of red brick, and the international shabbiness which has invaded the southern border, and broken it up into lodging-houses, shops, beer-gardens, and studios.

They noticed the sign of an apartment to let on the north side, and as soon as the little bootblack could be bought off they went over to look at it. The janitor met them at the door and examined them. Then he said, as if still in doubt, “It has ten rooms, and the rent is twenty-eight hundred dollars.”

“It wouldn’t do, then,” March replied, and left him to divide the responsibility between the paucity of the rooms and the enormity of the rent as he best might. But their self-love had received a wound, and they questioned each other what it was in their appearance made him doubt their ability to pay so much.

“Of course, we don’t look like New-Yorkers,” sighed Mrs. March, “and we’ve walked through the Square. That might be as if we had walked along the Park Street mall in the Common before we came out on Beacon. Do you suppose he could have seen you getting your boots blacked in that way?”

“It’s useless to ask,” said March. “But I never can recover from this blow.”

“Oh, pshaw! You know you hate such things as badly as I do. It was very impertinent of him.”

“Let us go back and ‘ecraser l’infame’ by paying him a year’s rent in advance and taking immediate possession. Nothing else can soothe my wounded feelings. You were not having your boots blacked: why shouldn’t he have supposed you were a New-Yorker, and I a country cousin?”

“They always know. Don’t you remember Mrs. Williams’s going to a Fifth Avenue milliner in a Worth dress, and the woman’s asking her instantly what hotel she should send her hat to?”

“Yes; these things drive one to despair. I don’t wonder the bodies of so many genteel strangers are found in the waters around New York. Shall we try the south side, my dear? or had we better go back to our rooms and rest awhile?”

Mrs. March had out the vertebrate, and was consulting one of its glittering ribs and glancing up from it at a house before which they stood. “Yes, it’s the number; but do they call this being ready October first?” The little area in front of the basement was heaped with a mixture of mortar, bricks, laths, and shavings from the interior; the brownstone steps to the front door were similarly bestrewn; the doorway showed the half-open, rough pine carpenter’s sketch of an unfinished house; the sashless windows of every story showed the activity of workmen within; the clatter of hammers and the hiss of saws came out to them from every opening.

“They may call it October first,” said March, “because it’s too late to contradict them. But they’d better not call it December first in my presence; I’ll let them say January first, at a pinch.”

“We will go in and look at it, anyway,” said his wife; and he admired how, when she was once within, she began provisionally to settle the family in each of the several floors with the female instinct for domiciliation which never failed her. She had the help of the landlord, who was present to urge forward the workmen apparently; he lent a hopeful fancy to the solution of all her questions. To get her from under his influence March had to represent that the place was damp from undried plastering, and that if she stayed she would probably be down with that New York pneumonia which visiting Bostonians are always dying of. Once safely on the pavement outside, she realized that the apartment was not only unfinished, but unfurnished, and had neither steam heat nor elevator. “But I thought we had better look at everything,” she explained.

“Yes, but not take everything. If I hadn’t pulled you away from there by main force you’d have not only died of New York pneumonia on the spot, but you’d have had us all settled there before we knew what we were about.”

“Well, that’s what I can’t help, Basil. It’s the only way I can realize whether it will do for us. I have to dramatize the whole thing.”

She got a deal of pleasure as well as excitement out of this, and he had to own that the process of setting up housekeeping in so many different places was not only entertaining, but tended, through association with their first beginnings in housekeeping, to restore the image of their early married days and to make them young again.

It went on all day, and continued far into the night, until it was too late to go to the theatre, too late to do anything but tumble into bed and simultaneously fall asleep. They groaned over their reiterated disappointments, but they could not deny that the interest was unfailing, and that they got a great deal of fun out of it all. Nothing could abate Mrs. March’s faith in her advertisements. One of them sent her to a flat of ten rooms which promised to be the solution of all their difficulties; it proved to be over a livery-stable, a liquor store, and a milliner’s shop, none of the first fashion. Another led them far into old Greenwich Village to an apartment-house, which she refused to enter behind a small girl with a loaf of bread under one arm and a quart can of milk under the other.

In their search they were obliged, as March complained, to the acquisition of useless information in a degree unequalled in their experience. They came to excel in the sad knowledge of the line at which respectability distinguishes itself from shabbiness. Flattering advertisements took them to numbers of huge apartment-houses chiefly distinguishable from tenement-houses by the absence of fire-escapes on their facades, till Mrs. March refused to stop at any door where there were more than six bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes on either hand. Before the middle of the afternoon she decided against ratchets altogether, and confined herself to knobs, neatly set in the door-trim. Her husband was still sunk in the superstition that you can live anywhere you like in New York, and he would have paused at some places where her quicker eye caught the fatal sign of “Modes” in the ground-floor windows. She found that there was an east and west line beyond which they could not go if they wished to keep their self-respect, and that within the region to which they had restricted themselves there was a choice of streets. At first all the New York streets looked to them ill-paved, dirty, and repulsive; the general infamy imparted itself in their casual impression to streets in no wise guilty. But they began to notice that some streets were quiet and clean, and, though never so quiet and clean as Boston streets, that they wore an air of encouraging reform, and suggested a future of greater and greater domesticity. Whole blocks of these downtown cross-streets seemed to have been redeemed from decay, and even in the midst of squalor a dwelling here and there had been seized, painted a dull red as to its brick-work, and a glossy black as to its wood-work, and with a bright brass bell-pull and door-knob and a large brass plate for its key-hole escutcheon, had been endowed with an effect of purity and pride which removed its shabby neighborhood far from it. Some of these houses were quite small, and imaginably within their means; but, as March said, some body seemed always to be living there himself, and the fact that none of them was to rent kept Mrs. March true to her ideal of a fiat. Nothing prevented its realization so much as its difference from the New York ideal of a flat, which was inflexibly seven rooms and a bath. One or two rooms might be at the front, the rest crooked and cornered backward through increasing and then decreasing darkness till they reached a light bedroom or kitchen at the rear. It might be the one or the other, but it was always the seventh room with the bath; or if, as sometimes happened, it was the eighth, it was so after having counted the bath as one; in this case the janitor said you always counted the bath as one. If the flats were advertised as having “all light rooms,” he explained that any room with a window giving into the open air of a court or shaft was counted a light room.

The Marches tried to make out why it was that these flats were so much more repulsive than the apartments which everyone lived in abroad; but they could only do so upon the supposition that in their European days they were too young, too happy, too full of the future, to notice whether rooms were inside or outside, light or dark, big or little, high or low. “Now we’re imprisoned in the present,” he said, “and we have to make the worst of it.”

In their despair he had an inspiration, which she declared worthy of him: it was to take two small flats, of four or five rooms and a bath, and live in both. They tried this in a great many places, but they never could get two flats of the kind on the same floor where there was steam heat and an elevator. At one place they almost did it. They had resigned themselves to the humility of the neighborhood, to the prevalence of modistes and livery-stablemen (they seem to consort much in New York), to the garbage in the gutters and the litter of paper in the streets, to the faltering slats in the surrounding window-shutters and the crumbled brownstone steps and sills, when it turned out that one of the apartments had been taken between two visits they made. Then the only combination left open to them was of a ground-floor flat to the right and a third-floor flat to the left.

Still they kept this inspiration in reserve for use at the first opportunity. In the mean time there were several flats which they thought they could almost make do: notably one where they could get an extra servant’s room in the basement four flights down, and another where they could get it in the roof five flights up. At the first the janitor was respectful and enthusiastic; at the second he had an effect of ironical pessimism. When they trembled on the verge of taking his apartment, he pointed out a spot in the kalsomining of the parlor ceiling, and gratuitously said, Now such a thing as that he should not agree to put in shape unless they took the apartment for a term of years. The apartment was unfurnished, and they recurred to the fact that they wanted a furnished apartment, and made their escape. This saved them in several other extremities; but short of extremity they could not keep their different requirements in mind, and were always about to decide without regard to some one of them.

They went to several places twice without intending: once to that old-fashioned house with the pleasant colored janitor, and wandered all over the apartment again with a haunting sense of familiarity, and then recognized the janitor and laughed; and to that house with the pathetic widow and the pretty daughter who wished to take them to board. They stayed to excuse their blunder, and easily came by the fact that the mother had taken the house that the girl might have a home while she was in New York studying art, and they hoped to pay their way by taking boarders. Her daughter was at her class now, the mother concluded; and they encouraged her to believe that it could only be a few days till the rest of her scheme was realized.

“I dare say we could be perfectly comfortable there,” March suggested when they had got away. “Now if we were truly humane we would modify our desires to meet their needs and end this sickening search, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes, but we’re not truly humane,” his wife answered, “or at least not in that sense. You know you hate boarding; and if we went there I should have them on my sympathies the whole time.”

“I see. And then you would take it out of me.”

“Then I should take it out of you. And if you are going to be so weak, Basil, and let every little thing work upon you in that way, you’d better not come to New York. You’ll see enough misery here.”

“Well, don’t take that superior tone with me, as if I were a child that had its mind set on an undesirable toy, Isabel.”

“Ah, don’t you suppose it’s because you are such a child in some respects that I like you, dear?” she demanded, without relenting.

“But I don’t find so much misery in New York. I don’t suppose there’s any more suffering here to the population than there is in the country. And they’re so gay about it all. I think the outward aspect of the place and the hilarity of the sky and air must get into the people’s blood. The weather is simply unapproachable; and I don’t care if it is the ugliest place in the world, as you say. I suppose it is. It shrieks and yells with ugliness here and there but it never loses its spirits. That widow is from the country. When she’s been a year in New York she’ll be as gay — as gay as an L road.” He celebrated a satisfaction they both had in the L roads. “They kill the streets and avenues, but at least they partially hide them, and that is some comfort; and they do triumph over their prostrate forms with a savage exultation that is intoxicating. Those bends in the L that you get in the corner of Washington Square, or just below the Cooper Institute — they’re the gayest things in the world. Perfectly atrocious, of course, but incomparably picturesque! And the whole city is so,” said March, “or else the L would never have got built here. New York may be splendidly gay or squalidly gay; but, prince or pauper, it’s gay always.”

“Yes, gay is the word,” she admitted, with a sigh. “But frantic. I can’t get used to it. They forget death, Basil; they forget death in New York.”

“Well, I don’t know that I’ve ever found much advantage in remembering it.”

“Don’t say such a thing, dearest.”

He could see that she had got to the end of her nervous strength for the present, and he proposed that they should take the Elevated road as far as it would carry them into the country, and shake off their nightmare of flat-hunting for an hour or two; but her conscience would not let her. She convicted him of levity equal to that of the New-Yorkers in proposing such a thing; and they dragged through the day. She was too tired to care for dinner, and in the night she had a dream from which she woke herself with a cry that roused him, too. It was something about the children at first, whom they had talked of wistfully before falling asleep, and then it was of a hideous thing with two square eyes and a series of sections growing darker and then lighter, till the tail of the monstrous articulate was quite luminous again. She shuddered at the vague description she was able to give; but he asked, “Did it offer to bite you?”

“No. That was the most frightful thing about it; it had no mouth.”

March laughed. “Why, my dear, it was nothing but a harmless New York flat — seven rooms and a bath.”

“I really believe it was,” she consented, recognizing an architectural resemblance, and she fell asleep again, and woke renewed for the work before them.

IX.

Their house-hunting no longer had novelty, but it still had interest; and they varied their day by taking a coupe, by renouncing advertisements, and by reverting to agents. Some of these induced them to consider the idea of furnished houses; and Mrs. March learned tolerance for Fulkerson by accepting permits to visit flats and houses which had none of the qualifications she desired in either, and were as far beyond her means as they were out of the region to which she had geographically restricted herself. They looked at three-thousand and four-thousand dollar apartments, and rejected them for one reason or another which had nothing to do with the rent; the higher the rent was, the more critical they were of the slippery inlaid floors and the arrangement of the richly decorated rooms. They never knew whether they had deceived the janitor or not; as they came in a coupe, they hoped they had.

They drove accidentally through one street that seemed gayer in the perspective than an L road. The fire-escapes, with their light iron balconies and ladders of iron, decorated the lofty house fronts; the roadway and sidewalks and door-steps swarmed with children; women’s heads seemed to show at every window. In the basements, over which flights of high stone steps led to the tenements, were green-grocers’ shops abounding in cabbages, and provision stores running chiefly to bacon and sausages, and cobblers’ and tinners’ shops, and the like, in proportion to the small needs of a poor neighborhood. Ash barrels lined the sidewalks, and garbage heaps filled the gutters; teams of all trades stood idly about; a peddler of cheap fruit urged his cart through the street, and mixed his cry with the joyous screams and shouts of the children and the scolding and gossiping voices of the women; the burly blue bulk of a policeman defined itself at the corner; a drunkard zigzagged down the sidewalk toward him. It was not the abode of the extremest poverty, but of a poverty as hopeless as any in the world, transmitting itself from generation to generation, and establishing conditions of permanency to which human life adjusts itself as it does to those of some incurable disease, like leprosy.

The time had been when the Marches would have taken a purely aesthetic view of the facts as they glimpsed them in this street of tenement-houses; when they would have contented themselves with saying that it was as picturesque as a street in Naples or Florence, and with wondering why nobody came to paint it; they would have thought they were sufficiently serious about it in blaming the artists for their failure to appreciate it, and going abroad for the picturesque when they had it here under their noses. It was to the nose that the street made one of its strongest appeals, and Mrs. March pulled up her window of the coupe. “Why does he take us through such a disgusting street?” she demanded, with an exasperation of which her husband divined the origin.

“This driver may be a philanthropist in disguise,” he answered, with dreamy irony, “and may want us to think about the people who are not merely carried through this street in a coupe, but have to spend their whole lives in it, winter and summer, with no hopes of driving out of it, except in a hearse. I must say they don’t seem to mind it. I haven’t seen a jollier crowd anywhere in New York. They seem to have forgotten death a little more completely than any of their fellow-citizens, Isabel. And I wonder what they think of us, making this gorgeous progress through their midst. I suppose they think we’re rich, and hate us — if they hate rich people; they don’t look as if they hated anybody. Should we be as patient as they are with their discomfort? I don’t believe there’s steam heat or an elevator in the whole block. Seven rooms and a bath would be more than the largest and genteelest family would know what to do with. They wouldn’t know what to do with the bath, anyway.”

His monologue seemed to interest his wife apart from the satirical point it had for themselves. “You ought to get Mr. Fulkerson to let you work some of these New York sights up for Every Other Week, Basil; you could do them very nicely.”

“Yes; I’ve thought of that. But don’t let’s leave the personal ground. Doesn’t it make you feel rather small and otherwise unworthy when you see the kind of street these fellow-beings of yours live in, and then think how particular you are about locality and the number of bellpulls? I don’t see even ratchets and speaking-tubes at these doors.” He craned his neck out of the window for a better look, and the children of discomfort cheered him, out of sheer good feeling and high spirits. “I didn’t know I was so popular. Perhaps it’s a recognition of my humane sentiments.”

“Oh, it’s very easy to have humane sentiments, and to satirize ourselves for wanting eight rooms and a bath in a good neighborhood, when we see how these wretched creatures live,” said his wife. “But if we shared all we have with them, and then settled down among them, what good would it do?”

“Not the least in the world. It might help us for the moment, but it wouldn’t keep the wolf from their doors for a week; and then they would go on just as before, only they wouldn’t be on such good terms with the wolf. The only way for them is to keep up an unbroken intimacy with the wolf; then they can manage him somehow. I don’t know how, and I’m afraid I don’t want to. Wouldn’t you like to have this fellow drive us round among the halls of pride somewhere for a little while? Fifth Avenue or Madison, up-town?”

“No; we’ve no time to waste. I’ve got a place near Third Avenue, on a nice cross street, and I want him to take us there.” It proved that she had several addresses near together, and it seemed best to dismiss their coupe and do the rest of their afternoon’s work on foot. It came to nothing; she was not humbled in the least by what she had seen in the tenement-house street; she yielded no point in her ideal of a flat, and the flats persistently refused to lend themselves to it. She lost all patience with them.

“Oh, I don’t say the flats are in the right of it,” said her husband, when she denounced their stupid inadequacy to the purposes of a Christian home. “But I’m not so sure that we are, either. I’ve been thinking about that home business ever since my sensibilities were dragged — in a coupe — through that tenement-house street. Of course, no child born and brought up in such a place as that could have any conception of home. But that’s because those poor people can’t give character to their habitations. They have to take what they can get. But people like us — that is, of our means — do give character to the average flat. It’s made to meet their tastes, or their supposed tastes; and so it’s made for social show, not for family life at all. Think of a baby in a flat! It’s a contradiction in terms; the flat is the negation of motherhood. The flat means society life; that is, the pretence of social life. It’s made to give artificial people a society basis on a little money — too much money, of course, for what they get. So the cost of the building is put into marble halls and idiotic decoration of all kinds. I don’t object to the conveniences, but none of these flats has a living-room. They have drawing-rooms to foster social pretence, and they have dining-rooms and bedrooms; but they have no room where the family can all come together and feel the sweetness of being a family. The bedrooms are black-holes mostly, with a sinful waste of space in each. If it were not for the marble halls, and the decorations, and the foolishly expensive finish, the houses could be built round a court, and the flats could be shaped something like a Pompeiian house, with small sleeping-closets — only lit from the outside — and the rest of the floor thrown into two or three large cheerful halls, where all the family life could go on, and society could be transacted unpretentiously. Why, those tenements are better and humaner than those flats! There the whole family lives in the kitchen, and has its consciousness of being; but the flat abolishes the family consciousness. It’s confinement without coziness; it’s cluttered without being snug. You couldn’t keep a self-respecting cat in a flat; you couldn’t go down cellar to get cider. No! the Anglo-Saxon home, as we know it in the Anglo-Saxon house, is simply impossible in the Franco-American flat, not because it’s humble, but because it’s false.”

“Well, then,” said Mrs. March, “let’s look at houses.”

He had been denouncing the flat in the abstract, and he had not expected this concrete result. But he said, “We will look at houses, then.”

X.

Nothing mystifies a man more than a woman’s aberrations from some point at which he, supposes her fixed as a star. In these unfurnished houses, without steam or elevator, March followed his wife about with patient wonder. She rather liked the worst of them best: but she made him go down into the cellars and look at the furnaces; she exacted from him a rigid inquest of the plumbing. She followed him into one of the cellars by the fitful glare of successively lighted matches, and they enjoyed a moment in which the anomaly of their presence there on that errand, so remote from all the facts of their long-established life in Boston, realized itself for them.

“Think how easily we might have been murdered and nobody been any the wiser!” she said when they were comfortably outdoors again.

“Yes, or made way with ourselves in an access of emotional insanity, supposed to have been induced by unavailing flat-hunting,” he suggested. She fell in with the notion. “I’m beginning to feel crazy. But I don’t want you to lose your head, Basil. And I don’t want you to sentimentalize any of the things you see in New York. I think you were disposed to do it in that street we drove through. I don’t believe there’s any real suffering — not real suffering — among those people; that is, it would be suffering from our point of view, but they’ve been used to it all their lives, and they don’t feel their discomfort so much.”

“Of course, I understand that, and I don’t propose to sentimentalize them. I think when people get used to a bad state of things they had better stick to it; in fact, they don’t usually like a better state so well, and I shall keep that firmly in mind.”

She laughed with him, and they walked along the L bestridden avenue, exhilarated by their escape from murder and suicide in that cellar, toward the nearest cross town track, which they meant to take home to their hotel. “Now to-night we will go to the theatre,” she said, “and get this whole house business out of our minds, and be perfectly fresh for a new start in the morning.” Suddenly she clutched his arm. “Why, did you see that man?” and she signed with her head toward a decently dressed person who walked beside them, next the gutter, stooping over as if to examine it, and half halting at times.

“No. What?”

“Why, I saw him pick up a dirty bit of cracker from the pavement and cram it into his mouth and eat it down as if he were famished. And look! he’s actually hunting for more in those garbage heaps!”

This was what the decent-looking man with the hard hands and broken nails of a workman was doing-like a hungry dog. They kept up with him, in the fascination of the sight, to the next corner, where he turned down the side street still searching the gutter.

They walked on a few paces. Then March said, “I must go after him,” and left his wife standing.

“Are you in want — hungry?” he asked the man.

The man said he could not speak English, Monsieur.

March asked his question in French.

The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, “Mais, Monsieur—”

March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man’s face twisted up; he caught the hand of this alms-giver in both of his and clung to it. “Monsieur! Monsieur!” he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.

His benefactor pulled himself away, shocked and ashamed, as one is by such a chance, and got back to his wife, and the man lapsed back into the mystery of misery out of which he had emerged.

March felt it laid upon him to console his wife for what had happened. “Of course, we might live here for years and not see another case like that; and, of course, there are twenty places where he could have gone for help if he had known where to find them.”

“Ah, but it’s the possibility of his needing the help so badly as that,” she answered. “That’s what I can’t bear, and I shall not come to a place where such things are possible, and we may as well stop our house-hunting here at once.”

“Yes? And what part of Christendom will you live in? Such things are possible everywhere in our conditions.”

“Then we must change the conditions—”

“Oh no; we must go to the theatre and forget them. We can stop at
Brentano’s for our tickets as we pass through Union Square.”

“I am not going to the theatre, Basil. I am going home to Boston to-night. You can stay and find a flat.”

He convinced her of the absurdity of her position, and even of its selfishness; but she said that her mind was quite made up irrespective of what had happened, that she had been away from the children long enough; that she ought to be at home to finish up the work of leaving it. The word brought a sigh. “Ah, I don’t know why we should see nothing but sad and ugly things now. When we were young—”

“Younger,” he put in. “We’re still young.”

“That’s what we pretend, but we know better. But I was thinking how pretty and pleasant things used to be turning up all the time on our travels in the old days. Why, when we were in New York here on our wedding journey the place didn’t seem half so dirty as it does now, and none of these dismal things happened.”

“It was a good deal dirtier,” he answered; “and I fancy worse in every way — hungrier, raggeder, more wretchedly housed. But that wasn’t the period of life for us to notice it. Don’t you remember, when we started to Niagara the last time, how everybody seemed middle-aged and commonplace; and when we got there there were no evident brides; nothing but elderly married people?”

“At least they weren’t starving,” she rebelled.

“No, you don’t starve in parlor-cars and first-class hotels; but if you step out of them you run your chance of seeing those who do, if you’re getting on pretty well in the forties. If it’s the unhappy who see unhappiness, think what misery must be revealed to people who pass their lives in the really squalid tenement-house streets — I don’t mean picturesque avenues like that we passed through.”

“But we are not unhappy,” she protested, bringing the talk back to the personal base again, as women must to get any good out of talk. “We’re really no unhappier than we were when we were young.”

“We’re more serious.”

“Well, I hate it; and I wish you wouldn’t be so serious, if that’s what it brings us to.”

“I will be trivial from this on,” said March. “Shall we go to the Hole in the Ground to-night?”

“I am going to Boston.”

“It’s much the same thing. How do you like that for triviality? It’s a little blasphemous, I’ll allow.”

“It’s very silly,” she said.

At the hotel they found a letter from the agent who had sent them the permit to see Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment. He wrote that she had heard they were pleased with her apartment, and that she thought she could make the terms to suit. She had taken her passage for Europe, and was very anxious to let the flat before she sailed. She would call that evening at seven.

“Mrs. Grosvenor Green!” said Mrs. March. “Which of the ten thousand flats is it, Basil?”

“The gimcrackery,” he answered. “In the Xenophon, you know.”

“Well, she may save herself the trouble. I shall not see her. Or yes — I must. I couldn’t go away without seeing what sort of creature could have planned that fly-away flat. She must be a perfect—”

“Parachute,” March suggested.

“No! anybody so light as that couldn’t come down.”

“Well, toy balloon.”

“Toy balloon will do for the present,” Mrs. March admitted. “But I feel that naught but herself can be her parallel for volatility.”

When Mrs. Grosvenor-Green’s card came up they both descended to the hotel parlor, which March said looked like the saloon of a Moorish day-boat; not that he knew of any such craft, but the decorations were so Saracenic and the architecture so Hudson Riverish. They found there on the grand central divan a large lady whose vast smoothness, placidity, and plumpness set at defiance all their preconceptions of Mrs. Grosvenor Green, so that Mrs. March distinctly paused with her card in her hand before venturing even tentatively to address her. Then she was astonished at the low, calm voice in which Mrs. Green acknowledged herself, and slowly proceeded to apologize for calling. It was not quite true that she had taken her passage for Europe, but she hoped soon to do so, and she confessed that in the mean time she was anxious to let her flat. She was a little worn out with the care of housekeeping — Mrs. March breathed, “Oh yes!” in the sigh with which ladies recognize one another’s martyrdom — and Mrs. Green had business abroad, and she was going to pursue her art studies in Paris; she drew in Mr. Ilcomb’s class now, but the instruction was so much better in Paris; and as the superintendent seemed to think the price was the only objection, she had ventured to call.

“Then we didn’t deceive him in the least,” thought Mrs. March, while she answered, sweetly: “No; we were only afraid that it would be too small for our family. We require a good many rooms.” She could not forego the opportunity of saying, “My husband is coming to New York to take charge of a literary periodical, and he will have to have a room to write in,” which made Mrs. Green bow to March, and made March look sheepish. “But we did think the apartment very charming”, (It was architecturally charming, she protested to her conscience), “and we should have been so glad if we could have got into it.” She followed this with some account of their house-hunting, amid soft murmurs of sympathy from Mrs. Green, who said that she had been through all that, and that if she could have shown her apartment to them she felt sure that she could have explained it so that they would have seen its capabilities better, Mrs. March assented to this, and Mrs. Green added that if they found nothing exactly suitable she would be glad to have them look at it again; and then Mrs. March said that she was going back to Boston herself, but she was leaving Mr. March to continue the search; and she had no doubt he would be only too glad to see the apartment by daylight. “But if you take it, Basil,” she warned him, when they were alone, “I shall simply renounce you. I wouldn’t live in that junk-shop if you gave it to me. But who would have thought she was that kind of looking person? Though of course I might have known if I had stopped to think once. It’s because the place doesn’t express her at all that it’s so unlike her. It couldn’t be like anybody, or anything that flies in the air, or creeps upon the earth, or swims in the waters under the earth. I wonder where in the world she’s from; she’s no New-Yorker; even we can see that; and she’s not quite a country person, either; she seems like a person from some large town, where she’s been an aesthetic authority. And she can’t find good enough art instruction in New York, and has to go to Paris for it! Well, it’s pathetic, after all, Basil. I can’t help feeling sorry for a person who mistakes herself to that extent.”

“I can’t help feeling sorry for the husband of a person who mistakes herself to that extent. What is Mr. Grosvenor Green going to do in Paris while she’s working her way into the Salon?”

“Well, you keep away from her apartment, Basil; that’s all I’ve got to say to you. And yet I do like some things about her.”

“I like everything about her but her apartment,” said March.

“I like her going to be out of the country,” said his wife. “We shouldn’t be overlooked. And the place was prettily shaped, you can’t deny it. And there was an elevator and steam heat. And the location is very convenient. And there was a hall-boy to bring up cards. The halls and stairs were kept very clean and nice. But it wouldn’t do. I could put you a folding bed in the room where you wrote, and we could even have one in the parlor.”

“Behind a portiere? I couldn’t stand any more portieres!”

“And we could squeeze the two girls into one room, or perhaps only bring Margaret, and put out the whole of the wash. Basil!” she almost shrieked, “it isn’t to be thought of!”

He retorted, “I’m not thinking of it, my dear.”

Fulkerson came in just before they started for Mrs. March’s train, to find out what had become of them, he said, and to see whether they had got anything to live in yet.

“Not a thing,” she said. “And I’m just going back to Boston, and leaving Mr. March here to do anything he pleases about it. He has ‘carte blanche.’”

“But freedom brings responsibility, you know, Fulkerson, and it’s the same as if I’d no choice. I’m staying behind because I’m left, not because I expect to do anything.”

“Is that so?” asked Fulkerson. “Well, we must see what can be done. I supposed you would be all settled by this time, or I should have humped myself to find you something. None of those places I gave you amounts to anything?”

“As much as forty thousand others we’ve looked at,” said Mrs. March. “Yes, one of them does amount to something. It comes so near being what we want that I’ve given Mr. March particular instructions not to go near it.”

She told him about Mrs. Grosvenor Green and her flats, and at the end he said:

“Well, well, we must look out for that. I’ll keep an eye on him, Mrs. March, and see that he doesn’t do anything rash, and I won’t leave him till he’s found just the right thing. It exists, of course; it must in a city of eighteen hundred thousand people, and the only question is where to find it. You leave him to me, Mrs. March; I’ll watch out for him.”

Fulkerson showed some signs of going to the station when he found they were not driving, but she bade him a peremptory good-bye at the hotel door.

“He’s very nice, Basil, and his way with you is perfectly charming. It’s very sweet to see how really fond of you he is. But I didn’t want him stringing along with us up to Forty-second Street and spoiling our last moments together.”

At Third Avenue they took the Elevated for which she confessed an infatuation. She declared it the most ideal way of getting about in the world, and was not ashamed when he reminded her of how she used to say that nothing under the sun could induce her to travel on it. She now said that the night transit was even more interesting than the day, and that the fleeing intimacy you formed with people in second and third floor interiors, while all the usual street life went on underneath, had a domestic intensity mixed with a perfect repose that was the last effect of good society with all its security and exclusiveness. He said it was better than the theatre, of which it reminded him, to see those people through their windows: a family party of work-folk at a late tea, some of the men in their shirt-sleeves; a woman sewing by a lamp; a mother laying her child in its cradle; a man with his head fallen on his hands upon a table; a girl and her lover leaning over the window-sill together. What suggestion! what drama? what infinite interest! At the Forty-second Street station they stopped a minute on the bridge that crosses the track to the branch road for the Central Depot, and looked up and down the long stretch of the Elevated to north and south. The track that found and lost itself a thousand times in the flare and tremor of the innumerable lights; the moony sheen of the electrics mixing with the reddish points and blots of gas far and near; the architectural shapes of houses and churches and towers, rescued by the obscurity from all that was ignoble in them, and the coming and going of the trains marking the stations with vivider or fainter plumes of flame-shot steam-formed an incomparable perspective. They often talked afterward of the superb spectacle, which in a city full of painters nightly works its unrecorded miracles; and they were just to the Arachne roof spun in iron over the cross street on which they ran to the depot; but for the present they were mostly inarticulate before it. They had another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred without dispersing the vast darkness of the place. What forces, what fates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north and south and west through the night! Now they waited there like fabled monsters of Arab story ready for the magician’s touch, tractable, reckless, will-less — organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life.

The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like. Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her a lower berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car. They made the most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; and she promised to write as soon as she reached home. She promised also that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, she would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal. Only he must remember that it was not to be above Twentieth Street nor below Washington Square; it must not be higher than the third floor; it must have an elevator, steam heat, hail-boys, and a pleasant janitor. These were essentials; if he could not get them, then they must do without. But he must get them.

XI.

Mrs. March was one of those wives who exact a more rigid adherence to their ideals from their husbands than from themselves. Early in their married life she had taken charge of him in all matters which she considered practical. She did not include the business of bread-winning in these; that was an affair that might safely be left to his absent-minded, dreamy inefficiency, and she did not interfere with him there. But in such things as rehanging the pictures, deciding on a summer boarding-place, taking a seaside cottage, repapering rooms, choosing seats at the theatre, seeing what the children ate when she was not at table, shutting the cat out at night, keeping run of calls and invitations, and seeing if the furnace was dampered, he had failed her so often that she felt she could not leave him the slightest discretion in regard to a flat. Her total distrust of his judgment in the matters cited and others like them consisted with the greatest admiration of his mind and respect for his character. She often said that if he would only bring these to bear in such exigencies he would be simply perfect; but she had long given up his ever doing so. She subjected him, therefore, to an iron code, but after proclaiming it she was apt to abandon him to the native lawlessness of his temperament. She expected him in this event to do as he pleased, and she resigned herself to it with considerable comfort in holding him accountable. He learned to expect this, and after suffering keenly from her disappointment with whatever he did he waited patiently till she forgot her grievance and began to extract what consolation lurks in the irreparable. She would almost admit at moments that what he had done was a very good thing, but she reserved the right to return in full force to her original condemnation of it; and she accumulated each act of independent volition in witness and warning against him. Their mass oppressed but never deterred him. He expected to do the wrong thing when left to his own devices, and he did it without any apparent recollection of his former misdeeds and their consequences. There was a good deal of comedy in it all, and some tragedy.

He now experienced a certain expansion, such as husbands of his kind will imagine, on going back to his hotel alone. It was, perhaps, a revulsion from the pain of parting; and he toyed with the idea of Mrs. Grosvenor Green’s apartment, which, in its preposterous unsuitability, had a strange attraction. He felt that he could take it with less risk than anything else they had seen, but he said he would look at all the other places in town first. He really spent the greater part of the next day in hunting up the owner of an apartment that had neither steam heat nor an elevator, but was otherwise perfect, and trying to get him to take less than the agent asked. By a curious psychical operation he was able, in the transaction, to work himself into quite a passionate desire for the apartment, while he held the Grosvenor Green apartment in the background of his mind as something that he could return to as altogether more suitable. He conducted some simultaneous negotiation for a furnished house, which enhanced still more the desirability of the Grosvenor Green apartment. Toward evening he went off at a tangent far up-town, so as to be able to tell his wife how utterly preposterous the best there would be as compared even with this ridiculous Grosvenor Green gimcrackery. It is hard to report the processes of his sophistication; perhaps this, again, may best be left to the marital imagination.

He rang at the last of these up-town apartments as it was falling dusk, and it was long before the janitor appeared. Then the man was very surly, and said if he looked at the flat now he would say it was too dark, like all the rest. His reluctance irritated March in proportion to his insincerity in proposing to look at it at all. He knew he did not mean to take it under any circumstances; that he was going to use his inspection of it in dishonest justification of his disobedience to his wife; but he put on an air of offended dignity. “If you don’t wish to show the apartment,” he said, “I don’t care to see it.”

The man groaned, for he was heavy, and no doubt dreaded the stairs. He scratched a match on his thigh, and led the way up. March was sorry for him, and he put his fingers on a quarter in his waistcoat-pocket to give him at parting. At the same time, he had to trump up an objection to the flat. This was easy, for it was advertised as containing ten rooms, and he found the number eked out with the bath-room and two large closets. “It’s light enough,” said March, “but I don’t see how you make out ten rooms.”

“There’s ten rooms,” said the man, deigning no proof.

March took his fingers off the quarter, and went down-stairs and out of the door without another word. It would be wrong, it would be impossible, to give the man anything after such insolence. He reflected, with shame, that it was also cheaper to punish than forgive him.

He returned to his hotel prepared for any desperate measure, and convinced now that the Grosvenor Green apartment was not merely the only thing left for him, but was, on its own merits, the best thing in New York.

Fulkerson was waiting for him in the reading-room, and it gave March the curious thrill with which a man closes with temptation when he said: “Look here! Why don’t you take that woman’s flat in the Xenophon? She’s been at the agents again, and they’ve been at me. She likes your look — or Mrs. March’s — and I guess you can have it at a pretty heavy discount from the original price. I’m authorized to say you can have it for one seventy-five a month, and I don’t believe it would be safe for you to offer one fifty.”

March shook his head, and dropped a mask of virtuous rejection over his corrupt acquiescence. “It’s too small for us — we couldn’t squeeze into it.”

“Why, look here!” Fulkerson persisted. “How many rooms do you people want?”

“I’ve got to have a place to work—”

“Of course! And you’ve got to have it at the Fifth Wheel office.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” March began. “I suppose I could do my work at the office, as there’s not much writing—”

“Why, of course you can’t do your work at home. You just come round with me now, and look at that again.”

“No; I can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“I — I’ve got to dine.”

“All right,” said Fulkerson. “Dine with me. I want to take you round to a little Italian place that I know.”

One may trace the successive steps of March’s descent in this simple matter with the same edification that would attend the study of the self-delusions and obfuscations of a man tempted to crime. The process is probably not at all different, and to the philosophical mind the kind of result is unimportant; the process is everything.

Fulkerson led him down one block and half across another to the steps of a small dwelling-house, transformed, like many others, into a restaurant of the Latin ideal, with little or no structural change from the pattern of the lower middle-class New York home. There were the corroded brownstone steps, the mean little front door, and the cramped entry with its narrow stairs by which ladies could go up to a dining-room appointed for them on the second floor; the parlors on the first were set about with tables, where men smoked cigarettes between the courses, and a single waiter ran swiftly to and fro with plates and dishes, and, exchanged unintelligible outcries with a cook beyond a slide in the back parlor. He rushed at the new-comers, brushed the soiled table-cloth before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form the dinner at such places.

“Ah, this is nice!” said Fulkerson, after the laying of the charitable napkin, and he began to recognize acquaintances, some of whom he described to March as young literary men and artists with whom they should probably have to do; others were simply frequenters of the place, and were of all nationalities and religions apparently — at least, several were Hebrews and Cubans. “You get a pretty good slice of New York here,” he said, “all except the frosting on top. That you won’t find much at Maroni’s, though you will occasionally. I don’t mean the ladies ever, of course.” The ladies present seemed harmless and reputable-looking people enough, but certainly they were not of the first fashion, and, except in a few instances, not Americans. “It’s like cutting straight down through a fruitcake,” Fulkerson went on, “or a mince-pie, when you don’t know who made the pie; you get a little of everything.” He ordered a small flask of Chianti with the dinner, and it came in its pretty wicker jacket. March smiled upon it with tender reminiscence, and Fulkerson laughed. “Lights you up a little. I brought old Dryfoos here one day, and he thought it was sweet-oil; that’s the kind of bottle they used to have it in at the country drug-stores.”

“Yes, I remember now; but I’d totally forgotten it,” said March. “How far back that goes! Who’s Dryfoos?”

“Dryfoos?” Fulkerson, still smiling, tore off a piece of the half-yard of French loaf which had been supplied them, with two pale, thin disks of butter, and fed it into himself. “Old Dryfoos? Well, of course! I call him old, but he ain’t so very. About fifty, or along there.”

“No,” said March, “that isn’t very old — or not so old as it used to be.”

“Well, I suppose you’ve got to know about him, anyway,” said Fulkerson, thoughtfully. “And I’ve been wondering just how I should tell you. Can’t always make out exactly how much of a Bostonian you really are! Ever been out in the natural-gas country?”

“No,” said March. “I’ve had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I’ve never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it as much as we do.”

“Yes, yes,” said Fulkerson. “Well, the natural-gas country is worth seeing. I don’t mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio and Indiana around Moffitt — that’s the place in the heart of the gas region that they’ve been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country. If you haven’t been West for a good many years, you haven’t got any idea how old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all full of stumps?”

“I should think so.”

“Well, you won’t see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffitt is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England. You know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they just touch ’em off with a little dynamite, and they’ve got a cellar dug and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it. Only they haven’t got any use for kindling in that country — all gas. I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting time, and every once in a while I’d come to a place with a piece of ragged old stove-pipe stickin’ up out of the ground, and blazing away like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any more than if it was spring violets. Horses didn’t notice it, either. Well, they’ve always known about the gas out there; they say there are places in the woods where it’s been burning ever since the country was settled.

“But when you come in sight of Moffitt — my, oh, my! Well, you come in smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain’t odorless, like the Pittsburg gas, and so it’s perfectly safe; but the smell isn’t bad — about as bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing that strikes you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good warm, growing rain, and the town’s come up overnight. That’s in the suburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain’t shabby — no shanty-farm business; nice brick and frame houses, some of ’em Queen Anne style, and all of ’em looking as if they had come to stay. And when you drive up from the depot you think everybody’s moving. Everything seems to be piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere. You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our section — half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to the public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or four churches. Well, they’re all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture has struck it hard, and they’ve got a lot of new buildings that needn’t be ashamed of themselves anywhere; the new court-house is as big as St. Peter’s, and the Grand Opera-house is in the highest style of the art. You can’t buy a lot on that street for much less than you can buy a lot in New York — or you couldn’t when the boom was on; I saw the place just when the boom was in its prime. I went out there to work the newspapers in the syndicate business, and I got one of their men to write me a real bright, snappy account of the gas; and they just took me in their arms and showed me everything. Well, it was wonderful, and it was beautiful, too! To see a whole community stirred up like that was — just like a big boy, all hope and high spirits, and no discount on the remotest future; nothing but perpetual boom to the end of time — I tell you it warmed your blood. Why, there were some things about it that made you think what a nice kind of world this would be if people ever took hold together, instead of each fellow fighting it out on his own hook, and devil take the hindmost. They made up their minds at Moffitt that if they wanted their town to grow they’d got to keep their gas public property. So they extended their corporation line so as to take in pretty much the whole gas region round there; and then the city took possession of every well that was put down, and held it for the common good. Anybody that’s a mind to come to Moffitt and start any kind of manufacture can have all the gas he wants free; and for fifteen dollars a year you can have all the gas you want to heat and light your private house. The people hold on to it for themselves, and, as I say, it’s a grand sight to see a whole community hanging together and working for the good of all, instead of splitting up into as many different cut-throats as there are able-bodied citizens. See that fellow?” Fulkerson broke off, and indicated with a twirl of his head a short, dark, foreign-looking man going out of the door. “They say that fellow’s a Socialist. I think it’s a shame they’re allowed to come here. If they don’t like the way we manage our affairs let ’em stay at home,” Fulkerson continued. “They do a lot of mischief, shooting off their mouths round here. I believe in free speech and all that; but I’d like to see these fellows shut up in jail and left to jaw one another to death. We don’t want any of their poison.”

March did not notice the vanishing Socialist. He was watching, with a teasing sense of familiarity, a tall, shabbily dressed, elderly man, who had just come in. He had the aquiline profile uncommon among Germans, and yet March recognized him at once as German. His long, soft beard and mustache had once been fair, and they kept some tone of their yellow in the gray to which they had turned. His eyes were full, and his lips and chin shaped the beard to the noble outline which shows in the beards the Italian masters liked to paint for their Last Suppers. His carriage was erect and soldierly, and March presently saw that he had lost his left hand. He took his place at a table where the overworked waiter found time to cut up his meat and put everything in easy reach of his right hand.

“Well,” Fulkerson resumed, “they took me round everywhere in Moffitt, and showed me their big wells — lit ’em up for a private view, and let me hear them purr with the soft accents of a mass-meeting of locomotives. Why, when they let one of these wells loose in a meadow that they’d piped it into temporarily, it drove the flame away forty feet from the mouth of the pipe and blew it over half an acre of ground. They say when they let one of their big wells burn away all winter before they had learned how to control it, that well kept up a little summer all around it; the grass stayed green, and the flowers bloomed all through the winter. I don’t know whether it’s so or not. But I can believe anything of natural gas. My! but it was beautiful when they turned on the full force of that well and shot a roman candle into the gas — that’s the way they light it — and a plume of fire about twenty feet wide and seventy-five feet high, all red and yellow and violet, jumped into the sky, and that big roar shook the ground under your feet! You felt like saying:

“‘Don’t trouble yourself; I’m perfectly convinced. I believe in Moffitt.’ We-e-e-ll!” drawled Fulkerson, with a long breath, “that’s where I met old Dryfoos.”

“Oh yes! — Dryfoos,” said March. He observed that the waiter had brought the old one-handed German a towering glass of beer.

“Yes,” Fulkerson laughed. “We’ve got round to Dryfoos again. I thought I could cut a long story short, but I seem to be cutting a short story long. If you’re not in a hurry, though—”

“Not in the least. Go on as long as you like.”

“I met him there in the office of a real-estate man — speculator, of course; everybody was, in Moffitt; but a first-rate fellow, and public-spirited as all get-out; and when Dryfoos left he told me about him. Dryfoos was an old Pennsylvania Dutch farmer, about three or four miles out of Moffitt, and he’d lived there pretty much all his life; father was one of the first settlers. Everybody knew he had the right stuff in him, but he was slower than molasses in January, like those Pennsylvania Dutch. He’d got together the largest and handsomest farm anywhere around there; and he was making money on it, just like he was in some business somewhere; he was a very intelligent man; he took the papers and kept himself posted; but he was awfully old-fashioned in his ideas. He hung on to the doctrines as well as the dollars of the dads; it was a real thing with him. Well, when the boom began to come he hated it awfully, and he fought it. He used to write communications to the weekly newspaper in Moffitt — they’ve got three dailies there now — and throw cold water on the boom. He couldn’t catch on no way. It made him sick to hear the clack that went on about the gas the whole while, and that stirred up the neighborhood and got into his family. Whenever he’d hear of a man that had been offered a big price for his land and was going to sell out and move into town, he’d go and labor with him and try to talk him out of it, and tell him how long his fifteen or twenty thousand would last him to live on, and shake the Standard Oil Company before him, and try to make him believe it wouldn’t be five years before the Standard owned the whole region.

“Of course, he couldn’t do anything with them. When a man’s offered a big price for his farm, he don’t care whether it’s by a secret emissary from the Standard Oil or not; he’s going to sell and get the better of the other fellow if he can. Dryfoos couldn’t keep the boom out of has own family even. His wife was with him. She thought whatever he said and did was just as right as if it had been thundered down from Sinai. But the young folks were sceptical, especially the girls that had been away to school. The boy that had been kept at home because he couldn’t be spared from helping his father manage the farm was more like him, but they contrived to stir the boy up — with the hot end of the boom, too. So when a fellow came along one day and offered old Dryfoos a cool hundred thousand for his farm, it was all up with Dryfoos. He’d ‘a’ liked to ‘a’ kept the offer to himself and not done anything about it, but his vanity wouldn’t let him do that; and when he let it out in his family the girls outvoted him. They just made him sell.

“He wouldn’t sell all. He kept about eighty acres that was off in some piece by itself, but the three hundred that had the old brick house on it, and the big barn — that went, and Dryfoos bought him a place in Moffitt and moved into town to live on the interest of his money. Just what he had scolded and ridiculed everybody else for doing. Well, they say that at first he seemed like he would go crazy. He hadn’t anything to do. He took a fancy to that land-agent, and he used to go and set in his office and ask him what he should do. ‘I hain’t got any horses, I hain’t got any cows, I hain’t got any pigs, I hain’t got any chickens. I hain’t got anything to do from sun-up to sun-down.’ The fellow said the tears used to run down the old fellow’s cheeks, and if he hadn’t been so busy himself he believed he should ‘a’ cried, too. But most o’ people thought old Dryfoos was down in the mouth because he hadn’t asked more for his farm, when he wanted to buy it back and found they held it at a hundred and fifty thousand. People couldn’t believe he was just homesick and heartsick for the old place. Well, perhaps he was sorry he hadn’t asked more; that’s human nature, too.

“After a while something happened. That land-agent used to tell Dryfoos to get out to Europe with his money and see life a little, or go and live in Washington, where he could be somebody; but Dryfoos wouldn’t, and he kept listening to the talk there, and all of a sudden he caught on. He came into that fellow’s one day with a plan for cutting up the eighty acres he’d kept into town lots; and he’d got it all plotted out so-well, and had so many practical ideas about it, that the fellow was astonished. He went right in with him, as far as Dryfoos would let him, and glad of the chance; and they were working the thing for all it was worth when I struck Moffitt. Old Dryfoos wanted me to go out and see the Dryfoos & Hendry Addition — guess he thought maybe I’d write it up; and he drove me out there himself. Well, it was funny to see a town made: streets driven through; two rows of shadetrees, hard and soft, planted; cellars dug and houses put up — regular Queen Anne style, too, with stained glass — all at once. Dryfoos apologized for the streets because they were hand-made; said they expected their street-making machine Tuesday, and then they intended to push things.”

Fulkerson enjoyed the effect of his picture on March for a moment, and then went on: “He was mighty intelligent, too, and he questioned me up about my business as sharp as I ever was questioned; seemed to kind of strike his fancy; I guess he wanted to find out if there was any money in it. He was making money, hand over hand, then; and he never stopped speculating and improving till he’d scraped together three or four hundred thousand dollars, they said a million, but they like round numbers at Moffitt, and I guess half a million would lay over it comfortably and leave a few thousands to spare, probably. Then he came on to New York.”

Fulkerson struck a match against the ribbed side of the porcelain cup that held the matches in the centre of the table, and lit a cigarette, which he began to smoke, throwing his head back with a leisurely effect, as if he had got to the end of at least as much of his story as he meant to tell without prompting.

March asked him the desired question. “What in the world for?”

Fulkerson took out his cigarette and said, with a smile: “To spend his money, and get his daughters into the old Knickerbocker society. Maybe he thought they were all the same kind of Dutch.”

“And has he succeeded?”

“Well, they’re not social leaders yet. But it’s only a question of time — generation or two — especially if time’s money, and if ‘Every Other Week’ is the success it’s bound to be.”

“You don’t mean to say, Fulkerson,” said March, with a half-doubting, half-daunted laugh, “that he’s your Angel?”

“That’s what I mean to say,” returned Fulkerson. “I ran onto him in Broadway one day last summer. If you ever saw anybody in your life; you’re sure to meet him in Broadway again, sooner or later. That’s the philosophy of the bunco business; country people from the same neighborhood are sure to run up against each other the first time they come to New York. I put out my hand, and I said, ‘Isn’t this Mr. Dryfoos from Moffitt?’ He didn’t seem to have any use for my hand; he let me keep it, and he squared those old lips of his till his imperial stuck straight out. Ever see Bernhardt in ‘L’Etrangere’? Well, the American husband is old Dryfoos all over; no mustache; and hay-colored chin-whiskers cut slanting froze the corners of his mouth. He cocked his little gray eyes at me, and says he: ‘Yes, young man; my name is Dryfoos, and I’m from Moffitt. But I don’t want no present of Longfellow’s Works, illustrated; and I don’t want to taste no fine teas; but I know a policeman that does; and if you’re the son of my old friend Squire Strohfeldt, you’d better get out.’ ‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘how would you like to go into the newspaper syndicate business?’ He gave another look at me, and then he burst out laughing, and he grabbed my hand, and he just froze to it. I never saw anybody so glad.

“Well, the long and the short of it was that I asked him round here to Maroni’s to dinner; and before we broke up for the night we had settled the financial side of the plan that’s brought you to New York.”

“I can see,” said Fulkerson, who had kept his eyes fast on March’s face, “that you don’t more than half like the idea of Dryfoos. It ought to give you more confidence in the thing than you ever had. You needn’t be afraid,” he added, with some feeling, “that I talked Dryfoos into the thing for my own advantage.”

“Oh, my dear Fulkerson!” March protested, all the more fervently because he was really a little guilty.

“Well, of course not! I didn’t mean you were. But I just happened to tell him what I wanted to go into when I could see my way to it, and he caught on of his own accord. The fact is,” said Fulkerson, “I guess I’d better make a clean breast of it, now I’m at it, Dryfoos wanted to get something for that boy of his to do. He’s in railroads himself, and he’s in mines and other things, and he keeps busy, and he can’t bear to have his boy hanging round the house doing nothing, like as if he was a girl. I told him that the great object of a rich man was to get his son into just that fix, but he couldn’t seem to see it, and the boy hated it himself. He’s got a good head, and he wanted to study for the ministry when they were all living together out on the farm; but his father had the old-fashioned ideas about that. You know they used to think that any sort of stuff was good enough to make a preacher out of; but they wanted the good timber for business; and so the old man wouldn’t let him. You’ll see the fellow; you’ll like him; he’s no fool, I can tell you; and he’s going to be our publisher, nominally at first and actually when I’ve taught him the ropes a little.”

XII.

Fulkerson stopped and looked at March, whom he saw lapsing into a serious silence. Doubtless he divined his uneasiness with the facts that had been given him to digest. He pulled out his watch and glanced at it. “See here, how would you like to go up to Forty-sixth street with me, and drop in on old Dryfoos? Now’s your chance. He’s going West tomorrow, and won’t be back for a month or so. They’ll all be glad to see you, and you’ll understand things better when you’ve seen him and his family. I can’t explain.”

March reflected a moment. Then he said, with a wisdom that surprised him, for he would have liked to yield to the impulse of his curiosity: “Perhaps we’d better wait till Mrs. March comes down, and let things take the usual course. The Dryfoos ladies will want to call on her as the last-comer, and if I treated myself ‘en garcon’ now, and paid the first visit, it might complicate matters.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” said Fulkerson. “I don’t know much about these things, and I don’t believe Ma Dryfoos does, either.” He was on his legs lighting another cigarette. “I suppose the girls are getting themselves up in etiquette, though. Well, then, let’s have a look at the ‘Every Other Week’ building, and then, if you like your quarters there, you can go round and close for Mrs. Green’s flat.”

March’s dormant allegiance to his wife’s wishes had been roused by his decision in favor of good social usage. “I don’t think I shall take the flat,” he said.

“Well, don’t reject it without giving it another look, anyway. Come on!”

He helped March on with his light overcoat, and the little stir they made for their departure caught the notice of the old German; he looked up from his beer at them. March was more than ever impressed with something familiar in his face. In compensation for his prudence in regard to the Dryfooses he now indulged an impulse. He stepped across to where the old man sat, with his bald head shining like ivory under the gas-jet, and his fine patriarchal length of bearded mask taking picturesque lights and shadows, and put out his hand to him.

“Lindau! Isn’t this Mr. Lindau?”

The old man lifted himself slowly to his feet with mechanical politeness, and cautiously took March’s hand. “Yes, my name is Lindau,” he said, slowly, while he scanned March’s face. Then he broke into a long cry. “Ah-h-h-h-h, my dear poy! my gong friendt! my-my — Idt is Passil Marge, not zo? Ah, ha, ha, ha! How gladt I am to zee you! Why, I am gladt! And you rememberdt me? You remember Schiller, and Goethe, and Uhland? And Indianapolis? You still lif in Indianapolis? It sheers my hardt to zee you. But you are lidtle oldt, too? Tventy-five years makes a difference. Ah, I am gladt! Dell me, idt is Passil Marge, not zo?”

He looked anxiously into March’s face, with a gentle smile of mixed hope and doubt, and March said: “As sure as it’s Berthold Lindau, and I guess it’s you. And you remember the old times? You were as much of a boy as I was, Lindau. Are you living in New York? Do you recollect how you tried to teach me to fence? I don’t know how to this day, Lindau. How good you were, and how patient! Do you remember how we used to sit up in the little parlor back of your printing-office, and read Die Rauber and Die Theilung der Erde and Die Glocke? And Mrs. Lindau? Is she with—”

“Deadt — deadt long ago. Right after I got home from the war — tventy years ago. But tell me, you are married? Children? Yes! Goodt! And how oldt are you now?”

“It makes me seventeen to see you, Lindau, but I’ve got a son nearly as old.”

“Ah, ha, ha! Goodt! And where do you lif?”

“Well, I’m just coming to live in New York,” March said, looking over at Fulkerson, who had been watching his interview with the perfunctory smile of sympathy that people put on at the meeting of old friends. “I want to introduce you to my friend Mr. Fulkerson. He and I are going into a literary enterprise here.”

“Ah! zo?” said the old man, with polite interest. He took Fulkerson’s proffered hand, and they all stood talking a few moments together.

Then Fulkerson said, with another look at his watch, “Well, March, we’re keeping Mr. Lindau from his dinner.”

“Dinner!” cried the old man. “Idt’s better than breadt and meadt to see
Mr. Marge!”

“I must be going, anyway,” said March. “But I must see you again soon,
Lindau. Where do you live? I want a long talk.”

“And I. You will find me here at dinner-time.” said the old man. “It is the best place”; and March fancied him reluctant to give another address.

To cover his consciousness he answered, gayly: “Then, it’s ‘auf wiedersehen’ with us. Well!”

“Also!” The old man took his hand, and made a mechanical movement with his mutilated arm, as if he would have taken it in a double clasp. He laughed at himself. “I wanted to gif you the other handt, too, but I gafe it to your gountry a goodt while ago.”

“To my country?” asked March, with a sense of pain, and yet lightly, as if it were a joke of the old man’s. “Your country, too, Lindau?”

The old man turned very grave, and said, almost coldly, “What gountry hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?”

“Well, you ought to have a share in the one you helped to save for us rich men, Lindau,” March returned, still humoring the joke.

The old man smiled sadly, but made no answer as he sat down again.

“Seems to be a little soured,” said Fulkerson, as they went down the steps. He was one of those Americans whose habitual conception of life is unalloyed prosperity. When any experience or observation of his went counter to it he suffered — something like physical pain. He eagerly shrugged away the impression left upon his buoyancy by Lindau, and added to March’s continued silence, “What did I tell you about meeting every man in New York that you ever knew before?”

“I never expected to meat Lindau in the world again,” said March, more to himself than to Fulkerson. “I had an impression that he had been killed in the war. I almost wish he had been.”

“Oh, hello, now!” cried Fulkerson.

March laughed, but went on soberly: “He was a man predestined to adversity, though. When I first knew him out in Indianapolis he was starving along with a sick wife and a sick newspaper. It was before the Germans had come over to the Republicans generally, but Lindau was fighting the anti-slavery battle just as naturally at Indianapolis in 1858 as he fought behind the barricades at Berlin in 1848. And yet he was always such a gentle soul! And so generous! He taught me German for the love of it; he wouldn’t spoil his pleasure by taking a cent from me; he seemed to get enough out of my being young and enthusiastic, and out of prophesying great things for me. I wonder what the poor old fellow is doing here, with that one hand of his?”

“Not amassing a very ‘handsome pittance,’ I guess, as Artemus Ward would say,” said Fulkerson, getting back some of his lightness. “There are lots of two-handed fellows in New York that are not doing much better, I guess. Maybe he gets some writing on the German papers.”

“I hope so. He’s one of the most accomplished men! He used to be a splendid musician — pianist — and knows eight or ten languages.”

“Well, it’s astonishing,” said Fulkerson, “how much lumber those Germans can carry around in their heads all their lives, and never work it up into anything. It’s a pity they couldn’t do the acquiring, and let out the use of their learning to a few bright Americans. We could make things hum, if we could arrange ’em that way.”

He talked on, unheeded by March, who went along half-consciously tormented by his lightness in the pensive memories the meeting with Lindau had called up. Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature could come to? What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d’hote, with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour’s oblivion! That shabby dress, that pathetic mutilation! He must have a pension, twelve dollars a month, or eighteen, from a grateful country. But what else did he eke out with?

“Well, here we are,” said Fulkerson, cheerily. He ran up the steps before March, and opened the carpenter’s temporary valve in the door frame, and led the way into a darkness smelling sweetly of unpainted wood-work and newly dried plaster; their feat slipped on shavings and grated on sand. He scratched a match, and found a candle, and then walked about up and down stairs, and lectured on the advantages of the place. He had fitted up bachelor apartments for himself in the house, and said that he was going to have a flat to let on the top floor. “I didn’t offer it to you because I supposed you’d be too proud to live over your shop; and it’s too small, anyway; only five rooms.”

“Yes, that’s too small,” said March, shirking the other point.

“Well, then, here’s the room I intend for your office,” said Fulkerson, showing him into a large back parlor one flight up. “You’ll have it quiet from the street noises here, and you can be at home or not, as you please. There’ll be a boy on the stairs to find out. Now, you see, this makes the Grosvenor Green flat practicable, if you want it.”

March felt the forces of fate closing about him and pushing him to a decision. He feebly fought them off till he could have another look at the flat. Then, baked and subdued still more by the unexpected presence of Mrs. Grosvenor Green herself, who was occupying it so as to be able to show it effectively, he took it. He was aware more than ever of its absurdities; he knew that his wife would never cease to hate it; but he had suffered one of those eclipses of the imagination to which men of his temperament are subject, and into which he could see no future for his desires. He felt a comfort in irretrievably committing himself, and exchanging the burden of indecision for the burden of responsibility.

“I don’t know,” said Fulkerson, as they walked back to his hotel together, “but you might fix it up with that lone widow and her pretty daughter to take part of their house here.” He seemed to be reminded of it by the fact of passing the house, and March looked up at its dark front. He could not have told exactly why he felt a pang of remorse at the sight, and doubtless it was more regret for having taken the Grosvenor Green flat than for not having taken the widow’s rooms. Still, he could not forget her wistfulness when his wife and he were looking at them, and her disappointment when they decided against them. He had toyed, in his after-talk to Mrs. March, with a sort of hypothetical obligation they had to modify their plans so as to meet the widow’s want of just such a family as theirs; they had both said what a blessing it would be to her, and what a pity they could not do it; but they had decided very distinctly that they could not. Now it seemed to him that they might; and he asked himself whether he had not actually departed as much from their ideal as if he had taken board with the widow. Suddenly it seemed to him that his wife asked him this, too.

“I reckon,” said Fulkerson, “that she could have arranged to give you your meals in your rooms, and it would have come to about the same thing as housekeeping.”

“No sort of boarding can be the same as house-keeping,” said March. “I want my little girl to have the run of a kitchen, and I want the whole family to have the moral effect of housekeeping. It’s demoralizing to board, in every way; it isn’t a home, if anybody else takes the care of it off your hands.”

“Well, I suppose so,” Fulkerson assented; but March’s words had a hollow ring to himself, and in his own mind he began to retaliate his dissatisfaction upon Fulkerson.

He parted from him on the usual terms outwardly, but he felt obscurely abused by Fulkerson in regard to the Dryfooses, father and son. He did not know but Fulkerson had taken an advantage of him in allowing him to commit himself to their enterprise without fully and frankly telling him who and what his backer was; he perceived that with young Dryfoos as the publisher and Fulkerson as the general director of the paper there might be very little play for his own ideas of its conduct. Perhaps it was the hurt to his vanity involved by the recognition of this fact that made him forget how little choice he really had in the matter, and how, since he had not accepted the offer to edit the insurance paper, nothing remained for him but to close with Fulkerson. In this moment of suspicion and resentment he accused Fulkerson of hastening his decision in regard to the Grosvenor Green apartment; he now refused to consider it a decision, and said to himself that if he felt disposed to do so he would send Mrs. Green a note reversing it in the morning. But he put it all off till morning with his clothes, when he went to bed, he put off even thinking what his wife would say; he cast Fulkerson and his constructive treachery out of his mind, too, and invited into it some pensive reveries of the past, when he still stood at the parting of the ways, and could take this path or that. In his middle life this was not possible; he must follow the path chosen long ago, wherever, it led. He was not master of himself, as he once seemed, but the servant of those he loved; if he could do what he liked, perhaps he might renounce this whole New York enterprise, and go off somewhere out of the reach of care; but he could not do what he liked, that was very clear. In the pathos of this conviction he dwelt compassionately upon the thought of poor old Lindau; he resolved to make him accept a handsome sum of money — more than he could spare, something that he would feel the loss of — in payment of the lessons in German and fencing given so long ago. At the usual rate for such lessons, his debt, with interest for twenty-odd years, would run very far into the hundreds. Too far, he perceived, for his wife’s joyous approval; he determined not to add the interest; or he believed that Lindau would refuse the interest; he put a fine speech in his mouth, making him do so; and after that he got Lindau employment on ‘Every Other Week,’ and took care of him till he died.

Through all his melancholy and munificence he was aware of sordid anxieties for having taken the Grosvenor Green apartment. These began to assume visible, tangible shapes as he drowsed, and to became personal entities, from which he woke, with little starts, to a realization of their true nature, and then suddenly fell fast asleep.

In the accomplishment of the events which his reverie played with, there was much that retroactively stamped it with prophecy, but much also that was better than he forboded. He found that with regard to the Grosvenor Green apartment he had not allowed for his wife’s willingness to get any sort of roof over her head again after the removal from their old home, or for the alleviations that grow up through mere custom. The practical workings of the apartment were not so bad; it had its good points, and after the first sensation of oppression in it they began to feel the convenience of its arrangement. They were at that time of life when people first turn to their children’s opinion with deference, and, in the loss of keenness in their own likes and dislikes, consult the young preferences which are still so sensitive. It went far to reconcile Mrs. March to the apartment that her children were pleased with its novelty; when this wore off for them, she had herself begun to find it much more easily manageable than a house. After she had put away several barrels of gimcracks, and folded up screens and rugs and skins, and carried them all off to the little dark store-room which the flat developed, she perceived at once a roominess and coziness in it unsuspected before. Then, when people began to call, she had a pleasure, a superiority, in saying that it was a furnished apartment, and in disclaiming all responsibility for the upholstery and decoration. If March was by, she always explained that it was Mr. March’s fancy, and amiably laughed it off with her callers as a mannish eccentricity. Nobody really seemed to think it otherwise than pretty; and this again was a triumph for Mrs. March, because it showed how inferior the New York taste was to the Boston taste in such matters.

March submitted silently to his punishment, and laughed with her before company at his own eccentricity. She had been so preoccupied with the adjustment of the family to its new quarters and circumstances that the time passed for laying his misgivings, if they were misgivings, about Fulkerson before her, and when an occasion came for expressing them they had themselves passed in the anxieties of getting forward the first number of ‘Every Other Week.’ He kept these from her, too, and the business that brought them to New York had apparently dropped into abeyance before the questions of domestic economy that presented and absented themselves. March knew his wife to be a woman of good mind and in perfect sympathy with him, but he understood the limitations of her perspective; and if he was not too wise, he was too experienced to intrude upon it any affairs of his till her own were reduced to the right order and proportion. It would have been folly to talk to her of Fulkerson’s conjecturable uncandor while she was in doubt whether her cook would like the kitchen, or her two servants would consent to room together; and till it was decided what school Tom should go to, and whether Bella should have lessons at home or not, the relation which March was to bear to the Dryfooses, as owner and publisher, was not to be discussed with his wife. He might drag it in, but he was aware that with her mind distracted by more immediate interests he could not get from her that judgment, that reasoned divination, which he relied upon so much. She would try, she would do her best, but the result would be a view clouded and discolored by the effort she must make.

He put the whole matter by, and gave himself to the details of the work before him. In this he found not only escape, but reassurance, for it became more and more apparent that whatever was nominally the structure of the business, a man of his qualifications and his instincts could not have an insignificant place in it. He had also the consolation of liking his work, and of getting an instant grasp of it that grew constantly firmer and closer. The joy of knowing that he had not made a mistake was great. In giving rein to ambitions long forborne he seemed to get back to the youth when he had indulged them first; and after half a lifetime passed in pursuits alien to his nature, he was feeling the serene happiness of being mated through his work to his early love. From the outside the spectacle might have had its pathos, and it is not easy to justify such an experiment as he had made at his time of life, except upon the ground where he rested from its consideration — the ground of necessity.

His work was more in his thoughts than himself, however; and as the time for the publication of the first number of his periodical came nearer, his cares all centred upon it. Without fixing any date, Fulkerson had announced it, and pushed his announcements with the shameless vigor of a born advertiser. He worked his interest with the press to the utmost, and paragraphs of a variety that did credit to his ingenuity were afloat everywhere. Some of them were speciously unfavorable in tone; they criticised and even ridiculed the principles on which the new departure in literary journalism was based. Others defended it; others yet denied that this rumored principle was really the principle. All contributed to make talk. All proceeded from the same fertile invention.

March observed with a degree of mortification that the talk was very little of it in the New York press; there the references to the novel enterprise were slight and cold. But Fulkerson said: “Don’t mind that, old man. It’s the whole country that makes or breaks a thing like this; New York has very little to do with it. Now if it were a play, it would be different. New York does make or break a play; but it doesn’t make or break a book; it doesn’t make or break a magazine. The great mass of the readers are outside of New York, and the rural districts are what we have got to go for. They don’t read much in New York; they write, and talk about what they’ve written. Don’t you worry.”

The rumor of Fulkerson’s connection with the enterprise accompanied many of the paragraphs, and he was able to stay March’s thirst for employment by turning over to him from day to day heaps of the manuscripts which began to pour in from his old syndicate writers, as well as from adventurous volunteers all over the country. With these in hand March began practically to plan the first number, and to concrete a general scheme from the material and the experience they furnished. They had intended to issue the first number with the new year, and if it had been an affair of literature alone, it would have been very easy; but it was the art leg they limped on, as Fulkerson phrased it. They had not merely to deal with the question of specific illustrations for this article or that, but to decide the whole character of their illustrations, and first of all to get a design for a cover which should both ensnare the heedless and captivate the fastidious. These things did not come properly within March’s province — that had been clearly understood — and for a while Fulkerson tried to run the art leg himself. The phrase was again his, but it was simpler to make the phrase than to run the leg. The difficult generation, at once stiff-backed and slippery, with which he had to do in this endeavor, reduced even so buoyant an optimist to despair, and after wasting some valuable weeks in trying to work the artists himself, he determined to get an artist to work them. But what artist? It could not be a man with fixed reputation and a following: he would be too costly, and would have too many enemies among his brethren, even if he would consent to undertake the job. Fulkerson had a man in mind, an artist, too, who would have been the very thing if he had been the thing at all. He had talent enough, and his sort of talent would reach round the whole situation, but, as Fulkerson said, he was as many kinds of an ass as he was kinds of an artist.

PART SECOND

I.

The evening when March closed with Mrs. Green’s reduced offer, and decided to take her apartment, the widow whose lodgings he had rejected sat with her daughter in an upper room at the back of her house. In the shaded glow of the drop-light she was sewing, and the girl was drawing at the same table. From time to time, as they talked, the girl lifted her head and tilted it a little on one side so as to get some desired effect of her work.

“It’s a mercy the cold weather holds off,” said the mother. “We should have to light the furnace, unless we wanted to scare everybody away with a cold house; and I don’t know who would take care of it, or what would become of us, every way.”

“They seem to have been scared away from a house that wasn’t cold,” said the girl. “Perhaps they might like a cold one. But it’s too early for cold yet. It’s only just in the beginning of November.”

“The Messenger says they’ve had a sprinkling of snow.”

“Oh yes, at St. Barnaby! I don’t know when they don’t have sprinklings of snow there. I’m awfully glad we haven’t got that winter before us.”

The widow sighed as mothers do who feel the contrast their experience opposes to the hopeful recklessness of such talk as this. “We may have a worse winter here,” she said, darkly.

“Then I couldn’t stand it,” said the girl, “and I should go in for lighting out to Florida double-quick.”

“And how would you get to Florida?” demanded her mother, severely.

“Oh, by the usual conveyance Pullman vestibuled train, I suppose. What makes you so blue, mamma?” The girl was all the time sketching away, rubbing out, lifting her head for the effect, and then bending it over her work again without looking at her mother.

“I am not blue, Alma. But I cannot endure this — this hopefulness of yours.”

“Why? What harm does it do?”

“Harm?” echoed the mother.

Pending the effort she must make in saying, the girl cut in: “Yes, harm. You’ve kept your despair dusted off and ready for use at an instant’s notice ever since we came, and what good has it done? I’m going to keep on hoping to the bitter end. That’s what papa did.”

It was what the Rev. Archibald Leighton had done with all the consumptive’s buoyancy. The morning he died he told them that now he had turned the point and was really going to get well. The cheerfulness was not only in his disease, but in his temperament. Its excess was always a little against him in his church work, and Mrs. Leighton was right enough in feeling that if it had not been for the ballast of her instinctive despondency he would have made shipwreck of such small chances of prosperity as befell him in life. It was not from him that his daughter got her talent, though he had left her his temperament intact of his widow’s legal thirds. He was one of those men of whom the country people say when he is gone that the woman gets along better without him. Mrs. Leighton had long eked out their income by taking a summer boarder or two, as a great favor, into her family; and when the greater need came, she frankly gave up her house to the summer-folks (as they call them in the country), and managed it for their comfort from the small quarter of it in which she shut herself up with her daughter.

The notion of shutting up is an exigency of the rounded period. The fact is, of course, that Alma Leighton was not shut up in any sense whatever. She was the pervading light, if not force, of the house. She was a good cook, and she managed the kitchen with the help of an Irish girl, while her mother looked after the rest of the housekeeping. But she was not systematic; she had inspiration but not discipline, and her mother mourned more over the days when Alma left the whole dinner to the Irish girl than she rejoiced in those when one of Alma’s great thoughts took form in a chicken-pie of incomparable savor or in a matchless pudding. The off-days came when her artistic nature was expressing itself in charcoal, for she drew to the admiration of all among the lady boarders who could not draw. The others had their reserves; they readily conceded that Alma had genius, but they were sure she needed instruction. On the other hand, they were not so radical as to agree with the old painter who came every summer to paint the elms of the St. Barnaby meadows. He contended that she needed to be a man in order to amount to anything; but in this theory he was opposed by an authority, of his own sex, whom the lady sketchers believed to speak with more impartiality in a matter concerning them as much as Alma Leighton. He said that instruction would do, and he was not only younger and handsomer, but he was fresher from the schools than old Harrington, who, even the lady sketchers could see, painted in an obsolescent manner. His name was Beaton — Angus Beaton; but he was not Scotch, or not more Scotch than Mary Queen of Scots was. His father was a Scotchman, but Beaton was born in Syracuse, New York, and it had taken only three years in Paris to obliterate many traces of native and ancestral manner in him. He wore his black beard cut shorter than his mustache, and a little pointed; he stood with his shoulders well thrown back and with a lateral curve of his person when he talked about art, which would alone have carried conviction even if he had not had a thick, dark bang coming almost to the brows of his mobile gray eyes, and had not spoken English with quick, staccato impulses, so as to give it the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French. One of the ladies said that you always thought of him as having spoken French after it was over, and accused herself of wrong in not being able to feel afraid of him. None of the ladies was afraid of him, though they could not believe that he was really so deferential to their work as he seemed; and they knew, when he would not criticise Mr. Harrington’s work, that he was just acting from principle.

They may or may not have known the deference with which he treated Alma’s work; but the girl herself felt that his abrupt, impersonal comment recognized her as a real sister in art. He told her she ought to come to New York, and draw in the League, or get into some painter’s private class; and it was the sense of duty thus appealed to which finally resulted in the hazardous experiment she and her mother were now making. There were no logical breaks in the chain of their reasoning from past success with boarders in St. Barnaby to future success with boarders in New York. Of course the outlay was much greater. The rent of the furnished house they had taken was such that if they failed their experiment would be little less than ruinous.

But they were not going to fail; that was what Alma contended, with a hardy courage that her mother sometimes felt almost invited failure, if it did not deserve it. She was one of those people who believe that if you dread harm enough it is less likely to happen. She acted on this superstition as if it were a religion.

“If it had not been for my despair, as you call it, Alma,” she answered,
“I don’t know where we should have been now.”

“I suppose we should have been in St. Barnaby,” said the girl. “And if it’s worse to be in New York, you see what your despair’s done, mamma. But what’s the use? You meant well, and I don’t blame you. You can’t expect even despair to come out always just the way you want it. Perhaps you’ve used too much of it.” The girl laughed, and Mrs. Leighton laughed, too. Like every one else, she was not merely a prevailing mood, as people are apt to be in books, but was an irregularly spheroidal character, with surfaces that caught the different lights of circumstance and reflected them. Alma got up and took a pose before the mirror, which she then transferred to her sketch. The room was pinned about with other sketches, which showed with fantastic indistinctness in the shaded gaslight. Alma held up the drawing. “How do you like it?”

Mrs. Leighton bent forward over her sewing to look at it. “You’ve got the man’s face rather weak.”

“Yes, that’s so. Either I see all the hidden weakness that’s in men’s natures, and bring it to the surface in their figures, or else I put my own weakness into them. Either way, it’s a drawback to their presenting a truly manly appearance. As long as I have one of the miserable objects before me, I can draw him; but as soon as his back’s turned I get to putting ladies into men’s clothes. I should think you’d be scandalized, mamma, if you were a really feminine person. It must be your despair that helps you to bear up. But what’s the matter with the young lady in young lady’s clothes? Any dust on her?”

“What expressions!” said Mrs. Leighton. “Really, Alma, for a refined girl you are the most unrefined!”

“Go on — about the girl in the picture!” said Alma, slightly knocking her mother on the shoulder, as she stood over her.

“I don’t see anything to her. What’s she doing?”

“Oh, just being made love to, I suppose.”

“She’s perfectly insipid!”

“You’re awfully articulate, mamma! Now, if Mr. Wetmore were to criticise that picture he’d draw a circle round it in the air, and look at it through that, and tilt his head first on one side and then on the other, and then look at you, as if you were a figure in it, and then collapse awhile, and moan a little and gasp, ‘Isn’t your young lady a little too-too—’ and then he’d try to get the word out of you, and groan and suffer some more; and you’d say, ‘She is, rather,’ and that would give him courage, and he’d say, ‘I don’t mean that she’s so very—’ ‘Of course not.’ ‘You understand?’ ‘Perfectly. I see it myself, now.’ ‘Well, then’ — and he’d take your pencil and begin to draw— ‘I should give her a little more — Ah?’ ‘Yes, I see the difference.’— ‘You see the difference?’ And he’d go off to some one else, and you’d know that you’d been doing the wishy-washiest thing in the world, though he hadn’t spoken a word of criticism, and couldn’t. But he wouldn’t have noticed the expression at all; he’d have shown you where your drawing was bad. He doesn’t care for what he calls the literature of a thing; he says that will take care of itself if the drawing’s good. He doesn’t like my doing these chic things; but I’m going to keep it up, for I think it’s the nearest way to illustrating.”

She took her sketch and pinned it up on the door.

“And has Mr. Beaton been about, yet?” asked her mother.

“No,” said the girl, with her back still turned; and she added, “I believe he’s in New York; Mr. Wetmore’s seen him.”

“It’s a little strange he doesn’t call.”

“It would be if he were not an artist. But artists never do anything like other people. He was on his good behavior while he was with us, and he’s a great deal more conventional than most of them; but even he can’t keep it up. That’s what makes me really think that women can never amount to anything in art. They keep all their appointments, and fulfil all their duties just as if they didn’t know anything about art. Well, most of them don’t. We’ve got that new model to-day.”

“What new model?”

“The one Mr. Wetmore was telling us about the old German; he’s splendid. He’s got the most beautiful head; just like the old masters’ things. He used to be Humphrey Williams’s model for his Biblical-pieces; but since he’s dead, the old man hardly gets anything to do. Mr. Wetmore says there isn’t anybody in the Bible that Williams didn’t paint him as. He’s the Law and the Prophets in all his Old Testament pictures, and he’s Joseph, Peter, Judas Iscariot, and the Scribes and Pharisees in the New.”

“It’s a good thing people don’t know how artists work, or some of the most sacred pictures would have no influence,” said Mrs. Leighton.

“Why, of course not!” cried the girl. “And the influence is the last thing a painter thinks of — or supposes he thinks of. What he knows he’s anxious about is the drawing and the color. But people will never understand how simple artists are. When I reflect what a complex and sophisticated being I am, I’m afraid I can never come to anything in art. Or I should be if I hadn’t genius.”

“Do you think Mr. Beaton is very simple?” asked Mrs. Leighton.

“Mr. Wetmore doesn’t think he’s very much of an artist. He thinks he talks too well. They believe that if a man can express himself clearly he can’t paint.”

“And what do you believe?”

“Oh, I can express myself, too.”

The mother seemed to be satisfied with this evasion. After a while she said, “I presume he will call when he gets settled.”

The girl made no answer to this. “One of the girls says that old model is an educated man. He was in the war, and lost a hand. Doesn’t it seem a pity for such a man to have to sit to a class of affected geese like us as a model? I declare it makes me sick. And we shall keep him a week, and pay him six or seven dollars for the use of his grand old head, and then what will he do? The last time he was regularly employed was when Mr. Mace was working at his Damascus Massacre. Then he wanted so many Arab sheiks and Christian elders that he kept old Mr. Lindau steadily employed for six months. Now he has to pick up odd jobs where he can.”

“I suppose he has his pension,” said Mrs. Leighton.

“No; one of the girls” — that was the way Alma always described her fellow-students— “says he has no pension. He didn’t apply for it for a long time, and then there was a hitch about it, and it was somethinged — vetoed, I believe she said.”

“Who vetoed it?” asked Mrs. Leighton, with some curiosity about the process, which she held in reserve.

“I don’t know — whoever vetoes things. I wonder what Mr. Wetmore does think of us — his class. We must seem perfectly crazy. There isn’t one of us really knows what she’s doing it for, or what she expects to happen when she’s done it. I suppose every one thinks she has genius. I know the Nebraska widow does, for she says that unless you have genius it isn’t the least use. Everybody’s puzzled to know what she does with her baby when she’s at work — whether she gives it soothing syrup. I wonder how Mr. Wetmore can keep from laughing in our faces. I know he does behind our backs.”

Mrs. Leighton’s mind wandered back to another point. “Then if he says Mr.
Beaton can’t paint, I presume he doesn’t respect him very much.”

“Oh, he never said he couldn’t paint. But I know he thinks so. He says he’s an excellent critic.”

“Alma,” her mother said, with the effect of breaking off, “what do you suppose is the reason he hasn’t been near us?”

“Why, I don’t know, mamma, except that it would have been natural for another person to come, and he’s an artist at least, artist enough for that.”

“That doesn’t account for it altogether. He was very nice at St. Barnaby, and seemed so interested in you — your work.”

“Plenty of people were nice at St. Barnaby. That rich Mrs. Horn couldn’t contain her joy when she heard we were coming to New York, but she hasn’t poured in upon us a great deal since we got here.”

“But that’s different. She’s very fashionable, and she’s taken up with her own set. But Mr. Beaton’s one of our kind.”

“Thank you. Papa wasn’t quite a tombstone-cutter, mamma.”

“That makes it all the harder to bear. He can’t be ashamed of us. Perhaps he doesn’t know where we are.”

“Do you wish to send him your card, mamma?” The girl flushed and towered in scorn of the idea.

“Why, no, Alma,” returned her mother.

“Well, then,” said Alma.

But Mrs. Leighton was not so easily quelled. She had got her mind on Mr. Beaton, and she could not detach it at once. Besides, she was one of those women (they are commoner than the same sort of men) whom it does not pain to take out their most intimate thoughts and examine them in the light of other people’s opinions. “But I don’t see how he can behave so. He must know that—”

“That what, mamma?” demanded the girl.

“That he influenced us a great deal in coming—”

“He didn’t. If he dared to presume to think such a thing—”

“Now, Alma,” said her mother, with the clinging persistence of such natures, “you know he did. And it’s no use for you to pretend that we didn’t count upon him in — in every way. You may not have noticed his attentions, and I don’t say you did, but others certainly did; and I must say that I didn’t expect he would drop us so.”

“Drop us!” cried Alma, in a fury. “Oh!”

“Yes, drop us, Alma. He must know where we are. Of course, Mr. Wetmore’s spoken to him about you, and it’s a shame that he hasn’t been near us. I should have thought common gratitude, common decency, would have brought him after — after all we did for him.”

“We did nothing for him — nothing! He paid his board, and that ended it.”

“No, it didn’t, Alma. You know what he used to say — about its being like home, and all that; and I must say that after his attentions to you, and all the things you told me he said, I expected something very dif—”

A sharp peal of the door-bell thrilled through the house, and as if the pull of the bell-wire had twitched her to her feet, Mrs. Leighton sprang up and grappled with her daughter in their common terror.

They both glared at the clock and made sure that it was five minutes after nine. Then they abandoned themselves some moments to the unrestricted play of their apprehensions.

II.

“Why, Alma,” whispered the mother, “who in the world can it be at this time of night? You don’t suppose he—”

“Well, I’m not going to the door, anyhow, mother, I don’t care who it is; and, of course, he wouldn’t be such a goose as to come at this hour.” She put on a look of miserable trepidation, and shrank back from the door, while the hum of the bell died away, in the hall.

“What shall we do?” asked Mrs. Leighton, helplessly.

“Let him go away — whoever they are,” said Alma.

Another and more peremptory ring forbade them refuge in this simple expedient.

“Oh, dear! what shall we do? Perhaps it’s a despatch.”

The conjecture moved Alma to no more than a rigid stare. “I shall not go,” she said. A third ring more insistent than the others followed, and she said: “You go ahead, mamma, and I’ll come behind to scream if it’s anybody. We can look through the side-lights at the door first.”

Mrs. Leighton fearfully led the way from the back chamber where they bad been sitting, and slowly descended the stairs. Alma came behind and turned up the hall gas-jet with a sudden flash that made them both jump a little. The gas inside rendered it more difficult to tell who was on the threshold, but Mrs. Leighton decided from a timorous peep through the scrims that it was a lady and gentleman. Something in this distribution of sex emboldened her; she took her life in her hand, and opened the door.

The lady spoke. “Does Mrs. Leighton live heah?” she said, in a rich, throaty voice; and she feigned a reference to the agent’s permit she held in her hand.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Leighton; she mechanically occupied the doorway, while
Alma already quivered behind her with impatience of her impoliteness.

“Oh,” said the lady, who began to appear more and more a young lady, “Ah didn’t know but Ah had mistaken the hoase. Ah suppose it’s rather late to see the apawtments, and Ah most ask you to pawdon us.” She put this tentatively, with a delicately growing recognition of Mrs. Leighton as the lady of the house, and a humorous intelligence of the situation in the glance she threw Alma over her mother’s shoulder. “Ah’m afraid we most have frightened you.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Alma; and at the same time her mother said, “Will you walk in, please?”

The gentleman promptly removed his hat and made the Leightons an inclusive bow. “You awe very kind, madam, and I am sorry for the trouble we awe giving you.” He was tall and severe-looking, with a gray, trooperish mustache and iron-gray hair, and, as Alma decided, iron-gray eyes. His daughter was short, plump, and fresh-colored, with an effect of liveliness that did not all express itself in her broad-vowelled, rather formal speech, with its odd valuations of some of the auxiliary verbs, and its total elision of the canine letter.

“We awe from the Soath,” she said, “and we arrived this mawning, but we got this cyahd from the brokah just befo’ dinnah, and so we awe rathah late.”

“Not at all; it’s only nine o’clock,” said Mrs. Leighton. She looked up from the card the young lady had given her, and explained, “We haven’t got in our servants yet, and we had to answer the bell ourselves, and—”

“You were frightened, of coase,” said the young lady, caressingly.

The gentleman said they ought not to have come so late, and he offered some formal apologies.

“We should have been just as much scared any time after five o’clock,”
Alma said to the sympathetic intelligence in the girl’s face.

She laughed out. “Of coase! Ah would have my hawt in my moath all day long, too, if Ah was living in a big hoase alone.”

A moment of stiffness followed; Mrs. Leighton would have liked to withdraw from the intimacy of the situation, but she did not know how. It was very well for these people to assume to be what they pretended; but, she reflected too late, she had no proof of it except the agent’s permit. They were all standing in the hall together, and she prolonged the awkward pause while she examined the permit. “You are Mr. Woodburn?” she asked, in a way that Alma felt implied he might not be.

“Yes, madam; from Charlottesboag, Virginia,” he answered, with the slight umbrage a man shows when the strange cashier turns his check over and questions him before cashing it.

Alma writhed internally, but outwardly remained subordinate; she examined the other girl’s dress, and decided in a superficial consciousness that she had made her own bonnet.

“I shall be glad to show you my rooms,” said Mrs. Leighton, with an irrelevant sigh. “You must excuse their being not just as I should wish them. We’re hardly settled yet.”

“Don’t speak of it, madam,” said the gentleman, “if you can overlook the trouble we awe giving you at such an unseasonable houah.”

“Ah’m a hoasekeepah mahself,” Miss Woodburn joined in, “and Ah know ho’ to accyoant fo’ everything.”

Mrs. Leighton led the way up-stairs, and the young lady decided upon the large front room and small side room on the third story. She said she could take the small one, and the other was so large that her father could both sleep and work in it. She seemed not ashamed to ask if Mrs. Leighton’s price was inflexible, but gave way laughing when her father refused to have any bargaining, with a haughty self-respect which he softened to deference for Mrs. Leighton. His impulsiveness opened the way for some confidence from her, and before the affair was arranged she was enjoying in her quality of clerical widow the balm of the Virginians’ reverent sympathy. They said they were church people themselves.

“Ah don’t know what yo’ mothah means by yo’ hoase not being in oddah,” the young lady said to Alma as they went down-stairs together. “Ah’m a great hoasekeepah mahself, and Ah mean what Ah say.”

They had all turned mechanically into the room where the Leightons were sitting when the Woodburns rang: Mr. Woodburn consented to sit down, and he remained listening to Mrs. Leighton while his daughter bustled up to the sketches pinned round the room and questioned Alma about them.

“Ah suppose you awe going to be a great awtust?” she said, in friendly banter, when Alma owned to having done the things. “Ah’ve a great notion to take a few lessons mahself. Who’s yo’ teachah?”

Alma said she was drawing in Mr. Wetmore’s class, and Miss Woodburn said: “Well, it’s just beautiful, Miss Leighton; it’s grand. Ah suppose it’s raght expensive, now? Mah goodness! we have to cyoant the coast so much nowadays; it seems to me we do nothing but cyoant it. Ah’d like to hah something once without askin’ the price.”

“Well, if you didn’t ask it,” said Alma, “I don’t believe Mr. Wetmore would ever know what the price of his lessons was. He has to think, when you ask him.”

“Why, he most be chomming,” said Miss Woodburn. “Perhaps Ah maght get the lessons for nothing from him. Well, Ah believe in my soul Ah’ll trah. Now ho’ did you begin? and ho’ do you expect to get anything oat of it?” She turned on Alma eyes brimming with a shrewd mixture of fun and earnest, and Alma made note of the fact that she had an early nineteenth-century face, round, arch, a little coquettish, but extremely sensible and unspoiled-looking, such as used to be painted a good deal in miniature at that period; a tendency of her brown hair to twine and twist at the temples helped the effect; a high comb would have completed it, Alma felt, if she had her bonnet off. It was almost a Yankee country-girl type; but perhaps it appeared so to Alma because it was, like that, pure Anglo-Saxon. Alma herself, with her dull, dark skin, slender in figure, slow in speech, with aristocratic forms in her long hands, and the oval of her fine face pointed to a long chin, felt herself much more Southern in style than this blooming, bubbling, bustling Virginian.

“I don’t know,” she answered, slowly.

“Going to take po’traits,” suggested Miss Woodburn, “or just paint the ahdeal?” A demure burlesque lurked in her tone.

“I suppose I don’t expect to paint at all,” said Alma. “I’m going to illustrate books — if anybody will let me.”

“Ah should think they’d just joamp at you,” said Miss Woodburn. “Ah’ll tell you what let’s do, Miss Leighton: you make some pictures, and Ah’ll wrahte a book fo’ them. Ah’ve got to do something. Ali maght as well wrahte a book. You know we Southerners have all had to go to woak. But Ah don’t mand it. I tell papa I shouldn’t ca’ fo’ the disgrace of bein’ poo’ if it wasn’t fo’ the inconvenience.”

“Yes, it’s inconvenient,” said Alma; “but you forget it when you’re at work, don’t you think?”

“Mah, yes! Perhaps that’s one reason why poo’ people have to woak so hawd — to keep their wands off their poverty.”

The girls both tittered, and turned from talking in a low tone with their backs toward their elders, and faced them.

“Well, Madison,” said Mr. Woodburn, “it is time we should go. I bid you good-night, madam,” he bowed to Mrs. Leighton. “Good-night,” he bowed again to Alma.

His daughter took leave of them in formal phrase, but with a jolly cordiality of manner that deformalized it. “We shall be roand raght soon in the mawning, then,” she threatened at the door.

“We shall be all ready for you,” Alma called after her down the steps.

“Well, Alma?” her mother asked, when the door closed upon them.

“She doesn’t know any more about art,” said Alma, “than — nothing at all. But she’s jolly and good-hearted. She praised everything that was bad in my sketches, and said she was going to take lessons herself. When a person talks about taking lessons, as if they could learn it, you know where they belong artistically.”

Mrs. Leighton shook her head with a sigh. “I wish I knew where they belonged financially. We shall have to get in two girls at once. I shall have to go out the first thing in the morning, and then our troubles will begin.”

“Well, didn’t you want them to begin? I will stay home and help you get ready. Our prosperity couldn’t begin without the troubles, if you mean boarders, and boarders mean servants. I shall be very glad to be afflicted with a cook for a while myself.”

“Yes; but we don’t know anything about these people, or whether they will be able to pay us. Did she talk as if they were well off?”

“She talked as if they were poor; poo’ she called it.”

“Yes, how queerly she pronounced,” said Mrs. Leighton. “Well, I ought to have told them that I required the first week in advance.”

“Mamma! If that’s the way you’re going to act!”

“Oh, of course, I couldn’t, after he wouldn’t let her bargain for the rooms. I didn’t like that.”

“I did. And you can see that they were perfect ladies; or at least one of them.” Alma laughed at herself, but her mother did not notice.

“Their being ladies won’t help if they’ve got no money. It’ll make it all the worse.”

“Very well, then; we have no money, either. We’re a match for them any day there. We can show them that two can play at that game.”

III.

Arnus Beaton’s studio looked at first glance like many other painters’ studios. A gray wall quadrangularly vaulted to a large north light; casts of feet, hands, faces hung to nails about; prints, sketches in oil and water-color stuck here and there lower down; a rickety table, with paint and palettes and bottles of varnish and siccative tossed comfortlessly on it; an easel, with a strip of some faded mediaeval silk trailing from it; a lay figure simpering in incomplete nakedness, with its head on one side, and a stocking on one leg, and a Japanese dress dropped before it; dusty rugs and skins kicking over the varnished floor; canvases faced to the mop-board; an open trunk overflowing with costumes: these features one might notice anywhere. But, besides, there was a bookcase with an unusual number of books in it, and there was an open colonial writing-desk, claw-footed, brass-handled, and scutcheoned, with foreign periodicals — French and English — littering its leaf, and some pages of manuscript scattered among them. Above all, there was a sculptor’s revolving stand, supporting a bust which Beaton was modelling, with an eye fixed as simultaneously as possible on the clay and on the head of the old man who sat on the platform beside it.

Few men have been able to get through the world with several gifts to advantage in all; and most men seem handicapped for the race if they have more than one. But they are apparently immensely interested as well as distracted by them. When Beaton was writing, he would have agreed, up to a certain point, with any one who said literature was his proper expression; but, then, when he was painting, up to a certain point, he would have maintained against the world that he was a colorist, and supremely a colorist. At the certain point in either art he was apt to break away in a frenzy of disgust and wreak himself upon some other. In these moods he sometimes designed elevations of buildings, very striking, very original, very chic, very everything but habitable. It was in this way that he had tried his hand on sculpture, which he had at first approached rather slightingly as a mere decorative accessory of architecture. But it had grown in his respect till he maintained that the accessory business ought to be all the other way: that temples should be raised to enshrine statues, not statues made to ornament temples; that was putting the cart before the horse with a vengeance. This was when he had carried a plastic study so far that the sculptors who saw it said that Beaton might have been an architect, but would certainly never be a sculptor. At the same time he did some hurried, nervous things that had a popular charm, and that sold in plaster reproductions, to the profit of another. Beaton justly despised the popular charm in these, as well as in the paintings he sold from time to time; he said it was flat burglary to have taken money for them, and he would have been living almost wholly upon the bounty of the old tombstone-cutter in Syracuse if it had not been for the syndicate letters which he supplied to Fulkerson for ten dollars a week.

They were very well done, but he hated doing them after the first two or three, and had to be punched up for them by Fulkerson, who did not cease to prize them, and who never failed to punch him up. Beaton being what he was, Fulkerson was his creditor as well as patron; and Fulkerson being what he was, had an enthusiastic patience with the elusive, facile, adaptable, unpractical nature of Beaton. He was very proud of his art-letters, as he called them; but then Fulkerson was proud of everything he secured for his syndicate. The fact that he had secured it gave it value; he felt as if he had written it himself.

One art trod upon another’s heels with Beaton. The day before he had rushed upon canvas the conception of a picture which he said to himself was glorious, and to others (at the table d’hote of Maroni) was not bad. He had worked at it in a fury till the light failed him, and he execrated the dying day. But he lit his lamp and transferred the process of his thinking from the canvas to the opening of the syndicate letter which he knew Fulkerson would be coming for in the morning. He remained talking so long after dinner in the same strain as he had painted and written in that he could not finish his letter that night. The next morning, while he was making his tea for breakfast, the postman brought him a letter from his father enclosing a little check, and begging him with tender, almost deferential, urgence to come as lightly upon him as possible, for just now his expenses were very heavy. It brought tears of shame into Beaton’s eyes — the fine, smouldering, floating eyes that many ladies admired, under the thick bang — and he said to himself that if he were half a man he would go home and go to work cutting gravestones in his father’s shop. But he would wait, at least, to finish his picture; and as a sop to his conscience, to stay its immediate ravening, he resolved to finish that syndicate letter first, and borrow enough money from Fulkerson to be able to send his father’s check back; or, if not that, then to return the sum of it partly in Fulkerson’s check. While he still teemed with both of these good intentions the old man from whom he was modelling his head of Judas came, and Beaton saw that he must get through with him before he finished either the picture or the letter; he would have to pay him for the time, anyway. He utilized the remorse with which he was tingling to give his Judas an expression which he found novel in the treatment of that character — a look of such touching, appealing self-abhorrence that Beaton’s artistic joy in it amounted to rapture; between the breathless moments when he worked in dead silence for an effect that was trying to escape him, he sang and whistled fragments of comic opera.

In one of the hushes there came a blow on the outside of the door that made Beaton jump, and swear with a modified profanity that merged itself in apostrophic prayer. He knew it must be Fulkerson, and after roaring “Come in!” he said to the model, “That’ll do this morning, Lindau.”

Fulkerson squared his feet in front of the bust and compared it by fleeting glances with the old man as he got stiffly up and suffered Beaton to help him on with his thin, shabby overcoat.

“Can you come to-morrow, Lindau?”

“No, not to-morrow, Mr. Peaton. I haf to zit for the young ladties.”

“Oh!” said Beaton. “Wetmore’s class? Is Miss Leighton doing you?”

“I don’t know their namess,” Lindau began, when Fulkerson said:

“Hope you haven’t forgotten mine, Mr. Lindau? I met you with Mr. March at
Maroni’s one night.” Fulkerson offered him a universally shakable hand.

“Oh yes! I am gladt to zee you again, Mr. Vulkerson. And Mr. Marge — he don’t zeem to gome any more?”

“Up to his eyes in work. Been moving on from Boston and getting settled, and starting in on our enterprise. Beaton here hasn’t got a very flattering likeness of you, hey? Well, good-morning,” he said, for Lindau appeared not to have heard him and was escaping with a bow through the door.

Beaton lit a cigarette which he pinched nervously between his lips before he spoke. “You’ve come for that letter, I suppose, Fulkerson? It isn’t done.”

Fulkerson turned from staring at the bust to which he had mounted. “What you fretting about that letter for? I don’t want your letter.”

Beaton stopped biting his cigarette and looked at him. “Don’t want my letter? Oh, very good!” he bristled up. He took his cigarette from his lips, and blew the smoke through his nostrils, and then looked at Fulkerson.

“No; I don’t want your letter; I want you.”

Beacon disdained to ask an explanation, but he internally lowered his crest, while he continued to look at Fulkerson without changing his defiant countenance. This suited Fulkerson well enough, and he went on with relish, “I’m going out of the syndicate business, old man, and I’m on a new thing.” He put his leg over the back of a chair and rested his foot on its seat, and, with one hand in his pocket, he laid the scheme of ‘Every Other Week’ before Beaton with the help of the other. The artist went about the room, meanwhile, with an effect of indifference which by no means offended Fulkerson. He took some water into his mouth from a tumbler, which he blew in a fine mist over the head of Judas before swathing it in a dirty cotton cloth; he washed his brushes and set his palette; he put up on his easel the picture he had blocked on the day before, and stared at it with a gloomy face; then he gathered the sheets of his unfinished letter together and slid them into a drawer of his writing-desk. By the time he had finished and turned again to Fulkerson, Fulkerson was saying: “I did think we could have the first number out by New-Year’s; but it will take longer than that — a month longer; but I’m not sorry, for the holidays kill everything; and by February, or the middle of February, people will get their breath again and begin to look round and ask what’s new. Then we’ll reply in the language of Shakespeare and Milton, ‘Every Other Week; and don’t you forget it.’” He took down his leg and asked, “Got a pipe of ‘baccy anywhere?”

Beaton nodded at a clay stem sticking out of a Japanese vase of bronze on his mantel. “There’s yours,” he said; and Fulkerson said, “Thanks,” and filled the pipe and sat down and began to smoke tranquilly.

Beaton saw that he would have to speak now. “And what do you want with me?”

“You? Oh yes,” Fulkerson humorously dramatized a return to himself from a pensive absence. “Want you for the art department.”

Beaton shook his head. “I’m not your man, Fulkerson,” he said, compassionately. “You want a more practical hand, one that’s in touch with what’s going. I’m getting further and further away from this century and its claptrap. I don’t believe in your enterprise; I don’t respect it, and I won’t have anything to do with it. It would — choke me, that kind of thing.”

“That’s all right,” said Fulkerson. He esteemed a man who was not going to let himself go cheap. “Or if it isn’t, we can make it. You and March will pull together first-rate. I don’t care how much ideal you put into the thing; the more the better. I can look after the other end of the schooner myself.”

“You don’t understand me,” said Beaton. “I’m not trying to get a rise out of you. I’m in earnest. What you want is some man who can have patience with mediocrity putting on the style of genius, and with genius turning mediocrity on his hands. I haven’t any luck with men; I don’t get on with them; I’m not popular.” Beaton recognized the fact with the satisfaction which it somehow always brings to human pride.

“So much the better!” Fulkerson was ready for him at this point. “I don’t want you to work the old-established racket the reputations. When I want them I’ll go to them with a pocketful of rocks — knock-down argument. But my idea is to deal with the volunteer material. Look at the way the periodicals are carried on now! Names! names! names! In a country that’s just boiling over with literary and artistic ability of every kind the new fellows have no chance. The editors all engage their material. I don’t believe there are fifty volunteer contributions printed in a year in all the New York magazines. It’s all wrong; it’s suicidal. ‘Every Other Week’ is going back to the good old anonymous system, the only fair system. It’s worked well in literature, and it will work well in art.”

“It won’t work well in art,” said Beaton. “There you have a totally different set of conditions. What you’ll get by inviting volunteer illustrations will be a lot of amateur trash. And how are you going to submit your literature for illustration? It can’t be done. At any rate, I won’t undertake to do it.”

“We’ll get up a School of Illustration,” said Fulkerson, with cynical security. “You can read the things and explain ‘em, and your pupils can make their sketches under your eye. They wouldn’t be much further out than most illustrations are if they never knew what they were illustrating. You might select from what comes in and make up a sort of pictorial variations to the literature without any particular reference to it. Well, I understand you to accept?”

“No, you don’t.”

“That is, to consent to help us with your advice and criticism. That’s all I want. It won’t commit you to anything; and you can be as anonymous as anybody.” At the door Fulkerson added: “By-the-way, the new man — the fellow that’s taken my old syndicate business — will want you to keep on; but I guess he’s going to try to beat you down on the price of the letters. He’s going in for retrenchment. I brought along a check for this one; I’m to pay for that.” He offered Beaton an envelope.

“I can’t take it, Fulkerson. The letter’s paid for already.” Fulkerson stepped forward and laid the envelope on the table among the tubes of paint.

“It isn’t the letter merely. I thought you wouldn’t object to a little advance on your ‘Every Other Week’ work till you kind of got started.”

Beaton remained inflexible. “It can’t be done, Fulkerson. Don’t I tell you I can’t sell myself out to a thing I don’t believe in? Can’t you understand that?”

“Oh yes; I can understand that first-rate. I don’t want to buy you; I want to borrow you. It’s all right. See? Come round when you can; I’d like to introduce you to old March. That’s going to be our address.” He put a card on the table beside the envelope, and Beaton allowed him to go without making him take the check back. He had remembered his father’s plea; that unnerved him, and he promised himself again to return his father’s poor little check and to work on that picture and give it to Fulkerson for the check he had left and for his back debts. He resolved to go to work on the picture at once; he had set his palette for it; but first he looked at Fulkerson’s check. It was for only fifty dollars, and the canny Scotch blood in Beaton rebelled; he could not let this picture go for any such money; he felt a little like a man whose generosity has been trifled with. The conflict of emotions broke him up, and he could not work.

IV

The day wasted away in Beaton’s hands; at half-past four o’clock he went out to tea at the house of a lady who was At Home that afternoon from four till seven. By this time Beaton was in possession of one of those other selves of which we each have several about us, and was again the laconic, staccato, rather worldlified young artist whose moments of a controlled utterance and a certain distinction of manner had commended him to Mrs. Horn’s fancy in the summer at St. Barnaby.

Mrs. Horn’s rooms were large, and they never seemed very full, though this perhaps was because people were always so quiet. The ladies, who outnumbered the men ten to one, as they always do at a New York tea, were dressed in sympathy with the low tone every one spoke in, and with the subdued light which gave a crepuscular uncertainty to the few objects, the dim pictures, the unexcited upholstery, of the rooms. One breathed free of bric-a-brac there, and the new-comer breathed softly as one does on going into church after service has begun. This might be a suggestion from the voiceless behavior of the man-servant who let you in, but it was also because Mrs. Horn’s At Home was a ceremony, a decorum, and not festival. At far greater houses there was more gayety, at richer houses there was more freedom; the suppression at Mrs. Horn’s was a personal, not a social, effect; it was an efflux of her character, demure, silentious, vague, but very correct.

Beaton easily found his way to her around the grouped skirts and among the detached figures, and received a pressure of welcome from the hand which she momentarily relaxed from the tea-pot. She sat behind a table put crosswise of a remote corner, and offered tea to people whom a niece of hers received provisionally or sped finally in the outer room. They did not usually take tea, and when they did they did not usually drink it; but Beaton was feverishly glad of his cup; he took rum and lemon in it, and stood talking at Mrs. Horn’s side till the next arrival should displace him: he talked in his French manner.

“I have been hoping to see you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you about the
Leightons. Did they really come?”

“I believe so. They are in town — yes. I haven’t seen them.”

“Then you don’t know how they’re getting on — that pretty creature, with her cleverness, and poor Mrs. Leighton? I was afraid they were venturing on a rash experiment. Do you know where they are?”

“In West Eleventh Street somewhere. Miss Leighton is in Mr. Wetmore’s class.”

“I must look them up. Do you know their number?”

“Not at the moment. I can find out.”

“Do,” said Mrs. Horn. “What courage they must have, to plunge into New York as they’ve done! I really didn’t think they would. I wonder if they’ve succeeded in getting anybody into their house yet?”

“I don’t know,” said Beaton.

“I discouraged their coming all I could,” she sighed, “and I suppose you did, too. But it’s quite useless trying to make people in a place like St. Barnaby understand how it is in town.”

“Yes,” said Beaton. He stirred his tea, while inwardly he tried to believe that he had really discouraged the Leightons from coming to New York. Perhaps the vexation of his failure made him call Mrs. Horn in his heart a fraud.

“Yes,” she went on, “it is very, very hard. And when they won’t understand, and rush on their doom, you feel that they are going to hold you respons—”

Mrs. Horn’s eyes wandered from Beaton; her voice faltered in the faded interest of her remark, and then rose with renewed vigor in greeting a lady who came up and stretched her glove across the tea-cups.

Beaton got himself away and out of the house with a much briefer adieu to the niece than he had meant to make. The patronizing compassion of Mrs. Horn for the Leightons filled him with indignation toward her, toward himself. There was no reason why he should not have ignored them as he had done; but there was a feeling. It was his nature to be careless, and he had been spoiled into recklessness; he neglected everybody, and only remembered them when it suited his whim or his convenience; but he fiercely resented the inattentions of others toward himself. He had no scruple about breaking an engagement or failing to keep an appointment; he made promises without thinking of their fulfilment, and not because he was a faithless person, but because he was imaginative, and expected at the time to do what he said, but was fickle, and so did not. As most of his shortcomings were of a society sort, no great harm was done to anybody else. He had contracted somewhat the circle of his acquaintance by what some people called his rudeness, but most people treated it as his oddity, and were patient with it. One lady said she valued his coming when he said he would come because it had the charm of the unexpected. “Only it shows that it isn’t always the unexpected that happens,” she explained.

It did not occur to him that his behavior was immoral; he did not realize that it was creating a reputation if not a character for him. While we are still young we do not realize that our actions have this effect. It seems to us that people will judge us from what we think and feel. Later we find out that this is impossible; perhaps we find it out too late; some of us never find it out at all.

In spite of his shame about the Leightons, Beaton had no present intention of looking them up or sending Mrs. Horn their address. As a matter of fact, he never did send it; but he happened to meet Mr. Wetmore and his wife at the restaurant where he dined, and he got it of the painter for himself. He did not ask him how Miss Leighton was getting on; but Wetmore launched out, with Alma for a tacit text, on the futility of women generally going in for art. “Even when they have talent they’ve got too much against them. Where a girl doesn’t seem very strong, like Miss Leighton, no amount of chic is going to help.”

His wife disputed him on behalf of her sex, as women always do.

“No, Dolly,” he persisted; “she’d better be home milking the cows and leading the horse to water.”

“Do you think she’d better be up till two in the morning at balls and going all day to receptions and luncheons?”

“Oh, guess it isn’t a question of that, even if she weren’t drawing. You knew them at home,” he said to Beaton.

“Yes.”

“I remember. Her mother said you suggested me. Well, the girl has some notion of it; there’s no doubt about that. But — she’s a woman. The trouble with these talented girls is that they’re all woman. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be much chance for the men, Beaton. But we’ve got Providence on our own side from the start. I’m able to watch all their inspirations with perfect composure. I know just how soon it’s going to end in nervous breakdown. Somebody ought to marry them all and put them out of their misery.”

“And what will you do with your students who are married already?” his wife said. She felt that she had let him go on long enough.

“Oh, they ought to get divorced.”

“You ought to be ashamed to take their money if that’s what you think of them.”

“My dear, I have a wife to support.”

Beaton intervened with a question. “Do you mean that Miss Leighton isn’t standing it very well?”

“How do I know? She isn’t the kind that bends; she’s the kind that breaks.”

After a little silence Mrs. Wetmore asked, “Won’t you come home with us,
Mr. Beaton?”

“Thank you; no. I have an engagement.”

“I don’t see why that should prevent you,” said Wetmore. “But you always were a punctilious cuss. Well!”

Beaton lingered over his cigar; but no one else whom he knew came in, and he yielded to the threefold impulse of conscience, of curiosity, of inclination, in going to call at the Leightons’. He asked for the ladies, and the maid showed him into the parlor, where he found Mrs. Leighton and Miss Woodburn.

The widow met him with a welcome neatly marked by resentment; she meant him to feel that his not coming sooner had been noticed. Miss Woodburn bubbled and gurgled on, and did what she could to mitigate his punishment, but she did not feel authorized to stay it, till Mrs. Leighton, by studied avoidance of her daughter’s name, obliged Beaton to ask for her. Then Miss Woodburn caught up her work, and said, “Ah’ll go and tell her, Mrs. Leighton.” At the top of the stairs she found Alma, and Alma tried to make it seem as if she had not been standing there. “Mah goodness, chald! there’s the handsomest young man asking for you down there you evah saw. Alh told you’ mothah Ah would come up fo’ you.”

“What — who is it?”

“Don’t you know? But bo’ could you? He’s got the most beautiful eyes, and he wea’s his hai’ in a bang, and he talks English like it was something else, and his name’s Mr. Beaton.”

“Did he — ask for me?” said Alma, with a dreamy tone. She put her hand on the stairs rail, and a little shiver ran over her.

“Didn’t I tell you? Of coase he did! And you ought to go raght down if you want to save the poo’ fellah’s lahfe; you’ mothah’s just freezin’ him to death.”

V.

“She is?” cried Alma. “Tchk!” She flew downstairs, and flitted swiftly into the room, and fluttered up to Beaton, and gave him a crushing hand-shake.

“How very kind of you to come and see us, Mr. Beaton! When did you come to New York? Don’t you find it warm here? We’ve only just lighted the furnace, but with this mild weather it seems too early. Mamma does keep it so hot!” She rushed about opening doors and shutting registers, and then came back and sat facing him from the sofa with a mask of radiant cordiality. “How have you been since we saw you?”

“Very well,” said Beaton. “I hope you’re well, Miss Leighton?”

“Oh, perfectly! I think New York agrees with us both wonderfully. I never knew such air. And to think of our not having snow yet! I should think everybody would want to come here! Why don’t you come, Mr. Beaton?”

Beaton lifted his eyes and looked at her. “I — I live in New York,” he faltered.

“In New York City!” she exclaimed.

“Surely, Alma,” said her mother, “you remember Mr. Beaton’s telling us he lived in New York.”

“But I thought you came from Rochester; or was it Syracuse? I always get those places mixed up.”

“Probably I told you my father lived at Syracuse. I’ve been in New York ever since I came home from Paris,” said Beaton, with the confusion of a man who feels himself played upon by a woman.

“From Paris!” Alma echoed, leaning forward, with her smiling mask tight on. “Wasn’t it Munich where you studied?”

“I was at Munich, too. I met Wetmore there.”

“Oh, do you know Mr. Wetmore?”

“Why, Alma,” her mother interposed again, “it was Mr. Beaton who told you of Mr. Wetmore.”

“Was it? Why, yes, to be sure. It was Mrs. Horn who suggested Mr. Ilcomb.
I remember now. I can’t thank you enough for having sent me to Mr.
Wetmore, Mr. Beaton. Isn’t he delightful? Oh yes, I’m a perfect
Wetmorian, I can assure you. The whole class is the same way.”

“I just met him and Mrs. Wetmore at dinner,” said Beaton, attempting the recovery of something that he had lost through the girl’s shining ease and steely sprightliness. She seemed to him so smooth and hard, with a repellent elasticity from which he was flung off. “I hope you’re not working too hard, Miss Leighton?”

“Oh no! I enjoy every minute of it, and grow stronger on it. Do I look very much wasted away?” She looked him full in the face, brilliantly smiling, and intentionally beautiful.

“No,” he said, with a slow sadness; “I never saw you looking better.”

“Poor Mr. Beaton!” she said, in recognition of his doleful tune. “It seems to be quite a blow.”

“Oh no—”

“I remember all the good advice you used to give me about not working too hard, and probably it’s that that’s saved my life — that and the house-hunting. Has mamma told you of our adventures in getting settled?

“Some time we must. It was such fun! And didn’t you think we were fortunate to get such a pretty house? You must see both our parlors.” She jumped up, and her mother followed her with a bewildered look as she ran into the back parlor and flashed up the gas.

“Come in here, Mr. Beaton. I want to show you the great feature of the house.” She opened the low windows that gave upon a glazed veranda stretching across the end of the room. “Just think of this in New York! You can’t see it very well at night, but when the southern sun pours in here all the afternoon—”

“Yes, I can imagine it,” he said. He glanced up at the bird-cage hanging from the roof. “I suppose Gypsy enjoys it.”

“You remember Gypsy?” she said; and she made a cooing, kissing little noise up at the bird, who responded drowsily. “Poor old Gypsum! Well, he sha’n’t be disturbed. Yes, it’s Gyp’s delight, and Colonel Woodburn likes to write here in the morning. Think of us having a real live author in the house! And Miss Woodburn: I’m so glad you’ve seen her! They’re Southern people.”

“Yes, that was obvious in her case.”

“From her accent? Isn’t it fascinating? I didn’t believe I could ever endure Southerners, but we’re like one family with the Woodburns. I should think you’d want to paint Miss Woodburn. Don’t you think her coloring is delicious? And such a quaint kind of eighteenth-century type of beauty! But she’s perfectly lovely every way, and everything she says is so funny. The Southerners seem to be such great talkers; better than we are, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Beaton, in pensive discouragement. He was sensible of being manipulated, operated, but he was helpless to escape from the performer or to fathom her motives. His pensiveness passed into gloom, and was degenerating into sulky resentment when he went away, after several failures to get back to the old ground he had held in relation to Alma. He retrieved something of it with Mrs. Leighton; but Alma glittered upon him to the last with a keen impenetrable candor, a child-like singleness of glance, covering unfathomable reserve.

“Well, Alma,” said her mother, when the door had closed upon him.

“Well, mother.” Then, after a moment, she said, with a rush: “Did you think I was going to let him suppose we were piqued at his not coming? Did you suppose I was going to let him patronize us, or think that we were in the least dependent on his favor or friendship?”

Her mother did not attempt to answer her. She merely said, “I shouldn’t think he would come any more.”

“Well, we have got on so far without him; perhaps we can live through the rest of the winter.”

“I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He was quite stupefied. I could see that he didn’t know what to make of you.”

“He’s not required to make anything of me,” said Alma.

“Do you think he really believed you had forgotten all those things?”

“Impossible to say, mamma.”

“Well, I don’t think it was quite right, Alma.”

“I’ll leave him to you the next time. Miss Woodburn said you were freezing him to death when I came down.”

“That was quite different. But, there won’t be any next time, I’m afraid,” sighed Mrs. Leighton.

Beaton went home feeling sure there would not. He tried to read when he got to his room; but Alma’s looks, tones, gestures, whirred through and through the woof of the story like shuttles; he could not keep them out, and he fell asleep at last, not because he forgot them, but because he forgave them. He was able to say to himself that he had been justly cut off from kindness which he knew how to value in losing it. He did not expect ever to right himself in Alma’s esteem, but he hoped some day to let her know that he had understood. It seemed to him that it would be a good thing if she should find it out after his death. He imagined her being touched by it under those circumstances.

VI.

In the morning it seemed to Beaton that he had done himself injustice. When he uncovered his Judas and looked at it, he could not believe that the man who was capable of such work deserved the punishment Miss Leighton had inflicted upon him. He still forgave her, but in the presence of a thing like that he could not help respecting himself; he believed that if she could see it she would be sorry that she had cut herself off from his acquaintance. He carried this strain of conviction all through his syndicate letter, which he now took out of his desk and finished, with an increasing security of his opinions and a mounting severity in his judgments. He retaliated upon the general condition of art among us the pangs of wounded vanity, which Alma had made him feel, and he folded up his manuscript and put it in his pocket, almost healed of his humiliation. He had been able to escape from its sting so entirely while he was writing that the notion of making his life more and more literary commended itself to him. As it was now evident that the future was to be one of renunciation, of self-forgetting, an oblivion tinged with bitterness, he formlessly reasoned in favor of reconsidering his resolution against Fulkerson’s offer. One must call it reasoning, but it was rather that swift internal dramatization which constantly goes on in persons of excitable sensibilities, and which now seemed to sweep Beaton physically along toward the ‘Every Other Week’ office, and carried his mind with lightning celerity on to a time when he should have given that journal such quality and authority in matters of art as had never been enjoyed by any in America before. With the prosperity which he made attend his work he changed the character of the enterprise, and with Fulkerson’s enthusiastic support he gave the public an art journal of as high grade as ‘Les Lettres et les Arts’, and very much that sort of thing. All this involved now the unavailing regret of Alma Leighton, and now his reconciliation with her: they were married in Grace Church, because Beaton had once seen a marriage there, and had intended to paint a picture of it some time.

Nothing in these fervid fantasies prevented his responding with due dryness to Fulkerson’s cheery “Hello, old man!” when he found himself in the building fitted up for the ‘Every Other Week’ office. Fulkerson’s room was back of the smaller one occupied by the bookkeeper; they had been respectively the reception-room and dining-room of the little place in its dwelling-house days, and they had been simply and tastefully treated in their transformation into business purposes. The narrow old trim of the doors and windows had been kept, and the quaintly ugly marble mantels. The architect had said, Better let them stay they expressed epoch, if not character.

“Well, have you come round to go to work? Just hang up your coat on the floor anywhere,” Fulkerson went on.

“I’ve come to bring you that letter,” said Beaton, all the more haughtily because he found that Fulkerson was not alone when he welcomed him in these free and easy terms. There was a quiet-looking man, rather stout, and a little above the middle height, with a full, close-cropped iron-gray beard, seated beyond the table where Fulkerson tilted himself back, with his knees set against it; and leaning against the mantel there was a young man with a singularly gentle face, in which the look of goodness qualified and transfigured a certain simplicity. His large blue eyes were somewhat prominent; and his rather narrow face was drawn forward in a nose a little too long perhaps, if it had not been for the full chin deeply cut below the lip, and jutting firmly forward.

“Introduce you to Mr. March, our editor, Mr. Beaton,” Fulkerson said, rolling his head in the direction of the elder man; and then nodding it toward the younger, he said, “Mr. Dryfoos, Mr. Beaton.” Beaton shook hands with March, and then with Mr. Dryfoos, and Fulkerson went on, gayly: “We were just talking of you, Beaton — well, you know the old saying. Mr. March, as I told you, is our editor, and Mr. Dryfoos has charge of the publishing department — he’s the counting-room incarnate, the source of power, the fountain of corruption, the element that prevents journalism being the high and holy thing that it would be if there were no money in it.” Mr. Dryfoos turned his large, mild eyes upon Beaton, and laughed with the uneasy concession which people make to a character when they do not quite approve of the character’s language. “What Mr. March and I are trying to do is to carry on this thing so that there won’t be any money in it — or very little; and we’re planning to give the public a better article for the price than it’s ever had before. Now here’s a dummy we’ve had made up for ‘Every Other Week’, and as we’ve decided to adopt it, we would naturally like your opinion of it, so’s to know what opinion to have of you.” He reached forward and pushed toward Beaton a volume a little above the size of the ordinary duodecimo book; its ivory-white pebbled paper cover was prettily illustrated with a water-colored design irregularly washed over the greater part of its surface: quite across the page at top, and narrowing from right to left as it descended. In the triangular space left blank the title of the periodical and the publisher’s imprint were tastefully lettered so as to be partly covered by the background of color.

“It’s like some of those Tartarin books of Daudet’s,” said Beacon, looking at it with more interest than he suffered to be seen. “But it’s a book, not a magazine.” He opened its pages of thick, mellow white paper, with uncut leaves, the first few pages experimentally printed in the type intended to be used, and illustrated with some sketches drawn into and over the text, for the sake of the effect.

“A Daniel — a Daniel come to judgment! Sit down, Dan’el, and take it easy.” Fulkerson pushed a chair toward Beaton, who dropped into it. “You’re right, Dan’el; it’s a book, to all practical intents and purposes. And what we propose to do with the American public is to give it twenty-four books like this a year — a complete library — for the absurd sum of six dollars. We don’t intend to sell ’em — it’s no name for the transaction — but to give ‘em. And what we want to get out of you — beg, borrow, buy, or steal from you is an opinion whether we shall make the American public this princely present in paper covers like this, or in some sort of flexible boards, so they can set them on the shelf and say no more about it. Now, Dan’el, come to judgment, as our respected friend Shylock remarked.”

Beacon had got done looking at the dummy, and he dropped it on the table before Fulkerson, who pushed it away, apparently to free himself from partiality. “I don’t know anything about the business side, and I can’t tell about the effect of either style on the sales; but you’ll spoil the whole character of the cover if you use anything thicker than that thickish paper.”

“All right; very good; first-rate. The ayes have it. Paper it is. I don’t mind telling you that we had decided for that paper before you came in. Mr. March wanted it, because he felt in his bones just the way you do about it, and Mr. Dryfoos wanted it, because he’s the counting-room incarnate, and it’s cheaper; and I wanted it, because I always like to go with the majority. Now what do you think of that little design itself?”

“The sketch?” Beaton pulled the book toward him again and looked at it again. “Rather decorative. Drawing’s not remarkable. Graceful; rather nice.” He pushed the book away again, and Fulkerson pulled it to his aide of the table.

“Well, that’s a piece of that amateur trash you despise so much. I went to a painter I know-by-the-way, he was guilty of suggesting you for this thing, but I told him I was ahead of him — and I got him to submit my idea to one of his class, and that’s the result. Well, now, there ain’t anything in this world that sells a book like a pretty cover, and we’re going to have a pretty cover for ‘Every Other Week’ every time. We’ve cut loose from the old traditional quarto literary newspaper size, and we’ve cut loose from the old two-column big page magazine size; we’re going to have a duodecimo page, clear black print, and paper that’ll make your mouth water; and we’re going to have a fresh illustration for the cover of each number, and we ain’t agoing to give the public any rest at all. Sometimes we’re going to have a delicate little landscape like this, and sometimes we’re going to have an indelicate little figure, or as much so as the law will allow.”

The young man leaning against the mantelpiece blushed a sort of protest.

March smiled and said, dryly, “Those are the numbers that Mr. Fulkerson is going to edit himself.”

“Exactly. And Mr. Beaton, here, is going to supply the floating females, gracefully airing themselves against a sunset or something of that kind.” Beaton frowned in embarrassment, while Fulkerson went on philosophically; “It’s astonishing how you fellows can keep it up at this stage of the proceedings; you can paint things that your harshest critic would be ashamed to describe accurately; you’re as free as the theatre. But that’s neither here nor there. What I’m after is the fact that we’re going to have variety in our title-pages, and we are going to have novelty in the illustrations of the body of the book. March, here, if he had his own way, wouldn’t have any illustrations at all.”

“Not because I don’t like them, Mr. Beacon,” March interposed, “but because I like them too much. I find that I look at the pictures in an illustrated article, but I don’t read the article very much, and I fancy that’s the case with most other people. You’ve got to doing them so prettily that you take our eyes off the literature, if you don’t take our minds off.”

“Like the society beauties on the stage: people go in for the beauty so much that they don’t know what the play is. But the box-office gets there all the same, and that’s what Mr. Dryfoos wants.” Fulkerson looked up gayly at Mr. Dryfoos, who smiled deprecatingly.

“It was different,” March went on, “when the illustrations used to be bad. Then the text had some chance.”

“Old legitimate drama days, when ugliness and genius combined to storm the galleries,” said Fulkerson.

“We can still make them bad enough,” said Beaton, ignoring Fulkerson in his remark to March.

Fulkerson took the reply upon himself. “Well, you needn’t make ’em so bad as the old-style cuts; but you can make them unobtrusive, modestly retiring. We’ve got hold of a process something like that those French fellows gave Daudet thirty-five thousand dollars to write a novel to use with; kind of thing that begins at one side; or one corner, and spreads in a sort of dim religious style over the print till you can’t tell which is which. Then we’ve got a notion that where the pictures don’t behave quite so sociably, they can be dropped into the text, like a little casual remark, don’t you know, or a comment that has some connection, or maybe none at all, with what’s going on in the story. Something like this.” Fulkerson took away one knee from the table long enough to open the drawer, and pull from it a book that he shoved toward Beacon. “That’s a Spanish book I happened to see at Brentano’s, and I froze to it on account of the pictures. I guess they’re pretty good.”

“Do you expect to get such drawings in this country?” asked Beaton, after a glance at the book. “Such character — such drama? You won’t.”

“Well, I’m not so sure,” said Fulkerson, “come to get our amateurs warmed up to the work. But what I want is to get the physical effect, so to speak — get that sized picture into our page, and set the fashion of it. I shouldn’t care if the illustration was sometimes confined to an initial letter and a tail-piece.”

“Couldn’t be done here. We haven’t the touch. We’re good in some things, but this isn’t in our way,” said Beaton, stubbornly. “I can’t think of a man who could do it; that is, among those that would.”

“Well, think of some woman, then,” said Fulkerson, easily. “I’ve got a notion that the women could help us out on this thing, come to get ’em interested. There ain’t anything so popular as female fiction; why not try female art?”

“The females themselves have been supposed to have been trying it for a good while,” March suggested; and Mr. Dryfoos laughed nervously; Beaton remained solemnly silent.

“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson assented. “But I don’t mean that kind exactly. What we want to do is to work the ‘ewig Weibliche’ in this concern. We want to make a magazine that will go for the women’s fancy every time. I don’t mean with recipes for cooking and fashions and personal gossip about authors and society, but real high-tone literature that will show women triumphing in all the stories, or else suffering tremendously. We’ve got to recognize that women form three-fourths of the reading public in this country, and go for their tastes and their sensibilities and their sex-piety along the whole line. They do like to think that women can do things better than men; and if we can let it leak out and get around in the papers that the managers of ‘Every Other Week’ couldn’t stir a peg in the line of the illustrations they wanted till they got a lot of God-gifted girls to help them, it ‘ll make the fortune of the thing. See?”

He looked sunnily round at the other men, and March said: “You ought to be in charge of a Siamese white elephant, Fulkerson. It’s a disgrace to be connected with you.”

“It seems to me,” said Beaton, “that you’d better get a God-gifted girl for your art editor.”

Fulkerson leaned alertly forward, and touched him on the shoulder, with a compassionate smile. “My dear boy, they haven’t got the genius of organization. It takes a very masculine man for that — a man who combines the most subtle and refined sympathies with the most forceful purposes and the most ferruginous will-power. Which his name is Angus Beaton, and here he sets!”

The others laughed with Fulkerson at his gross burlesque of flattery, and Beaton frowned sheepishly. “I suppose you understand this man’s style,” he growled toward March.

“He does, my son,” said Fulkerson. “He knows that I cannot tell a lie.”
He pulled out his watch, and then got suddenly upon his feet.

“It’s quarter of twelve, and I’ve got an appointment.” Beaton rose too, and Fulkerson put the two books in his lax hands. “Take these along, Michelangelo Da Vinci, my friend, and put your multitudinous mind on them for about an hour, and let us hear from you to-morrow. We hang upon your decision.”

“There’s no deciding to be done,” said Beaton. “You can’t combine the two styles. They’d kill each other.”

“A Dan’el, a Dan’el come to judgment! I knew you could help us out! Take ’em along, and tell us which will go the furthest with the ‘ewig Weibliche.’ Dryfoos, I want a word with you.” He led the way into the front room, flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went.

VII.

March and Beaton remained alone together for a moment, and March said: “I hope you will think it worth while to take hold with us, Mr. Beaton. Mr. Fulkerson puts it in his own way, of course; but we really want to make a nice thing of the magazine.” He had that timidity of the elder in the presence of the younger man which the younger, preoccupied with his own timidity in the presence of the elder, cannot imagine. Besides, March was aware of the gulf that divided him as a literary man from Beaton as an artist, and he only ventured to feel his way toward sympathy with him. “We want to make it good; we want to make it high. Fulkerson is right about aiming to please the women, but of course he caricatures the way of going about it.”

For answer, Beaton flung out, “I can’t go in for a thing I don’t understand the plan of.”

March took it for granted that he had wounded some exposed sensibility of Beaton’s. He continued still more deferentially: “Mr. Fulkerson’s notion — I must say the notion is his, evolved from his syndicate experience — is that we shall do best in fiction to confine ourselves to short stories, and make each number complete in itself. He found that the most successful things he could furnish his newspapers were short stories; we Americans are supposed to excel in writing them; and most people begin with them in fiction; and it’s Mr. Fulkerson’s idea to work unknown talent, as he says, and so he thinks he can not only get them easily, but can gradually form a school of short-story writers. I can’t say I follow him altogether, but I respect his experience. We shall not despise translations of short stories, but otherwise the matter will all be original, and, of course, it won’t all be short stories. We shall use sketches of travel, and essays, and little dramatic studies, and bits of biography and history; but all very light, and always short enough to be completed in a single number. Mr. Fulkerson believes in pictures, and most of the things would be capable of illustration.”

“I see,” said Beaton.

“I don’t know but this is the whole affair,” said March, beginning to stiffen a little at the young man’s reticence.

“I understand. Thank you for taking the trouble to explain.
Good-morning.” Beaton bowed himself off, without offering to shake hands.

Fulkerson came in after a while from the outer office, and Mr. Dryfoos followed him. “Well, what do you think of our art editor?”

“Is he our art editor?” asked March. “I wasn’t quite certain when he left.”

“Did he take the books?”

“Yes, he took the books.”

“I guess he’s all right, then.” Fulkerson added, in concession to the umbrage he detected in March.

“Beaton has his times of being the greatest ass in the solar system, but he usually takes it out in personal conduct. When it comes to work, he’s a regular horse.”

“He appears to have compromised for the present by being a perfect mule,” said March.

“Well, he’s in a transition state,” Fulkerson allowed. “He’s the man for us. He really understands what we want. You’ll see; he’ll catch on. That lurid glare of his will wear off in the course of time. He’s really a good fellow when you take him off his guard; and he’s full of ideas. He’s spread out over a good deal of ground at present, and so he’s pretty thin; but come to gather him up into a lump, there’s a good deal of substance to him. Yes, there is. He’s a first-rate critic, and he’s a nice fellow with the other artists. They laugh at his universality, but they all like him. He’s the best kind of a teacher when he condescends to it; and he’s just the man to deal with our volunteer work. Yes, sir, he’s a prize. Well, I must go now.”

Fulkerson went out of the street door, and then came quickly back. “By-the-bye, March, I saw that old dynamiter of yours round at Beaton’s room yesterday.”

“What old dynamiter of mine?”

“That old one-handed Dutchman — friend of your youth — the one we saw at
Maroni’s—”

“Oh-Lindau!” said March, with a vague pang of self reproach for having thought of Lindau so little after the first flood of his tender feeling toward him was past.

“Yes, our versatile friend was modelling him as Judas Iscariot. Lindau makes a first-rate Judas, and Beaton has got a big thing in that head if he works the religious people right. But what I was thinking of was this — it struck me just as I was going out of the door: Didn’t you tell me Lindau knew forty or fifty, different languages?”

“Four or five, yes.”

“Well, we won’t quarrel about the number. The question is, Why not work him in the field of foreign literature? You can’t go over all their reviews and magazines, and he could do the smelling for you, if you could trust his nose. Would he know a good thing?”

“I think he would,” said March, on whom the scope of Fulkerson’s suggestion gradually opened. “He used to have good taste, and he must know the ground. Why, it’s a capital idea, Fulkerson! Lindau wrote very fair English, and he could translate, with a little revision.”

“And he would probably work cheap. Well, hadn’t you better see him about it? I guess it ‘ll be quite a windfall for him.”

“Yes, it will. I’ll look him up. Thank you for the suggestion,
Fulkerson.”

“Oh, don’t mention it! I don’t mind doing ‘Every Other Week’ a good turn now and then when it comes in my way.” Fulkerson went out again, and this time March was finally left with Mr. Dryfoos.

“Mrs. March was very sorry not to be at home when your sisters called the other day. She wished me to ask if they had any afternoon in particular. There was none on your mother’s card.”

“No, sir,” said the young man, with a flush of embarrassment that seemed habitual with him. “She has no day. She’s at home almost every day. She hardly ever goes out.”

“Might we come some evening?” March asked. “We should be very glad to do that, if she would excuse the informality. Then I could come with Mrs. March.”

“Mother isn’t very formal,” said the young man. “She would be very glad to see you.”

“Then we’ll come some night this week, if you will let us. When do you expect your father back?”

“Not much before Christmas. He’s trying to settle up some things at
Moffitt.”

“And what do you think of our art editor?” asked March, with a smile, for the change of subject.

“Oh, I don’t know much about such things,” said the young man, with another of his embarrassed flushes. “Mr. Fulkerson seems to feel sure that he is the one for us.”

“Mr. Fulkerson seemed to think that I was the one for you, too,” said March; and he laughed. “That’s what makes me doubt his infallibility. But he couldn’t do worse with Mr. Beaton.”

Mr. Dryfoos reddened and looked down, as if unable or unwilling to cope with the difficulty of making a polite protest against March’s self-depreciation. He said, after a moment: “It’s new business to all of us except Mr. Fulkerson. But I think it will succeed. I think we can do some good in it.”

March asked rather absently, “Some good?” Then he added: “Oh yes; I think we can. What do you mean by good? Improve the public taste? Elevate the standard of literature? Give young authors and artists a chance?”

This was the only good that had ever been in March’s mind, except the good that was to come in a material way from his success, to himself and to his family.

“I don’t know,” said the young man; and he looked down in a shamefaced fashion. He lifted his head and looked into March’s face. “I suppose I was thinking that some time we might help along. If we were to have those sketches of yours about life in every part of New York—”

March’s authorial vanity was tickled. “Fulkerson has been talking to you about them? He seemed to think they would be a card. He believes that there’s no subject so fascinating to the general average of people throughout the country as life in New York City; and he liked my notion of doing these things.” March hoped that Dryfoos would answer that Fulkerson was perfectly enthusiastic about his notion; but he did not need this stimulus, and, at any rate, he went on without it. “The fact is, it’s something that struck my fancy the moment I came here; I found myself intensely interested in the place, and I began to make notes, consciously and unconsciously, at once. Yes, I believe I can get something quite attractive out of it. I don’t in the least know what it will be yet, except that it will be very desultory; and I couldn’t at all say when I can get at it. If we postpone the first number till February I might get a little paper into that. Yes, I think it might be a good thing for us,” March said, with modest self-appreciation.

“If you can make the comfortable people understand how the uncomfortable people live, it will be a very good thing, Mr. March. Sometimes it seems to me that the only trouble is that we don’t know one another well enough; and that the first thing is to do this.” The young fellow spoke with the seriousness in which the beauty of his face resided. Whenever he laughed his face looked weak, even silly. It seemed to be a sense of this that made him hang his head or turn it away at such times.

“That’s true,” said March, from the surface only. “And then, those phases of low life are immensely picturesque. Of course, we must try to get the contrasts of luxury for the sake of the full effect. That won’t be so easy. You can’t penetrate to the dinner-party of a millionaire under the wing of a detective as you could to a carouse in Mulberry Street, or to his children’s nursery with a philanthropist as you can to a street-boy’s lodging-house.” March laughed, and again the young man turned his head away. “Still, something can be done in that way by tact and patience.”

VII.

That evening March went with his wife to return the call of the Dryfoos ladies. On their way up-town in the Elevated he told her of his talk with young Dryfoos. “I confess I was a little ashamed before him afterward for having looked at the matter so entirely from the aesthetic point of view. But of course, you know, if I went to work at those things with an ethical intention explicitly in mind, I should spoil them.”

“Of course,” said his wife. She had always heard him say something of this kind about such things.

He went on: “But I suppose that’s just the point that such a nature as young Dryfoos’s can’t get hold of, or keep hold of. We’re a queer lot, down there, Isabel — perfect menagerie. If it hadn’t been that Fulkerson got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should say he was the oddest stick among us. But when I think of myself and my own crankiness for the literary department; and young Dryfoos, who ought really to be in the pulpit, or a monastery, or something, for publisher; and that young Beaton, who probably hasn’t a moral fibre in his composition, for the art man, I don’t know but we could give Fulkerson odds and still beat him in oddity.”

His wife heaved a deep sigh of apprehension, of renunciation, of monition. “Well, I’m glad you can feel so light about it, Basil.”

“Light? I feel gay! With Fulkerson at the helm, I tell you the rocks and the lee shore had better keep out of the way.” He laughed with pleasure in his metaphor. “Just when you think Fulkerson has taken leave of his senses he says or does something that shows he is on the most intimate and inalienable terms with them all the time. You know how I’ve been worrying over those foreign periodicals, and trying to get some translations from them for the first number? Well, Fulkerson has brought his centipedal mind to bear on the subject, and he’s suggested that old German friend of mine I was telling you of — the one I met in the restaurant — the friend of my youth.”

“Do you think he could do it?” asked Mrs. March, sceptically.

“He’s a perfect Babel of strange tongues; and he’s the very man for the work, and I was ashamed I hadn’t thought of him myself, for I suspect he needs the work.”

“Well, be careful how you get mixed up with him, then, Basil,” said his wife, who had the natural misgiving concerning the friends of her husband’s youth that all wives have. “You know the Germans are so unscrupulously dependent. You don’t know anything about him now.”

“I’m not afraid of Lindau,” said March. “He was the best and kindest man I ever saw, the most high-minded, the most generous. He lost a hand in the war that helped to save us and keep us possible, and that stump of his is character enough for me.”

“Oh, you don’t think I could have meant anything against him!” said Mrs. March, with the tender fervor that every woman who lived in the time of the war must feel for those who suffered in it. “All that I meant was that I hoped you would not get mixed up with him too much. You’re so apt to be carried away by your impulses.”

“They didn’t carry me very far away in the direction of poor old Lindau, I’m ashamed to think,” said March. “I meant all sorts of fine things by him after I met him; and then I forgot him, and I had to be reminded of him by Fulkerson.”

She did not answer him, and he fell into a remorseful reverie, in which he rehabilitated Lindau anew, and provided handsomely for his old age. He got him buried with military honors, and had a shaft raised over him, with a medallion likeness by Beaton and an epitaph by himself, by the time they reached Forty-second Street; there was no time to write Lindau’s life, however briefly, before the train stopped.

They had to walk up four blocks and then half a block across before they came to the indistinctive brownstone house where the Dryfooses lived. It was larger than some in the same block, but the next neighborhood of a huge apartment-house dwarfed it again. March thought he recognized the very flat in which he had disciplined the surly janitor, but he did not tell his wife; he made her notice the transition character of the street, which had been mostly built up in apartment-houses, with here and there a single dwelling dropped far down beneath and beside them, to that jag-toothed effect on the sky-line so often observable in such New York streets. “I don’t know exactly what the old gentleman bought here for,” he said, as they waited on the steps after ringing, “unless he expects to turn it into flats by-and-by. Otherwise, I don’t believe he’ll get his money back.”

An Irish serving-man, with a certain surprise that delayed him, said the ladies were at home, and let the Marches in, and then carried their cards up-stairs. The drawing-room, where he said they could sit down while he went on this errand, was delicately decorated in white and gold, and furnished with a sort of extravagant good taste; there was nothing to object to in the satin furniture, the pale, soft, rich carpet, the pictures, and the bronze and china bric-a-brac, except that their costliness was too evident; everything in the room meant money too plainly, and too much of it. The Marches recognized this in the hoarse whispers which people cannot get their voices above when they try to talk away the interval of waiting in such circumstances; they conjectured from what they had heard of the Dryfooses that this tasteful luxury in no wise expressed their civilization. “Though when you come to that,” said March, “I don’t know that Mrs. Green’s gimcrackery expresses ours.”

“Well, Basil, I didn’t take the gimcrackery. That was your—”

The rustle of skirts on the stairs without arrested Mrs. March in the well-merited punishment which she never failed to inflict upon her husband when the question of the gimcrackery — they always called it that — came up. She rose at the entrance of a bright-looking, pretty-looking, mature, youngish lady, in black silk of a neutral implication, who put out her hand to her, and said, with a very cheery, very ladylike accent, “Mrs. March?” and then added to both of them, while she shook hands with March, and before they could get the name out of their months: “No, not Miss Dryfoos! Neither of them; nor Mrs. Dryfoos. Mrs. Mandel. The ladies will be down in a moment. Won’t you throw off your sacque, Mrs. March? I’m afraid it’s rather warm here, coming from the outside.”

“I will throw it back, if you’ll allow me,” said Mrs. March, with a sort of provisionality, as if, pending some uncertainty as to Mrs. Mandel’s quality and authority, she did not feel herself justified in going further.

But if she did not know about Mrs. Mandel, Mrs. Mandel seemed to know about her. “Oh, well, do!” she said, with a sort of recognition of the propriety of her caution. “I hope you are feeling a little at home in New York. We heard so much of your trouble in getting a flat, from Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, a true Bostonian doesn’t give up quite so soon,” said Mrs. March.

“But I will say New York doesn’t seem so far away, now we’re here.”

“I’m sure you’ll like it. Every one does.” Mrs. Mandel added to March,
“It’s very sharp out, isn’t it?”

“Rather sharp. But after our Boston winters I don’t know but I ought to repudiate the word.”

“Ah, wait till you have been here through March!” said Mrs. Mandel. She began with him, but skillfully transferred the close of her remark, and the little smile of menace that went with it, to his wife.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, “or April, either: Talk about our east winds!”

“Oh, I’m sure they can’t be worse than our winds,” Mrs. Mandel returned, caressingly.

“If we escape New York pneumonia,” March laughed, “it will only be to fall a prey to New York malaria as soon as the frost is out of the ground.”

“Oh, but you know,” said Mrs. Mandel, “I think our malaria has really been slandered a little. It’s more a matter of drainage — of plumbing. I don’t believe it would be possible for malaria to get into this house, we’ve had it gone over so thoroughly.”

Mrs. March said, while she tried to divine Mrs. Mandel’s position from this statement, “It’s certainly the first duty.”

“If Mrs. March could have had her way, we should have had the drainage of our whole ward put in order,” said her husband, “before we ventured to take a furnished apartment for the winter.”

Mrs. Mandel looked discreetly at Mrs. March for permission to laugh at this, but at the same moment both ladies became preoccupied with a second rustling on the stairs.

Two tall, well-dressed young girls came in, and Mrs. Mandel introduced, “Miss Dryfoos, Mrs. March; and Miss Mela Dryfoos, Mr. March,” she added, and the girls shook hands in their several ways with the Marches.

Miss Dryfoos had keen black eyes, and her hair was intensely black. Her face, but for the slight inward curve of the nose, was regular, and the smallness of her nose and of her mouth did not weaken her face, but gave it a curious effect of fierceness, of challenge. She had a large black fan in her hand, which she waved in talking, with a slow, watchful nervousness. Her sister was blonde, and had a profile like her brother’s; but her chin was not so salient, and the weak look of the mouth was not corrected by the spirituality or the fervor of his eyes, though hers were of the same mottled blue. She dropped into the low seat beside Mrs. Mandel, and intertwined her fingers with those of the hand which Mrs. Mandel let her have. She smiled upon the Marches, while Miss Dryfoos watched them intensely, with her eyes first on one and then on the other, as if she did not mean to let any expression of theirs escape her.

“My mother will be down in a minute,” she said to Mrs. March.

“I hope we’re not disturbing her. It is so good of you to let us come in the evening,” Mrs. March replied.

“Oh, not at all,” said the girl. “We receive in the evening.”

“When we do receive,” Miss Mela put in. “We don’t always get the chance to.” She began a laugh, which she checked at a smile from Mrs. Mandel, which no one could have seen to be reproving.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan, and looked up defiantly at Mrs. March. “I suppose you have hardly got settled. We were afraid we would disturb you when we called.”

“Oh no! We were very sorry to miss your visit. We are quite settled in our new quarters. Of course, it’s all very different from Boston.”

“I hope it’s more of a sociable place there,” Miss Mela broke in again. “I never saw such an unsociable place as New York. We’ve been in this house three months, and I don’t believe that if we stayed three years any of the neighbors would call.”

“I fancy proximity doesn’t count for much in New York,” March suggested.

Mrs. Mandel said: “That’s what I tell Miss Mela. But she is a very social nature, and can’t reconcile herself to the fact.”

“No, I can’t,” the girl pouted. “I think it was twice as much fun in
Moffitt. I wish I was there now.”

“Yes,” said March, “I think there’s a great deal more enjoyment in those smaller places. There’s not so much going on in the way of public amusements, and so people make more of one another. There are not so many concerts, theatres, operas—”

“Oh, they’ve got a splendid opera-house in Moffitt. It’s just grand,” said Miss Mela.

“Have you been to the opera here, this winter?” Mrs. March asked of the elder girl.

She was glaring with a frown at her sister, and detached her eyes from her with an effort. “What did you say?” she demanded, with an absent bluntness. “Oh yes. Yes! We went once. Father took a box at the Metropolitan.”

“Then you got a good dose of Wagner, I suppose?” said March.

“What?” asked the girl.

“I don’t think Miss Dryfoos is very fond of Wagner’s music,” Mrs. Mandel said. “I believe you are all great Wagnerites in Boston?”

“I’m a very bad Bostonian, Mrs. Mandel. I suspect myself of preferring
Verdi,” March answered.

Miss Dryfoos looked down at her fan again, and said, “I like ‘Trovatore’ the best.”

“It’s an opera I never get tired of,” said March, and Mrs. March and Mrs. Mandel exchanged a smile of compassion for his simplicity. He detected it, and added: “But I dare say I shall come down with the Wagner fever in time. I’ve been exposed to some malignant cases of it.”

“That night we were there,” said Miss Mela, “they had to turn the gas down all through one part of it, and the papers said the ladies were awful mad because they couldn’t show their diamonds. I don’t wonder, if they all had to pay as much for their boxes as we did. We had to pay sixty dollars.” She looked at the Marches for their sensation at this expense.

March said: “Well, I think I shall take my box by the month, then. It must come cheaper, wholesale.”

“Oh no, it don’t,” said the girl, glad to inform him. “The people that own their boxes, and that had to give fifteen or twenty thousand dollars apiece for them, have to pay sixty dollars a night whenever there’s a performance, whether they go or not.”

“Then I should go every night,” March said.

“Most of the ladies were low neck—”

March interposed, “Well, I shouldn’t go low-neck.”

The girl broke into a fondly approving laugh at his drolling. “Oh, I guess you love to train! Us girls wanted to go low neck, too; but father said we shouldn’t, and mother said if we did she wouldn’t come to the front of the box once. Well, she didn’t, anyway. We might just as well ‘a’ gone low neck. She stayed back the whole time, and when they had that dance — the ballet, you know — she just shut her eyes. Well, Conrad didn’t like that part much, either; but us girls and Mrs. Mandel, we brazened it out right in the front of the box. We were about the only ones there that went high neck. Conrad had to wear a swallow-tail; but father hadn’t any, and he had to patch out with a white cravat. You couldn’t see what he had on in the back o’ the box, anyway.”

Mrs. March looked at Miss Dryfoos, who was waving her fan more and more slowly up and down, and who, when she felt herself looked at, returned Mrs. March’s smile, which she meant to be ingratiating and perhaps sympathetic, with a flash that made her start, and then ran her fierce eyes over March’s face. “Here comes mother,” she said, with a sort of breathlessness, as if speaking her thought aloud, and through the open door the Marches could see the old lady on the stairs.

She paused half-way down, and turning, called up: “Coonrod! Coonrod! You bring my shawl down with you.”

Her daughter Mela called out to her, “Now, mother, Christine ‘ll give it to you for not sending Mike.”

“Well, I don’t know where he is, Mely, child,” the mother answered back. “He ain’t never around when he’s wanted, and when he ain’t, it seems like a body couldn’t git shet of him, nohow.”

“Well, you ought to ring for him!” cried Miss Mela, enjoying the joke.

Her mother came in with a slow step; her head shook slightly as she looked about the room, perhaps from nervousness, perhaps from a touch of palsy. In either case the fact had a pathos which Mrs. March confessed in the affection with which she took her hard, dry, large, old hand when she was introduced to her, and in the sincerity which she put into the hope that she was well.

“I’m just middlin’,” Mrs. Dryfoos replied. “I ain’t never so well, nowadays. I tell fawther I don’t believe it agrees with me very well here, but he says I’ll git used to it. He’s away now, out at Moffitt,” she said to March, and wavered on foot a moment before she sank into a chair. She was a tall woman, who had been a beautiful girl, and her gray hair had a memory of blondeness in it like Lindau’s, March noticed. She wore a simple silk gown, of a Quakerly gray, and she held a handkerchief folded square, as it had come from the laundress. Something like the Sabbath quiet of a little wooden meeting-house in thick Western woods expressed itself to him from her presence.

“Laws, mother!” said Miss Mela; “what you got that old thing on for? If
I’d ‘a’ known you’d ‘a’ come down in that!”

“Coonrod said it was all right, Mely,” said her mother.

Miss Mela explained to the Marches: “Mother was raised among the Dunkards, and she thinks it’s wicked to wear anything but a gray silk even for dress-up.”

“You hain’t never heared o’ the Dunkards, I reckon,” the old woman said to Mrs. March. “Some folks calls ’em the Beardy Men, because they don’t never shave; and they wash feet like they do in the Testament. My uncle was one. He raised me.”

“I guess pretty much everybody’s a Beardy Man nowadays, if he ain’t a
Dunkard!”

Miss Mela looked round for applause of her sally, but March was saying to his wife: “It’s a Pennsylvania German sect, I believe — something like the Quakers. I used to see them when I was a boy.”

“Aren’t they something like the Mennists?” asked Mrs. Mandel.

“They’re good people,” said the old woman, “and the world ‘d be a heap better off if there was more like ‘em.”

Her son came in and laid a soft shawl over her shoulders before he shook hands with the visitors. “I am glad you found your way here,” he said to them.

Christine, who had been bending forward over her fan, now lifted herself up with a sigh and leaned back in her chair.

“I’m sorry my father isn’t here,” said the young man to Mrs. March. “He’s never met you yet?”

“No; and I should like to see him. We hear a great deal about your father, you know, from Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Oh, I hope you don’t believe everything Mr. Fulkerson says about people,” Mela cried. “He’s the greatest person for carrying on when he gets going I ever saw. It makes Christine just as mad when him and mother gets to talking about religion; she says she knows he don’t care anything more about it than the man in the moon. I reckon he don’t try it on much with father.”

“Your fawther ain’t ever been a perfessor,” her mother interposed; “but he’s always been a good church-goin’ man.”

“Not since we come to New York,” retorted the girl.

“He’s been all broke up since he come to New York,” said the old woman, with an aggrieved look.

Mrs. Mandel attempted a diversion. “Have you heard any of our great New
York preachers yet, Mrs. March?”

“No, I haven’t,” Mrs. March admitted; and she tried to imply by her candid tone that she intended to begin hearing them the very next Sunday.

“There are a great many things here,” said Conrad, “to take your thoughts off the preaching that you hear in most of the churches. I think the city itself is preaching the best sermon all the time.”

“I don’t know that I understand you,” said March.

Mela answered for him. “Oh, Conrad has got a lot of notions that nobody can understand. You ought to see the church he goes to when he does go. I’d about as lief go to a Catholic church myself; I don’t see a bit o’ difference. He’s the greatest crony with one of their preachers; he dresses just like a priest, and he says he is a priest.” She laughed for enjoyment of the fact, and her brother cast down his eyes.

Mrs. March, in her turn, tried to take from it the personal tone which the talk was always assuming. “Have you been to the fall exhibition?” she asked Christine; and the girl drew herself up out of the abstraction she seemed sunk in.

“The exhibition?” She looked at Mrs. Mandel.

“The pictures of the Academy, you know,” Mrs. Mandel explained. “Where I wanted you to go the day you had your dress tried on.”

“No; we haven’t been yet. Is it good?” She had turned to Mrs. March again.

“I believe the fall exhibitions are never so good as the spring ones. But there are some good pictures.”

“I don’t believe I care much about pictures,” said Christine. “I don’t understand them.”

“Ah, that’s no excuse for not caring about them,” said March, lightly.
“The painters themselves don’t, half the time.”

The girl looked at him with that glance at once defiant and appealing, insolent and anxious, which he had noticed before, especially when she stole it toward himself and his wife during her sister’s babble. In the light of Fulkerson’s history of the family, its origin and its ambition, he interpreted it to mean a sense of her sister’s folly and an ignorant will to override his opinion of anything incongruous in themselves and their surroundings. He said to himself that she was deathly proud — too proud to try to palliate anything, but capable of anything that would put others under her feet. Her eyes seemed hopelessly to question his wife’s social quality, and he fancied, with not unkindly interest, the inexperienced girl’s doubt whether to treat them with much or little respect. He lost himself in fancies about her and her ideals, necessarily sordid, of her possibilities of suffering, of the triumphs and disappointments before her. Her sister would accept both with a lightness that would keep no trace of either; but in her they would sink lastingly deep. He came out of his reverie to find Mrs. Dryfoos saying to him, in her hoarse voice:

“I think it’s a shame, some of the pictur’s a body sees in the winders. They say there’s a law ag’inst them things; and if there is, I don’t understand why the police don’t take up them that paints ‘em. I hear tell, since I been here, that there’s women that goes to have pictur’s took from them that way by men painters.” The point seemed aimed at March, as if he were personally responsible for the scandal, and it fell with a silencing effect for the moment. Nobody seemed willing to take it up, and Mrs. Dryfoos went on, with an old woman’s severity: “I say they ought to be all tarred and feathered and rode on a rail. They’d be drummed out of town in Moffitt.”

Miss Mela said, with a crowing laugh: “I should think they would! And they wouldn’t anybody go low neck to the opera-house there, either — not low neck the way they do here, anyway.”

“And that pack of worthless hussies,” her mother resumed, “that come out on the stage, and begun to kick.”

“Laws, mother!” the girl shouted, “I thought you said you had your eyes shut!”

All but these two simpler creatures were abashed at the indecorum of suggesting in words the commonplaces of the theatre and of art.

“Well, I did, Mely, as soon as I could believe my eyes. I don’t know what they’re doin’ in all their churches, to let such things go on,” said the old woman. “It’s a sin and a shame, I think. Don’t you, Coonrod?”

A ring at the door cut short whatever answer he was about to deliver.

“If it’s going to be company, Coonrod,” said his mother, making an effort to rise, “I reckon I better go up-stairs.”

“It’s Mr. Fulkerson, I guess,” said Conrad. “He thought he might come”; and at the mention of this light spirit Mrs. Dryfoos sank contentedly back in her chair, and a relaxation of their painful tension seemed to pass through the whole company. Conrad went to the door himself (the serving-man tentatively, appeared some minutes later) and let in Fulkerson’s cheerful voice before his cheerful person.

“Ah, how dye do, Conrad? Brought our friend, Mr. Beaton, with me,” those within heard him say; and then, after a sound of putting off overcoats, they saw him fill the doorway, with his feet set square and his arms akimbo.

IX.

“Ah! hello! hello!” Fulkerson said, in recognition of the Marches. “Regular gathering of the clans. How are you, Mrs. Dryfoos? How do you do, Mrs. Mandel, Miss Christine, Mela, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks? How you wuz?” He shook hands gayly all round, and took a chair next the old lady, whose hand he kept in his own, and left Conrad to introduce Beaton. But he would not let the shadow of Beaton’s solemnity fall upon the company. He began to joke with Mrs. Dryfoos, and to match rheumatisms with her, and he included all the ladies in the range of appropriate pleasantries. “I’ve brought Mr. Beaton along to-night, and I want you to make him feel at home, like you do me, Mrs. Dryfoos. He hasn’t got any rheumatism to speak of; but his parents live in Syracuse, and he’s a kind of an orphan, and we’ve just adopted him down at the office. When you going to bring the young ladies down there, Mrs. Mandel, for a champagne lunch? I will have some hydro-Mela, and Christine it, heigh? How’s that for a little starter? We dropped in at your place a moment, Mrs. March, and gave the young folks a few pointers about their studies. My goodness! it does me good to see a boy like that of yours; business, from the word go; and your girl just scoops my youthful affections. She’s a beauty, and I guess she’s good, too. Well, well, what a world it is! Miss Christine, won’t you show Mr. Beaton that seal ring of yours? He knows about such things, and I brought him here to see it as much as anything. It’s an intaglio I brought from the other side,” he explained to Mrs. March, “and I guess you’ll like to look at it. Tried to give it to the Dryfoos family, and when I couldn’t, I sold it to ‘em. Bound to see it on Miss Christine’s hand somehow! Hold on! Let him see it where it belongs, first!”

He arrested the girl in the motion she made to take off the ring, and let her have the pleasure of showing her hand to the company with the ring on it. Then he left her to hear the painter’s words about it, which he continued to deliver dissyllabically as he stood with her under a gas-jet, twisting his elastic figure and bending his head over the ring.

“Well, Mely, child,” Fulkerson went on, with an open travesty of her mother’s habitual address, “and how are you getting along? Mrs. Mandel hold you up to the proprieties pretty strictly? Well, that’s right. You know you’d be roaming all over the pasture if she didn’t.”

The girl gurgled out her pleasure in his funning, and everybody took him. on his own ground of privileged character. He brought them all together in their friendliness for himself, and before the evening was over he had inspired Mrs. Mandel to have them served with coffee, and had made both the girls feel that they had figured brilliantly in society, and that two young men had been devoted to them.

“Oh, I think he’s just as lovely as he can live!” said Mela, as she stood a moment with her sister on the scene of her triumph, where the others had left them after the departure of their guests.

“Who?” asked Christine, deeply. As she glanced down at her ring, her eyes burned with a softened fire.

She had allowed Beaton to change it himself from the finger where she had worn it to the finger on which he said she ought to wear it. She did not know whether it was right to let him, but she was glad she had done it.

“Who? Mr. Fulkerson, goosie-poosie! Not that old stuckup Mr. Beaton of yours!”

“He is proud,” assented Christine, with a throb of exultation.

Beaton and Fulkerson went to the Elevated station with the Marches; but the painter said he was going to walk home, and Fulkerson let him go alone.

“One way is enough for me,” he explained. “When I walk up, I don’t walk down. Bye-bye, my son!” He began talking about Beaton to the Marches as they climbed the station stairs together. “That fellow puzzles me. I don’t know anybody that I have such a desire to kick, and at the same time that I want to flatter up so much. Affect you that way?” he asked of March.

“Well, as far as the kicking goes, yes.”

“And how is it with you, Mrs. March?”

“Oh, I want to flatter him up.”

“No; really? Why? Hold on! I’ve got the change.”

Fulkerson pushed March away from the ticket-office window; and made them his guests, with the inexorable American hospitality, for the ride down-town. “Three!” he said to the ticket-seller; and, when he had walked them before him out on the platform and dropped his tickets into the urn, he persisted in his inquiry, “Why?”

“Why, because you always want to flatter conceited people, don’t you?”
Mrs. March answered, with a laugh.

“Do you? Yes, I guess you do. You think Beaton is conceited?”

“Well, slightly, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“I guess you’re partly right,” said Fulkerson, with a sigh, so unaccountable in its connection that they all laughed.

“An ideal ‘busted’?” March suggested.

“No, not that, exactly,” said Fulkerson. “But I had a notion maybe Beaton wasn’t conceited all the time.”

“Oh!” Mrs. March exulted, “nobody could be so conceited all the time as Mr. Beaton is most of the time. He must have moments of the direst modesty, when he’d be quite flattery-proof.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. I guess that’s what makes me want to kick him.
He’s left compliments on my hands that no decent man would.”

“Oh! that’s tragical,” said March.

“Mr. Fulkerson,” Mrs. March began, with change of subject in her voice, “who is Mrs. Mandel?”

“Who? What do you think of her?” he rejoined. “I’ll tell you about her when we get in the cars. Look at that thing! Ain’t it beautiful?”

They leaned over the track and looked up at the next station, where the train, just starting, throbbed out the flame-shot steam into the white moonlight.

“The most beautiful thing in New York — the one always and certainly beautiful thing here,” said March; and his wife sighed, “Yes, yes.” She clung to him, and remained rapt by the sight till the train drew near, and then pulled him back in a panic.

“Well, there ain’t really much to tell about her,” Fulkerson resumed when they were seated in the car. “She’s an invention of mine.”

“Of yours?” cried Mrs. March.

“Of course!” exclaimed her husband.

“Yes — at least in her present capacity. She sent me a story for the syndicate, back in July some time, along about the time I first met old Dryfoos here. It was a little too long for my purpose, and I thought I could explain better how I wanted it cut in a call than I could in a letter. She gave a Brooklyn address, and I went to see her. I found her,” said Fulkerson, with a vague defiance, “a perfect lady. She was living with an aunt over there; and she had seen better days, when she was a girl, and worse ones afterward. I don’t mean to say her husband was a bad fellow; I guess he was pretty good; he was her music-teacher; she met him in Germany, and they got married there, and got through her property before they came over here. Well, she didn’t strike me like a person that could make much headway in literature. Her story was well enough, but it hadn’t much sand in it; kind of-well, academic, you know. I told her so, and she understood, and cried a little; but she did the best she could with the thing, and I took it and syndicated it. She kind of stuck in my mind, and the first time I went to see the Dryfooses they were stopping at a sort of family hotel then till they could find a house—” Fulkerson broke off altogether, and said, “I don’t know as I know just how the Dryfooses struck you, Mrs. March?”

“Can’t you imagine?” she answered, with a kindly, smile.

“Yes; but I don’t believe I could guess how they would have struck you last summer when I first saw them. My! oh my! there was the native earth for you. Mely is a pretty wild colt now, but you ought to have seen her before she was broken to harness.

“And Christine? Ever see that black leopard they got up there in the Central Park? That was Christine. Well, I saw what they wanted. They all saw it — nobody is a fool in all directions, and the Dryfooses are in their right senses a good deal of the time. Well, to cut a long story short, I got Mrs. Mandel to take ’em in hand — the old lady as well as the girls. She was a born lady, and always lived like one till she saw Mandel; and that something academic that killed her for a writer was just the very thing for them. She knows the world well enough to know just how much polish they can take on, and she don’t try to put on a bit more. See?”

“Yes, I can see,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, she took hold at once, as ready as a hospital-trained nurse; and there ain’t anything readier on this planet. She runs the whole concern, socially and economically, takes all the care of housekeeping off the old lady’s hands, and goes round with the girls. By-the-bye, I’m going to take my meals at your widow’s, March, and Conrad’s going to have his lunch there. I’m sick of browsing about.”

“Mr. March’s widow?” said his wife, looking at him with provisional severity.

“I have no widow, Isabel,” he said, “and never expect to have, till I leave you in the enjoyment of my life-insurance. I suppose Fulkerson means the lady with the daughter who wanted to take us to board.”

“Oh yes. How are they getting on, I do wonder?” Mrs. March asked of
Fulkerson.

“Well, they’ve got one family to board; but it’s a small one. I guess they’ll pull through. They didn’t want to take any day boarders at first, the widow said; I guess they have had to come to it.”

“Poor things!” sighed Mrs. March. “I hope they’ll go back to the country.”

“Well, I don’t know. When you’ve once tasted New York — You wouldn’t go back to Boston, would you?”

“Instantly.”

Fulkerson laughed out a tolerant incredulity.

X

Beaton lit his pipe when he found himself in his room, and sat down before the dull fire in his grate to think. It struck him there was a dull fire in his heart a great deal like it; and he worked out a fanciful analogy with the coals, still alive, and the ashes creeping over them, and the dead clay and cinders. He felt sick of himself, sick of his life and of all his works. He was angry with Fulkerson for having got him into that art department of his, for having bought him up; and he was bitter at fate because he had been obliged to use the money to pay some pressing debts, and had not been able to return the check his father had sent him. He pitied his poor old father; he ached with compassion for him; and he set his teeth and snarled with contempt through them for his own baseness. This was the kind of world it was; but he washed his hands of it. The fault was in human nature, and he reflected with pride that he had at least not invented human nature; he had not sunk so low as that yet. The notion amused him; he thought he might get a Satanic epigram out of it some way. But in the mean time that girl, that wild animal, she kept visibly, tangibly before him; if he put out his hand he might touch hers, he might pass his arm round her waist. In Paris, in a set he knew there, what an effect she would be with that look of hers, and that beauty, all out of drawing! They would recognize the flame quality in her. He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad, whatever, from one of her native gas-wells. He began to sketch on a bit of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from it. The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across it. Beaton laughed out. Pretty good to let Fulkerson have that for the cover of his first number! In black and red it would be effective; it would catch the eye from the news-stands. He made a motion to throw it on the fire, but held it back and slid it into the table-drawer, and smoked on. He saw the dummy with the other sketch in the open drawer which he had brought away from Fulkerson’s in the morning and slipped in there, and he took it out and looked at it. He made some criticisms in line with his pencil on it, correcting the drawing here and there, and then he respected it a little more, though he still smiled at the feminine quality — a young lady quality.

In spite of his experience the night he called upon the Leightons, Beaton could not believe that Alma no longer cared for him. She played at having forgotten him admirably, but he knew that a few months before she had been very mindful of him. He knew he had neglected them since they came to New York, where he had led them to expect interest, if not attention; but he was used to neglecting people, and he was somewhat less used to being punished for it — punished and forgiven. He felt that Alma had punished him so thoroughly that she ought to have been satisfied with her work and to have forgiven him in her heart afterward. He bore no resentment after the first tingling moments were past; he rather admired her for it; and he would have been ready to go back half an hour later and accept pardon and be on the footing of last summer again. Even now he debated with himself whether it was too late to call; but, decidedly, a quarter to ten seemed late. The next day he determined never to call upon the Leightons again; but he had no reason for this; it merely came into a transitory scheme of conduct, of retirement from the society of women altogether; and after dinner he went round to see them.

He asked for the ladies, and they all three received him, Alma not without a surprise that intimated itself to him, and her mother with no appreciable relenting; Miss Woodburn, with the needlework which she found easier to be voluble over than a book, expressed in her welcome a neutrality both cordial to Beaton and loyal to Alma.

“Is it snowing outdo’s?” she asked, briskly, after the greetings were transacted. “Mah goodness!” she said, in answer to his apparent surprise at the question. “Ah mahght as well have stayed in the Soath, for all the winter Ah have seen in New York yet.”

“We don’t often have snow much before New-Year’s,” said Beaton.

“Miss Woodburn is wild for a real Northern winter,” Mrs. Leighton explained.

“The othah naght Ah woke up and looked oat of the window and saw all the roofs covered with snow, and it turned oat to be nothing but moonlaght. Ah was never so disappointed in mah lahfe,” said Miss Woodburn.

“If you’ll come to St. Barnaby next summer, you shall have all the winter you want,” said Alma.

“I can’t let you slander St. Barnaby in that way,” said Beaton, with the air of wishing to be understood as meaning more than he said.

“Yes?” returned Alma, coolly. “I didn’t know you were so fond of the climate.”

“I never think of it as a climate. It’s a landscape. It doesn’t matter whether it’s hot or cold.”

“With the thermometer twenty below, you’d find that it mattered,” Alma persisted.

“Is that the way you feel about St. Barnaby, too, Mrs. Leighton?” Beaton asked, with affected desolation.

“I shall be glad enough to go back in the summer,” Mrs. Leighton conceded.

“And I should be glad to go now,” said Beaton, looking at Alma. He had the dummy of ‘Every Other Week’ in his hand, and he saw Alma’s eyes wandering toward it whenever he glanced at her. “I should be glad to go anywhere to get out of a job I’ve undertaken,” he continued, to Mrs. Leighton. “They’re going to start some sort of a new illustrated magazine, and they’ve got me in for their art department. I’m not fit for it; I’d like to run away. Don’t you want to advise me a little, Mrs. Leighton? You know how much I value your taste, and I’d like to have you look at the design for the cover of the first number: they’re going to have a different one for every number. I don’t know whether you’ll agree with me, but I think this is rather nice.”

He faced the dummy round, and then laid it on the table before Mrs. Leighton, pushing some of her work aside to make room for it and standing over her while she bent forward to look at it.

Alma kept her place, away from the table.

“Mah goodness! Ho’ exciting!” said Miss Woodburn. “May anybody look?”

“Everybody,” said Beaton.

“Well, isn’t it perfectly choming!” Miss Woodburn exclaimed. “Come and look at this, Miss Leighton,” she called to Alma, who reluctantly approached.

“What lines are these?” Mrs. Leighton asked, pointing to Beaton’s pencil scratches.

“They’re suggestions of modifications,” he replied.

“I don’t think they improve it much. What do you think, Alma?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the girl, constraining her voice to an effect of indifference and glancing carelessly down at the sketch. “The design might be improved; but I don’t think those suggestions would do it.”

“They’re mine,” said Beaton, fixing his eyes upon her with a beautiful sad dreaminess that he knew he could put into them; he spoke with a dreamy remoteness of tone — his wind-harp stop, Wetmore called it.

“I supposed so,” said Alma, calmly.

“Oh, mah goodness!” cried Miss Woodburn. “Is that the way you awtusts talk to each othah? Well, Ah’m glad Ah’m not an awtust — unless I could do all the talking.”

“Artists cannot tell a fib,” Alma said, “or even act one,” and she laughed in Beaton’s upturned face.

He did not unbend his dreamy gaze. “You’re quite right. The suggestions are stupid.”

Alma turned to Miss Woodburn: “You hear? Even when we speak of our own work.”

“Ah nevah hoad anything lahke it!”

“And the design itself?” Beaton persisted.

“Oh, I’m not an art editor,” Alma answered, with a laugh of exultant evasion.

A tall, dark, grave-looking man of fifty, with a swarthy face and iron-gray mustache and imperial and goatee, entered the room. Beaton knew the type; he had been through Virginia sketching for one of the illustrated papers, and he had seen such men in Richmond. Miss Woodburn hardly needed to say, “May Ah introduce you to mah fathaw, Co’nel Woodburn, Mr. Beaton?”

The men shook hands, and Colonel Woodburn said, in that soft, gentle, slow Southern voice without our Northern contractions: “I am very glad to meet you, sir; happy to make yo’ acquaintance. Do not move, madam,” he said to Mrs. Leighton, who made a deprecatory motion to let him pass to the chair beyond her; “I can find my way.” He bowed a bulk that did not lend itself readily to the devotion, and picked up the ball of yarn she had let drop out of her lap in half rising. “Yo’ worsteds, madam.”

“Yarn, yarn, Colonel Woodburn!” Alma shouted. “You’re quite incorrigible.
A spade is a spade!”

“But sometimes it is a trump, my dear young lady,” said the Colonel, with unabated gallantry; “and when yo’ mothah uses yarn, it is worsteds. But I respect worsteds even under the name of yarn: our ladies — my own mothah and sistahs — had to knit the socks we wore — all we could get in the woe.”

“Yes, and aftah the woe,” his daughter put in. “The knitting has not stopped yet in some places. Have you been much in the Soath, Mr. Beaton?”

Beaton explained just how much.

“Well, sir,” said the Colonel, “then you have seen a country making gigantic struggles to retrieve its losses, sir. The South is advancing with enormous strides, sir.”

“Too fast for some of us to keep up,” said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside. “The pace in Charlottesboag is pofectly killing, and we had to drop oat into a slow place like New York.”

“The progress in the South is material now,” said the Colonel; “and those of us whose interests are in another direction find ourselves — isolated — isolated, sir. The intellectual centres are still in the No’th, sir; the great cities draw the mental activity of the country to them, sir. Necessarily New York is the metropolis.”

“Oh, everything comes here,” said Beaton, impatient of the elder’s ponderosity. Another sort of man would have sympathized with the Southerner’s willingness to talk of himself, and led him on to speak of his plans and ideals. But the sort of man that Beaton was could not do this; he put up the dummy into the wrapper he had let drop on the floor beside him, and tied it round with string while Colonel Woodburn was talking. He got to his feet with the words he spoke and offered Mrs. Leighton his hand.

“Must you go?” she asked, in surprise.

“I am on my way to a reception,” he said. She had noticed that he was in evening dress; and now she felt the vague hurt that people invited nowhere feel in the presence of those who are going somewhere. She did not feel it for herself, but for her daughter; and she knew Alma would not have let her feel it if she could have prevented it. But Alma had left the room for a moment, and she tacitly indulged this sense of injury in her behalf.

“Please say good-night to Miss Leighton for me,” Beaton continued. He bowed to Miss Woodburn, “Goodnight, Miss Woodburn,” and to her father, bluntly, “Goodnight.”

“Good-night, sir,” said the Colonel, with a sort of severe suavity.

“Oh, isn’t he choming!” Miss Woodburn whispered to Mrs. Leighton when
Beaton left the room.

Alma spoke to him in the hall without. “You knew that was my design, Mr.
Beaton. Why did you bring it?”

“Why?” He looked at her in gloomy hesitation.

Then he said: “You know why. I wished to talk it over with you, to serve you, please you, get back your good opinion. But I’ve done neither the one nor the other; I’ve made a mess of the whole thing.”

Alma interrupted him. “Has it been accepted?”

“It will be accepted, if you will let it.”

“Let it?” she laughed. “I shall be delighted.” She saw him swayed a little toward her. “It’s a matter of business, isn’t it?”

“Purely. Good-night.”

When Alma returned to the room, Colonel Woodburn was saying to Mrs. Leighton: “I do not contend that it is impossible, madam, but it is very difficult in a thoroughly commercialized society, like yours, to have the feelings of a gentleman. How can a business man, whose prosperity, whose earthly salvation, necessarily lies in the adversity of some one else, be delicate and chivalrous, or even honest? If we could have had time to perfect our system at the South, to eliminate what was evil and develop what was good in it, we should have had a perfect system. But the virus of commercialism was in us, too; it forbade us to make the best of a divine institution, and tempted us to make the worst. Now the curse is on the whole country; the dollar is the measure of every value, the stamp of every success. What does not sell is a failure; and what sells succeeds.”

“The hobby is oat, mah deah,” said Miss Woodburn, in an audible aside to
Alma.

“Were you speaking of me, Colonel Woodburn?” Alma asked.

“Surely not, my dear young lady.”

“But he’s been saying that awtusts are just as greedy aboat money as anybody,” said his daughter.

“The law of commercialism is on everything in a commercial society,” the Colonel explained, softening the tone in which his convictions were presented. “The final reward of art is money, and not the pleasure of creating.”

“Perhaps they would be willing to take it all oat in that if othah people would let them pay their bills in the pleasure of creating,” his daughter teased.

“They are helpless, like all the rest,” said her father, with the same deference to her as to other women. “I do not blame them.”

“Oh, mah goodness! Didn’t you say, sir, that Mr. Beaton had bad manners?”

Alma relieved a confusion which he seemed to feel in reference to her. “Bad manners? He has no manners! That is, when he’s himself. He has pretty good ones when he’s somebody else.”

Miss Woodburn began, “Oh, mah—” and then stopped herself. Alma’s mother looked at her with distressed question, but the girl seemed perfectly cool and contented; and she gave her mind provisionally to a point suggested by Colonel Woodburn’s talk.

“Still, I can’t believe it was right to hold people in slavery, to whip them and sell them. It never did seem right to me,” she added, in apology for her extreme sentiments to the gentleness of her adversary.

“I quite agree with you, madam,” said the Colonel. “Those were the abuses of the institution. But if we had not been vitiated on the one hand and threatened on the other by the spirit of commercialism from the North — and from Europe, too — those abuses could have been eliminated, and the institution developed in the direction of the mild patriarchalism of the divine intention.” The Colonel hitched his chair, which figured a hobby careering upon its hind legs, a little toward Mrs. Leighton and the girls approached their heads and began to whisper; they fell deferentially silent when the Colonel paused in his argument, and went on again when he went on.

At last they heard Mrs. Leighton saying, “And have you heard from the publishers about your book yet?”

Then Miss Woodburn cut in, before her father could answer: “The coase of commercialism is on that, too. They are trahing to fahnd oat whethah it will pay.”

“And they are right — quite right,” said the Colonel. “There is no longer any other criterion; and even a work that attacks the system must be submitted to the tests of the system.”

“The system won’t accept destruction on any othah tomes,” said Miss
Woodburn, demurely.

XI.

At the reception, where two men in livery stood aside to let him pass up the outside steps of the house, and two more helped him off with his overcoat indoors, and a fifth miscalled his name into the drawing-room, the Syracuse stone-cutter’s son met the niece of Mrs. Horn, and began at once to tell her about his evening at the Dryfooses’. He was in very good spirits, for so far as he could have been elated or depressed by his parting with Alma Leighton he had been elated; she had not treated his impudence with the contempt that he felt it deserved; she must still be fond of him; and the warm sense of this, by operation of an obscure but well-recognized law of the masculine being, disposed him to be rather fond of Miss Vance. She was a slender girl, whose semi-aesthetic dress flowed about her with an accentuation of her long forms, and redeemed them from censure by the very frankness with which it confessed them; nobody could have said that Margaret Vance was too tall. Her pretty little head, which she had an effect of choosing to have little in the same spirit of judicious defiance, had a good deal of reading in it; she was proud to know literary and artistic fashions as well as society fashions. She liked being singled out by an exterior distinction so obvious as Beaton’s, and she listened with sympathetic interest to his account of those people. He gave their natural history reality by drawing upon his own; he reconstructed their plebeian past from the experiences of his childhood and his youth of the pre-Parisian period; and he had a pang of suicidal joy in insulting their ignorance of the world.

“What different kinds of people you meet!” said the girl at last, with an envious sigh. Her reading had enlarged the bounds of her imagination, if not her knowledge; the novels nowadays dealt so much with very common people, and made them seem so very much more worth while than the people one met.

She said something like this to Beaton. He answered: “You can meet the people I’m talking of very easily, if you want to take the trouble. It’s what they came to New York for. I fancy it’s the great ambition of their lives to be met.”

“Oh yes,” said Miss Vance, fashionably, and looked down; then she looked up and said, intellectually: “Don’t you think it’s a great pity? How much better for them to have stayed where they were and what they were!”

“Then you could never have had any chance of meeting them,” said Beaton.
“I don’t suppose you intend to go out to the gas country?”

“No,” said Miss Vance, amused. “Not that I shouldn’t like to go.”

“What a daring spirit! You ought to be on the staff of ‘Every Other
Week,’” said Beaton.

“The staff— ‘Every Other Week’? What is it?”

“The missing link; the long-felt want of a tie between the Arts and the Dollars.” Beaton gave her a very picturesque, a very dramatic sketch of the theory, the purpose, and the personnel of the new enterprise.

Miss Vance understood too little about business of any kind to know how it differed from other enterprises of its sort. She thought it was delightful; she thought Beaton must be glad to be part of it, though he had represented himself so bored, so injured, by Fulkerson’s insisting upon having him. “And is it a secret? Is it a thing not to be spoken of?”

“‘Tutt’ altro’! Fulkerson will be enraptured to have it spoken of in society. He would pay any reasonable bill for the advertisement.”

“What a delightful creature! Tell him it shall all be spent in charity.”

“He would like that. He would get two paragraphs out of the fact, and your name would go into the ‘Literary Notes’ of all the newspapers.”

“Oh, but I shouldn’t want my name used!” cried the girl, half horrified into fancying the situation real.

“Then you’d better not say anything about ‘Every Other Week’. Fulkerson is preternaturally unscrupulous.”

March began to think so too, at times. He was perpetually suggesting changes in the make-up of the first number, with a view to its greater vividness of effect. One day he came and said: “This thing isn’t going to have any sort of get up and howl about it, unless you have a paper in the first number going for Bevans’s novels. Better get Maxwell to do it.”

“Why, I thought you liked Bevans’s novels?”

“So I did; but where the good of ‘Every Other Week’ is concerned I am a Roman father. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans, and Maxwell is the man to do it. There hasn’t been a new magazine started for the last three years that hasn’t had an article from Maxwell in its first number cutting Bevans all to pieces. If people don’t see it, they’ll think ‘Every Other Week’ is some old thing.”

March did not know whether Fulkerson was joking or not. He suggested,
“Perhaps they’ll think it’s an old thing if they do see it.”

“Well, get somebody else, then; or else get Maxwell to write under an assumed name. Or — I forgot! He’ll be anonymous under our system, anyway. Now there ain’t a more popular racket for us to work in that first number than a good, swinging attack on Bevans. People read his books and quarrel over ‘em, and the critics are all against him, and a regular flaying, with salt and vinegar rubbed in afterward, will tell more with people who like good old-fashioned fiction than anything else. I like Bevans’s things, but, dad burn it! when it comes to that first number, I’d offer up anybody.”

“What an immoral little wretch you are, Fulkerson!” said March, with a laugh.

Fulkerson appeared not to be very strenuous about the attack on the novelist. “Say!” he called out, gayly, “what should you think of a paper defending the late lamented system of slavery’?”

“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” asked March, with a puzzled smile.

Fulkerson braced his knees against his desk, and pushed himself back, but kept his balance to the eye by canting his hat sharply forward. “There’s an old cock over there at the widow’s that’s written a book to prove that slavery was and is the only solution of the labor problem. He’s a Southerner.”

“I should imagine,” March assented.

“He’s got it on the brain that if the South could have been let alone by the commercial spirit and the pseudophilanthropy of the North, it would have worked out slavery into a perfectly ideal condition for the laborer, in which he would have been insured against want, and protected in all his personal rights by the state. He read the introduction to me last night. I didn’t catch on to all the points — his daughter’s an awfully pretty girl, and I was carrying that fact in my mind all the time, too, you know — but that’s about the gist of it.”

“Seems to regard it as a lost opportunity?” said March.

“Exactly! What a mighty catchy title, Neigh? Look well on the title-page.”

“Well written?”

“I reckon so; I don’t know. The Colonel read it mighty eloquently.”

“It mightn’t be such bad business,” said March, in a muse. “Could you get me a sight of it without committing yourself?”

“If the Colonel hasn’t sent it off to another publisher this morning. He just got it back with thanks yesterday. He likes to keep it travelling.”

“Well, try it. I’ve a notion it might be a curious thing.”

“Look here, March,” said Fulkerson, with the effect of taking a fresh hold; “I wish you could let me have one of those New York things of yours for the first number. After all, that’s going to be the great card.”

“I couldn’t, Fulkerson; I couldn’t, really. I want to philosophize the material, and I’m too new to it all yet. I don’t want to do merely superficial sketches.”

“Of course! Of course! I understand that. Well, I don’t want to hurry you. Seen that old fellow of yours yet? I think we ought to have that translation in the first number; don’t you? We want to give ’em a notion of what we’re going to do in that line.”

“Yes,” said March; “and I was going out to look up Lindau this morning.
I’ve inquired at Maroni’s, and he hasn’t been there for several days.
I’ve some idea perhaps he’s sick. But they gave me his address, and I’m
going to see.”

“Well, that’s right. We want the first number to be the keynote in every way.”

March shook his head. “You can’t make it so. The first number is bound to be a failure always, as far as the representative character goes. It’s invariably the case. Look at the first numbers of all the things you’ve seen started. They’re experimental, almost amateurish, and necessarily so, not only because the men that are making them up are comparatively inexperienced like ourselves, but because the material sent them to deal with is more or less consciously tentative. People send their adventurous things to a new periodical because the whole thing is an adventure. I’ve noticed that quality in all the volunteer contributions; it’s in the articles that have been done to order even. No; I’ve about made up my mind that if we can get one good striking paper into the first number that will take people’s minds off the others, we shall be doing all we can possibly hope for. I should like,” March added, less seriously, “to make up three numbers ahead, and publish the third one first.”

Fulkerson dropped forward and struck his fist on the desk. “It’s a first-rate idea. Why not do it?”

March laughed. “Fulkerson, I don’t believe there’s any quackish thing you wouldn’t do in this cause. From time to time I’m thoroughly ashamed of being connected with such a charlatan.”

Fulkerson struck his hat sharply backward. “Ah, dad burn it! To give that thing the right kind of start I’d walk up and down Broadway between two boards, with the title-page of ‘Every Other Week’ facsimiled on one and my name and address on the—”

He jumped to his feet and shouted, “March, I’ll do it!”

“What?”

“I’ll hire a lot of fellows to make mud-turtles of themselves, and I’ll have a lot of big facsimiles of the title-page, and I’ll paint the town red!”

March looked aghast at him. “Oh, come, now, Fulkerson!”

“I mean it. I was in London when a new man had taken hold of the old Cornhill, and they were trying to boom it, and they had a procession of these mudturtles that reached from Charing Cross to Temple Bar. ‘Cornhill Magazine’. Sixpence. Not a dull page in it.’ I said to myself then that it was the livest thing I ever saw. I respected the man that did that thing from the bottom of my heart. I wonder I ever forgot it. But it shows what a shaky thing the human mind is at its best.”

“You infamous mountebank!”, said March, with great amusement at Fulkerson’s access; “you call that congeries of advertising instinct of yours the human mind at its best? Come, don’t be so diffident, Fulkerson. Well, I’m off to find Lindau, and when I come back I hope Mr. Dryfoos will have you under control. I don’t suppose you’ll be quite sane again till after the first number is out. Perhaps public opinion will sober you then.”

“Confound it, March! How do you think they will take it? I swear I’m getting so nervous I don’t know half the time which end of me is up. I believe if we don’t get that thing out by the first of February it ‘ll be the death of me.”

“Couldn’t wait till Washington’s Birthday? I was thinking it would give the day a kind of distinction, and strike the public imagination, if—”

“No, I’ll be dogged if I could!” Fulkerson lapsed more and more into the parlance of his early life in this season of strong excitement. “I believe if Beaton lags any on the art leg I’ll kill him.”

“Well, I shouldn’t mind your killing Beaton,” said March, tranquilly, as he went out.

He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham Square. He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the East Side to the West Side lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions, and characters to his inspection. They draw not only from the up-town American region, but from all the vast hive of populations swarming between them and the East River. He had found that, according to the hour, American husbands going to and from business, and American wives going to and from shopping, prevailed on the Sixth Avenue road, and that the most picturesque admixture to these familiar aspects of human nature were the brilliant eyes and complexions of the American Hebrews, who otherwise contributed to the effect of well-clad comfort and citizen-self-satisfaction of the crowd. Now and then he had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions; and whether they found them practically very different from those of the immemorial brigandage and enforced complicity with rapine under which they had been born. But, after all, this was an infrequent effect, however massive, of travel on the West Side, whereas the East offered him continual entertainment in like sort. The sort was never quite so squalid. For short distances the lowest poverty, the hardest pressed labor, must walk; but March never entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these East Side travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant race. If they do not outvote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the blonde dulness of Germans; the cold quiet of Scandinavians — fire under ice — were aspects that he identified, and that gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth. It must be owned that he did not take much trouble about this; what these poor people were thinking, hoping, fearing, enjoying, suffering; just where and how they lived; who and what they individually were — these were the matters of his waking dreams as he stared hard at them, while the train raced farther into the gay ugliness — the shapeless, graceful, reckless picturesqueness of the Bowery.

There were certain signs, certain facades, certain audacities of the prevailing hideousness that always amused him in that uproar to the eye which the strident forms and colors made. He was interested in the insolence with which the railway had drawn its erasing line across the Corinthian front of an old theatre, almost grazing its fluted pillars, and flouting its dishonored pediment. The colossal effigies of the fat women and the tuft-headed Circassian girls of cheap museums; the vistas of shabby cross streets; the survival of an old hip-roofed house here and there at their angles; the Swiss chalet, histrionic decorativeness of the stations in prospect or retrospect; the vagaries of the lines that narrowed together or stretched apart according to the width of the avenue, but always in wanton disregard of the life that dwelt, and bought and sold, and rejoiced or sorrowed, and clattered or crawled, around, below, above — were features of the frantic panorama that perpetually touched his sense of humor and moved his sympathy. Accident and then exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the destruction, the decay of the weaker. The whole at moments seemed to him lawless, godless; the absence of intelligent, comprehensive purpose in the huge disorder, and the violent struggle to subordinate the result to the greater good, penetrated with its dumb appeal the consciousness of a man who had always been too self-enwrapped to perceive the chaos to which the individual selfishness must always lead.

But there was still nothing definite, nothing better than a vague discomfort, however poignant, in his half recognition of such facts; and he descended the station stairs at Chatham Square with a sense of the neglected opportunities of painters in that locality. He said to himself that if one of those fellows were to see in Naples that turmoil of cars, trucks, and teams of every sort, intershot with foot-passengers going and coming to and from the crowded pavements, under the web of the railroad tracks overhead, and amid the spectacular approach of the streets that open into the square, he would have it down in his sketch-book at once. He decided simultaneously that his own local studies must be illustrated, and that he must come with the artist and show him just which bits to do, not knowing that the two arts can never approach the same material from the same point. He thought he would particularly like his illustrator to render the Dickensy, cockneyish quality of the shabby-genteel ballad-seller of whom he stopped to ask his way to the street where Lindau lived, and whom he instantly perceived to be, with his stock in trade, the sufficient object of an entire study by himself. He had his ballads strung singly upon a cord against the house wall, and held down in piles on the pavement with stones and blocks of wood. Their control in this way intimated a volatility which was not perceptible in their sentiment. They were mostly tragical or doleful: some of them dealt with the wrongs of the working-man; others appealed to a gay experience of the high seas; but vastly the greater part to memories and associations of an Irish origin; some still uttered the poetry of plantation life in the artless accents of the end — man. Where they trusted themselves, with syntax that yielded promptly to any exigency of rhythmic art, to the ordinary American speech, it was to strike directly for the affections, to celebrate the domestic ties, and, above all, to embalm the memories of angel and martyr mothers whose dissipated sons deplored their sufferings too late. March thought this not at all a bad thing in them; he smiled in patronage of their simple pathos; he paid the tribute of a laugh when the poet turned, as he sometimes did, from his conception of angel and martyr motherhood, and portrayed the mother in her more familiar phases of virtue and duty, with the retributive shingle or slipper in her hand. He bought a pocketful of this literature, popular in a sense which the most successful book can never be, and enlisted the ballad vendor so deeply in the effort to direct him to Lindau’s dwelling by the best way that he neglected another customer, till a sarcasm on his absent-mindedness stung hint to retort, “I’m a-trying to answer a gentleman a civil question; that’s where the absent-minded comes in.”

It seemed for some reason to be a day of leisure with the Chinese dwellers in Mott Street, which March had been advised to take first. They stood about the tops of basement stairs, and walked two and two along the dirty pavement, with their little hands tucked into their sleeves across their breasts, aloof in immaculate cleanliness from the filth around them, and scrutinizing the scene with that cynical sneer of faint surprise to which all aspects of our civilization seem to move their superiority. Their numbers gave character to the street, and rendered not them, but what was foreign to them, strange there; so that March had a sense of missionary quality in the old Catholic church, built long before their incursion was dreamed of. It seemed to have come to them there, and he fancied in the statued saint that looked down from its facade something not so much tolerant as tolerated, something propitiatory, almost deprecatory. It was a fancy, of course; the street was sufficiently peopled with Christian children, at any rate, swarming and shrieking at their games; and presently a Christian mother appeared, pushed along by two policemen on a handcart, with a gelatinous tremor over the paving and a gelatinous jouncing at the curbstones. She lay with her face to the sky, sending up an inarticulate lamentation; but the indifference of the officers forbade the notion of tragedy in her case. She was perhaps a local celebrity; the children left off their games, and ran gayly trooping after her; even the young fellow and young girl exchanging playful blows in a robust flirtation at the corner of a liquor store suspended their scuffle with a pleased interest as she passed. March understood the unwillingness of the poor to leave the worst conditions in the city for comfort and plenty in the country when he reflected upon this dramatic incident, one of many no doubt which daily occur to entertain them in such streets. A small town could rarely offer anything comparable to it, and the country never. He said that if life appeared so hopeless to him as it must to the dwellers in that neighborhood he should not himself be willing to quit its distractions, its alleviations, for the vague promise of unknown good in the distance somewhere.

But what charm could such a man as Lindau find in such a place? It could not be that he lived there because he was too poor to live elsewhere: with a shutting of the heart, March refused to believe this as he looked round on the abounding evidences of misery, and guiltily remembered his neglect of his old friend. Lindau could probably find as cheap a lodging in some decenter part of the town; and, in fact, there was some amelioration of the prevailing squalor in the quieter street which he turned into from Mott.

A woman with a tied-up face of toothache opened the door for him when he pulled, with a shiver of foreboding, the bell-knob, from which a yard of rusty crape dangled. But it was not Lindau who was dead, for the woman said he was at home, and sent March stumbling up the four or five dark flights of stairs that led to his tenement. It was quite at the top of the house, and when March obeyed the German-English “Komm!” that followed his knock, he found himself in a kitchen where a meagre breakfast was scattered in stale fragments on the table before the stove. The place was bare and cold; a half-empty beer bottle scarcely gave it a convivial air. On the left from this kitchen was a room with a bed in it, which seemed also to be a cobbler’s shop: on the right, through a door that stood ajar, came the German-English voice again, saying this time, “Hier!”

XII.

March pushed the door open into a room like that on the left, but with a writing-desk instead of a cobbler’s bench, and a bed, where Lindau sat propped up; with a coat over his shoulders and a skull-cap on his head, reading a book, from which he lifted his eyes to stare blankly over his spectacles at March. His hairy old breast showed through the night-shirt, which gaped apart; the stump of his left arm lay upon the book to keep it open.

“Ah, my tear yo’ng friendt! Passil! Marge! Iss it you?” he called out, joyously, the next moment.

“Why, are you sick, Lindau?” March anxiously scanned his face in taking his hand.

Lindau laughed. “No; I’m all righdt. Only a lidtle lazy, and a lidtle eggonomigal. Idt’s jeaper to stay in pedt sometimes as to geep a fire a-goin’ all the time. Don’t wandt to gome too hardt on the ‘brafer Mann’, you know:

“Braver Mann, er schafft mir zu essen.”

You remember? Heine? You readt Heine still? Who is your favorite boet now, Passil? You write some boetry yourself yet? No? Well, I am gladt to zee you. Brush those baperss off of that jair. Well, idt is goodt for zore eyess. How didt you findt where I lif?

“They told me at Maroni’s,” said March. He tried to keep his eyes on Lindau’s face, and not see the discomfort of the room, but he was aware of the shabby and frowsy bedding, the odor of stale smoke, and the pipes and tobacco shreds mixed with the books and manuscripts strewn over the leaf of the writing-desk. He laid down on the mass the pile of foreign magazines he had brought under his arm. “They gave me another address first.”

“Yes. I have chust gome here,” said Lindau. “Idt is not very coy, Neigh?”

“It might be gayer,” March admitted, with a smile. “Still,” he added, soberly, “a good many people seem to live in this part of the town. Apparently they die here, too, Lindau. There is crape on your outside door. I didn’t know but it was for you.”

“Nodt this time,” said Lindau, in the same humor. “Berhaps some other time. We geep the ondertakers bratty puzy down here.”

“Well,” said March, “undertakers must live, even if the rest of us have to die to let them.” Lindau laughed, and March went on: “But I’m glad it isn’t your funeral, Lindau. And you say you’re not sick, and so I don’t see why we shouldn’t come to business.”

“Pusiness?” Lindau lifted his eyebrows. “You gome on pusiness?”

“And pleasure combined,” said March, and he went on to explain the service he desired at Lindau’s hands.

The old man listened with serious attention, and with assenting nods that culminated in a spoken expression of his willingness to undertake the translations. March waited with a sort of mechanical expectation of his gratitude for the work put in his way, but nothing of the kind came from Lindau, and March was left to say, “Well, everything is understood, then; and I don’t know that I need add that if you ever want any little advance on the work—”

“I will ask you,” said Lindau, quietly, “and I thank you for that. But I can wait; I ton’t needt any money just at bresent.” As if he saw some appeal for greater frankness in March’s eye, he went on: “I tidn’t gome here begause I was too boor to lif anywhere else, and I ton’t stay in pedt begause I couldn’t haf a fire to geep warm if I wanted it. I’m nodt zo padt off as Marmontel when he went to Paris. I’m a lidtle loaxurious, that is all. If I stay in pedt it’s zo I can fling money away on somethings else. Heigh?”

“But what are you living here for, Lindau?” March smiled at the irony lurking in Lindau’s words.

“Well, you zee, I foundt I was begoming a lidtle too moch of an aristograt. I hadt a room oap in Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs over on the West Side, and I foundt” — Liudau’s voice lost its jesting quality, and his face darkened— “that I was beginning to forget the boor!”

“I should have thought,” said March, with impartial interest, “that you might have seen poverty enough, now and then, in Greenwich Village to remind you of its existence.”

“Nodt like here,” said Lindau. “Andt you must zee it all the dtime — zee it, hear it, smell it, dtaste it — or you forget it. That is what I gome here for. I was begoming a ploated aristograt. I thought I was nodt like these beople down here, when I gome down once to look aroundt; I thought I must be somethings else, and zo I zaid I better take myself in time, and I gome here among my brothers — the becears and the thiefs!” A noise made itself heard in the next room, as if the door were furtively opened, and a faint sound of tiptoeing and of hands clawing on a table.

“Thiefs!” Lindau repeated, with a shout. “Lidtle thiefs, that gabture your breakfast. Ah! ha! ha!” A wild scurrying of feet, joyous cries and tittering, and a slamming door followed upon his explosion, and he resumed in the silence: “Idt is the children cot pack from school. They gome and steal what I leaf there on my daple. Idt’s one of our lidtle chokes; we onderstand one another; that’s all righdt. Once the gobbler in the other room there he used to chase ‘em; he couldn’t onderstand their lidtle tricks. Now dot goppler’s teadt, and he ton’t chase ’em any more. He was a Bohemian. Gindt of grazy, I cuess.”

“Well, it’s a sociable existence,” March suggested. “But perhaps if you let them have the things without stealing—”

“Oh no, no! Most nodt mage them too gonceitedt. They mostn’t go and feel themselfs petter than those boor millionairss that hadt to steal their money.”

March smiled indulgently at his old friend’s violence. “Oh, there are fagots and fagots, you know, Lindau; perhaps not all the millionaires are so guilty.”

“Let us speak German!” cried Lindau, in his own tongue, pushing his book aside, and thrusting his skullcap back from his forehead. “How much money can a man honestly earn without wronging or oppressing some other man?”

“Well, if you’ll let me answer in English,” said March, “I should say about five thousand dollars a year. I name that figure because it’s my experience that I never could earn more; but the experience of other men may be different, and if they tell me they can earn ten, or twenty, or fifty thousand a year, I’m not prepared to say they can’t do it.”

Lindau hardly waited for his answer. “Not the most gifted man that ever lived, in the practice of any art or science, and paid at the highest rate that exceptional genius could justly demand from those who have worked for their money, could ever earn a million dollars. It is the landlords and the merchant princes, the railroad kings and the coal barons (the oppressors to whom you instinctively give the titles of tyrants) — it is these that make the millions, but no man earns them. What artist, what physician, what scientist, what poet was ever a millionaire?”

“I can only think of the poet Rogers,” said March, amused by Lindau’s tirade. “But he was as exceptional as the other Rogers, the martyr, who died with warm feet.” Lindau had apparently not understood his joke, and he went on, with the American ease of mind about everything: “But you must allow, Lindau, that some of those fellows don’t do so badly with their guilty gains. Some of them give work to armies of poor people—”

Lindau furiously interrupted: “Yes, when they have gathered their millions together from the hunger and cold and nakedness and ruin and despair of hundreds of thousands of other men, they ‘give work’ to the poor! They give work! They allow their helpless brothers to earn enough to keep life in them! They give work! Who is it gives toil, and where will your rich men be when once the poor shall refuse to give toil? Why, you have come to give me work!”

March laughed outright. “Well, I’m not a millionaire, anyway, Lindau, and I hope you won’t make an example of me by refusing to give toil. I dare say the millionaires deserve it, but I’d rather they wouldn’t suffer in my person.”

“No,” returned the old man, mildly relaxing the fierce glare he had bent upon March. “No man deserves to suffer at the hands of another. I lose myself when I think of the injustice in the world. But I must not forget that I am like the worst of them.”

“You might go up Fifth Avenue and live among the rich awhile, when you’re in danger of that,” suggested March. “At any rate,” he added, by an impulse which he knew he could not justify to his wife, “I wish you’d come some day and lunch with their emissary. I’ve been telling Mrs. March about you, and I want her and the children to see you. Come over with these things and report.” He put his hand on the magazines as he rose.

“I will come,” said Lindau, gently.

“Shall I give you your book?” asked March.

“No; I gidt oap bretty soon.”

“And — and — can you dress yourself?”

“I vhistle, and one of those lidtle fellowss comess. We haf to dake gare of one another in a blace like this. Idt iss nodt like the worldt,” said Lindau, gloomily.

March thought he ought to cheer him up. “Oh, it isn’t such a bad world, Lindau! After all, the average of millionaires is small in it.” He added, “And I don’t believe there’s an American living that could look at that arm of yours and not wish to lend you a hand for the one you gave us all.” March felt this to be a fine turn, and his voice trembled slightly in saying it.

Lindau smiled grimly. “You think zo? I wouldn’t moch like to drost ‘em. I’ve driedt idt too often.” He began to speak German again fiercely: “Besides, they owe me nothing. Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, this aristocracy of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine-slave drivers and mill-serf owners? No; I gave it to the slave; the slave — ha! ha! ha! — whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold. And you think I would be the beneficiary of such a state of things?”

“I’m sorry to hear you talk so, Lindau,” said March; “very sorry.” He stopped with a look of pain, and rose to go. Lindau suddenly broke into a laugh and into English.

“Oh, well, it is only dalk, Passil, and it toes me goodt. My parg is worse than my pidte, I cuess. I pring these things roundt bretty soon. Good-bye, Passil, my tear poy. Auf wiedersehen!”

XIII.

March went away thinking of what Lindau had said, but not for the impersonal significance of his words so much as for the light they cast upon Lindau himself. He thought the words violent enough, but in connection with what he remembered of the cheery, poetic, hopeful idealist, they were even more curious than lamentable. In his own life of comfortable reverie he had never heard any one talk so before, but he had read something of the kind now and then in blatant labor newspapers which he had accidentally fallen in with, and once at a strikers’ meeting he had heard rich people denounced with the same frenzy. He had made his own reflections upon the tastelessness of the rhetoric, and the obvious buncombe of the motive, and he had not taken the matter seriously.

He could not doubt Lindau’s sincerity, and he wondered how he came to that way of thinking. From his experience of himself he accounted for a prevailing literary quality in it; he decided it to be from Lindau’s reading and feeling rather than his reflection. That was the notion he formed of some things he had met with in Ruskin to much the same effect; he regarded them with amusement as the chimeras of a rhetorician run away with by his phrases.

But as to Lindau, the chief thing in his mind was a conception of the droll irony of a situation in which so fervid a hater of millionaires should be working, indirectly at least, for the prosperity of a man like Dryfoos, who, as March understood, had got his money together out of every gambler’s chance in speculation, and all a schemer’s thrift from the error and need of others. The situation was not more incongruous, however, than all the rest of the ‘Every Other Week’ affair. It seemed to him that there were no crazy fortuities that had not tended to its existence, and as time went on, and the day drew near for the issue of the first number, the sense of this intensified till the whole lost at moments the quality of a waking fact, and came to be rather a fantastic fiction of sleep.

Yet the heterogeneous forces did co-operate to a reality which March could not deny, at least in their presence, and the first number was representative of all their nebulous intentions in a tangible form. As a result, it was so respectable that March began to respect these intentions, began to respect himself for combining and embodying them in the volume which appealed to him with a novel fascination, when the first advance copy was laid upon his desk. Every detail of it was tiresomely familiar already, but the whole had a fresh interest now. He now saw how extremely fit and effective Miss Leighton’s decorative design for the cover was, printed in black and brick-red on the delicate gray tone of the paper. It was at once attractive and refined, and he credited Beaton with quite all he merited in working it over to the actual shape. The touch and the taste of the art editor were present throughout the number. As Fulkerson said, Beaton had caught on with the delicacy of a humming-bird and the tenacity of a bulldog to the virtues of their illustrative process, and had worked it for all it was worth. There were seven papers in the number, and a poem on the last page of the cover, and he had found some graphic comment for each. It was a larger proportion than would afterward be allowed, but for once in a way it was allowed. Fulkerson said they could not expect to get their money back on that first number, anyway. Seven of the illustrations were Beaton’s; two or three he got from practised hands; the rest were the work of unknown people which he had suggested, and then related and adapted with unfailing ingenuity to the different papers. He handled the illustrations with such sympathy as not to destroy their individual quality, and that indefinable charm which comes from good amateur work in whatever art. He rescued them from their weaknesses and errors, while he left in them the evidence of the pleasure with which a clever young man, or a sensitive girl, or a refined woman had done them. Inevitably from his manipulation, however, the art of the number acquired homogeneity, and there was nothing casual in its appearance. The result, March eagerly owned, was better than the literary result, and he foresaw that the number would be sold and praised chiefly for its pictures. Yet he was not ashamed of the literature, and he indulged his admiration of it the more freely because he had not only not written it, but in a way had not edited it. To be sure, he had chosen all the material, but he had not voluntarily put it all together for that number; it had largely put itself together, as every number of every magazine does, and as it seems more and more to do, in the experience of every editor. There had to be, of course, a story, and then a sketch of travel. There was a literary essay and a social essay; there was a dramatic trifle, very gay, very light; there was a dashing criticism on the new pictures, the new plays, the new books, the new fashions; and then there was the translation of a bit of vivid Russian realism, which the editor owed to Lindau’s exploration of the foreign periodicals left with him; Lindau was himself a romanticist of the Victor Hugo sort, but he said this fragment of Dostoyevski was good of its kind. The poem was a bit of society verse, with a backward look into simpler and wholesomer experiences.

Fulkerson was extremely proud of the number; but he said it was too good — too good from every point of view. The cover was too good, and the paper was too good, and that device of rough edges, which got over the objection to uncut leaves while it secured their aesthetic effect, was a thing that he trembled for, though he rejoiced in it as a stroke of the highest genius. It had come from Beaton at the last moment, as a compromise, when the problem of the vulgar croppiness of cut leaves and the unpopularity of uncut leaves seemed to have no solution but suicide. Fulkerson was still morally crawling round on his hands and knees, as he said, in abject gratitude at Beaton’s feet, though he had his qualms, his questions; and he declared that Beaton was the most inspired ass since Balaam’s. “We’re all asses, of course,” he admitted, in semi-apology to March; “but we’re no such asses as Beaton.” He said that if the tasteful decorativeness of the thing did not kill it with the public outright, its literary excellence would give it the finishing stroke. Perhaps that might be overlooked in the impression of novelty which a first number would give, but it must never happen again. He implored March to promise that it should never happen again; he said their only hope was in the immediate cheapening of the whole affair. It was bad enough to give the public too much quantity for their money, but to throw in such quality as that was simply ruinous; it must be stopped. These were the expressions of his intimate moods; every front that he presented to the public wore a glow of lofty, of devout exultation. His pride in the number gushed out in fresh bursts of rhetoric to every one whom he could get to talk with him about it. He worked the personal kindliness of the press to the utmost. He did not mind making himself ridiculous or becoming a joke in the good cause, as he called it. He joined in the applause when a humorist at the club feigned to drop dead from his chair at Fulkerson’s introduction of the topic, and he went on talking that first number into the surviving spectators. He stood treat upon all occasions, and he lunched attaches of the press at all hours. He especially befriended the correspondents of the newspapers of other cities, for, as he explained to March, those fellows could give him any amount of advertising simply as literary gossip. Many of the fellows were ladies who could not be so summarily asked out to lunch, but Fulkerson’s ingenuity was equal to every exigency, and he contrived somehow to make each of these feel that she had been possessed of exclusive information. There was a moment when March conjectured a willingness in Fulkerson to work Mrs. March into the advertising department, by means of a tea to these ladies and their friends which she should administer in his apartment, but he did not encourage Fulkerson to be explicit, and the moment passed. Afterward, when he told his wife about it, he was astonished to find that she would not have minded doing it for Fulkerson, and he experienced another proof of the bluntness of the feminine instincts in some directions, and of the personal favor which Fulkerson seemed to enjoy with the whole sex. This alone was enough to account for the willingness of these correspondents to write about the first number, but March accused him of sending it to their addresses with boxes of Jacqueminot roses and Huyler candy.

Fulkerson let him enjoy his joke. He said that he would do that or anything else for the good cause, short of marrying the whole circle of female correspondents.

March was inclined to hope that if the first number had been made too good for the country at large, the more enlightened taste of metropolitan journalism would invite a compensating favor for it in New York. But first Fulkerson and then the event proved him wrong. In spite of the quality of the magazine, and in spite of the kindness which so many newspaper men felt for Fulkerson, the notices in the New York papers seemed grudging and provisional to the ardor of the editor. A merit in the work was acknowledged, and certain defects in it for which March had trembled were ignored; but the critics astonished him by selecting for censure points which he was either proud of or had never noticed; which being now brought to his notice he still could not feel were faults. He owned to Fulkerson that if they had said so and so against it, he could have agreed with them, but that to say thus and so was preposterous; and that if the advertising had not been adjusted with such generous recognition of the claims of the different papers, he should have known the counting-room was at the bottom of it. As it was, he could only attribute it to perversity or stupidity. It was certainly stupid to condemn a magazine novelty like ‘Every Other Week’ for being novel; and to augur that if it failed, it would fail through its departure from the lines on which all the other prosperous magazines had been built, was in the last degree perverse, and it looked malicious. The fact that it was neither exactly a book nor a magazine ought to be for it and not against it, since it would invade no other field; it would prosper on no ground but its own.

XIV.

The more March thought of the injustice of the New York press (which had not, however, attacked the literary quality of the number) the more bitterly he resented it; and his wife’s indignation superheated his own. ‘Every Other Week’ had become a very personal affair with the whole family; the children shared their parents’ disgust; Belle was outspoken in, her denunciations of a venal press. Mrs. March saw nothing but ruin ahead, and began tacitly to plan a retreat to Boston, and an establishment retrenched to the basis of two thousand a year. She shed some secret tears in anticipation of the privations which this must involve; but when Fulkerson came to see March rather late the night of the publication day, she nobly told him that if the worst came to the worst she could only have the kindliest feeling toward him, and should not regard him as in the slightest degree responsible.

“Oh, hold on, hold on!” he protested. “You don’t think we’ve made a failure, do you?”

“Why, of course,” she faltered, while March remained gloomily silent.

“Well, I guess we’ll wait for the official count, first. Even New York hasn’t gone against us, and I guess there’s a majority coming down to Harlem River that could sweep everything before it, anyway.”

“What do you mean, Fulkerson?” March demanded, sternly.

“Oh, nothing! Only, the ‘News Company’ has ordered ten thousand now; and you know we had to give them the first twenty on commission.”

“What do you mean?” March repeated; his wife held her breath.

“I mean that the first number is a booming success already, and that it’s going to a hundred thousand before it stops. That unanimity and variety of censure in the morning papers, combined with the attractiveness of the thing itself, has cleared every stand in the city, and now if the favor of the country press doesn’t turn the tide against us, our fortune’s made.” The Marches remained dumb. “Why, look here! Didn’t I tell you those criticisms would be the making of us, when they first began to turn you blue this morning, March?”

“He came home to lunch perfectly sick,” said Mrs. March; “and I wouldn’t let him go back again.”

“Didn’t I tell you so?” Fulkerson persisted.

March could not remember that he had, or that he had been anything but incoherently and hysterically jocose over the papers, but he said, “Yes, yes — I think so.”

“I knew it from the start,” said Fulkerson. “The only other person who took those criticisms in the right spirit was Mother Dryfoos — I’ve just been bolstering up the Dryfoos family. She had them read to her by Mrs. Mandel, and she understood them to be all the most flattering prophecies of success. Well, I didn’t read between the lines to that extent, quite; but I saw that they were going to help us, if there was anything in us, more than anything that could have been done. And there was something in us! I tell you, March, that seven-shooting self-cocking donkey of a Beaton has given us the greatest start! He’s caught on like a mouse. He’s made the thing awfully chic; it’s jimmy; there’s lots of dog about it. He’s managed that process so that the illustrations look as expensive as first-class wood-cuts, and they’re cheaper than chromos. He’s put style into the whole thing.”

“Oh yes,” said March, with eager meekness, “it’s Beaton that’s done it.”

Fulkerson read jealousy of Beaton in Mrs. March’s face. “Beaton has given us the start because his work appeals to the eye. There’s no denying that the pictures have sold this first number; but I expect the literature of this first number to sell the pictures of the second. I’ve been reading it all over, nearly, since I found how the cat was jumping; I was anxious about it, and I tell you, old man, it’s good. Yes, sir! I was afraid maybe you had got it too good, with that Boston refinement of yours; but I reckon you haven’t. I’ll risk it. I don’t see how you got so much variety into so few things, and all of them palpitant, all of ’em on the keen jump with actuality.”

The mixture of American slang with the jargon of European criticism in Fulkerson’s talk made March smile, but his wife did not seem to notice it in her exultation. “That is just what I say,” she broke in. “It’s perfectly wonderful. I never was anxious about it a moment, except, as you say, Mr. Fulkerson, I was afraid it might be too good.”

They went on in an antiphony of praise till March said: “Really, I don’t see what’s left me but to strike for higher wages. I perceive that I’m indispensable.”

“Why, old man, you’re coming in on the divvy, you know,” said Fulkerson.

They both laughed, and when Fulkerson was gone, Mrs. March asked her husband what a divvy was.

“It’s a chicken before it’s hatched.”

“No! Truly?”

He explained, and she began to spend the divvy.

At Mrs. Leighton’s Fulkerson gave Alma all the honor of the success; he told her mother that the girl’s design for the cover had sold every number, and Mrs. Leighton believed him.

“Well, Ah think Ah maght have some of the glory,” Miss Woodburn pouted.
“Where am Ah comin’ in?”

“You’re coming in on the cover of the next number,” said Fulkerson. “We’re going to have your face there; Miss Leighton’s going to sketch it in.” He said this reckless of the fact that he had already shown them the design of the second number, which was Beaton’s weird bit of gas-country landscape.

“Ah don’t see why you don’t wrahte the fiction for your magazine, Mr.
Fulkerson,” said the girl.

This served to remind Fulkerson of something. He turned to her father. “I’ll tell you what, Colonel Woodburn, I want Mr. March to see some chapters of that book of yours. I’ve been talking to him about it.”

“I do not think it would add to the popularity of your periodical, sir,” said the Colonel, with a stately pleasure in being asked. “My views of a civilization based upon responsible slavery would hardly be acceptable to your commercialized society.”

“Well, not as a practical thing, of course,” Fulkerson admitted. “But as something retrospective, speculative, I believe it would make a hit. There’s so much going on now about social questions; I guess people would like to read it.”

“I do not know that my work is intended to amuse people,” said the
Colonel, with some state.

“Mah goodness! Ah only wish it WAS, then,” said his daughter; and she added: “Yes, Mr. Fulkerson, the Colonel will be very glad to submit po’tions of his woak to yo’ edito’. We want to have some of the honaw. Perhaps we can say we helped to stop yo’ magazine, if we didn’t help to stawt it.”

They all laughed at her boldness, and Fulkerson said: “It’ll take a good deal more than that to stop ‘Every Other Week’. The Colonel’s whole book couldn’t do it.” Then he looked unhappy, for Colonel Woodburn did not seem to enjoy his reassuring words; but Miss Woodburn came to his rescue. “You maght illustrate it with the po’trait of the awthoris daughtaw, if it’s too late for the covah.”

“Going to have that in every number, Miss Woodburn!” he cried.

“Oh, mah goodness!” she said, with mock humility.

Alma sat looking at her piquant head, black, unconsciously outlined against the lamp, as she sat working by the table. “Just keep still a moment!”

She got her sketch-block and pencils, and began to draw; Fulkerson tilted himself forward and looked over her shoulder; he smiled outwardly; inwardly he was divided between admiration of Miss Woodburn’s arch beauty and appreciation of the skill which reproduced it; at the same time he was trying to remember whether March had authorized him to go so far as to ask for a sight of Colonel Woodburn’s manuscript. He felt that he had trenched upon March’s province, and he framed one apology to the editor for bringing him the manuscript, and another to the author for bringing it back.

“Most Ah hold raght still like it was a photograph?” asked Miss Woodburn.
“Can Ah toak?”

“Talk all you want,” said Alma, squinting her eyes. “And you needn’t be either adamantine, nor yet — wooden.”

“Oh, ho’ very good of you! Well, if Ah can toak — go on, Mr. Fulkerson!”

“Me talk? I can’t breathe till this thing is done!” sighed Fulkerson; at that point of his mental drama the Colonel was behaving rustily about the return of his manuscript, and he felt that he was looking his last on Miss Woodburn’s profile.

“Is she getting it raght?” asked the girl.

“I don’t know which is which,” said Fulkerson.

“Oh, Ah hope Ah shall! Ah don’t want to go round feelin’ like a sheet of papah half the time.”

“You could rattle on, just the same,” suggested Alma.

“Oh, now! Jost listen to that, Mr. Fulkerson. Do you call that any way to toak to people?”

“You might know which you were by the color,” Fulkerson began, and then he broke off from the personal consideration with a business inspiration, and smacked himself on the knee, “We could print it in color!”

Mrs. Leighton gathered up her sewing and held it with both hands in her lap, while she came round, and looked critically at the sketch and the model over her glasses. “It’s very good, Alma,” she said.

Colonel Woodburn remained restively on his side of the table. “Of course, Mr. Fulkerson, you were jesting, sir, when you spoke of printing a sketch of my daughter.”

“Why, I don’t know — If you object — ?

“I do, sir — decidedly,” said the Colonel.

“Then that settles it, of course, — I only meant—”

“Indeed it doesn’t!” cried the girl. “Who’s to know who it’s from? Ah’m jost set on havin’ it printed! Ah’m going to appear as the head of Slavery — in opposition to the head of Liberty.”

“There’ll be a revolution inside of forty-eight hours, and we’ll have the Colonel’s system going wherever a copy of ‘Every Other Week’ circulates,” said Fulkerson.

“This sketch belongs to me,” Alma interposed. “I’m not going to let it be printed.”

“Oh, mah goodness!” said Miss Woodburn, laughing good-humoredly. “That’s becose you were brought up to hate slavery.”

“I should like Mr. Beaton to see it,” said Mrs. Leighton, in a sort of absent tone. She added, to Fulkerson: “I rather expected he might be in to-night.”

“Well, if he comes we’ll leave it to Beaton,” Fulkerson said, with relief in the solution, and an anxious glance at the Colonel, across the table, to see how he took that form of the joke. Miss Woodburn intercepted his glance and laughed, and Fulkerson laughed, too, but rather forlornly.

Alma set her lips primly and turned her head first on one side and then on the other to look at the sketch. “I don’t think we’ll leave it to Mr. Beaton, even if he comes.”

“We left the other design for the cover to Beaton,” Fulkerson insinuated.
“I guess you needn’t be afraid of him.”

“Is it a question of my being afraid?” Alma asked; she seemed coolly intent on her drawing.

“Miss Leighton thinks he ought to be afraid of her,” Miss Woodburn explained.

“It’s a question of his courage, then?” said Alma.

“Well, I don’t think there are many young ladies that Beaton’s afraid of,” said Fulkerson, giving himself the respite of this purely random remark, while he interrogated the faces of Mrs. Leighton and Colonel Woodburn for some light upon the tendency of their daughters’ words.

He was not helped by Mrs. Leighton’s saying, with a certain anxiety, “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, you’re as much in the dark as I am myself, then,” said Fulkerson. “I suppose I meant that Beaton is rather — a — favorite, you know. The women like him.”

Mrs. Leighton sighed, and Colonel Woodburn rose and left the room.

In the silence that followed, Fulkerson looked from one lady to the other with dismay. “I seem to have put my foot in it, somehow,” he suggested, and Miss Woodburn gave a cry of laughter.

“Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson! Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson! Papa thoat you wanted him to go.”

“Wanted him to go?” repeated Fulkerson.

“We always mention Mr. Beaton when we want to get rid of papa.”

“Well, it seems to me that I have noticed that he didn’t take much interest in Beaton, as a general topic. But I don’t know that I ever saw it drive him out of the room before!”

“Well, he isn’t always so bad,” said Miss Woodburn. “But it was a case of hate at first sight, and it seems to be growin’ on papa.”

“Well, I can understand that,” said Fulkerson. “The impulse to destroy
Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against at the start.”

“I must say, Mr. Fulkerson,” said Mrs. Leighton, in the tremor through which she nerved herself to differ openly with any one she liked, “I never had to struggle with anything of the kind, in regard to Mr. Beaton. He has always been most respectful and — and — considerate, with me, whatever he has been with others.”

“Well, of course, Mrs. Leighton!” Fulkerson came back in a soothing tone. “But you see you’re the rule that proves the exception. I was speaking of the way men felt about Beaton. It’s different with ladies; I just said so.”

“Is it always different?” Alma asked, lifting her head and her hand from her drawing, and staring at it absently.

Fulkerson pushed both his hands through his whiskers. “Look here! Look here!” he said. “Won’t somebody start some other subject? We haven’t had the weather up yet, have we? Or the opera? What is the matter with a few remarks about politics?”

“Why, Ah thoat you lahked to toak about the staff of yo’ magazine,” said
Miss Woodburn.

“Oh, I do!” said Fulkerson. “But not always about the same member of it. He gets monotonous, when he doesn’t get complicated. I’ve just come round from the Marches’,” he added, to Mrs. Leighton.

“I suppose they’ve got thoroughly settled in their apartment by this time.” Mrs. Leighton said something like this whenever the Marches were mentioned. At the bottom of her heart she had not forgiven them for not taking her rooms; she had liked their looks so much; and she was always hoping that they were uncomfortable or dissatisfied; she could not help wanting them punished a little.

“Well, yes; as much as they ever will be,” Fulkerson answered. “The Boston style is pretty different, you know; and the Marches are old-fashioned folks, and I reckon they never went in much for bric-a-brac. They’ve put away nine or ten barrels of dragon candlesticks, but they keep finding new ones.”

“Their landlady has just joined our class,” said Alma. “Isn’t her name Green? She happened to see my copy of ‘Every Other Week’, and said she knew the editor; and told me.”

“Well, it’s a little world,” said Fulkerson. “You seem to be touching elbows with everybody. Just think of your having had our head translator for a model.”

“Ah think that your whole publication revolves aroand the Leighton family,” said Miss Woodburn.

“That’s pretty much so,” Fulkerson admitted. “Anyhow, the publisher seems disposed to do so.”

“Are you the publisher? I thought it was Mr. Dryfoos,” said Alma.

“It is.”

“Oh!”

The tone and the word gave Fulkerson a discomfort which he promptly confessed. “Missed again.”

The girls laughed, and he regained something of his lost spirits, and smiled upon their gayety, which lasted beyond any apparent reason for it.

Miss Woodburn asked, “And is Mr. Dryfoos senio’ anything like ouah Mr.
Dryfoos?”

“Not the least.”

“But he’s jost as exemplary?”

“Yes; in his way.”

“Well, Ah wish Ah could see all those pinks of puffection togethah, once.”

“Why, look here! I’ve been thinking I’d celebrate a little, when the old gentleman gets back. Have a little supper — something of that kind. How would you like to let me have your parlors for it, Mrs. Leighton? You ladies could stand on the stairs, and have a peep at us, in the bunch.”

“Oh, mah! What a privilege! And will Miss Alma be there, with the othah contributors? Ah shall jost expah of envy!”

“She won’t be there in person,” said Fulkerson, “but she’ll be represented by the head of the art department.”

“Mah goodness! And who’ll the head of the publishing department represent?”

“He can represent you,” said Alma.

“Well, Ah want to be represented, someho’.”

“We’ll have the banquet the night before you appear on the cover of our fourth number,” said Fulkerson.

“Ah thoat that was doubly fo’bidden,” said Miss Woodburn. “By the stern parent and the envious awtust.”

“We’ll get Beaton to get round them, somehow. I guess we can trust him to manage that.”

Mrs. Leighton sighed her resentment of the implication.

“I always feel that Mr. Beaton doesn’t do himself justice,” she began.

Fulkerson could not forego the chance of a joke. “Well, maybe he would rather temper justice with mercy in a case like his.” This made both the younger ladies laugh. “I judge this is my chance to get off with my life,” he added, and he rose as he spoke. “Mrs. Leighton, I am about the only man of my sex who doesn’t thirst for Beaton’s blood most of the time. But I know him and I don’t. He’s more kinds of a good fellow than people generally understand. He doesn’t wear his heart upon his sleeve — not his ulster sleeve, anyway. You can always count me on your side when it’s a question of finding Beaton not guilty if he’ll leave the State.”

Alma set her drawing against the wall, in rising to say goodnight to Fulkerson. He bent over on his stick to look at it. “Well, it’s beautiful,” he sighed, with unconscious sincerity.

Alma made him a courtesy of mock modesty. “Thanks to Miss Woodburn!”

“Oh no! All she had to do was simply to stay put.”

“Don’t you think Ah might have improved it if Ah had looked better?” the girl asked, gravely.

“Oh, you couldn’t!” said Fulkerson, and he went off triumphant in their applause and their cries of “Which? which?”

Mrs. Leighton sank deep into an accusing gloom when at last she found herself alone with her daughter. “I don’t know what you are thinking about, Alma Leighton. If you don’t like Mr. Beaton—”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t? You know better than that. You know that, you did care for him.”

“Oh! that’s a very different thing. That’s a thing that can be got over.”

“Got over!” repeated Mrs. Leighton, aghast.

“Of course, it can! Don’t be romantic, mamma. People get over dozens of such fancies. They even marry for love two or three times.”

“Never!” cried her mother, doing her best to feel shocked; and at last looking it.

Her looking it had no effect upon Alma. “You can easily get over caring for people; but you can’t get over liking them — if you like them because they are sweet and good. That’s what lasts. I was a simple goose, and he imposed upon me because he was a sophisticated goose. Now the case is reversed.”

“He does care for you, now. You can see it. Why do you encourage him to come here?”

“I don’t,” said Alma. “I will tell him to keep away if you like. But whether he comes or goes, it will be the same.”

“Not to him, Alma! He is in love with you!”

“He has never said so.”

“And you would really let him say so, when you intend to refuse him?”

“I can’t very well refuse him till he does say so.”

This was undeniable. Mrs. Leighton could only demand, in an awful tone, “May I ask why — if you cared for him; and I know you care for him still you will refuse him?”

Alma laughed. “Because — because I’m wedded to my Art, and I’m not going to commit bigamy, whatever I do.”

“Alma!”

“Well, then, because I don’t like him — that is, I don’t believe in him, and don’t trust him. He’s fascinating, but he’s false and he’s fickle. He can’t help it, I dare say.”

“And you are perfectly hard. Is it possible that you were actually pleased to have Mr. Fulkerson tease you about Mr. Dryfoos?”

“Oh, good-night, now, mamma! This is becoming personal.”

PART THIRD

I.

The scheme of a banquet to celebrate the initial success of ‘Every Other Week’ expanded in Fulkerson’s fancy into a series. Instead of the publishing and editorial force, with certain of the more representative artists and authors sitting down to a modest supper in Mrs. Leighton’s parlors, he conceived of a dinner at Delmonico’s, with the principal literary and artistic, people throughout the country as guests, and an inexhaustible hospitality to reporters and correspondents, from whom paragraphs, prophetic and historic, would flow weeks before and after the first of the series. He said the thing was a new departure in magazines; it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self government in the arts; and it was this idea that had never yet been fully developed in regard to it. That was what must be done in the speeches at the dinner, and the speeches must be reported. Then it would go like wildfire. He asked March whether he thought Mr. Depew could be got to come; Mark Twain, he was sure, would come; he was a literary man. They ought to invite Mr. Evarts, and the Cardinal and the leading Protestant divines. His ambition stopped at nothing, nothing but the question of expense; there he had to wait the return of the elder Dryfoos from the West, and Dryfoos was still delayed at Moffitt, and Fulkerson openly confessed that he was afraid he would stay there till his own enthusiasm escaped in other activities, other plans.

Fulkerson was as little likely as possible to fall under a superstitious subjection to another man; but March could not help seeing that in this possible measure Dryfoos was Fulkerson’s fetish. He did not revere him, March decided, because it was not in Fulkerson’s nature to revere anything; he could like and dislike, but he could not respect. Apparently, however, Dryfoos daunted him somehow; and besides the homage which those who have not pay to those who have, Fulkerson rendered Dryfoos the tribute of a feeling which March could only define as a sort of bewilderment. As well as March could make out, this feeling was evoked by the spectacle of Dryfoos’s unfailing luck, which Fulkerson was fond of dazzling himself with. It perfectly consisted with a keen sense of whatever was sordid and selfish in a man on whom his career must have had its inevitable effect. He liked to philosophize the case with March, to recall Dryfoos as he was when he first met him still somewhat in the sap, at Moffitt, and to study the processes by which he imagined him to have dried into the hardened speculator, without even the pretence to any advantage but his own in his ventures. He was aware of painting the character too vividly, and he warned March not to accept it exactly in those tints, but to subdue them and shade it for himself. He said that where his advantage was not concerned, there was ever so much good in Dryfoos, and that if in some things he had grown inflexible, he had expanded in others to the full measure of the vast scale on which he did business. It had seemed a little odd to March that a man should put money into such an enterprise as ‘Every Other Week’ and go off about other affairs, not only without any sign of anxiety, but without any sort of interest. But Fulkerson said that was the splendid side of Dryfoos. He had a courage, a magnanimity, that was equal to the strain of any such uncertainty. He had faced the music once for all, when he asked Fulkerson what the thing would cost in the different degrees of potential failure; and then he had gone off, leaving everything to Fulkerson and the younger Dryfoos, with the instruction simply to go ahead and not bother him about it. Fulkerson called that pretty tall for an old fellow who used to bewail the want of pigs and chickens to occupy his mind. He alleged it as another proof of the versatility of the American mind, and of the grandeur of institutions and opportunities that let every man grow to his full size, so that any man in America could run the concern if necessary. He believed that old Dryfoos could step into Bismarck’s shoes and run the German Empire at ten days’ notice, or about as long as it would take him to go from New York to Berlin. But Bismarck would not know anything about Dryfoos’s plans till Dryfoos got ready to show his hand. Fulkerson himself did not pretend to say what the old man had been up to since he went West. He was at Moffitt first, and then he was at Chicago, and then he had gone out to Denver to look after some mines he had out there, and a railroad or two; and now he was at Moffitt again. He was supposed to be closing up his affairs there, but nobody could say.

Fulkerson told March the morning after Dryfoos returned that he had not only not pulled out at Moffitt, but had gone in deeper, ten times deeper than ever. He was in a royal good-humor, Fulkerson reported, and was going to drop into the office on his way up from the Street (March understood Wall Street) that afternoon. He was tickled to death with ‘Every Other Week’ so far as it had gone, and was anxious to pay his respects to the editor.

March accounted for some rhetoric in this, but let it flatter him, and prepared himself for a meeting about which he could see that Fulkerson was only less nervous than he had shown himself about the public reception of the first number. It gave March a disagreeable feeling of being owned and of being about to be inspected by his proprietor; but he fell back upon such independence as he could find in the thought of those two thousand dollars of income beyond the caprice of his owner, and maintained an outward serenity.

He was a little ashamed afterward of the resolution it had cost him to do so. It was not a question of Dryfoos’s physical presence: that was rather effective than otherwise, and carried a suggestion of moneyed indifference to convention in the gray business suit of provincial cut, and the low, wide-brimmed hat of flexible black felt. He had a stick with an old-fashioned top of buckhorn worn smooth and bright by the palm of his hand, which had not lost its character in fat, and which had a history of former work in its enlarged knuckles, though it was now as soft as March’s, and must once have been small even for a man of Mr. Dryfoos’s stature; he was below the average size. But what struck March was the fact that Dryfoos seemed furtively conscious of being a country person, and of being aware that in their meeting he was to be tried by other tests than those which would have availed him as a shrewd speculator. He evidently had some curiosity about March, as the first of his kind whom he had encountered; some such curiosity as the country school trustee feels and tries to hide in the presence of the new schoolmaster. But the whole affair was, of course, on a higher plane; on one side Dryfoos was much more a man of the world than March was, and he probably divined this at once, and rested himself upon the fact in a measure. It seemed to be his preference that his son should introduce them, for he came upstairs with Conrad, and they had fairly made acquaintance before Fulkerson joined them.

Conrad offered to leave them at once, but his father made him stay. “I reckon Mr. March and I haven’t got anything so private to talk about that we want to keep it from the other partners. Well, Mr. March, are you getting used to New York yet? It takes a little time.”

“Oh yes. But not so much time as most places. Everybody belongs more or less in New York; nobody has to belong here altogether.”

“Yes, that is so. You can try it, and go away if you don’t like it a good deal easier than you could from a smaller place. Wouldn’t make so much talk, would it?” He glanced at March with a jocose light in his shrewd eyes. “That is the way I feel about it all the time: just visiting. Now, it wouldn’t be that way in Boston, I reckon?”

“You couldn’t keep on visiting there your whole life,” said March.

Dryfoos laughed, showing his lower teeth in a way that was at once simple and fierce. “Mr. Fulkerson didn’t hardly know as he could get you to leave. I suppose you got used to it there. I never been in your city.”

“I had got used to it; but it was hardly my city, except by marriage. My wife’s a Bostonian.”

“She’s been a little homesick here, then,” said Dryfoos, with a smile of the same quality as his laugh.

“Less than I expected,” said March. “Of course, she was very much attached to our old home.”

“I guess my wife won’t ever get used to New York,” said Dryfoos, and he drew in his lower lip with a sharp sigh. “But my girls like it; they’re young. You never been out our way yet, Mr. March? Out West?”

“Well, only for the purpose of being born, and brought up. I used to live in Crawfordsville, and then Indianapolis.”

“Indianapolis is bound to be a great place,” said Dryfoos. “I remember now, Mr. Fulkerson told me you was from our State.” He went on to brag of the West, as if March were an Easterner and had to be convinced. “You ought to see all that country. It’s a great country.”

“Oh yes,” said March, “I understand that.” He expected the praise of the great West to lead up to some comment on ‘Every Other Week’; and there was abundant suggestion of that topic in the manuscripts, proofs of letter-press and illustrations, with advance copies of the latest number strewn over his table.

But Dryfoos apparently kept himself from looking at these things. He rolled his head about on his shoulders to take in the character of the room, and said to his son, “You didn’t change the woodwork, after all.”

“No; the architect thought we had better let it be, unless we meant to change the whole place. He liked its being old-fashioned.”

“I hope you feel comfortable here, Mr. March,” the old man said, bringing his eyes to bear upon him again after their tour of inspection.

“Too comfortable for a working-man,” said March, and he thought that this remark must bring them to some talk about his work, but the proprietor only smiled again.

“I guess I sha’n’t lose much on this house,” he returned, as if musing aloud. “This down-town property is coming up. Business is getting in on all these side streets. I thought I paid a pretty good price for it, too.” He went on to talk of real estate, and March began to feel a certain resentment at his continued avoidance of the only topic in which they could really have a common interest. “You live down this way somewhere, don’t you?” the old man concluded.

“Yes. I wished to be near my work.” March was vexed with himself for having recurred to it; but afterward he was not sure but Dryfoos shared his own diffidence in the matter, and was waiting for him to bring it openly into the talk. At times he seemed wary and masterful, and then March felt that he was being examined and tested; at others so simple that March might well have fancied that he needed encouragement, and desired it. He talked of his wife and daughters in a way that invited March to say friendly things of his family, which appeared to give the old man first an undue pleasure and then a final distrust. At moments he turned, with an effect of finding relief in it, to his son and spoke to him across March of matters which he was unacquainted with; he did not seem aware that this was rude, but the young man must have felt it so; he always brought the conversation back, and once at some cost to himself when his father made it personal.

“I want to make a regular New York business man out of that fellow,” he said to March, pointing at Conrad with his stick. “You s’pose I’m ever going to do it?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said March, trying to fall in with the joke. “Do you mean nothing but a business man?”

The old man laughed at whatever latent meaning he fancied in this, and said: “You think he would be a little too much for me there? Well, I’ve seen enough of ’em to know it don’t always take a large pattern of a man to do a large business. But I want him to get the business training, and then if he wants to go into something else he knows what the world is, anyway. Heigh?”

“Oh yes!” March assented, with some compassion for the young man reddening patiently under his father’s comment.

Dryfoos went on as if his son were not in hearing. “Now that boy wanted to be a preacher. What does a preacher know about the world he preaches against when he’s been brought up a preacher? He don’t know so much as a bad little boy in his Sunday-school; he knows about as much as a girl. I always told him, You be a man first, and then you be a preacher, if you want to. Heigh?”

“Precisely.” March began to feel some compassion for himself in being witness of the young fellow’s discomfort under his father’s homily.

“When we first come to New York, I told him, Now here’s your chance to see the world on a big scale. You know already what work and saving and steady habits and sense will bring a man, to; you don’t want to go round among the rich; you want to go among the poor, and see what laziness and drink and dishonesty and foolishness will bring men to. And I guess he knows, about as well as anybody; and if he ever goes to preaching he’ll know what he’s preaching about.” The old man smiled his fierce, simple smile, and in his sharp eyes March fancied contempt of the ambition he had balked in his son. The present scene must have been one of many between them, ending in meek submission on the part of the young man, whom his father, perhaps without realizing his cruelty, treated as a child. March took it hard that he should be made to suffer in the presence of a co-ordinate power like himself, and began to dislike the old man out of proportion to his offence, which might have been mere want of taste, or an effect of mere embarrassment before him. But evidently, whatever rebellion his daughters had carried through against him, he had kept his dominion over this gentle spirit unbroken. March did not choose to make any response, but to let him continue, if he would, entirely upon his own impulse.

II.

A silence followed, of rather painful length. It was broken by the cheery voice of Fulkerson, sent before him to herald Fulkerson’s cheery person. “Well, I suppose you’ve got the glorious success of ‘Every Other Week’ down pretty cold in your talk by this time. I should have been up sooner to join you, but I was nipping a man for the last page of the cover. I guess we’ll have to let the Muse have that for an advertisement instead of a poem the next time, March. Well, the old gentleman given you boys your scolding?” The person of Fulkerson had got into the room long before he reached this question, and had planted itself astride a chair. Fulkerson looked over the chairback, now at March, and now at the elder Dryfoos as he spoke.

March answered him. “I guess we must have been waiting for you,
Fulkerson. At any rate, we hadn’t got to the scolding yet.”

“Why, I didn’t suppose Mr. Dryfoos could ‘a’ held in so long. I understood he was awful mad at the way the thing started off, and wanted to give you a piece of his mind, when he got at you. I inferred as much from a remark that he made.” March and Dryfoos looked foolish, as men do when made the subject of this sort of merry misrepresentation.

“I reckon my scolding will keep awhile yet,” said the old man, dryly.

“Well, then, I guess it’s a good chance to give Mr. Dryfoos an idea of what we’ve really done — just while we’re resting, as Artemus Ward says. Heigh, March?”

“I will let you blow the trumpet, Fulkerson. I think it belongs strictly to the advertising department,” said March. He now distinctly resented the old man’s failure to say anything to him of the magazine; he made his inference that it was from a suspicion of his readiness to presume upon a recognition of his share in the success, and he was determined to second no sort of appeal for it.

“The advertising department is the heart and soul of every business,” said Fulkerson, hardily, “and I like to keep my hand in with a little practise on the trumpet in private. I don’t believe Mr. Dryfoos has got any idea of the extent of this thing. He’s been out among those Rackensackens, where we were all born, and he’s read the notices in their seven by nine dailies, and he’s seen the thing selling on the cars, and he thinks he appreciates what’s been done. But I should just like to take him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him ‘Every Other Week’ on the centre tables of the millionaires — the Vanderbilts and the Astors — and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and let him judge for himself. It’s the talk of the clubs and the dinner-tables; children cry for it; it’s the Castoria of literature and the Pearline of art, the ‘Won’t-be-happy-till-he-gets-it of every enlighteneds man, woman, and child in this vast city. I knew we could capture the country; but, my goodness! I didn’t expect to have New York fall into our hands at a blow. But that’s just exactly what New York has done. ‘Every Other Week’ supplies the long-felt want that’s been grinding round in New York and keeping it awake nights ever since the war. It’s the culmination of all the high and ennobling ideals of the past.”

“How much,” asked Dryfoos, “do you expect to get out of it the first year, if it keeps the start it’s got?”

“Comes right down to business, every time!” said Fulkerson, referring the characteristic to March with a delighted glance. “Well, sir, if everything works right, and we get rain enough to fill up the springs, and it isn’t a grasshopper year, I expect to clear above all expenses something in the neighborhood of twenty-five thousand dollars.”

“Humph! And you are all going to work a year — editor, manager, publisher, artists, writers, printers, and the rest of ’em — to clear twenty-five thousand dollars? — I made that much in half a day in Moffitt once. I see it made in half a minute in Wall Street, sometimes.” The old man presented this aspect of the case with a good-natured contempt, which included Fulkerson and his enthusiasm in an obvious liking.

His son suggested, “But when we make that money here, no one loses it.”

“Can you prove that?” His father turned sharply upon him. “Whatever is won is lost. It’s all a game; it don’t make any difference what you bet on. Business is business, and a business man takes his risks with his eyes open.”

“Ah, but the glory!” Fulkerson insinuated with impudent persiflage. “I hadn’t got to the glory yet, because it’s hard to estimate it; but put the glory at the lowest figure, Mr. Dryfoos, and add it to the twenty-five thousand, and you’ve got an annual income from ‘Every Other Week’ of dollars enough to construct a silver railroad, double-track, from this office to the moon. I don’t mention any of the sister planets because I like to keep within bounds.”

Dryfoos showed his lower teeth for pleasure in Fulkerson’s fooling, and said, “That’s what I like about you, Mr. Fulkerson — you always keep within bounds.”

“Well, I ain’t a shrinking Boston violet, like March, here. More sunflower in my style of diffidence; but I am modest, I don’t deny it,” said Fulkerson. “And I do hate to have a thing overstated.”

“And the glory — you do really think there’s something in the glory that pays?”

“Not a doubt of it! I shouldn’t care for the paltry return in money,” said Fulkerson, with a burlesque of generous disdain, “if it wasn’t for the glory along with it.”

“And how should you feel about the glory, if there was no money along with it?”

“Well, sir, I’m happy to say we haven’t come to that yet.”

“Now, Conrad, here,” said the old man, with a sort of pathetic rancor, “would rather have the glory alone. I believe he don’t even care much for your kind of glory, either, Mr. Fulkerson.”

Fulkerson ran his little eyes curiously over Conrad’s face and then March’s, as if searching for a trace there of something gone before which would enable him to reach Dryfoos’s whole meaning. He apparently resolved to launch himself upon conjecture. “Oh, well, we know how Conrad feels about the things of this world, anyway. I should like to take ’em on the plane of another sphere, too, sometimes; but I noticed a good while ago that this was the world I was born into, and so I made up my mind that I would do pretty much what I saw the rest of the folks doing here below. And I can’t see but what Conrad runs the thing on business principles in his department, and I guess you’ll find it so if you look into it. I consider that we’re a whole team and big dog under the wagon with you to draw on for supplies, and March, here, at the head of the literary business, and Conrad in the counting-room, and me to do the heavy lying in the advertising part. Oh, and Beaton, of course, in the art. I ‘most forgot Beaton — Hamlet with Hamlet left out.”

Dryfoos looked across at his son. “Wasn’t that the fellow’s name that was there last night?”

“Yes,” said Conrad.

The old man rose. “Well, I reckon I got to be going. You ready to go up-town, Conrad?”

“Well, not quite yet, father.”

The old man shook hands with March, and went downstairs, followed by his son.

Fulkerson remained.

“He didn’t jump at the chance you gave him to compliment us all round,
Fulkerson,” said March, with a smile not wholly of pleasure.

Fulkerson asked, with as little joy in the grin he had on, “Didn’t he say anything to you before I came in?”

“Not a word.”

“Dogged if I know what to make of it,” sighed Fulkerson, “but I guess he’s been having a talk with Conrad that’s soured on him. I reckon maybe he came back expecting to find that boy reconciled to the glory of this world, and Conrad’s showed himself just as set against it as ever.”

“It might have been that,” March admitted, pensively. “I fancied something of the kind myself from words the old man let drop.”

Fulkerson made him explain, and then he said:

“That’s it, then; and it’s all right. Conrad ‘ll come round in time; and all we’ve got to do is to have patience with the old man till he does. I know he likes you.” Fulkerson affirmed this only interrogatively, and looked so anxiously to March for corroboration that March laughed.

“He dissembled his love,” he said; but afterward, in describing to his wife his interview with Mr. Dryfoos, he was less amused with this fact.

When she saw that he was a little cast down by it, she began to encourage him. “He’s just a common, ignorant man, and probably didn’t know how to express himself. You may be perfectly sure that he’s delighted with the success of the magazine, and that he understands as well as you do that he owes it all to you.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure. I don’t believe a man’s any better for having made money so easily and rapidly as Dryfoos has done, and I doubt if he’s any wiser. I don’t know just the point he’s reached in his evolution from grub to beetle, but I do know that so far as it’s gone the process must have involved a bewildering change of ideals and criterions. I guess he’s come to despise a great many things that he once respected, and that intellectual ability is among them — what we call intellectual ability. He must have undergone a moral deterioration, an atrophy of the generous instincts, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t have reached his mental make-up. He has sharpened, but he has narrowed; his sagacity has turned into suspicion, his caution to meanness, his courage to ferocity. That’s the way I philosophize a man of Dryfoos’s experience, and I am not very proud when I realize that such a man and his experience are the ideal and ambition of most Americans. I rather think they came pretty near being mine, once.”

“No, dear, they never did,” his wife protested.

“Well, they’re not likely to be in the future. The Dryfoos feature of
‘Every Other Week’ is thoroughly distasteful to me.”

“Why, but he hasn’t really got anything to do with it, has he, beyond furnishing the money?”

“That’s the impression that Fulkerson has allowed us to get. But the man that holds the purse holds the reins. He may let us guide the horse, but when he likes he can drive. If we don’t like his driving, then we can get down.”

Mrs. March was less interested in this figure of speech than in the personal aspects involved. “Then you think Mr. Fulkerson has deceived you?”

“Oh no!” said her husband, laughing. “But I think he has deceived himself, perhaps.”

“How?” she pursued.

“He may have thought he was using Dryfoos, when Dryfoos was using him, and he may have supposed he was not afraid of him when he was very much so. His courage hadn’t been put to the test, and courage is a matter of proof, like proficiency on the fiddle, you know: you can’t tell whether you’ve got it till you try.”

“Nonsense! Do you mean that he would ever sacrifice you to Mr. Dryfoos?”

“I hope he may not be tempted. But I’d rather be taking the chances with Fulkerson alone than with Fulkerson and Dryfoos to back him. Dryfoos seems, somehow, to take the poetry and the pleasure out of the thing.”

Mrs. March was a long time silent. Then she began, “Well, my dear, I never wanted to come to New York—”

“Neither did I,” March promptly put in.

“But now that we’re here,” she went on, “I’m not going to have you letting every little thing discourage you. I don’t see what there was in Mr. Dryfoos’s manner to give you any anxiety. He’s just a common, stupid, inarticulate country person, and he didn’t know how to express himself, as I said in the beginning, and that’s the reason he didn’t say anything.”

“Well, I don’t deny you’re right about it.”

“It’s dreadful,” his wife continued, “to be mixed up with such a man and his family, but I don’t believe he’ll ever meddle with your management, and, till he does, all you need do is to have as little to do with him as possible, and go quietly on your own way.”

“Oh, I shall go on quietly enough,” said March. “I hope I sha’n’t begin going stealthily.”

“Well, my dear,” said Mrs. March, “just let me know when you’re tempted to do that. If ever you sacrifice the smallest grain of your honesty or your self-respect to Mr. Dryfoos, or anybody else, I will simply renounce you.”

“In view of that I’m rather glad the management of ‘Every Other Week’ involves tastes and not convictions,” said March.

III.

That night Dryfoos was wakened from his after-dinner nap by the sound of gay talk and nervous giggling in the drawing-room. The talk, which was Christine’s, and the giggling, which was Mela’s, were intershot with the heavier tones of a man’s voice; and Dryfoos lay awhile on the leathern lounge in his library, trying to make out whether he knew the voice. His wife sat in a deep chair before the fire, with her eyes on his face, waiting for him to wake.

“Who is that out there?” he asked, without opening his eyes.

“Indeed, indeed, I don’t know, Jacob,” his wife answered. “I reckon it’s just some visitor of the girls’.”

“Was I snoring?”

“Not a bit. You was sleeping as quiet! I did hate to have ’em wake you, and I was just goin’ out to shoo them. They’ve been playin’ something, and that made them laugh.”

“I didn’t know but I had snored,” said the old man, sitting up.

“No,” said his wife. Then she asked, wistfully, “Was you out at the old place, Jacob?”

“Yes.”

“Did it look natural?”

“Yes; mostly. They’re sinking the wells down in the woods pasture.”

“And — the children’s graves?”

“They haven’t touched that part. But I reckon we got to have ’em moved to the cemetery. I bought a lot.”

The old woman began softly to weep. “It does seem too hard that they can’t be let to rest in peace, pore little things. I wanted you and me to lay there, too, when our time come, Jacob. Just there, back o’ the beehives and under them shoomakes — my, I can see the very place! And I don’t believe I’ll ever feel at home anywheres else. I woon’t know where I am when the trumpet sounds. I have to think before I can tell where the east is in New York; and what if I should git faced the wrong way when I raise? Jacob, I wonder you could sell it!” Her head shook, and the firelight shone on her tears as she searched the folds of her dress for her pocket.

A peal of laughter came from the drawing-room, and then the sound of chords struck on the piano.

“Hush! Don’t you cry, ‘Liz’beth!” said Dryfoos. “Here; take my handkerchief. I’ve got a nice lot in the cemetery, and I’m goin’ to have a monument, with two lambs on it — like the one you always liked so much. It ain’t the fashion, any more, to have family buryin’ grounds; they’re collectin’ ’em into the cemeteries, all round.”

“I reckon I got to bear it,” said his wife, muffling her face in his handkerchief. “And I suppose the Lord kin find me, wherever I am. But I always did want to lay just there. You mind how we used to go out and set there, after milkin’, and watch the sun go down, and talk about where their angels was, and try to figger it out?”

“I remember, ‘Liz’beth.”

The man’s voice in the drawing-room sang a snatch of French song, insolent, mocking, salient; and then Christine’s attempted the same strain, and another cry of laughter from Mela followed.

“Well, I always did expect to lay there. But I reckon it’s all right. It won’t be a great while, now, anyway. Jacob, I don’t believe I’m a-goin’ to live very long. I know it don’t agree with me here.”

“Oh, I guess it does, ‘Liz’beth. You’re just a little pulled down with the weather. It’s coming spring, and you feel it; but the doctor says you’re all right. I stopped in, on the way up, and he says so.”

“I reckon he don’t know everything,” the old woman persisted: “I’ve been runnin’ down ever since we left Moffitt, and I didn’t feel any too well there, even. It’s a very strange thing, Jacob, that the richer you git, the less you ain’t able to stay where you want to, dead or alive.”

“It’s for the children we do it,” said Dryfoos. “We got to give them their chance in the world.”

“Oh, the world! They ought to bear the yoke in their youth, like we done.
I know it’s what Coonrod would like to do.”

Dryfoos got upon his feet. “If Coonrod ‘ll mind his own business, and do what I want him to, he’ll have yoke enough to bear.” He moved from his wife, without further effort to comfort her, and pottered heavily out into the dining-room. Beyond its obscurity stretched the glitter of the deep drawing-room. His feet, in their broad; flat slippers, made no sound on the dense carpet, and he came unseen upon the little group there near the piano. Mela perched upon the stool with her back to the keys, and Beaton bent over Christine, who sat with a banjo in her lap, letting him take her hands and put them in the right place on the instrument. Her face was radiant with happiness, and Mela was watching her with foolish, unselfish pleasure in her bliss.

There was nothing wrong in the affair to a man of Dryfoos’s traditions and perceptions, and if it had been at home in the farm sitting-room, or even in his parlor at Moffitt, he would not have minded a young man’s placing his daughter’s hands on a banjo, or even holding them there; it would have seemed a proper, attention from him if he was courting her. But here, in such a house as this, with the daughter of a man who had made as much money as he had, he did not know but it was a liberty. He felt the angry doubt of it which beset him in regard to so many experiences of his changed life; he wanted to show his sense of it, if it was a liberty, but he did not know how, and he did not know that it was so. Besides, he could not help a touch of the pleasure in Christine’s happiness which Mela showed; and he would have gone back to the library, if he could, without being discovered.

But Beaton had seen him, and Dryfoos, with a nonchalant nod to the young man, came forward. “What you got there, Christine?”

“A banjo,” said the girl, blushing in her father’s presence.

Mela gurgled. “Mr. Beaton is learnun’ her the first position.”

Beaton was not embarrassed. He was in evening dress, and his face, pointed with its brown beard, showed extremely handsome above the expanse of his broad, white shirt-front. He gave back as nonchalant a nod as he had got, and, without further greeting to Dryfoos, he said to Christine: “No, no. You must keep your hand and arm so.” He held them in position. “There! Now strike with your right hand. See?”

“I don’t believe I can ever learn,” said the girl, with a fond upward look at him.

“Oh yes, you can,” said Beaton.

They both ignored Dryfoos in the little play of protests which followed, and he said, half jocosely, half suspiciously, “And is the banjo the fashion, now?” He remembered it as the emblem of low-down show business, and associated it with end-men and blackened faces and grotesque shirt-collars.

“It’s all the rage,” Mela shouted, in answer for all. “Everybody plays it. Mr. Beaton borrowed this from a lady friend of his.”

“Humph! Pity I got you a piano, then,” said Dryfoos. “A banjo would have been cheaper.”

Beaton so far admitted him to the conversation as to seem reminded of the piano by his mentioning it. He said to Mela, “Oh, won’t you just strike those chords?” and as Mela wheeled about and beat the keys he took the banjo from Christine and sat down with it. “This way!” He strummed it, and murmured the tune Dryfoos had heard him singing from the library, while he kept his beautiful eyes floating on Christine’s. “You try that, now; it’s very simple.”

“Where is Mrs. Mandel?” Dryfoos demanded, trying to assert himself.

Neither of the girls seemed to have heard him at first in the chatter they broke into over what Beaton proposed. Then Mela said, absently, “Oh, she had to go out to see one of her friends that’s sick,” and she struck the piano keys. “Come; try it, Chris!”

Dryfoos turned about unheeded and went back to the library. He would have liked to put Beaton out of his house, and in his heart he burned against him as a contumacious hand; he would have liked to discharge him from the art department of ‘Every Other Week’ at once. But he was aware of not having treated Beaton with much ceremony, and if the young man had returned his behavior in kind, with an electrical response to his own feeling, had he any right to complain? After all, there was no harm in his teaching Christine the banjo.

His wife still sat looking into the fire. “I can’t see,” she said, “as we’ve got a bit more comfort of our lives, Jacob, because we’ve got such piles and piles of money. I wisht to gracious we was back on the farm this minute. I wisht you had held out ag’inst the childern about sellin’ it; ’twould ‘a’ bin the best thing fur ‘em, I say. I believe in my soul they’ll git spoiled here in New York. I kin see a change in ’em a’ready — in the girls.”

Dryfoos stretched himself on the lounge again. “I can’t see as Coonrod is much comfort, either. Why ain’t he here with his sisters? What does all that work of his on the East Side amount to? It seems as if he done it to cross me, as much as anything.” Dryfoos complained to his wife on the basis of mere affectional habit, which in married life often survives the sense of intellectual equality. He did not expect her to reason with him, but there was help in her listening, and though she could only soothe his fretfulness with soft answers which were often wide of the purpose, he still went to her for solace. “Here, I’ve gone into this newspaper business, or whatever it is, on his account, and he don’t seem any more satisfied than ever. I can see he hain’t got his heart in it.”

“The pore boy tries; I know he does, Jacob; and he wants to please you. But he give up a good deal when he give up bein’ a preacher; I s’pose we ought to remember that.”

“A preacher!” sneered Dryfoos. “I reckon bein’ a preacher wouldn’t satisfy him now. He had the impudence to tell me this afternoon that he would like to be a priest; and he threw it up to me that he never could be because I’d kept him from studyin’.”

“He don’t mean a Catholic priest — not a Roman one, Jacob,” the old woman explained, wistfully. “He’s told me all about it. They ain’t the kind o’ Catholics we been used to; some sort of ‘Piscopalians; and they do a heap o’ good amongst the poor folks over there. He says we ain’t got any idea how folks lives in them tenement houses, hundreds of ’em in one house, and whole families in a room; and it burns in his heart to help ’em like them Fathers, as he calls ‘em, that gives their lives to it. He can’t be a Father, he says, because he can’t git the eddication now; but he can be a Brother; and I can’t find a word to say ag’inst it, when it gits to talkin’, Jacob.”

“I ain’t saying anything against his priests, ‘Liz’beth,” said Dryfoos. “They’re all well enough in their way; they’ve given up their lives to it, and it’s a matter of business with them, like any other. But what I’m talking about now is Coonrod. I don’t object to his doin’ all the charity he wants to, and the Lord knows I’ve never been stingy with him about it. He might have all the money he wants, to give round any way he pleases.”

“That’s what I told him once, but he says money ain’t the thing — or not the only thing you got to give to them poor folks. You got to give your time and your knowledge and your love — I don’t know what all you got to give yourself, if you expect to help ‘em. That’s what Coonrod says.”

“Well, I can tell him that charity begins at home,” said Dryfoos, sitting up in his impatience. “And he’d better give himself to us a little — to his old father and mother. And his sisters. What’s he doin’ goin’ off there to his meetings, and I don’t know what all, an’ leavin’ them here alone?”

“Why, ain’t Mr. Beaton with ‘em?” asked the old woman. “I thought I heared his voice.”

“Mr. Beaton! Of course he is! And who’s Mr. Beaton, anyway?”

“Why, ain’t he one of the men in Coonrod’s office? I thought I heared—”

“Yes, he is! But who is he? What’s he doing round here? Is he makin’ up to Christine?”

“I reckon he is. From Mely’s talk, she’s about crazy over the fellow.
Don’t you like him, Jacob?”

“I don’t know him, or what he is. He hasn’t got any manners. Who brought him here? How’d he come to come, in the first place?”

“Mr. Fulkerson brung him, I believe,” said the old woman, patiently.

“Fulkerson!” Dryfoos snorted. “Where’s Mrs. Mandel, I should like to know? He brought her, too. Does she go traipsin’ off this way every evening?”

“No, she seems to be here pretty regular most o’ the time. I don’t know how we could ever git along without her, Jacob; she seems to know just what to do, and the girls would be ten times as outbreakin’ without her. I hope you ain’t thinkin’ o’ turnin’ her off, Jacob?”

Dryfoos did not think it necessary to answer such a question. “It’s all Fulkerson, Fulkerson, Fulkerson. It seems to me that Fulkerson about runs this family. He brought Mrs. Mandel, and he brought that Beaton, and he brought that Boston fellow! I guess I give him a dose, though; and I’ll learn Fulkerson that he can’t have everything his own way. I don’t want anybody to help me spend my money. I made it, and I can manage it. I guess Mr. Fulkerson can bear a little watching now. He’s been travelling pretty free, and he’s got the notion he’s driving, maybe. I’m a-going to look after that book a little myself.”

“You’ll kill yourself, Jacob,” said his wife, “tryin’ to do so many things. And what is it all fur? I don’t see as we’re better off, any, for all the money. It’s just as much care as it used to be when we was all there on the farm together. I wisht we could go back, Ja—”

“We can’t go back!” shouted the old man, fiercely. “There’s no farm any more to go back to. The fields is full of gas-wells and oil-wells and hell-holes generally; the house is tore down, and the barn’s goin’—”

“The barn!” gasped the old woman. “Oh, my!”

“If I was to give all I’m worth this minute, we couldn’t go back to the farm, any more than them girls in there could go back and be little children. I don’t say we’re any better off, for the money. I’ve got more of it now than I ever had; and there’s no end to the luck; it pours in. But I feel like I was tied hand and foot. I don’t know which way to move; I don’t know what’s best to do about anything. The money don’t seem to buy anything but more and more care and trouble. We got a big house that we ain’t at home in; and we got a lot of hired girls round under our feet that hinder and don’t help. Our children don’t mind us, and we got no friends or neighbors. But it had to be. I couldn’t help but sell the farm, and we can’t go back to it, for it ain’t there. So don’t you say anything more about it, ‘Liz’beth.”

“Pore Jacob!” said his wife. “Well, I woon’t, dear.”

IV

It was clear to Beaton that Dryfoos distrusted him; and the fact heightened his pleasure in Christine’s liking for him. He was as sure of this as he was of the other, though he was not so sure of any reason for his pleasure in it. She had her charm; the charm of wildness to which a certain wildness in himself responded; and there were times when his fancy contrived a common future for them, which would have a prosperity forced from the old fellow’s love of the girl. Beaton liked the idea of this compulsion better than he liked the idea of the money; there was something a little repulsive in that; he imagined himself rejecting it; he almost wished he was enough in love with the girl to marry her without it; that would be fine. He was taken with her in a certain measure, in a certain way; the question was in what measure, in what way.

It was partly to escape from this question that he hurried down-town, and decided to spend with the Leightons the hour remaining on his hands before it was time to go to the reception for which he was dressed. It seemed to him important that he should see Alma Leighton. After all, it was her charm that was most abiding with him; perhaps it was to be final. He found himself very happy in his present relations with her. She had dropped that barrier of pretences and ironical surprise. It seemed to him that they had gone back to the old ground of common artistic interest which he had found so pleasant the summer before. Apparently she and her mother had both forgiven his neglect of them in the first months of their stay in New York; he was sure that Mrs. Leighton liked him as well as ever, and, if there was still something a little provisional in Alma’s manner at times, it was something that piqued more than it discouraged; it made him curious, not anxious.

He found the young ladies with Fulkerson when he rang. He seemed to be amusing them both, and they were both amused beyond the merit of so small a pleasantry, Beaton thought, when Fulkerson said: “Introduce myself, Mr. Beaton: Mr. Fulkerson of ‘Every Other Week.’ Think I’ve met you at our place.” The girls laughed, and Alma explained that her mother was not very well, and would be sorry not to see him. Then she turned, as he felt, perversely, and went on talking with Fulkerson and left him to Miss Woodburn.

She finally recognized his disappointment: “Ah don’t often get a chance at you, Mr. Beaton, and Ah’m just goin’ to toak yo’ to death. Yo’ have been Soath yo’self, and yo’ know ho’ we do toak.”

“I’ve survived to say yes,” Beaton admitted.

“Oh, now, do you think we toak so much mo’ than you do in the No’th?” the young lady deprecated.

“I don’t know. I only know you can’t talk too much for me. I should like to hear you say Soath and house and about for the rest of my life.”

“That’s what Ah call raght personal, Mr. Beaton. Now Ah’m goin’ to be personal, too.” Miss Woodburn flung out over her lap the square of cloth she was embroidering, and asked him: “Don’t you think that’s beautiful? Now, as an awtust — a great awtust?”

“As a great awtust, yes,” said Beaton, mimicking her accent. “If I were less than great I might have something to say about the arrangement of colors. You’re as bold and original as Nature.”

“Really? Oh, now, do tell me yo’ favo’ite colo’, Mr. Beaton.”

“My favorite color? Bless my soul, why should I prefer any? Is blue good, or red wicked? Do people have favorite colors?” Beaton found himself suddenly interested.

“Of co’se they do,” answered the girl. “Don’t awtusts?”

“I never heard of one that had — consciously.”

“Is it possible? I supposed they all had. Now mah favo’ite colo’ is gawnet. Don’t you think it’s a pretty colo’?”

“It depends upon how it’s used. Do you mean in neckties?” Beaton stole a glance at the one Fulkerson was wearing.

Miss Woodburn laughed with her face bowed upon her wrist. “Ah do think you gentlemen in the No’th awe ten tahms as lahvely as the ladies.”

“Strange,” said Beaton. “In the South — Soath, excuse me! I made the observation that the ladies were ten times as lively as the gentlemen. What is that you’re working?”

“This?” Miss Woodburn gave it another flirt, and looked at it with a glance of dawning recognition. “Oh, this is a table-covah. Wouldn’t you lahke to see where it’s to go?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Well, if you’ll be raght good I’ll let yo’ give me some professional advass about putting something in the co’ners or not, when you have seen it on the table.”

She rose and led the way into the other room. Beaton knew she wanted to talk with him about something else; but he waited patiently to let her play her comedy out. She spread the cover on the table, and he advised her, as he saw she wished, against putting anything in the corners; just run a line of her stitch around the edge, he said.

“Mr. Fulkerson and Ah, why, we’ve been having a regular faght aboat it,” she commented. “But we both agreed, fahnally, to leave it to you; Mr. Fulkerson said you’d be sure to be raght. Ah’m so glad you took mah sahde. But he’s a great admahrer of yours, Mr. Beaton,” she concluded, demurely, suggestively.

“Is he? Well, I’m a great admirer of Fulkerson,” said Beaton, with a capricious willingness to humor her wish to talk about Fulkerson. “He’s a capital fellow; generous, magnanimous, with quite an ideal of friendship and an eye single to the main chance all the time. He would advertise ‘Every Other Week’ on his family vault.”

Miss Woodburn laughed, and said she should tell him what Beaton had said.

“Do. But he’s used to defamation from me, and he’ll think you’re joking.”

“Ah suppose,” said Miss Woodburn, “that he’s quahte the tahpe of a New York business man.” She added, as if it followed logically, “He’s so different from what I thought a New York business man would be.”

“It’s your Virginia tradition to despise business,” said Beaton, rudely.

Miss Woodburn laughed again. “Despahse it? Mah goodness! we want to get into it and woak it fo’ all it’s wo’th,’ as Mr. Fulkerson says. That tradition is all past. You don’t know what the Soath is now. Ah suppose mah fathaw despahses business, but he’s a tradition himself, as Ah tell him.” Beaton would have enjoyed joining the young lady in anything she might be going to say in derogation of her father, but he restrained himself, and she went on more and more as if she wished to account for her father’s habitual hauteur with Beaton, if not to excuse it. “Ah tell him he don’t understand the rising generation. He was brought up in the old school, and he thinks we’re all just lahke he was when he was young, with all those ahdeals of chivalry and family; but, mah goodness! it’s money that cyoants no’adays in the Soath, just lahke it does everywhere else. Ah suppose, if we could have slavery back in the fawm mah fathaw thinks it could have been brought up to, when the commercial spirit wouldn’t let it alone, it would be the best thing; but we can’t have it back, and Ah tell him we had better have the commercial spirit as the next best thing.”

Miss Woodburn went on, with sufficient loyalty and piety, to expose the difference of her own and her father’s ideals, but with what Beaton thought less reference to his own unsympathetic attention than to a knowledge finally of the personnel and materiel of ‘Every Other Week.’ and Mr. Fulkerson’s relation to the enterprise. “You most excuse my asking so many questions, Mr. Beaton. You know it’s all mah doing that we awe heah in New York. Ah just told mah fathaw that if he was evah goin’ to do anything with his wrahtings, he had got to come No’th, and Ah made him come. Ah believe he’d have stayed in the Soath all his lahfe. And now Mr. Fulkerson wants him to let his editor see some of his wrahtings, and Ah wanted to know something aboat the magazine. We awe a great deal excited aboat it in this hoase, you know, Mr. Beaton,” she concluded, with a look that now transferred the interest from Fulkerson to Alma. She led the way back to the room where they were sitting, and went up to triumph over Fulkerson with Beaton’s decision about the table-cover.

Alma was left with Beaton near the piano, and he began to talk about the
Dryfooses as he sat down on the piano-stool. He said he had been giving
Miss Dryfoos a lesson on the banjo; he had borrowed the banjo of Miss
Vance. Then he struck the chord he had been trying to teach Christine,
and played over the air he had sung.

“How do you like that?” he asked, whirling round.

“It seems rather a disrespectful little tune, somehow,” said Alma, placidly.

Beaton rested his elbow on the corner of the piano and gazed dreamily at her. “Your perceptions are wonderful. It is disrespectful. I played it, up there, because I felt disrespectful to them.”

“Do you claim that as a merit?”

“No, I state it as a fact. How can you respect such people?”

“You might respect yourself, then,” said the girl. “Or perhaps that wouldn’t be so easy, either.”

“No, it wouldn’t. I like to have you say these things to me,” said
Beaton, impartially.

“Well, I like to say them,” Alma returned.

“They do me good.”

“Oh, I don’t know that that was my motive.”

“There is no one like you — no one,” said Beaton, as if apostrophizing her in her absence. “To come from that house, with its assertions of money — you can hear it chink; you can smell the foul old banknotes; it stifles you — into an atmosphere like this, is like coming into another world.”

“Thank you,” said Alma. “I’m glad there isn’t that unpleasant odor here; but I wish there was a little more of the chinking.”

“No, no! Don’t say that!” he implored. “I like to think that there is one soul uncontaminated by the sense of money in this big, brutal, sordid city.”

“You mean two,” said Alma, with modesty. “But if you stifle at the
Dryfooses’, why do you go there?”

“Why do I go?” he mused. “Don’t you believe in knowing all the natures, the types, you can? Those girls are a strange study: the young one is a simple, earthly creature, as common as an oat-field and the other a sort of sylvan life: fierce, flashing, feline—”

Alma burst out into a laugh. “What apt alliteration! And do they like being studied? I should think the sylvan life might — scratch.”

“No,” said Beaton, with melancholy absence, “it only-purrs.”

The girl felt a rising indignation. “Well, then, Mr. Beaton, I should hope it would scratch, and bite, too. I think you’ve no business to go about studying people, as you do. It’s abominable.”

“Go on,” said the young man. “That Puritan conscience of yours! It appeals to the old Covenanter strain in me — like a voice of pre-existence. Go on—”

“Oh, if I went on I should merely say it was not only abominable, but contemptible.”

“You could be my guardian angel, Alma,” said the young man, making his eyes more and more slumbrous and dreamy.

“Stuff! I hope I have a soul above buttons!”

He smiled, as she rose, and followed her across the room. “Good-night;
Mr. Beaton,” she said.

Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson came in from the other room. “What! You’re not going, Beaton?”

“Yes; I’m going to a reception. I stopped in on my way.”

“To kill time,” Alma explained.

“Well,” said Fulkerson, gallantly, “this is the last place I should like to do it. But I guess I’d better be going, too. It has sometimes occurred to me that there is such a thing as staying too late. But with Brother Beaton, here, just starting in for an evening’s amusement, it does seem a little early yet. Can’t you urge me to stay, somebody?”

The two girls laughed, and Miss Woodburn said:

“Mr. Beaton is such a butterfly of fashion! Ah wish Ah was on mah way to a pawty. Ah feel quahte envious.”

“But he didn’t say it to make you,” Alma explained, with meek softness.

“Well, we can’t all be swells. Where is your party, anyway, Beaton?” asked Fulkerson. “How do you manage to get your invitations to those things? I suppose a fellow has to keep hinting round pretty lively, Neigh?”

Beaton took these mockeries serenely, and shook hands with Miss Woodburn, with the effect of having already shaken hands with Alma. She stood with hers clasped behind her.

V.

Beaton went away with the smile on his face which he had kept in listening to Fulkerson, and carried it with him to the reception. He believed that Alma was vexed with him for more personal reasons than she had implied; it flattered him that she should have resented what he told her of the Dryfooses. She had scolded him in their behalf apparently; but really because he had made her jealous by his interest, of whatever kind, in some one else. What followed, had followed naturally. Unless she had been quite a simpleton she could not have met his provisional love-making on any other terms; and the reason why Beaton chiefly liked Alma Leighton was that she was not a simpleton. Even up in the country, when she was overawed by his acquaintance, at first, she was not very deeply overawed, and at times she was not overawed at all. At such times she astonished him by taking his most solemn histrionics with flippant incredulity, and even burlesquing them. But he could see, all the same, that he had caught her fancy, and he admired the skill with which she punished his neglect when they met in New York. He had really come very near forgetting the Leightons; the intangible obligations of mutual kindness which hold some men so fast, hung loosely upon him; it would not have hurt him to break from them altogether; but when he recognized them at last, he found that it strengthened them indefinitely to have Alma ignore them so completely. If she had been sentimental, or softly reproachful, that would have been the end; he could not have stood it; he would have had to drop her. But when she met him on his own ground, and obliged him to be sentimental, the game was in her hands. Beaton laughed, now, when he thought of that, and he said to himself that the girl had grown immensely since she had come to New York; nothing seemed to have been lost upon her; she must have kept her eyes uncommonly wide open. He noticed that especially in their talks over her work; she had profited by everything she had seen and heard; she had all of Wetmore’s ideas pat; it amused Beaton to see how she seized every useful word that he dropped, too, and turned him to technical account whenever she could. He liked that; she had a great deal of talent; there was no question of that; if she were a man there could be no question of her future. He began to construct a future for her; it included provision for himself, too; it was a common future, in which their lives and work were united.

He was full of the glow of its prosperity when he met Margaret Vance at the reception.

The house was one where people might chat a long time together without publicly committing themselves to an interest in each other except such as grew out of each other’s ideas. Miss Vance was there because she united in her catholic sympathies or ambitions the objects of the fashionable people and of the aesthetic people who met there on common ground. It was almost the only house in New York where this happened often, and it did not happen very often there. It was a literary house, primarily, with artistic qualifications, and the frequenters of it were mostly authors and artists; Wetmore, who was always trying to fit everything with a phrase, said it was the unfrequenters who were fashionable. There was great ease there, and simplicity; and if there was not distinction, it was not for want of distinguished people, but because there seems to be some solvent in New York life that reduces all men to a common level, that touches everybody with its potent magic and brings to the surface the deeply underlying nobody. The effect for some temperaments, for consciousness, for egotism, is admirable; for curiosity, for hero worship, it is rather baffling. It is the spirit of the street transferred to the drawing-room; indiscriminating, levelling, but doubtless finally wholesome, and witnessing the immensity of the place, if not consenting to the grandeur of reputations or presences.

Beaton now denied that this house represented a salon at all, in the old sense; and he held that the salon was impossible, even undesirable, with us, when Miss Vance sighed for it. At any rate, he said that this turmoil of coming and going, this bubble and babble, this cackling and hissing of conversation was not the expression of any such civilization as had created the salon. Here, he owned, were the elements of intellectual delightfulness, but he said their assemblage in such quantity alone denied the salon; there was too much of a good thing. The French word implied a long evening of general talk among the guests, crowned with a little chicken at supper, ending at cock-crow. Here was tea, with milk or with lemon-baths of it and claret-cup for the hardier spirits throughout the evening. It was very nice, very pleasant, but it was not the little chicken — not the salon. In fact, he affirmed, the salon descended from above, out of the great world, and included the aesthetic world in it. But our great world — the rich people, were stupid, with no wish to be otherwise; they were not even curious about authors and artists. Beaton fancied himself speaking impartially, and so he allowed himself to speak bitterly; he said that in no other city in the world, except Vienna, perhaps, were such people so little a part of society.

“It isn’t altogether the rich people’s fault,” said Margaret; and she spoke impartially, too. “I don’t believe that the literary men and the artists would like a salon that descended to them. Madame Geoffrin, you know, was very plebeian; her husband was a business man of some sort.”

“He would have been a howling swell in New York,” said Beaton, still impartially.

Wetmore came up to their corner, with a scroll of bread and butter in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. Large and fat, and clean-shaven, he looked like a monk in evening dress.

“We were talking about salons,” said Margaret.

“Why don’t you open a salon yourself?” asked Wetmore, breathing thickly from the anxiety of getting through the crowd without spilling his tea.

“Like poor Lady Barberina Lemon?” said the girl, with a laugh. “What a good story! That idea of a woman who couldn’t be interested in any of the arts because she was socially and traditionally the material of them! We can, never reach that height of nonchalance in this country.”

“Not if we tried seriously?” suggested the painter. “I’ve an idea that if the Americans ever gave their minds to that sort of thing, they could take the palm — or the cake, as Beaton here would say — just as they do in everything else. When we do have an aristocracy, it will be an aristocracy that will go ahead of anything the world has ever seen. Why don’t somebody make a beginning, and go in openly for an ancestry, and a lower middle class, and an hereditary legislature, and all the rest? We’ve got liveries, and crests, and palaces, and caste feeling. We’re all right as far as we’ve gone, and we’ve got the money to go any length.”

“Like your natural-gas man, Mr. Beaton,” said the girl, with a smiling glance round at him.

“Ah!” said Wetmore, stirring his tea, “has Beaton got a natural-gas man?”

“My natural-gas man,” said Beaton, ignoring Wetmore’s question, “doesn’t know how to live in his palace yet, and I doubt if he has any caste feeling. I fancy his family believe themselves victims of it. They say — one of the young ladies does — that she never saw such an unsociable place as New York; nobody calls.”

“That’s good!” said Wetmore. “I suppose they’re all ready for company, too: good cook, furniture, servants, carriages?”

“Galore,” said Beaton.

“Well, that’s too bad. There’s a chance for you, Miss Vance. Doesn’t your philanthropy embrace the socially destitute as well as the financially? Just think of a family like that, without a friend, in a great city! I should think common charity had a duty there — not to mention the uncommon.”

He distinguished that kind as Margaret’s by a glance of ironical deference. She had a repute for good works which was out of proportion to the works, as it always is, but she was really active in that way, under the vague obligation, which we now all feel, to be helpful. She was of the church which seems to have found a reversion to the imposing ritual of the past the way back to the early ideals of Christian brotherhood.

“Oh, they seem to have Mr. Beaton,” Margaret answered, and Beaton felt obscurely flattered by her reference to his patronage of the Dryfooses.

He explained to Wetmore: “They have me because they partly own me.
Dryfoos is Fulkerson’s financial backer in ‘Every Other Week’.”

“Is that so? Well, that’s interesting, too. Aren’t you rather astonished, Miss Vance, to see what a petty thing Beaton is making of that magazine of his?”

“Oh,” said Margaret, “it’s so very nice, every way; it makes you feel as if you did have a country, after all. It’s as chic — that detestable little word! — as those new French books.”

“Beaton modelled it on them. But you mustn’t suppose he does everything about ‘Every Other Week’; he’d like you to. Beaton, you haven’t come up to that cover of your first number, since. That was the design of one of my pupils, Miss Vance — a little girl that Beaton discovered down in New Hampshire last summer.”

“Oh yes. And have you great hopes of her, Mr. Wetmore?”

“She seems to have more love of it and knack for it than any one of her sex I’ve seen yet. It really looks like a case of art for art’s sake, at times. But you can’t tell. They’re liable to get married at any moment, you know. Look here, Beaton, when your natural-gas man gets to the picture-buying stage in his development, just remember your old friends, will you? You know, Miss Vance, those new fellows have their regular stages. They never know what to do with their money, but they find out that people buy pictures, at one point. They shut your things up in their houses where nobody comes, and after a while they overeat themselves — they don’t know what else to do — and die of apoplexy, and leave your pictures to a gallery, and then they see the light. It’s slow, but it’s pretty sure. Well, I see Beaton isn’t going to move on, as he ought to do; and so I must. He always was an unconventional creature.”

Wetmore went away, but Beaton remained, and he outstayed several other people who came up to speak to Miss Vance. She was interested in everybody, and she liked the talk of these clever literary, artistic, clerical, even theatrical people, and she liked the sort of court with which they recognized her fashion as well as her cleverness; it was very pleasant to be treated intellectually as if she were one of themselves, and socially as if she was not habitually the same, but a sort of guest in Bohemia, a distinguished stranger. If it was Arcadia rather than Bohemia, still she felt her quality of distinguished stranger. The flattery of it touched her fancy, and not her vanity; she had very little vanity. Beaton’s devotion made the same sort of appeal; it was not so much that she liked him as she liked being the object of his admiration. She was a girl of genuine sympathies, intellectual rather than sentimental. In fact, she was an intellectual person, whom qualities of the heart saved from being disagreeable, as they saved her on the other hand from being worldly or cruel in her fashionableness. She had read a great many books, and had ideas about them, quite courageous and original ideas; she knew about pictures — she had been in Wetmore’s class; she was fond of music; she was willing to understand even politics; in Boston she might have been agnostic, but in New York she was sincerely religious; she was very accomplished; and perhaps it was her goodness that prevented her feeling what was not best in Beaton.

“Do you think,” she said, after the retreat of one of the comers and goers left her alone with him again, “that those young ladies would like me to call on them?”

“Those young ladies?” Beaton echoed. “Miss Leighton and—”

“No; I have been there with my aunt’s cards already.”

“Oh yes,” said Beaton, as if he had known of it; he admired the pluck and pride with which Alma had refrained from ever mentioning the fact to him, and had kept her mother from mentioning it, which must have been difficult.

“I mean the Miss Dryfooses. It seems really barbarous, if nobody goes near them. We do all kinds of things, and help all kinds of people in some ways, but we let strangers remain strangers unless they know how to make their way among us.”

“The Dryfooses certainly wouldn’t know how to make their way among you,” said Beaton, with a sort of dreamy absence in his tone.

Miss Vance went on, speaking out the process of reasoning in her mind, rather than any conclusions she had reached. “We defend ourselves by trying to believe that they must have friends of their own, or that they would think us patronizing, and wouldn’t like being made the objects of social charity; but they needn’t really suppose anything of the kind.”

“I don’t imagine they would,” said Beaton. “I think they’d be only too happy to have you come. But you wouldn’t know what to do with each other, indeed, Miss Vance.”

“Perhaps we shall like each other,” said the girl, bravely, “and then we shall know. What Church are they of?”

“I don’t believe they’re of any,” said Beaton. “The mother was brought up a Dunkard.”

“A Dunkard?”

Beaton told what he knew of the primitive sect, with its early Christian polity, its literal interpretation of Christ’s ethics, and its quaint ceremonial of foot-washing; he made something picturesque of that. “The father is a Mammon-worshipper, pure and simple. I suppose the young ladies go to church, but I don’t know where. They haven’t tried to convert me.”

“I’ll tell them not to despair — after I’ve converted them,” said Miss
Vance. “Will you let me use you as a ‘point d’appui’, Mr. Beaton?”

“Any way you like. If you’re really going to see them, perhaps I’d better make a confession. I left your banjo with them, after I got it put in order.”

“How very nice! Then we have a common interest already.”

“Do you mean the banjo, or—”

“The banjo, decidedly. Which of them plays?”

“Neither. But the eldest heard that the banjo was ‘all the rage,’ as the youngest says. Perhaps you can persuade them that good works are the rage, too.”

Beaton had no very lively belief that Margaret would go to see the Dryfooses; he did so few of the things he proposed that he went upon the theory that others must be as faithless. Still, he had a cruel amusement in figuring the possible encounter between Margaret Vance, with her intellectual elegance, her eager sympathies and generous ideals, and those girls with their rude past, their false and distorted perspective, their sordid and hungry selfishness, and their faith in the omnipotence of their father’s wealth wounded by their experience of its present social impotence. At the bottom of his heart he sympathized with them rather than with her; he was more like them.

People had ceased coming, and some of them were going. Miss Vance said she must go, too, and she was about to rise, when the host came up with March; Beaton turned away.

“Miss Vance, I want to introduce Mr. March, the editor of ‘Every Other Week.’ You oughtn’t to be restricted to the art department. We literary fellows think that arm of the service gets too much of the glory nowadays.” His banter was for Beaton, but he was already beyond ear-shot, and the host went on:

“Mr. March can talk with you about your favorite Boston. He’s just turned his back on it.”

“Oh, I hope not!” said Miss Vance. “I can’t imagine anybody voluntarily leaving Boston.”

“I don’t say he’s so bad as that,” said the host, committing March to her. “He came to New York because he couldn’t help it — like the rest of us. I never know whether that’s a compliment to New York or not.”

They talked Boston a little while, without finding that they had common acquaintance there; Miss Vance must have concluded that society was much larger in Boston than she had supposed from her visits there, or else that March did not know many people in it. But she was not a girl to care much for the inferences that might be drawn from such conclusions; she rather prided herself upon despising them; and she gave herself to the pleasure of being talked to as if she were of March’s own age. In the glow of her sympathetic beauty and elegance he talked his best, and tried to amuse her with his jokes, which he had the art of tingeing with a little seriousness on one side. He made her laugh; and he flattered her by making her think; in her turn she charmed him so much by enjoying what he said that he began to brag of his wife, as a good husband always does when another woman charms him; and she asked, Oh was Mrs. March there; and would he introduce her?

She asked Mrs. March for her address, and whether she had a day; and she said she would come to see her, if she would let her. Mrs. March could not be so enthusiastic about her as March was, but as they walked home together they talked the girl over, and agreed about her beauty and her amiability. Mrs. March said she seemed very unspoiled for a person who must have been so much spoiled. They tried to analyze her charm, and they succeeded in formulating it as a combination of intellectual fashionableness and worldly innocence. “I think,” said Mrs. March, “that city girls, brought up as she must have been, are often the most innocent of all. They never imagine the wickedness of the world, and if they marry happily they go through life as innocent as children. Everything combines to keep them so; the very hollowness of society shields them. They are the loveliest of the human race. But perhaps the rest have to pay too much for them.”

“For such an exquisite creature as Miss Vance,” said March, “we couldn’t pay too much.”

A wild laughing cry suddenly broke upon the air at the street-crossing in front of them. A girl’s voice called out: “Run, run, Jen! The copper is after you.” A woman’s figure rushed stumbling across the way and into the shadow of the houses, pursued by a burly policeman.

“Ah, but if that’s part of the price?”

They went along fallen from the gay spirit of their talk into a silence which he broke with a sigh. “Can that poor wretch and the radiant girl we left yonder really belong to the same system of things? How impossible each makes the other seem!”

VI.

Mrs. Horn believed in the world and in society and its unwritten constitution devoutly, and she tolerated her niece’s benevolent activities as she tolerated her aesthetic sympathies because these things, however oddly, were tolerated — even encouraged — by society; and they gave Margaret a charm. They made her originality interesting. Mrs. Horn did not intend that they should ever go so far as to make her troublesome; and it was with a sense of this abeyant authority of her aunt’s that the girl asked her approval of her proposed call upon the Dryfooses. She explained as well as she could the social destitution of these opulent people, and she had of course to name Beaton as the source of her knowledge concerning them.

“Did Mr. Beaton suggest your calling on them?”

“No; he rather discouraged it.”

“And why do you think you ought to go in this particular instance? New
York is full of people who don’t know anybody.”

Margaret laughed. “I suppose it’s like any other charity: you reach the cases you know of. The others you say you can’t help, and you try to ignore them.”

“It’s very romantic,” said Mrs. Horn. “I hope you’ve counted the cost; all the possible consequences.”

Margaret knew that her aunt had in mind their common experience with the Leightons, whom, to give their common conscience peace, she had called upon with her aunt’s cards and excuses, and an invitation for her Thursdays, somewhat too late to make the visit seem a welcome to New York. She was so coldly received, not so much for herself as in her quality of envoy, that her aunt experienced all the comfort which vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her niece’s guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the Leightons till she went to call upon them. She never complained: the strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now she said, with this in mind: “Nothing seems simpler than to get rid of people if you don’t want them. You merely have to let them alone.”

“It isn’t so pleasant, letting them alone,” said Mrs. Horn.

“Or having them let you alone,” said Margaret; for neither Mrs. Leighton nor Alma had ever come to enjoy the belated hospitality of Mrs. Horn’s Thursdays.

“Yes, or having them let you alone,” Mrs. Horn courageously consented. “And all that I ask you, Margaret, is to be sure that you really want to know these people.”

“I don’t,” said the girl, seriously, “in the usual way.”

“Then the question is whether you do in the unusual way. They will build a great deal upon you,” said Mrs. Horn, realizing how much the Leightons must have built upon her, and how much out of proportion to her desert they must now dislike her; for she seemed to have had them on her mind from the time they came, and had always meant to recognize any reasonable claim they had upon her.

“It seems very odd, very sad,” Margaret returned, “that you never could act unselfishly in society affairs. If I wished to go and see those girls just to do them a pleasure, and perhaps because if they’re strange and lonely, I might do them good, even — it would be impossible.”

“Quite,” said her aunt. “Such a thing would be quixotic. Society doesn’t rest upon any such basis. It can’t; it would go to pieces, if people acted from unselfish motives.”

“Then it’s a painted savage!” said the girl. “All its favors are really bargains. It’s gifts are for gifts back again.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Mrs. Horn, with no more sense of wrong in the fact than the political economist has in the fact that wages are the measure of necessity and not of merit. “You get what you pay for. It’s a matter of business.” She satisfied herself with this formula, which she did not invent, as fully as if it were a reason; but she did not dislike her niece’s revolt against it. That was part of Margaret’s originality, which pleased her aunt in proportion to her own conventionality; she was really a timid person, and she liked the show of courage which Margaret’s magnanimity often reflected upon her. She had through her a repute, with people who did not know her well, for intellectual and moral qualities; she was supposed to be literary and charitable; she almost had opinions and ideals, but really fell short of their possession. She thought that she set bounds to the girl’s originality because she recognized them. Margaret understood this better than her aunt, and knew that she had consulted her about going to see the Dryfooses out of deference, and with no expectation of luminous instruction. She was used to being a law to herself, but she knew what she might and might not do, so that she was rather a by-law. She was the kind of girl that might have fancies for artists and poets, but might end by marrying a prosperous broker, and leavening a vast lump of moneyed and fashionable life with her culture, generosity, and good-will. The intellectual interests were first with her, but she might be equal to sacrificing them; she had the best heart, but she might know how to harden it; if she was eccentric, her social orbit was defined; comets themselves traverse space on fixed lines. She was like every one else, a congeries of contradictions and inconsistencies, but obedient to the general expectation of what a girl of her position must and must not finally be. Provisionally, she was very much what she liked to be.

VII

Margaret Vance tried to give herself some reason for going to call upon the Dryfooses, but she could find none better than the wish to do a kind thing. This seemed queerer and less and less sufficient as she examined it, and she even admitted a little curiosity as a harmless element in her motive, without being very well satisfied with it. She tried to add a slight sense of social duty, and then she decided to have no motive at all, but simply to pay her visit as she would to any other eligible strangers she saw fit to call upon. She perceived that she must be very careful not to let them see that any other impulse had governed her; she determined, if possible, to let them patronize her; to be very modest and sincere and diffident, and, above all, not to play a part. This was easy, compared with the choice of a manner that should convey to them the fact that she was not playing a part. When the hesitating Irish serving-man had acknowledged that the ladies were at home, and had taken her card to them, she sat waiting for them in the drawing-room. Her study of its appointments, with their impersonal costliness, gave her no suggestion how to proceed; the two sisters were upon her before she had really decided, and she rose to meet them with the conviction that she was going to play a part for want of some chosen means of not doing so. She found herself, before she knew it, making her banjo a property in the little comedy, and professing so much pleasure in the fact that Miss Dryfoos was taking it up; she had herself been so much interested by it. Anything, she said, was a relief from the piano; and then, between the guitar and the banjo, one must really choose the banjo, unless one wanted to devote one’s whole natural life to the violin. Of course, there was the mandolin; but Margaret asked if they did not feel that the bit of shell you struck it with interposed a distance between you and the real soul of the instrument; and then it did have such a faint, mosquitoy little tone! She made much of the question, which they left her to debate alone while they gazed solemnly at her till she characterized the tone of the mandolin, when Mela broke into a large, coarse laugh.

“Well, that’s just what it does sound like,” she explained defiantly to her sister. “I always feel like it was going to settle somewhere, and I want to hit myself a slap before it begins to bite. I don’t see what ever brought such a thing into fashion.”

Margaret had not expected to be so powerfully seconded, and she asked, after gathering herself together, “And you are both learning the banjo?” “My, no!” said Mela, “I’ve gone through enough with the piano. Christine is learnun’ it.”

“I’m so glad you are making my banjo useful at the outset, Miss Dryfoos.” Both girls stared at her, but found it hard to cope with the fact that this was the lady friend whose banjo Beaton had lent them. “Mr. Beaton mentioned that he had left it here. I hope you’ll keep it as long as you find it useful.”

At this amiable speech even Christine could not help thanking her. “Of course,” she said, “I expect to get another, right off. Mr. Beaton is going to choose it for me.”

“You are very fortunate. If you haven’t a teacher yet I should so like to recommend mine.”

Mela broke out in her laugh again. “Oh, I guess Christine’s pretty well suited with the one she’s got,” she said, with insinuation. Her sister gave her a frowning glance, and Margaret did not tempt her to explain.

“Then that’s much better,” she said. “I have a kind of superstition in such matters; I don’t like to make a second choice. In a shop I like to take the first thing of the kind I’m looking for, and even if I choose further I come back to the original.”

“How funny!” said Mela. “Well, now, I’m just the other way. I always take the last thing, after I’ve picked over all the rest. My luck always seems to be at the bottom of the heap. Now, Christine, she’s more like you. I believe she could walk right up blindfolded and put her hand on the thing she wants every time.”

“I’m like father,” said Christine, softened a little by the celebration of her peculiarity. “He says the reason so many people don’t get what they want is that they don’t want it bad enough. Now, when I want a thing, it seems to me that I want it all through.”

“Well, that’s just like father, too,” said Mela. “That’s the way he done when he got that eighty-acre piece next to Moffitt that he kept when he sold the farm, and that’s got some of the best gas-wells on it now that there is anywhere.” She addressed the explanation to her sister, to the exclusion of Margaret, who, nevertheless, listened with a smiling face and a resolutely polite air of being a party to the conversation. Mela rewarded her amiability by saying to her, finally, “You’ve never been in the natural-gas country, have you?”

“Oh no! And I should so much like to see it!” said Margaret, with a fervor that was partly, voluntary.

“Would you? Well, we’re kind of sick of it, but I suppose it would strike a stranger.”

“I never got tired of looking at the big wells when they lit them up,” said Christine. “It seems as if the world was on fire.”

“Yes, and when you see the surface-gas burnun’ down in the woods, like it used to by our spring-house — so still, and never spreadun’ any, just like a bed of some kind of wild flowers when you ketch sight of it a piece off.”

They began to tell of the wonders of their strange land in an antiphony of reminiscences and descriptions; they unconsciously imputed a merit to themselves from the number and violence of the wells on their father’s property; they bragged of the high civilization of Moffitt, which they compared to its advantage with that of New York. They became excited by Margaret’s interest in natural gas, and forgot to be suspicious and envious.

She said, as she rose, “Oh, how much I should like to see it all!” Then she made a little pause, and added:

“I’m so sorry my aunt’s Thursdays are over; she never has them after Lent, but we’re to have some people Tuesday evening at a little concert which a musical friend is going to give with some other artists. There won’t be any banjos, I’m afraid, but there’ll be some very good singing, and my aunt would be so glad if you could come with your mother.”

She put down her aunt’s card on the table near her, while Mela gurgled, as if it were the best joke: “Oh, my! Mother never goes anywhere; you couldn’t get her out for love or money.” But she was herself overwhelmed with a simple joy at Margaret’s politeness, and showed it in a sensuous way, like a child, as if she had been tickled. She came closer to Margaret and seemed about to fawn physically upon her.

“Ain’t she just as lovely as she can live?” she demanded of her sister when Margaret was gone.

“I don’t know,” said Christine. “I guess she wanted to know who Mr.
Beaton had been lending her banjo to.”

“Pshaw! Do you suppose she’s in love with him?” asked Mela, and then she broke into her hoarse laugh at the look her sister gave her. “Well, don’t eat me, Christine! I wonder who she is, anyway? I’m goun’ to git it out of Mr. Beaton the next time he calls. I guess she’s somebody. Mrs. Mandel can tell. I wish that old friend of hers would hurry up and git well — or something. But I guess we appeared about as well as she did. I could see she was afraid of you, Christine. I reckon it’s gittun’ around a little about father; and when it does I don’t believe we shall want for callers. Say, are you goun’? To that concert of theirs?”

“I don’t know. Not till I know who they are first.”

“Well, we’ve got to hump ourselves if we’re goun’ to find out before
Tuesday.”

As she went home Margaret felt wrought in her that most incredible of the miracles, which, nevertheless, any one may make his experience. She felt kindly to these girls because she had tried to make them happy, and she hoped that in the interest she had shown there had been none of the poison of flattery. She was aware that this was a risk she ran in such an attempt to do good. If she had escaped this effect she was willing to leave the rest with Providence.

VIII.

The notion that a girl of Margaret Vance’s traditions would naturally form of girls like Christine and Mela Dryfoos would be that they were abashed in the presence of the new conditions of their lives, and that they must receive the advance she had made them with a certain grateful humility. However they received it, she had made it upon principle, from a romantic conception of duty; but this was the way she imagined they would receive it, because she thought that she would have done so if she had been as ignorant and unbred as they. Her error was in arguing their attitude from her own temperament, and endowing them, for the purposes of argument, with her perspective. They had not the means, intellectual or moral, of feeling as she fancied. If they had remained at home on the farm where they were born, Christine would have grown up that embodiment of impassioned suspicion which we find oftenest in the narrowest spheres, and Mela would always have been a good-natured simpleton; but they would never have doubted their equality with the wisest and the finest. As it was, they had not learned enough at school to doubt it, and the splendor of their father’s success in making money had blinded them forever to any possible difference against them. They had no question of themselves in the social abeyance to which they had been left in New York. They had been surprised, mystified; it was not what they had expected; there must be some mistake.

They were the victims of an accident, which would be repaired as soon as the fact of their father’s wealth had got around. They had been steadfast in their faith, through all their disappointment, that they were not only better than most people by virtue of his money, but as good as any; and they took Margaret’s visit, so far as they, investigated its motive, for a sign that at last it was beginning to get around; of course, a thing could not get around in New York so quick as it could in a small place. They were confirmed in their belief by the sensation of Mrs. Mandel when she returned to duty that afternoon, and they consulted her about going to Mrs. Horn’s musicale. If she had felt any doubt at the name for there were Horns and Horns — the address on the card put the matter beyond question; and she tried to make her charges understand what a precious chance had befallen them. She did not succeed; they had not the premises, the experience, for a sufficient impression; and she undid her work in part by the effort to explain that Mrs. Horn’s standing was independent of money; that though she was positively rich, she was comparatively poor. Christine inferred that Miss Vance had called because she wished to be the first to get in with them since it had begun to get around. This view commended itself to Mela, too, but without warping her from her opinion that Miss Vance was all the same too sweet for anything. She had not so vivid a consciousness of her father’s money as Christine had; but she reposed perhaps all the more confidently upon its power. She was far from thinking meanly of any one who thought highly of her for it; that seemed so natural a result as to be amiable, even admirable; she was willing that any such person should get all the good there was in such an attitude toward her.

They discussed the matter that night at dinner before their father and mother, who mostly sat silent at their meals; the father frowning absently over his plate, with his head close to it, and making play into his mouth with the back of his knife (he had got so far toward the use of his fork as to despise those who still ate from the edge of their knives), and the mother partly missing hers at times in the nervous tremor that shook her face from side to side.

After a while the subject of Mela’s hoarse babble and of Christine’s high-pitched, thin, sharp forays of assertion and denial in the field which her sister’s voice seemed to cover, made its way into the old man’s consciousness, and he perceived that they were talking with Mrs. Mandel about it, and that his wife was from time to time offering an irrelevant and mistaken comment. He agreed with Christine, and silently took her view of the affair some time before he made any sign of having listened. There had been a time in his life when other things besides his money seemed admirable to him. He had once respected himself for the hard-headed, practical common sense which first gave him standing among his country neighbors; which made him supervisor, school trustee, justice of the peace, county commissioner, secretary of the Moffitt County Agricultural Society. In those days he had served the public with disinterested zeal and proud ability; he used to write to the Lake Shore Farmer on agricultural topics; he took part in opposing, through the Moffitt papers, the legislative waste of the people’s money; on the question of selling a local canal to the railroad company, which killed that fine old State work, and let the dry ditch grow up to grass; he might have gone to the Legislature, but he contented himself with defeating the Moffitt member who had voted for the job. If he opposed some measures for the general good, like high schools and school libraries, it was because he lacked perspective, in his intense individualism, and suspected all expense of being spendthrift. He believed in good district schools, and he had a fondness, crude but genuine, for some kinds of reading — history, and forensics of an elementary sort.

With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised preachers; he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them for their ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the intellectual encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended a sitting of the fall term of court, when he went to town, for the pleasure of hearing the speeches. He was a good citizen, and a good husband. As a good father, he was rather severe with his children, and used to whip them, especially the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him most, till the twins died. After that he never struck any of them; and from the sight of a blow dealt a horse he turned as if sick. It was a long time before he lifted himself up from his sorrow, and then the will of the man seemed to have been breached through his affections. He let the girls do as they pleased — the twins had been girls; he let them go away to school, and got them a piano. It was they who made him sell the farm. If Conrad had only had their spirit he could have made him keep it, he felt; and he resented the want of support he might have found in a less yielding spirit than his son’s.

His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold his farm. He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted the last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and listlessness. When he broke down and cried for the hard-working, wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself. He devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizenship, which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had already made without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love in him; he began to honor money, especially money that had been won suddenly and in large sums; for money that had been earned painfully, slowly, and in little amounts, he had only pity and contempt. The poison of that ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local speculators had instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had succeeded his somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the proper field for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New York, whither the men who have made money and do not yet know that money has made them, all instinctively turn. He came where he could watch his money breed more money, and bring greater increase of its kind in an hour of luck than the toil of hundreds of men could earn in a year. He called it speculation, stocks, the Street; and his pride, his faith in himself, mounted with his luck. He expected, when he had sated his greed, to begin to spend, and he had formulated an intention to build a great house, to add another to the palaces of the country-bred millionaires who have come to adorn the great city. In the mean time he made little account of the things that occupied his children, except to fret at the ungrateful indifference of his son to the interests that could alone make a man of him. He did not know whether his daughters were in society or not; with people coming and going in the house he would have supposed they must be so, no matter who the people were; in some vague way he felt that he had hired society in Mrs. Mandel, at so much a year. He never met a superior himself except now and then a man of twenty or thirty millions to his one or two, and then he felt his soul creep within him, without a sense of social inferiority; it was a question of financial inferiority; and though Dryfoos’s soul bowed itself and crawled, it was with a gambler’s admiration of wonderful luck. Other men said these many-millioned millionaires were smart, and got their money by sharp practices to which lesser men could not attain; but Dryfoos believed that he could compass the same ends, by the same means, with the same chances; he respected their money, not them.

When he now heard Mrs. Mandel and his daughters talking of that person, whoever she was, that Mrs. Mandel seemed to think had honored his girls by coming to see them, his curiosity was pricked as much as his pride was galled.

“Well, anyway,” said Mela, “I don’t care whether Christine’s goon’ or not; I am. And you got to go with me, Mrs. Mandel.”

“Well, there’s a little difficulty,” said Mrs. Mandel, with her unfailing dignity and politeness. “I haven’t been asked, you know.”

“Then what are we goun’ to do?” demanded Mela, almost crossly. She was physically too amiable, she felt too well corporeally, ever to be quite cross. “She might ‘a’ knowed — well known — we couldn’t ‘a’ come alone, in New York. I don’t see why we couldn’t. I don’t call it much of an invitation.”

“I suppose she thought you could come with your mother,” Mrs. Mandel suggested.

“She didn’t say anything about mother: Did she, Christine? Or, yes, she did, too. And I told her she couldn’t git mother out. Don’t you remember?”

“I didn’t pay much attention,” said Christine. “I wasn’t certain we wanted to go.”

“I reckon you wasn’t goun’ to let her see that we cared much,” said Mela, half reproachful, half proud of this attitude of Christine. “Well, I don’t see but what we got to stay at home.” She laughed at this lame conclusion of the matter.

“Perhaps Mr. Conrad — you could very properly take him without an express invitation—” Mrs. Mandel began.

Conrad looked up in alarm and protest. “I — I don’t think I could go that evening—”

“What’s the reason?” his father broke in, harshly. “You’re not such a sheep that you’re afraid to go into company with your sisters? Or are you too good to go with them?”

“If it’s to be anything like that night when them hussies come out and danced that way,” said Mrs. Dryfoos, “I don’t blame Coonrod for not wantun’ to go. I never saw the beat of it.”

Mela sent a yelling laugh across the table to her mother. “Well, I wish Miss Vance could ‘a’ heard that! Why, mother, did you think it like the ballet?”

“Well, I didn’t know, Mely, child,” said the old woman. “I didn’t know what it was like. I hain’t never been to one, and you can’t be too keerful where you go, in a place like New York.”

“What’s the reason you can’t go?” Dryfoos ignored the passage between his wife and daughter in making this demand of his son, with a sour face.

“I have an engagement that night — it’s one of our meetings.”

“I reckon you can let your meeting go for one night,” said Dryfoos. “It can’t be so important as all that, that you must disappoint your sisters.”

“I don’t like to disappoint those poor creatures. They depend so much upon the meetings—”

“I reckon they can stand it for one night,” said the old man. He added,
“The poor ye have with you always.”

“That’s so, Coonrod,” said his mother. “It’s the Saviour’s own words.”

“Yes, mother. But they’re not meant just as father used them.”

“How do you know how they were meant? Or how I used them?” cried the father. “Now you just make your plans to go with the girls, Tuesday night. They can’t go alone, and Mrs. Mandel can’t go with them.”

“Pshaw!” said Mela. “We don’t want to take Conrad away from his meetun’, do we, Chris?”

“I don’t know,” said Christine, in her high, fine voice. “They could get along without him for one night, as father says.”

“Well, I’m not a-goun’ to take him,” said Mela. “Now, Mrs. Mandel, just think out some other way. Say! What’s the reason we couldn’t get somebody else to take us just as well? Ain’t that rulable?”

“It would be allowable—”

“Allowable, I mean,” Mela corrected herself.

“But it might look a little significant, unless it was some old family friend.”

“Well, let’s get Mr. Fulkerson to take us. He’s the oldest family friend we got.”

“I won’t go with Mr. Fulkerson,” said Christine, serenely.

“Why, I’m sure, Christine,” her mother pleaded, “Mr. Fulkerson is a very good young man, and very nice appearun’.”

Mela shouted, “He’s ten times as pleasant as that old Mr. Beaton of
Christine’s!”

Christine made no effort to break the constraint that fell upon the table at this sally, but her father said: “Christine is right, Mela. It wouldn’t do for you to go with any other young man. Conrad will go with you.”

“I’m not certain I want to go, yet,” said Christine.

“Well, settle that among yourselves. But if you want to go, your brother will go with you.”

“Of course, Coonrod ‘ll go, if his sisters wants him to,” the old woman pleaded. “I reckon it ain’t agoun’ to be anything very bad; and if it is, Coonrod, why you can just git right up and come out.”

“It will be all right, mother. And I will go, of course.”

“There, now, I knowed you would, Coonrod. Now, fawther!” This appeal was to make the old man say something in recognition of Conrad’s sacrifice.

“You’ll always find,” he said, “that it’s those of your own household that have the first claim on you.”

“That’s so, Coonrod,” urged his mother. “It’s Bible truth. Your fawther ain’t a perfesser, but he always did read his Bible. Search the Scriptures. That’s what it means.”

“Laws!” cried Mely, “a body can see, easy enough from mother, where Conrad’s wantun’ to be a preacher comes from. I should ‘a’ thought she’d ‘a’ wanted to been one herself.”

“Let your women keep silence in the churches,” said the old woman, solemnly.

“There you go again, mother! I guess if you was to say that to some of the lady ministers nowadays, you’d git yourself into trouble.” Mela looked round for approval, and gurgled out a hoarse laugh.

IX.

The Dryfooses went late to Mrs. Horn’s musicale, in spite of Mrs. Mandel’s advice. Christine made the delay, both because she wished to show Miss Vance that she was (not) anxious, and because she had some vague notion of the distinction of arriving late at any sort of entertainment. Mrs. Mandel insisted upon the difference between this musicale and an ordinary reception; but Christine rather fancied disturbing a company that had got seated, and perhaps making people rise and stand, while she found her way to her place, as she had seen them do for a tardy comer at the theatre.

Mela, whom she did not admit to her reasons or feelings always, followed her with the servile admiration she had for all that Christine did; and she took on trust as somehow successful the result of Christine’s obstinacy, when they were allowed to stand against the wall at the back of the room through the whole of the long piece begun just before they came in. There had been no one to receive them; a few people, in the rear rows of chairs near them, turned their heads to glance at them, and then looked away again. Mela had her misgivings; but at the end of the piece Miss Vance came up to them at once, and then Mela knew that she had her eyes on them all the time, and that Christine must have been right. Christine said nothing about their coming late, and so Mela did not make any excuse, and Miss Vance seemed to expect none. She glanced with a sort of surprise at Conrad, when Christine introduced him; Mela did not know whether she liked their bringing him, till she shook hands with him, and said: “Oh, I am very glad indeed! Mr. Dryfoos and I have met before.” Without explaining where or when, she led them to her aunt and presented them, and then said, “I’m going to put you with some friends of yours,” and quickly seated them next the Marches. Mela liked that well enough; she thought she might have some joking with Mr. March, for all his wife was so stiff; but the look which Christine wore seemed to forbid, provisionally at least, any such recreation. On her part, Christine was cool with the Marches. It went through her mind that they must have told Miss Vance they knew her; and perhaps they had boasted of her intimacy. She relaxed a little toward them when she saw Beaton leaning against the wall at the end of the row next Mrs. March. Then she conjectured that he might have told Miss Vance of her acquaintance with the Marches, and she bent forward and nodded to Mrs. March across Conrad, Mela, and Mr. March. She conceived of him as a sort of hand of her father’s, but she was willing to take them at their apparent social valuation for the time. She leaned back in her chair, and did not look up at Beaton after the first furtive glance, though she felt his eyes on her.

The music began again almost at once, before Mela had time to make Conrad tell her where Miss Vance had met him before. She would not have minded interrupting the music; but every one else seemed so attentive, even Christine, that she had not the courage. The concert went onto an end without realizing for her the ideal of pleasure which one ought to find. in society. She was not exacting, but it seemed to her there were very few young men, and when the music was over, and their opportunity came to be sociable, they were not very sociable. They were not introduced, for one thing; but it appeared to Mela that they might have got introduced, if they had any sense; she saw them looking at her, and she was glad she had dressed so much; she was dressed more than any other lady there, and either because she was the most dressed of any person there, or because it had got around who her father was, she felt that she had made an impression on the young men. In her satisfaction with this, and from her good nature, she was contented to be served with her refreshments after the concert by Mr. March, and to remain joking with him. She was at her ease; she let her hoarse voice out in her largest laugh; she accused him, to the admiration of those near, of getting her into a perfect gale. It appeared to her, in her own pleasure, her mission to illustrate to the rather subdued people about her what a good time really was, so that they could have it if they wanted it. Her joy was crowned when March modestly professed himself unworthy to monopolize her, and explained how selfish he felt in talking to a young lady when there were so many young men dying to do so.

“Oh, pshaw, dyun’, yes!” cried Mela, tasting the irony. “I guess I see them!”

He asked if he might really introduce a friend of his to her, and she said, Well, yes, if he thought he could live to get to her; and March brought up a man whom he thought very young and Mela thought very old. He was a contributor to ‘Every Other Week,’ and so March knew him; he believed himself a student of human nature in behalf of literature, and he now set about studying Mela. He tempted her to express her opinion on all points, and he laughed so amiably at the boldness and humorous vigor of her ideas that she was delighted with him. She asked him if he was a New-Yorker by birth; and she told him she pitied him, when he said he had never been West. She professed herself perfectly sick of New York, and urged him to go to Moffitt if he wanted to see a real live town. He wondered if it would do to put her into literature just as she was, with all her slang and brag, but he decided that he would have to subdue her a great deal: he did not see how he could reconcile the facts of her conversation with the facts of her appearance: her beauty, her splendor of dress, her apparent right to be where she was. These things perplexed him; he was afraid the great American novel, if true, must be incredible. Mela said he ought to hear her sister go on about New York when they first came; but she reckoned that Christine was getting so she could put up with it a little better, now. She looked significantly across the room to the place where Christine was now talking with Beaton; and the student of human nature asked, Was she here? and, Would she introduce him? Mela said she would, the first chance she got; and she added, They would be much pleased to have him call. She felt herself to be having a beautiful time, and she got directly upon such intimate terms with the student of human nature that she laughed with him about some peculiarities of his, such as his going so far about to ask things he wanted to know from her; she said she never did believe in beating about the bush much. She had noticed the same thing in Miss Vance when she came to call that day; and when the young man owned that he came rather a good deal to Mrs. Horn’s house, she asked him, Well, what sort of a girl was Miss Vance, anyway, and where did he suppose she had met her brother? The student of human nature could not say as to this, and as to Miss Vance he judged it safest to treat of the non-society side of her character, her activity in charity, her special devotion to the work among the poor on the East Side, which she personally engaged in.

“Oh, that’s where Conrad goes, too!” Mela interrupted. “I’ll bet anything that’s where she met him. I wisht I could tell Christine! But I suppose she would want to kill me, if I was to speak to her now.”

The student of human nature said, politely, “Oh, shall I take you to her?”

Mela answered, “I guess you better not!” with a laugh so significant that he could not help his inferences concerning both Christine’s absorption in the person she was talking with and the habitual violence of her temper. He made note of how Mela helplessly spoke of all her family by their names, as if he were already intimate with them; he fancied that if he could get that in skillfully, it would be a valuable color in his study; the English lord whom she should astonish with it began to form himself out of the dramatic nebulosity in his mind, and to whirl on a definite orbit in American society. But he was puzzled to decide whether Mela’s willingness to take him into her confidence on short notice was typical or personal: the trait of a daughter of the natural-gas millionaire, or a foible of her own.

Beaton talked with Christine the greater part of the evening that was left after the concert. He was very grave, and took the tone of a fatherly friend; he spoke guardedly of the people present, and moderated the severity of some of Christine’s judgments of their looks and costumes. He did this out of a sort of unreasoned allegiance to Margaret, whom he was in the mood of wishing to please by being very kind and good, as she always was. He had the sense also of atoning by this behavior for some reckless things he had said before that to Christine; he put on a sad, reproving air with her, and gave her the feeling of being held in check.

She chafed at it, and said, glancing at Margaret in talk with her brother, “I don’t think Miss Vance is so very pretty, do you?”

“I never think whether she’s pretty or not,” said Beaton, with dreamy, affectation. “She is merely perfect. Does she know your brother?”

“So she says. I didn’t suppose Conrad ever went anywhere, except to tenement-houses.”

“It might have been there,” Beaton suggested. “She goes among friendless people everywhere.”

“Maybe that’s the reason she came to see us!” said Christine.

Beaton looked at her with his smouldering eyes, and felt the wish to say, “Yes, it was exactly that,” but he only allowed himself to deny the possibility of any such motive in that case. He added: “I am so glad you know her, Miss Dryfoos. I never met Miss Vance without feeling myself better and truer, somehow; or the wish to be so.”

“And you think we might be improved, too?” Christine retorted. “Well, I must say you’re not very flattering, Mr. Beaton, anyway.”

Beaton would have liked to answer her according to her cattishness, with a good clawing sarcasm that would leave its smart in her pride; but he was being good, and he could not change all at once. Besides, the girl’s attitude under the social honor done her interested him. He was sure she had never been in such good company before, but he could see that she was not in the least affected by the experience. He had told her who this person and that was; and he saw she had understood that the names were of consequence; but she seemed to feel her equality with them all. Her serenity was not obviously akin to the savage stoicism in which Beaton hid his own consciousness of social inferiority; but having won his way in the world so far by his talent, his personal quality, he did not conceive the simple fact in her case. Christine was self-possessed because she felt that a knowledge of her father’s fortune had got around, and she had the peace which money gives to ignorance; but Beaton attributed her poise to indifference to social values. This, while he inwardly sneered at it, avenged him upon his own too keen sense of them, and, together with his temporary allegiance to Margaret’s goodness, kept him from retaliating Christine’s vulgarity. He said, “I don’t see how that could be,” and left the question of flattery to settle itself.

The people began to go away, following each other up to take leave of Mrs. Horn. Christine watched them with unconcern, and either because she would not be governed by the general movement, or because she liked being with Beaton, gave no sign of going. Mela was still talking to the student of human nature, sending out her laugh in deep gurgles amid the unimaginable confidences she was making him about herself, her family, the staff of ‘Every Other Week,’ Mrs. Mandel, and the kind of life they had all led before she came to them. He was not a blind devotee of art for art’s sake, and though he felt that if one could portray Mela just as she was she would be the richest possible material, he was rather ashamed to know some of the things she told him; and he kept looking anxiously about for a chance of escape. The company had reduced itself to the Dryfoos groups and some friends of Mrs. Horn’s who had the right to linger, when Margaret crossed the room with Conrad to Christine and Beaton.

“I’m so glad, Miss Dryfoos, to find that I was not quite a stranger to you all when I ventured to call, the other day. Your brother and I are rather old acquaintances, though I never knew who he was before. I don’t know just how to say we met where he is valued so much. I suppose I mustn’t try to say how much,” she added, with a look of deep regard at him.

Conrad blushed and stood folding his arms tight over his breast, while his sister received Margaret’s confession with the suspicion which was her first feeling in regard to any new thing. What she concluded was that this girl was trying to get in with them, for reasons of her own. She said: “Yes; it’s the first I ever heard of his knowing you. He’s so much taken up with his meetings, he didn’t want to come to-night.”

Margaret drew in her lip before she answered, without apparent resentment of the awkwardness or ungraciousness, whichever she found it: “I don’t wonder! You become so absorbed in such work that you think nothing else is worth while. But I’m glad Mr. Dryfoos could come with you; I’m so glad you could all come; I knew you would enjoy the music. Do sit down—”

“No,” said Christine, bluntly; “we must be going. Mela!” she called out, “come!”

The last group about Mrs. Horn looked round, but Christine advanced upon them undismayed, and took the hand Mrs. Horn promptly gave her. “Well, I must bid you good-night.”

“Oh, good-night,” murmured the elder lady. “So very kind of you to come.”

“I’ve had the best kind of a time,” said Mela, cordially. “I hain’t laughed so much, I don’t know when.”

“Oh, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” said Mrs. Horn, in the same polite murmur she had used with Christine; but she said nothing to either sister about any future meeting.

They were apparently not troubled. Mela said over her shoulder to the student of human nature, “The next time I see you I’ll give it to you for what you said about Moffitt.”

Margaret made some entreating paces after them, but she did not succeed in covering the retreat of the sisters against critical conjecture. She could only say to Conrad, as if recurring to the subject, “I hope we can get our friends to play for us some night. I know it isn’t any real help, but such things take the poor creatures out of themselves for the time being, don’t you think?”

“Oh yes,” he answered. “They’re good in that way.” He turned back hesitatingly to Mrs. Horn, and said, with a blush, “I thank you for a happy evening.”

“Oh, I am very glad,” she replied, in her murmur.

One of the old friends of the house arched her eyebrows in saying good-night, and offered the two young men remaining seats home in her carriage. Beaton gloomily refused, and she kept herself from asking the student of human nature, till she had got him into her carriage, “What is Moffitt, and what did you say about it?”

“Now you see, Margaret,” said Mrs. Horn, with bated triumph, when the people were all gone.

“Yes, I see,” the girl consented. “From one point of view, of course it’s been a failure. I don’t think we’ve given Miss Dryfoos a pleasure, but perhaps nobody could. And at least we’ve given her the opportunity of enjoying herself.”

“Such people,” said Mrs. Horn, philosophically, “people with their money,
must of course be received sooner or later. You can’t keep them out.
Only, I believe I would rather let some one else begin with them. The
Leightons didn’t come?”

“I sent them cards. I couldn’t call again.”

Mrs. Horn sighed a little. “I suppose Mr. Dryfoos is one of your fellow-philanthropists?”

“He’s one of the workers,” said Margaret. “I met him several times at the
Hall, but I only knew his first name. I think he’s a great friend of
Father Benedict; he seems devoted to the work. Don’t you think he looks
good?”

“Very,” said Mrs. Horn, with a color of censure in her assent. “The younger girl seemed more amiable than her sister. But what manners!”

“Dreadful!” said Margaret, with knit brows, and a pursed mouth of humorous suffering. “But she appeared to feel very much at home.”

“Oh, as to that, neither of them was much abashed. Do you suppose Mr. Beaton gave the other one some hints for that quaint dress of hers? I don’t imagine that black and lace is her own invention. She seems to have some sort of strange fascination for him.”

“She’s very picturesque,” Margaret explained. “And artists see points in people that the rest of us don’t.”

“Could it be her money?” Mrs. Horn insinuated. “He must be very poor.”

“But he isn’t base,” retorted the girl, with a generous indignation that made her aunt smile.

“Oh no; but if he fancies her so picturesque, it doesn’t follow that he would object to her being rich.”

“It would with a man like Mr. Beaton!”

“You are an idealist, Margaret. I suppose your Mr. March has some disinterested motive in paying court to Miss Mela — Pamela, I suppose, is her name. He talked to her longer than her literature would have lasted.”

“He seems a very kind person,” said Margaret.

“And Mr. Dryfoos pays his salary?”

“I don’t know anything about that. But that wouldn’t make any difference with him.”

Mrs. Horn laughed out at this security; but she was not displeased by the nobleness which it came from. She liked Margaret to be high-minded, and was really not distressed by any good that was in her.

The Marches walked home, both because it was not far, and because they must spare in carriage hire at any rate. As soon as they were out of the house, she applied a point of conscience to him.

“I don’t see how you could talk to that girl so long, Basil, and make her laugh so.”

“Why, there seemed no one else to do it, till I thought of Kendricks.”

“Yes, but I kept thinking, Now he’s pleasant to her because he thinks it’s to his interest. If she had no relation to ‘Every Other Week,’ he wouldn’t waste his time on her.”

“Isabel,” March complained, “I wish you wouldn’t think of me in he, him, and his; I never personalize you in my thoughts: you remain always a vague unindividualized essence, not quite without form and void, but nounless and pronounless. I call that a much more beautiful mental attitude toward the object of one’s affections. But if you must he and him and his me in your thoughts, I wish you’d have more kindly thoughts of me.”

“Do you deny that it’s true, Basil?”

“Do you believe that it’s true, Isabel?”

“No matter. But could you excuse it if it were?”

“Ah, I see you’d have been capable of it in my place, and you’re ashamed.”

“Yes,” sighed the wife, “I’m afraid that I should. But tell me that you wouldn’t, Basil!”

“I can tell you that I wasn’t. But I suppose that in a real exigency, I could truckle to the proprietary Dryfooses as well as you.”

“Oh no; you mustn’t, dear! I’m a woman, and I’m dreadfully afraid. But you must always be a man, especially with that horrid old Mr. Dryfoos. Promise me that you’ll never yield the least point to him in a matter of right and wrong!”

“Not if he’s right and I’m wrong?”

“Don’t trifle, dear! You know what I mean. Will you promise?”

“I’ll promise to submit the point to you, and let you do the yielding. As for me, I shall be adamant. Nothing I like better.”

“They’re dreadful, even that poor, good young fellow, who’s so different from all the rest; he’s awful, too, because you feel that he’s a martyr to them.”

“And I never did like martyrs a great deal,” March interposed.

“I wonder how they came to be there,” Mrs. March pursued, unmindful of his joke.

“That is exactly what seemed to be puzzling Miss Mela about us. She asked, and I explained as well as I could; and then she told me that Miss Vance had come to call on them and invited them; and first they didn’t know how they could come till they thought of making Conrad bring them. But she didn’t say why Miss Vance called on them. Mr. Dryfoos doesn’t employ her on ‘Every Other Week.’ But I suppose she has her own vile little motive.”

“It can’t be their money; it can’t be!” sighed Mrs. March.

“Well, I don’t know. We all respect money.”

“Yes, but Miss Vance’s position is so secure. She needn’t pay court to those stupid, vulgar people.”

“Well, let’s console ourselves with the belief that she would, if she needed. Such people as the Dryfooses are the raw material of good society. It isn’t made up of refined or meritorious people — professors and litterateurs, ministers and musicians, and their families. All the fashionable people there to-night were like the Dryfooses a generation or two ago. I dare say the material works up faster now, and in a season or two you won’t know the Dryfooses from the other plutocrats. THEY will — a little better than they do now; they’ll see a difference, but nothing radical, nothing painful. People who get up in the world by service to others — through letters, or art, or science — may have their modest little misgivings as to their social value, but people that rise by money — especially if their gains are sudden — never have. And that’s the kind of people that form our nobility; there’s no use pretending that we haven’t a nobility; we might as well pretend we haven’t first-class cars in the presence of a vestibuled Pullman. Those girls had no more doubt of their right to be there than if they had been duchesses: we thought it was very nice of Miss Vance to come and ask us, but they didn’t; they weren’t afraid, or the least embarrassed; they were perfectly natural — like born aristocrats. And you may be sure that if the plutocracy that now owns the country ever sees fit to take on the outward signs of an aristocracy — titles, and arms, and ancestors — it won’t falter from any inherent question of its worth. Money prizes and honors itself, and if there is anything it hasn’t got, it believes it can buy it.”

“Well, Basil,” said his wife, “I hope you won’t get infected with Lindau’s ideas of rich people. Some of them are very good and kind.”

“Who denies that? Not even Lindau himself. It’s all right. And the great thing is that the evening’s enjoyment is over. I’ve got my society smile off, and I’m radiantly happy. Go on with your little pessimistic diatribes, Isabel; you can’t spoil my pleasure.”

“I could see,” said Mela, as she and Christine drove home together, “that she was as jealous as she could be, all the time you was talkun’ to Mr. Beaton. She pretended to be talkun’ to Conrad, but she kep’ her eye on you pretty close, I can tell you. I bet she just got us there to see how him and you would act together. And I reckon she was satisfied. He’s dead gone on you, Chris.”

Christine listened with a dreamy pleasure to the flatteries with which Mela plied her in the hope of some return in kind, and not at all because she felt spitefully toward Miss Vance, or in anywise wished her ill. “Who was that fellow with you so long?” asked Christine. “I suppose you turned yourself inside out to him, like you always do.”

Mela was transported by the cruel ingratitude. “It’s a lie! I didn’t tell him a single thing.”

Conrad walked home, choosing to do so because he did not wish to hear his sisters’ talk of the evening, and because there was a tumult in his spirit which he wished to let have its way. In his life with its single purpose, defeated by stronger wills than his own, and now struggling partially to fulfil itself in acts of devotion to others, the thought of women had entered scarcely more than in that of a child. His ideals were of a virginal vagueness; faces, voices, gestures had filled his fancy at times, but almost passionately; and the sensation that he now indulged was a kind of worship, ardent, but reverent and exalted. The brutal experiences of the world make us forget that there are such natures in it, and that they seem to come up out of the lowly earth as well as down from the high heaven. In the heart of this man well on toward thirty there had never been left the stain of a base thought; not that suggestion and conjecture had not visited him, but that he had not entertained them, or in any-wise made them his. In a Catholic age and country, he would have been one of those monks who are sainted after death for the angelic purity of their lives, and whose names are invoked by believers in moments of trial, like San Luigi Gonzaga. As he now walked along thinking, with a lover’s beatified smile on his face, of how Margaret Vance had spoken and looked, he dramatized scenes in which he approved himself to her by acts of goodness and unselfishness, and died to please her for the sake of others. He made her praise him for them, to his face, when he disclaimed their merit, and after his death, when he could not. All the time he was poignantly sensible of her grace, her elegance, her style; they seemed to intoxicate him; some tones of her voice thrilled through his nerves, and some looks turned his brain with a delicious, swooning sense of her beauty; her refinement bewildered him. But all this did not admit the idea of possession, even of aspiration. At the most his worship only set her beyond the love of other men as far as beyond his own.

PART FOURTH

I.

Not long after Lent, Fulkerson set before Dryfoos one day his scheme for a dinner in celebration of the success of ‘Every Other Week.’ Dryfoos had never meddled in any manner with the conduct of the periodical; but Fulkerson easily saw that he was proud of his relation to it, and he proceeded upon the theory that he would be willing to have this relation known: On the days when he had been lucky in stocks, he was apt to drop in at the office on Eleventh Street, on his way up-town, and listen to Fulkerson’s talk. He was on good enough terms with March, who revised his first impressions of the man, but they had not much to say to each other, and it seemed to March that Dryfoos was even a little afraid of him, as of a piece of mechanism he had acquired, but did not quite understand; he left the working of it to Fulkerson, who no doubt bragged of it sufficiently. The old man seemed to have as little to say to his son; he shut himself up with Fulkerson, where the others could hear the manager begin and go on with an unstinted flow of talk about ‘Every Other Week;’ for Fulkerson never talked of anything else if he could help it, and was always bringing the conversation back to it if it strayed:

The day he spoke of the dinner he rose and called from his door: “March,
I say, come down here a minute, will you? Conrad, I want you, too.”

The editor and the publisher found the manager and the proprietor seated on opposite sides of the table. “It’s about those funeral baked meats, you know,” Fulkerson explained, “and I was trying to give Mr. Dryfoos some idea of what we wanted to do. That is, what I wanted to do,” he continued, turning from March to Dryfoos. “March, here, is opposed to it, of course. He’d like to publish ‘Every Other Week’ on the sly; keep it out of the papers, and off the newsstands; he’s a modest Boston petunia, and he shrinks from publicity; but I am not that kind of herb myself, and I want all the publicity we can get — beg, borrow, or steal — for this thing. I say that you can’t work the sacred rites of hospitality in a better cause, and what I propose is a little dinner for the purpose of recognizing the hit we’ve made with this thing. My idea was to strike you for the necessary funds, and do the thing on a handsome scale. The term little dinner is a mere figure of speech. A little dinner wouldn’t make a big talk, and what we want is the big talk, at present, if we don’t lay up a cent. My notion was that pretty soon after Lent, now, when everybody is feeling just right, we should begin to send out our paragraphs, affirmative, negative, and explanatory, and along about the first of May we should sit down about a hundred strong, the most distinguished people in the country, and solemnize our triumph. There it is in a nutshell. I might expand and I might expound, but that’s the sum and substance of it.”

Fulkerson stopped, and ran his eyes eagerly over the faces of his three listeners, one after the other. March was a little surprised when Dryfoos turned to him, but that reference of the question seemed to give Fulkerson particular pleasure: “What do you think, Mr. March?”

The editor leaned back in his chair. “I don’t pretend to have Mr. Fulkerson’s genius for advertising; but it seems to me a little early yet. We might celebrate later when we’ve got more to celebrate. At present we’re a pleasing novelty, rather than a fixed fact.”

“Ah, you don’t get the idea!” said Fulkerson. “What we want to do with this dinner is to fix the fact.”

“Am I going to come in anywhere?” the old man interrupted.

“You’re going to come in at the head of the procession! We are going to strike everything that is imaginative and romantic in the newspaper soul with you and your history and your fancy for going in for this thing. I can start you in a paragraph that will travel through all the newspapers, from Maine to Texas and from Alaska to Florida. We have had all sorts of rich men backing up literary enterprises, but the natural-gas man in literature is a new thing, and the combination of your picturesque past and your aesthetic present is something that will knock out the sympathies of the American public the first round. I feel,” said Fulkerson, with a tremor of pathos in his voice, “that ‘Every Other Week’ is at a disadvantage before the public as long as it’s supposed to be my enterprise, my idea. As far as I’m known at all, I’m known simply as a syndicate man, and nobody in the press believes that I’ve got the money to run the thing on a grand scale; a suspicion of insolvency must attach to it sooner or later, and the fellows on the press will work up that impression, sooner or later, if we don’t give them something else to work up. Now, as soon as I begin to give it away to the correspondents that you’re in it, with your untold millions — that, in fact, it was your idea from the start, that you originated it to give full play to the humanitarian tendencies of Conrad here, who’s always had these theories of co-operation, and longed to realize them for the benefit of our struggling young writers and artists—”

March had listened with growing amusement to the mingled burlesque and earnest of Fulkerson’s self-sacrificing impudence, and with wonder as to how far Dryfoos was consenting to his preposterous proposition, when Conrad broke out: “Mr. Fulkerson, I could not allow you to do that. It would not be true; I did not wish to be here; and — and what I think — what I wish to do — that is something I will not let any one put me in a false position about. No!” The blood rushed into the young man’s gentle face, and he met his father’s glance with defiance.

Dryfoos turned from him to Fulkerson without speaking, and Fulkerson said, caressingly: “Why, of course, Coonrod! I know how you feel, and I shouldn’t let anything of that sort go out uncontradicted afterward. But there isn’t anything in these times that would give us better standing with the public than some hint of the way you feel about such things. The public expects to be interested, and nothing would interest it more than to be told that the success of ‘Every Other Week’ sprang from the first application of the principle of Live and let Live to a literary enterprise. It would look particularly well, coming from you and your father, but if you object, we can leave that part out; though if you approve of the principle I don’t see why you need object. The main thing is to let the public know that it owes this thing to the liberal and enlightened spirit of one of the foremost capitalists of the country; and that his purposes are not likely to be betrayed in the hands of his son, I should get a little cut made from a photograph of your father, and supply it gratis with the paragraphs.”

“I guess,” said the old man, “we will get along without the cut.”

Fulkerson laughed. “Well, well! Have it your own way, But the sight of your face in the patent outsides of the country press would be worth half a dozen subscribers in every school district throughout the length and breadth of this fair land.”

“There was a fellow,” Dryfoos explained, in an aside to March, “that was getting up a history of Moffitt, and he asked me to let him put a steel engraving of me in. He said a good many prominent citizens were going to have theirs in, and his price was a hundred and fifty dollars. I told him I couldn’t let mine go for less than two hundred, and when he said he could give me a splendid plate for that money, I said I should want it cash. You never saw a fellow more astonished when he got it through him. that I expected him to pay the two hundred.”

Fulkerson laughed in keen appreciation of the joke. “Well, sir, I guess ‘Every Other Week’ will pay you that much. But if you won’t sell at any price, all right; we must try to worry along without the light of your countenance on the posters, but we got to have it for the banquet.”

“I don’t seem to feel very hungry, yet,” said they old man, dryly.

“Oh, ‘l’appetit vient en mangeant’, as our French friends say. You’ll be hungry enough when you see the preliminary Little Neck clam. It’s too late for oysters.”

“Doesn’t that fact seem to point to a postponement till they get back, sometime in October,” March suggested.

“No, no!” said Fulkerson, “you don’t catch on to the business end of this thing, my friends. You’re proceeding on something like the old exploded idea that the demand creates the supply, when everybody knows, if he’s watched the course of modern events, that it’s just as apt to be the other way. I contend that we’ve got a real substantial success to celebrate now; but even if we hadn’t, the celebration would do more than anything else to create the success, if we got it properly before the public. People will say: Those fellows are not fools; they wouldn’t go and rejoice over their magazine unless they had got a big thing in it. And the state of feeling we should produce in the public mind would make a boom of perfectly unprecedented grandeur for E. O. W. Heigh?”

He looked sunnily from one to the other in succession. The elder Dryfoos said, with his chin on the top of his stick, “I reckon those Little Neck clams will keep.”

“Well, just as you say,” Fulkerson cheerfully assented. “I understand you to agree to the general principle of a little dinner?”

“The smaller the better,” said the old man.

“Well, I say a little dinner because the idea of that seems to cover the case, even if we vary the plan a little. I had thought of a reception, maybe, that would include the lady contributors and artists, and the wives and daughters of the other contributors. That would give us the chance to ring in a lot of society correspondents and get the thing written up in first-class shape. By-the-way!” cried Fulkerson, slapping himself on the leg, “why not have the dinner and the reception both?”

“I don’t understand,” said Dryfoos.

“Why, have a select little dinner for ten or twenty choice spirits of the male persuasion, and then, about ten o’clock, throw open your palatial drawing-rooms and admit the females to champagne, salads, and ices. It is the very thing! Come!”

“What do you think of it, Mr. March?” asked Dryfoos, on whose social inexperience Fulkerson’s words projected no very intelligible image, and who perhaps hoped for some more light.

“It’s a beautiful vision,” said March, “and if it will take more time to realize it I think I approve. I approve of anything that will delay Mr. Fulkerson’s advertising orgie.”

“Then,” Fulkerson pursued, “we could have the pleasure of Miss Christine and Miss Mela’s company; and maybe Mrs. Dryfoos would look in on us in the course of the evening. There’s no hurry, as Mr. March suggests, if we can give the thing this shape. I will cheerfully adopt the idea of my honorable colleague.”

March laughed at his impudence, but at heart he was ashamed of Fulkerson for proposing to make use of Dryfoos and his house in that way. He fancied something appealing in the look that the old man turned on him, and something indignant in Conrad’s flush; but probably this was only his fancy. He reflected that neither of them could feel it as people of more worldly knowledge would, and he consoled himself with the fact that Fulkerson was really not such a charlatan as he seemed. But it went through his mind that this was a strange end for all Dryfoos’s money-making to come to; and he philosophically accepted the fact of his own humble fortunes when he reflected how little his money could buy for such a man. It was an honorable use that Fulkerson was putting it to in ‘Every Other Week;’ it might be far more creditably spent on such an enterprise than on horses, or wines, or women, the usual resources of the brute rich; and if it were to be lost, it might better be lost that way than in stocks. He kept a smiling face turned to Dryfoos while these irreverent considerations occupied him, and hardened his heart against father and son and their possible emotions.

The old man rose to put an end to the interview. He only repeated, “I guess those clams will keep till fall.”

But Fulkerson was apparently satisfied with the progress he had made; and when he joined March for the stroll homeward after office hours, he was able to detach his mind from the subject, as if content to leave it.

“This is about the best part of the year in New York,” he said; In some of the areas the grass had sprouted, and the tender young foliage had loosened itself froze the buds on a sidewalk tree here and there; the soft air was full of spring, and the delicate sky, far aloof, had the look it never wears at any other season. “It ain’t a time of year to complain much of, anywhere; but I don’t want anything better than the month of May in New York. Farther South it’s too hot, and I’ve been in Boston in May when that east wind of yours made every nerve in my body get up and howl. I reckon the weather has a good deal to do with the local temperament. The reason a New York man takes life so easily with all his rush is that his climate don’t worry him. But a Boston man must be rasped the whole while by the edge in his air. That accounts for his sharpness; and when he’s lived through twenty-five or thirty Boston Mays, he gets to thinking that Providence has some particular use for him, or he wouldn’t have survived, and that makes him conceited. See?”

“I see,” said March. “But I don’t know how you’re going to work that idea into an advertisement, exactly.”

“Oh, pahaw, now, March! You don’t think I’ve got that on the brain all the time?”

“You were gradually leading up to ‘Every Other Week’, somehow.”

“No, sir; I wasn’t. I was just thinking what a different creature a
Massachusetts man is from a Virginian. And yet I suppose they’re both as
pure English stock as you’ll get anywhere in America. Marsh, I think
Colonel Woodburn’s paper is going to make a hit.”

“You’ve got there! When it knocks down the sale about one-half, I shall know it’s made a hit.”

“I’m not afraid,” said Fulkerson. “That thing is going to attract attention. It’s well written — you can take the pomposity out of it, here and there and it’s novel. Our people like a bold strike, and it’s going to shake them up tremendously to have serfdom advocated on high moral grounds as the only solution of the labor problem. You see, in the first place, he goes for their sympathies by the way he portrays the actual relations of capital and labor; he shows how things have got to go from bad to worse, and then he trots out his little old hobby, and proves that if slavery had not been interfered with, it would have perfected itself in the interest of humanity. He makes a pretty strong plea for it.”

March threw back his head and laughed. “He’s converted you! I swear, Fulkerson, if we had accepted and paid for an article advocating cannibalism as the only resource for getting rid of the superfluous poor, you’d begin to believe in it.”

Fulkerson smiled in approval of the joke, and only said: “I wish you could meet the colonel in the privacy of the domestic circle, March. You’d like him. He’s a splendid old fellow; regular type. Talk about spring!

“You ought to see the widow’s little back yard these days. You know that glass gallery just beyond the dining-room? Those girls have got the pot-plants out of that, and a lot more, and they’ve turned the edges of that back yard, along the fence, into a regular bower; they’ve got sweet peas planted, and nasturtiums, and we shall be in a blaze of glory about the beginning of June. Fun to see ’em work in the garden, and the bird bossing the job in his cage under the cherry-tree. Have to keep the middle of the yard for the clothesline, but six days in the week it’s a lawn, and I go over it with a mower myself. March, there ain’t anything like a home, is there? Dear little cot of your own, heigh? I tell you, March, when I get to pushing that mower round, and the colonel is smoking his cigar in the gallery, and those girls are pottering over the flowers, one of these soft evenings after dinner, I feel like a human being. Yes, I do. I struck it rich when I concluded to take my meals at the widow’s. For eight dollars a week I get good board, refined society, and all the advantages of a Christian home. By-the-way, you’ve never had much talk with Miss Woodburn, have you, March?”

“Not so much as with Miss Woodburn’s father.”

“Well, he is rather apt to scoop the conversation. I must draw his fire, sometime, when you and Mrs. March are around, and get you a chance with Miss Woodburn.”

“I should like that better, I believe,” said March.

“Well, I shouldn’t wonder if you did. Curious, but Miss Woodburn isn’t at all your idea of a Southern girl. She’s got lots of go; she’s never idle a minute; she keeps the old gentleman in first-class shape, and she don’t believe a bit in the slavery solution of the labor problem; says she’s glad it’s gone, and if it’s anything like the effects of it, she’s glad it went before her time. No, sir, she’s as full of snap as the liveliest kind of a Northern girl. None of that sunny Southern languor you read about.”

“I suppose the typical Southerner, like the typical anything else, is pretty difficult to find,” said March. “But perhaps Miss Woodburn represents the new South. The modern conditions must be producing a modern type.”

“Well, that’s what she and the colonel both say. They say there ain’t anything left of that Walter Scott dignity and chivalry in the rising generation; takes too much time. You ought to see her sketch the old-school, high-and-mighty manners, as they survive among some of the antiques in Charlottesburg. If that thing could be put upon the stage it would be a killing success. Makes the old gentleman laugh in spite of himself. But he’s as proud of her as Punch, anyway. Why don’t you and Mrs. March come round oftener? Look here! How would it do to have a little excursion, somewhere, after the spring fairly gets in its work?”

“Reporters present?”

“No, no! Nothing of that kind; perfectly sincere and disinterested enjoyment.”

“Oh, a few handbills to be scattered around: ‘Buy “Every Other Week”,’ ‘Look out for the next number of “Every Other Week,”’ “‘Every Other Week’ at all the news-stands.’ Well, I’ll talk it over with Mrs. March. I suppose there’s no great hurry.”

March told his wife of the idyllic mood in which he had left Fulkerson at the widow’s door, and she said he must be in love.

“Why, of course! I wonder I didn’t think of that. But Fulkerson is such an impartial admirer of the whole sex that you can’t think of his liking one more than another. I don’t know that he showed any unjust partiality, though, in his talk of ‘those girls,’ as he called them. And I always rather fancied that Mrs. Mandel — he’s done so much for her, you know; and she is such a well-balanced, well-preserved person, and so lady-like and correct — —”

“Fulkerson had the word for her: academic. She’s everything that instruction and discipline can make of a woman; but I shouldn’t think they could make enough of her to be in love with.”

“Well, I don’t know. The academic has its charm. There are moods in which I could imagine myself in love with an academic person. That regularity of line; that reasoned strictness of contour; that neatness of pose; that slightly conventional but harmonious grouping of the emotions and morals — you can see how it would have its charm, the Wedgwood in human nature? I wonder where Mrs. Mandel keeps her urn and her willow.”

“I should think she might have use for them in that family, poor thing!” said Mrs. March.

“Ah, that reminds me,” said her husband, “that we had another talk with the old gentleman, this afternoon, about Fulkerson’s literary, artistic, and advertising orgie, and it’s postponed till October.”

“The later the better, I should think,” said Mrs. March, who did not really think about it at all, but whom the date fixed for it caused to think of the intervening time. “We have got to consider what we will do about the summer, before long, Basil.”

“Oh, not yet, not yet,” he pleaded; with that man’s willingness to abide in the present, which is so trying to a woman. “It’s only the end of April.”

“It will be the end of June before we know. And these people wanting the Boston house another year complicates it. We can’t spend the summer there, as we planned.”

“They oughtn’t to have offered us an increased rent; they have taken an advantage of us.”

“I don’t know that it matters,” said Mrs. March. “I had decided not to go there.”

“Had you? This is a surprise.”

“Everything is a surprise to you, Basil, when it happens.”

“True; I keep the world fresh, that way.”

“It wouldn’t have been any change to go from one city to another for the summer. We might as well have stayed in New York.”

“Yes, I wish we had stayed,” said March, idly humoring a conception of the accomplished fact. “Mrs. Green would have let us have the gimcrackery very cheap for the summer months; and we could have made all sorts of nice little excursions and trips off and been twice as well as if we had spent the summer away.”

“Nonsense! You know we couldn’t spend the summer in New York.”

“I know I could.”

“What stuff! You couldn’t manage.”

“Oh yes, I could. I could take my meals at Fulkerson’s widow’s; or at Maroni’s, with poor old Lindau: he’s got to dining there again. Or, I could keep house, and he could dine with me here.”

There was a teasing look in March’s eyes, and he broke into a laugh, at the firmness with which his wife said: “I think if there is to be any housekeeping, I will stay, too; and help to look after it. I would try not intrude upon you and your guest.”

“Oh, we should be only too glad to have you join us,” said March, playing with fire.

“Very well, then, I wish you would take him off to Maroni’s, the next time he comes to dine here!” cried his wife.

The experiment of making March’s old friend free of his house had not given her all the pleasure that so kind a thing ought to have afforded so good a woman. She received Lindau at first with robust benevolence, and the high resolve not to let any of his little peculiarities alienate her from a sense of his claim upon her sympathy and gratitude, not only as a man who had been so generously fond of her husband in his youth, but a hero who had suffered for her country. Her theory was that his mutilation must not be ignored, but must be kept in mind as a monument of his sacrifice, and she fortified Bella with this conception, so that the child bravely sat next his maimed arm at table and helped him to dishes he could not reach, and cut up his meat for him. As for Mrs. March herself, the thought of his mutilation made her a little faint; she was not without a bewildered resentment of its presence as a sort of oppression. She did not like his drinking so much of March’s beer, either; it was no harm, but it was somehow unworthy, out of character with a hero of the war. But what she really could not reconcile herself to was the violence of Lindau’s sentiments concerning the whole political and social fabric. She did not feel sure that he should be allowed to say such things before the children, who had been nurtured in the faith of Bunker Hill and Appomattox, as the beginning and the end of all possible progress in human rights. As a woman she was naturally an aristocrat, but as an American she was theoretically a democrat; and it astounded, it alarmed her, to hear American democracy denounced as a shuffling evasion. She had never cared much for the United States Senate, but she doubted if she ought to sit by when it was railed at as a rich man’s club. It shocked her to be told that the rich and poor were not equal before the law in a country where justice must be paid for at every step in fees and costs, or where a poor man must go to war in his own person, and a rich man might hire someone to go in his. Mrs. March felt that this rebellious mind in Lindau really somehow outlawed him from sympathy, and retroactively undid his past suffering for the country: she had always particularly valued that provision of the law, because in forecasting all the possible mischances that might befall her own son, she had been comforted by the thought that if there ever was another war, and Tom were drafted, his father could buy him a substitute. Compared with such blasphemy as this, Lindau’s declaration that there was not equality of opportunity in America, and that fully one-half the people were debarred their right to the pursuit of happiness by the hopeless conditions of their lives, was flattering praise. She could not listen to such things in silence, though, and it did not help matters when Lindau met her arguments with facts and reasons which she felt she was merely not sufficiently instructed to combat, and he was not quite gentlemanly to urge. “I am afraid for the effect on the children,” she said to her husband. “Such perfectly distorted ideas — Tom will be ruined by them.”

“Oh, let Tom find out where they’re false,” said March. “It will be good exercise for his faculties of research. At any rate, those things are getting said nowadays; he’ll have to hear them sooner or later.”

“Had he better hear them at home?” demanded his wife.

“Why, you know, as you’re here to refute them, Isabel,” he teased, “perhaps it’s the best place. But don’t mind poor old Lindau, my dear. He says himself that his parg is worse than his pidte, you know.”

“Ah, it’s too late now to mind him,” she sighed. In a moment of rash good feeling, or perhaps an exalted conception of duty, she had herself proposed that Lindau should come every week and read German with Tom; and it had become a question first how they could get him to take pay for it, and then how they could get him to stop it. Mrs. March never ceased to wonder at herself for having brought this about, for she had warned her husband against making any engagement with Lindau which would bring him regularly to the house: the Germans stuck so, and were so unscrupulously dependent. Yet, the deed being done, she would not ignore the duty of hospitality, and it was always she who made the old man stay to their Sunday-evening tea when he lingered near the hour, reading Schiller and Heine and Uhland with the boy, in the clean shirt with which he observed the day; Lindau’s linen was not to be trusted during the week. She now concluded a season of mournful reflection by saying, “He will get you into trouble, somehow, Basil.”

“Well, I don’t know how, exactly. I regard Lindau as a political economist of an unusual type; but I shall not let him array me against the constituted authorities. Short of that, I think I am safe.”

“Well, be careful, Basil; be careful. You know you are so rash.”

“I suppose I may continue to pity him? He is such a poor, lonely old fellow. Are you really sorry he’s come into our lives, my dear?”

“No, no; not that. I feel as you do about it; but I wish I felt easier about him — sure, that is, that we’re not doing wrong to let him keep on talking so.”

“I suspect we couldn’t help it,” March returned, lightly. “It’s one of what Lindau calls his ‘brincibles’ to say what he thinks.”

II.

The Marches had no longer the gross appetite for novelty which urges youth to a surfeit of strange scenes, experiences, ideas; and makes travel, with all its annoyances and fatigues, an inexhaustible delight. But there is no doubt that the chief pleasure of their life in New York was from its quality of foreignness: the flavor of olives, which, once tasted, can never be forgotten. The olives may not be of the first excellence; they may be a little stale, and small and poor, to begin with, but they are still olives, and the fond palate craves them. The sort which grew in New York, on lower Sixth Avenue and in the region of Jefferson Market and on the soft exposures south of Washington Square, were none the less acceptable because they were of the commonest Italian variety.

The Marches spent a good deal of time and money in a grocery of that nationality, where they found all the patriotic comestibles and potables, and renewed their faded Italian with the friendly family in charge. Italian table d’hotes formed the adventure of the week, on the day when Mrs. March let her domestics go out, and went herself to dine abroad with her husband and children; and they became adepts in the restaurants where they were served, and which they varied almost from dinner to dinner. The perfect decorum of these places, and their immunity from offence in any, emboldened the Marches to experiment in Spanish restaurants, where red pepper and beans insisted in every dinner, and where once they chanced upon a night of ‘olla podrida’, with such appeals to March’s memory of a boyish ambition to taste the dish that he became poetic and then pensive over its cabbage and carrots, peas and bacon. For a rare combination of international motives they prized most the table d’hote of a French lady, who had taken a Spanish husband in a second marriage, and had a Cuban negro for her cook, with a cross-eyed Alsation for waiter, and a slim young South-American for cashier. March held that something of the catholic character of these relations expressed itself in the generous and tolerant variety of the dinner, which was singularly abundant for fifty cents, without wine. At one very neat French place he got a dinner at the same price with wine, but it was not so abundant; and March inquired in fruitless speculation why the table d’hote of the Italians, a notoriously frugal and abstemious people, should be usually more than you wanted at seventy-five cents and a dollar, and that of the French rather less at half a dollar. He could not see that the frequenters were greatly different at the different places; they were mostly Americans, of subdued manners and conjecturably subdued fortunes, with here and there a table full of foreigners. There was no noise and not much smoking anywhere; March liked going to that neat French place because there Madame sat enthroned and high behind a ‘comptoir’ at one side of the room, and everybody saluted her in going out. It was there that a gentle-looking young couple used to dine, in whom the Marches became effectlessly interested, because they thought they looked like that when they were young. The wife had an aesthetic dress, and defined her pretty head by wearing her back-hair pulled up very tight under her bonnet; the husband had dreamy eyes set wide apart under a pure forehead. “They are artists, August, I think,” March suggested to the waiter, when he had vainly asked about them. “Oh, hartis, cedenly,” August consented; but Heaven knows whether they were, or what they were: March never learned.

This immunity from acquaintance, this touch-and go quality in their New York sojourn, this almost loss of individuality at times, after the intense identification of their Boston life, was a relief, though Mrs. March had her misgivings, and questioned whether it were not perhaps too relaxing to the moral fibre. March refused to explore his conscience; he allowed that it might be so; but he said he liked now and then to feel his personality in that state of solution. They went and sat a good deal in the softening evenings among the infants and dotards of Latin extraction in Washington Square, safe from all who ever knew them, and enjoyed the advancing season, which thickened the foliage of the trees and flattered out of sight the church warden’s Gothic of the University Building. The infants were sometimes cross, and cried in their weary mothers’ or little sisters’ arms; but they did not disturb the dotards, who slept, some with their heads fallen forward, and some with their heads fallen back; March arbitrarily distinguished those with the drooping faces as tipsy and ashamed to confront the public. The small Italian children raced up and down the asphalt paths, playing American games of tag and hide-and-whoop; larger boys passed ball, in training for potential championships. The Marches sat and mused, or quarrelled fitfully about where they should spend the summer, like sparrows, he once said, till the electric lights began to show distinctly among the leaves, and they looked round and found the infants and dotards gone and the benches filled with lovers. That was the signal for the Marches to go home. He said that the spectacle of so much courtship as the eye might take in there at a glance was not, perhaps, oppressive, but the thought that at the same hour the same thing was going on all over the country, wherever two young fools could get together, was more than he could bear; he did not deny that it was natural, and, in a measure authorized, but he declared that it was hackneyed; and the fact that it must go on forever, as long as the race lasted, made him tired.

At home, generally, they found that the children had not missed them, and were perfectly safe. It was one of the advantages of a flat that they could leave the children there whenever they liked without anxiety. They liked better staying there than wandering about in the evening with their parents, whose excursions seemed to them somewhat aimless, and their pleasures insipid. They studied, or read, or looked out of the window at the street sights; and their mother always came back to them with a pang for their lonesomeness. Bella knew some little girls in the house, but in a ceremonious way; Tom had formed no friendships among the boys at school such as he had left in Boston; as nearly as he could explain, the New York fellows carried canes at an age when they would have had them broken for them by the other boys at Boston; and they were both sissyish and fast. It was probably prejudice; he never could say exactly what their demerits were, and neither he nor Bella was apparently so homesick as they pretended, though they answered inquirers, the one that New York was a hole, and the other that it was horrid, and that all they lived for was to get back to Boston. In the mean time they were thrown much upon each other for society, which March said was well for both of them; he did not mind their cultivating a little gloom and the sense of a common wrong; it made them better comrades, and it was providing them with amusing reminiscences for the future. They really enjoyed Bohemianizing in that harmless way: though Tom had his doubts of its respectability; he was very punctilious about his sister, and went round from his own school every day to fetch her home from hers. The whole family went to the theatre a good deal, and enjoyed themselves together in their desultory explorations of the city.

They lived near Greenwich Village, and March liked strolling through its quaintness toward the waterside on a Sunday, when a hereditary Sabbatarianism kept his wife at home; he made her observe that it even kept her at home from church. He found a lingering quality of pure Americanism in the region, and he said the very bells called to worship in a nasal tone. He liked the streets of small brick houses, with here and there one painted red, and the mortar lines picked out in white, and with now and then a fine wooden portal of fluted pillars and a bowed transom. The rear of the tenement-houses showed him the picturesqueness of clothes-lines fluttering far aloft, as in Florence; and the new apartment-houses, breaking the old sky-line with their towering stories, implied a life as alien to the American manner as anything in continental Europe. In fact, foreign faces and foreign tongues prevailed in Greenwich Village, but no longer German or even Irish tongues or faces. The eyes and earrings of Italians twinkled in and out of the alleyways and basements, and they seemed to abound even in the streets, where long ranks of trucks drawn up in Sunday rest along the curbstones suggested the presence of a race of sturdier strength than theirs. March liked the swarthy, strange visages; he found nothing menacing for the future in them; for wickedness he had to satisfy himself as he could with the sneering, insolent, clean-shaven mug of some rare American of the b’hoy type, now almost as extinct in New York as the dodo or the volunteer fireman. When he had found his way, among the ash-barrels and the groups of decently dressed church-goers, to the docks, he experienced a sufficient excitement in the recent arrival of a French steamer, whose sheds were thronged with hacks and express-wagons, and in a tacit inquiry into the emotions of the passengers, fresh from the cleanliness of Paris, and now driving up through the filth of those streets.

Some of the streets were filthier than others; there was at least a choice; there were boxes and barrels of kitchen offal on all the sidewalks, but not everywhere manure-heaps, and in some places the stench was mixed with the more savory smell of cooking. One Sunday morning, before the winter was quite gone, the sight of the frozen refuse melting in heaps, and particularly the loathsome edges of the rotting ice near the gutters, with the strata of waste-paper and straw litter, and egg-shells and orange peel, potato-skins and cigar-stumps, made him unhappy. He gave a whimsical shrug for the squalor of the neighboring houses, and said to himself rather than the boy who was with him: “It’s curious, isn’t it, how fond the poor people are of these unpleasant thoroughfares? You always find them living in the worst streets.”

“The burden of all the wrong in the world comes on the poor,” said the boy. “Every sort of fraud and swindling hurts them the worst. The city wastes the money it’s paid to clean the streets with, and the poor have to suffer, for they can’t afford to pay twice, like the rich.”

March stopped short. “Hallo, Tom! Is that your wisdom?”

“It’s what Mr. Lindau says,” answered the boy, doggedly, as if not pleased to have his ideas mocked at, even if they were second-hand.

“And you didn’t tell him that the poor lived in dirty streets because they liked them, and were too lazy and worthless to have them cleaned?”

“No; I didn’t.”

“I’m surprised. What do you think of Lindau, generally speaking, Tom?”

“Well, sir, I don’t like the way he talks about some things. I don’t suppose this country is perfect, but I think it’s about the best there is, and it don’t do any good to look at its drawbacks all the time.”

“Sound, my son,” said March, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder and beginning to walk on. “Well?”

“Well, then, he says that it isn’t the public frauds only that the poor have to pay for, but they have to pay for all the vices of the rich; that when a speculator fails, or a bank cashier defaults, or a firm suspends, or hard times come, it’s the poor who have to give up necessaries where the rich give up luxuries.”

“Well, well! And then?”

“Well, then I think the crank comes in, in Mr. Lindau. He says there’s no need of failures or frauds or hard times. It’s ridiculous. There always have been and there always will be. But if you tell him that, it seems to make him perfectly furious.”

March repeated the substance of this talk to his wife. “I’m glad to know that Tom can see through such ravings. He has lots of good common sense.”

It was the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end; at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall — for its convenience in looking into the street, he said. The line of these comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the facades of shops; and March professed himself vulgarized by a want of style in the people they met in their walk to Twenty-third Street.

“Take me somewhere to meet my fellow-exclusives, Isabel,” he demanded. “I pine for the society of my peers.”

He hailed a passing omnibus, and made his wife get on the roof with him. “Think of our doing such a thing in Boston!” she sighed, with a little shiver of satisfaction in her immunity from recognition and comment.

“You wouldn’t be afraid to do it in London or Paris?”

“No; we should be strangers there — just as we are in New York. I wonder how long one could be a stranger here.”

“Oh, indefinitely, in our way of living. The place is really vast, so much larger than it used to seem, and so heterogeneous.”

When they got down very far up-town, and began to walk back by Madison Avenue, they found themselves in a different population from that they dwelt among; not heterogeneous at all; very homogeneous, and almost purely American; the only qualification was American Hebrew. Such a well-dressed, well-satisfied, well-fed looking crowd poured down the broad sidewalks before the handsome, stupid houses that March could easily pretend he had got among his fellow-plutocrats at last. Still he expressed his doubts whether this Sunday afternoon parade, which seemed to be a thing of custom, represented the best form among the young people of that region; he wished he knew; he blamed himself for becoming of a fastidious conjecture; he could not deny the fashion and the richness and the indigeneity of the spectacle; the promenaders looked New-Yorky; they were the sort of people whom you would know for New-Yorkers elsewhere, — so well equipped and so perfectly kept at all points. Their silk hats shone, and their boots; their frocks had the right distension behind, and their bonnets perfect poise and distinction.

The Marches talked of these and other facts of their appearance, and curiously questioned whether this were the best that a great material civilization could come to; it looked a little dull. The men’s faces were shrewd and alert, and yet they looked dull; the women’s were pretty and knowing, and yet dull. It was, probably, the holiday expression of the vast, prosperous commercial class, with unlimited money, and no ideals that money could not realize; fashion and comfort were all that they desired to compass, and the culture that furnishes showily, that decorates and that tells; the culture, say, of plays and operas, rather than books.

Perhaps the observers did the promenaders injustice; they might not have been as common-minded as they looked. “But,” March said, “I understand now why the poor people don’t come up here and live in this clean, handsome, respectable quarter of the town; they would be bored to death. On the whole, I think I should prefer Mott Street myself.”

In other walks the Marches tried to find some of the streets they had wandered through the first day of their wedding journey in New York, so long ago. They could not make sure of them; but once they ran down to the Battery, and easily made sure of that, though not in its old aspect. They recalled the hot morning, when they sauntered over the trodden weed that covered the sickly grass-plots there, and sentimentalized the sweltering paupers who had crept out of the squalid tenements about for a breath of air after a sleepless night. Now the paupers were gone, and where the old mansions that had fallen to their use once stood, there towered aloft and abroad those heights and masses of many-storied brick-work for which architecture has yet no proper form and aesthetics no name. The trees and shrubs, all in their young spring green, blew briskly over the guarded turf in the south wind that came up over the water; and in the well-paved alleys the ghosts of eighteenth-century fashion might have met each other in their old haunts, and exchanged stately congratulations upon its vastly bettered condition, and perhaps puzzled a little over the colossal lady on Bedloe’s Island, with her lifted torch, and still more over the curving tracks and chalet-stations of the Elevated road. It is an outlook of unrivalled beauty across the bay, that smokes and flashes with the innumerable stacks and sails of commerce, to the hills beyond, where the moving forest of masts halts at the shore, and roots itself in the groves of the many villaged uplands. The Marches paid the charming prospects a willing duty, and rejoiced in it as generously as if it had been their own. Perhaps it was, they decided. He said people owned more things in common than they were apt to think; and they drew the consolations of proprietorship from the excellent management of Castle Garden, which they penetrated for a moment’s glimpse of the huge rotunda, where the immigrants first set foot on our continent. It warmed their hearts, so easily moved to any cheap sympathy, to see the friendly care the nation took of these humble guests; they found it even pathetic to hear the proper authority calling out the names of such as had kin or acquaintance waiting there to meet them. No one appeared troubled or anxious; the officials had a conscientious civility; the government seemed to manage their welcome as well as a private company or corporation could have done. In fact, it was after the simple strangers had left the government care that March feared their woes might begin; and he would have liked the government to follow each of them to his home, wherever he meant to fix it within our borders. He made note of the looks of the licensed runners and touters waiting for the immigrants outside the government premises; he intended to work them up into a dramatic effect in some sketch, but they remained mere material in his memorandum-book, together with some quaint old houses on the Sixth Avenue road, which he had noticed on the way down. On the way up, these were superseded in his regard by some hip-roof structures on the Ninth Avenue, which he thought more Dutch-looking. The perspectives of the cross-streets toward the river were very lively, with their turmoil of trucks and cars and carts and hacks and foot passengers, ending in the chimneys and masts of shipping, and final gleams of dancing water. At a very noisy corner, clangorous with some sort of ironworking, he made his wife enjoy with him the quiet sarcasm of an inn that called itself the Home-like Hotel, and he speculated at fantastic length on the gentle associations of one who should have passed his youth under its roof.

III.

First and last, the Marches did a good deal of travel on the Elevated roads, which, he said, gave you such glimpses of material aspects in the city as some violent invasion of others’ lives might afford in human nature. Once, when the impulse of adventure was very strong in them, they went quite the length of the West Side lines, and saw the city pushing its way by irregular advances into the country. Some spaces, probably held by the owners for that rise in value which the industry of others providentially gives to the land of the wise and good, it left vacant comparatively far down the road, and built up others at remoter points. It was a world of lofty apartment houses beyond the Park, springing up in isolated blocks, with stretches of invaded rusticity between, and here and there an old country-seat standing dusty in its budding vines with the ground before it in rocky upheaval for city foundations. But wherever it went or wherever it paused, New York gave its peculiar stamp; and the adventurers were amused to find One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street inchoately like Twenty-third Street and Fourteenth Street in its shops and shoppers. The butchers’ shops and milliners’ shops on the avenue might as well have been at Tenth as at One Hundredth Street.

The adventurers were not often so adventurous. They recognized that in their willingness to let their fancy range for them, and to let speculation do the work of inquiry, they were no longer young. Their point of view was singularly unchanged, and their impressions of New York remained the same that they had been fifteen years before: huge, noisy, ugly, kindly, it seemed to them now as it seemed then. The main difference was that they saw it more now as a life, and then they only regarded it as a spectacle; and March could not release himself from a sense of complicity with it, no matter what whimsical, or alien, or critical attitude he took. A sense of the striving and the suffering deeply possessed him; and this grew the more intense as he gained some knowledge of the forces at work — forces of pity, of destruction, of perdition, of salvation. He wandered about on Sunday not only through the streets, but into this tabernacle and that, as the spirit moved him, and listened to those who dealt with Christianity as a system of economics as well as a religion. He could not get his wife to go with him; she listened to his report of what he heard, and trembled; it all seemed fantastic and menacing. She lamented the literary peace, the intellectual refinement of the life they had left behind them; and he owned it was very pretty, but he said it was not life — it was death-in-life. She liked to hear him talk in that strain of virtuous self-denunciation, but she asked him, “Which of your prophets are you going to follow?” and he answered: “All-all! And a fresh one every Sunday.” And so they got their laugh out of it at last, but with some sadness at heart, and with a dim consciousness that they had got their laugh out of too many things in life.

What really occupied and compassed his activities, in spite of his strenuous reveries of work beyond it, was his editorship. On its social side it had not fulfilled all the expectations which Fulkerson’s radiant sketch of its duties and relations had caused him to form of it. Most of the contributions came from a distance; even the articles written in New York reached him through the post, and so far from having his valuable time, as they called it, consumed in interviews with his collaborators, he rarely saw any of them. The boy on the stairs, who was to fence him from importunate visitors, led a life of luxurious disoccupation, and whistled almost uninterruptedly. When any one came, March found himself embarrassed and a little anxious. The visitors were usually young men, terribly respectful, but cherishing, as he imagined, ideals and opinions chasmally different from his; and he felt in their presence something like an anachronism, something like a fraud. He tried to freshen up his sympathies on them, to get at what they were really thinking and feeling, and it was some time before he could understand that they were not really thinking and feeling anything of their own concerning their art, but were necessarily, in their quality of young, inexperienced men, mere acceptants of older men’s thoughts and feelings, whether they were tremendously conservative, as some were, or tremendously progressive, as others were. Certain of them called themselves realists, certain romanticists; but none of them seemed to know what realism was, or what romanticism; they apparently supposed the difference a difference of material. March had imagined himself taking home to lunch or dinner the aspirants for editorial favor whom he liked, whether he liked their work or not; but this was not an easy matter. Those who were at all interesting seemed to have engagements and preoccupations; after two or three experiments with the bashfuller sort — those who had come up to the metropolis with manuscripts in their hands, in the good old literary tradition — he wondered whether he was otherwise like them when he was young like them. He could not flatter himself that he was not; and yet he had a hope that the world had grown worse since his time, which his wife encouraged.

Mrs. March was not eager to pursue the hospitalities which she had at first imagined essential to the literary prosperity of ‘Every Other Week’; her family sufficed her; she would willingly have seen no one out of it but the strangers at the weekly table-d’hote dinner, or the audiences at the theatres. March’s devotion to his work made him reluctant to delegate it to any one; and as the summer advanced, and the question of where to go grew more vexed, he showed a man’s base willingness to shirk it for himself by not going anywhere. He asked his wife why she did not go somewhere with the children, and he joined her in a search for non-malarial regions on the map when she consented to entertain this notion. But when it came to the point she would not go; he offered to go with her then, and then she would not let him. She said she knew he would be anxious about his work; he protested that he could take it with him to any distance within a few hours, but she would not be persuaded. She would rather he stayed; the effect would be better with Mr. Fulkerson; they could make excursions, and they could all get off a week or two to the seashore near Boston — the only real seashore — in August. The excursions were practically confined to a single day at Coney Island; and once they got as far as Boston on the way to the seashore near Boston; that is, Mrs. March and the children went; an editorial exigency kept March at the last moment. The Boston streets seemed very queer and clean and empty to the children, and the buildings little; in the horse-cars the Boston faces seemed to arraign their mother with a down-drawn severity that made her feel very guilty. She knew that this was merely the Puritan mask, the cast of a dead civilization, which people of very amiable and tolerant minds were doomed to wear, and she sighed to think that less than a year of the heterogeneous gayety of New York should have made her afraid of it. The sky seemed cold and gray; the east wind, which she had always thought so delicious in summer, cut her to the heart. She took her children up to the South End, and in the pretty square where they used to live they stood before their alienated home, and looked up at its close-shuttered windows. The tenants must have been away, but Mrs. March had not the courage to ring and make sure, though she had always promised herself that she would go all over the house when she came back, and see how they had used it; she could pretend a desire for something she wished to take away. She knew she could not bear it now; and the children did not seem eager. She did not push on to the seaside; it would be forlorn there without their father; she was glad to go back to him in the immense, friendly homelessness of New York, and hold him answerable for the change, in her heart or her mind, which made its shapeless tumult a refuge and a consolation.

She found that he had been giving the cook a holiday, and dining about hither and thither with Fulkerson. Once he had dined with him at the widow’s (as they always called Mrs. Leighton), and then had spent the evening there, and smoked with Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn on the gallery overlooking the back yard. They were all spending the summer in New York. The widow had got so good an offer for her house at St. Barnaby for the summer that she could not refuse it; and the Woodburns found New York a watering-place of exemplary coolness after the burning Augusts and Septembers of Charlottesburg.

“You can stand it well enough in our climate, sir,” the colonel explained, “till you come to the September heat, that sometimes runs well into October; and then you begin to lose your temper, sir. It’s never quite so hot as it is in New York at times, but it’s hot longer, sir.” He alleged, as if something of the sort were necessary, the example of a famous Southwestern editor who spent all his summers in a New York hotel as the most luxurious retreat on the continent, consulting the weather forecasts, and running off on torrid days to the mountains or the sea, and then hurrying back at the promise of cooler weather. The colonel had not found it necessary to do this yet; and he had been reluctant to leave town, where he was working up a branch of the inquiry which had so long occupied him, in the libraries, and studying the great problem of labor and poverty as it continually presented itself to him in the streets. He said that he talked with all sorts of people, whom he found monstrously civil, if you took them in the right way; and he went everywhere in the city without fear and apparently without danger. March could not find out that he had ridden his hobby into the homes of want which he visited, or had proposed their enslavement to the inmates as a short and simple solution of the great question of their lives; he appeared to have contented himself with the collection of facts for the persuasion of the cultivated classes. It seemed to March a confirmation of this impression that the colonel should address his deductions from these facts so unsparingly to him; he listened with a respectful patience, for which Fulkerson afterward personally thanked him. Fulkerson said it was not often the colonel found such a good listener; generally nobody listened but Mrs. Leighton, who thought his ideas were shocking, but honored him for holding them so conscientiously. Fulkerson was glad that March, as the literary department, had treated the old gentleman so well, because there was an open feud between him and the art department. Beaton was outrageously rude, Fulkerson must say; though as for that, the old colonel seemed quite able to take care of himself, and gave Beaton an unqualified contempt in return for his unmannerliness. The worst of it was, it distressed the old lady so; she admired Beaton as much as she respected the colonel, and she admired Beaton, Fulkerson thought, rather more than Miss Leighton did; he asked March if he had noticed them together. March had noticed them, but without any very definite impression except that Beaton seemed to give the whole evening to the girl. Afterward he recollected that he had fancied her rather harassed by his devotion, and it was this point that he wished to present for his wife’s opinion.

“Girls often put on that air,” she said. “It’s one of their ways of teasing. But then, if the man was really very much in love, and she was only enough in love to be uncertain of herself, she might very well seem troubled. It would be a very serious question. Girls often don’t know what to do in such a case.”

“Yes,” said March, “I’ve often been glad that I was not a girl, on that account. But I guess that on general principles Beaton is not more in love than she is. I couldn’t imagine that young man being more in love with anybody, unless it was himself. He might be more in love with himself than any one else was.”

“Well, he doesn’t interest me a great deal, and I can’t say Miss Leighton does, either. I think she can take care of herself. She has herself very well in hand.”

“Why so censorious?” pleaded March. “I don’t defend her for having herself in hand; but is it a fault?”

Mrs. March did not say. She asked, “And how does Mr. Fulkerson’s affair get on?”

“His affair? You really think it is one? Well, I’ve fancied so myself, and I’ve had an idea of some time asking him; Fulkerson strikes one as truly domesticable, conjugable at heart; but I’ve waited for him to speak.”

“I should think so.”

“Yes. He’s never opened on the subject yet. Do you know, I think
Fulkerson has his moments of delicacy.”

“Moments! He’s all delicacy in regard to women.”

“Well, perhaps so. There is nothing in them to rouse his advertising instincts.”

IV

The Dryfoos family stayed in town till August. Then the father went West again to look after his interests; and Mrs. Mandel took the two girls to one of the great hotels in Saratoga. Fulkerson said that he had never seen anything like Saratoga for fashion, and Mrs. Mandel remembered that in her own young ladyhood this was so for at least some weeks of the year. She had been too far withdrawn from fashion since her marriage to know whether it was still so or not. In this, as in so many other matters, the Dryfoos family helplessly relied upon Fulkerson, in spite of Dryfoos’s angry determination that he should not run the family, and in spite of Christine’s doubt of his omniscience; if he did not know everything, she was aware that he knew more than herself. She thought that they had a right to have him go with them to Saratoga, or at least go up and engage their rooms beforehand; but Fulkerson did not offer to do either, and she did not quite see her way to commanding his services. The young ladies took what Mela called splendid dresses with them; they sat in the park of tall, slim trees which the hotel’s quadrangle enclosed, and listened to the music in the morning, or on the long piazza in the afternoon and looked at the driving in the street, or in the vast parlors by night, where all the other ladies were, and they felt that they were of the best there. But they knew nobody, and Mrs. Mandel was so particular that Mela was prevented from continuing the acquaintance even of the few young men who danced with her at the Saturday-night hops. They drove about, but they went to places without knowing why, except that the carriage man took them, and they had all the privileges of a proud exclusivism without desiring them. Once a motherly matron seemed to perceive their isolation, and made overtures to them, but then desisted, as if repelled by Christine’s suspicion, or by Mela’s too instant and hilarious good-fellowship, which expressed itself in hoarse laughter and in a flow of talk full of topical and syntactical freedom. From time to time she offered to bet Christine that if Mr. Fulkerson was only there they would have a good time; she wondered what they were all doing in New York, where she wished herself; she rallied her sister about Beaton, and asked her why she did not write and tell him to come up there.

Mela knew that Christine had expected Beaton to follow them. Some banter had passed between them to this effect; he said he should take them in on his way home to Syracuse. Christine would not have hesitated to write to him and remind him of his promise; but she had learned to distrust her literature with Beaton since he had laughed at the spelling in a scrap of writing which dropped out of her music-book one night. She believed that he would not have laughed if he had known it was hers; but she felt that she could hide better the deficiencies which were not committed to paper; she could manage with him in talking; she was too ignorant of her ignorance to recognize the mistakes she made then. Through her own passion she perceived that she had some kind of fascination for him; she was graceful, and she thought it must be that; she did not understand that there was a kind of beauty in her small, irregular features that piqued and haunted his artistic sense, and a look in her black eyes beyond her intelligence and intention. Once he sketched her as they sat together, and flattered the portrait without getting what he wanted in it; he said he must try her some time in color; and he said things which, when she made Mela repeat them, could only mean that he admired her more than anybody else. He came fitfully, but he came often, and she rested content in a girl’s indefiniteness concerning the affair; if her thought went beyond lovemaking to marriage, she believed that she could have him if she wanted him. Her father’s money counted in this; she divined that Beaton was poor; but that made no difference; she would have enough for both; the money would have counted as an irresistible attraction if there had been no other.

The affair had gone on in spite of the sidelong looks of restless dislike with which Dryfoos regarded it; but now when Beaton did not come to Saratoga it necessarily dropped, and Christine’s content with it. She bore the trial as long as she could; she used pride and resentment against it; but at last she could not bear it, and with Mela’s help she wrote a letter, bantering Beaton on his stay in New York, and playfully boasting of Saratoga. It seemed to them both that it was a very bright letter, and would be sure to bring him; they would have had no scruple about sending it but for the doubt they had whether they had got some of the words right. Mela offered to bet Christine anything she dared that they were right, and she said, Send it anyway; it was no difference if they were wrong. But Christine could not endure to think of that laugh of Beaton’s, and there remained only Mrs. Mandel as authority on the spelling. Christine dreaded her authority on other points, but Mela said she knew she would not interfere, and she undertook to get round her. Mrs. Mandel pronounced the spelling bad, and the taste worse; she forbade them to send the letter; and Mela failed to get round her, though she threatened, if Mrs. Mandel would not tell her how to spell the wrong words, that she would send the letter as it was; then Mrs. Mandel said that if Mr. Beaton appeared in Saratoga she would instantly take them both home. When Mela reported this result, Christine accused her of having mismanaged the whole business; she quarrelled with her, and they called each other names. Christine declared that she would not stay in Saratoga, and that if Mrs. Mandel did not go back to New York with her she should go alone. They returned the first week in September; but by that time Beaton had gone to see his people in Syracuse.

Conrad Dryfoos remained at home with his mother after his father went West. He had already taken such a vacation as he had been willing to allow himself, and had spent it on a charity farm near the city, where the fathers with whom he worked among the poor on the East Side in the winter had sent some of their wards for the summer. It was not possible to keep his recreation a secret at the office, and Fulkerson found a pleasure in figuring the jolly time Brother Conrad must have teaching farm work among those paupers and potential reprobates. He invented details of his experience among them, and March could not always help joining in the laugh at Conrad’s humorless helplessness under Fulkerson’s burlesque denunciation of a summer outing spent in such dissipation.

They had time for a great deal of joking at the office during the season of leisure which penetrates in August to the very heart of business, and they all got on terms of greater intimacy if not greater friendliness than before. Fulkerson had not had so long to do with the advertising side of human nature without developing a vein of cynicism, of no great depth, perhaps, but broad, and underlying his whole point of view; he made light of Beaton’s solemnity, as he made light of Conrad’s humanity. The art editor, with abundant sarcasm, had no more humor than the publisher, and was an easy prey in the manager’s hands; but when he had been led on by Fulkerson’s flatteries to make some betrayal of egotism, he brooded over it till he had thought how to revenge himself in elaborate insult. For Beaton’s talent Fulkerson never lost his admiration; but his joke was to encourage him to give himself airs of being the sole source of the magazine’s prosperity. No bait of this sort was too obvious for Beaton to swallow; he could be caught with it as often as Fulkerson chose; though he was ordinarily suspicious as to the motives of people in saying things. With March he got on no better than at first. He seemed to be lying in wait for some encroachment of the literary department on the art department, and he met it now and then with anticipative reprisal. After these rebuffs, the editor delivered him over to the manager, who could turn Beaton’s contrary-mindedness to account by asking the reverse of what he really wanted done. This was what Fulkerson said; the fact was that he did get on with Beaton and March contented himself with musing upon the contradictions of a character at once so vain and so offensive, so fickle and so sullen, so conscious and so simple.

After the first jarring contact with Dryfoos, the editor ceased to feel the disagreeable fact of the old man’s mastery of the financial situation. None of the chances which might have made it painful occurred; the control of the whole affair remained in Fulkerson’s hands; before he went West again, Dryfoos had ceased to come about the office, as if, having once worn off the novelty of the sense of owning a literary periodical, he was no longer interested in it.

Yet it was a relief, somehow, when he left town, which he did not do without coming to take a formal leave of the editor at his office. He seemed willing to leave March with a better impression than he had hitherto troubled himself to make; he even said some civil things about the magazine, as if its success pleased him; and he spoke openly to March of his hope that his son would finally become interested in it to the exclusion of the hopes and purposes which divided them. It seemed to March that in the old man’s warped and toughened heart he perceived a disappointed love for his son greater than for his other children; but this might have been fancy. Lindau came in with some copy while Dryfoos was there, and March introduced them. When Lindau went out, March explained to Dryfoos that he had lost his hand in the war; and he told him something of Lindau’s career as he had known it. Dryfoos appeared greatly pleased that ‘Every Other Week’ was giving Lindau work. He said that he had helped to enlist a good many fellows for the war, and had paid money to fill up the Moffitt County quota under the later calls for troops. He had never been an Abolitionist, but he had joined the Anti-Nebraska party in ‘55, and he had voted for Fremont and for every Republican President since then.

At his own house March saw more of Lindau than of any other contributor, but the old man seemed to think that he must transact all his business with March at his place of business. The transaction had some peculiarities which perhaps made this necessary. Lindau always expected to receive his money when he brought his copy, as an acknowledgment of the immediate right of the laborer to his hire; and he would not take it in a check because he did not approve of banks, and regarded the whole system of banking as the capitalistic manipulation of the people’s money. He would receive his pay only from March’s hand, because he wished to be understood as working for him, and honestly earning money honestly earned; and sometimes March inwardly winced a little at letting the old man share the increase of capital won by such speculation as Dryfoos’s, but he shook off the feeling. As the summer advanced, and the artists and classes that employed Lindau as a model left town one after another, he gave largely of his increasing leisure to the people in the office of ‘Every Other Week.’ It was pleasant for March to see the respect with which Conrad Dryfoos always used him, for the sake of his hurt and his gray beard. There was something delicate and fine in it, and there was nothing unkindly on Fulkerson’s part in the hostilities which usually passed between himself and Lindau. Fulkerson bore himself reverently at times, too, but it was not in him to keep that up, especially when Lindau appeared with more beer aboard than, as Fulkerson said, he could manage shipshape. On these occasions Fulkerson always tried to start him on the theme of the unduly rich; he made himself the champion of monopolies, and enjoyed the invectives which Lindau heaped upon him as a slave of capital; he said that it did him good.

One day, with the usual show of writhing under Lindau’s scorn, he said,
“Well, I understand that although you despise me now, Lindau—”

“I ton’t desbise you,” the old man broke in, his nostrils swelling and his eyes flaming with excitement, “I bity you.”

“Well, it seems to come to the same thing in the end,” said Fulkerson. “What I understand is that you pity me now as the slave of capital, but you would pity me a great deal more if I was the master of it.”

“How you mean?”

“If I was rich.”

“That would tebendt,” said Lindau, trying to control himself. “If you hat inheritedt your money, you might pe innocent; but if you hat mate it, efery man that resbectedt himself would haf to ask how you mate it, and if you hat mate moch, he would know—”

“Hold on; hold on, now, Lindau! Ain’t that rather un-American doctrine? We’re all brought up, ain’t we, to honor the man that made his money, and look down — or try to look down; sometimes it’s difficult on the fellow that his father left it to?”

The old man rose and struck his breast. “On Amerigan!” he roared, and, as he went on, his accent grew more and more uncertain. “What iss Amerigan? Dere iss no Ameriga any more! You start here free and brafe, and you glaim for efery man de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit of habbiness. And where haf you entedt? No man that vorks vith his handts among you has the liperty to bursue his habbiness. He iss the slafe of some richer man, some gompany, some gorporation, dat crindt him down to the least he can lif on, and that rops him of the marchin of his earnings that he knight pe habby on. Oh, you Amerigans, you haf cot it down goldt, as you say! You ton’t puy foters; you puy lechislatures and goncressmen; you puy gourts; you puy gombetitors; you pay infentors not to infent; you atfertise, and the gounting-room sees dat de etitorial-room toesn’t tink.”

“Yes, we’ve got a little arrangement of that sort with March here,” said
Fulkerson.

“Oh, I am sawry,” said the old man, contritely, “I meant noting bersonal. I ton’t tink we are all cuilty or gorrubt, and efen among the rich there are goodt men. But gabidal” — his passion rose again— “where you find gabidal, millions of money that a man hass cot togeder in fife, ten, twenty years, you findt the smell of tears and ploodt! Dat iss what I say. And you cot to loog oudt for yourself when you meet a rich man whether you meet an honest man.”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “I wish I was a subject of suspicion with you, Lindau. By-the-way,” he added, “I understand that you think capital was at the bottom of the veto of that pension of yours.”

“What bension? What feto?” — The old man flamed up again. “No bension of mine was efer fetoedt. I renounce my bension, begause I would sgorn to dake money from a gofernment that I ton’t peliefe in any more. Where you hear that story?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Fulkerson, rather embarrassed. “It’s common talk.”

“It’s a gommon lie, then! When the time gome dat dis iss a free gountry again, then I dake a bension again for my woundts; but I would sdarfe before I dake a bension now from a rebublic dat iss bought oap by monobolies, and ron by drusts and gompines, and railroadts andt oil gompanies.”

“Look out, Lindau,” said Fulkerson. “You bite yourself mit dat dog some day.” But when the old man, with a ferocious gesture of renunciation, whirled out of the place, he added: “I guess I went a little too far that time. I touched him on a sore place; I didn’t mean to; I heard some talk about his pension being vetoed from Miss Leighton.” He addressed these exculpations to March’s grave face, and to the pitying deprecation in the eyes of Conrad Dryfoos, whom Lindau’s roaring wrath had summoned to the door. “But I’ll make it all right with him the next time he comes. I didn’t know he was loaded, or I wouldn’t have monkeyed with him.”

“Lindau does himself injustice when he gets to talking in that way,” said March. “I hate to hear him. He’s as good an American as any of us; and it’s only because he has too high an ideal of us—”

“Oh, go on! Rub it in — rub it in!” cried Fulkerson, clutching his hair in suffering, which was not altogether burlesque. “How did I know he had renounced his ‘bension’? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know it myself. I only knew that he had none, and I didn’t ask, for I had a notion that it might be a painful subject.”

Fulkerson tried to turn it off lightly. “Well, he’s a noble old fellow; pity he drinks.” March would not smile, and Fulkerson broke out: “Dog on it! I’ll make it up to the old fool the next time he comes. I don’t like that dynamite talk of his; but any man that’s given his hand to the country has got mine in his grip for good. Why, March! You don’t suppose I wanted to hurt his feelings, do you?”

“Why, of course not, Fulkerson.”

But they could not get away from a certain ruefulness for that time, and in the evening Fulkerson came round to March’s to say that he had got Lindau’s address from Conrad, and had looked him up at his lodgings.

“Well, there isn’t so much bric-a-brac there, quite, as Mrs. Green left you; but I’ve made it all right with Lindau, as far as I’m concerned. I told him I didn’t know when I spoke that way, and I honored him for sticking to his ‘brinciples’; I don’t believe in his ‘brincibles’; and we wept on each other’s necks — at least, he did. Dogged if he didn’t kiss me before I knew what he was up to. He said I was his chenerous gong friendt, and he begged my barton if he had said anything to wound me. I tell you it was an affecting scene, March; and rats enough round in that old barracks where he lives to fit out a first-class case of delirium tremens. What does he stay there for? He’s not obliged to?”

Lindau’s reasons, as March repeated them, affected Fulkerson as deliciously comical; but after that he confined his pleasantries at the office to Beaton and Conrad Dryfoos, or, as he said, he spent the rest of the summer in keeping Lindau smoothed up.

It is doubtful if Lindau altogether liked this as well. Perhaps he missed the occasions Fulkerson used to give him of bursting out against the millionaires; and he could not well go on denouncing as the slafe of gabidal a man who had behaved to him as Fulkerson had done, though Fulkerson’s servile relations to capital had been in nowise changed by his nople gonduct.

Their relations continued to wear this irksome character of mutual forbearance; and when Dryfoos returned in October and Fulkerson revived the question of that dinner in celebration of the success of ‘Every Other Week,’ he carried his complaisance to an extreme that alarmed March for the consequences.

V.

“You see,” Fulkerson explained, “I find that the old man has got an idea of his own about that banquet, and I guess there’s some sense in it. He wants to have a preliminary little dinner, where we can talk the thing up first — half a dozen of us; and he wants to give us the dinner at his house. Well, that’s no harm. I don’t believe the old man ever gave a dinner, and he’d like to show off a little; there’s a good deal of human nature in the old man, after all. He thought of you, of course, and Colonel Woodburn, and Beaton, and me at the foot of the table; and Conrad; and I suggested Kendricks: he’s such a nice little chap; and the old man himself brought up the idea of Lindau. He said you told him something about him, and he asked why couldn’t we have him, too; and I jumped at it.”

“Have Lindau to dinner?” asked March.

“Certainly; why not? Father Dryfoos has a notion of paying the old fellow a compliment for what he done for the country. There won’t be any trouble about it. You can sit alongside of him, and cut up his meat for him, and help him to things—”

“Yes, but it won’t do, Fulkerson! I don’t believe Lindau ever had on a dress-coat in his life, and I don’t believe his ‘brincibles’ would let him wear one.”

“Well, neither had Dryfoos, for the matter of that. He’s as high-principled as old Pan-Electric himself, when it comes to a dress-coat,” said Fulkerson. “We’re all going to go in business dress; the old man stipulated for that.

“It isn’t the dress-coat alone,” March resumed. “Lindau and Dryfoos wouldn’t get on. You know they’re opposite poles in everything. You mustn’t do it. Dryfoos will be sure to say something to outrage Lindau’s ‘brincibles,’ and there’ll be an explosion. It’s all well enough for Dryfoos to feel grateful to Lindau, and his wish to honor him does him credit; but to have Lindau to dinner isn’t the way. At the best, the old fellow would be very unhappy in such a house; he would have a bad conscience; and I should be sorry to have him feel that he’d been recreant to his ‘brincibles’; they’re about all he’s got, and whatever we think of them, we’re bound to respect his fidelity to them.” March warmed toward Lindau in taking this view of him. “I should feel ashamed if I didn’t protest against his being put in a false position. After all, he’s my old friend, and I shouldn’t like to have him do himself injustice if he is a crank.”

“Of course,” said Fulkerson, with some trouble in his face. “I appreciate your feeling. But there ain’t any danger,” he added, buoyantly. “Anyhow, you spoke too late, as the Irishman said to the chicken when he swallowed him in a fresh egg. I’ve asked Lindau, and he’s accepted with blayzure; that’s what he says.”

March made no other comment than a shrug.

“You’ll see,” Fulkerson continued, “it ‘ll go off all right. I’ll engage to make it, and I won’t hold anybody else responsible.”

In the course of his married life March had learned not to censure the irretrievable; but this was just what his wife had not learned; and she poured out so much astonishment at what Fulkerson had done, and so much disapproval, that March began to palliate the situation a little.

“After all, it isn’t a question of life and death; and, if it were, I don’t see how it’s to be helped now.”

“Oh, it’s not to be helped now. But I am surprised at Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, Fulkerson has his moments of being merely human, too.”

Mrs. March would not deign a direct defence of her favorite. “Well, I’m glad there are not to be ladies.”

“I don’t know. Dryfoos thought of having ladies, but it seems your infallible Fulkerson overruled him. Their presence might have kept Lindau and our host in bounds.”

It had become part of the Marches’ conjugal joke for him to pretend that she could allow nothing wrong in Fulkerson, and he now laughed with a mocking air of having expected it when she said: “Well, then, if Mr. Fulkerson says he will see that it all comes out right, I suppose you must trust his tact. I wouldn’t trust yours, Basil. The first wrong step was taken when Mr. Lindau was asked to help on the magazine.”

“Well, it was your infallible Fulkerson that took the step, or at least suggested it. I’m happy to say I had totally forgotten my early friend.”

Mrs. March was daunted and silenced for a moment. Then she said: “Oh, pshaw! You know well enough he did it to please you.”

“I’m very glad he didn’t do it to please you, Isabel,” said her husband, with affected seriousness. “Though perhaps he did.”

He began to look at the humorous aspect of the affair, which it certainly had, and to comment on the singular incongruities which ‘Every Other Week’ was destined to involve at every moment of its career. “I wonder if I’m mistaken in supposing that no other periodical was ever like it. Perhaps all periodicals are like it. But I don’t believe there’s another publication in New York that could bring together, in honor of itself, a fraternity and equality crank like poor old Lindau, and a belated sociological crank like Woodburn, and a truculent speculator like old Dryfoos, and a humanitarian dreamer like young Dryfoos, and a sentimentalist like me, and a nondescript like Beaton, and a pure advertising essence like Fulkerson, and a society spirit like Kendricks. If we could only allow one another to talk uninterruptedly all the time, the dinner would be the greatest success in the world, and we should come home full of the highest mutual respect. But I suspect we can’t manage that — even your infallible Fulkerson couldn’t work it — and I’m afraid that there’ll be some listening that’ll spoil the pleasure of the time.”

March was so well pleased with this view of the case that he suggested the idea involved to Fulkerson. Fulkerson was too good a fellow not to laugh at another man’s joke, but he laughed a little ruefully, and he seemed worn with more than one kind of care in the interval that passed between the present time and the night of the dinner.

Dryfoos necessarily depended upon him for advice concerning the scope and nature of the dinner, but he received the advice suspiciously, and contested points of obvious propriety with pertinacious stupidity. Fulkerson said that when it came to the point he would rather have had the thing, as he called it, at Delmonico’s or some other restaurant; but when he found that Dryfoos’s pride was bound up in having it at his own house, he gave way to him. Dryfoos also wanted his woman-cook to prepare the dinner, but Fulkerson persuaded him that this would not do; he must have it from a caterer. Then Dryfoos wanted his maids to wait at table, but Fulkerson convinced him that this would be incongruous at a man’s dinner. It was decided that the dinner should be sent in from Frescobaldi’s, and Dryfoos went with Fulkerson to discuss it with the caterer. He insisted upon having everything explained to him, and the reason for having it, and not something else in its place; and he treated Fulkerson and Frescobaldi as if they were in league to impose upon him. There were moments when Fulkerson saw the varnish of professional politeness cracking on the Neapolitan’s volcanic surface, and caught a glimpse of the lava fires of the cook’s nature beneath; he trembled for Dryfoos, who was walking rough-shod over him in the security of an American who had known how to make his money, and must know how to spend it; but he got him safely away at last, and gave Frescobaldi a wink of sympathy for his shrug of exhaustion as they turned to leave him.

It was at first a relief and then an anxiety with Fulkerson that Lindau did not come about after accepting the invitation to dinner, until he appeared at Dryfoos’s house, prompt to the hour. There was, to be sure, nothing to bring him; but Fulkerson was uneasily aware that Dryfoos expected to meet him at the office, and perhaps receive some verbal acknowledgment of the honor done him. Dryfoos, he could see, thought he was doing all his invited guests a favor; and while he stood in a certain awe of them as people of much greater social experience than himself, regarded them with a kind of contempt, as people who were going to have a better dinner at his house than they could ever afford to have at their own. He had finally not spared expense upon it; after pushing Frescobaldi to the point of eruption with his misgivings and suspicions at the first interview, he had gone to him a second time alone, and told him not to let the money stand between him and anything he would like to do. In the absence of Frescobaldi’s fellow-conspirator he restored himself in the caterer’s esteem by adding whatever he suggested; and Fulkerson, after trembling for the old man’s niggardliness, was now afraid of a fantastic profusion in the feast. Dryfoos had reduced the scale of the banquet as regarded the number of guests, but a confusing remembrance of what Fulkerson had wished to do remained with him in part, and up to the day of the dinner he dropped in at Frescobaldi’s and ordered more dishes and more of them. He impressed the Italian as an American original of a novel kind; and when he asked Fulkerson how Dryfoos had made his money, and learned that it was primarily in natural gas, he made note of some of his eccentric tastes as peculiarities that were to be caressed in any future natural-gas millionaire who might fall into his hands. He did not begrudge the time he had to give in explaining to Dryfoos the relation of the different wines to the different dishes; Dryfoos was apt to substitute a costlier wine where he could for a cheaper one, and he gave Frescobaldi carte blanche for the decoration of the table with pieces of artistic confectionery. Among these the caterer designed one for a surprise to his patron and a delicate recognition of the source of his wealth, which he found Dryfoos very willing to talk about, when he intimated that he knew what it was.

Dryfoos left it to Fulkerson to invite the guests, and he found ready acceptance of his politeness from Kendricks, who rightly regarded the dinner as a part of the ‘Every Other Week’ business, and was too sweet and kind-hearted, anyway, not to seem very glad to come. March was a matter of course; but in Colonel Woodburn, Fulkerson encountered a reluctance which embarrassed him the more because he was conscious of having, for motives of his own, rather strained a point in suggesting the colonel to Dryfoos as a fit subject for invitation. There had been only one of the colonel’s articles printed as yet, and though it had made a sensation in its way, and started the talk about that number, still it did not fairly constitute him a member of the staff, or even entitle him to recognition as a regular contributor. Fulkerson felt so sure of pleasing him with Dryfoos’s message that he delivered it in full family council at the widow’s. His daughter received it with all the enthusiasm that Fulkerson had hoped for, but the colonel said, stiffly, “I have not the pleasure of knowing Mr. Dryfoos.” Miss Woodburn appeared ready to fall upon him at this, but controlled herself, as if aware that filial authority had its limits, and pressed her lips together without saying anything.

“Yes, I know,” Fulkerson admitted. “But it isn’t a usual case. Mr. Dryfoos don’t go in much for the conventionalities; I reckon he don’t know much about ‘em, come to boil it down; and he hoped” — here Fulkerson felt the necessity of inventing a little— “that you would excuse any want of ceremony; it’s to be such an informal affair, anyway; we’re all going in business dress, and there ain’t going to be any ladies. He’d have come himself to ask you, but he’s a kind of a bashful old fellow. It’s all right, Colonel Woodburn.”

“I take it that it is, sir,” said the colonel, courteously, but with unabated state, “coming from you. But in these matters we have no right to burden our friends with our decisions.”

“Of course, of course,” said Fulkerson, feeling that he had been delicately told to mind his own business.

“I understand,” the colonel went on, “the relation that Mr. Dryfoos bears to the periodical in which you have done me the honor to print my papah, but this is a question of passing the bounds of a purely business connection, and of eating the salt of a man whom you do not definitely know to be a gentleman.”

“Mah goodness!” his daughter broke in. “If you bah your own salt with his money—”

“It is supposed that I earn his money before I buy my salt with it,” returned her father, severely. “And in these times, when money is got in heaps, through the natural decay of our nefarious commercialism, it behooves a gentleman to be scrupulous that the hospitality offered him is not the profusion of a thief with his booty. I don’t say that Mr. Dryfoos’s good-fortune is not honest. I simply say that I know nothing about it, and that I should prefer to know something before I sat down at his board.”

“You’re all right, colonel,” said Fulkerson, “and so is Mr. Dryfoos. I give you my word that there are no flies on his personal integrity, if that’s what you mean. He’s hard, and he’d push an advantage, but I don’t believe he would take an unfair one. He’s speculated and made money every time, but I never heard of his wrecking a railroad or belonging to any swindling company or any grinding monopoly. He does chance it in stocks, but he’s always played on the square, if you call stocks gambling.”

“May I think this over till morning?” asked the colonel.

“Oh, certainly, certainly,” said Fulkerson, eagerly. “I don’t know as there’s any hurry.”

Miss Woodburn found a chance to murmur to him before he went: “He’ll come. And Ah’m so much oblahged, Mr. Fulkerson. Ah jost know it’s all you’ doing, and it will give papa a chance to toak to some new people, and get away from us evahlastin’ women for once.”

“I don’t see why any one should want to do that,” said Fulkerson, with grateful gallantry. “But I’ll be dogged,” he said to March when he told him about this odd experience, “if I ever expected to find Colonel Woodburn on old Lindau’s ground. He did come round handsomely this morning at breakfast and apologized for taking time to think the invitation over before he accepted. ‘You understand,’ he says, ‘that if it had been to the table of some friend not so prosperous as Mr. Dryfoos — your friend Mr. March, for instance — it would have been sufficient to know that he was your friend. But in these days it is a duty that a gentleman owes himself to consider whether he wishes to know a rich man or not. The chances of making money disreputably are so great that the chances are against a man who has made money if he’s made a great deal of it.’”

March listened with a face of ironical insinuation. “That was very good; and he seems to have had a good deal of confidence in your patience and in your sense of his importance to the occasion—”

“No, no,” Fulkerson protested, “there’s none of that kind of thing about the colonel. I told him to take time to think it over; he’s the simplest-hearted old fellow in the world.”

“I should say so. After all, he didn’t give any reason he had for accepting. But perhaps the young lady had the reason.”

“Pshaw, March!” said Fulkerson.

VI.

So far as the Dryfoos family was concerned, the dinner might as well have been given at Frescobaldi’s rooms. None of the ladies appeared. Mrs. Dryfoos was glad to escape to her own chamber, where she sat before an autumnal fire, shaking her head and talking to herself at times, with the foreboding of evil which old women like her make part of their religion. The girls stood just out of sight at the head of the stairs, and disputed which guest it was at each arrival; Mrs. Mandel had gone to her room to write letters, after beseeching them not to stand there. When Kendricks came, Christine gave Mela a little pinch, equivalent to a little mocking shriek; for, on the ground of his long talk with Mela at Mrs. Horn’s, in the absence of any other admirer, they based a superstition of his interest in her; when Beaton came, Mela returned the pinch, but awkwardly, so that it hurt, and then Christine involuntarily struck her.

Frescobaldi’s men were in possession everywhere they had turned the cook out of her kitchen and the waitress out of her pantry; the reluctant Irishman at the door was supplemented by a vivid Italian, who spoke French with the guests, and said, “Bien, Monsieur,” and “toute suite,” and “Merci!” to all, as he took their hats and coats, and effused a hospitality that needed no language but the gleam of his eyes and teeth and the play of his eloquent hands. From his professional dress-coat, lustrous with the grease spotted on it at former dinners and parties, they passed to the frocks of the elder and younger Dryfoos in the drawing-room, which assumed informality for the affair, but did not put their wearers wholly at their ease. The father’s coat was of black broadcloth, and he wore it unbuttoned; the skirts were long, and the sleeves came down to his knuckles; he shook hands with his guests, and the same dryness seemed to be in his palm and throat, as he huskily asked each to take a chair. Conrad’s coat was of modern texture and cut, and was buttoned about him as if it concealed a bad conscience within its lapels; he met March with his entreating smile, and he seemed no more capable of coping with the situation than his father. They both waited for Fulkerson, who went about and did his best to keep life in the party during the half-hour that passed before they sat down at dinner. Beaton stood gloomily aloof, as if waiting to be approached on the right basis before yielding an inch of his ground; Colonel Woodburn, awaiting the moment when he could sally out on his hobby, kept himself intrenched within the dignity of a gentleman, and examined askance the figure of old Lindau as he stared about the room, with his fine head up, and his empty sleeve dangling over his wrist. March felt obliged to him for wearing a new coat in the midst of that hostile luxury, and he was glad to see Dryfoos make up to him and begin to talk with him, as if he wished to show him particular respect, though it might have been because he was less afraid of him than of the others. He heard Lindau saying, “Boat, the name is Choarman?” and Dryfoos beginning to explain his Pennsylvania Dutch origin, and he suffered himself, with a sigh of relief, to fall into talk with Kendricks, who was always pleasant; he was willing to talk about something besides himself, and had no opinions that he was not ready to hold in abeyance for the time being out of kindness to others. In that group of impassioned individualities, March felt him a refuge and comfort — with his harmless dilettante intention of some day writing a novel, and his belief that he was meantime collecting material for it.

Fulkerson, while breaking the ice for the whole company, was mainly engaged in keeping Colonel Woodburn thawed out. He took Kendricks away from March and presented him to the colonel as a person who, like himself, was looking into social conditions; he put one hand on Kendricks’s shoulder, and one on the colonel’s, and made some flattering joke, apparently at the expense of the young fellow, and then left them. March heard Kendricks protest in vain, and the colonel say, gravely: “I do not wonder, sir, that these things interest you. They constitute a problem which society must solve or which will dissolve society,” and he knew from that formula, which the colonel had, once used with him, that he was laying out a road for the exhibition of the hobby’s paces later.

Fulkerson came back to March, who had turned toward Conrad Dryfoos, and said, “If we don’t get this thing going pretty soon, it ‘ll be the death of me,” and just then Frescobaldi’s butler came in and announced to Dryfoos that dinner was served. The old man looked toward Fulkerson with a troubled glance, as if he did not know what to do; he made a gesture to touch Lindau’s elbow. Fulkerson called out, “Here’s Colonel Woodburn, Mr. Dryfoos,” as if Dryfoos were looking for him; and he set the example of what he was to do by taking Lindau’s arm himself. “Mr. Lindau is going to sit at my end of the table, alongside of March. Stand not upon the order of your going, gentlemen, but fall in at once.” He contrived to get Dryfoos and the colonel before him, and he let March follow with Kendricks. Conrad came last with Beaton, who had been turning over the music at the piano, and chafing inwardly at the whole affair. At the table Colonel Woodburn was placed on Dryfoos’s right, and March on his left. March sat on Fulkerson’s right, with Lindau next him; and the young men occupied the other seats.

“Put you next to March, Mr. Lindau,” said Fulkerson, “so you can begin to put Apollinaris in his champagne-glass at the right moment; you know his little weakness of old; sorry to say it’s grown on him.”

March laughed with kindly acquiescence in Fulkerson’s wish to start the gayety, and Lindau patted him on the shoulder. “I know hiss veakness. If he liges a class of vine, it iss begause his loaf ingludes efen hiss enemy, as Shakespeare galled it.”

“Ah, but Shakespeare couldn’t have been thinking of champagne,” said
Kendricks.

“I suppose, sir,” Colonel Woodburn interposed, with lofty courtesy, “champagne could hardly have been known in his day.”

“I suppose not, colonel,” returned the younger man, deferentially. “He seemed to think that sack and sugar might be a fault; but he didn’t mention champagne.”

“Perhaps he felt there was no question about that,” suggested Beaton, who then felt that he had not done himself justice in the sally.

“I wonder just when champagne did come in,” said March.

“I know when it ought to come in,” said Fulkerson. “Before the soup!”

They all laughed, and gave themselves the air of drinking champagne out of tumblers every day, as men like to do. Dryfoos listened uneasily; he did not quite understand the allusions, though he knew what Shakespeare was, well enough; Conrad’s face expressed a gentle deprecation of joking on such a subject, but he said nothing.

The talk ran on briskly through the dinner. The young men tossed the ball back and forth; they made some wild shots, but they kept it going, and they laughed when they were hit. The wine loosed Colonel Woodburn’s tongue; he became very companionable with the young fellows; with the feeling that a literary dinner ought to have a didactic scope, he praised Scott and Addison as the only authors fit to form the minds of gentlemen.

Kendricks agreed with him, but wished to add the name of Flaubert as a master of style. “Style, you know,” he added, “is the man.”

“Very true, sir; you are quite right, sir,” the colonel assented; he wondered who Flaubert was.

Beaton praised Baudelaire and Maupassant; he said these were the masters.
He recited some lurid verses from Baudelaire; Lindau pronounced them a
disgrace to human nature, and gave a passage from Victor Hugo on Louis
Napoleon, with his heavy German accent, and then he quoted Schiller.
“Ach, boat that is a peaudifool! Not zo?” he demanded of March.

“Yes, beautiful; but, of course, you know I think there’s nobody like
Heine!”

Lindau threw back his great old head and laughed, showing a want of teeth under his mustache. He put his hand on March’s back. “This poy — he was a poy den — wars so gracy to pekin reading Heine that he gommence with the tictionary bevore he knows any Grammar, and ve bick it out vort by vort togeder.”

“He was a pretty cay poy in those days, heigh, Lindau?” asked Fulkerson, burlesquing the old man’s accent, with an impudent wink that made Lindau himself laugh. “But in the dark ages, I mean, there in Indianapolis. Just how long ago did you old codgers meet there, anyway?” Fulkerson saw the restiveness in Dryfoos’s eye at the purely literary course the talk had taken; he had intended it to lead up that way to business, to ‘Every Other Week;’ but he saw that it was leaving Dryfoos too far out, and he wished to get it on the personal ground, where everybody is at home.

“Ledt me zee,” mused Lindau. “Wass it in fifty-nine or zixty, Passil? Idt wass a year or dwo pefore the war proke oudt, anyway.”

“Those were exciting times,” said Dryfoos, making his first entry into the general talk. “I went down to Indianapolis with the first company from our place, and I saw the red-shirts pouring in everywhere. They had a song,

 ”Oh, never mind the weather, but git over double trouble,
   For we’re bound for the land of Canaan.”

The fellows locked arms and went singin’ it up and down four or five abreast in the moonlight; crowded everybody else off the sidewalk.”

“I remember, I remember,” said Lindau, nodding his head slowly up and down. “A coodt many off them nefer gome pack from that landt of Ganaan, Mr. Dryfoos?”

“You’re right, Mr. Lindau. But I reckon it was worth it — the country we’ve got now. Here, young man!” He caught the arm of the waiter who was going round with the champagne bottle. “Fill up Mr. Lindau’s glass, there. I want to drink the health of those old times with him. Here’s to your empty sleeve, Mr. Lindau. God bless it! No offence to you, Colonel Woodburn,” said Dryfoos, turning to him before he drank.

“Not at all, sir, not at all,” said the colonel. “I will drink with you, if you will permit me.”

“We’ll all drink — standing!” cried Fulkerson. “Help March to get up, somebody! Fill high the bowl with Samian Apollinaris for Coonrod! Now, then, hurrah for Lindau!”

They cheered, and hammered on the table with the butts of their knife-handles. Lindau remained seated. The tears came into his eyes; he said, “I thank you, chendlemen,” and hiccoughed.

“I’d ‘a’ went into the war myself,” said Dryfoos, “but I was raisin’ a family of young children, and I didn’t see how I could leave my farm. But I helped to fill up the quota at every call, and when the volunteering stopped I went round with the subscription paper myself; and we offered as good bounties as any in the State. My substitute was killed in one of the last skirmishes — in fact, after Lee’s surrender — and I’ve took care of his family, more or less, ever since.”

“By-the-way, March,” said Fulkerson, “what sort of an idea would it be to have a good war story — might be a serial — in the magazine? The war has never fully panned out in fiction yet. It was used a good deal just after it was over, and then it was dropped. I think it’s time to take it up again. I believe it would be a card.”

It was running in March’s mind that Dryfoos had an old rankling shame in his heart for not having gone into the war, and that he had often made that explanation of his course without having ever been satisfied with it. He felt sorry for him; the fact seemed pathetic; it suggested a dormant nobleness in the man.

Beaton was saying to Fulkerson: “You might get a series of sketches by substitutes; the substitutes haven’t been much heard from in the war literature. How would ‘The Autobiography of a Substitute’ do? You might follow him up to the moment he was killed in the other man’s place, and inquire whether he had any right to the feelings of a hero when he was only hired in the place of one. Might call it ‘The Career of a Deputy Hero.’”

“I fancy,” said March, “that there was a great deal of mixed motive in the men who went into the war as well as in those who kept out of it. We canonized all that died or suffered in it, but some of them must have been self-seeking and low-minded, like men in other vocations.” He found himself saying this in Dryfoos’s behalf; the old man looked at him gratefully at first, he thought, and then suspiciously.

Lindau turned his head toward him and said: “You are righdt, Passil; you are righdt. I haf zeen on the fieldt of pattle the voarst eggsipitions of human paseness — chelousy, fanity, ecodistic bridte. I haf zeen men in the face off death itself gofferned by motifes as low as — as pusiness motifes.”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “it would be a grand thing for ‘Every Other Week’ if we could get some of those ideas worked up into a series. It would make a lot of talk.”

Colonel Woodburn ignored him in saying, “I think, Major Lindau—”

“High brifate; prefet gorporal,” the old man interrupted, in rejection of the title.

Hendricks laughed and said, with a glance of appreciation at Lindau,
“Brevet corporal is good.”

Colonel Woodburn frowned a little, and passed over the joke. “I think Mr. Lindau is right. Such exhibitions were common to both sides, though if you gentlemen will pardon me for saying so, I think they were less frequent on ours. We were fighting more immediately for existence. We were fewer than you were, and we knew it; we felt more intensely that if each were not for all, then none was for any.”

The colonel’s words made their impression. Dryfoos said, with authority,
“That is so.”

“Colonel Woodburn,” Fulkerson called out, “if you’ll work up those ideas into a short paper — say, three thousand words — I’ll engage to make March take it.”

The colonel went on without replying: “But Mr. Lindau is right in characterizing some of the motives that led men to the cannon’s mouth as no higher than business motives, and his comparison is the most forcible that he could have used. I was very much struck by it.”

The hobby was out, the colonel was in the saddle with so firm a seat that no effort sufficed to dislodge him. The dinner went on from course to course with barbaric profusion, and from time to time Fulkerson tried to bring the talk back to ‘Every Other Week.’ But perhaps because that was only the ostensible and not the real object of the dinner, which was to bring a number of men together under Dryfoos’s roof, and make them the witnesses of his splendor, make them feel the power of his wealth, Fulkerson’s attempts failed. The colonel showed how commercialism was the poison at the heart of our national life; how we began as a simple, agricultural people, who had fled to these shores with the instinct, divinely implanted, of building a state such as the sun never shone upon before; how we had conquered the wilderness and the savage; how we had flung off, in our struggle with the mother-country, the trammels of tradition and precedent, and had settled down, a free nation, to the practice of the arts of peace; how the spirit of commercialism had stolen insidiously upon us, and the infernal impulse of competition had embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse had exhausted itself, and we found competition gone and the whole economic problem in the hands of monopolies — the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Rubber Trust, and what not. And now what was the next thing? Affairs could not remain as they were; it was impossible; and what was the next thing?

The company listened for the main part silently. Dryfoos tried to grasp the idea of commercialism as the colonel seemed to hold it; he conceived of it as something like the dry-goods business on a vast scale, and he knew he had never been in that. He did not like to hear competition called infernal; he had always supposed it was something sacred; but he approved of what Colonel Woodburn said of the Standard Oil Company; it was all true; the Standard Oil has squeezed Dryfoos once, and made him sell it a lot of oil-wells by putting down the price of oil so low in that region that he lost money on every barrel he pumped.

All the rest listened silently, except Lindau; at every point the colonel made against the present condition of things he said more and more fiercely, “You are righdt, you are righdt.” His eyes glowed, his hand played with his knife-hilt. When the colonel demanded, “And what is the next thing?” he threw himself forward, and repeated: “Yes, sir! What is the next thing?”

“Natural gas, by thunder!” shouted Fulkerson.

One of the waiters had profited by Lindau’s posture to lean over him and put down in the middle of the table a structure in white sugar. It expressed Frescobaldi’s conception of a derrick, and a touch of nature had been added in the flame of brandy, which burned luridly up from a small pit in the centre of the base, and represented the gas in combustion as it issued from the ground. Fulkerson burst into a roar of laughter with the words that recognized Frescobaldi’s personal tribute to Dryfoos. Everybody rose and peered over at the thing, while he explained the work of sinking a gas-well, as he had already explained it to Frescobaldi. In the midst of his lecture he caught sight of the caterer himself, where he stood in the pantry doorway, smiling with an artist’s anxiety for the effect of his masterpiece.

“Come in, come in, Frescobaldi! We want to congratulate you,” Fulkerson called to him. “Here, gentlemen! Here’s Frescobaldi’s health.”

They all drank; and Frescobaldi, smiling brilliantly and rubbing his hands as he bowed right and left, permitted himself to say to Dryfoos: “You are please; no? You like?”

“First-rate, first-rate!” said the old man; but when the Italian had bowed himself out and his guests had sunk into their seats again, he said dryly to Fulkerson, “I reckon they didn’t have to torpedo that well, or the derrick wouldn’t look quite so nice and clean.”

“Yes,” Fulkerson answered, “and that ain’t quite the style — that little wiggly-waggly blue flame — that the gas acts when you touch off a good vein of it. This might do for weak gas”; and he went on to explain:

“They call it weak gas when they tap it two or three hundred feet down; and anybody can sink a well in his back yard and get enough gas to light and heat his house. I remember one fellow that had it blazing up from a pipe through a flower-bed, just like a jet of water from a fountain. My, my, my! You fel — you gentlemen — ought to go out and see that country, all of you. Wish we could torpedo this well, Mr. Dryfoos, and let ’em see how it works! Mind that one you torpedoed for me? You know, when they sink a well,” he went on to the company, “they can’t always most generally sometimes tell whether they’re goin’ to get gas or oil or salt water. Why, when they first began to bore for salt water out on the Kanawha, back about the beginning of the century, they used to get gas now and then, and then they considered it a failure; they called a gas-well a blower, and give it up in disgust; the time wasn’t ripe for gas yet. Now they bore away sometimes till they get half-way to China, and don’t seem to strike anything worth speaking of. Then they put a dynamite torpedo down in the well and explode it. They have a little bar of iron that they call a Go-devil, and they just drop it down on the business end of the torpedo, and then stand from under, if you please! You hear a noise, and in about half a minute you begin to see one, and it begins to rain oil and mud and salt water and rocks and pitchforks and adoptive citizens; and when it clears up the derrick’s painted — got a coat on that’ll wear in any climate. That’s what our honored host meant. Generally get some visiting lady, when there’s one round, to drop the Go-devil. But that day we had to put up with Conrad here. They offered to let me drop it, but I declined. I told ’em I hadn’t much practice with Go-devils in the newspaper syndicate business, and I wasn’t very well myself, anyway. Astonishing,” Fulkerson continued, with the air of relieving his explanation by an anecdote, “how reckless they get using dynamite when they’re torpedoing wells. We stopped at one place where a fellow was handling the cartridges pretty freely, and Mr. Dryfoos happened to caution him a little, and that ass came up with one of ’em in his hand, and began to pound it on the buggy-wheel to show us how safe it was. I turned green, I was so scared; but Mr. Dryfoos kept his color, and kind of coaxed the fellow till he quit. You could see he was the fool kind, that if you tried to stop him he’d keep on hammering that cartridge, just to show that it wouldn’t explode, till he blew you into Kingdom Come. When we got him to go away, Mr. Dryfoos drove up to his foreman. ‘Pay Sheney off, and discharge him on the spot,’ says he. ‘He’s too safe a man to have round; he knows too much about dynamite.’ I never saw anybody so cool.”

Dryfoos modestly dropped his head under Fulkerson’s flattery and, without lifting it, turned his eyes toward Colonel Woodburn. “I had all sorts of men to deal with in developing my property out there, but I had very little trouble with them, generally speaking.”

“Ah, ah! you foundt the laboring-man reasonable — dractable — tocile?”
Lindau put in.

“Yes, generally speaking,” Dryfoos answered. “They mostly knew which side of their bread was buttered. I did have one little difficulty at one time. It happened to be when Mr. Fulkerson was out there. Some of the men tried to form a union—”

“No, no!” cried Fulkerson. “Let me tell that! I know you wouldn’t do yourself justice, Mr. Dryfoos, and I want ’em to know how a strike can be managed, if you take it in time. You see, some of those fellows got a notion that there ought to be a union among the working-men to keep up wages, and dictate to the employers, and Mr. Dryfoos’s foreman was the ringleader in the business. They understood pretty well that as soon as he found it out that foreman would walk the plank, and so they watched out till they thought they had Mr. Dryfoos just where they wanted him — everything on the keen jump, and every man worth his weight in diamonds — and then they came to him, and — told him to sign a promise to keep that foreman to the end of the season, or till he was through with the work on the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under penalty of having them all knock off. Mr. Dryfoos smelled a mouse, but he couldn’t tell where the mouse was; he saw that they did have him, and he signed, of course. There wasn’t anything really against the fellow, anyway; he was a first-rate man, and he did his duty every time; only he’d got some of those ideas into his head, and they turned it. Mr. Dryfoos signed, and then he laid low.”

March saw Lindau listening with a mounting intensity, and heard him murmur in German, “Shameful! shameful!”

Fulkerson went on: “Well, it wasn’t long before they began to show their hand, but Mr. Dryfoos kept dark. He agreed to everything; there never was such an obliging capitalist before; there wasn’t a thing they asked of him that he didn’t do, with the greatest of pleasure, and all went merry as a marriage-bell till one morning a whole gang of fresh men marched into the Dryfoos and Hendry Addition, under the escort of a dozen Pinkertons with repeating rifles at half-cock, and about fifty fellows found themselves out of a job. You never saw such a mad set.”

“Pretty neat,” said Kendricks, who looked at the affair purely from an aesthetic point of view. “Such a coup as that would tell tremendously in a play.”

“That was vile treason,” said Lindau in German to March. “He’s an infamous traitor! I cannot stay here. I must go.”

He struggled to rise, while March held him by the coat, and implored him under his voice: “For Heaven’s sake, don’t, Lindau! You owe it to yourself not to make a scene, if you come here.” Something in it all affected him comically; he could not help laughing.

The others were discussing the matter, and seemed not to have noticed Lindau, who controlled himself and sighed: “You are right. I must have patience.”

Beaton was saying to Dryfoos, “Pity your Pinkertons couldn’t have given them a few shots before they left.”

“No, that wasn’t necessary,” said Dryfoos. “I succeeded in breaking up the union. I entered into an agreement with other parties not to employ any man who would not swear that he was non-union. If they had attempted violence, of course they could have been shot. But there was no fear of that. Those fellows can always be depended upon to cut one another’s throats in the long run.”

“But sometimes,” said Colonel Woodburn, who had been watching throughout. for a chance to mount his hobby again, “they make a good deal of trouble first. How was it in the great railroad strike of ‘77?”

“Well, I guess there was a little trouble that time, colonel,” said Fulkerson. “But the men that undertake to override the laws and paralyze the industries of a country like this generally get left in the end.”

“Yes, sir, generally; and up to a certain point, always. But it’s the exceptional that is apt to happen, as well as the unexpected. And a little reflection will convince any gentleman here that there is always a danger of the exceptional in your system. The fact is, those fellows have the game in their own hands already. A strike of the whole body of the Brotherhood of Engineers alone would starve out the entire Atlantic seaboard in a week; labor insurrection could make head at a dozen given points, and your government couldn’t move a man over the roads without the help of the engineers.”

“That is so,” said Kendrick, struck by the dramatic character of the conjecture. He imagined a fiction dealing with the situation as something already accomplished.

“Why don’t some fellow do the Battle of Dorking act with that thing?” said Fulkerson. “It would be a card.”

“Exactly what I was thinking, Mr. Fulkerson,” said Kendricks.

Fulkerson laughed. “Telepathy — clear case of mind transference. Better see March, here, about it. I’d like to have it in ‘Every Other Week.’ It would make talk.”

“Perhaps it might set your people to thinking as well as talking,” said the colonel.

“Well, sir,” said Dryfoos, setting his lips so tightly together that his imperial stuck straight outward, “if I had my way, there wouldn’t be any Brotherhood of Engineers, nor any other kind of labor union in the whole country.”

“What!” shouted Lindau. “You would sobbress the unionss of the voarking-men?”

“Yes, I would.”

“And what would you do with the unionss of the gabidalists — the drosts — and gompines, and boolss? Would you dake the righdt from one and gif it to the odder?”

“Yes, sir, I would,” said Dryfoos, with a wicked look at him.

Lindau was about to roar back at him with some furious protest, but March put his hand on his shoulder imploringly, and Lindau turned to him to say in German: “But it is infamous — infamous! What kind of man is this? Who is he? He has the heart of a tyrant.”

Colonel Woodburn cut in. “You couldn’t do that, Mr. Dryfoos, under your system. And if you attempted it, with your conspiracy laws, and that kind of thing, it might bring the climax sooner than you expected. Your commercialized society has built its house on the sands. It will have to go. But I should be sorry if it went before its time.”

“You are righdt, sir,” said Lindau. “It would be a bity. I hobe it will last till it feelss its rottenness, like Herodt. Boat, when its hour gomes, when it trope to bieces with the veight off its own gorrubtion — what then?”

“It’s not to be supposed that a system of things like this can drop to pieces of its own accord, like the old Republic of Venice,” said the colonel. “But when the last vestige of commercial society is gone, then we can begin to build anew; and we shall build upon the central idea, not of the false liberty you now worship, but of responsibility — responsibility. The enlightened, the moneyed, the cultivated class shall be responsible to the central authority — emperor, duke, president; the name does not matter — for the national expense and the national defence, and it shall be responsible to the working-classes of all kinds for homes and lands and implements, and the opportunity to labor at all times.

“The working-classes shall be responsible to the leisure class for the support of its dignity in peace, and shall be subject to its command in war. The rich shall warrant the poor against planless production and the ruin that now follows, against danger from without and famine from within, and the poor—”

“No, no, no!” shouted Lindau. “The State shall do that — the whole beople. The men who voark shall have and shall eat; and the men that will not voark, they shall sdarfe. But no man need sdarfe. He will go to the State, and the State will see that he haf voark, and that he haf foodt. All the roadts and mills and mines and landts shall be the beople’s and be ron by the beople for the beople. There shall be no rich and no boor; and there shall not be war any more, for what bower wouldt dare to addack a beople bound togeder in a broderhood like that?”

“Lion and lamb act,” said Fulkerson, not well knowing, after so much champagne, what words he was using.

No one noticed him, and Colonel Woodburn said coldly to Lindau, “You are talking paternalism, sir.”

“And you are dalking feutalism!” retorted the old man.

The colonel did not reply. A silence ensued, which no one broke till Fulkerson said: “Well, now, look here. If either one of these millenniums was brought about, by force of arms, or otherwise, what would become of ‘Every Other Week’? Who would want March for an editor? How would Beaton sell his pictures? Who would print Mr. Kendricks’s little society verses and short stories? What would become of Conrad and his good works?” Those named grinned in support of Fulkerson’s diversion, but Lindau and the colonel did not speak; Dryfoos looked down at his plate, frowning.

A waiter came round with cigars, and Fulkerson took one. “Ah,” he said, as he bit off the end, and leaned over to the emblematic masterpiece, where the brandy was still feebly flickering, “I wonder if there’s enough natural gas left to light my cigar.” His effort put the flame out and knocked the derrick over; it broke in fragments on the table. Fulkerson cackled over the ruin: “I wonder if all Moffitt will look that way after labor and capital have fought it out together. I hope this ain’t ominous of anything personal, Dryfoos?”

“I’ll take the risk of it,” said the old man, harshly.

He rose mechanically, and Fulkerson said to Frescobaldi’s man, “You can bring us the coffee in the library.”

The talk did not recover itself there. Landau would not sit down; he refused coffee, and dismissed himself with a haughty bow to the company; Colonel Woodburn shook hands elaborately all round, when he had smoked his cigar; the others followed him. It seemed to March that his own good-night from Dryfoos was dry and cold.

VII.

March met Fulkerson on the steps of the office next morning, when he arrived rather later than his wont. Fulkerson did not show any of the signs of suffering from the last night’s pleasure which painted themselves in March’s face. He flirted his hand gayly in the air, and said, “How’s your poor head?” and broke into a knowing laugh. “You don’t seem to have got up with the lark this morning. The old gentleman is in there with Conrad, as bright as a biscuit; he’s beat you down. Well, we did have a good time, didn’t we? And old Lindau and the colonel, didn’t they have a good time? I don’t suppose they ever had a chance before to give their theories quite so much air. Oh, my! how they did ride over us! I’m just going down to see Beaton about the cover of the Christmas number. I think we ought to try it in three or four colors, if we are going to observe the day at all.” He was off before March could pull himself together to ask what Dryfoos wanted at the office at that hour of the morning; he always came in the afternoon on his way up-town.

The fact of his presence renewed the sinister misgivings with which March had parted from him the night before, but Fulkerson’s cheerfulness seemed to gainsay them; afterward March did not know whether to attribute this mood to the slipperiness that he was aware of at times in Fulkerson, or to a cynical amusement he might have felt at leaving him alone to the old man, who mounted to his room shortly after March had reached it.

A sort of dumb anger showed itself in his face; his jaw was set so firmly that he did not seem able at once to open it. He asked, without the ceremonies of greeting, “What does that one-armed Dutchman do on this book?”

“What does he do?” March echoed, as people are apt to do with a question that is mandatory and offensive.

“Yes, sir, what does he do? Does he write for it?”

“I suppose you mean Lindau,” said March. He saw no reason for refusing to answer Dryfoos’s demand, and he decided to ignore its terms. “No, he doesn’t write for it in the usual way. He translates for it; he examines the foreign magazines, and draws my attention to anything he thinks of interest. But I told you about this before—”

“I know what you told me, well enough. And I know what he is. He is a red-mouthed labor agitator. He’s one of those foreigners that come here from places where they’ve never had a decent meal’s victuals in their lives, and as soon as they get their stomachs full, they begin to make trouble between our people and their hands. There’s where the strikes come from, and the unions and the secret societies. They come here and break our Sabbath, and teach their atheism. They ought to be hung! Let ’em go back if they don’t like it over here. They want to ruin the country.”

March could not help smiling a little at the words, which came fast enough now in the hoarse staccato of Dryfoos’s passion. “I don’t know whom you mean by they, generally speaking; but I had the impression that poor old Lindau had once done his best to save the country. I don’t always like his way of talking, but I know that he is one of the truest and kindest souls in the world; and he is no more an atheist than I am. He is my friend, and I can’t allow him to be misunderstood.”

“I don’t care what he is,” Dryfoos broke out, “I won’t have him round. He can’t have any more work from this office. I want you to stop it. I want you to turn him off.”

March was standing at his desk, as he had risen to receive Dryfoos when he entered. He now sat down, and began to open his letters.

“Do you hear?” the old man roared at him. “I want you to turn him off.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Dryfoos,” said March, succeeding in an effort to speak calmly, “I don’t know you, in such a matter as this. My arrangements as editor of ‘Every Other Week’ were made with Mr. Fulkerson. I have always listened to any suggestion he has had to make.”

“I don’t care for Mr. Fulkerson! He has nothing to do with it,” retorted
Dryfoos; but he seemed a little daunted by March’s position.

“He has everything to do with it as far as I am concerned,” March answered, with a steadiness that he did not feel. “I know that you are the owner of the periodical, but I can’t receive any suggestion from you, for the reason that I have given. Nobody but Mr. Fulkerson has any right to talk with me about its management.”

Dryfoos glared at him for a moment, and demanded, threateningly: “Then you say you won’t turn that old loafer off? You say that I have got to keep on paying my money out to buy beer for a man that would cut my throat if he got the chance?”

“I say nothing at all, Mr. Dryfoos,” March answered. The blood came into his face, and he added: “But I will say that if you speak again of Mr. Lindau in those terms, one of us must leave this room. I will not hear you.”

Dryfoos looked at him with astonishment; then he struck his hat down on his head, and stamped out of the room and down the stairs; and a vague pity came into March’s heart that was not altogether for himself. He might be the greater sufferer in the end, but he was sorry to have got the better of that old man for the moment; and he felt ashamed of the anger into which Dryfoos’s anger had surprised him. He knew he could not say too much in defence of Lindau’s generosity and unselfishness, and he had not attempted to defend him as a political economist. He could not have taken any ground in relation to Dryfoos but that which he held, and he felt satisfied that he was right in refusing to receive instructions or commands from him. Yet somehow he was not satisfied with the whole affair, and not merely because his present triumph threatened his final advantage, but because he felt that in his heart he had hardly done justice to Dryfoos’s rights in the matter; it did not quite console him to reflect that Dryfoos had himself made it impossible. He was tempted to go home and tell his wife what had happened, and begin his preparations for the future at once. But he resisted this weakness and kept mechanically about his work, opening the letters and the manuscripts before him with that curious double action of the mind common in men of vivid imaginations. It was a relief when Conrad Dryfoos, having apparently waited to make sure that his father would not return, came up from the counting-room and looked in on March with a troubled face.

“Mr. March,” he began, “I hope father hasn’t been saying anything to you that you can’t overlook. I know he was very much excited, and when he is excited he is apt to say things that he is sorry for.”

The apologetic attitude taken for Dryfoos, so different from any attitude the peremptory old man would have conceivably taken for himself, made March smile. “Oh no. I fancy the boot is on the other leg. I suspect I’ve said some things your father can’t overlook, Conrad.” He called the young man by his Christian name partly to distinguish him from his father, partly from the infection of Fulkerson’s habit, and partly from a kindness for him that seemed naturally to express itself in that way.

“I know he didn’t sleep last night, after you all went away,” Conrad pursued, “and of course that made him more irritable; and he was tried a good deal by some of the things that Mr. Lindau said.”

“I was tried a good deal myself,” said March. “Lindau ought never to have been there.”

“No.” Conrad seemed only partially to assent.

“I told Mr. Fulkerson so. I warned him that Lindau would be apt to break out in some way. It wasn’t just to him, and it wasn’t just to your father, to ask him.”

“Mr. Fulkerson had a good motive,” Conrad gently urged. “He did it because he hurt his feelings that day about the pension.”

“Yes, but it was a mistake. He knew that Lindau was inflexible about his principles, as he calls them, and that one of his first principles is to denounce the rich in season and out of season. I don’t remember just what he said last night; and I really thought I’d kept him from breaking out in the most offensive way. But your father seems very much incensed.”

“Yes, I know,” said Conrad.

“Of course, I don’t agree with Lindau. I think there are as many good, kind, just people among the rich as there are among the poor, and that they are as generous and helpful. But Lindau has got hold of one of those partial truths that hurt worse than the whole truth, and—”

“Partial truth!” the young man interrupted. “Didn’t the Saviour himself say, ‘How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God?’”

“Why, bless my soul!” cried March. “Do you agree with Lindau?”

“I agree with the Lord Jesus Christ,” said the young man, solemnly, and a strange light of fanaticism, of exaltation, came into his wide blue eyes. “And I believe He meant the kingdom of heaven upon this earth, as well as in the skies.”

March threw himself back in his chair and looked at him with a kind of stupefaction, in which his eye wandered to the doorway, where he saw Fulkerson standing, it seemed to him a long time, before he heard him saying: “Hello, hello! What’s the row? Conrad pitching into you on old Lindau’s account, too?”

The young man turned, and, after a glance at Fulkerson’s light, smiling face, went out, as if in his present mood he could not bear the contact of that persiflant spirit.

March felt himself getting provisionally very angry again. “Excuse me, Fulkerson, but did you know when you went out what Mr. Dryfoos wanted to see me for?”

“Well, no, I didn’t exactly,” said Fulkerson, taking his usual seat on a chair and looking over the back of it at March. “I saw he was on his car about something, and I thought I’d better not monkey with him much. I supposed he was going to bring you to book about old Lindau, somehow.” Fulkerson broke into a laugh.

March remained serious. “Mr. Dryfoos,” he said, willing to let the simple statement have its own weight with Fulkerson, and nothing more, “came in here and ordered me to discharge Lindau from his employment on the magazine — to turn him off, as he put it.”

“Did he?” asked Fulkerson, with unbroken cheerfulness. “The old man is business, every time. Well, I suppose you can easily get somebody else to do Lindau’s work for you. This town is just running over with half-starved linguists. What did you say?”

“What did I say?” March echoed. “Look here, Fulkerson; you may regard this as a joke, but I don’t. I’m not used to being spoken to as if I were the foreman of a shop, and told to discharge a sensitive and cultivated man like Lindau, as if he were a drunken mechanic; and if that’s your idea of me—”

“Oh, hello, now, March! You mustn’t mind the old man’s way. He don’t mean anything by it — he don’t know any better, if you come to that.”

“Then I know better,” said March. “I refused to receive any instructions from Mr. Dryfoos, whom I don’t know in my relations with ‘Every Other Week,’ and I referred him to you.”

“You did?” Fulkerson whistled. “He owns the thing!”

“I don’t care who owns the thing,” said March. “My negotiations were with you alone from the beginning, and I leave this matter with you. What do you wish done about Lindau?”

“Oh, better let the old fool drop,” said Fulkerson. “He’ll light on his feet somehow, and it will save a lot of rumpus.”

“And if I decline to let him drop?”

“Oh, come, now, March; don’t do that,” Fulkerson began.

“If I decline to let him drop,” March repeated, “what will you do?”

“I’ll be dogged if I know what I’ll do,” said Fulkerson. “I hope you won’t take that stand. If the old man went so far as to speak to you about it, his mind is made up, and we might as well knock under first as last.”

“And do you mean to say that you would not stand by me in what I considered my duty — in a matter of principle?”

“Why, of course, March,” said Fulkerson, coaxingly, “I mean to do the right thing. But Dryfoos owns the magazine—”

“He doesn’t own me,” said March, rising. “He has made the little mistake of speaking to me as if he did; and when” — March put on his hat and took his overcoat down from its nail— “when you bring me his apologies, or come to say that, having failed to make him understand they were necessary, you are prepared to stand by me, I will come back to this desk. Otherwise my resignation is at your service.”

He started toward the door, and Fulkerson intercepted him. “Ah, now, look here, March! Don’t do that! Hang it all, don’t you see where it leaves me? Now, you just sit down a minute and talk it over. I can make you see — I can show you — Why, confound the old Dutch beer-buzzer! Twenty of him wouldn’t be worth the trouble he’s makin’. Let him go, and the old man ‘ll come round in time.”

“I don’t think we’ve understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson,” said March, very haughtily. “Perhaps we never can; but I’ll leave you to think it out.”

He pushed on, and Fulkerson stood aside to let him pass, with a dazed look and a mechanical movement. There was something comic in his rueful bewilderment to March, who was tempted to smile, but he said to himself that he had as much reason to be unhappy as Fulkerson, and he did not smile. His indignation kept him hot in his purpose to suffer any consequence rather than submit to the dictation of a man like Dryfoos; he felt keenly the degradation of his connection with him, and all his resentment of Fulkerson’s original uncandor returned; at the same time his heart ached with foreboding. It was not merely the work in which he had constantly grown happier that he saw taken from him; but he felt the misery of the man who stakes the security and plenty and peace of home upon some cast, and knows that losing will sweep from him most that most men find sweet and pleasant in life. He faced the fact, which no good man can front without terror, that he was risking the support of his family, and for a point of pride, of honor, which perhaps he had no right to consider in view of the possible adversity. He realized, as every hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is contrived for his wearing, that he belongs to another, whose will is his law. His indignation was shot with abject impulses to go back and tell Fulkerson that it was all right, and that he gave up. To end the anguish of his struggle he quickened his steps, so that he found he was reaching home almost at a run.

VIII.

He must have made more clatter than he supposed with his key at the apartment door, for his wife had come to let him in when he flung it open. “Why, Basil,” she said, “what’s brought you back? Are you sick? You’re all pale. Well, no wonder! This is the last of Mr. Fulkerson’s dinners you shall go to. You’re not strong enough for it, and your stomach will be all out of order for a week. How hot you are! and in a drip of perspiration! Now you’ll be sick.” She took his hat away, which hung dangling in his hand, and pushed him into a chair with tender impatience. “What is the matter? Has anything happened?”

“Everything has happened,” he said, getting his voice after one or two husky endeavors for it; and then he poured out a confused and huddled statement of the case, from which she only got at the situation by prolonged cross-questioning.

At the end she said, “I knew Lindau would get you into trouble.”

This cut March to the heart. “Isabel!” he cried, reproachfully.

“Oh, I know,” she retorted, and the tears began to come. “I don’t wonder you didn’t want to say much to me about that dinner at breakfast. I noticed it; but I thought you were just dull, and so I didn’t insist. I wish I had, now. If you had told me what Lindau had said, I should have known what would have come of it, and I could have advised you—”

“Would you have advised me,” March demanded, curiously, “to submit to bullying like that, and meekly consent to commit an act of cruelty against a man who had once been such a friend to me?”

“It was an unlucky day when you met him. I suppose we shall have to go. And just when we had got used to New York, and begun to like it. I don’t know where we shall go now; Boston isn’t like home any more; and we couldn’t live on two thousand there; I should be ashamed to try. I’m sure I don’t know where we can live on it. I suppose in some country village, where there are no schools, or anything for the children. I don’t know what they’ll say when we tell them, poor things.”

Every word was a stab in March’s heart, so weakly tender to his own; his wife’s tears, after so much experience of the comparative lightness of the griefs that weep themselves out in women, always seemed wrung from his own soul; if his children suffered in the least through him, he felt like a murderer. It was far worse than he could have imagined, the way his wife took the affair, though he had imagined certain words, or perhaps only looks, from her that were bad enough. He had allowed for trouble, but trouble on his account: a svmpathy that might burden and embarrass him; but he had not dreamed of this merely domestic, this petty, this sordid view of their potential calamity, which left him wholly out of the question, and embraced only what was most crushing and desolating in the prospect. He could not bear it. He caught up his hat again, and, with some hope that his wife would try to keep him, rushed out of the house. He wandered aimlessly about, thinking the same exhausting thoughts over and over, till he found himself horribly hungry; then he went into a restaurant for his lunch, and when he paid he tried to imagine how he should feel if that were really his last dollar.

He went home toward the middle of the afternoon, basely hoping that Fulkerson had sent him some conciliatory message, or perhaps was waiting there for him to talk it over; March was quite willing to talk it over now. But it was his wife who again met him at the door, though it seemed another woman than the one he had left weeping in the morning.

“I told the children,” she said, in smiling explanation of his absence from lunch, “that perhaps you were detained by business. I didn’t know but you had gone back to the office.”

“Did you think I would go back there, Isabel?” asked March, with a haggard look. “Well, if you say so, I will go back, and do what Dryfoos ordered me to do. I’m sufficiently cowed between him and you, I can assure you.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “I approve of everything you did. But sit down, now, and don’t keep walking that way, and let me see if I understand it perfectly. Of course, I had to have my say out.”

She made him go all over his talk with Dryfoos again, and report his own language precisely. From time to time, as she got his points, she said, “That was splendid,” “Good enough for him!” and “Oh, I’m so glad you said that to him!” At the end she said:

“Well, now, let’s look at it from his point of view. Let’s be perfectly just to him before we take another step forward.”

“Or backward,” March suggested, ruefully. “The case is simply this: he owns the magazine.”

“Of course.”

“And he has a right to expect that I will consider his pecuniary interests—”

“Oh, those detestable pecuniary interests! Don’t you wish there wasn’t any money in the world?”

“Yes; or else that there was a great deal more of it. And I was perfectly willing to do that. I have always kept that in mind as one of my duties to him, ever since I understood what his relation to the magazine was.”

“Yes, I can bear witness to that in any court of justice. You’ve done it a great deal more than I could, Basil. And it was just the same way with those horrible insurance people.”

“I know,” March went on, trying to be proof against her flatteries, or at least to look as if he did not deserve praise; “I know that what Lindau said was offensive to him, and I can understand how he felt that he had a right to punish it. All I say is that he had no right to punish it through me.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, askingly.

“If it had been a question of making ‘Every Other Week’ the vehicle of Lindau’s peculiar opinions — though they’re not so very peculiar; he might have got the most of them out of Ruskin — I shouldn’t have had any ground to stand on, or at least then I should have had to ask myself whether his opinions would be injurious to the magazine or not.”

“I don’t see,” Mrs. March interpolated, “how they could hurt it much worse than Colonel Woodburn’s article crying up slavery.”

“Well,” said March, impartially, “we could print a dozen articles praising the slavery it’s impossible to have back, and it wouldn’t hurt us. But if we printed one paper against the slavery which Lindau claims still exists, some people would call us bad names, and the counting-room would begin to feel it. But that isn’t the point. Lindau’s connection with ‘Every Other Week’ is almost purely mechanical; he’s merely a translator of such stories and sketches as he first submits to me, and it isn’t at all a question of his opinions hurting us, but of my becoming an agent to punish him for his opinions. That is what I wouldn’t do; that’s what I never will do.”

“If you did,” said his wife, “I should perfectly despise you. I didn’t understand how it was before. I thought you were just holding out against Dryfoos because he took a dictatorial tone with you, and because you wouldn’t recognize his authority. But now I’m with you, Basil, every time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says. But who would ever have supposed he would be so base as to side against you?”

“I don’t know,” said March, thoughtfully, “that we had a right to expect anything else. Fulkerson’s standards are low; they’re merely business standards, and the good that’s in him is incidental and something quite apart from his morals and methods. He’s naturally a generous and right-minded creature, but life has taught him to truckle and trick, like the rest of us.”

“It hasn’t taught you that, Basil.”

“Don’t be so sure. Perhaps it’s only that I’m a poor scholar. But I don’t know, really, that I despise Fulkerson so much for his course this morning as for his gross and fulsome flatteries of Dryfoos last night. I could hardly stomach it.”

His wife made him tell her what they were, and then she said, “Yes, that was loathsome; I couldn’t have believed it of Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Perhaps he only did it to keep the talk going, and to give the old man a chance to say something,” March leniently suggested. “It was a worse effect because he didn’t or couldn’t follow up Fulkerson’s lead.”

“It was loathsome, all the same,” his wife insisted. “It’s the end of Mr.
Fulkerson, as far as I’m concerned.”

“I didn’t tell you before,” March resumed, after a moment, “of my little interview with Conrad Dryfoos after his father left,” and now he went on to repeat what had passed between him and the young man.

“I suspect that he and his father had been having some words before the old man came up to talk with me, and that it was that made him so furious.”

“Yes, but what a strange position for the son of such a man to take! Do you suppose he says such things to his father?”

“I don’t know; but I suspect that in his meek way Conrad would say what he believed to anybody. I suppose we must regard him as a kind of crank.”

“Poor young fellow! He always makes me feel sad, somehow. He has such a pathetic face. I don’t believe I ever saw him look quite happy, except that night at Mrs. Horn’s, when he was talking with Miss Vance; and then he made me feel sadder than ever.”

“I don’t envy him the life he leads at home, with those convictions of his. I don’t see why it wouldn’t be as tolerable there for old Lindau himself.”

“Well, now,” said Mrs. March, “let us put them all out of our minds and see what we are going to do ourselves.”

They began to consider their ways and means, and how and where they should live, in view of March’s severance of his relations with ‘Every Other Week.’ They had not saved anything from the first year’s salary; they had only prepared to save; and they had nothing solid but their two thousand to count upon. But they built a future in which they easily lived on that and on what March earned with his pen. He became a free lance, and fought in whatever cause he thought just; he had no ties, no chains. They went back to Boston with the heroic will to do what was most distasteful; they would have returned to their own house if they had not rented it again; but, any rate, Mrs. March helped out by taking boarders, or perhaps only letting rooms to lodgers. They had some hard struggles, but they succeeded.

“The great thing,” she said, “is to be right. I’m ten times as happy as if you had come home and told me that you had consented to do what Dryfoos asked and he had doubled your salary.”

“I don’t think that would have happened in any event,” said March, dryly.

“Well, no matter. I just used it for an example.”

They both experienced a buoyant relief, such as seems to come to people who begin life anew on whatever terms. “I hope we are young enough yet, Basil,” she said, and she would not have it when he said they had once been younger.

They heard the children’s knock on the door; they knocked when they came home from school so that their mother might let them in. “Shall we tell them at once?” she asked, and ran to open for them before March could answer.

They were not alone. Fulkerson, smiling from ear to ear, was with them.
“Is March in?” he asked.

“Mr. March is at home, yes,” she said very haughtily. “He’s in his study,” and she led the way there, while the children went to their rooms.

“Well, March,” Fulkerson called out at sight of him, “it’s all right! The old man has come down.”

“I suppose if you gentlemen are going to talk business—” Mrs. March began.

“Oh, we don’t want you to go away,” said Fulkerson. “I reckon March has told you, anyway.”

“Yes, I’ve told her,” said March. “Don’t go, Isabel. What do you mean,
Fulkerson?”

“He’s just gone on up home, and he sent me round with his apologies. He sees now that he had no business to speak to you as he did, and he withdraws everything. He’d ‘a’ come round himself if I’d said so, but I told him I could make it all right.”

Fulkerson looked so happy in having the whole affair put right, and the Marches knew him to be so kindly affected toward them, that they could not refuse for the moment to share his mood. They felt themselves slipping down from the moral height which they had gained, and March made a clutch to stay himself with the question, “And Lindau?”

“Well,” said Fulkerson, “he’s going to leave Lindau to me. You won’t have anything to do with it. I’ll let the old fellow down easy.”

“Do you mean,” asked March, “that Mr. Dryfoos insists on his being dismissed?”

“Why, there isn’t any dismissing about it,” Fulkerson argued. “If you don’t send him any more work, he won’t do any more, that’s all. Or if he comes round, you can — He’s to be referred to me.”

March shook his head, and his wife, with a sigh, felt herself plucked up from the soft circumstance of their lives, which she had sunk back into so quickly, and set beside him on that cold peak of principle again. “It won’t do, Fulkerson. It’s very good of you, and all that, but it comes to the same thing in the end. I could have gone on without any apology from Mr. Dryfoos; he transcended his authority, but that’s a minor matter. I could have excused it to his ignorance of life among gentlemen; but I can’t consent to Lindau’s dismissal — it comes to that, whether you do it or I do it, and whether it’s a positive or a negative thing — because he holds this opinion or that.”

“But don’t you see,” said Fulkerson, “that it’s just Lindau’s opinions the old man can’t stand? He hasn’t got anything against him personally. I don’t suppose there’s anybody that appreciates Lindau in some ways more than the old man does.”

“I understand. He wants to punish him for his opinions. Well, I can’t consent to that, directly or indirectly. We don’t print his opinions, and he has a perfect right to hold them, whether Mr. Dryfoos agrees with them or not.”

Mrs. March had judged it decorous for her to say nothing, but she now went and sat down in the chair next her husband.

“Ah, dog on it!” cried Fulkerson, rumpling his hair with both his hands.
“What am I to do? The old man says he’s got to go.”

“And I don’t consent to his going,” said March.

“And you won’t stay if he goes.”

Fulkerson rose. “Well, well! I’ve got to see about it. I’m afraid the old man won’t stand it, March; I am, indeed. I wish you’d reconsider. I — I’d take it as a personal favor if you would. It leaves me in a fix. You see I’ve got to side with one or the other.”

March made no reply to this, except to say, “Yes, you must stand by him, or you must stand by me.”

“Well, well! Hold on awhile! I’ll see you in the morning. Don’t take any steps—”

“Oh, there are no steps to take,” said March, with a melancholy smile.
“The steps are stopped; that’s all.” He sank back into his chair when
Fulkerson was gone and drew a long breath. “This is pretty rough. I
thought we had got through it.”

“No,” said his wife. “It seems as if I had to make the fight all over again.”

“Well, it’s a good thing it’s a holy war.”

“I can’t bear the suspense. Why didn’t you tell him outright you wouldn’t go back on any terms?”

“I might as well, and got the glory. He’ll never move Dryfoos. I suppose we both would like to go back, if we could.”

“Oh, I suppose so.”

They could not regain their lost exaltation, their lost dignity. At dinner Mrs. March asked the children how they would like to go back to Boston to live.

“Why, we’re not going, are we?” asked Tom, without enthusiasm.

“I was just wondering how you felt about it, now,” she said, with an underlook at her husband.

“Well, if we go back,” said Bella, “I want to live on the Back Bay. It’s awfully Micky at the South End.”

“I suppose I should go to Harvard,” said Tom, “and I’d room out at
Cambridge. It would be easier to get at you on the Back Bay.”

The parents smiled ruefully at each other, and, in view of these grand expectations of his children, March resolved to go as far as he could in meeting Dryfoos’s wishes. He proposed the theatre as a distraction from the anxieties that he knew were pressing equally on his wife. “We might go to the ‘Old Homestead,’” he suggested, with a sad irony, which only his wife felt.

“Oh yes, let’s!” cried Bella.

While they were getting ready, someone rang, and Bella went to the door, and then came to tell her father that it was Mr. Lindau. “He says he wants to see you just a moment. He’s in the parlor, and he won’t sit down, or anything.”

“What can he want?” groaned Mrs. March, from their common dismay.

March apprehended a storm in the old man’s face. But he only stood in the middle of the room, looking very sad and grave. “You are Going oudt,” he said. “I won’t geep you long. I haf gome to pring pack dose macassines and dis mawney. I can’t do any more voark for you; and I can’t geep the mawney you haf baid me a’ready. It iss not hawnest mawney — that hass been oarned py voark; it iss mawney that hass peen mate py sbeculation, and the obbression off lapor, and the necessity of the boor, py a man — Here it is, efery tollar, efery zent. Dake it; I feel as if dere vas ploodt on it.”

“Why, Lindau,” March began, but the old man interrupted him.

“Ton’t dalk to me, Passil! I could not haf believedt it of you. When you know how I feel about dose tings, why tidn’t you dell me whose mawney you bay oudt to me? Ach, I ton’t plame you — I ton’t rebroach you. You haf nefer thought of it; boat I have thought, and I should be Guilty, I must share that man’s Guilt, if I gept hiss mawney. If you hat toldt me at the peginning — if you hat peen frank with me boat it iss all righdt; you can go on; you ton’t see dese tings as I see them; and you haf cot a family, and I am a free man. I voark to myself, and when I ton’t voark, I sdarfe to myself. But I geep my handts glean, voark or sdarfe. Gif him hiss mawney pack! I am sawry for him; I would not hoart hiss feelings, boat I could not pear to douch him, and hiss mawney iss like boison!”

March tried to reason with Lindau, to show him the folly, the injustice, the absurdity of his course; it ended in their both getting angry, and in Lindau’s going away in a whirl of German that included Basil in the guilt of the man whom Lindau called his master.

“Well,” said Mrs. March. “He is a crank, and I think you’re well rid of him. Now you have no quarrel with that horrid old Dryfoos, and you can keep right on.”

“Yes,” said March, “I wish it didn’t make me feel so sneaking. What a long day it’s been! It seems like a century since I got up.”

“Yes, a thousand years. Is there anything else left to happen?”

“I hope not. I’d like to go to bed.”

“Why, aren’t you going to the theatre?” wailed Bella, coming in upon her father’s desperate expression.

“The theatre? Oh yes, certainly! I meant after we got home,” and March amused himself at the puzzled countenance of the child. “Come on! Is Tom ready?”

IX.

Fulkerson parted with the Marches in such trouble of mind that he did not feel able to meet that night the people whom he usually kept so gay at Mrs. Leighton’s table. He went to Maroni’s for his dinner, for this reason and for others more obscure. He could not expect to do anything more with Dryfoos at once; he knew that Dryfoos must feel that he had already made an extreme concession to March, and he believed that if he was to get anything more from him it must be after Dryfoos had dined. But he was not without the hope, vague and indefinite as it might be, that he should find Lindau at Maroni’s, and perhaps should get some concession from him, some word of regret or apology which he could report to Dryfoos, and at lest make the means of reopening the affair with him; perhaps Lindau, when he knew how matters stood, would back down altogether, and for March’s sake would withdraw from all connection with ‘Every Other Week’ himself, and so leave everything serene. Fulkerson felt capable, in his desperation, of delicately suggesting such a course to Lindau, or even of plainly advising it: he did not care for Lindau a great deal, and he did care a great deal for the magazine.

But he did not find Lindau at Maroni’s; he only found Beaton. He sat looking at the doorway as Fulkerson entered, and Fulkerson naturally came and took a place at his table. Something in Beaton’s large-eyed solemnity of aspect invited Fulkerson to confidence, and he said, as he pulled his napkin open and strung it, still a little damp (as the scanty, often-washed linen at Maroni’s was apt to be), across his knees, “I was looking for you this morning, to talk with you about the Christmas number, and I was a good deal worked up because I couldn’t find you; but I guess I might as well have spared myself my emotions.”

“Why?” asked Beaton, briefly.

“Well, I don’t know as there’s going to be any Christmas number.”

“Why?” Beaton asked again.

“Row between the financial angel and the literary editor about the chief translator and polyglot smeller.”

“Lindau?”

“Lindau is his name.”

“What does the literary editor expect after Lindau’s expression of his views last night?”

“I don’t know what he expected, but the ground he took with the old man was that, as Lindau’s opinions didn’t characterize his work on the magazine, he would not be made the instrument of punishing him for them the old man wanted him turned off, as he calls it.”

“Seems to be pretty good ground,” said Beaton, impartially, while he speculated, with a dull trouble at heart, on the effect the row would have on his own fortunes. His late visit home had made him feel that the claim of his family upon him for some repayment of help given could not be much longer delayed; with his mother sick and his father growing old, he must begin to do something for them, but up to this time he had spent his salary even faster than he had earned it. When Fulkerson came in he was wondering whether he could get him to increase it, if he threatened to give up his work, and he wished that he was enough in love with Margaret Vance, or even Christine Dryfoos, to marry her, only to end in the sorrowful conviction that he was really in love with Alma Leighton, who had no money, and who had apparently no wish to be married for love, even. “And what are you going to do about it?” he asked, listlessly.

“Be dogged if I know what I’m going to do about it,” said Fulkerson. “I’ve been round all day, trying to pick up the pieces — row began right after breakfast this morning — and one time I thought I’d got the thing all put together again. I got the old man to say that he had spoken to March a little too authoritatively about Lindau; that, in fact, he ought to have communicated his wishes through me; and that he was willing to have me get rid of Lindau, and March needn’t have anything to do with it. I thought that was pretty white, but March says the apologies and regrets are all well enough in their way, but they leave the main question where they found it.”

“What is the main question?” Beaton asked, pouring himself out some Chianti. As he set the flask down he made the reflection that if he would drink water instead of Chianti he could send his father three dollars a week, on his back debts, and he resolved to do it.

“The main question, as March looks at it, is the question of punishing Lindau for his private opinions; he says that if he consents to my bouncing the old fellow it’s the same as if he bounced him.”

“It might have that complexion in some lights,” said Beaton. He drank off his Chianti, and thought he would have it twice a week, or make Maroni keep the half-bottles over for him, and send his father two dollars. “And what are you going to do now?”

“That’s what I don’t know,” said Fulkerson, ruefully. After a moment he said, desperately, “Beaton, you’ve got a pretty good head; why don’t you suggest something?”

“Why don’t you let March go?” Beaton suggested.

“Ah, I couldn’t,” said Fulkerson. “I got him to break up in Boston and come here; I like him; nobody else could get the hang of the thing like he has; he’s — a friend.” Fulkerson said this with the nearest approach he could make to seriousness, which was a kind of unhappiness.

Beaton shrugged. “Oh, if you can afford to have ideals, I congratulate you. They’re too expensive for me. Then, suppose you get rid of Dryfoos?”

Fulkerson laughed forlornly. “Go on, Bildad. Like to sprinkle a few ashes over my boils? Don’t mind me!”

They both sat silent a little while, and then Beaton said, “I suppose you haven’t seen Dryfoos the second time?”

“No. I came in here to gird up my loins with a little dinner before I tackled him. But something seems to be the matter with Maroni’s cook. I don’t want anything to eat.”

“The cooking’s about as bad as usual,” said Beaton. After a moment he added, ironically, for he found Fulkerson’s misery a kind of relief from his own, and was willing to protract it as long as it was amusing, “Why not try an envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary?”

“What do you mean?”

“Get that other old fool to go to Dryfoos for you!”

“Which other old fool? The old fools seem to be as thick as flies.”

“That Southern one.”

“Colonel Woodburn?”

“Mmmmm.”

“He did seem to rather take to the colonel!” Fulkerson mused aloud.

“Of course he did. Woodburn, with his idiotic talk about patriarchal slavery, is the man on horseback to Dryfoos’s muddy imagination. He’d listen to him abjectly, and he’d do whatever Woodburn told him to do.” Beaton smiled cynically.

Fulkerson got up and reached for his coat and hat. “You’ve struck it, old man.” The waiter came up to help him on with his coat; Fulkerson slipped a dollar in his hand. “Never mind the coat; you can give the rest of my dinner to the poor, Paolo. Beaton, shake! You’ve saved my life, little boy, though I don’t think you meant it.” He took Beaton’s hand and solemnly pressed it, and then almost ran out of the door.

They had just reached coffee at Mrs. Leighton’s when he arrived and sat down with them and began to put some of the life of his new hope into them. His appetite revived, and, after protesting that he would not take anything but coffee, he went back and ate some of the earlier courses. But with the pressure of his purpose driving him forward, he did not conceal from Miss Woodburn, at least, that he was eager to get her apart from the rest for some reason. When he accomplished this, it seemed as if he had contrived it all himself, but perhaps he had not wholly contrived it.

“I’m so glad to get a chance to speak to you alone,” he said at once; and while she waited for the next word he made a pause, and then said, desperately, “I want you to help me; and if you can’t help me, there’s no help for me.”

“Mah goodness,” she said, “is the case so bad as that? What in the woald is the trouble?”

“Yes, it’s a bad case,” said Fulkerson. “I want your father to help me.”

“Oh, I thoat you said me!”

“Yes; I want you to help me with your father. I suppose I ought to go to him at once, but I’m a little afraid of him.”

“And you awe not afraid of me? I don’t think that’s very flattering, Mr.
Fulkerson. You ought to think Ah’m twahce as awful as papa.”

“Oh, I do! You see, I’m quite paralyzed before you, and so I don’t feel anything.”

“Well, it’s a pretty lahvely kyand of paralysis. But — go on.”

“I will — I will. If I can only begin.”

“Pohaps Ah maght begin fo’ you.”

“No, you can’t. Lord knows, I’d like to let you. Well, it’s like this.”

Fulkerson made a clutch at his hair, and then, after another hesitation, he abruptly laid the whole affair before her. He did not think it necessary to state the exact nature of the offence Lindau had given Dryfoos, for he doubted if she could grasp it, and he was profuse of his excuses for troubling her with the matter, and of wonder at himself for having done so. In the rapture of his concern at having perhaps made a fool of himself, he forgot why he had told her; but she seemed to like having been confided in, and she said, “Well, Ah don’t see what you can do with you’ ahdeals of friendship except stand bah Mr. Mawch.”

“My ideals of friendship? What do you mean?”

“Oh, don’t you suppose we know? Mr. Beaton said you we’ a pofect Bahyard in friendship, and you would sacrifice anything to it.”

“Is that so?” said Fulkerson, thinking how easily he could sacrifice Lindau in this case. He had never supposed before that he was chivalrous in such matters, but he now began to see it in that light, and he wondered that he could ever have entertained for a moment the idea of throwing March over.

“But Ah most say,” Miss Woodburn went on, “Ah don’t envy you you’ next interview with Mr. Dryfoos. Ah suppose you’ll have to see him at once aboat it.”

The conjecture recalled Fulkerson to the object of his confidences. “Ah, there’s where your help comes in. I’ve exhausted all the influence I have with Dryfoos—”

“Good gracious, you don’t expect Ah could have any!”

They both laughed at the comic dismay with which she conveyed the preposterous notion; and Fulkerson said, “If I judged from myself, I should expect you to bring him round instantly.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, with mock meekness.

“Not at all. But it isn’t Dryfoos I want you to help me with; it’s your father. I want your father to interview Dryfoos for me, and I — I’m afraid to ask him.”

“Poo’ Mr. Fulkerson!” she said, and she insinuated something through her burlesque compassion that lifted him to the skies. He swore in his heart that the woman never lived who was so witty, so wise, so beautiful, and so good. “Come raght with me this minute, if the cyoast’s clea’.” She went to the door of the diningroom and looked in across its gloom to the little gallery where her father sat beside a lamp reading his evening paper; Mrs. Leighton could be heard in colloquy with the cook below, and Alma had gone to her room. She beckoned Fulkerson with the hand outstretched behind her, and said, “Go and ask him.”

“Alone!” he palpitated.

“Oh, what a cyowahd!” she cried, and went with him. “Ah suppose you’ll want me to tell him aboat it.”

“Well, I wish you’d begin, Miss Woodburn,” he said. “The fact is, you know, I’ve been over it so much I’m kind of sick of the thing.”

Miss Woodburn advanced and put her hand on her father’s shoulder. “Look heah, papa! Mr. Fulkerson wants to ask you something, and he wants me to do it fo’ him.”

The colonel looked up through his glasses with the sort of ferocity elderly men sometimes have to put on in order to keep their glasses from falling off. His daughter continued: “He’s got into an awful difficulty with his edito’ and his proprieto’, and he wants you to pacify them.”

“I do not know whethah I understand the case exactly,” said the colonel, “but Mr. Fulkerson may command me to the extent of my ability.”

“You don’t understand it aftah what Ah’ve said?” cried the girl. “Then Ah don’t see but what you’ll have to explain it you’self, Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Well, Miss Woodburn has been so luminous about it, colonel,” said Fulkerson, glad of the joking shape she had given the affair, “that I can only throw in a little side-light here and there.”

The colonel listened as Fulkerson went on, with a grave diplomatic satisfaction. He felt gratified, honored, even, he said, by Mr. Fulkerson’s appeal to him; and probably it gave him something of the high joy that an affair of honor would have brought him in the days when he had arranged for meetings between gentlemen. Next to bearing a challenge, this work of composing a difficulty must have been grateful. But he gave no outward sign of his satisfaction in making a resume of the case so as to get the points clearly in his mind.

“I was afraid, sir,” he said, with the state due to the serious nature of the facts, “that Mr. Lindau had given Mr. Dryfoos offence by some of his questions at the dinner-table last night.”

“Perfect red rag to a bull,” Fulkerson put in; and then he wanted to withdraw his words at the colonel’s look of displeasure.

“I have no reflections to make upon Mr. Landau,” Colonel Woodburn continued, and Fulkerson felt grateful to him for going on; “I do not agree with Mr. Lindau; I totally disagree with him on sociological points; but the course of the conversation had invited him to the expression of his convictions, and he had a right to express them, so far as they had no personal bearing.”

“Of course,” said Fulkerson, while Miss Woodburn perched on the arm of her father’s chair.

“At the same time, sir, I think that if Mr. Dryfoos felt a personal censure in Mr. Lindau’s questions concerning his suppression of the strike among his workmen, he had a right to resent it.”

“Exactly,” Fulkerson assented.

“But it must be evident to you, sir, that a high-spirited gentleman like Mr. March — I confess that my feelings are with him very warmly in the matter — could not submit to dictation of the nature you describe.”

“Yes, I see,” said Fulkerson; and, with that strange duplex action of the human mind, he wished that it was his hair, and not her father’s, that Miss Woodburn was poking apart with the corner of her fan.

“Mr. Lindau,” the colonel concluded, “was right from his point of view, and Mr. Dryfoos was equally right. The position of Mr. March is perfectly correct—”

His daughter dropped to her feet from his chair-arm. “Mah goodness! If nobody’s in the wrong, ho’ awe you evah going to get the mattah straight?”

“Yes, you see,” Fulkerson added, “nobody can give in.”

“Pardon me,” said the colonel, “the case is one in which all can give in.”

“I don’t know which ‘ll begin,” said Fulkerson.

The colonel rose. “Mr. Lindau must begin, sir. We must begin by seeing Mr. Lindau, and securing from him the assurance that in the expression of his peculiar views he had no intention of offering any personal offence to Mr. Dryfoos. If I have formed a correct estimate of Mr. Lindau, this will be perfectly simple.”

Fulkerson shook his head. “But it wouldn’t help. Dryfoos don’t care a rap whether Lindau meant any personal offence or not. As far as that is concerned, he’s got a hide like a hippopotamus. But what he hates is Lindau’s opinions, and what he says is that no man who holds such opinions shall have any work from him. And what March says is that no man shall be punished through him for his opinions, he don’t care what they are.”

The colonel stood a moment in silence. “And what do you expect me to do under the circumstances?”

“I came to you for advice — I thought you might suggest —— ?”

“Do you wish me to see Mr. Dryfoos?”

“Well, that’s about the size of it,” Fulkerson admitted. “You see, colonel,” he hastened on, “I know that you have a great deal of influence with him; that article of yours is about the only thing he’s ever read in ‘Every Other Week,’ and he’s proud of your acquaintance. Well, you know” — and here Fulkerson brought in the figure that struck him so much in Beaton’s phrase and had been on his tongue ever since— “you’re the man on horseback to him; and he’d be more apt to do what you say than if anybody else said it.”

“You are very good, sir,” said the colonel, trying to be proof against the flattery, “but I am afraid you overrate my influence.” Fulkerson let him ponder it silently, and his daughter governed her impatience by holding her fan against her lips. Whatever the process was in the colonel’s mind, he said at last: “I see no good reason for declining to act for you, Mr. Fulkerson, and I shall be very happy if I can be of service to you. But” — he stopped Fulkerson from cutting in with precipitate thanks— “I think I have a right, sir, to ask what your course will be in the event of failure?”

“Failure?” Fulkerson repeated, in dismay.

“Yes, sir. I will not conceal from you that this mission is one not wholly agreeable to my feelings.”

“Oh, I understand that, colonel, and I assure you that I appreciate, I—”

“There is no use trying to blink the fact, sir, that there are certain aspects of Mr. Dryfoos’s character in which he is not a gentleman. We have alluded to this fact before, and I need not dwell upon it now: I may say, however, that my misgivings were not wholly removed last night.”

“No,” Fulkerson assented; though in his heart he thought the old man had behaved very well.

“What I wish to say now is that I cannot consent to act for you, in this matter, merely as an intermediary whose failure would leave the affair in state quo.”

“I see,” said Fulkerson.

“And I should like some intimation, some assurance, as to which party your own feelings are with in the difference.”

The colonel bent his eyes sharply on Fulkerson; Miss Woodburn let hers fall; Fulkerson felt that he was being tested, and he said, to gain time, “As between Lindau and Dryfoos?” though he knew this was not the point.

“As between Mr. Dryfoos and Mr. March,” said the colonel.

Fulkerson drew a long breath and took his courage in both hands. “There can’t be any choice for me in such a case. I’m for March, every time.”

The colonel seized his hand, and Miss Woodburn said, “If there had been any choice fo’ you in such a case, I should never have let papa stir a step with you.”

“Why, in regard to that,” said the colonel, with a literal application of the idea, “was it your intention that we should both go?”

“Well, I don’t know; I suppose it was.”

“I think it will be better for me to go alone,” said the colonel; and, with a color from his experience in affairs of honor, he added: “In these matters a principal cannot appear without compromising his dignity. I believe I have all the points clearly in mind, and I think I should act more freely in meeting Mr. Dryfoos alone.”

Fulkerson tried to hide the eagerness with which he met these agreeable views. He felt himself exalted in some sort to the level of the colonel’s sentiments, though it would not be easy to say whether this was through the desperation bred of having committed himself to March’s side, or through the buoyant hope he had that the colonel would succeed in his mission.

“I’m not afraid to talk with Dryfoos about it,” he said.

“There is no question of courage,” said the colonel. “It is a question of dignity — of personal dignity.”

“Well, don’t let that delay you, papa,” said his daughter, following him to the door, where she found him his hat, and Fulkerson helped him on with his overcoat. “Ah shall be jost wald to know ho’ it’s toned oat.”

“Won’t you let me go up to the house with you?” Fulkerson began. “I needn’t go in—”

“I prefer to go alone,” said the colonel. “I wish to turn the points over in my mind, and I am afraid you would find me rather dull company.”

He went out, and Fulkerson returned with Miss Woodburn to the drawing-room, where she said the Leightons were. They, were not there, but she did not seem disappointed.

“Well, Mr. Fulkerson,” she said, “you have got an ahdeal of friendship, sure enough.”

“Me?” said Fulkerson. “Oh, my Lord! Don’t you see I couldn’t do anything else? And I’m scared half to death, anyway. If the colonel don’t bring the old man round, I reckon it’s all up with me. But he’ll fetch him. And I’m just prostrated with gratitude to you, Miss Woodburn.”

She waved his thanks aside with her fan. “What do you mean by its being all up with you?”

“Why, if the old man sticks to his position, and I stick to March, we’ve both got to go overboard together. Dryfoos owns the magazine; he can stop it, or he can stop us, which amounts to the same thing, as far as we’re concerned.”

“And then what?” the girl pursued.

“And then, nothing — till we pick ourselves up.”

“Do you mean that Mr. Dryfoos will put you both oat of your places?”

“He may.”

“And Mr. Mawch takes the risk of that jost fo’ a principle?”

“I reckon.”

“And you do it jost fo’ an ahdeal?”

“It won’t do to own it. I must have my little axe to grind, somewhere.”

“Well, men awe splendid,” sighed the girl. “Ah will say it.”

“Oh, they’re not so much better than women,” said Fulkerson, with a nervous jocosity. “I guess March would have backed down if it hadn’t been for his wife. She was as hot as pepper about it, and you could see that she would have sacrificed all her husband’s relations sooner than let him back down an inch from the stand he had taken. It’s pretty easy for a man to stick to a principle if he has a woman to stand by him. But when you come to play it alone—”

“Mr. Fulkerson,” said the girl, solemnly, “Ah will stand bah you in this, if all the woald tones against you.” The tears came into her eyes, and she put out her hand to him.

“You will?” he shouted, in a rapture. “In every way — and always — as long as you live? Do you mean it?” He had caught her hand to his breast and was grappling it tight there and drawing her to him.

The changing emotions chased one another through her heart and over her face: dismay, shame, pride, tenderness. “You don’t believe,” she said, hoarsely, “that Ah meant that?”

“No, but I hope you do mean it; for if you don’t, nothing else means anything.”

There was no space, there was only a point of wavering. “Ah do mean it.”

When they lifted their eyes from each other again it was half-past ten.
“No’ you most go,” she said.

“But the colonel — our fate?”

“The co’nel is often oat late, and Ah’m not afraid of ouah fate, no’ that we’ve taken it into ouah own hands.” She looked at him with dewy eyes of trust, of inspiration.

“Oh, it’s going to come out all right,” he said. “It can’t come out wrong now, no matter what happens. But who’d have thought it, when I came into this house, in such a state of sin and misery, half an hour ago—”

“Three houahs and a half ago!” she said. “No! you most jost go. Ah’m tahed to death. Good-night. You can come in the mawning to see — papa.” She opened the door and pushed him out with enrapturing violence, and he ran laughing down the steps into her father’s arms.

“Why, colonel! I was just going up to meet you.” He had really thought he would walk off his exultation in that direction.

“I am very sorry to say, Mr. Fulkerson,” the colonel began, gravely, “that Mr. Dryfoos adheres to his position.”

“Oh, all right,” said Fulkerson, with unabated joy. “It’s what I expected. Well, my course is clear; I shall stand by March, and I guess the world won’t come to an end if he bounces us both. But I’m everlastingly obliged to you, Colonel Woodburn, and I don’t know what to say to you. I — I won’t detain you now; it’s so late. I’ll see you in the morning. Good-ni—”

Fulkerson did not realize that it takes two to part. The colonel laid hold of his arm and turned away with him. “I will walk toward your place with you. I can understand why you should be anxious to know the particulars of my interview with Mr. Dryfoos”; and in the statement which followed he did not spare him the smallest. It outlasted their walk and detained them long on the steps of the ‘Every Other Week’ building. But at the end Fulkerson let himself in with his key as light of heart as if he had been listening to the gayest promises that fortune could make.

By the time he met March at the office next morning, a little, but only a very little, misgiving saddened his golden heaven. He took March’s hand with high courage, and said, “Well, the old man sticks to his point, March.” He added, with the sense of saying it before Miss Woodburn: “And I stick by you. I’ve thought it all over, and I’d rather be right with you than wrong with him.”

“Well, I appreciate your motive, Fulkerson,” said March. “But perhaps — perhaps we can save over our heroics for another occasion. Lindau seems to have got in with his, for the present.”

He told him of Lindau’s last visit, and they stood a moment looking at each other rather queerly. Fulkerson was the first to recover his spirits. “Well,” he said, cheerily, “that let’s us out.”

“Does it? I’m not sure it lets me out,” said March; but he said this in tribute to his crippled self-respect rather than as a forecast of any action in the matter.

“Why, what are you going to do?” Fulkerson asked. “If Lindau won’t work for Dryfoos, you can’t make him.”

March sighed. “What are you going to do with this money?” He glanced at the heap of bills he had flung on the table between them.

Fulkerson scratched his head. “Ah, dogged if I know: Can’t we give it to the deserving poor, somehow, if we can find ‘em?”

“I suppose we’ve no right to use it in any way. You must give it to
Dryfoos.”

“To the deserving rich? Well, you can always find them. I reckon you don’t want to appear in the transaction! I don’t, either; but I guess I must.” Fulkerson gathered up the money and carried it to Conrad. He directed him to account for it in his books as conscience-money, and he enjoyed the joke more than Conrad seemed to do when he was told where it came from.

Fulkerson was able to wear off the disagreeable impression the affair left during the course of the fore-noon, and he met Miss Woodburn with all a lover’s buoyancy when he went to lunch. She was as happy as he when he told her how fortunately the whole thing had ended, and he took her view that it was a reward of his courage in having dared the worst. They both felt, as the newly plighted always do, that they were in the best relations with the beneficent powers, and that their felicity had been especially looked to in the disposition of events. They were in a glow of rapturous content with themselves and radiant worship of each other; she was sure that he merited the bright future opening to them both, as much as if he owed it directly to some noble action of his own; he felt that he was indebted for the favor of Heaven entirely to the still incredible accident of her preference of him over other men.

Colonel Woodburn, who was not yet in the secret of their love, perhaps failed for this reason to share their satisfaction with a result so unexpectedly brought about. The blessing on their hopes seemed to his ignorance to involve certain sacrifices of personal feeling at which he hinted in suggesting that Dryfoos should now be asked to make some abstract concessions and acknowledgments; his daughter hastened to deny that these were at all necessary; and Fulkerson easily explained why. The thing was over; what was the use of opening it up again?

“Perhaps none,” the colonel admitted. But he added, “I should like the opportunity of taking Mr. Lindau’s hand in the presence of Mr. Dryfoos and assuring him that I considered him a man of principle and a man of honor — a gentleman, sir, whom I was proud and happy to have known.”

“Well, Ah’ve no doabt,” said his daughter, demurely, “that you’ll have the chance some day; and we would all lahke to join you. But at the same tahme, Ah think Mr. Fulkerson is well oat of it fo’ the present.”

PART FIFTH

I.

Superficially, the affairs of ‘Every Other Week’ settled into their wonted form again, and for Fulkerson they seemed thoroughly reinstated. But March had a feeling of impermanency from what had happened, mixed with a fantastic sense of shame toward Lindau. He did not sympathize with Lindau’s opinions; he thought his remedy for existing evils as wildly impracticable as Colonel Woodburn’s. But while he thought this, and while he could justly blame Fulkerson for Lindau’s presence at Dryfoos’s dinner, which his zeal had brought about in spite of March’s protests, still he could not rid himself of the reproach of uncandor with Lindau. He ought to have told him frankly about the ownership of the magazine, and what manner of man the man was whose money he was taking. But he said that he never could have imagined that he was serious in his preposterous attitude in regard to a class of men who embody half the prosperity of the country; and he had moments of revolt against his own humiliation before Lindau, in which he found it monstrous that he should return Dryfoos’s money as if it had been the spoil of a robber. His wife agreed with him in these moments, and said it was a great relief not to have that tiresome old German coming about. They had to account for his absence evasively to the children, whom they could not very well tell that their father was living on money that Lindau disdained to take, even though Lindau was wrong and their father was right. This heightened Mrs. March’s resentment toward both Lindau and Dryfoos, who between them had placed her husband in a false position. If anything, she resented Dryfoos’s conduct more than Lindau’s. He had never spoken to March about the affair since Lindau had renounced his work, or added to the apologetic messages he had sent by Fulkerson. So far as March knew, Dryfoos had been left to suppose that Lindau had simply stopped for some reason that did not personally affect him. They never spoke of him, and March was too proud to ask either Fulkerson or Conrad whether the old man knew that Lindau had returned his money. He avoided talking to Conrad, from a feeling that if he did he should involuntarily lead him on to speak of his differences with his father. Between himself and Fulkerson, even, he was uneasily aware of a want of their old perfect friendliness. Fulkerson had finally behaved with honor and courage; but his provisional reluctance had given March the measure of Fulkerson’s character in one direction, and he could not ignore the fact that it was smaller than he could have wished.

He could not make out whether Fulkerson shared his discomfort or not. It certainly wore away, even with March, as time passed, and with Fulkerson, in the bliss of his fortunate love, it was probably far more transient, if it existed at all. He advanced into the winter as radiantly as if to meet the spring, and he said that if there were any pleasanter month of the year than November, it was December, especially when the weather was good and wet and muddy most of the time, so that you had to keep indoors a long while after you called anywhere.

Colonel Woodburn had the anxiety, in view of his daughter’s engagement, when she asked his consent to it, that such a dreamer must have in regard to any reality that threatens to affect the course of his reveries. He had not perhaps taken her marriage into account, except as a remote contingency; and certainly Fulkerson was not the kind of son-in-law that he had imagined in dealing with that abstraction. But because he had nothing of the sort definitely in mind, he could not oppose the selection of Fulkerson with success; he really knew nothing against him, and he knew, many things in his favor; Fulkerson inspired him with the liking that every one felt for him in a measure; he amused him, he cheered him; and the colonel had been so much used to leaving action of all kinds to his daughter that when he came to close quarters with the question of a son-in-law he felt helpless to decide it, and he let her decide it, as if it were still to be decided when it was submitted to him. She was competent to treat it in all its phases: not merely those of personal interest, but those of duty to the broken Southern past, sentimentally dear to him, and practically absurd to her. No such South as he remembered had ever existed to her knowledge, and no such civilization as he imagined would ever exist, to her belief, anywhere. She took the world as she found it, and made the best of it. She trusted in Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious emergency; and in small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it with him. She was not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic in her expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and she liked the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of Fulkerson. She did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she realized him; she did him justice, and she would not have believed that she did him more than justice if she had sometimes known him to do himself less.

Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband; and his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March. But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble. She interested herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England superiority. She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison; and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly invented, only made it more ridiculous.

Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of Beaton’s taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find it out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness that strongly moved Fulkerson’s sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton was engaged, too.

It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and forgotten; in a manner, it made him feel trifled with. Something of the unfriendliness of fate seemed to overcast his resentment, and he allowed the sadness of his conviction that he had not the means to marry on to tinge his recognition of the fact that Alma Leighton would not have wanted him to marry her if he had. He was now often in that martyr mood in which he wished to help his father; not only to deny himself Chianti, but to forego a fur-lined overcoat which he intended to get for the winter, He postponed the moment of actual sacrifice as regarded the Chianti, and he bought the overcoat in an anguish of self-reproach. He wore it the first evening after he got it in going to call upon the Leightons, and it seemed to him a piece of ghastly irony when Alma complimented his picturesqueness in it and asked him to let her sketch him.

“Oh, you can sketch me,” he said, with so much gloom that it made her laugh.

“If you think it’s so serious, I’d rather not.”

“No, no! Go ahead! How do you want me?”

“Oh, fling yourself down on a chair in one of your attitudes of studied negligence; and twist one corner of your mustache with affected absence of mind.”

“And you think I’m always studied, always affected?”

“I didn’t say so.”

“I didn’t ask you what you said.”

“And I won’t tell you what I think.”

“Ah, I know what you think.”

“What made you ask, then?” The girl laughed again with the satisfaction of her sex in cornering a man.

Beaton made a show of not deigning to reply, and put himself in the pose she suggested, frowning.

“Ah, that’s it. But a little more animation —

 ”’As when a great thought strikes along the brain,
   And flushes all the cheek.’”

She put her forehead down on the back of her hand and laughed again. “You ought to be photographed. You look as if you were sitting for it.”

Beaton said: “That’s because I know I am being photographed, in one way. I don’t think you ought to call me affected. I never am so with you; I know it wouldn’t be of any use.”

“Oh, Mr. Beaton, you flatter.”

“No, I never flatter you.”

“I meant you flattered yourself.”

“How?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Imagine.”

“I know what you mean. You think I can’t be sincere with anybody.”

“Oh no, I don’t.”

“What do you think?”

“That you can’t — try.” Alma gave another victorious laugh.

Miss Woodburn and Fulkerson would once have both feigned a great interest in Alma’s sketching Beaton, and made it the subject of talk, in which they approached as nearly as possible the real interest of their lives. Now they frankly remained away in the dining-room, which was very cozy after the dinner had disappeared; the colonel sat with his lamp and paper in the gallery beyond; Mrs. Leighton was about her housekeeping affairs, in the content she always felt when Alma was with Beaton.

“They seem to be having a pretty good time in there,” said Fulkerson, detaching himself from his own absolute good time as well as he could.

“At least Alma does,” said Miss Woodburn.

“Do you think she cares for him?”

“Quahte as moch as he desoves.”

“What makes you all down on Beaton around here? He’s not such a bad fellow.”

“We awe not all doan on him. Mrs. Leighton isn’t doan on him.”

“Oh, I guess if it was the old lady, there wouldn’t be much question about it.”

They both laughed, and Alma said, “They seem to be greatly amused with something in there.”

“Me, probably,” said Beaton. “I seem to amuse everybody to-night.”

“Don’t you always?”

“I always amuse you, I’m afraid, Alma.”

She looked at him as if she were going to snub him openly for using her name; but apparently she decided to do it covertly. “You didn’t at first. I really used to believe you could be serious, once.”

“Couldn’t you believe it again? Now?”

“Not when you put on that wind-harp stop.”

“Wetmore has been talking to you about me. He would sacrifice his best friend to a phrase. He spends his time making them.”

“He’s made some very pretty ones about you.”

“Like the one you just quoted?”

“No, not exactly. He admires you ever so much. He says” She stopped, teasingly.

“What?”

“He says you could be almost anything you wished, if you didn’t wish to be everything.”

“That sounds more like the school of Wetmore. That’s what you say, Alma.
Well, if there were something you wished me to be, I could be it.”

“We might adapt Kingsley: ‘Be good, sweet man, and let who will be clever.’” He could not help laughing. She went on: “I always thought that was the most patronizing and exasperating thing ever addressed to a human girl; and we’ve had to stand a good deal in our time. I should like to have it applied to the other ‘sect’ a while. As if any girl that was a girl would be good if she had the remotest chance of being clever.”

“Then you wouldn’t wish me to be good?” Beaton asked.

“Not if you were a girl.”

“You want to shock me. Well, I suppose I deserve it. But if I were one-tenth part as good as you are, Alma, I should have a lighter heart than I have now. I know that I’m fickle, but I’m not false, as you think I am.”

“Who said I thought you were false?”

“No one,” said Beaton. “It isn’t necessary, when you look it — live it.”

“Oh, dear! I didn’t know I devoted my whole time to the subject.”

“I know I’m despicable. I could tell you something — the history of this day, even — that would make you despise me.” Beaton had in mind his purchase of the overcoat, which Alma was getting in so effectively, with the money he ought to have sent his father. “But,” he went on, darkly, with a sense that what he was that moment suffering for his selfishness must somehow be a kind of atonement, which would finally leave him to the guiltless enjoyment of the overcoat, “you wouldn’t believe the depths of baseness I could descend to.”

“I would try,” said Alma, rapidly shading the collar, “if you’d give me some hint.”

Beaton had a sudden wish to pour out his remorse to her, but he was afraid of her laughing at him. He said to himself that this was a very wholesome fear, and that if he could always have her at hand he should not make a fool of himself so often. A man conceives of such an office as the very noblest for a woman; he worships her for it if he is magnanimous. But Beaton was silent, and Alma put back her head for the right distance on her sketch. “Mr. Fulkerson thinks you are the sublimest of human beings for advising him to get Colonel Woodburn to interview Mr. Dryfoos about Lindau. What have you ever done with your Judas?”

“I haven’t done anything with it. Nadel thought he would take hold of it at one time, but he dropped it again. After all, I don’t suppose it could be popularized. Fulkerson wanted to offer it as a premium to subscribers for ‘Every Other Week,’ but I sat down on that.”

Alma could not feel the absurdity of this, and she merely said, “‘Every
Other Week’ seems to be going on just the same as ever.”

“Yes, the trouble has all blown over, I believe. Fulkerson,” said Beaton, with a return to what they were saying, “has managed the whole business very well. But he exaggerates the value of my advice.”

“Very likely,” Alma suggested, vaguely. “Or, no! Excuse me! He couldn’t, he couldn’t!” She laughed delightedly at Beaton’s foolish look of embarrassment.

He tried to recover his dignity in saying, “He’s ‘a very good fellow, and he deserves his happiness.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Alma, perversely. “Does any one deserve happiness?”

“I know I don’t,” sighed Beaton.

“You mean you don’t get it.”

“I certainly don’t get it.”

“Ah, but that isn’t the reason.”

“What is?”

“That’s the secret of the universe,” She bit in her lower lip, and looked at him with eyes, of gleaming fun.

“Are you never serious?” he asked.

“With serious people always.”

“I am serious; and you have the secret of my happiness—” He threw himself impulsively forward in his chair.

“Oh, pose, pose!” she cried.

“I won’t pose,” he answered, “and you have got to listen to me. You know I’m in love with you; and I know that once you cared for me. Can’t that time — won’t it — come back again? Try to think so, Alma!”

“No,” she said, briefly and seriously enough.

“But that seems impossible. What is it I’ve done what have you against me?”

“Nothing. But that time is past. I couldn’t recall it if I wished. Why did you bring it up? You’ve broken your word. You know I wouldn’t have let you keep coming here if you hadn’t promised never to refer to it.”

“How could I help it? With that happiness near us — Fulkerson—”

“Oh, it’s that? I might have known it!”

“No, it isn’t that — it’s something far deeper. But if it’s nothing you have against me, what is it, Alma, that keeps you from caring for me now as you did then? I haven’t changed.”

“But I have. I shall never care for you again, Mr. Beaton; you might as well understand it once for all. Don’t think it’s anything in yourself, or that I think you unworthy of me. I’m not so self-satisfied as that; I know very well that I’m not a perfect character, and that I’ve no claim on perfection in anybody else. I think women who want that are fools; they won’t get it, and they don’t deserve it. But I’ve learned a good. deal more about myself than I knew in St. Barnaby, and a life of work, of art, and of art alone that’s what I’ve made up my mind to.”

“A woman that’s made up her mind to that has no heart to hinder her!”

“Would a man have that had done so?”

“But I don’t believe you, Alma. You’re merely laughing at me. And, besides, with me you needn’t give up art. We could work together. You know how much I admire your talent. I believe I could help it — serve it; I would be its willing slave, and yours, Heaven knows!”

“I don’t want any slave — nor any slavery. I want to be free always. Now do you see? I don’t care for you, and I never could in the old way; but I should have to care for some one more than I believe I ever shall to give up my work. Shall we go on?” She looked at her sketch.

“No, we shall not go on,” he said, gloomily, as he rose.

“I suppose you blame me,” she said, rising too.

“Oh no! I blame no one — or only myself. I threw my chance away.”

“I’m glad you see that; and I’m glad you did it. You don’t believe me, of course. Why do men think life can be only the one thing to women? And if you come to the selfish view, who are the happy women? I’m sure that if work doesn’t fail me, health won’t, and happiness won’t.”

“But you could work on with me—”

“Second fiddle. Do you suppose I shouldn’t be woman enough to wish my work always less and lower than yours? At least I’ve heart enough for that!”

“You’ve heart enough for anything, Alma. I was a fool to say you hadn’t.”

“I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least, of having heart—”

“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong!”

“But mine isn’t mine to give you, anyhow. And now I don’t want you ever to speak to me about this again.”

“Oh, there’s no danger!” he cried, bitterly. “I shall never willingly see you again.”

“That’s as you like, Mr. Beaton. We’ve had to be very frank, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends. Still, we needn’t, if you don’t like.”

“And I may come — I may come here — as — as usual?”

“Why, if you can consistently,” she said, with a smile, and she held out her hand to him.

He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been put upon him. At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the aspect of his familiar studio. Some of the things in it were not very familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on Japanese bric-a-brac. When he saw these things in the shops he had felt that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to pay his father. As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life. He felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe. Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a remote relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come to with Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit between them. Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she had taken him seriously. It was inevitable that he should declare himself in love with her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of his love; perhaps not so much as he would have been at its acceptance, though he tried to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy. He did not really feel that the result was worse than what had gone before, and it left him free.

But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs.
Leighton asked Alma what had happened. Alma told her.

“And he won’t come any more?” her mother sighed, with reserved censure.

“Oh, I think he will. He couldn’t very well come the next night. But he has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything — even the habit of thinking he’s in love with some one.”

“Alma,” said her mother, “I don’t think it’s very nice for a girl to let a young man keep coming to see her after she’s refused him.”

“Why not, if it amuses him and doesn’t hurt the girl?”

“But it does hurt her, Alma. It — it’s indelicate. It isn’t fair to him; it gives him hopes.”

“Well, mamma, it hasn’t happened in the given case yet. If Mr. Beaton comes again, I won’t see him, and you can forbid him the house.”

“If I could only feel sure, Alma,” said her mother, taking up another branch of the inquiry, “that you really knew your own mind, I should be easier about it.”

“Then you can rest perfectly quiet, mamma. I do know my own mind; and, what’s worse, I know Mr. Beaton’s mind.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that he spoke to me the other night simply because Mr.
Fulkerson’s engagement had broken him all up.”

“What expressions!” Mrs. Leighton lamented.

“He let it out himself,” Alma went on. “And you wouldn’t have thought it was very flattering yourself. When I’m made love to, after this, I prefer to be made love to in an off-year, when there isn’t another engaged couple anywhere about.”

“Did you tell him that, Alma?”

“Tell him that! What do you mean, mamma? I may be indelicate, but I’m not quite so indelicate as that.”

“I didn’t mean you were indelicate, really, Alma, but I wanted to warn you. I think Mr. Beaton was very much in earnest.”

“Oh, so did he!”

“And you didn’t?”

“Oh yes, for the time being. I suppose he’s very much in earnest with
Miss Vance at times, and with Miss Dryfoos at others. Sometimes he’s a
painter, and sometimes he’s an architect, and sometimes he’s a sculptor.
He has too many gifts — too many tastes.”

“And if Miss Vance and Miss Dryfoos—”

“Oh, do say Sculpture and Architecture, mamma! It’s getting so dreadfully personal!”

“Alma, you know that I only wish to get at your real feeling in the matter.”

“And you know that I don’t want to let you — especially when I haven’t got any real feeling in the matter. But I should think — speaking in the abstract entirely — that if either of those arts was ever going to be in earnest about him, it would want his exclusive devotion for a week at least.”

“I didn’t know,” said Mrs. Leighton, “that he was doing anything now at the others. I thought he was entirely taken up with his work on ‘Every Other Week.’”

“Oh, he is! he is!”

“And you certainly can’t say, my dear, that he hasn’t been very kind — very useful to you, in that matter.”

“And so I ought to have said yes out of gratitude? Thank you, mamma! I didn’t know you held me so cheap.”

“You know whether I hold you cheap or not, Alma. I don’t want you to cheapen yourself. I don’t want you to trifle with any one. I want you to be honest with yourself.”

“Well, come now, mamma! Suppose you begin. I’ve been perfectly honest with myself, and I’ve been honest with Mr. Beaton. I don’t care for him, and I’ve told him I didn’t; so he may be supposed to know it. If he comes here after this, he’ll come as a plain, unostentatious friend of the family, and it’s for you to say whether he shall come in that capacity or not. I hope you won’t trifle with him, and let him get the notion that he’s coming on any other basis.”

Mrs. Leighton felt the comfort of the critical attitude far too keenly to abandon it for anything constructive. She only said, “You know very well, Alma, that’s a matter I can have nothing to do with.”

“Then you leave him entirely to me?”

“I hope you will regard his right to candid and open treatment.”

“He’s had nothing but the most open and candid treatment from me, mamma. It’s you that wants to play fast and loose with him. And, to tell you the truth, I believe he would like that a good deal better; I believe that, if there’s anything he hates, it’s openness and candor.” Alma laughed, and put her arms round her mother, who could not help laughing a little, too.

II.

The winter did not renew for Christine and Mela the social opportunity which the spring had offered. After the musicale at Mrs. Horn’s, they both made their party-call, as Mela said, in due season; but they did not find Mrs. Horn at home, and neither she nor Miss Vance came to see them after people returned to town in the fall. They tried to believe for a time that Mrs. Horn had not got their cards; this pretence failed them, and they fell back upon their pride, or rather Christine’s pride. Mela had little but her good-nature to avail her in any exigency, and if Mrs. Horn or Miss Vance had come to call after a year of neglect, she would have received them as amiably as if they had not lost a day in coming. But Christine had drawn a line beyond which they would not have been forgiven; and she had planned the words and the behavior with which she would have punished them if they had appeared then. Neither sister imagined herself in anywise inferior to them; but Christine was suspicious, at least, and it was Mela who invented the hypothesis of the lost cards. As nothing happened to prove or to disprove the fact, she said, “I move we put Coonrod up to gittun’ it out of Miss Vance, at some of their meetun’s.”

“If you do,” said Christine, “I’ll kill you.”

Christine, however, had the visits of Beaton to console her, and, if these seemed to have no definite aim, she was willing to rest in the pleasure they gave her vanity; but Mela had nothing. Sometimes she even wished they were all back on the farm.

“It would be the best thing for both of you,” said Mrs. Dryfoos, in answer to such a burst of desperation. “I don’t think New York is any place for girls.”

“Well, what I hate, mother,” said Mela, “is, it don’t seem to be any place for young men, either.” She found this so good when she had said it that she laughed over it till Christine was angry.

“A body would think there had never been any joke before.”

“I don’t see as it’s a joke,” said Mrs. Dryfoos. “It’s the plain truth.”

“Oh, don’t mind her, mother,” said Mela. “She’s put out because her old Mr. Beaton ha’r’t been round for a couple o’ weeks. If you don’t watch out, that fellow ‘ll give you the slip yit, Christine, after all your pains.”

“Well, there ain’t anybody to give you the slip, Mela,” Christine clawed back.

“No; I ha’n’t ever set my traps for anybody.” This was what Mela said for want of a better retort; but it was not quite true. When Kendricks came with Beaton to call after her father’s dinner, she used all her cunning to ensnare him, and she had him to herself as long as Beaton stayed; Dryfoos sent down word that he was not very well and had gone to bed. The novelty of Mela had worn off for Kendricks, and she found him, as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs. Horn’s; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material which had yet come to her hand. It would have been her ideal to have the young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in his stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go. But they made a visit of decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace in her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself, Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York society all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as a man of conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind, if it was simple and vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it seemed to him that she would come even to better literary effect if this were recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her willingness to fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality. After all, he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the lures she threw out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did not like Beaton’s laughing at the other girl, either. It seemed to Kendricks, with the code of honor which he mostly kept to himself because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others like it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl — and Christine appeared simply detestable to Kendricks — he had better keep away from her, and not give her the impression he was in love with her. He rather fancied that this was the part of a gentleman, and he could not have penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the consciousness of a nature like Beaton’s and was chiefly a torment to itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed and well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do what one will; but Kendricks, though a sage of twenty-seven, was still too young to understand this.

Beaton scarcely understood it himself, perhaps because he was not yet twenty-seven. He only knew that his will was somehow sick; that it spent itself in caprices, and brought him no happiness from the fulfilment of the most vehement wish. But he was aware that his wishes grew less and less vehement; he began to have a fear that some time he might have none at all. It seemed to him that if he could once do something that was thoroughly distasteful to himself, he might make a beginning in the right direction; but when he tried this on a small scale, it failed, and it seemed stupid. Some sort of expiation was the thing he needed, he was sure; but he could not think of anything in particular to expiate; a man could not expiate his temperament, and his temperament was what Beaton decided to be at fault. He perceived that it went deeper than even fate would have gone; he could have fulfilled an evil destiny and had done with it, however terrible. His trouble was that he could not escape from himself; and, for the most part, he justified himself in refusing to try. After he had come to that distinct understanding with Alma Leighton, and experienced the relief it really gave him, he thought for a while that if it had fallen out otherwise, and she had put him in charge of her destiny, he might have been better able to manage his own. But as it was, he could only drift, and let all other things take their course. It was necessary that he should go to see her afterward, to show her that he was equal to the event; but he did not go so often, and he went rather oftener to the Dryfooses; it was not easy to see Margaret Vance, except on the society terms. With much sneering and scorning, he fulfilled the duties to Mrs. Horn without which he knew he should be dropped from her list; but one might go to many of her Thursdays without getting many words with her niece. Beaton hardly knew whether he wanted many; the girl kept the charm of her innocent stylishness; but latterly she wanted to talk more about social questions than about the psychical problems that young people usually debate so personally. Son of the working-people as he was, Beaton had never cared anything about such matters; he did not know about them or wish to know; he was perhaps too near them. Besides, there was an embarrassment, at least on her part, concerning the Dryfooses. She was too high-minded to blame him for having tempted her to her failure with them by his talk about them; but she was conscious of avoiding them in her talk. She had decided not to renew the effort she had made in the spring; because she could not do them good as fellow-creatures needing food and warmth and work, and she would not try to befriend them socially; she had a horror of any such futile sentimentality. She would have liked to account to Beaton in this way for a course which she suspected he must have heard their comments upon, but she did not quite know how to do it; she could not be sure how much or how little he cared for them. Some tentative approaches which she made toward explanation were met with such eager disclaim of personal interest that she knew less than before what to think; and she turned the talk from the sisters to the brother, whom it seemed she still continued to meet in their common work among the poor.

“He seems very different,” she ventured.

“Oh, quite,” said Beaton. “He’s the kind of person that you might suppose gave the Catholics a hint for the cloistral life; he’s a cloistered nature — the nature that atones and suffers for. But he’s awfully dull company, don’t you think? I never can get anything out of him.”

“He’s very much in earnest.”

“Remorselessly. We’ve got a profane and mundane creature there at the office who runs us all, and it’s shocking merely to see the contact of the tyro natures. When Fulkerson gets to joking Dryfoos — he likes to put his joke in the form of a pretence that Dryfoos is actuated by a selfish motive, that he has an eye to office, and is working up a political interest for himself on the East Side — it’s something inexpressible.”

“I should think so,” said Miss Vance, with such lofty disapproval that
Beaton felt himself included in it for having merely told what caused it.
He could not help saying, in natural rebellion, “Well, the man of one
idea is always a little ridiculous.”

“When his idea is right?” she demanded. “A right idea can’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh, I only said the man that held it was. He’s flat; he has no relief, no projection.”

She seemed unable to answer, and he perceived that he had silenced her to his own, disadvantage. It appeared to Beaton that she was becoming a little too exacting for comfort in her idealism. He put down the cup of tea he had been tasting, and said, in his solemn staccato: “I must go. Good-bye!” and got instantly away from her, with an effect he had of having suddenly thought of something imperative.

He went up to Mrs. Horn for a moment’s hail and farewell, and felt himself subtly detained by her through fugitive passages of conversation with half a dozen other people. He fancied that at crises of this strange interview Mrs. Horn was about to become confidential with him, and confidential, of all things, about her niece. She ended by not having palpably been so. In fact, the concern in her mind would have been difficult to impart to a young man, and after several experiments Mrs. Horn found it impossible to say that she wished Margaret could somehow be interested in lower things than those which occupied her. She had watched with growing anxiety the girl’s tendency to various kinds of self-devotion. She had dark hours in which she even feared her entire withdrawal from the world in a life of good works. Before now, girls had entered the Protestant sisterhoods, which appeal so potently to the young and generous imagination, and Margaret was of just the temperament to be influenced by them. During the past summer she had been unhappy at her separation from the cares that had engrossed her more and more as their stay in the city drew to an end in the spring, and she had hurried her aunt back to town earlier in the fall than she would have chosen to come. Margaret had her correspondents among the working-women whom she befriended. Mrs. Horn was at one time alarmed to find that Margaret was actually promoting a strike of the button-hole workers. This, of course, had its ludicrous side, in connection with a young lady in good society, and a person of even so little humor as Mrs. Horn could not help seeing it. At the same time, she could not help foreboding the worst from it; she was afraid that Margaret’s health would give way under the strain, and that if she did not go into a sisterhood she would at least go into a decline. She began the winter with all such counteractive measures as she could employ. At an age when such things weary, she threw herself into the pleasures of society with the hope of dragging Margaret after her; and a sympathetic witness must have followed with compassion her course from ball to ball, from reception to reception, from parlor-reading to parlor-reading, from musicale to musicale, from play to play, from opera to opera. She tasted, after she had practically renounced them, the bitter and the insipid flavors of fashionable amusement, in the hope that Margaret might find them sweet, and now at the end she had to own to herself that she had failed. It was coming Lent again, and the girl had only grown thinner and more serious with the diversions that did not divert her from the baleful works of beneficence on which Mrs. Horn felt that she was throwing her youth away. Margaret could have borne either alone, but together they were wearing her out. She felt it a duty to undergo the pleasures her aunt appointed for her, but she could not forego the other duties in which she found her only pleasure.

She kept up her music still because she could employ it at the meetings for the entertainment, and, as she hoped, the elevation of her working-women; but she neglected the other aesthetic interests which once occupied her; and, at sight of Beaton talking with her, Mrs. Horn caught at the hope that he might somehow be turned to account in reviving Margaret’s former interest in art. She asked him if Mr. Wetmore had his classes that winter as usual; and she said she wished Margaret could be induced to go again: Mr. Wetmore always said that she did not draw very well, but that she had a great deal of feeling for it, and her work was interesting. She asked, were the Leightons in town again; and she murmured a regret that she had not been able to see anything of them, without explaining why; she said she had a fancy that if Margaret knew Miss Leighton, and what she was doing, it might stimulate her, perhaps. She supposed Miss Leighton was still going on with her art? Beaton said, Oh yes, he believed so.

But his manner did not encourage Mrs. Horn to pursue her aims in that direction, and she said, with a sigh, she wished he still had a class; she always fancied that Margaret got more good from his instruction than from any one else’s.

He said that she was very good; but there was really nobody who knew half as much as Wetmore, or could make any one understand half as much. Mrs. Horn was afraid, she said, that Mr. Wetmore’s terrible sincerity discouraged Margaret; he would not let her have any illusions about the outcome of what she was doing; and did not Mr. Beaton think that some illusion was necessary with young people? Of course, it was very nice of Mr. Wetmore to be so honest, but it did not always seem to be the wisest thing. She begged Mr. Beaton to try to think of some one who would be a little less severe. Her tone assumed a deeper interest in the people who were coming up and going away, and Beaton perceived that he was dismissed.

He went away with vanity flattered by the sense of having been appealed to concerning Margaret, and then he began to chafe at what she had said of Wetmore’s honesty, apropos of her wish that he still had a class himself. Did she mean, confound her? that he was insincere, and would let Miss Vance suppose she had more talent than she really had? The more Beaton thought of this, the more furious he became, and the more he was convinced that something like it had been unconsciously if not consciously in her mind. He framed some keen retorts, to the general effect that with the atmosphere of illusion preserved so completely at home, Miss Vance hardly needed it in her art studies. Having just determined never to go near Mrs. Horn’s Thursdays again, he decided to go once more, in order to plant this sting in her capacious but somewhat callous bosom; and he planned how he would lead the talk up to the point from which he should launch it.

In the mean time he felt the need of some present solace, such as only unqualified worship could give him; a cruel wish to feel his power in some direction where, even if it were resisted, it could not be overcome, drove him on. That a woman who was to Beaton the embodiment of artificiality should intimate, however innocently — the innocence made it all the worse — that he was less honest than Wetmore, whom he knew to be so much more honest, was something that must be retaliated somewhere before his self-respect could be restored. It was only five o’clock, and he went on up-town to the Dryfooses’, though he had been there only the night before last. He asked for the ladies, and Mrs. Mandel received him.

“The young ladies are down-town shopping,” she said, “but I am very glad of the opportunity of seeing you alone, Mr. Beaton. You know I lived several years in Europe.”

“Yes,” said Beaton, wondering what that could have to do with her pleasure in seeing him alone. “I believe so?” He involuntarily gave his words the questioning inflection.

“You have lived abroad, too, and so you won’t find what I am going to ask so strange. Mr. Beaton, why do you come so much to this house?” Mrs. Mandel bent forward with an aspect of ladylike interest and smiled.

Beaton frowned. “Why do I come so much?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I — Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you ask?”

“Oh, certainly. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t say, for I wish you to be very frank with me. I ask because there are two young ladies in this house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to them. I needn’t explain why; you know all the people here, and you understand. I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people. They do not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help themselves or one another. But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here. You are either interested in one of these young girls or you are not. If you are, I have nothing more to say. If you are not—” Mrs. Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.

Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself. He had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses, but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty. He reddened, and then turned an angry pallor. “Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel. Do you ask this from the young ladies?”

“Certainly not,” she said, with the best temper, and with something in her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of her authority in the form of a sneer. “As I have suggested, they would hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter. I have no objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies. Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything about your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn’t very pleasant.” The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as something rather nice.

“I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel,” he said, with a dreamy sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. “If I told you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?”

“Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly leading them on to infer differently.” They both mechanically kept up the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant. A good many thoughts went through Beaton’s mind, and none of them were flattering. He had not been unconscious that the part he had played toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a way that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because he was listless and wished nothing. He rose in saying: “I might be a little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won’t trouble you with any palliating theory. I will not come any more.”

He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, “Of course, it’s only your action that I am concerned with.”

She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs. Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop going to see Christine Dryfoos, but it was not at all simple for Mrs. Mandel to deal with the consequences of his not coming. He only thought how lightly she had stopped him, and the poor woman whom he had left trembling for what she had been obliged to do embodied for him the conscience that accused him of unpleasant things.

“By heavens! this is piling it up,” he said to himself through his set teeth, realizing how it had happened right on top of that stupid insult from Mrs. Horn. Now he should have to give up his place on ‘Every Other Week; he could not keep that, under the circumstances, even if some pretence were not made to get rid of him; he must hurry and anticipate any such pretence; he must see Fulkerson at once; he wondered where he should find him at that hour. He thought, with bitterness so real that it gave him a kind of tragical satisfaction, how certainly he could find him a little later at Mrs. Leighton’s; and Fulkerson’s happiness became an added injury.

The thing had, of course, come about just at the wrong time. There never had been a time when Beaton needed money more, when he had spent what he had and what he expected to have so recklessly. He was in debt to Fulkerson personally and officially for advance payments of salary. The thought of sending money home made him break into a scoffing laugh, which he turned into a cough in order to deceive the passers. What sort of face should he go with to Fulkerson and tell him that he renounced his employment on ‘Every Other Week;’ and what should he do when he had renounced it? Take pupils, perhaps; open a class? A lurid conception of a class conducted on those principles of shameless flattery at which Mrs. Horn had hinted — he believed now she had meant to insult him — presented itself. Why should not he act upon the suggestion? He thought with loathing for the whole race of women — dabblers in art. How easy the thing would be: as easy as to turn back now and tell that old fool’s girl that he loved her, and rake in half his millions. Why should not he do that? No one else cared for him; and at a year’s end, probably, one woman would be like another as far as the love was concerned, and probably he should not be more tired if the woman were Christine Dryfoos than if she were Margaret Vance. He kept Alma Leighton out of the question, because at the bottom of his heart he believed that she must be forever unlike every other woman to him.

The tide of his confused and aimless reverie had carried him far down-town, he thought; but when he looked up from it to see where he was he found himself on Sixth Avenue, only a little below Thirty-ninth Street, very hot and blown; that idiotic fur overcoat was stifling. He could not possibly walk down to Eleventh; he did not want to walk even to the Elevated station at Thirty-fourth; he stopped at the corner to wait for a surface-car, and fell again into his bitter fancies. After a while he roused himself and looked up the track, but there was no car coming. He found himself beside a policeman, who was lazily swinging his club by its thong from his wrist.

“When do you suppose a car will be along?” he asked, rather in a general sarcasm of the absence of the cars than in any special belief that the policeman could tell him.

The policeman waited to discharge his tobacco-juice into the gutter. “In about a week,” he said, nonchalantly.

“What’s the matter?” asked Beaton, wondering what the joke could be.

“Strike,” said the policeman. His interest in Beaton’s ignorance seemed to overcome his contempt of it. “Knocked off everywhere this morning except Third Avenue and one or two cross-town lines.” He spat again and kept his bulk at its incline over the gutter to glance at a group of men on the corner below: They were neatly dressed, and looked like something better than workingmen, and they had a holiday air of being in their best clothes.

“Some of the strikers?” asked Beaton.

The policeman nodded.

“Any trouble yet?”

“There won’t be any trouble till we begin to move the cars,” said the policeman.

Beaton felt a sudden turn of his rage toward the men whose action would now force him to walk five blocks and mount the stairs of the Elevated station. “If you’d take out eight or ten of those fellows,” he said, ferociously, “and set them up against a wall and shoot them, you’d save a great deal of bother.”

“I guess we sha’n’t have to shoot much,” said the policeman, still swinging his locust. “Anyway, we shant begin it. If it comes to a fight, though,” he said, with a look at the men under the scooping rim of his helmet, “we can drive the whole six thousand of ’em into the East River without pullin’ a trigger.”

“Are there six thousand in it?”

“About.”

“What do the infernal fools expect to live on?”

“The interest of their money, I suppose,” said the officer, with a grin of satisfaction in his irony. “It’s got to run its course. Then they’ll come back with their heads tied up and their tails between their legs, and plead to be taken on again.”

“If I was a manager of the roads,” said Beaton, thinking of how much he was already inconvenienced by the strike, and obscurely connecting it as one of the series with the wrongs he had suffered at the hands of Mrs. Horn and Mrs. Mandel, “I would see them starve before I’d take them back — every one of them.”

“Well,” said the policeman, impartially, as a man might whom the companies allowed to ride free, but who had made friends with a good many drivers and conductors in the course of his free riding, “I guess that’s what the roads would like to do if they could; but the men are too many for them, and there ain’t enough other men to take their places.”

“No matter,” said Beaton, severely. “They can bring in men from other places.”

“Oh, they’ll do that fast enough,” said the policeman.

A man came out of the saloon on the corner where the strikers were standing, noisy drunk, and they began, as they would have said, to have some fun with him. The policeman left Beaton, and sauntered slowly down toward the group as if in the natural course of an afternoon ramble. On the other side of the street Beaton could see another officer sauntering up from the block below. Looking up and down the avenue, so silent of its horse-car bells, he saw a policeman at every corner. It was rather impressive.

III.

The strike made a good deal of talk in the office of ‘Every Other Week’ that is, it made Fulkerson talk a good deal. He congratulated himself that he was not personally incommoded by it, like some of the fellows who lived uptown, and had not everything under one roof, as it were. He enjoyed the excitement of it, and he kept the office boy running out to buy the extras which the newsmen came crying through the street almost every hour with a lamentable, unintelligible noise. He read not only the latest intelligence of the strike, but the editorial comments on it, which praised the firm attitude of both parties, and the admirable measures taken by the police to preserve order. Fulkerson enjoyed the interviews with the police captains and the leaders of the strike; he equally enjoyed the attempts of the reporters to interview the road managers, which were so graphically detailed, and with such a fine feeling for the right use of scare-heads as to have almost the value of direct expression from them, though it seemed that they had resolutely refused to speak. He said, at second-hand from the papers, that if the men behaved themselves and respected the rights of property, they would have public sympathy with them every time; but just as soon as they began to interfere with the roads’ right to manage their own affairs in their own way, they must be put down with an iron hand; the phrase “iron hand” did Fulkerson almost as much good as if it had never been used before. News began to come of fighting between the police and the strikers when the roads tried to move their cars with men imported from Philadelphia, and then Fulkerson rejoiced at the splendid courage of the police. At the same time, he believed what the strikers said, and that the trouble was not made by them, but by gangs of roughs acting without their approval. In this juncture he was relieved by the arrival of the State Board of Arbitration, which took up its quarters, with a great many scare-heads, at one of the principal hotels, and invited the roads and the strikers to lay the matter in dispute before them; he said that now we should see the working of the greatest piece of social machinery in modern times. But it appeared to work only in the alacrity of the strikers to submit their grievance. The roads were as one road in declaring that there was nothing to arbitrate, and that they were merely asserting their right to manage their own affairs in their own way. One of the presidents was reported to have told a member of the Board, who personally summoned him, to get out and to go about his business. Then, to Fulkerson’s extreme disappointment, the august tribunal, acting on behalf of the sovereign people in the interest of peace, declared itself powerless, and got out, and would, no doubt, have gone about its business if it had had any. Fulkerson did not know what to say, perhaps because the extras did not; but March laughed at this result.

“It’s a good deal like the military manoeuvre of the King of France and his forty thousand men. I suppose somebody told him at the top of the hill that there was nothing to arbitrate, and to get out and go about his business, and that was the reason he marched down after he had marched up with all that ceremony. What amuses me is to find that in an affair of this kind the roads have rights and the strikers have rights, but the public has no rights at all. The roads and the strikers are allowed to fight out a private war in our midst as thoroughly and precisely a private war as any we despise the Middle Ages for having tolerated — as any street war in Florence or Verona — and to fight it out at our pains and expense, and we stand by like sheep and wait till they get tired. It’s a funny attitude for a city of fifteen hundred thousand inhabitants.”

“What would you do?” asked Fulkerson, a good deal daunted by this view of the case.

“Do? Nothing. Hasn’t the State Board of Arbitration declared itself powerless? We have no hold upon the strikers; and we’re so used to being snubbed and disobliged by common carriers that we have forgotten our hold on the roads and always allow them to manage their own affairs in their own way, quite as if we had nothing to do with them and they owed us no services in return for their privileges.”

“That’s a good deal so,” said Fulkerson, disordering his hair. “Well, it’s nuts for the colonel nowadays. He says if he was boss of this town he would seize the roads on behalf of the people, and man ’em with policemen, and run ’em till the managers had come to terms with the strikers; and he’d do that every time there was a strike.”

“Doesn’t that rather savor of the paternalism he condemned in Lindau?” asked March.

“I don’t know. It savors of horse sense.”

“You are pretty far gone, Fulkerson. I thought you were the most engaged man I ever saw; but I guess you’re more father-in-lawed. And before you’re married, too.”

“Well, the colonel’s a glorious old fellow, March. I wish he had the power to do that thing, just for the fun of looking on while he waltzed in. He’s on the keen jump from morning till night, and he’s up late and early to see the row. I’m afraid he’ll get shot at some of the fights; he sees them all; I can’t get any show at them: haven’t seen a brickbat shied or a club swung yet. Have you?”

“No, I find I can philosophize the situation about as well from the papers, and that’s what I really want to do, I suppose. Besides, I’m solemnly pledged by Mrs. March not to go near any sort of crowd, under penalty of having her bring the children and go with me. Her theory is that we must all die together; the children haven’t been at school since the strike began. There’s no precaution that Mrs. March hasn’t used. She watches me whenever I go out, and sees that I start straight for this office.”

Fulkerson laughed and said: “Well, it’s probably the only thing that’s saved your life. Have you seen anything of Beaton lately?”

“No. You don’t mean to say he’s killed!”

“Not if he knows it. But I don’t know — What do you say, March? What’s the reason you couldn’t get us up a paper on the strike?”

“I knew it would fetch round to ‘Every Other Week,’ somehow.”

“No, but seriously. There’ll be plenty of news paper accounts. But you could treat it in the historical spirit — like something that happened several centuries ago; De Foe’s Plague of London style. Heigh? What made me think of it was Beaton. If I could get hold of him, you two could go round together and take down its aesthetic aspects. It’s a big thing, March, this strike is. I tell you it’s imposing to have a private war, as you say, fought out this way, in the heart of New York, and New York not minding it a bit. See? Might take that view of it. With your descriptions and Beaton’s sketches — well, it would just be the greatest card! Come! What do you say?”

“Will you undertake to make it right with Mrs. March if I’m killed and she and the children are not killed with me?”

“Well, it would be difficult. I wonder how it would do to get Kendricks to do the literary part?”

“I’ve no doubt he’d jump at the chance. I’ve yet to see the form of literature that Kendricks wouldn’t lay down his life for.”

“Say!” March perceived that Fulkerson was about to vent another inspiration, and smiled patiently. “Look here! What’s the reason we couldn’t get one of the strikers to write it up for us?”

“Might have a symposium of strikers and presidents,” March suggested.

“No; I’m in earnest. They say some of those fellows — especially the foreigners — are educated men. I know one fellow — a Bohemian — that used to edit a Bohemian newspaper here. He could write it out in his kind of Dutch, and we could get Lindau to translate it.”

“I guess not,” said March, dryly.

“Why not? He’d do it for the cause, wouldn’t he? Suppose you put it up on him the next time you see him.”

“I don’t see Lindau any more,” said March. He added, “I guess he’s renounced me along with Mr. Dryfoos’s money.”

“Pshaw! You don’t mean he hasn’t been round since?”

“He came for a while, but he’s left off coming now. I don’t feel particularly gay about it,” March said, with some resentment of Fulkerson’s grin. “He’s left me in debt to him for lessons to the children.”

Fulkerson laughed out. “Well, he is the greatest old fool! Who’d ‘a’ thought he’d ‘a’ been in earnest with those ‘brincibles’ of his? But I suppose there have to be just such cranks; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

“There has to be one such crank, it seems,” March partially assented.
“One’s enough for me.”

“I reckon this thing is nuts for Lindau, too,” said Fulkerson. “Why, it must act like a schooner of beer on him all the while, to see ‘gabidal’ embarrassed like it is by this strike. It must make old Lindau feel like he was back behind those barricades at Berlin. Well, he’s a splendid old fellow; pity he drinks, as I remarked once before.”

When March left the office he did not go home so directly as he came, perhaps because Mrs. March’s eye was not on him. He was very curious about some aspects of the strike, whose importance, as a great social convulsion, he felt people did not recognize; and, with his temperance in everything, he found its negative expressions as significant as its more violent phases. He had promised his wife solemnly that he would keep away from these, and he had a natural inclination to keep his promise; he had no wish to be that peaceful spectator who always gets shot when there is any firing on a mob. He interested himself in the apparent indifference of the mighty city, which kept on about its business as tranquilly as if the private war being fought out in its midst were a vague rumor of Indian troubles on the frontier; and he realized how there might once have been a street feud of forty years in Florence without interfering materially with the industry and prosperity of the city. On Broadway there was a silence where a jangle and clatter of horse-car bells and hoofs had been, but it was not very noticeable; and on the avenues, roofed by the elevated roads, this silence of the surface tracks was not noticeable at all in the roar of the trains overhead. Some of the cross-town cars were beginning to run again, with a policeman on the rear of each; on the Third Avenge line, operated by non-union men, who had not struck, there were two policemen beside the driver of every car, and two beside the conductor, to protect them from the strikers. But there were no strikers in sight, and on Second Avenue they stood quietly about in groups on the corners. While March watched them at a safe distance, a car laden with policemen came down the track, but none of the strikers offered to molest it. In their simple Sunday best, March thought them very quiet, decent-looking people, and he could well believe that they had nothing to do with the riotous outbreaks in other parts of the city. He could hardly believe that there were any such outbreaks; he began more and more to think them mere newspaper exaggerations in the absence of any disturbance, or the disposition to it, that he could see. He walked on to the East River.

Avenues A, B, and C presented the same quiet aspect as Second Avenue; groups of men stood on the corners, and now and then a police-laden car was brought unmolested down the tracks before them; they looked at it and talked together, and some laughed, but there was no trouble.

March got a cross-town car, and came back to the West Side. A policeman, looking very sleepy and tired, lounged on the platform.

“I suppose you’ll be glad when this cruel war is over,” March suggested, as he got in.

The officer gave him a surly glance and made him no answer.

His behavior, from a man born to the joking give and take of our life, impressed March. It gave him a fine sense of the ferocity which he had read of the French troops putting on toward the populace just before the coup d’etat; he began to feel like the populace; but he struggled with himself and regained his character of philosophical observer. In this character he remained in the car and let it carry him by the corner where he ought to have got out and gone home, and let it keep on with him to one of the farthermost tracks westward, where so much of the fighting was reported to have taken place. But everything on the way was as quiet as on the East Side.

Suddenly the car stopped with so quick a turn of the brake that he was half thrown from his seat, and the policeman jumped down from the platform and ran forward.

IV

Dryfoos sat at breakfast that morning with Mrs. Mandel as usual to pour out his coffee. Conrad had gone down-town; the two girls lay abed much later than their father breakfasted, and their mother had gradually grown too feeble to come down till lunch. Suddenly Christine appeared at the door. Her face was white to the edges of her lips, and her eyes were blazing.

“Look here, father! Have you been saying anything to Mr. Beaton?”

The old man looked up at her across his coffee-cup through his frowning brows. “No.”

Mrs. Mandel dropped her eyes, and the spoon shook in her hand.

“Then what’s the reason he don’t come here any more?” demanded the girl; and her glance darted from her father to Mrs. Mandel. “Oh, it’s you, is it? I’d like to know who told you to meddle in other people’s business?”

“I did,” said Dryfoos, savagely. “I told her to ask him what he wanted here, and he said he didn’t want anything, and he stopped coming. That’s all. I did it myself.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” said the girl, scarcely less insolently than she had spoken to Mrs. Mandel. “I should like to know what you did it for? I’d like to know what made you think I wasn’t able to take care of myself. I just knew somebody had been meddling, but I didn’t suppose it was you. I can manage my own affairs in my own way, if you please, and I’ll thank you after this to leave me to myself in what don’t concern you.”

“Don’t concern me? You impudent jade!” her father began.

Christine advanced from the doorway toward the table; she had her hands closed upon what seemed trinkets, some of which glittered and dangled from them. She said, “Will you go to him and tell him that this meddlesome minx, here, had no business to say anything about me to him, and you take it all back?”

“No!” shouted the old man. “And if—”

“That’s all I want of you!” the girl shouted in her turn. “Here are your presents.” With both hands she flung the jewels-pins and rings and earrings and bracelets — among the breakfast-dishes, from which some of them sprang to the floor. She stood a moment to pull the intaglio ring from the finger where Beaton put it a year ago, and dashed that at her father’s plate. Then she whirled out of the room, and they heard her running up-stairs.

The old man made a start toward her, but he fell back in his chair before she was gone, and, with a fierce, grinding movement of his jaws, controlled himself. “Take — take those things up,” he gasped to Mrs. Mandel. He seemed unable to rise again from his chair; but when she asked him if he were unwell, he said no, with an air of offence, and got quickly to his feet. He mechanically picked up the intaglio ring from the table while he stood there, and put it on his little finger; his hand was not much bigger than Christine’s. “How do you suppose she found it out?” he asked, after a moment.

“She seems to have merely suspected it,” said Mrs. Mandel, in a tremor, and with the fright in her eyes which Christine’s violence had brought there.

“Well, it don’t make any difference. She had to know, somehow, and now she knows.” He started toward the door of the library, as if to go into the hall, where his hat and coat hung.

“Mr. Dryfoos,” palpitated Mrs. Mandel, “I can’t remain here, after the language your daughter has used to me — I can’t let you leave me — I — I’m afraid of her—”

“Lock yourself up, then,” said the old man, rudely. He added, from the hall before he went out, “I reckon she’ll quiet down now.”

He took the Elevated road. The strike seemed a vary far-off thing, though the paper he bought to look up the stockmarket was full of noisy typography about yesterday’s troubles on the surface lines. Among the millions in Wall Street there was some joking and some swearing, but not much thinking, about the six thousand men who had taken such chances in their attempt to better their condition. Dryfoos heard nothing of the strike in the lobby of the Stock Exchange, where he spent two or three hours watching a favorite stock of his go up and go down under the betting. By the time the Exchange closed it had risen eight points, and on this and some other investments he was five thousand dollars richer than he had been in the morning. But he had expected to be richer still, and he was by no means satisfied with his luck. All through the excitement of his winning and losing had played the dull, murderous rage he felt toward the child who had defied him, and when the game was over and he started home his rage mounted into a sort of frenzy; he would teach her, he would break her. He walked a long way without thinking, and then waited for a car. None came, and he hailed a passing coupe.

“What has got all the cars?” he demanded of the driver, who jumped down from his box to open the door for him and get his direction.

“Been away?” asked the driver. “Hasn’t been any car along for a week.
Strike.”

“Oh yes,” said Dryfoos. He felt suddenly giddy, and he remained staring at the driver after he had taken his seat.

The man asked, “Where to?”

Dryfoos could not think of his street or number, and he said, with uncontrollable fury: “I told you once! Go up to West Eleventh, and drive along slow on the south side; I’ll show you the place.”

He could not remember the number of ‘Every Other Week’ office, where he suddenly decided to stop before he went home. He wished to see Fulkerson, and ask him something about Beaton: whether he had been about lately, and whether he had dropped any hint of what had happened concerning Christine; Dryfoos believed that Fulkerson was in the fellow’s confidence.

There was nobody but Conrad in the counting-room, whither Dryfoos returned after glancing into Fulkerson’s empty office. “Where’s Fulkerson?” he asked, sitting down with his hat on.

“He went out a few moments ago,” said Conrad, glancing at the clock. “I’m afraid he isn’t coming back again today, if you wanted to see him.”

Dryfoos twisted his head sidewise and upward to indicate March’s room.
“That other fellow out, too?”

“He went just before Mr. Fulkerson,” answered Conrad.

“Do you generally knock off here in the middle of the afternoon?” asked the old man.

“No,” said Conrad, as patiently as if his father had not been there a score of times and found the whole staff of “Every Other Week” at work between four and five. “Mr. March, you know, always takes a good deal of his work home with him, and I suppose Mr. Fulkerson went out so early because there isn’t much doing to-day. Perhaps it’s the strike that makes it dull.”

“The strike-yes! It’s a pretty piece of business to have everything thrown out because a parcel of lazy hounds want a chance to lay off and get drunk.” Dryfoos seemed to think Conrad would make some answer to this, but the young man’s mild face merely saddened, and he said nothing. “I’ve got a coupe out there now that I had to take because I couldn’t get a car. If I had my way I’d have a lot of those vagabonds hung. They’re waiting to get the city into a snarl, and then rob the houses — pack of dirty, worthless whelps. They ought to call out the militia, and fire into ‘em. Clubbing is too good for them.” Conrad was still silent, and his father sneered, “But I reckon you don’t think so.”

“I think the strike is useless,” said Conrad.

“Oh, you do, do you? Comin’ to your senses a little. Gettin’ tired walkin’ so much. I should like to know what your gentlemen over there on the East Side think about the strike, anyway.”

The young fellow dropped his eyes. “I am not authorized to speak for them.”

“Oh, indeed! And perhaps you’re not authorized to speak for yourself?”

“Father, you know we don’t agree about these things. I’d rather not talk—”

“But I’m goin’ to make you talk this time!” cried Dryfoos, striking the arm of the chair he sat in with the side of his fist. A maddening thought of Christine came over him. “As long as you eat my bread, you have got to do as I say. I won’t have my children telling me what I shall do and sha’n’t do, or take on airs of being holier than me. Now, you just speak up! Do you think those loafers are right, or don’t you? Come!”

Conrad apparently judged it best to speak. “I think they were very foolish to strike — at this time, when the Elevated roads can do the work.”

“Oh, at this time, heigh! And I suppose they think over there on the East Side that it ‘d been wise to strike before we got the Elevated.” Conrad again refused to answer, and his father roared, “What do you think?”

“I think a strike is always bad business. It’s war; but sometimes there don’t seem any other way for the workingmen to get justice. They say that sometimes strikes do raise the wages, after a while.”

“Those lazy devils were paid enough already,” shrieked the old man.

“They got two dollars a day. How much do you think they ought to ‘a’ got?
Twenty?”

Conrad hesitated, with a beseeching look at his father. But he decided to answer. “The men say that with partial work, and fines, and other things, they get sometimes a dollar, and sometimes ninety cents a day.”

“They lie, and you know they lie,” said his father, rising and coming toward him. “And what do you think the upshot of it all will be, after they’ve ruined business for another week, and made people hire hacks, and stolen the money of honest men? How is it going to end?”

“They will have to give in.”

“Oh, give in, heigh! And what will you say then, I should like to know?
How will you feel about it then? Speak!”

“I shall feel as I do now. I know you don’t think that way, and I don’t blame you — or anybody. But if I have got to say how I shall feel, why, I shall feel sorry they didn’t succeed, for I believe they have a righteous cause, though they go the wrong way to help themselves.”

His father came close to him, his eyes blazing, his teeth set. “Do you dare so say that to me?”

“Yes. I can’t help it. I pity them; my whole heart is with those poor men.”

“You impudent puppy!” shouted the old man. He lifted his hand and struck his son in the face. Conrad caught his hand with his own left, and, while the blood began to trickle from a wound that Christine’s intaglio ring had made in his temple, he looked at him with a kind of grieving wonder, and said, “Father!”

The old man wrenched his fist away and ran out of the house. He remembered his address now, and he gave it as he plunged into the coupe. He trembled with his evil passion, and glared out of the windows at the passers as he drove home; he only saw Conrad’s mild, grieving, wondering eyes, and the blood slowly trickling from the wound in his temple.

Conrad went to the neat-set bowl in Fulkerson’s comfortable room and washed the blood away, and kept bathing the wound with the cold water till it stopped bleeding. The cut was not deep, and he thought he would not put anything on it. After a while he locked up the office and started out, he hardly knew where. But he walked on, in the direction he had taken, till he found himself in Union Square, on the pavement in front of Brentano’s. It seemed to him that he heard some one calling gently to him, “Mr. Dryfoos!”

V.

Conrad looked confusedly around, and the same voice said again, “Mr. Dryfoos!” and he saw that it was a lady speaking to him from a coupe beside the curbing, and then he saw that it was Miss Vance.

She smiled when he gave signs of having discovered her, and came up to the door of her carriage. “I am so glad to meet you. I have been longing to talk to somebody; nobody seems to feel about it as I do. Oh, isn’t it horrible? Must they fail? I saw cars running on all the lines as I came across; it made me sick at heart. Must those brave fellows give in? And everybody seems to hate them so — I can’t bear it.” Her face was estranged with excitement, and there were traces of tears on it. “You must think me almost crazy to stop you in the street this way; but when I caught sight of you I had to speak. I knew you would sympathize — I knew you would feel as I do. Oh, how can anybody help honoring those poor men for standing by one another as they do? They are risking all they have in the world for the sake of justice! Oh, they are true heroes! They are staking the bread of their wives and children on the dreadful chance they’ve taken! But no one seems to understand it. No one seems to see that they are willing to suffer more now that other poor men may suffer less hereafter. And those wretched creatures that are coming in to take their places — those traitors—”

“We can’t blame them for wanting to earn a living, Miss Vance,” said
Conrad.

“No, no! I don’t blame them. Who am I, to do such a thing? It’s we — people like me, of my class — who make the poor betray one another. But this dreadful fighting — this hideous paper is full of it!” She held up an extra, crumpled with her nervous reading. “Can’t something be done to stop it? Don’t you think that if some one went among them, and tried to make them see how perfectly hopeless it was to resist the companies and drive off the new men, he might do some good? I have wanted to go and try; but I am a woman, and I mustn’t! I shouldn’t be afraid of the strikers, but I’m afraid of what people would say!” Conrad kept pressing his handkerchief to the cut in his temple, which he thought might be bleeding, and now she noticed this. “Are you hurt, Mr. Dryfoos? You look so pale.”

“No, it’s nothing — a little scratch I’ve got.”

“Indeed, you look pale. Have you a carriage? How will you get home? Will you get in here with me and let me drive you?”

“No, no,” said Conrad, smiling at her excitement. “I’m perfectly well—”

“And you don’t think I’m foolish and wicked for stopping you here and talking in this way? But I know you feel as I do!”

“Yes, I feel as you do. You are right — right in every way — I mustn’t keep you — Good-bye.” He stepped back to bow, but she put her beautiful hand out of the window, and when he took it she wrung his hand hard.

“Thank you, thank you! You are good and you are just! But no one can do anything. It’s useless!”

The type of irreproachable coachman on the box whose respectability had suffered through the strange behavior of his mistress in this interview drove quickly off at her signal, and Conrad stood a moment looking after the carriage. His heart was full of joy; it leaped; he thought it would burst. As he turned to walk away it seemed to him as if he mounted upon the air. The trust she had shown him, the praise she had given him, that crush of the hand: he hoped nothing, he formed no idea from it, but it all filled him with love that cast out the pain and shame he had been suffering. He believed that he could never be unhappy any more; the hardness that was in his mind toward his father went out of it; he saw how sorely he had tried him; he grieved that he had done it, but the means, the difference of his feeling about the cause of their quarrel, he was solemnly glad of that since she shared it. He was only sorry for his father. “Poor father!” he said under his breath as he went along. He explained to her about his father in his reverie, and she pitied his father, too.

He was walking over toward the West Side, aimlessly at first, and then at times with the longing to do something to save those mistaken men from themselves forming itself into a purpose. Was not that what she meant when she bewailed her woman’s helplessness? She must have wished him to try if he, being a man, could not do something; or if she did not, still he would try, and if she heard of it she would recall what she had said and would be glad he had understood her so. Thinking of her pleasure in what he was going to do, he forgot almost what it was; but when he came to a street-car track he remembered it, and looked up and down to see if there were any turbulent gathering of men whom he might mingle with and help to keep from violence. He saw none anywhere; and then suddenly, as if at the same moment, for in his exalted mood all events had a dream-like simultaneity, he stood at the corner of an avenue, and in the middle of it, a little way off, was a street-car, and around the car a tumult of shouting, cursing, struggling men. The driver was lashing his horses forward, and a policeman was at their heads, with the conductor, pulling them; stones, clubs, brickbats hailed upon the car, the horses, the men trying to move them. The mob closed upon them in a body, and then a patrol-wagon whirled up from the other side, and a squad of policemen leaped out and began to club the rioters. Conrad could see how they struck them under the rims of their hats; the blows on their skulls sounded as if they had fallen on stone; the rioters ran in all directions.

One of the officers rushed up toward the corner where Conrad stood, and then he saw at his side a tall, old man, with a long, white beard, who was calling out at the policemen: “Ah, yes! Glup the strikerss — gif it to them! Why don’t you co and glup the bresidents that insoalt your lawss, and gick your Boart of Arpidration out-of-toors? Glup the strikerss — they cot no friendts! They cot no money to pribe you, to dreat you!”

The officer lifted his club, and the old man threw his left arm up to shield his head. Conrad recognized Lindau, and now he saw the empty sleeve dangle in the air over the stump of his wrist. He heard a shot in that turmoil beside the car, and something seemed to strike him in the breast. He was going to say to the policeman: “Don’t strike him! He’s an old soldier! You see he has no hand!” but he could not speak, he could not move his tongue. The policeman stood there; he saw his face: it was not bad, not cruel; it was like the face of a statue, fixed, perdurable — a mere image of irresponsible and involuntary authority. Then Conrad fell forward, pierced through the heart by that shot fired from the car.

March heard the shot as he scrambled out of his car, and at the same moment he saw Lindau drop under the club of the policeman, who left him where he fell and joined the rest of the squad in pursuing the rioters. The fighting round the car in the avenue ceased; the driver whipped his horses into a gallop, and the place was left empty.

March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying there if he would. Something stronger than his will drew him to the spot, and there he saw Conrad, dead beside the old man.

VI.

In the cares which Mrs. March shared with her husband that night she was supported partly by principle, but mainly by the potent excitement which bewildered Conrad’s family and took all reality from what had happened. It was nearly midnight when the Marches left them and walked away toward the Elevated station with Fulkerson. Everything had been done, by that time, that could be done; and Fulkerson was not without that satisfaction in the business-like despatch of all the details which attends each step in such an affair and helps to make death tolerable even to the most sorely stricken. We are creatures of the moment; we live from one little space to another; and only one interest at a time fills these. Fulkerson was cheerful when they got into the street, almost gay; and Mrs. March experienced a rebound from her depression which she felt that she ought not to have experienced. But she condoned the offence a little in herself, because her husband remained so constant in his gravity; and, pending the final accounting he must make her for having been where he could be of so much use from the first instant of the calamity, she was tenderly, gratefully proud of all the use he had been to Conrad’s family, and especially his miserable old father. To her mind, March was the principal actor in the whole affair, and much more important in having seen it than those who had suffered in it. In fact, he had suffered incomparably.

“Well, well,” said Fulkerson. “They’ll get along now. We’ve done all we could, and there’s nothing left but for them to bear it. Of course it’s awful, but I guess it ‘ll come out all right. I mean,” he added, “they’ll pull through now.”

“I suppose,” said March, “that nothing is put on us that we can’t bear. But I should think,” he went on, musingly, “that when God sees what we poor finite creatures can bear, hemmed round with this eternal darkness of death, He must respect us.”

“Basil!” said his wife. But in her heart she drew nearer to him for the words she thought she ought to rebuke him for.

“Oh, I know,” he said, “we school ourselves to despise human nature. But God did not make us despicable, and I say, whatever end He meant us for, He must have some such thrill of joy in our adequacy to fate as a father feels when his son shows himself a man. When I think what we can be if we must, I can’t believe the least of us shall finally perish.”

“Oh, I reckon the Almighty won’t scoop any of us,” said Fulkerson, with a piety of his own.

“That poor boy’s father!” sighed Mrs. March. “I can’t get his face out of my sight. He looked so much worse than death.”

“Oh, death doesn’t look bad,” said March. “It’s life that looks so in its presence. Death is peace and pardon. I only wish poor old Lindau was as well out of it as Conrad there.”

“Ah, Lindau! He has done harm enough,” said Mrs. March. “I hope he will be careful after this.”

March did not try to defend Lindau against her theory of the case, which inexorably held him responsible for Conrad’s death.

“Lindau’s going to come out all right, I guess,” said Fulkerson. “He was first-rate when I saw him at the hospital to-night.” He whispered in March’s ear, at a chance he got in mounting the station stairs: “I didn’t like to tell you there at the house, but I guess you’d better know. They had to take Lindau’s arm off near the shoulder. Smashed all to pieces by the clubbing.”

In the house, vainly rich and foolishly unfit for them, the bereaved family whom the Marches had just left lingered together, and tried to get strength to part for the night. They were all spent with the fatigue that comes from heaven to such misery as theirs, and they sat in a torpor in which each waited for the other to move, to speak.

Christine moved, and Mela spoke. Christine rose and went out of the room without saying a word, and they heard her going up-stairs. Then Mela said:

“I reckon the rest of us better be goun’ too, father. Here, let’s git mother started.”

She put her arm round her mother, to lift her from her chair, but the old man did not stir, and Mela called Mrs. Mandel from the next room. Between them they raised her to her feet.

“Ain’t there anybody agoin’ to set up with it?” she asked, in her hoarse pipe. “It appears like folks hain’t got any feelin’s in New York. Woon’t some o’ the neighbors come and offer to set up, without waitin’ to be asked?”

“Oh, that’s all right, mother. The men ‘ll attend to that. Don’t you bother any,” Mela coaxed, and she kept her arm round her mother, with tender patience.

“Why, Mely, child! I can’t feel right to have it left to hirelin’s so.
But there ain’t anybody any more to see things done as they ought. If
Coonrod was on’y here—”

“Well, mother, you are pretty mixed!” said Mela, with a strong tendency to break into her large guffaw. But she checked herself and said: “I know just how you feel, though. It keeps acomun’ and agoun’; and it’s so and it ain’t so, all at once; that’s the plague of it. Well, father! Ain’t you goun’ to come?”

“I’m goin’ to stay, Mela,” said the old man, gently, without moving. “Get your mother to bed, that’s a good girl.”

“You goin’ to set up with him, Jacob?” asked the old woman.

“Yes, ‘Liz’beth, I’ll set up. You go to bed.”

“Well, I will, Jacob. And I believe it ‘ll do you good to set up. I wished I could set up with you; but I don’t seem to have the stren’th I did when the twins died. I must git my sleep, so’s to — I don’t like very well to have you broke of your rest, Jacob, but there don’t appear to be anybody else. You wouldn’t have to do it if Coonrod was here. There I go ag’in! Mercy! mercy!”

“Well, do come along, then, mother,” said Mela; and she got her out of the room, with Mrs. Mandel’s help, and up the stairs.

From the top the old woman called down, “You tell Coonrod—” She stopped, and he heard her groan out, “My Lord! my Lord!”

He sat, one silence in the dining-room, where they had all lingered together, and in the library beyond the hireling watcher sat, another silence. The time passed, but neither moved, and the last noise in the house ceased, so that they heard each other breathe, and the vague, remote rumor of the city invaded the inner stillness. It grew louder toward morning, and then Dryfoos knew from the watcher’s deeper breathing that he had fallen into a doze.

He crept by him to the drawing-room, where his son was; the place was full of the awful sweetness of the flowers that Fulkerson had brought, and that lay above the pulseless breast. The old man turned up a burner in the chandelier, and stood looking on the majestic serenity of the dead face.

He could not move when he saw his wife coming down the stairway in the hall. She was in her long, white flannel bed gown, and the candle she carried shook with her nervous tremor. He thought she might be walking in her sleep, but she said, quite simply, “I woke up, and I couldn’t git to sleep ag’in without comin’ to have a look.” She stood beside their dead son with him, “well, he’s beautiful, Jacob. He was the prettiest baby! And he was always good, Coonrod was; I’ll say that for him. I don’t believe he ever give me a minute’s care in his whole life. I reckon I liked him about the best of all the children; but I don’t know as I ever done much to show it. But you was always good to him, Jacob; you always done the best for him, ever since he was a little feller. I used to be afraid you’d spoil him sometimes in them days; but I guess you’re glad now for every time you didn’t cross him. I don’t suppose since the twins died you ever hit him a lick.” She stooped and peered closer at the face. “Why, Jacob, what’s that there by his pore eye?” Dryfoos saw it, too, the wound that he had feared to look for, and that now seemed to redden on his sight. He broke into a low, wavering cry, like a child’s in despair, like an animal’s in terror, like a soul’s in the anguish of remorse.

VII.

The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter of the electric bell at their apartment door. It was really not so late as the children’s having gone to bed made it seem; but at nine o’clock it was too late for any probable visitor except Fulkerson. It might be he, and March was glad to postpone the impending question to his curiosity concerning the immediate business Fulkerson might have with him. He went himself to the door, and confronted there a lady deeply veiled in black and attended by a very decorous serving-woman.

“Are you alone, Mr. March — you and Mrs. March?” asked the lady, behind her veil; and, as he hesitated, she said: “You don’t know me! Miss Vance”; and she threw back her veil, showing her face wan and agitated in the dark folds. “I am very anxious to see you — to speak with you both. May I come in?”

“Why, certainly, Miss Vance,” he answered, still too much stupefied by her presence to realize it.

She promptly entered, and saying, with a glance at the hall chair by the door, “My maid can sit here?” followed him to the room where he had left his wife.

Mrs. March showed herself more capable of coping with the fact. She welcomed Miss Vance with the liking they both felt for the girl, and with the sympathy which her troubled face inspired.

“I won’t tire you with excuses for coming, Mrs. March,” she said, “for it was the only thing left for me to do; and I come at my aunt’s suggestion.” She added this as if it would help to account for her more on the conventional plane, and she had the instinctive good taste to address herself throughout to Mrs. March as much as possible, though what she had to say was mainly for March. “I don’t know how to begin — I don’t know how to speak of this terrible affair. But you know what I mean. I feel as if I had lived a whole lifetime since it happened. I don’t want you to pity me for it,” she said, forestalling a politeness from Mrs. March. “I’m the last one to be thought of, and you mustn’t mind me if I try to make you. I came to find out all of the truth that I can, and when I know just what that is I shall know what to do. I have read the inquest; it’s all burned into my brain. But I don’t care for that — for myself: you must let me say such things without minding me. I know that your husband — that Mr. March was there; I read his testimony; and I wished to ask him — to ask him—” She stopped and looked distractedly about. “But what folly! He must have said everything he knew — he had to.” Her eyes wandered to him from his wife, on whom she had kept them with instinctive tact.

“I said everything — yes,” he replied. “But if you would like to know—”

“Perhaps I had better tell you something first. I had just parted with him — it couldn’t have been more than half an hour — in front of Brentano’s; he must have gone straight to his death. We were talking, and I — I said, Why didn’t some one go among the strikers and plead with them to be peaceable, and keep them from attacking the new men. I knew that he felt as I did about the strikers: that he was their friend. Did you see — do you know anything that makes you think he had been trying to do that?”

“I am sorry,” March began, “I didn’t see him at all till — till I saw him lying dead.”

“My husband was there purely by accident,” Mrs. March put in. “I had begged and entreated him not to go near the striking anywhere. And he had just got out of the car, and saw the policeman strike that wretched Lindau — he’s been such an anxiety to me ever since we have had anything to do with him here; my husband knew him when he was a boy in the West. Mr. March came home from it all perfectly prostrated; it made us all sick! Nothing so horrible ever came into our lives before. I assure you it was the most shocking experience.”

Miss Vance listened to her with that look of patience which those who have seen much of the real suffering of the world — the daily portion of the poor — have for the nervous woes of comfortable people. March hung his head; he knew it would be useless to protest that his share of the calamity was, by comparison, infinitesimally small.

After she had heard Mrs. March to the end even of her repetitions, Miss Vance said, as if it were a mere matter of course that she should have looked the affair up, “Yes, I have seen Mr. Lindau at the hospital—”

“My husband goes every day to see him,” Mrs. March interrupted, to give a final touch to the conception of March’s magnanimity throughout.

“The poor man seems to have been in the wrong at the time,” said Miss
Vance.

“I could almost say he had earned the right to be wrong. He’s a man of the most generous instincts, and a high ideal of justice, of equity — too high to be considered by a policeman with a club in his hand,” said March, with a bold defiance of his wife’s different opinion of Lindau. “It’s the policeman’s business, I suppose, to club the ideal when he finds it inciting a riot.”

“Oh, I don’t blame Mr. Lindau; I don’t blame the policeman; he was as much a mere instrument as his club was. I am only trying to find out how much I am to blame myself. I had no thought of Mr. Dryfoos’s going there — of his attempting to talk with the strikers and keep them quiet; I was only thinking, as women do, of what I should try to do if I were a man.

“But perhaps he understood me to ask him to go — perhaps my words sent him to his death.”

She had a sort of calm in her courage to know the worst truth as to her responsibility that forbade any wish to flatter her out of it. “I’m afraid,” said March, “that is what can never be known now.” After a moment he added: “But why should you wish to know? If he went there as a peacemaker, he died in a good cause, in such a way as he would wish to die, I believe.”

“Yes,” said the girl; “I have thought of that. But death is awful; we must not think patiently, forgivingly of sending any one to their death in the best cause.”— “I fancy life was an awful thing to Conrad Dryfoos,” March replied. “He was thwarted and disappointed, without even pleasing the ambition that thwarted and disappointed him. That poor old man, his father, warped him from his simple, lifelong wish to be a minister, and was trying to make a business man of him. If it will be any consolation to you to know it, Miss Vance, I can assure you that he was very unhappy, and I don’t see how he could ever have been happy here.”

“It won’t,” said the girl, steadily. “If people are born into this world, it’s because they were meant to live in it. It isn’t a question of being happy here; no one is happy, in that old, selfish way, or can be; but he could have been of great use.”

“Perhaps he was of use in dying. Who knows? He may have been trying to silence Lindau.”

“Oh, Lindau wasn’t worth it!” cried Mrs. March.

Miss Vance looked at her as if she did not quite understand. Then she turned to March. “He might have been unhappy, as we all are; but I know that his life here would have had a higher happiness than we wish for or aim for.” The tears began to run silently down her cheeks.

“He looked strangely happy that day when he left me. He had hurt himself somehow, and his face was bleeding from a scratch; he kept his handkerchief up; he was pale, but such a light came into his face when he shook hands — ah, I know he went to try and do what I said!” They were all silent, while she dried her eyes and then put her handkerchief back into the pocket from which she had suddenly pulled it, with a series of vivid, young-ladyish gestures, which struck March by their incongruity with the occasion of their talk, and yet by their harmony with the rest of her elegance. “I am sorry, Miss Vance,” he began, “that I can’t really tell you anything more—”

“You are very kind,” she said, controlling herself and rising quickly. “I thank you — thank you both very much.” She turned to Mrs. March and shook hands with her and then with him. “I might have known — I did know that there wasn’t anything more for you to tell. But at least I’ve found out from you that there was nothing, and now I can begin to bear what I must. How are those poor creatures — his mother and father, his sisters? Some day, I hope, I shall be ashamed to have postponed them to the thought of myself; but I can’t pretend to be yet. I could not come to the funeral; I wanted to.”

She addressed her question to Mrs. March, who answered: “I can understand. But they were pleased with the flowers you sent; people are, at such times, and they haven’t many friends.”

“Would you go to see them?” asked the girl. “Would you tell them what
I’ve told you?”

Mrs. March looked at her husband.

“I don’t see what good it would do. They wouldn’t understand. But if it would relieve you—”

“I’ll wait till it isn’t a question of self-relief,” said the girl.
“Good-bye!”

She left them to long debate of the event. At the end Mrs. March said, “She is a strange being; such a mixture of the society girl and the saint.”

Her husband answered: “She’s the potentiality of several kinds of fanatic. She’s very unhappy, and I don’t see how she’s to be happier about that poor fellow. I shouldn’t be surprised if she did inspire him to attempt something of that kind.”

“Well, you got out of it very well, Basil. I admired the way you managed.
I was afraid you’d say something awkward.”

“Oh, with a plain line of truth before me, as the only possible thing, I can get on pretty well. When it comes to anything decorative, I’d rather leave it to you, Isabel.”

She seemed insensible of his jest. “Of course, he was in love with her. That was the light that came into his face when he was going to do what he thought she wanted him to do.”

“And she — do you think that she was—”

“What an idea! It would have been perfectly grotesque!”

VIII.

Their affliction brought the Dryfooses into humaner relations with the Marches, who had hitherto regarded them as a necessary evil, as the odious means of their own prosperity. Mrs. March found that the women of the family seemed glad of her coming, and in the sense of her usefulness to them all she began to feel a kindness even for Christine. But she could not help seeing that between the girl and her father there was an unsettled account, somehow, and that it was Christine and not the old man who was holding out. She thought that their sorrow had tended to refine the others. Mela was much more subdued, and, except when she abandoned herself to a childish interest in her mourning, she did nothing to shock Mrs. March’s taste or to seem unworthy of her grief. She was very good to her mother, whom the blow had left unchanged, and to her father, whom it had apparently fallen upon with crushing weight. Once, after visiting their house, Mrs. March described to March a little scene between Dryfoos and Mela, when he came home from Wall Street, and the girl met him at the door with a kind of country simpleness, and took his hat and stick, and brought him into the room where Mrs. March sat, looking tired and broken. She found this look of Dryfoos’s pathetic, and dwelt on the sort of stupefaction there was in it; he must have loved his son more than they ever realized. “Yes,” said March, “I suspect he did. He’s never been about the place since that day; he was always dropping in before, on his way up-town. He seems to go down to Wall Street every day, just as before, but I suppose that’s mechanical; he wouldn’t know what else to do; I dare say it’s best for him. The sanguine Fulkerson is getting a little anxious about the future of ‘Every Other Week.’ Now Conrad’s gone, he isn’t sure the old man will want to keep on with it, or whether he’ll have to look up another Angel. He wants to get married, I imagine, and he can’t venture till this point is settled.”

“It’s a very material point to us too, Basil,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, of course. I hadn’t overlooked that, you may be sure. One of the things that Fulkerson and I have discussed is a scheme for buying the magazine. Its success is pretty well assured now, and I shouldn’t be afraid to put money into it — if I had the money.”

“I couldn’t let you sell the house in Boston, Basil!”

“And I don’t want to. I wish we could go back and live in it and get the rent, too! It would be quite a support. But I suppose if Dryfoos won’t keep on, it must come to another Angel. I hope it won’t be a literary one, with a fancy for running my department.”

“Oh, I guess whoever takes the magazine will be glad enough to keep you!”

“Do you think so? Well, perhaps. But I don’t believe Fulkerson would let me stand long between him and an Angel of the right description.”

“Well, then, I believe he would. And you’ve never seen anything, Basil, to make you really think that Mr. Fulkerson didn’t appreciate you to the utmost.”

“I think I came pretty near an undervaluation in that Lindau trouble. I shall always wonder what put a backbone into Fulkerson just at that crisis. Fulkerson doesn’t strike me as the stuff of a moral hero.”

“At any rate, he was one,” said Mrs. March, “and that’s quite enough for me.”

March did not answer. “What a noble thing life is, anyway! Here I am, well on the way to fifty, after twenty-five years of hard work, looking forward to the potential poor-house as confidently as I did in youth. We might have saved a little more than we have saved; but the little more wouldn’t avail if I were turned out of my place now; and we should have lived sordidly to no purpose. Some one always has you by the throat, unless you have some one else in your grip. I wonder if that’s the attitude the Almighty intended His respectable creatures to take toward one another! I wonder if He meant our civilization, the battle we fight in, the game we trick in! I wonder if He considers it final, and if the kingdom of heaven on earth, which we pray for—”

“Have you seen Lindau to-day?” Mrs. March asked.

“You inferred it from the quality of my piety?” March laughed, and then suddenly sobered. “Yes, I saw him. It’s going rather hard with him, I’m afraid. The amputation doesn’t heal very well; the shock was very great, and he’s old. It’ll take time. There’s so much pain that they have to keep him under opiates, and I don’t think he fully knew me. At any rate, I didn’t get my piety from him to-day.”

“It’s horrible! Horrible!” said Mrs. March. “I can’t get over it! After losing his hand in the war, to lose his whole arm now in this way! It does seem too cruel! Of course he oughtn’t to have been there; we can say that. But you oughtn’t to have been there, either, Basil.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly advising the police to go and club the railroad presidents.”

“Neither was poor Conrad Dryfoos.”

“I don’t deny it. All that was distinctly the chance of life and death. That belonged to God; and no doubt it was law, though it seems chance. But what I object to is this economic chance-world in which we live, and which we men seem to have created. It ought to be law as inflexible in human affairs as the order of day and night in the physical world that if a man will work he shall both rest and eat, and shall not be harassed with any question as to how his repose and his provision shall come. Nothing less ideal than this satisfies the reason. But in our state of things no one is secure of this. No one is sure of finding work; no one is sure of not losing it. I may have my work taken away from me at any moment by the caprice, the mood, the indigestion of a man who has not the qualification for knowing whether I do it well, or ill. At my time of life — at every time of life — a man ought to feel that if he will keep on doing his duty he shall not suffer in himself or in those who are dear to him, except through natural causes. But no man can feel this as things are now; and so we go on, pushing and pulling, climbing and crawling, thrusting aside and trampling underfoot; lying, cheating, stealing; and then we get to the end, covered with blood and dirt and sin and shame, and look back over the way we’ve come to a palace of our own, or the poor-house, which is about the only possession we can claim in common with our brother-men, I don’t think the retrospect can be pleasing.”

“I know, I know!” said his wife. “I think of those things, too, Basil. Life isn’t what it seems when you look forward to it. But I think people would suffer less, and wouldn’t have to work so hard, and could make all reasonable provision for the future, if they were not so greedy and so foolish.”

“Oh, without doubt! We can’t put it all on the conditions; we must put some of the blame on character. But conditions make character; and people are greedy and foolish, and wish to have and to shine, because having and shining are held up to them by civilization as the chief good of life. We all know they are not the chief good, perhaps not good at all; but if some one ventures to say so, all the rest of us call him a fraud and a crank, and go moiling and toiling on to the palace or the poor-house. We can’t help it. If one were less greedy or less foolish, some one else would have and would shine at his expense. We don’t moil and toil to ourselves alone; the palace or the poor-house is not merely for ourselves, but for our children, whom we’ve brought up in the superstition that having and shining is the chief good. We dare not teach them otherwise, for fear they may falter in the fight when it comes their turn, and the children of others will crowd them out of the palace into the poor-house. If we felt sure that honest work shared by all would bring them honest food shared by all, some heroic few of us, who did not wish our children to rise above their fellows — though we could not bear to have them fall below — might trust them with the truth. But we have no such assurance, and so we go on trembling before Dryfooses and living in gimcrackeries.”

“Basil, Basil! I was always willing to live more simply than you. You know I was!”

“I know you always said so, my dear. But how many bell-ratchets and speaking-tubes would you be willing to have at the street door below? I remember that when we were looking for a flat you rejected every building that had a bell-ratchet or a speaking-tube, and would have nothing to do with any that had more than an electric button; you wanted a hall-boy, with electric buttons all over him. I don’t blame you. I find such things quite as necessary as you do.”

“And do you mean to say, Basil,” she asked, abandoning this unprofitable branch of the inquiry, “that you are really uneasy about your place? that you are afraid Mr. Dryfoos may give up being an Angel, and Mr. Fulkerson may play you false?”

“Play me false? Oh, it wouldn’t be playing me false. It would be merely looking out for himself, if the new Angel had editorial tastes and wanted my place. It’s what any one would do.”

“You wouldn’t do it, Basil!”

“Wouldn’t I? Well, if any one offered me more salary than ‘Every Other Week’ pays — say, twice as much — what do you think my duty to my suffering family would be? It’s give and take in the business world, Isabel; especially take. But as to being uneasy, I’m not, in the least. I’ve the spirit of a lion, when it comes to such a chance as that. When I see how readily the sensibilities of the passing stranger can be worked in New York, I think of taking up the role of that desperate man on Third Avenue who went along looking for garbage in the gutter to eat. I think I could pick up at least twenty or thirty cents a day by that little game, and maintain my family in the affluence it’s been accustomed to.”

“Basil!” cried his wife. “You don’t mean to say that man was an impostor! And I’ve gone about, ever since, feeling that one such case in a million, the bare possibility of it, was enough to justify all that Lindau said about the rich and the poor!”

March laughed teasingly. “Oh, I don’t say he was an impostor. Perhaps he really was hungry; but, if he wasn’t, what do you think of a civilization that makes the opportunity of such a fraud? that gives us all such a bad conscience for the need which is that we weaken to the need that isn’t? Suppose that poor fellow wasn’t personally founded on fact: nevertheless, he represented the truth; he was the ideal of the suffering which would be less effective if realistically treated. That man is a great comfort to me. He probably rioted for days on that quarter I gave him; made a dinner very likely, or a champagne supper; and if ‘Every Other Week’ wants to get rid of me, I intend to work that racket. You can hang round the corner with Bella, and Tom can come up to me in tears, at stated intervals, and ask me if I’ve found anything yet. To be sure, we might be arrested and sent up somewhere. But even in that extreme case we should be provided for. Oh no, I’m not afraid of losing my place! I’ve merely a sort of psychological curiosity to know how men like Dryfoos and Fulkerson will work out the problem before them.”

IX.

It was a curiosity which Fulkerson himself shared, at least concerning Dryfoos. “I don’t know what the old man’s going to do,” he said to March the day after the Marches had talked their future over. “Said anything to you yet?”

“No, not a word.”

“You’re anxious, I suppose, same as I am. Fact is,” said Fulkerson, blushing a little, “I can’t ask to have a day named till I know where I am in connection with the old man. I can’t tell whether I’ve got to look out for something else or somebody else. Of course, it’s full soon yet.”

“Yes,” March said, “much sooner than it seems to us. We’re so anxious about the future that we don’t remember how very recent the past is.”

“That’s something so. The old man’s hardly had time yet to pull himself together. Well, I’m glad you feel that way about it, March. I guess it’s more of a blow to him than we realize. He was a good deal bound up in Coonrod, though he didn’t always use him very well. Well, I reckon it’s apt to happen so oftentimes; curious how cruel love can be. Heigh? We’re an awful mixture, March!”

“Yes, that’s the marvel and the curse, as Browning says.”

“Why, that poor boy himself,” pursued Fulkerson, “had streaks of the mule in him that could give odds to Beaton, and he must have tried the old man by the way he would give in to his will and hold out against his judgment. I don’t believe he ever budged a hairs-breadth from his original position about wanting to be a preacher and not wanting to be a business man. Well, of course! I don’t think business is all in all; but it must have made the old man mad to find that without saying anything, or doing anything to show it, and after seeming to come over to his ground, and really coming, practically, Coonrod was just exactly where he first planted himself, every time.”

“Yes, people that have convictions are difficult. Fortunately, they’re rare.”

“Do you think so? It seems to me that everybody’s got convictions. Beaton himself, who hasn’t a principle to throw at a dog, has got convictions the size of a barn. They ain’t always the same ones, I know, but they’re always to the same effect, as far as Beaton’s being Number One is concerned. The old man’s got convictions or did have, unless this thing lately has shaken him all up — and he believes that money will do everything. Colonel Woodburn’s got convictions that he wouldn’t part with for untold millions. Why, March, you got convictions yourself!”

“Have I?” said March. “I don’t know what they are.”

“Well, neither do I; but I know you were ready to kick the trough over for them when the old man wanted us to bounce Lindau that time.”

“Oh yes,” said March; he remembered the fact; but he was still uncertain just what the convictions were that he had been so stanch for.

“I suppose we could have got along without you,” Fulkerson mused aloud. “It’s astonishing how you always can get along in this world without the man that is simply indispensable. Makes a fellow realize that he could take a day off now and then without deranging the solar system a great deal. Now here’s Coonrod — or, rather, he isn’t. But that boy managed his part of the schooner so well that I used to tremble when I thought of his getting the better of the old man and going into a convent or something of that kind; and now here he is, snuffed out in half a second, and I don’t believe but what we shall be sailing along just as chipper as usual inside of thirty days. I reckon it will bring the old man to the point when I come to talk with him about who’s to be put in Coonrod’s place. I don’t like very well to start the subject with him; but it’s got to be done some time.”

“Yes,” March admitted. “It’s terrible to think how unnecessary even the best and wisest of us is to the purposes of Providence. When I looked at that poor young fellow’s face sometimes — so gentle and true and pure — I used to think the world was appreciably richer for his being in it. But are we appreciably poorer for his being out of it now?”

“No, I don’t reckon we are,” said Fulkerson. “And what a lot of the raw material of all kinds the Almighty must have, to waste us the way He seems to do. Think of throwing away a precious creature like Coonrod Dryfoos on one chance in a thousand of getting that old fool of a Lindau out of the way of being clubbed! For I suppose that was what Coonrod was up to. Say! Have you been round to see Lindau to-day?”

Something in the tone or the manner of Fulkerson startled March. “No! I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Fulkerson. “I guess I saw him a little while after you did, and that young doctor there seemed to feel kind of worried about him.

“Or not worried, exactly; they can’t afford to let such things worry them, I suppose; but—”

“He’s worse?” asked March.

“Oh, he didn’t say so. But I just wondered if you’d seen him to-day.”

“I think I’ll go now,” said March, with a pang at heart. He had gone every day to see Lindau, but this day he had thought he would not go, and that was why his heart smote him. He knew that if he were in Lindau’s place Lindau would never have left his side if he could have helped it. March tried to believe that the case was the same, as it stood now; it seemed to him that he was always going to or from the hospital; he said to himself that it must do Lindau harm to be visited so much. But he knew that this was not true when he was met at the door of the ward where Lindau lay by the young doctor, who had come to feel a personal interest in March’s interest in Lindau.

He smiled without gayety, and said, “He’s just going.”

“What! Discharged?”

“Oh no. He has been failing very fast since you saw him yesterday, and now—” They had been walking softly and talking softly down the aisle between the long rows of beds. “Would you care to see him?”

The doctor made a slight gesture toward the white canvas screen which in such places forms the death-chamber of the poor and friendless. “Come round this way — he won’t know you! I’ve got rather fond of the poor old fellow. He wouldn’t have a clergyman — sort of agnostic, isn’t he? A good many of these Germans are — but the young lady who’s been coming to see him—”

They both stopped. Lindau’s grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths. Beside his bed Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face was lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying man; she moved her lips inaudibly.

X.

In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident of life, which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this is an instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but we have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it relates to some one remote or indifferent to us. March tried to project Lindau to the necessary distance from himself in order to realize the fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered the region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree. The changed conditions forbade that. He had a soreness of heart concerning him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was grief for his death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about Dryfoos, or a foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which he knew his wife would now exact of him down to the last minutest particular of their joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since they had met him in New York.

He felt something knock against his shoulder, and he looked up to have his hat struck from his head by a horse’s nose. He saw the horse put his foot on the hat, and he reflected, “Now it will always look like an accordion,” and he heard the horse’s driver address him some sarcasms before he could fully awaken to the situation. He was standing bareheaded in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blocking the tide of carriages flowing in either direction. Among the faces put out of the carriage windows he saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe. The old man knew him, and said, “Jump in here, Mr. March”; and March, who had mechanically picked up his hat, and was thinking, “Now I shall have to tell Isabel about this at once, and she will never trust me on the street again without her,” mechanically obeyed. Her confidence in him had been undermined by his being so near Conrad when he was shot; and it went through his mind that he would get Dryfoos to drive him to a hatter’s, where he could buy a new hat, and not be obliged to confess his narrow escape to his wife till the incident was some days old and she could bear it better. It quite drove Lindau’s death out of his mind for the moment; and when Dryfoos said if he was going home he would drive up to the first cross-street and turn back with him, March said he would be glad if he would take him to a hat-store. The old man put his head out again and told the driver to take them to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “There’s a hat-store around there somewhere, seems to me,” he said; and they talked of March’s accident as well as they could in the rattle and clatter of the street till they reached the place. March got his hat, passing a joke with the hatter about the impossibility of pressing his old hat over again, and came out to thank Dryfoos and take leave of him.

“If you ain’t in any great hurry,” the old man said, “I wish you’d get in here a minute. I’d like to have a little talk with you.”

“Oh, certainly,” said March, and he thought: “It’s coming now about what he intends to do with ‘Every Other Week.’ Well, I might as well have all the misery at once and have it over.”

Dryfoos called up to his driver, who bent his head down sidewise to listen: “Go over there on Madison Avenue, onto that asphalt, and keep drivin’ up and down till I stop you. I can’t hear myself think on these pavements,” he said to March. But after they got upon the asphalt, and began smoothly rolling over it, he seemed in no haste to begin. At last he said, “I wanted to talk with you about that — that Dutchman that was at my dinner — Lindau,” and March’s heart gave a jump with wonder whether he could already have heard of Lindau’s death; but in an instant he perceived that this was impossible. “I been talkin’ with Fulkerson about him, and he says they had to take the balance of his arm off.”

March nodded; it seemed to him he could not speak. He could not make out from the close face of the old man anything of his motive. It was set, but set as a piece of broken mechanism is when it has lost the power to relax itself. There was no other history in it of what the man had passed through in his son’s death.

“I don’t know,” Dryfoos resumed, looking aside at the cloth window-strap, which he kept fingering, “as you quite understood what made me the maddest. I didn’t tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can’t keep it up with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I could understand what he was saying to you about me. I know I had no business to understood it, after I let him think I couldn’t but I did, and I didn’t like very well to have a man callin’ me a traitor and a tyrant at my own table. Well, I look at it differently now, and I reckon I had better have tried to put up with it; and I would, if I could have known—” He stopped with a quivering lip, and then went on: “Then, again, I didn’t like his talkin’ that paternalism of his. I always heard it was the worst kind of thing for the country; I was brought up to think the best government was the one that governs the least; and I didn’t want to hear that kind of talk from a man that was livin’ on my money. I couldn’t bear it from him. Or I thought I couldn’t before — before—” He stopped again, and gulped. “I reckon now there ain’t anything I couldn’t bear.” March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stare forward with which they ended. “Mr. Dryfoos, I didn’t know that you understood Lindau’s German, or I shouldn’t have allowed him he wouldn’t have allowed himself — to go on. He wouldn’t have knowingly abused his position of guest to censure you, no matter how much he condemned you.” “I don’t care for it now,” said Dryfoos. “It’s all past and gone, as far as I’m concerned; but I wanted you to see that I wasn’t tryin’ to punish him for his opinions, as you said.”

“No; I see now,” March assented, though he thought his position still justified. “I wish—”

“I don’t know as I understand much about his opinions, anyway; but I ain’t ready to say I want the men dependent on me to manage my business for me. I always tried to do the square thing by my hands; and in that particular case out there I took on all the old hands just as fast as they left their Union. As for the game I came on them, it was dog eat dog, anyway.”

March could have laughed to think how far this old man was from even conceiving of Lindau’s point of view, and how he was saying the worst of himself that Lindau could have said of him. No one could have characterized the kind of thing he had done more severely than he when he called it dog eat dog.

“There’s a great deal to be said on both sides,” March began, hoping to lead up through this generality to the fact of Lindau’s death; but the old man went on:

“Well, all I wanted him to know is that I wasn’t trying to punish him for what he said about things in general. You naturally got that idea, I reckon; but I always went in for lettin’ people say what they please and think what they please; it’s the only way in a free country.”

“I’m afraid, Mr. Dryfoos, that it would make little difference to Lindau now—”

“I don’t suppose he bears malice for it,” said Dryfoos, “but what I want to do is to have him told so. He could understand just why I didn’t want to be called hard names, and yet I didn’t object to his thinkin’ whatever he pleased. I’d like him to know—”

“No one can speak to him, no one can tell him,” March began again, but again Dryfoos prevented him from going on.

“I understand it’s a delicate thing; and I’m not askin’ you to do it. What I would really like to do — if you think he could be prepared for it, some way, and could stand it — would be to go to him myself, and tell him just what the trouble was. I’m in hopes, if I done that, he could see how I felt about it.”

A picture of Dryfoos going to the dead Lindau with his vain regrets presented itself to March, and he tried once more to make the old man understand. “Mr. Dryfoos,” he said, “Lindau is past all that forever,” and he felt the ghastly comedy of it when Dryfoos continued, without heeding him.

“I got a particular reason why I want him to believe it wasn’t his ideas I objected to — them ideas of his about the government carryin’ everything on and givin’ work. I don’t understand ’em exactly, but I found a writin’ — among — my son’s — things” (he seemed to force the words through his teeth), “and I reckon he — thought — that way. Kind of a diary — where he — put down — his thoughts. My son and me — we differed about a good — many things.” His chin shook, and from time to time he stopped. “I wasn’t very good to him, I reckon; I crossed him where I guess I got no business to cross him; but I thought everything of — Coonrod. He was the best boy, from a baby, that ever was; just so patient and mild, and done whatever he was told. I ought to ‘a’ let him been a preacher! Oh, my son! my son!” The sobs could not be kept back any longer; they shook the old man with a violence that made March afraid for him; but he controlled himself at last with a series of hoarse sounds like barks. “Well, it’s all past and gone! But as I understand you from what you saw, when Coonrod was — killed, he was tryin’ to save that old man from trouble?”

“Yes, yes! It seemed so to me.”

“That’ll do, then! I want you to have him come back and write for the book when he gets well. I want you to find out and let me know if there’s anything I can do for him. I’ll feel as if I done it — for my — son. I’ll take him into my own house, and do for him there, if you say so, when he gets so he can be moved. I’ll wait on him myself. It’s what Coonrod ‘d do, if he was here. I don’t feel any hardness to him because it was him that got Coonrod killed, as you might say, in one sense of the term; but I’ve tried to think it out, and I feel like I was all the more beholden to him because my son died tryin’ to save him. Whatever I do, I’ll be doin’ it for Coonrod, and that’s enough for me.” He seemed to have finished, and he turned to March as if to hear what he had to say.

March hesitated. “I’m afraid, Mr. Dryfoos — Didn’t Fulkerson tell you that
Lindau was very sick?”

“Yes, of course. But he’s all right, he said.”

Now it had to come, though the fact had been latterly playing fast and loose with March’s consciousness. Something almost made him smile; the willingness he had once felt to give this old man pain; then he consoled himself by thinking that at least he was not obliged to meet Dryfoos’s wish to make atonement with the fact that Lindau had renounced him, and would on no terms work for such a man as he, or suffer any kindness from him. In this light Lindau seemed the harder of the two, and March had the momentary force to say —

“Mr. Dryfoos — it can’t be. Lindau — I have just come from him — is dead.”

XI.

“How did he take it? How could he bear it? Oh, Basil! I wonder you could have the heart to say it to him. It was cruel!”

“Yes, cruel enough, my dear,” March owned to his wife, when they talked the matter over on his return home. He could not wait till the children were out of the way, and afterward neither he nor his wife was sorry that he had spoken of it before them. The girl cried plentifully for her old friend who was dead, and said she hated Mr. Dryfoos, and then was sorry for him, too; and the boy listened to all, and spoke with a serious sense that pleased his father. “But as to how he took it,” March went on to answer his wife’s question about Dryfoos— “how do any of us take a thing that hurts? Some of us cry out, and some of us don’t. Dryfoos drew a kind of long, quivering breath, as a child does when it grieves — there’s something curiously simple and primitive about him — and didn’t say anything. After a while he asked me how he could see the people at the hospital about the remains; I gave him my card to the young doctor there that had charge of Lindau. I suppose he was still carrying forward his plan of reparation in his mind — to the dead for the dead. But how useless! If he could have taken the living Lindau home with him, and cared for him all his days, what would it have profited the gentle creature whose life his worldly ambition vexed and thwarted here? He might as well offer a sacrifice at Conrad’s grave. Children,” said March, turning to them, “death is an exile that no remorse and no love can reach. Remember that, and be good to every one here on earth, for your longing to retrieve any harshness or unkindness to the dead will be the very ecstasy of anguish to you. I wonder,” he mused, “if one of the reasons why we’re shut up to our ignorance of what is to be hereafter isn’t because if we were sure of another world we might be still more brutal to one another here, in the hope of making reparation somewhere else. Perhaps, if we ever come to obey the law of love on earth, the mystery of death will be taken away.”

“Well” — the ancestral Puritanism spoke in Mrs. March— “these two old men have been terribly punished. They have both been violent and wilful, and they have both been punished. No one need ever tell me there is not a moral government of the universe!”

March always disliked to hear her talk in this way, which did both her head and heart injustice. “And Conrad,” he said, “what was he punished for?”

“He?” — she answered, in an exaltation— “he suffered for the sins of others.”

“Ah, well, if you put it in that way, yes. That goes on continually.
That’s another mystery.”

He fell to brooding on it, and presently he heard his son saying, “I suppose, papa, that Mr. Lindau died in a bad cause?”

March was startled. He had always been so sorry for Lindau, and admired his courage and generosity so much, that he had never fairly considered this question. “Why, yes,” he answered; “he died in the cause of disorder; he was trying to obstruct the law. No doubt there was a wrong there, an inconsistency and an injustice that he felt keenly; but it could not be reached in his way without greater wrong.”

“Yes; that’s what I thought,” said the boy. “And what’s the use of our ever fighting about anything in America? I always thought we could vote anything we wanted.”

“We can, if we’re honest, and don’t buy and sell one another’s votes,” said his father. “And men like Lindau, who renounce the American means as hopeless, and let their love of justice hurry them into sympathy with violence — yes, they are wrong; and poor Lindau did die in a bad cause, as you say, Tom.”

“I think Conrad had no business there, or you, either, Basil,” said his wife.

“Oh, I don’t defend myself,” said March. “I was there in the cause of literary curiosity and of conjugal disobedience. But Conrad — yes, he had some business there: it was his business to suffer there for the sins of others. Isabel, we can’t throw aside that old doctrine of the Atonement yet. The life of Christ, it wasn’t only in healing the sick and going about to do good; it was suffering for the sins of others. That’s as great a mystery as the mystery of death. Why should there be such a principle in the world? But it’s been felt, and more or less dumbly, blindly recognized ever since Calvary. If we love mankind, pity them, we even wish to suffer for them. That’s what has created the religious orders in all times — the brotherhoods and sisterhoods that belong to our day as much as to the mediaeval past. That’s what is driving a girl like Margaret Vance, who has everything that the world can offer her young beauty, on to the work of a Sister of Charity among the poor and the dying.”

“Yes, yes!” cried Mrs. March. “How — how did she look there, Basil?” She had her feminine misgivings; she was not sure but the girl was something of a poseuse, and enjoyed the picturesqueness, as well as the pain; and she wished to be convinced that it was not so.

“Well,” she said, when March had told again the little there was to tell, “I suppose it must be a great trial to a woman like Mrs. Horn to have her niece going that way.”

“The way of Christ?” asked March, with a smile.

“Oh, Christ came into the world to teach us how to live rightly in it, too. If we were all to spend our time in hospitals, it would be rather dismal for the homes. But perhaps you don’t think the homes are worth minding?” she suggested, with a certain note in her voice that he knew.

He got up and kissed her. “I think the gimcrackeries are.” He took the hat he had set down on the parlor table on coming in, and started to put it in the hall, and that made her notice it.

“You’ve been getting a new hat!”

“Yes,” he hesitated; “the old one had got — was decidedly shabby.”

“Well, that’s right. I don’t like you to wear them too long. Did you leave the old one to be pressed?”

“Well, the hatter seemed to think it was hardly worth pressing,” said March. He decided that for the present his wife’s nerves had quite all they could bear.

XII.

It was in a manner grotesque, but to March it was all the more natural for that reason, that Dryfoos should have Lindau’s funeral from his house. He knew the old man to be darkly groping, through the payment of these vain honors to the dead, for some atonement to his son, and he imagined him finding in them such comfort as comes from doing all one can, even when all is useless.

No one knew what Lindau’s religion was, and in default they had had the Anglican burial service read over him; it seems so often the refuge of the homeless dead. Mrs. Dryfoos came down for the ceremony. She understood that it was for Coonrod’s sake that his father wished the funeral to be there; and she confided to Mrs. March that she believed Coonrod would have been pleased. “Coonrod was a member of the ‘Piscopal Church; and fawther’s doin’ the whole thing for Coonrod as much as for anybody. He thought the world of Coonrod, fawther did. Mela, she kind of thought it would look queer to have two funerals from the same house, hand-runnin’, as you might call it, and one of ’em no relation, either; but when she saw how fawther was bent on it, she give in. Seems as if she was tryin’ to make up to fawther for Coonrod as much as she could. Mela always was a good child, but nobody can ever come up to Coonrod.”

March felt all the grotesqueness, the hopeless absurdity of Dryfoos’s endeavor at atonement in these vain obsequies to the man for whom he believed his son to have died; but the effort had its magnanimity, its pathos, and there was a poetry that appealed to him in the reconciliation through death of men, of ideas, of conditions, that could only have gone warring on in life. He thought, as the priest went on with the solemn liturgy, how all the world must come together in that peace which, struggle and strive as we may, shall claim us at last. He looked at Dryfoos, and wondered whether he would consider these rites a sufficient tribute, or whether there was enough in him to make him realize their futility, except as a mere sign of his wish to retrieve the past. He thought how we never can atone for the wrong we do; the heart we have grieved and wounded cannot kindle with pity for us when once it is stilled; and yet we can put our evil from us with penitence, and somehow, somewhere, the order of loving kindness, which our passion or our wilfulness has disturbed, will be restored.

Dryfoos, through Fulkerson, had asked all the more intimate contributors of ‘Every Other Week’ to come. Beaton was absent, but Fulkerson had brought Miss Woodburn, with her father, and Mrs. Leighton and Alma, to fill up, as he said. Mela was much present, and was official with the arrangement of the flowers and the welcome of the guests. She imparted this impersonality to her reception of Kendricks, whom Fulkerson met in the outer hall with his party, and whom he presented in whisper to them all. Kendricks smiled under his breath, as it were, and was then mutely and seriously polite to the Leightons. Alma brought a little bunch of flowers, which were lost in those which Dryfoos had ordered to be unsparingly provided.

It was a kind of satisfaction to Mela to have Miss Vance come, and reassuring as to how it would look to have the funeral there; Miss Vance would certainly not have come unless it had been all right; she had come, and had sent some Easter lilies.

“Ain’t Christine coming down?” Fulkerson asked Mela.

“No, she ain’t a bit well, and she ain’t been, ever since Coonrod died. I don’t know, what’s got over her,” said Mela. She added, “Well, I should ‘a’ thought Mr. Beaton would ‘a’ made out to ‘a’ come!”

“Beaton’s peculiar,” said Fulkerson. “If he thinks you want him he takes a pleasure in not letting you have him.”

“Well, goodness knows, I don’t want him,” said the girl.

Christine kept her room, and for the most part kept her bed; but there seemed nothing definitely the matter with her, and she would not let them call a doctor. Her mother said she reckoned she was beginning to feel the spring weather, that always perfectly pulled a body down in New York; and Mela said if being as cross as two sticks was any sign of spring-fever, Christine had it bad. She was faithfully kind to her, and submitted to all her humors, but she recompensed herself by the freest criticism of Christine when not in actual attendance on her. Christine would not suffer Mrs. Mandel to approach her, and she had with her father a sullen submission which was not resignation. For her, apparently, Conrad had not died, or had died in vain.

“Pshaw!” said Mela, one morning when she came to breakfast, “I reckon if we was to send up an old card of Mr. Beaton’s she’d rattle down-stairs fast enough. If she’s sick, she’s love-sick. It makes me sick to see her.”

Mela was talking to Mrs. Mandel, but her father looked up from his plate and listened. Mela went on: “I don’t know what’s made the fellow quit comun’. But he was an aggravatun’ thing, and no more dependable than water. It’s just like Air. Fulkerson said, if he thinks you want him he’ll take a pleasure in not lettun’ you have him. I reckon that’s what’s the matter with Christine. I believe in my heart the girl ‘ll die if she don’t git him.”

Mela went on to eat her breakfast with her own good appetite. She now always came down to keep her father company, as she said, and she did her best to cheer and comfort him. At least she kept the talk going, and she had it nearly all to herself, for Mrs. Mandel was now merely staying on provisionally, and, in the absence of any regrets or excuses from Christine, was looking ruefully forward to the moment when she must leave even this ungentle home for the chances of the ruder world outside.

The old man said nothing at table, but, when Mela went up to see if she could do anything for Christine, he asked Mrs. Mandel again about all the facts of her last interview with Beaton.

She gave them as fully as she could remember them, and the old man made no comment on them. But he went out directly after, and at the ‘Every Other Week’ office he climbed the stairs to Fulkerson’s room and asked for Beaton’s address. No one yet had taken charge of Conrad’s work, and Fulkerson was running the thing himself, as he said, till he could talk with Dryfoos about it. The old man would not look into the empty room where he had last seen his son alive; he turned his face away and hurried by the door.

XIII.

The course of public events carried Beaton’s private affairs beyond the reach of his simple first intention to renounce his connection with ‘Every Other Week.’ In fact, this was not perhaps so simple as it seemed, and long before it could be put in effect it appeared still simpler to do nothing about the matter — to remain passive and leave the initiative to Dryfoos, to maintain the dignity of unconsciousness and let recognition of any change in the situation come from those who had caused the change. After all, it was rather absurd to propose making a purely personal question the pivot on which his relations with ‘Every Other Week’ turned. He took a hint from March’s position and decided that he did not know Dryfoos in these relations; he knew only Fulkerson, who had certainly had nothing to do with Mrs. Mandel’s asking his intentions. As he reflected upon this he became less eager to look Fulkerson up and make the magazine a partner of his own sufferings. This was the soberer mood to which Beaton trusted that night even before he slept, and he awoke fully confirmed in it. As he examined the offence done him in the cold light of day, he perceived that it had not come either from Mrs. Mandel, who was visibly the faltering and unwilling instrument of it, or from Christine, who was altogether ignorant of it, but from Dryfoos, whom he could not hurt by giving up his place. He could only punish Fulkerson by that, and Fulkerson was innocent. Justice and interest alike dictated the passive course to which Beaton inclined; and he reflected that he might safely leave the punishment of Dryfoos to Christine, who would find out what had happened, and would be able to take care of herself in any encounter of tempers with her father.

Beaton did not go to the office during the week that followed upon this conclusion; but they were used there to these sudden absences of his, and, as his work for the time was in train, nothing was made of his staying away, except the sarcastic comment which the thought of him was apt to excite in the literary department. He no longer came so much to the Leightons, and Fulkerson was in no state of mind to miss any one there except Miss Woodburn, whom he never missed. Beaton was left, then, unmolestedly awaiting the course of destiny, when he read in the morning paper, over his coffee at Maroni’s, the deeply scare-headed story of Conrad’s death and the clubbing of Lindau. He probably cared as little for either of them as any man that ever saw them; but he felt a shock, if not a pang, at Conrad’s fate, so out of keeping with his life and character. He did not know what to do; and he did nothing. He was not asked to the funeral, but he had not expected that, and, when Fulkerson brought him notice that Lindau was also to be buried from Dryfoos’s house, it was without his usual sullen vindictiveness that he kept away. In his sort, and as much as a man could who was necessarily so much taken up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad’s father; Beaton had a peculiar tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel if it were he who had been killed in Conrad’s place, as it might very well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility; and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau’s obsequies.

He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau’s funeral. Beaton roared out, “Come in!” as he always did to a knock if he had not a model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not come in. Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people’s difficulties with it, suddenly jerked the door open. The two men stood confronted, and at first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived. Each would have been willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible. Beaton snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not try to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or two, and Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from the chair which he told him to take. He noticed, as the old man sank tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father, and also that he looked very much like Christine. Dryfoos folded his hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall of the muscles on either side of his chin. He had forgotten to take his soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just as he sat.

Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into which he fell at first. “Young man,” he began, “maybe I’ve come here on a fool’s errand,” and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.

But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, “I don’t know what you mean.” “I reckon,” Dryfoos answered, quietly, “you got your notion, though. I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done. But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you didn’t feel like she had any right to question you up as if we suspected you of anything mean, I want you to say so.”

Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.

“I ain’t very well up in the ways of the world, and I don’t pretend to be. All I want is to be fair and square with everybody. I’ve made mistakes, though, in my time—” He stopped, and Beaton was not proof against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong physical ache. “I don’t know as I want to make any more, if I can help it. I don’t know but what you had a right to keep on comin’, and if you had I want you to say so. Don’t you be afraid but what I’ll take it in the right way. I don’t want to take advantage of anybody, and I don’t ask you to say any more than that.”

Beaton did not find the humiliation of the man who had humiliated him so sweet as he could have fancied it might be. He knew how it had come about, and that it was an effect of love for his child; it did not matter by what ungracious means she had brought him to know that he loved her better than his own will, that his wish for her happiness was stronger than his pride; it was enough that he was now somehow brought to give proof of it. Beaton could not be aware of all that dark coil of circumstance through which Dryfoos’s present action evolved itself; the worst of this was buried in the secret of the old man’s heart, a worm of perpetual torment. What was apparent to another was that he was broken by the sorrow that had fallen upon him, and it was this that Beaton respected and pitied in his impulse to be frank and kind in his answer.

“No, I had no right to keep coming to your house in the way I did, unless — unless I meant more than I ever said.” Beaton added: “I don’t say that what you did was usual — in this country, at any rate; but I can’t say you were wrong. Since you speak to me about the matter, it’s only fair to myself to say that a good deal goes on in life without much thinking of consequences. That’s the way I excuse myself.”

“And you say Mrs. Mandel done right?” asked Dryfoos, as if he wished simply to be assured of a point of etiquette.

“Yes, she did right. I’ve nothing to complain of.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” said Dryfoos; but apparently he had not finished, and he did not go, though the silence that Beaton now kept gave him a chance to do so. He began a series of questions which had no relation to the matter in hand, though they were strictly personal to Beaton. “What countryman are you?” he asked, after a moment.

“What countryman?” Beaton frowned back at him.

“Yes, are you an American by birth?”

“Yes; I was born in Syracuse.”

“Protestant?”

“My father is a Scotch Seceder.”

“What business is your father in?”

Beaton faltered and blushed; then he answered:

“He’s in the monument business, as he calls it. He’s a tombstone cutter.” Now that he was launched, Beaton saw no reason for not declaring, “My father’s always been a poor man, and worked with his own hands for his living.” He had too slight esteem socially for Dryfoos to conceal a fact from him that he might have wished to blink with others.

“Well, that’s right,” said Dryfoos. “I used to farm it myself. I’ve got a good pile of money together, now. At first it didn’t come easy; but now it’s got started it pours in and pours in; it seems like there was no end to it. I’ve got well on to three million; but it couldn’t keep me from losin’ my son. It can’t buy me back a minute of his life; not all the money in the world can do it!”

He grieved this out as if to himself rather than to Beaton, who, scarcely ventured to say, “I know — I am very sorry—”

“How did you come,” Dryfoos interrupted, “to take up paintin’?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Beaton, a little scornfully. “You don’t take a thing of that kind up, I fancy. I always wanted to paint.”

“Father try to stop you?”

“No. It wouldn’t have been of any use. Why—”

“My son, he wanted to be a preacher, and I did stop him or I thought I did. But I reckon he was a preacher, all the same, every minute of his life. As you say, it ain’t any use to try to stop a thing like that. I reckon if a child has got any particular bent, it was given to it; and it’s goin’ against the grain, it’s goin’ against the law, to try to bend it some other way. There’s lots of good business men, Mr. Beaton, twenty of ’em to every good preacher?”

“I imagine more than twenty,” said Beaton, amused and touched through his curiosity as to what the old man was driving at by the quaint simplicity of his speculations.

“Father ever come to the city?”

“No; he never has the time; and my mother’s an invalid.”

“Oh! Brothers and sisters?”

“Yes; we’re a large family.”

“I lost two little fellers — twins,” said Dryfoos, sadly. “But we hain’t ever had but just the five. Ever take portraits?”

“Yes,” said Beaton, meeting this zigzag in the queries as seriously as the rest. “I don’t think I am good at it.”

Dryfoos got to his feet. “I wish you’d paint a likeness of my son. You’ve seen him plenty of times. We won’t fight about the price, don’t you be afraid of that.”

Beaton was astonished, and in a mistaken way he was disgusted. He saw that Dryfoos was trying to undo Mrs. Mandel’s work practically, and get him to come again to his house; that he now conceived of the offence given him as condoned, and wished to restore the former situation. He knew that he was attempting this for Christine’s sake, but he was not the man to imagine that Dryfoos was trying not only to tolerate him, but to like him; and, in fact, Dryfoos was not wholly conscious himself of this end. What they both understood was that Dryfoos was endeavoring to get at Beaton through Conrad’s memory; but with one this was its dedication to a purpose of self sacrifice, and with the other a vulgar and shameless use of it.

“I couldn’t do it,” said Beaton. “I couldn’t think of attempting it.”

“Why not?” Dryfoos persisted. “We got some photographs of him; he didn’t like to sit very well; but his mother got him to; and you know how he looked.”

“I couldn’t do it — I couldn’t. I can’t even consider it. I’m very sorry.
I would, if it were possible. But it isn’t possible.”

“I reckon if you see the photographs once”

“It isn’t that, Mr. Dryfoos. But I’m not in the way of that kind of thing any more.”

“I’d give any price you’ve a mind to name—”

“Oh, it isn’t the money!” cried Beaton, beginning to lose control of himself.

The old man did not notice him. He sat with his head fallen forward, and his chin resting on his folded hands. Thinking of the portrait, he saw Conrad’s face before him, reproachful, astonished, but all gentle as it looked when Conrad caught his hand that day after he struck him; he heard him say, “Father!” and the sweat gathered on his forehead. “Oh, my God!” he groaned. “No; there ain’t anything I can do now.”

Beaton did not know whether Dryfoos was speaking to him or not. He started toward him. “Are you ill?”

“No, there ain’t anything the matter,” said the old man. “But I guess I’ll lay down on your settee a minute.” He tottered with Beaton’s help to the aesthetic couch covered with a tiger-skin, on which Beaton had once thought of painting a Cleopatra; but he could never get the right model. As the old man stretched himself out on it, pale and suffering, he did not look much like a Cleopatra, but Beaton was struck with his effectiveness, and the likeness between him and his daughter; she would make a very good Cleopatra in some ways. All the time, while these thoughts passed through his mind, he was afraid Dryfoos would die. The old man fetched his breath in gasps, which presently smoothed and lengthened into his normal breathing. Beaton got him a glass of wine, and after tasting it he sat up.

“You’ve got to excuse me,” he said, getting back to his characteristic grimness with surprising suddenness, when once he began to recover himself. “I’ve been through a good deal lately; and sometimes it ketches me round the heart like a pain.”

In his life of selfish immunity from grief, Beaton could not understand this experience that poignant sorrow brings; he said to himself that Dryfoos was going the way of angina pectoris; as he began shuffling off the tiger-skin he said: “Had you better get up? Wouldn’t you like me to call a doctor?”

“I’m all right, young man.” Dryfoos took his hat and stick from him, but he made for the door so uncertainly that Beaton put his hand under his elbow and helped him out, and down the stairs, to his coupe.

“Hadn’t you better let me drive home with you?” he asked.

“What?” said Dryfoos, suspiciously.

Beaton repeated his question.

“I guess I’m able to go home alone,” said Dryfoos, in a surly tone, and he put his head out of the window and called up “Home!” to the driver, who immediately started off and left Beaton standing beside the curbstone.

XIV.

Beaton wasted the rest of the day in the emotions and speculations which Dryfoos’s call inspired. It was not that they continuously occupied him, but they broke up the train of other thoughts, and spoiled him for work; a very little spoiled Beaton for work; he required just the right mood for work. He comprehended perfectly well that Dryfoos had made him that extraordinary embassy because he wished him to renew his visits, and he easily imagined the means that had brought him to this pass. From what he knew of that girl he did not envy her father his meeting with her when he must tell her his mission had failed. But had it failed? When Beaton came to ask himself this question, he could only perceive that he and Dryfoos had failed to find any ground of sympathy, and had parted in the same dislike with which they had met. But as to any other failure, it was certainly tacit, and it still rested with him to give it effect. He could go back to Dryfoos’s house, as freely as before, and it was clear that he was very much desired to come back. But if he went back it was also clear that he must go back with intentions more explicit than before, and now he had to ask himself just how much or how little he had meant by going there. His liking for Christine had certainly not increased, but the charm, on the other hand, of holding a leopardess in leash had not yet palled upon him. In his life of inconstancies, it was a pleasure to rest upon something fixed, and the man who had no control over himself liked logically enough to feel his control of some one else. The fact cannot other wise be put in terms, and the attraction which Christine Dryfoos had for him, apart from this, escapes from all terms, as anything purely and merely passional must. He had seen from the first that she was a cat, and so far as youth forecasts such things, he felt that she would be a shrew. But he had a perverse sense of her beauty, and he knew a sort of life in which her power to molest him with her temper could be reduced to the smallest proportions, and even broken to pieces. Then the consciousness of her money entered. It was evident that the old man had mentioned his millions in the way of a hint to him of what he might reasonably expect if he would turn and be his son-in-law. Beaton did not put it to himself in those words; and in fact his cogitations were not in words at all. It was the play of cognitions, of sensations, formlessly tending to the effect which can only be very clumsily interpreted in language. But when he got to this point in them, Beaton rose to magnanimity and in a flash of dramatic reverie disposed of a part of Dryfoos’s riches in placing his father and mother, and his brothers and sisters, beyond all pecuniary anxiety forever. He had no shame, no scruple in this, for he had been a pensioner upon others ever since a Syracusan amateur of the arts had detected his talent and given him the money to go and study abroad. Beaton had always considered the money a loan, to be repaid out of his future success; but he now never dreamt of repaying it; as the man was rich, he had even a contempt for the notion of repaying him; but this did not prevent him from feeling very keenly the hardships he put his father to in borrowing money from him, though he never repaid his father, either. In this reverie he saw himself sacrificed in marriage with Christine Dryfoos, in a kind of admiring self-pity, and he was melted by the spectacle of the dignity with which he suffered all the lifelong trials ensuing from his unselfishness. The fancy that Alma Leighton came bitterly to regret him, contributed to soothe and flatter him, and he was not sure that Margaret. Vance did not suffer a like loss in him.

There had been times when, as he believed, that beautiful girl’s high thoughts had tended toward him; there had been looks, gestures, even words, that had this effect to him, or that seemed to have had it; and Beaton saw that he might easily construe Mrs. Horn’s confidential appeal to him to get Margaret interested in art again as something by no means necessarily offensive, even though it had been made to him as to a master of illusion. If Mrs. Horn had to choose between him and the life of good works to which her niece was visibly abandoning herself, Beaton could not doubt which she would choose; the only question was how real the danger of a life of good works was.

As he thought of these two girls, one so charming and the other so divine, it became indefinitely difficult to renounce them for Christine Dryfoos, with her sultry temper and her earthbound ideals. Life had been so flattering to Beaton hitherto that he could not believe them both finally indifferent; and if they were not indifferent, perhaps he did not wish either of them to be very definite. What he really longed for was their sympathy; for a man who is able to walk round quite ruthlessly on the feelings of others often has very tender feelings of his own, easily lacerated, and eagerly responsive to the caresses of compassion. In this frame Beaton determined to go that afternoon, though it was not Mrs. Horn’s day, and call upon her in the hope of possibly seeing Miss Vance alone. As he continued in it, he took this for a sign and actually went. It did not fall out at once as he wished, but he got Mrs. Horn to talking again about her niece, and Mrs. Horn again regretted that nothing could be done by the fine arts to reclaim Margaret from good works.

“Is she at home? Will you let me see her?” asked Beacon, with something of the scientific interest of a physician inquiring for a patient whose symptoms have been rehearsed to him. He had not asked for her before.

“Yes, certainly,” said Mrs. Horn, and she went herself to call Margaret, and she did not return with her. The girl entered with the gentle grace peculiar to her; and Beaton, bent as he was on his own consolation, could not help being struck with the spiritual exaltation of her look. At sight of her, the vague hope he had never quite relinquished, that they might be something more than aesthetic friends, died in his heart. She wore black, as she often did; but in spite of its fashion her dress received a nun-like effect from the pensive absence of her face. “Decidedly,” thought Beaton, “she is far gone in good works.”

But he rose, all the same, to meet her on the old level, and he began at once to talk to her of the subject he had been discussing with her aunt. He said frankly that they both felt she had unjustifiably turned her back upon possibilities which she ought not to neglect.

“You know very well,” she answered, “that I couldn’t do anything in that way worth the time I should waste on it. Don’t talk of it, please. I suppose my aunt has been asking you to say this, but it’s no use. I’m sorry it’s no use, she wishes it so much; but I’m not sorry otherwise. You can find the pleasure at least of doing good work in it; but I couldn’t find anything in it but a barren amusement. Mr. Wetmore is right; for me, it’s like enjoying an opera, or a ball.”

“That’s one of Wetmore’s phrases. He’d sacrifice anything to them.”

She put aside the whole subject with a look. “You were not at Mr.
Dryfoos’s the other day. Have you seen them, any of them, lately?”

“I haven’t been there for some time, no,” said Beaton, evasively. But he thought if he was to get on to anything, he had better be candid. “Mr. Dryfoos was at my studio this morning. He’s got a queer notion. He wants me to paint his son’s portrait.”

She started. “And will you—”

“No, I couldn’t do such a thing. It isn’t in my way. I told him so. His son had a beautiful face an antique profile; a sort of early Christian type; but I’m too much of a pagan for that sort of thing.”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” Beaton continued, not quite liking her assent after he had invited it. He had his pride in being a pagan, a Greek, but it failed him in her presence, now; and he wished that she had protested he was none. “He was a singular creature; a kind of survival; an exile in our time and place. I don’t know: we don’t quite expect a saint to be rustic; but with all his goodness Conrad Dryfoos was a country person. If he were not dying for a cause you could imagine him milking.” Beaton intended a contempt that came from the bitterness of having himself once milked the family cow.

His contempt did not reach Miss Vance. “He died for a cause,” she said.
“The holiest.”

“Of labor?”

“Of peace. He was there to persuade the strikers to be quiet and go home.”

“I haven’t been quite sure,” said Beaton. “But in any case he had no business there. The police were on hand to do the persuading.”

“I can’t let you talk so!” cried the girl. “It’s shocking! Oh, I know it’s the way people talk, and the worst is that in the sight of the world it’s the right way. But the blessing on the peacemakers is not for the policemen with their clubs.”

Beaton saw that she was nervous; he made his reflection that she was altogether too far gone in good works for the fine arts to reach her; he began to think how he could turn her primitive Christianity to the account of his modern heathenism. He had no deeper design than to get flattered back into his own favor far enough to find courage for some sort of decisive step. In his heart he was trying to will whether he should or should not go back to Dryfoos’s house. It could not be from the caprice that had formerly taken him; it must be from a definite purpose; again he realized this. “Of course; you are right,” he said. “I wish I could have answered that old man differently. I fancy he was bound up in his son, though he quarrelled with him, and crossed him. But I couldn’t do it; it wasn’t possible.” He said to himself that if she said “No,” now, he would be ruled by her agreement with him; and if she disagreed with him, he would be ruled still by the chance, and would go no more to the Dryfooses’. He found himself embarrassed to the point of blushing when she said nothing, and left him, as it were, on his own hands. “I should like to have given him that comfort; I fancy he hasn’t much comfort in life; but there seems no comfort in me.”

He dropped his head in a fit attitude for compassion; but she poured no pity upon it.

“There is no comfort for us in ourselves,” she said. “It’s hard to get outside; but there’s only despair within. When we think we have done something for others, by some great effort, we find it’s all for our own vanity.”

“Yes,” said Beaton. “If I could paint pictures for righteousness’ sake, I should have been glad to do Conrad Dryfoos for his father. I felt sorry for him. Did the rest seem very much broken up? You saw them all?”

“Not all. Miss Dryfoos was ill, her sister said. It’s hard to tell how much people suffer. His mother seemed bewildered. The younger sister is a simple creature; she looks like him; I think she must have something of his spirit.”

“Not much spirit of any kind, I imagine,” said Beaton. “But she’s amiably material. Did they say Miss Dryfoos was seriously ill?”

“No. I supposed she might be prostrated by her brother’s death.”

“Does she seem that kind of person to you, Miss Vance?” asked Beaton.

“I don’t know. I haven’t tried to see so much of them as I might, the past winter. I was not sure about her when I met her; I’ve never seen much of people, except in my own set, and the — very poor. I have been afraid I didn’t understand her. She may have a kind of pride that would not let her do herself justice.”

Beaton felt the unconscious dislike in the endeavor of praise. “Then she seems to you like a person whose life — its trials, its chances — would make more of than she is now?”

“I didn’t say that. I can’t judge of her at all; but where we don’t know, don’t you think we ought to imagine the best?”

“Oh yes,” said Beaton. “I didn’t know but what I once said of them might have prejudiced you against them. I have accused myself of it.” He always took a tone of conscientiousness, of self-censure, in talking with Miss Vance; he could not help it.

“Oh no. And I never allowed myself to form any judgment of her. She is very pretty, don’t you think, in a kind of way?”

“Very.”

“She has a beautiful brunette coloring: that floury white and the delicate pink in it. Her eyes are beautiful.”

“She’s graceful, too,” said Beaton. “I’ve tried her in color; but I didn’t make it out.”

“I’ve wondered sometimes,” said Miss Vance, “whether that elusive quality you find in some people you try to paint doesn’t characterize them all through. Miss Dryfoos might be ever so much finer and better than we would find out in the society way that seems the only way.”

“Perhaps,” said Beaton, gloomily; and he went away profoundly discouraged by this last analysis of Christine’s character. The angelic imperviousness of Miss Vance to properties of which his own wickedness was so keenly aware in Christine might have made him laugh, if it had not been such a serious affair with him. As it was, he smiled to think how very differently Alma Leighton would have judged her from Miss Vance’s premises. He liked that clear vision of Alma’s even when it pierced his own disguises. Yes, that was the light he had let die out, and it might have shone upon his path through life. Beaton never felt so poignantly the disadvantage of having on any given occasion been wanting to his own interests through his self-love as in this. He had no one to blame but himself for what had happened, but he blamed Alma for what might happen in the future because she shut out the way of retrieval and return. When he thought of the attitude she had taken toward him, it seemed incredible, and he was always longing to give her a final chance to reverse her final judgment. It appeared to him that the time had come for this now, if ever.

XV.

While we are still young we feel a kind of pride, a sort of fierce pleasure, in any important experience, such as we have read of or heard of in the lives of others, no matter how painful. It was this pride, this pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realizing that the toils of fate were about him, that between him and a future of which Christine Dryfoos must be the genius there was nothing but the will, the mood, the fancy of a girl who had not given him the hope that either could ever again be in his favor. He had nothing to trust to, in fact, but his knowledge that he had once had them all; she did not deny that; but neither did she conceal that he had flung away his power over them, and she had told him that they never could be his again. A man knows that he can love and wholly cease to love, not once merely, but several times; he recognizes the fact in regard to himself, both theoretically and practically; but in regard to women he cherishes the superstition of the romances that love is once for all, and forever. It was because Beaton would not believe that Alma Leighton, being a woman, could put him out of her heart after suffering him to steal into it, that he now hoped anything from her, and she had been so explicit when they last spoke of that affair that he did not hope much. He said to himself that he was going to cast himself on her mercy, to take whatever chance of life, love, and work there was in her having the smallest pity on him. If she would have none, then there was but one thing he could do: marry Christine and go abroad. He did not see how he could bring this alternative to bear upon Alma; even if she knew what he would do in case of a final rejection, he had grounds for fearing she would not care; but he brought it to bear upon himself, and it nerved him to a desperate courage. He could hardly wait for evening to come, before he went to see her; when it came, it seemed to have come too soon. He had wrought himself thoroughly into the conviction that he was in earnest, and that everything depended upon her answer to him, but it was not till he found himself in her presence, and alone with her, that he realized the truth of his conviction. Then the influences of her grace, her gayety, her arch beauty, above all, her good sense, penetrated his soul like a subtle intoxication, and he said to himself that he was right; he could not live without her; these attributes of hers were what he needed to win him, to cheer him, to charm him, to guide him. He longed so to please her, to ingratiate himself with her, that he attempted to be light like her in his talk, but lapsed into abysmal absences and gloomy recesses of introspection.

“What are you laughing at?” he asked, suddenly starting from one of these.

“What you are thinking of.”

“It’s nothing to laugh at. Do you know what I’m thinking of?”

“Don’t tell, if it’s dreadful.”

“Oh, I dare say you wouldn’t think it’s dreadful,” he said, with bitterness. “It’s simply the case of a man who has made a fool of himself and sees no help of retrieval in himself.”

“Can any one else help a man unmake a fool of himself?” she asked, with a smile.

“Yes. In a case like this.”

“Dear me! This is very interesting.”

She did not ask him what the case was, but he was launched now, and he pressed on. “I am the man who has made a fool of himself—”

“Oh!”

“And you can help me out if you will. Alma, I wish you could see me as I really am.”

“Do you, Mr. Beacon? Perhaps I do.”

“No; you don’t. You formulated me in a certain way, and you won’t allow for the change that takes place in every one. You have changed; why shouldn’t I?”

“Has this to do with your having made a fool of yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Then I don’t see how you have changed.”

She laughed, and he too, ruefully. “You’re cruel. Not but what I deserve your mockery. But the change was not from the capacity of making a fool of myself. I suppose I shall always do that more or less — unless you help me. Alma! Why can’t you have a little compassion? You know that I must always love you.”

“Nothing makes me doubt that like your saying it, Mr. Beaton. But now you’ve broken your word—”

“You are to blame for that. You knew I couldn’t keep it!”

“Yes, I’m to blame. I was wrong to let you come — after that. And so I forgive you for speaking to me in that way again. But it’s perfectly impossible and perfectly useless for me to hear you any more on that subject; and so-good-bye!”

She rose, and he perforce with her. “And do you mean it?” he asked.
“Forever?”

“Forever. This is truly the last time I will ever see you if I can help it. Oh, I feel sorry enough for you!” she said, with a glance at his face. “I do believe you are in earnest. But it’s too late now. Don’t let us talk about it any more! But we shall, if we meet, and so,—”

“And so good-bye! Well, I’ve nothing more to say, and I might as well say that. I think you’ve been very good to me. It seems to me as if you had been — shall I say it? — trying to give me a chance. Is that so?” She dropped her eyes and did not answer.

“You found it was no use! Well, I thank you for trying. It’s curious to think that I once had your trust, your regard, and now I haven’t it. You don’t mind my remembering that I had? It’ll be some little consolation, and I believe it will be some help. I know I can’t retrieve the past now. It is too late. It seems too preposterous — perfectly lurid — that I could have been going to tell you what a tangle I’d got myself in, and to ask you to help untangle me. I must choke in the infernal coil, but I’d like to have the sweetness of your pity in it — whatever it is.”

She put out her hand. “Whatever it is, I do pity you; I said that.”

“Thank you.” He kissed the hand she gave him and went.

He had gone on some such terms before; was it now for the last time? She believed it was. She felt in herself a satiety, a fatigue, in which his good looks, his invented airs and poses, his real trouble, were all alike repulsive. She did not acquit herself of the wrong of having let him think she might yet have liked him as she once did; but she had been honestly willing to see whether she could. It had mystified her to find that when they first met in New York, after their summer in St. Barnaby, she cared nothing for him; she had expected to punish him for his neglect, and then fancy him as before, but she did not. More and more she saw him selfish and mean, weak-willed, narrow-minded, and hard-hearted; and aimless, with all his talent. She admired his talent in proportion as she learned more of artists, and perceived how uncommon it was; but she said to herself that if she were going to devote herself to art, she would do it at first-hand. She was perfectly serene and happy in her final rejection of Beaton; he had worn out not only her fancy, but her sympathy, too.

This was what her mother would not believe when Alma reported the interview to her; she would not believe it was the last time they should meet; death itself can hardly convince us that it is the last time of anything, of everything between ourselves and the dead. “Well, Alma,” she said, “I hope you’ll never regret what you’ve done.”

“You may be sure I shall not regret it. If ever I’m low-spirited about anything, I’ll think of giving Mr. Beaton his freedom, and that will cheer me up.”

“And don’t you expect to get married? Do you intend to be an old maid?” demanded her mother, in the bonds of the superstition women have so long been under to the effect that every woman must wish to get married, if for no other purpose than to avoid being an old maid.

“Well, mamma,” said Alma, “I intend being a young one for a few years yet; and then I’ll see. If I meet the right person, all well and good; if not, not. But I shall pick and choose, as a man does; I won’t merely be picked and chosen.”

“You can’t help yourself; you may be very glad if you are picked and chosen.”

“What nonsense, mamma! A girl can get any man she wants, if she goes about it the right way. And when my ‘fated fairy prince’ comes along, I shall just simply make furious love to him and grab him. Of course, I shall make a decent pretence of talking in my sleep. I believe it’s done that way more than half the time. The fated fairy prince wouldn’t see the princess in nine cases out of ten if she didn’t say something; he would go mooning along after the maids of honor.”

Mrs. Leighton tried to look unspeakable horror; but she broke down and laughed. “Well, you are a strange girl, Alma.”

“I don’t know about that. But one thing I do know, mamma, and that is that Prince Beaton isn’t the F. F. P. for me. How strange you are, mamma! Don’t you think it would be perfectly disgusting to accept a person you didn’t care for, and let him go on and love you and marry you? It’s sickening.”

“Why, certainly, Alma. It’s only because I know you did care for him once—”

“And now I don’t. And he didn’t care for me once, and now he does. And so we’re quits.”

“If I could believe—”

“You had better brace up and try, mamma; for as Mr. Fulkerson says, it’s as sure as guns. From the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he’s loathsome to me; and he keeps getting loathsomer. Ugh! Goodnight!”

XVI.

“Well, I guess she’s given him the grand bounce at last,” said Fulkerson to March in one of their moments of confidence at the office. “That’s Mad’s inference from appearances — and disappearances; and some little hints from Alma Leighton.”

“Well, I don’t know that I have any criticisms to offer,” said March. “It may be bad for Beaton, but it’s a very good thing for Miss Leighton. Upon the whole, I believe I congratulate her.”

“Well, I don’t know. I always kind of hoped it would turn out the other way. You know I always had a sneaking fondness for the fellow.”

“Miss Leighton seems not to have had.”

“It’s a pity she hadn’t. I tell you, March, it ain’t so easy for a girl to get married, here in the East, that she can afford to despise any chance.”

“Isn’t that rather a low view of it?”

“It’s a common-sense view. Beaton has the making of a first-rate fellow in him. He’s the raw material of a great artist and a good citizen. All he wants is somebody to take him in hand and keep him from makin’ an ass of himself and kickin’ over the traces generally, and ridin’ two or three horses bareback at once.”

“It seems a simple problem, though the metaphor is rather complicated,” said March. “But talk to Miss Leighton about it. I haven’t given Beaton the grand bounce.”

He began to turn over the manuscripts on his table, and Fulkerson went away. But March found himself thinking of the matter from time to time during the day, and he spoke to his wife about it when he went home. She surprised him by taking Fulkerson’s view of it.

“Yes, it’s a pity she couldn’t have made up her mind to have him. It’s better for a woman to be married.”

“I thought Paul only went so far as to say it was well. But what would become of Miss Leighton’s artistic career if she married?”

“Oh, her artistic career!” said Mrs. March, with matronly contempt of it.

“But look here!” cried her husband. “Suppose she doesn’t like him?”

“How can a girl of that age tell whether she likes any one or not?”

“It seems to me you were able to tell at that age, Isabel. But let’s examine this thing. (This thing! I believe Fulkerson is characterizing my whole parlance, as well as your morals.) Why shouldn’t we rejoice as much at a non-marriage as a marriage? When we consider the enormous risks people take in linking their lives together, after not half so much thought as goes to an ordinary horse trade, I think we ought to be glad whenever they don’t do it. I believe that this popular demand for the matrimony of others comes from our novel-reading. We get to thinking that there is no other happiness or good-fortune in life except marriage; and it’s offered in fiction as the highest premium for virtue, courage, beauty, learning, and saving human life. We all know it isn’t. We know that in reality marriage is dog cheap, and anybody can have it for the asking — if he keeps asking enough people. By-and-by some fellow will wake up and see that a first-class story can be written from the anti-marriage point of view; and he’ll begin with an engaged couple, and devote his novel to disengaging them and rendering them separately happy ever after in the denouement. It will make his everlasting fortune.”

“Why don’t you write it, Basil?” she asked. “It’s a delightful idea. You could do it splendidly.”

He became fascinated with the notion. He developed it in detail; but at the end he sighed and said: “With this ‘Every Other Week’ work on my hands, of course I can’t attempt a novel. But perhaps I sha’n’t have it long.”

She was instantly anxious to know what he meant, and the novel and Miss Leighton’s affair were both dropped out of their thoughts. “What do you mean? Has Mr. Fulkerson said anything yet?”

“Not a word. He knows no more about it than I do. Dryfoos hasn’t spoken, and we’re both afraid to ask him. Of course, I couldn’t ask him.”

“No.”

“But it’s pretty uncomfortable, to be kept hanging by the gills so, as
Fulkerson says.”

“Yes, we don’t know what to do.”

March and Fulkerson said the same to each other; and Fulkerson said that if the old man pulled out, he did not know what would happen. He had no capital to carry the thing on, and the very fact that the old man had pulled out would damage it so that it would be hard to get anybody else to put it. In the mean time Fulkerson was running Conrad’s office-work, when he ought to be looking after the outside interests of the thing; and he could not see the day when he could get married.

“I don’t know which it’s worse for, March: you or me. I don’t know, under the circumstances, whether it’s worse to have a family or to want to have one. Of course — of course! We can’t hurry the old man up. It wouldn’t be decent, and it would be dangerous. We got to wait.”

He almost decided to draw upon Dryfoos for some money; he did not need any, but, he said maybe the demand would act as a hint upon him. One day, about a week after Alma’s final rejection of Beaton, Dryfoos came into March’s office. Fulkerson was out, but the old man seemed not to have tried to see him.

He put his hat on the floor by his chair, after he sat down, and looked at March awhile with his old eyes, which had the vitreous glitter of old. eyes stimulated to sleeplessness. Then he said, abruptly, “Mr. March, how would you like to take this thing off my hands?”

“I don’t understand, exactly,” March began; but of course he understood that Dryfoos was offering to let him have ‘Every Other Week’ on some terms or other, and his heart leaped with hope.

The old man knew he understood, and so he did not explain. He said: “I am going to Europe, to take my family there. The doctor thinks it might do my wife some good; and I ain’t very well myself, and my girls both want to go; and so we’re goin’. If you want to take this thing off my hands, I reckon I can let you have it in ‘most any shape you say. You’re all settled here in New York, and I don’t suppose you want to break up, much, at your time of life, and I’ve been thinkin’ whether you wouldn’t like to take the thing.”

The word, which Dryfoos had now used three times, made March at last think of Fulkerson; he had been filled too full of himself to think of any one else till he had mastered the notion of such wonderful good fortune as seemed about falling to him. But now he did think of Fulkerson, and with some shame and confusion; for he remembered how, when Dryfoos had last approached him there on the business of his connection with ‘Every Other Week,’ he had been very haughty with him, and told him that he did not know him in this connection. He blushed to find how far his thoughts had now run without encountering this obstacle of etiquette.

“Have you spoken to Mr. Fulkerson?” he asked.

“No, I hain’t. It ain’t a question of management. It’s a question of buying and selling. I offer the thing to you first. I reckon Fulkerson couldn’t get on very well without you.”

March saw the real difference in the two cases, and he was glad to see it, because he could act more decisively if not hampered by an obligation to consistency. “I am gratified, of course, Mr. Dryfoos; extremely gratified; and it’s no use pretending that I shouldn’t be happy beyond bounds to get possession of ‘Every Other Week.’ But I don’t feel quite free to talk about it apart from Mr. Fulkerson.”

“Oh, all right!” said the old man, with quick offence.

March hastened to say: “I feel bound to Mr. Fulkerson in every way. He got me to come here, and I couldn’t even seem to act without him.”

He put it questioningly, and the old man answered:

“Yes, I can see that. When ‘ll he be in? I can wait.” But he looked impatient.

“Very soon, now,” said March, looking at his watch. “He was only to be gone a moment,” and while he went on to talk with Dryfoos, he wondered why the old man should have come first to speak with him, and whether it was from some obscure wish to make him reparation for displeasures in the past, or from a distrust or dislike of Fulkerson. Whichever light he looked at it in, it was flattering.

“Do you think of going abroad soon?” he asked.

“What? Yes — I don’t know — I reckon. We got our passage engaged. It’s on one of them French boats. We’re goin’ to Paris.”

“Oh! That will be interesting to the young ladies.”

“Yes. I reckon we’re goin’ for them. ‘Tain’t likely my wife and me would want to pull up stakes at our age,” said the old man, sorrowfully.

“But you may find it do you good, Mr. Dryfoos,” said March, with a kindness that was real, mixed as it was with the selfish interest he now had in the intended voyage.

“Well, maybe, maybe,” sighed the old man; and he dropped his head forward. “It don’t make a great deal of difference what we do or we don’t do, for the few years left.”

“I hope Mrs. Dryfoos is as well as usual,” said March, finding the ground delicate and difficult.

“Middlin’, middlin’,” said the old man. “My daughter Christine, she ain’t very well.”

“Oh,” said March. It was quite impossible for him to affect a more explicit interest in the fact. He and Dryfoos sat silent for a few moments, and he was vainly casting about in his thought for something else which would tide them over the interval till Fulkerson came, when he heard his step on the stairs.

“Hello, hello!” he said. “Meeting of the clans!” It was always a meeting of the clans, with Fulkerson, or a field day, or an extra session, or a regular conclave, whenever he saw people of any common interest together. “Hain’t seen you here for a good while, Mr. Dryfoos. Did think some of running away with ‘Every Other Week’ one while, but couldn’t seem to work March up to the point.”

He gave Dryfoos his hand, and pushed aside the papers on the corner of March’s desk, and sat down there, and went on briskly with the nonsense he could always talk while he was waiting for another to develop any matter of business; he told March afterward that he scented business in the air as soon as he came into the room where he and Dryfoos were sitting.

Dryfoos seemed determined to leave the word to March, who said, after an inquiring look at him, “Mr. Dryfoos has been proposing to let us have ‘Every Other Week,’ Fulkerson.”

“Well, that’s good; that suits yours truly; March & Fulkerson, publishers and proprietors, won’t pretend it don’t, if the terms are all right.”

“The terms,” said the old man, “are whatever you want ‘em. I haven’t got any more use for the concern—” He gulped, and stopped; they knew what he was thinking of, and they looked down in pity. He went on: “I won’t put any more money in it; but what I’ve put in a’ready can stay; and you can pay me four per cent.”

He got upon his feet; and March and Fulkerson stood, too.

“Well, I call that pretty white,” said Fulkerson. “It’s a bargain as far as I’m concerned. I suppose you’ll want to talk it over with your wife, March?”

“Yes; I shall,” said March. “I can see that it’s a great chance; but I want to talk it over with my wife.”

“Well, that’s right,” said the old man. “Let me hear from you tomorrow.”

He went out, and Fulkerson began to dance round the room. He caught March about his stalwart girth and tried to make him waltz; the office-boy came to the door and looked on with approval.

“Come, come, you idiot!” said March, rooting himself to the carpet.

“It’s just throwing the thing into our mouths,” said Fulkerson. “The wedding will be this day week. No cards! Teedle-lumpty-diddle! Teedle-lumpty-dee! What do you suppose he means by it, March?” he asked, bringing himself soberly up, of a sudden. “What is his little game? Or is he crazy? It don’t seem like the Dryfoos of my previous acquaintance.”

“I suppose,” March suggested, “that he’s got money enough, so that he don’t care for this—”

“Pshaw! You’re a poet! Don’t you know that the more money that kind of man has got, the more he cares for money? It’s some fancy of his — like having Lindau’s funeral at his house — By Jings, March, I believe you’re his fancy!”

“Oh, now! Don’t you be a poet, Fulkerson!”

“I do! He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you wouldn’t turn off old Lindau; he did, indeed. It kind of shook him up. It made him think you had something in you. He was deceived by appearances. Look here! I’m going round to see Mrs. March with you, and explain the thing to her. I know Mrs. March! She wouldn’t believe you knew what you were going in for. She has a great respect for your mind, but she don’t think you’ve got any sense. Heigh?”

“All right,” said March, glad of the notion; and it was really a comfort to have Fulkerson with him to develop all the points; and it was delightful to see how clearly and quickly she seized them; it made March proud of her. She was only angry that they had lost any time in coming to submit so plain a case to her.

Mr. Dryfoos might change his mind in the night, and then everything would be lost. They must go to him instantly, and tell him that they accepted; they must telegraph him.

“Might as well send a district messenger; he’d get there next week,” said Fulkerson. “No, no! It’ll all keep till to-morrow, and be the better for it. If he’s got this fancy for March, as I say, he ain’t agoing to change it in a single night. People don’t change their fancies for March in a lifetime. Heigh?”

When Fulkerson turned up very early at the office next morning, as March did, he was less strenuous about Dryfoos’s fancy for March. It was as if Miss Woodburn might have blown cold upon that theory, as something unjust to his own merit, for which she would naturally be more jealous than he.

March told him what he had forgotten to tell him the day before, though he had been trying, all through their excited talk, to get it in, that the Dryfooses were going abroad.

“Oh, ho!” cried Fulkerson. “That’s the milk in the cocoanut, is it? Well,
I thought there must be something.”

But this fact had not changed Mrs. March at all in her conviction that it was Mr. Dryfoos’s fancy for her husband which had moved him to make him this extraordinary offer, and she reminded him that it had first been made to him, without regard to Fulkerson. “And perhaps,” she went on, “Mr. Dryfoos has been changed — softened; and doesn’t find money all in all any more. He’s had enough to change him, poor old man!”

“Does anything from without change us?” her husband mused aloud. “We’re brought up to think so by the novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking, nowadays. But I doubt it, especially if the thing outside is some great event, something cataclysmal, like this tremendous sorrow of Dryfoos’s.”

“Then what is it that changes us?” demanded his wife, almost angry with him for his heresy.

“Well, it won’t do to say, the Holy Spirit indwelling. That would sound like cant at this day. But the old fellows that used to say that had some glimpses of the truth. They knew that it is the still, small voice that the soul heeds, not the deafening blasts of doom. I suppose I should have to say that we didn’t change at all. We develop. There’s the making of several characters in each of us; we are each several characters, and sometimes this character has the lead in us, and sometimes that. From what Fulkerson has told me of Dryfoos, I should say he had always had the potentiality of better things in him than he has ever been yet; and perhaps the time has come for the good to have its chance. The growth in one direction has stopped; it’s begun in another; that’s all. The man hasn’t been changed by his son’s death; it stunned, it benumbed him; but it couldn’t change him. It was an event, like any other, and it had to happen as much as his being born. It was forecast from the beginning of time, and was as entirely an effect of his coming into the world—”

“Basil! Basil!” cried his wife. “This is fatalism!”

“Then you think,” he said, “that a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of God?” and he laughed provokingly. But he went on more soberly: “I don’t know what it all means Isabel though I believe it means good. What did Christ himself say? That if one rose from the dead it would not avail. And yet we are always looking for the miraculous! I believe that unhappy old man truly grieves for his son, whom he treated cruelly without the final intention of cruelty, for he loved him and wished to be proud of him; but I don’t think his death has changed him, any more than the smallest event in the chain of events remotely working through his nature from the beginning. But why do you think he’s changed at all? Because he offers to sell me ‘Every Other Week’ on easy terms? He says himself that he has no further use for the thing; and he knows perfectly well that he couldn’t get his money out of it now, without an enormous shrinkage. He couldn’t appear at this late day as the owner, and sell it to anybody but Fulkerson and me for a fifth of what it’s cost him. He can sell it to us for all it’s cost him; and four per cent. is no bad interest on his money till we can pay it back. It’s a good thing for us; but we have to ask whether Dryfoos has done us the good, or whether it’s the blessing of Heaven. If it’s merely the blessing of Heaven, I don’t propose being grateful for it.”

March laughed again, and his wife said, “It’s disgusting.”

“It’s business,” he assented. “Business is business; but I don’t say it isn’t disgusting. Lindau had a low opinion of it.”

“I think that with all his faults Mr. Dryfoos is a better man than
Lindau,” she proclaimed.

“Well, he’s certainly able to offer us a better thing in ‘Every Other
Week,’” said March.

She knew he was enamoured of the literary finish of his cynicism, and that at heart he was as humbly and truly grateful as she was for the good-fortune opening to them.

XVII.

Beaton was at his best when he parted for the last time with Alma Leighton, for he saw then that what had happened to him was the necessary consequence of what he had been, if not what he had done. Afterward he lost this clear vision; he began to deny the fact; he drew upon his knowledge of life, and in arguing himself into a different frame of mind he alleged the case of different people who had done and been much worse things than he, and yet no such disagreeable consequence had befallen them. Then he saw that it was all the work of blind chance, and he said to himself that it was this that made him desperate, and willing to call evil his good, and to take his own wherever he could find it. There was a great deal that was literary and factitious and tawdry in the mood in which he went to see Christine Dryfoos, the night when the Marches sat talking their prospects over; and nothing that was decided in his purpose. He knew what the drift of his mind was, but he had always preferred to let chance determine his events, and now since chance had played him such an ill turn with Alma, he left it the whole responsibility. Not in terms, but in effect, this was his thought as he walked on up-town to pay the first of the visits which Dryfoos had practically invited him to resume. He had an insolent satisfaction in having delayed it so long; if he was going back he was going back on his own conditions, and these were to be as hard and humiliating as he could make them. But this intention again was inchoate, floating, the stuff of an intention, rather than intention; an expression of temperament chiefly.

He had been expected before that. Christine had got out of Mela that her father had been at Beaton’s studio; and then she had gone at the old man and got from him every smallest fact of the interview there. She had flung back in his teeth the good-will toward herself with which he had gone to Beaton. She was furious with shame and resentment; she told him he had made bad worse, that he had made a fool of himself to no end; she spared neither his age nor his grief-broken spirit, in which his will could not rise against hers. She filled the house with her rage, screaming it out upon him; but when her fury was once spent, she began to have some hopes from what her father had done. She no longer kept her bed; every evening she dressed herself in the dress Beaton admired the most, and sat up till a certain hour to receive him. She had fixed a day in her own mind before which, if he came, she would forgive him all he had made her suffer: the mortification, the suspense, the despair. Beyond this, she had the purpose of making her father go to Europe; she felt that she could no longer live in America, with the double disgrace that had been put upon her.

Beaton rang, and while the servant was coming the insolent caprice seized him to ask for the young ladies instead of the old man, as he had supposed of course he should do. The maid who answered the bell, in the place of the reluctant Irishman of other days, had all his hesitation in admitting that the young ladies were at home.

He found Mela in the drawing-room. At sight of him she looked scared; but she seemed to be reassured by his calm. He asked if he was not to have the pleasure of seeing Miss Dryfoos, too; and Mela said she reckoned the girl had gone up-stairs to tell her. Mela was in black, and Beaton noted how well the solid sable became her rich red-blonde beauty; he wondered what the effect would be with Christine.

But she, when she appeared, was not in mourning. He fancied that she wore the lustrous black silk, with the breadths of white Venetian lace about the neck which he had praised, because he praised it. Her cheeks burned with a Jacqueminot crimson; what should be white in her face was chalky white. She carried a plumed ostrich fan, black and soft, and after giving him her hand, sat down and waved it to and fro slowly, as he remembered her doing the night they first met. She had no ideas, except such as related intimately to herself, and she had no gabble, like Mela; and she let him talk. It was past the day when she promised herself she would forgive him; but as he talked on she felt all her passion for him revive, and the conflict of desires, the desire to hate, the desire to love, made a dizzying whirl in her brain. She looked at him, half doubting whether he was really there or not. He had never looked so handsome, with his dreamy eyes floating under his heavy overhanging hair, and his pointed brown beard defined against his lustrous shirtfront. His mellowly modulated, mysterious voice lulled her; when Mela made an errand out of the room, and Beaton crossed to her and sat down by her, she shivered.

“Are you cold?” he asked, and she felt the cruel mockery and exultant consciousness of power in his tone, as perhaps a wild thing feels captivity in the voice of its keeper. But now, she said she would still forgive him if he asked her.

Mela came back, and the talk fell again to the former level; but Beaton had not said anything that really meant what she wished, and she saw that he intended to say nothing. Her heart began to burn like a fire in her breast.

“You been tellun’ him about our goun’ to Europe?” Mela asked.

“No,” said Christine, briefly, and looking at the fan spread out on her lap.

Beaton asked when; and then he rose, and said if it was so soon, he supposed he should not see them again, unless he saw them in Paris; he might very likely run over during the summer. He said to himself that he had given it a fair trial with Christine, and he could not make it go.

Christine rose, with a kind of gasp; and mechanically followed him to the door of the drawing-room; Mela came, too; and while he was putting on his overcoat, she gurgled and bubbled in good-humor with all the world. Christine stood looking at him, and thinking how still handsomer he was in his overcoat; and that fire burned fiercer in her. She felt him more than life to her and knew him lost, and the frenzy, that makes a woman kill the man she loves, or fling vitriol to destroy the beauty she cannot have for all hers, possessed her lawless soul. He gave his hand to Mela, and said, in his wind-harp stop, “Good-bye.”

As he put out his hand to Christine, she pushed it aside with a scream of rage; she flashed at him, and with both hands made a feline pass at the face he bent toward her. He sprang back, and after an instant of stupefaction he pulled open the door behind him and ran out into the street.

“Well, Christine Dryfoos!” said Mela, “Sprang at him like a wild-cat!”

“I don’t care,” Christine shrieked. “I’ll tear his eyes out!” She flew up-stairs to her own room, and left the burden of the explanation to Mela, who did it justice.

Beaton found himself, he did not know how, in his studio, reeking with perspiration and breathless. He must almost have run. He struck a match with a shaking hand, and looked at his face in the glass. He expected to see the bleeding marks of her nails on his cheeks, but he could see nothing. He grovelled inwardly; it was all so low and coarse and vulgar; it was all so just and apt to his deserts.

There was a pistol among the dusty bric-a-brac on the mantel which he had kept loaded to fire at a cat in the area. He took it and sat looking into the muzzle, wishing it might go off by accident and kill him. It slipped through his hand and struck the floor, and there was a report; he sprang into the air, feeling that he had been shot. But he found himself still alive, with only a burning line along his cheek, such as one of Christine’s finger-nails might have left.

He laughed with cynical recognition of the fact that he had got his punishment in the right way, and that his case was not to be dignified into tragedy.

XVIII.

The Marches, with Fulkerson, went to see the Dryfooses off on the French steamer. There was no longer any business obligation on them to be civil, and there was greater kindness for that reason in the attention they offered. ‘Every Other Week’ had been made over to the joint ownership of March and Fulkerson, and the details arranged with a hardness on Dryfoos’s side which certainly left Mrs. March with a sense of his incomplete regeneration. Yet when she saw him there on the steamer, she pitied him; he looked wearied and bewildered; even his wife, with her twitching head, and her prophecies of evil, croaked hoarsely out, while she clung to Mrs. March’s hand where they sat together till the leave-takers were ordered ashore, was less pathetic. Mela was looking after both of them, and trying to cheer them in a joyful excitement. “I tell ’em it’s goun’ to add ten years to both their lives,” she said. “The voyage ‘ll do their healths good; and then, we’re gittun’ away from that miser’ble pack o’ servants that was eatun’ us up, there in New York. I hate the place!” she said, as if they had already left it. “Yes, Mrs. Mandel’s goun’, too,” she added, following the direction of Mrs. March’s eyes where they noted Mrs. Mandel, speaking to Christine on the other side of the cabin. “Her and Christine had a kind of a spat, and she was goun’ to leave, but here only the other day, Christine offered to make it up with her, and now they’re as thick as thieves. Well, I reckon we couldn’t very well ‘a’ got along without her. She’s about the only one that speaks French in this family.”

Mrs. March’s eyes still dwelt upon Christine’s face; it was full of a furtive wildness. She seemed to be keeping a watch to prevent herself from looking as if she were looking for some one. “Do you know,” Mrs. March said to her husband as they jingled along homeward in the Christopher Street bob-tail car, “I thought she was in love with that detestable Mr. Beaton of yours at one time; and that he was amusing himself with her.”

“I can bear a good deal, Isabel,” said March, “but I wish you wouldn’t attribute Beaton to me. He’s the invention of that Mr. Fulkerson of yours.”

“Well, at any rate, I hope, now, you’ll both get rid of him, in the reforms you’re going to carry out.”

These reforms were for a greater economy in the management of ‘Every Other Week;’ but in their very nature they could not include the suppression of Beaton. He had always shown himself capable and loyal to the interests of the magazine, and both the new owners were glad to keep him. He was glad to stay, though he made a gruff pretence of indifference, when they came to look over the new arrangement with him. In his heart he knew that he was a fraud; but at least he could say to himself with truth that he had not now the shame of taking Dryfoos’s money.

March and Fulkerson retrenched at several points where it had seemed indispensable to spend, as long as they were not spending their own: that was only human. Fulkerson absorbed Conrad’s department into his, and March found that he could dispense with Kendricks in the place of assistant which he had lately filled since Fulkerson had decided that March was overworked. They reduced the number of illustrated articles, and they systematized the payment of contributors strictly according to the sales of each number, on their original plan of co-operation: they had got to paying rather lavishly for material without reference to the sales.

Fulkerson took a little time to get married, and went on his wedding journey out to Niagara, and down the St. Lawrence to Quebec over the line of travel that the Marches had taken on their wedding journey. He had the pleasure of going from Montreal to Quebec on the same boat on which he first met March.

They have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners. At first Mrs. March did not like Mrs. Fulkerson’s speaking of her husband as the Ownah, and March as the Edito’; but it appeared that this was only a convenient method of recognizing the predominant quality in each, and was meant neither to affirm nor to deny anything. Colonel Woodburn offered as his contribution to the celebration of the copartnership, which Fulkerson could not be prevented from dedicating with a little dinner, the story of Fulkerson’s magnanimous behavior in regard to Dryfoos at that crucial moment when it was a question whether he should give up Dryfoos or give up March. Fulkerson winced at it; but Mrs. March told her husband that now, whatever happened, she should never have any misgivings of Fulkerson again; and she asked him if he did not think he ought to apologize to him for the doubts with which he had once inspired her. March said that he did not think so.

The Fulkersons spent the summer at a seaside hotel in easy reach of the city; but they returned early to Mrs. Leighton’s, with whom they are to board till spring, when they are going to fit up Fulkerson’s bachelor apartment for housekeeping. Mrs. March, with her Boston scruple, thinks it will be odd, living over the ‘Every Other Week’ offices; but there will be a separate street entrance to the apartment; and besides, in New York you may do anything.

The future of the Leightons promises no immediate change. Kendricks goes there a good deal to see the Fulkersons, and Mrs. Fulkerson says he comes to see Alma. He has seemed taken with her ever since he first met her at Dryfoos’s, the day of Lindau’s funeral, and though Fulkerson objects to dating a fancy of that kind from an occasion of that kind, he justly argues with March that there can be no harm in it, and that we are liable to be struck by lightning any time. In the mean while there is no proof that Alma returns Kendricks’s interest, if he feels any. She has got a little bit of color into the fall exhibition; but the fall exhibition is never so good as the spring exhibition. Wetmore is rather sorry she has succeeded in this, though he promoted her success. He says her real hope is in black and white, and it is a pity for her to lose sight of her original aim of drawing for illustration.

News has come from Paris of the engagement of Christine Dryfoos. There the Dryfooses met with the success denied them in New York; many American plutocrats must await their apotheosis in Europe, where society has them, as it were, in a translation. Shortly after their arrival they were celebrated in the newspapers as the first millionaire American family of natural-gas extraction who had arrived in the capital of civilization; and at a French watering-place Christine encountered her fate — a nobleman full of present debts and of duels in the past. Fulkerson says the old man can manage the debtor, and Christine can look out for the duellist. “They say those fellows generally whip their wives. He’d better not try it with Christine, I reckon, unless he’s practised with a panther.”

One day, shortly after their return to town in the autumn from the brief summer outing they permitted themselves, the Marches met Margaret Vance. At first they did not know her in the dress of the sisterhood which she wore; but she smiled joyfully, almost gayly, on seeing them, and though she hurried by with the sister who accompanied her, and did not stay to speak, they felt that the peace that passeth understanding had looked at them from her eyes.

“Well, she is at rest, there can’t be any doubt of that,” he said, as he glanced round at the drifting black robe which followed her free, nun-like walk.

“Yes, now she can do all the good she likes,” sighed his wife. “I wonder — I wonder if she ever told his father about her talk with poor Conrad that day he was shot?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care. In any event, it would be right. She did nothing wrong. If she unwittingly sent him to his death, she sent him to die for God’s sake, for man’s sake.”

“Yes — yes. But still—”

“Well, we must trust that look of hers.”

THE SHADOW OF A DREAM

CONTENTS

Part First. Faulkner

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Part Second. Hermia

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

Part Third. Nevil

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

Part First. Faulkner

I

DOUGLAS FAULKNER was of a type once commoner in the West than now, I fancy. In fact, many of the circumstances that tended to shape such a character, with the conditions that repressed and the conditions that evolved it, have changed so vastly that they may almost be said not to exist any longer.

He was a lawyer, with a high ideal of professional honor, and in his personal relations he was known to be almost fantastically delicate, generous, and faithful. At the same time he was a “practical” politician; he adhered to his party in all its measures; he rose rapidly to be a leader in it, and was an unscrupulous manager of caucuses and conventions. For a while he was editor of the party organ in his city, and he wrote caustic articles for it which were rather in the line of his political than his personal morality. This employment was supposed to be more congenial. than his profession to the literary taste for which he had a large repute among his more unliterary acquaintance. They said that Faulkner could have been an author if he had chosen, and they implied that this was not worth while with a man who could be something in law and politics. Their belief had followed him from Muskingum University, where he was graduated with distinction in letters and forensics. The school was not then on so grand a scale as its name, and a little of the humanities might have gone a long way in it; but Faulkner was really a lover of books, and a reader of them, whether he could ever have been a writer of them or not; and he kept up his habit of reading after he entered active life.

It was during his editorial phase that I came from the country to be a writer on the opposition newspaper in his city, and something I did caught his fancy: some sketch of the sort I was always trying at, or some pert criticism, or some flippant satire of his party friends. He came to see me, and asked me to his house, for a talk, he said, about literature; and when I went I chose to find him not very modern in his preferences. He wanted to talk to me about Byron and Shelley, Scott and Cooper, Lamartine and Schiller, Irving and Goldsmith, when I was full of Tennyson and Heine, Emerson and Lowell, George Eliot and Hawthorne and Thackeray; and he rather bored me, showing me fine editions of his favorites. I was surprised to learn that he was only a few years older than myself: he had filled my mind so long as a politician that I had supposed him a veteran of thirty, at least, and he proved to be not more than twenty-six. Still, as I was only twenty-two I paid him the homage of a younger man, but I remember deciding that he was something of a sentimentalist. He seemed anxious to account for himself in his public character, so out of keeping with the other lives he led; he said he was sorry that his mother (with whom he lived in her widowhood) was out of town; she was the inspiration of all his love of literature, he said; and would have been so glad to see me. I was flattered, for the Faulkners were of the first social importance; they were of Virginian extraction. From his library he took me into what he called his den, and introduced me to a friend of his who sat smoking in a corner, and whom I saw to be a tall young Episcopal clergyman when he stood up. The night was very hot; Faulkner had in some claret punch, and the Rev. Mr. Nevil drank with us. He did not talk much, and I perceived that he was the matter-of-fact partner in a friendship which was very romantic on Faulkner’s side, and which appeared to date back to their college days. That was now a good while ago, but they seemed to be in the habit of meeting often, and to have kept up their friendship in all its first fervor. Mr. Nevil was very handsome, with a regular face, and a bloom on it quite girlishly peachy, and very pure, still, earnest blue eyes. He looked physically and spiritually wholesome; but Faulkner certainly did not look wholesome in the matter of his complexion at least. It was pale, with a sort of smokiness, and his black, straight hair strung down in points over his forehead; his beautiful dark eyes were restlessly brilliant; he stooped a little, and he was, as they say in the West, loose-hung. I noticed his hands, long, nervous, with fingers that trembled, as he rested their tips, a little yellowed from his cigar, on a book.

It was a volume of De Quincey, on whom we all came together in literature, and we happened to talk especially of his essay on Kant, and of the dreams which afflicted the philosopher’s old age, and which no doubt De Quincey picturesquely makes the most of. Then we began to tell our own dreams, the ghastlier ones; and Faulkner said he sometimes had dreams, humiliating, disgraceful, loathsome, that followed him far into the next day with a sense of actual occurrence. He was very vivid about them, and in spite of the want of modernity in his literary preferences, I began to think he might really have been a writer. He said that sometimes he did not see why we should not attribute such dreams to the Evil One, who might have easier access to a man in the helplessness of sleep; but Nevil agreed with me that they were more likely to come from a late supper. Faulkner submitted, but he said they were a real affliction, and their persistence in a man’s waking thoughts might almost influence his life.

When I took my leave he followed me to his gate, in his bare head and slippers; it was moonlight, and he walked a long way homeward with me. We led a very simple life in our little city then, and a man might go bareheaded and slipper-footed about its streets at night as much as he liked. Now and then we met a policeman, and Faulkner nodded, with the facile “Ah, Tommy!” or “Hello, Mike!” of a man inside politics. I told him I envied him his ability to mingle with the people in that way, and he said it was not worth while.

“You are on the right track, and I hope you’ll stick to it. We ought to have some Western authors; the West’s ripe for it. I used to have the conceit to think I could have done something myself in literature, if I’d kept on after I left college.”

I murmured some civilities to the effect that this was what all his friends thought.

“Well, it’s too late, now,” he said, “if ever it was early enough. I was foredoomed to the law; my father wouldn’t hear of anything else, and I don’t know that I blame him. I might have made a spoon, but I should certainly have spoiled a horn. A man generally does what he’s fit for. Now there’s Nevil — Don’t you like Nevil?”

I said, “Very much,” though really I had not thought it very seemly for a clergyman to smoke, and drink claret punch: I was very severe in those days.

Faulkner went on: “Nevil’s an instance, a perfect case in point. If ever there was a human creature born into the world to do just the work he is doing, it’s Nevil. I can’t tell you how much that fellow has been to me, March!” This was the second time we had met; but Faulkner was already on terms of comradery with me; he was the kind of man who could hold no middle course; he must stand haughtily aloof, or he must take you to his heart. As he spoke, he put his long arm across my shoulders, and kept it there while we walked. “I was inclined to be pretty wild in college, and I had got to running very free when I first stumbled against Jim Nevil. He was standing up as tall and straight morally as he does physically, but he managed to meet me on my own level without seeming to stoop to it. He was ordained of God, then, and his life had a message for every one; for me it seemed to have a special message, and what he did for me was what he lived more than what he said. He talked to me, of course, but it was his example that saved me. You must know Nevil. Yes, he’s a noble fellow, and you can’t have any true conception of friendship till you have known him. Just see that moon!” Faulkner stopped abruptly, and threw up his head.

The perfect orb seemed to swim in the perfect blue. The words began to breathe themselves from my lips:

“‘The moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare;’”

and he responded as if it were the strain of a litany:

“‘Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;’”

and I spoke:

“‘The sunshine is a glorious birth;’”

and he responded again:

“‘But yet I know, where’er I go,
That there hath passed a glory from the earth.’”

His voice broke in the last line and faded into a tremulous whisper. It was the youth in both of us, smitten to ecstasy by the beauty of the scene, and pouring itself out in the modulations of that divine stop, as if it had been the rapture of one soul.

He took his arm from my shoulders, and turned about without any ceremony of adieu, and walked away, head down, with shuffling, slippered feet.

We met several times, very pleasantly, and with increased liking. Then he took offence, as capricious as his former fancy, at something I wrote, and sent me an angry note, which I answered in kind. Not long afterward I went abroad on a little money I had saved up, and when I came home, I married, and by an ironical chance, found myself; with my aesthetic tastes, my literary ambition, and my journalistic experience, settled in the insurance business at Boston. I did not revisit the West, but I learned by letters that our dear little city out there had become a formidable railroad centre; everybody had made or lost money, and Faulkner had become very rich through the real estate which had long kept him land-poor. One day I got a newspaper addressed in his handwriting, which brought me the news of his marriage. The name of the lady struck me as almost factitiously pretty, and I could well imagine Faulkner provisionally falling in love with her because she was called Hermia Winter. The half-column account of the wedding described the Rev. James Nevil as “officiating”; and something in the noisy and bragging tone of the reporter in dealing with this important society event disadvantaged the people concerned in my mind. I chose to regard it all as cruder and louder than anything I remembered of the place in old days; but my wife said that it was characteristically Western, and that probably it had always been like that out there; only I had not felt it while I was in it, though, as she said, I was not of it.

She was a Bostonian herself; and it was useless to appeal to the society journalism of her own city in proof of the prevalence of that sort of vulgarity everywhere. She laughed at the name Hermia, and said it sounded made-up, and that she had no doubt the girl’s name was Hannah. I thought I had my revenge afterward when a friend wrote me about the marriage, which was a surprise to everybody; for it had always been supposed that Faulkner was going to marry the beautiful and brilliant Miss Ludlow, long, perhaps too long, the belle of the place. The lady whom he had chosen was the daughter of a New England family, who had lived just out of town in my time and had never been in society. She was a teacher in Bell’s Institute, and Faulkner met her there on one of his business visits as trustee. She was a very cultivated girl, though; and they were going abroad for their wedding-journey. My correspondent had a special message from Faulkner for me, delivered on his wedding night. He remembered me among the people he would have liked to have there; he was sorry for our little quarrel and was to blame for it; he was coming home by way of Boston, and was going to look me up.

My wife said, Well, he seemed a nice fellow; but it only showed how any sort of New England girl could go out there and pick up the best. For the rest, she hoped they would not hurry home on my account; and if all my Western friends, with their free ideas of hospitality, were going to call on me, there would be no end to it. It was the jealousy of her husband’s past every good wife feels that spoke; but long before I met Faulkner again we had both forgotten all about him.

II

ONE DAY seven or eight years later, when I was coming up from Lynn, where we had board for a few weeks’ outing in August, I fell in with Dr. Wingate, the nervous specialist. We were members of the same dining club, and were supposed to meet every month; we really met once or twice during the winter, but then it was a great pleasure to me, and I tried always to get a place next him at table. I found in him, as I think one finds in most intelligent physicians, a sympathy for human suffering unclouded by sentiment, and a knowledge of human nature at once vast and accurate, which fascinated me far more than any forays of the imagination in that difficult region. Like physicians everywhere, he was less local in his feelings and interests than men of other professions; and I was able better to overcome with him that sense of being a foreigner, and in some sort on sufferance, which embarrassed me (quite needlessly, I dare say) with some of my commensals: lawyers, ministers, brokers, and politicians. I had a sort of affection for him; I never saw him, with the sunny, simple-hearted, boyish smile he had, without feeling glad; and it seemed to me that he liked me, too. His kindly presence must have gone a long way with his patients, whose fluttering sensibilities would hang upon his cheery strength as upon one of the main chances of life.

We rather rushed together to shake hands, and each asked how the other happened to be there at that hour in the morning. I explained my presence, and he said, as if it were some sort of coincidence: “You don’t say so! Why, I’ve got a patient over at Swampscott, who says he knows you. A man named Faulkner.”

I repeated, “Faulkner?” In the course of travel and business I had met so many people that I forgave myself for not distinguishing them very sharply by name, at once.

“He says he used to know you in your demi-semi-literary days, and he rather seemed to think you must be concealing a reputation for a poet, when I told him you were in the insurance business, and I only knew of your literary tastes. He’s a Western man, and he met you out there.”

“Oh!” said I. “Douglas Faulkner!” And now it was my turn to say, “You don’t say so! Why of course! Is it possible!” and I lost myself in a cloud of silent reminiscences and associations, to come out presently with the question, “What in the world is he doing at Swampscott?”

The doctor looked serious; and then he looked keenly at me. “Were you and he great friends?”

“Well, we were not sworn brothers exactly. We were writers on rival newspapers; but I rather liked him. Yes, there was something charming to me about him; something good and sweet. I haven’t met him, though, for ten years.”

“He seemed to be rather fond of you. He said he wished I would tell you to come and see him, the next time I met you. Odd you should turn up there in the station!” By this time we were in the train, on our way to Boston.

“I will,” I said, and I hesitated to add, “I hope there’s nothing serious the matter?”

The doctor hesitated too. “Well, he’s a pretty sick man. There’s no reason I shouldn’t tell you. He’s badly run down; and — I don’t like the way his heart behaves.”

“Oh, I’m sorry—”

“He had just got home from Europe, and was on his way to the mountains when he came to see me in Boston, and I sent him to the sea-side. I came down last night — it’s the beginning of my vacation — to see him, and spent the night there. He’s got the Mallows place — nice old place. Do you know his wife?”

“No; he married after I came East. What sort of person is she?” I asked.

I remembered my talk with my wife about her and her name, and I felt that it was really a triumph for me when the doctor said: “Well, she’s an exquisite creature. One of the most beautiful women I ever saw, and one of the most interesting. Of course, there’s where the ache comes in. In a case like that, it isn’t so much that one dies as that the other lives. It’s none of my business; but she seemed rather lonely. They have no acquaintance among the other cottagers, and — did you think of taking your wife over? Excuse me!”

“Why of course! I’m so glad you suggested it. Mrs. March will be most happy to go with me.”

III

MRS. MARCH dissembled her joy at the prospect when I opened it to her. She said she did not see how she entered into the affair. Faulkner was an old friend of mine; but she had nothing to do with him, and certainly nothing to do with his wife. They would not like each other; it would look patronizing; it would complicate matters; she did not see what good it would do for her to go. I constantly fell back upon the doctor’s suggestion. In the end, she went. She professed to be governed entirely by Dr. Wingate’s opinion of our duty in the case; I acknowledged a good deal of curiosity as well as some humanity, and I boldly proposed to gratify both. But in fact I felt rather ashamed of my motives when I met Faulkner, and I righted myself in my own regard by instantly shifting my visit to the ground of friendly civility. He seemed surprised and touched to see me, and he welcomed my wife with that rather decorative politeness which men of Southern extraction use toward women. He was not going to have any of my compassion as an invalid, that was clear; and he put himself on a level with me in the matter of health at once. He said it was very good of Dr. Wingate to send me so soon, and I was very good to come; he was rather expecting the doctor himself in the afternoon; he had been out of kilter for two or three years; but he was getting all right now. I knew he did not believe this, but I made believe not to know it, and I even said, when he asked me how I was, that I was so-so; and I left him to infer that everybody was out of kilter, and perhaps just in his own way.

“Well, let us go up to the house,” he said, as if this gave him a pleasure, “and find Mrs. Faulkner. You never met my wife, March? Her people used to live just outside the city line, on Pawpaw Creek. They were of New England origin,” he added to my wife; “but I don’t know whether you’ll find her very much of a Yankee. She has passed most of her life in the West. She will be very glad to see you; we have no acquaintances about here. Your Eastern people don’t catch on to the homeless stranger quite so quickly as we do in the West. I dare say they don’t let go so easily, either.”

We had found Faulkner at the gate of his avenue, and we began to walk with him at once toward his cottage, under the arches of the sea-beaten, somewhat wizened elms, which all slanted landward, with a writhing fling of their gray and yellow lichened boughs. It was a delicious morning, and the cool sunshine dripped in through the thin leaves, here and there blighted at the edge and faded, and seemed to lie in pools in the road. The fine air was fresh, and brought from a distance apparently greater than it really came the plunge of the surf against the rocks, and the crash of the rollers along the beach. The ground fell away in a wide stretch of neglected lawn toward the water; and the autumnal dandelions lifted their stars on their tall slender stems from the long grass, which was full of late summer glint and sheen, and blowing with a delicate sway and tilt of its blades in the breeze that tossed the elms.

“What a lovely place!” sighed my wife.

“You haven’t begun to see it,” said Faulkner. “We’ve got twenty acres of land here, and all the sea and sky there are. Mrs. Faulkner will want to show you the whole affair. Did you walk up from the station? I’ll send for your baggage from the house.”

“That won’t be necessary; I have it on my arm,” said my wife, and she put her little shopping bag in evidence with a gay twirl.

“Why, but you’re going to stay all night?”

“Oh, no, indeed! What would become of our children?”

“We’ll send to Lynn for them.”

“Thank you; it couldn’t be managed. I won’t try to convince you, Mr. Faulkner, but I’m sure your wife will be reasonable,” she said, to forestall the protests which she saw hovering in his eyes.

I noticed that his eyes, once so beautiful, had a dull and suffering look, and the smokiness of his complexion had a kind of livid stain in it. His hair straggled from under his soft felt hat with the unkempt effect I remembered, and his dress had a sort of characteristic slovenliness. He carried a stick, and his expressive hands seemed longer and languider, as if relaxed from a nervous tension borne beyond the strength.

“Well, I’m sorry,” said Faulkner. “But you’re booked for the day, anyway.”

My wife apparently did not think it worth while to dispute this; or perhaps she was waiting to have it out with Mrs. Faulkner. He put up his arm across my shoulders, and gave me a little pull toward him. “It’s mighty pleasant to see you again, old fellow! I can’t tell you how pleasant.”

I was not to be outdone in civilities, and my cordiality in reply retrospectively established our former acquaintance on a ground of intimacy which it had never really occupied. My wife knew this and gave me a look of surprise, which I could see hardening into the resolution not to betray herself at least into insincerities.

“You’ll find another old acquaintance of yours here,” Faulkner went on. “You remember Nevil?”

“Your clerical friend? Yes, indeed! Is he here?” I put as much factitious rapture into my tone as it would hold.

“Yes; we were in Europe together, and he’s spending a month with us here.” Faulkner spoke gloomily, almost sullenly; he added, brightly, “You know I can’t get along without Jim. He was in Europe with us, too, a good deal of the time. Yes, we’ve always been great friends.”

“You remember I told you about Mr. Nevil, my dear,” I explained to my wife.

“Oh, yes,” she said, non-committally.

Faulkner slipped his hand from my shoulder into my arm, and gently stayed my pace a little. I perceived that he was leaning on me; but I made a feint of our being merely affectionate, and slowed my step as unconsciously as I could. He looked up under the downward slanted brim of his hat. “I expected them before this. Nevil went up to the house for my wife, and then we were going down on the rocks.”

He stopped short, and rested heavily against me. I glanced round at his face: it was a lurid red, and, as it were, suffused with pain; his eyes seemed to stand full of tears; his lips were purple, and they quivered.

It was an odious moment: we could not speak or stir; we suffered too, and were cruelly embarrassed, for we felt that we must not explicitly recognize his seizure. In front of us I saw a gentleman and lady who seemed to be under something of our constraint. They were coming as swiftly as possible, without seeming to hurry, and they must have understood the situation, though they could not see his features. Before they reached us, Faulkner’s face relaxed, and began to recover its natural color. He stirred, and I felt him urging me softly forward. By the time we encountered the others, he was able to say, in very much his usual tone, “My dear, this is Mrs. March, and my old friend March, that I’ve told you about. Nevil, you remember March? Let me present you to Mrs. March.”

My astonishment that he could accomplish these introductions was lost in the interest that Mrs. Faulkner at once inspired in my wife, as I could see, equally with myself. She must then have been about thirty, and she had lost her girlish slenderness without having lost her girlish grace. Her figure, tall much above the wont of women, had a mature stateliness, while fitful gleams of her first youth brightened her face, her voice, her manner. There could be no doubt about her refinement, and none about her beauty; the one was as evident as the other. The beauty was of a usual American type; the refinement was from her eyes, which were angelic; deep and faithful and touching. I am sure this was the first impression of my wife as well as myself.

I shook hands with Nevil, whom I found looking not so much older as the past ten years should have made him. His dark golden hair had retreated a little on his forehead, and there were some faint, faint lines down his cheeks and his shaven lips. I saw the look of anxiety he cast furtively at Faulkner; but for that he seemed as young and high-hearted as when we first met. I searched his eyes for the clear goodness which once dwelt in them, and found it, a little saddened, a little sobered, a little more saintly, but all there, still. I cannot tell how my heart went out to him with a tenderness which nothing in his behavior toward me had ever invited. On the few occasions when we met, he had always loyally left me to Faulkner, who made all the advances and offered all the caresses, without winning any such return of affection from me as I now involuntarily felt for Nevil. Of course I looked at my wife to see what she thought of him. I saw that something in her being a woman, which drew her to Mrs. Faulkner, left her indifferent to Nevil.

IV

“HERMIA,” said Faulkner, sounding the canine letter in her name with a Western strength that was full of the charm of old associations for me, “these people have got some children at Lynn, and they can’t stay here overnight because they didn’t bring them. I’m going to send over for them.”

“Oh, I should like to see your children,” she answered to my wife, cordially, yet submissively, as the way of one wise woman is with another concerning her children.

Mrs. March explained how it was in no wise possible to have the children sent for; and how we had only come for a short call. I perceived that all Mrs. Faulkner’s politeness could not keep her mind on what my wife was saying: that she was scanning her husband’s face with devoted intensity. The same absence showed itself in Nevil’s manner. Of course they were both terribly anxious; I could understand that from what I had already seen of Faulkner’s case; and in his interest they were both trying to hide their anxiety. Of course, too, he knew it on his part, and he tried to ignore their efforts at concealment. We were all playing at the futile and heart-breaking comedy which humanity obliges us to keep up with a dying man, and in which he must bear his part with the rest. We began to be even gay. Faulkner insisted again that we were good for the whole day; his wife joined him; he appealed to Nevil to put it to Mrs. March as a duty (that would fetch any New England woman, he said), and we consented to stay over lunch, in a burlesque of being kept prisoners. While this went on, I could not help noticing the quality of the look which Faulkner turned upon his wife and Nevil when he spoke to either: a sort of deadliness passing into a piteous appeal. It was very curious.

He asked if we should go down on the rocks, or up to the house, and we decided that we had better go to the house, and do the rocks after lunch: the tide was coming in, and the surf would be better and better.

“All right,” he said, and we let Mr. Nevil lead the way with the ladies, while we came at a little distance behind. Faulkner began at once to praise Nevil, for his goodness in staying on with him so long after he had given up to him the whole past year in Europe. I said the proper things in appreciation, and Faulkner went on to say that Nevil had the richest and the poorest parish in our old home now, the most millionaires and the most paupers; and he had made St. Luke’s a refuge and a sanctuary for them all. He said he did not suppose a man had ever been so fortunate as he was in his friendship with Nevil. At first his wife had been jealous of it, but now she had got used to it; and though he did not suppose she would ever quite forgive Nevil for having been his friend before her time, she tolerated him. I said I understood how that sort of thing was; and he added that there was also the religious difference: Mrs. Faulkner’s people were Unitarians, and she was strenuous in their faith, where he never allowed her to be molested. We got to talking about the old times in the West, and the people whom we had known in common, and how the city had grown, and how I would hardly know where I was if I were dropped down in it. But he kept returning to Nevil and to his wife, and I became rather tired of them.

The cottage, when we reached it, afforded a relief by its extremely remarkable prettiness. Though it was so near the sea, it was almost hidden in trees, and as Faulkner said, if you did not purposely look out to the water, you could easily imagine yourself in the depths of the country. As we sat on the veranda that shaded three sides of the house, he named the different points on the coast, with the curious accuracy which some people like to achieve in particulars wholly unimportant to other people. I suppose he had amused the sad leisure of his sickness in verifying the geography, and I tried to be interested in it, though I was so much more interested in him. He sat deeply sunken in a low Japanese arm-chair of rushes, with his long lean legs one crossed on the other, and fondling the crook of his stick with his thin right hand, while he looked out to seaward under the brim of his hat pulled down to his eyes. Nevil went directly to his room when we reached the cottage, and after a little while Mrs. Faulkner took my wife away to show her the house, which was vast and extravagantly furnished for a summer cottage. “It had gone unlet until very late in the season,” Faulkner said, “and you’ve no idea how cheap we got it. I suppose it’s a little out of society, off here on this point; you see it’s quite alone; but as we’re out of society too, it just suits us.”

He looked after his wife as she left the veranda with Mrs. March, and I fancied in his glance at her buoyant, strenuous grace and her beauty of perfect health, something of the despair with which a sick man must feel the whole world slipping from his hold, too weak to close upon the most precious possession and keep it for his helplessness even while he stays.

The ladies were gone a good while, and he rambled on incessantly as if to keep me from thinking about his condition; or at least I fancied this, because I could not help thinking of it. Just as they returned, he was asking me, “Do you remember our talking that night about Kant’s dreams, and—” He stopped, and called out to my wife, “Well, don’t you think we are in luck?”

“Luck doesn’t express it, Mr. Faulkner. You’re in clover, knee-deep. I didn’t imagine there was such a place, anywhere.”

“After lunch we must show you our old garden, as well as the rocks,” said Faulkner. “At present I don’t see how we could do better than stay where we are.”

I thought he was going to recur to the subject he had dropped at sight of the returning ladies, but he did not. He asked my wife if Mrs. Faulkner had shown her the copy they had made of Murillo’s Madonna, and he talked about its qualities with an authoritative ignorance of art which I should have found amusing in different circumstances. He had made a complete collection of all the engravings of this Madonna, and of all the sentimental Madonnas of the Parmesan school. He considered them very spiritual, and said he would show them to us, some time; he always carried them about with him; but he wanted to keep something to tempt us back another day. He asked her if she cared for rare editions, and said he wished he had his large paper copies with him. He told her I would remember them, and I pretended that I did. I do not think Faulkner had read much since I saw him. He talked about Bulwer and Dickens and Cherbuliez and Octave Feuillet as if they were modern. But nobody came up to Victor Hugo. Of course we had both read Les Miserables? Mrs. Faulkner, he said, was crazy about a Russian fellow: Tourguénief Had we read him, and could we make anything out of him? Faulkner could not, for his part. Were we ever going to have any great poets again? Byron was the last that you could really call great.

His wife listened in a watchful abeyance to see if he needed anything, or felt worse, or was getting tired. From time to time he sent her for some book, or print, or curio that he mentioned, and whenever she came back, he gave her first that deadly look. Afterward, I fancied that he despatched her on these errands to make experiment of how the sight of her would affect him at each return.

The sea stretched a vast shimmer of thin grayish blue under the perfect sky; and the ships moved half sunk on its rim, or seemed buoyantly lifting from it for flight in the nearer distance. The colors were those of an aquarelle, washes of this tint and that, bodyless and impalpable, and they were attenuated to the last thinness in the long yellow curve of beach, and the break of the shallow rollers upon it. Faulkner said they never got tired of looking; there was one effect on the wide wet beach, which he wished we could see, when people were riding toward you, and seemed to be walking on some kind of extraordinary stilts.

Mr. Nevil came down, and then Mrs. Faulkner said it must be near lunch-time, and asked my wife and me if we would not like to go to our room first.

V

AS SOON AS the door closed upon us, my wife broke out: “Well, my dear! it’s just as I imagined. What a tiresome creature! And how ignorant and arrogant! Is that what you call a cultivated person in the West?”

“Well, I don’t think I shall quite hold myself responsible for Faulkner; I’ll own he hasn’t improved since I saw him last. But I always told you he was a sentimentalist.”

“Sentimentalist! He’s one sop of sentiment; and as conventional! Second-rate and second-hand! Why my dear! Could you ever have thought there was anything to that man?”

“Well, certainly more than I do at present. But I don’t recollect that I ever boasted him Apollo and the nine Muses all boiled down into one.”

She did not relent. “Why, compared with him, that Mr. Nevil is a burning and a shining light.”

“Nevil has certainly gathered brilliancy somehow,” I admitted.

“It’s quite like such a man as Faulkner to want a three-cornered household. I think the man who can’t give up his intimate friends after he’s married, is always a kind of weakling. He has no right to them; it’s a tacit reflection on his wife’s heart and mind.”

“Yes, I think you’re quite right, there,” I said, waiting for her to put the restorative touches to the bang which the sea-breeze had made a little too limp for social purposes; and we went over together the list of households we knew in which the husband supplemented himself with a familiar friend. We agreed that it was the innocence of our life that made it so common, but we said all the same that it was undignified and silly and mischievous. It kept the husband and wife apart, and kept them from the absolutely free exchange of tendernesses at any and every moment, and forbade them the equally wholesome immediate expression of resentments, or else gave their quarrels a witness whom they could not look at without remembering that they had quarrelled in his presence. We made allowance for the difference in the case of Nevil and the Faulkners; there was now at least a real reason for his being with them; they would have been singularly lonely and helpless without him.

“They have no children!” said my wife. “That says it all. They are really not a family. Oh, dear! I hope it isn’t wicked for us to be so happy in our children, Basil.”

“It’s a sin that I think I can brazen out at the Day of Judgment,” I answered. “What does she say when you have her alone with another woman?”

“Well, there you’ve hit upon the true test, my dear. If a person’s genuine, and not a poseuse, she’s more interesting when you have her alone with another woman, than when you have her with a lot of men. And Mrs. Faulkner stands the test. Yes, she’s a great creature.”

“Why, what did she say?”

“Say? Nothing! You don’t have to say anything. You merely have to be.”

“Oh! That seems rather simple.”

“Stuff! You know what I mean. You’re the true blue, if you don’t begin to fade or change your tone, in the least. If you remain just what you were, and are not anxious to get away. If you have repose, and are unselfish enough to be truly polite. If you make the other woman that you’re alone with feel that she’s just as well worth while as a man. And that can’t be done by saying. Now do you understand?”

“Yes; and it appears difficult.”

“Difficult? It’s next to impossible!”

“And it can all be conveyed by manner?”

“Of course we talked—”

“She must have flattered you enormously.”

“She praised you!”

“Oh!” I said, in admiration of the way my point was turned against me. But I was not satisfied with my wife’s judgment of Faulkner. I could not say it was unjust to the facts before her; but I felt that something was left out of the account: something that she as a woman and an Easterner could not take into the account. We men and we Westerners have a civilization of our own.

She went on to say, “Of course, I couldn’t be with her for a quarter of an hour, and especially after I had seen what he was, without understanding her marriage. She’s a great deal younger than he is; and she was earning her own living, poor thing, and perhaps Supporting her family—”

“Oh, oh! What jumps!”

“At any rate, she was poor, and they were poor; and she was dazzled by his offer, and might easily have supposed herself in love with him. Her people would be flattered too, if they were not quite up to her, and he was a great swell among you, out there, and rich, and all that. Of course, she simply had to marry him. And then — she outgrew him. With her taste and her sense, it could only be a question of time. I know she was writhing inwardly through all his pretentious, ignorant talk about art and literature; but with her ideal of duty, she would rather die than let anybody see that she didn’t think him the greatest and wisest of human creatures. They have no children; and that might be fatal to any woman that was less noble and heroic than she is. But she’s simply made him her child, since his sickness, and devoted herself to him, and that’s been their salvation. She won’t let herself see any fault in him, or anything offensive or conceited or petty.”

“Did she tell you all this?”

“What an idea! I knew it from the way she kept lugging him in, and relating everything to him. You could see she was simply determined to do it.”

“Oh, then you’ve romanced all this about her! Suppose I begin, now, and romance poor old Faulkner?”

“You’re welcome — if you can make anything out of him.”

“Well, of course, I’m at a disadvantage. In the first place, he isn’t quite so pretty as his wife—”

“No, he isn’t!”

“And his name isn’t Hermia, or Hannah.”

“Oh, it is Hermia!” my wife interrupted. “I’m satisfied of that. But what geese her parents must have been to call her so!”

I ignored the interpolation. “And he hasn’t got a regular two-horse carriage of a walk, nor immortal eyes with starlike sorrows in them; he seems plainer and limper than ever, poor old fellow. Ah, my dear, our miseries don’t embellish our persons very much, whatever they do for our souls; and Faulkner’s good looks—”

My wife had quite finished repairing her disordered bang, and we had abandoned ourselves entirely to controversy. A knock at the door startled us, and it was Mrs. Faulkner’s voice which said outside, “Lunch is ready.”

My wife seized my wrist melodramatically, and almost at the moment of answering, in a sweet, high society tone, “Yes, yes, thank you! We’re quite ready too!” she hissed in my ear, “Basil! Do you suppose she heard you?”

“If she did,” I said, “she must have thought I was praising Faulkner’s beauty.”

VI

THE LUNCH was a proof of Mrs. Faulkner’s native skill as a house-keeper, in all its appointments, and of her experience and observation of certain details of touch and flavor, acclimated and naturalized to the American kitchen from the cuisines of southern Europe. It meant money, but not money alone; it meant sympathy and appreciation and the artistic sense. I could see that my wife ate every morsel with triumph over me: I could feel that without looking at her: and she rendered merit to Mrs. Faulkner for it all, as much as if she had cooked it, created it. In fact I knew that my wife had fallen in love with her: and when you have fallen in love with a married woman you must of course hate her husband, especially if you are another woman.

I thought this reflection rather neat, and I wished that I could have a chance to put it to my wife; but none offered till it was forever too late; none offered at all in effect. After lunch we went that walk they had planned, and this time Faulkner took the two ladies in charge, or rather he fell to them, that he might tacitly be under his wife’s care. I heard him, as I lagged behind with Nevil, devoting himself to Mrs. March with his decorative politeness, and I longed in vain to beg the poor man to spare himself.

Nevil and I spoke irrelevancies till we had dropped back out of ear-shot. Then he asked, “How do you find Faulkner?” and looked at me.

There was no reason why I should not be honest. “Well, I confess he gave me a great shock.”

“When he had that seizure?”

“Yes.”

“But generally speaking?”

“Generally speaking he seems to me a very sick man.”

“You see him at his best,” said Nevil; and he fetched a deep sigh. “This is an exceptionally good day with him.”

“Does he suffer often in that way?”

“Yes, rather often.”

“And is he in danger at such times?”

“The greatest. The chance is that he will not live through such a seizure; he may die at any moment without the seizure. Any little excitement may bring on the paroxysm. I suppose it was seeing you unexpectedly.”

“Of course, I didn’t know we should meet him.”

“Oh, no one was to blame,” said Nevil. “The inevitable can’t be avoided. Somehow it must come.”

We were silent. Then I said, “He seemed to be in great agony.”

“I suppose we can’t imagine such agony.”

“And is there no hope for him?”

“I understand, none at all.”

“And he must go on suffering that way till — It’s horrible! He’d better be dead!” I said, remembering the atrocity of the anguish which Faulkner’s face had betrayed: the livid lips, the suffused eyes, the dumb ache visible in every fibre of his dull, copper-tinted visage.

“Ah!” said Nevil, with another long, quivering sigh. “We mustn’t allow ourselves to say such things, or even to think them. The appeal to death from the most intolerable pain, it’s going from the known to the unknown. Death is in the hands of God, as life is; he giveth and he taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord! Blessed, blessed!” He dropped his head, and lifted it suddenly. “We must say that all the more when we see such hopeless, senseless torment as Faulkner’s. I’ve often tried to think what Christ meant by that cry of his on the cross, ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ It couldn’t have been that he doubted his Father; that’s monstrous. But perhaps in the exquisite torture that he suffered, his weak, bewildered human nature forgot, lost for the dire moment, the reason of pain.”

“And is there any reason for pain?” I asked, sceptically. “Or any except that it frays away the tissues whose tatters are to let the spirit through?”

“I used not to think so, and I used to groan in despair when I could see no other reason for it. What can we say about the pain that does not end in death? Is it wasted, suffered to no end? Shall mortal man be more just than God? Shall man work wisely, usefully, definitely, and God work stupidly, idly, purposelessly? It’s impossible! Our whole being denies it; whatever we see or hear, of waste or aimlessness in the universe, which seems to affirm it, we know to be an illusion: our very nature protests it so. But I could not reason to the reason, and I owe my release to the suggestion of a friend whose experience of suffering had schooled him to clearer and deeper insight than mine. He had perceived, or it had been given him to feel, that no pang we suffer in soul or sense is lost or wasted, but is suffered to the good of some one, or of all. How, we shall some time know; and why. For the present the assurance that it is so is enough for me, and it enables me to be patient with the suffering of a man who is more to me than any brother could be. Sometimes it seems to me the clew to the whole labyrinthine mystery of life and death, of Being and Not-being.”

“It’s a great thought,” I said. “It’s immensely comforting. What does Faulkner think of it? Have you ever suggested it to him?”

I could not tell whether he fancied an edge of irony in my question; but it seemed as if he spiritually withdrew from me a little way, and then disciplined himself and returned. “No,” he said, gently. “Faulkner rejects everything. As he says, he is going it blind. He says it will soon be over with him, and then if he sleeps, it will be well with him, and if he wakes, it can’t be worse with him than it is now; and so he won’t worry about the why or wherefore of anything, since he can’t help it.”

“That doesn’t seem a bad kind of philosophy,” I mused aloud.

“No. Whatever we call such a frame of mind, it’s practically trust in God. And I don’t judge Faulkner, if his resignation is sometimes rather contemptuous in its expression. I wish it were otherwise; but I doubt if he’s always quite master of himself.”

We walked slowly on. Faulkner, I knew, was aware of his condition, and I thought his courage splendid, in view of it. I wondered if his wife knew it as fully as he; probably she did; and when I considered this, I appeared to myself the most trivial of human beings, though I am not so sure now that I was. We are all what the absence, not the presence, of death has made us.

I found myself at a stand-still, and I perceived that Nevil had halted me. “Did it strike you — have you seen anything strange-peculiar — in Faulkner’s manner?”

“No,” I returned. “That is, how do you mean?”

“I’ve sometimes fancied, lately — I’ve been afraid — that his mind was giving way under the stress of his suffering. It’s something that often happens — it’s something that Dr. Wingate has apprehended.”

“Good heavens! That would be too much. I saw no sign of it. He recurred once, just before lunch, to that night when we first met at his house, and had that talk about Kant’s dreams, and De Quincey. I thought he was going to say something; but just then the ladies came back to us, and he began to talk to them.”

Nevil looked at me fixedly. “Very likely I’m mistaken. Perhaps my own mind isn’t standing it very well! But the fear of that additional horror — I assure you that it makes my heart stop when I think of it. I ought to go away. I ought to be at home; I’ve spent the past year in Europe with the Faulkners, as — as their guest — and I have no right to a vacation this summer. There are duties, interests, claims upon me, that I’m neglecting in my proper work; and yet I can’t tear myself away from him — from them.”

We stood facing each other, and Nevil was speaking with the perturbation of an anxiety still suppressed, but now finding vent for the first time, and carrying us deep into an intimacy unwarranted by the casual character of our acquaintance.

I heard my wife’s voice calling, “Come, come!” and I looked up to see both of the ladies waving their handkerchiefs from an open gate where they stood, and beckoning us on.

“Oh, yes,” said Nevil. “That’s the old garden.”

VII

SOME former proprietor had built a paling of slender strips of wood ten or twelve feet high, and set so close together as almost to touch one another; and in this shelter from the salt gales had planted a garden on the southward, seaward slope, which must once have flourished in delicious luxuriance. The paling, weather-beaten a silvery gray, and blotched with lichens, sagged and swayed all out of plumb, with here and there a belvedere trembling upon rotting posts, and reached by broken steps, for the outlook over a tumult of vast rocks to the illimitable welter of the sea. Within the garden close there were old greenhouses and graperies, their roofs sunken in and their glass shattered, where every spring the tall weeds sprang up to the light, and withered in midsummer for want of moisture, and the Black Hamburgs and Sweetwaters set in large clusters whose berries mildewed and burst, and mouldered away in never-riping decay. Broken flower-pots strewed the ground about them, and filled the tangles of the grass; but nature took up the work from art, and continued the old garden in her wilding fashion to an effect of disordered loveliness that was full of poetry sad to heartbreak. Neglected rose-bushes straggled and fell in the high grass, their leaves tattered and skeletoned by slugs and blight; but here and there they still lifted a belated flower. The terraced garden beds were dense with witch-grass, through which the blackberry vines trailed their leaves, already on fire with autumn; young sumach-trees and Balm of Gilead scrub had sprung up in the paths, and about among the abandon and oblivion of former symmetry, stiff borders of box gave out their pungent odor in the sun that shone through clumps of tiger-lilies. The pear-trees in their places had been untouched by the pruning-knife for many a year, but they bore on their knotty and distorted scions, swollen to black lumps, crops of gnarled and misshapen fruit that bowed their branches to the ground; some peach-trees held a few leprous peaches, pale, and spotted with the gum that exuded from their limbs and trunks; over staggering trellises the grape-vines clung, and dangled imperfect bunches of Isabellas and Concords.

“Well, how do you like it?” asked Faulkner, with a sort of pride in our sensation, as if he had invented the place.

“Perfect! Perfect!” cried my wife, absorbing all its sentiment in a long, in-drawn sigh. “Nothing could possibly be better. You can’t believe you’re in America, here!”

He smiled in sympathy, and said, “No; for all practical purposes this is as old as Caesar. That’s what I used to feel, over there. You can hold only just so much antiquity. The ruin of twenty years, if it’s complete in its way, can fill you as full as the ruin of a thousand.”

“Yes, that’s true,” my wife answered, and I saw her eyes begin to light up with liking for a man who could express her feeling so well.

“But to enjoy perfectly a melancholy, a desolation, a crazy charm, a dead and dying beauty like this,” he went on, “one ought to be very young, and prosperous and happy. Then it would exhale all the sweetness of its melancholy, and distil into one’s cup the drop of pathos that gives pleasure its keenest thrill.” His voice broke with a feeling that forbade me to censure his words for magniloquence.

It seemed to make his wife uneasy; perhaps from long, close observation of him she knew how often the spiritual throe runs into the physical pang, and feared for the effect of his mood upon him.

“Shall we go on and show them the rocks from the Point, or from one of the belvederes here?” she asked.

“I don’t care,” he said, wearily; and again I saw that deadliness in the look he gave her. Then he seemed to recollect himself; and added, politely, “I’m afraid of those belvederes; you can’t tell what moment they’re going to give way. Better go out to the Point.”

“Do you think,” she entreated, “you had better walk so far?”

“Well, perhaps March will stay here with me awhile, and we can follow you later. I’m all right; only a little tired.”

I acquiesced, of course, and the ladies, after the usual flutter of civilities, started on. Nevil lingered to ask, “Doug, don’t you think I’d better go back and leave word for the doctor where he’ll find you, if he happens to come before we return to the house?”

“Oh, I’ve arranged all that,” said Faulkner, with a kind of dryness, as it seemed, though it might have been merely a sick man’s impatience; and he did not look up after Nevil as he turned away.

We stood silent a moment, after he left us, and I said, to break the constraint, “How much all this seems like those been-there-before seizures which we used to make so much of when we were young! This garden, this sky, the sea out there, the very feel of the air, are as familiar to me as any most intimate experience of my life, and yet I know it’s all as unreal, as unsubstantial historically, as the shadow of a dream.”

“How horribly,” said Faulkner, as if he had not heard me, “those old flower beds look like graves! I was going to sit down on one of them, but I can’t do it.”

“It would have been pretty damp, anyway; wouldn’t it?” I suggested.

“Perhaps. We can sit in that idiotic arbor, I suppose.”

He nodded at the frail structure on the terrace below where we stood: two sides of trellis meeting in an arch, and canted over like the belvederes; a dead grape-vine hung upon it. I stepped down, and made sure of the benches which faced each other under the arch. “Yes; they’re all right. Nothing could be better;” and Faulkner followed me, and took one of them. After some experiment of its strength, he leaned back in the corner of the arbor, and put his legs up along the seat.

The hoarse plunge and wash of the surf on the rocks below the garden filled the air like the texture of a denser silence; around us the crickets and grasshoppers blent their monotonies with it.

“Why do you call the shadow of a dream unsubstantial?” he demanded.

“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t suppose I meant to say that it was more unsubstantial than other shadows.”

“No. Of course.” He dropped his eyelids, and went on talking with them closed: the effect was curious; perhaps he found he could keep himself calmer in that way. “I began to speak to you a little while ago of the talk we had that night at my house about old Kant’s nightmares.”

“Oh, yes; poor old fellow! It was awful, his being afraid to go to sleep because he was sure to have them. I don’t know but that’s a touch worse than not being able to go to sleep at all. Just imagine: as soon as you drop off to refreshing slumber, as you would otherwise expect, you find you’ve dropped as it were into hell.”

“Yes; that’s it,” said Faulkner. “I wonder if it was the same thing over and over?”

“I don’t remember what De Quincey says about that; and I don’t know whether that would be worse or not. Perhaps, torment for torment, infernal monotony would be more infernal than infernal variety. But there couldn’t be much choice.”

Faulkner did not speak at once. Then he asked, “Did you ever have a recurrent dream?”

“A dream that repeated itself several times the same night? Yes; I’ve waked from a dream — or seemed to wake — and then fallen asleep and dreamed it again; and then waked and slept and dreamed it a third time. I suppose nearly every one has had that experience.”

“I don’t mean that kind of dream,” said Faulkner. “I mean a dream that recurs regularly, once a week or so, with little or no change in its incidents.”

“No, I never had that kind of dream; I don’t know that I ever heard of such a dream. I remember your speaking that night about shameful dreams, that projected a sense of dishonor over half the next day. I’ve had that kind. They’re a great nuisance. And then, if I’ve made free, as one’s appallingly apt to do in such dreams, with persons of my acquaintance, it’s extremely embarrassing to meet them.” Faulkner smiled, and I asked, “Do you find that your dream habit has changed since you were younger?”

“Yes; the dreams are more vivid; but usually I don’t remember them so distinctly. I suppose it’s like life: we experience things with a sharper and fuller consciousness than we once did, but they leave less impression.”

“Yes, yes!” I assented. “I wonder why?”

“Oh, I suppose because the fact is inscribed upon a surface that’s already occupied. We’re all old palimpsests by the time we reach forty. In youth we present a tabula rasa to experience.

“Then I should think we wouldn’t receive impressions with that sharper and fuller consciousness,” I suggested. “And yet I know we do.”

“I don’t understand it either,” said Faulkner.

“There’s one thing I’ve noticed of late years in my own dream habit, which I don’t remember in the past. I go to sleep sometimes — almost always in my afternoon naps — with a perfectly wide-awake knowledge that I’m doing so; and I’m able to pass the bounds with my eyes open, as it were. I can say to myself as I drowse off, ‘This is a dream thought,’ if I find something grotesque floating through my mind, and then, ‘This is a waking thought,’ when there is something logical and matter-of-fact. I come and go, that way, half a dozen times before I lose myself.”

“That is very curious, very interesting,” said Faulkner; and he raised his heavy eyelids for a smiling glance at me, and then let them drop. His face sobered almost to frowning sternness as he went on. “There’s a whole region of experience — half the map of our life — that they tell us must always remain a wilderness, with all its extraordinary phenomena irredeemably savage and senseless. For my part, I don’t believe it. I will put the wisdom of the ancients before the science of the moderns, and I will say with Elihu, ‘In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; then He openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction.’”

“It’s noble poetry,” I said.

“It’s more than that,” said Faulkner. “It’s truth.”

“Perhaps it was in the beginning, when men lived nearer to the origin of life, but I doubt if it’s more than noble poetry now; though that of course is truth in its way.”

Faulkner opened his eyes and let his legs drop to the ground. I saw that my dissent had excited him, and I was sorry; I resolved to agree with him at the first possible moment.

“Why should God be farther from men in our days than He was in Job’s?” he demanded.

“It isn’t that,” I said. “It’s men who are farther from God.”

“Oh! That’s a pretty quibble. But it gives you away, all the same. Do you mean to say that if you had a graphic and circumstantial dream, about something of importance to you — something you intended to do, a journey you intended to take, or an enterprise you were thinking of — and your dream contained a forecast or warning, do you mean to say you wouldn’t be influenced by it?”

“Certainly I should,” I answered; and I couldn’t help adding, “or rather, the ancestral tent-dweller within me would be influenced.”

“Oh!” Faulkner sneered. “God’s neighbor, or the neighbor of God?”

I had made a bad business of trying to agree with him. I braced myself for another effort. “Why, Faulkner, l don’t deny anything. All that I contend for is that we should not throw away ‘the long result of time,’ and return to the bondage of the superstitions that cursed the childhood of the race, that blackened every joy of its youth, and spread a veil of innocent blood between it and the skies. There may be something in dreams; if there is, our thoughts, not our fears, will find it out. I am a coward, like everybody else; perhaps rather more of a coward; but if I had a dream that contained a forecast or a warning of evil, I should feel it my duty in the interest of civilization to defy it; though I don’t say I should be able to do it. On the contrary, I think very likely I should lie down under it, and shudder out some propitiatory aspiration to the offended fetich that was threatening me.”

Faulkner seemed a little placated. “I understand what you mean; and I know the danger of giving way to the nervous tremors that vibrate in us from the horrible old times when, on this very coast, a wretched woman would have been caught up and flung in jail, and hung on the gallows, because some distempered child had dreamed that it saw her with the Black Man in the forest. But I’m not ready to say that a dream, recurring and recurring with the clearest circumstance, and without variation in its details, is idle and meaningless. Who is that Frenchman who wrote about the diseases of personality? Ribot! Well, he tells how people about to be attacked by disease are ‘warned in a dream’ of what is to happen. A man dreams of a mad dog, and wakes up with a malignant ulcer in the spot where he was bitten; dreams of an epileptic, and wakes to have his first fit; dreams of a deaf-mute, and wakes with a palsied tongue. He says that these are intimations of calamity from the recesses of the organism to the nerve centres, which we don’t notice in the hurly-burly of conscious life.”

“Yes, I remember that passage. And I have had one such experience myself;” I said.

“Very well, then,” said Faulkner. “If in the physical, why not in the moral world? If you dream persistently of evil, of perfidy, of treachery, so distinctly and perfectly bodied forth that when you wake the dream seems the reality, and your consciousness the delusion, why should you treat your vision with contempt? Why should not the psychologist respect it as something quite as gravely significant in its way as those dream hints of impending malady which no pathologist would ignore?”

I now perceived that I was in the presence of what was on Faulkner’s mind. I did not know what it was, and I did not expect that he would tell me. I did not wish him to tell me; I fancied that I might help him better, if I did not know just the make and manner of his trouble; and I longed to help him, for I saw that he longed for help. I felt that his logic was false, and I believed that he had entangled himself in it only after many attempts to escape it; but I did not know just which point of it to touch first. I felt him looking at me with imploring challenge, but I did not lift my head till I heard a step in the long, tangled grass, and heard the voice of Dr. Wingate in a cheerful, “Hello! hello! You here, March? Well, that’s good!”

Another step, another voice would have been startling; but these were with us, in a manner, before we heard them, and they brought support and repose with them.

“I’m glad to see you, doctor,” I said, without making ceremony of the greetings which I saw he was disposed to ignore.

He shook hands impartially with Faulkner and with me as if he were no more interested in one than the other; his large, honest, friendly stomach bowed out as he stood a moment wiping the sweat from his forehead, and looking round him. “Isn’t this a nice old place? I never see this garden without a kind of satisfaction in it as one of the things that money can’t buy. There are mighty few of them. But here’s one that only the loss of money can buy. Heigh?”

Wingate sat down, tentatively at first, on the other end of my seat, and faced Faulkner, still without seeming to take any special interest in him.

I repeated, “I’m glad to see you, doctor; and I’m particularly glad to see you in a metaphysical mood, for Faulkner, here, has got me in a corner, and I want you to get me out.”

“Ah? Am I in a metaphysical mood? What’s your corner?” The doctor worked his elbow into the trellis behind him, and then swayed back on it.

“We were talking about dreams,” I said, “and we had got as far as Ribot, and his instances of dreams that prophesy maladies. You know them.”

“Oh, yes. Well?”

“Well, Faulkner says if a man dreams of physical evil, and the dream is prophetic, or worthy of scientific regard, why shouldn’t the dream that forebodes moral evil be considered seriously too; why shouldn’t it be held to be truly prophetic?”

The doctor smiled. “It seems to me you’re pretty easily cornered. I should say that the dream of moral evil should certainly be seriously considered: not as prophetic in the least of what it foreboded, but as prophetic of very grave mental disturbance, — if it persisted. I should be afraid that it was the rehearsal of a mania that was soon to burst out in waking madness. If it persisted,” said the doctor, looking still at me, “and he yielded to it, I should feel anxious for the dreamer’s sanity.”

Faulkner sat with his face twisted away from us, as if the doctor had been looking at him, and he wished to avoid his eye. “I don’t see,” I said, “but what that settles it, Faulkner?”

“Oh, it’s a very good answer in its way,” said Faulkner, still without looking at us. “But it takes no account of the spiritual element in such experiences.”

“No,” said the doctor; “and I should be ashamed of it if it did. As long as we have on this muddy vesture of decay, the less medicine meddles and makes with our immortal part, the better. Of course, I’m not speaking for the Christian Scientists.”

“Then you don’t consider the mind immortal?” demanded Faulkner.

“I don’t consider the brain immortal. And I think I’ve seen the mind in decay.”

We were all silent. I found a comfort in this robust and clear refusal of Wingate’s to dally with any sort of ifs and ands, and to deal only with the facts of experience, which I felt must impart itself in some measure to Faulkner, even through his refusal. At the same time I was a little ashamed of not having myself been able to come to his rescue. The silence prolonged itself; and I began to see that the doctor wished to be alone with his patient, who perhaps was willing to part with me too.

Wingate asked, “Where’s Mrs. Faulkner?” and this gave me my chance to get away with dignity.

“She and my wife are off at the Point, looking at the rocks. I’ll go and tell her you’ve come.”

“Oh, there’s nothing especial. I merely wanted to ask her a few little things. You needn’t hurry her back.”

He left his place beside me, and went over to Faulkner, whose wrist he took between his fingers. He had dropped it, when I looked back, after I left them, and then, with the distinctness that one sense lends another, I partly heard, partly saw him say: “If you don’t, it will not only drive you mad; it will kill you.”

The doctor’s voice came to me in the same key of strenuous, almost angry remonstrance, after I hurried into the lane from the garden, but I could not make out the words any longer.

VIII

I REACHED the cliff that overlooked the rocks, and stood a moment staring out on that image of eternity: the infinite waters, seasonless, changeless, boundless. The tide was still coming in, with that slow, resistless invasion of the land which is like the closing in of death upon the borders of life. In successive plunges, it pounded on the outer reef; and brawled foaming in over the broken granite shore, lifting and tossing the sea-weed of the bowlders, which spread and swayed before it like the hair of drowned Titans, and lunged into the hollow murmuring caverns, to suck back again, and pull down a stretch of gravelly beach, with a long snarl of the pebbles torn from their beds. A mist was coming up from the farther ocean; and the sails on the horizon were melting into it.

I saw my wife down on the rocks near the water, with Nevil; on a height nearer me stood Mrs. Faulkner, fronting seaward, a solitary figure that looked wistful on the peak that lifted and defined her against the curtain of the waters. She was quite motionless, like a statue there. She stirred, and exchanged with those below gesticulations of the gay, meaningless sort which people make one another for no reason in the presence of scenes of natural grandeur. She faced about, and at sight of me began instantly to run toward me. I waved to her not to come, and hurried down the rocks to meet her. But I could not stop her, and she was quite breathless when we reached each other.

“What — what is it?” she gasped.

“Nothing whatever!” I returned. “Doctor Wingate is with Mr. Faulkner, and I’ve profited by the opportunity to come off and admire your rocks. Will you tell me how my wife ever got down there alive, or expects to get back?”

“Does he want me? Did the doctor send for me?”

“Not just at present,” I answered her first question. “He asked for you, but he said there was no occasion for hurry.”

“Oh, then, I’ll go at once,” she said, quite as if I had begged her not to lose a moment.

My wife and Nevil had now caught sight of us together, and started excitedly up the rocks. I waved and beckoned to them in vain; it was a panic. I laughed to see Nevil clamber upward forgetful of my wife, and then, recollecting her, go back, and pull her after him. At one point of his progress he lost his balance, and rolled down to her feet. Mrs. Faulkner laughed hysterically with me, and then began to cry.

“He’s up again — he isn’t hurt!” I shouted. “Good heavens! What an unnecessary excitement! Didn’t you all expect me to come? Did you suppose I could come invisibly?”

“No — no! But we expected Mr. Faulkner with you!”

“Yes, that’s all right. But he preferred to remain with the doctor. I should have staid myself; if I could have imagined the trouble I was going to make.”

“I will run on,” she said. “You can wait for them.”

“Why, there’s no occasion for running.” But she had already started, and was flying down the long slope that rose to the cliff, and I had no choice but to wait, and try to keep the others from following her at the same breakneck speed. I was getting angry, and my temper was not improved when my wife called out as soon as she was within ear-shot, “What is it? What is it? Has anything happened?”

“No! Nothing whatever!”

“Then what made you wave to us? You have almost killed us!”

“I waved, to stop you.”

She did not regard the words. “What is Mrs. Faulkner running so, for?”

“You’d better ask her, if you ever overtake her. Idon’t know. I told her the doctor said she needn’t hurry, and she started off like the wind.”

“Oh my goodness! Is the doctor there?”

“Really, my dear—” I began; but Nevil interposed in time.

“We rather expected him to-day,” he said to my wife.

“Oh, yes! Mr. Faulkner said so,” she recollected. “But of course Mrs. Faulkner is so anxious about her husband that she can t bear to lose a word of what the doctor says to him.”

“Well, that’s something intelligible,” I said, as we moved slowly after her: she was just vanishing into the wilding growth of trees that skirted the old garden. “But you can imagine my astonishment in coming up with a reassuring message, to have it act upon her like a fire-alarm. However, my calming presence seems to have had that effect upon everybody.”

Nevil did not concern himself with my personal grievance. In that tumble of his he must have fallen upon some scene of extinct revelry, for he carried on his back a collection of broken egg-shells, clam-shells, bits of charred drift-wood, burnt seaweed, and other vestiges of a former clam-bake. “Allow me!” I said, and I brushed some of them oft’ as he walked and talked along unheeding.

“No one can imagine,” he said, “the perpetual tension of her anxiety, her incessant devotion.”

“Oh, I can!” said my wife, with a meritorious effect of being one of the true faith as regarded Mrs. Faulkner, and of excluding me tacitly from the communion, which I found much harder to bear than Nevil’s indifference.

“Oh,” I said, coolly, “isn’t it such as any woman would feel in her circumstances?”

My wife gave me a look that I should have deserved, perhaps, if I had blasphemed.

“No one,” said Nevil, “was ever in quite such painful circumstances. If you had seen the strain she is under, as I have, for a whole year, you would understand this.”

“Yes, yes. Of course. It’s as painful as it can be; but it isn’t more painful than the case of many another woman who has seen her husband suffering, and dying by moments under her eyes.” I obeyed a perverse impulse to go on and say, though I felt my wife’s eyes dwelling in horrified reproach upon me, “I don’t mean to depreciate Mrs. Faulkner in any sense, or to question the exquisite poignancy of her trials and her self-sacrifice.”

“But you do!” said my wife. “You do both! You are talking of something you don’t know about. If you did, you couldn’t — or, I hope at least you wouldn’t — talk so.”

Nevil said, with the humane wish to mitigate the effect of her severity, “Mrs. March has divined the peculiarly painful feature in the case. It isn’t a thing we should have ventured to speak of; if we hadn’t somehow seemed to approach it simultaneously.”

“You mean,” I said, “his aversion to her?”

“Yes!” answered Nevil, in astonishment. “Have you — have you noticed it, too?”

“From the first moment I saw them together. But it wasn’t a thing I could make sure of until now. I suppose I was waiting to approach it simultaneously, too.”

Nevil did not heed the little jibe, and my wife noticed it only to contemn it with a look. “And how do you account for it?” he implored. “How can you explain such a terrible thing? That he should have conceived this unkindness, this repulsion for that hapless creature, whose whole existence is centred in her love of him? Ah, you haven’t seen — There have been times — I suppose I am speaking to friends of his who feel exactly as I do about him?”

“Oh, yes, indeed!” cried my wife, as one in authority for both of us.

“There have been times, within the past six months, and especially during the past month, when, if I hadn’t known it was the same man, I could hardly have believed it was Faulkner, in his treatment of her.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t Faulkner,” I suggested.

“You mean that—”

“He isn’t himself. You mentioned it.”

“Yes. I should be glad to believe that, sometimes, dreadful as it is. It’s so much less dreadful than the idea that he could change toward her in this hour of their dire need and mutual helplessness; and should leave her widowed of his love before she is widowed of his life.” Nevil went on: “You couldn’t at all appreciate the situation unless you had known them together from the beginning of their acquaintance, as I have. In fact, I was the means of bringing them together; at least I introduced them to each other. With him it was a case of love at first sight. He was much older than she — ten or twelve years; but I don’t believe anybody had ever struck Faulkner’s fancy before, in spite of all that talk about Miss Ludlow.”

“Oh,” I said, with a smile of reminiscence, “everybody was expected to be in love with Miss Ludlow, and to be rejected by her.”

“I’m sure Faulkner was neither,” said Nevil. “You know his romantic nature. He kept it hidden in his public life, but in all his personal relations he gave it full play. He’s a man who has lived the poetry that another man would have written; and he’s such a great soul that I think it rather pleased him to be that one of the two who must always love the most, in every marriage. To give more love than she gave him, I think he was glad to do that, and that he looked forward to all the future as the field for winning her to a love as perfect as the trust which she had in him. He used to talk with me about it before they were married — you know how boyishly simple-hearted he always was; of course since that, not a syllable. But his victory came sooner than he could have expected. Shortly after their marriage — in fact on their wedding-journey to Europe — she fell very sick, and hovered between life and death for a long time. He made himself her nurse; he wouldn’t allow any one else to come near her; he brought her back to health and the full strength of her youth. I don’t know whether I ought to repeat a conjecture of Dr. Win-gate’s — it’s merely a conjecture, and Mrs. Faulkner of course has never heard the slightest hint of it. But you know Faulkner was always a delicate fellow, with a force that was entirely nervous; and the doctor once said to me that he might have developed the tendency he was born with, by overtasking himself in care of her. The bending over, so much, was bad; the lifting, in that posture; and then, when she left her bed, he used to carry her about in his arms, up and down stairs, and everywhere.”

“Ah!” sighed my wife, “how cruel life is! But how beautiful, how grand!”

“A nature,” I said, without looking at her, “that might impress the casual observer as a mere sop of sentiment, is often capable of that sort of devotion. In fact I suppose that the people we call sentimentalists are merely poets who lack the artistic faculty of expression, and have to live their poetry, as you say, instead of writing it.”

I spoke to Nevil, but he replied to my wife, who cried out, “Oh, I hope she’ll never know it! I hope she’ll die without knowing it!”

“She’s a woman who could bear to know it,” he said, “if any woman ever could. But if she had known it she could not possibly have lived more singly for him than she has done ever since. I don’t know,” he went on in a kind of muse, “whether her devotion was love in the usual way. It has always seemed to me to ignore that, to leave that out of the question; perhaps to take that for granted, as a trivial thing that need hardly be reckoned in the large account. Their not having children, that, too, has kept them, in a way, like a young couple; they have had only each other to dedicate themselves to. I don’t mean that they have not had higher interests, spiritual interests. Faulkner, you know, has always been a faithful churchman, and Mrs. Faulkner, in her way — it may be your way, too—”

“We are Unitarians,” said my wife, firmly.

Nevil bowed tolerantly. “Mrs. Faulkner is a very religious person. But one could not live with them, as I have done, for months at a time, and now for a whole year past, without seeing that he was first of all things with her. She was what St. Paul describes the wife to be. She took thought of the things of this world, how she might please her husband. And she did please him. Even after his physical trouble began to show itself — or to be distressing — she made him exquisitely happy, so happy that I trembled for him, knowing that change must come to every state, and since nothing could bring him more happiness, something must bring him less. And then, this — blight came.”

As he spoke Nevil knit his fingers together, and rent them apart in an anguish of pity, of sympathy.

“And you can’t imagine — you have no clew — no hint—” my wife began.

“No. No. No. He keeps the horror, whatever it is, wholly to himself. I think if he could tell somebody he could escape it. But he can’t! The one thing evident is, that it somehow refers to her; and so — he can’t speak!” We walked on in silence a moment, and then Nevil began again, falteringly, “If — if Faulkner, if he had ever shown the slightest question of her — the least anxiety — the smallest wavering, with or without reason, you might suppose it was jealousy, in some suppressed form. But there never was anything of that! He is too noble, too magnanimous for that; he honors her too devoutly. Ah-h-h!”

He went along with his head fallen, and his hands clinging together behind him. We were very near the gate of the old garden. When he reached it he turned and said to us, “I almost dread to see them together; I always dread to see them: his aversion, and her bewilderment—”

I did not accuse the man of anything wrong in his intense feeling; in my heart I pitied him as the victim of a situation which he ought never to have witnessed, which should have been known only to the two doomed necessarily to suffer in it. I wanted to say to my wife that here was another instance, and perhaps the most odious we could ever know, of the evil of that disgusting three-cornered domestic arrangement which we had both always so cordially reprobated. But I had no chance for that. In fact we found ourselves in the presence of a scene from which we should all have retired, no doubt, if we had known just how.

Dr. Wingate was standing in the arbor, looking down at Faulkner, who sat in the place where I had left him. But now his wife sat beside him, and held his hand in her left, while she had drawn his head over on her shoulder with her right. I fancied, from the weak and fallen look of his face, with its closed eyes, that he had just recovered from one of those agonies.

The stir of our feet, or rather the cessation of it as we came involuntarily to a stop in the grass, roused the group in the arbor. Dr. Wingate and Mrs. Faulkner turned their heads toward us; Faulkner opened his eyes. He remained looking a moment, as if he did not see us. Then his gaze seemed to grow and centre upon Nevil. He flung his wife’s hand away, and started suddenly to his feet, and made a pace toward us.

She rose too, and “Ah, Douglas!” she cried out.

He put his hand on her breast and pushed her away with a look of fierce rejection. Then he caught at his own heart; a change, the change that shall come upon every living face, came upon his face. He fell back upon the seat, and his head sank forward.

Part Second. Hermia

I

THE DEATH of Faulkner precipitated in the same compassion all the doubts and reserves of its witnesses. Perhaps one of the reasons why sickness and death are in the world is that they humanize through the sympathies the nature that health and life imbrute. They link in the chain which must one day gall every mortal, the strong and happy with the weak and sorrowmg, and unite us in the consciousness of a common doom, if not the hope of a common redemption. “Some day,” each of us tries to realize to himself in their presence, “I shall suffer so; some day I shall lie dumb and cold like that;” and at least we perceive that it is the mystery of our origin speaking to us in those groans, in that silence, of the mystery of our destiny. We have no refuge then but to forget ourselves in pity; and it is sorrow and shame forever if we fail of it. The pity of those who saw Faulkner die was not for him. He was swiftly past all that. In a moment, in the twinking of an eye, he had been changed. The fire that burned so fiercely, the flame that was the sum of his passions, his hates, his loves, had been quenched in a breath; but his end had been such as each of us might desire for himself if he were at peace with himself.

A little wind, cold, keen, stirring the leaves overhead and the long grass underfoot, was coming in from the sea; the sun was growing pale before the rising fog; the roar of the ocean seemed solidly to fill the air. I do not know how long we stood still. All of us knew that Faulkner was dead; no one made the ghastly pretence that he had fallen in a faint; but none of us recognized the fact till my wife, with a burst of tears, took his widow in her arms. Then it was as if we had each wept, and found freedom to move, to speak, to act, by giving way to our grief.

Mrs. March had never before had occasion in our happy life to deal with such an event, and now her instinct of usefulness surprised me; or rather it afterward surprised me, when I thought of it. From moment to moment she knew what to do, and she knew what to make me do. The doctor, whose office was with life, went away; and the priest, whose calling concerned after-life, was so stunned by what had happened, that he remained helpless in the presence of death. If it had not been for my wife and myself I hardly know who would have grappled with all those details which present themselves in such a situation with the same imperative claim upon us as eating, drinking and sleeping, and the other commonplace needs of existence. I was struck by their equality with these; in their order, they came like anything else.

Just before dark my wife sent me back to our children at Lynn. “Poor little things! They will be frightened to death at our staying so long; and you must explain to them as well as you can why I didn’t come with you. Mrs. Wakely will get them to bed for you; and be sure that you see they have a light burning in the hall, if they’re nervous without it. You won’t be needed here. Of course I can’t leave her now. You must do the best you can without me.

“Yes, yes,” I said. “But how strange, Isabel, that we should be mixed up with these unhappy people in this way! Do you remember the critical mood in which we came here to-day?”

“Yes; perhaps we’ve always been too critical, and held ourselves too much aloof — tried to escape ties.”

“Death won’t let us escape them, even if life will,” I answered, and for the first time I had a perception of the necessary solidarity of human affairs from the beginning to the end, in which no one can do or be anything to himself alone. “It makes very little difference now what that poor man’s taste in literature and art was It seems a great while ago since we smiled at him for it. Was it only this morning?”

“This morning? It seems a thousand years — in some pre-existence.”

“Why, it was in a pre-existence for him!”

“Yes; how strange that is!”

II

I DID NOT SEE Wingate again till I met him at our first dinner in the fall. Then, as we sat at our corner together, with our comfortable little cups of black coffee before us, at a sufficient distance from the others, who had broken up the order of the table, and grouped themselves in twos and threes for the good talk that comes last at such a time, we began to speak of the Faulkners. They had probably been in both our minds, vaguely and vividly, the whole evening. He asked me if I had heard anything from Mrs. Faulkner lately; and I said, Oh, yes; my wife heard from her pretty often, though irregularly; and I told him how, with every intention and prepossession to the contrary, my wife had grown into what I might call an intimate friendship with her. The widow had gone back to the city where Faulkner and I had lived together, and had taken up her life again in the old place, with the old surroundings and the old associations.

“Then you were not especially intimate with him when you lived there?”

“No,” I said; “it was a friendly acquaintance for a while, and then it was an unfriendly non-acquaintance;” and I explained how. “To tell you the truth, I never cared a great deal for him; and I was surprised to find that he seemed to care a good deal for me; though perhaps what seemed affection for me was only the appeal for sympathy that a dying man addresses to the whole earth.”

“Perhaps,” said the doctor.

“I hope I don’t appear very cold-hearted. I liked his friend the parson a great deal better, and for no more reason than I liked Faulkner less. Faulkner was a sentimental idealist; he tried to live the rather high-strung literature that he might have written, if his lot had been cast in a literary community. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“I have known several such men in the West; they’re rather characteristic of a new country.”

“Yes; I can understand how. I didn’t know but you had been intimate,” said Wingate, in a half tone of disappointment.

I recognized it with a laugh. “Well, Faulkner was intimate, doctor, if I wasn’t. Will that serve the purpose?”

“I’m not sure.” The doctor broke off the ash of his cigar on the edge of his saucer. “I should like to ask one thing!” he said.

“Ask away!”

He hitched his chair nearer me, setting it sidewise of the table, on which he rested his left arm, and then dropped his face on his lifted hand. “That day, just before I came, had he been telling you his dream?”

The doctor now used a whole tone of disappointment. “Well, I’m sorry. I should have liked to talk it over with you.”

“You can’t be half so sorry as I am. I should like immensely to talk it over. I always had a fancy that his dream killed him.”

“Oh, no! oh, no!” said the doctor, with a smile at my unscientific leap to the conclusion.

“Hastened it, then.”

“We can’t say, very decidedly, whether a death is hastened or not — that kind. The man was destined to die soon, and to die what is called suddenly. He might have died at that very moment and in that precise way if he had never had any such dream. Undoubtedly it wore upon him. But I should say it was an effect rather than a cause of his condition. There’s where you outsiders are apt to make your mistakes in these recondite cases. You want something dramatic — like what you’ve read of — and you’re fond of supposing that a man’s trouble of mind caused his disease, when it was his disease caused his trouble of mind: the physical affected the moral, and not the moral the physical.”

“You mean that his mind was clouded?”

The doctor laughed. “No, I didn’t mean that. But it’s true, all the same. His mind was clouded, by the pain he had suffered, perhaps, and his dream came out of the cloud in his mind. If he had lived, it would have resulted in mania, as I told him substantially that day. But it was very curious, its recurrence and its unvarying circumstantiality. I don’t know that I ever knew anything just like it; though there’s a kind of similarity in all these cases.”

I saw that Wingate would like to tell me what Faulkner’s dream was; but I knew that he would not do so unless he could fully justify the confidence to his professional conscience. I said to myself that I should not tempt him, but I tried to tempt him. “He told you how long he had been having his dream?”

The doctor appeared not to have heard my question. “And you say she has gone back to their old place?”

“Yes, and to every circumstance of their life as nearly as possible.” I did not like his running away with my bait in that fashion very well, but I thought it best to give him all the line he wanted, and then play him back as I could. “You know — but of course you don’t know — that his mother always lived with them when they were at home — or they lived with her: it was the old lady’s house, I believe: and the widow has even repeated that feature of their former ménage, and has her mother-in-law with her.”

“And what’s become of the parson?”

“The parson? Oh — Nevil! Nevil’s given up his parish there, and gone further west — to Kansas, where he has charge of a sort of mission church — I don’t understand the mechanism of those things very well — and is doing some good work. I believe he has ritualized somewhat. That seems to be the way with them when they take to practical Christianity. Curious; but it’s so.”

“And she lives with her mother-in-law,” the doctor mused aloud. “Property tied up so she had to?”

“No. I think not. It seems to be quite her own choice. I dare say they get on very well. The old lady is romantic, I believe, like Faulkner; and probably she’s in love with her daughter-in-law.”

“Well,” said the doctor, “it isn’t a situation that every woman could reconcile herself to, under the best conditions. But if she thought she ought to do it, she would do it. She has pluck enough. I should like to tell you one thing,” and the doctor hitched his chair a little closer as he said this, and again he broke the ash of his cigar off on his saucer.

He did not go on at once, and lest it might be for want of prompting I said, “Well?”

“I don’t know whether this is something your wife ever knew about or not?” he began, askingly.

“Really, I can’t say,” I answered, impatiently, “till I know myself.”

He did not mind my impatience, but pulled comfortably at his cigar for a moment before he went on. “She came to my office with her.”

“When they went to see you just before she started West? I understood she called on business.”

“To pay my bill? Yes; and then she asked to see me alone. I suppose your wife thought she wished to consult me; and so did I. But it wasn’t the usual kind of consultation; in fact she wasn’t the usual kind of woman! She didn’t lose an instant; she went right at me. ‘Doctor,’ said she, ‘do you know what was on my husband’s mind?’ I like to deal with any one I can be honest with, and I saw I could be honest with her. ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘he told me.’ She caught her breath a little, and then said she, ‘Can you tell me the form, the kind, of trouble it was?’ ‘Yes,’ I said; ‘it was a dream. A dream that kept coming, again and again, and finally had begun to color his waking thoughts and impressions.’ She gave another gasp — I can see her now, just how she looked with the black crape round her face, all pale and washed out with weeping — and then she asked, ‘Did it relate to — me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it related to you, Mrs. Faulkner.’ She came right back at me. ‘Doctor Wingate,’ said she, ‘is it something that he could ever have told me, if he had lived?’ I had to think awhile before I said, ‘No, as I understood his character, I don’t think he ever could.’ She came right back again — I could see that she had made up her mind to go through it all in a certain way, and that she was ready for anything — and said she, ‘I know that whatever it was, he was always struggling against it; and that when it forced itself upon him, he did not believe it at the bottom of his heart. I have seen that; and now I will ask you only one thing more. Is it something that for his sake — not for mine, remember! — you wouldn’t wish me to know?’ ‘I would rather you wouldn’t know it, for his sake,’ said I. ‘Then,’ said she, ‘that is all;’ and she got up, and put out her hand to me, and gave mine a grip as strong as a man’s, and went out.”

“Splendid!” I said, overmastering my own disappointment, and wishing that in my interest Mrs. Faulkner had been a little less heroic.

“Splendid?” said Wingate. “It was superhuman! Or super-woman. Just think of the burden she shouldered for life! I don’t know how much or how little she had divined, but all the worse if she had divined anything. She denied herself the satisfaction of her curiosity, and left me to make whatever I chose of her motives. She didn’t explain; she simply asked and acted. I might suspect this, or I might suppose that; she left me free. I never saw such nerve. It was superb.”

“Perhaps a little topping,” I suggested.

“Yes, perhaps a little topping,” the doctor consented. “But still, it was a toppingness that could have consisted only with the most perfect conscience, the most absolute freedom from self-reproach in every particular.”

“C’&eactue;tait magnifique, mais ce n’était pas la guerre. I think I should have preferred a little more human nature in mine. I should have liked her better if she had gone down on her knees to you, and begged you to tell her what it was; and when you had told her, if it inculpated her at all, would never have left you till you had exculpated her. That would have been more like a woman.”

“Yes, much more like most women,” said the doctor. “But the type is not the nation, or the race, or the sex. The type is cheap, dirt cheap. It’s the variation from the type that is the character, the individual, the valuable and venerable personality.”

“Since when did you set up hero-worship, doctor? Really, you’re worse than my wife. But I expect her to be worse than you when I tell her this story of Mrs. Faulkner. You will let me tell her?”

“Oh, yes. I suppose you would tell her whether I let you or not.”

“There’s always a danger of that kind,” I admitted.

“I wonder,” said Wingate, “whether the eagerness of women to hear things isn’t a natural result from the eagerness of men to tell them?”

“Possibly they may have spoiled us in that way. Do you think you were as eager not to tell, as Mrs. Faulkner was not to hear?”

The doctor laughed tolerantly.

III

I WAS SURPISED at the way my wife took the doctor’s story when I repeated it to her the next morning at breakfast.

“Well,” she said, “that is the first thing I’ve ever heard of Mrs. Faulkner that I don’t like.”

“It was certainly a base treason to her sex to go back on its reputation for curiosity in that manner.”

“Oh, it was enough like a woman to do that — a certain kind of woman.”

“The poseuse?”

“The worse than poseuse. The kind of woman that overtasks her strength, and breaks down with what she’s undertaken, and makes us all ridiculous, and discourages us from trying to bear what we really could bear.”

“Doctor Wingate admires her immensely for her courage in trying it.”

“And I suppose you admire her too.”

“No. When it comes to that, I’m all woman — the kind of woman that wouldn’t attempt more than she could perform, unless she could get some man to carry out her enterprise for her. But perhaps she might do that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean what, at all. I mean whom. Nevil.”

“Basil,” said my wife, “when you talk that way you make me lose all respect for you. No. She may be too exalted, but at least she isn’t degraded.”

“She couldn’t very well be both,” I admitted.

“And it shows what a really low idea you have of women, my dear. I’m sorry for you.”

“Bless my soul! Why do you object to her being superwoman, as Wingate says, in one way, and not superwoman in another?”

“We both agreed, from the very beginning, that that ridiculous friendship was entirely between him and Faulkner. I think it was as silly as it could be, and weak, and sentimental in all of them. She ought to have put a stop to it; but with him so sick as he was, of course she had to yield, and then be subjected to — to anything that people were mean enough to think.”

“Why not say base enough, vile enough, grovelling enough, crawling-in-the-mire enough?”

“Very well, then, I will say that. And I will say that any one who will insinuate such a thing is as bad — as bad as Faulkner himself.”

“But not so much to blame, I hope. At least I didn’t bring Nevil into his family.”

“You admired him!”

“Yes, if I may say it without further offence, I liked him. I pitied him; it seemed to me that he was the chief victim of Faulkner’s fondness. He couldn’t get away without inhumanity; but I believe he was thoroughly bored by the situation. He felt it to be ndiculous.”

“And she, what did she think of it ?”

“I don’t believe she thought of it at all. She was preoccupied with her husband. He had to stay and simply look on, and see her suffer, because he couldn’t get away. It was an odious predicament.”

“Yes. I think it was too,” said my wife. “And I felt sorry for him, though I didn’t admire him. And I must say that he escaped from his false position as quickly and as completely as possible.”

“Ah, I don’t know that I’ve altogether liked his leaving the town. That looked, if anything, a little conscious. I should have preferred his staying and living it all down.”

“There was nothing to live down!”

“No; nothing.”

“You are talking so detestably,” said my wife, “that I’ve got a great mind not to tell you something.”

I folded my hands in supplication. “Oh, I will behave! I will behave! Don’t keep anything more from me, my dear. Think what I’ve endured already from the fortitude of Mrs. Faulkner!”

“The letter came last night, by the last distribution, after you’d gone to your dinner,” said Mrs. March, feeling in her pocket for it, which was always a work of time: a woman has to rediscover her pocket whenever she uses it. “He’s engaged.”

“Who?”

“Who? Mr. Nevil. Now, what do you have to say?”

I threw myself forward in astonishment. “What! Already! Why it isn’t six months since—”

“Basil!” cried my wife, in a voice of such terrible warning that I was silent. I had to humble myself very elaborately, after that. Even then it was with great hauteur and distance that she said, “He’s engaged to a young lady of his parish out there. The letter’s from Mrs. Faulkner.” She tossed it across the table to me with a disdain for my low condition that would have wounded a less fallen spirit. But I was glad of the letter on any terms, and I eagerly pulled it open and flattened it out.

“Just read it aloud, please,” commanded my wife, from her remote height, and I meekly obeyed.

‘DEAR MRS. MARCH, — You will be surprised to get a letter from me so soon after the last I wrote; but I have a piece of news which has excited us all here a good deal, and which I think will interest you and Mr. March. Mr. Nevil has just written my mother, Mrs. Faulkner, of his engagement.’

“What an astonishing woman!” I broke off. “Why in the world didn’t she keep it for the postscript, after she had palavered over forty or fifty pages about nothing?”

“Because,” said my wife, “she isn’t an ordinary woman in any way. Go on.”

I went on.

“‘His letter is rather incoherent, of course. But he tells us she is very young, and he encloses a photograph to show us that she is pretty. She is more than that, however; she is a beautiful girl; but the photograph does not paint character, and so we have to take Mr. Nevil’s word for the fact that she is very good, and cultivated and affectionate.’

“Affectionate, of course!” I broke off again; and my wife came down from her high horse long enough to laugh; and then instantly got back again.

‘He seems very much in love, and we feel as happy as we can about him without knowing his fiancée. He has been so long like a son to Mrs. Faulkner, that of course it is a little pang to her, but she reconciles herself to losing him by thinking of his good. I am thoroughly glad, for I think his life was very lonely, and that he longed for companionship. He is of a very simple nature — you cannot always see it under the ecclesiasticism and I think he has missed Douglas almost as much as we have. He hints in his letter that if Douglas were living, and the old place here could welcome him as of old, he could wish for no other home.’

“Look here, Isabel!” I broke off again. “These seem to me rather wild and whirling words. If Mrs. Faulkner mère is so very happy, why does she have a little pang and have to brace up by thinking of his good? And if Mr. Nevil is so very ecstatic about his betrothed, why does he intimate that if the old home of his friends could still be his, he would not want a new home of his own?”

“That is very weak in him,” my wife admitted.

“Yes; let’s hope the future Mrs. Nevil may never get hold of that letter of his. She probably hates the very name of Faulkner already.”

“If you will go on,” said my wife, “you will see what Hermia says of all that.”

“Hannah,” I corrected her; but I went on.

“‘I suppose,’” the letter ran, “‘that this is the last of Mr. Nevil, as far as we are concerned. I could not adopt his old friends, if I were in her place, and I am persuading Mrs. Faulkner to disappear out of his life as promptly and as voluntarily as possible, after his marriage. I know that this is one of the things that men laugh at us for; but I cannot help it, and I grieve to think now that I could not help showing poor Douglas that his friends were less welcome to me than they were to him. Mrs. Faulkner sees the matter as I do; but she will have to play the part of mother-in-law at least so far as the infare is concerned. Mr. Nevil has no relations of his own (he is the most bereft and orphaned person I ever knew), and she has asked him to bring his bride here as he would to his mother’s house. Of course it will all be very quiet; but we must go through some social form of welcome. The marriage is to be very soon — in a month. I will write you about it.’

I folded up the letter and gave it back to Mrs. March.

“Now, what have you got to say?” she demanded.

“I? Oh! May I ask why you didn’t tell me about this letter in the beginning, instead of allowing me to go on with my defamatory conjectures?”

“I wanted to see you cover yourself with confusion; I wished to give you a lesson.”

“Pshaw, Isabel! You know that you were so curious about what Wingate told me that it put the letter all out of your head.”

“And do you say now,” she retorted, quite as if she had got the better of me, and were making one triumph follow upon another, “do you still mean to say that she expected to get him to help her bear the — the shadow of Faulkner’s dream?”

“Isn’t that rather attenuating it?” I asked. But upon reflection I found that the phrase accurately expressed the case. “Why yes, that’s just what it is. It’s the burden of a shadow! In spite of Wingate’s scientific reluctances, I believe that it crushed poor Faulkner; and I’m glad the weight of it isn’t to fall upon her or upon Nevil. Weight! Why, Isabel, that letter has simply removed mountains from my mind! And the affair was really none of my business, either.”

“Yes, I’m glad it’s all over,” said my wife, with a sigh of relief. “Now I can respect her without the slightest reservation.”

“And isn’t it strange,” I suggested, “that this kind of burden she can bear alone, but if she had divided it with him she could not bear it?”

“Yes, it’s strange,” she answered. “And, as you say, this letter is a great relief. Dr. Wingate may account for it all on scientific grounds if he chooses, and say that Faulkner’s disease caused the dream, and not the dream his disease. But if this had not happened, if this engagement did not give the lie so distinctly to the worst that we ever thought when we thought our worst about it, I never could have felt exactly easy. There would always have been, don’t you know, the misgiving that there was a consciousness of something drawing them together during his life that frightened them apart after his death. But now I feel perfectly sure!”

There had never been any doubt with us as to the nature of Faulkner’s dream, though we could only conjecture its form and facts. Sometimes these appeared to us very gross and palpable, and again merely a vaguely accusing horror, a ghastly adumbration, a mere sensation, a swiftly vanishing impression. We had talked it over a great deal at first, and then it had faded more and more out of our minds. We had our own cares, our own concerns, which were naturally first with us; and I feel that in giving the idea of our preoccupation with those of others, however interesting, however fascinating, I am contributing to one of those false effects of perspective which have always annoyed me in history. The events of the past are pressed together in that retrospect, as if the past were entirely composed of events, and not, like the present, of long intermediate stretches and spaces of eventlessness, which the rapidly approaching lines and the vanishing point can give no hint of. In spite of everything, since the story only secondarily concerns ourselves, we must appear concerned in it alone, though for that very reason we ought to be able to seem what we really were: spectators giving it a sympathetic and appreciative glance now and then, while we kept about our own business.

IV

FOR A WHILE we expected with vivid interest Mrs. Faulkner’s account of the infare, and her description of the bride, and of the bridegroom in his new relations. Then we ceased to talk of it, and I, at least, forgot all about it. The time for her letter had passed when it came, and then we reckoned up the weeks since the last one came, and found that this was almost a month overdue. When we had ascertained this fact, my wife opened the letter, and began to snatch a phrase from this page and another from that, turning to the last and returning to the first, in that provoking way women have with a letter, instead of reading it solidly through from beginning to end. As she did this I saw her eyes dilate, and she grew more and more excited.

“Well, well?” I called out to her. when this spectacle became intolerable.

“Oh, my dear, my dear!” she answered, and went on snatching significant fragments from the letter.

“What is it? Doesn’t the bride suit? Was Nevil too silly about her? Were the dresses from Worth’s? Or what’s the matter?”

“The engagement — the engagement is off! Nevil is perfectly killed by it; and he’s back on their hands, down sick, and they’re taking care of him. Oh, horrors upon horrors! I never heard of anything so dreadful! And the details — well, the whole thing is simply inexpressible!”

“Suppose you give Mrs. Faulkner a chance at the inexpressible. I’d rather hear of the calamity at first hands and in a mass, than have it doled out to me piecemeal by a third person, and snatched back at every mouthful.” I put out my hand for the letter, and after a certain hesitation my wife gave it me.

“Well, see what you can make of it.”

“I shall make nothing of it; I shall leave that to the facts.”

These appeared to be that the engagement had gone on like other engagements up to a certain point. The preparations were made; the dresses were bought; the presents were provided, presumably with the usual fatuity and reluctance; the cards were out; the day was fixed. All this had gone forward with no hint of misgiving from the young lady. She seemed excited, Nevil could remember; but to seem excited in such circumstances was to seem natural. Suddenly, a week before the day fixed for the wedding, she discovered that she had made a mistake: she could never have truly loved him, and now she was sure that she did not love him at all. She was not fit to be a clergyman’s wife; she never could make him happy. He must release her; that was the substance of it; but there were decorative prayers to be forgiven and forgotten and accepted in the relation of a friend. She was the only daughter of rich and vulgar parents, and her father added a secret anguish to Nevil’s open shame by offering to make it right with him in any sum he would name; the millionaire wished to act handsomely. Nevil could perhaps have borne both the secret anguish and the open shame; but the Sunday edition of the leading newspaper of the place found the affair a legitimate field of journalistic enterprise. It gave column after column of imagined and half-imagined detail; it gave biographical sketches of what it called the high retracting parties; it gave Nevil’s portrait, the young lady’s portrait, the portraits of the young lady’s parents. It was immensely successful, and it drove Nevil out of town. He came back crushed and broken to his old home, and sought refuge with his old friends from the disgrace of his wrong. He would not see any one but the doctor, outside of their house; he was completely prostrated. The worst ofit was that he seemed really to have been in love with the girl, whom he believed to have been persuaded by her parents to break off the match; though he could not understand why they should have allowed her to go so far. Mrs. Faulkner had her own opinions on this point, which she expressed in her letter, and they were to the effect that the girl was weak and fickle, but that she was right in thinking she never had loved him, however wrong she had been in once thinking differently. This could not be suggested for Nevil’s comfort, and they were obliged tacitly to accept his theory of the matter; he could not bear to think slightingly of her. In fact, it had been a perfect infatuation, and it had been all the more complete because Nevil, though past thirty-five, had never been in love before, and gave himself to his passion with the ardor of an untouched heart, and the strength of a manhood matured in the loftiest worship, and the most childlike ignorance of women, and especially girls. This was what Mrs. Faulkner gathered at second-hand from his talk with her mother-in-law; and she found herself embarrassed in deciding just how to treat the bruised and broken man, so strangely cast upon their compassion. He wanted to talk with her about his misery, but it seemed to her that she ought not to let him; and yet she could not well avoid it, when he turned to her with such a confident expectation of her sympathy. It was very awkward having him in the house; but they could not turn him out of doors; and he clung to Douglas’s mother with all the trusting helplessness of a sick son. It was pathetic to see a man who had once been to her the very embodiment of strong common-sense and spiritual manliness, so weak and helpless. The doctor said he must get away as soon as he could; and he had better go to Europe and travel about. But Nevil was poor; they could send him, of course, and would be glad to do so; but he was sensitive about money, and had none of that innocent clerical willingness to take it.

The letter closed rather abruptly with civil remembrances to me.

“Isn’t it cruel, dear?” my wife said, pleadingly, as if to forestall any ironical view I might be inclined to take of the case.

“Yes, it is cruel,” I answered, quite in earnest, and we went on to talk it over in all the lights. We said, what a strange thing it was, in the distribution of sorrow and trouble, that this one should receive blow after blow, all through life, and that one go untouched from the beginning to the end. Any man would have thought that Mrs. Faulkner had certainly had her share of suffering in her husband’s sickness and death, without having this calamity of his friend laid upon her; for in the mystery of our human solidarity it was clear that she must help him support it. But apparently God did not think so; or was existence all a miserable chance, a series of stupid, blundering accidents? We could not believe that, for our very souls’ sake; and for our own sanity we must not. We who were nowhere when the foundations of the earth were laid, and knew not who had laid the measures of it, or stretched the line upon it, could only feel that our little corner of cognition afforded no perspective of the infinite plan; and we left those others to their place in it, not without commiseration, but certainly without trying to account for what had happened to them, or with any hope of ever offering a justification of it.

V

THE SITUATION, which seemed to our despondent philosophy tragically permanent, was of course only a transitory phase; and we quickly had news of a change. Nevil had grown better; he had been invited to resume his former charge, with a year’s leave of absence for travel and the complete recovery of his health. The sort of indignant tenderness with which all his old friends had taken up his cause against his cruel fate had gone far to console and restore him. Mrs. Faulkner spoke of his joy in their affection as something very beautiful, and she dwelt upon the pleasure it gave them to see the old Nevil coming back day by day, in the old unselfish manliness. He had been troubled, in his depression, by the consciousness that it was ignoble to give way to it, and his courage was rising with his strength to resist. But still it was thought best for him to go abroad and complete his recovery by an entire change; and he was going very soon. He had accepted the means from his people as an advance of salary for services which he expected to render, and so the obstacle of his poverty and pride was got over.

I cannot say that it pleased us greatly to learn that Nevil thought of sailing from Boston, and hoped to see us; but we had our curiosity to satisfy, as well as our intangible obligation of hospitality to fulfil, and my wife wrote asking him to our house for such time as he should have between arriving and departing. He was delayed in one way or other so that he came in the morning, and sailed at noon; she did not meet him at all, but I went over to the ship in East Boston, and saw him off; and then gave her such report of him as I could. I am afraid it was rather vague. I said he seemed shy, as if he were embarrassed by his knowledge that I knew his story; he seemed a little cold; he seemed a little more clerical. I suppose I had really expected him to speak with intense feeling of the Faulkners, and that it disappointed me when he only mentioned them in giving me the messages they had sent. I do not know why I should have felt repelled, almost hurt by his manner; but I dare say it was because I had met him so full of a sympathy which I could not express and which he could not recognize. I was aware afterward of having derived my mood rather from Mrs. Faulkner’s representations of him than from my own recollections. Perhaps I had a romantic wish to behold a man whom the waters had passed over, and who gave evidence of what he had undergone. But Nevil appeared as he had always appeared to me: pure, gentle, serene; not broken, not bruised, and by no means prepared for the compassion which I was prepared to lavish upon him. I did not reflect that the intimacy had proceeded much more rapidly on my part than on his.

He was in company with a wealthy parishioner, and he presented me as a fellow-Westerner. His friend ordered some champagne in celebration of this fact and of the parting hour, and we had it in their large state-room, the captain’s room, which the parishioner was very proud of having secured. He filled Nevil’s glass slowly, so that he should lose nothing in mere effervescence, and said, “Doctor’s orders, you know.” He explained to me that for his own part he did not care about Europe; he had seen too much of it; but he was going along to watch out that Nevil took care of himself.

My wife was even less satisfied with this interview at secondhand than I was at first-hand. She insisted that I should search my conscience and say whether I had not met Nevil with too great effusion, which he might justly resent as patronizing. I brought myself in not guilty of this crime, and then she said she had always thought he was tepid and limited, and she was disposed to console herself by finding in my rebuff; as she called it, a just punishment for my having liked Nevil so much. “You can see by that champagne business,” she said, “that, after all, he’s just as much a Westerner at heart as Faulkner. I doubt if he was so much hurt by that newspaper notoriety of his broken engagement as he pretended to be.”

I admitted that he was a fraud in every respect, and that he had been guilty of something very like larceny in depriving her of a hero. “But,” I said, “you have your heroine left.”

“Yes, thank goodness! She’s a woman!”

“A heroine usually is — unless she’s an angel.”

Nevil was gone a year, and during this time the correspondence between Mrs. Faulkner and Mrs. March, fevered to an abnormal activity by recent events, fell back into the state of correspondence in health, which tends to an exchange of apologies for not having written. Mrs. Faulkner’s letters contained some report of Nevil’s movements; and we had got so used to his being abroad that it seemed very sudden, when one came saying that he had got home, perfectly well, and had gone at once to work in his parish, with all his old energy. She sent some newspapers with marked notices of him; and then it seemed to me that we heard nothing more from her till the next spring, when a most joyful letter burst upon us, as it were, with the announcement of her engagement to Nevil.

I cannot say exactly what it was about this fact that shocked us both. The affair, superficially, was in every way right and proper. We were sure that, as Hermia reported, Faulkner’s mother was as happy in it as herself, and that it was the just and lawful recompense of suffering that Hermia and Nevil had jointly and severally undergone for no wrong or fault of theirs; we ought to have been glad for them; and yet, somehow, we could not; somehow we were not reconciled to that comfortable close for the most painful passage of life we had ever witnessed. Instead of being the end of trouble, it seemed like the beginning. It brought up again with dreadful vividness all the experiences of that day when Faulkner died. It was as if he rose from the dead, and walked the earth again in the agony of body we had seen, and the anguish of mind we had imagined. Once more I saw him, with a face full of hate, push her from him, and fall back and gasp and die.

Hermia’s letter came in the morning; and during the forenoon I received a telegram at my office from her asking if Dr. Wingate were in Boston. I sent out and found that the doctor was at home, and answered accordingly. Then I sent the telegram to my wife, and I hurried away from the office rather early in the afternoon, to learn what she made of it.

She had just got a telegram herself from Mrs. Faulkner, saying that she should start for Boston by the eleven o’clock train that night, and asking if she might come to our house.

VI

THE GENERAL CHANGE in Hermia, no less than a phase of her character which had never before shown itself to us, struck me at the station where I went to meet her on the arrival of her train; and when I brought her home, I saw that she affected my wife in the same way. Personally we had known her only as the submissive and patient subject of an invalid’s sick will, anxious to devote herself to the gratification of his whims. We remembered her as all gentleness, abeyance, self-effacement,and then as a despair so quiet that the wildest grief would have been less pathetic to witness. From Wingate’s report of her interview with him we had inferred a strength which was rather hysterical; and though her letters of the last two years had given us the impression of a clear and just mind, able to decide impartially from uncommon insight, we had still kept our old idea of her, and thought only of the self-abnegation we had seen, and the somewhat abnormal self-assertion of which we had heard.

She now appeared younger than before, which I suppose was an effect of her having really grown thinner; and with her return to her youthful figure she had acquired an elastic vigor which we did not perceive at once to be moral rather than physical. It was when we fairly saw her face in the light of the half-hour which we had with her before dinner, that we knew this was the spirit’s school of the body; and that underneath her power over herself was a weakness that had to be constantly watched and disciplined. She was like an athlete who knows the point in which lies the danger of his failure, and who guards and fortifies it. I am aware that this gives a false and theatrical complexion to the simple truth that touched and fascinated us; but I do not know how otherwise to express it; and I am not able to describe as I would like the appearance of a great happiness suddenly arrested and held in check, which we both believed we saw in her. It was this, I fancy, that kept us silent with those congratulations upon her engagement which we should both have felt it fit to offer. To tell the whole truth, we were a little quelled and overawed by the resolute strength of which she gave the effect, and we left it for her, if she would, to enlarge the circle of our talk from the commonplaces of her journey East, and her ability to sleep on the cars, and of her health, and Mrs. Faulkner’s health, and ours; and include an emotional region where Nevil should at least be named. But she did not mention him, and she only departed from these safe generalities in asking if we could probably see Dr. Wingate that evening.

I said that he had no office hours in the evening, but I knew he was to be found at home between half past seven and nine, and we might chance it. “I must see him to-night,” she answered, quietly, “and I wish you and Mrs. March would come with me. It’s a matter that I may want you to know about. I may need — need” — she faltered a breath— “your help.”

“Why, of course,” said my wife; and then I had one of my inspirations, as she called them.

I said, “Why not send a messenger round for Dr. Wingate to come here? It will catch him at dinner, and then we can make sure of him,” and I modestly evaded the merit I might have acquired through this suggestion, by going off to ring for a messenger, who arrived, of course, just when we had forgotten him, and made my wife believe it was the doctor.

We had a moment together before dinner for the exchange of impressions and conjectures, and I made my little objections to the hardship of being involved again in Mrs. Faulkner’s affairs. “What do you suppose she meant by needing our help? Really I think I must be excused from being present at her consultation of Dr. Wingate! If she’s going to break down on our hands—”

My wife saw the parody of her customary anxieties in the presence of any aspect of the unexpected. “Nonsense! It’s nothing of that kind, poor thing! If it only were! But it’s something that’s on her mind — that Dr. Wingate knows about and she doesn’t. And now the time’s come when she must.”

“Do you mean — the dream?”

“Yes. Or something connected with it. I saw it in an instant. Well, she’s got her punishment!”

“Her punishment? What in the world is she punished for?”

“For trying to bear more than she could. For trying not to know what she must know before she could really ever take another step in life. I suppose at that time she expected to die. But she lived.”

“Ah, that’s a mistake we often make!”

“Yes, she could have borne it if nothing else had happened after that.”

“But something else happened.”

“And now she has to provide for this world instead of the next.”

“Poor mortality!” I sighed. “Between the two worlds, how its difficulties are multiplied!”

VII

DR. WINGATE arrived with his professional face, in which I fancied a queer interrogation of mine. Then I said, “It’s Mrs. Faulkner who wishes to see you. You remember? She’s here with us.”

But he only asked, “How long has she been in town?” and he gave a poke or two at his hair after taking his hat off in the hall, where I went out to meet him when I heard his ring.

“Since four o’clock.”

“Oh!”

“She was anxious to see you at once, and I made bold to send for you, instead of taking the chance of not finding you in.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” he said, and he rubbed his hands with an air of impatience which decided me not to tell him, as I had imagined myself doing, of her engagement to Nevil by way of preparation. I saw that it was not my affair; and I decided not to put my fingers between the bark and the tree.

He preceded me into the library, where Mrs. Faulkner sat waiting with my wife, and I saw him make a special effort to temper his bluff directness with a kindly deference. It was she who was brusque, and who put aside the preliminaries which he would have interposed.

“Doctor Wingate, I have come to Boston to see you in the hope that you can help me. But now I almost think that no one can help me. You can’t change the truth!”

“Rather an undertaking, Mrs. Faulkner, I admit,” he said with a smile for her exaltation. “But it depends somewhat upon the nature of the truth. I have known cases in which I could change the truth back. They’re not so very uncommon.” He looked at her with smiling insinuation, and she smiled pathetically in response.

“This isn’t one of that kind,” she said, and she had to make the effort of beginning afresh. “Do you remember when I came to you just — just after my husband’s death, and spoke to you about the dream that killed him?”

“The dream didn’t kill him,” said Wingate. “But I remember the interview you refer to.” He looked round at my wife and me, and then at Hermia, as if to question whether it was really her intention that we should be present, and we both made an instinctive motion to rise.

“Don’t go,” she said. “I wish you to stay. I was afraid, then, to face it alone, and now I wish to know what it was. Oh, yes! I made a feint of refusing to know it for his sake. I believed that I was sincere, but I was a miserable hypocrite. I was sparing myself, not him. Now, all that must come to an end. I ask you to tell me what his dream was, and to tell it in the presence of those who saw him suffer from it, die of it.” Wingate opened his mouth to protest again, but she hurried on. “You said then that his dream concerned me, and I want them to judge me by it, and I will judge myself by their judgment.”

“Really, Mrs. Faulkner,” said Wingate, with the laugh of a man whose perplexity passes any other expression, “you are almost as bad as he was! Where shall I begin? How much can you bear? The whole thing’s very painful! Why must you know it now, when you’ve held out against it so bravely, so wisely, for two years?”

“Because,” she answered, as if she had prepared herself for some such question, “I was going to take a great step, and I wished to look at every thought and fact of my life, to be sure that I was worthy to take such a step. I got to thinking of that dream, which you said concerned me; and I found that I could have no peace, no certainty of the kind I wanted till I knew what it was. I must have been-there must have been something in me — terribly wrong, terribly bad, to have inspired such a dream, and—”

“Ah-h-h!” the doctor broke out, “you’re as wild as he was in that reasoning,” and to both of us men her logic was pitiably childlike; but I could see that for my wife it had a force inappreciable to us, because she was a woman too; no doubt she would judge Hermia as severely as she judged herself. “What you say,” the doctor went on, “is perfectly monstrous, and I should not feel justified in telling you anything about it, unless I could bring you to see the matter in a reasonable light. And in the first place, I want you to realize that whatever you were, or whatever you were not, it had absolutely no more to do with his dream, than the character of an inhabitant of Saturn, if there is one. Why, just consider! You wish to judge yourself, and if possible condemn yourself — I can see that! — for something he dreamed about you; and yet I suppose you dream things about others — we all do! — that dishonor and defame them, without thinking evil of them for it?”

I laughed. “Why, of course!” but the two women were silent.

My wife said, finally, “Why, of course, we don’t blame them for it; but we can’t feel exactly the same toward them afterward; and if I knew that a person had such a dream about me, I should not be comfortable till — till—”

“Till you knew just why they had it,” I suggested; and I tried to lighten the situation with another laugh.

Hermia gave my wife a grateful look for her sympathy, quite as if it had eased her of her self-accusal, instead of darkening her case against herself, and asked the doctor, “Did his dream dishonor me — defame me — to you?”

“No!” the doctor cried out. “I did not say that. His dream concerned you, and it distressed him; but I couldn’t say that it was one to make me or any one think wrong of you. Now, won’t that do! Isn’t that enough?”

“No,” said Hermia, “it isn’t enough. I must be judge of whether I was guilty of anything wrong, and I must know what his dream accused me of. Why did it keep coming and coming?”

“How do you know it kept coming and coming?”

“Because I know. Because — because — His mother and I were looking over some things he had left — I wished to do it — letters and papers; and we found a scrap that said — that said — that spoke of his having a dream, and how he had been dreaming the same thing for months, sometimes every night, sometimes once a week. And I can remember how he would be very good to me for days, and then some morning he would not speak to me or hardly look at me; so that — so that I was afraid his mind—”

“Did you keep that scrap?” Wingate interrupted.

Hermia took it out of her pocket, where she must have been keeping her hand upon it, and gave it him. He read it over, glanced again at the characters, and handed it back to her.

“If you needed any proof of what I must say to you now, Mrs. Faulkner,” he began, very gravely and tenderly, “you could get it of the first alienist whom you showed that paper. I suppose, if you’ve been brooding over this matter, it will be a relief, a help to know that your fears were right. When your husband wrote that paper, he was not in his right mind. The signs are simply unmistakable; they couldn’t be counterfeited; there’s insanity in every line, in every word of that handwriting. It would be interesting to know whether his hand was the same when he wrote of other things. But that’s irrelevant. What’s certain is that on one point he had a delusion, and that this delusion had begun to show itself in the form of a dream. Isn’t it enough, now, if I assure you that his dream had no more real significance, no more rightful implication, than any other form of mania?”

She shook her head. “No. Why should it persist?”

“Ha-a-a!” he breathed in desperation. “Why should any mania persist in a disordered mind?”

“It isn’t the same thing at all.”

“But it is exactly and perfectly the same thing! It was the presence in his sleep of a maniacal delusion that was gradually overshadowing his waking consciousness, and that must have ended in his open insanity if death had not come to his relief.”

She simply asked, “What was it?”

“What was it?” he echoed. “Well, you have a sort of right to know; perhaps you had better know. But I wish — I wish you had the strength to forego it — to accept my assurance, the most solemn, the most sincere I could give any one on a matter of life and death, that although his dream involved you, it no more rightfully inculpated you than it inculpated me, and that it ought to have no more consideration, no more influence, in your life than the ravings of any lunatic that came to you from an asylum window as you passed in the street. Now, won’t that do? Can’t you accept my assurance, and go home satisfied?”

“When I know what his dream was,” she answered. “I can never rest again, now, till I know it.”

“But there is this to be considered, Mrs. Faulkner,” he urged. “There is the regard you have for him, his memory. He was no more responsible for dreaming his dream than you are for having been the subject of it. But you know how involuntary, how helpless, we often are in our judgments of others; and I warn you — it’s my duty to warn you — that the danger is not that you may not be able to forgive yourself, but that you may not be able to forgive him.”

“I must take the risk of that. I must know everything, now, at any cost. I am not afraid of being unjust to him. I saw him suffer, and I can make every allowance.” Wingate was silent, with his head down, and she began with a kind of gasp: “Did he — was he afraid of me? I know how suspicious people are who are affected as you say he was beginning to be — though I can’t believe it, I can’t imagine it ! — and I can understand, if he was! Did he think I would hurt him, somehow? Was that what he dreamed? Did he dream that I was going to do him some harm — kill him — ?”

“Oh, no! no! no!” cried Wingate, getting to his feet. “Nothing of that kind, I assure you!” He spoke with the relief, as I fancied, of having found out the worst she had feared, and of being able to console her with something indefinitely less terrible. I had often known my wife push out a skirmish line of apprehension far beyond the main body of her anxiety, so as to have the comfort of finding herself within the utmost she had imagined of evil; and I understood the feminine principle on which Wingate counted, and shared his relief.

“Then what was it?” Hermia asked.

“What was it? Nothing. Nothing at all, in a manner! Nothing of the kind you feared. But if you must know” — Wingate glanced at us where we sat spellbound by our sympathy and interest— “though it’s ridiculously unimportant in comparison with what you’ve suggested, I think perhaps you’d better hear it alone, Mrs. Faulkner.”

“By all manner of means!” I said, and my wife said, “Yes, indeed!” as we rose together.

I felt from the first an odious quality in the part we had been obliged to bear; and I confess that I was beginning to bear it with some measure of resentment, in spite of my curiosity, and with some misgiving as to the delicacy of the woman who had required our presence at this interview. But perhaps I judged her too severely. In some of the most intimate affairs and sentiments, in which women are conventionally supposed to play a veiled and hidden part, they really have an overt, almost a public role, which nature no doubt fits them to sustain, without violence to their modesty, without touching susceptibilities that in men would be intolerably wounded.

I was impatient of the mechanical effort Hermia made to detain my wife, to whose hand she clung, and whom I had to draw from her with me out of the room. My wife agreed with me that we must have gone, but I doubt if she perfectly thought so; and they both had an effect of yielding out of regard to the sensibilities of us men.

VIII

I WAS IN no humor to tempt any confidence from Wingate when I hurried out to the street door to see him off after I heard him come out of the library. My curiosity, such as I had, was damped by a sense of the indecency of knowing in brutal vocables what I already conjectured, and I was still resentful of having been obliged to enter into the affair to the extent I had.

Wingate let me help him on with his overcoat, and he put his hand on the door-knob before he spoke. “The next time you have a case of this kind, old fellow, I hope I shall be in Europe.”

He looked hot and dry, and he breathed harder than even a stout man need after being helped on with his overcoat. “I made a mistake in sending your wife and you out of the room. It was no easier for me, and Mrs. Faulkner says she shall tell her at once, anyway, and you might as well have had it at first-hand. She takes it worse than I expected. Good-night!” he added abruptly, after a pause, and an evident intention to say something else; and he flung himself down my steps and seemed to rebound into his coupé, which was standing before them.

I waited the next turn of events with an increasing sense of injury at the hands of our guest, for I knew that ultimately I must be drawn upon for the nervous force which my wife would spend in sympathizing with her; and I had not yet recognized the claim that she seemed to think our purely accidental relations had established for her upon us.

But the next turn of events was apparently to wait our motion. I mechanically expected Hermia to come out of the library, where I was mechanically impatient to take my book and pity her at my ease; but she did not come out, and I had to go and sit down in the parlor, which was less commodious for my compassion, and unusual for my book. I sat there, disconsolately trying to read, for what I thought a long time, till my wife came down stairs.

“Where is Mrs. Faulkner?” she asked, under her breath. I nodded toward the library. “But I thought the doctor had gone?”

“So he has. He went some time ago; but he didn’t take her with him.”

“I’ve been expecting her to ask for me,” said my wife, vaguely. “I hated to go to her. It would have seemed like prying.”

“To a lady who was willing to have the whole matter, whatever it was, talked out before us both?”

“That is true,” said my wife. “Would you knock?”

“Perhaps I would listen at the key-hole first,” said I, and I felt myself growing more and more sardonic, for no reason, except that I had such a good chance.

My wife meekly went and listened, and then, after a look at me, opened the library door and went in. It was nearly an hour before she rejoined me in our own room, having first gone with our guest to hers, and staid with her there a little while.

Then she said, “Well, Basil, I never knew anything so sad in my life. I don’t know what we are going to do. She must go home at once, and I don’t see how she is ever to get there. That is what we have got to talk over now.”

“I supposed you had talked it over already,” I suggested, still perversely affecting that cheap cynicism.

My wife took it for what it was, and ignored it.

“Poor, stricken creature!” she sighed. “I don’t believe she had moved after the doctor left her till I came in, and then she hardly moved. She had that awful stony quiet that people — strong people — have, when you bring them bad news. I could hardly get her to speak. She said she wanted me to know everything, but she did not know how to tell me, unless I asked her; and so, little by little, we got it out together. But I think I’d better not tell you, dear, just in so many words, till she’s out of the house; do you?”

“No; I guess I know pretty well what you have to tell,” I answered, honestly enough, and without any ironical slant, even in my tone.

My wife went on: “I’m afraid Dr. Wingate didn’t manage very well: he had something finer than nerves to deal with. But I don’t blame him, poor man, either. He was thrown off his guard by her asking if her husband had dreamed that she was going to hurt him, and he thought that what he really did dream was so much less dreadful that it would relieve her; and I’m afraid he went at it too lightly. But it seems that she had never imagined that he could have dreamed that, and it perfectly crushed her. Basil! Don’t you believe there are some natures so innocent that they have no suspicion of suspicion, that they can’t conceive of it? Well, that is Hermia Faulkner! She is on such a grand scale, she’s so noble and faithful and loyal, that she can’t even understand the kind of nature that could attribute wrong to her: its baseness, its cruelty. She’s crushed under the ruin of her own ideal of that wretched man!”

“Oh, oh, oh!” I cried. “Isn’t that rather a high horse you’re on? I don’t think poor old Faulkner was to blame for his crazy dream. I wouldn’t like to shoulder the responsibility for my dreams!”

“You are very different. You are good,” said my wife, “and you couldn’t have such a dream, if you tried; but if you go, now, and think it was worse than it really was, I shall hate you. I should like to tell you just what it was; but you are such a fool, dear,” she added, tenderly, “that you’d be conscious the whole way, and couldn’t help showing it every minute.”

“The whole way? Every minute? What do you mean?”

“I’ve decided that you must take Hermia home.”

“Oh, I see! That was why you were so willing we should inquire how she could get there. But supposing I can’t leave my business?”

“But I know you can. You were going to New York with me next week, and we can give that up. There’s nothing else for it. We must! It will give you a chance to see your old friends out there, and you’ve simply got to do it; that’s all.” She added, in terms expressive of the only phase of her anxiety that could be put concretely, and by no means representative of her entire motive: “I can’t have her getting sick here on my hands; and there’s no other way. Her mother-in-law is too old to come for her, and—”

“We might telegraph the Reverend James Nevil to come,” I suggested.

“Basil!” cried my wife.

“Oh, it’s no use, my dear! I’d better know just what I’m to be conscious of.”

“You know it already; we’ve both known it from the beginning; but I can’t tell you. It isn’t her fault, though it covers her with such cruel shame that she can’t look herself in the face. It’s his fault for having him there to dream about; and it’s HIS fault for being there to be dreamt about.” I knew that my wife meant Faulkner by her less, and Nevil by her greater, vehemence of accent. “I suppose she felt, all the time — such a woman would — that he had no right to bring his friendship into their married life that way. She must have felt hampered and molested by it; but she yielded to him because she didn’t want to seem petty or jealous. There’s where I blame her. Basil! A woman’s jealousy is God-given! It’s inspired, for her safety and for her husband’s. She ought to show it.”

“How about a man’s?”

“Oh, that’s different! Men have no inspirations. Jealousy’s a low, brutal instinct with them. Just see the difference between her feeling that his friend had no business in their family, and his making that very friend the object of his suspicions!”

“If you conjecture one fact,” I said, “and hold Faulkner responsible for the other, the difference is certainly very much against him. But, as I understand from Dr. Wingate, Faulkner’s dream foreshadowed his alienation.”

“Oh, don’t talk to me of Dr. Wingate!” she cried. “He doesn’t know anything about it. No! It was his miserable jealousy that turned his brain; it wasn’t his insanity that caused his jealousy; and if you keep saying that, Basil, I shall think you are trying to justify him.”

“Bless my soul! What question of justification is there?”

“If he was not responsible for his dream,” she went on, “he was certainly responsible for the occasion of his dream, and so it comes to the same thing at last. It was his folly, his silly, romantic clinging to a sentiment that he ought to have flung away the instant he was married, which did all the harm. A husband shouldn’t have any friend but his wife.”

“You will never get me to deny that, my dear, at least as long as you’re in this dangerous humor.”

“I know I’m ridiculous,” she said, nervously. “But I do feel so sorry for that poor creature! She seems to me like some innocent thing caught in a trap; and she can’t escape, and no one can set her free. I shall begin to believe that there is such a thing as Fate, in that old Greek sense: something that punishes you for your sorrows and for the errors of others.”

“There is certainly something that does that,” I said, “whether we call it Fate or not. We suffer every day for our sorrows, and for the sins of men we never saw, or even heard of. here’s solidarity in that direction, anyway.”

“Yes, and why can’t we feel it in the other direction? Why can’t we feel that we’re helped, as well as hurt, by those unknown people? Why aren’t we rewarded for our happiness?”

“It’s all a mystery; and I don’t know but we are rewarded for our happiness, quite as much as we’re punished for our misery. Some utterly forgotten ancestral dyspeptic rises from the dust now and then, and smites me with his prehistoric indigestion. Well, perhaps it’s some other forgotten ancestor, whose motions were all hale and joyous, that makes me get up now and then impersonally gay and happy, and go through the day as if I had just come into a blessed immortality.”

“Ah, those awful dead! Basil,” she entreated, “from this time on, let’s live so that whichever dies first, the other won’t have anything to be remorseful for!”

“We can’t do that, and I don’t believe we were meant to do it. We have to live together as if we were going to live together forever.”

“Why, we are, dearest! Don’t you think we are?”

“I can’t imagine anything else; but I don’t understand that this is the prospect that now looks so disheartening for Mrs. Faulkner. If it were a question of her going on forever with Faulkner, it would be very simple, or comparatively simple. In that case the wrong he had helplessly done her in his crazy dream would only endear him to her the more, for it would be something for her perpetually to exercise her love of forgiving upon. But the difficulty is that she now wishes to go on living with somebody else forever. I don’t blame her for that; on the contrary I think it’s altogether well and wholly right, something to be desired and praised. But if the one she now wishes to go on living with forever happens to be the very person whom her dead husband’s dream foreboded—”

“Basil!”

“Why, you see, it complicates the affair.” We had touched the quick, and we were silent a moment, quivering with sympathy. “It’s all a mystery, and one part no more a mystery than another; but I suppose that when we come really to know, it will all be so very, very simple that we shall be astonished. Mrs. Faulkner’s trouble isn’t about the future, though; that has to be left to take care of itself; her trouble is about the present and about the past. I haven’t the least idea that she ever gave a thought to Nevil as long as her husband lived, or for long after he died.”

“Oh, Basil! I like to hear you say that!”

“I dare say you’d like to say it yourself: it’s very magnanimous. But I can understand how such a woman would now begin to question whether she had not thought of him, and would end by bringing herself in guilty, no matter what the facts were. I didn’t like her attempting to ignore the tenor of Faulkner’s dream when she went to talk with Wingate about it immediately after his death. That was romantic.”

“I didn’t like that either,” said my wife. “Yes, it was romantic.”

“If she had made Wingate tell her then, it would have been all over with by this time. Either she would have resented it, and set about forgetting Faulkner, and living a denial of all fealty to the memory of a man who could wrong her so—”

“Basil! You said he was not responsible for it!”

“Or else she would have succumbed to it, and refused ever to see Nevil, and this frightful quandary that she’s got us all into never would have been brought about.”

My wife could not laugh with me at our personal entanglement in Mrs. Faulkner’s affair, which my words reminded her of. She began to enlarge upon the hardship of it; and she was not reconciled to it by my arguments going to show how nothing any one did or suffered could be done or suffered to one’s self alone, and that probably at that very moment some nameless savage in Central Africa was shaping our destiny in some degree, and was making favor with his fetich for our disaster, when he supposed himself to be merely invoking protection against a raid of Arab slavers. Those were the days of frequent railroad accidents, and she recurred to her fixed principle that I must never go a railroad journey alone, because it was necessary that when I was killed on the train she and the children must be there to be killed with me. Nothing less than the infatuation she had for Mrs. Faulkner would have supported her in the sacrifice of such a principle, and I am not sure that even that would have been enough without the lively fear of having Mrs. Faulkner break down with a nervous fever, or something, before we could get her out of the house. I recurred to this consideration, which Isabel had already touched upon, and treated it in a philosophic spirit, as an instance of the grotesque and squalid element which is so apt to mar a heroic situation, in order apparently to keep human nature modest; but she could not follow me. She said, yes, that decided it; and she drew a sigh of relief, which she cut short to express her wonder that Dr. Wingate should have told Hermia what Faulkner’s dream was when he knew it would perfectly kill her. She said she had long had her doubts of his wisdom, and she now proceeded to disable it, with that confidence in her ability to judge him which all women feel in regard to physicians. At least, she said, if he had any sort of intuition, or even the smallest grain of common-sense, or the slightest delicacy, he would not have told her that the man whom the dream involved was the very man she was going to marry. I said that perhaps Wingate did not know she was going to marry Nevil; and she acknowledged that this was true, and began to rehabilitate him. I was in hopes that she would not ask me why I had not told him; for I now saw, or thought I saw, that I had been mistaken in the delicacy which had kept me from doing it. But I was not to escape: the question came, in due course, and all my struggles to free myself only served to fix the blame for the whole trouble more firmly upon me. She said that now she saw it all; and that I need not go to Central Africa for the cause of our predicament.

I spent a troubled night, tormented, whether sleeping or waking, by a fantastic exaggeration of the whole business, and exasperated by a keen sense of its preposterousness. It seemed to me intolerable that I should be made the victim of it: that this gossamer nothing, which might perhaps accountably involve the lives of those concerned through a morbid conscience, should have power upon me, to drag me a thousand miles away from my family, and subject me to all the chances of danger and death which I must incur, seemed to me atrocious. I spent myself in long imaginary dialogues with my wife, with Hermia, with Nevil, in which I convinced them to no effect that I had nothing whatever to do with the matter, and would not have. Faulkner appeared to me a demoniac presence, at the end of the lurid perspective, running back to that scene in the garden-implacable, immovable, ridiculous like all the rest, monstrous, illogical, and no more to be reasoned away than to be entreated.

I woke in the morning with the clear sense that there was only one thing for it, and that was simply to refuse to go with Mrs. Faulkner. I spent the forenoon in arranging my business for a week’s absence, and I started West with her on the three o’clock train.

Part Third. Nevil

I

IN SPITE OF my wife’s care that I should not be made conscious in Mrs. Faulkner’s presence by knowing just the terms of her husband’s dream, I must have been rather embarrassed in setting off upon her homeward journey with her if she had seemed aware of any strangeness in it. But she seemed aware of nothing. I could not help seeing that my company, or the supervision of some one, was essential to her. She was like a person mentally be-numbed; all the currents of her thought were turned so deeply inward, toward the one trouble which engrossed them, that she appeared incapable of motion from herself. She did what I bade her with a mute passivity, as if she were my mesmeric subject, and with a sort of unseeing stare, like a sleep-walker’s. My wife came with us to the station to take leave of her, but Hermia had parted with her at the moment of being left alone with Dr. Wingate the night before, and I think could not have been fully sensible of any of us since. I had a fantastic notion of being like something in a dream to her, and I am afraid I must have been like something very harassing, with the attentions I was obliged to offer her.

I tried to make them as few as possible, and to confine them to the elemental questions of eating and sleeping. These were very simply settled: she neither ate nor slept throughout the journey. I spent all the time I could in the smoking car. When I came to her with the announcement that at this or that next station we were to have five, or ten, or twenty minutes for refreshment, after the barbarous custom of the days before dining cars, she said she wanted nothing, so definitively that I could not urge her; and in the morning, after my nightmares in my berth, I found her sitting in one corner of the section I had secured for her, with every appearance of not having moved from her place since she first took it on coming aboard the car. Her cheek was propped on the palm of one hand, and she had that blind, straightforward stare.

It was a strange journey; and if our fellow-passengers made their conjectures about us, it must have been to the effect that I was in charge of a mild case of melancholia, and was rather negligent of my charge. I left her as much to herself as I could, for I understood with what a painful strain she would have to detach herself from the trouble on which her thoughts were bent, if I interrupted them, and that I could in no manner relieve her, or help her to puzzle it out. Toward the end of the second afternoon we came to one of the last stations between us and our destination, and then she started up with a long sigh, and after a moment began to put together the little bags and wraps which women travel with.

“Here we are at Blue Clay,” I said, coming up to her.

“Yes,” she answered; “this is the last stop the express makes before we get home.”

Probably she had taken note of every point and incident in the journey with that superficial consciousness which is so active in times of trouble. She now showed an alertness like that of one awakened from a refreshing sleep, and I had an increasing sense of her having cast off the burden that had oppressed her. There was nothing of levity in her apparent relief; her exaltation was noble and dignified as her dejection had been. Perhaps she had not reached any solution of her trouble; perhaps she had simply cast it from her by a natural reaction as we do when we have suffered enough, for one time, and was destined to take it up again. But I felt that I could not be mistaken in the fact of her relief. If I was mistaken, then it was because she had a strength to conceal her suffering which I could not imagine because she had so frankly shown her suffering before. Her present behavior might have been a woman’s ideal of the way she would wish to behave in the circumstances; but I still think Hermia Faulkner had found freedom, at that moment, from the stress of her preoccupation, and began to assume a certain hospitality of manner toward me, because she was able without pain to do so. She thanked me with ingenuous sweetness for coming home with her, and expressed a sense of the sacrifice which would have satisfied even the exacting woman who had made me make it. She asked if I had slept well, as if I had just got up; and she hoped I would not suffer by the great kindness which Mrs. March and I had both shown her, and which she would never forget. I protested, of course, that it was all nothing, and said that I had long wished to revisit the scenes of my youth, and had eagerly seized the excuse that the hope of being useful to her gave me for coming now. She answered, “Yes; that is what Mrs. March told me.” As we drew near our destination she sympathized with the interest I felt in approaching the place where I had spent the happiest years of my young manhood, and helped me to make out some of the landmarks by which I hoped to identify the city I remembered. But the new city was built all out over and beyond them, and our approach was hurried by finding them within it, so that before I realized it the train was slowing up in the grandiose depot of vaulted brick and glass which replaced the shabby wooden shed of former days. I had intended to renew there the emotions with which I parted from a friend long since dead, the night I started for Europe; but I was distracted by the change, as well as by the hurly-burly of arrival, and I willingly abandoned myself to the friendly care of the black serving-man of Mrs. Faulkner who was there to meet us, and who at once brevetted me one of the family. He took my bag, and led the way out to Mrs. Faulkner’s carriage, and put it in with her things before I thought to stop him.

“Oh, I can’t let you take the trouble of driving me to a hotel,” I said. “I will get a hack here.”

“Why, surely,” she answered in a tone of wounded expectation, “you are coming to us?”

“No; I shall be here such a little while, and—”

“But that’s all the more reason why you should be our guest. My mother would be hurt if you went anywhere else; we will leave you free to come and go as you like; only you must stay with us.”

It was useless to protest, and I got into the carriage with her.

II

BOTH THEN and afterward, when we reached the Faulkner mansion, I was aware of not having done the Faulkners justice as personages, in our meeting at Swampscott. I had understood, in a careless way, that their occupation of that villa and the style of their living in it meant money; but Faulkner himself was such an informal sloven, and Hermia was so little attributable in character to anything about her, and the doom hanging over them was so exclusive of all other interest in them, that I had not conjectured the degree of state from which they were detached. The quiet richness of the equip age that had met us now was the forerunner of a sumptuous comfort, far beyond any expectation of mine, in all Mrs. Faulkner’s belongings and surroundings. She was not a person you could imagine caring for the evidences or uses of wealth; she affected you at once as exterior to all such sordid accidents; as capable of being a goddess in any gown. As a matter of fact, however, the costliness in which her whole life was clad was certainly very great.

I had forgotten the spacious grounds in which Faulkner’s house stood, or perhaps I now noticed them more because all the neighborhood had been closely built up in the process of the city’s growth. In the heart of the town the mansion rose from the midst of ample lawns and gardens, enclosed by a high brick wall, such as I had always said was my ideal of stately bounds; and it all looked much older than anything at the East, from the soft-coal smoke with which wall and mansion and garden trees were blackened. I suppose it was the smell of this in the air, and the mat of ivy on the house front, that confused my memories of the farther past with more recent recollections of England, and imparted to my present sensations the vagueness of both, as we rolled up under the porte cochere. I saw that the house must have been vastly enlarged since I had been there last, and the bulk of the elms that overtopped it, and the height of the slim white birches on the lawn before it, warned me how long ago that had been. Within, I was met by the fresh, brisk warmth of a fire of hickory limbs, that burnt on the wide hall hearth, and I at once delivered myself up to the caresses of the velvety ease in which all life moved there. These influences are so subtly corrupting that a vulgar question formed itself in my mind, as I followed the servant up the broad staircase to my room, and I wondered how much the invitation of such luxury might tempt a man fagged in heart and mind. I said to myself that if I were Nevil, for example, and I were in love with the heart of this material bliss, I should certainly let no fantastic scruple bar me from possession. I cannot exactly say how the formulation of this low thought affected me with a perception of Hermia’s charm in a way it was not apt to make its appeal. But when I went down to dinner, and met her again, mellowed to harmony with all that softness and richness by a dress that lent itself in color and texture to her peculiar beauty, I was abashed by her youth and loveliness. I had till then thought of her so much as a mysteriously stricken soul, that I had never done justice to her as a woman that some favored man might be in love with, as men are with women, and might marry. When I now realized this I was ashamed of realizing it, and was afraid of betraying it somehow, by some levity, some want of conformity in mood or manner to what I knew of her. I suffered myself to wonder if Nevil ever had this unruly sense of her, against which something sadly reproachful in her beauty itself seemed to protest, and which I feel that I have given undue import and fixity in putting it into words. I suppose it was all from seeing her for the first time in colors, and from perceiving with a distinctness unfelt before that she was in the perfect splendor of a most regal womanhood. Something perversely comic mixed with my remorse, when I met her eye with these thoughts in my mind, and fancied a swift query there as to the impression I had of her. I wished to tease, to mystify her, to keep her between laughing and crying, as a naughty boy will with some little girl whom he pretends to have found something wrong about. I have since thought she may have been questioning whether I read in her costume any conclusion as to the matter pending in her mind; and that she meant to express by this assertion of her right to be beautiful the decision which she had reached. If this was so, she had chosen a means too finely, too purely feminine; my wife might have understood her, but I certainly did not.

The dowager Mrs. Faulkner was there with her in the drawing-room, a plain old lady, whom I could see her son had looked like, in a rich old lady’s silk. She welcomed me with a motherly cordiality, and put me on that footing of intimacy with Faulkner in the past which I was always wishing in vain to refuse. I perceived that I had for her only the personality that he had given me; she could not detach me from the period of my first acquaintance with him. She began at once to talk literature with me, as if that were the practical interest of my life; and I found her far better read, and of a far more modern taste, than her son had been. She was one of those old ladies who perhaps reach their perfection a little away from the centres of thought, or rather of talk, and in some such subordinate city as that where her life had been passed. She had kept the keen relish for books which seems to dull where books are written and printed, and she had vivid opinions about them which were not faded by constant wear. I found also that she knew personally a great many of the authors we discussed: it was still in the palmy days of lecturing, and the Faulkners had made their house the hospitable sojourn of every writer who had come to the place to read his essay or poem. She told me that I had the authors’ seat at her table, and that the very chair I then sat in had been occupied by Emerson, Curtis, Wendell Phillips, Saxe, Dr. Holland, Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, and I do not know who else.

I confess that she fatigued me a little with all that enthusiasm, but except for her passion for authorship in books and out of them, I found that I must revise my impression that she was a romantic person. Her relations with her daughter-in-law had nothing, certainly, of romantic insubstantiality; they were of the solidest and simplest affection, founded apparently upon a confidence as perfect as could have existed between them if Hermia had been her own child. She gave her the head of the table, and she let herself be ruled by her in many little things in which old ladies are apt to be rebellious to younger women. She seemed to wish only to lead the talk, but she deferred to Hermia in several questions of fact as well as taste, and though she always spoke to her as “child,” it was evidently with no wish to depose or minify her. On her part Hermia, without seeming to do so, showed herself watchful of Mrs. Faulkner’s comfort and pleasure at every moment, and evidently returned her liking in all its cordiality. There was no manner of jealousy between them, perhaps because Mrs. Faulkner could never have been a beauty, and could not even be retrospectively envious of Hermia’s magnificence, and partly also because they were temperaments that in being wholly opposite did not in the least wear upon each other.

This at least was my rapid formulation of the case. The dinner was exquisite, and Mrs. Faulkner praised it with impartial jollity, assuring me that I should have had no such dinner if she had been in authority, but that Hermia’s genius for house-keeping was such that its inspirations ruled even in her absence. As for herself, she did not know what she was eating.

“Nor, I hope, how much I am,” I said.

In fact I felt quite torpid, after dinner. As we sat before the fire I began to have long dreams between the syllables of the words I heard spoken, and I had a passage of conversation with my wife and Faulkner, in which it was all pleasantly arranged in regard to Nevil, while I was dimly aware of Mrs. Faulkner’s asking me whether I thought George Eliot would live as a poet.

I do not know whether I perceptibly disgraced myself or not. But we made a short evening, and a little after nine o’clock I acquiesced with an alacrity for which I am sure my wife would never have forgiven me, in Hermia’s suggestion that I must be very tired, and would like to go to bed.

III

IT WAS CERTAINLY a most anomalous situation, and I woke with the brilliant idea that for my own part in it the whole thing was to take it as naturally as possible; which was probably reflected into my waking thought from some otherwise wholly vanished dream.

I found it early, as to the daylight, but in that smoke-dimmed November air it might very well be still rather dark at seven o’clock. I went out for a breath of the pensive confusion which I found still persisted in it, and inhaled my glad youth and my first joy of travel in the odor of those bituminous fumes. The grass was still brightly green on the lawn;

“And parting summer lingering blooms delayed”

in the garden, which stretched with box-bordered walks and grape-vined trellises to the wall at one side of the house. The leaves had dropped from the trees, and I picked up from the fallen foliage, soft and dank under my feet, a black walnut, pungently aromatic, and redolent of my boyhood. At the same time a faint scent rose from the box, and transported me to that old neglected garden by the sea, where I saw Faulkner die. A thrill of immense pity for him pierced my heart. I thought with what a passion of tenderness for that woman he must have planned this house, from which he was now in eternal exile, and her willingness to forget him in her love for another seemed monstrous. It was hard to be a philosophical spectator; I found myself taking the unfriended side of the dead.

In the house, when I returned to it, I was met by Faulkner’s mother, before that cheerful hall fire. She put aside the damp morning paper which she had just opened to dry in the heat, and gave me her old, soft hand.

“Do you find many familiar points about the place?” she asked.

“No; I’m afraid I hadn’t kept any distinct remembrance of it. At least, it’s all very strange.”

“You would recognize my son’s room, I suppose,” she said, turning and leading the way down a corridor that branched away from the hall. “The old house is all here; the new one was built round it; and we’ve kept poor Douglas’s den, as he used to call it, just as it was.”

I thought it an odd fancy she should wish me to visit the place with her, but I concluded that perhaps she wished to tell her daughter I had already seen it, if she should ask. At any rate, I had no comment to make even in my own mind: we all deal as we best can with our bereavements. and it is but lamely, helplessly at the best.

We had to pass through the library, and I recognized some of the rare editions and large-paper copies with which poor Faulkner had so quickly surfeited me; and there were two or three of his ridiculous Madonnas hung about, cold engravings with wide mats in frigid frames of black, after a belated taste for the quiet in art. They made me shiver; and in the room which we entered from the library that night, and found Nevil smoking there, we were now met by a ghostly scent of tobacco, as if from the cigars that Faulkner kept on nervously consuming, one after another, as we had talked. It brought back my youth, which seemed haunting the city everywhere: not my youth bright and warm as we find it imagined in the lying books, but cold and dead: the spectre that really revisits after years, and makes us glad it is dead.

The stout-hearted old lady pushed back a blind that had swung to across an open casement, and let in the morning sun. “We keep it aired every day; I can’t bear to let it seem to be getting out of use. Hermia feels as I do about it, and she would have asked you to come here and smoke and write your letters; but I thought perhaps I had better bring you first. She was very tired, and we sat up late, talking. Will you sit down? Breakfast will not be ready till half past eight.”

I obeyed, and she sat down too. I wondered what could be her motive in wishing to keep me there, and what her theory was in bringing up the last matter that I should have supposed she would like to talk of in that place. Perhaps she spoke from that absence of sensation in regard to certain interests of life which we imagine callousness in the old: those interests are simply extinct in them, and they are no harder than the young who still feel them so keenly. Perhaps she still felt them, and meant to make a supreme renunciation of the past on the spot hallowed to her by the strongest associations. I do not know; I only know that she began to speak, and to speak with a plainness that I have no right to call obtuseness.

IV

“MR. MARCH, Hermia has been telling me of what she learnt in Boston from Dr. Wingate.”

“Yes?” I said feebly.

“It was my wish that she should go there, and see him, and find out to the last word all that he remembered of Douglas. She would not have gone without my wish; but it was her wish, too; or rather it was the necessity of both of us. After we found that paper of Douglas’s, which she took with her, we could neither of us rest till we knew everything.”

I nodded, for want of wit to say anything relevant, and she went on.

“I wish to say at once that I thoroughly approve of Hermia’s engagement to Mr. Nevil, and that nothing she heard from Dr. Wingate has changed me in the least about it. At first, the engagement was rather a shock to me; but not more so than his offer was to Hermia; perhaps not so much.” There was no faltering in Mrs. Faulkner’s voice, but a tear ran down her cheek. “We are very strangely made, Mr. March. It is twenty years since my husband died, and I have never once thought of marrying again; but I cannot honestly say that I would not have married if I had met any one I loved. I know that such a thing was possible, though I did not know it then. At first, after we have lost some one who is very dear to us, it seems as if henceforward we must live only for the dead: to atone to them for the default of our lives with them, and to make reparation for unkindness. That is the way I felt when my husband died. I wanted to keep myself in communion with him. But that was not possible. Nature soon teaches us better than that; she shows us that as long as we live upon the earth, we Cannot live at all for the dead: we can live only for the living.”

“Yes,” I said. “I never thought of it before, though.”

“Have you ever known any deep bereavement?”

“No; I have been very fortunate.”

“If you ever have such a sorrow, you will understand what I say as you never can without it. I had learned the truth when my son died, and I tried to make my daughter accept it from me. But she could not; she could only accept it from experience. He had been her whole life so long that she did not wish to live any other. No woman ever devoted herself more utterly than she did to him. She could not realize that as long as she remained in the world she could not devote herself to him any more; that all that had come absolutely to an end. The truth was the harder for her to learn ‘by reason of great strength.’ She thought that for his sake she could bear not to know what was the trouble of mind in which he died. That was a mistake.”

“My wife and I thought so, when we heard of it. Dr. Wingate told me about it. But it was very heroic.”

“It was heroic, yes; but it was impossible. I knew it at the time. If she had made Dr. Wingate tell her then, she could have thought it out and lived it down; or, if she couldn’t have done that, then at least what makes it so cruel now would never have happened.”

“Yes, I see,” I said, in the pause which Mrs. Faulkner made.

“I have always been willing,” she resumed, “and sometimes I have been anxious that Hermia should marry again. Marriage is for this world. We are told that by Christ himself, and we know it instinctively. Death does dissolve it inexorably; and although I believe, as Swedenborg says in one of his strange books, that one man and one woman shall live together to all eternity in a union that will make them one personality, still I believe that, as he says, that union may or may not begin on earth, and that it will be formed hereafter without regard to earthly ties. I was not a fool, and I saw that Hermia was young and attractive, and I expected her to have the feelings of other young and attractive women.”

There was a mixture of mysticism and matter-of-fact in this dear old lady’s formulation of the case which was bringing me near the verge of a smile, but I said, gravely, “Of course.”

“But she never showed the least sign of it; and when, after Mr. Nevil came back from Europe, their engagement took place, I was entirely unprepared for such a thing. He had been with us a great deal. We nursed him through a long sickness after that broken engagement of his in Nebraska, and he was quite like one of ourselves. In fact, his friendship with Douglas dates back so far — to the very beginning of their college days — that I can hardly remember when James did not seem like a son to me. You mustn’t suppose, though, that I ever objected to the engagement, or do now. I highly approve of it. But I had always fancied that the very intimacy that Hermia was thrown into with him, was unfavorable to her forming any fancy for him. In fact, she has always been rather critical of him; and I know that she rather dislikes clergymen — as men, I mean. She is a religious person in her own way: I’ve nothing to say against her way. So, as I say, I was sufficiently astonished; but that is neither here nor there. I gave my cordial consent at once. James has not had a very joyous life; he has made it rather hard for himself, and I suppose that the idea of putting some brightness into it may have first made Hermia — But at any rate they were very happy together; and though Hermia had her morbid feelings occasionally about Douglas, and seemed to think it was wicked to turn from him to anybody else, and a kind of treason, still, she always listened to me about it, and would be reasonable when I showed her how foolish she was. I wanted her to put his things away, and there I suppose I made a little mistake, especially the things connected with his last days — writings and letters, and odd scraps, that she was always intending to look over, and never quite had the strength for. She consented to burn them; but she could not bring herself to do that without reading them; and so we found that paper which she carried to Dr. Wingate. Do you know what was in it?”

“No, certainly. She showed it to him in our presence, and I think she was willing we should know, but he decided very wisely that he would rather speak with her alone about it.”

My feeling did not seem to make much impression upon Mrs. Faulkner.

“I suppose you do know, Mr. March, that my son was not quite in his right mind when he died?”

I admitted that I had some misgivings to that effect.

“I don’t understand,” she went on, “why we should be so ashamed to acknowledge that any one connected with us is not perfectly sane. As if the world were not full of crazy people! As if we were not all a little crazy on some point or other! The pain he suffered had affected his mind; it’s very common, I believe; and he had a delusion that showed itself in the form of a dream, but that would have been sure, if he lived, to have broken out in a mania.

She stopped, as if she expected me to prompt her or agree with her, and I said, “Yes, Dr. Wingate told me something of the kind.”

“But he gave you no hint of what the dream — the delusion — was?”

“None.”

“We used often to try to think what it could be. It seemed to give him a dislike or distrust for Hermia; and we thought — we hardly ever spoke of it openly; now we must handle it without shrinking, no matter what pain it gives! We thought — that it involved some fear of violence from her. People whose minds are beginning to be affected, often have such dreadful fancies about those who are dearest to them.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” I said, and I hope I did not let my tone express the slight impatience I felt at being obliged to traverse ground I had been over with Hermia already in this quest.

“But it was nothing of that kind whatever. It was” — Mrs. Faulkner hesitated, as if to prepare me for a great surprise-”jealousy.”

“Jealousy?” I repeated, and I could not help throwing into the word a touch of the surprise which she evidently expected of me. I had not followed her so far without perceiving that an old lady so devoted to literature valued the literary quality of the situation; that with all her good sense and true and just feeling she had the foible of being rather proud of a passage in her family life which was so like a passage of romance.

“Yes,” she went on. “And of all things, jealousy of her with — with James.” I could say nothing to a fact which I had conjectured long before, and she continued: “Dr. Wingate seemed to think that now she had better know exactly what the dream was, since the paper we had found distressed her so much, and take it in the right way. It was a scribble in one of his note-books, on a leaf that he had torn Out and probably meant to tear up. It had the date, and it spoke of his having that dream again; that he had begun to have it every night, and if he fell asleep by day. The leaf was torn out at the side in places, and you could only read scraps of sentences, but it all accused her of wishing his death. It would have driven any other woman wild, but Hermia had been through too much already. She told me something of it, to explain the paper as well as she could; and she said that she knew you and Mrs. March had noticed something strange in Douglas’s manner toward her the day you were there; and I urged her to go right on and consult you both, and see Dr. Wingate, and find out exactly what the trouble was.”

I was silent, for want of anything fitting to say, though she seemed to expect me to speak.

“The doctor told her that Douglas had been having the dream almost a year before he died: at first every month or two, and then every week. So far as he could remember it was always exactly the same thing from the very beginning. He dreamed that she and James were — attached, and were waiting for him to die, so that they could get married. Then he would see them getting married in church, and at the same time it would be his own funeral, and he would try to scream out that he was not dead; but Hermia would smile, and say to the people that she had known James before she knew Douglas; and then both ceremonies would go on, and he would wake. That was all.”

“It seems to me quite enough. Horrible! Horrible! I’m surprised that Wingate should have told her.”

“He had to do so. There was nothing else. She got it from him by questioning; though I suppose he thought it best she should know just what the trouble was, so that she could see how perfectly fantastic it was, and be able to deal with it accordingly.”

“Poor man! How he must have suffered from that unrelenting nightmare! And it seems too ghastly to drag from his grave the secret he kept while he lived.” These thoughts were so vivid in my mind that I should not have been surprised if Mrs. Faulkner had replied to them like spoken words.

But she only said: “There were some strange details of the dream, which it seems Dr. Wingate recalled; he may have written it down after hearing Douglas tell it; and from the description of the church which he gave, Hermia recognized it as one here in the city: James’s own church. Of course,” said the old lady, ignoring the shudder with which I received this final touch, “Dr. Wingate might not have been so explicit if he had known of Hermia’s engagement to James. I suppose you hadn’t told him?”

“No,” I said, and I set that omission down as the chief enormity in a life which has not been free from some blunders worse than crimes.

“Well, that is the whole affair, and we must act at once,” said Mrs. Faulkner.

“Break off the engagement, of course,” was at my tongue’s end; but I found out I had said nothing when she added:

“James must know it all without delay. He has been out of town, but he will be home to-night, and he must know it before he meets Hermia again.”

“Of course,” I said.

“We talked it over late into the night, and we both came to that conclusion. In fact, Hermia had thought it out on the way home; and she said that just as the train came in sight of home yesterday, it all flashed upon her what she must do. She must leave the future wholly to James, to do whatever he thought right after he knew everything. She says it came to her like a sudden relief from pain. You must have thought it strange we could keep up, as we did in the evening, but it was the revulsion of feeling with her, and I knew nothing till you left us. She merely said, when we met, ‘It is all right, mother,’ and I should have thought so, if she had told me every word. The decision she reached is the only one. We must leave it to James. She rests in that, and I can’t say whether the thought of my poor son’s illusion troubles her or not, in its elf. I know that it ought not to trouble her; but at the same time I know that it is something which we ought not to keep from James. Men often look at things very differently from women, the best of women.”

V

IT WENT THROUGH my mind that the affections being the main interest of women’s lives, perhaps they dealt with them more practically if not more wholesomely than men. Certainly their treatment of them seems much more business-like.

Heaven knows what was really in that old woman’s heart, as she talked so bravely of a future from which even her son’s memory was to be obliterated. Whether it was a sacrifice of herself she was completing, or whether she was accomplishing an end which she freely intended, I shall never be certain; but I thought afterward that she had perhaps schooled herself to look only at Hermia’s side of the affair, and had come to feel that she could do no wrong to the dead, whom she could no longer help, by seeking the happiness of the living, whom she could help so much. I myself have always reasoned to this effect, and in what I had to do with it I did my best to bring others to the same mind; and yet at that moment, in that place, it seemed a hellish thing. I saw Faulkner with the inner vision, by which alone, doubtless, we see the dead, standing there where I first met him, by that table where we were sitting, with his long nervous fingers, yellowed at their tips by his cigar, trembling on an open page; and then I saw him fall back on the seat of the arbor in the old sea-side garden and die. What a long tragedy it was that had passed between those two meetings! Had not his suffering won him the right to remembrance? None of us would have denied this; but what was proposed was to forget him; to blot his memory and his sorrow, as he had himself been blotted, out of the world forever. The living must do this for their lives’ sake; the dead must not master us through an immortal grief. All the same I pitied Faulkner, pitied him for his baleful dream, whose shadow had clouded his own life, and seemed destined to follow that of others as relentlessly; and I pitied him all the more because there seemed no one to do it but me who had cared for him so little while he lived. He had suffered greatly, and by no fault of his own, unless you could blame his folly in having his friend so familiarly a part of his home that his crazy jealousy must make him its object almost necessarily. But even this weakness, culpable as it was, was a weakness and not a wrong; and no casuistry could prove it malevolent. Something impersonally sinister was in it all, and the group involved was severally as blameless as the victims of fate in a Greek trilogy. Neither I nor any other witness of the fact considered for a moment that Faulkner had cause for the dark suspicion which was the beginning and the end of his dream.

I do not know whether Mrs. Faulkner had been saying anything else before I woke from these thoughts and heard her say, “I have spoken very fully and freely to you, Mr. March, both because you knew much of this matter already, and because I need — Hermia needs — your help. We depend upon your kindness; we are quite helpless without you; and you were one of my son’s early friends, and can enter into our feelings.”

“I assure you, Mrs. Faulkner—” I began; and I was going to say that the matter of my early friendship with her son had somehow always been strangely exaggerated; but I found that I could not decently do this, under the circumstances, and I said— “There is nothing in my power that I wouldn’t gladly do for you.”

“I was certain of that,” she answered. “James must know of this — of the whole fact — as soon as he gets back. But Hermia can’t write to him about it, and I can’t speak to him.” I began to feel a cold apprehension steal over me; at the same time a light of intelligence concerning Hermia’s hospitable eagerness to make me her guest dawned upon me. Could that exquisite creature, in that electrical moment of relief from her trouble, have foreseen my usefulness by the same flash that showed her the simple duty she had in the matter? I do not think I should have blamed her, if that were the case; and I was prepared for Mrs. Faulkner’s conclusion: “We must ask you to speak to James.”

I was prepared, but I was certainly dismayed, too; and I promptly protested: “My dear Mrs. Faulkner, I don’t see how I could possibly do that. I am very sorry, very sorry indeed; but I cannot. I should not feel warranted in assuming such a confidential mission to Mr. Nevil, by my really slight acquaintance, or by anything in my past relations with your son. I have been most reluctant to know anything about this painful business,” and if this was not quite true, it was certainly true that I had not sought to know anything. “At every point my wife and I have respected the secrecy in which we felt it ought to remain, even against the impulse of sympathetic curiosity.”

“Then Mrs. March did not tell you what it was when you started home with Hermia?”

“Surely not! She would have thought it a betrayal of Mrs. Faulkner that would have been embarrassing to me; and how could you suppose I would let you go on and tell me the whole story if I knew it already.

“I didn’t think of that,” said Mrs. Faulkner. “Hermia and I both took it for granted that Mrs. March had told you.” I did not say anything, and she added ruefully, “Then I don’t know what we shall do. Is it asking too much to ask if you can suggest anything?”

I knew from her tone that she was hurt as well as disappointed by this refusal of mine to act for them; strange as it appears, she must have counted unquestioningly upon my consent. I said, to gain time as much as possible, for I had no doubt on that point, “Excuse me, Mrs. Faulkner: do I understand this request to come from you both?”

“No; my daughter knows nothing about it. The idea of asking you was entirely my own; and I made a point of seeing you as soon as possible, this morning. If you must refuse, I beg you will not let her know.”

“You may depend upon my silence, Mrs. Faulkner. But,” and I rose and began to walk about the room, “why should you tell Mr. Nevil what the dream was; or at least that it concerned him? We must consider that, in the light of reason, the thing is non-existent. It has no manner of substance, or claim upon any one’s conscience or even interest. Dr. Wingate did not wish Mrs. Faulkner to know it; and I really think that when she insisted, he would have done wisely and righteously to lie to her about it. I’m sure he would have done so if he had known that she was engaged to Mr. Nevil. But it’s too late now; the mischief’s done, as far as she’s concerned. The question is now how to stop the evil from going farther; and I say there is no necessity for Mr. Nevil’s knowing anything about it. Treat it from this moment as the unreality which it is; ignore it.”

I went on to the same effect; but as I talked, I knew more and more that I was wasting my breath, and in a bad cause, and I saw that Mrs. Faulkner even ceased to follow me. One of the maids came to my rescue with the announcement that breakfast was served. We followed her, and I ate with the appetite to which I have noticed that the exercise of the sympathies always gives an edge of peculiar keenness.

VI

HERMIA did not join us at breakfast, but I had no need to account for her absence upon that theory of extreme fatigue from her journey, which Mrs. Faulkner urged with so much superfluous apology. I began to have my reluctances about that old lady, to wish to escape from her, because I had refused to oblige her in that little matter of interviewing Nevil, and I was afraid she would recur to it. I made an excuse of wanting to look about the town, and I went out as soon as I could get away after breakfast.

Now that I was there, and had come so far, I was willing to see all I could of the place, and of several people in it whom I remembered as very charming; and I felt exasperated by the terms of my presence. I reviled myself for going to the Faulkners’, though I knew I could not help it; but being their guest I could not leave them except to leave town. I strolled about harassed with the notion that I would go on the night express, and denying myself in the interest of this early departure all those little lapses into sentiment concerning the past which I had always expected to indulge when I returned to its scenes. I found myself unwilling to meet my old friends, with the burden on me of having to say that I was there only for the day, and to explain that I had come on with Mrs. Faulkner, and was her guest. I hated the air of mystery the affair would have; but there was one person whom I could not really think of going away without seeing. As a young man I used to come and go in her house as freely as in my own home, at any time between nine in the morning and twelve at night; she had been kind to me, and helpful and inspiring, as only a brilliant woman of the world, who is also good, can be to an ambitious, shy, awkward young fellow of twenty-two; and I decided to make hers stand for all the friendships of the past.

She made me so sweetly welcome that in a moment we had broken through the little web of alienation that the spider years had been spinning between us; and found ourselves exactly in the old relations again. I had been a little curious, after seeing so much of the world, to see whether she would appear as clever and accomplished as she used to seem; and I was glad to find she bore the test of my mature experience perfectly. After all, it is such women who make the polite world, wherever we find it; not the world them. Her tact divined, without any motion of mine, all the external points of the case, and made it seem even to me the most natural thing possible that I should have seized the occasion of Mrs. Faulkner’s being in Boston to run out with her to my old home, if only for a day, and give my old friends a glimpse of me. She supposed that I must be devoted to the Faulkners for the short time I staid, and she would merely insist upon my lunching with her; she would make my peace with Mrs. Faulkner. Was not she exquisite? Had I ever met any one just like her? And what a life of self-devotion, and then of sorrow! No, no one could understand what she had been through, unless they had seen something of it day by day. But I had seen something; the most tragical thing of all, perhaps; and my wife had been so good! Mrs. Faulkner had told her about Mrs. March.

The talk naturally confined itself to Mrs. Faulkner for a time, and it naturally returned to her from whatever excursions it made in other directions. After a while, it began, somehow, to include Nevil, whom I found to be another of my friend’s enthusiasms; she celebrated him with the fervor that is rather characteristic of hero and heroine worship in small places, where people almost have their noses against the altar. I trembled inwardly for the secret I was guarding, for I felt that my friend would have it out of me in an instant if she suspected me of its custody, but apparently she knew nothing of the engagement. She asked me if I had heard of that horrid affair out West which had given poor Mr. Nevil back to them again; and she said she supposed he would never think of marrying, now. She wished that he would marry Hermia Faulkner; it would be more than appropriate, it would be ideal; they were exactly suited to each other; and she could help him in his work as no other woman could. She deserved some happiness; but it would be like her to go on dedicating her whole existence to the memory of a man who was really her inferior, and who had nothing to commend him to her constancy except his love for her. Of his love for her you could not say enough; but my friend reminded me that she had never considered him the wonderful person that some people thought him; and she scouted the notion of his having married beneath him in marrying Hermia Winter. Her people were very nice people, though they were so poor; they were idealists; and her father had come West and settled on Pawpaw Creek after the failure of one of those communities in New England, which he had been connected with. As for Hermia herself, whom my friend remembered in her Bell’s Institute days, she was a girl of the rarest intelligence and character; a being quite supernally above a ward politician and a pretentious dilettante like Douglas Faulkner, whose “three times skimmed sky-blue” Virginia blood was full of the barbaric pride of a race of slave-holders. As my friend went on she characterized poor Faulkner with a violent excess which would have satisfied even Mrs. March the day when she first met him at Swampscott, and he betrayed his defective tastes in literature and art. Of course, I said that this was exactly the way in which he had impressed my wife; and I defended him. But she told me I might spare my breath; that she knew I really thought just as my wife and she did about him; and that if James Nevil had not been a saint upon earth he never could have endured the man.

“We are both saints,” I suggested. “I endured him.”

“Oh, no, you’re not. Nevil really loved him, and I believe he loves his memory to this day.”

“Well, at any rate Faulkner’s out of the story,” I urged.

“I’m not so sure of that!” cried my friend. “I’m afraid it’s their foolish constancy to him that keeps those two from thinking of each other.”

“Are you, really?” I asked, and I found a perverse amusement in playing with her shrewd ignorance so near my knowledge, which it could so easily have penetrated. “It seems to me that if they were inclined to each other, their allegiance to the dead would have very little effect. I suspect that conscience, or the moral sentiments, or whatever we call the supersensuous equipment, has nothing to do with people’s falling in love, except to find reasons and justifications for it, and to add a zest to it.”

“I will write that to Mrs. March,” said my friend, “and ask her if those are her ideas, too.”

“Oh, I know!” I answered airily. “You ladies like to pretend that it’s an affair of the soul, or if possible, of the intellect; and as your favor is the breath of the novelists’ nostrils, they all flatter you up in your pretension, till you get to believing in it yourselves. But at the bottom of your hearts, you know, as we do, that it’s a plain, earthly affair, for this life, for this trip and train only.”

“Shocking! shocking!” said my friend, shaking her head, which had grown charmingly gray, in a marquise manner, and evincing her delight in the boldness with which I handled the matter.

“You may be sure,” I concluded, “that if these two people have not fallen in love, it’s because they don’t fancy each other. If they did, there would be no consideration of sentiment, no air-woven tie of fealty to a love or a friendship of the past, which would hold them in the leash. If Faulkner’s ghost rose between them, they would plunge through it into each other’s arms.”

“Ah, now you are talking atrociously!” said my friend.

I had indeed been hurried a little beyond myself by a sudden realization of the fact that so far as Hermia was concerned, the past was obliterated by her determination to leave everything to Nevil; and that as soon as Nevil knew everything, he would decide, as I should have decided, that every consideration of honor and delicacy and duty, as well as of love, bound him to her. An added impulse had been given to my words by the consciousness that I was the only means of making her determination known to him, that whether she had inspired her mother to ask this service of me or not, she tacitly hoped it, and that in the end I should probably somehow render it.

But I instinctively fought off from it as long as I could, and I resolved to leave town without rendering it if possible. I spent most of the afternoon with my friend; and she sent a late embassy to the Faulkners to know if she might keep me to dinner. They consented, as they must; Hermia herself wrote that she consented only because she was so completely prostrated that she could not hope to see me at dinner, and her mother was not well; they counted upon having me several days with them, and they would not be selfish.

VII

THE FAULKNERS of course knew nothing of my intention of going that night, and I staid rather late after dinner, so that I should not have much more time than I needed to pack my bag and catch my train. I thought that if I could not altogether escape an embarrassing urgence from them to stay longer, I could at least cut it short. But I found that it was a needless precaution when I went back to them. Mrs. Faulkner, the mother, received my reasons for hurrying home with all the acquiescence I could have wished. She said she knew I must be anxious to get back to my family whom I had left at such short notice; that Hermia and herself appreciated my kindness and my wife’s goodness more than they could ever express; and they hoped and prayed that if our need should ever be like theirs we might find such friends in it as we had been to them. I felt an unintentional irony in these thanks so far as they concerned the perfection of my own friendship, but I still had no disposition to repair its lack by offering to see Nevil for her. That, I felt, more and more, I could not do; but I stood a moment, questioning whether I ought not to renew my expressions of regret that I could not do it. I ended by saying that I hoped all would turn out for the best with them; and I added some platitudes and inanities which she seemed not to hear, for she broke in upon them with excuses for Hermia, who would not be able to see me, she was afraid. I said, I knew what a wretched day she had been having, and I left my adieux with Mrs. Faulkner for her. Perhaps if I had not myself been so distraught I might have noticed more the incoherent attention Mrs. Faulkner was able to give me throughout this interview. But I did not realize it till afterward. I went to my room, glad to have it over so easily, and resolved to get out of the house with all possible despatch. I had a carriage at the gate, and I looked forward to waiting an hour and a half in the depot before my train started with more pleasure than such a prospect ever inspired in me before.

In the confusion which afterward explained and justified itself, Mrs. Faulkner had failed to offer me the superfluous help of a servant to fetch down my bag, and I was descending the stairs with it in my hand when I heard a door close in the corridor which led to Faulkner’s den. Steps uneven and irregular advanced toward the square hall at the foot of the stairs, and in a moment I saw a man stagger into the light, and stay himself by a clutch at the newel-post. He looked around as if dazed, and then vaguely up at me, where I stood as motionless and helpless as he. I have no belief he saw me; but at any rate, Nevil turned at the cry of “James! James!” which came in Hermia’s voice from the corridor, and caught her in his arms as she flew upon him. She locked her arms around his neck, and wildly kissed him again and again, with sobs such as break from the ruin of life and love; with gasps like dying, and with a fond, passionate moaning broken by the sound of those fierce, swift kisses.

I pitied her far too much to feel ashamed of my involuntary witness of the scene; though as for that I do not believe she would have foregone one caress if she had known that all the world was looking. I perceived that this was the end; and I understood as clearly as if I had been told that she had confided her secret to him, had left their fate in his hands, and that he had decided against their love. It maddened me against him, to think he had done that. I did not know, I did not care, what motive, what reason, what scruple had governed him; I felt that there could be only one good in the world, and that was the happiness of that woman. For the moment, this happiness seemed centred and existent solely in her possession of him. But I was sensible, through my compassion and my indignation, that whatever he had done, she was admiring, adoring him for it. I saw that, in a flash of her upturned face, as I stood, with my heart in my mouth, before the tragedy of their renunciation. The play suddenly ended. With one last long kiss, she pushed him from her, and fled back into the corridor.

VIII

I FOUND MYSELF outside in the night, and at the gate I found Nevil in parley with my coachman, who was explaining to him that he was engaged to take a gentleman inside the house, there, to the depot, and could not carry Nevil home.

“Get in, Mr. Nevil,” I said. “I’ve plenty of time, and can drop you wherever you say.”

It was as if we had both just come Out of the theatre, and actor and spectator had met on the same footing of the commonplace world of reality.

“Oh, Mr. March!” he said. “Is that you? I will drive with you as far as my study, if you’ll let me. I don’t feel quite able to walk.”

“Yes, certainly. Get in.”

He gave the direction, “St. Luke’s Church,” and I followed him into the hack, and he shrank into the corner, and scarcely spoke till we reached the church. By the gleams that the street lamps threw into the windows as we passed them I had glimpses of his face, haggard and estranged. He tried to fit his latch-key to the door in the church edifice, and then gave it to me, saying with pathetic feebleness, “You do it. I can’t. And don’t go — don’t leave me,” he added, as we entered. “Come in, a moment.”

I told the driver to wait, and I suppose he had his conjectures as to the condition in which I was getting the Rev. James Nevil into his study. He was like one drunk, and he went reeling and stumbling before me. Once within he seemed almost unconscious of me, where he sat sunken in an arm-chair, staring at the fire in the grate, and I waited for him to speak. At last I made a movement, and he took it as a sign of departure, and put out his hand entreatingly. “No, no! You mustn’t go. I want to tell you—” And then he lapsed again into his silence. At last he broke from it with a long sigh: that “Ah-h-h!” which I remembered from the time when he spoke, on the cliffs by the sea, of Faulkner’s unkindness to Hermia. “Well, it is ended!”

I had not the heart to pretend that I did not know what he meant. I said nothing, and he lifted his face toward me where I stood, leaning on his chimney-piece.

“Hermia has told me that you know about this unhappiness of ours,” he said, hoarsely. “Your knowledge makes you the one human being whom I can speak to of it; perhaps it gives you the right to know all — all there is.”

“No, no,” I protested. “I have no claim, and I haven’t the wish.” I mechanically referred to my watch, and seeing that I had abundant time before my train went, I dropped into the chair beside the hearth, and ended by saying, “But I should be glad if I could in any way serve you or help you. I do know the painful situation in which you are placed, and though I can truly say that neither my wife nor I have ever tried to know of it, I confess that we have been most deeply interested, and you have both had our sympathy in a measure which I needn’t try to express.” I instinctively calmed my tone to an effect of quiet upon his agitation.

“You have been very good — far kinder friends than we could have hoped to find, and there is nothing that such friends as you may not know, so far as we are concerned. But there is very little more to tell. It is all over.”

I thought he wished me to ask how, and I said, “Mrs. Faulkner’s mother told me this morning that they were waiting to see you — or rather to let you know on your return—”

“Yes. I expected to return to-night, but I came back late this afternoon, and I went directly to them, of course. It was not what Hermia wished — it was what she dreaded most — but it was doubtless for the best; at any rate it happened. In a moment we were confronted with our question. She told me, fully and fearlessly, as she deals with everything, just what it was, and we set ourselves to solve it — to solve it, if possible, in favor of ourselves, our weakness, perhaps our sin!” His head dropped on his breast, and I saw his eyes fixed with a dreary stare on the smouldering fire. I was sensible, without looking about it much, of the character of the room. It was one of those studies which clergymen for their convenience sometimes have in their church buildings, and where I suppose they go to read and write and think, and transact church business with the officers of their church, and receive people who come to them for counsel or comfort in such straits as those which bring us in piteous entreaty before the ministers of conscience. It is a kind of Protestant confessional; and while I waited for Nevil to speak again, I recalled stories I had heard of guilty souls seeking such an asylum for that relief which we shall all know at the judgment-day, when we shall be stripped bare before the divine compassion down to our inmost thoughts and purposes. Women who have betrayed their husbands go there to own their shame; men that have cheated and stolen and lied, go there to lay the burden of their wrong-doing upon the priest of God; and with these a mass of minor sinners, with their peccadilloes of temper and breeding and deceit; as well as the self-accusers who wish to purge their spirits even of the dread of sin, and to receive the acquittal which they cannot give themselves. More and more as Nevil went on it seemed to me that the place was not favorable to a judicial examination of his own case; that the color of things he had heard there must stain and blacken the facts of his own experience, and prevent him from seeing them aright.

“The question was,” he said, lifting his head, and bending that hopeless stare on me, “not what we should do, with that shadow of Faulkner’s dream hanging over us, but what we had done — what I had done — to cause him the torment of such a dream.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Mr. Nevil,” I broke in, “don’t take that way of looking at it. You had no more to do with causing that dream than I had. The pain he suffered — the physical pain — caused the craze which his dream came from. It was a somnambulic mania — nothing more and nothing less. Dr. Wingate assured Mrs. Faulkner in the most solemn manner—”

“Ah, the sincerity of a doctor with his patient! He is a skilful man, very able, very learned; he knows all about the body, but the soul and its secrets are beyond science. There are facts in the case that he has never had before him. I knew Hermia first, in the loveliness of her young girlhood, and I brought her and Faulkner together.”

I murmured, “Yes, I remember you told me.”

“I saw the impression she instantly made upon him: it was love at first sight. But though the love of her had possessed his whole soul, he was first faithful to his friendship with me. In that childlike, simple, cordial truthfulness of his, which no one ever knew so fully as I, and which I shall never see in any other man, he pressed me to tell him whether I had any feeling for her myself, for then he would go away, and live his passion down, as best he could, and leave her to me. I assured him that I had no such feeling, no feeling but that pleasure in her beauty and goodness which every one must have in her presence; and they were married.”

The silence following upon the gasp in which these words ended was not such as I could break. After a moment Nevil went on.

“I believed what I said; I have never doubted it till this day. But — how do I know — how do I know — that I was not in love with her then, that I have not always been in love with her through all his life and death? It is such a subtle, such a fatal thing in its perversion! I have seen it in others; why shouldn’t it be in me? Why shouldn’t we have been playing a part unknowingly to ourselves, hypocrites before our own souls? Why should I ever have consented to be with them, to qualify their home by an alien presence, through the daily, hourly lie of friendship for him, except that I loved her, and longed to be near her? Why could not I have kept the love of that poor foolish young girl, innocent and harmless, for all her levity, which she gave me Out there in the West, except that in the guilty inmost of my heart there was no room for anything but love for my friend’s wife, whom it had made his widow? Why—”

“Hold on! Wait! This is monstrous!” I broke in upon him. “It’s atrocious. You’re the victim of your own morbid introspection, of a kind of self-analysis that never ends in anything but self-conviction. I know what it is, every one knows; and it’s your right, it’s your duty as a man to stand out against it, and not let the honest and lawful feeling you now have damn the past to shame!”

I spoke vehemently, far beyond any explicit right I had to adjure him, but I could see that my words had not the slightest weight with him.

“And Hermia,” he went on, “why should she have cared nothing for Faulkner at first? Why, when she believed she had schooled herself to love him, should she have suffered the ever-repeated intrusion of my presence in her home? Why should she have refused so long to know what his dream was? Why should we have made such haste to separate after Faulkner’s death; and then why should my thoughts have turned so instantly to her, with such longing for her pity, in that shame I underwent; and why should she have honored and not despised me for a misfortune that my own folly had provoked? There is one answer to it all!”

“And the answer is that your view of the case is as purely an aberration as Faulkner’s dream.”

“Ah, you can’t account for everything on the ground of madness! Somewhere, some time, there must be responsibility for wrong.”

“Even if we have to find it in innocence! I tell you that your view of the situation is as false as that which the lowest scandal-mongering mind of an enemy could take of it. You are bound to let your own character — or if not your character, then her character, her nature — count for something in making up such a judgment. I will leave you out of the question, if you like, but I would stake my life upon the singleness of her devotion, in thought, feeling, and deed, to that wretched man whose misery seems such an inextinguishable poison. It’s preposterous that I should be defending her to you; but if you have suffered her to share these misgivings of yours, I say you’ve done a cruel thing. I know — her mother told me — that after what she underwent from learning just what Faulkner’s dream was — and my wife and I saw something of her suffering, both in Boston and on the way out here—”

“Ah-h-h!” he breathed.

“She had found peace in her reliance, her perfect faith in your conscience, in your sense of justice, and your instinct of right; and, if you will allow me to say so, you were most sacredly bound not to let any perverse scruple, any self-indulgent misgiving, betray her trust in you. You are a man, with a man’s larger outlook, and you should have been the perspective in which she could see the whole matter truly. If you have failed her in this, you have been guilty of something worse than anything you accuse yourself of. Take the thing at its worst! I refuse to consider that she ever allowed her fancy to stray from her duty, but suppose that you were in love with her, in that unconscious way you imagine: who was hurt, who was deceived by it? What harm was done? I will go farther, and ask what harm was there, even if you knew you were in love with her? You let no one else know it — her, least of any.” The words, when I had got them out, shocked me; they certainly did not represent my own feeling about such a situation; I was glad my wife had not heard them; and I saw the horror of me that came into Nevil’s face. I felt myself getting hot and red, and I hastened to add, “You will forgive me, if I try to put before you the mere legal, practical, matter-of-fact view of the affair”; and I could not help remembering that it was also the romantic view, which I had found celebrated in many novels, as something peculiarly fine and noble and high, something heroic in the silently suffering lover. “I admit that I have no right to speak to you at all—”

“Go on; I invite you to speak,” he said gently.

“Then I will say that my only desire is to-to — how shall I say it? — urge that this is altogether an affair of the future, and that if you allow the unhappy past, which is dead, and ought to be buried with Faulkner, to dominate you, or to shape your relations, you seem to me to be—”

I found myself talking sophistries, and I had nothing to say when he took up the word where I broke off.

“Recognizing the fact that the future is the creature, the mere consequence of the past! Without what has been, nothing can be. Oh, we have looked at it in every light! At first, when she told me, I was as bold, as defiant, as a man can be who finds himself unjustly defamed. I said that if ever we had felt reluctance or doubt in our allegiance to the dead, now it was our right, our duty to feel none. We should accuse ourselves if we admitted that any accusal could lie against us. The very innocence of our lives demanded vindication; we should be recreant to our good consciences if we did not treat that wretched figment of a dreaming craze as it deserved. For a moment — for an hour — we were happy in the escape which my defiance won for us, and we built that future without a past, which you think can stand. It fell to ruin. We had deceived each other, but the deceit could not last. Our very indignation at the treason imputed to us by Faulkner’s dream made us examine our hearts, and question each other. We could not tell when our love began, and that mystery of origin which love partakes of with eternity, and which makes it seem so divine a thing, became a witness against us. We said that if we could not make sure that no thought we had ever had of each other in his lifetime was false to him, then we were guilty of all, and we must part.”

“Oh,” I groaned out, “what mere madness of the moon!”

“It was not I who pronounced our sentence; she saw herself that it must be so; it was she who sent me from her.”

“Yes; only a woman could be capable of it, could be such a moral hypochondriac! But if she sent you away, and you know, as you must know, that in her heart she wished you to stay, why not in Heaven’s name go back to her?”

“Ah, you think I didn’t go back! You think we parted once only! We parted a hundred times!”

“But,” I said, “you will see it all differently to-morrow, and you must go back to her, and whether she bids you go or not, you must never leave her.”

“And what sort of life would that be? A life of defiance, of recklessness, a mere futureless present! I am a priest of the Church, and I teach submission, renunciation, abnegation, here below, where there can be no true happiness, for the sake of a blessed eternity. Shall I cleave to this love which we feel cannot innocently be ours, and preach those things with my lying tongue, while my life preaches rebellion, indulgence, self-will? Every breath I drew would be hypocrisy. What heart should I have to counsel or admonish others in temptation, when I was all rotten within myself? What—”

“Ah, but only listen a moment! This would be all well enough if you were guilty of what you accuse yourself! But don’t you see that in this reasoning, or this raving, of yours, you have violated the very first principle, the very highest principle of law? You have held yourself guilty till you were proven innocent, and you offer no proof that you are guilty, not the least proof in the world. You are only afraid that you are guilty; it amounts to that, and it amounts to nothing more; for I hold that Faulkner’s crazy jealousy forms no manner of case against you. I confess that though I may have seemed to imply the contrary, I should not feel it lawful for you to marry his widow if you had ever allowed yourself to covet his wife. But you never did; the very notion of such a thing fills you with such shame and horror that you accuse yourself of it. I know that kind of infernal juggle of the morbid conscience; but I thank Heaven I have my own conscience in such good training now that it accuses me of nothing I haven’t done; it finds it has quite enough to do in dealing with the facts; I don’t supply it with any fancies! It ought to be on your conscience not to leave that noble and beautiful creature to be the prey of doubts and fears, of ifs and ands, that will blast her whole life with the shame of a thief who has given up his booty to escape punishment! Suppose you look at that side of it! You say you left her because she bade you, but she bade you only because she knew you believed you ought to go; and now you must go back to her not only for her sake and for your sake, but in the interest of human enlightenment, from the duty every educated man has to resist the powers of darkness that work upon our nerves through the superstitions of the childhood of the world. You not only ought not to let Faulkner’s dream have any deterrent influence with you, but, as you saw yourself, exactly and entirely because of his dream you ought to act in defiance of it, if you have the good conscience which you’ve said nothing yet to prove you haven’t.”

I saw that I had touched some points that had escaped him; we talked a long time, and at last I pulled out my watch in a scare, lest I had overstaid my time. I jumped to my feet. “Good heavens! I’ve lost my train!”

Nevil looked at his watch. “You have Eastern time; there’s nearly a whole hour yet. I’ll go to the station with you.”

I would not sit down again. “Suppose, then, we let the driver take my bag, and we walk? We can talk better.”

“You are very good,” he said; “I should like that.”

The night was dark, and we had the seclusion of a room for our talk, as we walked along together; and in the vast depot, starred with its gas jets far overhead, there was an unbroken sense of communion. Long before we parted, Nevil had consented to revise his own conclusions, and so far to take my view of the situation as at least to see Hermia again, and lay it before her.

My spirits rose with my success, and I set myself to cheer the melancholy in which he assented to my urgence. I understood afterward that he was yielding to reason against that perverse and curious apparatus which we call the conscience; and I perceived that he was loath to have me leave him, as if he were afraid to be left alone, or wished to be still farther convinced. He followed me into the sleeping car, and there he fell into the hands of that rich and cordial parishioner of his whom I remembered meeting when I went down to the steamer at East Boston to see Nevil off for Europe. The gentleman recalled himself to my recollection, and rejoiced that we were to be fellow-travellers as far as Albany.

Nevil could not hide his disappointment and vexation from me, though his parishioner did not see it. He made us both light cigars with him in the smoking-room, and he talked us silent. The car began to move, and I said, “Well, good-by,” and followed Nevil out upon the platform for a last word. “Remember your promise! Better get off!”

“Oh, I sha’n’t forget that. If I live, I will see her again, and tell her all you have said. And I thank you — thank you—” Clinging to my hand, he pressed it hard, and stepped backward from the car to the ground. I saw him look up at me, and then he gave a wild cry, and I could feel the car grinding him up against the stone jamb of the archway through which the train was passing. There was a hideous crashing sound from his body, and I jumped at the bell-rope. The train stopped; Nevil stood upright, with his face turned toward the light, and a strange effect of patience in his attitude. When the train slowly backed and set him free, he dropped forward a crushed and lifeless lump.

IX

HERMIA DIED a year later, and was buried by Faulkner’s side; his mother lived on for several years.

It was inevitable, of course, that Hermia should accept Nevil’s death as a judgment; we become so bewildered before the mere meaninglessness of events, at times, that it is a relief to believe in a cruel and unjust providence rather than in none at all. What is probably true is that she sank under the strain of experiences that wrung the finest and most sensitive principles of her being, or, as we say, died of a broken heart.

My wife and I have often talked of her and Nevil, and have tried to see some way for them out of the shadow of Faulkner’s dream into a sunny and happy life. As they are both dead, we have dealt with them as arbitrarily as with the personages in a fiction, and have placed and replaced them at our pleasure in the game, which they played so disastrously, so that we could bring it to a fortunate close for them. We have always denied, in the interest of common-sense and common justice, any controlling effect to the dream itself; except through their own morbid conscientiousness, their exaggerated sensibility. We know people, plenty of them, who would have been no more restrained from each other by it than by a cobweb across their path: Hermias who would never have told their Nevils of it; Nevils who, if they had known it, would have charged their Hermias on their love to spurn and trample upon it. That evil dream had power upon the hapless pair who succumbed to it only because they were so wholly guiltless of the evil imputed to them.

Our Nevil’s death, violent and purely accidental as it was, seemed to us a most vague and inconclusive catastrophe, and no true solution of the problem. Yet our Hermia being what she was, and Nevil being Nevil, we saw that it was impossible Faulkner’s dream should not have always had power upon them; and the time came when we could regard their death without regret. I myself think that if Nevil had seen Hermia again, as he promised me, it would have been only to renew in her and in himself their strength for renunciation; and I have sometimes imagined a sort of dramatic friendship taking the place of their love, and uniting their lives in good works, or something of that kind. But I have not been satisfied with this conception; it is too like what I have found carried out in some very romantic novels; and my wife has always insisted that if they had met again, they would have married, and been unhappy. She insists that they could not have kept their self-respect and their perfect honor for each other, if they had married. But this again seems abominably unfair: that they should suffer so for no wrong; unless, indeed, all suffering is to some end unknown to the sufferer and the witnesses, and no anguish is wasted, as that friend of Nevil’s believed. We must come to some such conclusion; or else we must go back to a cruder theory, and say that they were all three destined to undergo what they underwent, and that what happened to them was not retribution, not penalty in any wise, since no wrong had been done, but simply fate.

Of course there is always the human possibility that the dream was a divination of facts; that Hermia and Nevil were really in love while Faulkner lived, and were untrue to him in their hearts, which are the fountains of potential good and evil; but knowing them to be what they were, we have never admitted this hypothesis for a moment. For any one to do so, my wife says, would be to confess himself worse than Faulkner dreamed them to be. She does not permit it to be said, or even suggested, that our feelings are not at our bidding, and that there is no sin where there has been no sinning.

THE END

A BOY’S TOWN

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

I.

EARLIEST EXPERIENCES.

I call it a Boy’s Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things. He may then indeed look up to the sky, and see heaven open, and angels ascending and descending; but he can only grope about on the earth, and he knows nothing aright that goes on there beyond his small boy’s world. Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep the ignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence; heaven has been shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These will not know what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope that the ungrown-up children will, and that the boys who read Harper’s Young People will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing — they have been used so often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody’s boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular.

THE “FIRST LOCK.”

It seems to me that my Boy’s Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another river, called the Old River, which was the Miami’s former channel, and which held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it The Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it was not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and a First Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but the Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy was very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had a Hydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill power through the heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the Big Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran under mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streams and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long they had boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice of the mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Then there were the Commons; a wide expanse of open fields, where the cows were pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and practised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses.

There were flocks of wild ducks on the Reservoirs and on Old River, and flocks of kildees on the Commons; and there were squirrels in the woods, where there was abundant mast for the pigs that ran wild in them, and battened on the nuts under the hickory-trees. There were no other nuts except walnuts, white and black; but there was no end to the small, sweetish acorns, which the boys called chinquepins; they ate them, but I doubt if they liked them, except as boys like anything to eat. In the vast corn-fields stretching everywhere along the river levels there were quails; and rabbits in the sumac thickets and turnip patches. There were places to swim, to fish, to hunt, to skate; if there were no hills for coasting, that was not so much loss, for there was very little snow, and it melted in a day or two after it fell. But besides these natural advantages for boys, there were artificial opportunities which the boys treated as if they had been made for them; grist-mills on the river and canal, cotton-factories and saw-mills on the Hydraulic, iron-founderies by the Commons, breweries on the river-bank, and not too many school-houses. I must not forget the market-house, with its public market twice a week, and its long rows of market-wagons, stretching on either side of High Street in the dim light of the summer dawn or the cold sun of the winter noon.

The place had its brief history running back to the beginning of the century. Mad Anthony Wayne encamped on its site when he went north to avenge St. Clair’s defeat on the Indians; it was at first a fort, and it remained a military post until the tribes about were reduced, and a fort was no longer needed. To this time belonged a tragedy, which my boy knew of vaguely when he was a child. Two of the soldiers were sentenced to be hanged for desertion, and the officer in command hurried forward the execution, although an express had been sent to lay the case before the general at another post. The offence was only a desertion in name, and the reprieve was promptly granted, but it came fifteen minutes too late.

I believe nothing more memorable ever happened in my Boy’s Town, as the grown-up world counts events; but for the boys there, every day was full of wonderful occurrence and thrilling excitement. It was really a very simple little town of some three thousand people, living for the most part in small one-story wooden houses, with here and there a brick house of two stories, and here and there a lingering log-cabin, when my boy’s father came to take charge of its Whig newspaper in 1840. It stretched eastward from the river to the Canal-Basin, with the market-house, the county buildings, and the stores and hotels on one street, and a few other stores and taverns scattering off on streets that branched from it to the southward; but all this was a vast metropolis to my boy’s fancy, where he might get lost — the sum of all disaster — if he ventured away from the neighborhood of the house where he first lived, on its southwestern border. It was the great political year of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too,” when the grandfather of our President Harrison was elected President; but the wild hard-cider campaign roared by my boy’s little life without leaving a trace in it, except the recollection of his father wearing a linsey-woolsey hunting-shirt, belted at the waist and fringed at the skirt, as a Whig who loved his cause and honored the good old pioneer times was bound to do. I dare say he did not wear it often, and I fancy he wore it then in rather an ironical spirit, for he was a man who had slight esteem for outward shows and semblances; but it remained in my boy’s mind, as clear a vision as the long cloak of blue broadcloth in which he must have seen his father habitually. This cloak was such a garment as people still drape about them in Italy, and men wore it in America then instead of an overcoat. To get under its border, and hold by his father’s hand in the warmth and dark it made around him was something that the boy thought a great privilege, and that brought him a sense of mystery and security at once that nothing else could ever give. He used to be allowed to go as far as the street corner, to enjoy it, when his father came home from the printing-office in the evening; and one evening, never to be forgotten, after he had long been teasing for a little axe he wanted, he divined that his father had something hidden under his cloak. Perhaps he asked him as usual whether he had brought him the little axe, but his father said, “Feel, feel!” and he found his treasure. He ran home and fell upon the woodpile with it, in a zeal that proposed to leave nothing but chips; before he had gone far he learned that this is a world in which you can sate but never satisfy yourself with anything, even hard work. Some of my readers may have found that out, too; at any rate, my boy did not keep the family in firewood with his axe, and his abiding association with it in after-life was a feeling of weariness and disgust; so I fancy that he must have been laughed at for it. Besides the surfeit of this little axe, he could recall, when he grew up, the glory of wearing his Philadelphia suit, which one of his grandmothers had brought him Over the Mountains, as people said in those days, after a visit to her Pennsylvania German kindred beyond the Alleghanies. It was of some beatified plaid in gay colors, and when once it was put on it never was laid aside for any other suit till it was worn out. It testified unmistakably to the boy’s advance in years beyond the shameful period of skirts; and no doubt it commended him to the shadowy little girl who lived so far away as to be even beyond the street-corner, and who used to look for him, as he passed, through the palings of a garden among hollyhocks and four-o’clocks.

The Young People may have heard it said that a savage is a grown-up child, but it seems to me even more true that a child is a savage. Like the savage, he dwells on an earth round which the whole solar system revolves, and he is himself the centre of all life on the earth. It has no meaning but as it relates to him; it is for his pleasure, his use; it is for his pain and his abuse. It is full of sights, sounds, sensations, for his delight alone, for his suffering alone. He lives under a law of favor or of fear, but never of justice, and the savage does not make a crueller idol than the child makes of the Power ruling over his world and having him for its chief concern. What remained to my boy of that faint childish consciousness was the idea of some sort of supernal Being who abode in the skies for his advantage and disadvantage, and made winter and summer, wet weather and dry, with an eye single to him; of a family of which he was necessarily the centre, and of that far, vast, unknown Town, lurking all round him, and existing on account of him if not because of him. So, unless I manage to treat my Boy’s Town as a part of his own being, I shall not make others know it just as he knew it.

Some of his memories reach a time earlier than his third year, and relate to the little Ohio River hamlet where he was born, and where his mother’s people, who were river-faring folk, all lived. Every two or three years the river rose and flooded the village; and his grandmother’s household was taken out of the second-story window in a skiff; but no one minded a trivial inconvenience like that, any more than the Romans have minded the annual freshet of the Tiber for the last three or four thousand years. When the waters went down the family returned and scrubbed out the five or six inches of rich mud they had left. In the meantime, it was a godsend to all boys of an age to enjoy it; but it was nothing out of the order of Providence. So, if my boy ever saw a freshet, it naturally made no impression upon him. What he remembered was something much more important, and that was waking up one morning and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside his bed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his very earliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloom without a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”

Over the spot where the little house once stood, a railroad has drawn its erasing lines, and the house itself was long since taken down and built up brick by brick in quite another place; but the blooming peach-tree glows before his childish eyes untouched by time or change. The tender, pathetic pink of its flowers repeated itself many long years afterwards in the paler tints of the almond blossoms in Italy, but always with a reminiscence of that dim past, and the little coal-smoky town on the banks of the Ohio.

“THE PASSENGER IS A ONE-LEGGED MAN.”

Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpse of a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with his head up and his antlers erect, as if he meditated offence. My boy might never have seen him so; he may have had the vision at second hand; but it is certain that there was a pet deer in the family, and that he was as likely to have come into the kitchen by the window as by the door. One of the boy’s uncles had seen this deer swimming the Mississippi, far to the southward, and had sent out a yawl and captured him, and brought him home. He began a checkered career of uselessness when they were ferrying him over from Wheeling in a skiff, by trying to help wear the pantaloons of the boy who was holding him; he put one of his fore-legs in at the watch-pocket; but it was disagreeable to the boy and ruinous to the trousers. He grew very tame, and butted children over, right and left, in the village streets; and he behaved like one of the family whenever he got into a house; he ate the sugar out of the bowl on the table, and plundered the pantry of its sweet cakes. One day a dog got after him, and he jumped over the river-bank and broke his leg, and had to be shot.

Besides the peach-tree and the pet deer there was only one other thing that my boy could remember, or seem to remember, of the few years before he came to the Boy’s Town. He is on the steamboat which is carrying the family down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, on their way to the Boy’s Town, and he is kneeling on the window-seat in the ladies’ cabin at the stern of the boat, watching the rain fall into the swirling yellow river and make the little men jump up from the water with its pelting drops. He knows that the boat is standing still, and they are bringing off a passenger to it in a yawl, as they used to do on the Western rivers when they were hailed from some place where there was no wharf-boat. If they were going down stream, they turned the boat and headed up the river, and then with a great deal of scurrying about among the deck-hands, and swearing among the mates, they sent the yawl ashore, and bustled the passenger on board. In the case which my boy seemed to remember, the passenger is a one-legged man, and he is standing in the yawl, with his crutch under his arm, and his cane in his other hand; his family must be watching him from the house. When the yawl comes alongside he tries to step aboard the steamboat, but he misses his footing and slips into the yellow river, and vanishes softly. It is all so smooth and easy, and it is as curious as the little men jumping up from the rain-drops. What made my boy think when he grew a man that this was truly a memory was that he remembered nothing else of the incident, nothing whatever after the man went down in the water, though there must have been a great and painful tumult, and a vain search for him. His drowning had exactly the value in the child’s mind that the jumping up of the little men had, neither more nor less.

II.

HOME AND KINDRED.

As the Boy’s Town was, in one sense, merely a part of the boy, I think I had better tell something about my boy’s family first, and the influences that formed his character, so that the reader can be a boy with him there on the intimate terms which are the only terms of true friendship. His great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of Welsh flannels, who had founded his industry in a pretty town called The Hay, on the river Wye, in South Wales, where the boy saw one of his mills, still making Welsh flannels, when he visited his father’s birthplace a few years ago. This great-grandfather was a Friend by Convincement, as the Quakers say; that is, he was a convert, and not a born Friend, and he had the zeal of a convert. He loved equality and fraternity, and he came out to America towards the close of the last century to prospect for these as well as for a good location to manufacture Welsh flannels; but after being presented to Washington, then President, at Philadelphia, and buying a tract of land somewhere near the District of Columbia, his phantom rolls a shadowy barrel of dollars on board ship at Baltimore, and sails back in the Flying Dutchman to South Wales. I fancy, from the tradition of the dollars, that he had made good affairs here with the stock of flannels he brought over with him; but all is rather uncertain about him, especially the land he bought, though the story of it is pretty sure to fire some descendant of his in each new generation with the wish to go down to Washington, and oust the people there who have unrightfully squatted on the ancestral property. What is unquestionable is that this old gentleman went home and never came out here again; but his son, who had inherited all his radicalism, sailed with his family for Boston in 1808, when my boy’s father was a year old. From Boston he passed to one Quaker neighborhood after another, in New York, Virginia, and Ohio, setting up the machinery of woollen mills, and finally, after much disastrous experiment in farming, paused at the Boy’s Town, and established himself in the drug and book business: drugs and books are still sold together, I believe, in small places. He had long ceased to be a Quaker, but he remained a Friend to every righteous cause; and brought shame to his grandson’s soul by being an abolitionist in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free. My boy’s father restored his self-respect in a measure by being a Henry Clay Whig, or a constitutional anti-slavery man. The grandfather was a fervent Methodist, but the father, after many years of scepticism, had become a receiver of the doctrines of Emanuel Swedenborg; and in this faith the children were brought up. It was not only their faith, but their life, and I may say that in this sense they were a very religious household, though they never went to church, because it was the Old Church. They had no service of the New Church, the Swedenborgians were so few in the place, except when some of its ministers stopped with us on their travels. My boy regarded these good men as all personally sacred, and while one of them was in the house he had some relief from the fear in which his days seem mostly to have been passed; as if he were for the time being under the protection of a spiritual lightning-rod. Their religion was not much understood by their neighbors of the Old Church, who thought them a kind of Universalists. But the boy once heard his father explain to one of them that the New Church people believed in a hell, which each cast himself into if he loved the evil rather than the good, and that no mercy could keep him out of without destroying him, for a man’s love was his very self. It made his blood run cold, and he resolved that rather than cast himself into hell, he would do his poor best to love the good. The children were taught when they teased one another that there was nothing the fiends so much delighted in as teasing. When they were angry and revengeful, they were told that now they were calling evil spirits about them, and that the good angels could not come near them if they wished while they were in that state. My boy preferred the company of good angels after dark, and especially about bedtime, and he usually made the effort to get himself into an accessible frame of mind before he slept; by day he felt that he could look out for himself, and gave way to the natural man like other boys. I suppose the children had their unwholesome spiritual pride in being different from their fellows in religion; but, on the other hand, it taught them not to fear being different from others if they believed themselves right. Perhaps it made my boy rather like it.

The grandfather was of a gloomy spirit, but of a tender and loving heart, whose usual word with a child, when he caressed it, was “Poor thing, poor thing!” as if he could only pity it; and I have no doubt the father’s religion was a true affliction to him. The children were taken to visit their grandmother every Sunday noon, and then the father and grandfather never failed to have it out about the New Church and the Old. I am afraid that the father would sometimes forget his own precepts, and tease a little; when the mother went with him she was sometimes troubled at the warmth with which the controversy raged. The grandmother seemed to be bored by it, and the boys, who cared nothing for salvation in the abstract, no matter how anxious they were about the main chance, certainly shared this feeling with her. She was a pale, little, large-eyed lady, who always wore a dress of Quakerish plainness, with a white kerchief crossed upon her breast; and her aquiline nose and jutting chin almost met. She was very good to the children and at these times she usually gave them some sugar-cakes, and sent them out in the yard, where there was a young Newfoundland dog, of loose morals and no religious ideas, who joined them in having fun, till the father came out and led them home. He would not have allowed them to play where it could have aggrieved any one, for a prime article of his religion was to respect the religious feelings of others, even when he thought them wrong. But he would not suffer the children to get the notion that they were guilty of any deadly crime if they happened to come short of the conventional standard of piety. Once, when their grandfather reported to him that the boys had been seen throwing stones on Sunday at the body of a dog lodged on some drift in the river, he rebuked them for the indecorum, and then ended the matter, as he often did, by saying, “Boys, consider yourselves soundly thrashed.”

I should be sorry if anything I have said should give the idea that their behavior was either fantastic or arrogant through their religion. It was simply a pervading influence; and I am sure that in the father and mother it dignified life, and freighted motive and action here with the significance of eternal fate. When the children were taught that in every thought and in every deed they were choosing their portion with the devils or the angels, and that God himself could not save them against themselves, it often went in and out of their minds, as such things must with children; but some impression remained and helped them to realize the serious responsibility they were under to their own after-selves. At the same time, the father, who loved a joke almost as much as he loved a truth, and who despised austerity as something owlish, set them the example of getting all the harmless fun they could out of experience. They had their laugh about nearly everything that was not essentially sacred; they were made to feel the ludicrous as an alleviation of existence; and the father and mother were with them on the same level in all this enjoyment.

The house was pretty full of children, big and little. There were seven of them in the Boy’s Town, and eight afterwards in all; so that if there had been no Boy’s Town about them, they would still have had a Boy’s World indoors. They lived in three different houses — the Thomas house, the Smith house, and the Falconer house — severally called after the names of their owners, for they never had a house of their own. Of the first my boy remembered nothing, except the woodpile on which he tried his axe, and a closet near the front door, which he entered into one day, with his mother’s leave, to pray, as the Scripture bade. It was very dark, and hung full of clothes, and his literal application of the text was not edifying; he fancied, with a child’s vague suspicion, that it amused his father and mother; I dare say it also touched them. Of the Smith house, he could remember much more: the little upper room where the boys slept, and the narrow stairs which he often rolled down in the morning; the front room where he lay sick with a fever, and was bled by the doctor, as people used to be in those days; the woodshed where, one dreadful afternoon, when he had somehow been left alone in the house, he took it into his head that the family dog Tip was going mad; the window where he traced the figure of a bull on greased paper from an engraving held up against the light: none of them important facts, but such as stick in the mind by the capricious action of memory, while far greater events drop out of it. My boy’s elder brother at once accused him of tracing that bull, which he pretended to have copied; but their father insisted upon taking the child’s word for it, though he must have known he was lying; and this gave my boy a far worse conscience than if his father had whipped him. The father’s theory was that people are more apt to be true if you trust them than if you doubt them; I do not think he always found it work perfectly; but I believe he was right.

My boy was for a long time very miserable about that bull, and the experience taught him to desire the truth and honor it, even when he could not attain it. Five or six years after, when his brother and he had begun to read stories, they found one in the old New York Mirror which had a great influence upon their daily conduct. It was called “The Trippings of Tom Pepper; or, the Effects of Romancing,” and it showed how at many important moments the hero had been baulked of fortune by his habit of fibbing. They took counsel together, and pledged themselves not to tell the smallest lie, upon any occasion whatever. It was a frightful slavery, for there are a great many times in a boy’s life when it seems as if the truth really could not serve him. Their great trial was having to take a younger brother with them whenever they wanted to go off with other boys; and it had been their habit to get away from him by many little deceits which they could not practise now: to tell him that their mother wanted him; or to send him home upon some errand to his pretended advantage that had really no object but his absence. I suppose there is now no boy living who would do this. My boy and his brother groaned under their good resolution, I do not know how long; but the day came when they could bear it no longer, though I cannot give just the time or the terms of their backsliding. That elder brother had been hard enough on my boy before the period of this awful reform: his uprightness, his unselfishness, his truthfulness were a daily reproach to him, and it did not need this season of absolute sincerity to complete his wretchedness. Yet it was an experience which afterwards he would not willingly have missed: for once in his little confused life he had tried to practise a virtue because the opposite vice had been made to appear foolish and mischievous to him; and not from any superstitious fear or hope.

As far as I can make out, he had far more fears than hopes; and perhaps every boy has. It was in the Smith house that he began to be afraid of ghosts, though he never saw one, or anything like one. He never saw even the good genius who came down the chimney and filled the children’s stockings at Christmas. He wished to see him; but he understood that St. Nicholas was a shy spirit, and was apt to pass by the stockings of boys who lay in wait for him. His mother had told him how the Peltsnickel used to come with a bundle of rods for the bad children when the Chriskingle brought the presents of the good ones, among his grandmother’s Pennsylvania German kindred; and he had got them all somehow mixed up together. Then St. Nicholas, though he was so pleasant and friendly in the poem about the night before Christmas, was known to some of the neighbor boys as Santa Claus; they called it Centre Claws, and my boy imagined him with large talons radiating from the pit of his stomach. But this was all nothing to the notion of Dowd’s spectacles, which his father sometimes joked him about, and which were represented by a pair of hollow, glassless iron rims which he had found in the street. They may or may not have belonged to Dowd, and Dowd may have been an Irishman in the neighborhood, or he may not; he may have died, or he may not; but there was something in the mere gruesome mention of his spectacles which related itself to all the boy had conceived of the ghostly and ghastly, and all that was alarming in the supernatural; he could never say in the least how or why. I fancy no child can ever explain just why it is affected in this way or that way by the things that are or are not in the world about it; it is not easy to do this for one’s self in after-life. At any rate, it is certain that my boy dwelt most of his time amid shadows that were, perhaps, projected over his narrow outlook from some former state of being, or from the gloomy minds of long-dead ancestors. His home was cheerful and most happy, but he peopled all its nooks and corners with shapes of doom and horror. The other boys were not slow to find this out, and their invention supplied with ready suggestion of officers and prisons any little lack of misery his spectres and goblins left. He often narrowly escaped arrest, or thought so, when they built a fire in the street at night, and suddenly kicked it to pieces, and shouted, “Run, run! The constable will catch you!” Nothing but flight saved my boy, in these cases, when he was small. He grew bolder, after a while, concerning constables, but never concerning ghosts; they shivered in the autumnal evenings among the tall stalks of the corn-field that stretched, a vast wilderness, behind the house to the next street, and they walked the night everywhere.

“RUN, RUN! THE CONSTABLE WILL CATCH YOU!”

Yet nothing more tragical, that he could remember, really happened while he lived in the Smith house than something he saw one bright sunny morning, while all the boys were hanging on the fence of the next house, and watching the martins flying down to the ground from their box in the gable. The birds sent out sharp cries of terror or anger, and presently he saw a black cat crouching in the grass, with half-shut eyes and an air of dreamy indifference. The birds swept down in longer and lower loops towards the cat, drawn by some fatal charm, or by fear of the danger that threatened their colony from the mere presence of the cat; but she did not stir. Suddenly she sprang into the air, and then darted away with a martin in her mouth, while my boy’s heart leaped into his own, and the other boys rushed after the cat.

As when something dreadful happens, this seemed not to have happened; but a lovely experience leaves a sense of enduring fact behind, and remains a rich possession no matter how slight and simple it was. My boy’s mother has been dead almost a quarter of a century, but as one of the elder children he knew her when she was young and gay; and his last distinct association with the Smith house is of coming home with her after a visit to her mother’s far up the Ohio River. In their absence the June grass, which the children’s feet always kept trampled down so low, had flourished up in purple blossom, and now stood rank and tall; and the mother threw herself on her knees in it, and tossed and frolicked with her little ones like a girl. The picture remains, and the wonder of the world in which it was true once, while all the phantasmagory of spectres has long vanished away.

The boy could not recall the family’s removal to the Falconer house. They were not there, and then they were there. It was a brick house, at a corner of the principal street, and in the gable there were places for mock-windows where there had never been blinds put, but where the swallows had thickly built their nests. I dare say my boy might have been willing to stone these nests, but he was not allowed, either he or his mates, who must have panted with him to improve such an opportunity of havoc. There was a real window in the gable from which he could look out of the garret; such a garret as every boy should once have the use of some time in his life. It was dim and low, though it seemed high, and the naked brown rafters were studded with wasps’ nests; and the rain beat on the shingles overhead. The house had been occupied by a physician, and under the eaves the children found heaps of phials full of doctor’s stuff; the garret abounded in their own family boxes and barrels, but there was always room for a swing, which the boys used in training for their circuses. Below the garret there were two unimportant stories with chambers, dining-room, parlor, and so on; then you came to the brick-paved kitchen in the basement, and a perfectly glorious cellar, with rats in it. Outside there was a large yard, with five or six huge old cherry-trees, and a garden plot, where every spring my boy tried to make a garden, with never-failing failure.

The house gave even to him a sense of space unknown before, and he could recall his mother’s satisfaction in it. He has often been back there in dreams, and found it on the old scale of grandeur; but no doubt it was a very simple affair. The fortunes of a Whig editor in a place so overwhelmingly democratic as the Boy’s Town were not such as could have warranted his living in a palace; and he must have been poor, as the world goes now. But the family always lived in abundance, and in their way they belonged to the employing class; that is, the father had men to work for him. On the other hand, he worked with them; and the boys, as they grew old enough, were taught to work with them, too. My boy grew old enough very young; and was put to use in the printing-office before he was ten years of age. This was not altogether because he was needed there, I dare say, but because it was part of his father’s Swedenborgian philosophy that every one should fulfil a use; I do not know that when the boy wanted to go swimming, or hunting, or skating, it consoled him much to reflect that the angels in the highest heaven delighted in uses; nevertheless, it was good for him to be of use, though maybe not so much use.

If his mother did her own work, with help only now and then from a hired girl, that was the custom of the time and country; and her memory was always the more reverend to him, because whenever he looked back at her in those dim years, he saw her about some of those household offices which are so beautiful to a child. She was always the best and tenderest mother, and her love had the heavenly art of making each child feel itself the most important, while she was partial to none. In spite of her busy days she followed their father in his religion and literature, and at night, when her long toil was over, she sat with the children and listened while he read aloud. The first book my boy remembered to have heard him read was Moore’s “Lalla Rookh,” of which he formed but a vague notion, though while he struggled after its meaning he took all its music in, and began at once to make rhymes of his own. He had no conception of literature except the pleasure there was in making it; and he had no outlook into the world of it, which must have been pretty open to his father. The father read aloud some of Dickens’s Christmas stories, then new; and the boy had a good deal of trouble with the “Haunted Man.” One rarest night of all, the family sat up till two o’clock, listening to a novel that my boy long ago forgot the name of, if he ever knew its name. It was all about a will, forged or lost, and there was a great scene in court, and after that the mother declared that she could not go to bed till she heard the end. His own first reading was in history. At nine years of age he read the history of Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a little while after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; but he did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who read novels, and a novel was like “Handy Andy,” or “Harry Lorrequer,” or the “Bride of Lammermoor.” His brother had another novel which they preferred to either; it was in Harper’s old “Library of Select Novels,” and was called “Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment,” and it was about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. It bewitched them, and though my boy could not afterwards recall a single fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind’s eye every trait of its outward aspect. It was at this time that his father bought an English-Spanish grammar from a returned volunteer, who had picked it up in the city of Mexico, and gave it to the boy. He must have expected him to learn Spanish from it; but the boy did not know even the parts of speech in English. As the father had once taught English grammar in six lessons, from a broadside of his own authorship, he may have expected the principle of heredity to help the boy; and certainly he did dig the English grammar out of that blessed book, and the Spanish language with it, but after many long years, and much despair over the difference between a preposition and a substantive.

All this went along with great and continued political excitement, and with some glimpses of the social problem. It was very simple then; nobody was very rich, and nobody was in want; but somehow, as the boy grew older, he began to discover that there were differences, even in the little world about him; some were higher and some were lower. From the first he was taught by precept and example to take the side of the lower. As the children were denied oftener than they were indulged, the margin of their own abundance must have been narrower than they ever knew then; but if they had been of the most prosperous, their bent in this matter would have been the same. Once there was a church festival, or something of that sort, and there was a good deal of the provision left over, which it was decided should be given to the poor. This was very easy, but it was not so easy to find the poor whom it should be given to. At last a hard-working widow was chosen to receive it; the ladies carried it to her front door and gave it her, and she carried it to her back door and threw it into the alley. No doubt she had enough without it, but there were circumstances of indignity or patronage attending the gift which were recognized in my boy’s home, and which helped afterwards to make him doubtful of all giving, except the humblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving at all.

III.

THE RIVER.

It seems to me that the best way to get at the heart of any boy’s town is to take its different watercourses and follow them into it.

The house where my boy first lived was not far from the river, and he must have seen it often before he noticed it. But he was not aware of it till he found it under the bridge. Without the river there could not have been a bridge; the fact of the bridge may have made him look for the river; but the bridge is foremost in his mind. It is a long wooden tunnel, with two roadways, and a foot-path on either side of these; there is a toll-house at each end, and from one to the other it is about as far as from the Earth to the planet Mars. On the western shore of the river is a smaller town than the Boy’s Town, and in the perspective the entrance of the bridge on that side is like a dim little doorway. The timbers are of a hugeness to strike fear into the heart of the boldest little boy; and there is something awful even about the dust in the roadways; soft and thrillingly cool to the boy’s bare feet, it lies thick in a perpetual twilight, streaked at intervals by the sun that slants in at the high, narrow windows under the roof; it has a certain potent, musty smell. The bridge has three piers, and at low water hardier adventurers than he wade out to the middle pier; some heroes even fish there, standing all day on the loose rocks about the base of the pier. He shudders to see them, and aches with wonder how they will get ashore. Once he is there when a big boy wades back from the middle pier, where he has been to rob a goose’s nest; he has some loose silver change in his wet hand, and my boy understands that it has come out of one of the goose eggs. This fact, which he never thought of questioning, gets mixed up in his mind with an idea of riches, of treasure-trove, in the cellar of an old house that has been torn down near the end of the bridge.

On the bridge he first saw the crazy man who belongs in every boy’s town. In this one he was a hapless, harmless creature, whom the boys knew as Solomon Whistler, perhaps because his name was Whistler, perhaps because he whistled; though when my boy met him midway of the bridge, he marched swiftly and silently by, with his head high and looking neither to the right nor to the left, with an insensibility to the boy’s presence that froze his blood and shrivelled him up with terror. As his fancy early became the sport of playfellows not endowed with one so vivid, he was taught to expect that Solomon Whistler would get him some day, though what he would do with him when he had got him his anguish must have been too great even to let him guess. Some of the boys said Solomon had gone crazy from fear of being drafted in the war of 1812; others that he had been crossed in love; but my boy did not quite know then what either meant. He only knew that Solomon Whistler lived at the poor-house beyond the eastern border of the town, and that he ranged between this sojourn and the illimitable wilderness north of the town on the western shore of the river. The crazy man was often in the boy’s dreams, the memories of which blend so with the memories of real occurrences: he could not tell later whether he once crossed the bridge when the footway had been partly taken up, and he had to walk on the girders, or whether he only dreamed of that awful passage. It was quite fearful enough to cross when the footway was all down, and he could see the blue gleam of the river far underneath through the cracks between the boards. It made his brain reel; and he felt that he took his life in his hand whenever he entered the bridge, even when he had grown old enough to be making an excursion with some of his playmates to the farm of an uncle of theirs who lived two miles up the river. The farmer gave them all the watermelons they wanted to eat, and on the way home, when they lay resting under the sycamores on the river-bank, Solomon Whistler passed by in the middle of the road, silent, swift, straight onward. I do not know why the sight of this afflicted soul did not slay my boy on the spot, he was so afraid of him; but the crazy man never really hurt any one, though the boys followed and mocked him as soon as he got by.

The boys knew little or nothing of the river south of the bridge, and frequented mainly that mile-long stretch of it between the bridge and the dam, beyond which there was practically nothing for many years; afterwards they came to know that this strange region was inhabited. Just above the bridge the Hydraulic emptied into the river with a heart-shaking plunge over an immense mill-wheel; and there was a cluster of mills at this point, which were useful in accumulating the waters into fishing-holes before they rushed through the gates upon the wheel. The boys used to play inside the big mill-wheel before the water was let into the Hydraulic, and my boy caught his first fish in the pool below the wheel. The mills had some secondary use in making flour and the like, but this could not concern a small boy. They were as simply a part of his natural circumstance as the large cottonwood-tree which hung over the river from a point near by, and which seemed to have always an oriole singing in it. All along there the banks were rather steep, and to him they looked very high. The blue clay that formed them was full of springs, which the boys dammed up in little ponds and let loose in glassy falls upon their flutter-mills. As with everything that boys do, these mills were mostly failures; the pins which supported the wheels were always giving way; and though there were instances of boys who started their wheels at recess and found them still fluttering away at noon when they came out of school, none ever carried his enterprise so far as to spin the cotton blowing from the balls of the cottonwood-tree by the shore, as they all meant to do. They met such disappointments with dauntless cheerfulness, and lightly turned from some bursting bubble to some other where the glory of the universe was still mirrored. The river shore was strewn not only with waste cotton, but with drift which the water had made porous, and which they called smoke-wood. They made cigars for their own use out of it, and it seemed to them that it might be generally introduced as a cheap and simple substitute for tobacco; but they never got any of it into the market, not even the market of that world where the currency was pins.

The river had its own climate, and this climate was of course much such a climate as the boys, for whom nature intended the river, would have chosen. I do not believe it was ever winter there, though it was sometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for the caves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through the turf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had the joy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended to live on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boy whose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn or to bake the potatoes in their caves, but there was the fire, and the draft was magnificent. The light of the red flames painted the little, happy, foolish faces, so long since wrinkled and grizzled with age, or mouldered away to dust, as the boys huddled before them under the bank, and fed them with the drift, or stood patient of the heat and cold in the afternoon light of some vast Saturday waning to nightfall.

The river-climate, with these autumnal intervals, was made up of a quick, eventful springtime, followed by the calm of a cloudless summer that seemed never to end. But the spring, short as it was, had its great attractions, and chief of these was the freshet which it brought to the river. They would hear somehow that the river was rising, and then the boys, who had never connected its rise with the rains they must have been having, would all go down to its banks and watch the swelling waters. These would be yellow and thick, and the boiling current would have smooth, oily eddies, where pieces of drift would whirl round and round, and then escape and slip down the stream. There were saw-logs and whole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coops and pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, there began to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meant serious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but the boys counted it all gain. They cheered the objects as they floated by, and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men who caught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs at the points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shore and stretched far out over the flood. The boys exulted in the turbid spread of the stream, which filled its low western banks and stole over their tops, and washed into all the hollow places along its shores, and shone among the trunks of the sycamores on Delorac’s Island, which was almost of the geographical importance of The Island in Old River. When the water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave up the hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose to within a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had been there to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers and swept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward. Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happen in the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning that the bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a little comfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go, watching as far into the night as nine o’clock with the men who sat up near the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but not perhaps the leading citizens.

There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the flood and the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but it left no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshet rushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking; it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period of fishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish in that part of the Miami; my boy’s experience was full of the ignominy of catching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they called the yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore, who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men who were reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass. They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets that they did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boy scarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast his line in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. These men often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when taken inwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for their ability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing that they should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where they had set their poles.

But they disappear like persons in a dream, and their fishing-time vanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full possession of the river, and of all the other waters of the Boy’s Town. The river, the Canal Basin, the Hydraulic and its Reservoirs, seemed all full of boys at the same moment; but perhaps it was not the same, for my boy was always in each place, and so he must have been there at different times. Each place had its delights and advantages, but the swimming-holes in the river were the greatest favorites. He could not remember when he began to go into them, though it certainly was before he could swim. There was a time when he was afraid of getting in over his head; but he did not know just when he learned to swim, any more than he knew when he learned to read; he could not swim, and then he could swim; he could not read, and then he could read; but I dare say the reading came somewhat before the swimming. Yet the swimming must have come very early, and certainly it was kept up with continual practice; he swam quite as much as he read; perhaps more. The boys had deep swimming-holes and shallow ones; and over the deep ones there was always a spring-board, from which they threw somersaults, or dived straight down into the depths, where there were warm and cold currents mysteriously interwoven. They believed that these deep holes were infested by water-snakes, though they never saw any, and they expected to be bitten by snapping-turtles, though this never happened. Fiery dragons could not have kept them out; gallynippers, whatever they were, certainly did not; they were believed to abound at the bottom of the deep holes; but the boys never stayed long in the deep holes, and they preferred the shallow places, where the river broke into a long ripple (they called it riffle) on its gravelly bed, and where they could at once soak and bask in the musical rush of the sunlit waters. I have heard people in New England blame all the Western rivers for being yellow and turbid; but I know that after the spring floods, when the Miami had settled down to its summer business with the boys, it was as clear and as blue as if it were spilled out of the summer sky. The boys liked the riffle because they could stay in so long there, and there were little landlocked pools and shallows, where the water was even warmer, and they could stay in longer. At most places under the banks there was clay of different colors, which they used for war-paint in their Indian fights; and after they had their Indian fights they could rush screaming and clattering into the riffle. When the stream had washed them clean down to their red sunburn or their leathern tan, they could paint up again and have more Indian fights.

I do not know why my boy’s associations with Delorac’s Island were especially wild in their character, for nothing more like outlawry than the game of mumble-the-peg ever occurred there. Perhaps it was because the boys had to get to it by water that it seemed beyond the bounds of civilization. They might have reached it by the bridge, but the temper of the boys on the western shore was uncertain; they would have had to run the gauntlet of their river-guard on the way up to it; and they might have been friendly or they might not; it would have depended a good deal on the size and number of the interlopers. Besides, it was more glorious to wade across to the island from their side of the river. They undressed and gathered their clothes up into a bundle, which they put on their heads and held there with one hand, while they used the other for swimming, when they came to a place beyond their depth. Then they dressed again, and stretched themselves under the cottonwood-trees and sycamores, and played games and told stories, and longed for a gun to kill the blackbirds which nested in the high tops, and at nightfall made such a clamor in getting to roost that it almost deafened you.

My boy never distinctly knew what formed that island, but as there was a mill there, it must have been made by the mill-race leaving and rejoining the river. It was enough for him to know that the island was there, and that a parrot — a screaming, whistling, and laughing parrot, which was a Pretty Poll, and always Wanted a Cracker — dwelt in a pretty cottage, almost hidden in trees, just below the end of the island. This parrot had the old Creole gentleman living with it who owned the island, and whom it had brought from New Orleans. The boys met him now and then as he walked abroad, with a stick, and his large stomach bowed in front of him. For no reason under the sun they were afraid of him; perhaps they thought he resented their parleys with the parrot. But he and the parrot existed solely to amuse and to frighten them; and on their own side of the river, just opposite the island, there were established some small industries for their entertainment and advantage, on a branch of the Hydraulic. I do not know just what it was they did with a mustard-mill that was there, but the turning-shop supplied them with a deep bed of elastic shavings just under the bank, which they turned somersaults into, when they were not turning them into the river.

I wonder what sign the boys who read this have for challenging or inviting one another to go in swimming. The boys in the Boy’s Town used to make the motion of swimming with both arms; or they held up the forefinger and middle-finger in the form of a swallow-tail; they did this when it was necessary to be secret about it, as in school, and when they did not want the whole crowd of boys to come along; and often when they just pretended they did not want some one to know. They really had to be secret at times, for some of the boys were not allowed to go in at all; others were forbidden to go in more than once or twice a day; and as they all had to go in at least three or four times a day, some sort of sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone. Since this is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, at one time or other, must have told lies about it, either before or after the fact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and there a boy, like my boy’s elder brother, would not tell lies at all, even about going in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to their hard fate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, and then they said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they had made this sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got their shirts on wrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, some enemy came upon them and tied their shirts. There are few cruelties which public opinion in the boys’ world condemns, but I am glad to remember, to their honor, that there were not many in that Boy’s Town who would tie shirts; and I fervently hope that there is no boy now living who would do it. As the crime is probably extinct, I will say that in those wicked days, if you were such a miscreant, and there was some boy you hated, you stole up and tied the hardest kind of a knot in one arm or both arms of his shirt. Then, if the Evil One put it into your heart, you soaked the knot in water, and pounded it with a stone.

I am glad to know that in the days when he was thoughtless and senseless enough, my boy never was guilty of any degree of this meanness. It was his brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it was his own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bitter tears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do, tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth, knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the fact that they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut off the sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without the shirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.

There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys’ hearts when they went in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitly forbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took the course of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled the home hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law and been forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bank and called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and it covered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, as children do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, he fully expiated; and I will whisper to the Young People here at the end of the chapter, that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, and insist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning, but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as our thoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen so and so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened to happen to me when I had done wrong.

IV.

THE CANAL AND ITS BASIN.

The canal came from Lake Erie, two hundred miles to the northward, and joined the Ohio River twenty miles south of the Boy’s Town. For a time my boy’s father was collector of tolls on it, but even when he was old enough to understand that his father held this State office (the canal belonged to the State) because he had been such a good Whig, and published the Whig newspaper, he could not grasp the notion of the distance which the canal-boats came out of and went into. He saw them come and he saw them go; he did not ask whence or whither; his wonder, if he had any about them, did not go beyond the second lock. It was hard enough to get it to the head of the Basin, which left the canal half a mile or so to the eastward, and stretched down into the town, a sheet of smooth water, fifteen or twenty feet deep, and a hundred wide; his sense ached with, the effort of conceiving of the other side of it. The Basin was bordered on either side near the end by pork-houses, where the pork was cut up and packed, and then lay in long rows of barrels on the banks, with other long rows of salt-barrels, and yet other long rows of whiskey-barrels; cooper-shops, where the barrels were made, alternated with the pork-houses. The boats brought the salt and carried away the pork and whiskey; but the boy’s practical knowledge of them was that they lay there for the boys to dive off of when they went in swimming, and to fish under. The water made a soft tuck-tucking at the sterns of the boat, and you could catch sunfish, if you were the right kind of a boy, or the wrong kind; the luck seemed to go a good deal with boys who were not good for much else. Some of the boats were open their whole length, with a little cabin at the stern, and these pretended to be for carrying wood and stone, but really again were for the use of the boys after a hard rain, when they held a good deal of water, and you could pole yourself up and down on the loose planks in them. The boys formed the notion at times that some of these boats were abandoned by their owners, and they were apt to be surprised by their sudden return. A feeling of transgression was mixed up with the joys of this kind of navigation; perhaps some of the boys were forbidden it. No limit was placed on their swimming in the Basin, except that of the law which prohibited it in the daytime, as the Basin was quite in the heart of the town. In the warm summer nights of that southerly latitude, the water swarmed with laughing, shouting, screaming boys, who plunged from the banks and rioted in the delicious water, diving and ducking, flying and following, safe in the art of swimming which all of them knew. They turned somersaults from the decks of the canal-boats; some of the boys could turn double somersaults, and one boy got so far as to turn a somersault and a half; it was long before the time of electric lighting, but when he struck the water there came a flash that seemed to illumine the universe.

I am afraid that the Young People will think I am telling them too much about swimming. But in the Boy’s Town the boys really led a kind of amphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almost as much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike the river, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the very first things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there, when a young man caught him up into his arms, and skated off with him almost as far away as the canal. He remembered the fearful joy of the adventure, and the pride, too; for he had somehow the notion that this young fellow was handsome and fine, and did him an honor by his notice — so soon does some dim notion of worldly splendor turn us into snobs! The next thing was his own attempt at skating, when he was set down from the bank by his brother, full of a vainglorious confidence in his powers, and appeared instantly to strike on the top of his head. Afterwards he learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than he knew just the moment of learning to read or to swim. He became passionately fond of skating, and kept at it all day long when there was ice for it, which was not often in those soft winters. They made a very little ice go a long way in the Boy’s Town; and began to use it for skating as soon as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of them ever got drowned there; though a boy would often start from one bank and go flying to the other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thin sheet sank and swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually the ice was not thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must have been on ice which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated all one bitter afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At first his feet were very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and at last he did not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he told one of the big boys. “Why, your feet are frozen!” said the big boy, and he dragged off my boy’s skates, and the little one ran all the long mile home, crazed with terror, and not knowing what moment his feet might drop off there in the road. His mother plunged them in a bowl of ice-cold water, and then rubbed them with flannel, and so thawed them out; but that could not save him from the pain of their coming to: it was intense, and there must have been a time afterwards when he did not use his feet.

His skates themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smile at nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty years ago, you did not make your choice between a Barney & Berry and an Acme, which fastened on with the turn of a screw or the twist of a clamp. You found an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies with guttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhaps curling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in an acorn; if this acorn was of brass, it transfigured the boy who wore that skate; he might have been otherwise all rags and patches, but the brass acorn made him splendid from head to foot. When you had bought your skates, you took them to a carpenter, and stood awe-strickenly about while he pierced the wood with strap-holes; or else you managed to bore them through with a hot iron yourself. Then you took them to a saddler, and got him to make straps for them; that is, if you were rich, and your father let you have a quarter to pay for the job. If not, you put strings through, and tied your skates on. They were always coming off, or getting crosswise of your foot, or feeble-mindedly slumping down on one side of the wood; but it did not matter, if you had a fire on the ice, fed with old barrels and boards and cooper’s shavings, and could sit round it with your skates on, and talk and tell stories, between your flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from the frozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among the embers.

Beyond the pork-houses, and up farther towards the canal, there were some houses under the Basin banks. They were good places for the fever-and-ague which people had in those days without knowing it was malaria, or suffering it to interfere much with the pleasure and business of life; but they seemed to my boy bowers of delight, especially one where there was a bear, chained to a weeping-willow, and another where there was a fishpond with gold-fish in it. He expected this bear to get loose and eat him, but that could not spoil his pleasure in seeing the bear stand on his hind-legs and open his red mouth, as I have seen bears do when you wound them up by a keyhole in the side. In fact, a toy bear is very much like a real bear, and safer to have round. The boys were always wanting to go and look at this bear, but he was not so exciting as the daily arrival of the Dayton packet. To my boy’s young vision this craft was of such incomparable lightness and grace as no yacht of Mr. Burgess’s could rival. When she came in of a summer evening her deck was thronged with people, and the captain stood with his right foot on the spring-catch that held the tow-rope. The water curled away on either side of her sharp prow, that cut its way onward at the full rate of five miles an hour, and the team came swinging down the tow-path at a gallant trot, the driver sitting the hindmost horse of three, and cracking his long-lashed whip with loud explosions, as he whirled its snaky spirals in the air. All the boys in town were there, meekly proud to be ordered out of his way, to break and fly before his volleyed oaths and far before his horses’ feet; and suddenly the captain pressed his foot on the spring and released the tow-rope. The driver kept on to the stable with unslackened speed, and the line followed him, swishing and skating over the water, while the steersman put his helm hard aport, and the packet rounded to, and swam softly and slowly up to her moorings. No steamer arrives from Europe now with such thrilling majesty.

The canal-boatmen were all an heroic race, and the boys humbly hoped that some day, if they proved worthy, they might grow up to be drivers; not indeed packet-drivers; they were not so conceited as that; but freight-boat drivers, of two horses, perhaps, but gladly of one. High or low, the drivers had a great deal of leisure, which commended their calling to the boyish fancy; and my boy saw them, with a longing to speak to them, even to approach them, never satisfied, while they amused the long summer afternoon in the shade of the tavern by a game of skill peculiar to them. They put a tack into a whiplash, and then, whirling it round and round, drove it to the head in a target marked out on the weather-boarding. Some of them had a perfect aim; and in fact it was a very pretty feat, and well worth seeing.

Another feat, which the pioneers of the region had probably learned from the Indians, was throwing the axe. The thrower caught the axe by the end of the helve, and with a dextrous twirl sent it flying through the air, and struck its edge into whatever object he aimed at — usually a tree. Two of the Basin loafers were brothers, and they were always quarrelling and often fighting. One was of the unhappy fraternity of town-drunkards, and somehow the boys thought him a finer fellow than the other, whom somehow they considered “mean,” and they were always of his side in their controversies. One afternoon these brothers quarrelled a long time, and then the sober brother retired to the doorway of a pork-house, where he stood, probably brooding upon his injuries, when the drunkard, who had remained near the tavern, suddenly caught up an axe and flung it; the boys saw it sail across the corner of the Basin, and strike in the door just above his brother’s head. This one did not lose an instant; while the axe still quivered in the wood, he hurled himself upon the drunkard, and did that justice on him which he would not ask from the law, perhaps because it was a family affair; perhaps because those wretched men were no more under the law than the boys were.

I do not mean that there was no law for the boys, for it was manifest to their terror in two officers whom they knew as constables, and who may have reigned one after another, or together, with full power of life and death over them, as they felt; but who in a community mainly so peaceful acted upon Dogberry’s advice, and made and meddled with rogues as little as they could. From time to time it was known among the boys that you would be taken up if you went in swimming inside of the corporation line, and for a while they would be careful to keep beyond it; but this could not last; they were soon back in the old places, and I suppose no arrests were ever really made. They did, indeed, hear once that Old Griffin, as they called him, caught a certain boy in the river before dark, and carried him up through the town to his own home naked. Of course no such thing ever happened; but the boys believed it, and it froze my boy’s soul with fear; all the more because this constable was a cabinet-maker and made coffins; from his father’s printing-office the boy could hear the long slide of his plane over the wood, and he could smell the varnish on the boards.

I dare say Old Griffin was a kindly man enough, and not very old; and I suppose that the other constable, as known to his family and friends, was not at all the gloomy headsman he appeared to the boys. When he became constable (they had not the least notion how a man became constable) they heard that his rule was to be marked by unwonted severity against the crime of going in swimming inside the corporation line, and so they kept strictly to the letter of the law. But one day some of them found themselves in the water beyond the First Lock, when the constable appeared on the tow-path, suddenly, as if he and his horse had come up out of the ground. He told them that he had got them now, and he ordered them to come along with him; he remained there amusing himself with their tears, their prayers, and then vanished again. Heaven knows how they lived through it; but they must have got safely home in the usual way, and life must have gone on as before. No doubt the man did not realize the torture he put them to; but it was a cruel thing; and I never have any patience with people who exaggerate a child’s offence to it, and make it feel itself a wicked criminal for some little act of scarcely any consequence. If we elders stand here in the place of the Heavenly Father towards those younger children of His, He will not hold us guiltless when we obscure for them the important difference between a great and a small misdeed, or wring their souls, fear-clouded as they always are, with a sense of perdition for no real sin.

THE SIX-MILE LEVEL.

“HE TOLD THEM THAT HE HAD GOT THEM NOW.”

V.

THE HYDRAULIC AND ITS RESERVOIRS. — OLD RIVER.

There were two branches of the Hydraulic: one followed the course of the Miami, from some unknown point to the northward, on the level of its high bank, and joined the other where it emptied into the river just above the bridge. This last came down what had been a street, and it must have been very pretty to have these two swift streams of clear water rushing through the little town, under the culverts, and between the stone walls of its banks. But what a boy mainly cares for in a thing is use, and the boys tried to make some use of the Hydraulic, since it was there to find what they could do with it. Of course they were aware of the mills dotted along its course, and they knew that it ran them; but I do not believe any of them thought that it was built merely to run flour-mills and saw-mills and cotton-mills. They did what they could to find out its real use, but they could make very little of it. The current was so rapid that it would not freeze in winter, and in summer they could not go in swimming in it by day, because it was so public, and at night the Basin had more attractions. There was danger of cutting your feet on the broken glass and crockery which people threw into the Hydraulic, and though the edges of the culverts were good for jumping off of, the boys did not find them of much practical value. Sometimes you could catch sunfish in the Hydraulic, but it was generally too swift, and the only thing you could depend upon was catching crawfish. These abounded so that if you dropped a string with a bit of meat on it into the water anywhere, you could pull it up again with two or three crawfish hanging to it. The boys could not begin to use them all for bait, which was the only use their Creator seemed to have designed them for; but they had vaguely understood that people somewhere ate them, or something like them, though they had never known even the name of lobsters; and they always intended to get their mothers to have them cooked for them. None of them ever did.

They could sometimes, under high favor of fortune, push a dog into the Hydraulic, or get him to jump in after a stick; and then have the excitement of following him from one culvert to another, till he found a foothold and scrambled out. Once my boy saw a chicken cock sailing serenely down the currant; he was told that he had been given brandy, and that brandy would enable a chicken to swim; but probably this was not true. Another time, a tremendous time, a boy was standing at the brink of a culvert, when one of his mates dared another to push him in. In those days the boys attached peculiar ideas of dishonor to taking a dare. They said, and in some sort they believed, that a boy who would take a dare would steal sheep. I do not now see why this should follow. In this case, the high spirit who was challenged felt nothing base in running up behind his unsuspecting friend and popping him into the water, and I have no doubt the victim considered the affair in the right light when he found that it was a dare. He drifted under the culvert, and when he came out he swiftly scaled the wall below, and took after the boy who had pushed him in; of course this one had the start. No great harm was done; everybody could swim, and a boy’s summer costume in that hot climate was made up of a shirt and trousers and a straw hat; no boy who had any regard for his social standing wore shoes or stockings, and as they were all pretty proud, they all went barefoot from April till October.

The custom of going barefoot must have come from the South, where it used to be so common, and also from the primitive pioneer times which were so near my boy’s time, fifty years ago. The South characterized the thinking and feeling of the Boy’s Town, far more than the North. Most of the people were of Southern extraction, from Kentucky or Virginia, when they were not from Pennsylvania or New Jersey. There might have been other New England families, but the boys only knew of one — that of the blacksmith whose shop they liked to haunt. His children were heard to dispute about an animal they had seen, and one of them said, “Tell ye ‘twa’n’t a squeerrel; ’twas a maouse;” and the boys had that for a by-word. They despised Yankees as a mean-spirited race, who were stingy and would cheat; and would not hit you if you told them they lied. A person must always hit a person who told him he lied; but even if you called a Yankee a fighting liar (the worst form of this insult), he would not hit you, but just call you a liar back. My boy long accepted these ideas of New England as truly representative of the sectional character. Perhaps they were as fair as some ideas of the West which he afterwards found entertained in New England; but they were false and stupid all the same.

If the boys could do little with the Hydraulic, they were at no loss in regard to the Reservoirs, into which its feeding waters were gathered and held in reserve, I suppose, against a time of drought. There was the Little Reservoir first, and then a mile beyond it the Big Reservoir, and there was nearly always a large flat boat on each which was used for repairing the banks, but which the boys employed as a pleasure-barge. It seemed in some natural way to belong to them, and yet they had a feeling of something clandestine in pushing out on the Reservoir in it. Once they filled its broad, shallow hold with straw from a neighboring oatfield, and spent a long golden afternoon in simply lying under the hot September sun, in the middle of the Reservoir, and telling stories. My boy then learned, for the first time, that there was such a book as the “Arabian Nights;” one of the other boys told stories out of it, and he inferred that the sole copy in existence belonged to this boy. He knew that they all had school-books alike, but it did not occur to him that a book which was not a Reader or a Speller was ever duplicated. They did nothing with their boat except loll in it and tell stories, and as there was no current in the Reservoir, they must have remained pretty much in the same place; but they had a sense of the wildest adventure, which mounted to frenzy, when some men rose out of the earth on the shore, and shouted at them, “Hello, there! What are you doing with that boat?” They must have had an oar; at any rate, they got to the opposite bank, and, springing to land, fled somewhere into the vaguest past.

The boys went in swimming in the Little Reservoir when they were not in the River or the Basin; and they fished in the Big Reservoir, where the sunfish bit eagerly. There were large trees standing in the hollow which became the bed of the Reservoir, and these died when the water was let in around them, and gave the stretch of quiet waters a strange, weird look; about their bases was the best kind of place for sunfish, and even for bass. Of course the boys never caught any bass; that honor was reserved for men of the kind I have mentioned. It was several years before the catfish got in, and then they were mud-cats; but the boys had great luck with sunfish there and in the pools about the flood-gates, where there was always some leakage, and where my boy once caught a whole string of live fish which had got away from some other boy, perhaps weeks before; they were all swimming about, in a lively way, and the largest hungrily took his bait. The great pleasure of fishing in these pools was that the waters were so clear you could see the fat, gleaming fellows at the bottom, nosing round your hook, and going off and coming back several times before they made up their minds to bite. It seems now impossible that my boy could ever have taken pleasure in the capture of these poor creatures. I know that there are grown people, and very good, kind men, too, who defend and celebrate the sport, and value themselves on their skill in it; but I think it tolerable only in boys, who are cruel because they are thoughtless. It is not probable that any lower organism

“In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great
As when a giant dies,”

but still, I believe that even a fish knows a dumb agony from the barbs of the hook which would take somewhat from the captor’s joy if he could but realize it.

“THAT HONOR WAS RESERVED FOR MEN OF THE KIND I HAVE MENTIONED.”

There was, of course, a time when the Hydraulic and the Reservoirs were not where they afterwards appeared always to have been. My boy could dimly recall the day when the water was first let into the Hydraulic, and the little fellows ran along its sides to keep abreast of the current, as they easily could; and he could see more vividly the tumult which a break in the embankment of the Little Reservoir caused. The whole town rushed to the spot, or at least all the boys in it did, and a great force of men besides, with shovels and wheelbarrows, and bundles of brush and straw, and heavy logs, and heaped them into the crevasse, and piled earth on them. The men threw off their coats and all joined in the work; a great local politician led off in his shirt-sleeves; and it was as if my boy should now see the Emperor of Germany in his shirt-sleeves pushing a wheelbarrow, so high above all other men had that exalted Whig always been to him. But the Hydraulic, I believe, was a town work, and everybody felt himself an owner in it, and hoped to share in the prosperity which it should bring to all. It made the people so far one family, as every public work which they own in common always does; it made them brothers and equals, as private property never does.

Of course the boys rose to no such conception of the fact before their eyes. I suspect that in their secret hearts they would have been glad to have seen that whole embankment washed away, for the excitement’s sake, and for the hope of catching the fish that would be left flopping at the bottom of the Reservoir when the waters were drained out, I think that these waters were brought somehow from Old River, but I am not sure how. Old River was very far away, and my boy was never there much, and knew little of the weird region it bounded. Once he went in swimming in it, but the still, clear waters were strangely cold, and not like those of the friendly Miami. Once, also, when the boys had gone into the vast woods of that measureless continent which they called the Island, for pawpaws or for hickory-nuts, or maybe buckeyes, they got lost; and while they ran about in terror, they heard the distant lowing and bellowing of cattle. They knew somehow, as boys know everything, that the leader of the herd, which ranged those woods in a half-savage freedom, was a vicious bull, and as the lowing and bellowing sounded nearer, they huddled together in the wildest dismay. Some were for running, some for getting over a fence near by; but they could not tell which side of the fence the herd was on. In the primitive piety of childhood my boy suggested prayer as something that had served people in extremity, and he believed that it was the only hope left. Another boy laughed, and began to climb a tree; the rest, who had received my boy’s suggestion favorably, instantly followed his example; in fact, he climbed a tree himself. The herd came slowly up, and when they reached the boys’ refuge they behaved with all the fury that could have been expected — they trampled and tossed the bags that held the pawpaws or buckeyes or hickory-nuts; they gored the trees where the boys hung trembling; they pawed and tossed the soft earth below; and then they must have gone away, and given them up as hopeless. My boy never had the least notion how he got home; and I dare say he was very young when he began these excursions to the woods.

In some places Old River was a stagnant pool, covered with thick green scum, and filled with frogs. The son of one of the tavern-keepers was skilled in catching them, and I fancy supplied them to his father’s table; the important fact was his taking them, which he did by baiting a cluster of three hooks with red flannel, and dropping them at the end of a fish-line before a frog. The fated croaker plunged at the brilliant bait, and was caught in the breast; even as a small boy, my boy thought it a cruel sight. The boys pretended that the old frogs said, whenever this frog-catching boy came in sight, “Here comes Hawkins! — here comes Hawkins! Look out! — look out!” and a row of boys, perched on a log in the water, would sound this warning in mockery of the frogs or their foe, and plump one after another in the depths, as frogs follow their leader in swift succession. They had nothing against Hawkins. They all liked him, for he was a droll, good-natured fellow, always up to some pleasantry. One day he laughed out in school. “Was that you laughed, Henry?” asked the teacher, with unerring suspicion. “I was only smiling, Mr. Slack.” “The next time, see that you don’t smile so loud,” said Mr. Slack, and forgave him, as any one who saw his honest face must have wished to do. They called him Old Hawkins, for fondness; and while my boy shuddered at him for his way of catching frogs, he was in love with him for his laughing eyes and the kindly ways he had, especially with the little boys.

VI.

SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS.

My boy had not a great deal to do with schools after his docile childhood. When he began to run wild with the other boys he preferred their savage freedom; and he got out of going to school by most of the devices they used. He had never quite the hardihood to play truant, but he was subject to sudden attacks of sickness, which came on about school-time and went off towards the middle of the forenoon or afternoon in a very strange manner. I suppose that such complaints are unknown at the present time, but the Young People’s fathers can tell them how much suffering they used to cause among boys. At the age when my boy was beginning to outgrow them he was taken into his father’s printing-office, and he completed his recovery and his education there. But all through the years when he lived in the Boy’s Town he had intervals of schooling, which broke in upon the swimming and the skating, of course, but were not altogether unpleasant or unprofitable.

They began, as they are apt to do, with lessons in a private house, where a lady taught several other children, and where he possibly learned to read; though he could only remember being set on a platform in punishment for some forgotten offence. After that he went to school in the basement of a church, where a number of boys and girls were taught by a master who knew how to endear study at least to my boy. There was a garden outside of the schoolroom; hollyhocks grew in it, and the boys gathered the little cheeses, as they called the seed-buttons which form when the flowers drop off, and ate them, because boys will eat anything, and not because they liked them. With the fact of this garden is mixed a sense of drowsy heat and summer light, and that is all, except the blackboard at the end of the room and a big girl doing sums at it; and the wonder why the teacher smiled when he read in one of the girls’ compositions a phrase about forging puddings and pies; my boy did not know what forging meant, so he must have been very young. But he had a zeal for learning, and somehow he took a prize in geography — a science in which he was never afterwards remarkable. The prize was a little history of Lexington, Mass., which the teacher gave him, perhaps because Lexington may have been his native town; but the history must have been very dryly told, for not a fact of it remained in the boy’s mind. He was vaguely disappointed in the book, but he valued it for the teacher’s sake whom he was secretly very fond of, and who had no doubt won the child’s heart by some flattering notice. He thought it a great happiness to follow him, when the teacher gave up this school, and took charge of one of the public schools; but it was not the same there; the teacher could not distinguish him in that multitude of boys and girls. He did himself a little honor in spelling, but he won no praise, and he disgraced himself then as always in arithmetic. He sank into the common herd of mediocrities; and then, when his family went to live in another part of the town, he began to go to another school. He had felt that the teacher belonged to him, and it must have been a pang to find him so estranged. But he was a kind man, and long afterwards he had a friendly smile and word for the boy when they met; and then all at once he ceased to be, as men and things do in a boy’s world.

The other school was another private school; and it was doubtless a school of high grade in some things, for it was called the Academy. But there was provision for the youngest beginners in a lower room, and for a while my boy went there. Before school opened in the afternoon, the children tried to roast apples on the stove, but there never was time, and they had to eat them half raw. In the singing-class there was a boy who wore his hair so enviably long that he could toss it on his neck as he wheeled in the march of the class round the room; his father kept a store and he brought candy to school. They sang “Scotland’s burning! Pour on water” and “Home, home! Dearest and happiest home!” No doubt they did other things, but none of them remained in my boy’s mind; and when he was promoted to the upper room very little more was added. He studied Philosophy, as it was called, and he learned, as much from the picture as the text, that you could not make a boat go by filling her sail from bellows on board; he did not see why. But he was chiefly concerned with his fears about the Chemical Room, where I suppose some chemical apparatus must have been kept, but where the big boys were taken to be whipped. It was a place of dreadful execution to him, and when he was once sent to the Chemical Boom, and shut up there, because he was crying, and because, as he explained, he could not stop crying without a handkerchief, and he had none with him, he never expected to come out alive.

In fact, as I have said, he dwelt in a world of terrors; and I doubt if some of the big boys who were taken there to be whipped underwent so much as he in being merely taken to the place where they had been whipped. At the same time, while he cowered along in the shadow of unreal dangers, he had a boy’s boldness with most of the real ones, and he knew how to resent an indignity even at the hands of the teacher who could send him to the Chemical Room at pleasure. He knew what belonged to him as a small boy of honor, and one thing was, not to be tamely put back from a higher to a lower place in his studies. I dare say that boys do not mind this now; they must have grown ever so much wiser since my boy went to school; but in his time, when you were put back, say from the Third Reader to the Second Reader, you took your books and left school. That was what the other boys expected of you, and it was the only thing for you to do if you had the least self-respect, for you were put back to the Second Reader after having failed to read the Third, and it was a public shame which nothing but leaving that school could wipe out. The other boys would have a right to mock you if you did not do it; and as soon as the class was dismissed you went to your desk as haughtily as you could, and began putting your books and your slate and your inkstand together, with defiant glances at the teacher; and then when twelve o’clock came, or four o’clock, and the school was let out, you tucked the bundle under your arm and marched out of the room, with as much majesty as could be made to comport with a chip hat and bare feet; and as you passed the teacher you gave a twist of the head that was meant to carry dismay to the heart of your enemy. I note all these particulars carefully, so as to show the boys of the present day what fools the boys of the past were; though I think they will hardly believe it. My boy was once that kind of fool; but not twice. He left school with all his things at twelve o’clock, and he returned with them at one; for his father and mother did not agree with him about the teacher’s behavior in putting him back. No boy’s father and mother agreed with him on this point; every boy returned in just the same way; but somehow the insult had been wiped out by the mere act of self-assertion, and a boy kept his standing in the world as he could never have done if he had not left school when he was put back.

The Hydraulic ran alongside of the Academy, and at recess the boys had a good deal of fun with it, one way and another, sailing shingles with stones on them, and watching them go under one end of the culvert and come out of the other, or simply throwing rocks into the water. It does not seem very exciting when you tell of it, but it really was exciting; though it was not so exciting as to go down to the mills, where the Hydraulic plunged over that great wheel into the Miami. A foot-bridge crossed it that you could jump up and down on and almost make touch the water, and there were happier boys, who did not go to school, fishing there with men who had never gone. Sometimes the schoolboys ventured inside of the flour-mill and the iron-foundry, but I do not think this was often permitted; and, after all, the great thing was to rush over to the river-bank, all the boys and girls together, and play with the flutter-mills till the bell rang. The market-house was not far off, and they went there sometimes when it was not market-day, and played among the stalls; and once a girl caught her hand on a meat-hook. My boy had a vision of her hanging from it; but this was probably one of those grisly fancies that were always haunting him, and no fact at all. The bridge was close by the market-house, but for some reason or no reason the children never played in the bridge. Perhaps the toll-house man would not let them; my boy stood in dread of the toll-house man; he seemed to have such a severe way of taking the money from the teamsters.

Some of the boys were said to be the beaux of some of the girls. My boy did not know what that meant; in his own mind he could not disentangle the idea of bows from the idea of arrows; but he was in love with the girl who caught her hand on the meat-hook, and secretly suffered much on account of her. She had black eyes, and her name long seemed to him the most beautiful name for a girl; he said it to himself with flushes from his ridiculous little heart. While he was still a boy of ten he heard that she was married; and she must have been a great deal older than he. In fact he was too small a boy when he went to the Academy to remember how long he went there, and whether it was months or years; but probably it was not more than a year. He stopped going there because the teacher gave up the school to become a New Church minister; and as my boy’s father and mother were New Church people, there must have been some intimacy between them and the teacher, which he did not know of. But he only stood in awe, not terror, of him; and he was not surprised when he met him many long years after, to find him a man peculiarly wise, gentle, and kind. Between the young and the old there is a vast gulf, seldom if ever bridged. The old can look backward over it, but they cannot cross it, any more than the young, who can see no thither side.

The next school my boy went to was a district school, as they called a public school in the Boy’s Town. He did not begin going there without something more than his usual fear and trembling; for he had heard free schools and pay schools talked over among the boys, and sharply distinguished: in a pay school the teacher had only such powers of whipping as were given him by the parents, and they were always strictly limited; in a free school the teacher whipped as much and as often as he liked. For this reason it was much better to go to a pay school; but you had more fun at a free school, because there were more fellows; you must balance one thing against another. The boy who philosophized the matter in this way was a merry, unlucky fellow, who fully tested the advantages and disadvantages of the free-school system. He was one of the best-hearted boys in the world, and the kindest to little boys; he was always gay and always in trouble, and forever laughing, when he was not crying under that cruel rod. Sometimes he would not cry; but when he was caught in one of his frequent offences and called up before the teacher’s desk in the face of the whole school, and whipped over his thinly jacketed shoulders, he would take it without wincing, and go smiling to his seat, and perhaps be called back and whipped more for smiling. He was a sort of hero with the boys on this account, but he was too kind-hearted to be proud, and mingled with the rest on equal terms. One awful day, just before school took up in the afternoon, he and another boy went for a bucket of drinking-water; it always took two boys. They were gone till long after school began, and when they came back the teacher called them up, and waited for them to arrive slowly at his desk while he drew his long, lithe rod through his left hand. They had to own that they had done wrong, and they had no excuse but the one a boy always has — they forgot. He said he must teach them not to forget, and their punishment began; surely the most hideous and depraving sight, except a hanging, that could be offered to children’s eyes. One of them howled and shrieked, and leaped and danced, catching his back, his arms, his legs, as the strokes rained upon him, imploring, promising, and getting away at last with a wild effort to rub himself all over all at once. When it came the hero’s turn, he bore it without a murmur, and as if his fortitude exasperated him, the teacher showered the blows more swiftly and fiercely upon him than before, till a tear or two did steal down the boy’s cheek. Then he was sent to his seat, and in a few minutes he was happy with a trap for catching flies which he had contrived in his desk.

No doubt they were an unruly set of boys, and I do not suppose the teacher was a hard man, though he led the life of an executioner, and seldom passed a day without inflicting pain that a fiend might shrink from giving. My boy lived in an anguish of fear lest somehow he should come under that rod of his; but he was rather fond of the teacher, and so were all the boys. The teacher took a real interest in their studies, and if he whipped them well, he taught them well; and at most times he was kind and friendly with them. Anyway, he did not blister your hand with a ruler, as some teachers did, or make you stand bent forward from the middle, with your head hanging down, so that the blood all ran into it. Under him my boy made great advances in reading and writing, and he won some distinction in declamation; but the old difficulties with the arithmetic remained. He failed to make anything out of the parts of speech in his grammar; but one afternoon, while he sat in his stocking feet, trying to ease the chilblains which every boy used to have from his snow-soaked boots, before the days of india-rubbers, he found something in the back of his grammar which made him forget all about the pain. This was a part called Prosody, and it told how to make verses; explained the feet, the accents, the stanzas — everything that had puzzled him in his attempts to imitate the poems he had heard his father read aloud. He was amazed; he had never imagined that such a science existed, and yet here it was printed out, with each principle reduced to practice. He conceived of its reasons at the first reading, so that I suppose nature had not dealt so charily with him concerning the rules of prosody as the rules of arithmetic; and he lost no time in applying them in a poem of his own. The afternoon air was heavy with the heat that quivered visibly above the great cast-iron wood stove in the centre of the schoolroom; the boys drowsed in their seats, or hummed sleepily over their lessons; the chilblains gnawed away at the poet’s feet, but heaven had opened to him, and he was rapt far from all the world of sense. The music which he had followed through those poems his father read was no longer a mystery; he had its key, its secret; he might hope to wield its charm, to lay its spell upon others. He wrote his poem, which was probably a simple, unconscious imitation of something that had pleased him in his school-reader, and carried it proudly home with him. But here he met with that sort of disappointment which more than any other dismays and baffles authorship; a difference in the point of view. His father said the verses were well made, and he sympathized with him in his delight at having found out the way to make them, though he was not so much astonished as the boy that such a science as prosody should exist. He praised the child’s work, and no doubt smiled at it with the mother; but he said that the poem spoke of heaven as a place in the sky, and he wished him always to realize that heaven was a state and not a place, and that we could have it in this world as well as the next. The boy promised that he would try to realize heaven as a state; but at the bottom of his heart he despaired of getting that idea into poetry. Everybody else who had made poetry spoke of heaven as a place; they even called it a land, and put it in the sky; and he did not see how he was to do otherwise, no matter what Swedenborg said. He revered Swedenborg; he had a religious awe of the seer’s lithograph portrait in a full-bottom wig which hung in the front-room, but he did not see how even Swedenborg could have helped calling heaven a place if he had been making poetry.

The next year, or the next quarter, maybe, there was a new teacher; they seem to have followed each other somewhat as people do in a dream; they were not there, and then they were there; but, however the new one came, the boys were some time in getting used to his authority. It appeared to them that several of his acts were distinctly tyrannical, and were encroachments upon rights of theirs which the other teacher, with all his severity, had respected. My boy was inspired by the common mood to write a tragedy which had the despotic behavior of the new teacher for its subject, and which was intended to be represented by the boys in the hayloft of a boy whose father had a stable without any horse in it. The tragedy was written in the measure of the “Lady of the Lake,” which was the last poem my boy had heard his father reading aloud; it was very easy kind of verse. At the same time, the boys were to be dressed as Roman conspirators, and one of them was to give the teacher a petition to read, while another plunged a dagger into his vitals, and still another shouted, “Strike, Stephanos, strike!” It seemed to my boy that he had invented a situation which he had lifted almost bodily out of Goldsmith’s history; and he did not feel that his lines,

“Come one, come all! This rock shall flee
From its firm base as soon as we,”

were too closely modelled upon Scott’s lines,

“Come one, come all! This rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I.”

The tragedy was never acted. There may have been some trouble about the hayloft; for the boy whose father owned the stable was to have got the use of it without his father’s knowing it; and the poet found that the boys themselves scarcely entered into the spirit of his work. But after that there came a real tragedy, which most of them had part in without realizing it, and that was their persecution of a teacher until he had to give up the school. He must have come next after that usurper, but at any rate the word had been passed round, even before school took up the first morning he began, that he was to be resisted to the death. He could not have had any notion of what was in the air, for in that opening speech to the school which a new teacher always used to make, he talked to the boys in the friendliest manner, and with more sense and reason than they could feel, though I hope they felt some secret shame for the way they meant to behave. He took up some old, dry rods, which he had lying on his desk, and which he said he had found in it, and he told them he hoped never to use such a thing as a rod in that school, and never to strike any boy a blow. He broke the rods into small pieces and put them into the stove, and called the school to order for the studies before it. But the school never came to order, either then or afterwards. As soon as the teacher took his seat, the whispering and giggling, the scuffling and pushing began. The boys passed notes to the girls and held up their slates with things written on them to make the girls laugh; and they threw chewed-paper balls at one another. They asked to go out, and they stayed out as long as they pleased, and came back with an easy air, as if they had done nothing. They would not study; they did not care how much they missed in the class, and they laughed when they had to go to the foot. They made faces at the teacher and mocked him when his back was turned; they even threw paper wads at him.

It went on day after day till the school became a babel. The teacher tried reasoning, and such mild punishment as standing up in the middle of the floor, and keeping in after school. One big boy whom he stood up winked at the girls and made everybody titter; another whom he bade stay after school grabbed his hat and ran out of the room. The fellows played hookey as much as they wanted to, and did not give any excuse for being late, or for not coming at all. At last, when the teacher was driven desperate, and got in a rod (which he said he was ashamed to use, but they left him no hope of ruling them by reason), the big boys fought him, and struck back when he began to whip them. This gentle soul had not one friend among all those little savages, whom he had given no cause to hate, but only cause to love him. None of them could have told why they used him so ill, for nobody knew; only, the word had gone out that you were not to mind him, but to mock him and fight him; nobody knew where the word first came from.

Not even my boy, I grieve to say, was the poor man’s friend, though he too had received only kindness from him. One day, when the teacher had set him his copy, and found him doing it badly as he came by, he gave him a slight tap on his head with his penknife, and addressed him some half-joking reproof. This fired my boy’s wicked little heart with furious resentment; he gathered up his books after school, and took them home; a good many other boys had done it, and the school was dwindling. He was sent back with his books the next morning, and many other parents behaved as wisely as his. One of the leading men in the town, whose mere presence in the schoolroom sent a thrill of awe through the fellows, brought his son in after such an escapade, and told the teacher that he had just given him a sound thrashing, and he hoped the teacher would give him another. But the teacher took the hand of the snivelling wretch, and called him affectionately by name, and said they would try to get along without that, and sent him to his seat forgiven. It ought to have touched a heart of stone, but in that barbarous republic of boys there was no gratitude. Sometimes they barred the teacher out by nailing the doors and windows; and at last he gave up the school.

But even then his persecution did not end. The word went out that you were not to speak to him if you met him; and if he spoke to you, you were not to say anything back. One day he came up to my boy where he sat fishing for crawfish in the Hydraulic, with his bare legs dangling over the edge of a culvert, and, unawed by this august figure, asked him pleasantly what luck he had. The boy made no sign of seeing or hearing him, and he ignored some other kindly advances. I hope the teacher thought it merely his shyness. The boy went home and told, gleefully, how he had refused to speak to Old Manton; but here he met his reward. He was made to feel how basely rude he had been, and to tingle with a wholesome shame. There was some talk of sending him to the teacher, to ask his forgiveness; but this was given up for fear of inflicting pain where possibly none had been felt. I wish now the boy could have gone to him, for perhaps the teacher is no longer living.

VII.

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS.

I sometimes wonder how much these have changed since my boy’s time. Of course they differ somewhat from generation to generation, and from East to West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown people are apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwritten usages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on the same level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but are binding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losing his standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their world without coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; he obeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages from whom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in and through the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into it any more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its own ideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, a depravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity that fathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it is only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on in it. No doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly; and in the meanwhile it is only in some of its milder manners and customs that the boy’s world can be studied.

The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through another boy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself upon his person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hope to revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for that time, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell the teacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outside of the boys’ world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor or self-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would have the right to mock you, to point at you, and call “E-e-e, e-e-e, e-e-e!” at you, till you fought them. After that, whether you whipped them or not there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had to stop.

Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a new neighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason for this, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no other means of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he became subject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in the last century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him into their tribe, and he became a leader among them. When you moved away from a neighborhood you did not lose all your rights in it; you did not have to fight when you went back to see the boys, or anything; but if one of them met you in your new precincts you might have to try conclusions with him; and perhaps, if he was a boy who had been in the habit of whipping you, you were quite ready to do so. When my boy’s family left the Smith house, one of the boys from that neighborhood came up to see him at the Falconer house, and tried to carry things with a high hand, as he had always done. Then my boy fought him, quite as if he were not a Delaware and the other boy not an Iroquois, with sovereign rights over him. My boy was beaten, but the difference was that, if he had not been on new ground, he would have been beaten without daring to fight. His mother witnessed the combat, and came out and shamed him for his behavior, and had in the other boy, and made them friends over some sugar-cakes. But after that the boys of the Smith neighborhood understood that my boy would not be whipped without fighting. The home instruction was all against fighting; my boy was taught that it was not only wicked, but foolish; that if it was wrong to strike, it was just as wrong to strike back; that two wrongs never made a right, and so on. But all this was not of the least effect with a hot temper amid the trials and perplexities of life in the Boy’s Town.

There were some boys of such standing as bullies and such wide fame that they could range all neighborhoods of the town not only without fear of being molested, or made to pass under the local yoke anywhere, but with such plenary powers of intimidation that the other boys submitted to them without question. My boy had always heard of one of these bullies, whose very name, Buz Simpson, carried terror with it; but he had never seen him, because he lived in the unknown region bordering on the river south of the Thomas house. One day he suddenly appeared, when my boy was playing marbles with some other fellows in front of the Falconer house, attended by two or three other boys from below the Sycamore Grove. He was small and insignificant, but such was the fear his name inspired that my boy and his friends cowered before him, though some of them were no mean fighters themselves. They seemed to know by instinct that this was Buz Simpson, and they stood patiently by while he kicked their marbles out of the ring and broke up their game, and, after staying awhile to cover them with ignominy and insult, passed on with his retainers to other fields of conquest. If it had been death to resist him, they could not have dreamed less of doing so; and though this outrage took place under my boy’s own windows, and a single word would have brought efficient aid (for the mere sight of any boy’s mother could put to flight a whole army of other boys), he never dreamed of calling for help.

That would have been a weakness which would not only have marked him forever as a cry-baby, but an indecorum too gross for words. It would have been as if, when once the boys were playing trip at school, and a big boy tripped him, and he lay quivering and panting on the ground, he had got up as soon as he could catch his breath and gone in and told the teacher; or as if, when the fellows were playing soak-about, and he got hit in the pit of the stomach with a hard ball, he had complained of the fellow who threw it. There were some things so base that a boy could not do them; and what happened out of doors, and strictly within the boy’s world, had to be kept sacredly secret among the boys. For instance, if you had been beguiled, as a little boy, into being the last in the game of snap-the-whip, and the snap sent you rolling head over heels on the hard ground, and skinned your nose and tore your trousers, you could cry from the pain without disgrace, and some of the fellows would come up and try to comfort you; but you were bound in honor not to appeal to the teacher, and you were expected to use every device to get the blood off you before you went in, and to hide the tear in your trousers. Of course, the tear and the blood could not be kept from the anxious eyes at home, but even there you were expected not to say just what boys did it.

They were by no means the worst boys who did such things, but only the most thoughtless. Still, there was a public opinion in the Boy’s Town which ruled out certain tricks, and gave the boys who played them the name of being “mean.” One of these was boring a hole in the edge of your school-desk to meet a shaft sunk from the top, which you filled with slate-pencil dust. Then, if you were that kind of boy, you got some little chap to put his eye close to the shaft, with the hope of seeing Niagara Falls, and set your lips to the hole in the edge, and blew his eye full of pencil-dust. This was mean; and it was also mean to get some unsuspecting child to close the end of an elderwood tube with his thumb, and look hard at you, while you showed him Germany. You did this by pulling a string below the tube, and running a needle into his thumb. My boy discovered Germany in this way long before he had any geographical or political conception of it.

I do not know why, if these abominable cruelties were thought mean, it was held lawful to cover a stone with dust and get a boy, not in the secret, to kick the pile over with his bare foot. It was perfectly good form, also, to get a boy, if you could, to shut his eyes, and then lead him into a mud-puddle or a thicket of briers or nettles, or to fool him in any heartless way, such as promising to pump easy when he put his mouth to the pump-spout, and then coming down on the pump-handle with a rush that flooded him with water and sent him off blowing the tide from his nostrils like a whale. Perhaps these things were permitted because the sight of the victim’s suffering was so funny. Half the pleasure in fighting wasps or bumble-bees was in killing them and destroying their nests; the other half was in seeing the fellows get stung. If you could fool a fellow into a mass-meeting of bumble-bees, and see him lead them off in a steeple-chase, it was right and fair to do so. But there were other cases in which deceit was not allowable. For instance, if you appeared on the playground with an apple, and all the boys came whooping round, “You know me, Jimmy!” “You know your uncle!” “You know your grandfather!” and you began to sell out bites at three pins for a lady-bite and six pins for a hog-bite, and a boy bought a lady-bite and then took a hog-bite, he was held in contempt, and could by no means pass it off for a good joke on you; it was considered mean.

In the Boy’s Town there was almost as much stone-throwing as there was in Florence in the good old times. There was a great abundance of the finest kind of pebbles, from the size of a robin’s egg upward, smooth and shapely, which the boys called rocks. They were always stoning something, birds, or dogs, or mere inanimate marks, but most of the time they were stoning one another. They came out of their houses, or front-yards, and began to throw stones, when they were on perfectly good terms, and they usually threw stones in parting for the day. They stoned a boy who left a group singly, and it was lawful for him to throw stones back at the rest, if the whim took him, when he got a little way off. With all this stone-throwing, very little harm was done, though now and then a stone took a boy on the skull, and raised a lump of its own size. Then the other boys knew, by the roar of rage and pain he set up, that he had been hit, and ran home and left him to his fate.

Their fights were mostly informal scuffles, on and off in a flash, and conducted with none of the ceremony which I have read of concerning the fights of English boys. It was believed that some of the fellows knew how to box, and all the fellows intended to learn, but nobody ever did. The fights sprang usually out of some trouble of the moment; but at times they were arranged to settle some question of moral or physical superiority. Then one boy put a chip on his shoulder and dared the other to knock it off. It took a great while to bring the champions to blows, and I have known the mere preparatory insults of a fight of this kind to wear out the spirit of the combatants and the patience of the spectators, so that not a blow was struck, finally, and the whole affair fell through.

Though they were so quarrelsome among themselves, the boys that my boy went with never molested girls. They mostly ignored them; but they would have scorned to hurt a girl almost as much as they would have scorned to play with one. Of course while they were very little they played with girls; and after they began to be big boys, eleven or twelve years old, they began to pay girls some attention; but for the rest they simply left them out of the question, except at parties, when the games obliged them to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, it was not good form for a boy to be greatly interested in them; and he had to conceal any little fancy he had about this girl or that unless he wanted to be considered soft by the other fellows. When they were having fun they did not want to have any girls around; but in the back-yard a boy might play teeter or seesaw, or some such thing, with his sisters and their friends, without necessarily losing caste, though such things were not encouraged. On the other hand, a boy was bound to defend them against anything that he thought slighting or insulting; and you did not have to verify the fact that anything had been said or done; you merely had to hear that it had. It once fell to my boy to avenge such a reported wrong from a boy who had not many friends in school, a timid creature whom the mere accusation frightened half out of his wits, and who wildly protested his innocence. He ran, and my boy followed with the other boys after him, till they overtook the culprit and brought him to bay against a high board fence; and there my boy struck him in his imploring face. He tried to feel like a righteous champion, but he felt like a brutal ruffian. He long had the sight of that terrified, weeping face, and with shame and sickness of heart he cowered before it. It was pretty nearly the last of his fighting; and though he came off victor, he felt that he would rather be beaten himself than do another such act of justice. In fact, it seems best to be very careful how we try to do justice in this world, and mostly to leave retribution of all kinds to God, who really knows about things; and content ourselves as much as possible with mercy, whose mistakes are not so irreparable.

The boys had very little to do with the inside of one another’s houses. They would follow a boy to his door, and wait for him to come out; and they would sometimes get him to go in and ask his mother for crullers or sugar-cakes; when they came to see him they never went indoors for him, but stood on the sidewalk and called him with a peculiar cry, something like “E-oo-we, e-oo-we!” and threw stones at trees, or anything, till he came out. If he did not come, after a reasonable time, they knew he was not there, or that his mother would not let him come. A fellow was kept in that way, now and then. If a fellow’s mother came to the door the boys always ran.

The mother represented the family sovereignty; the father was seldom seen, and he counted for little or nothing among the outside boys. It was the mother who could say whether a boy might go fishing or in swimming, and she was held a good mother or not according as she habitually said yes or no. There was no other standard of goodness for mothers in the boy’s world, and could be none; and a bad mother might be outwitted by any device that the other boys could suggest to her boy. Such a boy was always willing to listen to any suggestion, and no boy took it hard if the other fellows made fun when their plan got him into trouble at home. If a boy came out after some such experience with his face wet, and his eyes red, and his lips swollen, of course you had to laugh; he expected it, and you expected him to stone you for laughing.

When a boy’s mother had company, he went and hid till the guests were gone, or only came out of concealment to get some sort of shy lunch. If the other fellows’ mothers were there, he might be a little bolder, and bring out cake from the second table. But he had to be pretty careful how he conformed to any of the usages of grown-up society. A fellow who brushed his hair, and put on shoes, and came into the parlor when there was company, was not well seen among the fellows; he was regarded in some degree as a girl-boy; a boy who wished to stand well with other boys kept in the wood-shed, and only went in as far as the kitchen to get things for his guests in the back-yard. Yet there were mothers who would make a boy put on a collar when they had company, and disgrace him before the world by making him stay round and help; they acted as if they had no sense and no pity; but such mothers were rare.

Most mothers yielded to public opinion and let their boys leave the house, and wear just what they always wore. I have told how little they wore in summer. Of course in winter they had to put on more things. In those days knickerbockers were unknown, and if a boy had appeared in short pants and long stockings he would have been thought dressed like a circus-actor. Boys wore long pantaloons, like men, as soon as they put off skirts, and they wore jackets or roundabouts such as the English boys still wear at Eton. When the cold weather came they had to put on shoes and stockings, or rather long-legged boots, such as are seen now only among lumbermen and teamsters in the country. Most of the fellows had stoga boots, as heavy as iron and as hard; they were splendid to skate in, they kept your ankles so stiff. Sometimes they greased them to keep the water out; but they never blacked them except on Sunday, and before Saturday they were as red as a rusty stove-pipe. At night they were always so wet that you could not get them off without a boot-jack, and you could hardly do it anyway; sometimes you got your brother to help you off with them, and then he pulled you all round the room. In the morning they were dry, but just as hard as stone, and you had to soap the heel of your woollen sock (which your grandmother had knitted for you, or maybe some of your aunts) before you could get your foot in, and sometimes the ears of the boot that you pulled it on by would give way, and you would have to stamp your foot in and kick the toe against the mop-board. Then you gasped and limped round, with your feet like fire, till you could get out and limber your boots up in some water somewhere. About noon your chilblains began.

My boy had his secret longing to be a dandy, and once he was so taken with a little silk hat at the hat-store that he gave his father no peace till he got it for him. But the very first time he wore it the boys made fun of it, and that was enough. After that he wore it several times with streaming tears; and then he was allowed to lay it aside, and compromise on an unstylish cap of velvet, which he had despised before. I do not know why a velvet cap was despised, but it was; a cap with a tassel was babyish. The most desired kind of cap was a flat one of blue broadcloth, with a patent-leather peak, and a removable cover of oil-cloth, silk if you were rich, cotton if you were poor; when you had pulled the top of such a cap over on one side, you were dressed for conquest, especially if you wore your hair long. My boy had such a cap, with a silk oil-cloth cover, but his splendor was marred by his short hair.

At one time boots with long, sharp-pointed toes were the fashion, and he so ardently desired a pair of these that fate granted his prayer, but in the ironical spirit which fate usually shows when granting a person’s prayers. These boots were of calf-skin, and they had red leather tops, which you could show by letting your pantaloon-legs carelessly catch on the ears; but the smallest pair in town was several sizes too large for my boy. The other boys were not slow to discover the fact, and his martyrdom with these boots began at once. But he was not allowed to give them up as he did the silk hat; he had to wear them out. However, it did not take long to wear out a pair of boots in the Boy’s Town. A few weeks’ scuffling over the gravelly ground, or a single day’s steady sliding made them the subjects for half-soling, and then it was a question of only a very little time.

A good many of the boys, though, wore their boots long after they were worn out, and so they did with the rest of their clothes. I have tried to give some notion of the general distribution of comfort which was never riches in the Boy’s Town; but I am afraid that I could not paint the simplicity of things there truly without being misunderstood in these days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough, but nobody had too much; the richest man in town might be worth twenty thousand dollars. There were distinctions among the grown people, and no doubt there were the social cruelties which are the modern expression of the savage spirit otherwise repressed by civilization; but these were unknown among the boys. Savages they were, but not that kind of savages. They valued a boy for his character and prowess, and it did not matter in the least that he was ragged and dirty. Their mothers might not allow him the run of their kitchens quite so freely as some other boys, but the boys went with him just the same, and they never noticed how little he was washed and dressed. The best of them had not an overcoat; and underclothing was unknown among them. When a boy had buttoned up his roundabout, and put on his mittens, and tied his comforter round his neck and over his ears, he was warmly dressed.

VIII.

PLAYS AND PASTIMES.

About the time fate cursed him with a granted prayer in those boots, my boy was deep in the reading of a book about Grecian mythology which he found perpetually fascinating; he read it over and over without ever thinking of stopping merely because he had already been through it twenty or thirty times. It had pictures of all the gods and goddesses, demigods and heroes; and he tried to make poems upon their various characters and exploits. But Apollo was his favorite, and I believe it was with some hope of employing them in a personation of the god that he coveted those red-topped sharp-toed calf-skin boots. He had a notion that if he could get up a chariot by sawing down the sides of a store-box for the body, and borrowing the hind-wheels of the baby’s willow wagon, and then, drawn by the family dog Tip at a mad gallop, come suddenly whirling round the corner of the school-house, wearing spangled circus-tights and bearing Apollo’s bow and shaft, while a silken scarf which he had seen in a bureau-drawer at home blew gallantly out behind him, it would have a fine effect with the boys. Some of the fellows wished to be highway robbers and outlaws; one who intended to be a pirate afterwards got so far in a maritime career as to invent a steam-engine governor now in use on the seagoing steamers; my boy was content to be simply a god, the god of poetry and sunshine. He never realized his modest ambition, but then boys never realize anything; though they have lots of fun failing.

“A CITIZEN’S CHARACTER FOR CLEVERNESS OR MEANNESS WAS FIXED BY HIS WALKING ROUND OR OVER THE RINGS.”

In the Boy’s Town they had regular games and plays, which came and went in a stated order. The first thing in the spring as soon as the frost began to come out of the ground, they had marbles which they played till the weather began to be pleasant for the game, and then they left it off. There were some mean-spirited fellows who played for fun, but any boy who was anything played for keeps: that is, keeping all the marbles he won. As my boy was skilful at marbles, he was able to start out in the morning with his toy, or the marble he shot with, and a commy, or a brown marble of the Lowest value, and come home at night with a pocketful of white-alleys and blood-alleys, striped plasters find bull’s-eyes, and crystals, clear and clouded. His gambling was not approved of at home, but it was allowed him because of the hardness of his heart, I suppose, and because it was not thought well to keep him up too strictly; and I suspect it would have been useless to forbid his playing for keeps, though he came to have a bad conscience about it before he gave it up. There were three kinds of games at marbles which the boys played: one with a long ring marked out on the ground, and a base some distance off, which you began to shoot from; another with a round ring, whose line formed the base; and another with holes, three or five, hollowed in the earth at equal distances from each other, which was called knucks. You could play for keeps in all these games; and in knucks, if you won, you had a shot or shots at the knuckles of the fellow who lost, and who was obliged to hold them down for you to shoot at. Fellows who were mean would twitch their knuckles away when they saw your toy coming, and run; but most of them took their punishment with the savage pluck of so many little Sioux. As the game began in the raw cold of the earliest spring, every boy had chapped hands, and nearly every one had the skin worn off the knuckle of his middle finger from resting it on the ground when he shot. You could use a knuckle-dabster of fur or cloth to rest your hand on, but it was considered effeminate, and in the excitement you were apt to forget it, anyway. Marbles were always very exciting, and were played with a clamor as incessant as that of a blackbird roost. A great many points were always coming up: whether a boy took-up or edged beyond the very place where his toy lay when he shot; whether he knuckled down, or kept his hand on the ground in shooting; whether, when another boy’s toy drove one marble against another and knocked both out of the ring, he holloed “Fen doubs!” before the other fellow holloed “Doubs!” whether a marble was in or out of the ring, and whether the umpire’s decision was just or not. The gambling and the quarrelling went on till the second-bell rang for school, and began again as soon as the boys could get back to their rings when school let out. The rings were usually marked on the ground with a stick, but when there was a great hurry, or there was no stick handy, the side of a fellow’s boot would do, and the hollows for knucks were always bored by twirling round on your boot-heel. This helped a boy to wear out his boots very rapidly, but that was what his boots were made for, just as the sidewalks were made for the boys’ marble-rings, and a citizen’s character for cleverness or meanness was fixed by his walking round or over the rings. Cleverness was used in the Virginia sense for amiability; a person who was clever in the English sense was smart.

There were many games of ball. Two-cornered cat was played by four boys: two to bat, and two behind the batters to catch and pitch. Three-cornered cat was, I believe, the game which has since grown into base-ball, and was even then sometimes called so. But soak-about was the favorite game at school, and it simply consisted of hitting any other boy you could with the ball when you could get it. Foot-ball was always played with a bladder, and it came in season with the cold weather when the putting up of beef began; the business was practically regarded by the boys as one undertaken to supply them with bladders for foot-balls.

When the warm weather came on in April, and the boys got off their shoes for good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Life has a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none so ecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast of our mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then from the heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, and cousin to all her dumb children of the grass and trees. His blood leaps as wildly as at that kiss of the waters when he plunges into their arms in June; there is something even finer and sweeter in the rapture of the earlier bliss. The day will not be long enough for his flights, his races; he aches more with regret than with fatigue when he must leave the happy paths under the stars outside, and creep into his bed. It is all like some glimpse, some foretaste of the heavenly time when the earth and her sons shall be reconciled in a deathless love, and they shall not be thankless, nor she a step-mother any more.

About the only drawback to going barefoot was stumping your toe, which you were pretty sure to do when you first took off your shoes and before you had got used to your new running weight. When you struck your toe against a rock, or anything, you caught it up in your hand, and hopped about a hundred yards before you could bear to put it to the ground. Then you sat down, and held it as tight as you could, and cried over it, till the fellows helped you to the pump to wash the blood off. Then, as soon as you could, you limped home for a rag, and kept pretty quiet about it so as to get out again without letting on to your mother.

With the races came the other plays which involved running, like hide-and-go-whoop, and tag, and dog-on-wood, and horse, which I dare say the boys of other times and other wheres know by different names. The Smith-house neighborhood was a famous place for them all, both because there were such lots of boys, and because there were so many sheds and stables where you could hide, and everything. There was a town pump there for you, so that you would not have to go into the house for a drink when you got thirsty, and perhaps be set to doing something; and there were plenty of boards for teeter and see-saw; and somehow that neighborhood seemed to understand boys, and did not molest them in any way. In a vacant lot behind one of the houses there was a whirligig, that you could ride on and get sick in about a minute; it was splendid. There was a family of German boys living across the street, that you could stone whenever they came out of their front gate, for the simple and sufficient reason that they were Dutchmen, and without going to the trouble of a quarrel with them. My boy was not allowed to stone them; but when he was with the other fellows, and his elder brother was not along, he could not help stoning them.

There were shade trees all along that street, that you could climb if you wanted to, or that you could lie down under when you had run yourself out of breath, or play mumble-the-peg. My boy distinctly remembered that under one of these trees his elder brother first broached to him that awful scheme of reform about fibbing, and applied to their own lives the moral of “The Trippings of Tom Pepper;” he remembered how a conviction of the righteousness of the scheme sank into his soul, and he could not withhold his consent. Under the same tree, and very likely at the same time, a solemn conclave of boys, all the boys there were, discussed the feasibility of tying a tin can to a dog’s tail, and seeing how he would act. They had all heard of the thing, but none of them had seen it; and it was not so much a question of whether you ought to do a thing that on the very face of it would be so much fun, and if it did not amuse the dog as highly as anybody, could certainly do him no harm, as it was a question of whose dog you should get to take the dog’s part in the sport. It was held that an old dog would probably not keep still long enough for you to tie the can on; he would have his suspicions; or else he would not run when the can was tied on, but very likely just go and lie down somewhere. The lot finally fell to a young yellow dog belonging to one of the boys, and the owner at once ran home to get him, and easily lured him back to the other boys with flatteries and caresses. The flatteries and caresses were not needed, for a dog is always glad to go with boys, upon any pretext, and so far from thinking that he does them a favor, he feels himself greatly honored. But I dare say the boy had a guilty fear that if his dog had known why he was invited to be of that party of boys, he might have pleaded a previous engagement. As it was, he came joyfully, and allowed the can to be tied to his tail without misgiving. If there had been any question with the boys as to whether he would enter fully into the spirit of the affair, it must have been instantly dissipated by the dog’s behavior when he felt the loop tighten on his tail, and looked round to see what the matter was. The boys hardly had a chance to cheer him before he flashed out of sight round the corner, and they hardly had time to think before he flashed into sight again from the other direction. He whizzed along the ground, and the can hurtled in the air, but there was no other sound, and the cheers died away on the boys’ lips. The boy who owned the dog began to cry, and the other fellows began to blame him for not stopping the dog. But he might as well have tried to stop a streak of lightning; the only thing you could do was to keep out of the dog’s way. As an experiment it was successful beyond the wildest dreams of its projectors, though it would have been a sort of relief if the dog had taken some other road, for variety, or had even reversed his course. But he kept on as he began, and by a common impulse the boys made up their minds to abandon the whole affair to him. They all ran home and hid, or else walked about and tried to ignore it. But at this point the grown-up people began to be interested; the mothers came to their doors to see what was the matter. Yet even the mothers were powerless in a case like that, and the enthusiast had to be left to his fate. He was found under a barn at last, breathless, almost lifeless, and he tried to bite the man who untied the can from his tail. Eventually he got well again, and lived to be a solemn warning to the boys; he was touchingly distrustful of their advances for a time, but he finally forgot and forgave everything. They did not forget, and they never tried tying a tin can to a dog’s tail again, among all the things they tried and kept trying. Once was enough; and they never even liked to talk of it, the sight was so awful. They were really fond of the dog, and if they could have thought he would take the matter so seriously, they would not have tried to have that kind of fun with him. It cured them of ever wanting to have that kind of fun with any dog.

As the weather softened, tops came in some weeks after marbles went out, and just after foot-races were over, and a little before swimming began. At first the boys bought their tops at the stores, but after a while the boy whose father had the turning-shop on the Hydraulic learned to turn their tops, and did it for nothing, which was cheaper than buying tops, especially as he furnished the wood, too, and you only had to get the wire peg yourself. I believe he was the same boy who wanted to be a pirate and ended by inventing a steam-governor. He was very ingenious, and he knew how to turn a top out of beech or maple that would outspin anything you could get in a store. The boys usually chose a firm, smooth piece of sidewalk, under one of the big trees in the Smith neighborhood, and spun their tops there. A fellow launched his top into the ring, and the rest waited till it began to go to sleep, that is, to settle in one place, and straighten up and spin silently, as if standing still. Then any fellow had a right to peg at it with his top, and if he hit it, he won it; and if he split it, as sometimes happened, the fellow that owned it had to give him a top. The boys came with their pockets bulged out with tops, but before long they had to go for more tops to that boy who could turn them. From this it was but another step to go to the shop with him and look on while he turned the tops; and then in process of time the boys discovered that the smooth floor of the shop was a better place to fight tops than the best piece of sidewalk. They would have given whole Saturdays to the sport there, but when they got to holloing too loudly the boy’s father would come up, and then they would all run. It was considered mean in him, but the boy himself was awfully clever, and the first thing the fellows knew they were back there again. Some few of the boys had humming-tops; but though these pleased by their noise, they were not much esteemed, and could make no head against the good old turnip-shaped tops, solid and weighty, that you could wind up with a stout cotton cord, and launch with perfect aim from the flat button held between your fore finger and middle finger. Some of the boys had a very pretty art in the twirl they gave the top, and could control its course, somewhat as a skilful pitcher can govern that of a base-ball.

I do not know why a certain play went out, but suddenly the fellows who had been playing ball, or marbles, or tops, would find themselves playing something else. Kites came in just about the time of the greatest heat in summer, and lasted a good while; but could not have lasted as long as the heat, which began about the first of June, and kept on well through September; no play could last so long as that, and I suppose kite-flying must have died into swimming after the Fourth of July. The kites were of various shapes: bow kites, two-stick kites, and house kites. A bow kite could be made with half a barrel hoop carried over the top of a cross, but it was troublesome to make, and it did not fly very well, and somehow it was thought to look babyish; but it was held in greater respect than the two-stick kite, which only the smallest boys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks in the form of a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared on the Commons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as a kind of girl. The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the wind best, and flew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up, was the house kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly in the form of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at the base than at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of all these kites was given, and the sticks stayed in place by a string carried taut from stick to stick, which was notched at the ends to hold it; sometimes the sticks were held with a tack at the point of crossing, and sometimes they were mortised into one another; but this was apt to weaken them. The frame was laid down on a sheet of paper, and the paper was cut an inch or two larger, and then pasted and folded over the string. Most of the boys used a paste made of flour and cold water; but my boy and his brother could usually get paste from the printing-office; and when they could not they would make it by mixing flour and water cream-thick, and slowly boiling it. That was a paste that would hold till the cows came home, the boys said, and my boy was courted for his skill in making it. But after the kite was pasted, and dried in the sun, or behind the kitchen stove, if you were in very much of a hurry (and you nearly always were), it had to be hung, with belly-bands and tail-bands; that is, with strings carried from stick to stick over the face and at the bottom, to attach the cord for flying it and to fasten on the tail by. This took a good deal of art, and unless it were well done the kite would not balance, but would be always pitching and darting. Then the tail had to be of just the right weight; if it was too heavy the kite kept sinking, even after you got it up where otherwise it would stand; if too light, the kite would dart, and dash itself to pieces on the ground. A very pretty tail was made by tying twists of paper across a string a foot apart, till there were enough to balance the kite; but this sort of tail was apt to get tangled, and the best tail was made of a long streamer of cotton rags, with a gay tuft of dog-fennel at the end. Dog-fennel was added or taken away till just the right weight was got; and when this was done, after several experimental tests, the kite was laid flat on its face in the middle of the road, or on a long stretch of smooth grass; the bands were arranged, and the tail stretched carefully out behind, where it would not catch on bushes. You unwound a great length of twine, running backward, and letting the twine slip swiftly through your hands till you had run enough out; then you seized the ball, and with one look over your shoulder to see that all was right, started swiftly forward. The kite reared itself from the ground, and, swaying gracefully from side to side, rose slowly into the air, with its long tail climbing after it till the fennel tuft swung free. If there was not much surface wind you might have to run a little way, but as soon as the kite caught the upper currents it straightened itself, pulled the twine taut, and steadily mounted, while you gave it more and more twine; if the breeze was strong, the cord burned as it ran through your hands; till at last the kite stood still in the sky, at such a height that the cord holding it sometimes melted out of sight in the distance.

If it was a hot July day the sky would be full of kites, and the Commons would be dotted over with boys holding them, or setting them up, or winding them in, and all talking and screaming at the tops of their voices under the roasting sun. One might think that kite-flying, at least, could be carried on quietly and peaceably; but it was not. Besides the wild debate of the rival excellences of the different kites, there were always quarrels from getting the strings crossed; for, as the boys got their kites up, they drew together for company and for an easier comparison of their merits. It was only a mean boy who would try to cross another fellow’s string; but sometimes accidents would happen; two kites would become entangled, and both would have to be hauled in, while their owners cried and scolded, and the other fellows cheered and laughed. Now and then the tail of a kite would part midway, and then the kite would begin to dart violently from side to side, and then to whirl round and round in swifter and narrower circles till it dashed itself to the ground. Sometimes the kite-string would break, and the kite would waver and fall like a bird shot in the wing; and the owner of the kite, and all the fellows who had no kites, would run to get it where it came down, perhaps a mile or more away. It usually came down in a tree, and they had to climb for it; but sometimes it lodged so high that no one could reach it; and then it was slowly beaten and washed away in the winds and rains, and its long tail left streaming all winter from the naked bough where it had caught. It was so good for kites on the Commons, because there were no trees there, and not even fences, but a vast open stretch of level grass, which the cows and geese kept cropped to the earth; and for the most part the boys had no trouble with their kites there. Some of them had paper fringe pasted round the edges of their kites; this made a fine rattling as the kite rose, and when the kite stood, at the end of its string, you could hear the humming if you put your ear to the twine. But the most fun was sending up messengers. The messengers were cut out of thick paper, with a slit at one side, so as to slip over the string, which would be pulled level long enough to give the messenger a good start, and then released, when the wind would catch the little circle, and drive it up the long curving incline till it reached the kite.

KITE TIME.

It was thought a great thing in a kite to pull, and it was a favor to another boy to let him take hold of your string and feel how your kite pulled. If you wanted to play mumble-the-peg, or anything, while your kite was up, you tied it to a stake in the ground, or gave it to some other fellow to hold; there were always lots of fellows eager to hold it. But you had to be careful how you let a little fellow hold it; for, if it was a very powerful kite, it would take him up. It was not certain just how strong a kite had to be to take a small boy up, and nobody had ever seen a kite do it, but everybody expected to see it.

IX.

CIRCUSES AND SHOWS.

What every boy expected to do, some time or other, was to run off. He expected to do this because the scheme offered an unlimited field to the imagination, and because its fulfilment would give him the highest distinction among the other fellows. To run off was held to be the only way for a boy to right himself against the wrongs and hardships of a boy’s life. As far as the Boy’s Town was concerned, no boy had anything to complain of; the boys had the best time in the world there, and in a manner they knew it. But there were certain things that they felt no boy ought to stand, and these things were sometimes put upon them at school, but usually at home. In fact, nearly all the things that a fellow intended to run off for were done to him by those who ought to have been the kindest to him. Some boys’ mothers had the habit of making them stop and do something for them just when they were going away with the fellows. Others would not let them go in swimming as often as they wanted, and, if they saw them with their shirts on wrong side out, would not believe that they could get turned in climbing a fence. Others made them split kindling and carry in wood, and even saw wood. None of these things, in a simple form, was enough to make a boy run off, but they prepared his mind for it, and when complicated with whipping they were just cause for it. Weeding the garden, though, was a thing that almost, in itself, was enough to make a fellow run off.

Not many of the boys really had to saw wood, though a good many of the fellows’ fathers had saws and bucks in their wood-sheds. There were public sawyers who did most of the wood-sawing; and they came up with their bucks on their shoulders, and asked for the job almost as soon as the wood was unloaded before your door. The most popular one with the boys was a poor half-wit known among them as Morn; and he was a favorite with them because he had fits, and because, when he had a fit, he would seem to fly all over the woodpile. The boys would leave anything to see Morn in a fit, and he always had a large crowd round him as soon as the cry went out that he was beginning to have one. They watched the hapless creature with grave, unpitying, yet not unfriendly interest, too ignorant of the dark ills of life to know how deeply tragic was the spectacle that entertained them, and how awfully present in Morn’s contortions was the mystery of God’s ways with his children, some of whom he gives to happiness and some to misery. When Morn began to pick himself weakly up, with eyes of pathetic bewilderment, they helped him find his cap, and tried to engage him in conversation, for the pleasure of seeing him twist his mouth when he said, of a famous town drunkard whom he admired, “He’s a strong man; he eats liquor.” It was probably poor Morn’s ambition to eat liquor himself, and the boys who followed that drunkard about to plague him had a vague respect for his lamentable appetite.

None of the boys ever did run off, except the son of one of the preachers. He was a big boy, whom my boy remotely heard of, but never saw, for he lived in another part of the town; but his adventure was known to all the boys, and his heroism rated high among them. It took nothing from this, in their eyes, that he was found, homesick and crying in Cincinnati, and was glad to come back — the great fact was that he had run off; nothing could change or annul that. If he had made any mistake, it was in not running off with a circus, for that was the true way of running off. Then, if you were ever seen away from home, you were seen tumbling through a hoop and alighting on the crupper of a barebacked piebald, and if you ever came home you came home in a gilded chariot, and you flashed upon the domestic circle in flesh-colored tights and spangled breech-cloth. As soon as the circus-bills began to be put up you began to hear that certain boys were going to run off with that circus, and the morning after it left town you heard they had gone, but they always turned up at school just the same. It was believed that the circus-men would take any boy who wanted to go with them, and would fight off his friends if they tried to get him away.

The boys made a very careful study of the circus-bills, and afterwards, when the circus came, they held the performance to a strict account for any difference between the feats and their representation. For a fortnight beforehand they worked themselves up for the arrival of the circus into a fever of fear and hope, for it was always a question with a great many whether they could get their fathers to give them the money to go in. The full price was two bits, and the half-price was a bit, or a Spanish real, then a commoner coin than the American dime in the West; and every boy, for that time only, wished to be little enough to look young enough to go in for a bit. Editors of newspapers had a free ticket for every member of their families; and my boy was sure of going to the circus from the first rumor of its coming. But he was none the less deeply thrilled by the coming event, and he was up early on the morning of the great day, to go out and meet the circus procession beyond the corporation line.

I do not really know how boys live through the wonder and the glory of such a sight. Once there were two chariots — one held the band in red-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and the other was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vast mythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls in the gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in this splendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it in rapture through every turn and winding of its course in the Boy’s Town; nor in the magnificence of the actors and actresses, who came riding two by two in their circus-dresses after the chariots, and looking some haughty and contemptuous, and others quiet and even bored, as if it were nothing to be part of such a procession. The boys tried to make them out by the pictures and names on the bills: which was Rivers, the bare-back rider, and which was O’Dale, the champion tumbler; which was the India-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown. Covered with dust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours’ run beside the procession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrived with it on the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, and the ring was made, and mighty men were driving the iron-headed tent-stakes, and stretching the ropes of the great skeleton of the pavilion which they were just going to clothe with canvas. The boys were not allowed to come anywhere near, except three or four who got leave to fetch water from a neighboring well, and thought themselves richly paid with half-price tickets. The other boys were proud to pass a word with them as they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had money to go in would have been glad to carry water just for the glory of coming close to the circus-men. They stood about in twos and threes, and lay upon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was better than a sawdust ring; there were different opinions. They came as near the wagons as they dared, and looked at the circus-horses munching hay from the tail-boards, just like common horses. The wagons were left standing outside of the tent; but when it was up, the horses were taken into the dressing-room, and then the boys, with many a backward look at the wide spread of canvas, and the flags and streamers floating over it from the centre-pole (the centre-pole was revered almost like a distinguished personage), ran home to dinner so as to get back good and early, and be among the first to go in. All round, before the circus doors were open, the doorkeepers of the side-shows were inviting people to come in and see the giants and fat woman and boa-constrictors, and there were stands for peanuts and candy and lemonade; the vendors cried, “Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen hundred miles under ground! Walk up, roll up, tumble up, any way to get up!” The boys thought this brilliant drolling, but they had no time to listen after the doors were open, and they had no money to spend on side-shows or dainties, anyway. Inside the tent, they found it dark and cool, and their hearts thumped in their throats with the wild joy of being there; they recognized one another with amaze, as if they had not met for years, and the excitement kept growing, as other fellows came in. It was lots of fun, too, watching the country-jakes, as the boys called the farmer-folk, and seeing how green they looked, and how some of them tried to act smart with the circus-men that came round with oranges to sell. But the great thing was to see whether fellows that said they were going to hook in really got in. The boys held it to be a high and creditable thing to hook into a show of any kind, but hooking into a circus was something that a fellow ought to be held in special honor for doing. He ran great risks, and if he escaped the vigilance of the massive circus-man who patrolled the outside of the tent with a cowhide and a bulldog, perhaps he merited the fame he was sure to win.

I do not know where boys get some of the notions of morality that govern them. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves off as he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, and other boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps they come down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, and the unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliest Aryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospect of the Boy’s Town. The standard of honor there was, in a certain way, very high among the boys; they would have despised a thief as he deserved, and I cannot remember one of them who might not have been safely trusted. None of them would have taken an apple out of a market-wagon, or stolen a melon from a farmer who came to town with it; but they would all have thought it fun, if not right, to rob an orchard or hook a watermelon out of a patch. This would have been a foray into the enemy’s country, and the fruit of the adventure would have been the same as the plunder of a city, or the capture of a vessel belonging to him on the high seas. In the same way, if one of the boys had seen a circus-man drop a quarter, he would have hurried to give it back to him, but he would only have been proud to hook into the circus-man’s show, and the other fellows would have been proud of his exploit, too, as something that did honor to them all. As a person who enclosed bounds and forbade trespass, the circus-man constituted himself the enemy of every boy who respected himself, and challenged him to practise any sort of strategy. There was not a boy in the crowd that my boy went with who would have been allowed to hook into a circus by his parents; yet hooking in was an ideal that was cherished among them, that was talked of, and that was even sometimes attempted, though not often. Once, when a fellow really hooked in, and joined the crowd that had ignobly paid, one of the fellows could not stand it. He asked him just how and where he got in, and then he went to the door, and got back his money from the doorkeeper upon the plea that he did not feel well; and in five or ten minutes he was back among the boys, a hero of such moral grandeur as would be hard to describe. Not one of the fellows saw him as he really was — a little lying, thievish scoundrel. Not even my boy saw him so, though he had on some other point of personal honesty the most fantastic scruples.

The boys liked to be at the circus early so as to make sure of the grand entry of the performers into the ring, where they caracoled round on horseback, and gave a delicious foretaste of the wonders to come. The fellows were united in this, but upon other matters feeling varied — some liked tumbling best; some the slack-rope; some bare-back riding; some the feats of tossing knives and balls and catching them. There never was more than one ring in those days; and you were not tempted to break your neck and set your eyes forever askew, by trying to watch all the things that went on at once in two or three rings. The boys did not miss the smallest feats of any performance, and they enjoyed them every one, not equally, but fully. They had their preferences, of course, as I have hinted; and one of the most popular acts was that where a horse has been trained to misbehave, so that nobody can mount him; and after the actors have tried him, the ring-master turns to the audience, and asks if some gentleman among them wants to try it. Nobody stirs, till at last a tipsy country-jake is seen making his way down from one of the top-seats towards the ring. He can hardly walk, he is so drunk, and the clown has to help him across the ring-board, and even then he trips and rolls over on the sawdust, and has to be pulled to his feet. When they bring him up to the horse, he falls against it; and the little fellows think he will certainly get killed. But the big boys tell the little fellows to shut up and watch out. The ring-master and the clown manage to get the country-jake on to the broad platform on the horse’s back, and then the ring-master cracks his whip, and the two supes who have been holding the horse’s head let go, and the horse begins cantering round the ring. The little fellows are just sure the country-jake is going to fall off, he reels and totters so; but the big boys tell them to keep watching out; and pretty soon the country-jake begins to straighten up. He begins to unbutton his long gray overcoat, and then he takes it off and throws it into the ring, where one of the supes catches it. Then he sticks a short pipe into his mouth, and pulls on an old wool hat, and flourishes a stick that the supe throws to him, and you see that he is an Irishman just come across the sea; and then off goes another coat, and he comes out a British soldier in white duck trousers and red coat. That comes off, and he is an American sailor, with his hands on his hips dancing a hornpipe. Suddenly away flash wig and beard and false-face, the pantaloons are stripped off with the same movement, the actor stoops for the reins lying on the horse’s neck, and James Rivers, the greatest three-horse rider in the world nimbly capers on the broad pad, and kisses his hand to the shouting and cheering spectators as he dashes from the ring past the braying and bellowing brass-band into the dressing-room!

The big boys have known all along that he was not a real country-jake; but when the trained mule begins, and shakes everybody off, just like the horse, and another country-jake gets up, and offers to bet that he can ride that mule, nobody can tell whether he is a real country-jake or not. This is always the last thing in the performance, and the boys have seen with heavy hearts many signs openly betokening the end which they knew was at hand. The actors have come out of the dressing-room door, some in their everyday clothes, and some with just overcoats on over their circus-dresses, and they lounge about near the band-stand watching the performance in the ring. Some of the people are already getting up to go out, and stand for this last act, and will not mind the shouts of “Down in front! Down there!” which the boys eagerly join in, to eke out their bliss a little longer by keeping away even the appearance of anything transitory in it. The country-jake comes stumbling awkwardly into the ring, but he is perfectly sober, and he boldly leaps astride the mule, which tries all its arts to shake him off, plunging, kicking, rearing. He sticks on, and everybody cheers him, and the owner of the mule begins to get mad and to make it do more things to shake the country-jake off. At last, with one convulsive spring, it flings him from its back, and dashes into the dressing-room, while the country-jake picks himself up and vanishes among the crowd.

A man mounted on a platform in the ring is imploring the ladies and gentlemen to keep their seats, and to buy tickets for the negro-minstrel entertainment which is to follow, but which is not included in the price of admission. The boys would like to stay, but they have not the money, and they go out clamoring over the performance, and trying to decide which was the best feat. As to which was the best actor, there is never any question; it is the clown, who showed by the way he turned a double somersault that he can do anything, and who chooses to be clown simply because he is too great a creature to enter into rivalry with the other actors.

There will be another performance in the evening, with real fights outside between the circus-men and the country-jakes, and perhaps some of the Basin rounders, but the boys do not expect to come; that would be too much. The boy’s brother once stayed away in the afternoon, and went at night with one of the jour printers; but he was not able to report that the show was better than it was in the afternoon. He did not get home till nearly ten o’clock, though, and he saw the sides of the tent dropped before the people got out; that was a great thing; and what was greater yet, and reflected a kind of splendor on the boy at second hand, was that the jour printer and the clown turned out to be old friends. After the circus, the boy actually saw them standing near the centre-pole talking together; and the next day the jour showed the grease that had dripped on his coat from the candles. Otherwise the boy might have thought it was a dream, that some one he knew had talked on equal terms with the clown. The boys were always intending to stay up and see the circus go out of town, and they would have done so, but their mothers would not let them. This may have been one reason why none of them ever ran off with a circus.

As soon as a circus had been in town, the boys began to have circuses of their own, and to practise for them. Everywhere you could see boys upside down, walking on their hands or standing on them with their legs dangling over, or stayed against house walls. It was easy to stand on your head; one boy stood on his head so much that he had to have it shaved, in the brain fever that he got from standing on it; but that did not stop the other fellows. Another boy fell head downwards from a rail where he was skinning-the-cat, and nearly broke his neck, and made it so sore that it was stiff ever so long. Another boy, who was playing Samson, almost had his leg torn off by the fellows that were pulling at it with a hook; and he did have the leg of his pantaloons torn off. Nothing could stop the boys but time, or some other play coming in; and circuses lasted a good while. Some of the boys learned to turn hand-springs; anybody could turn cart-wheels; one fellow, across the river, could just run along and throw a somersault and light on his feet; lots of fellows could light on their backs; but if you had a spring-board, or shavings under a bank, like those by the turning-shop, you could practise for somersaults pretty safely.

All the time you were practising you were forming your circus company. The great trouble was not that any boy minded paying five or ten pins to come in, but that so many fellows wanted to belong there were hardly any left to form an audience. You could get girls, but even as spectators girls were a little too despicable; they did not know anything; they had no sense; if a follow got hurt they cried. Then another thing was, where to have the circus. Of course it was simply hopeless to think of a tent, and a boy’s circus was very glad to get a barn. The boy whose father owned the barn had to get it for the circus without his father knowing it; and just as likely as not his mother would hear the noise and come out and break the whole thing up while you were in the very middle of it. Then there were all sorts of anxieties and perplexities about the dress. You could do something by turning your roundabout inside out, and rolling your trousers up as far as they would go; but what a fellow wanted to make him a real circus actor was a long pair of white cotton stockings, and I never knew a fellow that got a pair; I heard of many a fellow who was said to have got a pair; but when you came down to the fact, they vanished like ghosts when you try to verify them. I believe the fellows always expected to get them out of a bureau-drawer or the clothes-line at home, but failed. In most other ways, a boy’s circus was always a failure, like most other things boys undertake. They usually broke up under the strain of rivalry; everybody wanted to be the clown or ring-master; or else the boy they got the barn of behaved badly, and went into the house crying, and all the fellows had to run.

There were only two kinds of show known by that name in the Boy’s Town: a Nigger Show, or a performance of burnt-cork minstrels; and an Animal Show, or a strolling menagerie; and the boys always meant a menagerie when they spoke of a show, unless they said just what sort of show. The only perfect joy on earth in the way of an entertainment, of course, was a circus, but after the circus the show came unquestionably next. It made a processional entry into the town almost as impressive as the circus’s, and the boys went out to meet it beyond the corporation line in the same way. It always had two elephants, at least, and four or five camels, and sometimes there was a giraffe. These headed the procession, the elephants in the very front, with their keepers at their heads, and then the camels led by halters dangling from their sneering lips and contemptuous noses. After these began to come the show-wagons, with pictures on their sides, very flattered portraits of the wild beasts and birds inside; lions first, then tigers (never meaner than Royal Bengal ones, which the boys understood to be a superior breed), then leopards, then pumas and panthers; then bears, then jackals and hyenas; then bears and wolves; then kangaroos, musk-oxen, deer, and such harmless cattle; and then ostriches, emus, lyre-birds, birds-of-Paradise and all the rest. From time to time the boys ran back from the elephants and camels to get what good they could out of the scenes in which these hidden wonders were dramatized in acts of rapine or the chase, but they always came forward to the elephants and camels again. Even with them they had to endure a degree of denial, for although you could see most of the camels’ figures, the elephants were so heavily draped that it was a kind of disappointment to look at them. The boys kept as close as they could, and came as near getting under the elephants’ feet as the keepers would allow; but, after all, they were driven off a good deal and had to keep stealing back. They gave the elephants apples and bits of cracker and cake, and some tried to put tobacco into their trunks; though they knew very well that it was nearly certain death to do so; for any elephant that was deceived that way would recognize the boy that did it, and kill him the next time he came, if it was twenty years afterwards. The boys used to believe that the Miami bridge would break down under the elephants if they tried to cross it, and they would have liked to see it do it, but no one ever saw it, perhaps because the elephants always waded the river. Some boys had seen them wading it, and stopping to drink and squirt the water out of their trunks. If an elephant got a boy that had given him tobacco into the river, he would squirt water on him till he drowned him. Still, some boys always tried to give the elephants tobacco, just to see how they would act for the time being.

A show was not so much in favor as a circus, because there was so little performance in the ring. You could go round and look at the animals, mostly very sleepy in their cages, but you were not allowed to poke them through the bars, or anything; and when you took your seat there was nothing much till Herr Driesbach entered the lions’ cage, and began to make them jump over his whip. It was some pleasure to see him put his head between the jaws of the great African King of Beasts, but the lion never did anything to him, and so the act wanted a true dramatic climax. The boys would really rather have seen a bare-back rider, like James Rivers, turn a back-somersault and light on his horse’s crupper, any time, though they respected Herr Driesbach, too; they did not care much for a woman who once went into the lions’ cage and made them jump round.

If you had the courage you could go up the ladder into the curtained tower on the elephant’s back, and ride round the ring with some of the other fellows; but my boy at least never had the courage; and he never was of those who mounted the trick pony and were shaken off as soon as they got on. It seemed to be a good deal of fun, but he did not dare to risk it; and he had an obscure trouble of mind when, the last thing, four or five ponies were brought out with as many monkeys tied on their backs, and set to run a race round the ring. The monkeys always looked very miserable, and even the one who won the race, and rode round afterwards with an American flag in his hand and his cap very much cocked over his left eye, did not seem to cheer up any.

The boys had their own beliefs about the different animals, and one of these concerned the inappeasable ferocity of the zebra. I do not know why the zebra should have had this repute, for he certainly never did anything to deserve it; but, for the matter of that, he was like all the other animals. Bears were not much esteemed, but they would have been if they could have been really seen hugging anybody to death. It was always hoped that some of the fiercest animals would get away and have to be hunted down, and retaken after they had killed a lot of dogs. If the elephants, some of them, had gone crazy, it would have been something, for then they would have roamed up and down the turnpike smashing buggies and wagons, and had to be shot with the six-pound cannon that was used to celebrate the Fourth of July with.

Another thing that was against the show was that the animals were fed after it was out, and you could not see the tigers tearing their prey when the great lumps of beef were thrown them. There was somehow not so much chance of hooking into a show as a circus, because the seats did not go all round, and you could be seen under the cages as soon as you got in under the canvas. I never heard of a boy that hooked into a show; perhaps nobody ever tried.

A show had the same kind of smell as a circus, up to a certain point, and then its smell began to be different. Both smelt of tan-bark or saw-dust and trodden grass, and both smelt of lemonade and cigars; but after that a show had its own smell of animals. I have found in later life that this is a very offensive smell on a hot day; but I do not believe a boy ever thinks so; for him it is just a different smell from a circus smell. There were two other reasons why a show was not as much fun as a circus, and one was that it was thought instructive, and fellows went who were not allowed to go to circuses. But the great reason of all was that you could not have an animal show of your own as you could a circus. You could not get the animals; and no boy living could act a camel, or a Royal Bengal tiger, or an elephant so as to look the least like one.

Of course you could have negro shows, and the boys often had them; but they were not much fun, and you were always getting the black on your shirt-sleeves.

THE CIRCUS.

X.

HIGHDAYS AND HOLIDAYS.

“THE BOYS BEGAN TO CELEBRATE IT WITH GUNS AND PISTOLS.”

The greatest day of all in the Boy’s Town was Christmas. In that part of the West the boys had never even heard of Thanksgiving, and their elders knew of it only as a festival of far-off New England. Christmas was the day that was kept in all churches and families, whether they were Methodists or Episcopalians, Baptists or Universalists, Catholics or Protestants; and among boys of whatever persuasion it was kept in a fashion that I suppose may have survived from the early pioneer times, when the means of expressing joy were few and primitive. On Christmas eve, before the church-bells began to ring in the day, the boys began to celebrate it with guns and pistols, with shooting-crackers and torpedoes; and they never stopped as long as their ammunition lasted. A fellow hardly ever had more than a bit to spend, and after he had paid ten cents for a pack of crackers, he had only two cents and a half for powder; and if he wanted his pleasure to last, he had to be careful. Of course he wanted his pleasure to last, but he would rather have had no pleasure at all than be careful, and most of the boys woke Christmas morning empty-handed, unless they had burst their pistols the night before; then they had a little powder left, and could go pretty well into the forenoon if they could find some other boy who had shot off his powder but had a whole pistol left. Lots of fellows’ pistols got out of order without bursting, and that saved powder; but generally a fellow kept putting in bigger and bigger loads till his pistol blew to pieces. There were all sorts of pistols; but the commonest was one that the boys called a Christmas-crack; it was of brass, and when it burst the barrel curled up like a dandelion stem when you split it and put it in water. A Christmas-crack in that shape was a trophy; but of course the little boys did not have pistols; they had to put up with shooting-crackers, or maybe just torpedoes. Even then the big boys would get to fire them off on one pretext or another. Some fellows would hold a cracker in their hands till it exploded; nearly everybody had burned thumbs, and some of the boys had their faces blackened with powder. Now and then a fellow who was nearly grown up would set off a whole pack of crackers in a barrel; it seemed almost incredible to the little boys.

It was glorious, and I do not think any of the boys felt that there was anything out of keeping in their way of celebrating the day, for I do not think they knew why they were celebrating it, or, if they knew, they never thought. It was simply a holiday, and was to be treated like a holiday. After all, perhaps there are just as strange things done by grown people in honor of the loving and lowly Saviour of Men; but we will not enter upon that question. When they had burst their pistols or fired off their crackers, the boys sometimes huddled into the back part of the Catholic church and watched the service, awed by the dim altar lights, the rising smoke of incense, and the grimness of the sacristan, an old German, who stood near to keep order among them. They knew the fellows who were helping the priest; one of them was the boy who stood on his head till he had to have it shaved; they would have liked to mock him then and there for wearing a petticoat, and most of them had the bitterest scorn and hate for Catholics in their hearts; but they were afraid of the sacristan, and they behaved very well as long as they were in the church; but as soon as they got out they whooped and yelled, and stoned the sacristan when he ran after them.

My boy would have liked to do all that too, just to be with the crowd, but at home he had been taught to believe that Catholics were as good as anybody, and that you must respect everybody’s religion. His father and the priest were friendly acquaintances, and in a dim way he knew that his father had sometimes taken the Catholics’ part in his paper when the prejudice against foreigners ran high. He liked to go to the Catholic church, though he was afraid of the painted figure that hung full length on the wooden crucifix, with the blood-drops under the thorns on its forehead, and the red wound in its side. He was afraid of it as something both dead and alive; he could not keep his eyes away from the awful, beautiful, suffering face, and the body that seemed to twist in agony, and the hands and feet so cruelly nailed to the cross.

But he never connected the thought of that anguish with Christmas. His head was too full of St. Nicholas, who came down the chimney, and filled your stockings; the day belonged to St. Nicholas. The first thing when you woke you tried to catch everybody, and you caught a person if you said “Christmas Gift!” before he or she did; and then the person you caught had to give you a present. Nobody ever said “Merry Christmas!” as people do now; and I do not know where the custom of saying “Christmas Gift” came from. It seems more sordid and greedy than it really was; the pleasure was to see who could say it first; and the boys did not care for what they got if they beat, any more than they cared for what they won in fighting eggs at Easter.

At New-Year’s the great thing was to sit up and watch the old year out; but the little boys could not have kept awake even if their mothers had let them. In some families, perhaps of Dutch origin, the day was kept instead of Christmas, but for most of the fellows it was a dull time. You had spent all your money at Christmas, and very likely burst your pistol, anyway. It was some consolation to be out of school, which did not keep on New-Year’s; and if it was cold you could have fires on the ice; or, anyway, you could have fires on the river-bank, or down by the shore, where there was always plenty of drift-wood.

But New-Year’s could not begin to compare with Easter. All the boys’ mothers colored eggs for them at Easter; I do not believe there was a mother in the Boy’s Town mean enough not to. By Easter Day, in that Southern region, the new grass was well started, and grass gave a beautiful yellow color to the eggs boiled with it. Onions colored them a soft, pale green, and logwood, black; but the most esteemed egg of all was a calico-egg. You got a piece of new calico from your mother, or maybe some of your aunts, and you got somebody (most likely your grandmother, if she was on a visit at the time) to sew an egg up in it; and when the egg was boiled it came out all over the pattern of the calico. My boy’s brother once had a calico-egg that seemed to my boy a more beautiful piece of color than any Titian he has seen since; it was kept in a bureau-drawer till nobody could stand the smell. But most Easter eggs never outlasted Easter Day. As soon as the fellows were done breakfast they ran out of the house and began to fight eggs with the other fellows. They struck the little ends of the eggs together, and if your egg broke another fellow’s egg, then you had a right to it. Sometimes an egg was so hard that it would break every other egg in the street; and generally when a little fellow lost his egg, he began to cry and went into the house. This did not prove him a cry-baby; it was allowable, like crying when you stumped your toe. I think this custom of fighting eggs came from the Pennsylvania Germans, to whom the Boy’s Town probably owed its Protestant observance of Easter. There was nothing religious in the way the boys kept it, any more than there was in their way of keeping Christmas.

I do not think they distinguished between it and All-Fool’s Day in character or dignity. About the best thing you could do then was to write April Fool on a piece of paper and pin it to a fellow’s back, or maybe a girl’s, if she was a big girl, and stuck-up, or anything. I do not suppose there is a boy now living who is silly enough to play this trick on anybody, or mean enough to fill an old hat with rocks and brickbats, and dare a fellow to kick it; but in the Boy’s Town there were some boys who did this; and then the fellow had to kick the hat, or else come under the shame of having taken a dare. Most of the April-foolings were harmless enough, like saying, “Oh, see that flock of wild-geese flying over!” and “What have you got on the back of your coat!” and holloing “April Fool!” as soon as the person did it. Sometimes a crowd of boys got a bit with a hole in it, and tied a string in it, and laid it on the sidewalk, and then hid in a cellar, and when anybody stooped to pick it up, they pulled it in. That was the greatest fun, especially if the person was stingy; but the difficulty was to get the bit, whether it had a hole in it or not.

From the first of April till the first of May was a long stretch of days, and you never heard any one talk about a May Party till April Fool was over. Then there always began to be talk of a May Party, and who was going to be invited. It was the big girls that always intended to have it, and it was understood at once who was going to be the Queen. At least the boys had no question, for there was one girl in every school whom all the boys felt to be the most beautiful; but probably there was a good deal of rivalry and heart-burning among the girls themselves. Very likely it was this that kept a May Party from hardly ever coming to anything but the talk. Besides the Queen, there were certain little girls who were to be Lambs; I think there were Maids of Honor, too; but I am not sure. The Lambs had to keep very close to the Queen’s person, and to wait upon her; and there were boys who had to hold the tassels of the banners which the big boys carried. These boys had to wear white pantaloons, and shoes and stockings, and very likely gloves, and to suffer the jeers of the other fellows who were not in the procession. The May Party was a girl’s affair altogether, though the boys were expected to help; and so there were distinctions made that the boys never dreamed of in their rude republic, where one fellow was as good as another, and the lowest-down boy in town could make himself master if he was bold and strong enough. The boys did not understand those distinctions, and nothing of them remained in their minds after the moment; but the girls understood them, and probably they were taught at home to feel the difference between themselves and other girls, and to believe themselves of finer clay. At any rate, the May Party was apt to be poisoned at its source by questions of class; and I think it might have been in the talk about precedence, and who should be what, that my boy first heard that such and such a girl’s father was a mechanic, and that it was somehow dishonorable to be a mechanic. He did not know why, and he has never since known why, but the girls then knew why, and the women seem to know now. He was asked to be one of the boys who held the banner-tassels, and he felt this a great compliment somehow, though he was so young that he had afterwards only the vaguest remembrance of marching in the procession, and going to a raw and chilly grove somewhere, and having untimely lemonade and cake. Yet these might have been the associations of some wholly different occasion.

No aristocratic reserves marred the glory of Fourth of July. My boy was quite a well-grown boy before he noticed that there were ever any clouds in the sky except when it was going to rain. At all other times, especially in summer, it seemed to him that the sky was perfectly blue, from horizon to horizon; and it certainly was so on the Fourth of July. He usually got up pretty early, and began firing off torpedoes and shooting-crackers, just as at Christmas. Everybody in town had been wakened by the salutes fired from the six-pounder on the river-bank, and by the noise of guns and pistols; and right after breakfast you heard that the Butler Guards were out, and you ran up to the court-house yard with the other fellows to see if it was true. It was not true, just yet, perhaps, but it came true during the forenoon, and in the meantime the court-house yard was a scene of festive preparation. There was going to be an oration and a public dinner, and they were already setting the tables under the locust-trees. There may have been some charge for this dinner, but the boys never knew of that, or had any question of the bounty that seemed free as the air of the summer day.

High Street was thronged with people, mostly country-jakes who had come to town with their wagons and buggies for the celebration. The young fellows and their girls were walking along hand in hand, eating gingerbread, and here and there a farmer had already begun his spree, and was whooping up and down the sidewalk unmolested by authority. The boys did not think it at all out of the way for him to be in that state; they took it as they took the preparations for the public dinner, and no sense of the shame and sorrow it meant penetrated their tough ignorance of life. He interested them because, after the regular town drunkards, he was a novelty; but, otherwise, he did not move them. By and by they would see him taken charge of by his friends and more or less brought under control; though if you had the time to follow him up you could see him wanting to fight his friends and trying to get away from them. Whiskey was freely made and sold and drunk in that time and that region; but it must not be imagined that there was no struggle against intemperance. The boys did not know it, but there was a very strenuous fight in the community against the drunkenness that was so frequent; and there were perhaps more people who were wholly abstinent then than there are now. The forces of good and evil were more openly arrayed against each other among people whose passions were strong and still somewhat primitive; and those who touched not, tasted not, handled not, far outnumbered those who looked upon the wine when it was red. The pity for the boys was that they saw the drunkards every day, and the temperance men only now and then; and out of the group of boys who were my boy’s friends, many kindly fellows came to know how strong drink could rage, how it could bite like the serpent, and sting like an adder.

But the temperance men made a show on the Fourth of July as well as the drunkards, and the Sons of Temperance walked in the procession with the Masons and the Odd-Fellows. Sometimes they got hold of a whole Fourth, and then there was nothing but a temperance picnic in the Sycamore Grove, which the boys took part in as Sunday-school scholars. It was not gay; there was no good reason why it should leave the boys with the feeling of having been cheated out of their holiday, but it did. A boy’s Fourth of July seemed to end about four o’clock, anyhow. After that, he began to feel gloomy, no matter what sort of a time he had. That was the way he felt after almost any holiday.

Market-day was a highday in the Boy’s Town, and it would be hard to say whether it was more so in summer than in winter. In summer, the market opened about four or five o’clock in the morning, and by this hour my boy’s father was off twice a week with his market-basket on his arm. All the people did their marketing in the same way; but it was a surprise for my boy, when he became old enough to go once with his father, to find the other boys’ fathers at market too. He held on by his father’s hand, and ran by his side past the lines of wagons that stretched sometimes from the bridge to the court-house, in the dim morning light. The market-house, where the German butchers in their white aprons were standing behind their meat-blocks, was lit up with candles in sconces, that shone upon festoons of sausage and cuts of steak dangling from the hooks behind them; but without, all was in a vague obscurity, broken only by the lanterns in the farmers’ wagons. There was a market-master, who rang a bell to open the market, and if anybody bought or sold anything before the tap of that bell, he would be fined. People would walk along the line of wagons, where the butter and eggs, apples and peaches and melons, were piled up inside near the tail-boards, and stop where they saw something they wanted, and stand near so as to lay hands on it the moment the bell rang. My boy remembered stopping that morning by the wagon of some nice old Quaker ladies, who used to come to his house, and whom his father stood chatting with till the bell rang. They probably had an understanding with him about the rolls of fragrant butter which he instantly lifted into his basket. But if you came long after the bell rang, you had to take what you could get.

There was a smell of cantaloupes in the air, along the line of wagons, that morning, and so it must have been towards the end of the summer. After the nights began to lengthen and to be too cold for the farmers to sleep in their wagons, as they did in summer on the market eves, the market time was changed to midday. Then it was fun to count the wagons on both sides of the street clear to where they frayed off into wood-wagons, and to see the great heaps of apples and cabbages, and potatoes and turnips, and all the other fruits and vegetables which abounded in that fertile country. There was a great variety of poultry for sale, and from time to time the air would be startled with the clamor of fowls transferred from the coops where they had been softly crr-crring in soliloquy to the hand of a purchaser who walked off with them and patiently waited for their well-grounded alarm to die away. All the time the market-master was making his rounds; and if he saw a pound roll of butter that he thought was under weight, he would weigh it with his steelyards, and if it was too light he would seize it. My boy once saw a confiscation of this sort with such terror as he would now, perhaps, witness an execution.

XI.

MUSTERS AND ELECTIONS.

The Butler Guards were the finest military company in the world. I do not believe there was a fellow in the Boy’s Town who ever even tried to imagine a more splendid body of troops: when they talked of them, as they did a great deal, it was simply to revel in the recognition of their perfection. I forget just what their uniform was, but there were white pantaloons in it, and a tuft of white-and-red cockerel plumes that almost covered the front of the hat, and swayed when the soldier walked, and blew in the wind. I think the coat was gray, and the skirts were buttoned back with buff, but I will not be sure of this; and somehow I cannot say how the officers differed from the privates in dress; it was impossible for them to be more magnificent. They walked backwards in front of the platoons, with their swords drawn, and held in their white-gloved hands at hilt and point, and kept holloing, “Shoulder-r-r — arms! Carry — arms! Present — arms!” and then faced round, and walked a few steps forward, till they could think of something else to make the soldiers do.

THE “BUTLER GUARDS.”

Every boy intended to belong to the Butler Guards when he grew up; and he would have given anything to be the drummer or the marker. These were both boys, and they were just as much dressed up as the Guards themselves, only they had caps instead of hats with plumes. It was strange that the other fellows somehow did not know who these boys were; but they never knew, or at least my boy never knew. They thought more of the marker than of the drummer; for the marker carried a little flag, and when the officers holloed out, “By the left flank — left! Wheel!” he set his flag against his shoulder, and stood marking time with his feet till the soldiers all got by him, and then he ran up to the front rank, with the flag fluttering behind him. The fellows used to wonder how he got to be marker, and to plan how they could get to be markers in other companies, if not in the Butler Guards. There were other companies that used to come to town on the Fourth of July and Muster Day, from smaller places round about; and some of them had richer uniforms: one company had blue coats with gold epaulets, and gold braid going down in loops on the sides of their legs; all the soldiers, of course, had braid straight down the outer seams of their pantaloons. One Muster Day, a captain of one of the country companies came home with my boy’s father to dinner; he was in full uniform, and he put his plumed helmet down on the entry table just like any other hat.

There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always called them; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe, and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys said for stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutch officers had to call out to the men when they were marching, “Up mit de hay-foot, down mit de straw-foot — links, links, links!” (Left, left, left!) But the boys honored even these imperfect intelligences so much in their quality of soldiers that they would any of them have been proud to be marker in the Dutch company; and they followed the Dutchmen round in their march as fondly as any other body of troops. Of course, school let out when there was a regular muster, and the boys gave the whole day to it; but I do not know just when the Muster Day came. They fired the cannon a good deal on the river-bank, and they must have camped somewhere near the town, though no recollection of tents remained in my boy’s mind. He believed with the rest of the boys that the right way to fire the cannon was to get it so hot you need not touch it off, but just keep your thumb on the touch-hole, and take it away when you wanted the cannon to go off. Once he saw the soldiers ram the piece full of dog-fennel on top of the usual charge, and then he expected the cannon to burst. But it only roared away as usual.

The boys had their own ideas of what that cannon could do if aptly fired into a force of British, or Bridish, as they called them. They wished there could be a war with England, just to see; and their national feeling was kept hot by the presence of veterans of the War of 1812 at all the celebrations. One of the boys had a grandfather who had been in the Revolutionary War, and when he died the Butler Guards fired a salute over his grave. It was secret sorrow and sometimes open shame to my boy that his grandfather should be an Englishman, and that even his father should have been a year old when he came to this country; but on his mother’s side he could boast a grandfather and a great-grandfather who had taken part, however briefly or obscurely, in both the wars against Great Britain. He hated just as much as any of the boys, or perhaps more, to be the Bridish when they were playing war, and he longed as truly as any of them to march against the hereditary, or half-hereditary, enemy.

Playing war was one of the regular plays, and the sides were always Americans and Bridish, and the Bridish always got whipped. But this was a different thing, and a far less serious thing, than having a company. The boys began to have companies after every muster, of course; but sometimes they began to have them for no external reason. Very likely they would start having a company from just finding a rooster’s tail-feather, and begin making plumes at once. It was easy to make a plume: you picked up a lot of feathers that the hens and geese had dropped; and you whittled a pine stick, and bound the feathers in spirals around it with white thread. That was a first-rate plume, but the uniform offered the same difficulties as the circus dress, and you could not do anything towards it by rolling up your pantaloons. It was pretty easy to make swords out of laths, but guns again were hard to realize. Some fellows had little toy guns left over from Christmas, but they were considered rather babyish, and any kind of stick was better; the right kind of a gun for a boy’s company was a wooden gun, such as some of the big boys had, with the barrel painted different from the stock. The little fellows never had any such guns, and if the question of uniform could have been got over, this question of arms would still have remained. In these troubles the fellows’ mothers had to suffer almost as much as the fellows themselves, the fellows teased them so much for bits of finery that they thought they could turn to account in eking out a uniform. Once it came to quite a lot of fellows getting their mothers to ask their fathers if they would buy them some little soldier-hats that one of the hatters had laid in, perhaps after a muster, when he knew the boys would begin recruiting. My boy was by when his mother asked his father, and stood with his heart in his mouth, while the question was argued; it was decided against him, both because his father hated the tomfoolery of the thing, and because he would not have the child honor any semblance of soldiering, even such a feeble image of it as a boys’ company could present. But, after all, a paper chapeau, with a panache of slitted paper, was no bad soldier-hat; it went far to constitute a whole uniform; and it was this that the boys devolved upon at last. It was the only company they ever really got together, for everybody wanted to be captain and lieutenant, just as they wanted to be clown and ring-master in a circus. I cannot understand how my boy came to hold either office; perhaps the fellows found that the only way to keep the company together was to take turn-about; but, at any rate, he was marshalling his forces near his grandfather’s gate one evening when his grandfather came home to tea. The old Methodist class-leader, who had been born and brought up a Quaker, stared at the poor little apparition in horror. Then he caught the paper chapeau from the boy’s head, and, saying “Dear me! Dear me!” trampled it under foot. It was an awful moment, and in his hot and bitter heart the boy, who was put to shame before all his fellows, did not know whether to order them to attack his grandfather in a body, or to engage him in single combat with his own lath-sword. In the end he did neither; his grandfather walked on into tea, and the boy was left with a wound that was sore till he grew old enough to know how true and brave a man his grandfather was in a cause where so many warlike hearts wanted courage.

It was already the time of the Mexican war, when that part of the West at least was crazed with a dream of the conquest which was to carry slavery wherever the flag of freedom went. The volunteers were mustered in at the Boy’s Town; and the boys, who understood that they were real soldiers, and were going to a war where they might get killed, suffered a disappointment from the plain blue of their uniform and the simplicity of their caps, which had not the sign of a feather in them. It was a consolation to know that they were going to fight the Mexicans; not so much consolation as if it had been the Bridish, though still something. The boys were proud of them, and they did not realize that most of these poor fellows were just country-jakes. Somehow they effaced even the Butler Guards in their fancy, though the Guards paraded with them, in all their splendor, as escort.

But this civic satisfaction was alloyed for my boy by the consciousness that both his father and his grandfather abhorred the war that the volunteers were going to. His grandfather, as an Abolitionist, and his father, as a Henry Clay Whig, had both been opposed to the annexation of Texas (which the boy heard talked of without knowing in the least what annexation meant), and they were both of the mind that the war growing out of it was wanton and wicked. His father wrote against it in every number of his paper, and made himself hated among its friends, who were the large majority in the Boy’s Town. My boy could not help feeling that his father was little better than a Mexican, and whilst his filial love was hurt by things that he heard to his disadvantage, he was not sure that he was not rightly hated. It gave him a trouble of mind that was not wholly appeased by some pieces of poetry that he used to hear his father reading and quoting at that time, with huge enjoyment. The pieces were called “The Biglow Papers,” and his father read them out of a Boston newspaper, and thought them the wisest and wittiest things that ever were. The boy always remembered how he recited the lines —

“Ez fur war, I call it murder —
There ye hev it plain and flat;
‘N I don’t want to go no furder
Then my Testament fur that.
God hez said so plump and fairly:
It’s as long as it is broad;
And ye’ll hev to git up airly,
Ef ye want to take in God.”

He thought this fine, too, but still, it seemed to him, in the narrow little world where a child dwells, that his father and his grandfather were about the only people there were who did not wish the Mexicans whipped, and he felt secretly guilty for them before the other boys.

It was all the harder to bear because, up to this time, there had been no shadow of difference about politics between him and the boys he went with. They were Whig boys, and nearly all the fellows in the Boy’s Town seemed to be Whigs. There must have been some Locofoco boys, of course, for my boy and his friends used to advance, on their side, the position that

“Democrats
Eat dead rats!”

The counter-argument that

“Whigs
Eat dead pigs!”

had no force in a pork-raising country like that; but it was urged, and there must have been Democratic boys to urge it. Still, they must have been few in number, or else my boy did not know them. At any rate, they had no club, and the Whig boys always had a club. They had a Henry Clay Club in 1844, and they had Buckeye Clubs whenever there was an election for governor, and they had clubs at every exciting town or county or district election. The business of a Whig club among the boys was to raise ash flag-poles, in honor of Henry Clay’s home at Ashland, and to learn the Whig songs and go about singing them. You had to have a wagon, too, and some of the club pulled while the others rode; it could be such a wagon as you went walnutting with; and you had to wear strands of buckeyes round your neck. Then you were a real Whig boy, and you had a right to throw fire-balls and roll tar-barrels for the bonfires on election nights.

I do not know why there should have been so many empty tar-barrels in the Boy’s Town, or what they used so much tar for; but there were barrels enough to celebrate all the Whig victories that the boys ever heard of, and more, too; the boys did not always wait for the victories, but celebrated every election with bonfires, in the faith that it would turn out right.

Maybe the boys nowadays do not throw fire-balls, or know about them. They were made of cotton rags wound tight and sewed, and then soaked in turpentine. When a ball was lighted a boy caught it quickly up, and threw it, and it made a splendid streaming blaze through the air, and a thrilling whir as it flew. A boy had to be very nimble not to get burned, and a great many boys dropped the ball for every boy that threw it. I am not ready to say why these fire-balls did not set the Boy’s Town on fire, and burn it down, but I know they never did. There was no law against them, and the boys were never disturbed in throwing them, any more than they were in building bonfires; and this shows, as much as anything, what a glorious town that was for boys. The way they used to build their bonfires was to set one tar-barrel on top of another, as high as the biggest boy could reach, and then drop a match into them; in a moment a dusky, smoky flame would burst from the top, and fly there like a crimson flag, while all the boys leaped and danced round it, and hurrahed for the Whig candidates. Sometimes they would tumble the blazing barrels over, and roll them up and down the street.

The reason why they wore buckeyes was that the buckeye was the emblem of Ohio, and Ohio, they knew, was a Whig state. I doubt if they knew that the local elections always went heavily against the Whigs; but perhaps they would not have cared. What they felt was a high public spirit, which had to express itself in some way. One night, out of pure zeal for the common good, they wished to mob the negro quarter of the town, because the “Dumb Negro” (a deaf-mute of color who was a very prominent personage in their eyes) was said to have hit a white boy. I believe the mob never came to anything. I only know that my boy ran a long way with the other fellows, and, when he gave out, had to come home alone through the dark, and was so afraid of ghosts that he would have been glad of the company of the lowest-down black boy in town.

There were always fights on election-day between well-known Whig and Democratic champions, which the boys somehow felt were as entirely for their entertainment as the circuses. My boy never had the heart to look on, but he shared the excitement of the affair, and rejoiced in the triumph of Whig principles in these contests as cordially as the hardiest witness. The fighting must have come from the drinking, which began as soon as the polls were opened, and went on all day and night with a devotion to principle which is now rarely seen. In fact, the politics of the Boy’s Town seem to have been transacted with an eye single to the diversion of the boys; or if not that quite, they were marked by traits of a primitive civilization among the men. The traditions of a rude hospitality in the pioneer times still lingered, and once there was a Whig barbecue, which had all the profusion of a civic feast in mediæval Italy. Every Whig family contributed loaves of bread and boiled hams; the Whig farmers brought in barrels of cider and wagon-loads of apples; there were heaps of pies and cakes; sheep were roasted whole, and young roast pigs, with oranges in their mouths, stood in the act of chasing one another over the long tables which were spread in one of the largest pork-houses, where every comer was freely welcome. I suppose boys, though, were not allowed at the dinner; all that my boy saw of the barbecue were the heaps of loaves and hams left over, that piled the floor in one of the rooms to the ceiling.

He remained an ardent Whig till his eleventh year, when his father left the party because the Whigs had nominated, as their candidate for president, General Taylor, who had won his distinction in the Mexican war, and was believed to be a friend of slavery, though afterwards he turned out otherwise. My boy then joined a Free-Soil club, and sang songs in support of Van Buren and Adams. His faith in the purity of the Whigs had been much shaken by their behavior in trying to make capital out of a war they condemned; and he had been bitterly disappointed by their preferring Taylor to Tom Corwin, the favorite of the anti-slavery Whigs. The “Biglow Papers” and their humor might not have moved him from his life-long allegiance, but the eloquence of Corwin’s famous speech against the Mexican war had grounded him in principles which he could not afterwards forsake. He had spoken passages of that speech at school; he had warned our invading hosts of the vengeance that has waited upon the lust of conquest in all times, and has driven the conquerors back with trailing battle-flags. “So shall it be with yours!” he had declaimed. “You may carry them to the loftiest peaks of the Cordilleras; they may float in insolent triumph in the halls of Montezuma; but the weakest hand in Mexico, uplifted in prayer, can call down a power against you before which the iron hearts of your warriors shall be turned into ashes!” It must have been a terrible wrench for him to part from the Whig boys in politics, and the wrench must have been a sudden one at last; he was ashamed of his father for opposing the war, and then, all at once, he was proud of him for it, and was roaring out songs against Taylor as the hero of that war, and praising Little Van, whom he had hitherto despised as the “Fox of Kinderhook.”

The fox was the emblem (totem) of the Democrats in the campaigns of 1840 and 1844; and in their processions they always had a fox chained to the hickory flag-poles which they carried round on their wagons, together with a cock, reconciled probably in a common terror. The Whigs always had the best processions; and one of the most signal days of my boy’s life was the day he spent in following round a Henry Clay procession, where the different trades and industries were represented in the wagons. There were coopers, hatters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, bakers, tinners, and others, all hard at work; and from time to time they threw out to the crowd something they had made. My boy caught a tin cup, and if it had been of solid silver he could not have felt it a greater prize. He ran home to show it and leave it in safe-keeping, and then hurried back, so as to walk with the other boys abreast of a great platform on wheels, where an old woman sat spinning inside of a log-cabin, and a pioneer in a hunting-shirt stood at the door, with his long rifle in his hand. In the window sat a raccoon, which was the Whig emblem, and which, on all their banners, was painted with the legend, “That same old Coon!” to show that they had not changed at all since the great days when they elected the pioneer, General Harrison, president of the United States. Another proof of the fact was the barrel of hard-cider which lay under the cabin window.

XII.

PETS.

As there are no longer any Whig boys in the world, the coon can no longer be kept anywhere as a political emblem, I dare say. Even in my boy’s time the boys kept coons just for the pleasure of it, and without meaning to elect Whig governors and presidents with them. I do not know how they got them — they traded for them, perhaps, with fellows in the country that had caught them, or perhaps their fathers bought them in market; some people thought they were very good to eat, and, like poultry and other things for the table, they may have been brought alive to market. But, anyhow, when a boy had a coon, he had to have a store-box turned open side down to keep it in, behind the house; and he had to have a little door in the box to pull the coon out through when he wanted to show it to other boys, or to look at it himself, which he did forty or fifty times a day, when he first got it. He had to have a small collar for the coon, and a little chain, because the coon would gnaw through a string in a minute. The coon himself never seemed to take much interest in keeping a coon, or to see much fun or sense in it. He liked to stay inside his box, where he had a bed of hay, and whenever the boy pulled him out, he did his best to bite the boy. He had no tricks; his temper was bad; and there was nothing about him except the rings round his tail and his political principles that anybody could care for. He never did anything but bite, and try to get away, or else run back into his box, which smelt, pretty soon, like an animal-show; he would not even let a fellow see him eat.

My boy’s brother had a coon, which he kept a good while, at a time when there was no election, for the mere satisfaction of keeping a coon. During his captivity the coon bit his keeper repeatedly through the thumb, and upon the whole seemed to prefer him to any other food; I do not really know what coons eat in a wild state, but this captive coon tasted the blood of nearly that whole family of children. Besides biting and getting away, he never did the slightest thing worth remembering; as there was no election, he did not even take part in a Whig procession. He got away two or three times. The first thing his owner would know when he pulled the chain out was that there was no coon at the end of it, and then he would have to poke round the inside of the box pretty carefully with a stick, so as not to get bitten; after that he would have to see which tree the coon had gone up. It was usually the tall locust-tree in front of the house, and in about half a second all the boys in town would be there, telling the owner of the coon how to get him. Of course the only way was to climb for the coon, which would be out at the point of a high and slender limb, and would bite you awfully, even if the limb did not break under you, while the boys kept whooping and yelling and holloing out what to do, and Tip the dog just howled with excitement. I do not know how that coon was ever caught, but I know that the last time he got away he was not found during the day, but after nightfall he was discovered by moonlight in the locust-tree. His owner climbed for him, but the coon kept shifting about, and getting higher and higher, and at last he had to be left till morning. In the morning he was not there, nor anywhere.

It had been expected, perhaps, that Tip would watch him, and grab him if he came down, and Tip would have done it probably if he had kept awake. He was a dog of the greatest courage, and he was especially fond of hunting. He had been bitten oftener by that coon than anybody but the coon’s owner, but he did not care for biting. He was always getting bitten by rats, but he was the greatest dog for rats that there almost ever was. The boys hunted rats with him at night, when they came out of the stables that backed down to the Hydraulic, for water; and a dog who liked above all things to lie asleep on the back-step, by day, and would no more think of chasing a pig out of the garden than he would think of sitting up all night with a coon, would get frantic about rats, and would perfectly wear himself out hunting them on land and in the water, and keep on after the boys themselves were tired. He was so fond of hunting, anyway, that the sight of a gun would drive him about crazy; he would lick the barrel all over, and wag his tail so hard that it would lift his hind-legs off the ground.

I do not know how he came into that family, but I believe he was given to it full grown by somebody. It was some time after my boy failed to buy what he called a Confoundland dog, from a colored boy who had it for sale, a pretty puppy with white and black spots which he had quite set his heart on; but Tip more than consoled him. Tip was of no particular breed, and he had no personal beauty; he was of the color of a mouse of an elephant, and his tail was without the smallest grace; it was smooth and round, but it was so strong that he could pull a boy all over the town by it, and usually did; and he had the best, and kindest, and truest ugly old face in the world. He loved the whole human race, and as a watch-dog he was a failure through his trustful nature; he would no more have bitten a person than he would have bitten a pig; but where other dogs were concerned, he was a lion. He might be lying fast asleep in the back-yard, and he usually was, but if a dog passed the front of the house under a wagon, he would be up and after that dog before you knew what you were about. He seemed to want to fight country dogs the worst, but any strange dog would do. A good half the time he would come off best; but, however he came off, he returned to the back-yard with his tongue hanging out, and wagging his tail in good-humor with all the world. Nothing could stop him, however, where strange dogs were concerned. He was a Whig dog, of course, as any one could tell by his name, which was Tippecanoe in full, and was given him because it was the nickname of General Harrison, the great Whig who won the battle of Tippecanoe. The boys’ Henry Clay Club used him to pull the little wagon that they went about in singing Whig songs, and he would pull five or six boys, guided simply by a stick which he held in his mouth, and which a boy held on either side of him. But if he caught sight of a dog that he did not know, he would drop that stick and start for that dog as far off as he could see him, spilling the Henry Clay Club out of the wagon piecemeal as he went, and never stopping till he mixed up the strange dog in a fight where it would have been hard to tell which was either champion and which was the club wagon. When the fight was over Tip would come smilingly back to the fragments of the Henry Clay Club, with pieces of the vehicle sticking about him, and profess himself, in a dog’s way, ready to go on with the concert.

Any crowd of boys could get Tip to go off with them, in swimming, or hunting, or simply running races. He was known through the whole town, and beloved for his many endearing qualities of heart. As to his mind, it was perhaps not much to brag of, and he certainly had some defects of character. He was incurably lazy, and his laziness grew upon him as he grew older, till hardly anything but the sight of a gun or a bone would move him. He lost his interest in politics, and, though there is no reason to suppose that he ever became indifferent to his principles, it is certain that he no longer showed his early ardor. He joined the Free-Soil movement in 1848, and supported Van Buren and Adams, but without the zeal he had shown for Henry Clay. Once a year as long as the family lived in the Boy’s Town, the children were anxious about Tip when the dog-law was put in force, and the constables went round shooting all the dogs that were found running at large without muzzles. At this time, when Tip was in danger of going mad and biting people, he showed a most unseasonable activity, and could hardly be kept in bounds. A dog whose sole delight at other moments was to bask in the summer sun, or dream by the winter fire, would now rouse himself to an interest in everything that was going on in the dangerous world, and make forays into it at all unguarded points. The only thing to do was to muzzle him, and this was done by my boy’s brother with a piece of heavy twine, in such a manner as to interfere with Tip’s happiness as little as possible. It was a muzzle that need not be removed for either eating, drinking, or fighting; but it satisfied the law, and Tip always came safely through the dog-days, perhaps by favor or affection with the officers who were so inexorable with some dogs.

My boy long remembered with horror and remorse his part in giving up to justice an unconscious offender, and seeing him pay for his transgression with his life. The boy was playing before his door, when a constable came by with his rifle on his shoulder, and asked him if he had seen any unmuzzled dogs about; and partly from pride at being addressed by a constable, partly from a nervous fear of refusing to answer, and partly from a childish curiosity to see what would happen, he said, “Yes; one over there by the pork-house.” The constable whistled, and the poor little animal, which had got lost from the farmer it had followed to town, came running into sight round the corner of the pork-house, and sat up on its haunches to look about. It was a small red dog, the size of a fox, and the boy always saw it afterwards as it sat there in the gray afternoon, and fascinated him with its deadly peril. The constable swung his rifle quickly to his shoulder; the sharp, whiplike report came, and the dog dropped over, and its heart’s blood flowed upon the ground and lay there in a pool. The boy ran into the house, with that picture forever printed in his memory. For him it was as if he had seen a fellow-being slain, and had helped to bring him to his death.

Whilst Tip was still in his prime the family of children was further enriched by the possession of a goat; but this did not belong to the whole family, or it was, at least nominally, the property of that eldest brother they all looked up to. I do not know how they came by the goat, any more than I know how they came by Tip; I only know that there came a time when it was already in the family, and that before it was got rid of it was a presence there was no mistaking. Nobody who has not kept a goat can have any notion of how many different kinds of mischief a goat can get into, without seeming to try, either, but merely by following the impulses of its own goatishness. This one was a nanny-goat, and it answered to the name of Nanny with an intelligence that was otherwise wholly employed in making trouble. It went up and down stairs, from cellar to garret, and in and out of all the rooms, like anybody, with a faint, cynical indifference in the glance of its cold gray eyes that gave no hint of its purposes or performances. In the chambers it chewed the sheets and pillow-cases on the beds, and in the dining-room, if it found nothing else, it would do its best to eat the table-cloth. Washing-day was a perfect feast for it, for then it would banquet on the shirt-sleeves and stockings that dangled from the clothes-line, and simply glut itself with the family linen and cotton. In default of these dainties, Nanny would gladly eat a chip-hat; she was not proud; she would eat a split-basket, if there was nothing else at hand. Once she got up on the kitchen-table, and had a perfect orgy with a lot of fresh-baked pumpkin-pies she found there; she cleaned all the pumpkin so neatly out of the pastry shells that, if there had been any more pumpkin left, they could have been filled up again, and nobody could have told the difference. The grandmother, who was visiting in the house at the time, declared to the mother that it would serve the father and the boys just right if she did fill these very shells up and give them to the father and the boys to eat. But I believe this was not done, and it was only suggested in a moment of awful exasperation, and because it was the father who was to blame for letting the boys keep the goat. The mother was always saying that the goat should not stay in the house another day, but she had not the heart to insist on its banishment, the children were so fond of it. I do not know why they were fond of it, for it never showed them the least affection, but was always taking the most unfair advantages of them, and it would butt them over whenever it got the chance. It would try to butt them into the well when they leaned down to pull up the bucket from the curb; and if it came out of the house, and saw a boy cracking nuts at the low flat stone the children had in the back-yard to crack nuts on, it would pretend that the boy was making motions to insult it, and before he knew what he was about it would fly at him and send him spinning head over heels. It was not of the least use in the world, and could not be, but the children were allowed to keep it till, one fatal day, when the mother had a number of other ladies to tea, as the fashion used to be in small towns, when they sat down to a comfortable gossip over dainty dishes of stewed chicken, hot biscuit, peach-preserves, sweet tomato-pickles, and pound-cake. That day they all laid off their bonnets on the hall-table, and the goat, after demurely waiting and watching with its faded eyes, which saw everything and seemed to see nothing, discerned a golden opportunity, and began to make such a supper of bonnet-ribbons as perhaps never fell to a goat’s lot in life before. It was detected in its stolen joys just as it had chewed the ribbon of a best bonnet up to the bonnet, and was chased into the back-yard; but, as it had swallowed the ribbon without being able to swallow the bonnet, it carried that with it. The boy who specially owned the goat ran it down in a frenzy of horror and apprehension, and managed to unravel the ribbon from its throat, and get back the bonnet. Then he took the bonnet in and laid it carefully down on the table again, and decided that it would be best not to say anything about the affair. But such a thing as that could not be kept. The goat was known at once to have done the mischief; and this time it was really sent away. All the children mourned it, and the boy who owned it the most used to go to the house of the people who took it, and who had a high board fence round their yard, and try to catch sight of it through the cracks. When he called “Nanny” it answered him instantly with a plaintive “Baa!” and then, after a vain interchange of lamentations, he had to come away, and console himself as he could with the pets that were left him.

Among these were a family of white rabbits, which the boys kept in a little hutch at the bottom of the yard. They were of no more use than the goat was, but they were at least not mischievous, and there was only one of them that would bite, and he would not bite if you would take him up close behind the ears, so that he could not get at you. The rest were very good-natured, and would let you smooth them, or put them inside of your shirt-bosom, or anything. They would eat cabbage or bread or apples out of your hand; and it was fun to see their noses twitch. Otherwise they had no accomplishments. All you could do with them was to trade with other boys, or else keep the dogs from them; it was pretty exciting to keep the dogs from them. Tip was such a good dog that he never dreamed of touching the rabbits.

Of course these boys kept chickens. The favorite chicken in those days was a small white bantam, and the more feathers it had down its legs the better. My boy had a bantam hen that was perfectly white, and so tame that she would run up to him whenever he came into the yard, and follow him round like a dog. When she had chickens she taught them to be just as fond of him, and the tiny little balls of yellow down tumbled fearlessly about in his hands, and pecked the crumbs of bread between his fingers. As they got older they ran with their mother to meet him, and when he sat down on the grass they clambered over him and crept into his shirt-bosom, and crooned softly, as they did when their mother hovered them. The boy loved them better than anything he ever had; he always saw them safe in the coop at night, and he ran out early in the morning to see how they had got through the night, and to feed them. One fatal morning he found them all scattered dead upon the grass, the mother and every one of her pretty chicks, with no sign upon them of how they had been killed. He could only guess that they had fallen a prey to rats, or to some owl that had got into their coop; but, as they had not been torn or carried away, he guessed in vain. He buried them with the sympathy of all the children and all the fellows at school who heard about the affair. It was a real grief; it was long before he could think of his loss without tears; and I am not sure there is so much difference of quality in our bereavements; the loss can hurt more or it can hurt less, but the pang must be always the same in kind.

Besides his goat, my boy’s brother kept pigeons, which, again, were like the goat and the rabbits in not being of very much use. They had to be much more carefully looked after than chickens when they were young, they were so helpless in their nests, such mere weak wads of featherless flesh. At first you had to open their bills and poke the food in; and you had to look out how you gave them water for fear you would drown them; but when they got a little larger they would drink and eat from your mouth; and that was some pleasure, for they did not seem to know you from an old pigeon when you took your mouth full of corn or water and fed them. Afterwards, when they began to fly, it was a good deal of fun to keep them, and make more cots for them, and build them nests in the cots.

But they were not very intelligent pets; hardly more intelligent than the fish that the boys kept in the large wooden hogshead of rain-water at the corner of the house. They had caught some of these fish when they were quite small, and the fish grew very fast, for there was plenty of food for them in the mosquito-tadpoles that abounded in the hogshead. Then, the boys fed them every day with bread-crumbs and worms. There was one big sunfish that was not afraid of anything; if you held a worm just over him he would jump out of the water and snatch it. Besides the fish, there was a turtle in the hogshead, and he had a broad chip that he liked to sun himself on. It was fun to watch him resting on this chip, with his nose barely poked out of his shell, and his eyes, with the skin dropped over them, just showing. He had some tricks: he would snap at a stick if you teased him with it, and would let you lift him up by it. That was a good deal of pleasure.

But all these were trifling joys, except maybe Tip and Nanny, compared with the pony which the boys owned in common, and which was the greatest thing that ever came into their lives. I cannot tell just how their father came to buy it for them, or where he got it; but I dare say he thought they were about old enough for a pony, and might as well have one. It was a Mexican pony, and as it appeared on the scene just after the Mexican war, some volunteer may have brought it home. One volunteer brought home a Mexican dog, that was smooth and hairless, with a skin like an elephant, and that was always shivering round with the cold; he was not otherwise a remarkable dog, and I do not know that he ever felt even the warmth of friendship among the boys; his manners were reserved and his temper seemed doubtful. But the pony never had any trouble with the climate of Southern Ohio (which is indeed hot enough to fry a salamander in summer); and though his temper was no better than other ponies’, he was perfectly approachable. I mean that he was approachable from the side, for it was not well to get where he could bite you or kick you. He was of a bright sorrel color, and he had a brand on one haunch. My boy had an ideal of a pony, conceived from pictures in his reading-books at school, that held its head high and arched its neck, and he strove by means of checks and martingales to make this real pony conform to the illustrations. But it was of no use; the real pony held his neck straight out like a ewe, or, if reined up, like a camel, and he hung his big head at the end of it with no regard whatever for the ideal. His caparison was another mortification and failure. What the boy wanted was an English saddle, embroidered on the morocco seat in crimson silk, and furnished with shining steel stirrups. What he had was the framework of a Mexican saddle, covered with rawhide, and cushioned with a blanket; the stirrups were Mexican too, and clumsily fashioned out of wood. The boys were always talking about getting their father to get them a pad, but they never did it, and they managed as they could with the saddle they had. For the most part they preferred to ride the pony barebacked, for then they could ride him double, and when they first got him they all wanted to ride him so much that they had to ride him double. They kept him going the whole day long; but after a while they calmed down enough to take him one at a time, and to let him have a chance for his meals.

They had no regular stable, and the father left the boys to fit part of the cow-shed up for the pony, which they did by throwing part of the hen-coop open into it. The pigeon-cots were just over his head, and he never could have complained of being lonesome. At first everybody wanted to feed him as well as ride him, and if he had been allowed time for it he might have eaten himself to death, or if he had not always tried to bite you or kick you when you came in with his corn. After a while the boys got so they forgot him, and nobody wanted to go out and feed the pony, especially after dark; but he knew how to take care of himself, and when he had eaten up everything there was in the cow-shed he would break out and eat up everything there was in the yard.

The boys got lots of good out of him. When you were once on his back you were pretty safe, for he was so lazy that he would not think of running away, and there was no danger unless he bounced you off when he trotted; he had a hard trot. The boys wanted to ride him standing up, like circus-actors, and the pony did not mind, but the boys could not stay on, though they practised a good deal, turn about, when the other fellows were riding their horses, standing up, on the Commons. He was not of much more use in Indian fights, for he could seldom be lashed into a gallop, and a pony that proposed to walk through an Indian fight was ridiculous. Still, with the help of imagination, my boy employed him in some scenes of wild Arab life, and hurled the Moorish javelin from him in mid-career, when the pony was flying along at the mad pace of a canal-boat. The pony early gave the boys to understand that they could get very little out of him in the way of herding the family cow. He would let them ride him to the pasture, and he would keep up with the cow on the way home, when she walked, but if they wanted anything more than that they must get some other pony. They tried to use him in carrying papers, but the subscribers objected to having him ridden up to their front doors over the sidewalk, and they had to give it up.

When he became an old story, and there was no competition for him among the brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him in the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He did not like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy who was learning the trade in his father’s printing-office. This boy was just between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the good comrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them, and my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that were not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books, and they both began to write historical romances. My boy’s romance was founded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of again and again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors, and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have given almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an Arabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the meantime he did what he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woods with the other boy, who used to get his father’s horse when he was not using it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wild grape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river, their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a world that could never come true.

XIII.

GUNS AND GUNNING.

All round the Boy’s Town stood the forest, with the trees that must have been well grown when Mad Anthony Wayne drove the Indians from their shadow forever. The white people had hewn space for their streets and houses, for their fields and farmsteads, out of the woods, but where the woods had been left they were of immemorial age. They were not very dense, and the timber was not very heavy; the trees stood more like trees in a park than trees in a forest; there was little or no undergrowth, except here and there a pawpaw thicket; and there were sometimes grassy spaces between them, where the may-apples pitched their pretty tents in the spring. Perhaps, at no very great distance of time, it had been a prairie country, with those wide savannahs of waving grass that took the eyes of the first-comers in the Ohio wilderness with an image of Nature long tamed to the hand of man. But this is merely my conjecture, and what I know does not bear me out in it; for the wall of forest that enclosed the Boy’s Town was without a break except where the axe had made it. At some points it was nearer and at some farther; but, nearer or farther, the forest encompassed the town, and it called the boys born within its circuit, as the sea calls the boys born by its shore, with mysterious, alluring voices, kindling the blood, taking the soul with love for its strangeness. There was not a boy in the Boy’s Town who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys’ fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned in the boys’ hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was their ideal, and they were always talking among themselves of how they would go farther West when they grew up, and be trappers and hunters. I do not remember any boy but one who meant to be a sailor; they lived too hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the boy who invented the marine-engine governor, and who wished to be a pirate, would just as soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those days Oregon had just been opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to go and live in Oregon, where you could stand in your door and shoot deer and wild turkey, while a salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging away at the line you had set in the river that ran before the log-cabin.

“ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE.”

If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anything else, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they were willing to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixed mind about them in the meantime, but perhaps they were not unlike other idolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they came pretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer than they knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites and the Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to be British when there were Americans on the other side; in either case you had to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of some time seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in the circus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of them dreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was at the arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from the Wyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the state, on their way to new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys’ fathers must have known that these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most of fathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once there the Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out of heaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets and moccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squatting in groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures. The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys had bows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed the Indians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went up to the court-house yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows. It almost made the boys crazy.

Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, or some game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents and bits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indians would all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit it had the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back the arrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they lived through it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; he could only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom he revered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would have been too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three of the Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy’s Town boys said they were girls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of six or seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men were not a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did not enter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sages who shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and the boys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of a world where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and ranging the woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alone make men of boys. They wished to escape these, as many foolish persons do among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escape them they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merely savage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilized man is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indians away into the far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for the rest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did not try it. After the red men had flitted away like red leaves their memory remained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged among them, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their old desire of having a gun.

But they came back to that at last, for that was the normal desire of every boy in the Boy’s Town who was not a girl-boy, and there were mighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point, a pistol would do, especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run bullets to shoot out of it; only your mother would be sure to see you running them, and just as likely as not would be so scared that she would say you must not shoot bullets. Then you would have to use buckshot, if you could get them anywhere near the right size, or small marbles; but a pistol was always a makeshift, and you never could hit anything with it, not even a board fence; it always kicked, or burst, or something. Very few boys ever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have one. But seven or eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and take turn-about shooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot at all, but they could run and see whether the big boys had hit anything when they fired, and that was something. This was my boy’s privilege for a long time before he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with his elder brother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shoot the load off before they got back to town; they were not allowed to bring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe for anything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going to do. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy’s brother bought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the half-real piece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one gunsmith and a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took time; perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in their leisure; they were delinquent subscribers, and they did it in part pay for their papers. When they got through with it my boy’s brother made himself a ramrod out of a straight piece of hickory, or at least as straight as the gun-barrel, which was rather sway-backed, and had a little twist to one side, so that one of the jour printers said it was a first-rate gun to shoot round a corner with. Then he made himself a powder-flask out of an ox-horn that he got and boiled till it was soft (it smelt the whole house up), and then scraped thin with a piece of glass; it hung at his side; and he carried his shot in his pantaloons pocket. He went hunting with this gun for a good many years, but he had never shot anything with it, when his uncle gave him a smoothbore rifle, and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have been nearly ten years old. It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have a gun; but he was mortified the very next morning after he got it by a citizen who thought differently. He had risen at daybreak to go out and shoot kildees on the Common, and he was hurrying along with his gun on his shoulder when the citizen stopped him and asked him what he was going to do with that gun. He said to shoot kildees, and he added that it was his gun. This seemed to surprise the citizen even more than the boy could have wished. He asked him if he did not think he was a pretty small boy to have a gun; and he took the gun from him, and examined it thoughtfully, and then handed it back to the boy, who felt himself getting smaller all the time. The man went his way without saying anything more, but his behavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boy had no pleasure in his sport that morning; partly, perhaps, because he found no kildees to shoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gun once or twice at a fence, and then he sneaked home with it through alleys and by-ways, and whenever he met a person he hurried by for fear the person would find him too small to have a gun.

Afterwards he came to have a bolder spirit about it, and he went hunting with it a good deal. It was a very curious kind of gun; you had to snap a good many caps on it, sometimes, before the load would go off; and sometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and go off, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder. The barrel was so crooked that it could not shoot straight, but this was not the only reason why the boy never hit anything with it. He could not shut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aim with both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till one day when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blow over his left eye from a shinny-stick. At first he thought his eye was put out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cut above it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at a pump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. It suddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now, and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; by help of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himself presentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and went joyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure it had not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurried home to share the joyful news with his family. He went hunting the very next Saturday, and at the first shot he killed a bird. It was a suicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal upon it so close that it could not escape even the vagaries of that wandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boy could bring only a few feathers of it away. In the evening, when his father came home, he showed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted of his exploit with the minutest detail. His father asked him whether he had expected to eat this sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it together. He said no, sap-suckers were not good to eat. “Then you took its poor little life merely for the pleasure of killing it,” said the father. “Was it a great pleasure to see it die?” The boy hung his head in shame and silence; it seemed to him that he would never go hunting again. Of course he did go hunting often afterwards, but his brother and he kept faithfully to the rule of never killing anything that they did not want to eat. To be sure, they gave themselves a wide range; they were willing to eat almost anything that they could shoot, even blackbirds, which were so abundant and so easy to shoot. But there were some things which they would have thought it not only wanton but wicked to kill, like turtle-doves, which they somehow believed were sacred, because they were the symbols of the Holy Ghost; it was quite their own notion to hold them sacred. They would not kill robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry, and they kept about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed a shame to shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were the turtle-doves, which used to light on the basin-bank, and pick up the grain scattered there from the boats and wagons. One of the apprentices in the printing-office kept a shot-gun loaded beside the press while he was rolling, and whenever he caught the soft twitter that the doves make with their wings, he rushed out with his gun and knocked over two or three of them. He was a good shot, and could nearly always get them in range. When he brought them back, it seemed to my boy that he had committed the unpardonable sin, and that something awful would surely happen to him. But he just kept on rolling the forms of type and exchanging insults with the pressman; and at the first faint twitter of doves’ wings he would be off again.

My boy and his brother made a fine distinction between turtle-doves and wild pigeons; they would have killed wild pigeons if they had got a chance, though you could not tell them from turtle-doves except by their size and the sound they made with their wings. But there were not many pigeons in the woods around the Boy’s Town, and they were very shy. There were snipe along the river, and flocks of kildees on the Commons, but the bird that was mostly killed by these boys was the yellowhammer. They distinguished, again, in its case; and decided that it was not a woodpecker, and might be killed; sometimes they thought that woodpeckers were so nearly yellowhammers that they might be killed, but they had never heard of any one’s eating a woodpecker, and so they could not quite bring themselves to it. There were said to be squirrels in the hickory woods near the Poor-House, but that was a great way off for my boy; besides the squirrels, there was a cross bull in those woods, and sometimes Solomon Whistler passed through them on his way to or from the Poor-House; so my boy never hunted squirrels. Sometimes he went with his brother for rabbits, which you could track through the corn-fields in a light snow, and sometimes, if they did not turn out to be cats, you could get a shot at them. Now and then there were quail in the wheat-stubble, and there were meadow-larks in the pastures, but they were very wild.

After all, yellowhammers were the chief reliance in the chase; they were pre-occupied, unsuspecting birds, and lit on fence rails and dead trees, so that they were pretty easy to shoot. If you could bring home a yellowhammer you felt that you had something to show for your long day’s tramp through the woods and fields, and for the five cents’ worth of powder and five cents’ worth of shot that you had fired off at other game. Sometimes you just fired it off at mullein-stalks, or barns, or anything you came to. There were a good many things you could do with a gun; you could fire your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through the air; you could fill the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, and send the water in a straight column at a fence. The boys all believed that you could fire that column of water right through a man, and they always wanted to try whether it would go through a cow, but they were afraid the owner of the cow would find it out. There was a good deal of pleasure in cleaning your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuck in it and you could hardly get it out. You poured hot water into the muzzle and blew it through the nipple, till it began to show clear; then you wiped it dry with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiled it with greasy tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw, and stay in the barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder in at the nipple to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the old muzzle-loading shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays.

But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired and footsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as you came in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit for supper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy’s mother ever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind of preserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly take the time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before you rushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you left it with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and saved you the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good deal quicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly.

Next to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late, was the pleasure of starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shoot ducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had an alarm-clock, which he set at about four, and he was up the instant it rang, and pulling my boy out of bed, where he would rather have stayed than shot the largest mallard duck in the world. They raked the ashes off the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked and bristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on their clothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns. Tip, the dog, was already waiting for them there, for he seemed to know they were going that morning, and he began whimpering for joy, and twisting himself sideways up against them, and nearly wagging his tail off; and licking their hands and faces, and kissing their guns all over; he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they were going, and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, and led the way across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks on the grass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild clamorous cries, till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back with my boy and let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right to the first shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and crept along to the place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold on Tip’s collar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning. The place so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that pale light, and he was glad of old Tip’s company, for it seemed a time when there might very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet of smooth, gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, and through these at last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro, and he could catch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood still and then jumped wildly in his breast, as the still air was startled with the rush of wings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocks arriving. Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopes he will lose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he bet that he did not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got a shot at them, they would not come back so that he could get a chance himself to kill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, and just when he was going to hollo, and tell his brother where the ducks were, the old smoothbore sent out a red flash and a white puff before he heard the report; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard the splashing rise of the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; and he ran forward, yelling, “How many did you hit? Where are they? Where are you? Are they coming back? It’s my turn now!” and making an outcry that would have frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less a flock of ducks.

One shot always ended the morning’s sport, and there were always good reasons why this shot never killed anything.

XIV.

FORAGING.

The foraging began with the first relenting days of winter, which usually came in February. Then the boys began to go to the woods to get sugar-water, as they called the maple sap, and they gave whole Saturdays to it as long as the sap would run. It took at least five or six boys to go for sugar-water, and they always had to get a boy whose father had an auger to come along, so as to have something to bore the trees with. On their way to the woods they had to stop at an elder thicket to get elder-wood to make spiles of, and at a straw pile to cut straws to suck the sap through, if the spiles would not work. They always brought lots of tin buckets to take the sap home in, and the big boys made the little fellows carry these, for they had to keep their own hands free to whittle the elder sticks into the form of spouts, and to push the pith out and make them hollow. They talked loudly and all at once, and they ran a good deal of the way, from the excitement. If it was a good sugar-day, there were patches of snow still in the fence corners and shady places, which they searched for rabbit-tracks; but the air was so warm that they wanted to take their shoes off, and begin going barefoot at once. Overhead, the sky was a sort of pale, milky blue, with the sun burning softly through it, and casting faint shadows. When they got into the woods, it was cooler, and there were more patches of snow, with bird-tracks and squirrel-tracks in them. They could hear the blue-jays snarling at one another, and the yellowhammer chuckling; on some dead tree a redheaded woodpecker hammered noisily, and if the boys had only had a gun with them they could have killed lots of things. Now and then they passed near some woodchoppers, whose axes made a pleasant sound, without frightening any of the wild things, they had got so used to them; sometimes the boys heard the long hollow crash of a tree they were felling. But all the time they kept looking out for a good sugar-tree, and when they saw a maple stained black from the branches down with the sap running from the little holes that the sap-suckers had made, they burst into a shout, and dashed forward, and the fellow with the auger began to bore away, while the other fellows stood round and told him how, and wanted to make him let them do it. Up and down the tree there was a soft murmur from the bees that had found it out before the boys, and every now and then they wove through the air the straight lines of their coming and going, and made the fellows wish they could find a bee-tree. But for the present these were intent upon the sugar-tree, and kept hurrying up the boy with the auger. When he had bored in deep enough, they tried to fit a spile to the hole, but it was nearly always crooked and too big, or else it pointed downward and the water would not run up through the spile. Then some of them got out their straws, and began to suck the sap up from the hole through them, and to quarrel and push, till they agreed to take turn-about, and others got the auger and bunted for another blackened tree. They never could get their spiles to work, and the water gathered so slowly in the holes they bored, and some of the fellows took such long turns, that it was very little fun. They tried to get some good out of the small holes the sap-suckers had made, but there were only a few drops in them, mixed with bark and moss. If it had not been for the woodchoppers, foraging for sugar-water would always have been a failure; but one of them was pretty sure to come up with his axe in his hand, and show the boys how to get the water. He would choose one of the roots near the foot of the tree, and chop a clean, square hole in it; the sap flew at each stroke of his axe, and it rose so fast in the well he made that the thirstiest boy could not keep it down, and three or four boys, with their heads jammed tight together and their straws plunged into its depths, lay stretched upon their stomachs and drank their fill at once. When every one was satisfied, or as nearly satisfied as a boy can ever be, they began to think how they could carry some of the sugar-water home. But by this time it would be pretty late in the afternoon; and they would have to put it off till some other day, when they intended to bring something to dip the water out with; the buckets they had brought were all too big. Then, if they could get enough, they meant to boil it down and make sugar-wax. I never knew of any boys who did so.

The next thing after going for sugar-water was gathering may-apples, as they called the fruit of the mandrake in that country. They grew to their full size, nearly as large as a pullet’s egg, some time in June, and they were gathered green, and carried home to be ripened in the cornmeal-barrel. The boys usually forgot about them before they were ripe; when now and then one was remembered, it was a thin, watery, sour thing at the best. But the boys gathered them every spring, in the pleasant open woods where they grew, just beyond the densest shade of the trees, among the tall, straggling grasses; and they had that joyous sense of the bounty of nature in hoarding them up which is one of the sweetest and dearest experiences of childhood. Through this the boy comes close to the heart of the mother of us all, and rejoices in the wealth she never grudges to those who are willing to be merely rich enough.

There were not many wild berries in the country near the Boy’s Town, or what seemed near; but sometimes my boy’s father took him a great way off to a region, long lost from the map, where there were blackberries. The swimming lasted so late into September, however, that the boys began to go for nuts almost as soon as they left off going into the water. They began with the little acorns that they called chinquepins, and that were such a pretty black, streaked upward from the cup with yellow, that they gathered them half for the unconscious pleasure of their beauty. They were rather bitter, and they puckered your mouth; but still you ate them. They were easy to knock off the low oaks where they grew, and they were so plentiful that you could get a peck of them in no time. There was no need of anybody’s climbing a tree to shake them; but one day the boys got to telling what they would do if a bear came, and one of them climbed a chinquepin-tree to show how he would get out on such a small limb that the bear would be afraid to follow him; and he went so far out on the limb that it broke under him. Perhaps he was heavier than he would have been if he had not been carrying the load of guilt which must burden a boy who is playing hookey. At any rate, he fell to the ground, and lay there helpless while the other boys gathered round him, and shared all the alarm he felt for his life. His despair of now hiding the fact that he had been playing hookey was his own affair, but they reasoned with him that the offence would be overlooked in the anxiety which his disaster must arouse. He was prepared to make the most of this, and his groans grew louder as he drew near home in the arms of the boys who took turns, two and two, in carrying him the whole long way from Dayton Lane, with a terrified procession of alternates behind them. These all ran as soon as they came in sight of his house and left the last pair to deliver him to his mother. They never knew whether she forgave him fully, or merely waited till he got well. You never could tell how a boy’s mother was going to act in any given case; mothers were so very apt to act differently.

Red haws came a little before chinquepins. The trees grew mostly by the First Lock, and the boys gathered the haws when they came out from swimming in the canal. They did not take bags to gather haws, as they did chinquepins; the fruit was not thought worthy of that honor; but they filled their pockets with them and ate them on the way home. They were rather nice, with a pleasant taste between a small apple and a rose seed-pod; only you had to throw most of them away because they were wormy. Once when the fellows were gathering haws out there they began to have fun with a flock of turkeys, especially the gobblers, and one boy got an old gobbler to following him while he walked slowly backward, and teased him. The other boys would not have told him for anything when they saw him backing against a low stump. When he reached it, his head went down and his heels flew into the air, and then the gobbler hopped upon him and began to have some of the fun himself. The boys always thought that if they had not rushed up all together and scared the gobbler off, he would have torn the boy to pieces, but very likely he would not. He probably intended just to have fun with him.

The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts, and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitter kernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, but the boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people. Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of black walnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks, as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to go walnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether they were ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, the fellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thought necessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, and that a boy had to make a new wagon every year. No boy’s walnut wagon could last till the next year; it did very well if it lasted till the next day. He had to make it nearly all with his pocket-knife. He could use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use a hatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use his knife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very round then; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. He whittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it. He could get a tongue ready-made if he used a broom-handle or a hoop-pole, but that had in either case to be whittled so it could be fastened to the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes with his knife if he could not get a gimlet; and if he could not get an auger, he bored the holes through the wheels with a red-hot poker, and then whittled them large enough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, because any other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was always splitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes, and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; the wheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailed across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles, and that kept the front-axle tight, so that it took the whole width of a street to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting.

FORAGING.

When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops and the roof of the wood-shed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen, wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever. The leaves had dropped from the trees overhead, and the branches outlined themselves against the blue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallen fruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send them plumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, and the nuts almost leaped into the boys’ hands. The boys ran, some of them to gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beat them from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick off his shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut was still clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile of grape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blows of a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, where the grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss them into a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk of that they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain on their hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed for days that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one another’s faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians.

The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, and while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and hotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every one of them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o’clock, they would start homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and their shoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had good luck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gone home with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so I have to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the wagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they always would in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready to drop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubs or rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to get the nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because they usually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made just as much preparation for drying the nuts on the wood-shed roof whether they got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stop gathering them till they had two or three barrels. They nailed a cleat across the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them out thin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. They said they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to try pretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and in about three days they were all eaten up.

I dare say boys are very different nowadays, and do everything they say they are going to do, and carry out all their undertakings. But in that day they never carried out any of their undertakings. Perhaps they undertook too much; but the failure was a part of the pleasure of undertaking a great deal, and if they had not failed they would have left nothing for the men to do; and a more disgusting thing than a world full of idle men who had done everything there was to do while they were boys, I cannot imagine. The fact is, boys have to leave a little for men to do, or else the race would go to ruin; and this almost makes me half believe that perhaps even the boys of the present time may be prevented from doing quite as much as they think they are going to do, until they grow up. Even then they may not want to do it all, but only a small part of it. I have noticed that men do not undertake half so many things as boys do; and instead of wanting to be circus-actors and Indians, and soldiers, and boat-drivers, and politicians and robbers, and to run off, and go in swimming all the time, and out hunting and walnutting, they keep to a very few things, and are glad then if they can do them. It is very curious, but it is true; and I advise any boy who doubts it to watch his father awhile.

XV.

MY BOY.

Every boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds of boys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming many characters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and one character when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onion when he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peeling off, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart, at last, and then you have got down to nothing.

All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy’s Town, in having each an inward being that was not the least like their outward being, but that somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so or not. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while he was joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage usages of the boy’s world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly different world within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not tell now these wonders any more than he could have told them then; but it was a world of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have been more ashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him. It was all vague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read, and that filled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof with their charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not lure him wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when their enchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of them afterwards. First of them was Goldsmith’s “History of Greece,” which made him an Athenian of Pericles’s time, and Goldsmith’s “History of Rome,” which naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed in slaying tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time of Domitian, there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he had read these books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his father thought fit to put into his hands “The Travels of Captain Ashe in North America,” to encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for useful reading; but this was a failure. The captain’s travels were printed with long esses, and the boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons. The fancy nourished upon

“The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,”

starved amidst the robust plenty of the Englishman’s criticisms of our early manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read “Malte-Brun’s Geography,” in three large folios, of a thousand pages each, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from the father, who had never been able to read it himself. But shortly after he failed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came into possession of a priceless treasure. It was that little treatise on “Greek and Roman Mythology” which I have mentioned, and which he must literally have worn out with reading, since no fragment of it seems to have survived his boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it; his father bought it with a number of other books at an auction, and the boy, who had about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the back part of his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in many transfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero upon imagined occasions in the Boy’s Town, to the fancied admiration of all the other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to his grandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollo with his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and resting from his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that his grandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, and show them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she was a girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed they would make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubt he was right.

There was another book which he read about this time, and that was “The Greek Soldier.” It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian, who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks, and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures. They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present at the Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French, and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that he could not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks, when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to console himself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the war over again, and he intended to harden himself for the long struggle by sleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the children often fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and his preparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in its practical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour.

Captain Riley’s narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, and his captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brother prized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told them that he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get his appointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was named William Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, William Willshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed to them almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly a greater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Riley and kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could. Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesque than the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had a vein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm, and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was not without its effect with the boys.

Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the same race and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the “Arabian Nights.” They did not think whether these were Mohammedans or not; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys are citizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as they lived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that Robinson Crusoe had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the place it ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had a feeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself the accomplice of an impostor. He liked the “Arabian Nights,” but oddly enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his “Greek and Roman Mythology;” and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it; at any rate it was gone, and he never got it back, and he never knew what book it was till thirty years afterwards, when he picked up from a friend’s library-table a copy of “Gesta Romanorum,” and recognized in this collection of old monkish legends the long-missing treasure of his boyhood. These stories, without beauty of invention, without art of construction or character, without spirituality in their crude materialization, which were read aloud in the refectories of mediæval cloisters while the monks sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of the boy that governed his life. He conformed his conduct to the principles and maxims which actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of these dry-as-dust tales; he went about drunk with the fumes of fables about Roman emperors that never were, in an empire that never was; and, though they tormented him by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in the place of that he knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to break from their influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing to happen to him as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying or prophecy; and at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies for himself, which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he was walking in an alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap that had probably fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it, and in his simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as he picked it up there came into his mind the words, “He who picketh up this cap picketh up a fortune,” and he could hardly wait for Monday to come and let him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduring prosperity in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expected this to take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost all courage; his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a syllable of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid the cap on the counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took it in his hand. “What’s this?” he said. “Why, this is ours,” and he tossed the cap into a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunk out, cut to the heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a cruel disappointment and mortification that it was rather a relief to have his brother mock him, and come up and say from time to time, “He who picketh up this cap picketh up a fortune,” and then split into a jeering laugh. At least he could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him; and he could throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jour printers when the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, “He who picketh—”

He was not different from other boys in his desire to localize, to realize, what he read; and he was always contriving in fancy scenes and encounters of the greatest splendor, in which he bore a chief part. Inwardly he was all thrones, principalities, and powers, the foe of tyrants, the friend of good emperors, and the intimate of magicians, and magnificently apparelled; outwardly he was an incorrigible little sloven, who suffered in all social exigencies from the direst bashfulness, and wished nothing so much as to shrink out of the sight of men if they spoke to him. He could not help revealing sometimes to the kindness of his father and mother the world of foolish dreams one half of him lived in, while the other half swam, and fished, and hunted, and ran races, and played tops and marbles, and squabbled and scuffled in the Boy’s Town. Very likely they sympathized with him more than they let him know; they encouraged his reading, and the father directed his taste as far as might be, especially in poetry. The boy liked to make poetry, but he preferred to read prose, though he listened to the poems his father read aloud, so as to learn how they were made. He learned certain pieces by heart, like “The Turk lay dreaming of the hour,” and “Pity the sorrows of a poor old man,” and he was fond of some passages that his father wished him to know in Thomson’s “Seasons.” There were some of Moore’s songs, too, that he was fond of, such as “When in death I shall calm recline,” and “It was noon and on flowers that ranged all around.” He learned these by heart, to declaim at school, where he spoke, “On the banks of the Danube fair Adelaide hied,” from Campbell; but he could hardly speak the “Soldier’s Dream” for the lump that came into his throat at the lines,

“My little ones kissed me a thousand times o’er,
And my wife sobbed aloud in her fulness of heart.

“‘Stay, stay with us! Stay! Thou art weary and worn!’
And fain was their war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned at the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away!”

He was himself both the war-broken soldier and the little ones that kissed him, in the rapture of this now old-fashioned music, and he woke with pangs of heartbreak in the very person of the dreamer.

But he could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small copperplates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to him. Afterwards he read Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village,” and he formed a great passion for Pope’s “Pastorals,” which he imitated in their easy heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine, he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. His father used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, like the taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he never came to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he always had his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as they pretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, a delicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chief dish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make long poems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read other people’s long poems.

He had no conception of authorship as a vocation in life, and he did not know why he wanted to make poetry. After first flaunting his skill in it before the boys, and getting one of them into trouble by writing a love-letter for him to a girl at school, and making the girl cry at a thing so strange and puzzling as a love-letter in rhyme, he preferred to conceal his gift. It became

“His shame in crowds — his solitary pride,”

and he learned to know that it was considered soft to write poetry, as indeed it mostly is. He himself regarded with contempt a young man who had printed a piece of poetry in his father’s newspaper and put his own name to it. He did not know what he would not have done sooner than print poetry and put his name to it; and he was melted with confusion when a girl who was going to have a party came to him at the printing-office and asked him to make her the invitations in verse. The printers laughed, and it seemed to the boy that he could never get over it.

But such disgraces are soon lived down, even at ten years, and a great new experience which now came to him possibly helped the boy to forget. This was the theatre, which he had sometimes heard his father speak of. There had once been a theatre in the Boy’s Town, when a strolling company came up from Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an empty pork-house. But that was a long time ago, and, though he had written a tragedy, all that the boy knew of a theatre was from a picture in a Sunday-school book where a stage scene was given to show what kind of desperate amusements a person might come to in middle life if he began by breaking the Sabbath in his youth. His brother had once been taken to a theatre in Pittsburgh by one of their river-going uncles, and he often told about it; but my boy formed no conception of the beautiful reality from his accounts of a burglar who jumped from a roof and was chased by a watchman with a pistol up and down a street with houses painted on a curtain.

“THE BEACON OF DEATH.”

The company which came to the Boy’s Town in his time was again from Cincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother of two actresses, afterwards famous, who were then children, just starting upon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading parts in “Bombastes Furioso,” the first night my boy ever saw a play, and he instantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitly remained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller of them came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawn sword in the other, and said,

“Whoever dares these boots displace
Shall meet Bombastes face to face,”

if the boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down — click-click, click-click — and died all over the deck of the pirate ship in the opening piece. This was called the “Beacon of Death,” and the scene represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern dangling from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their doom. Afterwards, the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of the dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate captain appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, “Let us go below and get some brandy!” the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss to have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longed to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he so glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at the theatre that he afterwards came to be very tired of it, and avoided the plays and novels that had very marked villains in them.

He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and he lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which was well on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put the public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money’s worth with three. On his first night my boy saw “The Beacon of Death,” “Bombastes Furioso,” and “Black-eyed Susan,” and he never afterwards saw less than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as long as the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainly Calvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most good people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long he dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with more effulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before, and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those villains on the stage, to have a moustache — a black moustache — such as they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, and somehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.

I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten years; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was, he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery; and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough of villainy, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue. At any rate, it was a phase of being that could not have been prevented without literally destroying him, and I feel pretty sure that his father did well to let him have his fill of the theatre at once. He could not have known of the riot of emotions behind the child’s shy silence, or how continually he was employed in dealing death to all the good people in the pieces he saw or imagined. This the boy could no more have suffered to appear than his passion for those lovely little girls, for whose sake he somehow perpetrated these wicked deeds. The theatre bills, large and small, were printed in his father’s office, and sometimes the amiable manager and his wife strolled in with the copy. The boy always wildly hoped and feared they would bring the little girls with them, but they never did, and he contented himself with secretly adoring the father and mother, doubly divine as their parents and as actors. They were on easy terms with the roller-boy, the wretch who shot turtle-doves with no regard for their symbolical character, and they joked with him, in a light give-and-take that smote my boy with an anguish of envy. It would have been richly enough for him to pass the least word with them; a look, a smile from them would have been bliss; but he shrank out of their way; and once when he met them in the street, and they seemed to be going to speak to him, he ran so that they could not.

XVI.

OTHER BOYS.

I cannot quite understand why the theatre, which my boy was so full of, and so fond of, did not inspire him to write plays, to pour them out, tragedy upon tragedy, till the world was filled with tears and blood. Perhaps it was because his soul was so soaked, and, as it were, water-logged with the drama, that it could only drift sluggishly in that welter of emotions, and make for no point, no port, where it could recover itself and direct its powers again. The historical romance which he had begun to write before the impassioned days of the theatre seems to have been lost sight of at this time, though it was an enterprise that he was so confident of carrying forward that he told all his family and friends about it, and even put down the opening passages of it on paper which he cut in large quantity, and ruled himself, so as to have it exactly suitable. The story, as I have said, was imagined from events in Irving’s history of the “Conquest of Granada,” a book which the boy loved hardly less than the monkish legends of “Gesta Romanorum,” and it concerned the rival fortunes of Hamet el Zegri and Boabdil el Chico, the uncle and nephew who vied with each other for the crumbling throne of the Moorish kingdom; but I have not the least notion how it all ended. Perhaps the boy himself had none.

I wish I could truly say that he finished any of his literary undertakings, but I cannot. They were so many that they cumbered the house, and were trodden under foot; and sometimes they brought him to open shame, as when his brother picked one of them up, and began to read it out loud with affected admiration. He was apt to be ashamed of his literary efforts after the first moment, and he shuddered at his brother’s burlesque of the high romantic vein in which most of his neverended beginnings were conceived. One of his river-faring uncles was visiting with his family at the boy’s home when he laid out the scheme of his great fiction of “Hamet el Zegri,” and the kindly young aunt took an interest in it which he poorly rewarded a few months later, when she asked how the story was getting on, and he tried to ignore the whole matter, and showed such mortification at the mention of it that the poor lady was quite bewildered.

The trouble with him was, that he had to live that kind of double life I have spoken of — the Boy’s Town life and the Cloud Dweller’s life — and that the last, which he was secretly proud of, abashed him before the first. This is always the way with double-lived people, but he did not know it, and he stumbled along through the glory and the ignominy as best he could, and, as he thought, alone.

He was often kept from being a fool, and worse, by that elder brother of his; and I advise every boy to have an elder brother. Have a brother about four years older than yourself, I should say; and if your temper is hot, and your disposition revengeful, and you are a vain and ridiculous dreamer at the same time that you are eager to excel in feats of strength and games of skill, and to do everything that the other fellows do, and are ashamed to be better than the worst boy in the crowd, your brother can be of the greatest use to you, with his larger experience and wisdom. My boy’s brother seemed to have an ideal of usefulness, while my boy only had an ideal of glory, to wish to help others, while my boy only wished to help himself. My boy would as soon have thought of his father’s doing a wrong thing as of his brother’s doing it; and his brother was a calm light of common-sense, of justice, of truth, while he was a fantastic flicker of gaudy purposes which he wished to make shine before men in their fulfilment. His brother was always doing for him and for the younger children; while my boy only did for himself; he had a very gray moustache before he began to have any conception of the fact that he was sent into the world to serve and to suffer, as well as to rule and enjoy. But his brother seemed to know this instinctively; he bore the yoke in his youth, patiently if not willingly; he shared the anxieties as he parted the cares of his father and mother. Yet he was a boy among boys, too; he loved to swim, to skate, to fish, to forage, and passionately, above all, he loved to hunt; but in everything he held himself in check, that he might hold the younger boys in check; and my boy often repaid his conscientious vigilance with hard words and hard names, such as embitter even the most self-forgiving memories. He kept mechanically within certain laws, and though in his rage he hurled every other name at his brother, he would not call him a fool, because then he would be in danger of hell-fire. If he had known just what Raca meant, he might have called him Raca, for he was not so much afraid of the council; but, as it was, his brother escaped that insult, and held through all a rein upon him, and governed him through his scruples as well as his fears.

His brother was full of inventions and enterprises beyond most other boys, and his undertakings came to the same end of nothingness that awaits all boyish endeavor. He intended to make fireworks and sell them; he meant to raise silk-worms; he prepared to take the contract of clearing the new cemetery grounds of stumps by blasting them out with gunpowder. Besides this, he had a plan with another big boy for making money, by getting slabs from the saw-mill, and sawing them up into stove-wood, and selling them to the cooks of canal-boats. The only trouble was that the cooks would not buy the fuel, even when the boys had a half-cord of it all nicely piled up on the canal-bank; they would rather come ashore after dark and take it for nothing. He had a good many other schemes for getting rich, that failed; and he wanted to go to California and dig gold; only his mother would not consent. He really did save the Canal-Basin once, when the banks began to give way after a long rain. He saw the break beginning, and ran to tell his father, who had the firebells rung. The fire companies came rushing to the rescue, but as they could not put the Basin out with their engines, they all got shovels and kept it in. They did not do this before it had overflowed the street, and run into the cellars of the nearest houses. The water stood two feet deep in the kitchen of my boy’s house, and the yard was flooded so that the boys made rafts and navigated it for a whole day. My boy’s brother got drenched to the skin in the rain, and lots of fellows fell off the rafts.

He belonged to a military company of big boys that had real wooden guns, such as the little boys never could get, and silk oil-cloth caps, and nankeen roundabouts, and white pantaloons with black stripes down the legs; and once they marched out to a boy’s that had a father that had a farm, and he gave them all a free dinner in an arbor before the house; bread and butter, and apple-butter, and molasses and pound cake, and peaches and apples; it was splendid. When the excitement about the Mexican War was the highest, the company wanted a fort; and they got a farmer to come and scale off the sod with his plough, in a grassy place there was near a piece of woods, where a good many cows were pastured. They took the pieces of sod, and built them up into the walls of a fort about fifteen feet square; they intended to build them higher than their heads, but they got so eager to have the works stormed that they could not wait, and they commenced having the battle when they had the walls only breast high. There were going to be two parties: one to attack the fort, and the other to defend it, and they were just going to throw sods; but one boy had a real shot-gun, that he was to load up with powder and fire off when the battle got to the worst, so as to have it more like a battle. He thought it would be more like yet if he put in a few shot, and he did it on his own hook. It was a splendid gun, but it would not stand cocked long, and he was resting it on the wall of the fort, ready to fire when the storming-party came on, throwing sods and yelling and holloing; and all at once his gun went off, and a cow that was grazing broadside to the fort gave a frightened bellow, and put up her tail, and started for home. When they found out that the gun, if not the boy, had shot a cow, the Mexicans and Americans both took to their heels; and it was a good thing they did so, for as soon as that cow got home, and the owner found out by the blood on her that she had been shot, though it was only a very slight wound, he was so mad that he did not know what to do, and very likely he would have half killed those boys if he had caught them. He got a plough, and he went out to their fort, and he ploughed it all down flat, so that not one sod remained upon another.

My boy’s brother had a good many friends who were too old for my boy to play with. One of them had a father that had a flour-mill out at the First Lock, and for a while my boy’s brother intended to be a miller. I do not know why he gave up being one; he did stay up all night with his friend in the mill once, and he found out that the water has more power by night than by day, or at least he came to believe so. He knew another boy who had a father who had a stone-quarry and a canal-boat to bring the stone to town. It was a scow, and it was drawn by one horse; sometimes he got to drive the horse, and once he was allowed to steer the boat. This was a great thing, and it would have been hard to believe of anybody else. The name of the boy that had the father that owned this boat was Piccolo; or, rather, that was his nickname, given him because he could whistle like a piccolo-flute. Once the fellows were disputing whether you could jump halfway across a narrow stream, and then jump back, without touching your feet to the other shore. Piccolo tried it, and sat down in the middle of the stream.

My boy’s brother had a scheme for preserving ripe fruit, by sealing it up in a stone jug and burying the jug in the ground, and not digging it up till Christmas. He tried it with a jug of cherries, which he dug up in about a week; but the cherries could not have smelt worse if they had been kept till Christmas. He knew a boy that had a father that had a bakery, and that used to let him come and watch them making bread. There was a fat boy learning the trade there, and they called him the dough-baby, because he looked so white and soft; and the boy whose father had a mill said that down at the German brewery they had a Dutch boy that they were teaching to drink beer, so they could tell how much beer a person could drink if he was taken early; but perhaps this was not true.

My boy’s brother went to all sorts of places that my boy was too shy to go to; and he associated with much older boys, but there was one boy who, as I have said, was the dear friend of both of them, and that was the boy who came to learn the trade in their father’s printing-office, and who began an historical romance at the time my boy began his great Moorish novel. The first day he came he was put to roll, or ink the types, while my boy’s brother worked the press, and all day long my boy, from where he was setting type, could hear him telling the story of a book he had read. It was about a person named Monte Cristo, who was a count, and who could do anything. My boy listened with a gnawing literary jealousy of a boy who had read a book that he had never heard of. He tried to think whether it sounded as if it were as great a book as the “Conquest of Granada,” or “Gesta Romanorum;” and for a time he kept aloof from this boy because of his envy. Afterwards they came together on “Don Quixote,” but though my boy came to have quite a passionate fondness for him, he was long in getting rid of his grudge against him for his knowledge of “Monte Cristo.” He was as great a laughter as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, so that two by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes and fun. He became the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunes but steadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as a private soldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely in many battles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where, ever after, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong, till he died not long ago at his post of duty — a true, generous, and lofty soul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seem commoner in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our millionaires and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their nobly simple lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word for word, deed for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of Monte Cristo, or any hero of romance; and so would the common story of any common life; but we cannot tell these stories, somehow.

My boy knew nearly a hundred boys, more or less; but it is no use trying to tell about them, for all boys are a good deal alike, and most of these did not differ much from the rest. They were pretty good fellows; that is to say, they never did half the mischief they intended to do, and they had moments of intending to do right, or at least they thought they did, and when they did wrong they said they did not intend to. But my boy never had any particular friend among his schoolmates, though he played and fought with them on intimate terms, and was a good comrade with any boy that wanted to go in swimming or out hunting. His closest friend was a boy who was probably never willingly at school in his life, and who had no more relish of literature or learning in him than the open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. I dare say it was a sense of his kinship with nature that took my boy with him, and rested his soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings. He was like a piece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling or spinning in him; willing for anything, but passive, and without force or aim. He lived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of a corn-field on the river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went to find him there, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two or three large sisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But the boys had very little to do with each other’s houses, or, for that matter, with each other’s yards. His friend seldom entered my boy’s gate, and never his door; for with all the toleration his father felt for every manner of human creature, he could not see what good the boy was to get from this queer companion. It is certain that, he got no harm; for his companion was too vague and void even to think evil. Socially, he was as low as the ground under foot, but morally he was as good as any boy in the Boy’s Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had no impulses at all, in fact, and of his own motion he never did anything, or seemed to think anything. When he wished to get at my boy, he simply appeared in the neighborhood, and hung about the outside of the fence till he came out. He did not whistle, or call “E-oo-we!” as the other fellows did, but waited patiently to be discovered, and to be gone off with wherever my boy listed. He never had any plans himself, and never any will but to go in swimming; he neither hunted nor foraged; he did not even fish; and I suppose that money could not have hired him to run races. He played marbles, but not very well, and he did not care much for the game. The two boys soaked themselves in the river together, and then they lay on the sandy shore, or under some tree, and talked; but my boy could not have talked to him about any of the things that were in his books, or the fume of dreams they sent up in his mind. He must rather have soothed against his soft, caressing ignorance the ache of his fantastic spirit, and reposed his intensity of purpose in that lax and easy aimlessness. Their friendship was not only more innocent than any other friendship my boy had, but it was wholly innocent; they loved each other, and that was all; and why people love one another there is never any satisfactory telling. But this friend of his must have had great natural good in him; and if I could find a man of the make of that boy I am sure I should love him.

My boy’s other friends wondered at his fondness for him, and it was often made a question with him at home, if not a reproach to him; so that in the course of time it ceased to be that comfort it had been to him. He could not give him up, but he could not help seeing that he was ignorant and idle, and in a fatal hour he resolved to reform him. I am not able now to say just how he worked his friend up to the point of coming to school, and of washing his hands and feet and face, and putting on a new check shirt to come in. But one day he came, and my boy, as he had planned, took him into his seat, and owned his friendship with him before the whole school. This was not easy, for though everybody knew how much the two were together, it was a different thing to sit with him as if he thought him just as good as any boy, and to help him get his lessons, and stay him mentally as well as socially. He struggled through one day, and maybe another; but it was a failure from the first moment, and my boy breathed freer when his friend came one half-day, and then never came again. The attempted reform had spoiled their simple and harmless intimacy. They never met again upon the old ground of perfect trust and affection. Perhaps the kindly earth-spirit had instinctively felt a wound from the shame my boy had tried to brave out, and shrank from their former friendship without quite knowing why. Perhaps it was my boy who learned to realize that there could be little in common but their common humanity between them, and could not go back to that. At any rate, their friendship declined from this point; and it seems to me, somehow, a pity.

Among the boys who were between my boy and his brother in age was one whom all the boys liked, because he was clever with everybody, with little boys as well as big boys. He was a laughing, pleasant fellow, always ready for fun, but he never did mean things, and he had an open face that made a friend of every one who saw him. He had a father that had a house with a lightning-rod, so that if you were in it when there was a thunder-storm you could not get struck by lightning, as my boy once proved by being in it when there was a thunder-storm and not getting struck. This in itself was a great merit, and there were grape-arbors and peach-trees in his yard which added to his popularity, with cling-stone peaches almost as big as oranges on them. He was a fellow who could take you home to meals whenever he wanted to, and he liked to have boys stay all night with him; his mother was as clever as he was, and even the sight of his father did not make the fellows want to go and hide. His father was so clever that he went home with my boy one night about midnight when the boy had come to pass the night with his boys, and the youngest of them had said he always had the nightmare and walked in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you before he knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon his chances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; and so he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundest slumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy had to go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up and gone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so only because the mother made him; but it shows how clever the whole family was.

It was their oldest boy whom my boy and his brother chiefly went with before that boy who knew about “Monte Cristo” came to learn the trade in their father’s office. One Saturday in July they three spent the whole day together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnuts on the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to be sweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchard thrown open for building-lots behind my boy’s yard; but they could not find any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought of putting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind of green apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They went up to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in the barrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold, and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened the points, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an apple almost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far as you could see him.

On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy was not there, and in the afternoon they heard he was sick. Then, towards the end of the week they heard that he had the flux; and on Friday, just before school let out, the teacher — it was the one that whipped so, and that the fellows all liked — rapped on his desk, and began to speak very solemnly to the scholars. He told them that their little mate, whom they had played with and studied with, was lying very sick, so very sick that it was expected he would die; and then he read them a serious lesson about life and death, and tried to make them feel how passing and uncertain all things were, and resolve to live so that they need never be afraid to die.

Some of the fellows cried, and the next day some of them went to see the dying boy, and my boy went with them. His spirit was stricken to the earth, when he saw his gay, kind playmate lying there, white as the pillow under his wasted face, in which his sunken blue eyes showed large and strange. The sick boy did not say anything that the other boys could hear, but they could see the wan smile that came to his dry lips, and the light come sadly into his eyes, when his mother asked him if he knew this one or that; and they could not bear it, and went out of the room.

In a few days they heard that he was dead, and one afternoon school did not keep, so that the boys might go to the funeral. Most of them walked in the procession; but some of them were waiting beside the open grave, that was dug near the grave of that man who believed there was a hole through the earth from pole to pole, and had a perforated stone globe on top of his monument.

XVII.

FANTASIES AND SUPERSTITIONS.

My boy used to be afraid of this monument, which stood a long time, or what seemed to him a long time, in the yard of the tombstone cutter before it was put up at the grave of the philosopher who imagined the earth as hollow as much of the life is on it. He was a brave officer in the army which held the region against the Indians in the pioneer times; he passed the latter part of his life there, and he died and was buried in the Boy’s Town. My boy had to go by the yard when he went to see his grandmother, and even at high noon the sight of the officer’s monument, and the other gravestones standing and leaning about, made his flesh creep and his blood run cold. When there were other boys with him he would stop at the door of the shed, where a large, fair German was sawing slabs of marble with a long saw that had no teeth, and that he eased every now and then with water from a sponge he kept by him; but if the boy was alone, and it was getting at all late in the afternoon, he always ran by the place as fast as he could. He could hardly have told what he was afraid of, but he must have connected the gravestones with ghosts.

“HE ALWAYS RAN BY THE PLACE AS FAST AS HE COULD.”

His superstitions were not all of the ghastly kind; some of them related to conduct and character. It was noted long ago how boys throw stones, for instance, at a tree, and feign to themselves that this thing or that, of great import, will happen or not as they hit or miss the tree. But my boy had other fancies, which came of things he had read and half understood. In one of his school-books was a story that began, “Charles was an honest boy, but Robert was the name of a thief,” and it went on to show how Charles grew up in the respect and affection of all who knew him by forbearing to steal some oranges which their owner had set for safe-keeping at the heels of his horse, while Robert was kicked at once (there was a picture that showed him holding his stomach with both hands), and afterwards came to a bad end, through attempting to take one. My boy conceived from the tale that the name of Robert was necessarily associated with crime; it was long before he outgrew the prejudice; and this tale and others of a like vindictive virtuousness imbued him with such a desire to lead an upright life that he was rather a bother to his friends with his scruples. A girl at school mislaid a pencil which she thought she had lent him, and he began to have a morbid belief that he must have stolen it; he became frantic with the mere dread of guilt; he could not eat or sleep, and it was not till he went to make good the loss with a pencil which his grandfather gave him that the girl said she had found her pencil in her desk, and saved him from the despair of a self-convicted criminal. After that his father tried to teach him the need of using his reason as well as his conscience concerning himself, and not to be a little simpleton. But he was always in an anguish to restore things to their owners, like the good boys in the story-books, and he suffered pangs of the keenest remorse for the part he once took in the disposition of a piece of treasure-trove. This was a brown-paper parcel which he found behind a leaning gravestone in the stone-cutter’s yard, and which he could not help peeping into. It was full of raisins, and in the amaze of such a discovery he could not help telling the other boys. They flocked round and swooped down upon the parcel like birds of prey, and left not a raisin behind. In vain he implored them not to stain their souls with this misdeed; neither the law nor the prophets availed; neither the awful shadow of the prison which he cast upon them, nor the fear of the last judgment which he invoked. They said that the raisins did not belong to anybody; that the owner had forgotten all about them; that they had just been put there by some one who never intended to come back for them. He went away sorrowing, without touching a raisin (he felt that the touch must have stricken him with death), and far heavier in soul than the hardened accomplices of his sin, of whom he believed himself the worst in having betrayed the presence of the raisins to them.

He used to talk to himself when he was little, but one day his mother said to him jokingly, “Don’t you know that he who talks to himself has the devil for a listener?” and after that he never dared whisper above his breath when he was alone, though his father and mother had both taught him that there was no devil but his own evil will. He shuddered when he heard a dog howling in the night, for that was a sign that somebody was going to die. If he heard a hen crow, as a hen sometimes unnaturally would, he stoned her, because it was a sign of the worst kind of luck. He believed that warts came from playing with toads, but you could send them away by saying certain words over them; and he was sorry that he never had any warts, so that he could send them away, and see them go; but he never could bear to touch a toad, and so of course he could not have warts. Other boys played with toads just to show that they were not afraid of having warts; but every one knew that if you killed a toad, your cow would give bloody milk. I dare say the far forefathers of the race knew this too, when they first began to herd their kine in the birthplace of the Aryan peoples; and perhaps they learned then that if you killed a snake early in the day its tail would live till sundown. My boy killed every snake he could; he thought it somehow a duty; all the boys thought so; they dimly felt that they were making a just return to the serpent-tribe for the bad behavior of their ancestor in the Garden of Eden. Once, in a corn-field near the Little Reservoir, the boys found on a thawing day of early spring knots and bundles of snakes writhen and twisted together, in the torpor of their long winter sleep. It was a horrible sight, that afterwards haunted my boy’s dreams. He had nightmares which remained as vivid in his thoughts as anything that happened to him by day. There were no poisonous snakes in the region of the Boy’s Town, but there were some large blacksnakes, and the boys said that if a blacksnake got the chance he would run up your leg, and tie himself round your body so that you could not breathe. Nobody had ever seen a blacksnake do it, and nobody had ever seen a hoop-snake, but the boys believed there was such a snake, and that he would take his tail in his mouth, when he got after a person, and roll himself along swifter than the fastest race-horse could run. He did not bite, but when he came up with you he would take the point of his tail out of his mouth and strike it into you. If he struck his tail into a tree, the tree would die. My boy had seen a boy who had been chased by a hoop-snake, but he had not seen the snake, though for the matter of that the boy who had been chased by it had not seen it either; he did not stop to see it. Another kind of snake that was very strange was a hair-snake. No one had ever seen it happen, but every one knew that if you put long horsehairs into a puddle of water and let them stay, they would turn into hair-snakes; and when you drank out of a spring you had to be careful not to swallow a hair-snake, or it would remain in your stomach and grow there.

When you saw a lizard, you had to keep your mouth tight shut, or else the lizard would run down your throat before you knew it. That was what all the boys said, and my boy believed it, though he had never heard of anybody that it happened to. He believed that if you gave a chicken-cock burnt brandy it could lay eggs, and that if you gave a boy burnt brandy it would stop his growing. That was the way the circus-men got their dwarfs, and the India-rubber man kept himself limber by rubbing his joints with rattlesnake oil.

A snake could charm a person, and when you saw a snake you had to kill it before it could get its eye on you or it would charm you. Snakes always charmed birds; and there were mysterious powers of the air and forces of nature that a boy had to be on his guard against, just as a bird had to look out for snakes. You must not kill a granddaddy-long-legs, or a lady-bug; it was bad luck. My boy believed, or was afraid he believed, that

“What you dream Monday morning before daylight
Will come true before Saturday night,”

but if it was something bad, you could keep it from coming true by not telling your dream till you had eaten breakfast. He governed his little, foolish, frightened life not only by the maxims he had learned out of his “Gesta Romanorum,” but by common sayings of all sorts, such as

“See a pin and leave it lay
You’ll have bad luck all the day,”

and if ever he tried to rebel against this slavery, and went by a pin in the path, his fears tormented him till he came back and picked it up. He would not put on his left stocking first, for that was bad luck; but besides these superstitions, which were common to all the boys, he invented superstitions of his own, with which he made his life a burden. He did not know why, but he would not step upon the cracks between the paving-stones, and some days he had to touch every tree or post along the sidewalk, as Doctor Johnson did in his time, though the boy had never heard of Doctor Johnson then.

While he was yet a very little fellow, he had the distorted, mistaken piety of childhood. He had an abject terror of dying, but it seemed to him that if a person could die right in the centre isle of the church — the Methodist church where his mother used to go before she became finally a New Churchwoman — the chances of that person’s going straight to heaven would be so uncommonly good that he need have very little anxiety about it. He asked his mother if she did not think so too, holding by her hand as they came out of church together, and he noticed the sort of gravity and even pain with which she and his father received this revelation of his darkling mind. They tried to teach him what they thought of such things; but though their doctrine caught his fancy and flattered his love of singularity, he was not proof against the crude superstitions of his mates. He thought for a time that there was a Bad Man, but this belief gave way when he heard his father laughing about a certain clergyman who believed in a personal devil.

The boys said the world was going to be burned up some time, and my boy expected the end with his full share of the trouble that it must bring to every sinner. His fears were heightened by the fact that his grandfather believed this end was very near at hand, and was prepared for the second coming of Christ at any moment. Those were the days when the minds of many were stirred by this fear or hope; the believers had their ascension robes ready, and some gave away their earthly goods so as not to be cumbered with anything in their heavenward flight. At home, my boy heard his father jest at the crazy notion, and make fun of the believers; but abroad, among the boys, he took the tint of the prevailing gloom. One awful morning at school, it suddenly became so dark that the scholars could not see to study their lessons, and then the boys knew that the end of the world was coming. There were no clouds, as for a coming storm, but the air was blackened almost to the dusk of night; the school was dismissed, and my boy went home to find the candles lighted, and a strange gloom and silence on everything outside. He remembered entering into this awful time, but he no more remembered coming out of it than if the earth had really passed away in fire and smoke.

He early heard of forebodings and presentiments, and he tried hard against his will to have them, because he was so afraid of having them. For the same reason he did his best, or his worst, to fall into a trance, in which he should know everything that was going on about him, all the preparations for his funeral, all the sorrow and lamentation, but should be unable to move or speak, and only be saved at the last moment by some one putting a mirror to his lips and finding a little blur of mist on it. Sometimes when he was beginning to try to write things and to imagine characters, if he imagined a character’s dying, then he became afraid he was that character, and was going to die.

Once, he woke up in the night and found the full moon shining into his room in a very strange and phantasmal way, and washing the floor with its pale light, and somehow it came into his mind that he was going to die when he was sixteen years old. He could then only have been nine or ten, but the perverse fear sank deep into his soul, and became an increasing torture till he passed his sixteenth birthday and entered upon the year in which he had appointed himself to die. The agony was then too great for him to bear alone any longer, and with shame he confessed his doom to his father. “Why,” his father said, “you are in your seventeenth year now. It is too late for you to die at sixteen,” and all the long-gathering load of misery dropped from the boy’s soul, and he lived till his seventeenth birthday and beyond it without further trouble. If he had known that he would be in his seventeenth year as soon as he was sixteen, he might have arranged his presentiment differently.

XVIII.

THE NATURE OF BOYS.

I tell these things about my boy, not so much because they were peculiar to him as because I think they are, many of them, common to all boys. One tiresome fact about boys is that they are so much alike; or used to be. They did not wish to be so, but they could not help it. They did not even know they were alike; and my boy used to suffer in ways that he believed no boy had ever suffered before; but as he grew older he found that boys had been suffering in exactly the same way from the beginning of time. In the world you will find a great many grown-up boys, with gray beards and grandchildren, who think that they have been different their whole lives through from other people, and are the victims of destiny. That is because with all their growing they have never grown to be men, but have remained a sort of cry-babies. The first thing you have to learn here below is that in essentials you are just like every one else, and that you are different from others only in what is not so much worth while. If you have anything in common with your fellow-creatures, it is something that God gave you; if you have anything that seems quite your own, it is from your silly self, and is a sort of perversion of what came to you from the Creator who made you out of himself, and had nothing else to make any one out of. There is not really any difference between you and your fellow-creatures; but only a seeming difference that flatters and cheats you with a sense of your strangeness, and makes you think you are a remarkable fellow.

There is a difference between boys and men, but it is a difference of self-knowledge chiefly. A boy wants to do everything because he does not know he cannot; a man wants to do something because he knows he cannot do everything; a boy always fails, and a man sometimes succeeds because the man knows and the boy does not know. A man is better than a boy because he knows better; he has learned by experience that what is a harm to others is a greater harm to himself, and he would rather not do it. But a boy hardly knows what harm is, and he does it mostly without realizing that it hurts. He cannot invent anything, he can only imitate; and it is easier to imitate evil than good. You can imitate war, but how are you going to imitate peace? So a boy passes his leisure in contriving mischief. If you get another fellow to walk into a wasp’s camp, you can see him jump and hear him howl, but if you do not, then nothing at all happens. If you set a dog to chase a cat up a tree, then something has been done; but if you do not set the dog on the cat, then the cat just lies in the sun and sleeps, and you lose your time. If a boy could find out some way of doing good, so that he could be active in it, very likely he would want to do good now and then; but as he cannot, he very seldom wants to do good.

Or at least he did not want to do good in my boy’s time. Things may be changed now, for I have been talking of boys as they were in the Boy’s Town forty years ago. For anything that I really know to the contrary, a lot of fellows when they get together now may plot good deeds of all kinds, but when more than a single one of them was together then they plotted mischief. When I see five or six boys now lying under a tree on the grass, and they fall silent as I pass them, I have no right to say that they are not arranging to go and carry some poor widow’s winter wood into her shed and pile it neatly up for her, and wish to keep it a secret from everybody; but forty years ago I should have had good reason for thinking that they were debating how to tie a piece of her clothes-line along the ground so that when her orphan boy came out for an armload of wood after dark, he would trip on it and send his wood flying all over the yard.

This would not be a sign that they were morally any worse than the boys who read Harper’s Young People, and who would every one die rather than do such a cruel thing, but that they had not really thought much about it. I dare say that if a crowd of the Young People’s readers, from eight to eleven years old, got together, they would choose the best boy among them to lead them on in works of kindness and usefulness; but I am very sorry to say that in the Boy’s Town such a crowd of boys would have followed the lead of the worst boy as far as they dared. Not all of them would have been bad, and the worst of them would not have been very bad; but they would have been restless and thoughtless. I am not ready to say that boys now are not wise enough to be good; but in that time and town they certainly were not. In their ideals and ambitions they were foolish, and in most of their intentions they were mischievous. Without realizing that it was evil, they meant more evil than it would have been possible for ten times as many boys to commit. If the half of it were now committed by men, the United States would be such an awful place that the decent people would all want to go and live in Canada.

I have often read in stories of boys who were fond of nature, and loved her sublimity and beauty, but I do not believe boys are ever naturally fond of nature. They want to make use of the woods and fields and rivers; and when they become men they find these aspects of nature endeared to them by association, and so they think that they were dear for their own sakes; but the taste for nature is as purely acquired as the taste for poetry or the taste for tomatoes. I have often seen boys wondering at the rainbow, but it was wonder, not admiration that moved them; and I have seen them excited by a storm, but because the storm was tremendous, not because it was beautiful.

I never knew a boy who loved flowers, or cared for their decorative qualities; if any boy had gathered flowers the other boys would have laughed at him; though boys gather every kind of thing that they think will be of the slightest use or profit. I do not believe they appreciate the perfume of flowers, and I am sure that they never mind the most noisome stench or the most loathsome sight. A dead horse will draw a crowd of small boys, who will dwell without shrinking upon the details of his putrefaction, when they would pass by a rose-tree in bloom with indifference. Hideous reptiles and insects interest them more than the loveliest form of leaf or blossom. Their senses have none of the delicacy which they acquire in after-life.

They are not cruel, that is, they have no delight in giving pain, as a general thing; but they do cruel things out of curiosity, to see how their victims will act. Still, even in this way, I never saw many cruel things done. If another boy gets hurt they laugh, because it is funny to see him hop or hear him yell; but they do not laugh because they enjoy his pain, though they do not pity him unless they think he is badly hurt; then they are scared, and try to comfort him. To bait a hook they tear an angle-worm into small pieces, or impale a grub without flinching; they go to the slaughter-house and see beeves knocked in the head without a tremor. They acquaint themselves, at any risk, with all that is going on in the great strange world they have come into; and they do not pick or choose daintily among the facts and objects they encounter. To them there is neither foul nor fair, clean nor unclean. They have not the least discomfort from being dirty or unkempt, and they certainly find no pleasure in being washed and combed and clad in fresh linen. They do not like to see other boys so; if a boy looking sleek and smooth came among the boys that my boy went with in the Boy’s Town, they made it a reproach to him, and hastened to help him spoil his clothes and his nice looks. Some of those boys had hands as hard as horn, cracked open at the knuckles and in the palms, and the crevices blackened with earth or grime; and they taught my boy to believe that he was an inferior and unmanly person, almost of the nature of a cry-baby, because his hands were not horn-like, and cracked open, and filled with dirt.

He had comrades enough and went with everybody, but till he formed that friendship with the queer fellow whom I have told of, he had no friend among the boys; and I very much doubt whether small boys understand friendship, or can feel it as they do afterwards, in its tenderness and unselfishness. In fact they have no conception of generosity. They are wasteful with what they do not want at the moment; but their instinct is to get and not to give. In the Boy’s Town, if a fellow appeared at his gate with a piece of bread spread with apple-butter and sugar on top, the other fellows flocked round him and tried to flatter him out of bites of it, though they might be at that moment almost bursting with surfeit. To get a bite was so much clear gain, and when they had wheedled one from the owner of the bread, they took as large a bite as their mouths could stretch to, and they had neither shame nor regret for their behavior, but mocked his just resentment.

The instinct of getting, of hoarding, was the motive of all their foraging; they had no other idea of property than the bounty of nature; and this was well enough as far as it went, but their impulse was not to share this bounty with others, but to keep it each for himself. They hoarded nuts and acorns, and hips and haws, and then they wasted them; and they hoarded other things merely from the greed of getting, and with no possible expectation of advantage. It might be well enough to catch bees in hollyhocks, and imprison them in underground cells with flowers for them to make honey from; but why accumulate fire-flies and even dor-bugs in small brick pens? Why heap together mussel-shells; and what did a boy expect to do with all the marbles he won? You could trade marbles for tops, but they were not money, like pins; and why were pins money? Why did the boys instinctively choose them for their currency, and pay everything with them? There were certain very rigid laws about them, and a bent pin could not be passed among the boys any more than a counterfeit coin among men. There were fixed prices; three pins would buy a bite of apple; six pins would pay your way into a circus; and so on. But where did these pins come from or go to; and what did the boys expect to do with them all? No boy knew. From time to time several boys got together and decided to keep store, and then other boys decided to buy of them with pins; but there was no calculation in the scheme; and though I have read of boys, especially in English books, who made a profit out of their fellows, I never knew any boy who had enough forecast to do it. They were too wildly improvident for anything of the kind, and if they had any virtue at all it was scorn of the vice of stinginess.

They were savages in this as in many other things, but noble savages; and they were savages in such bravery as they showed. That is, they were venturesome, but not courageous with the steadfast courage of civilized men. They fought, and then ran; and they never fought except with some real or fancied advantage. They were grave, like Indians, for the most part; and they were noisy without being gay. They seldom laughed, except at the pain or shame of some one; I think they had no other conception of a joke, though they told what they thought were funny stories, mostly about some Irishman just come across the sea, but without expecting any one to laugh. In fact, life was a very serious affair with them. They lived in a state of outlawry, in the midst of invisible terrors, and they knew no rule but that of might.

I am afraid that Harper’s Young People, or rather the mothers of Harper’s Young People, may think I am painting a very gloomy picture of the natives of the Boy’s Town; but I do not pretend that what I say of the boys of forty years ago is true of boys nowadays, especially the boys who read Harper’s Young People. I understand that these boys always like to go tidily dressed and to keep themselves neat; and that a good many of them carry canes. They would rather go to school than fish, or hunt, or swim, any day; and if one of their teachers were ever to offer them a holiday, they would reject it by a vote of the whole school. They never laugh at a fellow when he hurts himself or tears his clothes. They are noble and self-sacrificing friends, and they carry out all their undertakings. They often have very exciting adventures such as my boy and his mates never had; they rescue one another from shipwreck and Indians; and if ever they are caught in a burning building, or cast away on a desolate island, they know just exactly what to do.

But, I am ashamed to say, it was all very different in the Boy’s Town; and I might as well make a clean breast of it while I am about it. The fellows in that town were every one dreadfully lazy — that is, they never wanted to do any thing they were set to do; but if they set themselves to do anything, they would work themselves to death at it. In this alone I understand that they differed by a whole world’s difference from the boys who read Harper’s Young People. I am almost afraid to confess how little moral strength most of those long-ago boys had. A fellow would be very good at home, really and truly good, and as soon as he got out with the other fellows he would yield to almost any temptation to mischief that offered, and if none offered he would go and hunt one up, and would never stop till he had found one, and kept at it till it overcame him. The spirit of the boy’s world is not wicked, but merely savage, as I have often said in this book; it is the spirit of not knowing better. That is, the prevailing spirit is so. Here and there a boy does know better, but he is seldom a leader among boys; and usually he is ashamed of knowing better, and rarely tries to do better than the rest. He would like to please his father and mother, but he dreads the other boys and what they will say; and so the light of home fades from his ignorant soul, and leaves him in the outer darkness of the street. It may be that it must be so; but it seems a great pity; and it seems somehow as if the father and the mother might keep with him in some word, some thought, and be there to help him against himself, whenever he is weak and wavering. The trouble is that the father and mother are too often children in their way, and little more fit to be the guide than he.

But while I am owning to a good deal that seems to me lamentably wrong in the behavior of the Boy’s Town boys, I ought to remember one or two things to their credit. They had an ideal of honor, false enough as far as resenting insult went, but true in some other things. They were always respectful to women, and if a boy’s mother ever appeared among them, to interfere in behalf of her boy when they were abusing him, they felt the indecorum, but they were careful not to let her feel it. They would not have dreamed of uttering a rude or impudent word to her; they obeyed her, and they were even eager to serve her, if she asked a favor of them.

For the most part, also, they were truthful, and they only told lies when they felt obliged to do so, as when they had been in swimming and said they had not, or as when they wanted to get away from some of the boys, or did not wish the whole crowd to know what they were doing. But they were generally shamefaced in these lies; and the fellows who could lie boldly and stick to it were few. In the abstract lying was held in such contempt that if any boy said you were a liar you must strike him. That was not to be borne for an instant, any more than if he had called you a thief.

I never knew a boy who was even reputed to have stolen anything, among all the boys, high and low, who met together and played in a perfect social equality; and cheating in any game was despised. To break bounds, to invade an orchard or garden, was an adventure which might be permitted; but even this was uncommon, and most of the boys saw the affair in the true light, and would not take part in it, though it was considered fair to knock apples off a tree that hung over the fence; and if you were out walnutting you might get over the fence in extreme cases, and help yourself. If the owner of the orchard was supposed to be stingy you might do it to plague him. But the standard of honesty was chivalrously high among those boys; and I believe that if ever we have the equality in this world which so many good men have hoped for, theft will be unknown. Dishonesty was rare even among men in the Boy’s Town, because there was neither wealth nor poverty there, and all had enough and few too much.

XIX.

THE TOWN ITSELF.

Of course I do not mean to tell what the town was as men knew it, but only as it appeared to the boys who made use of its opportunities for having fun. The civic centre was the court-house, with the county buildings about it in the court-house yard; and the great thing in the court-house was the town clock. It was more important in the boys’ esteem than even the wooden woman, who had a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. Her eyes were blinded; and the boys believed that she would be as high as a house if she stood on the ground. She was above the clock, which was so far up in the air, against the summer sky which was always blue, that it made your neck ache to look up at it; and the bell was so large that once when my boy was a very little fellow, and was in the belfry with his brother, to see if they could get some of the pigeons that nested there, and the clock began to strike, it almost smote him dead with the terror of its sound, and he felt his heart quiver with the vibration of the air between the strokes. It seemed to him that he should never live to get down; and he never knew how he did get down. He could remember being in the court-house after that, one night when a wandering professor gave an exhibition in the court-room, and showed the effects of laughing-gas on such men and boys as were willing to breathe it. It was the same gas that dentists now give when they draw teeth; but it was then used to make people merry and truthful, to make them laugh and say just what they thought. My boy was too young to know whether it did either; but he was exactly the right age, when on another night there was a large picture of Death on a Pale Horse shown, to be harrowed to the bottom of his soul by its ghastliness. When he was much older, his father urged him to go to the court-house and hear the great Corwin, whose Mexican War speech he had learned so much of by heart, arguing a case; but the boy was too bashful to go in when he got to the door, and came back and reported that he was afraid they would make him swear. He was sometimes in the court-house yard, at elections and celebrations; and once he came from school at recess with some other boys and explored the region of the jail. Two or three prisoners were at the window, and they talked to the boys and joked; and the boys ran off again and played; and the prisoners remained like unreal things in my boy’s fancy. Perhaps if it were not for this unreality which misery puts on for the happy when it is out of sight, no one could be happy in a world where there is so much misery.

The school was that first one which he went to, in the basement of a church. It was the Episcopal church, and he struggled for some meaning in the word Episcopal; he knew that the Seceder church was called so because the spire was cedar; a boy who went to Sunday-school there told him so. There was a Methodist church, where his grandfather went; and a Catholic church, where that awful figure on the cross was. No doubt there were other churches; but he had nothing to do with them.

Besides his grandfather’s drug and book store, there was another drug store, and there were eight or ten dry-goods stores, where every spring the boys were taken to be fitted with new straw hats; but the store that they knew best was a toy-store near the market-house, kept by a quaint old German, where they bought their marbles and tops and Jew’s-harps. The store had a high, sharp gable to the street, and showed its timbers through the roughcast of its wall, which was sprinkled with broken glass that glistened in the sun. After a while the building disappeared like a scene shifted at the theatre, and it was probably torn down. Then the boys found another toy store; but they considered the dealer mean; he asked very high prices, and he said, when a boy hung back from buying a thing that it was “a very superior article,” and the boys had that for a by-word, and they holloed it at the storekeeper’s boy when they wanted to plague him. There were two bakeries, and at the American bakery there were small sponge-cakes, which were the nicest cakes in the world, for a cent apiece; at the Dutch bakery there were pretzels, with salt and ashes sticking on them, that the Dutch boys liked; but the American boys made fun of them, and the bread at the Dutch bakery was always sour. There were four or five taverns where drink was always sold and drunkards often to be seen; and there was one Dutch tavern, but the Dutchmen generally went to the brewery for their beer, and drank it there. The boys went to the brewery, to get yeast for their mothers; and they liked to linger among the great heaps of malt, and the huge vats wreathed in steam, and sending out a pleasant smell. The floors were always wet, and the fat, pale Dutchmen, working about in the vapory air, never spoke to the boys, who were afraid of them. They took a boy’s bottle and filled it with foaming yeast, and then took his cent, all in a silence so oppressive that he scarcely dared to breathe. My boy wondered where they kept the boy they were bringing up to drink beer; but it would have been impossible to ask. The brewery overlooked the river, and you could see the south side of the bridge from its back windows, and that was very strange. It was just like the picture of the bridge in “Howe’s History of Ohio,” and that made it seem like a bridge in some far-off country.

There were two fire-engines in the Boy’s Town; but there seemed to be something always the matter with them, so that they would not work, if there was a fire. When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulled them up through the town to the Basin bank, and practised with them against the roofs and fronts of the pork-houses. It was almost as good as a muster to see the firemen in their red shirts and black trousers, dragging the engine at a run, two and two together, one on each side of the rope. My boy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he never dared; and the foreman of the Neptune, which was the larger and feebler of the engines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyes that he felt as if he could not be just a common human being. He was a storekeeper, to begin with, and he was tall and slim, and his black trousers fitted him like a glove; he had a patent-leather helmet, and a brass speaking-trumpet, and he gave all his orders through this. It did not make any difference how close he was to the men, he shouted everything through the trumpet; and when they manned the breaks and began to pump, he roared at them, “Down on her, down on her, boys!” so that you would have thought the Neptune could put out the world if it was burning up. Instead of that there was usually a feeble splutter from the nozzle, and sometimes none at all, even if the hose did not break; it was fun to see the hose break. The Neptune was a favorite with the boys, though they believed that the Tremont could squirt farther, and they had a belief in its quiet efficiency which was fostered by its reticence in public. It was small and black, but the Neptune was large, and painted of a gay color lit up with gilding that sent the blood leaping through a boy’s veins. The boys knew the Neptune was out of order, but they were always expecting it would come right, and in the meantime they felt that it was an honor to the town, and they followed it as proudly back to the engine-house after one of its magnificent failures as if it had been a magnificent success. The boys were always making magnificent failures themselves, and they could feel for the Neptune.

“THE ARTIST SEEMED SATISFIED HIMSELF.”

Before the Hydraulic was opened, the pork-houses were the chief public attraction to the boys, and they haunted them, with a thrilling interest in the mysteries of pork-packing which none of their sensibilities revolted from. Afterwards, the cotton-mills, which were rather small brick factories, though they looked so large to the boys, eclipsed the pork-house in their regard. They were all wild to work in the mills at first, and they thought it a hardship that their fathers would not let them leave school and do it. Some few of the fellows that my boy knew did get to work in the mills; and one of them got part of his finger taken off in the machinery; it was thought a distinction among the boys, and something like having been in war. My boy’s brother was so crazy to try mill-life that he was allowed to do so for a few weeks; but a few weeks were enough of it, and pretty soon the feeling about the mills all quieted down, and the boys contented themselves with their flumes and their wheel-pits, and the head-gates that let the water in on the wheels; sometimes you could find fish under the wheels when the mills were not running. The mill-doors all had “No Admittance” painted on them; and the mere sight of the forbidding words would have been enough to keep my boy away, for he had a great awe of any sort of authority; but once he went into the mill to see his brother; and another time he and some other boys got into an empty mill, where they found a painter on an upper floor painting a panorama of “Paradise Lost.” This masterpiece must have been several hundred feet long; the boys disputed whether it would reach to the sawmill they could see from the windows if it was stretched out; and my boy was surprised by the effects which the painter got out of some strips of tinsel which he was attaching to the scenery of the lake of fire and brimstone at different points. The artist seemed satisfied himself with this simple means of suggesting the gleam of infernal fires. He walked off to a distance to get it in perspective, and the boys ventured so close to the paints which he had standing about by the bucketful that it seemed as if he must surely hollo at them. But he did not say anything or seem to remember that they were there. They formed such a favorable opinion of him and his art that they decided to have a panorama; but it never came to anything. In the first place they could not get the paints, let alone the muslin.

Besides the bridge, the school-houses, the court-house and jail, the port-houses and the mills, there was only one other public edifice in their town that concerned the boys, or that they could use in accomplishing the objects of their life, and this was the hall that was built while my boy could remember its rise, for public amusements. It was in this hall that he first saw a play, and then saw so many plays, for he went to the theatre every night; but for a long time it seemed to be devoted to the purposes of mesmerism. A professor highly skilled in that science, which has reappeared in these days under the name of hypnotism, made a sojourn of some weeks in the town, and besides teaching it to classes of learners who wished to practise it, gave nightly displays of its wonders. He mesmerized numbers of the boys, and made them do or think whatever he said. He would give a boy a cane, and then tell him it was a snake, and the boy would throw it away like lightning. He would get a lot of boys, and mount them on chairs, and then tell them that they were at a horse-race, and the boys would gallop astride of their chairs round and round till he stopped them. Sometimes he would scare them almost to death, with a thunder-storm that he said was coming on; at other times he would make them go in swimming, on the dusty floor, and they would swim all over it in their best clothes, and would think they were in the river.

There were some people who did not believe in the professor, or the boys either. One of these people was an officer of the army who was staying a while in the Boy’s Town, and perhaps had something to do with recruiting troops for the Mexican War. He came to the lecture one night, and remained with others who lingered after it was over to speak with the professor. My boy was there with his father, and it seemed to him that the officer smiled mockingly at the professor; angry words passed, and then the officer struck out at the professor. In an instant the professor put up both his fists; they flashed towards the officer’s forehead, and the officer tumbled backwards. The boy could hardly believe it had happened. It seemed unreal, and of the dreamlike quality that so many facts in a child’s bewildered life are of.

There were very few places of amusement or entertainment in the Boy’s Town that were within a boy’s reach. There were at least a dozen places where a man could get whiskey, but only one where he could get ice-cream, and the boys were mostly too poor and too shy to visit this resort. But there used to be a pleasure-garden on the outskirts of the town, which my boy remembered visiting when he was a very little fellow, with his brother. There were two large old mulberry-trees in this garden, and one bore white mulberries and the other black mulberries, and when you had paid your fip to come in, you could eat all the mulberries you wanted, for nothing. There was a tame crow that my boy understood could talk if it liked; but it only ran after him, and tried to bite his legs. Besides this attraction, there was a labyrinth, or puzzle, as the boys called it, of paths that wound in and out among bushes, so that when you got inside you were lucky if you could find your way out. My boy, though he had hold of his brother’s hand, did not expect to get out; he expected to perish in that labyrinth, and he had some notion that his end would be hastened by the tame crow. His first visit to the pleasure-garden was his last; and it passed so wholly out of his consciousness that he never knew what became of it any more than if it had been taken up into the clouds.

He tasted ice-cream there for the first time, and had his doubts about it, though a sherry-glass full of it cost a fip, and it ought to have been good for such a sum as that. Later in life, he sometimes went to the saloon where it was sold in the town, and bashfully gasped out a demand for a glass, and ate it in some sort of chilly back-parlor. But the boys in that town, if they cared for such luxuries, did not miss them much, and their lives were full of such vivid interests arising from the woods and waters all about them that they did not need public amusements other than those which chance and custom afforded them. I have tried to give some notion of the pleasure they got out of the daily arrival of the packet in the Canal Basin; and it would be very unjust if I failed to celebrate the omnibus which was put on in place of the old-fashioned stage-coaches between the Boy’s Town and Cincinnati. I dare say it was of the size of the ordinary city omnibus, but it looked as large to the boys then as a Pullman car would look to a boy now; and they assembled for its arrivals and departures with a thrill of civic pride such as hardly any other fact of the place could impart.

My boy remembered coming from Cincinnati in the stage when he was so young that it must have been when he first came to the Boy’s Town. The distance was twenty miles, and the stage made it in four hours. It was this furious speed which gave the child his earliest illusion of trees and fences racing by while the stage seemed to stand still. Several times after that he made the journey with his father, seeming to have been gone a long age before he got back, and always so homesick that he never had any appetite at the tavern where the stage stopped for dinner midway. When it started back, he thought it would never get off the city pave and out from between its lines of houses into the free country. The boys always called Cincinnati “The City.” They supposed it was the only city in the world.

“MY BOY REMEMBERS COMING FROM CINCINNATI IN THE STAGE.”

Of course there was a whole state of things in the Boy’s Town that the boys never knew of, or only knew by mistaken rumors and distorted glimpses. They had little idea of its politics, or commerce, or religion that was not wrong, and they only concerned themselves with persons and places so far as they expected to make use of them. But as they could make very little use of grown persons or public places, they kept away from them, and the Boy’s Town was, for the most part, an affair of water-courses, and fields and woods, and the streets before the houses, and the alleys behind them.

Nearly all the houses had vegetable gardens, and some of them had flower-gardens that appeared princelier pleasaunces to my boy than he has ever seen since in Europe or America. Very likely they were not so vast or so splendid as they looked to him then; but one of them at least had beds of tulips and nasturtiums, and borders of flags and pinks, with clumps of tiger-lilies and hollyhocks; and in the grassy yard beside it there were high bushes full of snow-balls, and rose-trees with moss-roses on them. In this superb domain there were two summer-houses and a shed where bee-hives stood; at the end of the garden was a bath-house, and you could have a shower-bath, if you were of a mind to bring the water for it from the pump in the barn-yard. But this was all on a scale of unequalled magnificence; and most of the houses, which were mostly of wood, just had a good big yard with plum-trees and cherry-trees in it; and a vegetable garden at one side that the boy hated to weed. My boy’s grandfather had a large and beautiful garden, with long arbors of grapes in it, that the old gentleman trimmed and cared for himself. They were delicious grapes; and there were black currants, which the grandfather liked, because he had liked them when he was a boy himself in the old country, but which no Boy’s Town boy could have been induced to take as a gracious gift. Another boy had a father that had a green-house; he was a boy that would let you pull pie-plant in the garden, and would bring out sugar to let you eat it with in the green-house. His cleverness was rewarded when his father was elected governor of the state; and what made it so splendid was that his father was a Whig.

Every house, whether it had a flower-garden or not, had a woodshed, which was the place where a boy mostly received his friends, and made his kites and wagons, and laid his plots and plans for all the failures of his life. The other boys waited in the woodshed when he went in to ask his mother whether he might do this or that, or go somewhere. A boy always wanted to have a stove in the woodshed and fit it up for himself, but his mother would not let him, because he would have been certain to set the house on fire.

Each fellow knew the inside of his own house tolerably well, but seldom the inside of another fellow’s house, and he knew the back-yard better than the front-yard. If he entered the house of a friend at all, it was to wait for him by the kitchen-door, or to get up to the garret with him by the kitchen-stairs. If he sometimes, and by some rare mischance, found himself in the living-rooms, or the parlor, he was very unhappy, and anxious to get out. Yet those interiors were not of an oppressive grandeur, and one was much like another. The parlor had what was called a flowered-carpet or gay pattern of ingrain on its floor, and the other rooms had rag-carpets, woven by some woman who had a loom for the work, and dyed at home with such native tints as butternut and foreign colors as logwood. The rooms were all heated with fireplaces, where wood was burned, and coal was never seen. They were lit at night with tallow-candles, which were mostly made by the housewife herself, or by lard-oil glass lamps. In the winter the oil would get so stiff with the cold that it had to be thawed out at the fire before the lamp would burn. There was no such thing as a hot-air furnace known; and the fire on the hearth was kept over from day to day all winter long, by covering a log at night with ashes; in the morning it would be a bed of coals. There were no fires in bedrooms, or at least not in a boy’s bedroom, and sometimes he had to break the ice in his pitcher before he could wash; it did not take him very long to dress.

I have said that they burned wood for heating in the Boy’s Town; but my boy could remember one winter when they burned ears of corn in the printing-office stove because it was cheaper. I believe they still sometimes burn corn in the West, when they are too far from a market to sell it at a paying price; but it always seems a sin and a shame that in a state pretending to be civilized food should ever be destroyed when so many are hungry. When one hears of such things one would almost think that boys could make a better state than this of the men.

XX.

TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.

In the Boy’s Town a great many men gave nearly their whole time to the affairs of the state, and did hardly anything but talk politics all day; they even sat up late at night to do it. Among these politicians the Whigs were sacred in my boy’s eyes, but the Democrats appeared like enemies of the human race; and one of the strangest things that ever happened to him was to find his father associating with men who came out of the Democratic party at the time he left the Whig party, and joining with them in a common cause against both. But when he understood what a good cause it was, and came to sing songs against slavery, he was reconciled, though he still regarded the Whig politicians as chief among the great ones, if not the good ones, of the earth. When he passed one of them on the street, he held his breath for awe till he got by, which was not always so very soon, for sometimes a Whig statesman wanted the whole sidewalk to himself, and it was hard to get by him. There were other people in that town who wanted the whole sidewalk, and these were the professional drunkards, whom the boys regarded as the keystones, if not corner-stones, of the social edifice. There were three or four of them, and the boys held them all, rich and poor alike, in a deep interest, if not respect, as persons of peculiar distinction. I do not think any boy realized the tragedy of those hopeless, wasted, slavish lives. The boys followed the wretched creatures, at a safe distance, and plagued them, and ran whenever one of them turned and threatened them. That was because the boys had not the experience to enable them to think rightly, or to think at all about such things, or to know what images of perdition they had before their eyes; and when they followed them and teased them, they did not know they were joining like fiends in the torment of lost souls. Some of the town-drunkards were the outcasts of good homes, which they had desolated, and some had merely destroyed in themselves that hope of any home which is the light of heaven in every human heart; but from time to time a good man held out a helping hand to one of them, and gave him the shelter of his roof, and tried to reclaim him. Then the boys saw him going about the streets, pale and tremulous, in a second-hand suit of his benefactor’s clothes, and fighting hard against the tempter that beset him on every side in that town; and then some day they saw him dead drunk in a fence corner; and they did not understand how seven devils worse than the first had entered in the place which had been swept and garnished for them.

Besides the town-drunkards there were other persons in whom the boys were interested, like the two or three dandies, whom their splendor in dress had given a public importance in a community of carelessly dressed men. Then there were certain genteel loafers, young men of good families, who hung about the principal hotel, and whom the boys believed to be fighters of singular prowess. Far below these in the social scale, the boys had yet other heroes, such as the Dumb Negro and his family. Between these and the white people, among whom the boys knew of no distinctions, they were aware that there was an impassable gulf; and it would not be easy to give a notion of just the sort of consideration in which they held them. But they held the Dumb Negro himself in almost superstitious regard as one who, though a deaf-mute, knew everything that was going on, and could make you understand anything he wished. He was, in fact, a master of most eloquent pantomime; he had gestures that could not be mistaken, and he had a graphic dumb-show for persons and occupations and experiences that was delightfully vivid. For a dentist, he gave an upward twist of the hand from his jaw, and uttered a howl which left no doubt that he meant tooth-pulling; and for what would happen to a boy if he kept on misbehaving, he crossed his fingers before his face and looked through them in a way that brought the jail-window clearly before the eyes of the offender.

The boys knew vaguely that his family helped runaway slaves on their way North, and in a community that was for the most part bitterly pro-slavery these negroes were held in a sort of respect for their courageous fidelity to their race. The men were swarthy, handsome fellows, not much darker than Spaniards, and they were so little afraid of the chances which were often such fatal mischances to colored people in that day that one of them travelled through the South, and passed himself in very good company as a Cherokee Indian of rank and education.

As far as the boys knew, the civic affairs of the place were transacted entirely by two constables. Of mayors and magistrates, such as there must have been, they knew nothing, and they had not the least notion what the Whigs whom they were always trying to elect were to do when they got into office. They knew that the constables were both Democrats, but, if they thought at all about the fact, they thought their Democracy the natural outcome of their dark constabulary nature, and by no means imagined that they were constables because they were Democrats. The worse of the two, or the more merciless, was also the town-crier, whose office is now not anywhere known in America, I believe; though I heard a town-crier in a Swiss village not many years ago. In the Boy’s Town the crier carried a good-sized bell; when he started out he rang it till he reached the street corner, and then he stopped, and began some such proclamation as, “O, yes! O, yes! O, yes! There will be an auction this evening at early candle-light, at Brown & Robinson’s store! Dry goods, boots and shoes, hats and caps, hardware, queen’s ware, and so forth, and so forth. Richard Roe, Auctioneer! Come one, come all, come everybody!” Then the crier rang his bell, and went on to the next corner, where he repeated his proclamation. After a while, the constable got a deputy to whom he made over his business of town-crier. This deputy was no other than that reckless boy who used to run out from the printing-office and shoot the turtle-doves; and he decorated his proclamation with quips and quirks of his own invention, and with personal allusions to his employer, who was auctioneer as well as constable. But though he was hail-fellow with every boy in town, and although every boy rejoiced in his impudence, he was so panoplied in the awfulness of his relation to the constabulary functions that, however remote it was, no boy would have thought of trifling with him when he was on duty. If ever a boy holloed something at him when he was out with his crier’s bell, he turned and ran as hard as he could, and as if from the constable himself.

The boys knew just one other official, and that was the gauger, whom they watched at a respectful distance, when they found him employed with his mysterious instruments gauging the whiskey in the long rows of barrels on the Basin bank. They did not know what the process was, and I own that I do not know to this day what it was. My boy watched him with the rest, and once he ventured upon a bold and reckless act. He had so long heard that it was whiskey which made people drunk that at last the notion came to have an irresistible fascination for him, and he determined to risk everything, even life itself, to know what whiskey was like. As soon as the gauger had left them, he ran up to one of the barrels where he had seen a few drops fall from his instrument when he lifted it from the bunghole, and plunged the tip of his little finger into the whiskey, and then put it to his tongue. He expected to become drunk instantly, if not to end a town-drunkard there on the spot; but the whiskey only tasted very disgusting; and he was able to get home without help. Still, I would not advise any other boy to run the risk he took in this desperate experiment.

There was a time not long after that when he really did get drunk, but it was not with whiskey. One morning after a rain, when the boys were having fun in one of those open canal-boats with the loose planks which the over-night shower had set afloat, a fellow came up and said he had got some tobacco that was the best kind to learn to chew with. Every boy who expected to be anything in the world expected to chew tobacco; for all the packet-drivers chewed; and it seemed to my boy that his father and grandfather and uncles were about the only people who did not chew. If they had only smoked, it would have been something, but they did not even smoke; and the boy felt that he had a long arrears of manliness to bring up, and that he should have to retrieve his family in spite of itself from the shame of not using tobacco in any form. He knew that his father abhorred it, but he had never been explicitly forbidden to smoke or chew, for his father seldom forbade him anything explicitly, and he gave himself such freedom of choice in the matter that when the boy with the tobacco began to offer it around, he judged it right to take a chew with the rest. The boy said it was a peculiar kind of tobacco, and was known as molasses-tobacco because it was so sweet. The other boys did not ask how he came to know its name, or where he got it; boys never ask anything that it would be well for them to know; but they accepted his theory, and his further statement that it was of a mildness singularly adapted to learners, without misgiving. The boy was himself chewing vigorously on a large quid, and launching the juice from his lips right and left like a grown person; and my boy took as large a bite as his benefactor bade him. He found it as sweet as he had been told it was, and he acknowledged the aptness of its name of molasses-tobacco; it seemed to him a golden opportunity to acquire a noble habit on easy terms. He let the quid rest in his cheek as he had seen men do, when he was not crushing it between his teeth, and for some moments he poled his plank up and down the canal-boat with a sense of triumph that nothing marred. Then, all of a sudden, he began to feel pale. The boat seemed to be going round, and the sky wheeling overhead; the sun was dodging about very strangely. Drops of sweat burst from the boy’s forehead; he let fall his pole, and said that he thought he would go home. The fellow who gave him the tobacco began to laugh, and the other fellows to mock, but my boy did not mind them. Somehow, he did not know how, he got out of the canal-boat and started homeward; but at every step the ground rose as high as his knees before him, and then when he got his foot high enough, and began to put it down, the ground was not there. He was deathly sick, as he reeled and staggered on, and when he reached home, and showed himself white and haggard to his frightened mother, he had scarcely strength to gasp out a confession of his attempt to retrieve the family honor by learning to chew tobacco. In another moment nature came to his relief, and then he fell into a deep sleep which lasted the whole afternoon, so that it seemed to him the next day when he woke up, glad to find himself alive, if not so very lively. Perhaps he had swallowed some of the poisonous juice of the tobacco; perhaps it had acted upon his brain without that. His father made no very close inquiry into the facts, and he did not forbid him the use of tobacco. It was not necessary; in that one little experiment he had got enough for a whole lifetime. It shows that, after all, a boy is not so hard to satisfy in everything.

There were some people who believed that tobacco would keep off the fever-and-ague, which was so common then in that country, or at any rate that it was good for the toothache. In spite of the tobacco, there were few houses where ague was not a familiar guest, however unwelcome. If the family was large, there was usually a chill every day; one had it one day, and another the next, so that there was no lapse. This was the case in my boy’s family, after they moved to the Faulkner house, which was near the Basin and its water-soaked banks; but they accepted the ague as something quite in the course of nature, and duly broke it up with quinine. Some of the boys had chills at school; and sometimes, after they had been in swimming, they would wait round on the bank till a fellow had his chill out, and then they would all go off together and forget about it. The next day that fellow would be as well as any one; the third day his chill would come on again, but he did not allow it to interfere with his business or pleasure, and after a while the ague would seem to get tired of it, and give up altogether. That strange earth-spirit who was my boy’s friend simply beat the ague, as it were, on its own ground. He preferred a sunny spot to have his chill in, a cosy fence-corner or a warm back door-step, or the like; but as for the fever that followed the chill, he took no account of it whatever, or at least made no provision for it.

The miasm which must have filled the air of the place from so many natural and artificial bodies of fresh water showed itself in low fevers, which were not so common as ague, but common enough. The only long sickness that my boy could remember was intermittent fever, which seemed to last many weeks, and which was a kind of bewilderment rather than a torment. When it was beginning he appeared to glide down the stairs at school without touching the steps with his feet, and afterwards his chief trouble was in not knowing, when he slept, whether he had really been asleep or not. But there was rich compensation for this mild suffering in the affectionate petting which a sick boy always gets from his mother when his malady takes him from his rough little world and gives him back helpless to her tender arms again. Then she makes everything in the house yield to him; none of the others are allowed to tease him or cross him in the slightest thing. They have to walk lightly; and when he is going to sleep, if they come into the room, they have got to speak in a whisper. She sits by his bed and fans him; she smooths the pillow and turns its cool side up under his hot and aching head; she cooks dainty dishes to tempt his sick appetite, and brings them to him herself. She is so good and kind and loving that he cannot help having some sense of it all, and feeling how much better she is than anything on earth. His little ruffian world drifts far away from him. He hears the yells and shouts of the boys in the street without a pang of envy or longing; in his weakness, his helplessness, he becomes a gentle and innocent child again; and heaven descends to him out of his mother’s heart.

XXI.

LAST DAYS.

I have already told that my boy’s father would not support General Taylor, the Whig candidate for President, because he believed him, as the hero of a pro-slavery war, to be a friend of slavery. At this time he had a large family of little children, and he had got nothing beyond a comfortable living from the newspaper which he had published for eight years; if he must give that up, he must begin life anew heavily burdened. Perhaps he thought it need not come to his giving up his paper, that somehow affairs might change. But his newspaper would have gone to nothing in his hands if he had tried to publish it as a Free Soil paper after the election of the Whig candidate; so he sold it, and began to cast about for some other business; how anxiously, my boy was too young to know. He only felt the relief that the whole family felt for a while at getting out of the printing business; the boys wanted to go into almost anything else: the drug-business, or farming, or a paper-mill, or anything. The elder brother knew all the anxiety of the time, and shared it fully with the mother, whose acquiescence in what the father thought right was more than patient; she abode courageously in the suspense, the uncertainty of the time; and she hoped for something from the father’s endeavors in the different ways he turned. At one time there was much talk in the family of using the fibre of a common weed in making paper, which he thought he could introduce; perhaps it was the milk-weed; but he could not manage it, somehow; and after a year of inaction he decided to go into another newspaper. By this time the boys had made their peace with the printing business, and the father had made his with the Whig party. He had done what it must have been harder to do than to stand out against it; he had publicly owned that he was mistaken in regard to Taylor, who had not become the tool of the slaveholders, but had obeyed the highest instincts of the party and served the interests of freedom, though he was himself a slaveholder and the hero of an unjust war.

It was then too late, however, for the father to have got back his old newspaper, even if he had wished, and the children heard, with the elation that novelty brings to all children, old or young, that they were going away from the Boy’s Town, to live in another place. It was a much larger place and was even considered a city, though it was not comparable to Cincinnati, so long the only known city in the world.

My boy was twelve years old by that time, and was already a swift compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case in setting type on Taylor’s inaugural message. But what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of “The Old Man” from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the printing-office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could remember learning to read; and in after-life he could not come within smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid paper, of a printing-office without that tender swelling of the heart which so fondly responds to any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his boyhood, almost his infancy came back to him in it. He now looked forward eagerly to helping on the new paper, and somewhat proudly to living in the larger place the family were going to. The moment it was decided he began to tell the boys that he was going to live in a city, and he felt that it gave him distinction. He had nothing but joy in it, and he did not dream that as the time drew near it could be sorrow. But when it came at last, and he was to leave the house, the town, the boys, he found himself deathly homesick. The parting days were days of gloom; the parting was an anguish of bitter tears. Nothing consoled him but the fact that they were going all the way to the new place in a canal-boat, which his father chartered for the trip. My boy and his brother had once gone to Cincinnati in a canal-boat, with a friendly captain of their acquaintance, and, though they were both put to sleep in a berth so narrow that when they turned they fell out on the floor, the glory of the adventure remained with him, and he could have thought of nothing more delightful than such another voyage. The household goods were piled up in the middle of the boat, and the family had a cabin forward, which seemed immense to the children. They played in it and ran races up and down the long canal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimes put their chairs and sat to admire the scenery.

As my boy could remember very few incidents of this voyage afterwards, I dare say he spent a great part of it with his face in a book, and was aware of the landscape only from time to time when he lifted his eyes from the story he was reading. That was apt to be the way with him; and before he left the Boy’s Town the world within claimed him more and more. He ceased to be that eager comrade he had once been; sometimes he left his book with a sigh; and he saw much of the outer world through a veil of fancies quivering like an autumn haze between him and its realities, softening their harsh outlines, and giving them a fairy coloring. I think he would sometimes have been better employed in looking directly at them; but he had to live his own life, and I cannot live it over for him. The season was the one of all others best fitted to win him to the earth, and in a measure it did. It was spring, and along the tow-path strutted the large, glossy blackbirds which had just come back, and made the boys sick with longing to kill them, they offered such good shots. But the boys had no powder with them, and at any rate the captain would not have stopped his boat, which was rushing on at the rate of two miles an hour, to let them pick up a bird, if they had hit it. They were sufficiently provisioned without the game, however; the mother had baked bread, and boiled a ham, and provided sugar-cakes in recognition of the holiday character of the voyage, and they had the use of the boat cooking-stove for their tea and coffee. The boys had to content themselves with such sense of adventure as they could get out of going ashore when the boat was passing through the locks, or staying aboard and seeing the water burst and plunge in around the boat. They had often watched this thrilling sight at the First Lock, but it had a novel interest now. As their boat approached the lock, the lower gates were pushed open by men who set their breasts to the long sweeps or handles of the gates, and when the boat was fairly inside of the stone-walled lock they were closed behind her. Then the upper gates, which opened against the dull current, and were kept shut by its pressure, were opened a little, and the waters rushed and roared into the lock, and began to lift the boat. The gates were opened wider and wider, till the waters poured a heavy cataract into the lock, where the boat tossed on their increasing volume, and at last calmed themselves to the level within. Then the boat passed out through the upper gates, on even water, and the voyage to the next lock began. At first it was rather awful, and the little children were always afraid when they came to a lock, but the boys enjoyed it after the first time. They would have liked to take turns driving the pair of horses that drew the boat, but it seemed too bold a wish, and I think they never proposed it; they did not ask, either, to relieve the man at the helm.

They arrived safely at their journey’s end, without any sort of accident. They had made the whole forty miles in less than two days, and were all as well as when they started, without having suffered for a moment from seasickness. The boat drew up at the tow-path just before the stable belonging to the house which the father had already taken, and the whole family at once began helping the crew put the things ashore. The boys thought it would have been a splendid stable to keep the pony in, only they had sold the pony; but they saw in an instant that it would do for a circus as soon as they could get acquainted with enough boys to have one.

The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meeting the boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for his standing among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did not realize at first how much he missed the Boy’s Town and all the familiar fellowships there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then he began to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a divided love. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, and wherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, at the end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-long mates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom of every pleasure and excitement. There were many excitements, not the least of which was the excitement of helping get out a tri-weekly and then a daily newspaper, instead of the weekly that his father had published in the Boy’s Town. Then that dear friend of his brother and himself, the apprentice who knew all about “Monte Cristo,” came to work with them and live with them again, and that was a great deal; but he did not bring the Boy’s Town with him; and when they each began to write a new historical romance, the thought of the beloved scenes amidst which they had planned their first was a pang that nothing could assuage. During the summer the cholera came; the milkman, though naturally a cheerful person, said that the people around where he lived were dying off like flies; and the funerals, three and four, five and six, ten and twelve a day, passed before the door; and all the brooding horror of the pestilence sank deep into the boy’s morbid soul. Then he fell sick of the cholera himself; and, though it was a mild attack, he lay in the Valley of the Shadow of Death while it lasted, and waited the worst with such terror that when he kept asking her if he should get well, his mother tried to reason with him, and to coax him out of his fear. Was he afraid to die, she asked him, when he knew that heaven was so much better, and he would be in the care of such love as never could come to him on earth? He could only gasp back that he was afraid to die; and she could only turn from reconciling him with the other world to assuring him that he was in no danger of leaving this.

I sometimes think that if parents would deal rightly and truly with children about death from the beginning, some of the fear of it might be taken away. It seems to me that it is partly because death is hushed up and ignored between them that it rests such a burden on the soul; but if children were told as soon as they are old enough that death is a part of nature, and not a calamitous accident, they would be somewhat strengthened to meet it. My boy had been taught that this world was only an illusion, a shadow thrown from the real world beyond; and no doubt his father and mother believed what they taught him; but he had always seen them anxious to keep the illusion, and in his turn he clung to the vain shadow with all the force of his being.

He got well of the cholera, but not of the homesickness, and after a while he was allowed to revisit the Boy’s Town. It could only have been three or four months after he had left it, but it already seemed a very long time; and he figured himself returning as stage-heroes do to the scenes of their childhood, after an absence of some fifteen years. He fancied that if the boys did not find him grown, they would find him somehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with the light accumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay with his grandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was very fond of her, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house. He must have gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept no record of the fact, and afterwards he knew only of having arrived, and of searching about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may have been at school; at any rate he found very few of them; and with them he was certainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him with a kind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once in the old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but he felt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt in the boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why; only it ached. When he went up from his grandmother’s to look at the Faulkner house, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could not bear the sight of it. There were other people living in it; strange voices sounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from the windows.

He came back to his grandmother’s, bruised and defeated, and spent the morning indoors reading. After dinner he went out again, and hunted up that queer earth-spirit who had been so long and closely his only friend. He at least was not changed; he was as unwashed and as unkempt as ever; but he seemed shy of my poor boy. He had probably never been shaken hands with in his life before; he dropped my boy’s hand; and they stood looking at each other, not knowing what to say. My boy had on his best clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy’s Town boys with the full splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid, but his presence altogether was too much for the earth-spirit, and he vanished out of his consciousness like an apparition.

After school was out in the afternoon, he met more of the boys, but none of them knew just what to do with him. The place that he had once had in their lives was filled; he was an outsider, who might be suffered among them, but he was no longer of them. He did not understand this at once, nor well know what hurt him. But something was gone that could not be called back, something lost that could not be found.

At tea-time his grandfather came home and gravely made him welcome; the uncle who was staying with them was jovially kind. But a heavy homesickness weighed down the child’s heart, which now turned from the Boy’s Town as longingly as it had turned towards it before.

They all knelt down with the grandfather before they went to the table. There had been a good many deaths from cholera during the day, and the grandfather prayed for grace and help amidst the pestilence that walketh in darkness and wasteth at noonday in such a way that the boy felt there would be very little of either for him unless he got home at once. All through the meal that followed he was trying to find the courage to say that he must go home. When he managed to say it, his grandmother and aunt tried to comfort and coax him, and his uncle tried to shame him, out of his homesickness, to joke it off, to make him laugh. But his grandfather’s tender heart was moved. He could not endure the child’s mute misery; he said he must go home if he wished.

In half an hour the boy was on the canal-packet speeding homeward at the highest pace of the three-horse team, and the Boy’s Town was out of sight. He could not sleep for excitement that night, and he came and spent the time talking on quite equal terms with the steersman, one of the canalers whom he had admired afar in earlier and simpler days. He found him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tell him funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. The rudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsy wooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single night the distance which the boy’s family had been nearly two days in travelling when they moved away from the Boy’s Town.

He arrived home for breakfast a travelled and experienced person, and wholly cured of that longing for his former home that had tormented him before he revisited its scenes. He now fully gave himself up to his new environment, and looked forward and not backward. I do not mean to say that he ceased to love the Boy’s Town; that he could not do and never did. But he became more and more aware that the past was gone from him forever, and that he could not return to it. He did not forget it, but cherished its memories the more fondly for that reason.

There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope would easily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he had been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a little sinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are some great fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that they are the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys, but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully rounded out with all a boy’s interests and pleasures, and he is glad that his lines were cast in the Boy’s Town; but he knows, or believes he knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in him then; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because his home in it was happy. The town was small and the boys there were hemmed in by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was large with vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenely bright with a father’s reason and warm with a mother’s love.

THE END

THE QUALITY OF MERCY

CONTENTS

PART FIRST.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

PART SECOND.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

PART THIRD.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

PART FIRST.

I.

Northwick’s man met him at the station with the cutter. The train was a little late, and Elbridge was a little early; after a few moments of formal waiting, he began to walk the clipped horses up and down the street. As they walked they sent those quivers and thrills over their thin coats which horses can give at will; they moved their heads up and down, slowly and easily, and made their bells jangle noisily together; the bursts of sound evoked by their firm and nervous pace died back in showers and falling drops of music. All the time Elbridge swore at them affectionately, with the unconscious profanity of the rustic Yankee whose lot has been much cast with horses. In the halts he made at each return to the station, he let his blasphemies bubble sociably from him in response to the friendly imprecations of the three or four other drivers who were waiting for the train; they had apparently no other parlance. The drivers of the hotel ‘bus and of the local express wagon were particular friends; they gave each other to perdition at every other word; a growing boy, who had come to meet Mr. Gerrish, the merchant, with the family sleigh, made himself a fountain of meaningless maledictions; the public hackman, who admired Elbridge almost as much as he respected Elbridge’s horses (they were really Northwick’s, but the professional convention was that they were Elbridge’s), clothed them with fond curses as with a garment. He was himself, more literally speaking, clothed in an old ulster, much frayed about the wrists and skirts, and polished across the middle of the back by rubbing against counters and window-sills. He was bearded like a patriarch, and he wore a rusty fur cap pulled down over his ears, though it was not very cold; its peak rested on the point of his nose, so that he had to throw his head far back to get Elbridge in the field of his vision. Elbridge had on a high hat, and was smoothly buttoned to his throat in a plain coachman’s coat of black; Northwick had never cared to have him make a closer approach to a livery; and it is doubtful if Elbridge would have done it if he had asked or ordered it of him. He deferred to Northwick in a measure as the owner of his horses, but he did not defer to him in any other quality.

“Say, Elbridge, when you goin’ to give me that old hat o’ your’n?” asked the hackman in a shout that would have reached Elbridge if he had been half a mile off instead of half a rod.

“What do you want of another second-hand hat, you ——  —— old fool, you?” asked Elbridge in his turn.

The hackman doubled himself down for joy, and slapped his leg; at the sound of a whistle to the eastward, he pulled himself erect again, and said, as if the fact were one point gained, “Well, there she blows, any way.” Then he went round the corner of the station to be in full readiness for any chance passenger the train might improbably bring him.

No one alighted but Mr. Gerrish and Northwick. Mr. Gerrish found it most remarkable that he should have come all the way from Boston on the same train with Northwick and not known it; but Northwick was less disposed to wonder at it. He passed rapidly beyond the following of Mr. Gerrish, and mounted to the place Elbridge made for him in the cutter. While Elbridge was still tucking the robes about their legs, Northwick drove away from the station, and through the village up to the rim of the highland that lies between Hatboro’ and South Hatboro’. The bare line cut along the horizon where the sunset lingered in a light of liquid crimson, paling and passing into weaker violet tints with every moment, but still tenderly flushing the walls of the sky, and holding longer the accent of its color where a keen star had here and there already pierced it and shone quivering through. The shortest days were past, but in the first week of February they had not lengthened sensibly, though to a finer perception there was the promise of release from the winter dark, if not from the winter cold. It was not far from six o’clock when Northwick mounted the southward rise of the street; it was still almost light enough to read; and the little slender black figure of a man that started up in the middle of the road, as if it had risen out of the ground, had an even vivid distinctness. He must have been lying in the snow; the horses crouched back with a sudden recoil, as if he had struck them back with his arm, and plunged the runners of the cutter into the deeper snow beside the beaten track. He made a slight pause, long enough to give Northwick a contemptuous glance, and then continued along the road at a leisurely pace to the deep cut through the snow from the next house. Here he stood regarding such difficulty as Northwick had in quieting his horses, and getting underway again. He said nothing, and Northwick did not speak; Elbridge growled, “He’s on one of his tears again,” and the horses dashed forward with a shriek of all their bells. Northwick did not open his lips till he entered the avenue of firs that led from the highway to his house; they were still clogged with the snowfall, and their lowermost branches were buried in the drifts.

“What’s the matter with the colt?” he asked.

“I don’t know as that fellow understands the colt’s feet very well. I guess one of the shoes is set wrong,” said Elbridge.

“Better look after it.”

Northwick left Elbridge the reins, and got out of the cutter at the flight of granite steps which rose to the ground-floor of his wooden palace. Broad levels of piazza stretched away from the entrance under a portico of that carpentry which so often passes with us for architecture. In spite of the effect of organic flimsiness in every wooden structure but a log cabin, or a fisherman’s cottage shingled to the ground, the house suggested a perfect functional comfort. There were double windows on all round the piazzas; a mellow glow from the incandescent electrics penetrated to the outer dusk from them; when the door was opened to Northwick, a pleasant heat gushed out, together with the perfume of flowers, and the odors of dinner.

“Dinner is just served, sir,” said the inside man, disposing of Northwick’s overcoat and hat on the hall table with respectful scruple.

Northwick hesitated. He stood over the register, and vaguely held his hands in the pleasant warmth indirectly radiated from the steam-pipes below.

“The young ladies were just thinking you wouldn’t be home till the next train,” the man suggested, at the sound of voices from the dining-room.

“They have some one with them?” Northwick asked.

“Yes, sir. The rector, sir; Mr. Wade, sir.”

“I’ll come down by and by,” Northwick said, turning to the stairs. “Say I had a late lunch before I left town.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man.

Northwick went on up stairs, with footfalls hushed by the thickly-padded thick carpet, and turned into the sort of study that opened out of his bedroom. It had been his wife’s parlor during the few years of her life in the house which he had built for her, and which they had planned to spend their old age in together. It faced southward, and looked out over the greenhouses and the gardens, that stretched behind the house to the bulk of woods, shutting out the stage-picturesqueness of the summer settlement of South Hatboro’. She had herself put the rocking-chair in the sunny bay-window, and Northwick had not allowed it to be disturbed there since her death. In an alcove at one side he had made a place for the safe where he kept his papers; his wife had intended to keep their silver in it, but she had been scared by the notion of having burglars so close to them in the night, and had always left the silver in the safe in the dining-room.

She was all her life a timorous creature, and after her marriage had seldom felt safe out of Northwick’s presence. Her portrait, by Hunt, hanging over the mantelpiece, suggested something of this, though the painter had made the most of her thin, middle-aged blond good looks, and had given her a substance of general character which was more expressive of his own free and bold style than of the facts in the case. She was really one of those hen-minded women, who are so common in all walks of life, and are made up of only one aim at a time, and of manifold anxieties at all times. Her instinct for saving long survived the days of struggle in which she had joined it to Northwick’s instinct for getting; she lived and died in the hope, if not the belief, that she had contributed to his prosperity by looking strictly after all manner of valueless odds and ends. But he had been passively happy with her; since her death, he had allowed her to return much into his thoughts, from which her troublesome solicitudes and her entire uselessness in important matters had obliged him to push her while she lived. He often had times when it seemed to him that he was thinking of nothing, and then he found he had been thinking of her. At such times, with a pang, he realized that he missed her; but perhaps the wound was to habit rather than affection. He now sat down in his swivel-chair and turned it from the writing-desk which stood on the rug before the fireplace, and looked up into the eyes of her effigy with a sense of her intangible presence in it, and with a dumb longing to rest his soul against hers. She was the only one who could have seen him in his wish to have not been what he was; she would have denied it to his face, if he had told her he was a thief; and as he meant to make himself more and more a thief, her love would have eased the way by full acceptance of the theories that ran along with his intentions and covered them with pretences of necessity. He thought how even his own mother could not have been so much comfort to him; she would have had the mercy, but she would not have had the folly. At the bottom of his heart, and under all his pretences, Northwick knew that it was not mercy which would help him; but he wanted it, as we all want what is comfortable and bad for us at times. With the performance and purpose of a thief in his heart, he turned to the pictured face of his dead wife as his refuge from the face of all living. It could not look at him as if he were a thief.

The word so filled his mind that it seemed always about to slip from his tongue. It was what the president of the board had called him when the fact of his fraudulent manipulation of the company’s books was laid so distinctly before him that even the insane refusal, which the criminal instinctively makes of his crime in its presence, was impossible. The other directors sat blankly round, and said nothing; not because they hated a scene, but because the ordinary course of life among us had not supplied them with the emotional materials for making one. The president, however, had jumped from his seat and advanced upon Northwick. “What does all this mean, sir? I’ll tell you what it means. It means that you’re a thief, sir; the same as if you had picked my pocket, or stolen my horse, or taken my overcoat out of my hall.”

He shook his clenched fist in Northwick’s face, and seemed about to take him by the throat. Afterwards he inclined more to mercy than the others; it was he who carried the vote which allowed Northwick three days’ grace, to look into his affairs, and lay before the directors the proof that he had ample means, as he maintained, to meet the shortage in the accounts. “I wish you well out of it, for your family’s sake,” he said at parting; “but all the same, sir, you are a thief.”

He put his hands ostentatiously in his pockets, when some others meaninglessly shook hands with Northwick, at parting, as Northwick himself might have shaken hands with another in his place; and he brushed by him out of the door without looking at him. He came suddenly back to say, “If it were a question of you alone, I would cheerfully lose something more than you’ve robbed me of for the pleasure of seeing you handcuffed in this room and led to jail through the street by a constable. No honest man, no man who was not always a rogue at heart, could have done what you’ve done; juggled with the books for years, and bewitched the record so by your infernal craft, that it was never suspected till now. You’ve given mind to your scoundrelly work, sir; all the mind you had; for if you hadn’t been so anxious to steal successfully, you’d have given more mind to the use of your stealings. You may have some of them left, but it looks as if you’d made ducks and drakes of them, like any petty rascal in the hands of the Employees’ Insurance Company. Yes, sir, I believe you’re of about the intellectual calibre of that sort of thief. I can’t respect you even on your own ground. But I’m willing to give you the chance you ask, for your daughter’s sake. She’s been in and out of my house with my girl like one of my own children, and I won’t send her father to jail if I can help it. Understand! I haven’t any sentiment for you, Northwick. You’re the kind of rogue I’d like to see in a convict’s jacket, learning to make shoe-brushes. But you shall have your chance to go home and see if you can pay up somehow, and you sha’n’t be shadowed while you’re at it. You shall keep your outside to the world three days longer, you whited sepulchre; but if you want to know, I think the best thing that could happen to you on your way home would be a good railroad accident.”

The man’s words and looks were burnt into Northwick’s memory, which now seemed to have the faculty of simultaneously reproducing them all. Northwick remembered his purple face, with its prominent eyes, and the swing of his large stomach, and just how it struck against the jamb as he whirled a second time out of the door. The other directors, some of them, stood round buttoned up in their overcoats, with their hats on, and a sort of stunned aspect; some held their hats in their hands, and looked down into them with a decorous absence of expression, as people do at a funeral. Then they left him alone in the treasurer’s private room, with its official luxury of thick Turkey rugs, leathern arm-chairs, and nickel-plated cuspidors standing one on each side of the hearth where a fire of soft coal in a low-down grate burned with a subdued and respectful flicker.

II.

If it had not been for the boisterous indignation of the president, Northwick might have come away from the meeting, after the exposure of his defalcations, with an unimpaired personal dignity. But as it was, he felt curiously shrunken and shattered, till the prevailing habit of his mind enabled him to piece himself together again and resume his former size and shape. This happened very quickly; he had conceived of himself so long as a man employing funds in his charge in speculations sometimes successful and sometimes not, but at all times secured by his personal probity and reliability. He had in fact more than once restored all that he had taken, and he had come to trust himself in the course of these transactions as fully as he was trusted by the men who were ignorant of his irregularities. He was somehow flattered by the complete confidence they reposed in him, though he really felt it to be no more than his due; he had always merited and received the confidence of men associated with him in business, and he had come to regard the funds of the corporation as practically his own. In the early days of his connection with the company, it largely owed its prosperity to his wise and careful management; one might say that it was not until the last, when he got so badly caught by that drop in railroads, that he had felt anything wrong in his convertible use of its money. It was an informality; he would not have denied that, but it was merely an informality. Then his losses suddenly leaped beyond his ability to make them good; then, for the first time, he began to practice that system in keeping the books which the furious president called juggling with them. Even this measure he considered a justifiable means of self-defence pending the difficulties which beset him, and until he could make his losses good by other operations. From time to time he was more fortunate; and whenever he dramatized himself in an explanation to the directors, as he often did, especially of late, he easily satisfied them as to the nature of his motives and the propriety of his behavior, by calling their attention to these successful deals, and to the probability, the entire probability, that he could be at any moment in a position to repay all he had borrowed of the company. He called it borrowing, and in his long habit of making himself these loans and returning them, he had come to have a sort of vague feeling that the company was privy to them; that it was almost an understood thing. The president’s violence was the first intimation to reach him in the heart of his artificial consciousness that his action was at all in the line of those foolish peculators whose discovery and flight to Canada was the commonplace of every morning’s paper; such a commonplace that he had been sensible of an effort in the papers to vary the tiresome repetition of the same old fact by some novel grace of wit, or some fresh picturesqueness in putting it. In the presence of the directors, he had refused to admit it to himself; but after they adjourned, and he was left alone, he realized the truth. He was like those fools, exactly like them, in what they had done, and in the way of doing it; he was like them in motive and principle. All of them had used others’ money in speculation, expecting to replace it, and then had not been able to replace it, and then had skipped, as the newspapers said.

Whether he should complete the parallel, and skip, too, was a point which he had not yet acknowledged to himself that he had decided. He never had believed that it need come to that; but, for an instant, when the president said he could wish him nothing better on his way home than a good railroad accident, it flashed upon him that one of the three alternatives before him was to skip. He had the choice to kill himself, which was supposed to be the gentlemanly way out of his difficulties, and would leave his family unstained by his crime; that matter had sometimes been discussed in his presence, and every one had agreed that it was the only thing for a gentleman to do after he had pilfered people of money he could not pay back. There was something else that a man of other instincts and weaker fibre might do, and that was to stand his trial for embezzlement, and take his punishment. Or a man, if he was that kind of a man, could skip. The question with Northwick was whether he was that kind of man, or whether, if he skipped, he would be that kind of man; whether the skipping would make him that kind of man.

The question was a cruel one for the self-respect which he had so curiously kept intact. He had been respectable ever since he was born; if he was born with any instinct it was the instinct of respectability, the wish to be honored for what he seemed. It was all the stronger in him, because his father had never had it; perhaps an hereditary trait found expression in him after passing over one generation; perhaps an antenatal influence formed him to that type. His mother was always striving to keep the man she had married worthy of her choice in the eyes of her neighbors; but he had never seconded her efforts. He had been educated a doctor, but never practised medicine; in carrying on the drug and book business of the village, he cared much more for the literary than the pharmaceutical side of it; he liked to have a circle of cronies about the wood-stove in his store till midnight, and discuss morals and religion with them; and one night, when denying the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, he went to the wrong jar for an ingredient of the prescription he was making up; the patient died of his mistake. The disgrace and the disaster broke his wife’s heart; but he lived on to a vague and colorless old age, supported by his son in a total disoccupation. The elder Northwick used sometimes to speak of his son and his success in the world; not boastfully, but with a certain sarcasm for the source of his bounty, as a boy who had always disappointed him by a narrowness of ambition. He called him Milt, and he said he supposed now Milt was the most self-satisfied man in Massachusetts; he implied that there were better things than material success. He did not say what they were, and he could have found very few people in that village to agree with him; or to admit that the treasurer of the Ponkwasset Mills had come in anywise short of the destiny of a man whose father had started him in life with the name of John Milton. They called him Milt, too, among themselves, and perhaps here and there a bolder spirit might have called him so to his face if he had ever come back to the village. But he had not. He had, as they had all heard, that splendid summer place at Hatboro’, where he spent his time when he was not at his house in Boston; and when they verified the fact of his immense prosperity by inquiry of some of the summer-folks who knew him or knew about him, they were obscurely flattered by the fact; just as many of us are proud of belonging to a nation in which we are enriched by the fellow-citizenship of many manifold millionnaires. They did not blame Northwick for never coming to see his father, or for never having him home on a visit; they daily saw what old Northwick was, and how little he was fitted for the society of a man whose respectability, even as it was reflected upon them, was so dazzling. Old Northwick had never done anything for Milt; he had never even got along with him; the fellow had left him, and made his own way; and the old man had no right to talk; if Milt was ever of a mind to cut off his rations, the old man would soon see.

III.

The local opinion scarcely did justice to old Northwick’s imperfect discharge of a father’s duties; his critics could not have realized how much some capacities, if not tastes, which Northwick had inherited, contributed to that very effect of respectability which they revered. The early range of books, the familiarity with the mere exterior of literature, restricted as it was, helped Northwick later to pass for a man of education, if not of reading, with men who were themselves less read than educated. The people whom his ability threw him with in Boston were all Harvard men, and they could not well conceive of an acquaintance, so gentlemanly and quiet as Northwick, who was not college bred, too. By unmistakable signs, which we carry through life, they knew he was from the country, and they attributed him to a freshwater college. They said, “You’re a Dartmouth man, Northwick, I believe,” or, “I think you’re from Williams,” and when Northwick said no, they forgot it, and thought that he was a Bowdoin man; the impression gradually fixed itself that he was from one or other of those colleges. It was believed in like manner, partly on account of his name, that he was from one of those old ministerial families that you find up in the hills, where the whole brood study Greek while they are sugaring off in the spring; and that his own mother had fitted him for college. There was, in fact, something clerical in Northwick’s bearing; and it was felt by some that he had studied for the ministry, but had gone into business to help his family. The literary phase of the superstition concerning him was humored by the library which formed such a striking feature of his house in Boston, as well as his house in Hatboro’; at Hatboro’ it was really vast, and was so charming and so luxurious that it gave the idea of a cultivated family; they preferred to live in it, and rarely used the drawing-room, which was much smaller, and was a gold and white sanctuary on the north side of the house, only opened when there was a large party of guests, for dancing. Most people came and went without seeing it, and it remained shut up, as much a conjecture as the memory of Northwick’s wife. She was supposed to have been taken from him early, to save him and his children from the mortifying consequences of one of those romantic love-affairs in which a conscientious man had sacrificed himself to a girl he was certain to outgrow. None of his world knew that his fortunes had been founded upon the dowry she brought him, and upon the stay her belief in him had always been. She was a church-member, as such women usually are, but Northwick was really her religion; and as there is nothing that does so much to sanctify a deity as the blind devotion of its worshippers, Northwick was rendered at times worthy of her faith by the intensity of it. In his sort he returned her love; he was not the kind of man whose affections are apt to wander, perhaps because they were few and easily kept together; perhaps because he was really principled against letting them go astray. He was not merely true in a passive way, but he was constant in the more positive fashion. When they began to get on in the world, and his business talent brought him into relations with people much above them socially, he yielded to her shrinking from the opportunities of social advancement that opened to them, and held aloof with her. This kept him a country person in his experiences much longer than he need have remained; and tended to that sort of defensive secretiveness which grew more and more upon him, and qualified his conduct in matters where there was no question of his knowledge of the polite world. It was not until after his wife’s death, and until his daughters began to grow up into the circles where his money and his business associations authorized them to move, that he began to see a little of that world. Even then he left it chiefly to his children; for himself he continued quite simply loyal to his wife’s memory, and apparently never imagined such a thing as marrying again.

He rose from the chair where he had sat looking up into her pictured face, and went to open the safe near the window. But he stopped in stooping over to work the combination, and glanced out across his shoulder into the night. The familiar beauty of the scene tempted him to the window for what, all at once, he felt might be his last look, though the next instant he was able to argue the feeling down, and make his meditated act work into his schemes of early retrieval and honorable return. He must have been thinking there before the fire a long time, for now the moon had risen, and shone upon the black bulk of firs to the southward, and on the group of outbuildings. These were in a sort the mechanism that transacted the life of his house, ministering to all its necessities and pleasures. Under the conservatories, with their long stretches of glass, catching the moon’s rays like levels of water, was the steam furnace that imparted their summer climate, through heavy mains carried below the basement, to every chamber of the mansion; a ragged plume of vapor escaped from the tall chimney above them, and dishevelled itself in diaphanous silver on the night-breeze. Beyond the hot-houses lay the cold graperies; and off to the left rose the stables; in a cosy nook of this low mass Northwick saw the lights of the coachman’s family-rooms; beyond the stables were the cow-barn and the dairy, with the farmer’s cottage; it was a sort of joke with Northwick’s business friends that you could buy butter of him sometimes at less than half it cost him, and the joke flattered Northwick’s sense of baronial consequence with regard to his place. It was really a farm in extent, and it was mostly a grazing farm; his cattle were in the herd-books, and he raised horses, which he would sell now and then to a friend; they were so distinctly varied from the original stock as to form almost a breed of themselves; they numbered scores in his stalls and pastures. The whole group of the buildings was so great that it was like a sort of communal village. In the silent moonlight Northwick looked at it as if it were an expansion or extension of himself, so personally did it seem to represent his tastes, and so historical was it of the ambitions of his whole life; he realized that it would be like literally tearing himself from it, when he should leave it. That would be the real pang; his children could come to him, but not his home. But he reminded himself that he was going only for a time, until he could rehabilitate himself, and come back upon the terms he could easily make when once he was on his feet again. He thought how fortunate it was that in the meanwhile this property could not be alienated; how fortunate it was that he had originally deeded it to his wife in the days when he had the full right to do so, and she had willed it to their children by a perfect entail. The horses and the cattle might go, and probably must go; and he winced to think of it, but the land, and the house, — all but the furniture and pictures, — were the children’s and could not be touched. The pictures were his, and would have to go with the horses and cattle; but ten or twelve thousand dollars would replace them, and he must add that sum to his other losses, and bear it as well as he could.

After all, when everything was said and done, he was the chief loser. If he was a thief, as that man said, he could show that he had robbed himself of two dollars for every dollar that he had robbed anybody else of; if now he was going to add to his theft by carrying off the forty-three thousand dollars of the company’s which he found himself possessed of, it was certainly not solely in his own interest. It was to be the means of recovering all that had gone before it, and that the very men whom it would enable him to repay finally in full, supposed it to have gone with.

Northwick felt almost a glow of pride in clarifying this point to his reason. The additional theft presented itself almost in the light of a duty; it really was his duty to make reparation to those he had injured, if he had injured any one, and it was his first duty to secure the means of doing it. If that money, which it might almost be said was left providentially in his hands, were simply restored now to the company, it would do comparatively no good at all, and would strip him of every hope of restoring the whole sum he had borrowed. He arrived at that word again, and reinforced by it, he stooped again to work the combination of his safe, and make sure of the money, which he now felt an insane necessity of laying his hands on; but he turned suddenly sick, with a sickness at the heart or at the stomach, and he lifted himself, and took a turn about the room.

He perceived that in spite of the outward calm which it had surprised him to find in himself, he was laboring under some strong inward stress, and he must have relief from it if he was to carry this business through. He threw up the window and stood with his hand on the sash, quivering in the strong in-rush of the freezing air. But it strengthened him, and when he put down the window after a few moments, his faintness passed altogether. Still, he thought he would not go through that business at once; there was time enough; he would see his girls and tell them that he was obliged to leave by an early train in the morning.

He took off his shoes, and put on his slippers and his house-coat, and went to the stair-landing outside, and listened to the voices in the library below. He could hear only women’s voices, and he inferred that the young man who had been dining with his daughters was gone. He went back into his bedroom, and looked at the face of an unmasked thief in his glass. It was not to get that aspect of himself, though, that he looked; it was to see if he was pale or would seem ill to his children.

IV.

Northwick was fond of both his daughters; if he was more demonstrative in meeting the younger, it was because she had the more modern and more urban habit of caressing her father; the elder, who was very much the elder, followed an earlier country fashion of self-possession, and remained silent and seated when he came into the room, though she watched with a pleased interest the exchange of endearments between him and her sister. Her name was Adeline, which was her mother’s name, too; and she had the effect of being the aunt of the young girl. She was thin and tall, and she had a New England indigestion which kept her looking frailer than she really was. She conformed to the change of circumstances which she had grown into almost as consciously as her parents, and dressed richly in sufficiently fashionable gowns, which she preferred to have of silk, cinnamon or brown in color; on her slight, bony fingers she wore a good many rings.

Suzette was the name of the other daughter; her mother had fancied that name; but the single monosyllable it had been shortened into somehow suited the proud-looking girl better than the whole name, with its suggestion of coquettishness.

She asked, “Why didn’t you come down, papa? Mr. Wade was calling, and he stayed to dinner.” She smiled, and it gave him a pang to see that she seemed unusually happy; he could have borne better, he perceived, to leave her miserable; at least, then, he would not have wholly made her so.

“I had some matters to look after,” he said. “I thought I might get down before he went.” A deep leathern arm-chair stood before the hearth where the young rector had been sitting, with the ladies at either corner of the mantel; Northwick let himself sink into it, and with a glance at the face of the faintly ticking clock on the black marble shelf before him, he added casually, “I must get an early train for Ponkwasset in the morning, and I still have some things to put in shape.”

“Is there any trouble there?” the girl asked from the place she had resumed. She held by one hand from the corner of the mantel, and let her head droop over on her arm. Her father had a sense of her extraordinary beauty, as a stranger might have had.

“Trouble?” he echoed.

“With the hands.”

“Oh, no; nothing of that sort. What made you think so?” asked Northwick, rapidly exploring the perspective opened up in his mind by her question, to see if it contained any suggestion of advantage to him. He found an instant’s relief in figuring himself called to the mills by a labor trouble.

“That tiresome little wretch of a Putney is going about circulating all sorts of reports.”

“There is no reason as yet, to suppose the strike will affect us,” said Northwick. “But I think I had better be on the ground.”

“I should think you could leave it to the Superintendent,” said the girl, “without wearing your own life out about it.”

“I suppose I might,” said Northwick, with an effect of refusing to acquire merit by his behavior, “but the older hands all know me so well, that—”

He stopped as if it were unnecessary to go on, and the elder daughter said: “He is on one of his sprees again. I should think something ought to be done about him, for his family’s sake, if nothing else. Elbridge told James that you almost drove over him, coming up.”

“Yes,” said Northwick. “I didn’t see him until he started up under the horses’ feet.”

“He will get killed, some of these days,” said Adeline, with the sort of awful satisfaction in realizing a catastrophe, which delicate women often feel.

“It would be the best thing for him,” said her sister, “and for his family, too. When a man is nothing but a burden and a disgrace to himself and everybody belonging to him, he had better die as soon as possible.”

Northwick sat looking into his daughter’s beautiful face, but he saw the inflamed and heated visage of the president of the board, and he heard him saying, “The best thing that could happen to you on your way home would be a good railroad accident.”

He sighed faintly, and said, “We can’t always tell. I presume it isn’t for us to say.” He went on, with that leniency for the shortcomings of others which we feel when we long for mercy to our own: “Putney is a very able man; one of the ablest lawyers in the State, and very honest. He could be almost anything if he would let liquor alone. I don’t wish to judge him. He may have” — Northwick sighed again, and ended vaguely— “his reasons.”

Suzette laughed. “How moderate you always are, papa! And how tolerant!”

“I guess Mr. Putney knows pretty well whom he’s got to deal with, and that he’s safe in abusing you all he likes,” said Adeline. “But I don’t see how such respectable people as Dr. Morrell and Mrs. Morrell can tolerate him. I’ve no patience with Dr. Morrell, or his wife, either. To be sure, they tolerate Mrs. Wilmington, too.”

Suzette went over to her father to kiss him. “Well, I’m going to bed, papa. If you’d wanted more of my society you ought to have come down sooner. I suppose I sha’n’t see you in the morning; so it’s good-bye as well as good-night. When will you be home?”

“Not for some days, perhaps,” said the unhappy man.

“How doleful! Are you always so homesick when you go away?”

“Not always; no.”

“Well, try to cheer up, this time, then. And if you have to be gone a great while, send for me, won’t you?”

“Yes, yes; I will,” said Northwick. The girl gave his head a hug, and then glided out of the room. She stopped to throw him a kiss from the door.

“There!” said Adeline. “I didn’t mean to let Mrs. Wilmington slip out; she can’t bear the name, and I know it drove her away. But you mustn’t let it worry you, father. I guess it’s all going well, now.”

“What’s going well?” Northwick asked, vaguely.

“The Jack Wilmington business. I know she’s really given him up at last; and we can’t be too thankful for that much, if it’s no more. I don’t believe he’s bad, for all the talk about him, but he’s been weak, and that’s a thing she couldn’t forgive in a man; she’s so strong herself.”

Northwick did not think of Wilmington; he thought of himself, and in the depths of his guilty soul, in those secret places underneath all his pretences, where he really knew himself a thief, he wondered if his child’s strength would be against her forgiving his weakness. What we greatly dread we most unquestioningly believe; and it did not occur to him to ask whether impatience with weakness was a necessary inference from strength. He only knew himself to be miserably weak.

He rose and stood a moment by the mantel, with his impassive, handsome face turned toward his daughter as if he were going to speak to her. He was a tall man, rather thin; he was clean shaven, except for the grayish whiskers just forward of his ears and on a line with them; he had a regular profile, which was more attractive than the expression of his direct regard. He took up a crystal ball that lay on the marble, and looked into it as if he were reading his future in its lucid depths, and then put it down again, with an effect of helplessness. When he spoke, it was not in connection with what his daughter had been talking about. He said almost dryly, “I think I will go up and look over some papers I have to take with me, and then try to get a little sleep before I start.”

“And when shall we expect you back?” asked his daughter, submissively accepting his silence concerning her sister’s love affairs. She knew that it meant acquiescence in anything that Sue and she thought best.

“I don’t know, exactly; I can’t say, now. Good-night.”

To her surprise he came up and kissed her; his caresses were for Sue, and she expected them no more than she invited them. “Why, father!” she said in a pleased voice.

“Let James pack the small bag for me, and send Elbridge to me in about an hour,” he said, as he went out into the hall.

V.

Northwick was now fifty-nine years old, but long before he reached this age he had seen many things to make him doubt the moral government of the universe. His earliest instruction had been such as we all receive. He had been taught to believe that there was an overruling power which would punish him if he did wrong, and reward him if he did right; or would, at least, be displeased in one case, and pleased in the other. The precept took primarily the monitory form, and first enforced the fact of the punishment or the displeasure; there were times when the reward or the pleasure might not sensibly follow upon good behavior, but evil behavior never escaped the just consequences. This was the doctrine which framed the man’s intention if not his conduct of life, and continued to shape it years after experience of the world, and especially of the business world, had gainsaid it. He had seen a great many cases in which not only good behavior had apparently failed of its reward but bad behavior had failed of its punishment. In the case of bad behavior, his observation had been that no unhappiness, not even any discomfort, came from it unless it was found out; for the most part, it was not found out. This did not shake Northwick’s principles; he still intended to do right, so as to be on the safe side, even in a remote and improbable contingency; but it enabled him to compromise with his principles and to do wrong provisionally and then repair the wrong before he was found out, or before the overruling power noticed him.

But now there were things that made him think, in the surprising misery of being found out, that this power might have had its eye upon him all the time, and was not sleeping, or gone upon a journey, as he had tacitly flattered himself. It seemed to him that there was even a dramatic contrivance in the circumstances to render his anguish exquisite. He had not read many books; but sometimes his daughters made him go to the theatre, and once he had seen the play of Macbeth. The people round him were talking about the actor who played the part of Macbeth, but Northwick kept his mind critically upon the play, and it seemed to him false to what he had seen of life in having all those things happen just so, to fret the conscience and torment the soul of the guilty man; he thought that in reality they would not have been quite so pat; it gave him rather a low opinion of Shakespeare, lower than he would have dared to have if he had been a more cultivated man. Now that play came back into his mind, and he owned with a pang that it was all true. He was being quite as aptly visited for his transgression; his heart was being wrung, too, by the very things that could hurt it most. He had not been very well of late, and was not feeling physically strong; his anxieties had preyed upon him, and he had never felt the need of the comfort and quiet of his home so much as now when he was forced to leave it. Never had it all been so precious; never had the beauty and luxury of it seemed so great. All that was nothing, though, to the thought of his children, especially of that youngest child, whom his heart was so wrapt up in, and whom he was going to leave to shame and ruin. The words she had spoken from her pride in him, her ignorant censure of that drunkard, as a man who had better die since he had become nothing but a burden and disgrace to his family, stung on as if by incessant repetition. He had crazy thoughts, impulses, fantasies, in which he swiftly dreamed renunciation of escape. Then he knew that it would not avail anything to remain; it would not avail anything even to die; nothing could avail anything at once, but in the end, his going would avail most. He must go; it would break the child’s heart to face his shame, and she must face it. He did not think of his eldest daughter, except to think that the impending disaster could not affect her so ruinously.

“My God, my God!” he groaned, as he went up stairs. Adeline called from the room he had left, “Did you speak, father?”

He had a conscience, that mechanical conscience which becomes so active in times of great moral obliquity, against telling a little lie, and saying he had not spoken. He went on up stairs without answering anything. He indulged the self pity, a little longer, of feeling himself an old man forced from his home, and he had a blind reasonless resentment of the behavior of the men who were driving him away, and whose interests, even at that moment, he was mindful of. But he threw off this mood when he entered his room, and settled himself to business. There was a good deal to be done in the arrangement of papers for his indefinite absence, and he used the same care in providing for some minor contingencies in the company’s affairs as in leaving instructions to his children for their action until they should hear from him again. Afterwards this curious scrupulosity became a matter of comment among those privy to it; some held it another proof of the ingrained rascality of the man, a trick to suggest lenient construction of his general conduct in the management of the company’s finances, others saw in it an interesting example of the involuntary operation of business instincts which persisted at a juncture when the man might be supposed to have been actuated only by the most intensely selfish motives.

The question was not settled even in the final retrospect, when it appeared that at the very moment that Northwick showed himself mindful of the company’s interests on those minor points, he was defrauding it further in the line of his defalcations, and keeping back a large sum of money that belonged to it. But at that moment Northwick did not consider that this money necessarily belonged to the company, any more than his daughters’ house and farm belonged to it. To be sure it was the fruit of money he had borrowed or taken from the company and had used in an enormously successful deal; but the company had not earned it, and in driving him into a corner, in forcing him to make instant restitution of all its involuntary loans, it was justifying him in withholding this part of them. Northwick was a man of too much sense to reason explicitly to this effect, but there was a sophistry, tacitly at work in him to this effect, which made it possible for him to go on and steal more where he had already stolen so much. In fact it presented the further theft as a sort of duty. This sum, large as it was, really amounted to nothing in comparison with the sum he owed the company; but it formed his only means of restitution, and if he did not take it and use it to that end, he might be held recreant to his moral obligations. He contended, from that vestibule of his soul where he was not a thief, with that self of his inmost where he was a thief, that it was all most fortunate, if not providential, as it had fallen out. Not only had his broker sent him that large check for his winnings in stocks the day before, but Northwick had, contrary to his custom, cashed the check, and put the money in his safe instead of banking it. Now he could perceive a leading in the whole matter, though at the time it seemed a flagrant defiance of chance, and a sort of invitation to burglars. He seemed to himself like a burglar, when he had locked the doors and pulled down the curtains, and stood before the safe working the combination. He trembled, and when at last the mechanism announced its effect, with a slight click of the withdrawing bolt, he gave a violent start. At the same time there came a rough knock at the door, and Northwick called out in the choking, incoherent voice of one suddenly roused from sleep: “Hello! Who’s there? What is it?”

“It’s me,” said Elbridge.

“Oh, yes! Well! All right! Hold on, a minute! Ah — you can come back in ten or fifteen minutes. I’m not quite ready for you, yet.” Northwick spoke the first broken sentences from the safe, where he stood in a frenzy of dismay; the more collected words were uttered from his desk, where he ran to get his pistol. He did not know why he thought Elbridge might try to force his way in; perhaps it was because any presence on the outside of the door would have terrified him. He had time to recognize that he was not afraid for the money, but that he was afraid for himself in the act of taking it.

Elbridge gave a cough on the other side of the door, and said with a little hesitation, “All right,” and Northwick heard him tramp away, and go down stairs.

He went back to the safe and pulled open the heavy door, whose resistance helped him shake off his nervousness. Then he took the money from the drawer where he had laid it, counted it, slipped it into the inner pocket of his waistcoat, and buttoned it in there. He shut the safe and locked it. The succession of these habitual acts calmed him more and more, and after he had struck a match and kindled the fire on his hearth, which he had hitherto forgotten, he was able to settle again to his preparations in writing.

VI.

When Elbridge came back, Northwick called out, “Come in!” and then went and unlocked the door for him. “I forgot it was locked,” he said, carelessly. “Do you think the colt’s going to be lame?”

“Well, I don’t like the way she behaves, very well. Them shoes have got to come off.” Elbridge stood at the corner of the desk, and diffused a strong smell of stable through the hot room.

“You’ll see to it, of course,” said Northwick. “I’m going away in the morning, and I don’t know just how long I shall be gone.” Northwick satisfied his mechanical scruple against telling a lie by this formula; and in its shelter he went on to give Elbridge instructions about the management of the place in his absence. He took some money from his pocket-book and handed it to him for certain expenses, and then he said, “I want to take the five o’clock train, that reaches Ponkwasset at nine. You can drive me up with the black mare.”

“All right,” said Elbridge; but his tone expressed a shadow of reluctance that did not escape Northwick.

“Anything the matter?” he asked.

“I dunno. Our little boy don’t seem to be very well.”

“What ails him?” asked Northwick, with the sympathy it was a relief for him to feel.

“Well, Dr. Morrell’s just been there, and he’s afraid it’s the membranous crou—” The last letter stuck in Elbridge’s throat; he gulped it down.

“Oh, I hope not,” said Northwick.

“He’s comin’ back again — he had to go off to another place — but I could see ‘twa’n’t no use,” said Elbridge with patient despair; he had got himself in hand again, and spoke clearly.

Northwick shrank back from the shadow sweeping so near him; a shadow thrown from the skies, no doubt, but terrible in its blackness on the earth. “Why, of course, you mustn’t think of leaving your wife. You must telephone Simpson to come for me.”

“All right.” Elbridge took himself away.

Northwick watched him across the icy stable-yard, going to the coachman’s quarters in that cosy corner of the spreading barn; the windows were still as cheerily bright with lamplight as when they struck a pang of dumb envy to Northwick’s heart. The child’s sickness must have been very sudden for his daughters not to have known of it. He thought he ought to call Adeline, and send her in there to those poor people; but he reflected that she could do no good, and he spared her the useless pain; she would soon need all her strength for herself. His thought returned to his own cares, from which the trouble of another had lured it for a moment. But when he heard the doctor’s sleigh-bells clash into the stable-yard, he decided to go himself and show the interest his family ought to feel in the matter.

No one answered his knock at Elbridge’s door, and he opened it and found his way into the room, where Elbridge and his wife were with the doctor. The little boy had started up in his crib, and was struggling, with his arms thrown wildly about.

“There! There, he’s got another of them chokin’ spells!” screamed the mother. “Elbridge Newton, ain’t you goin’ to do anything? Oh help him, save him, Dr. Morrell! Oh, I should think you’d be ashamed to let him suffer so!” She sprang upon the child, and caught him from the doctor’s hands, and turned him this way and that trying to ease him; he was suddenly quiet, and she said, “There, I just knew I could do it! What are you big, strong men good for, any—” She looked down at the child’s face in her arms, and then up at the doctor’s, and she gave a wild screech, like the cry of one in piercing torment.

It turned Northwick heart-sick. He felt himself worse than helpless there; but he went to the farmer’s house, and told the farmer’s wife to go over to the Newtons’; their little boy had just died. He heard her coming before he reached his own door, and when he reached his room, he heard the bells of the doctor’s sleigh clashing out of the avenue.

The voice and the look of that childless mother haunted him. She had been one of the hat-shop hands, a flighty, nervous thing, madly in love with Elbridge, whom she ruled with a sort of frantic devotion since their marriage, compensating his cool quiet with a perpetual flutter of exaggerated sensibilities in every direction. But somehow she had put Northwick in mind of his own mother, and he thought of the chance or the will that had bereaved one and spared the other, and he envied the little boy who had just died.

He considered the case of the parents who would want to make full outward show of their grief, and he wrote Elbridge a note, to be given him in the morning, and enclosed one of the bills he was taking from the company; he hoped Elbridge would accept it from him towards the expenses he must meet at such a time.

Then he wheeled his chair about to the fire and stretched his legs out to get what rest he could before the hour of starting. He would have liked to go to bed, but he was afraid of oversleeping himself in case Elbridge had neglected to telephone Simpson. But he did not believe this possible, and he had smoothly confided himself to his experience of Elbridge’s infallibility, when he started awake at the sound of bells before the front door, and then the titter of the electric bell over his bed in the next room. He thought it was an officer come to arrest him, but he remembered that only his household was acquainted with the use of that bell, and then he wondered that Simpson should have found it out. He put on his overcoat and arctics and caught up his bag, and hurried down stairs and out of doors. It was Elbridge who was waiting for him on the threshold, and took his bag from him.

“Why! Where’s Simpson?” he asked. “Couldn’t you get him?”

“It’s all right,” said Elbridge, opening the door of the booby, and gently bundling Northwick into it. “I could come just’s easy as not. I thought you’d ride better in the booby; it’s a little mite chilly for the cutter.” The stars seemed points of ice in the freezing sky; the broken snow clinked like charcoal around Elbridge’s feet. He shut the booby door and then came back and opened it slightly. “I wa’n’t agoin’ to let no Simpson carry you to no train, noway.”

The tears came into Northwick’s eyes, and he tried to say, “Why, thank you, Elbridge,” but the door shut upon his failure, and Elbridge mounted to his place and drove away. Northwick had been able to get out of his house only upon condition that he should behave as if he were going to be gone on an ordinary journey. He had to keep the same terms with himself on the way to the station. When he got out there he said to Elbridge, “I’ve left a note for you on my desk. I’m sorry to be leaving home — at such a time — when you’ve—”

“You’ll telegraph when to meet you?” Elbridge suggested.

“Yes,” said Northwick. He went inside the station, which was deliciously warm from the large register in the centre of the room, and brilliantly lighted in readiness for the train now almost due. The closing of the door behind Northwick roused a little black figure drooping forward on the benching in one corner. It was the drunken lawyer. There had been some displeasures, general and personal, between the two men, and they did not speak; but now, at sight of Northwick, Putney came forward, and fixed him severely with his eye.

“Northwick! Do you know who you tried to drive over, last evening?”

Northwick returned his regard with the half-ironical, half-patronizing look a dull man puts on with a person of less fortune but more brain. “I didn’t see you, Mr. Putney, until I was quite upon you. The horses—”

“It was the Law you tried to drive over!” thundered the little man with a voice out of keeping with his slender body. “Don’t try it too often! You can’t drive over the Law, yet — you haven’t quite millions enough for that. Heigh? That so?” he queried, sensible of the anti-climax of asking such a question in that way, but tipsily helpless in it.

Northwick did not answer; he walked to the other end of the station set off for ladies, and Putney did not follow him. The train came in, and Northwick went out and got aboard.

VII.

The president of the Board, who had called Northwick a thief, and yet had got him a chance to make himself an honest man, was awake at the hour the defaulter absconded, after passing quite as sleepless a night. He had kept a dinner engagement, hoping to forget Northwick, but he seemed to be eating and drinking him at every course. When he came home toward eleven o’clock, he went to his library and sat down before the fire. His wife had gone to bed, and his son and daughter were at a ball; and he sat there alone, smoking impatiently.

He told the man who looked in to see if he wanted anything that he might go to bed; he need not sit up for the young people. Hilary had that kind of consideration for servants, and he liked to practise it; he liked to realize that he was practising it now, in a moment when every habit of his life might very well yield to the great and varying anxieties which beset him.

He had an ideal of conduct, of what was due from him to himself, as a gentleman and a citizen, and he could not conceal from himself that he had been mainly instrumental in the escape of a rogue from justice, when he got the Board to give Northwick a chance. His ideals had not hitherto stood in the way of his comfort, his entire repose of mind, any more than they had impaired his prosperity, though they were of a kind far above those which commercial honor permits a man to be content with. He held himself bound, as a man of a certain origin and social tradition, to have public spirit, and he had a great deal of it. He believed that he owed it to the community to do nothing to lower its standards of personal integrity and responsibility; and he distinguished himself by a gratified consciousness from those people of chromo-morality, who held all sorts of loose notions on such points. His name stood not merely for so much money; many names stood for far more; but it meant reliability, it meant honesty, it meant good faith. He really loved these things, though, no doubt, he loved them less for their own sake than because they were spiritual properties of Eben Hilary. He did not expect everybody else to have them, but his theory of life exacted that they should be held the chief virtues. He was so conscious of their value that he ignored all those minor qualities in himself which rendered him not only bearable but even lovable; he was not aware of having any sort of foibles, so that any error of conduct in himself surprised him even more than it pained him. It was not easy to recognize it; but when he once saw it, he was not only willing but eager to repair it.

The error that he had committed in Northwick’s case, if it was an error, was one that presented peculiar difficulties, as every error in life does; the errors love an infinite complexity of disguise, and masquerade as all sorts of things. There were moments when Hilary saw his mistake so clearly that it seemed to him nothing less than the repayment of Northwick’s thefts from his own pocket would satisfy the claims of justice to his fellow-losers if Northwick ran away; and then again, it looked like the act of wise mercy which it had appeared to him when he was urging the Board to give the man a chance as the only thing which they could hopefully do in the circumstances, as common sense, as business. But it was now so obvious that a man like Northwick could and would do nothing but run away if he were given the chance, that he seemed to have been his accomplice when he used the force of his personal character with them in Northwick’s behalf. He was in a ridiculous position, there was no doubt of that, and he was not going to get out of it without much painful wear and tear of pride, of self-respect.

After a long time he looked at the clock, and found it still early for the return of his young people. He was impatient to see his son, and to get the situation in the light of his mind, and see how it looked there. He had already told him of the defalcation, and of what the Board had decided to do with Northwick; but this was while he was still in the glow of action, and he had spoken very hurriedly with Matt who came in just as he was going out to dinner; it was before his cold fit came on.

He had reached that time of life when a man likes to lay his troubles before his son; and in the view his son usually took of his troubles, Hilary seemed to find another mood of his own. It was a fresher, different self dealing with them; for the fellow was not only younger and more vigorous; he was another temperament with the same interests, and often the same principles. He had disappointed Hilary in some ways, but he had gratified his pride in the very ways he had disappointed him. The father had expected the son to go into business, and Matt did go into the mills at Ponkwasset, where he was to be superintendent in the natural course. But one day he came home and told his father that he had begun to have his doubts of the existing relations of labor and capital; and until he could see his way clearer he would rather give up his chance with the company. It was a keen disappointment to Hilary; he made no concealment of that; but he did not quarrel with his son about it. He robustly tolerated Matt’s queer notions, not only because he was a father who blindly doted on his children and behaved as if everything they did was right, no matter if it put him in the wrong, but because he chose to respect the fellow’s principles, if those were his principles. He had his own principles, and Matt should have his if he liked. He bore entirely well the purpose of going abroad that Matt expressed, and he wished to give him much more money than the fellow would take, to carry on those researches which he made in his travels. When he came back and published his monograph on work and wages in Europe, Hilary paid the expense, and took as unselfish an interest in the slow and meagre sale of the little book as if it had cost him nothing.

Eben Hilary had been a crank, too, in his day, so far as to have gone counter to the most respectable feeling of business in Boston, when he came out an abolitionist. His individual impulse to radicalism had exhausted itself in that direction; we are each of us good for only a certain degree of advance in opinion; few men are indefinitely progressive; and Hilary had not caught on to the movement that was carrying his son with it. But he understood how his son should be what he was, and he loved him so much that he almost honored him for what he called his balderdash about industrial slavery. His heart lifted when at last he heard the scratching of the night-latch at the door below, and he made lumbering haste down stairs to open and let the young people in. He reached the door as they opened it, and in the momentary lightness of his soul at sight of his children, he gave them a gay welcome, and took his daughter, all a fluff of soft silken and furry wraps, into his arms.

“Oh, don’t kiss my nose!” she called out. “It’ll freeze you to death, papa! What in the world are you up, for? Anything the matter with mamma?”

“No. She was in bed when I came home; I thought I would sit up and ask what sort of a time you’d had.”

“Did you ever know me to have a bad one? I had the best time in the world. I danced every dance, and I enjoyed it just as much as if I had ‘shut and been a Bud again.’ But don’t you know it’s very bad for old gentlemen to be up so late?”

They were mounting the stairs, and when they reached the library, she went in and poked her long-gloved hands well in over the fire on the hearth while she lifted her eyes to the clock. “Oh, it isn’t so very late. Only five.”

“No, it’s early,” said her father with the security in a feeble joke which none but fathers can feel with none but their grown-up daughters. “It’s full an hour yet before Matt would be getting up to feed his cattle, if he were in Vardley.” Hilary had given Matt the old family place there; and he always liked to make a joke of his getting an honest living by farming it.

“Don’t speak of that agricultural angel!” said the girl, putting her draperies back with one hand and confining them with her elbow, so as to give her other hand greater comfort of the fire. To do better yet she dropped on both knees before it.

“Was he nice?” asked the father, with confidence.

“Nice! Ask all the plain girls he danced with, all the dull girls he talked with! When I think what a good time I should have with him as a plain girl, if I were not his sister, I lose all patience.” She glanced up in her father’s face, with all the strange charm of features that had no regular beauty; and then, as she had to do whenever she remembered them, she asserted the grace which governed every movement and gesture in her, and got as lightly to her feet as if she were a wind-bowed flower tilting back to its perpendicular. Her father looked at her with as fond a delight as a lover could have felt in her fascination. She was, in fact, a youthful, feminine version of himself in her plainness; though the grace was all her own. Her complexion was not the leathery red of her father’s, but a smooth and even white from cheek to throat. She let her loose cloak fall to the chair behind her, and showed herself tall and slim, with that odd visage of hers drooping from a perfect neck. “Why,” she said, “if we had all been horned cattle, he couldn’t have treated us better.”

“Do you hear that, Matt?” asked the father, as his son came in, after a methodical and deliberate bestowal of his outer garments below; his method and his deliberation were part of the joke of him in the family.

“Complaining of me for making her walk home?” he asked in turn, with the quiet which was another part of the joke. “I didn’t suppose you’d give me away, Louise.”

“I didn’t; I knew I only had to wait and you would give yourself away,” said the girl.

“Did he make you walk home?” said the father. “That’s the reason your hands are so cold.”

“They’re not very cold — now; and if they were, I shouldn’t mind it in such a cause.”

“What cause?”

“Oh the general shamefulness of disusing the feet God had given me. But it was only three blocks, and I had my arctics.” She moved a little away toward the fire again and showed the arctics on the floor where she must have been scuffling them off under her skirts. “Ugh! But it’s cold!” She now stretched a satin slipper in toward the fire.

“Yes, it’s a cold night; but you seem to have got home alive, and I don’t think you’ll be the worse for it now, if you go to bed at once,” said her father.

“Is that a hint?” she asked, with a dreamy appreciation of the warmth through the toe of her slipper.

“Not at all; we should be glad to have you sit up the whole night with us.”

“Ah, now I know you’re hinting. Is it business?”

“Yes, it’s business.”

“Well, I’m just in the humor for business; I’ve had enough pleasure.”

“I don’t see why Louise shouldn’t stay and talk business with us, if she likes. I think it’s a pity to keep women out of it, as if it didn’t concern them,” said the son. “Nine-tenths of the time it concerns them more than it does men.” He had a bright, friendly, philosophical smile in saying this, and he stood waiting for his sister to be gone, with a patience which their father did not share. He stood something over six feet in his low shoes, and his powerful frame seemed starting out of the dress-suit, which it appeared so little related to. His whole face was handsome and regular, and his full beard did not wholly hide a mouth of singular sweetness.

“Yes; I think so too, in the abstract,” said the father. “If the business were mine, or were business in the ordinary sense of the term—”

“Why, why did you say it was business at all, then?” The girl put her arms round her father’s neck and let her head-scarf fall on the rug a little way from her cloak and her arctics. “If you hadn’t said it was business, I should have been in bed long ago.” Then, as if feeling her father’s eagerness to have her gone, she said, “Good night,” and gave him a kiss, and a hug or two more, and said “Good night, Matt,” and got herself away, letting a long glove trail somewhere out of her dress, and stretch its weak length upon the floor after her, as if it were trying to follow her.

VIII.

Louise’s father, in turning to look from her toward his son, felt himself slightly pricked in the cheek by the pin that had transferred itself from her neck-gear to his coat collar, and Matt went about picking up the cloak, the arctics, the scarf and the glove. He laid the cloak smoothly on the leathern lounge, and arranged the scarf and glove on it, and set the arctics on the floor in a sort of normal relation to it, and then came forward in time to relieve his father of the pin that was pricking him, and that he was rolling his eyes out of his head to get sight of.

“What in the devil is that?” he roared.

“Louise’s pin,” said Matt, as placidly as if that were quite the place for it, and its function were to prick her father in the cheek. He went and pinned it into her scarf, and then he said, “It’s about Northwick, I suppose.”

“Yes,” said his father, still furious from the pinprick. “I’m afraid the miserable scoundrel is going to run away.”

“Did you expect there was a chance of that?” asked Matt, quietly.

“Expect!” his father blustered. “I don’t know what I expected. I might have expected anything of him but common honesty. The position I took at the meeting was that our only hope was to give him a chance. He made all sorts of professions of ability to meet the loss. I didn’t believe him, but I thought that he might partially meet it, and that nothing was to be gained by proceeding against him. You can’t get blood out of a turnip, even by crushing the turnip.”

“That seems sound,” said the son, with his reasonable smile.

“I didn’t spare him, but I got the others to spare him. I told him he was a thief.”

“Oh!” said Matt.

“Why, wasn’t he?” returned his father, angrily.

“Yes, yes. I suppose he might be called so.” Matt admitted it with an air of having his reservations, which vexed his father still more.

“Very well, sir!” he roared. “Then I called him so; and I think that it will do him good to know it.” Hilary did not repeat all of the violent things he had said to Northwick, though he had meant to do so, being rather proud of them; the tone of his son’s voice somehow stopped him for the moment. “I brought them round to my position, and we gave him the chance he asked for.”

“It was really the only thing you could do.”

“Of course it was! It was the only business-like thing, though it won’t seem so when it comes out that he’s gone to Canada. I told him I thought the best thing for him would be a good, thorough, railroad accident on his way home; and that if it were not for his family, for his daughter who’s been in and out here so much with Louise, I would like to see him handcuffed, and going down the street with a couple of constables.”

Matt made no comment upon this, perhaps because he saw no use in criticising his father, and perhaps because his mind was more upon the point he mentioned. “It will be hard for that pretty creature.”

“It will be hard for a number of creatures, pretty and plain,” said his father. “It won’t break any of us; but it will shake some of us up abominably. I don’t know but it may send one or two people to the wall, for the time being.”

“Ah, but that isn’t the same thing at all. That’s suffering; it isn’t shame. It isn’t the misery that the sin of your father has brought on you.”

“Well, of course not!” said Hilary, impatiently granting it. “But Miss Northwick always seemed to me a tolerably tough kind of young person. I never quite saw what Louise found to like in her.”

“They were at school together,” said the son. “She’s a sufficiently offensive person, I fancy; or might be. But she sometimes struck me as a person that one might be easily unjust to, for that very reason; I suppose she has the fascination that a proud girl has for a girl like Louise.”

Hilary asked, with a divergence more apparent than real, “How is that affair of hers with Jack Wilmington?”

“I don’t know. It seems to have that quality of mystery that belongs to all affairs of the kind when they hang fire. We expect people to get married, and be done with it, though that may not really be the way to be done with it.”

“Wasn’t there some scandal about him, of some kind?”

“Yes; but I never believed in it.”

“He always struck me as something of a cub, but somehow he doesn’t seem the sort of a fellow to give the girl up because—”

“Because her father is a fraud?” Matt suggested. “No, I don’t think he is, quite. But there are always a great many things that enter into the matter besides a man’s feelings, or his principles, even. I can’t say what I think Wilmington would do. What steps do you propose to take next in the matter?”

“I promised him he shouldn’t be followed up, while he was trying to right himself. If we find he’s gone, we must give the case into the hands of the detectives, I suppose.” The disgust showed itself in Hilary’s face, which was an index to all his emotions, and his son said, with a smile of sympathy:

“The apparatus of justice isn’t exactly attractive, even when one isn’t a criminal. But I don’t know that it’s any more repulsive than the apparatus of commerce, or business, as we call it. Some dirt seems to get on everybody’s bread by the time he’s earned it, or on his money even when he’s made it in large sums as our class do.”

The last words gave the father a chance to vent his vexation with himself upon his son. “I wish you wouldn’t talk that walking-delegate’s rant with me, Matt. If I let you alone in your nonsense, I think you may fitly take it as a sign that I wish to be let alone myself.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the young man. “I didn’t wish to annoy you.”

“Don’t do it, then.” After a moment, Hilary added with a return to his own sense of deficiency, “The whole thing’s as thoroughly distasteful to me as it can be. But I can’t see how I could have acted otherwise than I’ve done. I know I’ve made myself responsible, in a way, for Northwick’s getting off; but there was really nothing to do but to give him the chance he asked for. His having abused it won’t change that fact at all; but I can’t conceal from myself that I half-expected him to abuse it.”

He put this tentatively, and his son responded, “I suppose that naturally inclines you to suppose he’ll run away.”

“Yes.”

“But your supposition doesn’t establish the fact.”

“No. But the question is whether it doesn’t oblige me to act as if it had; whether I oughtn’t, if I’ve got this suspicion, to take some steps at once to find out whether Northwick’s really gone or not, and to mix myself actively up in the catchpole business of his pursuit, after I promised him he shouldn’t be shadowed in any way till his three days were over.”

“It’s a nice question,” said Matt, “or rather, it’s a nasty one. Still, you’ve only got your fears for evidence, and you must all have had your fears before. I don’t think that even a bad conscience ought to hurry one into the catchpole business.” Matt laughed again with that fondness he had for his father. “Though as for any peculiar disgrace in catchpoles as catchpoles, I don’t see it. They’re a necessary part of the administration of justice, as we understand it, and have it; and I don’t see how a detective who arrests, say, a murderer, is not as respectably employed as the judge who sentences him, or the hangman who puts the rope round his neck. The distinction we make between them is one of those tricks for shirking responsibility which are practised in every part of the system. Not that I want you to turn catchpole. It’s all so sorrowful and sickening that I wish you hadn’t any duty at all in the matter. I suppose you feel at least that you ought to let the Board know that you have your misgivings?”

“Yes,” said Hilary, ruefully, with his double chin on his breast, “I felt like doing it at once; but there was my word to him! And I wanted to talk with you.”

“It was just as well to let them have their night’s rest. There isn’t really anything to be done.” Matt rose from the low chair where he had been sprawling, and stretched his stalwart arms abroad. “If the man was going he’s gone past recall by this time; and if he isn’t gone, there’s no immediate cause for anxiety.”

“Then you wouldn’t do anything at present?”

“I certainly shouldn’t. What could you do?”

“Yes, it might as well all go till morning, I suppose.”

“Good night,” the son said, suggestively, “I suppose there isn’t really anything more?”

“No, what could there be? You had better go to bed.”

“And you, too, I hope, father.”

“Oh, I shall go to bed — as a matter of form.”

The son laughed. “I wish you could carry your formality so far as to go to sleep, too. I shall.”

“I sha’n’t sleep,” said the father, bitterly. “When things like this happen, someone has to lie awake and think about them.”

“Well, I dare say Northwick’s doing that.”

“I doubt it,” said Hilary. “I suspect Northwick is enjoying a refreshing slumber on the Montreal express somewhere near St. Albans about this time.”

“I doubt if his dreams are pleasant. After all, he’s only going to a larger prison if he’s going into exile. He may be on the Montreal express, but I guess he isn’t sleeping,” said Matt.

“Yes,” his father admitted. “Poor devil! He’d much better be dead.”

IX.

The groom who drove Miss Sue Northwick down to the station at noon that day, came back without her an hour later. He brought word to her sister that she had not found the friend she expected to meet at the station, but had got a telegram from her there, and had gone into town to lunch with her. The man was to return and fetch her from the six o’clock train.

She briefly explained at dinner that her friend had been up at four balls during the week, and wished to beg off from the visit she had promised until after the fifth, which was to be that night.

“I don’t see how she lives through it,” said Adeline. “And at her age, it seems very odd to be just as fond of dancing as if she were a bud.”

“Louise is only twenty-three,” said Suzette. “If she were married, she would be just in the heart of her gayeties at that age, or even older.”

“But she isn’t married, and that makes all the difference.”

“Her brother is spending the month at home, and she makes the most of his being with them.”

“Has he given up his farming? It’s about time.”

“No; not at all, I believe. She says he’s in Boston merely as a matter of duty, to chaperon her at parties, and save her mother from having to go with her.”

“Well,” said Adeline, “I should think he would want to be of some use in the world; and if he won’t help his father in business, he had better help his mother in society.”

Suzette sat fallen back in her chair for the moment, and she said as if she had not heeded, “I think I will give a little dance here, next week. Louise can come up for a couple of days, and we can have it Thursday. We made out the list — just a few people. She went out with me after lunch, and we saw most of the girls, and I ordered the supper. Mrs. Lambert will matronize them; it’ll be an old dance, rather, as far as the girls are concerned, but I’ve asked two or three buds; and some of the young married people. It will be very pleasant, don’t you think?”

“Very. Do you think Mr. Wade would like to come?”

Suzette smiled. “I dare say he would. I wasn’t thinking of him in making it, but I don’t see why he shouldn’t look in.”

“He might come to the supper,” Adeline mused aloud, “if it isn’t one of his church days. I never can keep the run of them.”

“We were talking about that and we decided that Thursday would be perfectly safe. Louise and I looked it up together; but we knew we could make everything sure by asking Mrs. Lambert first of all; she would have been certain to object if we had made any mistake.”

“I’m very glad,” said Adeline. “I know father will be glad to have Mr. Wade here. He’s taken a great fancy to him.”

“Mr. Wade’s very nice,” said Suzette, coolly. “I shouldn’t have liked to have it without him.”

They left the table and went into the library, to talk the dance over at larger leisure. Suzette was somewhat sleepy from the fatigues of her escapade to Boston, and an afternoon spent mostly in the cold air, and from time to time she yawned, and said she must really go to bed, and then went on talking.

“Shall you have any of the South Hatboro’ people?” her sister asked.

“Mrs. Munger and her tribe?” said Suzette, with a contemptuous little smile. “I don’t think she would contribute much. Why not the Morrells; or the Putneys, at once?” She added abruptly, “I think I shall ask Jack Wilmington.” Adeline gave a start, and looked keenly at her; but she went on quite imperviously. “The Hilarys know him. Matt Hilary and he were quite friends at one time. Besides,” she said, as if choosing now to recognize the quality of Adeline’s gaze, “I don’t care to have Louise suppose there’s the shadow of anything between us any more, not even a quarrel.”

Adeline gave a little sigh of relief. “I’m glad that’s it. I’m always afraid you’ll get—”

“To thinking about him again? You needn’t be. All that’s as thoroughly dead and gone as anything can be in this world. No,” she continued, in the tone that is more than half for one’s self in such dealings, “whatever there was of that, or might have been, Mr. Wilmington has put an end to, long ago. It never was anything but a fancy, and I don’t believe it could have been anything else if it had ever come to the point.”

“I’m glad it seems so to you now, Sue,” said her sister, “but you needn’t tell me that you weren’t very much taken with him at one time; and if it’s going to begin again, I’d much rather you wouldn’t have him here.”

Suzette laughed at the old-maidish anxiety. “Do you think you shall see me at his feet before the evening is over? But I should like to see him at mine for a moment, and to have the chance of hearing his explanations.”

“I don’t believe he’s ever been bad!” cried Adeline. “He’s just weak.”

“Very well. I should like to hear what a man has to say for his weakness, and then tell him that I had a little weakness of my own, and didn’t think I had strength to endure a husband that had to be explained.”

“Ah, you’re in love with him, yet! You shall never have him here in the world, after the way he’s treated you!”

“Don’t be silly, Adeline! Don’t be romantic! If you had ever been in love yourself, you would know that people outlive that as well as other things. Let’s see how the drawing-room will do for the dance?”

She jumped from her chair and touched the electric button at the chimney. “You think that nothing but death can kill a fancy, and yet nobody marries their first love, and lots of women have second husbands.” The man showed himself at the door, and she said to him in a rapid aside: “Turn up the lights in the drawing-room, James,” and returned to her sister. “No, Adeline! The only really enduring and undying thing is a slight. That lasts — with me!”

Adeline was moved to say, in the perverse honesty of her soul, and from the inborn New England love of justice, “I don’t believe he ever meant it, Sue. I don’t believe but what he was influenced—”

Suzette laughed, not at all bitterly. “Oh, you’re in love with him! Well, you may have him if ever he offers himself to me. Let’s look at the drawing-room.” She caught Adeline round her bony waist, where each rib defined itself to her hand, and danced her out of the library, across the hall into the white and gold saloon beyond. “Yes,” she said, with a critical look at the room, “it will do splendidly. We shall have to put down linen, of course; but then the dancing will be superb — as good as a bare floor. Yes, it will be a grand success. Ugh! Come out, come out, come out! How deathly cold it is!”

She ran back into the warm library, and her sister followed more slowly. “You shouldn’t think,” she said, as if something in Sue’s words had reminded her of it, “that coming so soon after Mrs. Newton’s little boy—”

“Well, that’s like you, Adeline! To bring that up! No, indeed! It’ll be a whole week, nearly; and besides he isn’t quite one of the family. What an idea!”

“Of course,” her sister assented, abashed by Sue’s scornful surprise.

“It’s too bad it should have happened just at this time,” said the girl, with some relenting. “When is it to be?”

“To-morrow, at eleven,” said Adeline. She perceived that Sue’s selfishness was more a selfishness of words, perhaps, than of thoughts or feelings. “You needn’t have anything to do with it. I can tell them you were not very well, and didn’t feel exactly like coming. They will understand.” She was used to making excuses for Suzette, and a motherly fib like this seemed no harm to her.

X.

In the morning before her sister was astir, Adeline went out to the coachman’s quarters in the stabling, and met the mother of the dead child at the door. “Come right in!” she said, fiercely, as she set it wide. “I presume you want to know if there’s anything you can do for me; that’s what they all ask. Well, there ain’t, unless you can bring him back to life. I’ve been up and doin’, as usual, this mornin’,” she said, and a sound of frying came from the kitchen where she had left her work to let her visitor in. “We got to eat; we got to live.”

The farmer’s wife came in from the next chamber, where the little one lay; she had her bonnet and shawl on as if going home after a night’s watching. She said, “I tell her he’s better off where he’s gone; but she can’t seem to sense the comfort of it.”

“How do you know he’s better off?” demanded the mother, turning upon her. “It makes me tired to hear such stuff. Who’s goin’ to take more care of the child where he’s gone, than what his mother could? Don’t you talk nonsense, Mrs. Saunders! You don’t know anything about it, and nobody does. I can bear it; yes, I’ve got the stren’th to stand up against death, but I don’t want any comfort. You want to see Elbridge, Miss Northwick? He’s in the harness room, I guess. He’s got to keep about, too, if he don’t want to go clear crazy. One thing, he don’t have to stand any comfortin’. I guess men don’t say such things to each other as women do, big fools as they be!”

Mrs. Saunders gave Miss Northwick a wink of pity for Mrs. Newton and expressed that she was hardly accountable for what she was saying.

“He used to complain of me for lettin’ Arty get out into the stable among the horses; but I guess he won’t be troubled that way much more,” said the mother; and then something in Miss Northwick’s face seemed to stay her in her wild talk; and she asked, “Want I should call him for you?”

“No, no,” said Adeline, “I’ll go right through to him, myself.” She knew the way from the coachman’s dwelling into the stable, and she found Elbridge oiling one of the harnesses, with a sort of dogged attention to the work, which he hardly turned from to look at her. “Elbridge,” she asked, “did you drive father to the depot yesterday morning?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“When did he say he would be back?”

“Well, he said he couldn’t say, exactly. But I understood in a day or two.”

“Did he expect to be anywhere but Ponkwasset?”

“No, ma’am, I didn’t hear him say as he did.”

“Then it’s a mistake; and of course I knew it was a mistake. There’s more than one Northwick in the world, I presume.” She laughed a little hysterically; she had a newspaper in her hand, and it shook with the nervous tremor that passed over her.

“Why, what is it, Miss Northwick?” said Elbridge with a perception of the trouble in her voice through the trouble in his own heart. He stopped pulling the greasy sponge over the trace in his hand, and turned towards her.

“Oh, nothing. There’s been an accident on the Union and Dominion Railroad; and of course it’s a mistake.”

She handed him the paper, folded to the column which she wished to show, and he took it between two finger-tips, so as to soil it as little as possible, and stood reading it. She went on saying, “He wouldn’t be on the train if he was at Ponkwasset; I got the paper when I first came down stairs, but I didn’t happen to read the account till just now; and then I thought I’d run out and see what father said to you about where he was going. He told us he was going to the Mills, too, and—” Her voice growing more and more wistful, died away in the fascination of watching the fascination of Elbridge as he first took in the half-column of scare-heads, and then followed down to the meagre details of the dispatch eked out with double-leading to cover space.

It appeared that the Northern express had reached Wellwater Junction, on the Union and Dominion line, several hours behind time, and after the usual stop there for supper, had joined the Boston train, on the United States and Canada, for Montreal, and had, just after leaving the Junction, run off the track. “The deadly car stove got in its work” on the wreck, and many lives had been lost by the fire, especially in the parlor car. It was impossible to give a complete list of the killed and wounded, but several bodies were identified, and among the names of passengers in the Pullman that of T. W. Northwick was reported, from a telegram received by the conductor at Wellwater asking to have a seat reserved from that point to Montreal.

“It ain’t him, I know it ain’t, Miss Northwick,” said Elbridge. He offered to give her the paper, but took another look at it before he finally yielded it. “There’s lots of folks of the same name, I don’t care what it is, and the initials ain’t the ones.”

“No,” she said, doubtfully, “but I didn’t like the last name being the same.”

“Well, you can’t help that; and as long as it ain’t the initials, and you know your father is safe and sound at the Mills, you don’t want to worry.”

“No,” said Adeline. “You’re sure he told you he was going to the Mills?”

“Why, didn’t he tell you he was? I don’t recollect just what he said. But he told me about that note he left for me, and that had the money in it for the fun’al—” Elbridge stopped for a moment before he added, “He said he’d telegraph just which train he wanted me to meet him when he was comin’ back.... Why, dumn it! I guess I must be crazy. We can settle it in half an hour’s time — or an hour or two at the outside — and no need to worry about it. Telegraph to the Mills and find out whether he’s there or not.”

He dropped his harness, and went to the telephone and called up the Western Union operator at the station. He had the usual telephonic contention with her as to who he was, and what he wanted, but he got her at last to take his dispatch to Ponkwasset Falls, asking whether Northwick was at the Mills.

“There!” he said, “I don’t believe but what that’ll fix it all right. And I’ll bring you in the answer myself, when it comes, Miss Northwick.”

“I do hate to trouble you with my foolishness, when—”

“I guess you needn’t mind about that,” said Elbridge. “I guess it wouldn’t make much difference to me, if the whole world was burnt up. Be a kind of a relief.” He did not mean just the sense the words conveyed, and she, in her preoccupation with her own anxiety, and her pity for him, interpreted them aright.

She stayed to add, “I don’t know what he could have been on that train for, any way, do you?”

“No, and he wa’n’t on it; you’ll find that out.”

“It’ll be very provoking,” she said, forecasting the minor trouble of the greater trouble’s failure. “Everybody will wonder if it isn’t father, and we shall have to tell them it isn’t.”

“Well, that won’t be so bad as havin’ to tell ’em it is,” said Elbridge, getting back for the moment to his native dryness.

“That’s true,” Adeline admitted. “Don’t speak to anybody about it till you hear.” She knew from his making no answer that he would obey her, and she hid the paper in her pocket, as if she would hide the intelligence it bore from all the rest of the world.

She let Suzette sleep late, after the fatigues of her day in Boston and the excitement of their talk at night, which she suspected had prevented the girl from sleeping early. Elbridge’s sympathetic incredulity had comforted her, if it had not convinced her, and she possessed herself in such patience as she could till the answer should come from the mills. If her father were there, then it would be all right; and in the meantime she found some excuses for not believing the worst she feared. There was no reason in the world why he should be on that train; there was no reason why she should identify him with that T. W. Northwick in the burnt-up car; that was not his name, and that was not the place where he would have been.

XI.

There was trouble with the telegraph and telephone connections between Hatboro’ and Ponkwasset, and Adeline had to go to the funeral without an answer to Elbridge’s message. Below her surface interest in the ceremony and the behavior of the mourners and the friends, which nothing could have alienated but the actual presence of calamity, she had a nether misery of alternating hope and fear, of anxieties continually reasoned down, and of security lost the instant it was found. The double strain told so upon her nerves, that when the rites at the grave were ended, she sent word to the clergyman and piteously begged him to drive home with her.

“Why, aren’t you well, Miss Northwick?” he asked, with a glance at her troubled face, as he got into the covered sleigh with her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, and she flung herself back against the cushioning and began to cry.

“Poor Mrs. Newton’s grief has been very trying,” he said, gently, and with a certain serenity of smile he had, and he added, as if he thought it well to lure Miss Northwick from the minor affliction that we feel for others’ sorrows to the sorrow itself, “It has been a terrible blow to her — so sudden, and her only child.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” said Adeline, frankly. “Have — have you seen the — paper this morning?”

“It came,” said the clergyman. “But in view of the duty before me, I thought I wouldn’t read it. Is there anything particular in it?”

“No, nothing. Only — only—” Adeline had not been able to separate herself from the dreadful thing, and she took it out of the carriage pocket. “There has been an accident on the railroad,” she began firmly, but she broke down in the effort to go on. “And I wanted to have you see — see—” She stopped, and handed him the paper.

He took it and ran over the account of the accident, and came at her trouble with an instant intelligence that was in itself a sort of reassurance. “But had you any reason to suppose your father was on the train?”

“No,” she said from the strength he gave her. “That is the strange part about it. He went up to the Mills, yesterday morning, and he couldn’t have been on the train at all. Only the name—”

“It isn’t quite the name,” said Wade, with a gentle moderation, as if he would not willingly make too much of the difference, and felt truth to be too sacred to be tampered with even while it had merely the form of possibility.

“No,” said Adeline, eager to be comforted, “and I’m sure he’s at the Mills. Elbridge has sent a dispatch to find out if he’s there, but there must be something the matter with the telegraph. We hadn’t heard before the funeral; or, at least, he didn’t bring the word; and I hated to keep round after him when—”

“He probably hadn’t heard,” said the clergyman, soothingly, “and no news is good news, you know. But hadn’t we better drive round by the station, and find out whether any answer has been—”

“O, no! I couldn’t do that!” said Adeline, nervously. “They will telephone the answer up to Elbridge. But come home with me, if you haven’t something to do, and stay with us till we—”

“Oh, very willingly.” On the way the young clergyman talked of the accident, guessing that her hysterical conjectures had heightened the horror, and that he should make it less dreadful by exploring its facts with her. He did not declare it impossible her father should have been on the train, but he urged the extreme improbability.

Elbridge and his wife passed them, driving rapidly in Simpson’s booby, which Adeline had ordered for their use at the funeral; and when she got into the house Elbridge was waiting there for her. He began at once; “Miss Northwick, I don’t believe but what your father’s staid over at Springfield for something. He was talkin’ to me last week about some hosses there—”

“Isn’t he at the Mills?” she demanded sharply.

Elbridge gave his hat a turn on his hand, before he looked up. “Well, no, he hain’t been, yet—”

Adeline made no sound, but she sank down as a column of water sinks.

At the confusion of movements and voices that followed, Suzette came to the door of the library, and looked wonderingly into the hall, where this had happened, with a book clasped over her finger. “What in the world is the matter?” she asked with a sort of sarcastic amaze, at sight of Elbridge lifting something from the floor.

“Don’t be alarmed, Miss Suzette,” said Mr. Wade, “Your sister seems a little faint, and—”

“It’s this sickening heat!” cried the girl, running to the door, and setting it wide. “It suffocates me when I come in from the outside. I’ll get some water.” She vanished and was back again instantly, stooping over Adeline to wet her forehead and temples. The rush of the cold air began to revive her. She opened her eyes, and Suzette said, severely, “What has come over you, Adeline? Aren’t you well?” and as Adeline answered nothing, she went on: “I don’t believe she knows where she is. Let us get her into the library on the lounge.”

She put her strength with that of the young clergyman, and they carried Adeline to the lounge; Suzette dispatched Elbridge, hanging helplessly about, for some of the women. He sent the parlor-maid, and did not come back.

Adeline kept looking at her sister as if she were afraid of her. When she was recovered sufficiently to speak, she turned her eyes on the clergyman, and said huskily, “Tell her.”

“Your sister has had a little fright,” he began; and with his gentle eyes on the girl’s he went on to deal the pain that priests and physicians must give. “There’s the report of a railroad accident in the morning paper, and among the passengers — the missing — was one of the name of Northwick—”

“But father is at the Mills!”

“Your sister had telegraphed before the funeral, to make sure — and word has come that he — isn’t there.”

“Where is the paper?” demanded Suzette, with a kind of haughty incredulity.

Wade found it in his pocket, where he must have put it instead of giving it back to Adeline in the sleigh. Suzette took it and went with it to one of the windows. She stood reading the account of the accident, while her sister watched her with tremulous eagerness for the help that came from her contemptuous rejection of the calamity.

“How absurd! It isn’t father’s name, and he couldn’t have been on the train. What in the world would he have been going to Montreal for, at this time of year? It’s ridiculous!” Suzette flung the paper down, and came back to the other two.

“I felt,” said Wade, “that it was extremely improbable—”

“But where,” Adeline put in faintly, “could he have been if he wasn’t at the Mills?”

“Anywhere in the world except Wellwater Junction,” returned Suzette, scornfully. “He may have stopped over at Springfield, or—”

“Yes,” Adeline admitted, “that’s what Elbridge thought.”

“Or he may have gone on to Willoughby Junction. He often goes there.”

“That is true,” said the other, suffering herself to take heart a little. “And he’s been talking of selling his interest in the quarries there; and—”

“He’s there, of course,” said Suzette with finality. “If he’d been going farther, he’d have telegraphed us. He’s always very careful. I’m not in the least alarmed, and I advise you not to be, Adeline. When did you see the paper first?”

“When I came down to breakfast,” said Adeline, quietly.

“And I suppose you didn’t eat any breakfast?”

Adeline’s silence made confession.

“What I think is, we’d better all have lunch,” said Suzette, and she went and touched the bell at the chimney. “You’ll stay with us, won’t you, Mr. Wade? We want lunch at once, James,” she said to the man who answered her ring. “Of course, you must stay, Mr. Wade, and help see Adeline back to her right mind.” She touched the bell again, and when the man appeared, “My sleigh at once, James,” she commanded. “I will drive you home, Mr. Wade, on my way to the station. Of course I shall not leave anything in doubt about this silly scare. I fancy it will be no great difficulty to find out where father is. Where is that railroad guide? Probably my father took it up to his room.” She ran upstairs and came down with the book in her hand. “Now we will see. I don’t believe he could get any train at Springfield, where he would have to change for the Mills, that would take him beyond the Junction at that hour last night. The express has to come up from Boston—” She stopped and ran over the time-table of the route. “Well, he could get a connecting train at the Junction; but that doesn’t prove at all that he did.”

She talked on, mocking the mere suggestion of such a notion, and then suddenly rang the bell once more, to ask sharply, “Isn’t lunch ready yet? Then bring us tea, here. I shall telegraph to the Mills again, and I shall telegraph to Mr. Hilary in Boston; he will know whether father was going anywhere else. They had a meeting of the Board day before yesterday, and father went to the Mills unexpectedly. I shall telegraph to Ponkwasset Junction, too; and you may be sure I shall not come home, Adeline, till I know something definite.”

The tea came, and Suzette served the cups herself, with nerves that betrayed no tremor in the clash of silver or china. But she made haste, and at the sound of sleigh-bells without, she put down her own cup, untasted.

“Oh, must you take Mr. Wade away?” Adeline feebly pleaded. “Stay till she comes back!” she entreated.

Suzette faltered a moment, and then with a look at Mr. Wade, she gave a harsh laugh. “Very well!” she said.

She ran into the hall and up the stairs, and in another moment they heard her coming down again; the outer door shut after her, and then came the flutter of the sleigh-bells as she drove away.

Over the lunch the elder sister recovered herself a little, and ate as one can in the suspense of a strong emotion.

“Your sister is a person of great courage,” said the clergyman, as if he were a little abashed by it.

“She would never show that she’s troubled. But I know well enough that she’s troubled, by the way she kept talking and doing something every minute; and now, if she hadn’t gone to telegraph, she’d — I mustn’t keep you here, any longer, Mr. Wade,” she broke off in the sense of physical strength the food had given her. “Indeed, I mustn’t. You needn’t be anxious. I shall do very well, now. Yes! I shall!”

She begged him to leave her, but he perceived that she did not really wish him to go, and it was nearly an hour after Suzette drove away, before he got out of the house. He would not let her send him home; and he walked toward the village in the still, sunny cold of the early winter afternoon, thinking of the sort of contempt with which that girl had spurned the notion of calamity, as if it were something to be resented, and even snubbed, in its approach to her. It was as if she had now gone to trace it to its source, and defy it there; to stamp upon the presumptuous rumor and destroy it.

Just before he reached the crest of the upland that shut out the village from him, he heard the clash of sleigh-bells; a pair of horses leaped into sight, and came bearing down upon him with that fine throw of their feet, which you get only in such a direct encounter. He stepped into the side track, and then he heard Miss Sue Northwick call to her horses and saw her pulling them up. She had her father’s fondness for horses, and the pair of little grays were a gift from him with the picturesque sledge they drew. The dasher swelled forward like a swan’s breast, and then curved deeply backward; from either corner of the band of iron filagree at the top, dangled a red horsetail. The man who had driven her to the station sat in a rumble behind; on the seat with Suzette was another young lady, who put out her hand to Wade with a look of uncommon liking, across the shining bearskin robe, and laughed at his astonishment in seeing her. While they talked, the clipped grays nervously lifted and set down their forefeet in the snow, as if fingering it; they inhaled the cold air with squared nostrils, and blew it out in blasts of white steam. Suzette said, in, explanation of her friend’s presence: “Louise had seen the account, and she made her brother bring her up. They think just as I do, that there’s nothing of it; one of the papers had the name Nordeck; but we’ve left Mr. Hilary at the station, fighting the telegraph and telephone in all directions, and he isn’t to stop till he gets something positive. He’s trying Wellwater now.” She said all this very haughtily, but she added, “The only thing is, I can’t understand why my father hasn’t been heard of at the Mills. Some one was asking for him there yesterday.”

“Probably he went on to Willoughby Junction, as you suggested.”

“Of course he did,” said Louise. “We haven’t heard from there yet.”

“Oh, I’m not in the least troubled,” said Sue, “but it’s certainly very provoking.” She lifted her reins. “I’m hurrying home to let Adeline know.”

“She’ll be very glad,” Wade returned, as if it were the certainty of good news she was carrying. “I think I’ll join Matt at the station,” he suggested to Louise.

“Do!” she answered. “You can certainly manage something between you. Matt will be almost as glad of your coming as my going. I thought we were coming up here to reassure Sue, but I seem strangely superfluous.”

“You can reassure Adeline,” said Sue. She added to Wade, “I keep thinking what an annoyance it will be to my father, to have all this fuss made over him. I sometimes feel vexed with Adeline. Good-bye!” she called back to him as she drove away, and she stopped again to add, “Won’t you come up with Mr. Hilary when you’ve heard something definite?”

Wade promised, and they repeated their good-byes all round with a resolute cheerfulness.

XII.

The affair had been mixed up with tea and lunch, and there was now the suggestion of a gay return to the Northwick place and an hour or two more in that pleasant company of pretty and lively women, which Wade loved almost as well as he loved righteousness. He knew that there was such a thing as death in the world; he had often already seen its strange, peaceful face; he had just stood by an open grave; but at the moment, his youth denied it all, and he swung along over the hard-packed roadway thinking of the superb beauty of Suzette Northwick, and the witchery of Louise Hilary’s face. It was like her, to come at once to her friend in this anxiety; and he believed a strength in her to help bear the worst, the worst that now seemed so remote and impossible.

He did not find Matt Hilary in the station; but he pushed through to the platform outside and saw him at a little distance standing between two of the tracks, and watching a group of men there who were replacing some wornout rails with new ones.

“Matt!” he called to him, and Matt turned about and said, “Hello, Caryl!” and yielded him a sort of absent-minded hand, while he kept his face turned smilingly upon the men. Some were holding the rails in position, and another was driving in the spike that was to rivet the plate to the sleeper. He struck it with exquisite accuracy from a wide, free-handed rhythmical swing of his hammer.

“Beautiful! Isn’t it?” said Matt. “I never see any sort of manual labor, even the kinds that are brutified and demoralized by their association with machinery, without thinking how far the arts still come short of the trades. If any sculptor could feel it, what a magnificent bas-relief just that thing would make!” He turned round to look at the men again: in their different poses of self-forgetfulness and interest in their work, they had a beauty and grace, in spite of their clumsy dress, which ennobled the scene.

When Matt once more faced round, he smiled serenely on his friend. Wade, who knew his temperament and his philosophy, was deceived for the moment. “Then you don’t share Miss Northwick’s anxiety about her father,” he began, as if Matt had been dealing directly with that matter, and had been giving his reasons for not being troubled about it. “Have you heard any thing yet? But of course you haven’t, or—”

Matt halted him, and looked down into his face from his greater height with a sort of sobered cheerfulness. “How much do you know about Miss Northwick’s father?”

“Very little — nothing in fact but what she and her sister showed me in the morning paper. I know they’re in great distress about him; I just met Miss Suzette and your sister, and they told me I should find you at the station.”

Matt began to walk on again. “I didn’t know but you had heard some talk from the outside. I came off to escape the pressure of inquiry at the station; people had found out somehow that I had been put in charge of the telegraphing when the young ladies left. I imagined they wouldn’t follow me if I went for a walk.” He put his hand through Wade’s arm, and directed their course across the tracks toward the street away from the station, where Elbridge had walked his horses up and down the evening he met Northwick. “I told them to look out for me, if they got anything; I should keep in sight somewhere. Isn’t it a curious commentary on our state of things,” he went on, “that when any man in a position of trust can’t be accounted for twenty-four hours after he leaves home, the business-like supposition is that he has run away with money that doesn’t belong to him?”

“What do you mean, Matt?”

“I mean that the popular belief in Hatboro’ seems to be that Northwick was on his way to Canada on the train that was wrecked.”

“Shocking, shocking!” said Wade. “What makes you think they believe that?”

“The conjecture and speculation began in the station the moment Miss Northwick left it, and before it could be generally understood that I was there to represent her. I suppose there wasn’t a man among them that wouldn’t have trusted Northwick with all he had, or wouldn’t have felt that his fortune was made if Northwick had taken charge of his money. In fact I heard some of them saying so before their deference for me shut their mouths. Yet I haven’t a doubt they all think he’s an absconding defaulter.”

“It’s shocking,” said Wade, sadly, “but I’m afraid you’re right. These things are so common that people are subjected to suspicion on no kind of—” But just at this juncture Matt lifted his head from the moment’s revery in which he seemed to have been far absent.

“Have you seen much of the family this winter?”

“Yes, a good deal,” said Wade. “They’re not communicants, but they’ve been regular attendants at the services, and I’ve been a good deal at their house. They seem rather lonely; they have very little to do with the South Hatboro’ people, and nothing at all with the villagers. I don’t know why they’ve spent the winter here. Of course one hears all kinds of gossip. The gossips at South Hatboro’ say that Miss Suzette was willing to be on with young Wilmington again, and that she kept the family here. But I place no faith in such a conjecture.”

“It has a rustic crudity,” said Matt. “But if Jack Wilmington ever cared anything for the girl, now’s his chance to be a man and stand by her.”

Something in Matt’s tone made Wade stop and ask, “What do you mean, Matt? Is there anything besides—”

“Yes.” Matt took a fresh grip of his friend’s arm, and walked him steadily forward, and kept him walking in spite of his involuntary tendency to come to a halt every few steps, and try to urge something that he never quite got from his tongue, against the probability of what Matt was saying. “I mean that these people are right in their suspicions.”

“Right?”

“My dear Caryl, there is no doubt whatever that Northwick is a defaulter to the company in a very large amount. It came out at a meeting of the directors on Monday. He confessed it, for he could not deny it in the face of the proof against him, and he was given a number of days to make up his shortage. He was released on parole: it was really the best thing, the wisest as well as the mercifullest, and of course he broke his word, and seized the first chance to run away. I knew all about the defalcation from my father just after the meeting. There is simply no question about it.”

“Gracious powers!” said Wade, finally helpless to dispute the facts which he still did not realize. “And you think it possible — do you suppose — imagine — that it was really he who was in that burning car? What an awful fate!”

“An awful fate?” asked Matt. “Do you think so? Yes, yours is the safe ground in regard to a thing of that kind — the only ground.”

“The only ground?”

“I was thinking of my poor father,” said Matt.

“He said some sharp things to that wretched creature at the meeting of the Board — called him a thief, and I dare say other hard names — and told him that the best thing that could happen to him was a railroad accident on his way home.”

“Ah!”

“You see? When he read the account of that accident in the paper this morning, and found a name so much like Northwick’s among the victims, he was fearfully broken up, of course. He felt somehow as if he had caused his death — I could see that, though of course he wouldn’t admit anything of the kind.”

“Of course,” said Wade, compassionately.

“I suppose it isn’t well to invoke death in any way. He is like the devil, and only too apt to come, if you ask for him. I don’t mean anything superstitious, and I don’t suppose my father really has any superstitious feeling about the matter. But he’s been rather a friend — or a victim — of that damnable theory that the gentlemanly way out of a difficulty like Northwick’s is suicide, and I suppose he spoke from association with it, or by an impulse from it. He has been telegraphing right and left, to try to verify the reports, as it was his business and duty to do, anyway; and he caught at the notion of my coming up here with Louise to see if we could be of any use to those two poor women.”

“Poor women!” Wade echoed. “The worst must fall upon them, as the worst always seems to do.”

“Yes, wherever a cruel blow falls there seems to be a woman for it to fall on. And you see what a refinement of cruelty this is going to be when it reaches them? They have got to know that their father met that awful death, and that he met it because he was a defaulter and was running away. I suppose the papers will be full of it.”

“That seems intolerable. Couldn’t anything be done to stop them?”

“Why the thing has to come out. You can keep happiness a secret, but sorrow and shame have to come out — I don’t know why, but they do. Then, when they come out, we feel as if the means of their publicity were the cause of them. It’s very unphilosophical.” They walked slowly along in silence for a few moments, and then Matt’s revery broke out again in words: “Well, it’s to be seen now whether she has the strength that bears, or the strength that breaks. The way she held her head, as she took the reins and drove off, with poor Louise beside her palpitating with sympathy for her trouble and anxiety about her horses, was, yes, it was superb: there’s no other word for it. Ah, poor girl!”

“Your sister’s presence will be a great help to her,” said Wade. “It was very good of her to come.”

“Ah, there wasn’t anything else for it,” said Matt, flinging his head up. “Louise has my father’s loyalty. I don’t know much about her friendship with Miss Northwick — she’s so much younger than I, and they came together when I was abroad — but I’ve fancied she wasn’t much liked among the girls, and Louise was her champion, in a way. When Louise read that report, nothing would do but she must come.”

“Of course.”

“But our being here must have its embarrassments for my father. It was a sacrifice for him to let us come.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was he who carried through the respite the directors gave Northwick; and now he will have the appearance before some people of helping to cover up the miserable facts, of putting a good face on things while a rogue was getting away from justice. He might even be supposed to have some interest in getting him out of the way.”

“Oh, I don’t think any such suspicion can attach itself to such a man as Mr. Hilary,” said Wade, with a certain resentment of the suggestion even from the man’s son.

“In a commercial civilization like ours any sort of suspicion can attach to any sort of man in a case like this,” said Matt.

Wade took off his hat and wiped his forehead. “I can’t realize that the case is what you say. I can’t realize it at all. It seems like some poor sort of play, of make-believe. I can’t forgive myself for being so little moved by it. We are in the presence of a horror that ought to make us uncover our heads and fall to our knees and confess our own sins to God!”

“Ah, I’m with you there!” said Matt, and he pushed his hand farther through his friend’s arm.

They were both still well under thirty, and they both had that zest for mere experience, any experience, that hunger for the knowledge of life, which youth feels. In their several ways they were already men who had thought for themselves, or conjectured, rather; and they were eager to verify their speculations through their emotions. They thought a good deal alike in many things, though they started from such opposite points in their thinking; and they both had finally the same ideal of life. Their intimacy was of as old a date as their school days; at Harvard they were in the same clubs as well as the same class. Wade’s father was not a Boston man, but his mother was a Bellingham, and he was nurtured in the traditions of Hilary’s social life. Both had broken with them: Wade not so much when he became a ritualist as Hilary when he turned his back on manufacturing.

They were now not without a kind of pride in standing so close to the calamity they were fated witnesses of, and in the midst of their sympathy they had a curiosity which concerned itself with one of the victims because she was a young and beautiful girl. Their pity not so much forgot as ignored Northwick’s elder daughter, who was a plain, sick old maid, and followed the younger with a kind of shrinking and dread of her doom which Matt tried to put into words.

“I assure you if I couldn’t manage to pull away from it at moments, I don’t see how I could stand it. I had a sense of personal disgrace, when I met that poor girl, with what I had in my mind. I felt as if I were taking some base advantage of her in knowing that about her father, and I was so glad when she went off with Louise and left me to struggle with my infamous information alone. I hurried Louise away with her in the most cowardly haste. We don’t any of us realize it, as you say. Why, just imagine! It means sorrow, it means shame, it means poverty. They will have to leave their house, their home; she will have to give up everything to the company. It isn’t merely friends and her place in the world; it’s money, it’s something to eat and wear, it’s a roof over her head!”

Wade refused the extreme view portrayed by his friend’s figures. “Of course she won’t be allowed to come to want.”

“Of course. But there’s really no measuring the sinuous reach of a disaster like this. It strikes from a coil that seems to involve everything.”

“What are you going to do if you get bad news?” asked Wade.

“Ah, I don’t know! I must tell her, somehow; unless you think that you—” Wade gave a start which Matt interpreted aright; he laughed nervously. “No, no! It’s for me to do it. I know that; unless I can get Louise. Ah! I wonder what that is.”

They were walking back toward the station again, and Matt had seen a head and arm projected from the office window, and a hand waving a sheet of yellow paper. It seemed meant for them. They both began to run, and then they checked themselves; and walked as fast as they could.

“We must refer the matter to your sister,” said Wade, “and if she thinks best, remember that I shall be quite ready to speak to Miss Northwick. Or, if you think best, I will speak to her without troubling your sister.”

“Oh, you’re all right, Wade. You needn’t have any doubt of that. We’ll see. I wonder what there is in that dispatch.”

The old station master had come out of the station and was hurrying to meet them with the message, now duly enclosed in an envelope. He gave it to Matt and promptly turned his back on him.

Matt tore it open, and read: “Impossible to identify parlor-car passengers.” The telegram was signed “Operator,” and was dated at Wellwater. It fell blankly on their tense feeling.

“Well,” said Wade, after a long breath. “It isn’t the worst.”

Matt read it frowningly over several times; then he smiled. “Oh, no. This isn’t at all bad. It’s nothing. But so far, it’s rather comforting. And it’s something, even if it is nothing. Well, I suppose I’d better go up to Miss Northwick with it. Wait a moment; I must tell them where to send if anything else comes.”

“I’ll walk with you as far as St. Michael’s,” said Wade, when they left the station. “I’m going to my study, there.”

They set off together, up the middle of the street, which gave them more elbow-room than the sidewalk narrowly blocked out of the snow.

From a large store as they were passing, a small, dry-looking, pompous little man advanced to the middle of the street, and stopped them. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Wade! I beg your pardon, sir!” he said, nimbly transferring himself, after the quasi self-introduction, from Wade to Matt. “May I ask whether you have received any further information?”

“No,” said Matt, amiably, “the only answer we have got is that it is impossible to identify the passengers in the parlor-car.”

“Ah, thank you! Thank you very much, sir! I felt sure it couldn’t be our Mr. Northwick. Er — good-morning, sir.”

He bowed himself away, and went into his store again, and Matt asked Wade, “Who in the world is that?”

“He’s a Mr. Gerrish — keeps the large store, there. Rather an unpleasant type.”

Matt smiled. “He had the effect of refusing to believe that anything so low as an accident could happen to a man of Northwick’s business standing.”

“Something of that,” Wade assented. “He worships Northwick on the altar of material success.”

Matt lifted his head and looked about. “I suppose the whole place is simply seething with curiosity.”

Just after they reached the side-street where Wade left him to go down to his church, he met Sue Northwick driving in her sleigh. She was alone, except for the groom impassive in the rumble.

“Have you heard anything?” she asked, sharply.

Matt repeated the dispatch from the operator at Wellwater.

“I knew it was a mistake,” she said, with a kind of resolute scorn. “It’s perfectly ridiculous! Why should he have been there? I think there ought to be some way of punishing the newspapers for circulating false reports. I’ve been talking with the man who drove my father to the train yesterday morning, and he says he spoke lately of buying some horses at Springfield. He got several from a farm near there once. I’m going down to telegraph the farmer; I found his name among father’s bills. Of course he’s there. I’ve got the dispatch all written out.”

“Let me take it back to the station for you, Miss Northwick,” said Matt.

“No; get in with me here, and we’ll drive down, and then I’ll carry you back home. Or! Here, Dennis!” she said to the man in the rumble; and she handed him the telegram. “Take this to the telegraph-office, and tell them to send it up by Simpson the instant the answer comes.”

The Irishman said, “Yes, ma’am,” and dropped from his perch with the paper in his hand.

“Get in, Mr. Hilary,” she said, and after he had mounted she skilfully backed the sleigh and turned the horses homeward. “If I hear nothing from my dispatch, or if I hear wrong, I am going up to Wellwater Junction myself, by the first train. I can’t wait any longer. If it’s the worst, I want to know the worst.”

Matt did not know what to say to her courage. So he said, “Alone?” to gain time.

“Of course! At such a time, I would rather be alone.”

At the house Matt found Louise had gone to her room for a moment, and he said he would like to speak with her there.

She was lying on the lounge, when he announced himself, and she said, “Come in,” and explained, “I just came off a moment, to give my sympathies a little rest. And then, being up late so many nights this week. What have you heard?”

“Nothing, practically. Louise, how long did you expect to stay?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought. As long as I’m needed, I suppose. Why? Must you go back?”

“No — not exactly.”

“Not exactly? What are you driving at?”

“Why, there’s nothing to be found out by telegraphing. Some one must go up to the place where the accident happened. She sees that, and she wants to go. She can’t realize at all what it means to go there. Suppose she could manage the journey, going alone, and all that; what could she do after she got there? How could she go and look up the place of the accident, and satisfy herself whether her father was—”

“Matt!” shrieked his sister. “If you go on, you will drive me wild. She mustn’t go; that’s all there is of it. You mustn’t think of letting her go.” She sat up on the lounge in expression of her resolution on this point. “She must send somebody — some of their men. She mustn’t go. It’s too hideous!”

“No,” said Matt, thoughtfully. “I shall go.”

“You!”

“Why not? I can be at the place by four or five in the morning, and I can ascertain all the facts, and be able to relieve this terrible suspense for her.”

“For both of them,” suggested Louise. “It must be quite as bad for that poor, sick old maid.”

“Why, of course,” said Matt, and he felt so much ashamed of having left her out of the account that he added, “I dare say it’s even worse for her. She’s seen enough of life to realize it more.”

“Sue was his favorite, though,” Louise returned. “Of course you must go, Matt. You couldn’t do less! It’s magnificent of you. Have you told her, yet, that you would go?”

“Not yet. I thought I would talk it over with you, first.”

“Oh, I approve of it. It’s the only thing to do. And I had better stay here till you come back—”

“Why, no; I’m not sure.” He came a little nearer and dropped his voice. “You’d better know the whole trouble, Louise. There’s great trouble for them whether he’s dead or alive. There’s something wrong in his accounts with the company, and if he was on that train he was running away to Canada to escape arrest.”

He could see that only partial intelligence of the case reached her.

“Then if he’s killed, it will all be hushed up. I see! It makes you hope he’s killed.”

Matt gave a despairing groan. “If he’s killed it makes it just so much the worse. The defalcation has to come out, any way.”

“When must it come out?”

“A good many people know of it; and such things are hard to keep. It may come out — some rumor of it — in the morning papers. The question is whether you want to stay till they know it here; whether it would be wise, or useful.”

“Certainly not! I should want to kill anybody that was by when such a thing as that came out, and I should despise Sue Northwick if she let me get away alive. I must go at once!”

She slid herself from the lounge, and ran to the glass, where she put up a coil of hair in the knot it had escaped from.

“I had my doubts,” Matt said, “about letting you come here, without telling you just what the matter was; but mother thought you would insist upon coming, any way, and that you would be embarrassed.”

“Oh, that was quite right,” said Louise. “The great thing now is to get away.”

“I hope you won’t let her suspect—”

“Well, I think you can trust me for that, Matt,” said Louise, turning round upon him, with a hairpin in her mouth, long enough to give him as sarcastic a glance as she could. If her present self-possession was a warrant of future performance, Matt thought he could trust her; but he was afraid Louise had not taken in the whole enormity of the fact; and he was right in this. As a crime, she did not then, or ever afterwards, fully imagine it. It may be doubted whether she conceived of it as other than a great trouble, and as something that ought always to be kept from her friend.

Matt went down stairs and found Sue Northwick in the library.

“I feel perfectly sure,” she said, “that we shall hear of my father at Springfield. One of the horses he got there has gone lame, and it would be quite like him to stop and look up another in the place of it on the same farm.”

The logic of this theory did not strike Matt, but the girl held her head in such a strong way, she drew her short breaths with such a smoothness, she so visibly concealed her anxiety in the resolution to believe herself what she said that he could not refuse it the tribute of an apparent credence. “Yes, that certainly makes it seem probable.”

“At any rate,” she said, “if I hear nothing from him there, or we get no news from Wellwater, I shall go there at once. I’ve made up my mind to that.”

“I shouldn’t wish you to go alone, Sue,” Adeline quavered. Her eyes were red, and her lips swollen as if she had been crying; and now the tears came with her words. “You could never get there alone in the world. Don’t you remember, it took us all day to get to Wellwater the last time we went to Quebec?”

Sue gave her sister a severe look, as if to quell her open fears at least, and Matt asked aimlessly, “Is it on the way to Quebec?”

Sue picked up the railroad guide from the desk where she had left it. “Yes; it is, and it isn’t.” She opened the book and showed him the map of the road. “The train divides at Wellwater, and part goes to Montreal and part to Quebec. There are all sorts of stops and starts on the Quebec branch, so that you don’t arrive till next morning, but you get to Montreal in five or six hours. But the whole thing seems perfectly frantic. I don’t see why we pay the slightest attention to it! Of course, papa has stayed over in Springfield for something; only he’s usually so careful about telegraphing us if he changes his plans—”

She faltered, and let the book drop. Matt picked it up for her, and began to look at the time-table, at first to hide the pain he felt at the self-discouragement in which she ended, and then to see if he might not somehow be useful to her. “I see that a train from Boston meets the Springfield train at Wellwater.”

“Does there?” She bent to look over the book with him, and he felt the ungovernable thrill at being near the beauty of a woman’s face which a man never knows whether to be ashamed of or glad of, but which he cannot help feeling. “Then perhaps I had better go by way of Boston. What time does it start? Oh, I see! Seven, thirty. I could get that train — if I don’t hear from him at Springfield. But I know I shall hear.”

A stir of drapery made them aware of Louise at the library door. Suzette went toward her, “Are you going?” she asked, without apparently sharing the surprise Matt felt at seeing his sister with her hat and gloves on, and her jacket over her arm.

“Yes, I’m going, Sue. I just ran up to see you — I had to do that — but we both know I’m of no use here; and so we won’t make any pretences.” Louise spoke very steadily, almost coldly; her brother did not quite know what to make of her; she was pale, and she looked down, while she spoke. But when she finished buttoning the glove she was engaged with, she went up and put both her hands in Suzette’s. “I don’t need to tell you that I’m going just to get myself out of your way. It isn’t a time for ornamental friend-shipping, and you’ve got all the good you could out of seeing me, and knowing that I’m anxious with you. That’s about all there is of it, and I guess we’d better not spin it out. But remember, Sue, whenever you need me, when you really want me, you can send for me, and if I don’t come again till you do, you’ll know that I’m simply waiting. Will you remember that — whatever happens?”

Matt gave a long tacit sigh of relief.

“Yes, I will, Louise,” said Suzette. They kissed each other as if in formal ratification of their compact, which meant so much more to one of them than it could to the other.

“Come, Matt!” said Louise.

She added hastily, to prevent insistence against her plan, that they would have time to walk to the station, and she wished to walk. Then Matt said, “I will see you aboard the train, and then I’ll come back and wait till you hear from Springfield, Miss Suzette.”

“That is a good idea,” said Louise.

“But,” Adeline urged tremulously, “sha’n’t you be afraid to go to Boston alone? It’ll be dark by the time you get there!”

“The journey can’t be very dangerous,” said Louise, “and when I arrive, I shall put myself in charge of a faithful Boston hackman, and tell him I’m very valuable, and am to be taken the best of care of. Then I shall be set down at our door in perfect safety.”

They all had the relief of a little laugh; even Adeline joined reluctantly in it.

When they were once free of the house, Matt said, “I wonder whether she will remember, after the worst comes, what you said, and whether she will trust you enough to turn to us?”

“I don’t know. Probably she will be too proud at first. But I shall come, whether she asks me or not. If they had relations or connections, as everybody else has, it would be different. But as it is—”

“Yes, of course,” said Matt.

“I wish I could realize that Sue is fond of him, as we are of papa. But I can’t. He always made me feel creepy; didn’t he you?”

“He was a secret person. But as far as I had anything to do with him at the Mills, when I was there, I found him square enough. He was a country person.”

“I suppose Sue’s pride is countrified,” said Louise.

Matt went on, “His secrecy may have been only a sort of shyness; Heaven knows I don’t want to judge him. I suppose that that slow deliberation of his was an effort to maintain himself with dignity. Of course, we see him now in the light of his rascality, poor man, and most of his traits seem ugly.”

They had a little time after they reached the station, and they walked up and down the platform, talking, and Matt explained how his father might be glad to have him go to Wellwater and settle the question whether Northwick was in the accident or not. It would be a great relief for him to know. He tried to make out that he was going from a divided motive.

“Oh, you needn’t be at the trouble to say all that to me, Matt,” said Louise. “I don’t blame you for wanting to go, even out of kindness.”

“No, I suppose there’s no guilt attaching to a thing of that kind,” Matt answered.

There were a good many loungers about the station, young men and girls, released from the shops for the day; in such towns they find the station an agreeable resort, and enjoy a never-failing excitement in the coming and going of the trains. They watched the Hilarys, as they walked, with envy of that something distinguished which both of them had. They were both tall and handsomely made, and they had the ease before their fellow-beings which perhaps comes as much from the life-long habit of good clothes as from anything else. Matt had a conscience against whatever would separate him from his kind, but he could not help carrying himself like a swell, for all that; and Louise did not try to help it, for her part. She was an avowed worldling, and in this quality she now wore a drab cloth costume, bordered with black fur down the front of the jacket and around it at the hips; the skirt, which fell plain to her feet, had a border of fur there, and it swirled and swayed with her long, dashing stride in a way that filled all those poor girls who saw it, with despair. It seemed to interest almost as painfully a young man with a thin, delicate face, whom she noticed looking at her; she took him at first for one of those educated or half-educated operatives, who are complicating the labor problem more and more. He was no better dressed than others in the crowd, and there was no reason why he should not be a hat-shop or a shoe-shop hand, and yet, at a second glance, she decided that he was not. He stood staring at her with a studious frown, and with the faint suggestion of a sneer on his clean-shaven, fine lips; but she knew that he was admiring her, however he might be hating her, and she spoke to Matt about him as they turned from him in their walk and promised to point him out. But when they came up again to where he had been standing, he was gone. The train came in, and Louise got aboard, and Matt made his way into the station, and went to ask the operator in the telegraph office if she had got anything for Miss Northwick.

She said, “Something just come. I was waiting for the hack to send it up.”

“Oh, I will take it, if you please. I am going back to Mr. Northwick’s,” said Matt.

“All right.”

Matt took the dispatch, and hurried out to find some means of getting quickly to Miss Northwick with it. There was no conveyance about the station, and he started up the street at a gait which was little short of a run, and which exposed him to the ridicule of such small boys as observed his haste, in their intervals of punging. One, who dropped from the runner of a sleigh which came up behind him, jeered him for the awkwardness with which he floundered out of its way in the deep snow of the roadside. The sleigh was abruptly halted, and Sue Northwick called from it, “Mr. Hilary! I couldn’t wait at home; and I’ve just been at the depot by the lower road. You have a dispatch?”

“Yes, I have a telegram.”

“Oh, give it to me!”

He withheld it a moment. “I don’t know what it is, Miss Northwick. But if isn’t what you expected, will you let — will you allow me—”

As if she did not know what she was doing, she caught the dispatch from his hand, and tore it open. “Well,” she said, “I knew it. He hasn’t been there; now I shall go to Wellwater.” She crumpled the telegram nervously in her hand, and made a motion to lift the reins.

Matt put his hand on her wrist. “You couldn’t. You — you must let me go.”

“You?”

“Me. I can get into Boston in time for that half-past-seven train, and I can do all the things when I get to Wellwater that you couldn’t do. Come; be reasonable! You must see that what I propose is best. I solemnly promise you that nothing shall be left undone, or omitted or forgotten, that could set your mind at rest. Whatever you would wish done, I will do. Go home; your sister needs you; you need yourself; if you have a trial to meet greater than this suspense, which you’ve borne with such courage, you want all your strength for it. I beg you to trust me to do this for you. I know that it seems recreant to let another go in your place on such an errand, but it really isn’t so. You ought to know that I wouldn’t offer to go if I were not sure that I could do all that you could do, and more. Come! Let me go for you!”

He poured out his reasons vehemently, and she sat like one without strength to answer. When he stopped, she still waited before she answered simply, almost dryly, “Well,” and she gave no other sign of assent in words. But she turned over the hand, on which he was keeping his, and clutched his hand hard; the tears, the first she had shed that day, gushed into her eyes. She lifted the reins and drove away, and he stood in the road gazing after her, till her sleigh vanished over the rise of ground to the southward.

XIII.

The pale light in which Matt Hilary watched the sleigh out of sight thickened into early winter dusk before his train came and he got off to Boston. In the meantime the electrics came out like sudden moons, and shed a lunar ray over the region round about the station, where a young man, who was in the habit of describing himself in print as “one of The Boston Events’ young men,” found his way into an eating-house not far from the track. It had a simple, domestic effect inside, and the young man gave a sigh of comfort in the pleasant warmth and light. There was a woman there who had a very conversable air, a sort of eventual sociability, as the young man realized when she looked up from twitching the white, clean cloths perfectly straight on the little tables set in rows on either side of the room.

She finally reached the table where the young man had taken a chair for his overcoat and hat, and was about taking another for himself.

“Well,” he said, “let’s see. No use asking if you’ve got coffee?” He inhaled the odor of it coming from the open door of another room, with a deep breath.

“Baked beans?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t think there’s anything much better than baked beans. Do you?”

“Well, not when you git ’em good,” the woman admitted. “Ril good.”

“And what’s the matter with a piece of mince pie?”

“I don’t see’s there’s any great deal. Hot?”

“Every time.”

“I thought so,” said the woman. “We have it both ways, but I’d as soon eat a piece of I don’t know what as a piece o’ cold mince pie.”

“We have mince pie right along at our house,” said the young man. “But I guess if I was to eat a piece of it cold, my wife would have the doctor round inside of five minutes.”

The woman laughed as if for joy in the hot mince-pie fellowship established between herself and the young man. “Well, I guess she need to. Nothin’ else you want?” She brought the beans and coffee, with a hot plate, and a Japanese paper napkin, and she said, as she arranged them on the table before the young man, “Your pie’s warmin’ for you; I got you some rolls; they’re just right out the oven; and here’s some the best butter I ever put a knife to, if I do say so. It’s just as good and sweet as butter can be, if it didn’t come from the Northwick place at a dollar a pound.”

“Well, now, I should have thought you’d have used the Northwick butter,” said the young man with friendly irony.

“You know the Northwick butter?” said the woman, charmed at the discovery of another tie.

“Well, my wife likes it for cooking,” said the young man. “We have a fancy brand for the table.”

The woman laughed out her delight in his pleasantry. “Land! I’ll bet you grumble at it, too!” she said, with a precipitate advance in intimacy which he did not disallow.

“Well, I’m pretty particular,” said the young man. “But I have to be, to find anything to find fault with in the way my wife manages. I don’t suppose I shall be able to get much more Northwick butter, now.”

“Why not?”

“Why, if he was killed in that accident—”

“Oh, I guess there ain’t anything to that,” said the woman. “I guess it was some other Northwick. Their coachman — Elbridge Newton — was tellin’ my husband that Mr. Northwick had stopped over at Springfield to look at some hosses there. He’s always buyin’ more hosses. I guess he must have as much as eighty or ninety hosses now. I don’t place any dependence on that report.”

“That so?” said the young man. “Why, what did that fellow mean, over at the drug store, just now, by his getting out for Canada?”

“What fellow?”

“Little slim chap, with a big black moustache, and blue eyes, blue and blazing, as you may say.”

“Oh, — Mr. Putney! That’s just one of his jokes. He’s always down on Mr. Northwick.”

“Then I suppose he’s just gone up to Ponkwasset about the trouble there.”

“Labor trouble?”

“I guess so.”

The woman called toward an open door at the end of the room, “William!” and a man in his shirt sleeves showed himself. “You heard of any labor trouble to Mr. Northwick’s mills?”

“No, I don’t believe there is any,” said the man. He came forward inquiringly to the table where his wife was standing by the Events’ young man.

“Well, I’m sorry,” said the young man, “but it shows that I haven’t lost so much in missing Mr. Northwick, after all. I came up here from Boston to interview him for our paper about the labor troubles.”

“I want to know!” said the hostess. “You an editor?”

“Well, I’m a reporter — same thing,” the young man answered. “Perhaps you’ve got some troubles of your own here in your shops?”

“No,” said the host, “I guess everybody’s pretty well satisfied here in Hatboro’.” He was tempted to talk by the air of confidence which the Events’ young man somehow diffused about him, but his native Yankee caution prevailed, and he did not take the lead offered him.

“Well,” said the young man, “I noticed one of your citizens over at the drug store that seemed to be pretty happy.”

“Oh, yes; Mr. Putney. I heard you tellin’ my wife.”

“Who is Mr. Putney, any way?” asked the Events’ man.

“Mr. Putney?” the host repeated, with a glance at his wife, as if for instruction or correction in case he should go wrong. “He’s one of the old Hatboro’ Putneys, here.”

“All of ’em preserved in liquor, the same way?”

“Well, no, I can’t say as they are.” The host laughed, but not with much liking, apparently. His wife did not laugh at all, and the young man perceived that he had struck a false note.

“Pity,” he said, “to see a man like that, goin’ that way. He said more bright things in five minutes, drunk as he was, than I could say in a month on a strict prohibition basis.”

The good understanding was restored by this ready self-abasement. “Well, I d’ know as you can say that, exactly,” said the hostess, “but he is bright, there ain’t any two ways about it. And he ain’t always that way you see him. It’s just one of his times, now. He has ’em about once in every four or five months, and the rest part he’s just as straight as anybody. It’s like a disease, as I tell my husband.”

“I guess if he was a mind to steady up, there ain’t any lawyer could go ahead of him, well, not in this town,” said the husband.

“Seems to be pretty popular as it is,” said the young man. “What makes him so down on Mr. Northwick?”

“Well, I dunno,” said the host, “what it is. He’s always been so. I presume it’s more the kind of a man Mr. Northwick is, than what it is anything else.”

“Why, what kind of a man is Mr. Northwick, any way?” the young man asked, beginning to give his attention to the pie, which the woman had now brought. “He don’t seem to be so popular. What’s the reason.”

“Well, I don’t know as I could say, exactly. I presume, one thing, he’s only been here summers till this year, since his wife died, and he never did have much to do with the place, before.”

“What’s he living here for this winter? Economizing?”

“No; I guess he no need to do that,” the host answered.

His wife looked knowing, and said with a laugh, “I guess Miss Sue Northwick could tell you if she was a mind to.”

“Oh, I see,” said the reporter, with an irreverence that seemed to be merely provisional and held subject to instant exchange for any more available attitude. “Young man in the case. Friendless minister whose slippers require constant attention?”

“I guess he ain’t very friendless,” said the hostess, “as far forth as that goes. He’s about the most popular minister, especially with the workin’ folks, since Mr. Peck.”

“Who was Mr. Peck?”

“Well, he was the one that was run over by the cars at the depot here two or three years back. Why, this house was started on his idea. Sort of co-operation at first; we run it for the Social Union.”

“And the co-operation petered out,” said the reporter making a note. “Always does; and then you took it, and began to make money. Standard history of co-operation.”

“I guess we ain’t gettin’ rich any too fast,” said the hostess, dryly.

“Well, you will if you use the Northwick butter. What’s the reason he isn’t popular here when he is here? Must spend a good deal of money on that big place of his; and give work.”

“Mr. Putney says it’s corruptin’ to have such a rich man in the neighborhood; and he does more harm than good with his money.” The hostess threw out the notion as if it were something she had never been quite able to accept herself, and would like to see its effect upon a man of the reporter’s wide observation. “He thinks Hatboro’ was better off before there was a single hat-shop or shoe-shop in the place.”

“And the law offices had it all to themselves,” said the young man; and he laughed. “Well, it was a halcyon period. What sort of a man is Mr. Northwick, personally?”

The woman referred the question to her husband, who pondered it a moment. “Well, he’s a kind of a close-mouthed man. He’s never had anything to do with the Hatboro’ folks much. But I never heard anything against him. I guess he’s a pretty good man.”

“Wouldn’t be likely to mention it round a great deal if he was going to Canada. Heigh? Well, I’m sorry I can’t see Mr. Northwick, after all. With these strikes in the mills everywhere, he must have some light to throw on the labor question generally. Poor boy, himself, I believe?”

“I don’t believe his daughters could remember when,” said the hostess, sarcastically.

“That’s so? Well, we are apt to lose our memory for dates as we get on in the world, especially the ladies. Ponkwasset isn’t on the direct line of this road, is it?” He asked this of the host, as if it followed.

“No, you got to change at Springfield, and take the Union and Dominion road there. Then it’s on a branch.”

“Well, I guess I shall have to run up and see Mr. Northwick, there. What did you say the young man’s name was that’s keeping the Northwick family here this winter?” He turned suddenly to the hostess, putting up his note-book, and throwing a silver dollar on the table to be changed. “Married man myself, you know.”

“I guess I hain’t mentioned any names,” said the woman in high glee. Her husband went back to the kitchen, and she took the dollar away to a desk in the corner of the room, and brought back the change.

“Who’d be a good person to talk with about the labor situation here?” the young man asked, in pocketing his money.

“I d’ know as I could hardly tell,” said the hostess thoughtfully. “There’s Colonel Marvin, he’s got the largest shoe-shop; and some the hat-shop folks, most any of ’em would do. And then there’s Mr. Wilmington that owns the stocking mills; him or Mr. Jack Wilmington, either one’d be good. Mr. Jack’d be the best, I guess. Or I don’t suppose there’s anybuddy in the place ‘d know more, if they’d a mind to talk, than Mrs. Wilmington; unless it was Mis’ Docter Morrell.”

“Is Mr. Jack their son?” asked the reporter.

“Land! Why she ain’t a day older, if she’s that. He’s their nephew.”

“Oh, I see: second wife. Then he’s the young man, heigh!”

The hostess looked at the reporter with admiration. “Well, you do beat the witch. If he hain’t, I guess he might ‘a’ b’en.”

The reporter said he guessed he would take another piece of that pie, and some more coffee if she had it, and before he had finished them he had been allowed to understand that if it was not for his being Mrs. Wilmington’s nephew Mr. Jack would have been Miss Northwick’s husband long ago; and that the love lost between the two ladies was not worth crying for.

The reporter, who had fallen into his present calling by a series of accidents not necessarily of final result in it, did not use arts so much as instincts in its exercise. He liked to talk of himself and his own surroundings, and he found that few men, and no women could resist the lure thrown out by his sincere expansiveness. He now commended himself to the hostess by the philosophical view he took of the popular belief that Mrs. Wilmington was keeping her nephew from marrying any one else so as to marry him herself when her husband died. He said that if you were an old man and you married a young woman he guessed that was what you had got to expect. This gave him occasion to enlarge upon the happiness to be found only in the married state if you were fitly mated, and on his own exceptional good fortune in it.

He was in the full flow of an animated confidence relating to the flat he had just taken and furnished in Boston, when the door opened, and the pale young man whom Louise Hilary had noticed at the station, came in.

The reporter broke off with a laugh of greeting. “Hello, Maxwell! You onto it, too?”

“Onto what?” said the other, with none of the reporter’s effusion.

“This labor-trouble business,” said the reporter, with a wink for him alone.

“Pshaw, Pinney! You’d grow a bush for the pleasure of beating about it.” Maxwell hung his hat on a hook above the table, but sat down fronting Pinney with his overcoat on; it was a well-worn overcoat, irredeemably shabby at the buttonholes. “I’d like some tea,” he said to the hostess, “some English breakfast tea, if you have it; and a little toast.” He rested his elbows on the table, and took his head between his hands, and pressed his fingers against his temples.

“Headache?” asked Pinney, with the jocose sympathy men show one another’s sufferings, as if they could be joked away. “Better take something substantial. Nothing like ham and eggs for a headache.”

The other unfolded his paper napkin. “Have you got anything worth while?”

“Lots of public opinion and local color,” said Pinney. “Have you?”

“I’ve been half crazy with this headache. I suppose we brought most of the news with us,” he suggested.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Pinney.

“I do. You got your tip straight from headquarters. I know all about it, Pinney, so you might as well save time, on that point, if time’s an object with you. They don’t seem to know anything here; but the consensus in Hatboro’ is that he was running away.”

“The what is?” asked Pinney.

“The consensus.”

“Anything like the United States Census?”

“It isn’t spelt like it.”

Pinney made a note of it. “I’ll get a head-line out of that. I take my own wherever I find it, as George Washington said.”

“Your own, you thief!” said Maxwell, with sardonic amusement. “You don’t know what the word means.”

“I can make a pretty good guess, thank you,” said Pinney, putting up his book.

“Do you want to trade?” Maxwell asked, after his tea came, and he had revived himself with a sip or two.

“Any scoops?” asked Pinney, warily. “Anything exclusive?”

“Oh, come!” said Maxwell. “No, I haven’t; and neither have you. What do you make mysteries for? I’ve been over the whole ground, and so have you. There are no scoops in it.”

“I think there’s a scoop if you want to work it,” said Pinney, darkly.

Maxwell received the vaunt with a sneer. “You ought to be a detective — in a novel.” He buttered his toast and ate a little of it, like a man of small appetite and invalid digestion.

“I suppose you’ve interviewed the family?” suggested Pinney.

“No,” said Maxwell, gloomily, “there are some things that even a space-man can’t do.”

“You ought to go back on a salary,” said Pinney, with compassion and superiority. “You’ll ruin yourself trying to fill space, if you stick at trifles.”

“Such as going and asking a man’s family whether they think he was burnt up in a railroad accident, and trying to make copy out of their emotions? Thank you, I prefer ruin. If that’s your scoop, you’re welcome to it.”

“They’re not obliged to see you,” urged Pinney. “You send in your name and—”

“They shut the door in your face, if they have the presence of mind.”

“Well! What do you care if they do? It’s all in the way of business, anyhow. It’s not a personal thing.”

“A snub’s a pretty personal thing, Pinney. The reporter doesn’t mind it, but it makes the man’s face burn.”

“Oh, very well! If you’re going to let uncleanly scruples like that stand in your way, you’d better retire to the poet’s corner, and stay there. You can fill that much space, any way; but you are not built for a reporter. When are you going to Boston?”

“Six, fifteen. I’ve got a scoop of my own.”

“What is it?” asked Pinney, incredulously.

“Come round in the morning, and I’ll tell you.”

“Perhaps I’ll go in with you, after all. I’ll just step out into the cold air, and see if I can harden my cheek for that interview. Your diffidence is infectious, Maxwell.”

XIV.

Pinney was really somewhat dashed by Maxwell’s attitude, both because it appealed to the more delicate and generous self, which he was obliged to pocket so often in the course of business, and because it made him suspect that Maxwell had already interviewed Northwick’s family. They would be forewarned, in that case, and would, of course, refuse to see him. But he felt that as a space-man, with the privilege of filling all the space he chose with this defalcation, his duty to his family required him to use every means for making copy.

He encouraged himself by thinking of his wife, and what she was probably doing at that moment in their flat in Boston, and he was feeling fairly well when he asked for Miss Northwick at the door of the great wooden palace. He had time to take in its characteristics, before James, the inside-man, opened the door and scanned him for a moment with a sort of baffled intelligence. To the experience of the inside-man his appearance gave no proof that he was or was not an agent, a peddler in disguise, or a genteel mendicant of the sort he was used to detecting and deterring.

“I don’t know, sir, I’ll go and see.” He let rather than invited Pinney in, and in his absence, the representative of the Events made note of the interior, both of the hall which he had been allowed to enter, and of the library, where he found himself upon his own responsibility. The inside-man discovered him there with his back to the fire, when he returned with his card still in his hand.

“Miss Northwick thinks it’s her father you wish to see. He’s not at home.”

“Yes, I knew that. I did wish to see Mr. Northwick, and I asked to see Miss Northwick because I knew he wasn’t at home.”

“Oh!” The man disappeared, and after another interval Adeline came in. She showed the trepidation she felt at finding herself in the presence of an interviewer.

“Will you sit down?” she said, timidly, and she glanced at the card which she had brought back this time. It bore the name of Lorenzo A. Pinney, and in the left hand corner the words Representing the Boston Events. Mr. Pinney made haste to reassure her by a very respectful and business-like straightforwardness of manner; he did not forbid it a certain shade of authority.

“I am sorry to disturb you, Miss Northwick. I hoped to have some conversation with you in regard to this — this rumor — accident. Can you tell me just when Mr. Northwick left home?”

“He went up to the Mills, yesterday morning, quite early,” said Adeline. She was in the rise of hope which she and Suzette both felt from the mere fact that Matt Hilary was on the way to hunt the horrible rumor to its source; it seemed to her that he must extinguish it there. She wanted to tell this friendly-looking reporter so; but she would not do this without Suzette’s authority. Suzette had been scolding her for not telling her what was in the paper as soon as she read it in the morning; and they were both so far respited for the moment from their fear, as to have had some words back and forth about the propriety of seeing this reporter at all. Adeline was on her most prudent behavior.

“Did you expect him back soon when he left?” Pinney asked respectfully.

“Oh, no; he said he wouldn’t be back for some days.”

“It’s several hours to Ponkwasset, I believe?” suggested Pinney.

“Yes, three or four. There is one train, at half-past-twelve, I think,” said Miss Northwick, with a glance at the clock, “that takes you there in three hours.”

“The early train doesn’t connect right through, then?”

“No; my father would have to wait over at Springfield. He doesn’t often take the early train; and so we thought, when we found he wasn’t at the Mills, that he had stopped over a day at Springfield to buy some horses from a farmer there. But we’ve just heard that he didn’t. He may have run down to New York; he often has business there. We don’t place any reliance on that story” — she gasped the rest out— “about — that accident.”

“Of course not,” said Pinney with real sympathy. “It’s just one of those flying rumors — they get the names all mixed up, those country operators.”

“They spelled the name two ways in different papers,” said Adeline. “Father had no earthly business up that way; and he always telegraphs.”

“I believe the Mills are on the line of the Union and Dominion Road, are they not?” Pinney fell into the formal style of his printed questionings.

“Yes, they are. Father could get the Northern express at Springfield, and drive over from Ponkwasset Junction; the express doesn’t stop at the Falls.”

“I see. Well, I won’t trouble you any farther, Miss Northwick. I hope you’ll find out it’s all a mistake about—”

“Oh, I know it is!” said Adeline. “A gentleman — a friend of ours — has just gone up to Wellwater to see about it.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” said Pinney. “Then you’ll soon have good news. I suppose you’ve telegraphed?”

“We couldn’t get anything by telegraph. That is the reason he went.”

It seemed to Pinney that she wished to tell him who went; but she did not tell him; and after waiting for a moment in vain, he rose and said, “Well, I must be getting back to Boston. I should have been up here to see your father about these labor troubles night before last, if I’d taken my wife’s advice. I always miss it when I don’t,” he said, smiling.

There is no reason why a man should acquire merit with other women by seeming subject to his wife or dependent upon her; but he does. They take it as a sort of tribute to themselves, or to the abstract woman; their respect for that man rises; they begin to honor him; their hearts warm to him. Pinney’s devotion to his wife had already been of great use to him, on several occasions, in creating an atmosphere of trust about him. He really could not keep her out of his talk for more than five minutes at a time; all topics led up to her sooner or later.

When he now rose to go, Miss Northwick said, “I’m sorry my father isn’t at home, and I’m sorry I can’t give you any information about the troubles.”

“Oh, I shall go to the Mills, to-morrow,” he interrupted cheerily. Her relenting emboldened him to say, “You must have a beautiful place, here, in summer, Miss Northwick.”

“I like it all times of the year,” she answered. “We’ve all been enjoying the winter so much; it’s the first we’ve spent here for a long time.” She felt a strange pleasure in saying this; her reference to their family life seemed to reassure her of its unbroken continuity, and to warrant her father’s safety.

“Yes,” said Pinney, “I knew you had let your house in town. I think my wife would feel about it just as you do; she’s a great person for the country, and if it wasn’t for my work on the paper, I guess I sh’d have to live there.”

Miss Northwick took a mass of heavy-headed jacqueminot roses from the vase where they drooped above the mantel, and wrapping them in a paper from the desk, stiffly offered them to Pinney. “Won’t you carry these to your wife?” she said. This was not only a recognition of Pinney’s worth in being so fond of his wife, but a vague attempt at propitiation. She thought it might somehow soften the heart of the interviewer in him, and keep him from putting anything in the paper about her. She was afraid to ask him not to do so.

“Oh, thank you,” said Pinney. “I didn’t mean to — it’s very kind of you — I assure you.” He felt very queer to be remanded to the purely human basis in relation to these people, and he made haste to get away from that interview. He had nothing to blame himself for, and yet he now suddenly somehow felt to blame. In the light of the defaulter’s home life, Northwick appeared his victim. Pinney was not going to punish him, he was merely going to publish him: but all the same, for that moment, it seemed to him that he was Northwick’s persecutor, and was hunting him down, running him to earth. He wished that poor old girl had not given him those flowers; he did not feel that he could take them to his wife; on the way back to the station he stepped aside from the road and dropped them into the deep snow.

His wife met him at the door of their flat, eager to know what success he had; and at sight of her his spirits rose again, and he gave her an enthusiastic synopsis of what he had done.

She flung herself on his knees, where he sat, and embraced him. “Ren, you’ve done splendidly! And I know you’ll beat the Abstract clear out of sight. Oh, Ren, Ren!” She threw her arms round his neck again, and the happy tears started to her eyes. “This will give you any place on the paper you choose to ask for! Oh, I’m the happiest girl in the world.”

Pinney gave her a joyful hug. “Yes, it’s all right. There are ninety-nine chances to one that he was going to Canada. There’s a big default, running up into the hundred thousands, and they gave him a chance to make up his shortage — it’s the old story. I’ve got just the setting I wanted for my facts, and now, as soon as Manton gives us the word to go ahead—”

“Wait till Manton gives the word!” cried Mrs. Pinney. “Well, you shall do no such thing, Ren. We won’t wait a minute.”

Pinney broke out into a laugh, and gave her another hug for her enthusiasm, and explained, between laughing at her and kissing her, why he had to wait; that if he used the matter before the detective authorized him, it would be the last tip he would ever get from Manton. “We shan’t lose anything. I’m going to commence writing it out, now. I’m going to make it a work of art. Now, you go and get me some coffee, Hat. There isn’t going to be any let up on this till it’s all blocked out, any way; and I’m going to leave mighty few places to fill in, I can tell you.” He pulled off his coat, and sat down at his desk.

His wife stopped him. “You’d better come out into the kitchen, and work on the table there. It’s bigger than this desk.”

“Don’t know but I had,” said Pinney. He gathered up his work and followed her out into the cosy little kitchen, where she cooked their simple meals, and they ate them. “Been living on tea since I been gone?” He pulled open the refrigerator built into the wall, and glanced into it. “Last night’s dinner all there yet!”

“You know I don’t care to eat when you’re away, Ren,” she said, with a pathetic little mouth.

Pinney kissed her and then he sat down to his work again; and when he was tired with writing, his wife took the pen and wrote from his dictation. As they wrought on, they lost the sense, if they ever had it, of a fellow creature inside of the figure of a spectacular defaulter which grew from their hands; and they enjoyed the impersonality which enables us to judge and sentence one another in this world, and to do justice, as we say. It is true that Pinney, having seen Northwick’s home, and faced his elderly, invalid daughter, was moved to use him with a leniency which he would not otherwise have felt. He recognized a merit in this forbearance of his, and once, towards the end of his work, when he was taking a little rest, he said: “Reporters get as much abuse as plumbers; but if people only knew what we kept back, perhaps they would sing a different tune. Of course, it’s a temptation to describe his daughter, poor old thing, and give the interview in full, but I don’t quite like to. I’ve got to cut it down to the fact that she evidently hadn’t the least idea of the defalcation, or why he was on the way to Canada. Might work a little pathos in with that, but I guess I mustn’t!”

His wife pushed the manuscript away from her, and flung down the pen. “Well, Ren, if you go on talking in that way, you’ll take the pleasure out of it for me; I can tell you that much. If I get to thinking of his family, I can’t help you any more.”

“Pshaw!” said Pinney. “The facts have got to come out, any way, and I guess they won’t be handled half as mercifully anywhere else as I shall handle ‘em.” He put his arms round her, and pulled her tight up to him. “Your tender-heartedness is going to be the ruin of me yet, Hat. If it hadn’t been for thinking how you’d have felt, I should gone right up to Wellwater, and looked up that accident, myself, on the ground. But I knew you’d go all to pieces, if I wasn’t back at the time I said, and so I didn’t go.”

“Oh, what a story!” said the young wife, fondly, with her adoring eyes upon him. “I shouldn’t have cared, I guess, if you’d never come back.”

“Shouldn’t you? How many per cent of that am I going to believe?” he asked, and he drew her to him again in a rapture with her pretty looks, and the love he saw in them.

Pinney was a handsome little fellow himself, with a gay give-and-take air that had always served him well with women, and that, as his wife often told him, had made her determine to have him the first time she saw him.

This was at the opening of the Promontory House, two summers before, when Pinney was assigned to write the affair up for the Events. She had got her first place as operator in the new hotel; and he brought in a despatch for her to send to Boston just as she was going to shut up the office for the night, and go in to see the dancing in the main dining-room, and perhaps be asked to dance herself by some of the clerks.

At the sound of a pencil tapping on the ledge of the little window in the cast-iron filagree wall of her den, she turned quickly round ready to cry with disappointment; but at sight of Pinney with his blue eyes, and his brown fringe of moustache curling closely in over his lip, under his short, straight nose, and a funny cleft in his chin, she felt more like laughing, somehow, as she had since told him a hundred times. He wrote back to her from Boston, on some pretended business; and they began to correspond, as they called it; and they were engaged before the summer was over. They had never yet tired of talking about that first meeting, or of talking about themselves and each other in any aspect. They found out, as soon as they were engaged, and that sort of social splendor which young people wear to each other’s eyes had passed, that they were both rather simple and harmless folks, and they began to value each other as being good. This tendency only grew upon them with the greater intimacy of marriage. The chief reason for thinking that they were good was that they loved each other so much; she knew that he was good because he loved her; and he believed that he must have a great deal of good in him, if such a girl loved him so much. They thought it a virtue to exist solely for one another as they did; their mutual devotion seemed to them a form of unselfishness. They felt it a great merit to be frugal and industrious that they might prosper; they prospered solely to their own advantage, but the advantage of persons so deserving through their frugality and industry seemed a kind of altruism; it kept them in constant good humor with themselves, and content with each other. They had risked a great deal in getting married on Pinney’s small salary, but apparently their courage had been rewarded, and they were not finally without the sense that their happiness had been achieved somehow in the public interest.

XV.

Maxwell’s headache went off after his cup of tea, but when he reached the house in Clover Street, where he had a room in the boarding-house his mother kept, he was so tired that he wanted to go to bed. He told her he was not tired; only disappointed with his afternoon’s work.

“I didn’t get very much. Why, of course, there was a lot of stuff lying round in the gutters that I can work up, if I have the stomach for it. You’ll see it in Pinney’s report, whether I do it or not. Pinney thinks it’s all valuable material. I left him there interviewing the defaulter’s family, and making material out of their misery. I couldn’t do that.”

“I shouldn’t want you to, Brice,” said his mother. “I couldn’t bear to have you.”

“Well, we’re wrong, both of us, from one point of view,” said the young fellow. “As Pinney says, it’s business to do these things, and a business motive ought to purify and ennoble any performance. Pinney is getting to be a first-class reporter; he’ll be a managing editor and an owner, and be refusing my work in less than ten years.”

“I hope you’ll be out of such work long before that,” said the mother.

“I’m likely to be out of all kinds of work before that, if I keep on at this gait. Pinney hasn’t got the slightest literary instinct: he’s a wood-chopper, a stable-boy by nature; but he knows how to make copy, and he’s sure to get on.”

“Well, you don’t want to get on in his way,” the mother urged soothingly.

“Yes; but I’ve got to get on in his way while I’m trying to get on in my own. I’ve got to work eight hours at reporting for the privilege of working two at literature. That’s how the world is built. The first thing is to earn your bread.”

“Well, you do earn yours, my son — and no one works harder to earn it.”

“Ah, but it’s so damned dirty when I’ve earned it.”

“Oh, my son!”

“Well, I won’t swear at it. That’s stupid, too; as stupid as all the rest.” He rose from the chair he had dropped into, and went toward the door of the next room. “I must beautify my person with a clean collar and cuffs. I’m going down to make a call on the Back Bay, and I wish to leave a good impression with the fellow that shows me the door when he finds out who I am and what I want. I’m going to interview Mr. Hilary on the company’s feelings towards their absconding treasurer. What a dose! He’ll never know I hate it ten times as bad as he does. But it’s my only chance for a scoop.”

“I’m sure he’ll receive you well, Brice. He must see that you’re a gentleman.”

“No, I’m not a gentleman, mother,” the son interrupted harshly from the room where he was modifying his linen. “I’m not in that line of business. But I’m like most people in most other lines of business: I intend to be a gentleman as soon as I can afford it. I shall have to pocket myself as usual, when I interview Mr. Hilary. Perhaps he isn’t a gentleman, either. There’s some consolation in that. I should like to write an article some day on business methods and their compatibility with self-respect. But Mr. Ricker wouldn’t print it.”

“He’s very kind to you, Brice.”

“Yes, he’s as kind as he dares to be. He’s the oasis in the desert of my life; but the counting-room simoom comes along and dries him up, every now and then. Suppose I began my article by a study of the counting-room in independent journalism?”

Mrs. Maxwell had nothing to say to this suggestion, but much concerning the necessity of wearing the neck-muffler, which she found her son had not had on all day. She put it on for him now, and made him promise to put it on for himself when he left the house where he was going to call.

The man who came to the door told him that Mr. Hilary was not at home, but was expected shortly, and consented to let him come in and wait. He tried to classify Maxwell in deciding where to let him wait; his coat and hat looked like a chair in the hall; his pale, refined, rather haughty face, like the drawing-room. The man compromised on the library, and led him in there.

Louise rose upright on the lounge, where she had thrown herself, after dinner, to rest, in the dim light, and think over the day’s strange experience, and stared at him helplessly. For her greater ease and comfort, she had pushed off her shoes, and they had gone over the foot of the lounge. She found herself confronted with the contumacious-looking workman she had noticed at the station in Hatboro’, with those thin, mocking lips, and the large, dreamy eyes that she remembered.

The serving-man said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were here, Miss,” and stood irresolute. “The gentleman wishes to see your father.”

“Will you sit down?” she said to Maxwell. “My father will be in very soon, I think.” She began to wonder whether she could edge along unobserved to where her shoes lay, and slip her feet into them. But for the present she remained where she was, and not merely because her shoes were off and she could not well get away, but because it was not in her nature not to wish every one to be happy and comfortable. She was as far as any woman can be from coquetry, but she could not see any manner of man without trying to please him. “I’m sorry he’s isn’t here,” she said, and then, as there seemed nothing for him to answer, she ventured, “It’s very cold out, isn’t it?”

“It’s grown colder since nightfall,” said Maxwell.

He remembered her and she saw that he did, and this somehow promoted an illogical sense of acquaintance with him.

“It seems,” she ventured farther, “very unusual weather for the beginning of February.”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Maxwell, with rather more self-possession than she wished him to have, so soon. “I think we’re apt to have very cold weather after the January thaw.”

“That’s true,” said Louise, with inward wonder that she had not thought of it. His self-possession did not comport with his threadbare clothes any more than his neat accent and quiet tone comported with the proletarian character she had assigned him. She decided that he must be a walking-delegate, and that he had probably come on mischief from some of the workpeople in her father’s employ; she had never seen a walking-delegate before, but she had heard much dispute between her father and brother as to his usefulness in society; and her decision gave Maxwell fresh interest in her mind. Before he knew who Louise was, he had made her represent the millionnaire’s purse-pride, because he found her in Hilary’s house, and because he had hated her for a swell, as much as a young man can hate a pretty woman, when he saw her walking up and down the platform at Hatboro’. He looked about the rich man’s library with a scornful recognition of its luxury. His disdain, which was purely dramatic, and had no personal direction, began to scare Louise; she wanted to go away, but even if she could get to her shoes without his noticing, she could not get them on without making a scraping noise on the hard-wood floor. She did not know what to say next, and her heart warmed with gratitude to Maxwell when he said, with no great relevancy to what they had been saying, but with much to what he had in mind, “I don’t think one realizes the winter, except in the country.”

“Yes,” she said, “one forgets how lovely it is out of town.”

“And how dreary,” he added.

“Oh, do you feel that?” she asked, and she said to herself, “We shall be debating whether summer is pleasanter than winter, if we keep on at this rate.”

“Yes, I think so,” said Maxwell. He looked at a picture over the mantel, to put himself at greater ease, and began to speak of it, of the color and drawing. She saw that he knew nothing of art, and felt only the literary quality of the picture, and she was trying compassionately to get the talk away from it, when she heard her father’s step in the hall below.

Hilary gave a start of question, when he looked into the library, that brought Maxwell to his feet. “Mr. Hilary, I’m connected with the Daily Abstract, and I’ve come to see if you are willing to talk with me about this rumored accident to Mr. Northwick.”

“No, sir! No, sir!” Hilary stormed back. “I don’t know any more about the accident, than you do! I haven’t a word to say about it. Not a word! Not a syllable! I hope that’s enough?”

“Quite,” said Maxwell, and with a slight bow to Louise, he went out.

“Oh, papa!” Louise moaned out, “how could you treat him so?”

“Treat him so? Why shouldn’t I treat him so? Confound his impudence! What does he mean by thrusting himself in here and taking possession of my library? Why didn’t he wait in the hall?”

“Patrick showed him in here. He saw that he was a gentleman!”

“Saw that he was a gentleman?”

“Yes, certainly. He is very cultivated. He’s not — not a common reporter at all!” Louise’s voice trembled with mortification for her father, and pity for Maxwell, as she adventured this assertion from no previous experience of reporters. It was shocking to feel that it was her father who had not been the gentleman. “You — you might have been a little kinder, papa; he wasn’t at all obtrusive; and he only asked you whether you would say anything. He didn’t persist.”

“I didn’t intend he should persist,” said Hilary. His fire of straw always burnt itself out in the first blaze; it was uncomfortable to find himself at variance with his daughter, who was usually his fond and admiring ally; but he could not give up at once. “If you didn’t like the way I treated him, why did you stay?” he demanded. “Was it necessary for you to entertain him till I came in? Did he ask for the family? What does it all mean?”

The tears came into her eyes, and she said with indignant resentment: “Patrick didn’t know I was here when he brought him in; I’m sure I should have been glad to go, when you began raging at him, papa, if I could. It wasn’t very pleasant to hear you. I won’t come any more, if you don’t want me to. I thought you liked me to be here. You said you did.”

Her father blustered back: “Don’t talk nonsense. You’ll come, just as you always have. I suppose,” he added, after a moment, in which Louise gathered up her shoes, and stood with them in one hand behind her, a tall figure of hurt affection and wounded pride, “I suppose I might have been a little smoother with the fellow, but I’ve had twenty reporters after me to-day, and between them, and you, and Matt, in all this bother, I hardly know what I’m about. Didn’t Matt see that his going to Wellwater in behalf of Northwick’s family must involve me more and more?”

“I don’t see how he could help offering to go, when he found Suzette was going alone. He couldn’t do less.”

“Oh, do less!” said Hilary, with imperfectly sustained passion. He turned, to avoid looking at Louise, and his eyes fell on a strange-looking note-book on the table where Maxwell had sat. “What’s this?”

He took it up, and Louise said, “He must have left it.” And she thought, “Of course he will come back for it.”

“Well, I must send it to him. And I’ll — I’ll write him a note,” Hilary groaned.

Louise smiled eager forgiveness. “He seemed very intelligent, poor fellow, in some ways. Didn’t you notice what a cultivated tone he had? It’s shocking to think of his having to go about and interview people, and meet all kinds of rebuffs.”

“I guess you’d better not waste too much sympathy on him,” said Hilary, with some return to his grudge.

“Oh, I didn’t mean you, papa,” said Louise, sweetly.

The door-bell rang, and after some parley at the threshold, Patrick came up to say, “The gentleman that was just here thinks he left his note-book, he—”

Hilary did not let him get the words out; “Oh, yes, show him up! Here it is.” He ran half down the stairs himself to meet Maxwell.

XVI.

Louise stole a glance at herself across the room in the little triptych mirror against one of the shelves. Her hair was not tumbled, and she completed her toilet to the eye by dropping her shoes and extending the edge of her skirt over them where she stood.

Her father brought Maxwell in by the door, and she smiled a fresh greeting to him. “We — I had just picked your note-book up. I — I’m glad you came back, I — was a little short with you a moment ago. I — I — Mayn’t I offer you a cigar?”

“No, thanks. I don’t smoke,” said Maxwell.

“Then a glass of — It’s pretty cold out!”

“Thank you; I never drink.”

“Well, that’s good! That’s — sit down; sit down! — that’s a very good thing. I assure you, I don’t think it’s the least use, though I do both. My boy doesn’t, he’s a pattern to his father.”

In spite of Hilary’s invitation Maxwell remained on foot, with the effect of merely hearing him out as he went on.

“I — I’m sorry I haven’t anything to tell about that accident. I’ve been telegraphing all day, without finding out anything beyond the fact as first reported; and now my son’s gone up to Wellwater, to look it up on the ground. It may have been our Mr. Northwick, or it may not. May I ask how much you know?”

“I don’t know that I’m quite free to say,” answered Maxwell.

“Oh!”

“And I didn’t expect you to say anything unless you wished to make something known. It’s a matter of business.”

“Exactly,” said Hilary. “But I think I might been a little civiller in saying what I did. The rumor’s been a great annoyance to me; and I like to share my annoyances with other people. I suppose your business often brings you in contact with men of that friendly disposition? Heigh?” Hilary rolled the cigar he was about to light between his lips.

“We see the average man,” said Maxwell, not at all flattered from his poise by Hilary’s apologies. “It’s a bore to be interviewed; I know that from the bore it is to interview.”

“I dare say that’s often the worst part of it,” said Hilary, lighting his cigar, and puffing out the first great clouds. “Well, then, I may congratulate myself on sparing you an unpleasant duty. I didn’t know I should come off so handsomely.”

There seemed nothing more to say, and Maxwell did not attempt to make conversation. Hilary offered him his hand, and he said, as if to relieve the parting of abruptness, “If you care to look in on me again, later on, perhaps—”

“Thank you,” said Maxwell, and he turned to go. Then he turned back, and after a moment’s hesitation, bowed to Louise, and said very stiffly, “Good-evening!” and went out.

Louise fetched a deep breath. “Why didn’t you keep him longer, papa, and find out all about him?”

“I think we know all that’s necessary,” said her father, dryly. “At least he isn’t on my conscience any longer; and now I hope you’re satisfied.”

“Yes — yes,” she hesitated. “You don’t think you were too patronizing in your reparation, papa?”

“Patronizing?” Hilary’s crest began to rise.

“Oh, I don’t mean that; but I wish you hadn’t let him see that you expected him to leap for joy when you stooped to excuse yourself.”

Hilary delayed, for want of adequate terms, the violence he was about to permit himself. “The next time, if you don’t like my manner with people, don’t stay, Louise.”

“I knew you wanted me to stay, papa, to see how beautifully you could do it; and you did do it beautifully. It was magnificent — perhaps too magnificent.” She began to laugh and to kiss away the vexation from her father’s face, keeping her hands behind her with her shoes she had picked up again, in them, as she came and leaned over him, where he sat.

“And did I want you to stay and entertain him here till I came in?” he demanded, to keep from being mollified too soon.

“No,” she faltered. “That was a work of necessity. He looked so sick and sad, that he appealed to my sympathy, and besides — Do you think I could trust you with a secret, papa?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why, you see I thought he was a walking-delegate at first.”

“And was that the reason you stayed?”

“No. That was what frightened me, and then interested me. I wanted to find out what they were like. But that isn’t the secret.”

“It’s probably quite as important,” Hilary growled.

“Well, you see it’s such a good lesson to me! I had slipped off my shoes when I was lying down, and I couldn’t get away, he came in so suddenly.”

“And do you mean to tell me, Louise, that you were talking to that reporter all the time in—”

“How should he know it? You didn’t know it yourself, papa. I couldn’t get my shoes on after he came, of course!” She brought them round before her in evidence.

“Well, it’s scandalous, Louise, simply scandalous! I never come in after you’ve been here without finding some part of your gear lying round — hair-pins, or gloves, or ribbons, or belts, or handkerchiefs, or something — and I won’t have it. I want you to understand that I think it’s disgraceful. I’m ashamed of you.”

“Oh, no! Not ashamed, papa!”

“Yes, I am!” said her father; but he had to relent under her look of meek imploring, and say, “or I ought to be. I don’t see how you could hold up your head.”

“I held it very high up. When you haven’t got your shoes on — in company — it gives you a sort of — internal majesty; and I behaved very loftily. But it’s been a fearful lesson to me, papa!” She made her father laugh, and then she flung herself upon him, and kissed him for his amiability.

She said at the end of this rite, “He didn’t seem much impressed even after you had apologized, do you think, papa?”

“No, he didn’t,” Hilary grumbled. “He’s as stiff-necked as need be.”

“Yes,” said Louise, thoughtfully. “He must be proud. How funny proud people are, papa! I can’t understand them. That was what always fascinated me with Suzette.”

Hilary’s face saddened as it softened. “Ah, poor thing! She’ll have need of all her pride, now.”

“You mean about her father,” said Louise, sobered too. “Don’t you hope he’s got away?”

“What do you mean, child? That would be a very rascally wish in me.”

“Well, you’d rather he had got away than been killed?”

“Why, of course, of course,” Hilary ruefully assented. “But if Matt finds he wasn’t — in the accident, it’s my business to do all I can to bring him to justice. The man’s a thief.”

“Well, then, I hope he’s got away.”

“You mustn’t say such things, Louise.”

“Oh, no, papa! Only think them.”

XVII.

Hilary had to yield to the pressure on him and send detectives to look into the question of Northwick’s fate at the scene of the accident. It was a formal violation of his promise to Northwick that he should have three days unmolested; but perhaps the circumstances would have justified Hilary to any business man, and it could really matter nothing to the defaulter dead or alive. In either case he was out of harm’s way. Matt, all the same, felt the ghastliness of being there on the same errand with these agents of his father, and reaching the same facts with them. At moments it seemed to him as if he were tacitly working in agreement with them, for the same purpose as well as to the same end; but he would not let this illusion fasten upon him; and he kept faith with Suzette in the last degree. He left nothing undone which she could have asked if he had done; he invented some quite useless things to do, and did them, to give his conscience no cause against him afterwards. The fire had left nothing but a few charred fragments of the wreck. There had been no means of stopping it, and it had almost completely swept away the cars in which it had broken out. Certain of the cars to the windward were not burnt; these lay capsized beside the track, bent and twisted, and burst athwart, fantastically like the pictures of derailed cars as Matt had seen them in the illustrated papers; the locomotive, pitched into a heavy drift, was like some dead monster that had struggled hard for its life. Where the fire had raged, there was a wide black patch in the whiteness glistening everywhere else; there were ashes, and writhen iron-work; and bits of charred wood-work; but nothing to tell who or how many had died there. It was certain that the porter and the parlor-car conductor were among the lost; and his list of passengers had perished with the conductor; there was only left with the operator the original of that telegram, asking to have a chair reserved in the Pullman from Wellwater, and signed with Northwick’s name, but those different initials, which had given rise to the report of his death.

This was the definite fact which Matt could carry back with him to Northwick’s family, and this they knew already. It settled nothing; it left the question of his death just where it was before. But Matt struggled with it as if it were some quite new thing, and spent himself in trying to determine how he should present it to them. In his own mind he had very great doubt whether Northwick was in the accident, and whether that dispatch was not a trick, a ruse to cover up the real course of his flight. But then there was no sense in his trying to hide his track, for he must have known that as yet there was no pursuit. If the telegram was a ruse, it was a ruse to conceal the fact that Northwick was still in the country, and had not gone to Canada at all. But Matt could not imagine any reason for such a ruse; the motive must be one of those illogical impulses which sometimes govern criminals. In any case, Matt could not impart his conjectures to the poor women who must be awaiting his return with such cruel anxiety. If the man were really dead, it would simplify the matter beyond the power of any other fact; Matt perceived how it would mitigate the situation for his family; he could understand how people should hold that suicide was the only thing left for a man in Northwick’s strait. He blamed himself for coming a moment to that ground, and owned the shame of his interested motive; but it was, nevertheless, a relief which he did not know how to refuse when Suzette Northwick took what he had to tell as final proof that her father was dead.

She said that she had been talking it all over with her sister, and they were sure of it; they were prepared for it; they expected him to tell them so.

Matt tried to have her realize that he had not told her so; and he urged, as far as he could, the grounds for hoping that her father was not in the accident.

She put them all aside. The difference in the initials was really no difference; and besides, and above all, there was the fact that if her father were anywhere alive, he must have seen the report of his death by this time, and sent some word, made some sign for their relief. She was doubly sure of this, because he was so anxiously thoughtful of them when they were separated. He expected them to notify him of every slight change in their plans when they were away, and always telegraphed as to his own. The only mystery was his going to Canada without letting them know his plans before or afterwards. It must have been upon some very suddenly urgent business that took his mind off everything else.

Matt silently hung his head, dreading lest she should ask him what he thought, and wondering how he must answer if she did. He perceived that he had no choice but to lie, if she asked him; but when he volunteered nothing, she did not ask him.

It was the second morning after he had left her; but he could see that she had lived long since their parting. He thought, “That is the way she will look as she grows old.” The delicate outline of her cheeks showed a slight straightening of its curve; her lips were pinched; the aquiline jut of her nose was sharpened. There was no sign of tears in her eyes; but Adeline wept, and constantly dried her tears with her handkerchief. She accepted her affliction meekly, as Suzette accepted it proudly, and she seemed to leave all the conjectures and conclusions to her sister.

Suzette was in the exaltation which death first brings to the bereaved, when people say that they do not realize it yet, and that they will feel it later. Then they go about, especially if they are women, in a sort of hysterical strength; they speak calmly of what has happened; they help those beyond the immediate circle of their loss to bear up against it; these look to see them break suddenly under the stress of their bereavement, and wonder at their impassioned fortitude.

Matt knew neither how to stay nor to get away; it seemed intrusive to linger, and inhuman to go when he had told the little he had to tell. Suzette had been so still, so cold, in receiving him, that he was astonished at her intensity when he rose to leave her at last.

“I shall never forget what you have done for us, Mr. Hilary. Never! Don’t belittle it, or try to make it seem nothing! It was everything! I wonder you could do it!”

“Yes!” Adeline put in, as if they had been talking his kindness over, as well as their loss, and were of one mind about it.

“Oh, indeed!” he began. “Any one would have done it—”

“Don’t say so!” cried Suzette. “You think that because you would have done it for any one! But you have done it for us; and as long as I live I shall remember that! Oh” — She broke off; and dropped her face with a pathetic, childlike helplessness on her lifted arm; and now he was less than ever able to leave her. They all sat down again, after they had risen to part; Matt felt the imperative necessity of encouraging them; of rescuing her from the conjecture which she had accepted as certainty. He was one of those men in whom passion can be born only of some form of unselfish kindness; and who alone can make women happy. If it was love that was now stirring so strangely at his heart, he did not know it was love; he thought it was still the pity that he had felt for the girl’s immense calamity. He knew that from every phase of it he could not save her, but he tried to save her from that which now confronted them, and from which he saw her suffering. He went over all the facts again with the hapless creatures, and reasoned from them the probability that their father was still alive. It was respite from sorrow which misery must follow; it was insane, it was foolish, it was even guilty, but he could not help trying to win it for them; and when he left them at last, they were bright with the hope he had given them, and which the event, whether it was death or whether it was disgrace, must quench in a blacker despair.

The truth of this rushed upon him when he found himself staggering away from the doomed house which cast its light gayly out upon the snow, and followed him with a perverse sense of its warmth and luxury into the night. But a strange joy mixed with the trouble in his soul; and for all that sleepless night, the conflict of these emotions seemed to toss him to and fro as if he were something alien and exterior to them. Northwick was now dead, and his death had averted the disgrace which overhung his name; now he was still alive, and his escape from death had righted all the wrong he had done. Then his escape had only deepened the shame he had fled from; his death had fixed a stain of a blood-guiltiness on his misdeeds, and was no caprice of fate, but a judgment of the eternal justice. Against this savage conclusion Matt rebelled, and made his stand.

XVIII.

For forty-eight hours longer the fact of the defalcation was kept back; but then, in view of the legal action urged by those who did not accept the theory of Northwick’s death, it had to come out, and it broke all bounds in overwhelming floods of publicity.

Day after day the papers were full of the facts, and it was weeks before the editorial homilies ceased. From time to time, fresh details and unexpected revelations, wise guesses and shameless fakes, renewed the interest of the original fact. There were days when there was nothing about it in the papers, and then days when it broke out in vivid paragraphs and whole lurid columns again. It was not that the fraud was singular in its features; these were common to most of the defalcations, great and small, which were of daily fame in the newspapers. But the doubt as to the man’s fate, and the enduring mystery of his whereabouts, if he were still alive, were qualities that gave peculiar poignancy to Northwick’s case. Its results in the failure of people not directly involved, were greater than could have been expected; and the sum of his peculations mounted under investigation. It was all much worse than had been imagined, and in most of the editorial sermons upon it the moral gravity of the offence was measured by the amounts stolen and indirectly lost by it. There was a great deal of mere astonishment, as usual, that the crime should have been that of a man whom no one would have dreamed of suspecting, and there was some sufficiently ridiculous consternation at the presence of such moral decay in the very heart of the commercial life of Boston.

In the Events, Pinney made his report of the affair the work of art which he boasted should come from his hand. It was really a space-man’s masterpiece; and it appealed to every nerve in the reader’s body, with its sensations repeated through many columns, and continued from page to page with a recurrent efflorescence of scare-heads and catch-lines. In the ardor of production, all scruples and reluctances became fused in a devotion to the interests of the Events and its readers. With every hour the painful impressions of his interview with Miss Northwick grew fainter, and the desire to use it stronger, and he ended by sparing no color of it. But he compromised with his sympathy for her, by deepening the shadows in the behavior of the man who could bring all this sorrow upon those dearest to him. He dwelt upon the unconsciousness of the family, the ignorance of the whole household, in which life ran smoothly on, while the head of both was a fugitive from justice, if not the victim of a swift retribution. He worked in all the pathos which the facts were capable of holding, and at certain points he enlarged the capacity of the facts. He described with a good deal of graphic force the Northwick interior. Under his touch the hall expanded, the staircase widened and curved, the carpets thickened, the servants multiplied, the library into which “the Events’ representative was politely ushered,” was furnished with “all the appliances of a cultured taste.” The works of the standard authors in costly bindings graced its shelves; magnificent paintings and groups of statuary adorned its walls and alcoves. The dress of the lady who courteously received the Events’ reporter, was suitably enriched; her years were discounted, and her beauty approached to the patrician cast. There was nothing mean about Pinney, and while he was at it he lavished a manorial grandeur upon the Northwick place, outside as well as inside. He imparted a romantic consequence to Hatboro’ itself: “A thriving New England town, proud of its historic past, and rejoicing in its modern prosperity, with a population of some five or six thousand souls, among whose working men and women modern ideas of the most advanced character had been realized in the well-known Peck Social Union, with its co-operative kitchen and its clientèle of intelligent members and patrons.”

People of all occupations became leading residents in virtue of taking Pinney into their confidence, and “A Prominent Proletarian” achieved the distinction of a catch-line by freely imparting the impressions of J. M. Northwick’s character among the working-classes. “The Consensus of Public Feeling,” in portraying which Pinney did not fail to exploit the proprietary word he had seized, formed the subject of some dramatic paragraphs; and the whole formed a rich and fit setting for the main facts of Northwick’s undoubted fraud and flight, and for the conjectures which Pinney indulged in concerning his fate.

Pinney’s masterpiece was, in fine, such as he could write only at that moment of his evolution as a man, and such as the Events could publish only at that period of its development as a newspaper. The report was flashy and vulgar and unscrupulous, but it was not brutal, except by accident, and not unkind except through the necessities of the case. But it was helplessly and thoroughly personal, and it was no more philosophized than a monkish chronicle of the Middle Ages.

The Abstract addressed a different class of readers, and aimed at a different effect in its treatment of public affairs. We look upon newspapers as having a sort of composite temperament, formed from the temperaments of all the different men employed on them; but, as a matter of fact, they each express the disposition and reflect the temperament of one controlling spirit, which all the other dispositions and temperaments yield to. This is so much the case that it is hard to efface the influence of a strong mind from the journal it has shaped, even when it is no longer actively present in it. A good many years before the time of the Northwick defalcation, the Events had been in the management of a journalist, once well-known in Boston, a certain Bartley Hubbard, who had risen from the ranks of the reporters, and who had thoroughly reporterized it in the worst sense. After he left it, the owner tried several devices for elevating and reforming it, but failed, partly because he was himself a man of no ideals but those of the counting-room, and largely because the paper could not recover from the strong slant given it without self-destruction. So the Events continued what Bartley Hubbard had made it, and what the readers he had called about it liked it to be: a journal without principles and without convictions, but with interests only; a map of busy life, indeed, but glaringly colored, with crude endeavors at picturesqueness, and with no more truth to life than those railroad maps where the important centres converge upon the broad black level of the line advertised, and leave rival roads wriggling faintly about in uninhabited solitudes. In Hubbard’s time the Abstract, then the Chronicle-Abstract, was in charge of the editor who had been his first friend on the Boston press, and whom he finally quarreled with on a point which this friend considered dishonorable to Hubbard. Ricker had not since left the paper, and though he was called a crank by some of the more progressive and reckless of the young men, he clung to his ideal of a conscience in journalism; he gave the Abstract a fixed character and it could no more have changed than the Events, without self-destruction. The men under him were not so many as Cæsar’s soldiers, and that, perhaps, was the reason why he knew not only their names but their qualities. When Maxwell came with the fact of the defalcation which the detectives had entrusted to him for provisional use, and asked to be assigned to the business of working it up, Kicker consented, but he consented reluctantly. He thought Maxwell was better for better things; he knew he was a ravenous reader of philosophy and sociology, and he had been early in the secret of his being a poet; it had since become an open secret among his fellow-reporters, for which he suffered both honor and dishonor.

“I shouldn’t think you’d like to do it, Maxwell,” said Ricker, kindly. “It isn’t in your line, is it? Better give it to some of the other fellows.”

“It’s more in my line than you suppose, Mr. Ricker,” said the young fellow. “It’s a subject I’ve looked up a great deal lately. I once thought” — he looked down bashfully— “of trying to write a play about a defaulter, and I got together a good many facts about defalcation. You’ve no idea how common it is; it’s about the commonest fact of our civilization.”

“Ah! Is that so?” asked Ricker with ironical deference to the bold generalizer. “Who else is ‘onto’ this thing?”

“Pinney, of the Events.”

“Well, he’s a dangerous rival, in some ways,” said Ricker. “When it comes to slush and a whitewash brush, I don’t think you’re a match for him. But perhaps you don’t intend to choose the same weapons.” Ricker pulled down the green-lined pasteboard peak that he wore over his forehead by gaslight, and hitched his chair round to his desk again, and Maxwell knew that he was authorized to do the work.

He got no word from the detective, who had given him a hint of the affair, to go ahead the night after his return from Hatboro’, as he had expected, but he knew that the fact could not be kept back, and he worked as hard at his report as Pinney and Pinney’s wife had worked at theirs. He waited till the next morning to begin, however, for he was too fagged after he came home from the Hilarys’; he rose early and got himself a cup of tea over the gas-burner; before the house was awake he was well on in his report. By nightfall he had finished it, and then he carried it to Ricker. The editor had not gone to dinner yet, and he gave Maxwell’s work the critical censure of a hungry man. It was in two separate parts: one, a careful and lucid statement of all the facts which had come to Maxwell’s knowledge, in his quality of reporter, set down without sensation, and in that self-respectful decency of tone which the Abstract affected; the other, an editorial comment upon the facts. Ricker read the first through without saying anything; when he saw what the second was, he pushed up his green-lined peak, and said, “Hello, young man! Who invited you to take the floor?”

“Nobody. I found I couldn’t embody my general knowledge of defalcation in the report without impertinence, and as I had to get my wisdom off my mind somehow, I put it in editorial shape. I don’t expect you to take it. Perhaps I can sell it somewhere.”

Ricker seemed to pay no attention to his explanation. He went on reading the manuscript, and when he ended, he took up the report again, and compared it with the editorial in length. “If we printed these things as they stand it would look like a case of the tail wagging the dog.”

Maxwell began again, “Oh, I didn’t expect—”

“Oh, yes, you did,” said Ricker. “Of course, you felt that the report was at least physically inadequate.”

“I made as much as I honestly could of it. I knew you didn’t like padding or faking, and I don’t myself.”

Ricker was still holding the two manuscripts up before him. He now handed them over his shoulder to Maxwell, where he stood beside him. “Do you think you could weld these two things together?”

“I don’t know.”

“Suppose you try.”

“As editorial, or—”

“Either. I’ll decide after you’re done. Do it here.”

He pushed some papers off the long table beside him, and Maxwell sat down to his task. It was not difficult. The material was really of kindred character throughout. He had merely to write a few prefatory sentences, in the editorial attitude, to his report, and then append the editorial, with certain changes, again. It did not take him long; in half an hour he handed the result to Ricker.

“Yes,” said Ricker, and he began to read it anew, with his blue pencil in his hand.

Maxwell had come with nerves steeled to bear the rejection of his article entire, but he was not prepared to suffer the erasure of all his pet phrases and favorite sentences, sometimes running to entire paragraphs.

When Ricker handed it back to him at last with “What do you think of it now?” Maxwell had the boldness to answer, “Well, Mr. Ricker, if I must say, I think you’ve taken all the bones and blood out of it.”

Ricker laughed. “Oh, no! Merely the fangs and poison-sacks. Look here, young man! Did you believe all those cynical things when you were saying them?”

“I don’t know—”

“I know. I know you didn’t. Every one of them rang false. They were there for literary effect, and for the pleasure of the groundlings. But by and by, if you keep on saying those things, you’ll get to thinking them, and what a man thinks a man is. There are things there that you ought to be ashamed of, if you really thought them, but I know you didn’t, so I made free to strike them all out.” Maxwell looked foolish; he wished to assert himself, but he did not know how. Ricker went on: “Those charming little sarcasms and innuendoes of yours would have killed your article for really intelligent readers. They would have suspected a young fellow having his fling, or an old fool speaking out of the emptiness of his heart. As it is, we have got something unique, and I don’t mind telling you I’m very glad to have it. I’ve never made any secret of my belief that you have talent.”

“You’ve been very good,” said Maxwell, a little rueful still. The surgeon’s knife hurts though it cures.

When Maxwell went home, he met his mother. “Why, mother,” said the young fellow, “old Ricker is going to print my report as editorial; and we’re not going to have any report.”

“I told you it was good!”

Maxwell felt it was due to himself to keep some grudge, and he said, “Yes; but he’s taken all the life out of it with his confounded blue pencil. It’s perfectly dead.”

It did not seem so when he saw it in proof at the office later, and it did not seem so when he got it in the paper. He had not slept well; he was excited by several things; by the use Ricker had made of his work, and by the hopes of advancement which this use quickened in him. He was not ashamed of it; he was very proud of it; and he wondered at its symmetry and force, as he read and read it again.

He had taken very high philosophical ground in his view of the matter, and had accused the structure of society. There must be something rotten, he said, at the core of our civilization, when every morning brought the story of a defalcation, great or small, in some part of our country: not the peculations of such poor clerks and messengers as their employers could be insured against, but of officials, public and corporate, for whom we had no guaranty but the average morality of our commercial life. How low this was might be inferred from the fact that while such a defalcation as that of J. M. Northwick created dismay in business and social circles, it could not fairly be said to create surprise. It was, most unhappily, a thing to be expected, in proof of which no stronger evidence need be alleged than that patent to the Abstract reporter in the community where the defaulter had his home, and where, in spite of his reputation for the strictest probity, it was universally believed that he had run away with other people’s money merely because he had been absent twenty-four hours without accounting for his whereabouts.

At this point Maxwell wove in the material he had gathered on his visit to Hatboro’, and without using names or persons contrived to give a vivid impression of the situation and the local feeling. He aimed at the historical attitude, and with some imitation of Taino’s method and manner, he achieved it. His whole account of the defalcation had a closeness of texture which involved every significant detail, from the first chance suspicion of the defaulter’s honesty, to the final opinions and conjectures of his fate. At the same time the right relation and proportion of the main facts were kept, and the statement was throughout so dignified and dispassionate that it had the grace of something remote in time and place. It was when the narrative ended and the critical comment began that the artistic values made themselves felt. Ricker had been free in his recognition of the excellence of Maxwell’s work, and quick to appreciate its importance to the paper. He made the young fellow disjointed compliments and recurrent predictions concerning it when they were together, but there were qualities in it that he felt afterwards he had not been just to. Of course it owed much to the mere accident of Maxwell’s accumulation of material about defalcations for his play; but he had known men break down under the mass of their material, and it surprised and delighted him to see how easily and strongly Maxwell handled his. That sick little youngster carried it all off with an air of robust maturity that amused as well as surprised Ricker. He saw where the fellow had helped himself out, consciously or unconsciously, with the style and method of his favorite authors; and he admired the philosophic poise he had studied from them; but no one except Maxwell himself was in the secret of the forbearance, the humane temperance with which Northwick was treated. This was a color from the play which had gone to pieces in his hands; he simply adapted the conception of a typical defaulter, as he had evolved it from a hundred instances, to the case of the defaulter in hand, and it fitted perfectly. He had meant his imaginary defaulter to appeal rather to the compassion than the justice of the theatre, and he presented to the reader the almost fatal aspect of the offence. He dwelt upon the fact that the case, so far from being isolated or exceptional, was without peculiarities, was quite normal. He drew upon his accumulated facts for the proof of this, and with a rapid array of defaulting treasurers, cashiers, superintendents, and presidents, he imparted a sense of the uniformity in their malfeasance which is so evident to the student. They were all comfortably placed and in the way to prosperity if not fortune; they were all tempted by the possession of means to immediate wealth; they all yielded so far as to speculate with the money that did not belong to them; they were all easily able to replace the first loans they made themselves; they all borrowed again and then could not replace the loans; they were all found out, and all were given a certain time to make up their shortage. After that a certain diversity appeared: some shot themselves, and some hanged themselves, others decided to stand their trial; the vastly greater number ran away to Canada.

In this presentation of the subject, Maxwell had hardly to do more than to copy the words of a certain character in his play: one of those cynical personages, well-known to the drama, whose function is to observe the course of the action, and to make good-humored sarcasms upon the conduct and motives of the other characters. It was here that Ricker employed his blue pencil the most freely, and struck out passages of almost diabolical persiflage, and touched the colors of the black pessimism with a few rays of hope. The final summing up, again, was adapted from a drama that had been rejected by several purveyors of the leg-burlesque as immoral. In a soliloquy intended to draw tears from the listener, the hero of Maxwell’s play, when he parted from his young wife and children, before taking poison, made some apposite reflections on his case, in which he regarded himself as the victim of conditions, and in prophetic perspective beheld an interminable line of defaulters to come, who should encounter the same temptations and commit the same crimes under the same circumstances. Maxwell simply recast this soliloquy in editorial terms; and maintained that not only was there nothing exceptional in Northwick’s case, but that it might be expected to repeat itself indefinitely. On one hand, you had men educated to business methods which permitted this form of dishonesty and condemned that; their moral fibre was strained, if not weakened, by the struggle for money going on all around us; on the other hand, you had opportunity, the fascination of chance, the uncertainty of punishment. The causes would continue the same, and the effects would continue the same. He declared that no good citizen could wish a defaulter to escape the penalty of his offence against society; but it behooved society to consider how far it was itself responsible, which it might well do without ignoring the responsibility of the criminal. He ended with a paragraph in which he forecast a future without such causes and without such effects; but Ricker would not let this pass, even in the semi-ironical temper Maxwell had given it. He said it was rank socialism, and he cut it out in the proof, where he gave the closing sentences of the article an interrogative instead of an affirmative shape.

XIX.

The Hilarys always straggled down to breakfast as they chose. When Matt was at home, his mother and he were usually first; then his father came, and Louise last. They took the Events, as many other people did, because with all its faults it was a thorough newspaper; and they maintained their self-respect by taking the Abstract. The morning that the defalcation came out, Matt sent and got all the other papers, which he had glanced through and talked over with his mother before his father joined them at nine o’clock.

Several of them had illustrations: likenesses of Northwick, and views of his house in Boston, and his house in Hatboro’; views of the company’s Mills at Ponkwasset; views of the railroad wreck at Wellwater; but it was Pinney’s masterpiece which really made Hilary sick. All the papers were atrocious, but that was loathsome. Yet there was really nothing more to blame in the attitude of the papers than in that of the directors, who gave the case to the detectives, and set the machinery of publicity at work. Both were acting quite within their rights, both were fulfilling an official duty. Hilary, however, had been forced against his grain into the position, almost, of Northwick’s protector; he had suffered keenly from the falsity of this position, for no one despised the sort of man Northwick was more than he; but when you have suffered, even for a rogue, you begin to feel some kindness for him. All these blows fell upon his growing sympathy for the poor devil, as he called him. He got through the various accounts in the various papers, by broken efforts, taking them as if in successive shocks from these terrible particulars, which seemed to shower themselves upon him when he came in range of them, till he felt bruised and beaten all over.

“Well, at least, it’s out, my dear,” said his wife, who noted the final effect of his sufferings across the table, and saw him pause bewildered from the last paper he had dropped. “There’s that comfort.”

“Is that a comfort?” he asked, huskily.

“Why, yes, I think it is. The suspense is over, and now you can begin to pick yourself up.”

“I suppose there’s something in that.” He kept looking at Matt, or rather, at the copy of the Abstract which Matt was hiding behind, and he said, “What have you got there, Matt?”

“Perhaps I’d better read it out,” said Matt. “It seems to me most uncommonly good. I wonder who could have done it!”

“Suppose you do your wondering afterwards,” said his father impatiently; and Matt began to read. The positions of the article were not such as Hilary could have taken, probably, if he had been in a different mood; its implications were, some of them, such as he must have decidedly refused; but the temper of the whole was so humane, so forbearing, so enlightened, that Hilary was in a glow of personal gratitude to the writer, for what he called his common decency, by the time the reading was over. “That is a very extraordinary article,” he said, and he joined Matt in wondering who could have done it, with the usual effect in such cases.

“I wish,” said Mrs. Hilary, “that every other newspaper could be kept from those poor things.” She meant Northwick’s daughters, and she added, “If they must know the facts, they couldn’t be more mercifully told them.”

“Why, that was what I was thinking, mother,” said Matt. “But they can’t be kept to this version, unhappily. The misery will have to come on them shapelessly, as all our miseries do. I don’t know that the other papers are so bad—”

“Not bad!” cried his father.

“No. They’re not unkind to them, except as they are just to him. They probably represent fairly enough the average thinking and feeling about the matter; the thing they’ll have to meet all their lives and get used to. But I wish I knew who did this Abstract article; I should like to thank him.”

“The question is, now,” said Mrs. Hilary, “What can we do for them there? Are you sure you made it clear to them, Matt, that we were willing to have them come to us, no matter what happened?”

“Louise and I both tried to do that,” said her son, “when we were there together; and when I reported to them after Wellwater, I told them again and again what our wish was.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Hilary, “I am glad we have done everything we could. At first I doubted the wisdom of your taking Louise to see them; but now I’m satisfied that it was right. And I’m satisfied that your father did right in getting that wretched creature the chance he abused.”

“Oh, yes,” said Matt. “That was right. And I’m thoroughly glad he’s out of it. If he’s still alive, I’m glad he’s out of it.”

Hilary had kept silent, miserably involved in his various remorses and misgivings, but now he broke out. “And I think you’re talking abominable nonsense, Matt. I didn’t get Northwick given that chance to enable him to escape the consequences of his rascality. Why shouldn’t he be punished for it?”

“Because it wouldn’t do the least good, to him or to any one else. It wouldn’t reform him, it wouldn’t reform anything. Northwick isn’t the disease; he’s merely the symptom. You can suppress him; but that won’t cure the disease. It’s the whole social body that’s sick, as this article in the Abstract implies.”

“I don’t see any such implication in it,” his father angrily retorted. “Your theory would form an excuse for the scoundrelism of every scoundrel unhung. Where is the cure of the social body to begin if it doesn’t begin at home, with every man in it? I tell you, it would be a very good thing for Northwick, and every rogue like him, if he could be made serve his term in State’s prison.”

The controversy raged a long time without departing from these lines of argument on either side. Mrs. Hilary listened with the impatience women feel at every absence from the personal ground, the only ground of reality. When Matt had got so far from it as to be saying to his father, “Then I understand you to maintain that if A is properly punished for his sins, B will practice virtue in the same circumstances and under the same temptations that were too much for A,” his mother tried to break in upon them. She did not know much about the metaphysical rights and wrongs of the question; she only felt that Matt was getting his father, who loved him so proudly and indulgently, into a corner, and she saw that this was unseemly. Besides, when anything wrong happens, a woman always wants some one punished; some woman, first, or then some other woman’s men kindred. Every woman is a conservative in this, and Mrs. Hilary made up her mind to stop the talk between her son and husband, because she felt Matt to be doubly wrong.

But when she spoke, her husband roared at her, “Don’t interrupt, Sarah!” and then he roared at Matt, “I tell you that the individual is not concerned in the matter! I tell you that it is the interest, the necessity of the community to punish A for his sins without regard to B, and for my part, I shall leave no stone unturned till we have found Northwick, dead or alive; and if he is alive, I shall spare no effort to have him brought to trial, conviction and punishment.” He shouted these words out, and thumped the breakfast table so that the spoons clattered in the cups, and Mrs. Hilary could hardly hear what Patrick was saying just inside the door.

“To see Mr. Hilary? A lady? Did she send her card?”

“She wouldn’t give her name, ma’am; she said she didn’t wish to, ma’am. She wished to see Mr. Hilary just a moment in the reception-room.”

Hilary was leaning forward to give the table another bang with his fist, but his wife succeeded in stopping him, with a repetition of Patrick’s message.

“I won’t see her,” he answered. “It’s probably a woman reporter. They’re in our very bread trough. I tell you,” he went on to Matt, “there are claims upon you as a citizen, as a social factor, which annul all your sentimental obligations to B as a brother. God bless my soul! Isn’t C a brother, too, and all the rest of the alphabet? If A robs the other letters, then let B take a lesson from the wholesome fact that A’s little game has landed him in jail.”

“Oh, I admit that the A’s had better suffer for their sins; but I doubt if the punishment which a man gets against his will is the right kind of suffering. If this man had come forward voluntarily, and offered to bear the penalty he had risked by his misdeed, it would have been a good thing for himself and for everybody else; it would have been a real warning. But he ran away.”

“And so he ought to be allowed to stay away! You are a pretty Dogberry come to judgment! You would convict a thief by letting him steal out of your company.”

“It seems to me that’s what you did, father. And I think you did right, as I’ve told you.”

“What I did?” shouted Hilary. “No, sir, I did nothing of the kind! I gave him a chance to make himself an honest man—”

“My dear,” said Mrs. Hilary, “you must go and get rid of that woman, at least; or let me.”

Hilary flung down his napkin, and red from argument cast a dazed look about him, and without really quite knowing what he was about rushed out of the room.

His wife hardly had time to say, “You oughtn’t to have got into a dispute with your father, Matt, when you know he’s been so perplexed,” before they heard his voice call out, “Good heavens, my poor child!” For the present they could not know that this was a cry of dismay at the apparition of Suzette Northwick, who met him in the reception-room with the demand:

“What is this about my father, Mr. Hilary?”

“About your father, my dear?” He took the hands she put out to him with her words, and tried to think what pitying and helpful thing he could say. She got them away from him, and held one fast with the other.

“Is it true?” she asked.

He permitted himself the pretence of not understanding her; he had to do it. “Why, we hope — we hope it isn’t true. Nothing more is known about his being in the accident than we knew at first. Didn’t Matt—”

“It isn’t that. It’s worse than that. It’s that other thing — that the papers say — that he was a defaulter — dishonest. Is that true?”

“Oh, no, no! Nothing of the kind, my dear!” Hilary had to say this; he felt that it would be inhuman to say anything else; nothing else would have been possible. “Those newspapers — confound them! — you know how they get things all — You needn’t mind what the papers say.”

“But why should they say anything about my father, at such a time, when he’s — What does it all mean, Mr. Hilary? I don’t believe the papers, and so I came to you — as soon as I could, this morning. I knew you would tell me the truth. You have known my father so long; and you know how good he is! I — You know that he never wronged any one — that he couldn’t!”

“Of course, of course!” said Hilary. “It was quite right to come to me — quite right. How — how is your sister? You must stay, now — Louise isn’t down, yet — and have breakfast with her. I’ve just left Mrs. Hilary at the table. You must join us. She can assure you — Matt is quite confident that there’s nothing to be distressed about in regard to the — He—”

Hilary kept bustling aimlessly about as he spoke these vague phrases, and he now tried to have her go out of the room before him; but she dropped into a chair, and he had to stay.

“I want you to tell me, Mr. Hilary, whether there is the slightest foundation for what the papers say this morning?”

“How, foundation? My dear child—”

“Has there been any trouble between my father and the company?”

“Well — well, there are always questions arising.”

“Is there any question of my father’s accounts — his honesty?”

“People question everything nowadays, when there is so much — want of confidence in business. There have to be investigations, from time to time.”

“And has there been any reason to suspect my father? Does any one suspect him?”

Hilary looked round the room with a roving eye, that he could not bring to bear upon the girl’s face. “Why, I suppose that some of us — some of the directors — have had doubts—”

“Have you?”

“My dear girl — my poor child! You couldn’t understand. But I can truly say, that when this examination — when the subject came up for discussion at the board-meeting, I felt warranted in insisting that your father should have time to make it all right. He said he could; and we agreed that he should have the chance.” Hilary said this for the sake of the girl; and he was truly ashamed of the magnanimous face it put upon his part in the affair. He went on: “It is such a very, very common thing for people in positions of trust to use the resources in their charge, and then replace them, that these things happen every day, and no harm is meant, and none is done — unless — unless the venture turns out unfortunately. It’s not an isolated case!” Hilary felt that he was getting on now, though he was aware that he was talking very immorally; but he knew that he was not corrupting the poor child before him, and that he was doing his best to console her, to comfort her. “The whole affair was very well put in the Abstract. Have you seen it? You must see that, and not mind what the other papers say. Come in to Mrs. Hilary — we have the paper—”

Suzette rose. “Then some of the directors believe that my father has been taking the money of the company, as the papers say?”

“Their believing this or that, is nothing to the point—”

“Do you?”

“I can’t say — I don’t think he meant —— He expected to restore it, of course. He was given time for that.” Hilary hesitated, and then he thought he had better say: “But he had certainly been employing the company’s funds in his private enterprises.”

“That is all,” said the girl, and she now preceded Hilary out of the room. It was with inexpressible relief that he looked up and saw Louise coming down the stairs.

“Why, Sue!” she cried; and she flew down the steps, and threw her arms around her friend’s neck. “Oh, Sue, Sue!” she said, in that voice a woman uses to let another woman know that she understands and sympathizes utterly with her.

Suzette coldly undid her clasping arms. “Let me go, Louise.”

“No, no! You shan’t go. I want you — you must stay with us, now. I know Matt doesn’t believe at all in that dreadful report.”

“That wouldn’t be anything now, even if it were true. There’s another report — don’t you know it? — in the paper this morning.” Louise tried to look unconscious in the slight pause Suzette made before she said: “And your father has been saying my father is a thief.”

“Oh, papa!” Louise wailed out.

It was outrageously unfair and ungrateful of them both; and Hilary gave a roar of grief and protest. Suzette escaped from Louise, and before he could hinder it, flashed by Hilary to the street door, and was gone.

XX.

The sorrow that turned to shame in other eyes remained sorrow to Northwick’s daughters. When their father did not come back, or make any sign of being anywhere in life, they reverted to their first belief, and accepted the fact of his death. But it was a condition of their grief, that they must refuse any thought of guilt in him. Their love began to work that touching miracle which is possible in women’s hearts, and to establish a faith in his honor which no proof of his dishonesty could shake.

Even if they could have believed all the things those newspapers accused him of, they might not have seen the blame that others did in his acts. But as women, they could not make the fine distinctions that men make in business morality, and as Northwick’s daughters, they knew that he would not have done what he did if it was wrong. Their father had borrowed other people’s money, intending to pay it back, and then had lost his own, and could not; that was all.

With every difference of temperament they agreed upon this, and they were agreed that it would be a sort of treason to his memory if they encouraged the charges against him by making any change in their life. But it was a relief to them, especially to Suzette, who held the purse, when the changes began to make themselves, and their costly establishment fell away, through the discontent and anxiety of this servant and that, till none were left but Elbridge Newton and his wife. She had nothing to do now but grieve for the child she had lost, and she willingly came in to help about the kitchen and parlor work, while her husband looked after the horses and cattle as well as he could, and tended the furnaces, and saw that the plants in the greenhouses did not freeze. He was up early and late; he had no poetic loyalty to the Northwicks; but as nearly as he could explain his devotion, they had always treated him well, and he could not bear to see things run behind.

Day after day went by, and week after week, and the sisters lived on in the solitude to which the compassion, the diffidence, or the contempt of their neighbors left them. Adeline saw Wade, whenever he came to the house, where he felt it his duty and his privilege to bring the consolation that his office empowered him to offer in any house of mourning; but Suzette would not see him; she sent him grateful messages and promises, when he called, and bade Adeline tell him each time that the next time she hoped to see him.

One of the ladies of South Hatboro’, a Mrs. Munger, who spent her winters as well as her summers there, penetrated as far as the library, upon her own sense of what was due to herself as a neighbor; but she failed to find either of the sisters. She had to content herself with urging Mrs. Morrell, the wife of the doctor, to join her in a second attempt upon their privacy; but Mrs. Morrell had formed a notion of Suzette’s character and temper adverse to the motherly impulse of pity which she would have felt for any one else in the girl’s position. Mrs. Gerrish, the wife of the leading merchant in Hatboro’, who distinguished himself by coming up from Boston with Northwick, on the very day of the directors’ meeting, would have joined Mrs. Munger, but her husband forbade her. He had stood out against the whole community in his belief in Northwick’s integrity and solvency; and while every one else accused him of running away as soon as he was reported among the missing in the railroad accident, Gerrish had refused to admit it. The defalcation came upon him like thunder out of a clear sky; he felt himself disgraced before his fellow-citizens; and he resented the deceit which Northwick had tacitly practised upon him. He was impatient of the law’s delays in seizing the property the defaulter had left behind him, and which was now clearly the property of his creditors. Other people in Hatboro’, those who had been the readiest to suspect Northwick, cherished a guilty leniency toward him in their thoughts. Some believed that he had gone to his account in other courts; some that he was still alive in poverty and exile, which were punishment enough, as far as he was concerned. But Gerrish demanded something exemplary, something dramatic from the law. He blamed the Ponkwasset directors for a species of incivism, in failing to have Northwick indicted at once, dead or alive.

“Why don’t they turn his family out of that house, and hand it over to the stockholders he has robbed?” he asked one morning in the chance conclave of loungers in his store. “I understand it is this man Hilary, in Boston, who has shielded and — and protected him from the start, and — and right along. I don’t know why; but if I was one of the Ponkwasset stockholders, I think I should. I should make a point of inquiring why Northwick’s family went on living in my house after he had plundered me of everything he could lay his hands on.”

The lawyer Putney was present, and he shifted the tobacco he had in one cheek to the other cheek, and set his little, firm jaw. “Well, Billy, I’ll tell you why. Because the house, and farm, and all the real estate belong to Northwick’s family and not to Northwick’s creditors.” The listeners laughed, and Putney went on, “That was a point that brother Northwick looked after a good while ago, I guess. I guess he must have done it as long ago as when you first wanted his statue put on top of the soldier’s monument.”

“I never wanted his statue put on top of the soldier’s monument!” Mr. Gerrish retorted angrily.

Putney’s spree was past, and he was in the full enjoyment of the contempt for Gerrish, which was apt to turn to profound respect when he was in his cups. He was himself aware of the anomalous transition by which he then became a leader of conservative feeling on all subjects and one of the staunchest friends of the status; he said it was the worst thing he knew against the existing condition of things. He went on, now: “Didn’t you? Well, I think it would look better than that girl they’ve got there in circus-clothes.” They all laughed; Putney had a different form of derision for the Victory of the soldier’s monument every time he spoke of it. “And it would suggest what those poor fellows really died for: that we could have more and more Northwicks, and a whole Northwick system of things. Heigh? You see, Billy, I don’t have to be so hard on the Northwicks, personally, because I regard them as a necessary part of the system. What would become of the laws and the courts if there were no rogues? We must have Northwicks. It’s a pity that the Northwicks should have families; but I don’t blame the Northwicks for providing against the evil day that Northwickism is sure to end in. I’m glad the roof can’t be taken from over those women’s heads; I respect the paternal love and foresight of J. Milton in deeding the property to them.”

“It’s downright robbery of his creditors for them to keep it!” Gerrish shouted.

“Oh, no, it isn’t, Billy. It’s law. You must respect the law and the rights of property. You’ll be wanting the strikers to burn down the shoe-shops the next time we have trouble here. You’re getting awfully incendiary, Billy.”

Putney carried the laugh against Gerrish, but there were some of the group, and there were many people in Hatboro’, including most of the women, who felt the want of exemplary measures in dealing with Northwick’s case. These ladies did not see the sense of letting those girls live on just as if nothing had happened, in a house that their father’s crimes had forfeited to his victims, while plenty of honest people did not know where they were going to sleep that night, or where the next mouthful of victuals was to come from. It was not really the houseless and the hungry who complained of this injustice; it was not even those who toiled for their daily bread in the Hatboro’ shops who said such things. They were too busy, and then too tired, to think much about them, and the noise of Northwick’s misdeeds died first amid the din of machinery. It was in the close, stove-heated parlors of the respectable citizens, behind the windows that had so long commanded envious views of the Northwicks going by in their carriages and sledges, and among women of leisure and conscience, that his infamy endured, and that the injuries of his creditors cried out for vengeance on those daughters of his; they had always thought themselves too good to speak to other folks. Such women could not understand what the Ponkwasset Mills Company meant by not turning those girls right out of doors, and perhaps they could not have been taught why the company had no power to do this, or why the president, at least, had no wish to do it. When they learned that his family still kept up friendly relations with the Northwick girls, they were not without their suspicions, which were not long in becoming their express belief, that the Hilarys were sharing in the booty. They were not cruel, and would not really have liked to see the Northwick girls suffer, if it had come to that; but they were greedy of the vengeance promised upon the wicked, and they had no fear of judging or of meting with the fullest measure.

In the freer air of the streets and stores and offices, their husbands were not so eager. In fact, it might be said that no man was eager but Gerrish. After the first excitement, and the successive shocks of sensation imparted by the newspapers had passed, there came over the men of Hatboro’ a sort of resignation which might or might not be regarded as proof of a general demoralization. The defalcation had startled them, but it could not be said to have surprised any one; it was to be expected of a man in Northwick’s position; it happened every day somewhere, and the day had come when it should happen there. They did not say God was good and that Mahomet was His prophet, but they were fatalists all the same. They accepted the accomplished fact, and, reflecting that the disaster did not really concern them, many of them regarded it dispassionately, even jocosely. They did not care for a lot of rich people in Boston who had been supplying Northwick with funds to gamble in stocks; it was not as if the Hatboro’ bank had been wrecked, and hard-working folks had lost their deposits. They could look at the matter with an impartial eye, and in their hearts they obscurely believed that any member of the Ponkwasset Company would have done the same thing as Northwick if he had got the chance. Beyond that they were mostly interested in the question whether Northwick had perished in the railroad accident, or had put up a job on the public, and was possessing his soul in peace somewhere in Rogue’s Rest, as Putney called the Dominion of Canada. Putney represented the party in favor of Northwick’s survival; and Gates, the provision man, led the opposite faction. When Putney dropped in to order his marketing, he usually said something like, “Well, Joel, how’s cremation, this morning?”

“Just booming, Squire. That stock’s coming up, right along. Bound to be worth a hundred cents on the dollar before hayin’, yet.” This, or something like it, was what Gates usually answered, but one morning he asked, “Heard how it stands with the Ponkwasset folks, I suppose? They say — paper does — that the reason the president hung off from making a complaint was that he didn’t rightly see how he could have the ashes indicted. He believes in it, any way.”

“Well,” said Putney, “the fathers of New England all died in the blessed hope of infant damnation. But that didn’t prove it.”

“That’s something so, Squire. Guess you got me there,” said Gates.

“I can understand old Hilary’s not wanting to push the thing, under the circumstances, and I don’t blame him. But the law must have its course. Hilary’s got his duty to do. I don’t want to do it for him.”

XXI.

Hilary could not help himself, though when he took the legal steps he was obliged to, it seemed to him that he was wilfully urging on the persecution of that poor young girl and that poor old maid. It was really ghastly to go through the form of indicting a man who, so far as any one could prove to the contrary, had passed with his sins before the tribunal that searches hearts and judges motives rather than acts. But still the processes had to go on, and Hilary had to prompt them. It was all talked over in Hilary’s family, where he was pitied and forgiven in that affection which keeps us simple and sincere in spite of the masks we wear to the world. His wife and his children knew how kind he was, and how much he suffered in this business which, from the first, he had tried to be so lenient in. When he wished to talk of it, they all agreed that Matt must not vex him with his theories and his opinions; and when he did not talk of it, no one must mention it.

Hilary felt the peculiar hardships of his position, all the more keenly because he had a conscience that would not permit him to shirk his duty. He had used his influence, the weight of his character and business repute, to control the action of the Board towards Northwick, when the defalcation became known, and now he was doubly bound to respond to the wishes of the directors in proceeding against him. Most of them believed that Northwick was still alive; those who were not sure regarded it as a public duty to have him indicted at any rate, and they all voted that Hilary should make the necessary complaint. Then Hilary had no choice but to obey. Another man in his place might have resigned, but he could not, for he knew that he was finally responsible for Northwick’s escape.

He made it no less his duty to find out just how much hardship it would work Northwick’s daughters, and he tried to lend them money. But Suzette answered for both that her father had left them some money when he went away; and Hilary could only send Louise to explain how he must formally appear in the legal proceedings; he allowed Louise to put whatever warmth of color she wished into his regrets and into his advice that they should consult a lawyer. It was not business-like; if it were generally known it might be criticised; but in the last resort, with a thing like that, Hilary felt that he could always tell his critics to go to the deuce, and fall back upon a good conscience.

It seemed to Louise, at first, that Suzette was unwilling to separate her father from his office, or fully to appreciate his forbearance. She treated her own father’s course as something above suspicion, as something which he was driven to by enemies, whom he would soon have returned to put to confusion, if he had lived. It made no difference to her and Adeline what was done; their father was safe, now, and some day his name would be cleared. Adeline added that they were in the home where he had left them; it was their house, and no one could take it from them.

Louise compassionately assented to everything. She thought Suzette might have been a little more cordial in the way she received her father’s regrets. But she remembered that Suzette was always undemonstrative, and she did not blame her, after her first disappointment. She could see the sort of neglect that was already falling upon the house, the expression in housekeeping terms of the despair that was in their minds. The sisters did not cry, but Louise cried a good deal in pity for their forlornness, and at last her tears softened them into something like compassion for themselves. They had her stay to lunch rather against her will, but she thought she had better stay. The lunch was so badly cooked and so meagre that Louise fancied they were beginning to starve themselves, and wanted to cry into her tea-cup. The woman who waited wore such dismal black, and went about with her eyes staring and her mouth tightly pursed, and smelt faintly of horses. It was Mrs. Newton; she had let Louise in when she came, and she was the only servant whom the girl saw.

Suzette said nothing about their plans for the future, and Louise did not like to ask her. She felt as if she was received under a flag of truce, and that there could be no confidence between them. Both of the sisters seemed to stand on the defensive with her; but when she started to come away, Suzette put on her hat and jacket, and said she would go to the avenue gate with her, and meet Simpson, who was coming to take Louise back to the station.

It was a clear day of middle March; the sun rode high in a blue sky, and some jays bragged and jeered in the spruces. The frost was not yet out of the ground, but the shaded road was dry underfoot.

They talked at arm’s length of the weather; and then Suzette said abruptly, “Of course, Louise, your father will have to do what they want him to, against — papa. I understand that.”

“Oh, Sue—”

“Don’t! I should wish him to know that I wasn’t stupid about it.”

“I’m sure,” Louise adventured, “he would do anything to help you!”

Suzette put by the feeble expression of mere good feeling. “We don’t believe papa has done anything wrong, or anything he wouldn’t have made right if he had lived. We shall not let them take his property from us if we can help it.”

“Of course not! I’m sure papa wouldn’t wish you to.”

“It would be confessing that they were right, and we will never do that. But I don’t blame your father, and I want him to know it.”

Louise stopped short and kissed Suzette. In her affectionate optimism it seemed to her for the moment that all the trouble was over now. She had never realized anything hopelessly wrong in the affair; it was like a misunderstanding that could be explained away, if the different people would listen to reason.

Sue released herself, and said, looking away from her friend: “It has been hard. He is dead; but we haven’t even been allowed to see him laid in the grave.”

“Oh, perhaps,” Louise sobbed out, “he isn’t dead! So many people think he isn’t—”

Suzette drew away from her in stern offence. “Do you think that if he were alive he would leave us without a word — a sign?”

“No, no! He couldn’t be so cruel! I didn’t mean that! He is dead, and I shall always say it.”

They walked on without speaking, but at the gate Suzette offered to return Louise’s embrace. The tears stood in her eyes, as she said, “I would like to send my love to your mother — if she would care for it.”

“Care for it!”

“And tell your brother I can never forget what he did for us.”

“He can never forget that you let him do it,” said Louise, with eager gratitude. “He would have liked to come with me, if he hadn’t thought it might seem intrusive.”

“Intrusive! Your brother!” Sue spoke the words as if Matt were of some superior order of beings.

The intensity of feeling she put into her voice brought another gush of tears into Louise’s eyes. “Matt is good. And I will tell him what you say. He will like to hear it.” They looked down the road, but they could not see Simpson coming yet. “Don’t wait, Sue,” she pleaded. “Do go back! You will be all worn out.”

“No, I will stay till your carriage comes,” said Suzette; and they remained a moment silent together.

Then Louise said, “Matt has got a new fad: a young man that writes on the newspapers—”

“The newspapers!” Suzette repeated with an intimation of abhorrence.

“Oh, but he isn’t like the others,” Louise hastened to explain. “Very handsome, and interesting, and pale, and sick. He is going to be a poet, but he’s had to be a reporter. He’s awfully clever; but Matt says he’s awfully poor, and he has had such a hard time. Now they think he won’t have to interview people any more — he came to interview papa, the first time; and poor papa was very blunt with him; and then so sorry. He’s got some other kind of newspaper place; I don’t know what. Matt liked what he wrote about — about, your — troubles, Sue.”

“Where was it?” asked Sue. “They were all wickedly false and cruel.”

“His wasn’t cruel. It was in the Abstract.”

“Yes, I remember. But he said papa had taken the money,” Sue answered unrelentingly.

“Did he? I thought he only said if he did. I don’t believe he said more. Matt wouldn’t have liked it so much if he had. He’s in such bad health. But he’s awfully clever.”

The hack came in sight over the rise of ground, with Simpson driving furiously, as he always did when he saw people. Louise threw her arms round her friend again. “Let me go back and stay with you, Sue! Or, come home with me, you and Miss Northwick. We shall all be so glad to have you, and I hate so to leave you here alone. It seems so dreadful!”

“Yes. But it’s easier to bear it here than anywhere else. Some day all the falsehood will be cleared up, and then we shall be glad that we bore it where he left us. We have decided what we shall do, Adeline and I. We shall try to let the house furnished for the summer, and live in the lodge here.”

Louise looked round at the cottage by the avenue gate, and said it would be beautiful.

“We’ve never used it for any one, yet,” Suzette continued, “and we can move back into the house in the winter.”

This again seemed to Louise an admirable notion, and she parted from her friend in more comfort than she could have imagined when they met. She carried her feeling of elation home with her, and was able to report Sue in a state of almost smiling prosperity, and of perfect resignation, if not acquiescence, in whatever the company should make Hilary do. She figured her father, in his reluctance, as a sort of ally of the Northwicks, and she was disappointed that he seemed to derive so little pleasure from Sue’s approval. But he generally approved of all that she could remember to have said for him to the Northwicks, though he did not show himself so appreciative of the situation as Matt. She told her brother what Sue had said when she heard of his unwillingness to intrude upon her, and she added that now he must certainly go to see her.

XXII.

A day or two later, when Matt Hilary went to Hatboro’, he found Wade in his study at the church, and he lost no time in asking him, “Wade, what do you know of the Miss Northwicks? Have you seen them lately?”

Wade told him how little he had seen Miss Northwick, and how he had not seen Suzette at all. Then Matt said, “I don’t know why I asked you, because I knew all this from Louise; she was up here the other day, and they told her. What I am really trying to get at is, whether you know anything more about how that affair with Jack Wilmington stands. Do you know whether he has tried to see her since the trouble about her father came out?”

Adeline Northwick had dropped from the question, as usual, and it really related so wholly to Suzette in the thoughts of both the young men, that neither of them found it necessary to limit it explicitly.

“I feel quite sure he hasn’t,” said Wade, “though I can’t answer positively.”

“Then that settles it!” Matt walked away to one of Wade’s gothic windows, and looked out. When he turned and came back to his friend, he said, “If he had ever been in earnest about her, I think he would have tried to see her at such a time, don’t you?”

“I can’t imagine his not doing it. I never thought him a cad.”

“No, nor I.”

“He would have done it unless — unless that woman has some hold that gives her command of him. He’s shown great weakness, to say the least. But I don’t believe there’s anything worse. What do the village people believe?”

“All sorts of lurid things, some of them; others believe that the affair is neither more nor less than it appears to be. It’s a thing that could be just what it is in no other country in the world. It’s the phase that our civilization has contributed to the physiognomy of scandal, just as the exile of the defaulter is the phase we have contributed to the physiognomy of crime. Public opinion here isn’t severe upon Mrs. Wilmington or Mr. Northwick.”

“I’m not prepared to quarrel with it on that account,” said Matt, with the philosophical serenity which might easily be mistaken for irony in him. “The book we get our religion from teaches leniency in the judgment of others.”

“It doesn’t teach cynical indifference,” Wade suggested.

“Perhaps that isn’t what people feel,” said Matt.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I dread to think how deeply our demoralization goes in certain directions.”

Matt did not follow the lure to that sort of speculative inquiry he and Wade were fond of. He said, with an abrupt return to the personal ground: “Then you don’t think Jack Wilmington need be any further considered in regard to her?”

“In regard to Miss Sue Northwick? I don’t know whether I quite understand what you mean.”

“I mean, is it anybody’s duty — yours or mine — to go to the man and find him out; what he really thinks, what he really feels? I don’t mean, make an appeal to him. That would be unworthy of her. But perhaps he’s holding back from a mistaken feeling of delicacy, of remorse; when if he could be made to see that it was his right, his privilege, to be everything to her now that a man could be to a woman, and infinitely more than any man could hope to be to a happy or fortunate woman — What do you think? He could be reparation, protection, safety, everything!”

Wade shook his head. “It would be useless. Wilmington knows very well that such a girl would never let him be anything to her now when he had slighted her fancy for him before. Even if he were ever in love with her, which I doubt, he couldn’t do it.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Matt. After a little pause, he added, “Then I must go myself.”

“Go, yourself? What do you mean?” Wade asked.

“Some one must try to make them understand just how they are situated. I don’t think Louise did; I don’t think she knew herself, how the legal proceedings would affect them; and I think I’d better go and make it perfectly clear.”

“I can imagine it won’t be pleasant,” said Wade.

“No,” said Matt, “I don’t expect that. But I inferred, from what she said to Louise, that she would be willing to see me, and I think I had better go.”

He put his conviction interrogatively, and Wade said heartily, “Why, of course. It’s the only thing,” and Matt went away with a face which was cheerful with good-will, if not the hope of pleasure.

He met Suzette in the avenue, dressed for walking, and coming forward with the magnificent, haughty movement she had. As she caught sight of him, she started, and then almost ran toward him. “Oh! You!” she said, and she shrank back a little, and then put her hand impetuously out to him.

He took it in his two, and bubbled out, “Are you walking somewhere? Are you well? Is your sister at home? Don’t let me keep you! May I walk with you?”

Her smile clouded. “I’m only walking here in the avenue. How is Louise? Did she get home safely? It was good of her to come here. It isn’t the place for a gay visit.”

“Oh, Miss Northwick! It was good of you to see her. And we were very happy — relieved — to find that you didn’t feel aggrieved with any of us for what must happen. And I hope you don’t feel that I’ve taken an advantage of your kindness in coming?”

“Oh, no!”

“I’ve just been to see Wade.” Matt reddened consciously. “But it doesn’t seem quite fair to have met you where you had no choice but to receive me!”

“I walk here every morning,” she returned, evasively. “I have nowhere else. I never go out of the avenue. Adeline goes to the village, sometimes. But I can’t meet people.”

“I know,” said Matt, with caressing sympathy; and his head swam in the sudden desire to take her in his arms, and shelter her from that shame and sorrow preying upon her. Her eyes had a trouble in them that made him ache with pity; he recognized, as he had not before, that they were the translation in feminine terms, of her father’s eyes. “Poor Wade,” he went on, without well knowing what he was saying, “told me that he — he was very sorry he had not been able to see you — to do anything—”

“What would have been the use? No one can do anything. We must bear our burden; but we needn’t add to it by seeing people who believe that — that my father did wrong.”

Matt’s breath almost left him. He perceived that the condition on which she was bearing her sorrow was the refusal of her shame. Perhaps it could not have been possible for one of her nature to accept it, and it required no effort in her to frame the theory of her father’s innocence; perhaps no other hypothesis was possible to her, and evidence had nothing to do with the truth as she felt it.

“The greatest comfort we have is that none of you believe it; and your father knew my father better than any one else. I was afraid I didn’t make Louise understand how much I felt that, and how much Adeline did. It was hard to tell her, without seeming to thank you for something that was no more than my father’s due. But we do feel it, both of us; and I would like your father to know it. I don’t blame him for what he is going to do. It’s necessary to establish my father’s innocence to have the trial. I was very unjust to your father that first day, when I thought he believed those things against papa. We appreciate his kindness in every way, but we shall not get any lawyer to defend us.”

Matt was helplessly silent before this wild confusion of perfect trust and hopeless error. He would not have known where to begin to set her right; he did not see how he could speak a word without wounding her through her love, her pride.

She hurried on, walking swiftly, as if to keep up with the rush of her freed emotions. “We are not afraid but that it will come out so that our father’s name, who was always so perfectly upright, and so good to every one, will be cleared, and those who have accused him so basely will be punished as they deserve.”

She had so wholly misconceived the situation and the character of the impending proceedings that it would not have been possible to explain it all to her; but he could not leave her in her error, and he made at last an effort to enlighten her.

“I think my father was right in advising you to see a lawyer. It won’t be a question of the charges against your father’s integrity, but of his solvency. The proceedings will be against his estate; and you mustn’t allow yourselves to be taken at a disadvantage.”

She stopped. “What do we care for the estate, if his good name isn’t cleared up?”

“I’m afraid — I’m afraid,” Matt entreated, “that you don’t exactly understand.”

“If my father never meant to keep the money, then the trial will show,” the girl returned.

“But a lawyer — indeed you ought to see a lawyer! — could explain how such a trial would leave that question where it was. It wouldn’t be the case against your father, but against you.”

“Against us? What do they say we have done?”

Matt could have laughed at her heroic misapprehension of the affair, if it had not been for the pity of it. “Nothing! Nothing! But they can take everything here that belonged to your father — everything on the place, to satisfy his creditors. The question of his wrong-doing won’t enter. I can’t tell you how. But you ought to have a lawyer who would defend your rights in the case.”

“If they don’t pretend we’ve done anything then they can’t do anything to us!”

“They can take everything your father had in the world to pay his debts.”

“Then let them take it,” said the girl. “If he had lived he would have paid them. We will never admit that he did anything for us to be ashamed of; that he ever wilfully wronged any one.”

Matt could see that the profession of her father’s innocence was essential to her. He could not know how much of it was voluntary, a pure effect of will, in fulfilment of the demands of her pride, and how much was real belief. He only knew that, whatever it was, his wish was not to wound her or to molest her in it, but to leave what should be sacred from human touch to the mystery that we call providence. It might have been this very anxiety that betrayed him, for a glance at his face seemed to stay her.

“Don’t you think I am right, Mr. Hilary?”

“Yes, yes!” Matt began; and he was going to say that she was right in every way, but he found that his own truth was sacred to him as well as her fiction, and he said, “I’ve no right to judge your father. It’s the last thing I should be willing to do. I certainly don’t believe he ever wished to wrong any one if he could have helped it.”

“Thank you!” said the girl. “That was not what I asked you. I know what my father meant to do, and I didn’t need any reassurance. I’m sorry to have troubled you with all these irrelevant questions; and I thank you very much for the kind advice you have given me.”

“Oh, don’t take it so!” he entreated, simply. “I do wish to be of use to you — all the use that the best friend in the world can be; and I see that I have wounded you. Don’t take my words amiss; I’m sure you couldn’t take my will so, if you knew it! If the worst that anybody has said about your father were ten times true, it couldn’t change my will, or—”

“Thank you! Thank you!” she said perversely. “I don’t think we understand each other, Mr. Hilary. It’s scarcely worth while to try. I think I must say good-by. My sister will be expecting me.” She nodded, and he stood aside, lifting his hat. She dashed by him, and he remained staring after her till she vanished in the curve of the avenue. She suddenly reappeared, and came quickly back toward him. “I wanted to say that, no matter what you think or say, I shall never forget what you have done, and I shall always be grateful for it.” She launched these words fiercely at him, as if they were a form of defiance, and then whirled away, and was quickly lost to sight again.

XXIII.

That evening Adeline said to her sister, at the end of the meagre dinner they allowed themselves in these days, “Elbridge says the hay is giving out, and we have got to do something about those horses that are eating their heads off in the barn. And the cows: there’s hardly any feed for them.”

“We must take some of the money and buy feed,” said Suzette, passively. Adeline saw by her eyes that she had been crying; she did not ask her why; each knew why the other cried.

“I’m afraid to,” said the elder sister. “It’s going so fast, as it is, that I don’t know what we shall do pretty soon. I think we ought to sell some of the cattle.”

“We can’t. We don’t know whether they’re ours.”

“Not ours?”

“They may belong to the creditors. We must wait till the trial is over.”

Adeline made no answer. They had disputed enough about that trial, which they understood so little. Adeline had always believed they ought to speak to a lawyer about it; but Suzette had not been willing. Even when a man came that morning with a paper which he said was an attachment, and left it with them, they had not agreed to ask advice. For one thing, they did not know whom to ask. Northwick had a lawyer in Boston; but they had been left to the ignorance in which most women live concerning such matters, and they did not know his name.

Now Adeline resolved to act upon a plan of her own that she had kept from Suzette because she thought Suzette would not like it. Her sister went to her room after dinner, and then Adeline put on her things and let herself softly out into the night. She took that paper the man had left, and she took the deeds of the property which her father had given her soon after her mother died, while Sue was a little girl. He said that the deeds were recorded, and that she could keep them safely enough, and she had kept them ever since in the box where her old laces were, and her mother’s watch, that had never been wound up since her death.

Adeline was not afraid of the dark on the road or in the lonely village-streets; but when she rang at the lawyer Putney’s door, her heart beat so with fright that it seemed as if it must jump out of her mouth. She came to him because she had always heard that, in spite of his sprees, he was the smartest lawyer in Hatboro’; and she believed that he could protect their rights if any one could. At the same time she wished justice to be done, though they should suffer, and she came to Putney, partly because she knew he had always disliked her father, and she reasoned that such a man would be less likely to advise her against the right in her interest than a friendlier person.

Putney came to the door himself, as he was apt to do at night, when he was in the house, and she saw him control his surprise at sight of her. “Can I see — see — see you a moment,” she stammered out, “about some — some law business?”

“Certainly,” said Putney, with grave politeness. “Will you come in?” He led the way into the parlor, where he was reading when she rang, and placed a chair for her, and then shut the parlor door, and waited for her to offer him the papers that rattled in her nervous clutch.

“It’s this one that I want to show you first,” she said, and she gave him the writ of attachment. “A man left it this noon, and we don’t know what it means.”

“It means,” said Putney, “that your father’s creditors have brought suit against his estate, and have attached his property so that you cannot sell it, or put it out of your hands in any way. If the court declares him insolvent, then everything belonging to him must go to pay his debts.”

“But what can we do? We can’t buy anything to feed the stock, and they will suffer,” cried Adeline.

“I don’t think long,” said Putney. “Some one will be put in charge of the place, and then the stock will be taken care of by the creditors.”

“And will they turn us out? Can they take our house? It is our house — mine and my sister’s; here are the deeds that my father gave me long ago; and he said they were recorded.” Her voice grew shrill.

Putney took the deeds, and glanced at the recorder’s endorsement before he read them. He seemed to Adeline a long time; and she had many fears till he handed them back to her. “The land, and the houses, and all the buildings are yours and your sister’s, Miss Northwick, and your father’s creditors can’t touch them.”

The tears started from Adeline’s eyes; she fell weakly back in her chair and let them run silently down her worn face. After a while Putney said, gently, “Was this all you wanted to ask me?”

“That is all,” Adeline answered, and she began blindly to put her papers together. He helped her. “How much is there to pay?” she asked, with an anxiety she could not keep out of her voice.

“Nothing. I haven’t done you any legal service. Almost any man you showed those papers to could have told you as much as I have.” She tried to gasp out some acknowledgments and protests as he opened the doors for her. At the outer threshold he said, “Why, you’re alone!”

“Yes. I’m not at all afraid—”

“I will go home with you.” Putney caught his hat from the rack, and plunged into a shabby overcoat that dangled under it.

Adeline tried to refuse, but she could not. She was trembling so that it seemed as if she could not have set one foot before the other without help. She took his arm, and stumbled along beside him through the quiet, early spring night.

After a while he said, “Miss Northwick, there’s a little piece of advice I should like to give you.”

“Well?” she quavered, meekly.

“Don’t let anybody lead you into the expense of trying to fight this case with the creditors. It wouldn’t be any use. Your father was deeply involved—”

“He had been unfortunate, but he didn’t do anything wrong,” Adeline hastened to put in, nervously.

“It isn’t a question of that,” said Putney, with a smile which he could safely indulge in the dark. “But he owed a great deal of money, and his creditors will certainly be able to establish their right to everything but the real estate.”

“My sister never wished to have anything to do with the trial. We intended just to let it go.”

“That’s the best way,” Putney said.

“But I wanted to know whether they could take the house and the place from us.”

“That was right, and I assure you they can’t touch either. If you get anxious, come to me again — as often as you like.”

“I will, indeed, Mr. Putney,” said the old maid, submissively. She let him walk home with her, and up the avenue till they came in sight of the house. Then she plucked her hand away from his arm, and thanked him, with a pathetic little titter. “I don’t know what Suzette would say if she knew I had been to consult you,” she suggested.

“It’s for you to tell her,” said Putney, seriously. “But you’d better act together. You will need all your joint resources in that way.”

“Oh, I shall tell her,” said Adeline. “I’m not sorry for it, and I think just as you do, Mr. Putney.”

“Well, I’m glad you do,” said Putney, as if it were a favor.

When he reached home, his wife asked, “Where in the world have you been, Ralph?”

“Oh, just philandering round in the dark a little with Adeline Northwick.”

“Ralph, what do you mean?”

He told her, and they were moved and amused together at the strange phase their relation to the Northwicks had taken. “To think of her coming to you, of all people in the world, for advice in her trouble!”

“Yes,” said Putney. “But I was always a great friend of her father’s, you know, Ellen.”

“Ralph!”

“Oh. I may have spent my whole natural life in denouncing him as demoralization incarnate, and a curse to the community, but I always liked him, Ellen. Yes, I loved J. Milton, and I was merely waiting for him to prove himself a first-class scoundrel, to find out just how much I loved him. I’ve no doubt but if we could have him among us again, in the attractive garb of the State’s-prison inmates, I should be hand and glove with brother Northwick.”

XXIV.

Adeline’s reasons for going to Putney in their trouble had to avail with Suzette against the prejudice they had always felt towards him. In the tangible and immediate pressure that now came upon them they were glad to be guided by his counsel; they both believed it was dictated by a knowledge of law and a respect for justice, and by no regard for them. They had a comfort in it for this reason, and they freely relied upon it, as in some sort the advice of an honest and faithful enemy. They remembered that the last evening he was with them, their father had spoken leniently of Putney’s infirmity, and admiringly of his wasted ability. Now each step they took was at his suggestion. They left the great house before the creditors were put in possession of the personal property, and went to live in the porter’s lodge at the gate of the avenue, which they furnished with the few things they could claim for their own out of their former belongings, and from the ready money Suzette had remaining in her name at the bank. They abandoned everything of value in the house they had left, even to their richer dresses and their jewels: they preferred to do this, and Putney approved; he saw that it saved them more than it cost them in their helpless pride.

The Newtons continued in their quarters unmolested; the furniture was theirs and the building belonged to the Northwick girls, as the Newtons called them. Mrs. Newton went every day to help them to get going in their new place, and Elbridge and she lived there for a few weeks with them, till they said they should not be afraid to stay alone. He stood guard over their rights, as far as he could ascertain them in the spoliation that had to come. He locked the avenue gate against the approach of those who came to the assignee’s sale, and made them enter and take away their purchases by the farm road; and in all lawful ways he rendered himself obstructive and inconvenient.

His deference to the law was paid entirely through Putney, whose smartness inspired Elbridge with a respect he felt for no other virtue in man. Putney arranged with him to take the Northwick place and manage it on shares for the Northwick girls; he got for him two of the old horses which Elbridge wanted for his work, and one of the cheaper cows. The rest of the stock was sold to gentleman farmers round about, who had fancies for costly cattle: the horses, good, bad and indifferent, were sent to a sale-stable in Boston. The greenhouses were stripped of all that was valuable in them, and nothing was left upon the place, of its former equipment, except the few farm implements, a cart or two, and an ancient carryall that Putney bid off for Newton’s use.

Then, when all was finished, he advertised the house to let for a term of years, and failing a permanent tenant before the season opened, he rented it to an adventurous landlady, who proposed to fill it with summer boarders, and who engaged to pay a rental for it monthly, in advance, that would enable the Northwick girls to live on, in the porter’s lodge, without fear of want. For the future, Putney imagined a scheme for selling off some of the land next the villas of South Hatboro’, in lots to suit purchasers. That summer sojourn had languished several years in uncertainty of its own fortunes; but now, by a caprice of the fashion which is sending people more and more to the country for the spring and fall months, it was looking up decidedly. Property had so rapidly appreciated there, that Putney thought of asking so much a foot for the Northwick lands, instead of offering it by the acre.

In proposing to become a land operator, in behalf of his clients, he had to reconcile his practice with theories he had held concerning unearned land-values; and he justified himself to his crony, Dr. Morrell, on the ground that these might be justly taken from such rich and idle people as wanted to spend the spring and fall at South Hatboro’. The more land at a high price you could get into the hands of the class South Hatboro’ was now attracting, and make them pay the bulk of the town tax, the better for the land that working men wanted to get a living on. In helping the Northwick girls to keep all they could out of the clutches of their father’s creditors, he held that he was only defending their rights; and any fight against a corporation was a kind of holy war. He professed to be getting on very comfortably with his conscience, and he promised that he would not let it worry other people. To Mr. Gerrish he made excuses for taking charge of the affairs of two friendless women, when he ought to have joined Gerrish in punishing them for their father’s sins, as any respectable man would. He asked Gerrish to consider the sort of fellow he had always been, drinking up his own substance, while Gerrish was thriftily devouring other people’s houses, and begged him to make allowance for him.

The anomalous relation he held to the Northwicks afforded him so much excitement and enjoyment, that he passed his devil’s dividend, as he called his quarterly spree. He kept straight longer than his fellow citizens had known him to do for many years. But Putney was one of those men who could not be credited by people generally with the highest motives. He too often made a mock of what people generally regarded as the highest motives; he puzzled and affronted them; and as none of his most intimate friends could claim that he was respectable in the ordinary sense of the word, people generally attributed interested motives, or at least cynical motives, to him. Adeline Northwick profited by a call she made upon Dr. Morrell for advice about her dyspepsia, to sound him in regard to Putney’s management of her affairs; and if the doctor’s powders had not so distinctly done her good, she might not have been able to rely upon the assurance he gave her, that Putney was acting wisely and most disinterestedly toward her and her sister.

“He has such a strange way of talking, sometimes,” she said.

But she clung to Putney, and relied upon him in everything, not so much because she implicitly trusted him, as because she knew no one else to trust. The kindness that Mr. Hilary had shown for them in the first of their trouble, had, of course, become impossible to both the sisters. He had, in fact, necessarily ceased to offer it directly, and Sue had steadily rejected all the overtures Louise made her since they last met. Louise wanted to come again to see her; but Sue evaded her proposals; at last she would not answer her letters; and their friendship outwardly ceased. Louise did not blame her; she accounted for her, and pitied and forgave her; she said it was what she herself would do in Sue’s place, but probably if she had continued herself, she would not have done what Sue did, even in Sue’s place. She remembered Sue with a tender constancy when she could no longer openly approach her without hurting more than she helped; and before the day of the assignee’s sale came, she thought out a scheme which Wade carried into effect with Putney’s help. Those things of their own that the sisters had meant to sacrifice, were bidden off, and restored to them in such a way that it was not possible for them to refuse to take back the dresses, the jewels, the particular pieces of furniture which Louise associated with them.

Each of the sisters dealt with the event in her sort; Adeline simply exulted in getting her things again; Sue gave all hers into Adeline’s keeping, and bade her never let her see them.

PART SECOND.

I.

Northwick kept up the mental juggle he had used in getting himself away from Hatboro’, and as far as Ponkwasset Junction he made believe that he was going to leave the main line, and take the branch road to the mills. He had a thousand-mile ticket, and he had no baggage check to define his destination; he could step off and get on where he pleased. At first he let the conductor take up the mileage on his ticket as far as Ponkwasset Junction; but when he got there he kept on with the train, northward, in the pretence that he was going on as far as Willoughby Junction, to look after some business of his quarries. He verified his pretence by speaking of it to the conductor who knew him; he was not a person to take conductors into his confidence, but he felt obliged to account to the man for his apparent change of mind. He was at some trouble to make it seem casual and insignificant, and he wondered if the conductor meant to insinuate anything by saying in return that it was a pretty brisk day to be knocking round much in a stone quarry. Northwick smiled in saying, “It was, rather;” he watched the conductor to see if he should betray any particular interest in the matter when he left him. But the conductor went on punching the passengers’ tickets, and seemed to forget Northwick as soon as he left him. At the next station, Northwick followed him out on the platform to find if he sent any telegram off. When he had once given way to this anxiety, which he knew to be perfectly stupid and futile, he had to yield to it at every station. He took his bag with him each time he left the car, and he meant not to go back if he saw the conductor telegraphing. It was intensely cold, and in spite of the fierce heat of the stove at the end of the car, the frost gathered thickly on the windows. The train creaked, when it stopped and started, as if it were crunching along on a bed of dry snow; the noises of the wheels seemed at times to lose their rhythmical cadence, and then Northwick held his breath for fear one of them might be broken. He had a dread of accident such as he had never felt before; his life had never seemed so valuable to him as now; he reflected that it was so because it was to be devoted now to retrieving the past in a new field under new conditions. His life, in this view, was not his own; it was a precious trust which he held for others, first for his children, and then for those whom he was finally to save from loss by the miscarriage of his enterprises. He justified himself anew in what he was intending; it presented itself as a piece of self-sacrifice, a sacred duty which he was bound to fulfil. All the time he knew that he was a defaulter who had used the money in his charge, and tampered with the record so as to cover up the fact, and that he was now absconding, and was carrying off a large sum of money that was not morally his. At one of the stations where he got out to see whether the conductor was telegraphing, he noticed the conductor eyeing his bag curiously; and he knew that he believed there was money in it. Northwick felt a thrill of gratified cunning in realizing how mistaken the conductor was; but he was willing the fellow should think he was carrying up money to pay off his quarry hands.

He was impatient to reach the Junction, where this conductor would leave the train, and it would continue northward in the charge of another man; he seldom went beyond Willoughby on that road, and the new conductor would hardly know him. He meant to go on to Blackbrook Junction, and take the New England Central there for Montreal; but he saw the conductor go to the telegraph office at Willoughby Junction, and it suddenly occurred to him that he must not go to Montreal by a route so direct that any absconding defaulter would be expected to take it. He had not the least proof that the conductor’s dispatch had anything to do with him; but he could not help acting as if it had. He said good-day to the conductor as he passed him, and he went out of the station, with his bag, as if he were going up into the town. He watched till he saw the conductor go off in another direction, and then he came back, and got aboard the train just as it was drawing out of the station. He knew that he was not shadowed in any way, but his consciousness of stealth was such that he felt as if he were followed, and that he must act so as to baffle and mislead pursuit.

At Blackbrook, where the train stopped for dinner, he was aware that no one knew him, and he ate hungrily; he felt strengthened and encouraged, and he began to react against the terror that had possessed him. He perceived that it was senseless and ridiculous; that the conductor could not possibly have been telegraphing about him from Willoughby, and there was as yet no suspicion abroad concerning him; he might go freely anywhere, by any road.

But he had now let the New England Central train leave without him, and it only remained for him to push on to Wellwater, where he hoped to connect with the Boston train for Montreal, on the Union and Dominion road. He remembered that this train divided at Wellwater, and certain cars ran direct to Quebec, up through Sherbrooke and Lennoxville. He meant to go from Montreal to Quebec, but now he questioned whether he had better not go straight on from Wellwater; when he recalled the long, all-night ride without a sleeper, which he had once made on that route many summers before, he said to himself that in his shaken condition, he must not run the risk of such a hardship. If he were to get sick from it, or die, it would be as bad as a railroad accident. The word now made him think of what Hilary had said; Hilary who had called him a thief. He would show Hilary whether he was a thief or not, give him time; he would make him eat his words, and he figured Hilary retracting and apologizing in the presence of the whole Board; Hilary apologized handsomely, and Northwick forgave him, while it was also passing through his mind that he must reduce the risks of railroad accident to a minimum, by shortening the time. They reduced the risk of ocean travel in that way, by reducing the time, and logically the fastest ship was the safest. If he could get to Montreal from Wellwater in four or five hours, when it would take him twelve hours to get to Quebec, it was certainly his duty to go to Montreal. First of all, he must put himself out of danger of every kind. He must not even fatigue himself too much; and he decided to telegraph on to Wellwater, and secure a seat in the Pullman car to Montreal. He had been travelling all day in the ordinary car, and he had found it very rough.

It suddenly occurred to him that he must now assume a false name; and he reflected that he must take one that sounded like his own, or else he would not answer promptly and naturally to it. He chose Warwick, and he kept saying it over to himself while he wrote his dispatch to the station-master at Wellwater, asking him to secure a chair in the Pullman. He was pleased with the choice he had made; it seemed like his own name when spoken, and yet very unlike when written. But while he congratulated himself on his quickness and sagacity, he was aware of something detached, almost alien, in the operation of his mind. It did not seem to be working normally; he could govern it, but it was like something trying to get away from him, like a headstrong, restive horse. The notion suggested the colt that had fallen lame; he wondered if Elbridge would look carefully after it; and then he thought of all the other horses. A torment of heartbreaking homesickness seized him; his love for his place, his house, his children, seemed to turn against him, and to tear him and leave him bleeding, like the evil spirit in the demoniac among the tombs. He was in such misery with his longing for his children, that he thought it must show in his face; and he made a feint of having to rise and arrange his overcoat so that he could catch sight of himself in the mirror at the end of the car. His face betrayed nothing; it looked, as it always did, like the face of a kindly, respectable man, a financially reliable face, the face of a leading citizen. He gathered courage and strength from it to put away the remorse that was devouring him. If that was the way he looked that was the way he must be; and he could only be leaving those so dear to him for some good purpose. He recalled that his purpose was to clear the name they bore from the cloud that must fall upon it; to rehabilitate himself; to secure his creditors from final loss. This was a good purpose, the best purpose that a man in his place could have; he recollected that he was to be careful of his life and health, because he had dedicated himself to this purpose.

He determined to keep this purpose steadily in mind, not to lose thought of it for an instant; it was his only refuge. Then a new anguish seized him; a doubt that swiftly became certainty; and he knew that he had signed that dispatch Northwick and not Warwick; he saw just how his signature looked on the yellow manilla paper of the telegraph blank. Now he saw what a fool he had been to think of sending any dispatch. He cursed himself under his breath, and in the same breath he humbly prayed to God for some way of escape. His terror made it certain to him that he would be arrested as soon as he reached Wellwater. That would be the next stop, the conductor told him, when he halted him with the question on his way through the cars. The conductor said they were behind time, and Northwick knew by the frantic pull of the train that they were running to make up the loss. It would simply be death to jump from the car; and he must not die, he must run the risk. In his prayer he bargained with God that if He would let him escape, he would give every thought, every breath to making up the loss of his creditors; he half promised to return the money he was carrying away, and trust to his own powers, his business talent in a new field, to retrieve himself. He resolved to hide himself as soon as he reached Wellwater; it would be dark, and he hoped that by this understanding with Providence he could elude the officer in getting out of the car. But if there were two, one at each end of the car?

There was none, and Northwick walked away from the station with the other passengers, who were going to the hotel near the station for supper. In the dim light of the failing day and the village lamps, he saw with a kind of surprise, the deep snow, and felt the strong, still cold of the winterland he had been journeying into. The white drifts were everywhere; the vague level of the frozen lake stretched away from the hotel like a sea of snow; on its edge lay the excursion steamer in which Northwick had one summer made the tour of the lake with his family, long ago.

He was only a few miles from the Canadian frontier; with a rebound from his anxiety, he now exulted in the safety he had already experienced. He remained tranquilly eating after the departure of the Montreal train was cried; and when he was left almost alone, the head-waiter came to him and said, “Your train’s just going, sir.”

“Thank you,” he answered, “I’m going out on the Quebec line.” He wanted to laugh, in thinking how he had baffled fate. Now, if any inquiry were made for him it would be at the Montreal train before it started, or at the next station, which was still within the American border, on that line. But on the train for Quebec, which would reach Stanstead in half an hour, he would be safe from conjecture, even, thanks to that dispatch asking for a chair on the Montreal Pullman. The Quebec train was slow in starting; but he did not care; he walked up and down the platform, and waited patiently. He no longer thought with anxiety of the long all-night ride before him. If he did not choose to keep straight on to Quebec, he could stop at Lenoxville or Sherbrooke, and take up his journey again the next day. At Stanstead he ceased altogether to deal with the past in his thoughts. He was now safe from it beyond any possible peradventure, and he began to plan for the future. He had prepared himself for the all-night ride, if he should decide to take it, with a cup of strong coffee at Wellwater, and he was alert in every faculty. His mind worked nimbly and docilely now, with none of that perversity which had troubled him during the day with the fear that he was going wrong in it. His thought was clear and quick, and it obeyed his will like a part of it; that sense of duality in himself no longer agonized him. He took a calm and prudent survey of the work before him; and he saw how essential it was that he should make no false step, but should act at every moment with the sense that he was merely the agent of others in the effort to retrieve his losses.

II.

At Stanstead a party of three gentlemen came into the car; and their talk presently found its way through Northwick’s revery, at first as an interruption, an annoyance, and afterwards as a matter of intensifying personal interest to him. They were in very good spirits, and they made themselves at home in the car; there were only a few other passengers. They were going to Montreal, as he easily gathered, and some friends were to join them at the next junction, and go on with them. They talked freely of an enterprise which they wished to promote in Montreal; and they were very confident of it if they could get the capital. One of them said, It was a thing that would have been done long ago, if the Yankees had been in it. “Well, we may strike a rich defaulter, in Montreal,” another said, and they all laughed. Their laughter shocked Northwick; it seemed immoral; he remembered that though he might seem a defaulter, he was a man with a sacred trust, and a high purpose. But he listened eagerly; if their enterprise were one that approved itself to his judgment, the chance of their discussing it before him might be a leading of Providence which he would be culpable to refuse. Providence had answered his prayer in permitting him to pass the American frontier safely, and Northwick must not be derelict in fulfilling his part of the agreement. The Canadians borrowed the brakeman’s lantern, and began to study a map which they spread out on their knees. The one who seemed first among them put his finger on a place in the map, and said that was the spot. It was in the region just back of Chicoutimi. Gold had always been found there, but not in paying quantity. It cost more to mine it than it was worth; but with the application of his new process of working up the tailings, there was no doubt of the result. It was simply wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.

Northwick had heard that song before; and he fell back in his seat, with a smile which was perhaps too cynical for a partner of Providence, but which was natural in a man of his experience. He knew something about processes to utilize the tailings of gold mines which would not otherwise pay for working; he had paid enough for his knowledge: so much that if he still had the purchase-money he need not be going into exile now, and beginning life under a false name, in a strange land.

By and by he found himself listening again, and he heard the Canadian saying, “And there’s timber enough on the tract to pay twice over what it will cost, even if the mine wasn’t worth a penny.”

“Well, we might go down and see the timber, any way,” said one of the party who had not yet spoken much. “And then we could take a look at Markham’s soap-mine, too. Unless,” he added, “you had to tunnel under a hundred feet of snow to get at it. A good deal like diggin’ the north pole up by the roots, wouldn’t it be?”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” said he who seemed to be Markham, with the optimism of an enthusiast. “There’s no trouble about it. We’ve got some shanties that we put up about the mouth of the hole in the ground we made in the autumn, and you can see the hole without digging at all. Or at least you could in the early part of January, when I was down there.”

“The hole hadn’t run away?”

“No. It was just where we left it.”

“Well, that’s encouragin’. But I say, Markham, how do you get down there in the winter?”

“Oh! very easily. Simplest thing in the world. Lots of fellows in the lumber trade do it all winter long. Do it by sleigh from St. Anne’s, about twenty miles below Quebec — from Quebec you have your choice of train or sleigh. But I prefer to make a clean thing of it, and do it all by sleigh. I take it by easy stages, and so I take the long route: there is a short cut, but the stops are far between. You make your twenty miles to St. Anne from Quebec one day; eighteen to St. Joachim, the next; thirty-nine to Baie St. Paul, the next; twenty to Malbaie, the next; then forty to Tadoussac; then eighteen to Rivière Marguerite. You can do something every day at that rate, even in the new snow; but on the ice of the Saguenay, to Haha Bay, there’s a pull of sixty miles; you’re at Chicoutimi, eleven miles farther, before you know it. Good feed, and good beds, all along. You wrap up, and you don’t mind. Of course,” Markham concluded, “it isn’t the climate of Stanstead,” as if the climate of Stanstead were something like that of St. Augustine.

“Well, it sounds a mere bagatelle,” said the more talkative of the other two, “but it takes a week of steady travel.”

“What is a week on the way to Golconda, if Golconda’s yours when you get there?” said Markham. “Why, Watkins, the young spruce and poplar alone on that tract are worth twice the price I ask for the whole. A pulp-mill, which you could knock together for a few shillings, on one of those magnificent water-powers, would make you all millionnaires, in a single summer.”

“And what would it do in the winter when your magnificent water-power was restin’?”

“Work harder than ever, my dear boy, and set an example of industry to all the lazy habitans in the country. You could get your fuel for the cost of cutting, and you could feed your spruce and poplar in under your furnace, and have it come out paper pulp at the other end of the mill.”

Watkins and the other listener laughed with loud haw-haws at Markham’s drolling, and Watkins said, “I say, Markham, weren’t you born on the other side of the line?”

“No. But my father was; and I wish he’d stayed there till I came. Then I’d be going round with all the capitalists of Wall Street fighting for a chance to put their money into my mine, instead of wearing out the knees of my trousers before you Canucks, begging you not to slap your everlasting fortune in the face.”

They now all roared together again, and at Sherbrooke they changed cars.

Northwick had to change too, but he did not try to get into the same car with them. He wanted to think, to elaborate in his own mind the suggestion for his immediate and remoter future which he had got from their talk; and he dreaded the confusion, and possibly he dreaded the misgiving, that might come from hearing more of their talk. He thought he knew, now, just what he wanted to do, and he did not wish to be swerved from it.

He felt eager to get on, but he was not impatient. He bore very well the long waits that he had to make both at Sherbrooke and Richmond; but when the train left the Junction for Quebec at last, he settled himself in his seat with a solider content than he had felt before, and gave himself up to the pleasure of shaping the future, that was so obediently plastic in his fancy. The brakeman plied the fierce stove at the end of the car with fuel, and Northwick did not suffer from the cold that strengthened and deepened with the passing night outside, though he was not overcoated and booted for any such temperature as his fellow-travellers seemed prepared for. They were all Canadians, and they talked now and then in their broad-vowelled French, but their voices were low, and they came and went quietly at the country stations. The car was old and worn, and badly hung; but in spite of all, Northwick drowsed in the fervor of the glowing stove, and towards morning he fell into a long and dreamless sleep.

He woke from it with a vigor and freshness that surprised him, and found the train pulling into the station at Pointe Levis. The sun burned like a soft lamp through the thick frost on the car-window; when he emerged, he found it a cloudless splendor on a world of snow. The vast landscape, which he had seen in summer all green from the edge of the mighty rivers to the hilltops losing themselves in the blue distance, showed rounded and diminished in the immeasurable drifts that filled it, and that hid the streams in depths almost as great above their ice as those of the currents below. The villages of the habitans sparkled from tinned roof and spire, and the city before him rose from shore and cliff with a thousand plumes of silvery smoke. In and out among the frozen shipping swarmed an active life that turned the rivers into highroads, and speckled the expanse of glistening white with single figures and groups of men and horses.

It was all gay and bizarre, and it gave Northwick a thrill of boyish delight. He wondered for a moment why he had never come to Quebec in winter before, and brought his children. He beckoned to the walnut-faced driver of one of the carrioles which waited outside the station to take the passengers across the river, and tossed his bag into the bottom of the little sledge. He gave the name of a hotel in the Upper Town, and the driver whipped his tough, long-fetlocked pony over the space of ice which was kept clear of snow by diligent sweeping with fir-tree tops, and then up the steep incline of Mountain Hill. The streets were roadways from house-front to house-front, smooth, elastic levels of thickly-bedded, triply-frozen snow; and the foot passengers, muffled to the eyes against the morning cold, came and went among the vehicles in the middle of the street, or crept along close to the house-walls, to keep out of the light avalanches of an overnight snow that slipped here and there from the steep tin roofs.

Northwick’s unreasoned gladness grew with each impression of the beauty and novelty. It quickened associations of his earliest days, and of the winter among his native hills. He felt that life could be very pleasant in this latitude; he relinquished the notion he had cherished at times of going to South America with his family in case he should finally fail to arrange with the company for his safe return home; he forecast a future in Quebec where he could build a new home for his children, among scenes that need not be all so alien. This did not move him from his fixed intention to retrieve himself, though it gave him the courage of indefinitely expanded possibilities. He was bent upon the scheme he had in mind, and as soon as he finished his breakfast he went out to prepare for it.

III.

The inn he had chosen was one which he remembered, from former visits to Quebec, as having seemed a resort of old world folk of humble fortunes. He got a room, and went to it long enough to count the money he had with him, and find it safe. Then he took one of the notes from the others, and went to a broker’s to get it changed.

The amount seemed to give the broker pause; but he concerned himself only with the genuineness of the greenback, and after a keen glance at Northwick’s unimpeachable face, he paid over the thousand dollars in Canadian bills. “We used to make your countrymen give us something over,” he said with a smile in recognition of Northwick’s nationality.

“Yes; that’s all changed, now,” returned Northwick. “Do I look so very American?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know that,” said the broker, with an airy English inflection. “I suppose it’s your hard hat, as much as anything. We all wear fur caps in such weather.”

“Ah, that’s a good idea,” said Northwick. He spoke easily, but with a nether torment of longing to look at the newspaper lying open on the counter. He could see that it was the morning paper; there might be something about him in it. The thought turned him faint; but he knew that if the paper happened to have anything about him in it, any rumor of his offence, any conjecture of his flight, he could not bear it. He could bear to keep himself deaf and blind to the self he had put behind him, but he could not bear anything less. The papers seemed to thrust themselves upon him; newsboys followed him up in the street with them; he saw them in all the shops, where he went for the fur cap and fur overcoat he bought, for the underclothing and changes of garments that he had to provide; for the belt he got to put his money in. This great sum, which he dared not bank, must be carried about with him; it must not leave him night or day; it must be buckled into the chamois belt and worn round his waist, sleeping and waking. The belt was really for gold, but the forty-two thousand-dollar notes, which were not a great bulk, would easily go into it.

He returned to his hotel and changed them to it, and put the belt on. Then he felt easier, and he looked up the landlord to ask about the route he wished to take. He found, as he expected, that it was one very commonly travelled by lumber merchants going down into the woods to look after their logging camps. Some took a sleigh from Quebec; but the landlord said it was just as well to go by train to St. Anne, and save that much sleighing; you would get enough of it then. Northwick thought so too, and after the early dinner they gave him he took the cars for St. Anne.

He was not tired; he was curiously buoyant and strong. He thought he might get a nap on the way; but he remained vividly awake; and even that night he did not sleep much. He felt again that pulling of his mind, as if it were something separate from him, and were struggling to get beyond the control of his will. The hotel in the little native village was very good in its way; he had an excellent supper and an easy bed; but he slept brokenly, and he was awake long before the early breakfast which he had ordered for his start next day. The landlord wished to persuade him that there was no need of such great haste; it was only eighteen miles to St. Joachim, where he was to make his first stop, and the road was so good that he would get there in a few hours. He had better stop and visit the church, and see the sick people’s offerings, which they left there every year, in gratitude to the saint for healing them of their maladies. The landlord said it was a pity he could not come some time at the season of the pilgrimage; his countrymen often came then. Northwick perceived that in spite of his fur cap and overcoat, and his great Canadian boots, he was easily recognizable for an American to this man, though he could not definitely decide whether his landlord was French or Irish, and could not tell whether it was in earnest or in irony that he invited him to try St. Anne for any trouble he happened to be suffering from. But he winced at the suggestion, while his heart leaped at the fantastic thought of hanging that money-belt at her altar, and so easing himself of all his pains. He grotesquely imagined the American defaulters in Canada making a pilgrimage to St. Anne, and devoting emblems of their moral disease to her: forged notes, bewitched accounts, false statements. At the same time, with that part of him which seemed obedient, he asked the landlord if he knew of the gold discoveries on the Chicoutimi River, and tried to account for himself as an American speculator going to look into the matter in his own way and at his own time.

In spite of his uncertainty about the landlord in some ways, Northwick found him a kindly young fellow. He treated Northwick with a young fellow’s comfortable deference for an elderly man, and helped him forget the hurts to his respectability which rankled so when he remembered them. He explained the difference between the two routes from Malbaie on, and advised him to take the longer, which lay through a more settled district, where he would be safer in case of any mischance. But if he liked to take the shorter, he told him there were good campes, or log-house stations, every ten or fifteen miles, where he would find excellent meals and beds, and be well cared for by people who kept them in the winter for travellers. Ladies sometimes made the journey on that route, which the government had lately opened, and the mails were carried that way; he could take passage with the mail-carriers.

This fact determined Northwick. He shrank from trusting himself in government keeping, though he knew he would be safe in it. He said he would go by Tadoussac; and the landlord found a carriole driver, with a tough little Canadian horse, who agreed to go the whole way to Chicoutimi with him.

After an early lunch the man came, with the low-bodied sledge, set on runners of solid wood, and deeply bedded with bearskins for the lap and back. The day was still and sunny, like the day before, and the air which drove keenly against his face, with the rush of the carriole, sparkled with particles of frost that sometimes filled it like a light shower of snow. The drive was so short that he reached St. Joachim at noon, and he decided to push on part of the way to Baie St. Paul after dinner. His host at St. Joachim approved of that. “You goin’ have snow to-night and big drift to-morrow,” he said, and he gave his driver the name of an habitant whom they could stop the night with. The driver was silent, and he looked sinister; Northwick thought how easily the man might murder him on that lonely road and make off with the money in his belt; how probably he would do it if he dreamed such wealth was within his grasp. But the man did not notice him after their journey began, except once to turn round and say, “Look out you’ nose. You’ goin’ freeze him.” For the rest he talked to his horse, which was lazy, and which he kept urging forward with “Marche donc! Marche donc!” finally shortened to “‘Ch’ donc! ‘Ch’ donc!” and repeated and repeated at regular intervals like the tolling of a bell. It made Northwick think of a bell-buoy off a ledge of rocks, which he had spent a summer near. He wished to ask the man to stop, but he reflected that the waves would not let him stop; he had to keep tolling.

Northwick started. He must be going out of his mind, or else he was drowsing. Perhaps he was freezing, and this was the beginning of the death drowse. But he felt himself warm under his furs, where he touched himself, and he knew he had merely been dreaming. He let himself go again, and arrived at his own door in Hatboro’. He saw the electric lights through the long piazza windows, and he was going to warn Elbridge again about that colt’s shoes. Then he heard a sharp fox-like barking, and found that his carriole had stopped at the cabin of the habitant who was to keep him over night. The open doorway was filled with children; the wild-looking dogs leaping at his horse’s nose were in a frenzy of curiosity and suspicion.

Northwick rose from his nap refreshed physically, but with a desolate and sinking heart. The vision of his home had taken all his strength away with it; but from his surface consciousness he returned the greeting of the man with a pipe in his mouth and what looked like a blue stocking on his head, who welcomed him. It was a poor place within, but it had a comfort and kindliness of its own, and it was well warmed from the great oblong stove of cast-iron set in the partition of the two rooms. The meal that the housewife got him was good and savory, but he had no relish for it, and he went early to bed. He did not understand much French, and he could not talk with the people, but he heard them speak of him as an old man, with a sort of surprise and pity at his being there. He felt this surprise and pity, too; it seemed such a wild and wicked thing that he should be driven away from his home and children at his age. He tried to realize what had done it.

The habitant had given Northwick his best bed, in his large room; he went with his wife into the other, and they took two or three of the younger children; the rest all scattered up into the loft; each bade the guest a well-mannered good-night. Before Northwick slept he heard his host get up and open the outer door. Some Indians came in and lay down before the fire with the carriole driver.

IV.

In the morning, Northwick did not want to rise; but he forced himself; and that day he made the rest of the stage to Baie St. Paul. It snowed, but he got through without much interruption. The following day, however, the drifts had blocked the roads so that he did not make the twenty miles to Malbaie till after dark. He found himself bearing the journey better than he expected. He was never so tired again as that first day after St. Anne. He did not eat much or sleep much, but he felt well. The worst was that the breach between his will and his mind seemed to grow continually wider: he had a sense of the rift being like a chasm stretching farther and farther, the one side from the other. At first his mind worked clearly but disobediently; then he began to be aware of a dimness in its record of purposes and motives. At times he could not tell where he was going, or why. He reverted with difficulty to the fact that he had wished to get as far as possible, not only beyond pursuit, but beyond the temptation to return voluntarily and give himself up. He knew, in those days before the treaty, that he was safe from extradition; but he feared that if a detective approached he would yield to him, and go back, especially as he could not always keep before himself the reasons for not going back. When from time to time these reasons escaped him, it seemed as if nothing could be done to him in case he went home and restored to the company the money he had brought away. It needed a voluntary operation of logic to prove that this partial restitution would not avail; that he would be arrested, and convicted. He would not be allowed to go on living with his children in his own house. He would be taken from them, and put in prison.

He made an early start for Tadoussac, after a wakeful night. His driver wished to break the forty mile journey midway, but Northwick would not consent. The road was not so badly drifted as before, and they got through a little after nightfall. Northwick remembered the place because it was here that the Saguenay steamer lay so long before starting up the river. He recognized in the vague night-light the contour of the cove, and the hills above it, with the villages scattered over them. It was twenty years since he had made that trip with his wife, who had been nearly as long dead, but he recalled the place distinctly, and its summer effect; it did not seem much lonelier now than it seemed in the summer. The lamps shone from the windows where he had seen them then, when he walked about a little just after supper; the village store had a group of habitans and half-breeds about its stove, and there was as much show of life in the streets as there used to be at the same hour and season in the little White Mountain village where his boyhood was passed. It did not seem so bad; if Chicoutimi was no worse he could live there well enough till he could rehabilitate himself. He imagined bringing his family there after his mills had got successfully going; then probably other people from the outside world would be living there.

He ate a hearty supper, but again he did not sleep well, and in the night he was feverish. He thought how horrible it would be if he were to fall sick there; he might die before he could get word to his children and they reach him. He thought of going back to Quebec, and sailing for Europe, and having his children join him there. They could sell the place at Hatboro’, and with what it brought, and with what he had, they could live comfortably in some cheap country which had no extradition treaty with the United States. He remembered reading of a defaulter who went to a little republic called San Marino, somewhere in Italy, and was safe there; he found the President treading his own grape vats; and it cost nothing to live there, though it was dull, and the exile became so homesick that he returned and gave himself up. He wondered that he had not thought of that place before; then he reflected that no ships could make their way from Quebec to the sea before May, at the earliest. He would be arrested if he left any American port, or arrested as soon as he reached England. He remembered the advertisement of a line of steamships between Quebec and Brazil; he must wait for the St. Lawrence to open, and go to Brazil, and in the morning must go back to Quebec.

But in the morning he felt so much better that he decided to keep on to Chicoutimi. He could not bear the thought of being found out by detectives at Quebec, and by reporters who would fill the press with paragraphs about him. He must die to the world, to his family, before he could hope to revisit either.

The morning was brilliant with sunlight, and the glare of the snow hurt his eyes. He went to the store to get some glasses to protect them, and he bought some laudanum to make him sleep that night, if he should be wakeful again. It was sixty miles to Haha Bay, but the road on the frozen river was good, and he could do a long stretch of it. From Rivière Marguerite, he should travel on the ice of the Saguenay, and the going would be smooth and easy.

All the landscape seemed dwarfed since he saw it in that far-off summer. The tops of the interminable solitudes that walled the river in on both sides appeared lower, as if the snow upon them weighed them down, but doubtless they had grown beyond their real height in his memory. They had lost the mystery of the summer aspect when they were dimmed with rain or swathed in mist; all their outlines were in plain sight, and the forests that clothed them from the shore to their summits were not that unbroken gloom which they had seemed. The snow shone through their stems, and the inky river at their feet lay a motionless extent of white. As his carriole slipped lightly over it, Northwick had a fantastic sense of his own minuteness and remoteness. He thought of the photograph of a lunar landscape that he had once seen greatly magnified, and of a fly that happened to traverse the expanse of plaster-like white between the ranges of extinct volcanoes.

At times the cliffs rose from the river too sheer for the snow to lodge on; then their rocky faces shone harsh and stern; and sometimes the springs that gushed from them in summer were frozen in long streams of ice, like the tears bursting from the source of some Titanic grief. These monstrous icicles, blearing the visage of the rock, which he figured as nothing but icicles, affected Northwick with an awe that he nowhere felt except when his driver slowed his carriole in front of the great Capes Trinity and Eternity, and silently pointed at them with his whip. He had no need to name them, the fugitive would have known them in another planet. It was growing late; the lonely day was waning to the lonely night. While they halted, the scream of a catamount broke from the woods skirting the bay between the capes, and repeated itself in the echo that wandered from depth to depth of the frozen wilderness, and seemed to die wailing away at the point where it first tore the silence.

Here and there, at long intervals, they passed a point or a recess where a saw-mill stood, with a few log houses about it, and with signs of human life in the smoke that rose weakly on the thin, dry air from their chimneys, or in the figures that appeared at the doorways as the carriole passed. At the next of these beyond the capes, the driver proposed to stop and pass the night, and Northwick consented. He felt worn out by his day’s journey; his nerves were spent as if by a lateral pressure of the lifeless desert he had been travelling through, and by the stress of his thoughts, the intensity of his reveries. His mind ran back against his will, and dwelt with his children. By this time, long before this time, they must be wild with anxiety about him; by this time their shame must have come to poison their grief. He realized it all, and he realized that he could not, must not help them. He must not go back to them if ever he was to live for them again. But at last he asked why he should live, why he should not die. There was laudanum enough in that bottle to kill him.

As he walked up from the carriole at the river’s edge to the door of the saw-miller’s cabin, he drew the cork of the vial, and poured out the poison; it followed him a few steps, a black dribble of murder on the snow, that the miller’s dog smelt at and turned from in offence. That night he could not sleep again; toward morning, when all the house was snoring, he gave way to the sobs that were bursting his heart. He heard the sleepers, men and dogs, start a little in their dreams; then they were still, and he fell into a deep sleep.

They let him sleep late; and he had a dream of himself, which must have been caused by the nascent consciousness of the going and coming around him. People were talking of him, and one said how old he was; and another looked at his long, white beard which flowed down over the blanket as far as his waist. He told them that he wore it so that they should not know him when he got home; and he showed them how he could take it off and put it on at pleasure. He started awake, and found his carriole driver standing over him.

“You got you’ sleep hout, no?”

“What time is it?” said Northwick, stupidly, scanning the man to make sure that it was he, and waiting for a full sense of the situation to reach him.

“Nine o’clock,” said the man, and he turned away.

Northwick got up, and found the place empty of the men and dogs. A woman, who looked like a half-breed, brought him his breakfast of fried venison and bean-coffee; her little one held by her skirt, and stared at him. He thought of Elbridge’s baby that he had seen die. It seemed ages ago. He offered the child a shilling; it shyly turned its face into its mother’s dress. The driver said, “‘E do’n’ know what money is, yet,” but the mother seemed to know; she showed her teeth, and took it for the child. Northwick sat a moment thinking what a strange thing it was not to know what money was; it had never occurred to him before; he asked himself a queer question, What was money? The idea of it seemed to go to pieces, as a printed word does when you look steadily at it, and to have no meaning. It affected him as droll, fantastic, like a piece of childish make-believe, when the woman took some more money from him for his meals and lodging. But that was the way the world was worked. You could get anything done for money; it was the question of demand and supply; nothing more. He tried to think where money came in when he went out to see Elbridge’s sick boy; when Elbridge left the dead child to drive him to the station. It was something else that came in there; but that thing and money were the same, after all: he had proved his love for his children by making money for them; if he had not loved them so much he would not have tried to get so much money, and he would not have been where he was.

His mind fought away from his control, as the sledge slipped along over the frozen river again. It was very cold, but the full sun on his head afflicted him like heat. It was the blaze of light that beat up from the snow, too. His head felt imponderable; and yet he could not hold it up. It was always sinking forward; and he woke from naps without being sure that he had been asleep.

He intended to push through that day to Chicoutimi; but his start was so late that it seemed to him as if they would never get to Haha Bay. When they arrived, late in the afternoon, all sense of progress thither faded away; it was as if the starting and stopping were one, or contained in the same impulse. It might be so if he kept on eleven miles further to Chicoutimi, but he would not be able to feel it so at the beginning; the wish could involve its accomplishment only at the end. He said to himself that this was unreasonable; it was a poor rule that would not work both ways.

This ran through his mind in the presence of the old man who bustled out of the door of the cabin where his carriole had stopped. It was larger than most of the other cabins of the place, which Northwick remembered curiously well, some with their logs bare, and some sheathed in birch-bark. He remembered this man, too, when his white moustache, which branched into either ear, was a glistening brown, and the droop of his left eyelid was more like a voluntary wink. But the gayety of his face was the same, and his welcome was so cordial, that a fear of recognition went through Northwick. He knew the man for the talkative Canadian who had taken him and his wife a drive over the hills around the bay, in the morning, when their boat arrived, and afterwards stopped with them at this cabin, and had them in to drink a glass of milk. Northwick’s wife liked the man, and said she would like to live in such a house in such a place, and should not be afraid of the winter that he told her was so terrible. It was almost as if her spirit were there; but Northwick said to himself that he must not let the man know that he had ever seen him before. The resolution cost him something, for he felt so broken and weak that he would have liked to claim his kindness as an old acquaintance. He would have liked to ask if he still caught wild animals for showmen, and how his trade prospered; if he had always lived at Haha Bay since they met. But he was the more decided to ignore their former meeting because the man addressed him in English at once, and apparently knew him for an American. Perhaps other defaulters had been there before; perhaps the mines had brought Americans there prospecting.

“Good morning, sir!” cried the Canadian. “I am glad to see you! Let me ‘elp you hout, sir. Well, it is a pleasure to speak a little English with some one! The English close hup with the river in the autumn, but it open early this year. I ‘ope you are a sign of many Americans. They are the life of our country. Without the Americans we could not live. No, sir. Not a day. Come in, come in. You will find you’ room ready for you, sir.”

Northwick hung back suspiciously. “Were you expecting me?” he asked.

“No one!” cried the man, with a shrug and opening of the hands. “But hall the travellers they stop with Bird, and where there are honly two rooms, ‘eat with one stove between the walls, their room is always ready. Do me the pleasure!” He set the door open, and bowed Northwick in. “Baptiste!” he called to the driver over his shoulder, “take you’ ‘orse to the stable.” He added a long queue of unintelligible French to his English, and the driver responded, “Hall right.”

“I am the only person at Haha Bay who speaks English,” he said, in the same terms he had used twenty years before, when he presented himself to Northwick and his wife on their steamboat, and asked them if they would like to drive before breakfast. “But you must know me? Bird — Oiseau? You have been here before?”

“No,” said Northwick, with one lie for all. The man, with his cheer and gayety, was even terribly familiar; and Northwick could have believed that the room and the furniture in it were absolutely unchanged. There was the little window that he knew opened on the poor vegetable garden, with its spindling corn, and its beans for soup and coffee. There was the chair his wife had sat in to look out on the things; but for the frost on the pane he could doubtless see them growing now.

He sank into the chair, and said to himself that he should die there, and it would be as well, it would be easy. He felt very old and weak; and he did not try to take off the wraps which he had worn in the sledge. He wished that he might fall so into his grave, and be done with it.

V.

Bird walked up and down the room, talking; he seemed overjoyed with the chance, and as if he could not forego it for a moment. “Well, sir, I wish that I could say as much! But I have been here forty years, hoff and on. I am born at Quebec” — in his tremulous inattention, Northwick was aware that the man had said the same thing to him all those years before, with the same sidelong glance for the effect of the fact upon him— “and I came here when I was twenty. Now I am sixty. Hall the Americans know me. I used to go into the bush with them for bear. Lots of bear in the bush when I first came; now they get pretty scarce. I have the best moose-dog. But I don’t care much for the hunting now; I am too hold. That’s a fact. I am sixty; and forty winters I ‘ave pass at Haha Bay. You know why it is call Haha Bay? It is the hecho. Well, I don’t hear much ha-ha nowadays round this bay. But it is pretty here in the summer; yes, very pretty. Prettier than Chicoutimi; and more gold in the ‘ills.”

He let his bold, gay eye rest confidently on Northwick, as if to say he knew what had brought him there, and he might as well own the fact at once; and Northwick tried to get his mind to grapple with his real motive. But his mind kept pulling away from him, like that unruly horse, and he could not manage it. He knew, in that self which seemed apart from his mind, that it would be a very good thing to let the man suppose he was there to look into the question of the mines; but there was something else that seemed to go with that intention; something like a wish to get away from the past so remotely and so completely that no rumor of it should reach him till he was willing to let it; to be absent from all who had known him so long that no one of them would know him if he saw him. He was there not only to start a pulp-mill, but to grow a beard that should effectually disguise him. He recalled how he had looked with that long beard in his dream; he put his hand to his chin and felt the eight days’ stubble there, and he wondered how much time it would take to grow such a beard.

Bird went on talking. “I know that Chicoutimi Company. I told Markham about the gold when he was here for bear. He is smart; but he don’t know heverything. You think he can make it pay with that invention? I doubt, me. There is one place in those ‘ills,” and Bird came closer to Northwick, and dropped his voice, “where you don’t ‘ave to begin with the tailings. I know the place. But what’s the good? All the same, you want capital.”

He went to the shelf in the wall above the stove, and took a pipe, which he filled with tobacco, and then he drew some coals out on the stove hearth. But before he dropped one of them on his pipe with his horny thumb and finger, he asked politely, “You hobject to the smoking?”

Northwick said he did not, and Bird said, “It is one of three things you can do here in the winter; smoke the pipe, cut the wood, court the ladies.” Northwick remembered his saying that before, too, and how it had made his wife laugh. “I used to do all three. Now I smoke the pipe. Well, while you are young, it is all right, and it is fun in the woods. But I was always ‘omesick for Quebec, more or less. You know what it is to be ‘omesick.”

The word pierced Northwick through the vagary which clothed his consciousness like a sort of fog, and made his heart bleed with self-pity.

“Well, I been ‘omesick forty years, and I don’t know what for, any more. I been back to Quebec; it is not the same. You know ‘ow they pull down those city gate? What they want to do that for? The gate did not keep the stranger hout; it let them in! And there were too many people dead! Now I think I am ‘omesick just to get away from here. If I had some capital — ten, fifteen thousand dollars — I would hopen that mine, and take out my hundred, two hundred thousand dollar, and then, Good-by, Haha Bay! I would make it hecho like it never hecho before. I don’t want nothing to work up the tailings of my mine, me! There is gold enough there to pay, and I can hire those habitans cheap, like dirt. What is their time worth? The bush is cut away: they got nothing to do. It is the time of a setting ‘en, as you Americans say, their time.”

Bird smoked away for a little while in silence, and then he seemed aware, for the first time, that Northwick had not taken off his wraps, and he said, hospitably, “I ‘ope you will spend the night with me here?”

Northwick said, “Thank you, I don’t know. Is it far to Chicoutimi?” He knew, but he asked, hoping the man would exaggerate the distance, and then he would not have to go.

“It is eleven mile, but the road is bad. Drifted.”

“I will wait till to-morrow,” said Northwick, and he began to unswathe and unbutton, but so feebly that Bird noticed.

“Allow me!” he said, putting down his pipe, and coming to his aid. He was very gentle and light-handed, like a woman; but Northwick felt one touch on the pouch of his belt, and refused further help.

He let his host carry his two bags into the next room for him; the bag that he had brought with the few things from home, when he pretended that he was coming away for a day or two, and the bag that he had got in Quebec to hold the things he had to buy there. When Bird set them down beside his bed he could not bear to see the bag from home, and he pushed it under out of sight. Then he tumbled himself on the bed, and pulled the bearskin robe that he found on it up over him, and fell into a thin sleep, that was not so different from his dim waking that he was sure it had been sleep when Bird came back with a lamp.

“Been ‘aving a little nap?” he asked, looking gayly down on Northwick’s bewildered face. “Well, that is all right! We have supper, now, pretty soon. You hungry? Well, in a ‘alf-hour.”

He went out again, and Northwick, after some efforts, made out to rise. His skull felt sore, and his arms as if they had been beaten with hard blows. But after he had bathed his face and hands in the warm water Bird had brought with the lamp, he found himself better, though he was still wrapped in that cloudy uncertainty of himself and of his sleeping or waking. He saw some pictures about on the coarse, white walls: the Seven Stations of the Cross, in colored prints; a lithograph of Indians burning a Jesuit priest. Over the bed’s head hung a chromo of Our Lady, with seven swords piercing her heart; beside the bed was a Parian crucifix, with the figure of Christ writhing on it.

These things made Northwick feel very far and strange. His simple and unimaginative nature could in nowise relate itself to this alien faith, this alien language. He heard soft voices of women in the next room, the first that he had heard since he last heard his daughters’. A girl’s voice singing was severed by a door that closed and then opened to let it be heard a few notes more, and again closed.

But he found Bird still alone in the next room when he returned to it. “Well, now, we go to supper as soon as Father Étienne comes. He is our curate — our minister — here. And he eats with me when he heat anywhere. I tell ‘im ‘e hought to have my appetite, if he wants to keep up his spiritual strength. The body is the foundation of the soul, no? Well, you let that foundation tumble hin, and then where you got you’ soul, heigh? But Father Étienne speaks very good English. Heducate at Rome. I am the only other educated man at Haha Bay. You don’t ‘appen to have some papers in you’ bag? French? English? It is the same!”

“Papers? No!” said Northwick, with horror and suspicion. “What is in the papers?”

“That is what I like to find hout,” said Bird, spreading his hands with a shrug.

The outer door opened, and a young man in a priest’s long robe came in. Bird introduced his guest, and Northwick shook hands with the priest, who had a smooth, regular face, with beautiful, innocent eyes, like a girl’s. He might have been twenty-eight or twenty-nine; he had the spare figure of a man under thirty who leads an active life; his features were refined by study and the thought of others. When he smiled the innocence of his face was more than girlish, it was childlike. Points of light danced in his large, soft, dark eyes; an effect of trusting, alluring kindness came from his whole radiant visage.

Northwick felt its charm with a kind of fear. He shrank away from the priest, and at the table he left the talk to him and his host. They supped in a room opening into a sort of wing; beyond it was a small kitchen, from which an elderly woman brought the dishes, and where that girl whom he heard singing kept trilling away as if she were excited, like a canary, by the sound of the frying meat.

Bird said, by way of introduction, that the woman was his niece; but he did not waste time on her. He began to talk up his conjecture as to Northwick’s business with the priest, as if it were an ascertained fact. Northwick fancied his advantage in leaving him to it. They discussed the question of gold in the hills, which the young father treated as an old story of faded interest, and Bird entered into with the fervor of fresh excitement. The priest spoke of the poor return from the mines at Chaudière, but Bird claimed that it was different here. Northwick did not say anything: he listened and watched them, as if they were a pair of confidence-men trying to work him. The priest seemed to be anxious to get the question off the personal ground into the region of the abstract, and Northwick believed that this was part of his game, a ruse to throw him from his guard, and commit him to something. He made up his mind to get away as early as he could in the morning; he did not think it was a safe place.

“Very well!” the priest cried, at one point. “Suppose you had the capital you wish. And suppose you had taken out all the gold you say is there, and you were rich. What would you do?”

“What I do?” Bird struck the table with his fist. “Leave Haha Bay to-morrow morning!”

“And where would you go?”

“Go? To Quebec, to London, to Paris, to Rome, to the devil! Keep going!”

The young father laughed a laugh as innocent as his looks, and turned with a sudden appeal to Northwick. “Tell me a little about the rich men in your land of millionnaires! How do they find their happiness? In what? What is the secret of joy that they have bought with their money?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Northwick, with a recoil deeper into himself after the first flush of alarm at being addressed.

“Where do they live?”

Northwick hesitated, and the priest laid his hand on Bird’s shoulder, as if to restrain a burst of information from him.

“I suppose most of them live in New York.”

“All the time?”

“No. They generally have a house at the seaside, at Newport or Bar Harbor, for the summer, and one at Lenox or Tuxedo for the fall; and they go to Florida for the winter, or Nice. Then they have their yachts.”

“The land is not large enough for their restlessness; they roam the sea. My son,” said the young priest to the old hunter, “you can have all the advantage of riches at the expense of a gypsies’ van!” He laughed again in friendly delight at Bird’s supposed discomfiture; and touched him lightly, delicately, as before. “It is the same in Europe; I have seen it there, too.” Bird was going to speak, but the priest stayed him a moment. “But how did your rich people get their millions? Not like those rich people in Europe, by inheritance?”

“Very few,” said Northwick, sensible of a remnant of the pride he used to feel in the fact, hidden about somewhere in his consciousness. “They made it.”

“How? Excuse me!”

“By manufacturing, by speculating in railroad stocks, by mining, by the rise in land-values.”

“What causes the land to rise in value?”

“The demand for it. The necessity.”

“Oh! The need of others. And when a man gains in stocks, some other man loses. No? Do the manufacturers pay the operatives all they earn? Are the miners very well paid and comfortable? I have read that they are miserable. Is it so?”

Northwick was aware that there were good and valid answers to all these questions which the priest seemed to be asking rather for the confusion of Bird than as an expression of his own opinions; but in his dazed intelligence he could not find the answers.

Bird roared out, “Haw! Do not regard him! He is a man of the other world — an angel — a mere imbecile — about business!” The priest threw himself back in his chair and laughed tolerantly, showing his beautiful teeth. “All those rich men they give work to the poor. If I had a few thousand dollars to hopen up that place in the ‘ill, I would furnish work to every man in Haha Bay — to hundreds. Are the miners more miserable than those habitans, eh?”

“The good God seems to think so,” returned the priest, seriously. “At least, he has put the gold in the rocks so that you cannot get it out. What would you give the devil to help you?” he asked, with a smile.

“When I want to make a bargain with the devil, I don’t come to you, Père Étienne; I go to a notary. You ever hear, sir,” said Bird, turning to Northwick, “about that notary at Montreal—”

“I think I will go to bed,” said Northwick, abruptly. “I am not feeling very well — I am very tired, that is.” He had suddenly lost account of what and where he was. It seemed to him that he was both there and at Hatboro’; that there were really two Northwicks, and that there was a third self somewhere in space, conscious of them both.

It was this third Northwick whom Bird and the priest would have helped to bed if he had suffered them, but who repulsed their offers. He made shift to undress himself, while he heard them talking in French with lowered voices in the next room. Their debate seemed at an end. After a little while he heard the door shut, as if the priest had gone away. Afterwards he appeared to have come back.

VI.

The talk went on all night in Northwick’s head between those two Frenchmen, who pretended to be of contrary opinions, but were really leagued to get the better of him, and lure him on to put his money into that mine. In the morning his fever was gone; but he was weak, and he could not command his mind, could not make it stay by him long enough to decide whether any harm would come from remaining over a day before he pushed on to Chicoutimi. He tried to put in order or sequence the reasons he had for coming so deep into the winter and the wilderness; but when he passed from one to the next, the former escaped him.

Bird looked in with his blue woollen bonnet on his head, and his pipe in his mouth, and he removed each to ask how Northwick was, and whether he would like to have some breakfast; perhaps he would like a cup of tea and some toast.

Northwick caught eagerly at the suggestion, and in a few minutes the tea was brought him by a young girl, whom Bird called Virginie; he said she was his grand-niece, and he hoped that her singing had not disturbed the gentleman: she always sang; one could hardly stop her; but she meant no harm. He stayed to serve Northwick himself, and Northwick tried to put away the suspicion Bird’s kindness roused in him. He was in such need of kindness that he did not wish to suspect it. Nevertheless, he watched Bird narrowly, as he put the milk and sugar in his tea, and he listened warily when he began to talk of the priest and to praise him. It was a pleasure, Bird said, for one educated man to converse with another; and Father Étienne and he often maintained opposite sides of a question merely for the sake of the discussion; it was like a game of cards where there were no stakes; you exercised your mind.

Northwick understood this too little to believe it; when he talked, he talked business; even the jokes among the men he was used to meant business.

“Then you haven’t really found any gold in the hills?” he asked, slyly.

“My faith, yes!” said Bird. “But,” he added sadly, “perhaps it would not pay to mine it. I will show you when you get up. Better not go to Chicoutimi to-day! It is snowing.”

“Snowing?” Northwick repeated. “Then I can’t go!”

“Stop in bed till dinner. That is the best,” Bird suggested. “Try to get some sleep. Sleep is youth. When we wake we are old again, but some of the youth stick to our fingers. No?” He smiled gayly, and went out, closing the door softly after him, and Northwick drowsed. In a dream Bird came back to him with some specimens from his gold mine. Northwick could see that the yellow metal speckling the quartz was nothing but copper pyrites, but he thought it best to pretend that he believed it gold; for Bird, while he stood over him with a lamp in one hand, was feeling with the other for the buckle of Northwick’s belt, as he sat up in bed. He woke in fright, and the fear did not afterwards leave him in the fever which now began. He had his lucid intervals, when he was aware that he was wisely treated and tenderly cared for, and that his host and all his household were his devoted watchers and nurses; when he knew the doctor and the young priest, in their visits. But all this he perceived cloudily, and as with a thickness of some sort of stuff between him and the fact, while the illusion of his delirium, always the same, was always poignantly real. Then the morning came when he woke from it, when the delirium was past, and he knew what and where he was. The truth did not dawn gradually upon him, but possessed him at once. His first motion was to feel for his belt; and he found it gone. He gave a deep groan.

The blue woollen bonnet of the old hunter appeared through the open doorway, with the pipe under the branching gray moustache. The eyes of the men met.

“Well,” said Bird, “you are in you’ senses at last!” Northwick did not speak, but his look conveyed a question which the other could not misinterpret. He smiled. “You want you’ belt?” He disappeared, and then reappeared, this time full length, and brought the belt to Northwick. “You think you are among some Yankee defalcator?” he asked, for sole resentment of the suspicion which Northwick’s anguished look must have imparted. “Count it. I think you find it hall right.” But as the sick man lay still, and made no motion to take up the belt where it lay across his breast, Bird asked, “You want me to count it for you?”

Northwick faintly nodded, and Bird stood over him, and told the thousand-dollar bills over, one by one, and then put them back in the pouch of the belt.

“Now, I think you are going to get well. The doctor ‘e say to let you see you’ money the first thing. Shall I put it hon you?”

Northwick looked at the belt; it seemed to him that the bunch the bills made would hurt him, and he said, weakly, “You keep it for me.”

“Hall right,” said Bird, and he took it away. He went out with a proud air, as if he felt honored by the trust Northwick had explicitly confirmed, and sat down in the next room, so as to be within call.

Northwick made the slow recovery of an elderly man; and by the time he could go out of doors without fear of relapse, there were signs in the air and in the earth of the spring, which when it comes to that northern land possesses it like a passion. The grass showed green on the low bare hills as the snow uncovered them; the leaves seemed to break like an illumination from the trees; the south wind blew back the birds with its first breath. The jays screamed in the woods; the Canadian nightingales sang in the evening and the early morning when he woke and thought of his place at Hatboro’, where the robins’ broods must be half-grown by that time. It was then the time of the apple-blossoms there; with his homesick inward vision he saw the billowed tops of his orchard, all pink-white. He thought how the apples smelt when they first began to drop in August on the clean straw that bedded the orchard aisles. It seemed to him that if he could only be there again for a moment he would be willing to spend the rest of his life in prison. As it was, he was in prison; it did not matter how wide the bounds were that kept him from his home. He hated the vastness of the half world where he could come and go unmolested, this bondage that masked itself as such ample freedom. To be shut out was the same as to be shut in.

In the first days of his convalescence, while he was yet too weak to leave his room, he planned and executed many returns to his home. He went back by stealth, and disguised by the beard which had grown in his sickness, and tried to see what change had come upon it; but he could never see it different from what it was that clear winter night when he escaped from it. This baffled and distressed him, and strengthened the longing at the bottom of his heart actually to return. He thought that if he could once look on the misery he had brought upon his children he could bear it better; he complexly flattered himself that it would not be so bad in reality as it was in fancy. Sometimes when this wish harassed him, he said to himself, to still it, that as soon as the first boat came up the river from Quebec, he would go down with it, and arrange to surrender himself to the authorities, and abandon the struggle.

But as he regained his health, he began to feel that this was a rash and foolish promise: he thought he saw a better way out of his unhappiness. It appeared a misfortune once more, and not so much a fault of his. He was restored to this feeling in part by the respect, the distinction which he enjoyed in the little village, and which pleasantly recalled his consequence among the mill-people at Ponkwasset. When he was declared out of danger he began to receive visits of polite sympathy from the heads of families, who smoked round him in the evening, and predicted a renewal of his youth by the fever he had come through safely. Their prophecies were interpreted by Bird and Père Étienne, as with one or other of these he went to repay their visits. Everywhere, the inmates of the simple, clean little houses, had begun early to furbish them up for the use of their summer boarders, while they got ready the shanties behind them for their own occupancy; but everywhere Northwick was received with that pathetic deference which the poor render to those capable of bettering their condition. The secret of the treasure he had brought with him remained safe with the doctor and the priest, and with Bird who had discovered it with them; but Bird was not the man to conceal from his neighbors the fact that his guest was a great American capitalist, who had come to develop the mineral, agricultural, and manufacturing interests of Haha Bay on the American scale; and to enrich the whole region, buying land of those who wished to sell, and employing all those who desired to work. If he was impatient for the verification of these promises by Northwick, he was too polite to urge it; and did nothing worse than brag to him as he bragged about him. He probably had his own opinion of Northwick’s reasons for the silence he maintained concerning himself in all respects; he knew from the tag fastened to the bag Northwick had bought in Quebec that his name was Warwick, and he knew from Northwick himself that he was from Chicago; beyond this, if he conjectured that he was the victim of financial errors, he smoothly kept his guesses to himself and would not mar the chances of good that Northwick might do with his money by hinting any question of its origin. The American defaulter was a sort of hero in Bird’s fancy; he had heard much of that character; he would have experienced no shock at realizing him in Northwick; he would have accounted for Northwick, and excused him to himself, if need be. The doctor observed a professional reticence; his affair was with Northwick’s body, which he had treated skilfully. He left his soul to Père Étienne, who may have had his diffidence, his delicacy, in dealing with it, as the soul of a Protestant and a foreigner.

VII.

It took the young priest somewhat longer than it would have taken a man of Northwick’s own language and nation to perceive that his gentlemanly decorum and grave repose of manner masked a complete ignorance of the things that interest cultivated people, and that he was merely and purely a business man, a figment of commercial civilization, with only the crudest tastes and ambitions outside of the narrow circle of money-making. He found that he had a pleasure in horses and cattle, and from hints which Northwick let fall, regarding his life at home, that he was fond of having a farm and a conservatory with rare plants. But the flowers were possessions, not passions; he did not speak of them as if they afforded him any artistic or scientific delight. The young priest learned that he had put a good deal of money in pictures; but then the pictures seemed to have become investments, and of the nature of stocks and bonds. He found that this curious American did not care to read the English books which Bird offered to lend him out of the little store of gifts and accidents accumulated in the course of years from bountiful or forgetful tourists; the books in French Père Étienne proposed to him, Northwick said he did not know how to read. He showed no liking for music, except a little for the singing of Bird’s niece, Virginie, but when the priest thought he might care to understand that she sang the ballads which the first voyagers had brought from France into the wilderness, or which had sprung out of the joy and sorrow of its hard life, he saw that the fact said nothing to Northwick, and that it rather embarrassed him. The American could not take part in any of those discussions of abstract questions which the priest and the old woodsman delighted in, and which they sometimes tried to make him share. He apparently did not know what they meant. It was only when Père Étienne gave him up as the creature of a civilization too ugly and arid to be borne, that he began to love him as a brother; when he could make nothing of Northwick’s mind, he conceived the hope of saving his soul.

Père Étienne felt sure that Northwick had a soul, and he had his misgivings that it was a troubled one. He, too, had heard of the American defaulter, who has a celebrity of his own in Canada penetrating to different men with different suggestion, and touching here and there a pure and unworldly heart, such as Père Étienne bore in his breast, with commiseration. The young priest did not conceive very clearly of the make and manner of the crime he suspected the elusive and mysterious stranger of committing; but he imagined that the great sum of money he knew him possessed of, was spoil of some sort; and he believed that Northwick’s hesitation to employ it in any way was proof of an uneasy conscience in its possession. Why had he come to that lonely place in midwinter with a treasure such as that; and why did he keep the money by him, instead of putting it in a bank? Père Étienne talked these questions over with Bird and the doctor, and he could find only one answer to them. He wondered if he ought not to speak to Northwick, and delicately offer him the chance to unburden his mind to such a friend as only a priest could be to such a sinner. But he could not think of any approach sufficiently delicate. Northwick was not a Catholic, and the church had no hold upon him. Besides, he had a certain plausibility and reserve of demeanor that forbade suspicion, as well as the intimacy necessary to the good which Père Étienne wished to do the lonely and silent man. Northwick was in those days much occupied with a piece of writing, which he always locked carefully into his bag when he left his room, and which he copied in part or in whole again and again, burning the rejected drafts in the hearth-fire that had now superseded the stove, and stirring the carbonized paper into ashes, so that no word was left distinguishable on it.

One day there came up the river a bateau from Tadoussac, bringing the news that the ice was all out of the St. Lawrence. “It will not be long time, now,” said Bird, “before we begin to see you’ countrymen. The steamboats come to Haha Bay in the last of June.”

Northwick responded to the words with no visible sensation. His sphinx-like reticence vexed Bird more and more, and intolerably deepened the mystification of his failure to do any of the things with his capital which Bird had promised himself and his fellow-citizens. He no longer talked of going to Chicoutimi, that was true, and there was not the danger of his putting his money into Markham’s enterprise there; but neither did he show any interest or any curiosity concerning Bird’s discovery of the precious metal at Haha Bay. Bird had his delicacy as well as Père Étienne, and he could not thrust himself upon his guest, even with the intention of making their joint fortune.

A few days later there came to Père Étienne a letter, which, when he read it, superseded the interest in Northwick, which Bird felt gnawing him like a perpetual hunger. It was from the curé at Rimouski, where Père Étienne’s family lived, and it brought word that his mother, who had been in failing health all winter, could not long survive, and so greatly desired to see him, that his correspondent had asked their superior to allow him to replace Père Étienne at Haha Bay, while he came to visit her. Leave had been given, and Père Étienne might expect his friend very soon after his letter reached him.

“Where is Rimouski?” Northwick asked, when he found himself alone with the priest that evening.

“It is on the St. Lawrence. It is the last and first point where the steamers touch in going and coming between Quebec and Liverpool.” Père Étienne had been weeping, and his heart was softened and emboldened by the anxiety he felt. “It is my native village — where I lived till I went to make my studies in the Laval University. It is going home for me. Perhaps they will let me remain there.” He added, by an irresistible impulse of pity and love, “I wish you were going home, too, Mr. Warwick!”

“I wish I were!” said Northwick, with a heavy sigh. “But I can’t — yet.”

“This is a desert for you,” Père Étienne pressed on. “I can see that. I have seen how solitary you are.”

“Yes. It’s lonesome,” Northwick admitted.

“My son,” said the young priest to the man who was old enough to be his father, and he put his hand on Northwick’s, where it lay on his knee, as they sat side by side before the fire, “is there something you could wish to say to me? Something I might do to help you?”

In a moment all was open between them, and they knew each other’s meaning. “Yes,” said Northwick, and he felt the wish to trust in the priest and to be ruled by him well up like a tide of hot blood from his heart. It sank back again. This pure soul was too innocent, too unversed in the world and its ways to know his offence in its right proportion; to know it as Northwick himself knew it; to be able to account for it and condone it. The affair, if he could understand it at all, would shock him; he must blame it as relentlessly as Northwick’s own child would if her love did not save him. With the next word he closed that which was open between them, a rift in his clouds that heaven itself had seemed to look through. “I have a letter — a letter that I wish you would take and mail for me in Rimouski.”

“I will take it with great pleasure,” said the priest, but he had the sadness of a deep disappointment in his tone.

Northwick was disappointed, too; almost injured. He had something like a perception that if Père Étienne had been a coarser, commoner soul, he could have told him everything, and saved his own soul by the confession.

About a month after the priest’s departure the first steamboat came up the Saguenay from Quebec. By this time Bird was a desperate man. Northwick was still there in his house, with all that money which he would not employ in any way; at once a temptation and a danger if it should in any manner become known. The wandering poor, who are known to the piety of the habitans as the Brethren of Christ, were a terror to Bird, in their visits, when they came by day to receive the charity which no one denies them; he felt himself bound to keep a watchful eye on this old Yankee, who was either a rascal or a madman, and perhaps both, and to see that no harm came to him; and when he heard the tramps prowling about at night, and feeling for the alms that kind people leave out-doors for them, he could not sleep. The old hunter neglected his wild-beast traps, and suffered his affairs to fall into neglect; but it was not his failing appetite, or his broken sleep alone that wore upon him. The disappointment with his guest that was spreading through the community, involved Bird, and he thought his neighbors looked askance at him: as if they believed he could have moved Northwick to action, if he would. Northwick could not have moved himself. He was like one benumbed. He let the days go by, and made no attempt to realize the schemes for the retrieval of his fortunes that had brought him to that region.

The sound of the steamboat’s whistle was a joyful sound to Bird. He rose and went into Northwick’s room. Northwick was awake; he had heard the whistle, too.

“Now, Mr. Warwick, or what you’ name,” said Bird, with trembling eagerness, “that is the boat. I want you take you’ money and go hout my ‘ouse. Yes, sir. Now! Pack you’ things. Don’t wait for breakfast. You get breakfast on board. Go!”

VIII.

The letter which Père Étienne posted for Northwick at Rimouski was addressed to the editor of the Boston Events, and was published with every advantage which scare-heading could invent. A young journalist newly promoted to the management was trying to give the counting-room proofs of his efficiency in the line of the Events’ greatest successes, and he wasted no thrill that the sensation in his hands was capable of imparting to his readers. Yet the effect was disappointing, not only in the figure of the immediate sales, but in the cumulative value of the recognition of the fact that the Events had been selected by Northwick as the best avenue for approaching the public. The Abstract, in copying and commenting upon the letter, skilfully stabbed its esteemed contemporary with an acknowledgment of its prime importance as the organ of the American defaulters in Canada; other papers, after questioning the document as a fake, made common cause in treating it as a matter of little or no moment. In fact, there had been many defalcations since Northwick’s; the average of one a day in the despatches of the Associated Press had been fully kept up, and several of these had easily surpassed his in the losses involved, and in the picturesqueness of the circumstances. People generally recalled with an effort the supremely tragic claim of his case through the rumor of his death in the railroad accident; those who distinctly remembered it experienced a certain disgust at the man’s willingness to shelter himself so long in the doubt to which it had left not only the public, but his own family, concerning his fate.

The evening after the letter appeared, Hilary was dining one of those belated Englishmen who sometimes arrive in Boston after most houses are closed for the summer on the Hill and the Back Bay. Mrs. Hilary and Louise were already with Matt at his farm for a brief season before opening their own house at the shore, and Hilary was living en garçon. There were only men at the dinner, and the talk at first ran chiefly to question of a sufficient incentive for Northwick’s peculations; its absence was the fact which all concurred in owning. In deference to his guest’s ignorance of the matter, Hilary went rapidly over it from the beginning, and as he did so the perfectly typical character of the man and of the situation appeared in clear relief. He ended by saying: “It isn’t at all a remarkable instance. There is nothing peculiar about it. Northwick was well off and he wished to be better off. He had plenty of other people’s money in his hands which he controlled so entirely that he felt as if it were his own. He used it and he lost it. Then he was found out, and ran away. That’s all.”

“Then, as I understand,” said the Englishman, with a strong impression that he was making a joke, “this Mr. Northwick was not one of your most remarkable men.”

Everybody laughed obligingly, and Hilary said, “He was one of our least remarkable men.” Then, spurred on by that perverse impulse which we Americans often have to make the worst of ourselves to an Englishman, he added, “The defaulter seems to be taking the place of the self-made man among us. Northwick’s a type, a little differentiated from thousands of others by the rumor of his death in the first place, and now by this unconsciously hypocritical and nauseous letter. He’s what the commonplace American egotist must come to more and more in finance, now that he is abandoning the career of politics, and wants to be rich instead of great.”

“Really?” said the Englishman.

Among Hilary’s guests was Charles Bellingham, a bachelor of pronounced baldness, who said he would come to meet Hilary’s belated Englishman, in quality of bear-leader to his cousin-in-law, old Bromfield Corey, a society veteran of that period when even the swell in Boston must be an intellectual man. He was not only old, but an invalid, and he seldom left town in summer, and liked to go out to dinner whenever he was asked. Bellingham came to the rescue of the national repute in his own fashion. “I can’t account for your not locking up your spoons, Hilary, when you invited me, unless you knew where you could steal some more.”

“Ah, it isn’t quite like a gentleman’s stealing a few spoons,” old Corey began, in the gentle way he had, and with a certain involuntary sibilation through the gaps between his front teeth. “It’s a much more heroic thing than an ordinary theft; and I can’t let you belittle it as something commonplace because it happens every day. So does death; so does birth; but they’re not commonplace.”

“They’re not so frequent as defalcation with us, quite — especially birth,” suggested Bellingham.

“No,” Corey went on, “every fact of this sort is preceded by the slow and long decay of a moral nature, and that is of the most eternal and tragical interest; and” — here Corey broke down in an old man’s queer, whimpering laugh, as the notion struck him— “if it’s very common with us, I don’t know but we ought to be proud of it, as showing that we excel all the rest of the civilized world in the proportion of decayed moral natures to the whole population. But I wonder,” he went on, “that it doesn’t produce more moralists of a sanative type than it has. Our bad teeth have given us the best dentists in the world; our habit of defalcation hasn’t resulted yet in any ethical compensation. Sewell, here, used to preach about such things, but I’ll venture to say we shall have no homily on Northwick from him next Sunday.”

The Rev. Mr. Sewell suffered the thrust in patience. “What is the use?” he asked, with a certain sadness. “The preacher’s voice is lost in his sounding-board nowadays, when all the Sunday newspapers are crying aloud from twenty-eight pages illustrated.”

“Perhaps they are our moralists,” Corey suggested.

“Perhaps,” Sewell assented.

“By the way, Hilary,” said Bellingham, “did you ever know who wrote that article in the Abstract, when Northwick’s crookedness first appeared?”

“Yes,” said Hilary. “It was a young fellow of twenty-four or five.”

“Come off!” said Bellingham, in a slang phrase then making its way into merited favor. “What’s become of him? I haven’t seen anything else like it in the Abstract.”

“No, and I’m afraid you’re not likely to. The fellow was a reporter on the paper at the time; but he happened to have looked up the literature of defalcation, and they let him say his say.”

“It was a very good say.”

“Better than any other he had in him. They let him try again on different things, but he wasn’t up to the work. So the managing editor said — and he was a friend of the fellow’s. He was too literary, I believe.”

“And what’s become of him?” asked Corey.

“You might get him to read to you,” said Bellingham to the old man. He added to the company, “Corey uses up a fresh reader every three months. He takes them into his intimacy, and then he finds their society oppressive.”

“Why,” Hilary answered with a little hesitation, “he was out of health, and Matt had him up to his farm.”

“Is he Matt’s only beneficiary?” Corey asked, with a certain tone of tolerant liking for Matt. “I thought he usually had a larger colony at Vardley.”

“Well, he has,” said Hilary. “But when his mother and sister are visiting him, he has to reduce their numbers. He can’t very well turn his family away.”

“He might board them out,” said Bellingham.

“Do you suppose,” asked Sewell, as if he had not noticed the turn the talk had taken, “that Northwick has gone to Europe?”

“I’ve no doubt he wishes me to suppose so,” said Hilary, “and of course we’ve had to cable the authorities to look out for him at Moville and Liverpool, but I feel perfectly sure he’s still in Canada, and expects to make terms for getting home again. He must be horribly homesick.”

“Yes?” Sewell suggested.

“Yes. Not because he’s a man of any delicacy of feeling, or much real affection for his family. I’ve no doubt he’s fond of them, in a way, but he’s fonder of himself. You can see, all through his letter, that he’s trying to make interest for himself, and that he’s quite willing to use his children if it will tell on the public sympathies. He knows very well that they’re provided for. They own the place at Hatboro’; he deeded it to them long before his crookedness is known to have begun; and his creditors couldn’t touch it if they wished to. If he had really that fatherly affection for them, which he appeals to in others, he wouldn’t have left them in doubt whether he was alive or dead for four or five months, and then dragged them into an open letter asking forbearance in their name, and promising, for their sake, to right those he had wronged. The thing is thoroughly indecent.”

Since the fact of Northwick’s survival had been established beyond question by the publication of his letter, Hilary’s mind in regard to him had undergone a great revulsion. It relieved itself with a sharp rebound from the oppressive sense of responsibility for his death, which he seemed to have incurred in telling Northwick that the best thing for him would be a railroad accident. Now that the man was not killed, Hilary could freely declare, “He made a great mistake in not getting out of the world, as many of us believed he had; I confess I had rather got to believe it myself. But he ought at least to have had the grace to remain dead to the poor creatures he had dishonored till he could repay the people he had defrauded.”

“Ah! I don’t know about that,” said Sewell.

“No? Why not?”

“Because it would be a kind of romantic deceit that he’d better not keep up.”

“He seems to have kept it up for the last four or five months,” said Hilary.

“That’s no reason he should continue to keep it up,” Sewell persisted. “Perhaps he never knew of the rumor of his death.”

“Ah, that isn’t imaginable. There isn’t a hole or corner left where the newspapers don’t penetrate, nowadays.”

“Not in Boston. But if he were in hiding in some little French village down the St. Lawrence—”

“Isn’t that as romantic as the other notion, parson?” crowed old Corey.

“No, I don’t think so,” said the minister. “The cases are quite different. He might have a morbid shrinking from his own past, and the wish to hide from it as far as he could; that would be natural; but to leave his children to believe a rumor of his death in order to save their feelings, would be against nature; it would be purely histrionic; a motive from the theatre; that is, perfectly false.”

“Pretty hard on Hilary, who invented it,” Bellingham suggested; and they all laughed.

“I don’t know,” said Hilary. “The man seems to be posing in other ways. You would think from his letter that he was a sort of martyr to principle, and that he’d been driven off to Canada by the heartless creditors whom he’s going to devote his life to saving from loss, if he can’t do it in a few months or years. He may not be a conscious humbug, but he’s certainly a humbug. Take that pretence of his that he would come back and stand his trial if he believed it would not result in greater harm than good by depriving him of all hope of restitution!”

“Why, there’s a sort of crazy morality in that,” said Corey.

“Perhaps,” said Bellingham, “the solution of the whole matter is that Northwick is cracked.”

“I’ve no doubt he’s cracked to a certain extent,” said Sewell, “as every wrong-doer is. You know the Swedenborgians believe that insanity is the last state of the wicked.”

“I suppose,” observed old Corey, thoughtfully, “you’d be very glad to have him keep out of your reach, Hilary?”

“What a question!” said Hilary. “You’re as bad as my daughter. She asked me the same thing.”

“I wish I were no worse,” said the old man.

“You speak of his children,” said the Englishman. “Hasn’t he a wife?”

“No. Two daughters. One an old maid, and the other a young girl, whom my daughter knew at school,” Hilary answered.

“I saw the young lady at your house once,” said Bellingham, in a certain way.

“Yes. She’s been here a good deal, first and last.”

“Rather a high-stepping young person, I thought,” said Bellingham.

“She is a proud girl,” Hilary admitted. “Rather imperious, in fact.”

“Ah, what’s the pride of a young girl?” said Corey. “Something that comes from her love and goes to it; no separable quality; nothing that’s for herself.”

“Well, I’m not sure of that,” said Hilary. “In this case it seems to have served her own turn. It’s enabled her simply and honestly to deny the fact that her father ever did anything wrong.”

“That’s rather fine,” Corey remarked, as if tasting it.

“And what will it enable her to do, now that he’s come out and confessed the frauds himself?” the Englishman asked.

Hilary shrugged, for answer. He said to Bellingham, “Charles, I want you to try some of these crabs. I got them for you.”

“Why, this is touching, Hilary,” said Bellingham, getting his fat head round with difficulty to look at them in the dish the man was bringing to his side. “But I don’t know that I should have refused them, even if they had been got for Corey.”

IX.

They did not discuss Northwick’s letter at the dinner-parties in Hatboro’ because, socially speaking, they never dined there; but the stores, the shops, the parlors, buzzed with comment on it; it became a part of the forms of salutation, the color of the day’s joke. Gates, the provision man, had to own the error of his belief in Northwick’s death. He found his account in being the only man to own that he ever had such a belief; he was a comfort to those who said they had always had their doubts of it; the ladies of South Hatboro’, who declared to a woman that they had never believed it, respected the simple heart of a man who acknowledged that he had never questioned it. Such a man was not one to cheat his customers in quantity or quality; that stood to reason; his faith restored him to the esteem of many.

Mr. Gerrish was very bitter about the double fraud which he said Northwick had practised on the community, in having allowed the rumor of his death to gain currency. He denounced him to Mrs. Munger, making an early errand from South Hatboro’ to the village to collect public opinion, as a person who had put himself beyond the pale of public confidence, and whose professions of repentance for the past, and good intention for the future, he tore to shreds. “It is said, and I have no question correctly, that hell is paved with good intentions — if you will excuse me, Mrs. Munger. When Mr. Northwick brings forth fruits meet for repentance — when he makes the first payment to his creditors — I will believe that he is sorry for what he has done, and not till then.”

“That is true,” said Mrs. Munger. “I wonder what Mr. Putney will have to say to all this. Can he feel that his skirts are quite clean, acting that way, as the family counsel of the Northwicks, after all he used to say against him?”

Mr. Gerrish expressed his indifference by putting up a roll of muslin on the shelf while he rejoined, “I care very little for the opinions of Mr. Putney on any subject.”

In some places Mrs. Munger encountered a belief, which she did not discourage, that the Northwick girls had known all along that their father was alive, and had been in communication with him; through Putney, most probably. In the light of this conjecture the lawyer’s character had a lurid effect, which it did not altogether lose when Jack Wilmington said, bluntly, “What of it? He’s their counsel. He’s not obliged to give the matter away. He’s obliged to keep it.”

“But isn’t it very inconsistent,” Mrs. Munger urged, “after all he used to say against Mr. Northwick?”

“I suppose it’s a professional, not a personal matter,” said Wilmington.

“And then, their putting on mourning! Just think of it!” Mrs. Munger appealed to Mrs. Wilmington, who was listening to her nephew’s savagery of tone and phrase with the lazy pleasure she seemed always to feel in it.

“Yes. Do you suppose they meant it for a blind?”

“Why, that’s what people think now, don’t they?”

“Oh, I don’t know. What do you think, Jack?”

“I think they’re a pack of fools!” he blurted out, like a man who avenges on the folly of others the hurt of his own conscience. He cast a look of brutal contempt at Mrs. Munger, who said she thought so, too.

“It is too bad the way people allow themselves to talk,” she went on. “To be sure, Sue Northwick has never done anything to make herself loved in Hatboro’ — not among the ladies at least.”

Mrs. Wilmington gave a spluttering laugh, and said, “And I suppose it’s the ladies who allow themselves to talk as they do. I can’t get the men in my family to say a word against her.”

Jack scowled his blackest. “It would be a pitiful scoundrel that did. Her misfortunes ought to make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a man.”

“Well, so it does. That is just what I was saying. The trouble is that they don’t make her sacred to every one that has the soul of a woman,” Mrs. Wilmington teased.

“I know it doesn’t,” Jack returned, in helpless scorn, as he left Mrs. Munger alone to his aunt.

“Do you suppose he still cares anything for her?” Mrs. Munger asked, with cosey confidentiality.

“Who knows?” Mrs. Wilmington rejoined, indolently. “It would be very poetical, wouldn’t it, if he were to seize the opportunity to go back to her?”

“Beautiful!” sighed Mrs. Munger. “I do like a manly man!”

She drove home through the village slowly, hoping for a chance of a further interchange of conjectures and impressions; but she saw no one she had not already talked with till she met Dr. Morrell, driving out of the avenue from his house. She promptly set her phaeton across the road so that he could not get by, if he were rude enough to wish it.

“Doctor,” she called out, “what do you think of this extraordinary letter of Mr. Northwick’s?”

Dr. Morrell’s boyish eyes twinkled. “You mean that letter in the Events? Do you think Northwick wrote it?”

“Why, don’t you, doctor?” she questioned back, with a note of personal grievance in her voice.

“I’m not very well acquainted with his style. Then, you think he did write it? Of course, there are always various opinions. But I understood you thought he was burned in that accident last winter.”

“Now, doctor!” said Mrs. Munger, with the pout which Putney said always made him want to kill her. “You’re just trying to tease me; I know you are. I’m going to drive right in and see Mrs. Morrell. She will tell me what you think.”

“I don’t believe you can see her,” said the doctor. “She isn’t at all well.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for that. I don’t understand what excuse she has, though, with a physician for her husband. You must turn homoeopathy. Dr. Morrell, do you think it’s true that Jack Wilmington will offer himself to Sue Northwick, now that it’s come to the worst with her? Wouldn’t it be romantic?”

“Very,” said the doctor. He craned his head out of the buggy, as if to see whether he could safely drive into the ditch, and pass Mrs. Munger. He said politely, as he started, “Don’t disturb yourself! I can get by.”

She sent a wail of reproach after him, and then continued toward South Hatboro’. As she passed the lodge at the gate of the Northwick avenue, where the sisters now lived, she noted that the shades were closely drawn. They were always drawn on the side toward the street, but Mrs. Munger thought it interesting that she had never noticed it before, and in the dearth of material she made the most of it, both for her own emotion, and for the sensation of others when she reached South Hatboro’.

Behind the drawn shades that Mrs. Munger noted, Adeline Northwick sat crying over the paper that Elbridge Newton had pushed under the door that morning. It was limp from the nervous clutch and tremor of her hands, and wet with her tears; but she kept reading her father’s letter in it, and trying to puzzle out of it some hope or help. “He must be crazy, he must be crazy,” she moaned, more to herself than to Suzette, who sat rigidly and silently by. “He couldn’t have been so cruel, if he had been in his right mind; he couldn’t! He was always so good to us, and so thoughtful; he must have known that we had given him up for dead, long ago; and he has let us go on grieving for him all this time. It’s just as if he had come back from death, and the first he did was to tell us that everything they said against him was true, and that everything we said and believed was all wrong. How could he do it, how could he do it! We bore to think he was dead; yes, we bore that, and we didn’t complain; but this is more than any one can ask us to bear. Oh, Suzette, what can we say, now? What can we say, after he’s confessed himself that he took the money, and that he has got part of it yet? But I know he didn’t! I know he hasn’t! He’s crazy! Oh, poor, poor father! Don’t you think he must be crazy? And where is he? Why don’t he write to us, and tell us what he wants us to do? Does he think we would tell any one where he was? That shows he’s out of his mind. I always thought that if he could come back to life somehow, he’d prove that they had lied about him; and now! Oh, it isn’t as if it were merely the company that was concerned, or what people said; but it’s as if our own father, that we trusted so much, had broken his word to us. That is what kills me.”

The day passed. They sent Mrs. Newton away when she came to help them at dinner. They locked their doors, and shut themselves in from the world, as mourners do with death. Adeline’s monologue went on, with the brief responses which she extorted from Suzette, and at last it ceased, as if her heart had worn itself out in the futile repetition of its griefs.

Then Suzette broke her silence with words that seemed to break from it of themselves in their abrupt irrelevance to what Adeline had last said. “We must give it up!”

“Give what up?” Adeline groaned back.

“The house — and the farm — and this hovel. Everything! It isn’t ours.”

“Not ours?”

“No. That letter makes it theirs — the people’s whose money he took. We must send for Mr. Putney and tell him to give it to them. He will know how.”

Adeline looked at her sister’s face in dismay. She gasped out, “Why, but Mr. Putney says it’s ours, and nobody can touch it!”

“That was before. Now it is theirs; and if we kept it from them we should be stealing it. How do we know that father had any right to give it to us when he did?”

“Suzette!”

“I keep thinking such things, and I had better say them unless I want to go out of my senses. Once I would have died before I gave it up, because he left it to us, and now it seems as if I couldn’t live till I gave it up, because he left it to us. No, I can never forgive him, if he is my father. I can never speak to him again, or see him; never! He is dead to me, now!”

The words seemed to appeal to the contrary-mindedness that lurks in such natures as Adeline’s. “Why, I don’t see what there is so wrong about father’s letter,” she began. “It just shows what I always said: that his mind was affected by his business troubles, and that he wandered away because he couldn’t get them straight. And now it’s preyed so upon him that he’s beginning to believe the things they say are true, and to blame himself. That’s the way I look at it.”

“Adeline!” Suzette commanded, with a kind of shriek, “Be still! You know you don’t believe that!”

Adeline hesitated between her awe of her sister, and her wish to persist in a theory which, now that she had formulated it for Suzette’s confusion, she found effective for her own comfort. She ventured at last, “It is what I said, the first thing, and I shall always say it, Suzette; and I have a right.”

“Say what you please. I shall say nothing. But this property doesn’t belong to us till father comes back to prove it.”

“Comes back!” Adeline gasped. “Why, they’ll send him to State’s prison!”

“They won’t send him to State’s prison if he’s innocent, and if he isn’t—”

“Suzette! Don’t you dare!”

“But that has nothing to do with it. We must give up what doesn’t belong to us. Will you go for Mr. Putney, or shall I go? I’m not afraid to be seen, if you don’t like to go. I can hold up my head before the whole world, now I know what we ought to do, and we’re going to do it; but if we kept this place after that letter, I couldn’t even look you in the face again.” She continued to Adeline’s silence, “Why, we needn’t either of us go! I can get Elbridge to go.” She made as if to leave the room.

“Wait! I can’t let you — yet. I haven’t thought it out,” said Adeline.

“Not thought it out!” Suzette went back and stood over her where she sat in her rocking-chair.

“No!” said Adeline, shrinking from her fierce look, but with a gathering strength of resistance in her heart. “Because you’ve been thinking of it, you expect me to do what you say in an instant. The place was mother’s, and when she died it came to me, and I hold it in trust for both of us; that’s what Mr. Putney says. Even supposing that father did use their money — and I don’t believe he did — I don’t see why I should give up mother’s property to them.” She waited a moment before she said, “And I won’t.”

“Is half of it mine?” asked Suzette.

“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose so.”

“I’m of age, and I shall give up my half. I’m going to send for Mr. Putney.” She went out of the room, and came back with her hat and gloves on, and her jacket over her arm. She had never been so beautiful, or so terrible. “Listen to me, Adeline,” she said, “I’m going out to send Elbridge for Mr. Putney; and when he comes I am not going to have any squabbling before him. You can do what you please with your half of the property, but I’m going to give up my half to the company. Now, if you don’t promise you’ll freely consent to what I want to do with my own, I will never come back to this house, or ever see you again, or speak to you. Do you promise?”

“Oh, well, I promise,” said Adeline, forlornly, with a weak dribble of tears. “You can take your half of the place that mother owned, and give it to the men that are trying to destroy father’s character! But I shall never say that I wanted you should do it.”

“So that you don’t say anything against it, I don’t care what else you say.” Suzette put on her jacket and stood buttoning it at her soft throat. “I do it; and I do it for mother’s sake and for father’s. I care as much for them as you do.”

In the evening Putney came, and she told him she wished him to contrive whatever form was necessary to put her father’s creditors in possession of her half of the estate. “My sister doesn’t feel as I do about it,” she ended. “She thinks they have no right to it, and we ought to keep it. But she has agreed to let me give my half up.”

Putney went to the door and threw out the quid of tobacco which he had been absently chewing upon while she spoke. “You know,” he explained, “that the creditors have no more claim on this estate, in law, than they have on my house and lot?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care for the law.”

“The case isn’t altered at all, you know, by the fact that your father is still living, and your title isn’t affected by any of the admissions made in the letter he has published.”

“I understand that,” said the girl.

“Well,” said Putney, “I merely wanted to make sure you had all the bearings of the case. The thing can be done, of course. There’s nothing to prevent any one giving any one else a piece of property.”

He remained silent for a moment, as if doubtful whether to say more, and Adeline asked, “And do you believe that if we were to give up the property, they’d let father come back?”

Putney could not control a smile at her simplicity. “The creditors have got nothing to do with that, Miss Northwick. Your father has been indicted, and he’s in contempt of court as long as he stays away. There can’t be any question of mercy till he comes back for trial.”

“But if he came back,” she persisted, “our giving up the property would make them easier with him?”

“A corporation has no bowels of compassion, Miss Northwick. I shouldn’t like to trust one. The company has no legal claim on the estate. Unless you think it has a moral claim, you’d better hold on to your property.”

“And do you think it has a moral claim?”

Putney drew a long breath. “Well, that’s a nice question.” He stroked his trousers down over his little thin leg, as he sat. “I have some peculiar notions about corporations. I don’t think a manufacturing company is a benevolent institution, exactly. It isn’t even a sanitarium. It didn’t come for its health; it came to make money, and it makes it by a profit on the people who do its work and the people who buy its wares. Practically, it’s just like everything else that earns its bread by the sweat of its capital — neither better nor worse.” Launched in this direction, Putney recalled himself with an effort from the prospect of an irrelevant excursion in the fields of speculative economy. “But as I understand, the question is not so much whether the Ponkwasset Mills have a moral claim, as whether you have a moral obligation. And there I can’t advise. You would have to go to a clergyman. I can only say that if the property were mine I should hold on to it, and let the company be damned, or whatever could happen to a body that hadn’t a soul for that purpose.”

Putney thrust his hand into his pocket for his tobacco; and then recollected himself, and put it back.

“There, Suzette!” said Adeline.

Suzette had listened in a restive silence, while Putney was talking with her sister. She said in answer to him: “I don’t want advice about that. I wished to know whether I could give up my part of the estate to the company, and if you would do it for me at once.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Putney. “I will go down to Boston to-morrow morning and see their attorney.”

“Their attorney? I thought you would have to go to Mr. Hilary.”

“He would send me to their lawyer, I suppose. But I can go to him first, if you wish.”

“Yes, I do wish it,” said the girl. “I don’t understand about the company, and I don’t care for it. I want to offer the property to Mr. Hilary. Don’t say anything but just that I wished to give it up, and my sister consented. Don’t say a single word more, no matter what he asks you. Will you?”

“I will do exactly what you say,” answered Putney. “But you understand, I suppose, don’t you, that in order to make the division, the whole place must be sold?”

Suzette looked at him in surprise. Adeline wailed out, “The whole place sold?”

“Yes; how else could you arrive at the exact value?”

“I will keep the house and the grounds, and Suzette may have the farm.”

Putney shook his head. “I don’t believe it could be done. Perhaps—”

“Well, then,” said Adeline, “I will never let the place be sold in the world. I—” She caught Suzette’s eye and faltered, and then went on piteously, “I didn’t know what we should have to do when I promised. But I’ll keep my promise; yes, I will. We needn’t sign the papers to-night, need we, Mr. Putney? It’ll do in the morning?”

“Oh, yes; just as well,” said Putney. “It’ll take a little time to draw up the writings.”

“But you can send word to Mr. Hilary at once?” Suzette asked.

“Oh, yes; if you wish.”

“I do.”

“It won’t be necessary.”

“I wish it.”

Since the affair must so soon be known to everybody, Putney felt justified in telling his wife when he went home. “If that poor old girl freely consented, it must have been at the point of the hairpin. Of course, the young one is right to obey her conscience, but as a case of conscience, what do you think of it, Ellen? And do you think one ought to make any one else obey one’s conscience?”

“That’s a hard question, Ralph. And I’m not sure that she’s right. Why should she give up her property, if it was hers so long ago before the frauds began? Suppose he were not their father, and the case stood just as it does?”

“Ah, there’s something very strange about the duty of blood.”

“Blood? I think Suzette Northwick’s case of conscience is a case of pride,” said Mrs. Putney. “I don’t believe she cares anything about the right and wrong of it. She just wishes to stand well before the world. She would do anything for that. She’s as hard!”

“That’s what the world will say, I’ve no doubt,” Putney admitted.

X.

The next morning Adeline came early to her sister’s bed, and woke her. “I haven’t slept all night — I don’t see how you could — and I want you shouldn’t let Mr. Putney send that letter to Mr. Hilary, just yet. I want to think it over, first.”

“You want to break your promise?” asked Suzette, wide awake at the first word.

Adeline began to cry. “I want to think. It seems such a dreadful thing to sell the place. And why need you hurry to send off a letter to Mr. Hilary about it? Won’t it be time enough, when Mr. Putney has the writings ready? I think it will look very silly to send word beforehand. I could see that Mr. Putney didn’t think it was business-like.”

“You want to break your promise?” Suzette repeated.

“No, I don’t want to break my promise. But I do want to do what’s right; and I want to do what I think is right. I’m almost sick. I want Elbridge should stop for the doctor on his way to Mr. Putney’s.” She broke into a convulsive sobbing. “Oh, Suzette! Do give me a little more time! Won’t you? And as soon as I can see it as you do—”

They heard the rattling of a key in the back door of the cottage, and they knew it was Elbridge coming to make the fire in the kitchen stove, as he always did against the time his wife should come to get breakfast. Suzette started up from her pillow, and pulled Adeline’s face down on her neck, so as to smother the sound of her sobs. “Hush! Don’t let him hear! And I wouldn’t let any one know for the world that we didn’t agree! You can think it over all day, if you want; and I’ll stop Mr. Putney from writing till you think as I do. But be still, now!”

“Yes, yes! I will,” Adeline whispered back. “And I won’t quarrel with you, Sue! I know we shall think alike in the end. Only, don’t hurry me! And let Elbridge get the doctor to come. I’m afraid I’m going to be down sick.”

She crept sighing back to bed, and after a little while, Suzette came, dressed, to look after her. “I think I’m going to get a little sleep, now,” she said. “But don’t forget to stop Mr. Putney.”

Suzette went out into the thin, sweet summer morning air, and walked up and down the avenue between the lodge and the empty mansion. She had not slept, either; it was from her first drowse that Adeline had wakened her. But she was young, and the breath of the cool, southwest wind was a bath of rest to her fevered senses. She felt herself grow stronger in it, and she tried to think what she ought to do. If her purpose of the day before still seemed so wholly and perfectly just, it seemed very difficult; and she began to ask herself whether she had a right to compel Adeline’s consent to it. She felt the perplexities of the world where good and evil are often so mixed that when the problem passes from thoughts to deeds, the judgment is darkened and the will palsied. Till now the wrong had always appeared absolutely apart from the right; for the first time she perceived that a great right might involve a lesser wrong; and she was daunted. But she meant to fight out her fight wholly within herself before she spoke with Adeline again.

That day Matt Hilary came over from his farm to see Wade, whom he found as before, in his study at the church, and disposed to talk over Northwick’s letter. “It’s a miserable affair; humiliating; heart-sickening. That poor soul’s juggle with his conscience is a most pathetic spectacle. I can’t bring myself to condemn him very fiercely. But while others may make allowance for him, it’s ruinous for him to excuse himself. That’s truly perdition. Don’t you feel that?” Wade asked.

“Yes, yes,” Matt assented, with a kind of absence. “But there is something else I wanted to speak with you about; and I suppose it’s this letter that’s made it seem rather urgent now. You know when I asked you once about Jack Wilmington—”

Wade shook his head. “There isn’t the least hope in that direction. I’m sure there isn’t. If he had cared anything for the girl, he would have shown it long ago!”

“I quite agree with you,” said Matt, “and that isn’t what I mean. But if it would have been right and well for him to come forward at such a time, why shouldn’t some other man, who does love her?” He hurried tremulously on: “Wade, let me ask you one thing more! You have seen her so much more than I; and I didn’t know — Is it possible — Perhaps I ought to ask if you are at all — if you care for her?”

“For Miss Northwick? What an idea? Not the least in the world! Why do you ask?”

“Because I do!” said Matt. “I care everything for her. So much that when I thought of my love for her, I could not bear that it should be a wrong to any living soul or that it should be a shadow’s strength between her and any possible preference. And I came here with my mind made up that if you thought Jack Wilmington had still some right to a hearing from her, I would stand back. If there were any hopes for him from himself or from her, I should be a fool not to stand back. And I thought — I thought that if you, old fellow — But now, it’s all right — all right—”

Matt wrung the hand which Wade yielded him with a dazed air, at first. A great many things went through Wade’s mind, which he silenced on their way to his lips. It would not do to impart to Matt the impressions of a cold and arrogant nature which the girl had sometimes given him, and which Matt could not have received in the times of trouble and sorrow when he had chiefly seen her. Matt’s confession was a shock; Wade was scarcely less dismayed by the complications which it suggested; but he could no more impart his misgivings than his impressions; he could no more tell Matt that his father would be embarrassed and compromised by his passion than he could tell him that he did not think Sue Northwick was worthy of it. He was in the helpless predicament that confidants often find themselves in, but his final perception of his impossibilities enabled him to return the fervid pressure of Matt’s hand, and even to utter some of those incoherencies which serve the purpose when another wishes to do the talking.

“Of course,” said Matt, “I’m ridiculous, I know that. I haven’t got anything to found my hopes on but the fact that there’s nothing in my way to the one insuperable obstacle: to the fact that she doesn’t and can’t really care a straw for me. But just now that seems a mere bagatelle.” He laughed with a nervous joy, and he kept talking, as he walked up and down Wade’s study. “I don’t know that I have the hope of anything; and I don’t see how I’m to find out whether I have or not, for the present. You know, Wade,” he went on, with a simple-hearted sweetness, which Wade found touching, “I’m twenty-eight years old, and I don’t believe I’ve ever been in love before. Little fancies, of course; summer flirtations; every one has them; but never anything serious, anything like this. And I could see, at home, that they would be glad to have had me married. I rather think my father believes that a good sensible wife would bring me back to faith in commercial civilization.” He laughed out his relish of the notion, but went on, gravely: “Poor father! This whole business has been a terrible trial to him.”

Wade wondered at his ability to separate the thought of Suzette from the thought of her father; he inferred from his ability to do so that he must have been thinking of her a great deal, but he asked, “Isn’t it all rather sudden, Matt?” Wade put on a sympathetic, yet diplomatic, smile for the purpose of this question.

“Not for me!” said Matt. He added, not very consequently, “I suppose it must have happened to me the first moment I saw her here that day Louise and I came up about the accident. I couldn’t truly say that she had ever been out of my mind a moment since. No, there’s nothing sudden about it, though I don’t suppose these things usually take a great deal of time,” Matt ended, philosophically.

Wade left the dangerous ground he found himself on. He asked, “And your family, do they know of your — feeling?”

“Not in the least!” Matt answered, radiantly. “It will come on them like a thunder-clap! If it ever comes on them at all,” he added, despondently.

Wade had his own belief that there was no cause for despondency in the aspect of the affair that Matt was looking at. But he could not offer to share his security with Matt, who continued to look serious, and said, presently, “I suppose my father might think it complicated his relation to the Northwicks’ trouble, and I have thought that, too. It makes it very difficult. My father is to be considered. You know, Wade, I think there are very few men like my father?”

“There are none, Matt!” said Wade.

“I don’t mean he’s perfect; and I think his ideas are wrong, most of them. But his conduct is as right as the conduct of any quick-tempered man ever was in the world. I know him, and I don’t believe a son ever loved his father more; and so I want to consider him all I can.”

“Ah, I know that, my dear fellow!”

“But the question is, how far can I consider him? There are times,” said Matt, and he reddened, and laughed consciously, “when it seems as if I couldn’t consider him at all; the times when I have some faint hope that she will listen to me, or won’t think me quite a brute to speak to her of such a thing at such a moment. Then there are other times when I think he ought to be considered to the extreme of giving her up altogether; but those are the times when I know that I shall never have her to give up. Then it’s an easy sacrifice.”

“I understand,” said Wade, responding with a smile to Matt’s self-satire.

Matt went on, and as he talked he sometimes walked to Wade’s window and looked out, sometimes he stopped and confronted him across his desk. “It’s cowardly, in a way, not to speak at once — to leave her to suffer it out to the end alone; but I think that’s what I owe to my father. No real harm can come to her from waiting. I risk the unfair chance I might gain by speaking now when she sorely needs help; but if ever she came to think she had given herself through that need — No, it wouldn’t do! My father can do more for her if he isn’t hampered by my feeling, and Louise can be her friend — What do you think, Wade? I’ve tried to puzzle it out, and this is the conclusion I’ve come to. Is it rather cold-blooded? I know it isn’t at all like the lovemaking in the books. I suppose I ought to go and fling myself at her feet, in defiance of all the decencies and amenities and obligations of life, but somehow I can’t bring myself to do it. I’ve thought it all conscientiously over, and I think I ought to wait.”

“I think so, too, Matt. I think your decision is a just man’s, and it’s a true lover’s, too. It does your heart as much honor as your head,” and Wade gave him his hand now, with no mental reservation.

“Do you really think so, Caryl? That makes me very happy! I was afraid it might look calculating and self-interested—”

“You self-interested, Matt!”

“Oh, I know! But is it considering my duty too much, my love too little? If I love her, hasn’t she the first claim upon me, before father and mother, brother and sister, before all the world?”

“If you are sure she loves you, yes.”

Matt laughed. “Ah, that’s true; I hadn’t thought of that little condition! Perhaps it changes the whole situation. Well, I must go, now. I’ve just run over from the farm to see you—”

“I inferred that from your peasant garb,” said Wade, with a smile at the rough farm suit Matt had on: his face refined it and made it look mildly improbable. “Besides,” said Wade, as if the notion he recurred to were immediately relevant to Matt’s dress, “unless you are perfectly sure of yourself beyond any chance of change, you owe it to her as well as yourself, to take time before speaking.”

“I am perfectly sure, and I shall never change,” said Matt, with a shade of displeasure at the suggestion. “If there were nothing but that I should not take a moment of time.” He relented and smiled again, in adding, “But I have decided now, and I shall wait. And I’m very much obliged to you, old fellow, for talking the matter over with me, and helping me to see it in the right light.”

“Oh, my dear Matt!” said Wade, in deprecation.

“Yes. And oh, by the way! I’ve got hold of a young fellow that I think you could do something for, Wade. Do you happen to remember the article on the defalcation in the Boston Abstract?”

“Yes, I do remember that. Didn’t it treat the matter, if I recall it, very humanely — too humanely, perhaps?”

“Perhaps, from one point of view, too humanely. Well, it’s the writer of that article — a young fellow, not twenty-five, yet as completely at odds with life as any one I ever saw. He has a great deal of talent, and no health or money; so he’s toiling feebly for a living on a daily newspaper, instead of making literature. He was a reporter up to the time he wrote that article, but the managing editor is a man who recognizes quality; he’s fond of Maxwell — that’s the fellow’s name — and since then he’s given him a chance in the office, at social topics. But he hasn’t done very well; the fact is, the boy’s too literary, and he’s out of health, and he needs rest and the comfort of appreciative friendship. I want you to meet him. I’ve got him up at my place out of the east winds. You’ll be interested in him as a type — the artistic type cynicised by the hard conditions of life — newspaper conditions, and then economic conditions.”

Matt smiled with satisfaction in what he felt to be his very successful formulation of Maxwell.

Wade said he should be very glad to meet him; and if he could be of any use to him he should be even more glad. But his mind was still upon Matt’s love affair, and as they wrung each other’s hands, once more he said, “I think you’ve decided so wisely, Matt; and justly and unselfishly.”

“It’s involuntary unselfishness, if it’s unselfishness at all,” said Matt. He did not go; Wade stood bareheaded with him at the outer door of his study. After awhile he said with embarrassment, “Wade! Do you think it would seem unfeeling — or out of taste, at all — if I went to see her at such a time?”

“Why, I can’t imagine your doing anything out of taste, Matt.”

“Don’t be so smooth, Caryl! You know what I mean. Louise sent some messages by me to her. Will you take them, or—”

“I certainly see no reason why you shouldn’t deliver Miss Hilary’s messages yourself.”

“Well, I do,” said Matt. “But you needn’t be afraid.”

XI.

Matt took the lower road that wound away from Wade’s church toward the Northwick place; but as he went, he kept thinking that he must not really try to see Suzette. It would be monstrous, at such a time; out of all propriety, of all decency; it would be taking advantage of her helplessness to intrude upon her the offer of help and of kindness which every instinct of her nature must revolt from. There was only one thing that could justify his coming, and that was impossible. Unless he came to tell her that he loved her, and to ask her to let him take her burden upon him, to share her shame and her sorrow for his love’s sake, he had no right to see her. At moments it seemed as if that were right and he could do it, no matter how impossible, and then he almost ran forward; but only to check himself, to stop short, and doubt whether not to turn back altogether. By such faltering progresses, he found himself in the Northwick avenue at last, and keeping doggedly on from the mansion, which the farm road had brought him to, until he reached the cottage at the avenue gate. On the threshold drooped a figure that the sight of set his heart beating with a stifling pulse in his throat, and he floundered on till he made out that this languid figure was Adeline. He could have laughed at the irony, the mockery of the anti-climax, if it had not been for the face that the old maid turned upon him at the approach of his footfalls, and the pleasure that lighted up its pathos when she recognized him.

“Oh, Mr. Hilary!” she said; and then she could not speak, for the twitching of her lips and the trembling of her chin.

He took her hand in silence, and it seemed natural for him to do that reverent and tender thing which is no longer a part of our custom; he bent over it and kissed the chill, bony knuckles.

She drew her hand away to find her handkerchief and wipe her tears. “I suppose you’ve come to see Suzette; but she’s gone up to the village to talk with Mr. Putney; he’s our lawyer.”

“Yes,” said Matt.

“I presume I don’t need to talk to you about that — letter. I think, — and I believe Suzette will think so too in the end, — that his mind is affected, and he just accuses himself of all these things because they’ve been burnt into it so. How are your father and mother? And your sister?”

She broke off with these questions, he could see, to stay herself in what she wished to say. “They are all well. Father is still in Boston; but mother and Louise are at the farm with me. They sent their love, and they are anxious to know if there is anything—”

“Thank you. Will you sit down here? It’s so close indoors.” She made room for him on the threshold, but he took the step below.

“I hope Miss Suzette is well?”

“Why, thank you, not very well. There isn’t anything really the matter; but we didn’t either of us sleep very well last night; we were excited. I don’t know as I ought to tell you,” she began. “I don’t suppose it’s a thing you would know about, any way; but I’ve got to talk to somebody—”

“Miss Northwick,” said Matt, “if there is anything in the world that I can do for you, or that you even hope I can do, I beg you to let me hear it. I should be glad beyond all words to help you.”

“Oh, I don’t know as anything can be done,” she began, after the fresh gush of tears which were her thanks, “but Suzette and I have been talking it over a good deal, and we thought we would like to see your father about it. You see, Suzette can’t feel right about our keeping the place here, if father’s really done what he says he’s done. We don’t believe he has; but if he has, he has got to be found somewhere, and made to give up the money he says he has got. Suzette thinks we ought to give up the money we have got in the bank — fifteen hundred or two thousand dollars — and she wanted I should let her give up her half of the place, here; and at first I did say she might. But come to find out from Mr. Putney, the whole place would have to be sold before it could be divided, and I couldn’t seem to let it. That was what we — disputed about. Yes! We had a dispute; but it’s all right now, or it will be, when we get the company to say they will stop the lawsuit against father, if he will give up the money he’s got, and we will give up the place. Mr. Putney seemed to think the company couldn’t stop it; but I don’t see why a rich corporation like that couldn’t do almost anything it wanted to with its money.”

Her innocent corruption did not shock Matt, nor her scheme for defeating justice; but he smiled forlornly at the hopelessness of it. “I’m afraid Mr. Putney is right.” He was silent, and then at the despair that came into her face, he hurried on to say, “but I will see my father, Miss Northwick; I will go down to see him at once; and if anything can be honorably and fairly done to save your father, I am sure he will try to do it for your sake. But don’t expect anything,” he said, getting to his feet and putting out his hand to her.

“No, no; I won’t,” she said, with gratitude that wrung his heart. “And — won’t you wait and see Suzette?”

Matt reddened. “No; I think not now. But, perhaps, I will come back; and — and — I will come soon again. Good-by!”

“Mr. Hilary!” she called after him. He ran back to her. “If — if your father don’t think anything can be done, I don’t want he should say anything about it.”

“Oh, no; certainly not.”

“And, Mr. Hilary! Don’t you let Suzette know I spoke to you. I’ll tell her.”

“Why, of course.”

On his way to Boston the affair seemed to grow less and less impossible to Matt; but he really knew nothing of the legal complications; and when he proposed it to his father, old Hilary shook his head. “I don’t believe it could be done. The man’s regularly indicted, and he’s in contempt of court as long as he doesn’t present himself for trial. That’s the way I understand it. But I’ll see our counsel. Whose scheme is this?”

“I don’t know. Miss Northwick told me of it; but I fancied Miss Suzette—”

“Yes,” said Hilary. “It must have cost her almost her life to give up her faith in that pitiful rascal.”

“But after she had done that, it would cost her nothing to give up the property, and as I understood Miss Northwick, that was her sister’s first impulse. She wished to give up her half of the estate unconditionally; but Miss Northwick wouldn’t consent, and they compromised on the conditions she told me of.”

“Well,” said Hilary, “I think Miss Northwick showed the most sense. But of course, Sue’s a noble girl. She almost transfigures that old scoundrel of a father of hers. That fellow — Jack Wilmington — ought to come forward now and show himself a man, if he is one. Any man might be proud of such a girl’s love — and they say she was in love with him. But he seems to have preferred to dangle after his uncle’s wife. He isn’t good enough for her, and probably he always knew it.”

Matt profited by the musing fit that came upon his father, to go and look at the picture over the mantel. It was not a new picture; but he did not feel that he was using his father quite frankly; and he kept looking at it for that reason.

“If those poor creatures gave up their property, what would they do? They’ve absolutely nothing else in the world!”

“I fancy,” said Matt, “that isn’t a consideration that would weigh with Suzette Northwick.”

“No. If there’s anything in heredity, the father of such a girl must have some good in him. Of course, they wouldn’t be allowed to suffer.”

“Do you mean that the company would regard the fact that it had no legal claim on the property, and would recognize it in their behalf?”

“The company!” Hilary roared. “The company has no right to that property, moral or legal. But we should act as if we had. If it were unconditionally offered to us, we ought to acknowledge it as an act of charity to us, and not of restitution. But every man Jack of us would hold out for a right to it that didn’t exist, and we should take it as part of our due; and I should be such a coward that I couldn’t tell the Board what I thought of our pusillanimity.”

“It seems rather hard for men to act magnanimously in a corporate capacity, or even humanely,” said Matt. “But I don’t know but there would be an obscure and negative justice in such action. It would be right for the company to accept the property, if it was right for Northwick’s daughter to offer it, and I think it is most unquestionably right for her to do that.”

“Do you, Matt? Well, well,” said Hilary, willing to be comforted, “perhaps you’re right. You must send Louise and your mother over to see her.”

“Well, perhaps not just now. She’s proud and sensitive, and perhaps it might seem intrusive, at this juncture?”

“Intrusive? Nonsense! She’ll be glad to see them. Send them right over!”

Matt knew this was his father’s way of yielding the point, and he went away with his promise to say nothing of the matter they had talked of till he heard from Putney. After that would be time enough to ascertain the whereabouts of Northwick, which no one knew yet, not even his own children.

What his father had said in praise of Suzette gave his love for her unconscious approval; but at the same time it created a sort of comedy situation, and Matt was as far from the comic as he hoped he was from the romantic, in his mood. When he thought of going direct to her, he hated to be going, like the hero of a novel, to offer himself to the heroine at the moment her fortunes were darkest; but he knew that he was only like that outwardly, and inwardly was simply and humbly her lover, who wished in any way or any measure he might, to be her friend and helper. He thought he might put his offer in some such form as would leave her free to avail herself a little if not much of his longing to comfort and support her in her trial. But at last he saw that he could do nothing for the present, and that it would be cruel and useless to give her more than the tried help of a faithful friend. He did not go back to Hatboro’, as he longed to do. He went back to his farm, and possessed his soul in such patience as he could.

XII.

Suzette came back from Putney’s office with such a disheartened look that Adeline had not the courage to tell her of Matt’s visit and the errand he had undertaken for her. The lawyer had said no more than that he did not believe anything could be done. He was glad they had decided not to transfer their property to the company, without first trying to make interest for their father with it; that was their right, and their duty; and he would try what could be done; but he warned Suzette that he should probably fail.

“And then what did he think we ought to do?” Adeline asked.

“He didn’t say,” Suzette answered.

“I presume,” Adeline went on, after a little pause, “that you would like to give up the property, anyway. Well, you can do it, Suzette.” The joy she might have expected did not show itself in her sister’s face, and she added, “I’ve thought it all over, and I see it as you do, now. Only,” she quavered, “I do want to do all I can for poor father, first.”

“Yes,” said Suzette, spiritlessly, “Mr. Putney said we ought.”

“Sue,” said Adeline, after another little pause, “I don’t know what you’ll think of me, for what I’ve done. Mr. Hilary has been here—”

“Mr. Hilary!”

“Yes. He came over from his farm—”

“Oh! I thought you meant his father.” The color began to mount into the girl’s cheeks.

“Louise and Mrs. Hilary sent their love, and they all want to do anything they can; and — and I told Mr. Hilary what we were going to try; and — he said he would speak to his father about it; and — Oh, Suzette, I’m afraid I’ve done more than I ought!”

Suzette was silent, and then, “No,” she said, “I can’t see what harm there could be in it.”

“He said,” Adeline pursued with joyful relief, “he wouldn’t let his father speak to the rest about it, till we were ready; and I know he’ll do all he can for us. Don’t you?”

Sue answered, “I don’t see what harm it can do for him to speak to his father. I hope, Adeline,” she added, with the severity Adeline had dreaded, “you didn’t ask it as a favor from him?”

“No, no! I didn’t indeed, Sue! It came naturally. He offered to do it.”

“Well,” said Suzette, with a sort of relaxation, and she fell back in the chair where she had been sitting.

“I don’t see,” said Adeline, with an anxious look at the girl’s worn face, “but what we’d both better have the doctor.”

“Ah, the doctor!” cried Suzette. “What can the doctor do for troubles like ours?” She put up her hands to her face, and bowed herself on them, and sobbed, with the first tears she had shed since the worst had come upon them.

The company’s counsel submitted Putney’s overtures, as he expected, to the State’s attorney, in the hypothetical form, and the State’s attorney, as Putney expected, dealt with the actuality. He said that when Northwick’s friends communicated with him and ascertained his readiness to surrender the money he had with him, and to make restitution in every possible way, it would be time to talk of a nolle prosequi. In the meantime, by the fact of absconding he was in contempt of court. He must return and submit himself for trial, and take the chance of a merciful sentence.

There could be no other answer, he said, and he could give none for Putney to carry back to the defaulter’s daughters.

Suzette received it in silence, as if she had nerved herself up to bear it so. Adeline had faltered between her hopes and fears, but she had apparently decided how she should receive the worst, if the worst came.

“Well, then,” she said, “we must give up the place. You can get the papers ready, Mr. Putney.”

“I will do whatever you say, Miss Northwick.”

“Yes, and I don’t want you to think that I don’t want to do it. It’s my doing now; and if my sister was all against it, I should wish to do it all the same.”

Matt Hilary learned from his father the result of the conference with the State’s attorney, and he came up to Hatboro’ the next day, to see Putney on his father’s behalf, and to express the wish of his family that Mr. Putney would let them do anything he could think of for his clients. He got his message out bunglingly, with embarrassed circumlocution and repetition; but this was what it came to in the end.

Putney listened with sarcastic patience, shifting the tobacco in his mouth from one thin cheek to the other, and letting his fierce blue eyes burn on Matt’s kindly face.

“Well, sir,” he said, “what do you think can be done for two women, brought up as ladies, who choose to beggar themselves?”

“Is it so bad as that?” Matt asked.

“Why, you can judge for yourself. My present instructions are to make their whole estate over to the Ponkwasset Mills Company—”

“But I thought — I thought they might have something besides — something—”

“There was a little money in the bank that Northwick placed there to their credit when he went away; but I’ve had their instructions to pay that over to your company, too. I suppose they will accept it?”

“It isn’t my company,” said Matt. “I’ve nothing whatever to do with it — or any company. But I’ve no doubt they’ll accept it.”

“They can’t do otherwise,” said the lawyer, with a humorous sense of the predicament twinkling in his eyes. “And that will leave my clients just nothing in the world until Mr. Northwick comes home with that fortune he proposes to make. In the meantime they have their chance of starving to death, or living on charity. And I don’t believe,” said Putney, breaking down with a laugh, “they’ve the slightest notion of doing either.”

Matt stood appalled at the prospect which the brute terms brought before him. He realized that after all there is no misery like that of want, and that yonder poor girl had chosen something harder to bear than her father’s shame.

“Of course,” he said, “they mustn’t be allowed to suffer. We shall count upon you to see that nothing of that kind happens. You can contrive somehow not to let them know that they are destitute.”

“Why,” said Putney, putting his leg over the back of a chair into its seat, for his greater ease in conversation, “I could, if I were a lawyer in a novel. But what do you think I can do with two women like these, who follow me up every inch of the way, and want to know just what I mean by every step I take? You’re acquainted with Miss Suzette, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Matt, consciously.

“Well, do you suppose that such a girl as that, when she had made up her mind to starve, wouldn’t know what you were up to if you pretended to have found a lot of money belonging to her under the cupboard?”

“The company must do something,” said Matt, desperately. “They have no claim on the property, none whatever!”

“Now you’re shouting.” Putney put a comfortable mass of tobacco in his mouth, and began to work his jaws vigorously upon it.

“They mustn’t take it — they won’t take it!” cried Matt.

Putney laughed scornfully.

XIII.

Matt made his way home to his farm, by a tiresome series of circuitous railroad connections across country. He told his mother of the new shape the trouble of the Northwicks had taken, and asked her if she could not go to see them, and find out some way to help them.

Louise wished to go instantly to see them. She cried out over the noble action that Suzette wished to do; she knew it was all Suzette.

“Yes, it is noble,” said Mrs. Hilary. “But I almost wish she wouldn’t do it.”

“Why, mamma?”

“It complicates matters. They could have gone on living there very well as they were; and the company doesn’t need it; but now where will they go? What will become of them?”

Louise had not thought of that, and she found it shocking.

“I suppose,” Matt said, “that the company would let them stay where they are, for the present, and that they won’t be actually houseless. But they propose now to give up the money that their father left for their support till he could carry out the crazy schemes for retrieving himself that he speaks of in his letter; and then they will have nothing to live on.”

“I knew Suzette would do that!” said Louise. “Before that letter came out she always said that her father never did what the papers said. But that cut the ground from under her feet, and such a girl could have no peace till she had given up everything — everything!”

“Something must be done,” said Mrs. Hilary. “Have they — has Suzette — any plans?”

“None, but that of giving up the little money they have left in the bank,” said Matt, forlornly.

“Well,” Mrs. Hilary commented with a sort of magisterial authority, “they’ve all managed as badly as they could.”

“Well, mother, they hadn’t a very hopeful case, to begin with,” said Matt, and Louise smiled.

“I suppose your poor father is worried almost to death about it,” Mrs. Hilary pursued.

“He was annoyed, but I couldn’t see that he had lost his appetite. I don’t think that even his worriment is the first thing to be considered, though.”

“No; of course not, Matt. I was merely trying to think. I don’t know just what we can offer to do; but we must find out. Yes, we must go and see them. They don’t seem to have any one else. It is very strange that they should have no relations they can go to!” Mrs. Hilary meditated upon a hardship which she seemed to find personal. “Well, we must try what we can do,” she said relentingly, after a moment’s pause.

They talked the question of what she could do futilely over, and at the end Mrs. Hilary said, “I will go there in the morning. And I think I shall go from there to Boston, and try to get your father off to the shore.”

“Oh!” said Louise.

“Yes; I don’t like his being in town so late.”

“Poor papa! Did he look very much wasted away, Matt? Why don’t you get him to come up here?”

“He’s been asked,” said Matt.

“Yes, I know he hates the country,” Louise assented. She rose and went to the glass door standing open on the piazza, where a syringa bush was filling the dull, warm air with its breath. “We must all try to think what we can do for Suzette.”

Her mother looked at the doorway after she had vanished through it; and listened a moment to her voice in talk with some one outside. The two voices retreated together, and Louise’s laugh made itself heard farther off. “She is a light nature,” sighed Mrs. Hilary.

“Yes,” Matt admitted, thinking he would rather like to be of a light nature himself at that moment. “But I don’t know that there is anything wrong in it. It would do no good if she took the matter heavily.”

“Oh, I don’t mean the Northwicks entirely,” said Mrs. Hilary. “But she is so in regard to everything. I know she is a good child, but I’m afraid she doesn’t feel things deeply. Matt, I don’t believe I like this protégé of yours.”

“Maxwell?”

“Yes. He’s too intense.”

“Aren’t you a little difficult, mother?” Matt asked. “You don’t like Louise’s lightness, and you don’t like Maxwell’s intensity. I think he’ll get over that. He’s sick, poor fellow; he won’t be so intense when he gets better.”

“Oh, yes; very likely.” Mrs. Hilary paused, and then she added, abruptly, “I hope Louise’s sympathies will be concentrated on Sue Northwick for awhile, now.”’

“I thought they were that, already,” said Matt. “I’m sure Louise has shown herself anxious to be her friend ever since her troubles began. I hadn’t supposed she was so attached to her — so constant—”

“She’s romantic; but she’s worldly; she likes the world and its ways. There never was a girl who liked better the pleasure, the interest of the moment. I don’t say she’s fickle; but one thing drives another out of her mind. She likes to live in a dream; she likes to make-believe. Just now she’s all taken up with an idyllic notion of country life, because she’s here in June, with that sick young reporter to patronize. But she’s the creature of her surroundings, and as soon as she gets away she’ll be a different person altogether. She’s a strange contradiction!” Mrs. Hilary sighed. “If she would only be entirely worldly, it wouldn’t be so difficult; but when her mixture of unworldliness comes in, it’s quite distracting.” She waited a moment as if to let Matt ask her what she meant; but he did not, and she went on: “She’s certainly not a simple character — like Sue Northwick, for instance.”

Matt now roused himself. “Is she a simple character?” he asked, with a show of indifference.

“Perfectly,” said his mother. “She always acts from pride. That explains everything she does.”

“I know she is proud,” Matt admitted, finding a certain comfort in openly recognizing traits in Sue Northwick that he had never deceived himself about. He had a feeling, too, that he was behaving with something like the candor due his mother, in saying, “I could imagine her being imperious, even arrogant at times; and certainly she is a wilful person. But I don’t see,” he added, “why we shouldn’t credit her with something better than pride in what she proposes to do now.”

“She has behaved very well,” said Mrs. Hilary, “and much better than could have been expected of her father’s daughter.”

Matt felt himself getting angry at this scanty justice, but he tried to answer calmly, “Surely, mother, there must be a point where the blame of the innocent ends! I should be very sorry if you went to Miss Northwick with the idea that we were conferring a favor in any way. It seems to me that she is indirectly putting us under an obligation which we shall find it difficult to discharge with delicacy.”

“Aren’t you rather fantastic, Matt?”

“I’m merely trying to be just. The company has no right to the property which she is going to give up.”

“We are not the company.”

“Father is the president.”

“Well, and he got Mr. Northwick a chance to save himself, and he abused it, and ran away. And if she is not responsible for her father, why should you feel so for yours? But I think you may trust me, Matt, to do what is right and proper — even what is delicate — with Miss Northwick.”

“Oh, yes! I didn’t mean that.”

“You said something like it, my dear.”

“Then I beg your pardon, mother. I certainly wasn’t thinking of her alone. But she is proud, and I hoped you would let her feel that we realize all that she is doing.”

“I’m afraid,” said Mrs. Hilary, with a final sigh, “that if I were quite frank with her, I should tell her she was a silly, headstrong girl, and I wished she wouldn’t do it.”

XIV.

The morning which followed was that of a warm, lulling, luxuriant June day, whose high tides of life spread to everything. Maxwell felt them in his weak pulses where he sat writing at an open window of the farmhouse, and early in the forenoon he came out on the piazza of the farmhouse, with a cushion clutched in one of his lean hands; his soft hat-brim was pulled down over his dull, dreamy eyes, where the far-off look of his thinking still lingered. Louise was in the hammock, and she lifted herself alertly out of it at sight of him, with a smile for his absent gaze.

“Have you got through?”

“I’ve got tired; or, rather, I’ve got bored. I thought I would go up to the camp.”

“You’re not going to lie on the ground, there?” she asked, with the importance and authority of a woman who puts herself in charge of a sick man, as a woman always must when there is such a man near her.

“I would be willing to be under it, such a day as this,” he said. “But I’ll take the shawl, if that’s what you mean. I thought it was here?”

“I’ll get it for you,” said Louise; and he let her go into the parlor and bring it out to him. She laid, it in a narrow fold over his shoulder; he thanked her carelessly, and she watched him sweep languidly across the buttercupped and dandelioned grass of the meadow-land about the house, to the dark shelter of the pine grove at the north. The sun struck full upon the long levels of the boughs, and kindled their needles to a glistening mass; underneath, the ground was red, and through the warm-looking twilight of the sparse wood the gray canvas of a tent showed; Matt often slept there in the summer, and so the place was called the camp. There was a hammock between two of the trees, just beyond the low stone wall, and Louise saw Maxwell get into it.

Matt came out on the piazza in his blue woollen shirt and overalls and high boots, and his cork helmet topping all.

“You look like a cultivated cowboy that had gobbled an English tourist, Matt,” said his sister. “Have you got anything for me?”

Matt had some letters in his hands which the man had just brought up from the post-office. “No; but there are two for Maxwell—”

“I will carry them to him, if you’re busy. He’s just gone over to the camp.”

“Well, do,” said Matt. He gave them to her, and he asked, “How do you think he is, this morning?”

“He must be pretty well; he’s been writing ever since breakfast.”

“I wish he hadn’t,” said Matt. “He ought really to be got away somewhere out of the reach of newspapers. I’ll see. Louise, how do you think a girl like Sue Northwick would feel about an outright offer of help at such a time as this?”

“How, help? It’s very difficult to help people,” said Louise, wisely. “Especially when they’re not able to help themselves. Poor Sue! I don’t know what she will do. If Jack Wilmington — but he never really cared for her, and now I don’t believe she cares for him. No, it couldn’t be.”

“No; the idea of love would be sickening to her now.”

Louise opened her eyes. “Why, I don’t know what you mean, Matt. If she still cared for him, I can’t imagine any time when she would rather know that he cared for her.”

“But her pride — wouldn’t she feel that she couldn’t meet him on equal terms—”

“Oh, pride! Stuff! Do you suppose that a girl who really cared for a person would think of the terms she met them on? When it comes to such a thing as that there is no pride; and proud girls and meek girls are just alike — like cats in the dark.”

“Do you think so?” asked Matt; the sunny glisten, which had been wanting to them before, came into his eyes.

“I know so,” said Louise. “Why, do you think that Jack Wilmington still—”

“No; no. I was just wondering. I think I shall run down to Boston to-morrow, and see father — Or, no! Mother won’t be back till to-morrow evening. Well, I will talk with you, at dinner, about it.”

Matt went off to his mowing, and Louise heard the cackle of his machine before she reached the camp with Maxwell’s letters.

“Don’t get up!” she called to him, when he lifted himself with one arm at the stir of her gown over the pine-needles. “Merely two letters that I thought perhaps you might want to see at once.”

He took them, and glancing at one of them threw it out on the ground. “This is from Ricker,” he said, opening the other. “If you’ll excuse me,” and he began to read it. “Well, that is all right,” he said, when he had run it through. “He can manage without me a little while longer; but a few more days like this will put an end to my loafing. I begin to feel like work, for the first time since I came up here.”

“The good air is beginning to tell,” said Louise, sitting down on the board which formed a bench between two of the trees fronting the hammock. “But if you hurry back to town, now, you will spoil everything. You must stay the whole summer.”

“You rich people are amusing,” said Maxwell, turning himself on his side, and facing her. “You think poor people can do what they like.”

“I think they can do what other people like,” said the girl, “if they will try. What is to prevent your staying here till you get perfectly well?”

“The uncertainty whether I shall ever get perfectly well, for one thing,” said Maxwell, watching with curious interest the play of the light and shade flecks on her face and figure.

“I know you will get well, if you stay,” she interrupted.

“And for another thing,” he went on, “the high and holy duty we poor people feel not to stop working for a living as long as we live. It’s a caste pride. Poverty obliges, as well as nobility.”

“Oh, pshaw! Pride obliges, too. It’s your wicked pride. You’re worse than rich people, as you call us: a great deal prouder. Rich people will let you help them.”

“So would poor people, if they didn’t need help. You can take a gift if you don’t need it. You can accept an invitation to dinner, if you’re surfeited to loathing, but you can’t let any one give you a meal if you’re hungry. You rich people are like children, compared with us poor folks. You don’t know life; you don’t know the world. I should like to do a girl brought up like you in the ignorance and helplessness of riches.”

“You would make me hateful.”

“I would make you charming.”

“Well, do me, then!”

“Ah, you wouldn’t like it.”

“Why?”

“Because — I found it out in my newspaper work, when I had to interview people and write them up — people don’t like to have the good points they have, recognized; they want you to celebrate the good points they haven’t got. If a man is amiable and kind and has something about him that wins everybody’s heart, he wants to be portrayed as a very dignified and commanding character, full of inflexible purpose and indomitable will.”

“I don’t see,” said Louise, “why you think I’m weak, and low-minded, and undignified.”

Maxwell laughed. “Did I say something of that kind?”

“You meant it.”

“If ever I have to interview you, I shall say that under a mask of apparent incoherency and irrelevance, Miss Hilary conceals a profound knowledge of human nature and a gift of divination which explores the most unconscious opinions and motives of her interlocutor. How would you like that?”

“Pretty well, because I think it’s true. But I shouldn’t like to be interviewed.”

“Well, you’re safe from me. My interviewing days are over. I believe if I keep on getting better at the rate I’ve been going the last week, I shall be able to write a play this summer, besides doing my work for the Abstract. If I could do that, and it succeeded, the riddle would be read for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I should have a handsome income, and could give up newspaper work altogether.”

“Could you? How glorious!” said Louise, with the sort of maternal sympathy she permitted herself to feel for the sick youth. “How much would you get for your play?”

“If it was only reasonably successful, it would be worth five or six thousand dollars a year.”

“And is that a handsome income?” she asked, with mounting earnestness.

He pulled himself up in the hammock to get her face fully in view, and asked, “How much do you think I’ve been able to average up to this time?”

“I don’t know. I’m afraid I don’t know at all about such things. But I should like to.”

Maxwell let himself drop back into the hammock. “I think I won’t humiliate myself by giving the figures. I’d better leave it to your imagination. You’ll be sure to make it enough.”

“Why should you be ashamed of it, if it’s ever so little?” she asked. “But I know. It’s your pride. It’s like Sue Northwick wanting to give up all her property because her father wrote that letter, and said he had used the company’s money. And Matt says it isn’t his property at all, and the company has no right to it. If she gives it up, she and her sister will have nothing to live on. And they won’t let themselves be helped — any more than — than — you will!”

“No. We began with that; people who need help can’t let you help them. Don’t they know where their father is?”

“No. But of course they must, now, before long.”

Maxwell said, after the silence that followed upon this. “I should like to have a peep into that man’s soul.”

“Horrors! Why should you?” asked Louise.

“It would be such splendid material. If he is fond of his children—”

“He and Sue dote upon each other. I don’t see how she can endure him; he always made me feel creepy.”

“Then he must have written that letter to conciliate public feeling, and to make his children easier about him and his future. And now if you could see him when he realizes that he’s only brought more shame on them, and forced them to beggar themselves — it would be a tremendous situation.”

“But I shouldn’t like to see him at such a time. It seems to me, that’s worse than interviewing, Mr. Maxwell.”

There was a sort of recoil from him in her tone, which perhaps he felt. It seemed to interest, rather than offend him. “You don’t get the artistic point of view.”

“I don’t want to get it, if that’s it. And if your play is going to be about any such thing as that—”

“It isn’t,” said Maxwell. “I failed on that. I shall try a comic motive.”

“Oh!” said Louise, in the concessive tone people use, when they do not know but they have wronged some one. She spiritually came back to him, but materially she rose to go away and leave him. She stooped for the letter he had dropped out of the hammock and gave it him. “Don’t you want this?”

“Oh, thank you! I’d forgotten it.” He glanced at the superscription, “It’s from Pinney. You ought to know Pinney, Miss Hilary, if you want the true artistic point of view.”

“Is he a literary man?”

“Pinney? Did you read the account of the defalcation in the Events — when it first came out? All illustrations?”

“That? I don’t wonder you didn’t care to read his letter! Or perhaps he’s your friend—”

“Pinney’s everybody’s friend,” said Maxwell, with an odd sort of relish. “He’s delightful. I should like to do Pinney. He’s a type.” Louise stood frowning at the mere notion of Pinney. “He’s not a bad fellow, Miss Hilary, though he is a remorseless interviewer. He would be very good material. He is a mixture of motives, like everybody else, but he has only one ambition: he wants to be the greatest newspaper man of his generation. The ladies nearly always like him. He never lets five minutes pass without speaking of his wife; he’s so proud of her he can’t keep still.”

“I should think she would detest him.”

“She doesn’t. She’s quite as proud of him as he is of her. It’s affecting to witness their devotion — or it would be if it were not such a bore.”

“I can’t understand you,” said Louise, leaving him to his letter.

XV.

Part of Matt Hilary’s protest against the status in which he found himself a swell was to wash his face for dinner in a tin basin on the back porch, like the farm-hands. When he was alone at the farm he had the hands eat with him; when his mother and sister were visiting him he pretended that the table was too small for them all at dinner and tea, though he continued to breakfast with the hands, because the ladies were never up at his hour; the hands knew well enough what it meant, but they liked Matt.

Louise found him at the roller-towel, after his emblematic ablutions. “Oh, is it so near dinner?” she asked.

“Yes. Where is Maxwell?”

“I left him up at the camp.” She walked a little way out into the ground-ivy that matted the back-yard under the scattering spruce trees.

Matt followed, and watched the homing and departing bees around the hives in the deep, red-clovered grass near the wall.

“Those fellows will be swarming before long,” he said, with a measure of the good comradeship he felt for all living things.

“I don’t see,” said Louise, plucking a tender, green shoot from one of the fir boughs overhead, “why Mr. Maxwell is so hard.”

“Is he hard?” asked Matt. “Well, perhaps he is.”

“He is very sneering and bitter,” said the girl. “I don’t like it.”

“Ah, he’s to blame for that,” Matt said. “But as for his hardness, that probably comes from his having had to make such a hard fight for what he wants to be in life. That hardens people, and brutalizes them, but somehow we mostly admire them and applaud them for their success against odds. If we had a true civilization a man wouldn’t have to fight for the chance to do the thing he is fittest for, that is, to be himself. But I’m glad you don’t like Maxwell’s hardness; I don’t myself.”

“He seems to look upon the whole world as material, as he calls it; he doesn’t seem to regard people as fellow beings, as you do, Matt, or even as servants or inferiors; he hasn’t so much kindness for them as that.”

“Well, that’s the odious side of the artistic nature,” said Matt, smiling tolerantly. “But he’ll probably get over that; he’s very young; he thinks he has to be relentlessly literary now.”

“He’s older than I am!” said Louise.

“He hasn’t seen so much of the world.”

“He thinks he’s seen a great deal more. I don’t think he’s half so nice as we supposed. I should call him dangerous.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say that, exactly,” Matt returned. “But he certainly hasn’t our traditions. I’ll just step over and call him to dinner.”

“Oh, no! Let me try if I can blow the horn.” She ran to where the long tin tube hung on the porch, and coming out with it again, set it to her lips and evoked some stertorous and crumby notes from it. “Do you suppose he saw me?” she asked, running back with the horn.

Matt could not say; but Maxwell had seen her, and had thought of a poem which he imagined illustrated with the figure of a tall, beautiful girl lifting a long tin horn to her lips with outstretched arms. He did not know whether to name it simply The Dinner Horn, or grotesquely, Hebe Calling the Gods to Nectar. He debated the question as he came lagging over the grass with his cushion in one hand and Pinney’s letter, still opened, in the other. He said to Matt, who came out to get the cushion of him, “Here’s something I’d like to talk over with you, when you’ve the time.”

“Well, after dinner,” said Matt.

Pinney’s letter was a long one, written in pencil on one side of long slips of paper, like printer’s copy; the slips were each carefully folioed in the upper right hand corner; but the language was the language of Pinney’s life, and not the decorative diction which he usually addressed to the public on such slips of paper.

“I guess,” it began, “I’ve got onto the biggest thing yet, Maxwell. The Events is going to send me to do the Social Science Congress which meets in Quebec this year, and I’m going to take Mrs. Pinney along and have a good time. She’s got so she can travel first-rate, now; and the change will do her and the baby both good. I shall interview the social science wiseacres, and do their proceedings, of course, but the thing that I’m onto is Northwick. I’ve always felt that Northwick kind of belonged to yours truly, anyway; I was the only man that worked him up in any sort of shape, at the time the defalcation came out, and I’ve got a little idea that I think will simply clean out all competition. That letter of his set me to thinking, as soon as I read it, and my wife and I both happened on the idea at the same time; clear case of telepathy. Our idea is that Northwick didn’t go to Europe — of course he didn’t! — but he’s just holding out for terms with the company. I don’t believe he’s got off with much money; but if he was going into business with it in Canada, he would have laid low till he’d made his investments. So my theory is that he’s got all the money he took with him except his living expenses. I believe I can find Northwick, and I am not going to come home without trying hard. I am going to have a detective’s legal outfit, and I flatter myself I can get Northwick over the frontier somehow, and restore him to the arms of his anxious friends of the Ponkwasset Company. I don’t know yet just how I shall do it, but I guess I shall do it. I shall have Mrs. Pinney’s advice and counsel, and she’s a team; but I shall have to leave her and the baby at Quebec, while I’m roaming round in Rimouski and the wilderness generally, and I shall need active help.

“Now, I liked some things in that Abstract article of yours; it was snappy and literary, and all that, and it showed grasp of the subject. It showed a humane and merciful spirit toward our honored friend that could be made to tell in my little game if I could get the use of it. So I’ve concluded to let you in on the ground floor, if you want to go into the enterprise with me; if you don’t, don’t give it away; that’s all. My idea is that Northwick can be got at quicker by two than by one; but we have not only got to get at him, but we have got to get him; and get him on this side of Jordan. I guess we shall have to do that by moral suasion mostly, and that’s where your massive and penetrating intellect will be right on deck. You won’t have to play a part, either; if you believe that his only chance of happiness on earth is to come home and spend the rest of his life in State’s prison, you can conscientiously work him from that point of view. Seriously, Maxwell, I think this is a great chance. If there’s any of that money he speaks of we shall have our pickings: and then as a mere scoop, if we get at Northwick at all, whether we can coax him over the line or not, we will knock out the fellow that fired the Ephesian dome so that he’ll never come to time in all eternity.

“I mean business, Maxwell; I haven’t mentioned this to anybody but my wife, yet; and if you don’t go in with me, nobody shall. I want you, old boy, and I’m willing to pay for you. If this thing goes through, I shall be in a position to name my own place and price on the Events. I expect to be managing editor before the year’s out, and then I shall secure the best talent as leading writer, which his name is Brice E. Maxwell, and don’t you forget it.

“Now, you think it over, Maxwell. There’s no hurry. Take time. We’ve got to wait till the Soc. Sci. Congress meets, anyway, and we’ve got to let the professional pursuit die out. This letter of Northwick’s will set a lot of detectives after him, and if they can’t find him, or can’t work him after they’ve found him, they’ll get tired, and give him up for a bad job. Then will be the time for the gifted amateur to step in and show what a free and untrammelled press can do to punish vice and reward virtue.”

XVI.

Maxwell explained to Matt, as he had explained to Louise, that Pinney was the reporter who had written up the Northwick case for The Events. He said, after Matt had finished reading the letter, “I thought you would like to know about this. I don’t regard Pinney’s claim on my silence where you’re concerned; in fact, I don’t feel bound to him, anyway.”

“Thank you,” said Matt. “Then I suppose his proposal doesn’t tempt you?”

“Why, yes it does. But not as he imagines. I should like such an adventure well enough, because it would give me a glimpse of life and character that I should like to know something about. But the reporter business and the detective business wouldn’t attract me.”

“No, I should suppose not,” said Matt. “What sort of fellow, personally, is this — Pinney?”

“Oh, he isn’t bad. He is a regular type,” said Maxwell, with tacit enjoyment of the typicality of Pinney. “He hasn’t the least chance in the world of working up into any controlling place in the paper. They don’t know much in the Events office; but they do know Pinney. He’s a great liar and a braggart, and he has no more notion of the immunities of private life than — Well, perhaps it’s because he would as soon turn his life inside out as not, and in fact would rather. But he’s very domestic, and very kind-hearted to his wife; it seems they have a baby now, and I’ve no doubt Pinney is a pattern to parents. He’s always advising you to get married; but he’s a born Bohemian. He’s the most harmless creature in the world, so far as intentions go, and quite soft-hearted, but he wouldn’t spare his dearest friend if he could make copy of him; it would be impossible. I should say he was first a newspaper man, and then a man. He’s an awfully common nature, and hasn’t the first literary instinct. If I had any mystery, or mere privacy that I wanted to guard; and I thought Pinney was on the scent of it, I shouldn’t have any more scruple in setting my foot on him than I would on that snake.”

A little reptile, allured by their immobility, had crept out of the stone wall which they were standing near, and lay flashing its keen eyes at them, and running out its tongue, a forked thread of tremulous scarlet. Maxwell brought his heel down upon its head as he spoke, and ground it into the earth.

Matt winced at the anguish of the twisting and writhing thing. “Ah, I don’t think I should have killed it!”

“I should,” said Maxwell.

“Then you think one couldn’t trust him?”

“Yes. If you put your foot on him in some sort of agreement, and kept it there. Why, of course! Any man can be held. But don’t let Pinney have room to wriggle.”

They turned, and walked away, Matt keeping the image of the tormented snake in his mind; it somehow mixed there with the idea of Pinney, and unconsciously softened him toward the reporter.

“Would there be any harm,” he asked, after a while, “in my acting on a knowledge of this letter in behalf of Mr. Northwick’s family?”

“Not a bit,” said Maxwell. “I make you perfectly free of it, as far as I’m concerned; and it can’t hurt Pinney, even if he ought to be spared. He wouldn’t spare you.”

“I don’t know,” said Matt, “that I could justify myself in hurting him on that ground. I shall be careful about him. I don’t at all know that I shall want to use it; but it has just struck me that perhaps — But I don’t know! I should have to talk with their attorney — I will see about it! And I thank you very much, Mr. Maxwell.”

“Look here, Mr. Hilary!” said Maxwell. “Use Pinney all you please, and all you can; but I warn you he is a dangerous tool. He doesn’t mean any harm till he’s tempted, and when it’s done he doesn’t think it’s any harm. He isn’t to be trusted an instant beyond his self-interest; and yet he has flashes of unselfishness that would deceive the very elect. Good heavens!” cried Maxwell, “if I could get such a character as Pinney’s into a story or a play, I wouldn’t take odds from any man living!”

His notion, whatever it was, grew upon Matt, so that he waited more and more impatiently for his mother’s return, in order to act upon it. When she did get back to the farm she could only report from the Northwicks that she had said pretty much what she thought she would like to say to Suzette concerning her wilfulness and obstinacy in wishing to give up her property; but Matt inferred that she had at the same time been able to infuse so much motherly comfort into her scolding that it had left the girl consoled and encouraged. She had found out from Adeline that their great distress was not knowing yet where their father was. Apparently he thought that his published letter was sufficient reassurance for the time being. Perhaps he did not wish them to get at him in any way, or to have his purposes affected by any appeal from them. Perhaps, as Adeline firmly believed, his mind had been warped by his suffering — he must have suffered greatly — and he was not able to reason quite sanely about the situation. Mrs. Hilary spoke of the dignity and strength which both the sisters showed in their trial and present stress. She praised Suzette, especially; she said her trouble seemed to have softened and chastened her; she was really a noble girl, and she had sent her love to Louise; they had both wished to be remembered to every one. “Adeline, especially, wished to be remembered to you, Matt; she said they should never forget your kindness.”

Matt got over to Hatboro’ the next day, and went to see Putney, who received him with some ironical politeness, when Matt said he had come hoping to be useful to his clients, the Miss Northwicks.

“Well, we all hope something of that kind, Mr. Hilary. You were here on a mission of that kind before. But may I ask why you think I should believe you wish to be useful to them?”

“Why?”

“Yes. Your father is the president of the company Mr. Northwick had his little embarrassment with, and the natural presumption would be that you could not really be friendly toward his family.”

“But we are friendly! All of us! My father would do them any service in his power, consistent with his duty to — to — his business associates.”

“Ah, that’s just the point. And you would all do anything you could for them, consistent with your duty to him. That’s perfectly right — perfectly natural. But you must see that it doesn’t form a ground of common interest for us. I talked with you about the Miss Northwicks’ affairs the other day — too much, I think. But I can’t to-day. I shall be glad to converse with you on any other topic — discuss the ways of God to man, or any little interest of that kind. But unless I can see my way clearer to confidence between us in regard to my clients’ affairs than I do at present, I must avoid them.”

It was absurd; but in his high good-will toward Adeline, and in his latent tenderness for Suzette, Matt was hurt by the lawyer’s distrust, somewhat as you are hurt when the cashier of a strange bank turns over your check and says you must bring some one to recognize you. It cost Matt a pang; it took him a moment to own that Putney was right. Then he said, “Of course, I must offer you proof somehow that I’ve come to you in good faith. I don’t know exactly how I shall be able to do it. Would the assurance of my friend, Mr. Wade, the rector of St. Michael’s—”

The name seemed to affect Putney pleasantly; he smiled, and then he said, “Brother Wade is a good man, and his words usually carry conviction, but this is a serious subject, Mr. Hilary.” He laughed, and concluded earnestly, “You must know that I can’t talk with you on any such authority. I couldn’t talk with Mr. Wade himself.”

“No, no; of course not,” Matt assented; and he took himself off crestfallen, ashamed of his own short-sightedness.

There was only one way out of the trouble, and now he blamed himself for not having tried to take that way at the outset. He had justified himself in shrinking from it by many plausible excuses, but he could justify himself no longer. He rejoiced in feeling compelled, as it were, to take it. At least, now, he should not be acting from any selfish impulse, and if there were anything unseemly in what he was going to do, he should have no regrets on that score, even in the shame of failure.

XVII.

Matt Hilary gave himself time, on his way to the Northwick place, or at least as much time as would pass between walking and driving, but that was because he was impatient, and his own going seemed faster to his nerves than that of the swiftest horse could have seemed. At the crest of the upland which divides Hatboro’ from South Hatboro’, and just beyond the avenue leading to Dr. Morrell’s house, he met Sue Northwick; she was walking quickly, too. She was in mourning, but she had put aside her long, crape veil, and she came towards him with her proud face framed in the black, and looking the paler for it; a little of her yellow hair showed under her bonnet. She moved imperiously, and Matt was afraid to think what he was thinking at sight of her. She seemed not to know him at first, or rather not to realize that it was he; when she did, a joyful light, which she did not try to hide from him, flashed over her visage; and “Mr. Hilary!” she said as simply and hospitably as if their last parting had not been on terms of enmity that nothing could clear up or explain away.

He ran forward and caught her hand. “Oh, I am so glad,” he said. “I was going out to see you about something — very important; and I might have missed you.”

“No. I was just coming to the doctor’s, and then I was going back. My sister isn’t at all well, and I thought she’d better see the doctor.”

“It’s nothing serious, I hope?”

“Oh, no. I think she’s a little worn out.”’

“I know!” said Matt, with intelligence, and nothing more was said between them as to the cause or nature of Adeline’s sickness. Matt asked if he might go up the doctor’s avenue with her, and they walked along together under the mingling elm and maple tops, but he deferred the matter he wished to speak of. They found a little girl playing in the road near the house, and Sue asked, “Is your father at home, Idella?”

“Mamma is at home,” said the child. She ran forward, calling toward the open doors and windows, “Mamma! Mamma! Here’s a lady!”

“It isn’t their child,” Sue explained. “It’s the daughter of the minister who was killed on the railroad, here, a year or two ago — a very strange man, Mr. Peck.”

“I have heard Wade speak of him,” said Matt.

A handsome and very happy looking woman came to the door, and stilled the little one’s boisterous proclamation to the hoarse whisper of, “A lady! A lady!” as she took her hand; but she did not rebuke or correct her.

“How do you do, Mrs. Morrell,” said Suzette, with rather a haughty distance; but Matt felt that she kept aloof with the pride of a person who comes from an infected house, and will not put herself at the risk of avoidance. “I wished to see Dr. Morrell about my sister. She isn’t well. Will you kindly ask him to call?”

“I will send him as soon as he comes,” said Mrs. Morrell, giving Matt that glance of liking which no good woman could withhold. “Unless,” she added, “you would like to come in and wait for him.”

“Thank you, no,” said Suzette. “I must go back to her. Good-by.”

“Good-by!” said Mrs. Morrell.

Matt raised his hat and silently bowed; but as they turned away, he said to Suzette, “What a happy face! What a lovely face! What a good face!”

“She is a very good woman,” said the girl. “She has been very kind to us. But so has everybody. I couldn’t have believed it.” In fact, it was only the kindness of their neighbors that had come near the defaulter’s daughters; the harshness and the hate had kept away.

“Why shouldn’t they be kind?” Matt demanded, with his heart instantly in his throat. “I can’t imagine — at such a time — Don’t you know that I love you?” he entreated, as if that exactly followed; there was, perhaps, a subtle spiritual sequence, transcending all order of logic in the expression of his passion.

She looked at him over her shoulder as he walked by her side, and said, with neither surprise nor joy, “How can you say such a thing to me?”

“Because it is true! Because I can’t help it! Because I wish to be everything to you, and I have to begin by saying that. But don’t answer me now; you need never answer me. I only wish you to use me as you would use some one who loved you beyond anything on earth, — as freely as that, and yet not be bound or hampered by me in the least. Can you do that? I mean, can you feel, ‘This is my best friend, the truest friend that any one can have, and I will let him do anything and everything he wishes for me.’ Can you do that, — say that?”

“But how could I do that? I don’t understand you!” she said, faintly.

“Don’t you? I am so glad you don’t drive me from you—”

“I? You!”

“I was afraid — But now we can speak reasonably about it; I don’t see why people shouldn’t. I know it’s shocking to speak to you of such a thing at such a time. It’s dreadful; and yet I can’t feel wrong to have done it! No! If it’s as sacred as it seems to me when I think of it, then it couldn’t be wrong in the presence of death itself. I do love you; and I want you some day for my wife. Yes! But don’t answer that now! If you never answer me, or if you deny me at last, still I want you to let me be your true lover, while I can, and to do everything that your accepted lover could, whether you ever look at me again or not. Couldn’t you do that?”

“You know I couldn’t,” she answered, simply.

“Couldn’t you?” he asked, and he fell into a forlorn silence, as if he could not say anything more. He forced her to take the word by asking, “Then you are offended with me?”

“How could I be?”

“Oh—”

“It’s what any girl might be glad of—”

“Oh, my—”

“And I am not so silly as to think there can be a wrong time for it. If there were, you would make it right, if you chose it. You couldn’t do anything I should think wrong. And I — I — love you, too—”

“Suzette! Suzette!” he called wildly, as if she were a great way off. It seemed to him his heart would burst. He got awkwardly before her, and tried to seize her hand.

She slipped by him, with a pathetic “Don’t! But you know I never could be your wife. You know that.”

“I don’t know it. Why shouldn’t you?”

“Because I couldn’t bring my father’s shame on my husband.”

“It wouldn’t touch me, any more than it touches you!”

“It would touch your father and mother — and Louise.”

“They all admire you and honor you. They think you’re everything that’s true and grand.”

“Yes, while I keep to myself. And I shall keep to myself. I know how; and I shall not give way. Don’t think it!”

“You will do what is right. I shall think that.”

“Don’t praise me! I can’t bear it.”

“But I love you, and how can I help praising you? And if you love me—”

“I do. I do, with all my heart.” She turned and gave him an impassioned look from the height of her inapproachability.

“Then I won’t ask you to be my wife, Suzette! I know how you feel; I won’t be such a liar as to pretend I don’t. And I will respect your feeling, as the holiest thing on earth. And if you wish, we will be engaged as no other lovers ever were. You shall promise nothing but to let me help you all I can, for our love’s sake, and I will promise never to speak to you of our love again. That shall be our secret — our engagement. Will you promise?”

“It will be hard for you,” she said, with a pitying look, which perhaps tried him as sorely as anything could.

“Not if I can believe I am making it easy for you.”

They walked along, and she said with averted eyes, that he knew had tears in them, “I promise.”

“And I promise, too,” he said.

She impulsively put out her left hand toward him, and he held its slim fingers in his right a moment, and then let it drop. They both honestly thought they had got the better of that which laughs from its innumerable disguises at all stratagems and all devices to escape it.

“And now,” he said, “I want to talk to you about what brought me over here to-day. I thought at first that I was only going to see your lawyer.”

XVIII.

Matt felt that he need now no longer practise those reserves in speaking to Sue of her father, which he had observed so painfully hitherto. Neither did she shrink from the fact they had to deal with. In the trust established between them, they spoke of it all openly, and if there was any difference in them concerning it, the difference was in his greater forbearance toward the unhappy man. They both spoke of his wrong-doing as if it were his infirmity; they could not do otherwise; and they both insensibly assumed his irresponsibility in a measure; they dwelt in the fiction or the persuasion of a mental obliquity which would account for otherwise unaccountable things.

“It is what my sister has always said,” Sue eagerly assented to his suggestion of this theory. “I suppose it’s what I’ve always believed, too, somehow, or I couldn’t have lived.”

“Yes; yes, it must be so,” Matt insisted. “But now the question is how to reach him, and make some beginning of the end with him. I suppose it’s the suspense and the uncertainty that is breaking your sister down?”

“Yes — that and what we ought to do about giving up the property. We — quarrelled about that at first; we couldn’t see it alike; but now I’ve yielded; we’ve both yielded; and we don’t know what to do.”

“We must talk all that over with your lawyer, in connection with something I’ve just heard of.” He told her of Pinney’s scheme, and he said, “We must see if we can’t turn it to account.”

They agreed not to talk of her father with Adeline, but she began it herself. She looked very old and frail, as she sat nervously rocking herself in a corner of the cottage parlor, and her voice had a sharp, anxious note. “What I think is, that now we know father is alive, we oughtn’t to do anything about the property without hearing from him. It stands to reason, don’t you think it does, Mr. Hilary, that he would know better than anybody else, what we ought to do. Any rate, I think we ought to wait and consult with him about it, and see what he says. The property belonged to mother in the first place, and he mightn’t like to have us part with it.”

“I don’t think you need trouble about that, now, Miss Northwick,” said Matt. “Nothing need be done about the property at present.”

“But I keep thinking about it. I want to do what Sue thinks is right, and to see it just in the light she does; and I’ve told her I would do exactly as she said about it; but now she won’t say; and so I think we’ve got to wait and hear from father. Don’t you?”

“Decidedly, I think you ought to do nothing now, till you hear from him,” said Matt.

“I knew you would,” said the old maid, “and if Sue will be ruled by me, she’ll see that it will all turn out right. I know father, and I know he’ll want to do what is sensible, and at the same time honorable. He is a person who could never bear to wrong any one out of a cent.”

“Well,” said Sue, “we will do what Mr. Hilary says; and now, try not to worry about it any more,” she coaxed.

“Oh, yes! It’s well enough to say not to worry now, when my mind’s got going on it,” said the old maid, querulously; she flung her weak frame against the chair-back, and she began to wipe the gathering tears. “But if you’d agreed with me in the first place, it wouldn’t have come to this. Now I’m all broken down, and I don’t know when I shall be well again.”

It was a painful moment; Sue patiently adjusted the cushion to her sister’s shoulders, while Adeline’s tongue ran helplessly on. “You were so headstrong and stubborn, I thought you would kill me. You were just like a rock, and I could beat myself to pieces against you, and you wouldn’t move.”

“I was wrong,” said the proud girl, meekly.

“I’m sure,” Adeline whimpered, “I hate to make an exhibition before Mr. Hilary, as much as any one, but I can’t help it; no, I can’t. My nerves are all gone.”

The doctor came, and Sue followed Matt out of doors, to leave her, for the first few confidential moments, sacred to the flow of symptoms, alone with the physician. There was a little sequestered space among the avenue firs beside the lodge, with a bench, toward which he led the way, but the girl would not sit down. She stood with her arms fallen at her side, and looked him steadily in the face.

“It’s all true that she said of me. I set myself like a rock against her. I have made her sick, and if she died, I should be her murderer!”

He put his arms round her, and folded her to his heart. “Oh, my love, my love, my love!” he lamented and exulted over her.

She did not try to resist; she let her arms hang at her side; she said, “Is this the way we keep our word? — Already!”

“Our word was made to be broken; we must have meant it so. I’m glad we could break it so soon. Now I can truly help you; now that you are to be my wife.”

She did not gainsay him, but she asked, “What will you think when you know — you must have known that I used to care for some else; but he never cared for me? It ought to make you despise me; it made me despise myself! But it is true. I did care all the world for him, once. Now will you say—”

“Now, more than ever,” said the young man, silencing her lips with his own, and in their trance of love the world seemed to reel away from under their feet, with all its sorrows and shames, and leave them in mid-heaven.

“Suzette!” Adeline’s voice called from within. “Suzette! Where are you?”

Sue released herself, and ran into the cottage. She came out again in a little while, and said that the doctor thought Adeline had better go to bed for a day or two and have a thorough rest, and relief from all excitement. “We mustn’t talk before her any more, and you mustn’t stay any longer.”

He accepted the authority she instinctively assumed over him, and found his dismissal already of the order of things. He said, “Yes, I’ll go at once. But about—”

She put a card into his hand. “You can see Mr. Putney, and whatever you and he think best, will be best. Haven’t you been our good angel ever since — Oh, I’m not half good enough for you, and I shouldn’t be, even if there were no stain—”

“Stop!” he said; he caught her hand, and pulled her toward him.

The doctor came out, and said in a low voice, “There’s nothing to be anxious about, but she really must have quiet. I’ll send Mrs. Morrell down to see you, after tea. She’s quiet itself.”

Suzette submitted, and let Matt take her hand again in parting.

“Will you give me a lift, doctor, if you’re going toward town?”

“Get in,” said the doctor.

Sue went indoors, and the two men drove off together.

Matt looked at the card in his hand, and read: “Mr. Putney: Please talk to Mr. Hilary as you would to my sister or me.” Suzette’s printed name served for signature. Matt put the card in his pocket-book, and then he said, “What sort of man is Mr. Putney, doctor?”

“Mr. Putney,” said the doctor, with a twinkle of his blue eyes, “is one of those uncommon people who have enemies. He has a good many because he’s a man that thinks, and then says what he thinks. But he’s his own worst enemy, because from time to time he gets drunk.”

“A character,” said Matt. “Do you think he’s a safe one? Doesn’t his getting drunk from time to time interfere with his usefulness?”

“Well, of course,” said the doctor. “It’s bad for him; but I think it’s slowly getting better. Yes, decidedly. It’s very extraordinary, but ever since he’s been in charge of the Miss Northwicks’ interests—”

“Yes; that’s what I was thinking of.”

“He’s kept perfectly straight. It’s as if the responsibilities had steadied him.”

“But if he goes on sprees, he may be on the verge of one that’s gathering violence from its postponement,” Matt suggested.

“I think not,” said the doctor after a moment. “But of course I can’t tell.”

“They trust him so implicitly,” said Matt.

“I know,” said the doctor. “And I know that he’s entirely devoted to them. The fact is, Putney’s a very dear friend of mine.”

“Oh, excuse me—”

“No, no!” The doctor stayed Matt’s apologies. “I understand just what you mean. He disliked their father very much. He was principled against him as a merely rich man, with mischievous influence on the imaginations of all the poor people about him who wanted to be like him—”

“Oh, that’s rather good,” said Matt.

“Do you think so?” asked the doctor, looking round at him. “Well! I supposed you would be all the other way. Well! What I was saying was that Putney looks upon these poor girls as their father’s chief victims. I think he was touched by their coming to him, and has pitied them. The impression is that he’s managed their affairs very well; I don’t know about such things; but I know he’s managed them honorably; I would stake my life on it; and I believe he’ll hold out straight to the last. I suppose,” the doctor conjectured, at the end, “that they will try to get at Northwick now, and arrange with his creditors for his return.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” said Matt, “that it’s been tried and failed. The State’s attorney insists that he shall come back and stand his trial, first of all.”

“Oh!” said the doctor.

“Of course, that’s right from the legal point of view. But in the meantime, nobody knows where Mr. Northwick is.”

“I suppose,” said the doctor, “it would have been better for him not to have written that letter.”

“It’s hard to say,” Matt answered. “I thought so, too, at first. I thought it was cowardly and selfish of him to take away his children’s superstition about his honesty. You knew that they held to that through all?”

“Most touching thing in the world,” said the doctor, leaning forward to push a fly off his horse with the limp point of his whip. “That poor old maid has talked it into me till I almost believed it myself.”

“I don’t know that I should hold him severely accountable. And I’m not sure now that I should condemn him for writing that letter. It must have been a great relief to him. In a way, you may say he had to do it. It’s conceivable that if he had kept it on his mind any longer, his mind would have given way. As it is, they have now the comfort of another superstition — if it is a superstition. What do you think, doctor? Do you believe that there was a mental twist in him?”

“There seems to be in nearly all these defaulters. What they do is so senseless — so insane. I suppose that’s the true theory of all crime. But it won’t do to act upon it, yet awhile.”

“No.”

The doctor went on after a pause, with a laugh of enjoyment at the notion. “Above all, it won’t do to let the defaulters act upon that theory, and apply for admission to the insane asylums instead of taking the express for Canada, when they’re found out.”

“Oh, no,” said Matt. He wondered at himself for being able to analyze the offence of Suzette’s father so cold-bloodedly. But in fact he could not relate the thought of her to the thought of him in his sin, at all; he could only realize their kindred in her share of his suffering.

XIX.

Putney accepted Suzette’s authorization of Matt with apparent unconsciousness of anything but its immediate meaning, and they talked Pinney’s scheme intimately over together. In the end, it still remained a question whether the energies of such an investigator could be confined to the discovery of Northwick’s whereabouts; whether his newspaper instincts would not be too strong for any sense of personal advantage that could be appealed to in him. They both believed that it would not be long before Northwick followed up the publication of his letter by some communication with his family.

But time began to go by again, and Northwick made no further sign; the flurry of activity which his letter had called out in the detectives came to nothing. Their search was not very strenuous; Northwick’s creditors were of various minds as to the amount of money he had carried away with him. Every one knew that if he chose to stay in Canada, he could not be molested there; and it seemed very improbable that he could be persuaded to put himself within reach of the law. The law had no terms to offer him, and there was really nothing to be done.

Putney forecast all this in his talk with Matt, when he held that they must wait Northwick’s motion. He professed himself willing to wait as long as Northwick chose, though he thought they would not have to wait long, and he contended for a theory of the man’s whole performance which he said he should like to have tested before a jury.

Matt could not make out how much he really meant by saying that Northwick could be defended very fairly on the ground of insanity; and that he would enjoy managing such a defence. It was a common thing to show that a murderer was insane; why not a defaulter? Tilted back in his chair, with one leg over the corner of his table, and changing the tobacco in his mouth from one cheek to the other as he talked, the lawyer outlined the argument which he said could be made very effective. There was the fact to begin with, that Northwick was a very wealthy man, and had no need of more money when he began to speculate; Putney held that this want of motive could be made a strong point; and that the reckless, almost open, way in which Northwick used the company’s money, when he began to borrow, was proof in itself of unsound mind: apparently he had no sense whatever of meum and tuum, especially tuum. Then, the total collapse of the man when he was found out; his flight without an effort to retrieve himself, although his shortage was by no means hopelessly vast, and could have been almost made up by skilful use of the credit that Northwick could command, was another evidence of shaken reason. But besides all this, there was his behavior since he left home. He had been absent nearly five months, and in that time he had made no attempt whatever to communicate with his family, although he must have known that it was perfectly safe for him to do so. He was a father who was almost dotingly fond of his children, and singularly attached to his home; yet he had remained all that time in voluntary exile, and he had left them in entire uncertainty as to his fate except so far as they could accept the probability of his death by a horrible casualty. This inversion of the natural character of a man was one of the most striking phenomena of insanity, and Putney, for the purpose of argument, maintained that it could be made to tell tremendously with a jury.

Matt was unable to enjoy the sardonic metaphysics of the case with Putney. He said gravely that he had been talking of the matter with Dr. Morrell, and he had no doubt that there was a taint of insanity in every wrong-doer; some day he believed the law would take cognizance of the fact.

“I don’t suppose the time is quite ripe yet, though I think I could make out a strong case for Brother Northwick,” said Putney. He seemed to enter into it more fully, as if he had a mischievous perception of Matt’s uneasiness, and chose to torment him; but then apparently he changed his mind, and dealt with other aspects of their common interest so seriously and sympathetically, that Matt parted from him with a regret that he could not remove the last barrier between them, and tell the lawyer that he concerned himself so anxiously in the affairs of that wretched defaulter because his dearest hope was that the daughter of the criminal would some day be his wife.

But Matt felt that this fact must first be confided to those who were nearest him; and how to shape it in terms that would convey the fact and yet hide the repulsiveness he knew in it, was the question that teased him all the way back to Vardley, like some tiresome riddle. He understood why his love for Suzette Northwick must be grievous to his father and mother; how embarrassing, how disappointing, how really in some sort disastrous; and yet he felt that if there was anything more sacred than another in the world for him, it was that love, he must be true to it at whatever cost, and in every event, and he must begin by being perfectly frank with those whom it would afflict, and confessing to himself all its difficulties and drawbacks. He was not much afraid of dealing with his father; they were both men, and they could look at it from the man’s point of view. Besides, his father really cared little what people would say; after the first fever of disgust, if he did not change wholly and favor it vehemently, he would see so much good in it that he would be promptly and finally reconciled.

But Matt knew that his mother was of another make, and that the blow would be much harder for her to bear; his problem was how to lighten it. Sometimes he thought he had better not try to lighten it, but let it fall at once, and trust to her affection and good sense for the rest. But when he found himself alone with her that night, he began by making play and keeping her beyond reach. He was so lost in this perverse effort that he was not aware of some such effort on her part, till she suddenly dropped it, and said, “Matt, there is something I wish to speak to you about — very seriously.”

His heart jumped into his throat, but he said “Well?” and she went on.

“Louise tells me that you think of bringing this young man down to the shore with you when you come to see us next week.”

“Maxwell? I thought the change might do him good; yes,” said Matt, with a cowardly joy in his escape from the worst he feared. He thought she was going to speak to him of Suzette.

She said, “I don’t wish you to bring him. I don’t wish Louise to see him again after she leaves this place — ever again. She is fascinated with him.”

“Fascinated?”

“I can’t call it anything else. I don’t say that she’s in love; but there’s no question but she’s allowed her curiosity to run wild, and her fancy to be taken; the two strongest things in her — in most girls. I want to break it all up.”

“But do you think—”

“I know. It isn’t that she’s with him at every moment, but that her thoughts are with him when they’re apart. He puzzles her; he piques her; she’s always talking and asking about him. It’s their difference in everything that does it. I don’t mean to say that her heart is touched, and I don’t intend it shall be. So, you mustn’t ask him to the shore with you, and if you’ve asked him already, you must get out of it. If you think he needs sea air, you can get him board at some of the resorts. But not near us.” She asked, in default of any response from her son, “You don’t think, Matt, it would be well for the acquaintance to go on?”

“No, I don’t mother; you’re quite right as to that,” said Matt, “if you’re not mistaken in supposing—”

“I’m not; you may depend upon it. And I’m glad you can see the matter from my point of view. It is all very well for you to have your queer opinions, and even to live them. I think it’s all ridiculous; but your father and I both respect you for your sincerity, though your course has been a great disappointment to us.”

“I know that, mother,” said Matt, groaning in spirit to think how much worse the disappointment he was meditating must be, and feeling himself dishonest and cowardly, through and through.

“But I feel sure,” Mrs. Hilary went on, “that when it’s a question of your sister, you would wish her life to be continued on the same plane, and in the surroundings she had always been used to.”

“I should think that best, certainly, for a girl of Louise’s ideas,” said Matt, trying to get his own to the surface.

“Ideas!” cried his mother. “She has no ideas. She merely has impulses, and her impulses are to do what people wish. But her education and breeding have been different from those of such a young man, and she would be very unhappy with him. They never could quite understand each other, no matter how much they were in love. I know he is very talented, and all that; and I shouldn’t at all mind his being poor. I never minded Cyril Wade’s being poor, when I thought he had taken her fancy, because he was one of ourselves; and this young man — Matt, you can’t pretend, that with all his intellectual qualities, he’s what one calls a gentleman. With his origin and bringing up; his coarse experiences; all his trials and struggles; even with his successes, he couldn’t be; and Louise could not be happy with him for that very reason. He might have all the gifts, all the virtues, under the sun; I don’t deny that he has—”

“He has some very serious faults,” Matt interrupted.

“We all have,” said Mrs. Hilary, tolerantly. “But he might be a perfect saint — a hero — a martyr, and if he wasn’t what one calls a gentleman, don’t you see? We can’t be frank about such things, here, because we live in a republic; but—”

“We get there, just the same,” said Matt, with unwonted slang.

“Yes,” said his mother. “That is what I mean.”

“And you’re quite right, as to the facts, mother.” He got up, and began to walk about the long, low living-room of the farmhouse where they were sitting. Louise had gone to direct her maid in packing for her flitting to the seaside in the morning; Matt could see a light in the ell-chamber where Maxwell was probably writing. “The self-made man can never be the society equal of the society-made man. He may have more brains, more money, more virtue, but he’s a kind of inferior, and he betrays his inferiority in every worldly exigency. And if he’s successful, he’s so because he’s been stronger, fiercer, harder than others in the battle of life. That’s one reason why I say that there oughtn’t to be any battle of life. Maxwell has the defects of his disadvantages — I see that. He’s often bitter, and cynical, and cruel because he has had to fight for his bread. He isn’t Louise’s social equal; I quite agree with you there, mother; and if she wants to live for society, he would be always in danger of wounding her by his inferiority to other people of her sort. I’m sorry for Maxwell, but I don’t pity him, especially. He bears the penalty of his misfortunes; but he is strong enough to bear it. Let him stand it! But there are others — weaker, unhappier — Mother! You haven’t asked me yet about — the Northwicks.” Matt stopped in front of her chair, and looked down into her lifted face, where the satisfaction his acquiescence in her views concerning Louise was scarcely marred by her perception that he had not changed his mind at all on other points. She was used to his way of thinking, and she gratefully resolved to be more and more patient with it, and give him time for the change that was sure to come. She interpreted the look of stormy wistfulness he wore as an expression of his perplexity in the presence of the contradictory facts and theories.

“No,” she said, “I expected to do that. You know I’ve seen them so very lately, and with this about Louise on my mind — How are they? That poor Adeline — I’m afraid it’s killing her. Were you able to do anything for them?”

“Ah, I don’t know,” the young man sighed. “They have to suffer for their misfortunes, too.”

“It seems to be the order of Providence,” said Mrs. Hilary, with the resignation of the philosophical spectator.

“No!” Matt protested. “It’s the disorder of improvidence. There’s nothing of the Divine will in consequences so unjust and oppressive. Those women are perfectly innocent; they’ve only wished to do right, and tried to do it; but they’re under a ban the same as if they had shared their father’s guilt. They have no friends—”

“Well, Matt,” said his mother, with dignity, “I think you can hardly say that. I’m sure that as far as we are concerned, we have nothing to reproach ourselves with. I think we’ve gone to the extreme to show our good-will. How much further do you want us to go? Come; I don’t like your saying this!”

“I beg your pardon. I certainly don’t blame you, or Louise, or father. I blame myself — for cowardice — for — for unworthiness in being afraid to say — to tell you — Mother,” he burst out suddenly, after a halt, “I’ve asked Suzette Northwick to marry me.”

Matt had tried to imagine himself saying this to his mother, and the effect it would have, ever since he had left Suzette’s absorbing presence; all through his talk with Putney, and all the way home, and now throughout what he and his mother had been saying of Maxwell and Louise. But it always seemed impossible, and more and more impossible, so that when he found the words spoken in his own voice, it seemed wholly incredible.

XX.

The effect of a thing is never quite what we have forecast. Mrs. Hilary heard Matt’s confession without apparently anything of his tumult in making it. Women, after all, dwell mainly in the region of the affections; even the most worldly women have their likes and dislikes, and the question of the sort Matt had sprung upon his mother, is first a personal question with them. She was not a very worldly woman; but she liked her place in the world, and she preferred conformity and similarity; the people she was born of and bred with, were the nicest kind of people, and she did not see how any one could differ from them to advantage. Their ideas were the best, or they would not have had them; she, herself, did not wish to have other ideas. But her family was more, far more, to her than her world was. She knew that in his time her husband had not had the ideas of her world concerning slavery, but she had always contrived to honor the ideas of both. Since her son had begun to disagree with her world concerning what he called the industrial slavery, she contrived, without the sense of inconsistency, to suffer him and yet remain with the world. She represented in her maternal tolerance, the principle actuating the church, which includes the facts as fast as they accomplish themselves, without changing any point of doctrine.

“Then you mean, Matt,” she asked, “that you are going to marry her?”

“Yes,” said Matt, “that is what I mean,” and then, something in his mother’s way of taking it nettled him on Sue’s behalf. “But I don’t know that my marrying her necessarily followed from my asking her. I expected her to refuse me.”

“Men always do; I don’t know why,” said Mrs. Hilary. “But in this case I can’t imagine it.”

“Can’t imagine it? I can imagine it!” Matt retorted; but his mother did not seem to notice his resentment.

“Then, if it’s quite settled, you don’t wish me to say anything?”

“I wish you to say everything, mother — all that you feel and think — about her, and the whole affair. But I don’t wish you to think — I can’t let you think — that she has ever, by one look or word, allowed me to suppose that my offer would be welcome.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” said Mrs. Hilary. “She would be too proud for that. But I’ve no doubt it was welcome.” Matt fretted in silence, but he allowed his mother to go on. “She is a very proud girl, and I’ve no doubt that what she’s been through has intensified her pride.”

“I don’t suppose she’s perfect,” said Matt. “I’m not perfect, myself. But I don’t conceal her faults from myself any more than I do my own. I know she’s proud. I don’t admire pride; but I suppose that with her it can’t be helped.”

“I don’t know that I object to it,” said Mrs. Hilary. “It doesn’t always imply hardness; it goes with very good things, sometimes. That hauteur of hers is very effective. I’ve seen it carry her through with people who might have been disposed to look down on her for some reasons.”

“I shouldn’t value it, for that,” Matt interrupted.

“No. But she made it serve her instead of her want of those family connections that every one else has—”

“She will have all of ours, I hope, mother!” Matt broke in, with a smile; but his mother would not be diverted from the point she was making.

“And that it always seemed so odd she shouldn’t have. I’m sure that to see her come into a room, you would think half Boston, or all the princes of the blood, were her cousins. She’s certainly a magnificent creature.”

Matt differed with his mother from the ground up, in all her worldly reasons for admiring Suzette, but her praises filled his heart to overflowing. Tears stood in his eyes, and his voice trembled:

“She is — she is — angelically!”

“Well, not just that type, perhaps,” said Mrs. Hilary. “But she is a good girl. No one can help respecting her; and I think she’s even more to be respected for yielding to that poor old maid sister of hers about their property, than for wishing to give it up.”

“Yes,” Matt breathed gratefully.

“But there, there is the real skeleton, Matt! Suzette would grace the highest position. But her father! What will people say?”

“Need we mind that, mother?”

“Not, perhaps, so much, if things had remained as they were — if he had never been heard from again. But that letter of his! And what will he do next? He may come home, and offer to stand his trial!”

“I would respect him for that!” cried Matt passionately.

“Matt!”

“It isn’t a thing I should urge him to do. He may not have the strength for it. But if he had, it would be the best thing he could do, and I should be glad to stand by him!”

“And drag us all through the mire? Surely, my son, whatever you feel about your mother and sister, you can’t wish your poor father to suffer anything more on that wretch’s account?”

“Wish? No. And heaven knows how deeply anxious I am about the effect my engagement may have on father. I’m afraid it will embarrass him — compromise him, even—”

“As to that, I can’t say,” said Mrs. Hilary. “You and he ought to know best. One thing is certain. There won’t be any opposition on his part or mine, my son, that you won’t see yourself is reasonable—”

“Oh, I am sure of that, mother! And I can’t tell you how deeply I feel—”

“Your father appreciates Suzette as fully as I do; but I don’t believe he could stand any more Quixotism from you, Matt, and if you intend to make your marriage a preliminary to getting your father-in-law into State’s prison, you may be very sure your father won’t approve of your marriage.”

Matt laughed at the humor of the proposition, which his mother did not perceive so keenly.

“I don’t intend that, exactly.”

“And I’m satisfied, as it is, he won’t be easy about it till the thing is hushed up, or dies out of itself, if it’s let alone.”

“But father can’t let it alone!” said Matt. “It’s his duty to follow it up at every opportunity. I don’t want you to deceive yourself about the matter. I want you to understand just how it will be. I have tried to face it squarely, and I know how it looks. I shall try to make Suzette see it as I do, and I’m sure she will. I don’t think her father is guiltier than a great many other people who haven’t been found out. But he has been found out, and he ought, for the sake of the community, to be willing to bear the penalty the law inflicts. That is his only hope, his salvation, his duty. Father’s duty is to make him bear it whether he’s willing or not. It’s a much more odious duty—”

“I don’t understand you, Matt, saying your father’s part is more odious than a self-confessed defaulter’s.”

“No, I don’t say—”

“Then I think you’d better go to your father, and reconcile your duty with his, if you can. I wash my hands of the affair. It seems to me, though, that you’ve quite lost your head. The world will look very differently, I can assure you, at a woman whose father died in Canada, nobody could remember just why, from what it will on one whose father was sent to State’s prison for taking money that didn’t belong to him.”

Matt flung up his arms; “Oh, the world, the world! I won’t let the world enter! I will never let Suzette face its mean and cruel prejudices. She will come here to the farm with me, and we will live down the memory of what she has innocently suffered, and we will let the world go its way.”

“And don’t you think the world will follow you here? Don’t you suppose it is here, ready to welcome you home with all those prejudices you hope you can shun? Every old gossip of the neighborhood will point Suzette out, as the daughter of a man who is serving his term in jail for fraud. The great world forgets, but this little world around you here would remember it as long as either of you lived. No; the day you marry Suzette Northwick, you must make up your mind to follow her father into exile, or else to share his shame with her at home.”

“I’ve made up my mind to share that shame at home. I never could ask her to run from it.”

“Then for pity’s sake, let that miserable man alone, wherever he is. Or, if you can get at him, beg him to stay away, and keep still till he dies. Good-night.”

Mrs. Hilary rose from her own chair, and stooped over Matt, where he had sunk in his, and kissed his troubled forehead. He thought he had solved one part of his problem; but her words showed him that he had not rightly seen it in that light of love which had really hid it in dazzling illusions.

The difficulty had not yielded, at all, when he met his father with it; he thought it had only grown tougher and knottier; and he hardly knew how to present it. His mother had not only promised not to speak to his father of the affair, she had utterly refused to speak of it, and Matt instantly perceived that the fact he announced was somehow far more unexpected to his father than it had seemed to his mother.

But Hilary received it with a patience, a tenderness for his son, in all his amazement, that touched Matt more keenly than any other fashion of meeting it could have done. He asked if it were something that Matt had done, or had merely made up his mind some time to do; and when Matt said it was something he had done, his father was silent a moment. Then he said, “I shall have to take some action about it.”

“How, action?”

“Why, you must see, my dear boy, that as soon as this thing becomes known — and you wish it to be known, of course—”

“Of course!”

“It will be impossible for me to continue holding my present relation to Northwick.”

“Northwick?”

“As president of the Board, I’m ex officio his enemy and persecutor. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be decent, for me to continue that after it was known that you were going to marry his daughter. It wouldn’t be possible. I must resign, I must withdraw from the Board altogether. I haven’t the stuff in me to do my official duty at such a cost; so I’d better give up my office, and get rid of my duty.”

“That will be a great sacrifice for you, father,” said Matt.

“It won’t bring me to want, exactly, if you mean money-wise.”

“I didn’t mean money-wise. But I know you’ve always enjoyed the position so much.”

Hilary laughed uneasily. “Well, it hasn’t been a bed of roses since we discovered Northwick’s obliquities — excuse me!”

Matt blushed. “Oh, I know he’s oblique, as such things go.”

“In fact,” his father resumed, “I shall be glad to be out of it, and I don’t think there’ll be much opposition to my going out; I know that there’s a growing feeling against me in the Board. I have tried to carry water on both shoulders. I’ve made the effort honestly; but the effect hasn’t been good. I couldn’t keep my heart out of it; from the very first I pitied that poor devil’s children so that I got him and gave him all the chance I could.”

“That was perfectly right. It was the only business-like—”

“It wasn’t business-like to hope that even if justice were defeated he might somehow, anyhow, escape the consequences of his crime; and I’m afraid this is what I’ve hoped, in spite of myself,” said Hilary.

This was so probably true that Matt could not help his father deny it. He could only say, “I don’t believe you’ve ever allowed that hope to interfere with the strict performance of your duty, at any moment.”

“No; but I’ve had the hope; and others have had the suspicion that I’ve had it. I’ve felt that; and I’m glad that it’s coming to an end. I’m not ashamed of your choice, Matt; I’m proud of it. The thing gave me a shock at first, because I had to face the part I must take. But she’s all kinds of a splendid girl. The Board knows what she wished to do, and why she hasn’t done it. No one can help honoring her. And I don’t believe people will think the less of any of us for your wanting to marry her. But if they do, they may do it, and be damned.”

Hilary shook himself together with greater comfort than he had yet felt, upon this conclusion: but he lapsed again after the long hand-pressure that he exchanged with his son.

“We must make it our business, now, to see that no man loses anything by that — We must get at him somehow. Of course, they have no more notion where he is than we have.”

“No; not the least,” said Matt. “I think it’s the uncertainty that’s preying upon Miss Northwick.”

“The man’s behaving like a confounded lunatic,” said Hilary.

The word reminded Matt of Putney, and he said, “That’s their lawyer’s theory of him—”

“Oh, you’ve seen him, have you? Odd chap.”

“Yes; I saw him when I was up there, after — after — at the request of Suzette. I wished to talk with him about the scheme that Maxwell’s heard of from a brother reporter,” and Matt now unfolded Pinney’s plan to his father, and showed his letter.

Hilary looked from it at his son. “You don’t mean that this is the blackguard who wrote that account of the defalcation in the Events?”

“Yes; the same fellow. But as to blackguard—”

“Well, then, Matt, I don’t see how we can employ him. It seems to me it would be a kind of insult to those poor girls.”

“I had thought of that. I felt that. But after all, I don’t think he knew how much of a blackguard he was making of himself. Maxwell says he wouldn’t know. And besides, we can’t help ourselves. If he doesn’t go for us, he will go for himself. We must employ him. He’s a species of condottiere; we can buy his allegiance with his service: and we must forego the sentimental objection. I’ve gone all over it, and that’s the only conclusion.”

Hilary fumed and rebelled; but he saw that they could not help themselves, that they could not do better. He asked, “And what did their lawyer think of it?”

“He seemed to think we had better let it alone for the present; better wait and see if Mr. Northwick would not try to communicate with his family.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said Hilary. “If this fellow is such a fellow as you say, I don’t see why we shouldn’t make use of him at once.”

“Make use of him to get Mr. Northwick back?” said Matt. “I think it would be well for him to come back, but voluntarily—”

“Come back?” said Hilary, whose civic morality flew much lower than this. “Nonsense! And stir the whole filthy mess up in the courts? I mean, make use of this fellow to find him, and enable us to find out just how much money he has left, and how much we have got to supply, in order to make up his shortage.”

Matt now perceived the extent of his father’s purpose, and on its plane he honored it.

“Father, you’re splendid!”

“Stuff! I’m in a corner. What else is there to do? What less could we do? What’s the money for, if it isn’t to—” Hilary choked with the emotion that filled him at the sight of his son’s face.

Every father likes to have his grown-up son think him a good man; it is the sweetest thing that can come to him in life, far sweeter than a daughter’s faith in him; for a son knows whether his father is good or not. At the bottom of his soul Hilary cared more for his son’s opinion than most fathers; Matt was a crank, but because he was a crank, Hilary valued his judgment as something ideal.

After a moment he asked, “Can this fellow be got at?”

“Oh, I imagine very readily.”

“What did Maxwell say about him, generally?”

“Generally, that he’s not at all a bad kind of fellow. He’s a reporter by nature, and he’s a detective upon instinct. He’s done some amateur detective work, as many reporters do — according to Maxwell’s account. The two things run together — and he’s very shrewd and capable in his way. He’s going into it as a speculation, and of course he wants it to be worth his while. Maxwell says his expectation of newspaper promotion is mere brag; they know him too well to put him in any position of control. He’s a mixture, like everybody else. He’s devotedly fond of his wife, and he wants to give her and the baby a change of air—”

“My idea,” Hilary interrupted, “would be not to wait for the Social Science Convention, but to send this—”

“Pinney.”

“Pinney at once. Will you see him?”

“If you have made up your mind.”

“I’ve made up my mind. But handle the wretch carefully, and for heaven’s sake bind him by all that’s sacred — if there’s anything sacred to him — not to give the matter away. Let him fix his price, and offer him a pension for his widow afterwards.”

XXI.

Mrs. Hilary was a large woman, of portly frame, the prophecy in amplitude of what her son might come to be if he did not carry the activities of youth into his later life. She, for her part, was long past such activities; and yet she was not a woman to let the grass grow upon any path she had taken. She appointed the afternoon of the day following her talk with Matt for leaving the farm and going to the shore; Louise was to go with her, and upon the whole she judged it best to tell her why, when the girl came to say good-night, and to announce that her packing was finished.

“But what in the world are we in such a hurry for, mamma, all of a sudden?”

“We are in a hurry because — don’t you really know, Louise? — because in the crazy atmosphere of this house, one loses the sense of — of proportion — of differences.”

“Aren’t you rather — Emersonian, mamma?”

“Do you think so, my dear? Matt’s queer notions infect everybody; I don’t blame you, particularly; and the simple life he makes people lead — by leading it himself, more than anything else — makes you think that you could keep on living just as simply if you wished, everywhere.”

“It’s very sweet — it’s so restful,” sighed the girl. “It makes you sick of dinners and ashamed of dances.”

“But you must go back to them; you must go back to the world you belong to; and you’d better not carry any queer habits back with you.”

“You are rather sphinx-like, mamma! Such habits, for instance, as?”

“As Mr. Maxwell.” The girl’s face changed; her mother had touched the quick. She went on, looking steadily at her daughter, “You know he wouldn’t do, there.”

“No; he wouldn’t,” said Louise, promptly; so mournfully, though, that her mother’s heart relented.

“I’ve seen that you’ve become interested in him, Louise; that your fancy is excited; he stimulates your curiosity. I don’t wonder at it! He is very interesting. He makes you feel his power more than any other young man I’ve met. He charms your imagination even when he shocks your taste.”

“Yes; all that,” said Louise, desolately.

“But he does shock your taste?”

“Sometimes — not always.”

“Often enough, though, to make the difference that I’m afraid you’ll lose the sense of. Louise, I should be very sorry if I thought you were at all — in love with that young man!”

It seemed a question; Louise let her head droop, and answered with another. “How should I know? He hasn’t asked me.”

This vexed her mother. “Don’t be trivial, don’t be childish, my dear. You don’t need to be asked, though I’m exceedingly glad he hasn’t asked you, for now you can get away with a good conscience.”

“I’m not sure yet that I want to get away,” said the girl, dreamily.

“Yes, you are, my dear!” her mother retorted. “You know it wouldn’t do at all. It isn’t a question of his poverty; your father has money enough: it’s a question of his social quality, and of all those little nothings that make up the whole of happiness in marriage. He would be different enough, being merely a man; but being a man born and reared in as different a world from yours as if it were another planet — I want you to think over all the girls you know — all the people you know — and see how many of them have married out of their own set, their own circle — we might almost say, their own family. There isn’t one!”

“I’ve not said I wished to marry him, mamma.”

“No. But I wish you to realize just what it would be.”

“It would be something rather distinguished, if his dreams came true,” Louise suggested.

“Well, of course,” Mrs. Hilary admitted. She wished to be very, very reasonable; very, very just; it was the only thing with a girl like Louise; perhaps with any girl. “It would be distinguished, in a way. But it wouldn’t be distinguished in the society way; the only way you’ve professed to care for. I know that we’ve always been an intellectual community, and New-Yorkers, and that kind of people, think, or profess to think, that we make a great deal of literary men. We do invite them somewhat, but I pass whole seasons without meeting them; and I don’t know that you could say that they are of society, even when they are in it. If such a man has society connections, he’s in society; but he’s there on account of his connections, not on account of his achievements. This young man may become very distinguished, but he’ll always be rather queer; and he would put a society girl at odds with society. His distinction would be public; it wouldn’t be social.”

“Matt doesn’t think society is worth minding,” Louise said, casually.

“But you do,” returned her mother. “And Matt says that a man of this young man’s traditions might mortify you before society people.”

“Did Matt say that?” Louise demanded, angrily. “I will speak to Matt about that! I should like to know what he means by it. I should like to hear what he would say.”

“Very likely he would say that the society people were not worth minding. You know his nonsense. If you agree with Matt, I’ve nothing more to say, Louise; not a word. You can marry a mechanic or a day-laborer, in that case, without loss of self-respect. I’ve only been talking to you on the plane where I’ve always understood you wished to be taken. But if you don’t, then I can’t help it. You must understand, though, and understand distinctly, that you can’t live on two levels; the world won’t let you. Either you must be in the world and of it entirely; or you must discard its criterions, and form your own, and hover about in a sort of Bohemian limbo on its outskirts; or you must give it up altogether.” Mrs. Hilary rose from the lounge where she had been sitting, and said, “Now I’m going to bed. And I want you to think this all carefully over, Louise. I don’t blame you for it: and I wish nothing but your good and happiness — yours and Matt’s, both. But I must say you’ve been pretty difficult children to provide for. Do you know what Matt has been doing?” Mrs. Hilary had not meant to speak of it, but she felt an invincible necessity of doing so, at last.

“Something new about the Northwicks?”

“Very decidedly — or about one of them. He’s offered himself to Suzette.”

“How grand! How perfectly magnificent! Then she can give up her property at once, and Matt can take care of her and Adeline both.”

“Or, your father can, for him. Matt has not the crime of being a capitalist on his conscience. His idea seems to be to get Suzette to live here on the farm with him.”

“I don’t believe she’d be satisfied with that,” said Louise. “But could she bear to face the world? Wouldn’t she always be thinking what people thought?”

“I felt that I ought to suggest that to Matt; though, really, when it comes to the practical side of the matter, people wouldn’t care much what her father had been — that is, society people wouldn’t, as society people. She would have the education and the traditions of a lady, and she would have Matt’s name. It’s nonsense to suppose there wouldn’t be talk; but I don’t believe there would be anything that couldn’t be lived down. The fact is,” said Mrs. Hilary, giving her daughter the advantage of a species of soliloquy, “I think we ought to be glad Matt has let us off so easily. I’ve been afraid that he would end by marrying some farmer’s daughter, and bringing somebody into the family who would say ‘Want to know,’ and ‘How?’ and ‘What-say?’ through her nose. Suzette is indefinitely better than that, no matter what her father is. But I must confess that it was a shock when Matt told me they were engaged.”

“Why, were you surprised, mamma?” said Louise. “I thought all along that it would come to that. I knew in the first place, Matt’s sympathy would be roused, and you know that’s the strongest thing in him. And then, Suzette is a beautiful girl. She’s perfectly regal; and she’s just Matt’s opposite, every way; and, of course he would be taken with her. I’m not a bit surprised. Why it’s the most natural thing in the world.”

“It might be very much worse,” sighed Mrs. Hilary. “As soon as he has seen your father, we must announce it, and face it out with people. Fortunately, it’s summer; and a great many have gone abroad this year.”

Louise began to laugh. “Even Mr. Northwick is abroad.”

“Yes, and I hope he’ll stay there,” said Mrs. Hilary, wincing.

“It would be quite like Matt, wouldn’t it, to have him brought home in chains, long enough to give away the bride?”

“Louise!” said her mother.

Louise began to cry. “Oh, you think it’s nothing,” she said stormily, “for Matt to marry a girl whose father ran away with other people’s money; but a man who has fought his way honestly is disgraceful, no matter how gifted he is, because he hasn’t the traditions of a society man—”

“I won’t condescend to answer your unjust nonsense, my dear,” said Mrs. Hilary. “I will merely ask you if you wish to marry Mr. Maxwell—”

“I will take care of myself!” cried the girl, in open, if not definite rebellion. She flung from the room, and ran upstairs to her chamber, which looked across at the chamber where Maxwell’s light was burning. She dropped on her knees beside the window, and bowed herself to the light, that swam on her tears, a golden mist, and pitied and entreated it, and remained there, till the lamp was suddenly quenched, and the moon possessed itself of the night in unbroken splendor.

After breakfast, which she made late the next morning, she found Maxwell waiting for her on the piazza.

“Are you going over to the camp?” she asked.

“I was, after I had said good-by,” he answered.

“Oh, we’re not going for several hours yet. We shall take the noon train, mamma’s decided.” She possessed herself of the cushion, stuffed with spruce sprays, that lay on the piazza-steps, and added, “I will go over with you.” They had hitherto made some pretence, one to the other, for being together at the camp; but this morning neither feigned any reason for it. Louise stopped, when she found he was not keeping up with her, and turned to him, and waited for him to reach her. “I wanted to speak with you, Mr. Maxwell, and I expect you to be very patient and tractable.” She said this very authoritatively; she ended by asking, “Will you?”

“It depends upon what it is. I am always docile if I like a thing.”

“Well, you ought to like this.”

“Oh, that’s different. That’s often infuriating.”

They went on, and then paused at the low stone wall between the pasture and the pines.

“Before I say it, you must promise to take it in the right way,” she said.

He asked, teasingly, “Why do you think I won’t?”

“Because — because I wish you to so much!”

“And am I such a contrary-minded person that you can’t trust me to behave myself, under ordinary provocation?”

“You may think the provocation is extraordinary.”

“Well, let’s see.” He got himself over the wall, and allowed her to scramble after him.

She asked herself whether, if he had the traditions of a society man, he would have done that; but somehow, when she looked at his dreamy face, rapt in remote thought that beautified it from afar, she did not care for his neglect of small attentions. She said to herself that if a woman could be the companion of his thoughts that would be enough; she did not go into the details of arranging association with thoughts so far off as Maxwell’s; she did not ask herself whether it would be easy or possible. She put the cushion into the hammock for a pillow, but he chose to sit beside her on the bench between the pine-tree boles, and the hammock swayed empty in the light breeze that woke the sea-song of the boughs over them.

“I don’t know exactly how to begin,” she said, after a little silence.

“If you’ll tell me what you want to say,” he suggested, “I’ll begin for you.”

“No, thank you, I’ll begin myself. Do you remember, the other day, when we were here, and were talking of the difference in peoples’ pride?”

“Purse pride and poverty pride? Yes, I remember that.”

“I didn’t like what you said, then; or, rather, what you were.”

“Have you begun now? Why didn’t you?”

“Because — because you seemed very worldly.”

“And do you object to the world? I didn’t make it,” said Maxwell, with his scornful smile. “But I’ve no criticisms of the Creator to offer. I take the world as I find it, and as soon as I get a little stronger, I’m going back to it. But I thought you were rather worldly yourself, Miss Hilary.”

“I don’t know. I don’t believe I am, very. Don’t you think the kind of life Matt’s trying to live is better?”

“Your brother is the best man I ever knew—”

“Oh, isn’t he? Magnificent!”

“But life means business. Even literary life, as I understand it, means business.”

“And can’t you think — can’t you wish — for anything better than the life that means business?” she asked, she almost entreated. “Why should you ever wish to go back to the world? If you could live in the country away from society, and all its vanity and vexation of spirit, why wouldn’t you rather lead a literary life that didn’t mean business?”

“But how? Are you proposing a public subscription, or a fairy godmother?” asked Maxwell.

“No; merely the golden age. I’m just supposing the case,” said Louise. “You were born in Arcady, you know,” she added, with a wistful smile.

“Arcady is a good place to emigrate from,” said Maxwell, with a smile that was not wistful. “It’s like Vermont, where I was born, too. And if I owned the whole of Arcady, I should have no use for it till I had seen what the world had to offer. Then I might like it for a few months in the summer.”

“Yes,” she sighed faintly, and suddenly she rose, and said, “I must go and put the finishing touches. Good-by, Mr. Maxwell” — she mechanically gave him her hand. “I hope you will soon be well enough to get back to the world again.”

“Thank you,” he said, in surprise. “But the great trial you were going to make of my patience, my docility—”

She caught away her hand. “Oh, that wasn’t anything. I’ve decided not. Good-by! Don’t go through the empty form of coming back to the house with me. I’ll take your adieus to mamma.” She put the cushion into the hammock. “You had better stay and try to get a nap, and gather strength for the battle of life as fast as you can.”

She spoke so gayly and lightly, that Maxwell, with all his subtlety, felt no other mood in her. He did not even notice, till afterwards, that she had said nothing about their meeting again. He got into the hammock, and after a while he drowsed, with a delicious, poetic sense of her capricious charm, as she drifted back to the farmhouse, over the sloping meadow. He visioned a future in which fame had given him courage to tell her his love.

Mrs. Hilary knew from her daughter’s face that something had happened; but she knew also that it was not what she dreaded.

PART THIRD.

I.

Matt Hilary saw Pinney, and easily got at the truth of his hopes and possibilities concerning Northwick. He found that the reporter really expected to do little more than to find his man, and make a newspaper sensation out of his discovery. He was willing to forego this in the interest of Northwick’s family, if it could be made worth his while; he said he had always sympathized with his family, and Mrs. Pinney had, and he would be glad to be of use to them. He was so far from conceiving that his account of the defalcation in the Events could have been displeasing to them, that he bore them none of an offender’s malice. He referred to his masterpiece in proof of his interest, and he promptly agreed with Matt as to the terms of his visit to Canada, and its object.

It was, in fact, the more practicable, because, since he had written to Maxwell, there had been a change in his plans and expectations. Pinney was disappointed in the Events’ people; they had not seen his proposed excursion as he had; the failure of Northwick’s letter, as an enterprise, had dashed their interest in him; and they did not care to invest in Pinney’s scheme, even so far as to guarantee his expenses. This disgusted Pinney, and turned his thoughts strongly toward another calling. It was not altogether strange to him; he had already done some minor pieces of amateur detective work, and acquitted himself with gratifying success; and he had lately seen a private detective, who attested his appreciation of Pinney’s skill by offering him a partnership. His wife was not in favor of his undertaking the work, though she could not deny that he had some distinct qualification for it. The air of confidence which he diffused about him unconsciously, and which often served him so well in newspaper life, was in itself the most valuable property that a detective could have. She said this, and she did not object to the profession itself, except for the dangers that she believed it involved. She did not wish Pinney to incur these, and she would not be laughed out of her fears when he told her that there were lines of detective work that were not half so dangerous, in the long run, as that of a reporter subject to assignment. She only answered that she would much rather he kept along on the newspaper. But this offer to look up Northwick in behalf of his family, was a different affair. That would give them a chance for their outing in Canada, and pay them better than any newspaper enterprise. They agreed to this, and upon how much good it would do the baby, and they imagined how Mrs. Pinney should stay quietly at Quebec, while Pinney went about, looking up his man, if that was necessary.

“And then,” he said, “if I find him, and all goes well, and I can get him to come home with me by moral suasion, I can butter my bread on both sides. There’s a reward out for him; and I guess I will just qualify as a detective before we start, so as to be prepared for emergencies—”

“Lorenzo Pinney!” screamed his wife. “Don’t you think of such a wicked thing! So dishonorable!”

“How wicked? How dishonorable?” demanded Pinney.

“I’m ashamed to have to tell you, if you don’t see; and I won’t. But if you go as a detective, go as a detective; and if you go as their friend, to help them and serve them, then go that way. But don’t you try to carry water on both shoulders. If you do, I won’t stir a step with you; so there!”

“Ah!” said Pinney, “I understand. I didn’t catch on, at first. Well, you needn’t be afraid of my mixing drinks. I’ll just use the old fellow for practice. Very likely he may lead to something else in the defaulter line. You won’t object to that?”

“No; I won’t object to that.”

They had the light preparations of young housekeepers to make, and they were off to the field of Pinney’s work in a very few days after he had seen Matt, and told him that he would talk it over with his wife. At Quebec he found board for his family at the same hotel where Northwick had stopped in the winter, but it had kept no recognizable trace of him in the name of Warwick on its register. Pinney passed a week of search in the city, where he had to carry on his investigations with an eye not only to Northwick’s discovery, but to his concealment as well. If he could find him he must hide him from the pursuit of others, and he went about his work in the journalistic rather than the legal way. He had not wholly “severed his connection,” as the newspaper phrase is, with the Events. He had a fast and loose relation with it, pending a closer tie with his friend, the detective, which authorized him to keep its name on his card; and he was soon friends with all the gentlemen of the local press. They did not understand, in their old-fashioned, quiet ideal of newspaper work, the vigor with which Pinney proposed to enjoy the leisure of his vacation in exploiting all the journalistic material relating to the financial exiles resident in their city. But they had a sort of local pride in their presence, and with their help Pinney came to know all that was to be known of them. The colony was not large, but it had its differences, its distinctions, which the citizens were very well aware of. There are defaulters and defaulters, and the blame is not in all cases the same, nor the breeding of the offenders. Pinney learned that there were defaulters who were in society, and not merely because they were defaulters for large sums and were of good social standing at home, but because there were circumstances that attenuated their offence in the eyes of the people of their city of refuge; they judged them by their known intentions and their exigencies, as the justice they had fled from could not judge them. There were other defaulters of a different type and condition, whose status followed them: embezzlers who had deliberately planned their misdeeds, and who had fallen from no domestic dignity in their exclusion from respectable association abroad. These Pinney saw in their walks about the town; and he was not too proud, for the purposes of art, to make their acquaintance, and to study in their vacancy and solitude the dulness and weariness of exile. They did not consort together, but held aloof from one another, and professed to be ignorant each of the affairs of the rest. Pinney sympathized in tone if not in sentiment with them, but he did not lure them to the confidence he so often enjoyed; they proved to be men of reticent temper; when frankly invited to speak of their history and their hopes in the interest of the reputations they had left behind them, they said they had no statement to make.

It was not from them that Pinney could hope to learn anything of the man he was seeking; Northwick was not of their order, morally or socially, and from the polite circles where the more elect of the exiles moved, Pinney was himself excluded by the habits of his life and by the choice of the people who formed those circles. This seemed to Pinney rather comical, and it might have led him to say some satirical things of the local society, if it had been in him to say bitter things at all. As it was, it amused his inexhaustible amiability that an honest man like himself should not be admitted to the company of even the swellest defaulters when he was willing to seek it. He regretted that it should be so, mainly because Northwick could have been heard of among them, if at all; and when all his other efforts to trace him at Quebec failed, he did not linger there. In fact he had not expected to find him there, but he had begun his search at that point, because he must stop there on his way to Rimouski, where Northwick’s letter to the Events was posted. This postmark was the only real clue he had; but he left no stone unturned at Quebec, lest Northwick should be under it. By the time he came to the end of his endeavors, Mrs. Pinney and the baby were on such friendly terms with the landlady of the hotel where they were staying, that Pinney felt as easy at parting from them as he could ever hope to feel. His soft heart of husband and father was torn at leaving them behind; but he did not think it well to take them with him, not knowing what Rimouski might be like, or how long he might be kept remote from an English-speaking, or English-practising, doctor. He got a passage down the river on one of the steamers for Liverpool; and with many vows, in compliance with his wife’s charges, that he would not let the vessel by any chance carry him on to Europe, he rent himself away. She wagged the baby’s hand at him from the window where she stood to watch him getting into the calash, and the vision of her there shone in his tears, as the calash dashed wildly down Mountain Hill Street, and whirled him through the Lower Town on to the steamer’s landing. He went to his stateroom as soon as he got aboard, that he might give free course to his heartache, and form resolutions to be morally worthy of getting back alive to them, and of finding them well. He would, if he could, have given up his whole enterprise; and he was only supported in it by remembering what she had said in praise of its object. She had said that if he could be the means of finding their father for those two poor women, she should think it the greatest thing that ever was; and more to be glad of than if he could restore him to his creditors. Pinney had laughed at this womanish view of it; he had said that in either case it would be business, and nothing else; but now his heart warmed with acceptance of it as the only right view. He pledged himself to it in anticipative requital of the Providence that was to bring them all together again, alive and well; good as he had felt himself to be, when he thought of the love in which he and his wife were bound, he had never experienced so deep and thorough a sense of desert as in this moment. He must succeed, if only to crown so meritorious a marriage with the glory of success and found it in lasting prosperity.

II.

These emotions still filled Pinney to the throat when at last he left his cabin and went forward to the smoking-room, where he found a number of veteran voyagers enjoying their cigars over the cards which they had already drawn against the tedium of the ocean passage. Some were not playing, but merely smoking and talking, with glasses of clear, pale straw-colored liquid before them. In a group of these the principal speaker seemed to be an American; the two men who chorused him were Canadians; they laughed and applauded with enjoyment of what was national as well as what was individual in his talk.

“Well, I never saw a man as mad as old Oiseau when he told about that fellow, and how he tried to start him out every day to visit his soap-mine in the ‘ill, as he called it, and how the fellow would slip out of it, day after day, week after week, till at last Oiseau got tired, and gave him the bounce when the first boat came up in the spring. He tried to make him believe it would be good for his health, to go out prospecting with him, let alone making his everlasting fortune; but it was no good; and all the time Oiseau was afraid he would fall into my hands and invest with me. ‘I make you a present of ‘im, Mr. Markham,’ says he. ‘I ‘ave no more use for him, if you find him.’”

One of the Canadians said, “I don’t suppose he really had anything to invest.”

“Why, yes, that was the curious thing about it; he had a belt full of thousand-dollar bills round him. They found it when he was sick; and old Oiseau was so afraid that something would happen to him, and he would be suspected of it, that he nursed him like a brother till he got well, and as soon as he was able to get away he bounced him.”

“And what do you suppose was the matter with him, that he wouldn’t even go to look at Oiseau’s soap-mine?”

“Well,” said the American, closing his eyes for the better enjoyment of the analysis, and giving a long, slow pull at his cigar, “there might have been any one of several things. My idea is that he was a defaulter, and the thousand-dollar bills — there were forty or fifty of them, Oiseau says — were part of the money he got away with. Then, very likely he had no faith in Oiseau — knew it was probably a soap-mine, and was just putting him off till he could get away himself. Or, maybe his fever left him a little cracked, and he didn’t know exactly what he was about. Then, again, if my theory of what the man was is true, I think that kind of fellow gets a twist simply from what he’s done. A good many of them must bring money away with them, and there are business openings everywhere; but you never hear of their going into anything over here.”

“That is odd,” said the Canadian.

“Or would be if it were not so common. It’s the rule here, and I don’t know an exception. The defaulter never does anything with his money, except live on it. Meigs, who built those railroads on the Andes, is the only one who ever showed enterprise; and I never understood that it was a private enterprise with him. Anyway, the American defaulter who goes to Canada never makes any effort to grow up with the country. He simply rests on his laurels, or else employs his little savings to negotiate a safe return. No, sir; there’s something in defalcation that saps a man’s business energies, and I don’t suppose that old fellow would have been able to invest in Oiseau’s gold mine if it had opened at his feet, and he could have seen the sovereigns ready coined in it. He just couldn’t. I can understand that state of mind, though I don’t pretend to respect it. I can imagine just how the man trembled to go into some speculation, and didn’t dare to. Must have been an old hand at it, too. But it seems as if the money he steals becomes sacred to a man when he gets away with it, and he can’t risk it.”

“I rather think you could have overcome his scruples, Markham, if you could have got at him,” said the Canadian.

“Perhaps,” Markham assented. “But I guess I can do better with our stock in England.”

Pinney had let his cigar go out, in his excitement. He asked Markham for a light, though there were plenty of matches, and Markham accepted the request as an overture to his acquaintance.

“Brother Yank?” he suggested.

“Boston.”

“Going over?”

“Only to Rimouski. You don’t happen to know the name of that defaulter, do you?”

“No; I don’t,” said Markham.

“I had an idea I knew who it was,” said Pinney.

Markham looked sharply at him. “After somebody in Rimouski?”

“Well, not just in that sense, exactly, if you mean as a detective. But I’m a newspaper man, and this is my holiday, and I’m working up a little article about our financiers in exile while I’m resting. My name’s Pinney.”

“Markham can fill you up with the latest facts,” said the Canadian, going out; “and he’s got a gold mine that beats Oiseau’s hollow. But don’t trust him too far. I know him; he’s a partner of mine.”

“That accounts for me,” said Markham, with the tolerant light of a much-joked joker in his eyes. With Pinney alone he ceased to talk the American which seemed to please his Canadian friend, and was willing soberly to tell all he knew about Oiseau’s capitalist, whom he merely conjectured to be a defaulter. He said the man called himself Warwick, and professed to be from Chicago; and then Pinney recalled the name and address in the register of his Quebec hotel, and the date, which was about that of Northwick’s escape. “But I never dreamt of his using half of his real name,” and he told Markham what the real name was; and then he thought it safe to trust him with the nature of his special mission concerning Northwick.

“Is there any place on board where a man could go and kick himself?” he asked.

“Do it here as well as anywhere,” said Markham, breaking his cigar-ash off. But Pinney’s alluring confidence, and his simple-hearted acknowledgment of his lack of perspicacity had told upon him; he felt the fascinating need of helping Pinney, which Pinney was able to inspire in those who respected him least, and he said, “There was a priest who knew this man when he was at Haha Bay, and I believe he has a parish now — yes, he has! I remember Oiseau told me — at Rimouski. You’d better look him up.”

“Look him up!” said Pinney, in a frenzy. “I’ll live with him before I’m in Rimouski twenty seconds.”

He had no trouble in finding Père Étienne, but after the first hopeful encounter with the sunny surface sweetness of the young priest, he found him disposed to be reserved concerning the Mr. Warwick he had known at Haha Bay. It became evident that Père Étienne took Pinney for a detective; and however willing he might have been to save a soul for Paradise in the person of the man whose unhappiness he had witnessed, he was clearly not eager to help hunt a fugitive down for State’s prison.

Even when Pinney declared his true character and mission, the priest’s caution exacted all the proofs he could give, and made him submit his authorization to an English-speaking notary of the priest’s acquaintance. Then he owned that he had seen Mr. Warwick since their parting at Haha Bay; Mr. Warwick had followed him to Rimouski, after several weeks, and Père Étienne knew where he was then living. But he was still so anxious to respect the secrecy of a man who had trusted him as far as Northwick had, that it required all the logic and all the learning of the notary to convince him that Mr. Warwick, if he were the largest defaulter ever self-banished, was in no danger of extradition at Pinney’s hands. It was with many injunctions, and upon many promises, that at last he told Pinney where Mr. Warwick was living, and furnished him with a letter which was at once warrant and warning to the exile.

Pinney took the first train back toward Quebec; he left it at St. André, and crossed the St. Lawrence to Malbaie. He had no trouble there, in finding the little hostelry where Mr. Warwick lodged. But Pinney’s spirit, though not of the greatest delicacy, had become sensitized toward the defaulter through the scrupulous regard for him shown by Père Étienne no loss than by the sense of holding almost a filial relation to him in virtue of his children’s authorization. So his heart smote him at the ghastly look he got, when he advanced upon Warwick, where he sat at the inn-door, in the morning sun, and cheerily addressed him, “Mr. Northwick, I believe.”

It was the first time Northwick had heard his real name spoken since Putney had threatened him in the station, the dark February morning when he fled from home. The name he had worn for the last five months was suddenly no part of him, though till that moment it had seemed as much so as the white beard which he had suffered to hide his face.

“I don’t expect you to answer me,” said Pinney, feeling the need of taking, as well as giving time, “till you’ve looked at this letter, and of course I’ve no wish to hurry you. If I’m mistaken, and it isn’t Mr. Northwick, you won’t open the letter.”

He handed him, not the letter which Père Étienne had given him, but the letter Suzette Northwick had written her father; and Pinney saw that he recognized the hand-writing of the superscription. He saw the letter tremble in the old man’s hand, and heard its crisp rustle as he clutched it to keep it from falling to the ground. He could not bear the sight of the longing and the fears that came into his face. “No hurry; no hurry,” he said, kindly, and turned away.

III.

When Pinney came back from the little turn he took, Northwick was still holding the unopened letter in his hand. He stood looking at it in a kind of daze, and he was pale, and seemed faint.

“Why, Mr. Northwick,” said Pinney, “why don’t you read your letter? If it hadn’t been yours, don’t I know that you’d have given it back to me at once?”

“It isn’t that,” said the man, who was so much older and frailer than Pinney had expected to find him. “But — are they well? Is it — bad news?”

“No!” Pinney exulted. “They’re first-rate. You needn’t be afraid to read the letter!” Pinney’s exultation came partly from his certainty that it was really Northwick, and partly from the pleasure he felt in reassuring him; he sympathized with him as a father. His pleasure was not marred by the fact that he knew nothing of the state of Northwick’s family, and built his assertion upon the probability that the letter would contain nothing to alarm or afflict him, “Like a glass of water?” he suggested, seeing Northwick sit inert and helpless on the steps of the inn-porch, apparently without the force to break the seal of the letter. “Or a little brandy?” Pinney handed him the neat leather-covered flask his wife had reproached him for buying when they came away from home; she said he could not afford it; but he was glad he had got it, now, and he unscrewed the stopple with pride in handing it to Northwick. “You look sick.”

“I haven’t been very well,” Northwick admitted, and he touched the bottle with his lips. It revived him, and Pinney now saw that if he would leave him again, he would open the letter. There was little in it but the tender assurance Suzette gave him of their love, and the anxiety of Adeline and herself to know how and where he was. She told him that he was not to feel troubled about them; that they were well, and unhappy only for him; but he must not think they blamed him, or had ever done so. As soon as they were sure they could reach him, she said, they would write to him again. Adeline wrote a few lines with her name, to say that for some days past she had not been quite well; but that she was better and had nothing to wish for but to hear from him.

When Pinney came back a second time, he found Northwick with the letter open in his hand.

“Well, sir,” he said, with the easy respectfulness toward Northwick that had been replacing, ever since he talked with Matt Hilary, the hail-fellow manner he used with most men, and that had now fully established itself, “You’ve got some noble scenery about here.” He meant to compliment Northwick on the beauty of the landscape, as people ascribe merit to the inhabitants of a flourishing city.

Northwick, by his silence, neither accepted nor disclaimed the credit of the local picturesqueness; and Pinney ventured to add, “But you seem to take it out in nature, Mr. Northwick. The place is pretty quiet, sir.”

Northwick paid no heed to this observation, either; but after sitting mute so long that Pinney began to doubt whether he was ever going to speak at all, he began to ask some guarded and chary questions as to how Pinney had happened to find him. Pinney had no unwillingness to tell, and now he gave him the letter of Père Étienne, with a eulogy of the priest’s regard for Northwick’s interest and safety. He told him how Markham’s talk had caught his attention, and Northwick tacitly recognized the speculator. But when Pinney explained that it was the postmark on his letter to the Events that gave him the notion of going to Rimouski, he could see that Northwick was curious to know the effect of that letter with the public. At first he thought he would let him ask; but he perceived that this would be impossible for Northwick, and he decided to say, “That letter was a great sensation, Mr. Northwick.” The satisfaction that lighted up Northwick’s eyes caused Pinney to add, “I guess it set a good many people thinking about you in a different way. It showed that there was something to be said on both sides, and I believe it made friends for you, sir. Yes, sir.” Pinney had never believed this till the moment he spoke, but then it seemed so probable he had that he easily affirmed it. “I don’t believe, Mr. Northwick,” he went on, “but what this trouble could be patched up, somehow, so that you could come back, if you wanted to, give ’em time to think it over a little.”

As soon as he said this, the poison of that ulterior purpose which his wife had forbidden him, began to work in Pinney’s soul. He could not help feeling what a grand thing it would be if he could go back with Northwick in his train, and deliver him over, a captive of moral suasion, to his country’s courts. Whatever the result was, whether the conviction or the acquittal of Northwick, the process would be the making of Pinney. It would carry him to such a height in the esteem of those who knew him, that he could choose either career, and whether as a reporter or a detective, it would give his future the distinction of one of the most brilliant pieces of work in both sorts. Pinney tried his best to counteract the influence of these ideas by remembering his promises to his wife; but it was difficult to recall his promises with accuracy in his wife’s absence; and he probably owed his safety in this matter more to Northwick’s temperament than to any virtue of his own.

“I think I understand how that would be,” said the defaulter coldly; and he began very cautiously to ask Pinney the precise effect of his letter as Pinney had gathered it from print and hearsay. It was not in Pinney’s nature to give any but a rose-colored and illusory report of this; but he felt that Northwick was sizing him up while he listened, and knew just when and how much he was lying. This heightened Pinney’s respect for him, and apparently his divination of Pinney’s character had nothing to do with Northwick’s feeling toward him. So far as Pinney could make out it was friendly enough, and as their talk went on he imagined a growing trustfulness in it. Northwick kept his inferences and conclusions to himself. His natural reticence had been intensified by the solitude of his exile; it stopped him short of any expression concerning Pinney’s answers; and Pinney had to construct Northwick’s opinions from his questions. His own cunning was restlessly at work exploring Northwick’s motives in each of these, and it was not at fault in the belief it brought him that Northwick clearly understood the situation at home. He knew that the sensation of his offence and flight were past, and that so far as any public impulse to punish him was concerned, he might safely go back. But he knew that the involuntary machinery of the law must begin to operate upon him as soon as he came within its reach; and he could not learn from Pinney that anything had been done to block its wheels. The letter from his daughters threw no light upon this point; it was an appeal for some sign of life and love from him; nothing more. They, or the friends who were advising them, had not thought it best to tell him more than that they were well, and anxious to hear from him; and Pinney really knew nothing more about them. He had not been asked to Hatboro’ to see them before he started, and with all the will he had to invent comfortable and attractive circumstances for them, he was at a disadvantage for want of material. The most that he could conjecture was that Mr. Hilary’s family had not broken off their friendly relations with them. He had heard old Hilary criticised for it, and he told Northwick so.

“I guess he’s been standing by you, Mr. Northwick, as far as he consistently could,” he said; and Northwick ventured to reply that he expected that. “It was young Hilary who brought me the letter, and talked the whole thing up with me,” Pinney added.

Northwick had apparently not expected this; but he let no more than the fact appear. He kept silent for a time; then he said, “And you don’t know anything about the way they’re living?”

“No, I don’t,” said Pinney, with final candor. “But I should say they were living along there about as usual. Mr. Hilary didn’t say but what they were. I guess you haven’t got any cause to be uneasy on that score. My idea is, Mr. Northwick, that they wanted to leave you just as free as they could about themselves. They wanted to find out your whereabouts in the land of the living, first of all. You know that till that letter of yours came out, there were a good many that thought you were killed in that accident at Wellwater, the day you left home.”

Northwick started. “What accident? What do you mean?” he demanded.

“Why, didn’t you know about it? Didn’t you see the accounts? They had a name like yours amongst the missing, and people who thought you were not in it, said it was a little job you had put up. There was a despatch engaging a Pullman seat signed, T. W. Northwick—”

“Ah! I knew it!” said Northwick. “I knew that I must have signed my real name!”

“Well, of course,” said Pinney, soothingly, “a man is apt to do that, when he first takes another. It’s natural.”

“I never heard of the accident. I saw no papers for months. I wouldn’t; and then I was sick — They must have believed I was dead!”

“Well, sir,” said Pinney, “I don’t know that that follows. My wife and myself talked that up a good deal at the time, and we concluded that it was about an even thing. You see it’s pretty hard to believe that a friend is dead, even when you’ve seen him die; and I don’t understand how people that lose friends at a distance can ever quite realize that they’re gone. I guess that even if the ladies went upon the theory of the accident, there was always a kind of a merciful uncertainty about it, and that was my wife’s notion, too. But that’s neither here nor there, now, Mr. Northwick. Here you are, alive and well, in spite of all theories to the contrary — though they must have been pretty well exploded by your letter to the Events — and the question is what answer are you going to let me take back to your family? You want to send some word, don’t you? My instructions were not to urge you at all, and I won’t. But if I was in your place, I know what I should do.”

Northwick did not ask him what it was he would do. He fell into a deep silence which it seemed to Pinney he would never break; and his face became such a blank that all Pinney’s subtlety was at fault. It is doubtful, indeed, if there was anything definite or directed in the mute misery of Northwick’s soul. It was not a sharp anguish, such as a finer soul’s might have been, but it was a real misery, of a measure and a quality that he had not felt before. Now he realized how much he must have made his children suffer. Perhaps it wrung him the more keenly because it seemed to be an expression of the divine displeasure, which he flattered himself he had appeased, and was a fatal consequence of his guilt. It was a terrible suggestion of the possibility that, after all, Providence might not have been a party to the understanding between them, and that his good-will toward those he had wronged had gone for nothing. He had blamed himself for not having tried to retrieve himself and make their losses good. It was no small part of his misery now to perceive that anything he might have done would have gone for nothing in this one-sided understanding. He fetched a long, unconscious sigh.

“Why, it’s all over, now, Mr. Northwick,” said Pinney, with a certain amusement at the simple-heartedness of this sigh, whose cause he did not misinterpret. “The question is now about your getting back to them.”

“Getting back? You know I can’t go back,” said Northwick, with bitter despair, and an openness that he had not shown before.

Far beneath and within the senses that apprehend the obvious things, Pinney felt the unhappy man beginning to cling to him. He returned, joyously, “I don’t know about that. Now, see here, Mr. Northwick, you believe that I’m here as your friend, don’t you? That I want to deal in good faith with you?” Northwick hesitated, and Pinney pursued, “Your daughter’s letter ought to be a guaranty of that!”

“Yes,” Northwick admitted, after another hesitation.

“Well, then, what I’m going to say is in your interest, and you’ve got to believe that I have some authority for saying it. I can’t tell you just how much, for I don’t know as I know myself exactly. But I think you can get back if you work it right. Of course, you can’t get back for nothing. It’s going to cost you something. It’s going to cost you all you’ve brought with you,” — Pinney watched Northwick’s impassive face for the next change that should pass upon it; he caught it, and added— “and more. But I happen to know that the balance will be forthcoming when it’s needed. I can’t say how I know it, for I don’t exactly know how I know it. But I do know it; and you know that it’s for you to take the first step. You must say how much money you brought with you, and where it is, and how it can be got at. I should think,” said Pinney, with a drop in his earnestness, and as if the notion had just occurred to him, “you would want to see that place of yours again.”

Northwick gave a gasp in the anguish of homesickness the words brought upon him. In a flash of what was like a luminous pang, he saw it all as it looked the night he left it in the white landscape under the high, bare wintry sky. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, with a kind of severity.

“No,” Pinney admitted, “I don’t suppose any one can begin to appreciate it as you do. But I was there, just after you skipped—”

“Then I was the kind of man who would skip,” Northwick swiftly reflected —

“And I must say I would take almost any chance of getting back to a place like that. Why,” he said, with an easy, caressing cordiality, “you can’t have any idea how completely the thing’s blown over. Why, sir, I’ll bet you could go back to Hatboro’ now, and be there twenty-four hours before anybody would wake up enough to make trouble for you. Mind, I don’t say that’s what we want you to do. We couldn’t make terms for you half as well, with you on the ground. We want you to keep your distance for the present, and let your friends work for you. Like a candidate for the presidency,” Pinney added, with a smile. “Hello! Who’s this?”

A little French maid, barefooted, black-eyed, curly-headed, shyly approached Northwick, and said, “Diner, Monsieur.”

“That means dinner,” Northwick gravely interpreted. “I will ask you to join me.”

“Oh, thank you, I shall be very glad,” said Pinney rising with him. They had been sitting on the steps of a structure that Pinney now noticed was an oddity among the bark-sheathed cabins of the little hamlet. “Why, what’s this?”

“It’s the studio of an American painter who used to come here. He hasn’t been here for several years.”

“I suppose you expect to light out if he comes,” Pinney suggested, in the spirit of good fellowship towards Northwick now thoroughly established in him.

“He couldn’t do me any harm, if he wanted to,” answered Northwick, with unresentful dignity.

“No,” Pinney readily acquiesced, “and I presume you’d be glad to hear a little English, after all the French you have around.”

“The landlord speaks a little; and the priest. He is a friend of Father Étienne.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pinney. He noticed that Northwick walked slowly and weakly; he ventured to put his hand under his elbow, and Northwick did not resent the help offered him.

“I had a very severe sickness during the latter part of the winter,” he explained, “and it pulled me down a good deal.”

“At Rimouski, I presume?” said Pinney.

“No,” said Northwick, briefly.

IV.

Over the simple dinner, which Pinney praised for the delicacy of the local lamb, and Northwick ate of so sparingly, Northwick talked more freely. He told Pinney all about his flight, and his winter journey up toward the northern verge of the civilized world. The picturesque details of this narrative, and their capability of distribution under attractive catch-heads almost maddened the reporter’s soul in Pinney with longing to make newspaper material of Northwick on the spot. But he took his honor in both hands, and held fast to it; only he promised him that if the time ever came when that story could be told, it should be both fortune and fame to him.

They sat long over their dinner. At last Pinney pulled out his watch. “What time did you say the boat for Quebec got along here?”

Northwick had not said, of course, but he now told Pinney. He knew the time well in the homesickness which mounted to a paroxysm as that hour each day came and went.

“We must get there some time in the night then,” said Pinney, still looking at his watch. “Then let’s understand each other about this: Am I to tell your family where you are? Or what? Look here!” he broke off suddenly, “why don’t you come up to Quebec with me? You’ll be just as safe there as you are here; you know that; and now that your whereabouts are bound to be known to your friends, you might as well be where they can get at you by telegraph in case of emergency. Come! What do you say?”

Northwick said simply, “Yes, I will go with you.”

“Well, now you’re shouting,” said Pinney. “Can’t I help you to put your traps together? I want to introduce you to my wife. She takes as much interest in this thing as I do; and she’ll know how to look after you a great deal better, — get you to Quebec once. She’s the greatest little nurse in this world; and, as you say, you don’t seem over and above strong. I hope you don’t object to children. We’ve got a baby, but it’s the best baby! I’ve heard that child cry just once since it was born, and that was when it first realized that it was in this vale of tears; I believe we all do that; but our baby finished up the whole crying-business on that occasion.”

With Pinney these statements led to others until he had possessed Northwick of his whole autobiography. He was in high content with himself, and his joy overflowed in all manner of affectionate services to Northwick, which Northwick accepted as the mourner entrusts his helplessness to the ghastly kindness of the undertaker, and finds in it a sort of human sympathy. If Northwick had been his own father, Pinney could not have looked after him with tenderer care, in putting his things together for him, and getting on board the boat, and making interest with the clerk for the best stateroom. He did not hesitate to describe him as an American financier; he enjoyed saying that he was in Canada for his health; and that he must have an extra room. The clerk gave up the captain’s, as all the others were taken, and Pinney occupied it with Northwick. It was larger and pleasanter than the other rooms, and after Pinney got Northwick to bed, he sat beside him and talked. Northwick said that he slept badly, and liked to have Pinney talk; Pinney could see that he was uneasy when he left the room, and glad when he got back; he made up his mind that Northwick was somehow a very sick man. He lay quite motionless in the lower berth, where Pinney made him comfortable; his hands were folded on his breast, and his eyes were closed. Sometimes Pinney, as he talked on, thought the man was dead; and there were times when he invented questions that Northwick had to answer yes or no, before he felt sure that he was still alive; his breath went and came so softly Pinney could not hear it.

Pinney told him all about his courtship and married life, and what a prize he had drawn in Mrs. Pinney. He said she had been the making of him, and if he ever did amount to anything, he should owe it to her. They had their eye on a little place out of town, out Wollaston way, and Pinney was going to try to get hold of it. He was tired of being mewed up in a flat, and he wanted the baby to get its feet on the ground, when it began to walk. He wanted to make his rent pay part of his purchase. He considered that it was every man’s duty to provide a permanent home for his family, as soon as he began to have a family; and he asked Northwick if he did not think a permanent home was the thing.

Northwick said he thought it was, and after he said that, he sighed so deeply that Pinney said, “Oh, I beg your pardon.” He had, in fact, lost the sense of Northwick’s situation, and now he recurred to it with a fresh impulse of compassion. If his compassion was mixed with interest, with business, as he would have said, it was none the less a genuine emotion, and Pinney was sincere enough in saying he wished it could be fixed so that Northwick could get back to his home; at his time of life he needed it.

“And I don’t believe but what it could be fixed,” he said. “I don’t know much about the points of the case; but I should say that with the friends you’ve got, you wouldn’t have a great deal of trouble. I presume there are some legal forms you would have to go through with; but those things can always be appealed and continued and nolle prossed, and all that, till there isn’t anything of them, in the end. Of course, it would have been different if they could have got hold of you in the beginning. But now,” said Pinney, forgetting what he had already said of it, “the whole thing has blown over, so that that letter of yours from Rimouski hardly started a ripple in Boston; I can’t say how it was in Hatboro’. No, sir, I don’t believe that if you went back now, and your friends stood by you as they ought to, — I don’t believe you’d get more than a mere nominal sentence, if you got that.”

Northwick made no reply, but Pinney fancied that his words were having weight with him, and he went on: “I don’t know whether you’ve ever kept the run of these kind of things; but a friend of mine has, and he says there isn’t one case in ten where the law carries straight. You see, public feeling has got a good deal to do with it, and when the people get to feeling that a man has suffered enough, the courts are not going to be hard on him. No, sir. I’ve seen it time and again, in my newspaper experience. The public respects a man’s sufferings, and if public opinion can’t work the courts, it can work the Governor’s council. Fact is, I looked into that business of yours a little, after you left, Mr. Northwick, and I couldn’t see, exactly, why you didn’t stay, and try to fix it up with the company. I believe you could have done it, and that was the impression of a good many other newspaper men; and they’re pretty good judges; they’ve seen a lot of life. It’s exciting, and it’s pleasant, newspaper work is,” said Pinney, straying back again into the paths of autobiography, “but I’ve got about enough of it, myself. The worst of it is, there ain’t any outcome to it. The chances of promotion are about as good as they are in the U. S. Army when the Reservations are quiet. So I’m going into something else. I’d like to tell you about it, if you ain’t too sleepy?”

“I am rather tired,” said Northwick, with affecting patience.

“Oh, well, then, I guess we’ll postpone it till to-morrow. It’ll keep. My! It don’t seem as I was going back to my wife and baby. It seems too good to be true. Every time I leave ‘em, I just bet myself I sha’n’t get back alive; or if I do that I sha’n’t find ’em safe and sound; and I’m just as sure I’ll win every time, as if I’d never lost the bet yet.”

Pinney undressed rapidly, and before he climbed into the berth over Northwick’s, he locked the door, and put the key under his pillow. Northwick did not seem to notice him, but a feeling of compunction made him put the key back in the door. “I guess I’d better leave it there, after all,” he said. “It’ll stop a key from the outside. Well, sir, good-night,” he added to Northwick, and climbed to his berth with a light heart. Toward morning he was wakened by a groaning from the lower berth, and he found Northwick in great pain. He wished to call for help; but Northwick said the pain would pass, and asked him to get him some medicine he had in his hand-bag; and when he had taken that he was easier. But he held fast to Pinney’s hand, which he had gripped in one of his spasms, and he did not loose it till Pinney heard him drawing his breath in the long respirations of sleep. Then Pinney got back to his berth, and fell heavily asleep.

He knew it was late when he woke. The boat was at rest, and must be lying at her landing in Quebec. He heard the passengers outside hurrying down the cabin to go ashore. When he had collected himself, and recalled the events of the night, he was almost afraid to look down at Northwick lest he should find him lying dead in his berth; when he summoned courage to look, he found the berth empty.

He leaped out upon the floor, and began to throw himself into his clothes. He was reassured, for a moment, by seeing Northwick’s travelling-bag in the corner with his own; but the hand-bag was gone. He rushed out, as soon as he could make himself decent, and searched every part of the boat where Northwick might probably be; but he was not to be seen.

He asked a steward how long the boat had been in; and the steward said since six o’clock. It was then eight.

Northwick was not waiting for Pinney on the wharf, and he climbed disconsolately to his hotel in the Upper Town. He bet, as a last resource, that Northwick would not be waiting there for him, to give him a pleasant surprise, and he won his disastrous wager.

It did not take his wife so long to understand what had happened, as Pinney thought it would. She went straight to the heart of the mystery.

“Did you say anything about his going back?”

“Why — in a general way,” Pinney admitted, ruefully.

“Then, of course, that made him afraid of you. You broke your word, Ren, and it’s served you right.”

His wife was walking to and fro with the baby in her arms; and she said it was sick, and she had been up all night with it. She told Pinney he had better go out and get a doctor.

It was all as different from the return Pinney had planned as it could be.

“I believe the old fool is crazy,” he said, and he felt that this was putting the mildest possible construction upon Northwick’s behavior.

“He seems to have known what he was about, anyway,” said Mrs. Pinney, coldly. The baby began to cry. “Oh, do go for the doctor!”

V.

The day was still far from dawning when Northwick crept up the silent avenue, in the dark of its firs, toward his empty house, and stealthily began to seek for that home in it which had haunted his sleeping and waking dreams so long. He had a kind of ecstacy in the risk he ran; a wild pleasure mixed with the terror he felt in being what and where he was. He wanted to laugh when he thought of the perfect ease and safety of his return. At the same time a thrilling anxiety pierced him through and through, and made him take all the precautions of a thief in the night.

A thief in the night: that was the phrase which kept repeating itself to him, till he said it over under his breath, as he put off his shoes, and stole up the piazza-steps, and began to peer into the long windows, at the blackness within. He did not at once notice that the shutters were open, with an effect of reckless security or indifference, which struck a pang to his heart when he realized it. He felt the evil omen of this faltering in the vigilance which had once guarded his home, and which he had been the first to break down, and lay it open to spoil and waste. He tried the windows; he must get in, somehow, and he did not dare to ring at the door, or to call out. He must steal into his house, as he had stolen out of it.

One of the windows yielded; the long glass door gave inward, and he stepped on the carpetless floor of the library. Then the fact of the change that must have passed upon the whole house enforced itself, and he felt a passionate desire to face and appropriate the change in every detail. He lit one of the little taper matches that he had with him, and, hollowing his hands around it, let its glimmer show him the desolation of the dismantled and abandoned rooms. He passed through the doors set wide between library and drawing-room and dining-room and hall; and then from his dying taper he lit another, and mounted the stairs. He had no need to seek his daughter’s rooms to satisfy himself that the whole place was empty; they were gone; but he had a fantastic expectation that in his own room he might find himself. There was nothing there, either; it was as if he were a ghost come back in search of the body it had left behind; any one that met him, he thought, might well be more frightened than he; and yet he did not lose the sense of risk to himself.

He had an expectation, born of long custom, and persisting in spite of the nakedness of the place otherwise, that he should see the pictured face of his wife, where it had looked so mercifully at him that last night from the portrait above the mantel. He sighed lightly to find it gone; her chair was gone from the bay-window, where he had stood to gaze his last over the possessions he was abandoning. He let his little taper die out by the hearth, and then crept toward the glimmer of the window, and looked out again. The conservatories and the dairies and the barns showed plain in the gray of the moonless, starless night; in the coachman’s quarters a little point of light appeared for a moment through the window, and then vanished.

Northwick knew from this that the place was inhabited; unless some homeless tramp like himself was haunting it, and it went through his confusion that he must speak to Newton, and caution him about tramps sleeping in the barns anywhere; they might set them on fire. His mind reverted to his actual condition, and he wondered how long he could come and go as a vagrant without being detected. If it were not for the action against vagrants which he had urged upon the selectmen the summer before, he might now come and go indefinitely. But he was not to blame; it was because Mrs. Morrell had encouraged the tramps by her reckless charity that something had to be done; and now it was working against him. It was hard: he remembered reading of a man who had left his family one day, and taken a room across the street, and lived there in sight of them unknown till he died: and now he could not have passed his own door without danger of arrest as a vagrant. He struck another match, and looked at himself in the mirror framed as a window at one side of the bay; he believed that with the long white beard he wore, and his hair which he had let grow, his own children would not have known him.

It was bitter; but his mind suddenly turned from the thought, with a lightness it had, and he remembered that now he did not know where his children lived. He must find out, somehow; he had come to see them; and he could not go back without. He must hurry to find them, and be gone again before daylight. He crept out to the stairs, and struck a match to light himself down, and he carried it still burning, toward the window he had left open behind him in the library. As soon as he stepped out on the piazza he found himself gripped fast in the arms of a man.

“I’ve got you! What you doing in here, I’d like to know? Who are you, anyway, you thief? Just hold that lantern up to his face, a minute, ‘Lectra.”

Northwick had not tried to resist; he had not struggled; he had known Elbridge Newton’s voice at the first word. He saw the figure of a woman beside him, stooping over the lantern, and he knew that it was Mrs. Newton; but he made no sort of appeal to either. He did not make the least sound or movement. The habit of his whole life was reticence, especially in emergencies; and this habit had been strengthened and deepened by the solitude in which he had passed the last half-year. If a knife had been put to his throat, he would not have uttered a cry for mercy; but his silence was so involuntary that it seemed to him he did not breathe while Mrs. Newton was turning up the wick of the lantern for a good look at him. When the light was lifted to his face, Northwick felt that they both knew him through the disguise of his white beard. Elbridge’s grip fell from him and let him stand free. “Well, I’ll be dumned,” said Elbridge.

His wife remained holding the lantern to Northwick’s face. “What are you going to do with him?” she asked at last, as if Northwick were not present; he stood so dumb and impassive.

“I d’ know as I know,” said Newton, overpowered by the peculiar complications of the case. He escaped from them for the moment in the probable inference: “I presume he was lookin’ for his daughters. Didn’t you know,” he turned to Northwick, with a sort of apologetic reproach, “lightin’ matches that way in the house, here, you might set it on fire, and you’d be sure to make people think there was somebody there, anyhow?”

Northwick made no answer to this question, and Newton looked him carefully over in the light of the lantern. “I swear, he’s in his stockin’ feet. You look round and see if you can find his shoes, anywhere, ‘Lectra. You got the light.” Newton seemed to insist upon this because it relieved him to delegate any step in this difficult matter to another.

His wife cast the light of her lantern about, and found the shoes by the piazza-steps, and as Northwick appeared no more able to move than to speak, Elbridge stooped down, and put on his shoes for him where he stood. When he lifted himself, he stared again at Northwick, as if to make perfectly sure of him, and then he said, with a sigh of perplexity, “You go ahead, a little ways, ‘Lectra, with the lantern. I presume we’ve got to take him to ‘em,” and his wife, usually voluble and wilful, silently obeyed.

“Want to see your daughters?” he asked Northwick, and at the silence which was his only response, Newton said, “Well, I don’t know as I blame him any, for not wantin’ to commit himself. You don’t want to be afraid,” he added, to Northwick, “that anybody’s goin’ to keep you against your will, you know.”

“Well, I guess not,” said Mrs. Newton, finding her tongue, at last. “If they was to double and treble the reward, I’d slap ’em in the face first. Bring him along, Elbridge.”

As Northwick no more moved than spoke, Newton took him by the arm, and helped him down the piazza-steps and into the dark of the avenue, tunnelled about their feet by the light of the lantern, as they led and pushed their helpless capture toward the lodge at the avenue gate.

Northwick had heard and understood them; he did not know what secret purpose their pretence of taking him to his children might not cover; but he was not capable of offering any resistance, and when he reached the cottage he sank passively on the steps. He shook in every nerve, while Elbridge pounded on the door, till a window above was lifted, and Adeline’s frightened voice quavered out, “Who is it? What is it?”

Mrs. Newton took the words out of her husband’s mouth. “It’s us, Miss Northwick. If you’re sure you’re awake—”

“Oh, yes. I haven’t been asleep!”

“Then listen!” said Mr. Newton, in a lowered tone. “And don’t be scared. Don’t call out — don’t speak loud. There’s somebody here — Come down, and let him in.”

Northwick stood up. He heard the fluttered rush of steps on the stairs inside. The door opened, and Adeline caught him in her arms, with choking, joyful sobs. “Oh, father! Oh, father! Oh, I knew it! I knew it! Oh, oh, oh! Where was he? How did you find him?”

She did not heed their answers. She did not realize that she was shutting them out when she shut herself in with her father; but they understood.

VI.

Northwick stared round him in the light of the lamp which Adeline turned up. He held fast by one of her hands. “What’s he going to do? Has he gone for the officer? Is he going to give me up?”

“Who? Elbridge Newton? Well, I guess his wife hasn’t forgot what you did for them when their little boy died, if he has, and I guess he hasn’t gone for any officer! Where did you see him?”

“In the house. I was there.”

“But how did he know it?”

“I had to have a light to see by.”

“Oh, my goodness! If anybody else had caught you I don’t know what I should have done. I don’t see how you could be so venturesome!”

“I thought you were there. I had to come back. I couldn’t stand it any longer, when that fellow came with your letter.”

“Oh, he found you,” she cried, joyfully. “I knew he would find you, and I said so — Sit down, father; do.” She pushed him gently into a cushioned rocking-chair. “It’s mother’s chair; don’t you remember, it always stood in the bay-window in your room, where she put it? Louise Hilary bought it at the sale — I know she bought it — and gave it to me. It was because the place was mother’s that I wouldn’t let Suzette give it up to the company.”

He did not seem to understand what she was saying. He stared at her piteously, and he said with an effort: “Adeline, I didn’t know about that accident. I didn’t know you thought I was dead, or I—”

“No! Of course you didn’t! I always told Suzette you didn’t. Don’t you suppose I always believed in you, father? We both believed in you, through it all; and when that letter of yours came out in the paper I knew you were just overwrought.”

Northwick rose and looked fearfully round him again, and then came closer to her, with his hand in his breast. He drew it out with the roll of bank-notes in it. “Here’s that money I took away with me. I always kept it in my belt: but it hurt me there. I want you should take care of it for me, and we can make terms with them to let me stay.”

“Oh, they won’t let you stay. We’ve tried it over and over; and the court won’t let you. They say you will have to be tried, and they will put you in prison.”

Northwick mechanically put the money back.

“Well, let them,” said the broken man. “I can’t stand it any longer. I have got to stay.” He sank into the chair, and Adeline broke into tears.

“Oh, I can’t let you! You must go back! Think of your good name, that there’s never been any disgrace on!”

“What — what’s that?” Northwick quavered, at the sound of footsteps overhead.

“Why, it’s Suzette, of course! And I hadn’t called her,” said Adeline, breaking off from her weeping. She ran to the foot of the stairs, and called, huskily, “Suzette, Suzette! Come down this instant! Come down, come down, come down!” She bustled back to her father. “You must be hungry, ain’t you, father? I’ll get you a cup of tea over my lamp here; the water heats as quick! And you’ll feel stronger after that. Don’t you be afraid of anything; there’s nobody here but Suzette; Mrs. Newton comes to do the work in the morning; they used to stay with us, but we don’t mind it a bit, being alone here. I did want to go into the farmhouse, when we left our own, but Suzette couldn’t bear to live right in sight of our home, all the time; she said it would be worse than being afraid; but we haven’t been afraid; and the Newtons come all the time to see if we want anything. And now that you’ve got back—” She stopped, and stared at him in a daze, and then turned to her lamp again, as if unable to cope with the situation. “I haven’t been very well, lately, but I’m getting better; and if only we could get the court to let you come back I should be as well as ever. I don’t believe but what Mr. Hilary will make it out yet. Father!” She dropped her voice, and glanced round; “Suzette’s engaged to young Mr. Hilary — oh, he’s the best young man! — and I guess they’re going to be married just as soon as we can arrange it about you. I thought I’d tell you before she came down.”

Northwick did not seem to have taken the fact in, or else he could not appreciate it rightly. “Do you suppose,” he whispered back, “that she’ll speak to me?”

“Speak to you!”

“I didn’t know. She was always so proud. But now I’ve brought back the money, all but the little I’ve had to use—”

There was a rustle of skirts on the stairs. Suzette stood a moment in the doorway, looking at her father, as if not sure he was real; then she flung herself upon him, and buried her face in his white beard, and kissed him with a passion of grief and love. She sank into his lap, with a long sigh, and let her head fall on his shoulder. All that was not simply father and daughter was for the moment annulled between them.

Adeline looked on admiring, while she kept about heating the water over her lamp; and they all took up fitfully the broken threads of their lives, and tried to piece them again into some sort of unity.

Adeline did most of the talking. She told her father how friends seemed to have been raised up for them in their need, when it was greatest. She praised herself for the inspiration she had in going to Putney for advice, because she remembered how her father had spoken of him that last night, and for refusing to give up the property to the company. She praised Putney for justifying and confirming her at every step, and for doing everything that could be done about the court. She praised the Hilarys, all of them, for their constancy to her father throughout, and she said she believed that if Mr. Hilary could have had his way, there never would have been any trouble at all about the accounts, and she wanted her father to understand just how the best people felt about him. He listened vaguely to it all. A clock in the next room struck four, and Northwick started to his feet. “I must go!”

“Go?” Adeline echoed.

“Why must you go?” said Suzette, clinging about him.

They were all silent in view of the necessity that stared them in the face.

Then Adeline roused herself from the false dream of safety in which her words had lulled her. She wailed out, “He’s got to go! Oh, Suzette, let him go! He’s got to go to prison if he stays!”

“It’s prison there” said Northwick. “Let me stay!”

“No, no! I can’t let you stay! Oh, how hard I am to make you go! What makes you leave it all to me, Suzette? It’s for you, as much as anything, I do it.”

“Then don’t do it! If father wants to stay; if he thinks he had better, or if he will feel easier, he shall stay; and you needn’t think of me. I won’t let you think of me!”

“But what would they say — Mr. Hilary say — if they sent father to prison?”

Suzette’s eyes glowed. “Let them say what they will. I know I can trust him, but if he wants to give me up for that, he may. If father wishes to stay, he shall, and nothing that they can do to him will ever make him different to us. If he tells us that he didn’t mean anything wrong, that will be enough; and people may say what they please, and think what they please.”

Northwick listened with a confused air. He looked from one to the other, as if beaten back and forth between them; he started violently, when Adeline almost screamed out: “Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about! Father, tell her you don’t wish to stay!”

“I must go, Suzette; I had better go—”

“Here, drink this tea, now, and it will give you a little strength.” Adeline pressed the cup on him that she had been getting ready through all, and made him drain it. “Now, then, hurry, hurry, hurry, father! Say good-by! You’ve got to go, now — yes, you’ve got to! — but it won’t be for long. You’ve seen us, and you’ve found out we’re alive and well, and now we can write — be sure you write, father, when you get back there; or, you’d better telegraph — and we can arrange — I know we can — for you to come home, and stay home.”

“Home! Home!” Northwick murmured.

“It seems as if he wanted to kill me!” Adeline sobbed into her hands. She took them away. “Well, stay, then!” she said.

“No, no! I’ll go,” said Northwick. “You’re not to blame, Adeline. It’s all right — all for the best. I’ll go—”

“And let us know where you are, when you get there, this time, father!” said Adeline.

“Yes, I will.”

“And we will come to you, there,” Suzette put in. “We can live together in Canada, as well as here.”

Northwick shook his head. “It’s not the same. I can’t get used to it; their business methods are different. I couldn’t put my capital into any of their enterprises. I’ve looked the whole ground over. And — and I want to get back into our place.”

He said these things vaguely, almost dryly, but with an air of final conviction, as after much sober reflection. He sat down, but Adeline would not let him be. “Well, then, we’ll help you to think out some way of getting back, after we’re all there together. Go; it’ll soon begin to be light, and I’m afraid somebody’ll see you, and stop you! But oh, my goodness! How are you going? You can’t walk! And if you try to start from our depot, they’ll know you, some one, and they’ll arrest you. What shall we do?”

“I came over from East Hatboro’ to-night,” said Northwick. “I am going back there to get the morning train.” This was the way he had planned, and he felt the strength of a fixed purpose in returning to his plan in words.

“But it’s three miles!” Adeline shrieked. “You can never get there in the world in time for the train. Oh, why didn’t I tell Elbridge to come for you! I must go and tell him to get ready right away.”

“No, I’ll go!” said Suzette. “Adeline!”

Adeline flung the door open, and started back, with a cry, from the dark, van-like vehicle before the door, which looked like the Black Maria, or an undertaker’s wagon, in the pale light.

“It’s me,” said Elbridge’s voice from the front of it, and Elbridge’s head dimly showed itself. “I got to thinkin’ maybe you’d want the carryall, and I didn’t know but what I’d better go and hitch up, anyway.”

“Oh, well, we did!” cried Adeline, with an hysterical laugh. “Here, now, father, get right in! Don’t lose a second. Kiss Suzette; good-by! Be sure you get him to East Hatboro’ in time for the four-forty, Elbridge!” She helped her father, shaking and stumbling, into the shelter of the curtained carryall. “If anybody tries to stop you—”

“I’d like to see anybody try to stop me,” said Elbridge, and he whipped up his horse. Then he leaned back toward Northwick, and said, “I’m going to get the black colt’s time out of the old mare.”

“Which mare is it?” Northwick asked.

VII.

On his way home from the station, Elbridge Newton began to have some anxieties. He had no longer occasion for any about Northwick, he was safe on his way back to Canada; and Elbridge’s anxieties were for himself. He was in the cold fit after his act of ardent generosity. He had no desire to entangle himself with the law by his act of incivism in helping Northwick to escape, and he thought it might be well to put himself on the safe side by seeing Putney about it, and locking the stable after the horse was stolen.

He drove round by the lawyer’s house, and stopped at his gate just as Putney pushed his lawn-mower up to it, in his exercise of the instrument before breakfast.

Elbridge leaned out of the carryall, and asked, in a low confidential voice, “If J. Milton Northwick was to come back here, on the sly, say, to see his family, and I was to help him git off again, would I be li’ble?”

“Why?” asked Putney.

“Because I just done it,” said Elbridge, desperately.

“Just done it?” shouted Putney. “Why, confound you!” He suddenly brought his voice down. “Do you mean to tell me the fellow’s been back here, and you didn’t let me know?”

“I hadn’t any orders to do it,” Elbridge weakly urged.

“Orders, the devil!” Putney retorted. “I’d ‘a’ given a hundred dollars to see that man and talk with him. Come, now; tell me all you know about it! Don’t miss a thing!” After a few words from Newton, he broke out: “Found him in the house! And I was down there prowling round the place myself not three hours before! Go on! Great Scott! Just think of it!”

Putney was at one of those crises of his life when his drink-devil was besetting him with sore temptation, and for the last twenty-four hours he had been fighting it with the ruses and pretences which he had learned to employ against it, but he felt that he was losing the game, though he was playing for much greater stakes than usual. He had held out so long since his last spree, that if he lost now he would defeat hopes that were singularly precious and sacred to him: the hopes that those who loved him best, and distrusted him most, and forgave him soonest, had begun to cherish. It would not break his wife’s heart; she was used to his lapses; but it would wring it more cruelly than usual if he gave way now.

When the fiend thrust him out of his house the night before, he knew that she knew of it, though she let him go in that fearful company, and made no effort to keep him. He was so strait an agnostic that, as he boasted, he had no superstitions even; but his relation to the Northwicks covered the period of his longest resistance of temptation, and by a sort of instinctive, brute impulse, he turned his step towards the place where they lived, as if there might be rescue for him in the mere vicinity of those women who had appealed to him in their distress, as to a faithful enemy. His professional pride, his personal honor, were both involved in the feeling that he must not fail them; their implicit reliance had been a source of strength to him. He was always hoping for some turn of affairs which would enable him to serve them, or rather to serve Adeline; for he cared little for Suzette, or only secondarily; and since Pinney had gone upon his mission to Canada he was daily looking for this chance to happen. He must keep himself for that, and not because of them alone, but because those dearest to him had come tacitly to connect his resistance of the tempter with his zeal for the interests of his clients. With no more reasoned motives than these he had walked over the Northwick place, calling himself a fool for supposing that some virtue should enter into him out of the ground there, and yet finding a sort of relief, in the mere mechanical exercise, the novelty of exploring by night the property grown so familiar to him by day, and so strangely mixed up with the great trial and problem of his own usefulness.

He listened by turns, with a sinking and a rising heart, as Newton now dug the particulars of his adventure out of himself. At the end, he turned to go into the house.

“Well, what do you say, Squire Putney?” Elbridge called softly after him.

“Say?”

“You know: about what I done.”

“Keep your mouth shut about what you ‘done.’ I should like to see you sent to jail, though, for what you didn’t do.”

Elbridge felt a consolatory quality in Putney’s resentment, and Putney, already busy with the potentialities of the future, was buoyed up by the strong excitement of what had actually happened rather than finally cast down by what he had missed. He took three cups of the blackest coffee at breakfast, and he said to the mute, anxious face of his wife, “Well, Ellen, I seem to be pulling through, somehow.”

VIII.

Adeline was in a flutter of voluble foreboding till Elbridge came back. She asked Suzette whether she believed their father would get away; she said she knew that Elbridge would miss the train, with that slow, old mare, and their father would be arrested. Weak as she was from the sick-bed she had left to welcome him, she dressed herself carefully, so as to be ready for the worst; she was going to jail with him if they brought him back; she had made up her mind to that. From time to time she went out and looked up the road, to see if Elbridge was coming back alone, or whether the officers were bringing her father; she expected they would bring him first to his family; she did not know why. Suzette tried to keep her indoors; to make her lie down. She refused, with wild upbraidings. She declared that Suzette had never cared anything for her father; she had wanted to give their mother’s property away, to please the Hilarys; and now that she was going to marry Matt Hilary, she was perfectly indifferent to everything else. She asked Suzette what had come over her.

Elbridge drove first to the stable and put up his horse, when he came back. Then he walked to the lodge to report.

“Is he safe? Did he get away? Where is he?” Adeline shrieked at him before he could get a word out.

“He’s all right, Miss Northwick,” Elbridge answered soothingly. “He’s on his way back to Canady, again.”

“Then I’ve driven him away!” she lamented. “I’ve hunted him out of his home, and I shall never see him any more. Send for him! Send for him! Bring him back, I tell you! Go right straight after him, and tell him I said to come back! What are you standing there for?”

She fell fainting. Elbridge helped Suzette carry her upstairs to her bed, and then ran to get his wife, to stay with them while he went for the doctor.

Matt Hilary had been spending the night at the rectory with Wade, and he walked out to take leave of Suzette once more before he went home. He found the doctor just driving away. “Miss Northwick seems not so well,” said the doctor. “I’m very glad you happen to be here, on all accounts. I shall come again later in the day.”

Matt turned from the shadow of mystery the doctor’s manner left, and knocked at the door. It was opened by Suzette almost before he touched it.

“Come in,” she said, in a low voice, whose quality fended him from her almost as much as the conditional look she gave him. The excited babble of the sick woman overhead, mixed with Mrs. Newton’s nasal attempts to quiet her, broke in upon their talk.

“Mr. Hilary,” said Suzette, formally, “are you willing my father should come back, no matter what happens?”

“If he wishes to come back. You know what I have always said.”

“And you would not care if they put him in prison?”

“I should care very much.”

“You would be ashamed of me!”

“No! Never! What has it to do with you?”

“Then,” she pursued, “he has come back. He has been here.” She flashed all the fact upon him in vivid, rapid phrases, and he listened with an intelligent silence that stayed and comforted her as no words could have done. Before she had finished, his arms were round her, and she felt how inalienably faithful he was. “And now Adeline is raving to have him come back again, and stay. She thinks she drove him away; she will die if something can’t be done. She says she would not let him stay because — because you would be ashamed of us. She says I would be ashamed—”

“Suzette! Sue!” Adeline called down from the chamber above, “don’t you let Mr. Hilary go before I get there. I want to speak to him,” and while they stared helplessly at each other, they heard her saying to Mrs. Newton, “Yes, I shall, too! I’m perfectly rested, now; and I shall go down. I should think I knew how I felt. I don’t care what the doctor said; and if you try to stop me—” She came clattering down the stairs in the boots which she had pulled loosely on, and as soon as she showed her excited face at the door, she began; “I’ve thought out a plan, Mr. Hilary, and I want you should go and see Mr. Putney about it. You ask him if it won’t do. They can get father let out on bail, when he comes back, and I can be his bail, and then, when there’s a trial, they can take me instead of him. It won’t matter to the court which they have, as long as they have somebody. Now, you go and ask Mr. Putney. I know he’ll say so, for he’s thought just as I have about father’s case, all along. Will you go?”

“Will you go up and lie down again, Adeline, if Mr. Hilary will go?” Suzette asked, like one dealing with a capricious child.

“What do you all want me to lie down for?” Adeline turned upon her. “I’m perfectly well. And do you suppose I can rest, with such a thing on my mind? If you want me to rest, you’d better let him go and find out what Mr. Putney says. I think we’d better all go to Canada and bring father back with us. He isn’t fit to travel alone or with strangers; he needs some one that understands his ways; and I’m going to him, just as soon as Mr. Putney approves of my plan, and I know he will. But I don’t want Mr. Hilary to lose any time, now. I want to be in Quebec about as soon as father is. Will you go?”

“Yes, Miss Northwick,” said Matt, taking her tremulous hand. “I’ll go to Mr. Putney; and I’ll see my father again; and whatever can be done to save your father any further suffering, or yourself—”

“I don’t care for myself,” she said, plucking her hand away. “I’m young and strong, and I can bear it. But it’s father I’m so anxious about.”

She began to cry, and at a look from Suzette, Matt left them. As he walked along up toward the village in mechanical compliance with Adeline’s crazy wish, he felt more and more the deepening tragedy of the case, and the inadequacy of all compromises and palliatives. There seemed indeed but one remedy for the trouble, and that was for Northwick to surrender himself, and for them all to meet the consequences together. He realized how desperately homesick the man must have been to take the risks he had run in stealing back for a look upon the places and the faces so dear to him; his heart was heavy with pity for him. One might call him coward and egotist all one would; at the end remained the fact of a love which, if it could not endure heroically, was still a deep and strong affection, doubtless the deepest and strongest thing in the man’s weak and shallow nature. It might be his truest inspiration, and if it prompted him to venture everything, and to abide by whatever might befall him, for the sake of being near those he loved, and enjoying the convict’s wretched privilege of looking on them now and then, who should gainsay him?

Matt took Wade in on his way to Putney’s office, to lay this question before him, and he answered it for him in the same breath: “Certainly no one less deeply concerned than the man’s own flesh and blood could forbid him.”

“I’m not sure,” said Wade, “that even his own flesh and blood would have a supreme right there. It may be that love, and not duty, is the highest thing in life. Oh, I know how we reason it away, and say that true love is unselfish and can find its fruition in the very sacrifice of our impulses; and we are fond of calling our impulses blind, but God alone knows whether they are blind. The reasoned sacrifice may satisfy the higher soul, but what about the simple and primitive natures which it won’t satisfy?”

For answer, Matt told how Northwick had come back, at the risk of arrest, for an hour with his children, and was found in the empty house that had been their home, and brought to them: how he had besought them to let him stay, but they had driven him back to his exile. Matt explained how he was on his way to the lawyer, at Adeline’s frantic demand, to go all over the case again, and see if something could not be done to bring Northwick safely home. He had himself no hope of finding any loophole in the law, through which the fugitive could come and go; if he returned, Matt felt sure that he would be arrested and convicted, but he was not sure that this might not be the best thing for all. “You know,” he said, “I’ve always believed that if he could voluntarily submit himself to the penalty of his offence, the penalty would be the greatest blessing for him on earth; the only blessing for his ruined life.”

“Yes,” Wade answered, “we have always thought alike about that, and perhaps this torment of longing for his home and children, may be the divine means of leading him to accept the only mercy possible with God for such a sufferer. If there were no one but him concerned, we could not hesitate in urging him to return. But the innocent who must endure the shame of his penalty with him—”

“They are ready for that. Would it be worse than what they have learned to endure?”

“Perhaps not. But I was not thinking of his children alone. You, yourself, Matt; your family—”

Matt threw up his arms impatiently, and made for the door. “There’s no question of me. And if they could not endure their portion, — the mere annoyance of knowing the slight for them in the minds of vulgar people, — I should be ashamed of them.”

“Well, you are right, Matt,” said his friend. “God bless you and guide you!” added the priest.

The lawyer had not yet come to his office, and Matt went to find him at his house. Putney had just finished his breakfast, and they met at his gate, and he turned back indoors with Matt. “Well, you know what’s happened, I see,” he said, after the first glance at Matt’s face.

“Yes, I know; and now what can be done? Are you sure we’ve considered every point? Isn’t there some chance—”

Putney shook his head, and then bit off a piece of tobacco before he began to talk. “I’ve been over the whole case in my mind this morning, and I’m perfectly certain there isn’t the shadow of a chance of his escaping trial if he gives himself up. That’s what you mean, I suppose?”

“Yes; that’s what I mean,” said Matt, with a certain disappointment. He supposed he had nerved himself for the worst, but he found he had been willing to accept something short of it.

“At times I’m almost sorry he got off,” said Putney. “If we could have kept him, and surrendered him to the law, I believe we could have staved off the trial, though we couldn’t have prevented it, and I believe we could have kept him out of State’s prison on the ground of insanity.” Matt started impatiently. “Oh, I don’t mean that it could be shown that he was of unsound mind when he used the company’s funds and tampered with their books, though I have my own opinion about that. But I feel sure that he’s of unsound mind at present: and I believe we could show it so clearly in court that the prosecution would find it impossible to convict. We could have him sent to the insane asylum, and that would be a creditable exit from the affair in the public eye; it would have a retroactive effect that would popularly acquit him of the charges against him.”

Putney could not forego a mischievous enjoyment of Matt’s obvious discomfort at this suggestion. His fierce eyes blazed; but he added seriously, “Why shouldn’t he have the advantage of the truth, if that is the truth about him? And I believe it is. I think it could be honestly and satisfactorily proved from his history, ever since the defalcation came out, that his reason is affected. His whole conduct, so far as I know it, shows it; and I should like a chance to argue the case in court. And I feel pretty sure I shall, yet. I’m just as certain as I sit here that he will come back again. He can’t keep away, and another time he may not fall into the hands of friends. It will be a good while before any rumor of last night’s visit gets out; but it will get out at last, and then the detectives will be on the watch for him. Perhaps it will be just as well for us if he falls into their hands. If we produced him in court it might be more difficult to work the plea of insanity. But I do think the man’s insane, and I should go into the case with a full and thorough persuasion on that point. Did he tell them where to find him in Canada?”

“He promised to let them know.”

“I doubt if he does,” said Putney. “He means to try coming back again. The secrecy he’s kept as to his whereabouts — the perfectly needless and motiveless secrecy, as far as his children are concerned — would be a strong point in favor of the theory of insanity. Yes, sir; I believe the thing could be done; and I should like to do it. If the pressure of our life produces insanity of the homicidal and suicidal type, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t produce insanity of the defalcational type. The conditions tend to produce it in a proportion that is simply incalculable, and I think it’s time that jurisprudence recognized the fact of such a mental disease, say, as defalcomania. If the fight for money and material success goes on, with the opportunities that the accumulation of vast sums in a few hands afford, what is to be the end?”

Matt had no heart for the question of metaphysics or of economics, whichever it was, that would have attracted him in another mood. He went back to Suzette and addressed himself with her to the task of quieting her sister. Adeline would be satisfied with nothing less than the assurance that Putney agreed with her that her father would be acquitted if he merely came back and gave himself up; she had changed to this notion in Matt’s absence, and with the mental reservation which he permitted himself he was able to give the assurance she asked. Then at last she consented to go to bed, and wait for the doctor’s coming, before she began her preparations for joining her father in Canada. She did not relinquish that purpose; she felt sure that he never could get home without her; and Suzette must come, too.

IX.

The fourth morning, when Pinney went down into the hotel office at Quebec, after a trying night with his sick child and its anxious mother, he found Northwick sitting there. He seemed to Pinney a part of the troubled dream he had waked from.

“Well, where under the sun, moon and stars have you been?” he demanded, taking the chance that this phantasm might be flesh and blood.

A gleam of gratified slyness lit up the haggardness of Northwick’s face. “I’ve been at home — at Hatboro’.”

“Come off!” said Pinney, astounded out of the last remnant of deference he had tried to keep for Northwick. He stood looking incredulously at him a moment. “Come in to breakfast, and tell me about it. If I could only have it for a scoop—”

Northwick ate with wolfish greed, and as the victuals refreshed and fortified him, he came out with his story, slowly, bit by bit. Pinney listened with mute admiration. “Well, sir,” he said, “it’s the biggest thing I ever heard of.” But his face darkened. “I suppose you know it leaves me out in the cold. I came up here,” he explained, “as the agent of your friends, to find you, and I did find you. But if you’ve gone and given the whole thing away, I can’t ask anything for my services.”

Northwick seemed interested, and even touched, by the hardship he had worked to Pinney. “They don’t know where I am, now,” he suggested.

“Are you willing I should take charge of the case from this on?” asked Pinney.

“Yes. Only — don’t leave me,” said Northwick, with tremulous dependence.

“You may be sure I won’t let you out of my sight again,” said Pinney. He took a telegraphic blank from his breast pocket, and addressed it to Matt Hilary: “Our friend here all right with me at Murdock’s Hotel.” He counted the words to see that there were no more than ten; then he called a waiter, and sent the despatch to the office. “Tell ’em to pay it, and set it down against me. Tell ’em to rush it.”

Pinney showed himself only less devoted to Northwick than to his own wife and child. His walks and talks were all with him; and as the baby got better he gave himself more and more to the intimacy established with him; and Northwick seemed to grow more and more reliant on Pinney’s filial cares. Mrs. Pinney shared these, as far as the baby would permit; and she made the silent refugee at home with her. She had her opinion of his daughters, who did not come to him, now that they knew where he was; but she concealed it from him, and helped him answer Suzette’s letters when he said he was not feeling quite well enough to write himself. Adeline did not write; Suzette always said she was not quite well, but was getting better. Then in one of Suzette’s letters there came a tardy confession that Adeline was confined to her bed. She was tormented with the thought of having driven him away, and Suzette said she wished her to write and tell him to come back, or to let them come to him. She asked him to express some wish in the matter, so that she could show his answer to Adeline. Suzette wrote that Mr. Hilary had come over from his farm, and was staying at Elbridge Newton’s, to be constantly near them; and in fact, Matt was with them when Adeline suddenly died; they had not thought her dangerously sick, till the very day of her death, when she began to sink rapidly.

In the letter that brought this news, Suzette said that if they had dreamed of present danger they would have sent for their father to come back at any hazard, and she lamented that they had all been so blind. The Newtons would stay with her, till she could join him in Quebec; or, if he wished to return, she and Matt were both of the same mind about it. They were ready for any event; but Matt felt that he ought to know there was no hope of his escaping a trial if he returned, and that he ought to be left perfectly free to decide. Adeline would be laid beside her mother.

The old man broke into a feeble whimper as Mrs. Pinney read him the last words. Pinney, walking softly up and down with the baby in his arms, whimpered too.

“I believe he could be got off, if he went back,” he said to his wife, in a burst of sympathy, when Northwick had taken his letter away to his own room.

The belief, generous in itself, began to mix with self-interest in Pinney’s soul. He conscientiously forbore to urge Northwick to return, but he could not help portraying the flattering possibilities of such a course. Before they parted for Pinney’s own return, he confided his ambition for the future to Northwick, and as delicately as he could he suggested that if Northwick ever did make up his mind to go back, he could not find a more interested and attentive travelling-companion. Northwick seemed to take the right view of the matter, the business view, and Pinney thought he had arranged a difficult point with great tact; but he modestly concealed his success from his wife. They both took leave of the exile with affection; and Mrs. Pinney put her arms round his neck and kissed him; he promised her that he would take good care of himself in her absence. Pinney put a business address in his hand at the last moment.

Northwick seemed to have got back something of his moral force after these people, who had so strangely become his friends, left him to his own resources. Once more he began to dream of employing the money he had with him for making more, and paying back the Ponkwasset company’s forced loans. He positively forbade Suzette’s coming to him, as she proposed, after Adeline’s funeral. He telegraphed to prevent her undertaking the journey, and he wrote, saying he wished to be alone for a while, and to decide for himself the question of his fate. He approved of Matt’s wish that they should be married at once, and he replied to Matt with a letter decently observant of the peculiar circumstances, recognizing the reluctance his father and mother might well feel, and expressing the hope that he was acting with their full and free consent. If this letter could have been produced in court, it would have told heavily against Putney’s theory of a defence on the ground of insanity, it was so clear, and just, and reasonable; though perhaps an expert might have recognized a mental obliquity in its affirmation of Northwick’s belief that Matt’s father would yet come to see his conduct in its true light, and to regard him as the victim of circumstances which he really was.

Among the friends of the Hilarys there was misgiving on this point of their approval of Matt’s marriage. Some of them thought that the parents’ hands had been forced in the blessing they gave it. Old Bromfield Corey expressed a general feeling to Hilary with senile frankness. “Hilary, you seem to have disappointed the expectation of the admirers of your iron firmness. I tell ’em that’s what you keep for your enemies. But they seem to think that in Matt’s case you ought to have been more of a Roman father.”

“I’m just going to become one,” said Hilary, with the good temper proper to that moment of the dinner. “Mrs. Hilary and Louise are taking me over to Rome for the winter.”

“You don’t say so, you don’t say!” said Corey, “I wish my family would take me. Boston is gradually making an old man of me. I’m afraid it will end by killing me.”

X.

Northwick, after the Pinneys went home, lapsed into a solitude relieved only by the daily letters that Suzette sent him. He shrank from the offers of friendly kindness on the part of people at the hotel, who pitied his loneliness; and he began to live in a dream of his home again. He had relinquished that notion of attempting a new business life, which had briefly revived in his mind; the same causes that had operated against it in the beginning, controlled and defeated it now. He felt himself too old to begin life over; his energies were spent. Such as he had been, he had made himself very slowly and cautiously, in familiar conditions; he had never been a man of business dash, and he could not pick himself up and launch himself in a new career, as a man of different make might have done, even at his age. Perhaps there had been some lesion of the will in that fever of his at Haha Bay, which disabled him from forming any distinct purpose, or from trying to carry out any such purpose as he did form. Perhaps he was, in his helplessness, merely of that refugee-type which exile moulds men to: a thing of memories and hopes, without definite aims or plans.

As the days passed, he dwelt in an outward inertness, while his dreams and longings incessantly rehabilitated the home whose desolation he had seen with his own eyes. It would be better to go back and suffer the sentence of the law, and then go to live again in the place which, in spite of his senses, he could only imagine clothed in the comfort and state that had been stripped from it. Elbridge’s talk, on the way to West Hatboro’, about the sale, and what had become of the horses and cattle, and the plants, went for no more than the evidence of his own eyes that they were all gone. He did not realize, except in the shocks that the fact imparted at times, that death as well as disaster had invaded his home. Adeline was, for the most part, still alive: in his fond reveries she was present, and part of that home as she had always been.

He began to flatter himself that if he went back he could contrive that compromise with the court which his friends had failed to bring about; he persuaded himself that if it came to a trial he could offer evidence that would result in his acquittal. But if he must undergo some punishment for the offence of being caught in transactions which were all the time carried on with impunity, he told himself that interest could be used to make his punishment light. In these hopeful moods it was a necessity of his drama that his transgression of the law should seem venial to him. It was only when he feared the worst that he felt guilty of wrong.

It could not be said that these moments of a consciousness of guilt were so frequent as ever to become confluent, and to form a mood. They came and went; perhaps toward the last they were more frequent. What seems certain is that in the end there began to mix with his longing for home a desire, feeble and formless enough, for expiation. There began to be suggested to him from somewhere, somehow, something like the thought that if he had really done wrong, there might be rest and help in accepting the legal penalty, disproportionate and excessive as it might be. He tried to make this notion appreciable to Pinney when they first met after he summoned Pinney to Quebec; he offered it as an explanation of his action.

In making up his mind to return at all hazards and to take all the chances, he remembered what Pinney had said to him about his willingness to bear him company. It was not wholly a generous impulse that prompted him to send for Pinney, or the self-sacrificing desire to make Pinney’s fortune in his new quality of detective; he simply dreaded the long journey alone; he wanted the comfort of Pinney’s society. He liked Pinney, and he longed for the vulgar cheerfulness of his buoyant spirit. He felt that he could rest upon it in the fate he was bringing himself to face; he instinctively desired the kindly, lying sympathy of a soul that had so much affinity with his own. He telegraphed Pinney to come for him, and he was impatient till he came.

Pinney started the instant he received Northwick’s telegram, and met him with an enthusiasm of congratulation. “Well, Mr. Northwick, this is a great thing. It’s the right thing, and it’s the wise thing. It’s going to have a tremendous effect. I suppose,” he added, a little tremulously, “that you’ve thought it all thoroughly over?”

“Yes; I’m prepared for the worst,” said Northwick.

“Oh, there won’t be any worst,” Pinney returned gayly. “There’ll be legal means of delaying the trial; your lawyer can manage that; or if he can’t, and you have to face the music at once, we can have you brought into court without the least publicity, and the judge will go through with the forms, and it’ll be all over before anybody knows anything about it. I’ll see that there’s no interviewing, and that there are no reporters present. There’ll probably be a brief announcement among the cases in court; but there won’t be anything painful. You needn’t be afraid. But what I’m anxious about now is, not to bring any influence to bear on you. I promised my wife I wouldn’t urge you, and I won’t; I know I’m a little optimistic, and if you don’t see this thing exactly couleur de rose, don’t you do it from anything I say.” Pinney apparently put great stress upon himself to get this out.

“I’ve looked it in the face,” said Northwick.

“And your friends know you’re coming back?”

“They expect me at any time. You can notify them.”

Pinney drew a long, anxious breath. “Well,” he said, with a sort of desperation, “then I don’t see why we don’t start at once.”

“Have you got your papers all right?” Northwick asked.

“Yes,” said Pinney, with a blush. “But you know,” he added, respectfully, “I can’t touch you till we get over the line, Mr. Northwick.”

“I understand that. Let me see your warrant.”

Pinney reluctantly produced the paper, and Northwick read it carefully over. He folded it up with a deep sigh, and took a long stiff envelope from his breast-pocket, and handed it to Pinney, with the warrant. “Here is the money I brought with me.”

“Mr. Northwick! It isn’t necessary yet! Indeed it isn’t. I’ve every confidence in your honor as a gentleman.” Pinney’s eyes glowed with joy, and his fingers closed upon the envelope convulsively. “But if you mean business—”

“I mean business,” said Northwick. “Count it.”

Pinney took the notes out and ran them over. “Forty-one thousand six hundred and forty.”

“That is right,” said Northwick. “Now, another matter. Have you got handcuffs?”

“Why, Mr. Northwick! What are you giving me?” demanded Pinney. “I’d as soon put them on my own father.”

“I want you to put them on me,” said Northwick. “I intend to go back as your prisoner. If I have anything to expiate” — and he seemed to indulge a question of the fact for the last time— “I want the atonement to begin as soon as possible. If you haven’t brought those things with you, you’d better go out to the police station and get them, while I attend to the tickets.”

“Oh, I needn’t go,” said Pinney, and his face burned.

He was full of nervous trepidation at the start, and throughout the journey he was anxious and perturbed, while on Northwick, after the first excitement, a deep quiet, a stupor, or a spiritual peace, seemed to have fallen.

“By George!” said Pinney, when they started, “anybody to see us would think you were taking me back.” He was tenderly watchful of Northwick’s comfort; he left him free to come and go at the stations; from the restaurants he bought him things to tempt his appetite; but Northwick said he did not care to eat.

They had a long night in a day-car, for they found there was no sleeper on their train. In the morning, when the day broke, Northwick asked Pinney what the next station was.

Pinney said he did not know. He looked at Northwick as if the possession of him gave him very little pleasure, and asked him how he had slept.

“I haven’t slept,” said Northwick. “I suppose I’m rather excited. My nerves seem disordered.”

“Well, of course,” said Pinney, soothingly.

They were silent a moment, and then Northwick asked, “What did you say the next station was?”

“I’ll ask the brakeman.” They could see the brakeman on the platform. Pinney went out to him, and returned. “It’s Wellwater, he says. We get breakfast there.”

“Then we’re over the line, now,” said Northwick.

“Why, yes,” Pinney admitted, reluctantly. He added, in a livelier note, “You get a mighty good breakfast at Wellwater, and I’m ready to meet it half way.” He turned, and looked hard at Northwick. “If I should happen to get left there, what would you do? Would you keep on, anyway? Is your mind still made up on that point? I ask, because all kinds of accidents happen, and—” Pinney stopped, and regarded his captive fixedly. “Or if you don’t feel quite able to travel—”

“Let me see your warrant again,” said Northwick.

Pinney relaxed his gaze with a shrug, and produced the paper. Northwick read it all once more. “I’m your prisoner,” he said, returning the paper. “You can put the handcuffs on me now.”

“No, no, Mr. Northwick!” Pinney pleaded. “I don’t want to do that. I’m not afraid of your trying to get away. I assure you it isn’t necessary between gentlemen.”

Northwick held out his wrists. “Put them on, please.”

“Oh, well, if I must!” protested Pinney. “But I swear I won’t lock ‘em.” He glanced round to find whether any of the other passengers were noticing. “You can slip ’em off whenever you get tired of ‘em.” He pushed Northwick’s sleeves down over them with shame-faced anxiety. “Don’t let people see the damned things, for God’s sake!’”

“That’s good!” murmured Northwick, as if the feel of the iron pleased him.

The incident turned Pinney rather sick. He went out on the platform of the car for a little breath of air, and some restorative conversation with the brakeman. When he came back, Northwick was sitting where he left him. His head had fallen on his breast. “Poor old fellow, he’s asleep,” Pinney thought. He put his hand gently on Northwick’s shoulder. “I’ll have to wake you here,” he said. “We’ll be in, now, in a minute.”

Northwick tumbled forward at his touch, and Pinney caught him round the neck, and lifted his face.

“Oh, my God! He’s dead!”

The loosened handcuffs fell on the floor.

XI.

After they were married, Suzette and Matt went to live on his farm; and it was then that she accomplished a purpose she had never really given up. She surrendered the whole place at Hatboro’ to the company her father had defrauded. She had no sentiment about the place, such as had made the act impossible to Adeline, and must have prevented the sacrifice on Suzette’s part as long as her sister lived. But suffering from that and from all other earthly troubles was past for Adeline; she was dead; and Suzette felt it no wrong to her memory to put out of her own hands the property which something higher than the logic of the case forbade her to keep. As far as her father was concerned, she took his last act as a sign that he wished to make atonement for the wrong he had committed; and she felt that the surrender of this property to his creditors was in the line of his endeavor. She had strengthened herself to bear his conviction and punishment, if he came back; and since he was dead, this surrender of possessions tainted for her with the dishonesty in which the unhappy man had lived was nothing like loss; it was rather a joyful relief.

Yet it was a real sacrifice, and she was destined to feel it in the narrowed conditions of her life. But she had become used to narrow conditions; she had learned how little people could live with when they had apparently nothing to live for; and now that in Matt she had everything to live for, the surrender of all she had in the world left her incalculably rich.

Matt rejoiced with her in her decision, though he had carefully kept himself from influencing it. He was poor, too, except for the comfortable certainty that his father could not let him want; but so far as he had been able, he had renounced his expectations from his father’s estate in order that he might seem to be paying Northwick’s indebtedness to the company. Doubtless it was only an appearance; in the end the money his father left would come equally to himself and Louise; but in the meantime the restitution for Northwick did cramp Eben Hilary more for the moment than he let his son know. So he thought it well to allow Matt to go seriously to work on account of it, and to test his economic theories in the attempt to make his farm yield him a living. It must be said that the prospect dismayed neither Matt nor Suzette; there was that in her life which enabled her to dispense with the world and its pleasures and favors; and he had long ceased to desire them.

The Ponkwasset directors had no hesitation in accepting the assignment of property made them by Northwick’s daughter. As a corporate body they had nothing to do with the finer question of right involved. They looked at the plain fact that they had been heavily defrauded by the former owner of the property, who had inferably put it out of his hands in view of some such contingency as he had finally reached; and as it had remained in the possession of his family ever since, they took no account of the length of time that had elapsed since he was actually the owner. They recognized the propriety of his daughter’s action in surrendering it, and no member of the Board was quixotic enough to suggest that the company had no more claim upon the property she conveyed to them than upon any other piece of real estate in the commonwealth.

“They considered,” said Putney, who had completed the affair on the part of Suzette, and was afterwards talking it over with his crony, Dr. Morrell, in something of the bitterness of defeat, “that their first duty was to care for the interests of their stockholders, who seemed to turn out all widows and orphans, as nearly as I could understand. It appears as if nobody but innocents of that kind live on the Ponkwasset dividends, and it would have been inhuman not to look after their interests. Well,” he went on, breaking from this grievance, “there’s this satisfactory thing about it; somebody has done something at last that he intended to do; and, of course, the he in question is a she. ‘She that was’ Miss Suzette is the only person connected with the whole affair, that’s had her way. Everybody else’s way has come to nothing, beginning with my own. I can look back to the time when I meant to have the late J. Milton Northwick’s blood; I was lying low for years, waiting for him to do just what he did do at last, and I expected somehow, by the blessing of God, to help run him down, or bring him to justice, as we say. The first thing I knew, I turned up his daughter’s counsel, and was devoting myself to the interests of a pair of grass-orphans with the high and holy zeal of a Board of Directors. All I wanted was to have J. Milton brought to trial, not so I could help send him to State’s prison with a band of music, but so I could get him off on the plea of insanity. But I wasn’t allowed to have my way, even in a little thing like that; and of all the things that were planned for and against, and round about Northwick, just one has been accomplished. The directors failed to be in at the death; and old Hilary has had to resign from the Board, and pay the defaulter’s debts. Pinney, I understand, considers himself a ruined man; he’s left off detecting for a living, and gone back to interviewing. Poor old Adeline lived in the pious hope of making Northwick’s old age comfortable in their beautiful home on the money he had stolen; and now that she’s dead it goes to his creditors. Why, even Billy Gerrish, a high-minded, public-spirited man like William B. Gerrish, — couldn’t have his way about Northwick. No, sir; Northwick himself couldn’t! Look how he fooled away his time there in Canada, after he got off with money enough to start him on the high road to fortune again. He couldn’t budge of his own motion; and the only thing he really tried to do he failed in disgracefully. Adeline wouldn’t let him stay when he come back to buy himself off; and that killed her. Then, when he started home again, to take his punishment, the first thing he did was to drop dead. Justice herself couldn’t have her way with Northwick. But I’m not sorry he slipped through her fingers. There wasn’t the stuff for an example in Northwick; I don’t know that he’s much of a warning. He just seems to be a kind of — incident; and a pretty common kind. He was a mere creature of circumstances — like the rest of us! His environment made him rich, and his environment made him a rogue. Sometimes I think there was nothing to Northwick, except what happened to him. He’s a puzzle. But what do you say, Doc, to a world where we fellows keep fuming and fizzing away, with our little aims and purposes, and the great ball of life seems to roll calmly along, and get where it’s going without the slightest reference to what we do or don’t do? I suppose it’s wicked to be a fatalist, but I’ll go a few æons of eternal punishment more, and keep my private opinion that it’s all Fate.”

“Why not call it Law?” the doctor suggested.

“Well, I don’t like to be too bold. But taking it by and large, and seeing that most things seem to turn out pretty well in the end, I’ll split the difference with you and call it Mercy.”

AN IMPERATIVE DUTY

This short realist novel was published in 1892. The novel explores the problematic idea of “passing” (i.e. as a white person) through the racially mixed character of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman whose aunt informs her that she is one-sixteenth African American. Howells himself actively lobbied for the abolition of slavery and racial equality — a commitment reflected in this novel.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

I

OLNEY got back to Boston about the middle of July, and found himself in the social solitude which the summer makes more noticeable in that city than in any other. The business, the hard work of life, was going on, galloping on, as it always does in America, but the pleasure of life, which he used to be part of as a younger man, was taking a rest, or if not a rest, then certainly an outing at the sea-shore. He met no one he knew, and he continued his foreign travels in his native place, after an absence so long that it made everything once so familiar bewilderingly strange.

He had sailed ten days before from Liverpool, but he felt as if he had been voyaging in a vicious circle when he landed, and had arrived in Liverpool again. In several humiliating little ways, Boston recalled the most commonplace of English cities. It was not like Liverpool in a certain civic grandiosity, a sort of lion-and-unicorn spectacularity which he had observed there. The resemblance appeared to him in the meanness and dulness of many of the streets in the older part of the town where he was lodged, and in the littleness of the houses. Then there was a curious similarity in the figures and faces of the crowd. He had been struck by the almost American look of the poorer class in Liverpool, and in Boston he was struck by its English look. He could half account for this by the fact that the average face and figure one meets in Boston in midsummer, is hardly American; but the other half of the puzzle remained. He could only conjecture an approach from all directions to a common type among those who work with their hands for a living; what he had seen in Liverpool and now saw in Boston was not the English type or the American type, but the proletarian type. He noticed it especially in the women, and more especially in the young girls, as he met them in the street after their day’s work was done, and on the first Sunday afternoon following his arrival, as he saw them in the Common. By far the greater part of those listening to the brass band which was then beginning to vex the ghost of our poor old Puritan Sabbath there, were given away by their accent for those primary and secondary Irish who abound with us. The old women were strong, sturdy, old-world peasants, but the young girls were thin and crooked, with pale, pasty complexions, and an effect of physical delicacy from their hard work and hard conditions, which might later be physical refinement. They were conjecturably out of box factories and clothier’s shops; they went about in threes or fours, with their lank arms round one another’s waists, or lounged upon the dry grass; and they seemed fond of wearing red jerseys, which accented every fact of their anatomy. Looking at them scientifically, Olney thought that if they survived to be mothers they might give us, with better conditions, a race as hale and handsome as the elder American race; but the transition from the Old World to the New, as represented in them, was painful. Their voices were at once coarse and weak; their walk was uncertain, now awkward and now graceful, an undeveloped gait; he found their bearing apt to be aggressive, as if from a wish to ascertain the full limits of their social freedom, rather than from ill-nature, or that bad-heartedness which most rudeness comes from.

But, in fact, Olney met nowhere the deference from beneath that his long sojourn in Europe had accustomed him to consider politeness. He was used in all public places with a kindness mixed with roughness, which is probably the real republican manner; the manner of Florence before the Medici; the manner of Venice when the Florentines were wounded by it after the Medici corrupted them; the manner of the French when the Terror had done its work. Nobody proved unamiable, though everybody seemed so at first; not even the waiters at his hotel, where he was served by adoptive citizens who looked so much like brigands that he could not help expecting to be carried off and held somewhere for ransom when he first came into the dining-room. They wore immense black mustaches or huge whiskers, or else the American beard cut slanting from the corners of the mouth. They had a kind of short sack of alpaca, which did not support one’s love of gentility like the conventional dress-coat of the world-wide waiter, or cheer one’s heart like the white linen jacket and apron of the negro waiter. But Olney found them, upon what might be called personal acquaintance, neither uncivil nor unkind, though they were awkward and rather stupid. They could not hide their eagerness for fees, and they took an interest in his well-being so openly mercenary, that he could scarcely enjoy his meals. With two of those four-winged whirligigs revolving on the table before him to scare away the flies, and working him up to such a vertigo that he thought he must swoon into his soup, Olney was uncomfortably aware of the Irish waiter standing so close behind his chair that his stomach bulged against it, and he felt his breath coming and going on the bald spot on his crown. He could not put out his hand to take up a bit of bread without having a hairy paw thrust forward to anticipate his want; and he knew that his waiter considered each service of the kind worth a good deal extra, and expected to be remembered for it in our silver coinage, whose unique ugliness struck Olney afresh.

He would not have been ready to say that one of the negro waiters, whom he wished they had at his hotel, would not have been just as greedy of money; but he would have clothed his greed in such a smiling courtesy and such a childish simple-heartedness that it would have been graceful and winning. He would have used tact in his ministrations; he would not have cumbered him with service, as from a wheelbarrow, but would have given him a touch of help here, and a little morsel of attention there; he would have kept aloof as well as alert. That is, he would have had all these charms if he were at his best, and he would have had some of them if he were at his worst.

In fact, the one aspect of our mixed humanity here which struck Olney as altogether agreeable in getting home was that of the race which vexes our social question with its servile past, and promises to keep it uncomfortable with its civic future. He had not forgotten that, so far as society in the society sense is concerned, we have always frankly simplified the matter, and no more consort with the negroes than we do with the lower animals, so that one would be quite as likely to meet a cow or a horse in an American drawing-room as a person of color. But he had forgotten how entirely the colored people keep to themselves in all public places, and how, with the same civil rights as ourselves, they have their own neighborhoods, their own churches, their own amusements, their own resorts. They were just as free to come to the music on the Common that Sunday afternoon as any of the white people he saw there. They could have walked up and down, they could have lounged upon the grass, and no one would have molested them, though the whites would have kept apart from them. But he found very few of them there. It was not till he followed a group away from the Common through Charles Street, where they have their principal church, into Cambridge Street, which is their chief promenade, that he began to see many of them. In the humbler side-hill streets, and in the alleys branching upward from either thoroughfare, they have their homes, and here he encountered them of all ages and sexes. It seemed to him that they had increased since he was last in Boston beyond the ratio of nature; and the hotel clerk afterward told him there had been that summer an unusual influx of negroes from the South.

He would not have known the new arrivals by anything in their looks or bearing. Their environment had made as little impression on the older inhabitants, or the natives, as Time himself makes upon persons of their race, and Olney fancied that Boston did not characterize their manner, as it does that of almost every other sort of aliens. They all alike seemed shining with good-nature and good-will, and the desire of peace on earth. Their barbaric taste in color, when it flamed out in a crimson necktie or a scarlet jersey, or when it subdued itself to a sable that left no gleam of white about them but a point or rim of shirt collar, was invariably delightful to him; but he had to own that their younger people were often dressed with an innate feeling for style. Some of the young fellows were very effective dandies of the type we were then beginning to call dude, and were marked by an ultra correctness, if there is any such thing; they had that air of being clothed through and through, as to the immortal spirit as well as the perishable body, by their cloth gaiters, their light trousers, their neatly-buttoned cutaway coats, their harmonious scarfs, and their silk hats. They carried on flirtations of the eye with the young colored girls they met, or when they were walking with them they paid them a court which was far above the behavior of the common young white fellows with the girls of their class in refinement and delicacy. The negroes, if they wished to imitate the manners of our race, wished to imitate the manners of the best among us; they wished to be like ladies and gentlemen. But the young white girls and their fellows whom Olney saw during the evening in possession of most of the benches in the Common and the Public Garden, and between the lawns of Commonwealth Avenue, apparently did not wish to be like ladies and gentlemen in their behavior. The fellow in each case had his arm about the girl’s waist, and she had her head at times upon his shoulder; if the branch of a tree overhead cast the smallest rag or tatter of shadow upon them, she had her head on his shoulder most of the time. Olney was rather abashed when he passed close to one of these couples, but they seemed to suffer no embarrassment. They had apparently no concealments to make, nothing to be ashamed of; and they had really nothing to give them a sense of guilt. They were simply vulgar young people, who were publicly abusing the freedom our civilization gives their youth, without knowing any better, or meaning any worse. Olney knew this, but he could not help remarking to the advantage of the negroes, that among all these couples on the benches  of the Common and the Garden and the Avenue, he never found a colored couple. He thought that some of the young colored girls, as he met them walking with their decorous beaux, were very pretty in their way. They had very thin, high, piping voices, that had an effect both of gentleness and gentility. With their brilliant complexions of lustrous black, or rich café au lait, or creamy white, they gave a vividness to the public spectacle which it would not otherwise have had, and the sight of these negroes in Boston some how brought back to Olney’s homesick heart a sense of Italy, where he had never seen one of their race.

II

Olney was very homesick for Italy that Sunday night. After two days in Boston, mostly spent in exploring the once familiar places in it, and discovering the new and strange ones, he hardly knew which made him feel more hopelessly alien. He had been five years away, and he perceived that the effort to repatriate himself must involve wounds as sore as those of the first days of exile. The tissues then lacerated must bleed again before his life could be reunited with the stock from which it had been torn. He felt himself unable to bear the pain; and he found no attraction of novelty in the future before him. He knew the Boston of his coming years too well to have any illusions about it; and he had known too many other places to have kept the provincial superstitions of his nonage and his earlier manhood concerning its primacy. He believed he should succeed, but that it would be in a minor city, after a struggle with competitors who would be just, and who might be generous, but who would be able, thoroughly equipped, and perfectly disciplined. The fight would be long, even if it were victorious; its prizes would be hard to win, however splendid. Neither the fight nor the prizes seemed so attractive now as they had seemed at a distance. He wished he had been content to stay in Florence, where he could have had the field to himself, if the harvest could never have been so rich. But he understood, even while he called himself a fool for coming home, that he could not have been content to stay without first coming away.

When he went abroad to study, he had a good deal of money, and the income from it was enough for him to live handsomely on anywhere; in Italy it was enough to live superbly on. But the friend with whom he left his affairs, had put all of Olney’s eggs into one basket. It was the Union Pacific basket which he chose, because nearly every one in Boston was choosing it at the same time, with the fatuous faith of Bostonians in their stocks. Suddenly Olney’s income dropped from five or six thousand a year to nothing at all a year; and his pretty scheme of remaining in Italy and growing up with the country in a practice among the nervous Americans who came increasingly abroad every year, had to be abandoned, or at least it seemed so at the time. Now he wished he had sold some of his depreciated stock, which everybody said would be worth as much as ever some day, and taken the money to live on till he could begin earning some. This was what Garofalo, his friend and fellow-student in Vienna, and now Professor of the Superior Studies at Florence, urged him to do; and the notion pleased him, but could not persuade him. It was useless for Garofalo to argue that he would have to get the means of living in Boston in some such way, if he went home to establish himself; Olney believed that he should begin earning money in larger sums if not sooner at home. Besides, he recurred to that vague ideal of duty which all virtuous Americans have, and he felt that he ought, as an American, to live in America. He had been quite willing to think of living in Italy while he had the means, but as soon as he had no means, his dormant sense of patriotism roused itself. He said that if he had to make a fight, he would go where other people were making it, and where it would not seem so unnatural as it would in the secular repose of Florence, among those who had all put off their armor at the close of the sixteenth century. Garofalo alleged the intellectual activity everywhere around him in science, literature, philosophy. Olney could not say that it seemed to him a life referred from Germany, France and England, without root in Italian soil; but he could answer that all this might very well be without affording a lucrative practice for a specialist in nervous diseases, who could be most prosperous where nervous diseases most abounded.

The question was joked away between them, and in the end there never seemed to have been any very serious question of Olney’s staying in Florence. Now, if there had not been really, he wished there really had been. Everything discouraged him, somehow; and no doubt his depression was partly a physical mood. He had never expected to find people in town at that time in the summer, or to begin practice at once; he had only promised himself to look about and be suitably settled to receive the nervous sufferers when they began to got back in the fall. Yet the sight of all those handsome houses on the Back Bay, where nervous suffering, if it were to avail him, must mainly abide, struck a chill to his spirit; they seemed to repel his intended ministrations with their barricaded doorways and their close-shuttered windows. His failure to find Dr. Wingate, with whom he had advised about his studies, and with whom he had hoped to talk over his hopes, was peculiarly disheartening, though when he reasoned with himself he saw that there was an imperative logic in Wingate’s absence; a nervous specialist of his popularity must, of course, have followed nervous suffering somewhere out of town. Still it was a disappointment, and it made the expense of Olney’s sojourn seem yet more ruinous. The hotel where he had gone for cheapness was an old house kept on the American plan; but his outgo of three dollars a day dismayed him when he thought of the arrangiamento he could have made in Florence for half the money. He determined to look up a boarding-house in the morning; and the thought of this made him almost sick.

Olney was no longer so young as he had been; we none of us are as young as we once were; but all of us have not reached the great age of thirty, as he had, after seeming sweetly destined to remain forever in the twenties. He belonged to a family that became bald early, and there was already a thin place in the hair on his crown, which he discovered one day when he was looking at the back of his head in the glass. It was shortly after the Union Pacific first passed its dividend; and it made him feel for the time decrepit. Yet he was by no means superannuated in other respects. His color was youthfully fresh; his soft full beard was of a rich golden red; what there was of his hair — and there was by no means little except in that one spot — was of the same mellow color, which it would keep till forty, without a touch of gray. His figure had not lost its youthful slimness, and it looked even fashionable in its clothes of London cut; so that any fellow-countryman who disliked his air of reserve might easily have passed him by on the other side, and avoided him for a confounded Englishman.

He sat on the high-pillared portico of the hotel, smoking for a half-hour after he returned from his evening stroll, and then he went to his room, and began to go to bed. He was very meditative about it, and after he took off his coat, he sat on the edge of the bed, pensively holding one shoe in his hand, until he could think to unlace the other.

III

There came a shattering knock at his door, such as rouses you in the night when the porter mistakes your number for that of the gentleman he was to call at four. Olney shouted, “Come in!” and sat waiting the result, with his shoe still in his hand. The door opened and one of those Irish faces showed itself.

“Are you a doctor, sor?”

“Yes.”

“Ahl right.”

The face was withdrawn, and the door was closing, when Olney called out: “Why? What of it? Does any one want me?”

“I don’t know, sor. There’s a lady in Twenty-wan that sah your name in the paper; but she said not to disturb ye if ye wahsn’t a doctor.”

“A lady?” said Olney. He rapidly reasoned that the lady, whoever she was, had found his name printed in the Sunday papers among the arrivals at that hotel, and that she must have some association with it.”Is she ill? Does she know me?”

“I don’t know, sor,” said the man, with an air of wishing to conceal nothing. “She don’t be in bed, annyway.”

Olney reflected a moment, hesitating between a cer- tain vexation at being molested with this ridiculous message and a vague curiosity to find out who the lady could be. As a man, he would have wished to know who any unknown woman could be; as a man of science, he divined that this unknown woman was probably one of those difficult invalids who have to be coaxed into anything decisive, even sending for a doctor; this tentative question of hers must represent ever so much self-worry and a high degree of self-conquest.

“Tell her, yes, I’m a doctor,” he said to the man. He added, for purposes of identification, “Dr. Edward Olney.” He thought for an instant he would send his card; but he decided this would be silly.

“Ahl right, sor. Thank ye, sor,” said the man.

He went away, and Olney put on the shoe he had taken off, and got into his coat again. He expected the man back at once, and he wished to be ready, but the messenger did not come for ten or twelve minutes. Then he brought Olney a note, superscribed in a young-lady-like hand, and diffusing when opened a perfume which was instantly but indefinitely memoriferous. Where had he last met the young lady who used that perfume, so full of character, so redolent of personality? The mystery was solved by the note, and all the pleasure of the writer’s presence returned to him at the sight of her name.

“DEAR SIR, — My aunt, Mrs. Meredith, is so very far from well, that she asks me to write for her, and beg you to come and see her. She hopes she is not mistaken in thinking it is Dr. Olney whom she met at Professor Garofalo’s in Florence last winter; but if it is not, she trusts you will pardon the intrusion, otherwise unwarrantable at such an hour.
Yours very truly,
RHODA ALDGATE.”

“Where is the room?” Olney demanded, putting the note into his breast pocket, and taking up his hat. He smiled to think how much less distinctive the diction was than the perfume; he fancied that Miss Aldgate had written down her aunt’s words, which had a formality alien to the nature of the young girl he remembered so agreeably. As he followed along through the apparently aimless corridors, up and down short flights of steps that seemed to ascend at one point only to descend at another, he recalled the particulars of her beauty; her slender height, her rich complexion of olive, with a sort of under-stain of red, and the inky blackness of her eyes and hair. Her face was of almost classic perfection, and the hair, crinkling away to either temple, grew low upon the forehead, as the hair does in the Clytie head. In profile the mouth was firmly accented, with a deep cut outlining the full lower lip, and a fine jut forward of the delicate chin; and the regularity of the mask was farther relieved from insipidity by the sharp wing-like curve in the sides of the sensitive nostrils. Olney recalled it as a mask, and he recalled his sense of her wearing this family face, with its somewhat tragic beauty, over a personality that was at once gentle and gay. The mask, he felt, was inherited, but the character seemed to be of Miss Aldgate’s own invention, and expressed itself in the sunny sparkle of her looks, that ran over with a willingness to please and to be pleased, and to consist in effect of a succession of flashing, childlike smiles, showing between her red lips teeth of the milkiest whiteness, small, even and perfect. These looks, the evening he remembered first meeting her and her aunt, were employed chiefly upon a serious young clergyman, sojourning in Florence after a journey to the Holy Land. But they were not employed coquettishly so much as sympathetically, with a readiness for laughter that broke up the inherited mask with a strange contradictory levity. Olney was himself immersed in a long and serious analysis of Romola with the aunt, who appeared to have a conscience of prodigious magnifying force, cultivated to the last degree by a constant training upon the ethical problems of fiction. She brought its powerful lenses to bear upon the most intimate particles of Tito’s character; his bad qualities seemed to give her almost as much satisfaction as if they had been her own. In knocking at Mrs. Meredith’s door, he now remembered bow charmingly that pretty little head of Miss Aldgate’s, defined by the black hair with its lustrous crinkle, was set upon her shoulders. 

IV

The young girl herself opened the door, and faced him first with the tragic family mask. Then she put out her hand to him with the personal gayety he had recalled. Her laugh, so far as it bore upon the situation, recognized rather the good joke of their finding themselves all in an American hotel together than expressed anxiety for her aunt’s condition. It was so glad and free, in fact, that Olney was surprised to find Mrs. Meredith looking quite haggard on the sofa, from which she reached him her hand without attempting to rise.

“Isn’t it the most fortunate thing in the world,” said Miss Aldgate, “that it should really be Dr. Olney? We couldn’t believe it when we saw it in the paper!” she added; and now Olney perceived that the laugh which he might have thought indifferent, was a laugh of happy relief, of trust that since it was he, all must go well.

“Yes, it is indeed,” said Mrs. Meredith ; but she had none of the gayety in putting the burden upon Olney, under Providence, which flashed out in her niece’s smile ; she appeared to doubt whether Providence and he could manage it, and to relinquish it with misgiving. “There were so many chances against it that it scarcely seemed possible.” She examined Olney’s face, which had at once begun to hide the professional opinion he was forming, and seemed to find comfort in its unsmiling strength. “And I hated dreadfully to trouble you at such an hour.”

“I believe there’s no etiquette as to the time of a doctor’s visits,” said Olney, pulling a chair up to the, sofa, and looking down at her. “I hope, if things go well after I’m settled here, to be called up sometimes in the, middle of the night, though ten o’clock isn’t bad for my second day in Boston.” Miss Aldgate laughed with instant appreciation of his pleasantry, and Mrs. Meredith wanly smiled. “You must be even more recent than I am, Mrs. Meredith. I’m afraid that if I had found your names in the register when I signed mine, I should have ventured to call unprofessionally. But then it would very likely have been some other Mrs. Meredith.”

Miss Aldgate laughed again, and Olney gave her a look of the kindness a man feels for any one who sees his joke. She dropped upon the chair at the head of the sofa, and invited him with dancing eyes to say some more of these things. But Mrs. Meredith took the word.

“We only got in this morning. That is, the steamer arrived too late last night for us to come ashore, and we drove to the hotel before breakfast. You must be rather surprised to find us in such a place.”

“Not at all; I’m here myself,” said Olney. 

“Oh! “ Miss Aldgate laughed.

“I don’t assume,” he added, “that you came here for cheapness, as I did. At the hotels on the European plan, as they call it, they charge you as much for a room as they do for room and board together here.”

“Everything is very expensive,” sighed Mrs. Meredith. “We paid three dollars for our carriage from the ship; and I believe it’s nothing to what it is in New York. But it’s a great while since I’ve been in Boston, and I told them to bring me here because I’d heard it was an old-fashioned, quiet place. I felt them need of rest, but it seems very noisy. It was very smooth all the way over; but I was excited, and I slept badly. The last two or three nights I’ve scarcely slept at all.”

“Hmm!” said the doctor, feeling himself launched upon the case.

Miss Aldgate rose.

“My dear,” said her aunt, “I wish you would look up the prescription the ship’s doctor gave me. I was thinking of sending out to have it made up, but I shouldn’t wish to try it now unless Dr. Olney approves.”

Olney profited by Miss Aldgate’s absence to feel Mrs. Meredith’s pulse and look at her tongue. He asked her a few formal questions. He was a little surprised to find her so much better than she looked.

“You seem a little upset, Mrs. Meredith,” he said. “You may be suffering from suppressed seasickness, but I don’t think it’s anything worse.” He tried to treat the affair lightly, and he added: “I don’t see why you shouldn’t be on good terms with sleep. You know Tito slept very well, even with a bad conscience.”

Mrs. Meredith would not smile with him at the recurrence to their last conversation. She sighed, and gave him a look of tragical appeal. “ I sometimes think he had an enviable character.”

“Or temperament ,” Olney suggested. “There doesn’t seem to have been much question of character. But he was certainly well constituted for getting on in a world where there was no moral law — if he could have found such a world.”

“Then you do believe there is such a law in this world? “ Mrs. Meredith demanded, with an intensity that did not flatter Olney he had been light to good purpose.

He could not help smiling at his failure. “I would rather not say till you had got a night’s rest.”

“No, no,” she persisted. “Do you believe that any one can rightfully live a lie? Do you believe that Tito was ever really at rest when he thought of what he was concealing?”

“He seems to have been pretty comfortable, except when Romola got at him with her moral nature.”

“Ah, don’t laugh! “ said Mrs. Meredith. “It isn’t a thing to laugh at.”

MissAldgate came in, with a scrap of paper fluttering from her slim hand, and showing her pretty teeth in a smile so free of all ethical question that Olney swiftly conjectured an anxiety of Mrs. Meredith concerning a nature so apparently free of all personal responsibility as the young girl looked at that moment. He was aware of innocently rejoicing in this sense of her, which came from the goodness and sweet- ness which she looked as much as the irresponsibility. It might be that Mrs. Meredith bad lost sleep in revolving the problems of Miss Aldgate’s character, and the chances of her being equal to the duties that had left so little of Mrs. Meredith. If such an aunt and such a niece were formed to wear upon each other, as the ladies say, it was clear that the niece had worn the most. With this thought evanescently in mind, Olney took the prescription from her.

He read it over, but he did not perceive that the sense of it had failed to reach his mind till Mrs. Meredith said, “If it is one of those old-fashioned narcotics — he called it a sleeping draught — I would rather not take it.”

Though Olney had not been thinking of the prescription, he now pretended that he had. “It would be rather a heroic dose for a first-cabin passenger,” he said, “though it might do for the steerage.” He took out his pocket-book and wrote a prescription himself. “There! I think that ought to get you a night’s rest, Mrs. Meredith.”

“I suppose we can get it made up?”’ she said, irresolutely, lifting herself a little on one elbow.
“I’ll take it out and have it done myself,” said Olney. “There’s an apothecary’s just under the hotel.”

He rose, but she said: “I can’t let you be at that trouble. We can send. Will you-”

“I’ll ring, Aunt Caroline,” said Miss Aldgate; and she ran forward to press the electric button by the door.

The bell was answered by the same man who came to call the doctor to Mrs. Meredith. Miss Aldgate took the prescription, and rapidly explained to. him what she wanted. When she had finished, he looked up from the prescription at Olney with a puzzled face.

Olney smiled and Miss Aldgate laughed. The man had not understood at all.

“You know the apothecary’s shop under the hotel?” Olney began.

“Yes, I know that forst-rate, sor.”

“Well, take that paper down and give it to the apothecary, and wait till he makes up the medicine, and then bring it back to us.”

“This paper, sor?”

“No; the medicine.”

“And lave the paper wid um?”

“Yes. The apothecary will give you the medicine and keep the prescription. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sor.”

“Well?”
   “Is the ‘pot’ecary after havin’ the prescription now, sor?” 

Olney took the paper out of his hand and shook it at him. “ This paper — this — is the prescription. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sor.”

“Take it to the apothecary.”

“The man under the hotel, sor?”

“Yes, the one under the hotel. This prescription — this paper — give it to him; and he will make up a medicine, and give it to you in a bottle; and then you bring it here.”

“The bottle, sor?”

“Yes, the bottle with the medicine in it.”

“Ahl right, sor! I understand, sor!”

The man hurried away down the corridor, and Miss Aldgate shut the door and broke into a laugh at sight of Olney’s face, red and heated with the effort he had been making.

Olney laughed too. “If the matter had been much simpler, I never should have got it into his head at all!”

“They seem to have no imagination!” said the girl. “ Or too much,” suggested Olney. “ There is something very puzzling to us Teutons in the Celtic temperament. We don’t know where to have an Irishman. We can predicate of a brother Teuton that this will please him, and that will vex him, but we can’t of an Irishman. You treat him with the greatest rudeness and he doesn’t mind it; then you propose to be particularly kind and nice, and he takes fire with the most bewildering offence.”

“I know it,” said Miss Aldgate. “That was the way with all our cooks in New York. Don’t you remember, aunty?”

Mrs. Meredith made no answer, and

“We can’t call them stupid,” Olney went on. “I think that as a general thing the Irish are quicker-witted than we are. They’re sympathetic and poetic far beyond us. But they can’t understand the simplest thing from us. Perhaps they set the high constructive faculties of the imagination at work, when they ought to use a little attention and mere common- sense. At any rate they seem more foreign to our intelligence, our way of thinking, than the Jews — or the negroes even.”

“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that about the negroes,” said Miss Aldgate. “We were having a dispute this afternoon,” she explained, “about the white waiters here and the colored waiters at the Hotel Vendome. I was calling on some friends we have there,” and Miss Aldgate flushed a little as she said this: “ or rather, they came here to see us, and then I drove back with them a moment; and it made me quite homesick to come away and leave those black waiters. Don’t you think they’re charming? With those soft voices and gentle manners? My aunt has no patience with me; she can’t bear to have me look at them; but I never see one of them without loving them. I suppose it’s because they’re about the first thing I can remember. I was born in the South, you know. Perhaps I got to having a sort of fellow- feeling with them from my old black nurse. You know the Italians say you do.”

She turned vividly toward Olney, as if to refer the scientific point to him, but he put it by with a laugh.

“I’m afraid I feel about them as Miss Aldgate does, Mrs. Meredith; and I hadn’t an old
nurse, either.  I’ve been finding them wherever I’ve seen them, since I got back.” Miss Aldgate clapped her hands. “To be sure, I haven’t been here long enough to get tired of them.”

“Oh, I should never tire of them! “ said the girl. “But so far, certainly, they seem to me the most
agreeable, the most interesting feature of the social spectacle.”

“There, Aunt Caroline!”

“I must confess,” Olney went on, “that it’s given me a distinct pleasure whenever I’ve met one of them. They seem to be the only people left who have any heart for life here; they all look hopeful and happy, even in the rejection from their fellow- men, which strikes me as one of the most preposterous, the most monstrous things in the world, now I’ve got back to it here.”

Mrs. Meredith lay with her hand shading her eyes and half her face. She asked, without taking her hand away, “Would you like to meet them on terms of social equality — intermarry with them?”

“Oh, now, Aunt Caroline! “ Miss Aldgate broke in. Who’s talking of anything like that?”

“I certainly am not,” said Olney, as far as the intermarrying is concerned. But short of that I don’t see why one shouldn’t associate with them. There are terms a good deal short of the affection we lavish on dogs and horses that I fancy they might be very glad of. We might recognize them as fellow-beings in public, if we don’t in private; but we ignore, if we don’t repulse them at every point-from our business as well as our bosoms. Yes, it strikes one as very odd on getting home — very funny, very painful. You would think we might meet on common ground before our common God — but we don’t. They have their own churches, and I suppose it would be as surprising to find one of them at a white communion-table as it would to find one at a white dinner-party.”

Olney said this without the least feeling about the matter, except a sense of its grotesqueness. He was himself an agnostic, but he could be as censorious of the Christians who denied Christ in the sacrament, as if he had himself been a better sort. He added:

“Possibly the negroes would be welcome in a Catholic church; the Catholics seem to have kept the ideal of Christian equality in their churches. If ever they turn their attention to the negroes—”

“Oh, I can’t imagine a colored Catholic,” said Miss Aldgate. “There seems something unnatural in the very idea.”

“All the same, there are a good many of them.”

“In Boston?”

“No, not in Boston, I fancy.” Mrs. Meredith had taken no farther part in the con- versation; she lay rigidly quiet on her sofa, with her hand shading her eyes.

There was a knock at the door, and Miss Aldgate sprang to open it, with the effect of being glad to work off her exuberant activity in that or any other way: with Mrs. Meredith so passive, and Olney so acquiescent, the discussion of the race problem was not half enough for her.

The man was there, with the bottle from the apothecary’s, and he and Miss Aldgate had a beaming little interview. He exulted in getting back with the medicine all right, and she gratefully accepted his high sense of his offices, and repaid him his outlay, running about the room, and opening several trunks and bags to find her purse, and then added something for his trouble.

“Dear me! “ she said, when she got rid of him, “I wish they wouldn’t make it quite so clear that they expected to be I remembered.” They’ve kept my memory on the qui vive every moment I’ve been in the hotel.”

Olney smiled in sympathy as he took the bottle from her. “I’ve found it impossible to forget the least thing they’ve done for me, and I never boasted of my memory.”

She stood watching his examination of the label of the bottle, and his test of its contents from a touch of the inner tip of the cork on his tongue. “A spoon? I’ve got one here in aunty’s medicine chest. It would have cost its weight in silver to get one from the din- ing-room. And there happens to be ice-water, if you have to give it in water. Don’t say water without ice!”

“Ice-water will do,” said Olney. He began to drop the medicine from the bottle into the spoon, which he then poured into the glass of water she brought him. “I believe,” he said, stirring it, “that if the negroes ever have their turn — and if the meek are to inherit the earth they must come to it — we shall have a civilization of such sweetness and good-will as the world has never known yet. Perhaps we shall have to wait their turn for any real Christian civilization.”

“You remember the black Madonna at Florence, that used to be so popular? What Madonna was it? I suppose they will revere her, when they get to be all Catholics. Were you in any of their churches to-day? You were saying—” Miss Aldgate put out her hand for the glass.

“No; I never was in a colored church in my life,” said Olney. “I’m critical, not constructive, in my humanity. It’s easier.”

He went himself with the glass to Mrs. Meredith. She seemed not to have been paying any attention to his talk with her niece. She lifted herself up at his approach, and took the glass from him.

“Shall I drink it all?”

“Yes — you can take all of it.”

She quaffed it at one nervous gulp, and flung her head heavily down again. “I don’t believe it will make me sleep,” she said.

Olney smiled. “Well, fortunately, this kind doesn’t require the co-operation of the patient. It will make you sleep, I think. You may try keeping awake, if you like.”

She opened her eyes with a flash. “Is it chloral?”

“No, it isn’t chloral.”

“Tell me the truth!” She laid a convulsive clutch upon his wrist, as he sat fronting her and curiously watching her. “I will not let you justify yourself by that code of yours which lets the doctor cheat his patient! If you have been giving me some form of chloral -”

“I haven’t been giving you any form of chloral,” said Olney, beginning to smile.

“Then you are trying to hypnotize me!”

Olney burst into a laugh. “You certainly need sleep, Mrs. Meredith! I’ll look in during the fore-noon, about the time you ought to wake, and de-hypnotize you.” He moved toward the door; but before he reached it he stopped and said, seriously: “I don’t know of any code that would allow me to cheat you, against your will. I don’t believe any doctor is justified in doing that. Unless he has some sign, some petition for deception, from the patient, you can depend upon it that he finds the truth the best thing.”

“It’s the only thing — at all times — in life and death!” cried Mrs. Meredith, perfervidly. “If I were dying, I should wish to know it!”

“And I shouldn’t wish to know it! “ said Miss Ald- gate. “I think there are cases when the truth would be cruel — positively wicked! Don’t you Dr.Olney?”

“Well,” said Olney, preparing to escape through the door which he had set open, “I couldn’t honestly say that I think either of us is in immediate danger. Good-night! “

V

   Olney did not go to see Mrs. Meredith until noon, the next day. He thought that if she were worse, or no better, she would send for him, and that if she did not send, he might very well delay seeing her. He found her alone. Miss Aldgate, she said, had gone to drive with their friends at the Vendome, and was to lunch with them. Olney bore her absence as politely as he could, and hoped Mrs. Meredith had slept.

“Yes, I slept,” she said, with a kind of suppressed sigh, “but I’m not sure that I’m very much the better for it.”

“I’m sure you are,” said Olney, with resolute cheerfulness; and he began to go through with the usual touching of the pulse, and looking at the tongue, and the questions that accompany this business.

Mrs. Meredith broke abruptly away from it all. “It’s useless for us to go on! I’ve no doubt you can drug me to sleep whenever you will. But if I’m to wake up, when I wake, to the trouble that’s on my mind, the sleep will do me no good.”

She looked wistfully at him, as if she longed to have him ask her what the matter was; but Olney did not feel authorized to do this. He had known, almost from the first moment he met Mrs. Meredith, the night before, that she had something on her mind, or believed so, and that if she could tell him of her trouble, she would probably need no medicine; but he had to proceed, as the physician often must, upon the theory that only her body was out of order, and try to quiet her spirit through her nerves, when the true way was from the other direction. It went through his mind that it might be well for the nervous specialist hereafter to combine the functions of the priest and the leech, especially in the case of nervous ladies, and confess his patients before he began to prescribe for them.

But he could not help feeling glad that things had not come to this millennial pass; for he did not at all wish to know what Mrs. Meredith had on her mind. So much impression of her character had been left from their different meetings in Florence that he had already theorized her as one of those women, commoner; amongst us than any other people, perhaps, to whom life, in spite of all experience, remains a sealed book, and who are always trying to unlock its mysteries with the keys furnished them by fiction. They judge the world by the novels they have read, and their acquaintance in the flesh by characters in stories, instead of judging these by the real people they have met, and more or less lived with. Such women get a tone of mind that is very tiresome to every one but other women like them, and that is peculiarly repulsive to such men as Olney, or, if not repulsive, then very ridiculous. In Mrs. Meredith’s case he did not, so much accuse her of wishing to pose as a character with a problem to work out; there was nothing histrionic about the poor woman; but he fancied her hopelessly muddled as to her plain, every-day obligations, by a morbid sympathy with the duty-ridden creatures of the novelist’s brain. He remembered from that first talk of the winter before — it had been a long talk, an exhaustive talk, covering many cases of conscience in fiction besides that of Tito Malema — that she had shown herself incapable of sinking the sense of obligation in the sense of responsibility, and that she apparently conceived of what she called living up to the truth as something that might be done singly; that right affected her as a body of positive color, sharply distinguished from wrong, and not shading into and out of it by gradations of tint, as we find it doing in reality. Such a woman, he had vaguely reflected, when he came to sum up his impressions, would be capable of an atrocious cruelty in speaking or acting the truth, and would consider herself an exemplary person for having done her duty at any cost of suffering to herself and others. But she would exaggerate as well as idealize, and he tried to find comfort now in thinking that what she had on her mind was very likely a thing of bulk out of all proportion to its weight. Very likely it was something with reference to her niece; some waywardness of affection or ambition in the girl. She might be wanting to study medicine, or law, or divinity; perhaps she wanted to go on the stage. More probably, it was a question of whom she should marry, and Mrs. Meredith was wrestling with the problem of how far in this age of intense individualization a girl’s inclinations might be forced for her good, and how far let go for her evil. Such a problem would be quite enough to destroy Mrs. Meredith’s peace, if that was what she had on her mind; and Olney could not help relating his conjecture to these people at the Vendome, whom Miss Aldgate had gone to drive with and lunch with to-day, after having, been to drive with them yesterday. Those people in turn he related to the young clergyman she had spent the evening in talking with in Florence, when he was himself only partially engaged in exploring her aunt’s conscience. He wondered whether Mrs. Meredith favored or opposed the young clergyman, and what was just the form of the trouble that was on her mind, but still without the intention to inquire it
out.

“Well, perhaps,” he suggested, half jocosely,” the trouble will disappear when you’ve had sleep enough.”

“You know very well,” she answered, “that it won’t — that what you say is simply impossible. I remember some things, you said that night when we talked so long together, and I know that you are inclined to confound the moral and the physical, as all doctors are.”

Olney would have liked to say, “I wish, my dear lady, you wouldn’t confound the sane and insane in the way you do.” But he silently submitted, and let her go on.

“That made me dislike you; but I can’t say it made me distrust you. I think that if you had been an untruthful person you would have concealed your point of view from me.”

Olney could not say he might not have thought it worth while to do that. On the contrary, he had a sort of compassion for the lofty superiority of a woman who so obviously felt her dependence upon him, and was arming herself in all her pride for her abasement before him. He knew that she was longing to tell him what was on her mind, and would probably not end till she had done it. He did not feel that he had the right to prevent her doing that, and he smiled passively in saying, “I couldn’t advise you to trust me too far.”

“I must trust some. one too far,” she said, “and I have literally no one but you.” The tears came into her eyes, and Olney, who knew very well how easily the tears come into women’s eyes, was broken up by the sight.

“My dear Mrs. Meredith, I should be very glad to be trusted even too far, if I could really be of use to you.”

“Oh, I don’t know that you can,” she said. After a pause she added, abruptly, “Do you believe in heredity?”

Olney felt inclined to laugh. “Well, that’s rather a spacious question, Mrs. Meredith. What do you mean by heredity?”

“You know! The persistence of ancestral traits; the transmission of character and tendency; the reappearance of types after several generations; the—”

She stopped, and Olney know that he had got at the body of her anxiety, though she had not yet revealed its very features. He determined to deal with the matter as reassuringly as he could in the dark. He smiled in answering, “Heredity is a good deal like the germ theory. There’s a large amount of truth in it, no doubt; but it’s truth in a state of solution, and nobody knows just how much of it there is. Perhaps we shall never know. As for those cases of atavism — for I suppose that’s what you mean—”

“Yes, yes! Atavism? That is the word.”

“They’re not so very common, and they’re not so very well ascertained. You find them mentioned in the books, but vaguely, and on a kind of hearsay, without the names of persons and places; it’s a notion that some writers rather like to toy with; but when you come to boil it down, as the newspapers say, there isn’t a great deal of absolute fact there. Take the reversion to the inferior race type in the child of parents of mixed blood — say a white with a mulatto or quadroon—”

“Yes! “ said Mrs. Meredith, with eagerness. “Why, it’s, very effective as a bit of drama. But it must be very rare — very rare indeed. You hear of instances in which the parent of mixed race could not be known from a white person, and yet the child reverts to the negro type in color and feature and character. I should doubt it very much.”

Mrs. Meredith cried out as if he had questioned holy writ. “You should do it! Why should you doubt it, Dr. Olney?” Yet he perceived that for some reason she wished him to reaffirm his doubt.

“Because the chances are so enormously against it. The natural tendency is all the other way, to the permanent effacement of the inferior type. The child of a white and an octoroon is a sixteenth blood; and the child of that child and a white is a thirty-second blood. The chances of atavism, or reversion to the black great-great-great-grandfather are so remote that they may be said hardly to exist at all. They are outside of the probabilities, and only on the verge of the possibilities. But it’s so thrilling to consider such a possibility that people like to consider it. Fancy is as much committed to it as prejudice is; but it hasn’t so much excuse, for prejudice is mostly ignorant, and fancy mostly educated, or half-educated.” Olney folded one leg comfortably across the other, and went on, with a musing smile.”I’ve been thinking about all this a good deal within the past two days — or since I got back to Boston. I’ve been more and more struck with the fact that sooner or later our race must absorb the colored race; and I believe that it will obliterate not only its color, but its qualities. The tame man, the civilized man, is stronger than the wild man; and I believe that in those cases within any one race where there are very strong ancestral proclivities on one side especially toward evil, they will die out before the good tendencies on the other side, for much the same reason, that is, because vice is savage and virtue is civilized.”

Mrs. Meredith listened intently, but at last, “I wish I could believe what you say,” she sighed, heavily. “But I don’t know that that would relieve me of the duty before me,” she added, after a moment’s thought. “Dr. Olney, there is something that I need very much to speak about — something that must be done — that my health depends upon — I shall never get well unless—”

“If there is anything you wish to say concerning your health, Mrs. Meredith,” he answered, seriously, “it’s of course my duty to hear it.”

He sat prepared to listen, but she apparently did not know how to begin, and after several gasps she was silent. Then, “No, I can’t tell you! “ she broke out.

He rose. “Are you to be some time in Boston?” he asked, to relieve the embarrassment of the situation.

“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose a week or two.”

“If I can be of use to you in any way, I shall be glad to have you send for me.”

He turned to the door, but as he put his band on the knob she called out: “No! Don’t go! Sit down! I must speak! You remember,” she hurried on, before he could resume his chair, “a young gentleman who talked with my niece that night at Professor Garofalo’s — a Mr. Bloomingdale?”

“The young minister?”

“Yes.” 

“I remember him very well, though I don’t think I spoke with him.”

Olney stared at Mrs. Meredith, wondering what this Rev. Mr. Bloomingdale had to do with the matter, whatever the matter might be.

“It is his mother and sisters that my niece is lunching with,” she said, with an air of explaining. “He is expected on the next steamer, and then — then I must speak! It can’t go on, so. There must be a clear and perfect understanding.  Dr. Olney,” she continued, with a glance at his face, which he felt growing more and more bewildered under the influence of her words, “Mr. Bloomingdale is very much attached to my niece. He — he has offered himself ; he offered himself in Liverpool; and I insisted that Rhoda should not give him a decisive answer then — that she should take time to think it over. I wished to gain time myself.”

“Yes,” said Olney, because she seemed to expect him to say something.

“I wished to gain time and I wished to gain strength, but I have lost both; and the affair has grown more difficult and complicated. Mr. Bloomingdale’s family are very fond of Rhoda; they are aware of his attachment — they were in Florence at the time you were, and they came home without him a few months ago, because he wished to stay on in the hope of winning her — and they are showing her every attention ; and she does not see how her being with them complicates everything. Of course they flatter her, and she’s very headstrong, like all young girls, and I’m afraid she’s committing herself—”

“Do they live at the Vendome?” Olney asked, with a certain distaste for them, and he was conscious of resenting their attentions to Miss Aldgate as pushing and vulgar under the circumstances, though he had no right to do so.

“No. They are just waiting there for him. They are New York State people — the western part. They are very rich; the mother is a widow, and they are going to live in Ohio, where Mr. Bloomingdale has a call. They are kind, good people — very kind; and I feel that Rhoda is abusing their kindness by being so much with them before she has positively accepted him; and I can’t let her do that until everything is known. She refused him when he offered himself first in Florence — I’ve always thought she had some other fancy — but at Liverpool, where he renewed his offer just before we sailed, she was inclined to accept him; I suppose her fancy had passed. As I say, I insisted that she should take at least a week to consider it, and that he should change his passage from our steamer to the next. I had no idea of :finding his family in Boston, but perhaps in the confusion he forgot to tell us. They found our names in the passenger list, and they came to see us directly after lunch, yesterday. If the match is broken off now, after—”

Mrs. Meredith stopped in a sort of despair, which Olney shared with her as far as concerned the blind alley in which he found himself. He had not the least notion of the way out, and he could only wait her motion.

“I don’t see,” she resumed, “how my, niece can help accepting him if she goes on at this rate with his family, and I don’t know how to stop her without telling her the worst at once. I’m afraid she has got her heart set on him.” Mrs. Meredith paused again, and then went on. “I have shrunk from speaking because I know that the poor young man’s happiness, as well as Rhoda’s, is involved, and the peace and self-respect of his family. There have been times when I have almost felt that if there were no danger of the facts ever coming to light, I could make up my mind to die, as I have lived, in a lie. But now I know I cannot; it is my duty to speak out; and the marriage will not take place unless everything is known. It will kill her. But it must be done! Those ancestral traits, those tendencies, may die out, but I can’t let any one take the risk of their recurrence unknowingly. He must know who and what she is as fully as I do: her origin, her—”

Olney believed that he began to understand. There was some stain upon that poor child’s birth. She was probably not related to Mrs. Meredith at all; she was a foundling; or she was the daughter of some man or woman whose vices or crimes might find her out with their shame if not their propensity some day. Whatever sinister tendency she was heiress to, or whatever ancestral infamy, it could only be matter of conjecture, not inquiry, with Olney; but he imagined the worst from hints that Mrs. Meredith had thrown out, and attributed her to a family of criminals, such as has here and there found its way into the figures of the statistician. He was not shocked; he was interested by the fact; and he did not find Miss Aldgate at all less charming and beautiful in the conclusion he jumped to than he had found her before. He said to himself that if the case were his, as it was that young minister’s, there could be no question in it, except the question of her willingness. to marry him. He said this from the safe vantage of the disinterested witness, and with the easy decision of one who need not act upon his decision.

VI

In his instantaneous mental processes, Olney kept his attention fixed upon Mrs. Meredith, and he was aware of her gasping out:

“My niece is of negro descent.”

Olney recoiled from the words, in a turmoil of emotion for which there is no term but disgust. His disgust was profound and pervasive, and it did not fail, first of all, to involve the poor child herself. He found himself personally disliking the notion of her having negro blood in her veins; before he felt pity he felt repulsion; his own race instinct expressed itself in a merciless rejection of her beauty, her innocence, her helplessness because of her race. The impulse had to have its course; and then he mastered it, with an abiding compassion, and a sort of tender indignation. He felt that it was atrocious for this old woman to have allowed her hypochondriacal anxiety to dabble with the mysteries of the young girl’s future in that way, and he resented having been trapped into considering her detestable question. His feeling was unscientific; but he could not at once detach himself from the purely social relation which he had hitherto held toward Miss Aldgate. The professional view which he was invited to take seemed to have lost all dignity, to be impertinent, cruel, squalid, and to involve the abdication of certain sentiments, conventions, which he was unwilling to part with, at least in her case. Sensibilities which ought not to have survived his scientific training and ambition were wounded to rebellion in him; he perceived as never before that there was an inherent outrage in the submission of such questions to one of the opposite sex; there should be women to deal with them.

“How — negro descent?” he asked, stupidly, from the whirl of these thoughts.

“I will try to tell you,” said Mrs. Meredith. “And some things you said about that — race — those wretched beings, last night — You were sincere in what you said? “ she demanded of the kind of change that came into his face.

“Sincere? Yes,” said Olney, thinking how far from any concrete significance he had supposed his words to have for his listeners when he spoke them. He added, “I do abhor the cruel stupidity that makes any race treat another as outcast. But I never dreamed—”

Mrs. Meredith broke in upon him, saying:

“It is almost the only consolation I have in thinking she is rightfully and lawfully my niece, to know that in the course I must take now, I shall not be seeming to make her an outcast. I honored my brother for honoring her mother, and giving her his name when there was no need of his doing it.  He did not consult me, and I did not know it till afterward; but I should have been the first to urge it, when it came to a question of marriage or — anything else. For one of our family there could be no such question; there was none for him.

“He went South shortly after the war, as so many Northern men did, intending to make his home there; his health was delicate, and his only hope of strength and usefulness, if not of life, was in a milder climate. He outlived the distrust that the Southerners had for all Northern men in those days, and was establishing himself in a very good practice at New Orleans — I forgot to say he was a physician — when he met Rhoda’s mother. I needn’t go over the details; she was an octoroon, the daughter and the granddaughter of women who had never hoped for marriage with the white men who fell in love with them; but she had been educated by her father — he was a Creole, and she was educated in a Northern convent — and I have no doubt she was an accomplished and beautiful girl. I never saw her. My brother met her in her father’s house, almost beside her father’s death-bed; but even if he had met her in her mother’s house, on her mother’s level, it would not have been possible for him to do otherwise than as he did. He thought at first of keeping the marriage secret, and of going on as before, until he could afford to own it and take all the consequences; but he decided against this, and I was always glad that he did. They were married, after her father’s death; and then my brother’s ruin began. He lost his practice in the families where he had got a footing, among the well-to-do and respectable people whom he had made his friends; and though he would have been willing to go on among a poorer class who could pay less, it was useless. He had to go away; and for five or six years he drifted about from one place to another, trying to gain a hold here and there, and failing everywhere. Sooner or later his story followed him.

“I don’t blame the Southern people; I’m not sure it would have been better in the North. If it had been known who his wife was, she would not have been received socially here any more than she was there; and I doubt if it would not have affected my brother’s professional standing in much the same way. People don’t like to think there is anything strange about their doctor; they must make a confidant, they must make a familiar of him; and if there is anything peculiar, unusual — My husband was a very good man, one of the best men who ever lived, and he approved of my brother’s marriage in the abstract as much as I did; but even he never liked to think whom he had married. He was always afraid it would come out among our friends, somehow, and it would be known that his sister-in-law was —

“At last the poor young creature died, and my brother came North with his little girl. We hoped that then be might begin again, and make a new start in life. But it was too late. He was a mere wreck physically, and he died too within the year. And then it became a question what we should do with the child. As long as she was so merely a child, it was comparatively simple. We had no children of our own, and when my brother died in another part of the State — we were living in New York then, and he had gone up into the Adirondack region in the hope of getting better — it was natural that we should take the little one home. In a place like New York, nothing is known unless you make it known, and Rhoda was brought up in our house, without any conjecture or curiosity from people outside; she was my brother’s orphan, and nobody knew or cared who my brother was; she had teachers and she had schools like any other child, and she had the companionships and the social advantages which our own station and money could command.

“At first my husband and I thought of letting her think herself our child; but that would have involved a deceit which we were unwilling to practise; besides, it was not necessary, and it would have been great pain for her afterwards. We decided to tell her the truth when the time came, and never anything but the truth, at any time. We never deceived her, but we let her deceive herself. When she came to the age when children begin to ask about themselves, we told her that her father had married in the South, and that her mother, whom she did not remember, was of French descent; but we did not know of her family. This was all true; but still it was not the truth; we knew that well enough, but we promised ourselves that when the time came we would tell her the, truth.

“She made up little romances about her mother, which she came to believe in as facts, with our sufferance. I should now call it our connivance.”

Mrs. Meredith appealed to Olney with a glance, and he said, in the first sympathy he had felt for her, “It was a difficult position.”

“She easily satisfied herself — it’s astonishing how little curiosity children have about all the mystery of their coming here — and as she had instinctively inferred something strange or unusual about her mother’s family, she decided that she had married against her grandfather’s wishes. We left her that illusion, too — it seemed so easy to leave things then! It was when she ceased to be a child, and we realized more and more how her life might any time involve some other life, that the question became a constant pressure upon us. Neither my husband or myself ever justified the concealment we lived in concerning her. We often talked of it, and how it must come to an end. But we were very much attached to her, and we put off thinking definitely about the duty before us as long as we could. Sometimes it seemed to us that we ought to tell the child just who and what she was, but we never had the courage; she does not know to this day. What do you think our duty to her really was?”

“Your duty?” Olney echoed, vaguely. A little while ago be would have answered instantly that they had no duty but to keep her in ignorance as long as she lived; but now he could not honestly do this. 

The only thing that he could honestly do was to say, “I don’t know,” and this was what he said.

Mrs. Meredith resumed: “My husband had gone out of business, and there was nothing to keep us at home. But we had nothing definitely in view when we went abroad, or at least nothing explicitly in view. We said that we were going abroad for Rhoda’s education; but I think that in my husband’s heart, as well as in mine, there was the hope that something might happen to solve the difficulty; we had no plan for solving it. I thought, at any rate, if he did not, that in Europe there would be less unhappiness in store for her than here. I knew that in Europe, especially on the Continent, there was little or none of that race prejudice which we have, and I thought — I imagined — I should find it easier to tell Rhoda the truth, if I could tell her at the same time that it made no difference to the man she was to marry.”

Olney understood ; and he was rather restive under Mrs. Meredith’s apparent helplessness to leave anything to his imagination.

“I hoped it might be some Italian — from the first I liked the Italians the best. We lived a great deal in Italy, at Rome and Naples, at Florence, at Venice, even at Milan; and everywhere we tried to avoid Americans. We went into Italian society almost entirely.

“But it seemed a perfect fatality. Rhoda was always homesick for America, and always eager to meet Americans. She refused all the offers that were made for her — and they began to come, even before she was fairly in society — and declared that she would never marry any one but an American. She was always proclaiming her patriotism, and asserting the superiority of America over every other country in a way that would have made anybody but a very pretty girl offensive. The perplexities simply grew upon us, and in the midst of them my husband died, and then I had no one to advise with or confide in. When his affairs were settled up, it turned out that we were much poorer than we had believed. For a while I thought that I should return home, and Rhoda was always eager to come back, but we staid on at Florence, living very quietly, and we had scarcely been out at all for a year, when you first met us at Professor Garofalo’s. It was there that she met Mr. Bloomingdale, and he was so attentive to her. I could see at once that he was greatly taken with her, and he followed up the acquaintance in a way that could not leave me any doubt. It was certainly not her money that attracted him.

“I liked him from the beginning; and his being a minister gave me a kind of hope, I can hardly tell why. But I thought that if it ever came to my having to tell him about Rhoda, he would be more reasonable. He was so very amiable, very gentle, very kind. Did you ever meet him afterward, anywhere?”

“No,” said Olney, briefly. “I am sorry; I hoped you had; I thought you might have come to know him well enough to sug- gest — I don’t like his family, what I’ve seen of them, so well. If they know at all what is pending between him and Rhoda, it doesn’t seem very nice of them to be pursuing her so.”

Mrs. Meredith sat so dreary in her silence that Olney pitied her, and found a husky voice to say, “Perhaps they don’t know.”

“Perhaps not,” she assented, sadly. “But my only hope now is in his being able to take it, when I tell him, as I have hardly the hope that any other American would. I must tell him, if she accepts him, or decides to accept him, and the question is whether I shall tell him before I tell her. If I tell him first, fully and frankly, perhaps — perhaps — he may choose to keep it from her and she need never know. What — what do you think?” she entreated.

“Really,” said Olney, “that’s a matter I have no sort of opinion about. I’m very sorry, but you must excuse me.”

“But you feel that I must tell him?”

“That’s another question for you, Mrs. Meredith. I can’t answer it.”

She threw herself back on the sofa. “I wish I were dead! I see no way out of it; and whatever happens, it will kill the child.”

Olney sat silent. for some time in a muse almost as dreary as her own. After having despised her as a morbid sentimentalist with a hypochondriacal conscience, he had come to respect her, as we respect any fellow-creature on whom a heavy duty is laid, and who is struggling faithfully to stand up under the burden. He said suddenly, “You mustn’t tell him first, Mrs. Meredith!”

“Why?”

“Because — because — the secret is hers, to keep it, or to tell it. No one else has the right to know it without her leave.”

“And if — if she should choose to keep it from him — not tell him at all?”

“I couldn’t blame her. It’s no fault, no wrong of hers. And who is to be harmed by its concealment?”

“But the chances — the future — the — the—”

Olney could not bear the recurrence to this phase of the subject. He made a gesture of impatience.

Mrs. Meredith added, with hysterical haste: “It might come out in a hundred ways. I can hear it in her voice at times — it’s a black voice! I can see it in her looks! I can feel it in her character — so easy, so irresponsible, so fond of what is soft and pleasant! She could not deny herself the amusement of going with those people to-day, though I said all I could against it. She cannot forecast consequences; she’s a creature of the present hour; she’s like them all! I think that in some occult, dreadful way she feels her affinity with them, and that’s the reason why she’s so attracted by them, so fond of them. It’s her race calling her! I don’t believe she would ever tell him!”

“I think you ought to leave it to her,” said Olney. “And let her live a lie! Oh, I know too well
what that is!” 

“It’s bad. But there may be worse things. It seems as if there might be circumstances in which it was one’s right to live a lie, as you say; for the sake—”

“Never! “ said Mrs. Meredith vehemently. “It is better to die — to kill — than to lie. I know how people say such things and act them, till life is all one web of falsehood, from the rising to the going down of the sun. But I will never consent to be a party to any such deceit. I will tell Rhoda, and then she shall tell me what she is going to do, and if she is not going to tell him, I will do it. Yes! I will not be responsible for the future, and I should be responsible if he did not know. In such a case I could not spare her. She is my own flesh and blood; she is as dear to me as my own child could be; but if she were my own child it would be all the same. I would rather see her perish before my eyes than married to any man who did not know the secret of her — O-o-o-o-o!” Mrs. Meredith gave a loud, shuddering cry, as the door was flung suddenly open, and Miss Aldgate flashed radiantly into the room.

She kept the door-knob in her hand, while she demanded, half frightened, half amused, “What in the world is the matter? Did I startle you? Of course! But I just ran in a moment as we were driving by — we’re going over to do our duty by Bunker Hill Monument — to see how you were getting on. I’m so glad you are here, Dr. Olney.” She released the door-knob, and gave him her hand. “Now I can leave Aunt Caroline without a qualm of conscience till after lunch; and I did have a qualm or two, poor aunty!”

She stooped on one knee beside the sofa, and kissed her aunt, who seemed to Olney no better than a murderess in the embrace of her intended victim. In this light and joyous presence, all that he had heard of the girl’s anomalous origin became not only incredible, but atrocious. She was purely and merely a young lady, like any other; and he felt himself getting red with shame for having heard what he had been told against his will.

He could not speak, and he marvelled that Mrs., Meredith could command the words to say, in quite an every-day voice: “You silly child! You needn’t have stopped. I was getting on perfectly well.”

“Of course you were! And I suppose I have interrupted you in the full flow of symptoms! I can imagine what a perfectly delightful time you were having with Dr. Olney! I think I’ll change these gloves.” She ran into the room that opened from Mrs. Meredith’s parlor, and left him unable to lift his eyes from the floor in her brief absence. She came back pulling on one long mousquetaire glove, while the other dangled from her fingers, and began to laugh. “There’s one of those colored waiters down there that even you couldn’t have anything to say against my falling in love with, Aunt Caroline. He’s about four feet high, and his feet are about eighteen inches long, so that he looks just like a capital L. Hedoesn’t lift them when he walks, but he slips along on them over the floor like a funny little mouse; I’ve decided to call him Creepy-Mousy; it just exactly describes him, he’s so small and cunning. And he’s so sweet! I should like to own him, and keep him as long as he lived. Isn’t it a shame that we can’t buy them, Dr. Olney, as we used to do? There! I’ll put on the other one in the carriage.”

She swooped upon her aunt for another kiss, and then flashed out of the room as she had flashed into it, and left Mrs. Meredith and Olney staring at each other.

“Well!” she said.”You see! It is the race instinct! It must assert itself sooner or later.”

Olney became suddenly sardonic in the sort of desperation he fell into. “I should say it was the other-race instinct that was asserting itself sooner; “and when he had said this he felt somehow a hope, which he tried to impart to Mrs. Meredith.

At the end of all their talk she said: “But that doesn’t relieve me of the duty I owe to her and to him. I must tell her, at least, cost what it may. I cannot live this lie any longer. If she chooses to do so, perhaps—” 

VII

 Miss Aldgate came in late in the afternoon. She came in softly, and then, finding her aunt awake, she let herself fall into an easy-chair with the air of utter exhaustion that girls like to put on, after getting home from a social pleasure, and sighed out a long “0-o-o-h, dear!

Her aunt let her sit silent and stare awhile at the carpet just beyond the toe of her pretty boot before she suggested, “Well?”

“Oh, nothing! Only it got to be rather tiresome, toward the last.”

“Why did you stay so long?”

“I couldn’t get away; they wouldn’t let me go. They kept proposing this and that, and then they wanted to arrange something for to-morrow. But I wouldn’t.”

“They are rather persistent,” said Mrs. Meredith. “Yes, they are persistent. But they are very kind — they are very good-natured. I wish — I wish I liked them better!”

“Don’t you like them?”

“Oh, I like them, yes, in a kind of way. They’re a very familyish sort of a family; they’re so muck bound up in one another. Of course they can do a  great many nice things: Miss Bloomingdale is really wonderful with her music; and Josie sketches very nicely; and Roberta sings beautifully, — there’s no denying it; but they don’t talk very much, and they’re all so tall and handsome and blond; and they sit round with their hands arranged in their laps, and keep waiting for me to say things, and then their mother starts, them up and makes them do something. The worst is she keeps dragging in Mr. Bloomingdale all the time. There isn’t anything that doesn’t suggest him — what he thinks, what he says, where he’s been and what he did there; just how far he’s got on his way home by this time; how he’s never seasick, but he doesn’t like rough weather. I began to dread the introduction of a new subject: it was so sure to bring round to him. Don’t you think they’re of rather an old-fashioned taste?”

“I never liked this family very much,” said Mrs. Meredith. “They seemed very estimable people, but not—”

“Our kind? No, decidedly. Did Dr. Olney stay long?”

“No. Why do you ask? “ Mrs. Meredith returned, with a startled look.

“Oh, nothing. You seemed to be quite chummy with him, and not to want me round a great deal when I came in.” Miss Aldgate had discovered the toe of her boot just beyond her skirt, apparently with some surprise, and she leaned forward to touch it with the point of her parasol, as if to make sure of it. “Is he  coming again this evening? “ she asked, leaning back in her chair, and twisting her parasol by its handle.

“Not unless I send for him. I have his sleeping medicine.”

“Yes. And I know how to drop it. Did he think it strange my being away from you so much when you needed a doctor?”

“He knew I didn’t need any doctor. Why do you ask such a question as that?”

“I don’t know. I thought it might have struck him. But I thought I had better try and see if I could get used to them or not. They’re pretty formal people — conventional. I mean in the way of dress and that kind of thing. They’re formal in their ideals, don’t you know. They would want to do just what they thought other people were doing; they would be dreadfully troubled if there was anything about them that was not just like everybody else. Do you think Mr. Bloomingdale would be so?”

“I never — liked his family very much,” Mrs. Meredith repeated. “What little I saw of them,” she added, as if conscientiously.

“Oh, that doesn’t count, Aunt Caroline!” said the girl, with a laugh. “You never liked the families of any of the Americans that you thought fancied me. But the question is not whether we like his family, but whether he’s like them.”

“You can’t separate him from his family, Rhoda. You must remember that. Each of us is bound by a thousand mysterious ties to our kindred, our ancestors; we can’t get away from them—”

“Oh, what stuff, aunty! “ Miss Aldgate was still greatly amused. “I should like to know how I’m bound to my mother’s family, that I never saw one of; or to her father or grandfather?”

“How?” Mrs. Meredith gasped.

“Yes. Or how much they were bound to me, if they never tried to find me out or make themselves known by any sort of sign? I’m bound to you because we’ve always been together, and I was bound to Uncle Meredith because he was good to me. But there isn’t anything mysterious about it. And Mr. Bloomingdale is bound to his family in the same way. He’s fond of them because he’s been nice to them and they’ve been nice to him. I wonder,” she mused, while Mrs. Meredith felt herself slowly recoil from the point which she had been suddenly caught up to, “whether I really care for him or not? There were very nice things about him; and no, he was not tiresome and formal-minded like them. I wish I had been a little in love with some one, and then I could tell. But I’ve never had anything but decided dislikings, though I didn’t dislike him decidedly. No, I rather liked him. That is, I thought he was good. Yes, I respected his goodness. It’s about the only thing in this world you can respect. But now, I remember, he seemed very young, and all the younger because he thought it was his duty as a minister to seem old. Did you care very much for his sermon?”

Rhoda came to the end of her thinking aloud with a question that she had to repeat before her aunt asked, drearily in answer, “What sermon?”

“Why, we only heard him once! The one he preached in Florence. I didn’t have a full sense of his youth till I heard that. Isn’t it strange that there are ever young ministers? I suppose people think they can make up in inspiration what they lack in experience. But that day when I looked round at those men and women, some of them gray-haired, and most of them middle-aged, and all of them knowing so much more about life, and its trials and temptations, and troubles and sorrows, than poor Mr. Bloomingdale — I oughtn’t to call him poor — and heard him going on about the birds and the flowers, I wondered how they could bear it. Of course it was all right; I know that. But if the preacher shouldn’t happen to be inspired, wouldn’t it be awful? How old do you suppose Dr. Olney is?”

“I don’t know.”

“He seems rather bald. Do you think he is forty?”

“Dear me, no, child! He isn’t thirty yet, I dare say. Some men are bald much earlier than others. It’s a matter of — heredity.”

“Heredity! Everything’s heredity with you, Aunt Caroline!” the girl laughed. “I’ll bet he’s worn it off by thinking too much in one particular spot. “You know that they say now they can tell just what place in the brain a person thinks this or that; and just where the will-power comes from when you wink your eye, or wiggle your little finger. I wonder if Dr. Olney knows all those things? Have you tried him on your favorite heredity yet?”

“What do you mean, Rhoda?”

“I know you have!” the girl exulted. “Well, he is the kind of man I should always want to have for my doctor if I had to have one; though I don’t think he’s done you a great deal of good yet, Aunt Caroline: you look wretched, and I shall feel like scolding Dr. Olney when he comes again. But what I mean is, he has such noble ideas: don’t you think he has?”

“Yes — yes. About what?”

“Why, about the negroes, you know.” Mrs. Meredith winced at the word. “I never happened to see it in that light before. I thought when we had set them free, we had done everything. But I can see now we haven’t. We do perfectly banish them, as far as we can; and we don’t associate with them half as much as we do with the animals. I got to talking with the Bloomingdales this afternoon, and I had to take the negroes’ part. Don’t you think that was funny for a Southern girl?” Mrs. Meredith looked at her with a ghastly face, and moved her lips in answer, without making any sound. “They said that the negroes were an inferior race, and they never could associate with the whites because they never could be intellectually equal with them. I told them about that black English lawyer from Sierra Leone that talked so well at the table d’hôte in Venice — better than anybody else — but they wouldn’t give way. They were very narrow-minded; or the mother was; the rest didn’t say anything; only made exclamations. Mrs. Bloomingdale said Dr. Olney must be a  very strange physician, to have those ideas. I hope Mr. Bloomingdale isn’t like her. You would say he was a good deal younger than Dr. Olney, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes — not so very. But why—”

Rhoda broke out into a laugh of humorous perplexity. “Why, if he were only a little older, or a good deal older, he could advise me whether to marry him or not?” The laughter faded suddenly from her eyes, and she fell back dejectedly against her chair, and remained looking at her aunt, as if trying to read in her face the silent working of her thought. “Well?” she demanded, finally.

Mrs. Meredith dropped her eyes. “Why need you marry any one?”

“What a funny question! “ the girl answered, with the sparkle of a returning smile. “So as to have somebody to take care of me in my old age!” The young like to speak of age so, with a mocking incredulity; they feel that, however it may have fared with all the race hitherto, they never can be old, and they like to make a joke of the mere notion. “You’ll be getting old yourself some day, Aunt Caroline, and then what shall I do? Don’t you think that a woman ought to got married?

“Yes — yes. Not always — not necessarily. Certainly not to have some one to take care of her.”

“Of course not! That would be a very base motive. I suppose I really meant, have somebody for me to take care of. I think that is what keeps  one from being lonesome more than anything else. I do feel so alone sometimes. It seems to me there are very few girls so perfectly isolated. Why, just think! With the exception of you, I don’t believe I’ve got a single relation in the world.” Rhoda seemed interested rather than distressed by the fact. “Now there are the Bloomingdales,” she went on; “it seems as if they had connections everywhere. That is something like a family. If I married Mr. Bloomingdale, I could always have somebody to take care of as long as I lived. To be sure, they would be Bloomingdales,” she added, dreamily.

“Rhoda!” said her aunt, “I cannot let you speak so. If you are in earnest about Mr. Bloomingdale—”

“I am. But not about his family — or not so much so.”

“You cannot take him without taking his family; that is always the first thing to be thought of in marriage, and young people think of it the last. The family on each side counts almost as much as the couple themselves in a marriage.”

“Mine wouldn’t,” the girl interpolated. “There’s so very little of it!”

If Mrs. Meredith was trying to bring the talk to this point, she now seemed to find herself too suddenly confronted with it, and she shrank back a little. “I don’t mean that family is the first thing.”

“You just said it was, aunty!”

“The first thing,” Mrs. Meredith continued, ignoring the teasing little speech, “is to make sure of yourself, to be satisfied that you love him.”

“It’s so much easier,” the girl sighed in mock-seriousness, “to be satisfied that I don’t love them.”

“But that won’t do, Rhoda,” said Mrs. Meredith, and I can’t let you treat the matter in this trivial spirit. It is a most important matter — far more important than you can realize.”

“I can’t realize anything about it — that’s the trouble.”

“You can realize whether you wish to accept him or not.”

“No; that’s just what I can’t do.”

“You’ve had time enough.”

“I’ve had nearly a week. But I want all the time there is; it wouldn’t be any too much. I must see him again — after seeing so much of his family.”

“Rhoda!” her aunt called sternly to her from the sofa.

But Rhoda did not respond with any sort of intimidation. She was looking down into the street from the window where she sat, and she suddenly bowed. “It was Dr. Olney,” she explained. “He was just coming into the hotel, and he looked up. I wonder how he knew it was our window? He seems twice as young with his hat on. I wish he’d wear his hat in the room. But of course he can’t.”

Everything that had happened since Rhoda came in made it more difficult for Mrs. Meredith to discharge the duty that she thought she had nerved herself up to. She had promised herself that if Rhoda had decided to accept Mr. Bloomingdale, she would speak,  and tell her everything; but she was not certain yet that the girl had decided, though from the way in which she played with the question, and her freedom from all anxiety about it, she felt pretty sure that she had. She wished, vaguely, perversely, weakly, that she had not, for then the ordeal for them both could be postponed indefinitely again. She sympathized with the girl in her trials through the young minister’s family, who were so repugnant to her in their eagerness for her, and she burned with a prophetic indignation in imagining how such people would cast her off when they knew what she really was. The young man himself seemed kind and good, and if it were a question of him alone, she believed she could trust him; but these others! that mother, those sisters! She recoiled from the duty of humiliating the poor girl before them, so helplessly, innocently, ignorantly guilty of her own origin. The child’s gayety and lightness, her elfish whimsicality and thoughtless superficiality, as well as those gleams and glimpses of a deeper nature which a word or action gave from time to time, smote the elder woman’s heart with a nameless pain and a tender compassion. By all her circumstance Rhoda had a right to be the somewhat spoiled and teasing pretty thing that she was; and all that sovereign young-ladyishness which sat so becomingly upon her was proper to the station a beautiful young girl holds in a world where she has had only to choose and to command. But Mrs. Meredith shuddered to think with what contempt, open or masquerad- ing as pity, all this would be denied to her. Doubtless she exaggerated; the world slowly changes; it condones many things to those who are well placed in it; and it might not have fared so ill with the child as the woman thought; but Mrs. Meredith bad brooded so long upon her destiny that she could see it only in the gloomiest colors. She was darkling in its deepest shadow when she heard Rhoda saying, as if at the end of some speech that she had not caught, “But he doesn’t seem to have any more family than I have.”

“Who? “ Mrs. Meredith asked.

“Dr. Olney.”

“You don’t know anything about his family.”

“Well, I don’t know anything about my own,” Rhoda answered, lightly. She added, soberly, after a moment: “Don’t you think it’s rather strange that my mother’s family never cared to look us up in any way? Even if they were opposed to her marrying papa, one would think they might have forgiven it by this time. The family ties are so strong, among the French.”

Mrs. Meredith dropped her eyes, and murmured, “It may be different with the Creoles.”

“No, I don’t believe it is. I’ve heard it’s more so. Did papa never see any of mamma’s family but her father? It seems so strange that she should have been as much alone as I am. I know I have you, Aunt Caroline. Well, I don’t know what to think about Mr. Bloomingdale. I’m always summing up his virtues; he’s very good, and he’s good-looking,  and he’s good-natured. He’s rich, though I don’t let that count. He parts his hair too much on one side, but that doesn’t matter, I could make him part it in the middle, and it’s a very pretty shade of brown. His eyes are good, and his mouth wouldn’t be weak if he wore his beard full. I think he has very good ideas, and I’m sure he would be devoted all his days. It isn’t so easy to sum a person up, though, is it? I wish I knew whether I cared for him. I don’t believe I’ve ever been in love with anybody yet. Of course, I’ve had my fancies. I do respect Mr. Bloomingdale, and when I think how very anxious he was to have me care for him, I don’t know but I could if I really tried. But ought one to have to try? That’s the question. Oughtn’t the love to go of itself, without being pushed or pulled? I wish I knew! Aunt Caroline, do you believe in ‘learning to love’ your husband after marriage? That’s what happens in some of the stories; but it seems very ridiculous. I wish it was my duty to marry him — or not to; then I could decide. I believe I’m turning out quite a slave of duty. I must have I caught it from you, Aunt Caroline. Now I can imagine myself sacrificing anything to duty. If Mr. Bloomingdale were to step ashore from the next steamer, and drive to the hotel without stopping to take breath, and get himself shown up here, and say, ‘I’ve just dropped in, Miss Aldgate, to offer you the opportunity of uniting your life with mine in a high and holy purpose — say working among the poor on the east side in New York, or going down to edu-  cate the black race in the South! — I believe I should seize the opportunity without a murmur. Perhaps he may. Do you think he will?”

Rhoda ended her monologue with a gay look at her aunt, who was silent at the end, as she had been throughout, turning the trouble before them over and over in her mind. As happens when we are preoccupied with one thing, all other things seem to tend toward it and bear upon it; half a dozen mere accidents of the girl’s spoken reverie touched the sore place in Mrs. Meredith’s soul and fretted it to an anguish that she asked herself how she could bear. It all accused and judged and condemned her, because she had kept putting by the duty she had to discharge, and making it contingent upon that decision of the girl’s which she was still far from ascertaining. In her recoil from this duty she had believed that if it need not be done at this time, it somehow need never be done; or she had tried to believe this. If Rhoda rejected this young man, she might keep her safe forever from the fact which she felt must wreck the life of the light-hearted, high-spirited girl. That was the refuge which Mrs. Meredith had taken from the task which so strongly beset her; but when she had formulated the case to herself, the absurdity, the impossibility of her position appeared to her. If Rhoda cared nothing for Mr. Bloomingdale, the day would come when she would care everything for some one else; and that day could not be postponed, nor the duty of that day. It would be crueler to leave her unarmed  against the truth until the moment when her heart was set upon a love, and then strike her down with it. Mrs. Meredith now saw this; she saw that the doubt in which she was resting was the very moment of action for her; and that the occasion was divinely appointed for dealing more mercifully with the child than any other that could have offered. She had often imagined herself telling Rhoda what she had to tell, and with the romantic coloring from the novels she had read, she had painted herself in the heroic discharge of her duty at the instant when the girl was radiant in the possession of an accepted love, and had helped her to renounce, to suffer, and to triumph. She had always been very strong in these dramatized encounters, and had borne herself with a stony power throughout, against which the bruised and bleeding girl had rested her broken spirit; but now she cowered before her. She longed to fail upon her knees at her feet, and first implore her forgiveness for what she was going to do, and not speak till she had been forgiven; but habit is strong, really stronger than emotion of any sort, and so Mrs. Meredith remained lying on her sofa, and merely put up her fan to shut out the sight of the child, as she said, “And if it were your duty to give up Mr. Bloomingdale, could you do it?”

“Oh, instantly Aunt Caroline! “ answered Rhoda, with a gay burlesque of fortitude. “I would not hesitate a single week. But why do you ask such an awful question?”

“Is it a very awful question? “ Mrs. Meredith palpitated.

“Well, rather! One may wish to give a person up, but not as a duty.”

Mrs. Meredith understood this well enough, but it was her perfect intelligence concerning the whole situation that seemed to disable her. She made out to say, “Then you have decided not to give him up yet?”

“I’ve decided — I’ve decided — let me think! — not to decide till I see him again! What do you
mean by if it were my duty to give him up?”

“It would be your duty,” Mrs. Meredith faltered, “to give him up, unless you were sure you loved him.”

“Oh, yes; certainly. That.”

“You wouldn’t wish him, after you’ve seen so much of his family, not to know everything about yours, if you decided to accept him?”

“Why, you’re all there is, Aunt Caroline! You’re the end of the story. I should hope he understood that. What else is there?”

“Nothing — nothing — There is very little. But we ought to tell Mr. Bloomingdale all we know — of your mother’s family.”

“Why, certainly. I expected to do that. There was nothing disgraceful about them, I imagine, except their behavior toward mamma.”

“No—”

“You speak as if there were. What are you keeping back, Aunt Caroline?” Rhoda sat upright, and faced her aunt with a sort of sudden fierceness which  she sometimes showed when she was roused to self-assertion. This was seldom, in the succession of her amiable moods, but when it happened, Mrs. Meredith saw in it the outbreak of the ancestral savagery, and shuddered at it as a self-betrayal rather than a self-assertion; but perhaps self-assertion is this with all of us. “What are you hinting at? If there was anything dishonorable—”

Mrs. Meredith found herself launched at last. She could not go back now; she could not stop. She had only the choice, in going on, of telling the truth, or setting sail to shipwreck under some new lie. For this, both will and invention failed her; she was too weak mentally, if she was not too strong morally, for this. She went on, with a kind of mechanical force.

“If there were something dishonorable that was not, their fault, that was their wrong, their sorrow, their burden — what should you think of your father’s marrying your mother, with a full knowledge of it?”

“I should think he did nobly and bravely to marry her. But that’s nothing. What was the disgrace? What had they done, that they had to suffer innocently? You needn’t be afraid of telling me everything. I don’t care what Mr. Bloomingdale or any one thinks; I shall be proud of them for it; I shall be glad!” Mrs. Meredith saw with terror that the girl’s fancy had kindled with some romantic conjecture. “Who was my grandfather?”

“I know very little about him, Rhoda,” said Mrs. Meredith, seeking to rest in this neutral truth. “Your  father never told me much, except that he was a Creole, and — and rich; and — and — respected, as those things went there, among his people—”

“Was he some old slaver, like those in Mr. Cable’s book? I shouldn’t care for that! But that would have been his fault, and it wouldn’t have been any great disgrace; and you said — And my grand- mother — who was she?”

“She was — not his wife.”

“Oh! “ said the girl, with a quick breath, as if she had been struck over the heart. “That was how the dishonor—” She stopped, with an absent stare fixed upon her aunt, who waited in silence for her to realize this evil which was still so far short of the worst. Where she sat she could not see the blush of shame that gradually stained the girl’s face to her throat and forehead. “Who was she?”

Mrs. Meredith tried to think how the words would sound as she said them, and simultaneously she said them, “She was his slave.”

The girl was silent and motionless. With her head defined against the open window, her face showed quite black toward her aunt, as if the fact of her mother’s race had remanded her to its primordial hue in touching her consciousness. Mrs. Meredith had risen, and sat with one hand grasping the wrap that still covered her feet, as if ready to cast it loose, and fly her victim’s presence, if it became intolerable. But she found herself too weak to stand up, and she waited, throbbing and quaking, for Rhoda to speak.

The girl gave a little, low, faltering laugh, an inarticulate note of such pathetic fear and pitiful entreaty that it went through the woman’s heart. “Aunt Caroline, are you crazy?”

“Crazy?” The word gave her an instant of strange respite. Was she really mad, and had she long dreamed this thing in the cloudy deliriums of a sick brain ? The fact of her hopeless sanity repossesses her from this tricksy conjecture.  If I were only crazy!”

“And you mean to say — to tell me — that — that — I am — black?”

“Oh, no, poor child! You are as white as I am — as any one. No one would ever think—”

“But I have that blood in me? It is the same thing!” An awful silence followed again, and then the girl said: “And you let me grow up thinking I was white, like other girls, when you knew — You let we pass myself off on myself and every one else, for what I wasn’t! Oh, Aunt Caroline, what are you telling me this ghastly thing for? It isn’t true! You couldn’t have let me live on all these years thinking I was a white person, when — You would have told me from the very beginning, as soon as I could begin to understand anything. You wouldn’t have told me all those things about my mother’s family, and their being great people, and disowning her, and all that! If this is true you wouldn’t have let me believe that, you and Uncle Meredith?”

“We let you believe it, but you made it up yourself ; we never told you anything.”

“But you couldn’t have thought that was being honest, and so you couldn’t have done it — you couldn’t. And so it isn’t any of it true that you’ve just told me. But why did you tell me such a thing? I don’t believe you have told me it. Why, I must be dreaming. It’s as if — as if — you were to come to a perfectly well person, and tell them that they were going to die in half an hour. Don’t you see? How can you tell me such a thing ? Don’t you understand that it tears my whole life up, and flings it out on the ground? But you know it isn’t true. Oh, my, I think my head will burst! Why don’t you speak to me, and tell me why you said such a thing? Is it because you don’t want me to marry Mr. Bloomingdale? Well, I won’t marry him. Now will you say it?”

“Rhoda!” her aunt began, “whether you married Mr. Bloomingdale or not, the time had come—”

“No! The time had gone. It had come as soon as I could speak or understand the first word. Then would have been the time for you to tell me such a thing if it were true, so that I might have grown up knowing it, and trying to bear it. But it isn’t true, and you’re just saying it for some other reason. What has happened to you, Aunt Caroline? I am going to send for Dr. Olney; you’re not well. It’s something in that medicine of his, I know it is. Let me look at you!” She ran suddenly toward Mrs. Meredith, who recoiled, crouching back into the corner of her sofa. The girl broke into a hysterical laugh. “Do you think I will hurt you? Oh, Aunt Caroline, take it  back, take it back! See, I’ll get on my knees to you!” She threw herself down before the sofa where Mrs. Meredith crouched. “Oh, you couldn’t have been so wicked as to live such a lie as that!”

“It was a lie, the basest, the vilest,” said Mrs. Meredith, with a sort of hopeless gasp. “But I never saw the time when I must tell you the truth — and so I couldn’t.”

“Oh, no, no! Don’t take yourself from me!” The girl dropped her head on the woman’s knee, and broke into a wild sobbing. “I don’t know what you’re doing this for. It can’t be true — it can’t be real. Shall I never wake from it, and have you back ? You were all I had in the world, and now, if you were not what I thought you, so true and good, I haven’t even you any more. Oh, oh, oh!”

“Oh, it was all wrong,” said Mrs. Meredith, in a tearless misery, a dry pang of the heart for which her words were no relief. “There hasn’t been a day or an hour when I haven’t felt it; and I have always prayed for light to see my duty, and strength to do it. God knows that if I could bear this for you, how gladly I would do it. I have borne it all these years, and the guilt of the concealment besides; that is something, though it is nothing to what you are suffering. I know that — I know that!”

The girl sobbed on and on, and the woman repeated the same things over and over, a babble of words in which there was no comfort, no help, but which sufficed to tide them both over from the past which had  dropped into chaos behind them to a new present in which they must try to gain a footing once more.

The girl suddenly ceased to bemoan herself, and lifted her head, to look into her aunt’s face. “And my mother,” she said, ignoring the piteous sympathy she saw, “was she my father’s slave, too?”

“She was your father’s wife. Slavery was past then, and he was too good a man for anything else, though he knew his marriage would ruin him, as it did.”

“At least there is some one I can honor, then; I can’t honor him,” said the girl, with an unpitying hardness in her tone. She rose to her feet,. and turned toward the door of her own room.

“Is there — is there anything else that I can tell that you wish to know?” her aunt entreated.
“Oh, child! If you could only understand—”

“I do understand,” said the girl.

Mrs. Meredith, in her millionfold prefigurations of this moment, had often suffered from the necessity of insinuating to the ignorance of girlhood all the sad details of the social tragedy of which she was the victim. But she perceived that this at least was to be spared her, that the girl had somehow instantly realized the whole affair in these aspects. In middle life we often forget, amidst the accumulations of experience, how early the main bases of it were laid in our consciousness. We suppose, when we are experienced, that knowledge comes solely from experience; but knowledge, or if not knowledge, then truth, comes largely  from perception, from instinct, from divination, from the intelligence of our mere potentialities. A man can be anything along the vast range from angel to devil; without living either the good thing or the bad thing in which his fancy dramatizes him, he can perceive it. His intelligence may want accuracy, though after-experience often startlingly verifies it; but it does not want truth. The materials of knowledge accumulate from innumerable unremembered sources. All at once, some vital interest precipitates the latent electricity of the cloudy mass in a flash that illumines the world with a shadowless brilliancy and shows everything in its very form and meaning. Then the witness perceives that somehow from the beginning of conscious being he had understood all this before, and every influence and circumstance had tended to the significance revealed.

The proud, pure girl who had been told that her mother was slave-born and sin-born, had lived as carefully sheltered from the guilt and shame that are in the world as tender love and pitying fear could keep her; but so much of the sad fact of evil had somehow reached her that she stood in a sudden glare of the reality. She understood, and she felt all scathed within by the intelligence, by whatever the cruelest foe could have told her with the most unsparing fulness, whatever the fondest friend could have wished her not to know. The swiftness of these mental processes no words can suggest; we can portray life, not living.

“‘I am going to my room, now,” she said to her aunt, “and whatever happens, don’t follow me, don’t call me. If you are dying, don’t speak to me. I have a right to be alone.”

She crossed to the door of her chamber opening from the little parlor, and closed it behind   her, and her aunt fell back again on her sofa. She was too weak to follow her if she had wished, and she was too wise to wish it, She lay there revolving the whole misery in her mind, turning it over and over ten thousand times. She said to herself that it was worse, far worse, than she had ever pictured it; but in fact it was better, for her. She pretended otherwise, but for her there was the relief in the situation of a lie owned, a truth spoken, and with whatever heart-wrung drops she told the throes of the anguish beyond that door, for herself she was glad. It was monstrous to be glad, she knew that; but she knew that she was glad.

After awhile she began to be afraid of the absolute silence that continued in Rhoda’s room, and then she did what men would say a man would not have done; she crept to the door and peeped and listened. She could not hear anything, but she saw Rhoda sitting by the table writing. She went back to her sofa, and lay there more patiently now; but as the time passed she began to be hungry; with shame that did not suffer her to ring and ask for anything to eat, she began to feel the weak and self-pitiful craving of an invalid for food.

The time passed till the travelling-clock on the  mantel showed her that it was half-past seven. Then Rhoda’s door was flung open, and the girl stood before her with her hat on, and dressed to go out. She had a letter in her hand, and she said, with a mechanical hardness, “I have written to him, and I am going out with the letter. When I come back—”

“You can send your letter out,” pleaded her aunt; she knew what the girl had written too well to ask. “It’s almost dark; it’s too late for you to be out on the streets alone.”

“Oh, what could happen to me?” demanded Rhoda, scornfully. “Or if some one insulted a colored girl, what of it? When I come back I will pack for you, and in the morning we will start for New Orleans, and try to find out my mother’s family.”

Her aunt said nothing to this, but she set herself earnestly to plead with the girl not to go out. “It will be dark, Rhoda, and you don’t know the streets. Indeed you mustn’t go out. You haven’t had any dinner — For my sake—”

“For your sake!” said Rhoda. She went on, as if that were answer enough, “I have written to him that all is over between us — it was, even before this: I could never have married him — and that when he arrives we shall be gone, and he must never try to see me again. I’ve told you all that you could ask, Aunt Caroline, and now there is one thing I want you to answer me. Is there any one else who knows this?”

“No, indeed, child!” answered Mrs. Meredith instantly, and she thought for the instant that she was  telling the truth. “Not another living soul. No one ever knew but your uncle—”

“Be careful, Aunt Caroline,” said the girl, coming up to her sofa, and looking gloomily down upon her. “You had better always tell me the truth, now. Have you told no one else?”

“No one.”

“Not Dr. Olney?”

It was too late, now that Mrs. Meredith perceived her error. She could not draw back from it, and say that she had forgotten; Rhoda would never believe that. She could only say, “No, not Dr. Olney.”

“Tell me the truth, if you expect ever to see me again, in this world or the next. Is it the truth? Swear it!”

“It is the truth,” said the poor woman, feeling this now and astonishing lie triply riveted upon her soul; and she sank down upon the pillow from which she had partly lifted herself, and lay there as if crushed under the burden suddenly rolled back upon her.

“Then I forgive you,” said the girl, stooping down to kiss her.

The woman pushed her feebly away. “Oh, I don’t want your forgiveness, now,” she whimpered, and she began to cry.

Rhoda made no answer, but turned and went out of the room.

Mrs. Meredith lay exhausted. She was no longer hungry, but she was weak for want of food. After a while she slid from the sofa, and then on her hands  and knees she crept to the table where the bottle that held Dr. Olney’s sleeping medicine stood. She drank it all off. She felt the need of escaping from herself; she did not believe it would kill her; but she must escape at any risk. So men die who mean to take their lives; but it is not certain that death even is an escape from ourselves. 

VIII

In the street where Rhoda found herself the gas was already palely burning in the shops, and the moony glare of an electric globe was invading the flush of the sunset, whose after-glow still filled the summer air in the western perspective. She did not know where she was going, but she went that way, down the slope of the slightly curving thoroughfare. She had the letter which she meant to post in her hand, but she passed the boxes on the lamp-posts without putting it in. She no longer knew what else she meant to do, in any sort, or what she desired; but out of the turmoil of horror, which she whirled round and round in, some purpose that seemed at first exterior to herself began to evolve. The street was one where she would hardly have met ladies of the sort she had always supposed herself of; gentility fled it long ago, and the houses that had once been middle-class houses had fallen in the social scale to the grade of mechanics’ lodgings, and the shops, which had never been fashionable, were adapted strictly to the needs of a neighborhood of poor and humble people. They were largely provision stores, full of fruit, especially watermelons; there were some groceries, and some pharmacies of that professional neatness which pharmacies are of  everywhere. The, roadway was at this hour pretty well deserted by the express wagons and butcher carts that bang through it in the earlier day; and the horse-cars coming and going on its incline and its final westward level, were in the unrestricted enjoyment of the company’s monopoly of the best part of its space.

At the first corner Rhoda had to find her way through groups of intense-faced suburbans who were waiting for their respective cars, and who heaped themselves on board as these arrived, and hurried to find places, more from force of habit than from necessity, for the pressure of the evening travel was already over. When she had passed these groups she began to meet the proper life of the street — the women who had come out to cheapen the next day’s provisions at the markets, the men, in the brief leisure that their day’s work had left them before bedtime, lounging at the lattice doors of the drinking-shops, or standing listlessly about on the curb-stones smoking. Numbers of young fellows, of the sort whose leisure is day-long, exchanged the comfort of a mutual support with the house walls, and stared at her as she hurried by; and then she began to encounter in greater and greater number the colored people who descended to this popular promenade from the up-hill streets opening upon it. They politely made way for her, and at the first meeting that new agony of interest in them possessed her.

This was intensified by the deference they paid her as a young white lady, and the instant sense that she  had no right to it in that quality. She could have borne better to have them rude and even insolent; there was something in the way they turned their black eyes in their large disks of white upon her, like dogs, with a mute animal appeal in them, that seemed to claim her one of them, and to creep nearer and nearer and possess her in that late-found solidarity of race. She never know before how hideous they were, with their flat wide-nostriled noses, their out-rolled thick lips, their mobile, bulging eyes set near together, their retreating chins and foreheads, and their smooth, shining skin; they seemed burlesques of humanity, worse than apes, because they were more like. But the men were not half so bad as the women, from the shrill-piped young girls, with their grotesque attempts at fashion, to the old grandmothers, wrinkled or obese, who came down the sloping sidewalks in their bare heads, out of the courts and alleys where they lived, to get the evening air. Impish black children swarmed on these uphill sidewalks and played their games, with shrill cries racing back and forth, catching and escaping one another.

There colored folk were of all tints and types, from the comedy of the pure black to the closest tragical approach to white. She saw one girl, walking with a cloud of sable companions, who was as white as herself, and she wondered if she were of the same dilution of negro blood; she was laughing and chattering with the rest, and seemed to feel no difference, but to be pleased and flattered with the court paid her by the inky dandy who sauntered beside her.

“She has always known it; she has never felt it! “ she thought bitterly. “It is nothing; it is natural to her; I might have been like her.”

She began to calculate how many generations would carry her back, or that girl back, in hue, to the blackest of those loathsome old women. She knew what an octoroon was, and she thought, “I am like her, and my mother was darker, and my grandmother darker, and my great-grander like a mulatto, and then it was a horrible old negress, a savage stolen from Africa, where she bad been a cannibal.”

A vision of palm-tree roofs and grass huts, as she had seen them in pictures, with skulls grinning from the eaves, floated before her eyes; then a desert with a long coffle of captives passing by, and one black, naked woman, fallen out from weakness, kneeling, with manacled hands, and her head pulled back, and the Arab slaver’s knife at her throat. She walked in a nightmare of these sights; all the horror of the wrong by which she came to be, poured itself round and over her.

She emerged from it at moments with a refusal to accept the loss of her former self, like that of the mutilated man who looks where his arm was, and cannot believe it gone. Like him, she had the full sense of what was lost, the unbroken consciousness of what was lopped away. At these moments all her pride reasserted itself’; she wished to punish her aunt for what she had made her suffer, to make her pay pang for pang. Then the tide of reality overwhelmed her  again, and she grovelled in self-loathing and despair. From that she rose in a frenzy of longing to rid herself of this shame that was not hers; to tear out the stain; to spill it with the last drop of her blood upon the ground. By flamy impulses she thrilled towards the mastery of her misery through its open acknowledgment. She seemed to see herself and hear herself stopping some of these revolting creatures, the dreadfulest of them, and saying, “I am black, too. Take me home with you, and let me live with you, and be like you every way.” She thought, “Perhaps I have relations among them. Yes, it must be. I will send to the hotel for my things, and I will live here in some dirty little back court, and try to find them out.”

The emotions, densely pressing upon each other, the dramatizations that took place as simultaneously and insuccessively as the events of a dream, gave her a new measure of time; she compassed the experience of years in the seconds these sensations outnumbered.
All the while she seemed to be walking swiftly, flying forward; but the ground was uneven: it rose before her, and then suddenly fell. She felt her heart beat in the middle of her throat. Her head felt light, like the blowball of a dandelion. She wished to laugh. There seemed two selves of her, one that lived before that awful knowledge, and one that had lived as long since, and again a third that knew and pitied them both. She wondered at the same time if this were what people meant by saying one’s brain was turned;  and she recalled the longing with which her aunt said, “If I were only crazy! “ But she knew that her own exaltation was not madness, and she did not wish for escape that way. “There must be some other,” she said to herself; “if I can find the courage for it, I can find the way. It’s like a ghost: if I keep going towards it, it won’t hurt me; I mustn’t be afraid of it. Now, let me see! What ought I to do? Yes, that is the key: Duty.” Then her thought flew passionately off. “If she had done her duty all this might have been helped. But it was her cowardice that made her murder me. Yes, she has killed me!”

The tears gushed into her eyes, and all the bitterness of her trial returned upon her, with a pressure of lead on her brain.

In the double consciousness of trouble she was as fully aware of everything about her as she was of the world of misery within her; and she knew that this had so far shown itself without that some of the passers were noticing her. She stopped, fearful of their notice, at the corner of the street she had come to, and turned about to confront an old colored woman, yellow like saffron, with the mild, sad face we often see in mulattoes of that type, and something peculiarly pitiful in the straight underlip of her appealing mouth, and the cast of her gentle eyes. The expression might have been merely physical, or it might have been an hereditary look, and no part of her own personality, but Rhoda felt safe in it.

“What street is this?” she asked, thinking sud-denly, “She is the color of my grandmother; that is the way she looked; “ but though she thought this she did not realize it, and she kept an imperious attitude towards the old woman.

“Charles Street, lady.”

“Oh, yes; Charles. Where are all the people going?”

“The colored folks, lady?”

“Yes.”

“Well, lady, they’s a kyind of an evenin’ meetin’ at ouah choach to-night. Some of ‘em’s goin’ there, I reckon; some of ‘em’s just out fo’ a walk.”

“Will you let me go with you? “ Rhoda asked.

“Why, certainly, lady,” said the old woman. She glanced up at Rhoda’s face as the girl turned to accompany her. “But I’m a-goin’ to choach.”

“Yes, yes. That’s what I mean. I want to go to your church with you. Are you from the South — Louisiana? She would be the color,” she thought. “It might be my mother’s own mother.”

“No, lady: from Voginny. I was bawn a slave; and I lived there till after the wa’. Then I come Nawth.”

“Oh,” said Rhoda, disappointedly, for she had nerved herself to find this old woman, her grandmother.

They walked on in silence for a while; then the old woman said, “I thought you wasn’t very well, when I noticed you at the cawnah.”

“I — I am well,” Rhoda answered, feeling the tears  start to her eyes again at the note of motherly kindness in the old woman’s voice. “But I am in trouble; I am in trouble.”

“Then you’re gwine to the right place, lady,” said the old woman, and she repeated solemnly these words of hope and promise which so many fainting hearts have stayed themselves upon: “‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest unto your souls.’ Them’s the words, lady; the Lawd’s own words. Glory be to God; glory be to God!” she added in a whisper.

“Yes, yes,” said Rhoda, impatiently. “They are good words. But they are not for me. He can’t make my burden light; He can’t give me rest. If it were sin, He could; but it isn’t sin; it’s something worse than sin; more hopeless. If I were only a sinner, the vilest, the wickedest, how glad I should be!” Her heart uttered itself to this simple nature as freely as a child to its mother.

“Why, sholy, lady,” said the old woman, with a little shrinking from her as if she had blasphemed, “sholy you’s a sinnah?”

“No, I am not! “ said the girl, with nervous sharpness. “If I were a sinner, my sins could be forgiven me, and I could go free of my burden. But nothing can ever lift it from me.”

“The Lawd can do anything, the Bible says. He kin make the dead come to life. He done it oncet, too.”

The girl turned abruptly on her. “Can He change your skin? Can He make black white?”

The old woman seemed daunted; she faltered. “I don’t know as he ever tried, lady; the Bible don’t tell.” She added, more hopefully, “But I reckon He could do it if He wanted to.”

“Then why doesn’t He do it?” demanded the girl. “What does He leave you black for, when He could make you white?”

“I reckon He don’t think it’s worth while, if He can make me willing to be black so easy. Somebody’s got to be black, and it might as well be me,” said the old woman, with a meek sigh.

“No, no one need be black!” said Rhoda, with a vehemence that this submissive sigh awakened in her. “If He cared for us, no, one would be!”

“Sh!” said the old woman, gently.

They had reached the church porch, and Rhoda found herself in the tide of black worshippers who were drifting in. The faces of some were supernaturally solemn, and these rolled their large-whited eyes rebukingly on the young girls showing all their teeth in the smiles that gashed them from ear to ear, and carrying on subdued flirtations with the polite young fellows escorting them. It was no doubt the best colored society, and it was bearing itself with propriety and self-respect in the court of the temple. If their natural gayety and lightness of heart moved their youth to the betrayal of their pleasure in each other in the presence of their Maker, He was perhaps propitiated by the gloom of their elders.

“Tain’t a regular evenin’ meetin’,” Rhoda’s com-panion explained to her. It’s a kind o’ lecture.” She exchanged some stately courtesies of greeting with the old men and women as they pushed into the church; they called her sister, and they looked with at least as little surprise and offence at the beautiful young white lady with her as white Christians would have shown a colored girl come to worship with them. “De preacher’s one o’ the Southern students; I ain’t hud him speak; but I reckon the Lawd’s sent him, anyway.”

Rhoda had no motive in being where she was except to confront herself as fully and closely with the trouble in her soul as she could. She thought, so far as such willing may be called thinking, that she could strengthen herself for what she had henceforth to bear, if she could concentrate and intensify the fact to her outward perception; she wished densely to surround herself with the blackness from which she had sprung, and to reconcile herself to it, by realizing and owning it with every sense.

She did not know what the speaker was talking about at first, but phrases and words now and then caught in her consciousness. He was entirely black, and he was dressed in black from head to foot, so that he stood behind the pulpit light like a thick, soft shadow cast upon the wall by an electric. His absolute sable was relieved only by the white points of his shirt-collar, and the glare of his spectacles, which, when the light struck them, heightened the goblin effect of his presence. He had no discernible features, and  when he turned his profile in addressing those who sat at the sides, it was only a wavering blur against the wall. His voice was rich and tender, with those caressing notes in it which are the peculiar gift of his race.

The lecture opened with prayer and singing, and the lecturer took part in the singing; then he began to speak, and Rhoda’s mind to wander, with her eyes, to the congregation. The prevailing blackness gave back the light here and there in the glint of a bald head, or from a patch of white wool, or the cast of a rolling eye. Inside of the bonnets of the elder women, and under the gay hats of the young girls, it was mostly lost in a characterless dark; but nearer by, Rhoda distinguished faces, sad, repulsive visages of a frog-like ugliness added to the repulsive black in all its shades, from the unalloyed brilliancy of the pure negro type to the pallid yellow of the quadroon, and these mixed bloods were more odious to her than the others, because she felt herself more akin to them; but they were all abhorrent. Some of the elder people made fervent responses to thoughts and sentiments in the lecture as if it had been a sermon. “That is so!” they said. “Bless the Lord, that’s the truth!” and, “Glory to God!” One old woman, who sat in the same line of pews with Rhoda, opened her mouth like a catfish, to emit these pious ejaculations.

The night was warm, and as the church filled, the musky exhalations of their bodies thickened the air,  and made the girl faint; it seemed to her that she began to taste the odor; and these poor people, whom their Creator has made so hideous by the standards of all his other creatures, roused a cruel loathing in her, which expressed itself in a frantic refusal of their claim upon her. In her heart she cast them off with vindictive hate. “Yes,” she thought, “I should have whipped them, too. They are animals; they are only fit to be slaves.” But when she shut her eyes, and heard their wild, soft voices, her other senses were holden, and she was rapt by the music from her frenzy of abhorrence. In one of these suspenses, while she sat listening to the sound of the lecturer’s voice, which now and then struck a plangent note, like some rich, melancholy bell, a meaning began to steal out of it to her whirling thoughts.

“Yes, my friends,” it went on saying, “you got to commence doing a person good if you expect to love them as Jesus loved us when he died for us. And oh, if our white brethren could only understand — and they’re gettin’ to understand it — that if they would help us a little more, they needn’t hate us so much, what a great thing,” the lecturer lamely concluded— “what a great thing it would be all round!”

“Amen! Love’s the thing,” said the voice of the old woman with the catfish mouth; and Rhoda, who did not see her, did  not shudder. Her response inspired the lecturer to go on. “I believe it’s the one way out of all the trouble in this world. You can’t  fight your way out, and you can’t steal your way out, and you can’t lie your way out. But you can love your way out. And how can you love your way out? By helpin’ somebody else! Yes, that’s it. Somebody that needs your help. And now if there’s any one here that’s in trouble, and wants to get out of trouble, all he’s got to do is to help somebody else out. Remember that when the collection is taken up durin’ the singin’ of the hymn. Our college needs help, and every person that helps our college helps himself. Let us pray!”

The application was apt enough, and Rhoda did not feel anything grotesque in it. She put into the plate which the old woman passed to her from the collector all the money she had in her purse, notes and silver, and two or three gold pieces that had remained over to her from her European travel. Her companion saw them, and interrupted herself in her singing to say, “The Lawd’ll bless it to you; He’ll help them that helps them that can’t help themselves.”

“Yes, that is the clew,” the girl said to herself. “That is the way out; the only way. I can endure them if I can love them, and I shall love them if I try to help them. This money will help them.”

But she did not venture to look around at the objects; of her beneficence; she was afraid that the sight of their faces would harden her heart against them in spite of her giving, and she kept her eyes shut, listening to their pathetic voices. She stood forgetful after the lecturer had pronounced the benediction — he was a divinity student and he could not forego it — and her companion had to touch her arm. Then she started with a shiver, as if from a hypnotic trance.

Once out on the street she was afraid, and begged the old woman to go back to her hotel with her.

“Why, sholy, lady,” she consented.

But Rhoda did not hear. Her mind had begun suddenly to fasten itself upon a single thought, a sole purpose, and “Yes,” she pondered, “that is the first thing of all; to forgive her; to tell her that I forgive her, and that I understand and pity her. But how — how shall I begin? I shall have to do her some good to begin with, and how can I do that when I hate her so? I do hate her; I do hate her! It is her fault!”

As she hurried along, almost running, and heedless, of the old woman at her side, trying to keep up with her, it seemed to her that if her aunt had told her long ago, when a child, what she was, she would somehow not have been it now. It was not with love, not with pardon, but with frantic hate and accusal in her heart, that she burst into the room, and rushed to Mrs. Meredith’s sofa, where she lay still. “Aunt Caroline, wake up! Can you sleep when you see me going perfectly crazy? It is no time for sleeping! Wake! The moony pallor of an electric light suspended over the street shone in through the naked window  and fell upon Mrs. Meredith’s face. It was white, and as the girl started back her foot struck the empty bottle from which the woman had drained the sleeping medicine, and let lie where she had let it fall upon the floor. Rhoda caught it up, and flew with it to the light.

IX

The thing that had been lurking in a dark corner of Olney’s mind, intangible if not wholly invisible, came out sensible to touch and sight when he parted with Mrs. Meredith. At first it masqueraded a little longer as resentment of that hapless creature’s fate, a creature so pretty, so proud, and by all the rights of her youth and sex heiress of a prosperous and unclouded future, the best love and the tenderest care that any man could give her. Then it began to declare itself a fear lest the man whose avowal had given him the right to know everything concerning her, might prove superior to it, and nobly renounce his privilege, and gladly take her for what she had always seemed, for what, except in so remote degree, she really was. Then Olney knew that he was himself in love with her, and that he was judging a rival’s possibilities by his own, and dreading them. He had an impulse to go back to Mrs. Meredith and say that he was ready to take all those risks and chances which she had counted so great, and laugh them to scorn in the gladness of his heart if he could only hope that Rhoda would ever love him. A few years before he would have obeyed his impulse, and even now he dramatized an obedience to it, and exacted from Mrs.  Meredith a promise that she would not speak to Miss Aldgate until he had found time to put his fortune to the touch, and if he won, would never speak to her. But at thirty he had his hesitations, his misgivings, not indeed as to the wish, but as to the way. For one thing, he was too late, if Mrs. Meredith’s conjectures were right; and for another, he felt it dishonorable to do what he longed in his heart to do, and steal from this man, whom he began to hate, the love upon which his courageous wooing had given him the right to count. Such a thing would be not theft only in the possible but not probable case she did not care for his rival, and he had no means of knowing the fact as to that. It might be defended if not justified on the ground that he wished to keep her forever in ignorance of what it was Mrs. Meredith’s clear duty otherwise to tell her; Olney comforted himself with the theory that a woman who had delayed in her duty so long would doubtless put it off till the last moment, and that until this Mr. Bloomingdale actually appeared, and there was no loop-hole left her, she would not cease attempting to escape from her duty.

He postponed any, duty which he himself had in the matter through the love he now owned; he made it contingent upon hers; but all the same, he determined to forego no right it gave him. Again he had a mind to go back to Mrs. Meredith, and ask her to do nothing until Bloomingdale came, and then, before she spoke, to authorize him to approach the man as her family physician and deal tentatively, hypothetically,  with the matter, and interpret his probable decision from his actual behavior.

This course, which appeared the only course open to him, commended itself more and more to Olney as he thought of it; here was something practicable, here was something that was perhaps even obligatory upon him; he tried to believe it was obligatory. But it occurred to him only after long turmoil of thinking and feeling in other directions, and it was half-past seven o’clock before he returned from a walk he took as a final means of clearing his mind, and went to Mrs. Meredith’s room to propose it to her. He knocked several times without response, and then went to the once to see if she had gone out and left her key with the clerk ; he was now in a hurry to speak to her.

The clerk felt in the pigeon-hole of Mrs. Meredith’s number. “Her key isn’t here, but that’s no sign she hasn’t gone out. Ladies seldom leave their keys when they go out . we’re only too glad if they leave ’em when they go away for good. I thought she was sick.”

“She would be able to drive out.”

Olney mastered his impatience as well as he could, and went in to his dinner. After dinner he knocked again at Mrs., Meredith’s door, and confirmed himself in the belief that she had gone out. After that it was not so easy to wait for her to come back. He wished to remain of the mind he had been about speaking to her of Rhoda, and to avow himself her  lover at all risks, but more and more he began to feel that he was too late, that he was quixotic, that he was ridiculous. He felt himself wavering from his purpose, and he held to it all the more tenaciously for that reason. If he was willing to hazard all upon the chance of being in time, that gave him the right to ask that the girl might be spared; but when he thought she and Mrs. Meredith were probably spending the evening together with the Bloomingdales, his courage failed. It was but too imaginable that Miss Aldgate had made up her mind to accept that man, and that her aunt would tell her all that he longed to save her from knowing before he could prevent it.

When at last he went a third time to her door, he ventured to turn the knob, and the door opened to his inward pressure. It let in with him a glare of gas from the lamp in the entry, and by this light he saw Rhoda standing beside her aunt’s sofa with the empty bottle in her hand. She had her hat on, and at the face she turned him across her shoulder, a shiver of prescience passed over him. It was the tragic mask, the inherited woe, unlit by a gleam of the brightness which had sometimes seemed Heaven’s direct gift to the girl on whom that burden of ancestral sin and sorrow had descended.

“What is the matter?” he murmured.

Rhoda gave him the empty bottle. “She’s drunk it all. She’s dead.”

“Oh, no,” he almost laughed. “It would be too soon.” He dropped on his knees beside the insensi-ble body, and satisfied himself by pulse and breath that the life had not yet left it. But to keep it there was now the business, and Olney began his losing light with a sort of pluriscience in which it seemed to him that he was multiplied into three selves: one applying all the antidotes and using all the professional skill with instant coolness; another guarding the probable suicide from the conjecture of the hotel servants and keeping the whole affair as silent as possible; another devotedly vigilant of the poor girl who was so deeply concerned in the small chances of success perceptible to Olney, and who, whether he succeeded or not, was destined to so sad an orphanage. When he thought of the chance that fate was invisibly offering her, he almost wished he might fail, but he fought his battle through with relentless scientific conscience. At the end it was his part to say, “It’s over; she’s dead.”

“I know she was,” Rhoda answered apathetically. “I expected it.”

“Where were you? “ he asked, with the sort of sad futility with which, when all is done, the spirit continues its endeavor. “Was she alone?”

“Yes. I had gone out,” Rhoda said.

“What time was that?” Olney wondered that he had not asked this before; perhaps he had made some mistake through not having verified the moment.

“It was about half-past seven,” answered the girl.

“You went out at half-past seven! And when did you return?”

“We had a quarrel. I didn’t come back till nearly ten — when you came in.”

The poignancy of Olney’s interest remained, but it took another direction. “You were out all the evening alone? Excuse my asking,” he made haste to add, “But I don’t understand—”

“I wasn’t alone,” said Rhoda. “I met an old colored woman on the street, and she went with me to the colored church. She came home with me.” The girl said this quietly, as if there were nothing at all strange in it.

Her calm left Olney in the question which he was always pressing home to himself ; whether her aunt had told her that thing. It was on his tongue to ask her why she went to the colored church, and what her quarrel with her aunt was about. He asked her instead, “Did you think, when you left her, that Mrs. Meredith seemed different at all — that — ?”

“I didn’tnotice,”said Rhoda. “No. She seemed as she often did. But I know she thought she hadn’t taken enough of the medicine. She wanted to sleep more.”

Rhoda sat by the window of the little parlor where she had sat when the dead woman had told her that dreadful thing, and she remembered how she had glanced out of it and seen Olney in the street. The gas was now at full blaze in the room, but she glanced through the window again, and saw that the day was beginning to come outside. She turned from the chill of its pale light, and looked at Olney. Through the  irresistible association of ideas, she looked for his baldness with the lack-lustre eyes she lifted to his face.

“Is there anything you wish me — anything I can do?” he asked, after a silence, in which he got back to the level of practical affairs, though still stupefied from what Rhoda had said.

“No.”

“I mean, notify your friends — your family — telegraph—”

“I have no friends — no relatives. We were alone; all our family are dead.”

“But Mr. Meredith’s family — there is surely some one that you can call upon at this time.”

A strong compassion swelled in Olney’s heart; he yearned to take her in his arms and be all the world to one who had no one in all the world.

She remained as if dazed, and then she said, with a perplexed look: “I was trying to think who there was. Mr. Meredith’s people lived in St. Louis; I remember some of them when I was little. . Perhaps my aunt would have their address.”

She went into the adjoining chamber where the dead woman lay, in the atmosphere of useless drugs and effectless antidotes, and Olney thought, “It’s the mechanical operation of custom; she’s going to ask her,” but Rhoda came back with an address-book in her hand, as if she had gone directly to Mrs. Meredith’s writing case for it with no such error of cerebration.

“Here it is,” she said.

“Very well. I’ll telegraph them at once. But in the mean time, what will you do, Miss Aldgate? You can’t stay here in the hotel — she can’t. How can I be of use to you?” Olney felt all the disinterestedness in the world in asking, but in what he asked next he had a distinct consciousness of self-interest, or at least of selfish curiosity. “Shall I let your friends at the Vendome—”

“Oh, no, no, no!” she broke out. “Not on any account! I couldn’t bear to see them. I)don’t think of such a thing! No, indeed, I can’t let you!”

The self-seeker is never fully rewarded, and Olney was left with a doubt whether this reluctance meant abhorrence of the Bloomingdales, or unwillingness to receive kindness from them which might involve some loss of her perfect independence to the spirited girl; she would not choose or be chosen for any reason but one. He could not make out from her manner as yet whether her aunt had spoken what was on her mind to speak or not; it seemed such a cruel invasion of her rights even to conjecture, that he tried to put the question out of his thoughts.
He began again while he was sensible of an unequal struggle with the question, which intruded itself in the swift whirl of his anxieties, as to what could immediately be done for her.

“Is there anything else you would suggest?”

“No,” said the girl, in the dreamy quiet she seemed helpless to emerge from. “I suppose it wouldn’t do,  even if we could find her. I was thinking of the old woman I saw to-night,” she explained. “I would like to go and stay with her if I could.”

“Is it some one you know?”

“No, I don’t know her. I just met her on the street, and we went to the colored people’s church together. I went out after dinner and left my aunt alone. That was when she drank it.”

She added the vague sentences together with a child’s heedlessness as to their reaching her listener’s intelligence, and she did not persist in her whimsical suggestion.

Olney left it too. “You must let me got you another room,” he said; “You can’t stay here any longer,” and he made her take her hat and come with him to the hotel parlor. He went to arrange the business with the clerk, and to tell him of Mrs. Meredith’s death; then he had to go about other duties connected with the case, which he rather welcomed as a distraction; to notify the fact and cause of Mrs. Meredith’s death to the authorities, and to give the funeral preparations in charge. But when this was all done, and he could no longer play off the aggregate of these minor cares against his great one, he began to be harassed again about Miss Aldgate.

X

It was so much easier to dispose of the friendless dead than the friendless living, Olney thought, with a sardonic perception of one of the bitterest truths in the world; and he was not consoled by the reflection that it is often the man readiest to do all for a woman who can do nothing for her. At the same time he hurried along imagining a scene in which Rhoda owned her love for him, and for his sake and her own, consented to throw convention to the winds, and to unite her fate with his in a marriage truly solemnized by the presence of death. He was aroused from this preposterous melodrama by a voice that said, with liking and astonishment, “Why, Dr. Olney!” and he found himself confronted with Mrs. Atherton, whom he had known as Miss Clara Kingsbury. In another moment she had flooded him with inquiry and explanation, from which he emerged with the dim consciousness that he had told her how he happened not to be in Florence, and had heard how she happened to be in Boston. Her presence in the city at such an untimely season was to be accounted for by the eccentric spirit in which she carried on her visiting for the Associated Charities; she visited her families in the summer, while most people looked after their families only in  the winter. She excused herself by saying that Beverly was so near, and sometimes it gave her a chance for a little bohemian lunch with Mr. Atherton.

Olney laid his trouble before her. He knew from of old that if he could not count upon her tact, he could count upon her imagination, and he was quite prepared for the sympathy with which she rushed to his succor, a sympathy that in spite of the circumstances could not be called less than jubilant.

“Why, the poor, forlorn, little helpless creature!” she exulted. “I’ll go to the hotel at once with you, doctor; and she must come down to Beverly with me, and stay till her friends come on for her.”

The question whether he was not bound in honor to tell Mrs. Atherton just what Miss Aldgate was, crazily visited him, and became a kind of longing before he could rid himself of it; he dismissed it only upon the terms of a self-promise to entertain it some other time; and he availed himself of her good offices almost as joyfully as she proposed them. He had to submit to the romantic supposition which he was aware Mrs. Atherton was keeping out of her words and looks, and he joined her in the conspicuous pretence she made throughout the affair that he was acting from the most disinterested, the most scientific motives.

It was not so hard as he had fancied it might be to get Miss Aldgate’s consent to Mrs. Atherton’s hospitality. It was the only possible thing for her, and she acquiesced simply, like one accustomed to favors; she expressed a sense of the kindness done her, with  a delicate self-respect which Olney hardly know how to account for upon the theory that Mrs. Meredith had spoken to her.   Apparently she appreciated all the necessities of the case, and she did not troublesomely interpose any of the reluctanaces of grief which he had expected. If he could have wished any difference in her it would have been for rather less composure; but then this might have been the apathy following the great shock she had received. He willingly accepted Mrs. Atherton’s theory, hurriedly whispered at parting, that she did not realize what had happened yet; Mrs. Atherton seemed to prize her the more for it.

He came back from seeing them off on the train to the hotel, where he found a telegram from Mrs. Meredith’s connections in St. Louis. They were very sorry; they were unable to come on; they would write. Olney felt a grateful lift of the heart in thinking of Miss Aldgate in Mrs. Atherton’s affectionate keeping, as he crumpled the despatch in his hand and tossed it on his dismal white-marble hearth. He believed that he read between its words a revelation of the fact that the dead woman’s husband had not kept Rhoda’s secret from his family, and that these unable friends, whatever they wrote, were not likely to urge any claim to comfort the girl.

It was Mrs. Bloomingdale who came to do this with several of her large and passive daughters, about as long after the evening papers came out as would take her to drive over from the Vendome. Olney had been able to persuade the reporters who got hold of the case  that there was nothing to work up in it, and the paragraph that Mrs. Bloomingdale saw was discreet enough; it attributed Mrs. Meredith’s death to an overdose of the soporific prescribed for her, and it connected Olney’s name with the matter as the physician who happened to be stopping in the hotel with the unfortunate lady.

“I came the instant I read it,” Mrs. Bloomingdale explained, “for I couldn’t believe the evidence of my senses,” and she added such a circumstantial statement of her mental struggle with the fact projected into her consciousness as could leave no doubt that the fact itself was far less important than the effect produced upon her.

As Olney listened he lost entirely a lurking discomfort he had felt at Miss Aldgate’s refusal to let those people have anything to do with her or for her in her calamity. Whatever the son might be, the mother was a vulgarly selfish woman, posing before him as a generous benefactress, who was also a martyr. “I asked for you, doctor,” she went on, at the end of her personal history in connection with the affair, “because I preferred not to intrude upon that poor young creature without learning just how I ought to approach her. As I said to my daughter Roberta, in coming along” — she put the tallest and serenest of the big, still blondes in evidence with a wave of her hand— “I would be ruled entirely by what you said of the newspaper report.”

Olney said of it dryly that it was quite correct.

“Oh, I am so relieved, doctor!” said Mrs. Bloomingdale. “I didn’t know, don’t you know — I thought perhaps that there were facts — details which you preferred to keep from the public; that there were peculiar circumstances — aberration, don’t you know; and that kind of thing. But I’m so glad there wasn’t!”

Olney felt a malicious desire to disturb this crowing complacency which he believed was the cover of mean anxieties and suspicions. He asked, “Do you mean suicide?”

“Well, no; not that exactly. But—” She stopped, and he merely said:

“There was no evidence of suicidal intent.”

“Oh! “ said Mrs. Bloomingdale, but, as he intended, .not so crowingly this time. “And then -you think I can ask for Miss Aldgate?”

“Miss Aldgate is not here—” Olney began.

“Not here!”

“She is with Mrs. Atherton, at Beverly. She couldn’t remain here, you know.”

“And may I ask — do I understand — Why didn’t Miss Aldgate let us know?”

Olney rejoiced to be able to say, “I suggested that, but she preferred not to disturb you.”

“And why did she prefer that? “ said Mrs. Bloomingdale, with rising crest.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know. It was by accident that I met Mrs. Atherton on the street; she is a well- known lady here, and she at once took Miss Aldgate home with her.”

At the bottom of his heart Olney did not feel altogether easy at what he knew of Miss Aldgate’s relations to the Bloomingdale family. He would have liked to blind himself to facts that proved her weak or at least light-mindedly fond of any present pleasure at the cost of any future complication, but he was not quite able to do so, much as he wished to inculpate the Bloomingdales. He was silent, and attempted no farther explanation or defence of Rhoda’s refusal to see them.

“I presume, Dr. Olney,” Mrs. Bloomingdale went on, “that you know nothing of the circumstances of our acquaintance with Miss Aldgate; and I can’t expect you to sympathize with my — my — surprise that she should have turned from us at such a time. But I must say that I am very greatly surprised. Or not surprised, exactly. Pained.”

“I am very sorry,” Olney said again. “I have no right to intervene in any matter so far beyond my functions as Mrs. Meredith’s physician, but I venture to suggest that the blow which has fallen on Miss Aldgate is enough to account for what seems strange to you in—”

“Of course. Certainly. I make allowance for that,” said Mrs. Bloomingdale; and Olney was aware of receiving this proof of her amiability, her liberality, with regret; he would have so willingly had it otherwise, in justification of Miss Aldgate. “And I know that the past year has been one of great anxiety both to Mrs. Meredith and Miss Aldgate. You knew they had lost their money?”

“No,” said Olney, with a joyful throb of the heart, “I didn’t.”

“I have understood so. Miss Aldgate will be left without anything — in a manner. But that would have made no difference to us. We should have been only too glad to prove to her that it made no difference. But if she prefers not to see us — We expect my son by Wednesday’s steamer in New York.” She added this suddenly and with apparent irrelevance, but Olney perceived that she wished to test his knowledge of the whole case, and she had instantly learned from his face that he knew much more than he would own. But he made no verbal concession to her curiosity. “I think you met my son in Florence?” she said.

“I saw him at Professor Garofalo’s one night.”

“He was there a great deal. It was there he met Mrs. Meredith.” Olney said nothing, and Mrs.
Bloomingdale rose, and as with the same motion her large daughters rose. “ May I ask, Dr. Olney, that you will give Miss Aldgate our love, and say to her that if there is anything we can do, we shall be so — I suppose you have had to communicate with Mrs. Meredith’s — or Mr. Meredith’s rather — family?”

“Yes.”

“They will be at the funeral, of course; and if—”

“They are not coming,” said Olney. “ They have telegraphed that they are unable to come.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Bloomingdale; and after a little pause she said, “Good-afternoon,” and led her girls out.

Olney felt that he had parted with an enemy, and that though he had in one sort tried to keep a conscientious neutrality, he had discharged himself of an offensive office in a hostile manner, that he had made her his enemy if not Miss Aldgate’s enemy. She suspected him he knew that, of having somehow come between her and Miss Aldgate of his own will as well as Rhoda’s. In view of this fact he had to ask himself to be very explicit as to his feelings, his hopes, his intentions; and after a season of close question, the response was very clear. He could not doubt what he wished to do; the only doubt he had was as to how and where and whether he could do it. 

XI

   THE day of the funeral Bloomingdale arrived. None of his family had come to the last rites, though Olney had made it a point both of conscience and of honor to let them know when and where the ceremony would take place. He felt that their absence was an expression of resentment, but that it was a provisional resentment merely. There was a terrible provisionality about the whole business, beginning with the provisional deposition of the dead in the receiving-vault at Mount Auburn, till it could be decided where the long-tormented clay was finally to rest. Every decision concerning the affair seemed postponed, but he did not know till when; death had apparently decided nothing; he did not see how life should.

Bloomingdale came to see him in the evening, after dinner. His steamer had been late in getting up to her dock, and he had missed the first train on to Boston. He explained the fact briefly to Olney, and he said he had come directly to see him. He recalled their former meeting in Florence, but said, with somehow an effect of disappointment, that he had taken an older man whom he had seen at Professor Garofalo’s for Dr. Olney. On his part, Olney could have owned to an equal disappointment. He remembered perfectly  that Mr. Bloomingdale was a slight, dark man; but the composite Bloomingdale type, from the successive impressions of his mother’s and sisters’ style, was so deeply stamped in his consciousness that he was surprised to find the young minister himself neither large nor blond. His mind wandered from him to the father whom he had never seen, but who had left so distinct a record of himself in his son, and not in his daughters, as fathers are supposed usually to do. Then Olney’s thoughts turned to that whole vexed question of heredity, and he lost himself deeply in conjecture of Rhoda’s ancestry, while Bloomingdale was feeling his way forward to inquire about her through explanation and interest concerning Mrs. Meredith, and a fit sympathy, a most intelligent and delicate appreciation of the situation in all its details. Before the fact formulated itself in his mind, Olney was aware of feeling that this man was as different from his family in the most essential and characteristic qualities as he was different from them in temperament and complexion.

“And now about Miss Aldgate, Dr. Olney,” he said, with a kind of authority, which Olney instinctively, however unwillingly, admitted. “ I shall have to tell you why I am so very anxious to know how she is — how she bears this blow. I am afraid my mother betrayed to you the hurt which she felt, that Miss Aldgate should not have turned to her in her trouble; but I can understand how impossible it was she should. Without reflecting upon my mother at all for her  feeling — for I can see how she would feel as she does — I must say I don’t share it. While Miss Aldgate was still uncertain about — about myself — it was simply impossible that she should receive any sort of favor or kindness from my family even in such an exigency as this. It would have been indelicate; it must have been infinitely easier for her to accept the good offices of a total stranger, as she has done. Dr. Olney, I have to ask your good offices — and I have first to make you a confidence, as my reason for asking them. I’m sure you will understand me!”

In the fervor of his feeling the young man’s voice trembled, and Olney felt himself moved with a curious involuntary kindness for him — the sort of admiring pity which men have been said to feel toward a brave foeman they mean to fight to the death. ‘I had a very great hope — and I think I had grounds for my hope — that Miss Aldgate would have consented to be my wife when she met me, if this terrible visitation — if all had gone well.” The words sent a cold thrill through Olney’s heart, and the mere suggestion that Rhoda could be anybody’s wife but his own steeled it against this pretender to her love. “I offered myself to her in Liverpool before she sailed, and she was to have given me her answer here when we met. Now, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know anything. The whole world seems tumbled back into chaos. I can’t urge anything upon her at such a time. I’m not even sure that I can decently ask to see her. And yet if I don’t, what may not she think? Can’t you  help me in this matter? You were Mrs. Meredith’s physician, and you stand in a sort of relation to Miss
Aldgate that would authorize you to let her know that I am here, and very anxious to know what her wish — her will — is as to our meeting. It might not be professional, exactly, but — I came to you with the hope that it might be possible. Does it seem asking too much? I should be very sorry—”

Olney saw that the man’s sensitiveness was taking fire, and in spite of his resentment of a request which set aside all his own secret hopes and intentions as non-existent, he could not forbear a concession to his unwitting rival’s generous feeling. “Not at all,” he said; “but I doubt my authority to intervene in any way. I have no right—”

“Only the right I’ve suggested,” the young man urged. “ I wouldn’t have you assume anything for my sake. But I know that the circumstances are more than ordinarily distressing, and that Mrs. Meredith’s death came in a way that might make Miss Aldgate afraid that — that — there might be some shadow of change in me on account of them. At such times we have misgivings about everybody; but I wish it to be understood that no circumstance could influence my feeling toward her.”

“I don’t know whether I understand you exactly,” said Olney, with a growing dread of the man’s generosity.

“Why, I suppose, from what I am able to learn, that poor Mrs. Meredith committed suicide.”

“Not at all,”Olney promptly returned. “There is no evidence of that. There’s every indication that she simply took an overdose of the medicine I prescribed. It wouldn’t have killed her of itself, but her forces were otherwise weakened.”

“I’m glad, for her sake, to hear it,” said Bloomingdale, “but it would have made no difference with me if it had been different. If she had taken her life in a fit of insanity, as I inferred it would only have made me more constant in the feeling. There is no conceivable disadvantage which would not have endeared Miss Aldgate more to me. I could almost wish for the direst misfortune, the deepest disgrace,” he went on, while the tears sprang to his eyes, “to befall her, if only that I might show her that it counted nothing against her, that it counted everything for her!”

Olney’s heart sank within him, and he felt guilty before this unselfish frankness, which, if a little boyish, was still so noble. He knew very well that if such a lover could be told everything, it would not matter the least to him; that the girl might be as black as ebony, and his passion would paint her divinely fairer than the lily. Olney knew this from his own thoughts as well as from the other’s words; he was himself like the spirit he conceived:

  “Du gleichst dem Geist dem du begreifst.”

But he was aware of an instant purpose not to let his rival be brought to the test; and he was aware at the same time of a duty he had to let him somehow have  his chance. “After all,” he reflected, “what reason have I to suppose that she ever cared a moment for me, or ever could care? Very likely she likes this fellow ; he is lovable; he is a fine fellow, though I hate him so; and what right have I to stand between them? He must have his chance.” When he came to this point, he said aloud, coldly, “I don’t understand what you expect me to do.”

“Nothing! Only this: to let me go and see the lady with whom Miss Aldgate is staying, and learn from her whether and when Miss Aldgate will see me. That’s all I can reasonably ask. I ought to ask as much if I meant to give her up — and it’s all that I ask meaning never to give her up. Yes, that’s all I can ask!” he repeated, desperately.

“That will be a very simple matter,” said Olney. “Miss Aldgate is with Mrs. Atherton, at Beverly. I
can give you her address, and my card to her.”

“Yes,yes! Thank you — thank you ever so much.But — but if I present myself without explanation, what will this lady think?”

“She’ll give your name to Miss Aldgate, and that will be explanation enough,” said Olney, finding something a little superfine in this hesitation, and refusing to himself to be the bearer of any sort of confidences to Mrs. Atherton, who would be only too likely to take a romantic interest in the devoted young minister. Olney meant to give him an even chance, but nothing more.

“True! “ said Bloomingdale, nervously gnawing his  lip. “True!” He clrew a long breath, and added, “Of course, I can’t go now till morning.”

Olney said nothing as to this. He was writing on his card Mrs. Atherton’s address and the introduction for Bloomingdale which he combined with it. He had resolved to go down himself that night. Bloomingdale clung fervently to his hand in parting.

“I can never thank you enough!” he palpitated.

“You have verv little to thank me for,” said Olney.

XII

IF Mrs. Atherton thought it strange of Dr. Olney, to drive up to her sea-side door at half-past nine, out of a white fog that her hospitable hall lamp could pierce only a few paces down the roadway, she dissembled her surprise so well that he felt he was doing the most natural thing, not to say the most conventional thing, in the world. She was notoriously a woman of no tact, but of so much heart that where it was a question at once of friendship and of romance, as the question of Dr. Olnev and of Miss Aldgate was with her, she exercised a sort of inspiration in dealing with it. She put herself so wholly at the service of their imagined exigency that she now made Olney feel his welcome most keenly: a welcome which expressed that she would have been equally glad and equally ready to receive him in her sweet-matted, warm-rugged, hearth-fire-lit little drawing-room, if he had suddenly appeared at half-past two in the morning. The Japanese portiere had not ceased tinkling behind him when she appeared through it, with outstretched hand. She promptly refused his excuses. “I really believe I was somehow expecting you to-night; and I’m ashamed that Mr. Atherton isn’t up to bear witness to my presentiment. But he’s had rather a tiresome day, in  town, and he’s gone to bed early. I’m glad to say that Miss Aldgate has gone to her room, too. She’s feeling the reaction from the tension she’s been in, and I hope it will be a complete letting down for her. Have you heard anything more from those strange people? Very odd they shouldn’t any of them have come on!”

Mrs. Atherton meant the St. Louis connections of Mrs. Meredith, and Olney said, with an embarrassed frown, “ No, they haven’t made any sign yet.”

“The strange thing about a tragedy of this kind is,” Mrs. Atherton remarked, “ that you never can realize that it’s ended. You always think there’s going to be something more of it. I suppose I was thinking that you had heard something disagreeable from those people, though I don’t know what they could say or do to heighten the tragedy.”

“I don’t either,” Olney answered. “ But something else has happened, Mrs. Atherton. You were quite right in your foreboding that the end was not yet.” He paused with a gloomier air than he knew, for Bloomingdale’s appearance was to him bv far the most tragical phase of the affair. Then he went on thoughtfully. “I hardly know how to approach the matter without seeming to meddle in it more than I mean to do. I wish absolutely to put myself outside of it. But there’s a kind of necessity that I should tell you about it.” As he said this the kind of necessity that he had thought there was instantly vanished, and left him feeling rather blank. There was no  necessity at all that he should tell Mrs. Atherton what relation Bloomingdale bore, and wished to bear, toward Miss Aldgate. All that he had to do, if he had to do anything, was to tell her that he had given him his card to her, and that she might expect him in the morning, and so leave her to her conjectures. If he went beyond this, he must go very far beyond it, and not make any confidence for Bloomingdale without making a much ampler confidence for himself. “The fact is, I wish to submit a little case of conscience to you.”

Mrs. Atherton was delighted; and if she had been drowsy before, this would have aroused her to the most vigilant alertness. She knew that the case of conscience must somehow have something to do with Miss Aldgate; she believed that it was nothing but a love affair in disguise, and a love affair, with a strong infusion of moral question in it, promised a pleasure to Mrs. Atherton’s sympathetic nature which nothing else could give. “Yes?” she said.

“Mrs. Atherton,” Olnev resumed, “how far do you think a man is justified in pursuing an advantage which another has put in big hands unknowingly — say that another, who did not know that I was his enemy, had put in my hands?”

“Not very far, Dr. Olney,” she answered, promptly. “In fact, not at all. That is, you might justify such a man, if the case were some one else’s. But you couldn’t justify him if the case were yours.”

“I was afraid you would say so; I knew you would  say so. Well, the case is mine,” said Olney,” and it’s this. I’ve run down here to-night to tell you that I’ve given my card to a gentleman who will call here in the morning.”

Olney paused, and Mrs. Atherton said, “I’m sure I shall be glad to see any friend of yours, Dr. Olney.”

“He isn’t my friend,” Olney returned, gloomily.

“Then, any enemy,” Mrs. Atherton suggested.

Olney put the little pleasantry by.”The day before Mrs. Meredith died, she told me something that I need not speak of except as it relates to this Mr. Bloomingdale.”

“It’s Mr. Bloomingdale who’s coming, then?”

“Yes. Do you know anything about him?”

“Oh, no! Only it’s a very floral kind of name.”

“I wish I could be light about the kind of person he is. But I can’t. He’s a very formidable kind of person: very sensible, very frank, very generous.”

Mrs. Atherton shook her head with a subtle intelligence. “ These might be very disheartening traits — in another.”

“They are. They complicate the business for me. This Mr. Bloomingdale has offered himself to Miss Aldgate.” Mrs. Atherton’s attentive gaze expressed no surprise; probably she had divined this from the beginning. ‘He was to have had his answer when he met her in Boston,” Olney said, with an effect of finding the words a bad taste in his mouth. That was the arrangement in Liverpool. But, of course, now—”

He stopped, and Mrs. Atherton took the word, with a lofty courage:

“Of course now he has all the greater right to it.”

“Yes,” said Olney, though he did not see why.

“I shall be glad to see Mr. Bloomingdale when he comes,” Mrs. Atherton went on; “and though it’s an embarrassing moment, I must manage to prepare Miss Aldgate for his coming. She will certainly have her mind made up by this time.”

There was something definitive in Mrs. Atherton’s tone that made Olney feel as if he had transacted his business, and he rose. He had felt that he ought to tell Mrs. Atherton of his own hopes or purposes in regard to Miss Aldgate; but now that he had given Bloomingdale away, this did not seem necessary. In fact, by a sudden light that flashed upon it, he perceived that it would be allowing his rival a fairer chance if he let him have it without competition. Afterwards when he got out of the house he thought he was a fool to do this; but he could not go back and make his confession without appearing a greater fool; and he kept on to the station, and waited there till the last train for town came lagging along, and then he put himself beyond temptation, at least for the night.

He spent what was left of it in imaginary interviews, now with Mrs. Atherton, now with Bloomingdale, now with Rhoda, and now with all of them in various combinations, and constructed futures varying in character from the gayest happiness to the gloom of the  darkest tragedy, lit by the one high star of self-renunciation. Olney got almost as much satisfaction out of the renunciation as out of the fruition of his hopes. It is apt to be so in these hypothetical cases; perhaps it is often so in experience.

He waited heroically about all the next day to hear from Mrs. Atherton. Something in the pressure of her hand at parting had assured him that she understood everything, and that she was his friend; that they were people of honor, who were bound to do this thing at any cost to him, but that a just Providence would probably not let it cost him much, or at least not everything.

When her letter came at last, hurried forward by a special delivery stamp that spoke volumes in itself, it brought intelligence which at first made Olney feel that he must somehow have been guilty of an unfairness towards Bloomingdale, that he had tacitly if not explicitly prejudiced his case. There was a little magnanimous moment in which he could not rejoice that Miss Aldgate had absolutely refused to see Mr. Bloomingdale; that she had shown both surprise and indignation at his coming; and that no entreaty or argument of Mrs. Atherton’s had prevailed with her to show him the slightest mercy, or to send him any message but that of abrupt refusal, which Mrs. Atherton softened to him as best she could. She wrote now that she was sure there must be some misunderstanding but that in Miss Aldgate’s state of nervous exaltation, it was perfectly useless to urge anything in  excuse of him, and she had to resign herself to the girl’s decision. She coincided with Olney in his idea
of Bloomingdale’s character.  She owned to a little fancy for him, and to a great deal of compassion. He had borne the severe treatment he received very manfully, and at the same time gently. He seemed to accept it as final, and he did not rebel against it by the slightest murmur.  Olney perceived that Mrs. Atherton had been recognized as his rival’s confidante far enough to be authorized to pour balm into his wounds, and that she probably had not spared the balm. 

XIII

 OLNEY expected, without being able to say why exactly, a second visit from the man who was not only his former rival. Perhaps it was because he believed he knew why Miss Aldgate had refused to see him that he rather thought the young man would come to ask him. But he did not come, and in the mean time Olney began to perceive that it would have been preposterous for him to have come. Till he learned by inquiry of the clerk at the Vendome that Bloomingdale had left there with his mother and sisters, he did not feel that the minister was out of the story, and that it remained for him alone to read it to the end. He took it for granted that Rhoda treated the man who had certainly a claim upon her kindness in that brusque, not to say brutal manner, out of mere hysterical weakness. She had made up her mind to refuse him, and as she felt she might not have strength to endure the sight of the pain she must inflict, she had determined not to witness it. Whether she had loved him too well to afflict him with her secret, or not well enough to trust him with it, was what remained a question with Olney, and he turned from one point of it to the other with the wish to answer it in a sense different from both. What he wished to believe was  that she did not love the poor young fellow at all, but this seemed to be too good to be true, and he could not believe it with the constancy of his desire. Nevertheless he had a fitful hold upon it, and it was this faith, wavering and elusive as it was, that encouraged him to think Miss Aldgate would not refuse to see him, and that he might at any rate go down at once to Mrs. Atherton’s, and ask about her if not for her.

When he had reasoned to this conclusion, which he reached with electrical rapidity as soon as he knew that Bloomingdale was gone, he acted upon it. Mrs. Atherton received him with a cheerfulness that ignored, at least in Miss Aldgate’s presence, the fact that lay hidden in their thoughts if not in hers. Olney was not obliged to ask about her or for her; she came down with.Mrs. Atherton, as if it were entirely natural she should do so; and the pathetic confidingness of her reception of him as an old friend, brightened almost into the gayety that was her first and principal charm for him. If it had appeared at once this gayety would have troubled him; he would have doubted it for that levity of nature, of race, for which Mrs. Meredith had seen it; but it came out slowly like sunshine through mist, and flattered him with the hope that he had evoked it upon her tragic mask. At the same time he was puzzled, if not shocked, that she seemed forgetful of the woman, so recently gone forever, who had been in all effects a mother to her, and who had sacrificed and borne more than most mothers for her her sake. He was himself too inexperienced, as yet, to  know that we grieve for the dead only by fits, by impulses; that the soul from time to time flings off with all its force, the crushing burden, which then sinks slowly back and bows it in sorrow to the earth again; that if ever grief is constant, it is madness, it is death.

Mrs. Atherton could have told him of moments when the girl was prostrated by her bereavement, and realized to their whole meaning the desolation and despair which it had left her to. But she could not have told him of the stony weight of unforgiveness at the child’s heart; of her unreasoning resentment of the dead woman’s revelation, as if she had created the fact that she had felt so sorely bound to impart. The tragic circumstances of her death had not won her pardon for this: the girl felt through all that her aunt had somehow made it so; and for her, ignorant of it all her life till that avowal, she had indeed made it so. Whether a wiser and kinder conscience might not have found it possible to keep the secret, in which there was no guilt or responsibility for the girl, and trust the Judge of all the earth for the end, is a question which the casuist of Mrs. Meredith’s school could not deal with. Duty with her could mean but one thing, and she had done her duty. Certainly she was not to be condemned for it; but neither was the affection which she had so sorely wounded to blame if it had conceived for her memory the bitter drop of hate which poisoned all Rhoda’s thoughts of her. What the girl had constantly said to herself from the first was what she still said: that having kept this secret  from her all her life, it was too late for her aunt to speak when she did speak at last. Another not involved in the consequences of her act might not have taken this view of it; but this was the view taken of it by the girl who felt herself its victim, and who helplessly resented it, in spite of all that had happened since.

Whether she was in any degree excusable, or whether she was wholly in the wrong in this feeling, must remain for each to decide, and to each must be left the question of how far the Puritan civilization has carried the cult of the personal conscience into mere dutiolatry.   The daughter of an elder faith would have simplified the affair, and perhaps shirked the responsibility proper to her, by going first with her secret to her confessor, and then being ruled by him. Mrs. Meredith had indeed made a confessor of her physician, after the frequent manner of our shrill-nerved women, but even if Olney could have felt that he had the right to counsel her on the moral side, it is doubtful if she could have found the strength to submit to him.

Olney’s interest in her was mainly confined to the episodes of the last few days, and vivid as these had been, it could not hold him long in censure of Miss Aldgate’s behavior; he began to yield to the charm of her presence, and in a little while hazily to wonder what his reserves about her were. She was in the black that seems to grow upon women in the time of mourning, and it singularly became her. It is the  color for the South, and for Southern beauty, like the inky shadow cast by the effulgence of tropical skies, it is the counterpart of the glister and flash of hair and eyes which no other hue could set off so well. The girl’s splendor dazzled him from the sable cloud of her attire, and in Mrs. Atherton’s blond presence, which also bad its sumptuousness — she was large and handsome, and had as yet lost no grace of her girlhood — he felt the tameness of the Northern type. It was the elder world, the beauty of antiquity, which appealed to him in the lustre and sparkle of this girl; and the remote taint of her servile and savage origin gave her a kind of fascination which refuses to let itself be put in words: it was like the grace of a limp, the occult, indefinable lovableness of a deformity, but transcending these by its allurement in infinite degree, and going for the reason of its effect deep into the mysterious places of being where the spirit and the animal meet and part in us. When Olney followed some turn of her head, some movement of her person, a wave of the profoundest passion surged up in his heart, and he knew that he loved her with all his life, which he could make his death if it were a question of that. The mood was of his emotional nature alone; it sought and could have won no justification from his moral sense, which indeed it simply submerged and blotted out for the time.

There was no reason why he should not stay now as long as he liked, or why he should not come again as often as Mrs. Atherton could find pretexts for asking  him. Between them they treated the matter very frankly. He took her advice upon the taste and upon the wisdom of urging his suit at so strange a time; and she decided that in the anomalous situation to which Miss Aldgate was left, her absolute friendlessness and helplessness, there were more reasons for his wooing than against it. They took Mrs. Atherton’s husband into their confidence, and availed themselves of the daylight of a legal mind upon their problem. He greatly assisted to clear up the coarser difficulties by communicating as Miss Aldgate’s lawyer with her aunt’s connections in St. Louis. Mrs. Meredith had left to her niece the remnant of the property she had inherited from her husband, and his family willingly, almost eagerly, accepted the conditions of the will. They waived any right to question it in any sort, and they made no inquiries about Miss Aldgate, or her purposes or wishes.

Olney agreed with the Athertons that their behavior was very singular, but he kept his own conjectures as to the grounds of it. They were, in fact, hardly conjectures any more; they were convictions. He felt sure that they knew the secret which Mrs. Meredith believed her husband had kept from all the world; but this did not concern him so deeply as the belief that had constantly grown upon him since their first meeting in Mrs. Atherton’s presence, that Rhoda knew it too. He had no reason for his belief; it was quite without palpable proofs; it was mere intuition; and yet he was more and more sure of the fact.

His assurance of it strengthened with his belief that the girl loved him, and had perhaps had her fancy for him from the moment they saw each other in Florence. The evidences that a woman gives of her love before it is asked are always easily resolvable into something else; and in both these things Olney’s beliefs were of the same quality, and they were of the same measure. But the one conviction began to taint and poison the other. The man’s sweetest and fondest hope became a pang to him, because it involved the fear that the girl might have decided to accept his love and yet keep her secret. In any case he desired her love; as before himself he did not blame her for withholding her secret till she found what seemed to her the best time for imparting it; but for her own sake he could have wished that she would heroically choose the worst. This tacit demand upon her was made from his knowledge of how safe it would be for her to tell him everything, and it left out of the account the fact that till he asked her to be his wife he had no claim upon her, that he could have no terms from her till he owned himself won.  Love is a war in which there can be no preliminaries for grace; the surrender must be unconditional, before these can even be mentioned.

There were times, of course, when Olney could not believe that the girl knew what at other times she seemed to withhold from him; but at all times the conjecture had to be kept to himself. If she knew, she practised a perfect art in concealing her knowledge which made him fear for the future; and if she  did not know, then she showed an indifference to her aunt’s memory which seemed not less than unnatural. He conceived the truth concerning her when he said to himself that Rhoda must hold Mrs. Meredith responsible for the fact if she had imparted it; and that time alone could clear away her confusion of mind and enable her to be just to the means which she confounded with the cause of her suffering. But he could not have followed her into those fastnesses of the more intensely personalized feminine consciousness where the girl relentlessly punished her aunt in thought, not for doing her duty, but for doing it too late, when she could remain through life only the unreconciled victim of her origin, instead of revealing it early enough to enable her to accept it and annul it by conforming herself to it.

As this was what Rhoda had never ceased to believe would have been possible, her heart remained sore with resentment in the midst of the love which she could riot help letting Olney divine. Circumstance had drawn their lives into a sudden intimacy which neither would or could withdraw from; they drifted on toward the only possible conclusion together. For the most part the sense of their love preoccupied them. She turned from her desperate retrospect and blindly strove to keep herself in the present, and to shun the future as she tried to escape the past; he made sure of nothing to build on except the fact that at least she did not know that Mrs. Meredith had confided her secret to him. With this certain, he could take all  chances. He could trust time to soften her heart toward the dead, and he could forgive the concealment toward himself which she used.
One thing that he could not understand was her apparent willingness to remain just where and as she was indefinitely; he did not realize that it was apparent only, and as a man he did not account for her patience — if it were patience — as an effect of the abeyance in which the whole training of women teaches them to keep themselves. The moral of their education from the moment they can be instructed in anything is passivity, and to take any positive course must be a negation almost of their being; it must cost an effort unimaginable to a man.

The summer weeks faded away into September, when one morning Olney came to see Rhoda, and found her sitting on a bench to the seaward of a group of birches. The trees had already dropped a few yellow leaves on the lawn, which looked like flowers strewn in the still vividly green grass. It was one of those pale mornings when a silvery mist blots the edge of the sea and lets the sails melt into it. She was looking wistfully out at them, across Mrs. Atherton’s wall, which struggled so conscientiously to look wild and unkempt, with its nasturtiums clambering over it; but she did not affect to be startled when Olney’s steps made themselves heard on the gravel-walk coming toward her.

She flushed with the same joy that thrilled in his heart, and waited for him to come near enough to  take her hand before she asked, “ Oh, didn’t you see Mrs. Atherton?”

“She sent me word that you were here, as if that were what I wanted,” he answered, smiling over the hand he held.

“Well, I can tell you myself, then,” she said, sitting down again.

“Yes; or not, as you like,” he returned.

“No, it is isn’t whether I like or not. I am going
away.”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Where?”

“To — to New Orleans. To look up my mother’s family.” She lifted her eyes anxiously to his face, and then helplessly let her glance fall. “I have been talking it over with Mrs. Atherton, and she thinks too that I ought to try to find them.”

Olney’s heart gave a leap. He knew that she was hovering on the verge of a confession, which she longed to make for his sake, and that he ought not to suffer her till he had made his own confession. He had the joy of realizing her truth, and he rested nervelessly in that a moment, before he could say lightly, “ I don’t see why you should do that.”

“Don’t you think — think — that it’s my duty?” she pleaded.

“Not in the least! From the experience I’ve had with the St. Louis branch of your family I don’t think it’s your duty to look any of them up. Why do you think it is your duty? Have they tried to find you?”

“They are very poor and humble people — the humblest,” she faltered piteously. “They—” 

Her breath went in silence, and he cried, “Rhoda! Don’t go away! Stay! Stay with me. Or, if you must go somewhere, go back with me to Florence, where the happiness of my life began when I first knew you were in the world. I love you! I ask you to be my wife!”

She let her hand seem to sink deeper in his hold, which had somehow not released it yet; she almost pushed it in for an instant, and then she pulled it away violently. “Never!” She sprang to her feet and gasped hoarsely out, “I am a negress!”

Something in her tragedy affected Olney comically; perhaps the belief that she had often rehearsed these words as answer to his demand. He smiled. “Well, not a very black one. Besides, what of it, if I love you?”

“What of it?” she echoed. “But don’t you know? You mustn’t!”

The simpleness of the words made him laugh outright; these she had not rehearsed. She had dramatized his instant renunciation of her when he knew the fatal truth.

“Why not? I love you, whether I must or not!”

As tragedy the whole affair had fallen to ruin. It could be reconstructed, if at all, only upon an octave much below the operatic pitch. It must be treated in no lurid twilight gloom, but in plain, simple, matter-of-fact noonday.

“I can’t let you,” she began, in a vain effort to catch up some fragments of her meditated melodrama  about her. “You don’t understand. My grandmother was a slave.”

“The more shame to the man that called himself her master! “ said Olney. “ But I do know — I understand everything — I know everything!” He had not meant to say this. He had always imagined keeping his knowledge from her till they were married, and then in some favored moment confessing that her aunt had told him, and making her forgive her for having told him. But now, in his eagerness to spare her the story which he saw she had it on her conscience to tell him in full, the truth had escaped him.

“You know it!” she exclaimed, with a fierce recoil. “How do you know it?”

“Your aunt told me,” he answered, hardily. He must now make the best of the worst.

“Then she was false to me with her last breath! Oh, I will never forgive her!”

“Oh, yes you will, my dear,” said Olney, with the quiet which he felt to be his only hope with her. “She had to tell met to advise with me, before she told you. I wish she had never told you, but if she had not told me, she would have defrauded me of the sweetest thing in life.”

“The privilege of stooping to such a creature as I?” she demanded, bitterly.

He took her hand and kissed it, and kept it in his. “No: the right of saying that you are all the dearer to me for being just what you are, and that I’m prouder of you for it. And now, don’t say that you will not  forgive that poor soul, who suffered years for every hour that you have suffered from that cause. She felt herself sacredly bound to tell you.”

“It was too late then,” said the girl, with starting tears. “ She killed me. I can’t forgive her.”

“Well, what can that matter to her? She can forgive you; and that’s the great thing.”

“What do you mean?” she asked, weakly trying to get her hand away.

“How came she to tell you that she hadn’t told me?”

“I — I made her,” faltered the girl. “ I asked her if she had. I was frantic.”

“Yes. You had no right to do that. Of course she had to deny it, and you made her take a new lie on her conscience when she had just escaped from one that she had carried for you all your life.” Olney gave her back her hand. “Whatever you do with me, for your own sake put away all thoughts of hardness towards that poor woman.”

There was a long silence. Then the girl broke into sudden tears. “I do; I will! I see it now! It was cruel, cruel! But I couldn’t see it then; I couldn’t see anything but myself ; the world was filled with me — blotted out with me! Ah, can she ever forgive me? If I could only have one word with her, to say that there never was any real hardness in me toward her, and I didn’t know what I was doing! Do you think I made her kill herself? Tell me if you do! I can bear it — I deserve to bear it!” 

“She never meant to kill herself,” said Olney, sincerely. “I feel sure of that. But she’s gone, and you are here; the question’s of you, not of her; and I only asked you to be just to yourself. I did’ nt mean to tell you now that I knew your secret from her, but I’m not sorry I told you, if it’s helped you to substitute a regret for a resentment.”

“It’s done that for all my life long.”

“Ah, I didn’t mean it to go so far as that!” said Olney, smiling.

“No matter! It’s what I must bear. It’s a just punishment.” She rose suddenly, and put out her hand to him. “Good-by.”

“What for?” he asked. “I’m not going.”

“But I am. I’m going away to find my mother’s people, if I can — to help them and acknowledge them. I tried to talk with Mrs. Atherton about it, the other day, but I couldn’t rightly, for I couldn’t let her understand fully. But it’s true — and be serious about it, and don’t laugh at me! Oughtn’t I to go down there and help them; try to educate them, and elevate them; give my life to them? Isn’t it base and cowardly to desert them, and live happily apart from them, when—”

“When you might live so miserably with them?” Olney asked. “ Ah, that’s the kind of question that I suspect your poor aunt used to torment herself with! But if you wish me to be really serious with you about it, I will say, Yes, you would have some such duty toward them, perhaps, if you had voluntarily chosen  your part with them — if you had ever consented to be of their kind. Then it would be base and cowardly to desert them; it would be a treason of the vilest sort. But you never did that, or anything like it, and there is no more specific obligation upon you to give your life to their elevation than there is upon me. Besides, I doubt if that sort of specific devotion would do much good. The way to elevate them is to elevate us, to begin with. It will be an easy matter to deal with those simple-hearted folks after we’ve got into the right way ourselves. No, if you must give your life to the improvement of any particular race, give it to mine. Begin with me. You won’t find me unreasonable. All that I shall ask of you are the fifteen-sixteenths or so of you that belong to my race by heredity; and I will cheerfully consent to your giving our colored connections their one-sixteenth.”

Olney broke off, and laughed at his joke, and she joined him helplessly. “ Oh! don’t laugh at me!”

“Laugh at you? I feel a great deal more like crying. If you go down there to elevate the blacks, what is to become of me? I don’t really object to your going, but I want to go with you.”

“What do you mean?” she entreated, piteously.

“What I said just now. I love you, and I ask you to be my wife.”

“I said I couldn’t. You know why.”

“But you didn’t mean it, or you’d have given me some reason.”

“Some reason?”

“Yes. What you said was only an excuse. I can’t accept it. Rhoda,” he added, seriously, “ I’m afraid you don’t understand! Can’t you understand that what you told me — what I knew already — didn’t make the slightest difference to me, and couldn’t to any man who was any sort of a man! Or yes, it does make a difference! But such a kind of difference that if I could have you other than you are by wishing I wouldn’t — for my own selfish sake at least, I wouldn’t wish it for the world. Can’t you understand that?”

“No, I can’t understand that. It seems to me that it must make you loathe me. Oh!” she shuddered. “You don’t know how hideous they are — a whole churchful, as I saw them that night. And I’m like them!”

Olney’s heart ached for her, but he could not help his laugh. “Well, you don’t look it. Oh, you poor child! Why do you torment yourself ?”

“I can’t help it. It’s burnt into me. It’s branded me one of them. I am one. No, I can’t escape. And the best way is to go and live among them and own it. Then perhaps I can learn to bear it, and not hate them so. But I do hate them. I do, I do! I can’t help it and I don’t blame you for hating me!”

“I don’t happen to hate even you,” said Olney, going back to his lightness. “My trouble’s another kind. Perhaps I should hate you, and hate them, if I’d come of a race of slave-holders, as you have. But my people never injured those poor creatures, and so  I don’t hate them, or their infinitesimal part in you.”

He found himself, whenever it came to the worst with her in this crisis, taking a tone of levity which was so little of his own volition that it seemed rather to take him. He was physician enough to flatter his patient for her good, and instinctively he treated Rhoda as if she were his patient. It did flatter her to have that side of her ancestry dwelt upon, and to be treated as the daughter of slave-holders; she who would not reconcile herself to her servile origin, listened with a kind of fascination to his tender mockery, in which she felt herself swayed by the deep under-current of his faithful love.

“Come, come!” he went on, and at his touch she dropped weakly back into her seat again, and let him take her hand and hold it. “I know how this fact has seized upon you and blotted everything else out of the world. But life’s made up of a great deal else; and you are but one little part injured to many parts injurer. You belong incomparably more to the oppressors than to the oppressed, and what I’m afraid of is that you’ll keep me in hopeless slavery as long as I live. Who would ever imagine that you were as black as you say ? Who would think—”

“Ah, you’ve confessed it! You would be ashamed of me, if people knew! That is it!”

“If you’ll answer me as I wish, I’ll go up with you to the house and tell Mrs. Atherton. I’ve rather a fancy for seeing how she would take it. But I can’t  unless you’ll let me share in the disgrace with you. Will you?”

“Never! It shall never be known! For your sake! I can bear it; but you shall not. Promise me that you’ll never tell a living soul!” She caught him nervously, by the arm, and clung to him. It was her sign of surrender.

He accepted it, and said: “ Very well, I promise it. But only on one condition: that you believe I’m not afraid to tell it. Otherwise my self-respect will oblige me to go round shouting it to everybody. Do you promise?”

“Yes, I promise: “ and now she yielded to the gayety of his mood, and a succession of flashing smiles lit up her face, in which her doom was transmuted to the happiest fortune. She kept smiling, with her bands linked through his arm and her form drawn close to him; while their talk flowed fantastically away from all her awful questions.. Their love performed the effect of common-sense for them, and in its purple light they saw the every-day duties of life plain before them. They spoke frankly of the incidents of the past few days, and he told her now of his interview with the Bloomingdale family, and how he felt that be had hardened Mrs. Bloomingdale’s heart against her by his unsympathetic behavior in denying them an interview with Rhoda herself.

This made her laugh, but she said, with a shudder: “I couldn’t have borne to look at them. From the first moment after my aunt told me, I felt that I must  prevent their ever seeing me again. I wrote to him, and I carried the letter out with me to post it, and make sure it went; and then somehow I forgot to post it.”

“Ah,” said Olney, “ I suppose that’s the reason why he came to see me, and to ask where he could find you.”

“Yes,” answered Rhoda, placidly.

“There is only one thing in the whole affair that really troubles me,” said Olney, “ and that’s the very short shrift you gave that poor fellow.”

“Why, when I had written to him I would not see him again, I supposed he was persisting, and it was only the other day that I found the letter, which I’d forgotten to post. It was in the pocket of the dress I wore that night to the church.”

“And you don’t think his persisting — his caring so much for you — gave him the right to see you?”

“Not the least.”

“Ah, a man never understands a woman’s position on that question.”

“Why, of course, if I had cared for him—”

“I don’t know but I’ve a little case of conscience here myself. I had awful qualms when that poor fellow was talking with me. I perceived that he was as magnanimous as I was on the subject of heredity, and that, I thought, ought to count in his favor. Will you let it?”

“No.”

“Why not?’

“ Because I don’t care for him.”

“How simple it is! Well, he’s off my conscience, at any rate.”

She began to grieve a little.”But if you are sorry—”

“Sorry?”

“If you think you will ever regret — if you’re not sure that you’ll never be troubled by — by — that, then we had better—”

“My dear child,” said Olney, “ I’m going to leave all the trouble of that to you. I assure you that from this on I shall never think of it. I am going to provide for your future, and let you look after your past.”

She dropped her head with a sob upon his shoulder, and as he gathered her in his arms he felt as if he had literally rescued her from her own thoughts of herself.

He was young and strong, and he believed that he would always be able to make her trust him against them, because now in the fulness of their happiness he prevailed.

There are few men who, when the struggle of life is mainly over, do not wonder at the risks they took in the days of their youth and strength; and it could not be pretended that Olney found more than the common share of happiness in the lot he chose; but then it could be said honestly enough that he did not consider either life or love valuable for the happiness they could yield. They were enough in themselves. He was not a seeker after happiness, and when he  saw that even his love failed at times to make life happy for his wife, he pitied her, and he did not blame her. He knew that in her hours of despondency there was that war between her temperament and her character which is the fruitful cause of misery in the world, where all strains are now so crossed and intertangled that there is no definite and unbroken direction any more in any of us. In her, the infusion was only a little greater than in most others, and if Olney ever had any regret it was that the sunny-natured antetypes of her mother’s race had not endowed her with more of the heaven-born cheerfulness with which it meets contumely and injustice. His struggle was with that hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father’s race had sickened in her, and which so often seems to satisfy its crazy claim upon conscience by enforcing some aimless act of self-sacrifice. The silence in which they lived concerning her origin weighed upon her sometimes with the sense of a guilty deceit, and it was her remorse for this that he had to reason her out of. The question whether it ought not to be told to each of their acquaintance who became a friend had always to be solved anew, especially if the acquaintance was an American; but as yet their secret remains their own. They are settled at Rome, after a brief experiment of a narrower field of practice at Florence; and the most fanciful of Olney’s compatriot patients does not dream that his wife ought to suffer shame from her. She is thought to look so very Italian that you  would really take her for an Italian, and he represents to her that it would not be the ancestral color, which is much the same in other races, but the ancestral condition which their American friends would despise if they knew of it; that this is a quality of the despite in which hard work is held all the world over, and has always followed the children of the man who earns his bread with his hands, especially if he earns other people’s bread too.

THE WORLD OF CHANCE

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII.

XLIV.

XLV.

I.

FROM the club where the farewell dinner was given him, Ray went to the depot of the East & West Railroad with a friend of his own age, and they walked up and down the platform talking of their lives and their loves, as young men do, till they both at once found themselves suddenly very drowsy. They each pretended not to be so; his friend made a show of not meaning to leave him till the through express should come along at two o’clock and pick up the sleeping-car waiting for it on the side track; and Ray feigned that he had no desire to turn in, but would much rather keep walking and talking.

They got rid of each other at last, and Ray hurried aboard his sleeper, and plunged into his berth as soon as he could get his coat and boots off. Then he found himself very wakeful. The soporific first effect of the champagne had passed, but it still sent the blood thumping in his neck and pounding in his ears as he lay smiling and thinking of the honor that had been done him, and the affection that had been shown him by his fellow-townsmen. In the reflected light of these the future stretched brightly before him. He scarcely felt it a hardship any more that he should be forced to leave Midland by the business change which had thrown him out of his place on the Midland Echo, and he certainly did not envy the friend who had just parted from him, and who was going to remain with the new owners. His mind kept, in spite of him, a sort of grudge toward the Hanks Brothers who had bought the paper, and who had thought they must reduce the editorial force as a first step towards making the property pay. He could not say that they had treated him unfairly or unkindly; they had been very frank and very considerate with him; but he could not conceal from himself the probability that if they had really appreciated him they would have seen that it would be a measure of the highest wisdom to keep him. He had given the paper standing and authority in certain matters; he knew that; and he smiled to think of Joe Hanks conducting his department. He hoped the estimation in which the dinner showed that his fellow-citizens held him, had done something to open the eyes of the brothers to the mistake they had made; they were all three at the dinner, and Martin Hanks had made a speech expressive of regard and regret which did not reconcile Ray to them. He now tried to see them as benefactors in disguise, and when he recalled the words of people who said that they always thought he was thrown away on a daily paper, he was willing to acknowledge that the Hankses had probably, at least, not done him an injury. He had often been sensible himself of a sort of incongruity in using up in ephemeral paragraphs, and even leading articles, the mind-stuff of a man who had published poems in the Century Bric-a-brac and Harper’s Drawer, and had for several years had a story accepted by the Atlantic, though not yet printed. With the manuscript of the novel which he was carrying to New York, and the four or five hundred dollars he had saved from his salary, he felt that he need not undertake newspaper work at once again. He meant to make a thorough failure of literature first. There would be time enough then to fall back upon journalism, as he could always do.

He counted a good deal upon his novel in certain moods. He knew it had weak points which he was not able to strengthen because he was too ignorant of life, though he hated to own it; but he thought it had some strong ones too; and he believed it would succeed if he could get a publisher for it.

He had read passages of it to his friend, and Sanderson had praised them. Ray knew he had not entered fully into the spirit of the thing, because he was merely and helplessly a newspaper mind, though since Ray had left the Echo, Sanderson had talked of leaving it too, and going on to devote himself to literature in New York. Ray knew he would fail, but he encouraged him because he was so fond of him; he thought now what a good, faithful fellow Sanderson was. Sanderson not only praised the novel to its author, but he celebrated it to the young ladies. They all knew that Ray had written it, and several of them spoke to him about it; they said they were just dying to see it. One of them had seen it, and when he asked her what she thought of his novel, in the pretence that he did not imagine she had looked at the manuscript, it galled him a little to have her say that it was like Thackeray; he knew he had imitated Thackeray, but he feigned that he did not know; and he hoped no one else would see it. She recognized traits that he had drawn from himself, and he did not like that, either; in the same way that he feigned not to know that he had imitated Thackeray, he feigned not to know that he had drawn his own likeness. But the sum of what she said gave him great faith in himself, and in his novel. He theorized that if its subtleties of thought and its flavors of style pleased a girl like her, and at the same time a fellow like Sanderson was taken with the plot, he had got the two essentials of success in it. He thought how delicately charming that girl was; still he knew that he was not in love with her. He thought how nice girls were, anyway; there were lots of perfectly delightful girls in Midland, and he should probably have fallen in love with some of them if it had not been for that long passion of his early youth, which seemed to have vastated him before he came there. He was rather proud of his vastation, and he found it not only fine, but upon the whole very convenient, to be going away heart-free.

He had no embarrassing ties, no hindering obligations of any kind. He had no one but himself to look out for in seeking his fortune. His father, after long years of struggle, was very well placed in the little country town which Ray had come from to Midland; his brothers had struck out for themselves farther west; one of his sisters was going to be married; the other was at school. None of them needed his help, or was in anywise dependent upon him. He realized, in thinking of it all, that he was a very lucky fellow; and he was not afraid but he should get on if he kept trying, and if he did his best, the chances were that it would be found out. He lay in his berth, with a hopeful and flattered smile on his lips, and listened to the noises of the station: the feet on the platforms; the voices, as from some disembodied life; the clang of engine bells; the jar and clash and rumble of the trains that came and went, with a creaking and squealing of their slowing or starting wheels, while his sleeper was quietly side-tracked, waiting for the express to arrive and pick it up. He felt a sort of slight for the town he was to leave behind; a sort of contemptuous fondness; for though it was not New York, it had used him well; it had appreciated him, and Ray was not ungrateful. Upon the whole, he was glad that he had agreed to write those letters from New York which the Hanks Brothers had finally asked him to do for the Echo. He knew that they had asked him under a pressure of public sentiment, and because they had got it through them at last that other people thought he would be a loss to the paper. He liked well enough the notion of keeping the readers of the Echo in mind of him; if he failed to capture New York, Midland would always be a good point to fall back upon. He expected his novel to succeed, and then he should be independent. But till then, the five dollars a week which the Hanks Brothers proposed to pay him for his letters would be very convenient, though the sum was despicable in itself. Besides, he could give up the letters whenever he liked. He had his dreams of fame and wealth, but he knew very well that they were dreams, and he was not going to kick over his basket of glass till they had become realities.

A keen ray from one of the electric moons depending from the black roof of the depot suddenly pierced his window at the side of his drawn curtain; and he felt the car jolted backward. He must have been drowsing, for the express had come in unknown to him, and was picking up his sleeper. With a faint thrill of homesickness for the kindly town he was leaving, he felt the train pull forward and so out of its winking lamps into the night. He held his curtain aside to see the last of these lights. Then, with a luxurious sense of helplessness against fate, he let it fall; and Midland slipped back into the irrevocable past.

II.

THE next evening, under a rich, mild October sky, the train drew in towards New York over a long stretch of trestle-work spanning a New Jersey estuary. Ray had thriftily left his sleeper at the station where he breakfasted, and saved the expense of it for the day’s journey by taking an ordinary car. He could be free with his dollars when he did not suppose he might need them; but he thought he should be a fool to throw one of them away on the mere self-indulgence of a sleeper through to New York, when he had no use for it more than half way. He experienced the reward of virtue in the satisfaction he felt at having that dollar still in his pocket; and he amused himself very well in making romances about the people who got on and off at different points throughout the day. He read a good deal in a book he had brought with him, and imagined a review of it. He talked with passengers who shared his seat with him, from time to time. He ate ravenously at the station where the train stopped twenty minutes for dinner, and he took little supernumerary naps during the course of the afternoon, and pieced out the broken and abbreviated slumbers of the night From the last of these naps he woke with a sort of formless alarm, which he identified presently as the anxiety he must naturally feel at drawing so near the great, strange city which had his future in keeping. He was not so hopeful as he was when he left Midland; but he knew he had really no more cause now than he had then for being less so.

The train was at a station. Before it started, a brakeman came in and called out in a voice of formal warning: “This train express to Jersey City. Passengers for way stations change cars. This train does not stop between here and Jersey City.”

He went out and shut the door behind him, and at the same time a young woman with a baby in her arms jumped from her seat and called out, “Oh, dear, what did he say?”

Another young woman, with another baby in her arms, rose and looked round, but she did not say anything. She had the place in front of the first, and their two seats were faced, as if the two young women were travelling together. Ray noted, with the interest that he felt in all young women as the elements both of love and of literature, that they looked a good deal alike, as to complexion and feature. The distraction of the one who rose first seemed to communicate itself to her dull, golden-brown hair, and make a wisp of it come loose from the knot at the back of her head, and stick out at one side. The child in her arms was fretful, and she did not cease to move it to and fro and up and down, even in the panic which brought her to her feet. Her demand was launched at the whole carful of passengers, but one old man answered for all: “He said, this train doesn’t stop till it gets to Jersey City.”

The young woman said, “Oh!” and she and the other sat down again, and she stretched across the fretful child which clung to her, and tried to open her window. She could not raise it, and the old man who had answered her question lifted it for her. Then she sank back in her seat, and her sister, if it was her sister, leaned forward, and seemed to whisper to her. She put up her hand and thrust the loosened wisp of her hair back into the knot. To do this she gave the child the pocket-book which she seemed to have been holding, and she did not take it away again. The child stopped fretting, and began to pull at its plaything to get it open; then it made aimless dabs with it at the back of the car seat and at its mother’s face. She moved her head, patiently from side to side to escape the blows; and the child entered with more zest into the sport, and began to laugh and strike harder. Suddenly, mid-way of the long trestle-work, the child turned towards the window and made a dab at the sail of a passing sloop. The pocket-book flew from its hand, and the mother sprang to her feet again with a wail that filled the car.

“Oh, what shall I do! He’s thrown my pocket-book out of the window, and it’s got every cent of my money in it. Oh, couldn’t they stop the train?”

The child began to cry. The passengers all looked out of the windows on that side of the aisle; and Ray could see the pocket-book drifting by in the water. A brakeman whom the young woman’s lamentation had called to the rescue, passed through the car with a face of sarcastic compassion, and spoke to the conductor entering from the other end. The conductor shook his head; the train kept moving slowly on. Of course it was impossible and useless to stop. The young women leaned forward and talked anxiously together, as Ray could see from his distant seat; they gave the conductor their tickets, and explained to him what had happened; he only shook his head again.

When he came to get Ray’s ticket, the young fellow tried to find out something about them from him.

“Yes, I guess she told the truth. She had all her money, ten dollars and some change, in that pocket-book, and of course she gave it to her baby to play with right by an open window. Just like a woman! They’re just about as fit as babies to handle money. If they had to earn it, they’d be different. Some poor fellow’s week’s work was in that pocket-book, like as not. They don’t look like the sort that would have a great deal of money to throw out of the window, if they was men.”

“Do you know where they’re going?” Ray asked. “Are they going on any further?”

“Oh, no. They live in New York. Way up on the East Side somewhere.”

“But how will they get there with those two babies? They can’t walk.”

The conductor shrugged. “Guess they’ll have to try it.”

“Look here!” said Ray. He took a dollar note out of his pocket, and gave it to the conductor. “Find out whether they’ve got any change, and if they haven’t, tell them one of the passengers wanted them to take this for car fares. Don’t tell them which one.”

“All right,” said the conductor.

He passed into the next car. When he came back Ray saw him stop and parley with the young women. He went through the whole train again before he stopped for a final word with Ray, who felt that he had entered into the poetry of his intentions towards the women, and had made these delays and detours of purpose. He bent over Ray with a detached and casual air, and said:

“Every cent they had was in that pocket-book. Only wonder is they hadn’t their tickets there, too. They didn’t want to take the dollar, but I guess they had to. They live ‘way up on Third Avenue about Hundred and First Street; and the one that gave her baby her money to hold looks all played out. They couldn’t have walked it. I told ’em the dollar was from a lady passenger. Seemed as if it would make it kind of easier for ‘em.”

“Yes, that was right,” said Ray.

III.

WHEN they stopped in Jersey City, Ray made haste out of the car to see what became of his beneficiaries, and he followed closely after them, and got near them on the ferry-boat. They went forward out of the cabin and stood among the people at the bow who were eager to get ashore first They each held her heavy baby, and silently watched the New York shore, and scarcely spoke.

Ray looked at it too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges with freight trains in sections on them; the canal-boats in tow of the river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively expressed in an incredible picturesqueness.

Ray saw nothing amiss in it. This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not afraid. He took a new grip of the travelling-bag where he had his manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it went into some publisher’s keeping. He would not trust it to the trunk which he had checked at Midland, and which he now recognized among the baggage piled on a truck near him. He fingered the outside of his bag to make sure by feeling its shape that his manuscript was all right within. All the time he was aware of those two young women, each with her baby in her arms, which they amused with various devices, telling them to look at the water, the craft going by, and the horses in the wagon-way of the ferry-boat The children fretted, and pulled the women’s hair, and clawed their hats; and the passengers now and then looked censoriously at them. From time to time the young women spoke to each other spiritlessly. The one whose child had thrown her pocket-book away never lost a look of hopeless gloom, as she swayed her body half round and back, to give some diversion to the baby. Both were pretty, but she had the paleness and thinness of young motherhood; the other, though she was thin too, had the fresh color and firm texture of a young girl; she was at once less tragic and more serious than her sister, if it was her sister.

When she found Ray gazing fixedly at her, she turned discreetly away, after a glance that no doubt took in the facts of his neat, slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its dark eyes and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant mouth; his sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked with a few browner freckles.

He was one of those men who have no vanity concerning their persons; he knew he was rather handsome, but he did not care; his mind was on other things. When he found those soft woman-eyes lingering a moment on him he had the wish to please their owner, of course, but he did not think of his looks, or the effect they might have with her. He fancied knowing her well enough to repeat poetry to her, or of reading some favorite author aloud with her, and making her sympathize in his admiration of the book. He permitted his fancy this liberty because, although he supposed her married, his fancy safely operated their intellectual intimacy in a region as remote from experience as the dreamland of sleep. She and her sister had both a sort of refinement; they were ladies, he felt, although they were poorly dressed, and they somehow did not seem as if they had ever been richly dressed. They had not the New Yorkeress air; they had nothing of the stylishness which Ray saw in the other women about him, shabby or splendid; their hats looked as if they had been trimmed at home, and their simple gowns as if their wearers had invented and made them up themselves, after no decided fashion, but after a taste of their own, which he thought good. He began to make phrases about them to himself, and he said there was something pathetically idyllic about them. The phrase was indefinite, but it was sufficiently clear for his purpose. The baby which had thrown away the pocket-book began to express its final dissatisfaction with the prospect, and its mother turned distractedly about for some new diversion, when there came from the ladies’ cabin a soft whistle, like the warbling of a bird, low and rich and full, which possessed itself of the sense to the exclusion of all other sounds. Some of the people pressed into the cabin; others stood smiling in the benediction of the artless strain. Ray followed his idyllic sisters within, and saw an old negro, in the middle of the cabin floor, lounging in an easy pose, with his hat in one hand and the other hand on his hip, while his thick lips poured out those mellow notes, which might have come from the heart of some thrush-haunted wild wood. When the sylvan music ceased, and the old negro, with a roll of his large head, and a twist of his burly shape, began to limp round the circle, every one put something in his hat. Ray threw in a nickel, and he saw the sisters, who faced him from the other side of the circle, conferring together. The younger had the bill in her hand which Ray had sent them by the conductor to pay their car fares home. She parleyed a moment with the negro when he reached them, and he took some of the silver from his hat and changed the bill for her. She gave him a quarter back. He ducked his head, and said, “Thank yeh, miss,” and passed on.

The transaction seemed to amuse some of the bystanders, and Ray heard one of them, who stood near him, say: “Well, that’s the coolest thing I’ve seen yet I should have about as soon thought of asking the deacon to change a bill for me when he came round with the plate in church. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world!”

He looked like a country merchant, on a first business visit to the city; his companion, who had an air of smart ease, as of a man who had been there often, said:

“It takes all kinds to make a town like New York. You’ll see queerer things than that before you get home. If that old darkey makes much on that transaction, I’m no judge of human nature.”

“Pshaw! You don’t mean it wasn’t a good bill?” The two men lost themselves in the crowd now pressing out of the cabin door. The boat was pushing into her slip. She bumped from one elastic side to the other, and settled with her nose at the wharf. The snarl of the heavy chains that held her fast was heard; the people poured off and the hollow thunder of the hoofs and wheels of the disembarking teams began. Ray looked about for a last glimpse of the two young women and their babies; but he could not see them.

IV.

RAY carried his bag himself when he left the elevated road, and resisted the offer of the small Italian dodging about his elbow, and proposing to take it, after he had failed to get Ray to let him black his boots. The young man rather prided himself on his thrift in denying the boy, whose naked foot came half through one of his shoes; he saw his tatters and nakedness with the indifference of inexperience, and with his country breeding he considered his frugality a virtue. His senses were not offended by the foulness of the streets he passed through, or hurt by their sordid uproar; his strong young nerves were equal to all the assaults that the city could make; and his heart was lifted in a dream of hope. He was going to a hotel that Sanderson had told him of, where you could get a room, on the European plan, for seventy-five cents, and then eat wherever you pleased; he had gone to an American hotel when he was in New York before, and he thought he could make a saving by trying Sanderson’s. It had a certain gayety of lamps before it, but the splendor diminished within, and Ray’s pride was further hurt by the clerk’s exacting advance payment for his room from him. The clerk said he could not give him an outside room that night, but he would try to change him in the morning; and Ray had either to take the one assigned him or go somewhere else. But he had ordered his trunk sent to this hotel by the express, and he did not know how he should manage about that if he left; so he staid, and had himself shown to his room. It seemed to be a large cupboard in the wall of the corridor; but it had a window near the bed, and the usual equipment of stand and bureau, and Ray did not see why he should not sleep very well there. Still, he was glad that his friends at Midland could none of them see him in that room, and he resolved to leave the hotel as soon as he could the next day. It did not seem the place for a person who had left Midland with the highest social honors that could be paid a young man. He hurried through the hotel office when he came out, so as not to be seen by any other Midlander that might happen to be there, and he went down to the basement, where the clerk said the restaurant was, and got his supper. When he had finished his oyster stew he started towards the street-door, but was overtaken at the threshold by a young man who seemed to have run after him, and who said, “You didn’t pay for your supper.”

Ray said, “Oh, I forgot it,” and he went back to his table and got his check, and paid at the counter, where he tried in vain to impress the man who took his money with a sense of his probity by his profuse apologies. Apparently they were too used to such tricks at that restaurant. The man said nothing, but he looked as if he did not believe him, and Ray was so abashed that he stole back to his room, and tried to forget what had happened in revising the manuscript of his story. He was always polishing it; he had written it several times over, and at every moment he got he reconstructed sentences in it, and tried to bring the style up to his ideal of style; he wavered a little between the style of Thackeray and the style of Hawthorne, as an ideal. It made him homesick, now, to go over the familiar pages: they put him so strongly in mind of Midland, and the people of the kindly city. The pages smelt a little of Sanderson’s cigar smoke; he wished that Sanderson would come to New York; he perceived that they had also a fainter reminiscence of the perfume he associated with that girl who had found him out in his story; and then he thought how he had been in the best society at Midland, and it seemed a great descent from the drawing-rooms where he used to call on all those nice girls to this closet in a fourth-rate New York hotel. His story appeared to share his downfall; he thought it cheap and poor; he did not believe now that he should ever get a publisher for it. He cowered to think how scornfully he had thought the night before of his engagement with the Hanks Brothers to write letters for the Midland Echo; he was very glad he had so good a basis; he wondered how far he could make five dollars a week go toward supporting him in New York; he could not bear to encroach upon his savings, and yet he probably must. In Midland, you could get very good board for five dollars a week.

He determined to begin a letter to the Echo at once; and he went to open the window to give himself some air in the close room; but he found that it would not open. He pulled down the transom over his door to keep from stifling in the heat of his gas-burner, and some voices that had been merely a dull rumbling before now made themselves heard in talk which Ray could not help listening to.

Two men were talking together, one very hopelessly, and the other in a vain attempt to cheer him from time to time. The comforter had a deep base voice, and was often unintelligible; but the disheartened man spoke nervously, in a high key of plangent quality, like that of an unhappy bell.

“No,” he said; “I’d better fail, Bill. It’s no use trying to keep along. I can get pretty good terms from the folks at home, there; they all know me, and they know I done my best. I can pay about fifty cents on the dollar, I guess, and that’s more than most business men could, if they stopped; and if I ever get goin’ again, I’ll pay dollar for dollar; they know that.”

The man with the deep voice said something that Ray did not catch. The disheartened man seemed not to have caught it either; he said, “What say?” and when the other repeated his words, he said: “Oh yes! I know. But I been dancing round in a quart cup all my life there; and now it’s turning into a pint cup, and I guess I better get out The place did grow for a while, and we got all ready to be a city as soon as the railroad come along. But when the road come, it didn’t do all we expected of it. We could get out into the world a good deal easier than we could before, and we had all the facilities of transportation that we could ask for. But we could get away so easy that most of our people went to the big towns to do their trading, and the facilities for transportation carried off most of our local industries. The luck was against us. We bet high on what the road would do for us, and we lost. We paid out nearly our last dollar to get the road to come our way, and it came, and killed us. We subscribed to the stock, and we’ve got it yet; there ain’t any fight for it anywhere else; we’d let it go without a fight We tried one while for the car shops, but they located them further up the line, and since that we ha’n’t even wiggled. What say? Yes; but, you see, I’m part of the place. I’ve worked hard all my life, and I’ve held out a good many times when ruin stared me in the face, but I guess I sha’n’t hold out this time. What’s the use? Most every business man I know has failed some time or other; some of ’em three or four times over, and scrambled up and gone on again, and I guess I got to do the same. Had a kind of pride about it, m’ wife and me; but I guess we got to come to it. It does seem, sometimes, as if the very mischief was in it. I lost pretty heavy, for a small dealer, on Fashion’s Pansy, alone — got left with a big lot of ‘em. What say? It was a bustle. Women kept askin’ for Fashion’s Pansy, till you’d ‘a’ thought every last one of ’em was going to live and be buried in it. Then all at once none of ’em wanted it —— wouldn’t touch it. That and butter begun it You know how a country merchant’s got to take all the butter the women bring him, and he’s got to pay for sweet butter, and sell it for grease half the time. You can tell a woman she’d better keep an eye on her daughter, but if you say she don’t make good butter, that’s the last of that woman’s custom. But what’s finally knocked me out is this drop in bric-à-brac. If it hadn’t been for that, I guess I could have pulled through. Then there was such a rush for Japanese goods, and it lasted so long, that I loaded up all I could with ’em last time I was in New York, and now nobody wants ‘em; couldn’t give ’em away. Well, it’s all a game, and you don’t know any more how it’s comin’ out — you can’t bet on it with any more certainty — than you can on a trottin’ match. My! I wish I was dead.”

The deep-voiced man murmured something again, and the high-voiced man again retorted:

“What say? Oh, it’s all well enough to preach; and I’ve heard about the law of demand and supply before. There’s about as much of a law to it as there is to three-card monte. If it wasn’t for my poor wife, I’d let ’em take me back on ice. I would that.”

The deep-voiced man now seemed to have risen; there was a shuffling of feet, and presently a parley at the open door about commonplace matters; and then the two men exchanged adieux, and the door shut again, and all was silent in the room opposite Ray’s.

He felt sorry for the unhappy man shut in there; but he perceived no special significance in what he had overheard. He had no great curiosity about the matter; it was one of those things that happened every day, and for tragedy was in no wise comparable to a disappointment in first love, such as he had carefully studied for his novel from his own dark experience. Still it did suggest something to Ray; it suggested a picturesque opening for his first New York letter for the Midland Echo, and he used it in illustration of the immensity of New York, and the strange associations and juxtapositions of life there. He treated the impending failure of the country storekeeper from an overstock of Japanese goods rather humorously: it was not like a real trouble, a trouble of the heart; and the cause seemed to him rather grotesquely disproportionate to the effect. In describing the incident as something he had overheard in a hotel, he threw in some touches that were intended to give the notion of a greater splendor than belonged to the place.

He made a very good start on his letter, and when he went to bed the broken hairs that pierced his sheet from the thin mattress did not keep him from falling asleep, and they did prove that it was a horse-hair mattress.

V.

IN the morning, Ray determined that he would not breakfast at the restaurant under the hotel, partly because he was ashamed to meet the people who, he knew, suspected him of trying to beat them out of the price of his supper, and partly because he had decided that it was patronized chiefly by the country merchants who frequented the hotel, and he wanted something that was more like New York. He had heard of those foreign eating-houses where you got a meal served in courses at a fixed price, and he wandered about looking for one. He meant to venture into the first he found, and on a side street he came on a hotel with a French name, and over the door in an arch of gilt letters the inscription, Restaurant Français. There was a large tub on each side of the door, with a small evergreen tree in it; some strings or wires ran from these tubs to the door-posts and sustained a trailing vine that formed a little bower on either hand; a Maltese cat in the attitude of a sphinx dozed in the thicket of foliage, and Ray’s heart glowed with a sense of the foreignness of the whole effect. He had never been abroad, but he had read of such things, and he found himself at home in an environment long familiar to his fancy.

The difference of things was the source of his romance, as it is with all of us, and he looked in at the window of this French restaurant with the feelings he would have had in the presence of such a restaurant in Paris, and he began to imagine gay, light-minded pictures about it. At the same time, while he was figuring inside at one of the small tables, vis-à-vis with a pretty actress whom he invented for the purpose, he was halting on the sidewalk outside, wondering whether he could get breakfast there so early as eight o’clock, and doubtful whether he should not betray his strangeness to New York hours if he tried. When he went in there was nobody there but one white-aproned waiter, who was taking down some chairs from the middle table where they had been stacked with their legs in the air while he was sweeping. But he did not disdain to come directly to Ray, where he had sat down, with a plate and napkin and knife and fork, and exchange a good-morning with him in arranging them before him. Then he brought half a yard of French bread and a tenuous, translucent pat of American butter; and asked Ray whether he would have chops or beefsteak with his coffee. The steak came with a sprig of water-cress on it, and the coffee in a pot; and the waiter, who had one eye that looked at Ray, and another of uncertain focus, poured out the coffee for him, and stood near, with a friendly countenance, and a cordial interest in the young fellow’s appetite. By this time a neat dame de comptoir, whom Ray knew for a dame de comptoir at once, though he had never seen one before, took her place behind a little desk in the corner, and the day had begun for the Restaurant Français.

Ray felt that it was life, and he prolonged his meal to the last drop of the second cup of coffee that his pot held, and he wished that he could have Sanderson with him to show him what life really was in New York. Sanderson had taken all his meals in the basement of that seventy-five cent hotel, which Ray meant to leave at once. Where he was he would not have been ashamed to have any of the men who had given him that farewell dinner see him. He was properly placed, as a young New York literary man; he was already a citizen of that great Bohemia which he had heard and read so much of. He was sure that artists must come there, and actors, but of course much later in the day. His only misgiving was lest the taxes of Bohemia might be heavier than he could pay, and he asked the waiter for his account somewhat anxiously. It was forty cents, and his ambition leaped at the possibility of taking all his meals at that place. He made the occasion of telling the cross-eyed waiter to keep the change out of the half-dollar he gave him, serve for asking whether one could take board there by the week, and the waiter said one could for six dollars: a luncheon like the breakfast, but with soup and wine, and a dinner of fish, two meats, salad, sweets, and coffee. “On Sundays,” said the waiter, “the dinner is something splendid. And there are rooms; oh, yes, it is a hotel.”

“Yes, I knew it was a hotel,” said Ray.

The six dollars did not seem to him too much;’ but he had decided that he must live on ten dollars a week in order to make his money last for a full experiment of New York, or till he had placed himself in some permanent position of profit. The two strains of prudence and of poetry were strongly blended in him; he could not bear to think of wasting money, even upon himself, whom he liked so well, and whom he wished so much to have a good time. He meant to make his savings go far; with those five hundred dollars he could live a year in New York if he helped himself out on dress and incidental expenses with the pay for his Midland Echo letters. He would have asked to see some of the rooms in the hotel, but he was afraid it was too early, and he decided to come to dinner and ask about them. On his way back to the place where he had lodged he rapidly counted the cost, and he decided, at any rate, to try it for awhile; and he shut himself into his cupboard at the hotel, and began to go over some pages of his manuscript for the last time, with a lightness of heart which decision, even a wrong decision, often brings.

It was still too soon to go with the story to a publisher; he could not hope to find any one in before ten o’clock, and he had a whole hour yet to work on it He was always putting the last touches on it; but he almost wished he had not looked at it, now, when the touches must really be the last It seemed to suffer a sort of disintegration in his mind. It fell into witless and repellent fragments; it lost all beauty and coherence, so that he felt ashamed and frightened with it, and he could not think what the meaning of it had once so clearly been. He knew that no publisher would touch it in the way of business, and he doubted if any would really have it read or looked at. It seemed to him quite insane to offer it, and he had to summon an impudently cynical courage in nerving himself to the point. The best way, of course, would have been to get the story published first as a serial, in one of the magazines that had shown favor to his minor attempts; and Ray had tried this pretty fully. The manuscript had gone the rounds of a good many offices; and returned, after a longer or shorter sojourn, bearing on some marginal corner the hieroglyphic or numerical evidence that it had passed through the reader’s hand in each. Ray innocently fancied that he suppressed the fact by clipping this mark away with the scissors; but probably no one was deceived. In looking at it now he was not even deceived himself; the thing had a desperately worn and battered air; it was actually dog’s-eared; but he had still clung to the hope of getting it taken somewhere, because in all the refusals there was proof that the magazine reader had really read it through; and Ray argued that if this were so, there must be some interest or property in it that would attract the general reader if it could ever be got to his eye in print.

He was not wrong; for the story was fresh and new, in spite of its simple-hearted, unconscious imitations of the style and plot of other stories, because it was the soul if not the body of his first love. He thought that he had wrapped this fact impenetrably up in so many travesties and disguises that the girl herself would not have known it if she had read it; but very probably she would have known it Any one who could read between the lines could penetrate through the innocent psychical posing and literary affectation to the truth of conditions strictly and peculiarly American, and it was this which Ray had tried to conceal with all sorts of alien splendors of make and manner. It seemed to him now, at the last moment, that if he could only uproot what was native and indigenous in it, he should make it a strong and perfect thing. He thought of writing it over again, and recoloring the heroine’s hair and the hero’s character, and putting the scene in a new place; but he had already rewritten it so many times that he was sick of it; and with all his changing he had not been able to change it much. He decided to write a New York novel, and derive the hero from Midland, as soon as he could collect the material; the notion for it had already occurred to him; the hero should come on with a play; but first of all it would be necessary for Ray to get this old novel behind him, and the only way to do that was to get it before the public.

VI.

RAY put his manuscript back into its covering and took it under his arm. He meant to make a thorough trial of the publishers, and not to be discouraged by his failures as long as a publisher was left untried. He knew from his experience with the magazine editors that it would be a slow affair, and he must have patience. Some of the publishers, even if they did not look at his story, would keep it for days or weeks with the intention or the appearance of reading it, and if they did read it they would of course want time for it. He expected this, and he calculated that it might very well take his manuscript six months to go the rounds of all the houses in New York. Yet he meant, if he could, to get it through sooner, and he was going to use his journalistic connection to make interest for it. He would have given everything but honor to have it known that he had written some things for Harper’s and the Century; he did not wish, or he said to himself and stood to it that he did not wish, any favor shown his novel because he had written those things. At the same time he was willing the fact that he was the correspondent of the Midland Echo should help him to a prompt examination of his manuscript if it could; and he meant to let it be known that he was a journalist before he let it be known that he was an author.

He formulated some phrases introducing himself in his newspaper character, as he walked up Broadway with his manuscript held tight under his arm, and with that lifting and glowing of the heart which a young man cannot help feeling if he walks up Broadway on a bright October morning. The sun was gay on the senseless façades of the edifices, littered with signs of the traffic within, and hung with effigies and emblems of every conceit and color, from the cornice to the threshold, where the show-cases crowded the passengers toward the curbstones, and to the cellarways that overflowed the sidewalks with their wares. The frantic struggle and jumble of these appeals to curiosity and interest jarred themselves to an effect of kaleidoscopic harmony, just as the multitudinous noises of the hoofs and wheels and feet and tongues broke and bruised themselves to one roar on the ear; and the adventurer among them found no offence in their confusion. He had his stake, too, in the tremendous game that all were playing, some fair and some foul, and shrieking out their bets in these strident notes; and he believed so much he should win that he was ready to take the chances of losing. From the stainless blue sky overhead the morning sun glared down on the thronged and noisy street, and brought out all its details with keen distinctness; but Ray did not feel its anarchy. The irregularity of the buildings, high and low, as if they were parts of a wall wantonly hacked and notched, here more and here less, was of the same moral effect to him as the beautiful spire of Grace Church thrilling heavenward like a hymn.

He went along, wondering if he should happen to meet either of those young women whom he had befriended the evening before. He had heard that you were sure to meet somebody you knew whenever you stepped out on Broadway, and he figured meeting them, in fancy. He had decided to put them into his story of New York life, and he tried to imagine the character he should assign them, or rather one of them; the one who had given the old darkey a quarter out of his dollar. He did not quite know what to do with the child; something could be made of the child if it were older, but a mere baby like that would be difficult to manage in such a story as Ray meant to write. He wondered if it would do to have her deserted by her husband, and have the hero, a young literary adventurer, not at all like himself, fall in love with her, and then have them both die when the husband, a worthless, drunken brute, came back in time to prevent their marriage. Such a scheme would give scope for great suffering; Ray imagined a scene of renunciation between the lovers, who refused each other even a last kiss; and he felt a lump rise in his throat. It could be made very powerful.

He evolved a character of reckless generosity for her from her beneficence to the old negro in the ferryboat Under that still, almost cold exterior, he made her conceal a nature of passionate impulse, because the story required a nature of that sort. He did not know whether to have the husband finally die, and the lovers marry, or whether to have the lovers killed in an accident. It would be more powerful to have them killed; it would be so conventional and expected to have them happily married; but he knew the reader liked a novel that ended well. It would be at once powerful and popular to have them elope together. Perhaps the best thing he could do would be to have them elope; there was a fascination in the guilty thought; he could make such a dénomment very attractive; but upon the whole he felt that he must not, for very much the same reason that he must not himself run off with his neighbor’s wife.

All the time that this went on in his mind, Ray was walking up Broadway, and holding fast to the novel under his arm, which the novel in his brain was eclipsing. His inner eye was fixed on the remembered face of that strange girl, or woman, whom he was fashioning into a fictitious heroine, but his outward vision roved over the women faces it encountered, and his taste made its swift selection among them, and his ambidextrous fancy wove romances around such as he found pretty or interesting enough to give his heart to. They were mostly the silly or sordid faces that women wear when they are shopping, and they expressed such emotions as are roused by the chase of a certain shade of ribbon, or the hope of getting something rich and fashionable for less than its worth. But youth is not nice, or else its eyes are keener than those of after-life; and Ray found many beautiful and stylish girls where the middle-aged witness would have seen a long procession of average second-rate young women. He admired their New-Yorky dash; he saw their difference in look and carriage from the Midland girls; and he wondered what they would be like, if he knew them. He reflected that he did not know any one in New York; but he expected soon to be acquainted. If he got his novel taken he would very soon be known, and then his acquaintance would be sought. He saw himself launched upon a brilliant social career, and he suddenly had a difficulty presented to him which he had not foreseen a moment before; he had to choose between a brilliant marriage with a rich and well-born girl and fealty to the weird heroine of his story. The unexpected contingency suggested a new ending to his original story. The husband could die and the lovers be about to marry, when they could become aware that the rich girl was in love with the hero. They could renounce each other, and the hero could marry the rich girl; and shortly after the heroine could die. An ending like that could be made very powerful; and it would be popular, too.

Ray found himself in a jam of people who had begun suddenly to gather at the corner he was approaching. They were looking across at something on the other corner, and Ray looked too. Trunks and travelling-bags had overflowed from a store in the basement there, and piled themselves on the sidewalk and up the house wall; and against the background they formed stood two figures. One was a decent-looking young man in a Derby hat, and wearing spectacles, which gave him a sort of scholarly air; he remained passive in the grip of another, probably the shopman, who was quite colorless with excitement, and who clung fast to the shoulder of the first, as if his prisoner were making violent efforts to escape. A tall young policeman parted the crowd, and listened a moment to the complaint the shopman made, with many gestures toward his wares. Then he turned to the passive captive, and Ray heard the click of the handcuffs as they snapped on the wrists of this scholarly-looking man; and the policeman took him by the arm and led him away.

The intrusion of such a brutal fact of life into the tragic atmosphere of his revery made the young poet a little sick, but the young journalist avidly seized upon it The poet would not have dreamed of using such an incident, but the journalist saw how well it would work into the scheme of that first letter he was writing home to the Echo, where he treated of the surface contrasts of life in New York as they present themselves to the stranger. A glad astonishment at the profusion of the material for his letters possessed him; at this rate he should have no trouble in writing them; he could make them an indispensable feature; they would be quoted and copied, and he could get a rise out of Hanks Brothers on the price.

He crossed to the next comer, where the shopman was the centre of a lessening number of spectators, and found him willing to prolong the interest he had created in the public mind. He said the thief had priced a number of bags in the place below, and on coming up had made a grab at one and tried to get off with it; but he was onto him like lightning. He showed Ray which bag it was, and turned it round and upside down as if with a fresh sense of its moral value. He said he should have to take that bag into court, and he set it aside so that he should not forget it.

“I suppose,” said a tall, elderly gentleman, who seemed to have been listening to Ray’s dialogue with the shopman, “you wouldn’t be willing to sell me that bag?” He spoke slowly with a thick, mellow voice, deep in his throat.

“Money wouldn’t buy that bag; no sir,” said the shopman; but he seemed uneasy.

“You know,” urged the soft-voiced stranger, “you could show some other bag in court that was just like it.”

“I couldn’t swear to no other bag,” said the shopman, daunted, and visibly relenting.

“That is true,” said the stranger. “But you could swear that it was exactly like this. Still, I dare say you’re quite right, and it’s better to produce the corpus delicti, if possible.”

He glanced at Ray with a whimsical demand for sympathy; Ray smiled, and they walked off together, leaving the shopman in dubious study of his eventful bag. He was opening it, and scrutinizing the inside.

VII.

THE stranger skipped into step with Ray more lightly than would have been expected from one of his years. He wore a soft felt hat over locks of silken silver that were long enough to touch his beautiful white beard. He wore it with an effect of intention, as if he knew it was out of character with the city, but was so much in character with himself that the city must be left to reconcile itself to the incongruity or not, as it chose. For the same reason, apparently, his well-fitting frock-coat was of broadcloth, instead of modern diagonal; a black silk handkerchief tied in an easy knot at his throat strayed from under his beard, which had the same waviness as his hair; he had black trousers, and drab gaiters showing themselves above wide, low shoes. In his hands, which he held behind him, he dangled a stick with an effect of leisure and ease, enhanced somehow by the stoop he made towards the young fellow’s lower stature, and by his refusal to lift his voice above a certain pitch, whatever the uproar of the street about them. Ray screamed out his words, but the stranger spoke in what seemed his wonted tone, and left Ray to catch the words as he could.

“I didn’t think,” he said, after a moment, and with some misgiving, that this stranger who had got into step with him might be some kind of confidence man — — “I didn’t think that fellow looked like a thief much.”

“You are a believer in physiognomy?” asked the stranger, with a philosophic poise. He had himself a regular face, with gay eyes, and a fine pearly tint; lips that must have been beautiful shaped his branching mustache to a whimsical smile.

“No,” said Ray. “I wasn’t near enough to see his face. But he looked so decent and quiet, and he behaved with so much dignity. Perhaps it was his spectacles.”

“Glasses can do much,” said the stranger, “to redeem the human countenance, even when worn as a protest against the presence of one’s portrait in the rogues’ gallery I don’t say you’re wrong; I’m only afraid the chances are that you’ll never be proved right I should prefer to make a speculative approach to the facts on another plane. As you suggest, he had a sage and dignified appearance; I observed it myself; he had the effect — how shall I express it? — of some sort of studious rustic. Say he was a belated farm youth, working his way through a fresh-water college, who had great latent gifts of peculation, such as might have won him a wide newspaper celebrity as a defaulter later in life, and under more favorable conditions. He finds himself alone in a great city for the first time, and is attracted by the display of the trunk-dealer’s cellarway. The opportunity seems favorable to the acquisition of a neat travelling-bag; perhaps he has never owned one, or he wishes to present it to the object of his affections, or to a sick mother; he may have had any respectable motive: but his outlook has been so restricted that he cannot realize the difference between stealing a travelling-bag and stealing, say, a street; though I believe Mr. Sharp only bought Broadway of those who did not own it, and who sold it low; but never mind, it may stand for an illustration. If this young man had stolen a street, he would not have been arrested and handcuffed in that disgraceful way and led off to the dungeon-keep of the Jefferson Market Police Court — I presume that is the nearest prison, though I won’t be quite positive — but he would have had to be attacked and exposed a long time in the newspapers; and he would have had counsel, and the case would have been fought from one tribunal to another, till at last he wouldn’t have known whether he was a common criminal or a public benefactor. The difficulty in his case is simply an inadequate outlook.”

The philosophic stranger lifted his face and gazed round over Ray’s head, but he came to a halt at the same time with the young fellow. “Well, sir,” he said, with bland ceremony, “I must bid you good-morning. As we go our several ways let us remember the day’s lesson, and when we steal, always steal enough.”

He held out his hand, and Ray took it with a pleasure in his discourse which he was wondering how he should express to him. He felt it due himself to say something clever in return, but he could not think of anything. “I’m sure I shall remember your interpretation of it,” was all he could get out.

“Ah, well, don’t act upon that without due reflection,” the stranger said; and he gave Ray’s hand a final and impressive downward shake. “Dear me!” he added, for Ray made no sign of going on. “Are we both stopping here — two spiders at the parlor of the same unsuspecting fly? But perhaps you are merely a buyer, not a writer, of books? After you, sir!”

The stranger promoted a little polite rivalry that ensued between them; he ended it by passing one hand through the young man’s arm, and with the other pressing open the door which they had both halted at, and which bore on either jamb a rounded metallic plate with the sign, “H. C. Chapley & Co., Publisher.” Within, he released Ray with a courteous bow, as if willing to leave him now to his own devices. He went off to a distant counter in the wide, low room, and occupied himself with the books on it; Ray advanced and spoke to a clerk, who met him half-way. He asked for Mr. Chapley, and the clerk said he was not down yet — he seldom got down so early; but Mr. Brandreth would be in almost any minute now. When Ray said he had a letter for the firm, and would wait if the clerk pleased, the clerk asked if he would not take a chair in Mr. Brandreth’s room.

Ray could not help thinking the civility shown him was for an imaginable customer rather than a concealed author, but he accepted it all the same, and sat looking out into the salesroom, with its counters of books, and its shelves full of them around its walls, while he waited. Chapley & Co were of the few old-fashioned publishers who had remained booksellers too, in a day when most publishers have ceased to be so. They were jobbers as well as booksellers; they took orders and made terms for public and private libraries; they had customers all over the country who depended on them for advice and suggestion about forth-coming books, and there were many booksellers in the smaller cities who bought through them. The bookseller in Midland, who united bookselling with a stationery and music business, was one of these, and he had offered Ray a letter to them.

“If you ever want to get a book published,” he said, with a touch on the quick that made the conscious author wince, “they’re your men.”

Ray knew their imprint and its relative value better than the Midland bookseller, stationer, and music-dealer; and now, as he sat in the junior partner’s neat little den, with the letter of introduction in his hand, it seemed to him such a crazy thing to think of having his book brought out by them that he decided not to say anything about it, but to keep to that character of literary newspaper man which his friend gave him in his rather florid letter. He had leisure enough to make this decision and unmake it several times while he was waiting for Mr. Brandreth to come. It was so early that, with all the delays Ray had forced, it was still only a little after nine, and no one came in for a quarter of an hour. The clerks stood about and chatted together. The bookkeepers, in their high-railed enclosure, were opening their ledgers under the shaded gas-burners that helped out the twilight there. Ray could see his unknown street friend scanning the books on the upper shelf and moving his person from side to side, and letting his cane rise and fall behind him as if he were humming to himself and keeping time to the tune.

VIII.

THE distant street door opened at last, and a gentleman came in. His entrance caused an indefinite sensation in the clerks, such as we all feel in the presence of the man who pays our wages. At the sound of his step, Ray’s street friend turned about from his shelf, but without offering to leave it “Ah, good-morning, good-morning!” he called out; and the other called back, “Ah, good-morning, Mr. Kane!” and pushed on up towards a door near that of Ray’s retreat A clerk stopped him, and after a moment’s parley he came in upon the young fellow. He was a man of fifty-five or sixty, with whiskers slightly frosted, and some puckers and wrinkles about his temples and at the corners of his mouth, and a sort of withered bloom in his cheeks, something like the hardy self-preservation of the late-hanging apple that people call a frozen-thaw. He was a thin man, who seemed once to have been stouter; he had a gentle presence and a somewhat careworn look.

“Mr. Brandreth?” Ray said, rising.

“No,” said the other; “Mr. Chapley.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Ray. “They showed me into Mr. Brandreth’s room, and I thought” —

“It’s quite right, quite right,” said Mr. Chapley. “Mr. Brandreth will be in almost any moment if you wish to see him personally.” Mr. Chapley glanced at the parcel in Ray’s hand.

“Oh no; I have a letter for the firm,” and Ray gave it to Mr. Chapley, who read it through and then offered his hand, and said he was glad to meet Mr. Ray. He asked some questions of commonplace friendliness about his correspondent, and he said, with the kind of melancholy which seemed characteristic of him: “So you have come to take a hand in the great game here. Well, if there is anything I can do to serve you, I shall be very glad.”

Ray answered promptly, in pursuance of his plan: “You are very kind, Mr. Chapley. I’m going to write letters to the paper I’ve been connected with in Midland, and I wish to give them largely a literary character. I shall be obliged to you for any literary news you have.”

Mr. Chapley seemed relieved of a latent dread. A little knot of anxiety between his eyes came untied; he did not yet go to the length of laying off his light overcoat, but he set his hat down on Mr. Brandreth’s desk, and he loosed the grip he had kept of his cane.

“Why, Mr. Brandreth rather looks after that side of the business. He’s more in touch with the younger men — with what’s going on, in fact, than I am. He can tell you all there is about our own small affairs, and put you in relations with other publishers, if you wish.”

“Thank you—” Ray began.

“Not at all; it will be to our advantage, I’m sure. We should be glad to do much more for any friend of our old friends” — Mr. Chapley had to refer to the letter-head of the introduction before he could make sure of his old friends’ style—” Schmucker & Wills. I hope they are prospering in these uncertain times?” Ray said they were doing very well, he believed, and Mr. Chapley went on.

“So many of the local booksellers are feeling the competition of the large stores which have begun to deal in books as well as everything else under the sun, nowadays. I understand they have completely disorganized the book trade in some of our minor cities; completely! They take hold of a book like Robert Elsmere, for instance, as if it were a piece of silk that they control the pattern of, and run it at a price that is simply ruinous; besides doing a large miscellaneous business in books at rates that defy all competition on the part of the regular dealers. But perhaps you haven’t suffered from these commercial monstrosities yet in Midland?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ray; “We have our local Stewart’s or Macy’s, whichever it is; and I imagine Schmucker & Wills feel it, especially at the holidays.” He had never had to buy any books himself, because he got the copies sent to the Echo for review; and now, in deference to Mr. Chapley, he was glad that he had not shared in the demoralization of the book trade. “But I think,” he added, cheerfully, “that they are holding their own very well.”

“I am very glad to hear it, very glad, indeed,” said Mr. Chapley. “If we can only get this international copyright measure through and dam up the disorganizing tide of cheap publications at its source, we may hope to restore, the tone of the trade. As it is, we are ourselves constantly restricting our enterprise as publishers. We scarcely think now of looking at the manuscript of an unknown author.”

Mr. Chapley looked at the manuscript of the unknown author before him, as if he divined it through its wrappings of stiff manilla paper. Ray had no reason to think that he meant to prevent a possible offer of manuscript, but he could not help thinking so, and it cut him short in the inquiries he was going to make as to the extent of the demoralization the book trade had suffered through the competition of the large variety stores. He had seen a whole letter for the Echo in the subject, but now he could not go on. He sat blankly staring at Mr. Chapley’s friendly, pensive face, and trying to decide whether he had’ better get himself away without seeing Mr. Brandreth, or whether he had better stay and meet him, and after a cold, formal exchange of civilities, shake the dust of Chapley & Co.’s publishing house from his feet forever. The distant street door opened again, and a small light figure, much like his own, entered briskly. Mr. Kane turned about at the new-comer’s step as he had turned at Mr. Chapley’s, and sent his cheerful hail across the book counters as before. “Ah, good-morning, good-morning!”

“Good-morning, Mr. Kane; magnificent day,” said the gentleman, who advanced rapidly towards Ray and Mr. Chapley, with a lustrous silk hat on his head, and a brilliant smile on his face. His overcoat hung on his arm, and he looked fresh and warm as if from a long walk. “Ah, good-morning,” he said to Mr. Chapley; “how are you this morning, sir?” He bent his head inquiringly towards Ray, who stood a moment while Mr. Chapley got himself together and said:

“This is Mr. — ah — Ray, who brings a letter from our old friends” — he had to glance at the letter-head — — “Schmucker & Wills, of — Midland.”

“Ah! Midland! yes,” said Mr. Brandreth, for Ray felt it was he, although his name had not been mentioned yet. “Very glad to see you, Mr. Ray. When did you leave Midland? Won’t you sit down? And you, Mr. Chapley?”

“No, no,” said Mr. Chapley, nervously. “I was going to my own room. How is poor Bella this morning?”

“Wonderfully well, wonderfully! I waited for the doctor’s visit before I left home, so as to report reliably, and he says he never saw a better convalescence. He promises to let her go out in a fortnight or so, if the weather’s good.”

“You must be careful! Don’t go too fast!” said Mr. Chapley. And the — child?”

“Perfectly splendid! He slept like a top last night, and we could hardly get him awake for breakfast.”

“Poor thing!” said Mr. Chapley. He offered Ray his hand, and said that he hoped they should see him often; he must drop in whenever he was passing. “Mr. Ray,” he explained, “has come on to take up his residence in New York. He remains connected with one of the papers in — Midland; and I have been referring him to you for literary gossip, and that kind of thing.”

“All right, sir, all right!” said Mr. Brandreth. He laughed out after Mr. Chapley had left them, and then said: “Excuse me, Mr. Ray. You mustn’t mind my smiling rather irrelevantly. We’ve had a great event at my house this week — in fact, we’ve had a boy.”

“Indeed!” said Ray. He had the sort of contempt a young man feels for such domestic events; but he easily concealed it from the happy father, who looked scarcely older than himself.

“An eight-pounder,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I have been pretty anxious for the last few weeks, and — I don’t know whether you married or not, Mr. Ray?”

“No.”

“Well, then you wouldn’t understand.” Mr. Brandreth arrested himself reluctantly, Ray thought, in his confidences. “But you will, some day; you will, some day,” he added, gayly; “and then you’ll know what it is to have an experience like that go off well. It throws a new light on everything.” A clerk came in with a pile of opened letters and put them on Mr. Brandreth’s desk, with some which were still sealed; Ray rose again. “No, don’t go. But you won’t mind my glancing these over while we talk. I don’t know how much talk you’ve been having with Mr. Chapley — he’s my father-in-law, you know?”

Ray owned that he did not “Yes; I came into the firm and into the family a little over a year ago. But if there are any points I can give you, I’m quite at your service.”

“Thank you,” said Ray. “Mr. Chapley was speaking of the effect of the competition of the big variety stores on the regular booksellers.”

Mr. Brandreth slitted the envelope of one of the letters with a slim paper-knife, and glanced the letter over. “Well, that’s a little matter I differ with Mr. Chapley about. Of course, I know just how he feels, brought up the way he was, in the old traditions of the trade. It seems to him we must be going to the bad because our books are sold over a counter next to a tin-ware counter, or a perfume and essence counter, or a bric-à-brac counter. I don’t think so. I think the great thing is to sell the books, and I wish we could get a book into the hands of one of those big dealers; I should be glad of the chance. We should have to make him a heavy discount; but look at the discounts we have to make to the trade, now! Forty per cent., and ten cents off for cash; so that a dollar and a half book, that it costs twenty-five cents or thirty cents to make, brings you in about seventy cents. Then, when you pay the author his ten per cent copyright, how far will the balance go towards advertising, rent, clerk hire and sundries? If you want to get a book into the news companies, you have got to make them a discount of sixty per cent out of hand.”

“Is it possible?” asked Ray. “I’d no idea it was anything like that!”

“No; people haven’t. They think publishers are rolling in riches at the expense of the author and the reader. And some publishers themselves believe that if we could only keep up the old system of letting the regular trade have the lion’s share on long credit, their prosperity would be assured. I don’t, myself. If’ we could get hold of a good, breezy, taking story, I’d like to try my chance with it in the hands of some large dry-goods man.”

Ray’s heart thrilled. His own story had often seemed to him good and taking; whether it was breezy or not, he had never thought He wished he knew just what Mr. Brandreth meant by breezy; but he did not like to ask him. His hand twitched nervelessly on the manuscript in his lap, and he said, timidly: “Would it be out of the way for me to refer to some of these facts — they’re not generally known — in my letters? Of course not using your name.”

“Not at all! I should be very glad to have them understood,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“And what do you think is the outlook for the winter trade, Mr. Brandreth?”

“Never better. I think we’re going to have a good trade. We’ve got a larger list than we’ve had for a great many years. The fact is,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he gave a glance at Ray, as if he felt the trust the youthful gravity of his face inspired in most people—” the fact is, Chapley & Co have been dropping too much out of sight, as publishers; and I’ve felt, ever since I’ve been in the firm, that we ought to give the public a sharp reminder that we’re not merely booksellers and jobbers. I want the house to take its old place again. I don’t mean it’s ever really lost caste, or that its imprint doesn’t stand for as much as it did twenty years ago. I’ll just show you our list if you can wait a moment.” Mr. Brandreth closed a pair of wooden mandibles lying on his desk; an electric bell sounded in the distance, and a boy appeared. “You go and ask Miss Hughes if she’s got that list of announcements ready yet.” The boy went, and Mr. Brandreth took up one of the cards of the firm. “If you would like to visit some of the other houses, Mr. Ray, I’ll give you our card,” and he wrote on the card, “Introducing Mr. Ray, of the Midland Echo. P. Brandreth,” and handed it to him. “Not Peter, but Percy,” he said, with a friendly smile for his own pleasantry. “But for business purposes it’s better to let them suppose it’s Peter.”

Ray laughed, and said he imagined so. He said he had always felt it a disadvantage to have been named Shelley; but he could not write himself P. B. S. Ray, and he usually signed simply S. Ray.

“Why, then, we really have the same first name,” said Mr. Brandreth. “It’s rather an uncommon name, too. I’m very glad to share it with you, Mr. Ray.” It seemed to add another tie to those that already bound them in the sympathy of youth, and the publisher said, “I wish I could ask you up to my house; but just now, you know, it’s really a nursery.”

“You are very kind,” said Ray. “I couldn’t think of intruding on you, of course.”

Their exchange of civilities was checked by the return of the boy, who said Miss Hughes would have the list ready in a few minutes.

“Well, just ask her to bring it here, will you?” said Mr. Brandreth. “I want to speak to her about some of these letters.”

“I’m taking a great deal of your time, Mr. Brandreth,” Ray said.

“Not at all, not at all. I’m making a kind of holiday week of it, anyway. I’m a good deal excited,” and Mr. Brandreth smiled so benevolently that Ray could not help taking advantage of him.

The purpose possessed him almost before he was aware of its activity; he thought he had quelled it, but now he heard himself saying in a stiff unnatural voice, “I have a novel of my own, Mr. Brandreth, that I should like to submit to you.”

IX.

“OH, indeed!” said Mr. Brandreth, with a change in his voice, too, which Ray might well have interpreted as a tone of disappointment and injury. “Just at present, Mr. Ray, trade is rather quiet, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” said Ray, though he thought he had been told the contrary. He felt very mean and guilty; the blood went to his head, and his face burned “Our list for the fall trade is full, as I was saying, and we couldn’t really touch anything till next spring.”

“Oh, I didn’t suppose it would be in time for the fall trade,” said Ray, and in the sudden loss of the easy terms which he had been on with the publisher, he could not urge anything further.

Mr. Brandreth must have felt their estrangement too, for he said, apologetically: “Of course it’s our business to examine manuscripts for publication, and I hope it’s going to be our business to publish more and more of them, but an American novel by an unknown author, as long as we have the competition of these pirated English novels — If we can only get the copyright bill through, we shall be all right.”

Ray said nothing aloud, for he was busy reproaching himself under his breath for abusing Mr. Brandreth’s hospitality..

“What is the — character of your novel?” asked Mr. Brandreth, to break the painful silence, apparently, rather than to inform himself.

“The usual character,” Ray answered, with a listlessness which perhaps passed for careless confidence with the young publisher, and piqued his interest. “It’s a love-story.”

“Of course. Does it end well? A great deal depends upon the ending with the public, you know.”

“I suppose it ends badly. It ends as badly as it can,” said the author, feeling that he had taken the bit in his teeth. “It’s unrelieved tragedy.”

“That isn’t so bad, sometimes,” said Mr. Brandreth. “That is, if the tragedy is intense enough. Sometimes a thing of that kind takes with the public, if the love part is good and strong. Have you the manuscript here in New York with you?”

“I have it here in my lap with me,” said Ray, with a desperate laugh.

Mr. Brandreth cast his eye over the package. “What do you call it? So much depends upon a title with the public.”

“I had thought of several titles: the hero’s name for one; the heroine’s for another. Then I didn’t know but A Modem Romeo would do. It’s very much on the lines of the play.”

“Indeed!” said Mr. Brandreth, with a sudden interest that flattered Ray with fresh hopes. “That’s very curious. I once took part in an amateur performance of Romeo myself. We gave it in the open air. The effect was very novel.”

“I should think it might be,” said Ray. He hastened to add, “My story deals, of course, with American life, and the scene is laid in the little village where I grew up.”

“Our play,” said Mr. Brandreth, “was in a little summer place in Massachusetts. One of the ladies gave us her tennis-ground, and we made our exits and our entrances through the surrounding shrubbery. You’ve no idea how beautiful the mediaeval dresses looked in the electric light. It was at night.”

“It must have been beautiful,” Ray hastily admitted. “My Juliet is the daughter of the village doctor, and my Romeo is a young lawyer, who half kills a cousin of hers for trying to interfere with them.”

“That’s good,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I took the part of Romeo myself, and Mrs. Brandreth — she was Miss Chapley, then — was cast for Juliet; but another girl who had refused the part suddenly changed her mind and claimed it, and we had the greatest time to keep the whole affair from going to pieces. I beg your pardon; I interrupted you.”

“Not at all,” said Ray. “It must have been rather difficult. In my story there has been a feud between the families of the lovers about a land boundary; and both families try to break off the engagement.”

“That’s very odd,” said Mr. Brandreth. “The play nearly broke off my acquaintance with Mrs. Brandreth. Of course she was vexed — as anybody would be — at having to give up the part at the eleventh hour, when she’d taken so much trouble with it; but when she saw my suffering with the other girl, who didn’t know half her lines, and walked through it all like a mechanical doll, she forgave me. Romeo is my favorite play. Did you ever see Julia Marlowe in it?”

“No.”

“Then you never saw Juliet! I used to think Margaret Mather was about the loveliest Juliet, and in fact she has a great deal of passion” —

“My Juliet,” Ray broke in, “is one of those impassioned natures. When she finds that the old people are inexorable, she jumps at the suggestion of a secret marriage, and the lovers run off and are married, and come back and live separately. They meet at a picnic soon after, where Juliet goes with her cousin, who makes himself offensive to the husband, and finally insults him. They happen to be alone together near the high bank of a river, and the husband, who is a quiet fellow of the deadly sort, suddenly throws the cousin over the cliff. The rest are dancing “We introduced a minuet in our theatricals,” Mr. Brandreth interposed, “and people said it was the best thing in it. I beg your pardon!”

“Not at all. It must have been very picturesque. The cousin is taken up for dead, and the husband goes into hiding until the result of the cousin’s injuries can be ascertained. They are searching for the husband everywhere, and the girl’s father, who has dabbled in hypnotism, and has hypnotized his daughter now and then, takes the notion of trying to discover the husband’s whereabouts by throwing her into a hypnotic trance and questioning her: he believes that she knows. The trance is incomplete, and with what is left of her consciousness the girl suffers tremendously from the conflict that takes place in her. In the midst of it all, word comes from the room where the cousin is lying insensible that he is dying. The father leaves his daughter to go to him, and she lapses into the cataleptic state. The husband has been lurking about, intending to give himself up if it comes to the worst. He steals up to the open window — I forgot to say that the hypnotization scene takes place in her father’s office, a little building that stands apart from the house, and of course it’s a ground floor — and he sees her stretched out on the lounge, all pale and stiff, and he thinks she is dead.”

Mr. Brandreth burst into a laugh. “I must tell you what our Mercutio said — he was an awfully clever fellow, a lawyer up there, one of the natives, and he made simply a perfect Mercutio. He said that our Juliet was magnificent in the sepulchre scene; and if she could have played the part as a dead Juliet throughout, she would have beat us all!”

“Capital!” said Ray. “Ha, ha, ha!”

“Well, go on,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“Oh! Well, the husband gets in at the window and throws himself on her breast, and tries to revive her. She shows no signs of life, though all the time she is perfectly aware of what is going on, and is struggling to speak and reassure him. She recovers herself just at the moment he draws a pistol and shoots himself through the heart. The shot brings the father from the house, and as he enters the little office, his daughter lifts herself, gives him one ghastly stare, and falls dead on her husband’s body.”

“That is strong,” said Mr. Brandreth. “That is a very powerful scene.”

“Do you think so?” Ray asked. He looked flushed and flattered, but he said: “Sometimes I’ve been afraid it was overwrought, and improbable — weak. It’s not, properly speaking, a novel, you see. It’s more in the region of romance.”

“Well, so much the better. I think people are getting tired of those commonplace, photographic things. They want something with a little more imagination,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“The motive of my story might be called psychological,” said the author. “Of course I’ve only given you the crudest outline of it, that doesn’t do it justice” —

“Well, they say that roman psychologique is superseding the realistic novel in France. Will you allow me?”

He offered to take the manuscript, and Ray eagerly undid it, and placed it in his hands. He turned over some pages of it, and dipped into it here and there.

“Yes,” he said. “Now I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Mr. Bay. You leave this with us, and we’ll have our readers go over it, and report to us, and then we’ll communicate with you about it. What did you say your New York address was?”

“I haven’t any yet,” said Ray; but I’ll call and leave it as soon as I’ve got one.” He rose, and the young publisher said:

“Well, drop in any time. We shall always be glad to see you. Of course I can’t promise you an immediate decision.”

“Oh, no; I don’t expect that. I can wait. And I can’t tell you how much — how much I appreciate your kindness.”

“Oh, not at all. Ah!” The boy came back with a type-written sheet in his hand; Mr. Brandreth took it and gave it to Ray. “There! You can get some idea from that of what we’re going to do. Take it with you. It’s manifolded, and you can keep this copy. Drop in again when you’re passing.”

They shook hands, but they did not part there. Mr. Brandreth followed Ray out into the store, and asked him if he would not like some advance copies of their new books; he guessed some of them were ready. He directed a clerk to put them up, and then he said, “I’d like to introduce you to one of our authors. Mr. Kane!” he called out to what Ray felt to be the gentleman’s expectant back, and Mr. Kane promptly turned about from his bookshelf and met their advance half-way. “I want to make you acquainted with Mr. Ray.”

“Fortune,” said Mr. Kane, with evident relish of his own voice and diction, “had already made us friends, in the common interest we took in a mistaken fellow-man whom we saw stealing a bag to travel with instead of a road to travel on. Before you came in, we were street intimates of five minutes’ standing, and we entered your temple of the Muses together. But I am very glad to know my dear friend by name.” He gave Ray the pressure of a soft, cool hand. “My name is doubtless familiar to you, Mr. Ray. We spell it a little differently since that unfortunate affair with Abel; but it is unquestionably the same name, and we are of that ancient family. Am I right,” he said, continuing to press the young man’s hand, but glancing at Mr. Brandreth for correction, with ironical deference, “in supposing that Mr. Ray is one of us? I was sure,” he said, letting Ray’s hand go, with a final pressure, “that it must be so from the first moment Î The signs of the high freemasonry of letters are unmistakable!”

“Mr. Ray,” said Mr. Brandreth, “is going to cast his lot with us here in New York. He is from Midland, and he is still connected with one of the papers there.”

“Then he is a man to be cherished and avoided,” said Mr. Kane. “But don’t tell me that he has no tenderer, no more sacred tie to literature than a meretricious newspaper connection!”

Ray laughed, and said from his pleased vanity, “Mr. Brandreth has kindly consented to look at a manuscript of mine.”

“Poems?” Mr. Kane suggested.

“No, a novel,” the author answered, bashfully.

“The great American one, of course?”

“We are going to see,” said the young publisher, gaily.

“Well, that is good. It is pleasant to have the old literary tradition renewed in all the freshness of its prime, and to have young Genius coming up to New York from the provinces with a manuscript under its arm, just as it used to come up to London, and I’ve no doubt to Memphis and to Nineveh, for that matter; the indented tiles must have been a little more cumbrous than the papyrus, and Were probably conveyed in an ox-cart. And when you offered him your novel, Mr. Ray, did Mr. Brandreth say that the book trade was rather dull, just now?”

“Something of that kind,” Ray admitted, with a laugh; and Mr. Brandreth laughed too.

“I’m glad of that,” said Mr. Kane. “It would not have been perfect without that. They always say that. I’ve no doubt the publishers of Memphis and Nineveh said it in their day. It is the publishers’ way with authors. It makes the author realize the immense advantage of getting a publisher on any terms at such a disastrous moment, and he leaves the publisher to fix the terms. It is quite right. You are launched, my dear friend, and all you have to do is to let yourself go. You will probably turn out an ocean greyhound; we expect no less when we are launched. In that case, allow an old water-logged derelict to hail you, and wish you a prosperous voyage to the Happy Isles.” Mr. Kane smiled blandly, and gave Ray a bow that had the quality of a blessing.

“Oh, that book of yours is going to do well yet, Mr. Kane,” said Mr. Brandreth, consolingly. “I believe there’s going to be a change in the public taste, and good literature is going to have its turn again.”

“Let us hope so,” said Mr. Kane, devoutly. “We will pray that the general reader may be turned from the error of his ways, and eschew fiction and cleave to moral reflections. But not till our dear friend’s novel has made its success!” He inclined himself again towards Ray. “Though, perhaps,” he suggested, “it is a novel with a purpose?”

“I’m afraid hardly” — Ray began; but Mr. Brandreth interposed.

“It is a psychological romance — the next thing on the cards, I believe!”

“Indeed!” said Mr. Kane. “Do you speak by the card, now, as a confidant of fate; or is this the exuberant optimism of a fond young father? Mr. Ray, I am afraid you have taken our friend when he is all molten and fluid with happiness, and have abused his kindness for the whole race to your single advantage!”

“No, no! Nothing of the kind, I assure you!” said Mr. Brandreth, joyously. “Everything is on a strict business basis with me, always. But I wish you could see that little fellow, Mr. Kane. Of course it sounds preposterous to say it of a child only eight days old, but I believe he begins to notice already.”

“You must get him to notice your books. Do get him to notice mine! He is beginning young, but perhaps not too young for a critic,” said Mr. Kane, and he abruptly took his leave, as one does when he thinks he has made a good point, and Mr. Brandreth laughed the laugh of a man who magnanimously joins in the mirth made at his expense.

Ray stayed a moment after Mr. Kane went out, and Brandreth said, “There is one of the most puzzling characters in New York. If he could put himself into a book, it would make his fortune. He’s a queer genius. Nobody knows how he lives; but I fancy he has a little money of his own; his book doesn’t sell fifty copies in a year. What did he mean by that about the travelling-bag?”

Ray explained, and Mr. Brandreth said: “Just like him! He must have spotted you in an instant. He has nothing to do, and he spends most of his time wandering about. He says New York is his book, and he reads it over and over. If he could only work up that idea, he could make a book that everybody would want. But he never will. He’s one of those men whose talk makes you think he could write anything; but his book is awfully dry — perfectly crumby. Ever see it? Hard Sayings? Well, good-by! I wish I could ask you up to my house; but you see how it is!”

“Oh, yes! I see,” said Ray. “You’re only too good as it is, Mr. Brandreth.”

X.

RAY’S voice broke a little as he said this; but he hoped Mr. Brandreth did not notice, and he made haste to get out into the crowded street, and be alone with his emotions. He was quite giddy with the turn that Fortune’s wheel had taken, and he Walked a long way up town before he recovered his balance. He had never dreamt of such prompt consideration as Mr. Brandreth had promised to give his novel. He had expected to carry it round from publisher to publisher, and to wait weeks, and perhaps whole months, for their decision. Most of them he imagined refusing to look at it at all; and he had prepared himself for rebuffs. He could not help thinking that Mr. Brandreth’s different behavior was an effect of his goodness of heart, and of his present happiness. Of course he was a little ridiculous about that baby of his; Ray supposed that was natural, but he decided that if he should ever be a father he would not gush about it to the first person he met. He did not like Mr. Brandreth’s interrupting him with the account of those amateur theatricals when he was outlining the plot of his story; but that was excusable, and it showed that he was really interested. If it had not been for the accidental fact that Mr. Brandreth had taken the part of Romeo in those theatricals, he might not have caught on to the notion of A Modem Romeo at all. The question whether he was not rather silly himself to enter so fully into his plot, helped him to condone Mr. Brandreth’s weakness, which was not incompatible with shrewd business sense. All that Mr. Brandreth had said of the state of the trade and its new conditions was sound; he was probably no fool where his interest was concerned. Ray resented for him the cruelty of Mr. Kane in turning the baby’s precocity into the sort of joke he had made of it; but he admired his manner of saying things, too. He would work up very well in a story; but he ought to be made pathetic as well as ironical; he must be made to have had an early unhappy love-affair; the girl either to have died, or to have heartlessly jilted him. He could be the hero’s friend at some important moment; Ray did not determine just at what moment; but the hero should be about to wreck his happiness, somehow, and Mr. Kane should save him from the rash act, and then should tell him the story of his own life. Ray recurred to the manuscript he had left with Mr. Brandreth, and wondered if Mr. Brandreth would read it himself, and if he did, whether he would see any resemblance between the hero and the author. He had sometimes been a little ashamed of that mesmerization business in the story, but if it struck a mood of the reading public, it would be a great piece of luck; and he prepared himself to respect it. If Chapley & Co accepted the book, he was going to write all that passage over, and strengthen it, He was very happy; and he said to himself that he must try to be very good and to merit the fortune that had befallen him. He must not let it turn his head, or seem more than it really was; after all it was merely a chance to be heard that he was given. He instinctively strove to arrest the wheel which was bringing him up, and must carry him down if it kept on moving. With an impulse of the old heathen superstition lingering in us all, he promised his god, whom he imagined to be God, that he would be very grateful and humble if He would work a little miracle for him, and let the wheel carry him up without carrying him over and down. In the unconscious selfishness which he had always supposed morality, he believed that the thing most pleasing to his god would be some immediate effort in his own behalf, of prudent industry or frugality; and he made haste to escape from the bliss of his high hopes as if it were something that was wrong in itself, and that he would perhaps be punished for.

He went to the restaurant where he had breakfasted, and bargained for board and lodging by the week. It was not so cheap as he had expected to get it; with an apparent flexibility, the landlord was rigorous on the point of a dollar a day for the room; and Ray found that he must pay twelve dollars a week for his board and lodging instead of the ten he had set as a limit. But he said to himself that he must take the risk, and must make up the two dollars, somehow. His room was at the top of the house, and it had a view of the fourth story of a ten-story apartment-house opposite; but it had a southerly exposure, and there was one golden hour of the day when the sun shone into it, over the shoulder of a lower edifice next to the apartment house, and round the side of a clock tower beyond the avenue. He could see a bit of the chalet-roof of an elevated railroad station; he could see the tops of people’s heads in the street below if he leaned out of his window far enough, and he had the same bird’s-eye view of the passing carts and carriages. He shared it with the sparrows that bickered in the window-casing, and with the cats that crouched behind the chimneys and watched the progress of the sparrows’ dissensions with furtive and ironical eyes.

Within, the slope of the roof gave a picturesque slant to the ceiling. The room was furnished with an American painted set; there was a clock on the little shelf against the wall that looked as if it were French; but it was not going, and there was no telling what accent it might tick with if it were wound up. There was a little mahogany table in one corner near the window to write on, and he put his books up on the shelf on each side of the clock.

It was all very different from the dignified housing of his life at Midland, where less than the money he paid here got him a stately parlor, with a little chamber out of it, at the first boarding-house in the place. But still he would not have been ashamed to have any one from Midland see him in his present quarters. They were proper to New York in that cosmopolitan phase which he had most desired to see. He tried writing at the little table, and found it very convenient. He forced himself, just for moral effect, and to show himself that he was master of all his moods, to finish his letter to the Echo, and he pleased himself very well with it. He made it light and lively, and yet contrived to give it certain touches of poetry and to throw in bits of description which he fancied had caught something of the thrill and sparkle of the air, and imparted some sense of such a day as he felt it to be. He fancied different friends turning to the letter the first thing in the paper; and in the fond remembrance of the kindness he had left behind there, he became a little homesick.

XI.

RAY would have liked to go again that day, and give Mr. Brandreth his new address in person; but he was afraid it would seem too eager, and would have a bad effect on the fortunes of his book. He mastered himself so far that even the next day’ he did not go, but sent it in a note. Then he was sorry he had done this, for it might look a little too indifferent; that is, he feigned that it might have this effect; but what he really regretted was that it cut him off from going to see Mr. Brandreth as soon as he would have liked. It would be absurd to run to him directly after writing. He languished several days in the heroic resolution not to go near Chapley & Co until a proper time had passed; then he took to walking up and down Broadway, remote from their place at first, and afterwards nearer, till it came to his pacing slowly past their door, and stopping at their window, in the hope that one or other of the partners would happen upon him in some of their comings or goings. But they never did, and he had a faint, heart-sick feeling of disappointment, such as he used to have when he hung about the premises of his first love in much the same fashion and to much the same effect.

He cajoled himself by feigning interviews, now with Mr. Chapley and now with Mr. Brandreth; the publishers accepted his manuscript with transport, and offered him incredible terms. The good old man’s voice shook with emotion in hailing Ray as the heir of Hawthorne; Mr. Brandreth had him up to dinner, and presented him to his wife and baby; he named the baby for them jointly. As nothing of this kind really happened, Ray’s time passed rather forlornly. Without being the richer for it, he won the bets he made himself, every morning, that he should not get a letter that day from Chapley & Co., asking to see him at once, or from Mr. Brandreth hoping for the pleasure of his company upon this social occasion or that. He found that he had built some hopes upon Mr. Brandreth’s hospitable regrets; and as he did not know how long it must be after a happiness of the kind Mrs. Brandreth had conferred upon her husband before her house could be set in order for company, he was perhaps too impatient But he did not suffer himself to be censorious; he was duly grateful to Mr. Brandreth for his regrets; he had not expected them; but for them he would not have expected anything.

He did what he could to pass the time by visiting other publishers with Mr. Brandreth’s card. He perceived sometimes, or fancied that he perceived, a shadow of anxiety in the gentlemen who received him so kindly, but it vanished, if it ever existed, when he put himself frankly on the journalistic ground, and satisfied them that he had no manuscript lurking about him. Then he found some of them willing to drop into chat about the trade, and try to forecast its nearer future, if not to philosophize its conditions. They appeared to think these were all right; and it did not strike Ray as amiss that a work of literary art should be regarded simply as a merchantable or unmerchantable commodity, or as a pawn in a game, a counter that stood for a certain money value, a risk which the player took, a wager that he made.

“You know it’s really that,” one publisher explained to Ray. “No one can tell whether a book will succeed or not; no one knows what makes a book succeed. We have published things that I’ve liked and respected thoroughly, and that I’ve taken a personal pride and pleasure in pushing. They’ve been well received and intelligently praised by the best critics from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and cultivated people have talked about them everywhere; and they haven’t sold fifteen hundred copies Then we’ve tried trash — decent trash, of course; we always remember the cheek of the Young Person — and we’ve all believed that we had something that would hit the popular mood, and would leap into the tens of thousands; and it’s dropped dead from the press. Other works of art and other pieces of trash succeed for no better reason than some fail. You can’t tell anything about it If I were to trust my own observation, I should say it was luck, pure and simple, and mostly bad luck. Ten books fail, and twenty books barely pay, where one succeeds. Nobody can say why. Can’t I send you some of our new books?” He had a number of them on a table near him, and he talked them over with Ray, while a clerk did them up; and he would not let Ray trouble himself to carry them away with him. They were everywhere lavish of their publications with him, and he had so many new books and advance sheets given him that if he had been going to write his letters for the Echo about literature alone, he would have had material for many weeks ahead.

The letters he got at this time were some from home: a very sweet one from his mother, fondly conjecturing and questioning about his comfort in New York, and cautioning him not to take cold; a serious one from his father, advising him to try each week to put by something for a rainy day. There was also a letter from Sanderson, gay with news of all the goings on in Midland, and hilariously regretful of his absence. Sanderson did not say anything about coming to New York to seek his fortune, and the effect of his news was to leave Ray pining for the society of women, which had always been the sweetest thing in life to him, and next to literature the dearest. If he could have had immediate literary success, the excitement of it might have made him forget the privilege he had enjoyed at Midland of going every evening to call on some lovely young girl, and of staying as long as he liked. What made him feel still more lonesome and dropped out was Sanderson’s telling of several engagements among the girls they knew in Midland; it appeared to him that he only was destined to go loveless and mateless through life.

There were women enough in his hotel, but after the first interest of their strangeness, and the romantic effect of hearing them speak in their foreign tongues as if they were at home in them, he could not imagine a farther interest in those opaque Southern blondes, who spoke French, or the brunettes with purple-ringed vast eyes, who coughed out their Spanish gutturals like squirrels. He was appointed a table for his meals in a dining-room that seemed to be reserved for its inmates, as distinguished from the frequenters of the restaurant, who looked as if they were all Americans; and he was served by a shining black waiter weirdly ignorant of English. He gazed wistfully across into the restaurant at times, and had half a mind to ask if he might not eat there; but he liked the glances of curiosity and perhaps envy which its frequenters now and then cast at him in the hotel dining-room. There were no young ladies among them, that he ever saw, but sometimes there were young men whom he thought he would have liked to talk with. Some of them came in company, and at dinner they sat long, discussing matters which he could overhear by snatches were literary and artistic matters. They always came late, and rarely sat down before seven, when Ray was finishing his coffee. One night these comrades came later than usual and in unusual force, and took a large table set somewhat apart from the rest in the bay of a deep window which had once looked out into the little garden of the dwelling that the hotel had once been. They sat down, with a babble of questions and answers, as of people who had not all met for some time, and devoured the little radishes and olives and anchovies, with which the table had been prefatorily furnished, in apparent patience till all the places but the head of the table had been taken; then they began to complain and to threaten at the delay of the dinner; Ray was not aware just how a furious controversy suddenly began to rage between two of them. As nearly as he could make out, amidst the rapid thrust and parry of the principals, and the irregular lunges of this one or that of the company which gave it the character of a free fight, it turned upon a point of aesthetics, where the question was whether the moral aspect ought or ought not to be sought in it. In the heat of the debate the chiefs of the discussion talked both at once, interrupted each other, tried which should clamor loudest and fastest, and then suddenly the whole uproar fell to silence. The two parties casually discovered that they were of exactly the same mind, but each had supposed the other thought differently. Some one came in during the lull that followed, and took the seat at the head of the table.

It was Mr. Kane, and Ray’s heart leaped with the hope that he would see him and recognize him, but out of self-respect he tried to look as if it were not he, but perhaps some one who closely resembled him. He perceived that it was a club dinner of some literary sort; but because he could not help wishing that he were one of the company, he snubbed his desires with unsparing cruelty. He looked down at his plate, and shunned the roving glance which he felt sure Mr. Kane was sending into the room where he now sat almost alone; and he did his best to be ashamed of overhearing the talk now and then. He grew very bitter in his solitude, and he imagined himself using Mr. Kane with great hauteur, after A Modern Romeo had succeeded. He was not obliged to go out that way, when he left the dining-room, but he feigned that he must, and in spite of the lofty stand he had taken with Mr. Kane in fancy, he meanly passed quite near him. Kane looked up, and called out, “Ah, good-evening, good-evening!” and rose and shook hands with him, and asked him how in the world he happened to have found out that restaurant, and he was astonished to hear that Ray was staying in the hotel; he said that was very chic. He introduced him to the company generally, as his young friend Mr. Ray, of Midland, who had come on to cast in his literary lot with them in New York; and then he presented him personally to the nearest on either hand. They were young fellows, but their names were known to Ray with the planetary distinctness that the names of young authors have for literary aspirants, though they are all so nebulous to older eyes.

Mr. Kane asked Ray to sit down and take his coffee with them; Ray said he had taken his coffee; they all urged that this was no reason why he should not take some more; he stood out against them, like a fool — as he later called himself with gnashing teeth. He pretended he had an engagement, and he left the pleasant company he was hungering so to join, and went out and walked the streets, trying to stay himself with the hope that he had made a better impression than if he had remained and enjoyed himself. He was so lonesome when he came back, and caught the sound of their jolly voices on his way up stairs, that he could hardly keep from going in upon them, and asking if they would let him sit with them. In his room he could not work; he wanted to shed tears in his social isolation. He determined to go back to Midland, at any cost to his feelings or fortunes, or even to the little village where his family lived, and where he had been so restless and unhappy till he could get away from it. Now, any place seemed better than this waste of unknown hundreds of thousands of human beings, where he had not a friend, or even an enemy.

XII.

IN the morning Ray woke resolved to brace up against the nerveless suspense he had been in ever since he had left his manuscript with Mr. Brandreth, and go and present the letters that some people in Midland had given him to their friends in New York. At least he need not suffer from solitude unless he chose; he wondered if it would do to present his letters on Sunday.

He breakfasted in this question. Shortly after he went back to his room, there was a knock at his door, and when he shouted “Come in!” it was set softly ajar, and Mr. Kane showed his face at the edge of it.

“I suppose you know,” he said, ignoring Ray’s welcome, “or if you haven’t been out, you don’t know, that this is one of those Sunday mornings which make you feel that it has been blessed and hallowed above all the other days of the week. But I dare say,” he added, coming inside, “that the Mohammedans feel exactly so about a particularly fine Friday.”

He glanced round the little room with an air of delicate impartiality, and asked leave to look from Ray’s window. As he put his head out, he said to the birds in the eaves, “Ah, sparrows!” as if he knew them personally, before he began to make compliments to the picturesque facts of the prospect Then he stood with his back to Ray, looking down into the street, and praising the fashion of the shadow and sunshine in meeting so solidly there, at all sorts of irregular points and angles. Once he looked round and asked, with the sun making his hair all a shining silver:

“Has any one else been shown this view? No? Then let me be the first to utter the stock imbecility that it ought to inspire you if anything could.” He put out his head again, and gave a glance upward at the speckless heaven, and then drew it in. “Yes,” he said, thoughtfully, “a partially clouded sky is better for us, no doubt Why didn’t you sit down with us last night? I saw that you wished to do so.” He faced Ray benignly, with a remote glimmer of mocking in his eye.

Ray felt it safest to answer frankly. “Yes, I did want to join you awfully. I overheard a good deal you were saying where I was sitting, but I couldn’t accept your invitation. I knew it was a great chance, but I couldn’t.”

“Don’t you know,” Mr. Kane asked, “that the chances have a polite horror of iteration? Those men and those moods may never be got together again. You oughtn’t to have thrown such a chance away!”

“I know,” said Ray. “But I had to.”

Mr. Kane leaned back in the chair he had taken, and murmured as if to himself: “Ah, youth, youth! Yes, it has to throw chances away. Waste is a condition of survival. Otherwise we should perish of mere fruition. But could you,” he asked, addressing Ray more directly, “without too much loss to the intimacies that every man ought to keep sacred, could you tell me just why you had to refuse us your company?”

“Oh, yes,” said Ray, with the self-scorn which Mr. Kane’s attitude enabled him to show. “I was so low-spirited that I couldn’t rise to the hands that offered to pull me out of my Slough of Despond. I felt that the slightest exertion would sink me over head and ears. I had better stay as I was.”

“I understand,” said Mr. Kane. “But why should a man of your age be in low spirits?”

“Why? Nobody can tell why he’s in low spirits exactly. I suppose I got to thinking the prospect for my book wasn’t very gay. It’s hard to wait.”

“Was that all?”

“I was a little homesick, too. But wasn’t the other enough?”

“I can’t say. It’s a long time since I was your age. But shall I tell you what I first thought your unhappiness was, when you confessed it just now?”

“Yes, by all means.”

“I wonder if I’d better! I supposed it was not such as any man could inflict. Excuse me!” He kept his eyes smilingly on the young fellow’s face, as if to prevent his taking the audacity in bad part. “I don’t know why I should say this to you, except that it really went through my mind, and I did you the wrong to wonder why you should mention it.”

“I can forgive the wrong; it’s so very far from the fact” — Ray began.

“Ah, you’ve already noticed that!” Mr. Kane interrupted.

“Noticed what?”

“That we can forgive people their injurious conjectures when they’re wrong rather than when they’re right?”

“No, I hadn’t noticed,” Ray confessed; and he added, “I was only thinking how impossible that was for me in a place where I haven’t spoken to a woman yet.”

If Mr. Kane tasted the “bitterness in a speech which Ray tried to carry off with a laugh, his words did not confess it. “It wasn’t a reasoned conjecture, and I don’t defend it; I’m only too glad to escape from it without offence. When I was of your age, a slight from a woman was the only thing that could have kept me from any pleasure that offered itself. But I understand that now youth is made differently.”

“I don’t see why,” said Ray, and he quelled a desire he had to boast of his wounds; he permitted himself merely to put on an air of gloom.

“Why, I’ve been taught that modem society and civilization generally has so many consolations for unrequited affection that young men don’t suffer from that sort of trouble any more, or not deeply.”

Ray was sensible that Mr. Kane’s intrusiveness was justifiable upon the ground of friendly interest; and he was not able to repel what seemed like friendly interest. “It may be as you say, in New York; I’ve not been here long enough to judge.”

“But in Midland things go on in the old way? Tell me something about Midland, and why any one should ever leave Midland for New York?”

“I can’t say, generally speaking,” answered Ray, with pleasure in Kane’s pursuit, “but I think that in my case Midland began it.”

“Yes?”

Ray was willing enough to impart as much of his autobiography as related to the business change that had thrown him out of his place on the Echo. Then he sketched with objective airiness the sort of life one led in Midland, if one was a young man in society; and he found it no more than fair to himself to give some notion of his own local value in a graphic little account of the farewell dinner.

“Yes,” said Mr. Kane, “I can imagine how you should miss all that, and I don’t know that New York has anything so pleasant to offer. I fancy the conditions of society are incomparably different in Midland and in New York. You seem to me a race of shepherds and shepherdesses out there; your pretty world is like a dream of my own youth, when Boston was still only a large town, and was not so distinctly an aoristic Athens as it is now.”

“I had half a mind to go to Boston with my book first,” said Ray. “But somehow I thought there were more chances in New York.”

“There are certainly more publishers,” Kane admitted. “Whether there are more chances depends upon how much independent judgment there is among the publishers. Have you found them very judicial?”

“I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

“Did any one of them seem to be a man who would give your novel an unprejudiced reading if you took it to him and told him honestly that it had been rejected by all the others?”

“No, I can’t say any of them did. But I don’t know that I could give my manuscript an unprejudiced reading myself under the same circumstances. I certainly shouldn’t blame any publisher who couldn’t. Should you?”

“I? I blame nobody, my dear friend,” said Kane. “That is the way I keep my temper. I should not blame you if Chapley & Co declined your book, and you went to the rest of the trade carefully concealing from each publisher, the fact that he was not the first you had approached with it.”

Ray laughed, but he winced, too. “I suppose that’s what I should have to do. But Chapley & Co haven’t declined it yet.”

“Ah, I’m glad of that. Not that you could really impose upon any one. There would be certain infallible signs in your manuscript that would betray you: an air of use; little private marks and memoranda of earlier readers; the smell of their different brands of tobacco and sachet powder.”

“I shouldn’t try to impose upon any one,” Ray began, with a flush of indignation, which ended in shame. “What would you do under the same circumstances?” he demanded, with desperation.

“My dear friend! My dear boy,” Mr. Kane protested. “I am not censuring you. It’s said that Bismarck found it an advantage to introduce truth even into diplomacy. He discovered there was nothing deceived like it; nobody believed him. Some successful advertisers have made it work in commercial affairs. You mustn’t expect me to say what I should do under the same circumstances; the circumstances couldn’t be the same. I am not the author of a manuscript novel with a potential public of tens of thousands. But you can imagine that as the proprietor of a volume of essays which has a certain sale — Mr. Brandreth used that fatal term in speaking of my book, I suppose?”

“No, I don’t remember that he did,” said Ray.

“He was kinder than I could have expected. It is the death-knell of hope to the devoted author when his publisher tells him that his book will always have a certain sale; he is expressing in a pitying euphemism of the trade that there is no longer any chance for it, no happy accident in the future, no fortuity; it is dead. As the author of a book with a certain sale, I feel myself exempt from saying what I should do in your place. But I’m very glad it hasn’t come to the ordeal with you. Let us hope you won’t be tempted. Let us hope that Messrs. Chapley & Co will be equal to the golden opportunity offered them, and gradually —— snatch it.”

Kane smiled, and Ray laughed out He knew that he was being played upon, but he believed the touch was kindly, and even what he felt an occasional cold cynicism in it had the fascination that cynicism always has for the young when it does not pass from theory to conduct; when it does that, it shocks. He thought that Mr. Kane was something like Warrington in Pendennis, and again something like Coverdale in Blithedale Romance. He valued him for that; he was sure he had a history; and when he now rose, Ray said: “Oh, must you go?” with eager regret.

“Why, I had thought of asking you to come with me. I’m going for a walk in the Park, and I want to stop on the way for a moment to see an old friend of mine” — he hesitated, and then added—” a man whom I was once intimately associated with in some joint hopes we had for reconstructing the world. I think you will be interested in him, as a type, even if you don’t like him.”

Ray professed that he should be very much interested, and they went out together.

XIII.

THE streets had that Sunday sense which is as unmistakable as their week-day effect. Their noises were subdued almost to a country quiet; as he crossed with his friend to the elevated station, Ray noted with a lifting heart the sparrows that chirped from the knots and streamers of red Virginia-creeper hanging here and there from a porch roof or over a bit of garden wall; overhead the blue air was full of the jargoning of the blended church bells.

He tried to fit these facts with phrases in the intervals of his desultory talk with Kane, and he had got two or three very good epithets by the time they found seats together in an up-town train. It was not easy to find them, for the cars were thronged with workpeople going to the Park for one of the last Sundays that could be fine there.

Kane said: “The man we are going to see belongs to an order of thinking and feeling that one would have said a few years ago had passed away forever, but of late its turn seems to be coming again; it’s curious how these things recur. Do you happen to hate altruism in any of its protean forms?”

Ray smiled with the relish for the question which Kane probably meant him to feel. “I can’t say that I have any violent feeling against it.”

“It is usually repulsive to young people,” Kane went on, “and I could very well conceive your loathing it. My friend has been an altruist of one kind or another all his life. He’s a man whom it would be perfectly useless to tell that the world is quite good enough for the sort of people there are in it; he would want to set about making the people worthy of a better world, and he would probably begin on you. You have heard of Brook Farm, I suppose?”

“Of course,” Ray answered, with a show of resentment for such a question. “Blithedale Romance — I think it’s the best of Hawthorne’s books.”

“Blithedale,” said Mr. Kane, ignoring the literary interest, “is no more Brook Farm than — But we needn’t enter upon that! My friend’s career as an altruist began there; and since then there’s hardly been a communistic experiment in behalf of Man with a capital and without capital that he hasn’t been into and out of.”

“I should like immensely to see him,” said Ray. “Any man who was at Brook Farm — Did he know Hollingsworth and Zenobia, and Priscilla and Coverdale? Was it at Brook Farm that you met?”

Kane shook his head. “I think no one knew them but Hawthorne. I don’t speak positively; Brook Farm was a little before my day, or else I should have been there too, I dare say. But I’ve been told those characters never were.”

Then it was doubly impossible that Hawthorne should have studied Miles Coverdale from Kane; Ray had to relinquish a theory he had instantly formed upon no ground except Kane’s sort of authority in speaking of Brook Farm; what was worse he had to abandon an instant purpose of carrying forward the romance and doing The Last Days of Miles Coverdale; it would have been an attractive title.

“I met David Hughes,” Kane continued, “after the final break-up of the community, when I was beginning to transcendentalize around Boston, and he wanted me to go into another with him, out West. He came out of his last community within the year; he founded it himself, upon a perfectly infallible principle. It was so impregnable to the logic either of metaphysics or events, that Hughes had to break it up himself, I understand. At sixty-nine he has discovered that his efforts to oblige his fellow-beings ever since he was twenty have been misdirected. It isn’t long for an error of that kind in the life of the race, but it hasn’t exactly left my old friend in the vigor of youth. However, his hope and good-will are as athletic as ever.”

“It’s rather pathetic,” Ray suggested.

“Why, I don’t know — I don’t know! Is it so? He hasn’t found out the wrong way without finding the right way at the same time, and he’s buoyantly hopeful in it, though he’s not only an old man; he’s a sick man, too. Of course, he’s poor. He never was a fellow to do things by halves, and when he dispersed his little following he divided nearly all his substance among his disciples. He sees now that the right way to universal prosperity and peace is the political way; and if he could live long enough, we should see him in Congress — if we lived long enough. Naturally, he is paving the way with a book he’s writing.” Kane went on to speak of his friend at length; he suddenly glanced out of the car window, and said: “Ah, we’re just there. This is our station.”

The avenue had been changing its character as they rushed along. It had ceased to be a street of three or four story houses, where for the most part the people lived over their shops, and where there was an effect of excessive use on everything, a worn-out and shabby look, rather than a squalid look. The cross-streets of towering tenement-houses, had come and gone, and now the buildings were low again, with greater or less gaps between them, while the railroad had climbed higher, and was like a line drawn through the air without reference to the localities which the train left swiftly behind. The houses had begun to be of wood here and there, and it was at a frame of two stories that Mr. Kane stopped with Ray, when they clambered down the long iron staircase of the station to the footway below. They pulled a bell that sounded faintly somewhere within, and the catch of the lock clicked as if it were trying to release itself; but when they tried the door it was still fast, and Mr. Kane rang again. Then a clatter of quick, impatient feet sounded on the stairs; the door was pulled sharply open, and they confronted a tall young man, with a handsome pale face, who bent on them a look of impartial gloom from clouded blue eyes under frowning brows. A heavy fringe of dull yellow hair almost touched their level with its straight line, which the lower lip of the impassioned mouth repeated.

“Ah, Denton!” said Mr. Kane. “Good-morning, good-morning! This is my friend, Mr. Ray.” The young men shook hands with a provisional civility, and Mr. Kane asked, “Are you all at home?”

“We are, at the moment,” said the other. “I’m just going out with the babies; but father will be glad to see you. Come in.”

He had a thick voice that came from his throat by nervous impulses; he set the door open and twisted his head in the direction of the stairs, as if to invite them to go up. They found he had a perambulator in the narrow hall behind the door, and two children facing each other in it. He got it out on the sidewalk without further attention to them, and shut the door after him. But in the light which his struggles to get out had let into the entry they made their way up the stairs, where a woman’s figure stood silhouetted against an open door-way behind her.

“Ah, Mrs. Denton, how do you do?” said Kane, gaily.

The figure answered gaily back, “Oh, Mr. Kane!” and after Kane’s presentation of Ray, set open a door that opened from the landing into the apartment. “Father will be so glad to see you. Please walk in.”

Ray found himself in what must be the principal room of the apartment; its two windows commanded an immediate prospect of the elevated road, with an effect of having their sills against its trestle work. Between them stood a tall, gaunt old man, whose blue eyes flamed under the heavy brows of age, from a face set in a wilding growth of iron-gray hair and beard. He was talking down upon a gentleman whom Ray had black against the light, and he was saying: “No, Henry, no! Tolstoï is mistaken. I don’t object to his theories of non-resistance; the Quakers have found them perfectly practicable for more than two centuries; but I say that in quitting the scene of the moral struggle, and in simplifying himself into a mere peasant, he begs the question as completely as if he had gone into a monastery. He has struck out some tremendous truths, I don’t deny that, and his examination of the conditions of civilization is one of the most terrifically searching studies of the facts that have ever been contributed to the science of sociology; but his conclusions are as wrong as his premises are right If I had back the years that I have wasted in a perfectly futile effort to deal with the problem of the race at a distance where I couldn’t touch it, I would have nothing to do with eremitism in any of its forms, either collectively as we have had it in our various communistic experiments, or individually on the terms which Tolstoï apparently advises.”

“But I don’t understand him to advise eremitism,” the gentleman began.

“It amounts to the same thing,” said the other, cutting himself short in hollow cough, so as not to give up the word. “He would have us withdraw from the world, as if, where any man was, the world was not there in the midst of him!”

“Poor Tolstoï,” said Mr. Kane, going up and shaking hands with the others, “as I understand it, is at present able only to rehearse his rôle, because his family won’t consent to anything else. He’s sold all he has in order to give to the poor, but his wife manages the proceeds.”

“It’s easy enough to throw ridicule on him,” said the gentleman against the window, who now stood up.

“I throw no ridicule upon him,” said the tall, gaunt man. “He has taught me at least this, that contempt is of the devil — I beg your pardon, Kane — and I appreciate to the utmost the spiritual grandeur of the man’s nature. But practically, I don’t follow him. We shall never redeem the world by eschewing it. Society is not to be saved by self-outlawry. The body politic is to be healed politically. The way to have the golden age is to elect it by the Australian ballot. The people must vote themselves into possession of their own business, and intrust their economic affairs to the same faculty that makes war and peace, that frames laws, and that does justice. What I object to in Tolstoï is his utter unpracticality. I cannot forgive any man, however good and great, who does not measure the means to the end. If there is anything in my own life that I can regard with entire satisfaction it is that at every step of my career I have invoked the light of common-sense. Whatever my enemies may say against me, they cannot say that I have not instantly abandoned any project when I found it unpractical. I abhor dreamers; they have no place in a world of thinking and acting.” Ray saw Kane arching his eyebrows, while the other began again: “I tell you” —

“I want to introduce my young friend Mr. Ray,” Mr. Kane broke in.

The old man took Ray’s hand between two hot palms, and said, “Ah!” with a look at him that was benign, if somewhat bewildered.

“You know Mr. Ray, Chapley,” Kane pursued, transferring him to the other, who took his hand in turn.

“Mr. Ray?” he queried, with the distress of the elderly man who tries to remember.

“If you forget your authors in the green wood so easily, how shall it be with them in the dry?” Kane sighed; and now the publisher woke up to Ray’s identity.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes! Of course! Mr. Ray, of — of — Mr. Ray, of” —

“Midland,” Ray suggested, perspiring.

“Why, certainly!” Mr. Chapley pressed his hand with as much apologetic entreaty as he could intimate in that way, and assured him that he was glad to see him; and then he said to the old man, whose name Kane had not mentioned to Ray in presenting him, but whom Ray knew to be Hughes, “Well, I must be going now. I’m glad to find you looking so much better this morning.”

“Oh; I’m quite a new man — quite a new man!”

“You were always that!” said Mr. Chapley, with a certain fondness. He sighed, “I wish I knew your secret.”

“Stay, and let him expound it to us all!” Kane suggested. “I’ve no doubt he would.”

“No; I must be going,” said Mr. Chapley. “Good-by.” He shook hands with the old man. “Good-by, Kane. Er — good-morning, Mr. — er — Ray. You must drop in and see us, when you can find time.”

Ray bubbled after him some incoherencies about being afraid he could find only too much time. Apparently Mr. Chapley did not hear. He pottered out on the landing, and Ray heard him feeling his way carefully down stairs. It was an immense relief for him to have met Mr. Chapley there. It stamped his own presence in the place with propriety; he was fond of adventure and hungry for experience, but he wished all his adventures and experiences to be respectable. He had a young dread of queerness and irregularity; and he could not conceal from himself that but for Mr. Chapley his present environment was not in keeping with his smooth Philistine traditions. He had never been in an apartment before, much less a mere tenement; at Midland every one he knew lived in his own house; most of the people he knew lived in handsome houses of their own, with large grass-plots and shade-trees about them. But if Mr. Chapley were here, with this old man who called him by his first name, and with whom he and Mr. Kane seemed to have the past if not the present in common, it must be all right.

XIV.

RAY woke from his rapid mental formulation of this comforting reassurance to find the old man saying to him, “What is the nature of the work that Chapley has published for you? I hope something by which you intend to advance others, as well as yourself: something that is to be not merely the means of your personal aggrandizement in fame and fortune. Nothing, in my getting back to the world, strikes me as more shamelessly selfish than the ordinary literary career. I don’t wonder the art has sunk so low; its aims are on the business level.”

Mr. Kane listened with an air of being greatly amused, and even gratified, and Ray thought he had purposely let the old man go on as if he were an author who had already broken the shell. Before he could think of some answer that should at once explain and justify him, Kane interposed:

“I hope Mr. Ray is no better than the rest of us; but he may be; you must make your arraignment and condemnation conditional, at any rate. He’s an author in petto, as yet; Chapley may never publish him.”

“Then why,” said the old man, irascibly, “did you speak of him as you did to Chapley? It was misleading.”

“In the world you’ve come back to, my dear friend,” said Kane, “you’ll find that we have no time to refine upon the facts. We can only sketch the situation in large, bold outlines. Perhaps I wished to give Mr. Ray a hold upon Chapley by my premature recognition of him as an author, and make the wicked publisher feel that there was already a wide general impatience to see Mr. Ray’s book.”

“That would have been very corrupt, Kane,” said the other. “But I owe Mr. Ray an apology.”

Ray found his tongue. “Perhaps you won’t think so when you see my novel.”

“A novel! Oh, I have no time to read novels!” the old man burst out. “A practical man” —

“Nor volumes of essays,” said Kane, picking up a book from the table at his elbow. “Really, as a measure of self-defence, I must have the leaves of my presentation copies cut, at any rate. I must sacrifice my taste to my vanity. Then I sha’n’t know when the grateful recipients haven’t opened them.”

“I’ve no time to read books of any kind” — the old man began again.

“You ought to set up reviewer,” Kane interposed again.

“Oh, I’ve looked into your essays, Kane, here and there. The literature is of a piece with the affectation of the uncut edges: something utterly outdated and superseded. It’s all as impertinent as the demand you make that the reader should do the work of a bookbinder, and cut your leaves.”

“Do you know that I’m really hurt — not for myself, but for you! — by what you say of my uncut edges? You descend to the level of a Brandreth,” said Kane.

“A Brandreth? What is a Brandreth?”

“It is a publisher: Chapley’s son-in-law and partner.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” said Hughes.

“I spent many hours,” said Kane, plaintively, “ pleading with him for an edition with uncut edges. He contended that the public would not buy it if the edges were not cut; and I told him that I wished to have that fact to fall back upon, in case they didn’t buy it for some other reason. And I was right. The edition hasn’t sold, and the uncut edges have saved me great suffering until now. Why not have confined your own remarks, my dear friend, to the uncut edges? I might have agreed with you.”

“Because” said the old man, “I cannot have patience with a man of your age who takes the mere dilettante view of life — who regards the world as something to be curiously inspected and neatly commented, instead of toiled for, sweated for, suffered for!”

“It appears to me that there is toiling and sweating and suffering enough for the world already,” said Kane, with a perverse levity. “Look at the poor millionnaires, struggling to keep their employés in work! If you’ve come back to the world for no better purpose than to add to its perseverance and perspiration, I could wish for your own sake that you had remained in some of your communities — or all of them, for that matter.”

The other turned half round in his chair, and looked hard into Kane’s smiling face. “You are a most unserious spirit, Kane, and you always were! When will you begin to be different? Do you expect to continue a mere frivolous maker of phrases to the last? Your whole book there is just a bundle of phrases — labels for things. Do you ever intend to be anything?”

“I intend to be an angel, some time — or some eternity,” said Kane. “But, in the meanwhile, have you ever considered that perhaps you are demanding, in your hopes of what you call the redemption of the race from selfishness, as sheer and mere an impossibility as a change of the physical basis of the soul?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean — or, I won’t put it affirmatively; I will put it interrogatively.”

“Yes, that was always your way!”

“I will merely ask you,” Kane went on, without heeding the interruption, “what reason you have to suppose the altruistic is not eternally conditioned in the egoistic, just as the spiritual is conditioned in the animal?”

“What jargon is that?” demanded the old man, throwing one leg over the other, and smoothing the upper one down with his hand, as he bent forward to glower at Kane.

“It is the harmony of the spheres, my dear David; it is a metaphysical variation of the pleasing air that the morning stars sang together; it is the very truth.

The altruistic can no more shake off the egoistic in this world than the spiritual can shake off the animal. As soon as man ceases to get hungry three times a day, just so soon will he cease to eat his fellow-man.”

“There is the usual trivial truth in what you say,” Hughes replied, “and the usual serious impiety. You probably are not aware that your miserable paradox accuses the Creative Intelligence.”

“Ah, but use another word! Say Nature, and then where is the impiety?”

“But I decline to use the other word,” Hughes retorted.

“And I insist upon it; I must. It is Nature that I accuse; not the divine nature, or even human nature, but brute nature, that commits a million blunders, and destroys myriads of types, in order to arrive at such an imperfect creature as man still physically is, after untold ages of her blind empiricism. If the human intelligence could be put in possession of the human body, we should have altruism at once. We should not get hungry three times a day; instead of the crude digestive apparatus which we have inherited with apparently no change whatever from the cave-dweller, we should have an organ delicately adjusted to the exigencies of modern life, and responsive to all the emotions of philanthropy. But no! The stomach of the nineteenth century remains helplessly in the keeping of primeval nature, who is a mere Bourbon; who learns nothing and forgets nothing. She obliges us to struggle on with a rude arrangement developed from the mollusk, and adapted at best to the conditions of the savage; imperative and imperfect; liable to get out of order with the carefulest management, and to give way altogether with the use of half a lifetime. No, David! You will have to wait until man has come into control of his stomach, and is able to bring his ingenuity to bear upon its deficiencies. Then, and not till then, you will have the Altruistic Man. Until then the egoistic man will continue to eat his brother, and more or less indigest him — if there is such a verb.”

Bay listened with one ear to them. The other was filled with the soft murmur of women’s voices from the further end of the little apartment; they broke now and then from a steady flow of talk, and rippled into laughter, and then smoothed themselves to talk again. He longed to know what they were talking about, laughing about.

“No, David,” Kane went on, “when you take man out of the clutches of Nature, and put Nature in the keeping of man, we shall have the millennium. I have nothing to say against the millennium, per se, except that it never seems to have been on time. I am willing to excuse its want of punctuality; there may have always been unavoidable delays; but you can’t expect me to have as much faith in it as if it had never disappointed people. Now with you I admit it’s different. You’ve seen it come a great many times, and go even oftener.”

“Young man!” the other called so abruptly to Ray that it made him start in his chair, “I wish you would step out into the room yonder, and ask one of my daughters to bring me my whiskey and milk. It’s time for it,” and he put down a watch which he had taken from the table beside him.

He nodded toward a sort of curtained corridor at one side of the room, and after a glance of question at Kane, who answered with a reassuring smile, Ray went out through this passage. The voices had suddenly fallen silent, but he found their owners in the little room beyond; they were standing before their chairs as if they had jumped to their feet in a feminine dismay which they had quelled. In one he made out the young Mrs. Denton, whose silhouette had received him and Kane; the other looked like her, but younger, and in the two Ray recognized the heroines of the pocket-book affair on the train.

He trembled a little inwardly, but he said, with a bow for both: “I beg your pardon. Your father wished me to ask you for his” —

He faltered at the queerness of it all, but the younger said, simply and gravely: “Oh, yes, I’ll take it in. I’ve got it ready here,” and she took up a tumbler from the hearth of the cooking-stove keeping itself comfortable at one side of a little kitchen beyond the room where they were, and went out with it.

Ray did not know exactly what to do, or rather how he should do what he wished. He hesitated, and looked at Mrs. Denton, who said, “Won’t you sit down — if it isn’t too hot here?”

XV.

“OH, it isn’t at all hot,” said Ray, and in fact the air was blowing freely in through the plants at the open window. Then he sat down, as if to prove that it was not too hot; there was no other reason that he could have given for staying, instead of going back to Kane and her father.

“We can keep the windows open on this side,” said Mrs. Denton, “but the elevated makes too much noise in front. When we came here first, it was warm weather; it was stifling when we shut the windows, and when we opened them, it seemed as if the trains would drive us wild. It was like having them in the same room with us. But now it’s a little cooler, and we don’t need the front windows open; so it’s very pleasant.”

Ray said it was delightful, and he asked, “Then you haven’t been in New York long?”

“No; only since the beginning of September. We thought we would settle in New Jersey first, and we did take a house there, in the country; but it was too far from my husband’s work, and so we moved in. Father wants to meet people; he’s more in the current here.”

As she talked, Mrs. Denton had a way of looking down at her apron, and smoothing it across her knees with one hand, and now and then glancing at Ray out of the corner of her eye, as if she were smiling on the further side of her face.

“We went out there a little while ago to sell off the things we didn’t want to keep. The neighbors took them.” She began to laugh, and Ray laughed, too, when she said, “We found they had taken some of them before we got there. They might as well have taken all, they paid us so little for the rest I didn’t suppose there would be such a difference between firsthand and second-hand things. But it was the first time we had ever set up housekeeping for ourselves, and we had to make mistakes. We had always lived in a community.”

She looked at him for the impression of this fact, and Ray merely said, “Yep; Mr. Kane told me something of the kind.”

“It’s all very different in the world. I don’t know whether you’ve ever been in a community?”

“No,” said Ray.

“Well,” she went on, “we’ve had to get used to all sorts of things since we came out into the world. The very day we left the community, I heard some people in the seat just in front of me, in the car, planning how they should do something to get a living; it seemed ridiculous and dreadful. It fairly frightened me.

Ray was struck with the literary value of the fact. He said: “I suppose it would be startling if we could any of us realize it for the first time. But for most of us there never is any first time.”

Mrs. Denton said: “No, but in the community we never had to think how we should get things to eat and wear, any more than how we should get air to breathe. You know father believes that the world can be made like the Family, in that, and everybody be sure of a living, if he is willing to work.”

She glanced at Ray with another of her demure looks, which seemed inquiries both as to his knowledge of the facts and his opinion of them.

“I didn’t know just what your father’s ideas were,” he said; and she went on:

“Yes; he thinks all you’ve got to do is to have patience. But it seems to me you’ve got to have money too,” or you’ll starve to death before your patience gives out.”

Mrs. Denton laughed, and Ray sat looking at her with a curious mixture of liking and misgiving: he would have liked to laugh with her from the poet in him, but his civic man could not approve of her irresponsibility. In her quality of married woman, she was more reprehensible than she would have been as a girl; as a girl, she might well have been merely funny. Still, she was a woman, and her voice, if it expressed an irresponsible nature, was sweet to hear. She seemed not to dislike hearing it herself, and she let it run lightly on. “The hardest thing for us, though, has been getting used to money, and the care of it. It seems to be just as bad with a little as a great deal —— the care does; and you have to be thinking about it all the time; we never had to think of it at all in the Family. Most of us never saw it, or touched it; only the few that went out and sold and bought things.”

“That’s very odd,” said Ray, trying the notion if it would not work somewhere into literature; at the same time he felt the charm of this pretty young woman, and wondered why her sister did not come back. He heard her talking with Kane in the other room; now and then her voice, gentle and clear and somewhat high, was lost in Kane’s laugh, or the hoarse plunge of her father’s bass.

“Yes,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think I feel it more than my husband or my sister does; they just have to earn the money, but I have to take care of it, and see how far I can make it go. It’s perfectly distracting; and sometimes when I forget, and do something careless!” She let an impressive silence follow, and Ray laughed.

“Yes, that’s an anxious time for us, even if we’re brought up with the advantages of worldly experience.”

“Anxious!” Mrs. Denton repeated; and her tongue ran on. “Why, the day I went out to New Jersey with my sister to settle up our ‘estate’ out there, we each of us had a baby to carry — my children are twins, and we couldn’t leave them here with father; it was bad enough to leave him! and my husband was at work; and on the train coming home I forgot and gave the twins my pocket-book to play with; and just then a kind old gentleman put up the car window for me, and the first thing I knew they threw it out into the water — we were crossing that piece of water before you get to Jersey City. It had every cent of my money in it; and I was so scared when they threw my pocket-book away — we always say they, because they’re so much alike we never can remember which did a thing — I was so scared that I didn’t know what I was doing, and I just screamed out all about it.” Ray listened restively; he felt as if he were eavesdropping; but he did not know quite how, or when, or whether, after all, to tell her that he had witnessed the whole affair; he decided that he had better not; and she went on: “My sister said it was just as if I had begged of the whole carful; and I suppose it was. I don’t suppose that a person who was more used to money would have given it to a baby to play with.” She stopped, and Ray suddenly changed his mind; he thought he ought not to let her go on as if he knew nothing about it; that was hardly fair.

“The conductor,” he said, “appeared to think any woman would have done it.”

Mrs. Denton laughed out her delight. “It was you, then. My sister was sure it was, as soon as she saw you at Mr. Chapley’s.”

“At Mr. Chapley’s?”

“Yes; his store. That is where she works. You didn’t see her, but she saw you,” said Mrs. Denton; and then Ray recalled that Mr. Brandreth had sent to a Miss Hughes for the list of announcements she had given him.

“We saw you noticing us in the car, and we saw you talking with the conductor. Did he say anything else about us?” she asked, significantly.

“I don’t know exactly what you mean,” Ray answered, a little consciously, and coloring slightly.

“Why,” Mrs. Denton began; but she stopped at sight of her sister, who came in with the empty tumbler in her hand, and set it down in the room beyond. “Peace!” she called to her, and the girl came back reluctantly, Ray fancied. He had remained standing since her reappearance, and Mrs. Denton said, introducing them, “This is my sister, Mr. Ray;” and then she cried out joyfully, “It was Mr. Ray!” while he bowed ceremoniously to the girl, who showed an embarrassment that Mrs. Denton did not share. “The conductor told him that any woman would have given her baby her pocket-book to play with; and so you see I wasn’t so very bad, after all. But when one of these things happens to me, it seems as if the world had come to an end; I can’t get over it. Then we had another experience! One of the passengers that heard me say all our money was in that pocket-book, gave the conductor a dollar for us, to pay our car-fares home. We had to take it; we couldn’t have carried the children from the ferry all the way up here; but I never knew before that charity hurt so... It was dreadful!”

A certain note made itself evident in her voice which Ray felt as an appeal. “Why, I don’t think you need have considered it as charity. It was what might have happened to any lady who had lost her purse.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Miss Hughes broke in. “It would have been offered then so that it could be returned. We were to blame for not making the conductor say who gave it. But we were so confused!”

“I think the giver was to blame for not sending his address with it. But perhaps he was confused too,” said Ray.

“The conductor told us it was a lady,” said Mrs. Denton, with a sudden glance upward at Ray.

They all broke into a laugh together, and the girl sprang up and went into another room. She came back with a bank-note in her hand, which she held out toward Ray.

He did not offer to take it. “I haven’t pleaded guilty yet.”

“No,” said Mrs. Denton; “but we know you did it. Peace always thought you did; and now we’ve got you in our power, and you must take it back.”

“But you didn’t use it all. You gave a quarter to the old darkey who whistled. You’re as bad as I am. You do charity, too.”

“No; he earned his quarter. You paid him something yourself,” said the girl.

“He did whistle divinely,” Ray admitted. “How came you to think of asking him to change your bill? I should have thought you’d have given it all to him.” They had a childlike joy in his railery, which they laughed simply out. “We did want to,” Mrs. Denton said; “but we didn’t know how we could get home.”

“I don’t see but that convicts me.” Ray put out his hand as if to take the note, and then withdrew it. “I suppose I ought to take it,” he began. “But if I did, I should just spend it on myself. And the fact is, I had saved it on myself, or else, perhaps, I shouldn’t have given it to the conductor for you.” He told them how he had economized on his journey, and they laughed together at the picture he gave of his satisfaction in his self-denial.

“Oh, I know that good feeling!” said Mrs. Denton. “Yes, but you can’t imagine how superior I felt when I handed my dollar over to the conductor. Good is no name for it; and I’ve simply gloated over my own merit ever since. Miss Hughes, you must keep that dollar, and give it to somebody who needs it!” This was not so novel as it seemed to Ray; but the sisters glanced at each other as if struck with its originality.

Then the girl looked at him steadily out of her serene eyes a moment, as if thinking what she had better do, while Mrs. Denton cooed her pleasure in the situation.

“I knew just as well, when the conductor said it was a lady passenger sent it! He said it like a sort of after-thought, you know; he turned back to say it just after he left us.”

“Well, I will do that,” said the girl to Ray; and she carried the money back to her room.

“Do sit down!” said Mrs. Denton to Ray when she came back. The community of experience, and the wonder of the whole adventure, launched them indefinitely forward towards intimacy in their acquaintance. “We were awfully excited when my sister came home and said she had seen you at Mr. Chapley’s.” Her sister did not deny it; but when Mrs. Denton added the question, “Are you an author?” she protested—” Jenny!”

“I wish I were,” said Ray; “but I can’t say I am, yet. That depends upon whether Mr. Chapley takes my book,”

He ventured to be so frank because he thought Miss Hughes probably knew already that he had offered a manuscript; but if she knew, she made no sign of knowing, and Mrs. Denton said:

“Mr. Chapley gives my sister all the books he publishes. Isn’t it splendid? And he lets her bring home any of the books she wants to, out of the store. Are you acquainted in his family?”

“No; I only know Mr. Brandreth, his son-in-law.”

“My sister says he’s very nice. Everybody likes Mr. Brandreth. Mr. Chapley is an old friend of father’s. I should think his family would come to see us, some of them. But they haven’t. Mr. Chapley comes ever so much.”

Ray did not know what to say of a fact which Mrs. Denton did not suffer to remain last in his mind. She went on, as if it immediately followed.

“We are reading Browning now. But my husband likes Shelley the best of all. Which is your favorite poet?”

Ray smiled. “I suppose Shelley ought to be. I was named after him.” When he had said this he thought it rather silly, and certainly superfluous. So he added, “My father was a great reader of him when he was a young man, and I got the benefit of his taste, if it’s a benefit.”

“Why, do you hate to be named Shelley?” Mrs. Denton asked.

“Oh, no; except as I should hate to be named Shakespeare; it suggests comparisons.”

“Yes; but it’s a very pretty name.” As if it recalled him, she said, “My husband was just going out with the twins when you came in with Mr. Kane. He was taking them over to the Park. Do you like cats?” She leaned over and lugged up into her lap a huge Maltese from the further side of her. “My sister doesn’t because they eat sparrows.” She passed her hand slowly down the cat’s smooth flank, which snapped electrically, while the cat shut its eyes to a line of gray light.

“If your cat’s fond of sparrows, he ought to come and live with me,” said Ray. “I’ve got a whole colony of them outside of my dormer-window.”

Mrs. Denton lifted the cat’s head and rubbed her cheek on it. “Oh, we’ve got plenty of sparrows here, too. Where do you live? Down town? Mr. Kane does.”

Ray gave a picturesque account of his foreign hotel; but he had an impression that its strangeness was thrown away upon his hearers, who seemed like children in their contact with the world; it was all so strange that nothing was stranger than another to them. They thought what he told them of life in Midland as queer as life in New York.

The talk went on without sequence or direction, broken with abrupt questions and droll comments; and they laughed a good deal. They spoke of poems and of dreams. Ray told of a fragment of a poem he had made in a dream, and repeated it; they thought it was fine, or at least Mrs. Denton said she did. Her sister did not talk much, but she listened, and now and then she threw in a word. She sat against the light, and her face was in shadow to Ray, and this deepened his sense of mystery in her; her little head, so distinctly outlined, was beautiful. Her voice, which was so delicate and thin, had a note of childish innocence in it Mrs. Denton cooed deep and low. She tried to make her sister talk more, and tell this and that The girl did not seem afraid or shy, but only serious. Several times they got back to books, and at one of these times it appeared that she knew of Ray’s manuscript, and that it was going through the hands of the readers.

“And what is the name of your story?” Mrs. Denton asked, and before he could tell her she said, “Oh, yes; I forgot,” and he knew that they must have talked of it together. He wondered if Miss Hughes had read it “Talking of names,” Mrs. Denton went on, “I think my sister’s got the queerest one: Peace. Isn’t it a curious name?”

“It’s a beautiful name,” said Ray. “The Spanish give it a great deal, I believe.”

“Do they? It was a name that mother liked; but she had never heard of it, although there were so many Faiths, Hopes, and Charities. She died just a little while after Peace was born, and father gave her the name.”

Ray was too young to feel the latent pathos of the lightly treated fact “It’s a beautiful name,” he said again.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Denton, “and it’s so short you can’t nick it There can’t be anything shorter than Peace, can there?”

“Truce,” Ray suggested, and this made them laugh.

The young girl rose and went to the window, and began looking over the plants in the pots there. Ray made bold to go and join her.

“Are you fond of flowers?” she asked gently, and with a seriousness as if she really expected him to say truly.

“I don’t know. I’ve never thought,” he answered, thinking how pretty she was, now he had her face where he could see it fully. Her hair was of the indefinite blonde tending to brown, which most people’s hair is of; her sensitive face was cast in the American mould that gives us such a high average of good looks in our women; her eyes were angelically innocent When she laughed, her lip caught on her upper teeth, and clung there; one of the teeth was slightly broken; and both these little facts fascinated Ray. She did not laugh so much as Mrs. Denton, whose talk she let run on with a sufferance like that of an older person, though she was the younger. She and Ray stood awhile there playing the game of words in which youth hides itself from its kind, and which bears no relation to what it is feeling. The charm of being in the presence of a lovely and intelligent girl enfolded Ray like a caressing atmosphere, and healed him of all the hurts of homesickness, of solitude. Their talk was intensely personal, because youth is personal, and they were young; they thought that it dealt with the different matters of taste they touched on, but it really dealt with themselves, and not their preferences in literature, in flowers, in cats, in dress, in country and city. Ray was aware that they were discussing these things in a place very different from the parlors where he used to enjoy young ladies’ society in Midland; it was all far from the Midland expectation of his career in New York society. He recalled how, before the days of his social splendor in Midland, he had often sat and watched his own mother and sisters about their household work, which they did for themselves, while they debated the hopes and projects of his future, or let their hearts out in jest and laughter. Afterwards, he would not have liked to have this known among the fashionable people in Midland, with whom he wished to be so perfectly comme il faut.

From time to time Mrs. Denton dropped the cat out of her lap, and ran out to pull the wire which operated the latch of the street door; and then Ray heard her greeting some corner and showing him into the front room, where presently he heard him greeting her father. At last there was a sound below as of some one letting himself in with a latch-key, and then came the noises of the perambulator wheels bumping from step to step as it was pulled up. Mrs. Denton sat still, and kept on talking to Ray, but her sister went out to help her husband; and reappeared with a sleeping twin in her arms, and carried it into the room adjoining. The husband, with his pale face flushed from his struggle with the perambulator, came in with the other, and when he emerged from the next room again, Mrs. Denton introduced him to Ray.

“Oh, yes,” he said; “I saw you with Mr. Kane.” He sat down a moment at the other window, and put his bare head out for the air. “It has grown warm,” he said.

“Was the Park very full?” his wife asked.

“Crowded. It’s one of their last chances for the year.”

“I suppose it made you homesick.”

“Horribly,” said the husband, with his head still half out of the window. He took it in, and listened with the tolerance of a husband while she explained him to Ray.

“My husband’s so homesick for the old Family place — it was a pretty place! — that he almost dies when he goes into the Park; it brings it all back so. Are you homesick, too, Mr. Ray?”

“Well, not exactly for the country,” said Ray “I’ve been homesick for the place I came from — for Midland, that is.”

“Midland?” Denton repeated. “I’ve been there. I think those small cities are more deadly than New York. They’re still trying to get rid of the country, and New York is trying to get some of it back. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be a city, big or little, on the whole continent.” He did not wait for any reply from Ray, but he asked his wife, “Who’s come?”

She mentioned a number of names, ten or twelve, and he said, “We’d better go in,” and without further parley he turned toward the curtained avenue to the front room.

XVI.

IN the front room the little assemblage had the effect of some small religious sect The people were plainly dressed in a sort of keeping with their serious faces; there was one girl who had no sign of a ribbon or lace about her, and looked like a rather athletic boy in her short hair and black felt hat, and her jacket buttoned to her throat She sat with her hands in the side pockets of her coat, and her feet pushed out beyond the hem of her skirt There were several men of a foreign type, with beards pointed and parted; an American, who looked like a school-master, and whose mouth worked up into his cheek at one side with a sort of mechanical smile when he talked, sat near a man who was so bald as not to have even a spear of hair anywhere on his head. The rest were people who took a color of oddity from these types; a second glance showed them to be of the average humanity; and their dress and its fashion showed them to be of simple condition. They were attired with a Sunday consciousness and cleanliness, though one gentleman, whose coat sleeves and seams were brilliant with long use, looked as if he would be the better for a little benzining, where his moustache had dropped soup and coffee on his waistcoat; he had prominent eyes, with a straining, near-sighted look.

Kane sat among them with an air at once alert and aloof; his arms were folded, and he glanced around from one to another with grave interest They were all listening, when Ray came in, to a young man who was upholding the single-tax theory, with confidence and with eagerness, as something which, in its operation, would release the individual energies to free play and to real competition. Hughes broke in upon him:

“That is precisely what I object to in your theory. I don’t want that devil released. Competition is the Afreet that the forces of civilization have bottled up after a desperate struggle, and he is always making fine promises of what he will do for you if you will let him out. The fact is he will do nothing but mischief, because that is his nature. He is Beelzebub, he is Satan; in the Miltonic fable he attempted to compete with the Almighty for the rule of heaven; and the fallen angels have been taking the consequence ever since. Monopoly is the only prosperity. Where competition is there can be finally nothing but disaster and defeat for one side or another. That is self-evident Nothing succeeds till it begins to be a monopoly. This holds good from the lowest to the highest endeavor — from the commercial to the aesthetic, from the huckster to the artist. As long, for instance, as an author is young and poor” — Ray felt, looking down, that the speaker’s eye turned on him—” he must compete, and his work must be deformed by the struggle; when it becomes known that he alone can do his kind of work, he monopolizes and prospers in the full measure of his powers; and he realizes his ideal unrestrictedly. Competition enslaves, monopoly liberates. We must, therefore, have the greatest possible monopoly; one that includes the whole people economically as they are now included politically. Try to think of competition in the political administration as we now have it in the industrial. It isn’t thinkable! Or, yes! They do have it in those Eastern countries where the taxes are farmed to the highest bidder, and the taxpayer’s life is ground out of him.”

“I think,” said the school-masterly-looking man, “we all feel this instinctively. The trusts and the syndicates are doing our work for us as rapidly as we could ask.”

A voice, with a German heaviness of accent, came from one of the foreigners. “But they are not doing it for our sake, and they mean to stop distinctly short of the whole-people trust. As far back as Louis Napoleon’s rise we were expecting the growth of the corporate industries to accomplish our purposes for us. But between the corporation and the collectivity there is a gulf — a chasm that has never yet been passed.”

“We must bridge it!” cried Hughes.

A young man, with a clean-cut, English intonation, asked, “Why not fill it up with capitalists?”

“No,” said Hughes, “our cause should recognize no class as enemies.”

“I don’t think it matters much to them whether we recognize them or not, if we let them have their own way,” said the young man, whose cockney origin betrayed itself in an occasional vowel and aspirate.

“We shall not let them have their own way unless it is the way of the majority, too,” Hughes returned.

“From my point of view they are simply and purely a part of the movement, as entirely so as the proletariat.”

“The difficulty will be to get them to take your point of view,” the young man suggested.

“It isn’t necessary they should,” Hughes answered, “though some of them do already. Several of the best friends of our cause are capitalists; and there are numbers of moneyed people who believe in the nationalization of the telegraphs, railroads, and expresses.”

“Those are merely the first steps,” urged the young man, “which may lead now’ere.”

“They are the first steps,” said Hughes, “and they are not to be taken over the bodies of men. We must advance together as brothers, marching abreast, to the music of our own heart-beats.”

“Good!” said Kane. Ray did not know whether he said it ironically or not. It made the short-haired girl turn round and look at him where he sat behind her.

“We, in Russia,” said another of the foreign-looking people, “have seen the futility of violence. The only force that finally prevails is love; and we must employ it with those that can feel it best — with the little children. The adult world is hopeless; but with the next generation We may do something — everything. The highest office is the teacher’s, but we must become as little children if we would teach them, who are of the kingdom of heaven. We must begin by learning of them.”

“It appears rather complicated,” said the young Englishman, gayly; and Ray heard Kane choke off a laugh into a kind of snort.

“Christ said He came to call sinners to repentance,” said the man who would have been the better for benzining. “He evidently thought there was some hope of grown-up people if they would cease to do evil.”

“And several of the disciples were elderly men,” the short-haired girl put in.

“Our Russian friend’s idea seems to be a version of our Indian policy,” said Kane. “Good adults, dead adults.”

“No, no. You don’t understand, all of you,” the Russian began, but Hughes interrupted him.

“How would you deal with the children?”

“In communities here, at the heart of the trouble, and also in the West, where they could be easily made self-supporting.”

“I don’t believe in communities,” said Hughes. “If anything in the world has thoroughly failed, it is communities. They have failed all the more lamentably when they have succeeded financially, because that sort of success comes from competition with the world outside. A community is an aggrandized individual; it is the extension of the egoistic motive to a large family, which looks out for its own good against other families, just as a small family does. I have had enough of communities. The family we hope to found must include all men who are willing to work; it must recognize no aliens except the drones, and the drones must not be suffered to continue. They must either cease to exist by going to work, or by starving to death. But this great family — the real human family — must be no agglutinated structure, no mere federation of trades-unions; it must be a natural growth from indigenous stocks, which will gradually displace individual and corporate enterprises by pushing its roots and its branches out under and over them, till they have no longer earth or air to live in. It will then slowly possess itself of the whole field of production and distribution.”

“Very slowly,” said the young Englishman; and he laughed.

The debate went on, and it seemed as if there were almost as many opinions as there were people present. At times it interested Ray, at times it bored him; but at all times he kept thinking that if he could get those queer zealots into a book, they would be amusing material, though he shuddered to find himself personally among them. Hughes coughed painfully in the air thickened with many breaths, and the windows had to be opened for him; then the rush of the elevated trains filled the room, and the windows were shut again. After one of these interludes, Ray was aware of Hughes appealing to some one in the same tone in which he had asked him to go and send in his whiskey and milk; he looked up, and saw that Hughes was appealing to him.

“Young man, have you nothing to say on all these questions? Is it possible that you have not thought of them?”

Ray was so startled that for a moment he could not speak. Then he said, hardily, but in the frank spirit of the discussion, “No, I have never thought of them at all.”

“It is time you did,” said Hughes. “All other interests must yield to them. We can have no true art, no real literature, no science worthy the name, till the money-stamp of egoism is effaced from success, and it is honored, not paid.”

The others turned and stared at Ray; old Kane arched his eyebrows at him, and made rings of white round his eyes; he pursed his mouth as if he would like to laugh. Ray saw Mrs. Denton put her hand on her mouth; her husband glowered silently; her sister sat with downcast eyes.

Hughes went on: “I find it easier to forgive enmity than indifference; he who is not for us is against us in the worst sense. Our cause has a sacred claim upon all generous and enlightened spirits; they are recreant if they neglect it. But we must be patient, even with indifference; it is hard to bear, but we cannot fight it, and we must bear it. Nothing has astonished me more, since my return to the world, than to find the great mass of men living on, as when I left it, in besotted indifference to the vital interests of the hour. I find the politicians still talking of the tariff, just as they used to talk; low tariff and cheap clothes for the working-man; high tariff and large wages for the working-man. Whether we have high tariff or low, the working-man always wins. But he does not seem to prosper. He is poor; he is badly fed and housed; when he is out of work he starves in his den till he is evicted with a ruthlesness unknown in the history of Irish oppression. Neither party means to do anything for the working-man, and he hasn’t risen himself yet to the conception of anything more philosophical than more pay and fewer hours.”

A sad-faced man spoke from a corner of the room. “We must have time to think, and something to eat to-day. We can’t wait till to-morrow.”

“That is true,” Hughes answered. “Many must perish by the way. But we must have patience.”

His son-in-law spoke up, and his gloomy face darkened. “I have no heart for patience. When I see people perishing by the way, I ask myself how they shall be saved, not some other time, but now. Some one is guilty of the wrong they suffer. How shall the sin be remitted?” His voice shook with fanatical passion.

“We must have patience,” Hughes repeated. “We are all guilty.”

“It would be a good thing,” said the man with a German accent, “if the low-tariff men would really cut off the duties. The high-tariff men don’t put wages up because they have protection, but they would surely put them down if they didn’t have it. Then you would see labor troubles everywhere.”

“Yes,” said Hughes; “but such hopes as that would make me hate the cause, if anything could. Evil that good may come? Never! Always good, and good for evil, that the good may come more and more! We must have the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by laws, and not otherwise.”

The spirit which he rebuked had unlocked the passions of those around him. Ray had a vision of them in the stormy dispute which followed, as waves beating and dashing upon the old man; the head of the bald man was like a buoy among the breakers, as it turned and bobbed about, in his eagerness to follow all that was said.

Suddenly the impulses spent themselves, and a calm succeeded. One of the men looked at his watch; they all rose one after another to go.

Hughes held them a little longer. “I don’t believe the good time is so far off as we are apt to think in our indignation at wrong. It is coming soon, and its mere approach will bring sensible relief. We must have courage and patience.”

Ray and Kane went away together. Mrs. Denton looked at him with demure question in her eyes when they parted; Peace imparted no feeling in her still glance. Hughes took Ray’s little hand in his large, loose grasp, and said:

“Come again, young man; come again!”

XVII.

“If ever I come again,” Ray vowed to himself, when he got into the street, “I think I shall know it!” He abhorred all sorts of social outlandishness; he had always wished to be conformed, without and within, to the great world of smooth respectabilities. If for the present he was willing to Bohemianize a little, it was in his quality of author, and as part of a world-old tradition. To have been mixed up with a lot of howling dervishes like those people was intolerable. He tingled with a sense of personal injury from Hughes’s asking him to take part in their discussion; and he was all the angrier because he could not resent it, even to Kane, on account of that young girl, who could not let him see that it distressed her, too; he felt bound to her by the tie of favor done which he must not allow to become painful.

He knew, as they walked rapidly down the avenue, crazy with the trains hurtling by over the jingling horse-cars and the clattering holiday crowds, that old Kane was seeking out his with eyes brimming with laughter, but he would not look at him, and he would not see any fun in the affair. He would not speak, and he held his tongue the more resolutely because he believed Kane meant to make him speak first.

He had his way; it was Kane who broke the silence, after they left the avenue and struck into one of the cross-streets leading to the Park. Piles of lumber and barrels of cement blocked two-thirds of its space, in front of half-built houses, which yawned upon it from cavernous depths. Boys were playing over the boards and barrels, and on the rocky hill-side behind the houses, where a portable engine stood at Sunday rest, and tall derricks rose and stretched their idle arms abroad. At the top of the hill a row of brown-stone fronts looked serenely down upon the havoc thrown up by the blasting, as if it were a quiet pleasance.

“Amiable prospect, isn’t it?” said Kane. “It looks as if Hughes’s Afreet has got out of his bottle, and had a good time here, holding on for a rise, and then building on spec. But perhaps we oughtn’t to judge of it at this stage, when everything is in transition. Think how beautiful it will be when it is all solidly built up here as it is down-town!” He passed his hand through Ray’s lax arm, and leaned affectionately toward him as they walked on, after a little pause he made for this remark on the scenery. “Well, my dear young friend, what do you think of my dear old friend?”

“Of Mr. Hughes?” Ray asked; and he restrained himself in a pretended question.

“Of Mr. Hughes, and of Mr. Hughes’s friends.” Ray flashed out upon this. “I think his friends are a lot of cranks.”

“Yes; very good; very excellent good! They are a lot of cranks. Are they the first you have met in New York?”

“No; the place seems to be full of them.”

“Beginning with the elderly gentleman whom you met the first morning?”

“Beginning with the young man who met the elderly gentleman.”

Kane smiled with appreciation. “Well, we won’t be harsh on those two. We won’t call them cranks. They are philosophical observers, or inspired dreamers, if you like. As I understand it, we are all dreamers. If we like a man’s dream, we call him a prophet; if we don’t like his dream, we call him a crank. Now, what is the matter with the dreams, severally and collectively, of my dear old friend and his friends? Can you deny that any one of their remedies, if taken faithfully according to the directions blown on the bottle, would cure the world of all its woes inside of six months?”

The question gave Ray a chance to vent his vexation impersonally. “What is the matter with the world?” he burst out. “I don’t see that the world is so very sick. Why isn’t it going on very well? I don’t understand what this talk is all about. I don’t see what those people have got to complain of. All any one can ask is a fair chance to show how much his work is worth, and let the best man win. What’s the trouble? Where’s the wrong?”

“Ah,” said Kane, “what a pity you didn’t set forth those ideas when Hughes called upon you!”

“And have all that crew jump on me? Thank you!” said Ray.

“You would call them a crew, then? Perhaps they were a crew,” said Kane. “I don’t know why a reformer should be so grotesque; but he is, and he is always the easy prey of caricature. I couldn’t help feeling to-day how very like the burlesque reformers the real reformers are. And they are always the same, from generation to generation. For all outward difference, those men and brethren of both sexes at poor David’s were very like a group of old-time abolitionists conscientiously qualifying themselves for tar and feathers. Perhaps you don’t like being spoken to in meeting?”

“No, I don’t,” said Ray, bluntly.

“I fancied a certain reluctance in you at the time, but I don’t think poor David meant any harm. He preaches patience, but I think he secretly feels that he’s got to hurry, if he’s going to have the kingdom of heaven on earth in his time; and he wants every one to lend a hand.”

For the reason, or from the instinct, that forbade Ray to let out his wrath directly against Hughes, he now concealed his pity. He asked stiffly: “Couldn’t he be got into some better place? Where he wouldn’t be stunned when he tried to keep from suffocating?”

“No, I don’t know that he could,” said Kane, with a pensive singleness rare in him. “Any help of that kind would mean dependence, and David Hughes is proud.”

They had passed through lofty ranks of flats, and they now came to the viaduct carrying the northern railways; one of its noble arches opened before them like a city gate, and the viaduct in its massy extent  was like a wall that had stood a hundred sieges. Beyond they found open fields, with the old farm fences of stone still enclosing them, but with the cellars of city blocks dug out of the lots. In one place there was a spread of low sheds, neighbored by towering apartment-houses; some old cart-horses were cropping the belated grass; and comfortable companies of hens and groups of turkeys were picking about the stable-yard; a shambling cottage fronted on the avenue next the park, and drooped behind its dusty, leafless vines.

“He might be got into that,” said Kane, whimsically, “at no increase of rent, and at much increase of comfort and quiet — at least till the Afreet began to get in his work.”

“Wouldn’t it be rather too much like that eremitism which he’s so down on?” asked Ray, with a persistence in his effect of indifference.

“Perhaps it would, perhaps it would,” Kane consented, as they struck across into the Park. The grass was still very green, though here and there a little sallow; the leaves, which had dropped from the trees in the October rains, had lost their fire, and lay dull and brown in the little hollows and at the edges of the paths and the bases of the rocks; the oaks kept theirs, but in death; on some of the ash-trees and lindens the leaves hung in a pale reminiscence of their summer green.

“I understood the son-in-law to want a hermitage somewhere — a co-operative hermitage, I suppose,” Ray went on. He did not feel bound to spare the son-in-law, and he put contempt into his tone.

“Ah, yes,” said Kane. “What did you make of the son-in-law?”

“I don’t know. He’s a gloomy sprite. What is he, anyway? His wife spoke of his work.”

“Why, it’s rather a romantic story, I believe,” said Kane. “He was a young fellow who stopped at the community on his way to a place where he was going to find work; he’s a wood-engraver. I believe he’s always had the notion that the world was out of kilter, and it seems that he wasn’t very well himself when he looked in on the Family to see what they were doing to help it. He fell sick on their hands, and the Hugheses took care of him. Naturally, he married one of them when he got well enough, and naturally he married the wrong one.”

“Why the wrong one?” demanded Ray, with an obscure discomfort.

“Well, I don’t know! But if it isn’t evident to you that Mrs. Denton is hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man” —

Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. “His notion of what the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it would be all serene.”

“Ah, that wouldn’t do,” said Kane. “Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved by them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time.”

“I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago,” said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man’s willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious.

“Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kind — the kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature — the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and seedtime and harvest” —

“The seasons,” Ray broke in scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, “turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street.”

“Ah!” sighed Kane. “That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series of Hard Sayings.”

“Oh, you’re welcome to it!”

“Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author of A New Romeo. Is that what you call it?”

Ray blushed and laughed, and Kane continued:

“It’s a little beyond the fact, but it’s on the lines of truth. I don’t justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that’s why we call her she. But I don’t think that, with all her faults, she’s quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her steadfastness, her orderliness, her obedience, in laying the bases of civilization? We don’t go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come,” Kane broke off, gayly, “let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don’t wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way.” Kane put his arm across Bay’s shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. “Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.”

“Oh, no” — Ray began.

“I didn’t really mean to stay for Hughes’s conventicle,” said Kane. “Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, I couldn’t go. I forgot how repugnant the golden age has always been to the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take you away.”

He laughed, and Kay, more reluctantly, laughed with him.

“I have often wondered,” he went on, “how it is we lose the youthful point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven’t it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don’t suppose you could tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I should recognize that of forty years ago. I” —

He broke off to look at a party of horsemen pelting by on the stretch of the smooth hard road, and dashing into a bridle-path beyond. They were heavy young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard pace.

“Perhaps that is the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the condition of the ideal man to be. There is something,” said Kane, “a little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven’t. I am not in prospective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn’t you come with me? They would be delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty step-daughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for your welcome.”

Ray freed himself. “I’m sorry I can’t go. But I can’t You must excuse me; I really couldn’t; I am very much obliged to you. But” —

“You don’t trust me!”

“Oh, yes, I do. But I don’t feel quite up to meeting people just now; I’ll push on down town. I’m rather tired. Good-by.”

Kane held his hand between both his palms. “I wonder what the real reason is! Is it grudge, or pride, or youth?”

“Neither,” said Ray. “It’s — clothes. My boots are muddy, and I’ve got on my second-best trousers.”

“Ah, now you are frank with me, and you give me a real reason. Perhaps you are right I dare say I should have thought so once.”

XVIII.

RAY did not go to deliver any of his letters that afternoon; he decided now that it would be out of taste to do so on Sunday, as he had already doubted that it would be, in the morning. He passed the afternoon in his room, trying from time to time to reduce the turmoil of his reveries to intelligible terms in verse, and in poetic prose. He did nothing with them; in the end, though, he was aware of a new ideal, and he resolved that if he could get his story back from Chapley & Co., he would rewrite the passages that characterized the heroine, and make it less like the every-day, simple prettiness of his first love. He had always known that this did not suit the character he had imagined; he now saw that it required a more complex and mystical charm. But he did not allow himself to formulate these volitions and perceptions, any more than his conviction that he had now a double reason for keeping away from Mr. Brandreth and from Miss Hughes. He spent the week in an ecstasy of forbearance. On Saturday afternoon he feigned the necessity of going to ask Mr. Brandreth how he thought a novel in verse, treating a strictly American subject in a fantastic way, would succeed. He really wished to learn something without seeming to wish it, about his manuscript, but he called so late in the afternoon that he found Mr. Brandreth putting his desk in order just before starting home. He professed a great pleasure at sight of Ray, and said he wished he would come part of the way home with him; he wanted to have a little talk.

As if the word home had roused the latent forces of hospitality in him, he added, “I want to have you up at my place, some day, as soon as we can get turned round. Mrs. Brandreth is doing first-rate, now; and that boy — well, sir, he’s a perfect Titan. I wish you could see him undressed. He’s just like the figure of the infant Hercules strangling the serpent when he grips the nurse’s finger. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I believe that fellow recognizes me, and distinguishes between me and his mother. I suppose it’s my hat — I come in with my hat on, you know, just to try him; and when he catches sight of that hat, you ought to see his arms go!”

The paternal rhapsodies continued a long time after they were in the street, and Ray got no chance to bring in either his real or pretended business. He listened with mechanical smiles and hollow laughter, alert at the same time for the slightest vantage which Mr. Brandreth should give him. But the publisher said of his own motion:

“Oh, by-the-way, you’ll be interested to know that our readers’ reports on your story are in.”

“Are they?” Ray gasped. He could not get out any more.

Mr. Brandreth went on: “I didn’t examine the reports very attentively myself, but I think they were favorable, on the whole. There were several changes suggested: I don’t recall just what But you can see them all on Monday. We let Miss Hughes go after lunch on Saturdays, and she generally takes some work home with her, and I gave them to her to put in shape for you. I thought it would be rather instructive for you to see the different opinions in the right form. I believe you can’t have too much method in these things.”

“Of course,” said Ray, in an anguish of hope and fear. The street seemed to go round; he hardly knew where he was. He bungled on inarticulately before he could say: “I believe in method, too. But I’m sorry I couldn’t have had the reports to-day, because I might have had Sunday to think the suggestions over, and see what I could do with them.”

“Well, I’m sorry, too. She hadn’t been gone half an hour when you came in. If I’d thought of your happening in! Well, it isn’t very long till Monday! She’ll have them ready by that time. I make it a rule myself to put all business out of my mind from 2 p. M. on Saturday till Monday 9 A. M., and I think you’ll find it an advantage, too. I won’t do business, and I won’t talk business, and I won’t think business after two o’clock on Saturday. I believe in making Sunday a day of rest and family enjoyment We have an early dinner; and then I like to have my wife read or play to me, and now we have in the baby, and that amuses us.”

Ray forced himself to say that as a rule he did not believe in working on Sunday either; he usually wrote letters. He abruptly asked Mr. Brandreth how he thought it would do for him to go and ask Miss Hughes for a sight of the readers’ reports in the rough.

Mr. Brandreth laughed. “You are anxious! Do you know where she lives?”

“Oh, yes; I stopped there last Sunday with Mr. Kane on our way to the Park. I saw Mr. Chapley there.”

“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, with the effect of being arrested by the last fact in something he might otherwise have said. It seemed to make him rather unhappy. “Then you saw Miss Hughes’s father?”

“Yes; and all his friends,” Ray answered, in a way that evidently encouraged Mr. Brandreth to go on.

“Yes? What did you think of them?”

“I thought they were mostly harmless; but one or two of them ought to have been in the violent wards.”

“Did Mr. Chapley meet them?”

“Oh, no; he went away before any of them came in. As Mr. Kane took me, I had to stay with him.”

Mr. Brandreth got back a good deal of his smiling complacency, which had left him at Ray’s mention of Mr. Chapley in connection with Hughes. “Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are old friends.”

“Yes; I understood something of that kind.”

“They date back to the Brook Farm days together.”

“Mr. Hughes is rather too much of the Hollingsworth type for my use,” said Ray. He wished Mr. Brandreth to understand that he had no sympathy with Hughes’s wild-cat philosophy, both because he had none, and because he believed it would be to his interest with Mr. Brandreth to have none.

“I’ve never seen him,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I like Mr. Chapley’s loyalty to his friends — it’s one of his fine traits; but I don’t see any necessity for my taking them up. He goes there every Sunday morning to see Mr. Hughes, and they talk — political economy together. You knew Mr. Chapley has been a good deal interested in this altruistic agitation.”

“No, I didn’t,” said Ray.

“Yes. You can’t very well keep clear of it altogether. I was mixed up in it myself at one time: our summer place is on the outskirts of a manufacturing town in Massachusetts, and we had our Romeo and Juliet for the benefit of a social union for the workpeople; we made over two hundred dollars for them. Mr. Chapley was a George man in’86. Not that he agreed with the George men exactly; but he thought there ought to be some expression against the way things are going. You know a good many of the nicest kind of people went the same way at that time. I don’t object to that kind of thing as long as it isn’t carried too far. Mr. Chapley used to see a good deal of an odd stick of a minister at our summer place that had got some of the new ideas in a pretty crooked kind of shape; and then he’s read Tolstoi a good deal, and he’s been influenced by him. I think Hughes is a sort of safety valve for Mr. Chapley, and that’s what I tell the family. Mr. Chapley isn’t a fool, and he’s always had as good an eye for the main chance as anybody. That’s all.”

Ray divined that Mr. Brandreth would not have entered into this explanation of his senior partner and father-in-law, except to guard against the injurious inferences which he might draw from having met Mr. Chapley at Hughes’s, but he did not let his guess appear in his words. “I don’t wonder he likes Mr. Hughes,” he said. “He’s fine, and he seems a light of sanity and reason among the jack-a-lanterns he gathers round him. He isn’t at all Tolstoian.”

“He’s a gentleman, born and bred,” said Mr. Brandreth, “and he was a rich man for the days before he began his communistic career. And Miss Hughes is a perfect lady. She’s a cultivated girl, too, and she reads a great deal. I’d rather have her opinion about a new book than half the critics’ I know of, because I know I could get it honest, and I know it would be intelligent. Well, if you’re going up there, you’ll want to be getting across to the avenue to take the elevated.” He added, “I don’t mean to give you the impression that we’ve made up our minds about your book, yet. We haven’t. A book is a commercial venture as well as a literary venture, and we’ve got to have a pow-wow about that side of it before we come to any sort of conclusion. You understand?”

“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Ray, “and I’ll try not to be unreasonably hopeful,” but at the same moment his heart leaped with hope.

“Well, that’s right,” said Mr. Brandreth, taking his hand for parting. He held it, and then he said, with a sort of desperate impulse, “By-the-way, why not come home with me, now, and take dinner with us?”

XIX.

RAY’S heart sank. He was so anxious to get at those opinions; and yet he did not like to refuse Mr. Brandreth; a little thing might prejudice the case; he ought to make all the favor at court that he could for his book. “I — I’m afraid it mightn’t be convenient — at such a time — for Mrs. Brandreth” —

“Oh, yes it would,” said Mr. Brandreth in the same desperate note. “Come along. I don’t know that Mrs. Brandreth will be able to see you, but I want you to see my boy; and we can have a bachelor bite together, anyway.”

Ray yielded, and the stories of the baby began again when he moved on with Mr. Brandreth. It was agony for him to wrench his mind from his story, which he kept turning over and over in it, trying to imagine what the readers had differed about, and listen to Mr. Brandreth saying, “Yes, sir, I believe that child knows his grandmother and his nurse apart, as well as he knows his mother and me. He’s got his likes and his dislikes already: he cries whenever his grandmother takes him. By-the-way, you’ll see Mrs. Chapley at dinner, I hope. She’s spending the day with us.”

“Oh, I’m very glad,” said Ray, wondering if the readers objected to his introduction of hypnotism.

“She’s a woman of the greatest character,” said Mr. Brandreth, “but she has some old-fashioned notions about children. I want my boy to be trained as a boy from the very start. I think there’s nothing like a manly man, unless it’s a womanly woman. I hate anything masculine about a girl; a girl ought to be yielding and gentle; but I want my boy to be self-reliant from the word Go. I believe in a man’s being master in his own house; his will ought to be law, and that’s the way I shall bring up my boy. Mrs. Chapley thinks there ought always to be a light in the nurse’s room, but I don’t. I want my boy to get used to the dark, and not be afraid of it, and I shall begin just as soon as I can, without seeming arbitrary. Mrs. Chapley is the best soul in the world, and of course I don’t like to differ with her.”

“Of course,” said Ray. The mention of relationship made him think of the cousin in his story; if he had not had the cousin killed, he thought it would have been better; there was too much bloodshed in the story.

They turned into a cross-street from Lexington Avenue, where they had been walking, and stopped at a pretty little apartment-house, which had its door painted black and a wide brass plate enclosing its key-hole, and wore that air of standing aloof from its neighbors peculiar to private houses with black doors and brass plates.

Mr. Brandreth let himself in with a key. “There are only three families in our house, and it’s like having a house of our own. It’s so much easier living in a flat for your wife, that I put my foot down, and wouldn’t hear of a separate house.”

They mounted the carpeted stairs through the twilight that prevails in such entries, and a sound of flying steps was heard within the door where Mr. Brandreth applied his latch-key again, and as he flung it open a long wail burst upon the ear.

“Hear that?” he asked, with a rapturous smile, as he turned to Ray for sympathy; and then he called gayly out in the direction that the wail came from; “Oh, hello, hello, hello! What’s the matter, what’s the matter? You sit down here,” he said to Ray, leading the way forward into a pretty drawing-room. He caught something away from before the fire. “Confound that nurse! She’s always coming in here in spite of everything. I’ll be with you in a moment. Heigh! What ails the little man?” he called out, and disappeared down the long narrow corridor, and he was gone a good while.

At moments Ray caught the sound of voices in hushed, but vehement dispute; a door slammed violently; there were murmurs of expostulation. At last Mr. Brandreth reappeared with his baby in his arms, and its nurse at his heels, twitching the infant’s long robe into place.

“What do you think of that?” demanded the father, and Ray got to his feet and came near, so as to be able to see if he could think anything.

By an inspiration he was able to say, “Well, he is a great fellow!” and this apparently gave Mr. Brandreth perfect satisfaction. His son’s downy little oblong skull wagged feebly on his weak neck, his arms waved vaguely before his face.

“Now give him your finger, and see if he won’t do the infant Hercules act.”

Ray promptly assumed the part of the serpent, but the infant Hercules would not open his tightly-clinched, wandering fist.

“Try the other one,” said his father; and Ray tried the other one with no more effect. “Well, he isn’t in the humor; he’ll do it for you some time. All right, little man!” He gave the baby, which had acquitted itself with so much distinction, back into the arms of its nurse, and it was taken away.

“Sit down, sit down!” he said, cheerily. “Mrs. Chapley will be in directly. It’s astonishing,” he said, with a twist of his head in the direction the baby had been taken, “but I believe those little things have their moods just like any of us. That fellow knows as well as you do, when he’s wanted to show off, and if he isn’t quite in the key for it, he won’t do it I wish I had tried him with my hat, and let you see how he notices.”

Mr. Brandreth went on with anecdotes, theories, and moral reflections relating to the baby, and Ray answered with praiseful murmurs and perfunctory cries of wonder. He was rescued from a situation which he found more and more difficult by the advent of Mrs. Chapley, and not of Mrs. Chapley alone, but of Mrs. Brandreth. She greeted Ray with a certain severity, which he instinctively divined was not so much for him as for her husband. A like quality imparted itself, but not so authoritatively, from her mother; if Mr. Brandreth was not master in his house, at least his mother-in-law was not Mrs. Brandreth went about the room and made some housekeeperly rearrangements of its furniture, which had the result of reducing it, as it were, to discipline. Then she eat down, and Ray, whom she waited to have speak first, had a feeling that she was sitting in judgment on him, and the wish, if possible, to justify himself. He began to praise the baby, its beauty, and great size, and the likeness he professed to find in it to its father.

Mrs. Brandreth relented slightly. She said, with magnanimous impartiality, “It’s a very healthy child.” Her mother made the reservation, “But even healthy children are a great care,” and sighed.

The daughter must have found this intrusive. “Oh, I don’t know that Percy is any great care as yet, mamma.”

“He pays his way,” Mr. Brandreth suggested, with a radiant smile. “At least,” he corrected himself, “we shouldn’t know what to do without him.”

His wife said, drily, as if the remark were in bad taste, “It’s hardly a question of that, I think. Have you been long in New York, Mr. Ray?” she asked, with an abrupt turn to him.

“Only a few weeks,” Ray answered, inwardly wondering how he could render the fact propitiatory.

“Everything is very curious and interesting to me as a country person,” he added, deciding to make this sacrifice of himself.

It evidently availed somewhat. “But you don’t mean that you are really from the country?” Mrs. Brandreth asked.

“I’m from Midland; and I suppose that’s the country, compared with New York.”

Mrs. Chapley asked him if he knew the Mayquayts there. He tried to think of some people of that name; in the meantime she recollected that the Mayquayts were from Gitchigumee, Michigan. They talked some irrelevancies, and then she said, “Mr. Brandreth tells me you have met my husband,” as if they had been talking of him.

“Yes; I had that pleasure even before I met Mr. Brandreth,” said Ray.

“And you know Mr. Kane?”

“Oh, yes. He was the first acquaintance I made in New York.”

“Mr. Brandreth told me.” Mrs. Chapley made a show of laughing at the notion of Kane, as a harmless eccentric, and she had the effect of extending her kindly derision to Hughes, in saying, “And you’ve been taken to sit at the feet of his prophet already, Mr. Brandreth tells me; that strange Mr. Hughes.”

“I shouldn’t have said he was Mr. Kane’s prophet exactly,” said Ray with a smile of sympathy. “Mr. Kane doesn’t seem to need a prophet; but I’ve certainly seen Mr. Hughes. And heard him, for that matter.”

He smiled, recollecting his dismay when he heard Hughes calling upon him in meeting. He had a notion to describe his experience, and she gave him the chance.

“Yes?” she said, with veiled anxiety. “Do tell me about him!”

At the end of Ray’s willing compliance, she drew a deep breath, and said, “Then he is not a follower of Tolstoï?”

“Quite the contrary, I should say.”

Mrs. Chapley laughed more easily. “I didn’t know but he made shoes that nobody could wear. I couldn’t imagine what other attraction he could have for my husband. I believe he would really like to go into the country and work in the fields.” Mrs. Chapley laughed away a latent anxiety, apparently, in making this joke about her husband, and seemed to feel much better acquainted with Ray. “How are they living over there? What sort of family has Mr. Hughes?

I mean, besides the daughter we know of?”

Ray told, as well as he could, and he said they were living in an apartment.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Chapley, “I fancied a sort of tenement.”

“By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, “wouldn’t you like to see our apartment, Mr. Ray” — his wife quelled him with a glance, and he added,—” some time?”

Ray said he should, very much.

Mrs. Brandreth, like her mother, had been growing more and more clement, and now she said, “Won’t you stay and take a family dinner with us, Mr. Ray?”

Ray looked at her husband, and saw that he had not told her of the invitation he had already given. He did not do so now, and Ray rose and seized his opportunity. He thanked Mrs. Brandreth very earnestly, and said he was so sorry he had an appointment to keep, and he got himself away at once.

Mrs. Chapley hospitably claimed him for her Thursdays, at parting; and Mrs. Brandreth said he must let Mr. Brandreth bring him some other day; they would always be glad to see him.

Mr. Brandreth went down to the outer door with him, to make sure that he found the way, and said, “Then you will come some time?” and gratefully wrung his hand. “I saw how anxious you were about those opinions!”

XX.

WITH an impatience whose intensity he began to feel as soon as he permitted himself to indulge it, Ray hurried across to the line of the elevated road. Now he perceived how intolerable it would be to have staid to dinner with the Brandreths. He did not resent the failure of Mr. Brandreth to tell his wife that he had already asked him when she asked him again; he did not even care to know what his reasons or exigencies were; the second invitation had been a chance to get away. From time to time while Mr. Brandreth was showing him the baby, and then while Mrs. Chapley was setting her mind at rest about her husband by her researches into the philosophy and character of Hughes, he had superficially forgotten that the readers’ opinions of his story were in, while his nether thought writhed in anguish around the question of what their opinions were. When at moments this fully penetrated his consciousness, it was like a sort of vertigo, and he was lightheaded with it now as he walked, or almost ran, away from Mr. Brandreth’s door. He meant to see Miss Hughes, and beg for a sight of the criticisms; perhaps she might say something that would save him from the worst, if they were very bad. He imagined a perfect interview, in which he met no one but her.

It was Mrs. Denton who stood at the head of the stairs to receive him when the door promptly opened to his ring; she explained that her husband had put the lock in order since she last admitted him. Ray managed to say that he wished merely to see her sister for a moment, and why, and she said that Peace had gone out, but would be at home again very soon. She said her father would be glad to have him sit down with him till Peace came back.

Ray submitted. He found the old man coughing beside the front window, that looked out on the lines of the railroad, and the ugly avenue beneath.

Hughes knew him at once, and called to him: “Well, young man! I am glad to see you! How do you do?” He held out his hand when he was seated, and when Ray had shaken it, he motioned with it to the vacant chair on the other side of the window.

“I hope you are well, sir?” said Ray.

“I’m getting the better of this nasty cough gradually, and I pick up a little new strength every day. Yes, I’m doing very well. For the present I have to keep housed, and that’s tiresome. But it gives me time for a bit of writing that I have in hand; I’m putting together the impressions that this civilization of yours makes on me, in a little book that I call The World Revisited.”

Ray did not see exactly why Hughes should say his civilization, as if he had invented it; but he did not disclaim it; and Hughes went on without interruption from him.

“I hope to get my old friend Chapley to bring it out for me, if I can reconcile him to its radical opinions. He’s timid, Chapley is; and my book’s rather bold.”

Ray’s thought darted almost instantly to his own book, and ran it over in every part, seeking whether there might be something in it that was too bold for a timid publisher, or a timid publisher’s professional readers. He was aware of old Hughes monologuing on with the satisfaction of an author who speaks of his work to a listener he has at his mercy.

“My book is a criticism of modern life in all its aspects, though necessarily as the field is so vast, I can touch on some only in the most cursory fashion. For instance, take this whole architectural nightmare that we call a city. I hold that the average tasteless man has no right to realize his ideas of a house in the presence of a great multitude of his fellow-beings. It is an indecent exposure of his mind, and should not be permitted. All these structural forms about us, which with scarcely an exception are ugly and senseless, I regard as so many immoralities, as deliriums, as imbecilities, which a civilized state would not permit, and I say so in my book. The city should build the city, and provide every denizen with a fit and beautiful habitation to work in and rest in.”

“I’m afraid,” said Ray, tearing his mind from his book to put it on this proposition, “that such an idea might be found rather startling.”

“How, startling? Why, startling?” Hughes demanded.

“I don’t know. Wouldn’t it infringe upon private rights? Wouldn’t it be a little tyrannical?”

“What private rights has a man in the outside of his house” Hughes retorted. “The interior might be left to his ignorance and vulgarity. But the outside of my house is not for me! It’s for others! The public sees it ten times where I see it once. If I make it brutal and stupid, I am the tyrant, I am the oppressor — I, the individual! Besides, when the sovereign people is really lord of itself, it can and will do no man wrong.”

Ray had his misgivings, but he would not urge them, because it was a gnawing misery to think of anything but his story, and he let Hughes break the silence that he let follow.

“And so,” the old man said presently, as if speaking of his own book had reminded him of Ray’s, “you have written a novel, young man. And what is your justification for writing a novel at a time like this, when we are all trembling on the verge of a social cataclysm?”

“Justification?” Ray faltered.

“Yes. How does it justify itself? How does it serve God and help man? Does it dabble with the passion of love between a girl and boy as if that were the chief concern of men and women? Or does it touch some of the real concerns of life — some of the problems pressing on to their solution, and needing the prayerful attention of every human creature?”

“It isn’t merely a love-story,” said Ray, glad to get to it on any terms, “though it is a love-story. But I’ve ventured to employ a sort of psychological motive.”

“What sort?”

“Well — hypnotism.”

“A mere toy, that Poe and Hawthorne played with in the old mesmerist days, and I don’t know how many others.”

“I don’t play with it as they did, exactly,” said Ray.

“Oh, I’ve no doubt you employ it to as new effect as the scientifics who are playing with it again. But how can you live in this camp of embattled forces, where luxury and misery are armed against each other, and every lover of his kind should give heart and brain to the solution of the riddle that is maddening brother against brother, — how can you live on here and be content with the artistic study of hysteria?”

The strong words of the old man, which fell tingling with emotion, had no meaning for the soul of youth in Ray; he valued them aesthetically, but he could not make personal application of them. He had a kind of amusement in answering: “Well, I’m not quite so bad as you think, Mr. Hughes. I wrote my story several years ago. I don’t suppose I could do anything of the kind, now.”

Hughes’s mouth seemed stopped for the moment by this excuse. He sat glaring at Ray’s bright, handsome face through his overhanging, shaggy eyebrows, and seemed waiting to gather strength for another onset, when his daughter Peace came silently into the room behind Ray.

Her father did not give her time to greet their visitor. “Well,” he called out with a voice of stormy pathos, “how did you leave that poor woman?”

“She is dead,” answered the girl.

“Good!” said Hughes. “So far, so good. Who is living?”

“There are several children. The people in the house are taking care of them.”

“Of course! There, young man,” said Hughes, “is a psychological problem better worth your study than the phenomena of hypnotism: the ability of poverty to provide for want out of its very destitution. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is wrought here every day in the great tenement-houses. Those who have nothing for themselves can still find something for others. The direst want may be trusted to share its crust with those who have not a crust; and still something remains, as if Christ had blessed the bread and broken it among the famishing. Don’t you think that an interesting and romantic fact, a mystery meriting the attention of literary art?”

It did strike Ray as a good notion; something might be done with it, say in a Christmas story, if you could get hold of a tenement-house incident of that kind, and keep it from becoming allegorical in the working out.

This went through Ray’s mind as he stood thinking also how he should ask the girl for his manuscript and the criticisms on it without seeming foolishly eager. Her father’s formidable intervention had dispensed him from the usual greetings, and he could only say, “Oh! Miss Hughes, Mr. Brandreth told me I might come and get my story of you — A Modern Romeo — and the readers’ opinions. I — I thought I should like to look them over; and — and” —

“I haven’t had time to copy them yet,” she answered. “Mr. Brandreth wished you to see them; but we keep the readers anonymous, and he thought I had better show them to you all in my handwriting.”

“I shouldn’t know the writers. He said I could see them as they are.”’

“Well, then, I will go and get them for you,” she answered. She left him a moment, and he remained with her father unmolested. The old man sat staring out on the avenue, with his head black against its gathering lights.

She gave him the packet she brought back with her, and then she followed him out of the apartment upon the landing, after he had made his acknowledgments and adieux.

“I thought,” she said, timidly, “you would like to know that I had given your dollar for these poor children. Was that right?”

Ray’s head was so full of his story that he answered vaguely, “My dollar?” Then he remembered. “Oh! Oh yes! It was right — quite right! I’m glad you did it. Miss Hughes! Excuse me; but would you mind telling me whether you have happened to look at the story yourself?”

She hesitated, and then answered: “Yes, I’ve read it.”

“Oh, then,” he bubbled out, knowing that he was wrong and foolish, but helpless to refrain, “before I read those things, won’t you tell me — I should care more — I should like so much to know what you — I suppose I’ve no right to ask!”

He tried to make some show of decency about the matter, but in fact he had the heart to ask a dying man his opinion, in that literary passion which spares nothing, and is as protean as love itself in its disguises.

“I suppose,” she answered, “that I had no right to read it; I wasn’t asked to do it.”

“Oh, yes, you had. I’m very glad you did.”

“The opinions about it were so different that I couldn’t help looking at it, and then — I kept on,” she said.

“Were they so very different?” he asked, trembling with his author’s sensitiveness, while the implication of praise in her confession worked like a frenzied hope in his brain. “And you kept on? Then it interested you?”

She did not answer this question, but said: “None of them thought just alike about it. But you’ll see them” —

“No, no! Tell me what you thought of it yourself! Was there some part that seemed better than the rest?”

She hesitated. “No, I would rather not say. I oughtn’t to have told you I had read it.”

“You didn’t like it!”

“Yes; I did like parts of it. But I musn’t say any more.”

“But what parts?” he pleaded.

“You mustn’t ask me. The readers’ opinions” —

“I don’t care for them. I care for your opinion,” said Ray, perversely. “What did you mean by their being all different? Of course, I’m absurd! But you don’t know how much depends upon this book. It isn’t that it’s the only book I expect ever to write; but if it should be rejected! I’ve had to wait a long while already; and then to have to go peddling it around among the other publishers! Do you think that it’s hopelessly bad, or could I make it over? What did you dislike in it? Didn’t you approve of the hypnotism? That was the only thing I could think of to bring about the climax. And did it seem too melodramatic? Romeo and Juliet is melodramatic! I hope you won’t think I’m usually so nervous about my work,” he went on, wondering that he should be giving himself away so freely, when he was really so reserved. “I’ve been a long time writing the story; and I’ve worked over it and worked over it, till I’ve quite lost the sense of it I don’t believe I can make head or tail of those opinions. That’s the reason why I wanted you to tell me what you thought of it yourself.”

“But I have no right to do that It would be interfering with other people’s work. It wouldn’t be fair towards Mr. Brandreth,” she pleaded.

“I see. I didn’t see that before. And you’re quite right, and I beg your pardon. Good-night!”

He put his manuscript on the seat in the elevated train, and partly sat upon it, that he might not forget it when he left the car. But as he read the professional opinions of it he wished the thing could lose him, and never find him again. No other novel, he thought, could ever have had such a variety of certain faults, together with the vague merit which each of its critics seemed to feel in greater measure or less. Their work, he had to own, had been faithfully done; he had not even the poor consolation of accusing them of a neglect of duty. They had each read his story, and they spoke of it with intelligence in a way, if not every way. Each condemned it on a different ground, but as it stood they all joined in condemning it; and they did not so much contradict one another as dwell on different defects; so that together they covered the whole field with their censure. One of them reproached it for its crude realism, and the sort of helpless fidelity to provincial conditions which seemed to come from the author’s ignorance of anything different. Another blamed the youthful romanticism of its dealings with passion. A third pointed out the gross improbability of the plot in our modern circumstance. A fourth objected to the employment of hypnotism as a clumsy piece of machinery, and an attempt to reach the public interest through a prevailing fad. A fifth touched upon the obvious imitation of Hawthorne in the psychical analyses. A sixth accused the author of having adopted Thackeray’s manner without Thackeray’s material.

Kay resented, with a keen sense of personal affront, these criticisms in severalty, but their combined effect was utter humiliation, though they were less true taken together than they were separately. At the bottom of his sore and angry heart he could not deny their truth, and yet he knew that there was something in his book which none of them had taken account of, and that this was its life, which had come out of his own. He was aware of all those crude and awkward and affected things, but he believed there was something, too, that went with them, and that had not been in fiction before.

It was this something which he hoped that girl had felt in his story, and which he was trying to get her to own to him before he looked at the opinions. They confounded and distracted him beyond his foreboding even, and it was an added anguish to keep wondering, as he did all night, whether she had really found anything more in the novel than his critics had. As he turned from side to side and beat his pillow into this shape and that, he reconstructed the story after one critic’s suggestion, and then after another’s; but the material only grew more defiant and impossible; if it could not keep the shape it had, it would take no other. That was plain; and the only thing to be done was to throw it away, and write something else; for it was not reasonable to suppose that Mr. Brandreth would think of bringing the book out in the teeth of all these adverse critics. But now he had no heart to think of anything else, although he was always thinking of something else, while there was hope of getting this published. His career as an author was at an end; he must look about for some sort of newspaper work; he ought to be very glad if he could get something to do as a space man.

XXI.

HE rose, after a late nap following his night-long vigils, with despair in his soul. He believed it was despair, and so it was to all intents and purposes. But, when he had bathed, he seemed to have washed a little of his despair away; when he had dressed, he felt hungry, and he ate his breakfast with rather more than his usual appetite.

The reaction was merely physical, and his gloom settled round him again when he went back to his attic and saw his manuscript and those deadly opinions. He had not the heart to go out anywhere, and he cowered alone in his room. If he could only get the light of some other mind on the facts he might grapple with them; but without this he was limp and helpless. Now he knew, in spite of all his pretences to the contrary, in spite of the warnings and cautions he had given himself, that he had not only hoped, but had expected, that his story would be found good enough to publish. Yet none of these readers — even those who found some meritorious traits in it — had apparently dreamed of recommending it for publication. It was no wonder that Miss Hughes had been so unwilling to tell him what she thought of it; that she had urged him so strongly to read the opinions first What a fool she must have thought him!

There was no one else he could appeal to, unless it was old Kane. He did not know where Kane lived, even if he could have gathered the courage to go to him in his extremity; and he bet himself that Kane would not repeat his last Sunday’s visit The time for any reasonable hope of losing passed, and then to his great joy he lost There came a hesitating step outside his door, as if some one were in doubt where to knock, and then a tap at it.

Ray flung it open, and at sight of Kane the tears came into his eyes, and he could not speak.

“Why, my dear friend!” cried Kane, “what is the matter?”

Ray kept silent till he could say coldly, “Nothing. It’s all over.”

Kane stepped into the room, and took off his hat. “If you haven’t been rejected by the object of your affections, you have had the manuscript of your novel declined. These are the only things that really bring annihilation. I think the second is worse. A man is never so absolutely and solely in love with one woman but he knows some other who is potentially lovable; that is the wise provision of Nature. But while a man has a manuscript at a publisher’s, it is the only manuscript in the world. You can readily work out the comparison. I hope you have merely been disappointed in love, my dear boy.”

Ray smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid it’s worse.”

“Then Chapley & Co have declined your novel definitely?”

“Not in set terms; or not yet But their readers have all reported against it, and I’ve passed the night in reading their opinions. I’ve got them by heart Would you like to hear me repeat them?” he demanded, with a fierce self-scorn.

Kane looked at him compassionately. “Heaven forbid! I could repeat them, I dare say, as accurately as you; the opinions of readers do not vary much, and I have had many novels declined.”

“Have you?” Ray faltered with compunction for his arrogation of all such suffering to himself.

“Yes. That was one reason why I began to write Hard Sayings. But if you will let me offer you another leaf from my experience, I will suggest that there are many chances for reprieve and even pardon after the readers have condemned your novel. I once had a novel accepted — the only novel I ever had accepted — after all the publisher’s readers had pronounced against it.”

“Had you?” Ray came tremulously back at him.

“Yes,” sighed Kane. “That is why Chapley is so fond of me; he has forgiven me a deadly injury.” He paused to let his words carry Ray down again, and then he asked, with a nod toward the bed where the young fellow had flung his manuscript and the readers’ opinions, “Might I?”

“Oh, certainly,” said Ray from his depths; and Kane took up the opinions and began to run them over.

“Yes, they have a strangely familiar effect; they are like echoes from my own past.” He laid them down again. “Do you think they are right?”

“Yes. Perfectly! That is” —

“Oh! That is. There is hope, I see.”

“How, hope?” Ray retorted. “Does my differing with them make any difference as to the outcome?”

“For the book, no, perhaps; for you, yes, decidedly. It makes all the difference between being stunned and being killed. It is not pleasant to be stunned, but it is not for such a long time as being killed. What is your story about?”

It astonished Ray himself to find how much this question revived his faith and courage. His undying interest in the thing, by and for itself, as indestructible as a mother’s love, revived, and he gave Kane the outline of his novel. Then he filled this in, and he did not stop till he had read some of the best passages. He suddenly tossed his manuscript from him. “What a fool I am!”

Kane gave his soft, thick laugh, shutting his eyes, and showing his small white teeth, still beautifully sound. “Oh, no! Oh, no! I have read worse things than that! I have written worse than that. Come, come! Here is nothing to beat the breast for. I doubt if Chapley’s will take it, in defiance of their readers; their experience with me has rendered that very improbable. But they are not the only publishers in New York, or Philadelphia even; I’m told they have very eager ones in Chicago. Why shouldn’t the roman psychologique, if that’s the next thing, as Mr. Brandreth believes, get on its legs at Chicago, and walk East?”

“I wonder,” Ray said, rising aimlessly from his chair, “whether it would do to call on Mr. Brandreth to-day? This suspense — Do you know whether he is very religious?”

“How should I know such a thing of my fellow-man in New York? I don’t know it even of myself. At times I am very religious, and at times, not. But Mr. Brandreth is rather a formal little man, and a business interview on Sunday, with an agonized author, might not seem exactly decorous to him.”

“I got the impression he wasn’t very stiff. But it wouldn’t do,” said Ray, before Kane had rounded his neat period. “What an ass I am!”

“We are all asses,” Kane sighed. “It is the great bond of human brotherhood. When did you get these verdicts?”

“Oh, Mr. Brandreth told me Miss Hughes had taken them home with her yesterday, and I couldn’t rest till I had his leave to go and get them of her.”

“Exactly. If we know there is possible unhappiness in store for us, we don’t wait for it; we make haste and look it up, and embrace it. And how did my dear old friend Hughes, if you saw him, impress you this time?”

“I saw him, and I still prefer him to his friends,” said Bay.

“Naturally. There are not many people, even in a planet so overpeopled as this, who are the peers of David Hughes. He goes far to make me respect my species. Of course he is ridiculous. A man so hopeful as Hughes is the reductio ad absurdum of the human proposition. How can there reasonably be hope in a world where poverty and death are? To be sure, Hughes proposes to eliminate poverty and explain death. You know he thinks — he really believes, I suppose — that if he could once get his millenium going, and everybody so blessed in this life that the absolute knowledge of heavenly conditions in another would not tempt us to suicide, then the terror and the mystery of death would be taken away, and the race would be trusted with its benificent meaning. It’s rather a pretty notion.”

Ray, with his narrow experience, would not have been able to grasp it fully. Now he broke out without the least relevancy to it, “I wonder how it would do to remodel my story so far as to transfer the scene to New York? It might be more popular.” The criticism that one of those readers had made on the helplessness of his fidelity to simple rustic conditions had suddenly begun to gall him afresh. “I beg your pardon. I didn’t notice what you were saying! I can’t get my mind off that miserable thing!”

Kane laughed. “Oh, don’t apologize. I know how it is. Perhaps a change of scene would be good; it’s often advised, you know.” He laughed again, and Ray with him, ruefully, and now he rose.

“Oh, must you go?” Ray entreated.

“Yes. You are best alone; when we are in pain we are alone, anyway. If misery loves company, company certainly does not love misery. I can stand my own troubles, but not other people’s. Good-by! We will meet again when you are happier.”

XXII.

Mr. BRANDRETH tried hard to escape from the logic of his readers’ opinions. In the light of his friendly optimism they took almost a favorable cast. He argued that there was nothing absolutely damnatory in those verdicts, that they all more or less tacitly embodied a recommendation to mercy. So far his personal kindliness carried him, but beyond this point business put up her barrier. He did not propose to take the book in spite of his readers; he said he would see; and after having seen for a week longer, he returned the MS. with a letter assuring Ray of his regret, and saying that if he could modify the story according to the suggestions of their readers, Chapley & Co would be pleased to examine it again.

Ray had really expected some such answer as this, though he hoped against reason for something different. In view of it he had spent the week mentally recasting the story in this form and in that; sometimes it yielded to his efforts in one way or another; when the manuscript came into his hands again, he saw that it was immutably fixed in the terms he had given it, and that it must remain essentially what it was, in spite of any external travesty.

He offered Mr. Brandreth his thanks and his excuses for not trying to make any change in it until he had first offered it as it was to other publishers. He asked if it would shut him out of Chapley & Co.’s grace if he were refused elsewhere, and received an answer of the most flattering cordiality to the effect that their desire to see the work in another shape was quite unconditioned. Mr. Brandreth seemed to have put a great deal of heart in this answer; it was most affectionately expressed; it closed with the wish that he might soon see Ray at his house again.

Ray could not have believed, but for the experience which came to him, that there could be so many reasons for declining to publish any one book as the different publishers now gave him. For the most part they deprecated the notion of even looking at it The book-trade had never been so prostrate before; events of the most unexpected nature had conspired to reduce it to a really desperate condition. The unsettled state of Europe had a good deal to do with it; the succession of bad seasons at the West affected it most distinctly. The approach of a Presidential year was unfavorable to this sensitive traffic. Above all, the suspense created by the lingering and doubtful fate of the international copyright bill was playing havoc with it; people did not know what course to take; it was impossible to plan any kind of enterprise, or to risk any sort of project Men who had been quite buoyant in regard to the bill seemed carried down to the lowest level of doubt as to its fate by the fact that Ray had a novel to offer them; they could see no hope for American fiction, if that English trash was destined to flood the market indefinitely. They sympathized with him, but they said they were all in the same boat, and that the only thing was to bring all the pressure each could to bear upon Congress. The sum of their counsel and condolence came to the effect in Ray’s mind that his best hope was to get A Modern Romeo printed by Congress as a Public Document and franked by the Senators and Representatives to their constituents. He found a melancholy amusement in noting the change in the mood of those who used to meet him cheerfully and carelessly as the correspondent of a newspaper, and now found themselves confronted with an author, and felt his manuscript at their throats. Some tried to joke; some became helplessly serious; some sought to temporize.

Those whose circumstances and engagements forbade them even to look at his novel were the easiest to bear with. They did not question the quality or character of his work; they had no doubt of its excellence, and they had perfect faith in its success; but simply their hands were so full they could not touch it The other sort, when they consented to examine the story, kept it so long that Ray could not help forming false hopes of the outcome; or else they returned it with a precipitation that mortified his pride, and made him sceptical of their having looked into it at all. He did not experience unconditional rejection everywhere. In some cases the readers proposed radical and impossible changes, as Chapley & Co.’s readers had done. In one instance they so far recommended it that the publisher was willing to lend his imprint and manage the book for the per cent usually paid to authors, if Ray would meet all the expenses. There was an enthusiast who even went so far as to propose that he would publish it if Ray would pay the cost of the electrotype plates. He appeared to think this a handsome offer, and Ray in fact found it so much better than nothing that he went into some serious estimates upon it. He called in the help of old Kane, who was an expert in the matter of electrotyping, and was able from his sad experience to give him the exact figures. They found that A New Romeo would make some four hundred and thirty or forty pages, and that at the lowest price the plates would cost more than three hundred dollars. The figure made Ray gasp; the mere thought of it impoverished him. His expenses had already eaten a hundred dollars into his savings beyond the five dollars a week he had from the Midland Echo for his letters. If he paid out this sum for his plates, he should now have some ninety dollars left.

“But then,” said Kane, arching his eyebrows, “the trifling sum of three hundred dollars, risked upon so safe a venture as A New Romeo, will probably result in riches beyond the dreams of avarice.”

“Yes: or it may result in total loss,” Ray returned.

“It is a risk. But what was it you have been asking all these other people to do? One of them turns and asks you to share the risk with him; he asks you to risk less than half on a book that you have written yourself, and he will risk the other half. What just ground have you for refusing his generous offer?”

“It isn’t my business to publish books; it’s my business to write them,” said Ray, coldly.

“Ah-h-h! Very true! That is a solid position. Then all you have to do to make it quite impregnable is to write such books that other men will be eager to take all the risks of publishing them. It appears that in the present case you omitted to do that.” Kane watched Ray’s face with whimsical enjoyment. “I was afraid you were putting your reluctance upon the moral ground, and that you were refusing to bet on your book because you thought it wrong to bet.”

“I’m afraid,” said Ray, dejectedly, “that the moral question didn’t enter with me. If people thought it wrong to make bets of that kind, it seems to me that all business would come to a standstill.”

“‘Sh!” said Kane, putting his finger to his lip, and glancing round with burlesque alarm. “This is open incivism. It is accusing the whole framework of commercial civilization. Go on; it’s delightful to hear you; but don’t let any one overhear you.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Ray, with sullen resentment, “about incivism. I’m saying what everybody knows.”

“Ah! But what everybody knows is just what nobody says. If people said what they knew, society would tumble down like a house of cards.”

Ray was silent, far withdrawn from these generalities into his personal question.

Kane asked compassionately, “Then you think you can’t venture — risk — chance it? Excuse me! I was trying to find a euphemism for the action, but there seems none!”

“No; I daren’t do it! The risk is too great.”

“That seems to be the consensus of the book trade concerning it. Perhaps you are right. Would you mind,” asked Kane with all his sweet politeness, “letting me take your manuscript home, and go over it carefully?”

“Let you!” Ray began in a rapture of gratitude, but Kane stopped him.

“No, no! Don’t expect anything! Don’t form any hopes. Simply suppose me to be reading it as a lover of high-class fiction, with no ulterior view whatever. I am really the feeblest of conies, and I have not even the poor advantage of having my habitation in the rocks. Good-by! Good-day! Don’t try to stop me with civilities! Heaven knows how far my noble purpose will hold if it is weakened by any manner of delay.”

Ray lived a day longer in the flimsiest air-castles that ever the vagrant winds blew through. In the evening Kane came back with his story.

“Well, my dear young friend, you have certainly produced the despair of criticism in this extraordinary fiction of yours. I don’t wonder all the readers have been of so many minds about it. I only wonder that any one man could be of any one mind about it long enough to get himself down on paper. In some respects it is the very worst thing I ever saw, and yet — and yet — it interested me, it held me to the end. I will make a confession; I will tell you the truth. I took the thing home, hoping to find justification in it for approaching a poor friend of mine who is in the publishing line, and making him believe that his interest lay in publishing it But I could not bring myself to so simple an act of bad faith. I found I should have to say to my friend, ‘ Here is a novel which might make your everlasting fortune, but most of the chances are against it. There are twenty chances that it will fail to one that it will succeed; just the average of failure and success in business life. You had better take it.’ Of course he would not take it, because he could not afford to add a special risk to the general business risk. You see?”

“I see,” said Bay, but without the delight that a case so beautifully reasoned should bring to the logical mind. At the bottom of his heart, though he made such an outward show of fairness and impersonality, he was simply and selfishly emotional about his book. He could not enter into the humor of Kane’s dramatization of the case; he tacitly accused him of inconsistency, and possibly of envy and jealousy. It began to be as if it were Kane alone who was keeping his book from its chance with the public. This conception, which certainly appeared perverse to Ray at times, was at others entirely in harmony with one of several theories of the man. He had chilled Ray more than once by the cold cynicism of his opinions concerning mankind at large; and now Ray asked himself why Kane’s cynicism should not characterize his behavior towards him, too. Such a man would find a delight in studying him in his defeat, and turning his misery into phrases and aphorisms.

He was confirmed in his notion of Kane’s heartlessness by the strange behavior of Mr. Brandreth, who sent for his manuscript one morning, asking if he might keep it a few days, and then returned it the same day, with what Ray thought an insufficient explanation of the transaction. He proudly suffered a week under its inadequacy, and then he went to Mr. Brandreth, and asked him just what the affair meant; it seemed to him that he had a right to know.

Mr. Brandreth laughed in rather a shame-faced way. “I may as well make a clean breast of it. As I told you when we first met, I’ve been wanting to publish a novel for some time; and although I haven’t read yours, the plot attracted me, and I thought I would give it another chance — the best chance I could. I wanted to show it to a friend of yours — I suppose I may say friend, at least it was somebody that I thought would be prejudiced more in favor of it than against it; and I had made up my mind that if the person approved of it I would read it too, and if we agreed about it, I would get Mr. Chapley to risk it. But — I found that the person had read it.”

“And didn’t like it.”

“I can’t say that, exactly.”

“If it comes to that,” said Ray, with a bitter smile, “it doesn’t matter about the precise terms.” He could not speak for a moment; then he swallowed the choking lump in his throat, and offered Brandreth his hand. “Thank you, Mr. Brandreth! I’m sure you’re my friend; and I sha’n’t forget your kindness.”

XXIII.

THE disappointment which Ray had to suffer would have been bad enough simply as the refusal of his book; with the hope raised in him and then crushed after the first great defeat, the trial was doubly bitter. It was a necessity of his suffering and his temperament to translate it into some sort of literary terms, and he now beguiled his enforced leisure by beginning several stories and poems involving his experience. One of the poems he carried so far that he felt the need of another eye on it to admire it and confirm him in his good opinion of it; he pretended that he wanted criticism, but he wanted praise. He would have liked to submit the poem to Kane; but he could not do this now, though the coldness between them was tacit, and they met as friends when they met He had a vulgar moment when he thought it would be a fine revenge if he could make Kane listen to that passage of his poem which described the poet’s betrayal by a false friend, by the man who held his fate in his hand and coolly turned against him. Kane must feel the sting of self-reproach from this through all the disguises of time and place which wrapped it; but the vulgar moment passed, and Ray became disgusted with that part of his poem, and cut it out As it remained then, it was the pathetic story of a poet who comes up to some Oriental court with his song, but never gains a hearing, and dies neglected and unknown; he does not even achieve fame after death. Ray did not know why he chose an Oriental setting for his story, but perhaps it was because it removed it farther from the fact, and made it less recognizable. It would certainly lend itself more easily to illustration in that shape, if he could get some magazine to take it.

When he decided that he could not show it to Kane, and dismissed a fleeting notion of Mr. Brandreth as impossible, he thought of Miss Hughes. He had in fact thought of her first of all, but he had to feign that he had not. There had lingered in his mind a discomfort concerning her which he would have removed much sooner if it had been the only discomfort there; mixed with his other troubles, his shame for having indelicately urged her to speak of his story when he saw her last, did not persist separately or incessantly. He had imagined scenes in which he repaired his error, but he had never really tried to do so. It was now available as a pretext for showing her his poem; he could make it lead on to that; but he did not own any such purpose to himself when he put the poem into his pocket and went to make his tardy excuses.

The Hughes family were still at table when Denton let him into their apartment, and old Hughes came himself into the front room where Ray was provisionally shown, and asked him to join them.

“My children thought that I was wanting in the finer hospitalities when you were here before, and I forced my superabundance of reasons upon you. I forget, sometimes, that no man ever directly persuaded me, in my eagerness to have people think as I do. Will you show that you have forgiven me by eating salt with us?”

“There is a little potato to eat it on, Mr. Ray,” Mrs. Denton called gayly from the dining-room; and as Ray appeared there, Peace rose and set a plate for him next the old man. In front were the twins in high chairs, one on each side of their father, who from time to time put a knife or fork or cup and saucer beyond their reach, and left them to drub the table with nothing more offensive than their little soft fists.

There were not only potatoes, but some hot biscuits too, and there was tea. Ray had often sat down to no better meal at his father’s table, and he thought it good enough, even after several years’ sophistication in cities.

“There was to have been steak,” Mrs. Denton went on, with a teasing look at her husband, “but Ansel saw something on the way home which took away his appetite so completely that he thought we wouldn’t want any steak.”

Hughes began to fill himself with the tea and biscuit and potatoes, and he asked vaguely, “What did he see?”

“Oh, merely a family that had been put out on the sidewalk for their rent. I think that after this, when Ansel won’t come home by the Elevated, he ought to walk up on the west side, so that he can get some good from the exercise. He won’t see families set out on the sidewalk in Fifth Avenue.”

Ray laughed with her at her joke, and Peace smiled with a deprecating glance at Denton. Hughes paid no heed to what they were saying, and Denton said: “The more we see and feel the misery around us, the better. If we shut our eyes to it, and live in luxury ourselves” —

“Oh, I don’t call salt and potatoes luxury,” exactly, said his wife.

Denton remained darkly silent a moment, and then began to laugh with the helplessness of a melancholy man when something breaks through his sadness. “I should like to see a family set out on Fifth Avenue for back rent,” he said, and he laughed on; and then he fell suddenly silent again.

Ray said, for whatever relief it could give the situation, that it was some comfort to realize that the cases of distress which one saw were not always genuine. He told of a man who had begged of him at a certain point that morning, and then met him a few minutes later, and asked alms again on the ground that he had never begged before in his life. “I recalled myself to him, and he apologized handsomely, and gave me his blessing.”

“Did he look as if he had got rich begging?” Denton asked.

“No; he looked as if he could have got a great deal richer working,” Ray answered, neatly.

Mrs. Denton laughed, but her laugh did not give him the pleasure it would have done if Peace had not remained looking seriously at him.

“You think so,” Denton returned. “How much should you say the average laboring-man with a family could save out of his chances of wages?”

Hughes caught at the word save, and emerged with it from his revery. “Frugality is one of the vices we must hope to abolish. It is one of the lowest forms of selfishness, which can only be defended by reference to the state of Ishmaelitism in which we live.”

“Oh, but surely, father,” Mrs. Denton mocked, “you want street beggars to save, don’t you, so they can have something to retire on?”

“No; let them take their chance with the rest,” said the old man, with an imperfect hold of her irony.

“There are so many of them,” Ray suggested, “they couldn’t all hope to retire on a competency. I never go out without meeting one.”

“I wish there were more,” said Denton, passionately. I wish they would swarm up from their cellars and garrets into all the comfortable streets of the town, till every rich man’s door-step had a beggar on it, to show him what his wealth was based on.”

“It wouldn’t avail,” Hughes replied. “All that is mere sentimentality. The rich man would give to the first two or three, and then he would begin to realize that if he gave continually he would beggar himself. He would harden his heart; he would know, as he does now, that he must not take the chance of suffering for himself and his family by relieving the suffering of others. He could put it on the highest moral ground.”

“In the Family,” said Peace, speaking for the first time, “there was no chance of suffering.”

“No. But the community saved itself from chance by shutting out the rest of the world. It was selfish, too. The Family must include the whole world,” said her father. “There is a passage bearing upon that point in what I have been writing to-day. I will just read a part of it.”

He pushed back his chair, but Peace said, “I’ll get your manuscript, father,” and brought it to him.

The passage was a long one, and Hughes read it all with an author’s unsparing zest. At that rate Ray saw no hope of being able to read his poem, and he felt it out of taste for Hughes to take up the time. When he ended at last and left the table, Peace began to clear it away, while Mrs. Denton sat hearing herself talk and laugh. The twins had fallen asleep in their chairs, and she let their father carry them off and bestow them in the adjoining room. As he took them tenderly up from their chairs, he pressed his face close upon their little slumbering faces, and mumbled their fingers with his bearded lips. The sight of his affection impressed Ray, even in the preoccupation of following the movements of Peace, as she kept about her work.

“Is he as homesick as ever?” Ray asked Mrs. Denton, when he was gone.

“Yes; he’s worse,” she answered lightly. “He hasn’t got father’s faith in the millennium to keep him up. He would like to go back to-morrow, if there was anything to go back to.”

Peace halted a moment in her passing to and fro, and said, as if in deprecation of any slight or censure that her sister’s words might seem to imply: “He sees a great many discouraging things. They’re doing so much now by process, and unless an engraver has a great deal of talent, and can do the best kind of work, there’s very little work for him. Ansel has seen so many of them lose their work by the new inventions. What seems so bad to him is that these processes really make better pictures than the common engravers can, and yet they make life worse. He never did believe that an artist ought to get a living by his art.”

“Then I don’t see why he objects to the new processes,” said Ray, with the heartlessness which so easily passes for wit Peace looked at him with grave surprise.

Mrs. Denton laughed over the cat which had got up in her lap. “That’s what I tell him. But it doesn’t satisfy him.”

“You know,” said the younger sister, with a reproach in her tone, which brought Ray sensibly under condemnation, too, “that he means that art must be free before it can be true, and that there can be no freedom where there is the fear of want.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Denton, turning her head for a new effect of the sleeping cat, “there was no fear of want in the Family; but there wasn’t much art, either.”

Ray was tempted to laugh, but he wanted above all to read his poem, and to lead up to it without delay, and he denied himself the pleasure of a giggle with Mrs. Denton. “I suppose,” he said, “the experiment of emancipation is tried on too small a scale in a community.”

“That is what father thinks,” said Peace. “That is why he wants the whole world to be free.”

“Yes,” said Ray, aware of a relenting in her towards himself; and he added, with apparent inconsequence: “Perhaps it would help forward the time for it if every artist could express his feeling about it, or represent it somehow.”

“I don’t see exactly how they could in a picture or a statue,” said Mrs. Denton.

“No,” Ray assented from the blind alley where he had unexpectedly brought up. He broke desperately from it, and said, more toward Peace than toward her sister, “I have been trying to turn my own little disappointment into poetry. You know,” he added, “that Chapley & Co have declined my book?”

“Yes,” she admitted, with a kind of shyness.

“I wonder,” and here Ray took the manuscript out of his pocket, “whether you would let me read you some passages of my poem.”

Mrs. Denton assented eagerly, and Peace less eagerly, but with an interest that was enough for him. Before he began to read, Mrs. Denton said a number of things that seemed suddenly to have accumulated in her mind, mostly irrelevant; she excused herself for leaving the room, and begged Ray to wait till she came back. Several times during the reading she escaped and returned; the poet finished in one of her absences.

XXIV.

“You see,” Ray said, “it’s merely a fragment” He wiped the perspiration from his forehead.

“Of course,” the girl answered, with a sigh “Isn’t disappointment always fragmentary?” she asked, sadly.

“How do you mean?”

“Why, happiness is like something complete; and disappointment like something broken off, to me. A story that ends well seems rounded; and one that ends badly leaves you waiting, as you do just after some one dies.”

“Is that why you didn’t like my story?” Ray asked, imprudently. He added quickly, at an embarrassment which came into her face, “Oh, I didn’t mean to add to my offence! I came here partly to excuse it. I was too persistent the other night.”

“Oh, no!”

“Yes, I was. I had no right to an opinion from you. I knew it at the time, but I couldn’t help it You were right to refuse. But you can tell me how my poem strikes you. It isn’t offered for publication!”

He hoped that she would praise some passages that he thought fine; but she began to speak of the motive, and he saw that she had not missed anything, that she had perfectly seized his intention. She talked to him of it as if it were the work of some one else, and he said impulsively, “If I had you to criticise my actions beforehand, I should not be so apt to make a fool of myself.”

Mrs. Denton came back. “I ran off toward the last. I didn’t want to be here when Peace began to criticise. She’s so severe.”

“She hasn’t been at all severe this time,” said Ray. “I don’t see how she could be,” Mrs. Denton returned. “All that I heard was splendid.”

“It’s merely a fragment,” said Ray, with grave satisfaction in her flattery.

“You must finish it, and read us the rest of it.”

Ray looked at Peace, and something in her face made him say, “I shall never finish it; it isn’t worth it.”

“Did Peace say that?”

“No.”

Mrs. Denton laughed. “That’s just like Peace. She makes other people say the disagreeable things she thinks about them.”

“What a mysterious power!” said Ray. “Is it hypnotic suggestion?”

He spoke lightly toward Peace, but her sister answered: “Oh, we’re full of mysteries in this house. Did you know that my husband had a Voice?”

“A voice! Is a voice mysterious?”

“This one is. It’s an internal Voice. It tells him what to do.”

“Oh, like the demon of Socrates.”

“I hope it isn’t a demon!” said Mrs. Denton.

“That depends upon what it tells him to do,” said Ray. In Socrates’ day a familiar spirit could be a demon without being at all bad. How proud you must be to have a thing like that in the family!”

“I don’t know. It has its inconveniences, sometimes. When it tells him to do what we don’t want him to,” said Mrs. Denton.

“Oh, but think of the compensations!” Ray urged. “Why, it’s equal to a ghost.”

“I suppose it is a kind of ghost,” said Mrs. Denton, and Ray fancied she had the pride we all feel in any alliance, direct or indirect, with the supernatural. “Do you believe in dreams?” she asked abruptly.

“Bad ones, I do,” said Ray. “We always expect bad dreams and dark presentiments to come true, don’t we!”

“I don’t know. My husband does. He has a Dream as well as a Voice.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Ray; and he added: “I see. The Voice is the one he talks with in his sleep.”

The flippant suggestion amused Mrs. Denton; but a shadow of pain came over Peace’s face, that made Ray wish to get away from the mystery he had touched; she might be a believer in it, or ashamed of it.

“I wonder,” he added, “why we never expect our day-dreams to come true?”

“Perhaps because they’re never bad ones — because we know we’re just making them,” said Mrs. Denton.

“It must he that! But, do we always make them? Sometimes my day-dreams seem to make themselves, and they keep on doing it so long that they tire me to death. They’re perfect daymares.”

“How awful! The only way would he to go to sleep, if you wanted to get rid of them.”

“Yes; and that isn’t so easy as waking up. Anybody can wake up; a man can wake up to go to execution; but it takes a very happy man to go to sleep.” The recognition of this fact reminded Ray that he was himself a very unhappy man; he had forgotten it for the time.

“He might go into society and get rid of them that way,” Mrs. Denton suggested, with an obliquity which he was too simply masculine to perceive. “I suppose you go into society a good deal, Mr. Ray?”

Peace made a little movement as of remonstrance, but she did not speak, and Ray answered willingly: “I go into society? I have been inside of just one house — or flat — besides this, since I came to New York.”

“Why!” said Mrs. Denton.

She seemed to be going to say something more, but she stopped at a look from her sister, and left Ray free to go on or not, as he chose. He told them it was Mr. Brandreth’s flat he had been in; at some little hints of curiosity from Mrs. Denton, he described it to her.

“I have some letters from people in Midland, but I haven’t presented them yet,” he added at the end. “The Brandreths are all I know of society.”

“They’re much more than we know. Well, it seems like fairyland,” said Mrs. Denton, in amiable self-derision. “I used to think that was the way we should live when we left the Family. I suppose there are people in New York that would think it was like fairyland to live like us, and not all in one room. Ansel is always preaching that when I grumble.”

The cat sprang up into her lap, and she began to smooth its long flank, and turn her head from side to side, admiring its enjoyment.

“Well,” Ray said, “whatever we do, we are pretty sure to be sorry we didn’t do something else.”

He was going to lead up to his own disappointments by this commonplace, but Mrs. Denton interposed.

“Oh, I’m not sorry we left the Family, if that’s what you mean. There’s some chance, here, and there everything went by rule; you had your share of the work, and you knew just what you had to expect every day. I used to say I wished something wrong would happen, just so as to have something happen. I believe it was more than half that that got father out, too,” she said, with a look at her sister.

“I thought,” said Ray, “but perhaps I didn’t understand him, that your father wanted to make the world over on the image of your community.”

“I guess he wanted to have the fun of chancing it, too,” said Mrs. Denton. “Of course he wants to make the world over, but he has a pretty good time as it is; and I’m glad of all I did and said to get him into it He had no chance to bring his ideas to bear on it in the Family.”

“Then it was you who got him out of the community,” said Ray.

“I did my best,” said Mrs. Denton. “But I can’t say I did it, altogether.”

“Did you help?” he asked Peace.

“I wished father to do what he thought was right He had been doubtful about the life there for a good while — whether it was really doing anything for humanity.”

She used the word with no sense of cant in it; Ray could perceive that.

“And do you ever wish you were back in the Family?”

Mrs. Denton called out joyously: “Why, there is no Family to be back in, I’m thankful to say! Didn’t you know that?”

“I forgot” Ray smiled, as he pursued, “Well, if there was one to be back in, would you like to be there, Miss Hughes?”

“I can’t tell,” she answered, with a trouble in her voice. “When I’m not feeling very strong or well, I should. And when I see so many people struggling so hard here, and failing after all they do, I wish they could be where there was no failure, and no danger of it. In the Family we were safe, and we hadn’t any care.”

“We hadn’t any choice, either,” said her sister. “What choice has a man who doesn’t know where the next day’s work is coming from?”

Ray looked round to find that Denton had entered behind them from the room where he had been, and was sitting beside the window apparently listening to their talk. There was something uncanny in the fact of his unknown presence, though neither of the sisters seemed to feel it.

“Oh, you’re there,” said Mrs. Denton, without turning from her cat “Well, I suppose that’s a question that must come home to you more and more. Did you ever hear of such a dreadful predicament as my husband’s in, Mr. Ray? He’s just hit on an invention that’s going to make us rich, and throw all the few remaining engravers out of work, when he gets it finished.” Her husband’s face clouded, but she went on: “His only hope is that the invention will turn out a failure. You don’t have any such complications in your work, do you, Mr. Ray?”

“No,” said Ray, thinking what a good situation the predicament would be, in a story. “If they had taken my novel, and published an edition of fifty thousand, I don’t see how it could have reduced a single author to penury. But I don’t believe I could resist the advances of a publisher, even if I knew it might throw authors out of work right and left I could support their families till they got something to do.”

“Yes, you might do that, Ansel,” his wife suggested, with a slanting smile at him. “I only hope we may have the opportunity. But probably it will be as hard to get a process accepted as a book.”

“That hasn’t anything to do with the question,” Denton broke out. “The question is whether a man ought not to kill his creative thought as he would a snake, if he sees that there is any danger of its taking away work another man lives by. That is what I look at.”

“And father,” said Mrs. Denton, whimsically, “is so high-principled that he won’t let us urge on the millenium by having pandemonium first. If we were allowed to do that, Ansel might quiet his conscience by reflecting that the more men he threw out of work, the sooner the good time would come. I don’t see why that isn’t a good plan, and it would work in so nicely with what we want to do. Just make everything so bad people cannot bear it, and then they will rise up in their might and make it better for themselves. Don’t you think so, Mr. Ray?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

All this kind of thinking and feeling, which was a part and parcel of these people’s daily life, was alien to his habit of mind. He grasped it feebly and reluctantly, without the power or the wish to follow it to conclusions, whether it was presented ironically by Mrs. Denton, or with a fanatical sincerity by her husband.

“No, no! That won’t do,” Denton said. “I have tried to see that as a possible thoroughfare; but it isn’t possible. If we were dealing with statistics it would do; but it’s men we’re dealing with: men like ourselves that have women and children dependent on them.”

“I am glad to hear you say that, Ansel,” Peace said, gently.

“Yes,” he returned, bitterly, “whichever way I turn, the way is barred. My hands are tied, whatever I try to do. Some one must be responsible. Some one must atone. Who shall it be?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Denton, with a look of comic resignation, “it seems to be a pretty personal thing, after all, in spite of father’s philosophy. I always supposed that when we came into the world we should have an election, and vote down all these difficulties by an overwhelming majority.”

Ray quoted, musingly:

“The world is out of joint: — O cursed spite!

That ever I was born to set it right!”

“Yes? Who says that?”

“Hamlet.”

“Oh yes. Well, I feel just exactly as Ham does about it.”

Denton laughed wildly out at her saucy drolling, and she said, as if his mirth somehow vexed her, “I should think if you’re so much troubled by that hard question of yours, you would get your Voice to say something.”

Her husband rose, and stood looking down, while a knot gathered between his gloomy eyes. Then he turned and left the room without answering her.

She sent a laugh after him. “Sometimes,” she said to the others, “the Voice doesn’t know any better than the rest of us.”

Peace remained looking gravely at her a moment, and then she followed Denton out of the room.

Mrs. Denton began to ask Ray about Mrs. Brandreth and Mrs. Chapley, pressing him with questions as to what kind of people they really were, and whether they were proud; she wondered why they had never come to call upon her. It would all have been a little vulgar if it had not been so childlike and simple. Ray was even touched by it when he thought that the chief concern of these ladies was to find out from him just what sort of crank her father was, and to measure his influence for evil on Mr. Chapley.

At the same time he heard Peace talking to Denton in a tone of entreaty and pacification. She staid so long that Ray had risen to go when she came back. He had hoped for a moment alone with her at parting, so that he might renew in better form the excuses that he pretended he had come to make. But the presence of her sister took all the seriousness and delicacy from them; he had to make a kind of joke of them; and he could not tell her at all of the mysterious message from Mr. Brandreth about the friend to whom he wished to submit his book, and of the final pang of disappointment which its immediate return had given him. He had meant that she should say something to comfort him for this, but he had to forego his intended consolation.

XXV.

RAY had no doubt that Kane was the court of final resort which the case against his novel had been appealed to, and he thought it hard that he should have refused to give it a last chance, or even to look at it again. Surely it was not so contemptible as that, so hopelessly bad that a man who seemed his friend could remember nothing in it that would make it valuable in a second reading. If the fault were not in the book, then it must be in the friend, and Ray renounced old Kane by every means he could command. He could not make it an open question; he could only treat him more and more coldly, and trust to Kane’s latent sense of guilt for the justification of his behavior. But Kane was either so hardened, or else regarded his own action as so venial, or perhaps believed it so right, that he did not find Ray’s coldness intelligible.

“My dear young friend,” he frankly asked, “is there anything between us but our disparity of years? That existed from the first moment of our acquaintance. I have consoled myself at times with the notion of our continuing together in an exemplary friendship, you growing older and wiser, and I younger and less wise, if possible, like two Swedenborgian spirits in the final state. But evidently something has happened to tinge our amity with a grudge in your mind. Do you object to saying just what property in me has imparted this unpleasant discoloration to it?”

Ray was ashamed to say, or rather unable. He answered that nothing was the matter, and that he did not know what Kane meant. He was obliged to prove this by a show of cordiality, which he began perhaps to feel when he reasoned away his first resentment. Kane had acted quite within his rights, and if there was to be any such thing as honest criticism, the free censure of a friend must be suffered and even desired. He said this to himself quite heroically; he tried hard to be ruled by a truth so obvious.

In other things his adversity demoralized him, for a time. He ceased to live in the future, as youth does and should do; he lived carelessly and wastefully in the present With nothing in prospect, it was no longer important how his time or money went; he did not try to save either. He never finished his poem, and he did not attempt anything else.

In the midst of his listlessness and disoccupation there came a letter from Hanks Brothers asking if he could not give a little more social gossip in his correspondence for the Echo; they reminded him that there was nothing people liked so much as personalities. Ray scornfully asked himself, How should he, who knew only the outsides of houses, supply social gossip, even if he had been willing? He made a sarcastic reply to Hanks Brothers, intimating his readiness to relinquish the correspondence if it were not to their taste; and they took him at his word, and wrote that they would hereafter make use of a syndicate letter.

It had needed this blow to rouse him from his reckless despair. If he were defeated now, it would be in the face of all the friends who had believed in him and expected success of him. His motive was not high; it was purely egoistic at the best; but he did not know this; he had a sense of virtue in sending his book off to a Boston publisher without undoing the inner wrappings in which the last New York publisher had returned it.

Then he went round to ask Mr. Brandreth if he knew of any literary or clerical or manual work he could get to do. The industrial fury which has subdued a continent, and brought it under the hard American hand, wrought in him, according to his quality, and he was not only willing but eager to sacrifice the scruples of delicacy he had in appealing to a man whom he had sought first on such different terms. His only question was how to get his business quickly, clearly, and fully before him Mr. Brandreth received him with a gayety that put this quite out of his mind; and he thought the publisher was going to tell him that he had decided, after all, to accept his novel.

“Ah, Mr. Ray,” Mr. Brandreth called out at sight of him, “I was just sending a note to you! Sit down a moment, won’t you? The editor of Every Evening was in here just now, and he happened to say he wished he knew some one who could make him a synopsis of a rather important book he’s had an advanced copy of from the other side. It’s likely to be of particular interest in connection with Coquelin’s visit; it’s a study of French comic acting from Molière down; and I happened to think of you. You know French?”

“Why, yes, thank you — to read. You’re very kind, Mr. Brandreth, to think of me.”

“Oh, not at all! I didn’t know whether you ever did the kind of thing the Every Evening wants, or whether you were not too busy; but I thought I’d drop an anchor to windward for you, on the chance that you might like to do it.”

“I should like very much to do it; and” —

“I’ll tell you why I did it,” Mr. Brandreth interrupted, radiantly. “I happened to know they’re making a change in the literary department of the Every Evening, and I thought that if this bit of work would let you show your hand — See?”

“Yes; and I’m everlastingly” —

“Not at all, not at all!” Mr. Brandreth opened the letter he was holding, and gave Ray a note that it inclosed. “That’s an introduction to the editor of the Every Evening, and you’ll strike him at the office about now, if you’d like to see him.”

Ray caught with rapture the hand Mr. Brandreth offered him. “I don’t know what to say to you, but I’m extremely obliged. I’ll go at once.” He started to the door, and turned. “I hope Mrs. Brandreth is well, and — and — the baby?”

“Splendidly. I shall want to have you up there again as soon as we can manage it. Why haven’t you been at Mrs. Chapley’s? Didn’t you get her card?”

“Yes; but I haven’t been very good company of late. I didn’t want to have it generally known.”

“I understand. Well, now you must cheer up. Good-by, and good luck to you!”

All the means of conveyance were too slow for Ray’s eagerness, and he walked. On his way down to that roaring and seething maelstrom of business, whose fierce currents swept all round the Every Evening office, he painted his future as critic of the journal with minute detail; he had died chief owner and had his statue erected to his memory in Park Square before he crossed that space and plunged into one of the streets beyond.

He was used to newspaper offices, and he was not surprised to find the editorial force of the Every Evening housed in a series of dens, opening one beyond the other till the last, with the chief in it, looked down on the street from which he climbed. He thought it all fit enough, for the present; but, while he still dwelt in the future, and before the office-boy had taken his letter from him to the chief, he swiftly flung up a building for the Every Evening as lofty and as ugly as any of the many-storied towers that rose about the frantic neighborhood. He blundered upon two other writers before he reached the chief; one of them looked up from his desk, and roared at him in unintelligible affliction; the other simply wagged his head, without lifting it, in the direction of the final room, where Ray found himself sitting beside the editor-in-chief, without well knowing how he got there. The editor did not seem to know either, or to care that he was there, for some time; he kept on looking at this thing and that thing on the table before him; at everything but the letter Ray had sent in. When he did take that up he did not look at Ray; and while he talked with him he scarcely glanced at him; there were moments when he seemed to forget there was anybody there; and Ray’s blood began to burn with a sense of personal indignity. He wished to go away, and leave the editor to find him gone at his leisure; but he felt bound to Mr. Brandreth, and he staid. At last the editor took up a book from the litter of newspapers and manuscripts before him, and said:

“What we want is a rapid and attractive résumé of this book, with particular reference to Coquelin and his place on the stage and in art. No one else has the book yet, and we expect to use the article from it in our Saturday edition. See what you can do with it, and bring it here by ten to-morrow. You can run from one to two thousand words — not over two.”

He handed Ray the book and turned so definitively to his papers and letters again that Ray had no choice but to go. He left with the editor a self respectful parting salutation, which the editor evidently had no use for, and no one showed a consciousness of him, not even the office-boy, as he went out.

He ground his teeth in resentment, but he resolved to take his revenge by making literature of that résumé, and compelling the attention of the editor to him through his work. He lost no time in setting about it; he began to read the book at once, and he had planned his article from it before he reached his hotel. He finished it before he slept, and he went to bed as the first milkman sent his wail through the street below. His heart had worked itself free of its bitterness, and seemed to have imparted its lightness to the little paper, which he was not ashamed of even when he read it after he woke from the short rest he suffered himself. He was sure that the editor of Every Evening must feel the touch which he knew he had imparted to it, and he made his way to him with none of the perturbation, if none of the romantic interest of the day before.

The editor took the long slips which Ray had written his copy on, and struck them open with his right hand while he held them with his left.

“Why the devil,” he demanded, “don’t you write a better hand?” Before Ray could formulate an answer, he shouted again, “Why the devil don’t you begin with a fact?”

He paid no heed to the defence which the hurt author-pride of the young fellow spurred him to make, but went on reading the article through. When he had finished he threw it down and drew toward him a narrow book like a check-book, and wrote in it, and then tore out the page, and gave it to Ray. It was an order on the counting-room for fifteen dollars.

Ray had a weak moment of rage in which he wished to tear it up and fling it in the editor’s face. But he overcame himself and put the order in his pocket. He vowed never to use it, even to save himself from starving, but he kept it because he was ashamed to do otherwise. Even when the editor at the sound of his withdrawal called out, without looking round, “What is your address?” he told him; but this time he wasted no parting salutations upon him.

The hardest part was now to make his acknowledgments to Mr. Brandreth, without letting him know how little his personal interest in the matter had availed. He succeeded in keeping everything from him but the fact that his work had been accepted, and Mr. Brandreth was delighted.

“Well, that’s first-rate, as far as it goes, and I believe it’s going to lead to something permanent. You’ll be the literary man of Every Evening yet; and I understand the paper’s making its way. It’s a good thing to be connected with; thoroughly clean and decent, and yet lively.”

Though Ray hid his wrath from Mr. Brandreth, because it seemed due to his kindness, he let it break out before Kane, whom he found dining alone at his hotel that evening when he came down from his room.

“I don’t know whether I ought to sit down with you,” he began, when Kane begged him to share his table. “I’ve just been through the greatest humiliation I’ve had yet. It’s so thick on me that I’m afraid some of it will come off. And it wasn’t my fault, either; it was my misfortune.”

“We can bear to suffer for our misfortunes,” said Kane, dreamily. “To suffer for our faults would be intolerable, because then we couldn’t preserve our self-respect. Don’t you see? But the consciousness that our anguish is undeserved is consoling; it’s even flattering.”

“I’m sorry to deprive you of a Hard Saying, if that’s one, but my facts are against you.”

“Ah, but facts must always yield to reasons,” Kane began.

Ray would not be stopped. But he suddenly caught the humorous aspect of his adventure with the editor of Every Evening, and gave it with artistic zest. He did not spare his ridiculous hopes or his ridiculous pangs.

From time to time Kane said, at some neat touch: “Oh, good!”

“Very good!”

“Capital!”

“Charming, charming!” When Ray stopped, he drew a long breath, and sighed out: “Yes, I know the man. He’s not a bad fellow. He’s a very good fellow.”

“A good fellow?” Ray demanded. “Why did he behave like a brute, then? He’s the only man who’s been rude to me in New York. Why couldn’t he have shown me the same courtesy that all the publishers have? Every one of them has behaved decently, though none of them, confound them! wanted my book.”

“Ah,” said Kane, “his conditions were different. They had all some little grace of leisure, and according to your report he had none. I don’t know a more pathetic picture than you’ve drawn of him, trying to grasp all those details of his work, and yet seize a new one. It’s frightful. Don’t you feel the pathos of it?”

“No man ought to place himself in conditions where he has to deny himself the amenities of life,” Ray persisted, and he felt that he had made a point, and languaged it well. “He’s to blame if he does.”

“Oh, no man willingly places himself in hateful or injurious conditions,” said Kane. “He is pushed into them, or they grow up about him through the social action. He’s what they shape him to, and when he’s taken his shape from circumstances, he knows instinctively that he won’t fit into others. So he stays put. You would say that the editor of Every Evening ought to forsake his conditions at any cost, and go somewhere else and be a civilized man; but he couldn’t do that without breaking himself in pieces and putting himself together again. Why did I never go back to my own past? I look over my life in New York, and it is chiefly tiresome and futile in the retrospect; I couldn’t really say why I’ve staid here. I don’t expect anything of it, and yet I can’t leave it. The Every Evening man does expect a great deal of his conditions; he expects success, and I understand he’s getting it. But he didn’t place himself in his conditions in any dramatic way, and he couldn’t dramatically break with them. They may be gradually detached from him and then he may slowly change.

Of course there are signal cases of renunciation.

People have abdicated thrones and turned monks; but they’ve not been common, and I dare say, if the whole truth could be known, they have never been half the men they were before, Or become just the saints they intended to be. If you’ll take the most extraordinary instance of modern times, or of all times — if you’ll take Tolstoï himself, you’ll see how impossible it is for a man to rid himself of his environment. Tolstoï believes unquestionably in a life of poverty and toil and trust; but he has not been able to give up his money; he is defended against want by the usual gentlemanly sources of income; and he lives a ghastly travesty of his unfulfilled design. He’s a monumental warning of the futility of any individual attempt to escape from conditions. That’s what I tell my dear old friend Chapley, who’s quite Tolstoï mad, and wants to go into the country and simplify himself.”

“Does he, really?” Ray asked, with a smile.

Why not? Tolstoï convinces your reason and touches your heart. There’s no flaw in his logic and no falsity in his sentiment. I think that if Tolstoi had not become a leader, he would have had a multitude of followers.”

The perfection of his paradox afforded Kane the highest pleasure. He laughed out his joy in it, and clapped Ray on the shoulder, and provoked him to praise it, and was so frankly glad of having made it that all Ray’s love of him came back.

XXVI.

FROM one phase of his experience with his story, Ray took a hint, and made bold to ask Mr. Brandreth if he could not give him some manuscripts to read; he had rather a fancy for playing the part of some other man’s destiny since he could have so little to do with deciding his own. Chapley & Co had not much work of that kind to give, but they turned over a number of novels to him, and he read them with a jealous interest; he wished first of all to find whether other people were writing better novels than his, and he hoped to find that they were not. Mostly, they really were not, and they cumulatively strengthened him against an impulse which he had more than once had to burn his manuscript. From certain of the novels he read he got instruction both of a positive and negative kind; for it was part of his business to look at their construction, and he never did this without mentally revising the weak points of his story, and considering how he could repair them.

There was not a great deal of money in this work; but Ray got ten or fifteen dollars for reading a manuscript and rendering an opinion of it, and kept himself from the depravation of waiting for the turn of the cards. He waited for nothing; he worked continually, and he filled up the intervals of the work that was given to him with work that he made for himself. He wrote all sorts of things, — essays, stories, sketches, poems, — and sent them about to the magazines and the weekly newspapers and the syndicates. When the editors were long in reporting upon them he went and asked for a decision; and in audacious moments he carried his manuscript to them, and tried to surprise an instant judgment from them. This, if it were in the case of a poem, or a very short sketch, he could sometimes get; and it was usually adverse, as it usually was in the case of the things he sent them by mail. They were nowhere unkindly; they were often sympathetic, and suggested that what was not exactly adapted to their publications might be adapted to the publication of a fellow-editor; they were willing to sacrifice one another in his behalf. They did not always refuse his contributions. Kane, who witnessed his struggles at this period with an interest which he declared truly paternal, was much struck by the fact that Ray’s failures and successes exactly corresponded to those of business men; that is, he failed ninety-five times out of a hundred to get his material printed. His effort was not of the vast range suggested by these numbers; he had a few manuscripts that were refused many times over, and made up the large sum of his rejections by the peculiar disfavor that followed them.

Besides these regular attacks on the literary periodicals, Ray carried on guerilla operations of several sorts. He sold jokes at two dollars apiece to the comic papers; it sometimes seemed low for jokes, but the papers paid as much for a poor joke as a good one, and the market was steady. He got rather more for jokes that were ordered of him, as when an editor found himself in possession of an extremely amusing illustration without obvious meaning. He developed a facility wholly unexpected to himself in supplying the meaning for a picture of this kind; if it were a cartoon, he had the courage to ask as much as five dollars for his point.

A mere accident opened up another field of industry to him, when one day a gentleman halted him at the foot of the stairway to an elevated station, and after begging his pardon for first mistaking him for a Grand Army man, professed himself a journalist in momentary difficulty.

“I usually sell my things to the Sunday Planet, but my last poem was too serious for their F. S., and I’m down on my luck. Of course, I see now” said the journalist in difficulty, “that you couldn’t have been in the war; at first glance I took you for an old comrade of mine; but if you’ll leave your address with me — Thank you, sir! Thank you!”

Ray had put a quarter in his hand, and he thought he had bought the right to ask him a question.

“I know that I may look twice my age when people happen to see double” —

“Capital!” said the veteran. “First-rate!” and he clapped Ray on the shoulder, and then clung to him long enough to recover his balance.

“But would you be good enough to tell me what the F. S. of the Sunday Planet is?”

“Why, the Funny Side — the page where they put the jokes and the comic poetry. F. S. for short. Brevity is the soul of wit, you know.”

Ray hurried home and put together some of the verses that had come back to him from the comic papers, and mailed them to the Sunday Planet. He had learned not to respect his work the less for being rejected, but the Planet did not wane in his esteem because the editor of the F. S. accepted all his outcast verses. The pay was deplorably little, however, and for the first time he was tempted to consider an offer of partnership with a gentleman who wrote advertisements for a living, and who, in the falterings of his genius from overwork, had professed himself willing to share his honors and profits with a younger man; the profits, at any rate, were enormous.

But this temptation endured only for a moment of disheartenment. In all his straits Ray not only did his best, but he kept true to a certain ideal of himself as an artist. There were some things he could not do even to make a living. He might sell anything he wrote, and he might write anything within the bounds of honesty that would sell, but he could not sell his pen, or let it for hire, to be used as the lessee wished. It was not the loftiest grade of aesthetics or ethics, and perhaps the distinctions he made were largely imaginary. But he refused the partnership offered him, though it came with a flattering recognition of his literary abilities, and of his peculiar fitness for the work proposed.

He got to know a good many young fellows who were struggling forward on the same lines with himself, and chancing it high and low with the great monthlies, where they offered their poems and short stories, and with the one-cent dailies, where they turned in their space-work. They had a courage in their risks which he came to share in its gayety, if not its irreverence, and he enjoyed the cheerful cynicism with which they philosophized the facts of the newspaper side of their trade: they had studied its average of successes and failures, and each of them had his secret for surprising the favor of the managing editor, as infallible as the gambler’s plan for breaking the bank at Monaco.

“You don’t want to be serious,” one blithe spirit volunteered for Ray’s instruction in a moment of defeat; “you want to give a light and cheerful cast to things. For instance, if a fireman loses his life in a burning building, you mustn’t go straight for the reader’s pity; you must appeal to his sense of the picturesque. You must call it, ‘Knocked out in a Fight with Fire,’ or something like that, and treat the incident with mingled pathos and humor. If you’ve got a case of suicide by drowning, all you’ve got to do is to call it ‘ Launch of one more Unfortunate,’ and the editor is yours. Go round and make studies of our metropolitan civilization; write up the ‘ Leisure Moments of Surface-Car Conductors,’ or ‘Talks with the Ticket-Choppers.’ Do the amateur scavenger, and describe the ‘Mysteries of the Average Ash-Barrel.’”

As the time wore on, the circle of Ray’s acquaintance widened so much that he no longer felt those pangs of homesickness which used to seize him whenever he got letters from Midland. He rather neglected his correspondence with Sanderson; the news of parties and sleigh-rides and engagements and marriages which his friend wrote, affected him like echoes from some former life. He was beginning to experience the fascination of the mere city, where once he had a glimpse of the situation fleeting and impalpable as those dream-thoughts that haunt the consciousness on the brink of sleep. Then it was as if all were driving on together, no one knew why or whither; but some had embarked on the weird voyage to waste, and some to amass; their encounter formed the opportunity of both, and a sort of bewildered kindliness existed between them. Their common ignorance of what it was all for was like a bond, and they clung involuntarily together in their unwieldy multitude because of the want of meaning, and prospered on, suffered on, through vast cyclones of excitement that whirled them round and round, and made a kind of pleasant drunkenness in their brains, and consoled them for never resting and never arriving.

The fantastic vision passed, and Ray again saw himself and those around him full of distinctly intended effort, each in his sort, and of relentless energy, which were self-sufficing and self-satisfying. Most of the people he knew were, like himself, bent upon getting a story, or a poem, or an essay, or an article, printed in some magazine or newspaper, or some book into the hands of a publisher. They were all, like himself, making their ninety-five failures out of a hundred endeavors; but they were all courageous, if they were not all gay, and if they thought the proportion of their failures disastrous, they said nothing to show it They did not try to blink them, but they preferred to celebrate their successes; perhaps the rarity of these merited it more.

XXVII.

As soon as Ray had pulled himself out of his slough of despond, and began to struggle forward on such footing as he found firm, he felt the rise of the social instinct in him. He went about and delivered his letters; he appeared at one of Mrs. Chapley’s Thursdays, and began to be passed from one afternoon tea to another. He met the Mayquaits at Mrs. Chapley’s, those Gitchigumee people she had asked him about, and at their house he met a lady so securely his senior that she could let him see at once she had taken a great fancy to him. The Mayquaits have since bought a right of way into the heart of society, but they were then in the peripheral circles, and this lady seemed anxious to be accounted for in that strange company of rich outcasts. Something in Ray’s intelligent young good looks must have appealed to her as a possible solvent. As soon as he was presented to her she began to ply him with subtle questions concerning their hostess and their fellow-guests, with whom she professed to find herself by a species of accident springing from their common interest in a certain charity: that particular tea was to promote it. Perhaps it was the steadfast good faith of the pretty boy in refusing to share in her light satire, while he could not help showing that he enjoyed it, which commended Ray more and more to her. He told her how he came to be there, not because she asked, for she did not ask, but because he perceived that she wished to know, and because it is always pleasant to speak about one’s self upon any pretext, and he evinced a delicate sympathy with her misgiving. It flattered him that she should single him out for her appeal as if he were of her sort, and he eagerly accepted an invitation she made him. Through her favor and patronage he began to go to lunches and dinners; he went to balls, and danced sometimes when his pockets were so empty that he walked one way to save his car fares. But his poverty was without care; it did not eat into his heart, for no one else shared it; and those spectres of want and shame which haunt the city’s night, and will not always away at dawn, but remain present to eyes that have watched and wept, vanished in the joyous light that his youth shed about him, as he hurried home with the waltz music beating in his blood. A remote sense, very remote and dim, of something all wrong attended him at moments in his pleasure; at moments it seemed even he who was wrong. But this fled before his analysis; he could not see what harm he was doing. To pass his leisure in the company of well-bred, well-dressed, prosperous, and handsome people was so obviously right and fit that it seemed absurd to suffer any question of it. He met mainly very refined persons, whose interests were all elevated, and whose tastes were often altruistic. He found himself in a set of young people, who loved art and literature and music, and he talked to his heart’s content with agreeable girls about pictures and books and theatres.

It surprised him that with all this opportunity and contiguity he did not fall in love; after the freest give and take of aesthetic sympathies he came away with a kindled fancy and a cold heart. There was one girl he thought would have let him be in love with her if he wished, but when he questioned his soul he found that he did not wish, or could not He said to himself that it was her money, for she was rich as well as beautiful and wise; and he feigned that if it had not been for her money he might have been in love with her. Her people, an aunt and uncle, whom she lived with, made much of him, and the way seemed clear. They began to tell each other about themselves, and once he interested her very much by the story of his adventures in first coming to New York.

“And did you never meet the two young women afterwards?” she asked.

“Yes. That was the curious part of it,” he said, and piqued that she called them “two young women,” he went on to tell her of the Hugheses, whom he set forth in all the picturesqueness he could command. She listened intensely, and even provoked him with some questions to go on; but at the end she said nothing; and after that she was the same and not the same to him. At first he thought it might be her objection to his knowing such queer people; she was very proud; but he Was still made much of by her family, and there was nothing but this difference in her that marked with its delicate distinctness the loss of a chance.

He was not touched except in his vanity. Without the subtle willingness which she had subtly withdrawn, his life was still surpassingly rich on the side where it had been hopelessly poor; and in spite of his personal poverty he was in the enjoyment of a social affluence beyond the magic of mere money. Sometimes he regarded it all as his due, and at all times he took it with simple ingratitude; but he had moments of passionate humility when he realized that he owed his good fortune to the caprice of a worldly old woman, whom he did not respect very much.

When he began to go into society, he did not forget his earlier friends; he rather prided himself on his constancy; he thought it was uncommon, and he found it a consolation when other things failed him. It was even an amusement full of literary suggestion for him to turn from his own dream of what the world was to Hughes’s dream of what the world should be; and it flattered him that the old man should have taken the sort of fancy to him that he had. Hughes consulted him as a person with a different outlook on life, and valued him as a practical mind, akin to his own in quality, if not in direction. First and last, he read him his whole book; he stormily disputed with him about the passages which Ray criticised as to their basal facts; but he adopted some changes Ray suggested.

The young fellow was a whole gay world to Mrs. Denton, in his reproduction of his society career for her. She pursued him to the smallest details of dress and table and manner; he lived his society events over again for her with greater consciousness than he had known in their actual experience; and he suffered patiently the little splenetic resentment in which her satiety was apt finally to express itself. He decided that he must not take Mrs. Denton in any wise seriously; and he could see that Peace was grateful to him for his complaisance and forbearance. She used to listen, too, when he described the dinners and dances for her sister, and their interest gave the material a fascination for Ray himself: it emphasized the curious duality of his life, and lent the glamor of unreality to the regions where they could no more have hoped to follow him than to tread the realms of air. Sometimes their father hung about him — getting points for his morals, as Ray once accused him of doing.

“No, no!” Hughes protested. “I am interested to find how much better than their conditions men and women always are. The competitive conditions of our economic life characterize society as well as business. Yet business men and society women are all better and kinder than you would believe they could be. The system implies that the weak must always go to the wall, but in actual operation it isn’t so.”

“From Mr. Ray’s account there seem to be a good many wall-flowers,” Mrs. Denton suggested.

Hughes ignored her frivolity. “It shows what glorious beings men and women would be if they were rightly conditioned. There is a whole heaven of mercy and loving-kindness in human nature waiting to open itself: we know a little of what it may be when a man or woman rises superior to circumstance and risks a generous word or deed in a selfish world. Then for a moment we have a glimpse of the true life of the race.”

“Well, I wish I had a glimpse of the untrue life of the race, myself,” said Mrs. Denton, as her father turned away. “I would give a whole year of the millennium for a week in society.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said her husband. He had been listening in gloomy silence to Ray’s talk, and he now turned on his wife. “I would rather see you dead than in such ‘ good society’ as that.”

“Oh, well,” she answered, “you’re much likelier to see me dead. If I understand Mr. Ray, it’s a great deal easier to get into heaven than to get into good society.” She went up to her husband and pushed his hair back from his eyes. “If you wore it that way, people could see what a nice forehead you’ve got. You look twice as ‘ brainy.’ now, Ansel.”

He caught her hand and flung it furiously away. “Ansel,” she said, “is beginning to feel the wear and tear of the job of setting the world right as much as I do. He never had as much faith in the millennium as father has; he thinks there’s got to be some sort of sacrifice first; he hasn’t made up his mind quite what it’s to be, yet.”

Denton left them abruptly, and after a while Ray heard him talking in the next room; he thought he must be talking to some one there, till his wife said, “Ansel doesn’t say much in company, but he’s pretty sociable when he gets by himself.”

XXVIII.

THE next time Ray came, he found Denton dreamily picking at the strings of a violin which lay in his lap; the twins were clinging to his knees, and moving themselves in time to the music.

“You didn’t know Ansel was a musician? “ his wife said. “He’s just got a new violin — or rather it’s a second-hand one; but it’s splendid, and he got it so cheap.”

“I profited by another man’s misfortune,” said Denton. “That’s the way we get things cheap.”

“Oh, well, never mind about that, now. Play the ‘Darky’s Dream,’ won’t you, Ansel? I wish we had our old ferry-boat darky here to whistle!”

After a moment in which he seemed not to have noticed her, he put the violin to his chin, and began the wild, tender strain of the piece. It seemed to make the little ones drunk with delight. They swayed themselves to and fro, holding by their father’s knees, and he looked down softly into their uplifted faces. When he stopped playing, their mother put out her hand toward one of them, but it clung the faster to its father.

“Let me take your violin a moment,” said Ray. He knew the banjo a little, and now he picked out on the violin an air which one of the girls in Midland had taught him.

The twins watched him with impatient rejection; and they were not easy till their father had the violin back. Denton took them up one on each knee, and let them claw at it between them; they looked into his face for the effect on him as they lifted themselves and beat the strings. After a while Peace rose and tried to take it from them, for their father seemed to have forgotten what they were doing; but they stormed at her, in their baby way, by the impulse that seemed common to them, and screamed out their shrill protest against her interference.

“Let them alone,” said their father, gently, and she desisted.

“You’ll spoil those children, Ansel,” said his wife, “letting them have their own way so. The first thing you know, they’ll grow up capitalists.”

He had been looking down at them with dreamy melancholy, but he began to laugh helplessly, and he kept on till she said:

“I think it’s getting to be rather out of proportion to the joke; don’t you, Mr. Ray? Not that Ansel laughs too much, as a rule.”

Denton rose, when the children let the violin slip to the floor at last, and improvised the figure of a dance with them on his shoulders, and let himself go in fantastic capers, while he kept a visage of perfect seriousness.

Hughes was drawn by the noise, and put his head into the room.

“We’ve got the old original Ansel back, father!” cried Mrs. Denton, and she clapped her hands and tried to sing to the dance, but broke down, and mocked at her own failure.

When Denton stopped breathless, Peace took the children from him, and carried them away. His wife remained.

“Ansel was brought up among the Shakers; that’s the reason he dances so nicely.”

“Oh, was that a Shaker dance?” Ray asked, carelessly.

“No. The Shaker dance is a rite,” said Denton, angrily. “You might as well expect me to burlesque a prayer.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Ray. “I’m afraid I don’t know much about it.”

But Denton left the room without visible acceptance of his excuse.

“You must be careful how you say anything about the Shakers before Ansel,” his wife explained. “I believe he would be willing to go back to them now, if he knew what to do with the children and me.”

“If it were not for their unpractical doctrine of celibacy,” said Hughes, “the Shakers, as a religious sect, could perform a most useful office in the transition from the status to better conditions. They are unselfish, and most communities are not.”

“We might all go back with Ansel,” said Mrs. Denton, “and they could distribute us round in the different Families. I wonder if Ansel’s bull is hanging up in the South Family bam yet? You know,” she said, “he painted a red bull on a piece of shingle when they were painting the barn one day, and nailed it up in a stall; when the elders found it they labored with him, and then Ansel left the community, and went out into the world. But they say, once a Shaker always a Shaker, and I believe he’s had a bad conscience ever since he’s left them.”

Not long after this Ray came in one night dressed for a little dance that he was going to later, and Mrs. Denton had some moments alone with him before Peace joined them. She made him tell where he was going, and who the people were that were giving the dance, and what it would all be like — the rooms and decorations, the dresses, the supper.

“And don’t you feel very strange and lost, in such places?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Ray. “I can’t always remember that I’m a poor Bohemian with two cents in my pocket. Sometimes I imagine myself really rich and fashionable. But to-night I shan’t, thank you, Mrs. Denton.”

She laughed at the look he gave her in acknowledgment of her little scratch. “Then you wouldn’t refuse to come to a little dance here, if we were rich enough to give one?” she asked.

“I would come instantly.”

“And get your fashionable friends to come?”

“That might take more time. When are you going to give your little dance?”

“As soon as Ansel’s invention is finished.”

“Oh! Is he going on with that?”

“Yes. He has seen how he can do more good than harm with it — at last.”

“Ah! We can nearly always coax conscience along the path of self-interest.”

This pleased Mrs. Denton too. “That sounds like Mr. Kane.”

Peace came in while Mrs. Denton was speaking, and gave Ray her hand, with a glance at his splendor, enhanced by his stylish manner of holding his silk hat against his thigh.

“Who was it told you that Mr. Kane was sick?” Mrs. Denton asked.

Peace answered, “Mr. Chapley.”

“Kane? Is Mr. Kane sick?” said Ray. “I must go and see him.”

He asked Peace some questions about Kane, but she knew nothing more than that Mr. Chapley said he was not very well, and he was going to step round and see him on his way home. Ray thought of the grudge he had borne for a while against Kane, and he was very glad now that there was none left in his heart.

“It’s too late to-night; but I’ll go in the morning. He usually drops in on me Sundays; he didn’t come last Sunday; but I never thought of his being sick.” He went on to praise Kane, and he said, as if it were one of Kane’s merits, “He’s been a good friend of mine. He read my novel all over after Chapley declined it, and tried to find enough good in it to justify him in recommending it to some other publisher. I don’t blame him for failing, but I did feel hard about his refusing to look at it afterwards; I couldn’t help it for a while.” He was speaking to Peace, and he said, as if it were something she would be cognizant of, “I mean when Mr. Brandreth sent for it again after he first rejected it.”

“Yes,” she admitted, briefly, and he was subtly aware of the withdrawal which he noticed in her whenever the interest of the moment became personal.

But there was never any shrinking from the personal interest in Mrs. Denton; her eagerness to explore all his experiences and sentiments was vivid and untiring.

“Why did he send for it?” she asked. “What in the world for?”

Ray was willing to tell, for he thought the whole affair rather creditable to himself. “He wanted to submit it to a friend of mine; and if my friend’s judgment was favorable he might want to reconsider his decision. He returned the manuscript the same day, with a queer note which left me to infer that my mysterious friend had already seen it, and had seen enough of it. I knew it was Mr. Kane, and for a while I wanted to destroy him. But I forgave him, when I thought it all over.”

“It was pretty mean of him,” said Mrs. Denton.

“No, no! He had a perfect right to do it, and I had no right to complain. But it took me a little time to own it.”

Mrs. Denton turned to Peace. “Did you know about it?”

Denton burst suddenly into the room, and stared distractedly about as if he were searching for something.

“What is it, Ansel?” Peace asked.

“That zinc plate.”

“It’s on the bureau,” said his wife.

He was rushing out, when she recalled him.

“Here’s Mr. Ray.”

He turned, and glanced at Ray impatiently, as if he were eager to get back to his work; but the gloomy face which he usually wore was gone; his eyes expressed only an intense preoccupation through which gleamed a sudden gayety, as if it flashed into them from some happier time in the past. “Oh, yes,” he said to his wife, while he took hold of Ray’s arm and turned him about; “this is the way you want me to look.”

“As soon as your process succeeds, I expect you to look that way all the time. And I’m going to go round and do my work in a low-neck dress; and we are going to have champagne at every meal. I am going to have a day, on my card, and I am going to have afternoon teas and give dinners. We are going into the best society.”

Denton slid his hand down Ray’s arm, and kept Ray’s hand in his hot clasp while he rapidly asked him about the side of his life which that costume represented, as though now for the first time he had a reason for caring to know anything of the world and its pleasures.

“And those people don’t do anything else?” he asked, finally.

“Isn’t it enough?” Ray retorted. “They think they do a great deal.”

Denton laughed in a strange nervous note, catching his breath, and keeping on involuntarily. “Yes; too much. I pity them.”

“Well,” said his wife, “I want to be an object of pity as soon as possible. Don’t lose any more time, now, Ansel, from that precious process.” The light went out of his face again, and he jerked his head erect sharply, like one listening, while he stood staring at her. “Oh, now, don’t be ridiculous, Ansel!” she said.

XXIX.

THE next day after a little dance does not dawn very early. Ray woke late, with a vague trouble in his mind, which he thought at first was the sum of the usual regrets for awkward things done and foolish things said the night before. Presently it shaped itself as an anxiety which had nothing to do with the little dance, and which he was helpless to deal with when he recognized it. Still, as a definite anxiety, it was more than half a question, and his experience did not afford him the means of measuring its importance or ascertaining its gravity. He carried it loosely in his mind when he went to see Kane, as something he might or might not think of.

Kane was in bed, convalescent from a sharp gastric attack, and he reached Ray a soft moist hand across the counterpane and cheerily welcomed him. His coat and hat hung against a closet door, and looked so like him that they seemed as much part of him as his hair and beard, which were smoothly brushed, and gave their silver delicately against the pillow. A fire of soft coal purred in the grate, faded to a fainter flicker by the sunlight that poured in at the long south windows, and lit up the walls book-lined from floor to ceiling.

“Yes,” he said, in acceptance of the praises of its comfort that Ray burst out with, “I have lived in this room so long that I begin to cherish the expectation of dying in it. But, really, is this the first time you’ve been here?”

“The first,” said Ray. “I had to wait till you were helpless before I got in.”

“Ah, no; ah, no! Not so bad as that. I’ve often meant to ask you, when there was some occasion; but there never seemed any occasion; and I’ve lived here so much alone that I’m rather selfish about my solitude; I like to keep it to myself. But I’m very glad to see you; it was kind of you to think of coming.” He bent a look of affection on the young fellow’s handsome face. “Well, how wags the gay world?” he asked.

“Does the gay world do anything so light-minded as to wag?” Ray asked in his turn, with an intellectual coxcombry that he had found was not offensive to Kane. “It always seems to me very serious as a whole, the gay world, though it has its reliefs, when it tries to enjoy itself.” He leaned back in his chair, and handled his stick a moment, and then he told Kane about the little dance which he had been at the night before. He sketched some of the people and made it amusing.

“And which of your butterfly friends told you I was ill?” asked Kane.

“The butterflyest of all: Mrs. Denton.”

“Oh! Did she give the little dance?”

“No. I dropped in at the Hugheses’ on the way to the dance. But I don’t know how soon she may be doing something of the kind. They’re on the verge of immense prosperity. Her husband has invented a new art process, and it’s going to make them rich. He doesn’t seem very happy about it, but she does. He’s a dreary creature. At first I used to judge her rather severely, as we do with frivolous people. But I don’t know that frivolity is so bad; I doubt if it’s as bad as austerity; they’re both merely the effect of temperament, it strikes me. I like Mrs. Denton, though she does appear to care more for the cat than the twins. Perhaps she thinks she can safely leave them to him. He’s very devoted to them; it’s quite touching. It’s another quality of paternal devotion from Mr. Brandreth’s; it isn’t half so voluble. But it’s funny, all the same, to see how much more care of them he takes than their mother does. He looks after them at table, and he carries them off and puts them to bed with his own hands apparently,” said Ray, in celibate contempt of the paternal tenderness.

“I believe that in David’s community,” Kane suggested, “the male assisted the female in the care of their offspring. We still see the like in some of the feathered tribes. In the process of social evolution the father bird will probably leave the baby bird entirely to the mother bird; and the mother bird, as soon as she begins to have mind and money, will hire in some poor bird to look after them. Mrs. Denton seems to have evolved in the direction of leaving them entirely to the father bird.”

“Well, she has to do most of the talking. Have you ever heard,” Ray asked from the necessary association of ideas, “about her husband’s Voice?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, it seems that Mr. Denton has an inward monitor of some kind, like the demon of Socrates, that they call a Voice, and that directs his course in life, as I understand. I suppose it’s authorized him to go on with his process, which he was doubtful about for a good while, because if it succeeded it would throw a lot of people out of work. Then you’ve never heard of his Voice?”

“No,” said Kane. He added: “I suppose it’s part of the psychical nonsense that they go into in all sorts of communities. And Hughes,” he asked after a moment—” how is Hughes now?”

“He’s generally busy with his writing, and I don’t always see him. He’s a fine old fellow, if he does prefer to call me out of my name; he still addresses me generally as Young Man. Mrs. Denton has tried to teach him better; but he says that names are the most external of all things, and that I am no more essentially Ray than I am Hughes. There’s something in it; I think one might get a kind of story out of the notion.”

Kane lay silent in a pensive muse, which he broke to ask with a smile: “And how is Peace these days? Do you see her?”

“Yes; she’s very well, I believe,” said Ray, briefly, and he rose.

“Oh!” said Kane, “must you go?”

He kept Ray’s hand affectionately, and seemed loath to part with him. “I’m glad you don’t forget the Hugheses in the good time you’re having. It shows character in you not to mind their queerness; I’m sure you won’t regret it. Your visits are a great comfort to them, I know. I was afraid that you would not get over the disagreeable impression of that first Sunday, and I’ve never been sure that you’d quite forgiven me for taking you.”

“Oh yes, I had,” said Ray, and he smiled with the pleasure we all feel when we have a benefaction attributed to us. “I’ve forgiven you much worse things than that!”

“Indeed! You console me! But for example?”

“Refusing to look at my novel a second time,” answered Ray, by a sudden impulse.

“I don’t understand you,” said Kane, letting his hand go.

“When Mr. Brandreth offered to submit it to you in the forlorn hope that you might like it and commend it.”

“Brandreth never asked me to look at it at all; the only time I saw it was when you let me take it home with me. What do you mean?”

“Mr. Brandreth wrote me saying he wanted to try it on a friend of mine, and it came back the same day with word that my friend had already seen it,” said Ray, in an astonishment which Kane openly shared. “And was that the reason you were so cold with me for a time? Well, I don’t wonder! You had a right to expect that I would say anything in your behalf under the circumstances. And I’m afraid I should. But I never was tempted. Perhaps Brandreth got frightened and returned the manuscript with that message because he knew he couldn’t trust me.”

“Perhaps,” said Ray, blankly.

“Who else could it have been? Have you any surmise?”

“What is the use of surmising?” Ray retorted. “It’s all over. The story is dead, and I wish it was buried. Don’t bother about it! And try to forgive me for suspecting you.”

“It was very natural. But you ought to have known that I loved you too much not to sacrifice a publisher to you if I had him fairly in my hand.”

“Oh, thank you! And — good-by. Don’t think anything more about it. I sha’n’t.”

XXX.

THERE could be only one answer to the riddle, if Kane’s suggestion that Mr. Brandreth had returned the manuscript without showing it to any one were rejected. The publisher could speak of no one besides Kane as a friend except Miss Hughes, and it was clearly she who had refused to look again at Ray’s book. She had played a double part with him; she had let him make a fool of himself; she had suffered him to keep coming to her, and reading his things to her, and making her his literary confidante. He ground his teeth with shame to think how he had sought her advice and exulted in her praise; but the question was not merely, it was not primarily, a question of truth or untruth, kindness or unkindness toward himself, but of justice toward Kane. He had told her of the resentment he had felt toward Kane; he had left her to the belief that he still suspected Kane of what she had done. If she were willing that he should remain in this suspicion, it was worse than anything he now accused her of.

He kept away from Chapley’s all day, because of the embarrassment of seeing her with that in his mind. He decided that he must never see her again till she showed some wish to be relieved from the false position she had suffered herself to be placed in. At the end of the afternoon there came a knock at his door, and he set the door open and confronted Mr. Brandreth, who stood smiling at the joke of his being there, with his lustrous silk hat and gloves and light overcoat on. Ray passed some young banter with him in humorous recognition of the situation, before they came to business, as Mr. Brandreth called it.

“Look here!” said the publisher, with a quizzical glance at him from Ray’s easy-chair, while Ray himself lounged on the edge of his bed. “Did you think I wanted to show your novel to old Kane, that time when I sent back for it?”

“Yes,” said Ray; and he could not say any more for his prescience of what was coming.

“Well, I didn’t,” Mr. Brandreth returned. “And if I’d ever thought you suspected him, I should have told you so long ago. The person that I did want it for is anxious you should know it wasn’t Kane, and I thought I’d better come and tell you so by word of mouth; I rather made a mess of it before, in writing. If you’ve any feeling about the matter, it’s only fair to Kane to assure you that he wasn’t at all the person.”

“Kane told me so himself to-day,” said Ray; “and all the grudge I felt was gone long ago.”

“Well, of course! It’s a matter of business.” In turning it off in this common-sense way Mr. Brandreth added lightly, “I’m authorized to tell you who it really was, if you care to know.”

Ray shook his head. “I don’t care to know. What’s the use?”

“There isn’t any. I’m glad you take it the way you do, and it will be a great relief to — the real one.”

“It’s all right.”

Bay had been strengthening his defences against any confidential approach from the moment Mr. Brandreth began to speak; he could not help it Now they began to talk of other things. At the end the publisher returned to the book with a kind of desperate sigh: “You haven’t done anything with your story yet, I suppose?”

“No,” said Ray.

Mr. Brandreth, after a moment’s hesitation, went away without saying anything more. Even that tentative inquiry about the fate of his book could not swerve Ray now from his search for the motives which had governed Peace in causing this message to be sent him. It could only be that she had acted in Kane’s behalf, who had a right to justice from her, and she did not care what Ray thought of her way of doing justice. In the complex perversity of his mood the affair was so humiliating to him, as it stood, that he could not rest in it. That evening he went determined to make an opportunity to speak with her alone, if none offered.

It was she who let him in, and then she stood looking at him in a kind of daze, which he might well have taken for trepidation. It did not give him courage, and he could think of no better way to begin than to say, “I have come to thank you, Miss Hughes, for your consideration for Mr. Kane. I couldn’t have expected less of you, when you found out that I had been suspecting him of that friendly refusal to look at my manuscript the second time.”

His hard tone, tense with suppressed anger, had all the effect he could have wished. He could see her wince, and she said, confusedly, “I told Mr. Brandreth, and he said he would tell you it wasn’t Mr. Kane.”

“Yes,” said Ray, stiffly, “he came to tell me.”

She hesitated, and then she asked, “Did he tell you who it was?”

“No. But I knew.”

If she meant him to say something more, he would not; he left to her the strain and burden that in another mood he would have shared so willingly, or wholly assumed.

At a little noise she started, and looked about, and then, as if returning to him by a painful compliance with his will, she said, “When he told me what he had done to get the manuscript back, I couldn’t let him give it to me.”

She stopped, and Ray perceived that, for whatever reason, she could say nothing more, at least of her own motion. But it was not possible for him to leave it so.

“Of course,” he said, angrily, “I needn’t ask you why.”

“It was too much for me to decide,” she answered, faintly.

“Yes,” he assented, “it’s a good deal to take another’s fate in one’s hands. But you knew,” he added, with a short laugh, “you had my fortune in your hands, anyway.”

“I didn’t see that then,” she answered, and she let her eyes wander, and lapsed into a kind of absence, which vexed him as a slight to the importance of the affair.

“But it doesn’t really matter whether you decided it by refusing or consenting to look at the book again,” he said. “The result would have been the same, in any case.”

She lifted her eyes to his with a scared look, and began, “I didn’t say that” — and then she stopped again, and looked away from him as before.

“But if I can’t thank you for sparing me an explicit verdict,” he pushed on, “I can appreciate your consideration for Kane, and I will carry him any message you will trust me with.” He rose as he said this, and he found himself adding, “And I admire your strength in keeping your own counsel when I’ve been talking my book over with you. It must have been amusing for you.”

When he once began to revenge himself he did not stop till he said all he had thought he thought. She did not try to make any answer or protest She sat passive under his irony; at times he thought her hardly conscious of it, and that angered him the more, and he resented the preoccupation, and then the distraction with which she heard him to the end.

“Only I don’t understand exactly,” he went on, “how you could let me do it, in spite of the temptation. I can imagine that the loss of my acquaintance will be a deprivation to you; you’ll miss the pleasure of leading me on to make a fool of myself; but you know you can still laugh at me, and that ought to keep you in spirits for a long time. I won’t ask your motive in sending word to me by a third person. I dare say you didn’t wish to tell me to my face; and it couldn’t have been an easy thing to write.”

“I ought to have written,” she said, meekly. “I see that now. But to-day, I couldn’t. There is something — He offered to go to you — he wished to; and — I let him. I was wrong. I didn’t think how it might seem.”

“Oh, there was no reason why you should have thought of me in the matter. I’m glad you thought of Mr. Kane; I don’t ask anything more than that.”

“Oh, you don’t understand,” she began. “You don’t know” —

“Yes, I understand perfectly, and I know all that I wish to know. There was no reason why you should have protected me against my own folly. I have got my deserts, and you are not to blame if I don’t like them. Good-by.”

As he turned to go, she lifted her eyes, and he could see that they were blind with tears.

He went out and walked up and down the long, unlovely avenue, conscious of being the ugliest thing in it, and unconsciously hammered by its brutal noises, while he tried to keep himself from thinking how, in spite of all he had said, he knew her to be the soul of truth and goodness. He knew that all he had said was from the need of somehow venting his wounded vanity. As far as any belief in wrong done him was concerned, the affair was purely histrionic on his part; but he had seen that the pain he gave was real; the image of her gentle sufferance of his upbraiding went visibly before him. The wish to go back and own everything to her became an intolerable stress, and then he found himself again at her door.

He rang, and after waiting a long time to hear the click of the withdrawing latch, he rang again. After a further delay the door opened, and he saw Hughes standing at the top of the stairs with a lamp held above his head.

“Who is there?” the old man called down, with his hoarse voice.

“It’s I, Mr. Hughes,” Ray answered, a new trouble blending with his sense of the old man’s picturesque pose, and the leonine grandeur of his shaggy head. “Mr. Ray,” he explained.

“Oh!” said Hughes. “I’m glad to see you. Will you come up?” He added, as Ray mounted to him, and they entered his room together, “I am alone here for the time. My daughters have both gone out. Will you sit down?” Ray obeyed, with blank disappointment Hughes could not have known of his earlier visit, or had forgotten it “They will be in presently. Peace was here till a little while ago; when Ansel and Jenny came in, they all went out together.” He lapsed into a kind of muse, staring absently at Ray from his habitual place beside the window. He came back to a sense of him with words that had no evident bearing upon the situation.

“The thing which renders so many reformers nugatory and ridiculous, and has brought contempt and disaster on so many good causes, is the attempt to realize the altruistic man in competitive conditions. That must always be a failure or worse.” He went on at length to establish this position. Then, “Here is my son-in-law” — and the old man had the effect of stating the fact merely in illustration of the general principle he had laid down—” who has been giving all his spare time this winter to an invention in the line of his art, and had brought it to completion within a few days. He has all along had misgivings as to the moral bearing of his invention, since every process of the kind must throw a number of people out of work, and he has shown a morbid scruple in the matter which I have tried to overcome with every argument in my power.”

“I thought,” Ray made out to say, in the pause Hughes let follow, “he had come to see all that in another light.”

“Yes,” the old man resumed, “he has commonly yielded to reason, but there is an unpractical element in the man’s nature. In fact, here, this morning, while we supposed he was giving the finishing touches to his work, he was busy in destroying every vestige of result which could commend it to the people interested in it Absolutely nothing remains to show that he ever had anything of the kind successfully in hand.”

“Is it possible?” said Ray, deeply shocked. “I am so sorry to hear it” —

The old man had not heard him or did not heed him. “He has been in a very exalted state through the day, and my daughters have gone out to walk with him; it may quiet his nerves. He believes that he has acted in obedience to an inner Voice which governs his conduct. I know nothing about such things; but all such suggestions from beyond are to my thinking mischievous. Have you ever been interested in the phenomena of spiritualism, so-called?”

Ray shook his head decidedly. “Oh, no!” he said, with abhorrence.

“Ah! The Family were at one time disposed to dabble in those shabby mysteries. But I discouraged it; I do not deny the assumptions of the spiritualists; but I can see no practical outcome to the business; and I have used all my influence with Ansel to put him on his guard against this Voice, which seems to be a survival of some supernatural experiences of his among the Shakers. It had lately been silent, and had become a sort of joke with us. But he is of a very morbid temperament, and along with this improvement, there have been less favorable tendencies. He has got a notion of expiation, of sacrifice, which is perhaps a survival of his ancestral Puritanism. I suppose the hard experiences of the city have not been good for him. They prey upon his fancy. It would be well if he could be got into the country somewhere; though I don’t see just how it could be managed.” Hughes fell into another muse, and Ray asked, “What does he mean by expiation?”

The old man started impatiently. “Mere nonsense; the rags and tatters of man’s infancy, outworn and outgrown. The notion that sin is to be atoned for by some sort of offering. It makes me sick; and of late I haven’t paid much attention to his talk. I supposed he was going happily forward with his work; I was necessarily much preoccupied with my own; I have many interruptions from irregular health, and I must devote every available moment to my writing. There is a passage, by-the-way, which I had just completed when you rang, and which I should like to have your opinion of, if you will allow me to read it to you. It is peculiarly apposite to the very matter we have been speaking of; in fact, I may say it is an amplification of the truth that I am always trying to impress upon Ansel, namely, that when you are in the midst of a battle, as we all are here, you must fight, and fight for yourself, always, of course, keeping your will fixed on the establishment of a lasting peace.” Hughes began to fumble among the papers on the table beside him for his spectacles, and then for the scattered sheets of his manuscript. “Yes, there is a special obligation upon the friends of social reform to a life of common sense. I have regarded the matter from rather a novel standpoint, and I think you will be interested.”

The old man read on and on. At last Ray heard the latch of the street door click, and the sound of the opening and then the shutting of the door. A confused noise of feet and voices arrested the reading which Hughes seemed still disposed to continue, and light steps ascended the stairs, while as if in the dark below a parley ensued. Ray knew the high, gentle tones of Peace in the pleading words, “But try, try to believe that if it says that, it can’t be the Voice you used to hear, and that always told you to do what was right. It is a wicked Voice, now, and you must keep saying to yourself that it is wicked and you mustn’t mind it.”

“But the words, the words! Whose words were they? Without the shedding of blood: what does that mean? If it was a sin for me to invent my process, how shall the sin be remitted?”

“There is that abject nonsense of his again!” said old Hughes, in a hoarse undertone which drowned for Ray some further words from Denton. “ It’s impossible to get him away from that idea. Men have nothing to do with the remission of sins; it is their business to cease to do evil! But you might as well talk to a beetle!”

Ray listened with poignant eagerness for the next words of Peace, which came brokenly to his ear. He heard—”... justice and not sacrifice. If you try to do what is right — and — and to be good, then”—” I will try, Peace, I will try. O Lord, help me!” came in Denton’s deep tones. “Say the words again. The Voice keeps saying those — But I will say yours after you!”

“I will have justice.” The girl’s voice was lifted with a note in it that thrilled to Ray’s heart, and made him start to his feet; Hughes laid a detaining hand upon his arm.

“I will have justice,’ Denton repeated.

“And not sacrifice,” came in the girl’s tremulous accents.

“And not sacrifice,” followed devoutly from the man. “I will have justice, without the shedding of blood — it gets mixed; I can’t keep the Voice out! — and not sacrifice. What is justice? What is justice but sacrifice?”

“Yes, it is self-sacrifice! All our selfish wishes”—” I have burnt them in a fire, and scattered their ashes!”

“And all gloomy and morbid thoughts that distress other people.”

“Oh, you know I wouldn’t distress any one! You know how my heart is breaking for the misery of the world.”

“Let her alone!” said old Hughes to Ray, in his thick murmur, as if he read Ray’s impulse in the muscle of his arm. “She will manage him.”

“But say those words over again!” Denton implored. “The Voice keeps putting them out of my mind!” She said the text, and let him repeat it after her word by word, as a child follows its mother in prayer.

“And try hard, Ansel! Remember the children and poor Jenny!”

“Yes, yes. I will, Peace! Poor Jenny! I’m sorry for her. And the children — You know I wouldn’t harm any one for the whole world, don’t you, Peace?”

“Yes, I do know, Ansel, how good and kind you are; and I know you’ll see all this in the true light soon. But now you’re excited.”

“Well, say it just once more, and then I shall have it.”

Once more she said the words, and he after her. He got them straight this time, without admixture from the other text. There came a rush of his feet on the stairs, and a wild laugh.

“Jenny! Jenny! It’s all right now, Jenny!” he shouted, as he plunged into the apartment, and was heard beating as if on a door closed against him. It must have opened, for there was a sound like its shutting, and then everything was still except a little pathetic, almost inaudible murmur as of suppressed sobbing in the dark of the entry below. Presently soft steps ascended the stairs and lost themselves in the rear of the apartment.

“Now, young man,” said Hughes, “I think you had better go. Peace will be in here directly to look after me, and it will distress her to find any one else. It is all right now.”

“But hadn’t I better stay, Mr. Hughes? Can’t I be of use?”

“No. I will defer reading that passage to another time. You will be looking in on us soon again. We shall get on very well. We are used to these hypochrondriacal moods of Ansel’s.”

XXXI.

THERE was nothing for Ray to do but to accept his dismissal. He got himself stealthily down stairs and out of the house, but he could not leave it. He walked up and down before it, doubting whether he ought not to ring and try to get in again. When he made up his mind to this he saw that the front windows were dark. That decided him to go home.

He did not sleep, and the next morning he made an early errand to the publishers’. He saw Peace bent over her work in Mr. Chapley’s room. He longed to go and speak to her, and assure himself from her own words that all was well; but he had no right to do that, and with the first stress of his anxiety abated, he went to lay the cause of it before Kane.

“It was all a mere chance that I should know of this; but I thought you ought to know,” he explained.

“Yes, certainly,” said Kane; but he was less moved than Ray had expected, or else he showed his emotion less. “Hughes is not a fool, whatever Denton is; this sort of thing must have been going on a good while, and he’s got the measure of it. I’ll speak to Chapley about it. They mustn’t be left altogether to themselves with it.”

As the days began to go by, and Ray saw Peace constantly in her place at the publishers’, his unselfish anxiety yielded to the question of his own relation to her, and how he should make confession and reparation. He went to Kane in this trouble, as in the other, after he had fought off the necessity as long as he could, but they spoke of the other trouble first Then Ray said, with the effort to say it casually, “I don’t think I told you that the great mystery about my manuscript had been solved.’, Kane could not remember at once what the mystery was, and Ray was forced to add, “It seems that the unknown friend who wouldn’t look twice at my book was — Miss Hughes.” Kane said, after a moment, “Oh!” and then, as if it should be a very natural thing, he asked, “How did you find that out?”

“She got Mr. Brandreth to tell me it wasn’t you, as soon as she knew that I had suspected you.”

“Of course. Did he tell you who it was?”

“He was to tell me if I wished. But I knew it couldn’t be anybody but she, if it were not you, and I went to see her about it.”

“Well?” said Kane, with a kind of expectation in his look and voice that made it hard for Ray to go on.

“Well, I played the fool. I pretended that I thought she had used me badly. I don’t know. I tried to make her think so.”

“Did you succeed?”

“I succeeded in making her very unhappy.”

“That was success — of a kind,” said Kane, and he lay back in his chair looking into the fire, while Ray sat uncomfortably waiting at the other corner of the hearth.

“Did she say why she wouldn’t look at your manuscript a second time?” Kane asked finally.

“Not directly.”

“Did you ask?”

“Hardly!”

“You knew?”

“It was very simple,” said Ray. “She wouldn’t look at it because it wasn’t worth looking at. I knew that That was what hurt me, and made me wish to hurt her.”

Kane offered no comment After a moment he asked: “Has all this just happened? Have you just found it out?”

“Oh, it’s bad enough, but isn’t so bad as that,” said Ray, forcing a laugh. “Still, it’s as bad as I could make it I happened to go to see her that evening when I overheard her talk with Denton.”

“Oh! And you spoke to her after that?”

There was a provisional condemnation in Kane’s tone which kindled Ray’s temper and gave him strength to retort: “No, Mr. Kane! I spoke to her before that; and it was when I came back — to tell her! Was all wrong, and to beg her pardon — that I saw her father, and heard what I’ve told you.”

“Oh, I didn’t understand; I might have known that the other thing was impossible,” said Kane.

They were both silent, and Ray’s anger had died down into the shame that it had flamed up from, when Kane thoughtfully asked, “And you want my advice?”

“Yes.”

“Concretely?”

“As concretely as possible.”

“Then, if you don’t really know the reason why a girl so conscientious as Peace Hughes wouldn’t look at your manuscript again when she was practically left to decide its fate, I think you’d better not go there any more.”

Kane spoke with a seriousness the more impressive because he was so rarely serious, and Ray felt himself reddening under his eye.

“Aren’t you rather enigmatical?” he began.

“No, I don’t think so,” said Kane, and then neither spoke.

Some one knocked at the door. Kane called out, “Come in!” and Mr. Chapley entered.

After he had shaken hands with Kane and made Ray out, and had shaken hands with him, he said, with not more than his usual dejection, “I’m afraid poor David is in fresh trouble, Kane.”

“Yes?” said Kane, and Ray waited breathlessly to hear what the trouble was.

“That wretched son-in-law of his — though I don’t know why I should condemn him — seems to have been somewhere with his children and exposed them to scarlet fever; and he’s down with diphtheritic sore throat himself. Peace has been at home since the trouble declared itself, helping take care of them.”

“Is it going badly with them?” Kane asked.

“I don’t know. It’s rather difficult to communicate with the family under the circumstances.”

“You might have said impossible, without too great violence, Henry,” said Kane.

“I had thought of seeing their doctor,” suggested Mr. Chapley, with his mild sadness. “Ah, I wish David had stayed where he was.”

“We are apt to think these things are accidents,” said Kane. “Heaven knows. But scarlet fever and diphtheria are everywhere, and they take better care of them in town than they do in the country. Who did you say their doctor was?”

“Dear me! I’m sure I don’t know who he is. I promised Mr. Brandreth to look the matter up,” said Mr. Chapley. “He’s very anxious to guard against any spread of the infection to his own child, and my whole family are so apprehensive that’s it’s difficult. I should like to go and see poor David, myself, but they won’t hear of it. They’re quite in a panic as it is.”

“They’re quite right to guard against the danger,” said Kane, and he added, “I should like to hear David philosophize the situation. I can imagine how he would view the effort of each one of us to escape the consequences that we are all responsible for.”

“It is civilization which is in the wrong,” said Mr. Chapley.

“True,” Kane assented. “And yet our Indians suffered terribly from the toothache and rheumatism.

You can carry your return to nature too far, Henry; Nature must meet Man half-way.” Kane’s eye kindled with pleasure in his phrase, and Ray could perceive that the literary interest was superseding the personal interest in his mind. “The earth is a dangerous planet; the great question is how to get away from it alive,” and the light in Kane’s eyes overspread his face in a smile of deep satisfaction with his paradox.

The cold-blooded talk of the two elderly men sent a chill to Ray’s heart. For him, at least, there was but one thing to do; and half an hour, later he stood at the open street door of the Hughes apartment, looking up at Mrs. Denton silhouetted against the light on the landing as he had first seen her there.

“Oh, Mrs. Denton,” he called up, “how are the children?”

“I — I don’t know. They are very sick. The doctor is afraid” —

“Oh!” Ray groaned, at the stop she made. “Can I help — can’t I do something? May I come up?”

“Oh, yes,” she answered mechanically, and Ray was stooping forward to mount the stairs when he saw her caught aside, and Peace standing in her place.

“Don’t come up, Mr. Ray! You can’t do any good. It’s dangerous.”

“I don’t care for the danger,” he began. “Some one — some one must help you! Your father “— “My father doesn’t need any help, and we don’t Every moment you stay makes the danger worse!”

“But you, you are in danger! You” —

“It’s my right to be. But it’s wrong for you. Oh, do go away!” She wrung her hands, and he knew that she was weeping. “I do thank you for coming. I was afraid you would come.”

“Oh, were you?” he exulted. “I am glad of that! You know how I must have felt, when I came to think what I had said.”

“Yes — but, go, now!”

“How can I do that? I should be ashamed” —

“But you mustn’t,” she entreated. “It would put others in danger, too. You would carry the infection. You must go,” she repeated.

“Well, I shall come again. I must know how it is with you. When may I come again!”

“I don’t know. You mustn’t come inside again.” She thought a moment. “If you come I will speak to you from that window over the door. You must keep outside. If you will ring the bell twice, I shall know it is you.”

She shut the door, and left him no choice but to obey. It was not heroic; it seemed cowardly; and he turned ruefully away. But he submitted, and twice a day, early in the morning and late at night, he came and rang for her. The neighbors, such as cared, understood that he was the friend of the family who connected its exile with the world; sometimes the passers mistook these sad trysts for the happy lovers’ meetings which they resembled, and lingered to listen, and then passed on.

They caught only anxious questions and hopeless answers; the third morning that Ray came, Peace told him that the little ones were dead.

They had passed out of the world together, as they had entered it, and Ray stood with their mother beside the grave where they were both laid, and let her cling to his hand as if he were her brother. Her husband was too sick to be with them, and there had been apparently no question of Hughes’s coming, but Peace was there. The weather was that of a day in late March, bitter with a disappointed hope of spring. Ray went back to their door with the mourners. The mother kept on about the little ones, as if the incidents of their death were facts of a life that was still continuing.

“Oh, I know well enough,” she broke off from this illusion, “that they are gone, and I shall never see them again; perhaps their father will. Well, I don’t think I was so much to blame. I didn’t make myself, and I never asked to come here, any more than they did.”

She had the woe-begone hopeless face which she wore the first day that Ray saw her, after the twins had thrown her porte-monnaie out of the car window; she looked stunned and stupefied.

They let her talk on, mostly without interruption. Only, at this point Peace said, “That will be thought of, Jenny,” and the other asked, wistfully, “Do you think so, Peace? Well!”

XXXII.

PEACE did not come back to her work at the publishers’ for several weeks. The arrears began to accumulate, and Mr. Brandreth asked Kay to help look after it; Ray was now so often with him that their friendly acquaintance had become a confidential intimacy.

Men’s advance in these relations is rapid, even in later life; in youth it is by bounds. Before a week of their daily contact was out, Ray knew that Mrs. Chapley, though the best soul in the world, and the most devoted of mothers and grandmothers, had, in Mr. Brandreth’s opinion, a bad influence on his wife, and through her on his son. She excited Mrs. Brandreth by the long visits she paid her; and she had given the baby medicine on one occasion at least that distinctly had not agreed with it. “That boy has taken so much belladonna, as a preventive of scarlet fever, that I believe it’s beginning to affect his eyes. The pupils are tremendously enlarged, and he doesn’t notice half as much as he did a month ago. I don’t know when Mrs. Chapley will let us have Miss Hughes back again. Of course, I believe in taking precautions too, and I never could forgive myself if anything really happened. But I don’t want to be a perfect slave to my fears, or my mother-in-law’s, either — should you?”

He asked Ray whether, under the circumstances, he did not think he ought to get some little place near New York for the summer, rather than go to his country home in Massachusetts, where the Chapleys had a house, and where his own mother lived the year round. When Ray shrank from the question as too personal for him to deal with, Mr. Brandreth invited him to consider the more abstract proposition that if the two grandmothers had the baby there to quarrel over all summer, they would leave nothing of the baby, and yet would not part friends.

“I’ll tell you another reason why I want to be near my business so as to keep my finger on it all the time, this year,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he went into a long and very frank study of the firm’s affairs with Ray, who listened with the discreet intelligence which made everybody trust him. “With Mr. Chapley in the state he’s got into about business, when he doesn’t care two cents whether school keeps or not, I see that I’ve got to take the reins more and more into my own hands.” Mr. Brandreth branched off into an examination of his own character, and indirectly paid himself some handsome tributes as a business man. “I don’t mean to say,” he concluded, “that I’ve got the experience of some of the older men, but I do mean to say that experience doesn’t count for half of what they claim, in the book business, and I can prove it out of their own mouths. They all admit that nobody can forecast the fate of a book. Of coarse if you’ve got a book by a known author, you’ve got something to count on, but not so much as people think, and some unknown man may happen along with a thing that hits the popular mood and outsell him ten times over. It’s a perfect lottery.”

“I wonder they let you send your lists of new publications through the mails,” said Ray, dryly.

“Oh, it isn’t quite as bad as that,” said Mr. Brandreth. “Though there are a good many blanks too. I suppose the moral difference between business and gambling is that in business you do work for a living, and you don’t propose to give nothing for something, even when you’re buying as cheap as you can to sell as dear as you can. With a book it’s even better. It’s something you’ve put value into, and you have a right to expect to get value out of it. That’s what I tell Mr. Chapley when he gets into one of his Tolstoi moods, and wants to give his money to the poor and eat his bread in the sweat of his brow.”

The two young men laughed at these grotesque conceptions of duty, and Mr. Brandreth went on:

“Yes, sir, if I could get hold of a good, strong, lively novel” —

“Well, there is always A Modem Romeo,” Ray suggested.

Mr. Brandreth winced. “I know.” He added, with the effect of hurrying to get away from the subject, “I’ve had it over and over again with Mr. Chapley till I’m tired of it Well, I suppose it’s his age, somewhat, too. Every man, when he gets to Mr. Chapley’s time of life, wants to go into the country and live on the land. I’d like to see him living on the land in Hatboro’, Massachusetts! You can stand up in your buggy and count half-a-dozen abandoned farms wherever you’ve a mind to stop on the road. By-the-way,” said Mr. Brandreth, from an association of ideas that Ray easily followed, “have you seen anything of the book that Mr. Hughes is writing? He’s got a good title for it. ‘The World Revisited’ ought to sell the first edition of it at a go.”

“Before people found out what strong meat it was? It condemns the whole structure of society; he’s read me parts of it.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Brandreth, in a certain perplexity, “that might make it go too. People like strong meat. They like to have the structure of society condemned. There’s a good deal of sympathy with the underpinning; there’s no use trying to deny it Confound it! I should like to try such a book as that in the market But it would be regarded by everybody who knew him as an outcome of Mr. Chapley’s Tolstoï twist.”

“I understand that Mr. Hughes’s views are entirely opposed to Tolstoï’s. He regards him as unpractical,” said Ray, with a smile for Hughes’s practicality.

“It wouldn’t make any difference. They would call it Tolstoïan on Mr. Chapley’s account People don’t know. There was Looking Backward; they took that at a gulp, and didn’t know that it was the rankest sort of socialism. My! If I could get hold of a book like Looking Backward!”

“I might have it come out that the wicked cousin in A Modem Romeo was a secret Anarchist That ought to make the book’s fortune.”

Ray could deal lightly with his rejected novel, but even while he made an open jest of it, the book was still inwardly dear to him. He still had his moments of thinking it a great book, in places. He was always mentally comparing it with other novels that came out, and finding it better. He could not see why they should have got publishers, and his book not; he had to fall back upon that theory of mere luck which first so emboldens and then so embitters the heart; and the hope that lingered in him was mixed with cynicism.

XXXIII.

WHEN Peace came back to her work, Mr. Brandreth, in admiration of her spirit, confided to Bay that she had refused to take pay for the time she had been away, and that no arguments availed with her.

“They must have been at unusual expense on account of this sickness, and I understand that the son-in-law hasn’t earned anything for a month. But what can you do?”

“You can’t do anything,” said Ray. Their poverty might be finally reached from without, and it was not this which made him chiefly anxious in his futile sympathy for Peace. He saw her isolated in the presence of troubles from which he was held as far aloof as her father lived in his dream of a practicable golden age. Their common sorrow, which ought to have drawn the mother and father of the dead children nearer together, seemed to have alienated them. After the first transports of her grief Mrs. Denton appeared scarcely to miss the little ones; the cat, which they had displaced so rarely, was now always in her lap, and her idle, bantering talk went on, about anything, about everything, as before, but with something more of mockery for her husband’s depressions and exaltations. It might have been from a mistaken wish to rouse him to some sort of renewed endeavor that she let her reckless tongue run upon what he had done with his process; it might have been from her perception that he was most vulnerable there; Ray could not decide. For the most part Denton remained withdrawn from the rest, a shadow and a silence which they ignored. Sometimes he broke in with an irrelevant question or comment, but oftener he evaded answering when they spoke to him. If his wife pressed him at such times he left them; and then they heard him talking to himself in his room, after an old habit of his; now and then Ray thought he was praying. If he did not come back, Peace followed him, and then her voice could be heard in entreaty with him.

“She’s the only one that can do anything with Ansel,” her sister lightly explained one evening. “She has so much patience with him; father hasn’t any more than I have; but Peace can persuade him out of almost anything except his great idea of sacrifice.”

“Sacrifice?” Ray repeated.

“Yes. I don’t know what he means. But he thinks he’s been very wicked, trying to invent that process, and he can’t get forgiveness without some kind of sacrifice. He’s found it in the Old Testament somewhere. I tell him it’s a great pity he didn’t live in the days of the prophets; he might have passed for one. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He says we must make some sacrifice; but I can’t see what we’ve got left to sacrifice. We might make a burnt offering of the chairs in father’s stove; the coal’s about gone.”

She stopped, and looked up at Denton, who had come in with a book in his hand; Peace glided in behind him.

“Oh, are you going to read us something, Ansel?” his wife asked with her smile of thoughtless taunting. “I don’t see why you don’t give public readings. You could read better than the elocutionists that used to read to us in the Family. And it wouldn’t be taking the bread out of any one else’s mouth.” She turned to Ray: “You know Ansel’s given up his place so as to let another man have his chance. It was the least he could do after he had tried to take away the livelihood of so many by inventing that wicked process of his.”

Denton gave no sign of having heard her. He fixed his troubled eyes on Ray. “Do you know that poem?” he asked, handing him the open book.

“Oh, yes,” said Ray.

“It’s a mistake,” said Denton, “all a mistake. I should like to write to Tennyson and tell him so. I’ve thought it out. The true sacrifice would have been the best, not the dearest; the best.”

The next day was Sunday, and it broke, with that swift, capricious heat of our climate, after several days of cloudy menace. The sun shone, and the streets were thronged with people. They were going to church in different directions, but there was everywhere a heavy trend toward the stations of the elevated road, and the trains were crammed with men, women and children going to the Park. When Ray arrived there with one of the throngs he had joined, he saw the roads full of carriages, and in the paths black files of foot-passengers pushing on past the seats packed with those who had come earlier, and sat sweltering under the leafless trees. The grass was already green; some of the forwarder shrubs were olive-gray with buds.

Ray walked deep into the Park. He came in sight of a bench near a shelf of rock in a by-path, with a man sitting alone on it. There was room for two, and Ray made for the place.

The man sat leaning forward with his heavy blonde head hanging down as if he might have been drunk. He suddenly lifted himself, and Ray saw that it was Denton. His face was red from the blood that had run into it, but as it grew paler it showed pathetically thin. He stared at Ray confusedly, and did not know him till he spoke.

Then he said, “Oh!” and put out his hand. A sudden kindness in Ray, more than he commonly felt for the man whom he sometimes pitied, but never liked, responded to the overture.

“May I have part of your bench?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Denton. “Sit down,” and he made way for him. “It isn’t mine; it’s one of the few things in this cursed town that belongs to every one.”

“Well,” said Ray, cheerfully, “I suppose we’re all proprietors of the Park, even if we’re not allowed to walk on our own grass.”

“Yes; but don’t get me thinking about that. There’s been too much of that in my life. I want to get away — away from it all. We are going into the country. Do you know about those abandoned farms in New England? Could we go and take up one of them?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. But what could you do with it, if you did? The owners left those farms because they couldn’t live on them. You would have to fight a battle you’re not strong enough for. Better wait till you get fairly on your feet.”

“Yes, I’m sick; I’m no good. But it would be expiation.”

Ray did not speak at once. Then, partly because he thought he might be of use to the man by helping him to an objective vision of what was haunting him, and partly from an aesthetic desire to pry into the confusion of his turbid soul, he asked: “Do you mean for that invention of yours?”

“No; that’s nothing; that was a common crime.”

“Well, I have no right to ask you anything further. But in any given case of expiation, the trouble is that a man can’t expiate alone; he makes a lot of other people expiate with him.”

“Yes; you can’t even sin alone. That is the curse of it, and then the innocent have to suffer with the sinners. But I meant — the children.”

“The children?”

“Yes; I let them die.”

Ray understood now that it was remorse for his exposure of the little ones to contagion which was preying on him. “I don’t think you were to blame for that. It was something that might have happened to any one. For the sake of your family you ought to look at it in the true light You are no more responsible for your children’s death than I am.” Ray stopped, and Denton stared as if listening.

“What? What? What?” he said, in the tone of a man who tries to catch something partly heard. “Did you hear?” he asked. “They are both talking at once — with the same voice; it’s the twin nature.” He shook his head vehemently, and said, with an air of relief: “Well, now it’s stopped. What did you say?”

“I didn’t say anything,” Ray answered.

“Oh! It was the Voice, then. You see it was a mistake not to do it sooner; I ought to have given them; not waited for them to be taken. I couldn’t understand, because in the flesh they couldn’t speak. They had to speak in the spirit That was it — why they died. I thought that if I took some rich man who had made his millions selfishly, cruelly — you see? — it would satisfy justice; then the reign of peace and plenty could begin. But that was wrong. That would have made the guilty suffer for the innocent; and the innocent must suffer for the guilty. Always! There is no other atonement Now I see that Oh, my soul, my soul! What? No! Yes, yes! The best, the purest, the meekest! Always that! Without the shedding of blood, there is no remission — Who do you think is the best person in New York — the purest, the meekest?”

“Who?” Ray echoed.

“Yes,” said Denton. Then he broke off. “She said, No! No! No!” He started up from the seat.

“For their life, their life, their life! That was where the wrong was. I knew it was all wrong, always. Oh, my soul, my soul! What shall the atonement be?” He moved away, and at a few paces distance he began to run.

Ray watched him running, running, till he was out of sight.

He passed a restless, anxious day, and in the evening he could not keep from going to the Hugheses’. He found them all together, and gayer than he had seen them since the children’s death. He tried to join in the light-hearted fun that Mrs. Denton was making with her husband; she was unusually fond, and she flattered him with praises of his talent and good looks; she said his pallor became him.

“Do you know,” she asked Ray, “that we’re all going to New Hampshire to live on an abandoned farm?”

She made Denton get his violin, and he played a long time. Suddenly he stopped, and waited in the attitude of listening. He called out, “Yes!” and struck the instrument over a chair-top, breaking it to splinters. He jumped up as if in amaze at what had happened; then he said to Peace, “I’ve made you some kindling.”

His wife said with a smile, “A man must do something for a living.”

Denton merely looked at her with a kind of vague surprise. After a moment’s suspense he wheeled about and caught his hat from the wall, and rushed down the stairs into the street Hughes came in from the front room, with his pen in his hand, and hoarsely gasping. “What is the matter?” he weakly whispered. No one spoke, but the ruin of the violin answered for itself. “Some more of that fool’s work, I suppose. It is getting past all endurance. He was always the most unpractical creature, and of late, he’s become utterly worthless.” He kept on moving his lips as if he were speaking, but no sound came from them.

Mrs. Denton burst into a crowing laugh: “It’s too bad Ansel should have two voices and father none at all!”

The old man’s lips still moved, and now there came from them, “A fool, a perfect fool!”

“Oh, no, father,” said Peace, and she went up to the old man. “You know Ansel isn’t a fool. You know he has been tried; and he is good, you know he is! He has worked hard for us all; and I can’t bear to have you call him names.”‘

“Let him show some common-sense, then,” said her father. “I have no wish to censure him. But his continual folly wears me out. He owes it to the cause, if not to his family, to be sensible and — and — practical. Tell him I wish to see him when he comes in,” he added, with an air of authority, like the relic of former headship. “It’s high time I had a talk with him. These disturbances in the family are becoming very harassing. I cannot fix my mind on anything.” He went back into his own room, where they heard him coughing. It was a moment of pain without that dignity which we like to associate with the thought of suffering, but which is seldom present in it; Ray did not dare to go; he sat keenly sensible of the squalor of it, unable to stir. He glanced toward Peace for strength; she had her face hidden in her hands. He would not look at Mrs. Denton, who was saying: “I think father is right, and if Ansel can’t control himself any better than he has of late, he’d better leave us. It’s wearing father out. Don’t you think he looks worse, Mr. Ray?”

He did no answer, but remained wondering what he had better do.

Peace took down her hands and looked at him, and he saw that she wished him to go. He went, but in the dark below he lingered, trying to think whom he should turn to for help. He ran over Mr. Chapley, Brandreth, Kane in his mind with successive rejection, and then he thought of Kane’s doctor; he had never really seen him, but he feigned him the wisest and most efficient of the doctors known to fiction. Of course it must be a doctor whom Ray should speak to; but he must put the affair hypothetically, so that if the doctor thought it nothing, no one would be compromised. It must be a physician of the greatest judgment, a man of sympathy as well as sagacity; no, it could be any sort of doctor, and he ought to go to him at once.

He was fumbling in the dark for the wire that pulled the bolt of the street door when a night-latch was thrust into the key-hole outside, and the door was burst open with a violence that flung him back against the wall behind it. Before it could swing to again he saw Denton’s figure bent in its upward rush on the stairs; he leaped after him.

“Now, then!” Denton shouted, as they burst into the apartment together. “ The time has come! The time has come! They are calling you, Peace! You wouldn’t let me give them, and the Lord had to take them, but they have reconciled Him to you; He will accept you for their sake!”

Old Hughes had entered from his room, and stood looking on with a frowning brows, but with more vexation than apprehension. “ Be done with that arrant nonsense!” he commanded. “What stuff are you talking?”

Denton’s wife shrank into the farthest comer, with the cat still in her arms. Peace stood in the middle of the room staring at him. He did not heed Hughes except to thrust him aside as he launched himself towards the girl.

Ray slipped between them, and Denton regarded him with dull wavering eyes like a drunken man’s. “Oh, you’re here still, are you?” he said; a cunning gleam came into his eyes, and he dropped his voice from its impassioned pitch. He kept his right hand in his coat pocket, and Ray watched that hand too solely. Denton flashed past him, and with his left swept away the hands which Peace mechanically lifted to her face, and held them in his grip. Ray sprang upon him, and pinioned his right wrist.

“Hold him fast!” Hughes added his grip to Ray’s. “He’s got something in his pocket, there! Run to the window, Jenny, and call for help!”

“No, no, Jenny, don’t!” Peace entreated. “Don’t call out. Ansel won’t hurt me! I know he’ll listen — to me; won’t you Ansel? Oh, what is it you want to do?”

“Here!” cried Denton. “Take it! In an instant you will be with them! The sin will be remitted.” He struggled to reach her lips with the hand which he had got out of his pocket. Old Hughes panted out:

“Open his fist! Tear it open. If I had a knife”— “Oh, don’t hurt him!” Peace implored. “He isn’t hurting me.”

Denton suddenly released her wrists, and she sank senseless. Ray threw himself on his knees beside her, and stretched his arms out over her.

Denton did not look at them; he stood a moment listening; then with a formless cry he whirled into the next room. The door shut crashing behind him, and then there came the noise of a heavy fall within. The rush of a train made itself loudly heard in the silence. A keen bitter odor in the air rapt Ray far away to an hour of childhood when a storm had stripped the blossoms from a peach-tree by the house, and he noted with a child’s accidental observance the acrid scent which rose from them.

“That is prussic acid,” Hughes whispered, and he moved feebly towards the door and pushed it open. Denton lay on the floor with his head toward the threshold, and the old man stood looking down into his dead face.

“It must have been that which he had in his hand.”

XXXIV.

“WELL, old fellow, I’ve got some good news for you,” said Mr. Brandreth, when Ray showed himself at the door of the publisher’s little den the next morning. Ray thought that he carried the record of the event he had witnessed in every lineament, but Mr. Brandreth could have seen nothing unusual in his face. “The editor of Every Evening has just been here, and he wants to see you about taking hold of his literary department.” Ray stared blankly. Mr. Brandreth went on with generous pleasure: “He’s had some trouble with the man who’s been doing it, and it’s come to a complete break at last, and now he wants you to try. He’s got some new ideas about it. He wants to make something specially literary of the Saturday issue; he has a notion of restoring the old-fashioned serial. If you take charge, you could work in the Modem Romeo on him; and then, if it succeeds as a serial, we can republish it in book form! Better see him at once! Isn’t it funny how things turn out? He said he was coming down town in a Broadway car, and happened to catch sight of Coquelin’s name on a poster at the theatre, and it made him think of you. He’d always liked that thing you did for him, and when he got down here, he jumped out and came in to ask about you. I talked you into him good and strong, and he wants to see you.”

Ray listened in nerveless passivity to news that would have transported him with hope a few hours before. Mr. Brandreth might well have mistaken his absent stare for the effect of such a rapture. He said, as a man does when tempted a little beyond prudence by the pleasure he is giving:

“The fact is, I’ve been thinking about that work of yours, myself. I want to try some novel for the summer trade; and I want you to let me see it again. I want to read it myself this time. They say a publisher oughtn’t to know anything about the inside of a book, but I think we might make an exception of yours.” Ray’s face remained unchanged, and Mr. Brandreth now asked, with a sudden perception of its strangeness: “Hello! What’s the matter? Anything gone wrong with you?”

“No, no,” Ray struggled out, “not with me. But” —

“Nothing new with the Hugheses, I hope?” said Mr. Brandreth, with mounting alarm. “Miss Hughes was to have come back to work this morning, but she hasn’t yet. No more diphtheria, I hope? By Jove, my dear fellow, I don’t think you ought to come here if there is! I don’t think it’s quite fair to me.”

“It isn’t diphtheria,” Ray gasped. “But they’re in great trouble. I hardly know how to tell you. That wretched creature, Denton, has killed himself. He’s been off his base for some time, and I’ve been dreading — I’ve been there all night with them. He took prussic acid and died instantly. Mr. Hughes and I had a struggle with him to prevent — prevent him; and the old man got a wrench, and then he had a hemorrhage. He is very weak from it, but the doctor’s brought him round for the present. Miss Hughes wanted me to come and tell you.”

“Has it got out yet?” Mr. Brandreth asked. “Are the reporters on to it?”

“The fact has to come out officially through the doctor, but it isn’t known yet.”

“I wish it hadn’t happened,” said Mr. Brandreth. “It will be an awful scandal.”

There had been a moment with Ray too when the scandal of the fact was all he felt. “Yes,” he said, mechanically.

“You see,” Mr. Brandreth explained, “those fellows will rummage round in every direction, for every bit of collateral information, relevant and irrelevant, and they will make as much as they can of the fact that Miss Hughes was employed here.”

“I see,” said Ray.

Mr. Brandreth fell into a rueful muse, but he plucked himself out of it with self-reproachful decency. “It’s awful for them, poor things!”

“It’s the best thing that could have happened, under the circumstances,” said Ray, with a coldness that surprised himself, and a lingering resentment toward Denton that the physical struggle had left in his nerves. “It was a question whether he should kill himself, or kill some one else. He had a mania of sacrifice, of atonement. Somebody had to be offered up. He was a crank.” Ray pronounced the word with a strong disgust, as if there were nothing worse to be said of a man. He paused, and then he went on. “I shall have to tell you all about it, Brandreth;” and he went over the event again, and spared nothing.

Mr. Brandreth listened with starting eyes. As if the additional details greatly discouraged him, he said, “I don’t think those things can be kept from coming out. It will be a terrible scandal. Of course, I pity the family; and Miss Hughes. It’s strange that they could keep living on with such a danger hanging over them for weeks and months, and not try to do anything about it — not have him shut up.”

“The doctor says we’ve no idea what sort of things people keep living on with,” said Ray, gloomily. “The danger isn’t always there, and the hope is. The trouble keeps on, and in most cases nothing happens. The doctor says nothing would have happened in this case, probably, if the man had staid quietly in the country, in the routine he was used to. But when he had the stress of new circumstances put on him, with the anxieties and the chances, and all the miseries around him, his mind gave way; I don’t suppose it was ever a very strong one.”

“Oh, I don’t see how the strongest stands it, in this infernal hurly-burly,” said Mr. Brandreth, with an introspective air. He added, with no effect of relief from his reflection, “I don’t know what I’m going to say to my wife when all this comes out. I’ve got to prepare her, somehow — her and her mother. Look here! Why couldn’t you go up to Mr. Chapley’s with me, and see him? He wasn’t very well, yesterday, and said he wouldn’t be down till this afternoon. My wife’s going there to lunch, and we can get them all together before the evening papers are out. Then I think we could make them see it in the right light. What do you say?”

“I don’t see why I shouldn’t go with you. If I can be of any use,” said Ray, with an inward regret that he could think of no excuse for not going.

“I think you can be of the greatest use,” said Mr. Brandreth. He called a clerk, and left word with him that he should not be in again till after lunch. “You see,” he explained, as they walked out together, “if we can get the story to Mrs. Brandreth and her mother before it comes to them in print it won’t seem half as bad. Some fellow is going to get hold of the case and work it for all it is worth. He is going to unearth Mr. Hughes’s whole history, and exploit him as a reformer and a philosopher. He’s going to find out everybody who knows him, or has ever had anything to do with him, and interview people right and left.”

Ray had to acknowledge that this was but too probable. He quailed to think of the publicity which he must achieve in the newspapers, and how he must figure before the people of Midland, who had expected such a different celebrity for him.

“You must look out for yourself. I’m going to put Mr. Chapley on his guard, and warn the ladies not to see any reporters or answer any questions. By-the-way, does Mr. Kane know about this yet?”

“I’ve just come from his place; he wasn’t at home; I left a note for him.”

“I wonder if we hadn’t better go round that way and tell him?” Mr. Brandreth faltered a moment, and then pushed on. “Or, no! He’s a wary old bird, and I don’t think he’ll say anything that will commit anybody.” They walked on in silence for awhile before Mr. Brandreth said, with an air of relevance, “Of course, I shouldn’t want you to count too much upon our being able to do anything with your book this year, after all.”

“Of course,” said Ray. “If I’m mixed up with this business in the papers, my name won’t be a very good one for a respectable house to conjure with for some years to come. Perhaps never.”

At that moment he was mere egoist, feeling nothing but the mockery and the malice of fortune; all his compassion for the hapless creatures whose misery had involved him died within him.

“Oh, I don’t mean that, exactly,” said Mr. Brandreth. “But isn’t it curious how we’re all bound together here? It’s enough to make one forswear all intercourse with his fellow-beings. Here we are in same boat with people whom I didn’t know the existence of six months ago; and because Mr. Chapley has stood by his old friend and tried to help him along, he will probably be pilloried with him before the public as a fellow-Tolstoïan, and people all over the country that used to order their books through us will think we’re in sympathy with the anarchists, and won’t have any more to do with us than if we had published the Kreuzer Sonata.”

Ray thought how he had never asked to know the Hugheses at all, and was not justly responsible for them, even through a tie of ancient friendship. But in the presence of Mr. Brandreth’s shameless anxieties, he was ashamed to air his own. He only said, cynically: “Yes, it appears that a homicidal lunatic can’t take himself harmlessly out of the world. His fate reaches out in every direction, and covers everybody that knew him with confusion. And they talk of a moral government of the universe!”

“Yes!” said Mr. Brandreth, with as much satisfaction in Ray’s scorn of the order of things as his mild nature could probably feel.

At Mr. Chapley’s house they learned that Mrs. Brandreth had brought the baby to spend the day with her mother. Her sister, whom Ray knew, met the two men at the door on her way out to a young ladies’ lunch, and told them they would find her father in his library. She said Mr. Kane was there with him; and Mr. Brandreth, with a glance at Ray, said, “Well, that’s first-rate!” and explained, as they pushed on upstairs, “He may be able to suggest something.”

Kane did not suggest anything at once. He listened in silence and without apparent feeling to Ray’s story.

“Dear me!” Mr. Chapley lamented. “Dreadful, dreadful! Poor David must be in a sad state about it! And I’m not fit to go to him!”

“He wouldn’t expect you, sir,” Mr. Brandreth began.

“I don’t know; he would certainly come to me if I were in trouble. Dear, dear! Was the hemorrhage very exhausting, Mr. — er — Ray?”

Ray gave the doctor’s word that there was no immediate danger from it, and Mr. Brandreth made haste to say that he had come to tell the ladies about the affair before they saw it in the papers, and to caution them against saying anything if reporters called.

“Yes, that’s very well,” said Mr. Chapley. “But I see nothing detrimental to us in the facts.”

“No, sir. Not unless they’re distorted, and — in connection with your peculiar views, sir. When those fellows get on to your old friendship with Mr. Hughes, and his peculiar views, there’s no telling what they won’t make of them.” Kane glanced round at Ray with arched eyes and pursed mouth. Mr. Brandreth turned toward Ray, and asked sweetly, “Should you mind my lighting one of those after-dinner pastilles?” He indicated the slender stem in the little silver-holder on the mantel. “Of course there’s no danger of infection now; but it would be a little more reassuring to my wife, especially as she’s got the boy here with her.”

“By all means,” said Ray, and the pastille began sending up a delicate thread of pungent blue smoke, while Mr. Brandreth went for his wife and mother-in-law.

“It seems to me you’re in a parlous state, Henry,” said Kane. “I don’t see but you’ll have to renounce Tolstoï and all his works if you ever get out of this trouble. I’m sorry for you. It takes away half the satisfaction I feel at the lifting of that incubus from poor David’s life. I think I’d better go.” He rose, and went over to give his hand to Mr. Chapley, where he sat in a reclining-chair.

Mr. Chapley clung to him, and said feebly: “No, no! Don’t go, Kane. We shall need your advice, and — and — counsel,” and while Kane hesitated, Mr. Brandreth came in with the ladies, who wore a look of mystified impatience.

“I thought they had better hear it from you, Mr. Ray,” he said, and for the third time Ray detailed the tragical incidents. He felt as if he had been inculpating himself.

Then Mrs. Chapley said: “It is what we might have expected from the beginning. But if it will be a warning to Mr. Chapley” —

Mrs. Brandreth turned upon her mother with a tone that startled Mr. Chapley from the attitude of gentle sufferance in which he sat resting his chin upon his hand. “I don’t see what warning there can be for papa in such a dreadful thing. Do you think he’s likely to take prussic acid?”

“I don’t say that, you know well enough child.

But I shall be quite satisfied if it is the last of Tolstoïism in this family.”

“It has nothing to do with Tolstoi,” Mrs. Brandreth returned, with surprising energy. “If we’d all been living simply in the country, that wretched creature’s mind wouldn’t have been preyed upon by the misery of the city.”

“There’s more insanity in proportion to the population in the country than there is in the city,” Mrs. Chapley began.

Mrs. Brandreth ignored her statistical contribution. “There’s no more danger of father’s going out to live on a farm, or in a community, than there is of his taking poison; and at any rate he hasn’t got anything to do with what’s happened. He’s just been faithful to his old friend, and he’s given his daughter work. I don’t care how much the newspapers bring that in. We haven’t done anything wrong.”

Mr. Brandreth looked at his wife in evident surprise; her mother said, “Well, my dear!”

Her father gently urged: “I don’t think you’ve quite understood your mother. She doesn’t look at life from my point of view.”

“No, Henry, I’m thankful to say I don’t,” Mrs. Chapley broke in; “and I don’t know anybody who does. If I had followed you and your prophet, we shouldn’t have had a roof over our heads.”

“A good many people have no roofs over their heads,” Mr. Chapley meekly suggested.

“That’s no reason why we shouldn’t,” said his wife.

“No; you’re right there, my dear. That’s the hopeless part of it. Perhaps poor David is right, and the man who attempts to solve the problem of altruism singly and in his own life” —

Mrs. Brandreth would not let him finish. “The question is, what are we going to do for these poor things in their trouble?” She looked at Ray, who had sat by trying in his sense of intrusion and superfluity to shrink into as small a space as possible. He now blushed to find himself appealed to. He had not seen Mrs. Brandreth often, and he had not reversed his first impression of a narrow, anxious, housewifely spirit in her, sufficient to the demands of young motherhood, but of few and scanty general sympathies. “When did you see them last?” she asked.

He told her, and she said, “Well, I am going right up there with Percy.”

“And bring back the scarlet fever to your child!” cried her mother. “You shall neither of you go, as long as I have anything to say about it. Or, if you do, you shall not come back to this house, and I shall keep the baby here till there isn’t the least fear of danger; and I don’t know how long that will be.” All the grandmother rose in Mrs. Chapley; she lifted her voice, and in the transport of her alarm and indignation she suddenly appealed to Mr. Kane from the wilfulness she evidently feared in her daughter: “What do you think, Mr. Kane?”

“I wouldn’t presume to decide such a question finally; it’s too important,” Kane said, in his mellow murmur. “But I wish that for the moment Mrs. Brandreth would let me be the bearer of her kind messages and inquiries. If you haven’t been in the habit of calling there” —

“I have never been there at all, I’m sorry to say,” Mrs. Brandreth frankly declared.

“Ah! Well, I don’t see what good could come of it, just at present; and there might be some lingering infection.”

“It has been carried in clothes across the ocean months afterwards, and in letters,” Mrs. Chapley triumphed.

Kane abandoned the point to her. “The situation might be very much worse for the Hugheses, as I was saying to Henry before you came in. The Powers are not commonly so considerate. It seems to me distinctly the best thing that could have happened, at least as far as Denton is concerned.”

“Surely,” said Mrs. Chapley, “you don’t approve of suicide?”

“Not in the case of sane and happy people,” Kane blandly replied. “The suicide of such persons should be punished with the utmost rigor of the law. But there seem to be extenuating circumstances in the present instance; I hope the coroner’s jury will deal leniently with the culprit. I must go and see if I can do anything for David. Probably I can’t. It’s always a question in these cases whether you are not adding to the sufferings of the mourners by your efforts to alleviate them; but you can only solve it at their expense by trying.”

“And you will let us know,” said Mrs. Chapley, “whether we can do anything, Mr. Kane.”

Mrs. Brandreth did not openly persist in her determination to go to the Hugheses. She said, “Yes, be sure you let us know,” and when Kane had gone on an errand of mercy which he owned was distasteful to him, her husband followed Ray down to the door.

“You see what splendid courage she has,” he whispered, with a backward glance up the stairs. “I must confess that it surprised me, after all I’ve seen her go through, that stand she took with her mother. But I don’t altogether wonder at it; they were disagreeing about keeping up the belladonna when I found them, upstairs, and I guess Mrs. Brandreth’s opposition naturally carried over into this question about the Hugheses. Of course Mrs. Chapley means well, but if Mrs. Brandreth could once be got from under her influence she would be twice the woman she is. I think she’s right about the effect of our connection with the family before the public. They can’t make anything wrong out of it, no matter how they twist it or turn it. I’m not afraid. After all, it isn’t as if Mr. Hughes was one of those howling socialists. An old-time Brook Farmer — it’s a kind of literary tradition; it’s like being an original abolitionist. I’m going to see if I can’t get a glimpse of that book of his without committing myself. Well, let me know how you get on. I wouldn’t let that chance on Every Evening slip. Better see the man. Confound the papers! I hope they won’t drag us in!”

XXXV.

A FEW lines, with some misspelling of names, told the story of the suicide and inquest in the afternoon papers, and it dwindled into still smaller space and finer print the next morning. The publicity which those least concerned had most dreaded was spared them. Ray himself appeared in print as a witness named Bray; there was no search into the past of Hughes and his family, or their present relations; none of the rich sensations of the case were exploited; it was treated as one of those every-day tragedies without significance or importance, which abound in the history of great cities, and are forgotten as rapidly as they occur. The earth closed over the hapless wretch for whom the dream of duty tormenting us all, more or less, had turned to such a hideous nightmare, and those whom his death threatened even more than his life drew consciously or unconsciously a long breath of freedom.

Mr. Brandreth’s courage rose with his escape; there came a moment when he was ready to face the worst; the moment did not come till the danger of the worst was past. Then he showed himself even eager to retrieve the effect of anxieties not compatible with a scrupulous self-respect.

“Why should we laugh at him?” Kane philosophized, in talking the matter over with Ray. “The ideals of generosity and self-devotion are preposterous in our circumstances. He was quite right to be cautious, to be prudent, to protect his business and his bosom from the invasion of others’ misfortunes, and to look anxiously out for the main chance. Who would do it for him, if he neglected this first and most obvious duty? He has behaved most thoughtfully and kindly toward Peace through it all, and I can’t blame him for not thrusting himself forward to offer help when nothing could really be done.”

Kane had himself remained discreetly in the background, and had not cumbered his old acquaintance with offers of service. He kept away from the funeral, but he afterwards visited Hughes frequently, though he recognized nothing more than the obligation of the early kindness between them. This had been affected by many years of separation and wide divergence of opinion, and it was doubtful whether his visits were altogether a pleasure to the invalid. They disputed a good deal, and sometimes when Hughes lost his voice from excitement and exhaustion, Kane’s deep pipe kept on in a cool smooth assumption of positions which Hughes was physically unable to assail.

Mr. Chapley went out of town to his country place in Massachusetts, to try and get back his strength after a touch of the grippe. The Sunday conventicles had to be given up because Hughes could no longer lead them, and could not suffer the leadership of others. He was left mainly for society and consolation to the young fellow who did not let him feel that he differed from him, and was always gently patient with him.

Ray had outlived the grudge he felt at Kane for delivering him over to bonds which he shirked so lightly himself; but this was perhaps because they were no longer a burden. It was not possible for him to refuse his presence to the old man when he saw that it was his sole pleasure; he had come to share the pleasure of these meetings himself. As the days which must be fewer and fewer went by he tried to come every day, and Peace usually found him sitting with her father when she reached home at the end of the afternoon. Ray could get there first because his work on the newspaper was of a more flexible and desultory sort; and he often brought a bundle of books for review with him, and talked them over with Hughes, for whom he was a perspective of the literary world, with its affairs and events. Hughes took a vivid interest in the management of Ray’s department of Every Evening, and gave him advice about it, charging him not to allow it to be merely aesthetic, but to imbue it with an ethical quality; he maintained that literature should be the handmaid of reform; he regretted that he had not cast the material of The World Revisited in the form of fiction, which would have given it a charm impossible to a merely polemical treatise.

“I’m convinced that if I had it in that shape it would readily find a publisher, and I’m going to see what I can do to work it over as soon as I’m about again.”

“I hope you’ll be luckier than I’ve been with fiction,” said Ray. “I don’t know but it might be a good plan to turn A Modem Romeo into a polemical treatise. We might change about, Mr. Hughes.”

Hughes said, “Why don’t you bring your story up here and read it to me?’

“Wouldn’t that be taking an unfair advantage of you?” Ray asked. “Just at present my chiefs looking over it, to see if it won’t do for the feuilleton we’re going to try. He won’t want it; but it affords a little respite for you, Mr. Hughes, as long as he thinks he may.’

He knew that Peace must share his constraint in speaking of his book. When they were alone for a little while before he went away that evening he said to her, “You have never told me yet that you forgave me for my bad behavior about my book the last time we talked about it.”

“Did you wish me to tell you?” she asked, gently. “I thought I needn’t.”

“Yes, do,” he urged. “You thought I was wrong?”

“Yes,” she assented.

“Then you ought to say, in so many words, ‘I forgive you.’”

He waited, but she would not speak.

“Why can’t you say that?”

She did not answer, but after a while she said, “I think what I did was a good reason for” —

“My being in the wrong? Then why did you do it? Can’t you tell me that?”

“Not — now.”

“Some time?”

“Perhaps,” she murmured.

“Then I may ask you again?”

She was silent, sitting by the window in the little back room, where her head was dimly outlined against the late twilight. Between the rushing trains at the front they could hear Mrs. Denton talking to her father, joking and laughing. Our common notion of tragedy is that it alters the nature of those involved, as if it were some spiritual chemistry combining the elements of character anew. But it is merely an incident of our being, and, for all we can perceive, is of no more vital effect than many storms in the material world. What it does not destroy, it leaves essentially unchanged. The light creature whom its forces had beaten to the earth, rose again with the elasticity of light things, when it had passed. She was meant to be what she was made, and even Ray, with the severity of his young morality, and the paucity of his experience, perceived that the frivolity which shocked him was comfort and cheer to the sick old man. She sat with him, and babbled and jested; and Ray saw with a generous resentment that she must always have been his favorite. There was probably a responsive lightness in Hughes’s own soul to which hers brought the balm of kinship and of perfect sympathy. There was no apparent consciousness of his preference in the sisters; each in her way accepted it as something just and fit Peace looked after the small housekeeping, and her sister had more and more the care of their father.

Mrs. Denton’s buoyant temperament served a better purpose in the economy of sorrow than a farther-sighted seriousness. In virtue of all that Ray had ever read or fancied of such experiences, the deaths that had bereaved her ought to have chastened and sobered her, and he could not forgive her because she could not wear the black of a hushed and spiritless behavior. It even shocked him that Peace did nothing to restrain her, but took her from moment to moment as she showed herself, and encouraged her cheerful talk, and smiled at her jokes. He could not yet understand how the girl’s love was a solvent of all questions that harass the helpless reason, and embitter us with the faults of others; but from time to time he had a sense of quality in her that awed him from all other sense of her. There is something in the heart of man that puts a woman’s charm before all else, and that enables evil and foolish women to find husbands, while good and wise women die unwed. But in the soul of incontaminate youth there is often a passionate refusal to accept this instinct as the highest. The ideal of womanhood is then something too pure and hallowed even for the dreams of love. It was something like this, a mystical reverence or a fantastic exaltation, which removed Ray further from Peace, in what might have joined their lives, than he was the first day they met, when he began to weave about her the reveries which she had no more part in than if they had been the dreams of his sleep. They were of the stuff of his literature, and like the innumerably trooping, insubstantial fancies that followed each other through his brain from nothing in his experience. When they ceased to play, as they must after the little romance of that first meeting had yielded to acquaintance, what had taken their place? At the end of the half-year which had united them in the intimacy of those strange events and experiences, he could not have made sure of anything but a sort of indignant compassion that drew him near her, and the fantastic sentiment that held him aloof. The resentment in his pity was toward himself as much as her father; when he saw her in the isolation where the old man’s preference for her sister left her, he blamed himself as much as them.

Peace blamed no one by word or look. He doubted if she saw it, till he ventured one day to speak of her father’s fondness for her sister, and then she answered that he would always rather have Jenny with him than any one else. Ray returned some commonplaces, not too sincere, about the compensation the care of her father must be to Mrs. Denton in her bereavement, and Peace answered as frankly as before that they had got each other back again. “Father didn’t want her to marry Ansel, and he didn’t care for the children. He couldn’t help that; he was too old; and after we were all shut up here together they fretted him.”

She sighed gently, in the way she had, and Ray said, with the fatuity of comforters, “I suppose they are  better off out of this world.”

“They were born into this world,” she answered.

“Yes,” he had to own.

He saw how truly and deeply she grieved for the little ones, and he realized without umbrage that she mourned their wretched father too, with an affection as simple and pure. There were times when he thought how tragical it would be for her to have cared for Denton, in the way his wife cared so little; and then his fancy created a situation in whose unreality it ran riot. But all the time he knew that he was feigning these things, and that there was no more truth in them than in the supposition which he indulged at other times that he was himself in love with Mrs. Denton, and always had been, and this was the reason why he could not care for Peace. It was the effect in both cases of the aesthetic temperament, which is as often the slave as the master of its reveries.

It was in Mrs. Denton’s favor that she did not let the drift of their father’s affections away from Peace carry her with them. The earthward bodily decline of the invalid implied a lapse from the higher sympathies to the lower, and she seemed to have some vague perception of this, which she formulated in her own way, once, when she wished to account for the sick man’s refusal of some service from Peace which he accepted from herself.

“He has more use for me here, Peace, because I’m of the earth, earthy, but he’ll want you somewhere else.”

The old man clung to the world with a hope that admitted at least no open question of his living. He said that as soon as the spring fairly opened, and the weather would allow him to go out without taking more cold, he should carry his manuscript about to the different publishers, and offer it personally. He thought his plan carefully out, and talked it over with Ray, whom he showed that his own failure with his novel was from a want of address in these interviews. He proposed to do something for Ray’s novel as soon as he secured a publisher for himself, and again he bade him bring it and read it to him. Ray afterwards realized with shame that he would have consented to this if Hughes had persisted. But the invitation was probably a mere grace of civility with him, an effect of the exuberant faith he had in his own success.

As the season advanced, and the heat within-doors increased, they had to open the windows, and then the infernal uproar of the avenue filled the room, so that they could not hear one another speak till the windows were closed again. But the rush and clank of the elevated trains, the perpetual passage of the surface cars, with the clatter of their horses’ hoofs, and the clash of the air-slitting bells, the grind and jolt of the heavy trucks, the wild clatter of express carts across the rails or up and down the tracks, the sound of feet and voices, the cries of the fruit-venders, and the whiffs of laughter and blasphemy that floated up from the turmoil below like filthy odors, seemed not so keenly to afflict the sick man, or to rend his nerves with the anguish that forced the others to shut it all out, and rather stifle in the heat. Yet, in some sort he felt it too, for once when Ray spoke of it, he said yes, it was atrocious. “But,” he added, “I am glad I came and placed myself where I could fully realize the hideousness of a competitive metropolis. All these abominations of sight and sound, these horrible discords, that offend every sense, physically express the spiritual principle underlying the whole social framework. It has been immensely instructive to me, and I have got some color of it into my book: not enough, of course, but infinitely more than I could possibly have imagined. No one can imagine the horror, the squalor, the cruel and senseless turpitude which these things typify, except in their presence. I have merely represented the facts in regard to them, and have left the imagination free to deal with the ideal city as a contrast, with its peaceful streets, cleanly and quiet, its stately ranks of beautiful dwellings, its noble piles of civic and religious architecture, its shaded and colonnaded avenues, its parks and gardens, and all planned and built, not from the greed and the fraud of competition, but from the generous and unselfish spirit of emulation, wherein men join to achieve the best instead of separating to get the most. Think of a city operated by science, as every city might be now, without one of the wretched animals tamed by the savage man, and still perpetuated by the savage man for the awkward and imperfect uses of a barbarous society! A city without a horse, where electricity brought every man and everything silently to the door. Jenny! Get me that manuscript, will you? The part I was writing on to-day — in the desk —— the middle drawer — I should like to read” —

Mrs. Denton dropped her cat from her lap and ran to get the manuscript But when she brought it to her father, and he arranged the leaves with fluttering fingers, he could not read. He gasped out a few syllables, and in the paroxysm of coughing which began, he thrust the manuscript toward Ray.

“He wants you to take it,” said Peace. “You can take it home with you. You can give it to me in the morning.”

Ray took it, and stood by, looking on, not knowing how to come to their help for the sick man’s relief, and anxious not to cumber them. When they had got him quiet again, and Ray had once more thrown up the window, and let in the mild night air which came laden with that delirium of the frenzied city, Peace followed him into the little back room, where they stood a moment “For Heaven’s sake,” he said, “why don’t you get him away from here, where he could be a little more out of the noise? It’s enough to drive a well man mad.”

“He doesn’t feel it as if he were well,” she answered. “We have tried to get him to let us bring his bed out here. But he won’t. I think,” she added, “that he believes it would be a bad omen to change.”

“Surely,” said Ray, “a man like your father couldn’t care for that ridiculous superstition. What possible connection could his changing to a quieter place have with his living or” —

“It isn’t a matter of reason with him. I can see how he’s gone back to his early life in a great many things in these few days. He hasn’t been so much like himself for a long time as he has to-night.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“He says to let him have his own way about it. He says that — the noise can’t make any difference — now.”

They were in the dark; but he knew from her voice that tears were in her eyes. He felt for her hand to say good-night. When he had found it, he held it a moment, and then he kissed it But no thrill or glow of the heart justified him in what he had done. At the best he could excuse it as an impulse of pity.

XXXVI.

THE editor of Every Evening gave Ray his manuscript back. He had evidently no expectation that Ray could have any personal feeling about it, or could view it apart from the interests of the paper. He himself betrayed no personal feeling where the paper was concerned, and he probably could have conceived of none in Ray.

“I don’t think it will do for us,” he said. “It is a good story, and I read it all through, but I don’t believe it would succeed as a serial. What do you think, yourself?”

“I?” said Ray. “How could I have an unprejudiced opinion?”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. You know what we want; we’ve talked it over enough; and you ought to know whether this is the kind of thing. Anyhow, it’s within your province to decide. I don’t think it will do, but if you think it will, I’m satisfied. You must take the responsibility. I leave it to you, and I mean business.”

Ray thought how old Kane would be amused if he could know of the situation, how he would inspect and comment it from every side, and try to get novel phrases for it. He believed himself that no author had ever been quite in his place before; it was like something in Gilbert’s operas; it was as if a prisoner were invited to try himself and pronounce his own penalty. His chief seemed to see no joke in the affair; he remained soberly and somewhat severely waiting for Ray’s decision.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” said Ray. “I don’t think it would do for Every Evening. Even if it would, I should doubt the taste of working in something of my own on the reader at the beginning.”

“I shouldn’t care for that,” said the chief, “if it were the thing.”

Ray winced, but the chief did not see it. Now, as always, it was merely and simply a question of the paper. He added carelessly:

“I should think such a story as that would succeed as a book.”

“I wish you would get some publisher to think so.” The chief had nothing to say to that. He opened his desk and began to write.

In spite of the rejected manuscript lying on the table before him, Ray made out a very fair day’s work himself, and then he took it up town with him. He did not go at once to his hotel, but pushed on as far as Chapley’s, where he hoped to see Peace before she went home, and ask how her father was getting on; he had not visited Hughes for several weeks; he made himself this excuse. What he really wished was to confront the girl and divine her thoughts concerning himself. He must do that, now; but if it were not for the cruelty of forsaking the old man, it might be the kindest and best thing never to go near any of them again.

He had the temporary relief of finding her gone home when he reached Chapley’s. Mr. Brandreth was there, and he welcomed Ray with something more than his usual cordiality.

“Look here,” he said, shutting the door of his little room. “Have you got that story of yours where you could put your hand on it easily?”

“I can put my hand on it instantly,” said Ray, and he touched it “Oh!” Mr. Brandreth returned, a little daunted.  I didn’t know you carried it around with you.”

“I don’t usually — or only when I’ve got it from some publisher who doesn’t want it.”

“I thought it had been the rounds,” said Mr. Brandreth, still uneasily.

“Oh, it’s an editor, this time. It’s just been offered to me for serial use in Every Evening, and I’ve declined it.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Brandreth smiled in mystification.

“Exactly what I say.” Ray explained the affair as it had occurred. “It makes me feel like Brutus and the son of Brutus rolled into one. I’m going round to old Kane, to give the facts away to him. I think he’ll enjoy them.”

“Well! Hold on! What did the chief say about it?”

“Oh, he liked it Everybody likes it, but nobody wants it. He said he thought it would succeed as a book. The editors all think that. The publishers think it would succeed as a serial.”

Ray carried it off buoyantly, and enjoyed the sort of daze Mr. Brandreth was in.

“See here,” said the publisher, “I want you to leave that manuscript with me.”

“Again?”

“Yes. I’ve never read it myself yet, you know.”

“Take it and be happy!” Ray bestowed it upon him with dramatic effusion.

“No, seriously!” said Mr. Brandreth. “I want to talk with you. Sit down, won’t you? You know the first time you were in here, I told you I was anxious to get Chapley & Co in line as a publishing house again; I didn’t like the way we were dropping out and turning into mere jobbers. You remember.”

Ray nodded.

“Well, sir, I’ve never lost sight of that idea, and I’ve been keeping one eye out for a good novel, to start with, ever since. I haven’t found it, I don’t mind telling you. You see, all the established reputations are in the hands of other publishers, and you can’t get them away without paying ridiculous money, and violating the comity of the trade at the same time. If we are to start new, we must start with a new man.”

“I don’t know whether I’m a new man or not,” said Ray, “if you’re working up to me. Sometimes I feel like a pretty old one. I think I came to New York about the beginning of the Christian era. But A Modem Romeo is as fresh as ever. It has the dew of the morning on it still — rubbed off in spots by the nose of the professional smeller.”

“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “it’s new enough for all practical purposes. I want you to let me take it home with me.”

“Which of the leading orchestras would you like to have accompany you to your door?” asked Ray.

“No, no! Don’t expect too much!” Mr. Brandreth entreated.

“I don’t expect anything,” Ray protested.

“Well, that’s right — that’s the only business basis. But if it should happen to be the thing, I don’t believe you’d be personally any happier about it than I should.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’m not a fatalist” —

“But it would look a good deal like fatalism.”

“Yes, it would. It would look as if it were really intended to be, if it came back to us now, after it had been round to everybody else.”

“Yes; but if it was fated from the beginning, I don’t see why you didn’t take it in the beginning. I should rather wonder what all the bother had been for.”

“You might say that,” Mr. Brandreth admitted. Ray went off on the wave of potential prosperity, and got Kane to come out and dine with him They decided upon Martin’s, where the dinner cost twice as much as at Ray’s hotel, and had more the air of being a fine dinner; and they got a table in the corner, and Ray ordered a bottle of champagne.

“Yes,” said Kane, “that is the right drink for a man who wishes to spend his money before he has got it. It’s the true gambler’s beverage.”

“You needn’t drink it,” said Ray. “You shall have the vin ordinaire that’s included in the price of the dinner.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a glass of champagne now and then, after I’ve brought my host under condemnation for ordering it,” said Kane.

“And I want to let my heart out to-night,” Ray pursued. “I may not have the chance to-morrow. Besides, as to the gambling, it isn’t I betting on my book; it’s Brandreth. I don’t understand yet why he wants to do it. To be sure, it isn’t a great risk he’s taking.”

“I rather think he has to take some risks just now,” said Kane, significantly. He lowered his soft voice an octave as he went on. “I’m afraid that poor Henry, in his pursuit of personal perfectability, has let things get rather behindhand in his business. I don’t blame him — you know I never blame people — for there is always a question as to which is the cause and which is the effect in such matters. My dear old friend may have begun to let his business go to the bad because he had got interested in his soul, or he may have turned to his soul for refuge because he knew his business had begun to go to the bad. At any rate, he seems to have found the usual difficulty in serving God and Mammon; only, in this case Mammon has got the worst of it, for once: I suppose one ought to be glad of that. But the fact is that Henry has lost heart in business; he doesn’t respect business; he has a bad conscience; he wants to be out of it. I had a long talk with him before he went into the country, and I couldn’t help pitying him. I don’t think his wife and daughter even will ever get him back to New York. He knows it’s rather selfish to condemn them to the dulness of a country life, and that it’s rather selfish to leave young Brandreth to take the brunt of affairs here alone. But what are you to do in a world like this, where a man can’t get rid of one bad conscience without laying in another?” In his pleasure with his paradox Kane suffered Ray to fill up his glass a second time. Then he looked dissatisfied, and Ray divined the cause. “Did you word that quite to your mind?”

“No, I didn’t. It’s too diffuse. Suppose we say that in our conditions no man can do right without doing harm?”

“That’s more succinct,” said Ray. “Is it known at all that they’re in difficulties?”

Kane smoothly ignored the question. “I fancy that the wrong is in Henry’s desire to cut himself loose from the ties that bind us all together here. Poor David has the right of that. We must stand or fall together in the pass we’ve come to; and we cannot helpfully eschew the world except by remaining in it.” He took up Ray’s question after a moment’s pause. “No, it isn’t known that they’re in difficulties, and I don’t say that it’s so. Their affairs have simply been allowed to run down, and Henry has left Brandreth to gather them up single-handed. I don’t know that Brandreth will complain. It leaves him unhampered, even if he can do nothing with his hands but clutch at straws.”

“Such straws as the Modem Romeo?” Ray asked. “It seems to me that I have a case of conscience here. Is it right for me to let Mr. Brandreth bet his money on my book when there are so many chances of his losing?”

“Let us hope he won’t finally bet,” Kane suggested, and he smiled at the refusal which instantly came into Ray’s eyes. “But if he does, we must leave the end with God. People,” he mused on, “used to leave the end with God a great deal oftener than they do now. I remember that I did, myself, once. It was easier. I think I will go back to it. There is something very curious in our relation to the divine. God is where we believe He is, and He is a daily Providence or not, as we choose. People used to see His hand in a corner, or a deal, which prospered them, though it ruined others. They may be ashamed to do that now. But we might get back to faith by taking a wider sweep and seeing God in our personal disadvantages — finding Him not only in luck but in bad luck. Chance may be a larger law, with an orbit far transcending the range of the little statutes by which fire always burns, and water always finds its level.”

“That is a better Hard Saying than the other,” Ray mocked. “I’ faith an excellent song.” Have some more champagne. Now go on; but let us talk of A Modern Romeo.”

“We will drink to it,” said Kane, with an air of

XXXVII.

“WELL, sir,” said Mr. Brandreth when he found Ray waiting for him in his little room the next morning, “I haven’t slept a wink all night.”

Ray had not slept a wink himself, and he had not been able to keep away from Chapley’s in his fear and his hope concerning his book. He hoped Mr. Brandreth might have looked at it; he feared he had not. His heart began to go down, but he paused in his despair at the smiles that Mr. Brandreth broke into.

“It was that book of yours. I thought I would just dip into it after dinner, and try a chapter or two on Mrs. Brandreth; but I read on till eleven o’clock, and then she went to bed, and I kept at it till I finished it, about three this morning. Then the baby took up the strain for about half an hour and finished we.” Ray did not know what to say. He gasped out, “I’m proud to have been associated with young Mr. Brandreth in destroying his father’s rest.”

The publisher did not heed this poor attempt at nonchalance. “I left the manuscript for Mrs. Brandreth — she called me back to make sure, before I got out of doors — and if she likes it as well to the end — But I know she will! She likes you, Ray.”

“Does she?” Ray faintly questioned back.

“Yes; she thinks you’re all kinds of a nice fellow, and that you’ve been rather sacrificed in some ways. She thinks you behaved splendidly in that Denton business.”

Ray remained mutely astonished at the flattering opinions of Mrs. Brandreth; he had suspected them so little. Her husband went on, smiling:

“She wasn’t long making out the original of your hero.” Ray blushed consciously, but made no attempt to disown the self-portraiture. “Of course,” said Mr. Brandreth, “we’re all in the dark about the heroine. But Mrs. Brandreth doesn’t care so much for her.”

Now that he was launched upon the characters of the story, Mr. Brandreth discussed them all, and went over the incidents with the author, whose brain reeled with the ecstacy of beholding them objectively in the flattering light of another’s appreciation.

“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, at last, when Ray found strength to rise from this debauch of praise, “you’ll hear from me, now, very soon. I’ve made up my mind about the story, and unless Mrs. Brandreth should hate it very much before she gets through with it — Curious about women, isn’t it, how they always take the personal view? I believe the main reason why my wife dislikes your heroine is because she got her mixed up with the girl that took the part of Juliet away from her in our out-door theatricals. I tell her that you and I are not only the two Percys, we’re the two Romeos, too. She thinks your heroine is rather weak; of course you meant her to be so.”

Ray had not, but he said that he had, and he made a noisy pretence of thinking the two Romeos a prodigious joke. His complaisance brought its punishment.

“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth, “I must tell you a singular thing that happened. Just as I got to that place where he shoots himself, you know, and she starts up out of her hypnotic trance, our baby gave a frightful scream, and Mrs. Brandreth woke and thought the house was on fire. I suppose the little fellow had a bad dream; it’s strange what dreams babies do have! But wasn’t it odd, happening when I was wrought up so? Looks like telepathy, doesn’t it? Of course my mind’s always on the child. By-the-way, if this thing goes, you must try a telepathic story. It hasn’t been done yet.”

“Magnificent!” said Ray. “I’ll do it!”

They got away from each other, and Ray went down to his work at the Every Evening office. He enslaved himself to it by an effort twice as costly as that of writing when he was in the deepest and darkest of his despair; his hope danced before him, and there was a tumult in his pulses which he could quiet a little only by convincing himself that as yet he had no promise from Mr. Brandreth, and that if the baby had given Mrs. Brandreth a bad day, it was quite within the range of possibility that the publisher might, after all, have perfectly good reasons for rejecting his book. He insisted with himself upon this view of the case; it was the only one that he could steady his nerves with; and besides, he somehow felt that if he could feign it strenuously enough, the fates would be propitiated, and the reverse would happen.

It is uncertain whether it was his pretence that produced the result intended, but in the evening Mr. Brandreth came down to Ray’s hotel to say that he had made up his mind to take the book.

“We talked it over at dinner, and my wife made me come right down and tell you. She said you had been kept in suspense long enough, and she wasn’t going to let you go overnight. It’s the first book we’ve ever taken, and I guess she feels a little romantic about the new departure. By-the-way, we found out what ailed the baby. It was a pin that had got loose, and stuck up through the sheet in his crib. You can’t trust those nurses a moment. But I believe that telepathic idea is a good one.”

“Yes, yes; it is,” said Ray. Now that the certainty of acceptance had come, he was sobered by it, and he could not rejoice openly, though he was afraid he was disappointing Mr. Brandreth. He could only say, “It’s awfully kind of Mrs. Brandreth to think of me.”

“That’s her way,” said Mr. Brandreth, and he added briskly, “Well, now, let’s come down to business. How do you want to publish? Want to make your own plates?”

“No,” Ray faltered; “I can’t afford to do that; I had one such offer” —

“I supposed you wouldn’t,” Mr. Brandreth cut in, but I thought I’d ask. Well, then, we’ll make the plates ourselves, and we’ll pay you ten per cent on the retail price of the book. That is the classic arrangement with authors, and I think it’s fair.” When he said this he swallowed, as if there were something in his throat, and added, “Up to a certain point. And as we take all the risk, I think we ought to have — You see, on one side it’s a perfect lottery, and on the other side it’s a dead certainty. You can’t count on the public, but you can count on the landlord, the salesman, the bookkeeper, the printer, and the paper-maker We’re at all the expense — rent, clerk-hire, plates, printing, binding, and advertising, and the author takes no risk whatever.”

It occurred to Ray afterwards that an author took the risk of losing his labor if his book failed; but the public estimates the artist’s time at the same pecuniary value as the sitting hen’s, and the artist insensibly accepts the estimate. Ray did not think of his point in season to urge it, but it would hardly have availed if he had. He was tremulously eager to close with Mr. Brandreth on any terms, and after they had agreed, he was afraid he had taken advantage of him.

When the thing was done it was like everything else. He had dwelt so long and intensely upon it in a thousand reveries that he had perhaps exhausted his possibilities of emotion concerning it. At any rate he found himself curiously cold; he wrote to his father about it, and he wrote to Sanderson, who would be sure to make a paragraph for the Echo, and unless Hanks Brothers killed his paragraph, would electrify Midland with the news. Ray forecast the matter and the manner of the paragraph, but it did not excite him.

“What is the trouble with me?” he asked Kane, whom he hastened to tell his news. “I ought to be in a transport; I’m not in anything of the kind.”

“Ah! That is very interesting. No doubt you’ll come to it. I had a friend once who was accepted in marriage by the object of his affections. His first state was apathy, mixed, as nearly as I could understand, with dismay. He became more enthusiastic later on, and lived ever after in the belief that he was one of the most fortunate of men. But I think we are the victims of conventional acceptations in regard to most of the great affairs of life. We are taught that we shall feel so and so about such and such things: about success in love or in literature; about the birth of our first-born; about death. But probably no man feels as he expected to feel about these things. He finds them of exactly the same quality as all other experiences; there may be a little more or a little less about them, but there isn’t any essential difference. Perhaps when we come to die ourselves, it will be as simply and naturally as — as” —

“As having a book accepted by a publisher,” Ray suggested.

“Exactly!” said Kane, and he breathed out his deep, soft laugh.

“Well, you needn’t go on. I’m sufficiently accounted for.” Ray rose, and Kane asked him what his hurry was, and where he was going.

“I’m going up to tell the Hugheses.”

“Ah! then I won’t offer to go with you,” said Kane. “I approve of your constancy, but I have my own philosophy of such things. I think David would have done much better to stay where he was; I do not wish to punish him for coming to meet the world, and reform it on its own ground; but I could have told him he would get beaten. He is a thinker, or a dreamer, if you please, and in his community he had just the right sort of distance. He could pose the world just as he wished, and turn it in this light and in that. But here he sees the exceptions to his rules, and when I am with him I find myself the prey of a desire to dwell on the exceptions, and I know that I afflict him. I always did, and I feel it the part of humanity to keep away from him. I am glad that I do, for I dislike very much being with sick people. Of course I shall go as often as decency requires. For Decency,” Kane concluded, with the effect of producing a Hard Saying, “transcends Humanity. So many reformers forget that,” he added.

The days were now getting so long that they had just lighted the lamps in Hughes’s room when Ray came in, a little after seven. He had a few words with Peace in the family room first, and she told him that her father had passed a bad day, and she did not know whether he was asleep or not.

“Then I’ll go away again,” said Ray.

“No, no; if he is awake, he will like to see you. He always does. And now he can’t see you much oftener,”

“Oh, Peace! Do you really think so?”

“The doctor says so. There is no hope any more.” There was no faltering in her voice, and its steadiness strengthened Ray, standing so close to one who stood so close to death.

“Does he — your father — know?”

“I can’t tell. He is always so hopeful. And Jenny won’t hear of giving up. She is with him more than I am, and she says he has a great deal of strength yet He can still work at his book a little. He has every part of it in mind so clearly that he can tell her what to do when he has the strength to speak. The worst is, when his voice fails him — he gets impatient That was what brought on his hemorrhage to-day.”

“Peace! I am ashamed to think why I came tonight But I hoped it might interest him.”

“About your book? Oh yes. Mr. Brandreth spoke to me about it. I thought you would like to tell him.”

“Thank you,” said Ray. He was silent for a moment. She stood against the pale light of one of the windows, a shadowy outline, and he felt as if they were two translated spirits meeting there exterior to the world and all its interests; he made a mental note of his impression for use some time. But now he said: “I thought I should like to tell him, too. But after all, I’m not so sure. I’m not like you, Peace.

And I suppose I’m punished for my egotism in the very hour of my triumph. It isn’t like a triumph; it’s like — nothing. I’ve looked forward to this so long — I’ve counted on it so much — I’ve expected it to be like having the world in my hand. But if I shut my hand, it’s empty.”

He knew that he was appealing to her for comfort, and he expected her to respond as she did.

“That’s because you don’t realize it yet. When you do, it will seem the great thing that it is.”

“Do you think it’s a great thing?”

“As great as any success can be.”

“Do you think it will succeed?”

“Mr. Brandreth thinks it will. He’s very hopeful about it.”

“Sometimes I wish it would fail. I don’t believe it deserves to succeed. I’m ashamed of it in places. Have I any right to let him foist it on the public if I don’t perfectly respect it? You wouldn’t if it were yours.”

He wished her to deny that it was bad in any part, but she did not. She merely said: “I suppose that’s the way our work always seems to us when it’s done. There must be a time when we ought to leave what we’ve done to others; it’s for them, not for ourselves; why shouldn’t they judge it?”

“Yes; that is true! How generous you are! How can you endure to talk to me of my book? But I suppose you think that if I can stand it, you can.”

“I will go in, now,” said Peace, ignoring the drift of his words, “ and see if father is awake.” She returned in a moment, and murmured softly, “Come!”

“Here is Mr. Ray, father,” said Mrs. Denton She had to lift her voice to make the sick man hear, for the window was open, and the maniacal clamor of the street flooded the chamber. Hughes lay at his thin full-length in his bed, like one already dead.

He stirred a little at the sound of his daughter’s voice, and when he had taken in the fact of Ray’s presence, he signed to her to shut the window. The smells of the street, and the sick, hot whiffs from the passing trains were excluded; the powerful odors of the useless drugs burdened the air; by the light of the lamp shaded from Hughes’s eyes Ray could see the red blotches on his sheet and pillow.

He no longer spoke, but he could write with a pencil on the little memorandum-block which lay on the stand by his bed. When Peace said, “Father, Mr. Ray has come to tell you that his book has been accepted; Chapley & Co are going to publish it,” the old man’s face lighted up. He waved his hand toward the stand, and Mrs. Denton put the block and pencil in it, and held the lamp for him to see.

Ray took the block, and read, faintly scribbled on it: “Good! You must get them to take my World Revisited.”

The sick man smiled as Ray turned his eyes toward him from the paper.

“What is it?” demanded Mrs. Denton, after a moment “Some secret? What is it, father?” she pursued, with the lightness that evidently pleased him, for he smiled again, and an inner light shone through his glassy eyes. “Tell us, Mr. Ray!”

Hughes shook his head weakly, still smiling, and Ray put the leaf in his pocket. Then he took up the old man’s long hand where it lay inert on the bed.

“I will do my very best, Mr. Hughes. I will do everything that I possibly can.”

XXXVIII.

A PURPOSE had instantly formed itself in Ray’s mind which he instantly set himself to carry out. It was none the less a burden because he tried to think it heroic and knew it to be fantastic; and it was in a mood of equally blended devotion and resentment that he disciplined himself to fulfill it. It was shocking to criticise the dying man’s prayer from any such point of view, but he could not help doing so, and censuring it for a want of taste, for a want of consideration. He did not account for the hope of good to the world which Hughes must have had in urging him to befriend his book; he could only regard it as a piece of literature, and judge the author’s motives by his own, which he was fully aware were primarily selfish.

But he went direct to Mr. Brandreth and laid the matter before him.

“Now I’m going to suggest something,” he hurried on, “which may strike you as ridiculous, but I’m thoroughly in earnest about it. I’ve read Mr. Hughes’s book, first and last, all through, and it’s good literature, I can assure you of that. I don’t know about the principles in it, but I know it’s very original and from a perfectly news stand-point, and I believe it would make a great hit.”

Mr. Brandreth listened, evidently shaken. “I couldn’t do it, now. I’m making a venture with your book.”

“That’s just what I’m coming to. Don’t make your venture with my book; make it with his! I solemnly believe that his would be the safest venture of the two; I believe it would stand two chances to one of mine.”

“Well, I’ll look at it for the fall.”

“It will be too late, then, as far as Hughes is concerned. It’s now or never, with him! You want to come out with a book that will draw attention to your house, as well as succeed. I believe that Hughes’s book will be an immense success. It has a taking name, and it’s a novel and taking conception. It’ll make no end of talk.”

“It’s too late,” said Mr. Brandreth. “I couldn’t take such a book as that without passing it round among all our readers, and you know what that means. Besides, I’ve begun to make my plans for getting out your book at once. There isn’t any time to lose. I’ve sent out a lot of literary notes, and you’ll see them in every leading paper to-morrow morning. I’ll have Mr. Hughes’s book faithfully examined, and if I can see my way to it — I tell you, I believe I shall make a success of the Modem Romeo. I like the title better and better. I think you’ll be pleased with the way I’ve primed the press. I’ve tried to avoid all vulgar claptrap, and yet I believe I’ve contrived to pique the public curiosity.”

He went on to tell Ray some of the things he had said in his paragraphs, and Ray listened with that mingled shame and pleasure which the artist must feel whenever the commercial side of his life presents itself.

“I kept Miss Hughes pretty late this afternoon, working the things into shape, so as to get them to the papers at once. I just give her the main points, and she has such a neat touch.”

Ray left his publisher with a light heart, and a pious sense of the divine favor. He had conceived of a difficult duty, and he had discharged it with unflinching courage. He had kept his word to Hughes; he had done all that he could for him, even to offering his own chance of fame and fortune a sacrifice to him. Now he could do no more, and if he could not help being glad that the sacrifice had not been accepted of him, he was not to be blamed. He was very much to be praised, and he rewarded himself with a full recognition of his virtue; he imagined some words, few but rare, from Peace, expressing her sense of his magnanimity, when she came to know of it. He hoped that a fact so creditable to him, and so characteristic, would not escape the notice of his biographer. He wished that Hughes could know what he had done, and in his revery he contrived that his generous endeavor should be brought to the old man’s knowledge; he had Hughes say that such an action was more to him than the publication of his book.

Throughout his transport of self-satisfaction there ran a nether torment of question whether Peace Hughes could possibly suppose that he was privy to that paragraphing about his book, and this finally worked to the surface, and become his whole mood. After his joyful riot it was this that kept him awake till morning, that poisoned all his pleasure in his escape from self-sacrifice. He could only pacify himself and get some sleep at last by promising to stop at the publisher’s on his way down to the Every Evening office in the morning, and beseech her to believe that he had nothing to do with priming the press, and that he wished Mr. Brandreth had not told him of it Nothing less than this was due him in the character that he desired to appear in hereafter.

He reached the publisher’s office before Mr. Brandreth came down, and when he said he would like to see Miss Hughes, the clerk answered that Miss Hughes had sent word that her father was not so well, and she would not be down that day.

“He’s pretty low, I believe,” the clerk volunteered.

“I’m afraid so,” said Ray.

He asked if the clerk would call a messenger to take a note from him to his office, and when he had despatched it he went up to see Hughes.

“Did you get our message?” Peace asked him the first thing.

“No,” said Ray. “What message?”

“That we sent to your office. He has been wanting to see you ever since he woke this morning. I knew you would come!”

“O yes. I went to inquire of you about him at Chapley’s, and when I heard that he was worse, of course I came. Is he much worse?”

“He can’t live at all. The doctor says it’s no use. He wants to see you. Will you come in?”

“Peace!” Ray hesitated. “Tell me! Is it about his book?”

“Yes, something about that He wishes to speak with you.”

“Oh, Peace! I’ve done all I could about that I went straight to Mr. Brandreth and tried to get him to take it But I couldn’t What shall I tell your father, if he asks me?”

“You must tell him the truth,” said the girl, sadly.

“Is that Mr. Ray?” Mrs. Denton called from the sick-room. “Come in, Mr. Ray. Father wants you.”

“In a moment Come here, Mrs. Denton,” Ray called back.

She came out, and he told her what he had told Peace. She did not seem to see its bearing at once. When she realized it all, and had spent her quick wrath in denunciation of Mr. Brandreth’s heartlessness, she said desperately: “Well, you must come now. Perhaps it isn’t his book; perhaps it’s something else. But he wants you.”

She had to rouse her father from the kind of torpor in which he lay like one dead. She made him understand who was there, and then he smiled, and turned his eyes appealingly toward Ray. “Put your ear as close to his lips as you can. He can’t write any more. He wants to say something to you.”

Ray stooped over and put his ear to the drawn lips. A few whiffs of inarticulate breath mocked the dying man’s endeavor to speak. “I’m sorry; I can’t catch a syllable,” said Ray.

A mute despair showed itself in the old man’s eyes.

“Look at me father!” cried Mrs. Denton. “Is it about your book?”

The faintest smile came over his face.

“Did you wish to ask Mr. Ray if he would speak to Mr. Brandreth about it?”

The smile dimly dawned again.

“Well, he has spoken to him. He went to see him last night, and he’s come to tell you” — Ray shuddered and held his breath—” to tell you that Mr. Brandreth will take your book, and lie’s going to publish it right away!”

A beatific joy lit up Hughes’s face; and Ray drew a long breath. —

Peace looked at her sister.

“I don’t care!” said Mrs. Denton, passionately, dropping her voice. “You have your light, and I have mine.”

XXXIX.

RAY followed Hughes to his grave in the place where Denton and his children were already laid. It did not seem as if the old man were more related to them in death than he had been in life by their propinquity; but it satisfied a belated maternal and conjugal sentiment in Mrs. Denton. She did not relinquish the leading place in the family affairs which she had taken in her father’s last days. She decided against staying in their present apartment after their month was out, and found a tiny flat of three rooms in a better neighborhood down-town, where she had their scanty possessions established, including the cat Kane did not go to the funeral because of a prejudice which he said he had against such events; David Hughes, he said, would have been the first to applaud his sincerity in staying away. But he divined that there might be need of help of another kind in the emergency, and he gave it generously and delicately. He would not suffer Mr. Brandreth to render any part of this relief; he insisted that it was his exclusive privilege as Hughes’s old friend. Now that David was gone, he professed a singularly vivid sense of his presence; and he owned that he had something like the pleasure of carrying a point against him in defraying his funeral expenses.

Hughes’s daughters accepted his help frankly, each after her kind: Mrs. Denton as a gift which it must long continue to be; Peace as a loan which must some day be repaid. The girl went back to her work in due time, and whenever Ray visited his publisher he saw her at her desk.

He did not always go to speak to her, for he had a shamefaced fear that she was more or less always engaged in working up hints from Mr. Brandreth into paragraphs about A Modern Romeo. His consciousness exaggerated the publisher’s activity in this sort; and at first he shunned all these specious evidences of public interest in the forthcoming novel. Then he began jealously to look for them, and in his mind he arraigned the journals where they did not appear for envy and personal spite. It would have been difficult for him to prove why there should have been either in his case, unless it was because their literary notes were controlled by people whose books had been ignored or censured by Every Evening, and this theory could not hold with all. Most of the papers, however, published the paragraphs, with that munificence which journalism shows towards literature. The author found the inspired announcements everywhere; sometimes they were varied by the office touch, but generally they were printed exactly as Mr. Brandreth framed them; however he found them, they gave Ray an insensate joy. Even the paragraphs in the trade journals, purely perfunctory as they were, had a flavor of sincere appreciation; the very advertisements which accompanied them there affected him like favorable expressions of opinion. His hunger for them was inappeasable; in his heart he accused Mr. Brandreth of a stinted proclamation.

The publisher was hurrying the book forward for the summer trade, and was aiming it especially at the reader going into the country, or already there. He had an idea that the summer resorts had never been fully worked in behalf of the better sort of light literature, and he intended to make any sacrifice to get the book pushed by the news companies. He offered them rates ruinously special, and he persuaded Ray to take five per cent on such sales if they could be made. He pressed forward the printing, and the author got his proofs in huge batches, with a demand for their prompt return. The nice revision which he had fancied himself giving the work in type was impossible; it went from his hand with crudities that glared in his tormented sense, till a new instalment eclipsed the last. He balanced the merits and defects against one another, and tried to believe that the merits would distract the attention of criticism from the defects. He always knew that the story was very weak in places; he conceived how it could be attacked in these; he attacked it himself with pitiless ridicule in a helpless impersonation of different reviewers; and he gasped in his self-inflicted anguish. When the last proof left his hands the feeblest links were the strength of the whole chain, which fell to pieces from his grasp like a rope of sand.

There was some question at different times whether the book had not better be published under a pseudonym, and Ray faithfully submitted it to the editor of Every Evening, as something he was concerned in. It was to be considered whether it was advisable for a critic to appear as an author, and whether the possible failure of the book would not react unfavorably upon the criticisms of the journal. The chief decided that it would make no difference to him, and at the worst it could do no more than range Ray with the other critics who had failed as authors. With the publisher it was a more serious matter, and he debated much whether the book, as a stroke of business, had not better go to the public anonymously. They agreed that P. B. S. Ray on the title-page would be rather formidable from the number of the initials which the reader would have to master in speaking of the author. Shelley Ray, on the other hand, would be taken for a sentimental pseudonym. They decided that anonymity was the only thing for it.

“But then, it will be losing the interest of your money, if the book goes,” Mr. Brandreth mused. “You have a right to the cumulative reputation from it, so that if you should write another” —

“Oh, don’t be afraid of there ever being another!” said Ray, with his distracted head between his hands. He suddenly lifted it. “What is the matter with the Spartan severity of S. Ray?”

“S. Ray might do,” Mr. Brandreth assented, thoughtfully. “Should you mind my asking Mrs. Brandreth how it strikes her?”

“Not at all. Very glad to have you. It’s short, and unpretentious, and non-committal. I think it might do.”

Mrs. Brandreth thought so too, and in that form the author’s name appeared on the title-page. Even in that form it did not escape question and censure. One reviewer devoted his criticism of the story to inquiry into the meaning of the author’s initial; another surmised it a mask. But, upon the whole, its simplicity piqued curiosity, and probably promoted the fortune of the book, as far as that went.

There was no immediate clamor over it. In fact, it was received so passively by the public and the press that the author might well have doubted whether there was any sort of expectation of it, in spite of the publisher’s careful preparation of the critic’s or the reader’s mind. There came back at once from obscure quarters a few echoes, more or less imperfect, of the synopsis of the book’s attractions sent out with the editorial copies, but the influential journals remained heart-sickeningly silent concerning A Modern Romeo. There was a boisterous and fatuous eulogy of the book in the Midland Echo, which Ray knew for the expression of Sanderson’s friendship; but eager as he was for recognition, he could not let this count; and it was followed by some brief depreciatory paragraphs in which he perceived the willingness of Hanks Brothers to compensate themselves for having so handsomely let Sanderson have his swing. He got some letters of acknowledgment from people whom he had sent the book; he read them with hungry zest, but he could not make himself believe that they constituted impartial opinion; not even the letter of the young lady who had detected him in the panoply of his hero, and who now wrote to congratulate him on a success which she too readily took for granted. One of his sisters replied on behalf of his father and mother, and said they had all been sitting up reading the story aloud together, and that their father liked it as much as any of them; now they were anxious to see what the papers would say; had he read the long review in the Echo, and did not he think it rather cool and grudging for a paper that he had been connected with? He hardly knew whether this outburst of family pride gave him more or less pain than an anonymous letter which he got from his native village, and which betrayed the touch of the local apothecary; his correspondent, who also dealt in books, and was a man of literary opinions, heaped the novel with ridicule and abuse, and promised the author a coat of tar and feathers on the part of his betters whom he had caricatured, if ever he should return to the place. Ray ventured to offer a copy to the lady who had made herself his social sponsor in New York, and he hoped for some intelligent praise from her. She asked him where in the world he had got together such a lot of queer people, like nothing on earth but those one used to meet in the old days when one took country board; she mocked at the sufferings of his hero, and said what a vulgar little piece his heroine was; but she supposed he meant them to be what they were, and she complimented him on his success in handling them. She confessed, though, that she never read American novels, or indeed any but French ones, and that she did not know exactly where to rank his work; she burlesqued a profound impression of the honor she ought to feel in knowing a distinguished novelist. “You’ll be putting us all into your next book, I suppose. Mind you give me golden hair, not yet streaked with silver.”

In the absence of any other tokens of public acceptance, Ray kept an eager eye out for such signs of it as might be detected in the booksellers’ windows and on their sign-boards. The placards of other novels flamed from their door-jambs, but they seemed to know nothing of A Modem Romeo. He sought his book in vain among those which formed the attractions of their Casements; he found it with difficulty on their counters, two or three rows back, and in remote corners. It was like a conspiracy to keep it out of sight; it was not to be seen on the news-stands of the great hotels or the elevated stations, and Ray visited the principal railway depots without detecting a copy.

He blamed Mr. Brandreth for a lack of business energy in all this; he would like to see him fulfil some of those boasts of push which, when he first heard them, made him creep with shame. Mr. Brandreth had once proposed a file of sandwich men appealing with succeesive bil-boards:

I.

HAVE YOU HEAD

II.

“A Modern Romeo?”

III.

EVERY ONE IS READING

IV.

“A MODERN ROMEO.”

V.

WHY?

VI.

BECAUSE

VII.

“A MODERN ROMEO” IS

VIII.

THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

Ray had absolutely forbidden this procession, but now he would have taken off his hat to it, and stood uncovered, if he could have met it in Union Square or in Twenty-third Street.

XL.

IN this time of suspense Ray kept away from old Kane, whose peculiar touch he could not bear. But he knew perfectly well what his own feelings were, and he did not care to have them analyzed. He could not help sending Kane the book, and for a while he dreaded his acknowledgments; then he resented his failure to make any.

In the frequent visits he paid to his publisher, he fancied that his welcome from Mr. Brandreth was growing cooler, and he did not go so often. He kept doggedly at his work in the Every Evening office; but here the absolute silence of his chief concerning his book was as hard to bear as Mr. Brandreth’s fancied coolness; he could not make out whether it meant compassion or dissatisfaction, or how it was to effect his relation to the paper. The worst of it was that his adversity, or his delayed prosperity, which ever it was, began to corrupt him. In his self-pity he wrote so leniently of some rather worthless books that he had no defence to make when his chief called his attention to the wide divergence between his opinions and those of some other critics. At times when he resented the hardship of his fate he scored the books before him with a severity that was as unjust as the weak commiseration in his praises. He felt sure that if the situation prolonged itself his failure as an author must involve his failure as a critic.

It was not only the coolness in Mr. Brandreth’s welcome which kept him aloof; he had a sense of responsibility, which was almost a sense of guilt, in the publisher’s presence, for he was the author of a book which had been published contrary to the counsel of all his literary advisers. It was true that he had not finally asked Mr. Brandreth to publish it, but he had been eagerly ready to have him do it; he had kept his absurd faith in it, and his steadfastness must have imparted a favorable conviction to Mr. Brandreth; he knew that there had certainly been ever so much personal kindness for him mixed up with its acceptance. The publisher, however civil outwardly — and Mr. Brandreth, with all his foibles, was never less than a gentleman — must inwardly blame him for his unlucky venture. The thought of this became intolerable, and at the end of a Saturday morning, when the book was three or four weeks old, he dropped in at Chapley’s to have it out with Mr. Brandreth. The work on the Saturday edition of the paper was always very heavy, and Ray’s nerves were fretted from the anxieties of getting it together, as well as from the intense labor of writing. He was going to humble himself to the publisher, and declare their failure to be all his own fault; but he had in reserve the potentiality of a bitter quarrel with him if he did not take it in the right way.

He pushed on to Mr. Brandreth’s room, tense with his purpose, and stood scowling and silent when he found Kane there with him. Perhaps the old fellow divined the danger in Ray’s mood; perhaps he pitied him; perhaps he was really interested in the thing which he was talking of with the publisher, and which he referred to Ray without any preliminary ironies.

“It’s about the career of a book; how it begins to go, and why, and when.”

“Apropos of A Modern Romeo?” Ray asked, harshly.

“If you please, A Modem Romeo Ray took the chair which Mr. Brandreth signed a clerk to bring him from without. Kane went on: “It’s very curious, the history of these things, and I’ve looked into it somewhat. Ordinarily a book makes its fortune, or it doesn’t, at once. I should say this was always the case with a story that had already been published serially; but with a book that first appears as a book, the chances seem to be rather more capricious. The first great success with us was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that was assured before the story was finished in the old National Era, where it was printed. But that had an immense motive power behind it — a vital question that affected the whole nation.”

“I seem to have come too late for the vital questions,” said Ray.

“Oh no! oh no! There are always plenty of them left. There is the industrial slavery, which exists on a much more universal scale than the chattel slavery; that is still waiting its novelist.”

“Or its Trust of novelists,” Ray scornfully suggested.

“Very good; very excellent good; nothing less than a syndicate perhaps could grapple with a theme of such vast dimensions.”

“It would antagonize a large part of the reading public,” Mr. Brandreth said; but he had the air of making a mental memorandum to keep an eye out for MSS. dealing with industrial slavery.

“So much the better! So much the better!” said Kane. “Robert Elsmere antagonized much more than half its readers by its religious positions. But that wasn’t what I was trying to get at. I was thinking about how some of the phenomenally successful books hung fire at first.”

“Ah, that interests me as the author of a phenominally successful book that is still hanging fire,” sighed Ray.

Kane smiled approval of his attempt to play with his pain, and went on: “You know that Gates Ajar, which sold up into the hundred thousands, was three months selling the first fifteen hundred.”

“Is that so?’ Ray asked. “A Modern Romeo has been three weeks selling the first fifteen.” He laughed, and Mr. Brandreth with him; but the fact encouraged him, and he could see that it encouraged the publisher.

“We won’t speak of Mr. Barnes of New York” —

“Oh no! Don’t!” cried Ray.

“You might be very glad to have written it on some accounts, my dear boy,” said Kane.

“Have you read it?”

“That’s neither here nor there. I haven’t seen Little Lord Fauntleroy. But I wanted to speak of Looking Backward. Four months after that was published, the first modest edition was still unsold.”

Kane rose. “I just dropped in to impart these facts to your publisher, in case you and he might be getting a little impatient of the triumph which seems to be rather behind time. I suppose you’ve noticed it? These little disappointments are not suffered in a corner.”

“Then your inference is that at the end of three or four months A Modern Romeo will be selling at the rate of five hundred a day? I’m glad for Brandreth here, but I shall be dead by that time.”

“Oh no! Oh no!” Kane softly entreated, while he took Ray’s hand between his two hands. “One doesn’t really die of disappointed literature any more than one dies of disappointed love. That is one of the pathetic superstitions which we like to cherish in a world where we get well of nearly all our hurts, and live on to a hale old imbecility. Depend upon it, my dear boy, you will survive your book at least fifty years.” Kane wrung Ray’s hand, and got himself quickly away.

“There is a good deal of truth in what he says” — Mr. Brandreth began cheerfully.

“About my outliving my book?” Ray asked. “Thank you. There’s all the truth in the world in it.”

“I don’t mean that, of course. I mean the chances that it will pick up any time within three months, and make its fortune.”

“You’re counting on a lucky accident.”

“Yes, I am. I’ve done everything I can to push the book, and now we must trust to luck. You have to trust to luck in the book business, in every business. Business is buying on the chance of selling at a profit. The political economists talk about the laws of business; but there are no laws of business. There is nothing but chances, and no amount of wisdom can forecast them or control them. You had better be prudent, but if you are always prudent you will die poor. ‘Be bold; be bold; be not too bold.’ That’s about all there is of it. And I’m going to be cheerful too. I’m still betting on A Modem Romeo.” The young publisher leaned forward and put his hand on Ray’s shoulder, in a kindly way, and shook him a little. “Come! What will you bet that it doesn’t begin to go within the next fortnight? I don’t ask you to put up any money. Will you risk the copyright on the first thousand?”

“No, I won’t bet,” said Ray, more spiritlessly than he felt, for the proposition to relinquish a part of his copyright realized it to him. Still he found it safest not to allow himself any revival of his hopes; if he did it would be tempting fate to dash them again. In that way he had often got the better of fate; there was no other way to do it, at least for him.

XLI.

AFTER a silent and solitary dinner, Hay went to see Mrs. Denton and Peace in their new lodging. It was the upper floor of a little house in Greenwich Village, which was sublet to them by a machinist occupying the lower floors; Ray vaguely recalled something in his face at his first visit, and then recognized one of the attendants at Hughes’s Sunday ministrations. He was disposed to fellowship Ray in Hughes’s doctrine, and in the supposition of a community of interest in Hughes’s daughters. They could not have been in better or kindlier keeping than that of the machinist’s friendly wife, who must have fully shared his notion of Ray’s relation to them. She always received him like one of the family, and with an increasing intimacy and cordiality.

That evening when she opened the street door to him she said, “Go right along up; I guess you’ll find them there all right,” and Ray mounted obediently. Half-way up he met Mrs. Denton coming down, with her cat in her arms. “Oh, well!” she said. “You’ll find Peace at home; I’ll be back in a moment.”

He suspected that Mrs. Denton fostered the belief of the machinist and his wife that there was a tacit if not an explicit understanding between himself and Peace, and he thought that she would now very probably talk the matter over with them. But he kept on up to the little apartment at the top of the house, and tapped on the door standing wide open. The girl was sitting at one of the windows, with her head and bust sharply defined against the glassy clear evening light of the early summer. She had her face turned toward the street, and remained as if she did not hear him at first, so that there was a moment when it went through his mind that he would go away. Then she looked round, and greeted him; and he advanced into the room, and took the seat fronting her on the other side of the window. There was a small, irregular square below, and above the tops of its trees the swallows were weaving their swift flight and twittering song; the street noises came up slightly muted through the foliage; it was almost like a sylvan withdrawal from the city’s worst; and they talked of the country, and how lovely it must be looking now.

He said: “Yes, I wonder we can ever leave it. This is the first spring-time that I have ever been where I couldn’t feel my way with Nature at every step she took. It’s like a great loss out of my life. I think sometimes I am a fool to have staid here; I can never get it back. I could have gone home, and been the richer by the experience of another spring. Why didn’t I do it?”

“Perhaps you couldn’t have done your work there,” she suggested.

“Oh, my work! That is what people are always sacrificing the good of life to — their work! Is it worth so much? If I couldn’t do my newspaper-work there, I could do something else. I could write another unsuccessful novel.”

“Is your novel a failure?” she asked. “ Don’t you know it is? It’s been out three weeks, and nobody seems to know it. That’s my grief, now; it may one day be my consolation. I don’t complain. Mr. Brandreth still keeps his heroic faith in it, and even old Kane was trying to rise on the wings of favorable prophecy when I saw him just before dinner. But I haven’t the least hope any more. I think I could stand it better if I respected the book itself more. But to fail in a bad cause — that’s bitter.” He stopped, knowing as well as if he had put his prayer in words, that he had asked her to encourage him, and if possible, flatter him.

“I’ve been reading it all through again, since it came out,” she said.

“Oh, have you?” he palpitated.

“And I have lent it to the people in the house here, and they have read it. They are very intelligent in a kind of way” —

“Yes?”

“And they have been talking to me about it; they have been discussing the characters in it. They like it because they say they can understand just how every one felt. They like the hero, and Mrs. Simpson cried over the last scene. She thinks you have managed the heroine’s character beautifully. Mr. Simpson wondered whether you really believe in hypnotism. They both said they felt as if they were living it.”

Ray listened with a curious mixture of pleasure and of pain. He knew very well that it was not possible for such people as the Simpsons to judge his story with as fine artistic perception as that old society woman who thought he meant to make his characters cheap and ridiculous, and in the light of this knowledge their praise galled him. But then came the question whether they could not judge better of its truth and reality. If he had made a book which appealed to the feeling and knowledge of the great, simply-conditioned, sound-hearted, common-schooled American mass whom the Simpsons represented, he had made his fortune. He put aside that other question, which from time to time presses upon every artist, whether he would rather please the few who despise the judgment of the many, or the many who have no taste, but somehow have in their keeping the touchstone by which a work of art proves itself a human interest, and not merely a polite pleasure. Ray could not make this choice. He said dreamily: “If Mr. Brandreth could only find out how to reach all the Simpsons with it! I believe a twenty-five-cent paper edition would be the thing after all. I wish you could tell me just what Mr. and Mrs. Simpson said of the book; and if you can remember what they disliked as well as what they liked in it.”

Peace laughed a little. “Oh, they disliked the wicked people. They thought the hard old father of the heroine was terrible, and was justly punished by his daughter’s death. At the same time they thought you ought to have had her revive in time to seize the hero’s hand, when he is going to shoot himself, and keep him from giving himself a mortal wound. The cousin ought to get well, too; or else confess before he dies that he intended to throw the hero over the cliff, so that it could be made out a case of self-defence. Mr. Simpson says that could be done to the satisfaction of any jury.”

Ray laughed too. “Yes. It would have been more popular if it had ended well.”

“Perhaps not,” Peace suggested. “Isn’t it the great thing to make people talk about a book? If it ended well they wouldn’t have half so much to say as they will now about it.”

“Perhaps,” Ray assented with meek hopefulness. “But, Peace, what do you say about it? You’ve never told me that yet. Do you really despise it so much?”

“I’ve never said that I despised it.”

“You’ve never said you didn’t, and by everything that you’ve done, you’ve left me to think that you do. I know,” said the young man, “that I’m bringing up associations and recollections that must be painful to you; they’re painful and humiliating to me. But it seems to me that you owe me that much.”

“I owe you much more than that,” said the girl. “Do you think that I forget — can forget — anything —— all that you’ve been to us?”

“Oh, don’t speak of it!” said Ray. “I didn’t mean that. And you needn’t tell me now what you think of my book. But sometime you will, won’t you?” He drew forward a little nearer to her, where they sat in the light which had begun to wane. “Until then — until then — I want you to let me be the best friend you have in the world — the best friend I can be to any one.”

He stopped for some answer from her, and she said: “No one could be a truer friend to us than you have been, from the very first. And we have mixed you up so in our trouble!”

“Oh, no! But if it’s given me any sort of right to keep on coming to see Mrs. Denton and you, just as I used?”

“Why not?” she returned.

XLII.

RAT went home ill at ease with himself. He spent a bad night, and he seemed to have sunk away only a moment from his troubles, when a knock at his door brought him up again into the midst of them. He realized them before he realized the knock sufficiently to call out, “Who’s there?”

“Oh!” said Mr. Brandreth’s voice without; “you’re not up yet! Can I come in?”

“Certainly,” said Ray, and he leaned forward and slid, back the bolt of his door: it was one advantage of a room so small that he could do this without getting out of bed.

Mr. Brandreth seemed to beam with one radiance from his silk hat, his collar, his boots, his scarf, his shining eyes and smooth-shaven friendly face, as he entered.

“Of course,” he said, “you haven’t seen the Metropolis yet?”

“No; what is the matter with the Metropolis?” Mr. Brandreth, with his perfectly fitted gloves on, and his natty cane dangling from his wrist, unfolded the supplement of the newspaper, and accurately folded it again to the lines of the first three columns of the page. Then he handed it to Ray, and delicately turned away and looked out of the window.

Ray glanced at the space defined, and saw that it was occupied by a review of A Modern Romeo. There were lengths of large open type for the reviewer’s introduction and comments and conclusion, and embedded among these, in closer and finer print, extracts from the novel, where Ray saw his own language transfigured and glorified.

The critic struck in the beginning a note which he sounded throughout; a cry of relief, of exultation, at what was apparently the beginning of a new order of things in fiction. He hailed the unknown writer of A Modem Romeo as the champion of the imaginative and the ideal against the photographic and the commonplace, and he expressed a pious joy in the novel as a bold advance in the path that was to lead forever away from the slough of realism. But he put on a philosophic air in making the reader observe that it was not absolutely a new departure, a break, a schism; it was a natural and scientific evolution, it was a development of the spiritual from the material; the essential part of realism was there, but freed from the grossness, the dulness of realism as we had hitherto known it, and imbued with a fresh life. He called attention to the firmness and fineness with which the situation was portrayed and the characters studied before the imagination began to deal with them; and then he asked the reader to notice how, when this foundation had once been laid, it was made to serve as a “star-pointing pyramid” from which the author’s fancy took its bold flight through realms un travelled by the photographic and the commonplace. He praised the style of the book, which he said corresponded to the dual nature of the conception, and recalled Thackeray in the treatment of persons and things, and Hawthorne in the handling of motives and ideas. There was, in fact, so much subtlety in the author’s dealing with these, that one might almost suspect a feminine touch, but for the free and virile strength shown in the passages of passion and action.

The reviewer quoted several of such passages, and Ray followed with a novel intensity of interest the words he already knew by heart. The whole episode of throwing the cousin over the cliff was reprinted; but the parts which the reviewer gave the largest room and the loudest praise were those embodying the incidents of the hypnotic trance and the tragical close of the story. Here, he said, was a piece of the most palpitant actuality, and he applauded it as an instance of how the imagination might deal with actuality. Nothing in the whole range of commonplace, photographic, realistic fiction was of such striking effect as this employment of a scientific discovery in the region of the ideal. He contended that whatever lingering doubt people might have of the usefulness of hypnotism as a remedial agent, there could be no question of the splendid success with which the writer of this remarkable novel had turned it to account in poetic fiction of a very high grade. He did not say the highest grade; the book had many obvious faults. It was evidently the first book of a young writer, whose experience of life had apparently been limited to a narrow and comparatively obscure field. It was in a certain sense provincial, even parochial; but perhaps the very want of an extended horizon had concentrated the author’s thoughts the more penetratingly on the life immediately at hand. What was important was that he had seen this life with the vision of an idealist, and had discerned its poetic uses with the sense of the born artist, and had set it in

“The light that never was on sea or land.”

Much more followed to like effect, and the reviewer closed with a promise to look with interest for the future performance of a writer who had already given much more than the promise of mastery; who had given proofs of it. His novel might not be the great American novel which we had so long been expecting, but it was a most notable achievement in the right direction. The author was the prophet of better things; he was a Moses, who, if we followed him, would lead us up from the flesh-pots of Realism toward the promised land of the Ideal.

From time to time Ray made a little apologetic show of not meaning to do more than glance the review over, but Mr. Brandreth insisted upon his taking his time and reading it all; he wanted to talk to him about it. He began to talk before Ray finished; in fact he agonized him with question and comment, all through; and when Ray laid the paper down at last, he came and sat on the edge of his bed.

“Now, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I don’t believe in working on Sunday, and that sort of thing; but I believe this is providential. My wife does, too; she says it’s a reward for the faith we’ve had in the book; and that it would be a sin to lose a moment’s time. If there is to be any catch-on at all, it must be instantaneous; we mustn’t let the effect of this review get cold, and I’m going to strike while it’s red-hot.” The word seem to suggest the magnitude of the purpose which Mr. Brandreth expressed with seriousness that befitted the day. “I’m simply going to paint the universe red. You’ll see.”

“Well, well,” said Ray, “you’d better not tell me how. I guess I’ve got as much as I can stand, now.”

“If that book doesn’t succeed,” said Mr. Brandreth, as solemnly as if registering a vow, “it won’t be my fault.”

He went away, and Ray passed into a trance such as wraps a fortunate lover from the outer world. But nothing was further from his thoughts than love. The passion that possessed him was egotism flattered to an intensity in which he had no life but in the sense of himself. No experience could be more unwholesome while it lasted, but a condition so intense could not endure. His first impulse was to keep away from every one who could keep him from the voluptuous sense of his own success. He knew very well that the review in the Metropolis overrated his book, but he liked it to be overrated; he wilfully renewed his delirium from it by reading it again and again, over his breakfast, on the train to the Park, and in the lonely places which he sought out there apart from all who could know him or distract him from himself. At first it seemed impossible; at last it became unintelligible. He threw the paper into some bushes; then after he had got a long way off, he went back and recovered it, and read the review once more. The sense had returned, the praises had resumed their fires; again he bathed his spirit in their splendor. It was he, he, he, of whom those things were said. He tried to realize it. Who was he? The question scared him; perhaps he was going out of his mind. At any rate he must get away from himself now; that was his only safety. He thought whom he should turn to for refuge. There were still people of his society acquaintance in town, and he could have had a cup of tea poured for him by a charming girl at any one of a dozen friendly houses. There were young men, more than enough of them, who would have welcomed him to their bachelor quarters. There was old Kane. But they would have all begun to talk to him about that review; Peace herself would have done so. He ended by going home, and setting to work on some notices for the next day’s Every Evening. The performance was a play of double consciousness in which he struggled with himself as if with some alien personality. But the next day he could take the time to pay Mr. Brandreth a visit without wronging the work he had carried so far.

On the way he bought the leading morning papers, and saw that the publisher had reprinted long extracts from the Metropolis review as advertisments in the type of the editorial page; in the Metropolis itself he reprinted the whole review. “This sort of thing will be in the principal Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and St. Louis papers just as soon as the mail can carry them my copy. I had thought of telegraphing the advertisement, but it will cost money enough as it is,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“Are you sure you’re not throwing your money away?” Ray asked, somewhat aghast.

“I’m sure I’m not throwing my chance away,” the publisher retorted with gay courage. He developed the plan of campaign as he had conceived it, and Ray listened with a kind of nerveless avidity. He looked over at Mr. Chapley’s room, where he knew that Peace was busily writing, and he hoped that she did not know that he was there. His last talk with her had mixed itself up with the intense experience that had followed, and seemed of one frantic quality with it He walked out to the street door with Mr. Brandreth beside him, and did not turn for a glimpse of her.

“Oh by-the-way,” said the publisher at parting, “if you’d been here a little sooner, I could have made you acquainted with your reviewer. He dropped in a little while ago to ask who S. Ray was, and I did my best to make him believe it was a real name. I don’t think he was more than half convinced.”

“I don’t more than half believe in him,” said Ray, lightly, to cover his disappointment. “Who is he?”

“Well, their regular man is off on sick leave, and this young fellow — Worrell is his name — is a sort of under study. He was telling me how he happened to go in for your book — those things are always interesting. He meant to take another book up to his house with him, and he found he had yours when he got home, and some things about hypnotism. He went through them, and then he thought he would just glance at yours, anyway, and he opened on the hypnotic trance scene, just when his mind was full of the subject, and he couldn’t let go. He went back to the beginning and read it all through, and then he gave you the benefit of the other fellow’s chance. He wanted to see you, when I told him about you. Curious how these things fall out, half the time?”

“Very,” said Ray, rather blankly.

“I knew you’d enjoy it.”

“Oh, I do.”

XLIII.

WHETHER the boom for A Modem Romeo which began with the appearance of the Metropolis review was an effect of that review or not, no one acquainted with the caprices of the book trade would undertake to say. There had been enthusiastic reviews of other books in the Metropolis which had resulted in no boom whatever, as Kane pointed out in ironically inviting the author to believe that the success of the book was due wholly to its merit.

“And what was its long failure due to?” Ray asked, tasting the bitter of the suggestion, but feigning unconsciousness.

“To its demerit.”

Mr. Brandreth was at first inclined to ascribe the boom to the review; afterwards he held that it was owing to his own wise and bold use of the review in advertising. There, he contended, was the true chance, which, in moments of grateful piety, he claimed that he was inspired to seize. What is certain is that other friendly reviews began to appear in other influential journals, in New York and throughout the country. Ray began to see the book on the news-stands now; he found it in the booksellers’ windows; once he heard people in an elevated car talking of it; somehow it was in the air. But how it got in the air, no one could exactly say; he, least of all. He could put his hand on certain causes, gross, palpable, like the advertising activities of Mr. Brandreth; but these had been in effectless operation long before. He could not define the peculiar attraction that the novel seemed to have, even when frankly invited to do so by a vivid young girl who wrote New York letters for a Southern paper, and who came to interview him about it. The most that he could say was that it had struck a popular mood. She was very grateful for that idea, and she made much of it in her next letter; but she did not succeed in analyzing this mood, except as a general readiness for psychological fiction on the part of a reading public wearied and disgusted with the realism of the photographic, commonplace school. She was much more precise in her personal account of Ray; the young novelist appeared there as a type of manly beauty, as to his face and head, but of a regrettably low stature, which, however, you did not observe while he remained seated. It was specially confided to lady readers that his slightly wavy dark hair was parted in the middle over a forehead as smooth and pure as a girl’s. The processed reproduction of Ray’s photograph did not perfectly bear out her encomium; but it was as much like him as it was like her account of him. His picture began to appear in many places, with romanced biographies, which made much of the obscurity of his origin and the struggles of his early life. When it came to be said that he sprang from the lower classes, it brought him a letter of indignant protest from his mother, who reminded him that his father was a physician, and his people had always been educated and respectable on both sides. She thought that he ought to write to the papers and stop the injurious paragraph; and he did not wholly convince her that this was impossible. He could not have made her understand how in the sudden invasion of publicity his personality had quite passed out of his own keeping. The interviewers were upon him everywhere: at his hotel, whose quaintness and foreign picturesqueness they made go far in their studies of him; at the Every Evening office, where their visits subjected him to the mockery of his associates on the paper. His chief was too simple and serious of purpose to take the comic view of Ray’s celebrity; when he realized it through the frequency of the interviews, he took occasion to say: “I like your work and I want to keep you. As it is only a question of time when you will ask an increase of salary, I prefer to anticipate, and you’ll find it put up in your next check to the figure which I think the paper ought to stand.” He did not otherwise recognize the fact of the book’s success, or speak of it; as compared with his paper, Ray’s book was of no importance to him whatever.

The interviews were always flattering to Ray’s vanity, in a certain way, but it was rather wounding to find that most of the interviewers had not read his book; though they had just got it, or they were going to get it and read it. In some cases they came to him with poetic preoccupations from previous interviews with Mr. Brandreth, and he could not disabuse them of the notion that his literary career had been full of facts much stranger than fiction.

“Mr. Brandreth says that if the truth could be told about that book,” one young lady journalist stated, keeping her blue eyes fixed winningly upon the author’s, “it would form one of the most dramatic chapters in the whole history of literature. Won’t you tell me the truth about it, Mr. Ray?”

“Why, I don’t know the truth about it myself,” Ray said.

“Oh, how delightful!” cried the young lady. “I’m going to put that in, at any rate;” and she continued to work the young author with her appealing eyes and her unusually intelligent flatteries, until she had got a great deal more out of him concerning the periculations of his novel in manuscript than he could have believed himself capable of telling.

He went to Mr. Brandreth smarting with a sense of having made a fool of himself, and, “See here, Brandreth,” he said, “what is so very remarkably dramatic in the history of a novel kicking about for six months among the trade?”

Mr. Brandreth stared at him, and then said, with a flash of recollection, “Oh! That girl! Well, she was determined to have something exclusive about the book, and I just threw out the remark. I wasn’t thinking of your side of the business entirely. Ray, you’re a good fellow, and I don’t mind telling you that when I chanced it on this book of yours, it had got to a point with us where we had to chance it on something. Mr. Chapley had let the publishing interests of the house go till there was hardly anything of them left; and when he went up into the country, this spring, he was strongly opposed to my trying anything in the publishing line. But my wife and I talked it over, and she saw as well as I did that I should either have to go actively into the business, or else go out of it. As it stood, it wouldn’t support two families. So I made up my mind to risk your book. If it had failed it would have embarrassed me awfully; I don’t say but what I could have pulled through, but it would have been rough sledding.”

“That is interesting,” said Ray. “I don’t see why I shouldn’t begin to pose as your preserver.”

“Well, it wasn’t quite so bad as that,” Mr. Brandreth gayly protested. “And at the last moment it might have been some one else. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t tell you that the night you came and wanted me to take old Hughes’s book, I talked it very seriously over with my wife, and we determined that we would look at it in the morning, and perhaps postpone your novel. We woke the baby up with our talk, and then he woke us up the rest of the night, and in the morning we were not fit to grapple with the question, and I took that for a sign and let them go on with your book. I suppose these things were in my mind when I told that girl what she repeated to you.”

“Well, the incidents are dramatic enough,” said Ray, musingly. “Even tragical.”

“Yes,” sighed Mr. Brandreth. “I always dreaded to ask you how you made it right with Mr. Hughes.”

“Oh, Mrs. Denton made it right with him,” Ray scoffed. “I told her how I failed with you, and she went right to him and said that you had taken his book and would bring it out at once.”

Mr. Brandreth looked pained. “Well, I don’t know what to say about that. But I’m satisfied now that I acted for the best in keeping on with your book. I’m going to have Mr. Hughes’s carefully examined, though. I believe there’s the making of another hit in it. By-the-way,” he ended, cheerily, “you’ll be glad to know that A Modem Romeo has come of age; we’ve just printed the twenty-first thousand of him.”

“Is it possible!” said Ray, with well-simulated rapture. With all the talk there had been about the book, he supposed it had certainly gone to fifty thousand by this time.

The sale never really reached that figure. It went to forty two or three thousand, and there it stopped, and nothing could carry it farther. The author talked the strange arrest over with the publisher, but they could arrive at no solution of the mystery. There was no reason why a book which had been so widely talked about and written about should not keep on selling indefinitely; there was every reason why it should; but it did not. Had it, by some process of natural selection, reached exactly those people who cared for a psychological novel of its peculiar make, and were there really no more of them than had given it just that vogue? He sought a law for the fact in vain, in the more philosophical discussions he held with old Kane, as well as in his inquiries with Mr. Brandreth.

Finally, Kane said: “Why do we always seek a law for things? Is there a law for ourselves? We think so, but it’s out of sight for the most part, and generally we act from mere caprice, from impulse. I’ve lived a good many years, but I couldn’t honestly say that I’ve seen the cause overtaken by the consequence more than two or three times; then it struck me as rather theatrical. Consequences I’ve seen a plenty, but not causes. Perhaps this is merely a sphere of ultimations. We used to flatter ourselves, in the simple old days, when we thought we were all miserable sinners, that we were preparing tremendous effects, to follow elsewhere, by what we said and did here. But what if the things that happen here are effects initiated elsewhere?”

“It’s a very pretty conjecture,” said Ray, “but it doesn’t seem to have a very direct bearing on the falling off in the sale of A Modem Romeo.”

“Everything in the universe is related to that book, if you could only see it properly. If it has stopped selling, it is probably because the influence of some favorable star, extinguished thousands of years ago, has just ceased to reach this planet.”

Kane had the air of making a mental note after he said this, and Ray began to laugh. “There ought to be money in that,” he said.

“No, there is no money in Hard Sayings,” Kane returned, sadly; “there is only — wisdom.”

Ray was by no means discouraged with his failures to divine the reason for the arrested sale of his book. At heart he was richly satisfied with its success, and he left the public without grudging, to their belief that it had sold a hundred and fifty thousand. Mr. Brandreth was satisfied, too. He believed that the sale would pick up again in the fall after people got back from the country; he had discovered that the book had enduring qualities; but now the question was, what was Ray going to write next? “You ought to strike while the iron’s hot, you know.”

“Of course, I’ve been thinking about that,” the young fellow admitted, “and I believe I’ve got a pretty good scheme for a novel.”

“Could you give me some notion of it?”

“No, I couldn’t. It hasn’t quite crystallized in my mind yet. And I don’t believe it will, somehow, till I get a name for it.”

“Have you thought of a name?”

“Yes — half-a-dozen that won’t do.”

“There’s everything in a name,” said the publisher. “I believe it made the Modem Romeo’s fortune.”

Ray mused a moment. “How would A Rose by any other Name do?”

“That’s rather attractive,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“Well, anyway, remember that we are to have the book.”

Ray hesitated. “Well — not on those old ten-percent terms, Brandreth.”

“Oh, I think we can arrange the terms all right,” said Mr. Brandreth.

“Because I can do much better, you know.”

“Oh, they’ve been after you, have they?”

The young fellow held up the fingers of one hand.

“Well,” said Mr. Brandreth, “your next book belongs to Chapley & Co. You want to keep your books together. One will help sell the other. A Rose by any other Name will wake up A Modem Romeo when it comes out.”

XLIV.

FOR Peace Hughes and her sister, the summer passed uneventfully. The girl made up for the time she had lost earlier in the year by doing double duty at the increased business of the publishing house. The prosperity of A Modem Romeo had itself added to her work, and the new enterprises which its success had inspired Mr. Brandreth to consider meant more letter-writing and more formulation of the ideas which he struck shapelessly if boldly out He trusted her advice as well as her skill, and she had now become one of the regular readers for Chapley & Co.

Ray inferred this from the number of manuscripts which he saw on her table at home, and he could not help knowing the other things through his own acquaintance, which was almost an intimacy, with Mr. Brandreth’s affairs. The publisher was always praising her. “Talk about men!” he broke out one day. “That girl has a better business head than half the business men in New York. If she were not a woman, it would be only a question of time when we should have to offer her a partnership, or run the risk of losing her. But there’s only one kind of partnership you can offer a woman.” Ray flushed, but he did not say anything, and Mr. Brandreth asked, apparently from some association in his mind, “Do you see much of them at their new place?”

“Yes; I go there every week or so.”

“How are they getting on?”

“Very well, I believe.” Ray mused a moment, and then he said: “If it were not contrary to all our preconceptions of a sort of duty in people who have been through what they have been through, I should say they were both happier than I ever saw them before. I don’t think Mrs. Denton cared a great deal for her children or husband, but in her father’s last days he wouldn’t have anybody else about him. She strikes one like a person who would get married again.”

Mr. Brandreth listened with the air of one trying to feel shocked; but he smiled.

“I don’t blame her,” Ray continued. “Perhaps old Kane’s habit of not blaming people is infectious. She once accounted for herself on the ground that she didn’t make herself; I suppose it might be rather dangerous ground if people began to take it generally. But Miss Hughes did care for those poor little souls and for that wretched creature, and now the care’s gone, and the relief has come. They both miss their father; but he was doomed; he had to die; and besides, his fatherhood struck me as being rather thin, at times, from having been spread out over a community so long. I can’t express it exactly, but it seems to me that the children of a man who is trying to bring about a millennium of any kind do not have a good time. Still, I suppose we must have the millenniums.”

“You said that just like old Kane,” Mr. Brandreth observed.

“Did I? I just owned he was infectious. If I’ve caught his habit of mind, I dare say I’ve caught his accent. I don’t particularly admire either. But what I mean is that Miss Hughes and her sister are getting on very comfortably and sweetly. Their place is as homelike as any I know in New York.”

“As soon as we get back in the fall, Mrs. Brandreth is going to call on them. Now that Mr. Chapley and Mr. Hughes are out of the way, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t show them some attention. Miss Hughes, at least, is a perfect lady. I’m going to see that she doesn’t overwork; the success of A Modern Romeo has killed us nearly all; I’m going to give her a three weeks’ vacation toward the end of August” Ray called upon Peace one evening in the beginning of her vacation, and found her with the manuscript of a book before her; Mrs. Denton was sitting with the Simpsons on their front steps, and sent him on up to Peace when he declined to join her there.

He said, “I supposed I should find you reading up the Adirondack guide-books, or trying to decide between Newport and Saratoga. I don’t see how your outing differs very much from your inning.”

“This was only a book I brought home because I had got interested in it,” the girl explained in self-defence. “We’re not going away anywhere.”

“I think I would stay myself,” said Ray, “if it were not for wanting to see my family. My vacation begins to-morrow.”

“Does it?”

“Yes; and I should be very willing to spend my fortnight excursioning around New York. But I’m off at once to-night; I came in to say good-by. I hope you’ll miss me.”

“We shall miss you very much,” she said; and she added, “I suppose most of our fashionable friends have gone out of town.”

“Have they?”

“I should think you would know. We had them at second-hand from you.”

“Oh! Those?” said Ray. “Yes. They’re gone, and I’m going. I hate to leave you behind. Have you any message for the country?”

“Only my love.” She faced the manuscript down on the table before her, and rocked softly to and fro a moment. “It does make me a little homesick to think of it,” she said, with touching patience.

He felt the forlornness in her accent, and a sense of her isolation possessed him. When Mrs. Denton should marry again, Peace would be alone in the world. He looked at her, and she seemed very little and slight, to make her way single-handed.

“Peace!” he said, and the intensity of his voice startled him. “There is something I wanted to say to you — to ask you,” and he was aware of her listening as intensely as he spoke, though no change of attitude or demeanor betrayed the fact; he had to go on in a lighter strain if he went on at all. “You know, I suppose, what a rich man I am going to be when I get the copyright on my book. It’s almost incredible, but I’m going to be worth five or six thousand dollars; to be as rich as most millionaires. Well —— I asked you to let me be your friend once, because I didn’t think a man who was turning out a failure had the right to ask to be more. Or, no! That isn’t it!” he broke off, shocked by the false ring of his words. “I don’t know how to say it I was in love once — very much in love; the kind of love that I’ve put into my book; and this — this worship that I have for you, for I do worship you! — it isn’t the same, Peace. It’s everything that honors you, and once it was like that; but now I’m not sure. But I couldn’t go away without offering you my worship, for you to accept for all our lives; or reject, if it wasn’t enough. Do you understand?”

“I do understand,” the girl returned, and she nervously pressed the hand which she allowed to gather hers into it.

“I couldn’t leave you,” he went on, “without telling you that there is no one in the world that I honor so much as you. I had it in my heart to say this long ago; but it seems such a strange thing to stop with. If I didn’t think you so wise and so good, I don’t believe I could say it to you. I know that now whatever you decide will be right, and the best for us both. I couldn’t bear to have you suppose I would keep coming to see you without — I would have told you this long ago, but I always expected to tell you more.

But I’m twenty-six now, and perhaps I shall never feel in that old way again. I know our lives would be united in the highest things; and you would save me from living for myself alone. What do you say, Peace?”

He waited for her to break the silence which he did not know how to interpret At last she said “No!” and she drew back from him and took her hand away. “It wouldn’t be right I shouldn’t be afraid to trust you” —

“Then why” —

“For I know how faithful you are. But I’m afraid —— I know — I don’t love you! And without that it would be a sacrilege. That isn’t enough of itself, but everything else would be nothing without it” As if she felt the wound her words must have dealt to his self-love, she hurried on: “I did love you once. Yes! I did. And when Mr. Brandreth wanted me to read your book that time, I wouldn’t, because I was afraid of myself. But afterwards it — went.”

“Was it my fault?” Ray asked.

“It wasn’t any one’s fault,” said the girl. “If I had not been so unhappy, it might have been different.”

“Oh, Peace!”

“But I had no heart for it. And now my life must go on just as it is. I have thought it all out I thought that some time you might tell me — what you have — or different — and I tried to think what I ought to do. I shall never care for any one else; I shall never get married. Don’t think I shall be unhappy! I can take good care of myself, and Jenny and I will not be lonesome together. Even if we don’t always live together — still, I can always make myself a home. I’m not afraid to be an old maid. There is work in the world for me to do, and I can do it. Is it so strange I should be saying this?”

“No, no. It’s right.”

“I suppose that most of the girls you know wouldn’t do it But I have been brought up differently. In the Family they did not think that marriage was always the best thing; and when I saw how Jenny and Ansel —— I don’t mean that it would ever have been like that! But I don’t wish you to think that life will be hard or unhappy for me. And you — you will find somebody that you can feel towards as you did towards that first girl.”

“Never! I shall never care for any one again!” he cried. At the bottom of his heart there was a relief which he tried to ignore, though he could not deny himself a sense of the unique literary value of the situation. It was from a consciousness of this relief that he asked, “And what do you think of me, Peace? Do you blame me?”

“Blame you? How? For my having changed?”

“I feel to blame,” said the young man. “How shall we do, now? Shall I come to see you when I return?”

“Yes. But we won’t speak of this again.”

“Shall you tell Mrs. Denton?”

“Of course.”

“She will blame me.”

“She will blame me” said Peace. “But — I shall not be troubled, and you mustn’t,” she said, and she lightly touched him. “This is just as I wish it to be. I’ve been afraid that if this ever happened, I shouldn’t have the courage to tell you what I have. But you helped me, and I am so glad you did! I was afraid you would say something that would blind me, and keep me from going on in the right way; but now — Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Ray, vaguely. “May I — dream of you, Peace?”

“If you’ll stop at daybreak.”

“Ah, then I shall begin to think of you.”

XLV.

THEY had certainly come to an understanding, and for Ray at least there was release from the obscure sense of culpability which had so long harassed him. He knew that unless he was sure of his love for Peace, he was to blame for letting her trust it; but now that he had spoken, and spoken frankly, it had freed them both to go on and be friends without fear for each other. Her confession that there had been a time when she loved him flattered his vanity out of the pain of knowing that she did not love him now; it consoled him, it justified him; for the offence which he had accused himself of was of no other kind than hers. How wisely, how generously she had taken the whole matter!

The question whether she had not taken it more generously than he merited began to ask itself. She might have chosen to feign a parity with him in this. He had read of women who sacrificed their love to their love; and consented to a life-long silence, or practised a life-long deceit, that the men they loved might never know they loved them. He had never personally known of such a case, but the books were full of such cases. This might be one of them. Or it might much more simply and probably be that she had received his strange declaration as she did in order to spare his feelings. If that were true she had already told her sister, and Mrs. Denton had turned the absurd side of it to the light, and had made Peace laugh it over with her.

A cold perspiration broke out over him at the notion, which he rejected upon a moment’s reflection as unworthy of Peace. He got back to his compassionate admiration of her, as he walked down to the ferry and began his homeward journey. He looked about the boat, and fancied it the same he had crossed to New York in, when he came to the city nearly a year before. The old negro who whistled, limped silently through the long saloon; he glanced from right to left on the passengers, but he must have thought them too few, or not in the mood for his music. Ray wondered if he whistled only for the incoming passengers. He recalled every circumstance of his acquaintance with Peace, from the moment she caught his notice when Mrs. Denton made her outcry about the pocket-book. He saw how once it had seemed to deepen to love, and then had ceased to do so, but he did not see how. There had been everything in it to make them more to each other, but after a certain time they had grown less. It was not so strange to him that he had changed; he had often changed; but we suppose a constancy in others as to all passions which we cannot exact of ourselves. He tried to think what he had done to alienate the love which she confessed she once had for him, and he could not remember anything unless it was his cruelty to her when he found that she was the friend who would not look at his story a second time. She said she had forgiven him that; but perhaps she had not; perhaps she had divined a potential brutality in him, which made her afraid to trust him. But after that their lives had been united in the most intimate anxieties, and she had shown absolute trust in him. He reviewed his conduct toward her throughout, and he could find no blame in it except for that one thing. He could truly feel that he had been her faithful friend, and the friend of her whole uncomfortable family, in spite of all his prejudices and principles against people of that kind. In the recognition of this fact he enjoyed a moment’s sense of injury, which was heightened when he reflected that he had even been willing to sacrifice his pride, after his brilliant literary success, so far as to offer himself to a girl who worked for her living; it had always galled him that she held a place little better than a type-writer’s. No, he had nothing to accuse himself of, after a scrutiny of his behavior repeated in every detail, and applied in complex, again and again, with helpless iteration. Still he had a remote feeling of self-reproach, which he tried to verify, but which forever eluded him. It was mixed up with that sense of escape, which made him ashamed.

He lay awake in the sleeping-car the greater part of the night, and turned from side to side, seeking for the reason of a thing that can never have any reason, and trying to find some parity between his expectations and experiences of himself in such an affair. It went through his mind that it would be a good thing to write a story with some such situation in it; only the reader would not stand it. People expected love to begin mysteriously, but they did not like it to end so; though life itself began mysteriously and ended so. He believed that he should really try it; a story that opened with an engagement ought to be as interesting as one that closed with an engagement; and it would be very original. He must study his own affair very closely when he got a little further away from it. There was no doubt but that when the chances that favored love were so many and so recognizable, the chance that undid it could at last be recognized. It was merely a chance, and that ought to be shown.

He began to wonder if life had not all been a chance with him. Nothing, not even the success of his book, in the light he now looked at it in, was the result of reasoned cause. That success had happened; it had not followed; and he didn’t deserve any praise for what had merely happened. If this apparent fatality were confined to the economic world alone, he would have been willing to censure civilization, and take his chance dumbly, blindly, with the rest. He had not found it so. On the contrary, he had found the same caprice, the same rule of mere casualty, in the world which we suppose to be ordered by law — the world of thinking, the world of feeling. Who knew why or how this or that thought came, this or that feeling? Then, in that world where we lived in the spirit, was wrong always punished, was right always rewarded?

We must own that we often saw the good unhappy, and the wicked enjoying themselves. This was not just; yet somehow we felt, we knew, that justice ruled the universe. Nothing, then, that seemed chance was really chance. It was the operation of a law so large that we caught a glimpse of its vast orbit once or twice in a lifetime. It was Providence.

The car rushed on through the night with its succession of smooth impulses. The thought of the old friends he should soon meet began to dispossess the cares and questions that had ridden him; the notion of certain girls at Midland haunted him sweetly, warmly. He told that one who first read his story all about Peace Hughes, and she said they had never really been in love, for love was eternal. After a while he drowsed, and then he heard her saying that he had got that notion of the larger law from old Kane. Then it was not he, and not she. It was nothing.

THE COAST OF BOHEMIA

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

INTRODUCTORY SKETCH.

In one of the old-fashioned books for children there was a story of the adventures of a cent (or perhaps that coin of older lineage, a penny) told by itself, which came into my mind when the publishers suggested that the readers of a new edition of this book might like to know how it happened to be written. I promptly fancied the book speaking, and taking upon itself the burden of autobiography, which we none of us find very heavy; and no sooner had I done so than I began actually to hear from it in a narrative of much greater distinctness than I could have supplied for it.

“You must surely remember,” it protested to my forgetfulness, “that you first thought of me in anything like definite shape as you stood looking on at the trotting-races of a county fair in Northern Ohio, and that I began to gather color and character while you loitered through the art-building, and dwelt with pitying interest upon the forlorn, unpromising exhibits there.

“But previous to this, my motive existed somewhere in that nebulous fore-life where both men and books have their impalpable beginning; for even you cannot have forgotten that when a certain passionately enterprising young editor asked you for a novel to be printed in his journal, you so far imagined me as to say that I would be about a girl. When you looked over those hapless works of art at the Pymantoning County Fair, you thought, ‘What a good thing it would be to have a nice village girl, with a real but limited gift, go from here to study art in New York! And get in love there! And married!’ Cornelia and her mother at once stepped out of the inchoate; Ludlow advanced from another quarter of Chaos, and I began really to be.

“The getting me down on paper was a much later affair — nearly two years later. There were earlier engagements to be met; there was an exciting editorial episode to be got behind you; and there was material for a veridical representation of the ardent young life of the New York Synthesis of Art Studies to be gathered as nearly at first hands and as furtively as possible.

“I should be almost ashamed to remind you of the clandestine means you employed before you were forced to a frankness alien to your nature, and went and threw yourself on the mercy of a Member who, upon your avowing your purpose, took you through the schools of the Synthesis and instructed you in its operation. Not satisfied with this, you got an undergraduate of the Synthesis to coach you as to its social side, and while she was consenting to put it all down in writing for your convenience, you were shamelessly making notes of her boarding-house, as the very place to have Cornelia come to.

“Your methods were at first so secret and uncandid that I wonder I ever came to be the innocent book I am; and I feel that the credit is far less due to you than to the friends who helped you. But I am glad to remember how you got your come-uppings when, long after, a student of the Synthesis whom you asked, in your latent vanity, how she thought that social part of me was managed, answered, ‘Well, any one could see that it was studied altogether from the outside, that it wasn’t at all the spirit of the Synthesis.’

“It was enough almost to make me doubt myself, but I recovered my belief in my own truth when I reflected that it was merely a just punishment for you. I could expose you in other points, if I chose, and show what slight foundations you built my facts and characters upon; but perhaps that would be ungrateful. You were at least a doting parent, if not a wise one, and in your fondness you did your best to spoil me. You gave me two heroines, and you know very well that before you were done you did not know but you preferred Charmian to Cornelia. And you had nothing whatever to build Charmian upon, not the slightest suggestion from life, where you afterwards encountered her Egyptian profile! I think I ought to say that you had never been asked to a Synthesis dance when you wrote that account of one in me; and though you have often been asked since, you have never had the courage to go for fear of finding out how little it was like your description.

“But if Charmian was created out of nothing, what should you say if I were frank about the other characters of my story? Could you deny that the drummer who was first engaged to Cornelia was anything more than a materialization from seeing a painter very long ago make his two fingers do a ballet-dance? Or that Ludlow was not at first a mere pointed beard and a complexion glimpsed in a slim young Cuban one night at Saratoga? Or that Cornelia’s mother existed by any better right than your once happening to see a poor lady try to hide the gap in her teeth when she smiled?

“When I think what a thing of shreds and patches I am, I wonder that I have any sort of individual temperament or consciousness at all. But I know that I have, and that you wrote me with pleasure and like me still. You think I have form, and that, if I am not very serious, I am sincere, and that somehow I represent a phase of our droll American civilization truly enough. I know you were vexed when some people said I did not go far enough, and insisted that the coast of Bohemia ought to have been the whole kingdom. As if I should have cared to be that! There are shady places inland where I should not have liked my girls to be, and where I think my young men would not have liked to meet them; and I am glad you kept me within the sweet, pure breath of the sea. I think I am all the better book for that, and, if you are fond of me, you have your reasons. I — —”

“Upon my word,” I interrupted at this point, “it seems to me that you are saying rather more for yourself than I could say for you, if you are one of my spoiled children. Don’t you think we had both better give the reader a chance, now?”

“Oh, if there are to be any readers!” cried the book, and lapsed into the silence of print.

I.

The forty-sixth annual fair of the Pymantoning County Agricultural Society was in its second day. The trotting-matches had begun, and the vast majority of the visitors had abandoned the other features of the exhibition for this supreme attraction. They clustered four or five deep along the half-mile of railing that enclosed the track, and sat sweltering in the hot September sun, on the benching of the grandstand that flanked a stretch of the course. Boys selling lemonade and peanuts, and other boys with the score of the races, made their way up and down the seats with shrill cries; now and then there was a shriek of girls’ laughter from a group of young people calling to some other group, or struggling for a programme caught back and forth; the young fellows shouted to each other jokes that were lost in mid-air; but, for the most part, the crowd was a very silent one, grimly intent upon the rival sulkies as they flashed by and lost themselves in the clouds that thickened over the distances of the long, dusty loop. Here and there some one gave a shout as a horse broke, or settled down to his work under the guttural snarl of his driver; at times the whole throng burst into impartial applause as a horse gained or lost a length; but the quick throb of the hoofs on the velvety earth and the whir of the flying wheels were the sounds that chiefly made themselves heard.

The spectacle had the importance which multitude givers, and Ludlow found in it the effects which he hoped to get again in his impression. He saw the deep purples which he looked to see with eyes trained by the French masters of his school to find them, and the indigo blues, the intense greens, the rainbow oranges and scarlets; and he knew just how he should give them. In the light of that vast afternoon sky, cloudless, crystalline in its clearness, no brilliancy of rendering could be too bold.

If he had the courage of his convictions, this purely American event could be reported on his canvas with all its native character; and yet it could be made to appeal to the enlightened eye with the charm of a French subject, and impressionism could be fully justified of its follower in Pymantoning as well as in Paris. That golden dust along the track; the level tops of the buggies drawn up within its ellipse, and the groups scattered about in gypsy gayety on the grass there; the dark blur of men behind the barrier; the women, with their bright hats and parasols, massed flower-like, — all made him long to express them in lines and dots and breadths of pure color. He had caught the vital effect of the whole, and he meant to interpret it so that its truth should be felt by all who had received the light of the new faith in painting, who believed in the prismatic colors as in the ten commandments, and who hoped to be saved by tone-contrasts. For the others, Ludlow was at that day too fanatical an impressionist to care. He owed a duty to France no less than to America, and he wished to fulfil it in a picture which should at once testify to the excellence of the French method and the American material. At twenty-two, one is often much more secure and final in one’s conclusions than one is afterwards.

He was vexed that a lingering doubt of the subject had kept him from bringing a canvas with him at once, and recording his precious first glimpses of it. But he meant to come to the trotting-match the next day again, and then he hoped to get back to his primal impression of the scene, now so vivid in his mind. He made his way down the benches, and out of the enclosure of the track. He drew a deep breath, full of the sweet smell of the bruised grass, forsaken now by nearly all the feet that had trodden it. A few old farmers, who had failed to get places along the railing and had not cared to pay for seats on the stand, were loitering about, followed by their baffled and disappointed wives. The men occasionally stopped at the cattle-pens, but it was less to look at the bulls and boars and rams which had taken the premiums, and wore cards or ribbons certifying the fact, than to escape a consciousness of their partners, harassingly taciturn or voluble in their reproach. A number of these embittered women brokenly fringed the piazza of the fair-house, and Ludlow made his way toward them with due sympathy for their poor little tragedy, so intelligible to him through the memories of his own country-bred youth. He followed with his pity those who sulked away through the deserted aisles of the building, and nursed their grievance among the prize fruits and vegetables, and the fruits and vegetables that had not taken the prizes. They were more censorious than they would have been perhaps if they had not been defeated themselves; he heard them dispute the wisdom of most of the awards as the shoutings and clappings from the racetrack penetrated the lonely hall. They creaked wearily up and down in their new shoes or best shoes, and he knew how they wished themselves at home and in bed, and wondered why they had ever been such fools as to come, anyway. Occasionally, one of their husbands lagged in, as if in search of his wife, but kept at a safe distance, after seeing her, or hung about with a group of other husbands, who could not be put to shame or suffering as they might if they had appeared singly.

II.

Ludlow believed that if the right fellow ever came to the work, he could get as much pathos out of our farm folks as Millet got out of his Barbizon peasants. But the fact was that he was not the fellow; he wanted to paint beauty not pathos; and he thought, so far as he thought ethically about it, that, the Americans needed to be shown the festive and joyous aspects of their common life. To discover and to represent these was his pleasure as an artist, and his duty as a citizen. He suspected, though, that the trotting-match was the only fact of the Pymantoning County Fair that could be persuaded to lend itself to his purpose. Certainly, there was nothing in the fair-house, with those poor, dreary old people straggling through it, to gladden an artistic conception. Agricultural implements do not group effectively, or pose singly with much picturesqueness; tall stalks of corn, mammoth squashes, huge apples and potatoes want the beauty and quality that belong to them out of doors, when they are gathered into the sections of a county fair-house; piles of melons fail of their poetry on a wooden floor, and heaps of grapes cannot assert themselves in a very bacchanal profusion against the ignominy of being spread upon long tables and ticketed with the names of their varieties and exhibitors.

Ludlow glanced at them, to right and left, as he walked through the long, barn-like building, and took in with other glances the inadequate decorations of the graceless interior. His roving eye caught the lettering over the lateral archways, and with a sort of contemptuous compassion he turned into the Fine Arts Department.

The fine arts were mostly represented by photographs and crazy quilts; but there were also tambourines and round brass plaques painted with flowers, and little satin banners painted with birds or autumn leaves, and gilt rolling-pins with vines. There were medley-pictures contrived of photographs cut out and grouped together in novel and unexpected relations; and there were set about divers patterns and pretences in keramics, as the decoration of earthen pots and jars was called. Besides these were sketches in oil and charcoal, which Ludlow found worse than the more primitive things, with their second-hand chic picked up in a tenth-rate school. He began to ask himself whether people tasteless enough to produce these inanities and imagine them artistic, could form even the subjects of art; he began to have doubts of his impression of the trotting-match, its value, its possibility of importance. The senseless ugliness of the things really hurt him: his worship of beauty was a sort of religion, and their badness was a sort of blasphemy. He could not laugh at them; he wished he could; and his first impulse was to turn and escape from the Fine Arts Department, and keep what little faith in the artistic future of the country he had been able to get together during his long sojourn out of it. Since his return he had made sure of the feeling for color and form with which his country-women dressed themselves. There was no mistake about that; even here, in the rustic heart of the continent he had seen costumes which had touch and distinction; and it could not be that the instinct which they sprang from should go for nothing in the arts supposed higher than mantua-making and millinery. The village girls whom he saw so prettily gowned and picturesquely hatted on the benches out there by the race-course, could it have been they who committed these atrocities? Or did these come up from yet deeper depths of the country, where the vague, shallow talk about art going on for the past decade was having its first crude effect? Ludlow was exasperated as well as pained, for he knew that the pretty frocks and hats expressed a love of dressing prettily, which was honest and genuine enough, while the unhappy effects about him could spring only from a hollow vanity far lower than a woman’s wish to be charming. It was not an innate impulse which produced them, but a sham ambition, implanted from without, and artificially stimulated by the false and fleeting mood of the time. They must really hamper the growth of æsthetic knowledge among people who were not destitute of the instinct.

He exaggerated the importance of the fact with the sensitiveness of a man to whom æsthetic cultivation was all-important. It appeared to him a far greater evil than it was; it was odious to him, like a vice; it was almost a crime. He spent a very miserable time in the Fine Arts Department of the Pymantoning County Agricultural Fair; and in a kind of horrible fascination he began to review the collection in detail, to guess its causes in severalty and to philosophize its lamentable consequences.

III.

In this process Ludlow discovered that there was more of the Fine Arts Department than he had supposed at first. He was aware of some women who had come into the next aisle or section, and presently he overheard fragments of their talk.

A girl’s voice said passionately: “I don’t care! I shan’t leave them here for folks to make remarks about! I knew they wouldn’t take the premium, and I hope you’re satisfied now, mother.”

“Well, you’re a very silly child,” came in an older voice, suggestive of patience and amiability. “Don’t tear them, anyway!”

“I shall! I don’t care if I tear them all to pieces.”

There was a sound of quick steps, and of the angry swirl of skirts, and the crackling and rending of paper.

“There, now!” said the older voice. “You’ve dropped one.”

“I don’t care! I hope they’ll trample it under their great stupid hoofs.”

The paper, whatever it was, came skating out under the draped tabling in the section where Ludlow stood, arrested in his sad employment by the unseen drama, and lay at his feet. He picked it up, and he had only time to glance at it before he found himself confronted by a fiercely tearful young girl who came round the corner of his section, and suddenly stopped at sight of him. With one hand she pressed some crumpled sheets of paper against, her breast; the other she stretched toward Ludlow.

“Oh! will you — —” she began, and then she faltered; and as she turned her little head aside for a backward look over her shoulder, she made him, somehow, think of a hollyhock, by the tilt of her tall, slim, young figure, and by the colors of her hat from which her face flowered; no doubt the deep-crimson silk waist she wore, with its petal-edged ruffle flying free down her breast, had something to do with his fantastic notion. She was a brunette, with the lightness and delicacy that commonly go with the beauty of a blonde. She could not have been more than fifteen; her skirts had not yet matured to the full womanly length; she was still a child.

A handsome, mild, middle-aged woman appeared beside the stormy young thing, and said in the voice which Ludlow had already heard, “Well, Cornelia!” She seemed to make more account than the girl made of the young fellow’s looks. He was of the medium height for a man, but he was so slight that he seemed of lower stature, and he eked out an effect of distinction by brushing his little moustache up sharply at the corners in a fashion he had learned in France, and by wearing a little black dot of an imperial. His brow was habitually darkened by a careworn frown, which came from deep and anxious thinking about the principles and the practice of art. He was very well dressed, and he carried himself with a sort of worldly splendor which did not intimidate the lady before him. In the country women have no more apprehension of men who are young and stylish and good-looking than they have in the city; they rather like them to be so, and meet them with confidence in any casual encounter.

The lady said, “Oh, thank you,” as Ludlow came up to the girl with the paper, and then she laughed with no particular intention, and said, “It’s one of my daughter’s drawings.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Ludlow, with a quick perception of the mother’s pride in it, and of all the potentialities of prompt intimacy. “It’s very good.”

“Well, I think so,” said the lady, while the girl darkled and bridled in young helplessness. If she knew that her mother ought not to be offering a stranger her confidence like that, she did not know what to do about it. “She was just going to take them home,” said the mother vaguely.

“I’m sorry,” said Ludlow. “I seem to be a day after the fair, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the mother, with the same amiable vagueness. She had some teeth gone, and when she smiled she tried to hide their absence on the side next Ludlow; but as she was always smiling she did not succeed perfectly. She looked doubtfully at her daughter, in the manner of mothers whom no severity of snubbing can teach that their daughters when well-grown girls can no longer be treated as infants. “I don’t know as you’d think you had lost much. We didn’t expect they would take the premium, a great deal.”

“I should hope not,” said Ludlow. “The competition was bad enough.”

The mother seemed to divine a compliment in this indefinite speech. She said: “Well, I don’t see myself why they didn’t take it.”

“There was probably no one to feel how much better they were,” said Ludlow.

“Well, that’s what I think,” said the mother, “and it’s what I tell her.” She stood looking from Ludlow to her daughter and back, and now she ventured, seeing him so intent on the sketch he still held, “You an artist?”

“A student of art,” said Ludlow, with the effect of uncovering himself in a presence.

The mother did not know what to make of it apparently; she said blankly, “Oh!” and then added impressively, to her daughter: “Why don’t you show them to him, Cornelia?”

“I should think it a great favor,” said Ludlow, intending to be profoundly respectful. But he must have overdone it. The girl majestically gave her drawings to her mother, and marched out of the aisle.

Ludlow ignored her behavior, as if it had nothing to do with the question, and began to look at the drawings, one after another, with various inarticulate notes of comment imitated from a great French master, and with various foreign phrases, such as “Bon! Bon! Pas mauvais! Joli! Chic!” He seemed to waken from them to a consciousness of the mother, and returned to English. “They are very interesting. Has she had instruction?”

“Only in the High School, here. And she didn’t seem to care any for that. She seems to want to work more by herself.”

“That’s wrong,” said Ludlow, “though she’s probably right about the High School.”

The mother made bold to ask, “Where are you taking lessons?”

“I?” said Ludlow, dreamily. “Oh! everywhere.”

“I thought, perhaps,” the mother began, and she stopped, and then resumed, “How many lessons do you expect to take?”

IV.

Ludlow descended from the high horse which he saw it was really useless for him to ride in that simple presence. “I didn’t mean that I was a student of art in that sense, exactly. I suppose I’m a painter of some sort. I studied in Paris, and I’m working in New York — if that’s what you mean.”

“Yes,” said the lady, as if she did not know quite what she meant.

Ludlow still remained in possession of the sketches, and he now looked at them with a new knot between his eyebrows. He had known at the first glance, with the perception of one who has done things in any art, that here was the possibility of things in his art, and he had spoken from a generous and compassionate impulse, from his recognition of the possibility, and from his sympathy with the girl in her defeat. Now his conscience began to prick him. He asked himself whether he had any right to encourage her, whether he ought not rather to warn her. He asked her mother: “Has she been doing this sort of thing long?”

“Ever since she was a little bit of a thing,” said the mother. “You might say she’s been doing it ever since she could do anything; and she ain’t but about fifteen, now. Well, she’s going on sixteen,” the mother added, scrupulously. “She was born the third of July, and now it’s the beginning of September. So she’s just fifteen years and a little over two months. I suppose she’s too young to commence taking lessons regularly?”

“No one would be too young for that,” said Ludlow, austerely, with his eyes on the sketch. He lifted them, and bent them frankly and kindly on the mother’s face. “And were you thinking of her going on?” The mother questioned him for his exact meaning with the sweet unwisdom of her smile. “Did you think of her becoming an artist, a painter?”

“Well,” she returned, “I presume she would have as good a chance as anybody, if she had the talent for it.”

“She has the talent for it,” said Ludlow, “and she would have a better chance than most — that’s very little to say — but it’s a terribly rough road.”

“Yes,” the mother faltered, smiling.

“Yes. It’s a hard road for a man, and it’s doubly hard for a woman. It means work that breaks the back and wrings the brain. It means for a woman, tears, and hysterics, and nervous prostration, and insanity — some of them go wild over it. The conditions are bad air, and long hours, and pitiless criticism; and the rewards are slight and uncertain. One out of a hundred comes to anything at all; one out of a thousand to anything worth while. New York is swarming with girl art-students. They mostly live in poor boarding-houses, and some of them actually suffer from hunger and cold. For men the profession is hazardous, arduous; for women it’s a slow anguish of endeavor and disappointment. Most shop-girls earn more than most fairly successful art-students for years; most servant-girls fare better. If you are rich, and your daughter wishes to amuse herself by studying art, it’s all very well; but even then I wouldn’t recommend it as an amusement. If you’re poor — —”

“I presume,” the mother interrupted, “that she would be self-supporting by the time she had taken six months’ lessons, and I guess she could get along till then.”

Ludlow stared at the amiably smiling creature. From her unruffled composure his warning had apparently fallen like water from the back of a goose. He saw that it would be idle to go on, and he stopped short and waited for her to speak again.

“If she was to go to New York to take lessons, how do you think she’d better — —” She seemed not to know enough of the situation to formulate her question farther. He had pity on her ignorance, though he doubted whether he ought to have.

“Oh, go into the Synthesis,” he said briefly.

“The Synthesis?”

“Yes; the Synthesis of Art Studies; it’s the only thing. The work is hard, but it’s thorough; the training’s excellent, if you live through it.”

“Oh, I guess she’d live through it,” said the mother with a laugh. She added, “I don’t know as I know just what you mean by the Synthesis of Art Studies.”

“It’s a society that the art-students have formed. They have their own building, and casts, and models; the principal artists have classes among them. You submit a sketch, and if you get in you work away till you drop, if you’re in earnest, or till you’re bored, if you’re amusing yourself.”

“And should you think,” said the mother gesturing toward him with the sketches in her hand, “that she could get in?”

“I think she could,” said Ludlow, and he acted upon a sudden impulse. He took a card from his pocketbook, and gave it to the mother. “If you’ll look me up when you come to New York, or let me know, I may be of use to you, and I shall be very glad to put you in the way of getting at the Synthesis.”

“Thanks,” the mother drawled with her eyes on the card. She probably had no clear sense of the favor done her. She lifted her eyes and smiled on Ludlow with another kind of intelligence. “You’re visiting at Mrs. Burton’s.”

“Yes,” said Ludlow, remembering after a moment of surprise how pervasive the fact of a stranger’s presence in a village is. “Mr. Burton can tell you who I am,” he added in some impatience with her renewed scrutiny of his card.

“Oh, it’s all right,” she said, and she put it in her pocket, and then she began to drift away a little. “Well, I’m sure I’m much obliged to you.” She hesitated a moment, and then she said, “Well, good afternoon.”

“Good-by,” said Ludlow, and he lifted his hat and stood bowing her out of the Fine Arts Department, while she kept her eyes on him to the last with admiration and approval.

“Well, I declare, Cornelia,” she burst out to her daughter, whom she found glowering at the agricultural implements, “that is about the nicest fellow! Do you know what he’s done?” She stopped and began a search for her pocket, which ended successfully. “He’s given me his name, and told me just what you’re to do. And when you get to New York, if you ever do, you can go right straight to him.”

She handed Ludlow’s card to the girl, who instantly tore it to pieces without looking at it. “I’ll never go to him — horrid, mean, cross old thing! And you go and talk about me to a perfect stranger as if I were a baby. And now he’ll go and laugh at you with the Burtons, and they’ll say it’s just like you to say everything that comes into your head, that way, and think everybody’s as nice as they seem. But he isn’t nice! He’s horrid, and conceited, and — and — hateful. And I shall never study art anywhere. And I’d die before I asked him to help me. He was just making fun of you all the time, and anybody but you would see it, mother! Comparing me to a hired girl!”

“No, I don’t think he did that, Cornelia,” said the mother with some misgiving. “I presume he may have been a little touched up by your pictures, and wanted to put me down about them — —”

“Oh, mother, mother, mother!” The girl broke into tears over the agricultural implements. “They were the dust under his feet.”

“Why, Cornelia, how you talk!”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk, mother! I’ve asked you a thousand times, if I’ve asked you once, not to talk about me with anybody, and here you go and tell everything that you can think of to a person that you never saw before.”

“What did I tell him about you?” asked her mother, with the uncertainty of ladies who say a great deal.

“You told him how old I was almost to a day!”

“Oh, well, that wasn’t anything! I saw he’d got to know if he was to give any opinion about your going on that was worth having.”

“It’ll be all over town, to-morrow. Well, never mind! It’s the last time you’ll ever have a chance to do it. I’ll never, never, never touch a pencil to draw with again! Never! You’ve done it now, mother! I don’t care! I’ll help you with your work, all you want, but don’t ever ask me to draw a single thing after this. I guess he wouldn’t have much to say about the style of a bonnet, or set of a dress, if it was wrong!”

The girl swept out of the building with tragedy-queen strides that refused to adjust themselves to the lazy, lounging pace of her mother, and carried her homeward so swiftly that she had time to bang the front gate and the front door, and her own room door and lock it, and be crying on the bed with her face in the pillow, long before her mother reached the house. The mother wore a face of unruffled serenity, and as there was no one near to see, she relaxed her vigilance, and smiled with luxurious indifference to the teeth she had lost.

V.

Ludlow found his friend Burton smoking on his porch when he came back from the fair, and watching with half-shut eyes the dust that overhung the street. Some of the farmers were already beginning to drive home, and their wheels sent up the pulverous clouds which the western sun just tinged with red; Burton got the color under the lower boughs of the maple grove of his deep door-yard.

“Well,” he called out, in a voice expressive of the temperament which kept him content with his modest fortune and his village circumstance, when he might have made so much more and spent so much more in the world outside, “did you get your picture?”

Ludlow was only half-way up the walk from the street when the question met him, and he waited to reach the piazza steps before he answered.

“Oh, yes, I think I’ve got it.” By this time Mrs. Burton had appeared at the hall door-way, and stood as if to let him decide whether he would come into the house, or join her husband outside. He turned aside to take a chair near Burton’s, tilted against the wall, but he addressed himself to her.

“Mrs. Burton, who is rather a long-strung, easy-going, good-looking, middle-aged lady, with a daughter about fifteen years old, extremely pretty and rather peppery, who draws?”

Mrs. Burton at once came out, and sat sidewise in the hammock, facing the two men.

“How were they dressed?”

Ludlow told as well as he could; he reserved his fancy of the girl’s being like a hollyhock.

“Was the daughter pretty?”

“Very pretty.”

“Dark?”

“Yes, ‘all that’s best of dark and bright.’”

“Were they both very graceful?”

“Very graceful indeed.”

“Why it must be Mrs. Saunders. Where did you see them?”

“In the Art Department.”

“Yes. She came to ask me whether I would exhibit some of Cornelia’s drawings, if I were she.”

“And you told her you would?” her husband asked, taking his pipe out for the purpose.

“Of course I did. That was what she wished me to tell her.”

Burton turned to Ludlow. “Had they taken many premiums?”

“No; the premiums had been bestowed on the crazy quilts and the medley pictures — what extraordinarily idiotic inventions! — and Miss Saunders was tearing down her sketches in the next section. One of them slipped through on the floor, and they came round after it to where I was.”

“And so you got acquainted with Mrs. Saunders?” said Mrs. Burton.

“No. But I got intimate,” said Ludlow. “I sympathized with her, and she advised with me about her daughter’s art-education.”

“What did you advise her to do?” asked Burton.

“Not to have her art-educated.”

“Why, don’t you think she has talent?” Mrs. Burton demanded, with a touch of resentment.

“Oh, yes. She has beauty, too. Nothing is commoner than the talent and beauty of American girls. But they’d better trust to their beauty.”

“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Burton, with spirit.

“You can see how she’s advised Mrs. Saunders,” said Burton, winking the eye next Ludlow.

“Well, you mustn’t be vexed with me, Mrs. Burton,” Ludlow replied to her. “I don’t think she’ll take my advice, especially as I put it in the form of warning. I told her how hard the girl would have to work: but I don’t think she quite understood. I told her she had talent, too; and she did understand that; there was something uncommon in the child’s work; something — different. Who are they, Mrs. Burton?”

“Isn’t there!” cried Mrs. Burton. “I’m glad you told the poor thing that. I thought they’d take the premium. I was going to tell you about her daughter. Mrs. Saunders must have been awfully disappointed.”

“She didn’t seem to suffer much,” Ludlow suggested.

“No,” Mrs. Burton admitted, “she doesn’t suffer much about anything. If she did she would have been dead long ago. First, her husband blown up by his saw-mill boiler, and then one son killed in a railroad accident, and another taken down with pneumonia almost the same day! And she goes on, smiling in the face of death — —”

“And looking out that he doesn’t see how many teeth she’s lost,” Burton prompted.

Ludlow laughed at the accuracy of the touch.

Mrs. Burton retorted, “Why shouldn’t she? Her good looks and her good nature are about all she has left in the world, except this daughter.”

“Are they very poor?” asked Ludlow, gently.

“Oh, nobody’s very poor in Pymantoning,” said Mrs. Burton. “And Mrs. Saunders has her business, — when she’s a mind to work at it.”

“I suppose she has it, even when she hasn’t a mind to work at it,” said Burton, making his pipe purr with a long, deep inspiration of satisfaction. “I know I have mine.”

“What is her business?” asked Ludlow.

“Well, she’s a dressmaker and milliner — when she is.” Mrs. Burton stated the fact with the effect of admitting it. “You mustn’t suppose that makes any difference. In a place like Pymantoning, she’s ‘as good as anybody,’ and her daughter has as high social standing. You can’t imagine how Arcadian we are out here.”

“Oh, yes, I can; I’ve lived in a village,” said Ludlow.

“A New England village, yes; but the lines are drawn just as hard and fast there as they are in a city. You have to live in the West to understand what equality is, and in a purely American population, like this. You’ve got plenty of independence, in New England, but you haven’t got equality, and we have, — or used to have.” Mrs. Burton added the final words with apparent conscience.

“Just saved your distance, Polly,” said her husband. “We haven’t got equality now, any more than we’ve got buffalo. I don’t believe we ever had buffalo in this section; but we did have deer once; and when I was a boy here, venison was three cents a pound, and equality cheaper yet. When they cut off the woods the venison and the equality disappeared; they always do when the woods are cut off.”

“There’s enough of it left for all practical purposes, and Mrs. Saunders moves in the first circles of Pymantoning,” said Mrs. Burton.

“When she does move,” said Burton. “She doesn’t like to move.”

“Well, she has the greatest taste, and if you can get her to do anything for you your fortune’s made. But it’s a favor. She’ll take a thing that you’ve got home from the city, and that you’re frantic about, it’s so bad, and smile over it a little, and touch it here and there, and it comes out a miracle of style and becomingness. It’s like magic.”

“She was charming,” said Ludlow, in dreamy reminiscence.

“Isn’t she?” Mrs. Burton demanded. “And her daughter gets all her artistic talent from her. Mrs. Saunders is an artist, though I don’t suppose you like to admit it of a dressmaker.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” said Ludlow. “I don’t see why a man or woman who drapes the human figure in stuffs, isn’t an artist as well as the man or woman who drapes it in paint or clay.”

“Well, that’s sense,” Mrs. Burton began.

“She didn’t know you had any, Ludlow,” her husband explained.

Mrs. Burton did not regard him. “If she had any ambition she would be anything — just like some other lazy-boots,” and now she gave the large, dangling congress gaiter of her husband a little push with the point of her slipper, for purposes of identification, as the newspapers say. “But the only ambition she’s got is for her daughter, and she is proud of her, and she would spoil her if she could get up the energy. She dotes on her, and Nie is fond of her mother, too. Do you think she can ever do anything in art?”

“If she were a boy, I should say yes; as she’s a girl, I don’t know,” said Ludlow. “The chances are against her.”

“Nature’s against her, too,” said Burton.

“Human nature ought to be for her, then,” said Mrs. Burton. “If she were your sister what should you wish her to be?” she asked Ludlow.

“I should wish her to be” — Ludlow thought a moment and then concluded— “happily married.”

“Well, that’s a shame!” cried Mrs. Burton.

Her husband laughed, while he knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the edge of his chair-seat. “Rough on the holy estate of matrimony, Polly.”

“Oh, pshaw! I believe as much in the holy estate of matrimony as anybody, but I don’t believe it’s the begin-all or the end-all for a woman, any more than it is for a man. What, Katy?” she spoke to a girl who appeared and disappeared in the doorway. “Oh! Well, come in to supper, now. I hope you have an appetite, Mr. Ludlow. Mr. Burton’s such a delicate eater, and I like to have somebody keep me in countenance.” She suddenly put her hand on the back of her husband’s chair, and sprung it forward from its incline against the wall, with a violence that bounced him fearfully, and extorted a roar of protest from him.

They were much older than Ludlow, and they permitted themselves the little rowdy freedoms that good-natured married people sometimes use, as fearlessly in his presence as if he were a grown-up nephew. They prized him as a discovery of their own, for they had stumbled on him one day before any one else had found him out, when he was sketching at Fontainebleau. They liked the look of his picture, as they viewed it at a decent remove over his shoulder, and after they got by Burton proposed to go back and kill the fellow on account of the solemn coxcombery of his personal appearance. His wife said: “Well, ask him what he’ll take for his picture, first,” and Burton returned and said with brutal directness, while he pointed at the canvas with his stick, “Combien?” When Ludlow looked round up at him and answered with a pleasant light in his eye, “Well, I don’t know exactly. What’ll you give?” Burton spared his life, and became his friend. He called his wife to him, and they bought the picture, and afterwards they went to Ludlow’s lodging, for he had no studio, and conscientiously painted in the open air, and bought others. They got the pictures dog cheap, as Burton said, for Ludlow was just beginning then, and his reputation which has never since become cloud-capt, was a tender and lowly plant. They made themselves like a youngish aunt and uncle to him, and had him with them all they could while they stayed in Paris. When they came home they brought the first impressionistic pictures ever seen in the West; at Pymantoning, the village cynic asked which was right side up, and whether he was to stand on his head or not to get them in range. Ludlow remained in France, which he maintained had the only sun for impressionism; and then he changed his mind all at once, and under an impulse of sudden patriotism, declared for the American sky, and the thin, crystalline, American air. His faith included American subjects, and when, after his arrival in New York, Burton wrote to claim a visit from him and ironically proposed the trotting-match at the County Fair as an attraction for his pencil, Ludlow remembered the trotting-matches he had seen in his boyhood, and came out to Pymantoning with a seriousness of expectation that alarmed and then amused his friends.

He was very glad that he had come, and that night, after the supper which lasted well into the early autumn lamp-light, he went out and walked the village streets under the September moon, seeing his picture everywhere before him, and thinking his young, exultant thoughts. The maples were set so thick along the main street that they stood like a high, dark wall on either side, and he looked up at the sky as from the bottom of a chasm. The village houses lurked behind their door-yard trees, with breadths of autumnal bloom in the gardens beside them. Within their shadowy porches, or beside their gates, was

“The delight of happy laughter,

The delight of low replies,”

hushing itself at his approach, and breaking out again at his retreat. The air seemed full of love, and in the midst of his proud, gay hopes, he felt smitten with sudden isolation, such as youth knows in the presence of others’ passion. He walked back to Burton’s rather pensively, and got up to his room and went to bed after as little stay for talk with his hosts as he could make decent; he did not like to break with his melancholy.

He was roused from his first sleep by the sound of singing, which seemed to stop with his waking. There came a confused murmur of girls’ and young men’s voices, and Ludlow could see from his open window the dim shapes of the serenaders in the dark of the trees below. Then they were still, and all at once the silence was filled with a rich contralto note, carrying the song, till the whole choir of voices took up the burden. Nothing prettier could have happened anywhere in the world. Ludlow hung rapt upon the music till Burton flung up his window, as if to thank the singers. They stopped at the sound, and with gay shouts and shrieks, and a medley of wild laughter, skurried away into the farther darkness, where Ludlow heard them begin their serenade again under distant windows as little localized as any space of the sky.

VI.

Ludlow went back to New York and took up his work with vigor and with fervor. The picture of the County Fair, which he exhibited at the American Artists’, ran a gauntlet of criticism in which it was belabored at once for its unimaginative vulgarity and its fantastic unreality; then it returned to his studio and remained unsold, while the days, weeks, months and years went by and left each their fine trace on him. His purposes dropped away, mostly unfulfilled, as he grew older and wiser, but his dreams remained and he was still rich in a vast future. His impressionism was somewhat modified; he offered his palette less frequently to the public; he now and then permitted a black object to appear in his pictures; his purples and greens were less aggressive. His moustache had grown so thick that it could no longer be brushed up at the points with just the effect he desired, and he suffered it to branch straight across his cheeks; his little dot of an imperial had become lost in the beard which he wore so conscientiously trimmed to a point that it might be described as religiously pointed. He was now twenty-seven.

At sixteen Cornelia Saunders had her first love-affair. It was with a young man who sold what he called art-goods by sample — satin banners, gilt rolling-pins, brass disks and keramics; he had permitted himself to speak to her on the train coming over from the Junction, where she took the cars for Pymantoning one afternoon after a day’s shopping with her mother in Lakeland. It did not last very long, and in fact it hardly survived the brief stay which the young man made in Pymantoning, where his want of success in art-goods was probably owing to the fact that he gave his whole time to Cornelia, or rather Cornelia’s mother, whom he found much more conversable; he played upon the banjo for her, and he danced a little clog-dance in her parlor, which was also her shop, to the accompaniment of his own whistling, first setting aside the bonnet-trees with their scanty fruitage of summer hats, and pushing the show-table against the wall. “Won’t hurt ’em a mite,” he reassured her, and he struck her as a careful as well as accomplished young man. His passion for Cornelia lingered a while in letters, which he proposed in parting, and then, about six months later, Mrs. Saunders received the newspaper announcement of his marriage to Miss Tweety Byers of Lakeland. There were “No Cards,” but Mrs. Saunders made out, with Mrs. Burton’s help, that Tweety was the infantile for the pet name of Sweety; and the marriage seemed a fit union for one so warm and true as the young traveller in art-goods.

Mrs. Saunders was a good deal surprised, but she did not suffer keenly from the disappointment which she had innocently done her best to bring upon her daughter. Cornelia, who had been the passive instrument of her romance, did not suffer from it at all, having always objected to the thickness of the young man’s hands, and to the early baldness which gave him the Shakespearian brow he had so little use for. She laughed his memory to scorn, and employed the episode as best she could in quelling her mother’s simple trust of passing strangers. They worked along together, in the easy, unambitious village fashion, and kept themselves in the average comfort, while the time went by and Cornelia had grown from a long, lean child to a tall and stately young girl, who carried herself with so much native grace and pride that she had very little attention from the village youth. She had not even a girl friendship, and her chief social resource was in her intimacy at the Burtons. She borrowed books of them, and read a good deal; and when she was seventeen she rubbed up her old studies and got a teacher’s certificate for six months, and taught a summer term in a district at Burnt Pastures. She came home in the fall, and when she called at the Burtons’ to get a book, as usual, Mrs. Burton said, “Nelie, you’re not feeling very well, are you? Somehow you looked fagged.”

“Well, I do feel queer,” said the girl. “I seem to be in a kind of dream. It — scares me. I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

“Oh, I guess not,” Mrs. Burton answered comfortably. “You’re just tired out. How did you like your school?”

“I hated it,” said the girl, with a trembling chin and wet eyes. “I don’t believe I’m fit for teaching. I won’t try it any more; I’ll stay at home and help mother.”

“You ought to keep up your drawing,” said Mrs. Burton in general admonition. “Do you draw any now?”

“Nothing much,” said the girl.

“I should think you would, to please your mother. Don’t you care anything for it yourself?”

“Yes; but I haven’t the courage I had when I thought I knew it all. I don’t think I should ever amount to anything. It would be a waste of time.”

“I don’t think so,” said Mrs. Burton. “I believe you could be a great artist.”

The girl laughed. “What ever became of that painter who visited you year before last at fair time?”

“Mr. Ludlow? Oh, he’s in New York. He thought your sketches were splendid, Nelie.”

“He said the girls half-killed themselves there studying art.”

“Did he?” demanded Mrs. Burton with a note of wrath in her voice.

“Mm. He told mother so that day.”

“He had no business to say such a thing before you. Was that what discouraged you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I got discouraged. Of course, I should like to please mother. How much do you suppose it would cost a person to live in New York? I don’t mean take a room and board yourself; I shouldn’t like to do that; but everything included.”

“I don’t know, indeed, Nelie. Jim always kept the accounts when we were there, and we stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.”

“Do you suppose it would be twice as much as it is here? Five dollars a week?”

“Yes, I’m afraid it would,” Mrs. Burton admitted.

“I’ve got sixty-five dollars from my school. I suppose it would keep me three months in New York, if I was careful. But I’m not going to throw it away on any such wild scheme as that. I know that much.”

They talked away from the question, and then talked back to it several times, after they had both seemed to abandon it. At last Mrs. Burton said, “Why don’t you let me write to Mr. Ludlow, Nelie, and ask him all about it?”

The girl jumped to her feet in a fright. “If you do, Mrs. Burton, I’ll kill myself! No, I didn’t mean to say that. But I’ll never speak to you again. Now you won’t really, will you?”

“No, I won’t, Nelie, if you don’t want me to; but I don’t see why —— Why, bless the child!”

Mrs. Burton sprang forward and caught the girl, who was reeling as if she were going to fall. “Katy! Katy! Bring some water here, quick!”

When they had laid Cornelia on a sofa and restored her from her faint, Mrs. Burton would not let her try to rise. She sent out to Burton, who was reading a novel in the mild forenoon air under the crimson maples, and made him get the carryall and take Cornelia home in it. They thought they would pretend that they were out for a drive, and were merely dropping her at her mother’s door; but no ruse was necessary. Mrs. Saunders tranquilly faced the fact; she said she thought the child hadn’t been herself since she got back from her school, and she guessed she had better have the doctor now.

VII.

It was toward the end of January before Cornelia was well enough to be about in the old way, after her typhoid fever. Once she was so low that the rumor of her death went out; but when this proved false it was known for a good sign, and no woman, at least, was surprised when she began to get well. She was delirious part of the time, and then she raved constantly about Ludlow, and going to New York to study art. It was a mere superficial effect from her talk with Mrs. Burton just before she was taken down with the fever; but it was pathetic, all the same, to hear her pleading with him, quarrelling, protesting that she was strong enough, and that she was not afraid but that she should get through all right if he would only tell her how to begin. “Now you just tell me that, tell me that, tell me that! It’s the place that I can’t find. If I can get to the right door! But it won’t open! It won’t open! Oh, dear! What shall I do!”

Mrs. Burton, who heard this go on through the solemn hours of night, thought that if Ludlow could only hear it he would be careful how he ever discouraged any human being again. It was as much as her husband could do to keep her from writing to him, and making the girl’s fever a matter of personal reproach to him; but she refrained, and when Cornelia got up from it she was so changed that Mrs. Burton was glad she had never tried to involve any one else in her anxieties about her.

Not only the fever had burned itself out, but Cornelia’s temperament seemed for awhile to have been consumed in the fire. She came out of it more like her mother. She was gentler than she used to be, and especially gentle and good to her mother; and she had not only grown to resemble her in a greater tranquillity and easy-goingness, but to have come into her ambitions and desires. The change surprised Mrs. Saunders a good deal; up to this time it had always surprised her that Cornelia should not have been at all like her. She sometimes reflected, however, that if you came to that, Cornelia’s father had never been at all like her, either.

It was only a passing phase of the girl’s evolution. With the return of perfect health and her former strength, she got back her old energetic self, but of another quality and in another form. Probably she would have grown into the character she now took on in any case; but following her convalescence as it did, it had a more dramatic effect. She began to review her studies and her examination papers before the doctor knew it, and when the county examiners met in June she was ready for them, and got a certificate authorizing her to teach for a year. With this she need not meet the poor occasions of any such forlorn end-of-the-earth as Burnt Pastures. She had an offer of the school at Hartley’s Mills, and she taught three terms there, and brought home a hundred and fifty dollars at the end. All through the last winter she drew, more or less, and she could see better than any one else that she had not fallen behind in her art, but after having let it drop for a time, had taken it up with fresh power and greater skill. She had come to see things better than she used, and she had learned to be faithful to what she saw, which is the great matter in all the arts.

She had never formulated this fact, even if she knew it; and Mrs. Burton was still further from guessing what it was that made Cornelia’s sketches so much more attractive than they were, when the girl let her look at them, in one of her proud, shy confidences. She said, “I do wish Mr. Ludlow could see these, Nelie.”

“Do you think he would be very much excited?” asked the girl, with the sarcastic humor which had risen up in her to be one of the reliefs of her earlier intensity.

“He ought to be,” said Mrs. Burton. “You know he did admire your drawings, Nelie; even those you had at the fair, that time.”

“Did he?” returned the girl, carelessly. “What did he say?”

“Well, he said that if you were a boy there couldn’t be any doubt about you.”

Cornelia laughed. “That was a pretty safe kind of praise. I’m not likely ever to be a boy.” She rose up from where they were sitting together, and went to put her drawings away in her room. When she came back, she said, “It would be fun to show him, some day, that even so low down a creature as a girl could be something.”

“I wish you would, Nie,” said Mrs. Burton, “I just wish you would. Why don’t you go to New York, this winter, and study! Why don’t you make her, Mrs. Saunders?”

“Who? Me?” said Mrs. Saunders, who sat by, in an indolent abeyance. “Oh! I ain’t allowed to open my mouth any more.”

“Well,” said Cornelia, “don’t be so ungrammatical, then, when you do it without being allowed, mother.”

Mrs. Saunders laughed in lazy enjoyment. “One thing I know; if I had my way she’d have been in New York studying long ago, instead of fooling away her time out here, school-teaching.”

“And where would you have been, mother?”

“Me?” said Mrs. Saunders again, incorrigibly. “Oh, I guess I should have been somewhere!”

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Mrs. Burton broke in, “Nie must go, and that’s all about it. I know from what Mr. Ludlow said that he believes she could be an artist. She would have to work hard, but I don’t call teaching school play, exactly.”

“Indeed it isn’t!” said Mrs. Saunders. “I’d sooner set all day at the machine myself, and dear knows that’s trying enough!”

“I’m not afraid of the hard work,” said Cornelia.

“What are you afraid of, then?” demanded her mother. “Afraid of failing?”

“No; of succeeding,” answered Cornelia, perversely.

“I can’t make the child out,” said Mrs. Saunders, with apparent pleasure in the mystery.

Cornelia went on, at least partially, to explain herself. “I mean, succeeding in the way women seem to succeed. They make me sick!”

“Oh,” said her mother, with sarcasm that could not sustain itself even by a smile letting Mrs. Burton into the joke, “going to be a Rosa Bonnhure?”

Cornelia scorned this poor attempt of her mother. “If I can’t succeed as men succeed, and be a great painter, and not just a great woman painter, I’d rather be excused altogether. Even Rosa Bonheur: I don’t believe her horses would have been considered so wonderful if a man had done them. I guess that’s what Mr. Ludlow meant, and I guess he was right. I guess if a girl wants to turn out an artist she’d better start by being a boy.”

“I guess,” said Mrs. Burton, with admiring eyes full of her beauty, “that if Mr. Ludlow could see you now, he’d be very sorry to have you a boy!”

Cornelia blushed the splendid red of a brunette. “There it is, Mrs. Burton! That’s what’s always in everybody’s mind about a girl when she wants to do something. It’s what a magnificent match she’ll make by her painting or singing or acting! And if the poor fool only knew, she needn’t draw or sing or act, to do that.”

“A person would think you’d been through the wars, Cornelia,” said her mother.

“I don’t care! It’s a shame!”

“It is a shame, Nelie,” said Mrs. Burton, soothingly; and she added, unguardedly, “and I told Mr. Ludlow so, when he spoke about a girl’s being happily married, as if there was no other happiness for a girl.”

“Oh! He thinks that, does he?”

“No, of course, he doesn’t. He has a very high ideal of women; but he was just running on, in the usual way. He told afterwards how hard the girl art-students work in New York, and go ahead of the young men, some of them — where they have the strength. The only thing is that so few of them have the strength. That’s what he meant.”

“What do you think, mother?” asked the girl with an abrupt turn toward her. “Do you think I’d break down?”

“I guess if you didn’t break down teaching school, that you hated, you won’t break down studying art, when you love it so.”

“Well,” Cornelia said, with the air of putting an end to the audience, “I guess there’s no great hurry about it.”

She let her mother follow Mrs. Burton out, recognizing with a smile of scornful intelligence the ladies’ wish to have the last word about her to themselves.

VIII.

“I don’t know as I ever saw her let herself go so far before,” said Mrs. Saunders, leaning on the top of the closed gate, and speaking across it to Mrs. Burton on the outside of the fence. “I guess she’s thinking about it, pretty seriously. She’s got money enough, and more than enough.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Burton, “I’m going to write to Mr. Ludlow about it, as soon as I get home, and I know I can get him to say something that’ll decide her.”

“So do!” cried Mrs. Saunders, delighted.

She lingered awhile talking of other things, so as to enable herself to meet Cornelia with due unconsciousness when she returned to her.

“Have you been talking me over all this time, mother?” the girl asked.

“We didn’t hardly say a word about you,” said her mother, and now she saw what a good thing it was that she had staid and talked impersonalities with Mrs. Burton.

“Well, one thing I know,” said the girl, “if she gets that Mr. Ludlow to encourage me, I’ll never go near New York in the world.”

Mrs. Saunders escaped into the next room, and answered back from that safe distance, “I guess you’d better get her to tell you what she’s going to do.”

When she returned, the girl stood looking dreamily out of the little crooked panes of the low window. She asked, with her back to her mother, “What would you do, if I went?”

“Oh, I should get along,” said Mrs. Saunders with the lazy piety which had never yet found Providence to fail it. “I should get Miss Snively to go in with me, here. She ain’t making out very well, alone, and she could be company to me in more ways than one.”

“Yes,” said the girl, in a deep sigh. “I thought of her.” She faced about.

“Why, land, child!” cried her mother, “what’s the matter?”

Cornelia’s eyes were streaming with tears, and the passion in her heart was twisting her face with its anguish. She flung her arms round her mother’s neck, and sobbed on her breast. “Oh, I’m going, I’m going, and you don’t seem to care whether I go or stay, and it’ll kill me to leave you.”

Mrs. Saunders smiled across the tempest of grief in her embrace, at her own tranquil image in the glass, and took it into the joke. “Well, you ain’t going to leave this minute,” she said, smoothing the girl’s black hair. “And I don’t really care if you never go, Nie. You mustn’t go on my account.”

“Don’t you want me to?”

“Not unless you do.”

“And you don’t care whether I’m ever an artist or not?”

“What good is your being an artist going to do me?” asked her mother, still with a joking eye on herself in the mirror.

“And I’m perfectly free to go or to stay, as far as your wish is concerned?”

“Well!” said Mrs. Saunders, with insincere scorn of the question.

The girl gave her a fierce hug; she straightened herself up, and dashed the water from her eyes. “Well, then,” she said, “I’ll see. But promise me one thing, mother.”

“What is it?”

“That you won’t ask me a single thing about it, from this out, if I never decide!”

“Well, I won’t, Nie. I promise you that. I don’t want to drive you to anything. And I guess you know ten times as well what you want to do, as I do, anyway. I ain’t going to worry you.”

Three weeks later, just before fair time, Cornelia went to see Mrs. Burton. It was warm, and Mrs. Burton brought out a fan for her on the piazza.

“Oh, I’m not hot,” said Cornelia. “Mrs. Burton, I’ve made up my mind to go to New York this winter, and study art.”

“I knew you would, Nie!” Mrs. Burton exulted.

“Yes. I’ve thought it all out. I’ve got the money, now. I keep wanting to paint, and I don’t know whether I can or not, and the only way is to go and find out. It’ll be easy enough to come home. I’ll keep money enough to pay my way back.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Burton, “it’s the only way. But I guess you’ll find out you can paint fast enough. It’s a pretty good sign you can, if you want to.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Some girls want to write poetry awfully, and can’t. Mrs. Burton,” she broke off, with a nervous laugh, “I don’t suppose you expect that Mr. Ludlow out to the fair this year?”

“No, Nelie, I don’t,” said Mrs. Burton, with tender reluctance.

“Because,” said the girl with another laugh, “he might save me a trip to New York, if he could see my drawings.” Something, she did not know what, in Mrs. Burton’s manner, made her ask: “Have you heard from him lately? Perhaps he’s given it up, too!”

“Oh, no!” sighed Mrs. Burton, with a break from her cheerfulness with Cornelia, which set its voluntary character in evidence to the girl’s keen, young perception. “But he seemed to be rather discouraged about the prospects of artists when he wrote.” She was afraid Cornelia might ask her when he had written. “He seemed to think the ranks were very full. He’s a very changeable person. He’s always talked, before now, about there being plenty of room at the top.”

“Well, that’s where I expect to be,” said the girl, smiling but trembling. She turned the talk, and soon rose to go, ignoring to the last Mrs. Burton’s forced efforts to recur to her plan of studying art in New York. Now she said: “Mrs. Burton, there’s one thing I’d like to ask you,” and she lifted her eyes upon her with a suddenness that almost made Mrs. Burton jump.

“What is it, Nelie?”

“You’ve always been so good to me — and — and taken such an interest, that I’m afraid — I thought you might try — I want you to promise me you won’t write to Mr. Ludlow about me, or ask him to do the least thing, for me!”

“I won’t, I won’t indeed, Nelie!” Mrs. Burton promised with grateful perfervor.

“Because,” said the girl, taking her skirt in her left hand, preparatory to lifting it for her descent of the piazza steps, “now that I’ve made up my mind, I don’t want to be discouraged, and I don’t want to be helped. If I can’t do for myself, I won’t be done for.”

After she got down through the maples, and well out of the gate, Burton came and stood in the hall door-way, with his pipe in his mouth. “Saved your distance, Polly, as usual; saved your distance.”

“What would you have done?” retorted his wife.

“I should have told her that I’d just got a letter from Ludlow this morning, and that he begged and entreated me by everything I held dear, to keep the poor girl from coming to New York, and throwing away her time and health and money.”

“You wouldn’t!” cried Mrs. Burton. “You wouldn’t have done anything of the kind. It would have made her perfectly hate him.”

Burton found his pipe out. He lighted a match and hollowed his hands over it above the pipe, to keep it from the draught. “Well,” he said, avoiding the point in controversy, “why shouldn’t she perfectly hate him?”

IX.

September was theoretically always a very busy month with Mrs. Saunders. She believed that she devoted it to activities which she called her fall work, and that she pressed forward in the fulfilments of these duties with a vigor inspired by the cool, clear weather. But in reality there was not much less folding of the hands with her in September than there was in July. She was apt, on the coolest and clearest September day, to drop into a chair with a deep drawn “Oh, hum!” after the fatigue of bringing in an apronful of apples, or driving the hens away from her chrysanthemums, and she spent a good deal of time wondering how, with all she had to do, she was ever going to get those flowers in before the frost caught them. At one of these times, sitting up slim, graceful and picturesque, in the feather-cushioned rocker-lounge, and fanning her comely face with her shade-hat, it occurred to her to say to Cornelia, sewing hard beside the window, “I guess you won’t see them in blossom this Christmas, Nie.”

“Not unless you cut them at the roots and send them to me by mail to look at,” said the girl.

Her mother laughed easily. “Well, I must really take hold and help you, or you’ll never get away. I’ve put off everybody else’s work, till it’s perfectly scandalous, and I’m afraid they’ll bring the roof about my ears, and yet I seem to be letting you do all your sewing. Well, one thing, I presume I hate to have you go so!”

“Mother!” cried the girl, drawing out her needle to the full length of her thread before she let her hand drop nervelessly at her side, and she fell back to look fixedly at Mrs. Saunders. “If that’s the way you feel!”

“I don’t! I want you to go just as much as ever I did. But looking at you there, just against the window, that way, I got to thinking you wouldn’t be there a great while; and — —” Mrs. Saunders caught her breath, and was mute a moment before she gave way and began to whimper. From the force of habit she tried to whimper with one side of her mouth, as she smiled, to keep her missing teeth from showing; and at the sight of this characteristic effort, so familiar and so full of long association, Cornelia’s heart melted within her, and she ran to her mother, and pulled her head down on her breast and covered the unwhimpering cheek with kisses.

“Don’t you suppose I think of that, too, mother? And when you go round the room, or out in the yard, I just keep following you as if I was magnetized, and I can see you with my eyes shut as well as I can with them open; and I know how I shall feel when that’s all I’ve got of you! But I’ll soon be back! Why I’ll be here in June again! And it’s no use, now. I’ve got to go.”

“Oh, yes,” said her mother, pushing herself free, and entering upon so prolonged a search for her handkerchief that her tears had almost time to dry without it before she found it. “But that don’t make it any easier, child.”

They had agreed from the time Cornelia made up her mind to go, and they had vowed the Burtons to secrecy, that they were not to tell any one till just before she started; but it was not in Mrs. Saunders’s nature or the nature of things, that she should keep her part of the agreement. She was so proud of Cornelia’s going to study art in New York, and going on her own money, that she would have told all her customers that she was going, even if it had not proved such a good excuse for postponing and delaying the work they brought her.

It was all over town before the first week was out, and the fact had been canvassed in and out of the presence of the principals, with much the same frankness. What Cornelia had in excess of a putting-down pride her mother correspondingly lacked; what the girl forbade, Mrs. Saunders invited by her manner, and there were not many people, or at least many ladies, in Pymantoning, who could not put their hands on their hearts and truly declare that they had spoken their minds as freely to Mrs. Saunders as they had to anybody.

As the time drew near Mrs. Burton begged to be allowed to ask Mr. Ludlow about a boarding-place for Cornelia; and to this Cornelia consented on condition that he should be strictly prohibited from taking any more trouble than simply writing the address on a piece of paper. When Mrs. Burton brought it she confessed that Mr. Ludlow seemed to have so far exceeded his instructions as to have inquired the price of board in a single room.

“I’m afraid, Nelie, it’s more than you expected. But everything is very dear in New York, and Mr. Ludlow thought it was cheap. There’s no fire in the room, even at that, but if you leave the door open when you’re out, it heats nicely from the hall. It’s over the door, four flights up; it’s what they call a side room.”

“How much is it, Mrs. Burton?” Cornelia asked, steadily; but she held her breath till the answer came.

“It’s seven dollars a week.”

“Well, the land!” said Mrs. Saunders, for all comment on the extortionate figure.

For a moment Cornelia did not say anything. Then she quietly remarked, “I can be home all the sooner,” and she took the paper which Ludlow had written the address on; she noticed that it smelt of tobacco smoke.

“He said you could easily find your way from the Grand Central Depot by the street cars; it’s almost straight. He’s written down on the back which cars you take. You give your check to the baggage expressman that comes aboard the train before you get in, and then you don’t have the least trouble. He says there are several girl art-students in the same house, and you’ll soon feel at home. He says if you feel the least timid about getting in alone, he’ll come with a lady friend of his, to meet you, and she’ll take you to your boarding-house.”

Mrs. Burton escaped with rather more than her life from the transmission of this offer. Cornelia even said, “I’m very much obliged to him, I’m sure. But I shouldn’t wish to trouble him, thank you. I won’t feel the least timid.”

But her mother followed Mrs. Burton out to the gate, as usual. “I guess,” Mrs. Saunders explained, “she hated to have him make so much to-do about it. What makes him want to bring a lady friend to meet her? Somebody he’s engaged to?”

“Well, that’s what I wondered, at first,” said Mrs. Burton. “But then when I came to think how very different the customs are in New York, I came to the conclusion that he did it on Cornelia’s account. If he was to take her to the boarding-house himself, they might think he was engaged to her.”

“Well!” said Mrs. Saunders.

“You may be sure it’s because he’s good and thoughtful about it, and wants her not to have any embarrassment.”

“Oh, I guess he’s all right,” said Mrs. Saunders. “But who’d ever have thought of having to take such precautions? I shouldn’t think life was worth having on such terms, if I was a girl.”

She told Cornelia about this strange social ceremony of chaperonage, which now for the first time practically concerned them.

X.

The night began to fall an hour before Cornelia’s train reached New York, and it drew into the station, through the whirl and dance of parti-colored lights everywhere.

The black porter of the sleeping-ear caught up her bag and carried it out for her, as if he were going to carry it indefinitely; and outside she stood letting him hold it, while she looked about her, scared and bewildered, and the passengers hurrying by, pushed and bumped against her. When she collected her wits sufficiently to take it from him, she pressed on with the rest up toward the front of the station where the crowd frayed out in different directions. At the open doorway giving on the street she stopped, and stood holding her bag, and gazed fearfully out on a line of wild men on the curbstone; they all seemed to be stretching their hands out to her, and they rattled and clamored: “Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb? Want a keb? Keb here! Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb!” They were kept back by a policeman who prevented them from falling upon the passengers, and restored them to order when they yielded by the half-dozen to the fancy that some one had ordered a cab, and started off in the direction of their vehicles, and then rushed back so as not to lose other chances. The sight of Cornelia standing bag in hand there, seemed to drive them to a frenzy of hope; several newsboys, eager to share their prosperity, rushed up and offered her the evening papers.

Cornelia strained forward from the doorway and tried to make out, in the kaleidoscopic pattern of lights, which was the Fourth Avenue car; the street was full of cars and carts and carriages, all going every which way, with a din of bells, and wheels and hoofs that was as if crushed to one clangerous mass by the superior uproar of the railroad trains coming and going on a sort of street-roof overhead. A sickening odor came from the mud of the gutters and the horses and people, and as if a wave of repulsion had struck against every sense in her, the girl turned and fled from the sight and sound and smell of it all into the ladies’ waiting-room at her right.

She knew about that room from Mrs. Burton, who had said she could go in there, and fix her hair if it had got tumbled, when she came off the train. But it had been so easy to keep everything just right in the nice dressing-room on the sleeper that she had expected to step out of the station and take a Fourth Avenue car without going into the ladies-room. She found herself the only person in it, except a comfortable, friendly-looking, middle-aged woman, who seemed to be in charge of the place, and was going about with a dust-cloth in her hand. She had such a home-like air, and it was so peaceful there, after all that uproar outside, that Cornelia could hardly keep back the tears, though she knew it was silly, and kept saying so to herself under her breath.

She put her hand-bag down, and went and stood at one of the windows, trying to make up her mind to venture out; and then she began to move back and forth from one window to the other. It must have been this effect of restlessness and anxiety that made the janitress speak to her at last: “Expecting friends to meet you?”

Cornelia turned round and took a good look at the janitress. She decided from her official as well as her personal appearance that she might be trusted, as least provisionally. It had been going through her mind there at the windows what a fool she was to refuse to let Mr. Ludlow come to meet her with that friend of his, and she had been helplessly feigning that she had not refused, and that he was really coming, but was a little late. She was in the act of accepting his apology for the delay when the janitress spoke to her, and she said: “I don’t know whether I’d better wait any longer. I was looking for a Fourth Avenue car.”

“Well, you couldn’t hardly miss one,” said the janitress. “They’re going all the time. Stranger in the city?”

“Yes, I am,” Cornelia admitted; she thought she had better admit it.

“Well,” said the janitress, “if I was you I’d wait for my friends a while longer. It’s after dark, now, and if they come here and find you gone, they’ll be uneasy, won’t they?”

“Well,” said Cornelia, and she sank submissively into a seat.

The janitress sat down too. “Not but what it’s safe enough, and you needn’t be troubled, if they don’t come. You can go half an hour later just as well. My! I’ve had people sit here all day and wait. The things I’ve seen here, well, if they were put into a story you couldn’t hardly believe them. I had a poor woman come in here one morning last week with a baby in her arms, and three little children hanging round her, to wait for her husband; and she waited till midnight, and he didn’t come. I could have told her first as well as last that he wasn’t ever coming; I knew it from the kind of a letter he wrote her, and that she fished up out of her pocket to show me, so as to find whether she had come to the right place to wait, or not, but I couldn’t bear to do it; and I did for her and the children as well as I could, and when it came to it, about twelve, I coaxed her to go home, and come again in the morning. She didn’t come back again; I guess she began to suspect something herself.”

“Why, don’t you suppose he ever meant to come?” Cornelia asked, tremulously.

“I don’t know,” said the janitress. “I didn’t tell her so. I’ve had all kinds of homeless folks come in here, that had lost their pocket-books, or never had any, and little tots of children, with papers pinned on to tell me who they were expecting, and I’ve had ’em here on my hands till I had to shut up at night.”

“And what did you do then?” Cornelia began to be anxious about her own fate, in case she should not get away before the janitress had to shut up.

“Well, some I had to put into the street, them that were used to it; and then there are homes of all kinds for most of ‘em; old ladies’ homes, and young girls’ homes, and destitute females’ homes, and children’s homes, where they can go for the night, and all I’ve got to do is to give an order. It isn’t as bad as you’d think, when you first come to the city; I came here from Connecticut.”

Cornelia thought she might respond so far as to say, “I’m from Ohio,” and the janitress seemed to appreciate the confidence.

She said, “Not on your way to the White House, I suppose? There are so many Presidents from your State. Well, I knew you were not from near New York, anywhere. I do have so many different sorts of folks coming in here, and I have to get acquainted with so many of ’em whether or no. Lots of foreigners, for one thing, and men blundering in, as well as women. They think it’s a ticket-office, and want to buy tickets of me, and I have to direct ’em where. It’s surprising how bright they are, oftentimes. The Irish are the hardest to get pointed right; the Italians are quick; and the Chinese! My, they’re the brightest of all. If a Chinaman comes in for a ticket up the Harlem road, all I’ve got to do is to set my hand so, and so!” She faced south and set her hand westward; then she faced west, and set her hand northward. “They understand in a minute, and they’re off like a flash.”

As if she had done now all that sympathy demanded for Cornelia, the janitress went about some work in another part of the room and left the girl to herself. But Cornelia knew that she was keeping a friendly eye on her, and in the shelter of her presence, she tried to gather courage to make that start into the street alone, which she must finally make and which she was so foolish to keep postponing. She had written to the landlady of her boarding house that she should arrive on such a day, at such an hour; and here was the day, and she was letting the hour go by, and very likely the landlady would give her room to some one else. Or, if the expressman who took her check on the train, should get there with her trunk first, the landlady might refuse to take it. Cornelia did not know how people acted about such things in New York. She ought to go, and she tried to rise; but she was morally so unable that it was as if she were physically unable.

People came and went; some of them more than once, and Cornelia began to feel that they noticed her and recognized her, but still she could not move. Suddenly a figure appeared at the door, the sight of which armed her with the power of flight. She knew that it was Ludlow, from the photograph he had lately sent Mrs. Burton, with the pointed beard and the branching moustache which he had grown since they met last, and she jumped up to rush past him where he stood peering sharply round at the different faces in the room, and finally letting his eyes rest in eager question on hers.

He came towards her, and then it was too late to escape. “Miss Saunders? Oh, I’m so glad! I’ve been out of town, and I’ve only just got Mrs. Burton’s telegram. Have I kept you waiting long?”

“Not very,” said Cornelia. She might have said that he had not kept her waiting at all; the time that she had waited, without being kept by him, was now like no time at all; but she could not say anything more, and she wished to cry, she felt so glad and safe in his keeping. He caught up her bag, and she followed him out, with a blush over her shoulder for the janitress, who smiled after her with mistaken knowingness. But this was at least her self-delusion, and Cornelia had an instant in the confusion when it seemed as if Ludlow’s coming had somehow annulled the tacit deceit she had practised in letting the janitress suppose she expected some one.

Ludlow kept talking to her all the way in the horse-car, but she could find only the briefest and dryest answers to his friendly questions about her mother and the Burtons; and all Pymantoning; and she could not blame him for taking such a hasty leave of her at her boarding-house that he almost flew down the steps before the door closed upon her.

She knew that she had disgusted him; and she hinted at this in the letter of scolding gratitude which she wrote to Mrs. Burton before she slept, for the trick she had played her. After all, though, she reasoned, she need not be so much troubled: he had done it for Mrs. Burton, and not for her, and he had not thought it worth while to bring a chaperon. To be sure, he had no time for that; but there was something in it all which put Cornelia back to the mere child she was when they first met in the Fair House at Pymantoning; she kept seeing herself angry and ill-mannered and cross to her mother, and it was as if he saw her so, too. She resented that, for she knew that she was another person now, and she tingled with vexation that she had done nothing to make him realize it.

XI.

Ludlow caught a cab in the street, and drove furiously to his lodging, where he dressed in ten minutes, so that he was not more than fifteen minutes late at the dinner he had risked missing for Cornelia’s sake.

“I’m afraid I’m very late,” he said, from his place at the left of his hostess; he pulled his napkin across his lap, and began to attack his oysters at once.

“Oh, not at all,” said the lady, but he knew that she would have said much the same if he had come as they were rising from table.

A clear, gay voice rose from the corner of the board diagonally opposite: “The candles haven’t begun to burn their shades yet; so you are still early, Mr. Ludlow.”

The others laughed with the joy people feel in having a familiar fact noted for the first time. They had all seen candle-shades weakly topple down on the flames and take fire at dinner.

The gay voice went on, rendered, perhaps, a little over-bold by success: “If you see the men rising to put them out, you may be sure that they’ve been seated exactly an hour.”

Ludlow looked across the bed of roses which filled two-thirds of the table, across the glitter of glass, and the waver of light and shadow, and said, “Oh, you’re there!”

The wit that had inspired the voice before gave out; the owner tried to make a pout do duty for it. “Of course I’m there,” she said; then pending another inspiration she was silent. Everybody waited for her to rise again to the level of her reputation for clever things, and the general expectation expressed itself in a subdued creaking of stiff linen above the board, and the low murmur of silken skirts under the table.

Finally one of the men said, “Well, it’s bad enough to come late, but it’s a good deal worse to come too early. I’d rather come late, any time.”

“Mr. Wetmore wants you to ask him why, Mrs. Westley,” said Ludlow.

Mrs. Westley entreated, “Oh, why, Mr. Wetmore?” and every one laughed.

“All right, Ludlow,” said the gentleman in friendly menace. Then he answered Mrs. Westley: “Well, one thing, your hostess respects you more. If you come too early you bring reproach and you meet contempt; reproach that she shouldn’t have been ready to receive you, and contempt that you should have supposed her capable of dining at the hour fixed.”

It was a Mrs. Rangeley who had launched the first shaft at Ludlow; she now fitted another little arrow to her string, under cover of the laugh that followed Mr. Wetmore’s reasons. “I shouldn’t object to any one’s coming late, unless I were giving the dinner; but what I can’t bear is wondering what it was kept them.”

Again she had given a touch that reminded the company of their common humanity and their unity of emotion, and the laugh that responded was without any of that reservation or uncertainty which a subtle observer may often detect in the enjoyment of brilliant things said at dinner. But the great charm of the Westley dinners was that people generally did understand each other there. If you made a joke, as Wetmore said, you were not often required to spell it. He celebrated the Westleys as ideal hosts: Mrs. Westley had the youth and beauty befitting a second wife; her social ambition had as yet not developed into the passion for millionaires; she was simply content with painters, like himself and Ludlow, literary men, lawyers, doctors and their several wives.

General Westley was in what Wetmore called the bloom of age. He might be depended upon for the unexpected, like fate. He occasionally did it, he occasionally said it, from the passive hospitality that characterized him.

“I believe I share that impatience of yours, Mrs. Rangeley,” he now remarked; “though in the present case I think we ought to leave everything to Mr. Ludlow’s conscience.”

“Oh, do you think that would be quite safe?” she asked with burlesque seriousness. “Well! If we must!”

Ludlow said, “Why, I think Mrs. Rangeley is right. I would much rather yield to compulsion. I don’t mind telling what kept me, if I’m obliged to.”

“Oh, I almost hate to have you, now!” Mrs. Rangeley bubbled back. “Your willingness, somehow, makes it awful. You may be going to boast of it!”

“No, no!” Wetmore interposed. “I don’t believe it’s anything to boast of.”

“Now, you see, you must speak,” said Mrs. Westley.

Ludlow fell back in his chair, and dreamily crumbled his bread. “I don’t see how I can, exactly.”

Wetmore leaned forward and looked at Ludlow round the snowy shoulder of a tall lady next him.

“Is there any particular form of words in which you like to be prompted, when you get to this point?”

“Dr. Brayton might hypnotize him,” suggested the lady whose shoulder Wetmore was looking round.

The doctor answered across the table, “In these cases of the inverted or prostrated will, there is often not volition enough to coöperate with the hypnotizer. I don’t believe I could do anything with Mr. Ludlow.”

“How much,” sighed Mrs. Rangeley, “I should like to be the centre of universal interest like that!”

“It’s a good pose,” said Wetmore; “but really I think Ludlow is working it too hard. I don’t approve of mob violence, as the papers say when they’re going to; but if he keeps this up much longer I won’t be answerable for the consequences. I feel that we are getting beyond the control of our leaders.”

Ludlow was tempted to exploit the little incident with Cornelia, for he felt sure that it would win the dinner-table success which we all like to achieve. Her coming to study art in New York, and her arriving in that way, was a pretty romance; prettier than it would have been if she were plainer, and he knew that he could give the whole situation so that she should appear charming, and should appeal to everybody’s sympathy. If he could show her stiff and blunt, as she was, so much the better. He would go back to their first meeting, and bring in a sketch of Pymantoning County Fair, and of the village itself and its social conditions, with studies of Burton and his wife. Every point would tell, for though his commensals were now all well-to-do New Yorkers, he knew that the time had been with them when they lived closer to the ground, in simple country towns, as most prosperous and eminent Americans have done.

“Well,” said Wetmore, “how long are you going to make us wait?”

“Oh, you mustn’t wait for me,” said Ludlow. “Once is enough to-night. I’m not going to say what kept me.”

This also was a success in its way. It drew cries of protest and reproach from the ladies, and laughter from the men. Wetmore made himself heard above the rest. “Mrs. Westley, I know this man, and I can’t let you be made the victim of one of his shameless fakes. There was really nothing kept him. He either forgot the time, or, what is more probable, he deliberately put off coming so as to give himself a little momentary importance by arriving late. I don’t wish to be hard upon him, but that is the truth.”

“No, no,” said the hostess in the applause which recognized Wetmore’s mischievous intent. “I’ll not believe anything of the kind.” From her this had the effect of repartee, and when she asked with the single-heartedness which Wetmore had praised among her friends as her strongest point, and advised her keeping up as long as she possibly could, “It isn’t so, is it, Mr. Ludlow?” the finest wit could not have done more for her. The general beamed upon her over the length of the table. Mrs. Rangeley said at his elbow, “She’s always more charming than any one else, simply because she is,” and he made no effort to turn the compliment upon her as she thought he might very well have done.

Under cover of what the others now began saying about different matters, Ludlow murmured to Mrs. Westley, “I don’t mind telling you. You know that young girl you said you would go with me to meet when I should ask you?”

“The little school-mistress?”

“Yes.” Ludlow smiled. “She isn’t so very little, any more. It was she who kept me. I found a dispatch at my place when I got home to-day, telling me she was coming, and would arrive at six, and there was no time to trouble you; it was half-past when I got it.”

“She’s actually come then?” asked Mrs. Westlay. “Nothing you could say would stop her?”

“No,” said Ludlow with a shrug. He added, after a moment, “But I don’t know that I blame her. Nothing would have stopped me.”

“And is there anything else I can do? Has she a pleasant place to stay?”

“Good enough, I fancy. It’s a boarding-house where several people I know have been. She must be left to her own devices, now. That’s the best thing for her. It’s the only thing.”

XII.

In spite of his theory as to what was best for her, in some ways Ludlow rather expected that Cornelia would apply to him for advice as to how and where she should begin work. He forgot how fully he had already given it; but she had not. She remembered what she had overheard him say to her mother, that day in the Fair House, about the superiority of the Synthesis of Studies, and she had since confirmed her faith in his judgment by much silent inquiry of the newspapers. They had the Sunday edition of the Lakeland Light at Pymantoning, and Cornelia had kept herself informed of the “Gossip of the Ateliers,” and concerning “Women and Artists,” “Artists’ Summer Homes,” “Phases of Studio Life,” “The Ladies who are Organizing Ceramic Clubs,” “Women Art Students,” “Glimpses of the Dens of New York Women Artists,” and other æsthetic interests which the Sunday edition of the Light purveyed with the newspaper syndicate’s generous and indiscriminate abundance. She did not believe it all; much of it seemed to her very silly; but she nourished her ambition upon it all the same.

The lady writers who celebrated the lady artists, and who mostly preferred to swim in seas of personal float, did now and then offer their readers a basis of solid fact; and they all agreed that the Synthesis of Art Studies was the place for a girl if she was in earnest and wished to work.

As these ladies described them the conditions were of the exacting sort which Cornelia’s nature craved, and she had her sex-pride in the Synthesis, too, because she had read that women had borne an important part in founding it; the strictest technical training and the freest spirit of artistic endeavor prevailed in a school that owed its existence so largely to them. That was a great point, even if every one of the instructors was a man. She supposed that Mr. Ludlow would have sheltered himself behind this fact if she had used the other to justify herself in going on with art after he had urged that as a woman, she had better not do so. But the last thing Cornelia intended was to justify herself to Mr. Ludlow, and she vehemently wished he would not try to do anything more for her, now. After sleeping upon the facts of their meeting she felt sure that he would not try. She approved of herself for not having asked him to call in parting. She was almost glad that he hardly had given her a chance to do so.

It was Saturday night when Cornelia arrived, and she spent Sunday writing home a full account of her adventures to her mother, whom she asked to give Mrs. Barton the note she enclosed, and in looking over her drawings, and trying to decide which she should take to the Synthesis with her. She had a good deal of tacit argument about them with Mr. Ludlow, who persisted in her thoughts after several definitive dismissals; and Monday morning she presented herself with some drawings she had chosen as less ridiculous than some of the others, and hovered with a haughty humility at the door of the little office till the janitor asked her if she would not come in and sit down. He had apparently had official experience of cases like hers; he refused without surprise the drawings which she offered him as her credentials, and said the secretary would be in directly. He did not go so far as to declare his own quality, but he hospitably did what he could to make her feel at home.

Numbers of young people began to appear, singly and in twos and threes, and then go out again, and go on up the stairs which led crookedly to and from the corner the office was cramped into. Some of them went up stairs after merely glancing into the office, others found letters there, and staid chatting awhile. They looked at Cornelia with merely an identifying eye, at first, as if they perceived that she was a new girl, but as if new girls were such an old story that they could not linger long over one girl of the kind. Certain of the young ladies after they went up stairs came down in long, dismal calico aprons that covered them to the throat, and with an air of being so much absorbed in their work that they did not know what they had on. They looked at Cornelia again, those who had seen her before, and those who had not, made up for it by looking at her twice, and Cornelia began to wonder if there was anything peculiar about her, as she sat upright, stiffening with resentment and faintly flushing under their scrutiny. She wore her best dress, which was a street dress, as the best dress of a village girl usually is; her mother had fitted it, and they had made it themselves, and agreed that it was very becoming; Mrs. Burton had said so, too. The fashion of her hat she was not so sure about, but it was a pretty hat, and unless she had got it on skewy, and she did not believe she had, there was nothing about it to make people stare so. There was one of these girls, whom Cornelia felt to be as tall as herself, and of much her figure; she was as dark as Cornelia, but of a different darkness. Instead of the red that always lurked under the dusk in Cornelia’s cheeks, and that now burned richly through it, her face was of one olive pallor, except her crimson lips; her long eyes were black, with level brows, and with a heavy fringe of lucent black hair cut straight above them; her nose was straight, at first glance, but showed a slight arch in profile; her mouth was a little too full, and her chin slightly retreated. She came in late, and stopped at the door of the office, and bent upon Cornelia a look at once prehistoric and fin de siècle, which lighted up with astonishment, interest and sympathy, successively; then she went trailing herself on up stairs with her strange Sphinx-face over her shoulder, and turned upon Cornelia as long as she could see her.

At last a gentleman came in and sat down behind the table in the corner, and Cornelia found a hoarse voice to ask him if he was the secretary. He answered in the friendly way that she afterwards found went all through the Synthesis, that he was, and she said, with her country bluntness, that she wished to study at the Synthesis, and she had brought some of her drawings with her, if he wanted to look at them. He took them, but either he did not want to look at them, or else it was not his affair to do so. He said she would have to fill out a form, and he gave her a blank which asked her in print a number of questions she had not thought of asking herself till then. It obliged her to confess that she had never studied under any one before, and to say which master in the Synthesis she would like to study under, now. She had to choose between life, and still-life, and the antique, and she chose the antique. She was not governed by any knowledge or desire in her choice more definite than such as come from her having read somewhere that the instructor in the antique was the severest of all the Synthesis instructors, and the most dreaded in his criticisms by the students. She did not forget, even in the presence of the secretary, and with that bewildering blank before her, that she wished to be treated with severity, and that the criticism she needed was the criticism that every one dreaded.

When the secretary fastened her application to her drawings, she asked if she should wait to learn whether it was accepted or not; but he said that he would send her application to the Members’ Room, and the instructor would see it there in the morning. She would have liked to ask him if she should come back there to find out, but she was afraid to do it; he might say no, and then she should not know what to do. She determined to come without his leave, and the next morning she found that the master whom they had been submitted to had so far approved her drawings as to have scrawled upon her application, “Recommended to the Preparatory.” The secretary said the instructor in the Preparatory would tell her which grade to enter there.

Cornelia’s heart danced, but she governed herself outwardly, and asked through her set teeth, “Can I begin at once?” She had lost one day already, and she was not going to lose another if she could help it.

The secretary smiled. “If the instructor in the Preparatory will place you.”

Before noon she had passed the criticism needed for this, and was in the lowest grade of the Preparatory. But she was a student at the Synthesis, and she was there to work in the way that those who knew best bade her. She wished to endure hardness, and the more hardness the better.

XIII.

Cornelia found herself in the last of a long line of sections or stalls which flanked a narrow corridor dividing the girl students from the young men, who were often indeed hardly more than boys. There was a table stretching from this corridor to a window looking down on the roofs of some carpenter shops and stables; on the board before her lay the elementary shape of a hand in plaster, which she was trying to draw. At her side that odd-looking girl, who had stared so at her on the stairs the day before, was working at a block foot, and not getting it very well. She had in fact given it up for the present and was watching Cornelia’s work and watching her face, and talking to her.

“What is your name?” she broke off to ask, in the midst of a monologue upon the social customs and characteristics of the Synthesis.

Cornelia always frowned, and drew her breath in long sibilations, when she was trying hard to get a thing right. She now turned a knotted forehead on her companion, but stopped her hissing to ask, “What?” Then she came to herself and said, “Oh! Saunders.”

“I don’t mean your last name,” said the other, “I mean your first name.”

“Cornelia,” said the owner of it, as briefly as before.

“I should have thought it would have been Gladys,” the other suggested.

Cornelia looked up in astonishment and some resentment. “Why in the world should my name be Gladys?” she demanded.

“I don’t know,” the other explained. “But the first moment I saw you in the office, I said to myself, ‘Of course her name is Gladys.’ Mine is Charmian.”

“Is it?” said Cornelia, not so much with preoccupation, perhaps, as with indifference. She thought it rather a nice name, but she did not know what she had to do with it.

“Yes,” the other said, as if she had somehow expected to be doubted. “My last name’s Maybough.” Cornelia kept on at her work without remark, and Miss Maybough pursued, as if it were a branch of autobiography, “I’m going to have lunch; aren’t you?”

Cornelia sighed dreamily, as she drew back for an effect of her drawing, which she held up on the table before her, “Is it time?”

“Do you suppose they would be letting me talk so to you if it weren’t? The monitor would have been down on me long ago.”

Cornelia had noticed a girl who seemed to be in authority, and who sat where she could oversee and overhear all that went on.

“Is she one of the students?” she asked.

Miss Maybough nodded. “Elected every month. She’s awful. You can’t do anything with her when she’s on duty, but she’s a little dear when she isn’t. You’ll like her.” Miss Maybough leaned toward her, and joined Cornelia in a study of her drawing. “How splendidly you’re getting it. It’s very chic. Oh, anybody can see that you’ve got genius!”

Her admiration made no visible impression upon Cornelia, and for a moment she looked a little disappointed; then she took a basket from under the table, and drew from it a bottle of some yellowish liquid, an orange and a bit of sponge cake. “Are you going to have yours here?” she asked, as Cornelia opened a paper with the modest sandwich in it which she had made at breakfast, and fetched from her boarding-house. “Oh, I’m so glad you haven’t brought anything to drink with you! I felt almost sure you hadn’t, and now you’ve got to share mine.” She took a cup from her basket, and in spite of Cornelia’s protest that she never drank anything but water at dinner, she poured it full of tea for her. “I’ll drink out of the bottle,” she said. “I like to. Some of the girls bring chocolate, but I think there’s nothing like cold tea for the brain. Chocolate’s so clogging; so’s milk; but sometimes I bring that; it’s glorious, drinking it out of the can.” She tilted the bottle to her lips, and half drained it at a draught. “I always feel that I’m working with inspiration after I’ve had my cold tea. Of course they won’t let you stay here long,” she added.

“Why?” Cornelia fluttered back in alarm.

“When they see your work they’ll see that you’re fit for still-life, at least.”

“Oh!” said Cornelia, vexed at having been scared for nothing. “I guess they won’t be in any great hurry about it.”

“How magnificent!” said Miss Maybough. “Of course, with that calm of yours, you can wait, as if you had eternity before you. Do you know that you are terribly calm?”

Cornelia turned and gave her a long stare. Miss Maybough broke her bit of cake in two, and offered her half, and Cornelia took it mechanically, but ate her sandwich. “I feel as if I had eternity behind me, I’ve been in the Preparatory so long.”

On the common footing this drop to the solid ground gave, Cornelia asked her how long.

“Well, it’s the beginning of my second year, now. If they don’t let me go to round hands pretty soon, I shall have to see if I can’t get the form by modelling. That’s the best way. I suppose it’s my imagination; it carries me away so, and I don’t see the thing as it is before me; that’s what they say. But with the clay, I’ll have to, don’t you know. Well, you know some of the French painters model their whole picture in clay and paint it, before they touch the canvas, any way. I shall try it here awhile longer, and then if I can’t get to the round in any other way, I’ll take to the clay. If sculpture concentrates you more, perhaps I may stick to it altogether. Art is one, anyhow, and the great thing is to live it. Don’t you think so?”

“I don’t know,” said Cornelia. “I’m not certain I know what you mean.”

“You will,” said Miss Maybough, “after you’ve been here awhile, and get used to the atmosphere. I don’t believe I really knew what life meant before I came to the Synthesis. When you get to realizing the standards of the Synthesis, then you begin to breathe freely for the first time. I expect to pass the rest of my days here. I shouldn’t care if I stayed till I was thirty. How old are you?”

“I’m going on twenty,” said Cornelia. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing. You can’t begin too young; though some people think you oughtn’t to come before you’re eighteen. I look upon my days before I came here as simply wasted. Don’t you want to go out and sit on the stairs awhile?”

“I don’t believe I do,” said Cornelia, taking up her drawing again, as if she were going on with it.

“Horrors!” Miss Maybough put her hand out over the sketch. “You don’t mean that you’re going to carry it any farther?”

“Why, it isn’t finished yet,” Cornelia began.

“Of course it isn’t, and it never ought to be! I hope you’re not going to turn out a niggler! Please don’t! I couldn’t bear to have you. Nobody will respect you if you finish. Don’t! If you won’t come out with me and get a breath of fresh air, do start a new drawing! I want them to see this in the rough. It’s so bold.”

Miss Maybough had left her own drawing in the rough, but it could not be called bold; though if she had seen the block hand with a faltering eye, she seemed to have had a fearless vision of many other things, and she had covered her paper with a fantastic medley of grotesque shapes, out of that imagination which she had given Cornelia to know was so fatally mischievous to her in its uninvited activities. “Don’t look at them!” she pleaded, when Cornelia involuntarily glanced at her study. “My only hope is to hate them. I almost pray to be delivered from them. Let’s talk of something else.” She turned the sheet over. “Do you mind my having said that about your drawing?”

“No!” said Cornelia, provoked to laughter by the solemnity of the demand. “Why should I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Do you think you shall like me? I mean, do you care if I like you — very, very much?”

“I don’t suppose I could stop it if I did, could I?” asked Cornelia.

The Sphinx seemed to find heart to smile. “Of course, I’m ridiculous. But I do hope we’re going to be friends. Tell me about yourself. Or, have some more tea!”

XIV.

“I don’t want any more tea, thank you,” said Cornelia, “and there isn’t anything to tell.”

“There must be!” the other girl insisted, clinging to her bottle with tragic intensity. “Any one can see that you’ve lived. What part of the country did you come from?”

“Ohio,” said Cornelia, as the best way to be done with it.

“And have you ever been in Santa Fé?”

“Goodness, no! Why, it’s in New Mexico!”

“Yes; I was born there. Then my father went to Colorado. He isn’t living, now. Are your father and mother living?”

“My mother is,” said Cornelia; the words brought up a vision of her mother, as she must be sitting that moment in the little front-room, and a mist came suddenly before her eyes; she shut her lips hard to keep them from trembling.

“I see, you worship her,” said Miss Maybough fervidly, keeping her gaze fixed upon Cornelia. “You are homesick!”

“I’m not homesick!” said Cornelia, angry that she should be so and that she should be denying it.

“Mine,” said the other, “died while I was a baby. She had Indian blood,” she added in the same way in which she had said her name was Charmian.

“Did she?” Cornelia asked.

“That is the legend,” said Miss Maybough solemnly. “Her grandmother was a Zuñi princess.” She turned her profile. “See?”

“It does look a little Indian,” said Cornelia.

“Some people think it’s Egyptian,” Miss Maybough suggested, as if she had been leading up to the notion, and were anxious not to have it ignored.

Cornelia examined the profile steadily presented, more carefully: “It’s a good deal more Egyptian.”

Miss Maybough relieved her profile from duty, and continued, “We’ve been everywhere. Paris two years. That’s where I took up art in dead earnest; Julian, you know. Mamma didn’t want me to; she wanted me to go into society there; and she does here; but I hate it. Don’t you think society is very frivolous, or, any way, very stupid?”

“I don’t know much about it. I never went out, much,” said Cornelia.

“Well, I hope you’re not conventional! Nobody’s conventional here.”

“I don’t believe I’m conventional enough to hurt,” said Cornelia.

“You have humor, too,” said Miss Maybough, thoughtfully, as if she had been mentally cataloguing her characteristics. “You’ll be popular.”

Cornelia stared at her and turned to her drawing.

“But you’re proud,” said the other, “I can see that. I adore pride. It must have been your pride that fascinated me at the first glance. Do you mind my being fascinated with you?”

Cornelia wanted to laugh; at the same time she wondered what new kind of crazy person she had got with; this was hardly one of the art-students that went wild from overwork. Miss Maybough kept on without waiting to be answered: “I haven’t got a bit of pride, myself. I could just let you walk over me. How does it feel to be proud? What are you proud for?”

Cornelia quieted a first impulse to resent this pursuit. “I don’t think I’m very proud. I used to be proud when I was little; — I guess you ought to have asked me then.”

“Oh, yes! Tell me about yourself!” Miss Maybough implored again, but she went on as before without giving Cornelia any chance to reply. “Of course, when I say mamma, I mean my step-mother. She’s very good to me, but she doesn’t understand me. You’ll like her. I’ll tell you what sort of a person she is.” She did so at such length that the lunch hour passed before she finished, and a hush fell upon all the babbling voices about, as the monitor came back to her place.

Toward the end of the afternoon the monitor’s vigilance relaxed again, and Miss Maybough began to talk again. “If you want to be anything by the Synthesis standards,” she said, “you’ve got to keep this up a whole year, you know.” It was now four o’clock, and Cornelia had been working steadily since eleven, except for the half-hour at lunch-time. “They’ll see how well you draw; you needn’t be afraid of their not doing that; and they’ll let you go on to the round at once, perhaps. But if you’re truly Synthetic in spirit, you won’t want to. You’ll want to get all you can out of the block; and it’ll take you a year to do that; then another year for the full length, you know. At first we only had the block here, and a good many people think now that the full length Preparatory encroaches on the Antique. Sometimes they even let you put in backgrounds here, but it don’t matter much: when the instructor in the Antique gets hold of you he makes you unlearn everything you’ve learnt in the full-length. He’s grand.”

A girl who was working at the other end of the table said with a careless air, “They told me I might go up to the Antique to-day.”

“Lida!” Miss Maybough protested, in a voice hoarse with admiration.

“Yes; but I’m not going.”

“Why not? I should think you would be so proud. How did they come to tell you?”

“Oh, they just said I might. But I’m not going. They’re so severe in the Antique. They just discourage you.”

“Yes, that is so,” said Miss Maybough, with a sigh of solemn joy. “They make you feel as if you couldn’t draw at all.”

“Yes,” said the other girl. “They act as if you didn’t know a thing.”

“I wouldn’t go,” said Miss Maybough.

“I don’t know. Perhaps I may.” The girl went on drawing, and Miss Maybough turned to Cornelia again.

“Towards the end of your third year — or perhaps you don’t like to have your future all mapped out. Does it scare you?”

“I guess if it does I shall live through it,” said Cornelia steadily; her heart was beginning to quake somewhat, but she was all the more determined not to show it.

“Well, the third year you may get to painting still-life, while you keep up your drawing afternoons here. The next year you’ll go into the antique class, if they’ll let you, and draw heads, and keep up your still-life mornings. When they think you’re fit for it, they’ll let you do an arm, maybe, and work along that way to the full figure; and that takes another whole winter. Then you go into the life class, one of them, all the morning, and keep drawing from the antique in the afternoons, or else do heads from the model. You do a head every day, and then paint it out, and begin another the next day. You learn to sacrifice self to art. It’s grand! Well, then, the next winter you keep on just the same, and as many winters after that as you please. You know what one instructor said to a girl that asked him what she should do after she had been five years in the Synthesis?”

“No, I don’t,” answered Cornelia anxiously.

“Stay five years more!”

Miss Maybough did not give this time to sink very deep into Cornelia’s spirit. “Will you let me call you by your first name?”

“Why, I’ve hardly ever been called by any other,” said Cornelia simply.

“And will you call me Charmian?”

“I had just as lief.” Cornelia laughed; she could not help it; that girl seemed so odd; she did not know whether she liked her or not.

“What poise you have got!” sighed Charmian. “May I come to see you? Not a ceremonious call. In your own room; where we can talk.”

Cornelia thought that if they went on as they had that day, they should probably talk quite enough at the Synthesis; but she said, “Why, yes, I should like to have you, if you won’t care for my sitting on the trunk. There’s only one chair.”

“Let me have the trunk! Promise me you’ll let me sit on the trunk. It’s divine! Is it in a Salvation Hotel?”

“What do you mean?” asked Cornelia.

“Why, that’s what they call the places that the Young Women’s Christian Association keep.”

“No, it isn’t. It’s just a boarding-house.” Cornelia wrote her address on a piece of paper, and Charmian received it with solemn rapture. She caught Cornelia in a sudden embrace and kissed her, before Cornelia could help herself. “Oh, I adore you!” she cried.

They parted at the head of the stairs, where they found themselves among groups of students arriving from all parts of the place, and pausing for Synthesis gossip, which Cornelia could not have entered into yet if she had wished. She escaped, and walked home to her boarding-house with rather a languid pace, and climbed to her little room on the fifth story, and lay down on her bed. It was harder work than teaching, and her back ached, and her heart was heavy with the thought of five years in the Synthesis, when she barely had money enough for one winter. She was not afraid of the work; she liked that; she would be glad to spend her whole life at it; but she could not give five years to it, and perhaps ten. She was ashamed now to think she had once dreamed of somehow slipping through in a year, and getting the good of it without working for it. She tried to plan how she could go home and teach a year, and then come back and study a year, and so on; but by the end of the twenty years that it would take for ten years’ study at this rate, she would be an old woman of forty, ready to drop into the grave. She was determined not to give up, and if she did not give up, there was no other end to it; or so it seemed at the close of her first day in the Synthesis.

She was very homesick, and she would have liked to give up altogether and go home. But she thought of what people would say; of how her mother, who would be so glad to see her, would feel. She would not be a baby, and she turned her face over in the pillow and sobbed.

XV.

Cornelia thought that perhaps Mr. Ludlow would feel it due to Mrs. Burton to come and ask how she was getting on; but if she did not wish him to come she had reason to be glad, for the whole week passed, and she did not see him, or hear anything from him. She did not blame him, for she had been very uncouth, and no doubt he had done his whole duty in meeting her at the depot, and seeing her safely housed the first night. She wished to appreciate his kindness, and when she found herself wondering a little at his not caring to know anything more about her, she made much of it. If it was not all that she could have imagined from his offer to be of use to her in any way he could, she reminded herself that he had made that offer a very long time ago, and that she never meant to use him. Beside, she was proud of having made her start alone, and she knew which way she wished to go, though the way seemed so hard and long at times. She was not sure that all the students at the Synthesis were so clear as to their direction, but they all had the same faith in the Synthesis and its methods. They hardly ever talked to her of anything else, and first and last they talked a good deal to her. It was against the rules to loiter and talk in the corridors, as much against the rules as smoking; but every now and then you came upon a young man with a cigarette, and he was nearly always talking with a group of girls. At lunch-time the steps and window-seats were full, and the passages were no longer thoroughfares. After the first day Cornelia came out with the rest; Charmian Maybough said that one could not get into the spirit of the Synthesis unless one did; and in fact those who wished to work and those who would rather have played, as it seemed to her, met there in the same æsthetic equality. She found herself acquainted with a great many girls whose names she did not know, in the fervor of the common interest, the perpetual glow of enthusiasm which crowned the severest ordeals of the Synthesis with the halo of happy martyrdom if not the wreath of victory.

They talked about the different instructors, how awful they were, and how they made you cry sometimes, they were so hard on your work; but if you amounted to anything, you did not mind it when you got to feel what they meant; then you wanted them to be harsh. They said of one, “My! You ought to see him! He can spoil your drawing for you! He just takes your charcoal, and puts thick black lines all over everything. It don’t do to finish much for him.” They celebrated another for sitting down in front of your work, and drooping in silent despair before it for awhile, and then looking up at you in cold disgust, and asking, “What made you draw it that way?” as if it were inconceivable anybody should have been willing to do it so. There were other instructors who were known to have the idea of getting at the best in you by a sympathetic interest in what you had tried for, and looking for some good in it. The girls dramatized their manner of doing this; they did not hold them in greater regard than the harder masters, but they did not hold them in less, and some of them seemed to value an instructor as much for the way he squinted his eyes at your drawing as for what he said of it.

The young men did not talk so much of the instructors; they were more reticent about everything. But some had formed themselves upon them, and you could tell which each of these was studying under; or this was what Charmian Maybough said.

She led Cornelia all about through the quaint old rookery, with its wandering corridors, and its clusters of rooms distributed at random in the upper stories of several buildings which the Synthesis had gathered to itself as if by a sort of affinity, and she lectured upon every one and everything.

It was against usage for students in the lower grades to visit the upper classes when they were at work; but Charmian contrived stolen glimpses of the still-life rooms and the rooms where they were working from the draped models. For the first time Cornelia saw the irregular hemicycle of students silently intent upon the silent forms and faces of those strange creatures who sat tranced in a lifeless immobility, as if the long practice of their trade had resolved them into something as impersonal as the innumerable pictures studied from them. She even penetrated with Charmian to the women’s life-room, where you really could not go while the model was posing, and where they had to time their visit at the moment when the girls had left off for lunch, and were chattering over their chocolate. They had set it out on the vacant model-stand, and they invited their visitors to break bread with them: the bread they had brought to rub out their drawings with. They made Cornelia feel as much at home with them on the summit they had reached, as she felt with the timidest beginners in the Preparatory. Charmian had reported everywhere that she had genius, and in the absence of proofs to the contrary the life-class accepted her as if she had. Their talk was not very different from the talk of the students in the lower grades. They spoke of the Synthesis, and asked her how she liked it, but they did not wait for her to say. They began to descant upon their instructors, and the pictures their instructors had last exhibited at the Academy or the American Artists; and the things that the old Synthesis pupils had there. Cornelia learned here that even actual Synthetics had things in the exhibitions, and that in the last Academy a Preparatory girl had sold a picture; she determined that before the winter was over she would at least give the Academy a chance to refuse the picture of another Preparatory girl.

She got Charmian to point out the girl who had sold the picture; she was a little, quiet-looking thing; Cornelia saw some of her work in round hands and she did not think it was better than she could do herself. She took courage and dreamed of trying not to disappoint the hopes of immediate performance, which she knew her mother would be having in spite of her pretending the contrary. Her mother had written that she must not work herself down, trying to learn too fast, but must take the whole winter for it. Cornelia wondered what she would think if she knew how little a person could be expected to do in one winter, in the regular Synthesis way.

She was happier at the end of the first week than she had been at the end of the first day, though she was very tired, and was glad to stop at the earlier hour when most of the students left their work on Saturday afternoon. She had begun to feel the charm of the Synthesis, which every one said she would feel. She was already a citizen of the little republic where the heaviest drudgery was sweet with a vague, high faith and hope. It was all a strange happiness to her, and yet not strange. It was like a heritage of her own that she had come into; something she was born to, a right, a natural condition.

She did not formulate this, or anything; she did not ask herself why the frivolities and affectations which disgusted her in the beginning no longer offended her so much; she only saw that some of the most frivolous and affected of her fellow-citizens were the cleverest; and that the worst of them were better than they might have been where the ideal was less generous. She did not know then or afterwards just why some of them were there, and they did not seem to know themselves. There were some who could reasonably expect to live by their art; there were more who could hope to live by teaching it. But there were others who had no definite aim or purpose, and seemed to think their study would shape them to some design. They were trying it, they did not know clearly why, or at least were not able to say clearly why. There were several rich girls, and they worked from the love of it, as hard as the poorest. There were some through whom she realized what Ludlow meant when he spoke to her mother of the want that often went hand in hand with art; there were others even more pitiful, who struggled with the bare sufficiency of gift to keep within the Synthesis. But even among the girls who were so poor that they had to stint themselves of food and fire, for art’s sake, there were the bravest and gayest spirits; and some of these who could never have learned to draw well if they had spent their lives in the Synthesis, and were only waiting till their instructor should find the heart to forbid them further endeavor, were so sweet and good that Cornelia’s heart ached for them.

At first she was overawed by all the students, simply because they were all older students at the Synthesis than she was. Then she included them without distinction in the slight that she felt for the chatter and the airs of some. After that she made her exceptions among them; she begun to see how every one honored and admired the hard workers. She could not revert to her awe of them, even of the hardest workers; but she became more tolerant of the idlest and vaguest. She compared herself with the clever ones, and owned herself less clever, not without bitterness, but certainly with sincerity, and with a final humility that enabled her to tolerate those who were least clever.

XVI.

When she got home from the Synthesis the first Saturday afternoon, Cornelia climbed up the four flights of stairs that led to her little room, and lay down to rest, as she promised Mrs. Burton she would do every day; some days she did not. She had to lie on her bed, which filled two-thirds of the room. There was a bureau with a glass, which she could not see the bottom of her skirt in without jumping up; and a wash-stand with a shut-down lid, where she wrote her letters and drew; a chair stood between that and her trunk, which was next the door, and let the door open part way.

It seemed very cramped at first, but she soon got used to it, and then she did not think about it; but accepted it as she did everything else in the life that was all so strange to her. She had never been in a boarding-house before, and she did not know whether it was New York usage or not, that her trunk, which the expressman had managed to leave in the lower hall, should be left standing there for twenty-four hours after his escape, and that then she should be asked to take some things out of it so that it should not be too heavy for the serving-maids to carry up to her room. There was no man-servant in the place; but the landlady said that they expected to have a furnace-man as soon as it came cold weather.

The landlady was such an indistinct quality, that it could seldom be known whether she was at home or not, and when she was identifiably present, whether she had promised or had not promised to do this or that. People were always trying to see her for some reason or no reason, and it was said that the best time to find her was at table. This was not so easy; the meals had a certain range in time, and the landlady was nominally at the head of the table; but those who came early to find her made the mistake of not having come late, and if you came late you just missed her. Yet she was sometimes actually to be encountered at the head of the stairs from the kitchen, or evanescing from the parlor; and somehow the house was operated; the meals came and went, and the smell of their coming and going filled the hall-way from the ground floor to the attic. Some people complained of the meals, but Cornelia’s traditions were so simple that she thought them a constant succession of prodigies, with never less than steak, fish and hash for breakfast, and always turkey and cranberry sauce for dinner, and often ice-cream; sometimes the things were rather burnt, but she did not see that there was much to find fault with. She celebrated the luxury in her letters home, and she said that she liked the landlady, too, and that they had got to be great friends; in fact the landlady reminded the girl of her own mother in the sort of springless effectiveness with which she brought things to pass, when you would never have expected any result whatever; and she was gentle like her mother, and simple-hearted, with all her elusiveness. But she was not neat, like Mrs. Saunders; the house went at loose ends. Cornelia found fluff under her bed that must have been there a long time. The parlor and the dining-room were kept darkened, and no one could have told what mysteries their corners and set pieces of furniture harbored. The carpets, where the subdued light struck them, betrayed places worn down to the warp. Mrs. Montgomery herself had a like effect of unsparing use; her personal upholstery showed frayed edges and broken woofs, which did not seriously discord with her nerveless gentility.

The parlor was very long and rather narrow, and it was crossed at the rear by the dining-room which showed the table in stages of preparation or dismantling through sliding-doors never quite shut. At intervals along the parlor walls were set sofas in linen brocade and yellow jute; and various easy and uneasy chairs in green plush stood about in no definite relation to the black-walnut, marble-topped centre-table. A scarf, knotted and held by a spelter vase to one of the marble mantles, for there were two, recorded a moment of the æsthetic craze which had ceased before it got farther amidst the earlier and honester ugliness of the room. The gas-fixtures were of the vine-leaf and grape-cluster bronze-age; some of the garlands which ought to have been attached to the burners, hung loose from the parent stem, without the effort on the part of any witness to complete the artistic intention. In the evening, the lady-boarders received their gentlemen-callers in the parlor; their lady-callers were liable at all times to be asked if they would not like to go to the boarders’ rooms, and whether they expressed this preference or not, they were directed where to find them by the maid, who then rapidly disappeared down the kitchen stairs.

In fact, the door-service at Mrs. Montgomery’s was something she would probably have deprecated if any one had asked her to do so. It was the charge of a large, raw-boned Irish girl, who made up by her athletic physique and her bass voice for the want of a man-servant on the premises. She brow-beat visitors into acceptance of the theory that the persons they came to see were not at home, especially if they showed signs of intending to wait in the parlor while she went upstairs to find out. Those who suffered from her were of the sex least fitted to combat her. The gentlemen boarders seldom had callers; when they had, their callers did not ask whether their friends were in or not; they went and saw for themselves.

The gentlemen at Mrs. Montgomery’s were fewer than the ladies, and they were for several reasons in greater favor. For one thing they gave less trouble: they had a less lively fear of mice, and they were not so apt to be out of health and to want their meals sent up; they ate more, but they did not waste so much, and they never did any sort of washing in their rooms. Cornelia did not know who or what some of them were; but she made sure of a theatrical manager; two or three gentlemen in different branches of commerce; a newspaper writer of some sort, and an oldish gentleman who had been with Mrs. Montgomery a great while, and did not seem to be anything but a gentleman boarder, pure and simple. They were all very civil and quiet, and they bore with the amiable American fortitude the hardships of the common lot at Mrs. Montgomery’s, which Cornelia underwent ignorantly as necessary incidents of life in New York.

She now fell asleep where she lay, and she was startled from her nap, but hardly surprised, to hear her name spoken in the hall far below, as if it were a theme of contention between the bass-voiced Irish girl and some one at the street door, who supported the other side of the question in low, indistinct, lady-like murmurs.

“No, she don’t be in,” said the Irish girl bluntly. The polite murmur insisted, and the Irish girl said, with finality, “Well, then, yous can go up yourselves and see; the room is right over the dure, four flights up.”

Cornelia jumped up and tried to pull her hair into a knot before the glass. There came a tap at her door and the voice of Charmian Maybough asked, “May I come in, Miss Saunders, — Cornelia?”

“Yes,” said Cornelia, and she opened the door as far as her trunk would let her.

Charmian pushed impetuously in. She took Cornelia in her arms and kissed her, as if they had not met for a long time.

“Oh,” she said, whirling about, so as to sweep the whole room with her glance, before sinking down on Cornelia’s trunk, “why can’t I have something like this? Well, I shall have, I hope, before I die, yet. What made her say you weren’t in? I knew you were.” She rose and flew about the room, and examined it in detail. She was very beautifully dressed, in a street costume of immediate fashion, without a suggestion of the æstheticism of the picturesque gown she wore at the Synthesis; that had originality, but Cornelia perceived with the eye trained to see such differences, that this had authority. Charmian could not help holding and carrying herself differently in it, too. She was exquisitely gloved, and Cornelia instinctively felt that her hat was from Paris, though till then she had never seen a Paris hat to know it. She might have been a little overawed by it, if the wearer had not abruptly asked her what she thought of it.

“Well,” said Cornelia, with her country directness, which was so different from the other’s abruptness, “I think it’s about the most perfect thing I ever saw.”

Charmian sighed. “I saw you looking at it. Yes, it is a dream. But it’s a badge of slavery. So’s the whole costume. Look how I’m laced!” She flung open the jacket and revealed a waist certainly much smaller than she had earlier in the day. “That’s the way it goes through my whole life. Mamma is dead set against the artistic, and I’m dead set against the fashionable. As long as I’m at the Synthesis, I do as the Synthetics do. I dress like the Synthesis, and I think like it, and I act like it. As soon as I get home in the afternoon, I have to be of the world worldly. I put on a Worth frock, and mamma would make me put on a Worth spirit, if she could. I do my best to conform, because it’s the bargain, and I’ll keep my word if it kills me. Now you see what a double life I lead! If I could only be steeped in hopeless poverty to the lips! If I could have a room like this, even! Sometimes I’m so bewildered by the twofold existence I’m leading, I don’t really know what I’m saying. Those your things, of course?” She sprang from Cornelia’s trunk, which she had sank down upon again, and swiftly traversed the sketches Cornelia had pinned about the wall. “What touch! Yes, you merely have to live on, to be anything you like. It’ll do itself for you. Well, I suppose you’ll have to see her.” She turned about to Cornelia with an air of deprecation. “Mamma, you know. She’s down stairs waiting for us. She thinks it right to come with me always. I dare say it is. She isn’t so very bad, you know. Only she insists upon knowing all the girls I take a fancy to, herself. You needn’t be afraid of her.”

“I don’t know why I should be afraid of anybody,” said Cornelia.

The darker corner of the long parlor was occupied by a young couple in the earnest inquiry into each other’s psychological peculiarities which marks a stage of the passion of love. It obliged them to get very close together, where they sat, she on a lounge and he in the chair, which he kept pulling nearer and nearer; they fulfilled these conditions and exchanged their observations with a freedom that ignored the presence of the lady sitting somewhat severely upright between the two long, front windows, exactly midway of the dingy lace curtains, trained fan-wise on the carpet. They were not disturbed when Cornelia and Charmian appeared; the young lady continued to dangle the tassel of a cushion through her fingers, and the young man leaned toward her with his face in his hand, and his elbow sunk in the arm of the lounge; but the other lady rose at once and came quickly forward, as if escaping from them. Beside the tall girls she looked rather little, and she was decidedly blonde against their brunette color. She wore a veil that came just between her upper and her lower lip, and that stirred lightly when she spoke. She was dressed with the same authoritative fashion as Charmian, but not so simply.

She did not wait for her daughter to speak, but took Cornelia’s hand, and said in a soft voice, “Miss Saunders? I am very glad we found you at home. My daughter has been speaking to me about you, and we hoped to have come sooner, but we couldn’t manage together before.”

“Won’t you sit down?” asked Cornelia.

“No, I thank you,” Mrs. Maybough returned, with a velvety tenderness of tone that seemed to convey assent. “We shall be rather late, as it is. I hope you’re comfortably situated here.”

“Oh, very,” said Cornelia. “I’ve never been away from home before, and of course it isn’t like home.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Maybough, “one misses the refinements of home in such places.” She turned and swept the appointments of the room, including the students of psychology, with a critical eye.

“I wish I could come here,” sighed the daughter. “If I could have a room like Cornelia’s, mamma! I wish you could see it.”

“I’m glad you’re pleasantly placed, Miss Saunders. I hope you’re not working too hard at the Synthesis. I understand the young ladies there are so enthusiastic.”

“Oh, no,” Cornelia protested.

“Of course she is!” said Charmian. “Everybody works too hard at the Synthesis. It’s the ideal of the place. We woke her out of a nap, and I know she was tired to death.”

Cornelia could not deny it, and so she said nothing.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Maybough, non-committally; “that won’t do.” She paused, without intermitting the scrutiny which Cornelia felt she had been subjecting her to from the first moment through her veil. “You mustn’t wear yourself out.” She paused again, and then while Charmian turned away with an effect of impatience, she asked, “Do you ever go out on Sundays?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Cornelia began, not certain whether Mrs. Maybough meant walking out or driving out; young people did both in Pymantoning.

Mrs. Maybough pursued: “We receive on Thursdays, but we have a few friends coming in to-morrow afternoon, and we should be very glad to see you, if you have nothing better.”

The invitation was so tentatively, so gingerly offered in manner, if not in words, that Cornelia was not quite sure it had been given. She involuntarily searched her memory for something better before she spoke; for the first time in her life she was about to invent a previous engagement, when Charmian suddenly turned and laid her arms about her neck.

“You’ll come, of course!”

“Charmian!” said Mrs. Maybough. It would have been hard to tell whether she was reproving the action or the urgence. “Then we shall hope to see you?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Cornelia.

“Do come!” said Charmian, as if she had not yet accepted. “I can’t let it be a whole day and two nights before I see you again!” She put her arm round Cornelia’s waist, as the girl went with them to the outer door, to open it for them, in her village fashion. In the hall, Charmian whispered passionately, “Don’t you envy them? Oh, if I could live in such a house with you, and with people like that just to look at!”

“My dear!” said Mrs. Maybough.

“They seem to be engaged,” said Cornelia placidly, without sense of anything wrong in the appearance of the fact.

“Evidently,” said Mrs. Maybough.

“I shouldn’t care for the engagement,” said Charmian. “That would be rather horrid. But if you were in love, to feel that you needn’t hide it or pretend not to be! That is life! I’m coming here, mamma!”

XVII.

Mrs. Maybough had an apartment in the Mandan Flats, and her windows looked out over miles of the tinted foliage of the Park, and down across the avenue into one of the pretty pools which light up its woodland reaches. The position was superb, and the Mandan was in some sort worthy of it. The architect had done his best to give unity and character to its tremendous mass, and he had failed in much less measure than the architects of such buildings usually do. Cornelia dismounted into the dirty street in front of it from a shabby horse-car, and penetrated its dimmed splendors of mosaic pavement and polished granite pillars and frescoed vaults, with a heart fluttered by a hall-boy all over buttons, and a janitor in blue and silver livery, and an elevator-man in like keeping with American ideals. She was disgusted with herself that she should be so scared, and she was ashamed of the relief she felt when a servant in plain clothes opened Mrs. Maybough’s door to her; she knew he must be a servant because he had on a dress-coat and a white tie, and she had heard the Burtons joke about how they were always taking the waiters for clergymen at first in Europe, He answered her with subdued respectfulness when she asked for the ladies, and then he went forward and for the first time in her life she heard her name called into a drawing-room, as she had read it was done in England, but never could imagine it. The man held aside the portière for her to pass, but before she could pass there came a kind of joyous whoop from within, a swishing of skirts toward her, and she was caught in the arms of Charmian, who kissed her again and again, and cried out over her goodness in coming.

“Why, didn’t you expect me?” Cornelia asked bluntly.

“Yes, but I was just pretending you wouldn’t come, or something had happened to keep you, so that I could have the good of the revulsion when you did come, and feel that it was worth all I had suffered. Don’t you like to do that?”

“I don’t believe I ever did it,” said Cornelia.

“That’s what makes you so glorious,” Charmian exulted. “You don’t need to do such things. You’re equal to life as it comes. But I have to prepare myself for it every way I can. Don’t you see?”

She led her, all embraced, into the drawing-room, where she released her to the smooth welcome of Mrs. Maybough. There was no one else in the vast, high room which was lit with long windows and darkened again with long, thick curtains, but was still light enough to let Cornelia see the elaborate richness of Mrs. Maybough’s dress and the simple richness of Charmian’s. She herself wore her street-dress and she did not know whether she ought to keep her hat on or not; but Charmian said she must pour tea with her, and she danced Cornelia down the splendid length of the three great salons opening into each other along the front of the apartment, toward her own room where she said she must leave it. The drawing-room was a harmony of pictures so rich and soft, and rugs so rich and soft, that the colors seemed to play from wall to floor and back again in the same mellow note; the dimness of the dining-room was starred with the glimmer of silver and cut-glass and the fainter reflected light of polished mahogany; the library was a luxury of low leather chairs and lounges, lurking window-seats, curtained in warm colors, and shelves full of even ranks of books in French bindings of blue and green leather. There was a great carved library table in front of the hearth where a soft-coal fire flickered with a point or two of flame; on the mantel a French clock of classic architecture caught the eye with the gleam of its pendulum as it vibrated inaudibly. It was all extremely well done, infinitely better done than Cornelia could have known. It was tasteful and refined, with the taste and refinement of the decorator who had wished to produce the effect of long establishment and well-bred permanency; the Mandan Flats were really not two years old, and Mrs. Maybough had taken her apartment in the spring and had been in it only a few weeks.

“Now all this is mamma,” Charmian said, suffering Cornelia to pause for a backward glance at the rooms as she pushed open a door at the side of the library. “I simply endure it because it’s in the bargain. But it’s no more me than my gown is. This is where I stay, when I’m with mamma, but I’m going to show you where I live, where I dream.” She glided down the electric-lighted corridor where they found themselves, and apologized over her shoulder to Cornelia behind her: “Of course, you can’t have an attic in a flat; and anything like rain on the roof is practically impossible; but I’ve come as near to it as I could. Be careful! Here are the stairs.” She mounted eight or ten steps that crooked upward, and flung wide a door at the top of the landing. It gave into a large room fronting northward and lighted with one wide window; the ceiling sloped and narrowed down to this from the quadrangular vault, and the cool gray walls rose not much above Cornelia’s head where they met the roof. They were all stuck about with sketches in oil and charcoal. An easel with a canvas on it stood convenient to the light; a flesh-tinted lay-figure in tumbled drapery drooped limply in a corner; a table littered with palettes and brushes and battered tubes of color was carelessly pushed against the window; there were some lustrous rugs hung up beside the door; the floor was bare except for a great tiger-skin, with the head on, that sprawled in front of the fire-place. This was very simple, with rough iron fire-dogs; the low mantel was scattered with cigarettes, cigars in Chinese bronze vases at either end, and midway a medley of pipes, long-stemmed in clay and stubbed in briar-wood.

“Good gracious!” said Cornelia. “Do you smoke?”

“Not yet,” Charmian answered gravely, “but I’m going to learn: Bernhardt does. These are just some pipes that I got the men at the Synthesis to give me; pipes are so full of character. And isn’t this something like?” She invited Cornelia to a study of the place by turning about and looking at it herself. “It seemed as if it never would come together, at one time. Everything was in it, just as it should be; and then I found it was the ridiculous ceiling that was the trouble. It came to me like a flash, what to do, and I got this canvas painted the color of the walls, and sloped so as to cut off half the height of the room; and now it’s a perfect symphony. You wouldn’t have thought it wasn’t a real ceiling?”

“No, I shouldn’t,” said Cornelia, as much surprised as Charmian could have wished.

“You can imagine what a relief it is to steal away here from all that unreality of mamma’s, down there, and give yourself up to the truth of art; I just draw a long breath when I get in here, and leave the world behind me. Why, when I get off here alone, for a minute, I unlace!”

Cornelia went about looking at the sketches on the walls; they were all that mixture of bad drawing and fantastic thinking which she was used to in the things Charmian scribbled over her paper at the Synthesis. She glanced toward the easel, but Charmian said, “Don’t look at it! There’s nothing there; I haven’t decided what I shall do yet. I did think I should paint this tiger skin, but I don’t feel easy painting the skin of a tiger I haven’t killed myself. If I could get mamma to take me out to India and let me shoot one! But don’t you think the whole place is perfect? I’ve tried to make it just what a studio ought to be, and yet keep it free from pose, don’t you know?”

“Yes,” said Cornelia. “I’ve never seen a studio, before.”

“You poor thing, you don’t mean it!” cried Charmian in deep pity. Cornelia said nothing, and Charmian went on with an air of candor, “Well, I haven’t seen a great many myself — only two or three — but I know how they are, and it’s easy enough to realize one. What I want is to have the atmosphere of art about me, all the time. I’m like a fish out of water when I’m out of the atmosphere of art. I intend to spend my whole time here when I’m not at the Synthesis.”

“I should think it would be a good place to work,” Cornelia conceded.

“Yes, and I am going to work here,” said Charmian. “The great trouble with me is that I have so many things in my mind I don’t know which to begin on first. That’s why the Synthesis is so good for me; it concentrates me, if it is on a block hand. You’re concentrated by nature, and so you can’t feel what a glorious pang it is to be fixed to one spot like a butterfly with a pin through you. I don’t see how I ever lived without the Synthesis. I’m going to have a wolf-hound — as soon as I can get a good-tempered one that the man can lead out in the Park for exercise — to curl up here in front of the fire; and I’m going to have foils and masks over the chimney. As soon as I’m a member of the Synthesis I’m going to get them to let me be one of the monitors: that’ll concentrate me, if anything will, keeping the rest in order, and I can get a lot of ideas from posing the model; don’t you think so? But you’ve got all the ideas you want, already. Aren’t you going to join the sketch class?”

“I don’t know but I am,” said Cornelia. “I haven’t got quite turned round yet.”

“Well, you must do it. I’m going to have the class here, some day, as soon as I get the place in perfect order. I must have a suit of Japanese armor for that corner, over there; and then two or three of those queer-looking, old, long, faded trunks, you know, with eastern stuffs gaping out of them, to set along the wall. I should be ashamed to have anybody see it now; but you have an eye, you can supply every thing with a glance. I’m going to have a bed made up in the alcove, over there, and sleep here, sometimes: just that broad lounge, you know, with some rugs on it — I’ve got the cushions, you see, already — and mice running over you, for the crumbs you’ve left when you’ve got hungry sitting up late. Are you afraid of mice?”

“Well, I shouldn’t care to have them run over me, much,” said Cornelia.

“Well, I shouldn’t either,” said Charmian, “but if you sleep in your studio, sometime you have to. They all do. Just put your hat in here,” and she glided before Cornelia through the studio door into one that opened beside it. The room was a dim and silent bedchamber, appointed with the faultless luxury that characterized the rest of the apartment. Cornelia had never dreamt of anything like it, but “Don’t look at it!” Charmian pleaded. “I hate it, and I’m going to get into the studio to sleep as soon as I’ve thought out the kind of hangings. Well, we shall have to hurry back now,” but she kept Cornelia while she critically rearranged a ribbon on her, and studied the effect of it over her shoulder in the glass. “Yes,” she said, with a deep sigh of satisfaction, “perfectly Roman! Gladys wouldn’t have done for you. Cornelia was a step in the right direction; but it ought to have been Fulvia.

“‘I should have clung to Fulvia’s waist and thrust

The dagger through her side,’”

she chanted tragically; and she flung her arms about Cornelia for illustration. “Dream of Fair Women, you know. What part are you going to play, today?”

“What part?” Cornelia demanded, freeing herself, with her darkest frown of perplexity. “You’re not going to have theatricals, I hope.” She thought it was going pretty far to receive company Sunday afternoon, and if there was to be anything more she was ready to take her stand now.

Charmian gave a shout of laughter. “I wish we were. Then I could be natural. But I mean, what are you going to be: very gentle and mild and sweet and shrinking; or very philosophical and thoughtful; or very stately and cold and remote? You know you have to be something. Don’t you always plan out the character you want them to think you?”

“No,” said Cornelia, driven to her bluntest by the discomfort she felt at such a question, and the doubt it cast her into.

Charmian looked at her gloomily. “You strange creature!” she murmured. “But I love you,” she added aloud. “I simply idolize you!”

Cornelia said, half-laughing, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and pulled herself out of the embrace which her devotee had thrown about her. But she could not help liking Charmian for seeming to like her so much.

XVIII.

They still had some time with Mrs. Maybough, when they went back to her before any one else came; Cornelia could see that her features were rather small and regular, and that her hair was that sort of elderly blond in color which makes people look younger than they are after they have passed a certain age. She was really well on in the thirties when she went out to Leadville to take charge of Charmian Maybough’s education from the New England town where she had always lived, and ended by marrying Charmian’s father. At that time Andrew Maybough had already made and lost several fortunes without great depravation from the immoralities of the process; he remained, as he had always been, a large, loosely good-natured, casual kind of creature, of whom it was a question whether he would not be buried by public subscription, in the end; but he died so opportunely that he left the widow of his second marriage with the income from a million dollars, which she was to share during her lifetime with the child of his first. Mrs. Maybough went abroad with her step-daughter, and most of the girl’s life had been spent in Europe.

There was a good deal of Dresden in their sojourn, something of Florence, necessarily a little of Paris; it was not altogether wanting in London, where Mrs. Maybough was presented at court. But so far as definitively materialized society was concerned, Europe could not be said to have availed. When she came back to her own country, it was without more than the hope that some society people, whom she had met abroad, might remember her.

“You’ll see the greatest lot of frumps, if they ever do come,” Charmian said to Cornelia, after her stepmother had made her excuses to Cornelia for her friends being rather late, “and I don’t think they’re half as uncertain to come as mamma does. Anyway, they’re certain to stay, after they get here, till you want to rise up and howl.”

“My dear!” said Mrs. Maybough.

“Oh, I don’t suppose I ever shall howl. I’m too thoroughly subdued; and with Cornelia here to-day I shall be able to hold in. You’re the first Synthesis girl,” she frankly explained to Cornelia, “that mamma’s ever let me have. She thinks they spend all their time drawing the nude.”

Mrs. Maybough looked at Cornelia for the effect of this boldness upon her, and the girl frowned to keep herself from laughing, and then gave way. Mrs. Maybough smiled with a ladylike decorum which redeemed the excess from impropriety. Charmian seemed to know the bounds of her license, and as if Mrs. Maybough’s smile had marked them, she went no farther, and her mother began softly to question Cornelia about herself. The girl perceived that Charmian had not told her anything quite right concerning her, but had got everything dramatically and picturesquely awry. She tried to keep Cornelia from setting the facts straight, because it took all the romance out of them, and she said she should always believe them as she had reported them. Cornelia knew from novels that they were very humble facts, but she was prepared to abide by them whatever a great society woman like Mrs. Maybough should think of them. Mrs. Maybough seemed to think none the worse of them in the simple angularity which Cornelia gave them.

Her friends began to come in at last, and Cornelia found herself, for the first time, in a company of those modern nomads whom prosperity and the various forms of indigestion have multiplied among us. They were mostly people whom Mrs. Maybough had met in Europe, drinking different waters and sampling divers climates, and they had lately arrived home, or were just going abroad, or to Florida, or Colorado, or California. The men were not so sick as the women, but they were prosperous, and that was as good or as bad a reason for their homelessness. They gradually withdrew from the ladies, and stirred their tea in groups of their own sex, and talked investments; sometimes they spoke of their diseases, or their hotels and steamers; and they took advice of each other about places to go to if they went in this direction or that, but said that, when it came to it they supposed they should go where their wives decided. The ladies spoke of where they had met last, and of some who had died since, or had got their daughters married; they professed a generous envy of Mrs. Maybough for being so nicely settled, and said that now they supposed she would always live in New York, unless, one of them archly suggested, her daughter should be carried off somewhere; if one had such a lovely daughter it was what one might expect to happen, any day.

XIX.

The part that Charmian had chosen to represent must have been that of an Egyptian slave. She served her mother’s guests with the tea that Cornelia poured, in attitudes of the eldest sculptures and mural paintings, and received their thanks and compliments with the passive impersonality of one whose hope in life had been taken away some time in the reign of Thotmes II. She did not at once relent from her self-sacrificial conception of herself, even under the flatteries of the nice little fellow who had decorated the apartment for Mrs. Maybough, and had come to drink a cup of tea in the environment of his own taste. Perhaps this was because he had been one of the first to note the peculiar type of Charmian’s style and beauty, and she wished to keep him in mind of it. He did duty as youth and gayety beside the young ladies at their tea-urn, and when he learned that Cornelia was studying at the Synthesis, he professed a vivid interest and a great pleasure.

“I want Huntley to paint Miss Maybough,” he said. “Don’t you think he would do it tremendously well, Miss Saunders?”

“Miss Saunders is going to paint me,” said Charmian, mystically.

“As soon as I get to the round,” said Cornelia to Charmian; she was rather afraid to speak to the decorator. “I suppose you wouldn’t want to be painted with block hands.”

The decorator laughed, and Charmian asked, “Isn’t she nice not to say anything about a block head? Very few Synthesis girls could have helped it; it’s one of the oldest Synthesis jokes.”

The young man smiled sympathetically, and said he was sure they would not keep Miss Saunders long at the block. “There’s a friend of mine I should like to bring here, some day.”

“Mamma would be glad to see him,” said Charmian. “Who is it?”

Somebody began to sing: a full-bodiced lady, in a bonnet, and with an over-arching bust distended with chest-notes, which swelled and sank tumultuously to her music; her little tightly-gloved hands seemed of an earlier period. Cornelia lost the name which Mr. Plaisdell gave, in the first outburst, and caught nothing more of the talk which Charmian dropped, and then caught up again when the hand-clapping began.

Some of the people went, and others came, with brief devoirs to Mrs. Maybough in the crepuscular corner where she sat. The tea circulated more and more; the babble rose and fell; it was all very curious to Cornelia, who had never seen anything like it before, and quite lost the sense of the day being Sunday. The stout lady’s song had been serious, if not precisely devotional in character; but Cornelia could not have profited by the fact, for she did not know German. Mr. Plaisdell kept up his talk with Charmian, and she caught some words now and then that showed he was still speaking of his friend, or had recurred to him. “I’m rather dangerous when I get started on him. He’s working out of his mannerisms into himself. He’s a great fellow. I’m going to ask Mrs. Maybough.” But he did not go at once. He drew nearer Cornelia, and tried to include her in the talk, but she was ashamed to find that she was difficult to get on common ground. She would not keep on talking Synthesis, as if that were the only thing she knew, but in fact she did not know much else in New York, even about art.

“Ah!” he broke off to Charmian, with a lift of his head. “That’s too bad! There he comes now, with Wetmore!”

Cornelia looked toward Mrs. Maybough with him. One gentleman was presenting another to Mrs. Maybough. They got through with her as quickly as most people did, and then they made their way toward Cornelia’s table. She had just time to govern her head and hand into stony rigidity, when Wetmore came up with Ludlow, whom he introduced to Charmian. She was going to extend the acquaintance to Cornelia, but had no chance before Ludlow took Cornelia’s petrified fingers and bowed over them. The men suppressed their surprise, if they had any, at this meeting as of old friends, but Charmian felt no obligation to silence.

“Where in the world have you met before? Why, Cornelia Saunders, why didn’t you say you knew Mr. Ludlow?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t give her time,” Ludlow answered.

“Yes, but we were just speaking of you — Mr. Plaisdell was!” said Charmian, with the injury still in her voice.

“I didn’t hear you speak of him,” Cornelia said, with a vague flutter of her hands toward the teacups.

The action seemed to justify Wetmore to himself in saying, “Yes, thank you, I will have some tea, Miss Saunders, and then I’ll get some one to introduce me to you. You haven’t seen me before, and I can’t stand these airs of Ludlow’s.” He made them laugh, and Charmian introduced them, and Cornelia gave him his tea; then Charmian returned to her grievance and complained to Cornelia: “I thought you didn’t know anybody in New York.”

“Well, it seems you were not far wrong,” Wetmore interposed. “I don’t call Ludlow much of anybody.”

“You don’t often come down to anything as crude as that, Wetmore,” Ludlow said.

“Not if I can help it. But I was driven to it, this time; the provocation was great.”

“I had the pleasure of meeting Miss Saunders at home, several years ago,” Ludlow said in obedience to Charmian. “We had some very delightful friends in common, there — old friends of mine — at Pymantoning.”

“What a pretty name,” said Mr. Plaisdell. “What a pity that none of our great cities happen to have those musical Indian names.”

“Chicago,” Wetmore suggested.

“Yes, Chicago is big, and the name is Indian; but is it pretty?”

“You can’t have everything. I don’t suppose it is very decorative.”

“Pymantoning is as pretty as its name,” said Ludlow. “It has the loveliness of a level, to begin with; we’re so besotted with mountains in the East that we don’t know how lovely a level is.”

“The sea,” Wetmore suggested again.

“Well, yes, that’s occasionally level,” Ludlow admitted. “But it hasn’t got white houses with green blinds behind black ranks of maples in the moonlight.”

“If ‘good taste’ could have had its way, the white house with green blinds would have been a thing of the past.” said the decorator. “And they were a genuine instinct, an inspiration, with our people. The white paint is always beautiful, — as marble is. People tried to replace it with mud-color — the color of the ground the house was built on! I congratulate Miss Saunders on the conservatism of Py — ?”

“Pymantoning,” said Cornelia, eager to contribute something to the talk, and then vexed to have it made much of by Mr. Plaisdell.

Wetmore was looking away. He floated lightly off, with the buoyancy which is sometimes the property of people of his bulk, and Ludlow remained talking with Charmian. Then, with what was like the insensible transition of dreams to her, he was talking with Cornelia. He said he had been meaning to come and see her all the week past, but he had been out of town, and very busy, and he supposed she was occupied with looking about and getting settled. He did not make out a very clear case, she chose to think, and she was not sure but he was treating her still as a child, and she tried to think how she could make him realize that she was not. He seemed quite surprised to hear that she had been at work in the Synthesis ever since Tuesday. He complimented her energy, and asked, not how she was getting on there, but how she liked it; she answered stiffly, and she knew that he was ignoring her blunt behavior as something she could not help, and that vexed her the more; she wished to resist his friendliness because she did not deserve it. She kept seeing how handsome he was, with his brilliant brown beard, and his hazel eyes. There were points of sunny light in his eyes, when he smiled, and then his teeth shone very white. He did not smile very much; she liked his being serious and not making speeches; she wished she could do something to make him think her less of an auk, but when she tried, it was only worse. He did not say anything to let her think he had changed his mind as to the wisdom of her coming to study art in New York; and she liked that; she should have hated him if he had.

“Have you got that little Manet, yet?” Mr. Plaisdell broke in upon them. “I was telling Miss Maybough about it.”

“Yes,” said Ludlow. “It’s at my place. Why won’t Miss Maybough and Miss Saunders come and see it? You’ll come, won’t you, Miss Maybough?”

“If mamma will let me,” said Charmian, meekly.

“Of course! Suppose we go ask her?”

The friends of Mrs. Maybough had now reduced themselves to Wetmore, who sat beside her, looking over at the little tea-table group. Ludlow led the rest toward her.

“What an imprudence,” he called out, “when I’d just been booming you! Now you come up in person to spoil everything.”

Ludlow presented his petition, and Mrs. Maybough received it with her provisional anxiety till he named the day for the visit. She said she had an engagement for Saturday afternoon, and Ludlow ventured, “Then perhaps you’d let the young ladies come with a friend of mine: Mrs. Westley. She’ll be glad to call for them, I’m sure.”

“Mrs. General Westley?”

“Yes.”

“We met them in Rome,” said Mrs. Maybough. “I shall be very happy, indeed, for my daughter. But you know Miss Saunders — is not staying with us?”

“Miss Saunders will be very happy for herself,” said Charmian.

The men took their leave, and Charmian seized the first moment to breathe in Cornelia’s ear: “Oh, what luck! I didn’t suppose he would do it, when I got Mr. Plaisdell to hint about that Manet. And it’s all for you. Now come into my room and tell me everything about it. You have got to stay for dinner.”

“No, no; I can’t,” Cornelia gasped. “And I’m not going to his studio. He asked me because he had to.”

“I should think he did have to. He talked to you as if there was no one else here. How did you meet him before? When did you?” She could not wait for Cornelia to say, but broke out with fresh astonishment. “Why, Walter Ludlow! Do you know who Walter Ludlow is? He’s one of the greatest painters in New York. He’s the greatest!”

“Who is Mr. Wetmore?” Cornelia asked evasively.

“Don’t name him in the same century! He’s grand, too! Does those little Meissonier things. He’s going to paint mamma. She’s one of his types. He must have brought Mr. Ludlow to see me. But he didn’t. He saw nobody but you! Oh Cornelia!” She caught Cornelia in her arms.

“Don’t be a goose!” said Cornelia, struggling to get away.

“Will you tell me all about it, then?”

“Yes. But it isn’t anything.”

At the end of the story Charmian sighed, “How romantic! Of course, he’s simply in a frenzy till he sees you again. I don’t believe he can live through the week.”

“He’ll have to live through several,” said Cornelia; “You can excuse me when you go. He’s very conceited, and he talks to you as if he were a thousand years old. I think Mr. Plaisdell is a great deal nicer. He doesn’t treat you as if you were — I don’t know what!”

XX.

The next day Cornelia found herself the object of rumors that filled the Synthesis. She knew that they all came from Charmian, and that she could not hope to overtake them with denial. The ridiculous romances multiplied themselves, and those who did not understand that Cornelia and Ludlow had grown up together in the same place, or were first cousins, had been encouraged to believe that they were old lovers, who had quarrelled, and never spoken till they happened to meet at Mrs. Maybough’s. Ludlow was noted for a certain reticence and austerity with women, which might well have come from an unhappy love-affair; once when he took one of the instructor’s classes at the Synthesis temporarily, his forbidding urbanity was so glacial, that the girls scarcely dared to breathe in his presence, and left it half-frozen. The severest of the masters, with all his sarcasm, was simply nothing to him.

Cornelia liked to hear that. She should have despised Ludlow if she had heard he was silly with girls, and she did not wish to despise him, though she knew that he despised her; she could bear that. The Synthesis praises made her the more determined, however, to judge his recent work when she came to see it, just as she would judge any one’s work. But first of all she meant not to see it.

She seemed to have more trouble in bringing herself back to this point than in keeping Charmian to it. Charmian came to believe her at last, after declaring it the rudest thing she ever heard of, and asking Cornelia what she expected to say to Mrs. Westley when she came for her. Cornelia could never quite believe it herself, though she strengthened her purpose with repeated affirmation, tacit and explicit, and said it would be very easy to tell Mrs. Westley she was not going, if she ever did come for her. She could not keep Charmian from referring the case to every one on the steps and window-sills in the Synthesis, and at the sketch-class, where Charmian published it the first time Cornelia came, and wove a romance from it which involved herself as the close friend and witness of so strange a being.

Cornelia tried not to let all this interfere with her work, but it did, and at the sketch-class where she might have shown some rebound from the servile work of the Preparatory, and some originality, she disappointed those whom Charmian had taught to expect anything of her. They took her rustic hauteur and her professed indifference to the distinction of Ludlow’s invitation, as her pose. She went home from the class vexed to tears by her failure, and puzzled to know what she really should say to that Mrs. Westley when she came; it wouldn’t be so easy to tell her she was not going, after all. Cornelia hated her, and wished she would not come; she had let the whole week go by, now, till Thursday, and perhaps she really would not come. The girl knew so little of the rigidity of city dates that she thought very likely Mrs. Westley had decided to put it off till another week.

She let herself into her boarding-house with her latch-key and stood confronted in the hall with Ludlow, who was giving some charge to the maid. “Oh, Miss Saunders,” he said, and he put the card he held into his pocket, “I’m so glad not to miss you; I was just leaving a written message, but now I can tell you.”

He hesitated, and Cornelia did not know what to do. But she said, “Won’t you come in?” with a vague movement toward the parlor.

“Why, yes, thank you, for a moment,” he said; and he went back with her.

“I hope I haven’t kept you waiting,” she said, with a severity which was for her own awkwardness.

He did not take it for himself. “Oh, no! I’ve just come from Mrs. Westley’s, and she’s charged me with a message for you.” He handed Cornelia a note. “She will call for you and Miss Maybough at the Synthesis rather earlier than you usually leave work, I believe, but I want you to have some daylight on my Manet. I hope half-past two won’t be too early?”

“Oh, no,” said Cornelia, and while she wondered how she could make this opening of assent turn to refusal in the end, Ludlow went on:

“There’s something of my own, that I’d like to have you look at. Of course, you won’t get away with the Manet, alone; I don’t suppose you expected that. I’ve an idea you can tell me where I’ve gone wrong, if I have; it’s all a great while ago. Have you ever been at the County Fair at Pymantoning since — —”

He stopped, and Cornelia perceived that it was with doubt whether it might not still be a tender point with her.

“Oh, yes, I’ve forgiven the Fair long ago.” She laughed, and he laughed with her.

“It’s best not to keep a grudge against a defeat, I suppose. If we do, it won’t help us. I’ve had my quarrel with the Pymantoning County Fair, too; but it wasn’t with the Fine Arts Committee.”

“No, I didn’t suppose you wanted to exhibit anything there,” said Cornelia.

“Why, I don’t know. It might be a very good thing for me. Why not? I’d like to exhibit this very picture there. It’s an impression — not just what I’d do, now — of the trotting-match I saw there that day.”

“Yes,” said Cornelia, letting her eyes fall, “Mrs. Burton said you had painted it, or you were going to.”

“Well, I did,” said Ludlow, “and nobody seemed to know what I was after. I wonder if they would in Pymantoning! But what I wanted to ask was that you would try to look at it from the Pymantoning point of view. I hope you haven’t lost that yet?”

“Well, I haven’t been away such a great while,” said Cornelia, smiling.

“No; but still, one sophisticates in New York very soon. I’ll tell you what I’ve got a notion of! Well, it’s all very much in the air, yet, but so far as I’ve thought it out, it’s the relation of our art to our life. It sounds rather boring, I know, and I suppose I’m a bit of a theorist; I always was. It’s easy enough to prove to the few that our life is full of poetry and picturesqueness; but can I prove it to the many? Can the people themselves be made to see it and feel it? That’s the question. Can they be interested in a picture — a real work of art that asserts itself in a good way? Can they be taught to care for my impression of the trotting-match at the Pymantoning County Fair, as much as they would for a chromo of the same thing, and be made to feel that there was something more in it perhaps?”

He sat fronting her, with his head down over the hat he held between his hands; now he lifted his face and looked into hers. She smiled at his earnestness, and for a little instant felt herself older and wiser in her practicality.

“You might send it out to the next County Fair, and see.”

“Why, that’s just what I thought of!” he said, and he laughed. “Do you suppose they would let me exhibit it in the Fine Arts Department?”

“I don’t believe they would give you the first premium,” said Cornelia.

“Well, well, then I should have to put up with the second! I should like to get the first, I confess,” Ludlow went on seriously. “The premium would mean something to me — not so much, of course, as a popular recognition. What do you think the chance of that would be?”

“Well, I haven’t seen the picture yet,” Cornelia suggested.

“Ah, that’s true! I forgot that,” he said, and they both laughed. “But what do you think of my theory? It seems to me,” and now he leaned back in his chair, and smiled upon her with that bright earnestness which women always found charming in him, “it seems to me that the worst effect of an artist’s life is to wrap him up in himself, and separate him from his kind. Even if he goes in for what they call popular subjects, he takes from the many and gives to the few; he ought to give something back to the crowd — he ought to give everything back. But the terrible question is whether they’ll have it; and he has no means of finding out.”

“And you’ve come to one of the crowd to inquire?” Cornelia asked. Up to that moment she had been flattered, too, by his serious appeal to her, and generously pleased. But the chance offered, and she perversely seized it.

He protested with a simple “Ah!” and she was ashamed.

“I don’t know,” she hurried on to say. “I never thought about it in that way.”

“Well, it isn’t so simple any more, after you once begin. I don’t suppose I shall be at peace quite till I try what I can do; and seeing you Sunday brought Pymantoning all so freshly back, that I’ve been wondering, from time to time, ever since, whether you could possibly help me.”

“I will try, as the good little boy said,” Cornelia assented.

“It makes me feel like a good little boy to have asked it.” Ludlow did not profit by the chance which the conclusion of their agreement offered him, to go. He stayed and talked on, and from time to time he recurred to what he had asked, and said he was afraid she would think he was using her, and tried to explain that he really was not, but was approaching her most humbly for her opinion. He could not make it out, but they got better and better acquainted in the fun they had with his failures. It went on till Cornelia said, “Now, really, if you keep it up, I shall have to stand you in the corner, with your face to the wall.”

“Oh, do!” he entreated. “It would be such a relief.”

“You know I was a teacher two winters,” she said, “and have actually stood boys in corners.”

That seemed to interest him afresh; he made her tell him all about her school-teaching. He stayed till the bell rang for dinner, and he suffered a decent moment to pass before he rose then.

“After all,” he said at parting, “I think you’d better decide that it’s merely my Manet you’re coming to see.”

“Yes, merely the Manet,” Cornelia assented. “If I choose, the Ludlows will all be stood in the corners with their faces to the wall.”

She found her own face very flushed, when she climbed up to her room for a moment before going in to dinner, and her heart seemed to be beating in her neck. She looked at Mrs. Westley’s note. It stated everything so explicitly that she did not see why Mr. Ludlow need have come to explain. She remembered now that she had forgotten to tell him she was not going.

XXI.

Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley would come for Charmian and herself in her carriage; but when they went down to her in the Synthesis office, they found that she had planned to walk with them to Ludlow’s studio. She said it was not a great way off; and she had got into the habit of walking there, when he was painting her; she supposed they would rather walk after their work. Cornelia said “Oh, yes,” and Charmian asked, at her perfervidest, Had Mr. Ludlow painted her? and Mrs. Westley answered calmly. Yes; she believed he did not think it very successful; her husband liked it, though. Charmian said, Oh, how much she should like to see it, and Mrs. Westley said she must show it her some time. Cornelia thought Mrs. Westley very pretty, but she decided that she did not care to see Ludlow’s picture of her.

His studio stood a little back from the sidewalk; it was approached by a broad sloping pavement, and had two wide valves for the doorway. He opened the door himself, at their ring, and they found themselves in a large, gray room which went to the roof, with its vaulted ceiling; this was pierced with a vast window, that descended half-way down the northward wall. “My studio started in life as a gentleman’s stable; then it fell into the hands of a sculptor, and then it got as low as a painter.” He said to Charmian, “Mr. Plaisdell has told me how ingeniously you treated one of your rooms that you took for a studio.”

Charmian answered with dark humility, “But a studio without a painter in it!” and there were some offers and refusals of compliment between them, which ended in his saying that he would like to see her studio, and her saying that Mrs. Maybough would always be glad to see him. Then he talked with Mrs. Westley, who was very pleasant to Cornelia while the banter with Charmian went on, and proposed to show his pictures; he fancied that was what he had got them there, for; but he would make a decent pretence of the Manet, first.

The Manet was one of that painter’s most excessive; it was almost insolent in its defiance of the old theory and method of art. “He had to go too far, in those days, or he wouldn’t have arrived anywhere,” Ludlow said, dreamily, as he stood looking with them at the picture. “He fell back to the point he had really meant to reach.” He put the picture away amidst the sighs and murmurs of Mrs. Westley and Charmian, and the silence of Cornelia, which he did not try to break. He began to show his own pictures, taking them at random, as it seemed, from the ranks of canvasses faced against the wall. “You know we impressionists are nothing if not prolific,” he said, and he kept turning the frame on his easel, now for a long picture, and now for a tall one. The praises of the others followed him, but Cornelia could not speak. Some of the pictures she did not like; some she thought were preposterous; but there were some that she found brilliantly successful, and a few that charmed her with their delicate and tender poetry. He said something about most of them, in apology or extenuation; Cornelia believed that she knew which he liked by his not saying anything of them.

Suddenly he set a large picture on the easel that quite filled the frame. “Trotting Match at the Pymantoning County Fair,” he announced, and he turned away and began to make tea in a little battered copper kettle over a spirit-lamp, on a table strewn with color-tubes in the corner.

“Ah, yes,” said Mrs. Westley. “I remember this at the American Artists; three or four years ago, wasn’t it? But you’ve done something to it, haven’t you?”

“Improved with age,” said Ludlow, with his back toward them, bent above his tea-kettle. “That’s all.”

“It seems like painting a weed, though,” said Charmian. “How can you care for such subjects?”

Ludlow came up to her with the first cup of tea. “It’s no use to paint lilies, you know.”

“Do you call that an answer?”

“A poor one.”

He brought Mrs. Westley some tea, and then he came to Cornelia with a cup in each hand, one for her, and one for himself, and frankly put himself between her and the others. “Well, what do you think of it?” he asked, as if there were no one else but they two.

She felt a warm flush of pleasure in his boldness. “I don’t know. It’s like it; that’s the way I’ve always seen it; and it’s beautiful. But somehow — —”

“What?”

“It looks as if it were somewhere else.”

“You’ve hit it,” said Ludlow. “It serves me right. You see I was so anxious to prove that an American subject was just as susceptible of impressionistic treatment as a French one, that I made this look as French as I could. I must do it again and more modestly; not be so patronizing. I should like to come out there next fall again, and see another trotting-match. I suppose they’ll have one?”

“They always have them; it wouldn’t be the Fair without them,” said Cornelia.

“Well, I must come, and somehow do it on the spot; that’s the only way.” He pulled himself more directly in front of her and ignored the others, who talked about his picture with faded interest to each other, and then went about, and looked at the objects in the studio. “I don’t think I made myself quite clear the other day, about what I wanted to do in this way.” He plunged into the affair again, and if Cornelia did not understand it better, it was not for want of explanation. Perhaps she did not listen very closely. All the time she thought how brilliantly handsome he was, and how fine, by every worldly criterion. “Yes,” he said, “that is something I have been thinking of ever since my picture failed with the public; it deserved to fail, and you’ve made it so clear why, that I can’t refuse to know, or to keep myself in the dark about it any longer. I don’t believe we can take much from the common stock of life in any way, and find the thing at all real in our hands, without intending to give something back. Do you?”

Cornelia had never thought about it before; she did not try to pretend that she had; it seemed a little fantastic to her, but it flattered her to have him talk to her about it, and she liked his seriousness. He did not keep up the kind of banter with her that he did with Charmian; he did not pay her compliments, and she hated compliments from men.

Ludlow went off to speak to Mrs. Westley of something he saw her looking at; Charmian edged nearer to Cornelia. “I would give the world to be in your place. I never saw anything like it. Keep on looking just as you are! It’s magnificent. Such color, and that queenly pose of the head! It would kill those Synthesis girls if they knew how he had been talking to you. My, if I could get anybody to be serious with me! Talk! Say something! Do you think its going to rain before we get home? His eyes keep turning this way, all the time; you can’t see them, but they do. I am glad I brought my umbrella. Have you got your waterproof? I’m going to make you tell me every word he said when he came to see you yesterday; it’ll be mean if you don’t. No, I think I shall go up by the elevated, and then take the surface-car across. It’s the most romantic thing I ever heard of. No, I don’t believe it will be dark. Speak! Say something! You mustn’t let me do all the talking; he’ll notice.”

Cornelia began to laugh, and Charmian turned away and joined Mrs. Westley and Ludlow, who were tilting outward some of the canvasses faced against the wall, and talking them over. Cornelia followed her, and they all four loitered over the paintings, luxuriously giving a glance at each, and saying a word or two about it. “Yes,” Ludlow said, “sometimes I used to do three or four of them a day. I work more slowly now; if you want to get any thinking in, you’ve got to take time to it.”

It was growing dark; Ludlow proposed to see them all home one after another. Mrs. Westley said no, indeed; the Broadway car, at the end of the second block, would leave her within three minutes of her door.

“And nothing could happen in three minutes,” said Ludlow. “That stands to reason.”

“And my one luxury is going home alone,” said Charmian. “Mamma doesn’t allow it, except to and from the Synthesis. Then I’m an art student and perfectly safe. If I were a young lady my life wouldn’t be worth anything.”

“Yes,” Ludlow assented, “the great thing is to have some sort of business to be where you are.”

“I know a girl who’s in some of the charities, and she goes about at all hours of the night, and nobody speaks to her,” said Charmian.

“Well, then,” said Ludlow, “I don’t see that there’s anything for me to do, unless we all go together with Mrs. Wesley to get her Broadway car, and then keep on to the Elevated with you, Miss Maybough. Miss Saunders may be frightened enough then to let me walk to her door with her. A man likes to be of some little use in the world.”

They had some mild fun about the weakness of Cornelia in needing an escort. She found it best to own that she did not quite know her way home, and was afraid to ask if she got puzzled.

Ludlow put out his spirit-lamp, which had been burning blue all the time, and embittering the tea in the kettle over it, and then they carried out their plan. Cornelia went before with Mrs. Westley, who asked her to come to her on her day, whenever she could leave her work for such a reckless dissipation. At the foot of the Elevated station stairs, where Charmian inflexibly required that they should part with her, in the interest of the personal liberty which she prized above personal safety, she embraced Cornelia formally, and then added an embrace of a more specific character, and whispered to her ear, “You’re glorious!” and fled up the station stairs.

Cornelia understood that she was glorious because Mr. Ludlow was walking home with her, and that Charmian was giving the fact a significance out of all reason. They talked rather soberly, as two people do when a gayer third has left them, and they had little silences. They spoke of Charmian, and Cornelia praised her beauty and her heart, and said how everybody liked her at the Synthesis.

“Do they laugh at her a little, too?” Ludlow asked.

“Why?”

“She’s rather romantic.”

“Oh, I thought all girls were romantic.”

“Yes? You’re not.”

“What makes you think so?” asked the girl. “I’m a great deal more romantic than is good for me. Don’t you like romantic people? I do!”

“I don’t believe I do,” said Ludlow. “They’re rather apt to make trouble. I don’t mean Miss Maybough. She’ll probably take it out in madly impossible art. Can she draw?”

Cornelia did not like to say what she thought of Charmian’s drawing, exactly. She said, “Well, I don’t know.”

Ludlow hastened to say, “I oughtn’t to have asked that about your friend.”

“We’re both in the Preparatory, you know,” Cornelia explained. “I think Charmian has a great deal of imagination.”

“Well, that’s a good thing, if it doesn’t go too far. Fortunately it can’t, in the Preparatory.”

At her door Cornelia did not know whether to ask him in, as she would have done in Pymantoning; she ended by not even offering him her hand; but he took it all the same, as if he had expected her to offer it.

XXII.

Cornelia found herself in her room without knowing how she got there, or how long she had been there, when the man-voiced Irish girl came up and said something to her. She did not understand at first; then she made out that there was a gentleman asking for her in the parlor; and with a glance at her face in the glass, she ran down stairs. She knew it was Ludlow, and that he had thought of something he wanted to say, and had come back. It must be something very important; it might be an invitation to go with him somewhere; she wondered if they would have a chaperone.

In the vague light of the long parlor, where a single burner was turned half up, because it was not yet dark outside, a figure rose from one of the sofas and came toward her with one hand extended in gay and even jocose greeting. It was the figure of a young man, with a high forehead, and with nothing to obstruct the view of the Shakespearian dome it mounted into, except a modest growth of hair above either ear. He was light upon his feet, and he advanced with a rhythmical step. Cornelia tried to make believe that she did not know who it was; she recoiled, but her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth, and she could not gainsay him when he demanded joyfully, “Why, Nie! Why, Nelie! Don’t you remember me? Dickerson, J. B., with Gates & Clarkson, art goods? Pymantoning? Days of yore, generally? Oh, pshaw, now!”

“Yes, I remember you,” said Cornelia, in a voice as cold as the finger-tips which she inwardly raged to think she gave him, but was helpless to refuse, simply because he was holding out his hand to her.

“Well, it’s good for sore eyes to see you again,” said Mr. Dickerson, closing both of his hands on hers. “Let’s see; it’s four years ago! How the time flies! I declare, it don’t hardly seem a day. Mustn’t tell you how you’ve grown, I suppose? Well, we weren’t much more than children, then, anyhow. Set down! I’m at home here. Old stamping-ground of mine, when I’m in New York; our house has its headquarters in New York, now; everything’s got to come, sooner or later. Well, it’s a great place.”

Cornelia obeyed him for the same reason that she gave him her hand, which was no reason. “I heard your voice there at the door, when you came in a little while ago, and I was just going to rush out and speak to you. I was sure it was you; but thinks I, ‘It can’t be; it’s too good to be true’; and I waited till I could see Mrs. Montgomery, and then I sent up for you. Didn’t send my name; thought I’d like to surprise you. Well, how’s the folks? Mother still doing business at the old stand? Living and well, I hope?”

“My mother is well,” said Cornelia. She wondered how she should rid herself of this horrible little creature, who grew, as she looked at him in her fascination, more abominable to her every moment. She was without any definite purpose in asking, “How is Mrs. Dickerson?”

The question appeared to give Mr. Dickerson great satisfaction; he laughed, throwing back his head: “Who, Tweet? Well, I thought you’d be after me there, about the first thing! I don’t blame you; don’t blame you a bit. Be just so myself, if I was in your place! Perfectly natural you should! Then you ain’t heard?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Cornelia, with mounting aversion. She edged away from him, for in the expression of his agreeable emotion he had pushed nearer to her on the sofa.

“Why, Tweet is Mrs. Byers, now; court let her take back her maiden name. I didn’t oppose the divorce; nothing like peace in families, you know. Tweet was all right, and I hain’t got anything to say against her. She’s a good girl; but we couldn’t seem to hit it off, and we agreed to quit, after we’d tried it a couple of years or so, and I’ve been a free man ever since.”

It could not be honestly said that Cornelia was profoundly revolted by the facts so lightly, almost gaily, presented. Her innocence of so much that they implied, and her familiarity with divorce as a common incident of life, alike protected her from the shock. But what really struck terror to her heart was something that she realized with the look that the hideous little man now bent upon her: the mutual understanding; the rights once relinquished which might now be urged again; the memory of things past, were all suggested in this look. She thought of Ludlow, with his lofty ideals and his great gifts, and then she looked at this little grinning, leering wretch, and remembered how he had once put his arm round her and kissed her. It seemed impossible — too cruel and unjust to be. She was scarcely more than a child, then, and that foolish affair had been more her mother’s folly than her own. It flashed upon her that unless she put away the shame of it, the shame would weaken her and master her. But how to assert herself she did not know till he gave her some pretext.

“Well,” he sighed, rolling his head against the back of the sofa, and looking up at the chandelier, “sometimes a man has more freedom than he’s got any use for. I don’t know as I want to be back under Tweet’s thumb, but I guess the Scripture was about right where it says it ain’t good for a man to be alone. When d’you leave Pymantoning, Nelie?”

“It makes no difference when I left.” Cornelia got to her feet, trembling. “And I’ll thank you not to call me by my first name, Mr. Dickerson. I don’t know why you should do it, and I don’t like it.”

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Mr. Dickerson. “I don’t blame you. I think you’re perfectly excusable to feel the way you do. But some time, when I get a chance, I should like to tell you about it, and put it to you in the right light — —”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” cried Cornelia fiercely. “And I won’t have you thinking that it’s because I ever did care for you. I didn’t. And I was only too glad when you got married. And I don’t hate you, for I despise you too much; and I always did. So!”

She stamped her foot for a final emphasis, but she was aware of her words all having fallen effectless, like blows dealt some detestable thing in a dream.

“Good! Just what I expected and deserved,” said Mr. Dickerson, with a magnanimity that was appalling. “I did behave like a perfect scallawag to you, Nie; but I was young then, and Tweet got round me before I knew. I can explain — —”

“I don’t want you to explain! I won’t let you. You’re too disgusting for anything. Don’t I tell you I never cared for you?”

“Why, of course,” said Mr. Dickerson tolerantly, “you say that now; and I don’t blame you. But I guess you did care, once, Nelie.”

“Oh, my goodness, what shall I do?” She found herself appealing in some sort to the little wretch against himself.

“Why, let’s see how you look; I hain’t had a fair peep at you, yet.” As if with the notion of affording a relief to the strain of the situation, he advanced, and lifted his hand toward the low-burning chandelier.

“Stop!” cried Cornelia. “Are you staying here — in this house?”

“Well, I inferred that I was, from a remark that I made.”

“Then I’m going away instantly. I will tell Mrs. Montgomery, and I will go to-night.”

“Why, Nie!”

“Hush! Don’t you — don’t dare to speak to me! Oh, you — you — —” She could not find a word that would express all her loathing of him, and her scorn of herself in the past for having given him the hold upon her that nothing appeared to have loosed. She was putting on a bold front, and she meant to keep her word, but if she left that house, she did not know where, in the whole vast city, she should go. Of course she could go to Charmian Maybough; but besides bring afraid to venture out after dark, she knew she would have to tell Charmian all about it; or else make a mystery of it; there was nothing, probably, that Charmian would have liked better, but there was nothing that Cornelia would have liked less. She wanted to cry; it always seems hard and very unjust to us, in after life, when some error or folly of our youth rises up to perplex us; and Cornelia was all the more rebellious because the fault was not wholly hers, or not even largely, but mostly her dear, innocent, unwise mother’s.

Mr. Dickerson dropped his hand without turning up the gas; perhaps he did not need a stronger light on Cornelia, after all. “Oh, well! I don’t want to drive you out of the house. I’ll go. I’ve got my grip out here in the hall. But see here! I told Mrs. Montgomery we hailed from the same place — children together, and I don’t know but what cousins — and how glad I was to find you here, and now if I leave —— Better let me stay here, over night, anyhow! I’m off on the road to-morrow, anyway. I won’t trouble you; I won’t, indeed. Now you can depend upon it. Word’s as good as my bond, if my bond ain’t worth a great deal. But, honor bright!”

Cornelia’s heart, which stood still at the threat she made, began to pound in her breast. She panted so that she could hardly speak.

“Will you call me by my first name?” she demanded.

“No. You shall be Miss Saunders to me till you say when.”

“And will you ever speak to me, or look at me, as if we were ever anything but the most perfect strangers?”

“It’ll be a good deal of a discount from what I told Mrs. Montgomery, but I guess I shall have to promise.”

“And you will go in the morning?”

“Sure.”

“How soon?”

“Well, I don’t like a very early breakfast, but I guess I can get out of the house by about nine, or half-past eight, maybe.”

“Then you may stay.” Cornelia turned and marched out of the parlor with a state that failed her more and more, the higher she mounted toward her room. If it had been a flight further she would have had to crawl on her hands and knees.

At first she thought she would not go down to dinner, but after a while she found herself very hungry, and she decided she must go for appearance sake at any rate. At the bottom of her heart, too, she was curious to see whether that little wretch would keep his word.

He was the life of the table. His jokes made everybody laugh; it could be seen that he was a prime favorite with the landlady. After the coffee came he played a great many tricks with knives and forks and spoons, and coins. He dressed one of his hands, all but two fingers, with a napkin which he made like the skirts of a ballet-dancer, and then made his fingers dance a hornpipe. He tried a skirt-dance with them later, but it was comparatively a failure, for want of practice, he said.

Toward Cornelia he behaved with the most scrupulous deference, even with delicacy, as if they had indeed met in former days, but as if she were a person of such dignity and consequence that their acquaintance could only have been of the most formal character. He did it so well, and seemed to take such a pleasure in doing it that she blushed for him. Some of the things he said to the others were so droll that she had to laugh at them. But he did not presume upon her tolerance.

XXIII.

The false courage that supported her in Dickerson’s presence left Cornelia when she went back to her room, and she did not sleep that night, or she thought she did not. She came down early for a cup of coffee, and the landlady told her that Mr. Dickerson had just gone; he wished Mrs. Montgomery to give Cornelia his respects, and apologize for his going away without waiting to see her again. He had really expected to stay over till Monday, but he found he could save several days by taking the Chicago Limited that morning. Mrs. Montgomery praised his energy; she did not believe he would be on the road a great while longer; he would be in the firm in less than another year. She hinted at his past unhappiness in the married state, and she said she did hope that he would get somebody who would appreciate him, next time. There did not seem to be any doubt in her mind that there would be a next time with him.

Cornelia wanted to ask whether she expected him back soon; she could not; but she resolved that whenever he came he should not find her in that house. She thought where she should go, and what excuse she should make for going, what she should tell Charmian, or Mr. Ludlow, if she ever saw him again. It seemed to her that she had better go home, but Cornelia hated to give up; she could not bear to be driven away. She went to church, to escape herself, and a turmoil of things alien to the place and the hour whirled through her mind during the service; she came out spent with a thousand-fold dramatization of her relations to Mr. Dickerson and to Mr. Ludlow. She sat down on a bench in the little park before the church, and tried to think what she ought to do, while the children ran up and down the walks, and the people from the neighboring East Side avenues, in their poor Sunday best, swarmed in the square for the mild sun and air of the late October. The street cars dinned ceaselessly up and down, and back and forth; the trains of the Elevated hurtled by on the west and on the east; the troubled city roared all round with the anguish of the perpetual coming and going; but it was as much Sunday there as it would have been on the back street in Pymantoning where her mother’s little house stood. The leaves that dripped down at her feet in the light warm breaths of wind passing over the square might have fallen from the maple before the gate at home. The awful unity of life for the first time appeared to her. Was it true that you could not get away from what you had been? Was that the meaning of that little wretch’s coming back to claim her after he had forfeited every shadow of right to her that even her mother’s ignorance and folly had given him? Then it meant that he would come back again and again, and never stop coming. She made believe that if she looked up, she should now see him actually coming down the path toward her; she held her eyes fixed upon the ground at her feet, and then it seemed to her every moment that he was just going to take the seat next her. The seat was already taken; a heavy German woman filled it so solidly that no phantasm could have squeezed in beside her. But the presence of Dickerson became so veritable that Cornelia started up breathless, and hurried home, sick with the fear that she should find him waiting for her there.

She was afraid to go out the next morning, lest she should meet him on the street, though she knew that by this time he was a thousand miles away.

At the Synthesis she was ashamed to let Charmian think that her absent and tremulous mood had something to do with Ludlow; but she was so much more ashamed of the shabby truth that she would have been willing to accept the romance herself. This was very dishonest; it was very wicked and foolish; Cornelia saw herself becoming a guilty accomplice in an innocent illusion. She found strength to silence Charmian’s surmise, if not to undeceive her; she did her best; and as the days began to remove her farther and farther from the moment of her actual encounter with Dickerson, her reason came more and more into control of her conscience. She tried not to be the fool of a useless remorse for something she was at least not mainly to blame for. She had to make the struggle alone; there was no one she could advise with; her heart shut when she thought of telling any one her trouble; but in her perpetual reveries she argued the case before Ludlow.

It seemed to her as if he had come to render her a final judgment when his name was sent up to her room, that Saturday afternoon which ended the longest week of her life. She went down, and found him alone in the long parlor, and it was in keeping with her fantastic prepossession that he should begin, “I wonder how I shall say what I’ve come for?” as if he would fain have softened her sentence.

He kept her hand a moment longer than he need; but he was not one of those disgusting people who hold your hand while they talk to you, and whom Cornelia hated. She did not now resent it, though she was sensible of having to take her hand from him.

“I don’t know,” she answered, with hysterical flippancy. “If I did I would tell you.”

He laughed, as if he liked her flippancy, and he said, “It’s very simple. In fact, that’s what makes it so difficult.”

“Then you might practice on something hard first,” she suggested wildly. “How would the weather do?”

“Yes, hasn’t it been beautiful?” said Ludlow, with an involuntary lapse into earnestness. “I was in the Park to-day for a little effect I wanted to get, and it was heartbreaking to leave the woods. I was away up in those forest depths that look wild in spite of the asphalt. If you haven’t been there, you must go some day while the autumn color lasts. I saw a lot of your Synthesis ladies painting there. I didn’t know but I might see you.”

This was all very matter of fact. Cornelia took herself in hand, and shook herself out of her hallucination. “No, I don’t suppose it would be right for a person who was merely in the Preparatory to go sketching in the Park. And Charmian and I were very good to-day, and kept working away at our block hands as long as the light lasted.”

“Ah, yes; Miss Maybough,” said Ludlow; then he paused absently a moment. “Do you think she is going to do much in art?”

“How should I know?” returned Cornelia. She thought it rather odd he should recur to that after she had let him see she did not want to talk about Charmian’s art.

“Because you know that you can do something yourself,” said Ludlow. “That is the only kind of people who can really know. The other sort of people can make clever guesses; they can’t know.”

“And you believe that I can do something?” asked Cornelia, and a sudden revulsion of feeling sent the tears to her eyes. It was so sweet to be praised, believed in, after what she had been through. “But you haven’t seen anything of mine except those things — in the Fair House.”

“Oh, yes, I have. I’ve seen the drawings you submitted at the Synthesis. I’ve just seen them. I may as well confess it: I asked to see them.”

“You did! And — and — well?” she fluttered back.

“It will take hard work.”

“Oh, I know that!”

“And it will take time.”

“Yes, that is the worst of it. I don’t see how I can give the time.”

“Why?” he asked.

“Oh, because — I can’t very well be away from home.” She colored as she said this, for she could have been away from home well enough if she had the money. “I thought I would come and try it for one winter.”

He said lightly, “Perhaps you’ll get so much interested that you’ll find you can take more time.”

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“Well, then, you must get in all the work you can this winter. Block hands are well enough, but they’re not the whole of art nor the whole preparation for it.”

“Oh, I’ve joined the sketch class,” she said.

“Yes, that’s well enough, too,” he assented. “But I want you to come and paint with me,” he suddenly added.

“You? Me?” she gasped.

“Yes,” he returned. “I’ll tell you what I mean. I’ve been asked to paint a lady. She’ll have to come to my place, and I want you to come with her, and see what you can do, too. I hope it doesn’t seem too extraordinary?” he broke off, at sight of the color in her face.

“Oh, no,” said Cornelia. She wondered what Charmian would say if she knew this; she wondered what the Synthesis would say; the Synthesis held Mr. Ludlow in only less honor than the regular Synthesis instructors, and Mr. Ludlow had asked her to come and paint with him! She took shelter in the belief that Mrs. Burton must have put him up to it, somehow, but she ought to say something grateful, or at least something. She found herself stupidly and aimlessly asking, “Is it Mrs. Westley?” as if that had anything to do with the matter.

“No; I don’t see why I didn’t tell you at once,” said Ludlow. “It’s your friend, Miss Maybough.”

Cornelia relieved her nerves with a laugh. “I wonder how she ever kept from telling it.”

“Perhaps she didn’t know. I’ve only just got a letter from her mother, asking me to paint her, and I haven’t decided yet that I shall do it.”

She thought that he wanted her to ask him why, and she asked, “What are you waiting for?”

“For two reasons. Do you want the real reason first?” he asked, smiling at her.

She laughed. “No, the unreal one!”

“Well, I doubt whether Mrs. Maybough wrote to me of her own inspiration, entirely. I suspect that Wetmore and Plaisdell have been working the affair, and I don’t like that.”

“Well?”

“And I’m waiting for you to say whether I could do it. That’s the real reason.”

“How should I know?”

“I could make a picture of her,” he said, “but could I make a portrait? There is something in every one which holds the true likeness; if you don’t get at that, you don’t make a portrait, and you don’t give people their money’s worth. They haven’t proposed to buy merely a picture of you; they’ve proposed to buy a picture of a certain person; you may give them more, but you can’t honestly give them less; and if you don’t think you can give them that, then you had better not try. I should like to try for Miss Maybough’s likeness, and I’ll do that, at least, if you’ll try with me. The question is whether you would like to.”

“Like to? It’s the greatest opportunity! Why, I hope I know what a chance it is, and I don’t know why you ask me to.”

“I want to learn of you.”

“If you talk that way I shall know you are making fun of me.”

“Then I will talk some other way. I mean what I say. I want you to show me how to look at Miss Maybough. It sounds fantastic — —”

“It sounds ridiculous. I shall not do anything of the kind.”

“Very well, then, I shall not paint her.”

“You don’t expect me to believe that,” said Cornelia, but she did believe it a little, and she was daunted. She said, “Charmian would hate it.”

“I don’t believe she would,” said Ludlow. “I don’t think she would mind being painted by half-a-dozen people at once. The more the better.”

“That shows you don’t understand her,” Cornelia began.

“Didn’t I tell you I didn’t understand her? Now, you see, you must. I should have overdone that trait in her. Of course there is something better than that.”

“I don’t see how you could propose my painting her, too,” Cornelia relented, provisionally.

Ludlow was daunted in his turn; he had not thought of that. It would be a little embarrassing, certainly, but he could not quite own this. He laughed and said, “I have a notion she will propose it herself, if you give her a chance.”

“Oh,” said Cornelia, “if she does that, all well and good.”

“Then I may say to her mother that I will make a try at the portrait?”

“What have I to do with it?” Cornelia demanded, liking and not liking to have the decision seem left to her. “I shall have nothing to do with it if she doesn’t do it of her own accord.”

“You may be sure that she shall not have even a suggestion of any kind,” said Ludlow, solemnly.

“I shall know it if she does,” Cornelia retorted, not so solemnly, and they both laughed.

While he stayed and talked with her the affair had its reason and justification; it seemed very simple and natural; but when he went away it began to look difficult and absurd. It was something else she would have to keep secret, like that folly of the past; it cast a malign light upon Ludlow, and showed him less wise and less true than she had thought him. She must take back her consent; she must send for him, write to him, and do it; but she did not know how without seeming to blame him, and she wished to blame only herself. She let the evening go by, and she stood before the glass, putting up her hand to her back hair to extract the first dismantling hairpin, for a sleepless night, when a knock at her door was followed by the words, “He’s waitun’ in the parlor.” The door was opened and the Irish girl put a card in her hand.

XXIV.

The card was Ludlow’s, and the words, “Do see me, if you can, for a moment,” were scribbled on it.

Cornelia ran down stairs. He was standing, hat in hand, under the leafy gas chandelier in the parlor, and he said at once, “I’ve come back to say it won’t do. You can’t come to paint Miss Maybough with me. It would be a trick. I wonder I ever thought of such a thing.”

She broke out in a joyful laugh. “I knew you came for that.”

He continued to accuse himself, to explain himself. He ended, “You must have been despising me!”

“I despised myself. But I had made up my mind to tell Charmian all about it. There’s no need to do that, now it’s all over.”

“But it isn’t all over for me,” said Ludlow gloomily. “I went straight home from here, and wrote to Mrs. Maybough that I would paint her daughter, and now I’m in for it.”

He looked so acutely miserable that Cornelia gave way to a laugh, which had the effect of raising his fallen spirits, and making him laugh, too. They sat down together and began to talk the affair all over again.

Some of the boarders who were at the theatre came in before he rose to go.

Cornelia followed him out into the hall. “Then there is nothing for me to do about it?”

“No, nothing,” he said, “unless you want to take the commission off my hands, and paint the picture alone.” He tried to look gloomy again, but he smiled.

Every one slept late at Mrs. Montgomery’s on Sunday morning; all sects united in this observance of the day; in fact you could not get breakfast till nine. Cornelia opened her door somewhat later even than this, and started at the sight of Charmian Maybough standing there, with her hand raised in act to knock. They exchanged little shrieks of alarm.

“Did I scare you? Well, it’s worth it, and you’ll say so when you know what’s happened. Go right back in!” Charmian pushed Cornelia back and shut the door. “You needn’t try to guess, and I won’t ask you to. But it’s simply this: Mr. Ludlow is going to paint me. What do you think of that? Though I sha’n’t expect you to say at once. But it’s so. Mamma wrote to him several days ago, but she kept the whole affair from me till she knew he would do it, and he only sent his answer last night after dinner.” Charmian sat down on the side of the bed with the effect of intending to take all the time that was needed for the full sensation. “And now, while you’re absorbing the great central fact, I will ask if you have any idea why I have rushed down here this morning before you were up, or mamma either, to interview you?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Cornelia.

“You don’t happen to have an olive or a cracker any where about? I don’t need them for illustration, but I haven’t had any breakfast, yet.”

“There are some ginger-snaps in the bureau box right before you,” said Cornelia from the window-sill.

“Ginger-snaps will do, in an extreme case like this,” said Charmian, and she left her place long enough to search the bureau box. “What little ones!” she sighed. “But no matter; I can eat them all.” She returned to her seat on Cornelia’s bed with the paper bag which she had found, in her hand. “Well, I have thought it perfectly out, and all you have to do is to give your consent; and if you knew how much valuable sleep I had lost, thinking it out, you would consent at once. You know that the sittings will have to be at his studio, and that I shall have to have somebody go with me.” Cornelia was silent, and Charmian urged, “You know that much, don’t you?”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Cornelia allowed.

“Well, then, you know I could have mamma go, but it would bore her; or I could have a maid go, but that would bore me; and so I’ve decided to have you go.”

“Me?”

“Yes; and don’t say you can’t till you know what you’re talking about. It’ll take all your afternoons for a week or a fortnight, and you’ll think you can’t give the time. But I’ll tell you how you can, and more too; how you can give the whole winter, if it takes him that long to paint me; but they say he paints very rapidly, and gets his picture at a dash, or else doesn’t get it at all; and it’s neither more nor less than this: I’m going to get him to let you paint me at the same time? What do you think of that?”

All our motives are mixed, and it was not pure conscience which now wrought in Cornelia. It was pride, too, and a certain resentment that Charmian should assume authority to make Mr. Ludlow do this or that. For an instant she questioned whether he had not broken faith with her, and got Charmian to propose this; then she knew that it could not have been. She said coldly, “I can’t do it.”

“What! Not when I’ve come down here before breakfast to ask you? Why can’t you?” Charmian wailed.

“Because Mr. Ludlow was here last night, and asked me to do it.”

“He did? Then I am the happiest girl in the world! Let me embrace you, Cornelia!”

“Don’t be — disgusting!” said Cornelia, but she felt that Charmian was generously glad of the honor done her, and that she had wronged her by suspecting her of a wish to show power over Mr. Ludlow. “I told him I couldn’t, and I can’t, because it would have seemed to be making use of you, and — and — you wouldn’t like it, and I wouldn’t like it in your place, and — I wouldn’t do it. And I should have to tell you that he proposed it, and that you would perfectly hate it.”

“When it was the very first thing I thought of? Let me embrace you again, Cornelia Saunders, you adorable wooden image! Why his proposing it makes it perfectly divine, and relieves me of all responsibility. Oh, I would come down here every day before breakfast a whole week, for a moment like this! Then it’s all settled; and we will send him word that we will begin to-morrow afternoon. Let’s discuss the character you will do me in. I want you to paint me in character — both of you — something allegorical or mythical. Or perhaps you’re hungry, too! And I’ve eaten every one of the snaps.”

“No, I can’t do it,” Cornelia still protested; but the reasons why she could not, seemed to have escaped her, or to have turned into mere excuses. In fact, since Charmian had proposed it, and seemed to wish it, they were really no longer reasons. Cornelia alleged them again with a sense of their fatuity. She did not finally assent; she did not finally refuse; but she felt that she was very weak.

“I see what you’re thinking about,” said Charmian, “but you needn’t be afraid. I shall not show anything out. I shall be a perfect — tomb.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Cornelia, with a vexation heightened by the sense of her own insincerity.

“Oh, you know what. But from this time forth I don’t. It will be glorious not to let myself realize it. I shall just sit and think up conundrums, and not hear, or see, or dream anything. Yes, I can do it, and it will be splendid practice. This is the way I shall look.” She took a pose in Cornelia’s one chair, and put on an air of impenetrable mystery, which she relinquished a moment to explain, “Of course this back is rather too stiff and straight; I shall be more crouching.” She pushed a ginger-snap between her lips, and chewed enigmatically upon it. “See?” she said.

“Now, look here, Charmian Maybough,” said Cornelia sternly, “if you ever mention that again, or allude to it the least in the world — —”

“Don’t I say I won’t?” demanded Charmian, jumping up. “That will be the whole fun of it. From the very first moment, till I’m framed and hung in a good light, I’m going to be mum, through and through, and if you don’t speak of him, I sha’n’t, except as a fellow-artist.”

“What a simpleton!” said Cornelia. She laughed in spite of her vexation. “I’m not obliged to let what you think trouble me.”

“Of course not.”

“Your thinking it doesn’t make it so.”

“No — —”

“But if you let him see — —”

“The whole idea is not to let him see! That’s what I shall do it all for. Good-by!”

She put the paper bag down on the bureau for the greater convenience of embracing Cornelia.

“Why don’t you stay and have breakfast with me?” Cornelia asked. “You’ll be sick.”

“Breakfast? And ruin everything! I would rather never have any breakfast!” She took up the paper bag again, and explored it with an eager hand, while she stared absently at Cornelia. “Ah! I thought there was one left! What mites of things.” She put the last ginger-snap into her mouth, and with a flying kiss to Cornelia as she passed, she flashed out of the door, and down the stairs.

XXV.

After all, Ludlow decided that he would paint Charmian in her own studio, with the accessories of her peculiar pose in life about her; they were factitious, but they were genuine expressions of her character; he could not realize her so well away from there.

The first afternoon was given to trying her in this light and that, and studying her from different points. She wished to stand before her easel, in her Synthesis working-dress, with her palette on her thumb, and a brush in her other hand. He said finally, “Why not?” and Cornelia made a tentative sketch of her.

At the end of the afternoon he waited while the girl was putting on her hat in Charmian’s room, where she smiled into the glass at Charmian’s face over her shoulder, thinking of the intense fidelity her friend had shown throughout to her promise of unconsciousness.

“Didn’t I do it magnificently?” Charmian demanded. “It almost killed me; but I meant to do it if it did kill me; and now his offering to see you aboard the car shows that he is determined to do it, too, if it kills him. I call it masterly.”

“Well, don’t go and spoil it now,” said Cornelia. “And if you’re going to ask me every day how you’ve done — —”

“Oh, I’m not! Only the first day and the last day!”

“Well!”

As Ludlow walked with Cornelia toward the point where she was to take her car down town, he began, “You see, she is so dramatic, that if you tried to do her in any other way — that is, simply — you would be doing her artificially. You have to take her as she is, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know as I think Charmian is acting all the time, if that’s what you mean,” said Cornelia. “Or any of the time, even.”

Ludlow wished she had said she did not know that instead of as, but he reflected that ninety Americans out of a hundred, lettered or unlettered, would have said the same. “Oh, I don’t at all mean that she is, intentionally. It’s because it’s her nature that I want to recognize it. You think it is her nature, don’t you?” he asked deferentially.

“Oh, I suppose it is,” she answered; it amused her to have him take such a serious tone about Charmian.

“I shall have to depend a great deal on your judgment in that matter,” he went on. “You won’t mind it, I hope?”

“Not if you won’t mind it’s not being worth anything.”

“It will be worth everything!”

“Or if you won’t care for my not giving it, sometimes.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Well, I shouldn’t want to seem to talk her over.”

“Oh, no! You don’t think I expected you to do that? It was merely the right point of view I wanted to get.”

“I don’t know as I object to that,” said Cornelia.

The car which she wished to take came by, and he stopped it and handed her aboard. She thought he might decide to come with her, but he bowed his good-night, and she saw him walking on down town as she passed him.

At the end of a fortnight Ludlow had failed to get his picture of Charmian; at the end of a month he began with a new pose and a fresh theory. That quality of hers which he hoped to surprise with Cornelia’s help, and which was to give verity and value to his portrait, when once he expressed it there, escaped him still.

She was capable of perfect poses, but they were mere flashes of attitude. Then the antique mystery lurking in her face went out of it, and she became fin de siècle and romantic, and young ladyish, and uninteresting to Ludlow.

She made tea every afternoon when they finished, and sometimes the talk they began with before they began work prolonged itself till the time for the tea had come. On the days when Mr. Plaisdell dropped in for a cup, the talk took such a range that the early dark fell before it ended, and then Cornelia had to stay for dinner and to be sent home in Mrs. Maybough’s coupé.

She had never supposed there was anything like it in all the world. Money, and, in a certain measure, the things that money could buy, were imaginable in Pymantoning; but joys so fine, so simple as these, were what she could not have forecast from any ground of experience or knowledge. She tried to give her mother a notion of what they said and did; but she told her frankly she never could understand. Mrs. Saunders, in fact, could not see why it was so exciting; she read Cornelia’s letters to Mrs. Burton, who said she could see, and she told Mrs. Saunders that, she would like it as much as Cornelia did, if she were in her place; that she was a kind of Bohemian herself.

She tried to explain what Bohemian meant, and what Bohemia was; but this is what no one can quite do. Charmian herself, who aimed to be a perfect Bohemian, was uncertain of the ways and means of operating the Bohemian life, when she had apparently thrown off all the restrictions, for the afternoon, at least, that prevented its realization. She had a faultless setting for it. There never was a girl’s studio that was more like a man’s studio, an actual studio. Mr. Ludlow himself praised it; he said he felt at home in it, and he liked it because it was not carried a bit too far. Charmian’s mother had left her free to do what she wished, and there was not a convention of Philistine housekeeping in the arrangement of the place. Everything was in the admired disorder of an artist’s environment; but Mrs. Maybough insisted upon neatness. Even here Charmian had to submit to a compromise. She might and did keep things strewn all about in her studio, but every morning the housemaid was sent in to sweep it and dust it. She was a housemaid of great intelligence, and an imperfect sense of humor, and she obeyed with unsmiling scrupulosity the instructions she had to leave everything in Miss Charmian’s studio exactly as she found it, but to leave it clean. In consequence, this home of art had an effect of indescribable coldness and bareness, and there were at first some tempestuous scenes which Cornelia witnessed between Charmian and her mother, when the girl vainly protested:

“But don’t you see, mamma, that if you have it regularly dusted, it never can have any sentiment, any atmosphere?”

“I don’t see how you can call dust atmosphere, my dear,” said her stepmother. “If I left your studio looking as you want it, and there should be a fire, what would people think?”

“Well, if there should happen to be anybody from Wilbraham, Mass.,” Charmian retorted, “they might criticise, but I don’t think the New York Fire Department would notice whether the place had been dusted or not. But, go on, mamma! Some day I shall have a studio out of the house — Cornelia and I are going to have one — and then I guess you won’t have it dusted!”

“I’m sure Miss Saunders wouldn’t let it get dusty,” said Mrs. Maybough, and then, in self-defence, Charmian gave Cornelia the worst character for housekeeping that she could invent from her knowledge of Cornelia’s room.

She begged her pardon afterwards, but she said she had to do it, and she took what comfort she could in slamming everything round, as she called it, in her studio, when she went with Cornelia to have her coffee there. The maid restored it to its conscious picturesqueness the next day.

Charmian was troubled to decide what was truly Bohemian to eat, when they became hungry over their work. She provided candy and chocolate in all their forms and phases, but all girls ate candy and chocolate, and they were so missish, and so indistinctive, and they both went so badly with tea, which she must have because of the weird effect of the spirit-lamp under the kettle, that she disused them after the first week. There remained always crackers, which went with anything, but the question was what to have with them. Their natural association with cheese was rejected because Charmian said she should be ashamed to offer Mr. Ludlow those insipid little Neufchatel things, which were made in New Jersey, anyway, and the Gruyère smelt so, and so did Camembert; and pine-apple cheese was Philistine. There was nothing for it but olives, and though olives had no savor of originality, the little crescent ones were picturesque, and if you picked them out of the bottle with the end of a brush-handle, sharpened to a point, and the other person received them with their thumb and finger, the whole act was indisputably Bohemian.

There was one day when they all got on particularly well, and Charmian boldly ordered some champagne for a burst. The man brought back Apollinaris water, and she was afraid to ask why, for fear he should say Mrs. Maybough sent it. Ludlow said he never took champagne, and was awfully glad of the Apollinaris, and so the change was a great success, for neither Charmian nor Cornelia counted, in any case; they both hated every kind of wine.

Another time, Cornelia, when she came, found Charmian lighting one of the cigars kept for show on her mantel. She laughed wildly at Cornelia’s dismay, and the smoke, which had been going up her nose, went down her throat in a volume, and Cornelia had to run and catch her; she was reaching out in every direction for help.

Cornelia led her to the couch, which was still waiting its rugs to become a bed, and she lay down there, very pale and still, and was silent a long time, till Cornelia said, “Now, if I could find a moose somewhere to run over you,” and they both burst into a shriek of laughter.

“But I’m going to learn” Charmian declared. “Where did that cigar go?” She sprang up to look for it, but they never could find it, and they decided it must have gone into the fire, and been burnt up; that particular cigar seemed essential to the experiment, or at least Charmian did not try another.

They were both very grave after Ludlow came. When he went away, he said, with an absent look at Charmian, “You have a magnificent pallor to-day, Miss Maybough, and I must compliment you on keeping much quieter than usual.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Charmian, gravely, and as soon as the door closed upon him she flung herself into Cornelia’s arms, and they stifled their laughter in each other’s necks. It seemed to them that nothing so wildly funny had ever happened before; they remained a long while quaking over the question whether there was smell of smoke enough in the room to have made him suspect anything, and whether his congratulations were not ironical. Charmian said that her mistake was in not beginning with a cigarette instead of a cigar; she said she was ready to begin with a cigarette then, and she dared Cornelia to try one, too. Cornelia refused the challenge, and then she said, well, she would do it herself, some day.

There was a moment when it seemed to her that the Bohemian ideal could be realized to a wild excess in pop-corn. She bought a popper and three ears of corn, and brought them home tied up in paper, and fastened to some canvases she got for Cornelia. She insisted that it was part of the bargain that she should supply Cornelia’s canvases. But the process of popping made them all very red in the face; they had to take it by turns, for she would not let Ludlow hold the popper the whole time. They had a snowy heap of corn at last, which she put on the hearth before them in the hollow of a Japanese shield, detached from a suit of armor, for that use. They sat on the hearth to eat it, and they told ghost-stories and talked of the most psychological things they could think of. In all this Charmian put Cornelia forward as much as she dared, and kept herself in a sort of impassioned abeyance. If Cornelia had been the most jealous and exacting of principals she could not have received from her second a more single and devoted allegiance. Charmian’s joy in her fortunately mounted in proportion to the devotion she paid her, rather than Cornelia’s gratitude for it. She did not like to talk of herself, and these séances were nothing if not strictly personal; but Charmian talked for her, and represented her in phases of interest which Cornelia repudiated with a laugh, or denied outright, without scruple, when the invention was too bold. Charmian contrived that she should acquire the greater merit, from her refusals of it, and went on to fresh self-sacrifices in her behalf.

Sometimes she started the things they talked of; not because she ever seemed to have been thinking of them, or of anything, definitely, but because she was always apparently letting her mind wander about in space, and chanced upon them there. Mostly, however, the suggestions came from Ludlow. He talked of art, its methods, its principles, its duties to the age, the people, the civilization; the large moral uses, which kindled Charmian’s fancy, and made Cornelia laugh when Charmian proposed a scheme for the relief and refinement of the poor on the East Side, by frescoing the outsides of the tenement houses in Mott Street and Mulberry Bend, with subjects recalling the home life of the dwellers there: rice-fields and tea-plantations for the Chinese, and views of Etna and Vesuvius and their native shores for the Sicilians and Neapolitans, with perhaps religious histories.

Ludlow had to explain that he had not meant the employment of any such direct and obvious means, but the gradual growth of a conscience in art. Cornelia thought him vague, but it seemed clear to Charmian. She said, “Oh, yes; that,” and she made tea, and had him set fire to some pieces of Southern lightwood on her hearth, for the sake of the murky fumes and the wreaths of dusky crimson flame, which she said it was so weird to sit by.

In all matters of artistic theory and practice she set Cornelia the example of grovelling at the master’s feet, as if there could be no question of anything else; but in other things Cornelia sometimes asserted herself against this slavish submission with a kind of violence little short of impertinence. After these moral paroxysms, in which she disputed the most obviously right and reasonable things, she was always humiliated and cast down before his sincerity in trying to find a meaning in her difference from him, as if he could not imagine the nervous impulse that carried her beyond the bounds of truth, and must accuse himself of error. When this happened she would not let Charmian take her to task for her behavior; she would not own that she was wrong; she put the blame on him, and found him arrogant and patronizing. She had always known he was that kind of person, and she did not mean to be treated like a child in everything, even if he was a genius.

By this time they were far away from that point in Charmian’s romance where the faithful friend of the heroine remains forever constant to her vow not to speak to the heroine of the hero’s passion for her, and in fact rather finds it a duty to break her vow, and enjoys being snubbed for it. As the transaction of the whole affair took place in Charmian’s fancy, Cornelia had been obliged to indulge her in it, with the understanding that she should not let it interfere with their work, or try to involve her visibly or palpably in it.

With all their idling they had days when they worked intensely, and Ludlow was as severe with Cornelia’s work as he was with his own. He made her rub out and paint out, and he drew ruthless modifications of her work all over it, like the crudest of the Synthesis masters. He made her paint out every day the work of the day before, as they did in the Synthesis; though sometimes he paused over it in a sort of puzzle. Once he said, holding her sketch into the light he wanted, at the close of the afternoon, “If I didn’t know you had done that to-day, I should say it was the one you had done yesterday.”

Toward the end of the month he recurred to this notion again. “Suppose,” he said, “we keep this, and you do another to-morrow.”

The next day he said, in the same perplexity, “Well, keep this, and do another.”

After a week he took all her canvases, and set them one back of another, but so that he could see each in nearly the same light. He stood looking at them silently, with the two girls behind him, one at either shoulder.

“It’s as lovely as standing between two mirrors,” Charmian suggested dreamily.

“Pretty much of a sameness,” Cornelia remarked.

“Mm,” Ludlow made in his throat. He glanced over the shoulder next her, and asked, as if Charmian were not there, “What makes you do her always alike?”

“Because she is always alike.”

“Then I’ve seen her wrong,” said Ludlow, and he stared at Charmian as if she were a lay-figure. She bore his scrutiny as impassively as a lay-figure could.

He turned again to Cornelia’s sketches, and said gloomily, “I should like to have Wetmore see these.”

“Oh!” said Cornelia.

Charmian came to life with another “Oh!” and then she demanded. “When? We must have something besides tea for Mr. Wetmore.”

“I think I’ll ask him to step round in the morning,” said Ludlow, with authority.

Charmian said “Oh!” again, but submitted with the eagerness of a disciple; all phases of the art-life were equally precious, and even a snub from such a master must be willingly accepted.

He went away and would not have any tea; he had an air of trouble — almost of offence. “Isn’t he grand, gloomy and peculiar?” Charmian said. “I wonder what’s the matter?”

She turned to Ludlow’s picture which he had left standing on the chair where he painted at it in disdain of an easel, and silently compared it with Cornelia’s sketches. Then she looked at Cornelia and gave a dramatic start.

“What is the matter?” asked Cornelia. She came up and began to look at the picture, too.

Charmian demanded, “Don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t see anything,” said Cornelia, but as she looked something became apparent which she could not deny. She blushed violently and turned upon Charmian. “You ought to be ashamed,” she began, and she tried to take hold of her; she did not know why.

Charmian escaped, and fled to the other end of the room with a wild laugh, and stood there. Cornelia dropped into the chair before the picture, with her head fallen on her elbow. She seemed to be laughing, too, and Charmian went on:

“What is there to be ashamed of? I think it’s glorious. It’s one of the most romantic things I ever heard of. He simply couldn’t help it, and it proves everything I’ve said. Of course that was the reason he couldn’t see me all along. Why, if such a thing had happened to me, I should go round shouting it from the house-tops. I don’t suppose he knew what he was doing, or else he didn’t care; perfectly desperate. What fun!”

Cornelia kept laughing, but Charmian stopped and waited a moment and listened. “Why, Cornelia!” she said remorsefully, entreatingly, but she remained the length of the room away. Then she approached tentatively, and when Cornelia suddenly ceased to laugh she put her hand on her head, and tenderly lifted her face. It was dabbled with tears. “Cornelia!” she said again.

Cornelia sprang to her feet with a fierceness that sent her flying some yards away. “Charmian Maybough! Will you ever speak of this to any living soul?”

“No, no! Indeed I won’t — —” Charmian began.

“Will you ever think of it!”

“No — —”

“Because I don’t choose to have you think I am such a fool as to — to — —”

“No, indeed, I don’t.”

“Because there isn’t anything of it, and it wouldn’t mean anything, if there were.”

“No,” said Charmian. “The only thing is to tear him out of your heart; and I will help you!” She made as if she were ready to begin then, and Cornelia broke into a genuine laugh.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I guess there isn’t much to tear.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Nothing! What can I! There isn’t anything to do anything about. If it’s there, he knows it, and he’s left it there because he didn’t care what we thought. He was just trying something. He’s always treated me like a perfect — child. That’s all there is of it, and you know it.”

“Yes,” Charmian meekly assented. Then she plucked up a spirit in Cornelia’s behalf. “The only thing is to keep going on the same as ever, and show him we haven’t seen anything, and don’t care if we have.”

“No,” said Cornelia sadly, “I shall not come any more. Or, if I do, it will just be to —— I’m not certain yet what I shall do.” She provisionally dried her eyes and repaired her looks at the little mirror which hung at one side of the mantel, and then came back to Charmian who stood looking at Cornelia’s sketches, still in the order Ludlow had left them in. She stole her arm round Cornelia’s waist. “Well, anyway, he can’t say you’ve returned the compliment. They’re perfectly magnificent, every one; and they’re all me. Now we can both live for art.”

XXVI.

Wetmore came the next morning with Ludlow, and looked at Cornelia’s studies. “Well, there’s no doubt about her talent. I wonder why it was wasted on one of her sex! These gifted girls, poor things, there don’t seem to be any real call for them.” He turned from the sketches a moment to the arrangement of Charmian’s studio. “I suppose this is the other girl’s expression.” He looked more closely at the keeping of the room, and said, with a smile of mixed compassion and amusement, “Why, this girl seems to be trying to do the Bohemian act!”

“That is her pose,” Ludlow admitted.

“And does she get a great deal of satisfaction out of it?”

“The usual amount I fancy.” Ludlow began to tell of some of Charmian’s attempts to realize her ideal.

Wetmore listened with a pitying smile. “Poor thing! It isn’t much like the genuine thing, as we used to see it in Paris, is it? We Americans are too innocent in our traditions and experiences; our Bohemia is a non-alcoholic, unfermented condition. When it is diluted down to the apprehension of an American girl it’s no better, or no worse, than a kind of Arcadia. Miss Maybough ought to go round with a shepherdess’s crook and a straw hat with daisies in it. That’s what she wants to do, if she knew it. Is that a practicable pipe? I suppose those cigarettes are chocolates in disguise. Well!” He reverted to Cornelia’s canvases. “Why, of course they’re good. She’s doomed. She will have to exhibit. You couldn’t do less, Ludlow, than have her carry this one a little farther” — he picked out one of the canvases and set it apart— “and offer it to the Academy.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Ludlow, looking at it gravely.

“I don’t know. With the friends you’ve got on the Committee —— But you don’t suppose I came up here to see these things alone, did you? Where’s your picture?”

“I haven’t any,” said Ludlow.

“Ob, rubbish! Where’s your theory of a picture, then? I don’t care what you call it. My only anxiety, when you got a plain, simple, every-day conundrum like Miss Maybough to paint, was that you would try to paint the answer instead of the conundrum, and I dare say that’s the trouble. You’ve been trying to give something more of her character than you found in her face; is that it? Well, you deserved to fail, then. You’ve been trying to interpret her; to come the prophet! I don’t condemn the poetry in your nature, Ludlow,” Wetmore went on, “and if I could manage it for you, I think I could keep it from doing mischief. That is why I am so plain-spoken with you.”

“Do you call it plain-speaking?” Ludlow said, putting his picture where it could be seen best. “I was going to accuse you of flattery.”

“Well, you had better ponder the weighty truths I have let fall. I don’t go round dropping them on everybody’s toes.”

“Probably there are not enough of them,” Ludlow suggested.

“Oh, yes, there are.” Wetmore waited till Ludlow should say he was ready to have him look at his picture. “The fact is, I’ve been giving a good deal of attention to your case, lately. You’re not simple enough, and you’ve had the wrong training. You would naturally like to paint the literature of a thing, and let it go at that. But you’ve studied in France, where they know better, and you can’t bring yourself to do it. Your nature and your school are at odds. You ought to have studied in England. They don’t know how to paint there, but they’ve brought fiction in color to the highest point, and they’re not ashamed of it.”

“Perhaps you’ve boon theorizing, too,” said Ludlow, stepping aside from his picture.

“Not on canvas,” Wetmore returned. He put himself in the place Ludlow had just left. “Hello!” he began, but after a glance at Ludlow he went on, with the effect of having checked himself, to speak carefully and guardedly of the work in detail. His specific criticism was as gentle and diffident as his general censure of Ludlow was blunt and outright. It was given mostly in questions, and in recognitions of intention.

“Well, the sum of it is,” said Ludlow at last, “you see it’s a failure.”

Wetmore shrugged, as if this were something Ludlow ought not to have asked. He went back to Cornelia’s sketches, and looked at them one after another. “That girl knows what she’s about, or what she wants to do, and she goes for it every time. She has got talent. Whether she’s got enough to stand the training! That’s the great difference, after all. Lots of people have talent; that’s the gift. The question is whether one has it in paying quantity, or enough of it to amount to anything after the digging and refining. I should say that girl had, but very likely I might be mistaken.”

Ludlow joined in the examination of the sketches. He put his hand on the weak points as well as on the strong ones; he enjoyed with Wetmore the places where her artlessness had frankly offered itself instead of her art. There was something ingenuous and honest in it all that made it all charming.

“Yes, I think she can do it,” said Wetmore, “if she wants to bad enough, or if she doesn’t want to get married worse.”

Ludlow winced. “Isn’t there something a little vulgar in that notion of ours that a woman always wishes first and most of all to get married?”

“My dear boy,” said Wetmore, with an affectionate hand on Ludlow’s shoulder, “I never denied being vulgar.”

“Oh, I dare say. But I was thinking of myself.”

Ludlow sent word to Charmian at the Synthesis that he should not ask her to sit to him that afternoon, and in the evening he went to see Wetmore. It was eleven o’clock, and he would have been welcome at Wetmore’s any time between that hour of the night and two of the morning. He found a number of people. Mrs. Westley was there with Mrs. Rangeley; they had been at a concert together. Mrs. Wetmore had just made a Welsh rabbit, and they were all talking of the real meaning of the word “beautiful.”

“I think,” Mrs. Rangeley was saying, “that the beautiful is whatever pleases or fascinates. There are lots of good-looking people who are not beautiful at all, because they have no atmosphere: and you see other people, who are irregular, and quite plain even, and yet you come away feeling that they are perfectly beautiful.” Mrs. Rangeley’s own beauty was a little irregular. She looked anxiously round, and caught Wetmore in a smile. “What are you laughing at?” she demanded in rueful deprecation.

“Oh, nothing, nothing!” he said. “I was thinking how convincing you were!”

“Nothing of the kind!” said one of the men, who had been listening patiently till she fully committed herself. “There couldn’t be a more fallacious notion of the meaning of beauty. The thing exists in itself, independently of our pleasure or displeasure; they have almost nothing to do with it. If you mix it with them you are lost, as far as a true conception of it goes. Beauty is something as absolute as truth, and whatever varies from it, as it was ascertained, we’ll say, by the Greek sculptors and the Italian painters, is unbeautiful, just as anything that varies from the truth is untrue. Charm, fascination, atmosphere, are purely subjective; one feels them and another doesn’t. But beauty is objective, and nobody can deny it who sees it, whether he likes it or not. You can’t get away from it, any more than you can get away from the truth. There it is!”

“Where?” asked Wetmore. He looked at the ladies as if he thought one of them had been indicated.

“How delightful to have one’s ideas jumped on just as if they were a man’s!” sighed Mrs. Rangeley. Her opponent laughed a generous delight, as if he liked nothing better than having his reasoning brought to naught. He entered joyously into the tumult which the utterance of the different opinions, prejudices and prepossessions of the company became.

Ludlow escaped from it, and made his way to Mrs. Westley, in that remoter and quieter corner, which she seemed to find everywhere when you saw her out of her own house; there she was necessarily prominent.

“I think Mr. Agnew is right, and Mrs. Rangeley is altogether wrong,” she said. “There couldn’t be a better illustration of it than in those two young art-student friends of yours. Miss Saunders is beautiful in just that absolute way Mr. Agnew speaks of; you simply can’t refuse to see it; and Miss Maybough is fascinating, if you feel her so. I should think you’d find her very difficult to paint, and with Miss Saunders there, all the time, I should be afraid of getting her decided qualities into my picture.”

Ludlow said, “Ah, that’s very interesting.”

He meant to outstay the rest, for he wished to speak with Wetmore alone, and it seemed as though those people would never go. They went at last. Mrs. Wetmore herself went off to the domestic quarter of the apartment, and left the two men together.

“‘Baccy?” asked Wetmore, with a hospitable gesture toward the pipes on his mantel.

“No, thank you,” said Ludlow.

“Well?”

“Wetmore, what was it you saw in my picture today, when you began with that ‘Hello’ of yours, and then broke off to say something else?”

“Did I do that? Well, if you really wish to know — —”

“I do!”

“I’ll tell you. I was going to ask you which of those two girls you had painted it from. The topography was the topography of Miss Maybough, but the landscape was the landscape of Miss Saunders.” He waited, as if for Ludlow to speak; then he went on: “I supposed you had been working from some new theory of yours, and I thought I had said about as much on your theories as you would stand for the time.”

“Was that all?” Ludlow asked.

“All? It seems to me that’s a good deal to be compressed into one small ‘hello.’”

Wetmore lighted a pipe, and began to smoke in great comfort. “We were talking, just before you dropped in, of what you may call the psychical chemistry of our kind of shop: the way a fellow transmutes himself into everything he does. I can trace the man himself in every figure he draws or models. You can’t get away from yourself, simply because you are always thinking yourself, or through yourself; you can’t see or know any one else in any other way.”

“It’s a very curious thing,” said Ludlow, uneasily. “I’ve noticed that, too; I suppose every one has. But — good-night.”

Wetmore followed him out of the studio to the head of the public stairs with a lamp, and Ludlow stopped there again. “Should you think there was anything any one but you would notice?”

“You mean the two girls themselves? Well, I should say, on general principles, that what two such girls didn’t see in your work — —”

“Of course! Then — what would you do? Would you speak to her about it?”

“Which?”

“You know: Miss Saunders.”

“Ah! It seems rather difficult, doesn’t it?”

“Confoundedly.”

“Why, if you mean to say it was unconscious, perhaps I was mistaken. The thing may have been altogether in my own mind. I’d like to take another look at it — —”

“You can’t. I’ve painted it out.” Ludlow ran down one flight of the stairs, and then came stumbling quickly back. “I say, Wetmore. Do you tell your wife everything?”

“My dear boy, I don’t tell her anything. She finds it out. But, then, she never tells anybody.”

XXVII.

Ludlow sent word again to Charmian that he should not be able to keep his appointment for the afternoon, and as soon as he could hope to find Cornelia at home from the Synthesis, he went to see her.

He began abruptly, “I came to tell you, Miss Saunders, when I first thought of painting Miss Maybough, and now I’ve come to tell you that I’ve given it up.”

“Given it up?” she repeated.

“You’ve seen the failures I’ve made. I took my last one home yesterday, and painted it out.” He looked at Cornelia, but if he expected her to give him any sort of leading, he was disappointed. He had to conclude unaided, “I’m not going to try any more.”

She did not answer, and he went on, after a moment: “Of course, it’s humiliating to make a failure, but it’s better to own it, and leave it behind you; if you don’t own it, you have to carry it with you, and it remains a burden.”

She kept her eyes away from him, but she said, “Oh, yes; certainly.”

“The worst of it was the disappointment I had to inflict upon Mrs. Maybough,” he went on uneasily. “She was really hurt, and I don’t believe I convinced her after all that I simply and honestly couldn’t get the picture. I went to tell her this afternoon, and she seemed to feel some sort of disparagement — I can’t express it — in my giving it up.”

He stopped, and Cornelia asked, as if forced to say something, “Does Charmian know?”

“I suppose she does, by this time,” said Ludlow. He roused himself from a moment of revery, and added, “But I didn’t intend to oppress you with this. I want to tell you something — else.”

He drew a deep breath. She started forward where she sat, and looked past him at the door, as if to see whether the way of escape was clear. He went on: “I took Wetmore there with me yesterday, and I showed him your sketches, and he thinks you might get one of them into the Academy exhibition in the spring, after you’ve carried it a little farther.”

She sank back in her chair. “Does he?” she asked listlessly, and she thought, as of another person, how her heart would once have thrilled at the hope of this.

“Yes. But I don’t feel sure that it would be well,” said Ludlow. “I wanted to say, though, that I shall be glad to come and be of any little use I can if you’re going on with it.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Cornelia. She thought she was going to say something more, but she stopped stiffly at that, and they both stood in an embarrassment which neither could hide from the other. He repeated his offer, in other terms, and she was able finally to thank him a little more fitly, and to say that she should not forget his kind offer; she should not forget all he had done for her, all the trouble he had taken, and they parted with a vague alienation.

As we grow older, we are impatient of misunderstandings, of disagreements; we make haste to have them explained; but while we are young, life seems so spacious and so full of chances that we fetch a large compass round about such things, and wait for favoring fortuities, and hope for occasions precisely fit; we linger in dangerous delays, and take risks that may be ruinous.

Cornelia went hack to her work at the Synthesis as before, but she worked listlessly and aimlessly; the zest was gone, and the meaning. She knew that for the past month she had drudged through the morning at the Synthesis that she might free herself to the glad endeavor of the afternoon at Charmian’s studio with a good conscience. Ludlow’s criticism, even when it was harshest, was incentive and inspiration; and her life was blank and dull on the old terms.

The arts have a logic of their own, which seems no logic at all to the interests. Ludlow’s world found it altogether fit and intelligible that he should give up trying to paint Charmian if he had failed to get his picture of her, and thought he could not get it. Mrs. Maybough’s world regarded it as a breach of contract for him not to do what he had undertaken. She had more trouble to reconcile her friends to his behavior than she had in justifying it to herself. Through Charmian she had at least a second-hand appreciation of motives and principles that were instantly satisfactory to the girl and to all her comrades at the Synthesis; they accepted it as another proof of Ludlow’s greatness that he should frankly own he had missed his picture of her, and they exalted Charmian as a partner in his merit, for being so impossible. The arguments of Wetmore went for something with Mrs. Maybough, though they were mainly admissions to the effect that Ludlow was more of a crank than he had supposed, and would have to be humored in a case of the kind; but it was chiefly the courage and friendship of Mrs. Westley that availed. She enforced what she had to say in his behalf with the invitation to her January Thursdays which she had brought. She had brought it in person because she wished to beg Mrs. Maybough to let her daughter come with her friend, Miss Saunders, and pour tea at the first of the Thursdays.

“I got you off,” she said to Ludlow, when they met, “but it was not easy. She still thinks you ought to have let her see your last attempt, and left her to decide whether it was good or not.”

Mrs. Westley showed her amusement at this, but Ludlow answered gravely that there was a certain reason in the position. “If she’s disappointed in not having any portrait, though,” he added, “she had better take Miss Saunders’s.”

“Do you really mean that?” Mrs. Westley asked, with more or less of that incredulity concerning the performance of a woman which all the sex feel, in spite of their boasting about one another. “Has she so much talent?”

“Why not? Somebody has to have the talent.”

This was like Wetmore’s tone, and it made Mrs. Westley think of him. “And do you believe she could get her picture into the exhibition?”

“Has Wetmore been talking to you about it?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” said Ludlow. “That was Wetmore’s notion.”

“And does she know about it?”

“I mentioned it to her.”

“It would be a great thing for her if she could get her picture in — and sell it.”

“Yes,” Ludlow dryly admitted. He wished he had never told Mrs. Westley how Cornelia had earned the money for her studies at the Synthesis; he resented the implication of her need, and Mrs. Westley vaguely felt that she had somehow gone wrong. She made haste to retrieve her error by suggesting, “Perhaps Miss Maybough would object, though.”

“That’s hardly thinkable.” said Ludlow lightly. He would have gone away without making Mrs. Westley due return for the trouble she had taken for him with Mrs. Maybough, and she was so far vexed that she would have let him go without telling him that she was going to have his protégée pour tea for her; she had fancied that this would have pleased him.

But by one of those sudden flashes that seem to come from somewhere without, he saw himself in the odious light in which she must see him, and he turned in time. “Mrs. Westley, I think you have taken a great deal more pains for me than I’m worth. It’s difficult to care what such a poor little Philistine as Mrs. Maybough — the mere figment of somebody else’s misgotten money — thinks of me. But she is to be regarded, and I know that you have looked after her in my interest; and it’s very kind of you, and very good — it’s like you. If you’ve done it, though, with the notion of my keeping on in portraits, or getting more portraits to paint, I’m sorry, for I shall not try to do any. I’m not fit for that kind of work. I don’t say it because I despise the work, but because I despise myself. I should always let some wretched preoccupation of my own — some fancy, some whim — come between me and what I see my sitter to be, and paint that.”

“That is, you have some imagination,” she began, in defence of him against himself.

“No, no! There’s scope for the greatest imagination, the most intense feeling, in portraits. But I can’t do that kind of thing, and I must stick to my little sophistical fantasies, or my bald reports of nature. But Miss Saunders, if she were not a woman — excuse me! — —”

“Oh, I understand!”

“She could do it, and she will, if she keeps on. She could have a career; she could be a painter of women’s portraits. A man’s idea of a woman, it’s interesting, of course, but it’s never quite just; it’s never quite true; it can’t be. Every woman knows that, but you go on accepting men’s notions of women, in literature and in art, as if they were essentially, or anything but superficially, like women. I couldn’t get a picture of Miss Maybough because I was always making more or less than there really was of her. You were speaking the other night at Wetmore’s, of the uncertain quality of her beauty, and the danger of getting something else in,” said Ludlow, suddenly grappling with the fact, “and I was always doing that, or else leaving everything out. Her beauty has no fixed impression. It ranges from something exquisite to something grotesque; just as she ranges in character from the noblest generosity to the most inconceivable absurdity. You never can know how she will look or how she will behave. At least, I couldn’t. I was always guessing at her; but Miss Saunders seemed to understand her. All her studies of her are alike; the last might be taken for the first, except that the handling is better. It’s invariably the very person, without being in the least photographic, as people call it, because it is one woman’s unclouded perception of another. The only question is whether Miss Saunders can keep that saving simplicity. It may be trained out of her, or she may be taught to put other things before it. Wetmore felt the danger of that, when we looked at her sketches. I’m not saying they’re not full of faults; the technique is bad enough; sometimes it’s almost childish; but the root of the matter is there. She knows what she sees, and she tells.”

“Really?” said Mrs. Westley. “It is hard for a woman to believe much in women; we don’t expect anything of each other yet. Should you like her to paint me?”

“I?”

“I mean, do you think she could do it?”

“Not yet. She doesn’t know enough of life, even if she knew enough of art. She merely painted another girl.”

“That is true,” said Mrs. Westley with a sigh. She added impersonally; “But if people only kept to what they knew, and didn’t do what they divined, there would be very little art or literature left, it seems to me.”

“Well, perhaps the less the better.” said Ludlow, with a smile for the absurdity he was reduced to. “What was left would certainty be the best.”

He felt as if his praise of Cornelia were somehow retrieval; as if it would avail where he seemed otherwise so helpless, and would bring them together on the old terms again. There was, indeed, nothing explicit in their alienation, and when he saw Cornelia at Mrs. Westley’s first Thursday, he made his way to her at once, and asked her if she would give him some tea, with the effect of having had a cup from her the day before. He did not know whether to be pleased or not that she treated their meeting as something uneventful, too, and made a little joke about remembering that he liked his tea without sugar.

“I wasn’t aware that you knew that,” he said.

“Oh, yes; that is the way Charmian always made it for you; and sometimes I made it.”

“To be sure. It seems a great while ago. How are you getting on with your picture?”

“I’m not getting on,” said Cornelia, and she turned aside to make a cup of tea for an old gentleman, who confessed that he liked a spoonful of rum in his. General Westley had brought him up and presented him, and he remained chatting with Cornelia, apparently in the fatuity that if he talked trivially to her he would be the same as a young man. Ludlow stayed, too, and when the old gentleman got away, he said, the same as if there had been no interruption, “Why aren’t you getting on?”

“Because I’m not doing anything to it.”

“You ought to. I told you what Wetmore said of it.”

“Yes; but I don’t know how,” said Cornelia, with a laugh that he liked; it seemed an effect of pleasure in his presence at her elbow; though from time to time she ignored him, and talked with other people who came for tea. He noticed that she had begun to have a little society manner of her own; he did not know whether he liked it or not. She wore a very pretty dress, too; one he had not seen before.

“Will you let me show you how — as well as I can?”

“After I’ve asked you? Thank you!”

“I offered, once, before you asked.”

“Oh!” said Cornelia, with her face aslant from him over her tea-cups. “I thought you had forgotten that.”

He winced, but he knew that he deserved the little scratch. He did not try to exculpate himself, but he asked, “May I talk with Miss Maybough about it?”

Cornelia returned gayly, “It’s a free country.”

He rose from the chair which he had been keeping at her elbow, and looked about over the room. It was very full, and the first of Mrs. Westley’s Thursdays was successful beyond question. With the roving eye, which he would not suffer to be intercepted, he saw the distinguished people whom she had hitherto affected in their usual number, and in rather unusual number the society people who had probably come to satisfy an amiable curiosity; he made his reflection that Mrs. Westley’s evolution was proceeding in the inevitable direction, and that in another winter the swells would come so increasingly that there would be no celebrities for them to see. His glance rested upon Mrs. Maybough, who stood in a little desolation of her own, trying to look as if she were not there, and he had the inspiration to go and speak to her instead of her daughter; there were people enough speaking to Charmian, or seeming to speak to her, which serves much the same purpose on such occasions. She was looking her most mysterious, and he praised her peculiar charm to Mrs. Maybough.

“It’s no wonder I failed with that portrait.”

Mrs. Maybough said, “You must try again, Mr. Ludlow.”

“No, I won’t abuse your patience again, but I will tell you: I should like to come and look now and then at the picture Miss Saunders has begun of her, and that I want her to keep on with.”

“Why not?” asked Mrs. Maybough in the softest assent. She would not listen to the injuries which Ludlow heaped upon himself in proof of his unworthiness to cross her threshold.

He went back to Cornelia, and said, “Well, it’s arranged. I’ve spoken with Mrs. Maybough, and we can begin again whenever you like.”

“With Mrs. Maybough? You said you were going to speak to Charmian!”

“It doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Yes. I — I don’t know yet as I want to go on with the picture. I hadn’t thought — —”

“Oh!” said Ludlow, with marked politeness. “Then I misunderstood. But don’t let it annoy you. It doesn’t matter, of course. There’s no sort of appointment.”

He found Mrs. Westley in a moment of disoccupation before he went, and used a friend’s right to recognize the brilliancy of her Thursday. She refused all merit for it and asked him if he had ever seen any thing like the contrast of Charmian at the chocolate with Cornelia at the tea. “Did you notice the gown Miss Saunders had on? It’s one that her mother has just sent her from home. She says her mother made it, and she came to ask me, the other day, if it would do to pour tea in. Wasn’t it delightful? I’m going to have her spend a week with me in Lent. The general has taken a great fancy to her. I think I begin to appreciate her fascination; it’s her courage and her candor together. Most girls are so uncertain and capricious. It’s delightful to meet such a straightforward and downright creature.”

“Oh, yes,” said Ludlow.

XXVIII.

Cornelia knew that Ludlow was offended. She had not meant to hurt or offend him; though she thought he had behaved very queerly ever since he gave up painting Charmian. She had really not had time to think of his offer before he went off to speak with Charmian, as she supposed. The moment he was gone she saw that it would not do; that she could not have him coming to look at her work; she did not feel that she could ever touch it again. She wondered at him, and now if he had spoken to Mrs. Maybough instead of Charmian, it was not her fault, certainly. She did not wish to revenge herself, but she remembered how much she had been left to account for as she could, or painfully to ignore. If he was mystified and puzzled now, it was no more than she had been before.

There was nothing that Cornelia hated so much as to be made a fool of, and this was the grievance which she was willing fate should retaliate upon him, though she had not meant it at all. She ought to have been satisfied, and she ought to have been happy, but she was not.

She wished to escape from herself, and she eagerly accepted an invitation to go with Mrs. Montgomery to the theatre that night. The manager had got two places and given them to the landlady.

Cornelia had a passion for the theatre, and in the excitement of the play, which worked strongly in her ingenuous fancy, she forgot herself for the time, or dimly remembered the real world and her lot in it, as if it were a subordinate action of the piece. At the end of the fourth act she heard a voice which she knew, saying, “Well, well! Is this the way the folks at Pymantoning expect you to spend your evenings?” She looked up and around, and saw Mr. Dickerson in the seat behind her. He put forward two hands over her shoulder — one for her to shake, and one for Mrs. Montgomery.

“Why, Mr. Dickerson!” said the landlady, “where did you spring from? You been sitting here behind us all the time?”

“I wish I had,” said Dickerson. “But this seat is ‘another’s,’ as they say on the stage; he’s gone out ‘to see a man,’ and I’m keeping it for him. Just caught sight of you before the curtain fell. Couldn’t hardly believe my eyes.”

“But where are you? Why haven’t you been round to the house?”

“Well, I’m only here for a day,” said Dickerson, with a note of self-denial in his voice that Cornelia knew was meant for her, “and I thought I wouldn’t disturb you. No use making so many bites of a cherry. I got in so late last night I had to go to a hotel anyway.”

Mrs. Montgomery began some hospitable expostulations, but be waived them with, “Yes; that’s all right. I’ll remember it next time, Mrs. Montgomery,” and then he began to speak of the play, and he was so funny about some things in it that he made Cornelia laugh. He took leave of them when the owner of the seat came back. He told Mrs. Montgomery he should not see her again this time; but at the end of the play they found him waiting for them at the outer door of the theatre. He skipped lightly into step with them. “Thought I might as well see you home, as they say in Pymantoning. Do’ know as I shall be back for quite a while, this next trip, and we don’t see much ladies’ society on the road; at least, I don’t. I’m not so easy to make acquaintance as I used to be. I suppose it was being married so long. I can’t manage to help a pretty girl raise a car-window, or put her grip into the rack, the way I could once. Fact is, there don’t seem to be so many pretty girls as there were, or else I’m gettin’ old-sighted, and can’t see ‘em.”

He spoke to Mrs. Montgomery, but Cornelia knew he was talking at her. Now he leaned forward and addressed her across Mrs. Montgomery: “Do’ know as I told you that I saw your mother in Lakeland day before yesterday, Miss Saunders.”

“Oh, did you?” Cornelia eagerly besought him. The apparition of her mother rose before her; it was almost like having her actually there, to meet some one who had seen her so lately. “Was she looking well? The last letter she wrote she hadn’t been very — —”

“Well, I guess she’s all right, now. You know I think your mother is about the finest woman in this world, Miss Nelie, and the prettiest-looking. I’ve never told you about Mrs. Saunders, have I, Mrs. Montgomery? Well, you wouldn’t know but her and Miss Nelie were sisters. She looks like a girl, a little way off; and she is a girl, in her feelings. She’s got the kindest heart, and she’s the best person I ever saw. I tell you, it would be a different sort of a world if everybody was like Mrs. Saunders, and I should ha’ been a different sort of a man if I’d always appreciated her goodness. Well, so it goes,” he said, with a sigh of indefinite regret, which availed with Cornelia because it was mixed with praise of her mother; it made her feel safer with him and more tolerant. He leaned forward again, and said across Mrs. Montgomery, as before: “She was gettin’ off the train from Pymantoning, and I was just takin’ my train West, but I knew it was her as soon as I saw her walk. I was half a mind to stop and speak to her, and let my train go.”

Cornelia could see her mother, just how she would look, wandering sweetly and vaguely away from her train, and the vision was so delightful to her, that it made her laugh. “I guess you’re mother’s girl,” Mrs. Montgomery interpreted, and Mr. Dickerson said:

“Well, I guess she’s got a good right to be. I wasn’t certain whether it was her or Miss Saunders first when I saw her, the other day.”

At her door Mrs. Montgomery invited him to come in, and he said he did not know but he would for a minute, and Cornelia’s gratitude for his praise of her mother kept her from leaving them at once. In the dining-room, where Mrs. Montgomery set out a lunch for him, he began to tell stories.

Cornelia had no grudge against him for the past. She was only too glad that it had all fallen out as it did; and though she still knew that he was a shameless little wretch, she did not feel so personally disgraced by him, as she had at first, when she was not sure she could make him keep his distance. He was a respite from her own thoughts, and she lingered and lingered, and listened and listened, remotely aware that it was wrong, but somehow bewildered and constrained.

Mrs. Montgomery went down to the kitchen a moment, for something more to add to the lunch, and he seized the chance to say, “I know how you feel about me, Miss Saunders, and I don’t blame you. You needn’t be afraid; I ain’t going to trouble you. I might, if you was a different kind of girl; but I’ve thought it all over since I saw you, and I respect you. I hope you won’t give me away to Mrs. Montgomery, but if you do, I shall respect you all the same, and I sha’n’t blame you, even then.” The landlady returned, and he went on, “I was just tellin’ Miss Saunders about my friend Bob Whiteley’s railroad accident. But you’ve heard it so often.”

“Oh, well, do go on!” said Mrs. Montgomery, setting down the plate of cold chicken she had brought back with her.

It was midnight before he rose. “I declare I could listen all night,” said Mrs. Montgomery.

Cornelia could have done so, too, but she did not say it. While the talk lasted, she had a pleasure in the apt slang, and sinister wit and low wisdom, which made everything higher and nobler seem ridiculous. She tried helplessly to rise above the delight she found in it, and while she listened, she was miserably aware that she was unworthy even of the cheap respect which this amusing little wretch made a show of paying her before Mrs. Montgomery.

She loathed him, and yet she hated to have him go; for then she would be left to herself and her own thoughts. As she crept up the long stairs to her room, she asked herself if she could be the same girl who had poured tea at Mrs. Westley’s, and talked to all those refined people, who seemed to admire her and make much of her, as if she were one of them. Before, she had escaped from the toils of that folly of the past by disowning it; but now, she had voluntarily made it hers. She had wilfully entangled herself in its toils; they seemed to trip her steps, and make her stumble on the stairs as if they were tangible things. She had knowingly suffered such a man as that, whose commonness of soul she had always instinctively felt, to come back into her life, and she could never banish him again. She could never even tell any one; she was the captive of her shabby secret till he should come again and openly claim her. He would come again; there could be no doubt of that.

On the bureau before her glass lay a letter. It was from Ludlow, and it delicately expressed the hope that there had been nothing in his manner of offering to help her with her picture which made it impossible for her to accept. “I need not tell you that I think you have talent, for I have told you that before. I have flattered myself that I had a personal interest in it, because I saw it long ago, and I have been rather proud of thinking that you were making use of me. I wish you would think the matter over, and decide to go on with your picture of Miss Maybough. I promise to reduce my criticism to a minimum, for I think it is more important that you should keep on in your own way, even if you go a little wrong in it, now and then, than that you should go perfectly right in some one’s else. Do let me hear from you, and say that I may come Saturday to Miss Maybough’s studio, and silently see what you are doing.”

In a postscript he wrote: “I am afraid that I have offended you by something in my words or ways. If I have, won’t you at least let me come and be forgiven?”

She dropped her face on the letter where it lay open before her, and stretched out her arms, and moaned in a despair that no tears even came to soften. She realized how much worse it was to have made a fool of herself than to be made a fool of.

XXIX.

There was only one thing for Cornelia to do now, and she did it as well as she knew how, or could hope to know without the help that she could not seek anywhere. She wrote to Ludlow and thanked him, and told him that she did not think she should go on with the picture of Charmian, for the present. She said, in the first five or six drafts of her letter, that it had been her uncertainty as to this which made her hesitate when he spoke to her, but in every form she gave this she found it false; and at last she left it out altogether, and merely assured him that she had nothing whatever to forgive him. She wished to forbid his coming to see her; she did not know quite how to do that; but either the tone of her letter was forbidding enough, or else he felt that he had done his whole duty, now, for he did not come.

With moments of utter self-abasement, she had to leave Charmian to the belief that she was distraught and captious, solely for the reason they shared the secret of, and Charmian respected this with a devotion so obvious as to be almost spectacular. Cornelia found herself turning into a romantic heroine, and had to make such struggle against the transformation as she could in bursts of hysterical gayety. These had rather the effect of deepening Charmian’s compassionate gloom, till she exhausted her possibilities in that direction and began to crave some new expression. There was no change in her affection for Cornelia; and there were times when Cornelia longed to trust her fully; she knew that it would be safe, and she did not believe that it would lower her in Charmian’s eyes; but to keep the fact of her weakness altogether her own seemed the only terms on which she could bear it.

One day there came a letter from her mother out of her usual order of writing; she wrote on Sunday, and her letters reached Cornelia the next evening; but this letter came on a Wednesday morning, and the sight of it filled Cornelia with alarm, first for her mother, and then for herself; which deepened as she read:

“Dear Nie: That good-for-nothing little scrub has been here, talken aboute you, and acting as if you was hand-and-glove with him. Now Nelie, I don’t want to interfere with you anyway and I won’t if you say the word. But I never felt just righte about that fellow, and what I done long ago to make you tollerate him, and now I want to make it up to you if I can. He is a common low-down person, and he isn’t fit to speake to you, and I hope you wont speake to him. The divorce, the way I look at it, don’t make any difference; hese just as much married as what he ever was, and if he had never been married atoll, it wouldn’t of made any difference as far as I feel about it. Now Nelie, you are old enough to take care of yourself, but I hope if that fellow ever comes around you again, you’ll box his ears and be done with him. I know hes got a smooth tongue, and he can make you laugh in spite of yourselfe, but don’t you have anything to do with him.

“Mother.

“P. S. I have been talken it over with Mrs. Burton, and she thinks just the way I do aboute it. She thinks you are good enough for the best, and you no need to throw yourself away on such a perfect little scamp. In haste. How is that cellebrated picture that you are painting with Mr. Ludlow getting along?”

Cornelia got this letter from the postman at Mrs. Montgomery’s door, when she opened it to go out in the morning, and she read it on her way to the Synthesis. It seemed to make the air reel around her, and step by step she felt as if she should fall. A wild anger swelled her heart, and left no room there for shame even. She wondered what abominable lies that little wretch had told; but they must have been impudent indeed to overcome her mother’s life-long reluctance from writing and her well-grounded fears of spelling, so far as to make her send a letter out of the usual course. But when her first fury passed, and she began to grow weak in the revulsion, she felt only her helplessness in the presence of such audacity, and a fear that nothing could save her from him. If he could make her so far forget herself as to tolerate him, to listen to his stories, to laugh at his jokes, and show him that she enjoyed his company, after all she knew of him, then he could make her marry him, if he tried.

The logic was perfect, and it seemed but another link in the infrangible chain of events, when she found another letter waiting for her at the office of the Synthesis. It bore the postmark of Lakeland, of the same date as her mother’s, and in the corner of the envelope the business card of Gates & Clarkson, Dealers in Art Goods; J. B. Dickerson, in a line of fine print at the top was modestly “with” them.

The address, “Dear friend,” was written over something else which had been rubbed out, but beyond this the letter ran fluently and uninterruptedly along in a hand which had a business-like directness and distinctness. “I don’t know,” the writer said, “as you expected to hear from me, and I don’t know as I expected to let you, but circumstances alter cases, and I just wanted to drop you a line and tell you that I have been in Pymantoning and seen your mother. She is looking prime, and younger than ever. We had a long talk about old times, and I told her what a mistake I made. Confession is good for the soul, they say, and I took a big dose of it; I guess I confessed pretty much everything; regular Topsey style. Well, your mother didn’t spare me any, and I don’t know but what she was about right. The fact is, a man on the road don’t think as much about his p’s and q’s as he ought as long as he is young, and if I made a bad break in that little matrimonial venture of mine, I guess it was no more than I deserved to. I told your mother just how I happened to meet you again, and how the sight of you was enough to make another man of me. I was always a little too much afraid of you, or it might have turned out different; but I can appreciate a character like yours, and I want you to know it. I guess your mother sized it up about right when I said all I asked was to worship you at a distance, and she said she guessed you would look out for the distance. I told her you had, up to date. I want you to understand that I don’t presume on anything, and if we seemed to have a pretty good time after the theatre, the other night, it was because you didn’t want to spoil Mrs. Montgomery’s fun, and treated me well just because I was a friend of hers. Well, it’s pretty hard to realize that my life is ruined, and that I have got nobody but myself to thank for it, but I guess that’s what I’ve got to come to, sooner or later. It’s what your mother said, and I guess she was right; she didn’t spare me a bit, and I didn’t want her to. I knew she would write to you, as soon as I was gone, and tell you not to have anything to do with me; and if she has, all I have got to say is, all right. I have been a bad lot, and I don’t deny it, and all I can ask now, from this time forward, is to be kept from doing any more mischief. I don’t know as I shall ever see you again; I had a kind of presentiment I shouldn’t, and I told your mother so. I don’t know but I told a little more about how kind you were to me the other evening than what the facts would justify exactly, but as sure as you live I didn’t mean to lie about it. If I exaggerated any, it was because it seemed the greatest thing in the world to me, just to talk to you, and be where I could see you smile, and hear you laugh; you’ve got a laugh that is like a child’s, or an angel’s, if angels laugh. I’ve heard of their weeping, and if you knew my whole life, I think you would shed a tear or two over me. But that is not what I am trying to get at; I want to explain that if I appeared to brag of being tolerated by you, and made it seem any thing more than toleration, it was because it was like heaven to me not to have you give me the grand bounce again. And what I want to ask you now, is just to let me write to you, every now and then, and when I am tempted to go wrong, anyways — and a business life is full of temptations — let me put the case before you, and have you set me right. I won’t want but a word from you, and most part of the time, I shall just want to free my mind to you on life in general, and won’t expect any answer. I feel as if you had got my soul in your hands, and you could save it, or throw it away. That is all. I am writing on the train, and I have to use pencil. I hope you’ll excuse the stationery; it’s all the porter could get me, and I’m anxious to have a letter go back to you at once. I know your mother has written to you, and I want to corroborate everything she says against me.”

The letter covered half-a-dozen telegraph blanks, and filled them full, so that the diffident suggestion, “My permanent address is with Gates & Clarkson,” had to be written along the side of the first page.

The low cunning, the impudent hypocrisy, the leering pretence of reverence, the affectation of penitence, the whole fraudulent design, so flimsy that the writer himself seemed to be mocking at it, was open to Cornelia, and she read the letter through with distinct relief. Whatever the fascinations of Mr. Dickerson were when he was personally at hand, he had none at a distance, and when she ran over the pages a second time, it was with a laugh, which she felt sure he would have joined her in, if he had been there. It turned her tragedy into farce so completely, for the time, that she went through her morning’s work with a pleasure and a peace of mind which she had not felt for many days. It really seemed such a joke, that she almost yielded to the temptation of showing passages of the letter to Charmian; and she forebore only because she would have had to tell more than she cared to have any one know of Mr. Dickerson, if she did. She had a right to keep all that from those who had no right to know it, but she had no right, or if she had the right, she had not the power to act as if the past had never been. She set herself to bear what was laid upon her, and if she was ever to have strength for her burden she must begin by owning her weakness. There was no one to whom she could own it but her mother, and she did this fully as soon as she got back to her room, and could sit down to answer her letter. She enclosed Dickerson’s, and while she did not spare him, she took the whole blame upon herself, for she said she might have known that if she suffered him to see that he amused her or pleased her at all, he was impudent enough to think that he could make her like him again. “And mother,” she wrote, “you know I never really liked him, and was only too glad to get rid of him; you know that much. But I suppose you will wonder, then, why I ever let him speak to me if I really despised him as much as ever; and that is not easy to explain. For one thing he was with Mrs. Montgomery, and she likes him, and she has always been so good to me that I hated to treat him badly before her; but that is not the real reason, and I am not going to pretend it was. You know yourself how funny he is, and can make you laugh in spite of yourself, but it was not that, either. It was because I was angry with myself for having been angry with some one else, without a cause, as I can see it now, and I had made a fool of myself, and I wanted to get away from myself. I cannot tell you just how it was, yet, and I do not know as I ever can, but that was truly it, and nothing else, though the other things had something to do with it. I suppose it was just like men when they take a drink of whiskey to make them forget. The worst of it all is, and the discouraging part is, that it shows me I have not changed a particle. My temper is just us bad as ever, and I might as well be back at sixteen, for all the sense I’ve got. Sometimes it seems to me that the past is all there is of us, anyway. It seems to come up in me, all the time, and I am so ashamed I don’t know what to do. I make all kinds of good resolutions, and I want to be good, and then comes something and it is all over with me. Then, it appears as if it was not me, altogether, that is to blame. I know I was to blame, this last time, laughing at that little ‘scrub’s’ jokes as you call him, and behaving like a fool; but I don’t see how I was to blame for his coming back into my life, when I never really wanted him at all, and certainly never wished to set eyes on him again.

“I don’t suppose it would be the least use to ask you not to show this letter to Mrs. Burton, and I won’t, but if you do, I wish you would ask her what she thinks it means, and whether it’s fate, or foreordination, or what.”

Mrs. Saunders carried Cornelia’s letter to Mrs. Burton, as Cornelia had foreseen, but the question she put to her was not the abstraction the girl had suggested. “Mrs. Burton,” she asked, “who was it do you suppose Nie was so mad with that she had to go off and play the fool, that way?”

Mrs. Burton passed the point of casuistry too. “Well, of course I don’t know, Mrs. Saunders. Has she said anything about Mr. Ludlow lately?”

“No, she hain’t said a word, and that seems suspicious. She said a week or two ago that he had give up trying to paint that Maybough girl, and that she guessed she had got the last of her lessons from him; but she didn’t seem much troubled about it. But I guess by her not wantin’ to tell, it’s him. What do you suppose he did to provoke her?”

“Oh, just some young people’s nonsense, probably. It’ll come all right. You needn’t worry about it, because if it won’t come right of itself, he’ll make it come.”

“Oh, I’m not worrying about that,” said Mrs. Saunders, “I’m worrying about this.” She gave her the letter Cornelia had enclosed, and as Mrs. Burton began to read it she said, “If that fellow keeps on writing to her, I don’t know what I will do.”

XXX.

Ludlow did not come to see Cornelia, but they met, from time to time, at Mrs. Westley’s, where he was aware of her being rather taken up; at Mrs. Maybough’s, where he found it his duty to show himself after his failure with Charmian’s picture, so as to help Mrs. Maybough let people know there was nothing but the best feeling about it; and, more to his surprise, at Wetmore’s. At the painter’s, Charmian, who came with her, realized more than anywhere else, her dream of Bohemia, and Wetmore threw a little excess into the social ease of his life that he might fulfil her ideal. He proposed that Mrs. Wetmore should set the example of hilarities that her domestic spirit abhorred; he accused her of cutting off his beer, and invented conditions of insolvency and privation that surpassed Charmian’s wildest hopes. He borrowed money of Ludlow in her presence, and said that he did not know that he should ever be able to pay it back. He planned roystering escapades which were never put in effect, and once he really went out with the two girls to the shop of an old German, on the Avenue, who dealt in delicatessen, and bought some Nuremberg gingerbread and a bottle of lime-juice, after rejecting all the ranker meats and drinks as unworthy the palates of true Bohemians. He invited Charmian to take part in various bats, for the purpose of shocking the Pymantoning propriety of Cornelia, and they got such fun out of it as children do when the make-believe of their elders has been thinned to the most transparent pretence; but Charmian, who knew he was making fun of her, remained as passionately attached to the ideal he mocked as ever; and Cornelia had the guilty pang of wondering what he would think of her if he knew all about Mr. Dickerson, whose nature she now perceived to be that of the vulgarest batting.

She did not answer the letter she first got, nor any of those which immediately followed, and this had the effect of checking Mr. Dickerson’s ardor for so long a time that she began to think he would not trouble her again.

There was no real offence between her and Ludlow, or any but such as could wear itself away with time and the custom of friendly meeting. He had the magnanimity to ignore it when he first saw her after that Thursday of Mrs. Westley’s, and she had too keen a sense of having been a fool not to wish to act more wisely as soon as she could forget. There came so long a lapse between the letters of Mr. Dickerson that he ceased, at least perpetually, to haunt her thoughts. She had moments when it seemed as if she might justly consent to be happy again, or at least allow herself to enjoy the passing pleasure of the time without blame. She even suffered herself to fancy taking up the picture of Charmian, and carrying it farther under Ludlow’s criticism. She was very ambitious to try her fate with the Academy, and when he offered so generously to help her again, as if she had not refused him once so rudely, she could not deny him. She found herself once more in Charmian’s studio, and it all began to go on the same as if it had never stopped. It seemed like a dream, sometimes, when she thought about it, and it did not seem like a very wise dream. Cornelia now wished, above all things, to have a little bit of sense, as she phrased it in her thoughts; and she was aware that the present position of affairs might look rather crazy to some people. The best excuse for it was that it would have looked crazier yet if she had refused such an opportunity simply because of the circumstances. She began to be a little vague about the circumstances, and whether they were queer because she had fancied a likeness of herself in Mr. Ludlow’s picture of Charmian, or because she had afterwards made a fool of herself so irreparably as to be unworthy Mr. Ludlow’s kindness.

If it was merely kindness, and she was the object of charity, it was all right; she could accept it on those terms. She even tempted him to patronize her, but when he ventured upon something elderly and paternal in his monitions, she resented it so fiercely that she was astonished and ashamed. There was an inconsistency in it all that was perplexing, but not so perplexing as to spoil the pleasure of it.

There were not sittings every day, now; Ludlow came once or twice a week, and criticised her work; sometimes he struck off a sketch himself, in illustration of a point, and these sketches were now so unlike Cornelia, and so wholly like Charmian, that when he left them for her guidance, she studied them with a remote ache in her heart. “Never mind,” Charmian consoled her once, “he just does it on purpose.”

“Does what?” Cornelia demanded awfully.

“Oh, nothing!”

One of the sketches he fancied so much that he began to carry it forward. He worked at it whenever he came, and under his hand it grew an idealized Charmian, in which her fantastic quality expressed itself as high imagination, and her formless generosity as a wise and noble magnanimity.

She made fun of it when they were alone, but Cornelia could see that she was secretly proud of having inspired it, and that she did not really care for the constant portrait which Cornelia had been faithfully finishing up, while Ludlow changed and experimented, though Charmian praised her to his disadvantage.

One day he said he had carried his picture as far as he could, and he should let it go at that. It seemed an end of their pleasant days together; the two girls agreed that now there could be no further excuse for their keeping on, and Cornelia wondered how she could let him know that she understood. That evening he came to call on her at Mrs. Montgomery’s, and before he sat down he began to say: “I want to ask your advice, Miss Saunders, about what I shall do with my sketch of Miss Maybough.”

Cornelia blenched, for no reason that she could think of; she could not gasp out the “Yes” that she tried to utter.

“You see,” he went on, “I know that I’ve disappointed Mrs. Maybough, and I’d like to make her some sort of reparation, but I can’t offer her the sketch instead of the portrait; if she liked it she would want to pay for it, and I can’t take money for it. So I’ve thought of giving the sketch to Miss Maybough.”

He looked at Cornelia, now, for the advice he had asked, but she did not speak, and he had to say: “But I don’t know whether she likes it or not. Do you know whether she does? Has she ever spoken of it to you? Of course she’s said civil things to me about it. I beg your pardon! I suppose you don’t care to tell, and I had no right to inquire.”

“Oh, yes; yes.”

“Well?”

“I know she likes it; she must.”

“But she hasn’t said so?”

“Not — exactly.”

“Then what makes you think she does?”

“I don’t know. Any one would. It’s very beautiful.” Cornelia spoke very dryly, very coldly.

“But is it a likeness? Is it she? Her character? What do you think of it yourself?”

“I don’t know as I can say — —”

“Ah, I see you don’t like it!” said Ludlow, with an air of disappointment. “And yet I aimed at pleasing you in it.”

“At pleasing me?” she murmured thickly back.

“Yes, you. I tried to see her as you do; to do her justice, and if it is overdone, or flattered, or idealized, it is because I’ve been working toward your notion — —”

“Oh!” said Cornelia, and then, to the great amazement of herself as well as Ludlow, she began to laugh, and she laughed on, with her face in her handkerchief. When she took her handkerchief down, her eyes looked strange, but she asked, with a sort of radiance, “And did you think I thought Charmian was really like that?”

“Why, I didn’t know —— You’ve been very severe with me when I’ve suggested she wasn’t. At first, when I wanted to do her as Humbug, you wouldn’t stand it, and now, when I’ve done her as Mystery, you laugh.”

Cornelia pressed her handkerchief to her shining eyes, and laughed a little more. “That is because she isn’t either. Can’t you understand?”

“I could understand her being both, I think. Don’t you think she’s a little of both?”

“I told you,” said Cornelia gravely, “that I didn’t like to talk Charmian over.”

“That was a good while ago. I didn’t know but you might, by this time.”

“Why?” she asked. “Am I so changeable?”

“No; you’re the one constant and steadfast creature in a world of variableness. I didn’t really expect that. I know that I can always find you where I left you. You are the same as when I first saw you.”

It seemed to Cornelia that she had been asking him to praise her, and she was not going to have that. “Do you mean that I behave as badly as I did in the Fair House? No wonder you treat me like a child.” This was not at all what she meant to say, however, and was worse than what she had said before.

“No,” he answered seriously. “I meant that you are not capricious, and I hate caprice. But do I treat you like a child?”

“Sometimes,” said Cornelia, looking down and feeling silly.

“I am very sorry. I wish you would tell me how.”

She had not expected this pursuit, and she flashed back, “You are doing it now! You wouldn’t say that to — to — any one else.”

Ludlow paused thoughtfully. Then he said, “I seem to treat myself like a child when I am with you. Perhaps that’s what displeases you. Well, I can’t help that. It is because you are so true that I can’t keep up the conventions with you.” They were both silent; Cornelia was trying to think what she should say, and he added, irrelevantly, “If you don’t like that sketch of her, I won’t give it to her.”

“I? What have I to do with it?” She did not know what they were talking about, or to what end. “Yes, you must give it to her. I know she wants it. And I know how kind you are, and good. I didn’t mean — I didn’t wish to blame you — I don’t know why I’m making such a perfect fool of myself.”

She had let him have her hand somehow, and he was keeping it; but they had both risen.

“May I stay a moment?” he entreated.

No one thing now seemed more inconsequent than another, and Cornelia answered, with a catching of her breath, but as if it quite followed, “Why, certainly,” and they both sat down again.

“There is something I wish to tell — to speak of,” he began. “I think it’s what you mean. In my picture of Miss Maybough — —”

“I didn’t mean that at all. That doesn’t make any difference to me,” she broke incoherently in upon him. “I didn’t care for it. You can do what you please with it.”

He looked at her in a daze while she spoke. “Oh,” he said, “I am very stupid. I didn’t mean this sketch of mine; I don’t care for that, now. I meant that other picture of her — the last one — the one I painted out before I gave up painting her —— Did you see that it was like you?”

Cornelia felt that he was taking an advantage of her, and she lifted her eyes indignantly. “Mr. Ludlow!”

“Ah! Don’t think that,” he pleaded, and she knew that he meant her unexpressed sense of unfairness in him. “I know you saw it; and the likeness was there because — I wanted to tell you long ago, but I couldn’t, because when we met afterwards I was afraid that I was mistaken, in what I thought — hoped. I had no right to know anything till I was sure of myself; but — the picture was like you because you were all the time in my thoughts, and nothing and no one but you. Cornelia — —” She rose up crazily, and looked toward the door, as if she were going to run out of the room. “What is it?” he implored. “You know I love you.”

“Let me go!” she panted.

“If you tell me you don’t care for me — —”

“I don’t! I don’t care for you, and — let me go!”

He stood flushed and scared before her. “I — I am sorry. I didn’t mean — I hoped —— But it is all right —— I mean you are right, and I am wrong. I am very wrong.”

XXXI.

Ludlow stood aside and Cornelia escaped. When she reached her own room, she had a sense of her failure to take formal leave of him, and she mechanically blamed herself for that before she blamed herself for anything else. At first he was altogether to blame, and she heaped the thought of him with wild reproach and injury; if she had behaved like a fool, it was because she was trapped into it, and could not help it; she had to do so. She recalled distinctly, amidst the turmoil, how she had always kept in mind that a girl who had once let a man, like that dreadful little wretch, whose name she could not take into her consciousness, suppose that she could care for him, could not let a man like Ludlow care for her. If she did, she was wicked, and she knew she had not done it for she had been on her guard against it. The reasoning was perfect, and if he had spoiled everything now, he had himself to thank for it; and she did not pity him. Still she wished she had not run out of the room; she wished she had behaved with more dignity, and not been rude; he could laugh at her for that; it was like her behavior with him from the very beginning; there was something in him that always made her behave badly with him, like a petulant child. He would be glad to forget her; he would believe, now, that she was not good enough for him; and he might laugh; but at least he could not say that she had ever done or said the least thing to let him suppose that she cared for him. If she had, she should not forgive herself, and she should pity him as much as she blamed him now. There was nothing in her whole conduct that would have warranted her in supposing such a thing, if she were a man. Cornelia had this comfort, and she clung to it, till it flashed through her that not being a man, she could not imagine what the things were that could let a man suppose it. She had never thought of that before, and it dazed her. Perhaps he had seen all along that she did care for him, that he had known it in some way unknown and forever unknowable to her; the way a man knows; and all her disguises had availed nothing against him. Then, if he had known, he had acted very deceitfully and very wrongfully, and nothing could excuse him unless there had been other signs that a girl would recognize, too. That would excuse him, it would justify him, and she tried to see the affair with another woman’s eyes. She tried to see it with Charmian’s eves, but she knew they were filled with a romantic iridescence that danced before them and wrapt it in a rainbow mist. Then she tried Mrs. Westley’s eyes, which she knew were friendly to both Ludlow and herself, and she told her everything in her impassioned revery: all about that little wretch; all about the first portrait of Charmian and the likeness they had seen in it; all about what had happened since Ludlow began to criticise her work again. In the mere preparation for this review she found another’s agency insufferable; she abandoned herself wildly to a vision which burned itself upon her in mass and detail, under a light that searched motive and conduct alike, and left her no refuge from the truth. Then she perceived, how at every moment since they began those last lessons at Charmain’s he must have believed she cared for him and wished him to care for her. If she had not seen it too, it was because she was stupid, and she was to blame all the same. She was blind to what he saw in her, and she had thought because she was hidden from herself that she was hidden from him.

It was not a question now of whether she cared for him, or not; that was past all question; but whether she had not led him on to think she did, and she owned that down to the last moment before he had spoken, wittingly or unwittingly she had coaxed him to praise her, to console her, lo make love to her. She was rightly punished, and she was ready to suffer, but she could not let him suffer the shame of thinking himself wrong. That was mean, that was cowardly, and whatever she was, Cornelia was not base, and not afraid. She would have been willing to follow him into the night, to go to his door, and knock at it, and when he came, flash out at him, “I did love you, I do love you,” and then run, she did not know where, but somewhere out of the world. But he might not be there, or some one else might come to the door; the crude, material difficulties denied her the fierce joy of this exploit, but she could not rest (she should never really rest again) till she had done the nearest thing to it that she could. She looked at the little busy-bee clock ticking away on her bureau and saw that it was half-past eleven o’clock, and that there was no time to lose, and she sat down and wrote: “I did care for you. But I can never see you again. I cannot tell you the reason.”

She drew a deep breath when the thing was done, and hurried the scrap unsigned into an envelope and addressed it to Ludlow. She was in a frenzy till she could get it out of her hands and into the postal-box beyond recall. She pulled a shawl over her head and flew down stairs and out of the door into the street toward the postal-box on the corner. But before she reached it she thought of a special-delivery stamp, which should carry the letter to Ludlow the first thing in the morning, and she pushed on to the druggist’s at the corner beyond to get it. She was aware of the man staring at her, as if she had asked for arsenic; and she supposed she must have looked strange. This did not come into her mind till she found herself again at Mrs. Montgomery’s door, where she stood in a panic ecstasy at having got rid of the letter, which the special stamp seemed to make still more irrevocable, and tried to fit her night-latch into the lock. The cat, which had been shut out, crept up from the area, and rubbed with a soft insinuation against her skirt. She gave a little shriek of terror, and the door was suddenly pulled open from within.

She threw back her shawl from her head, and under the low-burning gas-light held aloft by the spelter statuette in the newel post, she confronted Mr. Dickerson. He had his hat on, and had the air of just having let himself in; his gripsack stood at his feet.

“Why, Nelie! Miss Saunders! Is that you? Why, where in the world —— Well, this is something like ‘Willy, we have missed you’; I’ve just come. What was the matter out there? Somebody trying to scare you? Well, there’s nothing to be afraid of now, anyway. How you do pant! But it becomes you. Yes, it does! You look now just like I’ve seen you all the time I’ve been gone! You didn’t answer any of my letters; I don’t know as I could have expected any different. But I did hope —— Nelie, it’s no use! I’ve got to speak out, and it’s now or never; maybe there won’t be another chance. Look here, my girl! I want you — I love you, Nie! and I always d — —”

He had got her hand, and he was drawing her toward him. She struggled to free herself, but he pulled her closer.

Her heart swelled with a fury of grief for all she had suffered and lost through him. She thought of what her mother had said she ought to do if he ever spoke to her again; there came without her agency, almost, three swift, sharp, electrical blows from the hand she had freed; she saw him reeling backward with his hand at his face, and then she was standing in her own room, looking at her ghost in the glass.

Now, if Mr. Ludlow knew, he would surely despise her, and she wished she were dead indeed: not so much because she had boxed Dickerson’s ears as because she had done what obliged her to do it.

XXXII.

It is hard for the young to understand that the world which seems to stop with their disaster is going on with smooth indifference, and that a little time will carry them so far from any fateful event that when they gather courage to face it they will find it curiously shrunken in the perspective. Nothing really stops the world but death, and that only for the dead. If we live, we must move on, we must change, we must outwear every motion, however poignant or deep. Cornelia’s shame failed to kill her; she woke the next morning with a self-loathing that seemed even greater than that of the night before, but it was actually less; and it yielded to the strong will which she brought to bear upon herself. She went to her work at the Synthesis as if nothing had happened, and she kept at it with a hard, mechanical faithfulness which she found the more possible, perhaps, because Charmian was not there, for some reason, and she had not her sympathy as well as her own weakness to manage. She surprised herself with the results of her pitiless industry, and realized for the first time the mysterious duality of being, in the power of the brain and the hand to toil while the heart aches.

She was glad, she kept assuring herself, that she had put an end to all hope from Ludlow; she rejoiced bitterly that now, however she had disgraced herself in her violent behavior, she had at least disgraced no one else. No one else could suffer through any claim upon her, or kindness for her, or had any right to feel ashamed of her or injured by her. But Cornelia was at the same time puzzled and perplexed with herself, and dismayed with the slightness of her hold upon impulses of hers which she thought she had overcome and bound forever. She made the discovery, which she was yet far too young to formulate, that she had a temperament to deal with that could at any time shake to ruins the character she had so carefully built upon it, and had so wholly mistaken for herself. In the midst of this dismay she made another discovery, and this was that perhaps even her temperament was not what she had believed it, but was still largely unknown to her. She had always known that she was quick and passionate, but she certainly had not supposed that she was capable of the meanness of wondering whether Mr. Ludlow would take her note as less final than she had meant it, and would perhaps seek some explanation of it. No girl that she ever heard or read of, had ever fallen quite so low as to hope that; but was not she hoping just that? Perhaps she had even written those words with the tacit intention of calling him back! But this conjecture was the mere play of a morbid fancy, and weak as she was, Cornelia had the strength to forbid it and deny it.

At the end of the afternoon, she pretended that she ought to go and see what had happened to Charmian, and on the way, she had time to recognize her own hypocrisy, and to resolve that she would do penance for it by coming straight at the true reason of her errand. She was sent to Charmian in her studio, and she scarcely gave her a chance to explain that she had staid at home on account of a cold, and had written a note for Cornelia to come to dinner with her, which she would find when she got back.

Cornelia said, “I want to tell you something, Charmian, and I want you to tell me what you really think — whether I’ve done right, or not.”

Charmian’s eyes lightened. “Wait a moment!” She got a piece of the lightwood, and put it on the fire which she had kindled on the hearth to keep the spring chill off, and went and turned Ludlow’s sketch of herself to the wall. “I know it’s about him.” Then she came and crouched on the tiger-skin at Cornelia’s feet, and clasped her hands around her knees, and fixed her averted face on the blazing pine. “Now go on,” she said, as if she had arranged the pose to her perfect satisfaction.

Cornelia went on. “It’s about him, and it’s about some one else, too,” and she had no pity on herself in telling Charmian all about that early, shabby affair with Dickerson.

“I knew it,” said Charmian, with a sigh of utter content, “I told you, the first time I saw you, that you had lived. Well: and has he — turned up?”

“He has turned up — three times,” said Cornelia.

Charmian shivered with enjoyment of the romantic situation. She reached a hand behind her and tried to clutch one of Cornelia’s but had to get on without it. “And well: have they met?”

“No, they haven’t,” said Cornelia crossly, but not so much with Charmian as with the necessity she was now in of telling her about her last meeting with Ludlow. She began, “They almost did,” and when Charmian in the intensity of her interest could not keep turning around to stare at her, Cornelia took hold of her head and turned her face toward the fire again. Then she went on to tell how it had all happened. She did not spare herself at any point, and she ended the story with the expression of her belief that she had deserved it all. “It wasn’t boxing that little wretch’s ears that was the disgrace; it was having brought myself to where I had to box them.”

“Yes, that was it,” sighed Charmian, with deep conviction.

“And I had to tell him that I could never care for him, because I couldn’t bear to tell him what a fool I had been.”

“No, no; you never could do that!”

“And I couldn’t bear to have him think I was better than I really was, or let him care for me unless I told him all about that miserable old affair.”

“No, you couldn’t, Cornelia,” said Charmian solemnly. “Some girls might; most girls would. They would just consider it a flirtation, and not say anything about it, or not till after they were engaged, and then just laugh. But you are different from other girls — you are so true! Yes, you would have to tell it if it killed you; I can see that; and you couldn’t tell it, and you had to break his heart. Yes, you had to!”

“Oh, Charmian Maybough! How cruel you are!” Cornelia flung herself forward and cried; Charmian whirled round, and kneeling before her, threw her arms around her, in a pose of which she felt the perfection, and kissed her tenderly.

“Why didn’t you let me see how you were looking? How I have gone on — —”

Cornelia pulled herself loose. “Charmian! Do you dare to mean that I want him to ever speak to me again — or look at me?”

“No, no — —”

“Or that I’m sorry I did it?”

“No; it’s this cold that’s making me so stupid.”

“If he were to come back again this instant, I should have to tell him just the same, or else tell him about that — that — and you know I couldn’t do that if I lived a thousand years.”

Now she melted, indeed, and suffered Charmian to moan over her, and fortify her with all the reasons she had urged herself in various forms of repetition. Charmain showed her again how impossible everything that she had thought impossible was, and convinced her of every conviction. She made Cornelia’s tragedy her romance, and solemnly exulted in its fatality, while she lifted her in her struggle of conscience to a height from which for the present at least, Cornelia could not have descended without a ruinous loss of self-respect. In the renunciation in which the worshipper confirmed her saint, Ludlow and his rights and feelings were ignored, and Cornelia herself was offered nothing more substantial than the prospect that henceforth she and Charmian could live for each other in a union that should be all principle on one side and all adoration on the other.

XXXIII.

Cornelia did not go to pass that week in Lent with Mrs. Westley. When she went, rather tardily, to withdraw her promise, she said that the time was now growing so short she must give every moment to the Synthesis. Mrs. Westley tacitly arranged to cancel some little plans she had made for her, and in the pity a certain harassed air of the girl’s moved in her, she accepted her excuses as valid, and said, “But I am afraid you are overworking at the Synthesis, Miss Saunders. Are you feeling quite well?”

“Oh, perfectly,” Cornelia answered with a false buoyancy from which she visibly fell. She looked down, and said, “I wish the work was twice as hard!”

“Ah, you have come to that very soon,” said Mrs. Westley; and then they were both silent, till she added, “How are you getting on with your picture of Miss Maybough?”

“Oh, I’m not doing anything with that,” said Cornelia, and she stood up to go.

“But you are going to exhibit it?” Mrs. Westley persisted.

“No, T don’t know as I am. I should have to offer it first.”

“It would be sure to be accepted; Mr. Ludlow thinks it would.”

“Oh, yes; I know,” said Cornelia, feeling herself get very red. “But I guess I won’t offer it. Goodbye.”

Mrs. Westley kept the impression of something much more personal than artistic in Cornelia’s reference to her picture, and when she met Ludlow a few days after, she asked him if he knew that Miss Saunders was not going to offer her picture to the Exhibition.

He said simply that he did not know it.

“Don’t you think she ought? I don’t think she’s looking very well, of late; do you?”

“I don’t know; isn’t she? I haven’t seen her — —” He began carelessly; he added anxiously. “When did you see her?”

“A few days ago. She came to say she could not take the time from the Synthesis to pay me that little visit. I’m afraid she’s working too hard. Of course, she’s very ambitious; but I can’t understand her not wanting to show her picture, there, and trying to sell it.”

Ludlow stooped forward and pulled the long ears of Mrs. Westley’s fashionable dog which lay on the rug at his feet.

“Have you any idea why she’s changed her mind?”

“Yes,” said Ludlow. “I think it’s because I helped her with it.”

“Is she so independent? Or perhaps I am not quite discreet — —”

“Why not? You say she didn’t look well?”

“She looked — worried.”

He asked, as if it immediately followed, “Mrs. Westley, should you mind giving me a little advice about a matter — a very serious matter?”

“If you won’t follow it.”

“Do we ever?”

“Well?”

“How much use can a man be to a girl when he knows that he can’t be of the greatest?”

“None, if he is sure.”

“He is perfectly sure.”

“He had better let her alone, then. He had better not try.”

“I am going to try. But I thank you for your advice more than if I were going to take it.”

They parted laughing; and Mrs. Westley was contented to be left with the mystery which she believed was no mystery to her.

Ludlow went home and wrote to Cornelia:

“Dear Miss Saunders: I hear you are not going to try to get your picture into the Exhibition. I will not pretend not to understand why, and you would not wish me to; so I feel free to say that you are making a mistake. You ought to offer your picture; I think it would be accepted, and you have no right to forego the chance it would give you, for the only reason you can have. I know that Mr. Wetmore would be glad to advise you about it; and I am sure you will believe that I have not asked him to do so.

“Yours sincerely,

“W. Ludlow.”

Cornelia turned this letter in many lights, and tried to take it in many ways; but in the end she could only take it in the right way, and she wrote back:

“Dear Mr. Ludlow: I thank you very much for your letter, and I am going to do what you say. Yours sincerely,

“Cornelia Saunders.

“P. S. I do appreciate your kindness very much.”

She added this postscript after trying many times to write a reply that would seem less blunt and dry; but she could not write anything at all between a letter that she felt was gushing and this note which certainly could not be called so; she thought the postscript did not help it much, but she let it go.

As soon as she had done so, it seemed to her that she had no reason for having done so, and she did not see how she could justify it to Charmian, whom she had told that she should not offer her picture. She would have to say that she had changed her mind simply because Mr. Ludlow had bidden her, and she tried to think how she could make that appear sufficient. But Charmian was entirely satisfied. “Oh, yes,” she said, “that was the least you could do, when he asked you. You certainly owed him that much. Now,” she added mystically, “he never can say a thing.”

They were in Charmian’s studio, where Cornelia’s sketch of her had been ever since she left working on it; and Charmian ran and got it, and set it where they could both see it in the light of the new event.

It’s magnificent, Cornelia. There’s no other word for it. Did you know he was going to give me his?”

“Yes, he told me he was going to,” said Cornelia, looking at her sketch, with a dreamy suffusion of happiness in her face.

“It’s glorious, but it doesn’t come within a million miles of yours. Mr. Wetmore isn’t on the Committee, this year, but he knows them all, and — —”

Cornelia turned upon her. “Charmian Maybough, if you breathe, if you dream a word to him about it I will never speak to you. If my picture can’t get into the Exhibition without the help of friends — —”

“Oh, I shan’t speak to him about it,” Charmian hastened to assure her. In pursuance of her promise, she only spoke to Mrs. Wetmore, and at the right time Wetmore used his influence with the committee. Then, for the reason, or the no reason that governs such matters, or because Cornelia’s picture was no better than too many others that were accepted, it was refused.

XXXIV.

The blow was not softened to Cornelia by her having prophesied to Charmian as well as to herself, that she knew her picture would be refused. Now she was aware that at the bottom of her heart she had always hoped and believed it would be accepted. She had kept it all from her mother, but she had her fond, proud visions of how her mother would look when she got her letter saying that she had a picture in the Exhibition, and how she would throw on her sacque and bonnet, and run up to Mrs. Burton for an explanation and full sense of the honor. In these fancies Cornelia even had them come to New York, to see her picture in position; it was not on the line, of course, and yet it was not skyed.

Her pride was not involved, and she suffered no sting of wounded vanity from its rejection: her hurt was in a tenderer place. She would not have cared how many people knew of her failure, if her mother and Mrs. Burton need not have known; but she wrote faithfully home of it, and tried to make neither much nor little of it. She forbade Charmian the indignation which she would have liked to vent, but she let her cry over the event with her. No one else knew that it had actually happened except Wetmore and Ludlow; she was angry with them at first for encouraging her to offer the picture, but Wetmore came and was so mystified and humbled by its refusal, that she forgave him and even comforted him for his part in the affair.

“She acted like a little man about it,” he reported to Ludlow. “She’ll do. When a girl can take a blow like that the way she does, she makes you wish that more fellows were girls. When I had my first picture refused, it laid me up. But I’m not going to let this thing rest. I’m going to see if that picture can’t be got into the American Artists’.”

“Better not,” said Ludlow so vaguely that Wetmore thought he must mean something.

“Why?”

“Oh — I don’t believe she’d like it.”

“What makes you think so? Have you seen her?”

“No — —”

“You haven’t? Well, Ludlow, I didn’t lose any time. Perhaps you think there was no one else to blame for the mortification of that poor child.”

“No, I don’t. I am to blame, too. I encouraged her to try — I urged her.”

“Then I should think you would go and tell her so.”

“Ah, I think she knows it. If I told her anything, I should tell her no one was to blame but myself.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be a bad idea.” Wetmore lighted his pipe. “Confound those fellows! I should like to knock their heads together. If there is anything like the self-righteousness of a committee when it’s wrong — but there isn’t, fortunately.”

It was not the first time that Ludlow had faltered in the notion of going to Cornelia and claiming to be wholly at fault. In thought he was always doing it, and there were times when he almost did it in reality, but he let these times pass effectless, hoping for some better time when the thing would do itself, waiting for the miracle which love expects, when it is itself the miracle that brings all its desires to fulfilment. He certainly had some excuses for preferring a passive part in what he would have been so glad to have happen. Cornelia had confessed that she had once cared for him, but at the same time she had implied that she cared for him no longer, and she had practically forbidden him to see her again. Much study of her words could make nothing else of them, and it was not until Ludlow saw his way to going impersonally in his quality of mistaken adviser, from whom explanation and atonement were due, that he went to Cornelia. Even then he did not quite believe that she would see him, and he gladly lost the bet he made himself, at the sound of a descending step on the stairs, that it was the Irish girl coming back to say that Miss Saunders was not at home.

They met very awkwardly, and Ludlow had such an official tone in claiming responsibility for having got Cornelia to offer her picture, and so have it rejected, that he hardly knew who was talking. “That is all,” he said, stiffly; and he rose and stood looking into his hat. “It seemed to me that I couldn’t do less than come and say this, and I hope you don’t feel that I’m — I’m unwarranted in coming.”

“Oh, no,” cried Cornelia, “it’s very kind of you, and no one’s to blame but me. I don’t suppose I should care; only” — she bit her lips hard, and added deep in her throat— “I hated to have my mother —— But I am rightfully punished.”

She meant for the Dickerson business, but Ludlow thought she meant for her presumption, and his heart smote him in tender indignation as her head sank and her face averted itself. It touched him keenly that she should speak to him in that way of her mother, as if from an instinctive sense of his loving and faithful sympathy; and then, somehow he had her in his arms, there in Mrs. Montgomery’s dim parlor; he noted, as in a dream, that his hat had fallen and was rolling half the length of it.

“Oh, wait!” cried the girl. “What are you doing —— You don’t know. There is something I must tell you — that will make you hate me — —” She struggled to begin somehow, but she did not know where.

“No,” he said. “You needn’t tell me anything. There isn’t anything in the world that could change me to you — nothing that you could tell me! Sometime, if you must — if you wish; but not now. I’ve been too miserable, and now I’m so happy.”

“But it’s very foolish, it’s silly! I tell you — —”

“Not now, not now!” He insisted. He made her cry, he made her laugh; but he would not listen to her. She knew it was all wrong, that it was romantic and fantastic, and she was afraid of it; but she was so happy too, that she could not will it for the moment to be otherwise. She put off the time that must come, or let him put it off for her, and gladly lost herself in the bliss of the present. The fear, growing more and more vague and formless, haunted her rapture, but even this ceased before they parted, and left her at perfect peace in his love — their love.

He told her how much she could be to him, how she could supplement him in every way where he was faltering and deficient, and he poured out his heart in praises of her that made her brain reel. They talked of a thousand things, touching them, and leaving them, and coming back, but always keeping within the circle of their relation to themselves. They flattered one another with the tireless and credulous egotism of love; they tried to tell what they had thought of each other from the first moment they met, and tried to make out that they neither had ever since had a thought that was not the other’s; they believed this. The commonplaces of the passion ever since it began to refine itself from the earliest savage impulse, seemed to have occurred to them for the first time in the history of the race; they accused themselves each of not being worthy of the other; they desired to be very good, and to live for the highest things.

They began this life by spending the whole afternoon together. When some other people came into the parlor, they went out to walk. They walked so long and far, that they came at last to the Park without meaning to, and sat on a bench by a rock. Other people were doing the same: nurses with baby-carriages before them; men smoking and reading; elderly husbands with their elderly wives beside them, whom they scarcely spoke to; it must have been a very common, idle thing, but to them it had the importance, the distinction of something signal, done for the first time. They staid there till it was almost dark, and then they went and had tea together in the restaurant of one of the vast hotels at the entrance of the Park. It was a very Philistine place, with rich-looking, dull-looking people, travellers and sojourners, dining about in its spacious splendor; but they got a table in a corner and were as much alone there as in the Park; their happiness seemed to push the world away from them wherever they were, and to leave them free within a wide circle of their own. She poured the tea for them both from the pot which the waiter set at her side; he looked on in joyful wonder and content. “How natural it all is,” he sighed. “I should think you had always been doing that for me. But I suppose it is only from the beginning of time!”

She let him talk the most, because she was too glad to speak, and because they had both the same thoughts, and it did not need two to utter them. Now and then, he made her speak; he made her answer some question; but it was like some question that she had asked herself. From time to time they spoke of others besides themselves; of her mother and the Burtons, of Charmian, of Mrs. Westley, of Wetmore; but it was in relation to themselves; without this relation, nothing had any meaning.

When they parted after an evening prolonged till midnight in Mrs. Montgomery’s parlor, that which had been quiescent in Cornelia’s soul, stirred again, and she knew that she was wrong to let Ludlow go without telling him of Dickerson. It was the folly of that agreement of theirs about painting Charmian repeating itself in slightly different terms, and with vastly deeper meaning, but to a like end of passive deceit, of tacit untruth; his wish did not change it. She thought afterwards she could not have let him go without telling him, if she had not believed somehow that the parallel would complete itself, and that he would come back, as he had done before, and help her undo what was false between them; but perhaps this was not so; perhaps if she had been sure he would not come back she would not have spoken; at any rate he did not come back.

XXXV.

Cornelia was left to no better counsels than those of Charmian Maybough, and these were disabled from what they might have been at their best, by Cornelia’s failure to be frank with her. If she was wronging Charmian by making her a half-confidant only, she could not be more open with her than with Ludlow, and she must let her think that she had told him everything until she had told him everything.

She did honestly try to do so, from time to time; she tried to lead him on to ask her what it was he had kept her from telling him in that first moment of their newly confessed love, when it would have been easier than it could ever be again. She reproached him in her heart for having prevented her then; it seemed as if he must know that she was longing for his help to be frank; but she never could make that cry for his help pass her lips where it trembled when she ought to have felt safest with him. She began to be afraid of him, and he began to be aware of her fear.

He went home after parting with her that first night of their engagement too glad of all that was, to feel any lack in it; but the first thought in his mind when he woke the next morning was not that perfect joy which the last before he fell asleep had been. His discomfort was a formless emotion at first, and it was a moment before it took shape in the mistake he had made, in forbidding Cornelia to tell him what she had kept from him, merely because he knew that she wished to keep it. He ought to have been strong enough for both, and he had joined his weakness to hers from a fantastic impulse of generosity. Now he perceived that the truth, slighted and postponed, must right itself at the cost of the love which it should have been part of. He began to be tormented with a curiosity to know what he could not ask, or let her suspect that he even wished to know. Whether he was with her or away from her, he always had that in his mind, and in the small nether ache, inappeasable and incessant, he paid the penalty of his romantic folly. He had to bear it and to hide it. Yet they both seemed flawlessly happy to others, and in a sort they seemed so to themselves. They waited for the chance that should make them really so.

Cornelia kept on at her work, all the more devotedly because she was now going home so soon and because she knew herself divided from it by an interest which made art seem slight and poor, when she felt secure in her happiness, and made it seem nothing when her heart misgave her. She never could devolve upon that if love failed her; art could only be a part of her love henceforward. She could go home and help her mother with her work till she died, if love failed her, but she could never draw another line.

There was going to be an exhibition of Synthesis work at the close of the Synthesis year, and there was to be a masquerade dance in the presence of the pictures. Charmian was the heart and soul of the masquerade, and she pushed its claims to the disadvantage of the exhibition. Some of the young ladies who thought that art should have the first place, went about saying that she was for the dance because she could waltz and mask better than she could draw, and would rather exhibit herself than her work, but it was a shame that she should make Miss Saunders work for her the way she did, because Miss Saunders, though she was so overrated, was really learning something, thanks to the Synthesis atmosphere; and Charmian Maybough would never learn anything. It was all very well for her to pretend that she scorned to send anything to a school exhibition, but she was at least not such a simpleton as to risk offering anything, for it would not be accepted. That, they said, was the real secret of her devotion to the masquerade and of her theory that the spirit of the Synthesis could be expressed as well in making that beautiful, as in the exhibition. Charmian had Cornelia come and stay with her the whole week before the great event, and she spent it in a tumult of joyful excitement divided between the tremendous interests of Ludlow’s coming every night to see Cornelia, and of having them both advise with her about her costume. Ludlow was invited to the dance, and he was to be there so as to drive home with her and Cornelia.

In the mean time Charmian’s harshest critics were not going to be outdone, if they could help it, in any way; they not only contributed to the exhibition, but four or five days beforehand they began to stay away from the Synthesis, and get up their costumes for the masquerade. Everything was to be very simple, and you could come in costume or not, as you pleased, but the consensus was that people were coming in costume, and you would not want to look odd.

The hall for the dancing was created by taking down the board partitions that separated three of the class-rooms; and hanging the walls with cheese-cloth to hide the old stains and paint-marks, and with pictures by the instructors. There was a piano for the music, and around the wall rough benches were put, with rugs over them to save the ladies’ dresses. The effect was very pretty, with palettes on nails, high up, and tall flowers in vases on brackets, and a life-study in plaster by one of the girls, in a corner of the room. It all had the charm of tasteful design yielding here and there to happy caprice; this mingling of the ordered and the bizarre, expressed the spirit, at once free and submissive, of the place. There had been a great deal of trouble which at times seemed out of all keeping with the end to be gained, but when it was all over, the trouble seemed nothing. The exhibition was the best the Synthesis had ever made, and those who had been left out of it were not the least of those in the masquerade; they were by no means the worst dressed, or when they unmasked, the plainest, and Charmian’s favorite maxim that art was all one, was verified in the costumes of several girls who could not draw any better than she could. If they were not on the walls in one way neither were they in another. After they had wandered heart-sick through the different rooms, and found their sketches nowhere, they had their compensation when the dancing began.

The floor was filled early, and the scene gathered gayety and brilliancy. It had the charm that the taste of the school could give in the artistic effects, and its spirit of generous comradery found play in the praises they gave each other’s costumes, and each other’s looks when they were not in costume. It was a question whether Cornelia who came as herself, was lovelier than Charmian, who was easily recognizable as Cleopatra, with ophidian accessories in her dress that suggested at once the serpent of old Nile, and a Moqui snake-dancer. Cornelia looked more beautiful than ever; her engagement with Ludlow had come out and she moved in the halo of poetic interest which betrothal gives a girl with all other girls; it was thought an inspiration that she should not have come in costume, but in her own character. Ludlow’s fitness to carry off such a prize was disputed; he was one of the heroes of the Synthesis, and much was conceded to him because he had more than once replaced the instructor in still-life there. But there remained a misgiving with some whether Cornelia was right in giving up her art for him; whether she were not recreant to the Synthesis in doing that; the doubt, freshly raised by her beauty, was not appeased till Charmian met it with the assertion that Cornelia was not going to give up her art at all, but after her marriage was coming back to study and paint with Ludlow.

Charmian bore her honors graciously, both as the friend of the new fiancée, and as the most successful mask of the evening. In her pride and joy, she set the example of looking out for girls who were not having a good time, and helping them to have one with the men of her own too constant following, and with those who stood about, wanting the wish or the courage to attach themselves to any one. In the excitement she did not miss Cornelia, or notice whether Ludlow had come yet. When she did think of her it was to fancy that she was off somewhere with him, and did not want to be looked up. Before the high moment when one of the instructors appeared, and chose a partner fur the Virginia Reel, Charmian had fused all the faltering and reluctant temperaments in the warmth of her amiability. Nobody ever denied her good nature, in fact, whatever else they denied her, and there were none who begrudged her its reward at last. She was last on the floor, when the orchestra, having played as long as it had bargained to, refused to play any longer, and the dance came to an end. She then realized that it was after twelve, and she remembered Cornelia. She rushed down into the dressing-room, and found her sitting there alone, bonneted and wrapped for the street. There was something suddenly strange and fateful about it all to Charmian.

“Cornelia!” she entreated. “What is the matter? What has become of Mr. Ludlow? Hasn’t he been here to-night?”

Cornelia shook her head, and made a hoarse murmur in her throat, as if she wished to speak and could not. There seemed to be some sort of weight upon her, so that she could not rise, but Charmian swiftly made her own changes of toilet necessary for the street, and got Cornelia out of doors and into her coupé which was waiting for them, before the others descended from the dancing-room, where the men staid to help the janitor put out the lights. As the carriage whirled them away, they could hear the gay cries and laughter of the first of the revellers who came out into the night after them.

XXXVI.

The solemn man-servant, who was now also sleepy, but who saved the respect due the young ladies by putting his hand over a yawn when he let them in, brought Cornelia a letter which he seemed to have been keeping on his professional salver. “A letter for you, miss. It came about an hour after you went out. The messenger said he wasn’t to wait for an answer, and Mrs. Maybough thought she needn’t send it to you at the Synthesis. She wanted me to tell you, miss.”

“Oh, it is all right, thank you,” said Cornelia, with a tremor which she could not repress at the sight of Ludlow’s handwriting.

Charmian put her arm round her. “Come into the studio, dear. You can answer it there, if you want to, at once.”

“Well,” said Cornelia, passively.

Charmian found her sitting with the letter in her lap, as if she had not moved from her posture while she had been away exchanging her Ptolemaic travesty for the ease of a long silken morning gown of Nile green. She came back buttoning it at her throat, when she gave a start of high tragic satisfaction at something stonily rigid in Cornelia’s attitude, but she kept to herself both her satisfaction and the poignant sympathy she felt at the same time, and sank noiselessly into a chair by the fireless hearth.

After a moment Cornelia stirred and asked, “Do you want to see it, Charmian?”

“Do you want me to?” Charmian asked back, with her heart in her throat, lest the question should make Cornelia change her mind.

There were two lines from Ludlow, unsigned: “I have received the enclosed letter, which I think you should see before I see you again.” His note enclosed a letter from Dickerson to Ludlow, which ran:

“Although you are a stranger to me, I feel an old friend’s interest in your engagement to Miss Cornelia Saunders, of which I have just been informed. I can fully endorse your good taste. Was once engaged to the young lady myself some years since, and have been in correspondence with her up to a very recent date. Would call and offer my well wishes in person, but am unexpectedly called away on business. Presume Miss Saunders has told you of our little affair, so will not enlarge upon the facts. Please give her my best regards and congratulations.

“Yours respect’ly,

“J. B. Dickerson.”

Charmian let the papers fall to her lap, and looked at Cornelia who stared blankly, helplessly back at her. “What a hateful, spiteful little cad!” she began, and she enlarged at length upon Mr. Dickerson’s character and behavior. She arrested herself in this pleasure, and said, “But I don’t understand why Mr. Ludlow should have staid away this evening on account of his letter, or why he should have sent it to you, if he knew about it already. It seems to me — —”

“He didn’t know about it,” said Cornelia. “I haven’t told him yet.”

“Why, Cornelia!”

The reproachful superiority in Charmian’s tone was bitter to Cornelia, but she did not even attempt to resent it. She said meekly, “I did try to tell him. I wanted to tell him the very first thing, but he wouldn’t let me, then; and then — I couldn’t.”

Charmian’s superiority melted into sympathy: “Of course,” she said.

“And now, I never can tell him,” Cornelia desperately concluded.

“Never!” Charmian assented. The gleam of common-sense which had visited her for an instant, was lost in the lime-light of romance, which her fancy cast upon the situation. “And what are you going to do?” she asked, enraptured by its hopeless gloom.

“Nothing. What can I do?”

“No. You can do nothing.” She started, as with a sudden inspiration. “Why, look here, Cornelia! Why wouldn’t this do?”

She stopped so long that Cornelia asked, somewhat crossly, “Well?”

“I don’t know whether I’d better tell you. But I know it would be the very thing. Do you want me to tell you?”

“Oh, it makes no difference,” said Cornelia, hopelessly.

Charmian went on tentatively, “Why, it’s this. I’ve often heard of such things: Me to pretend that I wrote this horrid Dickerson letter, and there isn’t any such person; but I did it just for a joke, or wanted to break off the engagement because I couldn’t bear to give you up. Don’t you see? It’s like lots of things on the stage, and I’ve read of them, I’d be perfectly willing to sacrifice myself in such a cause, and I should have to, for after I said I had done such a thing as that, he would never let you speak to me again, or look at me, even. But I should die happy — —” She stopped, frozen to silence, by the scornful rejection in Cornelia’s look. “Oh, no, no! It wouldn’t do! I see it wouldn’t! Don’t speak! But there’s nothing else left, that I know of.” She added, by another inspiration, “Or, yes! Now — now — we can live for each other, Cornelia. You will outlive this. You will be terribly changed, of course; and perhaps your health may be affected; but I shall always be with you from this on. I have loved you more truly than he ever did, if he can throw you over for a little thing like that. If I were a man I should exult to ignore such a thing. Oh, if men could only be what girls would be if they were men! But now you must begin to forget him from this instant — to put him out of your mind — your life.”

To further this end Charmian talked of Ludlow for a long time, and entered upon a close examination of his good and bad qualities; his probable motives for now behaving as he was doing, and the influence of the present tragedy upon his future as a painter. It would either destroy him or it would be the fire out of which he would rise a master; he would degenerate into a heartless worldling, which he might very well do, for he was fond of society, or he might become a gloomy recluse, and produce pictures which the multitude would never know were painted with tears and blood. “Of course, I don’t mean literally; the idea is rather disgusting; but you know what I mean, Cornelia. He may commit suicide, like that French painter, Robert; but he doesn’t seem one of that kind, exactly; he’s much more likely to abandon art and become an art-critic. Yes, it may make an art-critic of him.”

Cornelia sat in a heavy muse, hearing and not hearing what she said. Charmian bustled about, and made a fire of lightwood, and then kindled her spirit lamp, and made tea, which she brought to Cornelia. “We may as well take it,” she said. “We shall not sleep to-night anyway. What a strange ending to our happy evening. It’s perfectly Hawthornesque. Don’t you think it’s like the Marble Faun, somehow? I believe you will rise to a higher life through this trouble, Cornelia, just as Donatello did through his crime. I can arrange it with mamma to be with you; and if I can’t I shall just simply abandon her, and we will take a little flat like two newspaper girls that I heard of, and live together. We will get one down-town, on the East Side.”

Cornelia look the tea and drank it, but she could not speak. It would have been easier to bear if she had only had herself alone to blame, but mixed with her shame, and with her pity for him, was a sense of his want of wisdom in refusing to let her speak at once, when she wanted to tell him all about Dickerson. That was her instinct; she had been right, and he wrong; she might be to blame for everything since, but he was to blame then and for that. Now it was all wrong, and past undoing. She tried, in the reveries running along with what she was hearing of Charmian’s talk, every way of undoing it that she could imagine: she wrote to Ludlow; she sent for him; she went to him; but it was all impossible. She did not wish to undo the wrong that she might have back her dream of happiness again; she had been willing to be less than true, and she could wish him to know that she hated herself for that.

It went on and on, in her brain; there was no end to it; no way to undo the snarl that life had tangled itself up into. She looked at the clock on the mantel, and saw that it was three o’clock. “Why don’t you go to bed?” she asked Charmian.

“I shall not go to bed, I shall never go to bed,” said Charmian darkly. She added, “If you’ll come with me, I will.”

“I can’t,” said Cornelia, with a sort of dry anguish. She rose from where she had been sitting motionless so long. “Let me lie down on that couch of yours, there. I’m tired to death.”

She went toward the alcove curtained off from the studio, and Charmian put her arm round her to stay her and help.

“Don’t. I can get along perfectly well.”

“I will lie down here with you,” said Charmian. “You won’t mind?”

“No, I shall like to have you.”

Cornelia shivered as she sat down on the edge of this divan, and Charmian ran back to put another stick of lightwood on the fire, and turn the gas down to a blue flame. She pulled down rugs and draperies, and dragged them toward the alcove for covering. “Oh, how different it is from the way I always supposed it would be when I expected to sleep here!” She sank her voice to a ghostly whisper, and yawned. “Now you go to sleep, Cornelia; but if you want anything I shall be watching here beside you, and you must ask me. Would you like anything now? An olive, or a — cracker?”

“Nothing,” said Cornelia, tumbling wearily upon the couch.

Charmian surveyed her white, drawn face with profound appreciation. Then she stretched herself at her side, and in a little while Cornelia knew by her long, regular breathing that she had found relief from the stress of sympathy in sleep.

XXXVII.

The cold north-light of the studio showed that it was broad day when a tap at the door roused Cornelia from a thin drowse she had fallen into at dawn. She stirred, and Charmian threw herself from the couch to her feet. “Don’t move — I’ll get it — let me — —” She tossed back the black mane that fell over her eyes and stared about her. “What — what is it? Have I been asleep? Oh, I never can forgive myself!”

The tapping at the door began again, and she ran to open it. The inexorable housemaid was there; she said that Mrs. Maybough was frightened at her not finding either of the young ladies in their rooms, and had sent her to see if they were in the studio.

“Yes, tell her we are, please; we fell asleep on the couch, please; and, Norah! we want our breakfast here. We are very — busy, and we can’t be disturbed.”

She twisted her hair into a loose knot, and cowered over the hearth, where she kindled some pieces of lightwood, and then sat huddled before it, watching the murky roll of its flames, till the maid came back with the tray. Charmian wished to bring Cornelia a cup of coffee where she still lay, so crushed with the despair that had rolled back upon her with the first consciousness that she thought she never could rise again. But as the aroma of the coffee that Charmian poured out stole to her, she found strength to lift herself on her elbow, and say, “No, I will take it there with you.”

The maid had put the tray on the low table where Charmian usually served tea, but in spite of all the poignant associations of this piece of furniture with happier times, the two girls ate hungrily of the omelette and the Vienna rolls; and by the time the maid had put the studio in order, and beaten up the cushions of the couch into their formal shape, they had cleared the tray, and she took it away with her quite empty. Even in the house of mourning, and perhaps there more than elsewhere, the cravings of the animal, which hungers and thirsts on, whatever happens, satisfy themselves, while the spirit faints and despairs.

Perhaps if Cornelia had thought of it she would not have chosen to starve to no visible end, but she did not think, and she ate ravenously as long as there was anything left, and when she had eaten, she felt so much stronger in heart and clearer in mind, that after the maid had gone she began, “Charmian, I am going home, at once, and you mustn’t try to stop me; I mean to Mrs. Montgomery’s. I want to write to Mr. Ludlow. I shall tell him it is all true.”

“Cornelia!”

“Yes; what else could I tell him?”

“Oh, you must! But must you write it?”

“Yes; I never can see him again, and I won’t let him think that I want to, or to have him forgive me. He was to blame, but I was the most, for he might have thought it was just some little thing, and I knew what it was, and that it was something he ought to know at once. He will always believe now that it was worse than it is, if anything can be worse. I shall tell him that after I had seen Mr. Dickerson again, and knew just what a — a dreadful thing he was, I tolerated him, and lured him on — —”

“You didn’t lure him on, and I won’t let you say such a thing, Cornelia Saunders,” Charmian protested. “You always did profess to have sense, and that isn’t sense.”

“I never had any sense,” said Cornelia, “I can see that now. I have been a perfect fool from the beginning.”

“You may have been a fool,” said Charmian, judicially, “but you have not been false, and I am not going to let you say so. If you don’t promise not to, I will tell Mr. Ludlow myself that you were always perfectly true, and you couldn’t help being true, any more than a — a broomstick, or anything else that is perpendicular. Now, will you promise?”

“I will tell him just how everything was, and he can judge. But what difference? It’s all over, and I wouldn’t help it if I could.”

“Yes, I know that,” said Charmian, “but that’s all the more reason why you shouldn’t go and say more than there is. He can’t think, even if you’re just to yourself, that you want to — wheedle.”

“Wheedle!” cried Cornelia.

“Well, not wheedle, exactly, but what would be wheedling in some other girl — in me,” said Charmian, offering herself up. “Will you let me see the letter before you send it? I do believe I’ve got more sense than you have about such things, this minute.”

“You wouldn’t have any to brag of, even then,” said Cornelia with gloomy meekness, and unconscious sarcasm. “Yes, I will let you see the letter.”

“Well, then, you needn’t go home to write it; you can write in your room here. I want to see that letter, and I sha’n’t let it go if there’s the least thing wrong in it.” She jumped up gayly, as if this were the happiest possible solution of the whole difficulty, and began to push Cornelia out of the room. “Now go, and after you’ve put yourself in shape, and got your hair done, you’ll have some self-respect. I suppose you won’t begin to write till you’re all as spick and span as if you were going to receive a call from him. I’m such a slouch that I should just sit down and write, looking every which-way — but I know you can’t.”

She came back to the studio an hour later, and waited impatiently for Cornelia’s appearance. She was so long coming that Charmian opened the door, to go and ask her some question, so as to get her to say that she would be with her in a moment, even if she didn’t come, and almost ran against the man-servant, who was bringing her a card. She gave a little nervous shriek, and caught it from his salver.

“For Miss Saunders, miss,” he said, in respectful deprecation of her precipitate behavior.

“Yes, yes; it’s all right. Say that she — is in the studio.” Charmian spoke in thick gasps. The card was Ludlow’s; and between the man’s going and Ludlow’s coming, she experienced a succession of sensations which were, perhaps, the most heroically perfect of any in a career so much devoted to the emotions. She did not stop to inquire what she should do after she got Ludlow there, or to ask herself what he was coming for, a little after nine o’clock in the morning; she simply waited his approach in an abandon which exhausted the capabilities of the situation, and left her rather limp and languid when he did appear. If it had been her own affair she could not have entered into it with more zeal, more impassioned interest. So far as she reasoned her action at all, it was intended to keep Ludlow, after she got him there, till Cornelia should come, for she argued that if she should go for her Cornelia would suspect something, and she would not come at all.

XXXVIII.

When Ludlow found Charmian and not Cornelia waiting for him, he managed to get through the formalities of greeting decently, but he had an intensity which he had the effect of not allowing to relax. He sat down with visible self-constraint when Charmian invited him to do so.

“Miss Saunders has just gone to her room; she’ll be back in a moment.” She added, with wild joy in a fact which veiled the truth, “She is writing a note.”

“Oh!” said Ludlow, and he was so clearly able not to say anything more that Charmian instantly soared over him in smooth self-possession. “We were so sorry not to see you last night, Mr. Ludlow. It was a perfect success, except your not coming, of course.”

“Thank you,” said Ludlow, “I was — I couldn’t come — at the last moment.”

“Yes, I understood you intended to come. I do wish you could have seen Miss Saunders! I don’t believe she ever looked lovelier. I wanted her to go in costume, you know, but she wouldn’t, and in fact when I saw her, I saw that she needn’t. She doesn’t have to eke herself out, as some people do.”

Ludlow was aware of the opening for a civil speech, but he was quite helpless to use it. He stared blankly at Charmian, who went on:

“And then, Cornelia is so perfectly truthful, you know, so sincere, that any sort of disguise would have been out of character with her, and I’m glad she went simply as herself. We were up so late talking, that we slept till I don’t know when, this morning. I forgot to wind my clock. I suppose it’s very late.”

“No,” said Ludlow, “it’s so very early that I ought to apologize for coming, I suppose. But I wished to see Miss Saunders — —” He stopped, feeling that he had given too rude a hint.

Charmian did not take it amiss. “Oh, Cornelia is usually up at all sorts of unnatural hours of the day. I expected when she came here to spend the week with me, we should have some fun, sitting up and talking, but last night is the only time we have had a real good talk, and I suppose that was because we were so excited that even Cornelia couldn’t go to sleep at once. I do wish you could have seen some of the costumes, Mr. Ludlow!”

Ludlow began to wonder whether Cornelia had got his letter, or whether, if she had got it, she had kept the matter so carefully from Charmian that she had not suspected anything was wrong. Or, what was more likely, had not Cornelia cared? Was she glad to be released, and had she joyfully hailed his letter and its enclosure as a means of escape? His brain reeled with these doubts, which were the next moment relieved with the crazy hope that if his letter had not yet been delivered, he might recover it, and present the affair in the shape he had now come to give it. He believed that Charmian must have some motive for what she was doing and saying beyond the hospitable purpose of amusing him till Cornelia should appear. We always think that other people have distinct motives, but for the most part in our intercourse with one another we are really as superficially intentioned, when we are intentioned at all, as Charmian was in wishing to get what sensation she could out of the dramatic situation by hovering darkly over it, and playing perilously about its circumference. She divined that he was not there to deepen its tragical tendency at least, and she continued without well knowing what she was going to say next: “Yes, I think that the real reason why Cornelia wouldn’t go in costume was that she felt that it was a kind of subterfuge. She keeps me in a perfect twitter of self-reproach. I tell her I would rather have the conscience of the worst kind of person than hers; I could get along with it a great deal easier. Don’t you think you could, Mr. Ludlow?”

“Yes, yes,” said Ludlow aimlessly. He rose up, and pretended a curiosity about a sketch on the wall; he could not endure to sit still.

“Won’t you have a cup of tea?” asked Charmian. “Cornelia and I had some last night, and — —”

“No, thank you,” said Ludlow.

“Do let me ring for some coffee, then?”

“No, I have just breakfasted — that is, I have breakfasted — —”

“Why, were you up early, too?” said Charmian, with what seemed to Ludlow a supernatural shrewdness. “It’s perfectly telepathic! The Psychical Research ought to have it. It would be such fun if we could get together and compare our reasons for waking so early. But Cornelia and I didn’t know just when we did wake, and I suppose the Psychical Research wouldn’t care for it without. She seems to be writing a pretty long note, or a pretty hard one!” Ludlow lifted his downcast eyes, and gave her a look that was ghastly. “Did you look at your watch?” she asked.

“Look at my watch?” he returned in a daze.

“When you woke, that is.”

“Oh!” he groaned.

“Because — —”

Charmian suddenly stopped and ran to the door, which Cornelia opened before she could reach it.

Cornelia gave her a letter. “See if this will do,” she said spiritlessly, and Charmian caught it from her hand.

“Yes, yes, I’ll read it,” she said, as she slipped out of the door and shut Cornelia in.

Cornelia saw Ludlow, and made an instinctive movement of flight.

“For pity’s sake, don’t go!” he implored.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she said, the same dejection in her tone.

“No, they told me you were here; but let me stay long enough to tell you —— That abominable letter — you ought never to have known that it existed. I don’t expect you to forgive me; I don’t ask you; but I am so ashamed; and I would do anything if I could recall — undo — Cornelia! Isn’t there any way of atoning for it? Come! I don’t believe a word of that scoundrel’s. I don’t know what his motive was, and I don’t care. Let it all be as if nothing of the kind had ever happened. Dearest, don’t speak of it, and I never will!”

Cornelia was tempted. She could see how he had wrought himself up to this pitch, and she believed that he would keep his word; we believe such miracles of those we love, before life has taught us that love cannot make nature err against itself. In his absence the duty she had to do was hard; in his presence it seemed impossible, now when he asked her not to do it. She had not expected ever to see him again, or to be tried in this way. She had just written it all to him, but she must speak it now. She had been weak, and had brought on herself the worst she had to tell, and should she be false, even though he wished it, and not tell?

She forced the words out in a voice that hardly seemed her own at first.

“No, we made a mistake; you did, and I did, too. There was something — something — I wanted to tell you at first, but you wouldn’t let me, and I was glad you wouldn’t; but it was all wrong, and now I have got to tell you, when everything is over, and it can never do any good.” She gave a dry sob, and cast upon him a look of keen reproach, which he knew he deserved. “I was engaged to him once. Or,” she added, as if she could not bear to see him blench, “he could think so. It was the year after you were in Pymantoning.”

She went on and told him everything. She did not spare herself any fact that she thought he ought to know, and as she detailed the squalid history, it seemed to her far worse than it had ever been in her own thoughts of it.

He listened patiently, and at the end he asked, “Is that all?”

“All?”

“Yes. I wanted to know just how much you have to forgive me.” She looked at him stupefied. “Yes, I ought to have let you tell me all this before, when you wanted to, at first. But I have been a romantic fool, and I have made you suffer for my folly. I have left you to think, all the time, that I might care for this; that I might not know that you were yourself through it all, or that I could care for you any the less because of it, when it only makes you dearer to me.”

“No!” she said for all protest, and he understood.

“Oh, I don’t mean that you were always right in it, or always wise; but I can truly say it makes no difference with me except to make you dearer. If I had always had more sense than I had, you would not have to blame yourself for the only wrong or unwise thing you have done, and I am really to blame for that.”

She knew that he meant her having taken refuge from his apparent indifference in Dickerson, when she fell below her ideal of herself. This was what she had thought at the time; it was the thought with which she had justified herself then, and she could not deny it now. She loved him for taking her blame away, and she said to strengthen herself for her doom, “Well, it is all over!”

“No,” he said, “why is it over? Don’t be worse than I was. Let us be reasonable about it! Why shouldn’t we talk of it as if we were other people? Do you mean it is all over because you think I must be troubled by what you’ve told me, or because you can’t forgive me for not letting you tell me before?”

“You know which!” she said.

“Well, then, what should you think of some other man if he could care for such a thing, when some other girl had told it him of herself? You would think him very unjust and — —”

“But it isn’t some other man; it isn’t some other girl!”

“No, I’m glad it isn’t. But can’t we reason about it as if it were?”

“No, we can’t. It would be — wicked.”

“It would be wicked not to. Do you think you ought to break our engagement because I didn’t let you tell me this at first?”

Cornelia could not say that she did; she could hardly say, “I don’t know.”

Ludlow assumed that she had said more. “Then if you don’t think you ought to do it for that, do you think you ought to do it for nothing?”

“For nothing?” Cornelia asked herself. Was there really nothing else, then? She stood looking at him, as if she were asking him that aloud. He was not so far off as when they began to talk, just after they had risen, and now he suddenly came much nearer still.

“Are you going to drive me from you because I don’t care for all this?”

“You ought to care,” she persisted.

“But if I don’t? If I can’t? Then what is the reason you won’t let it all be as if nothing had happened? Ah, I see! You can’t forgive me for sending you his letter! Well, I deserve to be punished for that!”

“No; I should have despised you if you hadn’t — —”

“Well?”

She was silent, looking at the floor. He put his arm round her, and pushed her head down on his shoulder. “Oh, how silly!” she said, with lips muted against his own.

XXXIX.

Cornelia and Ludlow were married at Pymantoning in the latter part of June, and he spent the summer there, working at a picture which he was going to exhibit in the fall. At the same time he worked at a good many other pictures, and he helped Cornelia with the things she was trying. He painted passages and incidents in her pictures, sometimes illustratively, and sometimes for the pleasure of having their lives blended in their work, and he tried to see how nearly he could lose his work in hers. He pretended that he learned more than he taught in the process, and that he felt in her efforts a determining force, a clear sense of what she wanted to do, that gave positive form and direction to what was vague and speculative in himself. He was strenuous that she should not, in the slightest degree, lapse from her ideal and purpose, or should cease to be an artist in becoming a wife. He contended that there was no real need of that, and though it had happened in most of the many cases where artists had married artists, he held that it had happened through the man’s selfishness and thoughtlessness, and not through the conditions. He was resolved that Cornelia should not lose faith in herself from want of his appreciation, or from her own over-valuation of his greater skill and school; and he could prove to any one who listened that she had the rarer gift. He did not persuade her, with all his reasons, but her mother faithfully believed him. It had never seemed surprising to her that Cornelia should win a man like Ludlow; she saw no reason why Cornelia should not; and she could readily accept the notion of Cornelia’s superiority when he advanced it. She was not arrogant about it; she was simply and entirely satisfied; and she was every moment so content with Cornelia’s husband that Cornelia herself had to be a little critical of him in self-defence. She called him a dreamer and theorist; she ran him down to the Burtons, and said he would never come to anything, because artists who talked well never painted so well. She allowed that he talked divinely, and it would not have been safe for Mrs. Burton to agree with her otherwise; but Mrs. Burton was far too wise a woman to do so. She did not, perhaps, ride so high a horse as Mrs. Saunders in her praises of Ludlow, but it would have been as impossible to unseat her. She regarded herself as somehow the architect of Cornelia’s happiness in having discovered Ludlow and believed in him long before Cornelia met him, and she could easily see that if he had not come out to visit Burton, that first time, they would never have met at all. Mrs. Saunders could joyfully admit this without in the least relinquishing her own belief, so inarticulate that it was merely part of her personal consciousness, that this happiness was of as remote an origin as the foundations of the world. She could see, now, that nothing else could have been intended from the beginning, but she did not fail at the same time to credit herself with forethought and wisdom in bracing Cornelia against the overtures of Dickerson when he reappeared in her life. Burton, of course, advanced no claim to recognition in the affair. He enjoyed every moment of Ludlow’s stay in Pymantoning, and gave his work a great deal of humorous attention and gratuitous criticism, especially the picture he was chiefly engaged upon. This, when it was shown at the County Fair, where Ludlow chose to enter it, before he took it back to Now York with him in the fall, did not keep the crowd away from the trotting-matches, and it did not take either the first or the second premium. In fact, if the critics of the metropolis were right in their judgment of it when it appeared later in the Academy, it did not deserve either of them. They said that it was an offence to those who had hoped better things of the painter as time went on with him, and who would now find themselves snubbed by this return to his worst manner. Here, they said, was his palette again, with a tacit invitation to the public to make what it liked of the colors, as children did with the embers on the hearth, or the frost on the window. You paid your money and you took your choice as to what Mr. Ludlow meant by this extraordinary performance, if he really meant anything at all.

As far as it could be made out with the naked eye, it represented a clump of hollyhocks, with a slim, shadowy and uncertain young girl among them, and the painter had apparently wished to suggest a family, resemblance among them all. To this end he had emphasized some facts of the girl’s dress, accessories to his purpose, the petal-edged ruffle of her crimson silk waist, the flower-like flare of her red hat, and its finials of knotted ribbon; and in the hollyhocks he had recognized a girlishness of bearing, which he evidently hoped would appeal to a fantastic sympathy in the spectator. The piece was called “Hollyhocks”; it might equally well be called “Girls,” though when you had called it one or the other, it would be hard to say just what you were to do about it, especially with the impression curiously left by the picture that whether it was a group of girls, or a clump of hollyhocks, they were not in very good humor. The moment chosen, if one might judge from some suggestions of light, was that just before the breaking of a thunderstorm; the girl, if it was a girl, had flashed into sight round the corner of the house where the hollyhocks, if they were hollyhocks, were blowing outward in the first gust of the storm. It could not be denied that there was something fine in the wild toss and pull of the flowers, with the abandon of the storm in them; this was the best thing in the piece. It was probably intended to express a moment of electric passion; but there was something so forced, and at the same time so ineffectual in the execution of the feebly fantastic design, that it became the duty of impartial criticism, to advise Mr. Ludlow, if he must continue to paint at all, to paint either girls or flowers, but not both at once, or both together, or convertibly.

Ludlow did not mind these criticisms much, being pretty well used to that kind of thing, and feeling secure of his public in any event; but Cornelia was deeply vexed. She knew that it must be evident to those who knew her and knew him that she was the girl and she was the hollyhocks, and though the origin of the picture was forever hid in the memories of their first meeting, she was aware of a measure of justice in the censure that condemned it for obscurity. She had not wished him to show it, but here, as often elsewhere, she found him helpless to yield to her, even though he confessed that she was right. He did not try to justify himself, and he did not explain himself very clearly. “I don’t know how it is about one’s work, exactly. Up to a certain point you are master over it, and it seems to belong absolutely to you; but beyond that it is its own master and does what it pleases with itself. Of course I could have kept from showing that picture, and yet — I must.”

“Well, at least, then, you can keep from selling it,” said Cornelia. “I want it; give it to me.”

“My dear, I will buy it for you. Mrs. Maybough became the owner of the picture, yesterday, but I will offer her an advance on the price she paid.”

Cornelia now thought she was really angry with him for the first time since their marriage. She would not speak at once, but when she did speak, it was to say, “No, let her keep it. I know Charmian made her buy it and I wouldn’t like to take it from her. She has so much imagination that maybe she can see some meaning in it and it will always be such a pleasure to her to explain it even if she can’t.”

Charmian made the Ludlows a Bohemian dinner as soon as the people whom she wanted got back to town. She said it was a Bohemian dinner, and she asked artists, mostly; but of course she had the Westleys and their friend Mrs. Rangeley. There were several of the Synthesis girls, who said the Synthesis would never be itself again without Cornelia, and there were some of the students, nice fellows, whom Charmian had liked; there were, of course, the Wetmores. Ludlow’s picture was in evidence in a place of honor, especially created for it, and Wetmore said, when they sat down at dinner, “Well, Ludlow, all this company can tell where you got your hollyhocks.” Cornelia turned the color of the reddest in the picture, and Wetmore recognized her consciousness with the added remark, “Oh, you’ll be in all his imaginative pictures, now, Mrs. Ludlow. That’s the fate of the wife of an imaginative painter. But you really must get him to keep you out of his portraits.”

Charmian checked herself in a wild laugh, and sent Cornelia a look of fond and proud intelligence, which Mrs. Rangeley tapped, as it were, on its way up the length of the table. “O Mrs. Ludlow!” she entreated. “What is it? I hope it isn’t professional envy! Is he afraid of Mr. Ludlow becoming too popular?”

Ludlow answered for his wife, “Mrs. Rangeley, that was worthy even of you,” and he boldly kissed his hand to her.

The dinner was remembered for several weeks as one of the pleasantest people had ever been at, and it established Mrs. Maybough in such social acceptance that she was asked to the first of the Westley dinners, where swells prevailed, and where she was as null as any of them. But although Charmian was apparently radiant the whole evening, and would hardly let Cornelia go away at the end, she wanted her to stay so and talk it over, she had a girl’s perverseness in not admitting the perfection of the occasion to Mrs. Maybough, when she said, “Well, my dear, I hope your dinner was Bohemian enough for you.”

“Bohemian!” she retorted. “It wasn’t Bohemian at all. You oughtn’t to have taken the ladies away at coffee. They ought to have stayed and had cigarettes with the gentlemen.”

“My dear, you know that the mere smell of tobacco makes you sick!”

“No matter, I should — if I could only have seen Cornelia Ludlow smoking — I should have been willing to die. And now — now, I’m afraid she’s going to be perfectly respectable!”

A TRAVELER FROM ALTRURIA

A novel in the Utopian tradition, A Traveller from Altruria was first serialised in The Cosmopolitan between November 1892 and October 1893, before appearing in book form in 1894. The novel is a critique of unfettered capitalism, its consequences and of the Gilded Age — a term coined by Mark Twain to denote the situation in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, which he saw as being characterised by a slew of social problems masked by a superficial ‘gilding’ of apparent prosperity.

Set during the early 1890’s in a fashionable summer resort on the East Coast of the United States, the novel is narrated by a Mr Twelvemough, a popular author of light fiction, who has been selected to function as host to a visitor from the faraway island of Altruria called Mr Homos. Homos has come all the way to the United States to experience first-hand everyday life in the country that prides itself as a haven of democracy and equality, to see for himself how the principle that “all men are created equal” is being practiced.

However, due to Altruria’s secluded existence, very little is known about that state, so Twelvemough and his circle of acquaintances, all of whom are staying at the same hotel, are more eager to learn something about Altruria than to explain American life and institutions. To their dismay, it becomes gradually clear to everyone involved in the conversations with Mr Homos — who in the course of the novel becomes less and less reluctant to talk about his own country — that the United States is greatly lagging behind Altruria in practically every aspect of life, be it political, economical, cultural or moral. Thus, Howells employs the island state of Altruria as a foil to America, whose citizens, compared to Altrurians, appear selfish, obsessed with money and emotionally imbalanced. In particular, the novel is a critique of unfettered capitalism and its consequences.

In A Traveler from Altruria, Howells acknowledges the history of Utopian literature by having his group of educated characters refer to eminent representatives of that literary tradition, such as Campanella (La città del Sole, 1602) and Francis Bacon (New Atlantis, 1623), but also to quite recent authors like Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward, 1888) and William Morris (News from Nowhere, 1890).

Howells would eventually create an Altrurian trilogy, following the first book with Letters of an Altrurian Traveller (1904) and Through the Eye of the Needle (1907).

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

“The Breakers,” a Gilded Age mansion in Newport, Rhode Island

I

I confess that with all my curiosity to meet an Altrurian, I was in no hospitable mood toward the traveler when he finally presented himself, pursuant to the letter of advice sent me by the friend who introduced him. It would be easy enough to take care of him in the hotel; I had merely to engage a room for him, and have the clerk tell him his money was not good if he tried to pay for anything. But I had swung fairly into my story; its people were about me all the time; I dwelt amid its events and places, and I did not see how I could welcome my guest among them, or abandon them for him. Still, when he actually arrived, and I took his hand as he stepped from the train, I found it less difficult to say that I was glad to see him than I expected. In fact, I was glad, for I could not look upon his face without feeling a glow of kindness for him. I had not the least trouble in identifying him, for he was so unlike all the Americans who dismounted from the train with him, and who all looked hot, worried, and anxious. He was a man no longer young, but in what we call the heyday of life, when our own people are so absorbed in making provision for the future that they may be said not to live in the present at all. This Altrurian’s whole countenance, and especially his quiet, gentle eyes, expressed a vast contemporaneity, with bounds of leisure removed to the end of time; or, at least, this was the effect of something in them which I am obliged to report in rather fantastic terms. He was above the middle height, and he carried himself vigorously. His face was sunburned, or sea-burned, where it was not bearded; and, although I knew from my friend’s letter that he was a man of learning and distinction in his own country, I should never have supposed him a person of scholarly life, he was so far from sicklied over with anything like the pale cast of thought. When he took the hand I offered him in my half-hearted welcome he gave it a grasp that decided me to confine our daily greetings to something much less muscular.

“Let me have your bag,” I said, as we do when we meet people at the train, and he instantly bestowed a rather heavy valise upon me, with a smile in his benignant eyes, as if it had been the greatest favor. “Have you got any checks?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, in very good English, but with an accent new to me, “I bought two.” He gave them to me, and I passed them to our hotel porter, who was waiting there with the baggage-cart. Then I proposed that we should walk across the meadow to the house, which is a quarter of a mile or so from the station. We started, but he stopped suddenly and looked back over his shoulder. “Oh, you needn’t be troubled about your trunks,” I said. “The porter will get them to the house all right. They’ll be in your room by the time we get there.”

“But he’s putting them into the wagon himself,” said the Altrurian.

“Yes; he always does that. He’s a strong young fellow. He’ll manage it. You needn’t—” I could not finish saying he need not mind the porter; he was rushing back to the station, and I had the mortification of seeing him take an end of each trunk and help the porter toss it into the wagon; some lighter pieces he put in himself, and he did not stop till all the baggage the train had left was disposed of.

I stood holding his valise, unable to put it down in my embarrassment at this eccentric performance, which had been evident not to me alone, but to all the people who arrived by the train, and all their friends who came from the hotel to meet them. A number of these passed me on the tally-ho coach; and a lady, who had got her husband with her for over Sunday, and was in very good spirits, called gayly down to me: “Your friend seems fond of exercise!”

“Yes,” I answered, dryly; the sparkling repartee which ought to have come to my help failed to show up. But it was impossible to be vexed with the Altrurian when he returned to me, unruffled by his bout with the baggage and serenely smiling.

“Do you know,” he said, “I fancied that good fellow was ashamed of my helping him. I hope it didn’t seem a reflection upon him in any way before your people? I ought to have thought of that.”

“I guess we can make it right with him. I dare say he felt more surprised than disgraced. But we must make haste a little now; your train was half an hour late, and we shall not stand so good a chance for supper if we are not there pretty promptly.”

“No?” said the Altrurian. “Why?”

“Well,” I said, with evasive lightness, “first come, first served, you know. That’s human nature.”

“Is it?” he returned, and he looked at me as one does who suspects another of joking.

“Well, isn’t it?” I retorted; but I hurried to add: “Besides, I want to have time after supper to show you a bit of our landscape. I think you’ll enjoy it.” I knew he had arrived in Boston that morning by steamer, and I now thought it high time to ask him: “Well, what do you think of America, anyway?” I ought really to have asked him this the moment he stepped from the train.

“Oh,” he said, “I’m intensely interested,” and I perceived that he spoke with a certain reservation. “As the most advanced country of its time, I’ve always been very curious to see it.”

The last sentence raised my dashed spirits again, and I said, confidently: “You must find our system of baggage-checks delightful.” I said this because it is one of the first things we brag of to foreigners, and I had the habit of it. “By-the-way,” I ventured to add, “I suppose you meant to say you brought two checks when I asked you for them at the train just now? But you really said you bought them.”

“Yes,” the Altrurian replied, “I gave half a dollar apiece for them at the station in Boston. I saw other people doing it,” he explained, noting my surprise. “Isn’t it the custom?”

“I’m happy to say it isn’t yet, on most of our roads. They were tipping the baggage-man, to make sure that he checked their baggage in time and put it on the train. I had to do that myself when I came up; otherwise it might have got along here some time next day. But the system is perfect.”

“The poor man looked quite worn out,” said the Altrurian, “and I am glad I gave him something. He seemed to have several hundred pieces of baggage to look after, and he wasn’t embarrassed like your porter by my helping him put my trunks into the car. May I confess that the meanness of the station, its insufficient facilities, its shabby waiting-rooms, and its whole crowded and confused appearance gave me rather a bad impression?”

“I know,” I had to own, “it’s shameful; but you wouldn’t have found another station in the city so bad.”

“Ah, then,” said the Altrurian, “I suppose this particular road is too poor to employ more baggage-men or build new stations; they seemed rather shabby all the way up.”

“Well, no,” I was obliged to confess, “it’s one of the richest roads in the country. The stock stands at about 180. But I’m really afraid we shall be late to supper if we don’t get on,” I broke off; though I was not altogether sorry to arrive after the porter had disposed of the baggage. I dreaded another display of active sympathy on the part of my strange companion; I have often felt sorry myself for the porters of hotels, but I have never thought of offering to help them handle the heavy trunks that they manage.

The Altrurian was delighted with the hotel; and in fact it did look extremely pretty, with its branching piazzas full of well-dressed people, and its green lawns where the children were playing. I led the way to the room which I had taken for him next my own; it was simply furnished, but it was sweet with matting, fresh linen, and pure whitewashed walls. I flung open the window-blinds and let him get a glimpse of the mountains purpling under the sunset, the lake beneath, and the deeply foliaged shores.

“Glorious! glorious!” he sighed.

“Yes,” I modestly assented. “We think that’s rather fine.” He stood tranced before the window, and I thought I had better say: “Well, now I can’t give you much time to get the dust of travel off; the dining-room doors close at eight, and we must hurry down.”

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” he said, pulling off his coat.

I waited impatiently at the foot of the stairs, avoiding the question I met on the lips and in the eyes of my acquaintance. The fame of my friend’s behavior at the station must have spread through the whole place; and everybody wished to know who he was. I answered simply he was a traveler from Altruria; and in some cases I went further and explained that the Altrurians were peculiar.

In much less time than it seemed my friend found me; and then I had a little compensation for my suffering in his behalf. I could see that, whatever people said of him, they felt the same mysterious liking at sight of him that I had felt. He had made a little change in his dress, and I perceived that the women thought him not only good-looking but well-dressed. They followed him with their eyes as we went into the dining-room, and I was rather proud of being with him, as if I somehow shared the credit of his clothes and good looks. The Altrurian himself seemed most struck with the head-waiter, who showed us to our places, and while we were waiting for our supper I found a chance to explain that he was a divinity student from one of the fresh-water colleges, and was serving here during his summer vacation. This seemed to interest my friend so much that I went on to tell him that many of the waitresses, whom he saw standing there subject to the order of the guests, were country school-mistresses in the winter.

“Ah, that is as it should be,” he said; “that is the kind of thing I expected to meet with in America.”

“Yes,” I responded, in my flattered national vanity, “if America means anything at all it means the honor of work and the recognition of personal worth everywhere. I hope you are going to make a long stay with us. We like to have travelers visit us who can interpret the spirit of our institutions as well as read their letter. As a rule Europeans never quite get our point of view. Now a great many of these waitresses are ladies, in the true sense of the word — selfrespectful, intelligent, refined, and fit to grace—”

I was interrupted by the noise my friend made in suddenly pushing back his chair and getting to his feet. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’re not ill, I hope?”

But he did not hear me. He had run half down the dining-hall toward the slender young girl who was bringing us our supper. I had ordered rather generously, for my friend had owned to a good appetite, and I was hungry myself with waiting for him, so that the tray the girl carried was piled up with heavy dishes. To my dismay I saw, rather than heard at that distance, the Altrurian enter into a polite controversy with her, and then, as if overcoming all her scruples by sheer strength of will, possess himself of the tray and make off with it toward our table. The poor child followed him, blushing to her hair; the head-waiter stood looking helplessly on; the guests, who at that late hour were fortunately few, were simply aghast at the scandal; the Altrurian alone seemed to think his conduct the most natural thing in the world. He put the tray on the side-table near us, and in spite of our waitress’s protests insisted upon arranging the little bird-bath dishes before our plates. Then at last he sat down, and the girl, flushed and tremulous, left the room, as I could not help suspecting, to have a good cry in the kitchen. She did not come back, and the head-waiter, who was perhaps afraid to send another in her place, looked after our few wants himself. He kept a sharp eye on my friend, as if he were not quite sure he was safe, but the Altrurian resumed the conversation with all that lightness of spirits which I noticed in him after he helped the porter with the baggage. I did not think it the moment to take him to task for what he had just done; I was not even sure that it was the part of a host to do so at all, and between the one doubt and the other I left the burden of talk to him.

“What a charming young creature!” he began. “I never saw anything prettier than the way she had of refusing my help, absolutely without coquetry or affectation of any kind. She is, as you said, a perfect lady, and she graces her work, as I am sure she would grace any exigency of life. She quite realizes my ideal of an American girl, and I see now what the spirit of your country must be from such an expression of it.”

I wished to tell him that while a country school-teacher who waits at table in a summer hotel is very much to be respected in her sphere, she is not regarded with that high honor which some other women command among us; but I did not find this very easy, after what I had said of our esteem for labor; and while I was thinking how I could hedge, my friend went on.

“I liked England greatly, and I liked the English, but I could not like the theory of their civilization or the aristocratic structure of their society. It seemed to me iniquitous, for we believe that inequality and iniquity are the same in the last analysis.”

At this I found myself able to say: “Yes, there is something terrible, something shocking, in the frank brutality with which Englishmen affirm the essential inequality of men. The affirmation of the essential equality of men was the first point of departure with us when we separated from them.”

“I know,” said the Altrurian. “How grandly it is expressed in your glorious Declaration!”

“Ah, you have read our Declaration of Independence, then?”

“Every Altrurian has read that,” answered my friend.

“Well,” I went on smoothly, and I hoped to render what I was going to say the means of enlightening him without offence concerning the little mistake he had just made with the waitress, “of course we don’t take that in its closest literality.”

“I don’t understand you,” he said.

“Why, you know it was rather the political than the social traditions of England that we broke with, in the Revolution.”

“How is that?” he returned. “Didn’t you break with monarchy and nobility, and ranks and classes?”

“Yes, we broke with all those things.”

“But I found them a part of the social as well as the political structure in England. You have no kings or nobles here. Have you any ranks or classes?”

“Well, not exactly in the English sense. Our ranks and classes, such as we have, are what I may call voluntary.”

“Oh, I understand. I suppose that from time to time certain ones among you feel the need of serving, and ask leave of the commonwealth to subordinate themselves to the rest of the state and perform all the lowlier offices in it. Such persons must be held in peculiar honor. Is it something like that?”

“Well, no, I can’t say it’s quite like that. In fact I think I’d better let you trust to your own observation of our life.”

“But I’m sure,” said the Altrurian, with a simplicity so fine that it was a long time before I could believe it quite real, “that I shall approach it so much more intelligently with a little instruction from you. You say that your social divisions are voluntary. But do I understand that those who serve among you do not wish to do so?”

“Well, I don’t suppose they would serve if they could help it,” I replied.

“Surely,” said the Altrurian, with a look of horror, “you don’t mean that they are slaves.”

“Oh no! oh no!” I said; “the war put an end to that. We are all free now, black and white.”

“But if they do not wish to serve, and are not held in peculiar honor for serving—”

“I see that my word ‘voluntary’ has misled you,” I put in. “It isn’t the word exactly. The divisions among us are rather a process of natural selection. You will see, as you get better acquainted with the workings of our institutions, that there are no arbitrary distinctions here but the fitness of the work for the man and the man for the work determines the social rank that each one holds.”

“Ah, that is fine!” cried the Altrurian, with a glow of enthusiasm. “Then I suppose that these intelligent young people who teach school in winter and serve at table in the summer are in a sort of provisional state, waiting for the process of natural selection to determine whether they shall finally be teachers or waiters.”

“Yes, it might be stated in some such terms,” I assented, though I was not altogether easy in my mind. It seemed to me that I was not quite candid with this most candid spirit. I added: “You know we are a sort of fatalists here in America. We are great believers in the doctrine that it will all come out right in the end.”

“Ah, I don’t wonder at that,” said the Altrurian, “if the process of natural selection works so perfectly among you as you say. But I am afraid I don’t understand this matter of your domestic service yet. I believe you said that all honest work is honored in America. Then no social slight attaches to service, I suppose?”

“Well, I can’t say that, exactly. The fact is, a certain social slight does attach to service, and that is one reason why I don’t quite like to have students wait at table. It won’t be pleasant for them to remember it in after-life, and it won’t be pleasant for their children to remember it.”

“Then the slight would descend?”

“I think it would. One wouldn’t like to think one’s father or mother had been at service.”

The Altrurian said nothing for a moment. Then he remarked: “So it seems that while all honest work is honored among you, there are some kinds of honest work that are not honored so much as others.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because some occupations are more degrading than others.”

“But why?” he persisted, as I thought, a little unreasonably.

“Really,” I said, “I think I must leave you to imagine.”

“I am afraid I can’t,” he said, sadly. “Then, if domestic service is degrading in your eyes, and people are not willing servants among you, may I ask why any are servants?”

“It is a question of bread-and-butter. They are obliged to be.”

“That is, they are forced to do work that is hateful and disgraceful to them because they cannot live without?”

“Excuse me,” I said, not at all liking this sort of pursuit, and feeling it fair to turn even upon a guest who kept it up. “Isn’t it so with you in Altruria?”

“It was so once,” he admitted, “but not now. In fact, it is like a waking dream to find one’s self in the presence of conditions here that we outlived so long ago.”

There was an unconscious superiority in this speech that nettled me, and stung me to retort: “We do not expect to outlive them. We regard them as final, and as indestructibly based in human nature itself.”

“Ah,” said the Altrurian, with a delicate and caressing courtesy, “have I said something offensive?”

“Not at all,” I hastened to answer. “It is not surprising that you did not get our point of view exactly. You will by-and-by, and then, I think, you will see that it is the true one. We have found that the logic of our convictions could not be applied to the problem of domestic service. It is everywhere a very curious and perplexing problem. The simple old solution of the problem was to own your servants; but we found that this was not consistent with the spirit of our free institutions. As soon as it was abandoned the anomaly began. We had outlived the primitive period when the housekeeper worked with her domestics and they were her help, and were called so; and we had begun to have servants to do all the household work, and to call them so. This state of things never seemed right to some of our purest and best people. They fancied, as you seem to have done, that to compel people through their necessities to do your hateful drudgery, and to wound and shame them with a name which every American instinctively resents, was neither republican nor Christian. Some of our thinkers tried to mend matters by making their domestics a part of their families; and in the life of Emerson you’ll find an amusing account of his attempt to have his servant eat at the same table with himself and his wife. It wouldn’t work. He and his wife could stand it, but the servant couldn’t.”

I paused, for this was where the laugh ought to have come in. The Altrurian did not laugh, he merely asked, “Why?”

“Well, because the servant knew, if they didn’t, that they were a whole world apart in their traditions, and were no more fit to associate than New-Englanders and New-Zealanders. In the mere matter of education—”

“But I thought you said that these young girls who wait at table here were teachers.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon; I ought to have explained. By this time it had become impossible, as it now is, to get American girls to take service except on some such unusual terms as we have in a summer hotel; and the domestics were already ignorant foreigners, fit for nothing else. In such a place as this it isn’t so bad. It is more as if the girls worked in a shop or a factory. They command their own time, in a measure, their hours are tolerably fixed, and they have one another’s society. In a private family they would be subject to order at all times, and they would have no social life. They would be in the family, out not of it. American girls understand this, and so they won’t go out to service in the usual way. Even in a summer hotel the relation has its odious aspects. The system of giving fees seems to me degrading to those who have to take them. To offer a student or a teacher a dollar for personal service — it isn’t right, or I can’t make it so. In fact, the whole thing is rather anomalous with us. The best that you can say of it is that it works, and we don’t know what else to do.”

“But I don’t see yet,” said the Altrurian, “just why domestic service is degrading in a country where all kinds of work are honored.”

“Well, my dear fellow, I have done my best to explain. As I intimated before, we distinguish; and in the different kinds of labor we distinguish against domestic service. I dare say it is partly because of the loss of independence which it involves. People naturally despise a dependant.”

“Why?” asked the Altrurian, with that innocence of his which I was beginning to find rather trying.

“Why?” I retorted. “Because it implies weakness.”

“And is weakness considered despicable among you?” he pursued.

“In every community it is despised practically, if not theoretically,” I tried to explain. “The great thing that America has done is to offer the race an opportunity — the opportunity for any man to rise above the rest and to take the highest place, if he is able.” I had always been proud of this fact, and I thought I had put it very well, but the Altrurian did not seem much impressed by it.

He said: “I do not see how it differs from any country of the past in that. But perhaps you mean that to rise carries with it an obligation to those below ‘If any is first among you, let him be your servant.’ Is it something like that?”

“Well, it is not quite like that,” I answered, remembering how very little our self-made men as a class had done for others. “Every one is expected to look out for himself here. I fancy that there would be very little rising if men were expected to rise for the sake of others, in America. How is it with you in Altruria?” I demanded, hoping to get out of a certain discomfort I felt in that way. “Do your risen men generally devote themselves to the good of the community after they get to the top?”

“There is no rising among us,” he said, with what seemed a perception of the harsh spirit of my question; and he paused a moment before he asked in his turn: “How do men rise among you?”

“That would be rather a long story,” I replied. “But, putting it in the rough, I should say that they rose by their talents, their shrewdness, their ability to seize an advantage and turn it to their own account.”

“And is that considered noble?”

“It is considered smart. It is considered at the worst far better than a dead level of equality. Are all men equal in Altruria? Are they all alike gifted or beautiful, or short or tall?”

“No, they are only equal in duties and in rights. But, as you said just now, that is a very long story. Are they equal in nothing here?”

“They are equal in opportunities.”

“Ah!” breathed the Altrurian, “I am glad to hear that.”

I began to feel a little uneasy, and I was not quite sure that this last assertion of mine would hold water. Everybody but ourselves had now left the dining-room, and I saw the head-waiter eying us impatiently. I pushed back my chair and said: “I’m sorry to seem to hurry you, but I should like to show you a very pretty sunset effect we have here before it is too dark. When we get back, I want to introduce you to a few of my friends. Of course, I needn’t tell you that there is a good deal of curiosity about you, especially among the ladies.”

“Yes, I found that the case in England, largely. It was the women who cared most to meet me. I understand that in America society is managed even more by women than it is in England.”

“It’s entirely in their hands,” I said, with the satisfaction we all feel in the fact. “We have no other leisure class. The richest men among us are generally hard workers; devotion to business is the rule; but, as soon as a man reaches the point where he can afford to pay for domestic service, his wife and daughters expect to be released from it to the cultivation of their minds and the enjoyment of social pleasures. It’s quite right. That is what makes them so delightful to foreigners. You must have heard their praises chanted in England. The English find our men rather stupid, I believe; but they think our women are charming.”

“Yes, I was told that the wives of their nobility were sometimes Americans,” said the Altrurian. “The English think that you regard such marriages as a great honor, and that they are very gratifying to your national pride.”

“Well, I suppose that is so in a measure,” I confessed. “I imagine that it will not be long before the English aristocracy derives as largely from American millionaires as from kings’ mistresses. Not,” I added, virtuously, “that we approve of aristocracy.”

“No, I understand that,” said the Altrurian. “I shall hope to get your point of view in this matter more distinctly by-and-by. As yet, I’m a little vague about it.”

“I think I can gradually make it clear to you,” I returned.

II

We left the hotel, and I began to walk my friend across the meadow toward the lake. I wished him to see the reflection of the afterglow in its still waters, with the noble lines of the mountain-range that glassed itself there; the effect is one of the greatest charms of that lovely region, the sojourn of the sweetest summer in the world, and I am always impatient to show it to strangers.

We climbed the meadow wall and passed through a stretch of woods to a path leading down to the shore, and, as we loitered along in the tender gloom of the forest, the music of the hermit-thrushes rang all round us like crystal bells, like silver flutes, like the drip of fountains, like the choiring of still-eyed cherubim. We stopped from time to time and listened, while the shy birds sang unseen in their covert of shadows; but we did not speak till we emerged from the trees and suddenly stood upon the naked knoll overlooking the lake.

Then I explained: “The woods used to come down to the shore here, and we had their mystery and music to the water’s edge; but last winter the owner cut the timber off. It looks rather ragged now.” I had to recognize the fact, for I saw the Altrurian staring about him over the clearing in a kind of horror. It was a squalid ruin, a graceless desolation, which not even the pitying twilight could soften. The stumps showed their hideous mutilation everywhere; the brush had been burned, and the fires had scorched and blackened the lean soil of the hill-slope and blasted it with sterility. A few weak saplings, withered by the flames, drooped and straggled about; it would be a century before the forces of nature could repair the waste.

“You say the owner did this?” said the Altrurian. “Who is the owner?”

“Well, it does seem too bad,” I answered, evasively. “There has been a good deal of feeling about it. The neighbors tried to buy him off before he began the destruction, for they knew the value of the woods as an attraction to summer-boarders; the city cottagers, of course, wanted to save them, and together they offered for the land pretty nearly as much as the timber was worth. But he had got it into his head that the land here by the lake would sell for building lots if it was cleared, and he could make money on that as well as on the trees; and so they had to go. Of course, one might say that he was deficient in public spirit, but I don’t blame him, altogether.”

“No,” the Altrurian assented, somewhat to my surprise, I confess.

I resumed: “There was no one else to look after his interests, and it was not only his right but his duty to get the most he could for himself and his own, according to his best light. That is what I tell people when they fall foul of him for his want of public spirit.”

“The trouble seems to be, then, in the system that obliges each man to be the guardian of his own interests. Is that what you blame?”

“No, I consider it a very perfect system. It is based upon individuality, and we believe that individuality is the principle that differences civilized men from savages, from the lower animals, and makes us a nation instead of a tribe or a herd. There isn’t one of us, no matter how much he censured this man’s want of public spirit, but would resent the slightest interference with his property rights. The woods were his; he had the right to do what he pleased with his own.”

“Do I understand you that, in America, a man may do what is wrong with his own?”

“He may do anything with his own.”

“To the injury of others?”

“Well, not in person or property. But he may hurt them in taste and sentiment as much as he likes. Can’t a man do what he pleases with his own in Altruria?”

“No, he can only do right with his own.”

“And if he tries to do wrong, or what the community thinks is wrong?”

“Then the community takes his own from him.” Before I could think of anything to say to this he went on: “But I wish you would explain to me why it was left to this man’s neighbors to try and get him to sell his portion of the landscape?”

“Why, bless my soul!” I exclaimed, “who else was there? You wouldn’t have expected to take up a collection among the summer-boarders?”

“That wouldn’t have been so unreasonable; but I didn’t mean that. Was there no provision for such an exigency in your laws? Wasn’t the state empowered to buy him off at the full value of his timber and his land?”

“Certainly not,” I replied. “That would be rank paternalism.”

It began to get dark, and I suggested that we had better be going back to the hotel. The talk seemed already to have taken us away from all pleasure in the prospect; I said, as we found our way through the rich, balsam-scented twilight of the woods, where one joy-haunted thrush was still singing: “You know that in America the law is careful not to meddle with a man’s private affairs, and we don’t attempt to legislate personal virtue.”

“But marriage,” he said— “surely you have the institution of marriage?”

I was really annoyed at this. I returned, sarcastically; “Yes, I am glad to say that there we can meet your expectation; we have marriage, not only consecrated by the church, but established and defended by the state. What has that to do with the question?”

“And you consider marriage,” he pursued, “the citadel of morality, the fountain of all that is pure and good in your private life, the source of home and the image of heaven?”

“There are some marriages,” I said, with a touch of our national humor, “that do not quite fill the bill, but that is certainly our ideal of marriage.”

“Then why do you say that you have not legislated personal virtue in America?” he asked. “You have laws, I believe, against theft and murder, and slander and incest, and perjury and drunkenness?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Then it appears to me that you have legislated honesty, regard for human life, regard for character, abhorrence of unnatural vice, good faith, and sobriety. I was told on the train coming up, by a gentleman who was shocked at the sight of a man beating his horse, that you even had laws against cruelty to animals.”

“Yes, and I am happy to say that they are enforced to such a degree that a man cannot kill a cat cruelly without being punished for it.” The Altrurian did not follow up his advantage, and I resolved not to be outdone in magnanimity. “Come, I will own that you have the best of me on those points. I must say you’ve trapped me very neatly, too; I can enjoy a thing of that kind when it’s well done, and I frankly knock under. But I had in mind something altogether different when I spoke. I was thinking of those idealists who want to bind us hand and foot and render us the slaves of a state where the most intimate relations of life shall be penetrated by legislation and the very hearthstone shall be a tablet of laws.”

“Isn’t marriage a rather intimate relation of life?” asked the Altrurian. “And I understood that gentleman on the train to say that you had laws against cruelty to children, and societies established to see them enforced. You don’t consider such laws an invasion of the home, do you, or a violation of its immunities? I imagine,” he went on, “that the difference between your civilization and ours is only one of degree, after all, and that America and Altruria are really one at heart.”

I thought his compliment a bit hyperbolical, but I saw that it was honestly meant, and as we Americans are first of all patriots, and vain for our country before we are vain for ourselves, I was not proof against the flattery it conveyed to me civically if not personally.

We were now drawing near the hotel, and I felt a certain glow of pleasure in its gay effect on the pretty knoll where it stood. In its artless and accidental architecture it was not unlike one of our immense coastwise steamboats. The twilight had thickened to dusk, and the edifice was brilliantly lighted with electrics, story above story, which streamed into the gloom around like the lights of saloon and state-room. The corner of wood making into the meadow hid the station; there was no other building in sight; the hotel seemed riding at anchor on the swell of a placid sea. I was going to call the Altrurian’s attention to this fanciful resemblance when I remembered that he had not been in our country long enough to have seen a Fall River boat, and I made toward the house without wasting the comparison upon him. But I treasured it up in my own mind, intending some day to make a literary use of it.

The guests were sitting in friendly groups about the piazzas or in rows against the walls, the ladies with their gossip and the gentlemen with their cigars. The night had fallen cool after a hot day, and they all had the effect of having cast off care with the burden of the week that was past, and to be steeping themselves in the innocent and simple enjoyment of the hour. They were mostly middle-aged married folk, but some were old enough to have sons and daughters among the young people who went and came in a long, wandering promenade of the piazzas, or wove themselves through the waltz past the open windows of the great parlor; the music seemed one with the light that streamed far out on the lawn flanking the piazzas. Every one was well-dressed and comfortable and at peace, and I felt that our hotel was in some sort a microcosm of the republic.

We involuntarily paused, and I heard the Altrurian murmur: “Charming, charming! This is really delightful!”

“Yes, isn’t it?” I returned, with a glow of pride. “Our hotel here is a type of the summer hotel everywhere; it’s characteristic in not having anything characteristic about it; and I rather like the notion of the people in it being so much like the people in all the others that you would feel yourself at home wherever you met such a company in such a house. All over the country, north and south, wherever you find a group of hills or a pleasant bit of water or a stretch of coast, you’ll find some such refuge as this for our weary toilers. We began to discover some time ago that it would not do to cut open the goose that laid our golden eggs, even if it looked like an eagle, and kept on perching on our banners just as if nothing had happened. We discovered that, if we continued to kill ourselves with hard work, there would be no Americans pretty soon.”

The Altrurian laughed. “How delightfully you put it! How quaint! How picturesque! Excuse me, but I can’t help expressing my pleasure in it. Our own humor is so very different.”

“Ah,” I said; “what is your humor like?”

“I could hardly tell you, I’m afraid; I’ve never been much of a humorist myself.”

Again a cold doubt of something ironical in the man went through me, but I had no means of verifying it, and so I simply remained silent, waiting for him to prompt me if he wished to know anything further about our national transformation from bees perpetually busy into butterflies occasionally idle. “And when you had made that discovery?” he suggested.

“Why, we’re nothing if not practical, you know, and as soon as we made that discovery we stopped killing ourselves and invented the summer resort. There are very few of our business or professional men now who don’t take their four or five weeks’ vacation. Their wives go off early in the summer, and, if they go to some resort within three or four hours of the city, the men leave town Saturday afternoon and run out, or come up, and spend Sunday with their families. For thirty-eight hours or so a hotel like this is a nest of happy homes.”

“That is admirable,” said the Altrurian. “You are truly a practical people. The ladies come early in the summer, you say?”

“Yes, sometimes in the beginning of June.”

“What do they come for?” asked the Altrurian.

“What for? Why, for rest!” I retorted, with some little temper.

“But I thought you told me awhile ago that as soon as a husband could afford it he relieved his wife and daughters from all household work.”

“So he does.”

“Then what do the ladies wish to rest from?”

“From care. It is not work alone that kills. They are not relieved from household care even when they are relieved from household work. There is nothing so killing as household care. Besides, the sex seems to be born tired. To be sure, there are some observers of our life who contend that with the advance of athletics among our ladies, with boating and bathing, and lawn-tennis and mountain-climbing and freedom from care, and these long summers of repose, our women are likely to become as superior to the men physically as they now are intellectually. It is all right. We should like to see it happen. It would be part of the national joke.”

“Oh, have you a national joke?” asked the Altrurian. “But, of course! You have so much humor. I wish you could give me some notion of it.”

“Well, it is rather damaging to any joke to explain it,” I replied, “and your only hope of getting at ours is to live into it. One feature of it is the confusion of foreigners at the sight of our men’s willingness to subordinate themselves to our women.”

“Oh, I don’t find that very bewildering,” said the Altrurian. “It seems to me a generous and manly trait of the American character. I’m proud to say that it is one of the points at which your civilization and our own touch. There can be no doubt that the influence of women in your public affairs must be of the greatest advantage to you; it has been so with us.”

I turned and stared at him, but he remained insensible to my astonishment, perhaps because it was now too dark for him to see it. “Our women have no influence in public affairs,” I said, quietly, after a moment.

“They haven’t? Is it possible? But didn’t I understand you to imply just now that your women were better educated than your men?”

“Well, I suppose that, taking all sorts and conditions among us, the women are as a rule better schooled, if not better educated.”

“Then, apart from the schooling, they are not more cultivated?”

“In a sense you might say they were. They certainly go in for a lot of things: art and music, and Browning and the drama, and foreign travel and psychology, and political economy and Heaven knows what all. They have more leisure for it; they have all the leisure there is, in fact; our young men have to go into business. I suppose you may say our women are more cultivated than our men; yes, I think there’s no questioning that. They are the great readers among us. We poor devils of authors would be badly off if it were not for our women. In fact, no author could make a reputation among us without them. American literature exists because American women appreciate it and love it.”

“But surely your men read books?”

“Some of them; not many, comparatively. You will often hear a complacent ass of a husband and father say to an author: ‘My wife and daughters know your books, but I can’t find time for anything but the papers nowadays. I skim them over at breakfast, or when I’m going in to business on the train.’ He isn’t the least ashamed to say that he reads nothing but the newspapers.”

“Then you think that it would be better for him to read books?”

“Well, in the presence of four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping-knives I should not like to say so. Besides, modesty forbids.”

“No, but, really,” the Altrurian persisted, “you think that the literature of a book is more carefully pondered than the literature of a daily newspaper?”

“I suppose even the four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping-knives would hardly deny that.”

“And it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that the habitual reader of carefully pondered literature ought to be more thoughtful than the readers of literature which is not carefully pondered and which they merely skim over on their way to business?”

“I believe we began by assuming the superior culture of our women, didn’t we? You’ll hardly find an American that isn’t proud of it.”

“Then,” said the Altrurian, “if your women are generally better schooled than your men, and more cultivated and more thoughtful, and are relieved of household work in such great measure, and even of domestic cares, why have they no part in your public affairs?”

I laughed, for I thought I had my friend at last. “For the best of all possible reasons: they don’t want it.”

“Ah, that’s no reason,” he returned. “Why don’t they want it?”

“Really,” I said, out of all patience, “I think I must let you ask the ladies themselves,” and I turned and moved again toward the hotel, but the Altrurian gently detained me.

“Excuse me,” he began.

“No, no,” I said.

 “‘The feast is set, the guests are met,

   May’st hear the merry din.’

Come in and see the young people dance.”

“Wait,” he entreated; “tell me a little more about the old people first. This digression about the ladies has been very interesting, but I thought you were going to speak of the men here. Who are they, or, rather, what are they?”

“Why, as I said before, they are all business men and professional men; people who spend their lives in studies and counting-rooms and offices, and have come up here for a few weeks or a few days of well-earned repose. They are of all kinds of occupations: they are lawyers and doctors, and clergymen and merchants, and brokers and bankers. There’s hardly any calling you Won’t find represented among them. As I was thinking just now, our hotel is a sort of microcosm of the American republic.”

“I am most fortunate in finding you here, where I can avail myself of your intelligence in making my observations of your life under such advantageous circumstances. It seems to me that with your help I might penetrate the fact of American life, possess myself of the mystery of your national joke, without stirring beyond the piazza of your hospitable hotel,” said my friend. I doubted it, but one does not lightly put aside a compliment like that to one’s intelligence, and I said I should be very happy to be of use to him. He thanked me, and said: “Then, to begin with, I understand that these gentlemen are here because they are all overworked.”

“Of course. You can have no conception of how hard our business men and our professional men work. I suppose there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. But, as I said before, we are beginning to find that we cannot burn the candle at both ends and have it last long. So we put one end out for a little while every summer. Still, there are frightful wrecks of men strewn all along the course of our prosperity, wrecks of mind and body. Our insane asylums are full of madmen who have broken under the tremendous strain, and every country in Europe abounds in our dyspeptics.” I was rather proud of this terrible fact; there is no doubt but we Americans are proud of overworking ourselves; Heaven knows why.

The Altrurian murmured: “Awful! Shocking!” But I thought somehow he had not really followed me very attentively in my celebration of our national violation of the laws of life and its consequences. “I am glad,” he went on, “that your business men and professional men are beginning to realize the folly and wickedness of overwork. Shall I find some of your other weary workers here, too?”

“What other weary workers?” I asked in turn, for I imagined I had gone over pretty much the whole list.

“Why,” said the Altrurian, “your mechanics and day laborers, your iron-moulders and glass-blowers, your miners and farmers, your printers and mill-operatives, your trainmen and quarry-hands. Or do they prefer to go to resorts of their own?”

III

It was not easy to make sure of such innocence as prompted this inquiry of my Altrurian friend. The doubt whether he could really be in earnest was something that I had already felt; and it was destined to beset me, as it did now, again and again. My first thought was that, of course, he was trying a bit of cheap irony on me, a mixture of the feeble sarcasm and false sentiment that makes us smile when we find it in the philippics of the industrial agitators. For a moment I did not know but I had fallen victim to a walking delegate on his vacation, who was employing his summer leisure in going about the country in the guise of a traveler from Altruria, and foisting himself upon people who would have had nothing to do with him in his real character. But in another moment I perceived that this was impossible. I could not suppose that the friend who had introduced him to me would be capable of seconding so poor a joke, and, besides, I could not imagine why a walking delegate should wish to address his clumsy satire to me particularly. For the present, at least, there was nothing for it but to deal with this inquiry as if it were made in good faith and in the pursuit of useful information. It struck me as grotesque; but it would not have been decent to treat it as if it were so. I was obliged to regard it seriously, and so I decided to shirk it.

“Well,” I said, “that opens up rather a large field, which lies somewhat outside of the province of my own activities. You know, I am a writer of romantic fiction, and my time is so fully occupied in manipulating the destinies of the good old-fashioned hero and heroine, and trying always to make them end in a happy marriage, that I have hardly had a chance to look much into the lives of agriculturists or artisans; and, to tell you the truth, I don’t know what they do with their leisure. I’m pretty certain, though, you won’t meet any of them in this hotel; they couldn’t afford it, and I fancy they would find themselves out of their element among our guests. We respect them thoroughly; every American does, and we know that the prosperity of the country rests with them; we have a theory that they are politically sovereign, but we see very little of them, and we don’t associate with them. In fact, our cultivated people have so little interest in them socially that they don’t like to meet them, even in fiction; they prefer refined and polished ladies and gentlemen, whom they can have some sympathy with; and I always go to the upper classes for my types. It won’t do to suppose, though, that we are indifferent to the working classes in their place. Their condition is being studied a good deal just now, and there are several persons here who will be able to satisfy your curiosity on the points you have made, I think. I will introduce you to them.”

The Altrurian did not try to detain me this time. He said he should be very glad indeed to meet my friends, and I led the way toward a little group at the corner of the piazza. They were men whom I particularly liked, for one reason or another; they were intelligent and open-minded, and they were thoroughly American. One was a banker; another was a minister; there was a lawyer, and there was a doctor; there was a professor of political economy in one of our colleges; and there was a retired manufacturer — I do not know what he used to manufacture: cotton or iron, or something like that. They all rose politely as I came up with my Altrurian, and I fancied in them a sensation of expectancy created by the rumor of his eccentric behavior which must have spread through the hotel. But they controlled this if they had it, and I could see, as the light fell upon his face from a spray of electrics on the nearest pillar, that sort of liking kindle in theirs which I had felt myself at first sight of him.

I said, “Gentlemen, I wish to introduce my friend, Mr. Homos,” and then I presented them severally to him by name. We all sat down, and I explained: “Mr. Homos is from Altruria. He is visiting our country for the first time, and is greatly interested in the working of our institutions. He has been asking me some rather hard questions about certain phases of our civilization; and the fact is that I have launched him upon you because I don’t feel quite able to cope with him.”

They all laughed civilly at this sally of mine, but the professor asked, with a sarcasm that I thought I hardly merited, “What point in our polity can be obscure to the author of ‘Glove and Gauntlet’ and ‘Airs and Graces’?”

They all laughed again, not so civilly, I felt, and then the banker asked my friend: “Is it long since you left Altruria?”

“It seems a great while ago,” the Altrurian answered, “but it is really only a few weeks.”

“You came by way of England, I suppose?”

“Yes; there is no direct line to America,” said the Altrurian.

“That seems rather odd,” I ventured, with some patriotic grudge.

“Oh, the English have direct lines everywhere,” the banker instructed me.

“The tariff has killed our shipbuilding,” said the professor. No one took up this firebrand, and the professor added: “Your name is Greek, isn’t it, Mr. Homos?”

“Yes; we are of one of the early Hellenic families,” said the Altrurian.

“And do you think,” asked the lawyer, who, like most lawyers, was a lover of romance, and was well read in legendary lore especially, “that there is any reason for supposing that Altruria is identical with the fabled Atlantis’?”

“No, I can’t say that I do. We have no traditions of a submergence of the continent, and there are only the usual evidences of a glacial epoch which you find everywhere to support such a theory. Besides, our civilization is strictly Christian, and dates back to no earlier period than that of the first Christian commune after Christ. It is a matter of history with us that one of these communists, when they were dispersed, brought the Gospel to our continent; he was cast away on our eastern coast on his way to Britain.”

“Yes, we know that,” the minister intervened, “but it is perfectly astonishing that an island so large as Altruria should have been lost to the knowledge of the rest of the world ever since the beginning of our era. You would hardly think that there was a space of the ocean’s surface a mile square which had not been traversed by a thousand keels since Columbus sailed westward.”

“No, you wouldn’t. And I wish,” the doctor suggested in his turn, “that Mr. Homos would tell us something about his country, instead of asking us about ours.”

“Yes,” I coincided, “I’m sure we should all find it a good deal easier. At least I should; but I brought our friend up in the hope that the professor would like nothing better than to train a battery of hard facts upon a defenceless stranger.” Since the professor had given me that little stab, I was rather anxious to see how he would handle the desire for information in the Altrurian which I had found so prickly.

This turned the laugh on the professor, and he pretended to be as curious about Altruria as the rest, and said he would rather hear of it. But the Altrurian said: “I hope you will excuse me. Sometime I shall be glad to talk of Altruria as long as you like; or, if you will come to us, I shall be still happier to show you many things that I couldn’t make you understand at a distance. But I am in America to learn, not to teach, and I hope you will have patience with my ignorance. I begin to be afraid that it is so great as to seem a little incredible. I have fancied in my friend here,” he went on, with a smile toward me, “a suspicion that I was not entirely single in some of the inquiries I have made, but that I had some ulterior motive, some wish to censure or satirize.”

“Oh, not at all,” I protested, for it was not polite to admit a conjecture so accurate. “We are so well satisfied with our condition that we have nothing but pity for the darkened mind of the foreigner, though we believe in it fully: we are used to the English tourist.”

My friends laughed, and the Altrurian continued: “I am very glad to hear it, for I feel myself at a peculiar disadvantage among you. I am not only a foreigner, but I am so alien to you in all the traditions and habitudes that I find it very difficult to get upon common ground with you. Of course, I know theoretically what you are, but to realize it practically is another thing. I had read so much about America and understood so little that I could not rest without coming to see for myself. Some of the apparent contradictions were so colossal—”

“We have everything on a large scale here,” said the banker, breaking off the ash of his cigar with the end of his little finger, “and we rather pride ourselves on the size of our inconsistencies, even. I know something of the state of things in Altruria, and, to be frank with you, I will say that it seems to me preposterous. I should say it was impossible, if it were not an accomplished fact; but I always feel bound to recognize the thing done. You have hitched your wagon to a star, and you have made the star go; there is never any trouble with wagons, but stars are not easily broken to harness, and you have managed to get yours well in hand. As I said, I don’t believe in you, but I respect you.” I thought this charming, myself; perhaps because it stated my own mind about Altruria so exactly and in terms so just and generous.

“Pretty good,” said the doctor, in a murmur of satisfaction, at my ear, “for a bloated bond-holder.”

“Yes,” I whispered back, “I wish I had said it. What an American way of putting it! Emerson would have liked it himself. After all, he was our prophet.”

“He must have thought so from the way we kept stoning him,” said the doctor, with a soft laugh.

“Which of our contradictions,” asked the banker, in the same tone of gentle bonhomie, “has given you and our friend pause just now?”

The Altrurian answered, after a moment: “I am not sure that it is a contradiction, for as yet I have not ascertained the facts I was seeking. Our friend was telling me of the great change that had taken place in regard to work, and the increased leisure that your professional people are now allowing themselves; and I was asking him where your working-men spent their leisure.”

He went over the list of those he had specified, and I hung my head in shame and pity; it really had such an effect of mawkish sentimentality. But my friends received it in the best possible way. They did not laugh; they heard him out, and then they quietly deferred to the banker, who made answer for us all:

“Well, I can be almost as brief as the historian of Iceland in his chapter on snakes: those people have no leisure to spend.”

“Except when they go out on a strike,” said the manufacturer, with a certain grim humor of his own; I never heard anything more dramatic than the account he once gave of the way he broke up a labor union. “I have seen a good many of them at leisure then.”

“Yes,” the doctor chimed in, “and in my younger days, when I necessarily had a good deal of charity practice, I used to find them at leisure when they were ‘laid off.’ It always struck me as such a pretty euphemism. It seemed to minify the harm of the thing so. It seemed to take all the hunger and cold and sickness out of the fact. To be simply ‘laid off’ was so different from losing your work and having to face beggary or starvation.”

“Those people,” said the professor, “never put anything by. They are wasteful and improvident, almost to a man; and they learn nothing by experience, though they know as well as we do that it is simply a question of demand and supply, and that the day of overproduction is sure to come, when their work must stop unless the men that give them work are willing to lose money.”

“And I’ve seen them lose it, sometimes, rather than shut down,” the manufacturer remarked; “lose it hand over hand, to keep the men at work; and then as soon as the tide turned the men would strike for higher wages. You have no idea of the ingratitude of those people.” He said this toward the minister, as if he did not wish to be thought hard; and, in fact, he was a very kindly man.

“Yes,” replied the minister, “that is one of the most sinister features of the situation. They seem really to regard their employers as their enemies. I don’t know how it will end.”

“I know how it would end if I had my way,” said the professor. “There wouldn’t be any labor unions, and there wouldn’t be any strikes.”

“That is all very well,” said the lawyer, from that judicial mind which I always liked in him, “as far as the strikes are concerned, but I don’t understand that the abolition of the unions would affect the impersonal process of ‘laying off.’ The law of demand and supply I respect as much as any one — it’s something like the constitution; but, all the same, I should object extremely to have my income stopped by it every now and then. I’m probably not so wasteful as a working-man generally is; still, I haven’t laid by enough to make it a matter of indifference to me whether my income went on or not. Perhaps the professor has.” The professor did not say, and we all took leave to laugh. The lawyer concluded: “I don’t see how those fellows stand it.”

“They don’t, all of them,” said the doctor. “Or their wives and children don’t. Some of them die.”

“I wonder,” the lawyer pursued, “what has become of the good old American fact that there is always work for those who are willing to work? I notice that wherever five thousand men strike in the forenoon, there are five thousand men to take their places in the afternoon — and not men who are turning their hands to something new, but men who are used to doing the very thing the strikers have done.”

“That is one of the things that teach the futility of strikes,” the professor made haste to interpose, as if he had not quite liked to appear averse to the interests of the workman; no one likes to do that. “If there were anything at all to be hoped from them, it would be another matter.”

“Yes, but that isn’t the point, quite,” said the lawyer.

“By-the-way, what is the point?” I asked, with my humorous lightness.

“Why, I supposed,” said the banker, “it was the question how the working classes amused their elegant leisure. But it seems to be almost anything else.”

We all applauded the neat touch, but the Altrurian eagerly entreated: “No, no; never mind that now. That is a matter of comparatively little interest. I would so much rather know something about the status of the working-man among you.”

“Do you mean his political status? It’s that of every other citizen.”

“I don’t mean that. I suppose that in America you have learned, as we have in Altruria, that equal political rights are only means to an end, and as an end have no value or reality. I meant the economic status of the working-man, and his social status.”

I do not know why we were so long girding up our loins to meet this simple question. I myself could not have hopefully undertaken to answer it; but the others were each in their way men of affairs, and practically acquainted with the facts, except perhaps the professor; but he had devoted a great deal of thought to them, and ought to have been qualified to make some sort of response. But even he was silent; and I had a vague feeling that they were all somehow reluctant to formulate their knowledge, as if it were uncomfortable or discreditable. The banker continued to smoke quietly on for a moment; then he suddenly threw his cigar away.

“I like to free my mind of cant,” he said, with a short laugh, “when I can afford it, and I propose to cast all sorts of American cant out of it in answering your question. The economic status of the working-man among us is essentially the same as that of the working-man all over the civilized world. You will find plenty of people here, especially about election time, to tell you differently, but they will not be telling you the truth, though a great many of them think they are. In fact, I suppose most Americans honestly believe because we have a republican form of government, and manhood suffrage, and so on, that our economic conditions are peculiar, and that our working-man has a status higher and better than that of the working-man anywhere else. But he has nothing of the kind. His circumstances are better, and provisionally his wages are higher, but it is only a question of years or decades when his circumstances will be the same and his wages the same as the European working-man’s. There is nothing in our conditions to prevent this.”

“Yes, I understood from our friend here,” said the Altrurian, nodding toward me, “that you had broken only with the political tradition of Europe in your Revolution; and he has explained to me that you do not hold all kinds of labor in equal esteem; but—”

“What kind of labor did he say we did hold in esteem?” asked the banker.

“Why, I understood him to say that if America meant anything at all it meant the honor of work, but that you distinguished and did not honor some kinds of work so much as others; for instance, domestic service, or personal attendance of any kind.”

The banker laughed again. “Oh, he drew the line there, did he? Well, we all have to draw the line somewhere. Our friend is a novelist, and I will tell you in strict confidence that the line he has drawn is imaginary. We don’t honor any kind of work any more than any other people. If a fellow gets up, the papers make a great ado over his having been a woodchopper or a bobbin-boy, or something of that kind, but I doubt if the fellow himself likes it; he doesn’t if he’s got any sense. The rest of us feel that it’s infra dig., and hope nobody will find out that we ever worked with our hands for a living. I’ll go further,” said the banker, with the effect of whistling prudence down the wind, “and I will challenge any of you to gainsay me from his own experience or observation. How does esteem usually express itself? When we wish, to honor a man, what do we do?”

“Ask him to dinner,” said the lawyer.

“Exactly. We offer him some sort of social recognition. Well, as soon as a fellow gets up, if he gets up high enough, we offer him some sort of social recognition; in fact, all sorts; but upon condition that he has left off working with his hands for a living. We forgive all you please to his past on account of the present. But there isn’t a working-man, I venture to say, in any city or town, or even large village, in the whole length and breadth of the United States who has any social recognition, if he is still working at his trade. I don’t mean, merely, that he is excluded from rich and fashionable society, but from the society of the average educated and cultivated people. I’m not saying he is fit for it; but I don’t care how intelligent and agreeable he might be — and some of them are astonishingly intelligent, and so agreeable in their tone of mind and their original way of looking at things that I like nothing better than to talk with them — all of our invisible fences are up against him.”

The minister said: “I wonder if that sort of exclusiveness is quite natural? Children seem to feel no sort of social difference among themselves.”

“We can hardly go to children for a type of social order,” the professor suggested.

“True,” the minister meekly admitted. “But somehow there is a protest in us somewhere against these arbitrary distinctions — something that questions whether they are altogether right. We know that they must be, and always have been, and always will be, and yet — well, I will confess it — I never feel at peace when I face them.”

“Oh,” said the banker, “if you come to the question of right and wrong, that is another matter. I don’t say it’s right. I’m not discussing that question; though I’m certainly not proposing to level the fences; I should be the last to take my own down. I say simply that you are no more likely to meet a working-man in American society than you are to meet a colored man. Now you can judge,” he ended, turning directly to the Altrurian, “how much we honor labor. And I hope I have indirectly satisfied your curiosity as to the social status of the working-man among us.”

We were all silent.

Perhaps the others were occupied like myself in trying to recall some instance of a working-man whom they had met in society, and perhaps we said nothing because we all failed.

The Altrurian spoke at last.

“You have been so very full and explicit that I feel as if it were almost unseemly to press any further inquiry; but I should very much like to know how your working-men bear this social exclusion.”

“I’m sure I can’t say,” returned the banker. “A man does not care much to get into society until he has something to eat, and how to get that is always the first question with the working-man.”

“But you wouldn’t like it yourself?”

“No, certainly, I shouldn’t like it myself. I shouldn’t complain of not being asked to people’s houses, and the working-men don’t; you can’t do that; but I should feel it an incalculable loss. We may laugh at the emptiness of society, or pretend to be sick of it, but there is no doubt that society is the flower of civilization, and to be shut out from it is to be denied the best privilege of a civilized man. There are society women — we have all met them — whose graciousness and refinement of presence are something of incomparable value; it is more than a liberal education to have been admitted to it, but it is as inaccessible to the working-man as — what shall I say? The thing is too grotesquely impossible for any sort of comparison. Merely to conceive of its possibility is something that passes a joke; it is a kind of offence.”

Again we were silent.

“I don’t know,” the banker continued, “how the notion of our social equality originated, but I think it has been fostered mainly by the expectation of foreigners, who argued it from our political equality. As a matter of fact, it never existed, except in our poorest and most primitive communities, in the pioneer days of the West and among the gold-hunters of California. It was not dreamed of in our colonial society, either in Virginia or Pennsylvania or New York or Massachusetts; and the fathers of the republic, who were mostly slave-holders, were practically as stiff-necked aristocrats as any people of their day. We have not a political aristocracy, that is all; but there is as absolute a division between the orders of men and as little love, in this country as in any country on the globe. The severance of the man who works for his living with his hands from the man who does not work for his living with his hands is so complete, and apparently so final, that nobody even imagines anything else, not even in fiction. Or, how is that?” he asked, turning to me. “Do you fellows still put the intelligent, high-spirited, handsome young artisan, who wins the millionaire’s daughter, into your books? I used sometimes to find him there.”

“You might still find him in the fiction of the weekly story-papers; but,” I was obliged to own, “he would not go down with my readers. Even in the story-paper fiction he would leave off working as soon as he married the millionaire’s daughter, and go to Europe, or he would stay here and become a social leader, but he would not receive working-men in his gilded halls.”

The others rewarded my humor with a smile, but the banker said: “Then I wonder you were not ashamed of filling our friend up with that stuff about our honoring some kinds of labor. It is true that we don’t go about openly and explicitly despising any kind of honest toil — people don’t do that anywhere now; but we contemn it in terms quite as unmistakable. The working-man acquiesces as completely as anybody else. He does not remain a working-man a moment longer that he can help; and after he gets up, if he is weak enough to be proud of having been one, it is because he feels that his low origin is a proof of his prowess in rising to the top against unusual odds. I don’t suppose there is a man in the whole civilized world — outside of Altruria, of course — who is proud of working at a trade, except the shoemaker Tolstoy, and is a count, and he does not make very good shoes.”

We all laughed again: those shoes of Count Tolstoy’s are always such an infallible joke.

The Altrurian, however, was cocked and primed with another question; he instantly exploded it: “But are all the working-men in America eager to rise above their condition? Is there none willing to remain among the mass because the rest could not rise with him, and from the hope of yet bringing labor to honor?”

The banker answered: “I never heard of any. No, the American ideal is not to change the conditions for all, but for each to rise above the rest if he can.”

“Do you think it is really so bad as that?” asked the minister, timidly.

The banker answered: “Bad? Do you call that bad? I thought it was very good. But, good or bad, I don’t think you’ll find it deniable, if you look into the facts. There may be working-men willing to remain so for other working-men’s sake, but I have never met any — perhaps because the working-man never goes into society.”

The unfailing question of the Altrurian broke the silence which ensued: “Are there many of your working-men who are intelligent and agreeable — of the type you mentioned a moment since?”

“Perhaps,” said the banker, “I had better refer you to one of our friends here, who has had a great deal more to do with them than I have. He is a manufacturer, and he has had to do with all kinds of work-people.”

“Yes, for my sins,” the manufacturer assented; and he added: “They are often confoundedly intelligent, though I haven’t often found them very agreeable, either in their tone of mind or their original way of looking at things.”

The banker amiably acknowledged his thrust, and the Altrurian asked: “Ah, they are opposed to your own?”

“Well, we have the same trouble here that you must have heard of in England. As you know now that the conditions are the same here, you won’t be surprised at the fact.”

“But the conditions,” the Altrurian pursued— “do you expect them always to continue the same?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the manufacturer. “We can’t expect them to change of themselves, and I shouldn’t know how to change them. It was expected that the rise of the trusts and the syndicates would break the unions, but somehow they haven’t. The situation remains the same. The unions are not cutting one another’s throats now any more than we are. The war is on a larger scale — that’s all.”

“Then let me see,” said the Altrurian, “whether I clearly understand the situation as regards the working-man in America. He is dependent upon the employer for his chance to earn a living, and he is never sure of this. He may be thrown out of work by his employer’s disfavor or disaster, and his willingness to work goes for nothing; there is no public provision of work for him; there is nothing to keep him from want nor the prospect of anything.”

“We are all in the same boat,” said the professor.

“But some of us have provisioned ourselves rather better and can generally weather it through till we are picked up,” the lawyer put in.

“I am always saying the working-man is improvident,” returned the professor.

“There are the charities,” the minister suggested.

“But his economical status,” the Altrurian pursued, “is in a state of perpetual uncertainty, and to save himself in some measure he has organized, and so has constituted himself a danger to the public peace?”

“A very great danger,” said the professor.

“I guess we can manage him,” the manufacturer remarked.

“And socially he is non-existent?”

The Altrurian turned with this question to the banker, who said: “He is certainly not in society.”

“Then,” said my guest, “if the working-man’s wages are provisionally so much better here than in Europe, why should they be discontented? What is the real cause of their discontent?”

I have always been suspicious, in the company of practical men, of an atmosphere of condescension to men of my calling, if nothing worse. I fancy they commonly regard artists of all kinds as a sort of harmless eccentrics, and that literary people they look upon as something droll, as weak and soft, as not quite right. I believed that this particular group, indeed, was rather abler to conceive of me as a rational person than most others, but I knew that if even they had expected me to be as reasonable as themselves they would not have been greatly disappointed if I were not; and it seemed to me that I had put myself wrong with them in imparting to the Altrurian that romantic impression that we hold labor in honor here. I had really thought so, but I could not say so now, and I wished to retrieve myself somehow. I wished to show that I was a practical man, too, and so I made answer: “What is the cause of the working-man’s discontent? It is very simple: the walking delegate.”

IV

I suppose I could not have fairly claimed any great originality for my notion that the walking delegate was the cause of the labor troubles: he is regularly assigned as the reason of a strike in the newspapers, and is reprobated for his evil agency by the editors, who do not fail to read the working-men many solemn lessons and fervently warn them against him, as soon as the strike begins to go wrong — as it nearly always does. I understand from them that the walking delegate is an irresponsible tyrant, who emerges from the mystery that habitually hides him and from time to time orders a strike in mere rancor of spirit and plenitude of power, and then leaves the working-men and their families to suffer the consequences, while he goes off somewhere and rolls in the lap of luxury, careless of the misery he has created. Between his debauches of vicious idleness and his accesses of baleful activity he is employed in poisoning the mind of the working-men against his real interests and real friends. This is perfectly easy, because the American working-man, though singularly shrewd and sensible in other respects, is the victim of an unaccountable obliquity of vision which keeps him from seeing his real interests and real friends — or, at least, from knowing them when he sees them.

There could be no doubt, I thought, in the mind of any reasonable person that the walking delegate was the source of the discontent among our proletariate, and I alleged him with a confidence which met the approval of the professor, apparently, for he nodded, as if to say that I had hit the nail on the head this time; and the minister seemed to be freshly impressed with a notion that could not be new to him. The lawyer and the doctor were silent, as if waiting for the banker to speak again; but he was silent, too. The manufacturer, to my chagrin, broke into a laugh. “I’m afraid,” he said, with a sardonic levity which surprised me, “you’ll have to go a good deal deeper than the walking delegate. He’s a symptom; he isn’t the disease. The thing keeps on and on, and it seems to be always about wages; but it isn’t about wages at the bottom. Some of those fellows know it and some of them don’t, but the real discontent is with the whole system, with the nature of things. I had a curious revelation on that point the last time I tried to deal with my men as a union. They were always bothering me about this and about that, and there was no end to the bickering. I yielded point after point, but it didn’t make any difference. It seemed as if the more I gave the more they asked. At last I made up my mind to try to get at the real inwardness of the matter, and I didn’t wait for their committee to come to me — I sent for their leading man, and said I wanted to have it out with him. He wasn’t a bad fellow, and when I got at him, man to man that way, I found he had sense, and he had ideas — it’s no use pretending those fellows are fools; he had thought about his side of the question, anyway. I said: ‘Now what does it all mean? Do you want the earth, or don’t you? When is it going to end?’ I offered him something to take, but he said he didn’t drink, and we compromised on cigars. ‘Now when is it going to end?’ said I, and I pressed it home, and wouldn’t let him fight off from the point. ‘Do you mean when is it all going to end?’ said he. ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘all. I’m sick of it. If there’s any way out I’d like to know it.’ ‘Well,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you, if you want to know. It’s all going to end when you get the same amount of money for the same amount of work as we do.’”

We all laughed uproariously. The thing was deliciously comical; and nothing, I thought, attested the Altrurian’s want of humor like his failure to appreciate this joke. He did not even smile in asking: “And what did you say?”

“Well,” returned the manufacturer, with cosey enjoyment, “I asked him if the men would take the concern and run it themselves.” We laughed again; this seemed even better than the other joke. “But he said, ‘No’; they would not like to do that. And then I asked him just what they would like, if they could have their own way, and he said they would like to have me run the business, and all share alike. I asked him what was the sense of that, and why, if I could do something that all of them put together couldn’t do, I shouldn’t be paid more than all of them put together; and he said that if a man did his best he ought to be paid as much as the best man. I asked him if that was the principle their union was founded on, and he said, ‘Yes,’ that the very meaning of their union was the protection of the weak by the strong and the equalization of earnings among all who do their best.”

We waited for the manufacturer to go on, but he made a dramatic pause at this point, as if to let it sink into our minds; and he did not speak until the Altrurian prompted him with the question, “And what did you finally do?”

“I saw there was only one way out for me, and I told the fellow I did not think I could do business on that principle. We parted friends, but the next Saturday I locked them out and smashed their union. They came back, most of them — they had to — but I’ve treated with them ever since ‘as individuals.’”

“And they’re much better off in your hands than they were in the union,” said the professor.

“I don’t know about that,” said the manufacturer, “but I’m sure I am.”

We laughed with him, all but the minister, whose mind seemed to have caught upon some other point, and who sat absently by.

“And is it your opinion, from what you know of the working-man generally, that they all have this twist in their heads?” the professor asked.

“They have, until they begin to rise. Then they get rid of it mighty soon. Let a man save something — enough to get a house of his own, and take a boarder or two, and perhaps have a little money at interest — and he sees the matter in another light.”

“Do you think he sees it more clearly?” asked the minister.

“He sees it differently.”

“What do you think?” the minister pursued, turning to the lawyer. “You are used to dealing with questions of justice—”

“Rather more with questions of law, I’m afraid,” the other returned, pleasantly, putting his feet together before him and looking down at them in a way he had. “But, still, I have a great interest in questions of justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this principle, which I see nobody could do business on. It strikes me as idyllic — it’s a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our economic life.”

He referred this to me as something I might appreciate in my quality of literary man, and I responded in my quality of practical man: “There’s certainly more rhyme than reason in it.”

He turned again to the minister:

“I suppose the ideal of the Christian state is the family?”

“I hope so,” said the minister, with the gratitude that I have seen people of his cloth show when men of the world conceded premises which the world usually contests; it has seemed to me pathetic.

“And if that is the case, why, the logic of the postulate is that the prosperity of the weakest is the sacred charge and highest happiness of all the stronger. But the law has not recognized any such principle, in economics at least, and if the labor unions are based upon it they are outlaw, so far as any hope of enforcing it is concerned; and it is bad for men to feel themselves outlaw. How is it,” the lawyer continued, turning to the Altrurian, “in your country? We can see no issue here, if the first principle of organized labor antagonizes the first principle of business.”

“But I don’t understand precisely yet what the first principle of business is,” returned my guest.

“Ah, that raises another interesting question,” said the lawyer. “Of course, every business man solves the problem practically according to his temperament and education, and I suppose that on first thoughts every business man would answer you accordingly. But perhaps the personal equation is something you wish to eliminate from the definition.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Still, I would rather not venture upon it first,” said the lawyer. “Professor, what should you say was the first principle of business?”

“Buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest,” the professor promptly answered.

“We will pass the parson and the doctor and the novelist as witnesses of no value. They can’t possibly have any cognizance of the first principle of business; their affair is to look after the souls and bodies and fancies of other people. But what should you say it was?” he asked the banker.

“I should say it was an enlightened conception of one’s own interests.”

“And you?”

The manufacturer had no hesitation in answering: “The good of Number One, first, last, and all the time. There may be a difference of opinion about the best way to get at it; the long way may be the better, or the short way; the direct way or the oblique way, or the purely selfish way, or the partly selfish way; but if you ever lose sight of that end you might as well shut up shop. That seems to be the first law of nature, as well as the first law of business.”

“Ah, we mustn’t go to nature for our morality,” the minister protested.

“We were not talking of morality,” said the manufacturer; “we were talking of business.”

This brought the laugh on the minister, but the lawyer cut it short: “Well, then, I don’t really see why the trades-unions are not as business-like as the syndicates in their dealings with all those outside of themselves. Within themselves they practise an altruism of the highest order, but it is a tribal altruism; it is like that which prompts a Sioux to share his last mouthful with a starving Sioux, and to take the scalp of a starving Apache. How is it with your trades-unions in Altruria?” he asked my friend.

“We have no trades-unions in Altruria,” he began.

“Happy Altruria!” cried the professor.

“We had them formerly,” the Altrurian went on, “as you have them now. They claimed, as I suppose yours do, that they were forced into existence by the necessities of the case; that without union the working-man was unable to meet the capitalist on anything like equal terms, or to withstand his encroachments and oppressions. But to maintain themselves they had to extinguish industrial liberty among the working-men themselves, and they had to practise great cruelties against those who refused to join them or who rebelled against them.”

“They simply destroy them here,” said the professor.

“Well,” said the lawyer, from his judicial mind, “the great syndicates have no scruples in destroying a capitalist who won’t come into them or who tries to go out. They don’t club him or stone him, but they under-sell him and freeze him out; they don’t break his head, but they bankrupt him. The principle is the same.”

“Don’t interrupt Mr. Homos,” the banker entreated. “I am very curious to know just how they got rid of labor unions in Altruria.”

“We had syndicates, too, and finally we had the reductio ad absurdum — we had a federation of labor unions find a federation of syndicates, that divided the nation into two camps. The situation was not only impossible, but it was insupportably ridiculous.”

I ventured to say: “It hasn’t become quite so much of a joke with us yet.”

“Isn’t it in a fair way to become so?” asked the doctor; and he turned to the lawyer: “What should you say was the logic of events among us for the last ten or twenty years?”

“There’s nothing so capricious as the logic of events. It’s like a woman’s reasoning — you can’t tell what it’s aimed at, or where it’s going to fetch up; all that you can do is to keep out of the way if possible. We may come to some such condition of things as they have in Altruria, where the faith of the whole nation is pledged to secure every citizen in the pursuit of happiness; or we may revert to some former condition, and the master may again own the man; or we may hitch and joggle along indefinitely, as we are doing now.”

“But come, now,” said the banker, while he laid a caressing touch on the Altrurian’s shoulder, “you don’t mean to say honestly that everybody works with his hands in Altruria?”

“Yes, certainly. We are mindful, as a whole people, of the divine law— ‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.’”

“But the capitalists? I’m anxious about Number One, you see.”

“We have none.”

“I forgot, of course. But the lawyers, the doctors, the parsons, the novelists?”

“They all do their share of hand-work.”

The lawyer said: “That seems to dispose of the question of the working-man in society. But how about your minds? When do you cultivate your minds? When do the ladies of Altruria cultivate their minds, if they have to do their own work, as I suppose they do? Or is it only the men who work, if they happen to be the husbands and fathers of the upper classes?”

The Altrurian seemed to be sensible of the kindly scepticism which persisted in our reception of his statements, after all we had read of Altruria. He smiled indulgently, and said: “You mustn’t imagine that work in Altruria is the same as it is here. As we all work, the amount that each one need do is very little, a few hours each day at the most, so that every man and woman has abundant leisure and perfect spirits for the higher pleasures which the education of their whole youth has fitted them to enjoy. If you can understand a state of things where the sciences and arts and letters are cultivated for their own sake, and not as a means of livelihood—”

“No,” said the lawyer, smiling, “I’m afraid we can’t conceive of that. We consider the pinch of poverty the highest incentive that a man can have. If our gifted friend here,” he said, indicating me, “were not kept like a toad under the harrow, with his nose on the grindstone, and the poorhouse staring him in the face—”

“For Heaven’s sake,” I cried out, “don’t mix your metaphors so, anyway!”

“If it were not for that and all the other hardships that literary men undergo —

 ‘Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail’ —

his novels probably wouldn’t be worth reading.”

“Ah!” said the Altrurian, as if he did not quite follow this joking; and, to tell the truth, I never find the personal thing in very good taste. “You will understand, then, how extremely difficult it is for me to imagine a condition of things like yours — although I have it under my very eyes — where the money consideration is the first consideration.”

“Oh, excuse me,” urged the minister; “I don’t think that’s quite the case.”

“I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian, sweetly; “you can see how easily I go astray.”

“Why, I don’t know,” the banker interposed, “that you are so far out in what you say. If you had said that money was always the first motive, I should have been inclined to dispute you, too; but when you say that money is the first consideration, I think you are quite right. Unless a man secures his financial basis for his work, he can’t do his work. It’s nonsense to pretend otherwise. So the money consideration is the first consideration. People here have to live by their work, and to live they must have money. Of course, we all recognize a difference in the qualities, as well as in the kinds, of work. The work of the laborer may be roughly defined as the necessity of his life; the work of the business man as the means, and the work of the artist and scientist as the end. We might refine upon these definitions and make them closer, but they will serve for illustration as they are. I don’t think there can be any question as to which is the highest kind of work; some truths are self-evident. He is a fortunate man whose work is an end, and every business man sees this, and owns it to himself, at least when he meets some man of an aesthetic or scientific occupation. He knows that this luckier fellow has a joy in his work which he can never feel in business; that his success in it can never be embittered by the thought that it is the failure of another; that if he does it well, it is pure good; that there cannot be any competition in it — there can be only a noble emulation, as far as the work itself is concerned. He can always look up to his work, for it is something above him; and a business man often has to look down upon his business, for it is often beneath him, unless he is a pretty low fellow.”

I listened to all this in surprise; I knew that the banker was a cultivated man, a man of university training, and that he was a reader and a thinker; but he had always kept a certain reserve in his talk, which he now seemed to have thrown aside for the sake of the Altrurian, or because the subject had a charm that lured him out of himself. “Well, now,” he continued, “the question is of the money consideration, which is the first consideration with us all: does it, or doesn’t it degrade the work, which is the life, of those among us whose work is the highest? I understand that this is the misgiving which troubles you in view of our conditions?”

The Altrurian assented, and I thought it a proof of the banker’s innate delicacy that he did not refer the matter, so far as it concerned the aesthetic life and work, to me; I was afraid he was going to do so. But he courteously proposed to keep the question impersonal, and he went on to consider it himself: “Well, I don’t suppose any one can satisfy you fully. But I should say that it put such men under a double strain, and perhaps that is the reason why so many of them break down in a calling that is certainly far less exhausting than business. On one side, the artist is kept to the level of the working-man, of the animal, of the creature whose sole affair is to get something to eat and somewhere to sleep. This is through his necessity. On the other side, he is exalted to the height of beings who have no concern but with the excellence of their work, which they were born and divinely authorized to do. This is through his purpose. Between the two, I should say that he got mixed, and that his work shows it.”

None of the others said anything, and, since I had not been personally appealed to, I felt the freer to speak. “If you will suppose me to be speaking from observation rather than experience—” I began.

“By all means,” said the banker, “go on;” and the rest made haste in various forms to yield me the word.

“I should say that such a man certainly got mixed, but that his work kept itself pure from the money consideration, as it were, in spite of him. A painter or actor, or even a novelist, is glad to get all he can for his work, and, such is our fallen nature, he does get all he knows how to get: but, when he has once fairly passed into his work, he loses himself in it. He does not think whether it will pay or not, whether it will be popular or not, but whether he can make it good or not.”

“Well, that is conceivable,” said the banker. “But wouldn’t he rather do something he would get less for, if he could afford it, than the thing he knows he will get more for? Doesn’t the money consideration influence his choice of subject?”

“Oddly enough, I don’t believe it does,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection. “A man makes his choice once for all when he embraces the aesthetic life, or, rather, it is made for him; no other life seems possible. I know there is a general belief that an artist does the kind of thing he has made go because it pays; but this only shows the prevalence of business ideals. If he did not love to do the thing he does, he could not do it well, no matter how richly it paid.”

“I am glad to hear it,” said the banker, and he added to the Altrurian: “So, you see, we are not so bad as one would think. We are illogically better, in fact.”

“Yes,” the other assented. “I knew something of your literature as well as your conditions before I left home, and I perceived that by some anomaly the one was not tainted by the other. It is a miraculous proof of the divine mission of the poet.”

“And the popular novelist,” the lawyer whispered in my ear, but loud enough for the rest to hear, and they all testified their amusement at my cost.

The Altrurian, with his weak sense of humor, passed the joke. “It shows no signs of corruption from greed, but I can’t help thinking that, fine as it is, it might have been much finer if the authors who produced it had been absolutely freed to their work, and had never felt the spur of need.”

“Are they absolutely freed to it in Altruria?” asked the professor. “I understood you that everybody had to work for his living in Altruria.”

“That is a mistake. Nobody works for his living in Altruria; he works for others’ living.”

“Ah, that is precisely what our working-men object to doing here,” said the manufacturer. “In that last interview of mine with the walking delegate he had the impudence to ask me why my men should work for my living as well as their own.”

“He couldn’t imagine that you were giving them the work to do — the very means of life,” said the professor.

“Oh no, that’s the last thing those fellows want to think of.”

“Perhaps,” the Altrurian suggested, “they might not have found it such a hardship to work for your living if their own had been assured, as it is with us. If you will excuse my saying it, we should think it monstrous in Altruria for any man to have another’s means of life in his power; and in our condition it is hardly imaginable. Do you really have it in your power to take away a man’s opportunity to earn a living?”

The manufacturer laughed uneasily. “It is in my power to take away his life; but I don’t habitually shoot my fellow-men, and I never dismissed a man yet without good reason.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” said the Altrurian. “I didn’t dream of accusing you of such inhumanity. But, you see, our whole system is so very different that, as I said, it is hard for me to conceive of yours, and I am very curious to understand its workings. If you shot your fellow-man, as you say, the law would punish you; but if, for some reason that you decided to be good, you took away his means of living, and he actually starved to death—”

“Then the law would have nothing to do with it,” the professor replied for the manufacturer, who did not seem ready to answer. “But that is not the way things fall out. The man would be supported in idleness, probably, till he got another job, by his union, which would take the matter up.”

“But I thought that our friend did not employ union labor,” returned the Altrurian.

I found all this very uncomfortable, and tried to turn the talk back to a point that I felt curious about: “But in Altruria, if the literary class is not exempt from the rule of manual labor, where do they find time and strength to write?”

“Why, you must realize that our manual labor is never engrossing or exhausting. It is no more than is necessary to keep the body in health. I do not see how you remain well here, you people of sedentary occupations.”

“Oh, we all take some sort of exercise. We walk several hours a day, or we row, or we ride a bicycle, or a horse, or we fence.”

“But to us,” returned the Altrurian, with a growing frankness which nothing but the sweetness of his manner would have excused, “exercise for exercise would appear stupid. The barren expenditure of force that began and ended in itself, and produced nothing, we should — if you will excuse my saying so — look upon as childish, if not insane or immoral.”

V

At this moment the lady who had hailed me so gayly from the top of the coach while I stood waiting for the Altrurian to help the porter with the baggage, just after the arrival of the train, came up with her husband to our little group and said to me: “I want to introduce my husband to you. He adores your books.” She went on much longer to this effect, while the other men grinned round and her husband tried to look as if it were all true, and her eyes wandered to the Altrurian, who listened gravely. I knew perfectly well that she was using her husband’s zeal for my fiction to make me present my friend; but I did not mind that, and I introduced him to both of them. She took possession of him at once and began walking him off down the piazza, while her husband remained with me, and the members of our late conference drifted apart. I was not sorry to have it broken up for the present; it seemed to me that it had lasted quite long enough, and I lighted a cigar with the husband, and we strolled together in the direction his wife had taken.

He began, apparently in compliment to literature in my person: “Yes, I like to have a book where I can get at it when we’re not going out to the theatre, and I want to quiet my mind down after business. I don’t care much what the book is; my wife reads to me till I drop off, and then she finishes the book herself and tells me the rest of the story. You see, business takes it out of you so! Well, I let my wife do most of the reading, anyway. She knows pretty much everything that’s going in that line. We haven’t got any children, and it occupies her mind. She’s up to all sorts of things — she’s artistic, and she’s musical, and she’s dramatic, and she’s literary. Well, I like to have her. Women are funny, anyway.”

He was a good-looking, good-natured, average American of the money-making type; I believe he was some sort of a broker, but I do not quite know what his business was. As we walked up and down the piazza, keeping a discreet little distance from the corner where his wife had run off to with her capture, he said he wished he could get more time with her in the summer — but he supposed I knew what business was. He was glad she could have the rest, anyway; she needed it.

“By-the-way,” he asked, “who is this friend of yours? The women are all crazy about him, and it’s been an even thing between my wife and Miss Groundsel which would fetch him first. But I’ll bet on my wife every time, when it comes to a thing like that. He’s a good-looking fellow — some kind of foreigner, I believe; pretty eccentric, too, I guess. Where is Altruria, anyway?”

I told him, and he said: “Oh yes. Well, if we are going to restrict immigration, I suppose we sha’n’t see many more Altrurians, and we’d better make the most of this one. Heigh?”

I do not know why this innocent pleasantry piqued me to say: “If I understand the Altrurians, my dear fellow, nothing could induce them to emigrate to America. As far as I can make out, they would regard it very much as we should regard settling among the Eskimos.”

“Is that so?” asked my new acquaintance, with perfect good temper. “Why?”

“Really, I can’t say, and I don’t know that I’ve explicit authority for my statement.”

“They are worse than the English used to be,” he went on. “I didn’t know that there were any foreigners who looked at us in that light now. I thought the war settled all that.”

I sighed. “There are a good many things that the war didn’t settle so definitely as we’ve been used to thinking, I’m afraid. But, for that matter, I fancy an Altrurian would regard the English as a little lower in the scale of savagery than ourselves even.”

“Is that so? Well, that’s pretty good on the English, anyway,” said my companion, and he laughed with an easy satisfaction that I envied him.

“My dear!” his wife called to him from where she was sitting with the Altrurian, “I wish you would go for my shawl. I begin to feel the air a little.”

“I’ll go if you’ll tell me where,” he said, and he confided to me, “Never knows where her shawl is one-quarter of the time.”

“Well, I think I left it in the office somewhere. You might ask at the desk; or perhaps it’s in the rack by the dining-room door — or maybe up in our room.”

“I thought so,” said her husband, with another glance at me, as if it were the greatest fun in the world, and he started amiably off.

I went and took a chair by the lady and the Altrurian, and she began at once: “Oh, I’m so glad you’ve come! I have been trying to enlighten Mr. Homos about some of the little social peculiarities among us that he finds so hard to understand. He was just now,” the lady continued, “wanting to know why all the natives out here were not invited to go in and join our young people in the dance, and I’ve been trying to tell him that we consider it a great favor to let them come and take up so much of the piazza and look in at the windows.”

She gave a little laugh of superiority, and twitched her pretty head in the direction of the young country girls and country fellows who were thronging the place that night in rather unusual numbers. They were well enough looking, and, as it was Saturday night, they were in their best. I suppose their dress could have been criticised; the young fellows were clothed by the ready-made clothing-store, and the young girls after their own devices from the fashion papers; but their general effect was good, and their behavior was irreproachable; they were very quiet — if anything, too quiet. They took up a part of the piazza that was yielded them by common usage, and sat watching the hop inside, not so much enviously, I thought, as wistfully; and for the first time it struck me as odd that they should have no part in the gayety. I had often seen them there before, but I had never thought it strange they should be shut out. It had always seemed quite normal, but now, suddenly, for one baleful moment, it seemed abnormal. I suppose it was the talk we had been having about the working-men in society which caused me to see the thing as the Altrurian must have seen it; but I was, nevertheless, vexed with him for having asked such a question, after he had been so fully instructed upon the point. It was malicious of him, or it was stupid. I hardened my heart, and answered: “You might have told him, for one thing, that they were not dancing because they had not paid the piper.”

“Then the money consideration enters even into your social pleasures?” asked the Altrurian.

“Very much. Doesn’t it with you?”

He evaded this question, as he evaded all straightforward questions concerning his country: “We have no money consideration, you know. But do I understand that all your social entertainments are paid for by the guests?”

“Oh no, not so bad as that, quite. There are a great many that the host pays for. Even here, in a hotel, the host furnishes the music and the room free to the guests of the house.”

“And none are admitted from the outside?”

“Oh yes, people are welcome from all the other hotels and boarding-houses and the private cottages. The young men are especially welcome; there are not enough young men in the hotel to go round, you see.” In fact, we could see that some of the pretty girls within were dancing with other girls; half-grown boys were dangling from the waists of tall young ladies and waltzing on tiptoe.

“Isn’t that rather droll?” asked the Altrurian.

“It’s grotesque!” I said, and I felt ashamed of it. “But what are you to do? The young men are hard at work in the cities, as many as can get work there, and the rest are out West, growing up with the country. There are twenty young girls for every young man at all the summer resorts in the East.”

“But what would happen if these young farmers — I suppose they are farmers — were invited in to take part in the dance?” asked my friend.

“But that is impossible.”

“Why?”

“Really, Mrs. Makely, I think I shall have to give him back to you,” I said.

The lady laughed. “I am not sure that I want him back.”

“Oh yes,” the Altrurian entreated, with unwonted perception of the humor. “I know that I must be very trying with my questions; but do not abandon me to the solitude of my own conjectures. They are dreadful!”

“Well, I won’t,” said the lady, with another laugh. “And I will try to tell you what would happen if those farmers, or farm-hands, or whatever they are, were asked in. The mammas would be very indignant, and the young ladies would be scared, and nobody would know what to do, and the dance would stop.”

“Then the young ladies prefer to dance with one another and with little boys—”

“No, they prefer to dance with young men of their own station; they would rather not dance at all than dance with people beneath them. I don’t say anything against these natives here; they are very civil and decent. But they have not the same social traditions as the young ladies; they would be out of place with them, and they would feel it.”

“Yes, I can see that they are not fit to associate with them,” said the Altrurian, with a gleam of commonsense that surprised me, “and that as long as your present conditions endure they never can be. You must excuse the confusion which the difference between your political ideals and your economic ideals constantly creates in me. I always think of you politically first, and realize you as a perfect democracy; then come these other facts, in which I cannot perceive that you differ from the aristocratic countries of Europe in theory, or practice. It is very puzzling. Am I right in supposing that the effect of your economy is to establish insuperable inequalities among you, and to forbid the hope of the brotherhood which your policy proclaims?”

Mrs. Makely looked at me as if she were helpless to grapple with his meaning, and, for fear of worse, I thought best to evade it. I said: “I don’t believe that anybody is troubled by those distinctions. We are used to them, and everybody acquiesces in them, which is a proof that they are a very good thing.”

Mrs. Makely now came to my support. “The Americans are very high-spirited, in every class, and I don’t believe one of those nice farm-boys would like being asked in any better than the young ladies. You can’t imagine how proud some of them are.”

“So that they suffer from being excluded as inferiors?”

“Oh, I assure you they don’t feel themselves inferior! They consider themselves as good as anybody. There are some very interesting characters among them. Now, there is a young girl sitting at the first window, with her profile outlined by the light, whom I feel it an honor to speak to. That’s her brother, standing there with her — that tall, gaunt young man with a Roman face; it’s such a common type here in the mountains. Their father was a soldier, and he distinguished himself so in one of the last battles that he was promoted. He was badly wounded, but he never took a pension; he just came back to his farm and worked on till he died. Now the son has the farm, and he and his sister live there with their mother. The daughter takes in sewing, and in that way they manage to make both ends meet. The girl is really a first-rate seamstress, and so cheap! I give her a good deal of my work in the summer, and we are quite friends. She’s very fond of reading; the mother is an invalid, but she reads aloud while the daughter sews, and you’ve no idea how many books they get through. When she comes for sewing, I like to talk with her about them; I always have her sit down; it’s hard to realize that she isn’t a lady. I’m a good deal criticised, I know, and I suppose I do spoil her a little; it puts notions into such people’s heads, if you meet them in that way; they’re pretty free and independent as it is. But when I’m with Lizzie I forget that there is any difference between us; I can’t help loving the child. You must take Mr. Homos to see them, Mr. Twelvemough. They’ve got the father’s sword hung up over the head of the mother’s bed; it’s very touching. But the poor little place is so bare!”

Mrs. Makely sighed, and there fell a little pause, which she broke with a question she had the effect of having kept back.

“There is one thing I should like to ask you, too, Mr. Homos. Is it true that everybody in Altruria does some kind of manual labor?”

“Why, certainly,” he answered, quite as if he had been an American.

“Ladies, too? Or perhaps you have none.”

I thought this rather offensive, but I could not see that the Altrurian had taken it ill. “Perhaps we had better try to understand each other clearly before I answer that question. You have no titles of nobility as they have in England—”

“No, indeed! I hope we have outgrown those superstitions,” said Mrs. Makely, with a republican fervor that did my heart good. “It is a word that we apply first of all to the moral qualities of a person.”

“But you said just now that you sometimes forgot that your seamstress was not a lady. Just what did you mean by that?”

Mrs. Makely hesitated. “I meant — I suppose I meant — that she had not the surroundings of a lady; the social traditions.”

“Then it has something to do with social as well as moral qualities — with ranks and classes?”

“Classes, yes; but, as you know, we have no ranks in America.” The Altrurian took off his hat and rubbed an imaginable perspiration from his forehead. He sighed deeply. “It is all very difficult.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Makely assented, “I suppose it is. All foreigners find it so. In fact, it is something that you have to live into the notion of; it can’t be explained.”

“Well, then, my dear madam, will you tell me without further question what you understand by a lady, and let me live into the notion of it at my leisure?”

“I will do my best,” said Mrs. Makely. “But it would be so much easier to tell you who was or who was not a lady. However, your acquaintance is so limited yet that I must try to do something in the abstract and impersonal for you. In the first place, a lady must be above the sordid anxieties in every way. She need not be very rich, but she must have enough, so that she need not be harassed about making both ends meet, when she ought to be devoting herself to her social duties. The time is past with us when a lady could look after the dinner, and perhaps cook part of it herself, and then rush in to receive her guests and do the amenities. She must have a certain kind of house, so that her entourage won’t seem cramped and mean, and she must have nice frocks, of course, and plenty of them. She needn’t be of the smart set; that isn’t at all necessary; but she can’t afford to be out of the fashion. Of course, she must have a certain training. She must have cultivated tastes; she must know about art and literature and music, and all those kind of things, and, though it isn’t necessary to go in for anything in particular, it won’t hurt her to have a fad or two. The nicest kind of fad is charity; and people go in for that a great deal. I think sometimes they use it to work up with, and there are some who use religion in the same way; I think it’s horrid; but it’s perfectly safe; you can’t accuse them of doing it. I’m happy to say, though, that mere church association doesn’t count socially so much as it used to. Charity is a great deal more insidious. But you see how hard it is to define a lady. So much has to be left to the nerves, in all these things. And then it’s changing all the time; Europe’s coming in, and the old American ideals are passing away. Things that people did ten years ago would be impossible now, or at least ridiculous. You wouldn’t be considered vulgar, quite, but you would certainly be considered a back number, and that’s almost as bad. Really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I don’t believe I can tell you what a lady is.”

We all laughed together at her frank confession. The Altrurian asked: “But do I understand that one of her conditions is that she shall have nothing whatever to do?”

“Nothing to do!” cried Mrs. Makely. “A lady is busy from morning till night. She always goes to bed perfectly worn out.”

“But with what?” asked the Altrurian.

“With making herself agreeable and her house attractive, with going to lunches and teas and dinners and concerts and theatres and art exhibitions, and charity meetings and receptions, and with writing a thousand and one notes about them, and accepting and declining, and giving lunches and dinners, and making calls and receiving them, and I don’t know what all. It’s the most hideous slavery!” Her voice rose into something like a shriek; one could see that her nerves were going at the mere thought of it all. “You don’t have a moment to yourself; your life isn’t your own.”

“But the lady isn’t allowed to do any useful kind of work?”

“Work! Don’t you call all that work, and useful? I’m sure I envy the cook in my kitchen at times; I envy the woman that scrubs my floors. Stop! Don’t ask why I don’t go into my kitchen, or get down on my knees with the mop. It isn’t possible. You simply can’t. Perhaps you could if you were very grande dame, but if you’re anywhere near the line of necessity, or ever have been, you can’t. Besides, if we did do our own household work, as I understand your Altrurian ladies do, what would become of the servant class? We should be taking away their living, and that would be wicked.”

“It would certainly be wrong to take away the living of a fellow-creature,” the Altrurian gravely admitted, “and I see the obstacle in your way.”

“It’s a mountain,” said the lady, with exhaustion in her voice, but a returning amiability; his forbearance must have placated her.

“May I ask what the use of your society life is?” he ventured, after a moment.

“Use? Why should it have any? It kills time.”

“Then you are shut up to a hideous slavery without use, except to kill time, and you cannot escape from it without taking away the living of those dependent on you?”

“Yes,” I put in, “and that is a difficulty that meets us at every turn. It is something that Matthew Arnold urged with great effect in his paper on that crank of a Tolstoy. He asked what would become of the people who need the work if we served and waited on ourselves, as Tolstoy preached. The question is unanswerable.”

“That is true; in your conditions, it is unanswerable,” said the Altrurian.

“I think,” said Mrs. Makely, “that, under the circumstances, we do pretty well.”

“Oh, I don’t presume to censure you. And if you believe that your conditions are the best—”

“We believe them the best in the best of all possible worlds,” I said, devoutly; and it struck me that, if ever we came to have a national church, some such affirmation as that concerning our economical conditions ought to be in the confession of faith.

The Altrurian’s mind had not followed mine so far. “And your young girls,” he asked of Mrs. Makely— “how is their time occupied?”

“You mean after they come out in society?”

“I suppose so.”

She seemed to reflect. “I don’t know that it is very differently occupied. Of course, they have their own amusements; they have their dances, and little clubs, and their sewing-societies. I suppose that even an Altrurian would applaud their sewing for the poor?” Mrs. Makely asked, rather satirically.

“Yes,” he answered; and then he asked: “Isn’t it taking work away from some needy seamstress, though? But I suppose you excuse it to the thoughtlessness of youth.”

Mrs. Makely did not say, and he went on: “What I find it so hard to understand is how you ladies can endure a life of mere nervous exertion, such as you have been describing to me. I don’t see how you keep well.”

“We don’t keep well,” said Mrs. Makely, with the greatest amusement. “I don’t suppose that when you get above the working classes, till you reach the very rich, you would find a perfectly well woman in America.”

“Isn’t that rather extreme?” I ventured to ask.

“No,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s shamefully moderate,” and she seemed to delight in having made out such a bad case for her sex. You can’t stop a woman of that kind when she gets started; I had better left it alone.

“But,” said the Altrurian, “if you are forbidden by motives of humanity from doing any sort of manual labor, which you must leave to those who live by it, I suppose you take some sort of exercise?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Makely, shaking her head gayly, “we prefer to take medicine.”

“You must approve of that,” I said to the Altrurian, “as you consider exercise for its own sake insane or immoral. But, Mrs. Makely,” I entreated, “you’re giving me away at a tremendous rate. I have just been telling Mr. Homos that you ladies go in for athletics so much now in your summer outings that there is danger of your becoming physically as well as intellectually superior to us poor fellows. Don’t take that consolation from me.”

“I won’t, altogether,” she said. “I couldn’t have the heart to, after the pretty way you’ve put it. I don’t call it very athletic, sitting around on hotel piazzas all summer long, as nineteen-twentieths of us do. But I don’t deny that there is a Remnant, as Matthew Arnold calls them, who do go in for tennis and boating and bathing and tramping and climbing.” She paused, and then she concluded, gleefully: “And you ought to see what wrecks they get home in the fall!”

The joke was on me; I could not help laughing, though I felt rather sheepish before the Altrurian. Fortunately, he did not pursue the inquiry; his curiosity had been given a slant aside from it.

“But your ladies,” he asked, “they have the summer for rest, however they use it. Do they generally leave town? I understood Mr. Twelvemough to say so,” he added, with a deferential glance at me.

“Yes, you may say it is the universal custom in the class that can afford it,” said Mrs. Makely. She proceeded as if she felt a tacit censure in his question. “It wouldn’t be the least use for us to stay and fry through our summers in the city simply because our fathers and brothers had to. Besides, we are worn out, at the end of the season, and they want us to come away as much as we want to come.”

“Ah, I have always heard that the Americans are beautiful in their attitude toward women.”

“They are perfect dears,” said Mrs. Makely, “and here comes one of the best of them.”

At that moment her husband came up and laid her shawl across her shoulders. “Whose character is it you’re blasting?” he asked, jocosely.

“Where in the world did you find it?” she asked, meaning the shawl.

“It was where you left it — on the sofa, in the side parlor. I had to take my life in my hand when I crossed among all those waltzers in there. There must have been as many as three couples on the floor. Poor girls! I pity them, off at these places. The fellows in town have a good deal better time. They’ve got their clubs, and they’ve got the theatre, and when the weather gets too much for them they can run off down to the shore for the night. The places anywhere within an hour’s ride are full of fellows. The girls don’t have to dance with one another there, or with little boys. Of course, that’s all right if they like it better.” He laughed at his wife, and winked at me, and smoked swiftly, in emphasis of his irony.

“Then the young gentlemen whom the young ladies here usually meet in society are all at work in the cities?” the Altrurian asked him, rather needlessly, as I had already said so.

“Yes, those who are not out West, growing up with the country, except, of course, the fellows who have inherited a fortune. They’re mostly off on yachts.”

“But why do your young men go West to grow up with the country?” pursued my friend.

“Because the East is grown up. They have got to hustle, and the West is the place to hustle. To make money,” added Makely, in response to a puzzled glance of the Altrurian.

“Sometimes,” said his wife, “I almost hate the name of money.”

“Well, so long as you don’t hate the thing, Peggy.”

“Oh, we must have it, I suppose,” she sighed. “They used to say about the girls who grew into old maids just after the Rebellion that they had lost their chance in the war for the Union. I think quite as many lose their chance now in the war for the dollar.”

“Mars hath slain his thousands, but Mammon hath slain his tens of thousands,” I suggested, lightly; we all like to recognize the facts, so long as we are not expected to do anything about them; then, we deny them.

“Yes, quite as bad as that,” said Mrs. Makely.

“Well, my dear, you are expensive, you know,” said her husband, “and if we want to have you — why, we’ve got to hustle first.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you, you poor things! There’s nothing to be done about it; it’s just got to go on and on; I don’t see how it’s ever to end.”

The Altrurian had been following us with that air of polite mystification which I had begun to dread in him. “Then, in your good society you postpone, and even forego, the happiness of life in the struggle to be rich?”

“Well, you see,” said Makely, “a fellow don’t like to ask a girl to share a home that isn’t as nice as the home she has left.”

“Sometimes,” his wife put in, rather sadly, “I think that it’s all a mistake, and that we’d be willing to share the privations of the man we loved.”

“Well,” said Makely, with a laugh, “we wouldn’t like to risk it.”

I laughed with him, but his wife did not, and in the silence that ensued there was nothing to prevent the Altrurian from coming in with another of his questions: “How far does this state of things extend downward? Does it include the working classes, too?”

“Oh no!” we all answered together, and Mrs. Makely said: “With your Altrurian ideas, I suppose you would naturally sympathize a great deal more with the lower classes, and think they had to endure all the hardships in our system; but if you could realize how the struggle goes on in the best society, and how we all have to fight for what we get, or don’t get, you would be disposed to pity our upper classes, too.”

“I am sure I should,” said the Altrurian.

Makely remarked: “I used to hear my father say that slavery was harder on the whites than it was on the blacks, and that he wanted it done away with for the sake of the masters.”

Makely rather faltered in conclusion, as if he were not quite satisfied with his remark, and I distinctly felt a want of proportion in it; but I did not wish to say anything. His wife had no reluctance.

“Well, there’s no comparison between the two things, but the struggle certainly doesn’t affect the working classes as it does us. They go on marrying and giving in marriage in the old way. They have nothing to lose, and so they can afford it.”

“Blessed am dem what don’t expect nuffin! Oh, I tell you, it’s a working-man’s country,” said Makely, through his cigar-smoke. “You ought to see them in town, these summer nights, in the parks and squares and cheap theatres. Their girls are not off for their health, anywhere, and their fellows are not off growing up with the country. Their day’s work is over, and they’re going in for a good time. And, then, walk through the streets where they live, and see them out on the stoops with their wives and children! I tell you, it’s enough to make a fellow wish he was poor himself.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “it’s astonishing how strong and well those women keep, with their great families and their hard work. Sometimes I really envy them.”

“Do you suppose,” said the Altrurian, “that they are aware of the sacrifices which the ladies of the upper classes make in leaving all the work to them, and suffering from the nervous debility which seems to be the outcome of your society life?”

“They have not the remotest idea of it. They have no conception of what a society woman goes through with. They think we do nothing. They envy us, too, and sometimes they’re so ungrateful and indifferent, if you try to help them, or get on terms with them, that I believe they hate us.”

“But that comes from ignorance?”

“Yes, though I don’t know that they are really any more ignorant of us than we are of them. It’s the other half on both sides.”

“Isn’t that a pity, rather?”

“Of course it’s a pity, but what can you do? You can’t know what people are like unless you live like them, and then the question is whether the game is worth the candle. I should like to know how you manage in Altruria.”

“Why, we have solved the problem in the only way, as you say, that it can be solved. We all live alike.”

“Isn’t that a little, just a very trifling little bit, monotonous?” Mrs. Makely asked, with a smile. “But there is everything, of course, in being used to it. To an unregenerate spirit — like mine, for example — it seems intolerable.”

“But why? When you were younger, before you were married, you all lived at home together — or, perhaps, you were an only child?”

“Oh, no indeed! There were ten of us.”

“Then you all lived alike, and shared equally?”

“Yes, but we were a family.”

“We do not conceive of the human race except as a family.”

“Now, excuse me, Mr. Homos, that is all nonsense. You cannot have the family feeling without love, and it is impossible to love other people. That talk about the neighbor, and all that, is all well enough—” She stopped herself, as if she dimly remembered who began that talk, and then went on: “Of course, I accept it as a matter of faith, and the spirit of it, nobody denies that; but what I mean is, that you must have frightful quarrels all the time.” She tried to look as if this were where she really meant to bring up, and he took her on the ground she had chosen.

“Yes, we have quarrels. Hadn’t you at home?”

“We fought like little cats and dogs, at times.”

Makely and I burst into a laugh at her magnanimous frankness. The Altrurian remained serious. “But, because you lived alike, you knew each other, and so you easily made up your quarrels. It is quite as simple with us, in our life as a human family.”

This notion of a human family seemed to amuse Mrs. Makely more and more; she laughed and laughed again. “You must excuse me,” she panted, at last, “but I cannot imagine it! No, it is too ludicrous. Just fancy the jars of an ordinary family multiplied by the population of a whole continent! Why, you must be in a perpetual squabble. You can’t have any peace of your lives. It’s worse, far worse, than our way.”

“But, madam,” he began, “you are supposing our family to be made up of people with all the antagonistic interests of your civilization. As a matter of fact—”

“No, no! I know human nature, Mr. Homos!” She suddenly jumped up and gave him her hand. “Good-night,” she said, sweetly, and as she drifted off on her husband’s arm she looked back at us and nodded in gay triumph.

The Altrurian turned upon me with unabated interest. “And have you no provision in your system for finally making the lower classes understand the sufferings and sacrifices of the upper classes in their behalf? Do you expect to do nothing to bring them together in mutual kindness?”

“Well, not this evening,” I said, throwing the end of my cigar away. “I’m going to bed — aren’t you?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, good-night. Are you sure you can find your room?”

“Oh yes. Good-night.”

VI

I left my guest abruptly, with a feeling of vexation not very easily definable. His repetition of questions about questions which society has so often answered, and always in the same way, was not so bad in him as it would have been in a person of our civilization; he represented a wholly different state of things, the inversion of our own, and much could be forgiven him for that reason, just as in Russia much could be forgiven to an American if he formulated his curiosity concerning imperialism from a purely republican experience. I knew that in Altruria, for instance, the possession of great gifts, of any kind of superiority, involved the sense of obligation to others, and the wish to identify one’s self with the great mass of men, rather than the ambition to distinguish one’s self from them; and that the Altrurians honored their gifted men in the measure they did this. A man reared in such a civilization must naturally find it difficult to get our point of view; with social inclusion as the ideal, he would with difficulty conceive of our ideal of social exclusion; but I think we had all been very patient with him; we should have made short work with an American who had approached us with the same inquiries. Even from a foreigner, the citizen of a republic founded on the notion, elsewhere exploded ever since Cain, that one is his brother’s keeper, the things he asked seemed inoffensive only because they were puerile; but they certainly were puerile. I felt that it ought to have been self-evident to him that when a commonwealth of sixty million Americans based itself upon the great principle of self-seeking, self-seeking was the best thing, and, whatever hardship it seemed to work, it must carry with it unseen blessings in tenfold measure. If a few hundred thousand favored Americans enjoyed the privilege of socially contemning all the rest, it was as clearly right and just that they should do so as that four thousand American millionaires should be richer than all the other Americans put together. Such a status, growing out of our political equality and our material prosperity, must evince a divine purpose to any one intimate with the designs of Providence, and it seemed a kind of impiety to doubt its perfection. I excused the misgivings which I could not help seeing in the Altrurian to his alien traditions, and I was aware that my friends had done so, too. But, if I could judge from myself, he must have left them all sensible of their effort; and this was not pleasant. I could not blink the fact that although I had openly disagreed with him on every point of ethics and economics, I was still responsible for him as a guest. It was as if an English gentleman had introduced a blatant American Democrat into Tory society; or, rather, as if a Southerner of the olden time had harbored a Northern Abolitionist and permitted him to inquire into the workings of slavery among his neighbors. People would tolerate him as my guest for a time, but there must be an end of their patience with the tacit enmity of his sentiments and the explicit vulgarity of his ideals, and when the end came I must be attainted with him.

I did not like the notion of this, and I meant to escape it if I could. I confess that I would have willingly disowned him, as I had already disavowed his opinions, but there was no way of doing it short of telling him to go away, and I was not ready to do that. Something in the man, I do not know what, mysteriously appealed to me. He was not contemptibly puerile without being lovably childlike, and I could only make up my mind to be more and more frank with him and to try and shield him, as well as myself, from the effects I dreaded.

I fell asleep planning an excursion farther into the mountains, which should take up the rest of the week that I expected him to stay with me, and would keep him from following up his studies of American life where they would be so injurious to both of us as they must in our hotel. A knock at my door roused me, and I sent a drowsy “Come in!” toward it from the bedclothes without looking that way.

“Good-morning!” came back in the rich, gentle voice of the Altrurian. I lifted my head with a jerk from the pillow, and saw him standing against the closed door, with my shoes in his hand. “Oh, I am sorry I waked you. I thought—”

“Not at all, not at all,” I said. “It’s quite time, I dare say. But you oughtn’t to have taken the trouble to bring my shoes in.”

“I wasn’t altogether disinterested in it,” he returned. “I wished you to compliment me on them. Don’t you think they are pretty well done, for an amateur?” He came toward my bed, and turned them about in his hands, so that they would catch the light, and smiled down upon me.

“I don’t understand,” I began.

“Why,” he said, “I blacked them, you know.”

“You blacked them?”

“Yes,” he returned, easily. “I thought I would go into the baggage-room, after we parted last night, to look for a piece of mine that had not been taken to my room, and I found the porter there, with his wrist bound up. He said he had strained it in handling a lady’s Saratoga — he said a Saratoga was a large trunk — and I begged him to let me relieve him at the boots he was blacking. He refused at first, but I insisted upon trying my hand at a pair, and then he let me go on with the men’s boots; he said he could varnish the ladies’ without hurting his wrist. It needed less skill than I supposed, and after I had done a few pairs he said I could black boots as well as he.”

“Did anybody see you?” I gasped, and I felt a cold perspiration break out on me.

“No, we had the whole midnight hour to ourselves. The porter’s work with the baggage was all over, and there was nothing to interrupt the delightful chat we fell into. He is a very intelligent man, and he told me all about that custom of feeing which you deprecate. He says that the servants hate it as much as the guests; they have to take the tips now because the landlords figure on them in the wages, and they cannot live without them. He is a fine, manly fellow, and—”

“Mr. Homos,” I broke in, with the strength I found in his assurance that no one had seen him helping the porter black boots, “I want to speak very seriously with you, and I hope you will not be hurt if I speak very plainly about a matter in which I have your good solely at heart.” This was not quite true, and I winced inwardly a little when he thanked me with that confounded sincerity of his which was so much like irony; but I went on: “It is my duty to you, as my guest, to tell you that this thing of doing for others is not such a simple matter here, as your peculiar training leads you to think. You have been deceived by a superficial likeness; but, really, I do not understand how you could have read all you have done about us and not realize before coming here that America and Altruria are absolutely distinct and diverse in their actuating principles. They are both republics, I know; but America is a republic where every man is for himself, and you cannot help others as you do at home; it is dangerous — it is ridiculous. You must keep this fact in mind, or you will fall into errors that will be very embarrassing to you in your stay among us, and,” I was forced to add, “to all your friends. Now, I certainly hoped, after what I had said to you and what my friends had explained of our civilization, that you would not have done a thing of this kind. I will see the porter, as soon as I am up, and ask him not to mention the matter to any one, but, I confess, I don’t like to take an apologetic tone with him; your conditions are so alien to ours that they will seem incredible to him, and he will think I am stuffing him.”

“I don’t believe he will think that,” said the Altrurian, “and I hope you won’t find the case so bad as it seems to you. I am extremely sorry to have done wrong—”

“Oh, the thing wasn’t wrong in itself. It was only wrong under the circumstances. Abstractly, it is quite right to help a fellow-being who needs help; no one denies that, even in a country where every one is for himself.”

“I am so glad to hear it,” said the Altrurian. “Then, at least, I have not gone radically astray; and I do not think you need take the trouble to explain the Altrurian ideas to the porter. I have done that already, and they seemed quite conceivable to him; he said that poor folks had to act upon them, even here, more or less, and that if they did not act upon them there would be no chance for them at all. He says they have to help one another very much as we do at home, and that it is only the rich folks among you who are independent. I really don’t think you need speak to him at all, unless you wish; and I was very careful to guard my offer of help at the point where I understood from you and your friends that it might do harm. I asked him if there was not some one who would help him out with his boot-blacking for money, because in that case I should be glad to pay him; but he said there was no one about who would take the job; that he had to agree to black the boots, or else he would not have got the place of porter, but that all the rest of the help would consider it a disgrace, and would not help him for love or money. So it seemed quite safe to offer him my services.”

I felt that the matter was almost hopeless, but I asked: “And what he said — didn’t that suggest anything else to you?”

“How anything else?” asked the Altrurian, in his turn.

“Didn’t it occur to you that if none of his fellow-servants were willing to help him black boots, and if he did it only because he was obliged to, it was hardly the sort of work for you?”

“Why, no,” said the Altrurian, with absolute simplicity. He must have perceived the despair I fell into at this answer, for he asked: “Why should I have minded doing for others what I should have been willing to do for myself?”

“There are a great many things we are willing to do for ourselves that we are not willing to do for others. But even on that principle, which I think false and illogical, you could not be justified. A gentleman is not willing to black his own boots. It is offensive to his feelings, to his self-respect; it is something he will not do if he can get anybody else to do it for him.”

“Then in America,” said the Altrurian, “it is not offensive to the feelings of a gentleman to let another do for him what he would not do for himself?”

“Certainly not.”

“Ah,” he returned, “then we understand something altogether different by the word gentleman in Altruria. I see, now, how I have committed a mistake. I shall be more careful hereafter.”

I thought I had better leave the subject, and, “By-the-way,” I said, “how would you like to take a little tramp with me to-day farther up into the mountains?”

“I should be delighted,” said the Altrurian, so gratefully that I was ashamed to think why I was proposing the pleasure to him.

“Well, then, I shall be ready to start as soon as we have had breakfast. I will join you down-stairs in half an hour.”

He left me at this hint, though really I was half afraid he might stay and offer to lend me a hand at my toilet, in the expression of his national character. I found him with Mrs. Makely, when I went down, and she began, with a parenthetical tribute to the beauty of the mountains in the morning light: “Don’t be surprised to see me up at this unnatural hour. I don’t know whether it was the excitement of our talk last night, or what it was, but my sulphonal wouldn’t act, though I took fifteen grains, and I was up with the lark, or should have been, if there had been any lark outside of literature to be up with. However, this air is so glorious that I don’t mind losing a night’s sleep now and then. I believe that with a little practice one could get along without any sleep at all here; at least, I could. I’m sorry to say poor Mr. Makely can’t, apparently. He’s making up for his share of my vigils, and I’m going to breakfast without him. Do you know, I’ve done a very bold thing: I’ve got the head-waiter to give you places at our table; I know you’ll hate it, Mr. Twelvemough, because you naturally want to keep Mr. Homos to yourself, and I don’t blame you at all; but I’m simply not going to let you, and that’s all there is about it.”

The pleasure I felt at this announcement was not unmixed, but I tried to keep Mrs. Makely from thinking so, and I was immensely relieved when she found a chance to say to me, in a low voice: “I know just how you’re feeling, Mr. Twelvemough, and I’m going to help you keep him from doing anything ridiculous, if I can. I like him, and I think it’s a perfect shame to have people laughing at him. I know we can manage him between us.”

We so far failed, however, that the Altrurian shook hands with the head-waiter when he pressed open the wire-netting door to let us into the dining-room, and made a bow to our waitress of the sort one makes to a lady. But we thought it best to ignore these little errors of his and reserve our moral strength for anything more spectacular. Fortunately we got through our breakfast with nothing worse than his jumping up and stooping to hand the waitress a spoon she let fall; but this could easily pass for some attention to Mrs. Makely at a little distance. There were not many people down to breakfast yet; but I could see that there was a good deal of subdued sensation among the waitresses, standing with folded arms behind their tables, and that the head-waiter’s handsome face was red with anxiety.

Mrs. Makely asked if we were going to church. She said she was driving that way, and would be glad to drop us. “I’m not going myself,” she explained, “because I couldn’t make anything of the sermon, with my head in the state it is, and I’m going to compromise on a good action. I want to carry some books and papers over to Mrs. Camp. Don’t you think that will be quite as acceptable, Mr. Homos?”

“I should venture to hope it,” he said, with a tolerant seriousness not altogether out of keeping with her lightness.

“Who is Mrs. Camp?” I asked, not caring to commit myself on the question.

“Lizzie’s mother. You know I told you about them last night. I think she must have got through the books I lent her, and I know Lizzie didn’t like to ask me for more, because she saw me talking with you, and didn’t want to interrupt us. Such a nice girl! I think the Sunday papers must have come, and I’ll take them over, too; Mrs. Camp is always so glad to get them, and she is so delightful when she gets going about public events. But perhaps you don’t approve of Sunday papers, Mr. Homos.”

“I’m sure I don’t know, madam. I haven’t seen them yet. You know this is the first Sunday I’ve been in America.”

“Well, I’m sorry to say you won’t see the old Puritan Sabbath,” said Mrs. Makely, with an abrupt deflection from the question of the Sunday papers. “Though you ought to, up in these hills. The only thing left of it is rye-and-Indian bread, and these baked beans and fish-balls.”

“But they are very good?”

“Yes, I dare say they are not the worst of it.”

She was a woman who tended to levity, and I was a little afraid she might be going to say something irreverent; but, if she were, she was forestalled by the Altrurian asking: “Would it be very indiscreet, madam, if I were to ask you some time to introduce me to that family?”

“The Camps?” she returned. “Not at all. I should be perfectly delighted.” The thought seemed to strike her, and she asked: “Why not go with me this morning, unless you are inflexibly bent on going to church, you and Mr. Twelvemough?”

The Altrurian glanced at me, and I said I should be only too glad, if I could carry some books, so that I could compromise on a good action, too. “Take one of your own,” she instantly suggested.

“Do you think they wouldn’t be too severe upon it?” I asked.

“Well, Mrs. Camp might,” Mrs. Makely consented, with a smile. “She goes in for rather serious fiction; but I think Lizzie would enjoy a good, old-fashioned love-story, where everybody got married, as they do in your charming books.”

I winced a little, for every one likes to be regarded seriously, and I did not enjoy being remanded to the young-girl public; but I put a bold face on it, and said: “My good action shall be done in behalf of Miss Lizzie.”

Half an hour later, Mrs. Makely having left word with the clerk where we were gone, so that her husband need not be alarmed when he got up, we were striking into the hills on a two-seated buckboard, with one of the best teams of our hotel, and one of the most taciturn drivers. Mrs. Makely had the Altrurian get into the back seat with her, and, after some attempts to make talk with the driver, I leaned over and joined in their talk. The Altrurian was greatly interested, not so much in the landscape — though he owned its beauty when we cried out over it from point to point — but in the human incidents and features. He noticed the cattle in the fields, and the horses we met on the road, and the taste and comfort of the buildings, the variety of the crops, and the promise of the harvest. I was glad of the respite his questions gave me from the study of the intimate character of our civilization, for they were directed now at these more material facts, and I willingly joined Mrs. Makely in answering them. We explained that the finest teams we met were from the different hotels or boarding-houses, or at least from the farms where the people took city people to board; and that certain shabby equipages belonged to the natives who lived solely by cultivating the soil. There was not very much of the soil cultivated, for the chief crop was hay, with here and there a patch of potatoes or beans, and a few acres in sweet-corn. The houses of the natives, when they were for their use only, were no better than their turnouts; it was where the city boarder had found shelter that they were modern and pleasant. Now and then we came to a deserted homestead, and I tried to make the Altrurian understand how farming in New England had yielded to the competition of the immense agricultural operations of the West. “You know,” I said, “that agriculture is really an operation out there, as much as coal-mining is in Pennsylvania, or finance in Wall Street; you have no idea of the vastness of the scale.” Perhaps I swelled a little with pride in my celebration of the national prosperity, as it flowed from our Western farms of five and ten and twenty thousand acres; I could not very well help putting on the pedal in these passages. Mrs. Makely listened almost, as eagerly, as the Altrurian, for, as a cultivated American woman, she was necessarily quite ignorant of her own country, geographically, politically, and historically. “The only people left in the hill country of New England,” I concluded, “are those who are too old or too lazy to get away. Any young man of energy would be ashamed to stay, unless he wanted to keep a boarding-house or live on the city vacationists in summer. If he doesn’t, he goes West and takes up some of the new land, and comes back in middle-life and buys a deserted farm to spend his summers on.”

“Dear me!” said the Altrurian. “Is it so simple as that? Then we can hardly wonder at their owners leaving these worn-out farms; though I suppose it must be with the pang of exile, sometimes.”

“Oh, I fancy there isn’t much sentiment involved,” I answered, lightly.

“Whoa!” said Mrs. Makely, speaking to the horses before she spoke to the driver, as some women will. He pulled them up, and looked round at her.

“Isn’t that Reuben Camp, now, over there by that house?” she asked, as if we had been talking of him; that is another way some women have.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the driver.

“Oh, well, then!” and “Reuben!” she called to the young man, who was prowling about the door-yard of a sad-colored old farm-house, and peering into a window here and there. “Come here a moment — won’t you, please?”

He lifted his head and looked round, and, when he had located the appeal made to him, he came down the walk to the gate and leaned over it, waiting for further instructions. I saw that it was the young man whom we had noticed with the girl Mrs. Makely called Lizzie on the hotel piazza the night before.

“Do you know whether I should find Lizzie at home this morning?”

“Yes, she’s there with mother,” said the young fellow, with neither liking nor disliking in his tone.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” said the lady. “I didn’t know but she might be at church. What in the world has happened here? Is there anything unusual going on inside?”

“No, I was just looking to see if it was all right. The folks wanted I should come round.”

“Why, where are they?”

“Oh, they’re gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yes; gone West. They’ve left the old place, because they couldn’t make a living here any longer.”

“Why, this is quite a case in point,” I said. “Now, Mr. Homos, here is a chance to inform yourself at first hand about a very interesting fact of our civilization”; and I added, in a low voice, to Mrs. Makely: “Won’t you introduce us?”

“Oh yes. Mr. Camp, this is Mr. Twelvemough, the author — you know his books, of course; and Mr. Homos, a gentleman from Altruria.”

The young fellow opened the gate he leaned on and came out to us. He took no notice of me, but he seized the Altrurian’s hand and wrung it. “I’ve heard of you” he said. “Mrs. Makely, were you going to our place?”

“Why, yes.”

“So do, then. Mother would give almost anything to see Mr. Homos. We’ve heard of Altruria, over our way,” he added to our friend. “Mother’s been reading up all she can about it. She’ll want to talk with you, and she won’t give the rest of us much of a chance, I guess.”

“Oh, I shall be glad to see her,” said the Altrurian, “and to tell her everything I can. But won’t you explain to me first something about your deserted farms here? It’s quite a new thing to me.”

“It isn’t a new thing to us,” said the young fellow, with a short laugh. “And there isn’t much to explain about it. You’ll see them all through New England. When a man finds he can’t get his funeral expenses out of the land, he don’t feel like staying to be buried in it, and he pulls up and goes.”

“But people used to get their living expenses here,” I suggested. “Why can’t they now?”

“Well, they didn’t use to have Western prices to fight with; and then the land wasn’t worn out so, and the taxes were not so heavy. How would you like to pay twenty to thirty dollars on the thousand, and assessed up to the last notch, in the city?”

“Why, what in the world makes your taxes so heavy?”

“Schools and roads. We’ve got to have schools, and you city folks want good roads when you come here in the summer, don’t you? Then the season is short, and sometimes we can’t make a crop. The frost catches the corn in the field, and you have your trouble for your pains. Potatoes are the only thing we can count on, except grass, and, when everybody raises potatoes, you know where the price goes.”

“Oh, but now, Mr. Camp,” said Mrs. Makely, leaning over toward him, and speaking in a cosey and coaxing tone, as if he must not really keep the truth from an old friend like her, “isn’t it a good deal because the farmers’ daughters want pianos, and the farmers’ sons want buggies? I heard Professor Lumen saying, the other day, that, if the farmers were willing to work as they used to work, they could still get a good living off their farms, and that they gave up their places because they were too lazy, in many cases, to farm them properly.”

“He’d better not let me hear him saying that,” said the young fellow, while a hot flush passed over his face. He added, bitterly: “If he wants to see how easy it is to make a living up here, he can take this place and try for a year or two; he can get it cheap. But I guess he wouldn’t want it the year round; he’d only want it a few months in the summer, when he could enjoy the sightliness of it, and see me working over there on my farm, while he smoked on his front porch.” He turned round and looked at the old house in silence a moment. Then, as he went on, his voice lost its angry ring. “The folks here bought this place from the Indians, and they’d been here more than two hundred years. Do you think they left it because they were too lazy to run it, or couldn’t get pianos and buggies out of it, or were such fools as not to know whether they were well off? It was their home; they were born and lived and died here. There is the family burying-ground over there.”

Neither Mrs. Makely nor myself was ready with a reply, and we left the word with the Altrurian, who suggested: “Still, I suppose they will be more prosperous in the West on the new land they take up?”

The young fellow leaned his arms on the wheel by which he stood. “What do you mean by taking up new land?”

“Why, out of the public domain—”

“There ain’t any public domain that’s worth having. All the good land is in the hands of railroads and farm syndicates and speculators; and if you want a farm in the West you’ve got to buy it; the East is the only place where folks give them away, because they ain’t worth keeping. If you haven’t got the ready money, you can buy one on credit, and pay ten, twenty, and thirty per cent. interest, and live in a dugout on the plains — till your mortgage matures.” The young man took his arms from the wheel and moved a few steps backward, as he added: “I’ll see you over at the house later.”

The driver touched his horses, and we started briskly off again. But I confess I had quite enough of his pessimism, and as we drove away I leaned back toward the Altrurian and said: “Now, it is all perfect nonsense to pretend that things are at that pass with us. There are more millionaires in America, probably, than there are in all the other civilized countries of the globe, and it is not possible that the farming population should be in such a hopeless condition. All wealth comes out of the earth, and you may be sure they get their full share of it.”

“I am glad to hear you say so,” said the Altrurian. “What is the meaning of this new party in the West that seems to have held a convention lately? I read something of it in the train yesterday.”

“Oh, that is a lot of crazy Hayseeds, who don’t want to pay back the money they have borrowed, or who find themselves unable to meet their interest. It will soon blow over. We are always having these political flurries. A good crop will make it all right with them.”

“But is it true that they have to pay such rates of interest as our young friend mentioned?”

“Well,” I said, seeing the thing in the humorous light which softens for us Americans so many of the hardships of others, “I suppose that man likes to squeeze his brother man when he gets him in his grip. That’s human nature, you know.”

“Is it?” asked the Altrurian.

It seemed to me that he had asked something like that before when I alleged human nature in defence of some piece of every-day selfishness. But I thought best not to notice it, and I went on: “The land is so rich out there that a farm will often pay for itself with a single crop.”

“Is it possible?” cried the Altrurian. “Then I suppose it seldom really happens that a mortgage is foreclosed, in the way our young friend insinuated?”

“Well, I can’t say that exactly”; and, having admitted so much, I did not feel bound to impart a fact that popped perversely into my mind. I was once talking with a Western money-lender, a very good sort of fellow, frank and open as the day; I asked him whether the farmers generally paid off their mortgages, and he answered me that if the mortgage was to the value of a fourth of the land, the farmer might pay it off, but if it were to a half, or a third even, he never paid it, but slaved on and died in his debts. “You may be sure, however,” I concluded, “that our young friend takes a jaundiced view of the situation.”

“Now, really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I must insist upon dropping this everlasting talk about money. I think it is perfectly disgusting, and I believe it was Mr. Makely’s account of his speculations that kept me awake last night. My brain got running on figures till the dark seemed to be all sown with dollar-marks, like the stars in the Milky Way. I — ugh! What in the world is it? Oh, you dreadful little things!”

Mrs. Makely passed swiftly from terror to hysterical laughter as the driver pulled up short and a group of barefooted children broke in front of his horses and scuttled out of the dust into the road-side bushes like a covey of quails. There seemed to be a dozen of them, nearly all the same in size, but there turned out to be only five or six; or at least no more showed their gleaming eyes and teeth through the underbrush in quiet enjoyment of the lady’s alarm.

“Don’t you know that you might have got killed?” she demanded, with that severity good women feel for people who have just escaped with their lives. “How lovely the dirty little dears are!” she added, in the next wave of emotion. One bold fellow of six showed a half-length above the bushes, and she asked: “Don’t you know that you oughtn’t to play in the road when there are so many teams passing? Are all those your brothers and sisters?”

He ignored the first question. “One’s my cousin.” I pulled out a half-dozen coppers, and held my hand toward him. “See if there is one for each.” They had no difficulty in solving the simple mathematical problem except the smallest girl, who cried for fear and baffled longing. I tossed the coin to her, and a little fat dog darted out at her feet and caught it up in his mouth. “Oh, good gracious!” I called out in my light, humorous way. “Do you suppose he’s going to spend it for candy?” The little people thought that a famous joke, and they laughed with the gratitude that even small favors inspire. “Bring your sister here,” I said to the boldest boy, and, when he came up with the little woman, I put another copper into her hand. “Look out that the greedy dog doesn’t get it,” I said, and my gayety met with fresh applause. “Where do you live?” I asked, with some vague purpose of showing the Altrurian the kindliness that exists between our upper and lower classes.

“Over there,” said the boy. I followed the twist of his head, and glimpsed a wooden cottage on the border of the forest, so very new that the sheathing had not yet been covered with clapboards. I stood up in the buckboard and saw that it was a story and a half high, and could have had four or five rooms in it. The bare, curtainless windows were set in the unpainted frames, but the front door seemed not to be hung yet. The people meant to winter there, however, for the sod was banked up against the wooden underpinning; a stovepipe stuck out of the roof of a little wing behind. While I gazed a young-looking woman came to the door, as if she had been drawn by our talk with the children, and then she jumped down from the threshold, which still wanted a doorstep, and came slowly out to us. The children ran to her with their coppers, and then followed her back to us.

Mrs. Makely called to her before she reached us: “I hope you weren’t frightened. We didn’t drive over any of them.”

“Oh, I wasn’t frightened,” said the young woman. “It’s a very safe place to bring up children, in the country, and I never feel uneasy about them.”

“Yes, if they are not under the horses’ feet,” said Mrs. Makely, mingling instruction and amusement very judiciously in her reply. “Are they all yours?”

“Only five,” said the mother, and she pointed to the alien in her flock. “He’s my sister’s. She lives just below here.” Her children had grouped themselves about her, and she kept passing her hands caressingly over their little heads as she talked. “My sister has nine children, but she has the rest at church with her to-day.”

“You don’t speak like an American,” Mrs. Makely suggested.

“No, we’re English. Our husbands work in the quarry. That’s my little palace.” The woman nodded her head toward the cottage.

“It’s going to be very nice,” said Mrs. Makely, with an evident perception of her pride in it.

“Yes, if we ever get money to finish it. Thank you for the children.”

“Oh, it was this gentleman.” Mrs. Makely indicated me, and I bore the merit of my good action as modestly as I could.

“Then thank you, sir,” said the young woman, and she asked Mrs. Makely: “You’re not living about here, ma’am?”

“Oh no, we’re staying at the hotel.”

“At the hotel! It must be very dear, there.”

“Yes, it is expensive,” said Mrs. Makely, with a note of that satisfaction in her voice which we all feel in spending a great deal of money.

“But I suppose you can afford it,” said the woman, whose eye was running hungrily over Mrs. Makely’s pretty costume. “Some are poor, and some are rich. That’s the way the world has to be made up, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, very dryly, and the talk languished from this point, so that the driver felt warranted in starting up his horses. When we had driven beyond earshot she said: “I knew she was not an American, as soon as she spoke, by her accent, and then those foreigners have no self-respect. That was a pretty bold bid for a contribution to finish up her ‘little palace’! I’m glad you didn’t give her anything, Mr. Twelvemough. I was afraid your sympathies had been wrought upon.”

“Oh, not at all,” I answered. “I saw the mischief I had done with the children.”

The Altrurian, who has not asked anything for a long time, but had listened with eager interest to all that passed, now came up smiling with his question: “Will you kindly tell me what harm would have been done by offering the woman a little money to help finish up her cottage?”

I did not allow Mrs. Makely to answer, I was so eager to air my political economy. “The very greatest harm. It would have pauperized her. You have no idea how quickly they give way to the poison of that sort of thing. As soon as they get any sort of help they expect more; they count upon it, and they begin to live upon it. The sight of those coppers which I gave her children — more out of joke than charity — demoralized the woman. She took us for rich people, and wanted us to build her a house. You have to guard against every approach to a thing of that sort.”

“I don’t believe,” said Mrs. Makely, “that an American would have hinted, as she did.”

“‘No, an American would not have done that, I’m thankful to say. They take fees, but they don’t ask charity, yet.” We went on to exult in the noble independence of the American character in all classes, at some length. We talked at the Altrurian, but he did not seem to hear us. At last he asked, with a faint sigh: “Then, in your conditions, a kindly impulse to aid one who needs your help is something to be guarded against as possibly pernicious?”

“Exactly,” I said. “And now you see what difficulties beset us in dealing with the problem of poverty. We cannot let people suffer, for that would be cruel; and we cannot relieve their need without pauperizing them.”

“I see,” he answered. “It is a terrible quandary.”

“I wish,” said Mrs. Makely, “that you would tell us just how you manage with the poor in Altruria.”

“We have none,” he replied.

“But the comparatively poor — you have some people who are richer than others?”

“No. We should regard that as the worst incivism.”

“What is incivism?”

I interpreted, “Bad citizenship.”

“Well, then, if you will excuse me, Mr. Homos,” she said, “I think that is simply impossible. There must be rich and there must be poor. There always have been, and there always will be. That woman said it as well as anybody. Didn’t Christ Himself say, ‘The poor ye have always with you’?”

VII

The Altrurian looked at Mrs. Makely with an amazement visibly heightened by the air of complacency she put on after delivering this poser: “Do you really think Christ meant that you ought always to have the poor with you?” he asked.

“Why, of course!” she answered, triumphantly. “How else are the sympathies of the rich to be cultivated? The poverty of some and the wealth of others, isn’t that what forms the great tie of human brotherhood? If we were all comfortable, or all shared alike, there could not be anything like charity, and Paul said, ‘The greatest of these is charity.’ I believe it’s ‘love’ in the new version, but it comes to the same thing.”

The Altrurian gave a kind of gasp, and then lapsed into a silence that lasted until we came in sight of the Camp farm-house. It stood on the crest of a road-side upland, and looked down the beautiful valley, bathed in Sabbath sunlight, and away to the ranges of hills, so far that it was hard to say whether it was sun or shadow that dimmed their distance. Decidedly, the place was what the country people call sightly. The old house, once painted a Brandon red, crouched low to the ground, with its lean-to in the rear, and its flat-arched wood-sheds and wagon-houses stretching away at the side of the barn, and covering the approach to it with an unbroken roof. There were flowers in the beds along the underpinning of the house, which stood close to the street, and on one side of the door was a clump of Spanish willow; an old-fashioned June rose climbed over it from the other. An aged dog got stiffly to his feet from the threshold stone and whimpered as our buckboard drew up; the poultry picking about the path and among the chips lazily made way for us, and as our wheels ceased to crunch upon the gravel we heard hasty steps, and Reuben Camp came round the corner of the house in time to give Mrs. Makely his hand and help her spring to the ground, which she did very lightly; her remarkable mind had kept her body in a sort of sympathetic activity, and at thirty-five she had the gracile ease and self-command of a girl.

“Ah, Reuben,” she sighed, permitting herself to call him by his first name, with the emotion which expressed itself more definitely in the words that followed, “how I envy you all this dear, old, homelike place! I never come here without thinking of my grandfather’s farm in Massachusetts, where I used to go every summer when I was a little girl. If I had a place like this, I should never leave it.”

“Well, Mrs. Makely,” said young Camp, “you can have this place cheap, if you really want it. Or almost any other place in the neighborhood.”

“Don’t say such a thing!” she returned. “It makes one feel as if the foundations of the great deep were giving way. I don’t know what that means exactly, but I suppose it’s equivalent to mislaying George’s hatchet and going back on the Declaration generally; and I don’t like to hear you talk so.”

Camp seemed to have lost his bitter mood, and he answered, pleasantly: “The Declaration is all right, as far as it goes, but it don’t help us to compete with the Western farm operations.”

“Why, you believe every one was born free and equal, don’t you?” Mrs. Makely asked.

“Oh yes, I believe that; but—”

“Then why do you object to free and equal competition?”

The young fellow laughed, and said, as he opened the door for us: “Walk right into the parlor, please. Mother will be ready for you in a minute.” He added: “I guess she’s putting on her best cap for you, Mr. Homos. It’s a great event for her, your coming here. It is for all of us. We’re glad to have you.”

“And I’m glad to be here,” said the Altrurian, as simply as the other. He looked about the best room of a farm-house that had never adapted itself to the tastes or needs of the city boarder, and was as stiffly repellent in its upholstery and as severe in its decoration as hair-cloth chairs and dark-brown wall-paper of a trellis pattern, with drab roses, could make it. The windows were shut tight, and our host did not offer to open them. A fly or two crossed the doorway into the hall, but made no attempt to penetrate the interior, where we sat in an obscurity that left the high-hung family photographs on the walls vague and uncertain. I made a mental note of it as a place where it would be very characteristic to have a rustic funeral take place; and I was pleased to have Mrs. Makely drop into a sort of mortuary murmur, as she said: “I hope your mother is as well as usual this morning?” I perceived that this murmur was produced by the sepulchral influence of the room.

“Oh yes,” said Camp, and at that moment a door opened from the room across the hall, and his sister seemed to bring in some of the light from it to us where we sat. She shook hands with Mrs. Makely, who introduced me to her, and then presented the Altrurian. She bowed very civilly to me, but with a touch of severity, such as country people find necessary for the assertion of their self-respect with strangers. I thought it very pretty, and instantly saw that I could work it into some picture of character; and I was not at all sorry that she made a difference in favor of the Altrurian.

“Mother will be so glad to see you,” she said to him, and, “Won’t you come right in?” she added to us all.

We followed her and found ourselves in a large, low, sunny room on the southeast corner of the house, which had no doubt once been the living-room, but which was now given up to the bedridden invalid; a door opened into the kitchen behind, where the table was already laid for the midday meal, with the plates turned down in the country fashion, and some netting drawn over the dishes to keep the flies away.

Mrs. Makely bustled up to the bedside with her energetic, patronizing cheerfulness. “Ah, Mrs. Camp, I am glad to see you looking so well this morning. I’ve been meaning to run over for several days past, but I couldn’t find a moment till this morning, and I knew you didn’t object to Sunday visits.” She took the invalid’s hand in hers, and, with the air of showing how little she felt any inequality between them, she leaned over and kissed her, where Mrs. Camp sat propped against her pillows. She had a large, nobly moulded face of rather masculine contour, and at the same time the most motherly look in the world. Mrs. Makely bubbled and babbled on, and every one waited patiently till she had done, and turned and said, toward the Altrurian: “I have ventured to bring my friend, Mr. Homos, with me. He is from Altruria.” Then she turned to me and said: “Mr. Twelvemough you know already through his delightful books”; but, although she paid me this perfunctory compliment it was perfectly apparent to me that in the esteem of this disingenuous woman the distinguished stranger was a far more important person than the distinguished author. Whether Mrs. Camp read my perception of this fact in my face or not I cannot say, but she was evidently determined that I should not feel a difference in her. She held out her hand to me first, and said that I never could know how many heavy hours I had helped to lighten for her, and then she turned to the Altrurian and took his hand. “Oh!” she said, with a long, deep-drawn sigh, as if that were the supreme moment of her life. “And are you really from Altruria? It seems too good to be true!” Her devout look and her earnest tone gave the commonplace words a quality that did not inhere in them, but Mrs. Makely took them on their surface.

“Yes, doesn’t it?” she made haste to interpose, before the Altrurian could say anything. “That is just the way we all feel about it, Mrs. Camp. I assure you, if it were not for the accounts in the papers and the talk about it everywhere, I couldn’t believe there was any such place as Altruria; and if it were not for Mr. Twelvemough here — who has to keep all his inventions for his novels, as a mere matter of business routine — I might really suspect him and Mr. Homos of — well, working us, as my husband calls it.”

The Altrurian smiled politely, but vaguely, as if he had not quite caught her meaning, and I made answer for both: “I am sure, Mrs. Makely, if you could understand my peculiar state of mind about Mr. Homos, you would never believe that I was in collusion with him. I find him quite as incredible as you do. There are moments when he seems so entirely subjective with me that I feel as if he were no more definite or tangible than a bad conscience.”

“Exactly!” said Mrs. Makely, and she laughed out her delight in my illustration.

The Altrurian must have perceived that we were joking, though the Camps all remained soberly silent. “I hope it isn’t so bad as that,” he said, “though I have noticed that I seem to affect you all with a kind of misgiving. I don’t know just what it is; but, if I could remove it, I should be very glad to do so.”

Mrs. Makely very promptly seized her chance: “Well, then, in the first place, my husband and I were talking it over last night after we left you, and that was one of the things that kept us awake; it turned into money afterward. It isn’t so much that a whole continent, as big as Australia, remained undiscovered till within such a very few years, as it is the condition of things among you: this sort of all living for one another, and not each one for himself. My husband says that is simply moonshine; such a thing never was and never can be; it is opposed to human nature, and would take away incentive and all motive for exertion and advancement and enterprise. I don’t know what he didn’t say against it; but one thing, he says it’s perfectly un-American.” The Altrurian remained silent, gravely smiling, and Mrs. Makely added, with her most engaging little manner: “I hope you won’t feel hurt, personally or patriotically, by what I’ve repeated to you. I know my husband is awfully Philistine, though he is such a good fellow, and I don’t, by any means, agree with him on all those points; but I would like to know what you think of them. The trouble is, Mrs. Camp,” she said, turning to the invalid, “that Mr. Homos is so dreadfully reticent about his own country, and I am so curious to hear of it at first hands, that I consider it justifiable to use any means to make him open up about it.”

“There is no offence,” the Altrurian answered for himself, “in what Mr. Makely says, though, from the Altrurian point of view, there is a good deal of error.

“Does it seem so strange to you,” he asked, addressing himself to Mrs. Camp, “that people should found a civilization on the idea of living for one another instead of each for himself?”

“No indeed!” she answered. “Poor people have always had to live that way, or they could not have lived at all.”

“That was what I understood your porter to say last night,” said the Altrurian to me. He added, to the company generally: “I suppose that even in America there are more poor people than there are rich people?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I suppose there are more people independently rich than there are people independently poor.”

“We will let that formulation of it stand. If it is true, I do not see why the Altrurian system should be considered so very un-American. Then, as to whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, a civic expression of it, I think it cannot be denied that among the first Christians, those who immediately followed Christ, and might be supposed to be directly influenced by His life, there was an altruism practised as radical as that which we have organized into a national polity and a working economy in Altruria.”

“Ah, but you know,” said Mrs. Makely, with the air of advancing a point not to be put aside, “they had to drop that. It was a dead failure. They found that they couldn’t make it go at all among cultivated people, and that, if Christianity was to advance, they would have to give up all that crankish kind of idolatry of the mere letter. At any rate,” she went on, with the satisfaction we all feel in getting an opponent into close quarters, “you must confess that there is a much greater play of individuality here.”

Before the Altrurian could reply, young Camp said: “If you want to see American individuality, the real, simon-pure article, you ought to go down to one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in droves after a day’s work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the individuality of a flock of sheep.”

“Some,” said Mrs. Makely, heroically, as if she were one of these, “must be sacrificed. Of course, some are not so individual as others. A great deal depends upon temperament.”

“A great deal more depends upon capital,” said Camp, with an offensive laugh. “If you have capital in America, you can have individuality; if you haven’t, you can’t.”

His sister, who had not taken part in the talk before, said, demurely: “It seems to me you’ve got a good deal of individuality, Reub, and you haven’t got a great deal of capital, either,” and the two young people laughed together.

Mrs. Makely was one of those fatuous women whose eagerness to make a point excludes the consideration even of their own advantage. “I’m sure,” she said, as if speaking for the upper classes, “we haven’t got any individuality at all. We are as like as so many peas or pins. In fact, you have to be so in society. If you keep asserting your own individuality too much, people avoid you. It’s very vulgar and the greatest bore.”

“Then you don’t find individuality so desirable, after all,” said the Altrurian.

“I perfectly detest it!” cried the lady, and evidently she had not the least notion where she was in the argument. “For my part, I’m never happy except when I’ve forgotten myself and the whole individual bother.”

Her declaration seemed somehow to close the incident, and we were all silent a moment, which I employed in looking about the room, and taking in with my literary sense the simplicity and even bareness of its furnishing. There was the bed where the invalid lay, and near the head a table with a pile of books and a kerosene-lamp on it, and I decided that she was a good deal wakeful, and that she read by that lamp when she could not sleep at night. Then there were the hard chairs we sat on, and some home-made hooked rugs, in rounds and ovals, scattered about the clean floor; there was a small melodeon pushed against the wall; the windows had paper shades, and I recalled that I had not seen any blinds on the outside of the house. Over the head of the bed hung a cavalryman’s sword, with its belt — the sword that Mrs. Makely had spoken of. It struck me as a room where a great many things might have happened, and I said: “You can’t think, Mrs. Camp, how glad I am to see the inside of your house. It seems to me so typical.”

A pleased intelligence showed itself in her face, and she answered: “Yes, it is a real old-fashioned farmhouse. We have never taken boarders, and so we have kept it as it was built pretty much, and only made such changes in it as we needed or wanted for ourselves.”

“It’s a pity,” I went on, following up what I thought a fortunate lead, “that we city people see so little of the farming life when we come into the country. I have been here now for several seasons, and this is the first time I have been inside a farmer’s house.”

“Is it possible!” cried the Altrurian, with an air of utter astonishment; and, when I found the fact appeared so singular to him, I began to be rather proud of its singularity.

“Yes, I suppose that most city people come and go, year after year, in the country, and never make any sort of acquaintance with the people who live there the year round. We keep to ourselves in the hotels, or, if we go out at all, it is to make a call upon some city cottager, and so we do not get out of the vicious circle of our own over-intimacy with ourselves and our ignorance of others.”

“And you regard that as a great misfortune?” asked the Altrurian.

“Why, it’s inevitable. There is nothing to bring us together, unless it’s some happy accident, like the present. But we don’t have a traveler from Altruria to exploit every day, and so we have no business to come into people’s houses.”

“You would have been welcome in ours long ago, Mr. Twelvemough,” said Mrs. Camp.

“But, excuse me,” said the Altrurian, “what you say really seems dreadful to me. Why, it is as if you were not the same race or kind of men!”

“Yes,” I answered. “It has sometimes seemed to me as if our big hotel there were a ship anchored off some strange coast. The inhabitants come out with supplies, and carry on their barter with the ship’s steward, and we sometimes see them over the side, but we never speak to them or have anything to do with them. We sail away at the close of the season, and that is the end of it till next summer.”

The Altrurian turned to Mrs. Camp. “And how do you look at it? How does it seem to you?”

“I don’t believe we have thought about it very much; but, now that Mr. Twelvemough has spoken of it, I can see that it does look that way. And it seems very strange, doesn’t it, for we are all the same people, and have the same language and religion and country — the country that my husband fought for and, I suppose I may say, died for; he was never the same man after the war. It does appear as if we had some interests in common, and might find it out if we ever came together.”

“It’s a great advantage, the city people going into the country so much as they do now,” said Mrs. Makely. “They bring five million dollars into the State of New Hampshire, alone, every summer.”

She looked round for the general approval which this fact merited, and young Camp said: “And it shows how worthless the natives are, that they can’t make both ends meet, with all that money, but have to give up their farms and go West, after all. I suppose you think it comes from wanting buggies and pianos.”

“Well, it certainly comes from something,” said Mrs. Makely, with the courage of her convictions.

She was evidently not going to be put down by that sour young fellow, and I was glad of it, though I must say I thought the thing she left to rankle in his mind from our former meeting had not been said in very good taste. I thought, too, that she would not fare best in any encounter of wits with him, and I rather trembled for the result. I said, to relieve the strained situation: “I wish there was some way of our knowing each other better. I’m sure there’s a great deal of good-will on both sides.”

“No, there isn’t,” said Camp, “or at least I can answer for our side that there isn’t. You come into the country to get as much for your money as you can, and we mean to let you have as little as we can. That’s the whole story, and if Mr. Homos believes anything different, he’s very much mistaken.”

“I hadn’t formed any conclusion in regard to the matter, which is quite new to me,” said the Altrurian, mildly. “But why is there no basis of mutual kindness between you?”

“Because it’s like everything else with us; it’s a question of supply and demand, and there is no room for any mutual kindness in a question of that kind. Even if there were, there is another thing that would kill it. The summer folks, as we call them, look down on the natives, as they call us, and we know it.”

“Now, Mr. Camp, I am sure that you cannot say I look down on the natives,” said Mrs. Makely, with an air of argument.

The young fellow laughed. “Oh yes, you do,” he said, not unamiably, and he added, “and you’ve got the right to. We’re not fit to associate with you, and you know it, and we know it. You’ve got more money, and you’ve got nicer clothes, and you’ve got prettier manners. You talk about things that most natives never heard of, and you care for things they never saw. I know it’s the custom to pretend differently, but I’m not going to pretend differently.”

I recalled what my friend the banker said about throwing away cant, and I asked myself if I were in the presence of some such free spirit again. I did not see how young Camp could afford it; but then I reflected that he had really nothing to lose by it, for he did not expect to make anything out of us; Mrs. Makely would probably not give up his sister as seamstress if the girl continued to work so well and so cheaply as she said.

“Suppose,” he went on, “that some old native took you at your word, and came to call upon you at the hotel, with his wife, just as one of the city cottagers would do if he wanted to make your acquaintance?”

“I should be perfectly delighted,” said Mrs. Makely, “and I should receive them with the greatest possible cordiality.”

“The same kind of cordiality that you would show to the cottagers?”

“I suppose that I should feel that I had more in common with the cottagers. We should be interested in the same things, and we should probably know the same people and have more to talk about—”

“You would both belong to the same class, and that tells the whole story. If you were out West, and the owner of one of those big twenty-thousand-acre farms called on you with his wife, would you act toward them as you would toward our natives? You wouldn’t. You would all be rich people together, and you would understand one another because you had money.”

“Now, that is not so,” Mrs. Makely interrupted. “There are plenty of rich people one wouldn’t wish to know at all, and who really can’t get into society — who are ignorant and vulgar. And then, when you come to money, I don’t see but what country people are as glad to get it as anybody.”

“Oh, gladder,” said the young man.

“Well?” demanded Mrs. Makely, as if this were a final stroke of logic. The young man did not reply, and Mrs. Makely continued: “Now I will appeal to your sister to say whether she has ever seen any difference in my manner toward her from what I show to all the young ladies in the hotel.” The young girl flushed and seemed reluctant to answer. “Why, Lizzie!” cried Mrs. Makely, and her tone showed that she was really hurt.

The scene appeared to me rather cruel, and I glanced at Mrs. Camp with an expectation that she would say something to relieve it. But she did not. Her large, benevolent face expressed only a quiet interest in the discussion.

“You know very well, Mrs. Makely,” said the girl, “you don’t regard me as you do the young ladies in the hotel.”

There was no resentment in her voice or look, but only a sort of regret, as if, but for this grievance, she could have loved the woman from whom she had probably had much kindness. The tears came into Mrs. Makely’s eyes, and she turned toward Mrs. Camp. “And is this the way you all feel toward us?” she asked.

“Why shouldn’t we?” asked the invalid, in her turn. “But, no, it isn’t the way all the country people feel. Many of them feel as you would like to have them feel; but that is because they do not think. When they think, they feel as we do. But I don’t blame you. You can’t help yourselves any more than we can. We’re all bound up together in that, at least.”

At this apparent relenting Mrs. Makely tricked her beams a little, and said, plaintively, as if offering herself for further condolence: “Yes, that is what that woman at the little shanty back there said: some have to be rich, and some have to be poor; it takes all kinds to make a world.”

“How would you like to be one of those that have to be poor?” asked young Camp, with an evil grin.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Makely, with unexpected spirit; “but I am sure that I should respect the feelings of all, rich or poor.”

“I am sorry if we have hurt yours, Mrs. Makely,” said Mrs. Camp, with dignity. “You asked us certain questions, and we thought you wished us to reply truthfully. We could not answer you with smooth things.”

“But sometimes you do,” said Mrs. Makely, and the tears stood in her eyes again. “And you know how fond I am of you all!”

Mrs. Camp wore a bewildered look. “Perhaps we have said more than we ought. But I couldn’t help it, and I don’t see how the children could, when you asked them here, before Mr. Homos.”

I glanced at the Altrurian, sitting attentive and silent, and a sudden misgiving crossed my mind concerning him. Was he really a man, a human entity, a personality like ourselves, or was he merely a sort of spiritual solvent, sent for the moment to precipitate whatever sincerity there was in us, and show us what the truth was concerning our relations to one another? It was a fantastic conception, but I thought it was one that I might employ in some sort of purely romantic design, and I was professionally grateful for it. I said, with a humorous gayety: “Yes, we all seem to have been compelled to be much more honest than we like; and if Mr. Homos is going to write an account of his travels when he gets home, he can’t accuse us of hypocrisy, at any rate. And I always used to think it was one of our virtues! What with Mr. Camp, here, and my friend the banker at the hotel, I don’t think he’ll have much reason to complain even of our reticence.”

“Well, whatever he says of us,” sighed Mrs. Makely, with a pious glance at the sword over the bed, “he will have to say that, in spite of our divisions and classes, we are all Americans, and, if we haven’t the same opinions and ideas on minor matters, we all have the same country.”

“I don’t know about that,” came from Reuben Camp, with shocking promptness. “I don’t believe we all have the same country. America is one thing for you, and it’s quite another thing for us. America means ease and comfort and amusement for you, year in and year out, and if it means work, it’s work that you wish to do. For us, America means work that we have to do, and hard work all the time if we’re going to make both ends meet. It means liberty for you; but what liberty has a man got who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from? Once I was in a strike, when I was working on the railroad, and I’ve seen men come and give up their liberty for a chance to earn their family’s living. They knew they were right, and that they ought to have stood up for their rights; but they had to lie down and lick the hand that fed them. Yes, we are all Americans, but I guess we haven’t all got the same country, Mrs. Makely. What sort of a country has a blacklisted man got?”

“A blacklisted man?” she repeated. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, a kind of man I’ve seen in the mill towns, that the bosses have all got on their books as a man that isn’t to be given work on any account; that’s to be punished with hunger and cold, and turned into the street, for having offended them; and that’s to be made to suffer through his helpless family for having offended them.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Camp,” I interposed, “but isn’t a blacklisted man usually a man who has made himself prominent in some labor trouble?”

“Yes,” the young fellow answered, without seeming sensible of the point I had made.

“Ah!” I returned. “Then you can hardly blame the employers for taking it out of him in any way they can. That’s human nature.”

“Good heavens!” the Altrurian cried out. “Is it possible that in America it is human nature to take away the bread of a man’s family because he has gone counter to your interest or pleasure on some economical question?”

“Well, Mr. Twelvemough seems to think so,” sneered the young man. “But whether it’s human nature or not, it’s a fact that they do it, and you can guess how much a blacklisted man must love the country where such a thing can happen to him. What should you call such a thing as blacklisting in Altruria?”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Makely pleaded, “do let us get him to talking about Altruria on any terms. I think all this about the labor question is so tiresome; don’t you, Mrs. Camp?”

Mrs. Camp did not answer; but the Altrurian said, in reply to her son: “We should have no name for such a thing, for with us such a thing would be impossible. There is no crime so heinous with us that the punishment would take away the criminal’s chance of earning his living.”

“Oh, if he was a criminal,” said young Camp, “he would be all right here. The state would give him a chance to earn his living then.”

“But if he had no other chance of earning his living, and had committed no offence against the laws—”

“Then the state would let him take to the road — like that fellow.”

He pulled aside the shade of the window where he sat, and we saw pausing before the house, and glancing doubtfully at the doorstep, where the dog lay, a vile and loathsome-looking tramp, a blot upon the sweet and wholesome landscape, a scandal to the sacred day. His rags burlesqued the form which they did not wholly hide; his broken shoes were covered with dust; his coarse hair came in a plume through his tattered hat; his red, sodden face, at once fierce and timid, was rusty with a fortnight’s beard. He offended the eye like a visible stench, and the wretched carrion seemed to shrink away from our gaze as if he were aware of his loathsomeness.

“Really,” said Mrs. Makely, “I thought those fellows were arrested now. It is too bad to leave them at large. They are dangerous.” Young Camp left the room, and we saw him going out toward the tramp.

“Ah, that’s quite right,” said the lady. “I hope Reuben is going to send him about his business. Why, surely, he’s not going to feed the horrid creature!” she added, as Camp, after a moment’s parley with the tramp, turned with him and disappeared round a corner of the house. “Now, Mrs. Camp, I think that is really a very bad example. It’s encouraging them. Very likely he’ll go to sleep in your barn, and set it on fire with his pipe. What do you do with tramps in Altruria, Mr. Homos?”

The Altrurian seemed not to have heard her. He said to Mrs. Camp: “Then I understand from something your son let fall that he has not always been at home with you here. Does he reconcile himself easily to the country after the excitement of town life? I have read that the cities in America are draining the country of the young people.”

“I don’t think he was sorry to come home,” said the mother, with a touch of fond pride. “But there was no choice for him after his father died; he was always a good boy, and he has not made us feel that we were keeping him away from anything better. When his father was alive we let him go, because then we were not so dependent, and I wished him to try his fortune in the world, as all boys long to do. But he is rather peculiar, and he seems to have got quite enough of the world. To be sure, I don’t suppose he’s seen the brightest side of it. He first went to work in the mills down at Ponkwasset, but he was ‘laid off’ there when the hard times came and there was so much overproduction, and he took a job of railroading, and was braking on a freight-train when his father left us.”

Mrs. Makely said, smiling: “No, I don’t think that was the brightest outlook in the world. No wonder he has brought back such gloomy impressions. I am sure that if he could have seen life under brighter auspices he would not have the ideas he has.”

“Very likely,” said the mother, dryly. “Our experiences have a great deal to do with forming our opinions. But I am not dissatisfied with my son’s ideas. I suppose Reuben got a good many of his ideas from his father: he’s his father all over again. My husband thought slavery was wrong, and he went into the war to fight against it. He used to say when the war was over that the negroes were emancipated, but slavery was not abolished yet.”

“What in the world did he mean by that?” demanded Mrs. Makely.

“Something you wouldn’t understand as we do. I tried to carry on the farm after he first went, and before Reuben was large enough to help me much and ought to be in school, and I suppose I overdid. At any rate, that was when I had my first shock of paralysis. I never was very strong, and I presume my health was weakened by my teaching school so much, and studying, before I was married. But that doesn’t matter now, and hasn’t for many a year. The place was clear of debt then, but I had to get a mortgage put on it. The savings-bank down in the village took it, and we’ve been paying the interest ever since. My husband died paying it, and my son will pay it all my life, and then I suppose the bank will foreclose. The treasurer was an old playmate of my husband’s, and he said that as long as either of us lived the mortgage could lie.”

“How splendid of him!” said Mrs. Makely. “I should think you had been very fortunate.”

“I said that you would not see it as we do,” said the invalid, patiently.

The Altrurian asked: “Are there mortgages on many of the farms in the neighborhood?”

“Nearly all,” said Mrs. Camp. “We seem to own them, but in fact they own us.”

Mrs. Makely hastened to say: “My husband thinks it’s the best way to have your property. If you mortgage it close up, you have all your capital free, and you can keep turning it over. That’s what you ought to do, Mrs. Camp. But what was the slavery that Captain Camp said was not abolished yet?”

The invalid looked at her a moment without replying, and just then the door of the kitchen opened, and Young Camp came in and began to gather some food from the table on a plate.

“Why don’t you bring him to the table, Reub?” his sister called to him.

“Oh, he says he’d rather not come in, as long as we have company. He says he isn’t dressed for dinner; left his spike-tail in the city.”

The young man laughed, and his sister with him.

VIII

Young Camp carried out the plate of victuals to the tramp, and Mrs. Makely said to his mother: “I suppose you would make the tramp do some sort of work to earn his breakfast on week-days?”

“Not always,” Mrs. Camp replied. “Do the boarders at the hotel always work to earn their breakfast?”

“No, certainly not,” said Mrs. Makely, with the sharpness of offence. “But they always pay for it.”

“I don’t think that paying for a thing is earning it. Perhaps some one else earned the money that pays for it. But I believe there is too much work in the world. If I were to live my life over again, I should not work half so hard. My husband and I took this place when we were young married people, and began working to pay for it. We wanted to feel that it was ours, that we owned it, and that our children should own it afterward. We both worked all day long like slaves, and many a moonlight night we were up till morning, almost, gathering the stones from our fields and burying them in deep graves that we had dug for them. But we buried our youth and strength and health in those graves, too, and what for? I don’t own the farm that we worked so hard to pay for, and my children won’t. That is what it has all come to. We were rightly punished for our greed, I suppose. Perhaps no one has a right to own any portion of the earth. Sometimes I think so, but my husband and I earned this farm, and now the savings-bank owns it. That seems strange, doesn’t it? I suppose you’ll say that the bank paid for it. Well, perhaps so; but the bank didn’t earn it. When I think of that I don’t always think that a person who pays for his breakfast has the best right to a breakfast.”

I could see the sophistry of all this, but I had not the heart to point it out; I felt the pathos of it, too. Mrs. Makely seemed not to see the one nor to feel the other very distinctly. “Yes, but surely,” she said, “if you give a tramp his breakfast without making him work for it, you must see that it is encouraging idleness. And idleness is very corrupting — the sight of it.”

“You mean to the country people? Well, they have to stand a good deal of that. The summer folks that spend four or five months of the year here don’t seem to do anything from morning till night.”

“Ah, but you must recollect that they are resting! You have no idea how hard they all work in town during the winter,” Mrs. Makely urged, with an air of argument.

“Perhaps the tramps are resting, too. At any rate, I don’t think the sight of idleness in rags, and begging at back doors, is very corrupting to the country people; I never heard of a single tramp who had started from the country; they all come from the cities. It’s the other kind of idleness that tempts our young people. The only tramps that my son says he ever envies are the well-dressed, strong young fellows from town that go tramping through the mountains for exercise every summer.”

The ladies both paused. They seemed to have got to the end of their tether; at least, Mrs. Makely had apparently nothing else to advance, and I said, lightly: “But that is just the kind of tramps that Mr. Homos would most disapprove of. He says that in Altruria they would consider exercise for exercise’ sake a wicked waste of force and little short of lunacy.”

I thought my exaggeration might provoke him to denial, but he seemed not to have found it unjust. “Why, you know,” he said to Mrs. Camp, “in Altruria every one works with his hands, so that the hard work shall not all fall to any one class; and this manual labor of each is sufficient to keep the body in health, as well as to earn a living. After the three, hours’ work, which constitutes a day’s work with us, is done, the young people have all sorts of games and sports, and they carry them as late into life as the temperament of each demands. But what I was saying to Mr. Twelvemough — perhaps I did not make myself clear — was that we should regard the sterile putting forth of strength in exercise, if others were each day worn out with hard manual labor, as insane or immoral. But I can account for it differently with you, because I understand that in your conditions a person of leisure could not do any manual labor without taking away the work of some one who needed it to live by; and could not even relieve an overworked laborer, and give him the money for the work, without teaching him habits of idleness. In Altruria we can all keep ourselves well by doing each his share of hard work, and we can help those who are exhausted, when such a thing happens, without injuring them materially or morally.”

Young Camp entered at this moment, and the Altrurian hesitated. “Oh, do go on!” Mrs. Makely entreated. She added to Camp: “We’ve got him to talking about Altruria at last, and we wouldn’t have him stopped for worlds.”

The Altrurian looked around at all our faces, and no doubt read our eager curiosity in them. He smiled and said: “I shall be very glad, I’m sure. But I do not think you will find anything so remarkable in our civilization, if you will conceive of it as the outgrowth of the neighborly instinct. In fact, neighborliness is the essence of Altrurianism. If you will imagine having the same feeling toward all,” he explained to Mrs. Makely, “as you have toward your next-door neighbor—”

“My next-door neighbor!” she cried. “But I don’t know the people next door! We live in a large apartment house, some forty families, and I assure you I do not know a soul among them.”

He looked at her with a puzzled air, and she continued: “Sometimes it does seem rather hard. One day the people on the same landing with us lost one of their children, and I should never have been a whit the wiser if my cook hadn’t happened to mention it. The servants all know each other; they meet in the back elevator, and get acquainted. I don’t encourage it. You can’t tell what kind of families they belong to.”

“But surely,” the Altrurian persisted, “you have friends in the city whom you think of as your neighbors?”

“No, I can’t say that I have,” said Mrs. Makely. “I have my visiting-list, but I shouldn’t think of anybody on that as a neighbor.”

The Altrurian looked so blank and baffled that I could hardly help laughing. “Then I should not know how to explain Altruria to you, I’m afraid.”

“Well,” she returned, lightly, “if it’s anything like neighborliness as I’ve seen it in small places, deliver me from it! I like being independent. That’s why I like the city. You’re let alone.”

“I was down in New York once, and I went through some of the streets and houses where the poor people live,” said young Camp, “and they seemed to know each other and to be quite neighborly.”

“And would you like to be all messed in with one another that way?” demanded the lady.

“Well, I thought it was better than living as we do in the country, so far apart that we never see one another, hardly. And it seems to me better than not having any neighbors at all.”

“Well, every one to his taste,” said Mrs. Makely. “I wish you would tell us how people manage with you socially, Mr. Homos.”

“Why, you know,” he began, “we have neither city nor country in your sense, and so we are neither so isolated nor so crowded together. You feel that you lose a great deal in not seeing one another oftener?” he asked Camp.

“Yes. Folks rust out living alone. It’s Human nature to want to get together.”

“And I understand Mrs. Makely that it is human nature to want to keep apart?”

“Oh no, but to come together independently,” she answered.

“Well, that is what we have contrived in our life at home. I should have to say, in the first place, that—”

“Excuse me just one moment, Mr. Homos,” said Mrs. Makely. This perverse woman was as anxious to hear about Altruria as any of us, but she was a woman who would rather hear the sound of her own voice than any other, even if she were dying, as she would call it, to hear the other. The Altrurian stopped politely, and Mrs. Makely went on: “I have been thinking of what Mr. Camp was saying about the blacklisted men, and their all turning into tramps—”

“But I didn’t say that, Mrs. Makely,” the young fellow protested, in astonishment.

“Well, it stands to reason that if the tramps have all been blacklisted men—”

“But I didn’t say that, either.”

“No matter! What I am trying to get at is this: if a workman has made himself a nuisance to the employers, haven’t they a right to punish him in any way they can?”

“I believe there’s no law yet against blacklisting,” said Camp.

“Very well, then, I don’t see what they’ve got to complain of. The employers surely know their own business.”

“They claim to know the men’s, too. That’s what they’re always saying; they will manage their own affairs in their own way. But no man, or company, that does business on a large scale has any affairs that are not partly other folks’ affairs, too. All the saying in the world won’t make it different.”

“Very well, then,” said Mrs. Makely, with a force of argument which she seemed to think was irresistible, “I think the workmen had better leave things to the employers, and then they won’t get blacklisted. It’s as broad as it’s long.”

I confess that, although I agreed with Mrs. Makely in regard to what the workmen had better do, her position had been arrived at by such extraordinary reasoning that I blushed for her; at the same time, I wanted to laugh. She continued, triumphantly: “You see, the employers have ever so much more at stake.”

“Then men have everything at stake — the work of their hands,” said the young fellow.

“Oh, but surely,” said Mrs. Makely, “you wouldn’t set that against capital? You wouldn’t compare the two?”

“Yes, I should,” said Camp, and I could see his eye kindle and his jaw stiffen.

“Then I suppose you would say that a man ought to get as much for his work as an employer gets for his capital. If you think one has as much at stake as the other, you must think they ought to be paid alike.”

“That is just what I think,” said Camp, and Mrs. Makely burst into a peal of amiable laughter.

“Now, that is too preposterous!”

“Why is it preposterous?” he demanded, with a quivering nostril.

“Why, simply because it is” said the lady, but she did not say why, and although I thought so, too, I was glad she did not attempt to do it, for her conclusions seemed to me much better than her reasons.

The old wooden clock in the kitchen began to strike, and she rose briskly to her feet and went and laid the books she had been holding in her lap on the table beside Mrs. Camp’s bed. “We must really be going,” she said, as she leaned over and kissed the invalid. “It is your dinner-time, and we shall barely get back for lunch if we go by the Loop road; and I want very much to have Mr. Homos see the Witch’s Falls on the way. I have got two or three of the books here that Mr. Makely brought me last night — I sha’n’t have time to read them at once — and I’m smuggling in one of Mr. Twelvemough’s, that he’s too modest to present for himself.” She turned a gay glance upon me, and Mrs. Camp thanked me, and a number of civilities followed from all sides. In the process of their exchange, Mrs. Makely’s spirits perceptibly rose, and she came away in high good-humor with the whole Camp family. “Well, now, I am sure,” she said to the Altrurian, as we began the long ascent of the Loop road, “you must allow that you have seen some very original characters. But how warped people get living alone so much! That is the great drawback of the country. Mrs. Camp thinks the savings-bank did her a real injury in taking a mortgage on her place, and Reuben seems to have seen just enough of the outside world to get it all wrong. But they are the best-hearted creatures in the world, and I know you won’t misunderstand them. That unsparing country bluntness — don’t you think it’s perfectly delightful? I do like to stir poor Reuben up, and get him talking. He is a good boy, if he is so wrong-headed, and he’s the most devoted son and brother in the world. Very few young fellows would waste their lives on an old farm like that; I suppose, when his mother dies, he will marry and strike out for himself in some growing place.”

“He did not seem to think the world held out any very bright inducements for him to leave home,” the Altrurian suggested.

“Oh, let him get one of these lively, pushing Yankee girls for a wife, and he will think very differently,” said Mrs. Makely.

The Altrurian disappeared that afternoon, and I saw little or nothing of him till the next day at supper. Then he said he had been spending the time with young Camp, who had shown him something of the farm-work, and introduced him to several of the neighbors; he was very much interested in it all, because at home he was, at present, engaged in farm-work himself, and he was curious to contrast the American and Altrurian methods. We began to talk of the farming interest again, later in the day, when the members of our little group came together, and I told them what the Altrurian had been doing. The doctor had been suddenly called back to town; but the minister was there, and the lawyer and the professor and the banker and the manufacturer.

It was the banker who began to comment on what I said, and he seemed to be in the frank humor of the Saturday night before. “Yes,” he said, “it’s a hard life, and they have to look sharp if they expect to make both ends meet. I would not like to undertake it myself with their resources.”

The professor smiled, in asking the Altrurian: “Did your agricultural friends tell you anything of the little rural traffic in votes that they carry on about election time? That is one of the side means they have of making both ends meet.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Altrurian.

“Why, you know, you can buy votes among our virtuous yeomen from two dollars up at the ordinary elections. When party feeling runs high, and there are vital questions at stake, the votes cost more.”

The Altrurian looked round at us all aghast. “Do, you mean that Americans buy votes?”

The professor smiled again. “Oh no; I only mean that they sell them. Well, I don’t wonder that they rather prefer to blink the fact; but it is a fact, nevertheless, and pretty notorious.”

“Good heavens!” cried the Altrurian. “And what defence have they for such treason? I don’t mean those who sell; from what I have seen of the bareness and hardship of their lives, I could well imagine that there might sometimes come a pinch when they would be glad of the few dollars that they could get in that way; but what have those who buy to say?”

“Well,” said the professor, “it isn’t a transaction that’s apt to be talked about much on either side.”

“I think,” the banker interposed, “that there is some exaggeration about that business; but it certainly exists, and I suppose it is a growing evil in the country. I fancy it arises, somewhat, from a want of, clear thinking on the subject. Then there is no doubt but it comes, sometimes, from poverty. A man sells his vote, as a woman sells her person, for money, when neither can turn virtue into cash. They feel that they must live, and neither of them would be satisfied if Dr. Johnson told them he didn’t see the necessity. In fact, I shouldn’t myself, if I were in their places. You can’t have the good of a civilization like ours without having the bad; but I am not going to deny that the bad is bad. Some people like to do that; but I don’t find my account in it. In either case, I confess that I think the buyer is worse than the seller — incomparably worse. I suppose you are not troubled with either case in Altruria?”

“Oh no!” said the Altrurian, with an utter horror, which no repetition of his words can give the sense of. “It would be unimaginable.”

“Still,” the banker suggested, “you have cakes and ale, and at times the ginger is hot in the mouth?”

“I don’t pretend that we have immunity from error; but upon such terms as you have described we have none. It would be impossible.”

The Altrurian’s voice expressed no contempt, but only a sad patience, a melancholy surprise, such as a celestial angel might feel in being suddenly confronted with some secret shame and horror of the Pit.

“Well,” said the banker, “with us the only way is to take the business view and try to strike an average somewhere.”

“Talking of business,” said the professor, turning to the manufacturer, who had been quietly smoking, “why don’t some of you capitalists take hold of farming here in the East, and make a business of it as they do in the West?”

“Thank you,” said the other; “if you mean me, I would rather not invest.” He was silent a moment, and then he went on, as if the notion were beginning to win upon him: “It may come to something like that, though. If it does, the natural course, I should think, would be through the railroads. It would be a very easy matter for them to buy up all the good farms along their lines and put tenants on them, and run them in their own interest. Really, it isn’t a bad scheme. The waste in the present method is enormous, and there is no reason why the roads should not own the farms, as they are beginning to own the mines. They could manage them better than the small farmers do in every way. I wonder the thing hasn’t occurred to some smart railroad man.”

We all laughed a little, perceiving the semi-ironical spirit of his talk; but the Altrurian must have taken it in dead earnest: “But, in that case, the number of people thrown out of work would be very great, wouldn’t it? And what would become of them?”

“Well, they would have whatever their farms brought to make a new start with somewhere else; and, besides, that question of what would become of people thrown out of work by a given improvement is something that capital cannot consider. We used to introduce a bit of machinery in the mill, every now and then, that threw out a dozen or a hundred people; but we couldn’t stop for that.”

“And you never knew what became of them?”

“Sometimes. Generally not. We took it for granted that they would light on their feet somehow.”

“And the state — the whole people — the government — did nothing for them?”

“If it became a question of the poor-house, yes.”

“Or the jail,” the lawyer suggested.

“Speaking of the poor-house,” said the professor, “did our exemplary rural friends tell you how they sell out their paupers to the lowest bidder, and get them boarded sometimes as low as a dollar and a quarter a week?”

“Yes, young Mr. Camp told me of that. He seemed to think it was terrible.”

“Did he? Well, I’m glad to hear that of young Mr. Camp. From all that I’ve been told before, he seems to reserve his conscience for the use of capitalists. What does he propose to do about it?”

“He seems to think the state ought to find work for them.”

“Oh, paternalism! Well, I guess the state won’t.”

“That was his opinion, too.”

“It seems a hard fate,” said the minister, “that the only provision the law makes for people who are worn out by sickness or a life of work should be something that assorts them with idiots and lunatics, and brings such shame upon them that it is almost as terrible as death.”

“It is the only way to encourage independence and individuality,” said the professor. “Of course, it has its dark side. But anything else would be sentimental and unbusinesslike, and, in fact, un-American.”

“I am not so sure that it would be un-Christian,” the minister timidly ventured, in the face of such an authority on political economy.

“Oh, as to that, I must leave the question to the reverend clergy,” said the professor.

A very unpleasant little silence followed. It was broken by the lawyer, who put his feet together, and, after a glance down at them, began to say: “I was very much interested this afternoon by a conversation I had with some of the young fellows in the hotel. You know most of them are graduates, and they are taking a sort of supernumerary vacation this summer before they plunge into the battle of life in the autumn. They were talking of some other fellows, classmates of theirs, who were not so lucky, but had been obliged to begin the fight at once. It seems that our fellows here are all going in for some sort of profession: medicine or law or engineering or teaching or the church, and they were commiserating those other fellows not only because they were not having the supernumerary vacation, but because they were going into business. That struck me as rather odd, and I tried to find out what it meant, and, as nearly as I could find out, it meant that most college graduates would not go into business if they could help it. They seemed to feel a sort of incongruity between their education and the business life. They pitied the fellows that had to go in for it, and apparently the fellows that had to go in for it pitied themselves, for the talk seemed to have begun about a letter that one of the chaps here had got from poor Jack or Jim somebody, who had been obliged to go into his father’s business, and was groaning over it. The fellows who were going to study professions were hugging themselves at the contrast between their fate and his, and were making remarks about business that were, to say the least, unbusinesslike. A few years ago we should have made a summary disposition of the matter, and I believe some of the newspapers still are in doubt about the value of a college education to men who have got to make their way. What do you think?”

The lawyer addressed his question to the manufacturer, who answered, with a comfortable satisfaction, that he did not think those young men if they went into business would find that they knew too much.

“But they pointed out,” said the lawyer, “that the great American fortunes had been made by men who had never had their educational advantages, and they seemed to think that what we call the education of a gentleman was a little too good for money-making purposes.”

“Well,” said the other, “they can console themselves with the reflection that going into business isn’t necessarily making money; it isn’t necessarily making a living, even.”

“Some of them seem to have caught on to that fact; and they pitied Jack or Jim partly because the chances were so much against him. But they pitied him mostly because in the life before him he would have no use for his academic training, and he had better not gone to college at all. They said he would be none the better for it, and would always be miserable when he looked back to it.”

The manufacturer did not reply, and the professor, after a preliminary hemming, held his peace. It was the banker who took the word: “Well, so far as business is concerned, they were right. It is no use to pretend that there is any relation between business and the higher education. There is no business man who will pretend that there is not often an actual incompatibility if he is honest. I know that when we get together at a commercial or financial dinner we talk as if great merchants and great financiers were beneficent geniuses, who evoked the prosperity of mankind by their schemes from the conditions that would otherwise have remained barren. Well, very likely they are, but we must all confess that they do not know it at the time. What they are consciously looking out for then is the main chance. If general prosperity follows, all well and good; they are willing to be given the credit for it. But, as I said, with business as business, the ‘education of a gentleman’ has nothing to do. That education is always putting the old Ciceronian question: whether the fellow arriving at a starving city with a cargo of grain is bound to tell the people before he squeezes them that there are half a dozen other fellows with grain just below the horizon. As a gentleman he would have to tell them, because he could not take advantage of their necessities; but, as a business man, he would think it bad business to tell them, or no business at all. The principle goes all through; I say, business is business; and I am not going to pretend that business will ever be anything else. In our business battles we don’t take off our hats to the other side and say, ‘Gentlemen of the French Guard, have the goodness to fire.’ That may be war, but it is not business. We seize all the advantages we can; very few of us would actually deceive; but if a fellow believes a thing, and we know he is wrong, we do not usually take the trouble to set him right, if we are going to lose anything by undeceiving him. That would not be business. I suppose you think that is dreadful?” He turned smilingly to the minister.

“I wish — I wish,” said the minister, gently, “it could be otherwise.”

“Well, I wish so, too,” returned the banker. “But it isn’t. Am I right or am I wrong?” he demanded of the manufacturer, who laughed.

“I am not conducting this discussion. I will not deprive you of the floor.”

“What you say,” I ventured to put in, “reminds me of the experience of a friend of mine, a brother novelist. He wrote a story where the failure of a business man turned on a point just like that you have instanced. The man could have retrieved himself if he had let some people believe that what was so was not so, but his conscience stepped in and obliged him to own the truth. There was a good deal of talk about the case, I suppose, because it was not in real life, and my friend heard divers criticisms. He heard of a group of ministers who blamed him for exalting a case of common honesty, as if it were something extraordinary; and he heard of some business men who talked it over and said he had worked the case up splendidly, but he was all wrong in the outcome — the fellow would never have told the other fellows. They said it would not have been business.”

We all laughed except the minister and the Altrurian; the manufacturer said: “Twenty-five years hence, the fellow who is going into business may pity the fellows who are pitying him for his hard fate now.”

“Very possibly, but not necessarily,” said the banker. “Of course, the business man is on top, as far as money goes; he is the fellow who makes the big fortunes; the millionaire lawyers and doctors and ministers are exceptional. But his risks are tremendous. Ninety-five times out of a hundred he fails. To be sure, he picks up and goes on, but he seldom gets there, after all.”

“Then in your system,” said the Altrurian, “the great majority of those who go into what you call the battle of life are defeated?”

“The killed, wounded, and missing sum up a frightful total,” the banker admitted. “But whatever the end is, there is a great deal of prosperity on the way. The statistics are correct, but they do not tell the whole truth. It is not so bad as it seems. Still, simply looking at the material chances, I don’t blame those young fellows for not wanting to go into business. And when you come to other considerations! We used to cut the knot of the difficulty pretty sharply; we said a college education was wrong, or the hot and hot American spread-eaglers did. Business is the national ideal, and the successful business man is the American type. It is a business man’s country.”

“Then, if I understand you,” said the Altrurian, “and I am very anxious to have a clear understanding of the matter, the effect of the university with you is to unfit a youth for business life.”

“Oh no. It may give him great advantages in it, and that is the theory and expectation of most fathers who send their sons to the university. But, undoubtedly, the effect is to render business life distasteful. The university nurtures all sorts of lofty ideals, which business has no use for.”

“Then the effect is undemocratic?”

“No, it is simply unbusinesslike. The boy is a better democrat when he leaves college than he will be later, if he goes into business. The university has taught him and equipped him to use his own gifts and powers for his advancement; but the first lesson of business, and the last, is to use other men’s gifts and powers. If he looks about him at all, he sees that no man gets rich simply by his own labor, no matter how mighty a genius he is, and that, if you want to get rich, you must make other men work for you, and pay you for the privilege of doing so. Isn’t that true?”

The banker turned to the manufacturer with this question, and the other said: “The theory is, that we give people work,” and they both laughed.

The minister said: “I believe that in Altruria no man works for the profit of another?”

“No; each works for the profit of all,” replied the Altrurian.

“Well,” said the banker, “you seem to have made it go. Nobody can deny that. But we couldn’t make it go here.”

“Why? I am very curious to know why our system seems so impossible to you.”

“Well, it is contrary to the American spirit. It is alien to our love of individuality.”

“But we prize individuality, too, and we think we secure it under our system. Under yours, it seems to me that while the individuality of the man who makes other men work for him is safe, except from itself, the individuality of the workers—”

“Well, that is their lookout. We have found that, upon the whole, it is best to let every man look out for himself. I know that, in a certain light, the result has an ugly aspect; but, nevertheless, in spite of all, the country is enormously prosperous. The pursuit of happiness, which is one of the inalienable rights secured to us by the Declaration, is, and always has been, a dream; but the pursuit of the dollar yields tangible proceeds, and we get a good deal of excitement out of it as it goes on. You can’t deny that we are the richest nation in the world. Do you call Altruria a rich country?”

I could not quite make out whether the banker was serious or not in all this talk; sometimes I suspected him of a fine mockery, but the Altrurian took him upon the surface of his words.

“I hardly know whether it is or not. The question of wealth does not enter into our scheme. I can say that we all have enough, and that no one is even in the fear of want.”

“Yes, that is very well. But we should think it was paying too much for it if we had to give up the hope of ever having more than we wanted,” and at this point the banker uttered his jolly laugh, and I perceived that he had been trying to draw the Altrurian out and practise upon his patriotism. It was a great relief to find that he had been joking in so much that seemed a dead give-away of our economical position. “In Altruria,” he asked, “who is your ideal great man? I don’t mean personally, but abstractly.”

The Altrurian thought a moment. “With us there is so little ambition for distinction, as you understand it, that your question is hard to answer. But I should say, speaking largely, that it was some man who had been able for the time being to give the greatest happiness to the greatest number — some artist or poet or inventor or physician.”

I was somewhat surprised to have the banker take this preposterous statement seriously, respectfully. “Well, that is quite conceivable with your system. What should you say,” he demanded of the rest of us generally, “was our ideal of greatness?”

No one replied at once, or at all, till the manufacturer said: “We will let you continue to run it.”

“Well, it is a very curious inquiry, and I have thought it over a good deal. I should say that within a generation our ideal has changed twice. Before the war, and during all the time from the Revolution onward, it was undoubtedly the great politician, the publicist, the statesman. As we grew older and began to have an intellectual life of our own, I think the literary fellows had a pretty good share of the honors that were going — that is, such a man as Longfellow was popularly considered a type of greatness. When the war came, it brought the soldier to the front, and there was a period of ten or fifteen years when he dominated the national imagination. That period passed, and the great era of material prosperity set in. The big fortunes began to tower up, and heroes of another sort began to appeal to our admiration. I don’t think there is any doubt but the millionaire is now the American ideal. It isn’t very pleasant to think so, even for people who have got on, but it can’t very hopefully be denied. It is the man with the most money who now takes the prize in our national cake-walk.”

The Altrurian turned curiously toward me, and I did my best to tell him what a cake-walk was. When I had finished, the banker resumed, only to say, as he rose from his chair to bid us good-night: “In any average assembly of Americans the greatest millionaire would take the eyes of all from the greatest statesman, the greatest poet, or the greatest soldier we ever had. That,” he added to the Altrurian, “will account to you for many things as you travel through our country.”

IX

The next time the members of our little group came together, the manufacturer began at once upon the banker:

“I should think that our friend the professor, here, would hardly like that notion of yours, that business, as business, has nothing to do with the education of a gentleman. If this is a business man’s country, and if the professor has nothing in stock but the sort of education that business has no use for, I should suppose that he would want to go into some other line.”

The banker mutely referred the matter to the professor, who said, with that cold grin of his which I hated:

“Perhaps we shall wait for business to purge and live cleanly. Then it will have some use for the education of a gentleman.”

“I see,” said the banker, “that I have touched the quick in both of you, when I hadn’t the least notion of doing so. But I shouldn’t really like to prophesy which will adapt itself to the other — education or business. Let us hope there will be mutual concessions. There are some pessimists who say that business methods, especially on the large scale of the trusts and combinations, have grown worse instead of better; but this may be merely what is called a ‘transition state.’ Hamlet must be cruel to be kind; the darkest hour comes before dawn — and so on. Perhaps when business gets the whole affair of life into its hands, and runs the republic, as its enemies now accuse it of doing, the process of purging and living cleanly will begin. I have known lots of fellows who started in life rather scampishly; but when they felt secure of themselves, and believed that they could afford to be honest, they became so. There’s no reason why the same thing shouldn’t happen on a large scale. We must never forget that we are still a very novel experiment, though we have matured so rapidly in some respects that we have come to regard ourselves as an accomplished fact. We are really less so than we were forty years ago, with all the tremendous changes since the war. Before that we could take certain matters for granted. If a man got out of work, he turned his hand to something else; if a man failed in business, he started in again from some other direction; as a last resort, in both cases, he went West, pre-empted a quarter-section of public land, and grew up with the country. Now the country is grown up; the public land is gone; business is full on all sides, and the hand that turned itself to something else has lost its cunning. The struggle for life has changed from a free-fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free-fighters that are left get ground to pieces between organized labor and organized capital. Decidedly, we are in a transition state, and if the higher education tried to adapt itself to business needs, there are chances that it might sacrifice itself without helping business. After all, how much education does business need? Were our great fortunes made by educated men, or men of university training? I don’t know but these young fellows are right about that.”

“Yes, that may all be,” I put in. “But it seems to me that you give Mr. Homos, somehow, a wrong impression of our economic life by your generalizations. You are a Harvard man yourself.”

“Yes, and I am not a rich man. A million or two, more or less; but what is that? I have suffered, at the start and all along, from the question as to what a man with the education of a gentleman ought to do in such and such a juncture. The fellows who have not that sort of education have not that sort of question, and they go in and win.”

“So you admit, then,” said the professor, “that the higher education elevates a business man’s standard of morals?”

“Undoubtedly. That is one of its chief drawbacks,” said the banker, with a laugh.

“Well,” I said, with the deference due even to a man who had only a million or two, more or less, “we must allow you to say such things. But if the case is so bad with the business men who have made the great fortunes — the business men who have never had the disadvantage of a university education — I wish you would explain to Mr. Homos why, in every public exigency, we instinctively appeal to the business sense of the community as if it were the fountain of wisdom, probity, and equity. Suppose there were some question of vital interest — I won’t say financial, but political or moral or social — on which it was necessary to rouse public opinion, what would be the first thing to do? To call a meeting over the signatures of the leading business men, because no other names appeal with such force to the public. You might get up a call signed by all the novelists, artists, ministers, lawyers, and doctors in the state, and it would not have a tithe of the effect, with the people at large, that a call signed by a few leading merchants, bank presidents, railroad men, and trust officers would have. What is the reason? It seems strange that I should be asking you to defend yourself against yourself.”

“Not at all, my dear fellow, not at all,” the banker replied, with his caressing bonhomie. “Though I will confess, to begin with, that I do not expect to answer your question to your entire satisfaction. I can only do my best — on the instalment plan.”

He turned to the Altrurian, and then went on: “As I said the other night, this is a business man’s country. We are a purely commercial people; money is absolutely to the fore; and business, which is the means of getting the most money, is the American ideal. If you like, you may call it the American fetish; I don’t mind calling it so myself. The fact that business is our ideal, or our fetish, will account for the popular faith in business men, who form its priesthood, its hierarchy. I don’t know, myself, any other reason for regarding business men as solider than novelists or artists or ministers, not to mention lawyers and doctors. They are supposed to have long heads; but it appears that ninety-five times out of a hundred they haven’t. They are supposed to be very reliable; but it is almost invariably a business man of some sort who gets out to Canada while the state examiner is balancing his books, and it is usually the longest headed business men who get plundered by him. No, it is simply because business is our national ideal that the business man is honored above all other men among us. In the aristocratic countries they forward a public object under the patronage of the nobility and gentry; in a plutocratic country they get the business men to indorse it. I suppose that the average American citizen feels that they wouldn’t indorse a thing unless it was safe; and the average American citizen likes to be safe — he is cautious. As a matter of fact, business men are always taking risks, and business is a game of chance, in a certain degree. Have I made myself intelligible?”

“Entirely so,” said the Altrurian; and he seemed so thoroughly well satisfied that he forbore asking any further question.

No one else spoke. The banker lighted a cigar, and resumed at the point where he left off when I ventured to enter upon the defence of his class with him. I must say that he had not convinced me at all. At that moment I would rather have trusted him, in any serious matter of practical concern, than all the novelists I ever heard of. But I thought I would leave the word to him, without further attempt to reinstate him in his self-esteem. In fact, he seemed to be getting along very well without it, or else he was feeling that mysterious control from the Altrurian which I had already suspected him of using. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the banker proceeded with his contribution to the Altrurian’s stock of knowledge concerning our civilization:

“I don’t believe, however, that the higher education is any more of a failure, as a provision for a business career, than the lower education is for the life of labor. I suppose that the hypercritical observer might say that in a wholly commercial civilization like ours the business man really needed nothing beyond the three R’s, and the working-man needed no R at all. As a practical affair, there is a good deal to be said in favor of that view. The higher education is part of the social ideal which we have derived from the past, from Europe. It is part of the provision for the life of leisure, the life of the aristocrat, which nobody of our generation leads, except women. Our women really have some use for the education of a gentleman, but our men have none. How will that do for a generalization?” the banker asked of me.

“Oh,” I admitted, with a laugh, “it is a good deal like one of my own. I have always been struck with that phase of our civilization.”

“Well, then,” the banker resumed, “take the lower education. That is part of the civic ideal which, I suppose, I may say we evolved from the depths of our inner consciousness of what an American citizen ought to be. It includes instruction in all the R’s, and in several other letters of the alphabet. It is given free by the state, and no one can deny that it is thoroughly socialistic in conception and application.”

“Distinctly so,” said the professor. “Now that the text-books are furnished by the state, we have only to go a step further and provide a good, hot lunch for the children every day, as they do in Paris.”

“Well,” the banker returned, “I don’t know that I should have much to say against that. It seems as reasonable as anything in the system of education which we force upon the working classes. They know perfectly well, whether we do or not, that the three R’s will not make their children better mechanics or laborers, and that, if the fight for a mere living is to go on from generation to generation, they will have no leisure to apply the little learning they get in the public schools for their personal culture. In the mean time we deprive the parents of their children’s labor, in order that they may be better citizens for their schooling, as we imagine; I don’t know whether they are or not. We offer them no sort of compensation for their time, and I think we ought to feel obliged to them for not wanting wages for their children while we are teaching them to be better citizens.”

“You know,” said the professor, “that has been suggested by some of their leaders.”

“No, really? Well, that is too good!” The banker threw back his head and roared, and we all laughed with him. When we had sobered down again, he said: “I suppose that when a working-man makes all the use he can of his lower education he becomes a business man, and then he doesn’t need the higher. Professor, you seem to be left out in the cold by our system, whichever way you take it.”

“Oh,” said the professor, “the law of supply and demand works both ways: it creates the demand, if the supply comes first; and if we keep on giving the sons of business men the education of a gentleman, we may yet make them feel the need of it. We shall evolve a new sort of business man.”

“The sort that can’t make money, or wouldn’t exactly like to, on some terms?” asked the banker. “Well, perhaps we shall work out our democratic salvation in that way. When you have educated your new business man to the point where he can’t consent to get rich at the obvious cost of others, you’ve got him on the way back to work with his hands. He will sink into the ranks of labor, and give the fellow with the lower education a chance. I’ve no doubt he’ll take it. I don’t know but you’re right, professor.”

The lawyer had not spoken as yet. Now he said: “Then it is education, after all, that is to bridge the chasm between the classes and the masses, though it seems destined to go a long way around about it. There was a time, I believe, when we expected religion to do that.”

“Well, it may still be doing it, for all I know,” said the banker. “What do you say?” he asked, turning to the minister. “You ought to be able to give us some statistics on the subject with that large congregation of yours. You preach to more people than any other pulpit in your city.”

The banker named one of the principal cities in the East, and the minister answered, with, modest pride: “I am not sure of that; but our society is certainly a very large one.”

“Well, and how many of the lower classes are there in it — people who work for their living with their hands?”

The minister stirred uneasily in his chair, and at last he said, with evident unhappiness: “They — I suppose — they have their own churches. I have never thought that such a separation of the classes was right; and I have had some of the very best people — socially and financially — with me in the wish that there might be more brotherliness between the rich and poor among us. But as yet—”

He stopped; the banker pursued: “Do you mean there are no working-people in your congregation?”

“I cannot think of any,” returned the minister, so miserably that the banker forbore to press the point.

The lawyer broke the awkward pause which followed: “I have heard it asserted that there is no country in the world where the separation of the classes is so absolute as in ours. In fact, I once heard a Russian revolutionist, who had lived in exile all over Europe, say that he had never seen anywhere such a want of kindness or sympathy between rich and poor as he had observed in America. I doubted whether he was right. But he believed that, if it ever came to the industrial revolution with us, the fight would be more uncompromising than any such fight that the world had ever seen. There was no respect from low to high, he said, and no consideration from high to low, as there were in countries with traditions and old associations.”

“Well,” said the banker, “there may be something in that. Certainly, so far as the two forces have come into conflict here, there has been no disposition, on either side, to ‘make war with the water of roses.’ It’s astonishing, in fact, to see how ruthless the fellows who have just got up are toward the fellows who are still down. And the best of us have been up only a generation or two — and the fellows who are still down know it.”

“And what do you think would be the outcome of such a conflict?” I asked, with my soul divided between fear of it and the perception of its excellence as material. My fancy vividly sketched the outline of a story which should forecast the struggle and its event, somewhat on the plan of the Battle of Dorking.

“We should beat,” said the banker, breaking his cigar-ash off with his little finger; and I instantly cast him, with his ironic calm, for the part of a great patrician leader in my “Fall of the Republic.” Of course, I disguised him somewhat, and travestied his worldly bonhomie with the bluff sang-froid of the soldier; these things are easily done.

“What makes you think we should beat?” asked the manufacturer, with a certain curiosity.

“Well, all the good jingo reasons: we have got the materials for beating. Those fellows throw away their strength whenever they begin to fight, and they’ve been so badly generalled, up to the present time, that they have wanted to fight at the outset of every quarrel. They have been beaten in every quarrel, but still they always want to begin by fighting. That is all right. When they have learned enough to begin by voting, then we shall have to look out. But if they keep on fighting, and always putting themselves in the wrong and getting the worst of it, perhaps we can fix the voting so we needn’t be any more afraid of that than we are of the fighting. It’s astonishing how short-sighted they are. They, have no conception of any cure for their grievances except more wages and fewer hours.”

“But,” I asked, “do you really think they have any just grievances?”

“Of course not, as a business man,” said the banker. “If I were a working-man, I should probably think differently. But we will suppose, for the sake of argument, that their day is too long and their pay is too short. How do they go about to better themselves? They strike. Well, a strike is a fight, and in a fight, nowadays, it is always skill and money that win. The working-men can’t stop till they have put themselves outside of the public sympathy which the newspapers say is so potent in their behalf; I never saw that it did them the least good. They begin by boycotting, and breaking the heads of the men who want to work. They destroy property, and they interfere with business — the two absolutely sacred things in the American religion. Then we call out the militia and shoot a few of them, and their leaders declare the strike off. It is perfectly simple.”

“But will it be quite as simple,” I asked, reluctant in behalf of my projected romance, to have the matter so soon disposed of— “will it be quite so simple if their leaders ever persuade the working-men to leave the militia, as they threaten to do, from time to time?”

“No, not quite so simple,” the banker admitted. “Still, the fight would be comparatively simple. In the first place, I doubt — though I won’t be certain about it — whether there are a great many working-men in the militia now. I rather fancy it is made up, for the most part, of clerks and small tradesmen and book-keepers, and such employés of business as have time and money for it. I may be mistaken.”

No one seemed able to say whether he was mistaken or not; and, after waiting a moment, he proceeded: “I feel pretty sure that it is so in the city companies and regiments, at any rate, and that if every working-man left them it would not seriously impair their effectiveness. But when the working-men have left the militia, what have they done? They have eliminated the only thing that disqualifies it for prompt and unsparing use against strikers. As long as they are in it we might have our misgivings, but if they were once out of it we should have none. And what would they gain? They would not be allowed to arm and organize as an inimical force. That was settled once for all in Chicago, in the case of the International Groups. A few squads of policemen would break them up. Why,” the banker exclaimed, with his good-humored laugh, “how preposterous they are when you come to look at it! They are in the majority, the immense majority, if you count the farmers, and they prefer to behave as if they were the hopeless minority. They say they want an eight-hour law, and every now and then they strike and try to fight it. Why don’t they vote it? They could make it the law in six months by such overwhelming numbers that no one would dare to evade or defy it. They can make any law they want, but they prefer to break such laws as we have. That ‘alienates public sympathy,’ the newspapers say; but the spectacle of their stupidity and helpless wilfulness is so lamentable that I could almost pity them. If they chose, it would take only a few years to transform our government into the likeness of anything they wanted. But they would rather not have what they want, apparently, if they can only keep themselves from getting it, and they have to work hard to do that!”

“I suppose,” I said, “that they are misled by the un-American principles and methods of the Socialists among them.”

“Why, no,” returned the banker, “I shouldn’t say that. As far as I understand it, the Socialists are the only fellows among them who propose to vote their ideas into laws, and nothing can be more American than that. I don’t believe the Socialists stir up the strikes — at least, among our working-men; though the newspapers convict them of it, generally without trying them. The Socialists seem to accept the strikes as the inevitable outcome of the situation, and they make use of them as proofs of the industrial discontent. But, luckily for the status, our labor leaders are not Socialists, for your Socialist, whatever you may say against him, has generally thought himself into a Socialist. He knows that until the working-men stop fighting, and get down to voting — until they consent to be the majority — there is no hope for them. I am not talking of anarchists, mind you, but of Socialists, whose philosophy is more law, not less, and who look forward to an order so just that it can’t be disturbed.”

“And what,” the minister faintly said, “do you think will be the outcome of it all?”

“We had that question the other night, didn’t we? Our legal friend here seemed to feel that we might rub along indefinitely as we are doing, or work out an Altruria of our own; or go back to the patriarchal stage and own our working-men. He seemed not to have so much faith in the logic of events as I have. I doubt if it is altogether a woman’s logic. Parole femmine, fatti maschi, and the logic of events isn’t altogether words; it’s full of hard knocks, too. But I’m no prophet. I can’t forecast the future; I prefer to take it as it comes. There’s a little tract of William Morris’s, though — I forget just what he calls it — that is full of curious and interesting speculation on this point. He thinks that, if we keep the road we are now going, the last state of labor will be like its first, and it will be owned.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that will ever happen in America,” I protested.

“Why not?” asked the banker. “Practically, it is owned already in a vastly greater measure than we recognize. And where would the great harm be? The new slavery would not be like the old. There needn’t be irresponsible whipping and separation of families, and private buying and selling. The proletariate would probably be owned by the state, as it was at one time in Greece; or by large corporations, which would be much more in keeping with the genius of our free institutions; and an enlightened public opinion would cast safeguards about it in the form of law to guard it from abuse. But it would be strictly policed, localized, and controlled. There would probably be less suffering than there is now, when a man may be cowed into submission to any terms through the suffering of his family; when he may be starved out and turned out if he is unruly. You may be sure that nothing of that kind would happen in the new slavery. We have not had nineteen hundred years of Christianity for nothing.”

The banker paused, and, as the silence continued, he broke it with a laugh, which was a prodigious relief to my feelings, and I suppose to the feelings of all. I perceived that he had been joking, and I was confirmed in this when he turned to the Altrurian and laid his hand upon his shoulder. “You see,” he said, “I’m a kind of Altrurian myself. What is the reason why we should not found a new Altruria here on the lines I’ve drawn? Have you never had philosophers — well, call them philanthropists; I don’t mind — of my way of thinking among you?”

“Oh yes,” said the Altrurian. “At one time, just before we emerged from the competitive conditions, there was much serious question whether capital should not own labor instead of labor owning capital. That was many hundred years ago.”

“I am proud to find myself such an advanced thinker,” said the banker. “And how came you to decide that labor should own capital?”

“We voted it,” answered the Altrurian.

“Well,” said the banker, “our fellows are still fighting it, and getting beaten.”

I found him later in the evening talking with Mrs. Makely. “My dear sir,” I said, “I liked your frankness with my Altrurian friend immensely; and it may be well to put the worst foot foremost; but what is the advantage of not leaving us a leg to stand upon?”

He was not in the least offended at my boldness, as I had feared he might be, but he said, with that jolly laugh of his: “Capital! Well, perhaps I have worked my candor a little too hard; I suppose there is such a thing. But don’t you see that it leaves me in the best possible position to carry the war into Altruria when we get him to open up about his native land?”

“Ah! If you can get him to do it.”

“Well, we were just talking about that. Mrs. Makely has a plan.”

“Yes,” said the lady, turning an empty chair near her own toward me. “Sit down and listen.”

X

I sat down, and Mrs. Makely continued: “I have thought it all out, and I want you to confess that in all practical matters a woman’s brain is better than a man’s. Mr. Bullion, here, says it is, and I want you to say so, too.”

“Yes,” the banker admitted, “when it comes down to business a woman is worth any two of us.”

“And we have just been agreeing,” I coincided, “that the only gentlemen among us are women. Mrs. Makely, I admit, without further dispute, that the most unworldly woman is worldlier than the worldliest man; and that in all practical matters we fade into dreamers and doctrinaires beside you. Now, go on.”

But she did not mean to let me off so easily. She began to brag herself up, as women do whenever you make them the slightest concession.

“Here, you men,” she said, “have been trying for a whole week to get something out of Mr. Homos about his country, and you have left it to a poor, weak woman, at last, to think how to manage it. I do believe that you get so much interested in your own talk, when you are with him, that you don’t let him get in a word, and that’s the reason you haven’t found out anything about Altruria yet from him.”

In view of the manner in which she had cut in at Mrs. Camp’s, and stopped Homos on the very verge of the only full and free confession he had ever been near making about Altruria, I thought this was pretty cool; but, for fear of worse, I said:

“You’re quite right, Mrs. Makely. I’m sorry to say that there has been a shameful want of self-control among us, and that, if we learn anything at all from him, it will be because you have taught us how.”

She could not resist this bit of taffy. She scarcely gave herself time to gulp it before she said:

“Oh, it’s very well to say that now! But where would you have been if I hadn’t set my wits to work? Now, listen! It just popped into my mind, like an inspiration, when I was thinking of something altogether different. It flashed upon me in an instant: a good object, and a public occasion.”

“Well?” I said, finding this explosion and electrical inspiration rather enigmatical.

“Why, you know, the Union Chapel, over in the village, is in a languishing condition, and the ladies have been talking all summer about doing something for it, getting up something — a concert or theatricals or a dance or something — and applying the proceeds to repainting and papering the visible church; it needs it dreadfully. But, of course, those things are not exactly religious, don’t you know; and a fair is so much trouble; and such a bore, when you get the articles ready, even; and everybody feels swindled; and now people frown on raffles, so there is no use thinking of them. What you want is something striking. We did think of a parlor-reading, or perhaps ventriloquism; but the performers all charge so much that there wouldn’t be anything left after paying expenses.”

She seemed to expect some sort of prompting at this point; so I said: “Well?”

“Well,” she repeated, “that is just where your Mr. Homos comes in.”

“Oh! How does he come in there?”

“Why, get him to deliver a Talk on Altruria. As soon as he knows it’s for a good object, he will be on fire to do it; and they must live so much in common there that the public occasion will be just the thing that will appeal to him.”

It did seem a good plan to me, and I said so. But Mrs. Makely was so much in love with it that she was not satisfied with my modest recognition.

“Good? It’s magnificent! It’s the very thing! And I have thought it out, down to the last detail—”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted. “Do you think there is sufficient general interest in the subject, outside of the hotel, to get a full house for him? I shouldn’t like to see him subjected to the mortification of empty benches.”

“What in the world are you thinking of? Why, there isn’t a farm-house, anywhere within ten miles, where they haven’t heard of Mr. Homos; and there isn’t a servant under this roof, or in any of the boarding-houses, who doesn’t know something about Altruria and want to know more. It seems that your friend has been much oftener with the porters and the stable-boys than he has been with us.”

I had only too great reason to fear so. In spite of my warnings and entreaties, he had continued to behave toward every human being he met exactly as if they were equals. He apparently could not conceive of that social difference which difference of occupation creates among us. He owned that he saw it, and from the talk of our little group he knew it existed; but, when I expostulated with him upon some act in gross violation of society usage, he only answered that he could not imagine that what he saw and knew could actually be. It was quite impossible to keep him from bowing with the greatest deference to our waitress; he shook hands with the head-waiter every morning as well as with me; there was a fearful story current in the house, that he had been seen running down one of the corridors to relieve a chambermaid laden with two heavy water-pails which she was carrying to the rooms to fill up the pitchers. This was probably not true; but I myself saw him helping in the hotel hay-field one afternoon, shirt-sleeved like any of the hired men. He said that it was the best possible exercise, and that he was ashamed he could give no better excuse for it than the fact that without something of the kind he should suffer from indigestion. It was grotesque, and out of all keeping with a man of his cultivation and breeding. He was a gentleman and a scholar, there was no denying, and yet he did things in contravention of good form at every opportunity, and nothing I could say had any effect with him. I was perplexed beyond measure, the day after I had reproached him for his labor in the hay-field, to find him in a group of table-girls, who were listening while the head-waiter read aloud to them in the shade of the house; there was a corner looking toward the stables which was given up to them by tacit consent of the guests during a certain part of the afternoon.

I feigned not to see him, but I could not forbear speaking to him about it afterward. He took it in good part, but he said he had been rather disappointed in the kind of literature they liked and the comments they made on it; he had expected that with the education they had received, and with their experience of the seriousness of life, they would prefer something less trivial. He supposed, however, that a romantic love-story, where a poor American girl marries an English lord, formed a refuge for them from the real world which promised them so little and held them so cheap. It was quite useless for one to try to make him realize his behavior in consorting with servants as a kind of scandal.

The worst of it was that his behavior, as I could see, had already begun to demoralize the objects of his misplaced politeness. At first the servants stared and resented it, as if it were some tasteless joke; but in an incredibly short time, when they saw that he meant his courtesy in good faith, they took it as their due. I had always had a good understanding with the head-waiter, and I thought I could safely smile with him at the queer conduct of my friend toward himself and his fellow-servants. To my astonishment he said: “I don’t see why he shouldn’t treat them as if they were ladies and gentlemen. Doesn’t he treat you and your friends so?”

It was impossible to answer this, and I could only suffer in silence, and hope the Altrurian would soon go. I had dreaded the moment when the landlord should tell me that his room was wanted; now I almost desired it; but he never did. On the contrary, the Altrurian was in high favor with him. He said he liked to see a man make himself pleasant with everybody; and that he did not believe he had ever had a guest in the house who was so popular all round.

“Of course,” Mrs. Makely went on, “I don’t criticise him — with his peculiar traditions. I presume I should be just so myself if I had been brought up in Altruria, which, thank goodness, I wasn’t. But Mr. Homos is a perfect dear, and all the women in the house are in love with him, from the cook’s helpers, up and down. No, the only danger is that there won’t be room in the hotel parlors for all the people that will want to hear him, and we shall have to make the admission something that will be prohibitive in most cases. We shall have to make it a dollar.”

“Well,” I said, “I think that will settle the question as far as the farming population is concerned. It’s twice as much as they ever pay for a reserved seat in the circus, and four times as much as a simple admission. I’m afraid, Mrs. Makely, you’re going to be very few, though fit.”

“Well, I’ve thought it all over, and I’m going to put the tickets at one dollar.”

“Very good. Have you caught your hare?”

“No, I haven’t yet. And I want you to help me catch him. What do you think is the best way to go about it?”

The banker said he would leave us to the discussion of that question, but Mrs. Makely could count upon him in everything if she could only get the man to talk. At the end of our conference we decided to interview the Altrurian together.

I shall always be ashamed of the way that woman wheedled the Altrurian, when we found him the next morning, walking up and down the piazza, before breakfast — that is, it was before our breakfast; when we asked him to go in with us, he said he had just had his breakfast, and was waiting for Reuben Camp, who had promised to take him up as he passed with a load of hay for one of the hotels in the village.

“Ah, that reminds me, Mr. Homos,” the unscrupulous woman began on him at once. “We want to interest you in a little movement we’re getting up for the Union Chapel in the village. You know it’s the church where all the different sects have their services; alternately. Of course, it’s rather an original way of doing, but there is sense in it where the people are too poor to go into debt for different churches, and—”

“It’s admirable!” said the Altrurian. “I have heard about it from the Camps. It is an emblem of the unity which ought to prevail among Christians of all professions. How can I help you, Mrs. Makely?”

“I knew you would approve of it!” she exulted. “Well, it’s simply this: The poor little place has got so shabby that I’m almost ashamed to be seen going into it, for one; and want to raise money enough to give it a new coat of paint outside and put on some kind of pretty paper, of an ecclesiastical pattern, on the inside. I declare, those staring white walls, with the cracks in the plastering zigzagging every which way, distract me so that I can’t put my mind on the sermon. Don’t you think that paper, say of a Gothic design, would be a great improvement? I’m sure it would; and it’s Mr. Twelvemough’s idea, too.”

I learned this fact now for the first time; but, with Mrs. Makely’s warning eye upon me, I could not say so, and I made what sounded to me like a Gothic murmur of acquiescence. It sufficed for Mrs. Makely’s purpose, at any rate, and she went on, without giving the Altrurian a chance to say what he thought the educational effect of wall-paper would be:

“Well, the long and short of it is that we want you to make this money for us, Mr. Homos.”

“I?” He started in a kind of horror. “My dear lady, I never made any money in my life. I should think it wrong to make money.”

“In Altruria, yes. We all know how it is in your delightful country, and I assure you that no one could respect your conscientious scruples more than I do. But you must remember that you are in America now. In America you have to make money, or else — get left. And then you must consider the object, and all the good you can do, indirectly, by a little Talk on Altruria.”

He answered, blandly: “A little Talk on Altruria? How in the world should I get money by that?”

She was only too eager to explain, and she did it with so much volubility and at such great length that I, who am good for nothing till I have had my cup of coffee in the morning, almost perished of an elucidation which the Altrurian bore with the sweetest patience.

When she gave him a chance to answer, at last, he said: “I shall be very happy to do what you wish, madam.”

“Will you?” she screamed. “Oh, I’m so glad! You have been so slippery about Altruria, you know, that I expected nothing but a point-blank refusal. Of course, I knew you would be kind about it. Oh, I can hardly believe my senses! You can’t think what a dear you are.” I knew she had got that word from some English people who had been in the hotel; and she was working it rather wildly, but it was not my business to check her. “Well, then, all you have got to do is to leave the whole thing to me, and not bother about it a bit till I send and tell you we are ready to listen. There comes Reuben, with his ox-team. Thank you so much, Mr. Homos. No one need be ashamed to enter the house of God” — she said Gawd, in an access of piety— “after we get that paint and paper on it; and we shall have them on before two Sabbaths have passed over it.”

She wrung the Altrurian’s hand; I was only afraid she was going to kiss him.

“There is but one stipulation I should like to make,” he began.

“Oh, a thousand,” she cut in.

“And that is, there shall be no exclusion from my lecture on account of occupation or condition. That is a thing that I can in no wise countenance, even in America; it is far more abhorrent to me even than money-making, though they are each a part and parcel of the other.”

“I thought it was that,” she retorted, joyously. “And I can assure you, Mr. Homos, there shall be nothing of that kind. Every one — I don’t care who it is or what they do — shall hear you who buys a ticket. Now, will that do?”

“Perfectly,” said the Altrurian, and he let her wring his hand again.

She pushed hers through my arm as we started for the dining-room, and leaned over to whisper jubilantly: “That will fix it. He will see how much his precious lower classes care for Altruria if they have to pay a dollar apiece to hear about it. And I shall keep faith with him to the letter.”

I could not feel that she would keep it in the spirit; but I could only groan inwardly and chuckle outwardly at the woman’s depravity.

It seemed to me, though I could not approve of it, a capital joke, and so it seemed to all the members of the little group whom I had made especially acquainted with the Altrurian. It is true that the minister was somewhat troubled with the moral question, which did not leave me wholly at peace; and the banker affected to find a question of taste involved, which he said he must let me settle, however, as the man’s host; if I could stand it, he could. No one said anything against the plan to Mrs. Makely, and this energetic woman made us take two tickets apiece, as soon as she got them printed, over in the village. She got little hand-bills printed, and had them scattered about through the neighborhood, at all the hotels, boarding-houses, and summer cottages, to give notice of the time and place of the talk on Altruria. She fixed this for the following Saturday afternoon, in our hotel parlor; she had it in the afternoon so as not to interfere with the hop in the evening; she put tickets on sale at the principal houses and at the village drug-store, and she made me go about with her and help her sell them at some of the cottages in person.

I must say I found this extremely distasteful, especially where the people were not very willing to buy, and she had to urge them. They all admitted the excellence of the object, but they were not so sure about the means. At several places the ladies asked who was this Mr. Homos, anyway; and how did she know he was really from Altruria? He might be an impostor.

Then Mrs. Makely would put me forward, and I would be obliged to give such account of him as I could, and to explain just how and why he came to be my guest; with the cumulative effect of bringing back all the misgivings which I had myself felt at the outset concerning him, and which I had dismissed as too fantastic.

The tickets went off rather slowly, even in our own hotel; people thought them too dear; and some, as soon as they knew the price, said frankly they had heard enough about Altruria already, and were sick of the whole thing.

Mrs. Makely said this was quite what she had expected of those people; that they were horrid and stingy and vulgar; and she should see what face they would have to ask her to take tickets when they were trying to get up something. She began to be vexed with herself, she confessed, at the joke she was playing on Mr. Homos, and I noticed that she put herself rather defiantly en evidence in his company whenever she could in the presence of these reluctant ladies. She told me she had not the courage to ask the clerk how many of the tickets he had sold out of those she had left at the desk.

One morning, the third or fourth, as I was going in to breakfast with her, the head-waiter stopped her as he opened the door, and asked modestly if she could spare him a few tickets, for he thought he could sell some. To my amazement the unprincipled creature said: “Why, certainly. How many?” and instantly took a package out of her pocket, where she seemed always to have them. He asked, Would twenty be more than she could spare? and she answered: “Not at all. Here are twenty-five.” and bestowed the whole package upon him.

That afternoon Reuben Camp came lounging up toward us, where I sat with her on the corner of the piazza, and said that if she would like to let him try his luck with some tickets for the Talk he would see what he could do.

“You can have all you want, Reuben,” she said, “and I hope you’ll have better luck than I have. I’m perfectly disgusted with people.”

She fished several packages out of her pocket this time, and he asked: “Do you mean that I can have them all?”

“Every one, and a band of music into the bargain,” she answered, recklessly. But she seemed a little daunted when he quietly took them. “You know there are a hundred here?”

“Yes, I should like to see what I can do among the natives. Then there is a construction train over at the junction, and I know a lot of the fellows. I guess some of ’em would like to come.”

“The tickets are a dollar each, you know,” she suggested.

“That’s all right,” said Camp. “Well, good-afternoon.”

Mrs. Makely turned to me with a kind of gasp as he shambled away. “I don’t know about that.”

“About having the whole crew of a construction train at the Talk? I dare say it won’t be pleasant to the ladies who have bought tickets.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Makely, with astonishing contempt, “I don’t care what they think. But Reuben has got all my tickets, and suppose he keeps them so long that I won’t have time to sell any, and then throws them back on my hands? I know!” she added, joyously. “I can go around now and tell people that my tickets are all gone; and I’ll go instantly and have the clerk hold all he has left at a premium.”

She came back looking rather blank.

“He hasn’t got a single one left. He says an old native came in this morning and took every last one of them — he doesn’t remember just how many. I believe they’re going to speculate on them; and if Reuben Camp serves me a trick like that — Why,” she broke off, “I believe I’ll speculate on them myself. I should like to know why I shouldn’t. Oh, I should just like to make some of those creatures pay double, or treble, for the chances they’ve refused. Ah, Mrs. Bulkham,” she called out to a lady who was coming down the veranda toward us, “you’ll be glad to know I’ve got rid of all my tickets. Such a relief!”

“You have?” Mrs. Bulkham retorted.

“Every one.”

“I thought,” said Mrs. Bulkham, “that you understood I wanted one for my daughter and myself, if she came.”

“I certainly didn’t,” said Mrs. Makely, with a wink of concentrated wickedness at me. “But, if you do, you will have to say so now, without any ifs or ands about it; and if any of the tickets come back — I let friends have a few on sale — I will give you two.”

“Well, I do,” said Mrs. Bulkham, after a moment.

“Very well; it will be five dollars for the two. I feel bound to get all I can for the cause. Shall I put your name down?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Bulkham, rather crossly; but Mrs. Makely inscribed her name on her tablets with a radiant amiability, which suffered no eclipse when, within the next fifteen minutes, a dozen other ladies hurried up and bought in at the same rate.

I could not stand it, and I got up to go away, feeling extremely particeps criminis. Mrs. Makely seemed to have a conscience as light as air.

“If Reuben Camp or the head-waiter don’t bring back some of those tickets, I don’t know what I shall do. I shall have to put chairs into the aisles and charge five dollars apiece for as many people as I can crowd in there. I never knew anything so perfectly providential.”

“I envy you the ability to see it in that light, Mrs. Makely,” I said, faint at heart. “Suppose Camp crowds the place full of his trainmen, how will the ladies that you’ve sold tickets to at five dollars apiece like it?”

“Pooh! What do I care how they like it! Horrid things! And for repairs on the house of Gawd, it’s the same as being in church, where everybody is equal.”

The time passed. Mrs. Makely sold chances to all the ladies in the house; on Friday night Reuben Camp brought her a hundred dollars; the head-waiter had already paid in twenty-five. “I didn’t dare to ask them if they speculated on them,” she confided to me. “Do you suppose they would have the conscience?”

They had secured the large parlor of the hotel, where the young people danced in the evening, and where entertainments were held, of the sort usually given in summer hotels; we had already had a dramatic reading, a time with the phonograph, an exhibition of necromancy, a concert by a college glee club, and I do not know what else. The room would hold perhaps two hundred people, if they were closely seated, and, by her own showing, Mrs. Makely had sold above two hundred and fifty tickets and chances. All Saturday forenoon she consoled herself with the belief that a great many people at the other hotels and cottages had bought seats merely to aid the cause, and would not really come; she estimated that at least fifty would stay away; but, if Reuben Camp had sold his tickets among the natives, we might expect every one of them to come and get his money’s worth; she did not dare to ask the head-waiter how he had got rid of his twenty-five tickets.

The hour set for the Talk to begin was three o’clock, so that people could have their naps comfortably over, after the one o’clock dinner, and be just in the right frame of mind for listening. But long before the appointed time the people who dine at twelve, and never take an afternoon nap, began to arrive, on foot, in farm-wagons, smart buggies, mud-crusted carryalls, and all manner of ramshackle vehicles. They arrived as if coming to a circus, old husbands and wives, young couples and their children, pretty girls and their fellows, and hitched their horses to the tails of their wagons, and began to make a picnic lunch in the shadow of the grove lying between the hotel and the station. About two we heard the snorting of a locomotive at a time when no train was due, and a construction train came in view, with the men waving their handkerchiefs from the windows, and apparently ready for all the fun there was to be in the thing. Some of them had a small flag in each hand, the American Stars and Stripes and the white flag of Altruria, in compliment to my guest, I suppose. A good many of the farmers came over to the hotel to buy tickets, which they said they expected to get after they came, and Mrs. Makely was obliged to pacify them with all sorts of lying promises. From moment to moment she was in consultation with the landlord, who decided to throw open the dining-room, which connected with the parlor, so as to allow the help and the neighbors to hear without incommoding the hotel guests. She said that this took a great burden off her mind, and that now she should feel perfectly easy, for now no one could complain about being mixed up with the servants and the natives, and yet every one could hear perfectly.

She could not rest until she had sent for Homos and told him of this admirable arrangement. I did not know whether to be glad or not when he instantly told her that, if there was to be any such separation of his auditors, in recognition of our class distinctions, he must refuse to speak at all.

“Then what in the world are we to do?” she wailed out, and the tears came into her eyes.

“Have you got the money for all your tickets?” he asked, with a sort of disgust for the whole transaction in his tone.

“Yes, and more, too. I don’t believe there’s a soul, in the hotel or out of it, that hasn’t paid at least a dollar to hear you; and that makes it so very embarrassing. Oh, dear Mr. Homos! You won’t be so implacably high-principled as all that! Think that you are doing it for the house of Gawd.”

The woman made me sick.

“Then no one,” said the Altrurian, “can feel aggrieved, or unfairly used, if I say what I have to say in the open air, where all can listen equally, without any manner of preference or distinction. We will go up to the edge of the grove overlooking the tennis-court, and hold our meeting there, as the Altrurian meetings are always held, with the sky for a roof, and with no walls but the horizon.”

“The very thing!” cried Mrs. Makely. “Who would ever have thought you were so practical, Mr. Homos? I don’t believe you’re an Altrurian, after all; I believe you are an American in disguise.”

The Altrurian turned away, without making any response to this flattering attribution of our nationality to him; but Mrs. Makely had not waited for any. She had flown off, and I next saw her attacking the landlord, with such apparent success that he slapped himself on the leg and vanished, and immediately the porters and bell-boys and all the men-servants began carrying out chairs to the tennis-court, which was already well set round with benches. In a little while the whole space was covered, and settees were placed well up the ground toward the grove.

By half-past two the guests of the hotel came out and took the best seats, as by right, and the different tallyhoes and mountain wagons began to arrive from the other hotels, with their silly hotel cries, and their gay groups dismounted and dispersed themselves over the tennis-court until all the chairs were taken. It was fine to see how the natives and the trainmen and the hotel servants, with an instinctive perception of the proprieties, yielded these places to their superiors, and, after the summer folks were all seated, scattered themselves on the grass and the pine-needles about the border of the grove. I should have liked to instance the fact to the Altrurian, as a proof that this sort of subordination was a part of human nature, and that a principle which pervaded our civilization, after the democratic training of our whole national life, must be divinely implanted. But there was no opportunity for me to speak with him after the fact had accomplished itself, for by this time he had taken his place in front of a little clump of low pines and was waiting for the assembly to quiet itself before he began to speak. I do not think there could have been less than five hundred present, and the scene had that accidental picturesqueness which results from the grouping of all sorts of faces and costumes. Many of our ladies had pretty hats and brilliant parasols, but I must say that the soberer tone of some of the old farm-wives’ brown calicoes and outdated bonnets contributed to enrich the coloring, and there was a certain gayety in the sunny glisten of the men’s straw hats everywhere that was very good.

The sky overhead was absolutely stainless, and the light of the cool afternoon sun streamed upon the slopes of the solemn mountains to the east. The tall pines in the background blackened themselves against the horizon; nearer they showed more and more decidedly their bluish green, and the yellow of the newly fallen needles painted their aisles deep into the airy shadows.

A little wind stirred their tops, and for a moment, just before the Altrurian began to speak, drew from them an organ-tone that melted delicately away as his powerful voice rose.

XI

“I could not give you a clear account of the present state of things in my country,” the Altrurian began, “without first telling you something of our conditions before the time of our Evolution. It seems to be the law of all life that nothing can come to fruition without dying and seeming to make an end. It must be sown in corruption before it can be raised in incorruption. The truth itself must perish to our senses before it can live to our souls; the Son of Man must suffer upon the cross before we can know the Son, of God.

“It was so with His message to the world, which we received in the old time as an ideal realized by the earliest Christians, who loved one another and who had all things common. The apostle cast away upon our heathen coasts won us with the story of this first Christian republic, and he established a commonwealth of peace and good-will among us in its likeness. That commonwealth perished, just as its prototype perished, or seemed to perish; and long ages of civic and economic warfare succeeded, when every man’s hand was against his neighbor, and might was the rule that got itself called right. Religion ceased to be the hope of this world, and became the vague promise of the next. We descended into the valley of the shadow, and dwelt amid chaos for ages before we groped again into the light.

“The first glimmerings were few and indistinct, but men formed themselves about the luminous points here and there, and, when these broke and dispersed into lesser gleams, still men formed themselves about each of them. There arose a system of things better, indeed, than that darkness, but full of war and lust and greed, in which the weak rendered homage to the strong, and served them in the field and in the camp, and the strong in turn gave the weak protection against the other strong. It was a juggle in which the weak did not see that their safety was, after all, from themselves; but it was an image of peace, however false and fitful, and it endured for a time. It endured for a limited time, if we measure by the life of the race; it endured for an unlimited time if we measure by the lives of the men who were born and died while it endured.

“But that disorder, cruel and fierce and stupid, which endured because it sometimes masked itself as order, did at last pass away. Here and there one of the strong overpowered the rest; then the strong became fewer and fewer, and in their turn they all yielded to a supreme lord, and throughout the land there was one rule, as it was called then, or one misrule, as we should call it now. This rule, or this misrule, continued for ages more; and again, in the immortality of the race, men toiled and struggled, and died without the hope of better things.

“Then the time came when the long nightmare was burst with the vision of a future in which all men were the law, and not one man, or any less number of men than all.

“The poor dumb beast of humanity rose, and the throne tumbled, and the sceptre was broken, and the crown rolled away into that darkness of the past. We thought that heaven had descended to us, and that liberty, equality, and fraternity were ours. We could not see what should again alienate us from one another, or how one brother could again oppress another. With a free field and no favor we believed we should prosper on together, and there would be peace and plenty for all. We had the republic again after so many ages now, and the republic, as we knew it in our dim annals, was brotherhood and universal happiness. All but a very few, who prophesied evil of our lawless freedom, were wrapped in a delirium of hope. Men’s minds and men’s hands were suddenly released to an activity unheard of before. Invention followed invention; our rivers and seas became the warp of commerce where the steam-sped shuttles carried the woof of enterprise to and fro with tireless celerity; machines to save labor multiplied themselves as if they had been procreative forces, and wares of every sort were produced with incredible swiftness and cheapness. Money seemed to flow from the ground; vast fortunes ‘rose like an exhalation,’ as your Milton says.

“At first we did not know that they were the breath of the nethermost pits of hell, and that the love of money, which was becoming universal with us, was filling the earth with the hate of men. It was long before we came to realize that in the depths of our steamships were those who fed the fires with their lives, and that our mines from which we dug our wealth were the graves of those who had died to the free light and air, without finding the rest of death. We did not see that the machines for saving labor were monsters that devoured women and children, and wasted men at the bidding of the power which no man must touch.

“That is, we thought we must not touch it, for it called itself prosperity and wealth and the public good, and it said that it gave bread, and it impudently bade the toiling myriads consider what would become of them if it took away their means of wearing themselves out in its service. It demanded of the state absolute immunity and absolute impunity, the right to do its will wherever and however it would, without question from the people who were the final law. It had its way, and under its rule we became the richest people under the sun. The Accumulation, as we called this power, because we feared to call it by its true name, rewarded its own with gains of twenty, of a hundred, of a thousand per cent., and to satisfy its need, to produce the labor that operated its machines, there came into existence a hapless race of men who bred their kind for its service, and whose little ones were its prey almost from their cradles. Then the infamy became too great, and the law, the voice of the people, so long guiltily silent, was lifted in behalf of those who had no helper. The Accumulation came under control for the first time, and could no longer work its slaves twenty hours a day amid perils to life and limb from its machinery and in conditions that forbade them decency and morality. The time of a hundred and a thousand per cent. passed; but still the Accumulation demanded immunity and impunity, and, in spite of its conviction of the enormities it had practised, it declared itself the only means of civilization and progress. It began to give out that it was timid, though its history was full of the boldest frauds and crimes, and it threatened to withdraw itself if it were ruled or even crossed; and again it had its way, and we seemed to prosper more and more. The land was filled with cities where the rich flaunted their splendor in palaces, and the poor swarmed in squalid tenements. The country was drained of its life and force, to feed the centres of commerce and industry. The whole land was bound together with a network of iron roads that linked the factories and founderies to the fields and mines, and blasted the landscape with the enterprise that spoiled the lives of men.

“Then, all at once, when its work seemed perfect and its dominion sure, the Accumulation was stricken with consciousness of the lie always at its heart. It had hitherto cried out for a free field and no favor, for unrestricted competition; but, in truth, it had never prospered except as a monopoly. Whenever and wherever competition had play there had been nothing but disaster to the rival enterprises, till one rose over the rest. Then there was prosperity for that one.

“The Accumulation began to act upon its new consciousness. The iron roads united; the warring industries made peace, each kind under a single leadership. Monopoly, not competition, was seen to be the beneficent means of distributing the favors and blessings of the Accumulation to mankind. But, as before, there was alternately a glut and dearth of things, and it often happened that when starving men went ragged through the streets the storehouses were piled full of rotting harvests that the farmers toiled from dawn till dusk to grow, and the warehouses fed the moth with the stuffs that the operative had woven his life into at his loom. Then followed, with a blind and mad succession, a time of famine, when money could not buy the super-abundance that vanished, none knew how or why.

“The money itself vanished from time to time, and disappeared into the vaults of the Accumulation, for no better reason than that for which it poured itself out at other times. Our theory was that the people — that is to say, the government of the people — made the people’s money, but, as a matter of fact, the Accumulation made it and controlled it and juggled with it; and now you saw it, and now you did not see it. The government made gold coins, but the people had nothing but the paper money that the Accumulation made. But whether there was scarcity or plenty, the failures went on with a continuous ruin that nothing could check, while our larger economic life proceeded in a series of violent shocks, which we called financial panics, followed by long periods of exhaustion and recuperation.

“There was no law in our economy, but as the Accumulation had never cared for the nature of law, it did not trouble itself for its name in our order of things. It had always bought the law it needed for its own use, first through the voter at the polls in the more primitive days, and then, as civilization advanced, in the legislatures and the courts. But the corruption even of these methods was far surpassed when the era of consolidation came, and the necessity for statutes and verdicts and decisions became more stringent. Then we had such a burlesque of—”

“Look here!” a sharp, nasal voice snarled across the rich, full pipe of the Altrurian, and we all instantly looked there. The voice came from an old farmer, holding himself stiffly up, with his hands in his pockets and his lean frame bent toward the speaker. “When are you goin’ to get to Altrury? We know all about Ameriky.”

He sat down again, and it was a moment before the crowd caught on. Then a yell of delight and a roar of volleyed laughter went up from the lower classes, in which, I am sorry to say, my friend the banker joined, so far as the laughter was concerned. “Good! That’s it! First-rate!” came from a hundred vulgar throats.

“Isn’t it a perfect shame?” Mrs. Makely demanded. “I think some of you gentlemen ought to say something. What will Mr. Homos think of our civilization if we let such interruptions go unrebuked?”

She was sitting between the banker and myself, and her indignation made him laugh more and more. “Oh, it serves him right,” he said. “Don’t you see that he is hoist with his own petard? Let him alone. He’s in the hands of his friends.”

The Altrurian waited for the tumult to die away, and then he said, gently: “I don’t understand.”

The old farmer jerked himself to his feet again. “It’s like this: I paid my dolla’ to hear about a country where there wa’n’t no co’perations nor no monop’lies nor no buyin’ up cou’ts; and I ain’t agoin’ to have no allegory shoved down my throat, instead of a true history, noways. I know all about how it is here. Fi’st, run their line through your backya’d, and then kill off your cattle, and keep kerryin’ on it up from cou’t to cou’t, till there ain’t hide or hair on ’em left—”

“Oh, set down, set down! Let the man go on! He’ll make it all right with you,” one of the construction gang called out; but the farmer stood his ground, and I could hear him through the laughing and shouting keep saying something, from time to time, about not wanting to pay no dolla’ for no talk about co’perations and monop’lies that we had right under our own noses the whole while, and, you might say, in your very bread-troughs; till, at last, I saw Reuben Camp make his way toward him, and, after an energetic expostulation, turn to leave him again.

Then he faltered out, “I guess it’s all right,” and dropped out of sight in the group he had risen from. I fancied his wife scolding him there, and all but shaking him in public.

“I should be very sorry,” the Altrurian proceeded, “to have any one believe that I have not been giving you a bona fide account of conditions in my country before the Evolution, when we first took the name of Altruria in our great, peaceful campaign against the Accumulation. As for offering you any allegory or travesty of your own conditions, I will simply say that I do not know them well enough to do so intelligently. But, whatever they are, God forbid that the likeness which you seem to recognize should ever go so far as the desperate state of things which we finally reached. I will not trouble you with details; in fact, I have been afraid that I had already treated of our affairs too abstractly; but, since your own experience furnishes you the means of seizing my meaning, I will go on as before.

“You will understand me when I explain that the Accumulation had not erected itself into the sovereignty with us unopposed. The working-men, who suffered most from its oppression had early begun to band themselves against it, with the instinct of self-preservation, first trade by trade and art by art, and then in congresses and federations of the trades and arts, until finally they enrolled themselves in one vast union, which included all the working-men, whom their necessity or their interest did not leave on the side of the Accumulation. This beneficent and generous association of the weak for the sake of the weakest did not accomplish itself fully till the baleful instinct of the Accumulation had reduced the monopolies to one vast monopoly, till the stronger had devoured the weaker among its members, and the supreme agent stood at the head of our affairs, in everything but name, our imperial ruler. We had hugged so long the delusion of each man for himself that we had suffered all realty to be taken from us. The Accumulation owned the land as well as the mines under it and the shops over it; the Accumulation owned the seas and the ships that sailed the seas, and the fish that swam in their depths; it owned transportation and distribution, and the wares and products that were to be carried to and fro; and, by a logic irresistible and inexorable, the Accumulation was, and we were not.

“But the Accumulation, too, had forgotten something. It had found it so easy to buy legislatures and courts that it did not trouble itself about the polls. It left us the suffrage, and let us amuse ourselves with the periodical election of the political clay images which it manipulated and moulded to any shape and effect at its pleasure. The Accumulation knew that it was the sovereignty, whatever figure-head we called president or governor or mayor: we had other names for these officials, but I use their analogues for the sake of clearness, and I hope my good friend over there will not think I am still talking about America.”

“No,” the old farmer called back, without rising, “we hain’t got there quite yit.”

“No hurry,” said a trainman. “All in good time. Go on!” he called to the Altrurian.

The Altrurian resumed:

“There had been, from the beginning, an almost ceaseless struggle between the Accumulation and the proletariate. The Accumulation always said that it was the best friend of the proletariate, and it denounced, through the press which it controlled, the proletarian leaders who taught that it was the enemy of the proletariate, and who stirred up strikes and tumults of all sorts, for higher wages and fewer hours. But the friend of the proletariate, whenever occasion served, treated the proletariate like a deadly enemy. In seasons of overproduction, as it was called, it locked the workmen out or laid them off, and left their families to starve, or ran light work and claimed the credit of public benefactors for running at all. It sought every chance to reduce wages; it had laws passed to forbid or cripple the workmen in their strikes; and the judges convicted them of conspiracy, and wrested the statutes to their hurt, in cases where there had been no thought of embarrassing them, even among the legislators. God forbid that you should ever come to such a pass in America; but, if you ever should, God grant that you may find your way out as simply as we did at last, when freedom had perished in everything but name among us, and justice had become a mockery.

“The Accumulation had advanced so smoothly, so lightly, in all its steps to the supreme power, and had at last so thoroughly quelled the uprisings of the proletariate, that it forgot one thing: it forgot the despised and neglected suffrage. The ballot, because it had been so easy to annul its effect, had been left in the people’s hands; and when, at last, the leaders of the proletariate ceased to counsel strikes, or any form of resistance to the Accumulation that could be tormented into the likeness of insurrection against the government, and began to urge them to attack it in the political way, the deluge that swept the Accumulation out of existence came trickling and creeping over the land. It appeared first in the country, a spring from the ground; then it gathered head in the villages; then it swelled to a torrent in the cities. I cannot stay to trace its course; but suddenly, one day, when the Accumulation’s abuse of a certain power became too gross, it was voted out of that power. You will perhaps be interested to know that it was with the telegraphs that the rebellion against the Accumulation began, and the government was forced, by the overwhelming majority which the proletariate sent to our parliament, to assume a function which the Accumulation had impudently usurped. Then the transportation of smaller and more perishable wares—”

“Yes,” a voice called— “express business. Go on!”

“Was legislated a function of the post-office,” the Altrurian went on. “Then all transportation was taken into the hands of the political government, which had always been accused of great corruption in its administration, but which showed itself immaculately pure compared with the Accumulation. The common ownership of mines necessarily followed, with an allotment of lands to any one who wished to live by tilling the land; but not a foot of the land was remitted to private hands for the purposes of selfish pleasure or the exclusion of any other from the landscape. As all business had been gathered into the grasp of the Accumulation, and the manufacture of everything they used and the production of everything that they ate was in the control of the Accumulation, its transfer to the government was the work of a single clause in the statute.

“The Accumulation, which had treated the first menaces of resistance with contempt, awoke to its peril too late. When it turned to wrest the suffrage from the proletariate, at the first election where it attempted to make head against them, it was simply snowed under, as your picturesque phrase is. The Accumulation had no voters, except the few men at its head and the creatures devoted to it by interest and ignorance. It seemed, at one moment, as if it would offer an armed resistance to the popular will, but, happily, that moment of madness passed. Our Evolution was accomplished without a drop of bloodshed, and the first great political brotherhood, the commonwealth of Altruria, was founded.

“I wish that I had time to go into a study of some of the curious phases of the transformation from a civility in which the people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each other. There is a famous passage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president which compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half a decade after the fall of the old plutocratic oligarchy one of the chief directors of the Accumulation publicly expressed his gratitude to God that the Accumulation had passed away forever. You will realize the importance of such an expression in recalling the declarations some of your slave-holders have made since the Civil War, that they would not have slavery restored for any earthly consideration.

“But now, after this preamble, which has been so much longer than I meant it to be, how shall I give you a sufficiently just conception of the existing Altruria, the actual state from which I come?”

“Yes,” came the nasal of the old farmer again, “that’s what we are here fur. I wouldn’t give a copper to know all you went through beforehand. It’s too dumn like what we have been through ourselves, as fur as heard from.”

A shout of laughter went up from most of the crowd, but the Altrurian did not seem to see any fun in it.

“Well,” he resumed, “I will tell you, as well as I can, what Altruria is like; but, in the first place, you will have to cast out of your minds all images of civilization with which your experience has filled them. For a time the shell of the old Accumulation remained for our social habitation, and we dwelt in the old competitive and monopolistic forms after the life had gone out of them — that is, we continued to live in populous cities, and we toiled to heap up riches for the moth to corrupt, and we slaved on in making utterly useless things, merely because we had the habit of making them to sell. For a while we made the old sham things, which pretended to be useful things and were worse than the confessedly useless things. I will give you an illustration from the trades, which you will all understand. The proletariate, in the competitive and monopolistic time, used to make a kind of shoes for the proletariate, or the women of the proletariate, which looked like fine shoes of the best quality. It took just as much work to make these shoes as to make the best fine shoes; but they were shams through and through. They wore out in a week, and the people called them, because they were bought fresh for every Sunday—”

“Sat’d’y-night shoes,” screamed the old farmer. “I know ‘em. My gals buy ‘em. Half-dolla’ a pai’, and not wo’th the money.”

“Well,” said the Altrurian, “they were a cheat and a lie in every way, and under the new system it was not possible, when public attention was called to the fact, to continue the falsehood they embodied. As soon as the Saturday-night shoes realized itself to the public conscience, an investigation began, and it was found that the principle of the Saturday-night shoe underlay half our industries and made half the work that was done.

“Then an immense reform took place. We renounced, in the most solemn convocation of the whole economy, the principle of the Saturday-night shoe, and those who had spent their lives in producing sham shoes—”

“Yes,” said the professor, rising from his seat near us and addressing the speaker, “I shall be very glad to know what became of the worthy and industrious operatives who were thrown out of employment by this explosion of economic virtue.”

“Why,” the Altrurian replied, “they were set to work making honest shoes; and, as it took no more time to make a pair of honest shoes which lasted a year than it took to make a pair of dishonest shoes that lasted a week, the amount of labor in shoemaking was at once enormously reduced.”

“Yes,” said the professor, “I understand that. What became of the shoemakers?”

“They joined the vast army of other laborers who had been employed, directly or indirectly, in the fabrication of fraudulent wares. These shoemakers — lasters, button-holers, binders, and so on — no longer wore themselves out over their machines. One hour sufficed where twelve hours were needed before, and the operatives were released to the happy labor of the fields, where no one with us toils killingly, from dawn till dusk, but does only as much work as is needed to keep the body in health. We had a continent to refine and beautify; we had climates to change and seasons to modify, a whole system of meteorology to readjust, and the public works gave employment to the multitudes emancipated from the soul-destroying service of shams. I can scarcely give you a notion of the vastness of the improvements undertaken and carried through, or still in process of accomplishment. But a single one will, perhaps, afford a sufficient illustration. Our southeast coast, from its vicinity to the pole, had always suffered from a winter of antarctic rigor; but our first president conceived the plan of cutting off a peninsula, which kept the equatorial current from making in to our shores; and the work was begun in his term, though the entire strip, twenty miles in width and ninety-three in length, was not severed before the end of the first Altrurian decade. Since that time the whole region of our southeastern coast has enjoyed the climate of your Mediterranean countries.

“It was not only the makers of fraudulent things who were released to these useful and wholesome labors, but those who had spent themselves in contriving ugly and stupid and foolish things were set free to the public employment. The multitude of these monstrosities and iniquities was as great as that of the shams—”

Here I lost some words, for the professor leaned over and whispered to me: “He has got that out of William Morris. Depend upon it, the man is a humbug. He is not an Altrurian at all.”

I confess that my heart misgave me; but I signalled the professor to be silent, and again gave the Altrurian — if he was an Altrurian — my whole attention.

XII

“And so,” the Altrurian continued, “when the labor of the community was emancipated from the bondage of the false to the free service of the true, it was also, by an inevitable implication, dedicated to beauty and rescued from the old slavery to the ugly, the stupid, and the trivial. The thing that was honest and useful became, by the operation of a natural law, a beautiful thing.

“Once we had not time enough to make things beautiful, we were so overworked in making false and hideous things to sell; but now we had all the time there was, and a glad emulation arose among the trades and occupations to the end that everything done should be done finely as well as done honestly. The artist, the man of genius, who worked from the love of his work, became the normal man, and in the measure of his ability and of his calling each wrought in the spirit of the artist. We got back the pleasure of doing a thing beautifully, which was God’s primal blessing upon all His working children, but which we had lost in the horrible days of our need and greed. There is not a working-man within the sound of my voice but has known this divine delight, and would gladly know it always if he only had the time. Well, now we had the time, the Evolution had given us the time, and in all Altruria there was not a furrow driven or a swath mown, not a hammer struck on house or on ship, not a stitch sewn or a stone laid, not a line written or a sheet printed, not a temple raised or an engine built, but it was done with an eye to beauty as well as to use.

“As soon as we were freed from the necessity of preying upon one another, we found that there was no hurry. The good work would wait to be well done; and one of the earliest effects of the Evolution was the disuse of the swift trains which had traversed the continent, night and day, that one man might overreach another, or make haste to undersell his rival, or seize some advantage of him, or plot some profit to his loss. Nine-tenths of the railroads, which in the old times had ruinously competed, and then, in the hands of the Accumulation, had been united to impoverish and oppress the people, fell into disuse. The commonwealth operated the few lines that were necessary for the collection of materials and the distribution of manufactures, and for pleasure travel and the affairs of state; but the roads that had been built to invest capital, or parallel other roads, or ‘make work,’ as it was called, or to develop resources, or boom localities, were suffered to fall into ruin; the rails were stripped from the landscape, which they had bound as with shackles, and the road-beds became highways for the use of kindly neighborhoods, or nature recovered them wholly and hid the memory of their former abuse in grass and flowers and wild vines. The ugly towns that they had forced into being, as Frankenstein was fashioned, from the materials of the charnel, and that had no life in or from the good of the community, soon tumbled into decay. The administration used parts of them in the construction of the villages in which the Altrurians now mostly live; but generally these towns were built of materials so fraudulent, in form so vile, that it was judged best to burn them. In this way their sites were at once purified and obliterated.

“We had, of course, a great many large cities under the old egoistic conditions, which increased and fattened upon the country, and fed their cancerous life with fresh infusions of its blood. We had several cities of half a million, and one of more than a million; we had a score of them with a population of a hundred thousand or more. We were very proud of them, and vaunted them as a proof of our unparalleled prosperity, though really they never were anything but congeries of millionaires and the wretched creatures who served them and supplied them. Of course, there was everywhere the appearance of enterprise and activity, but it meant final loss for the great mass of the business men, large and small, and final gain for the millionaires. These and their parasites dwelt together, the rich starving the poor and the poor plundering and misgoverning the rich; and it was the intolerable suffering in the cities that chiefly hastened the fall of the old Accumulation and the rise of the commonwealth.

“Almost from the moment of the Evolution the competitive and monopolistic centres of population began to decline. In the clear light of the new order it was seen that they were not fit dwelling-places for men, either in the complicated and luxurious palaces where the rich fenced themselves from their kind, or in the vast tenements, towering height upon height, ten and twelve stories up, where the swarming poor festered in vice and sickness and famine. If I were to tell you of the fashion of those cities of our egoistic epoch, how the construction was one error from the first, and every correction of an error bred a new defect, I should make you laugh, I should make you weep. We let them fall to ruin as quickly as they would, and their sites are still so pestilential, after the lapse of centuries, that travelers are publicly guarded against them. Ravening beasts and poisonous reptiles lurk in those abodes of the riches and the poverty that are no longer known to our life. A part of one of the less malarial of the old cities, however, is maintained by the commonwealth in the form of its prosperity, and is studied by antiquarians for the instruction, and by moralists for the admonition, it affords. A section of a street is exposed, and you see the foundations of the houses; you see the filthy drains that belched into the common sewers, trapped and retrapped to keep the poison gases down; you see the sewers that rolled their loathsome tides under the streets, amid a tangle of gas-pipes, steam-pipes, water-pipes, telegraph-wires, electric lighting-wires, electric motor-wires, and grip-cables — all without a plan, but makeshifts, expedients, devices, to repair and evade the fundamental mistake of having any such cities at all.

“There are now no cities in Altruria, in your meaning, but there are capitals, one for each of the regions of our country and one for the whole commonwealth. These capitals are for the transaction of public affairs, in which every citizen of Altruria is schooled, and they are the residences of the administrative officials, who are alternated every year, from the highest to the lowest. A public employment with us is of no greater honor or profit than any other, for with our absolute economic equality there can be no ambition, and there is no opportunity for one citizen to outshine another. But as the capitals are the centres of all the arts, which we consider the chief of our public affairs, they are oftenest frequented by poets, actors, painters, sculptors, musicians, and architects. We regard all artists, who are in a sort creators, as the human type which is likest the divine, and we try to conform our whole industrial life to the artistic temperament. Even in the labors of the field and shop, which are obligatory upon all, we study the inspiration of this temperament, and in the voluntary pursuits we allow it full control. Each, in these, follows his fancy as to what he shall do, and when he shall do it, or whether he shall do anything at all. In the capitals are the universities, theatres, galleries, museums, cathedrals, laboratories and conservatories, and the appliances of every art and science, as well as the administration buildings; and beauty as well as use is studied in every edifice. Our capitals are as clean and quiet and healthful as the country, and these advantages are secured simply by the elimination of the horse, an animal which we should be as much surprised to find in the streets of a town as the plesiosaurus or the pterodactyl. All transportation in the capitals, whether for pleasure or business, is by electricity, and swift electrical expresses connect the capital of each region with the villages which radiate from it to the cardinal points. These expresses run at the rate of a hundred and fifty miles an hour, and they enable the artist, the scientist, the literary man, of the remotest hamlet, to visit the capital (when he is not actually resident there in some public use) every day, after the hours of the obligatory industries; or, if he likes, he may remain there a whole week or fortnight, giving six hours a day instead of three to the obligatories, until the time is made up. In case of very evident merit, or for the purpose of allowing him to complete some work requiring continuous application, a vote of the local agents may release him from the obligatories indefinitely. Generally, however, our artists prefer not to ask this, but avail themselves of the stated means we have of allowing them to work at the obligatories, and get the needed exercise and variety of occupation in the immediate vicinity of the capital.

“We do not think it well to connect the hamlets on the different lines of radiation from the capital, except by the good country roads which traverse each region in every direction. The villages are mainly inhabited by those who prefer a rural life; they are farming villages; but in Altruria it can hardly be said that one man is more a farmer than another. We do not like to distinguish men by their callings; we do not speak of the poet This or the shoemaker That, for the poet may very likely be a shoemaker in the obligatories, and the shoemaker a poet in the voluntaries. If it can be said that one occupation is honored above another with us, it is that which we all share, and that is the cultivation of the earth. We believe that this, when not followed slavishly, or for gain, brings man into the closest relations to the Deity, through a grateful sense of the divine bounty, and that it not only awakens a natural piety in him, but that it endears to the worker that piece of soil which he tills, and so strengthens his love of home. The home is the very heart of the Altrurian system, and we do not think it well that people should be away from their homes very long or very often. In the competitive and monopolistic times men spent half their days in racing back and forth across our continent; families were scattered by the chase for fortune, and there was a perpetual paying and repaying of visits. One-half the income of those railroads which we let fall into disuse came from the ceaseless unrest. Now a man is born and lives and dies among his own kindred, and the sweet sense of neighborhood, of brotherhood, which blessed the golden age of the first Christian republic is ours again. Every year the people of each region meet one another on Evolution day, in the regionic capital; once in four years they all visit the national capital. There is no danger of the decay of patriotism among us; our country is our mother, and we love her as it is impossible to love the step-mother that a competitive or monopolistic nation must be to its citizens.

“I can only touch upon this feature and that of our system as I chance to think of it. If any of you are curious about others, I shall be glad to answer questions as well as I can. We have, of course,” the Altrurian proceeded, after a little indefinite pause, to let any speak who liked, “no money in your sense. As the whole people control affairs, no man works for another, and no man pays another. Every one does his share of labor, and receives his share of food, clothing, and shelter, which is neither more nor less than another’s. If you can imagine the justice and impartiality of a well-ordered family, you can conceive of the social and economic life of Altruria. We are, properly speaking, a family rather than a nation like yours.

“Of course, we are somewhat favored by our insular, or continental, position; but I do not know that we are more so than you are. Certainly, however, we are self-sufficing in a degree unknown to most European countries; and we have within our borders the materials of every comfort and the resources of every need. We have no commerce with the egoistic world, as we call that outside, and I believe that I am the first Altrurian to visit foreign countries avowedly in my national character, though we have always had emissaries living abroad incognito. I hope that I may say without offence that they find it a sorrowful exile, and that the reports of the egoistic world, with its wars, its bankruptcies, its civic commotions, and its social unhappiness, do not make us discontented with our own condition. Before the Evolution we had completed the round of your inventions and discoveries, impelled by the force that drives you on; and we have since disused most of them as idle and unfit. But we profit, now and then, by the advances you make in science, for we are passionately devoted to the study of the natural laws, open or occult, under which all men have their being. Occasionally an emissary returns with a sum of money, and explains to the students of the national university the processes by which it is lost and won; and at a certain time there was a movement for its introduction among us, not for its use as you know it, but for a species of counters in games of chance. It was considered, however, to contain an element of danger, and the scheme was discouraged.

“Nothing amuses and puzzles our people more than the accounts our emissaries give of the changes of fashion in the outside world, and of the ruin of soul and body which the love of dress often works. Our own dress, for men and for women, is studied, in one ideal of use and beauty, from the antique; caprice and vagary in it would be thought an effect of vulgar vanity. Nothing is worn that is not simple and honest in texture; we do not know whether a thing is cheap or dear, except as it is easy or hard to come by, and that which is hard to come by is forbidden as wasteful and foolish. The community builds the dwellings of the community, and these, too, are of a classic simplicity, though always beautiful and fit in form; the splendors of the arts are lavished upon the public edifices, which we all enjoy in common.”

“Isn’t this the greatest rehash of ‘Utopia,’ ‘New Atlantis,’ and ‘City of the Sun’ that you ever imagined?” the professor whispered across me to the banker. “The man is a fraud, and a very bungling fraud at that.”

“Well, you must expose him, when he gets through,” the banker whispered back.

But the professor could not wait. He got upon his feet and called out: “May I ask the gentleman from Altruria a question?”

“Certainly,” the Altrurian blandly assented.

“Make it short!” Reuben Camp’s voice broke in, impatiently. “We didn’t come here to listen to your questions.”

The professor contemptuously ignored him. “I suppose you occasionally receive emissaries from, as well as send them to, the world outside?”

“Yes, now and then castaways land on our coasts, and ships out of their reckonings put in at our ports for water or provision.”

“And how are they pleased with your system?”

“Why, I cannot better answer than by saying that they mostly refuse to leave us.”

“Ah, just as Bacon reports!” cried the professor.

“You mean in the New Atlantis?” returned the Altrurian. “Yes; it is astonishing how well Bacon in that book, and Sir Thomas More in his Utopia, have divined certain phases of our civilization and polity.”

“I think he rather has you, professor,” the banker whispered, with a laugh.

“But all those inspired visionaries,” the Altrurian continued, while the professor sat grimly silent, watching for another chance, “who have borne testimony of us in their dreams, conceived of states perfect without the discipline of a previous competitive condition. What I thought, however, might specially interest you Americans in Altruria is the fact that our economy was evolved from one so like that in which you actually have your being. I had even hoped you might feel that, in all these points of resemblance, America prophesies another Altruria. I know that to some of you all that I have told of my country will seem a baseless fabric, with no more foundation, in fact, than More’s fairy-tale of another land where men dealt kindly and justly by one another, and dwelt, a whole nation, in the unity and equality of a family. But why should not a part of that fable have come true in our polity, as another part of it has come true in yours? When Sir Thomas More wrote that book, he noted with abhorrence the monstrous injustice of the fact that men were hanged for small thefts in England; and in the preliminary conversation between its characters he denounced the killing of men for any sort of thefts. Now you no longer put men to death for theft; you look back upon that cruel code of your mother England with an abhorrence as great as his own. We, for our part, who have realized the Utopian dream of brotherly equality, look back with the same abhorrence upon a state where some were rich and some poor, some taught and some untaught, some high and some low, and the hardest toil often failed to supply a sufficiency of the food which luxury wasted in its riots. That state seems as atrocious to us as the state which hanged a man for stealing a loaf of bread seems to you.

“But we do not regret the experience of competition and monopoly. They taught us some things in the operation of the industries. The labor-saving inventions which the Accumulation perverted to money-making we have restored to the use intended by their inventors and the Creator of their inventors. After serving the advantage of socializing the industries which the Accumulation effected for its own purposes, we continued the work in large mills and shops, in the interest of the workers, whom we wished to guard against the evil effects of solitude. But our mills and shops are beautiful as well as useful. They look like temples, and they are temples, dedicated to that sympathy between the divine and human which expresses itself in honest and exquisite workmanship. They rise amid leafy boscages beside the streams, which form their only power; for we have disused steam altogether, with all the offences to the eye and ear which its use brought into the world. Our life is so simple and our needs are so few that the hand-work of the primitive toilers could easily supply our wants; but machinery works so much more thoroughly and beautifully that we have in great measure retained it. Only, the machines that were once the workmen’s enemies and masters are now their friends and servants; and, if any man chooses to work alone with his own hands, the state will buy what he makes at the same price that it sells the wares made collectively. This secures every right of individuality.

“The farm-work, as well as the mill-work and the shop-work, is done by companies of workers; and there is nothing of that loneliness in our woods and fields which, I understand, is the cause of so much insanity among you. It is not good for man to be alone, was the first thought of his Creator when he considered him, and we act upon this truth in everything. The privacy of the family is sacredly guarded in essentials, but the social instinct is so highly developed with us that we like to eat together in large refectories, and we meet constantly to argue and dispute on questions of aesthetics and metaphysics. We do not, perhaps, read so many books as you do, for most of our reading, when not for special research, but for culture and entertainment, is done by public readers, to large groups of listeners. We have no social meetings which are not free to all; and we encourage joking and the friendly give and take of witty encounters.”

“A little hint from Sparta,” suggested the professor.

The banker leaned over to whisper to me: “From what I have seen of your friend when offered a piece of American humor, I should fancy the Altrurian article was altogether different. Upon the whole, I would rather not be present at one of their witty encounters, if I were obliged to stay it out.”

The Altrurian had paused to drink a glass of water, and now he went on: “But we try, in everything that does not inconvenience or injure others, to let every one live the life he likes best. If a man prefers to dwell apart, and have his meals in private for himself alone or for his family, it is freely permitted; only he must not expect to be served as in public, where service is one of the voluntaries; private service is not permitted; those wishing to live alone must wait upon themselves, cook their own food, and care for their own tables. Very few, however, wish to withdraw from the public life, for most of the discussions and debates take place at our mid-day meal, which falls at the end of the obligatory labors, and is prolonged indefinitely, or as long as people like to chat and joke or listen to the reading of some pleasant book.

“In Altruria there is no hurry, for no one wishes to outstrip another, or in any wise surpass him. We are all assured of enough, and are forbidden any and every sort of superfluity. If any one, after the obligatories, wishes to be entirely idle, he may be so, but I cannot now think of a single person without some voluntary occupation; doubtless there are such persons, but I do not know them. It used to be said, in the old times, that ‘it was human nature’ to shirk and malinger and loaf, but we have found that it is no such thing. We have found that it is human nature to work cheerfully, willingly, eagerly, at the tasks which all share for the supply of the common necessities. In like manner we have found out that it is not human nature to hoard and grudge, but that when the fear, and even the imagination, of want is taken away, it is human nature to give and to help generously. We used to say: ‘A man will lie, or a man will cheat, in his own interest; that is human nature’; but that is no longer human nature with us, perhaps because no man has any interest to serve; he has only the interests of others to serve, while others serve his. It is in no wise possible for the individual to separate his good from the common good; he is prosperous and happy only as all the rest are so; and therefore it is not human nature with us for any one to lie in wait to betray another or seize an advantage. That would be ungentlemanly, and in Altruria every man is a gentleman and every woman a lady. If you will excuse me here for being so frank, I would like to say something by way of illustration which may be offensive if you take it personally.”

He looked at our little group, as if he were addressing himself more especially to us, and the banker called out, jollily: “Go on! I guess we can stand it,” and “Go ahead!” came from all sides, from all kinds of listeners.

“It is merely this: that as we look back at the old competitive conditions we do not see how any man could be a gentleman in them, since a gentleman must think first of others, and these conditions compelled every man to think first of himself.”

There was a silence broken by some conscious and hardy laughter, while we each swallowed this pill as we could.

“What are competitive conditions?” Mrs. Makely demanded of me.

“Well, ours are competitive conditions,” I said.

“Very well, then,” she returned, “I don’t think Mr. Homos is much of a gentleman to say such a thing to an American audience. Or, wait a moment! Ask him if the same rule applies to women.”

I rose, strengthened by the resentment I felt, and said: “Do I understand that in your former competitive conditions it was also impossible for a woman to be a lady?”

The professor gave me an applausive nod as I sat down. “I envy you the chance of that little dig,” he whispered.

The Altrurian was thoughtful a moment, and then he answered: “No, I should not say it was. From what we know historically of those conditions in our country, it appears that the great mass of women were not directly affected by them. They constituted an altruistic dominion of the egoistic empire, and, except as they were tainted by social or worldly ambitions, it was possible for every woman to be a lady, even in competitive conditions. Her instincts were unselfish, and her first thoughts were nearly always of others.”

Mrs. Makely jumped to her feet and clapped violently with her fan on the palm of her left hand. “Three cheers for Mr. Homos!” she shrieked, and all the women took up the cry, supported by all the natives and the construction gang. I fancied these fellows gave their support largely in a spirit of burlesque; but they gave it robustly, and from that time on, Mrs. Makely led the applause, and they roared in after her.

It is impossible to follow closely the course of the Altrurian’s account of his country, which grew more and more incredible as he went on, and implied every insulting criticism of ours. Some one asked him about war in Altruria, and he said: “The very name of our country implies the absence of war. At the time of the Evolution our country bore to the rest of our continent the same relative proportion that your country bears to your continent. The egoistic nations to the north and the south of us entered into an offensive and defensive alliance to put down, the new altruistic commonwealth, and declared war against us. Their forces were met at the frontier by our entire population in arms, and full of the martial spirit bred of the constant hostilities of the competitive and monopolistic epoch just ended. Negotiations began in the face of the imposing demonstration we made, and we were never afterward molested by our neighbors, who finally yielded to the spectacle of our civilization and united their political and social fate with ours. At present, our whole continent is Altrurian. For a long time we kept up a system of coast defences, but it is also a long time since we abandoned these; for it is a maxim with us that where every citizen’s life is a pledge of the public safety, that country can never be in danger of foreign enemies.

“In this, as in all other things, we believe ourselves the true followers of Christ, whose doctrine we seek to make our life as He made it His. We have several forms of ritual, but no form of creed, and our religious differences may be said to be aesthetic and temperamental rather than theological and essential. We have no denominations, for we fear in this, as in other matters, to give names to things lest we should cling to the names instead of the things. We love the realities, and for this reason we look at the life of a man rather than his profession for proof that he is a religious man.

“I have been several times asked, during my sojourn among you, what are the sources of compassion, of sympathy, of humanity, of charity with us, if we have not only no want, or fear of want, but not even any economic inequality. I suppose this is because you are so constantly struck by the misery arising from economic inequality and want, or the fear of want, among yourselves, that you instinctively look in that direction. But have you ever seen sweeter compassion, tenderer sympathy, warmer humanity, heavenlier charity than that shown in the family where all are economically equal and no one can want while any other has to give? Altruria, I say again, is a family, and, as we are mortal, we are still subject to those nobler sorrows which God has appointed to men, and which are so different from the squalid accidents that they have made for themselves. Sickness and death call out the most angelic ministries of love; and those who wish to give themselves to others may do so without hinderance from those cares, and even those duties, resting upon men where each must look out first for himself and for his own. Oh, believe me, believe me, you can know nothing of the divine rapture of self-sacrifice while you must dread the sacrifice of another in it. You are not free, as we are, to do everything for others, for it is your duty to do rather for those of your own household!

“There is something,” he continued, “which I hardly know how to speak of,” and here we all began to prick our ears. I prepared myself as well as I could for another affront, though I shuddered when the banker hardily called out: “Don’t hesitate to say anything you wish, Mr. Homos. I, for one, should like to hear you express yourself fully.”

It was always the unexpected, certainly, that happened from the Altrurian. “It is merely this,” he said: “Having come to live rightly upon earth, as we believe, or having at least ceased to deny God in our statutes and customs, the fear of death, as it once, weighed upon us, has been lifted from our souls. The mystery of it has so far been taken away that we perceive it as something just and natural. Now that all unkindness has been banished from among us, we can conceive of no such cruelty as death once seemed. If we do not know yet the full meaning of death, we know that the Creator of it and of us meant mercy and blessing by it. When one dies we grieve, but not as those without hope. We do not say that the dead have gone to a better place, and then selfishly bewail them, for we have the kingdom of heaven upon earth already, and we know that wherever they go they will be homesick for Altruria; and when we think of the years that may pass before we meet them again our hearts ache, as theirs must. But the presence of the risen Christ in our daily lives is our assurance that no one ceases to be, and that we shall see our dead again. I cannot explain this to you; I can only affirm it.”

The Altrurian spoke very solemnly, and a reverent hush fell upon the assembly. It was broken by the voice of a woman wailing out: “Oh, do you suppose, if we lived so, we should feel so, too? That I should know my little girl was living?”

“Why not?” asked the Altrurian.

To my vast astonishment, the manufacturer, who sat the farthest from me in the same line with Mrs. Makely, the professor, and the banker, rose and asked, tremulously: “And have — have you had any direct communication with the other world? Has any disembodied spirit returned to testify of the life beyond the grave?”

The professor nodded significantly across Mrs. Makely to me, and then frowned and shook his head. I asked her if she knew what he meant. “Why, didn’t you know that spiritualism was that poor man’s foible? He lost his son in a railroad accident, and ever since—”

She stopped and gave her attention to the Altrurian, who was replying to the manufacturer’s question.

“We do not need any such testimony. Our life here makes us sure of the life there. At any rate, no externation of the supernatural, no objective miracle, has been wrought in our behalf. We have had faith to do what we prayed for, and the prescience of which I speak has been added unto us.”

The manufacturer asked, as the bereaved mother had asked: “And if I lived so, should I feel so?”

Again the Altrurian answered: “Why not?”

The poor woman quavered: “Oh, I do believe it! I just know it must be true!”

The manufacturer shook his head sorrowfully and sat down, and remained there, looking at the ground.

“I am aware,” the Altrurian went on, “that what I have said as to our realizing the kingdom of heaven on the earth must seem boastful and arrogant. That is what you pray for every day, but you do not believe it possible for God’s will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven — that is, you do not if you are like the competitive and monopolistic people we once were. We once regarded that petition as a formula vaguely pleasing to the Deity, but we no more expected His kingdom to come than we expected Him to give us each day our daily bread; we knew that if we wanted something to eat we should have to hustle for it, and get there first; I use the slang of that far-off time, which, I confess, had a vulgar vigor.

“But now everything is changed, and the change has taken place chiefly from one cause — namely, the disuse of money. At first, it was thought that some sort of circulating medium must be used, that life could not be transacted without it. But life began to go on perfectly well, when each dwelt in the place assigned him, which was no better and no worse than any other; and when, after he had given his three hours a day to the obligatory labors, he had a right to his share of food, light, heat, and raiment; the voluntary labors, to which he gave much time or little, brought him no increase of those necessaries, but only credit and affection. We had always heard it said that the love of money was the root of all evil, but we had taken this for a saying, merely; now we realized it as an active, vital truth. As soon as money was abolished the power to purchase was gone, and even if there had been any means of buying beyond the daily needs, with overwork, the community had no power to sell to the individual. No man owned anything, but every man had the right to anything that he could use; when he could not use it, his right lapsed.

“With the expropriation of the individual the whole vast catalogue of crimes against property shrank to nothing. The thief could only steal from the community; but if he stole, what was he to do with his booty? It was still possible for a depredator to destroy, but few men’s hate is so comprehensive as to include all other men, and when the individual could no longer hurt some other individual in his property destruction ceased.

“All the many murders done from love of money, or of what money could buy, were at an end. Where there was no want, men no longer bartered their souls, or women their bodies, for the means to keep themselves alive. The vices vanished with the crimes, and the diseases almost as largely disappeared. People were no longer sickened by sloth and surfeit, or deformed and depleted by overwork and famine. They were wholesomely housed in healthful places, and they were clad fitly for their labor and fitly for their leisure; the caprices of vanity were not suffered to attaint the beauty of the national dress.

“With the stress of superfluous social and business duties, and the perpetual fear of want which all classes felt, more or less; with the tumult of the cities and the solitude of the country, insanity had increased among us till the whole land was dotted with asylums and the mad were numbered by hundreds of thousands. In every region they were an army, an awful army of anguish and despair. Now they have decreased to a number so small, and are of a type so mild, that we can hardly count insanity among our causes of unhappiness.

“We have totally eliminated chance from our economic life. There is still a chance that a man will be tall or short in Altruria, that he will be strong or weak, well or ill, gay or grave, happy or unhappy in love, but none that he will be rich or poor, busy or idle, live splendidly or meanly. These stupid and vulgar accidents of human contrivance cannot befall us; but I shall not be able to tell you just how or why, or to detail the process of eliminating chance. I may say, however, that it began with the nationalization of telegraphs, expresses, railroads, mines, and all large industries operated by stock companies. This at once struck a fatal blow at the speculation in values, real and unreal, and at the stock-exchange, or bourse; we had our own name for that gambler’s paradise, or gambler’s hell, whose baleful influence penetrated every branch of business.

“There were still business fluctuations as long as we had business, but they were on a smaller and smaller scale, and with the final lapse of business they necessarily vanished; all economic chance vanished. The founders of the commonwealth understood perfectly that business was the sterile activity of the function interposed between the demand and the supply; that it was nothing structural; and they intended its extinction, and expected it from the moment that money was abolished.”

“This is all pretty tiresome,” said the professor to our immediate party. “I don’t see why we oblige ourselves to listen to that fellow’s stuff. As if a civilized state could exist for a day without money or business.”

He went on to give his opinion of the Altrurian’s pretended description, in a tone so audible that it attracted the notice of the nearest group of railroad hands, who were listening closely to Homos, and one of them sang out to the professor: “Can’t you wait and let the first man finish?” and another yelled: “Put him out!” and then they all laughed with a humorous perception of the impossibility of literally executing the suggestion.

By the time all was quiet again I heard the Altrurian saying: “As to our social life, I cannot describe it in detail, but I can give you some notion of its spirit. We make our pleasures civic and public as far as possible, and the ideal is inclusive and not exclusive. There are, of course, festivities which all cannot share, but our distribution into small communities favors the possibility of all doing so. Our daily life, however, is so largely social that we seldom meet by special invitation or engagement. When we do, it is with the perfect understanding that the assemblage confers no social distinction, but is for a momentary convenience. In fact, these occasions are rather avoided, recalling, as they do, the vapid and tedious entertainments of the competitive epoch, the receptions and balls and dinners of a semi-barbaric people striving for social prominence by shutting a certain number in and a certain number out, and overdressing, overfeeding, and overdrinking. Anything premeditated in the way of a pleasure we think stupid and mistaken; we like to meet suddenly, or on the spur of the moment, out-of-doors, if possible, and arrange a picnic or a dance or a play; and let people come and go without ceremony. No one is more host than guest; all are hosts and guests. People consort much according to their tastes — literary, musical, artistic, scientific, or mechanical — but these tastes are made approaches, not barriers; and we find out that we have many more tastes in common than was formerly supposed.

“But, after all, our life is serious, and no one among us is quite happy, in the general esteem, unless he has dedicated himself, in some special way, to the general good. Our ideal is not rights, but duties.”

“Mazzini!” whispered the professor.

“The greatest distinction which any one can enjoy with us is to have found out some new and signal way of serving the community; and then it is not good form for him to seek recognition. The doing any fine thing is the purest pleasure it can give; applause flatters, but it hurts, too, and our benefactors, as we call them, have learned to shun it.

“We are still far from thinking our civilization perfect; but we are sure that our civic ideals are perfect. What we have already accomplished is to have given a whole continent perpetual peace; to have founded an economy in which there is no possibility of want; to have killed out political and social ambition; to have disused money and eliminated chance; to have realized the brotherhood of the race, and to have outlived the fear of death.”

The Altrurian suddenly stopped with these words and sat down. He had spoken a long time, and with a fulness which my report gives little notion of; but, though most of his cultivated listeners were weary, and a good many ladies had left their seats and gone back to the hotel, not one of the natives, or the work-people of any sort, had stirred; now they remained a moment motionless and silent before they rose from all parts of the field and shouted: “Go on! Don’t stop! Tell us all about it!”

I saw Reuben Camp climb the shoulders of a big fellow near where the Altrurian had stood; he waved the crowd to silence with out-spread arms. “He isn’t going to say anything more; he’s tired. But if any man don’t think he’s got his dollar’s worth, let him walk up to the door and the ticket-agent will refund him his money.”

The crowd laughed, and some one shouted: “Good for you, Reub!”

Camp continued: “But our friend here will shake the hand of any man, woman, or child that wants to speak to him; and you needn’t wipe it on the grass first, either. He’s a man! And I want to say that he’s going to spend the next week with us, at my mother’s house, and we shall be glad to have you call.”

The crowd, the rustic and ruder part of it, cheered and cheered till the mountain echoes answered; then a railroader called for three times three, with a tiger, and got it. The guests of the hotel broke away and went toward the house over the long shadows of the meadow. The lower classes pressed forward, on Camp’s invitation.

“Well, did you ever hear a more disgusting rigmarole?” asked Mrs. Makely, as our little group halted indecisively about her.

“With all those imaginary commonwealths to draw upon, from Plato, through More, Bacon, and Campanella, down to Bellamy and Morris, he has constructed the shakiest effigy ever made of old clothes stuffed with straw,” said the professor.

The manufacturer was silent. The banker said: “I don’t know. He grappled pretty boldly with your insinuations. That frank declaration that Altruria was all these pretty soap-bubble worlds solidified was rather fine.”

“It was splendid!” cried Mrs. Makely. The lawyer and the minister came toward us from where they had been sitting together. She called out to them: “Why in the world didn’t one of your gentlemen get up and propose a vote of thanks?”

“The difficulty with me is,” continued the banker, “that he has rendered Altruria incredible. I have no doubt that he is an Altrurian, but I doubt very much if he comes from anywhere in particular, and I find this quite a blow, for we had got Altruria nicely located on the map, and were beginning to get accounts of it in the newspapers.”

“Yes, that is just exactly the way I feel about it,” sighed Mrs. Makely. “But still, don’t you think there ought to have been a vote of thanks, Mr. Bullion?”

“Why, certainly. The fellow was immensely amusing, and you must have got a lot of money by him. It was an oversight not to make him a formal acknowledgment of some kind. If we offered him money, he would have to leave it all behind him here when he went home to Altruria.”

“Just as we do when we go to heaven,” I suggested; the banker did not answer, and I instantly felt that in the presence of the minister my remark was out of taste.

“Well, then, don’t you think,” said Mrs. Makely, who had a leathery insensibility to everything but the purpose possessing her, “that we ought at least to go and say something to him personally?”

“Yes, I think we ought,” said the banker, and we all walked up to where the Altrurian stood, still thickly surrounded by the lower classes, who were shaking hands with him and getting in a word with him now and then.

One of the construction gang said, carelessly: “No all-rail route to Altruria, I suppose?”

“No,” answered Homos, “it’s a far sea voyage.”

“Well, I shouldn’t mind working my passage, if you think they’d let me stay after I got there.”

“Ah, you mustn’t go to Altruria. You must let Altruria come to you” returned Homos, with that confounded smile of his that always won my heart.

“Yes,” shouted Reuben Camp, whose thin face was red with excitement, “that’s the word. Have Altruria right here, and right now.”

The old farmer, who had several times spoken, cackled out: “I didn’t know, one while, when you was talk’n’ about not havin’ no money, but what some on us had had Altrury here for quite a spell, already. I don’t pass more’n fifty dolla’s through my hands most years.”

A laugh went up, and then, at sight of Mrs. Makely heading our little party, the people round Homos civilly made way for us. She rushed upon him, and seized his hand in both of hers; she dropped her fan, parasol, gloves, handkerchief, and vinaigrette in the grass to do so. “Oh, Mr. Homos,” she fluted, and the tears came into her eyes, “it was beautiful, beautiful, every word of it! I sat in a perfect trance from beginning to end, and I felt that it was all as true as it was beautiful. People all around me were breathless with interest, and I don’t know how I can ever thank you enough.”

“Yes, indeed,” the professor hastened to say, before the Altrurian could answer, and he beamed malignantly upon him through his spectacles while he spoke, “it was like some strange romance.”

“I don’t know that I should go so far as that,” said the banker, in his turn, “but it certainly seemed too good to be true.”

“Yes,” the Altrurian responded, simply, but a little sadly; “now that I am away from it all, and in conditions so different, I sometimes had to ask myself, as I went on, if my whole life had not hitherto been a dream, and Altruria were not some blessed vision of the night.”

“Then you know how to account for a feeling which I must acknowledge, too?” the lawyer asked, courteously. “But it was most interesting.”

“The kingdom of God upon earth,” said the minister— “It ought not to be incredible; but that, more than anything else you told us of, gave me pause.”

“You of all men?” returned the Altrurian, gently.

“Yes,” said the minister, with a certain dejection, “when I remember what I have seen of men, when I reflect what human nature is, how can I believe that the kingdom of God will ever come upon the earth?”

“But in heaven, where He reigns, who is it does His will? The spirits of men?” pursued the Altrurian.

“Yes, but conditioned as men are here—”

“But if they were conditioned as men are there?”

“Now, I can’t let you two good people get into a theological dispute,” Mrs. Makely pushed in. “Here is Mr. Twelvemough dying to shake hands with Mr. Homos and compliment his distinguished guest.”

“Ah, Mr. Homos knows what I must have thought of his talk without my telling him,” I began, skilfully. “But I am sorry that I am to lose my distinguished guest so soon.”

Reuben Camp broke out: “That was my blunder, Mr. Twelvemough. Mr. Homos and I had talked it over conditionally, and I was not to speak of it till he had told you; but it slipped out in the excitement of the moment.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” I said, and I shook hands cordially with both of them. “It will be the greatest possible advantage for Mr. Homos to see certain phases of American life at close range, and he couldn’t possibly see them under better auspices than yours, Camp.”

“Yes, I’m going to drive him through the hill country after haying, and then I’m going to take him down and show him one of our big factory towns.”

I believe this was done, but finally the Altrurian went on to New York, where he was to pass the winter. We parted friends; I even offered him some introductions; but his acquaintance had become more and more difficult, and I was not sorry to part with him. That taste of his for low company was incurable, and I was glad that I was not to be responsible any longer for whatever strange thing he might do next. I think he remained very popular with the classes he most affected; a throng of natives, construction hands, and table-girls saw him off on his train; and he left large numbers of such admirers in our house and neighborhood, devout in the faith that there was such a commonwealth as Altruria, and that he was really an Altrurian. As for the more cultivated people who had met him, they continued of two minds upon both points.

THE END

THE DAY OF THEIR WEDDING

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

I

WHEN the train slowed before drawing into the station at Fitchburg, Sister Althea took up her bag from the floor, and began to collect her paper parcels into her lap, as if she were going to leave the car. Then she sat gripping the bag to her side and staring out into the night, blotched everywhere with the city lights and the railway signals — red and green and orange. From time to time she looked round over her shoulder into the car, up and down the aisle, and again set her face towards the window, and held it so rigidly, to keep herself from turning any more, that it hurt her neck.

The car was a day-coach on a night train, and most of the few passengers were taking preparations for leaving it. An old gentleman in the seat across the aisle, whom she had asked more than once whether the train was sure to stop at Fitchburg, was already buttoned up in a light overcoat, which he had the effect of wearing in compliance with charges against exposing himself to the night air. He sat humming to himself while he held fast an umbrella and a bundle such as one married sister might send to another by their father; it was in several sections of wrapping-paper, and was tied with tape. He leaned over towards Sister Althea, and asked, benevolently, “Was you expecting to meet friends in Fitchburg?”

Sister Althea started and looked round. He repeated the question, and she gasped out, “Nay; I am not expecting friends to meet me.” She had framed her reply with a certain mechanical exactness which he seemed to feel.

“Oh! ah! From the Family at Yardley, I presume?”

Sister Althea faltered a moment before she answered, “Yee.”

She let her head droop forward a little, and with her Shaker bonnet slanting downward over her deeply hidden face she looked like a toucan, except for the gayety of color with which nature mocks that strange bird’s grotesqueness. She was in Shaker drabs as to her prim gown, and her shawl crossed fichuwise upon her breast; her huge bonnet was covered with a dove-colored satin. To the eye that could not catch a glimpse of her face, or rightly measure her figure as she sat dejected for the moment following her speech, she must have looked little and old.

The friendly person in the seat opposite began humming to himself again. He stood up before the train halted, and he said to Sister Althea, as he turned to leave the car, “Well, I wish you good-evening.”

“Good-evening,” said Sister Aithea, faintly; and now, when the train stopped at last, and the noises of the station began to make themselves heard outside, with the bray of a supper-gong above all, she jumped to her feet and started into the aisle as if she were going to leave the car too. She even made some steps towards the door; then she came back, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she sat down again, and remained as motionless as before.

People came and took places, and arranged their wraps, and put their parcels into the racks, and settled themselves for their journey. Among the rest a woman came in, followed by a man with a child. When he had put the child in the seat beside her, he stood talking with her till she drove him away. She said she did not want him to get off after the cars began to move. He laughed and kissed her, and after he had got almost to the door he came back and kissed her again. Sister Althea trembled at each kiss. When the man lifted the little one and kissed it, and put it down again on the seat beside its mother, the tears came into her eyes.

“Well, give my love to all the folks!” He called back from the door.

“Yes, yes!” said the woman. “Do get off, quick!”

He laughed again, and in looking back from the door he struck against a young man who was coming in. “Oh, excuse me!” he said, and went out while the young man came forward. He looked from side to side keenly, and then, with a smile that flashed through Sister Althea’s tears, he came swiftly down the aisle to where she sat, near the end of the car.

“Well, well!” he cried, and he stood a moment with his hands upon the seat-backs, looking down at her where she sat, helpless to move her bag and parcels from her side. “A’n’t you going to let me set with you, Althea? A’n’t you going to look round and let me see if it’s really you? First, I didn’t know but it was Eldress Susan.”

“‘Sh!” said Sister Althea, and she turned up towards him the deep tunnel of her bonnet, with her young face at the bottom of it, and clutched her parcels into her lap.

He swung her bag to the floor, and let himself sink easily into the seat, and stretched his arm along the top behind her. “Oh, I guess she won’t hear us,” said the young man. “Did you know me when I came into the car? I don’t believe you did!” He laughed, and his eyes shone. They were gay blue eyes, and his hair, now that he took his soft hat off, had glints of gold in the dun tone that the close shingling of the barber gave it. His face was clean shaven and boyishly handsome. He was dressed in a new suit of diagonals which betrayed the clothing-store; but his figure was not vulgar, though his hands, thrusting out of the coat-sleeves without the shirt-cuffs that might have partly hidden them, were large and red, and rough with work. “I saw you through the window as I came along the platform outside, and I wanted to stop and watch you. But you had your head down, as if you wa’n’t feeling any too bright, and I hurried right in. I thought you would be frightened if I didn’t come in as soon as the cars stopped. But I was waiting here so long expecting the train that I forgot to get my bag checked till the last minute, and I had to run and do it after you got in. That’s what kept me. Did you think I wa’n’t going to be here, after all?” He let his arm drop from the seat-top, and he sought with his the little hand lying weak on the seat between them. It closed upon his fingers at their touch, and then tried to free itself, and then trembled and remained quiet. “Oh, I guess I did frighten you,” he murmured, fondly.

“Hush! Yee,” said Althea. “But I knew you would be sure to be here. I wasn’t afraid, but I was — scared a little. I was anxious. When you came in I could see it was you, but you looked so strange.” She cast a glance up and down the car.

“Don’t you like it?” he asked, with a smile of innocent pride and a downward look at his clothes.

“Yee, yee,” she said. “But, Lorenzo, do you think — do you think you had ought to — sit in the same seat with me — so close? Won’t folks—”

Lorenzo laughed securely. “Think I ought to set across the aisle, same as in meeting? I guess folks won’t mind us much.” In fact, in the going and coming and settling in place no one seemed to notice them. “If they do, they’ll think I’m just your brother or some relation. It’s this old bonnet, if anything, that will make them look. I thought Friend Ella Shewall was going to lend you a hat.”

“Yee, she was. But I didn’t get to her house till it was almost time for the cars, and then we had to just race to the depot. I’ve got the hat here in this paper, and that’s a sack in this bundle. I hadn’t time to put it on, either. I was almost ready to drop when I reached Friend Ella’s.” He peered into the depths of the bonnet she turned towards him, and she added: “I ran nearly the whole way from Harshire to the Junction.”

“Ran?”

“Yee. I couldn’t get out of the house without some of the Family seeing me before dusk; and if they had I should have died. I was so ashamed, Lorenzo, and I felt so — I can’t tell you! I kept close to the walls and in the woods all I could, and I had this bag—”

Lorenzo stooped forward and lifted the bag from the floor. “You carried that all the way from Harshire to the Junction?”

“Yee.”

“Well!”

“I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t the bag that was so heavy. Oh, Lorenzo, do you think we’re doing right?”

“I know we are! Why, Althea, it’s what everybody does in the world-outside.”

“In the world-outside, yee.”

“Well, we’re in the world-outside, ain’t we?”

“Yee, I presume we are. We are going to be of the earthly order, Lorenzo; we are going to give up the angelic life! Have you thought enough of it, Lorenzo? Do you think you have? Because if you haven’t—”

“Why, haven’t we both thought of it till we couldn’t think any more? What did Friend Ella Shewall say? Didn’t she say that we ought to take our feelin’ for each other as a sign from spirit-land that we were meant for each other from all eternity?”

“Yee; but she isn’t living with her own husband; she’s trying to get a divorce from him, and she used to be so fond of him.”

“Well, then, the signs failed in her case—”

“Oh, don’t laugh at it, Lorenzo! If they failed in ours, what should we have? Am I worth all you’re risking for me in this world and the next? Think of it, Lorenzo! I can get out at the next stopping-place and go back to the Family; I know they’ll let me; and you — Think of it! Am I worth it?” She spoke in a low, intense whisper.

“Am I?” retorted the young man, lightly.

“Oh yee! You are! I’d go through it all for you.”

“Then I guess that settles it.”

“Nay, nay; it doesn’t! I’m wicked, and that’s why I feel so. You don’t know how bad I am. I deceived! It was all right for you, for you left the Family open and above-board, and you told the Trustees you were going, and you made them give back your proerty and everything; but I stole away like a thief in the night; and I made Friend Ella take part in my deceit; and, Lorenzo, I don’t believe there’s going to be any end to it. I’ve told two lies already, here in this very car — just before it stopped. There was a man asked me whether I expected to meet friends at Fitchburg, and I said nay; and he asked me if I wasn’t from the Family at Yardley, and I said yee, I was, and—”

“He no business to asked you anything,” said Lorenzo, hotly, “and I d’ know as you can call it lyin’, anyway. I a’n’t friends in the sense he meant, and Yardley and Harshire, it’s almost the same thing, and it don’t matter which Family you come from, so you’re out of it.”

“Do you think so, Lorenzo?”

“Yee, I do. And now look here, Althea; you’re nervous, and you can’t see things in the true light, and so everything looks wrong to you. We’re doing what we have a perfect right to do, and what everybody in the world-outside does, as I said before. If you had to steal away, as you call it, from the Family, whose fault was it? ‘Twa’n’t yours. You did it, if anything, to save their fellin’s, didn’t you?”

“Yee, I presume so.”

“Don’t you know you did? Now I want you to try and look at it in the light of the world-outside; for that’s all the light we’ve got now, or that we’re going to have.”

A little troubled sigh exhaled from the depths of the bonnet, and Lorenzo threw himself back in despair. “Oh, well, if that’s the way you’re goin’ to feel about it.”

“Nay, nay, Lorenzo! I’m not going to. I shall be all right in a minute. I’m just nervous, that’s all. I think just as you do about it. Wasn’t I perfectly willing and glad to do it?”

“I guess you wa’n’t half so willing nor half so glad as I was,” said the young man, and now he drooped towards her again. “And, as you say, I had the easiest part of it, too, as far forth as getting away from the Family went. But, Althea,” he added, with a touch of pride, “I haven’t had a very easy time since I’ve been in the world-outside. ‘Ta’n’t but a few days, but it seems as if it was years, worrying about you all the while, and trying to sell my lot in Fitchburg, and look up something for me to do when we get back.”

“Yee, we have got to think of that now, I suppose,” said Althea. “In the Family it came without our thinking.”

“Yee, too many things came there without our thinking,”said Lorenzo, resentfully. “Not that I want to talk against the Family. I presume I feel just as you do about that. Our own fathers and mothers couldn’t have been better to us. But if we was to have each other, we had to leave ‘em. There wa’n’t any two ways about it. And I guess I do like to think for myself, even of my bread and butter. And I guess I’ve arranged for all that. I’m going into the drug business with Friend Nason.”

“That used to come and buy our herbs at Harshire?”

Lorenzo nodded. “It’s just the place for me. He’s goin’ to put a new remedy on the market for lung difficulty — Pulmine, he calls it — and he wants me, because I know about herbs; it’s going to be purely vegetable. He’s bought my lot, too, and he’s advanced me a hundred dollars on it.” The young fellow leaned a little nearer and tapped his breast-pocket. “I’ve got it with me! And I’ve seen the nicest little set of rooms for us to go to house-keeping in when we get back. Friend Nason calls it a flat; and I guess when you see that kitchen, Althea! Friend Nason says it’s just as well we’re going to Saratoga, for we sha’n’t have to get a license in York state; and if it had to be in Fitchburg, and we was to settle down there, right from the Family, it might make talk. But if we come back just like anybody else from the world-outside it’ll all blow over before anybody notices. He wouldn’t want it to get into the newspapers any more than we would or the Family would.”

II

THE train, which had started long before, advanced by smooth leaps through the dark, and the rhythmical clangor of the wheels upon the rails lost itself in Lorenzo’s tones while he talked on and mapped out the future to Althea. Already, though he had been so few days in the world-outside, he knew many things unknown to her, and he looked at everything from a point of view that she could not yet imagine. He used words that she had never heard before, and he used familiar phrases in a new sense. He spoke low, and not to lose anything he said she had to turn her deep bonnet towards him, and peer up into his face with eyes so still and solemn in their fixity that at last he laughed out.

“What are you laughing at?” she half grieved.

“Oh, nothing. Your eyes down there in that old bonnet made me think of a rabbit that I got into a hole once, and it kept looking up at me. What is there to scare anybody, anyway, Althea?”

“Nothing. I’m not scared now.”

“Well, I believe it’s that bonnet, after all. Why don’t you take the old thing off?”

“I don’t know. They would look.”

She glanced round the car at their fellow-passengers, and Lorenzo did so too. “Well, let them look!” He said, with a petulant impulse; and then, as if he had given way too far, he added, “They’ve all got their backs turned, anyway.”

“So they have!” said Althea. “I took this seat at the end of the car on purpose, so they wouldn’t notice me so much. I forgot about that.”

Still she did not offer to remove her bonnet, and he repeated, “Why don’t you take the old thing off?”

“Do you truly want me to?”

“Yee; I want to see how you’ll look.”

“Why, you know already how I look with my cap on.”

“Got that on too?”

“Yee.”

“Oh, what’s the use of yeeing and naying it all the time, Althea? We’ve got to say yes and no after this.”

“You said yee yourself half a minute ago.”

“Did I?” asked Lorenzo; and after a moment’s thought, he said, “Well, so I did,” and he laughed at himself. “But it’s all that old bonnet makes me do it. I say yes to other folks straight enough. Do take it off!”

“Well, I will, if you want I should so very much,” said Althea, and she kept watching his face while she began to undo the bonnet strings.

“Want I should help you any?”

“Nay; I guess I can get along.”

“There’s that nay again!” said Lorenzo, desperately, and they both laughed. “ Take off your cap, too. Wouldn’t you just as lives?”

“Yee, if you say so.”

“There it goes again!” And they laughed together, but very softly, so that the other passengers should not notice. The woman with the child was making up a bed on the seat in front of her for the little one; she looked over her shoulder a moment, but she did not seem to take them in with her vague glance. Althea stopped untying her bonnet-strings, and then went on. She lifted the drab tunnel from her head at last, and showed the wire-framed gauze cap, closely fitted to her head. “Now the cap,” said the young man, and she untied that too, and took it off, and turned her face full upon him.

She looked like a pretty boy, with her dark hair cropped to her head all round, and her severe turn-down collar, which came so high up on her throat that her soft round chin almost touched it. She had dark eyes, very tender and truthful, a little straight nose, and a mouth that smiled unspeakable question at the young man with its red lips; delicate brows arched themselves above her dovelike eyes, and her forehead was a smooth and white wall to the edge of her hair. The ugly bonnet had served well to keep her complexion fair; its indoors pallor had now a faint flush in it.

Lorenzo caught his breath, and turned his face with a slight cough.

“What is the matter? Have you got a cold?” she asked.

“Nay. It seemed as if my heart skipped a beat. I guess it was the surprise.”

“Do I surprise you very much, Lorenzo?” her pretty lips entreated, fondly. “Do I look so very funny? You made me do it!”

“Nay, nay! You look — beautiful, Althea. I don’t know as I ought to say it, Althea, but I didn’t know how beautiful you was before.”

He stared at her so helplessly and awe-strickenly that she could not help laughing.

“You’re fine-appearing, too, Lorenzo. I noticed it when you came into the car. I presume it’s my hair that makes me look so funny. But it isn’t half as short as yours,” she said, with an arch glance at his hair as far as it showed itself under his hat. He took his hat off, and she pressed her hand against her mouth to keep from laughing too loud. “I guess we’re a pair of them!”

He still sat embarrassed, looking at her, and studying every little motion of her head and face as she put her cap inside her bonnet, and made as if to tie the string of the bonnet over both. “But maybe,” she said, “you want I should put them on again?”

“Nay,” he began, and she mocked him with “Nay? There it is again!” But he would not laugh.

“Althea, I don’t hardly feel as if I had any right to you. It’s all well enough to talk, but I didn’t know that till you looked — the way you do look; and if you say, I’ll give up right now.”

“And what shall I do if you give up now?” she asked, with eyes full of laughter.

“That’s true,” he sighed.

“I didn’t know how well you looked, either, till I saw you with that suit of clothes on.”

“Do you like them?” he asked, with a proud glance at the sleeves of his coat and the legs of his trousers. “I had to pay twenty dollars for the suit. Friend Nason thought it was a good deal — he went with me — but he said he guessed I better have them if I was going off with you; I’d get more comfort out of them than what I would a cheaper suit.”

“Yee,” said Althea, thoughtfully. “ If we’re in the world-outside we have got to do the same as the rest.” She drew a little away from him to add, with a touch of tender reproach, “But I began to feel foolish about you, Lorenzo, long before I saw you in that suit of clothes — as foolish as I ever could.”

“And I felt foolish about you when I couldn’t hardly see your face in the bottom of that bonnet, let alone know what a pretty head you had, or anything. It was something the way you walked — I d’ know — and your — your waist, Althea—”

She turned away from him to take up the parcel on the other side. She put it in her lap, and asked. “Do you want I should show you the sack Friend Ella lent me?”

“Why, yee; of course!”

“She said it was quite the fashion.” Althea undid it and held it up and whirled it about, so that the jet trimming would show, and she made him feel the texture of the silk. “Now, I’ll try it on if you want I should.” She flung it across his knees, and unpinned the Shaker shawl from over her breast, and let it fall from her shoulders. She stopped suddenly with a fiery flush.

“What is it?” asked Lorenzo. He looked in the direction of her eyes, and saw one of the men passengers coming straight down the car towards them; but the man went on to the water-cooler in the corner just beyond them, and after he had solemnly filled himself up from the tank there he lumbered back to his place again at the other end of the car. They looked at each other as people do who have had a narrow escape. Althea pulled the shawl up on her shoulders again. “I guess I’ll wait till morning to put it on.”

“Yee, just as well,” said Lorenzo, and he could not have seen the filmy shade of disappointment that passed over her face. “What are you going to do with that old thing?”

He touched her Shaker bonnet, and she glanced down at it. “Oh, keep it, I presume,” she sighed— “keep it always. Any rate, I shall keep it till morning.” She tied it up with the paper that had wrapped her sack.

Lorenzo rose from the seat and stood beside it. “Look here, Althea, I’m going back into the sleeping-car here to get a place for you, so you can rest comfortable. I don’t want you should sit up here all night.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Oh, I can set up well enough—”

“Then so can I, too! And I’m going to stay here with you.”

“Now, Althea, you just let me have my own way about this. I took the place for you before the car reached Fitchburg, and it’s paid for, and you might as well use it.”

She would have protested further, but he had already left her, and she vainly appealed to him with her entreating eyes when he looked back at her over his shoulder.

While he was gone she unwrapped the hat that she had borrowed from Friend Ella Shewall, and put it on at the little mirror by the water-cooler. Then she dropped her Shaker shawl over her arm, and sat down again to wait.

When Lorenzo came back he started at sight of her. “Well, well!” he said.

“Do you like it?” she cooed back at him.

“Well, I should think so!”

He began to pick up her bundles, and she stood outside of the seat to give him a chance. “I thought I wouldn’t like to have them see me in my Family shawl and my short hair,” she explained.

“I guess they wouldn’t noticed much,” said Lorenzo. “There a’n’t anybody up but the porter. Well, it’s all ready.” He stopped, and let some of the parcels fall back into the seat, and stood staring at her.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” he answered; and then he said, thickly, “ I was just thinking how you would look in a dress that I saw a girl have on at Fitchburg to-day.” She felt his eyes on her waist, but she did not mind; she laughed for pleasure; she liked to know he thought she had a pretty waist; he might just as well. He affected to turn it off with a practical remark:

“That dress looks a little Shaker yet. Perhaps it won’t when you’ve got the sack on over it. Anyway, we can get something ready-made at Saratoga. I don’t believe you’ll ever get anything that’ll fit you much better,” he gasped, in helpless adoration.

The girl’s face fell a little. “Yee. Sister Miranda made it. She said she was afraid she took almost too much pride in it. I did hate to leave without saying good-bye to her!”

“Yee,” said the young fellow, gravely.

The black porter from the sleeping-car came in briskly, and after a glance up and down their car to make sure of his passenger he came and took Althea’s bags and parcels from Lorenzo’s passive hands. “This way, lady,” he said.

She looked at Lorenzo, and he nodded. “I guess he can show you.”

“Good-night,” she said, following the porter out.

“Well, good-night,” answered Lorenzo. He sat down in the seat now empty of her form, and pulled his hat over his eyes.

III

IT was bright day when she came back to him from the sleeping-car, but he had not yet awakened. She stood looking down at him and smiling, and presently he started awake and stared distractedly up at her before he could pull himself together and say, “Well, well! Did you sleep pretty well?”

“I rested pretty well,” she answered. “how did you?”

Lorenzo laughed. “I guess I slept pretty Well, but I don’t believe I rested very much. But I’ve got the whole day to rest in now.” Althea had Friend Ella Shewall’s hat and sack both on, and she waited for him to realize the fact before she sat down. “Well, well,” he said, in recognition, “that sack is nice.”

“Well?” she urged, as if she felt a disappointment in his tone.

“Well, what do you think?”

“It don’t seem to go exactly with the dress.”

“Nay,” said Lorenzo, with his laugh. “It makes you look like the world-outside one-half, and the other half Shaker.”

“Yee, it does,” said Althea, forlornly; her chin trembled a little, and her eyes threatened tears. “I guess it’s all we’re ever going to be, too, Lorenzo: half Shaker and half world-outside,” she added, bitterly. “I guess I better go back into the sleeping-car and put on my old shawl and bonnet again.”

“No such a thing!” cried Lorenzo. “I guess we’ll see about that when we get to Saratoga — we must be pretty near there now. Set right down here, and I’ll go back for your things.”

“Nay, the colored man said he would bring them.” Althea sank into the seat and got out the handkerchief, broad as a napkin, which she had brought from the Family with her, and wiped the tears from her eyes. Then she bowed her face into it, and her little frame shook with the sobs she smothered.

“Well! well!” groaned Lorenzo, in an anguish of tenderness.

Althea suddenly took her handkerchief away and controlled her face. “There! I am ashamed, Lorenzo.”

“Nay, don’t you say that, Althea. You’ve got just as much right to cry as anybody, and I want you should cry.”

“Nay, I’ve got through now,” said Altlica; and to prove it she smiled up into his face so radiantly that he laughed, and she laughed with him.

The porter with her bag and parcels perhaps thought he had arrived at a fortunate moment. He set the bag respectfully at her feet, and kept a smiling face on Lorenzo while he arranged the parcels almost decoratively on her lap. Then he lingered a moment; the smile died on his face, and he went mournfully away. They both felt the gloom in his manner, aud were sensible of a vague reproach in it.

“What was it, Lorenzo?” she asked.

“Well, that was just what I was going to ask you, Althea,” said Lorenzo. They wondered over the incident so sadly closed, and their minds were not wholly taken from it until they drew in sight of Saratoga and the train began to slow. They ran along the backs of some simple houses whose yards and gardens were shorn off by the track, and then the vast bulks of the hotels began to show among the foliage that everywhere masses itself over the town. “This must be it,” said Lorenzo, and they looked at each other in a sudden fright. “No use being scared about it now,” he added, as he resolutely gathered up Althea’s belongings and stood aside to let her get out of the car. The conductor who took her elbow to help her down from it let Lorenzo shift for himself, and the embarrassment they felt was relieved for them both by his dropping some of the parcels, and their having to pick them up from under the feet of the crowd thronging into the station. She made him let her keep some of them now, and they passed through the station to the street beyond, where there was a clamor of carriage drivers, and a rank of stately hacks and barouches, and light, wood-colored surreys and phaetons. The drivers swarmed upon them, but as they stood silent and motionless under their burdens the drivers dropped off one by one, like dogs that have rushed out at a passer and have failed to make the expected impression upon him. At last they were free, and they walked from the station under the flank of a mighty hotel into a wide street, where they found it one hotel of many, with sweeping piazzas and narrow pillars springing into the air like the stems of tall young trees. The street was freshly watered, and smelled of the dampened dust; it was set with elms, and under their arches stood vehicles of the same sort and variety as those at the station. Some drove slowly up and down through the sun and shadow; but their drivers, after a glance at Lorenzo and Althea struggling along under their parcels, intelligently forbore to invite them to a morning drive.

“I guess we sha’n’t want to go to any hotel just yet,” said Lorenzo. “We can get breakfast at an eating-house, if we can find one.”

“Yee,” Althea timidly assented.

They had to walk up and down a long while before they found an eating-house. Lorenzo began to be afraid there was nothing but hotels in Saratoga. They trudged along, staring at all the signs, and the shopkeepers, sweeping the dust of their floors across the pavement to the gutters, had to stop for them to get slowly by or else sweep it against them. Althea knew that Lorenzo looked well, but she was smitten with a sense of her own inadequate appearance, and she tried to shrink as much out of sight as possible.

“Here’s one at last,” said Lorenzo, stopping at a doorway. “Go right in, Althea,” he added to her at a certain faltering she showed. “It’s all right. It’s just like the one Friend Nason took me to in Fitchburg.”

It seemed very splendid with its mirrors and marble-topped tables and bent-wood chairs, and it overcame Althea with the surprise and then the indifference it showed in the shining black waiter who came forward after a moment, as if their custom were not expected or much wanted at that hour in the morning. But Lorenzo was not afraid. He asked if they could have something to eat; and then the waiter said he guessed so, and be took their parcels and set them against the wall by the table he chose for them. Little groups of flies had knotted themselves into rosettes on the marble where it seemed to have been imperfectly cleansed; others paraded across it in black files. There were a great many flies in the long, narrow saloon, and the air within was faint and dull, as if it were the air of the evening before, and had been up all night there. A man was wiping a marble counter with a soda fountain at one end of it. At the rear of the room a boy was taking down the chairs which stood on the tables with their legs up.

Lorenzo asked Althea what she wanted for breakfast, and when she could not think he told the colored man he guessed they would have beefsteak and coffee and hot biscuit. The colored man said they had no hot biscuit yet, and he suggested hot cakes.

“Well, hot cakes, then,” said Lorenzo; and he said to Althea that he guessed hot cakes would be full as well anyway.

Before he brought their breakfast the waiter spread a large napkin over the marble before them, and that forced the flies into a momentary exile. They rose into the air, but they did not go far; they remained circling round overhead and humming angrily till Lorenzo’s order came, and then they settled down upon the table again, and brought with them apparently all the other flies they knew.

The steak was very juicy and tender, and when the cakes came from the place where all old negro stood frying them on a slab of soapstone with gas-jets underneath they were very good too. But the coffee was green in color when they had poured their small jugs of milk into it, and thick with grounds.

“Not much like our cocoa at the Family,” said Lorenzo, for a joke.

Althea let fall a small “Nay” like a tear, and pushed her cup a little from her without seeming to know it.

But Lorenzo had seen the act of repulsion, and he called over his shoulder to the waiter, who stood behind him watching Althea, “haven’t you got any cocoa?”

“Chocolate,” said the waiter, impassively. “That do?”

Lorenzo saw Althea’s face brighten, and he said, “Yee — yes, I should say,” and then Althea and be laughed together at the joke that puzzled the waiter. They were very gay over their breakfast when he came back with the chocolate, though they were dashed a little at going when the same gloom that they had noticed in the sleeping-car porter fell upon their waiter, after Lorenzo had gathered up all the change he had brought them.

“What is it, Lorenzo, seems to come over them so at the last? He was so polite when we sat down, and took our bundles and everything, and he didn’t even offer to hand them back when we left.”

IV

THEY were out on the sidewalk again, and were pushing aimlessly ahead under their burdens. The air felt fresher outside, and a breeze had begun to stir. “I don’t know,” said Lorenzo. “I guess they’re rather changeable, that’s all. Now, Althea, I can see that you’re troubled about that dress of yours, and I want you should go into some of these stores with me and see if we can’t match your sack better.”

“Do you truly, Lorenzo?” she returned, in a flutter of pleasure. “Well!”

“Yee, I want to see you in something a little more seasonable. It’s summer, and I’d like you to have — well, a white dress, I believe.”

“But that wouldn’t go any better with the sack than this one.”

“Well, I guess we can find a sack that it will go with, then,” said Lorenzo. “I always heard that they got married in white, anyway. I want you should look like other folks.”

“Yee,” Althea assented, a little faint with her consciousness.

They passed a good many stores where there were dresses hanging at the doors or in the windows, but Lorenzo showed himself very fastidious; and though Althea thought some of them would do, he would only say that they could come back if they did not see anything that suited them better.

“I saw some dresses in a store under that big hotel down yonder a piece, and I want to ask about them first. Didn’t you notice them?”

“Yee, I did. But isn’t it rather of a fashionable place?”

“That’s just what I’m looking for,” said Lorenzo, and Althea laughed tremulously.

When they came down opposite the hotel he boldly led the way across the street, and would not let her falter at the shop door. “Now you come right in, Althea. I know more about the wor1d-outside than you do,” he said, in an imperative whisper.

He was blushing, too, though, when he set their things down on the floor, and a tall, handsome woman came flowingly forward to meet them, between counters gay with hats and bonnets, and clothes-trees with sacks and jackets, and figure-frames with gowns that swept the floor with silken trains. The shop-woman looked at them with a blush as bright as their own or brighter, but subdued to a softer effect by the film of powder that had got a little into her eyebrows.

She glanced inquiringly from one to the other, and at Althea’s vain gasp she said to Lorenzo, as if he were an old man of the world, and they could understand each other perhaps better, “Is there something I could show madam?”

“Yee, there is,” said Lorenzo. “We wanted to get some kind of a dress, if they a’n’t all too dear.”

“We have all prices,” said the woman, and she touched different gowns as she spoke. “Seventy-five dollars, one fifty, sixty-two and a half, forty-five.”

“You wanted something in cotton goods, didn’t you, Althea?” asked Lorenzo, artfully, so as both to escape from the offer of these garments, which he did not wish to discredit by refusing them, and to bring Althea into the transaction.

“Yee, I did.” And when Lorenzo whispered, “Yes — don’t say yee,” she promptly retorted, in undertone, “You keep saying it too.” And as if she had plucked up courage from inculpating him, she added to the shopwoman, “I should like something that would go with this sack and hat.”

“Oh, well, then,” said the shopwoman, as if she now understood exactly, and in a tone that transferred her allegiance instantly from Lorenzo to Althea, “I have something here very pretty and very cheap,” and she took up from a heap of dainty dresses thrown across a table a frock of white muslin, trimmed with ends and knots of cherry ribbon, and fluttered over with lace and ruching and ruffling. “This is very cheap,” she said, looking at the tag on it, and then drawing it over her arm with her right hand and holding it out to survey it with a glance of her sidelong head, in which there was an eye that studied both the young lovers. “It is quite a dream — and imported. It would fit you perfectly, madam. We’re about at the end of our season for summer things now, and you could have this — it’s marked thirty-five — for twenty-five.”

Lorenzo stood agape, but Althea did not seem to know that he was even there. She was rapt in the ecstasy of the pretty dress. “Could — would you let me try it on first?”

“Why, certainly, madam. Just come with me.”

Althea followed like one led by a spell. Lorenzo sat down on one of the revolving stools before a show-case filled with ribbons, with Althea’s bags and parcels at his feet. It seemed to him that he sat there a long time. While he waited the shopwoman drifted in twice — once to fetch away a coquettish cape from one of the clothes-trees, and once to take a gauze hat from a peg. Then nothing happened for a time; and he had begun to wonder what was keeping Althea when he lifted his downcast eyes and beheld a vision.

It was Althea and it was not Althea. It was Althea as she would look, he suddenly thought, in the spirit-life, if spirits could be as beautiful as people on the earth, and have some of the danger in them. He could only deeply murmur, “Well, well!” and stare and stare.

“Will it do?” she entreated, with a smile that had a heavenly splendor in it.

He shut his mouth and swallowed, and then opened it again, but he could not speak.

“I think,” said the shopwoman, “that madam looks superb in that dress, and she must have the cape with it. Her black sack is very nice, but it’s a little out of style, and it’s rather more of a spring and fall garment. Don’t you think the hat is very becoming, too? The ribbon is the same as that on the dress.” She touched a knot of it on the hat, and another knot of it on Althea’s breast, and Lorenzo felt as if his own heart were under the place. “As the season is passing I can let you have them at the same reduction as the dress. I should have wanted twenty-five for the cape at the beginning of the month, and fifteen for the hat. You can have them both now for twenty-five — just fifty in all. And there isn’t a stitch needed in any of them.”

“They do seem to fit,” said Lorenzo.

“She could wear them into the street this moment,” said the woman.

Althea said nothing. She let her eyes fall.

“I guess we shall have to take them,” said Lorenzo, and he got his pocket-book out.

Althea turned suddenly upon him. “Don’t you do it unless you feel you’d ought to, Lorenzo. If it isn’t right, I don’t want you should do it.”

“Oh, I guess it’s all right,” said Lorepzo, and the shopwoman confirmed him in the opinion.

“It would be simply wicked for madam not to have them.”

“Yee, it would” said Lorenzo more heartily, and he paid the bills over on the counter.

The woman took them with an absent air, as if she too were bewitched with the beauty she had adorned. “The hat would look ever so much better, of course,” she said, “if madam’s hair was the natural length. You must come back when it’s grown out, and let me show you another.”

It seemed a joke, and they laughed. Lorenzo said, boldly, “Yee, we will.” And then he said, to help get away, “Well, Althea, I guess we must be going.”

“Oh, then, madam will wear the things at once? Well, that is right. Where did you say I should send the old ones?”

The shopwoman addressed Lorenzo, and he blushed — he did not know why. “Well, we haven’t gone to any hotel yet. Could — could we leave them here a little while?”

“Certainly, by all means,” said the woman.

“What name?”

“Well,” said Lorenzo, and he thought a moment, “I guess you better just put Lorenzo Weaver on.”

“Very well,” said the shopwoman, and she wrote it down on a piece of paper which she pinned to the sack Friend Ella Shewall had lent Althea. In the midst of all that finery it now looked very common and shabby. Lorenzo said he would come round for the things a little later, and she said, politely, “Oh, any time!” and she followed them to the door. “I wish,” she said,” I could have seen madam with her hair long. It’s such a pretty shade. Cut off in sickness, I suppose.”

“Yee,” said Lorenzo; and as they issued upon the sidewalk he was aware that Althea shrank from him, perhaps rather spiritually than corporeally, and yet really. “I know,” he pleaded, “that I oughtn’t to have said that, Althea, and I hated to do it as much as you would. But what could I do?”

“Nay, we seem to have to tell lies whenever folks speak to us,” said Althea, sadly.

“Well, it a’n’t lying exactly, or it a’n’t so considered in the world-outside. It’s considered just the same as putting folks off. I suppose we’ve got to conform in such things.”

“Oh, yee,” she sighed.

They walked along in an unhappy silence till Lorenzo said, “Those shoes, Althea, don’t seem to go exactly with the rest.” he looked down at the little feet which flatly patted the ground in the roomy gear of the Family.

She looked down at them too, and she assented in a rueful “Nay.”

“I want to see if we can’t find you something a little more like,” he said ; and he laughed to see a slight lift come at once into Althea’s gait.

The young man in the shoe-store made Althea sit down for him to unlace her shoe, and then when he had put on the russet ties, which he said were the thing she wanted, felt her foot all over, to see that the fit was perfect, Lorenzo thought that they ought to have a woman for that, and he could see Althea blushing and shrinking, as if she thought so too; but he noticed another young woman trying on pair after pair of shoes under the same conditions, and he decided to say nothing about what was so plainly the custom of the world-outside. The shoes were certainly very pretty, and when Althea suffered him to see the points, the very sharp points of them, beyond her skirt, it seemed to him that her feet had gone to nothing in them. “A’n’t they a little tight, Althea? No use getting shoes that will hurt you.”

“They don’t feel so,” said Althea, conscientiously.

“You’ll find more room in a sharp-pointed shoe, lady,” said the shopman, ignoring Lorenzo in the matter, “than you will in a broad-pointed. Keep them on? All right. Where shall I send the old ones?”

Lorenzo explained, as he had to the modiste, that they had not got a hotel yet, and he asked if he might not call for the shoes later, and he had them marked with his name. “Seems to me you’re a good deal taller than you were before, Althea,” he said, when they were out on the sidewalk again.

“Yee; these shoes have got heels, and they seem to be pretty high.” She no longer swung forward with the free gait he had always thought so beautiful, but walked mincingly, like the fashionably dressed ladies of the world-outside, whom they now began to meet more and more. He thought Althea was as well dressed as any of them, and he made her come into a gay little shop with him and choose a parasol. “Got to have something to keep the sun off, now your old bonnet’s gone.” And Althea laughed with him at the thought of it. She chose a white parasol with white silk fringe, and when the shopwoman suggested gloves she chose a pair of white ones, which the woman put on for her. Lorenzo bought her a lace handkerchief, and the woman showed her how to tuck it in at the waist of her dress, where she said handkerchiefs were worn now.

“Lorenzo,” Althea said, with coquettish severity, when they were in the street again, “I’m not going another step with you unless you get something for yourself now.”

“What do you want I should get?” he asked, fondly, with his heart in his throat.

“You ought to know,” she returned, almost pertly.

“Well,” said Lorenzo, “I been thinking I’d look full better in this hot weather with a straw hat.”

“Yee, you would,” said Althea; and they went into a men’s furnishing store, where the shopman advised a straw hat with a very low crown and a very wide brim, and a deep ribbon with vertical stripes of red and blue. Lorenzo took it, and he took a necktie of white silk, which he was advised was the latest style, and he put it on at a little mirror in the back of the store. When he came forward with his new hat on a little slanted, he could see the glow of pride in his looks which came into Althea’s face.

“Like it?” he asked. But it seemed as if she were too full to speak, and he resumed, carelessly, after he had given the shopman his name, and promised to call for his old hat and tie, “I don’t know but we’d full as well go to some hotel now, Althea, and get our things sent there.”

“Well, if you say so, Lorenzo,” she answered, demurely.

“I declare, I don’t know which one to go to, though,” said Lorenzo. “ We sha’n’t be here often, I presume, and I should like to go to the very best; but if we asked anybody we shouldn’t know whether they were right or not about it.”

They stopped and stood looking up and down the street at the different hotels as they showed themselves in the perspective, but they could not make a choice.

“I wish we had asked that woman at the dress-store,” said Lorenzo, dreamily; and Althea assented with an anxious, “Yee, she could have told.”

“We might go and ask her now,” said Lorenzo, “and yet I kind of hate to.”

The driver of a gay, wood-colored surrey, who was slowly walking his horses up and down with an eye abroad for custom, placed his own interpretation on the wistful air of the young couple standing at the edge of the sidewalk and looking into the street. He pulled up beside them before they were aware. “Carriage? Take you to the Lake for a dollar! Drive?”

Lorenzo hastily whispered Althea, “We could ask him which is the best, on the way. And — and, Althea, we have got to ask somebody about a minister!” She questioned his meaning with her eyes, and he added, “To marry us.”

She flushed and looked down, and admitted, faintly, “Yee.”

“The driver could take us to a good one.”

The driver waited patiently for the end of their conference, though they had not yet answered a word. He suggested, “Take you through the principal streets first, and not charge you anything more.”

“I guess we better, Althea,” said Lorenzo; and she let him help her into the surrey with a soft “Well.”

V

THE driver looked sharply round at them, and then turned about to his horses again. As he drove by the United States, and the Grand Union, and Congress Hall, and out past the Windsor, he named the different great hotels to them, and Lorenzo caught at the chance to ask him which was the best. “Well, I don’t know as I could hardly make a choice between the four biggest. It depends on what you want for your money.” He leaned half round, so as to converse with his passengers at his ease, and lightly controlled his slim sorrels with his left hand, while he stretched his right arm along the back of the seat. “If you want old-family business, I sh’d go to the States; and if you want all the earth can give in the way of solid comfort, I sh’d go to Congress Hall; and if you want something very tony, I sh’d go to the Windsor; but if you’re in for all the life you can get, and all the distinguished visitors, and the big politicians, and style, and jewelry, and full band all the while, you want to go to the Grand Union. That’s where I’d go if I was in Saratoga for a good time; but tastes differ, and there a’n’t a word to say against the other big hotels, or any house in the place, as far as I’ve heard from ‘em. Lady object to smokin’?” The driver suddenly addressed himself to Lorenzo. “Because if she don’t, I’ll finish my cigar.” He spoke with the unlighted remnant of a cigar between his teeth.

Lorenzo looked at Althea, and she said, “Nay, I don’t mind.”

A smile ran up into the hard, averted cheek of the driver. He was a slim young fellow, who wore his straw hat at an impudent angle, and had a handsome face full of wicked wisdom; at the same time there was something like a struggle of conscience in the restraint from impertinence which he put upon himself. “If you’ll just take these lines a second,” he said, giving them into Lorenzo’s hand; and then he lighted a match and exhaled his thanks with the first whiff of his cigar. “I can always talk so much better when I’m smokin’, but I don’t never like to smoke when my passengers object.” He started up his horses briskly, and pointed out the objects of interest as he passed them. “That’s Congress Park. You want to come here in the afternoon for the music — Troy band — and there’s a balloon ascension there to-day; that’s something you don’t want to miss.” He said, more especially for Althea’s behoof, “Lady goes up.” He let them look a moment at the pretty park with its stretch of level lawn, and its pavilion and kiosk, its fountain, and its amphitheatrical upland, with a roofage of darker and lighter green propped on tall pine and oak tree stems, and then he jerked his head towards a building on the left. “That’s the Saratoga Club. Gamblin’ place,” he explained to their innocence. “Lots of money exchanges hands every night. German prince dropped ten thousand there one night, and he didn’t take the whole night for it either. It’s a gay place, if it don’t look it.” In fact, with its discreetlv drawn curtains, its careful keeping of grass and flowers, the club-house looked in the bright morning sun like the demure dwelling of some rich man who did not care to flaunt his riches. “Indian encampment,” said the driver, with another nod to the left, a little farther up the hill. “Get your fortune told there; shooting-gallery, Punch and Judy, and a little of everything.” He nodded at a splendid villa on the right, with an auctioneer’s sign upon it. “One of our leadin’ gamblers’ house. Cost him eighty thousand dollars, and won’t bring twenty under the hammer. Got caught in the panic. Took to speculatin’. Been all right if he’d stuck to the cards,” he concluded, as if this were the moral.

Lorenzo’s mind worked with rustic slowness through a cloud of worldly ignorance, and the driver had time to point out several other notable residences on the handsome avenue which they were passing through, and told them that it was the way to the horse-races, and that they ought to be in Saratoga for the races, before Lorenzo could get round to ask, “But a’n’t it against the law to gamble?”

“It’s against the gospel too, I guess,” said the driver, “but you wouldn’t know it in Saratoga. It’s the gamblin’ and the racin’ that makes the place.” He spoke with that pride which people feel in their local evils if they are very great. He swept his passengers with his hardy eye, as if for full enjoyment of any horror he had raised in them, and ended:

“And there a’n’t but one single minister here that I ever heard of that’s had the gall to say a word against hoss-racin’. That’s what Saratoga is.”

His point was lost to them in the thought that came into both their minds at once. Lorenzo whispered it : “Wouldn’t that be the one?”

“I don’t know,” Althea began. Then she said, boldly, “Yee, it would. Ask who it is.”

It took courage; but Lorenzo was leaning forward to put the question, when the driver turned round upon them and said, “But if it a’n’t one thing it’s another, and I don’t suppose Saratoga’s any worse than any other place in the world-outside.”

He pronounced the last words slowly, hut with no apparent consciousness that they must have a peculiar effect with Lorenzo and Althea, who mutely shrank together at them. “You ought to let me fetch you here in the afternoon if you want to see life,” the driver went on, carelessly. “It’s a string of carriages going out one side, and a string coming in on the other. Or it is,” he added, more candidly, “in the season. It’s full early yet.”

It was Althea who commanded herself first. When the danger of discovery seemed past Lorenzo was still silent, but she began to talk and to ask the driver questions, which he answered, “Yes, ma’am,” and “No, ma’am,” with a crowing stress on the opening word that seemed personal to her at first, and then only personal to himself. But it was as if he had to he held in cheek continually from taking liberties, and it tasked all the severity Althea had learned in teaching the girls’ school at the Family to manage him. Lorenzo was no help to her; but she held her own, even upon ground so strange to her.

When they reached the wayside restaurant at the end of the lake, he said, Well, here they were, if they wanted to get a lemonade or anything; and he added to Lorenzo, “Be a dollar; I sha’n’t charge you anything extra for showin’ you round first, as I said.”

“I thought,” said Lorenzo to Althea, as they followed, passively, the lead of the waiter who was showing them to a table on the veranda of the house, “that it meant taking us back, too. Didn’t you, Althea?”

“Yee,” Althea whispered, in return. “But I’m glad it didn’t. I don’t believe I like him very much. We can take another carriage back.”

“Oh yee.”

They could see far up the lovely lake, from their table, and beyond a stretch of level the noble range of nearer uplands and farther mountains that frames the Saratoga landscape on the northward.

“It’s sightly, Althea,” Lorenzo murmured: and she answered in the same undertone, “Yee, it is.”

She spoke vaguely, for she was noticing the people who were sitting about at the other tables, and trying to make out what kind of people they were. There was one group of rather noisy girls, who had very yellow hair and bright cheeks, and who seemed to her like a bevy of harsh, brilliant birds; their eyes shone glassily when they turned to look at her. A family party of father and mother, and children who had to be constantly checked and controlled were at another table. At another still a pair in later-middle life, who sat at their half-eaten ices, seemed to be studying the rest, and Althea could feel that Lorenzo and she were peculiarly interesting to this pair.

“They are talking about us,” she said to Lorenzo.

“Well,” he returned, after a long draught of his lemonade — he had ordered that because the driver had mentioned lemonade— “they can’t say anything against you, Althea.”

“I wonder if they live in Saratoga,” she said.

“What makes you ask that?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, faintly, and she looked down. “Don’t you think they are very nice appearing?”

“Yee, I do,” said Lorenzo, after a moment. “We’ve got to ask somebody about a minister, I presume,” he mused aloud, “sooner or later.”

A quick red and white dyed and then blanched Althea’s face. “There’s no — hurry. I like keeping so, don’t you, Lorenzo?”

“Oh yee. But we can’t keep so always.”

“I do declare, when that fellow spoke up so about the world-outside I didn’t know which way to look. Althea, if you think those friends reside here, and it would do to ask tkem about a minister—”

“Nay,” she whispered back in a sudden panic, “you mustn’t!”

“Well, I won’t then.”

They had to pass the elderly couple in going out, and Althea heard the gentleman say to the lady: “It’s quite the nun look.”

“Yes. I don’t understand,” the lady answered. “Beautiful — lovely — pure! It’s like a child’s — an angel’s.”

They were both looking up the lake, where the little excursion steamer was coming in sight.

VI

Lorenzo and Althea found a number of carriages standing outside, but the drivers all said they were engaged. The driver wbo had brought them was sitting under a tree smoking. He waited for them to ask the others, and then he called out briskly to them, as if he had never seen them before, “Carriage?”

They looked at each other. “It would be too far to walk back,” Lorenzo suggested.

“It would dust this dress,” said Althea, “and I can’t seem to walk so well in these shoes.”

Lorenzo turned to the driver, who had now come up to them. “What will you charge to take us back to town?”

The driver reflected. “Well, I’ve got to go back pretty soon anyway. I’ll leave it to you.”

“If it was worth a dollar to bring us here,” said Lorenzo, firmly, “it’s worth a dollar to take us back; and it a’n’t worth any more.”

“All right,” said the man, and he jumped to his seat. “Where do you want I should leave you?” he asked, turning round to them when they were seated, while his sorrels started gayly off of themselves. “Leave you at Congress Park, if you say so. It’s central, and you could set down in there, and think what you wanted to do next.”

They felt an impertinence in his suggestion, but it expressed their minds, and Lorenzo assented with a stiff “All right.” He received some remarks of the driver’s so forbiddingly that he left them quite to themselves until they reached the park.

When they dismounted at the upper gate he took Lorenzo’s dollar with a certain hesitation. “I don’t know as I’d ought to charge you so much for just bringin’ you back.” He looked at them, and then suddenly turned upon Lorenzo: “Say, a’n’t you up from Lebanon? You’re Shakers, anyway!”

“Nay,” returned Lorenzo, angrily, “we are not.”

“Nays have it,” said the young fellow. Without looking round at them, he hollowed out his hands about the match he struck, and lighted a cigar at it while he drove up the street at a slow walk, with the lines held between his knees.

“Oh, Lorenzo,” cried Althea, “we are! You know we are! How could you say it?”

“Well, Althea, we a’n’t from Lebanon!”

“Oh, you know it wasn’t that you denied. We are Shakers. Run after him — run after him, and tell him so, no matter what happens!”

“Well, well! But just as you say, Althea. I don’t want to tell a lie any more than you do.”

Lorenzo started and ran up the street after the carriage, calling out, “Say! hello! Stop there a minute!” The driver stopped and looked round. Lorenzo did not give himself time to falter after he came up. “We are Shakers. Yee, we are! What is it to you?” he added, in defiance.

“Oh, nothing,” said the young fellow. “I’m from down around Lebanon myself. Been at the Family there many a time. Just wanted to see if you’d lie about it; always heard a Shaker wouldn’t lie.”

“Well, we’re not from Lebanon!” Lorenzo retorted, with futile resentment.

“All right,” said the driver. “Lookin’ for a minister?”

The answer seemed to fly out of Lorenzo’s mouth of itself: “Yee, we are.”

“I thought so,” said the driver. “Well, I know the whitest man in this town, and I can take you to him if you want to get married. Take you and the lady there, and it sha’n’t cost you a cent. Say!” He drew from his waistcoat-pocket the dollar bill which Lorenzo had just given him, and handed it to him. “You just take that, and if he a’n’t all I tell you, you keep it. I don’t want any man’s money without I earn it.”

“All right,” said Lorenzo, and he put the bill in his pocket and walked back to Althea in a kind of daze, while the carriage slowly followed. “Althea, he says he knows a good minister.”

“Get right in, lady,” said the driver. “If you’re all right, I guess you won’t feel but what he is. Well, I’ll tell you what! He’s the one — and he’s the only one — that’s got the gall to preach against hoss-racin’.”

He looked as if his words must carry conviction; the lovers were helpless before them, and they mounted to the place they had so lately left. The driver turned reassuringly to Althea again. “Now don’t you be anxious any. If you don’t like his looks you just come right out again, and I’ll take you anywheres else you want to go — and I know every minister in the place — and no extra charge.”

They had not even to go inside for the test the driver proposed. The minister himself answered Lorenzo’s ring; he pushed open the lattice door that opened outwardly, and scanned them from the threshold with a face that seemed kind and gentle as well as shrewd. Lorenzo and Althea looked at each other without being able to speak.

The driver spoke for them from his carriage, where he waited to see whether they should find the minister at home. “Good-morning, dominie! I want you to take care of these folks. Friends of mine.”

The minister looked up at him from under brows that frowned in the strong sunlight, and then laughed in recognition. “I hope they have some better recommendation. Will you walk in?” he asked of the young couple, and he held the door open for them to enter, and shut it upon them in the cool, dark entry, without further notice of the driver. Then he led them into a dim parlor, and when he had made a little more light in it by turning the slats of one of the blinds, he asked them if they would not sit down. He said he would be with them in a moment, and he went out, as if to still the clamor of children’s voices which made themselves heard from the rear of the house, and then were silent.

VII

ALTHEA clutched Lorenzo nervously by the coat-sleeve in the twilight of the parlor, and whispered, “Oh, Lorenzo, do you think we’d better?”

“Yee, I do, Althea. It would be ridic’lous to back out now. We’ve got to do it.”

“Yee, I presume we have. But not — not unless you wish it as much as ever you did!”

“I do, full as much. Don’t you, Althea?”

“Oh, yee — yee. Will it take — very long?”

“How should I know, Althea?”

“That is so. But I hope it won’t take long. I can’t seem to — get my — breath.”

“Now, Althea—”

“There! There he is! I shall behave, Lorenzo. But don’t you — don’t you try to deny anything if he asks you!”

“Nay, I won’t, Althea.”

The minister came in again, and Althea saw that he had a different coat on and a book in his hand. He sat down and faced them, gravely smiling, and pushed softly backward and forward in the rocking-chair he had taken. After waiting for them to speak, he asked, “Is there something I can do for you?”

He looked at Lorenzo, who glanced in turn at Althea; she met his eye with a mute reproach that made him speak.

“Yee, there is. We — we some thought of gettin’ — married.”

“Well,” said the minister, still smiling, “that is rather serious business, though people seem not to think so always. Do you live in this state?”

“Nay — or no, I should say. We are from Massachusetts.”

“Have you friends in Saratoga whom you would like to have present?”

“Nay, we are strangers here,” answered Lorenzo. “We just came this morning.” He looked at Althea for the reward of his honesty, but her eyes were fixed upon the minister.

“At all in a hurry?” asked the minister, with a smile.

“Some of a hurry,” Lorenzo asserted, and he drew a long, sighiug breath, as if to strengthen himself for further question.

The minister laughed a little. He was a tall, fair young man, with a light-colored mustache cut short along his lip. “I’m sorry for the hurry. I don’t think it’s the best way to get married. But if you’ve made up your minds—”

“Yee — yes, we have,” said Lorenzo, boldly. “Haven’t we, Althea?”

“Yee,” Althea answered, more faintly.

“It a’n’t any new thing or any sudden thing with us,” said Lorenzo. “We’ve thought it over, and we’ve talked it over, and we’ve made up our minds, fully. The only hurry that there’s been about it was our comin’ here, and that we had to do, to save feelin’, as much as anything. We no need to do it.”

Still Althea did not look at Lorenzo, but at a favorable change that passed over the minister’s face she gave a little sigh of relief.

“Well, that’s good,” said the minister. “I can marry you, of course, and I will, if you wish. But the step you are going to take is the most important step you can take in your whole lives. I like to have people realize that, before I help them to take it, and reflect that it is irrevocable. But if you are attached to each other you will wish it to be so,” he suggested, always smiling.

“Yee,” said Lorenzo.

“That is the theory,” continued the minister, and he looked at Althea, as if he felt that he could address a finer and higher intelligence in her. “But the strongest feeling is not always the surest guide. Would you like to go away for a little while, and ask yourselves and each other whether you are quite sure, and then come back?” He looked from one to the other kindly. Althea glanced at Lorenzo as if shaken. Lorenzo would not meet her eye.

“We’ve done that already. We know our minds now as well as we ever shall,” he said, with a kind of doggedness.

“Very well,” said the minister. “I thought I ought to suggest it. I must ask whether there is anything in the lives of either of you, or in your circumstances, which should cause you a conscientious scruple against entering the state of marriage.”

“Nay,” they answered together.

“I needn’t ask if you have either of you been married before or are now married?”

“Oh, nay,” they answered, and Lorenzo permitted himself the relief of a laugh at the notion. Althea smiled in sympathy.

“And your name?”

“Lorenzo Weaver.”

“The lady’s?”

“Althea Brown.”

The minister made a note of the names, and he said, “Is that driver a friend of yours?”

“Nay,” said Lorenzo, “we don’t know him.”

The minister laughed as if he enjoyed the rogue’s pretence of intimacy with them. “Well,” he said, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t proceed. As you have no friends of yonr own to be present, I will just call my wife to witness the ceremony.”

He went out again, and Althea murmured to Lorenzo in the twilight, “ Oh, I hope she’ll come soon!”

“I don’t believe but what she will,” he murmured back. He tried to take her hand, to reassure her, but she kept it from him.

“Because if she don’t,” she scarcely more than gasped, “I don’t believe I can bear it.”

Lorenzo was silent, as if he did not know what to answer, and they sat mute together in the dim room till the minister came back.

“My wife will be in directly,” he said, seating himself in the rocking- chair; “ she has to make some change in her dress;” and now he spoke to Althea more especially. “With you ladies everything in life seems an occasion for that.”

He smiled, and Althea smiled in mechanical response. “Yee,” she said.

The minister looked at her, and after a momentary hesitation he said, “May I ask why you use that form of speech. I notice that you both use it.”

Althea looked at Lorenzo, and he answered, bluntly, “We are Shakers.”

“Oh, indeed!” said the minister. “That is very interesting. I have never met any of your people before. You must excuse me if I say that I observed something peculiar in you at the first glance. But I supposed that the Shakers had a dress of their own.”

“Yee, we have — in the Family,” said Lorenzo; “but we got these things since we came into the world-outside.”

The minister said “Oh!” and Althea blushed with a consciousness that imparted itself to the whole texture of her pretty dress, and to the cherry ribbons on her breast and hat. “But don’t you use the plain language, and say thee and thou, like the Quakers?”

“Nay, we say Yee and Nay, ‘for more than this cometh of evil.’”

A sort of sectarian self-satisfaction, a survival of conditions he had abandoned, expressed itself in Lorenzo’s tone, and he was not apparently sensible of the irony in the minister’s “Oh, I see!” But Althea stirred as if she felt it.

“We only say so now,” she explained, “because we have the habit of it. We have no right to set ourselves above anybody else in the world-outside any more, as far as that goes.”

“Will you excuse me?” said the minister, with a burst of frankness. “But if it isn’t intrusive, I should like very much to know something about your Family life. You are communists, I believe?”

“Yee, we have all things common. There is not much to tell you. We all work and serve. I taught the school. Lorenzo was in the herb and seed shop; we put them up for sale.”

“But your religious life — your social life?”

“We believe in the Bible, but we believe that Ann Lee came after Jesus to fulfil his mission. We think that revelation continues to this day, and that we are always in communion with the spirit world. The spirits give us our hymns and our music.”

“I have heard something about it,” said the minister, “and about your dancing at your meetings.”

Lorenzo laughed with a little sectarian scorn. “That is about all that some folks in the world-outside think there is to it. That’s what they come to see, generally. And it a’n’t dancin’, to call it rightly. It’s more of a march.”

“I should like to see it,” said the minister. “But your distinctive social peculiarities besides your communism?”

Neither of the young people answered at once. At last Althea said, in a low voice, “We live the angelic life.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She was silent, and looked at Lorenzo. he answered, impatiently, “They don’t get married; they think they are as the angels in heaven.”

“Oh, indeed! Then—”

“That’s the reason we left them. If there had been any other way—” Lorenzo hesitated, and Althea took the word.

“We never should have left the Family as long as we lived. They took us when we were little, and they have taken care of us, and taught us, and done everything for us. They loved us, and we loved them. But—”

She stopped in her turn, and Lorenzo resumed, “Well, the whole story is, we got to feelin’ foolish about each other.”

“Do you mean,” and the minister suppressed a smile as he spoke, “that you fell in love?”

“Well, I presume you would call it that in the world-outside.”

“I see,” said the minister. “And as you could not be married there—”

They were all silent now till Althea asked, in a trembling voice, “Do you think — it is wrong for us to — get married?”

The minister roused himself from the muse he was falling into. “Not the least in the world! Why should I think so?”

“We tried to look at it in every light, but sometimes I am afraid we were blinded by our feelings for each other. We didn’t wish to be selfish about it, and it did seem as if our—”

“Being in love?” suggested the minister.

“Yee — was a kind of leading, and that we had as good a right to think that it was put into our hearts as any of the other things.”

“That is the way the world-outside regards it,” said the minister, with a smile that betrayed his relish of the phrase he had adopted. “We even go so far as to say that matches are made in heaven. I must confess that some of them don’t seem to bear out the theory.”

“But you think — you think that there is nothing wrong in marriage itself, even if folks are not always happy in it?” Althea pursued.

“Most certainly,” said the minister. “It’s often very bad; but at its worst it’s probably always the best thing under the circumstances.” He seemed to speak in earnest, but he kept his smile on Althea, as if her quaint seriousness amused him in its relation to the worldly gayety of her appearance. The spirit of a nun speaking from the fashions that Althea wore with as much grace as if she were born in them might well have appealed to a less imaginative sympathy. “Why do you ask? Were you taught that it was wrong in itself?”

“Nay — nay,” she faltered.

“They’re always talkin’ against it,” said Lorenzo, bitterly. “They say themselves that it’s all right in the earthly order; and yet they keep braggin’ up the gospel relation and the angelic life, and tellin’ you that Christ never got married; and I think it’s wore on her. I tried to convince her the best I could that Christ wouldn’t have gone to weddin’s if he hadn’t approved of ‘em, for all he didn’t marry.”

“Do you think he did approve of them?” she entreated, tremulously, of the minister.

“I think he did, indeed.”

“But if — Don’t his not marrying make it appear as if he thought it was of the earthly order?”

“There it is again!” cried Lorenzo. “She can’t seem to get past that! I tell her — and I don’t know how many times I’ve told her that we can’t all expect to lead the angelic life in this world.”

“We can if we choose,” she retorted, nervously, speaking to Lorenzo, but still intent upon the minister’s face.

“I don’t believe,” he said, “that we ought to study a literal conformity to the life of Jesus in everything; that is, we should not make his practice in such a matter an article of faith. I should say that if any one felt strongly appealed to by it, he would do well to follow it; but if he did not, he would not do well to follow it; and especially would not do well to enforce it upon others.”

“There! Didn’t I say so?” demanded Lorenzo of Althea. “Let everybody do according to his own conscience.”

“As long,” said the minister, “as Christ’s words do not explicitly condemn marriage—”

The voice of Althea broke in upon him, still tremulous but clear, and gaining firmness to the close: “And Jesus answering said unto them, the children of this world marry and are given in marriage; but they which shall he accounted worthy to obtain that world and the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage; neither can they die any more; for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection.”

The minister listened with a smile, as if her child-like fanaticism interested him like something of rare and peculiar quality, but he replied, with a certain touch of compassionate respect, “Is that the passage they ground their doctrine on? You know those are Luke’s words, and Luke had his facts at second-hand. The other gospels do not report the words of Jesus so, but even if Luke’s report were the most accurate, as it’s certainly the fullest, I should not take it literally. I have thought a good deal about that passage,” said the minister, “for I have to do a good deal of marrying and giving in marriage, and I read in it a deeper meaning than the face of the words bear. In a certain sense, marriage is both the death and the resurrection. If you will think about it, you will see that it is the very symbol of eternity in human life. All other human relations dissolve and end, but that endures imperishably. The family continually perishes through marriage, which creates it. Children are born to a wedded pair, and there is a family; they grow up and marry, and the family which they constituted ceases to be, as the family which their children shall constitute will cease to be. But the marriage of the father and mother remains to all eternity. If there is no giving in marriage beyond this life it is not in condemnation of marriage, but in recognition of the fact that it is from everlasting as well as to everlasting, like all things eternal.”

“There, Althea,” murmured Lorenzo; but the girl did not speak.

The minister went on, “The husband and the wife lay down their separate lives, and take up a joint life, which, if they are truly married, shall be theirs forever. There is no marrying after death, but heaven is imaged in every true marriage on earth; for heaven is nothing but the joy of self-giving, and marriage is the supreme self-giving. We call the ceremony ‘getting married,’ he pursued, expanding with a certain pleasure in his theme, which was not, perhaps, very relevant to it; “but the living together, the adjustment of temperaments, the compromise of opinions, the reconciliation of tastes, is what we should call ‘getting married.’ I should wish you to remember that marriage is the giving up of self. That is its highest meaning. If it is not that, it is something so low as to be the unworthiest of all human relations. If you do not give up yourselves, if you insist upon what you think your rights against one another, you will be yokemates of perdition, and your marriage will be a hell. I suppose it is the dread of something like this in marriage that has created the celibate sects in all times and in all religions. But marriage is properly the death of the individual, and in its resurrection you will rise not as man and woman, but as one pair, in the unity of immortal love. I declare,” he broke off, “I don’t know what’s keeping my wife. I’m detaining you an unconscionable time. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go—” He started from his chair, and made a movement towards the door.

Althea sprang to her feet, and put out her hand. “Nay!” she said, nervously, “don’t call her yet. Lorenzo — I — Don’t you believe we’d better take a little time to think — and come back? You could let us come back?” she entreated of the minister.

“Why, surely! Again and again, as often as you wish. Go and think it over; and if you still have any misgiving—”

“We haven’t any misgivings,” said Lorenzo, stoutly. “But if she wants to get her mind clear, I won’t be the one to hinder or hurry her.”

“That is the right spirit,” said the minister, and he offered the young fellow his hand. “I shall be here till twelve o’clock — it’s eleven now — and after that not till between four and five. I shall be glad to see you back, but if you don’t come — Good-morning!” He smiled cordially upon them at the lattice door, where he parted from them, and held it open for them to pass out.

VIII

THEY blinked in the strong sunshine, and walked dizzily down the bit of brick pavement to the gate, and then down the quiet street.

“I don’t know what you’ll say to me, Lorenzo,” Althea began.

Without looking round at her he answered, “You done right, Althea.”

“Oh, do you think so?” she quavered. “I did for the best; I thought we ought to talk it over more, and look into our minds and ask ourselves — I’m not sure that I see all these things in the light he did.”

“Seemed to me he gave us a pretty solemn talk,” said Lorenzo— “more than he’d any need to. Well, he said as much himself; I a’n’t criticisin’ him. I thought we had our minds made up. But I could see how he unsettled you by some of the things he said, and if you don’t think he made it out so very clear, after all, I want you should feel just right about it every way, Althea. We can come back this afternoon.”

“Lorenzo, if you say so, we will go back now — this minute!” she cried, passionately. “I didn’t draw back on my account any more than yours.”

“Nay, we’ll wait now awhile — or, any rate, till we see it in the right light. But I’ll tell you what, Althea: I think we’ve thought enough about it, and more than enough. What we want to do now is to think of something else, and let our marryin’ alone awhile. It’s like this, the way I view it it’s like a sum that you can’t do or work out anyhow; and you can beat yourself against it all day, and you can’t do it. But let it alone a spell, and come back after your mind’s rested, and you’ll find it’s done itself.”

“I do believe it’s so, Lorenzo,” said Althea, with a potential joy in her tone.

“Yee. And, Althea, I say, let’s forget all about it, and go round and enjoy ourselves. It’s about as fine a day as I ever saw, and it a’n’t likely we shall be back in Saratoga very soon again. There’s no use makin’ a poor mouth, and I don’t see as there’s any reason. You was feelin’ well enough before we went in there, and I guess nothing’s really happened to make us downhearted.”

He leaned over from his loftier height with a smile, and his shoulder touched hers. At the contact her hand glided out upon his arm, as if without her will, and rested there. She did not answer, but in a moment she halted him with a little pull. “Where are we going?”

He looked round and laughed. “Well, well! I declare if I thought. I guess we came down the street because it was easier than to go up.”

“I hope that isn’t going to be the way with us through life!” she said, and she looked round with a laughing face.

A young man driving a pair of light sorrels in a wood-colored surrey drew up in the middle of the road, and held his whip towards them. “Carriage?” he called out.

“Nay, we don’t want to ride,” Lorenzo began.

“Well, then,” said the driver, and he guided his team closer to them on the corner where they stood, “I guess I shall have to get that dollar from you.” He smiled benignly at the bewildered look Lorenzo gave him, and then laughed at his dawning consciousness.

“Well, well! I forgot all about it!” Lorenzo put his hand in his pocket, while Althea drew her hand from his arm; he took out the note and handed it to the driver.

“Dominie made it all right for you, then?”

Lorenzo tried to withdraw with dignity from the confidential ground taken with him. “I guess so,” he said, with dry evasion.

“Well, I thought so,” the driver exulted, “when you come out; and when I see her take your arm, I knowed there wasn’t a doubt about it. Say, why don’t you get in and let me take you to your hotel? It sha’n’t cost you a cent. You want to pull up at the Grand Union in style, if that’s where you’re goin’.”

Althea shrank in dismay from these preternatural intuitions, but it seemed to Lorenzo, though he felt her reluctance, that it would be better to accept the offer, and get rid of the fellow at the hotel door. He was afraid that otherwise he might follow them the whole way, and perhaps give a mortifying publicity to their adventure by trying to talk with them about it from the middle of the street. Besides, he did not know where the Grand Union was, and it seemed settled that they were to go there.

“I guess we better, Althea,” he suggested.

“Well, if you say so, Lorenzo.”

“Well, that’s right! Get right in,” said the driver. When they were seated and he turned about to arrange the linen lap-cloth over their knees, he laughed, for Althea’s pleasure, and said, “‘Now you’re married, you must obey, and mind your husband night and day,’ as the song says. Well, that’s the way it works for a while, anyhow. Then it’s the husband’s turn, and he takes a hack at obeyin’. Well, it’s all in a lifetime, as I tell my wife. Didn’t think I was married? How did you suppose I was on to you so quick? Been there myself. Got the nicest little wife in this town. But I guess I should ha’ known what you was after, anyway. Lots o’ couples come to Saratoga to get married in a hurry. It’s all right! Did the dominie ask you some hard questions? He does oftentimes, and if he can’t feel just right about it, he won’t splice you. I’ve had to take more than one couple to another shop. But he’s all right, the dominie is! Tell him what you was?”

“We no need to feel ashamed of anything,” said Lorenzo, resentfully.

“Well, that’s so. That’s what the dominie likes. I could tell you some pretty tough stories about the couples I’ve had to hunt round for a minister with.”

Lorenzo wished to say something that would put a stop to the fellow’s talk, but Althea pressed his arm as a sign for him not to answer, and he forbore.

The driver seemed to interpret their silence aright. “Well,” he said, “it’s a pleasure to strike the right sort of couple, and I guess that’s what the dominie thought too. He’s all right. Didn’t I tell you he was a white man? Well, he is.” Though his words ran so freely, the driver suffered from a poverty of ideas which now seemed to make itself apparent even to himself, and he fell silent before they reached the hotel. “Here we are,” he said, when he pulled up in front of it at last.

Lorenzo and Althea sat staring at the great hostelry’s facade, with the upward sweep of its portico in front of them, the wide stretch of its verandas southward, and northward the glitter of the shops and offices under it. Men were going and coming up and down the steps of the portico, and they thronged the office within, and stretched in groups along the verandas, with their feet on the railing; they were smoking and talking together. Here and there one sat alone, with his cigar sloped upward and his hat-brim sloped downward almost to the point of meeting.

There were very few women to be seen, and Lorenzo hesitated, with a glance at Althea. The driver tried to encourage him.

“You want to go right through the inside piazza, and get the rest of the concert; it a’n’t over yet. And you can register just as well afterwards; you won’t have any trouble about rooms so early in the season.” They dismounted anxiously, and stood looking up into the hotel. “There!” said the driver. “I guess they’re goin’ in. You just follow them, and you’ll be all right.” he pointed at a group of ladies who were mounting the steps, and then drove away. The ladies pushed fearlessly into the hotel, and Althea followed with Lorenzo. The place was full of men talking and smoking, like those outside, and she missed the shelter of the deep Shaker bonnet where she could have hid her face from the glances that seemed to seek it from all sides. She knew that her cropped hair must look strange under her gay hat, and she wanted to ask Lorenzo whether it looked so very strange; but he was intent upon finding a way between the groups and keeping those ladies in sight. The noise of shuffling feet and rippling dresses confused her, and the vastness of the place awed her; through a doorway on one hand she caught a glimpse of a long room with splendors of upholstery and furnishing, under shining chandeliers and deep mirrors; and then suddenly they reached a wide open doorway, and at the same moment there burst through upon them a joyous tide of music that seemed to Althea almost to sweep her from her feet, and made her cling closer to Lorenzo.

On either side of the doorway beautifully dressed women sat listening, or whispered with the haughty-looking men beside them, and before her tall, slim pines shot up from the levels of a wide lawn, and a fountain, set round with broad-leaved plants, gushed into the sunshine that their boughs sifted upon it. On the pathways that intersected each other under the trees nearer and farther pairs of young men and women strayed together to the limits of the high, many-windowed walls that enclosed the landscape.

“Lorenzo, Lorenzo!” she murmured, as they found places among the company that they seemed to be an accepted part of, “do you believe that we’re awake?”

“Yee, I guess we are at last, Althea. Do you like it?” he whispered back, with a lover’s pleasure in her pleasure; he involuntarily took credit for it as if he had created it.

“I feel as if I had just come to life,” she whispered. “Oh, how could it all have been, and we not know it!”

“I guess,” he exulted, “there are a good many things in the world-outside that are never heard of in the Family. Do you feel now as if it was wrong?”

She saw the same look in his eyes that she knew he saw in hers. “Nay, that’s all gone. I shall never think so any more.”

Her hand found his at their side, and they sat with their fingers knitted together in the shelter of her drapery that flowed over them. The music that thrilled from the viols and violins, and breathed cool and piercing from the flutes and flageolets, seemed to claim Althea for the earth, and to fill her heart with a bliss of living. It liberated her from the fear that had been lurking in the bottom of her heart. It silenced that dull nether ache of doubt; it flattered and promised; it lured her out of the prison of herself, and invited her to be of its own ecstasy.

IX

WHEN the piece ended a sweet, high pipe of a voice behind them said, “Won’t you have a programme?” and Althea was aware of a little white hand dangling a printed leaf at her shoulder. She looked round and confronted a young girl, with bright, joyful eyes, and a smile of radiant happiness on her lips. she was very fair, with hair of pale yellow, which loosed itself from the mass in rings and tendrils at her temples and about her neck, and sunnily misted her uncovered head. She wore a light-blue dress, and in her lap lay a hat of yellow straw, with blue cornflowers knotted among its ribbons. “Mamma has one,” she explained to Althea’s look of question and reluctance, “and we don’t need them both;” and she glanced at the elder lady in black beside her, who nodded a silent assent.

Althea took the programme provisionally, with some halting thanks, and the girl showed, with a deeply jewelled finger, where the musicians had got in it. She included Lorenzo, who was looking round at her, too, in the same hospitable smile. At the end of the next piece Althea offered to restore the programme, but she made her keep it, and she began to talk to her. She asked her if she did not think the music was too lovely for anything, and whether she had heard the music at the other hotels. She contended that it did not sound half so well there, and that it was everything to hear it in such a beautiful place. She asked Althea if she ever saw such a beautiful place, and she said that she did not believe that there was such a beautiful place anywhere. She made her look at the fountain, and while Althea was looking at it she knew the girl was looking at her hat and her dress.

At the end of the second piece she seemed to have gone much further with Althea in her mind. She leaned forward to ask, “Don’t you just love Saratoga? We’ve been here a week, and I don’t believe we can ever get enough of it. You won’t mind my talking to you, will you, without being introduced? When you came through the door, I said to mamma, ‘Well, there’s one person that I have simply got to know; and when you came and sat down right in front of us, it did seem too much! Of course it must seem very unceremonious, and I shouldn’t do so to every one. Do you mind?”

Althea contrived to get in that she did not, between this question and the next, but the girl seemed not to care much for her answers. “Have you ever been in Saratoga before? I think everything is so romantic here, and perfect. We didn’t expect to stay so long, but” — she put on a sudden state as she said so— “we’ve been detained by business. My husband had to go back to New York on business. He’s with Stroud & Malkim there.” She looked at Althea as if for an effect of the firm’s name npon her, and added, “Curtains, you know. We did intend to go up to Lake George and Lake Champlain and to Montreal, but I shouldn’t care if we spent every bit of the time in Saratoga. Are you staying in this hotel?”

Althea looked at Lorenzo. “Yee — es. We are going to as soon as—”

The music began again; it was the last piece, and when it ended most of the people about them rose and dispersed; but certain of them waited till they could get away without being crowded, and her new friend leaned forward to advise Althea to wait till the jam was over.

Lorenzo said, “I guess you better, Althea, and I might as well go aud register. I won’t be gone but a little while, and if you’ll stay right here I can easily find you again.”

“Just as you say, Lorenzo,” said Althea, but she looked up at him a little wistfully.

“Oh, we’ll chaperon her!” cried their new friend, gayly; and as soon as Lorenzo left his chair she laid her hat upon her own, and slipped into the place next Althea. “Now you needn’t tell me if you don’t want to, but I just know you’re on your wedding journey! When you first came in, arm in arm, I told mamma I bet you were.” She curled her lip in over her teeth, and questioned Althea with her gay eyes; then she flashed out: “You are, I know it! Oh, I wish George was here! George — that’s my husband, and he’s the nicest fellow! Well, I wish you could see him; he’ll be here to-night, too. I should like our husbands to get acquainted. I think yours is awfully nice-looking; he ought to have a mustache; he would look splendid in a mustache. I tell George his mustache is too big for anything. There he is!” She pulled a little watch from her belt, and sprung it open; on the inside of the case was the head of a young man, which filled it so full that the ends of his mustache extended invisibly into space beyond it. “Don’t you think he’s good-looking?”

“Yee, I do,” said Althea; but she did not think him so good-looking as Lorenzo.

The young wife did not wait for an answer; she pressed the pictured face to her lips, snapped the case to, and tucked the watch back in her belt. “It’s taken right on the case; they do that now, and it’s so much nicer than pasting the photograph. George gave it to me before we were married. Well, he had to hurry up; we didn’t have a very long courtship. We got acquainted on the cars, and he said that the minute he set eyes on me he knew I was the girl he was going to marry. It was a perfect novel, from beginning to end; and I don’t care what they say, but I know that the course of true love does run smooth, sometimes. It didn’t have a single hitch with us ; but I didn’t suppose we should be separated this way, right in the first week of our honeymoon. George says it’s good practice, though; he’s got to be on the road so much; and I’ve got to be left with mamma, and I might us well begin early; I’ve almost talked her to death about him already.” She seemed to be reminded to look round for her mother; the older woman had made her escape for the moment. “Oh, there she is, by the fountain. She’s just as fond of George as I am, and she’s going to live with us when we get our flat in New York; we’re going to board awhile first. Is your husband travelling?” She had to explain that her own husband went about over the country getting orders for the house of Stroud & Malkim, and she apparently forgot what she asked, for she followed her question up with another, not waiting for an answer. “Have you been to any of the stores in Saratoga yet? They have lovely things, and so cheap.” She looked hard at Althea’s costume.

“I got this dress and hat here this morning,” Althea said.

The other clapped her hands. “I just told mamma you did! Did you get them at that place under the hotel, a little way up?”

“I guess so,” Althea assented. “I didn’t notice exactly.”

“Well, if I ever knew anything like it! I do believe it’s the very dress George and I looked at yesterday, and I know I saw that hat in the window. They’re real imported, the woman said, and they’re dreams, both of them. George would have got them for me if they’d been my style. They’re killing on you.”

X

LORENZO found himself before the great hotel register, which one of the clerks had wheeled round towards him. When he had fancied inscribing himself and Althea as Lorenzo Weaver and Wife, it had been very simple; but it suddenly came to him that they were not married, and that he could not truthfully call her his wife. He stood leaning over the register, and he was aware of the clerk waiting impatiently. He had said that he wished to register, and he was not doing so.

The clerk said severely, and, Lorenzo felt, disdainfully, “Let this gentleman register, please,” and then he was aware of some one standing behind him. A large, flourishing-sort-of-looking man, with a shawl on his arm and a bag in his hand, which he put down when Lorenzo moved aside, wrote with the pen which the clerk dipped into the ink and offered him, “J. M. Bayne and Lady,” in a rapid, authoritative hand, and the clerk said, “Room, Mr. Bayne?” And the man answered, “No; dinner. We’re going on to Lake George in the afternoon. Like to check the things.” Aud the clerk answered, “Opposite desk, please.” And a black call-boy ran up and took the shawl and bag, aud the man went away, and left Lorenzo to the register again. The man had solved the problem for him, and he wrote “Lorenzo Weaver aud Lady.” If Althea was not his wife, she was certainly, in the parlance of the world-outside, a lady, and this seemed a safe way out of the trouble.

“Dinner?” asked the clerk, who came back to him when he looked up from the register.

“Nay — no, I guess I will have a room. But we do want dinner,” said Lorenzo. At the word he was sensible of being hungry.

The clerk wrote a number and an initial against Lorenzo’s name, and then he asked,

“Baggage?”

“What?” said Lorenzo.

“Any trunks or traps to go to your room?”

“Oh, they haven’t come yet. We left our things at the stores till we could make up our minds which hotel—”

“Ten dollars,” said the clerk, abruptly. Lorenzo did not know why he said this, but he stood waiting behind the register, and it came to Lorenzo that he was asking ten dollars of him, and he took out his money and paid it rather tentatively. The clerk took the money, and said, as he laid it in a drawer, “We have to get it in advance where there’s no baggage. Like to go to your room?”

“I guess we’ll have some dinner first,” said Lorenzo. He had decided that he would not try to answer yes or no to anything, for fear he should say yee or nay, and he found it easy to begin always with a guess.

“Early dinner from one to three,” said the clerk. “Go in any time you like.” He did not seem so unkind now as at first; he even smiled a little in looking at Lorenzo, as if now he had fathomed his hesitation in registering, and imagined him to have had the newly married man’s embarrassment in declaring his condition so publicly for the first time. He even added, “Dining-room right through the parlor,” and then he turned finally away.

Lorenzo went back to the place where he had left Althea. She was not there, and his heart gave a leap of alarm. He looked all round, whirling about, and searching the long verandas with eyes which he could not keep from being anxious.

Far off, almost at the end of the grove, two ladies — one in white and one in blue — were walking. At the moment he caught sight of them they stopped, and the one in blue began to wave her handkerchief as if she were signalling to him. Then he saw that it was Althea with that young woman who had taken his place beside her; it was she who was waving to him. She had Althea by the arm, and was leaning forward, as if talking rapidly up into her face. He went out to meet them, advancing shyly; and as soon as he came within hearing the young woman screamed at him, “Were you scared? Did you think some one had run away with her?”

Lorenzo was ashamed to own that he had been frightened. He said, “I guess so;” and that seemed to pass for a joke with the young woman, who bowed herself forward, and then threw herself backward in the fit of laughter that seized her at his words. She walked mincingly, and she hung her disengaged hand at her side with her handkerchief always in it, which she now pressed to her eyes, as if to wipe away her tears of laughter. She realized to Lorenzo all that he had ever dreamed of fashionable splendor in the world-outside. Her dress was beautiful, and so was her hat, which she wore at a saucy slant on her little golden head.

Althea blushed as they approached, but she merely said, “We thought you would see us; but we were coming back anyway.”

“Oh, this is the best joke!” the young lady cried, beginning to laugh again. “I shall tell George about this the very first thing when I see him. I guess he wouldn’t have been scared. He knows I couldn’t be induced to run away from him. We did give you a scare, didn’t we? Poor Mr. Brown!”

Lorenzo stared and said, “My name is Weaver.”

“Why, your wife said it was Brown,” the young lady began, in a tone of injury. Then she burst out laughing again. “Oh, I see!” She turned to Althea. “You forgot you were married, and you told me your maiden name. Oh, that is too good! When I tell George about this! But it isn’t the least bit surprising. I’ve been married nearly a whole week, and I believe if I didn’t keep saying my married name over to myself all the time, I shouldn’t realize yet that I was married. But the only way is to keep saying it; and I write it too: Mrs. George Cargate, Mrs. George Cargate. If you don’t do it, you’ll get into all sorts of scrapes. Well, Mr. Weaver, I am going to be awfully good now, and leave you to yourselves; I can see that you’re just dying to be together.” She drew her arm out of Althea’s, and then seized her by both wrists. “Oh, you are just too sweet for anything! That cherry red does become you so, and it’s just the same shade here, and here, and here!” She touched the knot on Althea’s hat, the knot on her breast, and the dimple on her check; and then, with a cry of laughter, she broke from them and ran down the path to the hotel.

Lorenzo and Althea stood abashed in each other’s presence. “Well, well!” he said, at last.

“I presume we do not understand their ways yet,” said Althea. “She seems to mean well; but she seems to let herself go a good deal, even for the world-outside.”

“Oh yes,” Lorenzo assented; “I presume she don’t mean any harm by it. I’d rather see a person more settled.”

They were walking demurely side by side towards the hotel, and she cast an upward, sidewise look at him. “You wouldn’t like to have me start off now with a little scream and run after her, yonder?”

“Nay,” said Lorenzo, soberly, “I should not Althea.” Something ascetic showed in his kind young face; the potentiality of Shaker eldership passed like a cloud-shadow over it. “I don’t like such behaving. Did you tell her — did you make her understand — that we were not married yet?”

“Nay, there was no time for that,” answered Althea; “I had to let her go on talking to me, as if we were.”

“Yee,” said Lorenzo.

“We had to let that driver think so too,” she pursued.

“Oh yee,” said Lorenzo, with a sigh; and he thought how he had let the hotel people think so by the entry he had made; but he did not tell Althea of that. “I presume,” he said, with another deep breath, “that it is not deceiving unless we mean to deceive. It will be all right as soon as we are married.”

“We promised not to talk of that yet,” said Althea.

“Yee. Not till you say so. I guess it’s about dinner-time now.”

“Oh, well, then, let us go right in. I am hungry. It is a long time since we had breakfast.”

XI

AT the door of the dining-room, where Lorenzo gave his hat to a man who was taking hats and putting them on long shelves, they stopped.

“My short hair will show,” Althea whispered, with her hands up to the elastic that held her hat on. “Shall you mind if it makes them look?”

“Oh nay, not if you don’t,” and he flushed a little, thinking how pretty she was, with her hands up so.

“I presume they will think it is queer. I don’t know exactly what to do, Lorenzo.”

They stood staring into the vast dining-room in a hesitation that grew painful. Rows of small tables stretched away in long perspective, with one wide avenue dividing them, and aisles penetrating their multitude crosswise and lengthwise. The china and glass and silver glittered, the napery shone, and the black waiters in white linen jackets ran to and fro seating and serving the guests, who were there already in great number. They kept pressing in around Lorenzo and Althea where they stood. An old, gray-headed negro received them with severe state as they entered, and waved his hand to one of his subordinates, who beckoned to the guests and ran down the dining-hall before them to some table where he pulled out chairs for them to be seated.

“Well, well!” said Lorenzo, in vague response to Althea’s perplexity; and he turned about without hope of help, but merely to gain time, when his eyes met the gay eyes of that young woman coming forward with her silent mother.

“Oh, are you going to have early dinner, too?” she called to him, and her voice made Althea turn round. “We are, just to pass away the time; we have got to do something till George comes. I’ve just got a despatch from him — he telegraphs twice a day — and only think! He won’t be here till to-morrow morning. Isn’t it a shame? I don’t know what I’m going to do to live through it. Why don’t you go in?” she asked Althea, as she put her hand through her arm. “We can go in together, I suppose; but there are no seats at our table, and they’ll be sure to put you somewhere else, they’re so obstinate. What are you waiting for?” She seemed to note something unusual now in their delay, and she addressed her question to Lorenzo.

“It’s her short hair,” he began; and in spite of Althea’s “Oh, Lorenzo!” he went on, “ It’ll show so when she takes her hat off.”

“Well, don’t take it off, then!” cried the young woman. “Half of them are going in with their hats and bonnets on, don’t you see?”

“Yee — es,” said Lorenzo. “But we didn’t know—”

“I guess you can do what other people do. Why did you cut it off? Was it sickness? I had a fever once when I was little, and I had to have my head shaved. George says he wishes he could have seen me.” She was pressing into the room with her hand in Althea’s arm, and the stately negro stopped them with a bow that made her drop her hand. “There! I suppose they’ll put you off somewhere by yourselves. I think everything is too provoking to-day! But I’ll see you just as soon as we’re through dinner.” She went gayly off with her mother, and an airy waiter went down, and in and out of the tables, in a series of dancing positions, till he had led Lorenzo and Althea almost the whole length of the hall, and pulled out two chairs for them where they were to sit, and snapped his fingers to another waiter, who came forward to wait upon them. They were red with shame and fear, but under his friendly smile they began to feel more at their ease. They did not know what to ask for, and they let him choose their dinner, which he brought in splendid profusion, and put before them with affectionate hospitality, which, after he had served their dessert, began to suffer a chill eclipse. He went and stood gloomily against the wall with folded arms.

“I can’t think what it is comes over them all, Althea,” said Lorenzo. “I believe I shall ask that young woman when we get back to the parlor and have a chance to speak to her.”

He had not to wait so long. The young woman made her way to them from her distant table before they rose from theirs, and took a vacant seat beside Althea. When Lorenzo told how strangely the sleeping-car porter and the restaurant waiter and now this waiter had behaved towards the end, she laughed, and said, “Why, it must be the tip. Did you give them something.”

“What for?”

“For waiting on you.”

“I thought they were paid for that.”

“Well, they are. But they always expect something extra, George says.”

“Well, well!” said Lorenzo. “How much had I ought to give?”

“Well, George says — of course, I don’t know anything about it myself — George says he always gives them five dollars to begin with, and that makes them pleasant; but if they don’t look after him well after that he don’t give them anything more.”

Lorenzo took out his money, which he had all in one roll of bills, and peeled off a five-dollar note, which he held out towards the waiter. The waiter rushed upon it. When he recognized its value he burst into a joyous effervescence of thanks; he begged them to let him bring them something else, and overwhelmed them with finger-bowls and superfluous service; he went down on his knees under the table, to see if they had not dropped something; he said that he would be sure to keep those seats for them as long as they stayed; and he said he would speak to the head-waiter, so that they should not be shown elsewhere.

“Yes, I guess that was it,” said the young woman, when they had got away from him, and were walking up the wide avenue towards the door together. She had her hand through Althea’s arm again, and she talked to Lorenzo over her pretty shoulder, which she drew a little forward as she moved. “I guess you’ve fixed him. And now, Mr. Weaver, I’m going to ask a great favor of you. I want you to lend me your wife a little while. I want her to go shopping with me for an hour or so. I can’t think of any other way to put in the time, and if I don’t do something I shall simply go stark, staring, raving mad without George here. The stores in Saratoga are awfully nice, and I’ve seen a lot of things that I want to get, and I know Mrs. Weaver has seen things too that she wants.”

“N — no,” Althea began. “I have got everything. I don’t want—”

“Now that is all nonsense,” said the young woman. “You tell her it is, Mr. Weaver! I know she’s dying to get something; and you give her a lot of money, won’t you? It’s your wedding journey, you know, and of course you expect to waste a little, and then economize after you settle down. That’s what George says.”

“Why, Althea, there may be something you need,” Lorenzo suggested.

“Now I ain’t going to have it that way!” the young woman pouted. “She’s going to get what she wants, whether she needs it or not. That’s the way I tell George I’m going to do, and I shall make the money fly, and he had better look out to get plenty of it. It drives mamma almost crazy to hear me talk, and she always takes his part against me.”

“Do you want I should go, Lorenzo?” asked Althea; but there was a latent light in her eye, that pleaded when her words would not.

“Why, yee,” said Lorenzo.

“Is that your pet way of saying yes?” asked the young woman. “I think it’s awfully nice to have those pet words just between yourselves. George and I, we say yep, and nop, just for fun, you know, like children. Well, now, give her the money, Mr. Weaver, and we’ll be back in the parlor about four o’clock, for I’m going to make an afternoon of it, and we’re not going to have you round. You can go off and sit in the park — Congress Park, right over there — and listen to the music, or you can go off shopping for yourself if you want to. Mrs. Weaver, I want you to come up to my room while I get my walking-dress on, and I want you to see my trousseau. There’s one imported dress — present from George — that is the dreamiest thing! By-by!” She waved her hand over her coquettishly shrugged shoulder, and without looking at Lorenzo again she pulled Althea away with her.

XII

LORENZO sat in the park till he was tired; then he went about to the different shops where they had left things, and carried them to the hotel himself. He had to wait half an hour in the hotel parlor before Althea and the young woman came in. The young woman said she was dead tired, and she knew they were just dying to be together, and she ran off and left them.

“Lorenzo,” said Althea, “can I go over and sit in that place where you have been staying? I want to talk with you. Can we talk there?”

“Why, yee. It’s a very quiet place now; the people nearly all went away when the band stopped.”

At the gate of the park Lorenzo stopped and bought admission tickets from the man at the window.

“Why, do you have to pay to go in?” demanded Althea.

“I found out I did when I tried to go in without,” said Lorenzo. “You have to pay for pretty much everything in the world-outside.”

“Oh, the world-outside, the world-outside!” cried the girl.

They walked along without speaking till they came to a seat where a recession in the high shaded bank made a special seclusion. They sat down, and Althea took from the belt of her dress a little roll of bank-notes and handed it to Lorenzo. “There is your money, Lorenzo — what is left of it. I spent some. I don’t know how much. I am not used to counting it.”

Lorenzo put the money in his pocket without looking at it. “Nay, we’re neither of us much used to that, Althea. Did you get what you wanted?”

“I got what she said I ought to get; I got a travelling-dress! I told them to send the things to the hotel.”

“Yee. And I went round to the places where we left our things this morning and got them.”

“I had forgotten about those things,” said Althea, dreamily. Lorenzo laughed vaguely, and she turned abruptly upon him, with a start from her absence. “Do you know what time it is, Lorenzo?”

“It has been rather of a long day, Althea, and I guess you must have felt it so too. It seems to me, we’ve been about so, that it was back in the last century some time when we got out the cars this morning.” He pulled his watch out, a large silver one, and he said, with an air of pride, as her eye fell upon it, “Friend Nason thought I better get it, seeing I never had one before, and he went with me to the jeweller’s. It’s a Swiss one, and it cost twelve dollars; he said it was full as good as an American one that would have cost me twenty.” She seemed not to notice it, and he added, with a little disappointment, “It’s half-past four.” She did not say anything. He closed the case of his watch with a snap, and put it back in his pocket. “I was just thinkin’,” he went on, in a smiling muse, “how this light lays along the slope of the upper pasture at the Family. Strikes over the top of the hill and slants along down; and it gets to be evening there, I guess, as much as an hour before it does in the lower pasture and the garden.” He closed his eyes to a fine line. “I can see how it looks as plain as if I was there now. Rufus is comin’ up the cow-path to look after the cows and drive ’em down to the barn; and I can see Elder Thomas there, waitin’ with the boys to see ’em milk, and show ‘em. It’s just about the time your school lets out, and you’re walkin’ over to the Church Family house, and the children — Well, it’s kind of peaceful there! And it’s sightly. It’s full as sightly here, I guess, and now the band’s stopped it’s peaceful too.” The delicious breeze that had been freshening ever since morning was at its sweetest now; it sang through the tops of the tall, slim oaks of the park, and sighed in the clump of pines where they were sitting. Lorenzo paused, as if he hoped for some sympathetic response from Althea, and then he said, “But I like that upper pasture. I guess the thrushes are beginning to tune up about now in the wood-lot there. I sha’n’t forget how you used to look comin’ up by the walk, kind of bendin’ forward, and lookin’ for wild strawberries, with the little girls in the afternoons, a little later on—”

She broke in upon him with a sudden harshness: “Lorenzo, what was it made you feel foolish about me in the first place?”

Lorenzo kept the smile that was left from his muse, though Althea had spoken so strangely. “I don’t know as I can remember the beginning exactly.”

“Yee, you can, Lorenzo! There must have been a time when you began to feel foolish. Think!”

“Why, I told you, Althea. It was one day when I saw you in the march at meetin’, and the way you stepped off, and the way you turned at the corners, and the way you carried your head. I always used to watch you; but that day I seemed to be following you round, as if I was drawed by a rope, and I couldn’t get away if I tried.”

“Was that what made you foolish about me?”

“It wasn’t all. I don’t know as I ought to tell you, Althea, but I thought you had beautiful eyes, and there was something about your mouth when you spoke or smiled, and your voice — there was something about that, when I picked it out in the singing; that seemed to go through me. I can’t express it exactly.”

“Was that all?”

“Well, I don’t know as you want me to speak of it—”

“Yee, yee!” she besought him, passionately. “Tell me everything, speak of everything!”

“I thought — I thought you had a nice figure, Althea; I told you that last night. Your dress was the same as the rest, but it didn’t look the same on you. It was sightlier, and graceful. There, I don’t feel anyways sure it’s right to speak of such things, but you wanted I should.”

“Yee, I wanted you should. And now I am going to tell you what made me feel foolish about you. It was because you were so tall and strong-looking, and you had pretty eyelashes, and your hair had such a wave in it when it was long; and your mouth curved so at the corners, and you had such a deep voice. And you were so handsome; and once when we all went berrying, and I hurt my foot, and you lifted me over the wall—”

“I remember,” said Lorenzo, joyfully, shyly.

“I didn’t want you to put me down. Do you despise me for it?”

“Althea!”

“You were afraid I despised you for thinking I had a pretty figure.” Lorenzo was silent, as if he did not know what to say.

“We’ve been over this before, Althea,” he spoke, at last.

She did not heed what he said, apparently. “That young woman, that Mrs. Cargate, has been telling me all about her love affairs, as she calls them. She was engaged three times before she got married. She says she has been in love with lots of men.”

“Well; well!” said Lorenzo.

“And she has got their pictures, and they have got hers. She asked me if I had been engaged before. She says it’s nothing to be engaged. She says that her husband says he first felt foolish about her when he saw her through the car-window eating candy and carrying on, as she calls it, with some other girls; and it was her regular teeth, and red lips when she was eating, that made him feel so.”

“It’s kind of — sickish,” said Lorenzo.

“He came into the car, and he made an excuse to sit down by her when the other girls left, and she let him have a chance to squeeze her hand — he didn’t know that she let him—”

“Don’t, Althea!”

“And before she got out they were as good as engaged; she was dead in love with him, she says, from the first look, and he sent her his picture as soon as he got to New York.”

“Well, well!”

“Her mother was opposed to her getting engaged again because she thought it was just another flirtation, and she had got sick of having her engaged so much. She told me just why she fell in love with each one, and what each one said he fell in love with her for.”

“It don’t seem exactly right,” said Lorenzo. “She must have made you about sick with her talk.”

“Her mother didn’t like him when he first called — they promised to correspond before she got off the cars, and she told him where she lived — but she took to her bed, and her mother had to consent. Now her mother likes him as much is she does. They’re the greatest friends, and when he found that he would have to go back to New York from here he kept it a secret from her and telegraphed for her mother to come up and stay with her, and she never knew anything about it till her mother came into the room.”

“Well, it seems to have come all right, then,” said Lorenzo, with a vague optimism but he moved uneasily under Althea’s eye, and his smile faded.

“From all that I can make out,” she said, “they fell in love with each other for the same things, or just about the same, as we got foolish about each other for. He thought she was handsome, and she thought he was handsome. Lorenzo, they fell in love with each other’s looks!”

Lorenzo waited a moment before he said, with a certain reproach, “I thought you was smart too, Althea — smarter than I was.”

“And I knew you were good, Lorenzo. But it didn’t begin with that.”

“Nay, it didn’t begin with that,” he owned.

“If it had begun with that,” she went on, “I shouldn’t ever have doubted about it for a second. It’s the way it began that makes me afraid of it.”

“I never saw it in that light before,” said Lorenzo.

She drew a little away from him, and looked at him askance. “How do I know but I was trying to make you feel, all the time in the march, that I was graceful? How do I know but what I just thought my foot hurt, so that you would have to carry me—”

“Now, look here, Althea, that young woman has made you blame yourself for nothin’. You’re perfectly notionate about it—”

She caught his hand where it lay next her on the seat, and pressed it nervously, piteously. “Try to think back — far back, Lorenzo — and see if there was not something different in your mind that made you foolish about me before you noticed that I was — sightly. See if you didn’t think I was bright first. I shouldn’t want them to say in the Family that we were taken with each other’s looks.”

Lorenzo thought, as he was bid. “Nay, I guess it was the looks first, as far as I went,” he said, faithfully. “It was afterwards that I thought you was smart.”

“Oh!” she said, and a little gush of tears came into her eyes.

They were both silent for a time, and then Lorenzo said, “I know it seems kind of demeanin’, but I don’t know as you can say it’s wrong exactly. I presume it’s the way that folks have begun to feel foolish ever since — there was any folks. And I presume the looks must have been given to us for some good purpose?” He suggested rather than asserted this, with his eyes fastened tenderly upon Althea’s face, which, blurred with tears as it was, was still so pretty. She wiped her eyes with the handkerchief he had bought her that morning, and then tucked it, with a little vivid, graceful motion, into the waist of her dress.

When he began again it was with more confidence, more authority of tone. “The way I think we had ought to look at it is this: It’s the body that contains the soul, and the body is outside of the soul, and it comes first, and it has a right to, as long as it’s outside the soul. It can’t help it, and the soul can’t help it. But I believe we shall find each other in the soul more and more.”

“Do you really think that, Lorenzo?”

“Yee, I do, and I wouldn’t say it just to comfort you.”

“I know you wouldn’t, Lorenzo. You are true — truer than I am.”

She rose, and they walked silently out of the park together. Beyond the gate he asked her, “Where would you like to go now, Althea?”

“To the minister’s,” she said.

Lorenzo arrested her in a panic. “Not unless you want to go there of your own accord, Althea.”

“I do.”

“Do you feel as if I had coaxed you to do it — hurried you any ?”

“Nay, you always do what you say you will do. If I only felt as sure of myself as I do of you!”

“Oh, I do!” said Lorenzo. “I presume,” he continued, as if from the necessity of finding a reason for her conclusion, “you’ll feel full better about lettin’ that driver and the young woman think we’re married if we really are married.”

“Nay, what difference does that make now?” she demanded, scornfully.

“I don’t know as it does a great deal,” he assented.

“If we’re like the world-outside in one thing, we must be like it in all,” she said.

Lorenzo did not answer.

XIII

IT was the minister himself again who opened the lattice door to them. “Oh, here you are back. I am glad to see you. Well, have you made up your minds?” He spoke while they were getting through the entry into his dim parlor, with a tone of pleasantry.

Althea took the word. “Yee, we have made up our minds.”

“And you really intend to get married this time?” He looked at Lorenzo.

“Yee, we do.”

“I suppose you’ve thought it over thoroughly. I wish all the young people who come to me would do so. It would save a great deal of hopeless and useless thinking afterwards. If you’ll sit down I will call my wife, and—”

He left them alone a moment, and Lorenzo whispered, “Althea, if you want to ask him again how he looks at that point in Luke—”

“Nay, we can see it as clearly as he can. We have got all the light there is.”

“Yee, I presume that is so.”

They had each other by the hand, and she pressed his hand convulsively, “Don’t say anything more, Lorenzo.”

“Just as you say, Althea.”

After a little delay the minister returned, bringing his wife with him — a short, stout little bruuette, who had the effect of having hurriedly encased herself for the occasion in a black silk dress she wore. She glanced at Althea with a certain dislike or defiance in her look, as one does at a stranger whom one has heard prejudicial things of; and if the minister had told her of Althea’s misgivings it might well have incensed a wife and mother.

He introduced them to her as Miss Brown and Mr. Weaver, and he said, “Well, now, if you will take your places,” and when they stood before him he began the ceremony. Lorenzo, when he was asked if he would take Althea to be his wedded wife, helplessly answered, “Yee,” and Althea did the same in her turn.

The light of a smile came over the minister’s face at their answers, and when he had pronounced them man and wife and blessed them, he said, laughing, “I suppose that this comes as near being a Shaker wedding as any could. Did you make the responses purposely in Shaker parlauce?”

“Did we say yee?” Lorenzo asked of Althea.

“Yee, we did,” she said, and he smiled, but she did not. “I heard you say it, and I guess I did.”

They both sat down again, and the minister’s wife was about to sit down too, seeing that they were not going away, when there came loud cries of grief and rage from the back of the house, and she ran out to still them. The minister went to a writing-desk and filled up a certificate of marriage, which he handed to Althea, and then he sat down too.

“I don’t know why we always make the ladies the custodians of these things, but we do. I think myself it’s often quite as important to the husband to know that he is married.

“And are we married now?” she faltered. “Is that all?”

“Quite. It wasn’t so very formidable, was it?”

“But — but—” She stopped, as if in a fright. “But it isn’t over? I thought — I thought there was something more; and that — that — Do you mean that now we couldn’t change?”

“Why, surely,” said the minister, “you understood what you were doing? Didn’t you suppose that when I asked you if you would take this man for your husband, I was asking you if you would marry him?”

“Yee, I knew that. But I didn’t think that was all there was to it.”

“I presume,” Lorenzo began, “that it’s because you ain’t used to it, Althea.”

The minister broke in with a laugh. “It’s to be hoped that you won’t get into the habit of it, Mrs. Weaver; some people do. But you’re quite right about it, in one sense. This isn’t all there is of marriage, aud it isn’t all over by any means. It’s just begun.” He sat rocking and smiling at them, and they remained rigidly upright in their chairs.

“I presume,” said Lorenzo, “that there’s some charge. How much will it be?”

The minister seemed amused at the bluntness of the demand. “There’s no fee.” He had apparently a little difficulty in adding, “It is something we always leave to the bridegroom.”

Lorenzo took out his roll of bank-notes. He peeled one off the roll, and handed it to the minister. “That be enough?”

The minister took the ten-dollar note and looked at it. “I think it would be altogether too much unless you are richer than I imagine.”

“Well,” said Lorenzo, proudly, “I started with a hundred dollars last night.”

“And is that all your worldly wealth?”

“I’ve got a lot in Fitchburg that’s worth four hundred more.”

“Is that so?” asked the minister. “You are a capitalist. Still, I think that if you happen to have a one-dollar bill in that roll I should prefer it.”

“I guess I got one,” said Lorenzo, with the same phlegm; and he looked among the notes till he found a dollar bill, which he gave to the minister.

“Ah, thank you,” said the minister; and he added, “I don’t suppose you had quite the training of a financier — a moneyed man — in the Family?”

Lorenzo laughed. “I never had a cent in my hands till a week ago, when I left the Family. The Trustees do all the buyin’.”

“Is it possible, is it possible?” cried the minister. “You are of the resurrection, indeed! You begin to convert me! Do you think they would admit me to the Family ?”

“Oh, yee,” said Lorenzo, gravely. “You would have to separate, and give up your children.”

“Ah, that isn’t so simple. At any rate, it requires reflection. But to be in a condition where the curse of money is taken away! What is the name of your family: Eden? Paradise? Golden Age?”

“Nay,” returned Lorenzo, with seriousness; “we came from Harshire.”

There seemed to he nothing more to say or do, but Lorenzo would probably not have got away of his own motion. It was Althea who had to say to the minister, “Well, good-afternoon;” and when he offered his hand in response, it was she who had first to take it. She did it very stiffly, hut Lorenzo gave it a large, loose grasp, and held it a moment, as if trying to think of something grateful, or at least fitting, before he said, “Well, good-afternoon,” in his turn.

XIV

ON their way back to the hotel they were silent till Lorenzo took out the money he had put loosely into his pocket, and folded it more neatly. He turned the notes over, and then felt in his other pockets, as if he thought he might have misplaced some of them. Althea did not seem to notice what he was doing. She walked rapidly a little ahead of him.

“Althea,” he said, gently, and a little timidly, “I don’t know as we better stay in Saratoga — well, not a great deal longer.” She looked round. “I — I — the money seems to be nearly all gone. I guess we ha’n’t got much more than enough to pay for our tickets back to Fitchburg.”

She appeared not to understand at first. Then she said, passionately, “Let us go at once then! I shall be glad to go. Don’t let’s stay a minute longer. It’s dreadful to me here!”

“Just as you say, Althea,” he returned, submissively. “I presume we might full as well stay till after supper. We’ve paid for it, and the cars don’t—”

“Go and see if there isn’t an earlier train — if there isn’t one that starts right off. I want to start now.”

“Why, Althea—”

“Don’t try to speak to me, Lorenzo!”

“Nay, I won’t, then. But I got to take you to the hotel, and get them to show you where the room is.”

“Well!”

“And then I’ll go round to the depot and find out about the cars.”

As they mounted the steps of the hotel porch a girlish figure in light blue came flying towards them from the end of the long veranda. It was young Mrs. Cargate; she waved a telegram in the air. “Oh, he’s coming!” she called to them. “He’s coming to-night! He’ll be here on the seven o’clock train! Oh, it seems as if I could fly, I’m so glad! I could just hug everybody! I must hug somebody; I must kiss—” She ran upon Althea, and flung her arms round her, and put up her pouted lips.

Althea pulled away, and, with her head thrown back, “Nay,” she said, icily, “we don’t kiss.”

The young woman released her. “You don’t kiss? Well, if that isn’t the best joke yet! When I tell George about this! Why, what do you and Mr. Wea—”

“It’s against our religion,” said Lorenzo, sternly, and his face was the face of an ascetic as he spoke.

The young woman gasped, and retreated from them, staring at them as she paced slowly backward. She turned and ran, with a cry of laughter, towards the black figure of her silent mother at the end of the veranda.

At the door of their room Lorenzo left Althea. “I will go and see about the cars now. You get the things all ready, so that we needn’t lose any time if the cars start anyways soon.” He spoke with an austerity which was like something left of the tone he had used in rebuking that young woman. It was gone when he came back, and called gently, on the outside of the door, “Althea!”

“Yee, Lorenzo,” her voice answered, come in!”

He opened the door, and stood staring at her from the threshold. She sat dressed in her garb of Shakeress — the plain, straight gown of drab, the drab shawl crossed upon her breast, the close collar that came up to her chin; her face was hidden in the depths of the Shaker bonnet.

“Well, well!” he murmured, huskily.

“Sit down, Lorenzo,” she said.

“There ain’t much time, Althea. The cars start in about half an hour, and—” he glanced about the room, where, on chairs and sofas, were strewn the finery that Althea had worn during the day; the packages of her afternoon purchases had been torn open, and their contents scattered about on the floor. His eye caught upon a fashionable gown of gray stuff. “That your travelling-dress, Althea?” he asked, feebly.

“I have got on my travelling-dress, Lorenzo. I am going back to the Family.”

“Yee,” he vaguely assented.

“I tried to put that dress on,” she continued; “I couldn’t.” She paused, as if for him to say something, but he did not say anything. “I have thought it all out at last, Lorenzo. I don’t blame the earthly order; it’s the best thing there is in the world-outside. But we have known the heavenly order, and if — even if — we were to be very happy together—”

She stopped, and he said,” Yee.”

“Or, that isn’t it, either. They may be all wrong in what they taught us in the Family.”

Lorenzo cleared his throat. “It did seem so — for a spell.”

“But whether it was right or whether it was wrong, whether it was true or whether it was false, it’s too strong for me now, and it would be too strong as long as I lived. I have got to go back.”

“Have you thought what they will say?”

“Haven’t I thought what they would say every minute since I stole out of the Family house like a thief and ran away? But I don’t care what they will say. They will take me back, I know that, and that is all I care for.”

“Yee.”

“I want you should let me go as far as Fitchburg with you, and then I can easily get to Harshire.”

He stared at her. “Althea, do you think I am going to let you go back alone?” he asked, solemnly. “I am going back to Harshire with you.”

“Nay, Lorenzo, I have thought that out too. I blame myself for getting married to you.”

“I wanted to full as much as you did, Althea. It was my fault too.”

“I thought — I thought if it was over I should feel differently, and see it as folks do in the world-outside.”

“Yea, I knew that, Althea. I wouldn’t have let you if I hadn’t understood it so. I could see how your mind was workin’.”

“But I can’t see it so, Lorenzo! The more I look at it the worse it seems for us!”

“It’s strange,” he mused, aloud, “that we can’t look at it in their light. Is it a sin for all the world?”

“It isn’t a sin for the world, for the world hasn’t the same light as ours. But we should be shutting our eyes to the light!”

“Yee,” he assented, sadly.

“But, Lorenzo,” she entreated, passionately, “if you say for me to stay in the world-outside with you and be your wife, I will do it! Do you say so? Do you say so?” She came towards him with her hands clasped, and her face wild in the depths of her Shaker bonnet, where her tears shone dimly. “I’m nothing! What do I care for myself? It’s only the truth I care for, and the light! But if you say so, Lorenzo, the light of the world shall be my light, the darkness shall be my light!”

There was a moment before he answered, “Nay, I don’t say so, Althea!”

“Oh!” She fell back in her chair and began to sob.

“Do you think,” he asked, “that I could be anyways comfortable knowin’ that you wanted to live the angelic life, and I was draggin’ you down to the earthly?”

“The angelic life wouldn’t be anything without you, Lorenzo,” she said, tenderly, but with a confusion of purpose which was not, perhaps, apparent even to herself.

“Nor the earthly order without you,” he answered, solemnly. He added, with that mixture of commonplace which was an element in his nature, “I presume, if I wanted to stay in the world-outside, I could get a divorce easy enough; but if I can’t have you, I don’t want to stay. If you can’t feel that it’s right for you to live in the earthly order, I know it can’t be right for me either. We can do like so many of them have done: we can go back to the Family, and live there separate. It will be a cross, but it won’t be any more of a cross for us than it is for the others that have separated; and maybe — maybe we ought to bear a cross.”

“Don’t try to make me cry, Lorenzo!”

He looked round the room again, disordered with the pretty things she had flung about. “I declare,” he said, dreamily, “that hat’s got to look like you.”

“Lorenzo!”

“If you’ve got on everything you need, Althea, we’ll leave these things here. We sha’n’t want ’em any more where we’re goin’.” He stopped,, and they stood looking at each other. “Althea, we have got to tell them everything we’ve done when we get back.”

“Yee.”

“Do you believe, Althea,” he said, in a voice that came like a thick whisper from his throat, “that they would think any the worse of you if I was to — kiss you?”

“I don’t know, Lorenzo.”

“It would be for good-bye, just once; and it would be my fault, and not yours.”

“I don’t want you should bear the blame. If you were to do it, it would be — because I let you.”

He caught her to his breast; she laid her arms tenderly about his neck; their heads were both hidden in her Shaker bonnet.

“Now come,” he said.

They walked along towards the station rapidly, Lorenzo some paces ahead of Althea, and they looked as if they did not belong together. A young fellow in a light wood-colored surrey, with a pair of slender sorrels, drew up to the sidewalk, and called to Lorenzo, “Carriage! Want a ca—” His eye strayed from Lorenzo to the figure of Althea in her Shaker dress. He pushed up his hat, and the cigar which he was smoking dropped from his parting lips. They passed him without looking up, but his head was drawn round after them, as if by a magnetic attraction, and he remained staring at them over his shoulder till they were lost to sight at the corner turning to the station.

THE END

THE LANDLORD AT LION’S HEAD

First published in 1897, this novel’s title derives from its setting – a country house in New Hampshire, near a mountain peak resembling a lion’s head. The eponymous landlord is Jeff, whose lowly ambitions (to be the landlord of a country house turned hotel) and the class conflicts in which he finds himself caught up, form the central themes of the novel. Jeff is one of Howells’s most unusual protagonists, due to his overt sexuality and exaggerated masculinity.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

Part I.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

Part II.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII

XLIV

XLV.

XLVI

XLVII.

XLVIII

XLIX.

L.

LI.

LII.

LIII.

LIV.

LV

Part I.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

In those dim recesses of the consciousness where things have their beginning, if ever things have a beginning, I suppose the origin of this novel may be traced to a fact of a fortnight’s sojourn on the western shore of lake Champlain in the summer of 1891. Across the water in the State of Vermont I had constantly before my eyes a majestic mountain form which the earlier French pioneers had named “Le Lion Couchant,” but which their plainer-minded Yankee successors preferred to call “The Camel’s Hump.” It really looked like a sleeping lion; the head was especially definite; and when, in the course of some ten years, I found the scheme for a story about a summer hotel which I had long meant to write, this image suggested the name of ‘The Landlord at Lion’s Head.’ I gave the title to my unwritten novel at once and never wished to change it, but rejoiced in the certainty that, whatever the novel turned out to be, the title could not be better.

I began to write the story four years later, when we were settled for the winter in our flat on Central Park, and as I was a year in doing it, with other things, I must have taken the unfinished manuscript to and from Magnolia, Massachusetts, and Long Beach, Long Island, where I spent the following summer. It was first serialized in Harper’s Weekly and in the London Illustrated News, as well as in an Australian newspaper — I forget which one; and it was published as a completed book in 1896.

I remember concerning it a very becoming despair when, at a certain moment in it, I began to wonder what I was driving at. I have always had such moments in my work, and if I cannot fitly boast of them, I can at least own to them in freedom from the pride that goes before a fall. My only resource at such times was to keep working; keep beating harder and harder at the wall which seemed to close me in, till at last I broke through into the daylight beyond. In this case, I had really such a very good grip of my characters that I need not have had the usual fear of their failure to work out their destiny. But even when the thing was done and I carried the completed manuscript to my dear old friend, the late Henry Loomis Nelson, then editor of the Weekly, it was in more fear of his judgment than I cared to show. As often happened with my manuscript in such exigencies, it seemed to go all to a handful of shrivelled leaves. When we met again and he accepted it for the Weekly, with a handclasp of hearty welcome, I could scarcely gasp out my unfeigned relief. We had talked the scheme of it over together; he had liked the notion, and he easily made me believe, after my first dismay, that he liked the result even better.

I myself liked the hero of the tale more than I have liked worthier men, perhaps because I thought I had achieved in him a true rustic New England type in contact with urban life under entirely modern conditions. What seemed to me my esthetic success in him possibly softened me to his ethical shortcomings; but I do not expect others to share my weakness for Jeff Durgin, whose strong, rough surname had been waiting for his personality ever since I had got it off the side of an ice-cart many years before.

At the time the story was imagined Harvard had been for four years much in the direct knowledge of the author, and I pleased myself in realizing the hero’s experience there from even more intimacy with the university moods and manners than had supported me in the studies of an earlier fiction dealing with them. I had not lived twelve years in Cambridge without acquaintance such as even an elder man must make with the undergraduate life; but it is only from its own level that this can be truly learned, and I have always been ready to stand corrected by undergraduate experience. Still, I have my belief that as a jay — the word may now be obsolete — Jeff Durgin is not altogether out of drawing; though this is, of course, the phase of his character which is one of the least important. What I most prize in him, if I may go to the bottom of the inkhorn, is the realization of that anti-Puritan quality which was always vexing the heart of Puritanism, and which I had constantly felt one of the most interesting facts in my observation of New England.

As for the sort of summer hotel portrayed in these pages, it was materialized from an acquaintance with summer hotels extending over quarter of a century, and scarcely to be surpassed if paralleled. I had a passion for knowing about them and understanding their operation which I indulged at every opportunity, and which I remember was satisfied as to every reasonable detail at one of the pleasantest seaside hostelries by one of the most intelligent and obliging of landlords. Yet, hotels for hotels, I was interested in those of the hills rather than those of the shores.

I worked steadily if not rapidly at the story. Often I went back over it, and tore it to pieces and put it together again. It made me feel at times as if I should never learn my trade, but so did every novel I have written; every novel, in fact, has been a new trade. In, the case of this one the publishers were hurrying me in the revision for copy to give the illustrator, who was hurrying his pictures for the English and Australian serializations.

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

I.

If you looked at the mountain from the west, the line of the summit was wandering and uncertain, like that of most mountain-tops; but, seen from the east, the mass of granite showing above the dense forests of the lower slopes had the form of a sleeping lion. The flanks and haunches were vaguely distinguished from the mass; but the mighty head, resting with its tossed mane upon the vast paws stretched before it, was boldly sculptured against the sky. The likeness could not have been more perfect, when you had it in profile, if it had been a definite intention of art; and you could travel far north and far south before the illusion vanished. In winter the head was blotted by the snows; and sometimes the vagrant clouds caught upon it and deformed it, or hid it, at other seasons; but commonly, after the last snow went in the spring until the first snow came in the fall, the Lion’s Head was a part of the landscape, as imperative and importunate as the Great Stone Face itself.

Long after other parts of the hill country were opened to summer sojourn, the region of Lion’s Head remained almost primitively solitary and savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that brawled through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a meagre acreage of field and pasture broken out of the woods that clothed all the neighboring steeps. The farm-house level commanded the best view of Lion’s Head, and the visitors always mounted to it, whether they came on foot, or arrived on buckboards or in buggies, or drove up in the Concord stages from the farther and nearer hotels. The drivers of the coaches rested their horses there, and watered them from the spring that dripped into the green log at the barn; the passengers scattered about the door-yard to look at the Lion’s Head, to wonder at it and mock at it, according to their several makes and moods. They could scarcely have felt that they ever had a welcome from the stalwart, handsome woman who sold them milk, if they wanted it, and small cakes of maple sugar if they were very strenuous for something else. The ladies were not able to make much of her from the first; but some of them asked her if it were not rather lonely there, and she said that when you heard the catamounts scream at night, and the bears growl in the spring, it did seem lonesome. When one of them declared that if she should hear a catamount scream or a bear growl she should die, the woman answered, Well, she presumed we must all die some time. But the ladies were not sure of a covert slant in her words, for they were spoken with the same look she wore when she told them that the milk was five cents a glass, and the black maple sugar three cents a cake. She did not change when she owned upon their urgence that the gaunt man whom they glimpsed around the corners of the house was her husband, and the three lank boys with him were her sons; that the children whose faces watched them through the writhing window panes were her two little girls; that the urchin who stood shyly twisted, all but his white head and sunburned face, into her dress and glanced at them with a mocking blue eye, was her youngest, and that he was three years old. With like coldness of voice and face, she assented to their conjecture that the space walled off in the farther corner of the orchard was the family burial ground; and she said, with no more feeling that the ladies could see than she had shown concerning the other facts, that the graves they saw were those of her husband’s family and of the children she had lost there had been ten children, and she had lost four. She did not visibly shrink from the pursuit of the sympathy which expressed itself in curiosity as to the sickness they had died of; the ladies left her with the belief that they had met a character, and she remained with the conviction, briefly imparted to her husband, that they were tonguey.

The summer folks came more and more, every year, with little variance in the impression on either side. When they told her that her maple sugar would sell better if the cake had an image of Lion’s Head stamped on it, she answered that she got enough of Lion’s Head without wanting to see it on all the sugar she made. But the next year the cakes bore a rude effigy of Lion’s Head, and she said that one of her boys had cut the stamp out with his knife; she now charged five cents a cake for the sugar, but her manner remained the same. It did not change when the excursionists drove away, and the deep silence native to the place fell after their chatter. When a cock crew, or a cow lowed, or a horse neighed, or one of the boys shouted to the cattle, an echo retorted from the granite base of Lion’s Head, and then she had all the noise she wanted, or, at any rate, all the noise there was most of the time. Now and then a wagon passed on the stony road by the brook in the valley, and sent up its clatter to the farm-house on its high shelf, but there was scarcely another break from the silence except when the coaching-parties came.

The continuous clash and rush of the brook was like a part of the silence, as the red of the farm-house and the barn was like a part of the green of the fields and woods all round them: the black-green of pines and spruces, the yellow-green of maples and birches, dense to the tops of the dreary hills, and breaking like a bated sea around the Lion’s Head. The farmer stooped at his work, with a thin, inward-curving chest, but his wife stood straight at hers; and she had a massive beauty of figure and a heavily moulded regularity of feature that impressed such as had eyes to see her grandeur among the summer folks. She was forty when they began to come, and an ashen gray was creeping over the reddish heaps of her hair, like the pallor that overlies the crimson of the autumnal oak. She showed her age earlier than most fair people, but since her marriage at eighteen she had lived long in the deaths of the children she had lost. They were born with the taint of their father’s family, and they withered from their cradles. The youngest boy alone; of all her brood, seemed to have inherited her health and strength. The rest as they grew up began to cough, as she had heard her husband’s brothers and sisters cough, and then she waited in hapless patience the fulfilment of their doom. The two little girls whose faces the ladies of the first coaching-party saw at the farm-house windows had died away from them; two of the lank boys had escaped, and in the perpetual exile of California and Colorado had saved themselves alive. Their father talked of going, too, but ten years later he still dragged himself spectrally about the labors of the farm, with the same cough at sixty which made his oldest son at twenty-nine look scarcely younger than himself.

II.

One soft noon in the middle of August the farmer came in from the corn-field that an early frost had blighted, and told his wife that they must give it up. He said, in his weak, hoarse voice, with the catarrhal catching in it, that it was no use trying to make a living on the farm any longer. The oats had hardly been worth cutting, and now the corn was gone, and there was not hay enough without it to winter the stock; if they got through themselves they would have to live on potatoes. Have a vendue, and sell out everything before the snow flew, and let the State take the farm and get what it could for it, and turn over the balance that was left after the taxes; the interest of the savings-bank mortgage would soon eat that up.

The long, loose cough took him, and another cough answered it like an echo from the barn, where his son was giving the horses their feed. The mild, wan-eyed young man came round the corner presently toward the porch where his father and mother were sitting, and at the same moment a boy came up the lane to the other corner; there were sixteen years between the ages of the brothers, who alone were left of the children born into and borne out of the house. The young man waited till they were within whispering distance of each other, and then he gasped: “Where you been?”

The boy answered, promptly, “None your business,” and went up the steps before the young man, with a lop-eared, liver-colored mongrel at his heels. He pulled off his ragged straw hat and flung it on the floor of the porch. “Dinner over?” he demanded.

His father made no answer; his mother looked at the boy’s hands and face, all of much the same earthen cast, up to the eaves of his thatch of yellow hair, and said: “You go and wash yourself.” At a certain light in his mother’s eye, which he caught as he passed into the house with his dog, the boy turned and cut a defiant caper. The oldest son sat down on the bench beside his father, and they all looked in silence at the mountain before them. They heard the boy whistling behind the house, with sputtering and blubbering noises, as if he were washing his face while he whistled; and then they heard him singing, with a muffled sound, and sharp breaks from the muffled sound, as if he were singing into the towel; he shouted to his dog and threatened him, and the scuffling of his feet came to them through all as if he were dancing.

“Been after them woodchucks ag’in,” his father huskily suggested.

“I guess so,” said the mother. The brother did not speak; he coughed vaguely, and let his head sink forward.

The father began a statement of his affairs.

The mother said: “You don’t want to go into that; we been all over it before. If it’s come to the pinch, now, it’s come. But you want to be sure.”

The man did not answer directly. “If we could sell off now and get out to where Jim is in Californy, and get a piece of land—” He stopped, as if confronted with some difficulty which he had met before, but had hoped he might not find in his way this time.

His wife laughed grimly. “I guess, if the truth was known, we’re too poor to get away.”

“We’re poor,” he whispered back. He added, with a weak obstinacy: “I d’know as we’re as poor as that comes to. The things would fetch something.”

“Enough to get us out there, and then we should be on Jim’s hands,” said the woman.

“We should till spring, maybe. I d’know as I want to face another winter here, and I d’know as Jackson does.”

The young man gasped back, courageously: “I guess I can get along here well enough.”

“It’s made Jim ten years younger. That’s what he said,” urged the father.

The mother smiled as grimly as she had laughed. “I don’t believe it ‘ll make you ten years richer, and that’s what you want.”

“I don’t believe but what we should ha’ done something with the place by spring. Or the State would,” the father said, lifelessly.

The voice of the boy broke in upon them from behind. “Say, mother, a’n’t you never goin’ to have dinner?” He was standing in the doorway, with a startling cleanness of the hands and face, and a strange, wet sleekness of the hair. His clothes were bedrabbled down the front with soap and water.

His mother rose and went toward him; his father and brother rose like apparitions, and slanted after her at one angle.

“Say,” the boy called again to his mother, “there comes a peddler.” He pointed down the road at the figure of a man briskly ascending the lane toward the house, with a pack on his back and some strange appendages dangling from it.

The woman did not look round; neither of the men looked round; they all kept on in-doors, and she said to the boy, as she passed him: “I got no time to waste on peddlers. You tell him we don’t want anything.”

The boy waited for the figure on the lane to approach. It was the figure of a young man, who slung his burden lightly from his shoulders when he arrived, and then stood looking at the boy, with his foot planted on the lowermost tread of the steps climbing from the ground to the porch.

III.

The boy must have permitted these advances that he might inflict the greater disappointment when he spoke. “We don’t want anything,” he said, insolently.

“Don’t you?” the stranger returned. “I do. I want dinner. Go in and tell your mother, and then show me where I can wash my hands.”

The bold ease of the stranger seemed to daunt the boy, and he stood irresolute. His dog came round the corner of the house at the first word of the parley, and, while his master was making up his mind what to do, he smelled at the stranger’s legs. “Well, you can’t have any dinner,” said the boy, tentatively. The dog raised the bristles on his neck, and showed his teeth with a snarl. The stranger promptly kicked him in the jaw, and the dog ran off howling. “Come here, sir!” the boy called to him, but the dog vanished round the house with a fading yelp.

“Now, young man,” said the stranger, “will you go and do as you’re bid? I’m ready to pay for my dinner, and you can say so.” The boy stared at him, slowly taking in the facts of his costume, with eyes that climbed from the heavy shoes up the legs of his thick-ribbed stockings and his knickerbockers, past the pleats and belt of his Norfolk jacket, to the red neckcloth tied under the loose collar of his flannel outing-shirt, and so by his face, with its soft, young beard and its quiet eyes, to the top of his braidless, bandless slouch hat of soft felt. It was one of the earliest costumes of the kind that had shown itself in the hill country, and it was altogether new to the boy. “Come,” said the wearer of it, “don’t stand on the order of your going, but go at once,” and he sat down on the steps with his back to the boy, who heard these strange terms of command with a face of vague envy.

The noonday sunshine lay in a thin, silvery glister on the slopes of the mountain before them, and in the brilliant light the colossal forms of the Lion’s Head were prismatically outlined against the speckless sky. Through the silvery veil there burned here and there on the densely wooded acclivities the crimson torch of a maple, kindled before its time, but everywhere else there was the unbroken green of the forest, subdued to one tone of gray. The boy heard the stranger fetch his breath deeply, and then expel it in a long sigh, before he could bring himself to obey an order that seemed to leave him without the choice of disobedience. He came back and found the stranger as he had left him. “Come on, if you want your dinner,” he said; and the stranger rose and looked at him.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Thomas Jefferson Durgin.”

“Well, Thomas Jefferson Durgin, will you show me the way to the pump and bring a towel along?”

“Want to wash?”

“I haven’t changed my mind.”

“Come along, then.” The boy made a movement as if to lead the way indoors; the stranger arrested him.

“Here. Take hold of this and put it out of the rush of travel somewhere.” He lifted his burden from where he had dropped it in the road and swung it toward the boy, who ran down the steps and embraced it. As he carried it toward a corner of the porch he felt of the various shapes and materials in it.

Then he said, “Come on!” again, and went before the guest through the dim hall running midway of the house to the door at the rear. He left him on a narrow space of stone flagging there, and ran with a tin basin to the spring at the barn and brought it back to him full of the cold water.

“Towel,” he said, pulling at the family roller inside the little porch at the door; and he watched the stranger wash his hands and face, and then search for a fresh place on the towel.

Before the stranger had finished the father and the elder brother came out, and, after an ineffectual attempt to salute him, slanted away to the barn together. The woman, in-doors, was more successful, when he found her in the dining-room, where the boy showed him. The table was set for him alone, and it affected him as if the family had been hurried away from it that he might have it to himself. Everything was very simple: the iron forks had two prongs; the knives bone handles; the dull glass was pressed; the heavy plates and cups were white, but so was the cloth, and all were clean. The woman brought in a good boiled dinner of corned-beef, potatoes, turnips, and carrots from the kitchen, and a teapot, and said something about having kept them hot on the stove for him; she brought him a plate of biscuit fresh from the oven; then she said to the boy, “You come out and have your dinner with me, Jeff,” and left the guest to make his meal unmolested.

The room was square, with two north windows that looked down the lane he had climbed to the house. An open door led into the kitchen in an ell, and a closed door opposite probably gave access to a parlor or a ground-floor chamber. The windows were darkened down to the lower sash by green paper shades; the walls were papered in a pattern of brown roses; over the chimney hung a large picture, a life-size pencil-drawing of two little girls, one slightly older and slightly larger than the other, each with round eyes and precise ringlets, and with her hand clasped in the other’s hand.

The guest seemed helpless to take his gaze from it, and he sat fallen back in his chair at it when the woman came in with a pie.

“Thank you, I believe I don’t want any dessert,” he said. “The fact is, the dinner was so good that I haven’t left any room for pie. Are those your children?”

“Yes,” said the woman, looking up at the picture with the pie in her hand. “They’re the last two I lost.”

“Oh, excuse me—” the guest began.

“It’s the way they appear in the spirit life. It’s a spirit picture.”

“Oh, I thought there was something strange about it.”

“Well, it’s a good deal like the photograph we had taken about a year before they died. It’s a good likeness. They say they don’t change a great deal at first.”

She seemed to refer the point to him for his judgment, but he answered wide of it:

“I came up here to paint your mountain, if you don’t mind, Mrs. Durgin-Lion’s Head, I mean.”

“Oh yes. Well, I don’t know as we could stop you if you wanted to take it away.” A spare glimmer lighted up her face.

The painter rejoined in kind: “The town might have something to say, I suppose.”

“Not if you was to leave a good piece of intervale in place of it. We’ve got mountains to spare.”

“Well, then, that’s arranged. What about a week’s board?”

“I guess you can stay if you’re satisfied.”

“I’ll be satisfied if I can stay. How much do you want?”

The woman looked down, probably with an inward anxiety between the fear of asking too much and the folly of asking too little. She said, tentatively: “Some of the folks that come over from the hotels say they pay as much as twenty dollars a week.”

“But you don’t expect hotel prices?”

“I don’t know as I do. We’ve never had anybody before.”

The stranger relaxed the frown he had put on at the greed of her suggestion; it might have come from ignorance or mere innocence. “I’m in the habit of paying five dollars for farm board, where I stay several weeks. What do you say to seven for a single week?”

“I guess that ‘ll do,” said the woman, and she went out with the pie, which she had kept in her hand.

IV.

The painter went round to the front of the house and walked up and down before it for different points of view. He ran down the lane some way, and then came back and climbed to the sloping field behind the barn, where he could look at Lion’s Head over the roof of the house. He tried an open space in the orchard, where he backed against the wall enclosing the little burial-ground. He looked round at it without seeming to see it, and then went back to the level where the house stood. “This is the place,” he said to himself. But the boy, who had been lurking after him, with the dog lurking at, his own heels in turn, took the words as a proffer of conversation.

“I thought you’d come to it,” he sneered.

“Did you?” asked the painter, with a smile for the unsatisfied grudge in the boy’s tone. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

The boy looked down, and apparently made up his mind to wait until something sufficiently severe should come to him for a retort. “Want I should help you get your things?” he asked, presently.

“Why, yes,” said the painter, with a glance of surprise. “I shall be much obliged for a lift.” He started toward the porch where his burden lay, and the boy ran before him. They jointly separated the knapsack from the things tied to it, and the painter let the boy carry the easel and campstool which developed themselves from their folds and hinges, and brought the colors and canvas himself to the spot he had chosen. The boy looked at the tag on the easel after it was placed, and read the name on it — Jere Westover. “That’s a funny name.”

“I’m glad it amuses you,” said the owner of it.

Again the boy cast down his eyes discomfited, and seemed again resolving silently to bide his time and watch for another chance.

Westover forgot him in the fidget he fell into, trying this and that effect, with his head slanted one way and then slanted the other, his hand held up to shut out the mountain below the granite mass of Lion’s Head, and then changed to cut off the sky above; and then both hands lifted in parallel to confine the picture. He made some tentative scrawls on his canvas in charcoal, and he wasted so much time that the light on the mountain-side began to take the rich tone of the afternoon deepening to evening. A soft flush stole into it; the sun dipped behind the top south of the mountain, and Lion’s Head stood out against the intense clearness of the west, which began to be flushed with exquisite suggestions of violet and crimson.

“Good Lord!” said Westover; and he flew at his colors and began to paint. He had got his canvas into such a state that he alone could have found it much more intelligible than his palette, when he heard the boy saying, over his shoulder: “I don’t think that looks very much like it.” He had last been aware of the boy sitting at the grassy edge of the lane, tossing small bits of earth and pebble across to his dog, which sat at the other edge and snapped at them. Then he lost consciousness of him. He answered, dreamily, while he found a tint he was trying for with his brush: “Perhaps you don’t know.” He was so sure of his effect that the popular censure speaking in the boy’s opinion only made him happier in it.

“I know what I see,” said the boy.

“I doubt it,” said Westover, and then he lost consciousness of him again. He was rapt deep and far into the joy of his work, and had no thought but for that, and for the dim question whether it would be such another day to-morrow, with that light again on Lion’s Head, when he was at last sensible of a noise that he felt he must have been hearing some time without noting it. It was a lamentable, sound of screaming, as of some one in mortal terror, mixed with wild entreaties. “Oh, don’t, Jeff! Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t! Oh, please! Oh, do let us be! Oh, Jeff, don’t!”

Westover looked round bewildered, and not able, amid the clamor of the echoes, to make out where the cries came from. Then, down at the point where the lane joined the road to the southward and the road lost itself in the shadow of a woodland, he saw the boy leaping back and forth across the track, with his dog beside him; he was shouting and his dog barking furiously; those screams and entreaties came from within the shadow. Westover plunged down the lane headlong, with a speed that gathered at each bound, and that almost flung him on his face when he reached the level where the boy and the dog were dancing back and forth across the road. Then he saw, crouching in the edge of the wood, a little girl, who was uttering the appeals he had heard, and clinging to her, with a face of frantic terror, a child of five or six years; her cries had grown hoarse, and had a hard, mechanical action as they followed one another. They were really in no danger, for the boy held his dog tight by his collar, and was merely delighting himself with their terror.

The painter hurled himself upon him, and, with a quick grip upon his collar, gave him half a dozen flat-handed blows wherever he could plant them and then flung him reeling away.

“You infernal little ruffian!” he roared at him; and the sound of his voice was enough for the dog; he began to scale the hill-side toward the house without a moment’s stay.

The children still crouched together, and Westover could hardly make them understand that they were in his keeping when he bent over them and bade them not be frightened. The little girl set about wiping the child’s eyes on her apron in a motherly fashion; her own were dry enough, and Westover fancied there was more of fury than of fright in her face. She seemed lost to any sense of his presence, and kept on talking fiercely to herself, while she put the little boy in order, like an indignant woman.

“Great, mean, ugly thing! I’ll tell the teacher on him, that’s what I will, as soon as ever school begins. I’ll see if he can come round with that dog of his scaring folks! I wouldn’t ‘a’ been a bit afraid if it hadn’t ‘a’ been for Franky. Don’t cry any more, Franky. Don’t you see they’re gone? I presume he thinks it smart to scare a little boy and a girl. If I was a boy once, I’d show him!”

She made no sign of gratitude to Westover: as far as any recognition from her was concerned, his intervention was something as impersonal as if it had been a thunder-bolt falling upon her enemies from the sky.

“Where do you live?” he asked. “I’ll go home with you if you’ll tell me where you live.”

She looked up at him in a daze, and Westover heard the Durgin boy saying: “She lives right there in that little wood-colored house at the other end of the lane. There ain’t no call to go home with her.”

Westover turned and saw the boy kneeling at the edge of a clump of bushes, where he must have struck; he was rubbing, with a tuft of grass, at the dirt ground into the knees of his trousers.

The little, girl turned hawkishly upon him. “Not for anything you can do, Jeff Durgin!”

The boy did not answer.

“There!” she said, giving a final pull and twitch to the dress of her brother, and taking him by the hand tenderly. “Now, come right along, Franky.”

“Let me have your other hand,” said Westover, and, with the little boy between them, they set off toward the point where the lane joined the road on the northward. They had to pass the bushes where Jeff Durgin was crouching, and the little girl turned and made a face at him. “Oh, oh! I don’t think I should have done that,” said Westover.

“I don’t care!” said the little girl. But she said, in explanation and partial excuse: “He tries to scare all the girls. I’ll let him know ‘t he can’t scare one!”

Westover looked up toward the Durgin house with a return of interest in the canvas he had left in the lane on the easel. Nothing had happened to it. At the door of the barn he saw the farmer and his eldest son slanting forward and staring down the hill at the point he had come from. Mrs. Durgin was looking out from the shelter of the porch, and she turned and went in with Jeff’s dog at her skirts when Westover came in sight with the children.

V.

Westover had his tea with the family, but nothing was said or done to show that any of them resented or even knew of what had happened to the boy from him. Jeff himself seemed to have no grudge. He went out with Westover, when the meal was ended, and sat on the steps of the porch with him, watching the painter watch the light darken on the lonely heights and in the lonely depths around. Westover smoked a pipe, and the fire gleamed and smouldered in it regularly with his breathing; the boy, on a lower’ step, pulled at the long ears of his dog and gazed up at him.

They were both silent till the painter asked: “What do you do here when you’re not trying to scare little children to death?”

The boy hung his head and said, with the effect of excusing a long arrears of uselessness: “I’m goin’ to school as soon as it commences.”

“There’s one branch of your education that I should like to undertake if I ever saw you at a thing like that again. Don’t you feel ashamed of yourself?”

The boy pulled so hard at the dog’s ear that the dog gave a faint yelp of protest.

“They might ‘a’ seen that I had him by the collar. I wa’n’t a-goin’ to let go.”

“Well, the next time I have you by the collar I won’t let go, either,” said the painter; but he felt an inadequacy in his threat, and he imagined a superfluity, and he made some haste to ask: “who are they?”

“Whitwell is their name. They live in that little house where you took them. Their father’s got a piece of land on Zion’s Head that he’s clearin’ off for the timber. Their mother’s dead, and Cynthy keeps house. She’s always makin’ up names and faces,” added the boy. “She thinks herself awful smart. That Franky’s a perfect cry-baby.”

“Well, upon my word! You are a little ruffian,” said Westover, and he knocked the ashes out of his pipe. “The next time you meet that poor little creature you tell her that I think you’re about the shabbiest chap I know, and that I hope the teacher will begin where I left off with you and not leave blackguard enough in you to—”

He stopped for want of a fitting figure, and the boy said: “I guess the teacher won’t touch me.”

Westover rose, and the boy flung his dog away from him with his foot. “Want I should show you where to sleep?”

“Yes,” said Westover, and the boy hulked in before him, vanishing into the dark of the interior, and presently appeared with a lighted hand-lamp. He led the way upstairs to a front room looking down upon the porch roof and over toward Zion’s Head, which Westover could see dimly outlined against the night sky, when he lifted the edge of the paper shade and peered out.

The room was neat, with greater comfort in its appointments than he hoped for. He tried the bed, and found it hard, but of straw, and not the feathers he had dreaded; while the boy looked into the water-pitcher to see if it was full; and then went out without any form of goodnight.

Westover would have expected to wash in a tin basin at the back door, and wipe on the family towel, but all the means of toilet, such as they were, he found at hand here, and a surprise which he had felt at a certain touch in the cooking renewed itself at the intelligent arrangements for his comfort. A secondary quilt was laid across the foot of his bed; his window-shade was pulled down, and, though the window was shut and the air stuffy within, there was a sense of cleanliness in everything which was not at variance with the closeness.

The bed felt fresh when he got into it, and the sweet breath of the mountains came in so cold through the sash he had lifted that he was glad to pull the secondary quilt up over him. He heard the clock tick in some room below; from another quarter came the muffled sound of coughing; but otherwise the world was intensely still, and he slept deep and long.

VI.

The men folks had finished their breakfast and gone to their farm-work hours before Westover came down to his breakfast, but the boy seemed to be of as much early leisure as himself, and was lounging on the threshold of the back door, with his dog in waiting upon him. He gave the effect of yesterday’s cleanliness freshened up with more recent soap and water. At the moment Westover caught sight of him, he heard his mother calling to him from the kitchen, “Well, now, come in and get your breakfast, Jeff,” and the boy called to Westover, in turn, “I’ll tell her you’re here,” as he rose and came in-doors. “I guess she’s got your breakfast for you.”

Mrs. Durgin brought the breakfast almost as soon as Westover had found his way to the table, and she lingered as if for some expression of his opinion upon it. The biscuit and the butter were very good, and he said so; the eggs were fresh, and the hash from yesterday’s corned-beef could not have been better, and he praised them; but he was silent about the coffee.

“It a’n’t very good,” she suggested.

“Why, I’m used to making my own coffee; I lived so long in a country where it’s nearly the whole of breakfast that I got into the habit of it, and I always carry my little machine with me; but I don’t like to bring it out, unless—”

“Unless you can’t stand the other folks’s,” said the woman, with a humorous gleam. “Well, you needn’t mind me. I want you should have good coffee, and I guess I a’n’t too old to learn, if you want to show me. Our folks don’t care for it much; they like tea; and I kind of got out of the way of it. But at home we had to have it.” She explained, to his inquiring glance.

“My father kept the tavern on the old road to St. Albans, on the other side of Lion’s Head. That’s where I always lived till I married here.”

“Oh,” said Westover, and he felt that she had proudly wished to account for a quality which she hoped he had noticed in her cooking. He thought she might be going to tell him something more of herself, but she only said, “Well, any time you want to show me your way of makin’ coffee,” and went out of the room.

That evening, which was the close of another flawless day, he sat again watching the light outside, when he saw her come into the hallway with a large shade-lamp in her hand. She stopped at the door of a room he had not seen yet, and looked out at him to ask:

“Won’t you come in and set in the parlor if you want to?”

He found her there when he came in, and her two sons with her; the younger was sleepily putting away some school-books, and the elder seemed to have been helping him with his lessons.

“He’s got to begin school next week,” she said to Westover; and at the preparations the other now began to make with a piece of paper and a planchette which he had on the table before him, she asked, in the half-mocking, half-deprecating way which seemed characteristic of her: “You believe any in that?”

“I don’t know that I’ve ever seen it work,” said the painter.

“Well, sometimes it won’t work,” she returned, altogether mockingly now, and sat holding her shapely hands, which were neither so large nor so rough as they might have been, across her middle and watching her son while the machine pushed about under his palm, and he bent his wan eyes upon one of the oval-framed photographs on the wall, as if rapt in a supernal vision. The boy stared drowsily at the planchette, jerking this way and that, and making abrupt starts and stops. At last the young man lifted his palm from it, and put it aside to study the hieroglyphics it had left on the paper.

“What’s it say?” asked his mother.

The young man whispered: “I can’t seem to make out very clear. I guess I got to take a little time to it,” he added, leaning back wearily in his chair. “Ever seen much of the manifestations?” he gasped at Westover.

“Never any, before,” said the painter, with a leniency for the invalid which he did not feel for his belief.

The young man tried for his voice, and found enough of it to say: “There’s a trance medium over at the Huddle. Her control says ‘t I can develop into a writin’ medium.” He seemed to refer the fact as a sort of question to Westover, who could think of nothing to say but that it must be very interesting to feel that one had such a power.

“I guess he don’t know he’s got it yet,” his mother interposed. “And planchette don’t seem to know, either.”

“We ha’n’t given it a fair trial yet,” said the young man, impartially, almost impassively.

“Wouldn’t you like to see it do some of your sums, Jeff?” said the mother to the drowsy boy, blinking in a corner. “You better go to bed.”

The elder brother rose. “I guess I’ll go, too.”

The father had not joined their circle in the parlor, now breaking up by common consent.

Mrs. Durgin took up her lamp again and looked round on the appointments of the room, as if she wished Westover to note them, too: the drab wallpaper, the stiff chairs, the long, hard sofa in haircloth, the high bureau of mahogany veneer.

“You can come in here and set or lay down whenever you feel like it,” she said. “We use it more than folks generally, I presume; we got in the habit, havin’ it open for funerals.”

VII.

Four or five days of perfect weather followed one another, and Westover worked hard at his picture in the late afternoon light he had chosen for it. In the morning he tramped through the woods and climbed the hills with Jeff Durgin, who seemed never to do anything about the farm, and had a leisure unbroken by anything except a rare call from his mother to help her in the house. He built the kitchen fire, and got the wood for it; he picked the belated pease and the early beans in the garden, and shelled them; on the Monday when the school opened he did a share of the family wash, which seemed to have been begun before daylight, and Westover saw him hanging out the clothes before he started off with his books. He suffered no apparent loss of self-respect in these employments, and, while he still had his days free, he put himself at Westover’s disposal with an effect of unimpaired equality. He had expected, evidently, that Westover would want to fish or shoot, or at least join him in the hunt for woodchucks, which he still carried on with abated zeal for lack of his company when the painter sat down to sketch certain bits that struck him. When he found that Westover cared for nothing in the way of sport, as people commonly understand it, he did not openly contemn him. He helped him get the flowers he studied, and he learned to know true mushrooms from him, though he did not follow his teaching in eating the toadstools, as his mother called them, when they brought them home to be cooked.

If it could not be said that he shared the affection which began to grow up in Westover from their companionship, there could be no doubt of the interest he took in him, though it often seemed the same critical curiosity which appeared in the eye of his dog when it dwelt upon the painter. Fox had divined in his way that Westover was not only not to be molested, but was to be respectfully tolerated, yet no gleam of kindness ever lighted up his face at sight of the painter; he never wagged his tail in recognition of him; he simply recognized him and no more, and he remained passive under Westover’s advances, which he had the effect of covertly referring to Jeff, when the boy was by, for his approval or disapproval; when he was not by, the dog’s manner implied a reservation of opinion until the facts could be submitted to his master.

On the Saturday morning which was the last they were to have together, the three comrades had strayed from the vague wood road along one of the unexpected levels on the mountain slopes, and had come to a standstill in a place which the boy pretended not to know his way out of. Westover doubted him, for he had found that Jeff liked to give himself credit for woodcraft by discovering an escape from the depths of trackless wildernesses.

“I guess you know where we are,” he suggested.

“No, honestly,” said the boy; but he grinned, and Westover still doubted him.

“Hark! What’s that?” he said, hushing further speech from him with a motion of his hand. It was the sound of an axe.

“Oh, I know where we are,” said Jeff. “It’s that Canuck chopping in Whitwell’s clearing. Come along.”

He led the way briskly down the mountain-side now, stopping from time to time and verifying his course by the sound of the axe. This came and went, and by-and-by it ceased altogether, and Jeff crept forward with a real or feigned uncertainty. Suddenly he stopped. A voice called, “Heigh, there!” and the boy turned and fled, crashing through the underbrush at a tangent, with his dog at his heels.

Westover looked after them, and then came forward. A lank figure of a man at the foot of a poplar, which he had begun to fell, stood waiting him, one hand on his axe-helve and the other on his hip. There was the scent of freshly smitten bark and sap-wood in the air; the ground was paved with broad, clean chips.

“Good-morning,” said Westover.

“How are you?” returned the other, without moving or making any sign of welcome for a moment. But then he lifted his axe and struck it into the carf on the tree, and came to meet Westover.

As he advanced he held out his hand. “Oh, you’re the one that stopped that fellow that day when he was tryin’ to scare my children. Well, I thought I should run across you some time.” He shook hands with Westover, in token of the gratitude which did not express itself in words. “How are you? Treat you pretty well up at the Durgins’? I guess so. The old woman knows how to cook, anyway. Jackson’s about the best o’ the lot above ground, though I don’t know as I know very much against the old man, either. But that boy! I declare I ‘most feel like takin’ the top of his head off when he gets at his tricks. Set down.”

Whitwell, as Westover divined the man to be, took a seat himself on a high stump, which suited his length of leg, and courteously waved Westover to a place on the log in front of him. A long, ragged beard of brown, with lines of gray in it, hung from his chin and mounted well up on his thin cheeks toward his friendly eyes. His mustache lay sunken on his lip, which had fallen in with the loss of his upper teeth. From the lower jaw a few incisors showed at this slant and that as he talked.

“Well, well!” he said, with the air of wishing the talk to go on, but without having anything immediately to offer himself.

Westover said, “Thank you,” as he dropped on the log, and Whitwell added, relentingly: “I don’t suppose a fellow’s so much to blame, if he’s got the devil in him, as what the devil is.”

He referred the point with a twinkle of his eyes to Westover, who said: “It’s always a question, of course, whether it’s the devil. It may be original sin with the fellow himself.”

“Well, that’s something so,” said Whitwell, with pleasure in the distinction rather than assent. “But I guess it ain’t original sin in the boy. Got it from his gran’father pootty straight, I should say, and maybe the old man had it secondhand. Ha’d to say just where so much cussedness gits statted.”

“His father’s father?” asked Westover, willing to humor Whitwell’s evident wish to philosophize the Durgins’ history.

“Mother’s. He kept the old tavern stand on the west side of Lion’s Head, on the St. Albans Road, and I guess he kept a pootty good house in the old times when the stages stopped with him. Ever noticed how a man on the mean side in politics always knows how to keep a hotel? Well, it’s something curious. If there was ever a mean side to any question, old Mason was on it. My folks used to live around there, and I can remember when I was a boy hangin’ around the bar-room nights hearin’ him argue that colored folks had no souls; and along about the time the fugitive-slave law was passed the folks pootty near run him out o’ town for puttin’ the United States marshal on the scent of a fellow that was breakin’ for Canada. Well, it was just so when the war come. It was known for a fact that he was in with them Secesh devils up over the line that was plannin’ a raid into Vermont in ‘63. He’d got pootty low down by that time; railroads took off all the travel; tavern ‘d got to be a regular doggery; old man always drank some, I guess. That was a good while after his girl had married Durgin. He was dead against it, and it broke him up consid’able when she would have him: Well, one night the old stand burnt up and him in it, and neither of ’em insured.”

Whitwell laughed with a pleasure in his satire which gave the monuments in his lower jaw a rather sinister action. But, as if he felt a rebuke in Westover’s silence, he added: “There ain’t anything against Mis’ Durgin. She’s done her part, and she’s had more than her share of hard knocks. If she was tough, to sta’t with, she’s had blows enough to meller her. But that’s the way I account for the boy. I s’pose — I’d oughtn’t to feel the way I do about him, but he’s such a pest to the whole neighborhood that he’d have the most pop’la’ fune’l. Well, I guess I’ve said enough. I’m much obliged to you, though, Mr.—”

“Westover,” the painter suggested. “But the boy isn’t so bad all the time.”

“Couldn’t be,” said Whitwell, with a cackle of humorous enjoyment. “He has his spells of bein’ decent, and he’s pootty smart, too. But when the other spell ketches him it’s like as if the devil got a-hold of him, as I said in the first place. I lost my wife here two-three years along back, and that little girl you see him tormentin’, she’s a regular little mother to her brother; and whenever Jeff Durgin sees her with him, seems as if the Old Scratch got into him. Well, I’m glad I didn’t come across him that day. How you gittin’ along with Lion’s Head? Sets quiet enough for you?” Whitwell rose from the stump and brushed the clinging chips from his thighs. “Folks trouble you any, lookin’ on?”

“Not yet,” said Westover.

“Well, there ain’t a great many to,” said Whitwell, going back to his axe. “I should like to see you workin’ some day. Do’ know as I ever saw an attist at it.”

“I should like to have you,” said Westover. “Any time.”

“All right.” Whitwell pulled his axe out of the carf, and struck it in again with a force that made a wide, square chip leap out. He looked over his shoulder at Westover, who was moving away. “Say, stop in some time you’re passin’. I live in that wood-colored house at the foot of the Durgins’ lane.”

VIII.

In a little sunken place, behind a rock, some rods away, Westover found Jeff lurking with his dog, both silent and motionless. “Hello?” he said, inquiringly.

“Come back to show you the way,” said the boy. “Thought you couldn’t find it alone.”

“Oh, why didn’t you say you’d wait?” The boy grinned. “I shouldn’t think a fellow like you would want to be afraid of any man, even for the fun of scaring a little girl.” Jeff stopped grinning and looked interested, as if this was a view of the case that had not occurred to him. “But perhaps you like to be afraid.”

“I don’t know as I do,” said the boy, and Westover left him to the question a great part of the way home. He did not express any regret or promise any reparation. But a few days after that, when he had begun to convoy parties of children up to see Westover at work, in the late afternoon, on their way home from school, and to show the painter off to them as a sort of family property, he once brought the young Whitwells. He seemed on perfect terms with them now, and when the crowd of larger children hindered the little boy’s view of the picture, Jeff, in his quality of host, lifted him under his arms and held him up so that he could look as long as he liked.

The girl seemed ashamed of the good understanding before Westover. Jeff offered to make a place for her among the other children who had looked long enough, but she pulled the front of her bonnet across her face and said that she did not want to look, and caught her brother by the hand and ran away with him. Westover thought this charming, somewhat; he liked the intense shyness which the child’s intense passion had hidden from him before.

Jeff acted as host to the neighbors who came to inspect the picture, and they all came, within a circuit of several miles around, and gave him their opinions freely or scantily, according to their several temperaments. They were mainly favorable, though there was some frank criticism, too, spoken over the painter’s shoulder as openly as if he were not by. There was no question but of likeness; all finer facts were far from them; they wished to see how good a portrait Westover had made, and some of them consoled him with the suggestion that the likeness would come out more when the picture got dry.

Whitwell, when he came, attempted a larger view of the artist’s work, but apparently more out of kindness for him than admiration of the picture. He said he presumed you could not always get a thing like that just right the first time, and that you had to keep trying till you did get it; but it paid in the end. Jeff had stolen down from the house with his dog, drawn by the fascination which one we have injured always has for us; when Whitwell suddenly turned upon him and asked, jocularly, “What do you think, Jeff?” the boy could only kick his dog and drive it home, as a means of hiding his feelings.

He brought the teacher to see the picture the last Friday before the painter went away. She was a cold-looking, austere girl, pretty enough, with eyes that wandered away from the young man, although Jeff used all his arts to make her feel at home in his presence. She pretended to have merely stopped on her way up to see Mrs. Durgin, and she did not venture any comment on the painting; but, when Westover asked something about her school, she answered him promptly enough as to the number and ages and sexes of the school-children. He ventured so far toward a joke with her as to ask if she had much trouble with such a tough subject as Jeff, and she said he could be good enough when he had a mind. If he could get over his teasing, she said, with the air of reading him a lecture, she would not have anything to complain of; and Jeff looked ashamed, but rather of the praise than the blame. His humiliation seemed complete when she said, finally: “He’s a good scholar.”

On the Tuesday following, Westover meant to go. It was the end of his third week, and it had brought him into September. The weather since he had begun to paint Lion’s Head was perfect for his work; but, with the long drought, it had grown very warm. Many trees now had flamed into crimson on the hill-slopes; the yellowing corn in the fields gave out a thin, dry sound as the delicate wind stirred the blades; but only the sounds and sights were autumnal. The heat was oppressive at midday, and at night the cold had lost its edge. There was no dew, and Mrs. Durgin sat out with Westover on the porch while he smoked a final pipe there. She had come to join him for some fixed purpose, apparently, and she called to her boy, “You go to bed, Jeff,” as if she wished to be alone with Westover; the men folks were already in bed; he could hear them cough now and then.

“Mr. Westover,” the woman began, even as she swept her skirts forward before she sat down, “I want to ask you whether you would let that picture of yours go on part board? I’ll give you back just as much as you say of this money.”

He looked round and saw that she had in the hand dropped in her lap the bills he had given her after supper.

“Why, I couldn’t, very well, Mrs. Durgin—” he began.

“I presume you’ll think I’m foolish,” she pursued. “But I do want that picture; I don’t know when I’ve ever wanted a thing more. It’s just like Lion’s Head, the way I’ve seen it, day in and day out, every summer since I come here thirty-five years ago; it’s beautiful!”

“Mrs. Durgin,” said Westover, “you gratify me more than I can tell you. I wish — I wish I could let you have the picture. I — I don’t know what to say—”

“Why don’t you let me have it, then? If we ever had to go away from here — if anything happened to us — it’s the one thing I should want to keep and take with me. There! That’s the way I feel about it. I can’t explain; but I do wish you’d let me have it.”

Some emotion which did not utter itself in the desire she expressed made her voice shake in the words. She held out the bank-notes to him, and they rustled with the tremor of her hand.

“Mrs. Durgin, I suppose I shall have to be frank with you, and you mustn’t feel hurt. I have to live by my work, and I have to get as much as I can for it—”

“That’s what I say. I don’t want to beat you down on it. I’ll give you whatever you think is right. It’s my money, and my husband feels just as I do about it,” she urged.

“You don’t quite understand,” he said, gently. “I expect to have an exhibition of my pictures in Boston this fall, and I hope to get two or three hundred dollars for Lion’s Head.”

“I’ve been a proper fool,” cried the woman, and she drew in a long breath.

“Oh, don’t mind,” he begged; “it’s all right. I’ve never had any offer for a picture that I’d rather take than yours. I know the thing can’t be altogether bad after what you’ve said. And I’ll tell you what! I’ll have it photographed when I get to Boston, and I’ll send you a photograph of it.”

“How much will that be?” Mrs. Durgin asked, as if taught caution by her offer for the painting.

“Nothing. And if you’ll accept it and hang it up here somewhere I shall be very glad.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Durgin, and the meekness, the wounded pride, he fancied in her, touched him.

He did not know at first how to break the silence which she let follow upon her words. At last he said:

“You spoke, just now, about taking it with you. Of course, you don’t think of leaving Lion’s Head?”

She did not answer for so long a time that he thought she had not perhaps heard him or heeded what he said; but she answered, finally: “We did think of it. The day you come we had about made up our minds to leave.”

“Oh!”

“But I’ve been thinkin’ of something since you’ve been here that I don’t know but you’ll say is about as wild as wantin’ to buy a three-hundred-dollar picture with a week’s board.” She gave a short, self-scornful laugh; but it was a laugh, and it relieved the tension.

“It may not be worth any more,” he said, glad of the relief.

“Oh, I guess it is,” she rejoined, and then she waited for him to prompt her.

“Well?”

“Well, it’s this; and I wanted to ask you, anyway. You think there’d be any chance of my gettin’ summer folks to come here and board if I was to put an advertisement in a Boston paper? I know it’s a lonesome place, and there ain’t what you may call attractions. But the folks from the hotels, sometimes, when they ride over in a stage to see the view, praise up the scenery, and I guess it is sightly. I know that well enough; and I ain’t afraid but what I can do for boarders as well as some, if not better. What do you think?”

“I think that’s a capital idea, Mrs. Durgin.”

“It’s that or go,” she said. “There ain’t a livin’ for us on the farm any more, and we got to do somethin’. If there was anything else I could do! But I’ve thought it out and thought it out, and I guess there ain’t anything I can do but take boarders — if I can get them.”

“I should think you’d find it rather pleasant on some accounts. Your boarders would be company for you,” said Westover.

“We’re company enough for ourselves,” said Mrs. Durgin. “I ain’t ever been lonesome here, from the first minute. I guess I had company enough when I was a girl to last me the sort that hotel folks are. I presume Mr. Whitwell spoke to you about my father?”

“Yes; he did, Mrs. Durgin.”

“I don’t presume he said anything that wa’n’t true. It’s all right. But I know how my mother used to slave, and how I used to slave myself; and I always said I’d rather do anything than wait on boarders; and now I guess I got to come to it. The sight of summer folks makes me sick! I guess I could ‘a’ had ’em long ago if I’d wanted to. There! I’ve said enough.” She rose, with a sudden lift of her powerful frame, and stood a moment as if expecting Westover to say something.

He said: “Well, when you’ve made your mind up, send your advertisement to me, and I’ll attend to it for you.”

“And you won’t forget about the picture?”

“No; I won’t forget that.”

The next morning he made ready for an early start, and in his preparations he had the zealous and even affectionate help of Jeff Durgin. The boy seemed to wish him to carry away the best impression of him, or, at least, to make him forget all that had been sinister or unpleasant in his behavior. They had been good comrades since the first evil day; they had become good friends even; and Westover was touched by the boy’s devotion at parting. He helped the painter get his pack together in good shape, and he took pride in strapping it on Westover’s shoulders, adjusting and readjusting it with care, and fastening it so that all should be safe and snug. He lingered about at the risk of being late for school, as if to see the last of the painter, and he waved his hat to him when Westover looked back at the house from half down the lane. Then he vanished, and Westover went slowly on till he reached that corner of the orchard where the slanting gravestones of the family burial-ground showed above the low wall. There, suddenly, a storm burst upon him. The air rained apples, that struck him on the head, the back, the side, and pelted in violent succession on his knapsack and canvases, camp-stool and easel. He seemed assailed by four or five skilful marksmen, whose missiles all told.

When he could lift his face to look round he heard a shrill, accusing voice, “Oh, Jeff Durgin!” and he saw another storm of apples fly through the air toward the little Whitwell girl, who dodged and ran along the road below and escaped in the direction of the schoolhouse. Then the boy’s face showed itself over the top of one of the gravestones, all agrin with joy. He waited and watched Westover keep slowly on, as if nothing had happened, and presently he let some apples fall from his hands and walked slowly back to the house, with his dog at his heels.

When Westover reached the level of the road and the shelter of the woods near Whitwell’s house, he unstrapped his load to see how much harm had been done to his picture. He found it unhurt, and before he had got the burden back again he saw Jeff Durgin leaping along the road toward the school-house, whirling his satchel of books about his head and shouting gayly to the girl, now hidden by the bushes at the other end of the lane: “Cynthy! Oh, Cynthy! Wait for me! I want to tell you something!”

IX.

Westover, received next spring the copy for an advertisement from Mrs. Durgin, which she asked to have him put in some paper for her. She said that her son Jackson had written it out, and Westover found it so well written that he had scarcely to change the wording. It offered the best of farm-board, with plenty of milk and eggs, berries and fruit, for five dollars a week at Lion’s Head Farm, and it claimed for the farm the merit of the finest view of the celebrated Lion’s Head Mountain. It was signed, as her letter was signed, “Mrs. J. M. Durgin,” with her post-office address, and it gave Westover as a reference.

The letter was in the same handwriting as the advertisement, which he took to be that of Jackson Durgin. It enclosed a dollar note to pay for three insertions of the advertisement in the evening Transcript, and it ended, almost casually: “I do not know as you have heard that my husband, James Monroe Durgin, passed to spirit life this spring. My son will help me to run the house.”

This death could not move Westover more than it had apparently moved the widow. During the three weeks he had passed under his roof, he had scarcely exchanged three words with James Monroe Durgin, who remained to him an impression of large, round, dull-blue eyes, a stubbly upper lip, and cheeks and chin tagged with coarse, hay-colored beard. The impression was so largely the impression that he had kept of the dull-blue eyes and the gaunt, slanted figure of Andrew Jackson Durgin that he could not be very distinct in his sense of which was now the presence and which the absence. He remembered, with an effort, that the son’s beard was straw-colored, but he had to make no effort to recall the robust effect of Mrs. Durgin and her youngest son. He wondered now, as he had often wondered before, whether she knew of the final violence which had avenged the boy for the prolonged strain of repression Jeff had inflicted upon himself during Westover’s stay at the farm. After several impulses to go back and beat him, to follow him to school and expose him to the teacher, to write to his mother and tell her of his misbehavior, Westover had decided to do nothing. As he had come off unhurt in person and property, he could afford to be more generously amused than if he had suffered damage in either. The more he thought of the incident, the more he was disposed to be lenient with the boy, whom he was aware of having baffled and subdued by his superior wit and virtue in perhaps intolerable measure. He could not quite make out that it was an act of bad faith; there was no reason to think that the good-natured things the fellow had done, the constant little offices of zeal and friendliness, were less sincere than this violent outbreak.

The letter from Lion’s Head Farm brought back his three weeks there very vividly, and made Westover wish he was going there for the summer. But he was going over to France for an indefinite period of work in the only air where he believed modern men were doing good things in the right way. He W a sale in the winter, and he had sold pictures enough to provide the means for this sojourn abroad; though his lion’s Head Mountain had not brought the two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars he had hoped for. It brought only a hundred and sixty; but the time had almost come already when Westover thought it brought too much. Now, the letter from Mrs. Durgin reminded him that he had never sent her the photograph of the picture which he had promised her. He encased the photograph at once, and wrote to her with many avowals of contrition for his neglect, and strong regret that he was not soon to see the original of the painting again. He paid a decent reverence to the bereavement she had suffered, and he sent his regards to all, especially his comrade Jeff, whom he advised to keep out of the apple-orchard.

Five years later Westover came home in the first week of a gasping August, whose hot breath thickened round the Cunarder before she got half-way up the harbor. He waited only to see his pictures through the custom-house, and then he left for the mountains. The mountains meant Lion’s Head for him, and eight hours after he was dismounting from the train at a station on the road which had been pushed through on a new line within four miles of the farm. It was called Lion’s Head House now, as he read on the side of the mountain-wagon which he saw waiting at the platform, and he knew at a glance that it was Jeff Durgin who was coming forward to meet him and take his hand-bag.

The boy had been the prophecy of the man in even a disappointing degree. Westover had fancied him growing up to the height of his father and brother, but Jeff Durgin’s stalwart frame was notable for strength rather than height. He could not have been taller than his mother, whose stature was above the standard of her sex, but he was massive without being bulky. His chest was deep, his square shoulders broad, his powerful legs bore him with a backward bulge of the calves that showed through his shapely trousers; he caught up the trunks and threw them into the baggage-wagon with a swelling of the muscles on his short, thick arms which pulled his coat-sleeves from his heavy wrists and broad, short hands.

He had given one of these to Westover to shake when they met, but with something conditional in his welcome, and with a look which was not so much furtive as latent. The thatch of yellow hair he used to wear was now cropped close to his skull, which was a sort of dun-color; and it had some drops of sweat along the lighter edge where his hat had shaded his forehead. He put his hat on the seat between himself and Westover, and drove away from the station bareheaded, to cool himself after his bout with the baggage, which was following more slowly in its wagon. There was a good deal of it, and there were half a dozen people — women, of course — going to Lion’s Head House. Westover climbed to the place beside Jeff to let them have the other two seats to themselves, and to have a chance of talking; but the ladies had to be quieted in their several anxieties concerning their baggage, and the letters and telegrams they had sent about their rooms, before they settled down to an exchange of apprehensions among themselves, and left Jeff Durgin free to listen to Westover.

“I don’t know but I ought to have telegraphed you that I was coming,” Westover said; “but I couldn’t realize that you were doing things on the hotel scale. Perhaps you won’t have room for me?”

“Guess we can put you up,” said Jeff.

“No chance of getting my old room, I suppose?”

“I shouldn’t wonder. If there’s any one in it, I guess mother could change ‘em.”

“Is that so?” asked Westover, with a liking for being liked, which his tone expressed. “How is your mother?”

Jeff seemed to think a moment before he answered:

“Just exactly the same.”

“A little older?”

“Not as I can see.”

“Does she hate keeping a hotel as badly as she expected?”

“That’s what she says,” answered Jeff, with a twinkle. All the time, while he was talking with Westover, he was breaking out to his horses, which he governed with his voice, trotting them up hill and down, and walking them on the short, infrequent levels, in the mountain fashion.

Westover almost feared to ask: “And how is Jackson?”

“First-rate — that is, for him. He’s as well as ever he was, I guess, and he don’t appear a day older. You’ve changed some,” said Jeff, with a look round at Westover.

“Yes; I’m twenty-nine now, and I wear a heavier beard.” Westover noticed that Jeff was clean shaved of any sign of an approaching beard, and artistically he rejoiced in the fellow’s young, manly beauty, which was very regular and sculpturesque. “You’re about eighteen?”

“Nearer nineteen.”

“Is Jackson as much interested in the other world as he used to be?”

“Spirits?”

“Yes.”

“I guess he keeps it up with Mr. Whitwell. He don’t say much about it at home. He keeps all the books, and helps mother run the house. She couldn’t very well get along without him.”

“And where do you come in?”

“Well, I look after the transportation,” said Jeff, with a nod toward his horses— “when I’m at home, that is. I’ve been at the Academy in Lovewell the last three winters, and that means a good piece of the summer, too, first and last. But I guess I’ll let mother talk to you about that.”

“All right,” said Westover. “What I don’t know about education isn’t worth knowing.”

Jeff laughed, and said to the off horse, which seemed to know that he was meant: “Get up, there!”

“And Cynthia? Is Cynthia at home?” Westover asked.

“Yes; they’re all down in the little wood-colored house yet. Cynthia teaches winters, and summers she helps mother. She has charge of the dining-room.”

“Does Franky cry as much as ever?”

“No, Frank’s a fine boy. He’s in the house, too. Kind of bell-boy.”

“And you haven’t worked Mr. Whitwell in anywhere?”

“Well, he talks to the ladies, and takes parties of ’em mountain-climbing. I guess we couldn’t get along without Mr. Whitwell. He talks religion to ‘em.” He cast a mocking glance at Westover over his shoulder. “Women seem to like religion, whether they belong to church or not.”

Westover laughed and asked: “And Fox? How’s Fox?”

“Well,” said Jeff, “we had to give Fox away. He was always cross with the boarders’ children. My brother was on from Colorado, and he took Fox back with him.”

“I didn’t suppose,” said Westover, “that I should have been sorry to miss Fox. But I guess I shall be.”

Jeff seemed to enjoy the implication of his words. “He wasn’t a bad dog. He was stupid.”

When they arrived at the foot of the lane, mounting to the farm, Westover saw what changes had been made in the house. There were large additions, tasteless and characterless, but giving the rooms that were needed. There was a vulgar modernity in the new parts, expressed with a final intensity in the four-light windows, which are esteemed the last word of domestic architecture in the country. Jeff said nothing as they approached the house, but Westover said: “Well, you’ve certainly prospered. You’re quite magnificent.”

They reached the old level in front of the house, artificially widened out of his remembrance, with a white flag-pole planted at its edge, and he looked up at the front of the house, which was unchanged, except that it had been built a story higher back of the old front, and discovered the window of his old room. He could hardly wait to get his greetings over with Mrs. Durgin and Jackson, who both showed a decorous pleasure and surprise at his coming, before he asked:

“And could you let me have my own room, Mrs. Durgin?”

“Why, yes,” she said, “if you don’t want something a little nicer.”

“I don’t believe you’ve got anything nicer,” Westover said.

“All right, if you think so,” she retorted. “You can have the old room, anyway.”

X.

Westover could not have said he felt very much at home on his first sojourn at the farm, or that he had cared greatly for the Durgins. But now he felt very much at home, and as if he were in the hands of friends.

It was toward the close of the afternoon that he arrived, and he went in promptly to the meal that was served shortly after. He found that the farm-house had not evolved so far in the direction of a hotel as to have reached the stage of a late dinner. It was tea that he sat down to, but when he asked if there were not something hot, after listening to a catalogue of the cold meats, the spectacled waitress behind his chair demanded, with the air of putting him on his honor:

“You among those that came this afternoon?”

Westover claimed to be of the new arrivals.

“Well, then, you can have steak or chops and baked potatoes.”

He found the steak excellent, though succinct, and he looked round in the distinction it conferred upon him, on the older guests, who were served with cold ham, tongue, and corned-beef. He had expected to be appointed his place by Cynthia Whitwell, but Jeff came to the dining-room with him and showed him to the table he occupied, with an effect of doing him special credit.

From his impressions of the berries, the cream, the toast, and the tea, as well as the steak, he decided that on the gastronomic side there could be no question but the Durgins knew how to keep a hotel; and his further acquaintance with the house and its appointments confirmed him in his belief. All was very simple, but sufficient; and no guest could have truthfully claimed that he was stinted in towels, in water, in lamp-light, in the quantity or quality of bedding, in hooks for clothes, or wardrobe or bureau room. Westover made Mrs. Durgin his sincere compliments on her success as they sat in the old parlor, which she had kept for herself much in its former state, and she accepted them with simple satisfaction.

“But I don’t know as I should ever had the courage to try it if it hadn’t been for you happening along just when you did,” she said.

“Then I’m the founder of your fortunes?”

“If you want to call them fortunes. We don’t complain It’s been a fight, but I guess we’ve got the best of it. The house is full, and we’re turnin’ folks away. I guess they can’t say that at the big hotels they used to drive over from to see Lion’s Head at the farm.” She gave a low, comfortable chuckle, and told Westover of the struggle they had made. It was an interesting story and pathetic, like all stories of human endeavor the efforts of the most selfish ambition have something of this interest; and the struggle of the Durgins had the grace of the wish to keep their home.

“And is Jeff as well satisfied as the rest?” Westover asked, after other talk and comment on the facts.

“Too much so,” said Mrs. Durgin. “I should like to talk with you about Jeff, Mr. Westover; you and him was always such friends.”

“Yes,” said Westover; “I shall be glad if I can be of use to you.”

“Why, it’s just this. I don’t see why Jeff shouldn’t do something besides keep a hotel.”

Westover’s eyes wandered to the photograph of his painting of Lion’s Head which hung over the mantelpiece, in what he felt to be the place of the greatest honor in the whole house, and a sudden fear came upon him that perhaps Jeff had developed an artistic talent in the belief of his family. But he waited silently to hear.

“We did think that before we got through the improvements last spring a year ago we should have to get the savings-bank to put a mortgage on the place; but we had just enough to start the season with, and we thought we would try to pull through. We had a splendid season, and made money, and this year we’re doin’ so well that I ain’t afraid for the future any more, and I want to give Jeff a chance in the world. I want he should go to college.”

Westover felt all the boldness of the aspiration, but it was at least not in the direction of art. “Wouldn’t you rather miss him in the management?”

“We should, some. But he would be here the best part of the summer, in his vacations, and Jackson and I are full able to run the house without him.”

“Jackson seems very well,” said Westover, evasively.

“He’s better. He’s only thirty-four years old. His father lived to be sixty, and he had the same kind. Jeff tell you he had been at Lovewell Academy?”

“Yes; he did.”

“He done well there. All his teachers that he ever had,” Mrs. Durgin went on, with the mother-pride that soon makes itself tiresome to the listener, “said Jeff done well at school when he had a mind to, and at the Academy he studied real hard. I guess,” said Mrs. Durgin, with her chuckle, “that he thought that was goin’ to be the end of it. One thing, he had to keep up with Cynthy, and that put him on his pride. You seen Cynthy yet?”

“No. Jeff told me she was in charge of the diningroom.”

“I guess I’m in charge of the whole house,” said Mrs. Durgin. “Cynthy’s the housekeeper, though. She’s a fine girl, and a smart girl,” said Mrs. Durgin, with a visible relenting from some grudge, “and she’ll do well wherever you put her. She went to the Academy the first two winters Jeff did. We’ve about scooped in the whole Whitwell family. Franky’s here, and his father’s — well, his father’s kind of philosopher to the lady boarders.” Mrs. Durgin laughed, and Westover laughed with her. “Yes, I want Jeff should go to college, and I want he should be a lawyer.”

Westover did not find that he had anything useful to say to this; so he said: “I’ve no doubt it’s better than being a painter.”

“I’m not so sure; three hundred dollars for a little thing like that.” She indicated the photograph of his Lion’s Head, and she was evidently so proud of it that he reserved for the moment the truth as to the price he had got for the painting. “I was surprised when you sent me a photograph full as big. I don’t let every one in here, but a good many of the ladies are artists themselves-amateurs, I guess — and first and last they all want to see it. I guess they’ll all want to see you, Mr. Westover. They’ll be wild, as they call it, when they know you’re in the house. Yes, I mean Jeff shall go to college.”

“Bowdoin or Dartmouth?” Westover suggested.

“Well, I guess you’ll think I’m about as forth-putting as I was when I wanted you to give me a three-hundred-dollar picture for a week’s board.”

“I only got a hundred and sixty, Mrs. Durgin,” said Westover, conscientiously.

“Well, it’s a shame. Any rate, three hundred’s the price to all my boarders. My, if I’ve told that story once, I guess I’ve told it fifty times!”

Mrs. Durgin laughed at herself jollily, and Westover noted how prosperity had changed her. It had freed her tongue, it has brightened her humor, it had cheered her heart; she had put on flesh, and her stalwart frame was now a far greater bulk than he remembered.

“Well, there,” she said, “the long and the short of it is, I want Jeff should go to Harvard.”

He commanded himself to say: “I don’t see why he shouldn’t.”

Mrs. Durgin called out, “Come in, Jackson,” and Westover looked round and saw the elder son like a gaunt shadow in the doorway. “I’ve just got where I’ve told Mr. Westover where I want Jeff should go. It don’t seem to have ca’d him off his feet any, either.”

“I presume,” said Jackson, coming in and sitting lankly down in the feather-cushioned rocking-chair which his mother pushed toward him with her foot, “that the expense would be more at Harvard than it would at the other colleges.”

“If you want the best you got to pay for it,” said Mrs. Durgin.

“I suppose it would cost more,” Westover answered Jackson’s conjecture. “I really don’t know much about it. One hears tremendous stories at Boston of the rate of living among the swell students in Cambridge. People talk of five thousand a year, and that sort of thing.” Mrs. Durgin shut her lips, after catching her breath. “But I fancy that it’s largely talk. I have a friend whose son went through Harvard for a thousand a year, and I know that many fellows do it for much less.”

“I guess we can manage to let Jeff have a thousand a year,” said Mrs. Durgin, proudly, “and not scrimp very much, either.”

She looked at her elder son, who said: “I don’t believe but what we could. It’s more of a question with me what sort of influence Jeff would come under there. I think he’s pretty much spoiled here.”

“Now, Jackson!” said his mother.

“I’ve heard,” said Westover, “that Harvard takes the nonsense out of a man. I can’t enter into what you say, and it isn’t my affair; but in regard to influence at Harvard, it depends upon the set Jeff is thrown with or throws himself with. So, at least, I infer from what I’ve heard my friend say of his son there. There are hard-working sets, loafing sets, and fast sets; and I suppose it isn’t different at Harvard in such matters from other colleges.”

Mrs. Durgin looked a little grave. “Of course,” she said, “we don’t know anybody at Cambridge, except some ladies that boarded with us one summer, and I shouldn’t want to ask any favor of them. The trouble would be to get Jeff started right.”

Westover surmised a good many things, but in the absence of any confidences from the Durgins he could not tell just how much Jackson meant in saying that Jeff was pretty much spoiled, or how little. At first, from Mrs. Durgin’s prompt protest, he fancied that Jackson meant that the boy had been over-indulged by his mother: “I understand,” he said, in default of something else to say, “that the requirements at Harvard are pretty severe.”

“He’s passed his preliminary examinations,” said Jackson, with a touch of hauteur, “and I guess he can enter this fall if we should so decide. He’ll have some conditions, prob’ly, but none but what he can work off, I guess.”

“Then, if you wish to have him go to college, by all means let him go to Harvard, I should say. It’s our great university and our oldest. I’m not a college man myself; but, if I were, I should wish to have been a Harvard man. If Jeff has any nonsense in him, it will take it out; and I don’t believe there’s anything in Harvard, as Harvard, to make him worse.”

“That’s what we both think,” said Jackson.

“I’ve heard,” Westover continued, and he rose and stood while he spoke, “that Harvard’s like the world. A man gets on there on the same terms that he gets on in the world. He has to be a man, and he’d better be a gentleman.”

Mrs. Durgin still looked serious. “Have you come back to Boston for good now? Do you expect to be there right along?”

“I’ve taken a studio there. Yes, I expect to be in Boston now. I’ve taken to teaching, and I fancy I can make a living. If Jeff comes to Cambridge, and I can be of any use—”

“We should be ever so much obliged to you,” said his mother, with an air of great relief.

“Not at all. I shall be very glad. Your mountain air is drugging me, Mrs. Durgin. I shall have to say good-night, or I shall tumble asleep before I get upstairs. Oh, I can find the way, I guess; this part of the house seems the same.” He got away from them, and with the lamp that Jackson gave him found his way to his room. A few moments later some one knocked at his door, and a boy stood there with a pitcher. “Some ice-water, Mr. Westover?”

“Why, is that you, Franky? I’m glad to see you again. How are you?”

“I’m pretty well,” said the boy, shyly. He was a very handsome little fellow of distinctly dignified presence, and Westover was aware at once that here was not a subject for patronage. “Is there anything else you want, Mr. Westover? Matches, or soap, or anything?” He put the pitcher down and gave a keen glance round the room.

“No, everything seems to be here, Frank,” said Westover.

“Well, good-night,” said the boy, and he slipped out, quietly closing the door after him.

Westover pushed up his window and looked at Lion’s Head in the moonlight. It slumbered as if with the sleep of centuries-austere, august. The moon-rays seemed to break and splinter on the outline of the lion-shape, and left all the mighty mass black below.

In the old porch under his window Westover heard whispering. Then, “You behave yourself, Jeff Durgin!” came in a voice which could be no other than Cynthia Whitwell’s, and Jeff Durgin’s laugh followed.

He saw the girl in the morning. She met him at the door of the dining-room, and he easily found in her shy, proud manner, and her pure, cold beauty, the temperament and physiognomy of the child he remembered. She was tall and slim, and she held herself straight without stiffness; her face was fine, with a straight nose, and a decided chin, and a mouth of the same sweetness which looked from her still, gray eyes; her hair, of the average brown, had a rough effect of being quickly tossed into form, which pleased him; as she slipped down the room before him to place him at table he saw that she was, as it were, involuntarily, unwillingly graceful. She made him think of a wild sweetbrier, of a hermit-thrush; but, if there were this sort of poetic suggestion in Cynthia’s looks, her acts were of plain and honest prose, such as giving Westover the pleasantest place and the most intelligent waitress in the room.

He would have liked to keep her in talk a moment, but she made business-like despatch of all his allusions to the past, and got herself quickly away. Afterward she came back to him, with the effect of having forced herself to come, and the color deepened in her cheeks while she stayed.

She seemed glad of his being there, but helpless against the instincts or traditions that forbade her to show her pleasure in his presence. Her reticence became almost snubbing in its strictness when he asked her about her school-teaching in the winter; but he found that she taught at the little school-house at the foot of the hill, and lived at home with her father.

“And have you any bad boys that frighten little girls in your school?” he asked, jocosely.

“I don’t know as I have,” she said, with a consciousness that flamed into her cheeks.

“Perhaps the boys have reformed?” Westover suggested.

“I presume,” she said, stiffly, “that there’s room for improvement in every one,” and then, as if she were afraid he might take this personally, she looked unhappy and tried to speak of other things. She asked him if he did not see a great many changes at Lion’s Head; he answered, gravely, that he wished he could have found it just as he left it, and then she must have thought she had gone wrong again, for she left him in an embarrassment that was pathetic, but which was charming.

XI.

After breakfast Westover walked out and saw Whitwell standing on the grass in front of the house, beside the flagstaff. He suffered Westover to make the first advances toward the renewal of their acquaintance, but when he was sure of his friendly intention he responded with a cordial openness which the painter had fancied wanting in his children. Whitwell had not changed much. The most noticeable difference was the compact phalanx of new teeth which had replaced the staggering veterans of former days, and which displayed themselves in his smile of relenting. There was some novelty of effect also in an arrangement of things in his hat-band. At first Westover thought they were fishhooks and artificial flies, such as the guides wear in the Adirondacks to advertise their calling about the hotel offices and the piazzas. But another glance showd him that they were sprays and wild flowers of various sorts, with gay mosses and fungi and some stems of Indian-pipe.

Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover’s eye. He said, almost immediately: “Lookin’ at my almanac? This is one of our field-days; we have ’em once a week; and I like to let the ladies see beforehand what nature’s got on the bill for ‘em, in the woods and pastur’s.”

“It’s a good idea,” said Westover, “and it’s fresh and picturesque.” Whitwell laughed for pleasure.

“They told me what a consolation you were to the ladies, with your walks and talks.”

“Well, I try to give ’em something to think about,” said Whitwell.

“But why do you confine your ministrations to one sex?”

“I don’t, on purpose. But it’s the only sex here, three-fourths of the time. Even the children are mostly all girls. When the husbands come up Saturday nights, they don’t want to go on a tramp Sundays. They want to lay off and rest. That’s about how it is. Well, you see some changes about Lion’s Head, I presume?” he asked, with what seemed an impersonal pleasure in them.

“I should rather have found the old farm. But I must say I’m glad to find such a good hotel.”

“Jeff and his mother made their brags to you?” said Whitwell, with a kind of amiable scorn. “I guess if it wa’n’t for Cynthy she wouldn’t know where she was standin’, half the time. It don’t matter where Jeff stands, I guess. Jackson’s the best o’ the lot, now the old man’s gone.” There was no one by at the moment to hear these injuries except Westover, but Whitwell called them out with a frankness which was perhaps more carefully adapted to the situation than it seemed. Westover made no attempt to parry them formally; but he offered some generalities in extenuation of the unworthiness of the Durgins, which Whitwell did not altogether refuse.

“Oh, it’s all right. Old woman talk to you about Jeff’s going to college? I thought so. Wants to make another Dan’el Webster of him. Guess she can’s far forth as Dan’el’s graduatin’ went.” Westover tried to remember how this had been with the statesman, but could not. Whitwell added, with intensifying irony so of look and tone: “Guess the second Dan’el won’t have a chance to tear his degree up; guess he wouldn’t ever b’en ready to try for it if it had depended on him. They don’t keep any record at Harvard, do they, of the way fellows are prepared for their preliminary examinations?”

“I don’t quite know what you mean,” said Westover.

“Oh, nothin’. You get a chance some time to ask Jeff who done most of his studyin’ for him at the Academy.”

This hint was not so darkling but Westover could understand that Whitwell attributed Jeff’s scholarship to the help of Cynthia, but he would not press him to an open assertion of the fact. There was something painful in it to him; it had the pathos which perhaps most of the success in the world would reveal if we could penetrate its outside.

He was silent, and Whitwell left the point. “Well,” he concluded, “what’s goin’ on in them old European countries?”

“Oh, the old thing,” said Westover. “But I can’t speak for any except France, very well.”

“What’s their republic like, over there? Ours? See anything of it, how it works?”

“Well, you know,” said Westover, “I was working so hard myself all the time—”

“Good!” Whitwell slapped his leg. Westover saw that he had on long India-rubber boots, which came up to his knees, and he gave a wayward thought to the misery they would be on an August day to another man; but Whitwell was probably insensible to any discomfort from them. “When a man’s mindin’ his own business any government’s good, I guess. But I should like to prowl round some them places where they had the worst scenes of the Revolution, Ever been in the Place de la Concorde?” Whitwell gave it the full English pronunciation.

“I passed through it nearly every day.”

“I want to know! And that column that they, pulled down in the Commune that had that little Boney on it — see that?”

“In the Place Vendome?”

“Yes, Plass Vonndome.”

“Oh yes. You wouldn’t know it had ever been down.”

“Nor the things it stood for?”

“As to that, I can’t be so sure.”

“Well, it’s funny,” said the philosopher, “how the world seems to always come out at the same hole it went in at!” He paused, with his mouth open, as if to let the notion have full effect with Westover.

The painter said: “And you’re still in the old place, Mr. Whitwell?”

“Yes, I like my own house. They’ve wanted me to come up here often enough, but I’m satisfied where I am. It’s quiet down there, and, when I get through for the day, I can read. And I like to keep my family together. Cynthy and Frank always sleep at home, and Jombateeste eats with me. You remember Jombateeste?”

Westover had to say that he did not.

“Well, I don’t know as you did see him much. He was that Canuck I had helpin’ me clear that piece over on Lion’s Head for the pulp-mill; pulp-mill went all to thunder, and I never got a cent. And sometimes Jackson comes down with his plantchette, and we have a good time.”

“Jackson still believes in the manifestations?”

“Yes. But he’s never developed much himself. He can’t seem to do much without the plantchette. We’ve had up some of them old philosophers lately. We’ve had up Socrates.”

“Is that so? It must be very interesting.”

Whitwell did not answer, and Westover saw his eye wander. He looked round. Several ladies were coming across the grass toward him from the hotel, lifting their skirts and tiptoeing through the dew. They called to him, “Good-morning, Mr. Whitwell!” and “Are you going up Lion’s Head to-day?” and “Don’t you think it will rain?”— “Guess not,” said Whitwell, with a fatherly urbanity and an air of amusement at the anxieties of the sex which seemed habitual to him. He waited tranquilly for them to come up, and then asked, with a wave of his hand toward Westover: “Acquainted with Mr. Westover, the attist?” He named each of them, and it would have been no great vanity in Westover to think they had made their little movement across the grass quite as much in the hope of an introduction to him as in the wish to consult Whitwell about his plans.

The painter found himself the centre of an agreeable excitement with all the ladies in the house. For this it was perhaps sufficient to be a man. To be reasonably young and decently good-looking, to be an artist, and an artist not unknown, were advantages which had the splendor of superfluity.

He liked finding himself in the simple and innocent American circumstance again, and he was not sorry to be confronted at once with one of the most characteristic aspects of our summer. He could read in the present development of Lion’s Head House all the history of its evolution from the first conception of farm-board, which sufficed the earliest comers, to its growth in the comforts and conveniences which more fastidious tastes and larger purses demanded. Before this point was reached, the boarders would be of a good and wholesome sort, but they would be people of no social advantages, and not of much cultivation, though they might be intelligent; they would certainly not be fashionable; five dollars a week implied all that, except in the case of some wandering artist or the family of some poor young professor. But when the farm became a boarding-house and called itself a hotel, as at present with Lion’s Head House, and people paid ten dollars a week, or twelve for transients, a moment of its character was reached which could not be surpassed when its prosperity became greater and its inmates more pretentious. In fact, the people who can afford to pay ten dollars a week for summer board, and not much more, are often the best of the American people, or, at least, of the New England people. They may not know it, and those who are richer may not imagine it. They are apt to be middle-aged maiden ladies from university towns, living upon carefully guarded investments; young married ladies with a scant child or two, and needing rest and change of air; college professors with nothing but their modest salaries; literary men or women in the beginning of their tempered success; clergymen and their wives away from their churches in the larger country towns or the smaller suburbs of the cities; here and there an agreeable bachelor in middle life, fond of literature and nature; hosts of young and pretty girls with distinct tastes in art, and devoted to the clever young painter who leads them to the sources of inspiration in the fields and woods. Such people are refined, humane, appreciative, sympathetic; and Westover, fresh from the life abroad where life is seldom so free as ours without some stain, was glad to find himself in the midst of this unrestraint, which was so sweet and pure. He had seen enough of rich people to know that riches seldom bought the highest qualities, even among his fellow-countrymen who suppose that riches can do everything, and the first aspects of society at Lion’s Head seemed to him Arcadian. There really proved to be a shepherd or two among all that troop of shepherdesses, old and young; though it was in the middle of the week, remote alike from the Saturday of arrivals and the Monday of departures. To be sure, there was none quite so young as himself, except Jeff Durgin, who was officially exterior to the social life.

The painter who gave lessons to the ladies was already a man of forty, and he was strongly dragoned round by a wife almost as old, who had taken great pains to secure him for herself, and who worked him to far greater advantage in his profession than he could possibly have worked himself: she got him orders; sold his pictures, even in Boston, where they never buy American pictures; found him pupils, and kept the boldest of these from flirting with him. Westover, who was so newly from Paris, was able to console him with talk of the salons and ateliers, which he had not heard from so directly in ten years. After the first inevitable moment of jealousy, his wife forgave Westover when she found that he did not want pupils, and she took a leading part in the movement to have him read Browning at a picnic, organized by the ladies shortly after he came.

XII.

The picnic was held in Whitwell’s Clearing, on the side of Lion’s Head, where the moss, almost as white as snow, lay like belated drifts among the tall, thin grass which overran the space opened by the axe, and crept to the verge of the low pines growing in the shelter of the loftier woods. It was the end of one of Whitwell’s “Tramps Home to Nature,” as he called his walks and talks with the ladies, and on this day Westover’s fellow-painter had added to his lessons in woodlore the claims of art, intending that his class should make studies of various bits in the clearing, and should try to catch something of its peculiar charm. He asked Westover what he thought of the notion, and Westover gave it his approval, which became enthusiastic when he saw the place. He found in it the melancholy grace, the poignant sentiment of ruin which expresses itself in some measure wherever man has invaded nature and then left his conquest to her again. In Whitwell’s Clearing the effect was intensified by the approach on the fading wood road, which the wagons had made in former days when they hauled the fallen timber to the pulp-mill. In places it was so vague and faint as to be hardly a trail; in others, where the wheel-tracks remained visible, the trees had sent out a new growth of lower branches in the place of those lopped away, and almost forbade the advance of foot-passengers. The ladies said they did not see how Jeff was ever going to get through with the wagon, and they expressed fears for the lunch he was bringing, which seemed only too well grounded.

But Whitwell, who was leading them on, said: “You let a Durgin alone to do a thing when he’s made up his mind to it. I guess you’ll have your lunch all right;” and by the time that they had got enough of Browning they heard the welcome sound of wheels crashing upon dead boughs and swishing through the underbrush, and, in the pauses of these pleasant noises, the voice of Jeff Durgin encouraging his horses. The children of the party broke away to meet him, and then he came in sight ahead of his team, looking strong and handsome in his keeping with the scene: Before he got within hearing, the ladies murmured a hymn of praise to his type of beauty; they said he looked like a young Hercules, and Westover owned with an inward smile that Jeff had certainly made the best of himself for the time being. He had taken a leaf from the book of the summer folks; his stalwart calves revealed themselves in thick, ribbed stockings; he wore knickerbockers and a Norfolk jacket of corduroy; he had style as well as beauty, and he had the courage of his clothes and looks. Westover was still in the first surprise of the American facts, and he wondered just what part in the picnic Jeff was to bear socially. He was neither quite host nor guest; but no doubt in the easy play of the life, which Westover was rather proud to find so charming, the question would solve itself rationally and gracefully.

“Where do you want the things?” the young fellow asked of the company at large, as he advanced upon them from the green portals of the roadway, pulling off his soft wool hat, and wiping his wet forehead with his blue-bordered white handkerchief.

“Oh, right here, Jeff!” The nimblest of the nymphs sprang to her feet from the lounging and crouching circle about Westover. She was a young nymph no longer, but with a daughter not so much younger than herself as to make the contrast of her sixteen years painful. Westover recognized the officious, self-approving kind of the woman, but he admired the brisk efficiency with which she had taken possession of the affair from the beginning and inspired every one to help, in strict subordination to herself.

When the cloths were laid on the smooth, elastic moss, and the meal was spread, she heaped a plate without suffering any interval in her activities.

“I suppose you’ve got to go back to your horses, Jeff, and you shall be the first served,” she said, and she offered him the plate with a bright smile and friendly grace, which were meant to keep him from the hurt of her intention.

Jeff did not offer to take the plate which she raised to him from where she was kneeling, but looked down at her with perfect intelligence. “I guess I don’t want anything,” he said, and turned and walked away into the woods.

The ill-advised woman remained kneeling for a moment with her ingratiating smile hardening on her face, while the sense of her blunder petrified the rest. She was the first to recover herself, and she said, with a laugh that she tried to make reckless, “Well, friends, I suppose the rest of you are hungry; I know I am,” and she began to eat.

The others ate, too, though their appetites might well have been affected by the diplomatic behavior of Whitwell. He would not take anything, just at present, he said, and got his long length up from the root of a tree where he had folded it down. “I don’t seem to care much for anything in the middle of the day; breakfast’s my best meal,” and he followed Jeff off into the woods.

“Really,” said the lady, “what did they expect?” But the question was so difficult that no one seemed able to make the simple answer.

The incident darkened the day and spoiled its pleasure; it cast a lessening shadow into the evening when the guests met round the fire in the large, ugly new parlor at the hotel.

The next morning the ladies assembled again on the piazza to decide what should be done with the beautiful day before them. Whitwell stood at the foot of the flag-staff with one hand staying his person against it, like a figure posed in a photograph to verify proportions in the different features of a prospect.

The heroine of the unhappy affair of the picnic could not forbear authorizing herself to invoke his opinion at a certain point of the debate, and “Mr. Whitwell,” she called to him, “won’t you please come here a moment?”

Whitwell slowly pulled himself across the grass to the group, and at the same moment, as if she had been waiting for him to be present, Mrs. Durgin came out of the office door and advanced toward the ladies.

“Mrs. Marven,” she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used to note in her when they came over to Lion’s Head Farm in the tally-hos, “the stage leaves here at two o’clock to get the down train at three. I want you should have your trunks ready to go on the wagon a little before two.”

“You want I should have my — What do you mean, Mrs. Durgin?”

“I want your rooms.”

“You want my rooms?”

Mrs. Durgin did not answer. She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter: “Why, you can’t have my rooms! I don’t understand you. I’ve taken my rooms for the whole of August, and they are mine; and—”

“I have got to have your rooms,” said Mrs. Durgin.

“Very well, then, I won’t give them up,” said the lady. “A bargain’s a bargain, and I have your agreement—”

“If you’re not out of your rooms by two o’clock, your things will be put out; and after dinner to-day you will not eat another bite under my roof.”

Mrs. Durgin went in, and it remained for the company to make what they could of the affair. Mrs. Marven did not wait for the result. She was not a dignified person, but she rose with hauteur and whipped away to her rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations. She knew at least how to give her going the effect of quitting the place with disdain and abhorrence.

The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be so. It made Westover a little sick, and he would have liked to pity Mrs. Marven more than he could. The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin’s behavior was an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to their own rooms and packing their things and leaving on the same stage with Mrs. Marven. None of them did so, and their talk veered around to something extenuating, if not justifying, Mrs. Durgin’s action.

“I suppose,” one of them said, “that she felt more indignant about it because she has been so very good to Mrs. Marven, and her daughter, too. They were both sick on her hands here for a week after they came, first one and then the other, and she looked after them and did for them like a mother.”

“And yet,” another lady suggested, “what could Mrs. Marven have done? What did she do? He wasn’t asked to the picnic, and I don’t see why he should have been treated as a guest. He was there, purely and simply, to bring the things and take them away. And, besides, if there is anything in distinctions, in differences, if we are to choose who is to associate with us — or our daughters—”

“That is true,” the ladies said, in one form or another, with the tone of conviction; but they were not so deeply convinced that they did not want a man’s opinion, and they all looked at Westover.

He would not respond to their look, and the lady who had argued for Mrs. Marven had to ask: “What do you think, Mr. Westover?”

“Ah, it’s a difficult question,” he said. “I suppose that as long as one person believes himself or herself socially better than another, it must always be a fresh problem what to do in every given case.”

The ladies said they supposed so, and they were forced to make what they could of wisdom in which they might certainly have felt a want of finality.

Westover went away from them in a perplexed mind which was not simplified by the contempt he had at the bottom of all for something unmanly in Jeff, who had carried his grievance to his mother like a slighted boy, and provoked her to take up arms for him.

The sympathy for Mrs. Marven mounted again when it was seen that she did not come to dinner, or permit her daughter to do so, and when it became known later that she had refused for both the dishes sent to their rooms. Her farewells to the other ladies, when they gathered to see her off on the stage, were airy rather than cheery; there was almost a demonstration in her behalf, but Westover was oppressed by a kind of inherent squalor in the incident.

At night he responded to a knock which he supposed that of Frank Whitwell with ice-water, and Mrs. Durgin came into his room and sat down in one of his two chairs. “Mr. Westover,” she said, “if you knew all I had done for that woman and her daughter, and how much she had pretended to think of us all, I don’t believe you’d be so ready to judge me.”

“Judge you!” cried Westover. “Bless my soul, Mrs. Durgin! I haven’t said a word that could be tormented into the slightest censure.”

“But you think I done wrong?”

“I have not been at all able to satisfy myself on that point, Mrs. Durgin. I think it’s always wrong to revenge one’s self.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Mrs. Durgin, humbly; and the tears came into her eyes. “I got the tray ready with my own hands that was sent to her room; but she wouldn’t touch it. I presume she didn’t like having a plate prepared for her! But I did feel sorry for her. She a’n’t over and above strong, and I’m afraid she’ll be sick; there a’n’t any rest’rant at our depot.”

Westover fancied this a fit mood in Mrs. Durgin for her further instruction, and he said: “And if you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Durgin, I don’t think what you did was quite the way to keep a hotel.”

More tears flashed into Mrs. Durgin’s eyes, but they were tears of wrath now. “I would ‘a’ done it,” she said, “if I thought every single one of ’em would ‘a’ left the house the next minute, for there a’n’t one that has the first word to say against me, any other way. It wa’n’t that I cared whether she thought my son was good enough to eat with her or not; I know what I think, and that’s enough for me. He wa’n’t invited to the picnic, and he a’n’t one to put himself forward. If she didn’t want him to stay, all she had to do was to do nothin’. But to make him up a plate before everybody, and hand it to him to eat with the horses, like a tramp or a dog—” Mrs. Durgin filled to the throat with her wrath, and the sight of her made Westover keenly unhappy.

“Yes, yes,” he said, “it was a miserable business.” He could not help adding: “If Jeff could have kept it to himself — but perhaps that wasn’t possible.”

“Mr. Westover!” said Mrs. Durgin, sternly. “Do you think Jeff would come to me, like a great crybaby, and complain of my lady boarders and the way they used him? It was Mr. Whit’ell that let it out, or I don’t know as I should ever known about it.”

“I’m glad Jeff didn’t tell you,” said Westover, with a revulsion of good feeling toward him.

“He’d ‘a’ died first,” said his mother. “But Mr. Whit’ell done just right all through, and I sha’n’t soon forget it. Jeff’s give me a proper goin’ over for what I done; both the boys have. But I couldn’t help it, and I should do just so again. All is, I wanted you should know just what you was blamin’ me for—”

“I don’t know that I blame you. I only wish you could have helped it — managed some other way.”

“I did try to get over it, and all I done was to lose a night’s rest. Then, this morning, when I see her settin’ there so cool and mighty with the boarders, and takin’ the lead as usual, I just waited till she got Whit’ell across, and nearly everybody was there that saw what she done to Jeff, and then I flew out on her.”

Westover could not suppress a laugh. “Well, Mrs. Durgin, your retaliation was complete; it was dramatic.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Mrs. Durgin, rising and resuming her self-control; she did not refuse herself a grim smile. “But I guess she thought it was pretty perfect herself — or she will, when she’s able to give her mind to it. I’m sorry for her daughter; I never had anything against her; or her mother, either, for that matter, before. Franky look after you pretty well? I’ll send him up with your ice-water. Got everything else you want?”

“I should have to invent a want if I wished to complain,” said Westover.

“Well, I should like to have you do it. We can’t ever do too much for you. Well, good-night, Mr. Westover.”

“Good’-night, Mrs. Durgin.”

XIII.

Jeff Durgin entered Harvard that fall, with fewer conditions than most students have to work off. This was set down to the credit of Lovewell Academy, where he had prepared for the university; and some observers in such matters were interested to note how thoroughly the old school in a remote town had done its work for him.

None who formed personal relations with him at that time conjectured that he had done much of the work for himself, and even to Westover, when Jeff came to him some weeks after his settlement in Cambridge, he seemed painfully out of his element, and unamiably aware of it. For the time, at least, he had lost the jovial humor, not too kindly always, which largely characterized him, and expressed itself in sallies of irony which were not so unkindly, either. The painter perceived that he was on his guard against his own friendly interest; Jeff made haste to explain that he came because he had told his mother that he would do so. He scarcely invited a return of his visit, and he left Westover wondering at the sort of vague rebellion against his new life which he seemed to be in. The painter went out to see him in Cambridge, not long after, and was rather glad to find him rooming with some other rustic Freshman in a humble street running from the square toward the river; for he thought Jeff must have taken his lodging for its cheapness, out of regard to his mother’s means. But Jeff was not glad to be found there, apparently; he said at once that he expected to get a room in the Yard the next year, and eat at Memorial Hall. He spoke scornfully of his boarding-house as a place where they were all a lot of jays together; and Westover thought him still more at odds with his environment than he had before. But Jeff consented to come in and dine with him at his restaurant, and afterward go to the theatre with him.

When he came, Westover did not quite like his despatch of the half-bottle of California claret served each of them with the Italian table d’hote. He did not like his having already seen the play he proposed; and he found some difficulty in choosing a play which Jeff had not seen. It appeared then that he had been at the theatre two or three times a week for the last month, and that it was almost as great a passion with him as with Westover himself. He had become already a critic of acting, with a rough good sense of it, and a decided opinion. He knew which actors he preferred, and which actresses, better still. It was some consolation for Westover to find that he mostly took an admission ticket when he went to the theatre; but, though he could not blame Jeff for showing his own fondness for it, he wished that he had not his fondness.

So far Jeff seemed to have spent very few of his evenings in Cambridge, and Westover thought it would be well if he had some acquaintance there. He made favor for him with a friendly family, who asked him to dinner. They did it to oblige Westover, against their own judgment and knowledge, for they said it was always the same with Freshmen; a single act of hospitality finished the acquaintance. Jeff came, and he behaved with as great indifference to the kindness meant him as if he were dining out every night; he excused himself very early in the evening on the ground that he had to go into Boston, and he never paid his dinner-call. After that Westover tried to consider his whole duty to him fulfilled, and not to trouble himself further. Now and then, however, Jeff disappointed the expectation Westover had formed of him, by coming to see him, and being apparently glad of the privilege. But he did not make the painter think that he was growing in grace or wisdom, though he apparently felt an increasing confidence in his own knowledge of life.

Westover could only feel a painful interest tinged with amusement in his grotesque misconceptions of the world where he had not yet begun to right himself. Jeff believed lurid things of the society wholly unknown to him; to his gross credulity, Boston houses, which at the worst were the homes of a stiff and cold exclusiveness, were the scenes of riot only less scandalous than the dissipation to which fashionable ladies abandoned themselves at champagne suppers in the Back Bay hotels and on their secret visits to the Chinese opium-joints in Kingston Street.

Westover tried to make him see how impossible his fallacies were; but he could perceive that Jeff thought him either wilfully ignorant or helplessly innocent, and of far less authority than a barber who had the entree of all these swell families as hair-dresser, and who corroborated the witness of a hotel night-clerk (Jeff would not give their names) to the depravity of the upper classes. He had to content himself with saying: “I hope you will be ashamed some day of having believed such rot. But I suppose it’s something you’ve got to go through. You may take my word for it, though? that it isn’t going to do you any good. It’s going to do you harm, and that’s why I hate to have you think it, for your own sake. It can’t hurt any one else.”

What disgusted the painter most was that, with all his belief in the wickedness of the fine world, it was clear that Jeff would have willingly been of it; and he divined that if he had any strong aspirations they were for society and for social acceptance. He had fancied, when the fellow seemed to care so little for the studies of the university, that he might come forward in its sports. Jeff gave more and more the effect of tremendous strength in his peculiar physique, though there was always the disappointment of not finding him tall. He was of the middle height, but he was hewn out and squared upward massively. He felt like stone to any accidental contact, and the painter brought away a bruise from the mere brunt of his shoulders. He learned that Jeff was a frequenter of the gymnasium, where his strength must have been known, but he could not make out that he had any standing among the men who went in for athletics. If Jeff had even this, the sort of standing in college which he failed of would easily have been won, too. But he had been falsely placed at the start, or some quality of his nature neutralized other qualities that would have made him a leader in college, and he remained one of the least forward men in it. Other jays won favor and liking, and ceased to be jays; Jeff continued a jay. He was not chosen into any of the nicer societies; those that he joined when he thought they were swell he could not care for when he found they were not.

Westover came into a knowledge of the facts through his casual and scarcely voluntary confidences, and he pitied him somewhat while he blamed him a great deal more, without being able to help him at all.

It appeared to him that the fellow had gone wrong more through ignorance than perversity, and that it was a stubbornness of spirit rather than a badness of heart that kept him from going right. He sometimes wondered whether it was not more a baffled wish to be justified in his own esteem than anything else that made him overvalue the things he missed. He knew how such an experience as that with Mrs. Marven rankles in the heart of youth, and will not cease to smart till some triumph in kind brines it ease; but between the man of thirty and the boy of twenty there is a gulf fixed, and he could not ask. He did not know that a college man often goes wrong in his first year, out of no impulse that he can very clearly account for himself, and then when he ceases to be merely of his type and becomes more of his character, he pulls up and goes right. He did not know how much Jeff had been with a set that was fast without being fine. The boy had now and then a book in his hand when he came; not always such a book as Westover could have wished, but still a book; and to his occasional questions about how he was getting on with his college work, Jeff made brief answers, which gave the notion that he was not neglecting it.

Toward the end of his first year he sent to Westover one night from a station-house, where he had been locked up for breaking a street-lamp in Boston. By his own showing he had not broken the lamp, or assisted, except through his presence, at the misdeed of the tipsy students who had done it. His breath betrayed that he had been drinking, too; but otherwise he seemed as sober as Westover himself, who did not know whether to augur well or ill for him from the proofs he had given before of his ability to carry off a bottle of wine with a perfectly level head. Jeff seemed to believe Westover a person of such influence that he could secure his release at once, and he was abashed to find that he must pass the night in the cell, where he conferred with Westover through the bars.

In the police court, where his companions were fined, the next morning, he was discharged for want of evidence against him; but the university authorities did not take the same view as the civil authorities. He was suspended, and for the time he passed out of Westover’s sight and knowledge.

He expected to find him at Lion’s Head, where he went to pass the month of August — in painting those pictures of the mountain which had in some sort, almost in spite of him, become his specialty. But Mrs. Durgin employed the first free moments after their meeting in explaining that Jeff had got a chance to work his way to London on a cattle-steamer, and had been abroad the whole summer. He had written home that the voyage had been glorious, with plenty to eat and little to do; and he had made favor with the captain for his return by the same vessel in September. By other letters it seemed that he had spent the time mostly in England; but he had crossed over into France for a fortnight, and had spent a week in Paris. His mother read some passages from his letters aloud to show Westover how Jeff was keeping his eyes open. His accounts of his travel were a mixture of crude sensations in the presence of famous scenes and objects of interest, hard-headed observation of the facts of life, narrow-minded misconception of conditions, and wholly intelligent and adequate study of the art of inn-keeping in city and country.

Mrs. Durgin seemed to feel that there was some excuse due for the relative quantity of the last. “He knows that’s what I’d care for the most; and Jeff a’n’t one to forget his mother.” As if the word reminded her, she added, after a moment: “We sha’n’t any of us soon forget what you done for Jeff — that time.”

“I didn’t do anything for him, Mrs. Durgin; I couldn’t,” Westover protested.

“You done what you could, and I know that you saw the thing in the right light, or you wouldn’t ‘a’ tried to do anything. Jeff told me every word about it. I know he was with a pretty harum-scarum crowd. But it was a lesson to him; and I wa’n’t goin’ to have him come back here, right away, and have folks talkin’ about what they couldn’t understand, after the way the paper had it.”

“Did it get into the papers?”

“Mm.” Mrs. Durgin nodded. “And some dirty, sneakin’ thing, here, wrote a letter to the paper and told a passel o’ lies about Jeff and all of us; and the paper printed Jeff’s picture with it; I don’t know how they got a hold of it. So when he got that chance to go, I just said, ‘Go.’ You’ll see he’ll keep all straight enough after this, Mr. Westover.”

“Old woman read you any of Jeff’s letters?” Whit-well asked, when his chance for private conference with Westover came. “What was the rights of that scrape he got into?”

Westover explained as favorably to Jeff as he could; the worst of the affair was the bad company he was in.

“Well, where there’s smoke there’s some fire. Cou’t discharged him and college suspended him. That’s about where it is? I guess he’ll keep out o’ harm’s way next time. Read you what he said about them scenes of the Revolution in Paris?”

“Yes; he seems to have looked it all up pretty thoroughly.”

“Done it for me, I guess, much as anything. I was always talkin’ it up with him. Jeff’s kep’ his eyes open, that’s a fact. He’s got a head on him, more’n I ever thought.”

Westover decided that Mrs. Durgin’s prepotent behavior toward Mrs. Marven the summer before had not hurt her materially, with the witnesses even. There were many new boarders, but most of those whom he had already met were again at Lion’s Head. They said there was no air like it, and no place so comfortable. If they had sold their birthright for a mess of pottage, Westover had to confess that the pottage was very good. Instead of the Irish woman at ten dollars a week who had hitherto been Mrs. Durgin’s cook, under her personal surveillance and direction, she had now a man cook, whom she boldly called a chef and paid eighty dollars a month. He wore the white apron and white cap of his calling, but Westover heard him speak Yankee through his nose to one of the stablemen as they exchanged hilarities across the space between the basement and the barn-door. “Yes,” Mrs. Durgin admitted, “he’s an American; and he learnt his trade at one of the best hotels in Portland. He’s pretty headstrong, but I guess he does what he’s told — in the end. The meanyous? Oh, Franky Whitwell prints then. He’s got an amateur printing-office in the stable-loft.”

XIV.

One morning toward the end of August, Whitwell, who was starting homeward, after leaving his ladies, burdened with their wishes and charges for the morrow, met Westover coming up the hill with his painting-gear in his hand. “Say!” he hailed him. “Why don’t you come down to the house to-night? Jackson’s goin’ to come, and, if you ha’n’t seen him work the plantchette for a spell, you’ll be surprised. There a’n’t hardly anybody he can’t have up. You’ll come? Good enough!”

What affected Westover first of all at the seance, and perhaps most of all, was the quality of the air in the little house; it was close and stuffy, mixed with an odor of mould and an ancient smell of rats. The kerosene-lamp set in the centre of the table, where Jackson afterward placed his planchette, devoured the little life that was left in it. At the gasps which Westover gave, with some despairing glances at the closed windows, Whitwell said: “Hot? Well, I guess it is a little. But, you see, Jackson has got to be careful about the night air; but I guess I can fix it for you.” He went out into the ell, and Westover heard him raising a window. He came back and asked, “That do? It ‘ll get around in here directly,” and Westover had to profess relief.

Jackson came in presently with the little Canuck, whom Whitwell presented to Westover: “Know Jombateeste?”

The two were talking about a landslide which had taken place on the other side of the mountain; the news had just come that they had found among the ruins the body of the farm-hand who had been missing since the morning of the slide; his funeral was to be the next day.

Jackson put his planchette on the table, and sat down before it with a sigh; the Canuck remained standing, and on foot he was scarcely a head higher than the seated Yankees. “Well,” Jackson said, “I suppose he knows all about it now,” meaning the dead farm-hand.

“Yes,” Westover suggested, “if he knows anything.”

“Know anything!” Whitwell shouted. “Why, man, don’t you believe he’s as much alive as ever he was?”

“I hope so,” said Westover, submissively.

“Don’t you know it?”

“Not as I know other things. In fact, I don’t know it,” said Westover, and he was painfully aware of having shocked his hearers by the agnosticism so common among men in towns that he had confessed it quite simply and unconsciously. He perceived that faith in the soul and life everlasting was as quick as ever in the hills, whatever grotesque or unwonted form it wore. Jackson sat with closed eyes and his head fallen back; Whitwell stared at the painter, with open mouth; the little Canuck began to walk up and down impatiently; Westover felt a reproach, almost an abhorrence, in all of them.

Whitwell asked: “Why, don’t you think there’s any proof of it?”

“Proof? Oh Yes. There’s testimony enough to carry conviction to the stubbornest mind on any other point. But it’s very strange about all that. It doesn’t convince anybody but the witnesses. If a man tells me he’s seen a disembodied spirit, I can’t believe him. I must see the disembodied spirit myself.”

“That’s something so,” said Whitwell, with a relenting laugh.

“If one came back from the dead, to tell us of a life beyond the grave, we should want the assurance that he’d really been dead, and not merely dreaming.”

Whitwell laughed again, in the delight the philosophic mind finds even in the reasoning that hates it.

The Canuck felt perhaps the simpler joy that the average man has in any strange notion that he is able to grasp. He stopped in his walk and said: “Yes, and if you was dead and went to heaven, and stayed so long you smelt, like Lazarus, and you come back and tol’ ’em what you saw, nobody goin’ believe you.”

“Well, I guess you’re right there, Jombateeste,” said Whitwell, with pleasure in the Canuck’s point. After a moment he suggested to Westover: “Then I s’pose, if you feel the way you do, you don’t care much about plantchette?”

“Oh yes, I do,” said the painter. “We never know when we may be upon the point of revelation. I wouldn’t miss any chance.”

Whether Whitwell felt an ironic slant in the words or not, he paused a moment before he said: “Want to start her up, Jackson?”

Jackson brought to the floor the forefeet of his chair, which he had tilted from it in leaning back, and without other answer put his hand on the planchette. It began to fly over the large sheet of paper spread upon the table, in curves and angles and eccentrics.

“Feels pootty lively to-night,” said Whitwell, with a glance at Westover.

The little Canuck, as if he had now no further concern in the matter, sat down in a corner and smoked silently. Whitwell asked, after a moment’s impatience:

“Can’t you git her down to business, Jackson?”

Jackson gasped: “She’ll come down when she wants to.”

The little instrument seemed, in fact, trying to control itself. Its movements became less wild and large; the zigzags began to shape themselves into something like characters. Jackson’s wasted face gave no token of interest; Whitwell laid half his gaunt length across the table in the endeavor to make out some meaning in them; the Canuck, with his hands crossed on his stomach, smoked on, with the same gleam in his pipe and eye.

The planchette suddenly stood motionless.

“She done?” murmured Whitwell.

“I guess she is, for a spell, anyway,” said Jackson, wearily.

“Let’s try to make out what she says.” Whitwell drew the sheets toward himself and Westover, who sat next him. “You’ve got to look for the letters everywhere. Sometimes she’ll give you fair and square writin’, and then again she’ll slat the letters down every which way, and you’ve got to hunt ’em out for yourself. Here’s a B I’ve got. That begins along pretty early in the alphabet. Let’s see what we can find next.”

Westover fancied he could make out an F and a T.

Whitwell exulted in an unmistakable K and N; and he made sure of an I, and an E. The painter was not so sure of an S. “Well, call it an S,” said Whitwell. “And I guess I’ve got an O here, and an H. Hello! Here’s an A as large as life. Pootty much of a mixture.”

“Yes; I don’t see that we’re much better off than we were before,” said Westover.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Whitwell.

“Write ’em down in a row and see if we can’t pick out some sense. I’ve had worse finds than this; no vowels at all sometimes; but here’s three.”

He wrote the letters down, while Jackson leaned back against the wall, in patient quiet.

“Well, sir,” said Whitwell, pushing the paper, where he had written the letters in a line, to Westover, “make anything out of ‘em?”

Westover struggled with them a moment. “I can make out one word-shaft.”

“Anything else?” demanded Whitwell, with a glance of triumph at Jackson.

Westover studied the remaining letters. “Yes, I get one other word-broken.”

“Just what I done! But I wanted you to speak first. It’s Broken Shaft. Jackson, she caught right onto what we was talkin’ about. This life,” he turned to Westover, in solemn exegesis, “is a broken shaft when death comes. It rests upon the earth, but you got to look for the top of it in the skies. That’s the way I look at it. What do you think, Jackson? Jombateeste?”

“I think anybody can’t see that. Better go and get some heye-glass.”

Westover remained in a shameful minority. He said, meekly: “It suggests a beautiful hope.”

Jackson brought his chair-legs down again, and put his hand on the planchette.

“Feel that tinglin’?” asked. Whitwell, and Jackson made yes with silent lips. “After he’s been workin’ the plantchette for a spell, and then leaves off, and she wants to say something more,” Whitwell explained to Westover, “he seems to feel a kind of tinglin’ in his arm, as if it was asleep, and then he’s got to tackle her again. Writin’ steady enough now, Jackson!” he cried, joyously. “Let’s see.” He leaned over and read, “Thomas Jefferson—” The planchette stopped, “My, I didn’t go to do that,” said Whitwell, apologetically. “You much acquainted with Jefferson’s writin’s?” he asked of Westover.

The painter had to own his ignorance of all except the diction that the government is best which governs least; but he was not in a position to deny that Jefferson had ever said anything about a broken shaft.

“It may have come to him on the other side,” said Whitwell.

“Perhaps,” Westover assented.

The planchette began to stir itself again. “She’s goin’ ahead!” cried Whitwell. He leaned over the table so as to get every letter as it was formed. “D — Yes! Death. Death is the Broken Shaft. Go on!” After a moment of faltering the planchette formed another letter. It was a U, and it was followed by an R, and so on, till Durgin had been spelled. “Thunder!” cried Whitwell. “If anything’s happened to Jeff!”

Jackson lifted his hand from the planchette.

“Oh, go on, Jackson!” Whitwell entreated. “Don’t leave it so!”

“I can’t seem to go on,” Jackson whispered, and Westover could not resist the fear that suddenly rose among them. But he made the first struggle against it. “This is nonsense. Or, if there’s any sense in it, it means that Jeff’s ship has broken her shaft and put back.”

Whitwell gave a loud laugh of relief. “That’s so! You’ve hit it, Mr. Westover.”

Jackson said, quietly: “He didn’t mean to start home till tomorrow. And how could he send any message unless he was—”

“Easily!” cried Westover. “It’s simply an instance of mental impression-of telepathy, as they call it.”

“That’s so!” shouted Whitwell, with eager and instant conviction.

Westover could see that Jackson still doubted. “If you believe that a disembodied spirit can communicate with you, why not an embodied spirit? If anything has happened to your brother’s ship, his mind would be strongly on you at home, and why couldn’t it convey its thought to you?”

“Because he ha’n’t started yet,” said Jackson.

Westover wanted to laugh; but they all heard voices without, which seemed to be coming nearer, and he listened with the rest. He made out Frank Whitwell’s voice, and his sister’s; and then another voice, louder and gayer, rose boisterously above them. Whitwell flung the door open and plunged out into the night. He came back, hauling Jeff Durgin in by the shoulder.

“Here, now,” he shouted to Jackson, “you just let this feller and plantchette fight it out together!”

“What’s the matter with plantchette?” said Jeff, before he said to his brother, “Hello, Jackson!” and to the Canuck, “Hello, Jombateeste!” He shook hands conventionally with them both, and then with the painter, whom he greeted with greater interest. “Glad to see you here, Mr. Westover. Did I take you by surprise?” he asked of the company at large.

“No, sir,” said Whitwell. “Didn’t surprise us any, if you are a fortnight ahead of time,” he added, with a wink at the others.

“Well, I took a notion I wouldn’t wait for the cattle-ship, and I started back on a French boat. Thought I’d try it. They live well. But I hoped I should astonish you a little, too. I might as well waited.”

Whitwell laughed. “We heard from you — plantchette kept right round after you.”

“That so?” asked Jeff, carelessly.

“Fact. Have a good voyage?” Whitwell had the air of putting a casual question.

“First-rate,” said Jeff. “Plantchette say not?”

“No. Only about the broken shaft.”

“Broken shaft? We didn’t have any broken shaft. Plantchette’s got mixed a little. Got the wrong ship.”

After a moment of chop-fallenness, Whitwell said:

“Then somebody’s been makin’ free with your name. Curious how them devils cut up oftentimes.”

He explained, and Jeff laughed uproariously when he understood the whole case. “Plantchette’s been havin’ fun with you.”

Whitwell gave himself time for reflection. “No, sir, I don’t look at it that way. I guess the wires got crossed some way. If there’s such a thing as the spirits o’ the livin’ influencin’ plantchette, accordin’ to Mr. Westover’s say, here, I don’t see why it wa’n’t. Jeff’s being so near that got control of her and made her sign his name to somebody else’s words. It shows there’s something in it.”

“Well, I’m glad to come back alive, anyway,” said Jeff, with a joviality new to Westover. “I tell you, there a’n’t many places finer than old Lion’s Head, after all. Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover? I want to get the daylight on it, but it does well by moonlight, even.” He looked round at the tall girl, who had been lingering to hear the talk of planchette; at the backward tilt he gave his head, to get her in range, she frowned as if she felt his words a betrayal, and slipped out of the room; the boy had already gone, and was making himself heard in the low room overhead.

“There’s a lot of folks here this summer, mother says,” he appealed from the check he had got to Jackson. “Every room taken for the whole month, she says.”

“We’ve been pretty full all July, too,” said Jackson, blankly.

“Well, it’s a great business; and I’ve picked up a lot of hints over there. We’re not so smart as we think we are. The Swiss can teach us a thing or two. They know how to keep a hotel.”

“Go to Switzerland?” asked Whitwell.

“I slipped over into the edge of it.”

“I want to know! Well, now them Alps, now — they so much bigger ‘n the White Hills, after all?”

“Well, I don’t know about all of ‘em,” said Jeff. “There may be some that would compare with our hills, but I should say that you could take Mount Washington up and set it in the lap of almost any one of the Alps I saw, and it would look like a baby on its mother’s knee.”

“I want to know!” said Whitwell again. His tone expressed disappointment, but impartiality; he would do justice to foreign superiority if he must. “And about the ocean. What about waves runnin? mountains high?”

“Well, we didn’t have it very rough. But I don’t believe I saw any waves much higher than Lion’s Head.” Jeff laughed to find Whitwell taking him seriously. “Won’t that satisfy you?”

“Oh, it satisfies me. Truth always does. But, now, about London. You didn’t seem to say so much about London in your letters, now. Is it so big as they let on? Big — that is, to the naked eye, as you may say?”

“There a’n’t any one place where you can get a complete bird’s-eye view of it,” said Jeff, “and two-thirds of it would be hid in smoke, anyway. You’ve got to think of a place that would take in the whole population of New England, outside of Massachusetts, and not feel as if it had more than a comfortable meal.”

Whitwell laughed for joy in the bold figure.

“I’ll tell you. When you’ve landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and struck London, you feel as if you’d gone to sea again. It’s an ocean — a whole Atlantic of houses.”

“That’s right!” crowed Whitwell. “That’s the way I thought it was. Growin’ any?”

Jeff hesitated. “It grows in the night. You’ve heard about Chicago growing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, London grows a whole Chicago every night.”

“Good!” said Whitwell. “That suits me. And about Paris, now. Paris strike you the same way?”

“It don’t need to,” said Jeff. “That’s a place where I’d like to live. Everybody’s at home there. It’s a man’s house and his front yard, and I tell you they keep it clean. Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed and mopped and rubbed dry. You couldn’t find any more dirt than you could in mother’s kitchen after she’s hung out her wash. That so, Mr. Westover?”

Westover confirmed in general Jeff’s report of the cleanliness of Paris.

“And beautiful! You don’t know what a good-looking town is till you strike Paris. And they’re proud of it, too. Every man acts as if he owned it. They’ve had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her back, some day.”

“Great country, Jombateeste!” Whitwell shouted to the Canuck.

The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and smoking. “Me, I’m Frantsh,” he said.

“Yes, that’s what Jeff was sayin’,” said Whitwell. “I meant France.”

“Oh,” answered Jombateeste, impatiently, “I thought you mean the Hunited State.”

“Well, not this time,” said Whitwell, amid the general laughter.

“Good for Jombateeste,” said Jeff. “Stand up for Canada every time, John. It’s the livest country, in the world three months of the year, and the ice keeps it perfectly sweet the other nine.”

Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry they had entered upon. “It must have made this country look pretty slim when you got back. How’d New York look, after Paris?”

“Like a pigpen,” said Jeff. He left his chair and walked round the table toward a door opening into the adjoining room. For the first time Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in the talk which had been going on. At the approach of Jeff, and before he could have made himself seen at the doorway, a tremor seemed to pass over the figure; it fluttered to its feet, and then it vanished into the farther dark of the room. When Jeff disappeared within, there was a sound of rustling skirts and skurrying feet and the crash of a closing door, and then the free rise of laughing voices without. After a discreet interval, Westover said: “Mr. Whitwell, I must say good-night. I’ve got another day’s work before me. It’s been a most interesting evening.”

“You must try it again,” said Whitwell, hospitably. “We ha’n’t got to the bottom of that broken shaft yet. You’ll see ‘t plantchette ‘ll have something more to say about it: Heigh, Jackson?” He rose to receive Westover’s goodnight; the others nodded to him.

As the painter climbed the hill to the hotel he saw two figures on the road below; the one in white drapery looked severed by a dark line slanting across it at the waist. In the country, he knew, such an appearance might mark the earliest stages of love-making, or mere youthful tenderness, in which there was nothing more implied or expected. But whatever the fact was, Westover felt a vague distaste for it, which, as it related itself to a more serious possibility, deepened to something like pain. It was probable that it should come to this between those two, but Westover rebelled against the event with a sense of its unfitness for which he could not give himself any valid reason; and in the end he accused himself of being a fool.

Two ladies sat on the veranda of the hotel and watched a cloud-wreath trying to lift itself from the summit of Lion’s Head. In the effort it thinned away to transparency in places; in others, it tore its frail texture asunder and let parts of the mountain show through; then the fragments knitted themselves loosely together, and the vapor lay again in dreamy quiescence.

The ladies were older and younger, and apparently mother and daughter. The mother had kept her youth in face and figure so admirably that in another light she would have looked scarcely the elder. It was the candor of the morning which confessed the fine vertical lines running up and down to her lips, only a shade paler than the girl’s, and that showed her hair a trifle thinner in its coppery brown, her blue eyes a little dimmer. They were both very graceful, and they had soft, caressing voices; they now began to talk very politely to each other, as if they were strangers, or as if strangers were by. They talked of the landscape, and of the strange cloud effect before them. They said that they supposed they should see the Lion’s Head when the cloud lifted, and they were both sure they had never been quite so near a cloud before. They agreed that this was because in Switzerland the mountains were so much higher and farther off. Then the daughter said, without changing the direction of her eyes or the tone of her voice, “The gentleman who came over from the station with us last night,” and the mother was aware of Jeff Durgin advancing toward the corner of the veranda where they sat.

“I hope you have got rested,” he said, with the jovial bluntness which was characteristic of him with women.

“Oh, yes indeed,” said the elder lady. Jeff had spoken to her, but had looked chiefly at the younger. “I slept beautifully. So quiet here, and with this delicious air! Have you just tasted it?”

“No; I’ve been up ever since daylight, driving round,” said Jeff. “I’m glad you like the air,” he said, after a certain hesitation. “We always want to have people do that at Lion’s Head. There’s no air like it, though perhaps I shouldn’t say so.”

“Shouldn’t?” the lady repeated.

“Yes; we own the air here — this part of it.” Jeff smiled easily down at the lady’s puzzled face.

“Oh! Then you are — are you a son of the house?”

“Son of the hotel, yes,” said Jeff, with increasing ease. The lady continued her question in a look, and he went on: “I’ve been scouring the country for butter and eggs this morning. We shall get all our supplies from Boston next year, I hope, but we depend on the neighbors a little yet.”

“How very interesting!” said the lady. “You must have a great many queer adventures,” she suggested in a provisional tone.

“Well, nothing’s queer to me in the hill country. But you see some characters here.” He nodded over his shoulder to where Whitwell stood by the flag-staff, waiting the morning impulse of the ladies. “There’s one of the greatest of them now.”

The lady put up a lorgnette and inspected Whitwell. “What are those strange things he has got in his hatband?”

“The flowers and the fungi of the season,” said Jeff. “He takes parties of the ladies walking, and that collection is what he calls his almanac.”

“Really?” cried the girl. “That’s charming!”

“Delightful!” said the mother, moved by the same impulse, apparently.

“Yes,” said Jeff. “You ought to hear him talk. I’ll introduce him to you after breakfast, if you like.”

“Oh, we should only be too happy,” said the mother, and her daughter, from her inflection, knew that she would be willing to defer her happiness.

But Jeff did not. “Mr. Whitwell!” he called out, and Whitwell came across the grass to the edge of the veranda. “I want to introduce you to Mrs. Vostrand — and Miss Vostrand.”

Whitwell took their slim hands successively into his broad, flat palm, and made Mrs. Vostrand repeat her name to him. “Strangers at Lion’s Head, I presume?” Mrs. Vostrand owned as much; and he added: “Well, I guess you won’t find a much sightlier place anywhere; though, accordin’ to Jeff’s say, here, they’ve got bigger mountains on the other side. Ever been in Europe?”

“Why, yes,” said Mrs. Vostrand, with a little mouth of deprecation. “In fact, we’ve just come home. We’ve been living there.”

“That so?” returned Whitwell, in humorous toleration. “Glad to get back, I presume?”

“Oh yes — yes,” said Mrs. Vostrand, in a sort of willowy concession, as if the character before her were not to be crossed or gainsaid.

“Well, it ‘ll do you good here,” said Whitwell. “‘N’ the young lady, too. A few tramps over these hills ‘ll make you look like another woman.” He added, as if he had perhaps made his remarks too personal to the girl, “Both of you.”

“Oh yes,” the mother assented, fervently. “We shall count upon your showing us all their-mysteries.”

Whitwell looked pleased. “I’ll do my best-whenever you’re ready.” He went on: “Why, Jeff, here, has just got back, too. Jeff, what was the name of that French boat you said you crossed on? I want to see if I can’t make out what plantchette meant by that broken shaft. She must have meant something, and if I could find out the name of the ship — Tell the ladies about it?” Jeff laughed, with a shake of the head, and Whitwell continued, “Why, it was like this,” and he possessed the ladies of a fact which they professed to find extremely interesting. At the end of their polite expressions he asked Jeff again: “What did you say the name was?”

“Aquitaine,” said Jeff, briefly.

“Why, we came on the Aquitaine!” said Mrs. Vostrand, with a smile for Jeff. “But how did we happen not to see one another?”

“Oh, I came second-cabin,” said Jeff. “I worked my way over on a cattle-ship to London, and, when I decided not to work my way back, I found I hadn’t enough money for a first-cabin passage. I was in a hurry to get back in time to get settled at Harvard, and so I came second-cabin. It wasn’t bad. I used to see you across the rail.”

“Well!” said Whitwell.

“How very — amusing!” said Mrs. Vostrand. “What a small world it is!” With these words she fell into a vagary; her daughter recalled her from it with a slight movement. “Breakfast? How impatient you are, Genevieve! Well!” She smiled the sweetest parting to Whitwell, and suffered herself to be led away by Jeff.

“And you’re at Harvard? I’m so interested! My own boy will be going there soon.”

“Well, there’s no place like Harvard,” said Jeff. “I’m in my Sophomore year now.”

“Oh, a Sophomore! Fancy!” cried Mrs. Vostrand, as if nothing could give her more pleasure. “My son is going to prepare at St. Mark’s. Did you prepare there?”

“No, I prepared at Lovewell Academy, over here.” Jeff nodded in a southerly direction.

“Oh, indeed!” said Mrs. Vostrand, as if she knew where Lovewell was, and instantly recognized the name of the ancient school.

They had reached the dining room, and Jeff pushed the screen-door open with one hand, and followed the ladies in. He had the effect of welcoming them like invited guests; he placed the ladies himself at a window, where he said Mrs. Vostrand would be out of the draughts, and they could have a good view of Lion’s Head.

He leaned over between them, when they were seated, to get sight of the mountain, and, “There!” he said. “That cloud’s gone at last.” Then, as if it would be modester in the proprietor of the view to leave them to their flattering raptures in it, he moved away and stood talking a moment with Cynthia Whitwell near the door of the serving-room. He talked gayly, with many tosses of the head and turns about, while she listened with a vague smile, motionlessly.

“She’s very pretty,” said Miss Vostrand to her mother.

“Yes. The New England type,” murmured the mother.

“They all have the same look, a good deal,” said the girl, glancing over the room where the waitresses stood ranged against the wall with their hands folded at their waists. “They have better faces than figures, but she is beautiful every way. Do you suppose they are all schoolteachers? They look intellectual. Or is it their glasses?”

“I don’t know,” said the mother. “They used to be; but things change here so rapidly it may all be different. Do you like it?”

“I think it’s charming here,” said the younger lady, evasively. “Everything is so exquisitely clean. And the food is very good. Is this corn-bread — that you’ve told me about so much?”

“Yes, this is corn-bread. You will have to get accustomed to it.”

“Perhaps it won’t take long. I could fancy that girl knowing about everything. Don’t you like her looks?”

“Oh, very much.” Mrs. Vostrand turned for another glance at Cynthia.

“What say?” Their smiling waitress came forward from the wall where she was leaning, as if she thought they had spoken to her.

“Oh, we were speaking — the young lady to whom Mr. Durgin was talking — she is—”

“She’s the housekeeper — Miss Whitwell.”

“Oh, indeed! She seems so young—”

“I guess she knows what to do-o-o,” the waitress chanted. “We think she’s about ri-i-ght.” She smiled tolerantly upon the misgiving of the stranger, if it was that, and then retreated when the mother and daughter began talking together again.

They had praised the mountain with the cloud off, to Jeff, very politely, and now the mother said, a little more intimately, but still with the deference of a society acquaintance: “He seems very gentlemanly, and I am sure he is very kind. I don’t quite know what to do about it, do you?”

“No, I don’t. It’s all strange to me, you know.”

“Yes, I suppose it must be. But you will get used to it if we remain in the country. Do you think you will dislike it?”

“Oh no! It’s very different.”

“Yes, it’s different. He is very handsome, in a certain way.” The daughter said nothing, and the mother added: “I wonder if he was trying to conceal that he had come second-cabin, and was not going to let us know that he crossed with us?”

“Do you think he was bound to do so?”

“No. But it was very odd, his not mentioning it. And his going out on a cattle-steamer?” the mother observed.

“Oh, but that’s very chic, I’ve heard,” the daughter replied. “I’ve heard that the young men like it and think it a great chance. They have great fun. It isn’t at all like second-cabin.”

“You young people have your own world,” the mother answered, caressingly.

XVI.

Westover met the ladies coming out of the dining-room as he went in rather late to breakfast; he had been making a study of Lion’s Head in the morning light after the cloud lifted from it. He was always doing Lion’s Heads, it seemed to him; but he loved the mountain, and he was always finding something new in it.

He was now seeing it inwardly with so exclusive a vision that he had no eyes for these extremely pretty women till they were out of sight. Then he remembered noticing them, and started with a sense of recognition, which he verified by the hotel register when he had finished his meal. It was, in fact, Mrs. James W. Vostrand, and it was Miss Vostrand, whom Westover had know ten years before in Italy. Mrs. Vostrand had then lately come abroad for the education of her children, and was pausing in doubt at Florence whether she should educate them in Germany or Switzerland. Her husband had apparently abandoned this question to her, and he did not contribute his presence to her moral support during her struggle with a problem which Westover remembered as having a tendency to solution in the direction of a permanent stay in Florence.

In those days he liked Mrs. Vostrand very much, and at twenty he considered her at thirty distinctly middle-aged. For one winter she had a friendly little salon, which was the most attractive place in Florence to him, then a cub painter sufficiently unlicked. He was aware of her children being a good deal in the salon: a girl of eight, who was like her mother, and quite a savage little boy of five, who may have been like his father. If he was, and the absent Mr. Vostrand had the same habit of sulking and kicking at people’s shins, Westover could partly understand why Mrs. Vostrand had come to Europe for the education of her children. It all came vividly back to him, while he went about looking for Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter on the verandas and in the parlors. But he did not find them, and he was going to send his name to their rooms when he came upon Jeff Durgin figuring about the office in a fresh London conception of an outing costume.

“You’re very swell,” said Westover, halting him to take full note of it.

“Like it? Well, I knew you’d understand what it meant. Mother thinks it’s a little too rowdy-looking. Her idea is black broadcloth frock-coat and doeskin trousers for a gentleman, you know.” He laughed with a young joyousness, and then became serious. “Couple of ladies here, somewhere, I’d like to introduce you to. Came over with me from the depot last night. Very nice people, and I’d like to make it pleasant for them — get up something — go somewhere — and when you see their style you can judge what it had better be. Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter.”

“Thank you,” said Westover. “I think I know them already at least one of them. I used to go to Mrs. Vostrand’s house in Florence.”

“That so? Well, fact is, I crossed with them; but I came second-cabin, because I’d spent all my money, and I didn’t get acquainted with them on the ship, but we met in the train coming up last night. Said they had heard of Lion’s Head on the other side from friends. But it was quite a coincidence, don’t you think? I’d like to have them see what this neighborhood really is; and I wish, Mr. Westover, you’d find out, if you can, what they’d like. If they’re for walking, we could get Whitwell to personally conduct a party, and if they’re for driving, I’d like to show them a little mountain-coaching myself.”

“I don’t know whether I’d better not leave the whole thing to you, Jeff,” Westover said, after a moment’s reflection. “I don’t see exactly how I could bring the question into a first interview.”

“Well, perhaps it would be rather rushing it. But, if I get up something, you’ll come, Mr. Westover?”

“I will, with great pleasure,” said Westover, and he went to make his call.

A half-hour later he was passing the door of the old parlor which Mrs. Durgin still kept for hers, on his way up to his room, when a sound of angry voices came out to him. Then the voice of Mrs. Durgin defined itself in the words: “I’m not goin’ to have to ask any more folks for their rooms on your account, Jeff Durgin — Mr. Westover! Mr. Westover, is that you?” her voice broke off to call after him as he hurried by, “Won’t you come in here a minute?”

He hesitated, and then Jeff called, “Yes, come in, Mr. Westover.”

The painter found him sitting on the old hair-cloth sofa, with his stick between his hands and knees, confronting his mother, who was rocking excitedly to and fro in the old hair-cloth easy-chair.

“You know these folks that Jeff’s so crazy about?” she demanded.

“Crazy!” cried Jeff, laughing and frowning at the same time. “What’s crazy in wanting to go off on a drive and choose your own party?”

“Do you know them?” Mrs. Durgin repeated to Westover.

“The Vostrands? Why, yes. I knew Mrs. Vostrand in Italy a good many years ago, and I’ve just been calling on her and her daughter, who was a little girl then.”

“What kind of folks are they?”

“What kind? Really! Why, they’re very charming people—”

“So Jeff seems to think. Any call to show them any particular attention?”

“I don’t know if I quite understand—”

“Why, it’s just this. Jeff, here, wants to make a picnic for them, or something, and I can’t see the sense of it. You remember what happened at that other picnic, with that Mrs. Marven” — Jeff tapped the floor with his stick impatiently, and Westover felt sorry for him— “and I don’t want it to happen again, and I’ve told Jeff so. I presume he thinks it ‘ll set him right with them, if they’re thinkin’ demeaning of him because he came over second-cabin on their ship.”

Jeff set his teeth and compressed his lips to bear as best he could, the give-away which his mother could not appreciate in its importance to him:

“They’re not the kind of people to take such a thing shabbily,” said Westover. “They didn’t happen to mention it, but Mrs. Vostrand must have got used to seeing young fellows in straits of all kinds during her life abroad. I know that I sometimes made the cup of tea and biscuit she used to give me in Florence do duty for a dinner, and I believe she knew it.”

Jeff looked up at Westover with a grateful, sidelong glance.

His mother said: “Well, then, that’s all right, and Jeff needn’t do anything for them on that account. And I’ve made up my mind about one thing: whatever the hotel does has got to be done for the whole hotel. It can’t pick and choose amongst the guests.” Westover liked so little the part of old family friend which he seemed, whether he liked it or not, to bear with the Durgins, that he would gladly have got away now, but Mrs. Durgin detained him with a direct appeal. “Don’t you think so, Mr. Westover?”

Jeff spared him the pain of a response. “Very well,” he said to his mother; “I’m not the hotel, and you never want me to be. I can do this on my own account.”

“Not with my coach and not with my hosses,” said his mother.

Jeff rose. “I might as well go on down to Cambridge, and get to work on my conditions.”

“Just as you please about that,” said Mrs. Durgin, with the same impassioned quiet that showed in her son’s handsome face and made it one angry red to his yellow hair. “We’ve got along without you so far, this summer, and I guess we can the rest of the time. And the sooner you work off your conditions the better, I presume.”

The next morning Jeff came to take leave of him, where Westover had pitched his easel and camp-stool on the slope behind the hotel.

“Why, are you really going?” he asked. “I was in hopes it might have blown over.”

“No, things don’t blow over so easy with mother,” said Jeff, with an embarrassed laugh, but no resentment. “She generally means what she says.”

“Well, in this case, Jeff, I think she was right.”

“Oh, I guess so,” said Jeff, pulling up a long blade of grass and taking it between his teeth. “Anyway, it comes to the same thing as far as I’m concerned. It’s for her to say what shall be done and what sha’n’t be done in her own house, even if it is a hotel. That’s what I shall do in mine. We’re used to these little differences; but we talk it out, and that’s the end of it. I shouldn’t really go, though, if I didn’t think I ought to get in some work on those conditions before the thing begins regularly. I should have liked to help here a little, for I’ve had a good time and I ought to be willing to pay for it. But she’s in good hands. Jackson’s well — for him — and she’s got Cynthia.”

The easy security of tone with which Jeff pronounced the name vexed Westover. “I suppose your mother would hardly know how to do without her, even if you were at home,” he said, dryly.

“Well, that’s a fact,” Jeff assented, with a laugh for the hit. “And Jackson thinks the world of her. I believe he trusts her judgment more than he does mother’s about the hotel. Well, I must be going. You don’t know where Mrs. Vostrand is going to be this winter, I suppose?”

“No, I don’t,” said Westover. He could not help a sort of blind resentment in the situation. If he could not feel that Jeff was the best that could be for Cynthia, he had certainly no reason to regret that his thoughts could be so lightly turned from her. But the fact anomalously incensed him as a slight to the girl, who might have been still more sacrificed by Jeff’s constancy. He forced himself to add: “I fancy Mrs. Vostrand doesn’t know herself.”

“I wish I didn’t know where I was going to be,” said Jeff. “Well, good-bye, Mr. Westover. I’ll see you in Boston.”

“Oh, good-bye.” The painter freed himself from his brush and palette for a parting handshake, reluctantly.

Jeff plunged down the hill, waving a final adieu from the corner of the hotel before he vanished round it.

Mrs. Vostrand and her daughter were at breakfast when Westover came in after the early light had been gone some time. They entreated him to join them at their table, and the mother said: “I suppose you were up soon enough to see young Mr. Durgin off. Isn’t it too bad he has to go back to college when it’s so pleasant in the country?”

“Not bad for him,” said Westover. “He’s a young man who can stand a great deal of hard work.” Partly because he was a little tired of Jeff, and partly because he was embarrassed in their presence by the reason of his going, he turned the talk upon the days they had known together.

Mrs. Vostrand was very willing to talk of her past, even apart from his, and she told him of her sojourn in Europe since her daughter had left school. They spent their winters in Italy and their summers in Switzerland, where it seemed her son was still at his studies in Lausanne. She wished him to go to Harvard, she said, and she supposed he would have to finish his preparation at one of the American schools; but she had left the choice entirely to Mr. Vostrand.

This seemed a strange event after twelve years’ stay in Europe for the education of her children, but Westover did not feel authorized to make any comment upon it. He fell rather to thinking how very pleasant both mother and daughter were, and to wondering how much wisdom they had between them. He reflected that men had very little wisdom, as far as he knew them, and he questioned whether, after all, the main difference between men and women might not be that women talked their follies and men acted theirs. Probably Mrs. Vostrand, with all her babble, had done fewer foolish things than her husband, but here Westover felt his judgment disabled by the fact that he had never met her husband; and his mind began to wander to a question of her daughter, whom he had there before him. He found himself bent upon knowing more of the girl, and trying to eliminate her mother from the talk, or, at least, to make Genevieve lead in it. But apparently she was not one of the natures that like to lead; at any rate, she remained discreetly in abeyance, and Westover fancied she even respected her mother’s opinions and ideas. He thought this very well for both of them, whether it was the effect of Mrs. Vostrand’s merit or Miss Vostrand’s training. They seemed both of one exquisite gentleness, and of one sweet manner, which was rather elaborate and formal in expression. They deferred to each other as politely as they deferred to him, but, if anything, the daughter deferred most.

XVII.

The Vostrands did not stay long at Lion’s Head. Before the week was out Mrs. Vostrand had a letter summoning them to meet her husband at Montreal, where that mysterious man, who never came into the range of Westover’s vision, somehow, was kept by business from joining them in the mountains.

Early in October the painter received Mrs. Vostrand’s card at his studio in Boston, and learned from the scribble which covered it that she was with her daughter at the Hotel Vendome. He went at once to see them there, and was met, almost before the greetings were past, with a prayer for his opinion.

“Favorable opinion?” he asked.

“Favorable? Oh yes; of course. It’s simply this. When I sent you my card, we were merely birds of passage, and now I don’t know but we are — What is the opposite of birds of passage?”

Westover could not think, and said so.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. We were walking down the street, here, this morning, and we saw the sign of an apartment to let, in a window, and we thought, just for amusement, we would go in and look at it.”

“And you took it?”

“No, not quite so rapid as that. But it was lovely; in such a pretty ‘hotel garni’, and so exquisitely furnished! We didn’t really think of staying in Boston; we’d quite made up our minds on New York; but this apartment is a temptation.”

“Why not yield, then?” said Westover. “That’s the easiest way with a temptation. Confess, now, that you’ve taken the apartment already!”

“No, no, I haven’t yet,” said Mrs. Vostrand.

“And if I advised not, you wouldn’t?”

“Ah, that’s another thing!”

“When are you going to take possession, Mrs. Vostrand?”

“Oh, at once, I suppose — if we do!”

“And may I come in when I’m hungry, just as I used to do in Florence, and will you stay me with flagons in the old way?”

“There never was anything but tea, you know well enough.”

“The tea had rum in it.”

“Well, perhaps it will have rum in it here, if you’re very good.”

“I will try my best, on condition that you’ll make any and every possible use of me. Mrs. Vostrand, I can’t tell you how very glad I am you’re going to stay,” said the painter, with a fervor that made her impulsively put out her hand to him. He kept it while he could add, “I don’t forget — I can never forget — how good you were to me in those days,” and at that she gave his hand a quick pressure. “If I can do anything at all for you, you will let me, won’t you. I’m afraid you’ll be so well provided for that there won’t be anything. Ask them to slight you, to misuse you in something, so that I can come to your rescue.”

“Yes, I will,” Mrs. Vostrand promised. “And may we come to your studio to implore your protection?”

“The sooner the better.” Westover got himself away with a very sweet friendship in his heart for this rather anomalous lady, who, more than half her daughter’s life, had lived away from her daughter’s father, upon apparently perfectly good terms with him, and so discreetly and self-respectfully that no breath of reproach had touched her. Until now, however, her position had not really concerned Westover, and it would not have concerned him now, if it had not been for a design that formed itself in his mind as soon as he knew that Mrs. Vostrand meant to pass the winter in Boston. He felt at once that he could not do things by halves for a woman who had once done them for him by wholes and something over, and he had instantly decided that he must not only be very pleasant to her himself, but he must get his friends to be pleasant, too. His friends were some of the nicest people in Boston; nice in both the personal and the social sense; he knew they would not hesitate to sacrifice themselves for him in a good cause, and that made him all the more anxious that the cause should be good beyond question.

Since his last return from Paris he had been rather a fad as a teacher, and his class had been kept quite strictly to the ladies who got it up and to such as they chose to let enter it. These were not all chosen for wealth or family; there were some whose gifts gave the class distinction, and the ladies were glad to have them. It would be easy to explain Mrs. Vostrand to these, but the others might be more difficult; they might have their anxieties, and Westover meant to ask the leader of the class to help him receive at the studio tea he had at once imagined for the Vostrands, and that would make her doubly responsible.

He found himself drawing a very deep and long breath before he began to mount the many stairs to his studio, and wishing either that Mrs. Vostrand had not decided to spend the winter in Boston, or else that he were of a slacker conscience and could wear his gratitude more lightly. But there was some relief in thinking that he could do nothing for a month yet. He gained a degree of courage by telling the ladies, when he went to find them in their new apartment, that he should want them to meet a few of his friends at tea as soon as people began to get back to town; and he made the most of their instant joy in accepting his invitation.

His pleasure was somehow dashed a little, before he left them, by the announcement of Jeff Durgin’s name.

“I felt bound to send him my card,” said Mrs. Vostrand, while Jeff was following his up in the elevator. “He was so very kind to us the day we arrived at Zion’s Head; and I didn’t know but he might be feeling a little sensitive about coming over second-cabin in our ship; and—”

“How like you, Mrs. Vostrand!” cried Westover, and he was now distinctly glad he had not tried to sneak out of doing something for her. “Your kindness won’t be worse wasted on Durgin than it was on me, in the old days, when I supposed I had taken a second-cabin passage for the voyage of life. There’s a great deal of good in him; I don’t mean to say he got through his Freshman year without trouble with the college authorities, but the Sophomore year generally brings wisdom.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Vostrand, “they’re always a little wild at first, I suppose.”

Later, the ladies brought Jeff with them when they came to Westover’s studio, and the painter perceived that they were very good friends, as if they must have met several times since he had seen them together. He interested himself in the growing correctness of Jeff’s personal effect. During his Freshman year, while the rigor of the unwritten Harvard law yet forbade him a silk hat or a cane, he had kept something of the boy, if not the country boy. Westover had noted that he had always rather a taste for clothes, but in this first year he did not get beyond a derby-hat and a sack-coat, varied toward the end by a cutaway. In the outing dress he wore at home he was always effective, but there was something in Jeff’s figure which did not lend itself to more formal fashion; something of herculean proportion which would have marked him of a classic beauty perhaps if he had not been in clothes at all, or of a yeomanly vigor and force if he had been clad for work, but which seemed to threaten the more worldly conceptions of the tailor with danger. It was as if he were about to burst out of his clothes, not because he wore them tight, but because there was somehow more of the man than the citizen in him; something native, primitive, something that Westover could not find quite a word for, characterized him physically and spiritually. When he came into the studio after these delicate ladies, the robust Jeff Durgin wore a long frockcoat, with a flower in his button-hole, and in his left hand he carried a silk hat turned over his forearm as he must have noticed people whom he thought stylish carrying their hats. He had on dark-gray trousers and sharp-pointed enamelled-leather shoes; and Westover grotesquely reflected that he was dressed, as he stood, to lead Genevieve Vostrand to the altar.

Westover saw at once that when he made his studio tea for the Vostrands he must ask Jeff; it would be cruel, and for several reasons impossible, not to do so, and he really did not see why he should not. Mrs. Vostrand was taking him on the right ground, as a Harvard student, and nobody need take him on any other. Possibly people would ask him to teas at their own houses, from Westover’s studio, but he could not feel that he was concerned in that. Society is interested in a man’s future, not his past, as it is interested in a woman’s past, not her future.

But when he gave his tea it went off wonderfully well in every way, perhaps because it was one of the first teas of the fall. It brought people together in their autumnal freshness before the winter had begun to wither their resolutions to be amiable to one another, to dull their wits, to stale their stories, or to give so wide a currency to their sayings that they could not freely risk them with every one.

Westover had thought it best to be frank with the leading lady of his class, when she said she should be delighted to receive for him, and would provide suitable young ladies to pour: a brunette for the tea, and a blonde for the chocolate. She took his scrupulosity very lightly when he spoke of Mrs. Vostrand’s educational sojourn in Europe; she laughed and said she knew the type, and the situation was one of the most obvious phases of the American marriage.

He protested in vain that Mrs. Vostrand was not the type; she laughed again, and said, Oh, types were never typical. But she was hospitably gracious both to her and to Miss Genevieve; she would not allow that the mother was not the type when Westover challenged her experience, but she said they were charming, and made haste to get rid of the question with the vivid demand: “But who was your young friend who ought to have worn a lion-skin and carried a club?”

Westover by this time disdained palliation. He said that Jeff was the son of the landlady at Lion’s Head Mountain, which he had painted so much, and he was now in his second year at Harvard, where he was going to make a lawyer of himself; and this interested the lady. She asked if he had talent, and a number of other things about him and about his mother; and Westover permitted himself to be rather graphic in telling of his acquaintance with Mrs. Durgin.

XVIII.

After all, it was rather a simple-hearted thing of Westover to have either hoped or feared very much for the Vostrands. Society, in the sense of good society, can always take care of itself, and does so perfectly. In the case of Mrs. Vostrand some ladies who liked Westover and wished to be civil to him asked her and her daughter to other afternoon teas, shook hands with them at their coming, and said, when they went, they were sorry they must be going so soon. In the crowds people recognized them now and then, both of those who had met them at Westover’s studio, and of those who had met them at Florence and Lausanne. But if these were merely people of fashion they were readily, rid of the Vostrands, whom the dullest among them quickly perceived not to be of their own sort, somehow. Many of the ladies of Westover’s class made Genevieve promise to let them paint her; and her beauty and her grace availed for several large dances at the houses of more daring spirits, where the daughters made a duty of getting partners for her, and discharged it conscientiously. But there never was an approach to more intimate hospitalities, and toward the end of February, when good society in Boston goes southward to indulge a Lenten grief at Old Point Comfort, Genevieve had so many vacant afternoons and evenings at her disposal that she could not have truthfully pleaded a previous engagement to the invitations Jeff Durgin made her. They were chiefly for the theatre, and Westover saw him with her and her mother at different plays; he wondered how Jeff had caught on to the notion of asking Mrs. Vostrand to come with them.

Jeff’s introductions at Westover’s tea had not been many, and they had not availed him at all. He had been asked to no Boston houses, and when other students, whom he knew, were going in to dances, the whole winter he was socially as quiet, but for the Vostrands, as at the Mid-year Examinations. Westover could not resent the neglect of society in his case, and he could not find that he quite regretted it; but he thought it characteristically nice of Mrs. Vostrand to make as much of the friendless fellow as she fitly could. He had no doubt but her tact would be equal to his management in every way, and that she could easily see to it that he did not become embarrassing to her daughter or herself.

One day, after the east wind had ceased to blow the breath of the ice-fields of Labrador against the New England coast, and the buds on the trees along the mall between the lawns of the avenue were venturing forth in a hardy experiment of the Boston May, Mrs. Vostrand asked Westover if she had told him that Mr. Vostrand was actually coming on to Boston. He rejoiced with her in this prospect, and he reciprocated the wish which she said Mr. Vostrand had always had for a meeting with himself.

A fortnight later, when the leaves had so far inured themselves to the weather as to have fully expanded, she announced another letter from Mr. Vostrand, saying that, after all, he should not be able to come to Boston, but hoped to be in New York before she sailed.

“Sailed!” cried Westover.

“Why, yes! Didn’t you know we were going to sail in June? I thought I had told you!”

“No—”

“Why, yes. We must go out to poor Checco, now; Mr. Vostrand insists upon that. If ever we are a united family again, Mr. Westover — if Mr. Vostrand can arrange his business, when Checco is ready to enter Harvard — I mean to take a house in Boston. I’m sure I should be contented to live nowhere else in America. The place has quite bewitched me — dear old, sober, charming Boston! I’m sure I should like to live here all the rest of my life. But why in the world do people go out of town so early? Those houses over there have been shut for a whole month past!”

They were sitting at Mrs. Vostrand’s window looking out on the avenue, where the pale globular electrics were swimming like jelly-fish in the clear evening air, and above the ranks of low trees the houses on the other side were close-shuttered from basement to attic.

Westover answered: “Some go because they have such pleasant houses at the shore, and some because they want to dodge their taxes.”

“To dodge their taxes?” she repeated, and he had to explain how if people were in their country-houses before the 1st of May they would not have to pay the high personal tax of the city; and she said that she would write that to Mr. Vostrand; it would be another point in favor of Boston. Women, she declared, would never have thought of such a thing; she denounced them as culpably ignorant of so many matters that concerned them, especially legal matters. “And you think,” she asked, “that Mr. Durgin will be a good lawyer? That he will-distinguish himself?”

Westover thought it rather a short-cut to Jeff from the things they had been talking of, but if she wished to speak of him he had no reason to oppose her wish. “I’ve heard it’s all changed a good deal. There are still distinguished lawyers, and lawyers who get on, but they don’t distinguish themselves in the old way so much, and they get on best by becoming counsel for some powerful corporation.”

“And you think he has talent?” she pursued. “For that, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Westover. “I think he has a good head. He can do what he likes within certain limits, and the limits are not all on the side I used to fancy. He baffles me. But of late I fancy you’ve seen rather more of him than I have.”

“I have urged him to go more to you. But,” said Mrs. Vostrand, with a burst of frankness, “he thinks you don’t like him.”

“He’s wrong,” said Westover. “But I might dislike him very much.”

“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Vostrand, “and I’m glad you’ve been so frank with me. I’ve been so interested in Mr. Durgin, so interested! Isn’t he very young?”

The question seemed a bit of indirection to Westover. But he answered directly enough. “He’s rather old for a Sophomore, I believe. He’s twenty-two.”

“And Genevieve is twenty. Mr. Westover, may I trust you with something?”

“With everything, I hope, Mrs. Vostrand.”

“It’s about Genevieve. Her father is so opposed to her making a foreign marriage. It seems to be his one great dread. And, of course, she’s very much exposed to it, living abroad so much with me, and I feel doubly bound on that account to respect her father’s opinions, or even prejudices. Before we left Florence — in fact, last winter — there was a most delightful young officer wished to marry her. I don’t know that she cared anything for him, though he was everything that I could have wished: handsome, brilliant, accomplished, good family; everything but rich, and that was what Mr. Vostrand objected to; or, rather, he objected to putting up, as he called it, the sum that Captain Grassi would have had to deposit with the government before he was allowed to marry. You know how it is with the poor fellows in the army, there; I don’t understand the process exactly, but the sum is something like sixty thousand francs, I believe; and poor Gigi hadn’t it: I always called him Gigi, but his name is Count Luigi de’ Popolani Grassi; and he is descended from one of the old republican families of Florence. He is so nice! Mr. Vostrand was opposed to him from the beginning, and as soon as he heard of the sixty thousand francs, he utterly refused. He called it buying a son-in-law, but I don’t see why he need have looked at it in that light. However, it was broken off, and we left Florence — more for poor Gigi’s sake than for Genevieve’s, I must say. He was quite heart-broken; I pitied him.”

Her voice had a tender fall in the closing words, and Westover could fancy how sweet she would make her compassion to the young man. She began several sentences aimlessly, and he suggested, to supply the broken thread of her discourse rather than to offer consolation, while her eyes seemed to wander with her mind, and ranged the avenue up and down: “Those foreign marriages are not always successful.”

“No, they are not,” she assented. “But don’t you think they’re better with Italians than with Germans, for instance.”

“I don’t suppose the Italians expect their wives to black their boots, but I’ve heard that they beat them, sometimes.”

“In exaggerated cases, perhaps they do,” Mrs. Vostrand admitted. “And, of course,” she added, thoughtfully, “there is nothing like a purely American marriage for happiness.”

Westover wondered how she really regarded her own marriage, but she never betrayed any consciousness of its variance from the type.

XIX.

A young couple came strolling down the avenue who to Westover’s artistic eye first typified grace and strength, and then to his more personal perception identified themselves as Genevieve Vostrand and Jeff Durgin.

They faltered before one of the benches beside the mall, and he seemed to be begging her to sit down. She cast her eyes round till they must have caught the window of her mother’s apartment; then, as if she felt safe under it, she sank into the seat and Jeff put himself beside her. It was quite too early yet for the simple lovers who publicly notify their happiness by the embraces and hand-clasps everywhere evident in our parks and gardens; and a Boston pair of social tradition would not have dreamed of sitting on a bench in Commonwealth Avenue at any hour. But two such aliens as Jeff and Miss Vostrand might very well do so; and Westover sympathized with their bohemian impulse.

Mrs. Vostrand and he watched them awhile, in talk that straggled away from them, and became more and more distraught in view of them. Jeff leaned forward, and drew on the ground with the point of his stick; Genevieve held her head motionless at a pensive droop. It was only their backs that Westover could see, and he could not, of course, make out a syllable of what was effectively their silence; but all the same he began to feel as if he were peeping and eavesdropping. Mrs. Vostrand seemed not to share his feeling, and there was no reason why he should have it if she had not. He offered to go, but she said, No, no; he must not think of it till Genevieve came in; and she added some banalities about her always scolding when she had missed one of his calls; they would be so few, now, at the most.

“Why, do you intend to go so soon?” he asked.

She did not seem to hear him, and he could see that she was watching the young people intently. Jeff had turned his face up toward Genevieve, without lifting his person, and was saying something she suddenly shrank back from. She made a start as if to rise, but he put out his hand in front of her, beseechingly or compellingly, and she sank down again. But she slowly shook her head at what he was saying, and turned her face toward him so that it gave her profile to the spectators. In that light and at that distance it was impossible to do more than fancy anything fateful in the words which she seemed to be uttering; but Westover chose to fancy this. Jeff waited a moment in apparent silence, after she had spoken. He sat erect and faced her, and this gave his profile, too. He must have spoken, for she shook her head again; and then, at other words from him, nodded assentingly. Then she listened motionlessly while he poured a rapid stream of visible but inaudible words. He put out his hand, as if to take hers, but she put it behind her; Westover could see it white there against the belt of her dark dress.

Jeff went on more vehemently, but she remained steadfast, slowly shaking her head. When he ended she spoke, and with something of his own energy; he made a gesture of submission, and when she rose he rose, too. She stood a moment, and with a gentle and almost entreating movement she put out her hand to him. He stood looking down, with both his hands resting on the top of his stick, as if ignoring her proffer. Then he suddenly caught her hand, held it a moment; dropped it, and walked quickly away without looking back. Genevieve ran across the lawn and roadway toward the house.

“Oh, must, you go?” Mrs. Vostrand said to Westover. He found that he had probably risen in sympathy with Jeff’s action. He was not aware of an intention of going, but he thought he had better not correct Mrs. Vostrand’s error.

“Yes, I really must, now,” he said.

“Well, then,” she returned, distractedly, “do come often.”

He hurried out to avoid meeting Genevieve. He passed her, on the public stairs of the house, but he saw that she did not recognize him in the dim light.

Late that night he was startled by steps that seemed to be seeking their way up the stairs to his landing, and then by a heavy knock on his door. He opened it, and confronted Jeff Durgin.

“May I come in, Mr. Westover?” he asked, with unwonted deference.

“Yes, come in,” said Westover, with no great relish, setting his door open, and then holding onto it a moment, as if he hoped that, having come in, Jeff might instantly go out again.

His reluctance was lost upon Jeff, who said, unconscious of keeping his hat on: “I want to talk with you — I want to tell you something—”

“All right. Won’t you sit down?”

At this invitation Jeff seemed reminded to take his hat off, and he put it on the floor beside his chair. “I’m not in a scrape, this time — or, rather, I’m in the worst kind of a scrape, though it isn’t the kind that you want bail for.”

“Yes,” Westover prompted.

“I don’t know whether you’ve noticed — and if you haven’t it don’t make any difference — that I’ve seemed to — care a good deal for Miss Vostrand?”

Westover saw no reason why he should not be frank, and said: “Too much, I’ve fancied sometimes, for a student in his Sophomore year.”

“Yes, I know that. Well, it’s over, whether it was too much or too little.” He laughed in a joyless, helpless way, and looked deprecatingly at Westover. “I guess I’ve been making a fool of myself — that’s all.”

“It’s better to make a fool of one’s self than to make a fool of some one else,” said Westover, oracularly.

“Yes,” said Jeff, apparently finding nothing more definite in the oracle than people commonly find in oracles. “But I think,” he went on, with a touch of bitterness, “that her mother might have told me that she was engaged — or the same as engaged.”

“I don’t know that she was bound to take you seriously, or to suppose you took yourself so, at your age and with your prospects in life. If you want to know,” — Westover faltered, and then went on— “she began to be kind to you because she was afraid that you might think she didn’t take your coming home second-cabin in the right way; and one thing led to another. You mustn’t blame her for what’s happened.”

Westover defended Mrs. Vostrand, but he did not feel strong in her defence; he was not sure that Durgin was quite wrong, absurd as he had been. He sat down and looked up at his visitor under his brows.

“What are you here for, Jeff? Not to complain of Mrs. Vostrand?”

Jeff gave a short, shamefaced laugh. “No, it’s this you’re such an old friend of Mrs. Vostrand’s that I thought she’d be pretty sure to tell you about it; and I wanted to ask — to ask — that you wouldn’t say anything to mother.”

“You are a boy! I shouldn’t think of meddling with your affairs,” said Westover; he got up again, and Jeff rose, too.

Before noon the next day a district messenger brought Westover a letter which he easily knew, from, the now belated tall, angular hand, to be from Mrs. Vostrand. It announced on a much criss-crossed little sheet that she and Genevieve were inconsolably taking a very sudden departure, and were going on the twelve-o’clock train to New York, where Mr. Vostrand was to meet them. “In regard to that affair which I mentioned last night, he withdraws his objections (we have had an overnight telegram), and so I suppose all will go well. I cannot tell you how sorry we both are not to see you again; you have been such a dear, good friend to us; and if you don’t hear from us again at New York, you will from the other side. Genevieve had some very strange news when she came in, and we both feel very sorry for the poor young fellow. You must console him from us all you can. I did not know before how much she was attached to Gigi: but it turned out very fortunately that she could say she considered herself bound to him, and did everything to save Mr. D.’s feelings.”

XX.

Westover was not at Lion’s Head again till the summer before Jeff’s graduation. In the mean time the hotel had grown like a living thing. He could not have imagined wings in connection with the main edifice, but it had put forth wings — one that sheltered a new and enlarged dining-room, with two stories of chambers above, and another that hovered a parlor and ball-room under a like provision of chambers. An ell had been pushed back on the level behind the house; the barn had been moved farther to the southward, and on its old site a laundry built, with quarters for the help over it. All had been carefully, frugally, yet sufficiently done, and Westover was not surprised to learn that it was all the effect of Jackson Durgin’s ingenuity and energy. Mrs. Durgin confessed to having no part in it; but she had kept pace, with Cynthia Whitwell’s help, in the housekeeping. As Jackson had cautiously felt his way to the needs of their public in the enlargement and rearrangement of the hotel, the two housewives had watchfully studied, not merely the demands, but the half-conscious instincts of their guests, and had responded to them simply and adequately, in the spirit of Jackson’s exterior and structural improvements. The walls of the new rooms were left unpapered and their floors uncarpeted; there were thin rugs put down; the wood-work was merely stained. Westover found that he need not to ask especially for some hot dish at night; there was almost the abundance of a dinner, though dinner was still at one o’clock.

Mrs. Durgin asked him the first day if he would not like to go into the serving-room and see it while they were serving dinner. She tried to conceal her pride in the busy scene — the waitresses pushing in through one valve of the double-hinged doors with their empty trays, and out through the other with the trays full laden; delivering their dishes with the broken victual at the wicket, where the untouched portions were put aside and the rest poured into the waste; following in procession along the reeking steamtable, with its great tanks of soup and vegetables, where, the carvers stood with the joints and the trussed fowls smoking before them, which they sliced with quick sweeps of their blades, or waiting their turn at the board where the little plates with portions of fruit and dessert stood ready. All went regularly on amid a clatter of knives and voices and dishes; and the clashing rise and fall of the wire baskets plunging the soiled crockery into misty depths, whence it came up clean and dry without the touch of finger or towel. Westover could not deny that there were elements of the picturesque in it, so that he did not respond quite in kind to Jeff’s suggestion— “Scene for a painter, Mr. Westover.”

The young fellow followed satirically at his mother’s elbow, and made a mock of her pride in it, trying to catch Westover’s eye when she led him through the kitchen with its immense range, and introduced him to a new chef, who wiped his hand on his white apron to offer it to Westover.

“Don’t let him get away without seeing the laundry, mother,” her son jeered at a final air of absent-mindedness in her, and she defiantly accepted his challenge.

“Jeff’s mad because he wasn’t consulted,” she explained, “and because we don’t run the house like his one-horse European hotels.”

“Oh, I’m not in it at all, Mr. Westover,” said the young fellow. “I’m as much a passenger as you are. The only difference is that I’m allowed to work my passage.”

“Well, one thing,” said his mother, “is that we’ve got a higher class of boarders than we ever had before. You’ll see, Mr. Westover, if you stay on here till August. There’s a class that boards all the year round, and that knows what a hotel is — about as well as Jeff, I guess. You’ll find ’em at the big city houses, the first of the winter, and then they go down to Floridy or Georgy for February and March; and they get up to Fortress Monroe in April, and work along north about the middle of May to them family hotels in the suburbs around Boston; and they stay there till it’s time to go to the shore. They stay at the shore through July, and then they come here in August, and stay till the leaves turn. They’re folks that live on their money, and they’re the very highest class, I guess. It’s a round of gayety with ’em the whole year through.”

Jeff, from the vantage of his greater worldly experience, was trying to exchange looks of intelligence with Westover concerning those hotel-dwellers whom his mother revered as aristocrats; but he did not openly question her conceptions. “They’ve told me how they do, some of the ladies have,” she went on. “They’ve got the money for it, and they know how to get the most for their money. Why, Mr. Westover, we’ve got rooms in this house, now, that we let for thirty-five to fifty dollars a week for two persons, and folks like that take ’em right along through August and September, and want a room apiece. It’s different now, I can tell you, from what it was when folks thought we was killin’ ’em if we wanted ten or twelve dollars.”

Westover had finished his dinner before this tour of the house began, and when it was over the two men strolled away together.

“You see, it’s on the regular American lines,” Jeff pursued, after parting with his mother. “Jackson’s done it, and he can’t imagine anything else. I don’t say it isn’t well done in its way, but the way’s wrong; it’s stupid and clumsy.” When they were got so far from the hotel as to command a prospect of its ungainly mass sprawled upon the plateau, his smouldering disgust burst out: “Look at it! Did you ever see anything like it? I wish the damned thing would burn up — or down!”

Westover was aware in more ways than one of Jeff’s exclusion from authority in the place, where he was constantly set aside from the management as if his future were so definitely dedicated to another calling that not even his advice was desired or permitted; and he could not help sympathizing a little with him when he chafed at his rejection. He saw a great deal of him, and he thought him quite up to the average of Harvard’s Seniors in some essentials. He had been sobered, apparently, by experience; his unfortunate love-affair seemed to have improved him, as the phrase is.

They had some long walks and long talks together, and in one of them Jeff opened his mind, if not his heart, to the painter. He wanted to be the Landlord of the Lion’s Head, which he believed he could make the best hotel in the mountains. He knew, of course, that he could not hope to make any changes that did not suit his mother and his brother, as long as they had the control, but he thought they would let him have the control sooner if his mother could only be got to give up the notion of his being a lawyer. As nearly as he could guess, she wanted him to be a lawyer because she did not want him to be a hotel-keeper, and her prejudice against that was because she believed that selling liquor made her father a drunkard.

“Well, now you know enough about me, Mr. Westover, to know that drink isn’t my danger.”

“Yes, I think I do,” said Westover.

“I went a little wild in my Freshman year, and I got into that scrape, but I’ve never been the worse for liquor since; fact is, I never touch it now. There isn’t any more reason why I should take to drink because I keep a hotel than Jackson; but just that one time has set mother against it, and I can’t seem to make her understand that once is enough for me. Why, I should keep a temperance house, here, of course; you can’t do anything else in these days. If I was left to choose between hotel-keeping and any other life that I know of, I’d choose it every time,” Jeff went on, after a moment of silence. “I like a hotel. You can be your own man from the start; the start’s made here, and I’ve helped to make it. All you’ve got to do is to have common-sense in the hotel business, and you’re sure to succeed. I believe I’ve got common-sense, and I believe I’ve got some ideas that I can work up into a great success. The reason that most people fail in the hotel business is that they waste so much, and the landlord that wastes on his guests can’t treat them well. It’s got so now that in the big city houses they can’t make anything on feeding people, and so they try to make it up on the rooms. I should feed them well — I believe I know how — and I should make money on my table, as they do in Europe.

“I’ve thought a good many things out; my mind runs on it all the time; but I’m not going to bore you with it now.”

“Oh, not at all,” said Westover. “I’d like to know what your ideas are.”

“Well, some time I’ll tell you. But look here, Mr. Westover, I wish if mother gets to talking about me with you that you’d let her know how I feel. We can’t talk together, she and I, without quarrelling about it; but I guess you could put in a word that would show her I wasn’t quite a fool. She thinks I’ve gone crazy from seeing the way they do things in Europe; that I’m conceited and unpatriotic, and I don’t know what all.” Jeff laughed as if with an inner fondness for his mother’s wrong-headedness.

“And would you be willing to settle down here in the country for the rest of your life, and throw away your Harvard training on hotel-keeping?”

“What do the other fellows do with their Harvard training when they go into business, as nine-tenths of them do? Business is business, whether you keep a hotel or import dry-goods or manufacture cotton or run a railroad or help a big trust to cheat legally. Harvard has got to take a back seat when you get out of Harvard. But you don’t suppose that keeping a summer hotel would mean living in the country the whole time, do you? That’s the way mother does, but I shouldn’t. It isn’t good for the hotel, even. If I had such a place as Lion’s Head, I should put a man and his family into it for the winter to look after it, and I should go to town myself — to Boston or New York, or I might go to London or Paris. They’re not so far off, and it’s so easy to get to them that you can hardly keep away.” Jeff laughed, and looked up at Westover from the log where he sat, whittling a pine stick; Westover sat on the stump from which the log had been felled eight or ten years before.

“You are modern,” he said.

“That’s what I should do at first. But I don’t believe I should have Lion’s Head very long before I had another hotel — in Florida, or the Georgia uplands, or North Carolina, somewhere. I should take my help back and forth; it would be as easy to run two hotels as one-easier! It would keep my hand in. But if you want to know, I’d rather stick here in the country, year in and year out, and run Lion’s Head, than to be a lawyer and hang round trying to get a case for nine or ten years. Who’s going to support me? Do you suppose I want to live on mother till I’m forty? She don’t think of that. She thinks I can go right into court and begin distinguishing myself, if I can fight the people off from sending me to Congress. I’d rather live in the country, anyway. I think town’s the place for winter, or two-three months of it, and after that I haven’t got any use for it. But mother, she’s got this old-fashioned ambition to have me go to a city and set up there. She thinks that if I was a lawyer in Boston I should be at the top of the heap. But I know better than that, and so do you; and I want you to give her some little hint of how it really is: how it takes family and money and a lot of influence to get to the top in any city.”

It occurred to Westover, and not for the first time, that the frankest thing in Jeff Durgin was his disposition to use his friends. It seemed to him that Jeff was always asking something of him, and it did not change the fact that in this case he thought him altogether in the right. He said that if Mrs. Durgin spoke to him of the matter he would not keep the light from her. He looked behind him, now, for the first time, in recognition of the place where they had stopped. “Why, this is Whitwell’s Clearing.”

“Didn’t you know it?” Jeff asked. “It changes a good deal every year, and you haven’t been here for awhile, have you?”

“Not since Mrs. Marven’s picnic,” said Westover, and he added, quickly, to efface the painful association which he must have called up by his heedless words:

“The woods have crowded back upon it so. It can’t be more than half its old size.”

“No,” Jeff assented. He struck his heel against a fragment of the pine bough he had been whittling, and drove it into the soft ground beside the log, and said, without looking up from it: “I met that woman at a dance last winter. It wasn’t her dance, but she was running it as if it were, just the way she did with the picnic. She seemed to want to let bygones be bygones, and I danced with her daughter. She’s a nice girl. I thought mother did wrong about that.” Now he looked at Westover. “She couldn’t help it, but it wasn’t the thing to do. A hotel is a public house, and you can’t act as if it wasn’t. If mother hadn’t known how to keep a hotel so well in other ways, she might have ruined the house by not knowing in a thing like that. But we’ve got some of the people with us this year that used to come here when we first took farm-boarders; mother don’t know that they’re ever so much nicer, socially, than the people that take the fifty-dollar rooms.” He laughed, and then he said, seriously: “If I ever had a son, I don’t believe I should let my pride in him risk doing him mischief. And if you’ve a mind to let her understand that you believe I’m set against the law for good and all—”

“I guess I shall not be your ambassador, so far as that. Why don’t you tell her yourself?”

“She won’t believe me,” said Jeff, with a laugh. “She thinks I don’t know my mind. And I don’t like the way we differ when we differ. We differ more than we mean to. I don’t pretend to say I’m always right. She was right about that other picnic — the one I wanted to make for Mrs. Vostrand. I suppose,” he ended, unexpectedly, “that you hear from them, now and then?”

“No, I don’t. I haven’t heard from them for a year; not since — You knew Genevieve was married?”

“Yes, I knew that,” said Jeff, steadily.

“I don’t quite make it all out. Mr. Vostrand was very much opposed to it, Mrs. Vostrand told me; but he must have given way at last; and he must have put up the money.” Jeff looked puzzled, and Westover explained. “You know the officers in the Italian army — and all the other armies in Europe, for that matter — have to deposit a certain sum with the government before they can marry and in the case of Count Grassi, Mr. Vostrand had to furnish the money.”

Jeff said, after a moment: “Well, she couldn’t help that.”

“No, the girl wasn’t to blame. I don’t know that any one was to blame. But I’m afraid our girls wouldn’t marry many titles if their fathers didn’t put up the money.”

“Well, I don’t see why they shouldn’t spend their money that way as well as any other,” said Jeff, and this proof of his impartiality suggested to Westover that he was not only indifferent to the mercenary international marriages, which are a scandal to so many of our casuists, but had quite outlived his passion for the girl concerned in this.

“At any rate,” Jeff added, “I haven’t got anything to say against it. Mr. Westover, I’ve always wanted to say one thing to you. Then I came to your room that night, I wanted to complain of Mrs. Vostrand for not letting me know about the engagement; and I wasn’t man enough to acknowledge that what you said would account for their letting me make a fool of myself. But I believe I am now, and I want to say it.”

“I’m glad you can see it in that way,” said Westover, “and since you do, I don’t mind saying that I think Mrs. Vostrand might have been a little franker with you without being less kind. She was kind, but she wasn’t quite frank.”

“Well, it’s all over now,” said Jeff, and he rose up and brushed the whittlings from his knees. “And I guess it’s just as well.”

XXI.

That afternoon Westover saw Jeff helping Cynthia Whitwell into his buckboard, and then, after his lively horse had made some paces of a start, spring to the seat beside her, and bring it to a stand. “Can I do anything for you over at Lovewell, Mr. Westover?” he called, and he smiled toward the painter. Then he lightened the reins on the mare’s back; she squared herself for a start in earnest, and flashed down the sloping hotel road to the highway below, and was lost to sight in the clump of woods to the southward.

“That’s a good friend of yours, Cynthy,” he said, leaning toward the girl with a simple comfort in her proximity. She was dressed in a pale-pink color, with a hat of yet paler pink; without having a great deal of fashion, she had a good deal of style. She looked bright and fresh; there was a dash of pink in her cheeks, which suggested the color of the sweetbrier, its purity and sweetness, and if there was something in Cynthia’s character and temperament that suggested its thorns too, one still could not deny that she was like that flower. She liked to shop, and she liked to ride after a good horse, as the neighbors would have said; she was going over to Lovewell to buy a number of things, and Jeff Durgin was driving her there with the swift mare that was his peculiar property. She smiled upon him without the usual reservations she contrived to express in her smiles.

“Well, I don’t know anybody I’d rather have for my friend than Mr. Westover.” She added: “He acted like a friend the very first time I saw him.”

Jeff laughed with shameless pleasure in the reminiscence her words suggested. “Well, I did get my come-uppings that time. And I don’t know but he’s been a pretty good friend to me, too. I’m not sure he likes me; but Mr. Westover is a man that could be your friend if he didn’t like you.”

“What have you done to make him like you?” asked the girl.

“Nothing!” said Jeff, with a shout of laughter in his conviction. “I’ve done a lot of things to make him despise me from the start. But if you like a person yourself, you want him to like you whether you deserve it or not.”

“I don’t know as I do.”

“You say that because you always deserve it. You can’t tell how it is with a fellow like me. I should want you to like me, Cynthy, whatever you thought of me.” He looked round into her face, but she turned it away.

They had struck the level, long for the hill country, at the foot of the hotel road, and the mare, that found herself neither mounting nor descending a steep, dropped from the trot proper for an acclivity into a rapid walk.

“This mare can walk like a Kentucky horse,” said Jeff. “I believe I could teach her single-foot.” He added, with a laugh, “If I knew how,” and now Cynthia laughed with him.

“I was just going to say that.”

“Yes, you don’t lose many chances to give me a dig, do you?”

“Oh, I don’t know as I look for them. Perhaps I don’t need to.” The pine woods were deep on either side. They whispered in the thin, sweet wind, and gave out their odor in the high, westering sun. They covered with their shadows the road that ran velvety between them.

“This is nice,” said Jeff, letting himself rest against the back of the seat. He stretched his left arm along the top, and presently it dropped and folded itself about the waist of the girl.

“You may take your arm away, Jeff,” she said, quietly.

“Why?”

“Because it has no right there, for one thing!” She drew herself a little aside and looked round at him. “You wouldn’t put it round a town girl if you were riding with her.”

“I shouldn’t be riding with her: Girls don’t go buggy-riding in town any more,” said Jeff, brutally.

“Then I shall know what to do the next time you ask me.”

“Oh, they’d go quick enough if I asked them up here in the country. Etiquette don’t count with them when they’re on a vacation.”

“I’m not on a vacation; so it counts with me. Please take your arm away,” said Cynthia.

“Oh, all right. But I shouldn’t object to your putting your arm around me.”

“You will never have the chance.”

“Why are you so hard on me, Cynthy?” asked Jeff. “You didn’t used to be so.”

“People change.”

“Do I?”

“Not for the better.”

Jeff was dumb. She was pleased with her hit, and laughed. But her laugh did not encourage him to put his arm round her again. He let the mare walk on, and left her to resume the conversation at whatever point she would.

She made no haste to resume it. At last she said, with sufficient apparent remoteness from the subject they had dropped: “Jeff, I don’t know whether you want me to talk about it. But I guess I ought to, even if it isn’t my place exactly. I don’t think Jackson’s very well, this summer.”

Jeff faced round toward her. “What makes you think he isn’t well?”

“He’s weaker. Haven’t you noticed it?”

“Yes, I have noticed that. He’s worked down; that’s all.”

“No, that isn’t all. But if you don’t think so—”

“I want to know what you think, Cynthy,” said Jeff, with the amorous resentment all gone from his voice. “Sometimes folks outside notice the signs more — I don’t mean that you’re an outsider, as far as we’re concerned—”

She put by that point. “Father’s noticed it, too; and he’s with Jackson a good deal.”

“I’ll look after it. If he isn’t so well, he’s got to have a doctor. That medium’s stuff can’t do him any good. Don’t you think he ought to have a doctor?”

“Oh yes.”

“You don’t think a doctor can do him much good?”

“He ought to have one,” said the girl, noncommittally.

“Cynthia, I’ve noticed that Jackson was weak, too; and it’s no use pretending that he’s simply worked down. I believe he’s worn out. Do you think mother’s ever noticed it?”

“I don’t believe she has.”

“It’s the one thing I can’t very well make up my mind to speak to her about. I don’t know what she would do.” He did not say, “If she lost Jackson,” but Cynthia knew he meant that, and they were both silent. “Of course,” he went on, “I know that she places a great deal of dependence upon you, but Jackson’s her main stay. He’s a good man, and he’s a good son. I wish I’d always been half as good.”

Cynthia did not protest against his self-reproach as he possibly hoped she would. She said: “I think Jackson’s got a very good mind. He reads a great deal, and he’s thought a great deal, and when it comes to talking, I never heard any one express themselves better. The other night, we were out looking at the stars — I came part of the way home with him; I didn’t like to let him go alone, he seemed so feeble and he got to showing me Mars. He thinks it’s inhabited, and he’s read all that the astronomers say about it, and the seas and the canals that they’ve found on it. He spoke very beautifully about the other life, and then he spoke about death.” Cynthia’s voice broke, and she pulled her handkerchief out of her belt, and put it to her eyes. Jeff’s heart melted in him at the sight; he felt a tender affection for her, very unlike the gross content he had enjoyed in her presence before, and he put his arm round her again, but this time almost unconsciously, and drew her toward him. She did not repel him; she even allowed her head to rest a moment on his shoulder; though she quickly lifted it, and drew herself away, not resentfully, it seemed, but for her greater freedom in talking.

“I don’t believe he’s going to die,” Jeff said, consolingly, more as if it were her brother than his that he meant. “But he’s a very sick man, and he’s got to knock off and go somewhere. It won’t do for him to pass another winter here. He must go to California, or Colorado; they’d be glad to have him there, either of them; or he can go to Florida, or over to Italy. It won’t matter how long he stays—”

“What are you talking about, Jeff Durgin?” Cynthia demanded, severely. “What would your mother do? What would she do this winter?”

“That brings me to something, Cynthia,” said Jeff, “and I don’t want you to say anything till I’ve got through. I guess I could help mother run the place as well as Jackson, and I could stay here next winter.”

“You?”

“Now, you let me talk! My mind’s made up about one thing: I’m not going to be a lawyer. I don’t want to go back to Harvard. I’m going to keep a hotel, and, if I don’t keep one here at Lion’s Head, I’m going to keep it somewhere else.”

“Have you told your mother?”

“Not yet: I wanted to hear what you would say first.”

“I? Oh, I haven’t got anything to do with it,” said Cynthia.

“Yes, you have! You’ve got everything to do with it, if you’ll say one thing first. Cynthia, you know how I feel about you. It’s been so ever since we were boy and girl here. I want you to promise to marry me. Will you?”

The girl seemed neither surprised nor very greatly pleased; perhaps her pleasure had spent itself in that moment of triumphant expectation when she foresaw what was coming, or perhaps she was preoccupied in clearing the way in her own mind to a definite result.

“What do you say, Cynthia?” Jeff pursued, with more injury than misgiving in his voice at her delay in answering. “Don’t you-care for me?”

“Oh yes, I presume I’ve always done that — ever since we were boy and girl, as you say. But — —”

“Well?” said Jeff, patiently, but not insecurely.

“Have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Always cared for me.”

He could not find his voice quite as promptly as before. He cleared his throat before he asked: “Has Mr. Westover been saying anything about me?”

“I don’t know what you mean, exactly; but I presume you do.”

“Well, then — I always expected to tell you — I did have a fancy for that girl, for Miss Vostrand, and I told her so. It’s like something that never happened. She wouldn’t have me. That’s all.”

“And you expect me to take what she wouldn’t have?”

“If you like to call it that. But I should call it taking a man that had been out of his head for a while, and had come to his senses again.”

“I don’t know as I should ever feel safe with a man that had been out of his head once.”

“You wouldn’t find many men that hadn’t,” said Jeff, with a laugh that was rather scornful of her ignorance.

“No, I presume not,” she sighed. “She was beautiful, and I believe she was good, too. She was very nice. Perhaps I feel strangely about it. But, if she hadn’t been so nice, I shouldn’t have been so willing that you should have cared for her.”

“I suppose I don’t understand,” said Jeff, “but I know I was hard hit. What’s the use? It’s over. She’s married. I can’t go back and unlive it all. But if you want time to think — of course you do — I’ve taken time enough—”

He was about to lift the reins on the mare’s back as a sign to her that the talk was over for the present, and to quicken her pace, when Cynthia put out her hand and laid it on his, and said with a certain effect of authority: “I shouldn’t want you should give up your last year in Harvard.”

“Just as you say, Cynthy;” and in token of intelligence he wound his arm round her neck and kissed her. It was not the first kiss by any means; in the country kisses are not counted very serious, or at all binding, and Cynthia was a country girl; but they both felt that this kiss sealed a solemn troth between them, and that a common life began for them with it.

XXII.

Cynthia came back in time to go into the dining-room and see that all was in order there for supper before the door opened. The waitresses knew that she had been out riding, as they called it, with Jeff Durgin; the fact had spread electrically to them where they sat in a shady angle of the hotel listening to one who read a novel aloud, and skipped all but the most exciting love parts. They conjectured that the pair had gone to Lovewell, but they knew nothing more, and the subtlest of them would not have found reason for further conjecture in Cynthia’s behavior, when she came in and scanned the tables and the girls’ dresses and hair, where they stood ranged against the wall. She was neither whiter nor redder than usual, and her nerves and her tones were under as good control as a girl’s ever are after she has been out riding with a fellow. It was not such a great thing, anyway, to ride with Jeff Durgin. First and last, nearly all the young lady boarders had been out with him, upon one errand or another to Lovewell.

After supper, when the girls had gone over to their rooms in the helps’ quarters, and the guests had gathered in the wide, low office, in the light of the fire kindled on the hearth to break the evening chill, Jeff joined Cynthia in her inspection of the dining-room. She always gave it a last look, to see that it was in perfect order for breakfast, before she went home for the night. Jeff went home with her; he was impatient of her duties, but he was in no hurry when they stole out of the side door together under the stars, and began to stray sidelong down the hill over the dewless grass.

He lingered more and more as they drew near her father’s house, in the abandon of a man’s love. He wished to give himself solely up to it, to think and to talk of nothing else, after a man’s fashion. But a woman’s love is no such mere delight. It is serious, practical. For her it is all future, and she cannot give herself wholly up to any present moment of it, as a man does.

“Now, Jeff,” she said, after a certain number of partings, in which she had apparently kept his duty clearly in mind, “you had better go home and tell your mother.”

“Oh, there’s time enough for that,” he began.

“I want you to tell her right away, or there won’t be anything to tell.”

“Is that so?” he joked back. “Well, if I must, I must, I suppose. But I didn’t think you’d take the whip-hand so soon, Cynthia.”

“Oh, I don’t ever want to take the whip-hand with you, Jeff. Don’t make me!”

“Well, I won’t, then. But what are you in such a hurry to have mother know for? She’s not going to object. And if she does—”

“It isn’t that,” said the girl, quickly. “If I had to go round a single day with your mother hiding this from her, I should begin to hate you. I couldn’t bear the concealment. I shall tell father as soon as I go in.”

“Oh, your father ‘ll be all right, of course.”

“Yes, he’ll be all right, but if he wouldn’t, and I knew it, I should have to tell him, all the same. Now, good-night. Well, there, then; and there! Now, let me go!”

She paused for a moment in her own room, to smooth her tumbled hair, and try to identify herself in her glass. Then she went into the sitting-room, where she found her father pulled up to the table, with his hat on, and poring over a sheet of hieroglyphics, which represented the usual evening with planchette.

“Have you been to help Jackson up?” she asked.

“Well, I wanted to, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He’s feelin’ ever so much better to-night, and he wanted to go alone. I just come in.”

“Yes, you’ve got your hat on yet.”

Whitwell put his hand up and found that his daughter was right. He laughed, and said: “I guess I must ‘a’ forgot it. We’ve had the most interestin’ season with plantchette that I guess we’ve about ever had. She’s said something here—”

“Well, never mind; I’ve got something more important to say than plantchette has,” said Cynthia, and she pulled the sheet away from under her father’s eyes.

This made him look up at her. “Why, what’s happened?”

“Nothing. Jeff Durgin has asked me to marry him.”

“He has!” The New England training is not such as to fit people for the expression of strong emotion, and the best that Whitwell found himself able to do in view of the fact was to pucker his mouth for a whistle which did not come.

“Yes — this afternoon,” said Cynthia, lifelessly. The tension of her nerves relaxed in a languor which was evident even to her father, though his eyes still wandered to the sheet she had taken from him.

“Well, you don’t seem over and above excited about it. Did — did your — What did you say—”

“How should I know what I said? What do you think of it, father?”

“I don’t know as I ever give the subject much attention,” said the philosopher. “I always meant to take it out of him, somehow, if he got to playin’ the fool.”

“Then you wanted I should accept him?”

“What difference ‘d it make what I wanted? That what you done?”

“Yes, I’ve accepted him,” said the girl, with a sigh. “I guess I’ve always expected to.”

“Well, I thought likely it would come to that, myself. All I can say, Cynthy, is ‘t he’s a lucky feller.”

Whitwell leaned back, bracing his knees against the table, which was one of his philosophic poses. “I have sometimes believed that Jeff Durgin was goin’ to turn out a blackguard. He’s got it in him. He’s as like his gran’father as two peas, and he was an old devil. But you got to account in all these here heredity cases for counteractin’ influences. The Durgins are as good as wheat, right along, all of ‘em; and I guess Mis’ Durgin’s mother must have been a pretty good woman too. Mis’ Durgin’s all right, too, if she has got a will of her own.” Whitwell returned from his scientific inquiry to ask: “How ‘ll she take it?”

“I don’t know,” said Cynthia, dreamily, but without apparent misgiving. “That’s Jeff’s lookout.”

“So ’tis. I guess she won’t make much fuss. A woman never likes to see her son get married; but you’ve been a kind of daughter to her so long. Well, I guess that part of it ‘ll be all right. Jackson,” said Whitwell, in a tone of relief, as if turning from an irrelevant matter to something of real importance, “was down here to-night tryin’ to ring up some them spirits from the planet Mars. Martians, he calls ‘em. His mind’s got to runnin’ a good deal on Mars lately. I guess it’s this apposition that they talk about that does it. Mars comin’ so much nearer the earth by a million of miles or so, it stands to reason that he should be more influenced by the minds on it. I guess it’s a case o’ that telepathy that Mr. Westover tells about. I judge that if he kept at it before Mars gits off too far again he might make something out of it. I couldn’t seem to find much sense in what plantchette done to-night; we couldn’t either of us; but she has her spells when you can’t make head or tail of her. But mebbe she’s just leadin’ up to something, the way she did about that broken shaft when Jeff come home. We ha’n’t ever made out exactly what she meant by that yet.”

Whitwell paused, and Cynthia seized the advantage of his getting round to Jeff again. “He wanted to give up going to Harvard this last year, but I wouldn’t let him.”

“Jeff did?” asked her father. “Well, you done a good thing that time, anyway, Cynthy. His mother ‘d never get over it.”

“There’s something else she’s got to get over, and I don’t know how she ever will. He’s going to give up the law.”

“Give up the law!”

“Yes. Don’t tease, father! He says he’s never cared about it, and he wants to keep a hotel. I thought that I’d ought to tell him how we felt about Jackson’s having a rest and going off somewhere; and he wanted to begin at once. But I said if he left off the last year at Harvard I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

Whitwell put his hand in his pocket for his knife, and mechanically looked down for a stick to whittle. In default of any, he scratched his head. “I guess she’ll make it warm for him. She’s had her mind set on his studyin’ law so long, ‘t she won’t give up in a hurry. She can’t see that Jackson ain’t fit to help her run the hotel any more — till he’s had a rest, anyway — and I believe she thinks her and Frank could run it — and you. She’ll make an awful kick,” said Whitwell, solemnly. “I hope you didn’t encourage him, Cynthy?”

“I should encourage him,” said the girl. “He’s got the right to shape his own life, and nobody else has got the right to do it; and I should tell his mother so, if she ever said anything to me about it.”

“All right,” said Whitwell. “I suppose you know what you’re about.”

“I do, father. Jeff would make a good landlord; he’s got ideas about a hotel, and I can see that they’re the right ones. He’s been out in the world, and he’s kept his eyes open. He will make Lion’s Head the best hotel in the mountains.”

“It’s that already.”

“He doesn’t think it’s half as good as he can make it.”

“It wouldn’t be half what it is now, if it wa’n’t for you and Frank.”

“I guess he understands that,” said Cynthia. “Frank would be the clerk.”

“Got it all mapped out!” said Whitwell, proudly, in his turn. “Look out you don’t slip up in your calculations. That’s all.”

“I guess we cha’n’t slip up.”

XIII.

Jeff came into the ugly old family parlor, where his mother sat mending by the kerosene-lamp which she had kept through all the household changes, and pushed enough of her work aside from the corner of the table to rest his arm upon it.

“Mother, I want you to listen to me, and to wait till I get done. Will you?”

She looked up at him over her spectacles from the stocking she was darning; the china egg gleamed through the frayed place. “What notion have you got in your head, now?”

“It’s about Jackson. He isn’t well. He’s got to leave off work and go away.”

The mother’s hand dropped at the end of the yarn she had drawn through the stocking heel, and she stared at Jeff. Then she resumed her work with the decision expressed in her tone. “Your father lived to be sixty years old, and Jackson a’n’t forty! The doctor said there wa’n’t any reason why he shouldn’t live as long as his father did.”

“I’m not saying he won’t live to a hundred. I’m saying he oughtn’t to stay another winter here,” Jeff said, decisively.

Mrs. Durgin was silent for a time, and then she said. “Jeff, is that your notion about Jackson, or whose is it?”

“It’s mine, now.”

Mrs. Durgin waited a moment. Then she began, with a feeling quite at variance with her words:

“Well, I’ll thank Cynthy Whit’ell to mind her own business! Of course,” she added, and in what followed her feeling worked to the surface in her words, “I know ‘t she thinks the world of Jackson, and he does of her; and I presume she means well. I guess she’d be more apt to notice, if there was any change, than what I should. What did she say?”

Jeff told, as nearly as he could remember, and he told what Cynthia and he had afterward jointly worked out as to the best thing for Jackson to do. Mrs. Durgin listened frowningly, but not disapprovingly, as it seemed; though at the end she asked: “And what am I going to do, with Jackson gone?”

Jeff laughed, with his head down. “Well, I guess you and Cynthy could run it, with Frank and Mr. Whitwell.”

“Mr. Whit’ell!” said Mrs. Durgin, concentrating in her accent of his name the contempt she could not justly pour out on the others.

“Oh,” Jeff went on, “I did think that I could take hold with you, if you could bring yourself to let me off this last year at Harvard.”

“Jeff!” said his mother, reproachfully. “You know you don’t mean that you’d give up your last year in college?”

“I do mean it, but I don’t expect you to do it; and I don’t ask it. I suggested it to Cynthy, when we got to talking it over, and she saw it wouldn’t do.”

“Well, she showed some sense that time,” Mrs. Durgin said.

“I don’t know when Cynthy hasn’t shown sense; except once, and then I guess it was my fault.”

“What do you mean?”

“Why, this afternoon I asked her to marry me some time, and she said she would.” He looked at his mother and laughed, and then he did not laugh. He had expected her to be pleased; he had thought to pave the way with this confession for the declaration of his intention not to study law, and to make his engagement to Cynthia serve him in reconciling his mother to the other fact. But a menacing suspense followed his words.

His mother broke out at last: “You asked Cynthy Whit’ell to marry you! And she said she would! Well, I can tell her she won’t, then!”

“And I can tell you she will!” Jeff stormed back. He rose to his feet and stood over his mother.

She began steadily, as if he had not spoken. “If that designin’—”

“Look out, mother! Don’t you say anything against Cynthia! She’s been the best girl to you in the world, and you know it. She’s been as true to you as Jackson has himself. She hasn’t got a selfish bone in her body, and she’s so honest she couldn’t design anything against you or any one, unless she told you first. Now you take that back! Take it back! She’s no more designing than — than you are!”

Mrs. Durgin was not moved by his storming, but she was inwardly convinced of error. “I do take it back. Cynthy is all right. She’s all you say and more. It’s your fault, then, and you’ve got yourself to thank, for whosever fault it is, she’ll pack—”

“If Cynthy packs, I pack!” said Jeff. “Understand that. The moment she leaves this house I leave it, too, and I’ll marry her anyway. Frank ‘d leave and — and — Pshaw! What do you care for that? But I don’t know what you mean! I always thought you liked Cynthy and respected her. I didn’t believe I could tell you a thing that would please you better than that she had said she would have me. But if it don’t, all right.”

Mrs. Durgin held her peace in bewilderment; she stared at her son with dazed eyes, under the spectacles lifted above her forehead. She felt a change of mood in his unchanged tone of defiance, and she met him half-way. “I tell you I take back what I called Cynthia, and I told you so. But — but I didn’t ever expect you to marry her.”

“Why didn’t you? There isn’t one of the summer folks to compare with her. She’s got more sense than all of ‘em. I’ve known her ever since I can remember. Why didn’t you expect it?”

“I didn’t expect it.”

“Oh, I know! You thought I’d see somebody in Boston — some swell girl. Well, they wouldn’t any of them look at me, and if they would, they wouldn’t look at you.”

“I shouldn’t care whether they looked at me or not.”

“I tell you they wouldn’t look at me. You don’t understand about these things, and I do. They marry their own kind, and I’m not their kind, and I shouldn’t be if I was Daniel Webster himself. Daniel Webster! Who remembers him, or cares for him, or ever did? You don’t believe it? You think that because I’ve been at Harvard — Oh, can’t I make you see it? I’m what they call a jay in Harvard, and Harvard don’t count if you’re a jay.”

His mother looked at him without speaking. She would not confess the ambition he taxed her with, and perhaps she had nothing so definite in her mind. Perhaps it was only her pride in him, and her faith in a splendid future for him, that made her averse to his marriage in the lot she had always known, and on a little lower level in it that her own. She said at last:

“I don’t know what you mean by being a jay. But I guess we better not say anything more about this to-night.”

“All right,” Jeff returned. There never were any formal good-nights between the Durgins, and he went away now without further words.

His mother remained sitting where he left her. Two or three times she drew her empty darning-needle through the heel of the stocking she was mending.

She was still sitting there when Jackson passed on his way to bed, after leaving the office in charge of the night porter. He faltered, as he went by, and as he stood on the threshold she told him what Jeff had told her.

“That’s good,” he said, lifelessly. “Good for Jeff,” he added, thoughtfully, conscientiously.

“Why a’n’t it good for her, too?” demanded Jeff’s mother, in quick resentment of the slight put upon him.

“I didn’t say it wa’n’t,” said Jackson. “But it’s better for Jeff.”

“She may be very glad to get him!”

“I presume she is. She’s always cared for him, I guess. She’ll know how to manage him.”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Durgin, “as I like to have you talk so, about Jeff. He was here, just now, wantin’ to give up his last year in Harvard, so ‘s to let you go off on a vacation. He thinks you’ve worked yourself down.”

Jackson made no recognition of Jeff’s professed self-sacrifice. “I don’t want any vacation. I’m feeling first-rate now. I guess that stuff I had from the writin’ medium has begun to take hold of me. I don’t know when I’ve felt so well. I believe I’m going to get stronger than ever I was. Jeff say I needed a rest?”

Something like a smile of compassion for the delusion of his brother dawned upon the sick man’s wasted face, which was blotched with large freckles, and stared with dim, large eyes from out a framework of grayish hair, and grayish beard cut to the edges of the cheeks and chin.

XXIV.

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia did not seek any formal meeting the next morning. The course of their work brought them together, but it was not till after they had transacted several household affairs of pressing importance that Mrs. Durgin asked: “What’s this about you and Jeff?”

“Has he been telling you?” asked Cynthia, in her turn, though she knew he had.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Durgin, with a certain dryness, which was half humorous. “I presume, if you two are satisfied, it’s all right.”

“I guess we’re satisfied,” said the girl, with a tremor of relief which she tried to hide.

Nothing more was said, and there was no physical demonstration of affection or rejoicing between the women. They knew that the time would come when they would talk over the affair down to the bone together, but now they were content to recognize the fact, and let the time for talking arrive when it would. “I guess,” said Mrs. Durgin, “you’d better go over to the helps’ house and see how that youngest Miller girl’s gittin’ along. She’d ought to give up and go home if she a’n’t fit for her work.”

“I’ll go and see her,” said Cynthia. “I don’t believe she’s strong enough for a waitress, and I have got to tell her so.”

“Well,” returned Mrs. Durgin, glumly, after a moment’s reflection, “I shouldn’t want you should hurry her. Wait till she’s out of bed, and give her another chance.”

“All right.”

Jeff had been lurking about for the event of the interview, and he waylaid Cynthia on the path to the helps’ house.

“I’m going over to see that youngest Miller girl,” she explained.

“Yes, I know all about that,” said Jeff. “Well, mother took it just right, didn’t she? You can’t always count on her; but I hadn’t much anxiety in this case. She likes you, Cynthia.”

“I guess so,” said the girl, demurely; and she looked away from him to smile her pleasure in the fact.

“But I believe if she hadn’t known you were with her about my last year in Harvard — it would have been different. I could see, when I brought it in that you wanted me to go back, her mind was made up for you.”

“Why need you say anything about that?”

“Oh, I knew it would clinch her. I understand mother. If you want something from her you mustn’t ask it straight out. You must propose something very disagreeable. Then when she refuses that, you can come in for what you were really after and get it.”

“I don’t know,” said Cynthia, “as I should like to think that your mother had been tricked into feeling right about me.”

“Tricked!” The color flashed up in Jeff’s face.

“Not that, Jeff,” said the girl, tenderly. “But you know what I mean. I hope you talked it all out fully with her.”

“Fully? I don’t know what you mean.”

“About your not studying law, and — everything.”

“I don’t believe in crossing a river till I come to it,” said Jeff. “I didn’t say anything to her about that.”

“You didn’t!”

“No. What had it got to do with our being engaged?”

“What had your going back to Harvard to do with it? If your mother thinks I’m with her in that, she’ll think I’m with her in the other. And I’m not. I’m with you.” She let her hand find his, as they walked side by side, and gave it a little pressure.

“It’s the greatest thing, Cynthy,” he said, breathlessly, “to have you with me in that. But, if you said I ought to study law, I should do it.”

“I shouldn’t say that, for I believe you’re right; but even if I believed you were wrong, I shouldn’t say it. You have a right to make your life what you want it; and your mother hasn’t. Only she must know it, and you must tell her at once.”

“At once?”

“Yes — now. What good will it do to put it off? You’re not afraid to tell her!”

“I don’t like you to use that word.”

“And I don’t like to use it. But I know how it is. You’re afraid that the brunt of it will come on ME. She’ll think you’re all right, but I’m all wrong because I agree with you.”

“Something like that.”

“Well, now, I’m not afraid of anything she can say; and what could she do? She can’t part us, unless you let her, and then I should let her, too.”

“But what’s the hurry? What’s the need of doing it right off?”

“Because it’s a deceit not to do it. It’s a lie!”

“I don’t see it in that light. I might change my mind, and still go on and study law.”

“You know you never will. Now, Jeff! Why do you act so?”

Jeff did not answer at once. He walked beside her with a face of trouble that became one of resolve in the set jaws. “I guess you’re right, Cynthy. She’s got to know the worst, and the sooner she knows it the better.”

“Yes!”

He had another moment of faltering. “You don’t want I should talk it over with Mr. Westover?”

“What has he got to do with it?”

“That’s true!”

“If you want to see it in the right light, you can think you’ve let it run on till after you’re out of college, and then you’ve got to tell her. Suppose she asked you how long you had made up your mind against the law, how should you feel? And if she asked me whether I’d known it all along, and I had to say I had, and that I’d supported and encouraged you in it, how should I feel?”

“She mightn’t ask any such question,” said Jeff, gloomily. Cynthia gave a little impatient “Oh!” and he hastened to add: “But you’re right; I’ve got to tell her. I’ll tell her to-night—”

“Don’t wait till to-night; do it now.”

“Now?”

“Yes; and I’ll go with you as soon as I’ve seen the youngest Miller girl.” They had reached the helps’ house now, and Cynthia said: “You wait outside here, and I’ll go right back with you. Oh, I hope it isn’t doing wrong to put it off till I’ve seen that girl!” She disappeared through the door, and Jeff waited by the steps outside, plucking up one long grass stem after another and biting it in two. When Cynthia came out she said: “I guess she’ll be all right. Now come, and don’t-lose another second.”

“You’re afraid I sha’n’t do it if I wait any longer!”

“I’m afraid I sha’n’t.” There was a silence after this.

“Do you know what I think of you, Cynthy?” asked Jeff, hurrying to keep up with her quick steps. “You’ve got more courage—”

“Oh, don’t praise me, or I shall break down!”

“I’ll see that you don’t break down,” said Jeff, tenderly. “It’s the greatest thing to have you go with me!”

“Why, don’t you SEE?” she lamented. “If you went alone, and told your mother that I approved of it, you would look as if you were afraid, and wanted to get behind me; and I’m not going to have that.”

They found. Mrs. Durgin in the dark entry of the old farmhouse, and Cynthia said, with involuntary imperiousness: “Come in here, Mrs. Durgin; I want to tell you something.”

She led the way to the old parlor, and she checked Mrs. Durgin’s question, “Has that Miller girl—”

“It isn’t about her,” said Cynthy, pushing the door to. “It’s about me and Jeff.”

Mrs. Durgin became aware of Jeff’s presence with an effect of surprise. “There a’n’t anything more, is there?”

“Yes, there is!” Cynthia shrilled. “Now, Jeff!”

“It’s just this, mother: Cynthy thinks I ought to tell you — and she thinks I ought to have told you last night — she expected me to — that I’m not going to study law.”

“And I approve of his not doing it,” Cynthia promptly followed, and she put herself beside Jeff where he stood in front of his mother’s rocking-chair.

She looked from one to the other of the faces before her. “I’m sorry a son of mine,” she said, with dignity, “had to be told how to act with his mother. But, if he had, I don’t know as anybody had a better right to do it than the girl that’s going to marry him. And I’ll say this, Cynthia Whitwell, before I say anything else: you’ve begun right. I wish I could say Jeff had.”

There was an uncomfortable moment before Cynthia said: “He expected to tell you.”

“Oh Yes! I know,” said his mother, sadly. She added, sharply: “And did he expect to tell me what he intended to do for a livin’?”

Jeff took the word. “Yes, I did. I intend to keep a hotel.”

“What hotel?” asked Mrs. Durgin, with a touch of taunting in her tone.

“This one.”

The mother of the bold, rebellious boy that Jeff had been stirred in Mrs. Durgin’s heart, and she looked at him with the eyes, that used to condone his mischief. But she said: “I guess you’ll find out that there’s more than one has to agree to that.”

“Yes, there are two: you and Jackson; and I don’t know but what three, if you count Cynthy, here.”

His mother turned to the girl. “You think this fellow’s got sense enough to keep a hotel?”

“Yes, Mrs. Durgin, I do. I think he’s got good ideas about a hotel.”

“And what’s he goin’ to do with his college education?”

Jeff interposed. “You think that all the college graduates turn out lawyers and doctors and professors? Some of ’em are mighty glad to sweep out banks in hopes of a clerkship; and some take any sort of a place in a mill or a business house, to work up; and some bum round out West ‘on cattle ranches; and some, if they’re lucky, get newspaper reporters’ places at ten dollars a week.”

Cynthia followed with the generalization: “I don’t believe anybody can know too much to keep a hotel. It won’t hurt Jeff if he’s been to Harvard, or to Europe, either.”

“I guess there’s a pair of you,” said Mrs. Durgin, with superficial contempt. She was silent for a time, and they waited. “Well, there!” she broke out again. “I’ve got something to chew upon for a spell, I guess. Go along, now, both of you! And the next time you’ve got to face your mother, Jeff, don’t you come in lookin’ round anybody’s petticoats! I’ll see you later about all this.”

They went away with the joyful shame of children who have escaped punishment.

“That’s the last of it, Cynthy,” said Jeff.

“I guess so,” the girl assented, with a certain grief in her voice. “I wish you had told her first!”

“Oh, never mind that now!” cried Jeff, and in the dim passageway he took her in his arms and kissed her.

He would have released her, but she lingered in his embrace. “Will you promise that if there’s ever anything like it again, you won’t wait for me to make you?”

“I like your having made me, but I promise,” he said.

Then she tightened her arms round his neck and kissed him.

XXV.

The will of Jeff’s mother relaxed its grip upon the purpose so long held, as if the mere strain of the tenacity had wearied and weakened it. When it finally appeared that her ambition for her son was not his ambition for himself and would never be, she abandoned it. Perhaps it was the easier for her to forego her hopes of his distinction in the world, because she had learned before that she must forego her hopes of him in other ways. She had vaguely fancied that with the acquaintance his career at Harvard would open to him Jeff would make a splendid marriage. She had followed darkling and stumbling his course in society as far as he would report it to her, and when he would not suffer her to glory in it, she believed that he was forbidding her from a pride that would not recognize anything out of the common in it. She exulted in his pride, and she took all his snubbing reserves tenderly, as so many proofs of his success.

At the bottom of her heart she had both fear and contempt of all towns-people, whom she generalized from her experience of them as summer folks of a greater or lesser silliness. She often found herself unable to cope with them, even when she felt that she had twice their sense; she perceived that they had something from their training that with all her undisciplined force she could never hope to win from her own environment. But she believed that her son would have the advantages which baffled her in them, for he would have their environment; and she had wished him to rivet his hold upon those advantages by taking a wife from among them, and by living the life of their world. Her wishes, of course, had no such distinct formulation, and the feeling she had toward Cynthia as a possible barrier to her ambition had no more definition. There had been times when the fitness of her marriage with Jeff had moved the mother’s heart to a jealousy that she always kept silent, while she hoped for the accident or the providence which should annul the danger. But Genevieve Vostrand had not been the kind of accident or the providence that she would have invoked, and when she saw Jeff’s fancy turning toward her, Mrs. Durgin had veered round to Cynthia. All the same she kept a keen eye upon the young ladies among the summer folks who came to Lion’s Head, and tacitly canvassed their merits and inclinations with respect to Jeff in the often-imagined event of his caring for any one of them. She found that her artfully casual references to her son’s being in Harvard scarcely affected their mothers in the right way. The fact made them think of the head waiters whom they had met at other hotels, and who were working their way through Dartmouth or Williams or Yale, and it required all the force of Jeff’s robust personality to dissipate their erroneous impressions of him. He took their daughters out of their arms and from under their noses on long drives upon his buckboard, and it became a convention with them to treat his attentions somewhat like those of a powerful but faithful vassal.

Whether he was indifferent, or whether the young ladies were coy, none of these official flirtations came to anything. He seemed not to care for one more than another; he laughed and joked with them all, and had an official manner with each which served somewhat like a disparity of years in putting them at their ease with him. They agreed that he was very handsome, and some thought him very talented; but they questioned whether he was quite what you would call a gentleman. It is true that this misgiving attacked them mostly in the mass; singly, they were little or not at all troubled by it, and they severally behaved in an unprincipled indifference to it.

Mrs. Durgin had the courage of her own purposes, but she had the fear of Jeff’s. After the first pang of the disappointment which took final shape from his declaration that he was going to marry Cynthia, she did not really care much. She had the habit of the girl; she respected her, she even loved her. The children, as she thought of them, had known each other from their earliest days; Jeff had persecuted Cynthia throughout his graceless boyhood, but he had never intimidated her; and his mother, with all her weakness for him, felt that it was well for him that his wife should be brave enough to stand up against him.

She formulated this feeling no more than the others, but she said to Westover, whom Jeff bade her tell of the engagement: “It a’n’t exactly as I could ‘a’ wished it to be. But I don’t know as mothers are ever quite suited with their children’s marriages. I presume it’s from always kind of havin’ had her round under my feet ever since she was born, as you may say, and seein’ her family always so shiftless. Well, I can’t say that of Frank, either. He’s turned out a fine boy; but the father! Cynthy is one of the most capable girls, smart as a trap, and bright as a biscuit. She’s masterful, too! she NEED to have a will of her own with Jeff.”

Something of the insensate pride that mothers have in their children’s faults, as their quick tempers, or their wastefulness, or their revengefulness, expressed itself in her tone; and it was perhaps this that irritated Westover.

“I hope he’ll never let her know it. I don’t think a strong will is a thing to be prized, and I shouldn’t consider it one of Cynthia’s good points. The happiest life for her would be one that never forced her to use it.”

“I don’t know as I understand you exactly,” said Mrs. Durgin, with some dryness. “I know Jeff’s got rather of a domineering disposition, but I don’t believe but she can manage him without meetin’ him on his own ground, as you may say.”

“She’s a girl in a thousand,” Westover returned, evasively.

“Then you think he’s shown sense in choosin’ of her?” pursued Jeff’s mother, resolute to find some praise of him in Westover’s words.

“He’s a very fortunate man,” said the painter.

“Well, I guess you’re right,” Mrs. Durgin acquiesced, as much to Jeff’s advantage as she could. “You know I was always afraid he would make a fool of himself, but I guess he’s kept his eyes pretty well open all the while. Well!” She closed the subject with this exclamation. “Him and Cynthy’s been at me about Jackson,” she added, abruptly. “They’ve cooked it up between ’em that he’s out of health or run down or something.”

Her manner referred the matter to Westover, and he said: “He isn’t looking so well this summer. He ought to go away somewhere.”

“That’s what they thought,” said Mrs. Durgin, smiling in her pleasure at having their opinion confirmed by the old and valued friend of the family.

“Whereabouts do you think he’d best go?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Italy — or Egypt—”

“I guess, if you could get Jackson to go away at all, it would be to some of them old Bible countries,” said Mrs. Durgin. “We’ve got to have a fight to get him off, make the best of it, and I’ve thought it over since the children spoke about it, and I couldn’t seem to see Jackson willin’ to go out to Californy or Colorady, to either of his brothers. But I guess he would go to Egypt. That a good climate for the — his complaint?”

She entered eagerly into the question, and Westover promised to write to a Boston doctor, whom he knew very well, and report Jackson’s case to him, and get his views of Egypt.

“Tell him how it is,” said Mrs. Durgin, “and the tussle we shall have to have anyway to make Jackson believe he’d ought to have a rest. He’ll go to Egypt if he’ll go anywheres, because his mind keeps runnin’ on Bible questions, and it ‘ll interest him to go out there; and we can make him believe it’s just to bang around for the winter. He’s terrible hopeful.” Now that she began to speak, all her long-repressed anxiety poured itself out, and she hitched her chair nearer to Westover and wistfully clutched his sleeve. “That’s the worst of Jackson. You can’t make him believe anything’s the matter. Sometimes I can’t bear to hear him go on about himself as if he was a well young man. He expects that medium’s stuff is goin’ to cure him!”

“People sick in that way are always hopeful,” said Westover.

“Oh, don’t I know it! Ha’n’t I seen my children and my husband — Oh, do ask that doctor to answer as quick as he can!”

XXVI.

Westover had a difficulty in congratulating Jeff which he could scarcely define to himself, but which was like that obscure resentment we feel toward people whom we think unequal to their good fortune. He was ashamed of his grudge, whatever it was, and this may have made him overdo his expressions of pleasure. He was sensible of a false cordiality in them, and he checked himself in a flow of forced sentiment to say, more honestly: “I wish you’d speak to Cynthia for me. You know how much I think of her, and how much I want to see her happy. You ought to be a very good fellow, Jeff!”

“I’ll tell her that; she’ll like that,” said Jeff. “She thinks the world of you.”

“Does she? Well!”

“And I guess she’ll be glad you sent word. She’s been wondering what you would say; she’s always so afraid of you.”

“Is she? You’re not afraid of me, are you? But perhaps you don’t think so much of me.”

“I guess Cynthia and I think alike on that point,” said Jeff, without abating Westover’s discomfort.

There was a stress of sharp cold that year about the 20th of August. Then the weather turned warm again, and held fine till the beginning of October, within a week of the time when Jackson was to sail. It had not been so hard to make him consent when he knew where the doctor wished him to go, and he had willingly profited by Westover’s suggestions about getting to Egypt. His interest in the matter, which he tried to hide at first under a mask of decorous indifference, mounted with the fire of Whitwell’s enthusiasm, and they held nightly councils together, studying his course on the map, and consulting planchette upon the points at variance that rose between them, while Jombateeste sat with his chair tilted against the wall, and pulled steadily at his pipe, which mixed its strong fumes with the smell of the kerosene-lamp and the perennial odor of potatoes in the cellar under the low room where the companions forgathered.

Toward the end of September Westover spent the night before he went back to town with them. After a season with planchette, their host pushed himself back with his knees from the table till his chair reared upon its hind legs, and shoved his hat up from his forehead in token of philosophical mood.

“I tell you, Jackson,” he said, “you’d ought to get hold o’ some them occult devils out there, and squeeze their science out of ‘em. Any Buddhists in Egypt, Mr. Westover?”

“I don’t think there are,” said Westover. “Unless Jackson should come across some wandering Hindu. Or he might push on, and come home by the way of India.”

“Do it, Jackson!” his friend conjured him. “May cost you something more, but it ‘ll be worth the money. If it’s true, what some them Blavetsky fellers claim, you can visit us here in your astral body — git in with ’em the right way. I should like to have you try it. What’s the reason India wouldn’t be as good for him as Egypt, anyway?” Whitwell demanded of Westover.

“I suppose the climate’s rather too moist; the heat would be rather trying to him there.”

“That so?”

“And he’s taken his ticket for Alexandria,” Westover pursued.

“Well, I guess that’s so.” Whitwell tilted his backward sloping hat to one side, so as to scratch the northeast corner of his bead thoughtfully.

“But as far as that is concerned,” said Westover, “and the doctrine of immortality generally is concerned, Jackson will have his hands full if he studies the Egyptian monuments.”

“What they got to do with it?”

“Everything. Egypt is the home of the belief in a future life; it was carried from Egypt to Greece. He might come home by way of Athens.”

“Why, man!” cried Whitwell. “Do you mean to say that them old Hebrew saints, Joseph’s brethren, that went down into Egypt after corn, didn’t know about immortality, and them Egyptian devils did?”

“There’s very little proof in the Old Testament that the Israelites knew of it.”

Whitwell looked at Jackson. “That the idee you got?”

“I guess he’s right,” said Jackson. “There’s something a little about it in Job, and something in the Psalms: but not a great deal.”

“And we got it from them Egyptian d — —”

“I don’t say that,” Westover interposed. “But they had it before we had. As we imagine it, we got it though Christianity.”

Jombateeste, who had taken his pipe out of his mouth in a controversial manner, put it back again.

Westover added, “But there’s no question but the Egyptians believed in the life hereafter, and in future rewards and punishments for the deeds done in the body, thousands of years before our era.”

“Well, I’m dumned,” said Whitwell.

Jombateeste took his pipe out again. “Hit show they got good sense. They know — they feel it in their bone — what goin’ ‘appen — when you dead. Me, I guess they got some prophet find it hout for them; then they goin’ take the credit.”

“I guess that’s something so, Jombateeste,” said Whitwell. “It don’t stand to reason that folks without any alphabet, as you may say, and only a lot of pictures for words, like Injuns, could figure out the immortality of the soul. They got the idee by inspiration somehow. Why, here! It’s like this. Them Pharaohs must have always been clawin’ out for the Hebrews before they got a hold of Joseph, and when they found out the true doctrine, they hushed up where they got it, and their priests went on teachin’ it as if it was their own.”

“That’s w’at I say. Got it from the ‘Ebrew.”

“Well, it don’t matter a great deal where they got it, so they got it,” said Jackson, as he rose.

“I believe I’ll go with you,” said Westover.

“All there is about it,” said the sick man, solemnly, with a frail effort to straighten himself, to which his sunken chest would not respond, “is this: no man ever did figure that out for himself. A man sees folks die, and as far as his senses go, they don’t live again. But somehow he knows they do; and his knowledge comes from somewhere else; it’s inspired—”

“That’s w’at I say,” Jombateeste hastened to interpose. “Got it from the ‘Ebrew. Feel it in ‘is bone.”

Out under the stars Jackson and Westover silently mounted the hill-side together. At one of the thank-you-marms in the road the sick man stopped, like a weary horse, to breathe. He took off his hat and wiped the sweat of weakness that had gathered upon his forehead, and looked round the sky, powdered with the constellations and the planets. “It’s sightly,” he whispered.

“Yes, it is fine,” Westover assented. “But the stars of our Northern nights are nothing to what you’ll see in Egypt.”

Jackson repeated, vaguely: “Egypt! Where I should like to go is Mars.” He fixed his eyes on the flaming planets, in a long stare. “But I suppose they have their own troubles, same as we do. They must get sick and die, like the rest of us. But I should like to know more about ‘em. You believe it’s inhabited, don’t you?”

Westover’s agnosticism did not, somehow, extend to Mars. “Yes, I’ve no doubt of it.”

Jackson seemed pleased. “I’ve read everything I can lay my hands on about it. I’ve got a notion that if there’s any choosin’, after we get through here, I should like to go to Mars for a while, or as long as I was a little homesick still, and wanted to keep as near the earth as I could,” he added, quaintly.

Westover laughed. “You could study up the subject of irrigation, there; they say that’s what keeps the parallel markings green on Mars; and telegraph a few hints to your brother in Colorado, after the Martians perfect their signal code.”

Perhaps the invalid’s fancy flagged. He drew a long, ragged breath. “I don’t know as I care to leave home, much. If it wa’n’t a kind of duty, I shouldn’t.” He seemed impelled by a sudden need to say, “How do you think Jefferson and mother will make it out together?”

“I’ve no doubt they’ll manage,” said Westover.

“They’re a good deal alike,” Jackson suggested.

“Westover preferred not to meet his overture. You’ll be back, you know, almost as soon as the season commences, next summer.”

“Yes,” Jackson assented, more cheerfully. “And now, Cynthy’s sure to be here.”

“Yes, she will be here,” said Westover, not so cheerfully.

Jackson seemed to find the opening he was seeking, in Westover’s tone. “What do you think of gettin’ married, anyway, Mr. Westover?” he asked.

“We haven’t either of us thought so well of it as to try it, Jackson,” said the painter, jocosely.

“Think it’s a kind of chance?”

“It’s a chance.”

Jackson was silent. Then, “I a’n’t one of them,” he said, abruptly, “that think a man’s goin’ to be made over by marryin’ this woman or that. If he a’n’t goin’ to be the right kind of a man himself, he a’n’t because his wife’s a good woman. Sometimes I think that a man’s wife is the last person in the world that can change his disposition. She can influence him about this and about that, but she can’t change him. It seems as if he couldn’t let her if he tried, and after the first start-off he don’t try.”

“That’s true,” Westover assented. “We’re terribly inflexible. Nothing but something like a change of heart, as they used to call it, can make us different, and even then we’re apt to go back to our old shape. When you look at it in that light, marriage seems impossible. Yet it takes place every day!”

“It’s a great risk for a woman,” said Jackson, putting on his hat and stirring for an onward movement. “But I presume that if the man is honest with her it’s the best thing she can have. The great trouble is for the man to be honest with her.”

“Honesty is difficult,” said Westover.

He made Jackson promise to spend a day with him in Boston, on his way to take the Mediterranean steamer at New York. When they met he yielded to an impulse which the invalid’s forlornness inspired, and went on to see him off. He was glad that he did that, for, though Jackson was not sad at parting, he was visibly touched by Westover’s kindness.

Of course he talked away from it. “I guess I’ve left ’em in pretty good shape for the winter at Lion’s Head,” he said. “I’ve got Whitwell to agree to come up and live in the house with mother, and she’ll have Cynthy with her, anyway; and Frank and Jombateeste can look after the bosses easy enough.”

He had said something like this before, but Westover could see that it comforted him to repeat it, and he encouraged him to do so in full. He made him talk about getting home in the spring, after the frost was out of the ground, but he questioned involuntarily, while the sick man spoke, whether he might not then be lying under the sands that had never known a frost since the glacial epoch. When the last warning for visitors to go ashore came, Jackson said, with a wan smile, while he held Westover’s hand: “I sha’n’t forget this very soon.”

“Write to me,” said Westover.

Part II.

XXVII.

Jackson kept his promise to write to Westover, but he was better than his word to his mother, and wrote to her every week that winter.

“I seem just to live from letter to letter. It’s ridic’lous,” she said to Cynthia once when the girl brought the mail in from the barn, where the men folks kept it till they had put away their horses after driving over from Lovewell with it. The trains on the branch road were taken off in the winter, and the post-office at the hotel was discontinued. The men had to go to the town by cutter, over a highway that the winds sifted half full of snow after it had been broken out by the ox-teams in the morning. But Mrs. Durgin had studied the steamer days and calculated the time it would take letters to come from New York to Lovewell; and, unless a blizzard was raging, some one had to go for the mail when the day came. It was usually Jombateeste, who reverted in winter to the type of habitant from which he had sprung. He wore a blue woollen cap, like a large sock, pulled over his ears and close to his eyes, and below it his clean-shaven brown face showed. He had blue woollen mittens, and boots of russet leather, without heels, came to his knees; he got a pair every time he went home on St. John’s day. His lean little body was swathed in several short jackets, and he brought the letters buttoned into one of the innermost pockets. He produced the letter from Jackson promptly enough when Cynthia came out to the barn for it, and then he made a show of getting his horse out of the cutter shafts, and shouting international reproaches at it, till she was forced to ask, “Haven’t you got something for me, Jombateeste?”

“You expec’ some letter?” he said, unbuckling a strap and shouting louder.

“You know whether I do. Give it to me.”

“I don’ know. I think I drop something on the road. I saw something white; maybe snow; good deal of snow.”

“Don’t plague! Give it here!”

“Wait I finish unhitch. I can’t find any letter till I get some time to look.”

“Oh, now, Jombateeste! Give me my letter!”

“W’at you want letter for? Always same thing. Well! ‘Old the ‘oss; I goin’ to feel.”

Jombateeste felt in one pocket after another, while Cynthia clung to the colt’s bridle, and he was uncertain till the last whether he had any letter for her. When it appeared she made a flying snatch at it and ran; and the comedy was over, to be repeated in some form the next week.

The girl somehow always possessed herself of what was in her letters before she reached the room where Mrs. Durgin was waiting for hers. She had to read that aloud to Jackson’s mother, and in the evening she had to read it again to Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell and Jombateeste and Frank, after they had done their chores, and they had gathered in the old farm-house parlor, around the air-tight sheet-iron stove, in a heat of eighty degrees. Whitwell listened, with planchette ready on the table before him, and he consulted it for telepathic impressions of Jackson’s actual mental state when the reading was over.

He got very little out of the perverse instrument. “I can’t seem to work her. If Jackson was here—”

“We shouldn’t need to ask planchette about him,” Cynthia once suggested, with the spare sense of humor that sometimes revealed itself in her.

“Well, I guess that’s something so,” her father candidly admitted. But the next time he consulted the helpless planchette as hopefully as before. “You can’t tell, you can’t tell,” he urged.

“The trouble seems to be that planchette can’t tell,” said Mrs. Durgin, and they all laughed. They were not people who laughed a great deal, and they were each intent upon some point in the future that kept them from pleasure in the present. The little Canuck was the only one who suffered himself a contemporaneous consolation. His early faith had so far lapsed from him that he could hospitably entertain the wild psychical conjectures of Whitwell without an accusing sense of heresy, and he found the winter of northern New England so mild after that of Lower Canada that he experienced a high degree of animal comfort in it, and looked forward to nothing better. To be well fed, well housed, and well heated; to smoke successive pipes while the others talked, and to catch through his smoke-wreaths vague glimpses of their meanings, was enough. He felt that in being promoted to the care of the stables in Jackson’s absence he occupied a dignified and responsible position, with a confidential relation to the exile which justified him in sending special messages to him, and attaching peculiar value to Jackson’s remembrances.

The exile’s letters said very little about his health, which in the sense of no news his mother held to be good news, but they were full concerning the monuments and the ethnological interest of life in Egypt.

They were largely rescripts of each day’s observations and experiences, close and full, as his mother liked them in regard to fact, and generously philosophized on the side of politics and religion for Whitwell. The Eastern question became in the snow-choked hills of New England the engrossing concern of this speculative mind, and he was apt to spring it upon Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia at mealtimes and other defenceless moments. He tried to debate it with Jombateeste, who conceived of it as a form of spiritualistic inquiry, and answered from the hay-loft, where he was throwing down fodder for the cattle to Whitwell, volubly receiving it on the barn floor below, that he believed, him, everybody got a hastral body, English same as Mormons.

“Guess you mean Moslems,” said Whitwell, and Jombateeste asked the difference, defiantly.

The letters which came to Cynthia could not be made as much a general interest, and, in fact, no one else cared so much for them as for Jackson’s letters, not even Jeff’s mother. After Cynthia got one of them, she would ask, perfunctorily, what Jeff said, but when she was told there was no news she did not press her question.

“If Jackson don’t get back in time next summer,” Mrs. Durgin said, in one of the talks she had with the girl, “I guess I shall have to let Jeff and you run the house alone.”

“I guess we shall want a little help from you,” said Cynthia, demurely. She did not refuse the implication of Mrs. Durgin’s words, but she would not assume that there was more in them than they expressed.

When Jeff came home for the three days’ vacation at Thanksgiving, he wished again to relinquish his last year at Harvard, and Cynthia had to summon all her forces to keep him to his promise of staying. He brought home the books with which he was working off his conditions, with a half-hearted intention of study, and she took hold with him, and together they fought forward over the ground he had to gain. His mother was almost willing at last that he should give up his last year in college.

“What is the use?” she asked. “He’s give up the law, and he might as well commence here first as last, if he’s goin’ to.”

The girl had no reason to urge against this; she could only urge her feeling that he ought to go back and take his degree with the rest of his class.

“If you’re going to keep Lion’s Head the way you pretend you are,” she said to him, as she could not say to his mother, “you want to keep all your Harvard friends, don’t you, and have them remember you? Go back, Jeff, and don’t you come here again till after you’ve got your degree. Never mind the Christmas vacation, nor the Easter. Stay in Cambridge and work off your conditions. You can do it, if you try. Oh, don’t you suppose I should like to have you here?” she reproached him.

He went back, with a kind of grudge in his heart, which he confessed in his first letter home to her, when he told her that she was right and he was wrong. He was sure now, with the impulse which their work on them in common had given him, that he should get his conditions off, and he wanted her and his mother to begin preparing their minds to come to his Class Day. He planned how they could both be away from the hotel for that day. The house was to be opened on the 20th of June, but it was not likely that there would be so many people at once that they could not give the 21st to Class Day; Frank and his father could run Lion’s Head somehow, or, if they could not, then the opening could be postponed till the 24th. At all events, they must not fail to come. Cynthia showed the whole letter to his mother, who refused to think of such a thing, and then asked, as if the fact had not been fully set before her: “When is it to be?”

“The 21st of June.”

“Well, he’s early enough with his invitation,” she grumbled.

“Yes, he is,” said Cynthia; and she laughed for shame and pleasure as she confessed, “I was thinking he was rather late.”

She hung her head and turned her face away. But Mrs. Durgin understood. “You be’n expectin’ it all along, then.”

“I guess so.”

“I presume,” said the elder woman, “that he’s talked to you about it. He never tells me much. I don’t see why you should want to go. What’s it like?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But it’s the day the graduating class have to themselves, and all their friends come.”

“Well, I don’t know why anybody should want to go,” said Mrs. Durgin. “I sha’n’t. Tell him he won’t want to own me when he sees me. What am I goin’ to wear, I should like to know? What you goin’ to wear, Cynthy?”

XXVIII.

Jeff’s place at Harvard had been too long fixed among the jays to allow the hope of wholly retrieving his condition now. It was too late for him to be chosen in any of the nicer clubs or societies, but he was not beyond the mounting sentiment of comradery, which begins to tell in the last year among college men, and which had its due effect with his class. One of the men, who had always had a foible for humanity, took advantage of the prevailing mood in another man, and wrought upon him to ask, among the fellows he was asking to a tea at his rooms, several fellows who were distinctly and almost typically jay. The tea was for the aunt of the man who gave it, a very pretty woman from New York, and it was so richly qualified by young people of fashion from Boston that the infusion of the jay flavor could not spoil it, if it would not rather add an agreeable piquancy. This college mood coincided that year with a benevolent emotion in the larger world, from which fashion was not exempt. Society had just been stirred by the reading of a certain book, which had then a very great vogue, and several people had been down among the wretched at the North End doing good in a conscience-stricken effort to avert the millennium which the book in question seemed to threaten. The lady who matronized the tea was said to have done more good than you could imagine at the North End, and she caught at the chance to meet the college jays in a spirit of Christian charity. When the man who was going to give the tea rather sheepishly confessed what the altruistic man had got him in for, she praised him so much that he went away feeling like the hero of a holy cause. She promised the assistance and sympathy of several brave girls, who would not be afraid of all the jays in college.

After all, only one of the jays came. Not many, in fact, had been asked, and when Jeff Durgin actually appeared, it was not known that he was both the first and the last of his kind. The lady who was matronizing the tea recognized him, with a throe of her quickened conscience, as the young fellow whom she had met two winters before at the studio tea which Mr. Westover had given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do something for him. She had then even given him some vague hints of a prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of omission in a swift but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls, while Jeff stood blocking out a space for his stalwart bulk amid the alien elegance just within the doorway, and the host was making his way toward him, with an outstretched hand of hardy welcome.

At an earlier period of his neglect and exclusion, Jeff would not have responded to the belated overture which had now been made him, for no reason that he could divine. But he had nothing to lose by accepting the invitation, and he had promised the altruistic man, whom he rather liked; he did not dislike the giver of the tea so much as some other men, and so he came.

The brave girl whom the matron was preparing to devote to him stood shrinking with a trepidation which she could not conceal at sight of his strange massiveness, with his rust-gold hair coming down toward his thick yellow brows and mocking blue eyes in a dense bang, and his jaw squaring itself under the rather insolent smile of his full mouth. The matron felt that her victim teas perhaps going to fail her, when a voice at her ear said, as if the question were extorted, “Who in the world is that?”

She instantly turned, and flashed out in a few inspired syllables the fact she had just imparted to her treacherous heroine. “Do let me introduce him, Miss Lynde. I must do something for him, when he gets up to me, if he ever does.”

“By all means,” said the girl, who had an impulse to laugh at the rude force of Jeff’s face and figure, so disproportioned to the occasion, and she vented it at the matron’s tribulation. The matron was shaking hands with people right and left, and exchanging inaudible banalities with them. She did not know what the girl said in answer, but she was aware that she remained near her. She had professed her joy at seeing Jeff again, when he reached her, and she turned with him and said, “Let me present you to Miss Lynde, Mr. Durgin,” and so abandoned them to each other.

As Jeff had none of the anxiety for social success which he would have felt at an earlier period, he now left it to Miss Lynde to begin the talk, or not, as she chose. He bore himself with so much indifference that she was piqued to an effort to hold his eyes, that wandered from her to this face and that in the crowd.

“Do you find many people you know, Mr. Durgin?”

“I don’t find any.”

“I supposed you didn’t from the way you looked at them.”

“How did I look at them?”

“As if you wanted to eat them, and one never wants to eat one’s friends.”

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know. They wouldn’t agree with one.”

Jeff laughed, and he now took fuller note of the slender girl who stood before him, and swayed a little backward, in a graceful curve. He saw that she had a dull, thick complexion, with liquid eyes, set wide apart and slanted upward slightly, and a nose that was deflected inward from the straight line; but her mouth was beautiful and vividly red like a crimson blossom.

“Couldn’t you find me some place to sit down, Mr. Durgin?” she asked.

He had it on his tongue to say, “Well, not unless you want to sit down on some enemy,” but he did not venture this: when it comes to daring of that sort, the boldest man is commonly a little behind a timid woman.

Several of the fellows had clubbed their rooms, and lent them to the man who was giving the tea; he used one of the apartments for a cloak-room, and he meant the other for the social overflow from his own. But people always prefer to remain dammed-up together in the room where they are received, and Miss Lynde looked between the neighboring heads, and over the neighboring shoulders, and saw the borrowed apartment quite empty. At the moment of this discovery the host came fighting his way up to make sure that Jeff had been provided for in the way of introductions. He promptly introduced him to Miss Lynde. She said: “Oh, that’s been done! Can’t you think of something new?” Jeff liked the style of this. “I don’t mind it, but I’m afraid Mr. Durgin must find it monotonous.”

“Oh, well, do something original yourself, then, Miss Lynde!” said the host. “Start a movement for that room across the passage; that’s mine, too, for the occasion; and save some of these people’s lives. It’s suffocating in here.”

“I don’t mind saving Mr. Durgin’s,” said the girl, “if he wants it saved.”

“Oh, I know he’s just dying to have you save it,” said the host, and he left them, to inspire other people to follow their example. But such as glanced across the passage into the overflow room seemed to think it now the possession solely of the pioneers of the movement. At any rate, they made no show of joining them; and after Miss Lynde and Jeff had looked at the pictures on the walls and the photographs on the mantel of the room where they found themselves, they sat down on chairs fronting the open door and the door of the room they had left. The window-seat would have been more to Jeff’s mind, and he had proposed it, but the girl seemed not to have heard him; she took the deep easy-chair in full view of the company opposite, and left him to pull up a chair beside her.

“I always like to see the pictures in a man’s room,” she said, with a little sigh of relief from their inspection and a partial yielding of her figure to the luxury of the chair. “Then I know what the man is. This man — I don’t know whose room it is — seems to have spent a good deal of his time at the theatre.”

“Isn’t that where most of them spend their time?” asked Jeff.

“I’m sure I don’t know. Is that where you spend yours?”

“It used to be. I’m not spending my time anywhere just now.” She looked questioningly, and he added, “I haven’t got any to spend.”

“Oh, indeed! Is that a reason? Why don’t you spend somebody else’s?”

“Nobody has any, that I know.”

“You’re all working off conditions, you mean?”

“That’s what I’m doing, or trying to.”

“Then it’s never certain whether you can do it, after all?”

“Not so certain as to be free from excitement,” said Jeff, smiling.

“And are you consumed with the melancholy that seems to be balling up all the men at the prospect of having to leave Harvard and go out into the hard, cold world?”

“I don’t look it, do I? Jeff asked:

“No, you don’t. And you don’t feel it? You’re not trying concealment, and so forth?”

“No; if I’d had my own way, I’d have left Harvard before this.” He could see that his bold assumption of difference, or indifference, told upon her. “I couldn’t get out into the hard, cold world too soon.”

“How fearless! Most of them don’t know what they’re going to do in it.”

“I do.”

“And what are you going to do? Or perhaps you think that’s asking!”

“Oh no. I’m going to keep a hotel.”

He had hoped to startle her, but she asked, rather quietly, “What do you mean?” and she added, as if to punish him for trying to mystify her: “I’ve heard that it requires gifts for that. Isn’t there some proverb?”

“Yes. But I’m going to try to do it on experience.” He laughed, and he did not mind her trying to hit him, for he saw that he had made her curious.

“Do you mean that you have kept a hotel?”

“For three generations,” he returned, with a gravity that mocked her from his bold eyes.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said, indifferently. “Where is your hotel? In Boston — New York — Chicago?”

“It’s in the country — it’s a summer hotel,” he said, as before.

She looked away from him toward the other room. “There’s my brother. I didn’t know he was coming.”

“Shall I go and tell him where you are?” Jeff asked, following the direction of her eyes.

“No, no; he can find me,” said the girl, sinking back in her chair again. He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: “If it’s something ancestral, of course—”

“I don’t know as it’s that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a country tavern, and so it’s in the blood, but the hotel I mean is something that we’ve worked up into from a farm boarding-house.”

“You don’t talk like a country person,” the girl broke in, abruptly.

“Not in Cambridge. I do in the country.”

“And so,” she prompted, “you’re going to turn it into a hotel when you’ve got out of Harvard.”

“It’s a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I’m going to make the right kind of hotel of it when I take hold of it.”

“And what is the right kind of a hotel?”

“That’s a long story. It would make you tired.”

“It might, but we’ve got to spend the time somehow. You could begin, and then if I couldn’t stand it you could stop.”

“It’s easier to stop first and begin some other time. I guess I’ll let you imagine my hotel, Miss Lynde.”

“Oh, I understand now,” said the girl. “The table will be the great thing. You will stuff people.”

“Do you mean that I’m trying to stuff you?”

“How do I know? You never can tell what men really mean.”

Jeff laughed with mounting pleasure in her audacity, that imparted a sense of tolerance for him such as he had experienced very seldom from the Boston girls he had met; after all, he had met but few. It flattered him to have her doubt what he had told her in his reckless indifference; it implied that he was fit for better things than hotel-keeping.

“You never can tell how much a woman believes,” he retorted.

“And you keep trying to find out?”

“No, but I think that they might believe the truth.”

“You’d better try them with it!”

“Well, I will. Do you really want to know what I’m going to do when I get through?”

“Let me see!” Miss Lynde leaned forward, with her elbow on her knee and her chin in her hand, and softly kicked the edge of her skirt with the toe of her shoe, as if in deep thought. Jeff waited for her to play her comedy through. “Yes,” she said, “I think I did wish to know — at one time.”

“But you don’t now?”

“Now? How can I tell? It was a great while ago!”

“I see you don’t.”

Miss Lynde did not make any reply. She asked, “Do you know my aunt, Durgin?”

“I didn’t know you had one.”

“Yes, everybody has an aunt — even when they haven’t a mother, if you can believe the Gilbert operas. I ask because I happen to live with my aunt, and if you knew her she might — ask you to call.” Miss Lynde scanned Jeff’s face for the effect of this.

He said, gravely: “If you’ll introduce me to her, I’ll ask her to let me.”

“Would you, really?” said the girl. “I’ve half a mind to try. I wonder if you’d really have the courage.”

“I don’t think I’m easily rattled.”

“You mean that I’m trying to rattle you.”

“No—”

“I’m not. My aunt is just what I’ve said.”

“You haven’t said what she was. Is she here?”

“No; that’s the worst of it. If she were, I should introduce you, just to see if you’d dare. Well, some other time I will.”

“You think there’ll be some other time?” Jeff asked.

“I don’t know. There are all kinds of times. By-the-way, what time is it?”

Jeff looked at his watch. “Quarter after six.”

“Then I must go.” She jumped to her feet, and faced about for a glimpse of herself in the little glass on the mantel, and put her hand on the large pink roses massed at her waist. One heavy bud dropped from its stem to the floor, where, while she stood, the edge of her skirt pulled and pushed it. She moved a little aside to peer over at a photograph. Jeff stooped and picked up the flower, which he offered her.

“You dropped it,” he said, bowing over it.

“Did I?” She looked at it with an effect of surprise and doubt.

“I thought so, but if you don’t, I shall keep it.”

The girl removed her careless eyes from it. “When they break off so short, they won’t go back.”

“If I were a rose, I should want to go back,” said Jeff.

She stopped in one of her many aversions and reversions, and looked at him steadily across her shoulder. “You won’t have to keep a poet, Mr. Durgin.”

“Thank you. I always expected to write the circulars myself. I’ll send you one.”

“Do.”

“With this rose pressed between the leaves, so you’ll know.”

“That would, be very pretty. But you must take me to Mrs. Bevidge, now, if you can.”

“I guess I can,” said Jeff; and in a minute or two they stood before the matronizing hostess, after a passage through the babbling and laughing groups that looked as impossible after they had made it as it looked before.

Mrs. Bevidge gave the girl’s hand a pressure distinct from the official touch of parting, and contrived to say, for her hearing alone: “Thank you so much, Bessie. You’ve done missionary work.”

“I shouldn’t call it that.”

“It will do for you to say so! He wasn’t really so bad, then? Thank you again, dear!”

Jeff had waited his turn. But now, after the girl had turned away, as if she had forgotten him, his eyes followed her, and he did not know that Mrs. Bevidge was speaking to him. Miss Lynde had slimly lost herself in the mass, till she was only a graceful tilt of hat, before she turned with a distraught air. When her eyes met Jeff’s they lighted up with a look that comes into the face when one remembers what one has been trying to think of. She gave him a brilliant smile that seemed to illumine him from head to foot, and before it was quenched he felt as if she had kissed her hand to him from her rich mouth.

Then he heard Mrs. Bevidge asking something about a hall, and he was aware of her bending upon him a look of the daring humanity that had carried her triumphantly through her good works at the North End.

“Oh, I’m not in the Yard,” said Jeff, with belated intelligence.

“Then will just Cambridge reach you?”

He gave his number and street, and she thanked him with the benevolence that availed so much with the lower classes. He went away thrilling and tingling, with that girl’s tones in his ear, her motions in his nerves, and the colors of her face filling his sight, which he printed on the air whenever he turned, as one does with a vivid light after looking at it.

XXIX

When Jeff reached his room he felt the need of writing to Cynthia, with whatever obscure intention of atonement. He told her of the college tea he had just come from, and made fun of it, and the kind of people he had met, especially the affected girl who had tried to rattle him; he said he guessed she did not think she had rattled him a great deal.

While he wrote he kept thinking how this Miss Lynde was nearer his early ideal of fashion, of high life, which Westover had pretty well snubbed out of him, than any woman he had seen yet; she seemed a girl who would do what she pleased, and would not be afraid if it did not please other people. He liked her having tried to rattle him, and he smiled to himself in recalling her failure. It was as if she had laid hold of him with her little hands to shake him, and had shaken herself. He laughed out in the dark when this image came into his mind; its intimacy flattered him; and he believed that it was upon some hint from her that Mrs. Bevidge had asked his address. She must be going to ask him to her house, and very soon, for it was part of Jeff’s meagre social experience that this was the way swells did; they might never ask you twice, but they would ask you promptly.

The thing that Mrs. Bevidge asked Jeff to, when her note reached him the second day after the tea, was a meeting to interest young people in the work at the North End, and Jeff swore under his breath at the disappointment and indignity put upon him. He had reckoned upon an afternoon tea, at least, or even, in the flights of fancy which he now disowned to himself, a dance after the Mid-Years, or possibly an earlier reception of some sort. He burned with shame to think of a theatre-party, which he had fondly specialized, with a seat next Miss Lynde.

He tore Mrs. Bevidge’s note to pieces, and decided not to answer it at all, as the best way of showing how he had taken her invitation. But Mrs. Bevidge’s benevolence was not wanting in courage; she believed that Jeff should pay his footing in society, such as it was, and should allow himself to be made use of, the first thing; when she had no reply from him, she wrote him again, asking him to an adjourned meeting of the first convocation, which had been so successful in everything but numbers. This time she baited her hook, in hoping that the young men would feel something of the interest the young ladies had already shown in the matter. She expressed the fear that Mr. Durgin had not got her earlier letter, and she sent this second to the care of the man who had given the tea.

Jeff’s resentment was now so far past that he would have civilly declined to go to the woman’s house; but all his hopes of seeing that girl, as he always called Miss Lynde in his thought, were revived by the mention of the young ladies interested in the cause. He accepted, though all the way into Boston he laid wagers with himself that she would not be there; and up to the moment of taking her hand he refused himself any hope of winning.

There was not much business before the meeting; that had really been all transacted before; it was mainly to make sure of the young men, who were present in the proportion of one to five young ladies at least. Mrs. Bevidge explained that she had seen the wastefulness of amateur effort among the poor, and announced that hereafter she was going to work with the established charities. These were very much in want of visitors, especially young men, to go about among the applicants for relief, and inquire into their real necessities, and get work for them. She was hers self going to act as secretary for the meetings during the coming month, and apparently she wished to signalize her accession to the regular forces of charity by bringing into camp as large a body of recruits as she could.

But Jeff had not come to be made use of, or as a jay who was willing to work for his footing in society. He had come in the hope of meeting Miss Lynde, and now that he had met her he had no gratitude to Mrs. Bevidge as a means, and no regret for the defeat of her good purposes so far as she intended their fulfilment in him. He was so cool and self-possessed in excusing himself, for reasons that he took no pains to make seem unselfish, that the altruistic man who had got him asked to the college tea as a friendless jay felt it laid upon him to apologize for Mrs. Bevidge’s want of tact.

“She means well, and she’s very much in earnest, in this work; but I must say she can make herself very offensive — when she doesn’t try! She has a right to ask our help, but not to parade us as the captives of her bow and spear.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Jeff. He perceived that the amiable fellow was claiming for all an effect that Jeff knew really implicated himself alone. “I couldn’t load up with anything of that sort, if I’m to work off my conditions, you know.”

“Are you in that boat?” said the altruist, as if he were, too; and he put his hand compassionately on Jeff’s iron shoulder, and left him to Miss Lynde, whose side he had not stirred from since he had found her.

“It seems to me,” she said, “that where there are so many of you in the same boat, you might manage to get ashore somehow.”

“Yes, or all go down together.” Jeff laughed, and ate Mrs. Bevidge’s bread-and-butter, and drank her tea, with a relish unaffected by his refusal to do what she asked him. He was right, perhaps, and perhaps she deserved nothing better at his hands, but the altruist, when he glanced at him from the other side of the room, thought that he had possibly wasted his excuses upon Jeff’s self-complacence.

He went away in a halo of young ladies; several of the other girls grouped themselves in their departure; and it happened that Miss Lynde and Jeff took leave together. Mrs. Bevidge said to her, with the caressing tenderness of one in the same set, “Good-bye, dear!” To Jeff she said, with the cold conscience of those whom their nobility obliges, “I am always at home on Thursdays, Mr. Durgin.”

“Oh, thank you,” said Jeff. He understood what the words and the manner meant together, but both were instantly indifferent to him when he got outside and found that Miss Lynde was not driving. Something, which was neither look, nor smile, nor word, of course, but nothing more at most than a certain pull and tilt of the shoulder, as she turned to walk away from Mrs. Bevidge’s door, told him from her that he might walk home with her if he would not seem to do so.

It was one of the pink evenings, dry and clear, that come in the Boston December, and they walked down the sidehill street, under the delicate tracery of the elm boughs in the face of the metallic sunset. In the section of the Charles that the perspective of the street blocked out, the wrinkled current showed as if glazed with the hard color. Jeff’s strong frame rejoiced in the cold with a hale pleasure when he looked round into the face of the girl beside him, with the gray film of her veil pressed softly against her red mouth by her swift advance. Their faces were nearly on a level, as they looked into each other’s eyes, and he kept seeing the play of the veil’s edge against her lips as they talked.

“Why sha’n’t you go to Mrs. Bevidge’s Thursdays?” she asked. “They’re very nice.”

“How do you know I’m not going?” he retorted.

“By the way you thanked her.”

“Do you advise me to go?”

“I haven’t got anything to do with it. What do mean by that?”

“I don’t know. Curiosity, I suppose.”

“Well, I do advise you to go,” said the girl. “Shall you be there next Thursday?”

“I? I never go to Mrs. Bevidge’s Thursdays!”

“Touche,” said Jeff, and they both laughed. “Can you always get in at an enemy that way?”

“Enemy?”

“Well, friend. It’s the same thing.”

“I see,” said the girl. “You belong to the pessimistic school of Seniors.”

“Why don’t you try to make an optimist of me?”

“Would it be worth while?”

“That isn’t for me to say.”

“Don’t be diffident! That’s staler yet.”

“I’ll be anything you like.”

“I’m not sure you could.” For an instant Jeff did not feel the point, and he had not the magnanimity, when he did, to own himself touched again. Apparently, if this girl could not rattle him, she could beat him at fence, and the will to dominate her began to stir in him. If he could have thought of any sarcasm, no matter how crushing, he would have come back at her with it. He could not think of anything, and he walked at her side, inwardly chafing for the chance which would not come.

When they reached her door there was a young man at the lock with a latch-key, which he was not making work, for, after a bated blasphemy of his failure, he turned and twitched the bell impatiently.

Miss Lynde laughed provokingly, and he looked over his shoulder at her and at Jeff, who felt his injury increased by the disadvantage this young man put him at. Jeff was as correctly dressed; he wore a silk hat of the last shape, and a long frock-coat; he was properly gloved and shod; his clothes fitted him, and were from the best tailor; but at sight of this young man in clothes of the same design he felt ill-dressed. He was in like sort aware of being rudely blocked out physically, and coarsely colored as to his blond tints of hair and eye and cheek. Even the sinister something in the young man’s look had distinction, and there was style in the signs of dissipation in his handsome face which Jeff saw with a hunger to outdo him.

Miss Lynde said to Jeff, “My brother, Mr. Durgin,” and then she added to the other, “You ought to ring first, Arthur, and try your key afterward.”

“The key’s all right,” said the young man, without paying any attention to Jeff beyond a glance of recognition; he turned his back, and waited for the door to be opened.

His sister suggested, with an amiability which Jeff felt was meant in reparation to him, “Perhaps a night latch never works before dark — or very well before midnight.” The door was opened, and she said to Jeff, with winning entreaty, “Won’t you come in, Mr. Durgin?”

Jeff excused himself, for he perceived that her politeness was not so much an invitation to him as a defiance to her brother; he gave her credit for no more than it was worth, and he did not wish any the less to get even with her because of it.

XXX.

At dinner, in the absence of the butler, Alan Lynde attacked his sister across the table for letting herself be seen with a jay, who was not only a jay, but a cad, and personally so offensive to most of the college men that he had never got into a decent club or society; he had been suspended the first year, and if he had not had the densest kind of cheek he would never have come back. Lynde said he would like to know where she had picked the fellow up.

She answered that she had picked him up, if that was the phrase he liked, at Mrs. Bevidge’s; and then Alan swore a little, so as not to be heard by their aunt, who sat at the head of the table, and looked down its length between them, serenely ignorant, in her slight deafness, of what was going on between them. To her perception Alan was no more vehement than usual, and Bessie no more smilingly self-contained. He said he supposed that it was some more of Lancaster’s damned missionary work, then, and he wondered that a gentleman like Morland had ever let Lancaster work such a jay in on him; he had seen her ‘afficher’ herself with the fellow at Morland’s tea; he commanded her to stop it; and he professed to speak for her good.

Bessie returned that she knew how strongly he felt from the way he had misbehaved when she introduced him to Mr. Durgin, but that she supposed he had been at the club and his nerves were unstrung. Was that the reason, perhaps, why he could not make his latchkey work? Mr. Durgin might be a cad, and she would not say he was not a jay, but so far he had not sworn at her; and, if he had been suspended and come back, there were some people who had not been suspended or come back, either, though that might have been for want of cheek.

She ended by declaring she was used to going into society without her brother’s protection, or even his company, and she would do her best to get on without his advice. Or was it his conduct he wished her to profit by?

It had come to the fish going out by this time, and Alan, who had eaten with no appetite, and drunken feverishly of apollinaris, flung down his napkin and went out, too.

“What is the matter?” asked his aunt, looking after him.

Bessie shrugged, but she said, presently, with her lips more than her voice: “I don’t think he feels very well.”

“Do you think he—”

The girl frowned assent, and the meal went on to its end. Then she and her aunt went into the large, dull library, where they passed the evenings which Bessie did not spend in some social function. These evenings were growing rather more frequent, with her advancing years, for she was now nearly twenty-five, and there were few Seniors so old. She was not the kind of girl to renew her youth with the Sophomores and Freshmen in the classes succeeding the class with which she had danced through college; so far as she had kept up the old relation with students, she continued it with the men who had gone into the law-school. But she saw less and less of these without seeing more of other men, and perhaps in the last analysis she was not a favorite. She was allowed to be fascinating, but she was not felt to be flattering, and people would rather be flattered than fascinated. In fact, the men were mostly afraid of her; and it has been observed of girls of this kind that the men who are not afraid of them are such as they would do well to be afraid of. Whether that was quite the case with Bessie Lynde or not, it was certain that she who was always the cleverest girl in the room, and if not the prettiest, then the most effective, had not the best men about her. Her men were apt to be those whom the other girls called stupid or horrid, and whom it would not be easy, though it might be more just, to classify otherwise. The other girls wondered what she could see in them; but perhaps it was not necessary that she should see anything in them, if they could see all she wished them to see, and no more, in her.

The room where tea was now brought and put before her was volumed round by the collections of her grandfather, except for the spaces filled by his portrait and that of earlier ancestors, going back to the time when Copley made masterpieces of his fellow-Bostonians. Her aunt herself looked a family portrait of the middle period, a little anterior to her father’s, but subsequent to her great-grandfather’s. She had a comely face, with large, smooth cheeks and prominent eyes; the edges of her decorous brown wig were combed rather near their corners, and a fitting cap palliated but did not deny the wig. She had the quiet but rather dull look of people slightly deaf, and she had perhaps been stupefied by a life of unalloyed prosperity and propriety. She had grown an old maid naturally, but not involuntarily, and she was without the sadness or the harshness of disappointment. She had never known much of the world, though she had always lived in it. She knew that it was made up of two kinds of people — people who were like her and people who were not like her; and she had lived solely in the society of people who were like her, and in the shelter of their opinions and ideals. She did not contemn or exclude the people who were unlike her, but she had never had any more contact with them than she now had with the weather of the streets, as she sat, filling her large arm-chair full of her ladylike correctness, in the library of the handsome house her father had left her. The irruption of her brother’s son and daughter into its cloistered quiet had scarcely broken its invulnerable order. It was right and fit they should be there after his death, and it was not strange that in the course of time they should both show certain unregulated tendencies which, since they were not known to be Lynde tendencies, must have been derived from the Southwestern woman her brother had married during his social and financial periclitations in a region wholly inconceivable to her. Their mother was dead, too, and their aunt’s life closed about them with full acceptance, if not complacence, as part of her world. They had grown to manhood and womanhood without materially discomposing her faith in the old-fashioned Unitarian deity, whose service she had always attended.

When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but went rather to Europe and Egypt and Japan, it appeared to her myopic optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and distance. After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could have wished that he had taken up some profession or business; but since there was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he showed as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to have only for horses. In the mean while, from time to time, it came to her doctor’s advising his going to a certain retreat. But he came out the first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt felt a kind of security in his going again and again, whenever he became at all worse. He always came back better. As she took the cup of tea that Bessie poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she had partly asked already:

“Do you think Alan is getting worse again?”

“Not so very much,” said the girl, candidly. “He’s been at the club, I suppose, but he left the table partly because I vexed him.”

“Because you what?”

“Because I vexed him. He was scolding me, and I wouldn’t stand it.”

Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, “I don’t see what he had to scold you about.”

“Well,” returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of her aunt’s hearing, with some straining, and kept it there, “when he is in that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying, I suppose.”

“What had you been doing?” asked her aunt, making out her words more from the sight than from the sound, after all.

“I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in at the front door with his key, and I introduced him to the jay.”

Miss Louisa Lynde had heard the word so often from her niece and nephew, that she imagined herself in full possession of its meaning. She asked: “Where had you met him?”

“I met him first,” said the girl, “at Willie Morland’s tea, last week, and to-day I found him at Mrs. Bevidge’s altruistic toot.”

“I didn’t know,” said her aunt, after a momentary attention to her tea, “that jays were interested in that sort of thing.”

The girl laughed. “I believe they’re not. It hasn’t quite reached them, yet; and I don’t think it will ever reach my jay. Mrs. Bevidge tried to work him into the cause, but he refused so promptly, and so-intelligently, don’t you know — and so almost brutally, that poor Freddy Lancaster had to come and apologize to him for her want of tact.” Bessie enjoyed the fact, which she had colored a little, in another laugh, but she had apparently not possessed her aunt of the humor of it. She remained seriously-attentive, and the girl went on: “He was not the least abashed at having refused; he stayed till the last, and as we came out together and he was going my way, I let him walk home with me. He’s a jay, but he isn’t a common jay.” Bessie leaned forward and tried to implant some notion of Jeff’s character and personality in her aunt’s mind.

Miss Lynde listened attentively enough, but she merely asked, when all was said: “And why was Alan vexed with you about him?”

“Well,” said the girl, falling back into her chair, “generally because this man’s a jay, and particularly because he’s been rather a baddish jay, I believe. He was suspended in his first year for something or other, and you know poor Alan’s very particular! But Molly Enderby says Freddy Lancaster gives him the best of characters now.” Bessie pulled down her mouth, with an effect befitting the notion of repentance and atonement. Then she flashed out: “Perhaps he had been drinking when he got into trouble. Alan could never forgive him for that.”

“I think,” said her aunt, “it is to your brother’s credit that he is anxious about your associations.”

“Oh, very much!” shouted Bessie, with a burst of laughter. “And as he isn’t practically so, I ought to have been more patient with his theory. But when he began to scold me I lost my temper, and I gave him a few wholesome truths in the guise of taunts. That was what made him go away, I suppose.”

“But I don’t really see,” her aunt pursued,— “what occasion he had to be angry with you in this instance.”

“Oh, I do!” said Bessie. “Mr. Durgin isn’t one to inspire the casual beholder with the notion of his spiritual distinction. His face is so rude and strong, and he has such a primitive effect in his clothes, that you feel as if you were coming down the street with a prehistoric man that the barbers and tailors had put a ‘fin de siecle’ surface on.” At the mystification which appeared in her aunt’s face the girl laughed again. “I should have been quite as anxious, if I had been in Alan’s place, and I shall tell him so, sometime. If I had not been so interested in the situation I don’t believe I could have kept my courage. Whenever I looked round, and found that prehistoric man at my elbow, it gave me the creeps, a little, as if he were really carrying me off to his cave. I shall try to express that to Alan.”

XXXI.

The ladies finished their tea, and the butler came and took the cups away. Miss Lynde remained silent in her chair at her end of the library-table, and by-and-by Bessie got a book and began to read. When her aunt woke up it was half past nine. “Was that Alan coming in?” she asked.

“I don’t think he’s been out,” said the girl. “It isn’t late enough for him to come in — or early enough.”

“I believe I’ll go to bed,” Miss Lynde returned. “I feel rather drowsy.”

Bessie did not smile at a comedy which was apt to be repeated every evening that she and her aunt spent at home together; they parted for the night with the decencies of family affection, and Bessie delivered the elder lady over to her maid. Then the girl sank down again, and lay musing in her deep chair before the fire with her book shut on her thumb. She looked rather old and worn in her reverie; her face lost the air of gay banter which, after the beauty of her queer eyes and her vivid mouth, was its charm. The eyes were rather dull now, and the mouth was a little withered.

She was waiting for her brother to come down, as he was apt to do if he was in the house, after their aunt went to bed, to smoke a cigar in the library. He was in his house shoes when he shuffled into the room, but her ear had detected his presence before a hiccough announced it. She did not look up, but let him make several failures to light his cigar, and damn the matches under his breath, before she pushed the drop-light to him in silent suggestion. As he leaned over her chair-back to reach its chimney with his cigar in his mouth, she said, “You’re all right, Alan.”

He waited till he got round to his aunt’s easy-chair and dropped into it before he answered, “So are you, Bess.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” said the girl, “as I should be if you were still scolding me. I knew that he was a jay, well enough, and I’d just seen him behaving very like a cad to Mrs. Bevidge.”

“Then I don’t understand how you came to be with him.”

“Oh yes, you do, Alan. You mustn’t be logical! You might as well say you can’t understand how you came to be more serious than sober.” The brother laughed helplessly. “It was the excitement.”

“But you can’t give way to that sort of thing, Bess,” said her brother, with the gravity of a man feeling the consequences of his own errors.

“I know I can’t, but I do,” she returned. “I know it’s bad for me, if it isn’t for other people. Come! I’ll swear off if you will!”

“I’m always ready, to swear off,” said the young man, gloomily. He added, “But you’ve got brains, Bess, and I hate to see you playing the fool.”

“Do you really, Alan?” asked the girl, pleased perhaps as much by his reproach as by his praise. “Do you think I’ve got brains?”

“You’re the only girl that has.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to ask so much as that! But what’s the reason I can’t do anything with them? Other girls draw, and play, and write. I don’t do anything but go in for the excitement that’s bad for me. I wish you’d explain it.”

Alan Lynde did not try. The question seemed to turn his thoughts back upon himself to dispiriting effect. “I’ve got brains, too, I believe,” he began.

“Lots of them!” cried his sister, generously. “There isn’t any of the men to compare with you. If I had you to talk with all the time, I shouldn’t want jays. I don’t mean to flatter. You’re a constant feast of reason; I don’t care for flows of soul. You always take right views of things when you’re yourself, and even when you’re somebody else you’re not stupid. You could be anything you chose.”

“The devil of it is I can’t choose,” he replied.

“Yes, I suppose that’s the devil of it,” said the girl.

“You oughtn’t to use such language as that, Bess,” said her brother, severely.

“Oh, I don’t with everybody,” she returned. “Never with ladies!”

He looked at her out of the corner of his eye with a smile at once rueful and comic.

“You got me, I guess, that time,” he owned.

“‘Touche’,’ Mr. Durgin says. He fences, it seems, and he speaks French. It was like an animal speaking French; you always expect them to speak English. But I don’t mind your swearing before me; I know that it helps to carry off the electricity.” She laughed, and made him laugh with her.

“Is there anything to him?” he growled, when they stopped laughing.

“Yes, a good deal,” said Bessie, with an air of thoughtfulness; and then she went on to tell all that Jeff had told her of himself, and she described his aplomb in dealing with the benevolent Bevidge, as she called her, and sketched his character, as it seemed to her. The sketch was full of shrewd guesses, and she made it amusing to her brother, who from the vantage of his own baddishness no doubt judged the original more intelligently.

“Well, you’d better let him alone, after this,” he said, at the end.

“Yes,” she pensively assented. “I suppose it’s as if you took to some very common kind of whiskey, isn’t it? I see what you mean. If one must, it ought to be champagne.”

She turned upon him a look of that keen but limited knowledge which renders women’s conjectures of evil always so amusing, or so pathetic, to men.

“Better let the champagne alone, too,” said her brother, darkly.

“Yes, I know that,” she admitted, and she lay back in her chair, looking dreamily into the fire. After a while she asked, abruptly: “Will you give it up if I will?”

“I am afraid I couldn’t.”

“You could try.”

“Oh, I’m used to that.”

“Then it’s a bargain,” she said. She jumped from her chair and went over to him, and smoothed his hair over his forehead and kissed the place she had smoothed, though it was unpleasantly damp to her lips. “Poor boy, poor boy! Now, remember! No more jays for me, and no more jags for you. Goodnight.”

Her brother broke into a wild laugh at her slanging, which had such a bizarre effect in relation to her physical delicacy.

XXXII.

Jeff did not know whether Miss Bessie Lynde meant to go to Mrs. Bevidge’s Thursdays or not. He thought she might have been bantering him by what she said, and he decided that he would risk going to the first of them on the chance of meeting her. She was not there, and there was no one there whom he knew. Mrs. Bevidge made no effort to enlarge his acquaintance, and after he had drunk a cup of her tea he went away with rage against society in his heart, which he promised himself to vent at the first chance of refusing its favors. But the chance seemed not to come. The world which had opened its gates to him was fast shut again, and he had to make what he could of renouncing it. He worked pretty hard, and he renewed himself in his fealty to Cynthia, while his mind strayed curiously to that other girl. But he had almost abandoned the hope of meeting her again, when a large party was given on the eve of the Harvard Mid-Year Examinations, which end the younger gayeties of Boston, for a fortnight at least, in January. The party was so large that the invitations overflowed the strict bounds of society at some points. In the case of Jeff Durgin the excess was intentional beyond the vague benevolence which prompted the giver of the party to ask certain other outsiders. She was a lady of a soul several sizes larger than the souls of some other society leaders; she was not afraid to do as she liked; for instance, she had not only met the Vostrands at Westover’s tea, several years before, but she had afterward offered some hospitalities to those ladies which had discharged her whole duty toward them without involving her in any disadvantages. Jeff had been presented to her at Westover’s, but she disliked him so promptly and decidedly that she had left him out of even the things that she asked some other jays to, like lectures and parlor readings for good objects. It was not until one of her daughters met him, first at Willie Morland’s tea and then at Mrs. Bevidge’s meeting, that her social conscience concerned itself with him. At the first her daughter had not spoken to him, as might very well have happened, since Bessie Lynde had kept him away with her nearly all the time; but at the last she had bowed pleasantly to him across the room, and Jeff had responded with a stiff obeisance, whose coldness she felt the more for having been somewhat softened herself in Mrs. Bevidge’s altruistic atmosphere.

“I think he was hurt, mamma,” the girl explained to her mother, “that you’ve never had him to anything. I suppose they must feel it.”

“Oh, well, send him a card, then,” said her mother; and when Jeff got the card, rather near the eleventh hour, he made haste to accept, not because he cared to go to Mrs. Enderby’s house, but because he hoped he should meet Miss Lynde there.

Bessie was the first person he met after he turned from paying his duty to the hostess. She was with her aunt, and she presented him, and promised him a dance, which she let him write on her card. She sat out another dance with him, and he took her to supper.

To Westover, who had gone with the increasing forlornness a man feels in such pleasures after thirty-five, it seemed as if the two were in each other’s company the whole evening. The impression was so strong with him that when Jeff restored Bessie to her aunt for the dance that was to be for some one else, and came back to the supper-room, the painter tried to satisfy a certain uneasiness by making talk with him. But Jeff would not talk; he got away with a bottle of champagne, which he had captured, and a plate heaped with croquettes and pease, and galantine and salad. There were no ladies left in the room by that time, and few young men; but the oldsters crowded the place, with their bald heads devoutly bowed over their victual, or their frosty mustaches bathed in their drink, singly or in groups; the noise of their talk and laughter mixed with the sound of their eating and drinking, and the clash of the knives and dishes. Over their stooped shoulders and past their rounded stomachs Westover saw Alan Lynde vaguely making his way with a glass in his hand, and looking vaguely about for wine; he saw Jeff catch his wandering eye, and make offer of his bottle, and then saw Lynde, after a moment of haughty pause, unbend and accept it. His thin face was flushed, and his hair tossed over his forehead, but Jeff seemed not to take note of that. He laughed boisterously at something Lynde said, and kept filling his glass for him. His own color remained clear and cool. It was as if his powerful physique absorbed the wine before it could reach his brain.

Westover wanted to interfere, and so far as Jeff was concerned he would not have hesitated; but Lynde was concerned, too, and you cannot save such a man from himself without offence. He made his way to the young man, hoping he might somehow have the courage he wanted.

Jeff held up the bottle, and called to him, “Get yourself a glass, Mr. Westover.” He put on the air of a host, and would hardly be denied. “Know Mr. Westover, Mr. Lynde? Just talking about you,” he explained to Westover.

Alan had to look twice at the painter. “Oh yes. Mr. Durgin, here — telling me about his place in the mountains. Says you’ve been there. Going — going myself in the summer. See his — horses.” He made pauses between his words as some people do when they, try to keep from stammering.

Westover believed Lynde understood Jeff to be a country gentleman of sporting tastes, and he would not let that pass. “Yes, it’s the pleasantest little hotel in the mountains.”

“Strictly-temperance, I suppose?” said Alan, trying to smile with lips that obeyed him stiffly. He appeared not to care who or what Jeff was; the champagne had washed away all difference between them. He went on to say that he had heard of Jeff’s intention of running the hotel himself when he got out of Harvard. He held it to be damned good stuff.

Jeff laughed. “Your sister wouldn’t believe me when I told her.”

“I think I didn’t mention Miss Lynde,” said Alan, haughtily.

Jeff filled his glass; Alan looked at it, faltered, and then drank it off. The talk began again between the young men, but it left Westover out, and he had to go away. Whether Jeff was getting Lynde beyond himself from the love of mischief, such as had prompted him to tease little children in his boyhood, or was trying to ingratiate himself with the young fellow through his weakness, or doing him harm out of mere thoughtlessness, Westover came away very unhappy at what he had seen. His unhappiness connected itself so distinctly with Lynde’s family that he went and sat down beside Miss Lynde from an obscure impulse of compassion, and tried to talk with her. It would not have been so hard if she were merely deaf, for she had the skill of deaf people in arranging the conversation so that a nodded yes or no would be all that was needed to carry it forward. But to Westover she was terribly dull, and he was gasping, as in an exhausted receiver, when Bessie came up with a smile of radiant recognition for his extremity. She got rid of her partner, and devoted herself at once to Westover. “How good of you!” she said, without giving him the pain of an awkward disclaimer.

He could counter in equal sincerity and ambiguity, “How beautiful of you.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am looking rather well, tonight; but don’t you think effective would have been a better word?” She smiled across her aunt at him out of a cloud of pink, from which her thin shoulders and slender neck emerged, and her arms, gloved to the top, fell into her lap; one of them seemed to terminate naturally in the fan which sensitively shared the inquiescence of her person.

“I will say effective, too, if you insist,” said Westover. “But at the same time you’re the most beautiful person here.”

“How lovely of you, even if you don’t mean it,” she sighed. “If girls could have more of those things said to them, they would be better, don’t you think? Or at least feel better.”

Westover laughed. “We might organize a society — they have them for nearly everything now — for saying pleasant things to young ladies with a view to the moral effect.”

“Oh, do I.”

“But it ought to be done conscientiously, and you couldn’t go round telling every one that she was the most beautiful girl in the room.”

“Why not? She’d believe it!”

“Yes; but the effect on the members of the society?”

“Oh yes; that! But you could vary it so as to save your conscience. You could say, ‘How divinely you’re looking!’ or ‘How angelic!’ or ‘You’re the very poetry of motion,’ or ‘You are grace itself,’ or ‘Your gown is a perfect dream, or any little commonplace, and every one would take it for praise of her personal appearance, and feel herself a great beauty, just as I do now, though I know very well that I’m all out of drawing, and just chicqued together.”

“I couldn’t allow any one but you to say that, Miss Bessie; and I only let it pass because you say it so well.”

“Yes; you’re always so good! You wouldn’t contradict me even when you turned me out of your class.”

“Did I turn you out of my class?”

“Not just in so many words, but when I said I couldn’t do anything in art, you didn’t insist that it was because I wouldn’t, and of course then I had to go. I’ve never forgiven you, Mr. Westover, never! Do keep on talking very excitedly; there’s a man coming up to us that I don’t want to think I see him, or he’ll stop. There! He’s veered off! Where were you, Mr. Westover?”

“Ah, Miss Bessie,” said the painter; delighted at her drama, “there isn’t anything you couldn’t do if you would.”

“You mean parlor entertainments; impersonations; impressions; that sort of thing? I have thought of it. But it would be too easy. I want to try something difficult.”

“For instance.”

“Well, being very, very good. I want something that would really tax my powers. I should like to be an example. I tried it the other night just before I went to sleep, and it was fine. I became an example to others. But when I woke up — I went on in the old way. I want something hard, don’t you know; but I want it to be easy!”

She laughed, and Westover said: “I am glad you’re not serious. No one ought to be an example to others. To be exemplary is as dangerous as to be complimentary.

“It certainly isn’t so agreeable to the object,” said the girl. “But it’s fine for the subject as long as it lasts. How metaphysical we’re getting! The objective and the subjective. It’s quite what I should expect of talk at a Boston dance if I were a New-Yorker. Have you seen anything of my brother, within the last hour or so, Mr. Westover?”

“Yes; I just left him in the supper-room. Shall I go get him for you?” When he had said this, with the notion of rescuing him from Jeff, Westover was sorry, for he doubted if Alan Lynde were any longer in the state to be brought away from the supper-room, and he was glad to have Bessie say:

“No, no. He’ll look us up in the course of the evening — or the morning.” A young fellow came to claim her for a dance, and Westover had not the face to leave Miss Lynde, all the less because she told him he must not think of staying. He stayed till the dance was over, and Bessie came back to him.

“What time is it, Mr. Westover? I see my aunt beginning to nod on her perch.”

Westover looked at his watch. “It’s ten minutes past two.”

“How early!” sighed the girl. “I’m tired of it, aren’t you?”

“Very,” said Westover. “I was tired an hour ago.”

Bessie sank back in her chair with an air of nervous collapse, and did not say anything. Westover saw her watching the young couples who passed in and out of the room where the dancing was, or found corners on sofas, or window-seats, or sheltered spaces beside the doors and the chimney-piece, the girls panting and the men leaning forward to fan them. She looked very tired of it; and when a young fellow came up and asked her to dance, she told him that she was provisionally engaged. “Come back and get me, if you can’t do better,” she said, and he answered there was no use trying to do better, and said he would wait till the other man turned up, or didn’t, if she would let him. He sat down beside her, and some young talk began between them.

In the midst of it Jeff appeared. He looked at Westover first, and then approached with an embarrassed face.

Bessie got vividly to her feet. “No apologies, Mr. Durgin, please! But in just another moment you’d have last your dance.”

Westover saw what he believed a change pass in Jeff’s look from embarrassment to surprise and then to flattered intelligence. He beamed all over; and he went away with Bessie toward the ballroom, and left Westover to a wholly unsupported belief that she had not been engaged to dance with Jeff. He wondered what her reckless meaning could be, but he had always thought her a young lady singularly fitted by nature and art to take care of herself, and when he reasoned upon what was in his mind he had to own that there was no harm in Jeff’s dancing with her.

He took leave of Miss Lynde, and was going to get his coat and hat for his walk home when he was mysteriously stopped in a corner of the stairs by one of the caterer’s men whom he knew. It is so unnatural to be addressed by a servant at all unless he asks you if you will have something to eat or drink, that Westover was in a manner prepared to have him say something startling. “It’s about young Mr. Lynde, sor. We’ve got um in one of the rooms up-stairs, but he ain’t fit to go home alone, and I’ve been lookin’ for somebody that knows the family to help get um into a car’ge. He won’t go for anny of us, sor.”

“Where is he?” asked Westover, in anguish at being unable to refuse the appeal, but loathing the office put upon him.

“I’ll show you, sor,” said the caterer’s man, and he sprang up the stairs before Westover, with glad alacrity.

XXXIII.

In a little room at the side of that where the men’s hats and coats were checked, Alan Lynde sat drooping forward in an arm-chair, with his head fallen on his breast. He roused himself at the flash of the burner which the man turned up. “What’s all this?” he demanded, haughtily. “Where’s the carriage? What’s the matter?”

“Your carriage is waiting, Lynde,” said Westover. “I’ll see you down to it,” and he murmured, hopelessly, to the caterer’s man: “Is there any back way?”

“There’s the wan we got um up by.”

“It will do,” said Westover, as simply.

But Lynde called out, defiantly: “Back way; I sha’n’t go down back way. Inshult to guest. I wish — say — good-night to — Mrs. Enderby. Who you, anyway? Damn caterer’s man?”

“I’m Westover, Lynde,” the painter began, but the young fellow broke in upon him, shaking his hand and then taking his arm.

“Oh, Westover! All right! I’ll go down back way with you. Thought — thought it was damn caterer’s man. No — offence.”

“No. It’s all right.” Westover got his arm under Lynde’s elbow, and, with the man going before for them to fall upon jointly in case they should stumble, he got him down the dark and twisting stairs and through the basement hall, which was vaguely haunted by the dispossessed women servants of the family, and so out upon the pavement of the moonlighted streets.

“Call Miss Lynde’s car’ge,” shouted the caterer’s man to the barker, and escaped back into the basement, leaving Westover to stay his helpless charge on the sidewalk.

It seemed a publication of the wretch’s shame when the barker began to fill the night with hoarse cries of, “Miss Lynde’s carriage; carriage for Miss Lynde!” The cries were taken up by a coachman here and there in the rank of vehicles whose varnished roofs shone in the moon up and down the street. After a time that Westover of course felt to be longer than it was, Miss Lynde’s old coachman was roused from his sleep on the box and started out of the rank. He took in the situation with the eye of custom, when he saw Alan supported on the sidewalk by a stranger at the end of the canopy covering the pavement.

He said, “Oh, ahl right, sor!” and when the two white-gloved policemen from either side of it helped Westover into the carriage with Lynde, he set off at a quick trot. The policemen clapped their hands together, and smiled across the strip of carpet that separated them, and winks and nods of intelligence passed among the barkers to the footmen about the curb and steps. There were none of them sorry to see a gentleman in that state; some of them had perhaps seen Alan in that state before.

Half-way home he roused himself and put his hand on the carriage-door latch. “Tell the coachman drive us to — the — club. Make night of it.”

“No, no,” said Westover, trying to restrain him. “We’d better go right on to your house.”

“Who — who — who are you?” demanded Alan.

“Westover.”

“Oh yes — Westover. Thought we left Westover at Mrs. Enderby’s. Thought it was that jay — What’s his name? Durgin. He’s awful jay, but civil to me, and I want be civil to him. You’re not — jay? No? That’s right. Fellow made me sick; but I took his champagne; and I must show him some — attention.” He released the door-handle, and fell back against the cushioned carriage wall. “He’s a blackguard!” he said, sourly. “Not — simple jay-blackguard, too. No — no — business bring in my sister’s name, hey? You — you say it’s — Westover? Oh yes, Westover. Old friend of family. Tell you good joke, Westover — my sister’s. No more jays for me, no more jags for you. That’s what she say — just between her and me, you know; she’s a lady, Bess is; knows when to use — slang. Mark — mark of a lady know when to use slang. Pretty good — jays and jags. Guess we didn’t count this time — either of us.”

When the carriage pulled up before Miss Lynde’s house, Westover opened the door. “You’re at home, now, Lynde. Come, let’s get out.”

Lynde did not stir. He asked Westover again who he was, and when he had made sure of him, he said, with dignity, Very well; now they must get the other fellow. Westover entreated; he even reasoned; Lynde lay back in the corner of the carriage, and seemed asleep.

Westover thought of pulling him up and getting him indoors by main force. He appealed to the coachman to know if they could not do it together.

“Why, you see, I couldn’t leave me harsses, sor,” said the coachman. “What’s he wants, sor?” He bent urbanely down from his box and listened to the explanation that Westover made him, standing in the cold on the curbstone, with one hand on the carriage door. “Then it’s no use, sor,” the man decided. “Whin he’s that way, ahl hell couldn’t stir um. Best go back, sor, and try to find the gentleman.”

This was in the end what Westover had to do, feeling all the time that a thing so frantically absurd could not be a waking act, but helpless to escape from its performance. He thought of abandoning his charge and leaving him, to his fate when he opened the carriage door before Mrs. Enderby’s house; but with the next thought he perceived that this was on all accounts impossible. He went in, and began his quest for Jeff, sending various serving men about with vague descriptions of him, and asking for him of departing guests, mostly young men he did not know, but who, he thought, might know Jeff.

He had to take off his overcoat at last, and reappear at the ball. The crowd was still great, but visibly less dense than it had been. By a sudden inspiration he made his way to the supper-room, and he found Jeff there, filling a plate, as if he were about to carry it off somewhere. He commanded Jeff’s instant presence in the carriage outside; he told him of Alan’s desire for him.

Jeff leaned back against the wall with the plate in his hand and laughed till it half slipped from his hold. When he could get his breath, he said: “I’ll be back in a few minutes; I’ve got to take this to Miss Bessie Lynde. But I’ll be right back.”

Westover hardly believed him. But when he got on his own things again, Jeff joined him in his hat and overcoat, and they went out together.

It was another carriage that stopped the way now, and once more the barker made the night ring with what Westover felt his heartless and shameless cries for Miss Lynde’s carriage. After a maddening delay, it lagged up to the curb and Jeff pulled the door open.

“Hello!” he said. “There’s nobody here!”

“Nobody there?” cried Westover, and they fell upon the coachman with wild question and reproach; the policeman had to tell him at last that the carriage must move on, to make way for others.

The coachman had no explanation to offer: he did not know how or when Mr. Alan had got away.

“But you can give a guess where he’s gone?” Jeff suggested, with a presence of mind which Westover mutely admired.

“Well, sor, I know where he do be gahn, sometimes,” the man admitted.

“Well, that will do; take me there,” said Jeff. “You go in and account for me to Miss Lynde,” he instructed Westover, across his shoulder. “I’ll get him home before morning, somehow; and I’ll send the carriage right back for the ladies, now.”

Westover had the forethought to decide that Miss Bessie should ask for Jeff if she wanted him, and this simplified matters very much. She asked nothing about him. At sight of Westover coming up to her where she sat with her aunt, she merely said: “Why, Mr. Westover! I thought you took leave of this scene of gayety long ago.”

“Did you?” Westover returned, provisionally, and she saved him from the sin of framing some deceit in final answer by her next question.

“Have you seen anything of Alan lately?” she asked, in a voice involuntarily lowered.

Westover replied in the same octave: “Yes; I saw him going a good while ago.”

“Oh!” said the girl. “Then I think my aunt and I had better go, too.”

Still she did not go, and there was an interval in which she had the air of vaguely waiting. To Westover’s vision, the young people still passing to and from the ballroom were like the painted figures of a picture quickened with sudden animation. There were scarcely any elders to be seen now, except the chaperons, who sat in their places with iron fortitude; Westover realized that he was the only man of his age left. He felt that the lights ought to have grown dim, but the place was as brilliant as ever. A window had been opened somewhere, and the cold breath of the night was drawing through the heated rooms.

He was content to have Bessie stay on, though he was almost dropping with sleep, for he was afraid that if she went at once, the carriage might not have got back, and the whole affair must somehow be given away; at last, if she were waiting, she decided to wait no longer, and then Westover did not know how to keep her. He saw her rise and stoop over her aunt, putting her mouth to the elder lady’s ear, and he heard her saying, “I am going home, Aunt Louisa.” She turned sweetly to him. “Won’t you let us set you down, Mr. Westover?”

“Why, thank you, I believe I prefer walking. But do let me have your carriage called,” and again he hurried himself into his overcoat and hat, and ran down-stairs, and the barker a third time sent forth his lamentable cries in summons of Miss Lynde’s carriage.

While he stood on the curb-stone eagerly peering up and down the street, he heard, without being able either to enjoy or resent it, one of the policemen say across him to the other, “Miss lynde seems to be doin’ a livery-stable business to-night.”

Almost at the moment a carriage drove up, and he recognized Miss Lynde’s coachman, who recognized him.

“Just got back, sor,” he whispered, and a minute later Bessie came daintily out over the carpeted way with her aunt.

“How good of you!” she said, and “Good-night, Mr. Westover,” said Miss Lynde, with an implication in her voice that virtue was peculiarly its own reward for those who performed any good office for her or hers.

Westover shut them in, the carriage rolled off, and he started on his homeward walk with a long sigh of relief.

XXXIV.

Bessie asked the sleepy man who opened her aunt’s door whether her brother had come in yet, and found that he had not. She helped her aunt off up-stairs with her maid, and when she came down again she sent the man to bed; she told him she was going to sit up and she would let her brother in. The caprices of Alan’s latch-key were known to all the servants, and the man understood what she, meant. He said he had left a light in the reception-room and there was a fire there; and Bessie tripped on down from the library floor, where she had met him. She had put off her ball dress and had slipped into the simplest and easiest of breakfast frocks, which was by no means plain. Bessie had no plain frocks for any hour of the day; her frocks all expressed in stuff and style and color, and the bravery of their flying laces and ribbons, the audacity of spirit with which she was herself chicqued together, as she said. This one she had on now was something that brightened her dull complexion, and brought out the best effect of her eyes and mouth, and seemed the effluence of her personal dash and grace. It made the most of her, and she liked it beyond all her other negligees for its complaisance.

She got a book, and sat down in a long, low chair before the fire and crossed her pretty slippers on the warm hearth. It was a quarter after three by the clock on the mantel; but she had never felt more eagerly awake. The party had not been altogether to her mind, up to midnight, but after that it had been a series of rapid and vivid emotions, which continued themselves still in the tumult of her nerves, and seemed to demand an indefinite sequence of experience. She did not know what state her brother might be in when he came home; she had not seen anything of him after she first went out to supper; till then, though, he had kept himself straight, as he needs must; but she could not tell what happened to him afterward. She hoped that he would come home able to talk, for she wished to talk. She wished to talk about herself; and as she had already had flattery enough, she wanted some truth about herself; she wanted Alan to say what he thought of her behavior the whole evening with that jay. He must have seen something of it in the beginning, and she should tell him all the rest. She should tell him just how often she had danced with the man, and how many dances she had sat out with him; how she had pretended once that she was engaged when another man asked her, and then danced with the jay, to whom she pretended that he had engaged her for the dance. She had wished to see how he would take it; for the same reason she had given to some one else a dance that was really his. She would tell Alan how the jay had asked her for that last dance, and then never come near her again. That would give him the whole situation, and she would know just what he thought of it.

What she thought of herself she hardly knew, or made believe she hardly knew. She prided herself upon not being a flirt; she might not be very good, as goodness went, but she was not despicable, and a flirt was despicable. She did not call the audacity of her behavior with the jay flirting; he seemed to understand it as well as she, and to meet her in her own spirit; she wondered now whether this jay was really more interesting than the other men one met, or only different; whether he was original, like Alan himself, or merely novel, and would soon wear down to the tiresomeness that seemed to underlie them all, and made one wish to do something dreadful. In the jay’s presence she had no wish to do anything dreadful. Was it because he was dreadful enough for both, all the time, without doing anything? She would like to ask Alan that, and see how he would take it. Nothing seemed to put the jay out, so far as she had tried, and she had tried some bold impertinences with him. He was very jolly through them all, and at the worst of them he laughed and asked her for that dance, which he never came to claim, though in the mean time he brought her some belated supper, and was devoted to her and her aunt, inventing services to do for them. Then suddenly he went off and did not return, and Mr. Westover mysteriously reappeared, and got their carriage.

She heard a scratching at the key-hole of the outside door; she knew it was Alan’s latch. She had left the inner door ajar that there might be no uncertainty of hearing him, and she ran out into the space between that and the outer door where the fumbling and scraping kept on.

“Is that you, Alan?” she called, softly, and if she had any doubt before, she had none when she heard her brother outside, cursing his luck with his key as usual.

She flung the door open, and confronted him with another man, who had his arms around him as if he had caught him from falling with the inward pull of the door. Alan got to his feet and grappled with the man, and insisted that he should come in and make a night of it.

Bessie saw that it was Jeff, and they stood a moment, looking at each other. Jeff tried to free himself with an appeal to Bessie: “I beg your pardon, Miss Lynde. I walked home with your brother, and I was just helping him to get in — I didn’t think that you—”

Alan said, with his measured distinctness: “Nobody cares what you think. Come in, and get something to carry you over the bridge. Cambridge cars stopped running long ago. I say you shall!” He began to raise his voice. A light flashed in a window across the way, and a sash was lifted; some one must be looking out.

“Oh, come in with him!” Bessie implored, and at a little yielding in Jeff her brother added:

“Come in, you damn jay!” He pulled at Jeff.

Jeff made haste to shut the door behind them. He was laughing; and if it was from mere brute insensibility to what would have shocked another in the situation, his frank recognition of its grotesqueness was of better effect than any hopeless effort to ignore it would have been. People adjust themselves to their trials; it is the pretence of the witness that there is no trial which hurts, and Bessie was not wounded by Jeff’s laugh.

“There’s a fire here in the reception-room,” she said. “Can you get him in?”

“I guess so.”

Jeff lifted Alan into the room and stayed him on foot there, while he took off his hat and overcoat, and then he let him sink into the low easy-chair Bessie had just risen from. All the time, Alan was bidding her ring and have some champagne and cold meat set out on the side-board, and she was lightly promising and coaxing. But he drowsed quickly in the warmth, and the last demand for supper died half uttered on his lips.

Jeff asked across him: “Can’t I get him up-stairs for you? I can carry him.”

She shook her head and whispered back, “I can leave him here,” and she looked at Jeff with a moment’s hesitation. “Did you — do you think that — any one noticed him at Mrs. Enderby’s?”

“No; they had got him in a room by himself — the caterer’s men had.”

“And you found him there?”

“Mr. Westover found him there,” Jeff answered.

“I don’t understand.”

“Didn’t he come to you after I left?”

“Yes.”

“I told him to excuse me—”

“He didn’t.”

“Well, I guess he was pretty badly rattled.” Jeff stopped himself in the vague laugh of one who remembers something ludicrous, and turned his face away.

“Tell me what it was!” she demanded, nervously.

“Mr. Westover had been home with him once, and he wouldn’t stay. He made Mr. Westover come back for me.”

“What did he want with you?”

Jeff shrugged.

“And then what?”

“We went out to the carriage, as soon as I could get away from you; but he wasn’t in it. I sent Mr. Westover back to you and set out to look for him.”

“That was very good of you. And I — thank you for your kindness to my brother. I shall not forget it. And I wish to beg your pardon.”

“What for?” asked Jeff, bluntly.

“For blaming you when you didn’t come back for the dance.”

If Bessie had meant nothing but what was fitting to the moment some inherent lightness of nature played her false. But even the histrionic touch which she could not keep out of her voice, her manner, another sort of man might have found merely pathetic.

Jeff laughed with subtle intelligence. “Were you very hard on me?”

“Very,” she answered in kind, forgetting her brother and the whole terrible situation.

“Tell me what you thought of me,” he said, and he came a little nearer to her, looking very handsome and very strong. “I should like to know.”

“I said I should never speak to you again.”

“And you kept your word,” said Jeff. “Well, that’s all right. Good-night-or good-morning, whichever it is.” He took her hand, which she could not withdraw, or feigned to herself that she could not withdraw, and looked at her with a silent laugh, and a hardy, sceptical glance that she felt take in every detail of her prettiness, her plainness. Then he turned and went out, and she ran quickly and locked the door upon him.

XXXV.

Bessie crept up to her room, where she spent the rest of the night in her chair, amid a tumult of emotion which she would have called thinking. She asked herself the most searching questions, but she got no very candid answers to them, and she decided that she must see the whole fact with some other’s eyes before she could know what she had meant or what she had done.

When she let the daylight into her room, it showed her a face in her mirror that bore no trace of conflicting anxieties. Her complexion favored this effect of inward calm; it was always thick; and her eyes seemed to her all the brighter for their vigils.

A smile, even, hovered on her mouth as she sat down at the breakfast-table, in the pretty negligee she had worn all night, and poured out Miss Lynde’s coffee for her.

“That’s always very becoming to you, Bessie,” said her aunt. “It’s the nicest breakfast gown you have.”

“Do you think so?” Bessie looked down at it, first on one side and then on the other, as a woman always does when her dress is spoken of.

“Mr. Alan said he would have his breakfast in his room, miss,” murmured the butler, in husky respectfulness, as he returned to Bessie from carrying Miss Lynde’s cup to her. “He don’t want anything but a little toast and coffee.”

She perceived that the words were meant to make it easy for her to ask: “Isn’t he very well, Andrew?”

“About as usual, miss,” said Andrew, a thought more sepulchral than before. “He’s going on — about as usual.”

She knew this to mean that he was going on from bad to worse, and that his last night’s excess was the beginning of a debauch which could end only in one way. She must send for the doctor; he would decide what was best, when he saw how Alan came through the day.

Late in the afternoon she heard Mary Enderby’s voice in the reception-room, bidding the man say that if Miss Bessie were lying down she would come up to her, or would go away, just as she wished. She flew downstairs with a glad cry of “Molly! What an inspiration! I was just thinking of you, and wishing for you. But I didn’t suppose you were up yet!”

“It’s pretty early,” said Miss Enderby. “But I should have been here before if I could, for I knew I shouldn’t wake you, Bessie, with your habit of turning night into day, and getting up any time in the forenoon.”

“How dissipated you sound!”

“Yes, don’t I? But I’ve been thinking about you ever since I woke, and I had to come and find out if you were alive, anyhow.”

“Come up-stairs and see!” said Bessie, holding her friend’s hand on the sofa where they had dropped down together, and going all over the scene of last night in that place for the thousandth time.

“No, no; I really mustn’t. I hope you had a good time?”

“At your house!”

“How dear of you! But, Bessie, I got to thinking you’d been rather sacrificed. It came into my mind the instant I woke, and gave me this severe case of conscience. I suppose it’s a kind of conscience.”

“Yes, yes. Go on! I like having been a martyr, if I don’t know what about.”

“Why, you know, Bessie, or if you don’t you will presently, that it was I who got mamma to send him a card; I felt rather sorry for him, that day at Mrs. Bevidge’s, because she’d so obviously got him there to use him, and I got mamma to ask him. Everything takes care of itself, at a large affair, and I thought I might trust in Providence to deal with him after he came; and then I saw you made a means the whole evening! I didn’t reflect that there always has to be a means!”

“It’s a question of Mr. Durgin?” said Bessie, coldly thrilling at the sound of a name that she pronounced so gayly in a tone of sympathetic amusement.

Miss Enderby bobbed her head. “It shows that we ought never to do a good action, doesn’t it? But, poor thing! How you must have been swearing off!”

“I don’t know. Was it so very bad? I’m trying to think,” said Bessie, thinking that after this beginning it would be impossible to confide in Mary Enderby.

“Oh, now, Bessie! Don’t you be patient, or I shall begin to lose my faith in human nature. Just say at once that it was an outrage and I’ll forgive you! You see,” Miss Enderby went on, “it isn’t merely that he’s a jay; but he isn’t a very nice jay. None of the men like him — except Freddy Lancaster, of course; he likes everybody, on principle; he doesn’t count. I thought that perhaps, although he’s so crude and blunt, he might be sensitive and high-minded; you’re always reading about such things; but they say he isn’t, in the least; oh, not the least! They say he goes with a set of fast jays, and that he’s dreadful; though he has a very good mind, and could do very well if he chose. That’s what cousin Jim said to-day; he’s just been at our house; and it was so extremely telepathic that I thought I must run round and prevent your having the man on your conscience if you felt you had had too much of him. You won’t lay him up against us, will you?” She jumped to her feet.

“You dear!” said Bessie, keeping Mary Enderby’s hand, and pressing it between both of hers against her breast as they now stood face to face, “do come up and have some tea!”

“No, no! Really, I can’t.”

They were both involuntarily silent. The door had been opened to some one, and there was a brief parley, which ended in a voice they knew to be the doctor’s, saying, “Then I’ll go right up to his room.” Both the girls broke into laughing adieux, to hide their consciousness that the doctor was going up to see Alan Lynde, who was never sick except in the one way.

Miss Enderby even said: “I was so glad to see Alan looking so well, last night.”

“Yes, he had such a good time,” said Bessie, and she followed her friend to the door, where she kissed her reassuringly, and thanked her for taking all the trouble she had, bidding her not be the least anxious on her account.

It seemed to her that she should sink upon the stairs in mounting them to the library. Mary Enderby had told her only what she had known before; it was what her brother had told her; but then it had not been possible for the man to say that he had brought Alan home tipsy, and been alone in the house with her at three o’clock in the morning. He would not only boast of it to all that vulgar comradehood of his, but it might get into those terrible papers which published the society scandals. There would be no way but to appeal to his pity, his generosity. She fancied herself writing to him, but he could show her note, and she must send for him to come and see her, and try to put him on his honor. Or, that would not do, either. She must make it happen that they should be thrown together, and then speak to him. Even that might make him think she was afraid of him; or he might take it wrong, and believe that she cared for him. He had really been very good to Alan, and she tried to feel safe in the thought of that. She did feel safe for a moment; but if she had meant nothing but to make him believe her grateful, what must he infer from her talking to him in the light way she did about forgiving him for not coming back to dance with her. Her manner, her looks, her tone, had given him the right to say that she had been willing to flirt with him there, at that hour, and in those dreadful circumstances.

She found herself lying in a deep arm-chair in the library, when she was aware of Dr. Lacy pausing at the door and looking tentatively in upon her.

“Come in, doctor,” she said, and she knew that her face was wet with tears, and that she spoke with the voice of weeping.

He came forward and looked narrowly at her, without sitting down. “There’s nothing to be alarmed about, Miss Bessie,” he said. “But I think your brother had better leave home again, for a while.”

“Yes,” she said, blankly. Her mind was not on his words.

“I will make the arrangements.”

“Thank you,” said Bessie, listlessly.

The doctor had made a step backward, as if he were going away, and now he stopped. “Aren’t you feeling quite well, Miss Bessie?”

“Oh yes,” she said, and she began to cry.

The doctor came forward and said, cheerily: “Let me see.” He pulled a chair up to hers, and took her wrist between his fingers. “If you were at Mrs. Enderby’s last night, you’ll need another night to put you just right. But you’re pretty well as it is.” He let her wrist softly go, and said: “You mustn’t distress yourself about your brother’s case. Of course, it’s hard to have it happen now after he’s held up so long; longer than it has been before, I think, isn’t it? But it’s something that it has been so long. The next time, let us hope, it will be longer still.”

The doctor made as if to rise. Bessie put her hand out to stay him. “What is it makes him do it?”

“Ah, that’s a great mystery,” said the doctor. “I suppose you might say the excitement.”

“Yes!”

“But it seems to me very often, in such cases, as if it were to escape the excitement. I think you’re both keyed up pretty sharply by nature, Miss Bessie,” said the doctor, with the personal kindness he felt for the girl, and the pity softening his scientific spirit.

“I know!” she answered. “We’re alike. Why don’t I take to drinking, too?”

The doctor laughed at such a question from a young lady, but with an inner seriousness in his laugh, as if, coming from a patient, it was to be weighed. “Well, I suppose it isn’t the habit of your sex, Miss Bessie.”

“Sometimes it is. Sometimes women get drunk, and then I think they do less harm than if they did other things to get away from the excitement.” She longed to confide in him; the words were on her tongue; she believed he could help her, tell her what to do; out of his stores of knowledge and experience he must have some suggestion, some remedy; he could advise her; he could stand her friend, so far. People told their doctors all kinds of things, silly things. Why should she not tell her doctor this?

It would have been easier if it had been an older man, who might have had a daughter of her age. But he was in that period of the early forties when a doctor sometimes has a matter-of-fact, disagreeable wife whose idea stands between him and the spiritual intimacy of his patients, so that it seems as if they were delivering their confidences rather to her than to him. He was able, he was good, he was extremely acute, he was even with the latest facts and theories; but as he sat straight up in his chair his stomach defined itself as a half-moon before him, and he said to the quivering heap of emotions beside him, “You mean like breaking hearts, and such little matters?”

It was fatally stupid, and it beat her back into herself.

“Yes,” she said, with a contempt that she easily hid from him, “that’s worse than getting drunk, isn’t it?”

“Well, it isn’t so regarded,” said the doctor, who supposed himself to have made a sprightly answer, and laughed at it. “I wish, Miss Bessie, you’d take a little remedy I’m going to send you. You’ve merely been up too late, but it’s a very good thing for people who’ve been up too late.”

“Thank you. And about my brother?”

“Oh! I’ll send a man to look after him to-night, and tomorrow I really think he’d better go.”

XXXVI.

Miss Lynde had gone earlier than usual to bed, when Bessie heard Alan’s door open, and then heard him feeling his way fumbingly down-stairs. She surmised that he had drunk up all that he had in his room, and was making for the side-board in the dining-room.

She ran and got the two decanters-one of whiskey and one of brandy, which he was in the habit of carrying back to his room from such an incursion.

“Alan!” she called to him, in a low voice.

“Where are you?” he answered back.

“In the library,” she said. “Come in here, please.”

He came, and stood looking gloomily in from the doorway. He caught sight of the decanters and the glasses on the library table. “Oh!” he said, and gave a laugh cut in two by a hiccough.

“Come in, and shut the door, Alan,” she said. “Let’s make a night of it. I’ve got the materials here.” She waved her hand toward the decanters.

Alan shrugged. “I don’t know what you mean.” But he came forward, and slouched into one of the deep chairs.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” said Bessie, with a laugh. “We’re both excited, and we want to get away from ourselves. Isn’t that what’s the matter with you when it begins? Doctor Lacy thinks it is.”

“Does he?” Alan asked. “I didn’t suppose he had so much sense. What of it?”

“Nothing. Merely that I’m going to drink a glass of whiskey and a glass of brandy for every glass that you drink to-night.”

“You mustn’t play the fool, Bess,” said her brother, with dignified severity.

“But I’m really serious, Alan. Shall I give you something? Which shall we begin on? And we’d better begin soon, for there’s a man coming from the doctor to look after you, and then you won’t get anything.”

“Don’t be ridiculous! Give me those decanters!” Alan struggled out of his chair, and trembled over to where she had them on the table beside her.

She caught them up, one in either hand, and held them as high as she could lift them. “If you don’t sit down and promise to keep still, I’ll smash them both on the hearth. You know I will.”

Her strange eyes gleamed, and he hesitated; then he went back to his chair.

“I don’t see what’s got into you to-night. I don’t want anything,” he said. He tried to brave it out, but presently he cast a piteous glance at the decanters where she had put them down beside her again. “Does the doctor think I’d better go again?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“When?”

“To-morrow.”

He looked at the decanters. “And when is that fellow coming?”

“He may be here any moment.”

“It’s pretty rough,” he sighed. “Two glasses of that stuff would drive you so wild you wouldn’t know where you were, Bess,” he expostulated.

“Well, I wish I didn’t know where I was. I wish I wasn’t anywhere.” He looked at her, and then dropped his eyes, with the effect of giving up a hopeless conundrum.

But he asked: “What’s the matter?”

She scanned him keenly before she answered: “Something that I should like to tell you — that you ought to know. Alan, do you think you are fit to judge of a very serious matter?”

He laughed pathetically. “I don’t believe I’m in a very judicial frame of mind to-night, Bess. To-morrow—”

“Oh, to-morrow! Where will you be to-morrow?”

“That’s true! Well, what is it? I’ll try to listen. But if you knew how my nerves were going.” His eyes wandered from hers back to the decanters. “If I had just one glass—”

“I’ll have one, too,” she said, with a motion toward the decanter next her.

He threw up his arms. “Oh well, go on. I’ll listen as well as I can.” He sank down in his chair and stretched his little feet out toward the fire. “Go on!”

She hesitated before she began. “Do you know who brought you home last night, Alan?”

“Yes,” he answered, quickly, “Westover.”

“Yes, Mr. Westover brought you, and you wouldn’t stay. You don’t remember anything else?”

“No. What else?”

“Nothing for you, if you don’t remember.” She sat in silent hopelessness for a while, and her brother’s eyes dwelt on the decanters, which she seemed to have forgotten. “Alan!” she broke out, abruptly, “I’m worried, and if I can’t tell you about it there’s no one I can.”

The appeal in her voice must have reached him, though he seemed scarcely to have heeded her words. “What is it?” he asked, kindly.

“You went back to the Enderbys’ after Mr. Westover brought you home, and then some one else had to bring you again.”

“How do you know?”

“I was up, and let you in—”

“Did you, Bessie? That was like you,” he said, tenderly.

“And I had to let him in, too. You pulled him into the house, and you made such a disturbance at the door that he had to come in for fear you would bring the police.”

“What a beast!” said Alan, of himself, as if it were some one else.

“He came in with you. And you wanted him to have some supper. And you fell asleep before the fire in the reception-room.”

“That — that was the dream!” said Alan, severely. “What are you talking that stuff for, Bessie?”

“Oh no!” she retorted, with a laugh, as if the pleasure of its coming in so fitly were compensation for the shame of the fact. “The dream was what happened afterward. The dream was that you fell asleep there, and left me there with him—”

“Well, poor old Westover; he’s a gentleman! You needn’t be worried about him—”

“You’re not fit!” cried the girl. “I give it up.” She got upon her feet and stood a moment listless.

“No, I’m not, Bessie. I can’t pull my mind together tonight. But look here!” He seemed to lose what he wanted to say. He asked: “Is it something I’ve got you in for? Do I understand that?”

“Partly,” she said.

“Well, then, I’ll help you out. You can trust me, Bessie; you can, indeed. You don’t believe it?”

“Oh, I believe you think I can trust you.”

“But this time you can. If you need my help I will stand by you, right or wrong. If you want to tell me now I’ll listen, and I’ll advise you the best I can—”

“It’s just something I’ve got nervous about,” she said, while her eyes shone with sudden tears. “But I won’t trouble you with it to-night. There’s no such great hurry. We can talk about it in the morning if you’re better then. Oh, I forgot! You’re going away!”

“No,” said the young man, with pathetic dignity, “I’m not going if you need my help. But you’re right about me tonight, Bessie. I’m not fit. I’m afraid I can’t grasp anything to-night. Tell me in the morning. Oh, don’t be afraid!” he cried out at the glance she gave the decanters. “That’s over, now; you could put them in my hands and be safe enough. I’m going back to bed, and in the morning—”

He rose and went toward the door. “If that doctor’s man comes to-night you can send him away again. He needn’t bother.”

“All right, Alan,” she said, fondly. “Good-night. Don’t worry about me. Try to get some sleep.”

“And you must sleep, too. You can trust me, Bessie.”

He came back after he got out of the room and looked in. “Bess, if you’re anxious about it, if you don’t feel perfectly sure of me, you can take those things to your room with you.” He indicated the decanters with a glance.

“Oh no! I shall leave them here. It wouldn’t be any use your just keeping well overnight. You’ll have to keep well a long time, Alan, if you’re going to help me. And that’s the reason I’d rather talk to you when you can give your whole mind to what I say.”

“Is it something so serious?”

“I don’t know. That’s for you to judge. Not very — not at all, perhaps.”

“Then I won’t fail you, Bessie. I shall ‘keep well,’ as you call it, as long as you want me. Good-night.”

“Good-night. I shall leave these bottles here, remember.”

“You needn’t be afraid. You might put them beside my bed.”

Bessie slept soundly, from exhaustion, and in that provisional fashion in which people who have postponed a care to a given moment are able to sleep. But she woke early, and crept down-stairs before any one else was astir, and went to the library. The decanters stood there on the table, empty. Her brother lay a shapeless heap in one of the deep arm-chairs.

XXXVII.

Westover got home from the Enderby dance at last with the forecast of a violent cold in his system, which verified itself the next morning. He had been housed a week, when Jeff Durgin came to see him. “Why didn’t you let me know you were sick?” he demanded, “I’d have come and looked after you.”

“Thank you,” said Westover, with as much stiffness as he could command in his physical limpness. “I shouldn’t have allowed you to look after me; and I want you to understand, now, that there can’t be any sort of friendliness between us till you’ve accounted for your behavior with Lynde the other night.”

“You mean at the party?” Jeff asked, tranquilly.

“Yes!” cried Westover. “If I had not been shut up ever since, I should have gone to see you and had it out with you. I’ve only let you in, now, to give you the chance to explain; and I refuse to hear a word from you till you do.” Westover did not think that this was very forcible, and he was not much surprised that it made Jeff smile.

“Why, I don’t know what there is to explain. I suppose you think I got him drunk; I know what you thought that night. But he was pretty well loaded when he struck my champagne. It wasn’t a question of what he was going to do any longer, but how he was going to do it. I kept an eye on him, and at the right time I helped the caterer’s man to get him up into that room where he wouldn’t make any trouble. I expected to go back and look after him, but I forgot him.”

“I don’t suppose, really, that you’re aware what a devil’s argument that is,” said Westover. “You got Lynde drunk, and then you went back to his sister, and allowed her to treat you as if you were a gentleman, and didn’t deserve to be thrown out of the house.” This at last was something like what Westover had imagined he would say to Jeff, and he looked to see it have the imagined effect upon him.

“Do you suppose,” asked Jeff, with cheerful cynicism, “that it was the first time she was civil to a man her brother got drunk with?”

“No! But all the more you ought to have considered her helplessness. It ought to have made her the more sacred” — Jeff gave an exasperating shrug— “to you, and you ought to have kept away from her for decency’s sake.”

“I was engaged to dance with her.”

“I can’t allow you to be trivial with me, Durgin,” said Westover. “You’ve acted like a blackguard, and worse, if there is anything worse.”

Jeff stood at a corner of the fire, leaning one elbow on the mantel, and he now looked thoughtfully down on Westover, who had sunk weakly into a chair before the hearth. “I don’t deny it from your point of view, Mr. Westover,” he said, without the least resentment in his tone. “You believe that everything is done from a purpose, or that a thing is intended because it’s done. But I see that most things in this world are not thought about, and not intended. They happen, just as much as the other things that we call accidents.”

“Yes,” said Westover, “but the wrong things don’t happen from people who are in the habit of meaning the right ones.”

“I believe they do, fully half the time,” Jeff returned; “and, as far as the grand result is concerned, you might as well think them and intend them as not. I don’t mean that you ought to do it; that’s another thing, and if I had tried to get Lynde drunk, and then gone to dance with his sister, I should have been what you say I am. But I saw him getting worse without meaning to make him so; and I went back to her because — I wanted to.”

“And you think, I suppose,” said Westover, “that she wouldn’t have cared any more than you cared if she had known what you did.”

“I can’t say anything about that.”

The painter continued, bitterly: “You used to come in here, the first year, with notions of society women that would have disgraced a Goth, or a gorilla. Did you form your estimate of Miss Lynde from those premises?”

“I’m not a boy now,” Jeff answered, “and I haven’t stayed all the kinds of a fool I was.”

“Then you don’t think Miss Lynde would speak to you, or look at you, after she knew what you had done?”

“I should like to tell her and see,” said Jeff, with a hardy laugh. “But I guess I sha’n’t have the chance. I’ve never been a favorite in society, and I don’t expect to meet her again.”

“Perhaps you’d like to have me tell her?”

“Why, yes, I believe I should, if you could tell me what she thought — not what she said about it.”

“You are a brute,” answered Westover, with a puzzled air. What puzzled him most and pleased him least was the fellow’s patience under his severity, which he seemed either not to feel or not to mind. It was of a piece with the behavior of the rascally boy whom he had cuffed for frightening Cynthia and her little brother long ago, and he wondered what final malevolence it portended.

Jeff said, as if their controversy were at an end and they might now turn to more personal things: “You look pretty slim, Mr. Westover. A’n’t there something I can do for you-get you? I’ve come in with a message from mother. She says if you ever want to get that winter view of Lion’s Head, now’s your time. She wants you to come up there; she and Cynthia both do. They can make you as comfortable as you please, and they’d like to have a visit from you. Can’t you go?”

Westover shook his head ruefully. “It’s good of them, and I want you to thank them for me. But I don’t know when I’m going to get out again.”

“Oh, you’ll soon get out,” said Jeff. “I’m going to look after you a little,” and this time Westover was too weak to protest. He did not forbid Jeff’s taking off his overcoat; he suffered him to light his spirit-lamp and make a punch of the whiskey which he owned the doctor was giving him; and when Jeff handed him the steaming glass, and asked him, “How’s that?” he answered, with a pleasure in it which he knew to be deplorable, “It’s fine.”

Jeff stayed the whole evening with him, and made him more comfortable than he had been since his cold began. Westover now talked seriously and frankly with him, but no longer so harshly, and in his relenting he felt a return of his old illogical liking for him. He fancied in Durgin’s kindness to himself an indirect regret, and a desire to atone for what he had done, and he said: “The effect is in you — the worst effect. I don’t think either of the young Lyndes very exemplary people. But you’d be doing yourself a greater wrong than you’ve done then if you didn’t recognize that you had been guilty toward them.”

Jeff seemed struck by this notion. “What do you want me to do? What can I do? Chase myself out of society? Something like that? I’m willing. It’s too easy, though. As I said, I’ve never been wanted much, there, and I shouldn’t be missed.”

“Well, then, how would you like to leave it to the people at Lion’s Head to say what you should do?” Westover suggested.

“I shouldn’t like it,” said Jeff, promptly. “They’d judge it as you do — as if they’d done it themselves. That’s the reason women are not fit to judge.” His gay face darkened. “But tell ’em if you want to.”

“Bah!” cried the painter. “Why should I want to I’m not a woman in everything.”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Westover. I didn’t mean that. I only meant that you’re an idealist. I look at this thing as if some one else had done it; I believe that’s the practical way; and I shouldn’t go in for punishing any one else for such a thing very severely.” He made another punch — for himself this time, he said; but Westover joined him in a glass of it.

“It won’t do to take that view of your faults, Jeff,” he said, gravely.

“What’s the reason?” Jeff demanded; and now either the punch had begun to work in Westover’s brain, or some other influence of like force and quality. He perceived that in this earth-bound temperament was the potentiality of all the success it aimed at. The acceptance of the moral fact as it was, without the unconscious effort to better it, or to hold himself strictly to account for it, was the secret of the power in the man which would bring about the material results he desired; and this simplicity of the motive involved had its charm.

Westover was aware of liking Durgin at that moment much more than he ought, and of liking him helplessly. In the light of his good-natured selfishness, the injury to the Lyndes showed much less a sacrilege than it had seemed; Westover began to see it with Jeff’s eyes, and to see it with reference to what might be low and mean in them, instead of what might be fine and high.

He was sensible of the growth Jeff had made intellectually. He had not been at Harvard nearly four years for nothing. He had phrases and could handle them. In whatever obscure or perverse fashion, he had profited by his opportunities. The fellow who could accuse him of being an idealist, and could in some sort prove it, was no longer a naughty boy to be tutored and punished. The revolt latent in him would be violent in proportion to the pressure put upon him, and Westover began to be without the wish to press his fault home to him so strongly. In the optimism generated by the punch, he felt that he might leave the case to Jeff himself; or else in the comfort we all experience in sinking to a lower level, he was unwilling to make the effort to keep his own moral elevation. But he did make an effort to save himself by saying: “You can’t get what you’ve done before yourself as you can the action of some one else. It’s part of you, and you have to judge the motive as well as the effect.”

“Well, that’s what I’m doing,” said Jeff; “but it seems to me that you’re trying to have me judge of the effect from a motive I didn’t have. As far as I can make out, I hadn’t any motive at all.”

He laughed, and all that Westover could say was, “Then you’re still responsible for the result.” But this no longer appeared so true to him.

XXXVIII.

It was not a condition of Westover’s welcome at Lion’s Head that he should seem peculiarly the friend of Jeff Durgin, but he could not help making it so, and he began to overact the part as soon as he met Jeff’s mother. He had to speak of him in thanking her for remembering his wish to paint Lion’s Head in the winter, and he had to tell her of Jeff’s thoughtfulness during the past fortnight; he had to say that he did not believe he should ever have got away if it had not been for him. This was true; Durgin had even come in from Cambridge to see him off on the train; he behaved as if the incident with Lynde and all their talk about it had cemented the friendship between Westover and himself, and he could not be too devoted. It now came out that he had written home all about Westover, and made his mother put up a stove in the painter’s old room, so that he should have the instant use of it when he arrived.

It was an air-tight wood-stove, and it filled the chamber with a heat in which Westover drowsed as soon as he entered it. He threw himself on the bed, and slept away the fatigue of his railroad journey and the cold of his drive with Jombateeste from the station. His nap was long, and he woke from it in a pleasant languor, with the dream-clouds still hanging in his brain. He opened the damper of his stove, and set it roaring again; then he pulled down the upper sash of his window and looked out on a world whose elements of wood and snow and stone he tried to co-ordinate. There was nothing else in that world but these things, so repellent of one another. He suffered from the incongruity of the wooden bulk of the hotel, with the white drifts deep about it, and with the granite cliffs of Lion’s Head before it, where the gray crags darkened under the pink afternoon light which was beginning to play upon its crest from the early sunset. The wind that had seemed to bore through his thick cap and his skull itself, and that had tossed the dry snow like dust against his eyes on his way from the railroad, had now fallen, and an incomparable quiet wrapped the solitude of the hills. A teasing sense of the impossibility of the scene, as far as his art was concerned, filled him full of a fond despair of rendering its feeling. He could give its light and color and form in a sufficiently vivid suggestion of the fact, but he could not make that pink flush seem to exhale, like a long breath, upon those rugged shapes; he could not impart that sentiment of delicately, almost of elegance, which he found in the wilderness, while every detail of civilization physically distressed him. In one place the snow had been dug down to the pine planking of the pathway round the house; and the contact of this woodenness with the frozen ground pierced his nerves and set his teeth on edge like a harsh noise. When once he saw it he had to make an effort to take his eyes from it, and in a sort unknown to him in summer he perceived the offence of the hotel itself amid the pure and lonely beauty of the winter landscape. It was a note of intolerable banality, of philistine pretence and vulgar convention, such as Whitwell’s low, unpainted cottage at the foot of the hill did not give, nor the little red school-house, on the other hand, showing through the naked trees. There should have been really no human habitation visible except a wigwam in the shelter of the pines, here and there; and when he saw Whitwell making his way up the hill-side road, Westover felt that if there must be any human presence it should be some savage clad in skins, instead of the philosopher in his rubber boots and his clothing-store ulster. He preferred the small, wiry shape of Jombateeste, in his blue woollen cap and his Canadian footgear, as he ran round the corner of the house toward the barn, and left the breath of his pipe in the fine air behind him.

The light began to deepen from the pale pink to a crimson which stained the tops and steeps of snow, and deepened the dark of the woods massed on the mountain slopes between the irregular fields of white. The burnished brown of the hard-wood trees, the dull carbon shadows of the evergreens, seemed to wither to one black as the red strengthened in the sky. Westover realized that he had lost the best of any possible picture in letting that first delicate color escape him. This crimson was harsh and vulgar in comparison; it would have almost a chromo quality; he censured his pleasure in it as something gross and material, like that of eating; and on a sudden he felt hungry. He wondered what time they would give him supper, and he took slight account of the fact that a caprice of the wind had torn its hood of snow from the mountain summit, and that the profile of the Lion’s Head showed almost as distinctly as in summer. He stood before the picture which for that day at least was lost to him, and questioned whether there would be a hearty meal, something like a dinner, or whether there would be something like a farmhouse supper, mainly of doughnuts and tea.

He pulled up his window and was going to lie down again, when some one knocked, and Frank Whitwell stood at the door. “Do you want we should bring your supper to you here, Mr. Westover, or will you—”

“Oh, let me join you all!” cried the painter, eagerly. “Is it ready — shall I come now?”

“Well, in about five minutes or so.” Frank went away, after setting down in the room the lamp he had brought. It was a lamp which Westover thought he remembered from the farm-house period, and on his way down he realized as he had somehow not done in his summer sojourns, the entirety of the old house in the hotel which had encompassed it. The primitive cold of its stairways and passages struck upon him as soon as he left his own room, and he found the parlor door closed against the chill. There was a hot stove-fire within, and a kerosene-lamp turned low, but there was no one there, and he had the photograph of his first picture of Lion’s Head to himself in the dim light. The voices of Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia came to him from the dining-room, and from the kitchen beyond, with the occasional clash of crockery, and the clang of iron upon iron about the stove, and the quick tread of women’s feet upon the bare floor. With these pleasant noises came the smell of cooking, and later there was an opening and shutting of doors, with a thrill of the freezing air from without, and the dull thumping of Whitwell’s rubber boots, and the quicker flapping of Jombateeste’s soft leathern soles. Then there was the sweep of skirted feet at the parlor door, and Cynthia Whitwell came in without perceiving him. She went to the table by the darkening window, and quickly turned up the light of the lamp. In her ignorance of his presence, he saw her as if she had been alone, almost as if she were out of the body; he received from her unconsciousness the impression of something rarely pure and fine, and he had a sudden compassion for her, as for something precious that is fated to be wasted or misprized. At a little movement which he made to relieve himself from a sense of eavesdropping, she gave a start, and shut her lips upon the little cry that would have escaped from another sort of woman.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she said; and she flushed with the shyness of him which she always showed at first. She had met him already with the rest, but they had scarcely spoken together; and he knew of the struggle she must now be making with herself when she went on: “I didn’t know you had been called. I thought you were still sleeping.”

“Yes. I seemed to sleep for centuries,” said West over, “and I woke up feeling coeval with Lion’s Head. But I hope to grow younger again.”

She faltered, and then she asked: “Did you see the light on it when the sun went down?”

“I wish I hadn’t. I could never get that light — even if it ever came again.”

“It’s there every afternoon, when it’s clear.”

“I’m sorry for that; I shall have to try for it, then.”

“Wasn’t that what you came for?” she asked, by one of the efforts she was making with everything she said. He could have believed he saw the pulse throbbing in her neck. But she held herself stone-still, and he divined her resolution to conquer herself, if she should die for it.

“Yes, I came for that,” said Westover. “That’s what makes it so dismaying. If I had only happened on it, I shouldn’t have been responsible for the failure I shall make of it.”

She smiled, as if she liked his lightness, but doubted if she ought. “We don’t often get Lion’s Head clear of snow.”

“Yes; that’s another hardship,” said the painter. “Everything is against me! If we don’t have a snow overnight, and a cloudy day to-morrow, I shall be in despair.”

She played with the little wheel of the wick; she looked down, and then, with a glance flashed at him, she gasped: “I shall have to take your lamp for the table tea is ready.”

“Oh, well, if you will only take me with it. I’m frightfully hungry.”

Apparently she could not say anything to that. He tried to get the lamp to carry it out for her, but she would not let him. “It isn’t heavy,” she said, and hurried out before him.

It was all nothing, but it was all very charming, and Westover was richly content with it; and yet not content, for he felt that the pleasure of it was not truly his, but was a moment of merely borrowed happiness.

The table was laid in the old farm-house sitting-room where he had been served alone when he first came to Lion’s Head. But now he sat down with the whole family, even to Jombateeste, who brought in a faint odor of the barn with him.

They had each been in contact with the finer world which revisits nature in the summer-time, and they must all have known something of its usages, but they had reverted in form and substance to the rustic living of their neighbors. They had steak for Westover, and baked potatoes; but for themselves they had such farm fare as Mrs. Durgin had given him the first time he supped there. They made their meal chiefly of doughnuts and tea, and hot biscuit, with some sweet dishes of a festive sort added in recognition of his presence; and there was mince-pie for all. Mrs. Durgin and Whitwell ate with their knives, and Jombateeste filled himself so soon with every implement at hand that he was able to ask excuse of the others if he left them for the horses before they had half finished. Frank Whitwell fed with a kind of official or functional conformity to the ways of summer folks; but Cynthia, at whom Westover glanced with anxiety, only drank some tea and ate a little bread and butter. He was ashamed of his anxiety, for he had owned that it ought not to have mattered if she had used her knife like her father; and it seemed to him as if he had prompted Mrs. Durgin by his curious glance to say: “We don’t know half the time how the child lives. Cynthy! Take something to eat!”

Cynthia pleaded that she was not hungry; Mrs. Durgin declared that she would die if she kept on as she was going; and then the girl escaped to the kitchen on one of the errands which she made from time to time between the stove and the table.

“I presume it’s your coming, Mr. Westover,” Mrs. Durgin went on, with the comfortable superiority of elderly people to all the trials of the young. “I don’t know why she should make a stranger of you, every time. You’ve known her pretty much all her life.”

“Ever since you give Jeff what he deserved for scaring her and Frank with his dog,” said Whitwell.

“Poor Fox!” Mrs. Durgin sighed. “He did have the least sense for a dog I ever saw. And Jeff used to be so fond of him! Well, I guess he got tired of him, too, toward the last.”

“He’s gone to the happy hunting-grounds now. Colorady didn’t agree with him-or old age,” said Whitwell. “I don’t see why the Injuns wa’n’t right,” he pursued, thoughtfully. “If they’ve got souls, why ha’n’t their dogs? I suppose Mr. Westover here would say there wa’n’t any certainty about the Injuns themselves!”

“You know my weak point, Mr. Whitwell,” the painter confessed. “But I can’t prove they haven’t.”

“Nor dogs, neither, I guess,” said Whitwell, tolerantly. “It’s curious, though, if animals have got souls, that we ha’n’t ever had any communications from ‘em. You might say that ag’in’ the idea.”

“No, I’ll let you say it,” returned Westover. “But a good many of the communications seem to come from the lower intelligences, if not the lower animals.”

Whitwell laughed out his delight in the thrust. “Well, I guess that’s something so. And them old Egyptian devils, over there, that you say discovered the doctrine of immortality, seemed to think a cat was about as good as a man. What’s that,” he appealed to Mrs. Durgin, “Jackson said in his last letter about their cat mummies?”

“Well, I guess I’ll finish my supper first,” said Mrs. Durgin, whose nerves Westover would not otherwise have suspected of faintness. “But Jackson’s letters,” she continued, loyally, “are about the best letters!”

“Know they’d got some of ’em in the papers?” Whitwell asked; and at the surprise that Westover showed he told him how a fellow who was trying to make a paper go over at the Huddle, had heard of Jackson’s letters and teased for some of them, and had printed them as neighborhood news in that side of his paper which he did not buy ready printed in Boston.

Mrs. Durgin studied with modest deprecation the effect of the fact upon Westover, and seemed satisfied with it. “Well, of course, it’s interestin’ to Jackson’s old friends in the country, here. They know he’d look at things, over there, pretty much as they would. Well, I had to lend the letters round so much, anyway, it was a kind of a relief to have ’em in the paper, where everybody could see ‘em, and be done with it. Mr. Whit’ell here, he fixes ’em up so’s to leave out the family part, and I guess they’re pretty well thought of.”

Westover said he had no doubt they were, and he should want to see all the letters they could show him, in print and out of print.

“If Jackson only had Jeff’s health and opportunities—” the mother began, with a suppressed passion in her regret.

Frank Whitwell pushed back his chair. “I guess I’ll ask to be excused,” he said to the head of table.

“There! I a’n’t goin’ to say any more about that, if that’s what you’re afraid of, Frank,” said Mrs. Durgin. “Well, I presume I do talk a good deal about Jackson when I get goin’, and I presume it’s natural Cynthy shouldn’t want I should talk about Jeff before folks. Frank, a’n’t you goin’ to wait for that plate of hot biscuit? — if she ever gits it here!”

“I guess I don’t care for anything more,” said Frank, and he got himself out of the room more inarticulately than he need, Westover thought.

His, father followed his retreat with an eye of humorous intelligence. “I guess Frank don’t want to keep the young ladies waitin’ a great while. There’s a church sociable over ‘t the Huddle,” he explained to Westover.

“Oh, that’s it, is it?” Mrs. Durgin put in. “Why didn’t he say so.”

“Well, the young folks don’t any of ’em seem to want to talk about such things nowadays, and I don’t know as they ever did.” Whitwell took Westover into his confidence with a wink.

The biscuit that Cynthia brought in were burned a little on top, and Mrs. Durgin recognized the fact with the question, “Did you get to studyin’, out there? Take one, do, Mr. Westover! You ha’n’t made half a meal! If I didn’t keep round after her, I don’t know what would become of us all. The young ladies down at Boston, any of ‘em, try to keep up with the fellows in college?”

“I suppose they do in the Harvard Annex,” said Westover, simply, in spite of the glance with which Mrs. Durgin tried to convey a covert meaning. He understood it afterward, but for the present his single-mindedness spared the girl.

She remained to clear away the table, when the rest left it, and Westover followed Mrs. Durgin into the parlor, where she indemnified herself for refraining from any explicit allusion to Jeff before Cynthia. “The boy,” she explained, when she had made him ransack his memory for every scrap of fact concerning her son, “don’t hardly ever write to me, and I guess he don’t give Cynthy very much news. I presume he’s workin’ harder than ever this year. And I’m glad he’s goin’ about a little, from what you say. I guess he’s got to feelin’ a little better. It did worry me for him to feel so what you may call meechin’ about folks. You see anything that made you think he wa’n’t appreciated?”

After Westover got back into his own room, some one knocked at his door, and he found Whitwell outside. He scarcely asked him to come in, but Whitwell scarcely needed the invitation. “Got everything you want? I told Cynthy I’d come up and see after you; Frank won’t be back in time.” He sat down and put his feet on top of the stove, and struck the heels of his boots on its edge, from the habit of knocking the caked snow off them in that way on stove-tops. He did not wait to find out that there was no responsive sizzling before he asked, with a long nasal sigh, “Well, how is Jeff gettin’ along?”

He looked across at Westover, who had provisionally seated himself on his bed.

“Why, in the old way.” Whitwell kept his eye on him, and he added: “I suppose we don’t any of us change; we develop.”

Whitwell smiled with pleasure in the loosely philosophic suggestion. “You mean that he’s the same kind of a man that he was a boy? Well, I guess that’s so. The question is, what kind of a boy was he? I’ve been mullin’ over that consid’able since Cynthy and him fixed it up together. Of course, I know it’s their business, and all that; but I presume I’ve got a right to spee’late about it?”

He referred the point to Westover, who knew an inner earnestness in it, in spite of Whitwell’s habit of outside jocosity. “Every right in the world, I should say, Mr. Whitwell,” he answered, seriously.

“Well, I’m glad you feel that way,” said Whitwell, with a little apparent surprise. “I don’t want to meddle, any; but I know what Cynthy is — I no need to brag her up — and I don’t feel so over and above certain ‘t I know what he is. He’s a good deal of a mixture, if you want to know how he strikes me. I don’t mean I don’t like him; I do; the fellow’s got a way with him that makes me kind of like him when I see him. He’s good-natured and clever; and he’s willin’ to take any amount of trouble for you; but you can’t tell where to have him.” Westover denied the appeal for explicit assent in Whitwell’s eye, and he went on: “If I’d done that fellow a good turn, in spite of him, or if I’d held him up to something that he allowed was right, and consented to, I should want to keep a sharp lookout that he didn’t play me some ugly trick for it. He’s a comical devil,” Whitwell ended, rather inadequately. “How d’s it look to you? Seen anything lately that seemed to tally with my idee?”

“No, no; I can’t say that I have,” said Westover, reluctantly. He wished to be franker than he now meant to be, but he consulted a scruple that he did not wholly respect; a mere convention it seemed to him, presently. He said: “I’ve always felt that charm in him, too, and I’ve seen the other traits, though not so clearly as you seem to have done. He has a powerful will, yes—”

He stopped, and Whitwell asked: “Been up to any deviltry lately?”

“I can’t say he has. Nothing that I can call intentional.”

“No,” said Whitwell. “What’s he done, though?”

“Really, Mr. Whitwell, I don’t know that you have any right to expect me to talk him over, when I’m here as his mother’s guest — his own guest — ?”

“No. I ha’n’t,” said Whitwell. “What about the father of the girl he’s goin’ to marry?”

Westover could not deny the force of this. “You’d be anxious if I didn’t tell you what I had in mind, I dare say, more than if I did.” He told him of Jeff’s behavior with Alan Lynde, and of his talk with him about it. “And I think he was honest. It was something that happened, that wasn’t meant.”

Whitwell did not assent directly, somewhat to Westover’s surprise. He asked: “Fellow ever done anything to Jeff?”

“Not that I know of. I don’t know that they ever met before.”

Whitwell kicked his heels on the edge of the stove again. “Then it might been an accident,” he said, dryly.

Westover had to break the silence that followed, and he found himself defending Jeff, though somehow not for Jeff’s sake. He urged that if he had the strong will they both recognized in him, he would never commit the errors of a weak man, which were usually the basest.

“How do you know that a strong-willed man a’n’t a weak one?” Whitwell astonished him by asking. “A’n’t what we call a strong will just a kind of a bull-dog clinch that the dog himself can’t unloose? I take it a man that has a good will is a strong man. If Jeff done a right thing against his will, he wouldn’t rest easy till he’d showed that he wa’n’t obliged to, by some mischief worse ‘n what he was kept out of. I tell you, Mr. Westover, if I’d made that fellow toe the mark any way, I’d be afraid of him.” Whitwell looked at Westover with eyes of significance, if not of confidence. Then he rose with a prolonged “M — wel-l-l! We’re all born, but we a’n’t all buried. This world is a queer place. But I guess Jeff ‘ll come out right in the end.”

Westover said, “I’m sure he will!” and he shook hands warmly with the father of the girl Jeff was going to marry.

Whitwell came back, after he had got some paces away, and said: “Of course, this is between you and me, Mr. Westover.”

“Of course!”

“I don’t mean Mis’ Durgin. I shouldn’t care what she thought of my talkin’ him over with you. I don’t know,” he continued, putting up his hand against the door-frame, to give himself the comfort of its support while he talked, “as you understood what she mean by the young ladies at Boston keepin’ up with the fellows in college. Well, that’s what Cynthy’s doin’ with Jeff, right along; and if he ever works off them conditions of his, and gits his degree, it’ ll be because she helped him to. I tell you, there’s more than one kind of telepathy in this world, Mr. Westover. That’s all.”

XXXIX

Westover understood from Whitwell’s afterthought that it was Cynthia he was anxious to keep ignorant of his misgivings, if they were so much as misgivings. But the importance of this fact could not stay him against the tide of sleep which was bearing him down. When his head touched the pillow it swept over him, and he rose from it in the morning with a gayety of heart which he knew to be returning health. He jumped out of bed, and stuffed some shavings into his stove from the wood-box beside it, and laid some logs on them; he slid the damper open, and then lay down again, listening to the fire that showed its red teeth through the slats and roared and laughed to the day which sparkled on the white world without. When he got out of bed a second time, he found the room so hot that he had to pull down his window-sash, and he dressed in a temperature of twenty degrees below zero without knowing that the dry air was more than fresh. Mrs. Durgin called to him through the open door of her parlor, as he entered the dining-room: “Cynthy will give you your breakfast, Mr. Westover. We’re all done long ago, and I’m busy in here,” and the girl appeared with the coffee-pot and the dishes she had been keeping hot for him at the kitchen stove. She seemed to be going to leave him when she had put them down before him, but she faltered, and then she asked: “Do you want I should pour your coffee for you?”

“Oh yes! Do!” he begged, and she sat down across the table from him. “I’m ashamed to make this trouble for you,” he added. “I didn’t know it was so late.”

“Oh, we have the whole day for our work,” she answered, tolerantly.

He laughed, and said: “How strange that seems! I suppose I shall get used to it. But in town we seem never to have a whole day for a day’s work; we always have to do part of it at night, or the next morning. Do you ever have a day here that’s too large a size for its work?”

“You can nearly always find something to do about a house,” she returned, evasively. “But the time doesn’t go the way it does in the summer.”

“Oh, I know how the country is in the winter,” he said. “I was brought up in the country.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said, and she gave him a stare of surprise before her eyes fell.

“Yes. Out in Wisconsin. My people were emigrants, and I lived in the woods, there, till I began to paint my way out. I began pretty early, but I was in the woods till I was sixteen.”

“I didn’t know that,” she repeated. “I always thought that you were—”

“Summer folks, like the rest? No, I’m all-the-year-round folks originally. But I haven’t been in the country in the winter since I was a boy; and it’s all been coming back to me, here, like some one else’s experience.”

She did not say anything, but the interest in her eyes, which she could not keep from his face now, prompted him to go on.

“You can make a beginning in the West easier than you can in the East, and some people who came to our lumber camp discovered me, and gave me a chance to begin. I went to Milwaukee first, and they made me think I was somebody. Then I came on to New York, and they made me think I was nobody. I had to go to Europe to find out which I was; but after I had been there long enough I didn’t care to know. What I was trying to do was the important thing to me; not the fellow who was trying to do it.”

“Yes,” she said, with intelligence.

“I met some Boston people in Italy, and I thought I should like to live where that kind of people lived. That’s the way I came to be in Boston. It all seems very simple now, but I used to think it might look romantic from the outside. I’ve had a happy life; and I’m glad it began in the country. I shouldn’t care if it ended there. I don’t know why I’ve bothered you with my autobiography, though. Perhaps because I thought you knew it already.”

She looked as if she would have said something fitting if she could have ruled herself to it; but she said nothing at all. Her failure seemed to abash her, and she could only ask him if he would not have some more coffee, and then excuse herself, and leave him to finish his breakfast alone.

That day he tried for his picture from several points out-of-doors before he found that his own window gave him the best. With the window open, and the stove warm at his back, he worked there in great comfort nearly every afternoon. The snows kept off, and the clear sunsets burned behind the summit day after day. He painted frankly and faithfully, and made a picture which, he said to himself, no one would believe in, with that warm color tender upon the frozen hills. The soft suffusion of the winter scene was improbable to him when he had it in, nature before his eyes; when he looked at it as he got it on his canvas it was simply impossible.

In the forenoons he had nothing to do, for he worked at his picture only when the conditions renewed themselves with the sinking sun. He tried to be in the open air, and get the good of it; but his strength for walking had failed him, and he kept mostly to the paths broken around the house. He went a good deal to the barn with Whitwell and Jombateeste to look after the cattle and the horses, whose subdued stamping and champing gave him a sort of animal pleasure. The blended odors of the hay-mows and of the creatures’ breaths came to him with the faint warmth which their bodies diffused through the cold obscurity.

When the wide doors were rolled back, and the full day was let in, he liked the appeal of their startled eyes, and the calls they made to one another from their stalls, while the men spoke back to them in terms which they seemed to have in common with them, and with the poultry that flew down from the barn lofts to the barn floor and out into the brilliant day, with loud clamor and affected alarm.

In these simple experiences he could not imagine the summer life of the place. It was nowhere more extinct than in the hollow verandas, where the rocking-chairs swung in July and August, and where Westover’s steps in his long tramps up and down woke no echo of the absent feet. In-doors he kept to the few stove-heated rooms where he dwelt with the family, and sent only now and then a vague conjecture into the hotel built round the old farm-house. He meant, before he left, to ask Mrs. Durgin to let him go through the hotel, but he put it off from day to day, with a physical shrinking from its cold and solitude.

The days went by in the swiftness of monotony. His excursions to the barn, his walks on the verandas, his work on his picture, filled up the few hours of the light, and when the dark came he contentedly joined the little group in Mrs. Durgin’s parlor. He had brought two or three books with him, and sometimes he read from one of them; or he talked with Whitwell on some of the questions of life and death that engaged his speculative mind. Jombateeste preferred the kitchen for the naps he took after supper before his early bedtime. Frank Whitwell sat with his books there, where Westover sometimes saw his sister helping him at his studies. He was loyally faithful and obedient to her in all things. He helped her with the dishes, and was not ashamed to be seen at this work; she had charge of his goings and comings in society; he submitted to her taste in his dress, and accepted her counsel on many points which he referred to her, and discussed with her in low-spoken conferences. He seemed a formal, serious boy, shy like his sister; his father let fall some hints of a religious cast of mind in him. He had an ambition beyond the hotel; he wished to study for the ministry; and it was not alone the chance of going home with the girls that made him constant at the evening meetings. “I don’t know where he gits it,” said his father, with a shake of the head that suggested doubt of the wisdom of the son’s preference of theology to planchette.

Cynthia had the same care of her father as of her brother; she kept him neat, and held him up from lapsing into the slovenliness to which he would have tended if she had not, as Westover suspected, made constant appeals to him for the respect due their guest. Mrs. Durgin, for her part, left everything to Cynthia, with a contented acceptance of her future rule and an abiding trust in her sense and strength, which included the details of the light work that employed her rather luxurious leisure. Jombateeste himself came to Cynthia with his mending, and her needle kept him tight and firm against the winter which it amused Westover to realize was the Canuck’s native element, insomuch that there was now something incongruous in the notion of Jombateeste and any other season.

The girl’s motherly care of all the household did not leave Westover out. Buttons appeared on garments long used to shifty contrivances for getting on without them; buttonholes were restored to their proper limits; his overcoat pockets were searched for gloves, and the gloves put back with their finger-tips drawn close as the petals of a flower which had decided to shut and be a bud again.

He wondered how he could thank her for his share of the blessing that her passion for motherly care was to all the house. It was pathetic, and he used sometimes to forecast her self-devotion with a tender indignation, which included a due sense of his own present demerit. He was not reconciled to the sacrifice because it seemed the happiness, or at least the will, of the nature which made it. All the same it seemed a waste, in its relation to the man she was to marry.

Mrs. Durgin and Cynthia sat by the lamp and sewed at night, or listened to the talk of the men. If Westover read aloud, they whispered together from time to time about some matters remote from it, as women always do where there is reading. It was quiet, but it was not dull for Westover, who found himself in no hurry to get back to town.

Sometimes he thought of the town with repulsion; its unrest, its vacuous, troubled life haunted him like a memory of sickness; but he supposed that when he should be quite well again all that would change, and be as it was before. He interested himself, with the sort of shrewd ignorance of it that Cynthia showed in the questions she asked about it now and then when they chanced to be left alone together. He fancied that she was trying to form some intelligible image of Jeff’s environment there, and was piecing together from his talk of it the impressions she had got from summer folks. He did his best to help her, and to construct for her a veritable likeness of the world as far as he knew it.

A time came when he spoke frankly of Jeff in something they were saying, and she showed no such shrinking as he had expected she would; he reflected that she might have made stricter conditions with Mrs. Durgin than she expected to keep herself in mentioning him. This might well have been necessary with the mother’s pride in her son, which knew no stop when it once began to indulge itself. What struck Westover more than the girl’s self-possession when they talked of Jeff was a certain austerity in her with regard to him. She seemed to hold herself tense against any praise of him, as if she should fail him somehow if she relaxed at all in his favor.

This, at least, was the rather mystifying impression which Westover got from her evident wish to criticise and understand exactly all that he reported, rather than to flatter herself from it. Whatever her motive was, he was aware that through it all she permitted herself a closer and fuller trust of himself. At times it was almost too implicit; he would have liked to deserve it better by laying open all that had been in his heart against Jeff. But he forbore, of course, and he took refuge, as well as he could, in the respect by which she held herself at a reverent distance from him when he could not wholly respect himself.

XL.

One morning Westover got leave from Mrs. Durgin to help Cynthia open the dim rooms and cold corridors at the hotel to the sun and air. She promised him he should take his death, but he said he would wrap up warm, and when he came to join the girl in his overcoat and fur cap, he found Cynthia equipped with a woollen cloud tied around her head, and a little shawl pinned across her breast.

“Is that all?” he reproached her. “I ought to have put on a single wreath of artificial flowers and some sort of a blazer for this expedition. Don’t you think so, Mrs. Durgin?”

“I believe women can stand about twice as much cold as you can, the best of you,” she answered, grimly.

“Then I must try to keep myself as warm as I can with work,” he said. “You must let me do all the rough work of airing out, won’t you, Cynthia?”

“There isn’t any rough work about it,” she answered, in a sort of motherly toleration of his mood, without losing anything of her filial reverence.

She took care of him, he perceived, as she took care of her brother and her father, but with a delicate respect for his superiority, which was no longer shyness.

They began with the office and the parlor, where they flung up the windows, and opened the doors, and then they opened the dining-room, where the tables stood in long rows, with the chairs piled on them legs upward. Cynthia went about with many sighs for the dust on everything, though to Westover’s eyes it all seemed frigidly clean. “If it goes on as it has for the past two years,” she said, “we shall have to add on a new dining-room. I don’t know as I like to have it get so large!”

“I never wanted it to go beyond the original farmhouse,” said Westover. “I’ve been jealous of every boarder but the first. I should have liked to keep it for myself, and let the world know Lion’s Head from my pictures.”

“I guess Mrs. Durgin thinks it was your picture that began to send people here.”

“And do you blame me, too? What if the thing I’m doing now should make it a winter resort? Nothing could save you, then, but a fire. I believe that’s Jeff’s ambition. Only he would want to put another hotel in place of this; something that would be more popular. Then the ruin I began would be complete, and I shouldn’t come any more; I couldn’t bear the sight.”

“I guess Mrs. Durgin wouldn’t think it was lion’s Head if you stopped coming,” said Cynthia.

“But you would know better than that,” said Westover; and then he was sorry he had said it, for it seemed to ask something of different quality from her honest wish to make him know their regard for him.

She did not answer, but went down a long corridor to which they had mounted, to raise the window at the end, while he raised another at the opposite extremity. When they met at the stairway again to climb to the story above, he said: “I am always ashamed when I try to make a person of sense say anything silly,” and she flushed, still without answering, as if she understood him, and his meaning pleased her. “But fortunately a person of sense is usually equal to the temptation. One ought to be serious when he tries it with a person of the other sort; but I don’t know that one is!”

“Do you feel any draught between these windows?” asked Cynthia, abruptly. “I don’t want you should take cold.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Westover.

She went into the rooms on one side of the corridor, and put up their windows, and flung the blinds back. He did the same on the other side. He got a peculiar effect of desolation from the mattresses pulled down over the foot of the bedsteads, and the dismantled interiors reflected in the mirrors of the dressing-cases; and he was going to speak of it when he rejoined Cynthia at the stairway leading to the third story, when she said, “Those were Mrs. Vostrand’s rooms I came out of the last.” She nodded her head over her shoulder toward the floor they were leaving.

“Were they indeed! And do you remember people’s rooms so long?”

“Yes; I always think of rooms by the name of people that have them, if they’re any way peculiar.”

He thought this bit of uncandor charming, and accepted it as if it were the whole truth. “And Mrs. Vostrand was certainly peculiar. Tell me, Cynthia, what did you think of her?”

“She was only here a little while.”

“But you wouldn’t have come to think of her rooms by her name if she hadn’t made a strong impression on you!” She did not answer, and he said, “I see you didn’t like her!”

The girl would not speak, and Mr. Westover went on: “She used to be very good to me, and I think she used to be better to herself than she is now.” He knew that Jeff must have told Cynthia of his affair with Genevieve Vostrand, and he kept himself from speaking of her by a resolution he thought creditable, as he mounted the stairs to the upper story in the silence to which Cynthia left his last remark. At the top she made a little pause in the obscurer light of the close-shuttered corridor, while she said: “I liked her daughter the best.”

“Yes?” he returned. “I — never felt very well acquainted with her, I believe. One couldn’t get far with her. Though, for the matter of that, one didn’t get far with Mrs. Vostrand herself. Did you think Genevieve was much influenced by her mother?”

“She didn’t seem a strong character.”

“No, that was it. She was what her mother wished her to be. I’ve often wondered how much she was interested in the marriage she made.”

Cynthia let a rustic silence ensue, and Westover shrank again from the inquisition he longed to make.

It was not Genevieve Vostrand’s marriage which really concerned him, but Cynthia’s engagement, and it was her mind that he would have liked to look into. It might well be supposed that she regarded it in a perfect matter-of-fact way, and with no ambition beyond it. She was a country girl, acquainted from childhood with facts of life which town-bred girls would not have known without a blunting of the sensibilities, and why should she be different from other country girls? She might be as good and as fine as he saw her, and yet be insensible to the spiritual toughness of Jeff, because of her love for him. Her very goodness might make his badness unimaginable to her, and if her refinement were from the conscience merely, and not from the tastes and experiences, too, there was not so much to dread for her in her marriage with such a man. Still, he would have liked, if he could, to tell her what he had told her father of Durgin’s behavior with Lynde, and let her bring the test of her self-devotion to the case with a clear understanding. He had sometimes been afraid that Whitwell might not be able to keep it to himself; but now he wished that the philosopher had not been so discreet. He had all this so absorbingly in mind that he started presently with the fear that she had said something and he had not answered, but when he asked her he found that she had not spoken. They were standing at an open window looking out upon Lion’s Head, when he said: “I don’t know how I shall show my gratitude to Mrs. Durgin and you for thinking of having me up here. I’ve done a picture of Lion’s Head that might be ever so much worse; but I shouldn’t have dreamed of getting at it if it hadn’t been for you, though I’ve so often dreamed of doing it. Now I shall go home richer in every sort of way-thanks to you.”

She answered, simply: “You needn’t thank anybody; but it was Jeff who thought of it; we were ready enough to ask you.”

“That was very good of him,” said Westover, whom her words confirmed in a suspicion he had had all along. But what did it matter that Jeff had suggested their asking him, and then attributed the notion to them? It was not so malign for him to use that means of ingratiating himself with Westover, and of making him forget his behavior with Lynde, and it was not unnatural. It was very characteristic; at the worst it merely proved that Jeff was more ashamed of what he had done than he would allow, and that was to his credit.

He heard Cynthia asking: “Mr. Westover, have you ever been at Class Day? He wants us to come.”

“Class Day? Oh, Class Day!” He took a little time to gather himself together. “Yes, I’ve been at a good many. If you care to see something pretty, it’s the prettiest thing in the world. The students’ sisters and mothers come from everywhere; and there’s fashion and feasting and flirting, from ten in the morning till ten at night. I’m not sure there’s so much happiness; but I can’t tell. The young people know about that. I fancy there’s a good deal of defeat and disappointment in it all. But if you like beautiful dresses, and music and dancing, and a great flutter of gayety, you can get more of it at Class Day than you can in any other way. The good time depends a great deal upon the acquaintance a student has, and whether he is popular in college.” Westover found this road a little impassable, and he faltered.

Cynthia did not apparently notice his hesitation. “Do you think Mrs. Durgin would like it?”

“Mrs. Durgin?” Westover found that he had been leaving her out of the account, and had been thinking only of Cynthia’s pleasure or pain. “Well, I don’t suppose — it would be rather fatiguing — Did Jeff want her to come too?”

“He said so.”

“That’s very nice of him. If he could devote himself to her; but — And would she like to go?”

“To please him, she would.” Westover was silent, and the girl surprised him by the appeal she suddenly made to him. “Mr. Westover, do you believe it would be very well for either of us to go? I think it would be better for us to leave all that part of his life alone. It’s no use in pretending that we’re like the kind of people he knows, or that we know their ways, and I don’t believe—”

Westover felt his heart rise in indignant sympathy. “There isn’t any one he knows to compare with you!” he said, and in this he was thinking mainly of Bessie Lynde. “You’re worth a thousand — If I were — if he’s half a man he would be proud — I beg your pardon! I don’t mean — but you understand—”

Cynthia put her head far out of the window and looked along the steep roof before them. “There is a blind off one of the windows. I heard it clapping in the wind the other night. I must go and see the number of the room.” She drew her head in quickly and ran away without letting him see her face.

He followed her. “Let me help you put it on again!”

“No, no!” she called back. “Frank will do that, or Jombateeste, when they come to shut up the house.”

XLI.

Westover, did not meet Durgin for several days after his return from Lion’s Head. He brought messages for him from his mother and from Whitwell, and he waited for him to come and get them so long that he had to blame himself for not sending them to him. When Jeff appeared, at the end of a week, Westover had a certain embarrassment in meeting him, and the effort to overcome this carried him beyond his sincerity. He was aware of feigning the cordiality he showed, and of having less real liking for him than ever before. He suggested that he must be busier every day, now, with his college work, and he resented the air of social prosperity which Jeff put on in saying, Yes, there was that, and then he had some engagements which kept him from coming in sooner.

He did not say what the engagements were, and they did not recur to the things they had last spoken of. Westover could not do so without Jeff’s leading, and he was rather glad that he gave none. He stayed only a little time, which was spent mostly in a show of interest on both sides, and the hollow hilarities which people use to mask their indifference to one another’s being and doing. Jeff declared that he had never seen Westover looking so well, and said he must go up to Lion’s Head again; it had done him good. As for his picture, it was a corker; it made him feel as if he were there! He asked about all the folks, and received Westover’s replies with vague laughter, and an absence in his bold eye, which made the painter wonder what his mind was on, without the wish to find out. He was glad to have him go, though he pressed him to drop in soon again, and said they would take in a play together.

Jeff said he would like to do that, and he asked at the door whether Westover was going to the tea at Mrs. Bellingham’s. He said he had to look in there, before he went out to Cambridge; and left Westover in mute amaze at the length he had apparently gone in a road that had once seemed no thoroughfare for him. Jeff’s social acceptance, even after the Enderby ball, which was now some six or seven weeks past, had been slow; but of late, for no reason that he or any one else could have given, it had gained a sudden precipitance; and people who wondered why they met him at other houses began to ask him to their own.

He did not care to go to their houses, and he went at first in the hope of seeing Bessie Lynde again. But this did not happen for some time, and it was a mid-Lenten tea that brought them together. As soon as he caught sight of her he went up to her and began to talk as if they had been in the habit of meeting constantly. She could not control a little start at his approach, and he frankly recognized it.

“What’s the matter?”

“Oh — the window!”

“It isn’t open,” he said, trying it. “Do you want to try it yourself?”

“I think I can trust you,” she answered, but she sank a little into the shelter of the curtains, not to be seen talking with him, perhaps, or not to be interrupted — she did not analyze her motive closely.

He remained talking to her until she went away, and then he contrived to go with her. She did not try to escape him after that; each time they met she had the pleasure of realizing that there had never been any danger of what never happened. But beyond this she could perhaps have given no better reason for her willingness to meet him again and again than the bewildered witnesses of the fact. In her set people not only never married outside of it, but they never flirted outside of it. For one of themselves, even for a girl like Bessie, whom they had not quite known from childhood, to be apparently amusing herself with a man like that, so wholly alien in origin, in tradition, was something unheard of; and it began to look as if Bessie Lynde was more than amused. It seemed to Mary Enderby that wherever she went she saw that man talking to Bessie. She could have believed that it was by some evil art that he always contrived to reach Bessie’s side, if anything could have been less like any kind of art than the bold push he made for her as soon as he saw her in a room. But sometimes Miss Enderby feared that it was Bessie who used such finesse as there was, and always put herself where he could see her. She waited with trembling for her to give the affair sanction by making her aunt ask him to something at her house. On the other hand, she could not help feeling that Bessie’s flirtation was all the more deplorable for the want of some such legitimation.

She did not even know certainly whether Jeff ever called upon Bessie at her aunt’s house, till one day the man let him out at the same time he let her in.

“Oh, come up, Molly!” Bessie sang out from the floor above, and met her half-way down the stairs, where she kissed her and led her embraced into the library.

“You don’t like my jay, do you, dear?” she asked, promptly.

Mary Enderby turned her face, the mirror of conscience, upon her, and asked: “Is he your jay?”

“Well, no; not just in that sense, Molly. But suppose he was?”

“Then I should have nothing to say.”

“And suppose he wasn’t?”

Still Mary Enderby found herself with nothing of all she had a thousand times thought she should say to Bessie if she had ever the slightest chance. It always seemed so easy, till now, to take Bessie in her arms, and appeal to her good sense, her self-respect, her regard for her family and friends; and now it seemed so impossible.

She heard herself answering, very stiffly: “Perhaps I’d better apologize for what I’ve said already. You must think I was very unjust the last time we mentioned him.”

“Not at all!” cried Bessie, with a laugh that sounded very mocking and very unworthy to her friend. “He’s all that you said, and worse. But he’s more than you said, and better.”

“I don’t understand,” said Mary, coldly.

“He’s very interesting; he’s original; he’s different!”

“Oh, every one says that.”

“And he doesn’t flatter me, or pretend to think much of me. If he did, I couldn’t bear him. You know how I am, Molly. He keeps me interested, don’t you understand, and prowling about in the great unknown where he has his weird being.”

Bessie put her hand to her mouth, and laughed at Mary Enderby with her slanted eyes; a sort of Parisian version of a Chinese motive in eyes.

“I suppose,” her friend said, sadly, “you won’t tell me more than you wish.”

“I won’t tell you more than I know — though I’d like to,” said Bessie. She gave Mary a sudden hug. “You dear! There isn’t anything of it, if that’s what you mean.”

“But isn’t there danger that there will be, Bessie?” her friend entreated.

“Danger? I shouldn’t call it danger, exactly!”

“But if you don’t respect him, Bessie—”

“Why, how can I? He doesn’t respect me!”

“I know you’re teasing, now,” said Mary Enderby, getting up, “and you’re quite right. I have no business to—”

Bessie pulled her down upon the seat again. “Yes, you have! Don’t I tell you, over and over? He doesn’t respect me, because I don’t know how to make him, and he wouldn’t like it if I did. But now I’ll try to make you understand. I don’t believe I care for him the least; but mind, I’m not certain, for I’ve never cared for any one, and I don’t know what it’s like. You know I’m not sentimental; I think sentiment’s funny; and I’m not dignified—”

“You’re divine,” murmured Mary Enderby, with reproachful adoration.

“Yes, but you see how my divinity could be improved,” said Bessie, with a wild laugh. “I’m not sentimental, but I’m emotional, and he gives me emotions. He’s a riddle, and I’m all the time guessing at him. You get the answer to the kind of men we know easily; and it’s very nice, but it doesn’t amuse you so much as trying. Now, Mr. Durgin — what a name! I can see it makes you creep — is no more like one of us than a — bear is — and his attitude toward us is that of a bear who’s gone so much with human beings that he thinks he’s a human being. He’s delightful, that way. And, do you know, he’s intellectual! He actually brings me books, and wants to read passages to me out of them! He has brought me the plans of the new hotel he’s going to build. It’s to be very aesthetic, and it’s going to be called The Lion’s Head Inn. There’s to be a little theatre, for amateur dramatics, which I could conduct, and for all sorts of professional amusements. If you should ever come, Molly, I’m sure we shall do our best to make you comfortable.”

Mary Enderby would not let Bessie laugh upon her shoulder after she said this. “Bessie Lynde,” she said, severely, “if you have no regard for yourself, you ought to have some regard for him. You may say you are not encouraging him, and you may believe it—”

“Oh, I shouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it,” Bessie broke in, with a mock air of seriousness.

“I must be going,” said Mary, stiffly, and this time she succeeded in getting to her feet.

Bessie laid hold of her again. “You think you’ve been trifled with, don’t you, dear?”

“No—”

“Yes, you do! Don’t you try to be slippery, Molly. The plain pikestaff is your style, morally speaking — if any one knows what a pikestaff is. Well, now, listen! You’re anxious about me.”

“You know how I feel, Bessie,” said Mary Enderby, looking her in the eyes.

“Yes, I do,” said Bessie. “The trouble is, I don’t know how I feel. But if I ever do, Molly, I’ll tell you! Is that fair?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll give you ample warning. At the least little consciousness in the region of the pericardium, off will go a note by a district messenger, and when you come I’ll do whatever you say. There!”

“Oh, Bessie!” cried her friend, and she threw her arms round her, “you always were the most fascinating creature in the world!”

“Yes,” said Bessie, “that’s what I try to have him think.”

XLII.

Toward the end of April most people who had places at the Shore were mostly in them, but they came up to town on frequent errands, and had one effect of evanescence with people who still remained in their Boston houses provisionally, and seemed more than half absent. The Enderbys had been at the Shore for a fortnight, and the Lyndes were going to be a fortnight longer in Boston, yet, as Bessie made her friend observe, when Mary, ran in for lunch, or stopped for a moment on her way to the train, every few days, they were both of the same transitory quality.

“It might as well be I as you,” Bessie said one day, “if we only think so. It’s all very weird, dear, and I’m not sure but it is you who sit day after day at my lonely casement and watch the sparrows examining the fuzzy buds of the Jap ivy to see just how soon they can hope to build in the vines. Do you object to the ivy buds looking so very much like snipped woollen rags? If you do, I’m sure it’s you, here in my place, for when I come up to town in your personality it sets my teeth on edge. In fact, that’s the worst thing about Boston now — the fuzzy ivy buds; there’s so much ivy! When you can forget the buds, there are a great many things to make you happy. I feel quite as if we were spending the summer in town and I feel very adventurous and very virtuous, like some sort of self-righteous bohemian. You don’t know how I look down on people who have gone out of town. I consider them very selfish and heartless; I don’t know why, exactly. But when we have a good marrow-freezing northeasterly storm, and the newspapers come out with their ironical congratulations to the tax-dodgers at the Shore, I feel that Providence is on my side, and I’m getting my reward, even in this world.” Bessie suddenly laughed. “I see by your expression of fixed inattention, Molly, that you’re thinking of Mr. Durgin!”

Mary gave a start of protest, but she was too honest to deny the fact outright, and Bessie ran on:

“No, we don’t sit on a bench in the Common, or even in the Garden, or on the walk in Commonwealth Avenue. If we come to it later, as the season advances, I shall make him stay quite at the other end of the bench, and not put his hand along the top. You needn’t be afraid, Molly; all the proprieties shall be religiously observed. Perhaps I shall ask Aunt Louisa to let us sit out on her front steps, when the evenings get warmer; but I assure you it’s much more comfortable in-doors yet, even in town, though you’ll hardly, believe it at the Shore. Shall you come up to Class Day?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mary began, with a sigh of the baffled hope and the inextinguishable expectation which the mention of Class Day stirs in the heart of every Boston girl past twenty.

“Yes!” said Bessie, with a sigh burlesqued from Mary’s. “That is what we all say, and it is certainly the most maddening of human festivals. I suppose, if we were quite left to ourselves, we shouldn’t go; but we seem never to be, quite. After every Class Day I say to myself that nothing on earth could induce me to go to another; but when it comes round again, I find myself grasping at any straw of a pretext. I’m pretending now that I’ve a tender obligation to go because it’s his Class Day.”

“Bessie!” cried Mary Enderby. “You don’t mean it!”

“Not if I say it, Mary dear. What did I promise you about the pericardiac symptoms? But I feel — I feel that if he asks me I must go. Shouldn’t you like to go and see a jay Class Day — be part of it? Think of going once to the Pi Ute spread — or whatever it is! And dancing in their tent! And being left out of the Gym, and Beck! Yes, I ought to go, so that it can be brought home to me, and I can have a realizing sense of what I am doing, and be stayed in my mad career.”

“Perhaps,” Mary Enderby suggested, colorlessly, “he will be devoted to his own people.” She had a cold fascination in the picture Bessie’s words had conjured up, and she was saying this less to Bessie than to herself.

“And I should meet them — his mothers and sisters!” Bessie dramatized an excess of anguish. “Oh, Mary, that is the very thorn I have been trying not to press my heart against; and does your hand commend it to my embrace? His folks! Yes, they would be folks; and what folks! I think I am getting a realizing sense. Wait! Don’t speak don’t move, Molly!” Bessie dropped her chin into her hand, and stared straight forward, gripping Mary Enderby’s hand.

Mary withdrew it. “I shall have to go, Bessie,” she said. “How is your aunt?”

“Must you? Then I shall always say that it was your fault that I couldn’t get a realizing sense — that you prevented me, just when I was about to see myself as others see me — as you see me. She’s very well!” Bessie sighed in earnest, and her friend gave her hand a little pressure of true sympathy. “But of course it’s rather dull here, now.”

“I hate to have you staying on. Couldn’t you come down to us for a week?”

“No. We both think it’s best to be here when Alan gets back. We want him to go down with us.” Bessie had seldom spoken openly with Mary Enderby about her brother; but that was rather from Mary’s shrinking than her own; she knew that everybody understood his case. She went so far now as to say: “He’s ever so much better than he has been. We have such hopes of him, if he can keep well, when he gets back this time.”

“Oh, I know he will,” said Mary, fervently. “I’m sure of it. Couldn’t we do something for you, Bessie?”

“No, there isn’t anything. But — thank you. I know you always think of me, and that’s worlds. When are you coming up again?”

“I don’t know. Next week, some time.”

“Come in and see me — and Alan, if he should be at home. He likes you, and he will be so glad.”

Mary kissed Bessie for consent. “You know how much I admire Alan. He could be anything.”

“Yes, he could. If he could!”

Bessie seldom put so much earnest in anything, and Mary loved (as she would have said) the sad sincerity, the honest hopelessness of her tone. “We must help him. I know we can.”

“We must try. But people who could — if they could—” Bessie stopped.

Her friend divined that she was no longer speaking wholly of her brother, but she said: “There isn’t any if about it; and there are no ifs about anything if we only think so. It’s a sin not to think so.”

The mixture of severity and of optimism in the nature of her friend had often amused Bessie, and it did not escape her tacit notice in even so serious a moment as this. Her theory was that she was shocked to recognize it now, because of its relation to her brother, but her theories did not always agree with the facts.

That evening, however, she was truly surprised when, after a rather belated ring at the door, the card of Mr. Thomas Jefferson Durgin came up to her from the reception-room. Her aunt had gone to bed, and she had a luxurious moment in which she reaped all the reward of self-denial by supposing herself to have foregone the pleasure of seeing him, and sending down word that she was not at home. She did not wish, indeed, to see him, but she wished to know how he felt warranted in calling in the evening, and it was this unworthy, curiosity which she stifled for that luxurious moment. The next, with undiminished dignity, she said, “Ask him to come up, Andrew,” and she waited in the library for him to offer a justification of the liberty he had taken.

He offered none whatever, but behaved at once as if he had always had the habit of calling in the evening, or as if it was a general custom which he need not account for in his own case. He brought her a book which they had talked of at their last meeting, but he made no excuse or pretext of it.

He said it was a beautiful night, and that he had found it rather warm walking in from Cambridge. The exercise had moistened his whole rich, red color, and fine drops of perspiration stood on his clean-shaven upper lip and in the hollow between his under lip and his bold chin; he pushed back the coarse, dark-yellow hair from his forehead with his handkerchief, and let his eyes mock her from under his thick, straw-colored eyebrows. She knew that he was enjoying his own impudence, and he was so handsome that she could not refuse to enjoy it with him. She asked him if he would not have a fan, and he allowed her to get it for him from the mantel. “Will you have some tea?”

“No; but a glass of water, if you please,” he said, and Bessie rang and sent for some apollinaris, which Jeff drank a great goblet of when it came. Then he lay back in the deep chair he had taken, with the air of being ready for any little amusing thing she had to say.

“Are you still a pessimist, Mr. Durgin?” she asked, tentatively, with the effect of innocence that he knew meant mischief.

“No,” he said. “I’m a reformed optimist.”

“What is that?”

“It’s a man who can’t believe all the good he would like, but likes to believe all the good he can.”

Bessie said it over, with burlesque thoughtfulness. “There was a girl here to-day,” she said, solemnly, “who must have been a reformed pessimist, then, for she said the same thing.”

“Oh! Miss Enderby,” said Jeff.

Bessie started. “You’re preternatural! But what a pity you should be mistaken. How came you to think of her?”

“She doesn’t like me, and you always put me on trial after she’s been here.”

“Am I putting you on trial now? It’s your guilty conscience! Why shouldn’t Mary Enderby like you?”

“Because I’m not good enough.”

“Oh! And what has that to do with people’s liking you? If that was a reason, how many friends do you think you would have?”

“I’m not sure that I should have any.”

“And doesn’t that make you feel badly?”

“Very.” Jeff’s confession was a smiling one.

“You don’t show it!”

“I don’t want to grieve you.”

“Oh, I’m not sure that would grieve me.”

“Well, I thought I wouldn’t risk it.”

“How considerate of you!”

They had come to a little barrier, up that way, and could go no further. Jeff said: “I’ve just been interviewing another reformed pessimist.”

“Mr. Westover?”

“You’re preternatural, too. And you’re not mistaken, either. Do you ever go to his studio?”

“No; I haven’t been there since he told me it would be of no use to come as a student. He can be terribly frank.”

“Nobody knows that better than I do,” said Jeff, with a smile for the notion of Westover’s frankness as he had repeatedly experienced it. “But he means well.”

“Oh, that’s what they always say. But all the frankness can’t be well meant. Why should uncandor be the only form of malevolence?”

“That’s a good idea. I believe I’ll put that up on Westover the next time he’s frank.”

“And will you tell me what he says?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Jeff lay back in his chair at large ease and chuckled. “I should like to tell you what he’s just been saying to me, but I don’t believe I can.”

“Do!”

“You know he was up at Lion’s Head in February, and got a winter impression of the mountain. Did you see it?”

“No. Was that what you were talking about?”

“We talked about something a great deal more interesting — the impression he got of me.”

“Winter impression.”

“Cold enough. He had come to the conclusion that I was very selfish and unworthy; that I used other people for my own advantage, or let them use themselves; that I was treacherous and vindictive, and if I didn’t betray a man I couldn’t be happy till I had beaten him. He said that if I ever behaved well, it came after I had been successful one way or the other.”

“How perfectly fascinating!” Bessie rested her elbow on the corner of the table, and her chin in the palm of the hand whose thin fingers tapped her red lips; the light sleeve fell down and showed her pretty, lean little forearm. “Did it strike you as true, at all?”

“I could see how it might strike him as true.”

“Now you are candid. But go on! What did he expect you to do about it?”

“Nothing. He said he didn’t suppose I could help it.”

“This is immense,” said Bessie. “I hope I’m taking it all in. How came he to give you this flattering little impression? So hopeful, too! Or, perhaps your frankness doesn’t go any farther?”

“Oh, I don’t mind saying. He seemed to think it was a sort of abstract duty he owed to my people.”

“Your-folks?” asked Bessie.

“Yes,” said Jeff, with a certain dryness. But as her face looked blankly innocent, he must have decided that she meant nothing offensive. He relaxed into a broad smile. “It’s a queer household up there, in the winter. I wonder what you would think of it.”

“You might describe it to me, and perhaps we shall see.”

“You couldn’t realize it,” said Jeff, with a finality that piqued her. He reached out for the bottle of apollinaris, with somehow the effect of being in another student’s room, and poured himself a glass. This would have amused her, nine times out of ten, but the tenth time had come when she chose to resent it.

“I suppose,” she said, “you are all very much excited about Class Day at Cambridge.”

“That sounds like a remark made to open the way to conversation.” Jeff went on to burlesque a reply in the same spirit. “Oh, very much so indeed, Miss Lynde! We are all looking forward to it so eagerly. Are you coming?”

She rejected his lead with a slight sigh so skilfully drawn that it deceived him when she said, gravely:

“I don’t know. It’s apt to be a very baffling time at the best. All the men that you like are taken up with their own people, and even the men that you don’t like overvalue themselves, and think they’re doing you a favor if they give you a turn at the Gym or bring you a plate of something.”

“Well, they are, aren’t they?”

“I suppose, yes, that’s what makes me hate it. One doesn’t like to have such men do one a favor. And then, Juniors get younger every year! Even a nice Junior is only a Junior,” she concluded, with a sad fall of her mocking voice.

“I don’t believe there’s a Senior in Harvard that wouldn’t forsake his family and come to the rescue if your feelings could be known,” said Jeff. He lifted the bottle at his elbow and found it empty, and this seemed to remind him to rise.

“Don’t make them known, please,” said Bessie. “I shouldn’t want an ovation.” She sat, after he had risen, as if she wished to detain him, but when he came up to take leave she had to put her hand in his. She looked at it there, and so did he; it seemed very little and slim, about one-third the size of his palm, and it seemed to go to nothing in his grasp. “I should think,” she added, “that the jays would have the best time on Class Day. I should like to dance at one of their spreads, and do everything they did. It would be twice the fun, and there would be some nature in it. I should like to see a jay Class Day.”

“If you’ll come out, I’ll show you one,” said Jeff, without wincing.

“Oh, will you?” she said, taking away her hand. “That would be delightful. But what would become of your folks?” She caught a corner of her mouth with her teeth, as if the word had slipped out.

“Do you call them folks?” asked Jeff, quietly:

“I — supposed — Don’t you?”

“Not in Boston. I do at Lion’s Head.”

“Oh! Well-people.”

“I don’t know as they’re coming.”

“How delightful! I don’t mean that; but if they’re not, and if you really knew some jays, and could get me a little glimpse of their Class Day—”

“I think I could manage it for you.” He spoke as before, but he looked at her with a mockery in his lips and eyes as intelligent as her own, and the latent change in his mood gave her the sense of being in the presence of a vivid emotion. She rose in her excitement; she could see that he admired her, and was enjoying her insolence too, in a way, though in a way that she did not think she quite understood; and she had the wish to make him admire her a little more.

She let a light of laughter come into her eyes, of harmless mischief played to an end. “I don’t deserve your kindness, and I won’t come. I’ve been very wicked, don’t you think?”

“Not very — for you,” said Jeff.

“Oh, how good!” she broke out. “But be frank now! I’ve offended you.”

“How? I know I’m a jay, and in the country I’ve got folks.”

“Ah, I see you’re hurt at my joking, and I’m awfully sorry. I wish there was some way of making you forgive me. But it couldn’t be that alone,” she went on rather aimlessly as to her words, trusting to his answer for some leading, and willing meanwhile to prolong the situation for the effect in her nerves. It had been a very dull and tedious day, and she was finding much more than she could have expected in the mingled fear and slight which he inspired her with in such singular measure. These feminine subtleties of motive are beyond any but the finest natures in the other sex, and perhaps all that Jeff perceived was the note of insincerity in her words.

“Couldn’t be what alone?” he asked.

“What I’ve said,” she ventured, letting her eyes fall; but they were not eyes that fell effectively, and she instantly lifted them again to his.

“You haven’t said anything, and if you’ve thought anything, what have I got to do with that? I think all sorts of things about people — or folks, as you call them—”

“Oh, thank you! Now you are forgiving me!”

“I think them about you!”

“Oh, do sit down and tell me the kind of things you think about me!” Bessie implored, sinking back into her chair.

“You mightn’t like them.”

“But if they would do me good?”

“What should I want to do you good for?”

“That’s true,” sighed Bessie, thoughtfully.

“People — folks—”

“Thank you so much!”

“Don’t try to do each other good, unless they’re cranks like Lancaster, or bores like Mrs. Bevidge—”

“You belong to the analytical school of Seniors! Go on!”

“That’s all,” said Jeff.

“And you don’t think I’ve tried to do you good?”

He laughed. Her comedy was delicious to him. He had never found, anybody so amusing; he almost respected her for it.

“If that is your opinion of me, Mr. Durgin,” she said, very gravely, “I am sorry. May I remark that I don’t see why you come, then?”

“I can tell you,” said Jeff, and he advanced upon her where she sat so abruptly that she started and shrank back in her chair. “I come because you’ve got brains, and you’re the only girl that has — here.” They were Alan’s words, almost his words, and for an instant she thought of her brother, end wondered what he would think of this jay’s praising her in his terms. “Because,” Jeff went on, “you’ve got more sense and nonsense — than all the women here put together. Because it’s better than a play to hear you talk — and act; and because you’re graceful — and fascinating, and chic, and — Good-night, Miss Lynde.”

He put out his hand, but she did not take it as she rose haughtily. “We’ve said good-night once. I prefer to say good-bye this time. I’m sure you will understand why after this I cannot see you again.” She seemed to examine him for the effect of these words upon him before she went on.

“No, I don’t understand,” he answered, coolly; “but it isn’t necessary I should; and I’m quite willing to say good-bye, if you prefer. You haven’t been so frank with me as I have with you; but that doesn’t make any difference; perhaps you never meant to be, or couldn’t be, if you meant. Good-bye.” He bowed and turned toward the door.

She fluttered between him and it. “I wish to know what you accuse me of!”

“I? Nothing.”

“You imply that I have been unjust toward you.”

“Oh no!”

“And I can’t let you go till you prove it.”

“Prove to a woman that — Will you let me pass?”

“No!” She spread her slender arms across the doorway.

“Oh, very well!” Jeff took her hands and put them both in the hold of one of his large, strong bands. Then, with the contact, it came to him, from a varied experience of girls in his rustic past, that this young lady, who was nothing but a girl after all, was playing her comedy with a certain purpose, however little she might know it or own it. He put his other large, strong hand upon her waist, and pulled her to him and kissed her. Another sort of man, no matter what he had believed of her, would have felt his act a sacrilege then and there. Jeff only knew that she had not made the faintest straggle against him; she had even trembled toward him, and he brutally exulted in the belief that he had done what she wished, whether it was what she meant or not.

She, for her part, realized that she had been kissed as once she had happened to see one of the maids kissed by the grocer’s boy at the basement door. In an instant this man had abolished all her defences of family, of society, of personality, and put himself on a level with her in the most sacred things of life. Her mind grasped the fact and she realized it intellectually, while as yet all her emotions seemed paralyzed. She did not know whether she resented it as an abominable outrage or not; whether she hated the man for it or not. But perhaps he was in love with her, and his love overpowered him; in that case she could forgive him, if she were in love with him. She asked herself whether she was, and whether she had betrayed herself to him so that he was somehow warranted in what he did. She wondered if another sort of man would have done it, a gentleman, who believed she was in love with him. She wondered if she were as much shocked as she was astonished. She knew that there was everything in the situation to make the fact shocking, but she got no distinct reply from her jarred consciousness.

It ought to be known, and known at once; she ought to tell her brother, as soon as she saw him; she thought of telling her aunt, and she fancied having to shout the affair into her ear, and having to repeat, “He kissed me! Don’t you understand? Kissed me!” Then she reflected with a start that she could never tell any one, that in the midst of her world she was alone in relation to this; she was as helpless and friendless as the poorest and lowliest girl could be. She was more so, for if she were like the maid whom the grocer’s boy kissed she would be of an order of things in which she could advise with some one else who had been kissed; and she would know what to feel.

She asked herself whether she was at all moved at heart; till now it seemed to her that it had not been different with her toward him from what it had been toward all the other men whose meaning she would have liked to find out. She had not in the least respected them, and she did not respect him; but if it happened because he was overcome by his love for her, and could not help it, then perhaps she must forgive him whether she cared for him or not.

These ideas presented themselves with the simultaneity of things in a dream in that instant when she lingered helplessly in his hold, and she even wondered if by any chance Andrew had seen them; but she heard his step on the floor below; and at the same time it appeared to her that she must be in love with this man if she did not resent what he had done.

XLIII

Westover was sitting at an open window of his studio smoking out into the evening air, and looking down into the thinly foliaged tops of the public garden, where the electrics fainted and flushed and hissed. Cars trooped by in the troubled street, scraping the wires overhead that screamed as if with pain at the touch of their trolleys, and kindling now and again a soft planet, as the trolleys struck the batlike plates that connected the crossing lines. The painter was getting almost as much pleasure out of the planets as pain out of the screams, and he was in an after-dinner languor in which he was very reluctant to recognize a step, which he thought he knew, on his stairs and his stairs-landing. A knock at his door followed the sound of the approaching steps. He lifted himself, and called out, inhospitably, “Come in!” and, as he expected, Jeff Durgin came in. Westover’s meetings with him had been an increasing discomfort since his return from Lion’s Head. The uneasiness which he commonly felt at the first moment of encounter with him yielded less and less to the influence of Jeff’s cynical bonhomie, and it returned in force as soon as they parted.

It was rather dim in the place, except for the light thrown up into it from the turmoil of lights outside, but he could see that there was nothing of the smiling mockery on Jeff’s face which habitually expressed his inner hardihood. It was a frowning mockery.

“Hello!” said Westover.

“Hello!” answered Jeff. “Any commands for Lion’s Head?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m going up there to-morrow. I’ve got to see Cynthia, and tell her what I’ve been doing.”

Westover waited a moment before he asked: “Do you want me to ask what you’ve been doing?”

“I shouldn’t mind it.”

The painter paused again. “I don’t know that I care to ask. Is it any good?”

“No!” shouted Jeff. “It’s the worst thing yet, I guess you’ll think. I couldn’t have believed it myself, if I hadn’t been through it. I shouldn’t have supposed I was such a fool. I don’t care for the girl; I never did.”

“Cynthia?”

“Cynthia? No! Miss Lynde. Oh, try to take it in!” Jeff cried, with a laugh at the daze in Westover’s face. “You must have known about the flirtation; if you haven’t, you’re the only one.” His vanity in the fact betrayed itself in his voice. “It came to a crisis last week, and we tried to make each other believe that we were in earnest. But there won’t be any real love lost.”

Westover did not speak. He could not make out whether he was surprised or whether he was shocked, and it seemed to him that he was neither surprised nor shocked. He wondered whether he had really expected something of the kind, sooner or later, or whether he was not always so apprehensive of some deviltry in Durgin that nothing he did could quite take him unawares. At last he said: “I suppose it’s true — even though you say it. It’s probably the only truth in you.”

“That’s something like,” said Jeff, as if the contempt gave him a sort of pleasure; and his heavy face lighted up and then darkened again.

“Well,” said Westover, “what are we going to do? You’ve come to tell me.”

“I’m going to break with her. I don’t care for her — that!” He snapped his fingers. “I told her I cared because she provoked me to. It happened because she wanted it to and led up to it.”

“Ah!” said Westover. “You put it on her!” But he waited for Durgin’s justification with a dread that he should find something in it.

“Pshaw! What’s the use? It’s been a game from the beginning, and a question which should ruin. I won. She meant to throw me over, if the time came for her, but it came for me first, and it’s only a question now which shall break first; we’ve both been near it once or twice already. I don’t mean she shall get the start of me.”

Westover had a glimpse of the innate enmity of the sexes in this game; of its presence in passion that was lived and of its prevalence in passion that was played. But the fate of neither gambler concerned him; he was impatient of his interest in what Jeff now went on to tell him, without scruple concerning her, or palliation of himself. He scarcely realized that he was listening, but afterward he remembered it all, with a little pity for Bessie and none for Jeff, but with more shame for her, too. Love seems more sacredly confided to women than to men; it is and must be a higher and finer as well as a holier thing with them; their blame for its betrayal must always be the heavier. He had sometimes suspected Bessie’s willingness to amuse herself with Jeff, as with any other man who would let her play with him; and he would not have relied upon anything in him to defeat her purpose, if it had been anything so serious as a purpose.

At the end of Durgin’s story he merely asked: “And what are you going to do about Cynthia?”

“I am going to tell her,” said Jeff. “That’s what I am going up there for.”

Westover rose, but Jeff remained sitting where he had put himself astride of a chair, with his face over the back. The painter walked slowly up and down before him in the capricious play of the street light. He turned a little sick, and he stopped a moment at the window for a breath of air.

“Well?” asked Jeff.

“Oh! You want my advice?” Westover still felt physically incapable of the indignation which he strongly imagined. “I don’t know what to say to you, Durgin. You transcend my powers. Are you able to see this whole thing yourself?”

“I guess so,” Jeff answered. “I don’t idealize it, though. I look at facts; they’re bad enough. You don’t suppose that Miss Lynde is going to break her heart over—”

“I don’t believe I care for Miss Lynde any more than I care for you. But I believe I wish you were not going to break with her.”

“Why?”

“Because you and she are fit for each other. If you want my advice, I advise you to be true to her — if you can.”

“And Cynthia?”

“Break with her.”

“Oh!” Jeff gave a snort of derision.

“You’re not fit for her. You couldn’t do a crueler thing for her than to keep faith with her.”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, I mean it. Stick to Miss Lynde — if she’ll let you.”

Jeff seemed puzzled by Westover’s attitude, which was either too sincere or too ironical for him. He pushed his hat, which he had kept on, back from his forehead. “Damned if I don’t believe she would,” he mused aloud. The notion seemed to flatter him and repay him for what he must have been suffering. He smiled, but he said: “She wouldn’t do, even if she were any good. Cynthia is worth a million of her. If she wants to give me up after she knows all about me, well and good. I shu’n’t blame her. But I shall give her a fair chance, and I shu’n’t whitewash myself; you needn’t be afraid of that, Mr. Westover.”

“Why should I care what you do?” asked the painter, scornfully.

“Well, you can’t, on my account,” Durgin allowed. “But you do care on her account.”

“Yes, I do,” said Westover, sitting down again, and he did not say anything more.

Durgin waited a long while for him to speak before he asked: “Then that’s really your advice, is it?”

“Yes, break with her.”

“And stick to Miss Lynde.”

“If she’ll let you.”

Jeff was silent in his turn. He started from his silence with a laugh. “She’d make a daisy landlady for Lion’s Head. I believe she would like to try it awhile just for the fun. But after the ball was over — well, it would be a good joke, if it was a joke. Cynthia is a woman — she a’n’t any corpse-light. She understands me, and she don’t overrate me, either. She knew just how much I was worth, and she took me at her own valuation. I’ve got my way in life marked out, and she believes in it as much as I do. If anybody can keep me level and make the best of me, she can, and she’s going to have the chance, if she wants to. I’m going to act square with her about the whole thing. I guess she’s the best judge in a case like this, and I shall lay the whole case before her, don’t you be afraid of that. And she’s got to have a free field. Why, even if there wa’n’t any question of her,” he went on, falling more and more into his vernacular, “I don’t believe I should care in the long run for this other one. We couldn’t make it go for any time at all. She wants excitement, and after the summer folks began to leave, and we’d been to Florida for a winter, and then came back to Lion’s Head-well! This planet hasn’t got excitement enough in it for that girl, and I doubt if the solar system has. At any rate, I’m not going to act as advance-agent for her.”

“I see,” said Westover, “that you’ve been reasoning it all out, and I’m not surprised that you’ve kept your own advantage steadily in mind. I don’t suppose you know what a savage you are, and I don’t suppose I could teach you. I sha’n’t try, at any rate. I’ll take you on your own ground, and I tell you again you had better break with Cynthia. I won’t say that it’s what you owe her, for that won’t have any effect with you, but it’s what you owe yourself. You can’t do a wrong thing and prosper on it—”

“Oh yes, you can,” Jeff interrupted, with a sneering laugh. “How do you suppose all the big fortunes were made? By keeping the Commandments?”

“No. But you’re an unlucky man if life hasn’t taught you that you must pay in suffering of some kind, sooner or later, for every wrong thing you do—”

“Now that’s one of your old-fashioned superstitions, Mr. Westover,” said Jeff, with a growing kindliness in his tone, as if the pathetic delusion of such a man really touched him. “You pay, or you don’t pay, just as it happens. If you get hit soon after you’ve done wrong, you think it’s retribution, and if it holds off till you’ve forgotten all about it, you think it’s a strange Providence, and you puzzle over it, but you don’t reform. You keep right along in the old way. Prosperity and adversity, they’ve got nothing to do with conduct. If you’re a strong man, you get there, and if you’re a weak man, all the righteousness in the universe won’t help you. But I propose to do what’s right about Cynthia, and not what’s wrong; and according to your own theory, of life — which won’t hold water a minute — I ought to be blessed to the third and fourth generation. I don’t look for that, though. I shall be blessed if I look out for myself; and if I don’t, I shall suffer for my want of foresight. But I sha’n’t suffer for anything else. Well, I’m going to cut some of my recitations, and I’m going up to Lion’s Head, to-morrow, to settle my business with Cynthia. I’ve got a little business to look after here with some one else first, and I guess I shall have to be about it. I don’t know which I shall like the best.” He rose, and went over to where Westover was sitting, and held out his hand to him.

“What is it?” asked Westover.

“Any commands for Lion’s Head?” Jeff said, as at first.

“No,” said Westover, turning his face away.

“Oh, all right.” Durgin put his hand into his pocket unshaken.

XLIV

“What is it, Jeff?” asked Cynthia, the next night, as they started out together after supper, and began to stroll down the hill toward her father’s house. It lay looking very little and low in the nook at the foot of the lane, on the verge of the woods that darkened away to the northward from it, under the glassy night sky, lit with the spare young moon. The peeping of the frogs in the marshy places filled the air; the hoarse voice of the brook made itself heard at intervals through them.

“It’s not so warm here, quite, as it is in Boston,” he returned. “Are you wrapped up enough? This air has an edge to it.”

“I’m all right,” said the girl. “What is it?”

“You think there’s something? You don’t believe I’ve come up for rest over Sunday? I guess mother herself didn’t, and I could see your father following up my little lies as if he wa’n’t going to let one escape him. Well, you’re right. There is something. Think of the worst thing you can, Cynthy!”

She pulled her hand out of his arm, which she had taken, and halted him by her abrupt pause. “You’re not going to get through!”

“I’m all right on my conditions,” said Jeff, with forlorn derision. “You’ll have to guess again.” He stood looking back over his shoulder at her face, which showed white in the moonlight, swathed airily round in the old-fashioned soft woollen cloud she wore.

“Is it some trouble you’ve got into? I shall stand by you!”

“Oh, you splendid girl! The trouble’s over, but it’s something you can’t stand by me in, I guess. You know that girl I wrote to you about — the one I met at the college tea, and—”

“Yes! Miss Lynde!”

“Come on! We can’t stay here talking. Let’s go down and sit on your porch.” She mechanically obeyed him, and they started on together down the hill again; but she did not offer to take his arm, and he kept the width of the roadway from her.

“What about her?” she quietly asked.

“Last night I ended up the flirtation I’ve been carrying on with her ever since.”

“I want to know just what you mean, Jeff.”

“I mean that last week I got engaged to her, and last night I broke with her.” Cynthia seemed to stumble on something; he sprang over and caught. her, and now she put her hand in his arm, and stayed herself by him as they walked.

“Go on,” she said.

“That’s all there is of it.”

“No!” She stopped, and then she asked, with a kind of gentle bewilderment: “What did you want to tell me for?”

“To let you break with me — if you wanted to.”

“Don’t you care for me any more?”

“Yes, more than ever I did. But I’m not fit for you, Cynthia. Mr. Westover said I wasn’t. I told him about it—”

“What did he say?”

“That I ought to break with you.”

“But if you broke with her?”

“He told me to stick to her. He was right about you, Cynthy. I’m not fit for you, and that’s a fact.”

“What was it about that girl? Tell me everything.” She spoke in a tone of plaintive entreaty, very unlike the command she once used with Jeff when she was urging him to be frank with her and true to himself. They had come to her father’s house and she freed her hand from his arm again, and sat down on the step before the side door with a little sigh as of fatigue.

“You’ll take cold,” said Jeff, who remained on foot in front of her.

“No,” she said, briefly. “Go on.”

“Why,” Jeff began, harshly, and with a note of scorn for himself and his theme in his voice, “there isn’t any more of it, but there’s no end to her. I promised Mr. Westover I shouldn’t whitewash myself, and I sha’n’t. I’ve been behaving badly, and it’s no excuse for me because she wanted me to. I began to go for her as soon as I saw that she wanted me to, and that she liked the excitement. The excitement is all that she cared for; she didn’t care for me except for the excitement of it. She thought she could have fun with me, and then throw me over; but I guess she found her match. You couldn’t understand such a girl, and I don’t brag of it. All she cared for was to flirt with me, and she liked it all the more because I was a jay and she could get something new out of it. I can’t explain it; but I could see it right along. She fooled herself more than she fooled me.”

“Was she — very good-looking?” Cynthia asked, listlessly.

“No!” shouted Jeff. “She wasn’t good-looking at all. She was dark and thin, and she had little slanting eyes; but she was graceful, and she knew how to make herself go further than any girl I ever saw. If she came into a room, she made you look at her, or you had to somehow. She was bright, too; and she had more sense than all the other girls there put together. But she was a fool, all the same.” Jeff paused. “Is that enough?”

“It isn’t all.”

“No, it isn’t all. We didn’t meet much at first, but I got to walking home with her from some teas; and then we met at a big ball. I danced with her the whole while nearly, and — and I took her brother home — Pshaw! He was drunk; and I — well, he had got drunk drinking with me at the ball. The wine didn’t touch me, but it turned his head; and I took him home; he’s a drunkard, anyway. She let us in when we got to their house, and that kind of made a tie between us. She pretended to think she was under obligations to me, and so I got to going to her house.”

“Did she know how her brother got drunk?”

“She does now. I told her last night.”

“How came you to tell her?”

“I wanted to break with her. I wanted to stop it, once for all, and I thought that would do it, if anything would.”

“Did that make her willing to give you up?”

Jeff checked himself in a sort of retrospective laugh. “I’m not so sure. I guess she liked the excitement of that, too. You couldn’t understand the kind of girl she — She wanted to flirt with me that night I brought him home tipsy.”

“I don’t care to hear any more about her. Why did you give her up?”

“Because I didn’t care for her, and I did care for you, Cynthy.”

“I don’t believe it.” Cynthia rose from the step, where she had been sitting, as if with renewed strength. “Go up and tell father to come down here. I want to see him.” She turned and put her hand on the latch of the door.

“You’re not going in there, Cynthia,” said Jeff. “It must be like death in there.”

“It’s more like death out here. But if it’s the cold you mean, you needn’t be troubled. We’ve had a fire to-day, airing out the house. Will you go?”

“But what do you — what are you going to say to me?”

“I don’t know, yet. If I said anything now, I should tell you what Mr. Westover did: go back to that girl, if she’ll let you. You’re fit for each other, as he said. Did you tell her that you were engaged to some one else?”

“I did, last night.”

“But before that she didn’t know how false you were. Well, you’re not fit for her, then; you’re not good enough.”

She opened the door and went in, closing it after her. Jeff turned and walked slowly away; then he came quickly back, as if he were going to follow her within. But through the window he saw her as she stood by the table with a lamp in her hand. She had turned up the light, which shone full in her face and revealed its severe beauty broken and writhen with the effort to repress her weeping. He might not have minded the severity or the beauty, but the pathos was more than he could stand. “Oh, Lord!” he said, with a shrug, and he turned again and walked slowly up the hill.

When Whitwell faced his daughter in the little sitting-room, whose low ceiling his hat almost touched as he stood before her, the storm had passed with her, and her tear-drenched visage wore its wonted look of still patience.

“Did Jeff tell you why I sent for you, father?”

“No. But I knew it was trouble,” said Whitwell, with a dignity which-his sympathy for her gave a countenance better adapted to the expression of the lighter emotions.

“I guess you were right about him,” she resumed: She went on to tell in brief the story that Jeff had told her. Her father did not interrupt her, but at the end he said, inadequately: “He’s a comical devil. I knew about his gittin’ that feller drunk. Mr. Westover told me when he was up here.”

“Mr. Westover did!” said Cynthia, in a note of indignation.

“He didn’t offer to,” Whitwell explained. “I got it out of him in spite of him, I guess.” He had sat down with his hat on, as his absent-minded habit was, and he now braced his knees against the edge of the table. Cynthia sat across it from him with her head drooped over it, drawing vague figures on the board with her finger. “What are you goin’ to do?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“I guess you don’t quite realize it yet,” her father suggested, tenderly. “Well, I don’t want to hurry you any. Take your time.”

“I guess I realize it,” said the girl.

“Well, it’s a pootty plain case, that’s a fact,” Whitwell conceded. She was silent, and he asked: “How did he come to tell you?”

“It’s what he came up for. He began to tell me at once. I was certain there was some trouble.”

“Was it his notion to come, I wonder, or Mr. Westover’s?”

“It was his. But Mr. Westover told him to break off with me, and keep on with her, if she would let him.”

“I guess that was pootty good advice,” said Whitwell, letting his face betray his humorous relish of it. “I guess there’s a pair of ‘em.”

“She was not playing any one else false,” said Cynthia, bitterly.

“Well, I guess that’s so, too,” her father assented. “‘Ta’n’t so much of a muchness as you might think, in that light.” He took refuge from the subject in an undirected whistle.

After a moment the girl asked, forlornly: “What should you do, father, if you were in my place?”

“Well, there I guess you got me, Cynthy,” said her father. “I don’t believe ‘t any man, I don’t care how old he is, or how much experience he’s had, knows exactly how a girl feels about a thing like this, or has got any call to advise her. Of course, the way I feel is like takin’ the top of his head off. But I d’ know,” he added, “as that would do a great deal of good, either. I presume a woman’s got rather of a chore to get along with a man, anyway. We a’n’t any of us much to brag on. It’s out o’ sight, out o’ mind, with the best of us, I guess.”

“It wouldn’t be with Jackson — it wouldn’t be with Mr. Westover.”

“There a’n’t many men like Mr. Westover — well, not a great many; or Jackson, either. Time! I wish Jackson was home! He’d know how to straighten this thing out, and he wouldn’t weaken over Jeff much — well, not much. But he a’n’t here, and you’ve got to act for yourself. The way I look at it is this: you took Jeff when you knowed what a comical devil he was, and I presume you ha’n’t got quite the same right to be disappointed in what he done as if you hadn’t knowed. Now mind, I a’n’t excusin’ him. But if you knowed he was the feller to play the devil if he got a chance, the question is whether — whether—”

“I know what you mean, father,” said the girl, “and I don’t want to shirk my responsibility. It was everything to have him come right up and tell me.”

“Well,” said Whitwell, impartially, “as far forth as that goes, I don’t think he’s strained himself. He’d know you would hear of it sooner or later anyway, and he ha’n’t just found out that he was goin’ wrong. Been keepin’ it up for the last three months, and writin’ you all the while them letters you was so crazy to get.”

“Yes,” sighed the girl. “But we’ve got to be just to his disposition as well as his actions. I can see it in one light that can excuse it some. He can’t bear to be put down, and I know he’s been left out a good deal among the students, and it’s made him bitter. He told me about it; that’s one reason why he wanted to leave Harvard this last year. He saw other young men made much of, when he didn’t get any notice; and when he had the chance to pay them back with a girl of their own set that was trying to make a fool of him—”

“That was the time for him to remember you,” said Whitwell.

Cynthia broke under the defence she was trying to make. “Yes,” she said, with an indrawn sigh, and she began to sob piteously.

The sight of her grief seemed to kindle her father’s wrath to a flame. “Any way you look at him, he’s been a dumn blackguard; that’s what he’s been. You’re a million times too good for him; and I—”

She sobbed herself quiet, and then she said: “Father, I don’t like to go up there to-night. I want to stay here.”

“All right, Cynthia. I’ll come down and stay with you. You got everything we want here?”

“Yes. And I’ll go up and get the breakfast for them in the morning. There won’t be much to do.”

“Dumn ‘em! Let ’em get their own breakfast!” said Whitwell, recklessly.

“And, father,” the girl went on as if he had not spoken, “don’t you talk to Mrs. Durgin about it, will you?”

“No, no. I sha’n’t speak to her. I’ll just tell Frank you and me are goin’ to stay down here to-night. She’ll suspicion something, but she can figure it out for herself. Or she can make Jeff tell her. It can’t be kept from her.”

“Well, let him be the one to tell her. Whatever happens, I shall never speak of it to a soul besides you.”

“All right, Cynthy. You’ll have the night to think it over — I guess you won’t sleep much — and I’ll trust you to do what’s the best thing about it.”

XLV.

Cynthia found Mrs. Durgin in the old farm-house kitchen at work getting breakfast when she came up to the hotel in the morning. She was early, but the elder woman had been earlier still, and her heavy face showed more of their common night-long trouble than the girl’s.

She demanded, at sight of her, “What’s the matter with you and Jeff, Cynthy?”

Cynthia was unrolling the cloud from her hair. She said, as she tied on her apron: “You must get him to tell you, Mrs. Durgin.”

“Then there is something?”

“Yes.”

“Has Jeff been using you wrong?”

Cynthia stooped to open the oven door, and to turn the pan of biscuit she found inside. She shut the door sharply to, and said, as she rose: “I don’t want to tell anything about it, and I sha’n’t, Mrs. Durgin. He can do it, if he wants to. Shall I make the coffee?”

“Yes; you seem to make it better than I do. Do you think I shouldn’t believe you was fair to him?”

“I wasn’t thinking of that. But it’s his secret. If he wants to keep it, he can keep it, for all me.”

“You ha’n’t give each other up?”

“I don’t know.” Cynthia turned away with a trembling chin, and began to beat the coffee up with an egg she had dropped into the pot. She put the breakfast on the table when it was ready, but she would not sit down with the rest. She said she did not want any breakfast, and she drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen.

It fell to Jeff mainly to keep the talk going. He had been out at the barn with Jombateeste since daybreak, looking after the cattle, and the joy of the weather had got into his nerves and spirits. At first he had lain awake after he went to bed, but he had fallen asleep about midnight, and got a good night’s rest. He looked fresh and strong and very handsome. He talked resolutely to every one at the table, but Jombateeste was always preoccupied with eating at his meals, and Frank Whitwell had on a Sunday silence, which was perhaps deepened by a feeling that there was something wrong between his sister and Jeff, and it would be rash to commit himself to an open friendliness until he understood the case. His father met Jeff’s advances with philosophical blandness and evasion, and Mrs. Durgin was provisionally dry and severe both with the Whitwells and her son. After breakfast she went to the parlor, and Jeff set about a tour of the hotel, inside and out. He looked carefully to the details of its winter keeping. Then he came back and boldly joined his mother where she sat before her stove, whose subdued heat she found pleasant in the lingering cold of the early spring.

He tossed his hat on the table beside her, and sat down on the other side of the stove. “Well, I must say the place has been well looked after. I don’t believe Jackson himself could have kept it in better shape. When was the last you heard from him?”

“I hope,” said his mother, gravely, “you’ve been lookin’ after your end at Boston, too.”

“Well, not as well as you have here, mother,” said Jeff, candidly. “Has Cynthy told you?”

“I guess she expected you to tell me, if there was anything.”

“There’s a lot; but I guess I needn’t go over it all. I’ve been playing the devil.”

“Jeff!”

“Yes, I have. I’ve been going with another girl down there, one the kind you wanted me to make up to, and I went so far I — well, I made love to her; and then I thought it over, and found out I didn’t really care for her, and I had to tell her so, and then I came up to tell Cynthy. That’s about the size of it. What do you think of it?”

“D’ you tell Cynthy?”

“Yes, I told her.”

“What ‘d she say?”

“She said I’d better go back to the other girl.” Jeff laughed hardily, but his mother remained impassive.

“I guess she’s right; I guess you had.”

“That seems to be the general opinion. That’s what Mr. Westover advised. I seem to be the only one against it. I suppose you mean that I’m not fit for Cynthy. I don’t deny it. All I say is I want her, and I don’t want the other one. What are you going to do in a case like that?”

“The way I should look at it,” said his mother, “is this: whatever you are, Cynthy made you. You was a lazy, disobedient, worthless boy, and it was her carin’ for you from the first that put any spirit and any principle into you. It was her that helped you at school when you was little things together; and she helped you at the academy, and she’s helped you at college. I’ll bet she could take a degree, or whatever it is, at Harvard better than you could now; and if you ever do take a degree, you’ve got her to thank for it.”

“That’s so,” said Jeff. “And what’s the reason you didn’t want me to marry her when I came in here last summer and told you I’d asked her to?”

“You know well enough what the reason was. It was part of the same thing as my wantin’ you to be a lawyer; but I might knowed that if you didn’t have Cynthy to go into court with you, and put the words into your mouth, you wouldn’t make a speech that would” — Mrs. Durgin paused for a fitting figure— “save a flea from the gallows.”

Jeff burst into a laugh. “Well, I guess that’s so, mother. And now you want me to throw away the only chance I’ve got of learning how to run Lion’s Head in the right way by breaking with Cynthy.”

“Nobody wants you to run Lion’s Head for a while yet,” his mother returned, scornfully. “Jackson is going to run Lion’s Head. He’ll be home the end of June, and I’ll run Lion’s Head till he gets here. You talk,” she went on, “as if it was in your hands to break with Cynthy, or throw away the chance with her. The way I look at it, she’s broke with you, and you ha’n’t got any chance with her. Oh, Jeff,” she suddenly appealed to him, “tell me all about it! What have you been up to? If I understood it once, I know I can make her see it in the right light.”

“The better you understand it, mother, the less you’ll like it; and I guess Cynthy sees it in the right light already. What did she say?”

“Nothing. She said she’d leave it to you.”

“Well, that’s like Cynthy. I’ll tell you, then,” said Jeff; and he told his mother his whole affair with Bessie Lynde. He had to be very elemental, and he was aware, as he had never been before, of the difference between Bessie’s world and his mother’s world, in trying to make Bessie’s world conceivable to her.

He was patient in going over every obscure point, and illustrating from the characters and condition of different summer folks the facts of Bessie’s entourage. It is doubtful, however, if he succeeded in conveying to his mother a clear and just notion of the purely chic nature of the girl. In the end she seemed to conceive of her simply as a hussy, and so pronounced her, without limit or qualification, in spite of Jeff’s laughing attempt to palliate her behavior, and to inculpate himself. She said she did not see what he had done that was so much out of the way. That thing had led him on from the beginning; she had merely got her come-uppings, when all was said. Mrs. Durgin believed Cynthia would look at it as she did, if she could have it put before her rightly. Jeff shook his head with persistent misgiving. His notion was that Cynthia saw the affair only too clearly, and that there was no new light to be thrown on it from her point of view. Mrs. Durgin would not allow this; she was sure that she could bring Cynthia round; and she asked Jeff whether it was his getting that fellow drunk that she seemed to blame him for the most. He answered that he thought that was pretty bad, but he did not believe that was the worst thing in Cynthia’s eyes. He did not forbid his mother’s trying to do what she could with her, and he went away for a walk, and left the house to the two women. Jombateeste was in the barn, which he preferred to the house, and Frank Whitwell had gone to church over at the Huddle. As Jeff passed Whitwell’s cottage in setting out on his stroll he saw the philosopher through the window, seated with his legs on the table, his hat pushed back, and his spectacles fallen to the point of his nose, reading, and moving his lips as he read.

The forenoon sun was soft, but the air was cool.

There was still plenty of snow on the upper slopes of the hills, and there was a drift here and there in a corner of pasture wall in the valley; but the springtime green was beginning to hover over the wet places in the fields; the catkins silvered the golden tracery of the willow branches by the brook; there was a buzz of bees about them, and about the maples, blackened by the earlier flow of sap through the holes in the bark made by the woodpeckers’ bills. Now and then the tremolo of a bluebird shook in the tender light and the keen air. At one point in the road where the sun fell upon some young pines in a sheltered spot a balsamic odor exhaled from them.

These gentle sights and sounds and odors blended in the influence which Jeff’s spirit felt more and more. He realized that he was a blot on the loveliness of the morning. He had a longing to make atonement and to win forgiveness. His heart was humbled toward Cynthia, and he went wondering how his mother would make it out with her, and how, if she won him any advantage, he should avail himself of it and regain the girl’s trust; he had no doubt of her love. He perceived that there was nothing for him hereafter but the most perfect constancy of thought and deed, and he desired nothing better.

At a turn of his road where it branched toward the Huddle a group of young girls stood joking and laughing; before Jeff came up with them they separated, and all but one continued on the way beyond the turning. She came toward Jeff, who gayly recognized her as she drew near.

She blushed and bridled at his bow and at his beauty and splendor, and in her embarrassment pertly said that she did not suppose he would have remembered her. She was very young, but at fifteen a country girl is not so young as her town sister at eighteen in the ways of the other sex.

Jeff answered that he should have known her anywhere, in spite of her looking so much older than she did in the summer when she had come with berries to the hotel. He said she must be feeling herself quite a young lady now, in her long dresses, and he praised the dress which she had on. He said it became her style; and he found such relief from his heavy thoughts in these harmless pleasantries that he kept on with them. He had involuntarily turned with her to walk back to her house on the way he had come, and he asked her if he might not carry her catkins for her. She had a sheaf of them in the hollow of her slender arm, which seemed to him very pretty, and after a little struggle she yielded them to him. The struggle gave him still greater relief from his self-reproach, and at her gate he begged her to let him keep one switch of the pussywillows, and he stood a moment wondering whether he might not ask her for something else. She chose one from the bundle, and drew it lightly across his face before she put it in his hand. “You may have this for Cynthy,” she said, and she ran laughingly up the pathway to her door.

XLVI

Cynthia did not appear at dinner, and Jeff asked his mother when he saw her alone if she had spoken to the girl. “Yes, but she said she did not want to talk yet.”

“All right,” he returned. “I’m going to take a nap; I believe I feel as if I hadn’t slept for a month.”

He slept the greater part of the afternoon, and came down rather dull to the early tea. Cynthia was absent again, and his mother was silent and wore a troubled look. Whitwell was full of a novel conception of the agency of hypnotism in interpreting the life of the soul as it is intimated in dreams. He had been reading a book that affirmed the consubstantiality of the sleep-dream and the hypnotic illusion. He wanted to know if Jeff, down at Boston, had seen anything of the hypnotic doings that would throw light on this theory.

It was still full light when they rose from the table, and it was scarcely twilight when Jeff heard Cynthia letting herself out at the back door. He fancied her going down to her father’s house, and he went out to the corner of the hotel to meet her. She faltered a moment at sight of him, and then kept on with averted face.

He joined her, and walked beside her. “Well, Cynthy, what are you going to say to me? I’m off for Cambridge again to-morrow morning, and I suppose we’ve got to understand each other. I came up here to put myself in your hands, to keep or to throw away, just as you please. Well? Have you thought about it?”

“Every minute,” said the girl, quietly.

“Well?”

“If you had cared for me, it couldn’t have happened.”

“Oh yes, it could. Now that’s just where you’re mistaken. That’s where a woman never can understand a man. I might carry on with half a dozen girls, and yet never forget you, or think less of you, although I could see all the time how pretty and bright every one of ’em was. That’s the way a man’s mind is built. It’s curious, but it’s true.”

“I don’t believe I care for any share in your mind, then,” said the girl.

“Oh, come, now! You don’t mean that. You know I was just joking; you know I don’t justify what I’ve done, and I don’t excuse it. But I think I’ve acted pretty square with you about it — about telling you, I mean. I don’t want to lay any claim, but you remember when you made me promise that if there was anything shady I wanted to hide from you — Well, I acted on that. You do remember?”

“Yes,” said Cynthia, and she pulled the cloud over the side of her face next to him, and walked a little faster.

He hastened his steps to keep up with her. “Cynthy, if you put your arms round me, as you did then—”

“I can’t Jeff!”

“You don’t want to.”

“Yes, I do! But you don’t want me to, as you did then. Do you?” She stopped abruptly and faced him full. “Tell me, honestly!”

Jeff dropped his bold eyes, and the smile left his handsome mouth.

“You don’t,” said the girl, “for you know that if you did, I would do it.” She began to walk on again. “It wouldn’t be hard for me to forgive you anything you’ve done against me — or against yourself; I should care for you the same — if you were the same person; but you’re not the same, and you know it. I told you then — that time that I didn’t want to make you do what you knew was right, and I never shall try to do it again. I’m sorry I did it then. I was wrong. And I should be afraid of you if I did now. Some time you would make me suffer for it, just as you’ve made me suffer for making you do then what was right.”

It struck Jeff as a very curious fact that Cynthia must always have known him better than he knew himself in some ways, for he now perceived the truth and accuracy of her words. He gave her mind credit for the penetration due her heart; he did not understand that it is through their love women divine the souls of men. What other witnesses of his character had slowly and carefully reasoned out from their experience of him she had known from the beginning, because he was dear to her.

He was silent, and then, with rare gravity, he said, “Cynthia, I believe you’re right,” and he never knew how her heart leaped toward him at his words. “I’m a pretty bad chap, I guess. But I want you to give me another chance and I’ll try not to make you pay for it, either,” he added, with a flicker of his saucy humor.

“I’ll give you a chance, then,” she said, and she shrank from the hand he put out toward her. “Go back and tell that girl you’re free now, and if she wants you she can have you.”

“Is that what you call a chance?” demanded Jeff, between anger and injury. For an instant he imagined her deriding him and revenging herself.

“It’s the only one I can give you. She’s never tried to make you do what was right, and you’ll never be tempted to hurt her.”

“You’re pretty rough on me, Cynthy,” Jeff protested, almost plaintively. He asked, more in character: “Ain’t you afraid of making me do right, now?”

“I’m not making you. I don’t promise you anything, even if she won’t have you.”

“Oh!”

“Did you suppose I didn’t mean that you were free? That I would put a lie in your mouth for you to be true with?”

“I guess you’re too deep for me,” said Jeff, after a sulky silence.

“Then it’s all off between us? What do you say?”

“What do you say?”

“I say it’s just as it was before, if you care for me.”

“I care for you, but it can never be the same as it was before. What you’ve done, you’ve done. I wish I could help it, but I can’t. I can’t make myself over into what I was twenty-four hours ago. I seem another person, in another world; it’s as if I died, and came to life somewhere else. I’m sorry enough, if that could help, but it can’t. Go and tell that girl the truth: that you came up here to me, and I sent you back to her.”

A gleam of amusement visited Jeff in the gloom where he seemed to be darkling. He fancied doing that very thing with Bessie Lynde, and the wild joy she would snatch from an experience so unique, so impossible. Then the gleam faded. “And what if I didn’t want her?” he demanded.

“Tell her that too,” said Cynthia.

“I suppose,” said Jeff, sulkily, “you’ll let me go away and do as I please, if I’m free.”

“Oh yes. I don’t want you to do anything because I told you. I won’t make that mistake again. Go and do what you are able to do of your own free will. You know what you ought to do as well as I do; and you know a great deal better what you can do.”

They had reached Cynthia’s house, and they were talking at the side door, as they had the night before, when there had been hope for her in the newness of her calamity, before she had yet fully imagined it.

Jeff made no answer to her last words. He asked, “Am I going to see you again?”

“I guess not. I don’t believe I shall be up before you start.”

“All right. Good-bye, then.” He held out his hand, and she put hers in it for the moment he chose to hold it. Then he turned and slowly climbed the hill.

Cynthia was still lying with her face in her pillow when her father came into the dark little house, and peered into her room with the newly lighted lamp in his hand. She turned her face quickly over and looked at him with dry and shining eyes.

“Well, it’s all over with Jeff and me, father.”

“Well, I’m satisfied,” said Whitwell. “If you could ha’ made it up, so you could ha’ felt right about it, I shouldn’t ha’ had anything to say against it, but I’m glad it’s turned out the way it has. He’s a comical devil, and he always was, and I’m glad you a’n’t takin’ on about him any more. You used to have so much spirit when you was little.”

“Oh, — spirit! You don’t know how much spirit I’ve had, now.”

“Well, I presume not,” Whitwell assented.

“I’ve been thinking,” said the girl, after a little pause, “that we shall have to go away from here.”

“Well, I guess not,” her father began. “Not for no Jeff Dur—”

“Yes, yes. We must! Don’t make one talk about it. We’ll stay here till Jackson gets back in June, and then — we must go somewhere else. We’ll go down to Boston, and I’ll try to get a place to teach, or something, and Frank can get a place.”

“I presume,” Whitwell mused, “that Mr. Westover could—”

“Father!” cried the girl, with an energy that startled him, as she lifted herself on her elbow. “Don’t ever think of troubling Mr. Westover! Oh,” she lamented, “I was thinking of troubling him myself! But we mustn’t, we mustn’t! I should be so ashamed!”

“Well,” said Whitwell, “time enough to think about all that. We got two good months yet to plan it out before Jackson gets back, and I guess we can think of something before that. I presume,” he added, thoughtfully, “that when Mrs. Durgin hears that you’ve give Jeff the sack, she’ll make consid’able of a kick. She done it when you got engaged.”

XLVII.

After he went back to Cambridge, Jeff continued mechanically in the direction given him by motives which had ceased for him. In the midst of his divergence with Bessie Lynde he had still kept an inner fealty to Cynthia, and tried to fulfil the purposes and ambition she had for him. The operation of this habitual allegiance now kept him up to his work, but the time must come when it could no longer operate, when his whole consciousness should accept the fact known to his intelligence, and he should recognize the close of that incident of his life as the bereaved finally accept and recognize the fact of death.

The event brought him relief, and it brought him freedom. He was sensible in his relaxation of having strained up to another’s ideal, of having been hampered by another’s will. His pleasure in the relief was tempered by a regret, not wholly unpleasant, for the girl whose aims, since they were no longer his, must be disappointed. He was sorry for Cynthia, and in his remorse he was fonder of her than he had ever been. He felt her magnanimity and clemency; he began to question, in that wordless deep of being where volition begins, whether it would not be paying a kind of duty to her if he took her at her word and tried to go back to Bessie Lynde. But for the present he did nothing but renounce all notion of working at his conditions, or attempting to take a degree. That was part of a thing that was past, and was no part of anything to come, so far as Jeff now forecast his future.

He did not choose to report himself to Westover, and risk a scolding, or a snubbing. He easily forgave Westover for the tone he had taken at their last meeting, but he did not care to see him. He would have met him half-way, however, in a friendly advance, and he was aware of much good-will toward him, which he could not have been reluctant to show if chance had brought them together.

Jeff missed Cynthia’s letters which used to come so regularly every Tuesday, and he had a half-hour every Sunday which was at first rather painfully vacant since he no longer wrote to her. But in this vacancy he had at least no longer the pang of self-reproach which her letters always brought him, and he was not obliged to put himself to the shame of concealment in writing to her. He had never minded that tacit lying on his own account, but he hated it in relation to her; it always hurt him as something incongruous and unfit. He wrote to his mother now on Sunday, and in his first letter, while the impression of Cynthia’s dignity and generosity was still vivid, he urged her to make it clear to the girl that he wished her and her family to remain at Lion’s Head as if nothing had happened. He put a great deal of real feeling into this request, and he offered to go and spend a year in Europe, if his mother thought that Cynthia would be more reconciled to his coming back at the end of that time.

His mother answered with a dryness to which his ear supplied the tones of her voice, that she would try to get along in the management of Lion’s Head till his brother got back, but that she had no objection to his going to Europe for a year if he had the money to spare. Jeff could not refuse her joke, as he felt it, a certain applause, but he thought it pretty rough that his mother should take part so decidedly against him as she seemed to be doing. He had expected her to be angry with him, but before they parted she had seemed to find some excuse for him, and yet here she was siding against her own son in what he might very well consider an unnatural way. If Jackson had been at home he would have laid it to his charge; but he knew that Cynthia would have scorned even to speak of him with his mother, and he knew too well his mother’s slight for Whitwell to suppose that he could have influenced her. His mind turned in momentary suspicion to Westover. Had Westover, he wondered, with a purpose to pay him up for it forming itself simultaneously with his question, been setting his mother against him? She might have written to Westover to get at the true inwardness of his behavior, and Westover might have written her something that had made her harden her heart against him. But upon reflection this seemed out of character for both of them; and Jeff was thrown back upon his mother’s sober second thought of his misconduct for an explanation of her coldness. He could not deny that he had grievously disappointed her in several ways. But he did not see why he should not take a certain hint from her letter, or construct a hint from it, at one with a vague intent prompted by his own restless and curious vanity. Since he had parted with Bessie Lynde, on terms of humiliation for her which must have been anguish for him if he had ever loved her, or loved anything but his power over her, he had remained in absolute ignorance of her. He had not heard where she was or how she was; but now, as the few weeks before Class Day and Commencement crumbled away, he began to wonder why she made no sign. He believed that since she had been willing to go so far to get him, she would not be willing to give him up so easily. The thought of Cynthia had always intruded more or less effectively between them, but now that this thought began to fade into the past, the thought of Bessie began to grow out of it with no interposing shadow.

However, Jeff was in no hurry. It was not passion that moved him, and the mood in which he could play with the notion of getting back to his flirtation with Bessie Lynde was pleasanter after the violence of recent events than any renewal of strong sensations could be. He preferred to loiter in this mood, and he was meantime much more comfortable than he had been for a great while. He was rid of the disagreeable sense of disloyalty to Cynthia, and he was rid of the stress of living up to her conscience in various ways. He was rid of Bessie Lynde, too, and of the trouble of forecasting and discounting her caprices. His thought turned at times with a soft regret to hopes, disappointments, experiences connected with neither, and now tinged with a tender melancholy, unalloyed by shame or remorse. As he drew nearer to Class Day he had a somewhat keener compunction for Cynthia and the hopes he had encouraged her to build and had then dashed. But he was coming more and more to regard it all as fatality; and if the chance that he counted upon to bring him and Bessie together again had occurred he could have more easily forgiven himself.

One of the jays, who was spreading on rather a large scale, wanted Jeff to spread with him, but he refused, because, as he said, he meant to keep out of it altogether; and for the same reason he declined to take part in the spread of a rather jay society he belonged to. In his secret heart he trusted that some friendly fortuity might throw an invitation to Beck Hall in his way, or at least a card for the Gym, which, if no longer the place it had been, was still by no means jay. He got neither; but as he felt all the joy of the June day in his young blood he consoled himself very well with the dancing at one of the halls, where the company happened that year to be openly, almost recklessly jay. Jeff had some distinction among the fellows who enviously knew of his social success during the winter, and especially of his affair with Bessie Lynde; and there were some girls very pretty and very well dressed among the crowd of girls who were neither. They were from remote parts of the country, and in the charge of chaperons ignorant of the differences so poignant to local society. Jeff went about among them, and danced with the sisters and cousins of several men who seemed superior to the lost condition of their kinswomen; these were nice fellows enough, but doomed by their grinding, or digging, or their want of worldly wisdom, to a place among the jays, when they really had some qualifications for a nobler standing. He had a very good time, and he was enjoying himself in his devotion to a lively young brunette whom he was making laugh with his jokes about some of the others, when his eye was caught by a group of ladies who advanced among the jays with something of that collective intrepidity and individual apprehension characteristic of people in slumming. They had the air of not knowing what might happen to them, but the adventurous young Boston matron in charge of the girls kept on a bold front behind her lorgnette, and swept the strange company she found herself in with an unshrinking eye as she led her band among the promenaders, and past the couples seated along the walls. She hesitated a moment as her glance fell upon Jeff, and then she yielded, at whatever risk, to the comfort of finding a known face among so many aliens. “Why, Mr. Durgin!” she called out. “Bessie, here’s Mr. Durgin,” and she turned to the girl, who was in her train, as Jeff had perceived by something finer than the senses from the first.

He rose from the side of his brunette, whose brother was standing near, and shook hands with the adventurous young matron, who seemed suddenly much better acquainted with him than he had ever thought her, and with Bessie Lynde; the others were New York girls, and the matron presented him. “Are you going on?” she asked, and the vague challenge with the smile that accompanied it was sufficient invitation for him.

“Why, I believe so,” he said, and he turned to take leave of his pretty brunette; but she had promptly vanished with her brother, and he was spared the trouble of getting rid of her. He would have been equal to much more for the sake of finding himself with Bessie Lynde again, whose excitement he could see burning in her eyes, though her thick complexion grew neither brighter nor paler. He did not know what quality of excitement it might be, but he said, audaciously: “It’s a good while since we met!” and he was sensible that his audacity availed.

“Is it?” she asked. He put himself at her side, and he did not leave her again till he went to dress for the struggle around the Tree. He found himself easily included in the adventurous young matron’s party. He had not the elegance of some of the taller and slenderer men in the scholar’s gown, but the cap became his handsome face. His affair with Bessie Lynde had given him a certain note, and an adventurous young matron, who was naturally a little indiscriminate, might very well have been willing to let him go about with her party. She could not know how impudent his mere presence was with reference to Bessie, and the girl herself made no sign that could have enlightened her. She accepted something more that her share of his general usefulness to the party; she danced with him whenever he asked her, and she seemed not to scruple to publish her affair with him in the openest manner. If he could have stilled a certain shame for her which he felt, he would have thought he was having the best kind of time. They made no account of by-gones in their talk, but she had never been so brilliant, or prompted him to so many of the effronteries which were the spirit of his humor. He thought her awfully nice, with lots of sense; he liked her letting him come back without any fooling or fuss, and he began to admire instead of despising her for it. Decidedly it was, as she would have said, the chicquest sort of thing. What was the use, anyway? He made up his mind.

When he said he must go and dress for the Tree, he took leave of her first, and he was aware of a vivid emotion, which was like regret in her at parting with him. She said, Must he? She seemed to want to say something more to him; while he was dismissing himself from the others, he noticed that once or twice she opened her lips as if she were going to speak. In the end she did nothing more important than to ask if he had seen her brother; but after he had left the party he turned and saw her following him with eyes that he fancied anxious and even frightened in their gaze.

The riot round the Tree roared itself through its wonted events. Class after class of the undergraduates filed in and sank upon the grass below the terraces and parterres of brilliantly dressed ladies within the quadrangle of seats; the alumni pushed themselves together against the wall of Holder Chapel; the men of the Senior class came last in their grotesque variety of sweaters and second and third best clothes for the scramble at the Tree. The regulation cheers tore from throats that grew hoarser and hoarser, till every class and every favorite in the faculty had been cheered. Then the signal-hat was flung into the air, and the rush at the Tree was made, and the combat’ for the flowers that garlanded its burly waist began.

Jeff’s size and shape forbade him to try for the flowers from the shoulders of others. He was one of a group of jays who set their backs to the Tree, and fought away all comers except their own; they pulled down every man not of their sort, and put up a jay, who stripped the Tree of its flowers and flung them to his fellows below. As he was let drop to the ground, Jeff snatched a handful of his spoil from him, and made off with it toward the place where he had seen Bessie Lynde and her party. But when he reached the place, shouldering and elbowing his way through the press, she was no longer there. He saw her hat at a distance through the crowd, where he did not choose to follow, and he stuffed the flowers into his breast to give to her later. He expected to meet her somewhere in the evening; if not, he would try to find her at her aunt’s house in town; failing that, he could send her the flowers, and trust her for some sort of leading acknowledgment.

He went and had a bath and dressed himself freshly, and then he went for a walk in the still evening air. He was very hot from the battle which had been fought over him, and which he had shared with all his strength, and it seemed to him as if he could not get cool. He strolled far out along Concord Avenue, beyond the expanses and ice-horses of Fresh Pond, into the country toward Belmont, with his hat off and his head down. He was very well satisfied, and he was smiling to himself at the ease of his return to Bessie, and securely speculating upon the outcome of their renewed understanding.

He heard a vehicle behind him, rapidly driven, and he turned out for it without looking around. Then suddenly he felt a fiery sting on his forehead, and then a shower of stings swiftly following each other over his head and face. He remembered stumbling, when he was a boy, into a nest of yellow-jackets, that swarmed up around him and pierced him like sparks of fire at every uncovered point. But he knew at the same time that it was some one in the vehicle beside him who was lashing him over the head with a whip. He bowed his head with his eyes shut and lunged blindly out toward his assailant, hoping to seize him.

But the horse sprang aside, and tore past him down the road. Jeff opened his eyes, and through the blood that dripped from the cuts above them he saw the wicked face of Alan Lynde looking back at him from the dogcart where he sat with his man beside him. He brandished his broken whip in the air, and flung it into the bushes. Jeff walked on, and picked it up, before he turned aside to the pools of the marsh stretching on either hand, and tried to stanch his hurts, and get himself into shape for returning to town and stealing back to his lodging. He had to wait till after dark, and watch his chance to get into the house unnoticed.

XLVIII

The chum to whom Jeff confided the story of his encounter with a man he left nameless inwardly thanked fortune that he was not that man; for he knew him destined sooner or later to make such reparation for the injuries he had inflicted as Jeff chose to exact. He tended him carefully, and respected the reticence Jeff guarded concerning the whole matter, even with the young doctor whom his friend called, and who kept to himself his impressions of the nature of Jeff’s injuries.

Jeff lay in his darkened room, and burned with them, and with the thoughts, guesses, purposes which flamed through his mind. Had she, that girl, known what her brother meant to do? Had she wished him to think of her in the moment of his punishment, and had she spoken of her brother so that he might recall her, or had she had some ineffective impulse to warn him against her brother when she spoke of him?

He lay and raged in vain with his conjectures, and he did a thousand imagined murders upon Lynde in revenge of his shame.

Toward the end of the week, while his hurts were still too evident to allow him to go out-of-doors before dark, he had a note from Westover asking him to come in at once to see him.

“Your brother Jackson,” Westover wrote, “reached Boston by the New York train this morning, and is with me here. I must tell you I think he is not at all well, but he does not know how sick he is, and so I forewarn you. He wants to get on home, but I do not feel easy about letting him make the rest of the journey alone. Some one ought to go with him. I write not knowing whether you are still in Cambridge or not; or whether, if you are, you can get away at this time. But I think you ought, and I wish, at any rate, that you would come in at once and see Jackson. Then we can settle what had best be done.”

Jeff wrote back that he had been suffering with a severe attack of erysipelas — he decided upon erysipelas for the time being, but he meant to let Westover know later that he had been in a row — and the doctor would not let him go out yet. He promised to come in as soon as he possibly could. If Westover thought Jackson ought to be got home at once, and was not fit to travel alone, he asked him to send a hospital nurse with him.

Westover replied by Jeff’s messenger that it would worry and alarm Jackson to be put in charge of a nurse; but that he would go home with him, and they would start the next day. He urged Jeff to come and see his brother if it was at all safe for him to do so. But if he could not, Westover would give his mother a reassuring reason for his failure.

Mrs. Durgin did not waste any anxiety for the sickness which prevented Jeff from coming home with his brother. She said ironically that it must be very bad, and she gave all her thought and care to Jackson. The sick man rallied, as he prophesied he should, in his native air, and celebrated the sense and science of the last doctor he had seen in Europe, who told him that he had made a great gain, but he had better hurry home as fast as he could, for he had got all the advantage he could expect to have from his stay abroad, and now home air was the best thing for him.

It could not be known how much of this he believed; he had, at any rate, the pathetic hopefulness of his malady; but his mother believed it all, and she nursed him with a faith in his recovery which Whitwell confided to Westover was about as much as he wanted to see, for one while. She seemed to grow younger in the care of him, and to get back to herself, more and more, from the facts of Jeff’s behavior, which had aged and broken her. She had to tell Jackson about it all, but he took it with that indifference to the things of this world which the approach of death sometimes brings, and in the light of his passivity it no longer seemed to her so very bad. It was a relief to have Jackson say, Well, perhaps it was for the best; and it was a comfort to see how he and Cynthia took to each other; it was almost as if that dreadful trouble had not been. She told Jackson what hard work she had had to make Cynthia stay with her, and how the girl had consented to stay only until Jeff came home; but she guessed, now that Jackson had got back, he could make Cynthia see it all in another light, and perhaps it would all come right again. She consulted him about Jeff’s plan of going abroad, and Jackson said it might be about as well; he should soon be around, and he thought if Jeff went it would give Cynthia more of a chance to get reconciled. After all, his mother suggested, a good many fellows behaved worse than Jeff had done and still had made it up with the girls they were engaged to; and Jackson gently assented.

He did not talk with Cynthia about Jeff, out of that delicacy, or that coldness, common to them both. Perhaps it was not necessary for them to speak of him; perhaps they understood him aright in their understanding of each other.

Westover stayed on, day after day, thinking somehow that he ought to wait till Jeff came. There were only a few other people in the hotel, and these were of a quiet sort; they were not saddened by the presence of a doomed man under the same roof, as gayer summer folks might have been, and they were themselves no disturbance to him.

He sat about with them on the veranda, and he made friends among them, and they did what they could to encourage and console him in his impatience to take up his old cares in the management of the hotel. The Whitwells easily looked after the welfare of the guests, and Jackson was so much better to every one’s perception that Westover could honestly write Jeff a good report of him.

The report may have been so good that Jeff took the affair too easily. It was a fortnight after Jackson’s return to Lion’s Head when he began to fail so suddenly and alarmingly that Westover decided upon his own responsibility to telegraph Jeff of his condition. But he had the satisfaction of Whitwell’s approval when he told him what he had done.

“Of course, Jackson a’n’t long for this world. Anybody but him and his mother could see that; and now he’s just melting away, as you might say. I ha’n’t liked his not carin’ to work plantchette since he got back; looked to me from the start that he kind of knowed that it wa’n’t worth while for him to trouble about a world that he’ll know all about so soon, anyways; and d’ you notice he don’t seem to care about Mars, either? I’ve tried to wake him up on it two-three times, but you can’t git him to take an interest. I guess Jeff can’t git here any too soon on Jackson’s account; but as far forth as I go, he couldn’t git here too late. I should like to take the top of his head off.”

Westover had been in Whitwell’s confidence since their first chance of speech together. He now said:

“I know it will be rather painful to you to have him here for some reasons, but—”

“You mean Cynthy? Well! I guess when Cynthy can’t get along with the sight of Jeff Durgin, she’ll be a different girl from what she’s ever been before. If she’s got to see that skunk ag’in, I guess this is about the best time to do it.”

It was Westover who drove to meet Jeff at the station, when he got his despatch, naming the train he would take, and he found him looking very well, and perhaps stouter than he had been.

They left the station in silence, after their greeting and Jeff’s inquiries about Jackson. Jeff had taken the reins, and now he put them with the whip in one hand, and pushed up his hat with the other, and turned his face full upon Westover. “Notice anything in particular?” he demanded.

“No; yes — some slight marks.”

“I guess that fellow fixed me up pretty well: paints black eyes, and that kind of thing. I got to scrapping with a man, Class Day; we wanted to settle a little business we began at the Tree, and he left his marks on me. I meant to tell you the truth as soon as I could get at you; but I had to say erysipelas in my letter. I guess, if you don’t mind, we’ll let erysipelas stand, with the rest.”

“I shouldn’t have cared,” Westover said, “if you’d let it stand with me.”

“Oh, thank you,” Jeff returned.

There could have been no show of affection at his meeting with Jackson even if there had been any fact of it; that was not the law of their life. But Jeff had always been a turbulent, rebellious, younger brother, resentful of Jackson’s control, too much his junior to have the associations of an equal companionship in the past, and yet too near him in age to have anything like a filial regard for him. They shook hands, and each asked the other how he was, and then they seemed to have done with each other. Jeff’s mother kissed him in addition to the handshaking, but made him feel her preoccupation with Jackson; she asked him if he had hurried home on Jackson’s account, and he promptly lied her out of this anxiety.

He shook hands with Cynthia, too, but it was across the barrier which had not been lowered between them since they parted. He spoke to Jackson about her, the day after he came home, when Jackson said he was feeling unusually strong and well, and the two brothers had strolled out through the orchard together. Now and then he gave the sick man his arm, and when he wanted to sit down in a sunny place he spread the shawl he carried for him.

“I suppose mother’s told you about Cynthy and me, Jackson?” he began.

Jackson answered, with lack-lustre eyes, “Yes.” Presently he asked: “What’s become of the other girl?”

“Damn her! I don’t know what’s become of her, and I don’t care!” Jeff exploded, furiously.

“Then you don’t care for her any more?” Jackson pursued, with the same languid calm.

“I never cared for her.”

Jackson was silent, and the matter seemed to have faded out of his mind. But it was keenly alive in Jeff’s mind, and he was in the strange necessity which men in the flush of life and health often feel of seeking counsel of those who stand in the presence of death, as if their words should have something of the mystical authority of the unknown wisdom they are about to penetrate.

“What I want to know is, what I am going to do about Cynthy?”

“I don’t know,” Jackson answered, vaguely, and he expressed by his indirection the sense he must sometimes have had of his impending fate— “I don’t know what she’s going to do, her or mother, either.”

“Yes,” Jeff assented, “that’s what I think of. And I’d do anything that I could — that you thought was right.”

Jackson apparently concentrated his mind upon the question by an effort. “Do you care as much for Cynthy as you used to?”

“Yes,” said Jeff, after a moment, “as much as I ever did; and more. But I’ve been thinking, since the thing happened, that, if I’d cared for her the way she did for me, it wouldn’t have happened. Look here, Jackson! You know I’ve never pretended to be like some men — like Mr. Westover, for example — always looking out for the right and the wrong, and all that. I didn’t make myself, and I guess if the Almighty don’t make me go right it’s because He don’t want me to. But I have got a conscience about Cynthy, and I’d be willing to help out a little if I knew how, about her. The devil of it is, I’ve got to being afraid. I don’t mean that I’m not fit for her; any man’s fit for any woman if he wants her bad enough; but I’m afraid I sha’n’t ever care for her in the right way. That’s the point. I’ve cared for just one woman in this world, and it a’n’t Cynthy, as far as I can make out. But she’s gone, and I guess I could coax Cynthy round again, and I could be what she wants me to be, after this.”

Jackson lay upon his shawl, looking up at the sky full of islands of warm clouds in its sea of blue; he was silent so long that Jeff began to think he had not been listening; he could not hear him breathe, and he came forward to him quickly from the shadow of the tree where he sat.

“Well?” Jackson whispered, turning his eyes upon him.

“Well?” Jeff returned.

“I guess you’d better let it alone,” said Jackson.

“All right. That’s what I think, too.”

XLIX.

Jackson died a week later, and they buried him in the old family lot in the farthest corner of the orchard. His mother and Cynthia put on mourning for him, and they stood together by his open grave, Mrs. Durgin leaning upon her son’s arm and the girl upon her father’s. The women wept quietly, but Jeff’s eyes were dry, though his face was discharged of all its prepotent impudence. Westover, standing across the grave from him, noticed the marks on his forehead that he said were from his scrapping, and wondered what really made them. He recognized the spot where they were standing as that where the boy had obeyed the law of his nature and revenged the stress put upon him for righteousness. Over the stone of the nearest grave Jeff had shown a face of triumphant derision when he pelted Westover with apples. The painter’s mind fell into a chaos of conjecture and misgiving, so that he scarcely took in the words of the composite service which the minister from the Union Chapel at the Huddle read over the dead.

Some of the guests from the hotel came to the funeral, but others who were not in good health remained away, and there was a general sense among them, which imparted itself to Westover, that Jackson’s dying so, at the beginning of the season, was not a fortunate incident. As he sat talking with Jeff at a corner of the piazza late in the afternoon, Frank Whitwell came up to them and said there were some people in the office who had driven over from another hotel to see about board, but they had heard there was sickness in the house, and wished to talk with him.

“I won’t come,” said Jeff.

“They’re not satisfied with what I’ve said,” the boy urged. “What shall I tell them?”

“Tell them to-go to the devil,” said Jeff, and when Frank Whitwell made off with this message for delivery in such decent terms as he could imagine for it, Jeff said, rather to himself than to Westover, “I don’t see how we’re going to run this hotel with that old family lot down there in the orchard much longer.”

He assumed the air of full authority at Lion’s Head; and Westover felt the stress of a painful conjecture in regard to the Whitwells intensified upon him from the moment he turned away from Jackson’s grave.

Cynthia and her father had gone back to their own house as soon as Jeff returned, and though the girl came home with Mrs. Durgin after the funeral, and helped her in their common duties through the afternoon and evening, Westover saw her taking her way down the hill with her brother when the long day’s work was over. Jeff saw her too; he was sitting with Westover at the office door smoking, and he was talking of the Whitwells.

“I suppose they won’t stay,” he said, “and I can’t expect it; but I don’t know what mother will do, exactly.”

At the same moment Whitwell came round the corner of the hotel from the barn, and approached them: “Jeff, I guess I better tell you straight off that we’re goin’, the children and me.”

“All right, Mr. Whitwell,” said Jeff, with respectful gravity; “I was afraid of it.”

Westover made a motion to rise, but Whitwell laid a detaining hand upon his knee. “There ain’t anything so private about it, so far as I know.”

“Don’t go, Mr. Westover,” said Jeff, and Westover remained.

“We a’n’t a-goin’ to leave you in the lurch, and we want you should take your time, especially Mis’ Durgin. But the sooner the better. Heigh?”

“Yes, I understand that, Mr. Whitwell; I guess mother will miss you, but if you must go, you must.” The two men remained silent a moment, and then Jeff broke out passionately, rising and flinging his cigar away: “I wish I could go, instead! That would be the right way, and I guess mother would like it full as well. Do you see any way to manage it?” He put his foot up in his chair, and dropped his elbow on his knee, with his chin propped in his hand. Westover could see that he meant what he was saying. “If there was any way, I’d do it. I know what you think of me, and I should be just like you, in your place. I don’t feel right to turn you out here, I don’t, Mr. Whitwell, and yet if I stay, I’ve got to do it. What’s the reason I can’t go?”

“You can’t,” said Whitwell, “and that’s all about it. We shouldn’t let you, if you could. But I a’n’t surprised you feel the way you do,” he added, unsparingly. “As you say, I should feel just so myself if I was in your place. Well, goodnight, Mr. Westover.”

Whitwell turned and slouched down the hill, leaving the painter to the most painful moment he had known with Jeff Durgin, and nearer sympathy. “That’s all right, Mr. Westover,” Jeff said, “I don’t blame him.”

He remained in a constraint from which he presently broke with mocking hilarity when Jombateeste came round the corner of the house, as if he had been waiting for Whitwell to be gone, and told Jeff he must get somebody else to look after the horses.

“Why don’t you wait and take the horses with you, Jombateeste?” he inquired. “They’ll be handing in their resignation, the next thing. Why not go altogether?”

The little Canuck paused, as if uncertain whether he was made the object of unfriendly derision or not, and looked at Westover for help. Apparently he decided to chance it in as bitter an answer as he could invent. “The ‘oss can’t ‘elp ‘imself, Mr. Durgin. ‘E stay. But you don’ hown EVERYBODY.”

“That’s so, Jombateeste,” said Jeff. “That’s a good hit. It makes me feel awfully. Have a cigar?” The Canuck declined with a dignified bow, and Jeff said: “You don’t smoke any more? Oh, I see! It’s my tobacco you’re down on. What’s the matter, Jombateeste? What are you going away for?” Jeff lighted for himself the cigar the Canuck had refused, and smoked down upon the little man.

“Mr. W’itwell goin’,” Jombateeste said, a little confused and daunted.

“What’s Mr. Whitwell going for?”

“You hask Mr. W’itwell.”

“All right. And if I can get him to stay will you stay too, Jombateeste? I don’t like to see a rat leaving a ship; the ship’s sure to sink, if he does. How do you suppose I’m going to run Lion’s Head without you to throw down hay to the horses? It will be ruin to me, sure, Jombateeste. All the guests know how you play on the pitchfork out there, and they’ll leave in a body if they hear you’ve quit. Do say you’ll stay, and I’ll reduce your wages one-half on the spot.”

Jombateeste waited to hear no more injuries. He said: “You’ll don’ got money enough, Mr. Durgin, by gosh! to reduce my wages,” and he started down the hill toward Whitwell’s house with as great loftiness as could comport with a down-hill gait and his stature.

“Well, I seem to be getting it all round, Mr. Westover,” said Jeff. “This must make you feel good. I don’t know but I begin to believe there’s a God in Israel, myself.”

He walked away without saying good-night, and Westover went to bed without the chance of setting himself right. In the morning, when he came down to breakfast, and stopped at the desk to engage a conveyance for the station from Frank Whitwell the boy forestalled him with a grave face. “You don’t know about Mrs. Durgin?”

“No; what about her?”

“Well, we can’t tell exactly. Father thinks it’s a shock; Jombateeste gone over to Lovewell for the doctor. Cynthia’s with her. It seemed to come on in the night.”

He spoke softly, that no one else might hear; but by noon the fact that Mrs. Durgin had been stricken with paralysis was all over the place. The gloom cast upon the opening season by Jackson’s death was deepened among the guests. Some who had talked of staying through July went away that day. But under Cynthia’s management the housekeeping was really unaffected by Mrs. Durgin’s calamity, and the people who stayed found themselves as comfortable as ever. Jeff came fully into the hotel management, and in their business relation Cynthia and he were continually together; there was no longer a question of the Whitwells leaving him; even Jombateeste persuaded himself to stay, and Westover felt obliged to remain at least till the present danger in Mrs. Durgin’s case was past.

With the first return of physical strength, Mrs. Durgin was impatient to be seen about the house, and to retrieve the season that her affliction had made so largely a loss. The people who had become accustomed to it stayed on, and the house filled up as she grew better, but even the sight of her in a wheeled chair did not bring back the prosperity of other years. She lamented over it with a keen and full perception of the fact, but in a cloudy association of it with the joint future of Jeff and Cynthia.

One day, after Mrs. Durgin had declared that she did not know what they were to do, if things kept on as they were going, Whitwell asked his daughter:

“Do you suppose she thinks you and Jeff have made it up again?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl, with a troubled voice, “and I don’t know what to do about it. It don’t seem as if I could tell her, and yet it’s wrong to let her go on.”

“Why didn’t he tell her?” demanded her father. “‘Ta’n’t fair his leavin’ it to you. But it’s like him.”

The sick woman’s hold upon the fact weakened most when she was tired. When she was better, she knew how it was with them. Commonly it was when Cynthia had got her to bed for the night that she sent for Jeff, and wished to ask him what he was going to do. “You can’t expect Cynthy to stay here another winter helpin’ you, with Jackson away. You’ve got to either take her with you, or else come here yourself. Give up your last year in college, why don’t you? I don’t want you should stay, and I don’t know who does. If I was in Cynthia’s place, I’d let you work off your own conditions, now you’ve give up the law. She’ll kill herself, tryin’ to keep you along.”

Sometimes her speech became so indistinct that no one but Cynthia could make it out; and Jeff, listening with a face as nearly discharged as might be of its laughing irony, had to turn to Cynthia for the word which no one else could catch, and which the stricken woman remained distressfully waiting for her to repeat to him, with her anxious eyes upon the girl’s face. He was dutifully patient with all his mother’s whims. He came whenever she sent for him, and sat quiet under the severities with which she visited all his past unworthiness. “Who you been hectorin’ now, I should like to know,” she began on him one evening when he came at her summons. “Between you and Fox, I got no peace of my life. Where is the dog?”

“Fox is all right, mother,” Jeff responded. “You’re feeling a little better to-night, a’n’t you?”

“I don’t know; I can’t tell,” she returned, with a gleam of intelligence in her eye. Then she said: “I don’t see why I’m left to strangers all the time.”

“You don’t call Cynthia a stranger, do you, mother?” he asked, coaxingly.

“Oh — Cynthy!” said Mrs. Durgin, with a glance as of surprise at seeing her. “No, Cynthy’s all right. But where’s Jackson and your father? If I’ve told them not to be out in the dew once, I’ve told ’em a hundred times. Cynthy’d better look after her housekeepin’ if she don’t want the whole place to run behind, and not a soul left in the house. What time o’ year is it now?” she suddenly asked, after a little weary pause.

“It’s the last of August, mother.”

“Oh,” she sighed, “I thought it was the beginnin’ of May. Didn’t you come up here in May?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then — Or, mebbe that’s one o’ them tormentin’ dreams; they do pester so! What did you come for?”

Jeff was sitting on one side of her bed and Cynthia on the other: She was looking at the sufferer’s face, and she did not meet the glance of amusement which Jeff turned upon her at being so fairly cornered. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you might like to see me.”

“What ‘d he come for?” — the sick woman turned to Cynthia.

“You’d better tell her,” said the girl, coldly, to Jeff. “She won’t be satisfied till you do. She’ll keep coming back to it.”

“Well, mother,” said Jeff, still with something of his hardy amusement, “I hadn’t been acting just right, and I thought I’d better tell Cynthy.”

“You better let the child alone. If I ever catch you teasin’ them children again, I’ll make Jackson shoot Fox.”

“All right, mother,” said Jeff.

She moved herself restively in bed. “What’s this,” she demanded of her son, “that Whitwell’s tellin’ about you and Cynthy breakin’ it off?”

“Well, there was talk of that,” said Jeff, passing his hand over his lips to keep back the smile that was stealing to them.

“Who done it?”

Cynthia kept her eyes on Jeff, who dropped his to his mother’s face. “Cynthy did it; but I guess I gave her good enough reason.”

“About that hussy in Boston? She was full more to blame than what you was. I don’t see what Cynthy wanted to do it for on her account.”

“I guess Cynthy was right.”

Mrs. Durgin’s speech had been thickening more and more. She now said something that Jeff could not understand. He looked involuntarily at Cynthia.

“She says she thinks I was hasty with you,” the girl interpreted.

Jeff kept his eyes on hers, but he answered to his mother: “Not any more than I deserved. I hadn’t any right to expect that she would stand it.”

Again the sick woman tried to say something. Jeff made out a few syllables, and, after his mother had repeated her words, he had to look to Cynthia for help.

“She wants to know if it’s all right now.”

“What shall I say?” asked Jeff, huskily.

“Tell her the truth.”

“What is the truth?”

“That we haven’t made it up.”

Jeff hesitated, and then said: “Well, not yet, mother,” and he bent an entreating look upon Cynthia which she could not feel was wholly for himself. “I — I guess we can fix it, somehow. I behaved very badly to Cynthia.”

“No, not to me!” the girl protested in an indignant burst.

“Not to that little scalawag, then!” cried Jeff. “If the wrong wasn’t to you, there wasn’t any wrong.”

“It was to you!” Cynthia retorted.

“Oh, I guess I can stand it,” said Jeff, and his smile now came to his lips and eyes.

His mother had followed their quick parley with eager looks, as if she were trying to keep her intelligence to its work concerning them. The effort seemed to exhaust her, and when she spoke again her words were so indistinct that even Cynthia could not understand them till she had repeated them several times.

Then the girl was silent, while the invalid kept an eager look upon her. She seemed to understand that Cynthia did not mean to speak; and the tears came into her eyes.

“Do you want me to know what she said?” asked Jeff, respectfully, reverently almost.

Cynthia said, gently: “She says that then you must show you didn’t mean any harm to me, and that you cared for me, all through, and you didn’t care for anybody else.”

“Thank you,” said Jeff, and he turned to his mother. “I’ll do everything I can to make Cynthy believe that, mother.”

The girl broke into tears and went out of the room. She sent in the night-watcher, and then Jeff took leave of his mother with an unwonted kiss.

Into the shadow of a starlit night he saw the figure he had been waiting for glide out of the glitter of the hotel lights. He followed it down the road.

“Cynthia!” he called; and when he came up with her he asked: “What’s the reason we can’t make it true? Why can’t you believe what mother wants me to make you?”

Cynthia stopped, as her wont was when she wished to speak seriously. “Do you ask that for my sake or hers?”

“For both your sakes.”

“I thought so. You ought to have asked it for your own sake, Jeff, and then I might have been fool enough to believe you. But now—”

She started swiftly down the hill again, and this time he did not try to follow her.

L.

Mrs. Durgin’s speech never regained the measure of clearness it had before; no one but Cynthia could understand her, and often she could not. The doctor from Lovewell surmised that she had sustained another stroke, lighter, more obscure than the first, and it was that which had rendered her almost inarticulate. The paralysis might have also affected her brain, and silenced her thoughts as well as her words. Either she believed that the reconciliation between Jeff and Cynthia had taken place, or else she could no longer care. She did not question them again, but peacefully weakened more and more. Near the end of September she had a third stroke, and from this she died.

The day after the funeral Jeff had a talk with Whitwell, and opened his mind to him.

“I’m going over to the other side, and I shan’t be back before spring, or about time to start the season here. What I want to know is whether, if I’m out of the house, and not likely to come back, you’ll stay here and look after the place through the winter. It hasn’t been a good season, but I guess I can afford to make it worth your while if you look at it as a matter of business.”

Whitwell leaned forward and took a straw into his mouth from the golden wall of oat sheaves in the barn where they were talking. A soft rustling in the mow overhead marked the remote presence of Jombateeste, who was getting forward the hay for the horses, pushing it toward the holes where it should fall into their racks.

“I should want to think about it,” said Whitwell. “I do’ know as Cynthy’d care much about stayin’ — or Frank.”

“How long do you want to think about it?” Jeff demanded, ignoring the possible wishes of Cynthia and Frank.

“I guess I could let you know by night.”

“All right,” said Jeff.

He was turning away, when Whitwell remarked:

“I don’t know as I should want to stay without I could have somebody I could depend on, with me, to look after the hosses. Frank wouldn’t want to.”

“Who’d you like?”

“Well — Jombateeste.”

“Ask him.”

Whitwell called to the Canuck, and he came forward to the edge of the mow, and stood, fork in hand, looking down.

“Want to stay here this winter and look after the horses, Jombateeste?” Whitwell asked.

“Nosseh!” said the Canuck, with a misliking eye on Jeff.

“I mean, along with me,” Whitwell explained. “If I conclude to stay, will you? Jeff’s goin’ abroad.”

“I guess I stay,” said Jombateeste.

“Don’t strain yourself, Jombateeste,” said Jeff, with malevolent derision.

“Not for you, Jeff Dorrgin,” returned the Canuck. “I strain myself till I bust, if I want.”

Jeff sneered to Whitwell: “Well, then, the most important point is settled. Let me know about the minor details as soon as you can.”

“All right.”

Whitwell talked the matter over with his children at supper that evening. Jeff had made him a good offer, and he had the winter before him to provide for.

“I don’t know what deviltry he’s up to,” he said in conclusion.

Frank looked to his sister for their common decision. “I am going to try for a school,” she said, quietly. “It’s pretty late, but I guess I can get something. You and Frank had better stay.”

“And you don’t feel as if it was kind of meechin’, our takin’ up with his offer, after what’s—” Whitwell delicately forbore to fill out his sentence.

“You are doing the favor, father,” said the girl. “He knows that, and I guess he wouldn’t know where to look if you refused. And, after all, what’s happened now is as much my doing as his.”

“I guess that’s something so,” said Whitwell, with a long sigh of relief. “Well, I’m glad you can look at it in that light, Cynthy. It’s the way the feller’s built, I presume, as much as anything.”

His daughter waived the point. “I shouldn’t feel just right if none of us stayed in the old place. I should feel as if we had turned our backs on Mrs. Durgin.”

Her eyes shone, and her father said: “Well, I guess that’s so, come to think of it. She’s been like a mother to you, this past year, ha’n’t she? And it must have come pootty hard for her, sidin’ ag’in’ Jeff. But she done it.”

The girl turned her head away. They were sitting in the little, low keeping-room of Whitwell’s house, and her father had his hat on provisionally. Through the window they could see the light of the lantern at the office door of the hotel, whose mass was lost in the dark above and behind the lamp. It was all very still outside.

“I declare,” Whitwell went on, musingly, “I wisht Mr. Westover was here.”

Cynthia started, but it was to ask: “Do you want I should help you with your Latin, Frank?”

Whitwell came back an hour later and found them still at their books. He told them it was all arranged; Durgin was to give up the place to him in a week, and he was to surrender it again when Jeff came back in the spring. In the mean time things were to remain as they were; after he was gone, they could all go and live at Lion’s Head if they chose.

“We’ll see,” said Cynthia. “I’ve been thinking that might be the best way, after all. I might not get a school, it’s so late.”

“That’s so,” her father assented. “I declare,” he added, after a moment’s muse, “I felt sorry for the feller settin’ up there alone, with nobody to do for him but that old thing he’s got in. She can’t cook any more than—” He desisted for want of a comparison, and said: “Such a lookin’ table, too.”

“Do you think I better go and look after things a little?” Cynthia asked.

“Well, you no need to,” said her father. He got down the planchette, and labored with it, while his children returned to Frank’s lessons.

“Dumn ‘f I can make the thing work,” he said to himself at last. “I can’t git any of ’em up. If Jackson was here, now!”

Thrice a day Cynthia went up to the hotel and oversaw the preparation of Jeff’s meals and kept taut the slack housekeeping of the old Irish woman who had remained as a favor, after the hotel closed, and professed to have lost the chance of a place for the winter by her complaisance. She submitted to Cynthia’s authority, and tried to make interest for an indefinite stay by sudden zeal and industry, and the last days of Jeff in the hotel were more comfortable than he openly recognized. He left the care of the building wholly to Whitwell, and shut himself up in the old farm parlor with the plans for a new hotel which he said he meant to put up some day, if he could ever get rid of the old one. He went once to Lovewell, where he renewed the insurance, and somewhat increased it; and he put a small mortgage on the property. He forestalled the slow progress of the knowledge of others’ affairs, which, in the country, is as sure as it is slow, and told Whitwell what he had done. He said he wanted the mortgage money for his journey, and the insurance money, if he could have the luck to cash up by a good fire, to rebuild with.

Cynthia seldom met him in her comings and goings, but if they met they spoke on the terms of their boy and girl associations, and with no approach through resentment or tenderness to the relation that was ended between them. She saw him oftener than at any other time setting off on the long tramps he took through the woods in the afternoons. He was always alone, and, so far as any one knew, his wanderings had no object but to kill the time which hung heavy on his hands during the fortnight after his mother’s death, before he sailed. It might have seemed strange that he should prefer to pass the days at Lion’s Head after he had arranged for the care of the place with Whitwell, and Whitwell always believed that he stayed in the hope of somehow making up with Cynthia.

One day, toward the very last, Durgin found himself pretty well fagged in the old pulp-mill clearing on the side of Lion’s Head, which still belonged to Whitwell, and he sat down on a mouldering log there to rest. It had always been a favorite picnic ground, but the season just past had known few picnics, and it was those of former years that had left their traces in rusty sardine-cans and broken glass and crockery on the border of the clearing, which was now almost covered with white moss. Jeff thought of the day when he lurked in the hollow below with Fox, while Westover remained talking with Whitwell. He thought of the picnic that Mrs. Marven had embittered for him, and he thought of the last time that he had been there with Westover, when they talked of the Vostrands.

Life had, so far, not been what he meant it, and just now it occurred to him that he might not have wholly made it what it had been. It seemed to him that a good many other people had come in and taken a hand in making his own life what it had been; and if he had meddled with theirs more than he was wanted, it was about an even thing. As far as he could make out, he was a sort of ingredient in the general mixture. He had probably done his share of the flavoring, but he had had very little to do with the mixing. There were different ways of looking at the thing. Westover had his way, but it struck Jeff that it put too much responsibility on the ingredient, and too little on the power that chose it. He believed that he could prove a clear case in his own favor, as far as the question of final justice was concerned, but he had no complaints to make. Things had fallen out very much to his mind. He was the Landlord at Lion’s Head, at last, with the full right to do what he pleased with the place, and with half a year’s leisure before him to think it over. He did not mean to waste the time while he was abroad; if there was anything to be learned anywhere about keeping a summer hotel, he was going to learn it; and he thought the summer hotel could be advantageously studied in its winter phases in the mild climates of Southern Europe. He meant to strike for the class of Americans who resorted to those climates; to divine their characters and to please their tastes.

He unconsciously included Cynthia in his scheme of inquiry; he had been used so long to trust to her instincts and opinions, and to rely upon her help, and he realized that she was no longer in his life with something like the shock a man experiences when the loss of a limb, which continues a part of his inveterate consciousness, is brought to his sense by some mechanical attempt to use it. But even in this pang he did not regret that all was over between them. He knew now that he had never cared for her as he had once thought, and on her account, if not his own, he was glad their engagement was broken. A soft melancholy for his own disappointment imparted itself to his thoughts of Cynthia. He felt truly sorry for her, and he truly admired and respected her. He was in a very lenient mood toward every one, and he went so far in thought toward forgiving his enemies that he was willing at least to pardon all those whom he had injured. A little rustling in the underbrush across the clearing caught his quick ear, and he looked up to see Jombateeste parting the boughs of the young pines on its edge and advancing into the open with a gun on his shoulder. He called to him, cheerily: “Hello, John! Any luck?”

Jombateeste shook his head. “Nawthing.” He hesitated.

“What are you after?”

“Partridge,” Jombateeste ventured back.

Jeff could not resist the desire to scoff which always came upon him at sight of the Canuck. “Oh, pshaw! Why don’t you go for woodchucks? They fly low, and you can hit them on the wing, if you can’t sneak on ’em sitting.”

Jombateeste received his raillery in dignified silence, and turned back into the woods again. He left Durgin in heightened good-humor with himself and with the world, which had finally so well adapted itself to his desires and designs.

Jeff watched his resentful going with a grin, and then threw himself back on the thick bed of dry moss where he had been sitting, and watched the clouds drifting across the space of blue which the clearing opened overhead. His own action reminded him of Jackson, lying in the orchard and looking up at the sky. He felt strangely at one with him, and he experienced a tenderness for his memory which he had not known before. Jackson had been a good man; he realized that with a curious sense of novelty in the reflection; he wondered what the incentives and the objects of such men as Jackson and Westover were, anyway. Something like grief for his brother came upon him; not such grief as he had felt, passionately enough, though tacitly, for his mother, but a regret for not having shown Jackson during his life that he could appreciate his unselfishness, though he could not see the reason or the meaning of it. He said to himself, in their safe remoteness from each other, that he wished he could do something for Jackson. He wondered if in the course of time he should get to be something like him. He imagined trying.

He heard sounds again in the edge of the clearing, but he decided that it was that fool Jombateeste coming back; and when steps approached softly and hesitantly across the moss, he did not trouble himself to take his eyes from the clouds. He was only vexed to have his revery broken in upon.

A voice that was not Jombateeste’s spoke: “I say! Can you tell me the way to the Brooker Institute, or to the road down the mountain?”

Jeff sat suddenly bolt-upright; in another moment he jumped to his feet. The Brooker Institute was a branch of the Keeley Cure recently established near the Huddle, and this must be a patient who had wandered from it, on one of the excursions the inmates made with their guardians, and lost his way. This was the fact that Jeff realized at the first glance he gave the man. The next he recognized that the man was Alan Lynde.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, quite simply. He felt so cruelly the hardship of his one unforgiven enemy’s coming upon him just when he had resolved to be good that the tears came into his eyes. Then his rage seemed to swell up in him like the rise of a volcanic flood. “I’m going to kill you!” he, roared, and he launched himself upon Lynde, who stood dazed.

But the murder which Jeff meant was not to be so easily done. Lynde had not grown up in dissolute idleness without acquiring some of the arts of self-defence which are called manly. He met Jeff’s onset with remembered skill and with the strength which he had gained in three months of the wholesome regimen of the Brooker Institute. He had been sent there, not by Dr. Lacy’s judgment, but by his despair, and so far the Cure had cured. He felt strong and fresh, and the hate which filled Jeff at sight of him steeled his shaken nerves and reinforced his feebler muscles, too.

He made a desperate fight where he could not hope for mercy, and kept himself free of his powerful foe, whom he fought round and foiled, if he could not hurt him. Jeff never knew of the blows Lynde got in upon him; he had his own science, too, but he would not employ it. He wanted to crash through Lynde’s defence and lay hold of him and crush the life out of him.

The contest could not have lasted long at the best; but before Lynde was worn out he caught his heel in an old laurel root, and while he whirled to recover his footing Jeff closed in upon him, caught him by the middle, flung him down upon the moss, and was kneeling on his breast with both hands at his throat.

He glared down into his enemy’s face, and suddenly it looked pitifully little and weak, like a girl’s face, a child’s.

Sometimes, afterward, it seemed to him that he forbore because at that instant he saw Jombateeste appear at the edge of the clearing and come running upon them. At other times he had the fancy that his action was purely voluntary, and that, against the logic of his hate and habit of his life, he had mercy upon his enemy. He did not pride himself upon it; he rather humbled himself before the fact, which was accomplished through his will, and not by it, and remained a mystery he did not try to solve.

He took his hands from Lynde’s throat and his knees off his breast. “Get up,” he said; and when Lynde stood trembling on his feet he said to Jombateeste: “Show this man the way to the Brooker Institute. I’ll take your gun home for you,” and it was easy for him to detach the piece from the bewildered Canuck’s grasp. “Go! And if you stop, or even let him look back, I’ll shoot him. Quick!”

LI.

The day after Thanksgiving, when Westover was trying to feel well after the turkey and cranberry and cider which a lady had given him at a consciously old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner, but not making it out sufficiently to be able to work, he was astonished to receive a visit from Whitwell.

“Well, sir,” said the philosopher, without giving himself pause for the exchange of reflections upon his presence in Boston, which might have been agreeable to him on a less momentous occasion. “It’s all up with Lion’s Head.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Westover, with his mind upon the mountain, which he electrically figured in an incredible destruction.

“She’s burnt. Burnt down the day before yist’d’y aft’noon. A’n’t hardly a stick of her left. Ketehed Lord knows how, from the kitchen chimney, and a high northwest wind blowin’, that ca’d the sparks to the barn, and set fire to that, too. Hasses gone; couldn’t get round to ‘em; only three of us there, and mixed up so about the house till it was so late the critters wouldn’t come out. Folks from over Huddle way see the blaze, and helped all they could; but it wa’n’t no use. I guess all we saved, about, was the flag-pole.”

“But you’re all right yourselves? Cynthia.”

“Well, there was our misfortune,” said Whitwell, while Westover’s heart stopped in a mere wantonness of apprehension. “If she’d be’n there, it might ha’ be’n diff’ent. We might ha’ had more sense; or she would, anyway. But she was over to Lovewell stockin’ up for Thanksgivin’, and I had to make out the best I could, with Frank and Jombateeste. Why, that Canuck didn’t seem to have no more head on him than a hen. I was disgusted; but Cynthy wouldn’t let me say anything to him, and I d’ know as ‘t ‘ould done any good, myself. We’ve talked it all over in every light, ever since; guess we’ve set up most the time talkin’, and nothin’ would do her but I should come down and see you before I took a single step about it.”

“How — step about what?” asked Westover, with a remote sense of hardship at being brought in, tempered by the fact that it was Cynthia who had brought him in.

“Why, that devil,” said Whitwell, and Westover knew that he meant Jeff, “went and piled on all the insurance he could pile on, before he left; and I don’t know what to do about it.”

“I should think the best thing was to collect the insurance,” Westover suggested, distractedly.

“It a’n’t so easy as what that comes to,” said Whitwell. “I couldn’t collect the insurance; and here’s the point, anyway. When a hotel’s made a bad season, and she’s fully insured, she’s pootty certain to burn up some time in the winter. Everybody knows that comical devil wanted lion’s Head to burn up so ‘t he could build new, and I presume there a’n’t a man, woman, or child anywhere round but what believes I set her on fire. Hired to do it. Now, see? Jeff off in Europe; daytime; no lives lost; prop’ty total loss ‘s a clear case. Heigh? I tell you, I’m afraid I’ve got trouble ahead.”

Westover tried to protest, to say something in derision or defiance; but he was shaken himself, and he ended by getting his hat and coat; Whitwell had kept his own on, in the excitement. “We’ll go out and see a lawyer. A friend of mine; it won’t cost you anything.” He added this assurance at a certain look of reluctance that came into Whitwell’s face, and that left it as soon as he had spoken. Whitwell glanced round the studio even cheerily. “Who’d ha’ thought,” he said, fastening upon the study which Westover had made of Lion’s head the winter before, “that the old place would ‘a’ gone so soon?” He did not mean the mountain which he was looking at, but the hotel that was present to his mind’s eye; and Westover perceived as he had not before that to Whitwell the hotel and not the mountain was Lion’s Head.

He remembered to ask now where Whitwell had left his family, and Whitwell said that Frank and Cynthia were at home in his own house with Jombateeste; but he presumed he could not get back to them now before the next day. He refused to be interested in any of the aspects of Boston which Westover casually pointed out, but when they had seen the lawyer he came forth a new man, vividly interested in everything. The lawyer had been able to tell them that though the insurance companies would look sharply into the cause of the fire, there was no probability, hardly a possibility, that they would inculpate him, and he need give himself no anxiety about the affair.

“There’s one thing, though,” Whitwell said to Westover when they got out upon the street. “Hadn’t I ought to let Jeff know?”

“Yes, at once. You’d better cable him. Have you got his address?”

Whitwell had it, and he tasted all the dramatic quality of sending word to Jeff, which he would receive in Florence an hour after it left Boston. “I did hope I could ha’ cabled once to Jackson while he was gone,” he said, regretfully, “but, unless we can fix up a wire with the other world, I guess I shan’t ever do it now. I suppose Jackson’s still hangin’ round Mars, some’res.”

He had a sectarian pride in the beauty of the Spiritual Temple which Westover walked him by on his way to see Trinity Church and the Fine Arts Museum, and he sorrowed that he could not attend a service’ there. But he was consoled by the lunch which he had with Westover at a restaurant where it was served in courses. “I presume this is what Jeff’s goin’ to give ’em at Lion’s Head when he gits it goin’ again.”

“How is it he’s in Florence?” it occurred to Westover to ask. “I thought he was going to Nice for the winter.”

“I don’t know. That’s the address he give in his last letter,” said Whitwell. “I’ll be glad when I’ve done with him for good and all. He’s all kinds of a devil.”

It was in Westover’s mind to say that he wished the Whitwells had never had anything to do with Durgin after his mother’s death. He had felt it a want of delicacy in them that they had been willing to stay on in his employ, and his ideal of Cynthia had suffered a kind of wound from what must have been her decision in the matter. He would have expected something altogether different from her pride, her self-respect. But he now merely said: “Yes, I shall be glad, too. I’m afraid he’s a bad fellow.”

His words seemed to appeal to Whitwell’s impartiality. “Well, I d’ know as I should say bad, exactly. He’s a mixture.”

“He’s a bad mixture,” said Westover.

“Well, I guess you’re partly right there,” Whitwell admitted, with a laugh. After a dreamy moment he asked: “Ever hear anything more about that girl here in Boston?”

Westover knew that he meant Bessie Lynde. “She’s abroad somewhere, with her aunt.”

Whitwell had not taken any wine; apparently he was afraid of forming instantly the habit of drink if he touched it; but he tolerated Westover’s pint of Zinfandel, and he seemed to warm sympathetically to a greater confidence as the painter made away with it. “There’s one thing I never told Cynthy yet; well, Jombateeste didn’t tell me himself till after Jeff was gone; and then, thinks I, what’s the use? But I guess you had better know.”

He leaned forward across the table, and gave Jombateeste’s story of the encounter between Jeff and Alan Lynde in the clearing. “Now what do you suppose was the reason Jeff let up on the feller? Of course, he meant to choke the life out of him, and his just ketchin’ sight of Jombateeste — do you believe that was enough to stop him, when he’d started in for a thing like that? Or what was it done it?”

Westover listened with less thought of the fact itself than of another fact that it threw light upon. It was clear to him now that the Class-Day scrapping which had left its marks upon Jeff’s face was with Lynde, and that when Jeff got him in his power he was in such a fury for revenge that no mere motive of prudence could have arrested him. In both events, it must have been Bessie Lynde that was the moving cause; but what was it that stayed Jeff in his vengeance?

“Let him up, and let him walk away, you say?” he demanded of Whitwell.

Whitwell nodded. “That’s what Jombateeste said. Said Jeff said if he let the feller look back he’d shoot him. But he didn’t haf to.”

“I can’t make it out,” Westover sighed.

“It’s been too much for me,” Whitwell said. “I told Jombateeste he’d better keep it to himself, and I guess he done so. S’pose Jeff still had a sneakin’ fondness for the girl?”

“I don’t know; perhaps,” Westover asserted.

Whitwell threw his head back in a sudden laugh that showed all the work of his dentist. “Well, wouldn’t it be a joke if he was there in Florence after her? Be just like Jeff.”

“It would be like Jeff; I don’t know whether it would be a joke or not. I hope he won’t find it a joke, if it’s so,” said Westover, gloomily. A fantastic apprehension seized him, which made him wish for the moment that it might be so, and which then passed, leaving him simply sorry for any chance that might bring Bessie Lynde into the fellow’s way again.

For the evening Whitwell’s preference would have been a lecture of some sort, but there was none advertised, and he consented to go with Westover to the theatre. He came back to the painter at dinner-time, after a wary exploration of the city, which had resulted not only in a personal acquaintance with its monuments, but an immunity from its dangers and temptations which he prided himself hardly less upon. He had seen Faneuil Hall, the old State House, Bunker Hill, the Public Library, and the Old South Church, and he had not been sandbagged or buncoed or led astray from the paths of propriety. In the comfortable sense of escape, he was disposed, to moralize upon the civilization of great cities, which he now witnessed at first hand for the first time; and throughout the evening, between the acts of the “Old Homestead,” which he found a play of some merit, but of not so much novelty in its characters as he had somehow led himself to expect, he recurred to the difficulties and dangers that must beset a young man in coming to a place like Boston. Westover found him less amusing than he had on his own ground at Lion’s Head, and tasted a quality of commonplace in his deliverances which made him question whether he had not, perhaps, always owed more to this environment than he had suspected. But they parted upon terms of mutual respect and in the common hope of meeting again. Whitwell promised to let Westover know what he heard of Jeff, but, when the painter had walked the philosopher home to his hotel, he found a message awaiting him at his studio from Jeff direct:

  Whitwell’s despatch received. Wait letter.

                      “DURGIN.”

Westover raged at the intelligent thrift of this telegram, and at the implication that he not only knew all about the business of Whitwell’s despatch, but that he was in communication with him, and would be sufficiently interested to convey Jeff’s message to him. Of course, Durgin had at once divined that Whitwell must have come to him for advice, and that he would hear from him, whether he was still in Boston or not. By cabling to Westover, Jeff saved the cost of an elaborate address to Whitwell at Lion’s Head, and had brought the painter in for further consultation and assistance in his affairs. What vexed him still more was his own consciousness that he could not defeat this impudent expectation. He had, indeed, some difficulty with himself to keep from going to Whitwell’s hotel with the despatch at once, and he slept badly, in his fear that he might not get it to him in the morning before he left town.

The sum of Jeff’s letter when it came, and it came to Westover and not to Whitwell, was to request the painter to see a lawyer in his behalf, and put his insurance policies in his hands, with full authority to guard his interests in the matter. He told Westover where his policies would be found, and enclosed the key of his box in the Safety Vaults, with a due demand for Westover’s admission to it. He registered his letter, and he jocosely promised Westover to do as much for him some day, in pleading that there was really no one else he could turn to. He put the whole business upon him, and Westover discharged himself of it as briefly as he could by delivering the papers to the lawyer he had already consulted for Whitwell.

“Is this another charity patient?” asked his friend, with a grin.

“No,” replied Westover. “You can charge this fellow along the whole line.”

Before he parted with the lawyer he had his misgivings, and he said: “I shouldn’t want the blackguard to think I had got a friend a fat job out of him.”

The lawyer laughed intelligently. “I shall only make the usual charge. Then he is a blackguard.”

“There ought to be a more blistering word.”

“One that would imply that he was capable of setting fire to his property?”

“I don’t say that. But I’m glad he was away when it took fire,” said Westover.

“You give him the benefit of the doubt.”

“Yes, of every kind of doubt.”

LII.

Westover once more promised himself to have nothing to do with Jeff Durgin or his affairs. But he did not promise this so confidently as upon former occasions, and he instinctively waited for a new complication. He could not understand why Jeff should not have come home to look after his insurance, unless it was because he had become interested in some woman even beyond his concern for his own advantage. He believed him capable of throwing away advantages for disadvantages in a thing of that kind, but he thought it more probable that he had fallen in love with one whom he would lose nothing by winning. It did not seem at all impossible that he should have again met Bessie Lynde, and that they should have made up their quarrel, or whatever it was. Jeff would consider that he had done his whole duty by Cynthia, and that he was free to renew his suit with Bessie; and there was nothing in Bessie’s character, as Westover understood it, to prevent her taking him back upon a very small show of repentance if the needed emotions were in prospect. He had decided pretty finally that it would be Bessie rather than another when he received a letter from Mrs. Vostrand. It was dated at Florence, and after some pretty palaver about their old friendship, which she only hoped he remembered half as fondly as she did, the letter ran:

“I am turning to you now in a very strange difficulty, but I do not know that I should turn to you even now, and knowing all I do of your goodness, if I were not asked to do so by another. “I believe we have not heard from each other since the first days of my poor Genevieve’s marriage, when everything looked so bright and fair, and we little realized the clouds that were to overcast her happiness. It is a long story, and I will not go into it fully. The truth is that poor Gigi did not treat her very kindly, and that she has not lived with him since the birth of their little girl, now nearly two years old, and the sweetest little creature in the world; I wish you could see her; I am sure it would inspire your pencil with the idea of an angel-child. At first I hoped that the separation would be only temporary, and that when Genevieve had regained her strength she would be willing to go back to her husband; but nothing would induce her to do so. In fact, poor Gigi had spent all her money, and they would have had nothing to live upon but his pay, and you know that the pay of the Italian officers is very small. “Gigi made several attempts to see her, and he threatened to take the child from her, but he was always willing to compromise for money. I am afraid that he never really loved her and that we were both deceived by his fervent protestations. We managed to get away from Florence without his knowing it, and we have spent the last two years in Lausanne, very happily, though very quietly. Our dear Checco is in the university there, his father having given up the plan of sending him to Harvard, and we had him with us, while we were taking measures to secure the divorce. Even in the simple way we lived Genevieve attracted a great deal of attention, as she always has done, and she would have had several eligible offers if she had been divorced, or if her affections had not already been engaged, as I did not know at the time. “We were in this state of uncertainty up to the middle of last summer, when the news of poor Gigi’s sudden death came. I am sorry to say that his habits in some respects were not good, and that probably hastened it some; it had obliged him to leave the army. Genevieve did not feel that she could consistently put on black for him, and I did not urge her, under the peculiar circumstances; there is so much mere formality in those kind of things at the best; but we immediately returned to Florence to try and see if we could not get back some of her effects which his family had seized. I am opposed to lawsuits if they can possibly be avoided, and we arranged with poor Gigi’s family by agreeing to let them have Genevieve’s furniture if they would promise never to molest her with the child, and I must say they have behaved very well. We are on the best of terms with them, and they have let us have some of the things back which were endeared to her by old associations, at a very reasonable rate. “This brings me to the romantic part of my letter, and I will say at once that we found your friend Mr. Durgin in Florence, in the very hotel we went to. We all met in the dining-room, at the table d’hote one evening, and Genevieve and he took to each other at once. He spent the evening with us in our private drawing-room, and she said to me, after he went, that for the first time in years she felt rested. It seems that she had always secretly fancied him, and that she gave up to me in the matter of marrying poor Gigi, because she knew I had my heart set upon it, and she was not very certain of her own feelings when Mr. D. offered himself in Boston; but the conviction that she had made a mistake grew upon, her more and more after she had married Gigi. “Well, now, Mr. Westover, I suppose you have guessed by this time that Mr. Durgin has renewed his offer, and Genevieve has conditionally accepted him; we do not feel that she is like an ordinary widow, and that she has to fill up a certain season of mourning; she and Gigi have been dead to each other for years; and Mr. Durgin is as fond of our dear little Bice as her own father could be, and they are together all the time. Her name is Beatrice de’ Popolani Grassi. Isn’t it lovely? She has poor Gigi’s black eyes, with the most beautiful golden hair, which she gets from our aide. You remember Genevieve’s hair back in the dear old days, before any trouble had come, and we were all so happy together? And this brings me to what I wanted to say. You are the oldest friend we have, and by a singular coincidence you are the oldest friend of Mr. Durgin, too. I cannot bear to risk my child’s happiness a second time, and though Mr. Vostrand fully approves of the match, and has cabled his consent from Seattle, Washington, still, you know, a mother’s heart cannot be at rest without some positive assurance. I told Mr. Durgin quite frankly how I felt, and he agreed with me that after our experience with poor Gigi we could not be too careful, and he authorized me to write to you and find out all you knew about him. He said you had known him ever since he was a boy, and that if there was anything bad in his record you could tell it, and he did not want you to spire the truth. He knows you will be just, and he wants you to write out the facts as they struck you at the time. “I shall be on pins and needles, as the saying is, till we hear from you, and you know hew Genevieve and Mr. D. must be feeling. She is fully resolved not to have him without your endorsement, and he is quite willing to abide by what you say. “I could almost wish you to cable me just Good or Bad, but I know that this will not be wise, and I am going to wait for your letter, and get your opinion in full. “We all join in the kindest regards. Mr. D. is talking with Genevieve while I write, and has our darling Bice on his knees. You cannot imagine what a picture it makes, her childish delicacy contrasted with his stalwart strength. She says to send you a baciettino, and I wish you were here to receive it from her angel lips. Yours faithfully,

“MEDORA VOSTRAND.

“P. S. — Mr. D. says that he fell in love with Genevieve across the barrier between the first and second cabin when he came over with us on the Aquitaine four years ago, and that he has never ceased to love her, though at one time he persuaded himself that he cared for another because he felt that she was lost to him forever, and it was no use: He really did care for the lady he was engaged to, and had a true affection for her, which he mistook for a warmer feeling. He says that she was worthy of any man’s love and of the highest respect. I tell Genevieve that, she ought to honor him for it, and that she must never be jealous of a memory. We are very happy in Mr. Vostrand’s cordial approval of the match. He is so glad to think that Mr. D. is a business man. His cable from Seattle was most enthusiastic. “M. D.”

Westover did not know whether to laugh or cry when he read this letter, which covered several sheets of paper in lines that traversed each other in different directions. His old, youthful ideal of Mrs. Vostrand finally perished in its presence, though still he could not blame her for wishing to see her daughter well married after having seen her married so ill. He asked himself, without getting any very definite response, whether Mrs. Vostrand had always been this kind of a woman, or had grown into it by the use of arts which her peculiar plan of life had rendered necessary to her. He remembered the intelligent toleration of Cynthia in speaking of her, and his indignation in behalf of the girl was also thrill of joy for her escape from the fate which Mrs. Vostrand was so eagerly invoking for her daughter. But he thought of Genevieve with something of the same tenderness, and with a compassion that was for her alone. She seemed to him a victim who was to be sacrificed a second time, and he had clearly a duty to her which he must not evade. The only question could be how best to discharge it, and Westover took some hours from his work to turn the question over in his mind. In the end, when he was about to give the whole affair up for the present, and lose a night’s sleep over it later, he had an inspiration, and he acted upon it at once. He perceived that he owed no formal response to the sentimental insincerities of Mrs. Vostrand’s letter, and he decided to write to Durgin himself, and to put the case altogether in his hands. If Durgin chose to show the Vostrands what he should write, very well; if he chose not to show it, then Westover’s apparent silence would be a sufficient reply to Mrs. Vostrand’s appeal.

“I prefer to address you,” he began, “because I do not choose to let you think that I have any feeling to indulge against you, and because I do not think I have the right to take you out of your own keeping in any way. You would be in my keeping if I did, and I do not wish that, not only because it would be a bother to me, but because it would be a wrong to you. “Mrs. Vostrand, whose letter to me I will leave you to answer by showing her this, or in any other manner you choose, tells me you do not want me to spare the truth concerning you. I have never been quite certain what the truth was concerning you; you know that better than I do; and I do not propose to write your biography here. But I will remind you of a few things. “The first day I saw you, I caught you amusing yourself with the terror of two little children, and I had the pleasure of cuffing you for it. But you were only a boy then, and afterward you behaved so well that I decided you were not so much cruel as thoughtlessly mischievous. When you had done all you could to lead me to this favorable conclusion, you suddenly turned and avenged yourself on me, so far as you could, for the help I had given the little ones against you. I never greatly blamed you for that, for I decided that you had a vindictive temperament, and that you were not responsible for your temperament, but only for your character. “In your first year at Harvard your associations were bad, and your conduct generally was so bad that you were suspended. You were arrested with other rowdy students, and passed the night in a police station. I believe you were justly acquitted of any specific offence, and I always believed that if you had experienced greater kindness socially during your first year in college you would have been a better man. “You seem to have told Mrs. Vostrand of your engagement, and I will not speak of that. It was creditable to you that so wise and good a girl as your betrothed should have trusted you, and I do not know that it was against you that another girl who was neither wise nor good should have trusted you at the same time. You broke with the last, because you had to choose between the two; and, so far as I know, you accepted with a due sense of your faithlessness your dismissal by the first. In this connection I must remind you that while you were doing your best to make the party to your second engagement believe that you were in love with her, you got her brother, an habitual inebriate, drunk, and were, so far, instrumental in breaking down the weak will with which he was struggling against his propensity. It is only fair to you that I should add that you persuaded me you got him only a little drunker than he already got himself, and that you meant to have looked after him, but forgot him in your preoccupation with his sister. “I do not know what took place between you and these people after you broke your engagement with the sister, until your encounter with the brother in Whitwell’s Clearing, and I know of this only at second hand. I can well believe that you had some real or fancied injury to pay off; and I give you all the credit you may wish to claim for sparing him at last. For one of your vindictive temperament it must have been difficult. “I have told you the worst things I know of you, and I do not pretend to know them more than superficially. I am not asked to judge you, and I will not. You must be your own judge. You are to decide whether these and other acts of yours are the acts of a man good enough to be intrusted with the happiness of a woman who has already been very unhappy. “You have sometimes, however — oftener than I wished — come to me for advice, and I now offer you some advice voluntarily. Do not suppose that because you love this woman, as you believe, you are fit to be the keeper of her future. Ask yourself how you have dealt hitherto with those who have loved you, and whom in a sort you loved, and do not go further unless the answer is such as you can fully and faithfully report to the woman you wish to marry. What you have made yourself you will be to the end. You once called me an idealist, and perhaps you will call this idealism. I will only add, and I will give the last word in your defence, you alone know what you are.”

LIII.

As soon as Westover had posted his letter he began to blame himself for it. He saw that the right and manly thing would have been to write to Mrs. Vostrand, and tell her frankly what he thought of Durgin. Her folly, her insincerity, her vulgarity, had nothing to do with the affair, so far as he was concerned. If she had once been so kind to him as to bind him to her in grateful friendship, she certainly had a claim upon his best offices. His duty was to her, and not at all to Durgin. He need not have said anything against him because it was against him, but because it was true; and if he had written he must not have said anything less than the truth.

He could have chosen not to write at all. He could have said that her mawkish hypocrisy was a little too much; that she was really wanting him to whitewash Durgin for her, and she had no right to put upon him the responsibility for the step she clearly wished to take. He could have made either of these decisions, and defended them to himself; but in what he had done he had altogether shirked. While he was writing to Durgin, and pretending that he could justly leave this affair to him, he was simply indulging a bit of sentimental pose, far worse than anything in Mrs. Vostrand’s sham appeal for his help.

He felt, as the time went by, that she had not written of her own impulse, but at her daughter’s urgence, and that it was this poor creature whose trust he had paltered with. He believed that Durgin would not fail to make her unhappy, yet he had not done what he might to deliver her out of his hand. He had satisfied a wretched pseudo-magnanimity toward a faithless scoundrel, as he thought Durgin, at the cost of a woman whose anxious hope of his aid had probably forced her mother’s hand.

At first he thought his action irrevocable, and he bitterly upbraided himself for not taking council with Cynthia upon Mrs. Vostrand’s letter. He had thought of doing that, and then he had dismissed the thought as involving pain that he had no right to inflict; but now he perceived that the pain was such as she must suffer in the event, and that he had stupidly refused himself the only means of finding out the right thing to do. Her true heart and her clear mind would have been infallible in the affair, and he had trusted to his own muddled impulse.

He began to write other letters: to Durgin, to Mrs. Vostrand, to Genevieve; but none of them satisfied him, and he let the days go by without doing anything to retrieve his error or fulfil his duty. At last he did what he ought to have done at first: he enclosed Mrs. Vostrand’s letter to Cynthia, and asked her what she thought he ought to have done. While he was waiting Cynthia’s answer to his letter, a cable message reached him from Florence:

  “Kind letter received. Married to-day. Written.

                        “Vostrand.”

The next mail brought Cynthia’s reply, which was very brief:

  “I am sorry you had to write at all; nothing could have prevented

  it. Perhaps if he cares for her he will be good to her.”

Since the matter was now irremediable, Westover crept less miserably through the days than he could have believed he should, until the letter which Mrs. Vostrand’s cable promised came to hand.

“Dear friend,” she wrote, “your generous and satisfactory answer came yesterday. It was so delicate and high,-minded, and so like you, to write to Mr. Durgin, and leave the whole affair to him; and he did not lose a moment in showing us your beautiful letter. He said you were a man after his own heart, and I wish you could have heard how he praised you. It made Genevieve quite jealous, or would have, if it had been any one else. But she is so happy in your approval of her marriage, which is to take place before the ‘sindaco’ to-morrow, We shall only have the civil rite; she feels that it is more American, and we are all coming home to Lion’s Head in the spring to live and die true Americans. I wish you could spend the summer with us there, but, until Lion’s Head is rebuilt, we can’t ask you. I don’t know exactly how we shall do ourselves, but Mr. Durgin is full of plans, and we leave everything to him. He is here, making Genevieve laugh so that I can hardly write. He joins us in love and thanks, and our darling Bice sends you a little kiss.

“MEDORA VOSTRAND.

“P. S. Mr. D. has told us all about the affairs you alluded to. With Miss L. we cannot feel that he was to blame; but he blames himself in regard to Miss W. He says his only excuse is that he was always in love with Genevieve; and I think that is quite excuse enough. M. V.”

From time to time during the winter Westover wrote to Cynthia, and had letters from her in which he pleased himself fancying almost a personal effect of that shyness which he thought a charming thing in her. But no doubt this was something he read into them; on their face they were plain, straightforward accounts of the life she led in the little old house at Lion’s Head, under the shadow of the black ruin on the hill. Westover had taken to sending her books and magazines, and in thanking him for these she would sometimes speak of things she had read in them. Her criticism related to the spirit rather than the manner of the things she spoke of, and it pleased him that she seemed, with all her insight, to have very little artistic sense of any kind; in the world where he lived there were so many women with an artistic sense in every kind that he was rather weary of it.

There never was anything about Durgin in the letters, and Westover was both troubled and consoled by this silence. It might be from consciousness, and it probably was; it might be from indifference. In the worst event, it hid any pain she might have felt with a dignity from which no intimation of his moved her. The nearest she came to speaking of Jeff was when she said that Jombateeste was going to work at the brick-yards in Cambridge as soon as the spring opened, and was not going to stay any longer at Lion’s Head.

Her brother Frank, she reported, had got a place with part work in the drug-and-book store at Lovewell, where he could keep on more easily with his studies; he had now fully decided to study for the ministry; he had always wanted to be an Episcopalian.

One day toward the end of April, when several weeks had passed without bringing Westover any word from Cynthia, her father presented himself, and enjoyed in the painter’s surprise the sensation of having dropped upon him from the clouds. He gave due accounts of the health of each of his household; ending with Jombateeste. “You know he’s out at the brick, as he calls it, in Cambridge.”

“Cynthia said he was coming. I didn’t know he had come yet,” said Westover. “I must go out and look him up, if you think I could find him among all those Canucks.”

“Well, I don’t know but you’d better look us up at the same time,” said Whitwell, with additional pleasure in the painter’s additional surprise. “I guess we’re out in Cambridge, too,” he added, at Westover’s start of question. “We’re out there, visitin’ one of our summer folks, as you might say. Remember Mis’ Fredericks?”

“Why, what the deuce kept you from telling me so at once?” Westover demanded, indignantly.

“Guess I hadn’t got round to it,” said Whitwell, with dry relish.

“Do you mean that Cynthia’s there?”

“Well, I guess they wouldn’t cared much for a visit from me.”

Whitwell took advantage of Westover’s moment of mystification to explain that Jeff had written over to him from Italy, offering him a pretty good rent for his house, which he wanted to occupy while he was rebuilding Lion’s Head. He was going to push the work right through in the summer, and be ready for the season the year after. That was what Whitwell understood, and he understood that Jeff’s family was going to stay in Lovewell, but Jeff himself wanted to be on the ground day and night.

“So that’s kind of turned us out of doors, as you may say, and Cynthia’s always had this idee of comin’ down Boston way: and she didn’t know anybody that could advise with her as well as Mis’ Fredericks, and she wrote to her, and Mis’ Fredericks answered her to come right down and talk it over.” Westover felt a pang of resentment that Cynthia, had not turned to him for counsel, but he said nothing, and Whitwell went on: “She said she was, ashamed to bother you, you’d had the whole neighborhood on your hands so much, and so she wrote to Mis’ Fredericks.”

Westover had a vague discomfort in it all, which ultimately defined itself as a discontent with the willingness of the Whitwells to let Durgin occupy their house upon any terms, for any purpose, and a lingering grudge that Cynthia should have asked help of any one but himself, even from a motive of delicacy.

In the evening he went out to see the girl at the house of Mrs. Fredericks, whom he found living in the Port. They had a first moment of intolerable shyness on her part. He had been afraid to see her, with the jealousy for her dignity he always felt, lest she should look as if she had been unhappy about Durgin. But he found her looking, not only very well, but very happy and full of peace, as soon as that moment of shyness passed. It seemed to Westover as if she had begun to live on new terms, and that a harassing element, which had always been in it, had gone out of her life, and in its absence she was beginning to rejoice in a lasting repose. He found himself rejoicing with her, and he found himself on simpler and franker terms with her than ever before. Neither of them spoke of Jeff, or made any approach to mention him, and Westover believed that this was not from a morbid feeling in her, but from a final and enduring indifference.

He saw her alone, for Mrs. Fredericks and her daughter had gone into town to a concert, which he made her confess she would have gone to herself if it had not been that her father said he was coming out to see her. She would not let him joke about the sacrifice he pretended she had made; he had a certain pain in fancying that his visit was the highest and finest favor that life could do her. She told him of the ambition she had that she might get a school somewhere in the neighborhood of Boston, and then find something for her brother to do, while he began his studies in the Theological School at Harvard. Frank was still at Lovewell, it seemed.

At the end of the long call he made, he said, abruptly, when he had risen to go, “I should like to paint you.”

“Who? Me?” she cried, as if it were the most incredible thing, while a glad color rushed over her face.

“Yes. While you’re waiting to get your school, couldn’t you come in with your father, now and then, and sit for me?”

“What’s he want me to come fer?” Whitwell demanded, when the plan was laid before him. He was giving his unlimited leisure to the exploration of Boston, and his tone expressed something of the injury, which he also put into words, as a sole objection to the proposed interruption. “Can’t you go alone, Cynthy?” Cynthia said she did not know, but when the point was referred to Mrs. Fredericks, she was sure Cynthia could not go alone, and she acquainted them both, as far as she could, with that mystery of chaperonage which had never touched their lives before. Whitwell seemed to think that his daughter would give the matter up; and perhaps she might have done so, though she seemed reluctant, if Mrs. Fredericks had not further instructed them that it was the highest possible honor Mr. Westover was offering them, and that if he had proposed to paint her daughter she would simply have gone and lived with him while he was doing it.

Whitwell found some compensation for the time lost to his study of Boston in the conversation of the painter, which he said was worth a hundred cents on the dollar every time, though it dealt less with the metaphysical aspect of the latest facts of science than the philosopher could have wished. He did not, to be sure, take very much stock in the picture as it advanced, somewhat fitfully, with a good many reversions to its original state of sketch. It appeared to him always a slight and feeble representation of Cynthia, though, of course, a native politeness forbade him to express his disappointment. He avowed a faith in Westover’s ability to get it right in the end, and always bade him go on, and take as much time to it as he wanted.

He felt less uneasy than at first, because he had now found a little furnished house in the woodenest outskirts of North Cambridge, which he hired cheap from the recently widowed owner, and they were keeping house there. Jombateeste lived with them, and worked in the brick-yards. Out of hours he helped Cynthia, and kept the ugly little place looking trim and neat, and left Whitwell free for the tramps home to nature, which he began to take over the Belmont uplands as soon as the spring opened. He was not homesick, as Cynthia was afraid he might be; his mind was fully occupied by the vast and varied interests opened to it by the intellectual and material activities of the neighboring city; and he found ample scope for his physical energies in doing Cynthia’s errands, as well as studying the strange flora of the region. He apparently thought that he had made a distinct rise and advance in the world. Sometimes, in the first days of his satisfaction with his establishment, he expressed the wish that Jackson could only have seen how he was fixed, once. In his preoccupation with other things, he no longer attempted to explore the eternal mysteries with the help of planchette; the ungrateful instrument gathered as much dust as Cynthia would suffer on the what-not in the corner of the solemn parlor; and after two or three visits to the First Spiritual Temple in Boston, he lapsed altogether from an interest in the other world, which had, perhaps, mainly flourished in the absence of pressing subjects of inquiry, in this.

When at last Westover confessed that he had carried his picture of Cynthia as far as he could, Whitwell did his best to hide his disappointment. “Well, sir,” he said, tolerantly and even cheeringly, “I presume we’re every one of us a different person to whoever looks at us. They say that no two men see the same star.”

“You mean that she doesn’t look so to you,” suggested the painter, who seemed not at all abashed.

“Well, you might say — Why, here! It’s like her; photograph couldn’t get it any better; but it makes me think-well, of a bird that you’ve come on sudden, and it stoops as if it was goin’ to fly—”

“Ah,” said Westover, “does it make you think of that?”

LIV.

The painter could not make out at first whether the girl herself was pleased with the picture or not, and in his uncertainty he could not give it her at once, as he had hoped and meant to do. It was by a kind of accident he found afterward that she had always been passionately proud of his having painted her. This was when he returned from the last sojourn he had made in Paris, whither he went soon after the Whitwells settled in North Cambridge. He left the picture behind him to be framed and then sent to her with a letter he had written, begging her to give it houseroom while he was gone. He got a short, stiff note in reply after he reached Paris, and he had not tried to continue the correspondence. But as soon as he returned he went out to see the Whitwells in North Cambridge. They were still in their little house there; the young widower had married again; but neither he nor his new wife had cared to take up their joint life in his first home, and he had found Whitwell such a good tenant that he had not tried to put up the rent on him. Frank was at home, now, with an employment that gave him part of his time for his theological studies; Cynthia had been teaching school ever since the fall after Westover went away, and they were all, as Whitwell said, in clover. He was the only member of the family at home when Westover called on the afternoon of a warm summer day, and he entertained him with a full account of a visit he had paid Lion’s Head earlier in the season.

“Yes, sir,” he said, as if he had already stated the fact, “I’ve sold my old place there to that devil.” He said devil without the least rancor; with even a smile of good-will, and he enjoyed the astonishment Westover expressed in his demand:

“Sold Durgin your house?”

“Yes; I see we never wanted to go back there to live, any of us, and I went up to pass the papers and close the thing out. Well, I did have an offer for it from a feller that wanted to open a boa’din’-house there and get the advantage of Jeff’s improvements, and I couldn’t seem to make up my mind till I’d looked the ground over. Fust off, you know, I thought I’d sell to the other feller, because I could see in a minute what a thorn it ‘d be in Jeff’s flesh. But, dumn it all! When I met the comical devil I couldn’t seem to want to pester him. Why, here, thinks I, if we’ve made an escape from him — and I guess we have, about the biggest escape — what have I got ag’in’ him, anyway? I’d ought to feel good to him; and I guess that’s the way I did feel, come to boil it down. He’s got a way with him, you know, when you’re with him, that makes you like him. He may have a knife in your ribs the whole while, but so long’s he don’t turn it, you don’t seem to know it, and you can’t help likin’ him. Why, I hadn’t been with Jeff five minutes before I made up my mind to sell to him. I told him about the other offer — felt bound to do it — and he was all on fire. ‘I want that place, Mr. Whitwell,’ s’d he. ‘Name your price.’ Well, I wa’n’t goin’ to take an advantage of the feller, and I guess he see it. ‘You’ve offered me three thousand,’ s’d I, ‘n’ I don’t want to be no ways mean about it. Five thousand buys the place.’ ‘It’s mine,’ s’d he; just like that. I guess he see he had a gentleman to deal with, and we didn’t say a word more. Don’t you think I done right to sell to him? I couldn’t ‘a’ got more’n thirty-five hundred out the other feller, to save me, and before Jeff begun his improvements I couldn’t ‘a’ realized a thousand dollars on the prop’ty.”

“I think you did right to sell to him,” said Westover, saddened somewhat by the proof Whitwell alleged of his magnanimity.

“Well, Sir, I’m glad you do. I don’t believe in crowdin’ a man because you got him in a corner, an’ I don’t believe in bearin’ malice. Never did. All I wanted was what the place was wo’th — to him. ‘Twa’n’t wo’th nothin’ to me! He’s got the house and the ten acres around it, and he’s got the house on Lion’s Head, includin’ the Clearin’, that the poottiest picnic-ground in the mountains. Think of goin’ up there this summer?”

“No,” said Westover, briefly.

“Well, I some wish you did. I sh’d like to know how Jeff’s improvements struck you. Of course, I can’t judge of ’em so well, but I guess he’s made a pootty sightly thing of it. He told me he’d had one of the leadin’ Boston architects to plan the thing out for him, and I tell you he’s got something nice. ‘Tain’t so big as old Lion’s Head, and Jeff wants to cater to a different style of custom, anyway. The buildin’s longer’n what she is deep, and she spreads in front so’s to give as many rooms a view of the mountain as she can. Know what ‘runnaysonce’ is? Well, that’s the style Jeff said it was; it’s all pillars and pilasters; and you ride up to the office through a double row of colyums, under a kind of a portico. It’s all painted like them old Colonial houses down on Brattle Street, buff and white. Well, it made me think of one of them old pagan temples. He’s got her shoved along to the south’ard, and he’s widened out a piece of level for her to stand on, so ‘t that piece o’ wood up the hill there is just behind her, and I tell you she looks nice, backin’ up ag’inst the trees. I tell you, Jeff’s got a head on him! I wish you could see that dinin’-room o’ his: all white colyums, and frontin’ on the view. Why, that devil’s got a regular little theatyre back o’ the dinin’-room for the young folks to act ammyture plays in, and the shows that come along, and he’s got a dance-hall besides; the parlors ain’t much — folks like to set in the office; and a good many of the rooms are done off into soots, and got their own parlors. I tell you, it’s swell, as they say. You can order what you please for breakfast, but for lunch and dinner you got to take what Jeff gives you; but he treats you well. He’s a Durgin, when it comes to that. Served in cou’ses, and dinner at seven o’clock. I don’t know where he got his money for ‘t all, but I guess he put in his insurance fust, and then he put a mortgage on the buildin’; be as much as owned it; said he’d had a splendid season last year, and if he done as well for a copule of seasons more he’d have the whole prop’ty free o’ debt.”

Westover could see that the prosperity of the unjust man had corrupted the imagination and confounded the conscience of this simple witness, and he asked, in the hope of giving his praises pause: “What has he done about the old family burying-ground in the orchard?”

“Well, there!” said Whitwell. “That got me more than any other one thing: I naturally expected that Jeff ‘d had ’em moved, for you know and I know, Mr. Westover, that a place like that couldn’t be very pop’la’ with summer folks; they don’t want to have anything to kind of make ’em serious, as you may say. But that devil got his architect to treat the place, as he calls it, and he put a high stone wall around it, and planted it to bushes and evergreens so ‘t looks like a piece of old garden, down there in the corner of the orchard, and if you didn’t hunt for it you wouldn’t know it was there. Jeff said ‘t when folks did happen to find it out, he believed they liked it; they think it’s picturesque and ancient. Why, some on ’em wanted him to put up a little chapel alongside and have services there; and Jeff said he didn’t know but he’d do it yet. He’s got dark-colored stones up for Mis’ Durgin and Jackson, so ‘t they look as old as any of ‘em. I tell you, he knows how to do things.”

“It seems so,” said Westover, with a bitterness apparently lost upon the optimistic philosopher.

“Yes, sir. I guess it’s all worked out for the best. So long’s he didn’t marry Cynthy, I don’t care who he married, and — I guess he’s made out fust-rate, and he treats his wife well, and his mother-in-law, too. You wouldn’t hardly know they was in the house, they’re so kind of quiet; and if a guest wants to see Jeff, he’s got to send and ask for him; clerk does everything, but I guess Jeff keeps an eye out and knows what’s goin’ on. He’s got an elegant soot of appartments, and he lives as private as if he was in his own house, him and his wife. But when there’s anything goin’ on that needs a head, they’re both right on deck.

“He don’t let his wife worry about things a great deal; he’s got a fust-rate of a housekeeper, but I guess old Mis’ Vostrand keeps the housekeeper, as you may say. I hear some of the boa’ders talkin’ up there, and one of ’em said ‘t the great thing about Lion’s Head was ‘t you could feel everywheres in it that it was a lady’s house. I guess Jeff has a pootty good time, and a time ‘t suits him. He shows up on the coachin’ parties, and he’s got himself a reg’lar English coachman’s rig, with boots outside his trouse’s, and a long coat and a fuzzy plug-hat: I tell you, he looks gay! He don’t spend his winters at Lion’s Head: he is off to Europe about as soon as the house closes in the fall, and he keeps bringin’ home new dodges. Guess you couldn’t get no boa’d there for no seven dollars a week now! I tell you, Jeff’s the gentleman now, and his wife’s about the nicest lady I ever saw. Do’ know as I care so much about her mother; do’ know as I got anything ag’inst her, either, very much. But that little girl, Beechy, as they call her, she’s a beauty! And round with Jeff all the while! He seems full as fond of her as her own mother does, and that devil, that couldn’t seem to get enough of tormentin’ little children when he was a boy, is as good and gentle with that little thing as-pie!”

Whitwell seemed to have come to an end of his celebration of Jeff’s success, and Westover asked:

“And what do you make now, of planchette’s brokenshaft business? Or don’t you believe in planchette any more?”

Whitwell’s beaming face clouded. “Well, sir, that’s a thing that’s always puzzled me. If it wa’n’t that it was Jackson workin’ plantchette that night, I shouldn’t placed much dependence on what she said; but Jackson could get the truth out of her, if anybody could. Sence I b’en up there I b’en figurin’ it out like this: the broken shaft is the old Jeff that he’s left off bein’—”

Whitwell stopped midway in his suggestion, with an inquiring eye on the painter, who asked: “You think he’s left off being the old Jeff?”

“Well, sir, you got me there,” the philosopher confessed. “I didn’t see anything to the contrary, but come to think of it—”

“Why couldn’t the broken shaft be his unfulfilled destiny on the old lines? What reason is there to believe he isn’t what he’s always been?”

“Well, come to think of it—”

“People don’t change in a day, or a year,” Westover went on, “or two or three years, even. Sometimes I doubt if they ever change.”

“Well, all that I thought,” Whitwell urged, faintly, against the hard scepticism of a man ordinarily so yielding, “is ‘t there must be a moral government of the universe somewheres, and if a bad feller is to get along and prosper hand over hand, that way, don’t it look kind of as if—”

“There wasn’t any moral government of the universe? Not the way I see it,” said Westover. “A tree brings forth of its kind. As a man sows he reaps. It’s dead sure, pitilessly sure. Jeff Durgin sowed success, in a certain way, and he’s reaping it. He once said to me, when I tried to waken his conscience, that he should get where he was trying to go if he was strong enough, and being good had nothing to do with it. I believe now he was right. But he was wrong too, as such a man always is. That kind of tree bears Dead Sea apples, after all. He sowed evil, and he must reap evil. He may never know it, but he will reap what he has sown. The dreadful thing is that others must share in his harvest. What do you think?”

Whitwell scratched his head. “Well, sir, there’s something in what you say, I guess. But here! What’s the use of thinkin’ a man can’t change? Wa’n’t there ever anything in that old idee of a change of heart? What do you s’pose made Jeff let up on that feller that Jombateeste see him have down, that day, in my Clearin’? What Jeff would natch’ly done would b’en to shake the life out of him; but he didn’t; he let him up, and he let him go. What’s the reason that wa’n’t the beginnin’ of a new life for him?”

“We don’t know all the ins and outs of that business,” said Westover, after a moment. “I’ve puzzled over it a good deal. The man was the brother of that girl that Jeff had jilted in Boston. I’ve found out that much. I don’t know just the size and shape of the trouble between them, but Jeff may have felt that he had got even with his enemy before that day. Or he may have felt that if he was going in for full satisfaction, there was Jombateeste looking on.”

“That’s true,” said Whitwell, greatly daunted. After a while he took refuge in the reflection, “Well, he’s a comical devil.”

Westover said, in a sort of absence: “Perhaps we’re all broken shafts, here. Perhaps that old hypothesis of another life, a world where there is room enough and time enough for all the beginnings of this to complete themselves—”

“Well, now you’re shoutin’,” said Whitwell. “And if plantchette—” Westover rose. “Why, a’n’t you goin’ to wait and see Cynthy? I’m expectin’ her along every minute now; she’s just gone down to Harvard Square. She’ll be awfully put out when she knows you’ve be’n here.”

“I’ll come out again soon,” said Westover. “Tell her—”

“Well, you must see your picture, anyway. We’ve got it in the parlor. I don’t know what she’ll say to me, keepin’ you here in the settin’-room all the time.”

Whitwell led him into the little dark front hall, and into the parlor, less dim than it should have been because the afternoon sun was burning full upon its shutters. The portrait hung over the mantel, in a bad light, but the painter could feel everything in it that he could not see.

“Yes, it had that look in it.”

“Well, she ha’n’t took wing yet, I’m thankful to think,” said Whitwell, and he spoke from his own large mind to the sympathy of an old friend who he felt could almost share his feelings as a father.

LV

When Westover turned out of the baking little street where the Whitwells lived into an elm-shaded stretch of North Avenue, he took off his hat and strolled bareheaded along in the cooler air. He was disappointed not to have seen Cynthia, and yet he found himself hurrying away after his failure, with a sense of escape, or at least of respite.

What he had come to say, to do, was the effect of long experience and much meditation. The time had arrived when he could no longer feign to himself that his feelings toward the girl were not those of a lover, but he had his modest fears that she could never imagine him in that character, and that if he should ask her to do so he should shock and grieve her, and inflict upon himself an incurable wound.

During this last absence of his he had let his fancy dwell constantly upon her, until life seemed worth having only if she would share it with him. He was an artist, and he had always been a bohemian, but at heart he was philistine and bourgeois. His ideal was a settlement, a fixed habitation, a stated existence, a home where he could work constantly in an air of affection, and unselfishly do his part to make his home happy. It was a very simple-hearted ambition, and I do not quite know how to keep it from appearing commonplace and almost sordid; but such as it was, I must confess that it was his. He had not married his model, because he was mainly a landscapist, perhaps; and he had not married any of his pupils, because he had not been in love with them, charming and good and lovely as he had thought some of them; and of late he had realized more and more why his fancy had not turned in their direction. He perceived that it was already fixed, and possibly had long been fixed.

He did not blink the fact that there were many disparities, and that there would be certain disadvantages which could never be quite overcome. The fact had been brought rather strenuously home to him by his interview with Cynthia’s father. He perceived, as indeed he had always known, that with a certain imaginative lift in his thinking and feeling, Whitwell was irreparably rustic, that he was and always must be practically Yankee. Westover was not a Yankee, and he did not love or honor the type, though its struggles against itself touched and amused him. It made him a little sick to hear how Whitwell had profited by Durgin’s necessity, and had taken advantage of him with conscientious and self-applausive rapacity, while he admired his prosperity, and tried to account for it by doubt of its injustice. For a moment this seemed to him worse than Durgin’s conscientious toughness, which was the antithesis of Whitwell’s remorseless self-interest. For the moment this claimed Cynthia of its kind, and Westover beheld her rustic and Yankee of her father’s type. If she was not that now, she would grow into that through the lapse from the personal to the ancestral which we all undergo in the process of the years.

The sight of her face as he had pictured it, and of the soul which he had imagined for it, restored him to a better sense of her, but he felt the need of escaping from the suggestion of her father’s presence, and taking further thought. Perhaps he should never again reach the point that he was aware of deflecting from now; he filled his lungs with long breaths, which he exhaled in sighs of relief. It might have been a mistake on the spiritual as well as the worldly side; it would certainly not have promoted his career; it might have impeded it. These misgivings flitted over the surface of thought that more profoundly was occupied with a question of other things. In the time since he had seen her last it might very well be that a young and pretty girl had met some one who had taken her fancy; and he could not be sure that her fancy had ever been his, even if this had not happened. He had no proof at all that she had ever cared or could care for him except gratefully, respectfully, almost reverentially, with that mingling of filial and maternal anxiety which had hitherto been the warmest expression of her regard. He tried to reason it out, and could not. He suddenly found himself bitterly disappointed that he had missed seeing her, for if they had met, he would have known by this time what to think, what to hope. He felt old — he felt fully thirty-six years old — as he passed his hand over his crown, whose gossamer growth opposed so little resistance to his touch. He had begun to lose his hair early, but till then he had not much regretted his baldness. He entered into a little question of their comparative ages, which led him to the conclusion that Cynthia must now be about twenty-five.

Almost at the same moment he saw her coming up the walk toward him from far down the avenue. For a reason, or rather a motive, of his own he pretended to himself that it was not she, but he knew instantly that it was, and he put on his hat. He could see that she did not know him, and it was a pretty thing to witness the recognition dawn on her. When it had its full effect, he was aware of a flutter, a pause in her whole figure before she came on toward him, and he hurried his steps for the charm of her beautiful blushing face.

It was the spiritual effect of figure and face that he had carried in his thought ever since he had arrived at that one-sided intimacy through his study of her for the picture he had just seen. He had often had to ask himself whether he had really perceived or only imagined the character he had translated into it; but here, for the moment at least, was what he had seen. He hurried forward and joyfully took the hand she gave him. He thought he should speak of that at once, but it was not possible, of course. There had to come first the unheeded questions and answers about each other’s health, and many other commonplaces. He turned and walked home with her, and at the gate of the little ugly house she asked him if he would not come in and take tea with them.

Her father talked with him while she got the tea, and when it was ready her brother came in from his walk home out of Old Cambridge and helped her put it on the table. He had grown much taller than Westover, and he was very ecclesiastical in his manner; more so than he would be, probably, if he ever became a bishop, Westover decided. Jombateeste, in an interval of suspended work at the brick yard, was paying a visit to his people in Canada, and Westover did not see him.

All the time while they sat at table and talked together Westover realized more and more that for him, at least, the separation of the last two years had put that space between them which alone made it possible for them to approach each other on new ground. A kind of horror, of repulsion, for her engagement to Jeff Durgin had ceased from his sense of her; it was as if she had been unhappily married, and the man, who had been unworthy and unkind, was like a ghost who could never come to trouble his joy. He was more her contemporary, he found, than formerly; she had grown a great deal in the past two years, and a certain affliction which her father’s fixity had given him concerning her passed in the assurance of change which she herself gave him.

She had changed her world, and grown to it, but her nature had not changed. Even her look had not changed, and he told her how he had seen his picture in her at the moment of their meeting in the street. They all went in to verify his impression from the painting. “Yes, that is the way you looked.”

“It seems to me that is the way I felt,” she asserted.

Frank went about the house-work, and left her to their guest. When Whitwell came back from the post-office, where he said he would only be gone a minute, he did not rejoin Westover and Cynthia in the parlor.

The parlor door was shut; he had risked his fate, and they were talking it over. Cynthia was not sure; she was sure of nothing but that there was no one in the world she cared for so much; but she was not sure that was enough. She did not pretend that she was surprised; she owned that she had sometimes expected it; she blamed herself for not expecting it then.

Westover said that he did not blame her for not knowing her mind; he had been fifteen years learning his own fully. He asked her to take all the time she wished. If she could not make sure after all, he should always be sure that she was wise and good. She told him everything there was to tell of her breaking with Jeff, and he thought the last episode a supreme proof of her wisdom and goodness.

After a certain time they went for a walk in the warm summer moonlight under the elms, where they had met on the avenue.

“I suppose,” she said, as they drew near her door again, “that people don’t often talk it over as we’ve done.”

“We only know from the novels,” he answered. “Perhaps people do, oftener than is ever known. I don’t see why they shouldn’t.”

“No.”

“I’ve never wished to be sure of you so much as since you’ve wished to be sure of yourself.”

“And I’ve never been so sure as since you were willing to let me,” said Cynthia.

“I am glad of that. Try to think of me, if that will help my cause, as some one you might have always known in this way. We don’t really know each other yet. I’m a great deal older than you, but still I’m not so very old.”

“Oh, I don’t care for that. All I want to be certain of is that the feeling I have is really — the feeling.”

“I know, dear,” said Westover, and his heart surged toward her in his tenderness for her simple conscience, her wise question. “Take time. Don’t hurry. Forget what I’ve said — or no; that’s absurd! Think of it; but don’t let anything but the truth persuade you. Now, good-night, Cynthia.”

“Good-night — Mr. Westover.”

“Mr. Westover!” he reproached her.

She stood thinking, as if the question were crucial. Then she said, firmly, “I should always have to call you Mr. Westover.”

“Oh, well,” he returned, “if that’s all!”

THE STORY OF A PLAY

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

I.

The young actor who thought he saw his part in Maxwell’s play had so far made his way upward on the Pacific Coast that he felt justified in taking the road with a combination of his own. He met the author at a dinner of the Papyrus Club in Boston, where they were introduced with a facile flourish of praise from the journalist who brought them together, as the very men who were looking for each other, and who ought to be able to give the American public a real American drama. The actor, who believed he had an ideal of this drama, professed an immediate interest in the kind of thing Maxwell told him he was trying to do, and asked him to come the next day, if he did not mind its being Sunday, and talk the play over with him.

He was at breakfast when Maxwell came, at about the hour people were getting home from church, and he asked the author to join him. But Maxwell had already breakfasted, and he hid his impatience of the actor’s politeness as well as he could, and began at the first moment possible: “The idea of my play is biblical; we’re still a very biblical people.” He had thought of the fact in seeing so many worshippers swarming out of the churches.

“That is true,” said the actor.

“It’s the old idea of the wages of sin. I should like to call it that.”

“The name has been used, hasn’t it?”

“I shouldn’t mind; for I want to get a new effect from the old notion, and it would be all the stronger from familiar association with the name. I want to show that the wages of sin is more sinning, which is the very body of death.”

“Well?”

“Well, I take a successful man at the acme of his success, and study him in a succession of scenes that bring out the fact of his prosperity in a way to strike the imagination of the audience, even the groundlings; and, of course, I have to deal with success of the most appreciable sort — a material success that is gross and palpable. I have to use a large canvas, as big as Shakespeare’s, in fact, and I put in a great many figures.”

“That’s right,” said the actor. “You want to keep the stage full, with people coming and going.”

“There’s a lot of coming and going, and a lot of incidents, to keep the spectator interested, and on the lookout for what’s to happen next. The whole of the first act is working up to something that I’ve wanted to see put on the stage for a good while, or ever since I’ve thought of writing for the stage, and that is a large dinner, one of the public kind.”

“Capital!” said the actor.

“I’ve seen a good deal of that sort of thing as a reporter; you know they put us at a table off to one side, and we see the whole thing, a great deal better than the diners themselves do. It’s a banquet, given by a certain number of my man’s friends, in honor of his fiftieth birthday, and you see the men gathering in the hotel parlor — well, you can imagine it in almost any hotel — and Haxard is in the foreground. Haxard is the hero’s name, you know.”

“It’s a good name,” the actor mused aloud. “It has a strong sound.”

“Do you like it? Well, Haxard,” Maxwell continued, “is there in the foreground, from the first moment the curtain rises, receiving his friends, and shaking hands right and left, and joking and laughing with everybody — a very small joke makes a very large laugh on occasions like that, and I shall try to give some notion of the comparative size of the joke and the laugh — and receiving congratulations, that give a notion of what the dinner is for, and the kind of man he is, and how universally respected and all that, till everybody has come; and then the doors between the parlor and the dining-room are rolled back, and every man goes out with his own wife, or his sister, or his cousin, or his aunt, if he hasn’t got a wife; I saw them do that once, at a big commercial dinner I reported.”

“Ah, I was afraid it was to be exclusively a man’s dinner!” the actor interrupted.

“Oh, no,” Maxwell answered, with a shade of vexation. “That wouldn’t do. You couldn’t have a scene, or, at least, not a whole act, without women. Of course I understand that. Even if you could keep the attention of the audience without them, through the importance of the intrigue, still you would have to have them for the sake of the stage-picture. The drama is literature that makes a double appeal; it appeals to the sense as well as the intellect, and the stage is half the time merely a picture-frame. I had to think that out pretty early.”

The actor nodded. “You couldn’t too soon.”

“It wouldn’t do to have nothing but a crowd of black coats and white shirt-fronts on the stage through a whole act. You want color, and a lot of it, and you can only get it, in our day, with the women’s costumes. Besides, they give movement and life. After the dinner begins they’re supposed to sparkle all through. I’ve imagined the table set down the depth of the stage, with Haxard and the nominal host at the head, fronting the audience, and the people talking back and forth on each side, and I let the ladies do most of the talking, of course. I mean to have the dinner served through all the courses, and the waiters coming and going; the events will have to be hurried, and the eating merely sketched, at times; but I should keep the thing in pretty perfect form, till it came to the speaking. I shall have to cut that a good deal, but I think I can give a pretty fair notion of how they butter the object of their hospitality on such occasions; I’ve seen it and heard it done often enough. I think, perhaps, I shall have the dinner an act by itself. There are only four acts in the play now, and I’ll have to make five. I want to give Haxard’s speech as fully as possible, for that’s what I study the man in, and make my confidences to the audience about him. I shall make him butter himself, but all with the utmost humility, and brag of everything that he disclaims the merit of.”

The actor rose and reached across the table for the sugar. “That’s a capital notion. That’s new. That would make a hit — the speech would.”

“Do you think so?” returned the author. “I thought so. I believe that in the hands of a good actor the speech could be made tremendously telling. I wouldn’t have a word to give away his character, his nature, except the words of his own mouth, but I would have them do it so effectually that when he gets through the audience will be fairly ‘onto him,’ don’t you know.”

“Magnificent!” said the actor, pouring himself some more cocoa.

Maxwell continued: “In the third act — for I see that I shall have to make it the third now — the scene will be in Haxard’s library, after he gets home from the complimentary dinner, at midnight, and he finds a man waiting for him there — a man that the butler tells him has called several times, and was so anxious to see him that Mrs. Haxard has given orders to let him wait. Oh, I ought to go back a little, and explain—”

“Yes, do!” The actor stirred his cocoa with mounting interest. “Yes, don’t leave anything out.”

“I merely meant to say that in the talk in the scene, or the act, before the dinner — I shall have two acts, but with no wait between them; just let down the curtain and raise it again — it will come out that Haxard is not a Bostonian by birth, but has come here since the war from the Southwest, where he went, from Maine, to grow up with the country, and is understood to have been a sort of quiescent Union man there; it’s thought to be rather a fine thing the way he’s taken on Boston, and shown so much local patriotism and public spirit and philanthropy, in the way he’s brought himself forward here. People don’t know a great deal about his past, but it’s understood to have been very creditable. I shall have to recast that part a little, and lengthen the delay before he comes on, and let the guests, or the hosts — for they’re giving him the dinner — have time to talk about him, and free their minds in honor of him behind his back, before they begin to his face.”

“Never bring your principal character on at once,” the actor interjected.

“No,” Maxwell consented. “I see that wouldn’t have done.” He went on: “Well, as soon as Haxard turns up the light in his library, the man rises from the lounge where he has been sitting, and Haxard sees who it is. He sees that it is a man whom he used to be in partnership with in Texas, where they were engaged in some very shady transactions. They get caught in one of them — I haven’t decided yet just what sort of transaction it was, and I shall have to look that point up; I’ll get some law-student to help me — and Haxard, who wasn’t Haxard then, pulls out and leaves his partner to suffer the penalty. Haxard comes North, and after trying it in various places, he settles here, and marries, and starts in business and prospers on, while the other fellow takes their joint punishment in the penitentiary. By the way, it just occurs to me! I think I’ll have it that Haxard has killed a man, a man whom he has injured; he doesn’t mean to kill him, but he has to; and this fellow is knowing to the homicide, but has been prevented from getting onto Haxard’s trail by the consequences of his own misdemeanors; that will probably be the best way out. Of course it all has to transpire, all these facts, in the course of the dialogue which the two men have with each other in Haxard’s library, after a good deal of fighting away from the inevitable identification on Haxard’s part. After the first few preliminary words with the butler at the door before he goes in to find the other man — his name is Greenshaw—”

“That’s a good name, too,” said the actor.

“Yes, isn’t it? It has a sort of probable sound, and yet it’s a made-up name. Well, I was going to say—”

“And I’m glad you have it a homicide that Haxard is guilty of, instead of a business crime of some sort. That sort of crime never tells with an audience,” the actor observed.

“No,” said Maxwell. “Homicide is decidedly better. It’s more melodramatic, and I don’t like that, but it will be more appreciable, as a real sin, to most of the audience; we steal and cheat so much, and we kill comparatively so little in the North. Well, I was going to say that I shall have this whole act to consist entirely of the passage between the two men. I shall let it begin with a kind of shiver creeping over the spectator, when he recognizes the relation between them, and I hope I shall be able to make it end with a shudder, for Haxard must see from the first moment, and he must let the audience see at last, that the only way for him to save himself from his old crime is to commit a new one. He must kill the man who saw him kill a man.”

“That’s good,” the actor thoughtfully murmured, as if tasting a pleasant morsel to try its flavor. “Excellent.”

Maxwell laughed for pleasure, and went on: “He arranges to meet the man again at a certain time and place, and that is the last of Greenshaw. He leaves the house alone; and the body of an unknown man is found floating up and down with the tide under the Long Bridge. There are no marks of violence; he must have fallen off the bridge in the dark, and been drowned; it could very easily happen. Well, then comes the most difficult part of the whole thing; I have got to connect the casualty with Haxard in the most unmistakable way, unmistakable to the audience, that is; and I have got to have it brought home to him in a supreme moment of his life. I don’t want to have him feel remorse for it; that isn’t the modern theory of the criminal; but I do want him to be anxious to hide his connection with it, and to escape the consequences. I don’t know but I shall try another dinner-scene, though I am afraid it would be a risk.”

The actor said, “I don’t know. It might be the very thing. The audience likes a recurrence to a distinctive feature. It’s like going back to an effective strain in music.”

“Yes,” Maxwell resumed, “slightly varied. I might have a private dinner this time; perhaps a dinner that Haxard himself is giving. Towards the end the talk might turn on the case of the unknown man, and the guests might discuss it philosophically together; Haxard would combat the notion of a murder, and even of a suicide; he would contend for an accident, pure and simple. All the fellows would take a turn at the theory, but the summing-up opinion I shall leave to a legal mind, perhaps the man who had made the great complimentary speech at the public dinner to Haxard in the first act. I should have him warm to his work, and lay it down to Haxard in good round fashion, against his theory of accident. He could prove to the satisfaction of everybody that the man who was last seen with the drowned man — or was supposed to have been seen with him — according to some very sketchy evidence at the inquest, which never amounted to anything — was the man who pushed him off the bridge. He could gradually work up his case, and end the argument with a semi-jocular, semi-serious appeal to Haxard himself, like, ‘Why, suppose it was your own case,’ and so forth, and so forth, and so forth, and then suddenly stop at something he notices queer in Haxard, who is trying to get to his feet. The rest applaud: ‘That’s right! Haxard has the floor,’ and so on, and then Haxard slips back into his chair, and his head falls forward —— I don’t like death-scenes on the stage. They’re usually failures. But if this was managed simply, I think it would be effective.”

The actor left the table and began to walk about the room. “I shall want that play. I can see my part in Haxard. I know just how I could make up for him. And the play is so native, so American, that it will go like wildfire.”

The author heard these words with a swelling heart. He did not speak, for he could not. He sat still, watching the actor as he paced to and fro, histrionically rapt in his representation of an actor who had just taken a piece from a young dramatist. “If you can realize that part as you’ve sketched it to me,” he said, finally, “I will play it exclusively, as Jefferson does Rip Van Winkle. There are immense capabilities in the piece. Yes, sir; that thing will run for years!”

“Of course,” Maxwell found voice to say, “there is one great defect in it, from the conventional point of view.” The actor stopped and looked at him. “There’s no love-business.”

“We must have that. But you can easily bring it in.”

“By the head and shoulders, yes. But I hate love-making on the stage, almost as much as I do dying. I never see a pair of lovers beyond the footlights without wanting to kill them.” The actor remained looking at him over his folded arms, and Maxwell continued, with something like a personal rancor against love-making, while he gave a little, bitter laugh, “I might have it somehow that Haxard had killed a pair of stage-lovers, and this was what Greenshaw had seen him do. But that would have been justifiable homicide.”

The actor’s gaze darkened into a frowning stare, as if he did not quite make out this kind of fooling. “All the world loves a lover,” he said, tentatively.

“I don’t believe it does,” said Maxwell, “except as it’s stupid, and loves anything that makes it laugh. It loves a comic lover, and in the same way it loves a droll drunkard or an amusing madman.”

“We shall have to have some sort of love-business,” the actor returned, with an effect of leaving the right interpretation of Maxwell’s peculiar humor for some other time. “The public wants it. No play would go without it. You can have it subordinate if you like, but you have got to have it. How old did you say Haxard was?”

“About fifty. Too old for a lover, unless you could make him in love with some one else’s wife, as he has one of his own already. But that wouldn’t do.”

The actor looked as if he did not know why it would not do, but he said, “He could have a daughter.”

“Yes, and his daughter could have a lover. I had thought of something of that kind, and of bringing in their ill-fated passion as an element of the tragedy. We could have his disgrace break their hearts, and kill two birds with one stone, and avenge a long-suffering race of playwrights upon stage-lovers.”

The actor laughed like a man of small humor, mellowly, but hollowly. “No, no! We must have the love-affair end happily. You can manage that somehow. Have you got the play roughed out at all?”

“Not in manuscript. I’ve only got it roughed out in my mind.”

“Well, I want that play. That’s settled. I can’t do anything with it this winter, but I should like to open with it next fall. Do you think you could have it ready by the end of July?”

II.

They sat down and began to talk times and terms. They parted with a perfect understanding, and Maxwell was almost as much deceived as the actor himself. He went home full of gay hopes to begin work on the play at once, and to realize the character of Haxard with the personality of the actor in his eye. He heard nothing from him till the following spring, when the actor wrote with all the ardor of their parting moment, to say that he was coming East for the summer, and meant to settle down in the region of Boston somewhere, so that they could meet constantly and make the play what they both wanted. He said nothing to account for his long silence, and he seemed so little aware of it that Maxwell might very well have taken it for a simple fidelity to the understanding between them, too unconscious to protest itself. He answered discreetly, and said that he expected to pass the summer on the coast somewhere, but was not yet quite certain where he should be; that he had not forgotten their interview, and should still be glad to let him have the play if he fancied it. Between this time and the time when the actor appeared in person, he sent Maxwell several short notes, and two or three telegrams, sufficiently relevant but not very necessary, and when his engagement ended in the West, a fortnight after Maxwell was married, he telegraphed again and then came through without a stop from Denver, where the combination broke up, to Manchester-by-the-Sea. He joined the little colony of actors which summers there, and began to play tennis and golf, and to fish and to sail, almost without a moment’s delay. He was not very fond of any of these things, and in fact he was fond only of one thing in the world, which was the stage; but he had a theory that they were recreation, and that if he went in for them he was building himself up for the season, which began early in September; he had appropriate costumes for all of them, and no one dressed the part more perfectly in tennis or golf or sailing or fishing. He believed that he ought to read up in the summer, too, and he had the very best of the recent books, in fiction and criticism, and the new drama. He had all of the translations of Ibsen, and several of Mæterlinck’s plays in French; he read a good deal in his books, and he lent them about in the hotel even more. Among the ladies there he had the repute of a very modern intellect, and of a person you would never take for an actor, from his tastes. What his tastes would have been if you had taken him for an actor, they could not have said, perhaps, but probably something vicious, and he had not a vice. He did not smoke, and he did not so much as drink tea or coffee; he had cocoa for breakfast, and at lunch a glass of milk, with water at dinner. He had a tint like the rose, and when he smiled or laughed, which was often, from a constitutional amiability and a perfect digestion, his teeth showed white and regular, and an innocent dimple punctured either cheek. His name was Godolphin, for he had instinctively felt that in choosing a name he might as well take a handsome one while he was about it, and that if he became Godolphin there was no reason why he should not become Launcelot, too. He did not put on these splendors from any foible, but from a professional sense of their value in the bills; and he was not personally characterized by them. As Launcelot Godolphin he was simpler than he would have been with a simpler name, and it was his ideal to be modest in everything that personally belonged to him. He studied an unprofessional walk, and a very colloquial tone in speaking. He was of course clean-shaven, but during the summer he let his mustache grow, though he was aware that he looked better without it. He was tall, and he carried himself with the vigor of his perfect health; but on the stage he looked less than his real size, like a perfectly proportioned edifice.

Godolphin wanted the Maxwells to come to his hotel in Manchester, but there were several reasons for their not doing this; the one Maxwell alleged was that they could not afford it. They had settled for the summer, when they got home after their brief wedding journey, at a much cheaper house in Magnolia, and the actor and the author were then only three miles apart, which Mrs. Maxwell thought was quite near enough. “As it is,” she said, “I’m only afraid he’ll be with you every moment with his suggestions, and won’t let you have any chance to work out your own conceptions.”

Godolphin had not failed to notify the public through the press that Mr. Brice Maxwell had severed his connection with the Boston Abstract, for the purpose of devoting himself to a new play for Mr. Launcelot Godolphin, and he thought it would have been an effective touch if it could have been truthfully reported that Mr. Godolphin and Mr. Maxwell might be seen almost any day swinging over the roads together in the neighborhood of Manchester, blind and deaf to all the passing, in their discussion of the play, which they might almost be said to be collaborating. But failing Maxwell’s consent to anything of the sort, Godolphin did the swinging over the roads himself, so far as the roads lay between Manchester and Magnolia. He began by coming in the forenoon, when he broke Maxwell up fearfully, but he was retarded by a waning of his own ideal in the matter, and finally got to arriving at that hour in the afternoon when Maxwell could be found revising his morning’s work, or lying at his wife’s feet on the rocks, and now and then irrelevantly bringing up a knotty point in the character or action for her criticism. For these excursions Godolphin had equipped himself with a gray corduroy sack and knickerbockers, and a stick which he cut from the alder thicket; he wore russet shoes of ample tread, and very thick-ribbed stockings, which became his stalwart calves.

Nothing could be handsomer than the whole effect he made in this costume, and his honest face was a pleasure to look at, though its intelligence was of a kind so wholly different from the intelligence of Maxwell’s face, that Mrs. Maxwell always had a struggle with herself before she could allow that it was intelligence at all. He was very polite to her; he always brought her flowers, and he opened doors, and put down windows, and leaped to his feet for every imaginable occasion of hers, in a way that Maxwell never did, and somehow a way that the polite men of her world did not, either. She had to school herself to believe him a gentleman, and she would not accept a certain vivid cleanliness he had as at all aristocratic; she said it was too fresh, and he ought to have carried a warning placard of “Paint.” She found that Godolphin had one great and constant merit: he believed in Maxwell’s genius as devoutly as she did herself. This did not prevent him from coming every day with proposals for changes in the play, more or less structural. At one time he wished the action laid in some other country and epoch, so as to bring in more costume and give the carpenter something to do; he feared that the severity of the mise en scène would ruin the piece. At another time he wanted lines taken out of the speeches of the inferior characters and put into his own, to fatten the part, as he explained. At other times he wished to have paraphrases of passages that he had brought down the house with in other plays written into this; or scenes transposed, so that he would make a more effective entrance here or there. There was no end to his inventions for spoiling the simplicity and truthfulness of Maxwell’s piece, which he yet respected for the virtues in it, and hoped the greatest things from.

One afternoon he arrived with a scheme for a very up-to-date scene in the last act; have it a supper instead of a dinner, and then have a skirt-dancer introduced, as society people had been having Carmencita. “When Haxard dies, you know,” he explained, “it would be tremendously effective to have the woman catch him in her arms, and she would be a splendid piece of color in the picture, with Haxard’s head lying in her lap, as the curtain comes down with a run.”

At this suggestion Mrs. Maxwell was too indignant to speak; her husband merely said, with his cold smile, “Yes; but I don’t see what it would have to do with the rest of the play.”

“You could have it,” said Godolphin, “that he was married to a Mexican during his Texas episode, and this girl was their daughter.” Maxwell still smiled, and Godolphin deferred to his wife: “But perhaps Mrs. Maxwell would object to the skirt-dance?”

“Oh, no,” she answered, ironically, “I shouldn’t mind having it, with Carmencita in society for a precedent. But,” she added, “the incident seems so out of keeping with the action and the temperament of the play, and everything. If I were to see such a thing on the stage, merely as an impartial spectator, I should feel insulted.”

Godolphin flushed. “I don’t see where the insult would come in. You mightn’t like it, but it would be like anything else in a play that you were not personally concerned in.”

“No, excuse me, Mr. Godolphin. I think the audience is as much concerned in the play as the actor or the author, and if either of these fails in the ideal, or does a bit of clap-trap when they have wrought the audience up in expectation of something noble, then they insult the audience — or all the better part of it.”

“The better part of the audience never fills the house,” said the actor.

“Very well. I hope my husband will never write for the worse part.”

“And I hope I shall never play to it,” Godolphin returned, and he looked hurt at the insinuation of her words.

“It isn’t a question of all that,” Maxwell interposed, with a worried glance at his wife. “Mr. Godolphin has merely suggested something that can be taken into the general account; we needn’t decide it now. By the way,” he said to the actor, “have you thought over that point about changing Haxard’s crime, or the quality of it? I think it had better not be an intentional murder; that would kill the audience’s sympathy with him from the start, don’t you think? We had better have it what they call a rencontre down there, where two gentlemen propose to kill each other on sight. Greenshaw’s hold on him would be that he was the only witness of the fight, and that he could testify to a wilful murder if he chose. Haxard’s real crime must be the killing of Greenshaw.”

“Yes,” said Godolphin, and he entered into the discussion of the effect this point would have with the play. Mrs. Maxwell was too much vexed to forgive him for making the suggestion which he had already dropped, and she left the room for fear she should not be able to govern herself at the sight of her husband condescending to temporize with him. She thought that Maxwell’s willingness to temporize, even when it involved no insincerity, was a defect in his character; she had always thought that, and it was one of the things that she meant to guard him against with all the strength of her zeal for his better self. When Godolphin was gone at last, she lost no time in coming back to Maxwell, where he sat with the manuscript of his play before him, apparently lost in some tangle of it. She told him abruptly that she did not understand how, if he respected himself, if he respected his own genius, he could consider such an idea as Godolphin’s skirt-dance for an instant.

“Did I consider it?” he asked.

“You made him think so.”

“Well,” returned Maxwell, and at her reproachful look he added, “Godolphin never thought I was considering it. He has too much sense, and he would be astonished and disgusted if I took him in earnest and did what he wanted. A lot of actors get round him over there, and they fill him up with all sorts of stage notions, and what he wants of me is that I shall empty him of them and yet not put him to shame about them. But if you keep on in that way you took with him he’ll throw me over.”

“Well, let him!” cried Mrs. Maxwell. “There are twenty other actors who would jump at the chance to get such a play.”

“Don’t you believe it, my dear. Actors don’t jump at plays, and Godolphin is the one man for me. He’s young, and has the friendly regard from the public that a young artist has, and yet he isn’t identified with any part in particular, and he will throw all his force into creating this, as he calls it.”

“I can’t bear to have him use that word, Brice. You created it.”

“The word doesn’t matter. It’s merely a technical phrase. I shouldn’t know where to turn if he gave it up.”

“Pshaw! You could go to a manager.”

“Thank you; I prefer an actor. Now, Louise, you must not be so abrupt with Godolphin when he comes out with those things.”

“I can’t help it, dearest. They are insulting to you, and insulting to common-sense. It’s a kindness to let him know how they would strike the public. I don’t pretend to be more than the average public.”

“He doesn’t feel it a kindness the way you put it.”

“Then you don’t like me to be sincere with him! Perhaps you don’t like me to be sincere with you about your play?”

“Be as sincere with me as you like. But this — this is a matter of business, and I’d rather you wouldn’t.”

“Rather I wouldn’t say anything at all?” demanded Louise.

“I didn’t say so, and you know I didn’t; but if you can’t get on without ruffling Godolphin, why, perhaps—”

“Very well, then, I’ll leave the room the next time he comes. That will be perfectly simple; and it will be perfectly simple to do as most other people would — not concern myself with the play in any way from this out. I dare say you would prefer that, too, though I didn’t quite expect it to come to that before our honeymoon was out.”

“Oh, now, my dear!”

“You know it’s so. But I can do it! I might have expected it from a man who was so perfectly self-centred and absorbed. But I was such a fool—” Her tears came and her words stopped.

Maxwell leaned forward with his thin face between his hands. This made him miserable, personally, but he was not so miserable but his artistic consciousness could take note of the situation as a very good one, and one that might be used effectively on the stage. He analyzed it perfectly in that unhappy moment. She was jealous of his work, which she had tolerated only while she could share it, and if she could not share it, while some other was suffered to do so, it would be cruel for her. But he knew that he could not offer any open concession now without making bad worse, and he must wait till the right time for it came. He had so far divined her, without formulating her, that he knew she would be humiliated by anything immediate or explicit, but would later accept a tacit repentance from him; and he instinctively forebore.

III.

For the present in her resentment of his willingness to abase his genius before Godolphin, or even to hold it in abeyance, Mrs. Maxwell would not walk to supper with her husband in the usual way, touching his shoulder with hers from time to time, and making herself seem a little lower in stature by taking the downward slope of the path leading from their cottage to the hotel. But the necessity of appearing before the people at their table on as perfect terms with him as ever had the effect that conduct often has on feeling, and she took his arm in going back to their cottage, and leaned tenderly upon him.

Their cottage was one of the farthest from the hotel, and the smallest and quietest. In fact there was yet no one in it but themselves, and they dwelt there in an image of home, with the sole use of the veranda and the parlor, where Maxwell had his manuscripts spread about on the table as if he owned the place. A chambermaid came over from the hotel in the morning to put the cottage in order, and then they could be quite alone there for the rest of the day.

“Shall I light the lamp for you, Brice?” his wife asked, as they mounted the veranda steps.

“No,” he said, “let us sit out here,” and they took the arm-chairs that stood on the porch, and swung to and fro in silence for a little while. The sea came and went among the rocks below, marking its course in the deepening twilight with a white rope of foam, and raving huskily to itself, with now and then the long plunge of some heavier surge against the bowlders, and a hoarse shout. The Portland boat swam by in the offing, a glitter of irregular lights, and the lamps on the different points of the Cape blinked as they revolved in their towers. “This is the kind of thing you can get only in a novel,” said Maxwell, musingly. “You couldn’t possibly give the feeling of it in a play.”

“Couldn’t you give the feeling of the people looking at it?” suggested his wife, and she put out her hand to lay it on his.

“Yes, you could do that,” he assented, with pleasure in her notion; “and that would be better. I suppose that is what would be aimed at in a description of the scene, which would be tiresome if it didn’t give the feeling of the spectator.”

“And Godolphin would say that if you let the carpenter have something to do he would give the scene itself, and you could have the effect of it at first hand.”

Maxwell laughed. “I wonder how much they believe in those contrivances of the carpenter themselves. They have really so little to do with the dramatic intention; but they have been multiplied so since the stage began to make the plays that the actors are always wanting them in. I believe the time will come when the dramatist will avoid the occasion or the pretext for them.”

“That will be after Godolphin’s time,” said Mrs. Maxwell.

“Well, I don’t know,” returned Maxwell. “If Godolphin should happen to imagine doing without them he would go all lengths.”

“Or if you imagined it and let him suppose he had. He never imagines anything of himself.”

“No, he doesn’t. And yet how perfectly he grasps the notion of the thing when it is done! It is very different from literature, acting is. And yet literature is only the representation of life.”

“Well, acting is the representation of life at second-hand, then, and it ought to be willing to subordinate itself. What I can’t bear in Godolphin is his setting himself up to be your artistic equal. He is no more an artist than the canvas is that the artist paints a picture on.”

Maxwell laughed. “Don’t tell him so; he won’t like it.”

“I will tell him so some day, whether he likes it or not.”

“No, you mustn’t; for it isn’t true. He’s just as much an artist in his way as I am in mine, and, so far as the public is concerned, he has given more proofs.”

“Oh, his public!”

“It won’t do to despise any public, even the theatre-going public.” Maxwell added the last words with a faint sigh.

“It’s always second-rate,” said his wife, passionately. “Third-rate, fourth-rate! Godolphin was quite right about that. I wish you were writing a novel, Brice, instead of a play. Then you would be really addressing refined people.”

“It kills me to have you say that, Louise.”

“Well, I won’t. But don’t you see, then, that you must stand up for art all the more unflinchingly if you intend to write plays that will refine the theatre-going public, or create a new one? That is why I can’t endure to have you even seem to give way to Godolphin.”

“You must stand it so long as I only seem to do it. He’s far more manageable than I expected him to be. It’s quite pathetic how docile he is, how perfectly ductile! But it won’t do to browbeat him when he comes over here a little out of shape. He’s a curious creature,” Maxwell went on with a relish in Godolphin, as material, which his wife suffered with difficulty. “I wonder if he could ever be got into a play. If he could he would like nothing better than to play himself, and he would do it to perfection; only it would be a comic part, and Godolphin’s mind is for the serious drama.” Maxwell laughed. “All his artistic instincts are in solution, and it needs something like a chemical agent to precipitate them, or to give them any positive character. He’s like a woman!”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Maxwell.

“Oh, I mean all sorts of good things by that. He has the sensitiveness of a woman.”

“Is that a good thing? Then I suppose he was so piqued by what I said about his skirt-dance that he will renounce you.”

“Oh, I don’t believe he will. I managed to smooth him up after you went out.”

Mrs. Maxwell sighed. “Yes, you are very patient, and if you are patient, you are good. You are better than I am.”

“I don’t see the sequence exactly,” said Maxwell.

They were both silent, and she seemed to have followed his devious thought in the same muse, for when he spoke again she did not reproach him with an equal inconsequence. “I don’t know whether I could write a novel, and, besides, I think the drama is the supreme literary form. It stands on its own feet. It doesn’t have to be pushed along, or pulled along, as the novel does.”

“Yes, of course, it’s grand. That’s the reason I can’t bear to have you do anything unworthy of it.”

“I know, Louise,” he said, tenderly, and then again they did not speak for a little while.

He emerged from their silence, at a point apparently very remote, with a sigh. “If I could only know just what the feelings of a murderer really were for five minutes, I could out-Shakespeare Shakespeare in that play. But I shall have to trust to the fall of man, and the general depravity of human nature, I suppose. After all, there’s the potentiality of every kind of man in every man. If you’ve known what it is to hate, you’ve known what it is to kill.”

“I felt once as if I had killed you,” she said, and then he knew that she was thinking of a phase of their love which had a perpetual fascination for them both. “But I never hated you.”

“No; I did the hating,” he returned, lightly.

“Ah, don’t say so, dear,” she entreated, half in earnest.

“Well, have it all to yourself, then,” he said; and he rose and went indoors, and lighted the lamp, and she saw him get out the manuscript of his play, while she sat still, recalling the time when she had tried to dismiss him from her thoughts upon a theory of his unworthiness. He had not yet spoken of love to her then, but she felt as if she had refused to listen to him, and her remorse kept his image before her in an attitude of pathetic entreaty for at least a hearing. She knew that she had given him reason, if she had not given him courage, to believe that she cared for him; but he was too proud to renew the tacit approaches from which she had so abruptly retreated, and she had to invite them from him.

When she began to do this with the arts so imperceptible to the single-mindedness of a man, she was not yet sure whether she could endure to live with him or not; she was merely sure that she could not live without him, or, to be more specific, without his genius, which she believed no one else appreciated as she did. She believed that she understood his character better than any one else, and would know how to supplement it with her own. She had no ambition herself, but she could lend him a more telescopic vision in his, and keep his aims high, if his self-concentration ever made him short-sighted. He would write plays because he could not help it, but she would inspire him to write them with the lofty sense of duty she would have felt in writing them if she had his gifts.

She was as happy in their engagement and as unhappy as girls usually are during their courtship. It is the convention to regard those days as very joyous, but probably no woman who was honest about the fact would say that they were so from her own experience. Louise found them full of excitement and an interest from which she relaxed at times with such a sense of having strained forward to their end that she had a cold reluctance from Maxwell, and though she never dreamed of giving him up again, she sometimes wished she had never seen him. She was eager to have it all over, and be married and out of the way, for one thing because she knew that Maxwell could never be assimilated to her circumstance, and she should have no rest till she was assimilated to his. When it came to the dinners and lunches, which the Hilary kinship and friendship made in honor of her engagement, she found that Maxwell actually thought she could make excuse of his work to go without him, and she had to be painfully explicit before she could persuade him that this would not do at all. He was not timid about meeting her friends, as he might very well have been; but, in comparison with his work, he apparently held them of little moment, and at last he yielded to her wishes rather than her reasons. He made no pretence of liking those people, but he gave them no more offence than might have been expected. Among the Hilary cousins there were several clever women, who enjoyed the quality of Maxwell’s somewhat cold, sarcastic humor, and there were several men who recognized his ability, though none of them liked him any better than he liked them. He had a way of regarding them all at first as of no interest, and then, if something kindled his imagination from them, of showing a sudden technical curiosity, which made the ladies, at least, feel as if he were dealing with them as so much material. They professed to think that it was only a question of time when they should all reappear in dramatic form, unless Louise should detect them in the manuscript before they were put upon the stage and forbid his using them. If it were to be done before marriage they were not sure that she would do it, or could do it, for it was plain to be seen that she was perfectly infatuated with him. The faults they found in him were those of manner mostly, and they perceived that these were such as passion might forgive to his other qualities. There were some who said that they envied her for being so much in love with him, but these were not many; and some did not find him good-looking, or see what could have taken her with him.

Maxwell showed himself ignorant of the observances in every way, and if Louise had not rather loved him the more for what he made her suffer because of them, she must certainly have given him up at times. He had never, to her thinking, known how to put a note properly on paper; his letters were perfectly fascinating, but they lacked a final charm in being often written on one side of half-sheets, and numbered in the upper right-hand corner, like printer’s copy. She had to tell him that he must bring his mother to call upon her; and then he was so long doing it that Louise imagined a timidity in his mother which he was too proud to own, and made her own mother go with her to see Mrs. Maxwell in the house which she partly let out in lodgings on a very modest street. It really did not matter about any of those things though, and she and Maxwell’s mother got on very well after the first plunge, though the country doctor’s widow was distinctly a country person, with the narrow social horizons of a villager whose knowledge of the city was confined to the compass of her courageous ventures in it.

To her own mother Louise feigned to see nothing repulsive in the humility of these. She had been rather fastidiously worldly, she had been even aggressively worldly, in her preference for a luxurious and tasteful setting, and her mother now found it hard to bear her contented acceptance of the pervading commonness of things at Mrs. Maxwell’s. Either her senses were holden by her fondness for Maxwell, or else she was trying to hoodwink her mother by an effect of indifference; but Mrs. Hilary herself was certainly not obtuse to that commonness. If she did not rub it into Louise, which would have done no good, she did rub it into Louise’s father, though that could hardly have been said to do any good either. Her report of the whole affair made him writhe, but when she had made him writhe enough she began to admit some extenuating circumstances. If Mrs. Maxwell was a country person, she was not foolish. She did not chant, in a vain attempt to be genteel in her speech; she did not expand unduly under Mrs. Hilary’s graciousness, and she did not resent it. In fact, the graciousness had been very skilfully managed, and Mrs. Maxwell had not been allowed to feel that there was any condescension to her. She got on with Louise very well; if Mrs. Maxwell had any overweening pride in her son, she kept it as wholly to herself as any overweening pride she might have had in her son’s choice.

Mrs. Hilary did not like her daughter’s choice, but she had at last reached such resignation concerning it as the friends of a hopeless invalid may feel when the worst comes. She had tried to stop the affair when there was some hope or some use in trying, and now she determined to make the best of it. The worst was that Maxwell was undoubtedly of different origin and breeding, and he would always, in society, subject Louise to a consciousness of his difference if he did nothing more. But when you had said this, you seemed to have said all there was to say against him. The more the Hilarys learned about the young fellow the more reason they had to respect him. His life, on its level, was blameless. Every one who knew him spoke well of him, and those who knew him best spoke enthusiastically; he had believers in his talent and in his character. In a society so barometrical as ours, even in a city where it was the least barometrical, the obstacles to the acceptance of Maxwell were mainly subjective. They were formed not so much of what people would say as of what Mrs. Hilary felt they had a right to say, and, in view of the necessities of the case, she found herself realizing that if they did not say anything to her it would be much as if they had not said anything at all. She dealt with the fact before her frankly, and in the duties which it laid upon her she began to like Maxwell before Hilary did. Not that Hilary disliked him, but there was something in the young fellow taking his daughter away from him, in that cool matter-of-fact way, as if it were quite in the course of nature that he should, instead of being abashed and overwhelmed by his good fortune, which left Hilary with a misgiving lest he might realize it less and less as time went on.

Hilary had no definite ambition for her in marriage, but his vague dreams for her were not of a young man who meant to leave off being a newspaper writer to become a writer of plays. He instinctively wished her to be of his own order of things; and it had pleased him when he heard from his wife’s report that Louise had seen the folly of her fancy for the young journalist whom a series of accidents had involved with their lives, and had decided to give him up. When the girl decided again, more tacitly, that she could not give him up, Hilary submitted, as he would have submitted to anything she wished. To his simple idolatry of her she was too good for anything on earth, and if he were to lose her, he found that after all he had no great choice in the matter. As soon as her marriage appeared inevitable, he agreed with his wife that their daughter must never have any unhappiness of their making; and they let her reverse without a word the purpose of going to spend the winter abroad which they had formed at her wish when she renounced Maxwell.

All this was still recent in point of time, and though marriage had remanded it to an infinite distance apparently with the young people, it had not yet taken away the importance or the charm of the facts and the feelings that had seemed the whole of life before marriage. When Louise turned from her retrospect she went in through the window that opened on the veranda and stood beside her husband, where he sat with his manuscript before him, frowning at it in the lamplight that made her blink a little after the dark outside. She put her hand on his head, and carried it down his cheek over his mouth, so that he might kiss its palm.

“Going to work much longer, little man?” she asked, and she kissed the top of his head in her turn. It always amused her to find how smooth and soft his hair was. He flung his pen away and threw himself back in his chair. “Oh, it’s that infernal love business!” he said.

She sat down and let her hands fall on her lap. “Why, what makes it so hard?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But it seems as if I were fighting it, as the actors say, all the way. It doesn’t go of itself at all. It’s forced, from the beginning.”

“Why do you have it in, then?”

“I have to have it in. It has to be in every picture of life, as it has to be in every life. Godolphin is perfectly right. I talked with him about leaving it out to-day, but I had to acknowledge that it wouldn’t do. In fact, I was the first to suggest that there must be some sort of love business when I first talked the play over with him. But I wish there hadn’t. It makes me sick every time I touch it. The confounded fools don’t know what to do with their love.”

“They might get married with it,” Louise suggested.

“I don’t believe they have sense enough to think of that,” said her husband. “The curse of their origin is on them, I suppose. I tried to imagine them when I was only fit to imagine a man hating a woman with all his might.”

Louise laughed out her secure delight. “If the public could only know why your lovers were such feeble folk it would make the fortune of the play.”

Maxwell laughed, too. “Yes, fancy Pinney getting hold of a fact like that and working it up with all his native delicacy in the Sunday edition of the Events!”

Pinney was a reporter of Maxwell’s acquaintance, who stood to Louise for all that was most terrible in journalistic enterprise. “Don’t!” she shrieked.

Maxwell went on. “He would have both our portraits in, and your father’s and mother’s, and my mother’s; and your house on Commonwealth Avenue, and our meek mansion on Pinckney Street. He would make it a work of art, Pinney would, and he would believe that we were all secretly gratified with it, no matter how we pretended to writhe under it.” He laughed and laughed, and then suddenly he stopped and was very grave.

“I know what you’re thinking of now,” said his wife.

“What?”

“Whether you couldn’t use our affair in the play?”

“You’re a witch! Yes, I was! I was thinking it wouldn’t do.”

“Stuff! It will do, and you must use it. Who would ever know it? And I shall not care how blackly you show me up. I deserve it. If I was the cause of your hating love so much that you failed with your lovers on the old lines, I certainly ought to be willing to be the means of your succeeding on lines that had never been tried before.”

“Generous girl!” He bent over — he had not to bend far — and kissed her. Then he rose excitedly and began to walk the floor, with his hands in his pockets, and his head dropped forward. He broke into speech: “I could disguise it so that nobody would ever dream of it. I’ll just take a hint from ourselves. How would it do to have had the girl actually reject him? It never came to that with us; and instead of his being a howling outside swell that was rather condescending to her, suppose I have him some sort of subordinate in her father’s business? It doesn’t matter much what; it’s easy to arrange such a detail. She could be in love with him all the time, without even knowing it herself, or, at least, not knowing it when he offers himself; and she could always be vaguely hoping or expecting that he would come to time again.”

“That’s what I did,” said his wife, “and you hadn’t offered yourself either.”

Maxwell stopped, with an air of discomfiture and disappointment. “You wouldn’t like me to use that point, then?”

“What a simpleton! Of course I should! I shouldn’t care if all the world knew it.”

“Ah, well, we won’t give it to Pinney, anyway; but I really think it could be done without involving our own facts. I should naturally work farther and farther away from them when the thing got to spinning. Just take a little color from them now and then. I might have him hating her all the way through, or, supposing he hated her, and yet doing all sorts of nice little things, and noble big things for her, till it came out about her father’s crime, and then—” He stopped again with a certain air of distaste.

“That would be rather romantic, wouldn’t it?” his wife asked.

“That was what I was thinking,” he answered. “It would be confoundedly romantic.”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Louise; “you could have them squabbling all the way through, and doing hateful things to one another.”

“That would give it the cast of comedy.”

“Well?”

“And that wouldn’t do either.”

“Not if it led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the tragic all through!”

“Oh yes, I know that—”

“And it would be very effective to leave the impression of their happiness with the audience, so that they might have strength to get on their rubbers and wraps after the tremendous ordeal of your Haxard death-scene.”

“Godolphin wouldn’t stand that. He wants the gloom of Haxard’s death to remain in unrelieved inkiness at the end. He wants the people to go away thinking of Godolphin, and how well he did the last gasp. He wouldn’t stand any love business there. He would rather not have any in the play.”

“Very well, if you’re going to be a slave to Godolphin—”

“I’m not going to be a slave to Godolphin, and if I can see my way to make the right use of such a passage at the close I’ll do it even if it kills the play or Godolphin.”

“Now you’re shouting,” said Louise. She liked to use a bit of slang when it was perfectly safe — as in very good company, or among those she loved; at other times she scrupulously shunned it.

“But I can do it somehow,” Maxwell mused aloud. “Now I have the right idea, I can make it take any shape or color I want. It’s magnificent!”

“And who thought of it?” she demanded.

“Who? Why, I thought of it myself.”

“Oh, you little wretch!” she cried, in utter fondness, and she ran at him and drove him into a corner. “Now, say that again and I’ll tickle you.”

“No, no, no!” he laughed, and he fought away the pokes and thrusts she was aiming at him. “We both thought of it together. It was mind transference!”

She dropped her hands with an instant interest in the psychological phenomena. “Wasn’t it strange? Or, no, it wasn’t, either! If our lives are so united in everything, the wonder is that we don’t think more things and say more things together. But now I want you to own, Brice, that I was the first to speak about your using our situation!”

“Yes, you were, and I was the first to think of it. But that’s perfectly natural. You always speak of things before you think, and I always think of things before I speak.”

“Well, I don’t care,” said Louise, by no means displeased with the formulation. “I shall always say it was perfectly miraculous. And I want you to give me credit for letting you have the idea after you had thought of it.”

“Yes, there’s nothing mean about you, Louise, as Pinney would say. By Jove, I’ll bring Pinney in! I’ll have Pinney interview Haxard concerning Greenshaw’s disappearance.”

“Very well, then, if you bring Pinney in, you will leave me out,” said Louise. “I won’t be in the same play with Pinney.”

“Well, I won’t bring Pinney in, then,” said Maxwell. “I prefer you to Pinney — in a play. But I have got to have in an interviewer. It will be splendid on the stage, and I’ll be the first to have him.” He went and sat down at his table.

“You’re not going to work any more to-night!” his wife protested.

“No, just jot down a note or two, to clinch that idea of ours in the right shape.” He dashed off a few lines with pencil in his play at several points, and then he said: “There! I guess I shall get some bones into those two flabby idiots to-morrow. I see just how I can do it.” He looked up and met his wife’s adoring eyes.

“You’re wonderful, Brice!” she said.

“Well, don’t tell me so,” he returned, “or it might spoil me. Now I wouldn’t tell you how good you were, on any account.”

“Oh yes, do, dearest!” she entreated, and a mist came into her eyes. “I don’t think you praise me enough.”

“How much ought I to praise you?”

“You ought to say that you think I’ll never be a hinderance to you.”

“Let me see,” he said, and he pretended to reflect. “How would it do to say that if I ever come to anything worth while, it’ll be because you made me?”

“Oh, Brice! But would it be true?” She dropped on her knees at his side.

“Well, I don’t know. Let’s hope it would,” and with these words he laughed again and put his arms round her. Presently she felt his arm relax, and she knew that he had ceased to think about her and was thinking about his play again.

She pulled away, and “Well?” she asked.

He laughed at being found out so instantly. “That was a mighty good thing your father said when you went to tell him of our engagement.”

“It was very good. But if you think I’m going to let you use that you’re very much mistaken. No, Brice! Don’t you touch papa. He wouldn’t like it; he wouldn’t understand it. Why, what a perfect cormorant you are!”

They laughed over his voracity, and he promised it should be held in check as to the point which he had thought for a moment might be worked so effectively into the play.

The next morning Louise said to her husband: “I can see, Brice, that you are full of the notion of changing that love business, and if I stay round I shall simply bother. I’m going down to lunch with papa and mamma, and get back here in the afternoon, just in time to madden Godolphin with my meddling.”

She caught the first train after breakfast, and in fifteen minutes she was at Beverly Farms. She walked over to her father’s cottage, where she found him smoking his cigar on the veranda.

He was alone; he said her mother had gone to Boston for the day; and he asked: “Did you walk from the station? Why didn’t you come back in the carriage? It had just been there with your mother.”

“I didn’t see it. Besides, I might not have taken it if I had. As the wife of a struggling young playwright, I should have probably thought it unbecoming to drive. But the struggle is practically over, you’ll be happy to know.”

“What? Has he given it up?” asked her father.

“Given it up! He’s just got a new light on his love business!”

“I thought his love business had gone pretty well with him,” said Hilary, with a lingering grudge in his humor.

“This is another love business!” Louise exclaimed. “The love business in the play. Brice has always been so disgusted with it that he hasn’t known what to do. But last night we thought it out together, and I’ve left him this morning getting his hero and heroine to stand on their legs without being held up. Do you want to know about it?”

“I think I can get on without,” said Hilary.

Louise laughed joyously. “Well, you wouldn’t understand what a triumph it was if I told you. I suppose, papa, you’ve no idea how Philistine you are. But you’re nothing to mamma!”

“I dare say,” said Hilary, sulkily. But she looked at him with eyes beaming with gayety, and he could see that she was happy, and he was glad at heart. “When does Maxwell expect to have his play done?” he relented so far as to ask.

“Why, it’s done now, and has been for a month, in one sense, and it isn’t done at all in another. He has to keep working it over, and he has to keep fighting Godolphin’s inspirations. He comes over from Manchester with a fresh lot every afternoon.”

“I dare say Maxwell will be able to hold his own,” said Hilary, but not so much proudly as dolefully.

She knew he was braving it out about the theatre, and that secretly he thought it undignified, and even disreputable, to be connected with it, or to be in such close relations with an actor as Maxwell seemed to be with this fellow who talked of taking his play. Hilary could go back very easily to the time in Boston when the theatres were not allowed open on Saturday night, lest they should profane the approaching Sabbath, and when you would no more have seen an actor in society than an elephant. He had not yet got used to meeting them, and he always felt his difference, though he considered himself a very liberal man, and was fond of the theatre — from the front.

He asked now, “What sort of chap is he, really?” meaning Godolphin, and Louise did her best to reassure him. She told him Godolphin was young and enthusiastic; and he had an ideal of the drama; and he believed in Brice; and he had been two seasons with Booth and Barrett; and now he had made his way on the Pacific Coast, and wanted a play that he could take the road with. She parroted those phrases, which made her father’s flesh creep, and she laughed when she saw it creeping, for sympathy; her own had crept first.

“Well,” he said, at last, “he won’t expect you and Maxwell to take the road too with it?”

“Oh no, we shall only be with him in New York. He won’t put the play on there first; they usually try a new play in the country.”

“Oh, do they?” said Hilary, with a sense that his daughter’s knowledge of the fact was disgraceful to her.

“Yes. Shall I tell you what they call that? Trying it on a dog!” she shrieked, and Hilary had to laugh, too. “It’s dreadful,” she went on. “Then, if it doesn’t kill the dog, Godolphin will bring it to New York, and put it on for a run — a week or a month — as long as his money holds out. If he believes in it, he’ll fight it.” Her father looked at her for explanation, and she said, with a gleeful perception of his suffering, “He’ll keep it on if he has to play to paper every night. That is, to free tickets.”

“Oh!” said Hilary. “And are you to be there the whole time with him?”

“Why, not necessarily. But Brice will have to be there for the rehearsals; and if we are going to live in New York—”

Hilary sighed. “I wish Maxwell was going on with his newspaper work; I might be of use to him in that line, if he were looking forward to an interest in a newspaper; but I couldn’t buy him a theatre, you know.”

Louise laughed. “He wouldn’t let you buy him anything, papa; Brice is awfully proud. Now, I’ll tell you, if you want to know, just how we expect to manage in New York; Brice and I have been talking it all over; and it’s all going to be done on that thousand dollars he saved up from his newspaper work, and we’re not going to touch a cent of my money till that is gone. Don’t you call that pretty business-like?”

“Very,” said Hilary, and he listened with apparent acquiescence to the details of a life which he divined that Maxwell had planned from his own simple experience. He did not like the notion of it for his daughter, but he could not help himself, and it was a consolation to see that she was in love with it.

She went back from it to the play itself, and told her father that now Maxwell had got the greatest love business for it that there ever was. She would not explain just what it was, she said, because her father would get a wrong notion of it if she did. “But I have a great mind to tell you something else,” she said, “if you think you can behave sensibly about it, papa. Do you suppose you can?”

Hilary said he would try, and she went on: “It’s part of the happiness of having got hold of the right kind of love business now, and I don’t know but it unconsciously suggested it to both of us, for we both thought of the right thing at the same time; but in the beginning you couldn’t have told it from a quarrel.” Her father started, and Louise began to laugh. “Yes, we had quite a little tiff, just like real married people, about my satirizing one of Godolphin’s inspirations to his face, and wounding his feelings. Brice is so cautious and so gingerly with him; and he was vexed with me, and told me he wished I wouldn’t do it; and that vexed me, and I said I wouldn’t have anything to do with his play after this; and I didn’t speak to him again till after supper. I said he was self-centred, and he is. He’s always thinking about his play and its chances; and I suppose I would rather have had him think more about me now and then. But I’ve discovered a way now, and I believe it will serve the same purpose. I’m going to enter so fully into his work that I shall be part of it; and when he is thinking of that he will be thinking of me without knowing it. Now, you wouldn’t say there was anything in that to cry about, would you? and yet you see I’m at it!” and with this she suddenly dropped her face on her father’s shoulder.

Hilary groaned in his despair of being able to imagine an injury sufficiently atrocious to inflict on Maxwell for having brought this grief upon his girl. At the sound of his groan, as if she perfectly interpreted his meaning in it, she broke from a sob into a laugh. “Will you never,” she said, dashing away the tears, “learn to let me cry, simply because I am a goose, papa, and a goose must weep without reason, because she feels like it? I won’t have you thinking that I am not the happiest person in the world; and I was, even when I was suffering so because I had to punish Brice for telling me I had done wrong. And if you think I’m not, I will never tell you anything more, for I see you can’t be trusted. Will you?”

He said no to her rather complicated question, and he was glad to believe that she was really as happy as she declared, for if he could not have believed it, he would have had to fume away an intolerable deal of exasperation. This always made him very hot and uncomfortable, and he shrank from it, but he would have done it if it had been necessary. As it was, he got back to his newspaper again with a sufficiently light heart, when Louise gave him a final kiss, and went indoors and put herself in authority for the day, and ordered what she liked for luncheon. The maids were delighted to have her, and she had a welcome from them all, which was full of worship for her as a bride whose honeymoon was not yet over.

She went away before her mother got home, and she made her father own, before she left him, that he had never had such a lovely day since he could remember. He wanted to drive over to Magnolia with her; but she accused him of wanting to go so that he could spy round a little, and satisfy himself of the misery of her married life; and then he would not insist.

IV.

Louise kept wondering, the whole way back, how Maxwell had managed the recasting of the love-business, and she wished she had stayed with him, so that he could have appealed to her at any moment on the points that must have come up all the time. She ought to have coached him more fully about it, and told him the woman’s side of such a situation, as he never could have imagined how many advances a woman can make with a man in such an affair and the man never find it out. She had not made any advances herself when she wished to get him back, but she had wanted to make them; and she knew he would not have noticed it if she had done the boldest sort of things to encourage him, to let him know that she liked him; he was so simple, in his straightforward egotism, beside her sinuous unselfishness.

She began to think how she was always contriving little sacrifices to his vanity, his modesty, and he was always accepting them with a serene ignorance of the fact that they were offered; and at this she strayed off on a little by-way in her revery, and thought how it was his mind, always, that charmed her; it was no ignoble fondness she felt; no poor, grovelling pleasure in his good looks, though she had always seen that in a refined sort he had a great deal of manly beauty. But she had held her soul aloof from all that, and could truly say that what she adored in him was the beauty of his talent, which he seemed no more conscious of than of his dreamy eyes, the scornful sweetness of his mouth, the purity of his forehead, his sensitive nostrils, his pretty, ineffective little chin. She had studied her own looks with reference to his, and was glad to own them in no wise comparable, though she knew she was more graceful, and she could not help seeing that she was a little taller; she kept this fact from herself as much as possible. Her features were not regular, like his, but she could perceive that they had charm in their irregularity; she could only wonder whether he thought that line going under her chin, and suggesting a future double chin in the little fold it made, was so very ugly. He seemed never to have thought of her looks, and if he cared for her, it was for some other reason, just as she cared for him. She did not know what the reason could be, but perhaps it was her sympathy, her appreciation, her cheerfulness; Louise believed that she had at least these small merits.

The thought of them brought her back to the play again, and to the love-business, and she wondered how she could have failed to tell him, when they were talking about what should bring the lovers together, after their prefatory quarrel, that simply willing it would do it. She knew that after she began to wish Maxwell back, she was in such a frenzy that she believed her volition brought him back; and now she really believed that you could hypnotize fate in some such way, and that your longings would fulfil themselves if they were intense enough. If he could not use that idea in this play, then he ought to use it in some other, something psychological, symbolistic, Maeterlinckish.

She was full of it when she dismounted from the barge at the hotel and hurried over to their cottage, and she was intolerably disappointed when she did not find him at work in the parlor.

“Brice! Brice!” she shouted, in the security of having the whole cottage to herself. She got no answer, and ran up to their room, overhead. He was not there, either, and now it seemed but too probable that he had profited by her absence to go out for a walk alone, after his writing, and fallen from the rocks, and been killed — he was so absent-minded. She offered a vow to Heaven that if he were restored to her she would never leave him again, even for a half-day, as long as either of them lived. In reward for this she saw him coming from the direction of the beach, where nothing worse could have befallen him than a chill from the water, if the wind was off shore and he had been taking a bath.

She had not put off her hat yet, and she went out to meet him; she could not kiss him at once, if she went to meet him, but she could wait till she got back to the cottage, and then kiss him. It would be a trial to wait, but it would be a trial to wait for him to come in, and he might stroll off somewhere else, unless she went to him. As they approached each other she studied his face for some sign of satisfaction with his morning’s work. It lighted up at sight of her, but there remained an inner dark in it to her eye.

“What is the matter?” she asked, as she put her hand through his arm, and hung forward upon it so that she could look up into his face. “How did you get on with the love-business?”

“Oh, I think I’ve got that all right,” he answered, with a certain reservation. “I’ve merely blocked it out, of course.”

“So that you can show it to Godolphin?”

“I guess so.”

“I see that you’re not sure of it. We must go over it before he comes. He hasn’t been here yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Why are you so quiet, Brice? Is anything the matter? You look tired.”

“I’m not particularly tired.”

“Then you are worried. What is it?”

“Oh, you would have to know, sooner or later.” He took a letter from his pocket and gave it to her. “It came just after I had finished my morning’s work.”

She pulled it out of the envelope and read:

“Manchester-by-the-Sea, Friday.

“Dear Sir: I beg leave to relinquish any claim that you may feel I have established to the play you have in hand. As it now stands, I do not see my part in it, and I can imagine why you should be reluctant to make further changes in it, in order to meet my requirements.

“If I can be of any service to you in placing the piece, I shall be glad to have you make use of me.

“Yours truly,
“Launcelot Godolphin.”

“You blame me!” she said, after a blinding moment, in which the letter darkened before her eyes, and she tottered in her walk. She gave it back to him as she spoke.

“What a passion you have for blaming!” he answered, coldly. “If I fixed the blame on you it wouldn’t help.”

“No,” Louise meekly assented, and they walked along towards their cottage. They hardly spoke again before they reached it and went in. Then she asked, “Did you expect anything like this from the way he parted with you yesterday?”

Maxwell gave a bitter laugh. “From the way we parted yesterday I was expecting him early this afternoon, with the world in the palm of his hand, to lay it at my feet. He all but fell upon my neck when he left me. I suppose his not actually doing it was an actor’s intimation that we were to see each other no more.”

“I wish you had nothing to do with actors!” said Louise.

“They appear to have nothing to do with me,” said Maxwell. “It comes to the same thing.”

They reached the cottage, and sat down in the little parlor where she had left him so hopefully at work in the morning, where they had talked his play over so jubilantly the night before.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, after an abysmal interval.

“Nothing. What is there to do?”

“You have a right to an explanation; you ought to demand it.”

“I don’t need any explanation. The case is perfectly clear. Godolphin doesn’t want my play. That is all.”

“Oh, Brice!” she lamented. “I am so dreadfully sorry, and I know it was my fault. Why don’t you let me write to him, and explain—”

Maxwell shook his head. “He doesn’t want any explanation. He doesn’t want the play, even. We must make up our minds to that, and let him go. Now we can try it with your managers.”

Louise felt keenly the unkindness of his calling them her managers, but she was glad to have him unkind to her; deep within her Unitarianism she had the Puritan joy in suffering for a sin; her treatment of Godolphin’s suggestion of a skirt-dance, while very righteous in itself, was a sin against her husband’s interest, and she would rather he were unkind to her than not. The sooner she was punished for it and done with it, the better; in her unscientific conception of life, the consequences of a sin ended with its punishment. If Maxwell had upbraided her with the bitterness she merited, it would have been to her as if it were all right again with Godolphin. His failure to do so left the injury unrepaired, and she would have to do something. “I suppose you don’t care to let me see what you’ve written to-day?”

“No, not now,” said Maxwell, in a tone that said, “I haven’t the heart for it.”

They sat awhile without speaking, and then she ventured, “Brice, I have an idea, but I don’t know what you will think of it. Why not take Godolphin’s letter on the face of it, and say that you are very sorry he must give up the play, and that you will be greatly obliged to him if he can suggest some other actor? That would be frank, at least.”

Maxwell broke into a laugh that had some joy in it. “Do you think so? It isn’t my idea of frankness exactly.”

“No, of course not. You always say what you mean, and you don’t change. That is what is so beautiful in you. You can’t understand a nature that is one thing to-day and another thing to-morrow.”

“Oh, I think I can,” said Maxwell, with a satirical glance.

“Brice!” she softly murmured; and then she said, “Well, I don’t care. He is just like a woman.”

“You didn’t like my saying so last night.”

“That was a different thing. At any rate, it’s I that say so now, and I want you to write that to him. It will bring him back flying. Will you?”

“I’ll think about it,” said Maxwell; “I’m not sure that I want Godolphin back, or not at once. It’s a great relief to be rid of him, in a certain way, though a manager might be worse slavery. Still, I think I would like to try a manager. I have never shown this play to one, and I know the Odeon people in Boston, and, perhaps—”

“You are saying that to comfort me.”

“I wouldn’t comfort you for worlds, my dear. I am saying this to distress you. But since I have worked that love-business over, it seems to me much less a one-part play, and if I could get a manager to take a fancy to it I could have my own way with it much better; at least, he wouldn’t want me to take all the good things out of the other characters’ mouths and stuff them into Haxard’s.”

“Do you really think so?”

“I really thought so before I got Godolphin’s letter. That made him seem the one and only man for me.”

“Yes,” Louise assented, with a sad intelligence.

Maxwell seemed to have got some strength from confronting his calamity. At any rate, he said, almost cheerfully, “I’ll read you what I wrote this morning,” and she had to let him, though she felt that it was taking her at a moment when her wish to console him was so great that she would not be able to criticise him. But she found that he had done it so well there was no need of criticism.

“You are wonderful, Brice!” she said, in a transport of adoration, which she indulged as simply his due. “You are miraculous! Well, this is the greatest triumph yet, even of your genius. How you have seized the whole idea! And so subtly, so delicately! And so completely disguised! The girl acts just as a girl would have acted. How could you know it?”

“Perhaps I’ve seen it,” he suggested, demurely.

“No, no, you didn’t see it! That is the amusing part of it. You were as blind as a bat all the time, and you never had the least suspicion; you’ve told me so.”

“Well, then, I’ve seen it retrospectively.”

“Perhaps that way. But I don’t believe you’ve seen it at all. You’ve divined it; and that’s where your genius is worth all the experience in the world. The girl is twice as good as the man, and you never experienced a girl’s feelings or motives. You divined them. It’s pure inspiration. It’s the prophet in you!”

“You’ll be stoning me next,” said Maxwell. “I don’t think the man is so very bad, even if I didn’t divine him.”

“Yes, for a poor creature of experience and knowledge, he will do very well. But he doesn’t compare with the girl.”

“I hadn’t so good a model.”

She hugged him for saying that. “You pay the prettiest compliments in the world, even if you don’t pick up handkerchiefs.”

Their joy in the triumph of his art was unalloyed by the hope of anything outside of it, of any sort of honor or profit from it, though they could not keep the thought of these out very long.

“Yes,” she said, after one of the delicious silences that divided their moments of exaltation. “There won’t be any trouble about getting your play taken, now.”

After supper they strolled down for the sunset and twilight on the rocks. There, as the dusk deepened, she put her wrap over his shoulders as well as her own, and pulled it together in front of them both. “I am not going to have you taking cold, now, when you need all your health for your work more than ever. That love-business seems to me perfect just as it is, but I know you won’t be satisfied till you have put the very last touch on it.”

“Yes, I see all sorts of things I can do to it. Louise!”

“Well, what?”

“Don’t you see that the love-business is the play now? I have got to throw away all the sin-interest, all the Haxard situation, or keep them together as they are, and write a new play altogether, with the light, semi-comic motive of the love-business for the motive of the whole. It’s out of tone with Haxard’s tragedy, and it can’t be brought into keeping with it. The sin-interest will kill the love-business, or the love-business will kill the sin-interest. Don’t you see?”

“Why, of course! You must make this light affair now, and when it’s opened the way for you with the public you can bring out the old play,” she assented, and it instantly became the old play in both their minds; it became almost the superannuated play. They talked it over in this new aspect, and then they went back to the cottage, to look at the new play as it shadowed itself forth in the sketch Maxwell had made. He read the sketch to her again, and they saw how it could be easily expanded to three or four acts, and made to fill the stage and the evening.

“And it will be the most original thing that ever was!” she exulted.

“I don’t think there’s been anything exactly like it before,” he allowed.

From time to time they spoke to each other in the night, and she asked if he were asleep, and he if she were asleep, and then they began to talk of the play again. Towards morning they drowsed a little, but at their time of life the loss of a night’s sleep means nothing, and they rose as glad as they had lain down.

“I’ll tell you, Brice,” she said, the first thing, “you must have it that they have been engaged, and you can call the play ‘The Second Chapter,’ or something more alliterative. Don’t you think that would be a good name?”

“It would make the fortune of any play,” he answered, “let alone a play of such merit as this.”

“Well, then, sha’n’t you always say that I did something towards it?”

“I shall say you did everything towards it. You originated the idea, and named it, and I simply acted as your amanuensis, as it were, and wrote it out mostly from your dictation. It shall go on the bills, ‘The Second Chapter,’ a demi-semi-serious comedy by Mrs. Louise Hilary Maxwell — in letters half a foot high — and by B. Maxwell — in very small lower case, that can’t be read without the aid of a microscope.”

“Oh, Brice! If you make him talk that way to her, it will be perfectly killing.”

“I dare say the audience will find it so.”

They were so late at breakfast, and sat there so long talking, for Maxwell said he did not feel like going to work quite so promptly as usual, that it was quite ten o’clock when they came out of the dining-room, and then they stayed awhile gossiping with people on the piazza of the hotel before they went back to their cottage. When they came round the corner in sight of it they saw the figure of a man pacing back and forth on the veranda, with his head dropped forward, and swinging a stick thoughtfully behind him. Louise pulled Maxwell convulsively to a halt, for the man was Godolphin.

“What do you suppose it means?” she gasped.

“I suppose he will tell us,” said Maxwell, dryly. “Don’t stop and stare at him. He has got eyes all over him, and he’s clothed with self-consciousness as with a garment, and I don’t choose to let him think that his being here is the least important or surprising.”

“No, of course not. That would be ridiculous,” and she would have liked to pause for a moment’s worship of her husband’s sense, which appeared to her almost as great as his genius. But it seemed to her an inordinately long time before they reached the cottage-gate, and Godolphin came half-way down the walk to meet them.

He bowed seriously to her, and then said, with dignity, to her husband, “Mr. Maxwell, I feel that I owe you an apology — or an explanation, rather — for the abrupt note I sent you yesterday. I wish to assure you that I had no feeling in the matter, and that I am quite sincere in my offer of my services.”

“Why, you’re very good, Mr. Godolphin,” said Maxwell. “I knew that I could fully rely on your kind offer. Won’t you come in?” He offered the actor his hand, and they moved together towards the cottage; Louise had at once gone before, but not so far as to be out of hearing.

“Why, thank you, I will sit down a moment. I found the walk over rather fatiguing. It’s going to be a hot day.” He passed his handkerchief across his forehead, and insisted upon placing a chair for Mrs. Maxwell before he could be made to sit down, though she said that she was going indoors, and would not sit. “You understand, of course, Mr. Maxwell, that I should still like to have your play, if it could be made what I want?”

Maxwell would not meet his wife’s eye in answering. “Oh, yes; the only question with me is, whether I can make it what you want. That has been the trouble all along. I know that the love-business in the play, as it stood, was inadequate. But yesterday, just before I got your note, I had been working it over in a perfectly new shape. I wish, if you have a quarter of an hour to throw away, you’d let me show you what I’ve written. Perhaps you can advise me.”

“Why, I shall be delighted to be of any sort of use, Mr. Maxwell,” said Godolphin, with softened state; and he threw himself back in his chair with an air of eager readiness.

“I will get your manuscript, Brice,” said Louise, at a motion her husband made to rise. She ran in and brought it out, and then went away again. She wished to remain somewhere within earshot, but, upon the whole, she decided against it, and went upstairs, where she kept herself from eavesdropping by talking with the chambermaid, who had come over from the hotel.

V.

Louise did not come down till she heard Godolphin walking away on the plank. She said to herself that she had shipwrecked her husband once by putting in her oar, and she was not going to do it again. When the actor’s footfalls died out in the distance she descended to the parlor, where she found Maxwell over his manuscript at the table.

She had to call to him, “Well?” before he seemed aware of her presence.

Even then he did not look round, but he said, “Godolphin wants to play Atland.”

“The lover?”

“Yes. He thinks he sees his part in it.”

“And do you?”

“How do I know?”

“Well, I am glad I let him get safely away before I came back, for I certainly couldn’t have held in when he proposed that, if I had been here. I don’t understand you, Brice! Why do you have anything more to do with him? Why do you let him touch the new play? Was he ever of the least use with the old one?”

Maxwell lay back in his chair with a laugh. “Not the least in the world.” The realization of the fact amused him more and more. “I was just thinking how everything he ever got me to do to it,” he looked down at the manuscript, “was false and wrong. They talk about a knowledge of the stage as if the stage were a difficult science, instead of a very simple piece of mechanism whose limitations and possibilities any one can seize at a glance. All that their knowledge of it comes to is clap-trap, pure and simple. They brag of its resources, and tell you the carpenter can do anything you want nowadays, but if you attempt anything outside of their tradition they are frightened. They think that their exits and their entrances are great matters, and that they must come on with such a speech, and go off with such another; but it is not of the least consequence how they come or go if they have something interesting to say or do.”

“Why don’t you say these things to Godolphin?”

“I do, and worse. He admits their truth with a candor and an intelligence that are dismaying. He has a perfect conception of Atland’s part, and he probably will play it in a way to set your teeth on edge.”

“Why do you let him? Why don’t you keep your play and offer it to a manager or some actor who will know how to do it?” demanded Louise, with sorrowful submission.

“Godolphin will know how to do it, even if he isn’t able to. And, besides, I should be a fool to fling him away for any sort of promising uncertainty.”

“He was willing to fling you away!”

“Yes, but I’m not so important to him as he is to me. He’s the best I can do for the present. It’s a compromise all the way through — a cursed spite from beginning to end. Your own words don’t represent your ideas, and the more conscience you put into the work the further you get from what you thought it would be. Then comes the actor with the infernal chemistry of his personality. He imagines the thing perfectly, not as you imagined it, but as you wrote it, and then he is no more able to play it as he imagined it than you were to write it as you imagined it. What the public finally gets is something three times removed from the truth that was first in the dramatist’s mind. But I’m very lucky to have Godolphin back again.”

“I hope you’re not going to let him see that you think so.”

“Oh, no! I’m going to keep him in a suppliant attitude throughout, and I’m going to let you come in and tame his spirit, if he — kicks.”

“Don’t be vulgar, Brice,” said Louise, and she laughed rather forlornly. “I don’t see how you have the heart to joke, if you think it’s so bad as you say.”

“I haven’t. I’m joking without any heart.” He stood up. “Let us go and take a bath.”

She glanced at him with a swift inventory of his fagged looks, and said, “Indeed, you shall not take a bath this morning. You couldn’t react against it. You won’t, will you?”

“No, I’ll only lie on the sand, if you can pick me out a good warm spot, and watch you.”

“I shall not bathe, either.”

“Well, then, I’ll watch the other women.” He put out his hand and took hers.

She felt his touch very cold. “You are excited I can see. I wish—”

“What? That I was not an intending dramatist?”

“That you didn’t have such excitements in your life. They will kill you.”

“They are all that will keep me alive.”

They went down to the beach, and walked back and forth on its curve several times before they dropped in the sand at a discreet distance from several groups of hotel acquaintance. People were coming and going from the line of bath-houses that backed upon the low sand-bank behind them, with its tufts of coarse silvery-green grasses. The Maxwells bowed to some of the ladies who tripped gayly past them in their airy costumes to the surf, or came up from it sobered and shivering. Four or five young fellows, with sun-blackened arms and legs, were passing ball near them. A pony-carriage drove by on the wet sand; a horseman on a crop-tailed roan thumped after it at a hard trot. Dogs ran barking vaguely about, and children with wooden shovels screamed at their play. Far off shimmered the sea, of one pale blue with the sky. The rooks were black at either end of the beach; a line of sail-boats and dories swung across its crescent beyond the bathers, who bobbed up and down in the surf, or showed a head here and there outside of it.

“What a singular spectacle,” said Maxwell. “The casting off of the conventional in sea-bathing always seems to me like the effect of those dreams where we appear in society insufficiently dressed, and wonder whether we can make it go.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” His wife tried to cover all the propositions with one loosely fitting assent.

“I’m surprised,” Maxwell went on, “that some realistic wretch hasn’t put this sort of thing on the stage. It would be tremendously effective; if he made it realistic enough it would be attacked by the press as improper and would fill the house. Couldn’t we work a sea-bathing scene into the ‘Second Chapter’? It would make the fortune of the play, and it would give Godolphin a chance to show his noble frame in something like the majesty of nature. Godolphin would like nothing better. We could have Atland rescue Salome, and Godolphin could flop round among the canvas breakers for ten minutes, and come on for a recall with the heroine, both dripping real water all over the stage.”

“Don’t be disgusting, Brice,” said his wife, absently. She had her head half turned from him, watching a lady who had just come out of her bath-house and was passing very near them on her way to the water. Maxwell felt the inattention in his wife’s tone and looked up.

The bather returned their joint gaze steadily from eyes that seemed, as Maxwell said, to smoulder under their long lashes, and to question her effect upon them in a way that he was some time finding a phrase for. He was tormented to make out whether she were a large person or not; without her draperies he could not tell. But she moved with splendid freedom, and her beauty expressed a maturity of experience beyond her years; she looked young, and yet she looked as if she had been taking care of herself a good while. She was certainly very handsome, Louise owned to herself, as the lady quickened her pace, and finally ran down to the water and plunged into a breaker that rolled in at the right moment in uncommon volume.

“Well?” she asked her husband, whose eyes had gone with hers.

“We ought to have clapped.”

“Do you think she is an actress?”

“I don’t know. I never saw her before. She seemed to turn the sunshine into lime-light as she passed. Why! that’s rather pretty, isn’t it? And it’s a verse. I wonder what it is about these people. The best of them have nothing of the stage in them — at least, the men haven’t. I’m not sure, though, that the women haven’t. There are lots of women off the stage who are actresses, but they don’t seem so. They’re personal; this one was impersonal. She didn’t seem to regard me as a man; she regarded me as a house. Did you feel that?”

“Yes, that was it, I suppose. But she regarded you more than she did me, I think.”

“Why, of course. You were only a matinée.”

They sat half an hour longer in the sand, and then he complained that the wind blew all the warmth out of him as fast as the sun shone it into him. She felt his hand next her and found it still cold; after a glance round she furtively felt his forehead.

“You’re still thinking,” she sighed. “Come! We must go back.”

“Yes. That girl won’t be out of the water for half an hour yet; and we couldn’t wait to see her clothed and in her right mind afterwards.”

“What makes you think she’s a girl?” asked his wife, as they moved slowly off.

He did not seem to have heard her question. He said, “I don’t believe I can make the new play go, Louise; I haven’t the strength for it. There’s too much good stuff in Haxard; I can’t throw away what I’ve done on it.”

“That is just what I was thinking, Brice! It would be too bad to lose that. The love-business as you’ve remodeled it is all very well. But it is light; it’s comedy; and Haxard is such splendid tragedy. I want you to make your first impression in that. You can do comedy afterwards; but if you did comedy first, the public would never think your tragedy was serious.”

“Yes, there’s a law in that. A clown mustn’t prophesy. If a prophet chooses to joke, now and then, all well and good. I couldn’t begin now and expand that love-business into a whole play. It must remain an episode, and Godolphin must take it or leave it. Of course he’ll want Atland emaciated to fatten Haxard, as he calls it. But Atland doesn’t amount to much, as it is, and I don’t believe I could make him; it’s essentially a passive part; Salome must make the chief effect in that business, and I think I’ll have her a little more serious, too. It’ll be more in keeping with the rest.”

“I don’t see why she shouldn’t be serious. There’s nothing ignoble in what she does.”

“No. It can be very impassioned.”

Louise thought of the smouldering eyes of that woman, and she wondered if they were what suggested something very impassioned to Maxwell; but with all the frankness between them, she did not ask him.

On their way to the cottage they saw one of the hotel bell-boys coming out. “Just left a telegram in there for you,” he called, as he came towards them.

Louise began, “Oh, dear, I hope there’s nothing the matter with papa! Or your mother.”

She ran forward, and Maxwell followed at his usual pace, so that she had time to go inside and come out with the despatch before he mounted the veranda steps.

“You open it!” she entreated, piteously, holding it towards him.

He pulled it impatiently open, and glanced at the signature. “It’s from Godolphin;” and he read, “Don’t destroy old play. Keep new love-business for episode. Will come over this afternoon.” Maxwell smiled. “More mind transference.”

Louise laughed in hysterical relief. “Now you can make him do just what you want.”

VI.

Maxwell, now, at least, knew that he had got his play going in the right direction again. He felt a fresh pleasure in returning to the old lines after his excursion in the region of comedy, and he worked upon them with fresh energy. He rehabilitated the love-business as he and his wife had newly imagined it, and, to disguise the originals the more effectively, he made the girl, whom he had provisionally called Salome, more like himself than Louise in certain superficial qualities, though in an essential nobleness and singleness, which consisted with a great deal of feminine sinuosity and subtlety, she remained a portrait of Louise. He was doubtful whether the mingling of characteristics would not end in unreality, but she was sure it would not; she said he was so much like a woman in the traits he had borrowed from himself that Salome would be all the truer for being like him; or, at any rate, she would be finer, and more ideal. She said that it was nonsense, the way people regarded women as altogether different from men; she believed they were very much alike; a girl was as much the daughter of her father as of her mother; she alleged herself as proof of the fact that a girl was often a great deal more her father’s daughter, and she argued that if Maxwell made Salome quite in his own spiritual image, no one would dream of criticising her as unwomanly. Then he asked if he need only make Atland in her spiritual image to have him the manliest sort of fellow. She said that was not what she meant, and, in any case, a man could have feminine traits, and be all the nicer for them, but, if a woman had masculine traits, she would be disgusting. At the same time, if you drew a man from a woman, he would be ridiculous.

“Then you want me to model Atland on myself, too,” said Maxwell.

She thought a moment. “Yes, I do. If Salome is to be taken mostly from me, I couldn’t bear to have him like anybody but you. It would be indelicate.”

“Well, now, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to stand it,” said Maxwell. “I am going to make Atland like Pinney.”

But she would not be turned from the serious aspect of the affair by his joking. She asked, “Do you think it would intensify the situation if he were not equal to her? If the spectator could be made to see that she was throwing herself away on him, after all?”

“Wouldn’t that leave the spectator a little too inconsolable? You don’t want the love-business to double the tragedy, you want to have it relieved, don’t you?”

“Yes, that is true. You must make him worth all the sacrifice. I couldn’t stand it if he wasn’t.”

Maxwell frowned, as he always did when he became earnest, and said with a little sigh, “He must be passive, negative, as I said; you must simply feel that he is good, and that she will be safe with him, after the worst has happened to her father. And I must keep the interest of the love-business light, without letting it become farcical. I must get charm, all I can, into her character. You won’t mind my getting the charm all from you?”

“Oh, Brice, what sweet things you say to me! I wish everybody could know how divine you are.”

“The women would all be making love to me, and I should hate that. One is quite enough.”

“Am I quite enough?” she entreated.

“You have been up to the present time.”

“And do you think I shall always be?” She slid from her chair to her knees on the floor beside him, where he sat at his desk, and put her arms round him.

He did not seem to know it. “Look here, Louise, I have got to connect this love-business with the main action of the play, somehow. It won’t do simply to have it an episode. How would it do to have Atland know all the time that Haxard has killed Greenshaw, and be keeping it from Salome, while she is betraying her love for him?”

“Wouldn’t that be rather tawdry?” Louise let her arms slip down to her side, and looked up at him, as she knelt.

“Yes, it would,” he owned.

He looked very unhappy about it, and she rose to her feet, as if to give it more serious attention. “Brice, I want your play to be thoroughly honest and true from beginning to end, and not to have any sort of catchpenny effectivism in it. You have planned it so nobly that I can’t bear to have you lower the standard the least bit; and I think the honest and true way is to let the love-business be a pleasant fact in the case, as it might very well be. Those things do keep going on in life alongside of the greatest misery, the greatest unhappiness.”

“Well,” said Maxwell, “I guess you are right about the love-business. I’ll treat it frankly for what it is, a fact in the case. That will be the right way, and that will be the strong way. It will be like life. I don’t know that you are bound to relate things strictly to each other in art, any more than they are related in life. There are all sorts of incidents and interests playing round every great event that seem to have no more relation to it than the rings of Saturn have to Saturn. They form the atmosphere of it. If I can let Haxard’s wretchedness be seen at last through the atmosphere of his daughter’s happiness!”

“Yes,” she said, “that will be quite enough.” She knew that they had talked up to the moment when he could best begin to work, and now left him to himself.

Within a week he got the rehabilitated love-business in place, and the play ready to show to Godolphin again. He had managed to hold the actor off in the meantime, but now he returned in full force, with suggestions and misgivings which had first to be cleared away before he could give a clear mind to what Maxwell had done. Then Maxwell could see that he was somehow disappointed, for he began to talk as if there were no understanding between them for his taking the play. He praised it warmly, but he said that it would be hard to find a woman to do the part of Salome.

“That is the principal part in the piece now, you know,” he added.

“I don’t see how,” Maxwell protested. “It seems to me that her character throws Haxard’s into greater relief than before, and gives it more prominence.”

“You’ve made the love-business too strong, I think. I supposed you would have something light and graceful to occupy the house in the suspense between the points in Haxard’s case. If I were to do him, I should be afraid that people would come back from Salome to him with more or less of an effort, I don’t say they would, but that’s the way it strikes me now; perhaps some one else would look at it quite differently.”

“Then, as it is, you don’t want it?”

“I don’t say that. But it seems to me that Salome is the principal figure now. I think that’s a mistake.”

“If it’s a fact, it’s a mistake. I don’t want to have it so,” said Maxwell, and he made such effort as he could to swallow his disgust.

Godolphin asked, after a while, “In that last scene between her and her father, and in fact in all the scenes between them, couldn’t you give more of the strong speeches to him? She’s a great creation now, but isn’t she too great for Atland?”

“I’ve kept Atland under, purposely, because the part is necessarily a negative one, and because I didn’t want him to compete with Haxard at all.”

“Yes, that is all right; but as it is, she competes with Haxard.”

After Godolphin had gone, Louise came down, and found Maxwell in a dreary muse over his manuscript. He looked up at her with a lack-lustre eye, and said, “Godolphin is jealous of Salome now. What he really wants is a five-act monologue that will keep him on the stage all the time. He thinks that as it is, she will take all the attention from him.”

Louise appeared to reflect. “Well, isn’t there something in that?”

“Good heavens! I should think you were going to play Haxard, too!”

“No; but of course you can’t have two characters of equal importance in your play. Some one has to be first, and Godolphin doesn’t want an actress taking all the honors away from him.”

“Then why did you pretend to like the way I had done it,” Maxwell demanded, angrily, “if you think she will take the honors from him?”

“I didn’t say that I did. All that I want is that you should ask yourself whether she would or not.”

“Are you jealous of her?”

“Now, my dear, if you are going to be unreasonable, I will not talk with you.”

Nothing maddened Maxwell so much as to have his wife take this tone with him, when he had followed her up through the sinuosities that always began with her after a certain point. Short of that she was as frank and candid as a man, and he understood her, but beyond that the eternal womanly began, and he could make nothing of her. She evaded, and came and went, and returned upon her course, and all with as good a conscience, apparently, as if she were meeting him fairly and squarely on the question they started with. Sometimes he doubted if she really knew that she was behaving insincerely, or whether, if she knew it, she could help doing it. He believed her to be a more truthful nature than himself, and it was insufferable for her to be less so, and then accuse him of illogicality.

“I have no wish to talk,” he said, smothering his rage, and taking up a page of manuscript.

“Of course,” she went on, as if there had been no break in their good feeling, “I know what a goose Godolphin is, and I don’t wonder you’re vexed with him, but you know very well that I have nothing but the good of the play in view as a work of art, and I should say that if you couldn’t keep Salome from rivalling Haxard in the interest of the spectator, you had better go back to the idea of making two plays of it. I think that the ‘Second Chapter’ would be a very good thing to begin with.”

“Why, good heavens! you said just the contrary when we decided to drop it.”

“Yes, but that was when I thought you would be able to subdue Salome.”

“There never was any question of subduing Salome; it was a question of subduing Atland!”

“It’s the same thing; keeping the love-business in the background.”

“I give it up!” Maxwell flung down his manuscript in sign of doing so. “The whole thing is a mess, and you seem to delight in tormenting me about it. How am I to give the love-business charm, and yet keep it in the background?”

“I should think you could.”

“How?”

“Well, I was afraid you would give Salome too much prominence.”

“Didn’t you know whether I had done so or not? You knew what I had done before Godolphin came!”

“If Godolphin thinks she is too prominent, you ought to trust his instinct.”

Maxwell would not answer her. He went out, and she saw him strolling down the path to the rocks. She took the manuscript and began to read it over.

He did not come back, and when she was ready to go to supper she had to go down to the rocks for him. His angry fit seemed to have passed, but he looked abjectly sad, and her heart ached at sight of him. She said, cheerfully, “I have been reading that love-business over again, Brice, and I don’t find it so far out as I was afraid it was. Salome is a little too prononcée, but you can easily mend that. She is a delightful character, and you have given her charm — too much charm. I don’t believe there’s a truer woman in the whole range of the drama. She is perfect, and that is why I think you can afford to keep her back a little in the passages with Haxard. Of course, Godolphin wants to shine there. You needn’t give him her speeches, but you can put them somewhere else, in some of the scenes with Atland; it won’t make any difference how much she outshines him, poor fellow.”

He would not be entreated at once, but after letting her talk on to much the same effect for awhile, he said, “I will see what can be done with it. At present I am sick of the whole thing.”

“Yes, just drop it for the present,” she said. “I’m hungry, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t know it was time.”

She was very tender with him, walking up to the hotel, and all that evening she kept him amused, so that he would not want to look at his manuscript. She used him, as a wife is apt to use her husband when he is fretted and not very well, as if he were her little boy, and she did this so sweetly that Maxwell could not resent it.

The next morning she let him go to his play again, and work all the morning. He ended about noon, and told her he had done what she wanted done to the love-business, he thought, but he would not show it to her, for he said he was tired of it, and would have to go over it with Godolphin, at any rate, when he came in the afternoon. They went to the beach, but the person with the smouldering eyes failed to appear, and in fact they did not see her again at Magnolia, and they decided that she must have been passing a few days at one of the other hotels, and gone away.

Godolphin arrived in the sunniest good-humor, as if he had never had any thought of relinquishing the play, and he professed himself delighted with the changes Maxwell had made in the love-business. He said the character of Salome had the true proportion to all the rest now; and Maxwell understood that he would not be jealous of the actress who played the part, or feel her a dangerous rival in the public favor. He approved of the transposition of the speeches that Maxwell had made, or at least he no longer openly coveted them for Haxard.

What was more important to Maxwell was that Louise seemed finally contented with the part, too, and said that now, no matter what Godolphin wanted, she would never let it be touched again. “I am glad you have got that ‘impassioned’ rubbish out. I never thought that was in character with Salome.”

The artistic consciousness of Maxwell, which caught all the fine reluctances and all the delicate feminine preferences of his wife, was like a subtle web woven around him, and took everything, without his willing it, from within him as well as from without, and held it inexorably for future use. He knew the source of the impassioned rubbish which had displeased his wife; and he had felt while he was employing it that he was working in a commoner material than the rest of Salome’s character; but he had experimented with it in the hope that she might not notice it. The fact that she had instantly noticed it, and had generalized the dislike which she only betrayed at last, after she had punished him sufficiently, remained in the meshes of the net he wore about his mind, as something of value, which he could employ to exquisite effect if he could once find a scheme fit for it.

In the meantime it would be hard to say whether Godolphin continued more a sorrow or a joy to Maxwell, who was by no means always of the same mind about him. He told his wife sometimes, when she was pitying him, that it was a good discipline for him to work with such a man, for it taught him a great deal about himself, if it did not teach him much else. He said that it tamed his overweening pride to find that there was artistic ability employing itself with literature which was so unlike literary ability. Godolphin conceived perfectly of the literary intention in the fine passages of the play, and enjoyed their beauty, but he did not value them any more than the poorest and crudest verbiage that promised him a point. In fact, Maxwell found that in two or three places the actor was making a wholly wrong version of his words, and maturing in his mind an effect from his error that he was rather loath to give up, though when he was instructed as to their true meaning, he saw how he could get a better effect out of it. He had an excellent intelligence, but this was employed so entirely in the study of impression that significance was often a secondary matter with him. He had not much humor, and Maxwell doubted if he felt it much in others, but he told a funny story admirably, and did character-stuff, as he called it, with the subtlest sense; he had begun in sketches of the variety type. Sometimes Maxwell thought him very well versed in the history and theory of the drama; but there were other times when his ignorance seemed almost creative in that direction. He had apparently no feeling for values; he would want a good effect used, without regard to the havoc it made of the whole picture, though doubtless if it could have been realized to him, he would have abhorred it as thoroughly as Maxwell himself. He would come over from Manchester one day with a notion for the play so bad that it almost made Maxwell shed tears; and the next with something so good that Maxwell marvelled at it; but Godolphin seemed to value the one no more than the other. He was a creature of moods the most extreme; his faith in Maxwell was as profound as his abysmal distrust of him; and his frank and open nature was full of suspicion. He was like a child in the simplicity of his selfishness, as far as his art was concerned, but in all matters aside from it he was chaotically generous. His formlessness was sometimes almost distracting; he presented himself to the author’s imagination as mere human material, waiting to be moulded in this shape or that. From day to day, from week to week, Maxwell lived in a superficial uncertainty whether Godolphin had really taken his play, or would ever produce it; yet at the bottom of his heart he confided in the promises which the actor lavished upon him in both the written and the spoken word. They had an agreement carefully drawn up as to all the business between them, but he knew that Godolphin would not be held by any clause of it that he wished to break; he did not believe that Godolphin understood what it bound him to, either when he signed it or afterward; but he was sure that he would do not only what was right, but what was noble, if he could be taken at the right moment. Upon the whole, he liked him; in a curious sort, he respected and honored him; and he defended him against Mrs. Maxwell when she said Godolphin was wearing her husband’s life out, and that if he made the play as greatly successful as “Hamlet,” or the “Trip to Chinatown,” he would not be worth what it cost them both in time and temper.

They lost a good deal of time and temper with the play, which was almost a conjugal affair with them, and the struggle to keep up a show of gay leisure before the summering world up and down the coast told upon Mrs. Maxwell’s nerves. She did not mind the people in the hotel so much; they were very nice, but she did not know many of them, and she could not care for them as she did for her friends who came up from Beverly Farms and over from Manchester. She hated to call Maxwell from his work at such times, not only because she pitied him, but because he came to help her receive her friends with such an air of gloomy absence and open reluctance; and she had hated still worse to say he was busy with his play, the play he was writing for Mr. Godolphin. Her friends were apparently unable to imagine anyone writing a play so seriously, and they were unable to imagine Mr. Godolphin at all, for they had never heard of him; the splendor of his unknown name took them more than anything else. As for getting Maxwell to return their visits with her, when men had come with the ladies who called upon her, she could only manage it if he was so fagged with working at his play that he was too weak to resist her will, and even then he had to be torn from it almost by main force. He behaved so badly in the discharge of some of these duties to society, and was, to her eye at least, so bored and worried by them that she found it hard to forgive him, and made him suffer for it on the way home till she relented at the sight of his thin face, the face that she loved, that she had thought the world well lost for. After the third or fourth time she made him go with her she gave it up and went alone, though she was aware that it might look as if they were not on good terms. She only obliged him after that to go with her to her father’s, where she would not allow any shadow of suspicion to fall upon their happiness, and where his absent-mindedness would be accounted for. Her mother seemed to understand it better than her father, who, she could see, sometimes inwardly resented it as neglect. She also exacted of Maxwell that he should not sit silent through a whole meal at the hotel, and that, if he did not or could not talk, he should keep looking at her, and smiling and nodding, now and then. If he would remember to do this she would do all the talking herself. Sometimes he did not remember, and then she trod on his foot in vain.

The droll side of the case often presented itself for her relief, and, after all, she knew beforehand that this was the manner of man she was marrying, and she was glad to marry him. She was happier than she had ever dreamed of being. She was one of those women who live so largely in their sympathies that if these were employed she had no thought of herself, and not to have any thought of one’s self is to be blessed. Maxwell had no thought of anything but his work, and that made his bliss; if she could have no thought but of him in his work, she could feel herself in Heaven with him.

VII.

July and August went by, and it was time for Godolphin to take the road again. By this time Maxwell’s play was in as perfect form as it could be until it was tried upon the stage and then overhauled for repairs. Godolphin had decided to try it first in Toronto, where he was going to open, and then to give it in the West as often as he could. If it did as well as he expected he would bring it on for a run in New York about the middle of December. He would want Maxwell at the rehearsals there, but for the present he said he preferred to stage-manage it himself; they had talked it up so fully that he had all the author’s intentions in mind.

He came over from Manchester the day before his vacation ended to take leave of the Maxwells. He was in great spirits with the play, but he confessed to a misgiving in regard to the lady whom he had secured for the part of Salome. He said there was only one woman he ever saw fit to do that part, but when he named the actress the Maxwells had to say they had never heard of her before. “She is a Southerner. She is very well known in the West,” Godolphin said.

Louise asked if she had ever played in Boston, and when he said she had not, Louise said “Oh!”

Maxwell trembled, but Godolphin seemed to find nothing latent in his wife’s offensive tone, and after a little further talk they all parted on the friendliest terms. The Maxwells did not hear from him for a fortnight, though he was to have tried the play in Toronto at least a week earlier. Then there came a telegram from Midland:

“Tried play here last night. Went like wildfire.
Will write.
Godolphin.

The message meant success, and the Maxwells walked the air. The production of the piece was mentioned in the Associated Press despatches to the Boston papers, and though Mrs. Maxwell studied these in vain for some verbal corroboration of Godolphin’s jubilant message, she did not lose faith in it, nor allow her husband to do so. In fact, while they waited for Godolphin’s promised letter, they made use of their leisure to count the chickens which had begun to hatch. The actor had agreed to pay the author at the rate of five dollars an act for each performance of the play, and as it was five acts long a simple feat of arithmetic showed that the nightly gain from it would be twenty-five dollars, and that if it ran every night and two afternoons, for matinées, the weekly return from it would be two hundred dollars. Besides this, Godolphin had once said, in a moment of high content with the piece, that if it went as he expected it to go he would pay Maxwell over and above this twenty-five dollars a performance five per cent. of the net receipts whenever these passed one thousand dollars. His promise had not been put in writing, and Maxwell had said at the time that he should be satisfied with his five dollars an act, but he had told his wife of it, and they had both agreed that Godolphin would keep it. They now took it into the account in summing up their gains, and Mrs. Maxwell thought it reasonable to figure at least twenty-five dollars more from it for each time the play was given; but as this brought the weekly sum up to four hundred dollars, she so far yielded to her husband as to scale the total at three hundred dollars, though she said it was absurd to put it at any such figure. She refused, at any rate, to estimate their earnings from the season at less than fifteen thousand dollars. It was useless for Maxwell to urge that Godolphin had other pieces in his repertory, things that had made his reputation, and that he would naturally want to give sometimes. She asked him whether Godolphin himself had not voluntarily said that if the piece went as he expected he would play nothing else as long as he lived, like Jefferson with Rip Van Winkle; and here, she said, it had already, by his own showing, gone at once like wildfire. When Maxwell pleaded that they did not know what wildfire meant she declared that it meant an overwhelming house and unbridled rapture in the audience; it meant an instant and lasting triumph for the play. She began to praise Godolphin, or, at least, to own herself mistaken in some of her decrials of him. She could not be kept from bubbling over to two or three ladies at the hotel, where it was quickly known what an immense success the first performance of Maxwell’s play had been. He was put to shame by several asking him when they were to have it in Boston, but his wife had no embarrassment in answering that it would probably be kept the whole winter in New York, and not come to Boston till some time in the early spring.

She was resolved, now, that he should drive over to Beverly Farms with her, and tell her father and mother about the success of the play. She had instantly telegraphed them on getting Godolphin’s despatch, and she began to call out to her father as soon as she got inside the house, and saw him coming down the stairs in the hall, “Now, what do you say, papa? Isn’t it glorious? Didn’t I tell you it would be the greatest success? Did you ever hear anything like it? Where’s mamma? If she shouldn’t be at home, I don’t know what I shall do!”

“She’s here,” said her father, arriving at the foot of the stairs, where Louise embraced him, and then let him shake hands with her husband. “She’s dressing. We were just going over to see you.”

“Well, you’ve been pretty deliberate about it! Here it’s after lunch, and I telegraphed you at ten o’clock.” She went on to bully her father more and more, and to flourish Maxwell’s triumph in his face. “We’re going to have three hundred dollars a week from it at the very least, and fifteen thousand dollars for the season. What do you think of that? Isn’t that pretty good, for two people that had nothing in the world yesterday? What do you say now, papa?”

There were all sorts of lurking taunts, demands, reproaches, in these words, which both the men felt, but they smiled across her, and made as if they were superior to her simple exultation.

“I should say you had written the play yourself, Louise,” said her father.

“No,” answered her husband, “Godolphin wrote the play; or I’ve no doubt he’s telling the reporters so by this time.”

Louise would not mind them. “Well, I don’t care! I want papa to acknowledge that I was right, for once. Anybody could believe in Brice’s genius, but I believed in his star, and I always knew that he would get on, and I was all for his giving up his newspaper work, and devoting himself to the drama; and now the way is open to him, and all he has got to do is to keep on writing.”

“Come now, Louise,” said her husband.

“Well,” her father interposed, “I’m glad of your luck, Maxwell. It isn’t in my line, exactly, but I don’t believe I could be any happier, if it were. After all, it’s doing something to elevate the stage. I wish someone would take hold of the pulpit.”

Maxwell shrugged. “I’m not strong enough for that, quite. And I can’t say that I had any conscious intention to elevate the stage with my play.”

“But you had it unconsciously, Brice,” said Louise, “and it can’t help having a good effect on life, too.”

“It will teach people to be careful how they murder people,” Maxwell assented.

“Well, it’s a great chance,” said Hilary, with the will to steer a middle course between Maxwell’s modesty and Louise’s overweening pride. “There really isn’t anything that people talk about more. They discuss plays as they used to discuss sermons. If you’ve done a good play, you’ve done a good thing.”

His wife hastened to make answer for him. “He’s done a great play, and there are no ifs or ans about it.” She went on to celebrate Maxwell’s achievement till he was quite out of countenance, for he knew that she was doing it mainly to rub his greatness into her father, and he had so much of the old grudge left that he would not suffer himself to care whether Hilary thought him great or not. It was a relief when Mrs. Hilary came in. Louise became less defiant in her joy then, or else the effect of it was lost in Mrs. Hilary’s assumption of an entire expectedness in the event. Her world was indeed so remote from the world of art that she could value success in it only as it related itself to her family, and it seemed altogether natural to her that her daughter’s husband should take its honors. She was by no means a stupid woman; for a woman born and married to wealth, with all the advantages that go with it, she was uncommonly intelligent; but she could not help looking upon æsthetic honors of any sort as in questionable taste. She would have preferred position in a son-in-law to any distinction appreciable to the general, but wanting that it was fit he should be distinguished in the way he chose. In her feeling it went far to redeem the drama that it should be related to the Hilarys by marriage, and if she had put her feeling into words, which always oversay the feelings, they would have been to the effect that the drama had behaved very well indeed, and deserved praise. This is what Mrs. Hilary’s instinct would have said, but, of course, her reason would have said something quite different, and it was her reason that spoke to Maxwell, and expressed a pleasure in his success that was very gratifying to him. He got on with her better than with Hilary, partly because she was a woman and he was a man, and partly because, though she had opposed his marriage with Louise more steadily than her husband, there had been no open offence between them. He did not easily forgive a hurt to his pride, and Hilary, with all his good will since, and his quick repentance at the time, had never made it quite right with Maxwell for treating him rudely once, when he came to him so helplessly in the line of his newspaper work. They were always civil to each other, and they would always be what is called good friends; they had even an air of mutual understanding, as regarded Louise and her exuberances. Still, she was so like her father in these, and so unlike her mother, that it is probable the understanding between Hilary and Maxwell concerning her was only the understanding of men, and that Maxwell was really more in sympathy with Mrs. Hilary, even about Louise, even about the world. He might have liked it as much as she, if he had been as much of it, and he thought so well of it as a world that he meant to conquer one of the chief places in it. In the meantime he would have been very willing to revenge himself upon it, to satirize it, to hurt it, to humble it — but for his own pleasure, not the world’s good.

Hilary wanted the young people to stay the afternoon, and have dinner, but his wife perceived that they wished to be left alone in their exultation, and she would not let him keep them beyond a decent moment, or share too much in their joy. With only that telegram from Godolphin they could not be definite about anything but their future, which Louise, at least, beheld all rose color. Just what size or shape their good fortune had already taken they did not know, and could not, till they got the letter Godolphin had promised, and she was in haste to go back to Magnolia for that, though it could not arrive before the next morning at the earliest. She urged that he might have written before telegraphing, or when he came from the theatre after the play was given. She was not satisfied with the reception of her news, and she said so to Maxwell, as soon as they started home.

“What did you want?” he retorted, in a certain vexation. “They were as cordial as they could be.”

“Cordial is not enough. You can’t expect anything like uproar from mamma, but she took it too much as a matter of course, and I did suppose papa would be a little more riotous.”

“If you are going to be as exacting as that with people,” Maxwell returned, “you are going to disappoint yourself frightfully; and if you insist, you will make them hate you. People can’t share your happiness any more than they can share your misery; it’s as much as they can do to manage their own.”

“But I did think my own father and mother might have entered into it a little more,” she grieved. “Well, you are right, Brice, and I will try to hold in after this. It wasn’t for myself I cared.”

“I know,” said Maxwell, so appreciatively that she felt all her loss made up to her, and shrunk closer to him in the buggy he was driving with a lax, absent-minded rein. “But I think a little less Fourth of July on my account would be better.”

“Yes, you are wise, and I shall not say another word about it to anybody; just treat it as a common every-day event.”

He laughed at what was so far from her possibilities, and began to tell her of the scheme for still another play that had occurred to him while they were talking with her father. She was interested in the scheme, but more interested in the involuntary workings of his genius, and she celebrated that till he had to beg her to stop, for she made him ashamed of himself even in the solitude of the woodland stretches they were passing through. Then he said, as if it were part of the same strain of thought, “You have to lose a lot of things in writing a play. Now, for instance, that beautiful green light there in the woods.” He pointed to a depth of the boscage where it had almost an emerald quality, it was so vivid, so intense. “If I were writing a story about two lovers in such a light, and how it bathed their figures and illumined their faces, I could make the reader feel it just as I did. I could make them see it. But if I were putting them in a play, I should have to trust the carpenter and the scene-painter for the effect; and you know what broken reeds they are.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and some day I hope you will write novels. But now you’ve made such a success with this play that you must do some others, and when you’ve got two or three going steadily you can afford to take up a novel. It would be wicked to turn your back on the opportunity you’ve won.”

He silently assented and said, “I shall be all the the better novelist for waiting a year or two.”

VIII.

There was no letter from Godolphin in the morning, but in the course of the forenoon there came a newspaper addressed in his handwriting, and later several others. They were Midland papers, and they had each, heavily outlined in ink, a notice of the appearance of Mr. Launcelot Godolphin in a new play written expressly for him by a young Boston littérateur. Mr. Godolphin believed the author to be destined to make his mark high in the dramatic world, he said in the course of a long interview in the paper which came first, an evening edition preceeding the production of the piece, and plainly meant to give the public the right perspective. He had entered into a generous expression of his own feelings concerning it, and had given Maxwell full credit for the lofty conception of an American drama, modern in spirit, and broad in purpose. He modestly reserved to himself such praise as might be due for the hints his life-long knowledge of the stage had enabled him to offer the dramatist. He told how they had spent the summer near each other on the north shore of Massachusetts, and had met almost daily; and the reporter got a picturesque bit out of their first meeting at the actor’s hotel, in Boston, the winter before, when the dramatist came to lay the scheme of the play before Godolphin, and Godolphin made up his mind before he had heard him half through, that he should want the piece. He had permitted himself a personal sketch of Maxwell, which lost none of its original advantages in the diction of the reporter, and which represented him as young, slight in figure, with a refined and delicate face, bearing the stamp of intellectual force; a journalist from the time he left school, and one of the best exponents of the formative influences of the press in the training of its votaries. From time to time it was hard for Maxwell to make out whose words the interview was couched in, but he acquitted Godolphin of the worst, and he certainly did not accuse him of the flowery terms giving his patriotic reasons for not producing the piece first in Toronto as he had meant to do. It appeared that, upon second thoughts, he had reserved this purely American drama for the opening night of his engagement in one of the most distinctively American cities, after having had it in daily rehearsal ever since the season began.

“I should think they had Pinney out there,” said Maxwell, as he and his wife looked over the interview, with their cheeks together.

“Not at all!” she retorted. “It isn’t the least like Pinney,” and he was amazed to find that she really liked the stuff. She said that she was glad, now, that she understood why Godolphin had not opened with the play in Toronto, as he had promised, and she thoroughly agreed with him that it ought first to be given on our own soil. She was dashed for a moment when Maxwell made her reflect that they were probably the losers of four or five hundred dollars by the delay; then she said she did not care, that it was worth the money. She did not find the personal account of Maxwell offensive, though she contended that it did not do him full justice, and she cut out the interview and pasted it in a book, where she was going to keep all the notices of his play and every printed fact concerning it. He told her she would have to help herself out with some of the fables, if she expected to fill her book, and she said she did not care for that, either, and probably it was just such things as this interview that drew attention to the play, and must have made it go like wildfire that first night in Midland. Maxwell owned that it was but too likely, and then he waited hungrily for further word of his play, while she expected the next mail in cheerful faith.

It brought them four or five morning papers, and it seemed from these that a play might have gone like wildfire, and yet not been seen by a very large number of people. The papers agreed in a sense of the graceful compliment paid their city by Mr. Godolphin, who was always a favorite there, in producing his new piece at one of their theatres, and confiding it at once to the judgment of a cultivated audience, instead of trying it first in a subordinate place, and bringing it on with a factitious reputation worked up from all sorts of unknown sources. They agreed, too, that his acting had never been better; that it had great smoothness, and that it rose at times into passion, and was full of his peculiar force. His company was well chosen, and his support had an even excellence which reflected great credit upon the young star, who might be supposed, if he had followed an unwise tradition, to be willing to shine at the expense of his surroundings. His rendition of the rôle of Haxard was magnificent in one journal, grand in another, superb in a third, rich, full and satisfying in a fourth, subtle and conscientious in a fifth. Beyond this, the critics ceased to be so much of one mind. They were, by a casting vote, adverse to the leading lady, whom the majority decided an inadequate Salome, without those great qualities which the author had evidently meant to redeem a certain coquettish lightness in her; the minority held that she had grasped the rôle with intelligence, and expressed with artistic force a very refined intention in it. The minority hinted that Salome was really the great part in the piece, and that in her womanly endeavor to win back the lover whom she had not at first prized at his true worth, while her heart was wrung by sympathy with her unhappy father in the mystery brooding over him, she was a far more interesting figure than the less complex Haxard; and they intimated that Godolphin had an easier task in his portrayal. They all touched more or less upon the conduct of the subordinate actors in their parts, and the Maxwells, in every case, had to wade through their opinions of the playing before they got to their opinions of the play, which was the only vital matter concerned.

Louise would have liked to read them, as she had read the first, with her arm across Maxwell’s shoulder, and, as it were, with the same eye and the same mind, but Maxwell betrayed an uneasiness under the experiment which made her ask: “Don’t you like to have me put my arm round you, Brice?”

“Yes, yes,” he answered, impatiently, “I like to have you put your arm around me on all proper occasions; but — it isn’t favorable to collected thought.”

“Why, I think it is,” she protested with pathos, and a burlesque of her pathos. “I never think half so well as when I have my arm around you. Then it seems as if I thought with your mind. I feel so judicial.”

“Perhaps I feel too emotional, under the same conditions, and think with your mind. At any rate, I can’t stand it; and we can’t both sit in the same chair either. Now, you take one of the papers and go round to the other side of the table. I want to have all my faculties for the appreciation of this noble criticism; it’s going to be full of instruction.”

He made her laugh, and she feigned a pout in obeying him; but, nevertheless, in her heart she felt herself postponed to the interest that was always first in him, and always before his love.

“And don’t talk,” he urged, “or keep calling out, or reading passages ahead. I want to get all the sense there doesn’t seem to be in this thing.”

In fact the critics had found themselves confronted with a task which is always confusing to criticism, in the necessity of valuing a work of art so novel in material that it seems to refuse the application of criterions. As he followed their struggles in the endeavor to judge his work by such canons of art as were known to them, instead of taking it frankly upon the plane of nature and of truth, where he had tried to put it, and blaming or praising him as he had failed or succeeded in this, he was more and more bowed down within himself before the generous courage of Godolphin in rising to an appreciation of his intention. He now perceived that he was a man of far more uncommon intelligence than he had imagined him, and that in taking his play Godolphin had shown a zeal for the drama which was not likely to find a response in criticism, whatever its fate with the public might be. The critics frankly owned that in spite of its defects the piece had a cordial reception from the audience; that the principal actors were recalled again and again, and they reported that Godolphin had spoken both for the author and himself in acknowledging the applause, and had disclaimed all credit for their joint success. This made Maxwell ashamed of the suspicion he had harbored that Godolphin would give the impression of a joint authorship, at the least. He felt that he had judged the man narrowly and inadequately, and he decided that as soon as he heard from him, he would write and make due reparation for the tacit wrong he had done him.

Upon the whole he had some reason to be content with the first fortune of his work, whatever its final fate might be. To be sure, if the audience which received it was enthusiastic, it was confessedly small, and it had got no more than a foothold in the public favor. It must remain for further trial to prove it a failure or a success. His eye wandered to the column of advertised amusements for the pleasure of seeing the play announced there for the rest of the week. There was a full list of the pieces for the time of Godolphin’s stay; but it seemed that neither at night nor at morning was Maxwell’s play to be repeated. The paper dropped from his hand.

“What is the matter?” his wife asked, looking up from her own paper. “This poor man is the greatest possible goose. He doesn’t seem to know what he is talking about, even when he praises you. But of course he has to write merely from a first impression. Do you want to change papers?”

Maxwell mechanically picked his up, and gave it to her. “The worst of it is,” he said, with the sardonic smile he had left over from an unhappier time of life, “that he won’t have an opportunity to revise his first impression.”

“What do you mean?”

He told her, but she could not believe him till she had verified the fact by looking at the advertisements in all the papers.

Then she asked: “What in the world does he mean?”

“Not to give it there any more, apparently. He hasn’t entered upon the perpetual performance of the piece. But if he isn’t like Jefferson, perhaps he’s like Rip; he don’t count this time. Well, I might have known it! Why did I ever trust one of that race?” He began to walk up and down the room, and to fling out, one after another, the expressions of his scorn and his self-scorn. “They have no idea of what good faith is, except as something that brings down the house when they register a noble vow. But I don’t blame him; I blame myself. What an ass, what an idiot, I was! Why, he could have told me not to believe in his promises; he is a perfectly honest man, and would have done it, if I had appealed to him. He didn’t expect me to believe in them, and from the wary way I talked, I don’t suppose he thought I did. He hadn’t the measure of my folly; I hadn’t, myself!”

“Now, Brice!” his wife called out to him, severely, “I won’t have you going on in that way. When I denounced Godolphin you wouldn’t listen to me; and when I begged and besought you to give him up, you always said he was the only man in the world for you, till I got to believing it, and I believe it now. Why, dearest,” she added, in a softer tone, “don’t you see that he probably had his programme arranged all beforehand, and couldn’t change it, just because your play happened to be a hit? I’m sure he paid you a great compliment by giving it the first night. Now, you must just wait till you hear from him, and you may be sure he will have a good reason for not repeating it there.”

“Oh, Godolphin would never lack for a good reason. And I can tell you what his reason in this case will be: that the thing was practically a failure, and that he would have lost money if he had kept it on.”

“Is that what is worrying you? I don’t believe it was a failure. I think from all that the papers say, and the worst that they say, the piece was a distinct success. It was a great success with nice people, you can see that for yourself, and it will be a popular success, too; I know it will, as soon as it gets a chance. But you may be sure that Godolphin has some scheme about it, and that if he doesn’t give it again in Midland, it’s because he wants to make people curious about it, and hold it in reserve, or something like that. At any rate, I think you ought to wait for his letter before you denounce him.”

Maxwell laughed again at these specious arguments, but he could not refuse to be comforted by them, and he had really nothing to do but to wait for Godolphin’s letter. It did not come the next mail, and then his wife and he collated his dispatch with the newspaper notices, and tried to make up a judicial opinion from their combined testimony concerning the fate of the play with the audience. Their scrutiny of the telegram developed the fact that it must have been sent the night of the performance, and while Godolphin was still warm from his recalls and from the congratulations of his friends; it could not have reached them so soon as it did in the morning if it had been sent to the office then; it was not a night message, but it had probably lain in the office over night. In this view it was not such valuable testimony to the success of the play as it had seemed before. But a second and a third reading of the notices made them seem friendlier than at first. The Maxwells now perceived that they had first read them in the fever of their joy from Godolphin’s telegram, and that their tempered approval had struck cold upon them because they were so overheated. They were really very favorable, after all, and they witnessed to an interest in the play which could not be ignored. Very likely the interest in it was partly from the fact that Godolphin had given it, but apart from this it was evident that the play had established a claim of its own. The mail, which did not bring a letter from Godolphin, brought another copy of that evening paper which had printed the anticipatory interview with him, and this had a long and careful consideration of the play in its editorial columns, apparently written by a lover of the drama, as well as a lover of the theatre. Very little regard was paid to the performance, but a great deal to the play, which was skilfully analyzed, and praised and blamed in the right places. The writer did not attempt to forecast its fate, but he said that whatever its fate with the public might be, here, at least, was a step in the direction of the drama dealing with facts of American life — simply, vigorously, and honestly. It had faults of construction, but the faults were not the faults of weakness. They were rather the effects of a young talent addressing itself to the management of material too rich, too abundant for the scene, and allowing itself to touch the borders of melodrama in its will to enforce some tragic points of the intrigue. But it was not mawkish and it was not romantic. In its highest reaches it made you think, by its stern and unflinching fidelity to the implications, of Ibsen; but it was not too much to say that it had a charm often wanting to that master. It was full of the real American humor; it made its jokes, as Americans did, in the very face of the most disastrous possibilities; and in the love-passages it was delicious. The whole episode of the love between Haxard’s daughter, Salome, and Atland was simply the sweetest and freshest bit of nature in the modern drama. It daringly portrayed a woman in circumstances where it was the convention to ignore that she ever was placed, and it lent a grace of delicate comedy to the somber ensemble of the piece, without lowering the dignity of the action or detracting from the sympathy the spectator felt for the daughter of the homicide; it rather heightened this.

Louise read the criticism aloud, and then she and Maxwell looked at each other. It took their breath away; but Louise got her breath first. “Who in the world would have dreamed that there was any one who could write such a criticism, out there?”

Maxwell took the paper, and ran the article over again. Then he said, “If the thing did nothing more than get itself appreciated in that way, I should feel that it had done enough. I wonder who the fellow is! Could it be a woman?”

There was, in fact, a feminine fineness in the touch, here and there, that might well suggest a woman, but they finally decided against the theory: Louise said that a woman writer would not have the honesty to own that the part Salome played in getting back her lover was true to life, though every woman who saw it would know that it was. She examined the wrapper of the newspaper, and made sure that it was addressed in Godolphin’s hand, and she said that if he did not speak of the article in his letter, Maxwell must write out to the newspaper and ask who had done it.

Godolphin’s letter came at last, with many excuses for his delay. He said he had expected the newspaper notices to speak for him, and he seemed to think that they had all been altogether favorable to the play. It was not very consoling to have him add that he now believed the piece would have run the whole week in Midland, if he had kept it on; but he had arranged merely to give it a trial, and Maxwell would understand how impossible it was to vary a programme which had once been made out. One thing was certain, however: the piece was an assured success, and a success of the most flattering and brilliant kind, and Godolphin would give it a permanent place in his répertoire. There was no talk of his playing nothing else, and there was no talk of putting the piece on for a run, when he opened in New York. He said he had sent Maxwell a paper containing a criticism in the editorial columns, which would serve to show him how great an interest the piece had excited in Midland, though he believed the article was not written by one of the regular force, but was contributed from the outside by a young fellow who had been described to Godolphin as a sort of Ibsen crank. At the close, he spoke of certain weaknesses which the piece had developed in the performance, and casually mentioned that he would revise it at these points as he found the time; it appeared to him that it needed overhauling, particularly in the love episode; there was too much of that, and the interest during an entire act centred so entirely upon Salome that, as he had foreseen, the rôle of Haxard suffered.

IX.

The Maxwells stared at each other in dismay when they had finished this letter, which Louise had opened, but which they had read together, she looking over his shoulder. All interest in the authorship of the article of the Ibsen crank, all interest in Godolphin’s apparent forgetfulness of his solemn promises to give the rest of his natural life to the performance of the piece, was lost in amaze at the fact that he was going to revise it to please himself, and to fashion Maxwell’s careful work over in his own ideal of the figure he should make in it to the public. The thought of this was so petrifying that even Louise could not at once find words for it, and they were both silent, as people sometimes are, when a calamity has befallen them, in the hope that if they do not speak it will turn out a miserable dream.

“Well, Brice,” she said at last, “you certainly never expected this!”

“No,” he answered with a ghastly laugh; “this passes my most sanguine expectations, even of Godolphin. Good Heaven! Fancy the botch he will make of it!”

“You mustn’t let him touch it. You must demand it back, peremptorily. You must telegraph!”

“What a mania you have for telegraphing,” he retorted. “A special delivery postage-stamp will serve every purpose. He isn’t likely to do the piece again for a week, at the earliest.” He thought for awhile, and then he said: “In a week he’ll have a chance to change his mind so often, that perhaps he won’t revise and overhaul it, after all.”

“But he mustn’t think that you would suffer it for an instant,” his wife insisted. “It’s an indignity that you should not submit to; it’s an outrage!”

“Very likely,” Maxwell admitted, and he began to walk the floor, with his head fallen, and his fingers clutched together behind him. The sight of his mute anguish wrought upon his wife and goaded her to more and more utterance.

“It’s an insult to your genius, Brice, dear, and you must resent it. I am sure I have been as humble about the whole affair as any one could be, and I should be the last person to wish you to do anything rash. I bore with Godolphin’s suggestions, and I let him worry you to death with his plans for spoiling your play, but I certainly didn’t dream of anything so high-handed as his undertaking to work it over himself, or I should have insisted on your breaking with him long ago. How patient you have been through it all! You’ve shown so much forbearance, and so much wisdom, and so much delicacy in dealing with his preposterous ideas, and then, to have it all thrown away! It’s too bad!”

Maxwell kept walking hack and forth, and Louise began again at a new point.

“I was willing to have it remain simply a succès d’estime, as far as Midland was concerned, though I think you were treated abominably in that, for he certainly gave you reason to suppose that he would do it every night there. He says himself that it would have run the whole week; and you can see from that article how it was growing in public favor all the time. What has become of his promise to play nothing else, I should like to know? And he’s only played it once, and now he proposes to revise it himself!”

Still Maxwell walked on and she continued:

“I don’t know what I shall say to my family. They can never understand such a thing, never! Papa couldn’t conceive of giving a promise and not keeping it, much less giving a promise just for the pleasure of breaking it. What shall I tell them, Brice? I can’t bear to say that Godolphin is going to make your play over, unless I can say at the same time that you’ve absolutely forbidden him to do so. That’s why I wanted you to telegraph. I wanted to say you had telegraphed.”

Maxwell stopped in his walk and gazed at her, but she could feel that he did not see her, and she said:

“I don’t know that it’s actually necessary for me to say anything at present. I can show them the notices, or that article alone. It’s worth all the rest put together, and then we can wait, and see if we hear anything more from Godolphin. But now I don’t want you to lose any more time. You must write to him at once, and absolutely forbid him to touch your play. Will you?”

Her husband returned from his wanderings of mind and body, and as he dropped upon the lounge at her side, he said, gently, “No, I don’t think I’ll write at all, Louise.”

“Not write at all! Then you’re going to let him tamper with that beautiful work of yours?”

“I’m going to wait till I hear from him again. Godolphin is a good fellow—”

“Oh!”

“And he won’t be guilty of doing me injustice. Besides,” and here Maxwell broke off with a laugh that had some gayety in it, “he couldn’t. Godolphin is a fine actor, and he’s going to be a great one, but his gifts are not in the line of literature.”

“I should think not!”

“He couldn’t change the piece any more than if he couldn’t read or write. And if he could, when it came to touching it, I don’t believe he would, because the fact would remind him that it wasn’t fair. He has to realize things in the objective way before he can realize them at all. That’s the stage. If they can have an operator climbing a real telegraph-pole to tap the wire and telegraph the girl he loves that he is dead, so that she can marry his rich rival and go to Europe and cultivate her gift for sculpture, they feel that they have got real life.”

Louise would not be amused, or laugh with her husband at this. “Then what in the world does Godolphin mean?” she demanded.

“Why, being interpreted out of actor’s parlance, he means that he wishes he could talk the play over with me again and be persuaded that he is wrong about it.”

“I must say,” Louise remarked, after a moment for mastering the philosophy of this, “that you take it very strangely, Brice.”

“I’ve thought it out,” said Maxwell.

“And what are you going to do?”

“I am going to wait the turn of events. My faith in Godolphin is unshaken — such as it is.”

“And what is going to be our attitude in regard to it?”

“Attitude? With whom?”

“With our friends. Suppose they ask us about the play, and how it is getting along. And my family?”

“I don’t think it will be necessary to take any attitude. They can think what they like. Let them wait the turn of events, too. If we can stand it, they can.”

“No, Brice,” said his wife. “That won’t do. We might be silently patient ourselves, but if we left them to believe that it was all going well, we should be living a lie.”

“What an extraordinary idea!”

“I’ve told papa and mamma — we’ve both told them, though I did the talking, you can say — that the play was a splendid success, and Godolphin was going to give it seven or eight times a week; and now if it’s a failure—”

“It isn’t a failure!” Maxwell retorted, as if hurt by the notion.

“No matter! If he’s only going to play it once a fortnight or so, and is going to tinker it up to suit himself without saying by-your-leave to you, I say we’re occupying a false position, and that’s what I mean by living a lie.”

Maxwell looked at her in that bewilderment which he was beginning to feel at the contradictions of her character. She sometimes told outright little fibs which astonished him; society fibs she did not mind at all; but when it came to people’s erroneously inferring this or that from her actions, she had a yearning for the explicit truth that nothing else could appease. He, on the contrary, was indifferent to what people thought, if he had not openly misled them. Let them think this, or let them think that; it was altogether their affair, and he did not hold himself responsible; but he was ill at ease with any conventional lie on his conscience. He hated to have his wife say to people, as he sometimes overheard her saying, that he was out, when she knew he had run upstairs with his writing to escape them; she contended that it was no harm, since it deceived nobody.

Now he said, “Aren’t you rather unnecessarily complex?”

“No, I’m not. And I shall tell papa as soon as I see him just how the case stands. Why, it would be dreadful if we let him believe it was all going well, and perhaps tell others that it was, and we knew all the time that it wasn’t. He would hate that, and he wouldn’t like us for letting him.”

“Hadn’t you better give the thing a chance to go right? There hasn’t been time yet.”

“No, dearest, I feel that since I’ve bragged so to papa, I ought to eat humble-pie before him as soon as possible.”

“Yes. Why should you make me eat it, too?”

“I can’t help that; I would if I could. But, unfortunately, we are one.”

“And you seem to be the one. Suppose I should ask you not to eat humble-pie before your father?”

“Then, of course, I should do as you asked. But I hope you won’t.”

Maxwell did not say anything, and she went on, tenderly, entreatingly, “And I hope you’ll never allow me to deceive myself about anything you do. I should resent it a great deal more than if you had positively deceived me. Will you promise me, if anything sad or bad happens, that you don’t want me to know because it will make me unhappy or disagreeable, you’ll tell me at once?”

“It won’t be necessary. You’ll find it out.”

“No, do be serious, dearest. I am very serious. Will you?”

“What is the use of asking such a thing as that? It seems to me that I’ve invited you to a full share of the shame and sorrow that Godolphin has brought upon me.”

“Yes, you have,” said Louise, thoughtfully. “And you may be sure that I appreciate it. Don’t you like to have me share it?”

“Well, I don’t know. I might like to get at it first myself.”

“Ah, you didn’t like my opening Godolphin’s letter when it came!”

“I shouldn’t mind, now, if you would answer it.”

“I shall be only too glad to answer it, if you will let me answer it as it deserves.”

“That needs reflection.”

X.

The weather grew rough early in September, and all at once, all in a moment, as it were, the pretty watering-place lost its air of summer gayety. The sky had an inner gray in its blue; the sea looked cold. A few hardy bathers braved it out on select days in the surf, but they were purple and red when they ran up to the bath-houses, and they came out wrinkled, and hurried to their hotels, where there began to be a smell of steam-heat and a snapping of radiators in the halls. The barges went away laden to the stations, and came back empty, except at night, when they brought over the few and fewer husbands whose wives were staying down simply because they hated to go up and begin the social life of the winter. The people who had thronged the grassy-bordered paths of the village dwindled in number; the riding and driving on the roads was less and less; the native life showed itself more in the sparsity of the sojourners. The sweet fern in the open fields, and the brakes and blackberry-vines among the bowlders, were blighted with the cold wind; even the sea-weed swaying at the foot of the rocks seemed to feel a sharper chill than that of the brine. A storm came, and strewed the beach with kelp, and blew over half the bath-houses; and then the hardiest lingerer ceased to talk of staying through October. There began to be rumors at the Maxwells’ hotel that it would close before the month was out; some ladies pressed the landlord for the truth, and he confessed that he expected to shut the house by the 25th. This spread dismay; but certain of the boarders said they would go to the other hotels, which were to keep open till October. The dependent cottages had been mostly emptied before; those who remained in them, if they did not go away, came into the hotel. The Maxwells themselves did this at last, for the sake of the warmth and the human companionship around the blazing hearth-fires in the parlors. They got a room with a stove in it, so that he could write; and there was a pensive, fleeting coziness in it all, with the shrinking numbers in the vast dining-room grouped at two or three tables for dinner, and then gathered in the light of the evening lamps over the evening papers. In these conditions there came, if not friendship, an intensification of acquaintance, such as is imaginable of a company of cultured castaways. Ladies who were not quite socially certain of one another in town gossiped fearlessly together; there was whist among the men; more than once it happened that a young girl played or sang by request, and not, as so often happens where a hotel is full, against the general desire. It came once to a wish that Mr. Maxwell would read something from his play; but no one had the courage to ask him. In society he was rather severe with women, and his wife was not sorry for that; she made herself all the more approachable because of it. But she discouraged the hope of anything like reading from him; she even feigned that he might not like to do it without consulting Mr. Godolphin, and if she did not live a lie concerning the status of his play, she did not scruple to tell one, now and then.

That is, she would say it was going beyond their expectations, and this was not so fabulous as it might seem, for their expectations were not so high as they had been, and Godolphin was really playing the piece once or twice a week. They heard no more from him by letter, for Maxwell had decided that it would be better not to answer his missive from Midland; but he was pretty faithful in sending the newspaper notices whenever he played, and so they knew that he had not abandoned it. They did not know whether he had carried out his threat of overhauling it; and Maxwell chose to remain in ignorance of the fact till Godolphin himself should speak again. Unless he demanded the play back he was really helpless, and he was not ready to do that, for he hoped that when the actor brought it on to New York he could talk with him about it, and come to some understanding. He had not his wife’s belief in the perfection of the piece; it might very well have proved weak in places, and after his first indignation at the notion of Godolphin’s revising it, he was willing to do what he could to meet his wishes. He did not so much care what shape it had in these remote theatres of the West; the real test was New York, and there it should appear only as he wished.

It was a comfort to his wife when he took this stand, and she vowed him to keep it; she would have made him go down on his knees and hold up his right hand, which was her notion of the way an oath was taken in court, but she did not think he would do it, and he might refuse to seal any vow at all if she urged it.

In the meanwhile she was not without other consolations. At her insistence he wrote to the newspaper which had printed the Ibsen crank’s article on the play, and said how much pleasure it had given him, and begged his thanks to the author. They got a very pretty letter back from him, adding some praises of the piece which he said he had kept out of print because he did not want to seem too gushing about it; and he ventured some wary censures of the acting, which he said he had preferred not to criticise openly, since the drama was far more important to him than the theatre. He believed that Mr. Godolphin had a perfect conception of the part of Haxard, and a thorough respect for the piece, but his training had been altogether in the romantic school; he was working out of it, but he was not able at once to simplify himself. This was in fact the fault of the whole company. The girl who did Salome had moments of charming reality, but she too suffered from her tradition, and the rest went from bad to worse. He thought that they would all do better as they familiarized themselves with the piece, and he deeply regretted that Mr. Godolphin had been able to give it only once in Midland.

At this Mrs. Maxwell’s wounds inwardly bled afresh, and she came little short of bedewing the kind letter with her tears. She made Maxwell answer it at once, and she would not let him deprecate the writer’s worship of him as the first American dramatist to attempt something in the spirit of the great modern masters abroad. She contended that it would be as false to refuse this tribute as to accept one that was not due him, and there could be no doubt but it was fully and richly merited. The critic wrote again in response to Maxwell, and they exchanged three or four letters.

What was even more to Louise was the admirable behavior of her father when she went to eat humble-pie before him. He laughed at the notion of Godolphin’s meddling with the play, and scolded her for not taking her husband’s view of the case, which he found entirely reasonable, and the only reasonable view of it. He argued that Godolphin simply chose to assert in that way a claim to joint authorship, which he had all along probably believed he had, and he approved of Maxwell’s letting him have his head in the matter, so far as the West was concerned. If he attempted to give it with any alterations of his own in the East, there would be time enough to stop him. Louise seized the occasion to confirm herself in her faith that her father admired Maxwell’s genius as much as she did herself; and she tried to remember just the words he used in praising it, so that she could repeat them to Maxwell. She also committed to memory his declaration that the very fact of Godolphin’s playing the piece every now and then was proof positive that he would be very reluctant to part with it, if it came to that. This seemed to her very important, and she could hardly put up with Maxwell’s sardonic doubt of it.

Before they left Magnolia there came a letter from Godolphin himself, wholly different in tone from his earlier letter. He said nothing now of overhauling the piece, which he felt was gradually making its way. He was playing it at various one-night stands in the Northwest, preparatory to bringing it to Chicago and putting it on for a week, and he asked if Maxwell could not come out and see it there. He believed they were all gradually getting down to it, and the author’s presence at the rehearsals would be invaluable. He felt more and more that they had a fortune in it, and it only needed careful working to realize a bonanza. He renewed his promises, in view of his success so far, to play it exclusively if the triumph could be clinched by a week’s run in such a place as Chicago. He wrote from Grand Rapids, and asked Maxwell to reply to him at Oshkosh.

“Tell him you’ll come, of course,” said his wife.

Maxwell shook his head. “He doesn’t mean this any more than he meant to revise the thing himself. He probably finds that he can’t do that, and wants me to do it. But if I did it he might take it off after the first night in Chicago if the notices were unfavorable.”

“But they won’t be,” she argued. “I know they won’t.”

“I should simply break him up from the form he’s got into, if I went to the rehearsals. He must keep on doing it in his own way till he comes to New York.”

“But think of the effect it will have in New York if you should happen to make it go in Chicago.”

“It won’t have the slightest effect. When he brings it East, it will have to make its way just as if it had never been played anywhere before.”

A bright thought occurred to Louise. “Then tell him that if he will bring it on to Boston you will superintend all the rehearsals. And I will go with you to them.”

Maxwell only laughed at this. “Boston wouldn’t serve any better than Chicago, as far as New York is concerned. We shall have to build a success from the ground up there, if we get one. It might run a whole winter in Boston, and then we should probably begin with half a house in New York, or a third. The only advantage of trying it anywhere before, is that the actors will be warm in their parts. Besides, do you suppose Godolphin could get a theatre in Boston out of the order of his engagement there next spring?”

“Why not?”

“Simply because every night at every house is taken six months beforehand.”

“Who would ever have dreamt,” said Louise, ruefully, “that simply writing a play would involve any one in all these exasperating business details.”

“Nobody can get free of business,” Maxwell returned.

“Then I will tell you,” she brightened up to say. “Why not sell him the piece outright, and wash your hands of it?”

“Because he wouldn’t buy it outright, and if I washed my hands of it he could do what he pleased with it. If he couldn’t tinker it up himself he could hire some one else to do it, and that would be worse yet.”

“Well, then, the only thing for us to do is to go on to New York, and wait there till Godolphin comes. I suppose papa and mamma would like to have us stay through October with them in Boston, but I don’t see much sense in that, and I don’t choose to have the air of living on them. I want to present an unbroken front of independence from the beginning, as far as inquiring friends are concerned; and in New York we shall be so lost to sight that nobody will know how we are living. You can work at your new play while we’re waiting, and we can feel that the onset in the battle of life has sounded.”

Maxwell laughed, as she meant him, at the mock heroics of her phrase, and she pulled off his hat, and rubbed his hair round on his skull in exultation at having arrived at some clear understanding. “I wouldn’t have hair like silk,” she jeered.

“And I wouldn’t have hair like corn-silk,” he returned. “At least not on my own head.”

“Yes, it is coarse. And it’s yours quite as much as mine,” she said, thoughtfully. “We do belong to each other utterly, don’t we? I never thought of it in that light before. And now our life has gone into your work, already! I can’t tell you, Brice, how sweet it is to think of that love-business being our own! I shall be so proud of it on the stage! But as long as we live no one but ourselves must know anything about it. Do you suppose they will?” she asked, in sudden dismay.

He smiled. “Should you care?”

She reflected a moment. “No!” she shouted, boldly. “What difference?”

“Godolphin would pay any sum for the privilege of using the fact as an advertisement. If he could put it into Pinney’s hands, and give him carte blanche, to work in all the romance he liked—”

“Brice!” she shrieked.

“Well, we needn’t give it away, and if we don’t, nobody else will.”

“No, and we must always keep it sacredly secret. Promise me one thing!”

“Twenty!”

“That you will let me hold your hand all through the first performance of that part. Will you?”

“Why, we shall be set up like two brazen images in a box for all the first-nighters to stare at and the society reporters to describe. What would society journalism say to your holding my hand throughout the tender passages? It would be onto something personal in them in an instant.”

“No; now I will show you how we will do.” They were sitting in a nook of the rocks, in the pallor of the late September sunshine, with their backs against a warm bowlder. “Now give me your hand.”

“Why, you’ve got hold of it already.”

“Oh yes, so I have! Well, I’ll just grasp it in mine firmly, and let them both rest on your knee, so; and fling the edge of whatever I’m wearing on my shoulders over them, or my mantle, if it’s hanging on the back of the chair, so” — she flung the edge of her shawl over their clasped hands to illustrate— “and nobody will suspect the least thing. Suppose the sea was the audience — a sea of faces you know; would any one dream down there that I was squeezing your hand at all the important moments, or you squeezing mine?”

“I hope they wouldn’t think me capable of doing anything so indelicate as squeezing a lady’s hand,” said Maxwell. “I don’t know what they might think of you, though, if there was any such elaborate display of concealment as you’ve got up here.”

“Oh, this is merely rehearsing. Of course, I shall be more adroit, more careless, when I really come to it. But what I mean is that when we first see it together, the love-business, I shall want to feel that you are feeling every instant just as I do. Will you?”

“I don’t see any great objection to that. We shall both be feeling very anxious about the play, if that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I mean in one sense,” Louise allowed. “Sha’n’t you be very anxious to see how they have imagined Salome and Atland?”

“Not so anxious as about how Godolphin has ‘created’ Haxard.”

“I care nothing about that. But if the woman who does me is vulgar, or underbred, or the least bit coarse, and doesn’t keep the character just as sweet and delicate as you imagined it, I don’t know what I shall do to her.”

“Nothing violent, I hope,” Maxwell suggested languidly.

“I am not so sure,” said Louise. “It’s a dreadfully intimate affair with me, and if I didn’t like it I should hiss, anyway.”

Maxwell laughed long and loud. “What a delightful thing that would be for society journalism. ‘At one point the wife of the author was apparently unable to control her emotions, and she was heard to express her disapprobation by a prolonged sibilation. All eyes were turned upon the box where she sat with her husband, their hands clasped under the edge of her mantle.’ No, you mustn’t hiss, my dear; but if you find Salome getting too much for you you can throw a dynamite bomb at the young woman who is doing her. I dare say we shall want to blow up the whole theatre before the play is over.”

“Oh, I don’t believe we shall. I know the piece will go splendidly if the love-business is well done. But you can understand, can’t you, just how I feel about Salome?”

“I think I can, and I am perfectly sure that you will be bitterly disappointed in her, no matter how she’s done, unless you do her yourself.”

“I wish I could!”

“Then the other people might be disappointed.”

XI.

The Maxwells went to New York early in October, and took a little furnished flat for the winter on the West Side, between two streets among the Eighties. It was in a new apartment-house, rather fine on the outside, and its balconies leaned caressingly towards the tracks of the Elevated Road, whose trains steamed back and forth under them night and day. At first they thought it rather noisy, but their young nerves were strong, and they soon ceased to take note of the uproar, even when the windows were open.

The weather was charming, as the weather of the New York October is apt to be. The month proved much milder than September had been at Magnolia. They were not very far from Central Park, and they went for whole afternoons into it. They came to have such a sense of ownership in one of the seats in the Ramble, that they felt aggrieved when they found anybody had taken it, and they resented other people’s intimacy with the squirrels, which Louise always took a pocketful of nuts to feed; the squirrels got a habit of climbing into her lap for them. Sometimes Maxwell hired a boat and rowed her lazily about on the lake, while he mused and she talked. Sometimes, to be very lavish, they took places in the public carriage which plied on the drives of the Park, and went up to the tennis-grounds beyond the reservoirs, and watched the players, or the art-students sketching the autumn scenery there. They began to know, without acquaintance, certain attached or semi-attached couples; and no doubt they passed with these for lovers themselves, though they felt a vast superiority to them in virtue of their married experience; they looked upon them, though the people were sometimes their elders, as very young things, who were in the right way, but were as yet deplorably ignorant how happy they were going to be. They almost always walked back from these drives, and it was not so far but they could walk over to the North River for the sunset before their dinner, which they had late when they did that, and earlier when they did not do it. Dinner was rather a matter of caprice with them. Sometimes they dined at a French or Italian table d’hôte; sometimes they foraged for it before they came in from their sunset, or their afternoon in the park. When dinner consisted mainly of a steak or chops, with one of the delicious salads their avenue abounded in, and some improvisation of potatoes, and coffee afterward, it was very easy to get it up in half an hour. They kept one maid, who called herself a Sweden’s girl, and Louise cooked some of the things herself. She did not cook them so well as the maid, but Maxwell never knew what he was eating, and he thought it all alike good.

In their simple circumstances, Louise never missed the affluence that had flattered her whole life in her father’s house. It seemed to her as if she had not lived before her marriage — as if she had always lived as she did now. She made the most of her house-keeping, but there was not a great deal of that, at the most. She knew some New York people, but it was too early yet for them to be back to town, and, besides, she doubted if she should let them know where she was; for society afflicted Maxwell, and she could not care for it unless he did. She did not wish to do anything as yet, or be anything apart from him; she was timid about going into the street without him. She wished to be always with him, and always talking to him; but it soon came to his imploring her not to talk when she was in the room where he was writing; and he often came to the table so distraught that the meal might have passed without a word but for her.

He valued her all she could possibly have desired in relation to his work, and he showed her how absolutely he rested upon her sympathy, if not her judgment, in it. He submitted everything to her, and forbore, and changed, and amended, and wrote and rewrote at her will; or when he revolted, and wrote on in defiance of her, he was apt to tear the work up. He destroyed a good deal of good literature in this way, and more than once it happened that she had tacitly changed her mind and was of his way of thinking when it was too late. In view of such a chance she made him promise that he would always show her what he had written, even when he had written wholly against her taste and wish. He was not to let his pride keep him from doing this, though, as a general thing, she took a good deal of pride in his pride, having none herself, as she believed. Whether she had or not, she was very wilful, and rather prepotent; but she never bore malice, as the phrase is, when she got the worst of anything, though she might have been quite to blame. She had in all things a high ideal of conduct, which she expected her husband to live up to when she was the prey of adverse circumstances. At other times she did her share of the common endeavor.

All through the month of October he worked at the new play, and from time to time they heard from the old play, which Godolphin was still giving, here and there, in the West. He had not made any reply to Maxwell’s letter of regret that he could not come to the rehearsals at Chicago, but he sent the notices marked in the newspapers, at the various points where he played, and the Maxwells contented themselves as they could with these proofs of an unbroken amity. They expected something more direct and explicit from him when he should get to Chicago, where his engagement was to begin the first week in November. In the meantime the kind of life they were living had not that stressful unreality for Louise that it had for Maxwell on the economic side. For the first time his regular and serious habits of work did not mean the earning of money, but only the chance of earning money. Ever since he had begun the world for himself, and he had begun it very early, there had been some income from his industry; however little it was, it was certain; the salary was there for him at the end of the week when he went to the cashier’s desk. His mother and he had both done so well and so wisely in their several ways of taking care of themselves, that Maxwell had not only been able to live on his earnings, but he had been able to save out of them the thousand dollars which Louise bragged of to her father, and it was this store which they were now consuming, not rapidly, indeed, but steadily, and with no immediate return in money to repair the waste. The fact kept Maxwell wakeful at night sometimes, and by day he shuddered inwardly at the shrinkage of his savings, so much swifter than their growth, though he was generously abetted by Louise in using them with frugality. She could always have had money from her father, but this was something that Maxwell would not look forward to. There could be no real anxiety for them in the situation, but for Maxwell there was care. He might be going to get a great deal out of the play he was now writing, but as yet it was in no form to show to a manager or an actor; and he might be going to get a great deal out of his old play, but so far Godolphin had made no sign that he remembered one of the most essential of the obligations which seemed all to rest so lightly upon him. Maxwell hated to remind him of it, and in the end he was very glad that he never did, or that he had not betrayed the slightest misgiving of his good faith.

One morning near the end of the month, when he was lower in his spirits than usual from this cause, there came a letter from the editor of the Boston Abstract asking him if he could not write a weekly letter from New York for his old newspaper. It was a temptation, and Maxwell found it a hardship that his wife should have gone out just then to do the marketing for the day; she considered this the duty of a wife, and she fulfilled it often enough to keep her sense of it alive, but she much preferred to forage with him in the afternoon; that was poetry, she said, and the other was prose. He would have liked to talk the proposition over with her; to realize the compliment while it was fresh, to grumble at it a little, and to be supported in his notion that it would be bad business just then for him to undertake a task that might draw him away from his play too much; to do the latter well would take a great deal of time. Yet he did not feel quite that he ought to refuse it, in view of the uncertainties of the future, and it might even be useful to hold the position aside from the money it would bring him; the New York correspondent of the Boston Abstract might have a claim upon the attention of the managers which a wholly unaccredited playwright could not urge; there was no question of their favor with Maxwell; he would disdain to have that, even if he could get it, except by the excellence, or at least the availability of his work.

Louise did not come in until much later than usual, and then she came in looking very excited. “Well, my dear,” she began to call out to him as soon as the door was opened for her, “I have seen that woman again!”

“What woman?” he asked.

“You know. That smouldering-eyed thing in the bathing-dress.” She added, in answer to his stupefied gaze: “I don’t mean that she was in the bathing-dress still, but her eyes were smouldering away just as they were that day on the beach at Magnolia.”

“Oh!” said Maxwell, indifferently. “Where did you see her?”

“On the avenue, and I know she lives in the neighborhood somewhere, because she was shopping here on the avenue, and I could have easily followed her home if she had not taken the Elevated for down town.”

“Why didn’t you take it, too? It might have been a long way round, but it would have been certain. I’ve been wanting you here badly. Just tell me what you think of that.”

He gave her the editor’s letter, and she hastily ran it through. “I wouldn’t think of it for a moment,” she said. “Were there any letters for me?”

“It isn’t a thing to be dismissed without reflection,” he began.

“I thought you wanted to devote yourself entirely to the drama?”

“Of course.”

“And you’ve always said there was nothing so killing to creative work as any sort of journalism.”

“This wouldn’t take more than a day or two each week, and twenty-five dollars a letter would be convenient while we are waiting for our cards to turn up.”

“Oh, very well! If you are so fickle as all that, I don’t know what to say to you.” She put the letter down on the table before him, and went out of the room.

He tried to write, but with the hurt of what he felt her unkindness he could not, and after a certain time he feigned an errand into their room, where she had shut herself from him, and found her lying down. “Are you sick?” he asked, coldly.

“Not at all,” she answered. “I suppose one may lie down without being sick, as you call it. I should say ill, myself.”

“I’m so glad you’re not sick that I don’t care what you call it.”

He was going out, when she spoke again: “I didn’t know you cared particularly, you are always so much taken up with your work. I suppose, if you wrote those letters for the Abstract, you need never think of me at all, whether I was ill or well.”

“You would take care to remind me of your existence from time to time, I dare say. You haven’t the habit of suffering in silence a great deal.”

“You would like it better, of course, if I had.”

“A great deal better, my dear. But I didn’t know that you regarded my work as self-indulgence altogether. I have flattered myself now and then that I was doing it for you, too.”

“Oh yes, very likely. But if you had never seen me you would be doing it all the same.”

“I’m afraid so. I seem to have been made that way. I’m sorry you don’t approve. I supposed you did once.”

“Oh, I do approve — highly.” He left her, and she heard him getting his hat and stick in the little hallway, as if he were going out of doors. She called to him, “What I wonder is how a man so self-centred that he can’t look at his wife for days together, can tell whether another woman’s eyes are smouldering or not.”

Maxwell paused, with his hand on the knob, as if he were going to make some retort, but, perhaps because he could think of none, he went out without speaking.

He stayed away all the forenoon, walking down the river along the squalid waterside avenues; he found them in sympathy with the squalor in himself which always followed a squabble with his wife. At the end of one of the westward streets he found himself on a pier flanked by vast flotillas of canal-boats. As he passed one of these he heard the sound of furious bickering within, and while he halted a man burst from the gangway and sprang ashore, followed by the threats and curses of a woman, who put her head out of the hatch to launch them after him.

The incident turned Maxwell faint; he perceived that the case of this unhappy man, who tried to walk out of earshot with dignity, was his own in quality, if not in quantity. He felt the shame of their human identity, and he reached home with his teeth set in a hard resolve to bear and forbear in all things thereafter, rather than share ever again in misery like that, which dishonored his wife even more than it dishonored him. At the same time he was glad of a thought the whole affair suggested to him, and he wondered whether he could get a play out of it. This was the notion of showing the evil eventuation of good. Their tiffs came out of their love for each other, and no other quarrels could have the bitterness that these got from the very innermost sweetness of life. It would be hard to show this dramatically, but if it could be done the success would be worth all the toil it would cost.

At his door he realized with a pang that he could not submit the notion to his wife now, and perhaps never. But the door was pulled open before he could turn his latch-key in the lock, and Louise threw her arms round his neck.

“Oh, dearest, guess!” she commanded between her kisses.

“Guess what?” he asked, walking her into the parlor with his arms round her. She kept her hands behind her when he released her, and they stood confronted.

“What should you consider the best news — or not news exactly; the best thing — in the world?”

“Why, I don’t know. Has the play been a great success in Chicago?”

“Better than that!” she shouted, and she brought an open letter from behind her, and flourished it before him, while she went on breathlessly: “It’s from Godolphin, and of course I opened it at once, for I thought if there was anything worrying in it, I had better find it out while you were gone, and prepare you for it. He’s sent you a check for $300 — twelve performances of the play — and he’s written you the sweetest letter in the world, and I take back everything I ever said against him! Here, shall I read it? Or, no, you’ll want to read it yourself. Now, sit down at your desk, and I’ll put it before you, with the check on top!”

She pushed him into his chair, and he obediently read the check first, and then took up the letter. It was dated at Chicago, and was written with a certain histrionic consciousness, as if Godolphin enjoyed the pose of a rising young actor paying over to the author his share of the profits of their joint enterprise in their play. There was a list of the dates and places of the performances, which Maxwell noted were chiefly matinées; and he argued a distrust of the piece from this fact, which Godolphin did not otherwise betray. He said that the play constantly grew upon him, and that with such revision as they should be able to give it together when he reached New York, they would have one of the greatest plays of the modern stage. He had found that wherever he gave it the better part of his audience was best pleased with it, and he felt sure that when he put it on for a run the houses would grow up to it in every way. He was going to test it for a week in Chicago; there was no reference to his wish that Maxwell should have been present at the rehearsals there; but otherwise Godolphin’s letter was as candid as it was cordial.

Maxwell read it with a silent joy which seemed to please his wife as well as if he had joined her in rioting over it. She had kept the lunch warm for him, and now she brought it in from the kitchen herself and set it before him, talking all the time.

“Well, now we can regard it as an accomplished fact, and I shall not allow you to feel any anxiety about it from this time forward. I consider that Godolphin has done his whole duty by it. He has kept the spirit of his promises if he hasn’t the letter, and from this time forward I am going to trust him implicitly, and I’m going to make you. No more question of Godolphin in this family! Don’t you long to know how it goes in Chicago? But I don’t really care, for, as you say, that won’t have the slightest influence in New York; and I know it will go here, anyway. Yes, I consider it, from this time on, an assured success. And isn’t it delightful that, as Godolphin says, it’s such a favorite with refined people?” She went on a good while to this effect, but when she had talked herself out, Maxwell had still said so little that she asked, “What is it, Brice?”

“Do you think we deserve it?” he returned, seriously.

“For squabbling so? Why, I suppose I was tired and overwrought, or I shouldn’t have done it.”

“And I hadn’t even that excuse,” said Maxwell.

“Oh, yes you had,” she retorted. “I provoked you. And if any one was to blame, I was. Do you mind it so much?”

“Yes, it tears my heart. And it makes me feel so low and mean.”

“Oh, how good you are!” she began, but he stopped her.

“Don’t! I’m not good; and I don’t deserve success. I don’t feel as if this belonged to me. I ought to send Godolphin’s check back, in common honesty, common decency.” He told of the quarrel he had witnessed on the canal-boat, and she loved him for his simple-hearted humility; but she said there was nothing parallel in the cases, and she would not let him think so; that it was morbid, and showed he had been overworking.

“And now,” she went on, “you must write to Mr. Ricker at once and thank him, and tell him you can’t do the letters for him. Will you?”

“I’ll see.”

“You must. I want you to reserve your whole strength for the drama. That’s your true vocation, and it would be a sin for you to turn to the right or left.” He continued silent, and she went on: “Are you still thinking about our scrap this morning? Well, then, I’ll promise never to begin it again. Will that do?”

“Oh, I don’t know that you began it. And I wasn’t thinking — I was thinking of an idea for a play — the eventuation of good in evil — love evolving in hate.”

“That will be grand, if you can work it out. And now you see, don’t you, that there is some use in squabbling, even?”

“I suppose nothing is lost,” said Maxwell. He took out his pocket-book, and folded Godolphin’s check into it.

XII.

A week later there came another letter from Godolphin. It was very civil, and in its general text it did not bear out the promise of severity in its change of address to Dear Sir, from the Dear Mr. Maxwell of the earlier date.

It conveyed, in as kindly terms as could have been asked, a fact which no terms could have flattered into acceptability.

Godolphin wrote, after trying the play two nights and a matinée in Chicago, to tell the author that he had withdrawn it because its failure had not been a failure in the usual sense but had been a grievous collapse, which left him no hopes that it would revive in the public favor if it were kept on. Maxwell would be able to judge, he said, from the newspapers he sent, of the view the critics had taken of the piece; but this would not have mattered at all if it had not been the view of the public, too. He said he would not pain Maxwell by repeating the opinions which he had borne the brunt of alone; but they were such as to satisfy him fully and finally that he had been mistaken in supposing there was a part for him in the piece. He begged to return it to Maxwell, and he ventured to send his prompt-book with the original manuscript, which might facilitate his getting the play into other hands.

The parcel was brought in by express while they were sitting in the dismay caused by the letter, and took from them the hope that Godolphin might have written from a mood and changed his mind before sending back the piece. Neither of them had the nerve to open the parcel, which lay upon Maxwell’s desk, very much sealed and tied and labelled, diffusing a faint smell of horses, as express packages mostly do, through the room.

Maxwell found strength, if not heart, to speak first. “I suppose I am to blame for not going to Chicago for the rehearsals.” Louise said she did not see what that could have done to keep the play from failing, and he answered that it might have kept Godolphin from losing courage. “You see, he says he had to take the brunt of public opinion alone. He was sore about that.”

“Oh, well, if he is so weak as that, and would have had to be bolstered up all along, you are well rid of him.”

“I am certainly rid of him,” Maxwell partially assented, and they both lapsed into silence again. Even Louise could not talk. They were as if stunned by the blow that had fallen on them, as all such blows fall, when it was least expected, and it seemed to the victims as if they were least able to bear it. In fact, it was a cruel reverse from the happiness they had enjoyed since Godolphin’s check came, and although Maxwell had said that they must not count upon anything from him, except from hour to hour, his words conveyed a doubt that he felt no more than Louise. Now his gloomy wisdom was justified by a perfidy which she could paint in no colors that seemed black enough. Perhaps the want of these was what kept her mute at first; even when she began to talk she could only express her disdain by urging her husband to send back Godolphin’s check to him. “We want nothing more to do with such a man. If he felt no obligation to keep faith with you, it’s the same as if he had sent that money out of charity.”

“Yes, I have thought of that,” said Maxwell. “But I guess I shall keep the money. He may regard the whole transaction as child’s play; but I don’t, and I never did. I worked very hard on the piece, and at the rates for space-work, merely, I earned his money and a great deal more. If I can ever do anything with it, I shall be only too glad to give him his three hundred dollars again.”

She could see that he had already gathered spirit for new endeavor with the play, and her heart yearned upon him in pride and fondness. “Oh, you dear! What do you intend to do next?”

“I shall try the managers.”

“Brice!” she cried in utter admiration.

He rose and said, as he took up the express package, and gave Godolphin’s letter a contemptuous push with his hand, “You can gather up this spilt milk. Put it away somewhere; I don’t want to see it or think of it again.” He cut open the package, and found the prompt-book, which he laid aside, while he looked to see if his own copy of the play were all there.

“You are going to begin at once?” gasped Louise.

“This instant,” he said. “It will be slow enough work at the best, and we mustn’t lose time. I shall probably have to go the rounds of all the managers, but I am not going to stop till I have gone the rounds. I shall begin with the highest, and I sha’n’t stop till I reach the lowest.”

“But when? How? You haven’t thought it out.”

“Yes, I have. I have been thinking it out ever since I got the play into Godolphin’s hands. I haven’t been at peace about him since that day when he renounced me in Magnolia, and certainly till we got his check there has been nothing in his performance to restore my confidence. Come, now, Louise, you mustn’t stop me, dear,” he said, for she was beginning to cling about him. “I shall be back for lunch, and then we can talk over what I have begun to do. If I began to talk of it before, I should lose all heart for it. Kiss me good luck!”

She kissed him enough for all the luck in the world, and then he got himself out of her arms while she still hardly knew what to make of it all. He was half-way down the house-stairs, when her eye fell on the prompt-book. She caught it up and ran out upon the landing, and screamed down after him, “Brice, Brice! You’ve forgotten something.”

He came flying back, breathless, and she held the book out to him. “Oh, I don’t want that,” he panted, “It would damage the play with a manager to know that Godolphin had rejected it.”

“But do you think it would be quite right — quite frank — to let him take it without telling him?”

“It will be right to show it him without telling him. It will be time enough to tell him if he likes it.”

“That is true,” she assented, and then she kissed him again and let him go; he stood a step below her, and she had to stoop a good deal; but she went in doors, looking up to him as if he were a whole flight of steps above her, and saying to herself that he had always been so good and wise that she must now simply trust him in everything.

Louise still had it on her conscience to offer Maxwell reparation for the wrong she thought she had done him when she had once decided that he was too self-seeking and self-centred, and had potentially rejected him on that ground. The first thing she did after they became engaged was to confess the wrong, and give him a chance to cast her off if he wished; but this never seemed quite reparation enough, perhaps because he laughed and said that she was perfectly right about him, and must take him with those faults or not at all. She now entered upon a long, delightful review of his behavior ever since that moment, and she found that, although he was certainly as self-centred as she had ever thought or he had owned himself to be, self-seeking he was not, in any mean or greedy sense. She perceived that his self-seeking, now, at least, was as much for her sake as his own, and that it was really after all not self-seeking, but the helpless pursuit of aims which he was born into the world to achieve. She had seen that he did not stoop to achieve them, but had as haughty a disdain of any but the highest means as she could have wished him to have, and much haughtier than she could have had in his place. If he forgot her in them, he forgot himself quite as much, and they were equal before his ambition. In fact, this seemed to her even more her charge than his, and if he did not succeed as with his genius he had a right to succeed, it would be constructively her fault, and at any rate she should hold herself to blame for it; there would be some satisfaction in that. She thought with tender pathos how hard he worked, and was at his writing all day long, except when she made him go out with her, and was then often so fagged that he could scarcely speak. She was proud of his almost killing himself at it, but she must study more and more not to let him kill himself, and must do everything that was humanly possible to keep up his spirits when he met with a reverse.

She accused herself with shame of having done nothing for him in the present emergency, but rather flung upon him the burden of her own disappointment. She thought how valiantly he had risen up under it, and had not lost one moment in vain repining; how instantly he had collected himself for a new effort, and taken his measures with a wise prevision that omitted no detail. In view of all this, she peremptorily forbade herself to be uneasy at the little reticence he was practising with regard to Godolphin’s having rejected his play; and imagined the splendor he could put on with the manager after he had accepted it, in telling him its history, and releasing him, if he would, from his agreement. She imagined the manager generously saying this made no difference whatever, though he appreciated Mr. Maxwell’s candor in the matter, and should be all the happier to make a success of it because Godolphin had failed with it.

But she returned from this flight into the future, and her husband’s part in it, to the present and her own first duty in regard to him; and it appeared to her, that this was to look carefully after his health in the strain put upon it, and to nourish him for the struggle before him. It was to be not with one manager only, but many managers, probably, and possibly with all the managers in New York. That was what he had said it would be before he gave up, and she remembered how flushed and excited he looked when he said it, and though she did not believe he would get back for lunch — the manager might ask him to read his play to him, so that he could get just the author’s notion — she tried to think out the very most nourishing lunch she could for him. Oysters were in season, and they were very nourishing, but they had already had them for breakfast, and beefsteak was very good, but he hated it. Perhaps chops would do, or, better still, mushrooms on toast, only they were not in the market at that time of year. She dismissed a stewed squab, and questioned a sweetbread, and wondered if there were not some kind of game. In the end she decided to leave it to the provision man, and she lost no time after she reached her decision in going out to consult him. He was a bland, soothing German, and it was a pleasure to talk with him, because he brought her married name into every sentence, and said, “No, Mrs. Maxwell;” “Yes, Mrs. Maxwell;” “I send it right in, Mrs. Maxwell.” She went over his whole list of provisions with him, and let him persuade her that a small fillet was the best she could offer a person whose frame needed nourishing, while at the same time his appetite needed coaxing. She allowed him to add a can of mushrooms, as the right thing to go with it, and some salad; and then while he put the order up she stood reproaching herself for it, since it formed no fit lunch, and was both expensive and commonplace.

She was roused from her daze, when she was going to countermand the whole stupid order by the man’s saying: “What can I do for you this morning, Mrs. Harley?” and she turned round to find at her elbow the smouldering-eyed woman of the bathing-beach. She lifted her heavy lids and gave Louise a dull glance, which she let a sudden recognition burn through for a moment and then quenched. But in that moment the two women sealed a dislike that had been merely potential before. Their look said for each that the other was by nature, tradition, and aspiration whatever was most detestable in their sex.

Mrs. Harley, whoever she was, under a name that Louise electrically decided to be fictitious, seemed unable to find her voice at first in their mutual defiance, and she made a pretence of letting her strange eyes rove about the shop before she answered. Her presence was so repugnant to Louise that she turned abruptly and hurried out of the place without returning the good-morning which the German sent after her with the usual addition of her name. She resented it now, for if it was not tantamount to an introduction to that creature, it was making her known to her, and Louise wished to have no closer acquaintance with her than their common humanity involved. It seemed too odious to have been again made aware that they were inhabitants of the same planet, and the anger that heaved within her went out in a wild flash of resentment towards her husband for having forever fixed that woman in her consciousness with a phrase. If it had not been for that, she would not have thought twice of her when they first saw her, and she would not have known her when they met again, and at the worst would merely have been harassed with a vague resemblance which would never have been verified.

She had climbed the stairs to their apartment on the fourth floor, when she felt the need to see more, know more, of this hateful being so strong upon her, that she stopped with her latch-key in her door and went down again. She did not formulate her intention, but she meant to hurry back to the provision store, with the pretext of changing her order, and follow the woman wherever she went, until she found out where she lived; and she did not feel, as a man would, the disgrace of dogging her steps in that way so much as she felt a fatal dread of her. If she should be gone by the time Louise got back to the shop, she would ask the provision man about her, and find out in that way. She stayed a little while to rehearse the terms of her inquiry, and while she lingered the woman herself came round the corner of the avenue and mounted the steps where Louise stood and, with an air of custom, went on upstairs to the second floor, where Louise heard her putting a latch-key into the door, which then closed after her.

XIII.

Maxwell went to a manager whom he had once met in Boston, where they had been apparently acceptable to each other in a long talk they had about the drama. The manager showed himself a shrewd and rather remorseless man of business in all that he said of the theatre, but he spoke as generously and reverently of the drama as Maxwell felt, and they parted with a laughing promise to do something for it yet. In fact, if it had not been for the chances that threw him into Godolphin’s hand afterwards, he would have gone to this manager with his play in the first place, and he went to him now, as soon as he was out of Godolphin’s hands, not merely because he was the only manager he knew in the city, but because he believed in him as much as his rather sceptical temper permitted him to believe in any one, and because he believed he would give him at least an intelligent audience.

The man in the box-office, where he stood in the glow of an electric light at midday, recovered himself from the disappointment he suffered when Maxwell asked for the manager instead of a seat for the night’s performance. He owned that the manager was in his room, but said he was very much engaged, and he was hardly moved from this conviction by Maxwell’s urgence that he should send in his card; perhaps something in Maxwell’s tone and face as of authority prevailed with him; perhaps it was the title of the Boston Abstract, which Maxwell wrote under his name, to recall himself better to the manager’s memory. The answer was a good while getting back; people came in and bought tickets and went away, while Maxwell hung about the vestibule of the theatre and studied the bill of the play which formed its present attraction, but at last the man in the box-office put his face sidewise to the semi-circular opening above the glass-framed plan of seats and, after he had identified Maxwell, said, “Mr. Grayson would like to see you.” At the same time the swinging doors of the theatre opened, and a young man came out, to whom the other added, indicating Maxwell, “This is the gentleman;” and the young man held the door open for him to pass in, and then went swiftly before him into the theatre, and led the way around the orchestra circle to a little door that opened in the wall beside one of the boxes. There was a rehearsal going on in the glare of some grouped incandescent bulbs on the stage, and people moving about in top hats and bonnets and other every-day outside gear, which Maxwell lost sight of in his progress through the wings and past a rough brick wall before he arrived at another door down some winding stairs in the depths of the building. His guide knocked at it, and when an answering voice said, “Come in!” he left Maxwell to go in alone. The manager had risen from his chair at his table, and stood, holding out his hand, with a smile of kindly enough welcome. He said, “I’ve just made you out, Mr. Maxwell. Do you come as a friendly interviewer, or as a deadly dramatist!”

“As both or as neither, whichever you like,” said Maxwell, and he gladly took the manager’s hand, and then took the chair which he cleared of some prompt-books for him to sit down in.

“I hadn’t forgotten the pleasant talk I had with you in Boston, you see,” the manager began again, “but I had forgotten whom I had it with.”

“I can’t say I had even done that,” Maxwell answered, and this seemed to please the manager.

“Well, that counts you one,” he said. “You noticed that we have put on ‘Engaged?’ We’ve made a failure of the piece we began with; it’s several pieces now. Couldn’t you do something like ‘Engaged?’”

“I wish I could! But I’m afraid Gilbert is the only man living who can do anything like ‘Engaged.’ My hand is too heavy for that kind.”

“Well, the heavy hand is not so bad if it hits hard enough,” said the manager, who had a face of lively intelligence and an air of wary kindliness. He looked fifty, but this was partly the effect of overwork. There was something of the Jew, something of the Irishman, in his visage; but he was neither; he was a Yankee, from Maine, with a Boston training in his business. “What have you got?” he asked, for Maxwell’s play was evident.

“Something I’ve been at work on for a year, more or less.” Maxwell sketched the plot of his play, and the manager seemed interested.

“Rather Ibsenish, isn’t it?” he suggested at the end.

The time had passed with Maxwell when he wished to have this said of his play, not because he did not admire Ibsen, but because he preferred the recognition of the original quality of his work. “I don’t know that it is, very. Perhaps — if one didn’t like it.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I should dislike it for its Ibsenism. The time of that sort of thing may be coming. You never can be sure, in this business, when the time of anything is coming. I’ve always thought that a naturalized Ibsenism wouldn’t be so bad for our stage. You don’t want to be quite so bleak, you know, as the real Norwegian Ibsen.”

“I’ve tried not to be very bleak, because I thought it wasn’t in the scheme,” said Maxwell.

“I don’t understand that it ends well?”

“Unless you consider the implicated marriage of the young people a good ending. Haxard himself, of course, is past all surgery. But the thing isn’t pessimistic, as I understand, for its doctrine is that harm comes only from doing wrong.”

The manager laughed. “Oh, the average public would consider that very pessimistic. They want no harm to come even from doing wrong. They want the drama to get round it, somehow. If you could show that Divine Providence forgets wrong-doing altogether in certain cases, you would make the fortune of your piece. Come, why couldn’t you try something of that kind? It would be the greatest comfort to all the sinners in front, for every last man of them — or woman — would think she was the one who was going to get away.”

“I might come up to that, later,” said Maxwell, willing to take the humorous view of the matter, if it would please the manager and smooth the way for the consideration of his work; but, more obscurely, he was impatient, and sorry to have found him in so philosophical a mood.

The manager was like the man of any other trade; he liked to talk of his business, and this morning he talked of it a long time, and to an effect that Maxwell must have found useful if he had not been so bent upon getting to his manuscript that he had no mind for generalities. At last the manager said, abruptly, “You want me to read your play?”

“Very much,” Maxwell answered, and he promptly put the packet he had brought into the manager’s extended hand.

He not only took it, but he untied it, and even glanced at the first few pages. “All right,” he said, “I’ll read it, and let you hear from me as soon as I can. Your address — oh, it’s on the wrapper, here. By-the-way, why shouldn’t you lunch with me? We’ll go over to the Players’ Club.”

Maxwell flushed with eager joy; then he faltered.

“I should like to do it immensely. But I’m afraid — I’m afraid Mrs. Maxwell will be waiting for me.”

“Oh, all right; some other time,” answered the manager; and then Maxwell was vexed that he had offered any excuse, for he thought it would have been very pleasant and perhaps useful for him to lunch at the Players’. But the manager did not urge him. He only said, as he led the way to the stage-door, “I didn’t know there was a Mrs. Maxwell.”

“She’s happened since we met,” said Maxwell, blushing with fond pride. “We’re such a small family that we like to get together at lunch,” he added.

“Oh, yes, I can understand that stage of it,” said the manager. “By-the-way, are you still connected with the Abstract? I noticed the name on your card.”

“Not quite in the old way. But,” and with the words a purpose formed itself in Maxwell’s mind, “they’ve asked me to write their New York letter.”

“Well, drop in now and then. I may have something for you.” The manager shook hands with him cordially, and Maxwell opened the door and found himself in the street.

He was so little conscious of the transit homeward that he seemed to find himself the next moment with Louise in their little parlor. He remembered afterwards that there was something strange in her manner towards him at first, but, before he could feel presently cognizant of it, this wore off in the interest of what he had to tell.

“The sum of it all,” he ended his account of the interview with the manager, “is that he’s taken the thing to read, and that he’s to let me hear from him when he’s read it. When that will be nobody knows, and I should be the last to ask. But he seemed interested in my sketch of it, and he had an intelligence about it that was consoling. And it was a great comfort, after Godolphin, and Godolphin’s pyrotechnics, to have him take it in a hard, business way. He made no sort of promises, and he held out no sort of hopes; he didn’t commit himself in any sort of way, and he can’t break his word, for he hasn’t given it. I wish, now, that I had never let Godolphin have the play back after he first renounced it; I should have saved a great deal of time and wear and tear of feelings. Yes, if I had taken your advice then—”

At this generous tribute to her wisdom, all that was reluctant ceased from Louise’s manner and behavior. She put her arm around his neck and protested. “No, no! I can’t let you say that, Brice! You were right about that, as you are about everything. If you hadn’t had this experience with Godolphin, you wouldn’t have known how to appreciate Mr. Grayson’s reception of you, and you might have been unreasonable. I can see now that it’s all been for the best, and that we needed just this discipline to prepare us for prosperity. But I guess Godolphin will wish, when he hears that Mr. Grayson has taken your piece, and is going to bring it out at the Argosy, here—”

“Oh, good heavens! Do give those poor chickens a chance to get out of the shell this time, my dear!”

“Well, I know it vexes you, and I know it’s silly; but still I feel sure that Mr. Grayson will take it. You don’t mind that, do you?”

“Not if you don’t say it. I want you to realize that the chances are altogether against it. He was civil, because I think he rather liked me personally—”

“Of course he did!”

“Oh!”

“Well, never mind. Personally—”

“And I don’t suppose it did me any harm with him to suppose that I still had a newspaper connection. I put Boston Abstract on my card — for purposes of identification, as the editors say — because I was writing for it when I met him in Boston.”

“Oh, well, as long as you’re not writing for it now, I don’t care. I want you to devote yourself entirely to the drama, Brice.”

“Yes, that’s all very well. But I think I shall do Ricker’s letters for him this winter at least. I was thinking of it on the way down. It’ll be work, but it’ll be money, too, and if I have something coming in I sha’n’t feel as if I were ruined every time my play gets back from a manager.”

“Mr. Grayson will take it!”

“Now, Louise, if you say that, you will simply drive me to despair, for I shall know how you will feel when he doesn’t—”

“No, I shall not feel so; and you will see. But if you don’t let me hope for you—”

“You know I can’t stand hoping. The only safe way is to look for the worst, and if anything better happens it is so much pure gain. If we hadn’t been so eager to pin our faith to Godolphin—”

“How much better off should we have been? What have we lost by it?” she challenged him.

He broke off with a laugh. “We have lost the pins. Well, hope away! But, remember, you take the whole responsibility.” Maxwell pulled out his watch. “Isn’t lunch nearly ready? This prosperity is making me hungry, and it seems about a year since breakfast.”

“I’ll see what’s keeping it,” said Louise, and she ran out to the kitchen with a sudden fear in her heart. She knew that she had meant to countermand her order for the fillet and mushrooms, and she thought that she had forgotten to order anything else for lunch. She found the cook just serving it up, because such a dish as that took more time than an ordinary lunch, and the things had come late. Louise said, Yes, she understood that; and went back to Maxwell, whom she found walking up and down the room in a famine very uncommon for him. She felt the motherly joy a woman has in being able to appease the hunger of the man she loves, and now she was glad that she had not postponed the fillet till dinner as she had thought of doing. Everything was turning out so entirely for the best that she was beginning to experience some revival of an ancestral faith in Providence in a heart individually agnostic, and she was piously happy when Maxwell said at sight of the lunch, “Isn’t this rather prophetic? If it isn’t that, it’s telepathic. I sha’n’t regret now that I didn’t go with Grayson to lunch at the Players’ Club.”

“Did he ask you to do that?”

Maxwell nodded with his mouth full.

A sudden misgiving smote her. “Oh, Brice, you ought to have gone! Why didn’t you go?”

“It must have been a deep subconsciousness of the fillet and mushrooms. Or perhaps I didn’t quite like to think of your lunching alone.”

“Oh, you dear, faithful little soul!” she cried. The tears came into her eyes, and she ran round the table to kiss him several times on the top of his head.

He kept on eating as well as he could, and when she got back to her place, “Of course, it would have been a good thing for me to go to the Players’,” he teased, “for it would have pleased Grayson, and I should probably have met some other actors and managers there, and made interest with them provisionally for my play, if he shouldn’t happen to want it.”

“Oh, I know it,” she moaned. “You have ruined yourself for me. I’m not worth it. No, I’m not! Now, I want you to promise, dearest, that you’ll never mind me again, but lunch or dine, or breakfast, or sup whenever anybody asks you?”

“Well, I can’t promise all that, quite.”

“I mean, when the play is at stake.”

“Oh, in that case, yes.”

“What in the world did you say to Mr. Grayson?”

“Very much what I have said to you: that I hated to leave you to lunch alone here.”

“Oh, didn’t he think it very silly?” she entreated, fondly. “Don’t you think he’ll laugh at you for it!”

“Very likely. But he won’t like me the less for it. Men are glad of marital devotion in other men; they feel that it acts as a sort of dispensation for them.”

“You oughtn’t to waste those things on me,” she said, humbly. “You ought to keep them for your plays.”

“Oh, they’re not wasted, exactly. I can use them over again. I can say much better things than that with a pen in my hand.”

She hardly heard him. She felt a keen remorse for something she had meant to do and to say when he came home. Now she put it far from her; she thought she ought not to keep even an extinct suspicion in her heart against him, and she asked, “Brice, did you know that woman was living in this house?”

“What woman?”

Louise was ashamed to say anything about the smouldering eyes. “That woman on the bathing-beach at Magnolia — the one I met the other day.”

He said, dryly: “She seems to be pursuing us. How did you find it out?”

She told him, and she added, “I think she must be an actress of some sort.”

“Very likely, but I hope she won’t feel obliged to call because we’re connected with the profession.”

Some time afterwards Louise was stitching at a centre-piece she was embroidering for the dining-table, and Maxwell was writing a letter for the Abstract, which he was going to send to the editor with a note telling him that if it were the sort of thing he wanted he would do the letters for them.

“After all,” she breathed, “that look of the eyes may be purely physical.”

“What look?” Maxwell asked, from the depths of his work.

She laughed in perfect content, and said: “Oh, nothing.” But when he finished his letter, and was putting it into the envelope, she asked: “Did you tell Mr. Grayson that Godolphin had returned the play?”

“No, I didn’t. That wasn’t necessary at this stage of the proceedings.”

“No.”

XIV.

During the week that passed before Maxwell heard from the manager concerning his play, he did another letter for the Abstract, and, with a journalistic acquaintance enlarged through certain Boston men who had found places on New York papers, familiarized himself with New York ways and means of getting news. He visited what is called the Coast, a series of points where the latest intelligence grows in hotel bars and lobbies of a favorable exposure, and is nurtured by clerks and barkeepers skilled in its culture, and by inveterate gossips of their acquaintance; but he found this sort of stuff generally telegraphed on by the Associated Press before he reached it, and he preferred to make his letter a lively comment on events, rather than a report of them. The editor of the Abstract seemed to prefer this, too. He wrote Maxwell some excellent criticism, and invited him to appeal to the better rather than the worse curiosity of his readers, to remember that this was the principle of the Abstract in its home conduct. Maxwell showed the letter to his wife, and she approved of it all so heartily that she would have liked to answer it herself. “Of course, Brice,” she said, “it’s you he wants, more than your news. Any wretched reporter could give him that, but you are the one man in the world who can give him your mind about it.”

“Why not say universe?” returned Maxwell, but though he mocked her he was glad to believe she was right, and he was proud of her faith in him.

In another way this was put to proof more than once during the week, for Louise seemed fated to meet Mrs. Harley on the common stairs now when she went out or came in. It was very strange that after living with her a whole month in the house and not seeing her, she should now be seeing her so much. Mostly she was alone, but sometimes she was with an elderly woman, whom Louise decided at one time to be her mother, and at another time to be a professional companion. The first time she met them together she was sure that Mrs. Harley indicated her to the chaperon, and that she remembered her from Magnolia, but she never looked at Louise, any more than Louise looked at her, after that.

She wondered if Maxwell ever met her, but she was ashamed to ask him, and he did not mention her. Only once when they were together did they happen to encounter her, and then he said, quite simply, “I think she’s certainly an actress. That public look of the eyes is unmistakable. Emotional parts, I should say.”

Louise forced herself to suggest, “You might get her to let you do a play for her.”

“I doubt if I could do anything unwholesome enough for her.”

At last the summons they were expecting from Grayson came, just after they had made up their minds to wait another week for it.

Louise had taken the letter from the maid, and she handed it to Maxwell with a gasp at sight of the Argosy theatre address printed in the corner of the envelope. “I know it’s a refusal.”

“If you think that will make it an acceptance,” he had the hardihood to answer, “it won’t. I’ve tried that sort of thing too often;” and he tore open the letter.

It was neither a refusal nor an acceptance, and their hopes soared again, hers visibly, his secretly, to find it a friendly confession that the manager had not found time to read the play until the night before, and a request that Maxwell would drop in any day between twelve and one, which was rather a leisure time with him, and talk it over.

“Don’t lose an instant, dear!” she adjured him.

“It’s only nine o’clock,” he answered, “and I shall have to lose several instants.”

“That is so,” she lamented; and then they began to canvas the probable intention of the manager’s note. She held out passionately to the end for the most encouraging interpretation of it, but she did not feel that it would have any malign effect upon the fact for him to say, “Oh, it’s just a way of letting me down easy,” and it clearly gave him great heart to say so.

When he went off to meet his fate, she watched him, trembling, from the window; as she saw him mounting the elevated steps, she wondered at his courage; she had given him all her own.

The manager met him with “Ah, I’m glad you came soon. These things fade out of one’s mind so, and I really want to talk about your play. I’ve been very much interested in it.”

Maxwell could only bow his head and murmur something about being very glad, very, very glad, with a stupid iteration.

“I suppose you know, as well as I do, that it’s two plays, and that it’s only half as good as if it were one.”

The manager wheeled around from his table, and looked keenly at the author, who contrived to say, “I think I know what you mean.”

“You’ve got the making of the prettiest kind of little comedy in it, and you’ve got the making of a very strong tragedy. But I don’t think your oil and water mix, exactly,” said Grayson.

“You think the interest of the love-business will detract from the interest of the homicide’s fate?”

“And vice versa. Excuse me for asking something that I can very well understand your not wanting to tell till I had read your play. Isn’t this the piece Godolphin has been trying out West?”

“Yes, it is,” said Maxwell. “I thought it might prejudice you against it, if—”

“Oh, that’s all right. Why have you taken it from him?”

Maxwell felt that he could make up for his want of earlier frankness now. “I didn’t take it from him; he gave it back to me.”

He sketched the history of his relation to the actor, and the manager said, with smiling relish, “Just like him, just like Godolphin.” Then he added, “I’ll tell you, and you mustn’t take it amiss. Godolphin may not know just why he gave the piece up, and he probably thinks it’s something altogether different, but you may depend upon it the trouble was your trying to ride two horses in it. Didn’t you feel that it was a mistake yourself?”

“I felt it so strongly at one time that I decided to develop the love-business into a play by itself and let the other go for some other time. My wife and I talked it over. We even discussed it with Godolphin. He wanted to do Atland. But we all backed out simultaneously, and went back to the play as it stood.”

“Godolphin saw he couldn’t make enough of Atland,” said the manager, as if he were saying it to himself. “Well, you may be sure he feels now that the character which most appeals to the public in the play is Salome.”

“He felt that before.”

“And he was right. Now, I will tell you what you have got to do. You have either got to separate the love-business from the rest of the play and develop it into a comedy by itself—”

“That would mean a great deal of work, and I am rather sick of the whole thing.”

“Or,” the manager went on without minding Maxwell, “you have got to cut the part of Salome, and subordinate it entirely to Haxard” — Maxwell made a movement of impatience and refusal, and the manager finished— “or else you have got to treat it frankly as the leading part in the piece, and get it into the hands of some leading actress.”

“Do you mean,” the author asked, “that you — or any manager — would take it if that were done?”

Grayson looked a little unhappy. “No, that isn’t what I mean, exactly. I mean that as it stands, no manager would risk it, and that as soon as an actor had read it, he would see, as Godolphin must have seen from the start, that Haxard was a subordinate part. What you want to do is to get it in the hands of some woman who wants to star, and would take the road with it.” The manager expatiated at some length on the point, and then he stopped, and sat silent, as if he had done with the subject.

Maxwell perceived that the time had come for him to get up and go away.

“I’m greatly obliged to you for all your kindness, Mr. Grayson, and I won’t abuse your patience any further. You’ve been awfully good to me, and—” He faltered, in a dejection which he could not control. Against all reason, he had hoped that the manager would have taken his piece just as it stood, and apparently he would not have taken it in any event.

“You mustn’t speak of that,” said the manager. “I wish you would let me see anything else you do. There’s a great deal that’s good in this piece, and I believe that a woman who would make it her battle-horse could make it go.”

Maxwell asked, with melancholy scorn, “But you don’t happen to know any leading lady who is looking round for a battle-horse?”

The manager seemed trying to think. “Yes, I do. You wouldn’t like her altogether, and I don’t say she would be the ideal Salome, but she would be, in her way, effective; and I know that she wants very much to get a play. She hasn’t been doing anything for a year or two but getting married and divorced, but she made a very good start. She used to call herself Yolande Havisham; I don’t suppose it was her name; and she had a good deal of success in the West; I don’t think she’s ever appeared in New York. I believe she was of quite a good Southern family; the Southerners all are; and I hear she has money.”

“Godolphin mentioned a Southern girl for the part,” said Maxwell. “I wonder if—”

“Very likely it’s the same one. She does emotional leads. She and Godolphin played together in California, I believe. I was trying to think of her married name — or her unmarried name—”

Some one knocked at the door, and the young man put his head in, with what Maxwell fancied a preconcerted effect, and gave the manager a card. He said, “All right; bring him round,” and he added to Maxwell, “Shall I send your play—”

“No, no, I will take it,” and Maxwell carried it away with a heavier heart than he had even when he got it back from Godolphin. He did not know how to begin again, and he had to go home and take counsel with his wife as to the next step.

He could not bear to tell her of his disappointment, and it was harder still to tell her of the kind of hope the manager had held out to him. He revolved a compromise in his mind, and when they sat down together he did not mean to conceal anything, but only to postpone something; he did not clearly know why. He told her the alternatives the manager had suggested, and she agreed with him they were all impossible.

“Besides,” she said, “he doesn’t promise to take the play, even if you do everything to a ‘t.’ Did he ask you to lunch again?”

“No, that seemed altogether a thing of the past.”

“Well, let us have ours, and then we can go into the Park, and forget all about it for a while, and perhaps something new will suggest itself.”

That was what they did, but nothing new suggested itself. They came home fretted with their futile talk. There seemed nothing for Maxwell to do but to begin the next day with some other manager.

They found a note from Grayson waiting Maxwell. “Well, you open it,” he said, listlessly, to his wife, and in fact he felt himself at that moment physically unable to cope with the task, and he dreaded any fluctuation of emotion that would follow, even if it were a joyous one.

“What does this mean, Brice?” demanded his wife, with a terrible provisionality in her tone, as she stretched out the letter to him, and stood before him where he lounged in the cushioned window-seat.

Grayson had written: “If you care to submit your play to Yolande Havisham, you can easily do so. I find that her address is the same as yours. Her name is Harley. But I was mistaken about the divorce. It was a death.”

Maxwell lay stupidly holding the note before him.

“Will you tell me what it means?” his wife repeated. “Or why you didn’t tell me before, if you meant to give your play to that creature?”

“I don’t mean to give it to her,” said Maxwell, doggedly. “I never did, for an instant. As for not telling you that Grayson had suggested it — well, perhaps I wished to spare myself a scene like the present.”

“Do you think I will believe you?”

“I don’t think you will insult me. Why shouldn’t you believe I am telling you the truth?”

“Because — because you didn’t tell me at once.”

“That is nonsense, and you know it. If I wanted to keep this from you, it was to spare you the annoyance I can’t help now, and because the thing was settled in my mind as soon as Grayson proposed it.”

“Then, why has he written to you about it?”

“I suppose I didn’t say it was settled.”

“Suppose? Don’t you know whether you did?”

“Come, now, Louise! I am not on the witness-stand, and I won’t be cross-questioned. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. What is the matter with you? Am I to blame because a man who doesn’t imagine your dislike of a woman that you never spoke to suggests her taking part in a play that she probably wouldn’t look at? You’re preposterous! Try to have a little common-sense!” These appeals seemed to have a certain effect with his wife; she looked daunted; but Maxwell had the misfortune to add, “One would think you were jealous of the woman.”

“Now you are insulting me!” she cried. “But it’s a part of the vulgarity of the whole business. Actors, authors, managers, you’re all alike.”

Maxwell got very pale. “Look out, Louise!” he warned her.

“I won’t look out. If you had any delicacy, the least delicacy in the world, you could imagine how a woman who had given the most sacred feelings of her nature to you for your selfish art would loathe to be represented by such a creature as that, and still not be jealous of her, as you call it! But I am justly punished! I might have expected it.”

The maid appeared at the door and said something, which neither of them could make out at once, but which proved to be the question whether Mrs. Maxwell had ordered the dinner.

“No, I will go — I was just going out for it,” said Louise. She had in fact not taken off her hat or gloves since she came in from her walk, and she now turned and swept out of the room without looking at her husband. He longed to detain her, to speak some kindly or clarifying word, to set himself right with her, to set her right with herself; but the rage was so hot in his heart that he could not. She came back to the door a moment, and looked in. “I will do my duty.”

“It’s rather late,” he sneered, “but if you’re very conscientious, I dare say we shall have dinner at the usual time.”

He did not leave the window-seat, and it was as if the door had only just clashed to after her when there came a repeated and violent ringing at the bell, so that he jumped up himself, to answer it, without waiting for the maid.

“Your wife — your wife!” panted the bell-boy, who stood there. “She’s hurt herself, and she’s fainted.”

“My wife? Where — how?” He ran down stairs after the boy, and in the hallway on the ground floor he found Louise stretched upon the marble pavement, with her head in the lap of a woman, who was chafing her hands. He needed no look at this woman’s face to be sure that it was the woman of his wife’s abhorrence, and he felt quite as sure that it was the actress Yolande Havisham, from the effective drama of her self-possession.

“Don’t be frightened. Your wife turned her foot on the steps here. I was coming into the house, and caught her from falling. It’s only a swoon.” She spoke with the pseudo-English accent of the stage, but with a Southern slip upon the vowels here and there. “Get some water, please.”

The hall-boy came running up the back stairs with some that he had gone to get, and the woman bade Maxwell sprinkle his wife’s face. But he said: “No — you,” and he stooped and took his wife’s head into his own hands, so that she might not come to in the lap of Mrs. Harley; in the midst of his dismay he reflected how much she would hate that. He could hardly keep himself from being repellant and resentful towards the woman. In his remorse for quarrelling with Louise, it was the least reparation he could offer her. Mrs. Harley, if it were she, seemed not to notice his rudeness. She sprinkled Louise’s face, and wiped her forehead with the handkerchief she dipped in the water; but this did not bring her out of her faint, and Maxwell began to think she was dead, and to feel that he was a murderer. With a strange æsthetic vigilance he took note of his sensations for use in revising Haxard.

The janitor of the building had somehow arrived, and Mrs. Harley said: “I will go for a doctor, if you can get her up to your apartment;” and she left Louise with the two men.

The janitor, a burly Irishman, lifted her in his arms, and carried her up the three flights of steps; Maxwell followed, haggardly, helplessly.

On her own bed, Louise revived, and said: “My shoe — Oh, get it off!”

The doctor came a few minutes later, but Mrs. Harley did not appear with him as Maxwell had dreaded she would. He decided that Mrs. Maxwell had strained, not sprained, her ankle, and he explained how the difference was all the difference in the world, as he bound the ankle up with a long ribbon of india-rubber, and issued directions for care and quiet.

He left them there, and Maxwell heard him below in parley, apparently with the actress at her door. Louise lay with her head on her husband’s arm, and held his other hand tight in hers, while he knelt by the bed. The bliss of repentance and mutual forgiveness filled both their hearts, while she told him how she had hurt herself.

“I had got down to the last step, and I was putting my foot to the pavement, and I thought, Now I am going to turn my ankle. Wasn’t it strange? And I turned it. How did you get me upstairs?”

“The janitor carried you.”

“How lucky he happened to be there! I suppose the hall-boy kept me from falling — poor little fellow! You must give him some money. How did you find out about me?”

“He ran up to tell,” Maxwell said this, and then he hesitated. “I guess you had better know all about it. Can you bear something disagreeable, or would you rather wait—”

“No, no, tell me now! I can’t bear to wait. What is it?”

“It wasn’t the hall-boy that caught you. It was that — woman.”

He felt her neck and hand grow rigid, but he went on, and told her all about it. At the end some quiet tears came into her eyes. “Well, then, we must be civil to her. I am glad you told me at once, Brice!” She pulled his head down and kissed him, and he was glad, too.

XV.

Louise sent Maxwell down to Mrs. Harley’s apartment to thank her, and tell her how slight the accident was; and while he was gone she abandoned herself to an impassioned dramatization of her own death from blood-poisoning, and her husband’s early marriage with the actress, who then appeared in all his plays, though they were not happy together. Her own spectre was always rising between them, and she got some fearful joy out of that. She counted his absence by her heart-beats, but he came back so soon that she was ashamed, and was afraid that he had behaved so as to give the woman a notion that he was not suffered to stay longer. He explained that he had found her gloved and bonneted to go out, and that he had not stayed for fear of keeping her. She had introduced him to her mother, who was civil about Louise’s accident, and they had both begged him to let them do anything they could for her. He made his observations, and when Louise, after a moment, asked him about them, he said they affected him as severally typifying the Old South and the New South. They had a photograph over the mantel, thrown up large, of an officer in Confederate uniform. Otherwise the room had nothing personal in it; he suspected the apartment of having been taken furnished, like their own. Louise asked if he should say they were ladies, and he answered that he thought they were.

“Of course,” she said, and she added, with a wide sweep of censure: “They get engaged to four or five men at a time, down there. Well,” she sighed, “you mustn’t stay in here with me, dear. Go to your writing.”

“I was thinking whether you couldn’t come out and lie on the lounge. I hate to leave you alone in here.”

“No, the doctor said to be perfectly quiet. Perhaps I can, to-morrow, if it doesn’t swell up any worse.”

She kept her hold of his hand, which he had laid in hers, and he sat down beside the bed, in the chair he had left there. He did not speak, and after a while she asked, “What are you thinking of?”

“Oh, nothing. The confounded play, I suppose.”

“You’re disappointed at Grayson’s not taking it.”

“One is always a fool.”

“Yes,” said Louise, with a catching of the breath. She gripped his hand hard, and said, as well as she could in keeping back the tears, “Well, I will never stand in your way, Brice. You may do anything — anything — with it that you think best.”

“I shall never do anything you don’t like,” he answered, and he leaned over and kissed her, and at this her passion burst in a violent sobbing, and when she could speak she made him solemnly promise that he would not regard her in the least, but would do whatever was wisest and best with the play, for otherwise she should never be happy again.

As she could not come out to join him at dinner, he brought a little table to the bedside, and put his plate on it, and ate his dinner there with her. She gave him some attractive morsels off her own plate, which he had first insisted on bestowing upon her. They had such a gay evening that the future brightened again, and they arranged for Maxwell to take his play down-town the next day, and not lose a moment in trying to place it with some manager.

It all left him very wakeful, for his head began to work upon this scheme and that. When he went to lock the outer door for the night, the sight of his overcoat hanging in the hall made him think of a theatrical newspaper he had bought coming home, at a certain corner of Broadway, where numbers of smooth-shaven, handsome men, and women with dark eyes and champagned hair were lounging and passing. He had got it on the desperate chance that it might suggest something useful to him. He now took it out of his coat-pocket, and began to look its advertisements over in the light of his study lamp, partly because he was curious about it, and partly because he knew that he should begin to revise his play otherwise, and then he should not sleep all night.

In several pages of the paper ladies with flowery and alliterative names and pseudonyms proclaimed themselves in large letters, and in smaller type the parts they were presently playing in different combinations; others gave addresses and announced that they were At Liberty, or specified the kinds of rôles they were accustomed to fill, as Leads or Heavies, Dancing Soubrettes and Boys; Leads, Emotional and Juvenile; Heavy or Juvenile or Emotional Leads. There were gentlemen seeking engagements who were Artistic Whistling Soloists, Magicians, Leading Men, Leading Heavies, Singing and Dancing Comedians, and there were both ladies and gentlemen who were now Starring in this play or that, but were open to offers later. A teacher of stage dancing promised instruction in skirt and serpentine dancing, as well as high kicking, front and back, the backward bend, side practice, toe-practice, and all novelties. Dramatic authors had their cards among the rest, and one poor fellow, as if he had not the heart to name himself, advertised a play to be heard of at the office of the newspaper. Whatever related to the theatre was there, in bizarre solidarity, which was droll enough to Maxwell in one way. But he hated to be mixed up with all that, and he perceived that he must be mixed up with it more and more, if he wrote for the theatre. Whether he liked it or not, he was part of the thing which in its entirety meant high-kicking and toe-practice, as well as the expression of the most mystical passions of the heart. There was an austerity in him which the fact offended, and he did what he could to appease this austerity by reflecting that it was the drama and never the theatre that he loved; but for the time this was useless. He saw that if he wrote dramas he could not hold aloof from the theatre, nor from actors and actresses — heavies and juveniles, and emotionals and soubrettes. He must know them, and more intimately; and at first he must be subject to them, however he mastered them at last; he must flatter their oddities and indulge their caprices. His experience with Godolphin had taught him that, and his experience with Godolphin in the construction of his play could be nothing to what he must undergo at rehearsals and in the effort to adapt his work to a company. He reminded himself that Shakespeare even must have undergone all that. But this did not console him. He was himself, and what another, the greatest, had suffered would not save him. Besides, it was not the drama merely that Maxwell loved; it was not making plays alone; it was causing the life that he had known to speak from the stage, and to teach there its serious and important lesson. In the last analysis he was a moralist, and more a moralist than he imagined. To enforce, in the vividest and most palpable form, what he had thought true, it might be worth while to endure all the trials that he must; but at that moment he did not think so; and he did not dare submit his misgiving to his wife.

They had now been six months married, and if he had allowed himself to face the fact he must have owned that, though they loved each other so truly, and he had known moments of exquisite, of incredible rapture, he had been as little happy as in any half-year he had lived. He never formulated his wife’s character, or defined the precise relation she bore to his life; if he could have been challenged to do so, he would have said that she was the whole of life to him, and that she was the most delightful woman in the world.

He tasted to its last sweetness the love of loving her and of being loved by her. At the same time there was an obscure stress upon him which he did not trace to her at once; a trouble in his thoughts which, if he could have seen it clearly, he would have recognized for a lurking anxiety concerning how she would take the events of their life as they came. Without realizing it, for his mind was mostly on his work, and it was only in some dim recess of his spirit that the struggle took place, he was perpetually striving to adjust himself to the unexpected, or rather the unpredictable.

But when he was most afraid of her harassing uncertainty of emotion or action he was aware of her fixed loyalty to him; and perhaps it was the final effect with himself that he dreaded. Should he always be able to bear and forbear, as he felt she would, with all her variableness and turning? The question did not put itself in words, and neither did his conviction that his relation to the theatre was doubled in difficulty through her. But he perceived that she had no love for the drama, and only a love for his love of it; and sometimes he vaguely suspected that if he had been in business she would have been as fond of business as she was of the drama. He never perhaps comprehended her ideal, and how it could include an explicit and somewhat noisy devotion to the aims of his ambition, because it was his, and a patronizing reservation in regard to the ambition itself. But this was quite possible with Louise, just as it was possible for her to have had a humble personal joy in giving herself to him, while she had a distinct social sense of the sacrifice she had made in marrying him. In herself she looked up to him; as her father’s and mother’s daughter, as the child of her circumstance, there is no doubt she looked down upon him. But neither of these attitudes held in their common life. Love may or may not level ranks, but marriage unquestionably does, and is the one form of absolute equality. The Maxwells did not take themselves or each other objectively; they loved and hated, they made war and made peace, without any sense of the difference or desert that might have been apparent to the spectators.

Maxwell had never been so near the standpoint of the impartial observer as now when he confronted the question of what he should do, with a heart twice burdened by the question whether his wife would not make it hard for him to do it, whatever it was. He thought, with dark foreboding, of the difficulties he should have to smooth out for her if it ever came to a production of the piece. The best thing that could happen, perhaps, would be its rejection, final and total, by all possible managers and actors; for she would detest any one who took the part of Salome, and would hold him responsible for all she should suffer from it.

He recurred to what he had felt so strongly himself, and what Grayson had suggested, and thought how he could free himself from fealty to her by cutting out the whole love-business from his play. But that would be very hard. The thing had now knitted itself in one texture in his mind, and though he could sever the ties that bound the parts together, it would take from the piece the great element of charm. It was not symmetrical as it stood, but it was not two distinct motives; the motives had blended, and they really belonged to each other. He would have to invent some other love-business if he cut this out, but still it could be done. Then it suddenly flashed upon him that there was something easier yet, and that was to abandon the notion of getting his piece played at all, and to turn it into a novel. He could give it narrative form without much trouble, if any, beyond that of copying it, and it would be thought a very dramatic story. He saw instantly how he could keep and even enhance all the charm of the love-business as it stood, in a novel; and in his revulsion of feeling he wished to tell his wife. He made a movement towards the door of her room, but he heard the even breathing of her sleep, and he stopped and flung himself on the lounge to think. It was such a happy solution of the whole affair! He need not even cease trying it with the managers, for he could use the copy of the play that Godolphin had returned for that, and he could use the copy he had always kept for recasting it in narrative. By the time that he had got his play back from the last manager he would have his novel ready for the first publisher. In the meantime he should be writing his letters for the Abstract, and not consuming all his little savings.

The relief from the stress upon him was delicious. He lay at rest and heard the soft breathing of his wife from the other room, and an indescribable tenderness for her filled his heart. Then he heard her voice saying, “Well, don’t wake him, poor boy!”

XVI.

Maxwell opened his eyes and found the maid lightly escaping from the room. He perceived that he had slept all night on the lounge, and he sent a cheery hail into his wife’s room, and then followed it to tell her how he had thought it all out. She was as glad as he was; she applauded his plan to the ceiling; and he might not have thought of her accident if he had not seen presently that she was eating her breakfast in bed.

Then he asked after her ankle, and she said, “Oh, that is perfectly well, or the same as perfectly. There’s no pain at all there to speak of, and I shall get up to luncheon. You needn’t mind me any more. If you haven’t taken your death of cold sleeping there on the lounge—”

“I haven’t.”

“I want you to go down town to some manager with your play, and get some paper, the kind I like; and then, after lunch, we’ll begin turning it into a novel, from your copy. It will be so easy for you that you can dictate, and I’ll do the writing, and we’ll work it up together. Shall you like collaborating with me?”

“Ah!—”

“It will be our story, and I shall like it twice as well as if it were a play. We shall be independent of the theatre, that’s one satisfaction; they can take the play, if they like, but it will be perfectly indifferent to us. I shall help you get in all those nice touches that you said you could never get into a play, like that green light in the woods. I know just how we shall manage that love business, and we sha’n’t have any horror of an actress interpreting our inspirations to the public. We’ll play Atland and Salome ourselves. We’ll — ow!”

She had given her foot a twist in the excitement and she fell back on the pillow rather faint. But she instantly recovered herself with a laugh, and she hurried him away to his breakfast, and then away with his play. He would rather have stayed and begun turning it into a story at once. But she would not let him; she said it would be a loss of time, and she should fret a good deal more to have him there with her, than to have him away, for she should know he was just staying to cheer her up.

When he was gone she sent for whatever papers the maid could find in the parlor, so that she need not think of him in the amusement she would get out of them. Among the rest was that dramatic newspaper which caught her eye first, with the effigy of a very dramatized young woman whose portrait filled the whole first page. Louise abhorred her, but with a novel sense of security in the fact that Maxwell’s play was going so soon to be turned into a story; and she felt personally aloof from all the people who had dragged him down with a sense of complicity in their professional cards. She found them neither so droll nor so painful as he had, but she was very willing to turn from them, and she was giving the paper a parting glance before dropping it when she was arrested by an advertisement which made her start:

WANTED. — A drama for prominent star; light comic and emotional: star part must embody situations for the display of intense effects.    Address L. Sterne, this office.

A series of effects as intense as the advertiser could have desired in a drama followed one another in the mind of Louise. She now wildly reproached herself that she had, however unwittingly, sent her husband out of reach for four or five hours, when his whole future might depend upon his instantly answering this notice. Whether he had already seen the notice and rashly decided to ignore it, or had not seen it, he might involve himself with some manager irretrievably before he could be got at with a demand which seemed specifically framed to describe his play. She was in despair that there was no means of sending a messenger-boy after him with any chance of finding him. The light comic reliefs which the advertiser would have wished to give the dark phases of her mood were suggested by her reckless energy in whirling herself into her dressing-gown, and hopping out to Maxwell’s desk in the other room, where she dashed off a note in reply to the advertisement in her husband’s name, and then checked herself with the reflection that she had no right to sign his name: even in such a cause she must not do anything wrong. Something must be done, however, right or wrong, and she decided that a very formal note in the third person would involve the least moral trespass. She fixed upon these terms, after several experiments, almost weeping at the time they cost her, when every moment was precious:

Mr. Brice Maxwell writes to Mr. L. Sterne and begs to inform him that he has a play which he believes will meet the requirements of Mr. Sterne, as stated in his advertisement in the Theatrical Register of November the tenth. Mr. Maxwell asks the favor of an interview with Mr. Sterne at any time and place that Mr. Sterne may appoint.

It seemed to her that this violated no law of man or God, or if it did the exigency was such that the action could be forgiven, if not justified. She ransacked Maxwell’s desk for a special delivery stamp, and sent the letter out beyond recall; and then it occurred to her that its opening terms were too much those of a lady addressing a seamstress; but after a good deal of anguish on this point she comforted herself with the hope that a man would not know the form, or at least would not suspect another man of using it offensively.

She passed the time till Maxwell came back, in doubt whether to tell him what she had done. There was no reason why she should not, except that he might have seen the advertisement and decided not to answer it for some reason; but in that case it might be said that he ought to have spoken to her about it. She told him everything at once, but there were many things that he did not tell her till long afterwards; it would be a good thing to let him realize how that felt; besides, it would be a pleasure to keep it and let it burst upon him, if that L. Sterne, whoever he was, asked to see the play. In any case, it would not be a great while that she need keep from him what she had done, but at sight of him when he came in she could hardly be silent. He was gloomy and dispirited, and he confessed that his pleasant experience with Grayson had not been repeated with the other managers. They had all been civil enough, and he had seen three or four of them, but only one had consented to let him even leave his play with him; the others said that it would be useless for them to look at it.

She could not forbear showing him the advertisement she had answered as they sat at lunch; but he glanced at it with disdain, and said there must be some sort of fake in it; if it was some irresponsible fellow getting up a combination he would not scruple to use the ideas of any manuscript submitted to him and work them over to suit himself. Louise could not speak. All heart went out of her; she wanted to cry, and she did not tell what she had done.

Neither of them ate much. He asked her if she was ready to begin on the story with him; she said, “Oh yes;” and she hobbled off into the other room. Then he seemed to remember her hurt for the first time; he had been so full of his failure with the play before. He asked her how she was, and she said much better; and then he stretched himself on the lounge and tried to dictate, and she took her place at his desk and tried to write. But she either ran ahead of him and prompted him, which vexed him, or she lagged so far behind that he lost the thread of what he was saying and became angry. At last she put her head down on the paper and blotted it with her tears.

At that he said, “Oh, you’d better go back to bed,” and then, though he spoke harshly, he lifted her tenderly and half carried her to her room.

XVII.

They did not try working the play into a story again together. Maxwell kept doggedly at it, though he said it was of no use; the thing had taken the dramatic form with inexorable fixity as it first came from his mind; it could be changed, of course, but it could only be changed for the worse, artistically. If he could sell it as a story, the work would not be lost; he would gain the skill that came from doing, in any event, and it would keep him alive under the ill-luck that now seemed to have set in.

None of the managers wanted his play. Some of them seemed to want it less than others; some wanted it less immediately than others; some did not want it after reading; some refused it without reading it; some had their arrangements made for an indefinite time, others in the present uncertain state of affairs could not make any arrangements; some said it was an American play; others that it was un-American in its pessimistic spirit; some found it too literary; others, lacking in imagination. They were nearly all so kind that at first Maxwell was guilty of the folly of trying to persuade them against the reasons they gave; when he realized that these reasons were also excuses, he set his teeth and accepted them in silence.

For a number of days Louise suffered in momentary expectation of a reply from L. Sterne. She thought it would come by district messenger the day she wrote; and for several days afterwards she had the letters brought to her first, so that she could read them, and not disturb Maxwell with them at his work, if it were not necessary. He willingly agreed to that; he saw that it helped to pass the irksome time for her. She did not mean to conceal any answer she should have from L. Sterne, but she meant when the answer came to prepare her husband for it in such sort that he would understand her motive, and though he condemned it, would easily forgive her. But the days went and no letter from L. Sterne came, and after a season of lively indignation at his rudeness, Louise began to forget him a little, though she still kept her surveillance of the mail.

It was always on her conscience, in the meantime, to give some of the first moments of her recovery to going with Maxwell and thanking Mrs. Harley for the kindness she had shown her in her accident. She was the more strenuous in this intention because the duty was so distasteful, and she insisted upon Maxwell’s company, though he argued that he had already done enough himself in thanking her preserver, because she wished to punish a certain reluctance of her own in having him go. She promised herself that she would do everything that was right by the creature; and perhaps she repaired to her presence in rather overwhelming virtue. If this was so, Mrs. Harley showed herself equal to the demand upon her, and was overwhelming in her kind. She not only made nothing of what she had done for Louise, but she made nothing of Louise, and contrived with a few well-directed strokes to give her distinctly the sense of being a chit, a thing Louise was not at all used to. She was apparently one of those women who have no use for persons of their own sex; but few women, even of that sort, could have so promptly relegated Louise to the outside of their interest, or so frankly devoted themselves to Maxwell. The impartial spectator might easily have imagined that it was his ankle which had been strained, and that Louise was at best an intrusive sympathizer. Sometimes Mrs. Harley did not hear what she said; at other times, if she began a response to her, she ended it in a question to him; even when she talked to Louise, her eyes were smouldering upon Maxwell. If this had all or any of it been helpless or ignorant rudeness, it could have been borne and forgiven; but Louise was aware of intention, of perfect intelligence in it; she was sensible of being even more disliked than disliking, and of finally being put to flight with a patronizing benevolence for her complete recovery that was intolerable. What was worse was that, while the woman had been so offensive, she could not wholly rid herself of the feeling that her punishment was in a measure merited, though it was not justice that had dealt with her.

“Well, that is over,” said Maxwell, when they were again by themselves.

“Yes, forever,” sighed Louise, and for once she was not let have the last word.

“I hope you’ll remember that I didn’t want to go.”

At least, they had not misunderstood each other about Mrs. Harley.

Towards the end of the month, Louise’s father and mother came on from Boston. They professed that they had been taken with that wish to see the autumn exhibition at the National Academy which sometimes affects Bostonians, and that their visit had nothing to do with the little hurt that Louise wrote them of when she was quite well of it. They drove over from their hotel the morning they arrived, and she did not know anything of their coming till she heard their voices at the door; her father’s voice was rather husky from the climb to her apartment.

The apartment was looking somewhat frouzy, for the Maxwells breakfasted late, and the house-maid had not had time to put it in order. Louise saw it through her father’s and mother’s eyes with the glance they gave it, and found the rooms ridiculously little, and furnished with cheap Fourteenth Street things; but she bragged all the more noisily of it on that account, and made her mother look out of the window for the pretty view they had from their corner room. Mrs. Hilary pulled her head back from the prospect of the railroad-ridden avenue with silent horror, and Louise burst into a wild laugh. “Well, it isn’t Commonwealth Avenue, mamma; I don’t pretend that, you know.”

“Where’s Maxwell?” asked Hilary, still puffing from the lounge he had sunk upon as soon as he got into the room.

“Oh, he’s down town interviewing a manager about his play.”

“I thought that fellow out West had his play. Or is this a new one?”

“No,” said Louise, very slowly and thoughtfully, “Brice has taken back his play from Mr. Godolphin.” This was true; he had taken it back in a sense. She added, as much to herself as to her father, “But he has got a new play — that he’s working at.”

“I hope he hasn’t been rash with Godolphin; though I always had an idea that it would have been better for him to deal with a manager. It seems more business-like.”

“Oh, much,” said Louise.

After a little while they were more at home with each other; she began to feel herself more their child, and less Maxwell’s wife; the barriers of reluctance against him, which she always knew were up with them, fell away from between them and herself. But her father said they had come to get her and Maxwell to lunch with them at their hotel, and then Louise felt herself on her husband’s side of the fence again. She said no, they must stay with her; that she was sure Brice would be back for lunch; and she wanted to show them her house-keeping. Mrs. Hilary cast her eye about the room at the word, as if she had seen quite enough of it already, and this made Louise laugh again. She was no better in person than the room was, and she felt her mother’s tacit censure apply to her slatternly dressing-gown.

“I know what you’re thinking, mamma. But I got the habit of it when I had my strained ankle.”

“Oh, I’m sure it must be very comfortable,” Mrs. Hilary said, of the dressing-gown. “Is it entirely well now?” she added, of the ankle; and she and Hilary both looked at Louise in a way that would have convinced her that their final anxiety concerning it had brought them to New York, if she had not guessed it already. “The doctor,” and by this she meant their old family doctor, as if he were the only one, “said you couldn’t be too careful.”

“Well, I haven’t been careful,” said Louise, gayly; “but I’m quite well, and you can go back at once, if that’s all, mamma.”

Hilary laughed with her. “You haven’t changed much, Louise.”

Her mother said, in another sense, “I think you look a little pulled down,” and that made her and her father laugh again. She got to playing with him, and poking him, and kissing him, in the way she had with him when she was a girl; it was not so very long ago.

Her mother bore with this for awhile, and then she rose to go.

“You’re not going to stay!” Louise protested.

“Not to-day, my dear. I’ve got some shopping to do before lunch.”

“Well,” said Louise, “I didn’t suppose you would stay the first time, such swells as you and papa. But I shall insist upon your coming to-morrow when you’ve recovered a little from the blow this home of virtuous poverty has given you, and I’ve had a chance to dust and prepare for you. And I’ll tell you what, mamma; Brice and I will come to dinner with you to-night, and we won’t take any refusal. We’ll be with you at seven. How will that do, papa?”

“That will do,” said Hilary, with his arm round her waist, and they kissed each other to clinch the bargain.

“And don’t you two old things go away and put your frosty paws together and say Brice and I are not happy. We do quarrel like cats and dogs every now and then, but the rest of the time we’re the happiest couple in the universe, and an example to parents.”

Hilary would have manifestly liked to stay and have her go on with her nonsense, but his wife took him away.

When Maxwell came in she was so full of their visit that she did not ask him what luck he had with his play, but told him at once they were going to dine with her father and mother. “And I want you to brace up, my dear, and not let them imagine anything.”

“How, anything?” he asked, listlessly.

“Oh, nothing. About your play not going perfectly. I didn’t think it necessary to go into particulars with them, and you needn’t. Just pass it over lightly if they ask you anything about it. But they won’t.”

Maxwell did not look so happy as he might at the prospect of dining with his wife’s father and mother, but he did not say anything disagreeable, and after an instant of silent resentment Louise did not say anything disagreeable either. In fact, she devoted herself to avoiding any displeasures with him, and she arrived with him at the Hilarys’ hotel on perfectly good terms, and, as far as he was concerned, in rather good spirits.

Upon the whole, they had a very good time. Hilary made occasion to speak to Maxwell of his letters to the Abstract, and told him they were considered by far the best letters of the kind published anywhere, which meant anywhere in Boston.

“You do that sort of thing so well, newspaper writing,” he continued, with a slyness that was not lost upon Louise, though Maxwell was ignorant of his drift, “that I wonder you don’t sometimes want to take it up again.”

“It’s well enough,” said Maxwell, who was gratified by his praise.

“By the way,” said Hilary, “I met your friend, Mr. Ricker, the other day, and he spoke most cordially about you. I fancy he would be very glad to have you back.”

“In the old way? I would rather be excused.”

“No, from what he said, I thought he would like your writing in the editorial page.”

Maxwell looked pleased. “Ricker’s always been very good, but he has very little influence on the Abstract. He has no money interest in the paper.”

Hilary said, with the greatest artfulness, “I wonder he doesn’t buy in. I hear it can be done.”

“Not by Ricker, for the best of all possible reasons,” said Maxwell, with a laugh.

Louise could hardly wait till she had parted from her father and mother before she began on her husband: “You goose! Didn’t you see that papa was hinting at buying you a share in the Abstract?”

“He was very modest about it, then; I didn’t see anything of the kind.”

“Oh, do you think you are the only modest man? Papa is very modest, and he wouldn’t make you an offer outright, unless he saw that you would like it. But I know that was what he was coming to, and if you’ll let me—”

A sentiment of a reluctance rather than a refusal was what made itself perceptible from his arm to hers, as they hurried along the street together, and Louise would not press the question till he spoke again.

He did not speak till they were in the train on their way home. Then he said, “I shouldn’t care to have a money interest in a newspaper. It would tie me up to it, and load me down with cares I should hate. It wouldn’t be my real life.”

“Yes,” said his wife, but when they got into their little apartment she cast an eye, opened to its meanness and narrowness, over the common belongings, and wondered if he would ask himself whether this was her real life. But she did not speak, though she was apt to speak out most things that she thought.

XVIII.

Some people began to call, old friends of her mother, whose visit to New York seemed to have betrayed to them the fact of Louise’s presence for the first time, and some friends of her own, who had married, and come to New York to live, and who said they had just got back to town long enough to learn that she was there. These all reproached her for not having let them know sooner where she was, and they all more or less followed up their reproaches with the invitations which she dreaded because of Maxwell’s aversion for them. But she submitted them to him, and submitted to his refusal to go with her, and declined them. In her heart she thought he was rather ungracious, but she did not say so, though in two or three cases of people whom she liked she coaxed him a little to go with her. Meeting her mother and talking over the life she used to lead in Boston, and the life so many people were leading there still, made her a little hungry for society; she would have liked well enough to find herself at a dinner again, and she would have felt a little dancing after the dinner no hardship; but she remembered the promise she had made herself not to tease Maxwell about such things. So she merely coaxed him, and he so far relented as to ask her why she could not go without him, and that hurt her, and she said she never would go without him. All the same, when there came an invitation for lunch, from a particularly nice friend of her girlhood, she hesitated and was lost. She had expected, somehow, that it was going to be a very little lunch, but she found it a very large one, in the number of people, and after the stress of accounting for her husband’s failure to come with her, she was not sorry to have it so. She inhaled with joy the atmosphere of the flower-scented rooms; her eye dwelt with delight on their luxurious and tasteful appointments, the belongings of her former life, which seemed to emerge in them from the past and claim her again; the women in their chic New York costumes and their miracles of early winter hats hailed her a long-lost sister by every graceful movement and cultivated tone; the correctly tailored and agreeably mannered men had polite intelligence of a world that Maxwell never would and never could be part of; the talk of the little amusing, unvital things that began at once was more precious to her than the problems which the austere imagination of her husband dealt with; it suddenly fatigued her to think how hard she had tried to sympathize with his interest in them. Her heart leaped at sight of the long, rose-heaped table, with its glitter of glass and silver, and the solemn perfection of the serving-men; a spectacle not important in itself was dear to her from association with gayeties, which now, for a wicked moment, seemed to her better than love.

There were all sorts of people: artists and actors, as well as people of fashion. Her friend had given her some society notable to go out with, but she had appointed for the chair next her, on the other hand, a young man in a pretty pointed beard, whom she introduced across from the head of the table as soon as she could civilly take the notable to herself. Louise did not catch his name, and it seemed presently that he had not heard hers, but their acquaintance prospered without this knowledge. He made some little jokes, which she promptly responded to, and they talked awhile as if they were both New-Yorkers, till she said, at some remark of his, “But I am not a New-Yorker,” and then he said, “Well, neither am I,” and offered to tell her what he was if she would tell him what she was.

“Oh, I’m from Boston, of course,” she answered, but then, instead of saying where he was from, he broke out:

“Now I will fulfil my vow!”

“Your vow? What is your vow?”

“To ask the first Boston person I met if that Boston person knew anything about another Boston person, who wrote a most remarkable play I saw in the fall out at home.”

“A play?” said Louise, with a total loss of interest in the gentleman’s city or country.

“Yes, by a Boston man named Maxwell—”

Louise stared at him, and if their acquaintance had been a little older, she might have asked him to come off. As it was she could not speak, and she let him go on.

“I don’t know when I’ve ever had a stronger impression in the theatre than I had from that play. Perfectly modern, and perfectly American.” He briefly sketched it. “It was like a terrible experience on the tragic side, and on the other side it was a rapture. I never saw love-making on the stage before that made me wish to be a lover—”

A fire-red flew over Louise’s face, and she said, almost snubbingly, as if he had made some unwarrantable advance: “I think I had better not let you go on. It was my husband who wrote that play. I am Mrs. Maxwell.”

“Mrs. Maxwell! You are Mrs. Maxwell?” he gasped, and she could not doubt the honesty of his amaze.

His confusion was so charming that she instantly relented. “Of course I should like to have you go on all day as you’ve begun, but there’s no telling what exceptions you might be going to make later. Where did you see my husband’s play?”

“In Midland—”

“What! You are not — you can’t be — Mr. Ray?”

“I am — I can,” he returned, gleefully, and now Louise impulsively gave him her hand under the table-cloth.

The man[oe]uvre caught the eye of the hostess. “A bet?” she asked.

“Better,” cried Louise, not knowing her pun, “a thousand times,” and she turned without further explanation to the gentleman: “When I tell Mr. Maxwell of this he will suffer as he ought, and that’s saying a great deal, for not coming with me to-day. To think of it’s being you!”

“Ah, but to think of it’s being he! You acquit me of the poor taste of putting up a job?”

“Oh, of anything you want to be acquitted of! What crime would you prefer? There are whole deluges of mercy for you. But now go on, and tell me everything you thought about the play.”

“I’d rather you’d tell me what you know about the playwright.”

“Everything, of course, and nothing.” She added the last words from a sudden, poignant conviction. “Isn’t that the way with the wives of you men of genius?”

“Am I a man of genius?”

“You’re literary.”

“Oh, literary, yes. But I’m not married.”

“You’re determined to get out of it, somehow. Tell me about Midland. It has filled such a space in our imagination! You can’t think what a comfort and stay you have been to us! But why in Midland? Is it a large place?”

“Would it take such a very big one to hold me? It’s the place I brought myself up in, and it’s very good to me, and so I live there. I don’t think it has any vast intellectual or æsthetic interests, but there are very nice people there, very cultivated, some of them, and very well read. After all, you don’t need a great many people; three or four will do.”

“And have you always lived there?”

“I lived a year or so in New York, and I manage to get on here some time every winter. The rest of the year Midland is quite enough for me. It’s gay at times; there’s a good deal going on; and I can write there as well as anywhere, and better than in New York. Then, you know, in a small way I’m a prophet in my own country, perhaps because I was away from it for awhile. It’s very pretty. But it’s very base of you to make me talk about myself when I’m so anxious to hear about Mr. Maxwell.”

“And do you spend all your time writing Ibsen criticisms of Ibsen plays?” Louise pursued against his protest.

“I do some other kind of writing.”

“As—”

“Oh, no! I’m not here to interview myself.”

“Oh, but you ought. I know you’ve written something — some novel. Your name was so familiar from the first.” Mr. Ray laughed and shook his head in mockery of her cheap device. “You mustn’t be vexed because I’m so vague about it. I’m very ignorant.”

“You said you were from Boston.”

“But there are Bostons and Bostons. The Boston that I belonged to never hears of American books till they are forgotten!”

“Ah, how famous I must be there!”

“I see you are determined to be bad. But I remember now; it was a play. Haven’t you written a play?” He held up three fingers. “I knew it! What was it?”

“My plays,” said the young fellow, with a mock of superiority, “have never been played. I’ve been told that they are above the heads of an audience. It’s a great consolation. But now, really, about Mr. Maxwell’s. When is it to be given here? I hoped very much that I might happen on the very time.”

Louise hesitated a moment, and then she said: “You know he has taken it back from Godolphin.” It was not so hard to say this as it was at first, but it still required resolution.

“Oh, I’m so glad!” said Mr. Ray. “I never thought he appreciated it. He was so anxious to make his part all in all that he would have been willing to damage the rest of it irretrievably. I could see, from the way he talked of it, that he was mortally jealous of Salome; and the girl who did that did it very sweetly and prettily. Who has got the play now?”

“Well,” said Louise, with rather a painful smile, “nobody has it at present. We’re trying to stir up strife for it among managers.”

“What play is that?” asked her friend, the hostess, and all that end of the table became attentive, as any fashionable company will at the mention of a play; books may be more or less out of the range of society, but plays never at all.

“My husband’s,” said Louise, meekly.

“Why, does your husband write plays?” cried the lady.

“What did you think he did?” returned Louise, resentfully; she did not in the least know what her friend’s husband did, and he was no more there to speak for himself than her own.

“He’s written a very great play,” Mr. Ray spoke up with generous courage; “the very greatest American play I have seen. I don’t say ever written, for I’ve written some myself that I haven’t seen yet,” he added, and every one laughed at his bit of self-sacrifice. “But Mr. Maxwell’s play is just such a play as I would have written if I could — large, and serious, and charming.”

He went on about it finely, and Louise’s heart swelled with pride. She wished Maxwell could have been there, but if he had been, of course Mr. Ray would not have spoken so freely.

The hostess asked him where he had seen it, and he said in Midland.

Then she said, “We must all go,” and she had the effect of rising to do so, but it was only to leave the men to their tobacco.

Louise laid hold of her in the drawing-room: “Who is he? What is he?”

“A little dear, isn’t he?”

“Yes, of course. But what has he done?”

“Why, he wrote a novel — I forget the name, but I have it somewhere. It made a great sensation. But surely you must know what it was?”

“No, no,” Louise lamented. “I am ashamed to say I don’t.”

When the men joined the ladies, she lingered long enough to thank Mr. Ray, and try to make him tell her the name of his novel. She at least made him promise to let them know the next time he was in New York, and she believed all he said of his regret that he was going home that night. He sent many sweet messages to Maxwell, whom he wanted to talk with about his play, and tell him all he had thought about it. He felt sure that some manager would take it and bring it out in New York, and again he exulted that it was out of the actor’s hands. A manager might not have an artistic interest in it; an actor could only have a personal interest in it.

XIX.

Louise came home in high spirits. The world seemed to have begun to move again. It was full of all sorts of gay hopes, or at least she was, and she was impatient to impart them to Maxwell. Now she decided that her great office in his life must be to cheer him up, to supply that spring of joyousness which was so lacking in him, and which he never could do any sort of work without. She meant to make him go into society with her. It would do him good, and he would shine. He could talk as well as Mr. Ray, and if he would let himself go, he could be as charming.

She rushed in to speak with him, and was vexed to find a strange man sitting in the parlor alone. The stranger rose at her onset, and then, when she confusedly retreated, he sank into his chair again. She had seen him black against the window, and had not made out any feature or expression of his face.

The maid explained that it was a gentleman who had called to see Mr. Maxwell earlier in the day, and the last time had asked if he might sit down and wait for him. He had been waiting only a few minutes.

“But who is he?” demanded Louise, with a provisional indignation in case it should be a liberty on some unauthorized person’s part. “Didn’t he give you a card?”

He had given the girl a card, and she now gave it to Mrs. Maxwell. It bore the name Mr. Lawrence Sterne, which Louise read with much the same emotion as if it had been Mr. William Shakespeare. She suspected what her husband would have called a fake of some sort, and she felt a little afraid. She did not like the notion of the man’s sitting there in her parlor while she had nobody with her but the girl. He might be all right, and he might even be a gentleman, but the dark bulk which had risen up against the window and stood holding a hat in its hand was not somehow a gentlemanly bulk, the hat was not definitively a gentleman’s hat, and the baldness which had shone against the light was not exactly what you would have called a gentleman’s baldness. Clearly, however, the only thing to do was to treat the event as one of entire fitness till it proved itself otherwise, and Louise returned to the parlor with an air of lady-*like inquiry, expressed in her look and movement; if this effect was not wholly unmixed with patronage, it still was kind.

“I am sorry,” she said, “that my husband is out, and I am sorry to say that I don’t know just when he will be at home.” She stood and the man had risen again, with his portly frame and his invisible face between her and the light again. “If I could be of any use in giving him a message—” She stopped; it was really sending the man out of the house, and she could not do that; it was not decent. She added, “Or if you don’t mind waiting a few minutes longer—”

She sat down, but the man did not. He said: “I can’t wait any longer just now; but if Mr. Maxwell would like to see me, I am at the Coleman House.” She looked at him as if she did not understand, and he went on: “If he doesn’t recall my name he’ll remember answering my advertisement, some weeks ago in the Theatrical Register, for a play.”

“Oh yes!” said Louise. This was the actor whom she had written to on behalf of Maxwell. With electrical suddenness and distinctness she now recalled the name, L. Sterne, along with all the rest, though the card of Mr. Lawrence Sterne had not stirred her sleeping consciousness. She had always meant to tell Maxwell what she had done, but she was always waiting for something to come of it, and when nothing came of it, she did not tell; she had been so disgusted at the mere notion of answering the man’s advertisement. Now, here was the man himself, and he had to be answered, and that would probably be worse than answering his advertisement. “I remember,” she said, provisionally, but with the resolution to speak exactly the truth; “I wrote to you for Mr. Maxwell,” which did not satisfy her as the truth ought to have done.

“Well, then, I wish you would please tell him that I didn’t reply to his letter because it kept following me from place to place, and I only got it at the Register office this morning.”

“I will tell Mr. Maxwell,” said Louise.

“I should be glad to see his play, if he still has it to dispose of. From what Mr. Grayson has told me of it, I think it might — I think I should like to see it. It might suit the — the party I am acting for,” he added, letting himself go.

“Then you are not the — the — star?”

“I am the manager for the star.”

“Oh,” said Louise, with relief. The fact seemed to put another complexion on the affair. A distaste which she had formed for Mr. Sterne personally began to cede to other feelings. If he was manager for the star, he must be like other managers, such as Maxwell was willing to deal with, and if he knew Mr. Grayson he must be all right. “I will tell Mr. Maxwell,” she said, with no provisionality this time.

Mr. Sterne prepared to go, so far as buttoning his overcoat and making some paces towards the door gave token of his intention. Louise followed him with a politeness which was almost gratitude to him for reinstating her in her own esteem. He seemed to have atmospheric intelligence of her better will towards him, for he said, as if it were something she might feel an interest in: “If I can get a play that will suit, I shall take the road with a combination immediately after New Year’s. I don’t know whether you have ever seen the lady I want the play for.”

“The lady?” gasped Louise.

“She isn’t very well-known in the East yet, but she will be. She wants a play of her own. As I understand Mr. Grayson, there is a part in Mr. Maxwell’s play that would fit her to a T, or could be fitted to her; these things always need some little adaptation.” Mr. Sterne’s manner became easier and easier. “Curious thing about it is that you are next door — or next floor — neighbors, here. Mrs. Harley.”

“We — we have met her,” said Louise in a hollow murmur.

“Well, you can’t have any idea what Yolande Havisham is from Mrs. Harley. I shall be at the Coleman the whole evening, if Mr. Maxwell would like to call. Well, good-morning,” said Mr. Sterne, and he got himself away before Louise could tell him that Maxwell would never give his play to a woman; before she could say that it was already as good as accepted by another manager; before she could declare that if no manager ever wanted it, still, as far as Mrs. Harley was concerned, with her smouldering eyes, it would always be in negotiation; before she could form or express any utter and final refusal and denial of his abominable hopes.

It remained for her either to walk quietly down to the North River and drown herself or to wait her husband’s return and tell him everything and throw herself on his mercy, implore him, adjure him, not to give that woman his play; and then to go into a decline that would soon rid him of the clog and hinderance she had always been to him. It flashed through her turmoil of emotion that it was already dark, in spite of Mr. Sterne’s good-morning at parting, and that some one might speak to her on the way to the river; and then she thought how Maxwell would laugh when she told him the fear of being spoken to had kept her from suicide; and she sat waiting for him to come with such an inward haggardness that she was astonished, at sight of herself in the glass, to find that she wan looking very much as usual. Maxwell certainly noticed no difference when he came in and flung himself wearily on the lounge, and made no attempt to break the silence of their meeting; they had kissed, of course, but had not spoken.

She was by no means sure what she was going to do; she had hoped there would be some leading on his part that would make it easy for her to do right, whatever the right was, but her heart sank at sight of him. He looked defeated and harassed. But there was no help for it. She must speak, and speak unaided; the only question was whether she had better speak before dinner or after. She decided to speak after dinner, and then all at once she was saying: “Brice, I have brought something dreadful on myself.”

“At the lunch?” he asked, wearily, and she saw that he thought she had been making some silly speech she was ashamed of.

“Oh, if it had only been at the lunch!” she cried. “No, it was here — here in this very room.”

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you, Louise,” he said, lying back and shutting his eyes.

“Then I must tell you!” And she came out with the whole story, which she had to repeat in parts before he could understand it. When he did understand that she had answered an advertisement in the Register, in his name, he opened his eyes and sat up.

“Well?” he said.

“Well, don’t you see how wrong and wicked that was?”

“I’ve heard of worse things.”

“Oh, don’t say so, dearest! It was living a lie, don’t you see. And I’ve been living a lie ever since, and now I’m justly punished for not telling you long ago.”

She told him of the visit she had just had, and who the man was, and whom he wanted the play for; and now a strange thing happened with her. She did not beseech him not to give his play to that woman; on the contrary she said: “And now, Brice, I want you to let her have it. I know she will play Salome magnificently, and that will make the fortune of the piece, and it will give you such a name that anything you write after this will get accepted; and you can satisfy your utmost ambition, and you needn’t mind me — no — or think of me at all any more than if I were the dust of the earth; and I am! Will you?”

He got up from the lounge and began to walk the floor, as he always did when he was perplexed; and she let him walk up and down in silence as long as she could bear it. At last she said: “I am in earnest, Brice, I am indeed, and if you don’t do it, if you let me or my feelings stand in your way, in the slightest degree, I will never forgive you. Will you go straight down to the Coleman House, as soon as you’ve had your dinner, and tell that man he can have your play for that woman?”

“No,” said Maxwell, stopping in his walk, and looking at her in a dazed way.

Her heart seemed to leap into her throat. “Why?” she choked.

“Because Godolphin is here.”

“Godo—” she began; and she cast herself on the lounge that Maxwell had vacated, and plunged her face in the pillow and sobbed, “Oh, cruel, cruel, cruel! Oh, cruel, cruel, cruel, cruel!”

XX.

Maxwell stood looking at his wife with the cold disgust which hysterics are apt to inspire in men after they have seen them more than once. “I suppose that when you are ready you will tell me what is the matter with you.”

“To let me suffer so, when you knew all the time that Godolphin was here, and you needn’t give your play to that creature at all,” wailed Louise.

“How did I know you were suffering?” he retorted. “And how do I know that I can do anything with Godolphin?”

“Oh, I know you can!” She sprang up with the greatest energy, and ran into the bedroom to put in order her tumbled hair; she kept talking to him from there. “I want you to go down and see him the instant you have had dinner; and don’t let him escape you. Tell him he can have the play on any terms. I believe he is the only one who can make it go. He was the first to appreciate the idea, and — Frida!” she called into the hall towards the kitchen, “we will have dinner at once, now, please — he always talked so intelligently about it; and now if he’s where you can superintend the rehearsals, it will be the greatest success. How in the world did you find out he was here?”

She came out of her room, in surprising repair, with this question, and the rest of their talk went on through dinner.

It appeared that Maxwell had heard of Godolphin’s presence from Grayson, whom he met in the street, and who told him that Godolphin had made a complete failure of his venture. His combination had gone to pieces at Cleveland, and his company were straggling back to New York as they could. Godolphin was deeply in debt to them all, and to everybody else; and yet the manager spoke cordially of him, and with no sort of disrespect, as if his insolvency were only an affair of the moment, which he would put right. Louise took the same view of it, and she urged Maxwell to consider how Godolphin had promptly paid him, and would always do so.

“Probably I got the pay of some poor devil who needed it worse,” said Maxwell.

She said, “Nonsense! The other actors will take care of all that. They are so good to each other,” and she blamed Maxwell for not going to see Godolphin at once.

“That was what I did,” he answered, “but he wasn’t at home. He was to be at home after dinner.”

“Well, that makes it all the more providential,” said Louise; her piety always awoke in view of favorable chances. “You mustn’t lose any time. Better not wait for the coffee.”

“I think I’ll wait for the coffee,” said Maxwell. “It’s no use going there before eight.”

“No,” she consented. “Where is he stopping?”

“At the Coleman House.”

“The Coleman House? Then if that wretch should see you?” She meant the manager of Mrs. Harley.

“He wouldn’t know me, probably,” Maxwell returned, scornfully. “But if you think there’s any danger of his laying hold of me, and getting the play away before Godolphin has a chance of refusing it, I’ll go masked. I’m tired of thinking about it. What sort of lunch did you have?”

“I had the best time in the world. You ought to have come with me, Brice. I shall make you, the next one. Oh, and guess who was there! Mr. Ray!”

“Our Mr. Ray?” Maxwell breathlessly demanded.

“There is no other, and he’s the sweetest little dear in the world. He isn’t so big as you are, even, and he’s such a merry spirit; he hasn’t the bulk your gloom gives you. I want you to be like him, Brice. I don’t see why you shouldn’t go into society, too.”

“If I’d gone into society to-day, I should have missed seeing Grayson, and shouldn’t have known Godolphin was in town.”

“Well, that is true, of course. But if you get your play into Godolphin’s hands, you’ll have to show yourself a little, so that nice people will be interested in it. You ought to have heard Mr. Ray celebrate it. He piped up before the whole table.”

Louise remembered what Ray said very well, and she repeated it to a profound joy in Maxwell. It gave him an exquisite pleasure, and it flattered him to believe that, as the hostess had said in response, they, the nice people, must see it, though he had his opinion of nice people, apart from their usefulness in seeing his play. To reward his wife for it all, he rose as soon as he had drunk his coffee, and went out to put on his hat and coat. She went with him, and saw that he put them on properly, and did not go off with half his coat-collar turned up. After he got his hat on, she took it off to see whether his cow-lick was worse than usual.

“Why, good heavens! Godolphin’s seen me before, and besides, I’m not going to propose marriage to him,” he protested.

“Oh, it’s much more serious than that!” she sighed. “Anybody would take you, dear, but it’s your play we want him to take — or take back.”

When Maxwell reached the hotel, he did not find Godolphin there. He came back twice; then, as something in his manner seemed to give Maxwell authority, the clerk volunteered to say that he thought he might find the actor at the Players’ Club. In this hope he walked across to Gramercy Park. Godolphin had been dining there, and when he got Maxwell’s name, he came half way down the stairs to meet him. He put his arm round him to return to the library.

There happened to be no one else there, and he made Maxwell sit down in an arm-chair fronting his own, and give an account of himself since they parted. He asked after Mrs. Maxwell’s health, and as far as Maxwell could make out he was sincere in the quest. He did not stop till he had asked, with the most winning and radiant smile, “And the play, what have you done with the play?”

He was so buoyant that Maxwell could not be heavy about it, and he answered as gayly: “Oh, I fancy I have been waiting for you to come on and take it.”

Godolphin did not become serious, but he became if possible more sincere. “Do you really think I could do anything with it?”

“If you can’t nobody can.”

“Why, that is very good of you, very good indeed, Maxwell. Do you know, I have been thinking about that play. You see, the trouble was with the Salome. The girl I had for the part was a thoroughly nice girl, but she hadn’t the weight for it. She did the comic touches charmingly, but when it came to the tragedy she wasn’t there. I never had any doubt that I could create the part of Haxard. It’s a noble part. It’s the greatest rôle on the modern stage. It went magnificently in Chicago — with the best people. You saw what the critics said of it?”

“No; you didn’t send me the Chicago papers.” Maxwell did not say that all this was wholly different from what Godolphin had written him when he renounced the play. Yet he felt that Godolphin was honest then and was honest now. It was another point of view; that was all.

“Ah, I thought I sent them. There was some adverse criticism of the play as a whole, but there was only one opinion of Haxard. And you haven’t done anything with the piece yet?”

“No, nothing.”

“And you think I could do Haxard? You still have faith in me?”

“As much faith as I ever had,” said Maxwell; and Godolphin found nothing ambiguous in a thing certainly susceptible of two interpretations.

“That is very good of you, Maxwell; very good.” He lifted his fine head and gazed absently a moment at the wall before him. “Well, then I will tell you what I will do, Mr. Maxwell; I will take the play.”

“You will!”

“Yes; that is if you think I can do the part.”

“Why, of course!”

“And if — if there could be some changes — very slight changes — made in the part of Salome. It needs subduing.” Godolphin said this as if he had never suggested anything of the kind before; as if the notion were newly evolved from his experience.

“I will do what I can, Mr. Godolphin,” Maxwell promised, while he knitted his brows in perplexity “But I do think that the very strength of Salome gives relief to Haxard — gives him greater importance.”

“It may be so, dramatically. But theatrically, it detracts from him. Haxard must be the central figure in the eye of the audience from first to last.”

Maxwell mused for a moment of discouragement. They were always coming back to that; very likely Godolphin was right; but Maxwell did not know just how to subdue the character of Salome so as to make her less interesting. “Do you think that was what gave you bad houses in Chicago — the double interest, or the weakened interest in Haxard?”

“I think so,” said Godolphin.

“Were the houses bad — comparatively?”

Godolphin took a little note-book out of his breast-pocket. “Here are my dates. I opened the first night, the tenth of November, with Haxard, but we papered the house thoroughly, and we made a good show to the public and the press. There were four hundred and fifty dollars in it. The next night there were three hundred; the next night, two eighty; Wednesday matinée, less than two hundred. That night we put on ‘Virginius,’ and played to eight hundred dollars; Thursday night, with the ‘Lady of Lyons,’ we had eleven hundred; Friday night, we gave the ‘Lady’ to twelve hundred; Saturday afternoon with the same piece, we took in eleven hundred and fifty; Saturday night, with ‘Ingomar,’ we had fifteen hundred dollars in the house, and a hundred people standing.” Maxwell listened with a drooping head; he was bitterly mortified. “But it was too late then,” said Godolphin, with a sigh, as he shut his hook.

“Do you mean,” demanded Maxwell, “that my piece had crippled you so that — that—”

“I didn’t say that, Mr. Maxwell. I never meant to let you see the figures. But you asked me.”

“Oh, you’re quite right,” said Maxwell. He thought how he had blamed the actor, in his impatience with him, for not playing his piece oftener — and called him fool and thought him knave for not doing it all the time, as Godolphin had so lavishly promised to do. He caught at a straw to save himself from sinking with shame. “But the houses, were they so bad everywhere?”

Godolphin checked himself in a movement to take out his note-book again; Maxwell had given him such an imploring glance. “They were pretty poor everywhere. But it’s been a bad season with a good many people.”

“No, no,” cried Maxwell. “You did very well with the other plays, Godolphin. Why do you want to touch the thing again? It’s been ruinous to you so far. Give it up! Come! I can’t let you have it!”

Godolphin laughed, and all his beautiful white teeth shone. There was a rich, wholesome red in his smoothly shaven cheeks; he was a real pleasure to the eye. “I believe it would go better in New York. I’m not afraid to try it. You mustn’t take away my last chance of retrieving the season. Hair of the dog, you know. Have you seen Grayson lately?”

“Yes, I saw him this afternoon. It was he that told me you were in town.”

“Ah, yes.”

“And Godolphin, I’ve got it on my conscience, if you do take the play, to tell you that I offered it to Grayson, and he refused it. I think you ought to know that; it’s only fair; and for the matter of that, it’s been kicking round all the theatres in New York.”

“Dear boy!” said Godolphin, caressingly, and with a smile that was like a benediction, “that doesn’t make the least difference.”

“Well, I wished you to know,” said Maxwell, with a great load off his mind.

“Yes, I understand that. Will you drink anything, or smoke anything? Or — I forgot! I hate all that, too. But you’ll join me in a cup of tea downstairs?” They descended to the smoking-room below, and Godolphin ordered the tea, and went on talking with a gay irrelevance till it came. Then he said, as he poured out the two cups of it: “The fact is, Grayson is going in with me, if I do your piece.” This was news to Maxwell, and yet he was somehow not surprised at it. “I dare say he told you?”

“No, he didn’t give me any hint of it. He simply told me that you were in town, and where you were.”

“Ah, that was like Grayson. Queer fish.”

“But I’m mighty glad to know it. You can make it go, together, if any power on earth can do it; and if it fails,” Maxwell added, “I shall have the satisfaction of ruining some one else this time.”

“Well, Grayson has made nearly as bad a mess of it as I have, this season,” said Godolphin. “He’s got to take off that thing he has going now, and it’s a question of what he shall put on. It will be an experiment with Haxard, but I believe it will be a successful experiment. I have every confidence in that play.” Godolphin looked up, his lips set convincingly, and with the air of a man who had stood unfalteringly by his opinion from the first. “Now, if you will excuse me, I will tell you what I think ought to be done to it.”

“By all means,” said Maxwell; “I shall be glad to do anything you wish, or that I can.”

Godolphin poured out a cloudy volume of suggestion, with nothing clear in it but the belief that the part of Haxard ought to be fattened. He recurred to all the structural impossibilities that he had ever desired, and there was hardly a point in the piece that he did not want changed. At the end he said: “But all these things are of no consequence, comparatively speaking. What we need is a woman who can take the part of Salome, and play it with all the feminine charm that you’ve given it, and yet keep it strictly in the background, or thoroughly subordinated to the interest of Haxard.”

For all that Godolphin seemed to have learned from his experience with the play, Maxwell might well have thought they were still talking of it at Magnolia. It was a great relief to his prepossessions in the form of conclusions to have Grayson appear, with the air of looking for some one, and of finding the object of his search in Godolphin. He said he was glad to see Maxwell, too, and they went on talking of the play. From the talk of the other two Maxwell perceived that the purpose of doing his play had already gone far with them; but they still spoke of it as something that would be very good if the interest could be unified in it. Suddenly the manager broke out: “Look here, Godolphin! I have an idea! Why not frankly accept the inevitable! I don’t believe Mr. Maxwell can make the play different from what it is, structurally, and I don’t believe the character of Salome can be subdued or subordinated. Then why not play Salome as strongly as possible, and trust to her strength to enhance Haxard’s effect, instead of weakening it?”

Godolphin smiled towards Maxwell: “That was your idea.”

“Yes,” said Maxwell, and he kept himself from falling on Grayson’s neck for joy.

“It might do,” the actor assented with smiling eagerness and tolerant superiority. “But whom could you get for such a Salome as that?”

“Well, there’s only one woman for it,” said Grayson.

“Yolande Havisham?”

The name made Maxwell’s heart stop. He started forward to say that Mrs. Harley could not have the part, when the manager said: “And we couldn’t get her. Sterne has engaged her to star in his combination. By the way, he was looking for you to-day, Mr. Maxwell.”

“I missed him,” answered Maxwell, with immense relief. “But I should not have let him have the piece while I had the slightest hope of your taking it.”

Neither the manager nor the actor was perhaps greatly moved by his generous preference, though they both politely professed to be so. They went on to canvass the qualities and reputations of all the other actresses attainable, and always came back to Yolande Havisham, who was unattainable; Sterne would never give her up in the world, even if she were willing to give up the chance he was offering her. But she was the one woman who could do Salome.

They decided that they must try to get Miss Pettrell, who had played the part with Godolphin, and who had done it with refinement, if not with any great force. When they had talked to this conclusion, Grayson proposed getting something to eat, and the others refused, but they went into the dining-room with him, where he showed Maxwell the tankards of the members hanging on the walls over their tables — Booth’s tankard, Salvini’s, Irving’s, Jefferson’s. He was surprised that Maxwell was not a member of the Players, and said that he must be; it was the only club for him, if he was going to write for the stage. He came out with them and pointed out several artists whose fame Maxwell knew, and half a dozen literary men, among them certain playwrights; they were all smoking, and the place was blue with the fumes of their cigars. The actors were coming in from the theatres for supper, and Maxwell found himself with his friends in a group with a charming old comedian who was telling brief, vivid little stories, and sketching character, with illustrations from his delightful art. He was not swagger, like some of the younger men who stood about with their bell-crowned hats on, before they went into supper; and two or three other elderly actors who sat round him and took their turn in the anecdote and mimicry looked, with their smooth-shaven faces, like old-fashioned ministers. Godolphin, who was like a youthful priest, began to tell stories, too; and he told very good ones admirably, but without appearing to feel their quality, though he laughed loudly at them with the rest.

When Maxwell refused every one’s wish to have him eat or drink something, and said good-night, Grayson had already gone in to his supper, and Godolphin rose and smiled so fondly upon him that Maxwell felt as if the actor had blessed him. But he was less sure than in the beginning of the evening that the play was again in Godolphin’s hands; and he had to confirm himself from his wife’s acceptance of the facts in the belief that it was really so.

XXI.

Louise asked Maxwell, as soon as they had established their joint faith, whom Godolphin was going to get to play Salome, and he said that Grayson would like to re-engage Miss Pettrell, though he had a theory that the piece would be strengthened, and the effect of Haxard enhanced, if they could have a more powerful Salome.

“Mr. Ray told me at lunch,” said Louise, impartially but with an air of relief, “that in all the love-making she was delightful; but when it came to the tragedy, she wasn’t there.”

“Grayson seemed to think that if she could be properly rehearsed, she could be brought up to it,” Maxwell interposed.

“Mr. Ray said she was certainly very refined, and her Salome was always a lady. And that is the essential thing,” Louise added, decisively. “I don’t at all agree with Mr. Grayson about having Salome played so powerfully. I think Mr. Godolphin is right.”

“For Heaven’s sake don’t tell him so!” said Maxwell. “We have had trouble enough to get him under.”

“Indeed, I shall tell him so! I think he ought to know how we feel.”

“We?” repeated Maxwell.

“Yes. What we want for Salome is sweetness and delicacy and refinement; for she has to do rather a bold thing, and yet keep herself a lady.”

“Well, it may be too late to talk of Miss Pettrell now,” said Maxwell. “Your favorite Godolphin parted enemies with her.”

“Oh, stage enemies! Mr. Grayson can get her, and he must.”

“I’ll tell him what your orders are,” said Maxwell.

The next day he saw the manager, but nothing had been done, and the affair seemed to be hanging fire again. In the evening, while he was talking it over with his wife in a discouragement which they could not shake off, a messenger came to him with a letter from the Argosy Theatre, which he tore nervously open.

“What is it, dear?” asked his wife, tenderly. “Another disappointment?”

“Not exactly,” he returned, with a husky voice, and after a moment of faltering he gave her the letter. It was from Grayson, and it was to the effect that he had seen Sterne, and that Sterne had agreed to a proposition he had made him, to take Maxwell’s play on the road, if it succeeded, and in view of this had agreed to let Yolande Havisham take the part of Salome.

Godolphin was going to get all his old company together as far as possible, with the exception of Miss Pettrell, and there was to be little or no delay, because the actors had mostly got back to New York, and were ready to renew their engagements. That no time might be lost, Grayson asked Maxwell to come the next morning and read the piece to such of them as he could get together in the Argosy greenroom, and give them his sense of it.

Louise handed him back the letter, and said, with dangerous calm: “You might save still more time by going down to Mrs. Harley’s apartment and reading it to her at once.” Maxwell was miserably silent, and she pursued: “May I ask whether you knew they were going to try to get her?”

“No,” said Maxwell.

“Was there anything said about her?”

“Yes, there was, last night. But both Grayson and Godolphin regarded it as impossible to get her.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that they would like to get her?”

“You knew it, already. And I thought, as they both had given up the hope of getting her, I wouldn’t mention the subject. It’s always been a very disagreeable one.”

“Yes.” Louise sat quiet, and then she said: “What a long misery your play has been to me!”

“You haven’t helped make it any great joy to me,” said Maxwell, bitterly.

She began to weep, silently, and he stood looking down at her in utter wretchedness. “Well,” he said at last, “what shall I do about it?”

Louise wiped her tears, and cleared up cold, as we say of the weather. She rose, as if to leave the room, and said, haughtily: “You shall do as you think best for yourself. You must let them have the play, and let them choose whom they think best for the part. But you can’t expect me to come to see it.”

“Then that unsays all the rest. If you don’t come to see it, I sha’n’t, and I shall not let them have the piece. That is all. Louise,” he entreated, after these first desperate words, “can’t we grapple with this infernal nightmare, so as to get it into the light, somehow, and see what it really is? How can it matter to you who plays the part? Why do you care whether Miss Pettrell or Mrs. Harley does it?”

“Why do you ask such a thing as that?” she returned, in the same hard frost. “You know where the idea of the character came from, and why it was sacred to me. Or perhaps you forget!”

“No, I don’t forget. But try — can’t you try? — to specify just why you object to Mrs. Harley?”

“You have your theory. You said I was jealous of her.”

“I didn’t mean it. I never believed that.”

“Then I can’t explain. If you don’t understand, after all that’s been said, what is the use of talking? I’m tired of it!”

She went into her room, and he sank into the chair before his desk and sat there, thinking. When she came back, after a while, he did not look round at her, and she spoke to the back of his head. “Should you have any objection to my going home for a few days?”

“No,” he returned.

“I know papa would like to have me, and I think you would be less hampered in what you will have to do now if I’m not here.”

“You’re very considerate. But if that’s what you are going for, you might as well stay. I’m not going to do anything whatever.”

“Now, you mustn’t talk foolishly, Brice,” she said, with an air of superior virtue mixed with a hint of martyrdom. “I won’t have you doing anything rash or boyish. You will go on and let them have your play just the same as if I didn’t exist.” She somewhat marred the effect of her self-devotion by adding: “And I shall go on just as if it didn’t exist.” He said nothing, and she continued: “You couldn’t expect me to take any interest in it after this, could you? Because, though I am ready to make any sort of sacrifice for you, I think any one, I don’t care who it was, would say that was a little too much. Don’t you think so yourself?”

“You are always right. I think that.”

“Don’t be silly. I am trying to do the best I can, and you have no right to make it hard for me.”

Maxwell wheeled round in his chair: “Then I wish you wouldn’t make your best so confoundedly disagreeable.”

“Oh!” she twitted. “I see that you have made up your mind to let them have the play, after all.”

“Yes, I have,” he answered, savagely.

“Perhaps you meant to do it all along?”

“Perhaps I did.”

“Very well, then,” said Louise. “Would you mind coming to the train with me on your way down town to-morrow?”

“Not at all.”

XXII.

In the morning neither of them recurred to what Louise had said of her going home for a few days. She had apparently made no preparation for the journey; but if she was better than her words in this, he was quite as bad as his in going down town after breakfast to let Grayson have the play, no matter whom he should get to do Salome. He did not reiterate his purpose, but she knew from the sullen leave, or no-leave, which he took of her, that it was fixed.

When he was gone she had what seemed to her the very worst quarter of an hour she had ever known; but when he came back in the afternoon, looking haggard but savage, her ordeal had long been over. She asked him quietly if they had come to any definite conclusion about the play, and he answered, with harsh aggression, yes, that Mrs. Harley had agreed to take the part of Salome; Godolphin’s old company had been mostly got together, and they were to have the first rehearsal the next morning.

“Should you like me to come some time?” asked Louise.

“I should like you very much to come,” said Maxwell, soberly, but with a latent doubt of her meaning, which she perceived.

“I have been thinking,” she said, “whether you would like me to call on Mrs. Harley this evening with you?”

“What for?” he demanded, suspiciously.

“Well, I don’t know. I thought it might be appropriate.”

Maxwell thought a moment. “I don’t think it would be expected. After all, it isn’t a personal thing,” he said, with a relenting in his defiance.

“No,” said Louise.

They got through the evening without further question.

They had always had some sort of explicit making-up before, even when they had only had a tacit falling out, but this time Louise thought there had better be none of that. They were to rehearse the play every day that week, and Maxwell said he must be at the theatre the next morning at eleven. He could not make out to his wife’s satisfaction that he was of much use, but he did not try to convince her. He only said that they referred things to him now and then, and that generally he did not seem to know much about them. She saw that his æsthetic honesty kept him from pretending to more than this, and she believed he ought to have greater credit than he claimed.

Four or five days later she went with him to a rehearsal. By this time they had got so well forward with their work at the theatre that Maxwell said it would now be in appreciable shape; but still he warned her not to expect too much. He never could tell her just what she wanted to know about Mrs. Harley; all he could say was that her Salome was not ideal, though it had strong qualities; and he did not try to keep her from thinking it offensive; that would only have made bad worse.

It had been snowing overnight, and there was a bright glare of sunshine on the drifts, which rendered the theatre doubly dark when they stepped into it from the street. It was a dramatic event for Louise to enter by the stage-door, and to find Maxwell recognized by the old man in charge as having authority to do so; and she made as much of the strange interior as the obscurity and her preoccupation would allow. There was that immediate bareness and roughness which seems the first characteristic of the theatre behind the scenes, where the theatre is one of the simplest and frankest of workshops, in which certain effects are prepared to be felt before the footlights. Nothing of the glamour of the front is possible; there is a hard air of business in everything; and the work that goes to the making of a play shows itself the severest toil. Figures now came and went in the twilight beyond the reach of the gas in the door-keeper’s booth, but rapidly as if bent upon definite errands, and with nothing of that loitering gayety which is the imagined temperament of the stage.

Louise and Maxwell were to see Grayson first in his private office, and while their names were taken in, the old door-keeper gave them seats on the Mourners’ Bench, a hard wooden settee in the corridor, which he said was the place where actors wanting an engagement waited till the manager sent word that he could see them. The manager did not make the author and his wife wait, but came for them himself, and led the way back to his room. When he gave them seats there, Maxwell had the pleasure of seeing that Louise made an excellent impression with the magnate, of whom he had never quite lost the awe we feel for the master of our fortunes, whoever he is. He perceived that her inalienable worldly splendor added to his own consequence, and that his wife’s air of grande dame was not lost upon a man who could at least enjoy it artistically. Grayson was very polite to her, and said hopefuller things about the play than he had yet said to Maxwell, though he had always been civil about its merits. He had a number of papers before him, and he asked Louise if she had noticed their friendliness. She said, yes, she had seen some of those things, but she had supposed they were authorized, and she did not know how much to value them.

Grayson laughed and confessed that he did not practice any concealments with the press when it was a question of getting something to the public notice. “Of course,” he said, “we don’t want the piece to come in on rubbers.”

“What do you mean?” she demanded, with an ignorant joy in the phrase.

“That’s what we call it when a thing hasn’t been sufficiently heralded, or heralded at all. We have got to look after that part of it, you know.”

“Of course, I am not complaining, though I think all that’s dreadful.”

The manager assented partly. Then he said: “There’s something curious about it. You may put up the whole affair yourself, and yet in what’s said you can tell whether there’s a real good will that comes from the writers themselves or not.”

“And you mean that there is this mystical kindness for Mr. Maxwell’s play in the prophecies that all read so much alike to me?”

“Yes, I do,” said the manager, laughing. “They like him because he’s new and young, and is making his way single-handed.”

“Well,” said Louise, “those seem good grounds for preference to me, too;” and she thought how nearly they had been her own grounds for liking Maxwell.

Grayson went with them to the stage and found her the best place to sit and see the rehearsal. He made some one get chairs, and he sat with her chatting while men in high hats and overcoats and women in bonnets and fur-edged butterfly-capes came in one after another. Godolphin arrived among the first, with an ulster which came down to where his pantaloons were turned up above his overshoes. He caught sight of Louise, and approached her with outstretched hand, and Grayson gave up his chair to the actor. Godolphin was very cordial, deferentially cordial, with a delicate vein of reminiscent comradery running through his manner. She spoke to him of having at last got his ideal for Salome, and he said, with a slight sigh and a sort of melancholy absence: “Yes, Miss Havisham will do it magnificently.” Then he asked, with a look of latent significance:

“Have you ever seen her?”

Louise laughed for as darkling a reason. “Only in real life. You know we live just over and under each other.”

“Ah, true. But I meant, on the stage. She’s a great artist. You know she’s the one I wanted for Salome from the start.”

“Then you ought to be very happy in getting her at last.”

“She will do everything for the play,” sighed Godolphin. “She’ll make up for all my shortcomings.”

“You won’t persuade us that you have any shortcomings, Mr. Godolphin,” said Louise. “You are Haxard, and Haxard is the play. You can’t think, Mr. Godolphin, how deeply grateful we both are to you for your confidence in my husband’s work, your sacrifices—”

“You overpay me a thousand times for everything, Mrs. Maxwell,” said the actor. “Any one might have been proud and happy to do all I’ve done, and more, for such a play. I’ve never changed my opinion for a moment that it was the American drama. And now if Miss Havisham only turns out to be the Salome we want!”

“If?” returned Louise, and she felt a wild joy in the word. “Why, I thought there could be no earthly doubt about it.”

“Oh, there isn’t. We are all united on that point, I believe, Maxwell?”

Maxwell shrugged. “I confide in you and Mr. Grayson.”

Godolphin looked at his watch. “It’s eleven now, and she isn’t here yet. I would rather not have begun without her, but I think we had better not delay any longer.” He excused himself to Louise, and went and sat down with his hat on at a small table, lit with a single electric bulb, dropping like a luminous spider by a thread from the dark above. Other electric bulbs were grouped before reflectors on either side of the stage, and these shone on the actors before Godolphin. Back in the depths of the stage, some scene-painters and carpenters were at work on large strips of canvas lying unrolled upon the floor or stretched upon light wooden frames. Across Godolphin’s head the dim hollow of the auditorium showed, pierced by long bars of sunlight full of dancing motes, which slanted across its gloom from the gallery windows. Women in long aprons were sweeping the floors and pounding the seats, and a smell of dust from their labors mixed with the smell of paint and glue and escaping gas which pervaded the atmosphere of the stage.

Godolphin made Maxwell come and sit with him at the table; he opened his prompt-book and directed the rehearsal to begin. The people were mostly well up in their parts, and the work went smoothly, except for now and then an impatience in Godolphin which did not seem to come from what was going forward.

He showed himself a thorough master of his trade in its more mechanical details, and there were signal instances of his intelligence in the higher things of it which might well have put Mrs. Maxwell to shame for her many hasty judgments of the actor. He was altogether more of a man, more of a mind, than she had supposed, even when she supposed the best of him. She perceived that Godolphin grasped the whole meaning of her husband’s work, and interpreted its intentions with perfect accuracy, not only in his own part of Haxard, but in all the other persons, and he corrected the playing of each of the rôles as the rehearsal went on. She saw how he had really formed the other actors upon himself. They repeated his tones, his attitudes, his mannerisms, in their several ways. His touch could be felt all through the performance, and his limitations characterized it. He was very gentle and forbearing with their mistakes, but he was absolute master all the same. If some one erred, Godolphin left his place and went and showed how the thing should be said and done. He carefully addressed the men by their surnames, with the Mr. always; the women were all Dear to him, according to a convention of the theatre. He said, “No, dear,” and “Yes, dear,” and he was as caressingly deferential to each of them as he was formally deferential to the men; he required the same final obedience of them, and it was not always so easy to make them obey. In non-essentials he yielded at times, as when one of the ladies had overdone a point, and he demurred. “But I always got a laugh on that, Mr. Godolphin,” she protested. “Oh, well, my dear, hang on to your laugh, then.” However he meant to do Haxard himself, his voice was for simplicity and reality in others. “Is that the way you would do it, is that the way you would say it, if it were you?” he stopped one of the men in a bit of rant.

Even of Maxwell he exacted as clear a vision of his own work as he exacted of its interpreters. He asked the author his notion of points in dress and person among the different characters, which he had hitherto only generalized in his mind, and which he was gladly willing, when they were brought home to him, to leave altogether to Godolphin’s judgment.

The rehearsal had gone well on towards the end of the first act, and Godolphin was beginning to fidget. From where she sat Louise saw him take out his watch and lean towards her husband to say something. An actor who was going through a piece of business perceived that he had not Godolphin’s attention, and stopped. Just then Mrs. Harley came in.

Godolphin rose and advanced towards her with the prompt-book shut on his thumb. “You are late, Miss Havisham.”

“Yes,” she answered, haughtily, as if in resentment of his tone. She added in concession, “Unavoidably. But Salome doesn’t come on till the end of the act.”

“I think it best for the whole company to be present from the beginning,” said Godolphin.

“I quite agree with you,” said Mrs. Harley. “Where are we?” she asked, and then she caught sight of Louise, and came up to her. “How do you do, Mrs. Maxwell? I don’t know whether I’m glad to see you or not. I believe I’m rather afraid to have you see my Salome; I’ve an idea you are going to be very severe with her.”

“I am sure no severity will be needed. You’ll see me nodding approval all the way through,” Louise returned.

“I have always thought, somehow, that you had the part especially under your protection. I feel that I’m a very bold woman to attempt it.”

In spite of her will to say “Yes, a very bold woman indeed!” Louise answered: “Then I shall admire your courage, as well as your art.”

She was aware of Godolphin fretting at the colloquy he could not interrupt, and of Mrs. Harley prolonging it wilfully. “I know you are sincere, and I am going to make you tell me everything you object to in me when it’s over. Will you?”

“Of course,” Louise answered, gayly; and now Mrs. Harley turned to Godolphin again: “Where were you?”

XXIII.

Twice during the rehearsal Maxwell came to Louise and asked her if she were not tired and would not like to go home; he offered to go out and put her on a car. But both times she made him the same answer: she was not tired, and would not go away on any account; the second time she said, with a certain meaning in her look and voice, that she thought she could stand it if he could. At the end she went up and made her compliments to Mrs. Harley. “You must enjoy realizing your ideal of a character so perfectly,” she began.

“Yes? Did you feel that about it?” the actress returned. “It is a satisfaction. But if one has a strong conception of a part, I don’t see how one can help rendering it strongly. And this Salome, she takes hold of me so powerfully. Her passion and her will, that won’t stop at anything, seem to pierce through and through me. You can feel that she wouldn’t mind killing a man or two to carry her point.”

“That is certainly what you make one feel about her. And you make her very living, very actual.”

“You are very good,” said Mrs. Harley. “I am so glad you liked it. I was dreadfully afraid you wouldn’t like it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t imagine your being afraid of anything,” said Louise, lightly. Her smile was one which the other woman might have known how to interpret rightly, but her husband alone among men could feel its peculiar quality. Godolphin beamed with apparent satisfaction in it.

“Wasn’t Salome magnificent?” he said; and he magnanimously turned to the actress. “You will make everybody forget Haxard. You made me forget him.”

“I didn’t forget him though,” said Mrs. Harley. “I was trying all the time to play up to him — and to Mrs. Maxwell.”

The actor laughed his deep, mellow, hollow laugh, which was a fine work of art in itself, and said: “Mrs. Maxwell, you must let me present the other dramatis personæ to you,” and he introduced the whole cast of the play, one after another. Each said something of the Salome, how grand it was, how impassioned, how powerful. Maxwell stood by, listening, with his eyes on his wife’s face, trying to read her thought.

They were silent most of the way home, and she only talked of indifferent things. When the door of their apartment shut them in with themselves alone, she broke out: “Horrible, horrible, horrible! Well, the play is ruined, ruined! We might as well die; or I might! I suppose you really liked it!”

Maxwell turned white with anger. “I didn’t try to make her think I did, anyway. But I knew how you really felt, and I don’t believe you deceived her very much, either. All the same I was ashamed to see you try.”

“Don’t talk to me — don’t speak! She knew from every syllable I uttered that I perfectly loathed it, and I know that she tried to make it as hateful to me all the way through as she could. She played it at me, and she knew it was me. It was as if she kept saying all the time, ‘How do you like my translation of your Boston girl into Alabama, or Mississippi, or Arkansas, or wherever I came from? This is the way you would have acted, if you were me!’ Yes, that is the hideous part of it. Her nature has come off on the character, and I shall never see, or hear, or think, or dream Salome, after this, without having Yolande Havisham before me. She’s spoiled the sweetest thing in my life. She’s made me hate myself; she’s made me hate you! Will you go out somewhere and get your lunch? I don’t want anything myself, and just now I can’t bear to look at you. Oh, you’re not to blame, that I know of, if that’s what you mean. Only go!”

“I can go out for lunch, certainly,” said Maxwell “Perhaps you would rather I stayed out for dinner, too?”

“Don’t be cruel, dearest. I am trying to control myself—”

“I shouldn’t have thought it. You’re not succeeding.”

“No, not so well as you, if you hated this woman’s Salome as much as I did. If it’s always been as bad as it was to-day you’ve controlled yourself wonderfully well never to give me any hint of it, or prepare me for it in the least.”

“How could I prepare you? You would have come to it with your own prepossessions, no matter what I said.”

“Was that why you said nothing?”

“You would have hated it if she had played it with angelic perfection, because you hated her.”

“Perhaps you think she really did play it with angelic perfection! Well, you needn’t come back to dinner.”

Louise passed into their room, to lay off her hat and sack.

“I will not come back at all, if you prefer,” Maxwell called after her.

“I have no preferences in the matter,” she mocked back.

XXIV.

Maxwell and Louise had torn at each other’s hearts till they were bleeding, and he wished to come back at once and she wished him to come, that they might hurt themselves still more savagely; but when this desire passed, they longed to meet and bind up one another’s wounds. This better feeling brought them together before night-fall, when Maxwell returned, and Louise, at the sound of his latch-key in the door, ran to let him in.

“Mr. Godolphin is here,” she said, in a loud, cheery voice, and he divined that he owed something of his eager welcome to her wish to keep him from resuming the quarrel unwittingly. “He has just come to talk over the rehearsal with you, and I wouldn’t let him go. I was sure you would be back soon.”

She put her finger to her lip, with whatever warning intention, and followed her husband into the presence of the actor, and almost into his arms, so rapturous was the meeting between them.

“Well,” cried Godolphin, “I couldn’t help looking in a moment to talk with you and Mrs. Maxwell about our Salome. I feel that she will make the fortune of the piece — of any piece. Doesn’t Miss Havisham’s rendition grow upon you? It’s magnificent. It’s on the grand scale. It’s immense. The more I think about it, the more I’m impressed with it. She’ll carry the house by storm. I’ve never seen anything like it; and I’m glad to find that Mrs. Maxwell feels just as I do about it.” Maxwell looked at his wife, who returned his glance with a guiltless eye. “I was afraid she might feel the loss of things that certainly are lost in it. I don’t say that Miss Havisham’s Salome, superb as it is, is your Salome — or Mrs. Maxwell’s. I’ve always fancied that Mrs. Maxwell had a great deal to do with that character, and — I don’t know why — I’ve always thought of her when I’ve thought of it; but at the same time it’s a splendid Salome. She makes it Southern, almost tropical. It isn’t the Boston Salome. You may say that it is wanting in delicacy and the nice shades; but it’s full of passion; there’s nothing caviare to the general in it. The average audience will understand just what the girl that Miss Havisham gives is after, and she gives her so abundantly that there’s no more doubt of the why than there is of the how. Sometimes I used to think the house couldn’t follow Miss Pettrell in her subtle touches, but the house, to the topmost tier of the gallery, will get Miss Havisham’s intention.”

Godolphin was standing while he said all this, and Maxwell now asked: “Won’t you sit down?”

The actor had his overcoat on his arm, and his hat in one hand. He tapped at his boot with the umbrella he held in the other. “No, I don’t believe I will, thank you. The fact is, I just dropped in a moment to reassure you if you had misgivings about the Salome, and to give you my point of view.”

Maxwell did not say anything; he looked at Louise again, and it seemed to her that he meant her to speak. She said, “Oh, we understood that we couldn’t have all kinds of a Salome in one creation of the part; and I’m sure no one can see Mrs. Harley in it without feeling her intensity.”

“She’s a force,” said Godolphin. “And if, as we all decided,” he continued, to Maxwell, “when we talked it over with Grayson, that a powerful Salome would heighten the effect of Haxard, she is going to make the success of the piece.”

“You are going to make the success of the piece!” cried Louise.

“Ah, I sha’n’t care if they forget me altogether,” said the actor; “I shall forget myself.” He laughed his mellow, hollow laugh, and gave his hand to Louise and then to Maxwell. “I’m so glad you feel as you do about it, and I don’t wish you to lose your faith in our Salome for a moment. You’ve quite confirmed mine.” He wrung the hands of each with a fervor of gratitude that left them with a disquiet which their eyes expressed to each other when he was gone.

“What does it mean?” asked Louise.

Maxwell shook his head. “It’s beyond me.”

“Brice,” she appealed, after a moment, “do you think I had been saying anything to set him against her?”

“No,” he returned, instantly. “Why should I suspect you of anything so base?”

Her throat was full, but she made out to say, “No, you are too generous, too good for such a thing;” and now she went on to eat humble-pie with a self-devotion which few women could practise. “I know that if I don’t like having her I have no one but myself to thank for it. If I had never written to that miserable Mr. Sterne, or answered his advertisement, he would never have heard of your play, and nothing that has happened would have happened.”

“No, you don’t know that at all,” said Maxwell; and it seemed to her that she must sink to her knees under his magnanimity. “The thing might have happened in a dozen different ways.”

“No matter. I am to blame for it when it did happen; and now you will never hear another word from me. Would you like me to swear it?”

“That would be rather unpleasant,” said Maxwell.

They both felt a great physical fatigue, and they neither had the wish to prolong the evening after dinner. Maxwell was going to lock the door of the apartment at nine o’clock, and then go to bed, when there came a ring at it. He opened it, and stood confronted with Grayson, looking very hot and excited.

“Can I come in a moment?” the manager asked. “Are you alone? Can I speak with you?”

“There’s no one here but Mrs. Maxwell,” said her husband, and he led the way into the parlor.

“And if you don’t like,” Louise confessed to have overheard him, “you needn’t speak before her even.”

“No, no,” said the manager, “don’t go! We may want your wisdom. We certainly want all the wisdom we can get on the question. It’s about Godolphin.”

“Godolphin?” they both echoed.

“Yes. He’s given up the piece.”

The manager drew out a letter, which he handed to Maxwell, and which Louise read with her husband, over his shoulder. It was addressed to Grayson, and began very formally.

“Dear Sir:

“I wish to resign to you all claim I may have to a joint interest in Mr. Maxwell’s piece, and to withdraw from the company formed for its representation. I feel that my part in it has been made secondary to another, and I have finally decided to relinquish it altogether. I trust that you will be able to supply my place, and I offer you my best wishes for the success of your enterprise.

“Yours very truly,
“L. Godolphin.”

The Maxwells did not look at each other; they both looked at the manager, and neither spoke.

“You see,” said the manager, putting the letter back in its envelope, “it’s Miss Havisham. I saw some signs of what was coming at the rehearsals, but I didn’t think it would take such peremptory shape.”

“Why, but he was here only a few hours ago, praising her to the skies,” said Louise; and she hoped that she was keeping secret the guilty joy she felt; but probably it was not unknown to her husband.

“Oh, of course,” said Grayson, with a laugh, “that was Godolphin’s way. He may have felt all that he said; or he may have been trying to find out what Mr. Maxwell thought, and whether he could count upon him in a move against her.”

“We said nothing,” cried Louise, and she blessed heaven that she could truly say so, “which could possibly be distorted into that.”

“I didn’t suppose you had,” said the manager. “But now we have got to act. We have got to do one of two things, and Godolphin knows it; we have got to let Miss Havisham go, or we have got to let him go. For my part I would much rather let him go. She is a finer artist every way, and she is more important to the success of the piece. But it would be more difficult to replace him than it would be to replace her, and he knows it. We could get Miss Pettrell at once for Salome, and we should have to look about for a Haxard. Still, I am disposed to drop Godolphin, if Mr. Maxwell feels as I do.”

He looked at Maxwell; but Louise lowered her eyes, and would not influence her husband by so much as a glance. It seemed to her that he was a long time answering.

“I am satisfied with Godolphin’s Haxard much better than I am with Miss Havisham’s Salome, strong as it is. On the artistic side alone, I should prefer to keep Godolphin and let her go, if it could be done justly. Then, I know that Godolphin has made sacrifices and borne losses on account of the play, and I think that he has a right to a share in its success, if it has a chance of succeeding. He’s jealous of Miss Havisham, of course; I could see that from the first minute; but he’s earned the first place, and I’m not surprised he wants to keep it. I shouldn’t like to lose it if I were he. I should say that we ought to make any concession he asks in that way.”

“Very well,” said Grayson. “He will ask to have our agreement with Mrs. Harley broken; and we can say that we were compelled to break it. I feel as you do, that he has some right on his side. She’s a devilish provoking woman — excuse me, Mrs. Maxwell! — and I’ve seen her trying to take the centre from Godolphin ever since the rehearsals began; but I don’t like to be driven by him; still, there are worse things than being driven. In any case we have to accept the inevitable, and it’s only a question of which inevitable we accept. Good-night. I will see Godolphin at once. Good-night, Mrs. Maxwell. We shall expect you to do what you can in consoling your fair neighbor and reconciling her to the inevitable.” Louise did not know whether this was ironical or not, and she did not at all like the laugh from Maxwell which greeted the suggestion.

“I shall have to reconcile Sterne, and I don’t believe that will be half so easy.”

The manager’s words were gloomy, but there was an imaginable relief in his tone and a final cheerfulness in his manner. He left the Maxwells to a certain embarrassment in each other’s presence. Louise was the first to break the silence that weighed upon them both.

“Brice, did you decide that way to please me?”

“I am not such a fool,” said Maxwell.

“Because,” she said, “if you did, you did very wrong, and I don’t believe any good could come of it.”

Yet she did not seem altogether averse to the risks involved; and in fact she could not justly accuse herself of what had happened, however devoutly she had wished for such a consummation.

XXV.

It was Miss Havisham and not Godolphin who appeared to the public as having ended the combination their managers had formed. The interviewing on both sides continued until the interest of the quarrel was lost in that of the first presentation of the play, when the impression that Miss Havisham had been ill-used was effaced by the impression made by Miss Pettrell in the part of Salome. Her performance was not only successful in the delicacy and refinement which her friends expected of her, but she brought to the work a vivid yet purely feminine force which took them by surprise and made the public her own. No one in the house could have felt, as the Maxwells felt, a certain quality in it which it would be extremely difficult to characterize without overstating it. Perhaps Louise felt this more even than her husband, for when she appealed to him, he would scarcely confess to a sense of it; but from time to time in the stronger passages she was aware of an echo, to the ear and to the eye, of a more passionate personality than Miss Pettrell’s. Had Godolphin profited by his knowledge of Miss Havisham’s creation, and had he imparted to Miss Pettrell, who never saw it, hints of it which she used in her own creation of the part? If he had, just what was the measure and the nature of his sin? Louise tormented herself with this question, while a sense of the fact went as often as it came, and left her in a final doubt of it. What was certain was that if Godolphin had really committed this crime, of which he might have been quite unconsciously guilty, Miss Pettrell was wholly innocent of it; and, indeed, the effect she made might very well have been imagined by herself, and only have borne this teasing resemblance by pure accident. Godolphin was justly punished if he were culpable, and he suffered an eclipse in any case which could not have been greater from Miss Havisham. There were recalls for the chief actors at every fall of the curtain, and at the end of the third act, in which Godolphin had really been magnificent, there began to be cries of “Author! Author!” and a messenger appeared in the box where the Maxwells sat and begged the author, in Godolphin’s name, to come behind at once. The next thing that Louise knew the actor was leading her husband on the stage and they were both bowing to the house, which shouted at them and had them back once and twice and still shouted, but now with a certain confusion of voices in its demand, which continued till the author came on a fourth time, led by the actor as before, and himself leading the heroine of his piece. Then the storm of applause left no doubt that the will of the house had been rightly interpreted.

Louise sat still, with the tears blurring the sight before her. They were not only proud and happy tears, but they were tears of humble gratitude that it was Miss Pettrell, and not Mrs. Harley, whom her husband was leading on to share his triumph. She did not think her own desert was great; but she could not tax herself with any wrong that she had not at least tried to repair; she felt that what she had escaped she could not have suffered, and that Heaven was merciful to her weakness, if not just to her merit. Perhaps this was why she was so humble and so grateful.

There arose in her a vague fear as to what Godolphin might do in the case of a Salome who was certainly no more subordinated to his Haxard than Miss Havisham’s, or what new demands he might not make upon the author; but Maxwell came back to her with a message from the actor, which he wished conveyed with his congratulations upon the success of the piece. This was to tell her of his engagement to Miss Pettrell, which had suddenly taken place that day, and which he thought there could be no moment so fit to impart to her as that of their common triumph.

Louise herself went behind at the end of the piece, and made herself acceptable to both the artists in her cordial good wishes. Neither of them resented the arch intention with which she said to Godolphin, “I suppose you won’t mind such a beautiful Salome as Miss Pettrell has given us, now that it’s to be all in the family.”

Miss Pettrell answered for him with as complete an intelligence: “Oh, I shall know how to subdue her to his Haxard, if she ever threatens the peace of the domestic hearth.”

That Salome has never done so in any serious measure Maxwell argues from the fact that, though the Godolphins have now been playing his piece together for a whole year since their marriage, they have not yet been divorced.

THE END

RAGGED LADY

CONTENTS

Part 1.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

Part 2.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XI.

XXII.

XXIII

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

Part 1.

I.

It was their first summer at Middlemount and the Landers did not know the roads. When they came to a place where they had a choice of two, she said that now he must get out of the carry-all and ask at the house standing a little back in the edge of the pine woods, which road they ought to take for South Middlemount. She alleged many cases in which they had met trouble through his perverse reluctance to find out where they were before he pushed rashly forward in their drives. Whilst she urged the facts she reached forward from the back seat where she sat, and held her hand upon the reins to prevent his starting the horse, which was impartially cropping first the sweet fern on one side and then the blueberry bushes on the other side of the narrow wheel-track. She declared at last that if he would not get out and ask she would do it herself, and at this the dry little man jerked the reins in spite of her, and the horse suddenly pulled the carry-all to the right, and seemed about to overset it.

“Oh, what are you doing, Albe’t?” Mrs. Lander lamented, falling helpless against the back of her seat. “Haven’t I always told you to speak to the hoss fust?”

“He wouldn’t have minded my speakin’,” said her husband. “I’m goin’ to take you up to the dooa so that you can ask for youaself without gettin’ out.”

This was so well, in view of Mrs. Lander’s age and bulk, and the hardship she must have undergone, if she had tried to carry out her threat, that she was obliged to take it in some sort as a favor; and while the vehicle rose and sank over the surface left rough, after building, in front of the house, like a vessel on a chopping sea, she was silent for several seconds.

The house was still in a raw state of unfinish, though it seemed to have been lived in for a year at least. The earth had been banked up at the foundations for warmth in winter, and the sheathing of the walls had been splotched with irregular spaces of weather boarding; there was a good roof over all, but the window-casings had been merely set in their places and the trim left for a future impulse of the builder. A block of wood suggested the intention of steps at the front door, which stood hospitably open, but remained unresponsive for some time after the Landers made their appeal to the house at large by anxious noises in their throats, and by talking loud with each other, and then talking low. They wondered whether there were anybody in the house; and decided that there must be, for there was smoke coming out of the stove pipe piercing the roof of the wing at the rear.

Mr. Lander brought himself under censure by venturing, without his wife’s authority, to lean forward and tap on the door-frame with the butt of his whip. At the sound, a shrill voice called instantly from the region of the stove pipe, “Clem! Clementina? Go to the front dooa! The’e’s somebody knockin’.” The sound of feet, soft and quick, made itself heard within, and in a few moments a slim maid, too large for a little girl, too childlike for a young girl, stood in the open doorway, looking down on the elderly people in the buggy, with a face as glad as a flower’s. She had blue eyes, and a smiling mouth, a straight nose, and a pretty chin whose firm jut accented a certain wistfulness of her lips. She had hair of a dull, dark yellow, which sent out from its thick mass light prongs, or tendrils, curving inward again till they delicately touched it. Her tanned face was not very different in color from her hair, and neither were her bare feet, which showed well above her ankles in the calico skirt she wore. At sight of the elders in the buggy she involuntarily stooped a little to lengthen her skirt in effect, and at the same time she pulled it together sidewise, to close a tear in it, but she lost in her anxiety no ray of the joy which the mere presence of the strangers seemed to give her, and she kept smiling sunnily upon them while she waited for them to speak.

“Oh!” Mrs. Lander began with involuntary apology in her tone, “we just wished to know which of these roads went to South Middlemount. We’ve come from the hotel, and we wa’n’t quite ce’tain.”

The girl laughed as she said, “Both roads go to South Middlemount’m; they join together again just a little piece farther on.”

The girl and the woman in their parlance replaced the letter ‘r’ by vowel sounds almost too obscure to be represented, except where it came last in a word before a word beginning with a vowel; there it was annexed to the vowel by a strong liaison, according to the custom universal in rural New England.

“Oh, do they?” said Mrs. Lander.

“Yes’m,” answered the girl. “It’s a kind of tu’nout in the wintatime; or I guess that’s what made it in the beginning; sometimes folks take one hand side and sometimes the other, and that keeps them separate; but they’re really the same road, ‘m.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Lander, and she pushed her husband to make him say something, too, but he remained silently intent upon the child’s prettiness, which her blue eyes seemed to illumine with a light of their own. She had got hold of the door, now, and was using it as if it was a piece of drapery, to hide not only the tear in her gown, but somehow both her bare feet. She leaned out beyond the edge of it; and then, at moments she vanished altogether behind it.

Since Mr. Lander would not speak, and made no sign of starting up his horse, Mrs. Lander added, “I presume you must be used to havin’ people ask about the road, if it’s so puzzlin’.”

“O, yes’m,” returned the girl, gladly. “Almost every day, in the summatime.”

“You have got a pretty place for a home, he’e,” said Mrs. Lander.

“Well, it will be when it’s finished up.” Without leaning forward inconveniently Mrs. Lander could see that the partitions of the house within were lathed, but not plastered, and the girl looked round as if to realize its condition and added, “It isn’t quite finished inside.”

“We wouldn’t, have troubled you,” said Mrs. Lander, “if we had seen anybody to inquire of.”

“Yes’m,” said the girl. “It a’n’t any trouble.”

“There are not many otha houses about, very nea’, but I don’t suppose you get lonesome; young folks are plenty of company for themselves, and if you’ve got any brothas and sistas—”

“Oh,” said the girl, with a tender laugh, “I’ve got eva so many of them!”

There was a stir in the bushes about the carriage, and Mrs. Lander was aware for an instant of children’s faces looking through the leaves at her and then flashing out of sight, with gay cries at being seen. A boy, older than the rest, came round in front of the horse and passed out of sight at the corner of the house.

Lander now leaned back and looked over his shoulder at his wife as if he might hopefully suppose she had come to the end of her questions, but she gave no sign of encouraging him to start on their way again.

“That your brotha, too?” she asked the girl.

“Yes’m. He’s the oldest of the boys; he’s next to me.”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Lander thoughtfully, “as I noticed how many boys there were, or how many girls.”

“I’ve got two sistas, and three brothas, ‘m,” said the girl, always smiling sweetly. She now emerged from the shelter of the door, and Mrs. Lander perceived that the slight movements of such parts of her person as had been evident beyond its edge were the effects of some endeavor at greater presentableness. She had contrived to get about her an overskirt which covered the rent in her frock, and she had got a pair of shoes on her feet. Stockings were still wanting, but by a mutual concession of her shoe-tops and the border of her skirt, they were almost eliminated from the problem. This happened altogether when the girl sat down on the threshold, and got herself into such foreshortening that the eye of Mrs. Lander in looking down upon her could not detect their absence. Her little head then showed in the dark of the doorway like a painted head against its background.

“You haven’t been livin’ here a great while, by the looks,” said Mrs. Lander. “It don’t seem to be clea’ed off very much.”

“We’ve got quite a ga’den-patch back of the house,” replied the girl, “and we should have had moa, but fatha wasn’t very well, this spring; he’s eva so much better than when we fust came he’e.”

“It has the name of being a very healthy locality,” said Mrs. Lander, somewhat discontentedly, “though I can’t see as it’s done me so very much good, yit. Both your payrints livin’?”

“Yes’m. Oh, yes, indeed!”

“And your mother, is she real rugged? She need to be, with such a flock of little ones!”

“Yes, motha’s always well. Fatha was just run down, the doctas said, and ought to keep more in the open air. That’s what he’s done since he came he’e. He helped a great deal on the house and he planned it all out himself.”

“Is he a ca’penta?” asked Mrs. Lander.

“No’m; but he’s — I don’t know how to express it — he likes to do every kind of thing.”

“But he’s got some business, ha’n’t he?” A shadow of severity crept over Mrs. Lander’s tone, in provisional reprehension of possible shiftlessness.

“Yes’m. He was a machinist at the Mills; that’s what the doctas thought didn’t agree with him. He bought a piece of land he’e, so as to be in the pine woods, and then we built this house.”

“When did you say you came?”

“Two yea’s ago, this summa.”

“Well! What did you do befoa you built this house?”

“We camped the first summa.”

“You camped? In a tent?”

“Well, it was pahtly a tent, and pahtly bank.”

“I should have thought you would have died.”

The girl laughed. “Oh, no, we all kept fast-rate. We slept in the tents — we had two — and we cooked in the shanty.” She smiled at the notion in adding, “At fast the neighbas thought we we’e Gipsies; and the summa folks thought we were Indians, and wanted to get baskets of us.”

Mrs. Lander did not know what to think, and she asked, “But didn’t it almost perish you, stayin’ through the winter in an unfinished house?”

“Well, it was pretty cold. But it was so dry, the air was, and the woods kept the wind off nicely.”

The same shrill voice in the region of the stovepipe which had sent the girl to the Landers now called her from them. “Clem! Come here a minute!”

The girl said to Mrs. Lander, politely, “You’ll have to excuse me, now’m. I’ve got to go to motha.”

“So do!” said Mrs. Lander, and she was so taken by the girl’s art and grace in getting to her feet and fading into the background of the hallway without visibly casting any detail of her raiment, that she was not aware of her husband’s starting up the horse in time to stop him. They were fairly under way again, when she lamented, “What you doin’, Albe’t? Whe’e you goin’?”

“I’m goin’ to South Middlemount. Didn’t you want to?”

“Well, of all the men! Drivin’ right off without waitin’ to say thankye to the child, or take leave, or anything!”

“Seemed to me as if SHE took leave.”

“But she was comin’ back! And I wanted to ask—”

“I guess you asked enough for one while. Ask the rest to-morra.”

Mrs. Lander was a woman who could often be thrown aside from an immediate purpose, by the suggestion of some remoter end, which had already, perhaps, intimated itself to her. She said, “That’s true,” but by the time her husband had driven down one of the roads beyond the woods into open country, she was a quiver of intolerable curiosity. “Well, all I’ve got to say is that I sha’n’t rest till I know all about ‘em.”

“Find out when we get back to the hotel, I guess,” said her husband.

“No, I can’t wait till I get back to the hotel. I want to know now. I want you should stop at the very fust house we come to. Dea’! The’e don’t seem to be any houses, any moa.” She peered out around the side of the carry-all and scrutinized the landscape. “Hold on! No, yes it is, too! Whoa! Whoa! The’e’s a man in that hay-field, now!”

She laid hold of the reins and pulled the horse to a stand. Mr. Lander looked round over his shoulder at her. “Hadn’t you betta wait till you get within half a mile of the man?”

“Well, I want you should stop when you do git to him. Will you? I want to speak to him, and ask him all about those folks.”

“I didn’t suppose you’d let me have much of a chance,” said her husband. When he came within easy hail of the man in the hay-field, he pulled up beside the meadow-wall, where the horse began to nibble the blackberry vines that overran it.

Mrs. Lander beckoned and called to the man, who had stopped pitching hay and now stood leaning on the handle of his fork. At the signs and sounds she made, he came actively forward to the road, bringing his fork with him. When he arrived within easy conversational distance, he planted the tines in the ground and braced himself at an opposite incline from the long smooth handle, and waited for Mrs. Lander to begin.

“Will you please tell us who those folks ah’, livin’ back there in the edge of the woods, in that new unfinished house?”

The man released his fork with one hand to stoop for a head of timothy that had escaped the scythe, and he put the stem of it between his teeth, where it moved up and down, and whipped fantastically about as he talked, before he answered, “You mean the Claxons?”

“I don’t know what thei’ name is.” Mrs. Lander repeated exactly what she had said.

The farmer said, “Long, red-headed man, kind of sickly-lookin’?”

“We didn’t see the man—”

“Little woman, skinny-lookin; pootty tonguey?”

“We didn’t see her, eitha; but I guess we hea’d her at the back of the house.”

“Lot o’ children, about as big as pa’tridges, runnin’ round in the bushes?”

“Yes! And a very pretty-appearing girl; about thi’teen or fou’teen, I should think.”

The farmer pulled his fork out of the ground, and planted it with his person at new slopes in the figure of a letter A, rather more upright than before. “Yes; it’s them,” he said. “Ha’n’t been in the neighbahood a great while, eitha. Up from down Po’tland way, some’res, I guess. Built that house last summer, as far as it’s got, but I don’t believe it’s goin’ to git much fa’tha.”

“Why, what’s the matta?” demanded Mrs. Lander in an anguish of interest.

The man in the hay-field seemed to think it more dignified to include Lander in this inquiry, and he said with a glimmer of the eye for him, “Hea’d of do-nothin’ folks?”

“Seen ‘em, too,” answered Lander, comprehensively.

“Well, that a’n’t Claxon’s complaint exactly. He a’n’t a do-nothin’; he’s a do-everything. I guess it’s about as bad.” Lander glimmered back at the man, but did not speak.

“Kind of a machinist down at the Mills, where he come from,” the farmer began again, and Mrs. Lander, eager not to be left out of the affair for a moment, interrupted:

“Yes, Yes! That’s what the gul said.”

“But he don’t seem to think’t the i’on agreed with him, and now he’s goin’ in for wood. Well, he did have a kind of a foot-powa tu’nin’ lathe, and tuned all sots o’ things; cups, and bowls, and u’ns for fence-posts, and vases, and sleeve-buttons and little knick-knacks; but the place bunt down, here, a while back, and he’s been huntin’ round for wood, the whole winta long, to make canes out of for the summa-folks. Seems to think that the smell o’ the wood, whether it’s green or it’s dry, is goin’ to cure him, and he can’t git too much of it.”

“Well, I believe it’s so, Albe’t!” cried Mrs. Lander, as if her husband had disputed the theory with his taciturn back. He made no other sign of controversy, and the man in the hay-field went on.

“I hea’ he’s goin’ to put up a wind mill, back in an open place he’s got, and use the powa for tu’nin’, if he eva gits it up. But he don’t seem to be in any great of a hurry, and they scrape along somehow. Wife takes in sewin’ and the girl wo’ked at the Middlemount House last season. Whole fam’ly’s got to tu’n in and help s’po’t a man that can do everything.”

The farmer appealed with another humorous cast of his eye to Lander; but the old man tacitly refused to take any further part in the talk, which began to flourish apace, in question and answer, between his wife and the man in the hay-field. It seemed that the children had all inherited the father’s smartness. The oldest boy could beat the nation at figures, and one of the young ones could draw anything you had a mind to. They were all clear up in their classes at school, and yet you might say they almost ran wild, between times. The oldest girl was a pretty-behaved little thing, but the man in the hay-field guessed there was not very much to her, compared with some of the boys. Any rate, she had not the name of being so smart at school. Good little thing, too, and kind of mothered the young ones.

Mrs. Lander, when she had wrung the last drop of information out of him, let him crawl back to his work, mentally flaccid, and let her husband drive on, but under a fire of conjecture and asseveration that was scarcely intermitted till they reached their hotel. That night she talked a long time about their afternoon’s adventure before she allowed him to go to sleep. She said she must certainly see the child again; that they must drive down there in the morning, and ask her all about herself.

“Albe’t,” she concluded; “I wish we had her to live with us. Yes, I do! I wonder if we could get her to. You know I always did want to adopt a baby.”

“You neva said so,” Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first time, since the talk began.

“I didn’t suppose you’d like it,” said his wife.

“Well, she a’n’t a baby. I guess you’d find you had your hands full, takon’ a half-grown gul like that to bring up.”

“I shouldn’t be afraid any,” the wife declared. “She has just twined herself round my heat. I can’t get her pretty looks out of my eyes. I know she’s good.”

“We’ll see how you feel about it in the morning.”

The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least. He seldom talked, but there came times when he would not even listen. One of these was the time after he had wound his watch. A minute later he had undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as effectively blind and deaf to his wife’s appeals as if he were already asleep.

II.

When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the Treasury as a tribute to the statesman’s financial policy) went out of business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies. He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every kind. She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for a term of years without consulting her. But she had her way about their own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now lived so long that she believed any other impossible. Its luxury and idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.

They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was not much more than half the weight of his prime. Their digestion was alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result. She was sure that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one who ought to have wasted away. But she had before her the spectacle of a husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did not audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the side pockets which the change in his figure carried so far to the rear when the garment was reduced at the waist. At the same time her own dresses of ten years earlier would not half meet round her; and one of the most corroding cares of a woman who had done everything a woman could to get rid of care, was what to do with those things which they could neither of them ever wear again. She talked the matter over with herself before her husband, till he took the desperate measure of sending them back to storage; and they had been left there in the spring when the Landers came away for the summer.

They always spent the later spring months at a hotel in the suburbs of Boston, where they arrived in May from a fortnight in a hotel at New York, on their way up from hotels in Washington, Ashville, Aiken and St. Augustine. They passed the summer months in the mountains, and early in the autumn they went back to the hotel in the Boston suburbs, where Mrs. Lander considered it essential to make some sojourn before going to a Boston hotel for November and December, and getting ready to go down to Florida in January. She would not on any account have gone directly to the city from the mountains, for people who did that were sure to lose the good of their summer, and to feel the loss all the winter, if they did not actually come down with a fever.

She was by no means aware that she was a selfish or foolish person. She made Mr. Lander subscribe statedly to worthy objects in Boston, which she still regarded as home, because they had not dwelt any where else since they ceased to live there; and she took lavishly of tickets for all the charitable entertainments in the hotels where they stayed. Few if any guests at hotels enjoyed so much honor from porters, bell-boys, waiters, chambermaids and bootblacks as the Landers, for they gave richly in fees for every conceivable service which could be rendered them; they went out of their way to invent debts of gratitude to menials who had done nothing for them. He would make the boy who sold papers at the dining-room door keep the change, when he had been charged a profit of a hundred per cent. already; and she would let no driver who had plundered them according to the carriage tariff escape without something for himself.

A sense of their munificence penetrated the clerks and proprietors with a just esteem for guests who always wanted the best of everything, and questioned no bill for extras. Mrs. Lander, in fact, who ruled these expenditures, had no knowledge of the value of things, and made her husband pay whatever was asked. Yet when they lived under their own roof they had lived simply, and Lander had got his money in an old-fashioned business way, and not in some delirious speculation such as leaves a man reckless of money afterwards. He had been first of all a tailor, and then he had gone into boys’ and youths’ clothing in a small way, and finally he had mastered this business and come out at the top, with his hands full. He invested his money so prosperously that the income for two elderly people, who had no children, and only a few outlying relations on his side, was far beyond their wants, or even their whims.

She as a woman, who in spite of her bulk and the jellylike majesty with which she shook in her smoothly casing brown silks, as she entered hotel dining-rooms, and the severity with which she frowned over her fan down the length of the hotel drawing-rooms, betrayed more than her husband the commonness of their origin. She could not help talking, and her accent and her diction gave her away for a middle-class New England person of village birth and unfashionable sojourn in Boston. He, on the contrary, lurked about the hotels where they passed their days in a silence so dignified that when his verbs and nominatives seemed not to agree, you accused your own hearing. He was correctly dressed, as an elderly man should be, in the yesterday of the fashions, and he wore with impressiveness a silk hat whenever such a hat could be worn. A pair of drab cloth gaiters did much to identify him with an old school of gentlemen, not very definite in time or place. He had a full gray beard cut close, and he was in the habit of pursing his mouth a great deal. But he meant nothing by it, and his wife meant nothing by her frowning. They had no wish to subdue or overawe any one, or to pass for persons of social distinction. They really did not know what society was, and they were rather afraid of it than otherwise as they caught sight of it in their journeys and sojourns. They led a life of public seclusion, and dwelling forever amidst crowds, they were all in all to each other, and nothing to the rest of the world, just as they had been when they resided (as they would have said) on Pinckney street. In their own house they had never entertained, though they sometimes had company, in the style of the country town where Mrs. Lander grew up. As soon as she was released to the grandeur of hotel life, she expanded to the full measure of its responsibilities and privileges, but still without seeking to make it the basis of approach to society. Among the people who surrounded her, she had not so much acquaintance as her husband even, who talked so little that he needed none. She sometimes envied his ease in getting on with people when he chose; and his boldness in speaking to fellow guests and fellow travellers, if he really wanted anything. She wanted something of them all the time, she wanted their conversation and their companionship; but in her ignorance of the social arts she was thrown mainly upon the compassion of the chambermaids. She kept these talking as long as she could detain them in her rooms; and often fed them candy (which she ate herself with childish greed) to bribe them to further delays. If she was staying some days in a hotel, she sent for the house-keeper, and made all she could of her as a listener, and as soon as she settled herself for a week, she asked who was the best doctor in the place. With doctors she had no reserves, and she poured out upon them the history of her diseases and symptoms in an inexhaustible flow of statement, conjecture and misgiving, which was by no means affected by her profound and inexpugnable ignorance of the principles of health. From time to time she forgot which side her liver was on, but she had been doctored (as she called it) for all her organs, and she was willing to be doctored for any one of them that happened to be in the place where she fancied a present discomfort. She was not insensible to the claims which her husband’s disorders had upon science, and she liked to end the tale of her own sufferings with some such appeal as: “I wish you could do something for Mr. Landa, too, docta.” She made him take a little of each medicine that was left for her; but in her presence he always denied that there was anything the matter with him, though he was apt to follow the doctor out of the room, and get a prescription from him for some ailment which he professed not to believe in himself, but wanted to quiet Mrs. Lander’s mind about.

He rose early, both from long habit, and from the scant sleep of an elderly man; he could not lie in bed; but his wife always had her breakfast there and remained so long that the chambermaid had done up most of the other rooms and had leisure for talk with her. As soon as he was awake, he stole softly out and was the first in the dining-room for breakfast. He owned to casual acquaintance in moments of expansion that breakfast was his best meal, but he did what he could to make it his worst by beginning with oranges and oatmeal, going forward to beefsteak and fried potatoes, and closing with griddle cakes and syrup, washed down with a cup of cocoa, which his wife decided to be wholesomer than coffee. By the time he had finished such a repast, he crept out of the dining-room in a state of tension little short of anguish, which he confided to the sympathy of the bootblack in the washroom.

He always went from having his shoes polished to get a toothpick at the clerk’s desk; and at the Middlemount House, the morning after he had been that drive with Mrs. Lander, he lingered a moment with his elbows beside the register. “How about a buckboa’d?” he asked.

“Something you can drive yourself” — the clerk professionally dropped his eye to the register— “Mr. Lander?”

“Well, no, I guess not, this time,” the little man returned, after a moment’s reflection. “Know anything of a family named Claxon, down the road, here, a piece?” He twisted his head in the direction he meant.

“This is my first season at Middlemount; but I guess Mr. Atwell will know.” The clerk called to the landlord, who was smoking in his private room behind the office, and the landlord came out. The clerk repeated Mr. Lander’s questions.

“Pootty good kind of folks, I guess,” said the landlord provisionally, through his cigar-smoke. “Man’s a kind of univussal genius, but he’s got a nice family of children; smaht as traps, all of ‘em.”

“How about that oldest gul?” asked Mr. Lander.

“Well, the’a,” said the landlord, taking the cigar out of his mouth. “I think she’s about the nicest little thing goin’. We’ve had her up he’e, to help out in a busy time, last summer, and she’s got moo sense than guls twice as old. Takes hold like — lightnin’.”

“About how old did you say she was?”

“Well, you’ve got me the’a, Mr. Landa; I guess I’ll ask Mis’ Atwell.”

“The’e’s no hurry,” said Lander. “That buckboa’d be round pretty soon?” he asked of the clerk.

“Be right along now, Mr. Lander,” said the clerk, soothingly. He stepped out to the platform that the teams drove up to from the stable, and came back to say that it was coming. “I believe you said you wanted something you could drive yourself?”

“No, I didn’t, young man,” answered the elder sharply. But the next moment he added, “Come to think of it, I guess it’s just as well. You needn’t get me no driver. I guess I know the way well enough. You put me in a hitchin’ strap.”

“All right, Mr. Lander,” said the clerk, meekly.

The landlord had caught the peremptory note in Lander’s voice, and he came out of his room again to see that there was nothing going wrong.

“It’s all right,” said Lander, and went out and got into his buckboard.

“Same horse you had yesterday,” said the young clerk. “You don’t need to spare the whip.”

“I guess I can look out for myself,” said Lander, and he shook the reins and gave the horse a smart cut, as a hint of what he might expect.

The landlord joined the clerk in looking after the brisk start the horse made. “Not the way he set off with the old lady, yesterday,” suggested the clerk.

The landlord rolled his cigar round in his tubed lips. “I guess he’s used to ridin’ after a good hoss.” He added gravely to the clerk, “You don’t want to make very free with that man, Mr. Pane. He won’t stan’ it, and he’s a class of custom that you want to cata to when it comes in your way. I suspicioned what he was when they came here and took the highest cost rooms without tu’nin’ a haia. They’re a class of custom that you won’t get outside the big hotels in the big reso’ts. Yes, sir,” said the landlord taking a fresh start, “they’re them kind of folks that live the whole yea’ round in hotels; no’th in summa, south in winta, and city hotels between times. They want the best their money can buy, and they got plenty of it. She” — he meant Mrs. Lander— “has been tellin’ my wife how they do; she likes to talk a little betta than he doos; and I guess when it comes to society, they’re away up, and they won’t stun’ any nonsense.”

III.

Lander came into his wife’s room between ten and eleven o’clock, and found her still in bed, but with her half-finished breakfast on a tray before her. As soon as he opened the door she said, “I do wish you would take some of that heat-tonic of mine, Albe’t, that the docta left for me in Boston. You’ll find it in the upper right bureau box, the’a; and I know it’ll be the very thing for you. It’ll relieve you of that suffocatin’ feeling that I always have, comin’ up stars. Dea’! I don’t see why they don’t have an elevata; they make you pay enough; and I wish you’d get me a little more silva, so’s’t I can give to the chambamaid and the bell-boy; I do hate to be out of it. I guess you been up and out long ago. They did make that polonaise of mine too tight after all I said, and I’ve been thinkin’ how I could get it alt’ed; but I presume there ain’t a seamstress to be had around he’e for love or money. Well, now, that’s right, Albe’t; I’m glad to see you doin’ it.”

Lander had opened the lid of the bureau box, and uncorked a bottle from it, and tilted this to his lips.

“Don’t take too much,” she cautioned him, “or you’ll lose the effects. When I take too much of a medicine, it’s wo’se than nothing, as fah’s I can make out. When I had that spell in Thomasville spring before last, I believe I should have been over it twice as quick if I had taken just half the medicine I did. You don’t really feel anyways bad about the heat, do you, Albe’t?”

“I’m all right,” said Lander. He put back the bottle in its place and sat down.

Mrs. Lander lifted herself on her elbow and looked over at him. “Show me on the bottle how much you took.”

He got the bottle out again and showed her with his thumb nail a point which he chose at random.

“Well, that was just about the dose for you,” she said; and she sank down in bed again with the air of having used a final precaution. “You don’t want to slow your heat up too quick.”

Lander did not put the bottle back this time. He kept it in his hand, with his thumb on the cork, and rocked it back and forth on his knees as he spoke. “Why don’t you get that woman to alter it for you?”

“What woman alta what?”

“Your polonaise. The one whe’e we stopped yestaday.”

“Oh! Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that child, Albe’t; I did before I went to sleep; and I don’t believe I want to risk anything with her. It would be a ca’e,” said Mrs. Lander with a sigh, “and I guess I don’t want to take any moa ca’e than what I’ve got now. What makes you think she could alta my polonaise?”

“Said she done dress-makin’,” said Lander, doggedly.

“You ha’n’t been the’a?”

He nodded.

“You didn’t say anything to her about her daughta?”

“Yes, I did,” said Lander.

“Well, you ce’tainly do equal anything,” said his wife. She lay still awhile, and then she roused herself with indignant energy. “Well, then, I can tell you what, Albe’t Landa: you can go right straight and take back everything you said. I don’t want the child, and I won’t have her. I’ve got care enough to worry me now, I should think; and we should have her whole family on our hands, with that shiftless father of hers, and the whole pack of her brothas and sistas. What made you think I wanted you to do such a thing?”

“You wanted me to do it last night. Wouldn’t ha’dly let me go to bed.”

“Yes! And how many times have I told you nova to go off and do a thing that I wanted you to, unless you asked me if I did? Must I die befo’e you can find out that there is such a thing as talkin’, and such anotha thing as doin’? You wouldn’t get yourself into half as many scrapes if you talked more and done less, in this wo’ld.” Lander rose.

“Wait! Hold on! What are you going to say to the pooa thing? She’ll be so disappointed!”

“I don’t know as I shall need to say anything myself,” answered the little man, at his dryest. “Leave that to you.”

“Well, I can tell you,” returned his wife, “I’m not goin’ nea’ them again; and if you think — What did you ask the woman, anyway?”

“I asked her,” he said, “if she wanted to let the gul come and see you about some sewing you had to have done, and she said she did.”

“And you didn’t speak about havin’ her come to live with us?”

“No.”

“Well, why in the land didn’t you say so before, Albe’t?”

“You didn’t ask me. What do you want I should say to her now?”

“Say to who?”

“The gul. She’s down in the pahlor, waitin’.”

“Well, of all the men!” cried Mrs. Lander. But she seemed to find herself, upon reflection, less able to cope with Lander personally than with the situation generally. “Will you send her up, Albe’t?” she asked, very patiently, as if he might be driven to further excesses, if not delicately handled. As soon as he had gone out of the room she wished that she had told him to give her time to dress and have her room put in order, before he sent the child up; but she could only make the best of herself in bed with a cap and a breakfast jacket, arranged with the help of a handglass. She had to get out of bed to put her other clothes away in the closet and she seized the chance to push the breakfast tray out of the door, and smooth up the bed, while she composed her features and her ideas to receive her visitor. Both, from long habit rather than from any cause or reason, were of a querulous cast, and her ordinary tone was a snuffle expressive of deep-seated affliction. She was at once plaintive and voluable, and in moments of excitement her need of freeing her mind was so great that she took herself into her own confidence, and found a more sympathetic listener than when she talked to her husband. As she now whisked about her room in her bed-gown with an activity not predicable of her age and shape, and finally plunged under the covering and drew it up to her chin with one hand while she pressed it out decorously over her person with the other, she kept up a rapid flow of lamentation and conjecture. “I do suppose he’ll be right back with her before I’m half ready; and what the man was thinkin’ of to do such a thing anyway, I don’t know. I don’t know as she’ll notice much, comin’ out of such a lookin’ place as that, and I don’t know as I need to care if she did. But if the’e’s care anywhe’s around, I presume I’m the one to have it. I presume I did take a fancy to her, and I guess I shall be glad to see how I like her now; and if he’s only told her I want some sewin’ done, I can scrape up something to let her carry home with her. It’s well I keep my things where I can put my hand on ’em at a time like this, and I don’t believe I shall sca’e the child, as it is. I do hope Albe’t won’t hang round half the day before he brings her; I like to have a thing ova.”

Lander wandered about looking for the girl through the parlors and the piazzas, and then went to the office to ask what had become of her.

The landlord came out of his room at his question to the clerk. “Oh, I guess she’s round in my wife’s room, Mr. Landa. She always likes to see Clementina, and I guess they all do. She’s a so’t o’ pet amongst ‘em.”

“No hurry,” said Lander, “I guess my wife ain’t quite ready for her yet.”

“Well, she’ll be right out, in a minute or so,” said the landlord.

The old man tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and went to sit on the veranda and look at the landscape while he waited. It was one of the loveliest landscapes in the mountains; the river flowed at the foot of an abrupt slope from the road before the hotel, stealing into and out of the valley, and the mountains, gray in the farther distance, were draped with folds of cloud hanging upon their flanks and tops. But Lander was tired of nearly all kinds of views and prospects, though he put’ up with them, in his perpetual movement from place to place, in the same resignation that he suffered the limitations of comfort in parlor cars and sleepers, and the unwholesomeness of hotel tables. He was chained to the restless pursuit of an ideal not his own, but doomed to suffer for its impossibility as if he contrived each of his wife’s disappointments from it. He did not philosophize his situation, but accepted it as in an order of Providence which it would be useless for him to oppose; though there were moments when he permitted himself to feel a modest doubt of its justice. He was aware that when he had a house of his own he was master in it, after a fashion, and that as long as he was in business he was in some sort of authority. He perceived that now he was a slave to the wishes of a mistress who did not know what she wanted, and that he was never farther from pleasing her than when he tried to do what she asked. He could not have told how all initiative had been taken from him, and he had fallen into the mere follower of a woman guided only by her whims, who had no object in life except to deprive it of all object. He felt no rancor toward her for this; he knew that she had a tender regard for him, and that she believed she was considering him first in her most selfish arrangements. He always hoped that sometime she would get tired of her restlessness, and be willing to settle down again in some stated place; and wherever it was, he meant to get into some kind of business again. Till this should happen he waited with an apathetic patience of which his present abeyance was a detail. He would hardly have thought it anything unfit, and certainly nothing surprising, that the landlady should have taken the young girl away from where he had left her, and then in the pleasure of talking with her, and finding her a centre of interest for the whole domestic force of the hotel, should have forgotten to bring her back.

The Middlemount House had just been organized on the scale of a first class hotel, with prices that had risen a little in anticipation of the other improvements. The landlord had hitherto united in himself the functions of clerk and head waiter, but he had now got a senior, who was working his way through college, to take charge of the dining-room, and had put in the office a youth of a year’s experience as under clerk at a city hotel. But he meant to relinquish no more authority than his wife who frankly kept the name as well as duty of house-keeper. It was in making her morning inspection of the dusting that she found Clementina in the parlor where Lander had told her to sit down till he should come for her.

“Why, Clem!” she said, “I didn’t know you! You have grown so! Youa folks all well? I decla’e you ah’ quite a woman now,” she added, as the girl stood up in her slender, graceful height. “You look as pretty as a pink in that hat. Make that dress youaself? Well, you do beat the witch! I want you should come to my room with me.”

Mrs. Atwell showered other questions and exclamations on the girl, who explained how she happened to be there, and said that she supposed she must stay where she was for fear Mr. Lander should come back and find her gone; but Mrs. Atwell overruled her with the fact that Mrs. Lander’s breakfast had just gone up to her; and she made her come out and see the new features of the enlarged house-keeping. In the dining-room there were some of the waitresses who had been there the summer before, and recognitions of more or less dignity passed between them and Clementina. The place was now shut against guests, and the head-waiter was having it put in order for the one o’clock dinner. As they came near him, Mrs. Atwell introduced him to Clementina, and he behaved deferentially, as if she were some young lady visitor whom Mrs. Atwell was showing the improvements, but he seemed harassed and impatient, as if he were anxious about his duties, and eager to get at them again. He was a handsome little fellow, with hair lighter than Clementina’s and a sanguine complexion, and the color coming and going.

“He’s smaht,” said Mrs. Atwell, when they had left him — he held the dining-room door open for them, and bowed them out. “I don’t know but he worries almost too much. That’ll wear off when he gets things runnin’ to suit him. He’s pretty p’tic’la’. Now I’ll show you how they’ve made the office over, and built in a room for Mr. Atwell behind it.”

The landlord welcomed Clementina as if she had been some acceptable class of custom, and when the tall young clerk came in to ask him something, and Mrs. Atwell said, “I want to introduce you to Miss Claxon, Mr. Fane,” the clerk smiled down upon her from the height of his smooth, acquiline young face, which he held bent encouragingly upon one side.

“Now, I want you should come in and see where I live, a minute,” said Mrs. Atwell. She took the girl from the clerk, and led her to the official housekeeper’s room which she said had been prepared for her so that folks need not keep running to her in her private room where she wanted to be alone with her children, when she was there. “Why, you a’n’t much moa than a child youaself, Clem, and here I be talkin’ to you as if you was a mother in Israel. How old ah’ you, this summa? Time does go so!”

“I’m sixteen now,” said Clementina, smiling.

“You be? Well, I don’t see why I say that, eitha! You’re full lahge enough for your age, but not seein’ you in long dresses before, I didn’t realize your age so much. My, but you do all of you know how to do things!”

“I’m about the only one that don’t, Mrs. Atwell,” said the girl. “If it hadn’t been for mother, I don’t believe I could have eva finished this dress.” She began to laugh at something passing in her mind, and Mrs. Atwell laughed too, in sympathy, though she did not know what at till Clementina said, “Why, Mrs. Atwell, nea’ly the whole family wo’ked on this dress. Jim drew the patte’n of it from the dress of one of the summa boa’das that he took a fancy to at the Centa, and fatha cut it out, and I helped motha make it. I guess every one of the children helped a little.”

“Well, it’s just as I said, you can all of you do things,” said Mrs. Atwell. “But I guess you ah’ the one that keeps ’em straight. What did you say Mr. Landa said his wife wanted of you?”

“He said some kind of sewing that motha could do.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what! Now, if she ha’n’t really got anything that your motha’ll want you to help with, I wish you’d come here again and help me. I tuned my foot, here, two-three weeks back, and I feel it, times, and I should like some one to do about half my steppin’ for me. I don’t want to take you away from her, but IF. You sha’n’t go int’ the dinin’room, or be under anybody’s oddas but mine. Now, will you?”

“I’ll see, Mrs. Atwell. I don’t like to say anything till I know what Mrs. Landa wants.”

“Well, that’s right. I decla’e, you’ve got moa judgment! That’s what I used to say about you last summa to my husband: she’s got judgment. Well, what’s wanted?” Mrs. Atwell spoke to her husband, who had opened her door and looked in, and she stopped rocking, while she waited his answer.

“I guess you don’t want to keep Clementina from Mr. Landa much longa. He’s settin’ out there on the front piazza waitin’ for her.”

“Well, the’a!” cried Mrs. Atwell. “Ain’t that just like me? Why didn’t you tell me sooner, Alonzo? Don’t you forgit what I said, Clem!”

IV.

Mrs. Lander had taken twice of a specific for what she called her nerve-fag before her husband came with Clementina, and had rehearsed aloud many of the things she meant to say to the girl. In spite of her preparation, they were all driven out of her head when Clementina actually appeared, and gave her a bow like a young birch’s obeisance in the wind.

“Take a chaia,” said Lander, pushing her one, and the girl tilted over toward him, before she sank into it. He went out of the room, and left Mrs. Lander to deal with the problem alone. She apologized for being in bed, but Clementina said so sweetly, “Mr. Landa told me you were not feeling very well, ‘m,” that she began to be proud of her ailments, and bragged of them at length, and of the different doctors who had treated her for them. While she talked she missed one thing or another, and Clementina seemed to divine what it was she wanted, and got it for her, with a gentle deference which made the elder feel her age cushioned by the girl’s youth. When she grew a little heated from the interest she took in her personal annals, and cast off one of the folds of her bed clothing, Clementina got her a fan, and asked her if she should put up one of the windows a little.

“How you do think of things!” said Mrs. Lander. “I guess I will let you. I presume you get used to thinkin’ of othas in a lahge family like youas. I don’t suppose they could get along without you very well,” she suggested.

“I’ve neva been away except last summa, for a little while.”

“And where was you then?”

“I was helping Mrs. Atwell.”

“Did you like it?”

“I don’t know,” said Clementina. “It’s pleasant to be whe’e things ah’ going on.”

“Yes — for young folks,” said Mrs. Lander, whom the going on of things had long ceased to bring pleasure.

“It’s real nice at home, too,” said Clementina. “We have very good times — evenings in the winta; in the summer it’s very nice in the woods, around there. It’s safe for the children, and they enjoy it, and fatha likes to have them. Motha don’t ca’e so much about it. I guess she’d ratha have the house fixed up more, and the place. Fatha’s going to do it pretty soon. He thinks the’e’s time enough.”

“That’s the way with men,” said Mrs. Lander. “They always think the’s time enough; but I like to have things over and done with. What chuhch do you ‘tend?”

“Well, there isn’t any but the Episcopal,” Clementina answered. “I go to that, and some of the children go to the Sunday School. I don’t believe fatha ca’es very much for going to chuhch, but he likes Mr. Richling; he’s the recta. They take walks in the woods; and they go up the mountains togetha.”

“They want,” said Mrs. Lander, severely, “to be ca’eful how they drink of them cold brooks when they’re heated. Mr. Richling a married man?”

“Oh, yes’m! But they haven’t got any family.”

“If I could see his wife, I sh’d caution her about lettin’ him climb mountains too much. A’n’t your father afraid he’ll ovado?”

“I don’t know. He thinks he can’t be too much in the open air on the mountains.”

“Well, he may not have the same complaint as Mr. Landa; but I know if I was to climb a mountain,’ it would lay me up for a yea’.”

The girl did not urge anything against this conviction. She smiled politely and waited patiently for the next turn Mrs. Lander’s talk should take, which was oddly enough toward the business Clementina had come upon.

“I declare I most forgot about my polonaise. Mr. Landa said your motha thought she could do something to it for me.”

“Yes’m.”

“Well, I may as well let you see it. If you’ll reach into that fuhthest closet, you’ll find it on the last uppa hook on the right hand, and if you’ll give it to me, I’ll show you what I want done. Don’t mind the looks of that closet; I’ve just tossed my things in, till I could get a little time and stren’th to put ’em in odda.”

Clementina brought the polonaise to Mrs. Lander, who sat up and spread it before her on the bed, and had a happy half hour in telling the girl where she had bought the material and where she had it made up, and how it came home just as she was going away, and she did not find out that it was all wrong till a week afterwards when she tried it on. By the end of this time the girl had commended herself so much by judicious and sympathetic assent, that Mrs. Lander learned with a shock of disappointment that her mother expected her to bring the garment home with her, where Mrs. Lander was to come and have it fitted over for the alterations she wanted made.

“But I supposed, from what Mr. Landa said, that your motha would come here and fit me!” she lamented.

“I guess he didn’t undastand, ‘m. Motha doesn’t eva go out to do wo’k,” said Clementina gently but firmly.

“Well, I might have known Mr. Landa would mix it up, if it could be mixed;” Mrs. Lander’s sense of injury was aggravated by her suspicion that he had brought the girl in the hope of pleasing her, and confirming her in the wish to have her with them; she was not a woman who liked to have her way in spite of herself; she wished at every step to realize that she was taking it, and that no one else was taking it for her.

“Well,” she said dryly, “I shall have to see about it. I’m a good deal of an invalid, and I don’t know as I could go back and fo’th to try on. I’m moa used to havin’ the things brought to me.”

“Yes’m,” said Clementina. She moved a little from the bed, on her way to the door, to be ready for Mrs. Lander in leave-taking.

“I’m real sorry,” said Mrs. Lander. “I presume it’s a disappointment for you, too.”

“Oh, not at all,” answered Clementina. “I’m sorry we can’t do the wo’k he’a; but I know mocha wouldn’t like to. Good-mo’ning,’m!”

“No, no! Don’t go yet a minute! Won’t you just give me my hand bag off the bureau the’a?” Mrs. Lander entreated, and when the girl gave her the bag she felt about among the bank-notes which she seemed to have loose in it, and drew out a handful of them without regard to their value. “He’a!” she said, and she tried to put the notes into Clementina’s hand, “I want you should get yourself something.”

The girl shrank back. “Oh, no’m,” she said, with an effect of seeming to know that her refusal would hurt, and with the wish to soften it. “I — couldn’t; indeed I couldn’t.”

“Why couldn’t you? Now you must! If I can’t let you have the wo’k the way you want, I don’t think it’s fair, and you ought to have the money for it just the same.”

Clementina shook her head smiling. “I don’t believe motha would like to have me take it.”

“Oh, now, pshaw!” said Mrs. Lander, inadequately. “I want you should take this for youaself; and if you don’t want to buy anything to wea’, you can get something to fix your room up with. Don’t you be afraid of robbin’ us. Land! We got moa money! Now you take this.”

Mrs. Lander reached the money as far toward Clementina as she could and shook it in the vehemence of her desire.

“Thank you, I couldn’t take it,” Clementina persisted. “I’m afraid I must be going; I guess I must bid you good-mo’ning.”

“Why, I believe the child’s sca’ed of me! But you needn’t be. Don’t you suppose I know how you feel? You set down in that chai’a there, and I’ll tell you how you feel. I guess we’ve been pooa, too — I don’t mean anything that a’n’t exactly right — and I guess I’ve had the same feelin’s. You think it’s demeanin’ to you to take it. A’n’t that it?” Clementina sank provisionally upon the edge of the chair. “Well, it did use to be so consid’ed. But it’s all changed, nowadays. We travel pretty nee’ the whole while, Mr. Lander and me, and we see folks everywhere, and it a’n’t the custom to refuse any moa. Now, a’n’t there any little thing for your own room, there in your nice new house? Or something your motha’s got her heat set on? Or one of your brothas? My, if you don’t have it, some one else will! Do take it!”

The girl kept slipping toward the door. “I shouldn’t know what to tell them, when I got home. They would think I must be — out of my senses.”

“I guess you mean they’d think I was. Now, listen to me a minute!” Mrs. Lander persisted.

“You just take this money, and when you get home, you tell your mother every word about it, and if she says, you bring it right straight back to me. Now, can’t you do that?”

“I don’t know but I can,” Clementina faltered. “Well, then take it!” Mrs. Lander put the bills into her hand but she did not release her at once. She pulled Clementina down and herself up till she could lay her other arm on her neck. “I want you should let me kiss you. Will you?”

“Why, certainly,” said Clementina, and she kissed the old woman.

“You tell your mother I’m comin’ to see her before I go; and I guess,” said Mrs. Lander in instant expression of the idea that came into her mind, “we shall be goin’ pretty soon, now.”

“Yes’m,” said Clementina.

She went out, and shortly after Lander came in with a sort of hopeful apathy in his face.

Mrs. Lander turned her head on her pillow, and so confronted him. “Albe’t, what made you want me to see that child?”

Lander must have perceived that his wife meant business, and he came to it at once. “I thought you might take a fancy to her, and get her to come and live with us.”

“Yes?”

“We’re both of us gettin’ pretty well on, and you’d ought to have somebody to look after you if — I’m not around. You want somebody that can do for you; and keep you company, and read to you, and talk to you — well, moa like a daughta than a suvvant — somebody that you’d get attached to, maybe—”

“And don’t you see,” Mrs. Lander broke out severely upon him, “what a ca’e that would be? Why, it’s got so already that I can’t help thinkin’ about her the whole while, and if I got attached to her I’d have her on my mind day and night, and the moa she done for me the more I should be tewin’ around to do for her. I shouldn’t have any peace of my life any moa. Can’t you see that?”

“I guess if you see it, I don’t need to,” said Lander.

“Well, then, I want you shouldn’t eva mention her to me again. I’ve had the greatest escape! But I’ve got her off home, and I’ve give her money enough! had a time with her about it — so that they won’t feel as if we’d made ’em trouble for nothing, and now I neva want to hear of her again. I don’t want we should stay here a great while longer; I shall be frettin’ if I’m in reach of her, and I shan’t get any good of the ai’a. Will you promise?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then!” Mrs. Lander turned her face upon the pillow again in the dramatization of her exhaustion; but she was not so far gone that she was insensible to the possible interest that a light rap at the door suggested. She once more twisted her head in that direction and called, “Come in!”

The door opened and Clementina came in. She advanced to the bedside smiling joyously, and put the money Mrs. Lander had given her down upon the counterpane.

“Why, you haven’t been home, child?”

“No’m,” said Clementina, breathlessly. “But I couldn’t take it. I knew they wouldn’t want me to, and I thought you’d like it better if I just brought it back myself. Good-mo’ning.” She slipped out of the door. Mrs. Lander swept the bank-notes from the coverlet and pulled it over her head, and sent from beneath it a stifled wail. “Now we got to go! And it’s all youa fault, Albe’t.”

Lander took the money from the floor, and smoothed each bill out, and then laid them in a neat pile on the corner of the bureau. He sighed profoundly but left the room without an effort to justify himself.

V.

The Landers had been gone a week before Clementina’s mother decided that she could spare her to Mrs. Atwell for a while. It was established that she was not to serve either in the dining-room or the carving room; she was not to wash dishes or to do any part of the chamber work, but to carry messages and orders for the landlady, and to save her steps, when she wished to see the head-waiter, or the head-cook; or to make an excuse or a promise to some of the lady-boarders; or to send word to Mr. Atwell about the buying, or to communicate with the clerk about rooms taken or left.

She had a good deal of dignity of her own and such a gravity in the discharge of her duties that the chef, who was a middle-aged Yankee with grown girls of his own, liked to pretend that it was Mrs. Atwell herself who was talking with him, and to discover just as she left him that it was Clementina. He called her the Boss when he spoke of her to others in her hearing, and he addressed her as Boss when he feigned to find that it was not Mrs. Atwell. She did not mind that in him, and let the chef have his joke as if it were not one. But one day when the clerk called her Boss she merely looked at him without speaking, and made him feel that he had taken a liberty which he must not repeat. He was a young man who much preferred a state of self-satisfaction to humiliation of any sort, and after he had endured Clementina’s gaze as long as he could, he said, “Perhaps you don’t allow anybody but the chef to call you that?”

She did not answer, but repeated the message Mrs. Atwell had given her for him, and went away.

It seemed to him undue that a person who exchanged repartees with the young lady boarders across his desk, when they came many times a day to look at the register, or to ask for letters, should remain snubbed by a girl who still wore her hair in a braid; but he was an amiable youth, and he tried to appease her by little favors and services, instead of trying to bully her.

He was great friends with the head-waiter, whom he respected as a college student, though for the time being he ranked the student socially. He had him in behind the frame of letter-boxes, which formed a sort of little private room for him, and talked with him at such hours of the forenoon and the late evening as the student was off duty. He found comfort in the student’s fretful strength, which expressed itself in the pugnacious frown of his hot-looking young face, where a bright sorrel mustache was beginning to blaze on a short upper lip.

Fane thought himself a good-looking fellow, and he regarded his figure with pleasure, as it was set off by the suit of fine gray check that he wore habitually; but he thought Gregory’s educational advantages told in his face. His own education had ended at a commercial college, where he acquired a good knowledge of bookkeeping, and the fine business hand he wrote, but where it seemed to him sometimes that the earlier learning of the public school had been hermetically sealed within him by several coats of mathematical varnish. He believed that he had once known a number of things that he no longer knew, and that he had not always been so weak in his double letters as he presently found himself.

One night while Gregory sat on a high stool and rested his elbow on the desk before it, with his chin in his hand, looking down upon Fane, who sprawled sadly in his chair, and listening to the last dance playing in the distant parlor, Fane said. “Now, what’ll you bet that they won’t every one of ’em come and look for a letter in her box before she goes to bed? I tell you, girls are queer, and there’s no place like a hotel to study ‘em.”

“I don’t want to study them,” said Gregory, harshly.

“Think Greek’s more worth your while, or know ’em well enough already?” Fane suggested.

“No, I don’t know them at all,” said the student.

“I don’t believe,” urged the clerk, as if it were relevant, “that there’s a girl in the house that you couldn’t marry, if you gave your mind to it.”

Gregory twitched irascibly. “I don’t want to marry them.”

“Pretty cheap lot, you mean? Well, I don’t know.”

“I don’t mean that,” retorted the student. “But I’ve got other things to think of.”

“Don’t you believe,” the clerk modestly urged, “that it is natural for a man — well, a young man — to think about girls?”

“I suppose it is.”

“And you don’t consider it wrong?”

“How, wrong?”

“Well, a waste of time. I don’t know as I always think about wanting to marry ‘em, or be in love, but I like to let my mind run on ‘em. There’s something about a girl that, well, you don’t know what it is, exactly. Take almost any of ‘em,” said the clerk, with an air of inductive reasoning. “Take that Claxon girl, now for example, I don’t know what it is about her. She’s good-looking, I don’t deny that; and she’s got pretty manners, and she’s as graceful as a bird. But it a’n’t any one of ‘em, and it don’t seem to be all of ’em put together that makes you want to keep your eyes on her the whole while. Ever noticed what a nice little foot she’s got? Or her hands?”

“No,” said the student.

“I don’t mean that she ever tries to show them off; though I know some girls that would. But she’s not that kind. She ain’t much more than a child, and yet you got to treat her just like a woman. Noticed the kind of way she’s got?”

“No,” said the student, with impatience.

The clerk mused with a plaintive air for a moment before he spoke. “Well, it’s something as if she’d been trained to it, so that she knew just the right thing to do, every time, and yet I guess it’s nature. You know how the chef always calls her the Boss? That explains it about as well as anything, and I presume that’s what my mind was running on, the other day, when I called her Boss. But, my! I can’t get anywhere near her since!”

“It serves you right,” said Gregory. “You had no business to tease her.”

“Now, do you think it was teasing? I did, at first, and then again it seemed to me that I came out with the word because it seemed the right one. I presume I couldn’t explain that to her.”

“It wouldn’t be easy.”

“I look upon her,” said Fane, with an effect of argument in the sweetness of his smile, “just as I would upon any other young lady in the house. Do you spell apology with one p or two?”

“One,” said the student, and the clerk made a minute on a piece of paper.

“I feel badly for the girl. I don’t want her to think I was teasing her or taking any sort of liberty with her. Now, would you apologize to her, if you was in my place, and would you write a note, or just wait your chance and speak to her?”

Gregory got down from his stool with a disdainful laugh, and went out of the place. “You make me sick, Fane,” he said.

The last dance was over, and the young ladies who had been waltzing with one another, came out of the parlor with gay cries and laughter, like summer girls who had been at a brilliant hop, and began to stray down the piazzas, and storm into the office. Several of them fluttered up to the desk, as the clerk had foretold, and looked for letters in the boxes bearing their initials. They called him out, and asked if he had not forgotten something for them. He denied it with a sad, wise smile, and then they tried to provoke him to a belated flirtation, in lack of other material, but he met their overtures discreetly, and they presently said, Well, they guessed they must go; and went. Fane turned to encounter Gregory, who had come in by a side door.

“Fane, I want to beg your pardon. I was rude to you just now.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” the clerk protested. “That’s all right. Sit down a while, can’t you, and talk with a fellow. It’s early, yet.”

“No, I can’t. I just wanted to say I was sorry I spoke in that way. Good-night. Is there anything in particular?”

“No; good-night. I was just wondering about — that girl.”

“Oh!”

VI.

Gregory had an habitual severity with his own behavior which did not stop there, but was always passing on to the behavior of others; and his days went by in alternate offence and reparation to those he had to do with. He had to do chiefly with the dining-room girls, whose susceptibilities were such that they kept about their work bathed in tears or suffused with anger much of the time. He was not only good-looking but he was a college student, and their feelings were ready to bud toward him in tender efflorescence, but he kept them cropped and blighted by his curt words and impatient manner. Some of them loved him for the hurts he did them, and some hated him, but all agreed fondly or furiously that he was too cross for anything. They were mostly young school-mistresses, and whether they were of a soft and amorous make, or of a forbidding temper, they knew enough in spite of their hurts to value a young fellow whose thoughts were not running upon girls all the time. Women, even in their spring-time, like men to treat them as if they had souls as well as hearts, and it was a saving grace in Gregory that he treated them all, the silliest of them, as if they had souls. Very likely they responded more with their hearts than with their souls, but they were aware that this was not his fault.

The girls that waited at table saw that he did not distinguish in manner between them and the girls whom they served. The knot between his brows did not dissolve in the smiling gratitude of the young ladies whom he preceded to their places, and pulled out their chairs for, any more than in the blandishments of a waitress who thanked him for some correction.

They owned when he had been harshest that no one could be kinder if he saw a girl really trying, or more patient with well meaning stupidity, but some things fretted him, and he was as apt to correct a girl in her grammar as in her table service. Out of work hours, if he met any of them, he recognized them with deferential politeness; but he shunned occasions of encounter with them as distinctly as he avoided the ladies among the hotel guests. Some of the table girls pitied his loneliness, and once they proposed that he should read to them on the back piazza in the leisure of their mid-afternoons. He said that he had to keep up with his studies in all the time he could get; he treated their request with grave civility, but they felt his refusal to be final.

He was seen very little about the house outside of his own place and function, and he was scarcely known to consort with anyone but Fane, who celebrated his high sense of the honor to the lady-guests; but if any of these would have been willing to show Gregory that they considered his work to get an education as something that redeemed itself from discredit through the nobility of its object, he gave them no chance to do so.

The afternoon following their talk about Clementina, Gregory looked in for Fane behind the letter boxes, but did not find him, and the girl herself came round from the front to say that he was out buying, but would be back now, very soon; it was occasionally the clerk’s business to forage among the farmers for the lighter supplies, such as eggs, and butter, and poultry, and this was the buying that Clementina meant. “Very well, I’ll wait here for him a little while,” Gregory answered.

“So do,” said Clementina, in a formula which she thought polite; but she saw the frown with which Gregory took a Greek book from his pocket, and she hurried round in front of the boxes again, wondering how she could have displeased him. She put her face in sight a moment to explain, “I have got to be here and give out the lettas till Mr. Fane gets back,” and then withdrew it. He tried to lose himself in his book, but her tender voice spoke from time to time beyond the boxes, and Gregory kept listening for Clementina to say, “No’m, there a’n’t. Perhaps, the’e’ll be something the next mail,” and “Yes’m, he’e’s one, and I guess this paper is for some of youa folks, too.”

Gregory shut his book with a sudden bang at last and jumped to his feet, to go away.

The girl came running round the corner of the boxes. “Oh! I thought something had happened.”

“No, nothing has happened,” said Gregory, with a sort of violence; which was heightened by a sense of the rings and tendrils of loose hair springing from the mass that defined her pretty head. “Don’t you know that you oughtn’t to say ‘No’m’ and ‘Yes’m?”’ he demanded, bitterly, and then he expected to see the water come into her eyes, or the fire into her cheeks.

Clementina merely looked interested. “Did I say that? I meant to say Yes, ma’am and No, ma’am; but I keep forgetting.”

“You oughtn’t to say anything!” Gregory answered savagely, “Just say Yes, and No, and let your voice do the rest.”

“Oh!” said the girl, with the gentlest abeyance, as if charmed with the novelty of the idea. “I should be afraid it wasn’t polite.”

Gregory took an even brutal tone. It seemed to him as if he were forced to hurt her feelings. But his words, in spite of his tone, were not brutal; they might have even been thought flattering. “The politeness is in the manner, and you don’t need anything but your manner.”

“Do you think so, truly?” asked the girl joyously. “I should like to try it once!”

He frowned again. “I’ve no business to criticise your way of speaking.”

“Oh yes’m — yes, ma’am; sir, I mean; I mean, Oh, yes, indeed! The’a! It does sound just as well, don’t it?” Clementina laughed in triumph at the outcome of her efforts, so that a reluctant visional smile came upon Gregory’s face, too. “I’m very mach obliged to you, Mr. Gregory — I shall always want to do it, if it’s the right way.”

“It’s the right way,” said Gregory coldly.

“And don’t they,” she urged, “don’t they really say Sir and Ma’am, whe’e — whe’e you came from?”

He said gloomily, “Not ladies and gentlemen. Servants do. Waiters — like me.” He inflicted this stab to his pride with savage fortitude and he bore with self-scorn the pursuit of her innocent curiosity.

“But I thought — I thought you was a college student.”

“Were,” Gregory corrected her, involuntarily, and she said, “Were, I mean.”

“I’m a student at college, and here I’m a servant! It’s all right!” he said with a suppressed gritting of the teeth; and he added, “My Master was the servant of the meanest, and I must — I beg your pardon for meddling with your manner of speaking—”

“Oh, I’m very much obliged to you; indeed I am. And I shall not care if you tell me of anything that’s out of the way in my talking,” said Clementina, generously.

“Thank you; I think I won’t wait any longer for Mr. Fane.”

“Why, I’m su’a he’ll be back very soon, now. I’ll try not to disturb you any moa.”

Gregory turned from taking some steps towards the door, and said, “I wish you would tell Mr. Fane something.”

“For you? Why, suttainly!”

“No. For you. Tell him that it’s all right about his calling you Boss.”

The indignant color came into Clementina’s face. “He had no business to call me that.”

“No; and he doesn’t think he had, now. He’s truly sorry for it.”

“I’ll see,” said Clementina.

She had not seen by the time Fane got back. She received his apologies for being gone so long coldly, and went away to Mrs. Atwell, whom she told what had passed between Gregory and herself.

“Is he truly so proud?” she asked.

“He’s a very good young man,” said Mrs. Atwell, “but I guess he’s proud. He can’t help it, but you can see he fights against it. If I was you, Clem, I wouldn’t say anything to the guls about it.”

“Oh, no’m — I mean, no, indeed. I shouldn’t think of it. But don’t you think that was funny, his bringing in Christ, that way?”

“Well, he’s going to be a minister, you know.”

“Is he really?” Clementina was a while silent. At last she said, “Don’t you think Mr. Gregory has a good many freckles?”

“Well, them red-complected kind is liable to freckle,” said Mrs. Atwell, judicially.

After rather a long pause for both of them, Clementina asked, “Do you think it would be nice for me to ask Mr. Gregory about things, when I wasn’t suttain?”

“Like what?”

“Oh-wo’ds, and pronunciation; and books to read.”

“Why, I presume he’d love to have you. He’s always correctin’ the guls; I see him take up a book one day, that one of ’em was readin’, and when she as’t him about it, he said it was rubbage. I guess you couldn’t have a betta guide.”

“Well, that was what I was thinking. I guess I sha’n’t do it, though. I sh’d neva have the courage.” Clementina laughed and then fell rather seriously silent again.

VII.

One day the shoeman stopped his wagon at the door of the helps’ house, and called up at its windows, “Well, guls, any of you want to git a numba foua foot into a numba two shoe, to-day? Now’s youa chance, but you got to be quick abort it. The’e ha’r’t but just so many numba two shoes made, and the wohld’s full o’ numba foua feet.”

The windows filled with laughing faces at the first sound of the shoeman’s ironical voice; and at sight of his neat wagon, with its drawers at the rear and sides, and its buggy-hood over the seat where the shoeman lounged lazily holding the reins, the girls flocked down the stairs, and out upon the piazza where the shoe man had handily ranged his vehicle.

They began to ask him if he had not this thing and that, but he said with firmness, “Nothin’ but shoes, guls. I did carry a gen’l line, one while, of what you may call ankle-wea’, such as spats, and stockin’s, and gaitas, but I nova did like to speak of such things befoa ladies, and now I stick ex-elusively to shoes. You know that well enough, guls; what’s the use?”

He kept a sober face amidst the giggling that his words aroused, — and let his voice sink into a final note of injury.

“Well, if you don’t want any shoes, to-day, I guess I must be goin’.” He made a feint of jerking his horse’s reins, but forebore at the entreaties that went up from the group of girls.

“Yes, we do!” “Let’s see them!” “Oh, don’t go!” they chorused in an equally histrionic alarm, and the shoeman got down from his perch to show his wares.

“Now, the’a, ladies,” he said, pulling out one of the drawers, and dangling a pair of shoes from it by the string that joined their heels, “the’e’s a shoe that looks as good as any Sat’d’y-night shoe you eva see. Looks as han’some as if it had a pasteboa’d sole and was split stock all through, like the kind you buy for a dollar at the store, and kick out in the fust walk you take with your fella— ‘r some other gul’s fella, I don’t ca’e which. And yet that’s an honest shoe, made of the best of material all the way through, and in the best manna. Just look at that shoe, ladies; ex-amine it; sha’n’t cost you a cent, and I’ll pay for youa lost time myself, if any complaint is made.” He began to toss pairs of the shoes into the crowd of girls, who caught them from each other before they fell, with hysterical laughter, and ran away with them in-doors to try them on. “This is a shoe that I’m intaducin’,” the shoeman went on, “and every pair is warranted — warranted numba two; don’t make any otha size, because we want to cata to a strictly numba two custom. If any lady doos feel ’em a little mite too snug, I’m sorry for her, but I can’t do anything to help her in this shoe.”

“Too snug!” came a gay voice from in-doors. “Why my foot feels puffectly lost in this one.”

“All right,” the shoeman shouted back. “Call it a numba one shoe and then see if you can’t find that lost foot in it, some’eres. Or try a little flour, and see if it won’t feel more at home. I’ve hea’d of a shoe that give that sensation of looseness by not goin’ on at all.”

The girls exulted joyfully together at the defeat of their companion, but the shoeman kept a grave face, while he searched out other sorts of shoes and slippers, and offered them, or responded to some definite demand with something as near like as he could hope to make serve. The tumult of talk and laughter grew till the chef put his head out of the kitchen door, and then came sauntering across the grass to the helps’ piazza. At the same time the clerk suffered himself to be lured from his post by the excitement. He came and stood beside the chef, who listened to the shoeman’s flow of banter with a longing to take his chances with him.

“That’s a nice hawss,” he said. “What’ll you take for him?”

“Why, hello!” said the shoeman, with an eye that dwelt upon the chef’s official white cap and apron, “You talk English, don’t you? Fust off, I didn’t know but it was one of them foreign dukes come ova he’a to marry some oua poor millionai’es daughtas.” The girls cried out for joy, and the chef bore their mirth stoically, but not without a personal relish of the shoeman’s up-and-comingness. “Want a hawss?” asked the shoeman with an air of business. “What’ll you give?”

“I’ll give you thutty-seven dollas and a half,” said the chef.

“Sorry I can’t take it. That hawss is sellin’ at present for just one hundred and fifty dollas.”

“Well,” said the chef, “I’ll raise you a dolla and a quahta. Say thutty-eight and seventy-five.”

“W-ell now, you’re gittin’ up among the figgas where you’re liable to own a hawss. You just keep right on a raisin’ me, while I sell these ladies some shoes, and maybe you’ll hit it yit, ‘fo’e night.”

The girls were trying on shoes on every side now, and they had dispensed with the formality of going in-doors for the purpose. More than one put out her foot to the clerk for his opinion of the fit, and the shoeman was mingling with the crowd, testing with his hand, advising from his professional knowledge, suggesting, urging, and in some cases artfully agreeing with the reluctance shown.

“This man,” said the chef, indicating Fane, “says you can tell moa lies to the square inch than any man out o’ Boston.”

“Doos he?” asked the shoeman, turning with a pair of high-heeled bronze slippers in his hand from the wagon. “Well, now, if I stood as nea’ to him as you do, I believe I sh’d hit him.”

“Why, man, I can’t dispute him!” said the chef, and as if he had now at last scored a point, he threw back his head and laughed. When he brought down his head again, it was to perceive the approach of Clementina. “Hello,” he said for her to hear, “he’e comes the Boss. Well, I guess I must be goin’,” he added, in mock anxiety. “I’m a goin’, Boss, I’m a goin’.”

Clementina ignored him. “Mr. Atwell wants to see you a moment, Mr. Fane,” she said to the clerk.

“All right, Miss Claxon,” Fane answered, with the sorrowful respect which he always showed Clementina, now, “I’ll be right there.” But he waited a moment, either in expression of his personal independence, or from curiosity to know what the shoeman was going to say of the bronze slippers.

Clementina felt the fascination, too; she thought the slippers were beautiful, and her foot thrilled with a mysterious prescience of its fitness for them.

“Now, the’e, ladies, or as I may say guls, if you’ll excuse it in one that’s moa like a fatha to you than anything else, in his feelings” — the girls tittered, and some one shouted derisively— “It’s true!”— “now there is a shoe, or call it a slippa, that I’ve rutha hesitated about showin’ to you, because I know that you’re all rutha serious-minded, I don’t ca’e how young ye be, or how good-lookin’ ye be; and I don’t presume the’e’s one among you that’s eve’ head o’ dancin’.” In the mirthful hooting and mocking that followed, the shoeman hedged gravely from the extreme position he had taken. “What? Well, maybe you have among some the summa folks, but we all know what summa folks ah’, and I don’t expect you to patte’n by them. But what I will say is that if any young lady within the sound of my voice,” — he looked round for the applause which did not fail him in his parody of the pulpit style— “should get an invitation to a dance next winta, and should feel it a wo’k of a charity to the young man to go, she’ll be sorry — on his account, rememba — that she ha’n’t got this pair o’ slippas.

“The’a! They’re a numba two, and they’ll fit any lady here, I don’t ca’e how small a foot she’s got. Don’t all speak at once, sistas! Ample time allowed for meals. That’s a custom-made shoe, and if it hadn’t b’en too small for the lady they was oddid foh, you couldn’t-’a’ got ’em for less than seven dollas; but now I’m throwin’ on ’em away for three.”

A groan of dismay went up from the whole circle, and some who had pressed forward for a sight of the slippers, shrank back again.

“Did I hea’ just now,” asked the shoeman, with a soft insinuation in his voice, and in the glance he suddenly turned upon Clementina, “a party addressed as Boss?” Clementina flushed, but she did not cower; the chef walked away with a laugh, and the shoeman pursued him with his voice. “Not that I am goin’ to folla the wicked example of a man who tries to make spot of young ladies; but if the young lady addressed as Boss—”

“Miss Claxon,” said the clerk with ingratiating reverence.

“Miss Claxon — I Stan’ corrected,” pursued the shoeman. “If Miss Claxon will do me the fava just to try on this slippa, I sh’d be able to tell at the next place I stopped just how it looked on a lady’s foot. I see you a’n’t any of you disposed to buy ’em this aftanoon, ‘and I a’n’t complainin’; you done pootty well by me, already, and I don’t want to uhge you; but I do want to carry away the picture, in my mind’s eye — what you may call a mental photograph — of this slipper on the kind of a foot it was made for, so’t I can praise it truthfully to my next customer. What do you say, ma’am?” he addressed himself with profound respect to Clementina.

“Oh, do let him, Clem!” said one of the girls, and another pleaded, “Just so he needn’t tell a story to his next customa,” and that made the rest laugh.

Clementina’s heart was throbbing, and joyous lights were dancing in her eyes. “I don’t care if I do,” she said, and she stooped to unlace her shoe, but one of the big girls threw herself on her knees at her feet to prevent her. Clementina remembered too late that there was a hole in her stocking and that her little toe came through it, but she now folded the toe artfully down, and the big girl discovered the hole in time to abet her attempt at concealment. She caught the slipper from the shoeman and harried it on; she tied the ribbons across the instep, and then put on the other. “Now put out youa foot, Clem! Fast dancin’ position!” She leaned back upon her own heels, and Clementina daintily lifted the edge of her skirt a little, and peered over at her feet. The slippers might or might not have been of an imperfect taste, in their imitation of the prevalent fashion, but on Clementina’s feet they had distinction.

“Them feet was made for them slippas,” said the shoeman devoutly.

The clerk was silent; he put his hand helplessly to his mouth, and then dropped it at his side again.

Gregory came round the corner of the building from the dining-room, and the big girl who was crouching before Clementina, and who boasted that she was not afraid of the student, called saucily to him, “Come here, a minute, Mr. Gregory,” and as he approached, she tilted aside, to let him see Clementina’s slippers.

Clementina beamed up at him with all her happiness in her eyes, but after a faltering instant, his face reddened through its freckles, and he gave her a rebuking frown and passed on.

“Well, I decla’e!” said the big girl. Fane turned uneasily, and said with a sigh, he guessed he must be going, now.

A blight fell upon the gay spirits of the group, and the shoeman asked with an ironical glance after Gregory’s retreating figure, “Owna of this propaty?”

“No, just the ea’th,” said the big girl, angrily.

The voice of Clementina made itself heard with a cheerfulness which had apparently suffered no chill, but was really a rising rebellion. “How much ah’ the slippas?”

“Three dollas,” said the shoeman in a surprise which he could not conceal at Clementina’s courage.

She laughed, and stooped to untie the slippers. “That’s too much for me.”

“Let me untie ‘em, Clem,” said the big girl. “It’s a shame for you eva to take ’em off.”

“That’s right, lady,” said the shoeman. “And you don’t eva need to,” he added, to Clementina, “unless you object to sleepin’ in ‘em. You pay me what you want to now, and the rest when I come around the latta paht of August.”

“Oh keep ‘em, Clem!” the big girl urged, passionately, and the rest joined her with their entreaties.

“I guess I betta not,” said Clementina, and she completed the work of taking off the slippers in which the big girl could lend her no further aid, such was her affliction of spirit.

“All right, lady,” said the shoeman. “Them’s youa slippas, and I’ll just keep ’em for you till the latta paht of August.”

He drove away, and in the woods which he had to pass through on the road to another hotel he overtook the figure of a man pacing rapidly. He easily recognized Gregory, but he bore him no malice. “Like a lift?” he asked, slowing up beside him.

“No, thank you,” said Gregory. “I’m out for the walk.” He looked round furtively, and then put his hand on the side of the wagon, mechanically, as if to detain it, while he walked on.

“Did you sell the slippers to the young lady?”

“Well, not as you may say sell, exactly,” returned the shoeman, cautiously.

“Have you — got them yet?” asked the student.

“Guess so,” said the man. “Like to see ‘em?”

He pulled up his horse.

Gregory faltered a moment. Then he said, “I’d like to buy them. Quick!”

He looked guiltily about, while the shoeman alertly obeyed, with some delay for a box to put them in. “How much are they?”

“Well, that’s a custom made slipper, and the price to the lady that oddid’em was seven dollas. But I’ll let you have ’em for three — if you want ’em for a present.” — The shoeman was far too discreet to permit himself anything so overt as a smile; he merely let a light of intelligence come into his face.

Gregory paid the money. “Please consider this as confidential,” he said, and he made swiftly away. Before the shoeman could lock the drawer that had held the slippers, and clamber to his perch under the buggy-hood, Gregory was running back to him again.

“Stop!” he called, and as he came up panting in an excitement which the shoeman might well have mistaken for indignation attending the discovery of some blemish in his purchase. “Do you regard this as in any manner a deception?” he palpitated.

“Why,” the shoeman began cautiously, “it wa’n’t what you may call a promise, exactly. More of a joke than anything else, I looked on it. I just said I’d keep ’em for her; but—”

“You don’t understand. If I seemed to disapprove — if I led any one to suppose, by my manner, or by — anything — that I thought it unwise or unbecoming to buy the shoes, and then bought them myself, do you think it is in the nature of an acted falsehood?”

“Lo’d no!” said the shoeman, and he caught up the slack of his reins to drive on, as if he thought this amusing maniac might also be dangerous.

Gregory stopped him with another question. “And shall — will you — think it necessary to speak of — of this transaction? I leave you free!”

“Well,” said the shoeman. “I don’t know what you’re after, exactly, but if you think I’m so shot on for subjects that I’ve got to tell the folks at the next stop that I sold a fellar a pair of slippas for his gul — Go ‘long!” he called to his horse, and left Gregory standing in the middle of the road.

VIII.

The people who came to the Middlemount in July were ordinarily the nicest, but that year the August folks were nicer than usual and there were some students among them, and several graduates just going into business, who chose to take their outing there instead of going to the sea-side or the North Woods. This was a chance that might not happen in years again, and it made the house very gay for the young ladies; they ceased to pay court to the clerk, and asked him for letters only at mail-time. Five or six couples were often on the floor together, at the hops, and the young people sat so thick upon the stairs that one could scarcely get up or down.

So many young men made it gay not only for the young ladies, but also for a certain young married lady, when she managed to shirk her rather filial duties to her husband, who was much about the verandas, purblindly feeling his way with a stick, as he walked up and down, or sitting opaque behind the glasses that preserved what was left of his sight, while his wife read to him. She was soon acquainted with a good many more people than he knew, and was in constant request for such occasions as needed a chaperon not averse to mountain climbing, or drives to other hotels for dancing and supper and return by moonlight, or the more boisterous sorts of charades; no sheet and pillow case party was complete without her; for welsh-rarebits her presence was essential. The event of the conflict between these social claims and her duties to her husband was her appeal to Mrs. Atwell on a point which the landlady referred to Clementina.

“She wants somebody to read to her husband, and I don’t believe but what you could do it, Clem. You’re a good reader, as good as I want to hear, and while you may say that you don’t put in a great deal of elocution, I guess you can read full well enough. All he wants is just something to keep him occupied, and all she wants is a chance to occupy herself with otha folks. Well, she is moa their own age. I d’know as the’s any hahm in her. And my foot’s so much betta, now, that I don’t need you the whole while, any moa.”

“Did you speak to her about me?” asked the girl.

“Well, I told her I’d tell you. I couldn’t say how you’d like.”

“Oh, I guess I should like,” said Clementina, with her eyes shining. “But — I should have to ask motha.”

“I don’t believe but what your motha’d be willin’,” said Mrs. Atwell. “You just go down and see her about it.”

The next day Mrs. Milray was able to take leave of her husband, in setting off to matronize a coaching party, with an exuberance of good conscience that she shared with the spectators. She kissed him with lively affection, and charged him not to let the child read herself to death for him. She captioned Clementina that Mr. Milray never knew when he was tired, and she had better go by the clock in her reading, and not trust to any sign from him.

Clementina promised, and when the public had followed Mrs. Milray away, to watch her ascent to the topmost seat of the towering coach, by means of the ladder held in place by two porters, and by help of the down-stretched hands of all the young men on the coach, Clementina opened the book at the mark she found in it, and began to read to Mr. Milray.

The book was a metaphysical essay, which he professed to find a lighter sort of reading than fiction; he said most novelists were too seriously employed in preventing the marriage of the lovers, up to a certain point, to be amusing; but you could always trust a metaphysician for entertainment if he was very much in earnest, and most metaphysicians were. He let Clementina read on a good while in her tender voice, which had still so many notes of childhood in it, before he manifested any consciousness of being read to. He kept the smile on his delicate face which had come there when his wife said at parting, “I don’t believe I should leave her with you if you could see how prettty she was,” and he held his head almost motionlessly at the same poise he had given it in listening to her final charges. It was a fine head, still well covered with soft hair, which lay upon it in little sculpturesque masses, like chiseled silver, and the acquiline profile had a purity of line in the arch of the high nose and the jut of the thin lips and delicate chin, which had not been lost in the change from youth to age. One could never have taken it for the profile of a New York lawyer who had early found New York politics more profitable than law, and after a long time passed in city affairs, had emerged with a name shadowed by certain doubtful transactions. But this was Milray’s history, which in the rapid progress of American events, was so far forgotten that you had first to remind people of what he had helped do before you could enjoy their surprise in realizing that this gentle person, with the cast of intellectual refinement which distinguished his face, was the notorious Milray, who was once in all the papers. When he made his game and retired from politics, his family would have sacrificed itself a good deal to reclaim him socially, though they were of a severer social than spiritual conscience, in the decay of some ancestral ideals. But he had rendered their willingness hopeless by marrying, rather late in life, a young girl from the farther West who had come East with a general purpose to get on. She got on very well with Milray, and it was perhaps not altogether her own fault that she did not get on so well with his family, when she began to substitute a society aim for the artistic ambition that had brought her to New York. They might have forgiven him for marrying her, but they could not forgive her for marrying him. They were of New England origin and they were perhaps a little more critical with her than if they had been New Yorkers of Dutch strain. They said that she was a little Western hoyden, but that the stage would have been a good place for her if she could have got over her Pike county accent; in the hush of family councils they confided to one another the belief that there were phases of the variety business in which her accent would have been no barrier to her success, since it could not have been heard in the dance, and might have been disguised in the song.

“Will you kindly read that passage over again?” Milray asked as Clementina paused at the end of a certain paragraph. She read it, while he listened attentively. “Could you tell me just what you understand by that?” he pursued, as if he really expected Clementina to instruct him.

She hesitated a moment before she answered, “I don’t believe I undastand anything at all.”

“Do you know,” said Milray, “that’s exactly my own case? And I’ve an idea that the author is in the same box,” and Clementina perceived she might laugh, and laughed discreetly.

Milray seemed to feel the note of discreetness in her laugh, and he asked, smiling, “How old did you tell me you were?”

“I’m sixteen,” said Clementina.

“It’s a great age,” said Milray. “I remember being sixteen myself; I have never been so old since. But I was very old for my age, then. Do you think you are?”

“I don’t believe I am,” said Clementina, laughing again, but still very discreetly.

“Then I should like to tell you that you have a very agreeable voice. Do you sing?”

“No’m — no, sir — no,” said Clementina, “I can’t sing at all.”

“Ah, that’s very interesting,” said Milray, “but it’s not surprising. I wish I could see your face distinctly; I’ve a great curiosity about matching voices and faces; I must get Mrs. Milray to tell me how you look. Where did you pick up your pretty knack at reading? In school, here?”

“I don’t know,” answered Clementina. “Do I read-the way you want?”

“Oh, perfectly. You let the meaning come through — when there is any.”

“Sometimes,” said Clementina ingenuously, “I read too fast; the children ah’ so impatient when I’m reading to them at home, and they hurry me. But I can read a great deal slower if you want me to.”

“No, I’m impatient, too,” said Milray. “Are there many of them, — the children?”

“There ah’ six in all.”

“And are you the oldest?”

“Yes,” said Clementina. She still felt it very blunt not to say sir, too, but she tried to make her tone imply the sir, as Mr. Gregory had bidden her.

“You’ve got a very pretty name.”

Clementina brightened. “Do you like it? Motha gave it to me; she took it out of a book that fatha was reading to her.”

“I like it very much,” said Milray. “Are you tall for your age?”

“I guess I am pretty tall.”

“You’re fair, of course. I can tell that by your voice; you’ve got a light-haired voice. And what are your eyes?”

“Blue!” Clementina laughed at his pursuit.

“Ah, of course! It isn’t a gray-eyed blonde voice. Do you think — has anybody ever told you-that you were graceful?”

“I don’t know as they have,” said Clementina, after thinking.

“And what is your own opinion?” Clementina began to feel her dignity infringed; she did not answer, and now Milray laughed. “I felt the little tilt in your step as you came up. It’s all right. Shall we try for our friend’s meaning, now?”

Clementina began again, and again Milray stopped her. “You mustn’t bear malice. I can hear the grudge in your voice; but I didn’t mean to laugh at you. You don’t like being made fun of, do you?”

“I don’t believe anybody does,” said Clementina.

“No, indeed,” said Milray. “If I had tried such a thing I should be afraid you would make it uncomfortable for me. But I haven’t, have I?”

“I don’t know,” said Clementina, reluctantly.

Milray laughed gleefully. “Well, you’ll forgive me, because I’m an old fellow. If I were young, you wouldn’t, would you?”

Clementina thought of the clerk; she had certainly never forgiven him. “Shall I read on?” she asked.

“Yes, yes. Read on,” he said, respectfully. Once he interrupted her to say that she pronounced admirable, but he would like now and then to differ with her about a word if she did not mind. She answered, Oh no, indeed; she should like it ever so much, if he would tell her when she was wrong. After that he corrected her, and he amused himself by studying forms of respect so delicate that they should not alarm her pride; Clementina reassured him in terms as fine as his own. She did not accept his instructions implicitly; she meant to bring them to the bar of Gregory’s knowledge. If he approved of them, then she would submit.

Milray easily possessed himself of the history of her life and of all its circumstances, and he said he would like to meet her father and make the acquaintance of a man whose mind, as Clementina interpreted it to him, he found so original.

He authorized his wife to arrange with Mrs. Atwell for a monopoly of Clementina’s time while he stayed at Middlemount, and neither he nor Mrs. Milray seemed surprised at the good round sum, as the landlady thought it, which she asked in the girl’s behalf.

IX.

The Milrays stayed through August, and Mrs. Milray was the ruling spirit of the great holiday of the summer, at Middlemount. It was this year that the landlords of the central mountain region had decided to compete in a coaching parade, and to rival by their common glory the splendor of the East Side and the West Side parades. The boarding-houses were to take part, as well as the hotels; the farms where only three or four summer folks were received, were to send their mountain-wagons, and all were to be decorated with bunting. An arch draped with flags and covered with flowers spanned the entrance to the main street at Middlemount Centre, and every shop in the village was adorned for the event.

Mrs. Milray made the landlord tell her all about coaching parades, and the champions of former years on the East Side and the West Side, and then she said that the Middlemount House must take the prize from them all this year, or she should never come near his house again. He answered, with a dignity and spirit he rarely showed with Mrs. Milray’s class of custom, “I’m goin’ to drive our hossis myself.”

She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display on the coach. She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her decoration for the coach.

She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble. She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents of despair all over the place. When their dresses were finished she made the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the effects she aimed at. But on the eve of realizing these in public she was overwhelmed by disaster. The crowning glory of her composition was to be a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months. It had been all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her extreme youth, was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor’s orders. Mrs. Milray had now not only to improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose her from a group of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and embittering those who were not chosen. In her calamity she asked her husband what she should do, with but the least hope that he could tell her. But he answered promptly, “Take Clementina; I’ll let you have her for the day,” and then waited for the storm of her renunciations and denunciations to spend itself.

“To be sure,” she said, when this had happened, “it isn’t as if she were a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of public function, anyhow. I can’t say that I’ve hired her to take the part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same thing.”

The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child’s creation. “She has got to be dressed new from head to foot,” she said, “every stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?”

By a succession of miracles with cheese-cloth, and sashes and ribbons, it was managed; and ended in a triumph so great that Mrs. Milray took the girl in her arms and kissed her for looking the Spirit of Summer to a perfection that the victim of the mumps could not have approached. The victory was not lastingly marred by the failure of Clementina’s shoes to look the Spirit of Summer as well as the rest of her costume. No shoes at all world have been the very thing, but shoes so shabby and worn down at one side of the heel as Clementina’s were very far from the thing. Mrs. Milray decided that another fold of cheese-cloth would add to the statuesque charm of her figure, and give her more height; and she was richly satisfied with the effect when the Middlemount coach drove up to the great veranda the next morning, with all the figures of her picture in position on its roof, and Clementina supreme among them. She herself mounted in simple, undramatized authority to her official seat beside the landlord, who in coachman’s dress, with a bouquet of autumnal flowers in his lapel, sat holding his garlanded reins over the backs of his six horses; and then the coach as she intended it to appear in the parade set out as soon as the turnouts of the other houses joined it. They were all to meet at the Middlemount, which was thickly draped and festooned in flags, with knots of evergreen and the first red boughs of the young swamp maples holding them in place over its irregular facade. The coach itself was amass of foliage and flowers, from which it defined itself as a wheeled vehicle in vague and partial outline; the other wagons and coaches, as they drove tremulously up, with an effect of having been mired in blossoms about their spokes and hubs, had the unwieldiness which seems inseparable from spectacularity. They represented motives in color and design sometimes tasteless enough, and sometimes so nearly very good that Mrs. Milray’s heart was a great deal in her mouth, as they arrived, each with its hotel-cry roared and shrilled from a score of masculine and feminine throats, and finally spelled for distinctness sake, with an ultimate yell or growl. But she had not finished giving the lady-representative of a Sunday newspaper the points of her own tableau, before she regained the courage and the faith in which she remained serenely steadfast throughout the parade.

It was when all the equipages of the neighborhood had arrived that she climbed to her place; the ladder was taken away; the landlord spoke to his horses, and the Middlemount coach led the parade, amid the renewed slogans, and the cries and fluttered handkerchiefs of the guests crowding the verandas.

The line of march was by one road to Middlemount Centre, where the prize was to be awarded at the judges’ stand, and then the coaches were to escort the triumphant vehicle homeward by another route, so as to pass as many houses on the way as possible. It was a curious expression of the carnival spirit in a region immemorially starved of beauty in the lives of its people; and whatever was the origin of the mountain coaching parade, or from whatever impulse of sentimentality or advertising it came, the effect was of undeniable splendor, and of phantasmagoric strangeness.

Gregory watched its progress from a hill-side pasture as it trailed slowly along the rising and falling road. The songs of the young girls, interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday processional to sacrifice to their gods. Words of fierce Hebrew poetry burned in his thought; the warnings and the accusals and the condemnations of the angry prophets; and he stood rapt from his own time and place in a dream of days when the Most High stooped to commune face to face with His ministers, while the young voices of those forgetful or ignorant of Him, called to his own youth, and the garlanded chariots, with their banners and their streamers passed on the road beneath him and out of sight in the shadow of the woods beyond.

When the prize was given to the Middlemount coach at the Center the landlord took the flag, and gallantly transferred it to Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Milray passed it up to Clementina, and bade her, “Wave it, wave it!”

The village street was thronged with people that cheered, and swung their hats and handkerchiefs to the coach as it left the judges’ stand and drove under the triumphal arch, with the other coaches behind it. Then Atwell turned his horses heads homewards, and at the brisker pace with which people always return from festivals or from funerals, he left the village and struck out upon the country road with his long escort before him. The crowd was quick to catch the courteous intention of the victors, and followed them with applause as far beyond the village borders as wind and limb would allow; but the last noisy boy had dropped off breathless before they reached a half-finished house in the edge of some woods. A line of little children was drawn up by the road-side before it, who watched the retinue with grave eagerness, till the Middlemount coach came in full sight. Then they sprang into the air, and beating their hands together, screamed, “Clem! Clem! Oh it’s Clem!” and jumped up and down, and a shabby looking work worn woman came round the corner of the house and stared up at Clementina waving her banner wildly to the children, and shouting unintelligible words to them. The young people on the coach joined in response to the children, some simply, some ironically, and one of the men caught up a great wreath of flowers which lay at Clementina’s feet, and flung it down to them; the shabby woman quickly vanished round the corner of the house again. Mrs. Milray leaned over to ask the landlord, “Who in the world are Clementina’s friends?”

“Why don’t you know?” he retorted in abated voice. “Them’s her brothas and sistas.”

“And that woman?”

“The lady at the conna? That’s her motha.”

When the event was over, and all the things had been said and said again, and there was nothing more to keep the spring and summer months from going up to their rooms to lie down, and the fall and winter months from trying to get something to eat, Mrs. Milray found herself alone with Clementina.

The child seemed anxious about something, and Mrs. Milray, who wanted to go and lie down, too, asked a little impatiently, “What is it, Clementina?”

“Oh, nothing. Only I was afraid maybe you didn’t like my waving to the children, when you saw how queea they looked.” Clementina’s lips quivered.

“Did any of the rest say anything?”

“I know what they thought. But I don’t care! I should do it right over again!”

Mrs. Milray’s happiness in the day’s triumph was so great that she could indulge a generous emotion. She caught the girl in her arms. “I want to kiss you; I want to hug you, Clementina!”

X.

The notion of a dance for the following night to celebrate the success of the house in the coaching parade came to Mrs. Milray over a welsh-rarebit which she gave at the close of the evening. The party was in the charge of Gregory, who silently served them at their orgy with an austerity that might have conspired with the viand itself against their dreams, if they had not been so used to the gloom of his ministrations. He would not allow the waitresses to be disturbed in their evening leisure, or kept from their sleep by such belated pleasures; and when he had provided the materials for the rarebit, he stood aloof, and left their combination to Mrs. Milray and her chafing-dish.

She had excluded Clementina on account of her youth, as she said to one of the fall and winter months, who came in late, and noticed Clementina’s absence with a “Hello! Anything the matter with the Spirit of Summer?” Clementina had become both a pet and a joke with these months before the parade was over, and now they clamored together, and said they must have her at the dance anyway. They were more tepidly seconded by the spring and summer months, and Mrs. Milray said, “Well, then, you’ll have to all subscribe and get her a pair of dancing slippers.” They pressed her for her meaning, and she had to explain the fact of Clementina’s destitution, which that additional fold of cheese-cloth had hidden so well in the coaching tableau that it had never been suspected. The young men entreated her to let them each buy a pair of slippers for the Spirit of Summer, which she should wear in turn for the dance that she must give each of them; and this made Mrs. Milray declare that, no, the child should not come to the dance at all, and that she was not going to have her spoiled. But, before the party broke up, she promised that she would see what could be done, and she put it very prettily to the child the next day, and waited for her to say, as she knew she must, that she could not go, and why. They agreed that the cheese-cloth draperies of the Spirit of Summer were surpassingly fit for the dance; but they had to agree that this still left the question of slippers untouched. It remained even more hopeless when Clementina tried on all of Mrs. Milray’s festive shoes, and none of her razorpoints and high heels would avail. She went away disappointed, but not yet disheartened; youth does not so easily renounce a pleasure pressed to the lips; and Clementina had it in her head to ask some of the table girls to help her out. She meant to try first with that big girl who had helped her put on the shoeman’s bronze slippers; and she hurried through the office, pushing purblindly past Fane without looking his way, when he called to her in the deference which he now always used with her, “Here’s a package here for you, Clementina — Miss Claxon,” and he gave her an oblong parcel, addressed in a hand strange to her. “Who is it from?” she asked, innocently, and Fane replied with the same ingenuousness: “I’m sure I don’t know.” Afterwards he thought of having retorted, “I haven’t opened it,” but still without being certain that he would have had the courage to say it.

Clementina did not think of opening it herself, even when she was alone in her little room above Mrs. Atwell’s, until she had carefully felt it over, and ascertained that it was a box of pasteboard, three or four inches deep and wide, and eight or ten inches long. She looked at the address again, “Miss Clementina Claxon,” and at the narrow notched ribbon which tied it, and noted that the paper it was wrapped in was very white and clean. Then she sighed, and loosed the knot, and the paper slipped off the box, and at the same time the lid fell off, and the shoe man’s bronze slippers fell out upon the floor.

Either it must be a dream or it must be a joke; it could not be both real and earnest; somebody was trying to tease her; such flattery of fortune could not be honestly meant. But it went to her head, and she was so giddy with it as she caught the slippers from the floor, and ran down to Mrs. Atwell, that she knocked against the sides of the narrow staircase.

“What is it? What does it mean? Who did it?” she panted, with the slippers in her hand. “Whe’e did they come from?” She poured out the history of her trying on these shoes, and of her present need of them and of their mysterious coming, to meet her longing after it had almost ceased to be a hope. Mrs. Atwell closed with her in an exultation hardly short of a clapping the hands. Her hair was gray, and the girl’s hair still hung in braids down her back, but they were of the same age in their transport, which they referred to Mrs. Milray, and joined with her in glad but fruitless wonder who had sent Clementina the shoes. Mrs. Atwell held that the help who had seen the girl trying them on had clubbed together and got them for her at the time; and had now given them to her for the honor she had done the Middlemount House in the parade. Mrs. Milray argued that the spring and summer months had secretly dispatched some fall and winter month to ransack the stores at Middlemount Centre for them. Clementina believed that they came from the shoe man himself, who had always wanted to send them, in the hope that she would keep them, and had merely happened to send them just then in that moment of extremity when she was helpless against them. Each conjecture involved improbabilities so gross that it left the field free to any opposite theory.

Rumor of the fact could not fail to go through the house, and long before his day’s work was done it reached the chef, and amused him as a piece of the Boss’s luck. He was smoking his evening pipe at the kitchen door after supper, when Clementina passed him on one of the many errands that took her between Mrs. Milray’s room and her own, and he called to her: “Boss, what’s this I hear about a pair o’ glass slippas droppin’ out the sky int’ youa lap?”

Clementina was so happy that she thought she might trust him for once, and she said, “Oh, yes, Mr. Mahtin! Who do you suppose sent them?” she entreated him so sweetly that it would have softened any heart but the heart of a tease.

“I believe I could give a pootty good guess if I had the facts.”

Clementina innocently gave them to him, and he listened with a well-affected sympathy.

“Say Fane fust told you about ‘em?”

“Yes. ‘He’e’s a package for you,’ he said. Just that way; and he couldn’t tell me who left it, or anything.”

“Anybody asked him about it since?”

“Oh, yes! Mrs. Milray, and Mrs. Atwell, and Mr. Atwell, and everybody.”

“Everybody.” The chef smiled with a peculiar droop of one eye. “And he didn’t know when the slippas got into the landlo’d’s box?”

“No. The fust thing he knew, the’ they we’e!” Clementina stood expectant, but the chef smoked on as if that were all there was to say, and seemed to have forgotten her. “Who do you think put them thea, Mr. Mahtin?”

The chef looked up as if surprised to find her still there. “Oh! Oh, yes! Who d’ I think? Why, I know, Boss. But I don’t believe I’d betta tell you.”

“Oh, do, Mr. Mahtin! If you knew how I felt about it—”

“No, no! I guess I betta not. ’Twouldn’t do you any good. I guess I won’t say anything moa. But if I was in youa place, and I really wanted to know whe’e them slippas come from—”

“I do — I do indeed—”

The chef paused before he added, “I should go at Fane. I guess what he don’t know ain’t wo’th knowin’, and I guess nobody else knows anything. Thea! I don’t know but I said mo’n I ought, now.”

What the chef said was of a piece with what had been more than once in Clementina’s mind; but she had driven it out, not because it might not be true, but because she would not have it true. Her head drooped; she turned limp and springless away. Even the heart of the tease was touched; he had not known that it would worry her so much, though he knew that she disliked the clerk.

“Mind,” he called after her, too late, “I ain’t got no proof ‘t he done it.”

She did not answer him, or look round. She went to her room, and sat down in the growing dusk to think, with a hot lump in her throat.

Mrs. Atwell found her there an hour later, when she climbed to the chamber where she thought she ought to have heard Clementina moving about over her own room.

“Didn’t know but I could help you do youa dressin’,” she began, and then at sight of the dim figure she broke off: “Why, Clem! What’s the matte? Ah’ you asleep? Ah’ you sick? It’s half an hour of the time and—”

“I’m not going,” Clementina answered, and she did not move.

“Not goin’! Why the land o’—”

“Oh, I can’t go, Mrs. Atwell. Don’t ask me! Tell Mrs. Milray, please!”

“I will, when I got something to tell,” said Mrs. Atwell. “Now, you just say what’s happened, Clementina Claxon!” Clementina suffered the woful truth to be drawn from her. “But you don’t know whether it’s so or not,” the landlady protested.

“Yes, yes, I do! It was the last thing I thought of, and the chef wouldn’t have said it if he didn’t believe it.”

“That’s just what he would done,” cried Mrs. Atwell. “And I’ll give him such a goin’ ova, for his teasin’, as he ain’t had in one while. He just said it to tease. What you goin’ to say to Mrs. Milray?”

“Oh, tell her I’m not a bit well, Mrs. Atwell! My head does ache, truly.”

“Why, listen,” said Mrs. Atwell, recklessly. “If you believe he done it — and he no business to — why don’t you just go to the dance, in ‘em, and then give ’em back to him after it’s ova? It would suv him right.”

Clementina listened for a moment of temptation, and then shook her head. “It wouldn’t do, Mrs. Atwell; you know it wouldn’t,” she said, and Mrs. Atwell had too little faith in her suggestion to make it prevail. She went away to carry Clementina’s message to Mrs. Milray, and her task was greatly eased by the increasing difficulty Mrs. Milray had begun to find, since the way was perfectly smoothed for her, in imagining the management of Clementina at the dance: neither child nor woman, neither servant nor lady, how was she to be carried successfully through it, without sorrow to herself or offence to others? In proportion to the relief she felt, Mrs. Milray protested her irreconcilable grief; but when the simpler Mrs. Atwell proposed her going and reasoning with Clementina, she said, No, no; better let her alone, if she felt as she did; and perhaps after all she was right.

XI.

Clementina listened to the music of the dance, till the last note was played; and she heard the gay shouts and laughter of the dancers as they issued from the ball room and began to disperse about the halls and verandas, and presently to call good night to one another. Then she lighted her lamp, and put the slippers back into the box and wrapped it up in the nice paper it had come in, and tied it with the notched ribbon. She thought how she had meant to put the slippers away so, after the dance, when she had danced her fill in them, and how differently she was doing it all now. She wrote the clerk’s name on the parcel, and then she took the box, and descended to the office with it. There seemed to be nobody there, but at the noise of her step Fane came round the case of letter-boxes, and advanced to meet her at the long desk.

“What’s wanted, Miss Claxon?” he asked, with his hopeless respectfulness. “Anything I can do for you?”

She did not answer, but looked him solemnly in the eyes and laid the parcel down on the open register, and then went out.

He looked at the address on the parcel, and when he untied it, the box fell open and the shoes fell out of it, as they had with Clementina. He ran with them behind the letter-box frame, and held them up before Gregory, who was seated there on the stool he usually occupied, gloomily nursing his knee.

“What do you suppose this means, Frank?”

Gregory looked at the shoes frowningly. “They’re the slippers she got to-day. She thinks you sent them to her.”

“And she wouldn’t have them because she thought I sent them! As sure as I’m standing here, I never did it,” said the clerk, solemnly.

“I know it,” said Gregory. “I sent them.”

“You!”

“What’s so wonderful?” Gregory retorted. “I saw that she wanted them that day when the shoe peddler was here. I could see it, and you could.”

“Yes.”

“I went across into the woods, and the man overtook me with his wagon. I was tempted, and I bought the slippers of him. I wanted to give them to her then, but I resisted, and I thought I should never give them. To-day, when I heard that she was going to that dance, I sent them to her anonymously. That’s all there is about it.”

The clerk had a moment of bitterness. “If she’d known it was you, she wouldn’t have given them back.”

“That’s to be seen. I shall tell her, now. I never meant her to know, but she must, because she’s doing you wrong in her ignorance.”

Gregory was silent, and Fane was trying to measure the extent of his own suffering, and to get the whole bearing of the incident in his mind. In the end his attempt was a failure. He asked Gregory, “And do you think you’ve done just right by me?”

“I’ve done right by nobody,” said Gregory, “not even by myself; and I can see that it was my own pleasure I had in mind. I must tell her the truth, and then I must leave this place.”

“I suppose you want I should keep it quiet,” said Fane.

“I don’t ask anything of you.”

“And she wouldn’t,” said Fane, after reflection. “But I know she’d be glad of it, and I sha’n’t say anything. Of course, she never can care for me; and — there’s my hand with my word, if you want it.” Gregory silently took the hand stretched toward him and Fane added: “All I’ll ask is that you’ll tell her I wouldn’t have presumed to send her the shoes. She wouldn’t be mad at you for it.”

Gregory took the box, and after some efforts to speak, he went away. It was an old trouble, an old error, an old folly; he had yielded to impulse at every step, and at every step he had sinned against another or against himself. What pain he had now given the simple soul of Fane; what pain he had given that poor child who had so mistaken and punished the simple soul! With Fane it was over now, but with Clementina the worst was perhaps to come yet. He could not hope to see the girl before morning, and then, what should he say to her? At sight of a lamp burning in Mrs. Atwell’s room, which was on a level with the veranda where he was walking, it came to him that first of all he ought to go to her, and confess the whole affair; if her husband were with her, he ought to confess before him; they were there in the place of the child’s father and mother, and it was due to them. As he pressed rapidly toward the light he framed in his thought the things he should say, and he did not notice, as he turned to enter the private hallway leading to Mrs. Atwell’s apartment, a figure at the door. It shrank back from his contact, and he recognized Clementina. His purpose instantly changed, and he said, “Is that you, Miss Claxon? I want to speak with you. Will you come a moment where I can?”

“I — I don’t know as I’d betta,” she faltered. But she saw the box under his arm, and she thought that he wished to speak to her about that, and she wanted to hear what he would say. She had been waiting at the door there, because she could not bear to go to her room without having something more happen.

“You needn’t be afraid. I shall not keep you. Come with me a moment. There is something I must tell you at once. You have made a mistake. And it is my fault. Come!”

Clementina stepped out into the moonlight with him, and they walked across the grass that sloped between the hotel and the river. There were still people about, late smokers singly, and in groups along the piazzas, and young couples, like themselves, strolling in the dry air, under the pure sky.

Gregory made several failures in trying to begin, before he said: “I have to tell you that you are mistaken about Mr. Fane. I was there behind the letter boxes when you came in, and I know that you left these shoes because you thought he sent them to you. He didn’t send them.” Clementina did not say anything, and Gregory was forced to ask: “Do you wish to know who sent them? I won’t tell you unless you do wish it.”

“I think I ought to know,” she said, and she asked, “Don’t you?”

“Yes; for you must blame some one else now, for what you thought Fane did. I sent them to you.”

Clementina’s heart gave a leap in her breast, and she could not say anything. He went on.

“I saw that you wanted them that day, and when the peddler happened to overtake me in the woods where I was walking, after I left you, I acted on a sudden impulse, and I bought them for you. I meant to send them to you anonymously, then. I had committed one error in acting upon impulse-my rashness is my besetting sin — and I wished to add a species of deceit to that. But I was kept from it until-to-day. I hoped you would like to wear them to the dance to-night, and I put them in the post-office for you myself. Mr. Fane didn’t know anything about it. That is all. I am to blame, and no one else.”

He waited for her to speak, but Clementina could only say, “I don’t know what to say.”

“You can’t say anything that would be punishment enough for me. I have acted foolishly, cruelly.”

Clementina did not think so. She was not indignant, as she was when she thought Fane had taken this liberty with her, but if Mr. Gregory thought it was so very bad, it must be something much more serious than she had imagined. She said, “I don’t see why you wanted to do it,” hoping that he would be able to tell her something that would make his behavior seem less dreadful than he appeared to think it was.

“There is only one thing that could justify it, and that is something that I cannot justify.” It was very mysterious, but youth loves mystery, and Clementina was very young. “I did it,” said Gregory solemnly, and he felt that now he was acting from no impulse, but from a wisely considered decision which he might not fail in without culpability, “because I love you.”

“Oh!” said Clementina, and she started away from him.

“I knew that it would make me detestable!” he cried, bitterly. “I had to tell you, to explain what I did. I couldn’t help doing it. But now if you can forget it, and never think of me again, I can go away, and try to atone for it somehow. I shall be guided.”

Clementina did not know why she ought to feel affronted or injured by what he had said to her; but if Mr. Gregory thought it was wrong for him to have spoken so, it must be wrong. She did not wish him to feel badly, even if he had done wrong, but she had to take his view of what he had done. “Why, suttainly, Mr. Gregory,” she answered. “You mustn’t mind it.”

“But I do mind it. I have been very, very selfish, very thoughtless. We are both too young. I can’t ask you to wait for me till I could marry—”

The word really frightened Clementina. She said, “I don’t believe I betta promise.”

“Oh, I know it!” said Gregory. “I am going away from here. I am going to-morrow as soon as I can arrange — as soon as I can get away. Good-night — I” — Clementina in her agitation put her hands up to her face. “Oh, don’t cry — I can’t bear to have you cry.”

She took down her hands. “I’m not crying! But I wish I had neva seen those slippas.”

They had come to the bank of the river, whose current quivered at that point in a scaly ripple in the moonlight. At her words Gregory suddenly pulled the box from under his arm, and flung it into the stream as far as he could. It caught upon a shallow of the ripple, hung there a moment, then loosed itself, and swam swiftly down the stream.

“Oh!” Clementina moaned.

“Do you want them back?” he demanded. “I will go in for them!”

“No, no! No. But it seemed such a — waste!”

“Yes, that is a sin, too.” They climbed silently to the hotel. At Mrs. Atwell’s door, he spoke. “Try to forget what I said, and forgive me, if you can.”

“Yes — yes, I will, Mr. Gregory. You mustn’t think of it any moa.”

XII.

Clementina did not sleep till well toward morning, and she was still sleeping when Mrs. Atwell knocked and called in to her that her brother Jim wanted to see her. She hurried down, and in the confusion of mind left over from the night before she cooed sweetly at Jim as if he had been Mr. Gregory, “What is it, Jim? What do you want me for?”

The boy answered with the disgust a sister’s company manners always rouse in a brother. “Motha wants you. Says she’s wo’ked down, and she wants you to come and help.” Then he went his way.

Mrs. Atwell was used to having help snatched from her by their families at a moment’s notice. “I presume you’ve got to go, Clem,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I’ve got to go,” Clementina assented, with a note of relief which mystified Mrs. Atwell.

“You tied readin’ to Mr. Milray?”

“Oh, no’m — no, I mean. But I guess I betta go home. I guess I’ve been away long enough.”

“Well, you’re a good gul, Clem. I presume your motha’s got a right to have you home if she wants you.” Clementina said nothing to this, but turned briskly, and started upstairs toward her room again. The landlady called after her, “Shall you speak to Mis’ Milray, or do you want I should?”

Clementina looked back at her over her shoulder to warble, “Why, if you would, Mrs. Atwell,” and kept on to her room.

Mrs. Milray was not wholly sorry to have her go; she was going herself very soon, and Clementina’s earlier departure simplified the question of getting rid of her; but she overwhelmed her with reproaches which Clementina received with such sweet sincerity that another than Mrs. Milray might have blamed herself for having abused her ingenuousness.

The Atwells could very well have let the girl walk home, but they sent her in a buckboard, with one of the stablemen to drive her. The landlord put her neat bundle under the seat of the buckboard with his own hand. There was something in the child’s bearing, her dignity and her amiability, which made people offer her, half in fun, and half in earnest, the deference paid to age and state.

She did not know whether Gregory would try to see her before she went. She thought he must have known she was going, but since he neither came to take leave of her, nor sent her any message, she decided that she had not expected him to do so. About the third week of September she heard that he had left Middlemount and gone back to college.

She kept at her work in the house and helped her mother, and looked after the little ones; she followed her father in the woods, in his quest of stuff for walking sticks, and advised with both concerning the taste of summer folks in dress and in canes. The winter came, and she read many books in its long leisure, mostly novels, out of the rector’s library. He had a whole set of Miss Edgeworth, and nearly all of Miss Austen and Miss Gurney, and he gave of them to Clementina, as the best thing for her mind as well as her morals; he believed nothing could be better for any one than these old English novels, which he had nearly forgotten in their details. She colored the faded English life of the stories afresh from her Yankee circumstance; and it seemed the consensus of their testimony that she had really been made love to, and not so very much too soon, at her age of sixteen, for most of their heroines were not much older. The terms of Gregory’s declaration and of its withdrawal were mystifying, but not more mystifying than many such things, and from what happened in the novels she read, the affair might be trusted to come out all right of itself in time. She was rather thoughtfuller for it, and once her mother asked her what was the matter with her. “Oh, I guess I’m getting old, motha,” she said, and turned the question off. She would not have minded telling her mother about Gregory, but it would not have been the custom; and her mother would have worried, and would have blamed him. Clementina could have more easily trusted her father with the case, but so far as she knew fathers never were trusted with anything of the kind. She would have been willing that accident should bring it to the knowledge of Mrs. Richling; but the moment never came when she could voluntarily confide in her, though she was a great deal with her that winter. She was Mrs. Richling’s lieutenant in the social affairs of the parish, which the rector’s wife took under her care. She helped her get up entertainments of the kind that could be given in the church parlor, and they managed together some dances which had to be exiled to the town hall. They contrived to make the young people of the village feel that they were having a gay time, and Clementina did not herself feel that it was a dull one. She taught them some of the new steps and figures which the help used to pick up from the summer folks at the Middlemount, and practise together; she liked doing that; her mother said the child would rather dance than eat, any time. She was never sad, but so much dignity got into her sweetness that the rector now and then complained of feeling put down by her.

She did not know whether she expected Gregory to write to her or not; but when no letters came she decided that she had not expected them. She wondered if he would come back to the Middlemount the next summer; but when the summer came, she heard that they had another student in his place. She heard that they had a new clerk, and that the boarders were not so pleasant. Another year passed, and towards the end of the season Mrs. Atwell wished her to come and help her again, and Clementina went over to the hotel to soften her refusal. She explained that her mother had so much sewing now that she could not spare her; and Mrs. Atwell said: Well, that was right, and that she must be the greatest kind of dependence for her mother. “You ah’ going on seventeen this year, ain’t you?”

“I was nineteen the last day of August,” said Clementina, and Mrs. Atwell sighed, and said, How the time did fly.

It was the second week of September, but Mrs. Atwell said they were going to keep the house open till the middle of October, if they could, for the autumnal foliage, which there was getting to be quite a class of custom for.

“I presume you knew Mr. Landa was dead,” she added, and at Clementina’s look of astonishment, she said with a natural satisfaction, “Mm! died the thutteenth day of August. I presumed somehow you’d know it, though you didn’t see a great deal of ‘em, come to think of it. I guess he was a good man; too good for her, I guess,” she concluded, in the New England necessity of blaming some one. “She sent us the papah.”

There was an early frost; and people said there was going to be a hard winter, but it was not this that made Clementina’s father set to work finishing his house. His turning business was well started, now, and he had got together money enough to pay for the work. He had lately enlarged the scope of his industry by turning gate-posts and urns for the tops of them, which had become very popular, for the front yards of the farm and village houses in a wide stretch of country. They sold more steadily than the smaller wares, the cups, and tops, and little vases and platters which had once been the output of his lathe; after the first season the interest of the summer folks in these fell off; but the gate posts and the urns appealed to a lasting taste in the natives.

Claxon wished to put the finishing touches on the house himself, and he was willing to suspend more profitable labors to do so. After some attempts at plastering he was forced to leave that to the plasterers, but he managed the clap-boarding, with Clementina to hand him boards and nails, and to keep him supplied with the hammer he was apt to drop at critical moments. They talked pretty constantly at their labors, and in their leisure, which they spent on the brown needles under the pines at the side of the house. Sometimes the hammering or the talking would be interrupted by a voice calling, from a passing vehicle in the hidden roadway, something about urns. Claxon would answer, without troubling himself to verify the inquirer; or moving from his place, that he would get round to them, and then would hammer on, or talk on with Clementina.

One day in October a carriage drove up to the door, after the work on the house had been carried as far as Claxon’s mood and money allowed, and he and Clementina were picking up the litter of his carpentering. He had replaced the block of wood which once served at the front door by some steps under an arbor of rustic work; but this was still so novel that the younger children had not outgrown their pride in it and were playing at house-keeping there. Clementina ran around to the back door and out through the front entry in time to save the visitor and the children from the misunderstanding they began to fall into, and met her with a smile of hospitable brilliancy, and a recognition full of compassionate welcome.

Mrs. Lander gave way to her tears as she broke out, “Oh, it ain’t the way it was the last time I was he’a! You hea’d that he — that Mr. Landa—”

“Mrs. Atwell told me,” said Clementina. “Won’t you come in, and sit down?”

“Why, yes.” Mrs. Lander pushed in through the narrow door of what was to be the parlor. Her crapes swept about her and exhaled a strong scent of their dyes. Her veil softened her heavy face; but she had not grown thinner in her bereavement.

“I just got to the Middlemount last night,” she said, “and I wanted to see you and your payrents, both, Miss Claxon. It doos bring him back so! You won’t neva know how much he thought of you, and you’ll all think I’m crazy. I wouldn’t come as long as he was with me, and now I have to come without him; I held out ag’inst him as long as I had him to hold out ag’inst. Not that he was eva one to push, and I don’t know as he so much as spoke of it, afta we left the hotel two yea’s ago; but I presume it wa’n’t out of his mind a single minute. Time and time again I’d say to him, ‘Now, Albe’t, do you feel about it just the way you done?’ and he’d say, ‘I ha’r’t had any call to charge my mind about it,’ and then I’d begin tryin’ to ahgue him out of it, and keep a hectorin’, till he’d say, ‘Well, I’m not askin’ you to do it,’ and that’s all I could get out of him. But I see all the while ‘t he wanted me to do it, whateva he asked, and now I’ve got to do it when it can’t give him any pleasure.” Mrs. Lander put up her black-bordered handkerchief and sobbed into it, and Clementina waited till her grief had spent itself; then she gave her a fan, and Mrs. Lander gratefully cooled her hot wet face. The children had found the noises of her affliction and the turbid tones of her monologue annoying, and had gone off to play in the woods; Claxon kept incuriously about the work that Clementina had left him to; his wife maintained the confidence which she always felt in Clementina’s ability to treat with the world when it presented itself, and though she was curious enough, she did not offer to interrupt the girl’s interview with Mrs. Lander; Clementina would know how to behave.

Mrs. Lander, when she had refreshed herself with the fan, seemed to get a fresh grip of her theme, and she told Clementina all abort Mr. Lander’s last sickness. It had been so short that it gave her no time to try the climate of Colorado upon him, which she now felt sure would have brought him right up; and she had remembered, when too late, to give him a liver-medicine of her own, though it did not appear that it was his liver which was affected; that was the strange part of it. But, brief as his sickness was, he had felt that it was to be his last, and had solemnly talked over her future with her, which he seemed to think would be lonely. He had not named Clementina, but Mrs. Lander had known well enough what he meant; and now she wished to ask her, and her father and mother, how they would all like Clementina to come and spend the winter with her at Boston first, and then further South, and wherever she should happen to go. She apologized for not having come sooner upon this errand; she had resolved upon it as soon as Mr. Lander was gone, but she had been sick herself, and had only just now got out of bed.

Clementina was too young to feel the pathos of the case fully, or perhaps even to follow the tortuous course of Mrs. Lander’s motives, but she was moved by her grief; and she could not help a thrill of pleasure in the vague splendor of the future outlined by Mrs. Lander’s proposal. For a time she had thought that Mrs. Milray was going to ask her to visit her in New York; Mrs. Milray had thrown out a hint of something of the kind at parting, but that was the last of it; and now she at once made up her mind that she would like to go with Mrs. Lander, while discreetly saying that she would ask her father and mother to come and talk with her.

XIII.

Her parents objected to leaving their work; each suggested that the other had better go; but they both came at Clementina’s urgence. Her father laughed and her mother frowned when she told them what Mrs. Lander wanted, from the same misgiving of her sanity. They partly abandoned this theory for a conviction of Mrs. Lander’s mere folly when she began to talk, and this slowly yielded to the perception that she had some streaks of sense. It was sense in the first place to want to have Clementina with her, and though it might not be sense to suppose that they would be anxious to let her go, they did not find so much want of it as Mrs. Lander talked on. It was one of her necessities to talk away her emotions before arriving at her ideas, which were often found in a tangle, but were not without a certain propriety. She was now, after her interview with Clementina, in the immediate presence of these, and it was her ideas that she began to produce for the girl’s father and mother. She said, frankly, that she had more money than she knew what to do with, and they must not think she supposed she was doing a favor, for she was really asking one.

She was alone in the world, without near connections of her own, or relatives of her husband’s, and it would be a mercy if they could let their daughter come and visit her; she would not call it more than a visit; that would be the best thing on both sides; she told of her great fancy for Clementina the first time she saw her, and of her husband’s wish that she would come and visit with them then for the winter. As for that money she had tried to make the child take, she presumed that they knew about it, and she wished to say that she did it because she was afraid Mr. Lander had said so much about the sewing, that they would be disappointed. She gave way to her tears at the recollection, and confessed that she wanted the child to have the money anyway. She ended by asking Mrs. Claxon if she would please to let her have a drink of water; and she looked about the room, and said that they had got it finished up a great deal, now, had not they? She made other remarks upon it, so apt that Mrs. Claxon gave her a sort of permissive invitation to look about the whole lower floor, ending with the kitchen.

Mrs. Lander sat down there while Mrs. Claxon drew from the pipes a glass of water, which she proudly explained was pumped all over the house by the wind mill that supplied the power for her husband’s turning lathes.

“Well, I wish mah husband could have tasted that wata,” said Mrs. Lander, as if reminded of husbands by the word, and by the action of putting down the glass. “He was always such a great hand for good, cold wata. My! He’d ‘a liked youa kitchen, Mrs. Claxon. He always was such a home-body, and he did get so ti’ed of hotels. For all he had such an appearance, when you see him, of bein’ — well! — stiff and proud, he was fah moa common in his tastes — I don’t mean common, exactly, eitha — than what I was; and many a time when we’d be drivin’ through the country, and we’d pass some o’ them long-strung-out houses, don’t you know, with the kitchen next to the wood shed, and then an ahchway befoa you get to the stable, Mr. Landa he’d get out, and make an urrand, just so’s to look in at the kitchen dooa; he said it made him think of his own motha’s kitchen. We was both brought up in the country, that’s a fact, and I guess if the truth was known we both expected to settle down and die thea, some time; but now he’s gone, and I don’t know what’ll become o’ me, and sometimes I don’t much care. I guess if Mr. Landa’d ‘a seen youa kitchen, it wouldn’t ‘a’ been so easy to git him out of it; and I do believe if he’s livin’ anywhe’ now he takes as much comfo’t in my settin’ here as what I do. I presume I shall settle down somewhe’s before a great while, and if you could make up youa mind to let your daughta come to me for a little visit till spring, you couldn’t do a thing that ‘d please Mr. Landa moa.”

Mrs. Claxon said that she would talk it over with the child’s father; and then Mrs. Lander pressed her to let her take Clementina back to the Middlemount with her for supper, if they wouldn’t let her stay the night. After Clementina had driven away, Mrs. Claxon accused herself to her husband of being the greatest fool in the State, but he said that the carriage was one of the Middlemount rigs, and he guessed it was all right. He could see that Clem was wild to go, and he didn’t see why she shouldn’t.

“Well, I do, then,” his wife retorted. “We don’t know anything about the woman, or who she is.”

“I guess no harm’ll come to Clem for one night,” said Claxon, and Mrs. Claxon was forced back upon the larger question for the maintenance of her anxiety. She asked what he was going to do about letting Clem go the whole winter with a perfect stranger; and he answered that he had not got round to that yet, and that there were a good many things to be thought of first. He got round to see the rector before dark, and in the light of his larger horizon, was better able to orient Mrs. Lander and her motives than he had been before.

When she came back with the girl the next morning, she had thought of something in the nature of credentials. It was the letter from her church in Boston, which she took whenever she left home, so that if she wished she might unite with the church in any place where she happened to be stopping. It did not make a great impression upon the Claxons, who were of no religion, though they allowed their children to go to the Episcopal church and Sunday-school, and always meant to go themselves. They said they would like to talk the matter over with the rector, if Mrs. Lander did not object; she offered to send her carriage for him, and the rector was brought at once.

He was one of those men who have, in the breaking down of the old Puritanical faith, and the dying out of the later Unitarian rationalism, advanced and established the Anglican church so notably in the New England hill-country, by a wise conformity to the necessities and exactions of the native temperament. On the ecclesiastical side he was conscientiously uncompromising, but personally he was as simple-mannered as he was simple-hearted. He was a tall lean man in rusty black, with a clerical waistcoat that buttoned high, and scholarly glasses, but with a belated straw hat that had counted more than one summer, and a farmer’s tan on his face and hands. He pronounced the church-letter, though quite outside of his own church, a document of the highest respectability, and he listened with patient deference to the autobiography which Mrs. Lander poured out upon him, and her identifications, through reference to this or that person in Boston whom he knew either at first or second hand. He had not to pronounce upon her syntax, or her social quality; it was enough for him, in behalf of the Claxons, to find her what she professed to be.

“You must think,” he said, laughing, “that we are over-particular; but the fact is that we value Clementina rather highly, and we wish to be sure that your hospitable offer will be for her real good.”

“Of cou’se,” said Mrs. Lander. “I should be just so myself abort her.”

“I don’t know,” he continued, “that I’ve ever said how much we think of her, Mrs. Richling and I, but this seems a good opportunity, as she is not present.

“She is not perfect, but she comes as near being a thoroughly good girl as she can without knowing it. She has a great deal of common-sense, and we all want her to have the best chance.”

“Well, that’s just the way I feel about her, and that’s just what I mean to give her,” said Mrs. Lander.

“I am not sure that I make myself quite clear,” said the rector. “I mean, a chance to prove how useful and helpful she can be. Do you think you can make life hard for her occasionally? Can you be peevish and exacting, and unreasonable? Can you do something to make her value superfluity and luxury at their true worth?”

Mrs. Lander looked a little alarmed and a little offended. “I don’t know as I undastand what you mean, exactly,” she said, frowning rather with perplexity than resentment. “But the child sha’n’t have a care, and her own motha couldn’t be betta to her than me. There a’n’t anything money can buy that she sha’n’t have, if she wants it, and all I’ll ask of her is ‘t she’ll enjoy herself as much as she knows how. I want her with me because I should love to have her round; and we did from the very fust minute she spoke, Mr. Lander and me, both. She shall have her own money, and spend it for anything she pleases, and she needn’t do a stitch o’ work from mohnin’ till night. But if you’re afraid I shall put upon her.”

“No, no,” said the rector, and he threw back his head with a laugh.

When it was all arranged, a few days later, after the verification of certain of Mrs. Lander’s references by letters to Boston, he said to Clementina’s father and mother, “There’s only one danger, now, and that is that she will spoil Clementina; but there’s a reasonable hope that she won’t know how.” He found the Claxons struggling with a fresh misgiving, which Claxon expressed. “The way I look at it is like this. I don’t want that woman should eva think Clem was after her money. On the face of it there a’n’t very much to her that would make anybody think but what we was after it; and I should want it pootty well undastood that we wa’n’t that kind. But I don’t seem to see any way of tellin’ her.”

“No,” said the rector, with a sympathetic twinkle, “that would be difficult.”

“It’s plain to be seen,” Mrs. Claxon interposed, “that she thinks a good deal of her money; and I d’ know but what she’d think she was doin’ Clem most too much of a favor anyway. If it can’t be a puffectly even thing, all round, I d’ know as I should want it to be at all.”

“You’re quite right, Mrs. Claxon, quite right. But I believe Mrs. Lander may be safely left to look out for her own interests. After all, she has merely asked Clementina to pass the winter with her. It will be a good opportunity for her to see something of the world; and perhaps it may bring her the chance of placing herself in life. We have got to consider these things with reference to a young girl.”

Mrs. Claxon said, “Of cou’se,” but Claxon did not assent so readily.

“I don’t feel as if I should want Clem to look at it in that light. If the chance don’t come to her, I don’t want she should go huntin’ round for it.”

“I thoroughly agree with you,” said the rector. “But I was thinking that there was not only no chance worthy of her in Middlemount, but there is no chance at all.”

“I guess that’s so,” Claxon owned with a laugh. “Well, I guess we can leave it to Clem to do what’s right and proper everyway. As you say, she’s got lots of sense.”

From that moment he emptied his mind of care concerning the matter; but husband and wife are never both quite free of care on the same point of common interest, and Mrs. Claxon assumed more and more of the anxieties which he had abandoned. She fretted under the load, and expressed an exasperated tenderness for Clementina when the girl seemed forgetful of any of the little steps to be taken before the great one in getting her clothes ready for leaving home. She said finally that she presumed they were doing a wild thing, and that it looked crazier and crazier the more she thought of it; but all was, if Clem didn’t like, she could come home. By this time her husband was in something of that insensate eagerness to have the affair over that people feel in a house where there is a funeral.

At the station, when Clementina started for Boston with Mrs. Lander, her father and mother, with the rector and his wife, came to see her off. Other friends mistakenly made themselves of the party, and kept her talking vacuities when her heart was full, till the train drew up. Her father went with her into the parlor car, where the porter of the Middlemount House set down Mrs. Lander’s hand baggage and took the final fee she thrust upon him. When Claxon came out he was not so satisfactory about the car as he might have been to his wife, who had never been inside a parlor car, and who had remained proudly in the background, where she could not see into it from the outside. He said that he had felt so bad about Clem that he did not notice what the car was like. But he was able to report that she looked as well as any of the folks in it, and that, if there were any better dressed, he did not see them. He owned that she cried some, when he said good-bye to her.

“I guess,” said his wife, grimly, “we’re a passel o’ fools to let her go. Even if she don’t like, the’a, with that crazy-head, she won’t be the same Clem when she comes back.”

They were too heavy-hearted to dispute much, and were mostly silent as they drove home behind Claxon’s self-broken colt: a creature that had taken voluntarily to harness almost from its birth, and was an example to its kind in sobriety and industry.

The children ran out from the house to meet them, with a story of having seen Clem at a point in the woods where the train always slowed up before a crossing, and where they had all gone to wait for her. She had seen them through the car-window, and had come out on the car platform, and waved her handkerchief, as she passed, and called something to them, but they could not hear what it was, they were all cheering so.

At this their mother broke down, and went crying into the house. Not to have had the last words of the child whom she should never see the same again if she ever saw her at all, was more, she said, than heart could bear.

The rector’s wife arrived home with her husband in a mood of mounting hopefulness, which soared to tops commanding a view of perhaps more of this world’s kingdoms than a clergyman’s wife ought ever to see, even for another. She decided that Clementina’s chances of making a splendid match, somewhere, were about of the nature of certainties, and she contended that she would adorn any station, with experience, and with her native tact, especially if it were a very high station in Europe, where Mrs. Lander would now be sure to take her. If she did not take her to Europe, however, she would be sure to leave her all her money, and this would serve the same end, though more indirectly.

Mr. Richling scoffed at this ideal of Clementina’s future with a contempt which was as little becoming to his cloth. He made his wife reflect that, with all her inherent grace and charm, Clementina was an ignorant little country girl, who had neither the hardness of heart nor the greediness of soul, which gets people on in the world, and repair for them the disadvantages of birth and education. He represented that even if favorable chances for success in society showed themselves to the girl, the intense and inexpugnable vulgarity of Mrs. Lander would spoil them; and he was glad of this, he said, for he believed that the best thing which could happen to the child would be to come home as sweet and good as she had gone away; he added this was what they ought both to pray for.

His wife admitted this, but she retorted by asking if he thought such a thing was possible, and he was obliged to own that it was not possible. He marred the effect of his concession by subjoining that it was no more possible than her making a brilliant and triumphant social figure in society, either at home or in Europe.

XIV.

So far from embarking at once for Europe, Mrs. Lander went to that hotel in a suburb of Boston, where she had the habit of passing the late autumn months, in order to fortify herself for the climate of the early winter months in the city. She was a little puzzled how to provide for Clementina, with respect to herself, but she decided that the best thing would be to have her sleep in a room opening out of her own, with a folding bed in it, so that it could be used as a sort of parlor for both of them during the day, and be within easy reach, for conversation, at all times.

On her part, Clementina began by looking after Mrs. Lander’s comforts, large and little, like a daughter, to her own conception and to that of Mrs. Lander, but to other eyes, like a servant. Mrs. Lander shyly shrank from acquaintance among the other ladies, and in the absence of this, she could not introduce Clementina, who went down to an early breakfast alone, and sat apart with her at lunch and dinner, ministering to her in public as she did in private. She ran back to their rooms to fetch her shawl, or her handkerchief, or whichever drops or powders she happened to be taking with her meals, and adjusted with closer care the hassock which the head waiter had officially placed at her feet. They seldom sat in the parlor where the ladies met, after dinner; they talked only to each other; and there, as elsewhere, the girl kept her filial care of the old woman. The question of her relation to Mrs. Lander became so pressing among several of the guests that, after Clementina had watched over the banisters, with throbbing heart and feet, a little dance one night which the other girls had got up among themselves, and had fled back to her room at the approach of one of the kindlier and bolder of them, the landlord felt forced to learn from Mrs. Lander how Miss Claxon was to be regarded. He managed delicately, by saying he would give the Sunday paper she had ordered to her nurse, “Or, I beg your pardon,” he added, as if he had made a mistake. “Why, she a’n’t my nuhse,” Mrs. Lander explained, simply, neither annoyed nor amused; “she’s just a young lady that’s visiting me, as you may say,” and this put an end to the misgiving among the ladies. But it suggested something to Mrs. Lander, and a few days afterwards, when they came out from Boston where they had been shopping, and she had been lavishing a bewildering waste of gloves, hats, shoes, capes and gowns upon Clementina, she said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ve got to have a maid.”

“A maid?” cried the girl.

“It isn’t me, or my things I want her for,” said Mrs. Lander. “It’s you and these dresses of youas. I presume you could look afta them, come to give youa mind to it; but I don’t want to have you tied up to a lot of clothes; and I presume we should find her a comfo’t in moa ways than one, both of us. I don’t know what we shall want her to do, exactly; but I guess she will, if she undastands her business, and I want you should go in with me, to-morror, and find one. I’ll speak to some of the ladies, and find out whe’s the best place to go, and we’ll get the best there is.”

A lady whom Mrs. Lander spoke to entered into the affair with zeal born of a lurking sense of the wrong she had helped do Clementina in the common doubt whether she was not herself Mrs. Lander’s maid. She offered to go into Boston with them to an intelligence office, where you could get nice girls of all kinds; but she ended by giving Mrs. Lander the address, and instructions as to what she was to require in a maid. She was chiefly to get an English maid, if at all possible, for the qualifications would more or less naturally follow from her nationality. There proved to be no English maid, but there was a Swedish one who had received a rigid training in an English family living on the Continent, and had come immediately from that service to seek her first place in America. The manager of the office pronounced her character, as set down in writing, faultless, and Mrs. Lander engaged her. “You want to look afta this young lady,” she said, indicating Clementina. “I can look afta myself,” but Ellida took charge of them both on the train out from Boston with prompt intelligence.

“We got to get used to it, I guess,” Mrs. Lander confided at the first chance of whispering to Clementina.

Within a month after washing the faces and combing the hair of all her brothers and sisters who would suffer it at her hands, Clementina’s own head was under the brush of a lady’s maid, who was of as great a discreetness in her own way as Clementina herself. She supplied the defects of Mrs. Lander’s elementary habits by simply asking if she should get this thing and that thing for the toilet, without criticising its absence, — and then asking whether she should get the same things for her young lady. She appeared to let Mrs. Lander decide between having her brushes in ivory or silver, but there was really no choice for her, and they came in silver. She knew not only her own place, but the places of her two ladies, and she presently had them in such training that they were as proficient in what they might and might not do for themselves and for each other, as if making these distinctions were the custom of their lives.

Their hearts would both have gone out to Ellida, but Ellida kept them at a distance with the smooth respectfulness of the iron hand in the glove of velvet; and Clementina first learned from her to imagine the impassable gulf between mistress and maid.

At the end of her month she gave them, out of a clear sky, a week’s warning. She professed no grievance, and was not moved by Mrs. Lander’s appeal to say what wages she wanted. She would only say that she was going to take a place an Commonwealth Avenue, where a friend of hers was living, and when the week was up, she went, and left her late mistresses feeling rather blank. “I presume we shall have to get anotha,” said Mrs. Lander.

“Oh, not right away!” Clementina pleaded.

“Well, not right away,” Mrs. Lander assented; and provisionally they each took the other into her keeping, and were much freer and happier together.

Soon after Clementina was startled one morning, as she was going in to breakfast, by seeing Mr. Fane at the clerk’s desk. He did not see her; he was looking down at the hotel register, to compute the bill of a departing guest; but when she passed out she found him watching for her, with some letters.

“I didn’t know you were with us,” he said, with his pensive smile, “till I found your letters here, addressed to Mrs. Lander’s care; and then I put two and two together. It only shows how small the world is, don’t you think so? I’ve just got back from my vacation; I prefer to take it in the fall of the year, because it’s so much pleasanter to travel, then. I suppose you didn’t know I was here?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Clementina. “I never dreamed of such a thing.”

“To be sure; why should you?” Fane reflected. “I’ve been here ever since last spring. But I’ll say this, Miss Claxon, that if it’s the least unpleasant to you, or the least disagreeable, or awakens any kind of associations—”

“Oh, no!” Clementina protested, and Fane was spared the pain of saying what he would do if it were.

He bowed, and she said sweetly, “It’s pleasant to meet any one I’ve seen before. I suppose you don’t know how much it’s changed at Middlemount since you we’ e thea.” Fane answered blankly, while he felt in his breast pocket, Oh, he presumed so; and she added: “Ha’dly any of the same guests came back this summer, and they had more in July than they had in August, Mrs. Atwell said. Mr. Mahtin, the chef, is gone, and newly all the help is different.”

Fane kept feeling in one pocket and then slapped himself over the other pockets. “No,” he said, “I haven’t got it with me. I must have left it in my room. I just received a letter from Frank — Mr. Gregory, you know, I always call him Frank — and I thought I had it with me. He was asking about Middlemount; and I wanted to read you what he said. But I’ll find it upstairs. He’s out of college, now, and he’s begun his studies in the divinity school. He’s at Andover. I don’t know what to make of Frank, oftentimes,” the clerk continued, confidentially. “I tell him he’s a kind of a survival, in religion; he’s so aesthetic.” It seemed to Fane that he had not meant aesthetic, exactly, but he could not ask Clementina what the word was. He went on to say, “He’s a grand good fellow, Frank is, but he don’t make enough allowance for human nature. He’s more like one of those old fashioned orthodox. I go in for having a good time, so long as you don’t do anybody else any hurt.”

He left her, and went to receive the commands of a lady who was leaning over the desk, and saying severely, “My mail, if you please,” and Clementina could not wait for him to come back; she had to go to Mrs. Lander, and get her ready for breakfast; Ellida had taught Mrs. Lander a luxury of helplessness in which she persisted after the maid’s help was withdrawn.

Clementina went about the whole day with the wonder what Gregory had said about Middlemount filling her mind. It must have had something to do with her; he could not have forgotten the words he had asked her to forget. She remembered them now with a curiosity, which had no rancor in it, to know why he really took them back. She had never blamed him, and she had outlived the hurt she had felt at not hearing from him. But she had never lost the hope of hearing from him, or rather the expectation, and now she found that she was eager for his message; she decided that it must be something like a message, although it could not be anything direct. No one else had come to his place in her fancy, and she was willing to try what they would think of each other now, to measure her own obligation to the past by a knowledge of his. There was scarcely more than this in her heart when she allowed herself to drift near Fane’s place that night, that he might speak to her, and tell her what Gregory had said. But he had apparently forgotten about his letter, and only wished to talk about himself. He wished to analyze himself, to tell her what sort of person he was. He dealt impartially with the subject; he did not spare some faults of his; and after a week, he proposed a correspondence with her, in a letter of carefully studied spelling, as a means of mutual improvement as well as further acquaintance.

It cost Clementina a good deal of trouble to answer him as she wished and not hurt his feelings. She declined in terms she thought so cold that they must offend him beyond the point of speaking to her again; but he sought her out, as soon after as he could, and thanked her for her kindness, and begged her pardon. He said he knew that she was a very busy person, with all the lessons she was taking, and that she had no time for carrying on a correspondence. He regretted that he could not write French, because then the correspondence would have been good practice for her. Clementina had begun taking French lessons, of a teacher who came out from Boston. She lunched three times a week with her and Mrs. Lander, and spoke the language with Clementina, whose accent she praised for its purity; purity of accent was characteristic of all this lady’s pupils; but what was really extraordinary in Mademoiselle Claxon was her sense of grammatical structure; she wrote the language even more perfectly than she spoke it; but beautifully, but wonderfully; her exercises were something marvellous.

Mrs. Lander would have liked Clementina to take all the lessons that she heard any of the other young ladies in the hotel were taking. One of them went in town every day, and studied drawing at an art-school, and she wanted Clementina to do that, too. But Clementina would not do that; she had tried often enough at home, when her brother Jim was drawing, and her father was designing the patterns of his woodwork; she knew that she never could do it, and the time would be wasted. She decided against piano lessons and singing lessons, too; she did not care for either, and she pleaded that it would be a waste to study them; but she suggested dancing lessons, and her gift for dancing won greater praise, and perhaps sincerer, than her accent won from Mademoiselle Blanc, though Mrs. Lander said that she would not have believed any one could be more complimentary. She learned the new steps and figures in all the fashionable dances; she mastered some fancy dances, which society was then beginning to borrow from the stage; and she gave these before Mrs. Lander with a success which she felt herself.

“I believe I could teach dancing,” she said.

“Well, you won’t eve’ haf to, child,” returned Mrs. Lander, with an eye on the side of the case that seldom escaped her.

In spite of his wish to respect these preoccupations, Fane could not keep from offering Clementina attentions, which took the form of persecution when they changed from flowers for Mrs. Lander’s table to letters for herself. He apologized for his letters whenever he met her; but at last one of them came to her before breakfast with a special delivery stamp from Boston. He had withdrawn to the city to write it, and he said that if she could not make him a favorable answer, he should not come back to Woodlake.

She had to show this letter to Mrs. Lander, who asked: “You want he should come back?”

“No, indeed! I don’t want eva to see him again.”

“Well, then, I guess you’ll know how to tell him so.”

The girl went into her own room to write, and when she brought her answer to show it to Mrs. Lander she found her in frowning thought. “I don’t know but you’ll have to go back and write it all over again, Clementina,” she said, “if you’ve told him not to come. I’ve been thinkin’, if you don’t want to have anything to do with him, we betta go ouaselves.”

“Yes,” answered Clementina, “that’s what I’ve said.”

“You have? Well, the witch is in it! How came you to—”

“I just wanted to talk with you about it. But I thought maybe you’d like to go. Or at least I should. I should like to go home, Mrs. Landa.”

“Home!” retorted Mrs. Lander. “The’e’s plenty of places where you can be safe from the fella besides home, though I’ll take you back the’a this minute if you say so. But you needn’t to feel wo’ked up about it.”

“Oh, I’m not,” said Clementina, but with a gulp which betrayed her nervousness.

“I did think,” Mrs. Lander went on, “that I should go into the Vonndome, for December and January, but just as likely as not he’d come pesterin’ the’a, too, and I wouldn’t go, now, if you was to give me the whole city of Boston. Why shouldn’t we go to Florida?”

When Mrs. Lander had once imagined the move, the nomadic impulse mounted irresistably in her. She spoke of hotels in the South, where they could renew the summer, and she mapped out a campaign which she put into instant action so far as to advance upon New York.

Part 2.

XV.

Mrs. Lander went to a hotel in New York where she had been in the habit of staying with her husband, on their way South or North. The clerk knew her, and shook hands with her across the register, and said she could have her old rooms if she wanted them; the bell-boy who took up their hand-baggage recalled himself to her; the elevator-boy welcomed her with a smile of remembrance.

Since she was already up, from coming off the sleeping-car, she had no excuse for not going to breakfast like other people; and she went with Clementina to the dining-room, where the head-waiter, who found them places, spoke with an outlandish accent, and the waiter who served them had a parlance that seemed superficially English, but was inwardly something else; there was even a touch in the cooking of the familiar dishes, that needed translation for the girl’s inexperienced palate. She was finding a refuge in the strangeness of everything, when she was startled by the sound of a familiar voice calling, “Clementina Claxon! Well, I was sure all along it was you, and I determined I wouldn’t stand it another minute. Why, child, how you have changed! Why, I declare you are quite a woman! When did you come? How pretty you are!” Mrs. Milray took Clementina in her arms and kissed her in proof of her admiration before the whole breakfast room. She was very nice to Mrs. Lander, too, who, when Clementina introduced them, made haste to say that Clementina was there on a visit with her. Mrs. Milray answered that she envied her such a visitor as Miss Claxon, and protested that she should steal her away for a visit to herself, if Mr. Milray was not so much in love with her that it made her jealous. “Mr. Milray has to have his breakfast in his room,” she explained to Clementina. “He’s not been so well, since he lost his mother. Yes,” she said, with decorous solemnity, “I’m still in mourning for her,” and Clementina saw that she was in a tempered black. “She died last year, and now I’m taking Mr. Milray abroad to see if it won’t cheer him up a little. Are you going South for the winter?” she inquired, politely, of Mrs. Lander. “I wish I was going,” she said, when Mrs. Lander guessed they should go, later on. “Well, you must come in and see me all you can, Clementina; and I shall have the pleasure of calling upon you,” she added to Mrs. Lander with state that was lost in the soubrette-like volatility of her flight from them the next moment. “Goodness, I forgot all about Mr. Milray’s breakfast!” She ran back to the table she had left on the other side of the room.

“Who is that, Clementina?” asked Mrs. Lander, on their way to their rooms. Clementina explained as well as she could, and Mrs. Lander summed up her feeling in the verdict, “Well, she’s a lady, if ever I saw a lady; and you don’t see many of ‘em, nowadays.”

The girl remembered how Mrs. Milray had once before seemed very fond of her, and had afterwards forgotten the pretty promises and professions she had made her. But she went with Mrs. Lander to see her, and she saw Mr. Milray, too, for a little while. He seemed glad of their meeting, but still depressed by the bereavement which Mrs. Milray supported almost with gayety. When he left them she explained that he was a good deal away from her, with his family, as she approved of his being, though she had apparently no wish to join him in all the steps of the reconciliation which the mother’s death had brought about among them. Sometimes his sisters came to the hotel to see her, but she amused herself perfectly without them, and she gave much more of her leisure to Clementina and Mrs. Lander.

She soon knew the whole history of the relation between them, and the first time that Clementina found her alone with Mrs. Lander she could have divined that Mrs. Lander had been telling her of the Fane affair, even if Mrs. Milray had not at once called out to her, “I know all about it; and I’ll tell you what, Clementina, I’m going to take you over with me and marry you to an English Duke. Mrs. Lander and I have been planning it all out, and I’m going to send down to the steamer office, and engage your passage. It’s all settled!”

When she was gone, Mrs. Lander asked, “What do you s’pose your folks would say to your goin’ to Europe, anyway, Clementina?” as if the matter had been already debated between them.

Clementina hesitated. “I should want to be su’a, Mrs. Milray really wanted me to go ova with her.”

“Why, didn’t you hear her say so?” demanded Mrs. Lander.

“Yes,” sighed Clementina. “Mrs. Lander, I think Mrs. Milray means what she says, at the time, but she is one that seems to forget.”

“She thinks the wo’ld of you,” Mrs. Lander urged.

“She was very nice to me that summer at Middlemount. I guess maybe she would like to have us go with her,” the girl relented.

“I guess we’ll wait and see,” said Mrs. Lander. “I shouldn’t want she should change her mind when it was too late, as you say.” They were both silent for a time, and then Mrs. Lander resumed, “But I presume she ha’n’t got the only steams that’s crossin’. What should you say about goin’ over on some otha steams? I been South a good many wintas, and I should feel kind of lonesome goin’ round to the places where I been with Mr. Landa. I felt it since I been here in this hotel, some, and I can’t seem to want to go ova the same ground again, well, not right away.”

Clementina said, “Why, of cou’se, Mrs. Landa.”

“Should you be willin’,” asked Mrs. Lander, after another little pause, “if your folks was willin’, to go ova the’a, to some of them European countries, to spend the winta?”

“Oh yes, indeed!” said Clementina.

They discussed the matter in one of the full talks they both liked. At the end Mrs. Lander said, “Well, I guess you betta write home, and ask your motha whetha you can go, so’t if we take the notion we can go any time. Tell her to telegraph, if she’ll let you, and do write all the ifs and ands, so’t she’ll know just how to answa, without havin’ to have you write again.”

That evening Mrs. Milray came to their table from where she had been dining alone, and asked in banter: “Well, have you made up your minds to go over with me?”

Mrs. Lander said bluntly, “We can’t ha’dly believe you really want us to, Mrs. Milray.”

“I don’t want you? Who put such an idea into your head! Oh, I know!” She threatened Clementina with the door-key, which she was carrying in her hand. “It was you, was it? What an artful, suspicious thing! What’s got into you, child? Do you hate me?” She did not give Clementina time to protest. “Well, now, I can just tell you I do want you, and I’ll be quite heart-broken if you don’t come.”

“Well, she wrote to her friends this mohning,” Mrs. Lander said, “but I guess she won’t git an answa in time for youa steamer, even if they do let her go.”

“Oh, yes she will,” Mrs. Milray protested. “It’s all right, now; you’ve got to go, and there’s no use trying to get out of it.”

She came to them whenever she could find them in the dining-room, and she knocked daily at their door till she knew that Clementina had heard from home. The girl’s mother wrote, without a punctuation mark in her letter, but with a great deal of sense, that such a thing as her going to Europe could not be settled by telegraph. She did not think it worth while to report all the facts of a consultation with the rector which they had held upon getting Clementina’s request, and which had renewed all the original question of her relations with Mrs. Lander in an intensified form. He had disposed of this upon much the same terms as before; and they had yielded more readily because the experiment had so far succeeded. Clementina had apparently no complaint to make of Mrs. Lander; she was eager to go, and the rector and his wife, who had been invited to be of the council, were both of the opinion that a course of European travel would be of the greatest advantage to the girl, if she wished to fit herself for teaching. It was an opportunity that they must not think of throwing away. If Mrs. Lander went to Florence, as it seemed from Clementina’s letter she thought of doing, the girl would pass a delightful winter in study of one of the most interesting cities in the world, and she would learn things which would enable her to do better for herself when she came home than she could ever hope to do otherwise. She might never marry, Mr. Richling suggested, and it was only right and fair that she should be equipped with as much culture as possible for the struggle of life; Mrs. Richling agreed with this rather vague theory, but she was sure that Clementina would get married to greater advantage in Florence than anywhere else. They neither of them really knew anything at first hand about Florence; the rector’s opinion was grounded on the thought of the joy that a sojourn in Italy would have been to him; his wife derived her hope of a Florentine marriage for Clementina from several romances in which love and travel had gone hand in hand, to the lasting credit of triumphant American girlhood.

The Claxons were not able to enter into their view of the case, but if Mrs. Lander wanted to go to Florence instead of Florida they did not see why Clementina should not go with her to one place as well as the other. They were not without a sense of flattery from the fact that their daughter was going to Europe; but they put that as far from them as they could, the mother severely and the father ironically, as something too silly, and they tried not to let it weigh with them in making up their mind, but to consider only Clementina’s best good, and not even to regard her pleasure. Her mother put before her the most crucial questions she could think of, in her letter, and then gave her full leave from her father as well as herself to go if she wished.

Clementina had rather it had been too late to go with the Milrays, but she felt bound to own her decision when she reached it; and Mrs. Milray, whatever her real wish was, made it a point of honor to help get Mrs. Lander berths on her steamer. It did not require much effort; there are plenty of berths for the latest-comers on a winter passage, and Clementina found herself the fellow passenger of Mrs. Milray.

XVI.

As soon as Mrs. Lander could make her way to her state-room, she got into her berth, and began to take the different remedies for sea-sickness which she had brought with her. Mrs. Milray said that was nice, and that now she and Clementina could have a good time. But before it came to that she had taken pity on a number of lonely young men whom she found on board. She cheered them up by walking round the ship with them; but if any of them continued dull in spite of this, she dropped him, and took another; and before she had been two days out she had gone through with nearly all the lonely young men on the list of cabin passengers. She introduced some of them to Clementina, but at such times as she had them in charge; and for the most part she left her to Milray. Once, as the girl sat beside him in her steamer-chair, Mrs. Milray shed a wrap on his knees in whirring by on the arm of one of her young men, with some laughed and shouted charge about it.

“What did she say?” he asked Clementina, slanting the down-pulled brim of his soft hat purblindly toward her.

She said she had not understood, and then Milray asked, “What sort of person is that Boston youth of Mrs. Milray’s? Is he a donkey or a lamb?”

Clementina said ingenuously, “Oh, she’s walking with that English gentleman now — that lo’d.”

“Ah, yes,” said Milray. “He’s not very much to look at, I hear.”

“Well, not very much,” Clementina admitted; she did not like to talk against people.

“Lords are sometimes disappointing, Clementina,” Milray said, “but then, so are other great men. I’ve seen politicians on our side who were disappointing, and there are clergymen and gamblers who don’t look it.” He laughed sadly. “That’s the way people talk who are a little disappointing themselves. I hope you don’t expect too much of yourself, Clementina?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said, stiffening with a suspicion that he might be going to make fun of her.

He laughed more gayly. “Well, I mean we must hold the other fellows up to their duty, or we can’t do our own. We need their example. Charity may begin at home, but duty certainly begins abroad.” He went on, as if it were a branch of the same inquiry, “Did you ever meet my sisters? They came to the hotel in New York to see Mrs. Milray.”

“Yes, I was in the room once when they came in.”

“Did you like them?”

“Yes — I sca’cely spoke to them — I only stayed a moment.”

“Would you like to see any more of the family?”

“Why, of cou’se!” Clementina was amused at his asking, but he seemed in earnest.

“One of my sisters lives in Florence, and Mrs. Milray says you think of going there, too.”

“Mrs. Landa thought it would be a good place to spend the winter. Is it a pleasant place?”

“Oh, delightful! Do you know much about Italy?”

“Not very much, I don’t believe.”

“Well, my sister has lived a good while in Florence. I should like to give you a letter to her.”

“Oh, thank you!” said Clementina.

Milray smiled at her spare acknowledgment, but inquired gravely: “What do you expect to do in Florence?”

“Why, I presume, whateva Mrs. Landa wants to do.”

“Do you think Mrs. Lander will want to go into society?”

This question had not occurred to Clementina. “I don’t believe she will,” she said, thoughtfully.

“Shall you?”

Clementina laughed, “Why, do you think,” she ventured, “that society would want me to?”

“Yes, I think it would, if you’re as charming as you’ve tried to make me believe. Oh, I don’t mean, to your own knowledge; but some people have ways of being charming without knowing it. If Mrs. Lander isn’t going into society, and there should be a way found for you to go, don’t refuse, will you?”

“I shall wait and see if I’m asked, fust.”

“Yes, that will be best,” said Milray. “But I shall give you a letter to my sister. She and I used to be famous cronies, and we went to a great many parties together when we were young people. We thought the world was a fine thing, then. But it changes.”

He fell into a muse, and they were both sitting quite silent when Mrs. Milray came round the corner of the music room in the course of her twentieth or thirtieth compass of the deck, and introduced her lord to her husband and to Clementina. He promptly ignored Milray, and devoted himself to the girl, leaning over her with his hand against the bulkhead behind her and talking down upon her.

Lord Lioncourt must have been about thirty, but he had the heated and broken complexion of a man who has taken more than is good for him in twice that number of years. This was one of the wrongs nature had done him in apparent resentment of the social advantages he was born to, for he was rather abstemious, as Englishmen go. He looked a very shy person till he spoke, and then you found that he was not in the least shy. He looked so English that you would have expected a strong English accent of him, but his speech was more that of an American, without the nasality. This was not apparently because he had been much in America; he was returning from his first visit to the States, which had been spent chiefly in the Territories; after a brief interval of Newport he had preferred the West; he liked rather to hunt than to be hunted, though even in the West his main business had been to kill time, which he found more plentiful there than other game. The natives, everywhere, were much the same thing to him; if he distinguished it was in favor of those who did not suppose themselves cultivated. If again he had a choice it was for the females; they seemed to him more amusing than the males, who struck him as having an exaggerated reputation for humor. He did not care much for Clementina’s past, as he knew it from Mrs. Milray, and if it did not touch his fancy, it certainly did not offend his taste. A real artistocracy is above social prejudice, when it will; he had known some of his order choose the mothers of their heirs from the music halls, and when it came to a question of distinctions among Americans, he could not feel them. They might be richer or poorer; but they could not be more patrician or more plebeian.

The passengers, he told Clementina, were getting up, at this point of the ship’s run, an entertainment for the benefit of the seaman’s hospital in Liverpool, that well-known convention of ocean-travel, which is sure at some time or other, to enlist all the talent on board every English steamer in some sort of public appeal. He was not very clear how he came to be on the committee for drumming up talent for the occasion; his distinction seemed to have been conferred by a popular vote in the smoking room, as nearly as he could make out; but here he was, and he was counting upon Miss Claxon to help him out. He said Mrs. Milray had told him about that charming affair they had got up in the mountains, and he was sure they could have something of the kind again. “Perhaps not a coaching party; that mightn’t be so easy to manage at sea. But isn’t there something else — some tableaux or something? If we couldn’t have the months of the year we might have the points of the compass, and you could take your choice.”

He tried to get something out of the notion, but nothing came of it that Mrs. Milray thought possible. She said, across her husband, on whose further side she had sunk into a chair, that they must have something very informal; everybody must do what they could, separately. “I know you can do anything you like, Clementina. Can’t you play something, or sing?” At Clementina’s look of utter denial, she added, desperately, “Or dance something?” A light came into the girl’s face at which she caught. “I know you can dance something! Why, of course! Now, what is it?”

Clementina smiled at her vehemence. “Why, it’s nothing. And I don’t know whether I should like to.”

“Oh, yes,” urged Lord Lioncourt. “Such a good cause, you know.”

“What is it?” Mrs. Milray insisted. “Is it something you could do alone?”

“It’s just a dance that I learned at Woodlake. The teacha said that all the young ladies we’e leaning it. It’s a skut-dance—”

“The very thing!” Mrs. Milray shouted. “It’ll be the hit of the evening.”

“But I’ve never done it before any one,” Clementina faltered.

“They’ll all be doing their turns,” the Englishman said. “Speaking, and singing, and playing.”

Clementina felt herself giving way, and she pleaded in final reluctance, “But I haven’t got a pleated skut in my steama trunk.”

“No matter! We can manage that.” Mrs. Milray jumped to her feet and took Lord Lioncourt’s arm. “Now we must go and drum up somebody else.” He did not seem eager to go, but he started. “Then that’s all settled,” she shouted over her shoulder to Clementina.

“No, no, Mrs. Milray!” Clementina called after her. “The ship tilts so—”

“Nonsense! It’s the smoothest run she ever made in December. And I’ll engage to have the sea as steady as a rock for you. Remember, now, you’ve promised.”

Mrs. Milray whirled her Englishman away, and left Clementina sitting beside her husband.

“Did you want to dance for them, Clementina?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, with the vague smile of one to whom a pleasant hope has occurred.

“I thought perhaps you were letting Mrs. Milray bully you into it. She’s a frightful tyrant.”

“Oh, I guess I should like to do it, if you think it would be — nice.”

“I dare say it will be the nicest thing at their ridiculous show.” Milray laughed as if her willingness to do the dance had defeated a sentimental sympathy in him.

“I don’t believe it will be that,” said Clementina, beaming joyously. “But I guess I shall try it, if I can find the right kind of a dress.”

“Is a pleated skirt absolutely necessary,” asked Milray, gravely.

“I don’t see how I could get on without it,” said Clementina.

She was so serious still when she went down to her state-room that Mrs. Lander was distracted from her potential ailments to ask: “What is it, Clementina?”

“Oh, nothing. Mrs. Milray has got me to say that I would do something at a concert they ah’ going to have on the ship.” She explained, “It’s that skut dance I learnt at Woodlake of Miss Wilson.”

“Well, I guess if you’re worryin’ about that you needn’t to.”

“Oh, I’m not worrying about the dance. I was just thinking what I should wear. If I could only get at the trunks!”

“It won’t make any matte what you wear,” said Mrs. Lander. “It’ll be the greatest thing; and if ‘t wa’n’t for this sea-sickness that I have to keep fightin’ off he’a, night and day, I should come up and see you myself. You ah’ just lovely in that dance, Clementina.”

“Do you think so, Mrs. Landa?” asked the girl, gratefully. “Well, Mr. Milray didn’t seem to think that I need to have a pleated skut. Any rate, I’m going to look over my things, and see if I can’t make something else do.”

XVII.

The entertainment was to be the second night after that, and Mrs. Milray at first took the whole affair into her own hands. She was willing to let the others consult with her, but she made all the decisions, and she became so prepotent that she drove Lord Lioncourt to rebellion in the case of some theatrical people whom he wanted in the programme. He wished her to let them feel that they were favoring rather than favored, and she insisted that it should be quite the other way. She professed a scruple against having theatrical people in the programme at all, which she might not have felt if her own past had been different, and she spoke with an abhorrence of the stage which he could by no means tolerate in the case. She submitted with dignity when she could not help it. Perhaps she submitted with too much dignity. Her concession verged upon hauteur; and in her arrogant meekness she went back to another of her young men, whom she began to post again as the companion of her promenades.

He had rather an anxious air in the enjoyment of the honor, but the Englishman seemed unconscious of its loss, or else he chose to ignore it. He frankly gave his leisure to Clementina, and she thought he was very pleasant. There was something different in his way from that of any of the other men she had met; something very natural and simple, a way of being easy in what he was, and not caring whether he was like others or not; he was not ashamed of being ignorant of anything he did not know, and she was able to instruct him on some points. He took her quite seriously when she told him about Middlemount, and how her family came to settle there, and then how she came to be going to Europe with Mrs. Lander. He said Mrs. Milray had spoken about it; but he had not understood quite how it was before; and he hoped Mrs. Lander was coming to the entertainment.

He did not seem aware that Mrs. Milray was leaving the affair more and more to him. He went forward with it and was as amiable with her as she would allow. He was so amiable with everybody that he reconciled many true Americans to his leadership, who felt that as nearly all the passengers were Americans, the chief patron of the entertainment ought to have been some distinguished American. The want of an American who was very distinguished did something to pacify them; but the behavior of an English lord who put on no airs was the main agency. When the night came they filled the large music room of the ‘Asia Minor’, and stood about in front of the sofas and chairs so many deep that it was hard to see or hear through them.

They each paid a shilling admittance; they were prepared to give munificently besides when the hat came round; and after the first burst of blundering from Lord Lioncourt, they led the magnanimous applause. He said he never minded making a bad speech in a good cause, and he made as bad a one as very well could be. He closed it by telling Mark Twain’s whistling story so that those who knew it by heart missed the point; but that might have been because he hurried it, to get himself out of the way of the others following. When he had done, one of the most ardent of the Americans proposed three cheers for him.

The actress whom he had secured in spite of Mrs. Milray appeared in woman’s dress contrary to her inveterate professional habit, and followed him with great acceptance in her favorite variety-stage song; and then her husband gave imitations of Sir Henry Irving, and of Miss Maggie Kline in “T’row him down, McCloskey,” with a cockney accent. A frightened little girl, whose mother had volunteered her talent, gasped a ballad to her mother’s accompaniment, and two young girls played a duet on the mandolin and guitar. A gentleman of cosmopolitan military tradition, who sold the pools in the smoking-room, and was the friend of all the men present, and the acquaintance of several, gave selections of his autobiography prefatory to bellowing in a deep bass voice, “They’re hanging Danny Deaver,” and then a lady interpolated herself into the programme with a kindness which Lord Lioncourt acknowledged, in saying “The more the merrier,” and sang Bonnie Dundee, thumping the piano out of all proportion to her size and apparent strength.

Some advances which Clementina had made for Mrs. Milray’s help about the dress she should wear in her dance met with bewildering indifference, and she had fallen back upon her own devices. She did not think of taking back her promise, and she had come to look forward to her part with a happiness which the good weather and the even sway of the ship encouraged. But her pulses fluttered, as she glided into the music room, and sank into a chair next Mrs. Milray. She had on an accordion skirt which she had been able to get out of her trunk in the hold, and she felt that the glance of Mrs. Milray did not refuse it approval.

“That will do nicely, Clementina,” she said. She added, in careless acknowledgement of her own failure to direct her choice, “I see you didn’t need my help after all,” and the thorny point which Clementina felt in her praise was rankling, when Lord Lioncourt began to introduce her.

He made rather a mess of it, but as soon as he came to an end of his well-meant blunders, she stood up and began her poses and paces. It was all very innocent, with something courageous as well as appealing. She had a kind of tender dignity in her dance, and the delicate beauty of her face translated itself into the grace of her movements. It was not impersonal; there was her own quality of sylvan, of elegant in it; but it was unconscious, and so far it was typical, it was classic; Mrs. Milray’s Bostonian achieved a snub from her by saying it was like a Botticelli; and in fact it was merely the skirt-dance which society had borrowed from the stage at that period, leaving behind the footlights its more acrobatic phases, but keeping its pretty turns and bows and bends. Clementina did it not only with tender dignity, but when she was fairly launched in it, with a passion to which her sense of Mrs. Milray’s strange unkindness lent defiance. The dance was still so new a thing then, that it had a surprise to which the girl’s gentleness lent a curious charm, and it had some adventitious fascinations from the necessity she was in of weaving it in and out among the stationary armchairs and sofas which still further cramped the narrow space where she gave it. Her own delight in it shone from her smiling face, which was appealingly happy. Just before it should have ended, one of those wandering waves that roam the smoothest sea struck the ship, and Clementina caught herself skilfully from falling, and reeled to her seat, while the room rang with the applause and sympathetic laughter for the mischance she had baffled. There was a storm of encores, but Clementina called out, “The ship tilts so!” and her naivete won her another burst of favor, which was at its height when Lord Lioncourt had an inspiration.

He jumped up and said, “Miss Claxon is going to oblige us with a little bit of dramatics, now, and I’m sure you’ll all enjoy that quite as much as her beautiful dancing. She’s going to take the principal part in the laughable after-piece of Passing round the Hat, and I hope the audience will — a — a — a — do the rest. She’s consented on this occasion to use a hat — or cap, rather — of her own, the charming Tam O’Shanter in which we’ve all seen her, and — a — admired her about the ship for the week past.”

He caught up the flat woolen steamer-cap which Clementina had left in her seat beside Mrs. Milray when she rose to dance, and held it aloft. Some one called out, “Chorus! For he’s a jolly good fellow,” and led off in his praise. Lord Lioncourt shouted through the uproar the announcement that while Miss Claxon was taking up the collection, Mr. Ewins, of Boston, would sing one of the student songs of Cambridge — no! Harvard — University; the music being his own.

Everyone wanted to make some joke or some compliment to Clementina about the cap which grew momently heavier under the sovereigns and half sovereigns, half crowns and half dollars, shillings, quarters, greenbacks and every fraction of English and American silver; and the actor who had given the imitations, made bold, as he said, to ask his lordship if the audience might not hope, before they dispersed, for something more from Miss Claxon. He was sure she could do something more; he for one would be glad of anything; and Clementina turned from putting her cap into Mrs. Milray’s lap, to find Lord Lioncourt bowing at her elbow, and offering her his arm to lead her to the spot where she had stood in dancing.

The joy of her triumph went to her head; she wished to retrieve herself from any shadow of defeat.

She stood panting a moment, and then, if she had had the professional instinct, she would have given her admirers the surprise of something altogether different from what had pleased them before. That was what the actor would have done, but Clementina thought of how her dance had been brought to an untimely close by the rolling of the ship; she burned to do it all as she knew it, no matter how the sea behaved, and in another moment she struck into it again. This time the sea behaved perfectly, and the dance ended with just the swoop and swirl she had meant it to have at first. The spectators went generously wild over her; they cheered and clapped her, and crowded upon her to tell how lovely it was; but she escaped from them, and ran back to the place where she had left Mrs. Milray. She was not there, and Clementina’s cap full of alms lay abandoned on the chair. Lord Lioncourt said he would take charge of the money, if she would lend him her cap to carry it in to the purser, and she made her way into the saloon. In a distant corner she saw Mrs. Milray with Mr. Ewins.

She advanced in a vague dismay toward them, and as she came near Mrs. Milray said to Mr. Ewins, “I don’t like this place. Let’s go over yonder.” She rose and rushed him to the other end of the saloon.

Lord Lioncourt came in looking about. “Ah, have you found her?” he asked, gayly. “There were twenty pounds in your cap, and two hundred dollars.”

“Yes,” said Clementina, “she’s over the’a.” She pointed, and then shrank and slipped away.

XVIII.

At breakfast Mrs. Milray would not meet Clementina’s eye; she talked to the people across the table in a loud, lively voice, and then suddenly rose, and swept past her out of the saloon.

The girl did not see her again till Mrs. Milray came up on the promenade at the hour when people who have eaten too much breakfast begin to spoil their appetite for luncheon with the tea and bouillon of the deck-stewards. She looked fiercely about, and saw Clementina seated in her usual place, but with Lord Lioncourt in her own chair next her husband, and Ewins on foot before her. They were both talking to Clementina, whom Lord Lioncourt was accusing of being in low spirits unworthy of her last night’s triumphs. He jumped up, and offered his place, “I’ve got your chair, Mrs. Milray.”

“Oh, no,” she said, coldly, “I was just coming to look after Mr. Milray. But I see he’s in good hands.”

She turned away, as if to make the round of the deck, and Ewins hurried after her. He came back directly, and said that Mrs. Milray had gone into the library to write letters. He stayed, uneasily, trying to talk, but with the air of a man who has been snubbed, and has not got back his composure.

Lord Lioncourt talked on until he had used up the incidents of the night before, and the probabilities of their getting into Queenstown before morning; then he and Mr. Ewins went to the smoking-room together, and Clementina was left alone with Milray.

“Clementina,” he said, gently, “I don’t see everything; but isn’t there some trouble between you and Mrs. Milray?”

“Why, I don’t know what it can be,” answered the girl, with trembling lips. “I’ve been trying to find out, and I can’t undastand it.”

“Ah, those things are often very obscure,” said Milray, with a patient smile.

Clementina wanted to ask him if Mrs. Milray had said anything to him about her, but she could not, and he did not speak again till he heard her stir in rising from her chair. Then he said, “I haven’t forgotten that letter to my sister, Clementina. I will give it to you before we leave the steamer. Are you going to stay in Liverpool, over night, or shall you go up to London at once?”

“I don’t know. It will depend upon how Mrs. Landa feels.”

“Well, we shall see each other again. Don’t be worried.” He looked up at her with a smile, and he could not see how forlornly she returned it.

As the day passed, Mrs. Milray’s angry eyes seemed to search her out for scorn whenever Clementina found herself the centre of her last night’s celebrity. Many people came up and spoke to her, at first with a certain expectation of knowingness in her, which her simplicity baffled. Then they either dropped her, and went away, or stayed and tried to make friends with her because of this; an elderly English clergyman and his wife were at first compassionately anxious about her, and then affectionately attentive to her in her obvious isolation. Clementina’s simple-hearted response to their advances appeared to win while it puzzled them; and they seemed trying to divine her in the strange double character she wore to their more single civilization. The theatrical people thought none the worse of her for her simple-heartedness, apparently; they were both very sweet to her, and wanted her to promise to come and see them in their little box in St. John’s Wood. Once, indeed, Clementina thought she saw relenting in Mrs. Milray’s glance, but it hardened again as Lord Lioncourt and Mr. Ewins came up to her, and began to talk with her. She could not go to her chair beside Milray, for his wife was now keeping guard of him on the other side with unexampled devotion. Lord Lioncourt asked her to walk with him and she consented. She thought that Mr. Ewins would go and sit by Mrs. Milray, of course, but when she came round in her tour of the ship, Mrs. Milray was sitting alone beside her husband.

After dinner she went to the library and got a book, but she could not read there; every chair was taken by people writing letters to send back from Queenstown in the morning; and she strayed into the ladies’ sitting room, where no ladies seemed ever to sit, and lost herself in a miserable muse over her open page.

Some one looked in at the door, and then advanced within and came straight to Clementina; she knew without looking up that it was Mrs. Milray. “I have been hunting for you, Miss Claxon,” she said, in a voice frostily fierce, and with a bearing furiously formal. “I have a letter to Miss Milray that my husband wished me to write for you, and give you with his compliments.”

“Thank you,” said Clementina. She rose mechanically to her feet, and at the same time Mrs. Milray sat down.

“You will find Miss Milray,” she continued, with the same glacial hauteur, “a very agreeable and cultivated lady.”

Clementina said nothing; and Mrs. Milray added,

“And I hope she may have the happiness of being more useful to you than I have.”

“What do you mean, Mrs. Milray?” Clementina asked with unexpected spirit and courage.

“I mean simply this, that I have not succeeded in putting you on your guard against your love of admiration — especially the admiration of gentlemen. A young girl can’t be too careful how she accepts the attentions of gentlemen, and if she seems to invite them—”

“Mrs. Milray!” cried Clementina. “How can you say such a thing to me?”

“How? I shall have to be plain with you, I see. Perhaps I have not considered that, after all, you know nothing about life and are not to blame for things that a person born and bred in the world would understand from childhood. If you don’t know already, I can tell you that the way you have behaved with Lord Lioncourt during the last two or three days, and the way you showed your pleasure the other night in his ridiculous flatteries of you, was enough to make you the talk of the whole steamer. I advise you for your own sake to take my warning in time. You are very young, and inexperienced and ignorant, but that will not save you in the eyes of the world if you keep on.” Mrs. Milray rose. “And now I will leave you to think of what I have said. Here is the letter for Miss Milray—”

Clementina shook her head. “I don’t want it.”

“You don’t want it? But I have written it at Mr. Milray’s request, and I shall certainly leave it with you!”

“If you do,” said Clementina, “I shall not take it!”

“And what shall I say to Mr. Milray?”

“What you have just said to me.”

“What have I said to you?”

“That I’m a bold girl, and that I’ve tried to make men admi’a me.”

Mrs. Milray stopped as if suddenly daunted by a fact that had not occurred to her before. “Did I say that?”

“The same as that.”

“I didn’t mean that — I — merely meant to put you on your guard. It may be because you are so innocent yourself, that you can’t imagine what others think, and — I did it out of my regard for you.”

Clementina did not answer.

Mrs. Milray went on, “That was why I was so provoked with you. I think that for a young girl to stand up and dance alone before a whole steamer full of strangers” — Clementina looked at her without speaking, and Mrs. Milray hastened to say, “To be sure I advised you to do it, but I certainly was surprised that you should give an encore. But no matter, now. This letter—”

“I can’t take it, Mrs. Milray,” said Clementina, with a swelling heart.

“Now, listen!” urged Mrs. Milray. “You think I’m just saying it because, if you don’t take it I shall have to tell Mr. Milray I was so hateful to you, you couldn’t. Well, I should hate to tell him that; but that isn’t the reason. There!” She tore the letter in pieces, and threw it on the floor. Clementina did not make any sign of seeing this, and Mrs. Milray dropped upon her chair again. “Oh, how hard you are! Can’t you say something to me?”

Clementina did not lift her eyes. “I don’t feel like saying anything just now.”

Mrs. Milray was silent a moment. Then she sighed. “Well, you may hate me, but I shall always be your friend. What hotel are you going to in Liverpool?

“I don’t know,” said Clementina.

“You had better come to the one where we go. I’m afraid Mrs. Lander won’t know how to manage very well, and we’ve been in Liverpool so often. May I speak to her about it?”

“If you want to,” Clementina coldly assented.

“I see!” said Mrs. Milray. “You don’t want to be under the same roof with me. Well, you needn’t! But I’ll tell you a good hotel: the one that the trains start out of; and I’ll send you that letter for Miss Milray.” Clementina was silent. “Well, I’ll send it, anyway.”

Mrs. Milray went away in sudden tears, but the girl remained dry-eyed.

XIX.

Mrs. Lander realized when the ship came to anchor in the stream at Liverpool that she had not been seasick a moment during the voyage. In the brisk cold of the winter morning, as they came ashore in the tug, she fancied a property of health in the European atmosphere, which she was sure would bring her right up, if she stayed long enough; and a regret that she had never tried it with Mr. Lander mingled with her new hopes for herself.

But Clementina looked with home-sick eyes at the strangeness of the alien scene: the pale, low heaven which seemed not to be clouded and yet was so dim; the flat shores with the little railroad trains running in and out over them; the grimy bulks of the city, and the shipping in the river, sparse and sombre after the gay forest of sails and stacks at New York.

She did not see the Milrays after she left the tug, in the rapid dispersal of the steamer’s passengers. They both took leave of her at the dock, and Mrs. Milray whispered with penitence in her voice and eyes, “I will write,” but the girl did not answer.

Before Mrs. Lander’s trunks and her own were passed, she saw Lord Lioncourt going away with his heavily laden man at his heels. Mr. Ewins came up to see if he could help her through the customs, but she believed that he had come at Mrs. Milray’s bidding, and she thanked him so prohibitively that he could not insist. The English clergyman who had spoken to her the morning after the charity entertainment left his wife with Mrs. Lander, and came to her help, and then Mr. Ewins went his way.

The clergyman, who appeared to feel the friendlessness of the young girl and the old woman a charge laid upon him, bestowed a sort of fatherly protection upon them both. He advised them to stop at a hotel for a few hours and take the later train for London that he and his wife were going up by; they drove to the hotel together, where Mrs. Lander could not be kept from paying the omnibus, and made them have luncheon with her. She allowed the clergyman to get her tickets, and she could not believe that he had taken second class tickets for himself and his wife. She said that she had never heard of anyone travelling second class before, and she assured him that they never did it in America. She begged him to let her pay the difference, and bring his wife into her compartment, which the guard had reserved for her. She urged that the money was nothing to her, compared with the comfort of being with some one you knew; and the clergyman had to promise that as they should be neighbors, he would look in upon her, whenever the train stopped long enough.

Before it began to move, Clementina thought she saw Lord Lioncourt hurrying past their carriage-window. At Rugby the clergyman appeared, but almost before he could speak, Lord Lioncourt’s little red face showed at his elbow. He asked Clementina to present him to Mrs. Lander, who pressed him to get into her compartment; the clergyman vanished, and Lord Lioncourt yielded.

Mrs. Lander found him able to tell her the best way to get to Florence, whose situation he seemed to know perfectly; he confessed that he had been there rather often. He made out a little itinerary for going straight through by sleeping-car as soon as you crossed the Channel; she had said that she always liked a through train when she could get it, and the less stops the better. She bade Clementina take charge of the plan and not lose it; without it she did not see what they could do. She conceived of him as a friend of Clementina’s, and she lost in the strange environment the shyness she had with most people. She told him how Mr. Lander had made his money, and from what beginnings he rose to be ignorant of what he really was worth when he died. She dwelt upon the diseases they had suffered, and at the thought of his death, so unnecessary in view of the good that the air was already doing her in Europe, she shed tears.

Lord Lioncourt was very polite, but there was no resumption of the ship’s comradery in his manner. Clementina could not know how quickly this always drops from people who have been fellow-passengers; and she wondered if he were guarding himself from her because she had danced at the charity entertainment. The poison which Mrs. Milray had instilled worked in her thoughts while she could not help seeing how patient he was with all Mrs. Lander’s questions; he answered them with a simplicity of his own, or laughed and put them by, when they were quite impossible. Many of them related to the comparative merits of English and American railroads, and what he thought himself of these. Mrs. Lander noted the difference of the English stations; but she did not see much in the landscape to examine him upon. She required him to tell her why the rooks they saw were not crows, and she was not satisfied that he should say the country seat she pointed out was a castle when it was plainly deficient in battlements. She based upon his immovable confidence in respect to it an inquiry into the structure of English society, and she made him tell her what a lord was, and a commoner, and how the royal family differed from both. She asked him how he came to be a lord, and when he said that it was a peerage of George the Third’s creation, she remembered that George III. was the one we took up arms against. She found that Lord Lioncourt knew of our revolution generally, but was ignorant of such particulars as the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Surrender of Cornwallis, as well as the throwing of the Tea into Boston Harbor; he was much struck by this incident, and said, And quite right, he was sure.

He told Clementina that her friends the Milrays had taken the steamer for London in the morning. He believed they were going to Egypt for the winter. Cairo, he said, was great fun, and he advised Mrs. Lander, if she found Florence a bit dull, to push on there. She asked if it was an easy place to get to, and he assured her that it was very easy from Italy.

Mrs. Lander was again at home in her world of railroads and hotels; but she confessed, after he left them at the next station, that she should have felt more at home if he had been going on to London with them. She philosophized him to the disadvantage of her own countrymen as much less offish than a great many New York and Boston people. He had given her a good opinion of the whole English nation; and the clergyman, who had been so nice to them at Liverpool, confirmed her friendly impressions of England by getting her a small omnibus at the station in London before he got a cab for himself and his wife, and drove away to complete his own journey on another road. She celebrated the omnibus as if it were an effect of his goodness in her behalf. She admired its capacity for receiving all their trunks, and saving the trouble and delay of the express, which always vexed her so much in New York, and which had nearly failed in getting her baggage to the steamer in time.

The omnibus remained her chief association with London, for she decided to take the first through train for Italy in the morning. She wished to be settled, by which she meant placed in a Florentine hotel for the winter. That lord, as she now began and always continued to call Lioncourt, had first given her the name of the best little hotel in Florence, but as it had neither elevator nor furnace heat in it, he agreed in the end that it would not do for her, and mentioned the most modern and expensive house on the Lungarno. He told her he did not think she need telegraph for rooms; but she took this precaution before leaving London, and was able to secure them at a price which seemed to her quite as much as she would have had to pay for the same rooms at a first class hotel on the Back Bay.

The manager had reserved for her one of the best suites, which had just been vacated by a Russian princess. “I guess you better cable to your folks where you ah’, Clementina,” she said. “Because if you’re satisfied, I am, and I presume we sha’n’t want to change as long as we stay in Florence. My, but it’s sightly!” She joined Clementina a moment at the windows looking upon the Arno, and the hills beyond it. “I guess you’ll spend most of your time settin’ at this winder, and I sha’n’t blame you.”

They had arrived late in the dull, soft winter afternoon. The landlord led the way himself to their apartment, and asked if they would have fire; a facchino came in and kindled roaring blazes on the hearths; at the same time a servant lighted all the candles on the tables and mantels. They both gracefully accepted the fees that Mrs. Lander made Clementina give them; the facchino kissed the girl’s hand. “My!” said Mrs. Lander, “I guess you never had your hand kissed before.”

The hotel developed advantages which, if not those she was used to, were still advantages. The halls were warmed by a furnace, and she came to like the little logs burning in her rooms. In the care of her own fire, she went back to the simple time of her life in the country, and chose to kindle it herself when it died out, with the fagots of broom that blazed up so briskly.

In the first days of her stay she made inquiry for the best American doctor in Florence; and she found him so intelligent that she at once put her liver in his charge, with a history of her diseases and symptoms of every kind. She told him that she was sure that he could have cured Mr. Lander, if he had only had him in time; she exacted a new prescription from him for herself, and made him order some quinine pills for Clementina against the event of her feeling debilitated by the air of Florence.

XX.

In these first days a letter came to Clementina from Mrs. Lander’s banker, enclosing the introduction which Mrs. Milray had promised to her sister-in-law. It was from Mr. Milray, as before, and it was in Mrs. Milray’s handwriting; but no message from her came with it. To Clementina it explained itself, but she had to explain it to Mrs. Lander. She had to tell her of Mrs. Milray’s behavior after the entertainment on the steamer, and Mrs. Lander said that Clementina had done just exactly right; and they both decided, against some impulses of curiosity in Clementina’s heart, that she should not make use of the introduction.

The ‘Hotel des Financieres’ was mainly frequented by rich Americans full of ready money, and by rich Russians of large credit. Better Americans and worse, went, like the English, to smaller and cheaper hotels; and Clementina’s acquaintance was confined to mothers as shy and ungrammatical as Mrs. Lander herself, and daughters blankly indifferent to her. Mrs. Lander drove out every day when it did not rain, and she took Clementina with her, because the doctor said it would do them both good; but otherwise the girl remained pent in their apartment. The doctor found her a teacher, and she kept on with her French, and began to take lessons in Italian; she spoke with no one but her teacher, except when the doctor came. At the table d’hote she heard talk of the things that people seemed to come to Florence for: pictures, statues, palaces, famous places; and it made her ashamed of not knowing about them. But she could not go to see these things alone, and Mrs. Lander, in the content she felt with all her circumstances, seemed not to suppose that Clementina could care for anything but the comfort of the hotel and the doctor’s visits. When the girl began to get letters from home in answer to the first she had written back, boasting how beautiful Florence was, they assumed that she was very gay, and demanded full accounts of her pleasures. Her brother Jim gave something of the village news, but he said he supposed that she would not care for that, and she would probably be too proud to speak to them when she came home. The Richlings had called in to share the family satisfaction in Clementina’s first experiences, and Mrs. Richling wrote her very sweetly of their happiness in them. She charged her from the rector not to forget any chance of self-improvement in the allurements of society, but to make the most of her rare opportunities. She said that they had got a guide-book to Florence, with a plan of the city, and were following her in the expeditions they decided she must be making every day; they were reading up the Florentine history in Sismondi’s Italian Republics, and she bade Clementina be sure and see all the scenes of Savonarola’s martyrdom, so that they could talk them over together when she returned.

Clementina wondered what Mrs. Richling would think if she told her that all she knew of Florence was what she overheard in the talk of the girls in the hotel, who spoke before her of their dances and afternoon teas, and evenings at the opera, and drives in the Cascine, and parties to Fiesole, as if she were not by.

The days and weeks passed, until Carnival was half gone, and Mrs. Lander noticed one day that Clementina appeared dull. “You don’t seem to get much acquainted?” she suggested.

“Oh, the’e’s plenty of time,” said Clementina.

“I wish the’e was somebody you could go round with, and see the place. Shouldn’t you like to see the place?” Mrs. Lander pursued.

“There’s no hurry about it, Mrs. Lander. It will stay as long as we do.”

Mrs. Lander was thoughtfully silent. Then she said, “I declare, I’ve got half a mind to make you send that letta to Miss Milray, after all. What difference if Mrs. Milray did act so ugly to you? He never did, and she’s his sista.”

“Oh, I don’t want to send it, Mrs. Landa; you mustn’t ask me to. I shall get along,” said Clementina. The recognition of her forlornness deepened it, but she was cheerfuller, for no reason, the next morning; and that afternoon, the doctor unexpectedly came upon a call which he made haste to say was not professional.

“I’ve just come from another patient of mine, and I promised to ask if you had not crossed on the same ship with a brother of hers, — Mr. Milray.”

Celementina and Mrs. Lander looked guiltily at each other. “I guess we did,” Mrs. Lander owned at last, with a reluctant sigh.

“Then, she says you have a letter for her.”

The doctor spoke to both, but his looks confessed that he was not ignorant of the fact when Mrs. Lander admitted, “Well Clementina, he’e, has.”

“She wants to know why you haven’t delivered it,” the doctor blurted out.

Mrs. Lander looked at Clementina. “I guess she ha’n’t quite got round to it yet, have you, Clementina?”

The doctor put in: “Well, Miss Milray is rather a dangerous person to keep waiting. If you don’t deliver it pretty soon, I shouldn’t be surprised if she came to get it.” Dr. Welwright was a young man in the early thirties, with a laugh that a great many ladies said had done more than any one thing for them, and he now prescribed it for Clementina. But it did not seem to help her in the trouble her face betrayed.

Mrs. Lander took the word, “Well, I wouldn’t say it to everybody. But you’re our doctor, and I guess you won’t mind it. We don’t like the way Mrs. Milray acted to Clementina, in the ship, and we don’t want to be beholden to any of her folks. I don’t know as Clementina wants me to tell you just what it was, and I won’t; but that’s the long and sho’t of it.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “I’ve never met Mrs. Milray, but Miss Milray has such a pleasant house, and likes to get young people about her. There are a good many young people in your hotel, though, and I suppose you all have a very good time here together.” He ended by speaking to Clementina, and now he said he had done his errand, and must be going.

When he was gone, Mrs. Lander faltered, “I don’t know but what we made a mistake, Clementina.”

“It’s too late to worry about it now,” said the girl.

“We ha’n’t bound to stay in Florence,” said Mrs. Lander, thoughtfully. “I only took the rooms by the week, and we can go, any time, Clementina, if you are uncomf’table bein’ here on Miss Milray’s account. We could go to Rome; they say Rome’s a nice place; or to Egypt.”

“Mrs. Milray’s in Egypt,” Clementina suggested.

“That’s true,” Mrs. Lander admitted, with a sigh. After a while she went on, “I don’t know as we’ve got any right to keep the letter. It belongs to her, don’t it?”

“I guess it belongs to me, as much as it does to her,” said Clementina. “If it’s to her, it’s for me. I am not going to send it, Mrs. Landa.”

They were still in this conclusion when early in the following afternoon Miss Milray’s cards were brought up for Mrs. Lander and Miss Claxon.

“Well, I decla’e!” cried Mrs. Lander. “That docta: must have gone straight and told her what we said.”

“He had no right to,” said Clementina, but neither of them was displeased, and after it was over, Mrs. Lander said that any one would have thought the call was for her, instead of Clementina, from the way Miss Milray kept talking to her. She formed a high opinion of her; and Miss Milray put Clementina in mind of Mr. Milray; she had the same hair of chiseled silver, and the same smile; she moved like him, and talked like him; but with a greater liveliness. She asked fondly after him, and made Clementina tell her if he seemed quite well, and in good spirits; she was civilly interested in Mrs. Milray’s health. At the embarrassment which showed itself in the girl, she laughed and said, “Don’t imagine I don’t know all about it, Miss Claxon! My sister-in-law has owned up very handsomely; she isn’t half bad, as the English say, and I think she likes owning up if she can do it safely.”

“And you don’t think,” asked Mrs. Lander, “that Clementina done wrong to dance that way?”

Clementina blushed, and Miss Milray laughed again. “If you’ll let Miss Claxon come to a little party I’m giving she may do her dance at my house; but she sha’n’t be obliged to do it, or anything she doesn’t like. Don’t say she hasn’t a gown ready, or something of that kind! You don’t know the resources of Florence, and how the dress makers here doat upon doing impossible things in no time at all, and being ready before they promise. If you’ll put Miss Claxon in my hands, I’ll see that she’s dressed for my dance. I live out on one of the hills over there, that you see from your windows” — she nodded toward them— “in a beautiful villa, too cold for winter, and too hot for summer, but I think Miss Claxon can endure its discomfort for a day, if you can spare her, and she will consent to leave you to the tender mercies of your maid, and—” Miss Milray paused at the kind of unresponsive blank to which she found herself talking, and put up her lorgnette, to glance from Mrs. Lander to Clementina. The girl said, with embarrassment, “I don’t think I ought to leave Mrs. Landa, just now. She isn’t very well, and I shouldn’t like to leave her alone.”

“But we’re just as much obliged to you as if she could come,” Mrs. Lander interrupted; “and later on, maybe she can. You see, we han’t got any maid, yit. Well, we did have one at Woodlake, but she made us do so many things for her, that we thought we should like to do a few things for ouaselves, awhile.”

If Miss Milray perhaps did not conceive the situation, exactly, she said, Oh, they were quite right in that; but she might count upon Miss Claxon for her dance, might not she; and might not she do anything in her power for them? She rose to go, but Mrs. Lander took her at her word, so far as to say, Why, yes, if she could tell Clementina the best place to get a dress she guessed the child would be glad enough to come to the dance.

“Tell her!” Miss Milray cried. “I’ll take her! Put on your hat, my dear,” she said to Clementina, “and come with me now. My carriage is at your door.”

Clementina looked at Mrs. Lander, who said, “Go, of cou’se, child. I wish I could go, too.”

“Do come, too,” Miss Milray entreated.

“No, no,” said Mrs. Lander, flattered. “I a’n’t feeling very well, to-day. I guess I’m better off at home. But don’t you hurry back on my account, Clementina.” While the girl was gone to put on her hat she talked on about her. “She’s the best gul in the wo’ld, and she won’t be one of the poorest; and I shall feel that I’m doin’ just what Mr. Landa would have wanted I should. He picked her out himself, moa than three yea’s ago, when we was drivin’ past her house at Middlemount, and it was to humor him afta he was gone, moa than anything else, that I took her. Well, she wa’n’t so very easy to git, either, I can tell you.” She cut short her history of the affair to say when Clementina came back, “I want you should do the odderin’ yourself, Miss Milray, and not let her scrimp with the money. She wants to git some visitin’ cahds; and if you miss anything about her that she’d ought to have, or that any otha yong lady’s got, won’t you just git it for her?”

As soon as she imagined the case, Miss Milray set herself to overcome Mrs. Lander’s reluctance from a maid. She prevailed with her to try the Italian woman whom she sent her, and in a day the genial Maddalena had effaced the whole tradition of the bleak Ellida. It was not essential to the understanding which instantly established itself between them that they should have any language in common. They babbled at each other, Mrs. Lander in her Bostonized Yankee, and Maddalena in her gutteral Florentine, and Mrs. Lander was flattered to find how well she knew Italian.

Miss Milray had begun being nice to Clementina in fealty to her brother, who so seldom made any proof of her devotion to him, and to whom she had remained passionately true through his shady past. She was eager to humor his whim for the little country girl who had taken his fancy, because it was his whim, and not because she had any hopes that Clementina would justify it. She had made Dr. Welwright tell her all he knew about her, and his report of her grace and beauty had piqued her curiosity; his account of the forlorn dullness of her life with Mrs. Lander in their hotel had touched her heart. But she was still skeptical when she went to get her letter of introduction; when she brought Clementina home from the dressmaker’s she asked if she might kiss her, and said she was already in love with her.

Her love might have made her wish to do everything for her that she now began to do, but it simplified the situation to account for her to the world as the ward of Mrs. Lander, who was as rich as she was vulgar, and it was with Clementina in this character that Miss Milray began to make the round of afternoon teas, and inspired invitations for her at pleasant houses, by giving a young ladies’ lunch for her at her own. Before the night of her little dance, she had lost any misgiving she had felt at first, in the delight of seeing Clementina take the world as if she had thought it would always behave as amiably as that, and as if she had forgotten her unkind experiences to the contrary. She knew from Mrs. Lander how the girls at their hotel had left her out, but Miss Milray could not see that Clementina met them with rancor, when her authority brought them together. If the child was humiliated by her past in the gross lonely luxury of Mrs. Lander’s life or the unconscious poverty of her own home, she did not show it in the presence of the world that now opened its arms to her. She remained so tranquil in the midst of all the novel differences, that it made her friend feel rather vulgar in her anxieties for her, and it was not always enough to find that she had not gone wrong simply because she had hold still, and had the gift of waiting for things to happen. Sometimes when Miss Milray had almost decided that her passivity was the calm of a savage, she betrayed so sweet and grateful a sense of all that was done for her, that her benefactress decided that she was not rustic, but was sylvan in a way of her own, and not so much ignorant as innocent. She discovered that she was not ignorant even of books, but with no literary effect from them she had transmitted her reading into the substance of her native gentleness, and had both ideas and convictions. When Clementina most affected her as an untried wilderness in the conventional things she most felt her equality to any social fortune that might befall her, and then she would have liked to see her married to a title, and taking the glory of this world with an unconsciousness that experience would never wholly penetrate. But then again she felt that this would be somehow a profanation, and she wanted to pack her up and get her back to Middlemount before anything of the kind should happen. She gave Milray these impressions of Clementina in the letter she wrote to thank him for her, and to scold him for sending the girl to her. She accused him of wishing to get off on her a riddle which he could not read himself; but she owned that the charm of Clementina’s mystery was worth a thousand times the fatigue of trying to guess her out and that she was more and more infatuated with her every day.

In the meantime, Miss Milray’s little dance grew upon her till it became a very large one that filled her villa to overflowing when the time came for it. She lived on one of the fine avenues of the Oltrarno region, laid out in the brief period of prosperity which Florence enjoyed as the capital of Italy. The villa was built at that time, and it was much newer than the house on Seventeenth street in New York, where she spent the girlhood that had since prolonged itself beyond middle life with her. She had first lived abroad in the Paris of the Second Empire, and she had been one winter in Rome, but she had settled definitely in Florence before London became an American colony, so that her friends were chiefly Americans, though she had a wide international acquaintance. Perhaps her habit of taking her brother’s part, when he was a black sheep, inclined her to mercy with people who had not been so blameless in their morals as they were in their minds and manners. She exacted that they should be interesting and agreeable, and not too threadbare; but if they had something that decently buttoned over the frayed places, she did not frown upon their poverty. Bohemians of all kinds liked her; Philistines liked her too; and in such a place as Florence, where the Philistines themselves are a little Bohemian, she might be said to be very popular. You met persons whom you did not quite wish to meet at her house, but if these did not meet you there, it was your loss.

XI.

On the night of the dance the line of private carriages, remises and cabs, lined the Viale Ariosto for a mile up and down before her gates, where young artists of both sexes arrived on foot. By this time her passion for Clementina was at its height. She had Maddalena bring her out early in the evening, and made her dress under her own eye and her French maid’s, while Maddalena went back to comfort Mrs. Lander.

“I hated to leave her,” said Clementina. “I don’t believe she’s very well.”

“Isn’t she always ill?” demanded Miss Milray. She embraced the girl again, as if once were not enough. “Clementina, if Mrs. Lander won’t give you to me, I’m going to steal you. Do you know what I want you to do tonight? I want you to stand up with me, and receive, till the dancing begins, as if it were your coming-out. I mean to introduce everybody to you. You’ll be easily the prettiest girl, there, and you’ll have the nicest gown, and I don’t mean that any of your charms shall be thrown away. You won’t be frightened?”

“No, I don’t believe I shall,” said Clementina. “You can tell me what to do.”

The dress she wore was of pale green, like the light seen in thin woods; out of it shone her white shoulders, and her young face, as if rising through the verdurous light. The artists, to a man and woman, wished to paint her, and severally told her so, during the evening which lasted till morning. She was not surprised when Lord Lioncourt appeared, toward midnight, and astonished Miss Milray by claiming acquaintance with Clementina. He asked about Mrs. Lander, and whether she had got to Florence without losing the way; he laughed but he seemed really to care. He took Clementina out to supper, when the time came; and she would have topped him by half a head as she leaned on his arm, if she had not considerately drooped and trailed a little after him.

She could not know what a triumph he was making for her; and it was merely part of the magic of the time that Mr. Ewins should come in presently with one of the ladies. He had arrived in Florence that day, and had to be brought unasked. He put on the effect of an old friend with her; but Clementina’s curiosity was chiefly taken with a tall American, whom she thought very handsome. His light yellow hair was brushed smooth across his forehead like a well-behaving boy’s; he was dressed like the other men, but he seemed not quite happy in his evening coat, and his gloves which he smote together uneasily from time to time. He appeared to think that somehow the radiant Clementina would know how he felt; he did not dance, and he professed to have found himself at the party by a species of accident. He told her that he was out in Europe looking after a patent right that he had just taken hold of, and was having only a middling good time. He pretended surprise to hear her say that she was having a first-rate time, and he tried to reason her out of it. He confessed that from the moment he came into the room he had made up his mind to take her to supper, and had never been so disgusted in his life as when he saw that little lord toddling off with her, and trying to look as large as life. He asked her what a lord was like, anyway, and he made her laugh all the time.

He told her his name, G. W. Hinkle, and asked whether she would be likely to remember it if they ever met again.

Another man who interested her very much was a young Russian, with curling hair and neat, small features who spoke better English than she did, and said he was going to be a writer, but had not yet decided whether to write in Russian or French; she supposed he had wanted her advice, but he did not wait for it, or seem to expect it. He was very much in earnest, while he fanned her, and his earnestness amused her as much as the American’s irony. He asked which city of America she came from, and when she said none, he asked which part of America. She answered New England, and he said, “Oh, yes, that is where they have the conscience.” She did not know what he meant, and he put before her the ideal of New England girlhood which he had evolved from reading American novels. “Are you like that?” he demanded.

She laughed, and said, “Not a bit,” and asked him if he had ever met such an American girl, and he said, frankly, No; the American girls were all mercenary, and cared for nothing but money, or marrying titles. He added that he had a title, but he would not wear it.

Clementina said she did not believe she cared for titles, and then he said, “But you care for money.” She denied it, but as if she had confessed it, he went on: “The only American that I have seen with that conscience was a man. I will tell you of him, if you wish.”

He did not wait for her answer. “It was in Naples — at Pompeii. I saw at the first glance that he was different from other Americans, and I resolved to know him. He was there in company with a stupid boy, whose tutor he was; and he told me that he was studying to be a minister of the Protestant church. Next year he will go home to be consecrated. He promised to pass through Florence in the spring, and he will keep his word. Every act, every word, every thought of his is regulated by conscience. It is terrible, but it is beautiful.” All the time, the Russian was fanning Clementina, with every outward appearance of flirtation. “Will you dance again? No? I should like to draw such a character as his in a romance.”

XXII.

It was six o’clock in the morning before Miss Milray sent Clementina home in her carriage. She would have kept her to breakfast, but Clementina said she ought to go on Mrs. Lander’s account, and she wished to go on her own.

She thought she would steal to bed without waking her, but she was stopped by the sound of groans when she entered their apartment; the light gushed from Mrs. Lander’s door. Maddalena came out, and blessed the name of her Latin deity (so much more familiar and approachable than the Anglo-Saxon divinity) that Clementina had come at last, and poured upon her the story of a night of suffering for Mrs. Lander. Through her story came the sound of Mrs. Lander’s voice plaintively reproachful, summoning Clementina to her bedside. “Oh, how could you go away and leave me? I’ve been in such misery the whole night long, and the docta didn’t do a thing for me. I’m puffectly wohn out, and I couldn’t make my wants known with that Italian crazy-head. If it hadn’t been for the portyary comin’ in and interpretin’, when the docta left, I don’t know what I should have done. I want you should give him a twenty-leary note just as quick as you see him; and oh, isn’t the docta comin’?”

Clementina set about helping Maddalena put the room, which was in an impassioned disorder, to rights; and she made Mrs. Lander a cup of her own tea, which she had brought from S. S. Pierces in passing through Boston; it was the first thing, the sufferer said, that had saved her life. Clementina comforted her, and promised her that the doctor should be there very soon; and before Mrs. Lander fell away to sleep, she was so far out of danger as to be able to ask how Clementina had enjoyed herself, and to be glad that she had such a good time.

The doctor would not wake her when he came; he said that she had been through a pretty sharp gastric attack, which would not recur, if she ate less of the most unwholesome things she could get, and went more into the air, and walked a little. He did not seem alarmed, and he made Clementina tell him about the dance, which he had been called from to Mrs. Lander’s bed of pain. He joked her for not having missed him; in the midst of their fun, she caught herself in the act of yawning, and the doctor laughed, and went away.

Maddalena had to call her, just before dinner, when Mrs. Lander had been awake long enough to have sent for the doctor to explain the sort of gone feeling which she was now the victim of. It proved, when he came, to be hunger, and he prescribed tea and toast and a small bit of steak. Before he came she had wished to arrange for going home at once, and dying in her own country. But his opinion so far prevailed with her that she consented not to telegraph for berths. “I presume,” she said, “it’ll do, any time before the icebugs begin to run. But I d’ know, afta this, Clementina, as I can let you leave me quite as you be’n doin’. There was a lot of flowas come for you, this aftanoon, but I made Maddalena put ’em on the balcony, for I don’t want you should get poisoned with ’em in your sleep; I always head they was dangerous in a person’s ‘bed room. I d’ know as they are, eitha.”

Maddalena seemed to know that Mrs. Lander was speaking of the flowers. She got them and gave them to Clementina, who found they were from some of the men she had danced with. Mr. Hinkle had sent a vast bunch of violets, which presently began to give out their sweetness in the warmth of the room, and the odor brought him before her with his yellow hair, scrupulously parted at the side, and smoothly brushed, showing his forehead very high up. Most of the gentlemen wore their hair parted in the middle, or falling in a fringe over their brows; the Russian’s was too curly to part, and Lord Lioncourt had none except at the sides.

She laughed, and Mrs. Lander said, “Tell about it, Clementina,” and she began with Mr. Hinkle, and kept coming back to him from the others. Mrs. Lander wished most to know how that lord had got down to Florence; and Clementina said he was coming to see her.

“Well, I hope to goodness he won’t come to-day, I a’n’t fit to see anybody.”

“Oh, I guess he won’t come till to-morrow,” said Clementina; she repeated some of the compliments she had got, and she told of all Miss Milray’s kindness to her, but Mrs. Lander said, “Well, the next time, I’ll thank her not to keep you so late.” She was astonished to hear that Mr. Ewins was there, and “Any of the nasty things out of the hotel the’e?” she asked.

“Yes,” Clementina said, “the’e we’e, and some of them we’e very nice. They wanted to know if I wouldn’t join them, and have an aftanoon of our own here in the hotel, so that people could come to us all at once.”

She went back to the party, and described the rest of it. When she came to the part about the Russian, she told what he had said of American girls being fond of money, and wanting to marry foreign noblemen.

Mrs. Lander said, “Well, I hope you a’n’t a going to get married in a hurry, anyway, and when you do I hope you’ll pick out a nice American.”

“Oh, yes,” said Clementina.

Mrs. Lander had their dinner brought to their apartment. She cheered up, and she was in some danger of eating too much, but with Clementina’s help she denied herself. Their short evening was one of the gayest; Clementina declared she was not the least sleepy, but she went to bed at nine, and slept till nine the next day.

Mrs. Lander, the doctor confessed, the second morning, was more shaken up by her little attack than he had expected; but she decided to see the gentleman who had asked to call on Clementina. Lord Lioncourt did not come quite so soon as she was afraid he might, and when he came he talked mostly to Clementina. He did not get to Mrs. Lander until just before he was going. She hospitably asked him what his hurry was, and then he said that he was off for Rome, that evening at seven. He was nice about hoping she was comfortable in the hotel, and he sympathized with her in her wish that there was a set-bowl in her room; she told him that she always tried to have one, and he agreed that it must be very convenient where any one was, as she said, sick so much.

Mr. Hinkle came a day later; and then it appeared that he had a mother whose complaints almost exactly matched Mrs. Lander’s. He had her photograph with him, and showed it; he said if you had no wife to carry round a photograph of, you had better carry your mother’s; and Mrs. Lander praised him for being a good son. A good son, she added, always made a good husband; and he said that was just what he told the young ladies himself, but it did not seem to make much impression on them. He kept Clementina laughing; and he pretended that he was going to bring a diagram of his patent right for her to see, because she would be interested in a gleaner like that; and he said he wished her father could see it, for it would be sure to interest the kind of man Mrs. Lander described him to be. “I’ll be along up there just about the time you get home, Miss Clementina. When did you say it would be?”

“I don’t know; pretty ea’ly in the spring, I guess.”

She looked at Mrs. Lander, who said, “Well, it depends upon how I git up my health. I couldn’t bea’ the voyage now.”

Mr. Hinkle said, “No, best look out for your health, if it takes all summer. I shouldn’t want you to hurry on my account. Your time is my time. All I want is for Miss Clementina, here, to personally conduct me to her father. If I could get him to take hold of my gleaner in New England, we could make the blueberry crop worth twice what it is.”

Mrs. Lander perceived that he was joking; and she asked what he wanted to run away for when the young Russian’s card came up. He said, “Oh, give every man a chance,” and he promised that he would look in every few days, and see how she was getting along. He opened the door after he had gone out, and put his head in to say in confidence to Mrs. Lander, but so loud that Clementina could hear, “I suppose she’s told you who the belle of the ball was, the other night? Went out to supper with a lord!” He seemed to think a lord was such a good joke that if you mentioned one you had to laugh.

The Russian’s card bore the name Baron Belsky, with the baron crossed out in pencil, and he began to attack in Mrs. Lander the demerits of the American character, as he had divined them. He instructed her that her countrymen existed chiefly to make money; that they were more shopkeepers than the English and worse snobs; that their women were trivial and their men sordid; that their ambition was to unite their families with the European aristocracies; and their doctrine of liberty and equality was a shameless hypocrisy. This followed hard upon her asking, as she did very promptly, why he had scratched out the title on his card. He told her that he wished to be known solely as an artist, and he had to explain to her that he was not a painter, but was going to be a novelist. She taxed him with never having been in America, but he contended that as all America came to Europe he had the materials for a study of the national character at hand, without the trouble of crossing the ocean. In return she told him that she had not been the least sea-sick during the voyage, and that it was no trouble at all; then he abruptly left her and went over to beg a cup of tea from Clementina, who sat behind the kettle by the window.

“I have heard this morning from that American I met in Pompeii” he began. “He is coming northward, and I am going down to meet him in Rome.”

Mrs. Lander caught the word, and called across the room, “Why, a’n’t that whe’e that lo’d’s gone?”

Clementina said yes, and while the kettle boiled, she asked if Baron Belsky were going soon.

“Oh, in a week or ten days, perhaps. I shall know when he arrives. Then I shall go. We write to each other every day.” He drew a letter from his breast pocket. “This will give you the idea of his character,” and he read, “If we believe that the hand of God directs all our actions, how can we set up our theories of conduct against what we feel to be his inspiration?”

“What do you think of that?” he demanded.

“I don’t believe that God directs our wrong actions,” said Clementina.

“How! Is there anything outside of God?

“I don’t know whether there is or not. But there is something that tempts me to do wrong, sometimes, and I don’t believe that is God.”

The Russian seemed struck. “I will write that to him!”

“No,” said Clementina, “I don’t want you to say anything about me to him.”

“No, no!” said Baron Belsky, waving his band reassuringly. “I would not mention your name!”

Mr. Ewins came in, and the Russian said he must go. Mrs. Lander tried to detain him, too, as she had tried to keep Mr. Hinkle, but he was inexorable. Mr. Ewins looked at the door when it had closed upon him. Mrs. Lander said, “That is one of the gentlemen that Clementina met the otha night at the dance. He is a baron, but he scratches it out. You’d ought to head him go on about Americans.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Ewins coldly. “He’s at our hotel, and he airs his peculiar opinions at the table d’hote pretty freely. He’s a revolutionist of some kind, I fancy.” He pronounced the epithet with an abhorrence befitting the citizen of a state born of revolution and a city that had cradled the revolt. “He’s a Nihilist, I believe.”

Mrs. Lander wished to know what that was, and he explained that it was a Russian who wanted to overthrow the Czar, and set up a government of the people, when they were not prepared for liberty.

“Then, maybe he isn’t a baron at all,” said Mrs. Lander.

“Oh, I believe he has a right to his title,” Ewins answered. “It’s a German one.”

He said he thought that sort of man was all the more mischievous on account of his sincerity. He instanced a Russian whom a friend of his knew in Berlin, a man of rank like this fellow: he got to brooding upon the condition of working people and that kind of thing, till he renounced his title and fortune and went to work in an iron foundry.

Mr. Ewins also spoke critically of Mrs. Milray. He had met her in Egypt; but you soon exhausted the interest of that kind of woman. He professed a great concern that Clementina should see Florence in just the right way, and he offered his services in showing her the place.

The Russian came the next day, and almost daily after that, in the interest with which Clementina’s novel difference from other American girls seemed to inspire him. His imagination had transmuted her simple Yankee facts into something appreciable to a Slav of his temperament. He conceived of her as the daughter of a peasant, whose beauty had charmed the widow of a rich citizen, and who was to inherit the wealth of her adoptive mother. He imagined that the adoption had taken place at a much earlier period than the time when Clementina’s visit to Mrs. Lander actually began, and that all which could be done had been done to efface her real character by indulgence and luxury.

His curiosity concerning her childhood, her home, her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, and his misunderstanding of everything she told him, amused her. But she liked him, and she tried to give him some notion of the things he wished so much to know. It always ended in a dissatisfaction, more or less vehement, with the outcome of American conditions as he conceived them.

“But you,” he urged one day, “you who are a daughter of the fields and woods, why should you forsake that pure life, and come to waste yourself here?”

“Why, don’t you think it’s very nice in Florence?” she asked, with eyes of innocent interest.

“Nice! Nice! Do we live for what is nice? Is it enough that you have what you Americans call a nice time?”

Clementina reflected. “I wasn’t doing much of anything at home, and I thought I might as well come with Mrs. Lander, if she wanted me so much.” She thought in a certain way, that he was meddling with what was not his affair, but she believed that he was sincere in his zeal for the ideal life he wished her to lead, and there were some things she had heard about him that made her pity and respect him; his self-exile and his renunciation of home and country for his principles, whatever they were; she did not understand exactly. She would not have liked never being able to go back to Middlemount, or to be cut off from all her friends as this poor young Nihilist was, and she said, now, “I didn’t expect that it was going to be anything but a visit, and I always supposed we should go back in the spring; but now Mrs. Lander is beginning to think she won’t be well enough till fall.”

“And why need you stay with her?”

“Because she’s not very well,” answered Clementina, and she smiled, a little triumphantly as well as tolerantly.

“She could hire nurses and doctors, all she wants with her money.”

“I don’t believe it would be the same thing, exactly, and what should I do if I went back?”

“Do? Teach! Uplift the lives about you.”

“But you say it is better for people to live simply, and not read and think so much.”

“Then labor in the fields with them.”

Clementina laughed outright. “I guess if anyone saw me wo’king in the fields they would think I was a disgrace to the neighbahood.”

Belsky gave her a stupified glare through his spectacles. “I cannot understand you Americans.”

“Well, you must come ova to America, then, Mr. Belsky” — he had asked her not to call him by his title— “and then you would.”

“No, I could not endure the disappointment. You have the great opportunity of the earth. You could be equal and just, and simple and kind. There is nothing to hinder you. But all you try to do is to get more and more money.”

“Now, that isn’t faia, Mr. Belsky, and you know it.”

“Well, then, you joke, joke — always joke. Like that Mr. Hinkle. He wants to make money with his patent of a gleaner, that will take the last grain of wheat from the poor, and he wants to joke — joke!”

Clementina said, “I won’t let you say that about Mr. Hinkle. You don’t know him, or you wouldn’t. If he jokes, why shouldn’t he?”

Belsky made a gesture of rejection. “Oh, you are an American, too.”

She had not grown less American, certainly, since she had left home; even the little conformities to Europe that she practiced were traits of Americanism. Clementina was not becoming sophisticated, but perhaps she was becoming more conventionalized. The knowledge of good and evil in things that had all seemed indifferently good to her once, had crept upon her, and she distinguished in her actions. She sinned as little as any young lady in Florence against the superstitions of society; but though she would not now have done a skirt-dance before a shipful of people, she did not afflict herself about her past errors. She put on the world, but she wore it simply and in most matters unconsciously. Some things were imparted to her without her asking or wishing, and merely in virtue of her youth and impressionability. She took them from her environment without knowing it, and in this way she was coming by an English manner and an English tone; she was only the less American for being rather English without trying, when other Americans tried so hard. In the region of harsh nasals, Clementina had never spoken through her nose, and she was now as unaffected in these alien inflections as in the tender cooings which used to rouse the misgivings of her brother Jim. When she was with English people she employed them involuntarily, and when she was with Americans she measurably lost them, so that after half an hour with Mr. Hinkle, she had scarcely a trace of them, and with Mrs. Lander she always spoke with her native accent.

XXIII

One Sunday night, toward the end of Lent, Mrs. Lander had another of her attacks; she now began to call them so as if she had established an ownership in them. It came on from her cumulative over-eating, again, but the doctor was not so smiling as he had been with regard to the first. Clementina had got ready to drive out to Miss Milray’s for one of her Sunday teas, but she put off her things, and prepared to spend the night at Mrs. Lander’s bedside. “Well, I should think you would want to,” said the sufferer. “I’m goin’ to do everything for you, and you’d ought to be willing to give up one of youa junketin’s for me. I’m sure I don’t know what you see in ‘em, anyway.”

“Oh, I am willing, Mrs. Lander; I’m glad I hadn’t stahted before it began.” Clementina busied herself with the pillows under Mrs. Lander’s dishevelled head, and the bedclothes disordered by her throes, while Mrs. Lander went on.

“I don’t see what’s the use of so much gaddin’, anyway. I don’t see as anything comes of it, but just to get a passal of wo’thless fellas afta you that think you’a going to have money. There’s such a thing as two sides to everything, and if the favas is goin’ to be all on one side I guess there’d betta be a clear undastandin’ about it. I think I got a right to a little attention, as well as them that ha’n’t done anything; and if I’m goin’ to be left alone he’e to die among strangers every time one of my attacks comes on—”

The doctor interposed, “I don’t think you’re going to have a very bad attack, this time, Mrs. Lander.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you, docta! But you can undastand, can’t you, how I shall want to have somebody around that can undastand a little English?”

The doctor said, “Oh yes. And Miss Claxon and I can understand a good deal, between us, and we’re going to stay, and see how a little morphine behaves with you.”

Mrs. Lander protested, “Oh, I can’t bea’ mo’phine, docta.”

“Did you ever try it?” he asked, preparing his little instrument to imbibe the solution.

“No; but Mr. Landa did, and it ‘most killed him; it made him sick.”

“Well, you’re about as sick as you can be, now, Mrs. Lander, and if you don’t die of this pin-prick” — he pushed the needle-point under the skin of her massive fore-arm— “I guess you’ll live through it.”

She shrieked, but as the pain began to abate, she gathered courage, and broke forth joyfully. “Why, it’s beautiful, a’n’t it? I declare it wo’ks like a cha’m. Well, I shall always keep mo’phine around after this, and when I feel one of these attacks comin’ on—”

“Send for a physician, Mrs. Lander,” said Dr. Welwright, “and he’ll know what to do.”

“I an’t so sure of that,” returned Mrs. Lander fondly. “He would if you was the one. I declare I believe I could get up and walk right off, I feel so well.”

“That’s good. If you’ll take a walk day after tomorrow it will help you a great deal more.”

“Well, I shall always say that you’ve saved my life, this time, doctor; and Clementina she’s stood by, nobly; I’ll say that for her.” She twisted her big head round on the pillow to get sight of the girl. “I’m all right, now; and don’t you mind what I said. It’s just my misery talkin’; I don’t know what I did say; I felt so bad. But I’m fustrate, now, and I believe I could drop off to sleep, this minute. Why don’t you go to your tea? You can, just as well as not!”

“Oh, I don’t want to go, now, Mrs. Lander; I’d ratha stay.”

“But there a’n’t any more danger now, is the’e, docta?” Mrs. Lander appealed.

“No. There wasn’t any danger before. But when you’re quite yourself, I want to have a little talk with you, Mrs. Lander, about your diet. We must look after that.”

“Why, docta, that’s what I do do, now. I eat all the healthy things I lay my hands on, don’t I, Clementina? And ha’n’t you always at me about it?”

Clementina did not answer, and the doctor laughed. “Well, I should like to know what more I could do!”

“Perhaps you could do less. We’ll see about that. Better go to sleep, now, if you feel like it.”

“Well, I will, if you’ll make this silly child go to her tea. I s’pose she won’t because I scolded her. She’s an awful hand to lay anything up against you. You know you ah’, Clementina! But I can say this, doctor: a betta child don’t breathe, and I just couldn’t live without her. Come he’e, Clementina, I want to kiss you once, before I go to sleep, so’s to make su’a you don’t bea’ malice.” She pulled Clementina down to kiss her, and babbled on affectionately and optimistically, till her talk became the voice of her dreams, and then ceased altogether.

“You could go, perfectly well, Miss Claxon,” said the doctor.

“No, I don’t ca’e to go,” answered Clementina. “I’d ratha stay. If she should wake—”

“She won’t wake, until long after you’ve got back; I’ll answer for that. I’m going to stay here awhile. Go! I’ll take the responsibility.”

Clementina’s face brightened. She wanted very much to go. She should meet some pleasant people; she always did, at Miss Milray’s. Then the light died out of her gay eyes, and she set her lips. “No, I told her I shouldn’t go.”

“I didn’t hear you,” said Dr. Welwright. “A doctor has no eyes and ears except for the symptoms of his patients.”

“Oh, I know,” said Clementina. She had liked Dr. Welwright from the first, and she thought it was very nice of him to stay on, after he left Mrs. Lander’s bedside, and help to make her lonesome evening pass pleasantly in the parlor. He jumped up finally, and looked at his watch. “Bless my soul!” he said, and he went in for another look at Mrs. Lander. When he came back, he said, “She’s all right. But you’ve made me break an engagement, Miss Claxon. I was going to tea at Miss Milray’s. She promised me I should meet you there.”

It seemed a great joke; and Clementina offered to carry his excuses to Miss Milray, when she went to make her own.

She went the next morning. Mrs. Lander insisted that she should go; she said that she was not going to have Miss Milray thinking that she wanted to keep her all to herself.

Miss Milray kissed the girl in full forgiveness, but she asked, “Did Dr. Welwright think it a very bad attack?”

“Has he been he’a?” returned Clementina.

Miss Milray laughed. “Doctors don’t betray their patients — good doctors. No, he hasn’t been here, if that will help you. I wish it would help me, but it won’t, quite. I don’t like to think of that old woman using you up, Clementina.”

“Oh, she doesn’t, Miss Milray. You mustn’t think so. You don’t know how good she is to me.”

“Does she ever remind you of it?”

Clementina’s eyes fell. “She isn’t like herself when she doesn’t feel well.”

“I knew it!” Miss Milray triumphed. “I always knew that she was a dreadful old tabby. I wish you were safely out of her clutches. Come and live with me, my dear, when Mrs. Lander gets tired of you. But she’ll never get tired of you. You’re just the kind of helpless mouse that such an old tabby would make her natural prey. But she sha’n’t, even if another sort of cat has to get you! I’m sorry you couldn’t come last night. Your little Russian was here, and went away early and very bitterly because you didn’t come. He seemed to think there was nobody, and said so, in everything but words.”

“Oh!” said Clementina. “Don’t you think he’s very nice, Miss Milray?”

“He’s very mystical, or else so very simple that he seems so. I hope you can make him out.”

Don’t you think he’s very much in ea’nest?

“Oh, as the grave, or the asylum. I shouldn’t like him to be in earnest about me, if I were you.”

“But that’s just what he is!” Clementina told how the Russian had lectured her, and wished her to go back to the country and work in the fields.

“Oh, if that’s all!” cried Miss Milray. “I was afraid it was another kind of earnestness: the kind I shouldn’t like if I were you.”

“There’s no danger of that, I guess.” Clementina laughed, and Miss Milray went on:

“Another of your admirers was here; but he was not so inconsolable, or else he found consolation in staying on and talking about you, or joking.”

“Oh, yes; Mr. Hinkle,” cried Clementina with the smile that the thought of him always brought. “He’s lovely.”

“Lovely? Well, I don’t know why it isn’t the word. It suits him a great deal better than some insipid girls that people give it to. Yes, I could really fall in love with Mr. Hinkle. He’s the only man I ever saw who would know how to break the fall!”

It was lunch-time before their talk had begun to run low, and it swelled again over the meal. Miss Milray returned to Mrs. Lander, and she made Clementina confess that she was a little trying sometimes. But she insisted that she was always good, and in remorse she went away as soon as Miss Milray rose from table.

She found Mrs. Lander very much better, and willing to have had her stay the whole afternoon with Miss Milray. “I don’t want she should have anything to say against me, to you, Clementina; she’d be glad enough to. But I guess it’s just as well you’a back. That scratched-out baron has been he’e twice, and he’s waitin’ for you in the pahla’, now. I presume he’ll keep comin’ till you do see him. I guess you betta have it ova; whatever it is.”

“I guess you’re right, Mrs. Lander.”

Clementina found the Russian walking up and down the room, and as soon as their greeting was over, he asked leave to continue his promenade, but he stopped abruptly before her when she had sunk upon a sofa.

“I have come to tell you a strange story,” he said.

“It is the story of that American friend of mine. I tell it to you because I think you can understand, and will know what to advise, what to do.”

He turned upon his heel, and walked the length of the room and back before he spoke again.

“Since several years,” he said, growing a little less idiomatic in his English as his excitement mounted, “he met a young girl, a child, when he was still not a man’s full age. It was in the country, in the mountains of America, and — he loved her. Both were very poor; he, a student, earning the means to complete his education in the university. He had dedicated himself to his church, and with the temperament of the Puritans, he forbade himself all thoughts of love. But he was of a passionate and impulsive nature, and in a moment of abandon he confessed his love. The child was bewildered, frightened; she shrank from his avowal, and he, filled with remorse for his self-betrayal, bade her let it be as if it had not been; he bade her think of him no more.”

Clementina sat as if powerless to move, staring at Belsky. He paused in his walk, and allowed an impressive silence to ensue upon his words.

“Time passed: days, months, years; and he did not see her again. He pursued his studies in the university; at their completion, he entered upon the course of divinity, and he is soon to be a minister of his church. In all that time the image of the young girl has remained in his heart, and has held him true to the only love he has ever known. He will know no other while he lives.”

Again he stopped in front of Clementina; she looked helplessly up at him, and he resumed his walk.

“He, with his dreams of renunciation, of abnegation, had thought some day to return to her and ask her to be his. He believed her capable of equal sacrifice with himself, and he hoped to win her not for himself alone, but for the religion which he put before himself. He would have invited her to join her fate with his that they might go together on some mission to the pagan — in the South Seas, in the heart of Africa, in the jungle of India. He had always thought of her as gay but good, unworldly in soul, and exalted in spirit. She has remained with him a vision of angelic loveliness, as he had seen her last in the moonlight, on the banks of a mountain torrent. But he believes that he has disgraced himself before her; that the very scruple for her youth, her ignorance, which made him entreat her to forget him, must have made her doubt and despise him. He has never had the courage to write to her one word since all those years, but he maintains himself bound to her forever.” He stopped short before Clementina and seized her hands. “If you knew such a girl, what would you have her do? Should she bid him hope again? Would you have her say to him that she, too, had been faithful to their dream, and that she too—”

“Let me go, Mr. Belsky, let me go, I say!” Clementina wrenched her hands from him, and ran out of the room. Belsky hesitated, then he found his hat, and after a glance at his face in the mirror, left the house.

XXIV.

The tide of travel began to set northward in April. Many English, many Americans appeared in Florence from Naples and Rome; many who had wintered in Florence went on to Venice and the towns of northern Italy, on their way to Switzerland and France and Germany.

The spring was cold and rainy, and the irresolute Italian railroads were interrupted by the floods. A tawny deluge rolled down from the mountains through the bed of the Arno, and kept the Florentine fire-department on the alert night and day. “It is a curious thing about this country,” said Mr. Hinkle, encountering Baron Belsky on the Ponte Trinita, “that the only thing they ever have here for a fire company to put out is a freshet. If they had a real conflagration once, I reckon they would want to bring their life-preservers.”

The Russian was looking down over the parapet at the boiling river. He lifted his head as if he had not heard the American, and stared at him a moment before he spoke. “It is said that the railway to Rome is broken at Grossetto.”

“Well, I’m not going to Rome,” said Hinkle, easily. “Are you?”

“I was to meet a friend there; but he wrote to me that he was starting to Florence, and now—”

“He’s resting on the way? Well, he’ll get here about as quick as he would in the ordinary course of travel. One good thing about Italy is, you don’t want to hurry; if you did, you’d get left.”

Belsky stared at him in the stupefaction to which the American humor commonly reduced him. “If he gets left on the Grossetto line, he can go back and come up by Orvieto, no?”

“He can, if he isn’t in a hurry,” Hinkle assented.

“It’s a good way, if you’ve got time to burn.”

Belsky did not attempt to explore the American’s meaning. “Do you know,” he asked, “whether Mrs. Lander and her young friend are still in Florence?

“I guess they are.”

“It was said they were going to Venice for the summer.”

“That’s what the doctor advised for the old lady. But they don’t start for a week or two yet.”

“Oh!”

“Are you going to Miss Milray’s, Sunday night? Last of the season, I believe.”

Belsky seemed to recall himself from a distance.

“No — no,” he said, and he moved away, forgetful of the ceremonious salutation which he commonly used at meeting and parting. Hinkle looked after him with the impression people have of a difference in the appearance and behavior of some one whose appearance and behavior do not particularly concern them.

The day that followed, Belsky haunted the hotel where Gregory was to arrive with his pupil, and where the pupil’s family were waiting for them. That night, long after their belated train was due, they came; the pupil was with his father and mother, and Gregory was alone, when Belsky asked for him, the fourth or fifth time.

“You are not well,” he said, as they shook hands. “You are fevered!”

“I’m tired,” said Gregory. “We’ve bad a bad time getting through.”

“I come inconveniently! You have not dined, perhaps?”

“Yes, Yes. I’ve had dinner. Sit down. How have you been yourself?”

“Oh, always well.” Belsky sat down, and the friends stared at each other. “I have strange news for you.”

“For me?”

“You. She is here.”

“She?”

“Yes. The young girl of whom you told me. If I had not forbidden myself by my loyalty to you — if I had not said to myself every moment in her presence, ‘No, it is for your friend alone that she is beautiful and good!’ — But you will have nothing to reproach me in that regard.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Gregory.

“I mean that Miss Claxon is in Florence, with her protectress, the rich Mrs. Lander. The most admired young lady in society, going everywhere, and everywhere courted and welcomed; the favorite of the fashionable Miss Milray. But why should this surprise you?”

“You said nothing about it in your letters. You—”

“I was not sure it was she; you never told me her name. When I had divined the fact, I was so soon to see you, that I thought best to keep it till we met.”

Gregory tried to speak, but he let Belsky go on.

“If you think that the world has spoiled her, that she will be different from what she was in her home among your mountains, let me reassure you. In her you will find the miracle of a woman whom no flattery can turn the head. I have watched her in your interest; I have tested her. She is what you saw her last.”

“Surely,” asked Gregory, in an anguish for what he now dreaded, “you haven’t spoken to her of me?”

“Not by name, no. I could not have that indiscretion—”

“The name is nothing. Have you said that you knew me — Of course not! But have you hinted at any knowledge — Because—”

“You will hear!” said Belsky; and he poured out upon Gregory the story of what he had done. “She did not deny anything. She was greatly moved, but she did not refuse to let me bid you hope—”

“Oh!” Gregory took his head between his hands. “You have spoiled my life!”

“Spoiled” Belsky stopped aghast.

“I told you my story in a moment of despicable weakness — of impulsive folly. But how could I dream that you would ever meet her? How could I imagine that you would speak to her as you have done?” He groaned, and began to creep giddily about the room in his misery. “Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do?”

“But I do not understand!” Belsky began. “If I have committed an error—”

“Oh, an error that never could be put right in all eternity!”

“Then let me go to her — let me tell her—”

“Keep away from her!” shouted Gregory. “Do you hear? Never go near her again!”

“Gregory!”

“Ah, I beg your pardon! I don’t know what I’m doing — saying. What will she think — what will she think of me!” He had ceased to speak to Belsky; he collapsed into a chair, and hid his face in his arms stretched out on the table before him.

Belsky watched him in the stupefaction which the artistic nature feels when life proves sentient under its hand, and not the mere material of situations and effects. He could not conceive the full measure of the disaster he had wrought, the outrage of his own behavior had been lost to him in his preoccupation with the romantic end to be accomplished. He had meant to be the friend, the prophet, to these American lovers, whom he was reconciling and interpreting to each other; but in some point he must have misunderstood. Yet the error was not inexpiable; and in his expiation he could put the seal to his devotion. He left the room, where Gregory made no effort to keep him.

He walked down the street from the hotel to the Arno, and in a few moments he stood on the bridge, where he had talked with that joker in the morning, as they looked down together on the boiling river. He had a strange wish that the joker might have been with him again, to learn that there were some things which could not be joked away.

The night was blustering, and the wind that blew the ragged clouds across the face of the moon, swooped in sudden gusts upon the bridge, and the deluge rolling under it and hoarsely washing against its piers. Belsky leaned over the parapet and looked down into the eddies and currents as the fitful light revealed them. He had a fantastic pleasure in studying them, and choosing the moment when he should leap the parapet and be lost in them. The incident could not be used in any novel of his, and no one else could do such perfect justice to the situation, but perhaps afterwards, when the facts leading to his death should be known through the remorse of the lovers whom he had sought to serve, some other artist-nature could distil their subtlest meaning in a memoir delicate as the aroma of a faded flower.

He was willing to make this sacrifice, too, and he stepped back a pace from the parapet when the fitful blast caught his hat from his head, and whirled it along the bridge. The whole current of his purpose changed, and as if it had been impossible to drown himself in his bare head, he set out in chase of his hat, which rolled and gamboled away, and escaped from his clutch whenever he stooped for it, till a final whiff of wind flung it up and tossed it over the bridge into the river, where he helplessly watched it floating down the flood, till it was carried out of sight.

XXV.

Gregory did not sleep, and he did not find peace in the prayers he put up for guidance. He tried to think of some one with whom he might take counsel; but he knew no one in Florence except the parents of his pupil, and they were impossible. He felt himself abandoned to the impulse which he dreaded, in going to Clementina, and he went without hope, willing to suffer whatever penalty she should visit upon him, after he had disavowed Belsky’s action, and claimed the responsibility for it.

He was prepared for her refusal to see him; he had imagined her wounded and pathetic; he had fancied her insulted and indignant; but she met him eagerly and with a mystifying appeal in her welcome. He began at once, without attempting to bridge the time since they had met with any formalities.

“I have come to speak to you about — that — Russian, about Baron Belsky—”

“Yes, yes!” she returned, anxiously. “Then you have hea’d”

“He came to me last night, and — I want to say that I feel myself to blame for what he has done.”

“You?”

“Yes; I. I never spoke of you by name to him; I didn’t dream of his ever seeing you, or that he would dare to speak to you of what I told him. But I believe he meant no wrong; and it was I who did the harm, whether I authorized it or not.”

“Yes, yes!” she returned, with the effect of putting his words aside as something of no moment. “Have they head anything more?”

“How, anything more?” he returned, in a daze.

“Then, don’t you know? About his falling into the river? I know he didn’t drown himself.”

Gregory shook his head. “When — what makes them think” — He stopped and stared at her.

“Why, they know that he went down to the Ponte Trinity last night; somebody saw him going. And then that peasant found his hat with his name in it in the drift-wood below the Cascine—”

“Yes,” said Gregory, lifelessly. He let his arms drop forward, and his helpless hands hang over his knees; his gaze fell from her face to the floor.

Neither spoke for a time that seemed long, and then it was Clementina who spoke. “But it isn’t true!”

“Oh, yes, it is,” said Gregory, as before.

“Mr. Hinkle doesn’t believe it is,” she urged.

“Mr. Hinkle?”

“He’s an American who’s staying in Florence. He came this mo’ning to tell me about it. Even if he’s drowned Mr. Hinkle believes he didn’t mean to; he must have just fallen in.”

“What does it matter?” demanded Gregory, lifting his heavy eyes. “Whether he meant it or not, I caused it. I drove him to it.”

“You drove him?”

“Yes. He told me what he had said to you, and I — said that he had spoiled my life — I don’t know!”

“Well, he had no right to do it; but I didn’t blame you,” Clementina began, compassionately.

“It’s too late. It can’t be helped now.” Gregory turned from the mercy that could no longer save him. He rose dizzily, and tried to get himself away.

“You mustn’t go!” she interposed. “I don’t believe you made him do it. Mr. Hinkle will be back soon, and he will—”

“If he should bring word that it was true?” Gregory asked.

“Well,” said Clementina, “then we should have to bear it.”

A sense of something finer than the surface meaning of her words pierced his morbid egotism. “I’m ashamed,” he said. “Will you let me stay?”

“Why, yes, you must,” she said, and if there was any censure of him at the bottom of her heart, she kept it there, and tried to talk him away from his remorse, which was in his temperament, perhaps, rather than his conscience; she made the time pass till there came a knock at the door, and she opened it to Hinkle.

“I didn’t send up my name; I thought I wouldn’t stand upon ceremony just now,” he said.

“Oh, no!” she returned. “Mr. Hinkle, this is Mr. Gregory. Mr. Gregory knew Mr. Belsky, and he thinks—”

She turned to Gregory for prompting, and he managed to say, “I don’t believe he was quite the sort of person to — And yet he might — he was in trouble—”

“Money trouble?” asked Hinkle. “They say these Russians have a perfect genius for debt. I had a little inspiration, since I saw you, but there doesn’t seems to be anything in it, so far.” He addressed himself to Clementina, but he included Gregory in what he said. “It struck me that he might have been running his board, and had used this drowning episode as a blind. But I’ve been around to his hotel, and he’s settled up, all fair and square enough. The landlord tried to think of something he hadn’t paid, but he couldn’t; and I never saw a man try harder, either.” Clementina smiled; she put her hand to her mouth to keep from laughing; but Gregory frowned his distress in the untimely droning.

“I don’t give up my theory that it’s a fake of some kind, though. He could leave behind a good many creditors besides his landlord. The authorities have sealed up his effects, and they’ve done everything but call out the fire department; that’s on duty looking after the freshet, and it couldn’t be spared. I’ll go out now and slop round a little more in the cause,” Hinkle looked down at his shoes and his drabbled trousers, and wiped the perspiration from his face, “but I thought I’d drop in, and tell you not to worry about it, Miss Clementina. I would stake anything you pleased on Mr. Belsky’s safety. Mr. Gregory, here, looks like he would be willing to take odds,” he suggested.

Gregory commanded himself from his misery to say, “I wish I could believe — I mean—”

“Of course, we don’t want to think that the man’s a fraud, any more than that he’s dead. Perhaps we might hit upon some middle course. At any rate, it’s worth trying.”

“May I — do you object to my joining you?” Gregory asked.

“Why, come!” Hinkle hospitably assented. “Glad to have you. I’ll be back again, Miss Clementina!”

Gregory was going away without any form of leavetaking; but he turned back to ask, “Will you let me come back, too?”

“Why, suttainly, Mr. Gregory,” said Clementina, and she went to find Mrs. Lander, whom she found in bed.

“I thought I’d lay down,” she explained. “I don’t believe I’m goin’ to be sick, but it’s one of my pooa days, and I might just as well be in bed as not.” Clementina agreed with her, and Mrs. Lander asked: “You hea’d anything moa?”

“No. Mr. Hinkle has just been he’a, but he hadn’t any news.”

Mrs. Lander turned her face toward the wall. “Next thing, he’ll be drownin’ himself. I neva wanted you should have anything to do with the fellas that go to that woman’s. There ain’t any of ’em to be depended on.”

It was the first time that her growing jealousy of Miss Milray had openly declared itself; but Clementina had felt it before, without knowing how to meet it. As an escape from it now she was almost willing to say, “Mrs. Lander, I want to tell you that Mr. Gregory has just been he’a, too.”

“Mr. Gregory?”

“Yes. Don’t you remember? At the Middlemount? The first summa? He was the headwaita — that student.”

Mrs. Lander jerked her head round on the pillow. “Well, of all the — What does he want, over he’a?”

“Nothing. That is — he’s travelling with a pupil that he’s preparing for college, and — he came to see us—”

“D’you tell him I couldn’t see him?”

“Yes”

“I guess he’d think I was a pretty changed pusson! Now, I want you should stay with me, Clementina, and if anybody else comes—”

Maddalena entered the room with a card which she gave to the girl.

“Who is it?” Mrs. Lander demanded.

“Miss Milray.”

“Of cou’se! Well, you may just send wo’d that you can’t — Or, no; you must! She’d have it all ova the place, by night, that I wouldn’t let you see her. But don’t you make any excuse for me! If she asks after me, don’t you say I’m sick! You say I’m not at home.”

“I’ve come about that little wretch,” Miss Milray began, after kissing Clementina. “I didn’t know but you had heard something I hadn’t, or I had heard something you hadn’t. You know I belong to the Hinkle persuasion: I think Belsky’s run his board — as Mr. Hinkle calls it.”

Clementina explained how this part of the Hinkle theory had failed, and then Miss Milray devolved upon the belief that he had run his tailor’s bill or his shoemaker’s. “They are delightful, those Russians, but they’re born insolvent. I don’t believe he’s drowned himself. How,” she broke off to ask, in a burlesque whisper, “is-the-old-tabby?” She laughed, for answer to her own question, and then with another sudden diversion she demanded of a look in Clementina’s face which would not be laughed away, “Well, my dear, what is it?”

“Miss Milray,” said the girl, “should you think me very silly, if I told you something — silly?”

“Not in the least!” cried Miss Milray, joyously. “It’s the final proof of your wisdom that I’ve been waiting for?”

“It’s because Mr. Belsky is all mixed up in it,” said Clementina, as if some excuse were necessary, and then she told the story of her love affair with Gregory. Miss Milray punctuated the several facts with vivid nods, but at the end she did not ask her anything, and the girl somehow felt the freer to add: “I believe I will tell you his name. It is Mr. Gregory — Frank Gregory—”

“And he’s been in Egypt?”

“Yes, the whole winta.”

“Then he’s the one that my sister-in-law has been writing me about!”

“Oh, did he meet her the’a?”

“I should think so! And he’ll meet her here, very soon. She’s coming, with my poor brother. I meant to tell you, but this ridiculous Belsky business drove it out of my head.”

“And do you think,” Clementina entreated, “that he was to blame?”

“Why, I don’t believe he’s done it, you know.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean Mr. Belsky. I meant — Mr. Gregory. For telling Mr. Belsky?”

“Certainly not. Men always tell those things to some one, I suppose. Nobody was to blame but Belsky, for his meddling.”

Miss Milray rose and shook out her plumes for flight, as if she were rather eager for flight, but at the little sigh with which Clementina said, “Yes, that is what I thought,” she faltered.

“I was going to run away, for I shouldn’t like to mix myself up in your affair — it’s certainly a very strange one — unless I was sure I could help you. But if you think I can—”

Clementina shook her head. “I don’t believe you can,” she said, with a candor so wistful that Miss Milray stopped quite short. “How does Mr. Gregory take this Belsky business?” she asked.

“I guess he feels it moa than I do,” said the girl.

“He shows his feeling more?”

“Yes — no — He believes he drove him to it.”

Miss Milray took her hand, for parting, but did not kiss her. “I won’t advise you, my dear. In fact, you haven’t asked me to. You’ll know what to do, if you haven’t done it already; girls usually have, when they want advice. Was there something you were going to say?”

“Oh, no. Nothing. Do you think,” she hesitated, appealingly, “do you think we are — engaged?”

“If he’s anything of a man at all, he must think he is.”

“Yes,” said Clementina, wistfully, “I guess he does.”

Miss Milray looked sharply at her. “And does he think you are?”

“I don’t know — he didn’t say.”

“Well,” said Miss Milray, rather dryly, “then it’s something for you to think over pretty carefully.”

XXVI.

Hinkle came back in the afternoon to make a hopeful report of his failure to learn anything more of Belsky, but Gregory did not come with him. He came the next morning long before Clementina expected visitors, and he was walking nervously up and down the room when she appeared. As if he could not speak, he held toward her without speaking a telegram in English, dated that day in Rome:

“Deny report of my death. Have written.

“Belsky.”

She looked up at Gregory from the paper, when she had read it, with joyful eyes. “Oh, I am so glad for you! I am so glad he is alive.”

He took the dispatch from her hand. “I brought it to you as soon as it came.”

“Yes, yes! Of cou’se!”

“I must go now and do what he says — I don’t know how yet.” He stopped, and then went on from a different impulse. “Clementina, it isn’t a question now of that wretch’s life and death, and I wish I need never speak of him again. But what he told you was true.” He looked steadfastly at her, and she realized how handsome he was, and how well dressed. His thick red hair seemed to have grown darker above his forehead; his moustache was heavier, and it curved in at the corners of his mouth; he bore himself with a sort of self-disdain that enhanced his splendor. “I have never changed toward you; I don’t say it to make favor with you; I don’t expect to do that now; but it is true. That night, there at Middlemount, I tried to take back what I said, because I believed that I ought.”

“Oh, yes, I knew that,” said Clementina, in the pause he made.

“We were both too young; I had no prospect in life; I saw, the instant after I had spoken, that I had no right to let you promise anything. I tried to forget you; I couldn’t. I tried to make you forget me.” He faltered, and she did not speak, but her head drooped a little. “I won’t ask how far I succeeded. I always hoped that the time would come when I could speak to you again. When I heard from Fane that you were at Woodlake, I wished to come out and see you, but I hadn’t the courage, I hadn’t the right. I’ve had to come to you without either, now. Did he speak to you about me?”

“I thought he was beginning to, once; but he neva did.”

“It didn’t matter; it could only have made bad worse. It can’t help me to say that somehow I was wishing and trying to do what was right; but I was.”

“Oh, I know that, Mr. Gregory,” said Clementina, generously.

“Then you didn’t doubt me, in spite of all?”

“I thought you would know what to do. No, I didn’t doubt you, exactly.”

“I didn’t deserve your trust!” he cried. “How came that man to mention me?” he demanded, abruptly, after a moment’s silence.

“Mr. Belsky? It was the first night I saw him, and we were talking about Americans, and he began to tell me about an American friend of his, who was very conscientious. I thought it must be you the fust moment,” said Clementina, smiling with an impersonal pleasure in the fact.

“From the conscientiousness?” he asked, in bitter self-irony.

“Why, yes,” she returned, simply. “That was what made me think of you. And the last time when he began to talk about you, I couldn’t stop him, although I knew he had no right to.”

“He had no right. But I gave him the power to do it! He meant no harm, but I enabled him to do all the harm.”

“Oh, if he’s only alive, now, there is no harm!”

He looked into her eyes with a misgiving from which he burst impetuously. “Then you do care for me still, after all that I have done to make you detest me?” He started toward her, but she shrank back.

“I didn’t mean that,” she hesitated.

“You know that I love you, — that I have always loved you?”

“Yes,” she assented. “But you might be sorry again that you had said it.” It sounded like coquetry, but he knew it was not coquetry.

“Never! I’ve wished to say it again, ever since that night at Middlemount; I have always felt bound by what I said then, though I took back my words for your sake. But the promise was always there, and my life was in it. You believe that?”

“Why, I always believed what you said, Mr. Gregory.”

“Well?”

Clementina paused, with her head seriously on one side. “I should want to think about it before I said anything.”

“You are right,” he submitted, dropping his outstretched arms to his side. “I have been thinking only of myself, as usual.”

“No,” she protested, compassionately. “But doesn’t it seem as if we ought to be su’a, this time? I did ca’e for you then, but I was very young, and I don’t know yet — I thought I had always felt just as you did, but now — Don’t you think we had both betta wait a little while till we ah’ moa suttain?”

They stood looking at each other, and he said, with a kind of passionate self-denial, “Yes, think it over for me, too. I will come back, if you will let me.”

“Oh, thank you!” she cried after him, gratefully, as if his forbearance were the greatest favor.

When he was gone she tried to release herself from the kind of abeyance in which she seemed to have gone back and been as subject to him as in the first days when he had awed her and charmed her with his superiority at Middlemount, and he again older and freer as she had grown since.

He came back late in the afternoon, looking jaded and distraught. Hinkle, who looked neither, was with him. “Well,” he began, “this is the greatest thing in my experience. Belsky’s not only alive and well, but Mr. Gregory and I are both at large. I did think, one time, that the police would take us into custody on account of our morbid interest in the thing, and I don’t believe we should have got off, if the Consul hadn’t gone bail for us, so to speak. I thought we had better take the Consul in, on our way, and it was lucky we did.”

Clementina did not understand all the implications, but she was willing to take Mr. Hinkle’s fun on trust. “I don’t believe you’ll convince Mrs. Landa that Mr. Belsky’s alive and well, till you bring him back to say so.”

“Is that so!” said Hinkle. “Well, we must have him brought back by the authorities, then. Perhaps they’ll bring him, anyway. They can’t try him for suicide, but as I understand the police, here, a man can’t lose his hat over a bridge in Florence with impunity, especially in a time of high water. Anyway, they’re identifying Belsky by due process of law in Rome, now, and I guess Mr. Gregory” — he nodded toward Gregory, who sat silent and absent “will be kept under surveillance till the whole mystery is cleared up.”

Clementina responded gayly still, but with less and less sincerity, and she let Hinkle go at last with the feeling that he knew she wished him to go. He made a brave show of not seeing this, and when he was gone, she remembered that she had not thanked him for the trouble he had taken on her account, and her heart ached after him with a sense of his sweetness and goodness, which she had felt from the first through his quaint drolling. It was as if the door which closed upon him shut her out of the life she had been living of late, and into the life of the past where she was subject again to the spell of Gregory’s mood; it was hardly his will.

He began at once: “I wished to make you say something this morning that I have no right to hear you say, yet; and I have been trying ever since to think how I could ask you whether you could share my life with me, and yet not ask you to do it. But I can’t do anything without knowing — You may not care for what my life is to be, at all!”

Clementina’s head drooped a little, but she answered distinctly, “I do ca’e, Mr. Gregory.”

“Thank you for that much; I don’t count upon more than you have said. Clementina, I am going to be a missionary. I think I shall ask to be sent to China; I’ve not decided yet. My life will be hard; it will be full of danger and privation; it will be exile. You will have to think of sharing such a life if you think—”

He stopped; the time had come for her to speak, and she said, “I knew you wanted to be a missionary—”

“And — and — you would go with me? You would” — He started toward her, and she did not shrink from him, now; but he checked himself. “But you mustn’t, you know, for my sake.”

“I don’t believe I quite undastand,” she faltered.

“You must not do it for me, but for what makes me do it. Without that our life, our work, could have no consecration.”

She gazed at him in patient, faintly smiling bewilderment, as if it were something he would unriddle for her when he chose.

“We mustn’t err in this; it would be worse than error; it would be sin.” He took a turn about the room, and then stopped before her. “Will you — will you join me in a prayer for guidance, Clementina?”

“I — I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I will, but — do you think I had betta?”

He began, “Why, surely” — After a moment he asked gravely, “You believe that our actions will be guided aright, if we seek help?”

“Oh, yes — yes—”

“And that if we do not, we shall stumble in our ignorance?”

“I don’t know. I never thought of that.”

“Never thought of it—”

“We never did it in our family. Father always said that if we really wanted to do right we could find the way.” Gregory looked daunted, and then he frowned darkly. “Are you provoked with me? Do you think what I have said is wrong?”

“No, no! You must say what you believe. It would be double hypocrisy in me if I prevented you.”

“But I would do it, if you wanted me to,” she said.

“Oh, for me, for ME!” he protested. “I will try to tell you what I mean, and why you must not, for that very reason.” But he had to speak of himself, of the miracle of finding her again by the means which should have lost her to him forever; and of the significance of this. Then it appeared to him that he could not reject such a leading without error, without sin. “Such a thing could not have merely happened.”

It seemed so to Clementina, too; she eagerly consented that this was something they must think of, as well. But the light waned, the dark thickened in the room before he left her to do so. Then he said fervently, “We must not doubt that everything will come right,” and his words seemed an effect of inspiration to them both.

XXVII.

After Gregory was gone a misgiving began in Clementina’s mind, which grew more distinct, through all the difficulties of accounting to Mrs. Lander for his long stay, The girl could see that it was with an obscure jealousy that she pushed her questions, and said at last, “That Mr. Hinkle is about the best of the lot. He’s the only one that’s eva had the mannas to ask after me, except that lo’d. He did.”

Clementina could not pretend that Gregory had asked, but she could not blame him for a forgetfulness of Mrs. Lander which she had shared with him. This helped somehow to deepen the misgiving which followed her from Mrs. Lander’s bed to her own, and haunted her far into the night. She could escape from it only by promising herself to deal with it the first thing in the morning. She did this in terms much briefer than she thought she could have commanded. She supposed she would have to write a very long letter, but she came to the end of all she need say, in a very few lines.

  DEAR MR. GREGORY:

  “I have been thinking about what you said yesterday, and I have to

  tell you something. Then you can do what is right for both of us;

  you will know better than I can. But I want you to understand that

  if I go with you in your missionary life, I shall do it for you, and

  not for anything else. I would go anywhere and live anyhow for you,

  but it would be for you; I do not believe that I am religious, and I

  know that I should not do it for religion.

  “That is all; but I could not get any peace till I let you know just

  how I felt.

                      “CLEMENTINA CLAXON.”

The letter went early in the morning, though not so early but it was put in Gregory’s hand as he was leaving his hotel to go to Mrs. Lander’s. He tore it open, and read it on the way, and for the first moment it seemed as if it were Providence leading him that he might lighten Clementina’s heart of its doubts with the least delay. He had reasoned that if she would share for his sake the life that he should live for righteousness’ sake they would be equally blest in it, and it would be equally consecrated in both. But this luminous conclusion faded in his thought as he hurried on, and he found himself in her presence with something like a hope that she would be inspired to help him.

His soul lifted at the sound of the gay voice in which she asked, “Did you get my letta?” and it seemed for the instant as if there could be no trouble that their love could not overcome.

“Yes,” he said, and he put his arms around her, but with a provisionality in his embrace which she subtly perceived.

“And what did you think of it?” she asked. “Did you think I was silly?”

He was aware that she had trusted him to do away her misgiving. “No, no,” he answered, guiltily. “Wiser than I am, always. I — I want to talk with you about it, Clementina. I want you to advise me.”

He felt her shrink from him, and with a pang he opened his arms to free her. But it was right; he must. She had been expecting him to say that there was nothing in her misgiving, and he could not say it.

“Clementina,” he entreated, “why do you think you are not religious?”

“Why, I have never belonged to chu’ch,” she answered simply. He looked so daunted, that she tried to soften the blow after she had dealt it. “Of course, I always went to chu’ch, though father and motha didn’t. I went to the Episcopal — to Mr. Richling’s. But I neva was confirmed.”

“But — you believe in God?”

“Why, certainly!”

“And in the Bible?”

“Why, of cou’se!”

“And that it is our duty to bear the truth to those who have never heard of it?”

“I know that is the way you feel about it; but I am not certain that I should feel so myself if you didn’t want me to. That’s what I got to thinking about last night.” She added hopefully, “But perhaps it isn’t so great a thing as I—”

“It’s a very great thing,” he said, and from standing in front of her, he now sat down beyond a little table before her sofa. “How can I ask you to share my life if you don’t share my faith?”

“Why, I should try to believe everything that you do, of cou’se.”

“Because I do?”

“Well — yes.”

“You wring my heart! Are you willing to study — to look into these questions — to — to” — It all seemed very hopeless, very absurd, but she answered seriously:

“Yes, but I believe it would all come back to just where it is, now.”

“What you say, Clementina, makes me so happy; but it ought to make me — miserable! And you would do all this, be all this for me, a wretched and erring creature of the dust, and yet not do it for — God?”

Clementina could only say, “Perhaps if He meant me to do it for Him, He would have made me want to. He made you.”

“Yes,” said Gregory, and for a long time he could not say any more. He sat with his elbow on the table, and his head against his lifted hand.

“You see,” she began, gently, “I got to thinking that even if I eva came to believe what you wanted me to, I should be doing it after all, because you wanted me to—”

“Yes, yes,” he answered, desolately. “There is no way out of it. If you only hated me, Clementina, despised me — I don’t mean that. But if you were not so good, I could have a more hope for you — for myself. It’s because you are so good that I can’t make myself wish to change you, and yet I know — I am afraid that if you told me my life and objects were wrong, I should turn from them, and be whatever you said. Do you tell me that?”

“No, indeed!” cried Clementina, with abhorrence. “Then I should despise you.”

He seemed not to heed her. He moved his lips as if he were talking to himself, and he pleaded, “What shall we do?”

“We must try to think it out, and if we can’t — if you can’t let me give up to you unless I do it for the same reason that you do; and if I can’t let you give up for me, and I know I could neva do that; then — we mustn’t!”

“Do you mean, we must part? Not see each other again?”

“What use would it be?”

“None,” he owned. She had risen, and he stood up perforce. “May I — may I come back to tell you?”

“Tell me what?” she asked.

“You are right! If I can’t make it right, I won’t come. But I won’t say good bye. I — can’t.”

She let him go, and Maddalena came in at the door. “Signorina,” she said, “the signora is not well. Shall I send for the doctor?”

“Yes, yes, Maddalena. Run!” cried Clementina, distractedly. She hurried to Mrs. Lander’s room, where she found her too sick for reproaches, for anything but appeals for help and pity. The girl had not to wait for Doctor Welwright’s coming to understand that the attack was severer than any before.

It lasted through the day, and she could see that he was troubled. It had not followed upon any imprudeuce, as Mrs. Lander pathetically called Clementina to witness when her pain had been so far quelled that she could talk of her seizure.

He found her greatly weakened by it the next day, and he sat looking thoughtfully at her before he said that she needed toning up. She caught at the notion. “Yes, yes! That’s what I need, docta! Toning up! That’s what I need.”

He suggested, “How would you like to try the sea air, and the baths — at Venice?”

“Oh, anything, anywhere, to get out of this dreadful hole! I ha’n’t had a well minute since I came. And Clementina,” the sick woman whimpered, “is so taken up all the time, he’a, that I can’t get the right attention.”

The doctor looked compassionately away from the girl, and said, “Well, we must arrange about getting you off, then.”

“But I want you should go with me, doctor, and see me settled all right. You can, can’t you? I sha’n’t ca’e how much it costs?”

The doctor said gravely he thought he could manage it and he ignored the long unconscious sigh of relief that Clementina drew.

In all her confusing anxieties for Mrs. Lander, Gregory remained at the bottom of her heart a dumb ache. When the pressure of her fears was taken from her she began to suffer for him consciously; then a letter came from him:

  “I cannot make it right. It is where it was, and I feel that I must

  not see you again. I am trying to do right, but with the fear that

  I am wrong. Send some word to help me before I go away to-morrow.

  F. G.”

It was what she had expected, she knew now, but it was none the less to be borne because of her expectation. She wrote back:

  “I believe you are doing the best you can, and I shall always

  believe that.”

Her note brought back a long letter from him. He said that whatever he did, or wherever he went, he should try to be true to her ideal of him. If they renounced their love now for the sake of what seemed higher than their love, they might suffer, but they could not choose but do as they were doing.

Clementina was trying to make what she could of this when Miss Milray’s name came up, and Miss Milray followed it.

“I wanted to ask after Mrs. Lander, and I want you to tell her I did. Will you? Dr. Welwright says he’s going to take her to Venice. Well, I’m sorry — sorry for your going, Clementina, and I’m truly sorry for the cause of it. I shall miss you, my dear, I shall indeed. You know I always wanted to steal you, but you’ll do me the justice to say I never did, and I won’t try, now.”

“Perhaps I wasn’t worth stealing,” Clementina suggested, with a ruefulness in her smile that went to Miss Milray’s heart.

She put her arms round her and kissed her. “I wasn’t very kind to you, the other day, Clementina, was I?”

“I don’t know,” Clementina faltered, with half-averted face.

“Yes, you do! I was trying to make-believe that I didn’t want to meddle with your affairs; but I was really vexed that you hadn’t told me your story before. It hasn’t taken me all this time to reflect that you couldn’t, but it has to make myself come and confess that I had been dry and cold with you.” She hesitated. “It’s come out all right, hasn’t it, Clementina?” she asked, tenderly. “You see I want to meddle, now.”

“We ah’ trying to think so,” sighed the girl.

“Tell me about it!” Miss Milray pulled her down on the sofa with her, and modified her embrace to a clasp of Clementina’s bands.

“Why, there isn’t much to tell,” she began, but she told what there was, and Miss Milray kept her countenance concerning the scruple that had parted Clementina and her lover. “Perhaps he wouldn’t have thought of it,” she said, in a final self-reproach, “if I hadn’t put it into his head.”

“Well, then, I’m not sorry you put it into his head,” cried Miss Milray. “Clementina, may I say what I think of Mr. Gregory’s performance?”

“Why, certainly, Miss Milray!”

“I think he’s not merely a gloomy little bigot, but a very hard-hearted little wretch, and I’m glad you’re rid of him. No, stop! Let me go on! You said I might!” she persisted, at a protest which imparted itself from Clementina’s restive hands. “It was selfish and cruel of him to let you believe that he had forgotten you. It doesn’t make it right now, when an accident has forced him to tell you that he cared for you all along.”

“Why, do you look at it that way, Miss Milray? If he was doing it on my account?”

“He may think he was doing it on your account, but I think he was doing it on his own. In such a thing as that, a man is bound by his mistakes, if he has made any. He can’t go back of them by simply ignoring them. It didn’t make it the same for you when he decided for your sake that he would act as if he had never spoken to you.”

“I presume he thought that it would come right, sometime,” Clementina urged. “I did.”

“Yes, that was very well for you, but it wasn’t at all well for him. He behaved cruelly; there’s no other word for it.”

“I don’t believe he meant to be cruel, Miss Milray,” said Clementina.

“You’re not sorry you’ve broken with him?” demanded Miss Milray, severely, and she let go of Clementina’s hands.

“I shouldn’t want him to think I hadn’t been fai’a.”

“I don’t understand what you mean by not being fair,” said Miss Milray, after a study of the girl’s eyes.

“I mean,” Clementina explained, “that if I let him think the religion was all the’e was, it wouldn’t have been fai’a.”

“Why, weren’t you sincere about that?”

“Of cou’se I was!” returned the girl, almost indignantly. “But if the’e was anything else, I ought to have told him that, too; and I couldn’t.”

“Then you can’t tell me, of course?” Miss Milray rose in a little pique.

“Perhaps some day I will,” the girl entreated. “And perhaps that was all.”

Miss Milray laughed. “Well, if that was enough to end it, I’m satisfied, and I’ll let you keep your mystery — if it is one — till we meet in Venice; I shall be there early in June. Good bye, dear, and say good bye to Mrs. Lander for me.”

XXVIII.

Dr. Welwright got his patient a lodging on the Grand Canal in Venice, and decided to stay long enough to note the first effect of the air and the baths, and to look up a doctor to leave her with.

This took something more than a week, which could not all be spent in Mrs. Lander’s company, much as she wished it. There were hours which he gave to going about in a gondola with Clementina, whom he forbade to be always at the invalid’s side. He tried to reassure her as to Mrs. Lander’s health, when he found her rather mute and absent, while they drifted in the silvery sun of the late April weather, just beginning to be warm, but not warm enough yet for the tent of the open gondola. He asked her about Mrs. Lander’s family, and Clementina could only tell him that she had always said she had none. She told him the story of her own relation to her, and he said, “Yes, I heard something of that from Miss Milray.” After a moment of silence, during which he looked curiously into the girl’s eyes, “Do you think you can bear a little more care, Miss Claxon?”

“I think I can,” said Clementina, not very courageously, but patiently.

“It’s only this, and I wouldn’t tell you if I hadn’t thought you equal to it. Mrs. Lander’s case puzzles me. But I shall leave Dr. Tradonico watching it, and if it takes the turn that there’s a chance it may take, he will tell you, and you’d better find out about her friends, and — let them know. That’s all.”

“Yes,” said Clementina, as if it were not quite enough. Perhaps she did not fully realize all that the doctor had intended; life alone is credible to the young; life and the expectation of it.

The night before he was to return to Florence there was a full moon; and when he had got Mrs. Lander to sleep he asked Clementina if she would not go out on the lagoon with him. He assigned no peculiar virtue to the moonlight, and he had no new charge to give her concerning his patient when they were embarked. He seemed to wish her to talk about herself, and when she strayed from the topic, he prompted her return. Then he wished to know how she liked Florence, as compared with Venice, and all the other cities she had seen, and when she said she had not seen any but Boston and New York, and London for one night, he wished to know whether she liked Florence as well. She said she liked it best of all, and he told her he was very glad, for he liked it himself better than any place he had ever seen. He spoke of his family in America, which was formed of grownup brothers and sisters, so that he had none of the closest and tenderest ties obliging him to return; there was no reason why he should not spend all his days in Florence, except for some brief visits home. It would be another thing with such a place as Venice; he could never have the same settled feeling there: it was beautiful, but it was unreal; it would be like spending one’s life at the opera. Did not she think so?

She thought so, oh, yes; she never could have the home-feeling at Venice that she had at Florence.

“Exactly; that’s what I meant — a home-feeling; I’m glad you had it.” He let the gondola dip and slide forward almost a minute before he added, with an effect of pulling a voice up out of his throat somewhere, “How would you like to live there — with me — as my wife?”

“Why, what do you mean, Dr. Welwright?” asked Clementina, with a vague laugh.

Dr. Welwright laughed, too; but not vaguely; there was a mounting cheerfulness in his laugh. “What I say. I hope it isn’t very surprising.”

“No; but I never thought of such a thing.”

“Perhaps you will think of it now.”

“But you’re not in ea’nest!”

“I’m thoroughly in earnest,” said the doctor, and he seemed very much amused at her incredulity.

“Then; I’m sorry,” she answered. “I couldn’t.”

“No?” he said, still with amusement, or with a courage that took that form. “Why not?”

“Because I am — not free.”

For an interval they were so silent that they could hear each other breathe: Then, after he had quietly bidden the gondolier go back to their hotel, he asked, “If you had been free you might have answered me differently?”

“I don’t know,” said Clementina, candidly. “I never thought of it.”

“It isn’t because you disliked me?”

“Oh, no!”

“Then I must get what comfort I can out of that. I hope, with all my heart, that you may be happy.”

“Why, Dr. Welwright!” said Clementina. “Don’t you suppose that I should be glad to do it, if I could? Any one would!”

“It doesn’t seem very probable, just now,” he answered, humbly. “But I’ll believe it if you say so.”

“I do say so, and I always shall.”

“Thank you.”

Dr. Welwright professed himself ready for his departure, at breakfast next morning and he must have made his preparations very late or very early. He was explicit in his charges to Clementina concerning Mrs. Lander, and at the end of them, he said, “She will not know when she is asking too much of you, but you will, and you must act upon your knowledge. And remember, if you are in need of help, of any kind, you’re to let me know. Will you?”

“Yes, I will, Dr. Welwright.”

“People will be going away soon, and I shall not be so busy. I can come back if Dr. Tradonico thinks it necessary.”

He left Mrs. Lander full of resolutions to look after her own welfare in every way, and she went out in her gondola the same morning. She was not only to take the air as much as possible, but she was to amuse herself, and she decided that she would have her second breakfast at the Caffe Florian. Venice was beginning to fill up with arrivals from the south, and it need not have been so surprising to find Mr. Hinkle there over a cup of coffee. He said he had just that moment been thinking of her, and meaning to look her up at the hotel. He said that he had stopped at Venice because it was such a splendid place to introduce his gleaner; he invited Mrs. Lander to become a partner in the enterprise; he promised her a return of fifty per cent. on her investment. If he could once introduce his gleaner in Venice, he should be a made man. He asked Mrs. Lander, with real feeling, how she was; as for Miss Clementina, he need not ask.

“Oh, indeed, the docta thinks she wants a little lookin’ after, too,” said Mrs. Lander.

“Well, about as much as you do, Mrs. Lander,” Hinkle allowed, tolerantly. “I don’t know how it affects you, ma’am, such a meeting of friends in these strange waters, but it’s building me right up. It’s made another man of me, already, and I’ve got the other man’s appetite, too. Mind my letting him have his breakfast here with me at your table?” He bade the waiter just fetch his plate. He attached himself to them; he spent the day with them. Mrs. Lander asked him to dinner at her lodgings, and left him to Clementina over the coffee.

“She’s looking fine, doesn’t the doctor think? This air will do everything for her.”

“Oh, yes; she’s a great deal betta than she was befo’e we came.”

“That’s right. Well, now, you’ve got me here, you must let me make myself useful any way I can. I’ve got a spare month that I can put in here in Venice, just as well as not; I sha’n’t want to push north till the frost’s out of the ground. They wouldn’t have a chance to try my gleaner, on the other side of the Alps much before September, anyway. Now, in Ohio, the part I come from, we cut our wheat in June. When is your wheat harvest at Middlemount?”

Clementina laughed. “I don’t believe we’ve got any. I guess it’s all grass.”

“I wish you could see our country out there, once.”

“Is it nice?”

“Nice? We’re right in the centre of the state, measuring from north to south, on the old National Road.” Clementina had never heard of this road, but she did not say so. “About five miles back from the Ohio River, where the coal comes up out of the ground, because there’s so much of it there’s no room for it below. Our farm’s in a valley, along a creek bottom, what you Yankees call an intervals; we’ve got three hundred acres. My grandfather took up the land, and then he went back to Pennsylvania to get the girl he’d left there — we were Pennsylvania Dutch; that’s where I got my romantic name — they drove all the way out to Ohio again in his buggy, and when he came in sight of our valley with his bride, he stood up in his buggy and pointed with his whip. ‘There! As far as the sky is blue, it’s all ours!’”

Clementina owned the charm of his story as he seemed to expect, but when he said, “Yes, I want you to see that country, some day,” she answered cautiously.

“It must be lovely. But I don’t expect to go West, eva.”

“I like your Eastern way of saying everr,” said Hinkle, and he said it in his Western way. “I like New England folks.”

Clementina smiled discreetly. “They have their faults like everybody else, I presume.”

“Ah, that’s a regular Yankee word: presume,” said Hinkle. “Our teacher, my first one, always said presume. She was from your State, too.”

XXIX.

In the time of provisional quiet that followed for Clementina, she was held from the remorses and misgivings that had troubled her before Hinkle came. She still thought that she had let Dr. Welwright go away believing that she had not cared enough for the offer which had surprised her so much, and she blamed herself for not telling him how doubly bound she was to Gregory; though when she tried to put her sense of this in words to herself she could not make out that she was any more bound to him than she had been before they met in Florence, unless she wished to be so. Yet somehow in this time of respite, neither the regret for Dr. Welwright nor the question of Gregory persisted very strongly, and there were whole days when she realized before she slept that she had not thought of either.

She was in full favor again with Mrs. Lander, whom there was no one to embitter in her jealous affection. Hinkle formed their whole social world, and Mrs. Lander made the most of him. She was always having him to the dinners which her landlord served her from a restaurant in her apartment, and taking him out with Clementina in her gondola. He came into a kind of authority with them both which was as involuntary with him as with them, and was like an effect of his constant wish to be doing something for them.

One morning when they were all going out in Mrs. Lander’s gondola, she sent Clementina back three times to their rooms for outer garments of differing density. When she brought the last Mrs. Lander frowned.

“This won’t do. I’ve got to have something else — something lighter and warma.”

“I can’t go back any moa, Mrs. Landa,” cried the girl, from the exasperation of her own nerves.

“Then I will go back myself,” said Mrs. Lander with dignity, “and we sha’n’t need the gondoler any more this mo’ning,” she added, “unless you and Mr. Hinkle wants to ride.”

She got ponderously out of the boat with the help of the gondolier’s elbow, and marched into the house again, while Clementina followed her. She did not offer to help her up the stairs; Hinkle had to do it, and he met the girl slowly coming up as he returned from delivering Mrs. Lander over to Maddalena.

“She’s all right, now,” he ventured to say, tentatively.

“Is she?” Clementina coldly answered.

In spite of her repellent air, he persisted, “She’s a pretty sick woman, isn’t she?”

“The docta doesn’t say.”

“Well, I think it would be safe to act on that supposition. Miss Clementina — I think she wants to see you.”

“I’m going to her directly.”

Hinkle paused, rather daunted. “She wants me to go for the doctor.”

“She’s always wanting the docta.” Clementina lifted her eyes and looked very coldly at him.

“If I were you I’d go up right away,” he said, boldly.

She felt that she ought to resent his interference, but the mild entreaty of his pale blue eyes, or the elder-brotherly injunction of his smile, forbade her. “Did she ask for me?”

“No.”

“I’ll go to her,” she said, and she kept herself from smiling at the long sigh of relief he gave as she passed him on the stairs.

Mrs. Lander began as soon as she entered her room, “Well, I was just wonderin’ if you was goin’ to leave me here all day alone, while you staid down the’e, carryin’ on with that simpleton. I don’t know what’s got into the men.”

“Mr. Hinkle has gone for the docta,” said Clementina, trying to get into her voice the kindness she was trying to feel.

“Well, if I have one of my attacks, now, you’ll have yourself to thank for it.”

By the time Dr. Tradonico appeared Mrs. Lander was so much better that in her revulsion of feeling she was all day rather tryingly affectionate in her indirect appeals for Clementina’s sympathy.

“I don’t want you should mind what I say, when I a’n’t feelin’ just right,” she began that evening, after she had gone to bed, and Clementina sat looking out of the open window, on the moonlit lagoon.

“Oh, no,” the girl answered, wearily.

Mrs. Lander humbled herself farther. “I’m real sorry I plagued you so, to-day, and I know Mr. Hinkle thought I was dreadful, but I couldn’t help it. I should like to talk with you, Clementina, about something that’s worryin’ me, if you a’n’t busy.”

“I’m not busy, now, Mrs. Lander,” said Clementina, a little coldly, and relaxing the clasp of her hands; to knit her fingers together had been her sole business, and she put even this away.

She did not come nearer the bed, and Mrs. Lander was obliged to speak without the advantage of noting the effect of her words upon her in her face. “It’s like this: What am I agoin’ to do for them relations of Mr. Landa’s out in Michigan?”

“I don’t know. What relations?”

“I told you about ‘em: the only ones he’s got: his half-sista’s children. He neva saw ‘em, and he neva wanted to; but they’re his kin, and it was his money. It don’t seem right to pass ’em ova. Do you think it would yourself, Clementina?”

“Why, of cou’se not, Mrs. Lander. It wouldn’t be right at all.”

Mrs. Lander looked relieved, and she said, as if a little surprised, “I’m glad you feel that way; I should feel just so, myself. I mean to do by you just what I always said I should. I sha’n’t forget you, but whe’e the’e’s so much I got to thinkin’ the’e’d ought to some of it go to his folks, whetha he ca’ed for ’em or not. It’s worried me some, and I guess if anything it’s that that’s made me wo’se lately.”

“Why by Mrs. Landa,” said the girl, “Why don’t you give it all to them?”

“You don’t know what you’a talkin’ about,” said Mrs. Lander, severely. “I guess if I give ’em five thousand or so amongst’em, it’s full moa than they eve’ thought of havin’, and it’s moa than they got any right to. Well, that’s all right, then; and we don’t need to talk about it any moa. Yes,” she resumed, after a moment, “that’s what I shall do. I hu’n’t eva felt just satisfied with that last will I got made, and I guess I shall tear it up, and get the fust American lawyer that comes along to make me a new one. The prop’ty’s all goin’ to you, but I guess I shall leave five thousand apiece to the two families out the’e. You won’t miss it, any, and I presume it’s what Mr. Landa would expect I should do; though why he didn’t do it himself, I can’t undastand, unless it was to show his confidence in me.”

She began to ask Clementina how she felt about staying in Venice all summer; she said she had got so much better there already that she believed she should be well by fall if she stayed on. She was certain that it would put her all back if she were to travel now, and in Europe, where it was so hard to know how to get to places, she did not see how they could pick out any that would suit them as well as Venice did.

Clementina agreed to it all, more or less absentmindedly, as she sat looking into the moonlight, and the day that had begun so stormily ended in kindness between them.

The next morning Mrs. Lander did not wish to go out, and she sent Clementina and Hinkle together as a proof that they were all on good terms again. She did not spare the girl this explanation in his presence, and when they were in the gondola he felt that he had to say, “I was afraid you might think I was rather meddlesome yesterday.”

“Oh, no,” she answered. “I was glad you did.”

“Yes,” he returned, “I thought you would be afterwards.” He looked at her wistfully with his slanted eyes and his odd twisted smile and they both gave way in the same conscious laugh. “What I like,” he explained further, “is to be understood when I’ve said something that doesn’t mean anything, don’t you? You know anybody can understand you if you really mean something; but most of the time you don’t, and that’s when a friend is useful. I wish you’d call on me if you’re ever in that fix.”

“Oh, I will, Mr. Hinkle,” Clementina promised, gayly.

“Thank you,” he said, and her gayety seemed to turn him graver. “Miss Clementina, might I go a little further in this direction, without danger?”

“What direction?” she added, with a flush of sudden alarm.

“Mrs. Lander.”

“Why, suttainly!” she answered, in quick relief.

“I wish you’d let me do some of the worrying about her for you, while I’m here. You know I haven’t got anything else to do!”

“Why, I don’t believe I worry much. I’m afraid I fo’get about her when I’m not with her. That’s the wo’st of it.”

“No, no,” he entreated, “that’s the best of it. But I want to do the worrying for you even when you’re with her. Will you let me?”

“Why, if you want to so very much.”

“Then it’s settled,” he said, dismissing the subject.

But she recurred to it with a lingering compunction.

“I presume that I don’t remember how sick she is because I’ve neva been sick at all, myself.”

“Well,” he returned, “You needn’t be sorry for that altogether. There are worse things than being well, though sick people don’t always think so. I’ve wasted a good deal of time the other way, though I’ve reformed, now.”

They went on to talk about themselves; sometimes they talked about others, in excursions which were more or less perfunctory, and were merely in the way of illustration or instance. She got so far in one of these as to speak of her family, and he seemed to understand them. He asked about them all, and he said he believed in her father’s unworldly theory of life. He asked her if they thought at home that she was like her father, and he added, as if it followed, “I’m the worldling of my family. I was the youngest child, and the only boy in a flock of girls. That always spoils a boy.”

“Are you spoiled?” she asked.

“Well, I’m afraid they’d be surprised if I didn’t come to grief somehow — all but — mother; she expects I’ll be kept from harm.”

“Is she religious?”

“Yes, she’s a Moravian. Did you ever hear of them?” Clementina shook her head. “They’re something like the Quakers, and something like the Methodists. They don’t believe in war; but they have bishops.”

“And do you belong to her church?”

“No,” said the young man. “I wish I did, for her sake. I don’t belong to any. Do you?”

“No, I go to the Episcopal, at home. Perhaps I shall belong sometime. But I think that is something everyone must do for themselves.” He looked a little alarmed at the note of severity in her voice, and she explained. “I mean that if you try to be religious for anything besides religion, it isn’t being religious; — and no one else has any right to ask you to be.”

“Oh, that’s what I believe, too,” he said, with comic relief. “I didn’t know but I’d been trying to convert you without knowing it.” They both laughed, and were then rather seriously silent.

He asked, after a moment, in a fresh beginning, “Have you heard from Miss Milray since you left Florence?”

“Oh, yes, didn’t I tell you? She’s coming here in June.”

“Well, she won’t have the pleasure of seeing me, then. I’m going the last of May.”

“I thought you were going to stay a month!” she protested.

“That will be a month; and more, too.”

“So it will,” she owned.

“I’m glad it doesn’t seem any longer — say a year — Miss Clementina!”

“Oh, not at all,” she returned. “Miss Milray’s brother and his wife are coming with her. They’ve been in Egypt.”

“I never saw them,” said Hinkle. He paused, before he added, “Well, it would seem rather crowded after they get here, I suppose,” and he laughed, while Clementina said nothing.

XXX.

Hinkle came every morning now, to smoothe out the doubts and difficulties that had accumulated in Mrs. Lander’s mind over night, and incidentally to propose some pleasure for Clementina, who could feel that he was pitying her in her slavery to the sick woman’s whims, and yet somehow entreating her to bear them. He saw them together in what Mrs. Lander called her well days; but there were other days when he saw Clementina alone, and then she brought him word from Mrs. Lander, and reported his talk to her after he went away. On one of these she sent him a cheerfuller message than usual, and charged the girl to explain that she was ever so much better, but had not got up because she felt that every minute in bed was doing her good. Clementina carried back his regrets and congratulation, and then told Mrs. Lander that he had asked her to go out with him to see a church, which he was sorry Mrs. Lander could not see too. He professed to be very particular about his churches, for he said he had noticed that they neither of them had any great gift for sights, and he had it on his conscience to get the best for them. He told Clementina that the church he had for them now could not be better if it had been built expressly for them, instead of having been used as a place of worship for eight or ten generations of Venetians before they came. She gave his invitation to Mrs. Lander, who could not always be trusted with his jokes, and she received it in the best part.

“Well, you go!” she said. “Maddalena can look after me, I guess. He’s the only one of the fellas, except that lo’d, that I’d give a cent for.” She added, with a sudden lapse from her pleasure in Hinkle to her severity with Clementina, “But you want to be ca’eful what you’ doin’.”

“Ca’eful?”

“Yes! — About Mr. Hinkle. I a’n’t agoin’ to have you lead him on, and then say you didn’t know where he was goin’. I can’t keep runnin’ away everywhe’e, fo’ you, the way I done at Woodlake.”

Clementina’s heart gave a leap, whether joyful or woeful; but she answered indignantly, “How can you say such a thing to me, Mrs. Lander. I’m not leading him on!”

“I don’t know what you call it. You’re round with him in the gondoler, night and day, and when he’s he’e, you’a settin’ with him half the time on the balcony, and it’s talk, talk, the whole while.” Clementina took in the fact with silent recognition, and Mrs. Lander went on. “I ain’t sayin’ anything against it. He’s the only one I don’t believe is afta the money he thinks you’a goin’ to have; but if you don’t want him, you want to look what you’re about.”

The girl returned to Hinkle in the embarrassment which she was helpless to hide, and without the excuse which she could not invent for refusing to go with him. “Is Mrs. Lander worse — or anything?” he asked.

“Oh, no. She’s quite well,” said Clementina; but she left it for him to break the constraint in which they set out. He tried to do so at different points, but it seemed to close upon them — the more inflexibly. At last he asked, as they were drawing near the church, “Have you ever seen anything of Mr. Belsky since you left Florence?”

“No,” she said, with a nervous start. “What makes you ask?”

“I don’t know. But you see nearly everybody again that you meet in your travels. That friend of his — that Mr. Gregory — he seems to have dropped out, too. I believe you told me you used to know him in America.”

“Yes,” she answered, briefly; she could not say more; and Hinkle went on. “It seemed to me, that as far as I could make him out, he was about as much of a crank in his way as the Russian. It’s curious, but when you were talking about religion, the other day, you made me think of him!” The blood went to Clementina’s heart. “I don’t suppose you had him in mind, but what you said fitted him more than anyone I know of. I could have almost believed that he had been trying to convert you!” She stared at him, and he laughed. “He tackled me one day there in Florence all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to say, exactly. Of course, I respected his earnestness; but I couldn’t accept his view of things and I tried to tell him so. I had to say just where I stood, and why, and I mentioned some books that helped to get me there. He said he never read anything that went counter to his faith; and I saw that he didn’t want to save me, so much as he wanted to convince me. He didn’t know it, and I didn’t tell him that I knew it, but I got him to let me drop the subject. He seems to have been left over from a time when people didn’t reason about their beliefs, but only argued. I didn’t think there was a man like that to be found so late in the century, especially a young man. But that was just where I was mistaken. If there was to be a man of that kind at all, it would have to be a young one. He’ll be a good deal opener-minded when he’s older. He was conscientious; I could see that; and he did take the Russian’s death to heart as long as he was dead. But I’d like to talk with him ten years from now; he wouldn’t be where he is.”

Clementina was still silent, and she walked up the church steps from the gondola without the power to speak. She made no show of interest in the pictures and statues; she never had really cared much for such things, and now his attempts to make her look at them failed miserably. When they got back again into the boat he began, “Miss Clementina, I’m afraid I oughtn’t to have spoken as I did of that Mr. Gregory. If he is a friend of yours—”

“He is,” she made herself answer.

“I didn’t mean anything against him. I hope you don’t think I wanted to be unfair?”

“You were not unfair. But I oughtn’t to have let you say it, Mr. Hinkle. I want to tell you something — I mean, I must” — She found herself panting and breathless. “You ought to know it — Mr. Gregory is — I mean we are—”

She stopped and she saw that she need not say more.

In the days that followed before the time that Hinkle had fixed to leave Venice, he tried to come as he had been coming, to see Mrs. Lander, but he evaded her when she wished to send him out with Clementina. His quaintness had a heartache in it for her; and he was boyishly simple in his failure to hide his suffering. He had no explicit right to suffer, for he had asked nothing and been denied nothing, but perhaps for this reason she suffered the more keenly for him.

A senseless resentment against Gregory for spoiling their happiness crept into her heart; and she wished to show Hinkle how much she valued his friendship at any risk and any cost. When this led her too far she took herself to task with a severity which hurt him too. In the midst of the impulses on which she acted, there were times when she had a confused longing to appeal to him for counsel as to how she ought to behave toward him.

There was no one else whom she could appeal to. Mrs. Lander, after her first warning, had not spoken of him again, though Clementina could feel in the grimness with which she regarded her variable treatment of him that she was silently hoarding up a sum of inculpation which would crush her under its weight when it should fall upon her. She seemed to be growing constantly better, now, and as the interval since her last attack widened behind her, she began to indulge her appetite with a recklessness which Clementina, in a sense of her own unworthiness, was helpless to deal with. When she ventured to ask her once whether she ought to eat of something that was very unwholesome for her, Mrs. Lander answered that she had taken her case into her own hands, now, for she knew more about it than all the doctors. She would thank Clementina not to bother about her; she added that she was at least not hurting anybody but herself, and she hoped Clementina would always be able to say as much.

Clementina wished that Hinkle would go away, but not before she had righted herself with him, and he lingered his month out, and seemed as little able to go as she to let him. She had often to be cheerful for both, when she found it too much to be cheerful for herself. In his absence she feigned free and open talks with him, and explained everything, and experienced a kind of ghostly comfort in his imagined approval and forgiveness, but in his presence, nothing really happened except the alternation of her kindness and unkindness, in which she was too kind and then too unkind.

The morning of the day he was at last to leave Venice, he came to say good bye. He did not ask for Mrs. Lander, when the girl received him, and he did not give himself time to lose courage before he began, “Miss Clementina, I don’t know whether I ought to speak to you after what I understood you to mean about Mr. Gregory.” He looked steadfastly at her but she did not answer, and he went on. “There’s just one chance in a million, though, that I didn’t understand you rightly, and I’ve made up my mind that I want to take that chance. May I?” She tried to speak, but she could not. “If I was wrong — if there was nothing between you and him — could there ever be anything between you and me?”

His pleading looks entreated her even more than his words.

“There was something,” she answered, “with him.”

“And I mustn’t know what,” the young man said patiently.

“Yes — yes!” she returned eagerly. “Oh, yes! I want you to know — I want to tell you. I was only sixteen yea’s old, and he said that he oughtn’t to have spoken; we were both too young. But last winta he spoke again. He said that he had always felt bound” — She stopped, and he got infirmly to his feet. “I wanted to tell you from the fust, but—”

“How could you? You couldn’t. I haven’t anything more to say, if you are bound to him.”

“He is going to be a missionary and he wanted me to say that I would believe just as he did; and I couldn’t. But I thought that it would come right; and — yes, I felt bound to him, too. That is all — I can’t explain it!”

“Oh, I understand!” he returned, listlessly.

“And do you blame me for not telling before?” She made an involuntary movement toward him, a pathetic gesture which both entreated and compassionated.

“There’s nobody to blame. You have tried to do just right by me, as well as him. Well, I’ve got my answer. Mrs. Lander — can I—”

“Why, she isn’t up yet, Mr. Hinkle.” Clementina put all her pain for him into the expression of their regret.

“Then I’ll have to leave my good-bye for her with you. I don’t believe I can come back again.” He looked round as if he were dizzy. “Good-bye,” he said, and offered his hand. It was cold as clay.

When he was gone, Clementina went into Mrs. Lander’s room, and gave her his message.

“Couldn’t he have come back this aftanoon to see me, if he ain’t goin’ till five?” she demanded jealously.

“He said he couldn’t come back,” Clementina answered sadly.

The woman turned her head on her pillow and looked at the girl’s face. “Oh!” she said for all comment.

XXXI.

The Milrays came a month later, to seek a milder sun than they had left burning in Florence. The husband and wife had been sojourning there since their arrival from Egypt, but they had not been his sister’s guests, and she did not now pretend to be of their party, though the same train, even the same carriage, had brought her to Venice with them. They went to a hotel, and Miss Milray took lodgings where she always spent her Junes, before going to the Tyrol for the summer.

“You are wonderfully improved, every way,” Mrs. Milray said to Clementina when they met. “I knew you would be, if Miss Milray took you in hand; and I can see she has. What she doesn’t know about the world isn’t worth knowing! I hope she hasn’t made you too worldly? But if she has, she’s taught you how to keep from showing it; you’re just as innocent-looking as ever, and that’s the main thing; you oughtn’t to lose that. You wouldn’t dance a skirt dance now before a ship’s company, but if you did, no one would suspect that you knew any better. Have you forgiven me, yet? Well, I didn’t use you very well, Clementina, and I never pretended I did. I’ve eaten a lot of humble pie for that, my dear. Did Miss Milray tell you that I wrote to her about it? Of course you won’t say how she told you; but she ought to have done me the justice to say that I tried to be a friend at court with her for you. If she didn’t, she wasn’t fair.”

“She neva said anything against you, Mrs. Milray,” Clementina answered.

“Discreet as ever, my dear! I understand! And I hope you understand about that old affair, too, by this time. It was a complication. I had to get back at Lioncourt somehow; and I don’t honestly think now that his admiration for a young girl was a very wholesome thing for her. But never mind. You had that Boston goose in Florence, too, last winter, and I suppose he gobbled up what little Miss Milray had left of me. But she’s charming. I could go down on my knees to her art when she really tries to finish any one.”

Clementina noticed that Mrs. Milray had got a new way of talking. She had a chirpiness, and a lift in her inflections, which if it was not exactly English was no longer Western American. Clementina herself in her association with Hinkle had worn off her English rhythm, and in her long confinement to the conversation of Mrs. Lander, she had reverted to her clipped Yankee accent. Mrs. Milray professed to like it, and said it brought back so delightfully those pleasant days at Middlemount, when Clementina really was a child. “I met somebody at Cairo, who seemed very glad to hear about you, though he tried to seem not. Can you guess who it was? I see that you never could, in the world! We got quite chummy one day, when we were going out to the pyramids together, and he gave himself away, finely. He’s a simple soul! But when they’re in love they’re all so! It was a little queer, colloguing with the ex-headwaiter on society terms; but the head-waitership was merely an episode, and the main thing is that he is very talented, and is going to be a minister. It’s a pity he’s so devoted to his crazy missionary scheme. Some one ought to get hold of him, and point him in the direction of a rich New York congregation. He’d find heathen enough among them, and he could do the greatest amount of good with their money; I tried to talk it into him. I suppose you saw him in Florence, this spring?” she suddenly asked.

“Yes,” Clementina answered briefly.

“And you didn’t make it up together. I got that much out of Miss Milray. Well, if he were here, I should find out why. But I don’t suppose you would tell me.” She waited a moment to see if Clementina would, and then she said, “It’s a pity, for I’ve a notion I could help you, and I think I owe you a good turn, for the way I behaved about your dance. But if you don’t want my help, you don’t.”

“I would say so if I did, Mrs. Milray,” said Clementina. “I was hu’t, at the time; but I don’t care anything for it, now. I hope you won’t think about it any more!”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Milray, “I’ll try not to,” and she laughed. “But I should like to do something to prove my repentance.”

Clementina perceived that for some reason she would rather have more than less cause for regret; and that she was mocking her; but she was without the wish or the power to retaliate, and she did not try to fathom Mrs. Milray’s motives. Most motives in life, even bad motives, lie nearer the surface than most people commonly pretend, and she might not have had to dig deeper into Mrs. Milray’s nature for hers than that layer of her consciousness where she was aware that Clementina was a pet of her sister-in-law. For no better reason she herself made a pet of Mrs. Lander, whose dislike of Miss Milray was not hard to divine, and whose willingness to punish her through Clementina was akin to her own. The sick woman was easily flattered back into her first belief in Mrs. Milray and accepted her large civilities and small services as proof of her virtues. She began to talk them into Clementina, and to contrast them with the wicked principles and actions of Miss Milray.

The girl had forgiven Mrs. Milray, but she could not go back to any trust in her; and she could only passively assent to her praise. When Mrs. Lander pressed her for anything more explicit she said what she thought, and then Mrs. Lander accused her of hating Mrs. Milray, who was more her friend than some that flattered her up for everything, and tried to make a fool of her.

“I undastand now,” she said one day, “what that recta meant by wantin’ me to make life ba’d for you; he saw how easy you was to spoil. Miss Milray is one to praise you to your face, and disgrace you be hind your back, and so I tell you. When Mrs. Milray thought you done wrong she come and said so; and you can’t forgive her.”

Clementina did not answer. She had mastered the art of reticence in her relations with Mrs. Lander, and even when Miss Milray tempted her one day to give way, she still had strength to resist. But she could not deny that Mrs. Lander did things at times to worry her, though she ended compassionately with the reflection: “She’s sick.”

“I don’t think she’s very sick, now,” retorted her friend.

“No; that’s the reason she’s so worrying. When she’s really sick, she’s betta.”

“Because she’s frightened, I suppose. And how long do you propose to stand it?

“I don’t know,” Clementina listlessly answered.

“She couldn’t get along without me. I guess I can stand it till we go home; she says she is going home in the fall.”

Miss Milray sat looking at the girl a moment.

“Shall you be glad to go home?”

“Oh yes, indeed!”

“To that place in the woods?”

“Why, yes! What makes you ask?”

“Nothing. But Clementina, sometimes I think you don’t quite understand yourself. Don’t you know that you are very pretty and very charming? I’ve told you that often enough! But shouldn’t you like to be a great success in the world? Haven’t you ever thought of that? Don’t you care for society?”

The girl sighed. “Yes, I think that’s all very nice I did ca’e, one while, there in Florence, last winter!”

“My dear, you don’t know how much you were admired. I used to tell you, because I saw there was no spoiling you; but I never told you half. If you had only had the time for it you could have been the greatest sort of success; you were formed for it. It wasn’t your beauty alone; lots of pretty girls don’t make anything of their beauty; it was your temperament. You took things easily and naturally, and that’s what the world likes. It doesn’t like your being afraid of it, and you were not afraid, and you were not bold; you were just right.” Miss Milray grew more and more exhaustive in her analysis, and enjoyed refining upon it. “All that you needed was a little hard-heartedness, and that would have come in time; you would have learned how to hold your own, but the chance was snatched from you by that old cat! I could weep over you when I think how you have been wasted on her, and now you’re actually willing to go back and lose yourself in the woods!”

“I shouldn’t call it being lost, Miss Milray.”

“I don’t mean that, and you must excuse me, my dear. But surely your people — your father and mother — would want to have you get on in the world — to make a brilliant match—”

Clementina smiled to think how far such a thing was from their imaginations. “I don’t believe they would ca’e. You don’t undastand about them, and I couldn’t make you. Fatha neva liked the notion of my being with such a rich woman as Mrs. Lander, because it would look as if we wanted her money.”

“I never could have imagined that of you, Clementina!”

“I didn’t think you could,” said the girl gratefully. “But now, if I left her when she was sick and depended on me, it would look wohse, yet — as if I did it because she was going to give her money to Mr. Landa’s family. She wants to do that, and I told her to; I think that would be right; don’t you?”

“It would be right for you, Clementina, if you preferred it — and — I should prefer it. But it wouldn’t be right for her. She has given you hopes — she has made promises — she has talked to everybody.”

“I don’t ca’e for that. I shouldn’t like to feel beholden to any one, and I think it really belongs to his relations; it was HIS.”

Miss Milray did not say anything to this. She asked, “And if you went back, what would you do there? Labor in the fields, as poor little Belsky advised?”

Clementina laughed. “No; but I expect you’ll think it’s almost as crazy. You know how much I like dancing? Well, I think I could give dancing lessons at the Middlemount. There are always a good many children, and girls that have not grown up, and I guess I could get pupils enough, as long as the summa lasted; and come winter, I’m not afraid but what I could get them among the young folks at the Center. I used to teach them before I left home.”

Miss Milray sat looking at her. “I don’t know about such things; but it sounds sensible — like everything about you, my dear. It sounds queer, perhaps because you’re talking of such a White Mountain scheme here in Venice.”

“Yes, don’t it?” said Clementina, sympathetically. “I was thinking of that, myself. But I know I could do it. I could go round to different hotels, different days. Yes, I should like to go home, and they would be glad to have me. You can’t think how pleasantly we live; and we’re company enough for each other. I presume I should miss the things I’ve got used to ova here, at fust; but I don’t believe I should care a great while. I don’t deny but what the wo’ld is nice; but you have to pay for it; I don’t mean that you would make me—”

“No, no! We understand each other. Go on!”

Miss Milray leaned towards her and pressed the girl’s arm reassuringly.

As often happens with people when they are told to go on, Clementina found that she had not much more to say. “I think I could get along in the wo’ld, well enough. Yes, I believe I could do it. But I wasn’t bohn to it, and it would be a great deal of trouble — a great deal moa than if I had been bohn to it. I think it would be too much trouble. I would rather give it up and go home, when Mrs. Landa wants to go back.”

Miss Milray did not speak for a time. “I know that you are serious, Clementina; and you’re wise always, and good—”

“It isn’t that, exactly,” said Clementina. “But is it — I don’t know how to express it very well — is it wo’th while?”

Miss Milray looked at her as if she doubted the girl’s sincerity. Even when the world, in return for our making it our whole life, disappoints and defeats us with its prizes, we still question the truth of those who question the value of these prizes; we think they must be hopeless of them, or must be governed by some interest momentarily superior.

Clementina pursued, “I know that you have had all you wanted of the wo’ld—”

“Oh, no!” the woman broke out, almost in anguish. “Not what I wanted! What I tried for. It never gave me what I wanted. It — couldn’t!”

“Well?”

“It isn’t worth while in that sense. But if you can’t have what you want, — if there’s been a hollow left in your life — why the world goes a great way towards filling up the aching void.” The tone of the last words was lighter than their meaning, but Clementina weighed them aright.

“Miss Milray,” she said, pinching the edge of the table by which she sat, a little nervously, and banging her head a little, “I think I can have what I want.”

“Then, give the whole world for it, child!”

“There is something I should like to tell you.”

“Yes!”

“For you to advise me about.”

“I will, my dear, gladly and truly!”

“He was here before you came. He asked me—”

Miss Milray gave a start of alarm. She said, to gain time: “How did he get here? I supposed he was in Germany with his—”

“No; he was here the whole of May.”

“Mr. Gregory!”

“Mr. Gregory?” Clementina’s face flushed and drooped Still lower. “I meant Mr. Hinkle. But if you think I oughtn’t—”

“I don’t think anything; I’m so glad! I supposed from what you said about the world, that it must be — But if it isn’t, all the better. If it’s Mr. Hinkle that you can have—”

“I’m not sure I can. I should like to tell you just how it is, and then you will know.” It needed fewer words for this than she expected, and then Clementina took a letter from her pocket, and gave it to Miss Milray. “He wrote it on the train, going away, and it’s not very plain; but I guess you can make it out.”

Miss Milray received the penciled leaves, which seemed to be pages torn out of a note-book. They were dated the day Hinkle left Venice, and the envelope bore the postmark of Verona. They were not addressed, but began abruptly: “I believe I have made a mistake; I ought not to have given you up till I knew something that no one but you can tell me. You are not bound to any body unless you wish to be so. That is what I see now, and I will not give you up if I can help it. Even if you had made a promise, and then changed your mind, you would not be bound in such a thing as this. I say this, and I know you will not believe I say it because I want you. I do want you, but I would not urge you to break your faith. I only ask you to realize that if you kept your word when your heart had gone out of it, you would be breaking your faith; and if you broke your word you would be keeping your faith. But if your heart is still in your word, I have no more to say. Nobody knows but you. I would get out and take the first train back to Venice if it were not for two things. I know it would be hard on me; and I am afraid it might be hard on you. But if you will write me a line at Milan, when you get this, or if you will write to me at London before July; or at New York at any time — for I expect to wait as long as I live—”

The letter ended here in the local addresses which the writer gave.

Miss Milray handed the leaves back to Clementina, who put them into her pocket, and apparently waited for her questions.

“And have you written?”

“No,” said the girl, slowly and thoughtfully, “I haven’t. I wanted to, at fust; and then, I thought that if he truly meant what he said he would be willing to wait.”

“And why did you want to wait?”

Clementina replied with a question of her own. “Miss Milray, what do you think about Mr. Gregory?”

“Oh, you mustn’t ask me that, my dear! I was afraid I had told you too plainly, the last time.”

“I don’t mean about his letting me think he didn’t ca’e for me, so long. But don’t you think he wants to do what is right! Mr. Gregory, I mean.”

“Well, if you put me on my honor, I’m afraid I do.”

“You see,” Clementina resumed. “He was the fust one, and I did ca’e for him a great deal; and I might have gone on caring for him, if — When I found out that I didn’t care any longer, or so much, it seemed to me as if it must be wrong. Do you think it was?”

“No — no.”

“When I got to thinking about some one else at fust it was only not thinking about him — I was ashamed. Then I tried to make out that I was too young in the fust place, to know whether I really ca’ed for any one in the right way; but after I made out that I was, I couldn’t feel exactly easy — and I’ve been wanting to ask you, Miss Milray—”

“Ask me anything you like, my dear!”

“Why, it’s only whether a person ought eva to change.”

“We change whether we ought, or not. It isn’t a matter of duty, one way or another.”

“Yes, but ought we to stop caring for somebody, when perhaps we shouldn’t if somebody else hadn’t come between? That is the question.”

“No,” Miss Milray retorted, “that isn’t at all the question. The question is which you want and whether you could get him. Whichever you want most it is right for you to have.”

“Do you truly think so?”

“I do, indeed. This is the one thing in life where one may choose safest what one likes best; I mean if there is nothing bad in the man himself.”

“I was afraid it would be wrong! That was what I meant by wanting to be fai’a with Mr. Gregory when I told you about him there in Florence. I don’t believe but what it had begun then.”

“What had begun?”

“About Mr. Hinkle.”

Miss Milray burst into a laugh. “Clementina, you’re delicious!” The girl looked hurt, and Miss Milray asked seriously, “Why do you like Mr. Hinkle best — if you do?”

Clementina sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. He’s so resting.”

“Then that settles it. From first to last, what we poor women want is rest. It would be a wicked thing for you to throw your life away on some one who would worry you out of it. I don’t wish to say any thing against Mr. Gregory. I dare say he is good — and conscientious; but life is a struggle, at the best, and it’s your duty to take the best chance for resting.”

Clementina did not look altogether convinced, whether it was Miss Milray’s logic or her morality that failed to convince her. She said, after a moment, “I should like to see Mr. Gregory again.”

“What good would that do?”

“Why, then I should know.”

“Know what?”

“Whether I didn’t really ca’e for him any more — or so much.”

“Clementina,” said Miss Milray, “you mustn’t make me lose patience with you—”

“No. But I thought you said that it was my duty to do what I wished.”

“Well, yes. That is what I said,” Miss Milray consented. “But I supposed that you knew already.”

“No,” said Clementina, candidly, “I don’t believe I do.”

“And what if you don’t see him?”

“I guess I shall have to wait till I do. The’e will be time enough.”

Miss Milray sighed, and then she laughed. “You ARE young!”

XXXII.

Miss Milray went from Clementina to call upon her sister-in-law, and found her brother, which was perhaps what she hoped might happen.

“Do you know,” she said, “that that old wretch is going to defraud that poor thing, after all, and leave her money to her husband’s half-sister’s children?”

“You wish me to infer the Mrs. Lander — Clementina situation?” Milray returned.

“Yes!”

“I’m glad you put it in terms that are not actionable, then; for your words are decidedly libellous.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve just been writing Mrs. Lander’s will for her, and she’s left all her property to Clementina, except five thousand apiece to the half-sister’s three children.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Well,” said Milray, with his gentle smile, “I think that’s safe ground for you. Mrs. Lander will probably have time enough to change her will as well as her mind several times yet before she dies. The half-sister’s children may get their rights yet.”

“I wish they might!” said Miss Milray, with an impassioned sigh. “Then perhaps I should get Clementina — for a while.”

Her brother laughed. “Isn’t there somebody else wants Clementina?

“Oh, plenty. But she’s not sure she wants anybody else.”

“Does she want you?”

“No, I can’t say she does. She wants to go home.”

“That’s not a bad scheme. I should like to go home myself if I had one. What would you have done with Clementina if you had got her, Jenny?”

“What would any one have done with her? Married her brilliantly, of course.”

“But you say she isn’t sure she wishes to be married at all?”

Miss Milray stated the case of Clementina’s divided mind, and her belief that she would take Hinkle in the end, together with the fear that she might take Gregory. “She’s very odd,” Miss Milray concluded. “She puzzles me. Why did you ever send her to me?”

Milray laughed. “I don’t know. I thought she would amuse you, and I thought it would be a pleasure to her.”

They began to talk of some affairs of their own, from which Miss Milray returned to Clementina with the ache of an imperfectly satisfied intention. If she had meant to urge her brother to seek justice for the girl from Mrs. Lander, she was not so well pleased to have found justice done already. But the will had been duly signed and witnessed before the American vice-consul, and she must get what good she could out of an accomplished fact. It was at least a consolation to know that it put an end to her sister-in-law’s patronage of the girl, and it would be interesting to see Mrs. Milray adapt her behavior to Clementina’s fortunes. She did not really dislike her sister-in-law enough to do her a wrong; she was only willing that she should do herself a wrong. But one of the most disappointing things in all hostile operations is that you never can know what the enemy would be at; and Mrs. Milray’s manoeuvres were sometimes dictated by such impulses that her strategy was peculiarly baffling. The thought of her past unkindness to Clementina may still have rankled in her, or she may simply have felt the need of outdoing Miss Milray by an unapproachable benefaction. It is certain that when Baron Belsky came to Venice a few weeks after her own arrival, they began to pose at each other with reference to Clementina; she with a measure of consciousness, he with the singleness of a nature that was all pose. In his forbearance to win Clementina from Gregory he had enjoyed the distinction of an unique suffering; and in allowing the fact to impart itself to Mrs. Milray, he bathed in the warmth of her flattering sympathy. Before she withdrew this, as she must when she got tired of him, she learned from him where Gregory was; for it seemed that Gregory had so far forgiven the past that they had again written to each other.

During the fortnight of Belsky’s stay in Venice Mrs. Lander was much worse, and Clementina met him only once, very briefly — She felt that he had behaved like a very silly person, but that was all over now, and she had no wish to punish him for it. At the end of his fortnight he went northward into the Austrian Tyrol, and a few days later Gregory came down from the Dolomites to Venice.

It was in his favor with Clementina that he yielded to the impulse he had to come directly to her; and that he let her know with the first words that he had acted upon hopes given him through Belsky from Mrs. Milray. He owned that he doubted the authority of either to give him these hopes, but he said he could not abandon them without a last effort to see her, and learn from her whether they were true or false.

If she recognized the design of a magnificent reparation in what Mrs. Milray had done, she did not give it much thought. Her mind was upon distant things as she followed Gregory’s explanation of his presence, and in the muse in which she listened she seemed hardly to know when he ceased speaking.

“I know it must seem to take something for granted which I’ve no right to take for granted. I don’t believe you could think that I cared for anything but you, or at all for what Mrs. Lander has done for you.”

“Do you mean her leaving me her money?” asked Clementina, with that boldness her sex enjoys concerning matters of finance and affection.

“Yes,” said Gregory, blushing for her. “As far as I should ever have a right to care, I could wish there were no money. It could bring no blessing to our life. We could do no good with it; nothing but the sacrifice of ourselves in poverty could be blessed to us.”

“That is what I thought, too,” Clementina replied.

“Oh, then you did think—”

“But afterwards, I changed my Mind. If she wants to give me her money I shall take it.”

Gregory was blankly silent again.

“I shouldn’t know how to refuse, and I don’t know as I should have any right to.” Gregory shrank a little from her reyankeefied English, as well as from the apparent cynicism of her speech; but he shrank in silence still. She startled him by asking with a kindness that was almost tenderness, “Mr. Gregory, how do you think anything has changed?”

“Changed?”

“You know how it was when you went away from Florence. Do you think differently now? I don’t. I don’t think I ought to do something for you, and pretend that I was doing it for religion. I don’t believe the way you do; and I know I neva shall. Do you want me in spite of my saying that I can neva help you in your work because I believe in it?”

“But if you believe in me—”

She shook her head compassionately. “You know we ahgued that out before. We are just whe’e we were. I am sorry. Nobody had any right to tell you to come he’e. But I am glad you came—” She saw the hope that lighted up his face, but she went on unrelentingly— “I think we had betta be free.”

“Free?”

“Yes, from each other. I don’t know how you have felt, but I have not felt free. It has seemed to me that I promised you something. If I did, I want to take my promise back and be free.”

Her frankness appealed to his own. “You are free. I never held you bound to me in my fondest hopes. You have always done right.”

“I have tried to. And I am not going to let you go away thinking that the reason I said is the only reason. It isn’t. I wish to be free because — there is some one else, now.” It was hard to tell him this, but she knew that she must not do less; and the train that carried him from Venice that night bore a letter from her to Hinkle.

XXXIII.

Clementina told Miss Milray what had happened, but with Mrs. Milray the girl left the sudden departure of Gregory to account for itself.

They all went a week later, and Mrs. Milray having now done her whole duty to Clementina had the easiest mind concerning her. Miss Milray felt that she was leaving her to greater trials than ever with Mrs. Lander; but since there was nothing else, she submitted, as people always do with the trials of others, and when she was once away she began to forget her.

By this time, however, it was really better for her. With no one to suspect of tampering with her allegiance, Mrs. Lander returned to her former fondness for the girl, and they were more peaceful if not happier together again. They had long talks, such as they used to have, and in the first of these Clementina told her how and why she had written to Mr. Hinkle. Mrs. Lander said that it suited her exactly.

“There ha’n’t but just two men in Europe behaved like gentlemen to me, and one is Mr. Hinkle, and the other is that lo’d; and between the two I ratha you’d have Mr. Hinkle; I don’t know as I believe much in American guls marryin’ lo’ds, the best of ‘em.”

Clementina laughed. “Why, Mrs. Landa, Lo’d Lioncou’t never thought of me in the wo’ld!”

“You can’t eva know. Mrs. Milray was tellin’ that he’s what they call a pooa lo’d, and that he was carryin’ on with the American girls like everything down there in Egypt last winta. I guess if it comes to money you’d have enough to buy him and sell him again.”

The mention of money cast a chill upon their talk; and Mrs. Lander said gloomily, “I don’t know as I ca’e so much for that will Mr. Milray made for me, after all. I did want to say ten thousand apiece for Mr. Landa’s relations; but I hated to befo’e him; I’d told the whole kit of ’em so much about you, and I knew what they would think.”

She looked at Clementina with recurring grudge, and the girl could not bear it.

“Then why don’t you tear it up, and make another? I don’t want anything, unless you want me to have it; and I’d ratha not have anything.”

“Yes, and what would folks say, afta youa taken’ care of me?”

“Do you think I do it fo’ that?”

“What do you do it fo’?”

“What did you want me to come with you fo’?”

“That’s true.” Mrs. Lander brightened and warmed again. “I guess it’s all right. I guess I done right, and I got to be satisfied. I presume I could get the consul to make me a will any time.”

Clementina did not relent so easily. “Mrs. Landa, whateva you do I don’t ca’e to know it; and if you talk to me again about this I shall go home. I would stay with you as long as you needed me, but I can’t if you keep bringing this up.”

“I suppose you think you don’t need me any moa! Betta not be too su’a.”

The girl jumped to her feet, and Mrs. Lander interposed. “Well, the’a! I didn’t mean anything, and I won’t pesta you about it any moa. But I think it’s pretty ha’d. Who am I going to talk it ova with, then?”

“You can talk it ova with the vice-consul,” paid Clementina, at random.

“Well, that’s so.” Mrs. Lander let Clementina get her ready for the night, in sign of returning amity; when she was angry with her she always refused her help, and made her send Maddalena.

The summer heat increased, and the sick woman suffered from it, but she could not be persuaded that she had strength to get away, though the vice-consul, whom she advised with, used all his logic with her. He was a gaunt and weary widower, who described himself as being officially between hay and grass; the consul who appointed him had resigned after going home, and a new consul had not yet been sent out to remove him. On what she called her well days Mrs. Lander went to visit him, and she did not mind his being in his shirt-sleeves, in the bit of garden where she commonly found him, with his collar and cravat off, and clouded in his own smoke; when she was sick she sent for him, to visit her. He made excuses as often as hhe could, and if he saw Mrs. Lander’s gondola coming down the Grand Canal to his house he hurried on his cast clothing, and escaped to the Piazza, at whatever discomfort and risk from the heat.

“I don’t know how you stand it, Miss Claxon,” he complained to Clementina, as soon as he learned that she was not a blood relation of Mrs. Lander’s, and divined that she had her own reservations concerning her. “But that woman will be the death of me if she keeps this up. What does she think I’m here for? If this goes on much longer I’ll resign. The salary won’t begin to pay for it. What am I going to do? I don’t want to hurt her feelings, or not to help her; but I know ten times as much about Mrs. Lander’s liver as I do about my own, now.”

He treated Clementina as a person of mature judgment and a sage discretion, and he accepted what comfort she could offer him when she explained that it was everything for Mrs. Lander to have him to talk with. “She gets tied of talking to me,” she urged, “and there’s nobody else, now.”

“Why don’t she hire a valet de place, and talk to him? I’d hire one myself for her. It would be a good deal cheaper for me. It’s as much as I can do to stand this weather as it is.”

The vice-consul laughed forlornly in his exasperation, but he agreed with Clementina when she said, in further excuse, that Mrs. Lander was really very sick. He pushed back his hat, and scratched his head with a grimace.

“Of course, we’ve got to remember she’s sick, and I shall need a little sympathy myself if she keeps on at me this way. I believe I’ll tell her about my liver next time, and see how she likes it. Look here, Miss Claxon! Couldn’t we get her off to some of those German watering places that are good for her complaints? I believe it would be the best thing for her — not to mention me.”

Mrs. Lander was moved by the suggestion which he made in person afterwards; it appealed to her old nomadic instinct; but when the consul was gone she gave it up. “We couldn’t git the’e, Clementina. I got to stay he’e till I git up my stren’th. I suppose you’d be glad enough to have me sta’t, now the’e’s nobody he’e but me,” she added, suspiciously. “You git this scheme up, or him?”

Clementina did not defend herself, and Mrs. Lander presently came to her defence. “I don’t believe but what he meant it fo’ the best — or you, whichever it was, and I appreciate it; but all is I couldn’t git off. I guess this aia will do me as much good as anything, come to have it a little coola.”

They went every afternoon to the Lido, where a wheeled chair met them, and Mrs. Lander was trundled across the narrow island to the beach. In the evenings they went to the Piazza, where their faces and figures had become known, and the Venetians gossipped them down to the last fact of their relation with an accuracy creditable to their ingenuity in the affairs of others. To them Mrs. Lander was the sick American, very rich, and Clementina was her adoptive daughter, who would have her millions after her. Neither knew the character they bore to the amiable and inquisitive public of the Piazza, or cared for the fine eyes that aimed their steadfast gaze at them along the tubes of straw-barreled Virginia cigars, or across little cups of coffee. Mrs. Lander merely remarked that the Venetians seemed great for gaping, and Clementina was for the most part innocent of their stare.

She rested in the choice she had made in a content which was qualified by no misgiving. She was sorry for Gregory, when she remembered him; but her thought was filled with some one else, and she waited in faith and patience for the answer which should come to the letter she had written. She did not know where her letter would find him, or when she should hear from him; she believed that she should hear, and that was enough. She said to herself that she would not lose hope if no answer came for months; but in her heart she fixed a date for the answer by letter, and an earlier date for some word by cable; but she feigned that she did not depend upon this; and when no word came she convinced herself that she had not expected any.

It was nearing the end of the term which she had tacitly given her lover to make the first sign by letter, when one morning Mrs. Lander woke her. She wished to say that she had got the strength to leave Venice at last, and she was going as soon as their trunks could be packed. She had dressed herself, and she moved about restless and excited. Clementina tried to reason her out of her haste; but she irritated her, and fixed her in her determination. “I want to get away, I tell you; I want to get away,” she answered all persuasion, and there seemed something in her like the wish to escape from more than the oppressive environment, though she spoke of nothing but the heat and the smell of the canal. “I believe it’s that, moa than any one thing, that’s kept me sick he’e,” she said. “I tell you it’s the malariar, and you’ll be down, too, if you stay.”

She made Clementina go to the banker’s, and get money to pay their landlord’s bill, and she gave him notice that they were going that afternoon. Clementina wished to delay till they had seen the vice-consul and the doctor; but Mrs. Lander broke out, “I don’t want to see ‘em, either of ‘em. The docta wants to keep me he’e and make money out of me; I undastand him; and I don’t believe that consul’s a bit too good to take a pussentage. Now, don’t you say a wo’d to either of ‘em. If you don’t do exactly what I tell you I’ll go away and leave you he’e. Now, will you?”

Clementina promised, and broke her word. She went to the vice-consul and told him she had broken it, and she agreed with him that he had better not come unless Mrs. Lander sent for him. The doctor promptly imagined the situation and said he would come in casually during the morning, so as not to alarm the invalid’s suspicions. He owned that Mrs. Lander was getting no good from remaining in Venice, and if it were possible for her to go, he said she had better go somewhere into cooler and higher air.

His opinion restored him to Mrs. Lander’s esteem, when it was expressed to her, and as she was left to fix the sum of her debt to him, she made it handsomer than anything he had dreamed of. She held out against seeing the vice-consul till the landlord sent in his account. This was for the whole month which she had just entered upon, and it included fantastic charges for things hitherto included in the rent, not only for the current month, but for the months past when, the landlord explained, he had forgotten to note them. Mrs. Lander refused to pay these demands, for they touched her in some of those economies which the gross rich practice amidst their profusion. The landlord replied that she could not leave his house, either with or without her effects, until she had paid. He declared Clementina his prisoner, too, and he would not send for the vice-consul at Mrs. Lander’s bidding. How far he was within his rights in all this they could not know, but he was perhaps himself doubtful, and he consented to let them send for the doctor, who, when he came, behaved like anything but the steadfast friend that Mrs. Lander supposed she had bought in him. He advised paying the account without regard to its justice, as the shortest and simplest way out of the trouble; but Mrs. Lander, who saw him talking amicably and even respectfully with the landlord, when he ought to have treated him as an extortionate scamp, returned to her former ill opinion of him; and the vice-consul now appeared the friend that Doctor Tradonico had falsely seemed. The doctor consented, in leaving her to her contempt of him, to carry a message to the vice-consul, though he came back, with his finger at the side of his nose, to charge her by no means to betray his bold championship to the landlord.

The vice-consul made none of those shows of authority which Mrs. Lander had expected of him. She saw him even exchanging the common decencies with the landlord, when they met; but in fact it was not hard to treat the smiling and courteous rogue well. In all their disagreement he had looked as constantly to the comfort of his captives as if they had been his chosen guests. He sent Mrs. Lander a much needed refreshment at the stormiest moment of her indignation, and he deprecated without retort the denunciations aimed at him in Italian which did not perhaps carry so far as his conscience. The consul talked with him in a calm scarcely less shameful than that of Dr. Tradonico; and at the end of their parley which she had insisted upon witnessing, he said:

“Well, Mrs. Lander, you’ve got to stand this gouge or you’ve got to stand a law suit. I think the gouge would be cheaper in the end. You see, he’s got a right to his month’s rent.”

“It ain’t the rent I ca’e for: it’s the candles, and the suvvice, and the things he says we broke. It was undastood that everything was to be in the rent, and his two old chaias went to pieces of themselves when we tried to pull ’em out from the wall; and I’ll neva pay for ’em in the wo’ld.”

“Why,” the vice-consul pleaded, “it’s only about forty francs for the whole thing—”

“I don’t care if it’s only fotty cents. And I must say, Mr. Bennam, you’re about the strangest vice-consul, to want me to do it, that I eva saw.”

The vice-consul laughed unresentfully. “Well, shall I send you a lawyer?”

“No!” Mrs. Lander retorted; and after a moment’s reflection she added, “I’m goin’ to stay my month, and so you may tell him, and then I’ll see whetha he can make me pay for that breakage and the candles and suvvice. I’m all wore out, as it is, and I ain’t fit to travel, now, and I don’t know when I shall be. Clementina, you can go and tell Maddalena to stop packin’. Or, no! I’ll do it.”

She left the room without further notice of the consul, who said ruefully to Clementina, “Well, I’ve missed my chance, Miss Claxon, but I guess she’s done the wisest thing for herself.”

“Oh, yes, she’s not fit to go. She must stay, now, till it’s coola. Will you tell the landlo’d, or shall—”

“I’ll tell him,” said the vice-consul, and he had in the landlord. He received her message with the pleasure of a host whose cherished guests have consented to remain a while longer, and in the rush of his good feeling he offered, if the charge for breakage seemed unjust to the vice-consul, to abate it; and since the signora had not understood that she was to pay extra for the other things, he would allow the vice-consul to adjust the differences between them; it was a trifle, and he wished above all things to content the signora, for whom he professed a cordial esteem both on his own part and the part of all his family.

“Then that lets me out for the present,” said the vice-consul, when Clementina repeated Mrs. Lander’s acquiescence in the landlord’s proposals, and he took his straw hat, and called a gondola from the nearest ‘traghetto’, and bargained at an expense consistent with his salary, to have himself rowed back to his own garden-gate.

The rest of the day was an era of better feeling between Mrs. Lander and her host than they had ever known, and at dinner he brought in with his own hand a dish which he said he had caused to be specially made for her. It was so tempting in odor and complexion that Mrs. Lander declared she must taste it, though as she justly said, she had eaten too much already; when it had once tasted it she ate it all, against Clementina’s protestations; she announced at the end that every bite had done her good, and that she never felt better in her life. She passed a happy evening, with renewed faith in the air of the lagoon; her sole regret now was that Mr. Lander had not lived to try it with her, for if he had she was sure he would have been alive at that moment.

She allowed herself to be got to bed rather earlier than usual; before Clementina dropped asleep she heard her breathing with long, easy, quiet respirations, and she lost the fear of the landlord’s dish which had haunted her through the evening. She was awakened in the morning by a touch on her shoulder. Maddalena hung over her with a frightened face, and implored her to come and look at the signora, who seemed not at all well. Clementina ran into her room, and found her dead. She must have died some hours before without a struggle, for the face was that of sleep, and it had a dignity and beauty which it had not worn in her life of self-indulgent wilfulness for so many years that the girl had never seen it look so before.

XXXIV.

The vice-consul was not sure how far his powers went in the situation with which Mrs. Lander had finally embarrassed him. But he met the new difficulties with patience, and he agreed with Clementina that they ought to see if Mrs. Lander had left any written expression of her wishes concerning the event. She had never spoken of such a chance, but had always looked forward to getting well and going home, so far as the girl knew, and the most careful search now brought to light nothing that bore upon it. In the absence of instructions to the contrary, they did what they must, and the body, emptied of its life of senseless worry and greedy care, was laid to rest in the island cemetery of Venice.

When all was over, the vice-consul ventured an observation which he had hitherto delicately withheld. The question of Mrs. Lander’s kindred had already been discussed between him and Clementina, and he now felt that another question had duly presented itself. “You didn’t notice,” he suggested, “anything like a will when we went over the papers?” He had looked carefully for it, expecting that there might have been some expression of Mrs. Lander’s wishes in it. “Because,” he added, “I happen to know that Mr. Milray drew one up for her; I witnessed it.”

“No,” said Clementina, “I didn’t see anything of it. She told me she had made a will; but she didn’t quite like it, and sometimes she thought she would change it. She spoke of getting you to do it; I didn’t know but she had.”

The vice-consul shook his head. “No. And these relations of her husband’s up in Michigan; you don’t know where they live, exactly?”

“No. She neva told me; she wouldn’t; she didn’t like to talk about them; I don’t even know their names.”

The vice-consul thoughtfully scratched a corner of his chin through his beard. “If there isn’t any will, they’re the heirs. I used to be a sort of wild-cat lawyer, and I know that much law.”

“Yes,” said Clementina. “She left them five thousand dollas apiece. She said she wished she had made it ten.”

“I guess she’s made it a good deal more, if she’s made it anything. Miss Claxon, don’t you understand that if no will turns up, they come in for all her money.

“Well, that’s what I thought they ought to do,” said Clementina.

“And do you understand that if that’s so, you don’t come in for anything? You must excuse me for mentioning it; but she has told everybody that you were to have it, and if there is no will—”

He stopped and bent an eye of lack-lustre compassion on the girl, who replied, “Oh, yes. I know that; it’s what I always told her to do. I didn’t want it.”

“You didn’t want it?”

“No.”

“Well!” The vice-consul stared at her, but he forbore the comment that her indifference inspired. He said after a pause, “Then what we’ve got to do is to advertise for the Michigan relations, and let ’em take any action they want to.”

“That’s the only thing we could do, I presume.”

This gave the vice-consul another pause. At the end of it he got to his feet. “Is there anything I can do for you, Miss Claxon?”

She went to her portfolio and produced Mrs. Lander’s letter of credit. It had been made out for three thousand pounds, in Clementina’s name as well as her own; but she had lived wastefully since she had come abroad, and little money remained to be taken up. With the letter Clementina handed the vice-consul the roll of Italian and Austrian bank-notes which she had drawn when Mrs. Lander decided to leave Venice; they were to the amount of several thousand lire and golden. She offered them with the insensibility to the quality of money which so many women have, and which is always so astonishing to men. “What must I do with these?” she asked.

“Why, keep them! returned the vice-consul on the spur of his surprise.

“I don’t know as I should have any right to,” said Clementina. “They were hers.”

“Why, but” — The vice-consul began his protest, but he could not end it logically, and he did not end it at all. He insisted with Clementina that she had a right to some money which Mrs. Lander had given her during her life; he took charge of the bank-notes in the interest of the possible heirs, and gave her his receipt for them. In the meantime he felt that he ought to ask her what she expected to do.

“I think,” she said, “I will stay in Venice awhile.”

The vice-consul suppressed any surprise he might have felt at a decision given with mystifying cheerfulness. He answered, Well, that was right; and for the second time he asked her if there was anything he could do for her.

“Why, yes,” she returned. “I should like to stay on in the house here, if you could speak for me to the padrone.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t, if we can make the padrone understand it’s different.”

“You mean about the price?” The vice-consul nodded. “That’s what I want you should speak to him about, Mr. Bennam, if you would. Tell him that I haven’t got but a little money now, and he would have to make it very reasonable. That is, if you think it would be right for me to stay, afta the way he tried to treat Mrs. Lander.”

The vice-consul gave the point some thought, and decided that the attempted extortion need not make any difference with Clementina, if she could get the right terms. He said he did not believe the padrone was a bad fellow, but he liked to take advantage of a stranger when he could; we all did. When he came to talk with him he found him a man of heart if not of conscience. He entered into the case with the prompt intelligence and vivid sympathy of his race, and he made it easy for Clementina to stay till she had heard from her friends in America. For himself and for his wife, he professed that she could not stay too long, and they proposed that if it would content the signorina still further they would employ Maddalena as chambermaid till she wished to return to Florence; she had offered to remain if the signorina stayed.

“Then that is settled,” said Clementina with a sigh of relief; and she thanked the vice-consul for his offer to write to the Milrays for her, and said that she would rather write herself.

She meant to write as soon as she heard from Mr. Hinkle, which could not be long now, for then she could be independent of the offers of help which she dreaded from Miss Milray, even more than from Mrs. Milray; it would be harder to refuse them; and she entered upon a passage of her life which a nature less simple would have found much more trying. But she had the power of taking everything as if it were as much to be expected as anything else. If nothing at all happened she accepted the situation with implicit resignation, and with a gayety of heart which availed her long, and never wholly left her.

While the suspense lasted she could not write home as frankly as before, and she sent off letters to Middlemount which treated of her delay in Venice with helpless reticence. They would have set another sort of household intolerably wondering and suspecting, but she had the comfort of knowing that her father would probably settle the whole matter by saying that she would tell what she meant when she got round to it; and apart from this she had mainly the comfort of the vice-consul’s society. He had little to do besides looking after her, and he employed himself about this in daily visits which the padrone and his wife regarded as official, and promoted with a serious respect for the vice-consular dignity. If the visits ended, as they often did, in a turn on the Grand Canal, and an ice in the Piazza, they appealed to the imagination of more sophisticated witnesses, who decided that the young American girl had inherited the millions of the sick lady, and become the betrothed of the vice-consul, and that they were thus passing the days of their engagement in conformity to the American custom, however much at variance with that of other civilizations.

This view of the affair was known to Maddalena, but not to Clementina, who in those days went back in many things to the tradition of her life at Middlemount. The vice-consul was of a tradition almost as simple, and his longer experience set no very wide interval between them. It quickly came to his telling her all about his dead wife and his married daughters, and how, after his home was broken up, he thought he would travel a little and see what that would do for him. He confessed that it had not done much; he was always homesick, and he was ready to go as soon as the President sent out a consul to take his job off his hands. He said that he had not enjoyed himself so much since he came to Venice as he was doing now, and that he did not know what he should do if Clementina first got her call home. He betrayed no curiosity as to the peculiar circumstances of her stay, but affected to regard it as something quite normal, and he watched over her in every way with a fatherly as well as an official vigilance which never degenerated into the semblance of any other feeling. Clementina rested in his care in entire security. The world had quite fallen from her, or so much of it as she had seen at Florence, and in her indifference she lapsed into life as it was in the time before that with a tender renewal of her allegiance to it. There was nothing in the conversation of the vice-consul to distract her from this; and she said and did the things at Venice that she used to do at Middlemount, as nearly as she could; to make the days of waiting pass more quickly, she tried to serve herself in ways that scandalized the proud affection of Maddalena. It was not fit for the signorina to make her bed or sweep her room; she might sew and knit if she would; but these other things were for servants like herself. She continued in the faith of Clementina’s gentility, and saw her always as she had seen her first in the brief hour of her social splendor in Florence. Clementina tried to make her understand how she lived at Middlemount, but she only brought before Maddalena the humiliating image of a contadina, which she rejected not only in Clementina’s behalf, but that of Miss Milray. She told her that she was laughing at her, and she was fixed in her belief when the girl laughed at that notion. Her poverty she easily conceived of; plenty of signorine in Italy were poor; and she protected her in it with the duty she did not divide quite evenly between her and the padrone.

The date which Clementina had fixed for hearing from Hinkle by cable had long passed, and the time when she first hoped to hear from him by letter had come and gone. Her address was with the vice-consul as Mrs. Lander’s had been, and he could not be ignorant of her disappointment when he brought her letters which she said were from home. On the surface of things it could only be from home that she wished to hear, but beneath the surface he read an anxiety which mounted with each gratification of this wish. He had not seen much of the girl while Hinkle was in Venice; Mrs. Lander had not begun to make such constant use of him until Hinkle had gone; Mrs. Milray had told him of Clementina’s earlier romance, and it was to Gregory that the vice-consul related the anxiety which he knew as little in its nature as in its object.

Clementina never doubted the good faith or constancy of her lover; but her heart misgave her as to his well-being when it sank at each failure of the vice-consul to bring her a letter from him. Something must have happened to him, and it must have been something very serious to keep him from writing; or there was some mistake of the post-office. The vice-consul indulged himself in personal inquiries to make sure that the mistake was not in the Venetian post-office; but he saw that he brought her greater distress in ascertaining the fact. He got to dreading a look of resolute cheerfulness that came into her face, when he shook his head in sign that there were no letters, and he suffered from the covert eagerness with which she glanced at the superscriptions of those he brought and failed to find the hoped-for letter among them. Ordeal for ordeal, he was beginning to regret his trials under Mrs. Lander. In them he could at least demand Clementina’s sympathy, but against herself this was impossible. Once she noted his mute distress at hers, and broke into a little laugh that he found very harrowing.

“I guess you hate it almost as much as I do, Mr. Bennam.”

“I guess I do. I’ve half a mind to write the letter you want, myself.”

“I’ve half a mind to let you — or the letter I’d like to write.”

It had come to her thinking she would write again to Hinkle; but she could not bring herself to do it. She often imagined doing it; she had every word of such a letter in her mind; and she dramatized every fact concerning it from the time she should put pen to paper, to the time when she should get back the answer that cleared the mystery of his silence away. The fond reveries helped her to bear her suspense; they helped to make the days go by, to ease the doubt with which she lay down at night, and the heartsick hope with which she rose up in the morning.

One day, at the hour of his wonted visit, she saw the vice-consul from her balcony coming, as it seemed to her, with another figure in his gondola, and a thousand conjectures whirled through her mind, and then centred upon one idea. After the first glance she kept her eyes down, and would not look again while she told herself incessantly that it could not be, and that she was a fool and a goose and a perfect coot, to think of such a thing for a single moment. When she allowed herself, or forced herself, to look a second time; as the boat drew near, she had to cling to the balcony parapet for support, in her disappointment.

The person whom the vice-consul helped out of the gondola was an elderly man like himself, and she took a last refuge in the chance that he might be Hinkle’s father, sent to bring her to him because he could not come to her; or to soften some terrible news to her. Then her fancy fluttered and fell, and she waited patiently for the fact to reveal itself. There was something countrified in the figure of the man, and something clerical in his face, though there was nothing in his uncouth best clothes that confirmed this impression. In both face and figure there was a vague resemblance to some one she had seen before, when the vice-consul said:

“Miss Claxon, I want to introduce the Rev. Mr. James B. Orson, of Michigan.” Mr. Orson took Clementina’s hand into a dry, rough grasp, while he peered into her face with small, shy eyes. The vice-consul added with a kind of official formality, “Mr. Orson is the half-nephew of Mr. Lander,” and then Clementina now knew whom it was that he resembled. “He has come to Venice,” continued the vice-consul, “at the request of Mrs. Lander; and he did not know of her death until I informed him of the fact. I should have said that Mr. Orson is the son of Mr. Lander’s half-sister. He can tell you the balance himself.” The vice-consul pronounced the concluding word with a certain distaste, and the effect of gladly retiring into the background.

“Won’t you sit down?” said Clementina, and she added with one of the remnants of her Middlemount breeding, “Won’t you let me take your hat?”

Mr. Orson in trying to comply with both her invitations, knocked his well worn silk hat from the hand that held it, and sent it rolling across the room, where Clementina pursued it and put it on the table.

“I may as well say at once,” he began in a flat irresonant voice, “that I am the representative of Mrs. Lander’s heirs, and that I have a letter from her enclosing her last will and testament, which I have shown to the consul here—”

“Vice-consul,” the dignitary interrupted with an effect of rejecting any part in the affair.

“Vice-consul, I should say, — and I wish to lay them both before you, in order that—”

“Oh, that is all right,” said Clementina sweetly. “I’m glad there is a will. I was afraid there wasn’t any at all. Mr. Bennam and I looked for it everywhe’e.” She smiled upon the Rev. Mr. Orson, who silently handed her a paper. It was the will which Milray had written for Mrs. Lander, and which, with whatever crazy motive, she had sent to her husband’s kindred. It provided that each of them should be given five thousand dollars out of the estate, and that then all should go to Clementina. It was the will Mrs. Lander told her she had made, but she had never seen the paper before, and the legal forms hid the meaning from her so that she was glad to have the vice-consul make it clear. Then she said tranquilly, “Yes, that is the way I supposed it was.”

Mr. Orson by no means shared her calm. He did not lift his voice, but on the level it had taken it became agitated. “Mrs. Lander gave me the address of her lawyer in Boston when she sent me the will, and I made a point of calling on him when I went East, to sail. I don’t know why she wished me to come out to her, but being sick, I presume she naturally wished to see some of her own family.”

He looked at Clementina as if he thought she might dispute this, but she consented at her sweetest, “Oh, yes, indeed,” and he went on:

“I found her affairs in a very different condition from what she seemed to think. The estate was mostly in securities which had not been properly looked after, and they had depreciated until they were some of them not worth the paper they were printed on. The house in Boston is mortgaged up to its full value, I should say; and I should say that Mrs. Lander did not know where she stood. She seemed to think that she was a very rich woman, but she lived high, and her lawyer said he never could make her understand how the money was going. Mr. Lander seemed to lose his grip, the year he died, and engaged in some very unfortunate speculations; I don’t know whether he told her. I might enter into details—”

“Oh, that is not necessary,” said Clementina, politely, witless of the disastrous quality of the facts which Mr. Orson was imparting.

“But the sum and substance of it all is that there will not be more than enough to pay the bequests to her own family, if there is that.”

Clementina looked with smiling innocence at the vice-consul.

“That is to say,” he explained, “there won’t be anything at all for you, Miss Claxon.”

“Well, that’s what I always told Mrs. Lander I ratha, when she brought it up. I told her she ought to give it to his family,” said Clementina, with a satisfaction in the event which the vice-consul seemed unable to share, for he remained gloomily silent. “There is that last money I drew on the letter of credit, you can give that to Mr. Orson.”

“I have told him about that money,” said the vice-consul, dryly. “It will be handed over to him when the estate is settled, if there isn’t enough to pay the bequests without it.”

“And the money which Mrs. Landa gave me before that,” she pursued, eagerly. Mr. Orson had the effect of pricking up his ears, though it was in fact merely a gleam of light that came into his eyes.

“That’s yours,” said the vice-consul, sourly, almost savagely. “She didn’t give it to you without she wanted you to have it, and she didn’t expect you to pay her bequests with it. In my opinion,” he burst out, in a wrathful recollection of his own sufferings from Mrs. Lander, “she didn’t give you a millionth part of your due for all the trouble she made you; and I want Mr. Orson to understand that, right here.”

Clementina turned her impartial gaze upon Mr. Orson as if to verify the impression of this extreme opinion upon him; he looked as if he neither accepted nor rejected it, and she concluded the sentence which the vice-consul had interrupted. “Because I ratha not keep it, if there isn’t enough without it.”

The vice-consul gave way to violence. “It’s none of your business whether there’s enough or not. What you’ve got to do is to keep what belongs to you, and I’m going to see that you do. That’s what I’m here for.” If this assumption of official authority did not awe Clementina, at least it put a check upon her headlong self-sacrifice. The vice-consul strengthened his hold upon her by asking, “What would you do. I should like to know, if you gave that up?”

“Oh, I should get along,” she returned, light-heartedly, but upon questioning herself whether she should turn to Miss Milray for help, or appeal to the vice-consul himself, she was daunted a little, and she added, “But just as you say, Mr. Bennam.”

“I say, keep what fairly belongs to you. It’s only two or three hundred dollars at the outside,” he explained to Mr. Orson’s hungry eyes; but perhaps the sum did not affect the country minister’s imagination as trifling; his yearly salary must sometimes have been little more.

The whole interview left the vice-consul out of humor with both parties to the affair; and as to Clementina, between the ideals of a perfect little saint, and a perfect little simpleton he remained for the present unable to class her.

XXXV.

Clementina and the Vice-Consul afterwards agreed that Mrs. Lander must have sent the will to Mr. Orson in one of those moments of suspicion when she distrusted everyone about her, or in that trouble concerning her husband’s kindred which had grown upon her more and more, as a means of assuring them that they were provided for.

“But even then,” the vice-consul concluded, “I don’t see why she wanted this man to come out here. The only explanation is that she was a little off her base towards the last. That’s the charitable supposition.”

“I don’t think she was herself, some of the time,” Clementina assented in acceptance of the kindly construction.

The vice-consul modified his good will toward Mrs. Lander’s memory so far as to say, “Well, if she’d been somebody else most of the time, it would have been an improvement.”

The talk turned upon Mr. Orson, and what he would probably do. The vice-consul had found him a cheap lodging, at his request, and he seemed to have settled down at Venice either without the will or without the power to go home, but the vice-consul did not know where he ate, or what he did with himself except at the times when he came for letters. Once or twice when he looked him up he found him writing, and then the minister explained that he had promised to “correspond” for an organ of his sect in the Northwest; but he owned that there was no money in it. He was otherwise reticent and even furtive in his manner. He did not seem to go much about the city, but kept to his own room; and if he was writing of Venice it must have been chiefly from his acquaintance with the little court into which his windows looked. He affected the vice-consul as forlorn and helpless, and he pitied him and rather liked him as a fellow-victim of Mrs. Lander.

One morning Mr. Orson came to see Clementina, and after a brief passage of opinion upon the weather, he fell into an embarrassed silence from which he pulled himself at last with a visible effort. “I hardly know how to lay before you what I have to say, Miss Claxon,” he began, “and I must ask you to put the best construction upon it. I have never been reduced to a similar distress before. You would naturally think that I would turn to the vice-consul, on such an occasion; but I feel, through our relation to the — to Mrs. Lander — ah — somewhat more at home with you.”

He stopped, as if he wished to be asked his business, and she entreated him, “Why, what is it, Mr. Osson? Is there something I can do? There isn’t anything I wouldn’t!”

A gleam, watery and faint, which still could not be quite winked away, came into his small eyes. “Why, the fact is, could you — ah — advance me about five dollars?”

“Why, Mr. Orson!” she began, and he seemed to think she wished to withdraw her offer of help, for he interposed.

“I will repay it as soon as I get an expected remittance from home. I came out on the invitation of Mrs. Lander, and as her guest, and I supposed—”

“Oh, don’t say a wo’d!” cried Clementina, but now that he had begun he was powerless to stop.

“I would not ask, but my landlady has pressed me for her rent — I suppose she needs it — and I have been reduced to the last copper—”

The girl whose eyes the tears of self pity so rarely visited, broke into a sob that seemed to surprise her visitor. But she checked herself as with a quick inspiration: “Have you been to breakfast?”

“Well — ah — not this morning,” Mr. Orson admitted, as if to imply that having breakfasted some other morning might be supposed to serve the purpose.

She left him and ran to the door. “Maddalena, Maddalena!” she called; and Maddalena responded with a frightened voice from the direction of the kitchen:

“Vengo subito!”

She hurried out with the coffee-pot in her hand, as if she had just taken it up when Clementina called; and she halted for the whispered colloquy between them which took place before she set it down on the table already laid for breakfast; then she hurried out of the room again. She came back with a cantaloupe and grapes, and cold ham, and put them before Clementina and her guest, who both ignored the hunger with which he swept everything before him. When his famine had left nothing, he said, in decorous compliment:

“That is very good coffee, I should think the genuine berry, though I am told that they adulterate coffee a great deal in Europe.”

“Do they?” asked Clementina. “I didn’t know it.”

She left him still sitting before the table, and came back with some bank-notes in her hand. “Are you sure you hadn’t betta take moa?” she asked.

“I think that five dollars will be all that I shall require,” he answered, with dignity. “I should be unwilling to accept more. I shall undoubtedly receive some remittances soon.”

“Oh, I know you will,” Clementina returned, and she added, “I am waiting for lettas myself; I don’t think any one ought to give up.”

The preacher ignored the appeal which was in her tone rather than her words, and went on to explain at length the circumstances of his having come to Europe so unprovided against chances. When he wished to excuse his imprudence, she cried out, “Oh, don’t say a wo’d! It’s just like my own fatha,” and she told him some things of her home which apparently did not interest him very much. He had a kind of dull, cold self-absorption in which he was indeed so little like her father that only her kindness for the lonely man could have justified her in thinking there was any resemblance.

She did not see him again for a week, and meantime she did not tell the vice-consul of what had happened. But an anxiety for the minister began to mingle with her anxieties for herself; she constantly wondered why she did not hear from her lover, and she occasionally wondered whether Mr. Orson were not falling into want again. She had decided to betray his condition to the vice-consul, when he came, bringing the money she had lent him. He had received a remittance from an unexpected source; and he hoped she would excuse his delay in repaying her loan. She wished not to take the money, at least till he was quite sure he should not want it, but he insisted.

“I have enough to keep me, now, till I hear from other sources, with the means for returning home. I see no object in continuing here, under the circumstances.”

In the relief which she felt for him Clementina’s heart throbbed with a pain which was all for herself. Why should she wait any longer either? For that instant she abandoned the hope which had kept her up so long; a wave of homesickness overwhelmed her.

“I should like to go back, too,” she said. “I don’t see why I’m staying.”

“Mr. Osson, why can’t you let me” — she was going to say— “go home with you?” But she really said what was also in her heart, “Why can’t you let me give you the money to go home? It is all Mrs. Landa’s money, anyway.”

“There is certainly that view of the matter,” he assented with a promptness that might have suggested a lurking grudge for the vice-consul’s decision that she ought to keep the money Mrs. Lander had given her.

But Clementina urged unsuspiciously: “Oh, yes, indeed! And I shall feel better if you take it. I only wish I could go home, too!”

The minister was silent while he was revolving, with whatever scruple or reluctance, a compromise suitable to the occasion. Then he said, “Why should we not return together?”

“Would you take me?” she entreated.

“That should be as you wished. I am not much acquainted with the usages in such matters, but I presume that it would be entirely practicable. We could ask the vice-consul.”

“Yes—”

“He must have had considerable experience in cases of the kind. Would your friends meet you in New York, or—”

“I don’t know,” said Clementina with a pang for the thought of a meeting she had sometimes fancied there, when her lover had come out for her, and her father had been told to come and receive them. “No,” she sighed, “the’e wouldn’t be time to let them know. But it wouldn’t make any difference. I could get home from New Yo’k alone,” she added, listlessly. Her spirits had fallen again. She saw that she could not leave Venice till she had heard in some sort from the letter she had written. “Perhaps it couldn’t be done, after all. But I will see Mr. Bennam about it, Mr. Osson; and I know he will want you to have that much of the money. He will be coming he’e, soon.”

He rose upon what he must have thought her hint, and said, “I should not wish to have him swayed against his judgment.”

The vice-consul came not long after the minister had left her, and she began upon what she wished to do for him.

The vice-consul was against it. “I would rather lend him the money out of my own pocket. How are you going to get along yourself, if you let him have so much?”

She did not answer at once. Then she said, hopelessly, “I’ve a great mind to go home with him. I don’t believe there’s any use waiting here any longa.” The vice-consul could not say anything to this. She added, “Yes, I believe I will go home. We we’e talking about it, the other day, and he is willing to let me go with him.”

“I should think he would be,” the vice-consul retorted in his indignation for her. “Did you offer to pay for his passage?”

“Yes,” she owned, “I did,” and again the vice-consul could say nothing. “If I went, it wouldn’t make any difference whether it took it all or not. I should have plenty to get home from New York with.”

“Well,” the vice-consul assented, dryly, “it’s for you to say.”

“I know you don’t want me to do it!”

“Well, I shall miss you,” he answered, evasively.

“And I shall miss you, too, Mr. Bennam. Don’t you believe it? But if I don’t take this chance to get home, I don’t know when I shall eva have anotha. And there isn’t any use waiting — no, there isn’t!”

The vice-consul laughed at the sort of imperative despair in her tone. “How are you going? Which way, I mean.”

They counted up Clementina’s debts and assets, and they found that if she took the next steamer from Genoa, which was to sail in four days, she would have enough to pay her own way and Mr. Orson’s to New York, and still have some thirty dollars over, for her expenses home to Middlemount. They allowed for a second cabin-passage, which the vice-consul said was perfectly good on the Genoa steamers. He rather urged the gentility and comfort of the second cabin-passage, but his reasons in favor of it were wasted upon Clementina’s indifference; she wished to get home, now, and she did not care how. She asked the vice-consul to see the minister for her, and if he were ready and willing, to telegraph for their tickets. He transacted the business so promptly that he was able to tell her when he came in the evening that everything was in train. He excused his coming; he said that now she was going so soon, he wanted to see all he could of her. He offered no excuse when he came the next morning; but he said he had got a letter for her and thought she might want to have it at once.

He took it out of his hat and gave it to her. It was addressed in Hinkle’s writing; her answer had come at last; she stood trembling with it in her hand.

The vice-consul smiled. “Is that the one?”

“Yes,” she whispered back.

“All right.” He took his hat, and set it on the back of his head before he left her without other salutation.

Then Clementina opened her letter. It was in a woman’s hand, and the writer made haste to explain at the beginning that she was George W. Hinkle’s sister, and that she was writing for him; for though he was now out of danger, he was still very weak, and they had all been anxious about him. A month before, he had been hurt in a railroad collision, and had come home from the West, where the accident happened, suffering mainly from shock, as his doctor thought; he had taken to his bed at once, and had not risen from it since. He had been out of his head a great part of the time, and had been forbidden everything that could distress or excite him. His sister said that she was writing for him now as soon as he had seen Clementina’s letter; it had been forwarded from one address to another, and had at last found him there at his home in Ohio. He wished to say that he would come out for Clementina as soon as he was allowed to undertake the journey, and in the meantime she must let him know constantly where she was. The letter closed with a few words of love in his own handwriting.

Clementina rose from reading it, and put on her hat in a bewildered impulse to go to him at once; she knew, in spite of all the cautions and reserves of the letter that he must still be very sick. When she came out of her daze she found that she could only go to the vice-consul. She put the letter in his hands to let it explain itself. “You’ll undastand, now,” she said. “What shall I do?”

When he had read it, he smiled and answered, “I guess I understood pretty well before, though I wasn’t posted on names. Well, I suppose you’ll want to layout most of your capital on cables, now?”

“Yes,” she laughed, and then she suddenly lamented, “Why didn’t they telegraph?”

“Well, I guess he hadn’t the head for it,” said the vice-consul, “and the rest wouldn’t think of it. They wouldn’t, in the country.”

Clementina laughed again; in joyous recognition of the fact, “No, my fatha wouldn’t, eitha!”

The vice-consul reached for his hat, and he led the way to Clementina’s gondola at his garden gate, in greater haste than she. At the telegraph office he framed a dispatch which for expansive fullness and precision was apparently unexampled in the experience of the clerk who took it and spelt over its English with them. It asked an answer in the vice-consul’s care, and, “I’ll tell you what, Miss Claxon,” he said with a husky weakness in his voice, “I wish you’d let this be my treat.”

She understood. “Do you really, Mr. Bennam?”

“I do indeed.”

“Well, then, I will,” she said, but when he wished to include in his treat the dispatch she sent home to her father announcing her coming, she would not let him.

He looked at his watch, as they rowed away. “It’s eight o’clock here, now, and it will reach Ohio about six hours earlier; but you can’t expect an answer tonight, you know.”

“No” — She had expected it though, he could see that.

“But whenever it comes, I’ll bring it right round to you. Now it’s all going to be straight, don’t you be afraid, and you’re going home the quickest way you can get there. I’ve been looking up the sailings, and this Genoa boat will get you to New York about as soon as any could from Liverpool. Besides there’s always a chance of missing connections and losing time between here and England. I should stick to the Genoa boat.”

“Oh I shall,” said Clementina, far less fidgetted than he. She was, in fact, resting securely again in the faith which had never really deserted her, and had only seemed for a little time to waver from her when her hope went. Now that she had telegraphed, her heart was at peace, and she even laughed as she answered the anxious vice-consul.

XXXVI.

The next morning Clementina watched for the vice-consul from her balcony. She knew he would not send; she knew he would come; but it was nearly noon before she saw him coming. They caught sight of each other almost at the same moment, and he stood up in his boat, and waved something white in his hand, which must be a dispatch for her.

It acknowledged her telegram and reported George still improving; his father would meet her steamer in New York. It was very reassuring, it was every thing hopeful; but when she had read it she gave it to the vice-consul for encouragement.

“It’s all right, Miss Claxon,” he said, stoutly. “Don’t you be troubled about Mr. Hinkle’s not coming to meet you himself. He can’t keep too quiet for a while yet.”

“Oh, yes,” said Clementina, patiently.

“If you really want somebody to worry about, you can help Mr. Orson to worry about himself!” the vice-consul went on, with the grimness he had formerly used in speaking of Mrs. Lander. “He’s sick, or he thinks he’s going to be. He sent round for me this morning, and I found him in bed. You may have to go home alone. But I guess he’s more scared than hurt.”

Her heart sank, and then rose in revolt against the mere idea of delay. “I wonder if I ought to go and see him,” she said.

“Well, it would be a kindness,” returned the vice-consul, with a promptness that unmasked the apprehension he felt for the sick man.

He did not offer to go with her, and she took Maddalena. She found the minister seated in his chair beside his bed. A three days’ beard heightened the gauntness of his face; he did not move when his padrona announced her.

“I am not any better,” he answered when she said that she was glad to see him up. “I am merely resting; the bed is hard. I regret to say,” he added, with a sort of formal impersonality, “that I shall be unable to accompany you home, Miss Claxon. That is, if you still think of taking the steamer this week.”

Her whole being had set homeward in a tide that already seemed to drift the vessel from its moorings. “What — what do you mean?” she gasped.

“I didn’t know,” he returned, “but that in view of the circumstances — all the circumstances — you might be intending to defer your departure to some later steamer.”

“No, no, no! I must go, now. I couldn’t wait a day, an hour, a minute after the first chance of going. You don’t know what you are saying! He might die if I told him I was not coming; and then what should I do?” This was what Clementina said to herself; but what she said to Mr. Orson, with an inspiration from her terror at his suggestion was, “Don’t you think a little chicken broth would do you good, Mr. Osson? I don’t believe but what it would.”

A wistful gleam came into the preacher’s eyes. “It might,” he admitted, and then she knew what must be his malady. She sent Maddalena to a trattoria for the soup, and she did not leave him, even after she had seen its effect upon him. It was not hard to persuade him that he had better come home with her; and she had him there, tucked away with his few poor belongings, in the most comfortable room the padrone could imagine, when the vice-consul came in the evening.

“He says he thinks he can go, now,” she ended, when she had told the vice-consul. “And I know he can. It wasn’t anything but poor living.”

“It looks more like no living,” said the vice-consul. “Why didn’t the old fool let some one know that he was short of money?” He went on with a partial transfer of his contempt of the preacher to her, “I suppose if he’d been sick instead of hungry, you’d have waited over till the next steamer for him.”

She cast down her eyes. “I don’t know what you’ll think of me. I should have been sorry for him, and I should have wanted to stay.” She lifted her eyes and looked the vice-consul defiantly in the face. “But he hadn’t the fust claim on me, and I should have gone — I couldn’t have helped it! — I should have gone, if he had been dying!”

“Well, you’ve got more horse-sense,” said the vice-consul, “than any ten men I ever saw,” and he testified his admiration of her by putting his arms round her, where she stood before him, and kissing her. “Don’t you mind,” he explained. “If my youngest girl had lived, she would have been about your age.”

“Oh, it’s all right, Mr. Bennam,” said Clementina.

When the time came for them to leave Venice, Mr. Orson was even eager to go. The vice-consul would have gone with them in contempt of the official responsibilities which he felt to be such a thankless burden, but there was really no need of his going, and he and Clementina treated the question with the matter-of-fact impartiality which they liked in each other. He saw her off at the station where Maddalena had come to take the train for Florence in token of her devotion to the signorina, whom she would not outstay in Venice. She wept long and loud upon Clementina’s neck, so that even Clementina was once moved to put her handkerchief to her tearless eyes.

At the last moment she had a question which she referred to the vice consul. “Should you tell him?” she asked.

“Tell who what?” he retorted.

“Mr. Osson — that I wouldn’t have stayed for him.”

“Do you think it would make you feel any better?” asked the consul, upon reflection.

“I believe he ought to know.”

“Well, then, I guess I should do it.”

The time did not come for her confession till they had nearly reached the end of their voyage. It followed upon something like a confession from the minister himself, which he made the day he struggled on deck with her help, after spending a week in his berth.

“Here is something,” he said, “which appears to be for you, Miss Claxon. I found it among some letters for Mrs. Lander which Mr. Bennam gave me after my arrival, and I only observed the address in looking over the papers in my valise this morning.” He handed her a telegram. “I trust that it is nothing requiring immediate attention.”

Clementina read it at a glance. “No,” she answered, and for a while she could not say anything more; it was a cable message which Hinkle’s sister must have sent her after writing. No evil had come of its failure to reach her, and she recalled without bitterness the suffering which would have been spared her if she had got it before. It was when she thought of the suffering of her lover from the silence which must have made him doubt her, that she could not speak. As soon as she governed herself against her first resentment she said, with a little sigh, “It is all right, now, Mr. Osson,” and her stress upon the word seemed to trouble him with no misgiving. “Besides, if you’re to blame for not noticing, so is Mr. Bennam, and I don’t want to blame any one.” She hesitated a moment before she added: “I have got to tell you something, now, because I think you ought to know it. I am going home to be married, Mr. Osson, and this message is from the gentleman I am going to be married to. He has been very sick, and I don’t know yet as he’ll be able to meet me in New Yo’k; but his fatha will.”

Mr. Orson showed no interest in these facts beyond a silent attention to her words, which might have passed for an open indifference. At his time of life all such questions, which are of permanent importance to women, affect men hardly more than the angels who neither marry nor are given in marriage. Besides, as a minister he must have had a surfeit of all possible qualities in the love affairs of people intending matrimony. As a casuist he was more reasonably concerned in the next fact which Clementina laid before him.

“And the otha day, there in Venice when you we’e sick, and you seemed to think that I might put off stahting home till the next steamer, I don’t know but I let you believe I would.”

“I supposed that the delay of a week or two could make no material difference to you.”

“But now you see that it would. And I feel as if I ought to tell you — I spoke to Mr. Bennam about it, and he didn’t tell me not to — that I shouldn’t have staid, no not for anything in the wo’ld. I had to do what I did at the time, but eva since it has seemed as if I had deceived you, and I don’t want to have it seem so any longer. It isn’t because I don’t hate to tell you; I do; but I guess if it was to happen over again I couldn’t feel any different. Do you want I should tell the deck-stewahd to bring you some beef-tea?”

“I think I could relish a small portion,” said Mr. Orson, cautiously, and he said nothing more.

Clementina left him with her nerves in a flutter, and she did not come back to him until she decided that it was time to help him down to his cabin. He suffered her to do this in silence, but at the door he cleared his throat and began:

“I have reflected upon what you told me, and I have tried to regard the case from all points. I believe that I have done so, without personal feeling, and I think it my duty to say, fully and freely, that I believe you would have done perfectly right not to remain.”

“Yes,” said Clementina, “I thought you would think so.”

They parted emotionlessly to all outward effect, and when they met again it was without a sign of having passed through a crisis of sentiment. Neither referred to the matter again, but from that time the minister treated Clementina with a deference not without some shadows of tenderness such as her helplessness in Venice had apparently never inspired. She had cast out of her mind all lingering hardness toward him in telling him the hard truth, and she met his faint relentings with a grateful gladness which showed itself in her constant care of him.

This helped her a little to forget the strain of the anxiety that increased upon her as the time shortened between the last news of her lover and the next; and there was perhaps no more exaggeration in the import than in the terms of the formal acknowledgment which Mr. Orson made her as their steamer sighted Fire Island Light, and they both knew that their voyage had ended: “I may not be able to say to you in the hurry of our arrival in New York that I am obliged to you for a good many little attentions, which I should be pleased to reciprocate if opportunity offered. I do not think I am going too far in saying that they are such as a daughter might offer a parent.”

“Oh, don’t speak of it, Mr. Osson!” she protested. “I haven’t done anything that any one wouldn’t have done.”

“I presume,” said the minister, thoughtfully, as if retiring from an extreme position, “that they are such as others similarly circumstanced, might have done, but it will always be a source of satisfaction for you to reflect that you have not neglected them.”

XXXVII.

In the crowd which thronged the steamer’s dock at Hoboken, Clementina strained her eyes to make out some one who looked enough like her lover to be his father, and she began to be afraid that they might miss each other when she failed. She walked slowly down the gangway, with the people that thronged it, glad to be hidden by them from her failure, but at the last step she was caught aside by a small blackeyed, black-haired woman, who called out “Isn’t this Miss Claxon? I’m Georrge’s sisterr. Oh, you’rre just like what he said! I knew it! I knew it!” and then hugged her and kissed her, and passed her to the little lean dark old man next her. “This is fatherr. I knew you couldn’t tell us, because I take afterr him, and Georrge is exactly like motherr.”

George’s father took her hand timidly, but found courage to say to his daughter, “Hadn’t you betterr let her own fatherr have a chance at herr?” and amidst a tempest of apologies and self blame from the sister, Claxon showed himself over the shoulders of the little man.

“Why, there wa’n’t no hurry, as long as she’s he’a,” he said, in prompt enjoyment of the joke, and he and Clementina sparely kissed each other.

“Why, fatha!” she said. “I didn’t expect you to come to New Yo’k to meet me.”

“Well, I didn’t ha’dly expect it myself; but I’d neva been to Yo’k, and I thought I might as well come. Things ah’ ratha slack at home, just now, anyway.”

She did not heed his explanation. “We’e you sca’ed when you got my dispatch?”

“No, we kind of expected you’d come any time, the way you wrote afta Mrs. Landa died. We thought something must be up.”

“Yes,” she said, absently. Then, “Whe’e’s motha?” she asked.

“Well, I guess she thought she couldn’t get round to it, exactly,” said the father. “She’s all right. Needn’t ask you!”

“No, I’m fust-rate,” Clementina returned, with a silent joy in her father’s face and voice. She went back in it to the girl of a year ago, and the world which had come between them since their parting rolled away as if it had never been there.

Neither of them said anything about that. She named over her brothers and sisters, and he answered, “Yes, yes,” in assurance of their well-being, and then he explained, as if that were the only point of real interest, “I see your folks waitin’ he’e fo’ somebody, and I thought I’d see if it wa’n’t the same one, and we kind of struck up an acquaintance on your account befo’e you got he’e, Clem.”

“Your folks!” she silently repeated to herself. “Yes, they ah’ mine!” and she stood trying to realize the strange fact, while George’s sister poured out a voluminous comment upon Claxon’s spare statement, and George’s father admired her volubility with the shut smile of toothless age. She spoke with the burr which the Scotch-Irish settlers have imparted to the whole middle West, but it was music to Clementina, who heard now and then a tone of her lover in his sister’s voice. In the midst of it all she caught sight of a mute unfriended figure just without their circle, his traveling shawl hanging loose upon his shoulders, and the valise which had formed his sole baggage in the voyage to and from Europe pulling his long hand out of his coat sleeve.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “here is Mr. Osson that came ova with me, fatha; he’s a relation of Mr. Landa’s,” and she presented him to them all.

He shifted his valise to the left hand, and shook hands with each, asking, “What name?” and then fell motionless again.

“Well,” said her father, “I guess this is the end of this paht of the ceremony, and I’m goin’ to see your baggage through the custom-house, Clementina; I’ve read about it, and I want to know how it’s done. I want to see what you ah’ tryin’ to smuggle in.”

“I guess you won’t find much,” she said. “But you’ll want the keys, won’t you?” She called to him, as he was stalking away.

“Well, I guess that would be a good idea. Want to help, Miss Hinkle?”

“I guess we might as well all help,” said Clementina, and Mr. Orson included himself in the invitation. He seemed unable to separate himself from them, though the passage of Clementina’s baggage through the customs, and its delivery to an expressman for the hotel where the Hinkles said they were staying might well have severed the last tie between them.

“Ah’ you going straight home, Mr. Osson?” she asked, to rescue him from the forgetfulness into which they were all letting him fall.

“I think I will remain over a day,” he answered. “I may go on to Boston before starting West.”

“Well, that’s right,” said Clementina’s father with the wish to approve everything native to him, and an instinctive sense of Clementina’s wish to befriend the minister. “Betta come to oua hotel. We’re all goin’ to the same one.”

“I presume it is a good one?” Mr. Orson assented.

“Well,” said Claxon, “you must make Miss Hinkle, he’a, stand it if it ain’t. She’s got me to go to it.”

Mr. Orson apparently could not enter into the joke; but he accompanied the party, which again began to forget him, across the ferry and up the elevated road to the street car that formed the last stage of their progress to the hotel. At this point George’s sister fell silent, and Clementina’s father burst out, “Look he’a! I guess we betta not keep this up any longa; I don’t believe much in supprises, and I guess she betta know it now!”

He looked at George’s sister as if for authority to speak further, and Clementina looked at her, too, while George’s father nervously moistened his smiling lips with the tip of his tongue, and let his twinkling eyes rest upon Clementina’s face.

“Is he at the hotel?” she asked.

“Yes,” said his sister, monosyllabic for once.

“I knew it,” said Clementina, and she was only half aware of the fullness with which his sister now explained how he wanted to come so much that the doctor thought he had better, but that they had made him promise he would not try to meet her at the steamer, lest it should be too great a trial of his strength.

“Yes,” Clementina assented, when the story came to an end and was beginning over again.

She had an inexplicable moment when she stood before her lover in the room where they left her to meet him alone. She faltered and he waited constrained by her constraint.

“Is it all a mistake, Clementina?” he asked, with a piteous smile.

“No, no!”

“Am I so much changed?”

“No; you are looking better than I expected.”

“And you are not sorry — for anything?”

“No, I am — Perhaps I have thought of you too much! It seems so strange.”

“I understand,” he answered. “We have been like spirits to each other, and now we find that we are alive and on the earth like other people; and we are not used to it.”

“It must be something like that.”

“But if it’s something else — if you have the least regret, — if you would rather” — He stopped, and they remained looking at each other a moment. Then she turned her head, and glanced out of the window, as if something there had caught her sight.

“It’s a very pleasant view, isn’t it?” she said; and she lifted her hands to her head, and took off her hat, with an effect of having got home after absence, to stay.

XXXVIII.

It was possibly through some sense finer than any cognition that Clementina felt in meeting her lover that she had taken up a new burden rather than laid down an old one. Afterwards, when they once recurred to that meeting, and she tried to explain for him the hesitation which she had not been able to hide, she could only say, “I presume I didn’t want to begin unless I was sure I could carry out. It would have been silly.”

Her confession, if it was a confession, was made when one of his returns to health, or rather one of the arrests of his unhealth, flushed them with hope and courage; but before that first meeting was ended she knew that he had overtasked his strength, in coming to New York, and he must not try it further. “Fatha,” she said to Claxon, with the authority of a woman doing her duty, “I’m not going to let Geo’ge go up to Middlemount, with all the excitement. It will be as much as he can do to get home. You can tell mother about it; and the rest. I did suppose it would be Mr. Richling that would marry us, and I always wanted him to, but I guess somebody else can do it as well.”

“Just as you say, Clem,” her father assented. “Why not Brother Osson, he’a?” he suggested with a pleasure in the joke, whatever it was, that the minister’s relation to Clementina involved. “I guess he can put off his visit to Boston long enough.”

“Well, I was thinking of him,” said Clementina. “Will you ask him?”

“Yes. I’ll get round to it, in the mohning.”

“No — now; right away. I’ve been talking with Geo’ge about it; and the’e’s no sense in putting it off. I ought to begin taking care of him at once.”

“Well, I guess when I tell your motha how you’re layin’ hold, she won’t think it’s the same pusson,” said her father, proudly.

“But it is; I haven’t changed a bit.”

“You ha’n’t changed for the wohse, anyway.”

“Didn’t I always try to do what I had to?”

“I guess you did, Clem.”

“Well, then!”

Mr. Orson, after a decent hesitation, consented to perform the ceremony. It took place in a parlor of the hotel, according to the law of New York, which facilitates marriage so greatly in all respects that it is strange any one in the State should remain single. He had then a luxury of choice between attaching himself to the bridal couple as far as Ohio on his journey home to Michigan, or to Claxon who was going to take the boat for Boston the next day on his way to Middlemount. He decided for Claxon, since he could then see Mrs. Lander’s lawyer at once, and arrange with him for getting out of the vice-consul’s hands the money which he was holding for an authoritative demand. He accepted without open reproach the handsome fee which the elder Hinkle gave him for his services, and even went so far as to say, “If your son should ever be blest with a return to health, he has got a helpmeet such as there are very few of.” He then admonished the young couple, in whatever trials life should have in store for them, to be resigned, and always to be prepared for the worst. When he came later to take leave of them, he was apparently not equal to the task of fitly acknowledging the return which Hinkle made him of all the money remaining to Clementina out of the sum last given her by Mrs. Lander, but he hid any disappointment he might have suffered, and with a brief, “Thank you,” put it in his pocket.

Hinkle told Clementina of the apathetic behavior of Mr. Orson; he added with a laugh like his old self, “It’s the best that he doesn’t seem prepared for.”

“Yes,” she assented. “He wasn’t very chee’ful. But I presume that he meant well. It must be a trial for him to find out that Mrs. Landa wasn’t rich, after all.”

It was apparently never a trial to her. She went to Ohio with her husband and took up her life on the farm, where it was wisely judged that he had the best chance of working out of the wreck of his health and strength. There was often the promise and always the hope of this, and their love knew no doubt of the future. Her sisters-in-law delighted in all her strangeness and difference, while they petted her as something not to be separated from him in their petting of their brother; to his mother she was the darling which her youngest had never ceased to be; Clementina once went so far as to say to him that if she was ever anything she would like to be a Moravian.

The question of religion was always related in their minds to the question of Gregory, to whom they did justice in their trust of each other. It was Hinkle himself who reasoned out that if Gregory was narrow, his narrowness was of his conscience and not of his heart or his mind. She respected the memory of her first lover; but it was as if he were dead, now, as well as her young dream of him, and she read with a curious sense of remoteness, a paragraph which her husband found in the religious intelligence of his Sunday paper, announcing the marriage of the Rev. Frank Gregory to a lady described as having been a frequent and bountiful contributor to the foreign missions. She was apparently a widow, and they conjectured that she was older than he. His departure for his chosen field of missionary labor in China formed part of the news communicated by the rather exulting paragraph.

“Well, that is all right,” said Clementina’s husband. “He is a good man, and he is where he can do nothing but good. I am glad I needn’t feel sorry for him, any more.”

Clementina’s father must have given such a report of Hinkle and his family, that they felt easy at home in leaving her to the lot she had chosen. When Claxon parted from her, he talked of coming out with her mother to see her that fall; but it was more than a year before they got round to it. They did not come till after the birth of her little girl, and her father then humorously allowed that perhaps they would not have got round to it at all if something of the kind had not happened. The Hinkles and her father and mother liked one another, so much that in the first glow of his enthusiasm Claxon talked of settling down in Ohio, and the older Hinkle drove him about to look at some places that were for sale. But it ended in his saying one day that he missed the hills, and he did not believe that he would know enough to come in when it rained if he did not see old Middlemount with his nightcap on first. His wife and he started home with the impatience of their years, rather earlier than they had meant to go, and they were silent for a little while after they left the flag-station where Hinkle and Clementina had put them aboard their train.

“Well?” said Claxon, at last.

“Well?” echoed his wife, and then she did not speak for a little while longer. At last she asked,

“D’he look that way when you fust see him in New Yo’k?”

Claxon gave his honesty time to get the better of his optimism. Even then he answered evasively, “He doos look pootty slim.”

“The way I cypher it out,” said his wife, “he no business to let her marry him, if he wa’n’t goin’ to get well. It was throwin’ of herself away, as you may say.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Claxon, as if the point had occurred to him, too, and had been already argued in his mind. “I guess they must ‘a’ had it out, there in New York before they got married — or she had. I don’t believe but what he expected to get well, right away. It’s the kind of a thing that lingas along, and lingas along. As fah fo’th as Clem went, I guess there wa’n’t any let about it. I guess she’d made up her mind from the staht, and she was goin’ to have him if she had to hold him on his feet to do it. Look he’a! What would you done?”

“Oh, I presume we’re all fools!” said Mrs. Claxon, impatient of a sex not always so frank with itself. “But that don’t excuse him.”

“I don’t say it doos,” her husband admitted. “But I presume he was expectin’ to get well right away, then. And I don’t believe,” he added, energetically, “but what he will, yet. As I undastand, there ain’t anything ogganic about him. It’s just this he’e nuvvous prostration, resultin’ from shock, his docta tells me; and he’ll wo’k out of that all right.”

They said no more, and Mrs. Claxon did not recur to any phase of the situation till she undid the lunch which the Hinkles had put up for them, and laid out on the napkin in her lap the portions of cold ham and cold chicken, the buttered biscuit, and the little pot of apple-butter, with the large bottle of cold coffee. Then she sighed, “They live well.”

“Yes,” said her husband, glad of any concession, “and they ah’ good folks. And Clem’s as happy as a bud with ‘em, you can see that.”

“Oh, she was always happy enough, if that’s all you want. I presume she was happy with that hectorin’ old thing that fooled her out of her money.”

“I ha’n’t ever regretted that money, Rebecca,” said Claxon, stiffly, almost sternly, “and I guess you a’n’t, eitha.”

“I don’t say I have,” retorted Mrs. Claxon. “But I don’t like to be made a fool of. I presume,” she added, remotely, but not so irrelevantly, “Clem could ha’ got ‘most anybody, ova the’a.”

“Well,” said Claxon, taking refuge in the joke, “I shouldn’t want her to marry a crowned head, myself.”

It was Clementina who drove the clay-bank colt away from the station after the train had passed out of sight. Her husband sat beside her, and let her take the reins from his nerveless grasp; and when they got into the shelter of the piece of woods that the road passed through he put up his hands to his face, and broke into sobs. She allowed him to weep on, though she kept saying, “Geo’ge, Geo’ge,” softly, and stroking his knee with the hand next him. When his sobbing stopped, she said, “I guess they’ve had a pleasant visit; but I’m glad we’a together again.” He took up her hand and kissed the back of it, and then clutched it hard, but did not speak. “It’s strange,” she went on, “how I used to be home-sick for father and motha” — she had sometimes lost her Yankee accent in her association with his people, and spoke with their Western burr, but she found it in moments of deeper feeling— “when I was there in Europe, and now I’m glad to have them go. I don’t want anybody to be between us; and I want to go back to just the way we we’e befo’e they came. It’s been a strain on you, and now you must throw it all off and rest, and get up your strength. One thing, I could see that fatha noticed the gain you had made since he saw you in New Yo’k. He spoke about it to me the fust thing, and he feels just the way I do about it. He don’t want you to hurry and get well, but take it slowly, and not excite yourself. He believes in your gleaner, and he knows all about machinery. He says the patent makes it puffectly safe, and you can take your own time about pushing it; it’s su’a to go. And motha liked you. She’s not one to talk a great deal — she always leaves that to father and me — but she’s got deep feelings, and she just worshipped the baby! I neva saw her take a child in her ahms before; but she seemed to want to hold the baby all the time.” She stopped, and then added, tenderly, “Now, I know what you ah’ thinking about, Geo’ge, and I don’t want you to think about it any more. If you do, I shall give up.”

They had come to a bad piece of road where a slough of thick mud forced the wagon-way over the stumps of a turnout in the woods. “You had better let me have the reins, Clementina,” he said. He drove home over the yellow leaves of the hickories and the crimson leaves of the maples, that heavy with the morning dew, fell slanting through the still air; and on the way he began to sing; his singing made her heart ache. His father came out to put up the colt for him; and Hinkle would not have his help.

He unhitched the colt himself, while his father trembled by with bent knees; he clapped the colt on the haunch and started him through the pasture-bars with a gay shout, and then put his arm round Clementina’s waist, and walked her into the kitchen amidst the grins of his mother and sisters, who said he ought to be ashamed.

The winter passed, and in the spring he was not so well as he had been in the fall. It was the out-door life which was best for him, and he picked up again in the summer. When another autumn came, it was thought best for him not to risk the confinement of another winter in the North. The prolongation of the summer in the South would complete his cure, and Clementina took her baby and went with him to Florida. He was very well, there, and courageous letters came to Middlemount and Ohio, boasting of the gains he had made. One day toward spring he came in languid from the damp, unnatural heat, and the next day he had a fever, which the doctor would not, in a resort absolutely free from malaria, pronounce malarial. After it had once declared itself, in compliance with this reluctance, a simple fever, Hinkle was delirious, and he never knew Clementina again for the mother of his child. They were once more at Venice in his ravings, and he was reasoning with her that Belsky was not drowned.

The mystery of his malady deepened into the mystery of his death. With that his look of health and youth came back, and as she gazed upon his gentle face, it wore to her the smile of quaint sweetness that she had seen it wear the first night it won her fancy at Miss Milray’s horse in Florence.

XXXIX.

Six years after Miss Milray parted with Clementina in Venice she found herself, towards the close of the summer, at Middlemount. She had definitely ceased to live in Florence, where she had meant to die, and had come home to close her eyes. She was in no haste to do this, and in the meantime she was now at Middlemount with her brother, who had expressed a wish to revisit the place in memory of Mrs. Milray. It was the second anniversary of her divorce, which had remained, after a married life of many vicissitudes, almost the only experience untried in that relation, and which had been happily accomplished in the courts of Dacotah, upon grounds that satisfied the facile justice of that State. Milray had dealt handsomely with his widow, as he unresentfully called her, and the money he assigned her was of a destiny perhaps as honored as its origin. She employed it in the negotiation of a second marriage, in which she redressed the balance of her first by taking a husband somewhat younger than herself.

Both Milray and his sister had a wish which was much more than a curiosity to know what had become of Clementina; they had heard that her husband was dead, and that she had come back to Middlemount; and Miss Milray was going to the office, the afternoon following their arrival, to ask the landlord about her, when she was arrested at the door of the ball-room by a sight that she thought very pretty. At the bottom of the room, clearly defined against the long windows behind her, stood the figure of a lady in the middle of the floor. In rows on either side sat little girls and little boys who left their places one after another, and turned at the door to make their manners to her. In response to each obeisance the lady dropped a curtsey, now to this side, now to that, taking her skirt between her finger tips on either hand and spreading it delicately, with a certain elegance of movement, and a grace that was full of poetry, and to Miss Milray, somehow, full of pathos. There remained to the end a small mite of a girl, who was the last to leave her place and bow to the lady. She did not quit the room then, like the others, but advanced toward the lady who came to meet her, and lifted her and clasped her to her breast with a kind of passion. She walked down toward the door where Miss Milray stood, gently drifting over the polished floor, as if still moved by the music that had ceased, and as she drew near, Miss Milray gave a cry of joy, and ran upon her. “Why, Clementina!” she screamed, and caught her and the child both in her arms.

She began to weep, but Clementina smiled instead of weeping, as she always used to do. She returned Miss Milray’s affectionate greeting with a tenderness as great as her own, but with a sort of authority, such as sometimes comes to those who have suffered. She quieted the older woman with her own serenity, and met the torrent of her questions with as many answers as their rush permitted, when they were both presently in Miss Milray’s room talking in their old way. From time to time Miss Milray broke from the talk to kiss the little girl, whom she declared to be Clementina all over again, and then returned to her better behavior with an effect of shame for her want of self-control, as if Clementina’s mood had abashed her. Sometimes this was almost severe in its quiet; that was her mother coming to her share in her; but again she was like her father, full of the sunny gayety of self-forgetfulness, and then Miss Milray said, “Now you are the old Clementina!”

Upon the whole she listened with few interruptions to the story which she exacted. It was mainly what we know. After her husband’s death Clementina had gone back to his family for a time, and each year since she had spent part of the winter with them; but it was very lonesome for her, and she began to be home-sick for Middlemount. They saw it and considered it. “They ah’ the best people, Miss Milray!” she said, and her voice, which was firm when she spoke of her husband, broke in the words of minor feeling. Besides being a little homesick, she ended, she was not willing to live on there, doing nothing for herself, and so she had come back.

“And you are here, doing just what you planned when you talked your life over with me in Venice!”

“Yes, but life isn’t eva just what we plan it to be, Miss Milray.”

“Ah, don’t I know it!”

Clementina surprised Miss Milray by adding, “In a great many things — I don’t know but in most — it’s better. I don’t complain of mine—”

“You poor child! You never complained of anything — not even of Mrs. Lander!”

“But it’s different from what I expected; and it’s — strange.”

“Yes; life is very strange.”

“I don’t mean — losing him. That had to be. I can see, now, that it had to be almost from the beginning. It seems to me that I knew it had to be from the fust minute I saw him in New Yo’k; but he didn’t, and I am glad of that. Except when he was getting wohse, he always believed he should get well; and he was getting well, when he—”

Miss Milray did not violate the pause she made with any question, though it was apparent that Clementina had something on her mind that she wished to say, and could hardly say of herself.

She began again, “I was glad through everything that I could live with him so long. If there is nothing moa, here or anywhe’a, that was something. But it is strange. Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if it had happened.”

“I think I can understand, Clementina.”

“I feel sometimes as if I hadn’t happened myself.” She stopped, with a patient little sigh, and passed her hand across the child’s forehead, in a mother’s fashion, and smoothed her hair from it, bending over to look down into her face. “We think she has her fatha’s eyes,” she said.

“Yes, she has,” Miss Milray assented, noting the upward slant of the child’s eyes, which gave his quaintness to her beauty. “He had fascinating eyes.”

After a moment Clementina asked, “Do you believe that the looks are all that ah’ left?”

Miss Milray reflected. “I know what you mean. I should say character was left, and personality — somewhere.”

“I used to feel as if it we’e left here, at fust — as if he must come back. But that had to go.”

“Yes.”

“Everything seems to go. After a while even the loss of him seemed to go.”

“Yes, losses go with the rest.”

“That’s what I mean by its seeming as if it never any of it happened. Some things before it are a great deal more real.”

“Little things?”

“Not exactly. But things when I was very young.” Miss Milray did not know quite what she intended, but she knew that Clementina was feeling her way to something she wanted to say, and she let her alone. “When it was all over, and I knew that as long as I lived he would be somewhere else, I tried to be paht of the wo’ld I was left in. Do you think that was right?”

“It was wise; and, yes, it was best,” said Miss Milray, and for relief from the tension which was beginning to tell upon her own nerves, she asked, “I suppose you know about my poor brother? I’d better tell you to keep you from asking for Mrs. Milray, though I don’t know that it’s so very painful with him. There isn’t any Mrs. Milray now,” she added, and she explained why.

Neither of them cared for Mrs. Milray, and they did not pretend to be concerned about her, but Clementina said, vaguely, as if in recognition of Mrs. Milray’s latest experiment, “Do you believe in second marriages?”

Miss Milray laughed, “Well, not that kind exactly.”

“No,” Clementina assented, and she colored a little.

Miss Milray was moved to add, “But if you mean another kind, I don’t see why not. My own mother was married twice.”

“Was she?” Clementina looked relieved and encouraged, but she did not say any more at once. Then she asked, “Do you know what ever became of Mr. Belsky?”

“Yes. He’s taken his title again, and gone back to live in Russia; he’s made peace with the Czar; I believe.”

“That’s nice,” said Clementina; and Miss Milray made bold to ask:

“And what has become of Mr. Gregory?”

Clementina answered, as Miss Milray thought, tentatively and obliquely: “You know his wife died.”

“No, I never knew that she lived.”

“Yes. They went out to China, and she died the’a.”

“And is he there yet? But of course! He could never have given up being a missionary.”

“Well,” said Clementina, “he isn’t in China. His health gave out, and he had to come home. He’s in Middlemount Centa.”

Miss Milray suppressed the “Oh!” that all but broke from her lips. “Preaching to the heathen, there?” she temporized.

“To the summa folks,” Clementina explained, innocent of satire. “They have got a Union Chapel the’a, now, and Mr. Gregory has been preaching all summa.” There seemed nothing more that Miss Milray could prompt her to say, but it was not quite with surprise that she heard Clementina continue, as if it were part of the explanation, and followed from the fact she had stated, “He wants me to marry him.”

Miss Milray tried to emulate her calm in asking, “And shall you?”

“I don’t know. I told him I would see; he only asked me last night. It would be kind of natural. He was the fust. You may think it is strange—”

Miss Milray, in the superstition of her old-maidenhood concerning love, really thought it cold-blooded and shocking; but she said, “Oh, no.”

Clementina resumed: “And he says that if it was right for me to stop caring for him when I did, it is right now for me to ca’e for him again, where the’e’s no one to be hu’t by it. Do you think it is?”

“Yes; why not?” Miss Milray was forced to the admission against what she believed the finer feelings of her nature.

Clementina sighed, “I suppose he’s right. I always thought he was good. Women don’t seem to belong very much to themselves in this wo’ld, do they?”

“No, they seem to belong to the men, either because they want the men, or the men want them; it comes to the same thing. I suppose you don’t wish me to advise you, my dear?”

“No. I presume it’s something I’ve got to think out for myself.”

“But I think he’s good, too. I ought to say that much, for I didn’t always stand his friend with you. If Mr. Gregory has any fault it’s being too scrupulous.”

“You mean, about that old trouble — our not believing just the same?” Miss Milray meant something much more temperamental than that, but she allowed Clementina to limit her meaning, and Clementina went on. “He’s changed all round now. He thinks it’s all in the life. He says that in China they couldn’t understand what he believed, but they could what he lived. And he knows I neva could be very religious.”

It was in Miss Milray’s heart to protest, “Clementina, I think you are one of the most religious persons I ever knew,” but she forebore, because the praise seemed to her an invasion of Clementina’s dignity. She merely said, “Well, I am glad he is one of those who grow more liberal as they grow older. That is a good sign for your happiness. But I dare say it’s more of his happiness you think.”

“Oh, I should like to be happy, too. There would be no sense in it if I wasn’t.”

“No, certainly not.”

“Miss Milray,” said Clementina, with a kind of abruptness, “do you eva hear anything from Dr. Welwright?”

“No! Why?” Miss Milray fastened her gaze vividly upon her.

“Oh, nothing. He wanted me to promise him, there in Venice, too.”

“I didn’t know it.”

“Yes. But — I couldn’t, then. And now — he’s written to me. He wants me to let him come ova, and see me.”

“And — and will you?” asked Miss Milray, rather breathlessly.

“I don’t know. I don’t know as I’d ought. I should like to see him, so as to be puffectly su’a. But if I let him come, and then didn’t — It wouldn’t be right! I always felt as if I’d ought to have seen then that he ca’ed for me, and stopped him; but I didn’t. No, I didn’t,” she repeated, nervously. “I respected him, and I liked him; but I neva” — She stopped, and then she asked, “What do you think I’d ought to do, Miss Milray?”

Miss Milray hesitated. She was thinking superficially that she had never heard Clementina say had ought, so much, if ever before. Interiorly she was recurring to a sense of something like all this before, and to the feeling which she had then that Clementina was really cold-blooded and self-seeking. But she remembered that in her former decision, Clementina had finally acted from her heart and her conscience, and she rose from her suspicion with a rebound. She dismissed as unworthy of Clementina any theory which did not account for an ideal of scrupulous and unselfish justice in her.

“That is something that nobody can say but yourself, Clementina,” she answered, gravely.

“Yes,” sighed Clementina, “I presume that is so.”

She rose, and took her little girl from Miss Milray’s knee. “Say good-bye,” she bade, looking tenderly down at her.

Miss Milray expected the child to put up her lips to be kissed. But she let go her mother’s hand, took her tiny skirts between her finger-tips, and dropped a curtsey.

“You little witch!” cried Miss Milray. “I want a hug,” and she crushed her to her breast, while the child twisted her face round and anxiously questioned her mother’s for her approval. “Tell her it’s all right, Clementina!” cried Miss Milray. “When she’s as old as you were in Florence, I’m going to make you give her to me.”

“Ah’ you going back to Florence?” asked Clementina, provisionally.

“Oh, no! You can’t go back to anything. That’s what makes New York so impossible. I think we shall go to Los Angeles.”

XL.

On her way home Clementina met a man walking swiftly forward. A sort of impassioned abstraction expressed itself in his gait and bearing. They had both entered the shadow of the deep pine woods that flanked the way on either side, and the fallen needles helped with the velvety summer dust of the roadway to hush their steps from each other. She saw him far off, but he was not aware of her till she was quite near him.

“Oh!” he said, with a start. “You filled my mind so full that I couldn’t have believed you were anywhere outside of it. I was coming to get you — I was coming to get my answer.”

Gregory had grown distinctly older. Sickness and hardship had left traces in his wasted face, but the full beard he wore helped to give him an undue look of age.

“I don’t know,” said Clementina, slowly, “as I’ve got an answa fo’ you, Mr. Gregory — yet.”

“No answer is better that the one I am afraid of!”

“Oh, I’m not so sure of that,” she said, with gentle perplexity, as she stood, holding the hand of her little girl, who stared shyly at the intense face of the man before her.

“I am,” he retorted. “I have been thinking it all over, Clementina. I’ve tried not to think selfishly about it, but I can’t pretend that my wish isn’t selfish. It is! I want you for myself, and because I’ve always wanted you, and not for any other reason. I never cared for any one but you in the way I cared for you, and—”

“Oh!” she grieved. “I never ca’ed at all for you after I saw him.”

“I know it must be shocking to you; I haven’t told you with any wretched hope that it would commend me to you!”

“I don’t say it was so very bad,” said Clementina, reflectively, “if it was something you couldn’t help.”

“It was something I couldn’t help. Perhaps I didn’t try.”

“Did — she know it?”

“She knew it from the first; I told her before we were married.”

Clementina drew back a little, insensibly pulling her child with her. “I don’t believe I exactly like it.”

“I knew you wouldn’t! If I could have thought you would, I hope I shouldn’t have wished — and feared — so much to tell you.”

“Oh, I know you always wanted to do what you believed was right, Mr. Gregory,” she answered. “But I haven’t quite thought it out yet. You mustn’t hurry me.”

“No, no! Heaven forbid.” He stood aside to let her pass.

“I was just going home,” she added.

“May I go with you?”

“Yes, if you want to. I don’t know but you betta; we might as well; I want to talk with you. Don’t you think it’s something we ought to talk about — sensibly?”

“Why, of course! And I shall try to be guided by you; I should always submit to be ruled by you, if—”

“That’s not what I mean, exactly. I don’t want to do the ruling. You don’t undastand me.”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” he assented, humbly.

“If you did, you wouldn’t say that — so.” He did not venture to make any answer, and they walked on without speaking, till she asked, “Did you know that Miss Milray was at the Middlemount?”

“Miss Milray! Of Florence?”

“With her brother. I didn’t see him; Mrs. Milray is not he’a; they ah’ divo’ced. Miss Milray used to be very nice to me in Florence. She isn’t going back there any moa. She says you can’t go back to anything. Do you think we can?”

She had left moments between her incoherent sentences where he might interrupt her if he would, but he waited for her question. “I hoped we might; but perhaps—”

“No, no. We couldn’t. We couldn’t go back to that night when you threw the slippas into the riva, no’ to that time in Florence when we gave up, no’ to that day in Venice when I had to tell you that I ca’ed moa fo’ some one else. Don’t you see?”

“Yes, I see,” he said, in quick revulsion from the hope he had expressed. “The past is full of the pain and shame of my errors!”

“I don’t want to go back to what’s past, eitha,” she reasoned, without gainsaying him.

She stopped again, as if that were all, and he asked, “Then is that my answer?”

“I don’t believe that even in the otha wo’ld we shall want to go back to the past, much, do you?” she pursued, thoughtfully.

Once Gregory would have answered confidently; he even now checked an impulse to do so. “I don’t know,” he owned, meekly.

“I do like you, Mr. Gregory!” she relented, as if touched by his meekness, to the confession. “You know I do — moa than I ever expected to like anybody again. But it’s not because I used to like you, or because I think you always acted nicely. I think it was cruel of you, if you ca’ed for me, to let me believe you didn’t, afta that fust time. I can’t eva think it wasn’t, no matta why you did it.”

“It was atrocious. I can see that now.”

“I say it, because I shouldn’t eva wish to say it again. I know that all the time you we’e betta than what you did, and I blame myself a good deal moa fo’ not knowing when you came to Florence that I had begun to ca’e fo’ some one else. But I did wait till I could see you again, so as to be su’a which I ca’ed for the most. I tried to be fai’a, before I told you that I wanted to be free. That is all,” she said, gently, and Gregory perceived that the word was left definitely to him.

He could not take it till he had disciplined himself to accept unmurmuringly his sentence as he understood it. “At any rate,” he began, “I can thank you for rating my motive above my conduct.”

“Oh,” she said. “I don’t think either of us acted very well. I didn’t know till aftawa’ds that I was glad to have you give up, the way you did in Florence. I was — bewild’ed. But I ought to have known, and I want you to undastand everything, now. I don’t ca’e for you because I used to when I was almost a child, and I shouldn’t want you to ca’e for me eitha, because you did then. That’s why I wish you had neva felt that you had always ca’ed fo’ me.”

“Yes,” said Gregory. He let fall his head in despair.

“That is what I mean,” said Clementina. “If we ah’ going to begin togetha, now, it’s got to be as if we had neva begun before. And you mustn’t think, or say, or look as if the’e had been anything in oua lives but ouaselves. Will you? Do you promise?” She stopped, and put her hand on his breast, and pushed against it with a nervous vehemence.

“No!” he said. “I don’t promise, for I couldn’t keep my promise. What you ask is impossible. The past is part of us; it can’t be ignored any more than it can be destroyed. If we take each other, it must be for all that we have been as well as all that we are. If we haven’t the courage for that we must part.”

He dropped the little one’s hand which he had been holding, and moved a few steps aside. “Don’t!” she said. “They’ll think I’ve made you,” and he took the child’s hand again.

They had emerged from the shadow of the woods, and come in sight of her father’s house. Claxon was standing coatless before the door in full enjoyment of the late afternoon air; his wife beside him, at sight of Gregory, quelled a natural impulse to run round the corner of the house from the presence of strangers.

“I wonda what they’a sayin’,” she fretted.

“It looks some as if she was sayin’ yes,” said Claxon, with an impersonal enjoyment of his conjecture. “I guess she saw he was bound not to take no for an answa.”

“I don’t know as I should like it very much,” his wife relucted. “Clem’s doin’ very well, as it is. She no need to marry again.”

“Oh, I guess it a’n’t that altogetha. He’s a good man.” Claxon mused a moment upon the figures which had begun to advance again, with the little one between them, and then gave way in a burst of paternal pride, “And I don’t know as I should blame him so very much for wantin’ Clem. She always did want to be of moa use — But I guess she likes him too.”

THEIR SILVER WEDDING ANNIVERSARY

CONTENTS

PART I.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXV.

PART II.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII.

XLIV.

XLV.

XLVI.

XLVII.

PART III.

XLVIII.

XLIX.

L.

LI.

LII.

LIII.

LIV.

LV.

LVI.

LVII.

LVIII.

LIX.

LX.

LXI.

LXII.

LXIII.

LXIV.

LXV.

LXVI.

LXVII.

LXVIII.

LXIX.

LXX.

LXXI.

LXXII.

LXXIII.

LXXVI.

LXXV.

PART I.

I.

“You need the rest,” said the Business End; “and your wife wants you to go, as well as your doctor. Besides, it’s your Sabbatical year, and you, could send back a lot of stuff for the magazine.”

“Is that your notion of a Sabbatical year?” asked the editor.

“No; I throw that out as a bait to your conscience. You needn’t write a line while you’re gone. I wish you wouldn’t for your own sake; although every number that hasn’t got you in it is a back number for me.”

“That’s very nice of you, Fulkerson,” said the editor. “I suppose you realize that it’s nine years since we took ‘Every Other Week’ from Dryfoos?”

“Well, that makes it all the more Sabbatical,” said Fulkerson. “The two extra years that you’ve put in here, over and above the old style Sabbatical seven, are just so much more to your credit. It was your right to go, two years ago, and now it’s your duty. Couldn’t you look at it in that light?”

“I dare say Mrs. March could,” the editor assented. “I don’t believe she could be brought to regard it as a pleasure on any other terms.”

“Of course not,” said Fulkerson. “If you won’t take a year, take three months, and call it a Sabbatical summer; but go, anyway. You can make up half a dozen numbers ahead, and Tom, here, knows your ways so well that you needn’t think about ‘Every Other Week’ from the time you start till the time you try to bribe the customs inspector when you get back. I can take a hack at the editing myself, if Tom’s inspiration gives out, and put a little of my advertising fire into the thing.” He laid his hand on the shoulder of the young fellow who stood smiling by, and pushed and shook him in the liking there was between them. “Now you go, March! Mrs. Fulkerson feels just as I do about it; we had our outing last year, and we want Mrs. March and you to have yours. You let me go down and engage your passage, and—”

“No, no!” the editor rebelled. “I’ll think about it;” but as he turned to the work he was so fond of and so weary of, he tried not to think of the question again, till he closed his desk in the afternoon, and started to walk home; the doctor had said he ought to walk, and he did so, though he longed to ride, and looked wistfully at the passing cars.

He knew he was in a rut, as his wife often said; but if it was a rut, it was a support too; it kept him from wobbling: She always talked as if the flowery fields of youth lay on either side of the dusty road he had been going so long, and he had but to step aside from it, to be among the butterflies and buttercups again; he sometimes indulged this illusion, himself, in a certain ironical spirit which caressed while it mocked the notion. They had a tacit agreement that their youth, if they were ever to find it again, was to be looked for in Europe, where they met when they were young, and they had never been quite without the hope of going back there, some day, for a long sojourn. They had not seen the time when they could do so; they were dreamers, but, as they recognized, even dreaming is not free from care; and in his dream March had been obliged to work pretty steadily, if not too intensely. He had been forced to forego the distinctly literary ambition with which he had started in life because he had their common living to make, and he could not make it by writing graceful verse, or even graceful prose. He had been many years in a sufficiently distasteful business, and he had lost any thought of leaving it when it left him, perhaps because his hold on it had always been rather lax, and he had not been able to conceal that he disliked it. At any rate, he was supplanted in his insurance agency at Boston by a subordinate in his office, and though he was at the same time offered a place of nominal credit in the employ of the company, he was able to decline it in grace of a chance which united the charm of congenial work with the solid advantage of a better salary than he had been getting for work he hated. It was an incredible chance, but it was rendered appreciably real by the necessity it involved that they should leave Boston, where they had lived all their married life, where Mrs. March as well as their children was born, and where all their tender and familiar ties were, and come to New York, where the literary enterprise which formed his chance was to be founded.

It was then a magazine of a new sort, which his business partner had imagined in such leisure as the management of a newspaper syndicate afforded him, and had always thought of getting March to edit. The magazine which is also a book has since been realized elsewhere on more or less prosperous terms, but not for any long period, and ‘Every Other Week’ was apparently — the only periodical of the kind conditioned for survival. It was at first backed by unlimited capital, and it had the instant favor of a popular mood, which has since changed, but which did not change so soon that the magazine had not time to establish itself in a wide acceptance. It was now no longer a novelty, it was no longer in the maiden blush of its first success, but it had entered upon its second youth with the reasonable hope of many years of prosperity before it. In fact it was a very comfortable living for all concerned, and the Marches had the conditions, almost dismayingly perfect, in which they had often promised themselves to go and be young again in Europe, when they rebelled at finding themselves elderly in America. Their daughter was married, and so very much to her mother’s mind that she did not worry about her, even though she lived so far away as Chicago, still a wild frontier town to her Boston imagination; and their son, as soon as he left college, had taken hold on ‘Every Other Week’, under his father’s instruction, with a zeal and intelligence which won him Fulkerson’s praise as a chip of the old block. These two liked each other, and worked into each other’s hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March had ever done. It amused the father to see his son offering Fulkerson the same deference which the Business End paid to seniority in March himself; but in fact, Fulkerson’s forehead was getting, as he said, more intellectual every day; and the years were pushing them all along together.

Still, March had kept on in the old rut, and one day he fell down in it. He had a long sickness, and when he was well of it, he was so slow in getting his grip of work again that he was sometimes deeply discouraged. His wife shared his depression, whether he showed or whether he hid it, and when the doctor advised his going abroad, she abetted the doctor with all the strength of a woman’s hygienic intuitions. March himself willingly consented, at first; but as soon as he got strength for his work, he began to temporize and to demur. He said that he believed it would do him just as much good to go to Saratoga, where they always had such a good time, as to go to Carlsbad; and Mrs. March had been obliged several times to leave him to his own undoing; she always took him more vigorously in hand afterwards.

II.

When he got home from the ‘Every Other Week’ office, the afternoon of that talk with the Business End, he wanted to laugh with his wife at Fulkerson’s notion of a Sabbatical year. She did not think it was so very droll; she even urged it seriously against him, as if she had now the authority of Holy Writ for forcing him abroad; she found no relish of absurdity in the idea that it was his duty to take this rest which had been his right before.

He abandoned himself to a fancy which had been working to the surface of his thought. “We could call it our Silver Wedding Journey, and go round to all the old places, and see them in the reflected light of the past.”

“Oh, we could!” she responded, passionately; and he had now the delicate responsibility of persuading her that he was joking.

He could think of nothing better than a return to Fulkerson’s absurdity. “It would be our Silver Wedding Journey just as it would be my Sabbatical year — a good deal after date. But I suppose that would make it all the more silvery.”

She faltered in her elation. “Didn’t you say a Sabbatical year yourself?” she demanded.

“Fulkerson said it; but it was a figurative expression.”

“And I suppose the Silver Wedding Journey was a figurative expression too!”

“It was a notion that tempted me; I thought you would enjoy it. Don’t you suppose I should be glad too, if we could go over, and find ourselves just as we were when we first met there?”

“No; I don’t believe now that you care anything about it.”

“Well, it couldn’t be done, anyway; so that doesn’t matter.”

“It could be done, if you were a mind to think so. And it would be the greatest inspiration to you. You are always longing for some chance to do original work, to get away from your editing, but you’ve let the time slip by without really trying to do anything; I don’t call those little studies of yours in the magazine anything; and now you won’t take the chance that’s almost forcing itself upon you. You could write an original book of the nicest kind; mix up travel and fiction; get some love in.”

“Oh, that’s the stalest kind of thing!”

“Well, but you could see it from a perfectly new point of view. You could look at it as a sort of dispassionate witness, and treat it humorously — of course it is ridiculous — and do something entirely fresh.”

“It wouldn’t work. It would be carrying water on both shoulders. The fiction would kill the travel, the travel would kill the fiction; the love and the humor wouldn’t mingle any more than oil and vinegar.”

“Well, and what is better than a salad?”

“But this would be all salad-dressing, and nothing to put it on.” She was silent, and he yielded to another fancy. “We might imagine coming upon our former selves over there, and travelling round with them — a wedding journey ‘en partie carree’.”

“Something like that. I call it a very poetical idea,” she said with a sort of provisionality, as if distrusting another ambush.

“It isn’t so bad,” he admitted. “How young we were, in those days!”

“Too young to know what a good time we were having,” she said, relaxing her doubt for the retrospect. “I don’t feel as if I really saw Europe, then; I was too inexperienced, too ignorant, too simple. I would like to go, just to make sure that I had been.” He was smiling again in the way he had when anything occurred to him that amused him, and she demanded, “What is it?”

“Nothing. I was wishing we could go in the consciousness of people who actually hadn’t been before — carry them all through Europe, and let them see it in the old, simple-hearted American way.”

She shook her head. “You couldn’t! They’ve all been!”

“All but about sixty or seventy millions,” said March.

“Well, those are just the millions you don’t know, and couldn’t imagine.”

“I’m not so sure of that.”

“And even if you could imagine them, you couldn’t make them interesting.
All the interesting ones have been, anyway.”

“Some of the uninteresting ones too. I used, to meet some of that sort over there. I believe I would rather chance it for my pleasure with those that hadn’t been.”

“Then why not do it? I know you could get something out of it.”

“It might be a good thing,” he mused, “to take a couple who had passed their whole life here in New York, too poor and too busy ever to go; and had a perfect famine for Europe all the time. I could have them spend their Sunday afternoons going aboard the different boats, and looking up their accommodations. I could have them sail, in imagination, and discover an imaginary Europe, and give their grotesque misconceptions of it from travels and novels against a background of purely American experience. We needn’t go abroad to manage that. I think it would be rather nice.”

“I don’t think it would be nice in the least,” said Mrs. March, “and if you don’t want to talk seriously, I would rather not talk at all.”

“Well, then, let’s talk about our Silver Wedding Journey.”

“I see. You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it.”

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really silent. He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor. He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused. When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented to go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken. To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible thread of association which drew him.

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the outward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted as only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed steward ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the ladies’ parlor and music-room. March made his wife observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large march-panes in the roof. She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like serving-maids in the ‘Fliegende Blatter’; when they went ashore she challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.

“She has only one fault,” he assented. “She’s a ship.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I decide.”

Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take, and not whether they should take any. He explained, at first gently and afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to cross the Atlantic in.

When a man has gone so far as that he has committed himself to the opposite course in almost so many words; and March was neither surprised nor abashed when he discovered himself, before they reached home, offering his wife many reasons why they should go to Europe. She answered to all, No, he had made her realize the horror of it so much that she was glad to give it up. She gave it up, with the best feeling; all that she would ask of him was that he should never mention Europe to her again. She could imagine how much he disliked to go, if such a ship as the Colmannia did not make him want to go.

At the bottom of his heart he knew that he had not used her very well. He had kindled her fancy with those notions of a Sabbatical year and a Silver Wedding Journey, and when she was willing to renounce both he had persisted in taking her to see the ship, only to tell her afterwards that he would not go abroad on any account. It was by a psychological juggle which some men will understand that he allowed himself the next day to get the sailings of the Norumbia from the steamship office; he also got a plan of the ship showing the most available staterooms, so that they might be able to choose between her and the Colmannia from all the facts.

IV.

From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so perfectly tacit.

They began to amass maps and guides. She got a Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information. He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German. He used to read German, when he was a boy, with a young enthusiasm for its romantic poetry, and now, for the sake of Schiller and Uhland and Heine, he held imaginary conversations with a barber, a bootmaker, and a banker, and tried to taste the joy which he had not known in the language of those poets for a whole generation. He perceived, of course, that unless the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his pleasure in it. In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly, had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book.

Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place for it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining the respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia. She carried on her researches solely among persons of her own sex; its experiences were alone of that positive character which brings conviction, and she valued them equally at first or second hand. She heard of ladies who would not cross in any boat but the Colmannia, and who waited for months to get a room on her; she talked with ladies who said that nothing would induce them to cross in her. There were ladies who said she had twice the motion that the Norumbia had, and the vibration from her twin screws was frightful; it always was, on those twin-screw boats, and it did not affect their testimony with Mrs. March that the Norumbia was a twin-screw boat too. It was repeated to her in the third or fourth degree of hear-say that the discipline on the Colmannia was as perfect as that on the Cunarders; ladies whose friends had tried every line assured her that the table of the Norumbia was almost as good as the table of the French boats. To the best of the belief of lady witnesses still living who had friends on board, the Colmannia had once got aground, and the Norumbia had once had her bridge carried off by a tidal wave; or it might be the Colmannia; they promised to ask and let her know. Their lightest word availed with her against the most solemn assurances of their husbands, fathers, or brothers, who might be all very well on land, but in navigation were not to be trusted; they would say anything from a reckless and culpable optimism. She obliged March all the same to ask among them, but she recognized their guilty insincerity when he came home saying that one man had told him you could have played croquet on the deck of the Colmannia the whole way over when he crossed, and another that he never saw the racks on in three passages he had made in the Norumbia.

The weight of evidence was, he thought, in favor of the Norumbia, but when they went another Sunday to Hoboken, and saw the ship, Mrs. March liked her so much less than the Colmannia that she could hardly wait for Monday to come; she felt sure all the good rooms on the Colmannia would be gone before they could engage one.

From a consensus of the nerves of all the ladies left in town so late in the season, she knew that the only place on any steamer where your room ought to be was probably just where they could not get it. If you went too high, you felt the rolling terribly, and people tramping up and down on the promenade under your window kept you awake the whole night; if you went too low, you felt the engine thump, thump, thump in your head the whole way over. If you went too far forward, you got the pitching; if you went aft, on the kitchen side, you got the smell of the cooking. The only place, really, was just back of the dining-saloon on the south side of the ship; it was smooth there, and it was quiet, and you had the sun in your window all the way over. He asked her if he must take their room there or nowhere, and she answered that he must do his best, but that she would not be satisfied with any other place.

In his despair he went down to the steamer office, and took a room which one of the clerks said was the best. When he got home, it appeared from reference to the ship’s plan that it was the very room his wife had wanted from the beginning, and she praised him as if he had used a wisdom beyond his sex in getting it.

He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady came with her husband for an evening call, before going into the country. At sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches’ table, she expressed the greatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe. They had supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not heard a word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March found rather unduly filial. In getting a little past the prime of life he did not like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he did not think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated as if they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts of impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so much the better for the little outing! Under his breath, he confounded this lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always so careful of you. She made her husband agree with her, and it came out that he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia. He volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did not have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and the captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did call her unlucky.

“Unlucky?” Mrs. March echoed, faintly. “Why do they call her unlucky?”

“Oh, I don’t know. People will say anything about any boat. You know she broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice.”

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she parted gayly with this over-good young couple. As soon as they were gone, March knew that she would say: “You must change that ticket, my dear. We will go in the Norumbia.”

“Suppose I can’t get as good a room on the Norumbia?”

“Then we must stay.”

In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question them up about the Colmannia. The people there had never heard she was called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history. They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of Mrs. March’s anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of their insincerity to her. At the end she asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his passenger list with a shaking head. He was afraid there was nothing they would like.

“But we would take anything,” she entreated, and March smiled to think of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.

“We merely want the best,” he put in. “One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days.”

They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not understand, in the foreign steamship offices. The clerk turned unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker. A brief drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia; it was within one of being the same number. It was so providential, if it was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; even Mrs. March was silent. In this supreme moment she would not prompt her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that he said, “We will take it.”

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one’s will is never free; and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the events before it. No event that followed affected it, though the day after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He felt obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.

V.

During nearly the whole month that now passed before the date of sailing it seemed to March that in some familiar aspects New York had never been so interesting. He had not easily reconciled himself to the place after his many years of Boston; but he had got used to the ugly grandeur, to the noise and the rush, and he had divined more and more the careless good-nature and friendly indifference of the vast, sprawling, ungainly metropolis. There were happy moments when he felt a poetry unintentional and unconscious in it, and he thought there was no point more favorable for the sense of this than Stuyvesant Square, where they had a flat. Their windows looked down into its tree-tops, and across them to the truncated towers of St. George’s, and to the plain red-brick, white-trimmed front of the Friends’ Meeting House; he came and went between his dwelling and his office through the two places that form the square, and after dinner his wife and he had a habit of finding seats by one of the fountains in Livingston Place, among the fathers and mothers of the hybrid East Side children swarming there at play. The elders read their English or Italian or German or Yiddish journals, or gossiped, or merely sat still and stared away the day’s fatigue; while the little ones raced in and out among them, crying and laughing, quarrelling and kissing. Sometimes a mother darted forward and caught her child from the brink of the basin; another taught hers to walk, holding it tightly up behind by its short skirts; another publicly nursed her baby to sleep.

While they still dreamed, but never thought, of going to Europe, the Marches often said how European all this was; if these women had brought their knitting or sewing it would have been quite European; but as soon as they had decided to go, it all began to seem poignantly American. In like manner, before the conditions of their exile changed, and they still pined for the Old World, they contrived a very agreeable illusion of it by dining now and then at an Austrian restaurant in Union Square; but later when they began to be homesick for the American scenes they had not yet left, they had a keener retrospective joy in the strictly New York sunset they were bowed out into.

The sunsets were uncommonly characteristic that May in Union Square. They were the color of the red stripes in the American flag, and when they were seen through the delirious architecture of the Broadway side, or down the perspective of the cross-streets, where the elevated trains silhouetted themselves against their pink, they imparted a feeling of pervasive Americanism in which all impression of alien savors and civilities was lost. One evening a fire flamed up in Hoboken, and burned for hours against the west, in the lurid crimson tones of a conflagration as memorably and appealingly native as the colors of the sunset.

The weather for nearly the whole month was of a mood familiar enough in our early summer, and it was this which gave the sunsets their vitreous pink. A thrilling coolness followed a first blaze of heat, and in the long respite the thoughts almost went back to winter flannels. But at last a hot wave was telegraphed from the West, and the week before the Norumbia sailed was an anguish of burning days and breathless nights, which fused all regrets and reluctances in the hope of escape, and made the exiles of two continents long for the sea, with no care for either shore.

VI.

Their steamer was to sail early; they were up at dawn because they had scarcely lain down, and March crept out into the square for a last breath of its morning air before breakfast. He was now eager to be gone; he had broken with habit, and he wished to put all traces of the past out of sight. But this was curiously like all other early mornings in his consciousness, and he could not alienate himself from the wonted environment. He stood talking on every-day terms of idle speculation with the familiar policeman, about a stray parrot in the top of one of the trees, where it screamed and clawed at the dead branch to which it clung. Then he went carelessly indoors again as if he were secure of reading the reporter’s story of it in that next day’s paper which he should not see.

The sense of an inseverable continuity persisted through the breakfast, which was like other breakfasts in the place they would be leaving in summer shrouds just as they always left it at the end of June. The illusion was even heightened by the fact that their son was to be in the apartment all summer, and it would not be so much shut up as usual. The heavy trunks had been sent to the ship by express the afternoon before, and they had only themselves and their stateroom baggage to transport to Hoboken; they came down to a carriage sent from a neighboring livery-stable, and exchanged good-mornings with a driver they knew by name.

March had often fancied it a chief advantage of living in New York that you could drive to the steamer and start for Europe as if you were starting for Albany; he was in the enjoyment of this advantage now, but somehow it was not the consolation he had expected. He knew, of course, that if they had been coming from Boston, for instance, to sail in the Norumbia, they would probably have gone on board the night before, and sweltered through its heat among the strange smells and noises of the dock and wharf, instead of breakfasting at their own table, and smoothly bowling down the asphalt on to the ferryboat, and so to the very foot of the gangway at the ship’s side, all in the cool of the early morning. But though he had now the cool of the early morning on these conditions, there was by no means enough of it.

The sun was already burning the life out of the air, with the threat of another day of the terrible heat that had prevailed for a week past; and that last breakfast at home had not been gay, though it had been lively, in a fashion, through Mrs. March’s efforts to convince her son that she did not want him to come and see them off. Of, her daughter’s coming all the way from Chicago there was no question, and she reasoned that if he did not come to say good-by on board it would be the same as if they were not going.

“Don’t you want to go?” March asked with an obscure resentment.

“I don’t want to seem to go,” she said, with the calm of those who have logic on their side.

As she drove away with her husband she was not so sure of her satisfaction in the feint she had arranged, though when she saw the ghastly partings of people on board, she was glad she had not allowed her son to come. She kept saying this to herself, and when they climbed to the ship from the wharf, and found themselves in the crowd that choked the saloons and promenades and passages and stairways and landings, she said it more than once to her husband.

She heard weary elders pattering empty politenesses of farewell with friends who had come to see them off, as they stood withdrawn in such refuges as the ship’s architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way. She pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some girls, of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry, or at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had sent them flowers. Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up. Others, had got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of long-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins. In the midst of the turmoil children struggled against people’s feet and knees, and bewildered mothers flew at the ship’s officers and battered them with questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled about in their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship’s side on swinging seats, were placidly smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises midway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probably not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or even for their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girl twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it. He turned from it, and looked into the eyes of his son, who was laughing at his shoulder. He said that he had to come down with a good-by letter from his sister, which he made an excuse for following them; but he had always meant to see them off, he owned. The letter had just come with a special delivery stamp, and it warned them that she had sent another good-by letter with some flowers on board. Mrs. March scolded at them both, but with tears in her eyes, and in the renewed stress of parting which he thought he had put from him, March went on taking note, as with alien senses, of the scene before him, while they all talked on together, and repeated the nothings they had said already.

A rank odor of beet-root sugar rose from the far-branching sheds where some freight steamers of the line lay, and seemed to mingle chemically with the noise which came up from the wharf next to the Norumbia. The mass of spectators deepened and dimmed away into the shadow of the roofs, and along their front came files of carriages and trucks and carts, and discharged the arriving passengers and their baggage, and were lost in the crowd, which they penetrated like slow currents, becoming clogged and arrested from time to time, and then beginning to move again.

The passengers incessantly mounted by the canvas-draped galleries leading, fore and aft, into the ship. Bareheaded, blue-jacketed, brass-buttoned stewards dodged skillfully in and out among them with their hand-bags, holdalls, hat-boxes, and state-room trunks, and ran before them into the different depths and heights where they hid these burdens, and then ran back for more. Some of the passengers followed them and made sure that their things were put in the right places; most of them remained wedged among the earlier comers, or pushed aimlessly in and out of the doors of the promenades.

The baggage for the hold continually rose in huge blocks from the wharf, with a loud clucking of the tackle, and sank into the open maw of the ship, momently gathering herself for her long race seaward, with harsh hissings and rattlings and gurglings. There was no apparent reason why it should all or any of it end, but there came a moment when there began to be warnings that were almost threats of the end. The ship’s whistle sounded, as if marking a certain interval; and Mrs. March humbly entreated, sternly commanded, her son to go ashore, or else be carried to Europe. They disputed whether that was the last signal or not; she was sure it was, and she appealed to March, who was moved against his reason. He affected to talk calmly with his son, and gave him some last charges about ‘Every Other Week’.

Some people now interrupted their leave-taking; but the arriving passengers only arrived more rapidly at the gang-ways; the bulks of baggage swung more swiftly into the air. A bell rang, and there rose women’s cries, “Oh, that is the shore-bell!” and men’s protests, “It is only the first bell!” More and more began to descend the gangways, fore and aft, and soon outnumbered those who were coming aboard.

March tried not to be nervous about his son’s lingering; he was ashamed of his anxiety; but he said in a low voice, “Better be off, Tom.”

His mother now said she did not care if Tom were really carried to Europe; and at last he said, Well, he guessed he must go ashore, as if there had been no question of that before; and then she clung to him and would not let him go; but she acquired merit with herself at last by pushing him into the gangway with her own hands: he nodded and waved his hat from its foot, and mixed with the crowd.

Presently there was hardly any one coming aboard, and the sailors began to undo the lashings of the gangways from the ship’s side; files of men on the wharf laid hold of their rails; the stewards guarding their approach looked up for the signal to come aboard; and in vivid pantomime forbade some belated leavetakers to ascend. These stood aside, exchanging bows and grins with the friends whom they could not reach; they all tried to make one another hear some last words. The moment came when the saloon gangway was detached; then it was pulled ashore, and the section of the bulwarks opening to it was locked, not to be unlocked on this side of the world. An indefinable impulse communicated itself to the steamer: while it still seemed motionless it moved. The thick spread of faces on the wharf, which had looked at times like some sort of strange flowers in a level field, broke into a universal tremor, and the air above them was filled with hats and handkerchiefs, as if with the flight of birds rising from the field.

The Marches tried to make out their son’s face; they believed that they did; but they decided that they had not seen him, and his mother said that she was glad; it would only have made it harder to bear, though she was glad he had come over to say good-by it had seemed so unnatural that he should not, when everybody else was saying good-by.

On the wharf color was now taking the place of form; the scene ceased to have the effect of an instantaneous photograph; it was like an impressionistic study. As the ship swung free of the shed and got into the stream, the shore lost reality. Up to a certain moment, all was still New York, all was even Hoboken; then amidst the grotesque and monstrous shows of the architecture on either shore March felt himself at sea and on the way to Europe.

The fact was accented by the trouble people were already making with the deck-steward about their steamer chairs, which they all wanted put in the best places, and March, with a certain heart-ache, was involuntarily verifying the instant in which he ceased to be of his native shores, while still in full sight of them, when he suddenly reverted to them, and as it were landed on them again in an incident that held him breathless. A man, bareheaded, and with his arms flung wildly abroad, came flying down the promenade from the steerage. “Capitan! Capitan! There is a woman!” he shouted in nondescript English. “She must go hout! She must go hout!” Some vital fact imparted itself to the ship’s command and seemed to penetrate to the ship’s heart; she stopped, as if with a sort of majestic relenting. A tug panted to her side, and lifted a ladder to it; the bareheaded man, and a woman gripping a baby in her arms, sprawled safely down its rungs to the deck of the tug, and the steamer moved seaward again.

“What is it? Oh, what is it?” his wife demanded of March’s share of their common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some friends on board good-by.

He passed on, and Mrs. March said, “What a charming face he had!” even before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have escaped danger. She would not hear any excuse for her. “Her children oughtn’t to have been out of her mind for an instant.”

“Don’t you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?” March asked.

She started from him. “Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?”

In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot’s letters she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times reiterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of the mail decided.

“I shouldn’t have forgiven myself,” March said, “if we hadn’t let Tom know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well.”

“It’s to Bella, too,” she reasoned.

He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar things when he came with their daughter’s steamer letter and the flowers and fruit she had sent. She said, Very well, they would all keep, and went on with her unpacking. He asked her if she did not think these home things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way she should certainly go back on the pilot-boat. He perceived that her nerves were spent. He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke about the life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the breakfast-horn, wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and clearer down their corridor.

VII.

In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife’s anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats in the dining-saloon. At first he had his ambition for the captain’s table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced Mrs. March that the captain’s table had become a superstition of the past, and conferred no special honor. It proved in the event that the captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon among the passengers who paid least for their rooms. But while the Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see what he had done for them.

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the oval openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon and up into the music-room, as thickly thronged with breakfasters. The tables were brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one time the Marches thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht realized to the last detail in blue and white violets. The ports of the saloon were open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion except the tremor from her screws. The sound of talking and laughing rose with the clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the homely smell of the coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of the roses and carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a young foolish joy of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair. When the head steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to sit they both made an inclination toward the people already at table, as if it had been a company at some far-forgotten table d’hote in the later sixties. The head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with “Bleace!” for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the equivalent of their native “Bitte!” Otherwise there was no reason to suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good half of the passengers. The stewards looked English, however, in conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down. He need not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or less nodded in return.

A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the left of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were his mother and understood him. March decided that she had been some time a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have it known. Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallen lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm. She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black, roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well as she might if she had chosen. The elderly man on her right, it was easy to see, was her father; they had a family likeness, though his fair hair, now ashen with age, was so different from hers. He wore his beard cut in the fashion of the Second Empire, with a Louis Napoleonic mustache, imperial, and chin tuft; his neat head was cropt close; and there was something Gallic in its effect and something remotely military: he had blue eyes, really less severe than he meant, though be frowned a good deal, and managed them with glances of a staccato quickness, as if challenging a potential disagreement with his opinions.

The gentleman on his right, who sat at the head of the table, was of the humorous, subironical American expression, and a smile at the corner of his kindly mouth, under an iron-gray full beard cut short, at once questioned and tolerated the new-comers as he glanced at them. He responded to March’s bow almost as decidedly as the nice boy, whose mother he confronted at the other end of the table, and with his comely bulk formed an interesting contrast to her vivid slightness. She was brilliantly dark, behind the gleam of the gold-rimmed glasses perched on her pretty nose.

If the talk had been general before the Marches came, it did not at once renew itself in that form. Nothing was said while they were having their first struggle with the table-stewards, who repeated the order as if to show how fully they had misunderstood it. The gentleman at the head of the table intervened at last, and then, “I’m obliged to you,” March said, “for your German. I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket.”

“Oh, I wasn’t speaking German,” said the other. “It was merely their kind of English.”

The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect of being tacitly amused.

The mother of the nice boy said to Mrs. March, “You may not get what you ordered, but it will be good.”

“Even if you don’t know what it is!” said the young bride, and then blushed, as if she had been too bold.

Mrs. March liked the blush and the young bride for it, and she asked, “Have you ever been on one of these German boats before? They seem very comfortable.”

“Oh, dear, no! we’ve never been on any boat before.” She made a little petted mouth of deprecation, and added, simple-heartedly, “My husband was going out on business, and he thought he might as well take me along.”

The husband seemed to feel himself brought in by this, and said he did not see why they should not make it a pleasure-trip, too. They put themselves in a position to be patronized by their deference, and in the pauses of his talk with the gentleman at the head of the table, March heard his wife abusing their inexperience to be unsparingly instructive about European travel. He wondered whether she would be afraid to own that it was nearly thirty years since she had crossed the ocean; though that might seem recent to people who had never crossed at all.

They listened with respect as she boasted in what an anguish of wisdom she had decided between the Colmannia and the Norumbia. The wife said she did not know there was such a difference in steamers, but when Mrs. March perfervidly assured her that there was all the difference in the world, she submitted and said she supposed she ought to be thankful that they, had hit upon the right one. They had telegraphed for berths and taken what was given them; their room seemed to be very nice.

“Oh,” said Mrs. March, and her husband knew that she was saying it to reconcile them to the inevitable, “all the rooms on the Norumbia are nice. The only difference is that if they are on the south side you have the sun.”

“I’m not sure which is the south side,” said the bride. “We seem to have been going west ever since we started, and I feel as if we should reach home in the morning if we had a good night. Is the ocean always so smooth as this?”

“Oh, dear, no!” said Mrs. March. “It’s never so smooth as this,” and she began to be outrageously authoritative about the ocean weather. She ended by declaring that the June passages were always good, and that if the ship kept a southerly course they would have no fogs and no icebergs. She looked round, and caught her husband’s eye. “What is it? Have I been bragging? Well, you understand,” she added to the bride, “I’ve only been over once, a great while ago, and I don’t really know anything about it,” and they laughed together. “But I talked so much with people after we decided to go, that I feel as if I had been a hundred times.”

“I know,” said the other lady, with caressing intelligence. “That is just the way with—” She stopped, and looked at the young man whom the head steward was bringing up to take the vacant place next to March. He came forward, stuffing his cap into the pocket of his blue serge sack, and smiled down on the company with such happiness in his gay eyes that March wondered what chance at this late day could have given any human creature his content so absolute, and what calamity could be lurking round the corner to take it out of him. The new-comer looked at March as if he knew him, and March saw at a second glance that he was the young fellow who had told him about the mother put off after the start. He asked him whether there was any change in the weather yet outside, and he answered eagerly, as if the chance to put his happiness into the mere sound of words were a favor done him, that their ship had just spoken one of the big Hanseatic mailboats, and she had signalled back that she had met ice; so that they would probably keep a southerly course, and not have it cooler till they were off the Banks.

The mother of the boy said, “I thought we must be off the Banks when I came out of my room, but it was only the electric fan at the foot of the stairs.”

“That was what I thought,” said Mrs. March. “I almost sent my husband back for my shawl!” Both the ladies laughed and liked each other for their common experience.

The gentleman at the head of the table said, “They ought to have fans going there by that pillar, or else close the ports. They only let in heat.”

They easily conformed to the American convention of jocosity in their talk; it perhaps no more represents the individual mood than the convention of dulness among other people; but it seemed to make the young man feel at home.

“Why, do you think it’s uncomfortably warm?” he asked, from what March perceived to be a meteorology of his own. He laughed and added, “It is pretty summerlike,” as if he had not thought of it before. He talked of the big mail-boat, and said he would like to cross on such a boat as that, and then he glanced at the possible advantage of having your own steam-yacht like the one which he said they had just passed, so near that you could see what a good time the people were having on board. He began to speak to the Marches; his talk spread to the young couple across the table; it visited the mother on the sofa in a remark which she might ignore without apparent rejection, and without really avoiding the boy, it glanced off toward the father and daughter, from whom it fell, to rest with the gentleman at the head of the table.

It was not that the father and daughter had slighted his overture, if it was so much as that, but that they were tacitly preoccupied, or were of some philosophy concerning their fellow-breakfasters which did not suffer them, for the present, at least, to share in the common friendliness. This is an attitude sometimes produced in people by a sense of just, or even unjust, superiority; sometimes by serious trouble; sometimes by transient annoyance. The cause was not so deep-seated but Mrs. March, before she rose from her place, believed that she had detected a slant of the young lady’s eyes, from under her lashes, toward the young man; and she leaped to a conclusion concerning them in a matter where all logical steps are impertinent. She did not announce her arrival at this point till the young man had overtaken her before she got out of the saloon, and presented the handkerchief she had dropped under the table.

He went away with her thanks, and then she said to her husband, “Well, he’s perfectly charming, and I don’t wonder she’s taken with him; that kind of cold girl would be, though I’m not sure that she is cold. She’s interesting, and you could see that he thought so, the more he looked at her; I could see him looking at her from the very first instant; he couldn’t keep his eyes off her; she piqued his curiosity, and made him wonder about her.”

“Now, look here, Isabel! This won’t do. I can stand a good deal, but I sat between you and that young fellow, and you couldn’t tell whether he was looking at that girl or not.”

“I could! I could tell by the expression of her face.”

“Oh, well! If it’s gone as far as that with you, I give it up. When are you going to have them married?”

“Nonsense! I want you to find out who all those people are. How are you going to do it?”

“Perhaps the passenger list will say,” he suggested.

VIII.

The list did not say of itself, but with the help of the head steward’s diagram it said that the gentleman at the head of the table was Mr. R. M. Kenby; the father and the daughter were Mr. E. B. Triscoe and Miss Triscoe; the bridal pair were Mr. and Mrs. Leffers; the mother and her son were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in last was Mr. L. J. Burnamy. March carried the list, with these names carefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his wife in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and the character of the people from it. In this sort of conjecture long experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left. Some fishing-boats flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; but already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious solitude of the ocean was beginning. There was no swell; the sea lay quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sun flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud. With the light fair wind, there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from the smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.

The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of Fourteenth Street on a summer’s day, and showed much the social average of a New York shopping thoroughfare. Distinction is something that does not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still more retrusive. A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures. His criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he could wonder if they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he had seen certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the prevailing type. It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but he wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did. It might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that his glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies that forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that the trouble was with his glasses. He made what he could of a pretty girl who had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and was luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat. She had already attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more. She kept moving herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing now this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned.

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot leaving the ship. He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held her from the ship’s side with their oars; in the offing lay the white steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other times. The Norumbia’s screws turned again under half a head of steam; the pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and caught the bundle of letters tossed after him. Then his men let go the line that was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer’s departure was finally closed. It had been dramatically heightened perhaps by her final impatience to be off at some added risks to the pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and March smiled to think how men whose lives are all of dangerous chances seem always to take as many of them as they can.

He heard a girl’s fresh voice saying at his shoulder, “Well, now we are off; and I suppose you’re glad, papa!”

“I’m glad we’re not taking the pilot on, at least,” answered the elderly man whom the girl had spoken to; and March turned to see the father and daughter whose reticence at the breakfast table had interested him. He wondered that he had left her out of the account in estimating the beauty of the ship’s passengers: he saw now that she was not only extremely pretty, but as she moved away she was very graceful; she even had distinction. He had fancied a tone of tolerance, and at the same time of reproach in her voice, when she spoke, and a tone of defiance and not very successful denial in her father’s; and he went back with these impressions to his wife, whom he thought he ought to tell why the ship had stopped.

She had not noticed the ship’s stopping, in her study of the passenger list, and she did not care for the pilot’s leaving; but she seemed to think his having overheard those words of the father and daughter an event of prime importance. With a woman’s willingness to adapt the means to the end she suggested that he should follow them up and try to overhear something more; she only partially realized the infamy of her suggestion when he laughed in scornful refusal.

“Of course I don’t want you to eavesdrop, but I do want you to find out about them. And about Mr. Burnamy, too. I can wait, about the others, or manage for myself, but these are driving me to distraction. Now, will you?”

He said he would do anything he could with honor, and at one of the earliest turns he made on the other side of the ship he was smilingly halted by Mr. Burnamy, who asked to be excused, and then asked if he were not Mr. March of ‘Every Other Week’; he had seen the name on the passenger list, and felt sure it must be the editor’s. He seemed so trustfully to expect March to remember his own name as that of a writer from whom he had accepted a short poem, yet unprinted, that the editor feigned to do so until he really did dimly recall it. He even recalled the short poem, and some civil words he said about it caused Burnamy to overrun in confidences that at once touched and amused him.

IX.

Burnamy, it seemed, had taken passage on the Norumbia because he found, when he arrived in New York the day before, that she was the first boat out. His train was so much behind time that when he reached the office of the Hanseatic League it was nominally shut, but he pushed in by sufferance of the janitor, and found a berth, which had just been given up, in one of the saloon-deck rooms. It was that or nothing; and he felt rich enough to pay for it himself if the Bird of Prey, who had cabled him to come out to Carlsbad as his secretary, would not stand the difference between the price and that of the lower-deck six-in-a-room berth which he would have taken if he had been allowed a choice.

With the three hundred dollars he had got for his book, less the price of his passage, changed into German bank-notes and gold pieces, and safely buttoned in the breast pocket of his waistcoat, he felt as safe from pillage as from poverty when he came out from buying his ticket; he covertly pressed his arm against his breast from time to time, for the joy of feeling his money there and not from any fear of finding it gone. He wanted to sing, he wanted to dance; he could not believe it was he, as he rode up the lonely length of Broadway in the cable-car, between the wild, irregular walls of the canyon which the cable-cars have all to themselves at the end of a summer afternoon.

He went and dined, and he thought he dined well, at a Spanish-American restaurant, for fifty cents, with a half-bottle of California claret included. When he came back to Broadway he was aware that it was stiflingly hot in the pinkish twilight, but he took a cable-car again in lack of other pastime, and the motion served the purpose of a breeze, which he made the most of by keeping his hat off. It did not really matter to him whether it was hot or cool; he was imparadised in weather which had nothing to do with the temperature. Partly because he was born to such weather, in the gayety of soul which amused some people with him, and partly because the world was behaving as he had always expected, he was opulently content with the present moment. But he thought very tolerantly of the future, and he confirmed himself in the decision he had already made, to stick to Chicago when he came back to America. New York was very well, and he had no sentiment about Chicago; but he had got a foothold there; he had done better with an Eastern publisher, he believed, by hailing from the West, and he did not believe it would hurt him with the Eastern public to keep on hailing from the West.

He was glad of a chance to see Europe, but he did not mean to come home so dazzled as to see nothing else against the American sky. He fancied, for he really knew nothing, that it was the light of Europe, not its glare that he wanted, and he wanted it chiefly on his material, so as to see it more and more objectively. It was his power of detachment from this that had enabled him to do his sketches in the paper with such charm as to lure a cash proposition from a publisher when he put them together for a book, but he believed that his business faculty had much to do with his success; and he was as proud of that as of the book itself. Perhaps he was not so very proud of the book; he was at least not vain of it; he could, detach himself from his art as well as his material.

Like all literary temperaments he was of a certain hardness, in spite of the susceptibilities that could be used to give coloring to his work. He knew this well enough, but he believed that there were depths of unprofessional tenderness in his nature. He was good to his mother, and he sent her money, and wrote to her in the little Indiana town where he had left her when he came to Chicago. After he got that invitation from the Bird of Prey, he explored his heart for some affection that he had not felt for him before, and he found a wish that his employer should not know it was he who had invented that nickname for him. He promptly avowed this in the newspaper office which formed one of the eyries of the Bird of Prey, and made the fellows promise not to give him away. He failed to move their imagination when he brought up as a reason for softening toward him that he was from Burnamy’s own part of Indiana, and was a benefactor of Tippecanoe University, from which Burnamy was graduated. But they, relished the cynicism of his attempt; and they were glad of his good luck, which he was getting square and not rhomboid, as most people seem to get their luck. They liked him, and some of them liked him for his clean young life as well as for his cleverness. His life was known to be as clean as a girl’s, and he looked like a girl with his sweet eyes, though he had rather more chin than most girls.

The conductor came to reverse his seat, and Burnamy told him he guessed he would ride back with him as far as the cars to the Hoboken Ferry, if the conductor would put him off at the right place. It was nearly nine o’clock, and he thought he might as well be going over to the ship, where he had decided to pass the night. After he found her, and went on board, he was glad he had not gone sooner. A queasy odor of drainage stole up from the waters of the dock, and mixed with the rank, gross sweetness of the bags of beet-root sugar from the freight-steamers; there was a coming and going of carts and trucks on the wharf, and on the ship a rattling of chains and a clucking of pulleys, with sudden outbreaks and then sudden silences of trampling sea-boots. Burnamy looked into the dining-saloon and the music-room, with the notion of trying for some naps there; then he went to his state-room. His room-mate, whoever he was to be, had not come; and he kicked off his shoes and threw off his coat and tumbled into his berth.

He meant to rest awhile, and then get up and spend the night in receiving impressions. He could not think of any one who had done the facts of the eve of sailing on an Atlantic liner. He thought he would use the material first in a letter to the paper and afterwards in a poem; but he found himself unable to grasp the notion of its essential relation to the choice between chicken croquettes and sweetbreads as entrees of the restaurant dinner where he had been offered neither; he knew that he had begun to dream, and that he must get up. He was just going to get up, when he woke to a sense of freshness in the air, penetrating from the new day outside. He looked at his watch and found it was quarter past six; he glanced round the state-room and saw that he had passed the night alone in it. Then he splashed himself hastily at the basin next his berth, and jumped into his clothes, and went on deck, anxious to lose no feature or emotion of the ship’s departure.

When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air. His room-mate was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage, and Burnamy tried to infer him from it. He perceived a social quality in his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own equipment. The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here and there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B. Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and he now imagined a trespass on his property. But he reassured himself by a glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship’s passage down the stream and through the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his room again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he professed a much more general purpose. He blamed himself for not having got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet; but there was a pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he thought might do.

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into; and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down the narrow passage where he supposed it was. A lady was standing at an open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning forward with her head within and talking to some one there. Before he could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say: “Perhaps he’s some young man, and wouldn’t care.”

Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within. The lady spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, “No, I don’t suppose you could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer.”

She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a moment at the threshold. She looked round over her shoulder and discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage. She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape; with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood staring into the doorway of his room.

He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast. He begged his pardon, as he entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him. “I’m afraid I left my things all over the place, when I got up this morning.”

The other entreated him not to mention it and went on taking from his hand-bag a variety of toilet appliances which the sight of made Burnamy vow to keep his own simple combs and brushes shut in his valise all the way over. “You slept on board, then,” he suggested, arresting himself with a pair of low shoes in his hand; he decided to put them in a certain pocket of his steamer bag.

“Oh, yes,” Burnamy laughed, nervously: “I came near oversleeping, and getting off to sea without knowing it; and I rushed out to save myself, and so—”

He began to gather up his belongings while he followed the movements of Mr. Triscoe with a wistful eye. He would have liked to offer his lower berth to this senior of his, when he saw him arranging to take possession of the upper; but he did not quite know how to manage it. He noticed that as the other moved about he limped slightly, unless it were rather a weary easing of his person from one limb to the other. He stooped to pull his trunk out from under the berth, and Burnamy sprang to help him.

“Let me get that out for you!” He caught it up and put it on the sofa under the port. “Is that where you want it?”

“Why, yes,” the other assented. “You’re very good,” and as he took out his key to unlock the trunk he relented a little farther to the intimacies of the situation. “Have you arranged with the bath-steward yet? It’s such a full boat.”

“No, I haven’t,” said Burnamy, as if he had tried and failed; till then he had not known that there was a bath-steward. “Shall I get him for you?”

“No; no. Our bedroom-steward will send him, I dare say, thank you.”

Mr. Triscoe had got his trunk open, and Burnamy had no longer an excuse for lingering. In his defeat concerning the bath-steward, as he felt it to be, he had not the courage, now, to offer the lower berth. He went away, forgetting to change his shoes; but he came back, and as soon as he got the enamelled shoes on, and shut the shabby russet pair in his bag, he said, abruptly: “Mr. Triscoe, I wish you’d take the lower berth. I got it at the eleventh hour by some fellow’s giving it up, and it isn’t as if I’d bargained for it a month ago.”

The elder man gave him one of his staccato glances in which Burnamy fancied suspicion and even resentment. But he said, after the moment of reflection which he gave himself, “Why, thank you, if you don’t mind, really.”

“Not at all!” cried the young man. “I should like the upper berth better.
We’ll, have the steward change the sheets.”

“Oh, I’ll see that he does that,” said Mr. Triscoe. “I couldn’t allow you to take any trouble about it.” He now looked as if he wished Burnamy would go, and leave him to his domestic arrangements.

X.

In telling about himself Burnamy touched only upon the points which he believed would take his listener’s intelligent fancy, and he stopped so long before he had tired him that March said he would like to introduce him to his wife. He saw in the agreeable young fellow an image of his own youth, with some differences which, he was willing to own, were to the young fellow’s advantage. But they were both from the middle West; in their native accent and their local tradition they were the same; they were the same in their aspirations; they were of one blood in their literary impulse to externate their thoughts and emotions.

Burnamy answered, with a glance at his enamelled shoes, that he would be delighted, and when her husband brought him up to her, Mrs. March said she was always glad to meet the contributors to the magazine, and asked him whether he knew Mr. Kendricks, who was her favorite. Without giving him time to reply to a question that seemed to depress him, she said that she had a son who must be nearly his own age, and whom his father had left in charge of ‘Every Other Week’ for the few months they were to be gone; that they had a daughter married and living in Chicago. She made him sit down by her in March’s chair, and before he left them March heard him magnanimously asking whether Mr. Kendricks was going to do something more for the magazine soon. He sauntered away and did not know how quickly Burnamy left this question to say, with the laugh and blush which became him in her eyes:

“Mrs. March, there is something I should like to tell you about, if you will let me.”

“Why, certainly, Mr. Burnamy,” she began, but she saw that he did not wish her to continue.

“Because,” he went on, “it’s a little matter that I shouldn’t like to go wrong in.”

He told her of his having overheard what Miss Triscoe had said to her father, and his belief that she was talking about the lower berth. He said he would have wished to offer it, of course, but now he was afraid they might think he had overheard them and felt obliged to do it.

“I see,” said Mrs. March, and she added, thoughtfully, “She looks like rather a proud girl.”

“Yes,” the young fellow sighed.

“She is very charming,” she continued, thoughtfully, but not so judicially.

“Well,” Burnamy owned, “that is certainly one of the complications,” and they laughed together.

She stopped herself after saying, “I see what you mean,” and suggested,
“I think I should be guided by circumstances. It needn’t be done at once,
I suppose.”

“Well,” Burnamy began, and then he broke out, with a laugh of embarrassment, “I’ve done it already.”

“Oh! Then it wasn’t my advice, exactly, that you wanted.”

“No!”

“And how did he take it?”

“He said he should be glad to make the exchange if I really didn’t mind.” Burnamy had risen restlessly, and she did not ask him to stay. She merely said:

“Oh, well, I’m glad it turned out so nicely.”

“I’m so glad you think it was the thing to do.” He managed to laugh again, but he could not hide from her that he was not feeling altogether satisfied. “Would you like me to send Mr. March, if I see him?” he asked, as if he did not know on what other terms to get away.

“Do, please!” she entreated, and it seemed to her that he had hardly left her when her husband came up. “Why, where in the world did he find you so soon?”

“Did you send him for me? I was just hanging round for him to go.” March sank into the chair at her side. “Well, is he going to marry her?”

“Oh, you may laugh! But there is something very exciting!” She told him what had happened, and of her belief that Burnamy’s handsome behavior had somehow not been met in kind.

March gave himself the pleasure of an immense laugh. “It seems to me that this Mr. Burnamy of yours wanted a little more gratitude than he was entitled to. Why shouldn’t he have offered him the lower berth? And why shouldn’t the old gentleman have taken it just as he did? Did you want him to make a counteroffer of his daughter’s hand? If he does, I hope Mr. Burnamy won’t come for your advice till after he’s accepted her.”

“He wasn’t very candid. I hoped you would speak about that. Don’t you think it was rather natural, though?”

“For him, very likely. But I think you would call it sinuous in some one you hadn’t taken a fancy to.”

“No, no. I wish to be just. I don’t see how he could have come straight at it. And he did own up at last.” She asked him what Burnamy had done for the magazine, and he could remember nothing but that one small poem, yet unprinted; he was rather vague about its value, but said it had temperament.

“He has temperament, too,” she commented, and she had made him tell her everything he knew, or could be forced to imagine about Burnamy, before she let the talk turn to other things.

The life of the promenade had already settled into seafaring form; the steamer chairs were full, and people were reading or dozing in them with an effect of long habit. Those who would be walking up and down had begun their walks; some had begun going in and out of the smoking-room; ladies who were easily affected by the motion were lying down in the music-room. Groups of both sexes were standing at intervals along the rail, and the promenaders were obliged to double on a briefer course or work slowly round them. Shuffleboard parties at one point and ring-toss parties at another were forming among the young people. It was as lively and it was as dull as it would be two thousand miles at sea. It was not the least cooler, yet; but if you sat still you did not suffer.

In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly. The deck-steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and he had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch sounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from winding it. His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity, and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.

XI.

At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people at the Marches’ table did not renew the premature intimacy of their breakfast talk. Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and March went on deck without her. He began to walk to and from the barrier between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary betters of the saloon.

There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for a little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work. They gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and he feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if not just, then inevitable. He argued with them that the sort of barrier which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it, ran invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before their kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to excuse the fact he was defending. Was it any worse, he asked them, than their not being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth Avenue? He made them own that if they were let across that barrier the whole second cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were silenced. But they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle eyes whenever he returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear it no longer, and strolled off toward the steerage.

There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck at the bow. They seemed to be all foreigners, and if any had made their fortunes in our country they were hiding their prosperity in the return to their own. They could hardly have come to us more shabby and squalid than they were going away; but he thought their average less apathetic than that of the saloon passengers, as he leaned over the rail and looked down at them. Some one had brought out an electric battery, and the lumpish boys and slattern girls were shouting and laughing as they writhed with the current. A young mother seated flat on the deck, with her bare feet stuck out, inattentively nursed her babe, while she laughed and shouted with the rest; a man with his head tied in a shawl walked about the pen and smiled grotesquely with the well side of his toothache-swollen face. The owner of the battery carried it away, and a group of little children, with blue eyes and yellow hair, gathered in the space he had left, and looked up at a passenger near March who was eating some plums and cherries which he had brought from the luncheon table. He began to throw the fruit down to them, and the children scrambled for it.

An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, “I shouldn’t want a child of mine down there.”

“No,” March responded, “it isn’t quite what one would choose for one’s own. It’s astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the case of others.”

“I suppose it’s something we’ll have to get used to on the other side,” suggested the stranger.

“Well,” answered March, “you have some opportunities to get used to it on this side, if you happen to live in New York,” and he went on to speak of the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or money as this poverty of the steerage.

The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed. “I don’t believe I should like to live in New York, much,” he said, and March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live. It appeared that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but he said it suited him. He added that he had never expected to go to Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought he had better go out and try Carlsbad.

March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his own case. The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if it detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home. His heart opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up. When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him, but that his name was Eltwin. He betrayed a simple wish to have March realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.

He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of affliction. “There are too many elderly invalids on this ship. I knock against people of my own age everywhere. Why aren’t your youthful lovers more in evidence, my dear? I don’t believe they are lovers, and I begin to doubt if they’re young even.”

“It wasn’t very satisfactory at lunch, certainly,” she owned. “But I know it will be different at dinner.” She was putting herself together after a nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before. “I want you to look very nice, dear. Shall you dress for dinner?” she asked her husband’s image in the state-room glass which she was preoccupying.

“I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots,” it answered.

“I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and White Star boats, when it’s good weather,” she went on, placidly. “I shouldn’t want those people to think you were not up in the convenances.”

They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March flung out, “I shouldn’t want them to think you weren’t. There’s such a thing as overdoing.”

She attacked him at another point. “What has annoyed you? What else have you been doing?”

“Nothing. I’ve been reading most of the afternoon.”

“The Maiden Knight?”

This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board. It was just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal wave. It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for historical romance, while it flattered woman’s instinct of superiority by the celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous and wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.

March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, “I suppose you didn’t waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of ‘Every Other Week’?”

“Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair — for advertising purposes, probably.”

“Mr. Burnamy has another,” she said. “I saw it sticking out of his pocket this morning.”

“Oh, yes. He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if it had his poem in it. He’s an ingenuous soul — in some ways.”

“Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men are going to dress, and let him know. He would never think of it himself.”

“Neither would I,” said her husband.

“Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset,” she sighed.

She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong. Every one talked; even the father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she spoke. She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father addressed to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.

XII.

The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the ice-closet. Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they were aware of alien witnesses. They looked up as by a single impulse, and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down upon their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with yet hungrier eyes. A boy’s nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the height of the man’s elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.

The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite movements.

The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell. “I’m glad it didn’t begin with the Little Neck clams!”

“Probably they only let those people come for the dessert,” March suggested.

The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down. The young bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a scene. The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the port, and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at Burnamy.

The young fellow laughed. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done about it, unless we pass out a plate.”

Mr. Kenby shook his head. “It wouldn’t do. We might send for the captain.
Or the chief steward.”

The faces at the port vanished. At other ports profiles passed and repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them, but they paused no more.

The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made such a cruel thing possible.

“Oh,” he mocked, “they had probably had a good substantial meal of their own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a purely aesthetic treat. But supposing it wasn’t, we’re doing something like it every day and every moment of our lives. The Norumbia is a piece of the whole world’s civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to shore with unchanged classes, and conditions. A ship’s merely a small stage, where we’re brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity.”

“Well, then,” she protested, “I don’t like being brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it. And I don’t believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and I’m sorry we came on the Norumbia.”

“Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn’t hide anything,” he began, and he was going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed in time.

“If there’s anything worse, for pity’s sake don’t tell me,” she entreated, and he forebore.

He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out of sight. He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases. He had lived a happy life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been, must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?

“Say something,” said his wife. “What are you thinking about?”

“Oh, Burnamy,” he answered, honestly enough.

“I was thinking about the children,” she said. “I am glad Bella didn’t try to come from Chicago to see us off; it would have been too silly; she is getting to be very sensible. I hope Tom won’t take the covers off the furniture when he has the fellows in to see him.”

“Well, I want him to get all the comfort he can out of the place, even if the moths eat up every stick of furniture.”

“Yes, so do I. And of course you’re wishing that you were there with him!” March laughed guiltily. “Well, perhaps it was a crazy thing for us to start off alone for Europe, at our age.”

“Nothing of the kind,” he retorted in the necessity he perceived for staying her drooping spirits. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else on any account. Isn’t it perfectly delicious? It puts me in mind of that night on the Lake Ontario boat, when we were starting for Montreal. There was the same sort of red sunset, and the air wasn’t a bit softer than this.”

He spoke of a night on their wedding-journey when they were sill new enough from Europe to be comparing everything at home with things there.

“Well, perhaps we shall get into the spirit of it again,” she said, and they talked a long time of the past.

All the mechanical noises were muffled in the dull air, and the wash of the ship’s course through the waveless sea made itself pleasantly heard. In the offing a steamer homeward bound swam smoothly by, so close that her lights outlined her to the eye; she sent up some signal rockets that soared against the purple heaven in green and crimson, and spoke to the Norumbia in the mysterious mute phrases of ships that meet in the dark.

Mrs. March wondered what had become of Burnamy; the promenades were much freer now than they had been since the ship sailed; when she rose to go below, she caught sight of Burnamy walking the deck transversely with some lady. She clutched her husband’s arm and stayed him in rich conjecture.

“Do you suppose he can have got her to walking with him already?”

They waited till Burnamy and his companion came in sight again. She was tilting forward, and turning from the waist, now to him and now from him.

“No; it’s that pivotal girl,” said March; and his wife said, “Well, I’m glad he won’t be put down by them.”

In the music-room sat the people she meant, and at the instant she passed on down the stairs, the daughter was saying to the father, “I don’t see why you didn’t tell me sooner, papa.”

“It was such an unimportant matter that I didn’t think to mention it. He offered it, and I took it; that was all. What difference could it have made to you?”

“None. But one doesn’t like to do any one an injustice.”

“I didn’t know you were thinking anything about it.”

“No, of course not.”

XIII.

The voyage of the Norumbia was one of those which passengers say they have never seen anything like, though for the first two or three days out neither the doctor nor the deck-steward could be got, to prophesy when the ship would be in. There was only a day or two when it could really be called rough, and the sea-sickness was confined to those who seemed wilful sufferers; they lay on the cushioned benching around the stairs-landing, and subsisted on biscuit and beef tea without qualifying the monotonous well-being of the other passengers, who passed without noticing them.

The second morning there was rain, and the air freshened, but the leaden sea lay level as before. The sun shone in the afternoon; with the sunset the fog came thick and white; the ship lowed dismally through the night; from the dense folds of the mist answering noises called back to her. Just before dark two men in a dory shouted up to her close under her bows, and then melted out of sight; when the dark fell the lights of fishing-schooners were seen, and their bells pealed; once loud cries from a vessel near at hand made themselves heard. Some people in the dining-saloon sang hymns; the smoking-room was dense with cigar fumes, and the card-players dealt their hands in an atmosphere emulous of the fog without.

The Norumbia was off the Banks, and the second day of fog was cold as if icebergs were haunting the opaque pallor around her. In the ranks of steamer chairs people lay like mummies in their dense wrappings; in the music-room the little children of travel discussed the different lines of steamers on which they had crossed, and babes of five and seven disputed about the motion on the Cunarders and White Stars; their nurses tried in vain to still them in behalf of older passengers trying to write letters there.

By the next morning the ship had run out of the fog; and people who could keep their feet said they were glad of the greater motion which they found beyond the Banks. They now talked of the heat of the first days out, and how much they had suffered; some who had passed the night on board before sailing tried to impart a sense of their misery in trying to sleep.

A day or two later a storm struck the ship, and the sailors stretched canvas along the weather promenade and put up a sheathing of boards across the bow end to keep off the rain. Yet a day or two more and the sea had fallen again and there was dancing on the widest space of the lee promenade.

The little events of the sea outside the steamer offered themselves in their poor variety. Once a ship in the offing, with all its square sails set, lifted them like three white towers from the deep. On the rim of the ocean the length of some westward liner blocked itself out against the horizon, and swiftly trailed its smoke out of sight. A few tramp steamers, lounging and lunging through the trough of the sea, were overtaken and left behind; an old brigantine passed so close that her rusty iron sides showed plain, and one could discern the faces of the people on board.

The steamer was oftenest without the sign of any life beyond her. One day a small bird beat the air with its little wings, under the roof of the promenade, and then flittered from sight over the surface, of the waste; a school of porpoises, stiff and wooden in their rise, plunged clumsily from wave to wave. The deep itself had sometimes the unreality, the artificiality of the canvas sea of the theatre. Commonly it was livid and cold in color; but there was a morning when it was delicately misted, and where the mist left it clear, it was blue and exquisitely iridescent under the pale sun; the wrinkled waves were finely pitted by the falling spray. These were rare moments; mostly, when it was not like painted canvas, is was hard like black rock, with surfaces of smooth cleavage. Where it met the sky it lay flat and motionless, or in the rougher weather carved itself along the horizon in successions of surges.

If the sun rose clear, it was overcast in a few hours; then the clouds broke and let a little sunshine through, to close again before the dim evening thickened over the waters. Sometimes the moon looked through the ragged curtain of vapors; one night it seemed to shine till morning, and shook a path of quicksilver from the horizon to the ship. Through every change, after she had left the fog behind, the steamer drove on with the pulse of her engines (that stopped no more than a man’s heart stops) in a course which had nothing to mark it but the spread of the furrows from her sides, and the wake that foamed from her stern to the western verge of the sea.

The life of the ship, like the life of the sea, was a sodden monotony, with certain events which were part of the monotony. In the morning the little steward’s bugle called the passengers from their dreams, and half an hour later called them to their breakfast, after such as chose had been served with coffee by their bedroom-stewards. Then they went on deck, where they read, or dozed in their chairs, or walked up and down, or stood in the way of those who were walking; or played shuffleboard and ring-toss; or smoked, and drank whiskey and aerated waters over their cards and papers in the smoking-room; or wrote letters in the saloon or the music-room. At eleven o’clock they spoiled their appetites for lunch with tea or bouillon to the music of a band of second-cabin stewards; at one, a single blast of the bugle called them to lunch, where they glutted themselves to the torpor from which they afterwards drowsed in their berths or chairs. They did the same things in the afternoon that they had done in the forenoon; and at four o’clock the deck-stewards came round with their cups and saucers, and their plates of sandwiches, again to the music of the band. There were two bugle-calls for dinner, and after dinner some went early to bed, and some sat up late and had grills and toast. At twelve the lights were put out in the saloons and the smoking-rooms.

There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places: a whiff of whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the engine-room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the dining-saloon.

The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous. The walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware that there was no refuge if they got tired of one another. The flirting itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.

There seemed to be very little of it. There were not many young people on board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls. The young men were mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among the steamer chairs. It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in the steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion. The passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to it unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along the rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in his berth with a book under the convenient electric light. He was safe there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship’s run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves. He did not meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and then rather obtruded upon the public. There were people whom he encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark whom he never met by day. But none of these were people of the great world. Before six o’clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers, whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom of the saloon promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never been to Europe. But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of withholding him from March’s advances. Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became frankly bride and groom. They seldom talked with any one else, except at table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces; they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other’s hands under it.

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy, and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland, after the summer’s travel, and settling down with him at school there. She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the first grade in his quality of editor of ‘Every Other Week’, but as a sage of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in ‘Every Other Week’, and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy confessed to have had. They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others much more his seniors. He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March upon Kenby’s practice of always taking up the language of the country he visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher opinion of him from March’s approval.

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had written and what he meant to write. When he passed them where they sat together, March heard the young fellow’s perpetually recurring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal girl, and Miss Triscoe’s indifference to him, in which a less penetrating scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal. It was only at table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break in the reserve of the father and daughter. The signs of this were so fine that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity. But at breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of people accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the Marches, and began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March of ‘Every Other Week’, which he seemed to know of in its relation to him; and the young girl addressed herself to Mrs. March’s motherly sense not the less acceptably because indirectly. She spoke of going out with her father for an indefinite time, as if it were rather his wish than hers, and she made some inquiries about places in Germany; they had never been in Germany. They had some idea of Dresden; but the idea of Dresden with its American colony seemed rather tiresome; and did Mrs. March know anything about Weimar?

Mrs. March was obliged to say that she knew nothing about anyplace in Germany; and she explained perhaps too fully where and why she was going with her husband. She fancied a Boston note in that scorn for the tiresomeness of Dresden; but the girl’s style was of New York rather than of Boston, and her accent was not quite of either place. Mrs. March began to try the Triscoes in this place and in that, to divine them and to class them. She had decided from the first that they were society people, but they were cultivated beyond the average of the few swells whom she had met; and there had been nothing offensive in their manner of holding themselves aloof from the other people at the table; they had a right to do that if they chose.

When the young Lefferses came in to breakfast, the talk went on between
these and the Marches; the Triscoes presently left the table, and Mrs.
March rose soon after, eager for that discussion of their behavior which
March knew he should not be able to postpone.

He agreed with her that they were society people, but she could not at once accept his theory that they had themselves been the objects of an advance from them because of their neutral literary quality, through which they were of no social world, but potentially common to any. Later she admitted this, as she said, for the sake of argument, though what she wanted him to see, now, was that this was all a step of the girl’s toward finding out something about Burnamy.

The same afternoon, about the time the deck-steward was making his round with his cups, Miss Triscoe abruptly advanced upon her from a neighboring corner of the bulkhead, and asked, with the air of one accustomed to have her advances gratefully received, if she might sit by her. The girl took March’s vacant chair, where she had her cup of bouillon, which she continued to hold untasted in her hand after the first sip. Mrs. March did the same with hers, and at the moment she had got very tired of doing it, Burnamy came by, for the hundredth time that day, and gave her a hundredth bow with a hundredth smile. He perceived that she wished to get rid of her cup, and he sprang to her relief.

“May I take yours too?” he said very passively to Miss Triscoe.

“You are very good.” she answered, and gave it.

Mrs. March with a casual air suggested, “Do you know Mr. Burnamy, Miss Triscoe?” The girl said a few civil things, but Burnamy did not try to make talk with her while he remained a few moments before Mrs. March. The pivotal girl came in sight, tilting and turning in a rare moment of isolation at the corner of the music-room, and he bowed abruptly, and hurried off to join her.

Miss Triscoe did not linger; she alleged the necessity of looking up her father, and went away with a smile so friendly that Mrs. March might easily have construed it to mean that no blame attached itself to her in Miss Triscoe’s mind.

“Then you don’t feel that it was a very distinct success?” her husband asked on his return.

“Not on the surface,” she said.

“Better let ill enough alone,” he advised.

She did not heed him. “All the same she cares for him. The very fact that she was so cold shows that.”

“And do you think her being cold will make him care for her?”

“If she wants it to.”

XIV.

At dinner that day the question of ‘The Maiden Knight’ was debated among the noises and silences of the band. Young Mrs. Leffers had brought the book to the table with her; she said she had not been able to lay it down before the last horn sounded; in fact she could have been seen reading it to her husband where he sat under the same shawl, the whole afternoon.

“Don’t you think it’s perfectly fascinating,” she asked Mrs. Adding, with her petted mouth.

“Well,” said the widow, doubtfully, “it’s nearly a week since I read it, and I’ve had time to get over the glow.”

“Oh, I could just read it forever!” the bride exclaimed.

“I like a book,” said her husband, “that takes me out of myself. I don’t want to think when I’m reading.”

March was going to attack this ideal, but he reflected in time that Mr.
Leffers had really stated his own motive in reading. He compromised.
“Well, I like the author to do my thinking for me.”

“Yes,” said the other, “that is what I mean.”

“The question is whether ‘The Maiden Knight’ fellow does it,” said Kenby, taking duck and pease from the steward at his shoulder.

“What my wife likes in it is to see what one woman can do and be single-handed,” said March.

“No,” his wife corrected him, “what a man thinks she can.”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Triscoe, unexpectedly, “that we’re like the English in our habit of going off about a book like a train of powder.”

“If you’ll say a row of bricks,” March assented, “I’ll agree with you. It’s certainly Anglo-Saxon to fall over one another as we do, when we get going. It would be interesting to know just how much liking there is in the popularity of a given book.”

“It’s like the run of a song, isn’t it?” Kenby suggested. “You can’t stand either, when it reaches a given point.”

He spoke to March and ignored Triscoe, who had hitherto ignored the rest of the table.

“It’s very curious,” March said. “The book or the song catches a mood, or feeds a craving, and when one passes or the other is glutted—”

“The discouraging part is,” Triscoe put in, still limiting himself to the Marches, “that it’s never a question of real taste. The things that go down with us are so crude, so coarsely spiced; they tickle such a vulgar palate — Now in France, for instance,” he suggested.

“Well, I don’t know,” returned the editor. “After all, we eat a good deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people. Even when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn’t so bad as absinthe.”

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, “If we can’t get ice-water in Europe, I don’t know what Mr. Leffers will do,” and the talk threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and European customs.

Burnamy could not bear to let it. “I don’t pretend to be very well up in French literature,” he began, “but I think such a book as ‘The Maiden Knight’ isn’t such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty well-built story when they like it. Of course it’s sentimental, and it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character, and it makes the reader imagine it too. The man who wrote that book may be a donkey half the time, but he’s a genius the other half. By-and-by he’ll do something — after he’s come to see that his ‘Maiden Knight’ was a fool — that I believe even you won’t be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book.”

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to March in the end, he deferred with authority still. March liked him for coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned to like yet. “Yes,” he said, “if he has the power you say, and can keep it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!”

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother viewed his rapture with tender amusement. The steward was at Kenby’s shoulder with the salad and his entreating “Bleace!” and Triscoe seemed to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy’s general disagreement. He said at last: “I’m afraid we haven’t the documents. You don’t seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven’t read ‘The Maiden Knight’.” He added to March: “But I don’t defend absinthe. Ice-water is better. What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both for raw whiskey — and for milk-and-water.”

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next. “The doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth Wednesday morning. I always like to get a professional opinion on the ship’s run.”

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.

“We had quite a literary dinner,” she remarked, hovering for a moment near the chair which she later sank into. “It must have made you feel very much at home. Or perhaps you’re so tired of it at home that you don’t talk about books.”

“We always talk shop, in some form or other,” said Mrs. March. “My husband never tires of it. A good many of the contributors come to us, you know.”

“It must be delightful,” said the girl. She added as if she ought to excuse herself for neglecting an advantage that might have been hers if she had chosen, “I’m sorry one sees so little of the artistic and literary set. But New York is such a big place.”

“New York people seem to be very fond of it,” said Mrs. March. “Those who have always lived there.”

“We haven’t always lived there,” said the girl. “But I think one has a good time there — the best time a girl can have. It’s all very well coming over for the summer; one has to spend the summer somewhere. Are you going out for a long time?”

“Only for the summer. First to Carlsbad.”

“Oh, yes. I suppose we shall travel about through Germany, and then go to
Paris. We always do; my father is very fond of it.”

“You must know it very well,” said Mrs. March, aimlessly.

“I was born there, — if that means knowing it. I lived there — till I was eleven years old. We came home after my mother died.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. March.

The girl did not go further into her family history; but by one of those leaps which seem to women as logical as other progressions, she arrived at asking, “Is Mr. Burnamy one of the contributors?”

Mrs. March laughed. “He is going to be, as soon as his poem is printed.”

“Poem?”

“Yes. Mr. March thinks it’s very good.”

“I thought he spoke very nicely about ‘The Maiden Knight’. And he has been very nice to papa. You know they have the same room.”

“I think Mr. Burnamy told me,” Mrs. March said.

The girl went on. “He had the lower berth, and he gave it up to papa; he’s done everything but turn himself out of doors.”

“I’m sure he’s been very glad,” Mrs. March ventured on Burnamy’s behalf, but very softly, lest if she breathed upon these budding confidences they should shrink and wither away.

“I always tell papa that there’s no country like America for real unselfishness; and if they’re all like that, in Chicago!” The girl stopped, and added with a laugh, “But I’m always quarrelling with papa about America.”

“We have a daughter living in Chicago,” said Mrs. March, alluringly.

But Miss Triscoe refused the bait, either because she had said all she meant, or because she had said all she would, about Chicago, which Mrs. March felt for the present to be one with Burnamy. She gave another of her leaps. “I don’t see why people are so anxious to get it like Europe, at home. They say that there was a time when there were no chaperons before hoops, you know.” She looked suggestively at Mrs. March, resting one slim hand on the table, and controlling her skirt with the other, as if she were getting ready to rise at any moment. “When they used to sit on their steps.”

“It was very pleasant before hoops — in every way,” said Mrs. March. “I was young, then; and I lived in Boston, where I suppose it was always simpler than in New York. I used to sit on our steps. It was delightful for girls — the freedom.”

“I wish I had lived before hoops,” said Miss Triscoe.

“Well, there must be places where it’s before hoops yet: Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, for all I know,” Mrs. March suggested. “And there must be people in that epoch everywhere.”

“Like that young lady who twists and turns?” said Miss Triscoe, giving first one side of her face and then the other. “They have a good time. I suppose if Europe came to us in one way it had to come in another. If it came in galleries and all that sort of thing, it had to come in chaperons. You’ll think I’m a great extremist, Mrs. March; but sometimes I wish there was more America instead of less. I don’t believe it’s as bad as people say. Does Mr. March,” she asked, taking hold of the chair with one hand, to secure her footing from any caprice of the sea, while she gathered her skirt more firmly into the other, as she rose, “does he think that America is going — all wrong?”

“All wrong? How?”

“Oh, in politics, don’t you know. And government, and all that. And bribing. And the lower classes having everything their own way. And the horrid newspapers. And everything getting so expensive; and no regard for family, or anything of that kind.”

Mrs. March thought she saw what Miss Triscoe meant, but she answered, still cautiously, “I don’t believe he does always. Though there are times when he is very much disgusted. Then he says that he is getting too old — and we always quarrel about that — to see things as they really are. He says that if the world had been going the way that people over fifty have always thought it was going, it would have gone to smash in the time of the anthropoidal apes.”

“Oh, yes: Darwin,” said Miss Triscoe, vaguely. “Well, I’m glad he doesn’t give it up. I didn’t know but I was holding out just because I had argued so much, and was doing it out of — opposition. Goodnight!” She called her salutation gayly over her shoulder, and Mrs. March watched her gliding out of the saloon with a graceful tilt to humor the slight roll of the ship, and a little lurch to correct it, once or twice, and wondered if Burnamy was afraid of her; it seemed to her that if she were a young man she should not be afraid of Miss Triscoe.

The next morning, just after she had arranged herself in her steamer chair, he approached her, bowing and smiling, with the first of his many bows and smiles for the day, and at the same time Miss Triscoe came toward her from the opposite direction. She nodded brightly to him, and he gave her a bow and smile too; he always had so many of them to spare.

“Here is your chair!” Mrs. March called to her, drawing the shawl out of the chair next her own. “Mr. March is wandering about the ship somewhere.”

“I’ll keep it for him,” said Miss Triscoe, and as Burnamy offered to take the shawl that hung in the hollow of her arm, she let it slip into his hand with an “Oh; thank you,” which seemed also a permission for him to wrap it about her in the chair.

He stood talking before the ladies, but he looked up and down the promenade. The pivotal girl showed herself at the corner of the music-room, as she had done the day before. At first she revolved there as if she were shedding her light on some one hidden round the corner; then she moved a few paces farther out and showed herself more obviously alone. Clearly she was there for Burnamy to come and walk with her; Mrs. March could see that, and she felt that Miss Triscoe saw it too. She waited for her to dismiss him to his flirtation; but Miss Triscoe kept chatting on, and he kept answering, and making no motion to get away. Mrs. March began to be as sorry for her as she was ashamed for him. Then she heard him saying, “Would you like a turn or two?” and Miss Triscoe answering, “Why, yes, thank you,” and promptly getting out of her chair as if the pains they had both been at to get her settled in it were all nothing.

She had the composure to say, “You can leave your shawl with me, Miss Triscoe,” and to receive her fervent, “Oh, thank you,” before they sailed off together, with inhuman indifference to the girl at the corner of the music-room. Then she sank into a kind of triumphal collapse, from which she roused herself to point her husband to the chair beside her when he happened along.

He chose to be perverse about her romance. “Well, now, you had better let them alone. Remember Kendricks.” He meant one of their young friends whose love-affair they had promoted till his happy marriage left them in lasting doubt of what they had done. “My sympathies are all with the pivotal girl. Hadn’t she as much right to him, for the time being, or for good and all, as Miss Triscoe?”

“That depends upon what you think of Burnamy.”

“Well, I don’t like to see a girl have a young man snatched away from her just when she’s made sure of him. How do you suppose she is feeling now?”

“She isn’t feeling at all. She’s letting her revolving light fall upon half a dozen other young men by this time, collectively or consecutively. All that she wants to make sure of is that they’re young men — or old ones, even.”

March laughed, but not altogether at what his wife said. “I’ve been having a little talk with Papa Triscoe, in the smoking-room.”

“You smell like it,” said his wife, not to seem too eager: “Well?”

“Well, Papa Triscoe seems to be in a pout. He doesn’t think things are going as they should in America. He hasn’t been consulted, or if he has, his opinion hasn’t been acted upon.”

“I think he’s horrid,” said Mrs. March. “Who are they?”

“I couldn’t make out, and I couldn’t ask. But I’ll tell you what I think.”

“What?”

“That there’s no chance for, Burnamy. He’s taking his daughter out to marry her to a crowned head.”

XV.

It was this afternoon that the dance took place on the south promenade. Everybody came and looked, and the circle around the waltzers was three or four deep. Between the surrounding heads and shoulders, the hats of the young ladies wheeling and whirling, and the faces of the men who were wheeling and whirling them, rose and sank with the rhythm of their steps. The space allotted to the dancing was walled to seaward with canvas, and was prettily treated with German, and American flags: it was hard to go wrong with flags, Miss Triscoe said, securing herself under Mrs. March’s wing.

Where they stood they could see Burnamy’s face, flashing and flushing in the dance; at the end of the first piece he came to them, and remained talking and laughing till the music began again.

“Don’t you want to try it?” he asked abruptly of Miss Triscoe.

“Isn’t it rather — public?” she asked back.

Mrs. March could feel the hand which the girl had put through her arm thrill with temptation; but Burnamy could not.

“Perhaps it is rather obvious,” he said, and he made a long glide over the deck to the feet of the pivotal girl, anticipating another young man who was rapidly advancing from the opposite quarter. The next moment her hat and his face showed themselves in the necessary proximity to each other within the circle.

“How well she dances!” said Miss Triscoe.

“Do you think so? She looks as if she had been wound up and set going.”

“She’s very graceful,” the girl persisted.

The day ended with an entertainment in the saloon for one of the marine charities which address themselves to the hearts and pockets of passengers on all steamers. There were recitations in English and German, and songs from several people who had kindly consented, and ever more piano performance. Most of those who took part were of the race gifted in art and finance; its children excelled in the music, and its fathers counted the gate-money during the last half of the programme, with an audible clinking of the silver on the table before them.

Miss Triscoe was with her father, and Mrs. March was herself chaperoned by Mr. Burnamy: her husband had refused to come to the entertainment. She hoped to leave Burnamy and Miss Triscoe together before the evening ended; but Miss Triscoe merely stopped with her father, in quitting the saloon, to laugh at some features of the entertainment, as people who take no part in such things do; Burnamy stood up to exchange some unimpassioned words with her, and then they said good-night.

The next morning, at five o’clock, the Norumbia came to anchor in the pretty harbor of Plymouth. In the cool early light the town lay distinct along the shore, quaint with its small English houses, and stately with come public edifices of unknown function on the uplands; a country-seat of aristocratic aspect showed itself on one of the heights; on another the tower of a country church peered over the tree-tops; there were lines of fortifications, as peaceful, at their distance, as the stone walls dividing the green fields. The very iron-clads in the harbor close at hand contributed to the amiable gayety of the scene under the pale blue English sky, already broken with clouds from which the flush of the sunrise had not quite faded. The breath of the land came freshly out over the water; one could almost smell the grass and the leaves. Gulls wheeled and darted over the crisp water; the tones of the English voices on the tender were pleasant to the ear, as it fussed and scuffled to the ship’s side. A few score of the passengers left her; with their baggage they formed picturesque groups on the tender’s deck, and they set out for the shore waving their hands and their handkerchiefs to the friends they left clustering along the rail of the Norumbia. Mr. and Mrs. Leffers bade March farewell, in the final fondness inspired by his having coffee with them before they left the ship; they said they hated to leave.

The stop had roused everybody, and the breakfast tables were promptly filled, except such as the passengers landing at Plymouth had vacated; these were stripped of their cloths, and the remaining commensals placed at others. The seats of the Lefferses were given to March’s old Ohio friend and his wife. He tried to engage them in the tally which began to be general in the excitement of having touched land; but they shyly held aloof.

Some English newspapers had come aboard from the tug, and there was the usual good-natured adjustment of the American self-satisfaction, among those who had seen them, to the ever-surprising fact that our continent is apparently of no interest to Europe. There were some meagre New York stock-market quotations in the papers; a paragraph in fine print announced the lynching of a negro in Alabama; another recorded a coal-mining strike in Pennsylvania.

“I always have to get used to it over again,” said Kenby. “This is the twentieth time I have been across, and I’m just as much astonished as I was the first, to find out that they don’t want to know anything about us here.”

“Oh,” said March, “curiosity and the weather both come from the west. San
Francisco wants to know about Denver, Denver about Chicago, Chicago about
New York, and New York about London; but curiosity never travels the
other way any more than a hot wave or a cold wave.”

“Ah, but London doesn’t care a rap about Vienna,” said Kenby.

“Well, some pressures give out before they reach the coast, on our own side. It isn’t an infallible analogy.”

Triscoe was fiercely chewing a morsel, as if in haste to take part in the discussion. He gulped it, and broke out. “Why should they care about us, anyway?”

March lightly ventured, “Oh, men and brothers, you know.”

“That isn’t sufficient ground. The Chinese are men and brothers; so are the South-Americans and Central-Africans, and Hawaiians; but we’re not impatient for the latest news about them. It’s civilization that interests civilization.”

“I hope that fact doesn’t leave us out in the cold with the barbarians?”
Burnamy put in, with a smile.

“Do you think we are civilized?” retorted the other.

“We have that superstition in Chicago,” said Burnamy. He added, still smiling, “About the New-Yorkers, I mean.”

“You’re more superstitious in Chicago than I supposed. New York is an anarchy, tempered by vigilance committees.”

“Oh, I don’t think you can say that,” Kenby cheerfully protested, “since the Reformers came in. Look at our streets!”

“Yes, our streets are clean, for the time being, and when we look at them we think we have made a clean sweep in our manners and morals. But how long do you think it will be before Tammany will be in the saddle again?”

“Oh, never in the world!” said the optimistic head of the table.

“I wish I had your faith; or I should if I didn’t feel that it is one of the things that help to establish Tammanys with us. You will see our Tammany in power after the next election.” Kenby laughed in a large-hearted incredulity; and his laugh was like fuel to the other’s flame. “New York is politically a mediaeval Italian republic, and it’s morally a frontier mining-town. Socially it’s—” He stopped as if he could not say what.

“I think it’s a place where you have a very nice time, papa,” said his daughter, and Burnamy smiled with her; not because he knew anything about it.

Her father went on as if he had not heard her. “It’s as vulgar and crude as money can make it. Nothing counts but money, and as soon as there’s enough, it counts for everything. In less than a year you’ll have Tammany in power; it won’t be more than a year till you’ll have it in society.”

“Oh no! Oh no!” came from Kenby. He did not care much for society, but he vaguely respected it as the stronghold of the proprieties and the amenities.

“Isn’t society a good place for Tammany to be in?” asked March in the pause Triscoe let follow upon Kenby’s laugh.

“There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be. Society is as bad as all the rest of it. And what New York is, politically, morally, and socially, the whole country wishes to be and tries to be.”

There was that measure of truth in the words which silences; no one could find just the terms of refutation.

“Well,” said Kenby at last, “it’s a good thing there are so many lines to
Europe. We’ve still got the right to emigrate.”

“Yes, but even there we don’t escape the abuse of our infamous newspapers for exercising a man’s right to live where he chooses. And there is no country in Europe — except Turkey, or Spain — that isn’t a better home for an honest man than the United States.”

The Ohioan had once before cleared his throat as if he were going to speak. Now, he leaned far enough forward to catch Triscoe’s eye, and said, slowly and distinctly: “I don’t know just what reason you have to feel as you do about the country. I feel differently about it myself — perhaps because I fought for it.”

At first, the others were glad of this arrogance; it even seemed an answer; but Burnamy saw Miss Triscoe’s cheek, flush, and then he doubted its validity.

Triscoe nervously crushed a biscuit in his hand, as if to expend a violent impulse upon it. He said, coldly, “I was speaking from that stand-point.”

The Ohioan shrank back in his seat, and March felt sorry for him, though he had put himself in the wrong. His old hand trembled beside his plate, and his head shook, while his lips formed silent words; and his shy wife was sharing his pain and shame.

Kenby began to talk about the stop which the Norumbia was to make at Cherbourg, and about what hour the next day they should all be in Cuxhaven. Miss Triscoe said they had never come on the Hanseatic Line before, and asked several questions. Her father did not speak again, and after a little while he rose without waiting for her to make the move from table; he had punctiliously deferred to her hitherto. Eltwin rose at the same time, and March feared that he might be going to provoke another defeat, in some way.

Eltwin lifted his voice, and said, trying to catch Triscoe’s eye, “I think I ought to beg your pardon, sir. I do beg your pardon.”

March perceived that Eltwin wished to make the offer of his reparation as distinct as his aggression had been; and now he quaked for Triscoe, whose daughter he saw glance apprehensively at her father as she swayed aside to let the two men come together.

“That is all right, Colonel—”

“Major,” Eltwin conscientiously interposed.

“Major,” Triscoe bowed; and he put out his hand and grasped the hand which had been tremulously rising toward him. “There can’t be any doubt of what we did, no matter what we’ve got.”

“No, no!” said the other, eagerly. “That was what I meant, sir. I don’t think as you do; but I believe that a man who helped to save the country has a right to think what he pleases about it.”

Triscoe said, “That is all right, my dear sir. May I ask your regiment?”

The Marches let the old fellows walk away together, followed by the wife of the one and the daughter of the other. They saw the young girl making some graceful overtures of speech to the elder woman as they went.

“That was rather fine, my dear,” said Mrs. March.

“Well, I don’t know. It was a little too dramatic, wasn’t it? It wasn’t what I should have expected of real life.”

“Oh, you spoil everything! If that’s the spirit you’re going through
Europe in!”

“It isn’t. As soon as I touch European soil I shall reform.”

XVI.

That was not the first time General Triscoe had silenced question of his opinions with the argument he had used upon Eltwin, though he was seldom able to use it so aptly. He always found that people suffered, his belief in our national degeneration much more readily when they knew that he had left a diplomatic position in Europe (he had gone abroad as secretary of a minor legation) to come home and fight for the Union. Some millions of other men had gone into the war from the varied motives which impelled men at that time; but he was aware that he had distinction, as a man of property and a man of family, in doing so. His family had improved as time passed, and it was now so old that back of his grandfather it was lost in antiquity. This ancestor had retired from the sea and become a merchant in his native Rhode Island port, where his son established himself as a physician, and married the daughter of a former slave-trader whose social position was the highest in the place; Triscoe liked to mention his maternal grandfather when he wished a listener to realize just how anomalous his part in a war against slavery was; it heightened the effect of his pose.

He fought gallantly through the war, and he was brevetted Brigadier-General at the close. With this honor, and with the wound which caused an almost imperceptible limp in his gait, he won the heart of a rich New York girl, and her father set him up in a business, which was not long in going to pieces in his hands. Then the young couple went to live in Paris, where their daughter was born, and where the mother died when the child was ten years old. A little later his father-in-law died, and Triscoe returned to New York, where he found the fortune which his daughter had inherited was much less than he somehow thought he had a right to expect.

The income from her fortune was enough to live on, and he did not go back to Paris, where, in fact, things were not so much to his mind under the Republic as they had been under the Second Empire. He was still willing to do something for his country, however, and he allowed his name to be used on a citizen’s ticket in his district; but his provision-man was sent to Congress instead. Then he retired to Rhode Island and attempted to convert his shore property into a watering-place; but after being attractively plotted and laid out with streets and sidewalks, it allured no one to build on it except the birds and the chipmonks, and he came back to New York, where his daughter had remained in school.

One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them. She had no duties, but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian. Her character was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for the summer.

The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at Berne. Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without it. He was really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved it. His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children. She did not think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father. She said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived? They seemed to have everything there, like any place. She had wanted to ask Mrs. Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March’s suggestion he took one of the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where the Norumbia was to land again. The young people talked across Mrs. March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like airy clefts in low banks of clouds. It seemed all the nicer not to know just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of the ship. Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea. There had been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they shrank from forming others. Then the charm of the idle, eventless life grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable end.

Now that the beginning of the end had come, the pangs of disintegration were felt in all the once-more-repellant particles. Burnamy and Miss Triscoe, as they hung upon the rail, owned to each other that they hated to have the voyage over. They had liked leaving Plymouth and being at sea again; they wished that they need not be reminded of another debarkation by the energy of the crane in hoisting the Cherbourg baggage from the hold.

They approved of the picturesqueness of three French vessels of war that passed, dragging their kraken shapes low through the level water. At Cherbourg an emotional French tender came out to the ship, very different in her clamorous voices and excited figures from the steady self-control of the English tender at Plymouth; and they thought the French fortifications much more on show than the English had been. Nothing marked their youthful date so much to the Marches, who presently joined them, as their failure to realize that in this peaceful sea the great battle between the Kearsarge and the Alabama was fought. The elder couple tried to affect their imaginations with the fact which reanimated the spectre of a dreadful war for themselves; but they had to pass on and, leave the young people unmoved.

Mrs. March wondered if they noticed the debarkation of the pivotal girl, whom she saw standing on the deck of the tender, with her hands at her waist, and giving now this side and now that side of her face to the young men waving their hats to her from the rail of the ship. Burnamy was not of their number, and he seemed not to know that the girl was leaving him finally to Miss Triscoe. If Miss Triscoe knew it she did nothing the whole of that long, last afternoon to profit by the fact. Burnamy spent a great part of it in the chair beside Mrs. March, and he showed an intolerable resignation to the girl’s absence.

“Yes,” said March, taking the place Burnamy left at last, “that terrible patience of youth!”

“Patience? Folly! Stupidity! They ought to be together every instant! Do they suppose that life is full of such chances? Do they think that fate has nothing to do but—”

She stopped for a fit climax, and he suggested, “Hang round and wait on them?”

“Yes! It’s their one chance in a life-time, probably.”

“Then you’ve quite decided that they’re in love?” He sank comfortably back, and put up his weary legs on the chair’s extension with the conviction that love had no such joy as that to offer.

“I’ve decided that they’re intensely interested in each other.”

“Then what more can we ask of them? And why do you care what they do or don’t do with their chance? Why do you wish their love well, if it’s that? Is marriage such a very certain good?”

“It isn’t all that it might be, but it’s all that there is. What would our lives have been without it?” she retorted.

“Oh, we should have got on. It’s such a tremendous risk that we, ought to go round begging people to think twice, to count a hundred, or a nonillion, before they fall in love to the marrying-point. I don’t mind their flirting; that amuses them; but marrying is a different thing. I doubt if Papa Triscoe would take kindly to the notion of a son-in-law he hadn’t selected himself, and his daughter doesn’t strike me as a young lady who has any wisdom to throw away on a choice. She has her little charm; her little gift of beauty, of grace, of spirit, and the other things that go with her age and sex; but what could she do for a fellow like Burnamy, who has his way to make, who has the ladder of fame to climb, with an old mother at the bottom of it to look after? You wouldn’t want him to have an eye on Miss Triscoe’s money, even if she had money, and I doubt if she has much. It’s all very pretty to have a girl like her fascinated with a youth of his simple traditions; though Burnamy isn’t altogether pastoral in his ideals, and he looks forward to a place in the very world she belongs to. I don’t think it’s for us to promote the affair.”

“Well, perhaps you’re right,” she sighed. “I will let them alone from this out. Thank goodness, I shall not have them under my eyes very long.”

“Oh, I don’t think there’s any harm done yet,” said her husband, with a laugh.

At dinner there seemed so little harm of the kind he meant that she suffered from an illogical disappointment. The young people got through the meal with no talk that seemed inductive; Burnamy left the table first, and Miss Triscoe bore his going without apparent discouragement; she kept on chatting with March till his wife took him away to their chairs on deck.

There were a few more ships in sight than there were in mid-ocean; but the late twilight thickened over the North Sea quite like the night after they left New York, except that it was colder; and their hearts turned to their children, who had been in abeyance for the week past, with a remorseful pang. “Well,” she said, “I wish we were going to be in New York to-morrow, instead of Hamburg.”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” he protested. “Not so bad as that, my dear. This is the last night, and it’s hard to manage, as the last night always is. I suppose the last night on earth—”

“Basil!” she implored.

“Well, I won’t, then. But what I want is to see a Dutch lugger. I’ve never seen a Dutch lugger, and—”

She suddenly pressed his arm, and in obedience to the signal he was silent; though it seemed afterwards that he ought to have gone on talking as if he did not see Burnamy and Miss Triscoe swinging slowly by. They were walking close together, and she was leaning forward and looking up into his face while he talked.

“Now,” Mrs. March whispered, long after they were out of hearing, “let us go instantly. I wouldn’t for worlds have them see us here when they get found again. They would feel that they had to stop and speak, and that would spoil everything. Come!”

XVII.

Burnamy paused in a flow of autobiography, and modestly waited for Miss
Triscoe’s prompting. He had not to wait long.

“And then, how soon did you think of printing your things in a book?”

“Oh, about as soon as they began to take with the public.”

“How could you tell that they were-taking?”

“They were copied into other papers, and people talked about them.”

“And that was what made Mr. Stoller want you to be his secretary?”

“I don’t believe it was. The theory in the office was that he didn’t think much of them; but he knows I can write shorthand, and put things into shape.”

“What things?”

“Oh — ideas. He has a notion of trying to come forward in politics. He owns shares in everything but the United States Senate — gas, electricity, railroads, aldermen, newspapers — and now he would like some Senate. That’s what I think.”

She did not quite understand, and she was far from knowing that this cynic humor expressed a deadlier pessimism than her father’s fiercest accusals of the country. “How fascinating it is!” she said, innocently.

“And I suppose they all envy your coming out?”

“In the office?”

“Yes. I should envy, them — staying.”

Burnamy laughed. “I don’t believe they envy me. It won’t be all roses for me — they know that. But they know that I can take care of myself if it isn’t.” He remembered something one of his friends in the office had said of the painful surprise the Bird of Prey would feel if he ever tried his beak on him in the belief that he was soft.

She abruptly left the mere personal question. “And which would you rather write: poems or those kind of sketches?”

“I don’t know,” said Burnamy, willing to talk of himself on any terms. “I suppose that prose is the thing for our time, rather more; but there are things you can’t say in prose. I used to write a great deal of verse in college; but I didn’t have much luck with editors till Mr. March took this little piece for ‘Every Other Week’.”

“Little? I thought it was a long poem!”

Burnamy laughed at the notion. “It’s only eight lines.”

“Oh!” said the girl. “What is it about?”

He yielded to the temptation with a weakness which he found incredible in a person of his make. “I can repeat it if you won’t give me away to Mrs. March.”

“Oh, no indeed!” He said the lines over to her very simply and well.
“They are beautiful — beautiful!”

“Do you think so?” he gasped, in his joy at her praise.

“Yes, lovely. Do you know, you are the first literary man — the only literary man — I ever talked with. They must go out — somewhere! Papa must meet them at his clubs. But I never do; and so I’m making the most of you.”

“You can’t make too much of me, Miss Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

She would not mind his mocking. “That day you spoke about ‘The Maiden Knight’, don’t you know, I had never heard any talk about books in that way. I didn’t know you were an author then.”

“Well, I’m not much of an author now,” he said, cynically, to retrieve his folly in repeating his poem to her.

“Oh, that will do for you to say. But I know what Mrs. March thinks.”

He wished very much to know what Mrs. March thought, too; ‘Every Other Week’ was such a very good place that he could not conscientiously neglect any means of having his work favorably considered there; if Mrs. March’s interest in it would act upon her husband, ought not he to know just how much she thought of him as a writer? “Did she like the poem.”

Miss Triscoe could not recall that Mrs. March had said anything about the poem, but she launched herself upon the general current of Mrs. March’s liking for Burnamy. “But it wouldn’t do to tell you all she said!” This was not what he hoped, but he was richly content when she returned to his personal history. “And you didn’t know any one when, you went up to Chicago from—”

“Tippecanoe? Not exactly that. I wasn’t acquainted with any one in the office, but they had printed somethings of mine, and they were willing to let me try my hand. That was all I could ask.”

“Of course! You knew you could do the rest. Well, it is like a romance. A woman couldn’t have such an adventure as that!” sighed the girl.

“But women do!” Burnamy retorted. “There is a girl writing on the paper now — she’s going to do the literary notices while I’m gone — who came to Chicago from Ann Arbor, with no more chance than I had, and who’s made her way single-handed from interviewing up.”

“Oh,” said Miss Triscoe, with a distinct drop in her enthusiasm. “Is she nice?”

“She’s mighty clever, and she’s nice enough, too, though the kind of journalism that women do isn’t the most dignified. And she’s one of the best girls I know, with lots of sense.”

“It must be very interesting,” said Miss Triscoe, with little interest in the way she said it. “I suppose you’re quite a little community by yourselves.”

“On the paper?”

“Yes.”

“Well, some of us know one another, in the office, but most of us don’t. There’s quite a regiment of people on a big paper. If you’d like to come out,” Burnamy ventured, “perhaps you could get the Woman’s Page to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, fashion; and personal gossip about society leaders; and recipes for dishes and diseases; and correspondence on points of etiquette.”

He expected her to shudder at the notion, but she merely asked, “Do women write it?”

He laughed reminiscently. “Well, not always. We had one man who used to do it beautifully — when he was sober. The department hasn’t had any permanent head since.”

He was sorry he had said this, but it did not seem to shock her, and no doubt she had not taken it in fully. She abruptly left the subject. “Do you know what time we really get in to-morrow?”

“About one, I believe — there’s a consensus of stewards to that effect, anyway.” After a pause he asked, “Are you likely to be in Carlsbad?”

“We are going to Dresden, first, I believe. Then we may go on down to
Vienna. But nothing is settled, yet.”

“Are you going direct to Dresden?”

“I don’t know. We may stay in Hamburg a day or two.”

“I’ve got to go straight to Carlsbad. There’s a sleeping-car that will get me there by morning: Mr. Stoller likes zeal. But I hope you’ll let me be of use to you any way I can, before we part tomorrow.”

“You’re very kind. You’ve been very good already — to papa.” He protested that he had not been at all good. “But he’s used to taking care of himself on the other side. Oh, it’s this side, now!”

“So it is! How strange that seems! It’s actually Europe. But as long as we’re at sea, we can’t realize it. Don’t you hate to have experiences slip through your fingers?”

“I don’t know. A girl doesn’t have many experiences of her own; they’re always other people’s.”

This affected Burnamy as so profound that he did not question its truth. He only suggested, “Well; sometimes they make other people have the experiences.”

Whether Miss Triscoe decided that this was too intimate or not she left the question. “Do you understand German?”

“A little. I studied it at college, and I’ve cultivated a sort of beer-garden German in Chicago. I can ask for things.”

“I can’t, except in French, and that’s worse than English, in Germany, I hear.”

“Then you must let me be your interpreter up to the last moment. Will you?”

She did not answer. “It must be rather late, isn’t it?” she asked. He let her see his watch, and she said, “Yes, it’s very late,” and led the way within. “I must look after my packing; papa’s always so prompt, and I must justify myself for making him let me give up my maid when we left home; we expect to get one in Dresden. Good-night!”

Burnamy looked after her drifting down their corridor, and wondered whether it would have been a fit return for her expression of a sense of novelty in him as a literary man if he had told her that she was the first young lady he had known who had a maid. The fact awed him; Miss Triscoe herself did not awe him so much.

XVIII.

The next morning was merely a transitional period, full of turmoil and disorder, between the broken life of the sea and the untried life of the shore. No one attempted to resume the routine of the voyage. People went and came between their rooms and the saloons and the decks, and were no longer careful to take their own steamer chairs when they sat down for a moment.

In the cabins the berths were not made up, and those who remained below had to sit on their hard edges, or on the sofas, which were cumbered with, hand-bags and rolls of shawls. At an early hour after breakfast the bedroom stewards began to get the steamer trunks out and pile them in the corridors; the servants all became more caressingly attentive; and people who had left off settling the amount of the fees they were going to give, anxiously conferred together. The question whether you ought ever to give the head steward anything pressed crucially at the early lunch, and Kenby brought only a partial relief by saying that he always regarded the head steward as an officer of the ship. March made the experiment of offering him six marks, and the head steward took them quite as if he were not an officer of the ship. He also collected a handsome fee for the music, which is the tax levied on all German ships beyond the tolls exacted on the steamers of other nations.

After lunch the flat shore at Cuxhaven was so near that the summer cottages of the little watering-place showed through the warm drizzle much like the summer cottages of our own shore, and if it had not been for the strange, low sky, the Americans might easily have fancied themselves at home again.

Every one waited on foot while the tender came out into the stream where the Norumbia had dropped anchor. People who had brought their hand-baggage with them from their rooms looked so much safer with it that people who had left theirs to their stewards had to go back and pledge them afresh not to forget it. The tender came alongside, and the transfer of the heavy trunks began, but it seemed such an endless work that every one sat down in some other’s chair. At last the trunks were all on the tender, and the bareheaded stewards began to run down the gangways with the hand-baggage. “Is this Hoboken?” March murmured in his wife’s ear, with a bewildered sense of something in the scene like the reversed action of the kinematograph.

On the deck of the tender there was a brief moment of reunion among the companions of the voyage, the more intimate for their being crowded together under cover from the drizzle which now turned into a dashing rain. Burnamy’s smile appeared, and then Mrs. March recognized Miss Triscoe and her father in their travel dress; they were not far from Burnamy’s smile, but he seemed rather to have charge of the Eltwins, whom he was helping look after their bags and bundles. Rose Adding was talking with Kenby, and apparently asking his opinion of something; Mrs. Adding sat near them tranquilly enjoying her son.

Mrs. March made her husband identify their baggage, large and small, and after he had satisfied her, he furtively satisfied himself by a fresh count that it was all there. But he need not have taken the trouble; their long, calm bedroom-steward was keeping guard over it; his eyes expressed a contemptuous pity for their anxiety, whose like he must have been very tired of. He brought their handbags into the customs-room at the station where they landed; and there took a last leave and a last fee with unexpected cordiality.

Again their companionship suffered eclipse in the distraction which the customs inspectors of all countries bring to travellers; and again they were united during the long delay in the waiting-room, which was also the restaurant. It was full of strange noises and figures and odors — the shuffling of feet, the clash of crockery, the explosion of nervous German voices, mixed with the smell of beer and ham, and the smoke of cigars. Through it all pierced the wail of a postman standing at the door with a letter in his hand and calling out at regular intervals, “Krahnay, Krahnay!” When March could bear it no longer he went up to him and shouted, “Crane! Crane!” and the man bowed gratefully, and began to cry, “Kren! Kren!” But whether Mr. Crane got his letter or not, he never knew.

People were swarming at the window of the telegraph-office, and sending home cablegrams to announce their safe arrival; March could not forbear cabling to his son, though he felt it absurd. There was a great deal of talking, but no laughing, except among the Americans, and the girls behind the bar who tried to understand, what they wanted, and then served them with what they chose for them. Otherwise the Germans, though voluble, were unsmiling, and here on the threshold of their empire the travellers had their first hint of the anxious mood which seems habitual with these amiable people.

Mrs. Adding came screaming with glee to March where he sat with his wife, and leaned over her son to ask, “Do you know what lese-majesty is? Rose is afraid I’ve committed it!”

“No, I don’t,” said March. “But it’s the unpardonable sin. What have you been doing?”

“I asked the official at the door when our train would start, and when he said at half past three, I said, ‘How tiresome!’ Rose says the railroads belong to the state here, and that if I find fault with the time-table, it’s constructive censure of the Emperor, and that’s lese-majesty.” She gave way to her mirth, while the boy studied March’s face with an appealing smile.

“Well, I don’t think you’ll be arrested this time, Mrs. Adding; but I hope it will be a warning to Mrs. March. She’s been complaining of the coffee.”

“Indeed I shall say what I like,” said Mrs. March. “I’m an American.”

“Well, you’ll find you’re a German, if you like to say anything disagreeable about the coffee in the restaurant of the Emperor’s railroad station; the first thing you know I shall be given three months on your account.”

Mrs. Adding asked: “Then they won’t punish ladies? There, Rose! I’m safe, you see; and you’re still a minor, though you are so wise for your years.”

She went back to her table, where Kenby came and sat down by her.

“I don’t know that I quite like her playing on that sensitive child,”, said Mrs. March. “And you’ve joined with her in her joking. Go and speak, to him!”

The boy was slowly following his mother, with his head fallen. March overtook him, and he started nervously at the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and then looked gratefully up into the man’s face. March tried to tell him what the crime of lese-majesty was, and he said: “Oh, yes. I understood that. But I got to thinking; and I don’t want my mother to take any risks.”

“I don’t believe she will, really, Rose. But I’ll speak to her, and tell her she can’t be too cautious.”

“Not now, please!” the boy entreated.

“Well, I’ll find another chance,” March assented. He looked round and caught a smiling nod from Burnamy, who was still with the Eltwins; the Triscoes were at a table by themselves; Miss Triseoe nodded too, but her father appeared not to see March. “It’s all right, with Rose,” he said, when he sat down again by his wife; “but I guess it’s all over with Burnamy,” and he told her what he had seen. “Do you think it came to any displeasure between them last night? Do you suppose he offered himself, and she—”

“What nonsense!” said Mrs. March, but she was not at peace. “It’s her father who’s keeping her away from him.”

“I shouldn’t mind that. He’s keeping her away from us, too.” But at that moment Miss Triscoe as if she had followed his return from afar, came over to speak to his wife. She said they were going on to Dresden that evening, and she was afraid they might have no chance to see each other on the train or in Hamburg. March, at this advance, went to speak with her father; he found him no more reconciled to Europe than America.

“They’re Goths,” he said of the Germans. “I could hardly get that stupid brute in the telegraph-office to take my despatch.”

On his way back to his wife March met Miss Triscoe; he was not altogether surprised to meet Burnamy with her, now. The young fellow asked if he could be of any use to him, and then he said he would look him up in the train. He seemed in a hurry, but when he walked away with Miss Triscoe he did not seem in a hurry.

March remarked upon the change to his wife, and she sighed, “Yes, you can see that as far as they’re concerned.”

“It’s a great pity that there should be parents to complicate these affairs,” he said. “How simple it would be if there were no parties to them but the lovers! But nature is always insisting upon fathers and mothers, and families on both sides.”

XIX.

The long train which they took at last was for the Norumbia’s people alone, and it was of several transitional and tentative types of cars. Some were still the old coach-body carriages; but most were of a strange corridor arrangement, with the aide at the aide, and the seats crossing from it, with compartments sometimes rising to the roof, and sometimes rising half-way. No two cars seemed quite alike, but all were very comfortable; and when the train began to run out through the little sea-side town into the country, the old delight of foreign travel began. Most of the houses were little and low and gray, with ivy or flowering vines covering their walls to their browntiled roofs; there was here and there a touch of Northern Gothic in the architecture; but usually where it was pretentious it was in the mansard taste, which was so bad with us a generation ago, and is still very bad in Cuxhaven.

The fields, flat and wide, were dotted with familiar shapes of Holstein cattle, herded by little girls, with their hair in yellow pigtails. The gray, stormy sky hung low, and broke in fitful rains; but perhaps for the inclement season of mid-summer it was not very cold. Flowers were blooming along the embankments and in the rank green fields with a dogged energy; in the various distances were groups of trees embowering cottages and even villages, and always along the ditches and watercourses were double lines of low willows. At the first stop the train made, the passengers flocked to the refreshment-booth, prettily arranged beside the station, where the abundance of the cherries and strawberries gave proof that vegetation was in other respects superior to the elements. But it was not of the profusion of the sausages, and the ham which openly in slices or covertly in sandwiches claimed its primacy in the German affections; every form of this was flanked by tall glasses of beer.

A number of the natives stood by and stared unsmiling at the train, which had broken out in a rash of little American flags at every window. This boyish display, which must have made the Americans themselves laugh, if their sense of humor had not been lost in their impassioned patriotism, was the last expression of unity among the Norumbia’s passengers, and they met no more in their sea-solidarity. Of their table acquaintance the Marches saw no one except Burnamy, who came through the train looking for them. He said he was in one of the rear cars with the Eltwins, and was going to Carlsbad with them in the sleeping-car train leaving Hamburg at seven. He owned to having seen the Triscoes since they had left Cuxhaven; Mrs. March would not suffer herself to ask him whether they were in the same carriage with the Eltwins. He had got a letter from Mr. Stoller at Cuxhaven, and he begged the Marches to let him engage rooms for them at the hotel where he was going to stay with him.

After they reached Hamburg they had flying glimpses of him and of others in the odious rivalry to get their baggage examined first which seized upon all, and in which they no longer knew one another, but selfishly struggled for the good-will of porters and inspectors. There was really no such haste; but none could govern themselves against the general frenzy. With the porter he secured March conspired and perspired to win the attention of a cold but not unkindly inspector. The officer opened one trunk, and after a glance at it marked all as passed, and then there ensued a heroic strife with the porter as to the pieces which were to go to the Berlin station for their journey next day, and the pieces which were to go to the hotel overnight. At last the division was made; the Marches got into a cab of the first class; and the porter, crimson and steaming at every pore from the physical and intellectual strain, went back into the station.

They had got the number of their cab from the policeman who stands at the door of all large German stations and supplies the traveller with a metallic check for the sort of vehicle he demands. They were not proud, but it seemed best not to risk a second-class cab in a strange city, and when their first-class cab came creaking and limping out of the rank, they saw how wise they had been, if one of the second class could have been worse.

As they rattled away from the station they saw yet another kind of turnout, which they were destined to see more and more in the German lands. It was that team of a woman harnessed with a dog to a cart which the women of no other country can see without a sense of personal insult. March tried to take the humorous view, and complained that they had not been offered the choice of such an equipage by the policeman, but his wife would not be amused. She said that no country which suffered such a thing could be truly civilized, though he made her observe that no city in the world, except Boston or Brooklyn, was probably so thoroughly trolleyed as Hamburg. The hum of the electric car was everywhere, and everywhere the shriek of the wires overhead; batlike flights of connecting plates traversed all the perspectives through which they drove to the pleasant little hotel they had chosen.

XX.

On one hand their windows looked toward a basin of the Elbe, where stately white swans were sailing; and on the other to the new Rathhaus, over the trees that deeply shaded the perennial mud of a cold, dim public garden, where water-proof old women and impervious nurses sat, and children played in the long twilight of the sour, rain-soaked summer of the fatherland. It was all picturesque, and within-doors there was the novelty of the meagre carpets and stalwart furniture of the Germans, and their beds, which after so many ages of Anglo-Saxon satire remain immutably preposterous. They are apparently imagined for the stature of sleepers who have shortened as they broadened; their pillows are triangularly shaped to bring the chin tight upon the breast under the bloated feather bulk which is meant for covering, and which rises over the sleeper from a thick substratum of cotton coverlet, neatly buttoned into the upper sheet, with the effect of a portly waistcoat.

The hotel was illumined by the kindly splendor of the uniformed portier, who had met the travellers at the door, like a glowing vision of the past, and a friendly air diffused itself through the whole house. At the dinner, which, if not so cheap as they had somehow hoped, was by no means bad, they took counsel with the English-speaking waiter as to what entertainment Hamburg could offer for the evening, and by the time they had drunk their coffee they had courage for the Circus Renz, which seemed to be all there was.

The conductor of the trolley-car, which they hailed at the street corner, stopped it and got off the platform, and stood in the street until they were safely aboard, without telling them to step lively, or pulling them up the steps; or knuckling them in the back to make them move forward. He let them get fairly seated before he started the car, and so lost the fun of seeing them lurch and stagger violently, and wildly clutch each other for support. The Germans have so little sense of humor that probably no one in the car would have been amused to see the strangers flung upon the floor. No one apparently found it droll that the conductor should touch his cap to them when he asked for their fare; no one smiled at their efforts to make him understand where they wished to go, and he did not wink at the other passengers in trying to find out. Whenever the car stopped he descended first, and did not remount till the dismounting passenger had taken time to get well away from it. When the Marches got into the wrong car in coming home, and were carried beyond their street, the conductor would not take their fare.

The kindly civility which environed them went far to alleviate the inclemency of the climate; it began to rain as soon as they left the shelter of the car, but a citizen of whom they asked the nearest way to the Circus Renz was so anxious to have them go aright that they did not mind the wet, and the thought of his goodness embittered March’s self-reproach for under-tipping the sort of gorgeous heyduk, with a staff like a drum-major’s, who left his place at the circus door to get their tickets. He brought them back with a magnificent bow, and was then as visibly disappointed with the share of the change returned to him as a child would have been.

They went to their places with the sting of his disappointment rankling in their hearts. “One ought always to overpay them,” March sighed, “and I will do it from this time forth; we shall not be much the poorer for it. That heyduk is not going to get off with less than a mark when we come out.” As an earnest of his good faith he gave the old man who showed them to their box a tip that made him bow double, and he bought every conceivable libretto and play-bill offered him at prices fixed by his remorse.

“One ought to do it,” he said. “We are of the quality of good geniuses to these poor souls; we are Fortune in disguise; we are money found in the road. It is an accursed system, but they are more its victims than we.” His wife quite agreed with him, and with the same good conscience between them they gave themselves up to the pure joy which the circus, of all modern entertainments, seems alone to inspire. The house was full from floor to roof when they came ins and every one was intent upon the two Spanish clowns, Lui-Lui and Soltamontes, whose drolleries spoke the universal language of circus humor, and needed no translation into either German or English. They had missed by an event or two the more patriotic attraction of “Miss Darlings, the American Star,” as she was billed in English, but they were in time for one of those equestrian performances which leave the spectator almost exanimate from their prolixity, and the pantomimic piece which closed the evening.

This was not given until nearly the whole house had gone out and stayed itself with beer and cheese and ham and sausage, in the restaurant which purveys these light refreshments in the summer theatres all over Germany. When the people came back gorged to the throat, they sat down in the right mood to enjoy the allegory of “The Enchanted Mountain’s Fantasy; the Mountain episodes; the High-interesting Sledges-Courses on the Steep Acclivities; the Amazing-Up-rush of the thence plunging-Four Trains, which arrive with Lightnings-swiftness at the Top of the over-40-feet-high Mountain-the Highest Triumph of the To-day’s Circus-Art; the Sledge-journey in the Wizard-mountain, and the Fairy Ballet in the Realm of the Ghost-prince, with Gold and Silver, Jewel, Bloomghosts, Gnomes, Gnomesses, and Dwarfs, in never-till-now-seen Splendor of Costume.” The Marches were happy in this allegory, and happier in the ballet, which is everywhere delightfully innocent, and which here appealed with the large flat feet and the plain good faces of the ‘coryphees’ to all that was simplest and sweetest in their natures. They could not have resisted, if they had wished, that environment, of good-will; and if it had not been for the disappointed heyduk, they would have got home from their evening at the Circus Renz without a pang.

They looked for him everywhere when they came out, but he had vanished, and they were left with a regret which, if unavailing, was not too poignant. In spite of it they had still an exhilaration in their release from the companionship of their fellow-voyagers which they analyzed as the psychical revulsion from the strain of too great interest in them. Mrs. March declared that for the present, at least, she wanted Europe quite to themselves; and she said that not even for the pleasure of seeing Burnamy and Miss Triscoe come into their box together world she have suffered an American trespass upon their exclusive possession of the Circus Renz.

In the audience she had seen German officers for the first time in Hamburg, and she meant, if unremitting question could bring out the truth, to know why she had not met any others. She had read much of the prevalence and prepotence of the German officers who would try to push her off the sidewalk, till they realized that she was an American woman, and would then submit to her inflexible purpose of holding it. But she had been some seven or eight hours in Hamburg, and nothing of the kind had happened to her, perhaps because she had hardly yet walked a block in the city streets, but perhaps also because there seemed to be very few officers or military of any kind in Hamburg.

XXI.

Their absence was plausibly explained, the next morning, by the young German friend who came in to see the Marches at breakfast. He said Hamburg had been so long a free republic that the presence of a large imperial garrison was distasteful to the people, and as a matter of fact there were very few soldiers quartered there, whether the authorities chose to indulge the popular grudge or not. He was himself in a joyful flutter of spirits, for he had just the day before got his release from military service. He gave them a notion of what the rapture of a man reprieved from death might be, and he was as radiantly happy in the ill health which had got him his release as if it had been the greatest blessing of heaven. He bubbled over with smiling regrets that he should be leaving his home for the first stage of the journey which he was to take in search of strength, just as they had come, and he pressed them to say if there were not something that he could do for them.

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, with a promptness surprising to her husband, who could think of nothing; “tell us where Heinrich Heine lived when he was in Hamburg. My husband has always had a great passion for him and wants to look him up everywhere.”

March had forgotten that Heine ever lived in Hamburg, and the young man had apparently never known it. His face fell; he wished to make Mrs. March believe that it was only Heine’s uncle who had lived there; but she was firm; and when he had asked among the hotel people he came back gladly owning that he was wrong, and that the poet used to live in Konigstrasse, which was very near by, and where they could easily know the house by his bust set in its front. The portier and the head waiter shared his ecstasy in so easily obliging the friendly American pair, and joined him in minutely instructing the driver when they shut them into their carriage.

They did not know that his was almost the only laughing face they should see in the serious German Empire; just as they did not know that it rained there every day. As they drove off in the gray drizzle with the unfounded hope that sooner or later the weather would be fine, they bade their driver be very slow in taking them through Konigstrasse, so that he should by no means Miss Heine’s dwelling, and he duly stopped in front of a house bearing the promised bust. They dismounted in order to revere it more at their ease, but the bust proved, by an irony bitterer than the sick, heart-breaking, brilliant Jew could have imagined in his cruelest moment, to be that of the German Milton, the respectable poet Klopstock, whom Heine abhorred and mocked so pitilessly.

In fact it was here that the good, much-forgotten Klopstock dwelt, when he came home to live with a comfortable pension from the Danish government; and the pilgrims to the mistaken shrine went asking about among the neighbors in Konigstrasse, for some manner of house where Heine might have lived; they would have been willing to accept a flat, or any sort of two-pair back. The neighbors were somewhat moved by the anxiety of the strangers; but they were not so much moved as neighbors in Italy would have been. There was no eager and smiling sympathy in the little crowd that gathered to see what was going on; they were patient of question and kind in their helpless response, but they were not gay. To a man they had not heard of Heine; even the owner of a sausage and blood-pudding shop across the way had not heard of him; the clerk of a stationer-and-bookseller’s next to the butcher’s had heard of him, but he had never heard that he lived in Konigstrasse; he never had heard where he lived in Hamburg.

The pilgrims to the fraudulent shrine got back into their carriage, and drove sadly away, instructing their driver with the rigidity which their limited German favored, not to let any house with a bust in its front escape him. He promised, and took his course out through Konigstrasse, and suddenly they found themselves in a world of such eld and quaintness that they forgot Heine as completely as any of his countrymen had done. They were in steep and narrow streets, that crooked and turned with no apparent purpose of leading anywhere, among houses that looked down upon them with an astonished stare from the leaden-sashed windows of their timber-laced gables. The facades with their lattices stretching in bands quite across them, and with their steep roofs climbing high in successions of blinking dormers, were more richly mediaeval than anything the travellers had ever dreamt of before, and they feasted themselves upon the unimagined picturesqueness with a leisurely minuteness which brought responsive gazers everywhere to the windows; windows were set ajar; shop doors were darkened by curious figures from within, and the traffic of the tortuous alleys was interrupted by their progress. They could not have said which delighted them more — the houses in the immediate foreground, or the sharp high gables in the perspectives and the background; but all were like the painted scenes of the stage, and they had a pleasant difficulty in realizing that they were not persons in some romantic drama.

The illusion remained with them and qualified the impression which Hamburg made by her much-trolleyed Bostonian effect; by the decorous activity and Parisian architecture of her business streets; by the turmoil of her quays, and the innumerable masts and chimneys of her shipping. At the heart of all was that quaintness, that picturesqueness of the past, which embodied the spirit of the old Hanseatic city, and seemed the expression of the home-side of her history. The sense of this gained strength from such slight study of her annals as they afterwards made, and assisted the digestion of some morsels of tough statistics. In the shadow of those Gothic houses the fact that Hamburg was one of the greatest coffee marts and money marts of the world had a romantic glamour; and the fact that in the four years from 1870 till 1874 a quarter of a million emigrants sailed on her ships for the United States seemed to stretch a nerve of kindred feeling from those mediaeval streets through the whole shabby length of Third Avenue.

It was perhaps in this glamour, or this feeling of commercial solidarity, that March went to have a look at the Hamburg Bourse, in the beautiful new Rathhaus. It was not undergoing repairs, it was too new for that; but it was in construction, and so it fulfilled the function of a public edifice, in withholding its entire interest from the stranger. He could not get into the Senate Chamber; but the Bourse was free to him, and when he stepped within, it rose at him with a roar of voices and of feet like the New York Stock Exchange. The spectacle was not so frantic; people were not shaking their fists or fingers in each other’s noses; but they were all wild in the tamer German way, and he was glad to mount from the Bourse to the poor little art gallery upstairs, and to shut out its clamor. He was not so glad when he looked round on these, his first, examples of modern German art. The custodian led him gently about and said which things were for sale, and it made his heart ache to see how bad they were, and to think that, bad as they were, he could not buy any of them.

XXII.

In the start from Cuxhaven the passengers had the irresponsible ease of people ticketed through, and the steamship company had still the charge of their baggage. But when the Marches left Hamburg for Leipsic (where they had decided to break the long pull to Carlsbad), all the anxieties of European travel, dimly remembered from former European days, offered themselves for recognition. A porter vanished with their hand-baggage before they could note any trait in him for identification; other porters made away with their trunks; and the interpreter who helped March buy his tickets, with a vocabulary of strictly railroad English, had to help him find the pieces in the baggage-room, curiously estranged in a mountain of alien boxes. One official weighed them; another obliged him to pay as much in freight as for a third passenger, and gave him an illegible scrap of paper which recorded their number and destination. The interpreter and the porters took their fees with a professional effect of dissatisfaction, and he went to wait with his wife amidst the smoking and eating and drinking in the restaurant. They burst through with the rest when the doors were opened to the train, and followed a glimpse of the porter with their hand-bags, as he ran down the platform, still bent upon escaping them, and brought him to bay at last in a car where he had got very good seats for them, and sank into their places, hot and humiliated by their needless tumult.

As they cooled, they recovered their self-respect, and renewed a youthful joy in some of the long-estranged facts. The road was rougher than the roads at home; but for much less money they had the comfort, without the unavailing splendor, of a Pullman in their second-class carriage. Mrs. March had expected to be used with the severity on the imperial railroads which she had failed to experience from the military on the Hamburg sidewalks, but nothing could be kindlier than the whole management toward her. Her fellow-travellers were not lavish of their rights, as Americans are; what they got, that they kept; and in the run from Hamburg to Leipsic she had several occasions to observe that no German, however young or robust, dreams of offering a better place, if he has one, to a lady in grace to her sex or age; if they got into a carriage too late to secure a forward-looking seat, she rode backward to the end of that stage. But if they appealed to their fellow-travellers for information about changes, or stops, or any of the little facts that they wished to make sure of, they were enlightened past possibility of error. At the point where they might have gone wrong the explanations were renewed with a thoughtfulness which showed that their anxieties had not been forgotten. She said she could not see how any people could be both so selfish and so sweet, and her husband seized the advantage of saying something offensive:

“You women are so pampered in America that you are astonished when you are treated in Europe like the mere human beings you are.”

She answered with unexpected reasonableness:

“Yes, there’s something in that; but when the Germans have taught us how despicable we are as women, why do they treat us so well as human beings?”

This was at ten o’clock, after she had ridden backward a long way, and at last, within an hour of Leipsic, had got a seat confronting him. The darkness had now hidden the landscape, but the impression of its few simple elements lingered pleasantly in their sense: long levels, densely wooded with the precise, severely disciplined German forests, and checkered with fields of grain and grass, soaking under the thin rain that from time to time varied the thin sunshine.

The villages and peasants’ cottages were notably few; but there was here and there a classic or a gothic villa, which, at one point, an English-speaking young lady turned from her Tauchnitz novel to explain as the seat of some country gentleman; the land was in large holdings, and this accounted for the sparsity of villages and cottages.

She then said that she was a German teacher of English, in Hamburg, and was going home to Potsdam for a visit. She seemed like a German girl out of ‘The Initials’, and in return for this favor Mrs. March tried to invest herself with some romantic interest as an American. She failed to move the girl’s fancy, even after she had bestowed on her an immense bunch of roses which the young German friend in Hamburg had sent to them just before they left their hotel. She failed, later, on the same ground with the pleasant-looking English woman who got into their carriage at Magdeburg, and talked over the ‘London Illustrated News’ with an English-speaking Fraulein in her company; she readily accepted the fact of Mrs. March’s nationality, but found nothing wonderful in it, apparently; and when she left the train she left Mrs. March to recall with fond regret the old days in Italy when she first came abroad, and could make a whole carriage full of Italians break into ohs and ahs by saying that she was an American, and telling how far she had come across the sea.

“Yes,” March assented, “but that was a great while ago, and Americans were much rarer than they are now in Europe. The Italians are so much more sympathetic than the Germans and English, and they saw that you wanted to impress them. Heaven knows how little they cared! And then, you were a very pretty young girl in those days; or at least I thought so.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “and now I’m a plain old woman.”

“Oh, not quite so bad as that.”

“Yes, I am! Do you think they would have cared more if it had been Miss
Triscoe?”

“Not so much as if it had been the pivotal girl. They would have found her much more their ideal of the American woman; and even she would have had to have been here thirty years ago.”

She laughed a little ruefully. “Well, at any rate, I should like to know how Miss Triscoe would have affected them.”

“I should much rather know what sort of life that English woman is living here with her German husband; I fancied she had married rank. I could imagine how dull it must be in her little Saxon town, from the way she clung to her Illustrated News, and explained the pictures of the royalties to her friend. There is romance for you!”

They arrived at Leipsic fresh and cheerful after their five hours’ journey, and as in a spell of their travelled youth they drove up through the academic old town, asleep under its dimly clouded sky, and silent except for the trolley-cars that prowled its streets with their feline purr, and broke at times into a long, shrill caterwaul. A sense of the past imparted itself to the well-known encounter with the portier and the head waiter at the hotel door, to the payment of the driver, to the endeavor of the secretary to have them take the most expensive rooms in the house, and to his compromise upon the next most, where they found themselves in great comfort, with electric lights and bells, and a quick succession of fee-taking call-boys in dress-coats too large for them. The spell was deepened by the fact, which March kept at the bottom of his consciousness for the present, that one of their trunks was missing. This linked him more closely to the travel of other days, and he spent the next forenoon in a telegraphic search for the estray, with emotions tinged by the melancholy of recollection, but in the security that since it was somewhere in the keeping of the state railway, it would be finally restored to him.

XXIII.

Their windows, as they saw in the morning, looked into a large square of aristocratic physiognomy, and of a Parisian effect in architecture, which afterwards proved characteristic of the town, if not quite so characteristic as to justify the passion of Leipsic for calling itself Little Paris. The prevailing tone was of a gray tending to the pale yellow of the Tauchnitz editions with which the place is more familiarly associated in the minds of English-speaking travellers. It was rather more sombre than it might have been if the weather had been fair; but a quiet rain was falling dreamily that morning, and the square was provided with a fountain which continued to dribble in the rare moments when the rain forgot itself. The place was better shaded than need be in that sunless land by the German elms that look like ours and it was sufficiently stocked with German statues, that look like no others. It had a monument, too, of the sort with which German art has everywhere disfigured the kindly fatherland since the war with France. These monuments, though they are so very ugly, have a sort of pathos as records of the only war in which Germany unaided has triumphed against a foreign foe, but they are as tiresome as all such memorial pomps must be. It is not for the victories of a people that any other people can care. The wars come and go in blood and tears; but whether they are bad wars, or what are comically called good wars, they are of one effect in death and sorrow, and their fame is an offence to all men not concerned in them, till time has softened it to a memory

 ”Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
   And battles long ago.”

It was for some such reason that while the Marches turned with instant satiety from the swelling and strutting sculpture which celebrated the Leipsic heroes of the war of 1870, they had heart for those of the war of 1813; and after their noonday dinner they drove willingly, in a pause of the rain, out between yellowing harvests of wheat and oats to the field where Napoleon was beaten by the Russians, Austrians and Prussians (it always took at least three nations to beat the little wretch) fourscore years before. Yet even there Mrs. March was really more concerned for the sparsity of corn-flowers in the grain, which in their modern character of Kaiserblumen she found strangely absent from their loyal function; and March was more taken with the notion of the little gardens which his guide told him the citizens could have in the suburbs of Leipsic and enjoy at any trolley-car distance from their homes. He saw certain of these gardens in groups, divided by low, unenvious fences, and sometimes furnished with summer-houses, where the tenant could take his pleasure in the evening air, with his family. The guide said he had such a garden himself, at a rent of seven dollars a year, where he raised vegetables and flowers, and spent his peaceful leisure; and March fancied that on the simple domestic side of their life, which this fact gave him a glimpse of, the Germans were much more engaging than in their character of victors over either the First or the Third Napoleon. But probably they would not have agreed with him, and probably nations will go on making themselves cruel and tiresome till humanity at last prevails over nationality.

He could have put the case to the guide himself; but though the guide was imaginably liberated to a cosmopolitan conception of things by three years’ service as waiter in English hotels, where he learned the language, he might not have risen to this. He would have tried, for he was a willing and kindly soul, though he was not a ‘valet de place’ by profession. There seemed in fact but one of that useless and amusing race (which is everywhere falling into decay through the rivalry of the perfected Baedeker,) left in Leipsic, and this one was engaged, so that the Marches had to devolve upon their ex-waiter, who was now the keeper of a small restaurant. He gladly abandoned his business to the care of his wife, in order to drive handsomely about in his best clothes, with strangers who did not exact too much knowledge from him. In his zeal to do something he possessed himself of March’s overcoat when they dismounted at their first gallery, and let fall from its pocket his prophylactic flask of brandy, which broke with a loud crash on the marble floor in the presence of several masterpieces, and perfumed the whole place. The masterpieces were some excellent works of Luke Kranach, who seemed the only German painter worth looking at when there were any Dutch or Italian pictures near, but the travellers forgot the name and nature of the Kranachs, and remembered afterwards only the shattered fragments of the brandy-flask, just how they looked on the floor, and the fumes, how they smelt, that rose from the ruin.

It might have been a warning protest of the veracities against what they were doing; but the madness of sight-seeing, which spoils travel, was on them, and they delivered themselves up to it as they used in their ignorant youth, though now they knew its futility so well. They spared themselves nothing that they had time for, that day, and they felt falsely guilty for their omissions, as if they really had been duties to art and history which must be discharged, like obligations to one’s maker and one’s neighbor.

They had a touch of genuine joy in the presence of the beautiful old Rathhaus, and they were sensible of something like a genuine emotion in passing the famous and venerable university; the very air of Leipsic is redolent of printing and publication, which appealed to March in his quality of editor, and they could not fail of an impression of the quiet beauty of the town, with its regular streets of houses breaking into suburban villas of an American sort, and intersected with many canals, which in the intervals of the rain were eagerly navigated by pleasure boats, and contributed to the general picturesqueness by their frequent bridges, even during the drizzle. There seemed to be no churches to do, and as it was a Sunday, the galleries were so early closed against them that they were making a virtue as well as a pleasure of the famous scene of Napoleon’s first great defeat.

By a concert between their guide and driver their carriage drew up at the little inn by the road-side, which is also a museum stocked with relics from the battle-field, and with objects of interest relating to it. Old muskets, old swords, old shoes and old coats, trumpets, drums, gun-carriages, wheels, helmets, cannon balls, grape-shot, and all the murderous rubbish which battles come to at last, with proclamations, autographs, caricatures and likenesses of Napoleon, and effigies of all the other generals engaged, and miniatures and jewels of their womenkind, filled room after room, through which their owner vaunted his way, with a loud pounding voice and a bad breath. When he wished them to enjoy some gross British satire or clumsy German gibe at Bonaparte’s expense, and put his face close to begin the laugh, he was something so terrible that March left the place with a profound if not a reasoned regret that the French had not won the battle of Leipsic. He walked away musing pensively upon the traveller’s inadequacy to the ethics of history when a breath could so sway him against his convictions; but even after he had cleansed his lungs with some deep respirations he found himself still a Bonapartist in the presence of that stone on the rising ground where Napoleon sat to watch the struggle on the vast plain, and see his empire slipping through his blood-stained fingers. It was with difficulty that he could keep from revering the hat and coat which are sculptured on the stone, but it was well that he succeeded, for he could not make out then or afterwards whether the habiliments represented were really Napoleon’s or not, and they might have turned out to be Barclay de Tolly’s.

While he stood trying to solve this question of clothes he was startled by the apparition of a man climbing the little slope from the opposite quarter, and advancing toward them. He wore the imperial crossed by the pointed mustache once so familiar to a world much the worse for them, and March had the shiver of a fine moment in which he fancied the Third Napoleon rising to view the scene where the First had looked his coming ruin in the face.

“Why, it’s Miss Triscoe!” cried his wife, and before March had noticed the approach of another figure, the elder and the younger lady had rushed upon each other, and encountered with a kiss. At the same time the visage of the last Emperor resolved itself into the face of General Triscoe, who gave March his hand in a more tempered greeting.

The ladies began asking each other of their lives since their parting two days before, and the men strolled a few paces away toward the distant prospect of Leipsic, which at that point silhouettes itself in a noble stretch of roofs and spires and towers against the horizon.

General Triscoe seemed no better satisfied with Germany than he had been on first stepping ashore at Cuxhaven. He might still have been in a pout with his own country, but as yet he had not made up with any other; and he said, “What a pity Napoleon didn’t thrash the whole dunderheaded lot! His empire would have been a blessing to them, and they would have had some chance of being civilized under the French. All this unification of nationalities is the great humbug of the century. Every stupid race thinks it’s happy because it’s united, and civilization has been set back a hundred years by the wars that were fought to bring the unions about; and more wars will have to be fought to keep them up. What a farce it is! What’s become of the nationality of the Danes in Schleswig-Holstein, or the French in the Rhine Provinces, or the Italians in Savoy?”

March had thought something like this himself, but to have it put by General Triscoe made it offensive. “I don’t know. Isn’t it rather quarrelling with the course of human events to oppose accomplished facts? The unifications were bound to be, just as the separations before them were. And so far they have made for peace, in Europe at least, and peace is civilization. Perhaps after a great many ages people will come together through their real interests, the human interests; but at present it seems as if nothing but a romantic sentiment of patriotism can unite them. By-and-by they may find that there is nothing in it.”

“Perhaps,” said the general, discontentedly. “I don’t see much promise of any kind in the future.”

“Well, I don’t know. When you think of the solid militarism of Germany, you seem remanded to the most hopeless moment of the Roman Empire; you think nothing can break such a force; but my guide says that even in Leipsic the Socialists outnumber all the other parties, and the army is the great field of the Socialist propaganda. The army itself may be shaped into the means of democracy — even of peace.”

“You’re very optimistic,” said Triscoe, curtly. “As I read the signs, we are not far from universal war. In less than a year we shall make the break ourselves in a war with Spain.” He looked very fierce as he prophesied, and he dotted March over with his staccato glances.

“Well, I’ll allow that if Tammany comes in this year, we shall have war with Spain. You can’t ask more than that, General Triscoe?”

Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had not said a word of the ‘battle of Leipsic’, or of the impersonal interests which it suggested to the men. For all these, they might still have been sitting in their steamer chairs on the promenade of the Norumbia at a period which seemed now of geological remoteness. The girl accounted for not being in Dresden by her father’s having decided not to go through Berlin but to come by way of Leipsic, which he thought they had better see; they had come without stopping in Hamburg. They had not enjoyed Leipsic much; it had rained the whole day before, and they had not gone out. She asked when Mrs. March was going on to Carlsbad, and Mrs. March answered, the next morning; her husband wished to begin his cure at once.

Then Miss Triscoe pensively wondered if Carlsbad would do her father any good; and Mrs. March discreetly inquired General Triscoe’s symptoms.

“Oh, he hasn’t any. But I know he can’t be well — with his gloomy opinions.”

“They may come from his liver,” said Mrs. March. “Nearly everything of that kind does. I know that Mr. March has been terribly depressed at times, and the doctor said it was nothing but his liver; and Carlsbad is the great place for that, you know.”

“Perhaps I can get papa to run over some day, if he doesn’t like Dresden.
It isn’t very far, is it?”

They referred to Mrs. March’s Baedeker together, and found that it was five hours.

“Yes, that is what I thought,” said Miss Triscoe, with a carelessness which convinced Mrs. March she had looked up the fact already.

“If you decide to come, you must let us get rooms for you at our hotel. We’re going to Pupp’s; most of the English and Americans go to the hotels on the Hill, but Pupp’s is in the thick of it in the lower town; and it’s very gay, Mr. Kenby says; he’s been there often. Mr. Burnamy is to get our rooms.”

“I don’t suppose I can get papa to go,” said Miss Triscoe, so insincerely that Mrs. March was sure she had talked over the different routes; to Carlsbad with Burnamy — probably on the way from Cuxhaven. She looked up from digging the point of her umbrella in the ground. “You didn’t meet him here this morning?”

Mrs. March governed herself to a calm which she respected in asking, “Has
Mr. Burnamy been here?”

“He came on with Mr. and Mrs. Eltwin, when we did, and they all decided to stop over a day. They left on the twelve-o’clock train to-day.”

Mrs. March perceived that the girl had decided not to let the facts betray themselves by chance, and she treated them as of no significance.

“No, we didn’t see him,” she said, carelessly.

The two men came walking slowly towards them, and Miss Triscoe said,
“We’re going to Dresden this evening, but I hope we shall meet somewhere,
Mrs. March.”

“Oh, people never lose sight of each other in Europe; they can’t; it’s so little!”

“Agatha,” said the girl’s father, “Mr. March tells me that the museum over there is worth seeing.”

“Well,” the girl assented, and she took a winning leave of the Marches, and moved gracefully away with her father.

“I should have thought it was Agnes,” said Mrs. March, following them with her eyes before she turned upon her husband. “Did he tell you Burnamy had been here? Well, he has! He has just gone on to Carlsbad. He made, those poor old Eltwins stop over with him, so he could be with her.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but of course he did.”

“Then it’s all settled?”

“No, it isn’t settled. It’s at the most interesting point.”

“Well, don’t read ahead. You always want to look at the last page.”

“You were trying to look at the last page yourself,” she retorted, and she would have liked to punish him for his complex dishonesty toward the affair; but upon the whole she kept her temper with him, and she made him agree that Miss Triscoe’s getting her father to Carlsbad was only a question of time.

They parted heart’s-friends with their ineffectual guide, who was affectionately grateful for the few marks they gave him, at the hotel door; and they were in just the mood to hear men singing in a farther room when they went down to supper. The waiter, much distracted from their own service by his duties to it, told them it was the breakfast party of students which they had heard beginning there about noon. The revellers had now been some six hours at table, and he said they might not rise before midnight; they had just got to the toasts, which were apparently set to music.

The students of right remained a vivid color in the impression of the university town. They pervaded the place, and decorated it with their fantastic personal taste in coats and trousers, as well as their corps caps of green, white, red, and blue, but above all blue. They were not easily distinguishable from the bicyclers who were holding one of the dull festivals of their kind in Leipsic that day, and perhaps they were sometimes both students and bicyclers. As bicyclers they kept about in the rain, which they seemed not to mind; so far from being disheartened, they had spirits enough to take one another by the waist at times and waltz in the square before the hotel. At one moment of the holiday some chiefs among them drove away in carriages; at supper a winner of prizes sat covered with badges and medals; another who went by the hotel streamed with ribbons; and an elderly man at his side was bespattered with small knots and ends of them, as if he had been in an explosion of ribbons somewhere. It seemed all to be as exciting for them, and it was as tedious for the witnesses, as any gala of students and bicyclers at home.

Mrs. March remained with an unrequited curiosity concerning their different colors and different caps, and she tried to make her husband find out what they severally meant; he pretended a superior interest in the nature of a people who had such a passion for uniforms that they were not content with its gratification in their immense army, but indulged it in every pleasure and employment of civil life. He estimated, perhaps not very accurately, that only one man out of ten in Germany wore citizens’ dress; and of all functionaries he found that the dogs of the women-and-dog teams alone had no distinctive dress; even the women had their peasant costume.

There was an industrial fair open at Leipsic which they went out of the city to see after supper, along with a throng of Leipsickers, whom an hour’s interval of fine weather tempted forth on the trolley; and with the help of a little corporal, who took a fee for his service with the eagerness of a civilian, they got wheeled chairs, and renewed their associations with the great Chicago Fair in seeing the exposition from them. This was not, March said, quite the same as being drawn by a woman-and-dog team, which would have been the right means of doing a German fair; but it was something to have his chair pushed by a slender young girl, whose stalwart brother applied his strength to the chair of the lighter traveller; and it was fit that the girl should reckon the common hire, while the man took the common tip. They made haste to leave the useful aspects of the fair, and had themselves trundled away to the Colonial Exhibit, where they vaguely expected something like the agreeable corruptions of the Midway Plaisance. The idea of her colonial progress with which Germany is trying to affect the home-keeping imagination of her people was illustrated by an encampment of savages from her Central-African possessions. They were getting their supper at the moment the Marches saw them, and were crouching, half naked, around the fires under the kettles, and shivering from the cold, but they were not very characteristic of the imperial expansion, unless perhaps when an old man in a red blanket suddenly sprang up with a knife in his hand and began to chase a boy round the camp. The boy was lighter-footed, and easily outran the sage, who tripped at times on his blanket. None of the other Central Africans seemed to care for the race, and without waiting for the event, the American spectators ordered themselves trundled away to another idle feature of the fair, where they hoped to amuse themselves with the image of Old Leipsic.

This was so faithfully studied from the past in its narrow streets and Gothic houses that it was almost as picturesque as the present epoch in the old streets of Hamburg. A drama had just begun to be represented on a platform of the public square in front of a fourteenth-century beer-house, with people talking from the windows round, and revellers in the costume of the period drinking beer and eating sausages at tables in the open air. Their eating and drinking were genuine, and in the midst of it a real rain began, to pour down upon them, without affecting them any more than if they had been Germans of the nineteenth century. But it drove the Americans to a shelter from which they could not see the play, and when it held up, they made their way back to their hotel.

Their car was full of returning pleasurers, some of whom were happy beyond the sober wont of the fatherland. The conductor took a special interest in his tipsy passengers, trying to keep them in order, and genially entreating them to be quiet when they were too obstreperous. From time to time he got some of them off, and then, when he remounted the car, he appealed to the remaining passengers for their sympathy with an innocent smile, which the Americans, still strange to the unjoyous physiognomy of the German Empire, failed to value at its rare worth.

Before he slept that night March tried to assemble from the experiences and impressions of the day some facts which he would not be ashamed of as a serious observer of life in Leipsic, and he remembered that their guide had said house-rent was very low. He generalized from the guide’s content with his fee that the Germans were not very rapacious; and he became quite irrelevantly aware that in Germany no man’s clothes fitted him, or seemed expected to fit him; that the women dressed somewhat better, and were rather pretty sometimes, and that they had feet as large as the kind hearts of the Germans of every age and sex. He was able to note, rather more freshly, that with all their kindness the Germans were a very nervous people, if not irritable, and at the least cause gave way to an agitation, which indeed quickly passed, but was violent while it lasted. Several times that day he had seen encounters between the portier and guests at the hotel which promised violence, but which ended peacefully as soon as some simple question of train-time was solved. The encounters always left the portier purple and perspiring, as any agitation must with a man so tight in his livery. He bemoaned himself after one of them as the victim of an unhappy calling, in which he could take no exercise. “It is a life of excitements, but not of movements,” he explained to March; and when he learned where he was going, he regretted that he could not go to Carlsbad too. “For sugar?” he asked, as if there were overmuch of it in his own make.

March felt the tribute, but he had to say, “No; liver.”

“Ah!” said the portier, with the air of failing to get on common ground with him.

XXV.

The next morning was so fine that it would have been a fine morning in America. Its beauty was scarcely sullied, even subjectively, by the telegram which the portier sent after the Marches from the hotel, saying that their missing trunk had not yet been found, and their spirits were as light as the gay little clouds which blew about in the sky, when their train drew out in the sunshine, brilliant on the charming landscape all the way to Carlsbad. A fatherly ‘traeger’ had done his best to get them the worst places in a non-smoking compartment, but had succeeded so poorly that they were very comfortable, with no companions but a mother and daughter, who spoke German in soft low tones together. Their compartment was pervaded by tobacco fumes from the smokers, but as these were twice as many as the non-smokers, it was only fair, and after March had got a window open it did not matter, really.

He asked leave of the strangers in his German, and they consented in theirs; but he could not master the secret of the window-catch, and the elder lady said in English, “Let me show you,” and came to his help.

The occasion for explaining that they were Americans and accustomed to different car windows was so tempting that Mrs. March could not forbear, and the other ladies were affected as deeply as she could wish. Perhaps they were the more affected because it presently appeared that they had cousins in New York whom she knew of, and that they were acquainted with an American family that had passed the winter in Berlin. Life likes to do these things handsomely, and it easily turned out that this was a family of intimate friendship with the Marches; the names, familiarly spoken, abolished all strangeness between the travellers; and they entered into a comparison of tastes, opinions, and experiences, from which it seemed that the objects and interests of cultivated people in Berlin were quite the same as those of cultivated people in New York. Each of the parties to the discovery disclaimed any superiority for their respective civilizations; they wished rather to ascribe a greater charm and virtue to the alien conditions; and they acquired such merit with one another that when the German ladies got out of the train at Franzensbad, the mother offered Mrs. March an ingenious folding footstool which she had admired. In fact, she left her with it clasped to her breast, and bowing speechless toward the giver in a vain wish to express her gratitude.

“That was very pretty of her, my dear,” said March. “You couldn’t have done that.”

“No,” she confessed; “I shouldn’t have had the courage. The courage of my emotions,” she added, thoughtfully.

“Ah, that’s the difference! A Berliner could do it, and a Bostonian couldn’t. Do you think it so much better to have the courage of your convictions?”

“I don’t know. It seems to me that I’m less and less certain of everything that I used to be sure of.”

He laughed, and then he said, “I was thinking how, on our wedding journey, long ago, that Gray Sister at the Hotel Dieu in Quebec offered you a rose.”

“Well?”

“That was to your pretty youth. Now the gracious stranger gives you a folding stool.”

“To rest my poor old feet. Well, I would rather have it than a rose, now.”

“You bent toward her at just the slant you had when you took the flower that time; I noticed it. I didn’t see that you looked so very different. To be sure the roses in your cheeks have turned into rosettes; but rosettes are very nice, and they’re much more permanent; I prefer them; they will keep in any climate.”

She suffered his mockery with an appreciative sigh. “Yes, our age caricatures our youth, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t think it gets much fun out of it,” he assented.

“No; but it can’t help it. I used to rebel against it when it first began. I did enjoy being young.”

“You did, my dear,” he said, taking her hand tenderly; she withdrew it, because though she could bear his sympathy, her New England nature could not bear its expression. “And so did I; and we were both young a long time. Travelling brings the past back, don’t you think? There at that restaurant, where we stopped for dinner—”

“Yes, it was charming! Just as it used to be! With that white cloth, and those tall shining bottles of wine, and the fruit in the centre, and the dinner in courses, and that young waiter who spoke English, and was so nice! I’m never going home; you may, if you like.”

“You bragged to those ladies about our dining-cars; and you said that our railroad restaurants were quite as good as the European.”

“I had to do that. But I knew better; they don’t begin to be.”

“Perhaps not; but I’ve been thinking that travel is a good deal alike everywhere. It’s the expression of the common civilization of the world. When I came out of that restaurant and ran the train down, and then found that it didn’t start for fifteen minutes, I wasn’t sure whether I was at home or abroad. And when we changed cars at Eger, and got into this train which had been baking in the sun for us outside the station, I didn’t know but I was back in the good old Fitchburg depot. To be sure, Wallenstein wasn’t assassinated at Boston, but I forgot his murder at Eger, and so that came to the same thing. It’s these confounded fifty-odd years. I used to recollect everything.”

He had got up and was looking out of the window at the landscape, which had not grown less amiable in growing rather more slovenly since they had crossed the Saxon bolder into Bohemia. All the morning and early afternoon they had run through lovely levels of harvest, where men were cradling the wheat and women were binding it into sheaves in the narrow fields between black spaces of forest. After they left Eger, there was something more picturesque and less thrifty in the farming among the low hills which they gradually mounted to uplands, where they tasted a mountain quality in the thin pure air. The railroad stations were shabbier; there was an indefinable touch of something Southern in the scenery and the people. Lilies were rocking on the sluggish reaches of the streams, and where the current quickened, tall wheels were lifting water for the fields in circles of brimming and spilling pockets. Along the embankments, where a new track was being laid, barefooted women were at work with pick and spade and barrow, and little yellow-haired girls were lugging large white-headed babies, and watching the train go by. At an up grade where it slowed in the ascent he began to throw out to the children the pfennigs which had been left over from the passage in Germany, and he pleased himself with his bounty, till the question whether the children could spend the money forced itself upon him. He sat down feeling less like a good genius than a cruel magician who had tricked them with false wealth; but he kept his remorse to himself, and tried to interest his wife in the difference of social and civic ideal expressed in the change of the inhibitory notices at the car windows, which in Germany had strongliest forbidden him to outlean himself, and now in Austria entreated him not to outbow himself. She refused to share in the speculation, or to debate the yet nicer problem involved by the placarded prayer in the washroom to the Messrs. Travellers not to take away the soap; and suddenly he felt himself as tired as she looked, with that sense of the futility of travel which lies in wait for every one who profits by travel.

PART II.

XXVI.

They found Burnamy expecting them at the station in Carlsbad, and she scolded him like a mother for taking the trouble to meet them, while she kept back for the present any sign of knowing that he had staid over a day with the Triscoes in Leipsic. He was as affectionately glad to see her and her husband as she could have wished, but she would have liked it better if he had owned up at once about Leipsic. He did not, and it seemed to her that he was holding her at arm’s-length in his answers about his employer. He would not say how he liked his work, or how he liked Mr. Stoller; he merely said that they were at Pupp’s together, and that he had got in a good day’s work already; and since he would say no more, she contented herself with that.

The long drive from the station to the hotel was by streets that wound down the hill-side like those of an Italian mountain town, between gay stuccoed houses, of Southern rather than of Northern architecture; and the impression of a Latin country was heightened at a turn of the road which brought into view a colossal crucifix planted against a curtain of dark green foliage on the brow of one of the wooded heights that surrounded Carlsbad. When they reached the level of the Tepl, the hill-fed torrent that brawls through the little city under pretty bridges within walls of solid masonry, they found themselves in almost the only vehicle on a brilliant promenade thronged with a cosmopolitan world. Germans in every manner of misfit; Polish Jews in long black gabardines, with tight corkscrew curls on their temples under their black velvet derbys; Austrian officers in tight corsets; Greek priests in flowing robes and brimless high hats; Russians in caftans and Cossacks in Astrakhan caps, accented the more homogeneous masses of western Europeans, in which it would have been hard to say which were English, French or Italians. Among the vividly dressed ladies, some were imaginably Parisian from their chic costumes, but they might easily have been Hungarians or Levantines of taste; some Americans, who might have passed unknown in the perfection of their dress, gave their nationality away in the flat wooden tones of their voices, which made themselves heard above the low hum of talk and the whisper of the innumerable feet.

The omnibus worked its way at a slow walk among the promenaders going and coming between the rows of pollard locusts on one side and the bright walls of the houses on the other. Under the trees were tables, served by pretty bareheaded girls who ran to and from the restaurants across the way. On both sides flashed and glittered the little shops full of silver, glass, jewelry, terracotta figurines, wood-carvings, and all the idle frippery of watering-place traffic: they suggested Paris, and they suggested Saratoga, and then they were of Carlsbad and of no place else in the world, as the crowd which might have been that of other cities at certain moments could only have been of Carlsbad in its habitual effect.

“Do you like it?” asked Burnamy, as if he owned the place, and Mrs. March saw how simple-hearted he was in his reticence, after all. She was ready to bless him when they reached the hotel and found that his interest had got them the only rooms left in the house. This satisfied in her the passion for size which is at the bottom of every American heart, and which perhaps above all else marks us the youngest of the peoples. We pride ourselves on the bigness of our own things, but we are not ungenerous, and when we go to Europe and find things bigger than ours, we are magnanimously happy in them. Pupp’s, in its altogether different way, was larger than any hotel at Saratoga or at Niagara; and when Burnamy told her that it sometimes fed fifteen thousand people a day in the height of the season, she was personally proud of it.

She waited with him in the rotunda of the hotel, while the secretary led March off to look at the rooms reserved for them, and Burnamy hospitably turned the revolving octagonal case in the centre of the rotunda where the names of the guests were put up. They were of all nations, but there were so many New Yorkers whose names ended in berg, and thal, and stern, and baum that she seemed to be gazing upon a cyclorama of the signs on Broadway. A large man of unmistakable American make, but with so little that was of New England or New York in his presence that she might not at once have thought him American, lounged toward them with a quill toothpick in the corner of his mouth. He had a jealous blue eye, into which he seemed trying to put a friendly light; his straight mouth stretched into an involuntary smile above his tawny chin-beard, and he wore his soft hat so far back from his high forehead (it showed to the crown when he took his hat off) that he had the effect of being uncovered.

At his approach Burnamy turned, and with a flush said: “Oh! Let me introduce Mr. Stoller, Mrs. March.”

Stoller took his toothpick out of his mouth and bowed; then he seemed to remember, and took off his hat. “You see Jews enough, here to make you feel at home?” he asked; and he added: “Well, we got some of ’em in Chicago, too, I guess. This young man” — he twisted his head toward Burnamy— “found you easy enough?”

“It was very good of him to meet us,” Mrs. March began. “We didn’t expect—”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Stoller, putting his toothpick back, and his hat on. “We’d got through for the day; my doctor won’t let me work all I want to, here. Your husband’s going to take the cure, they tell me. Well, he wants to go to a good doctor, first. You can’t go and drink these waters hit or miss. I found that out before I came.”

“Oh, no!” said Mrs. March, and she wished to explain how they had been advised; but he said to Burnamy:

“I sha’n’t want you again till ten to-morrow morning. Don’t let me interrupt you,” he added patronizingly to Mrs. March. He put his hand up toward his hat, and sauntered away out of the door.

Burnamy did not speak; and she only asked at last, to relieve the silence, “Is Mr. Stoller an American?”

“Why, I suppose so,” he answered, with an uneasy laugh. “His people were
German emigrants who settled in Southern Indiana. That makes him as much
American as any of us, doesn’t it?”

Burnamy spoke with his mind on his French-Canadian grandfather, who had come down through Detroit, when their name was Bonami; but Mrs. March answered from her eight generations of New England ancestry. “Oh, for the West, yes, perhaps,” and they neither of them said anything more about Stoller.

In their room, where she found March waiting for her amidst their arriving baggage, she was so full of her pent-up opinions of Burnamy’s patron that she, would scarcely speak of the view from their windows of the wooded hills up and down the Tepl. “Yes, yes; very nice, and I know I shall enjoy it ever so much. But I don’t know what you will think of that poor young Burnamy!”

“Why, what’s happened to him?”

“Happened? Stoller’s happened.”

“Oh, have you seen him, already? Well?”

“Well, if you had been going to pick out that type of man, you’d have rejected him, because you’d have said he was too pat. He’s like an actor made up for a Western millionaire. Do you remember that American in ‘L’Etranger’ which Bernhardt did in Boston when she first came? He, looks exactly like that, and he has the worst manners. He stood talking to me with his hat on, and a toothpick in his mouth; and he made me feel as if he had bought me, along with Burnamy, and had paid too much. If you don’t give him a setting down, Basil, I shall never speak to you; that’s all. I’m sure Burnamy is in some trouble with him; he’s got some sort of hold upon him; what it could be in such a short time, I can’t imagine; but if ever a man seemed to be, in a man’s power, he does, in his!

“Now,” said March, “your pronouns have got so far beyond me that I think we’d better let it all go till after supper; perhaps I shall see Stoller myself by that time.”

She had been deeply stirred by her encounter with Stoller, but she entered with impartial intensity into the fact that the elevator at Pupp’s had the characteristic of always coming up and never going down with passengers. It was locked into its closet with a solid door, and there was no bell to summon it, or any place to take it except on the ground-floor; but the stairs by which she could descend were abundant and stately; and on one landing there was the lithograph of one of the largest and ugliest hotels in New York; how ugly it was, she said she should never have known if she had not seen it there.

The dining-room was divided into the grand saloon, where they supped amid rococo sculptures and frescoes, and the glazed veranda opening by vast windows on a spread of tables without, which were already filling up for the evening concert. Around them at the different tables there were groups of faces and figures fascinating in their strangeness, with that distinction which abashes our American level in the presence of European inequality.

“How simple and unimpressive we are, Basil,” she said, “beside all these people! I used to feel it in Europe when I was young, and now I’m certain that we must seem like two faded-in old village photographs. We don’t even look intellectual! I hope we look good.”

“I know I do,” said March. The waiter went for their supper, and they joined in guessing the different nationalities in the room. A French party was easy enough; a Spanish mother and daughter were not difficult, though whether they were not South-American remained uncertain; two elderly maiden ladies were unmistakably of central Massachusetts, and were obviously of a book-club culture that had left no leaf unturned; some Triestines gave themselves away by their Venetian accent; but a large group at a farther table were unassignable in the strange language which they clattered loudly together, with bursts of laughter. They were a family party of old and young, they were having a good time, with a freedom which she called baronial; the ladies wore white satin, or black lace, but the men were in sack-coats; she chose to attribute them, for no reason but their outlandishness, to Transylvania. March pretended to prefer a table full of Germans, who were unmistakably bourgeois, and yet of intellectual effect. He chose as his favorite a middle-aged man of learned aspect, and they both decided to think of him as the Herr Professor, but they did not imagine how perfectly the title fitted him till he drew a long comb from his waistcoat pocket and combed his hair and beard with it above the table.

The wine wrought with the Transylvanians, and they all jargoned together at once, and laughed at the jokes passing among them. One old gentleman had a peculiar fascination from the infantile innocence of his gums when he threw his head back to laugh, and showed an upper jaw toothless except for two incisors, standing guard over the chasm between. Suddenly he choked, coughed to relieve himself, hawked, held his napkin up before him, and —

“Noblesse oblige,” said March, with the tone of irony which he reserved for his wife’s preoccupations with aristocracies of all sorts. “I think I prefer my Hair Professor, bourgeois, as he is.”

The ladies attributively of central Massachusetts had risen from their table, and were making for the door without having paid for their supper. The head waiter ran after them; with a real delicacy for their mistake he explained that though in most places the meals were charged in the bill, it was the custom in Carlsbad to pay for them at the table; one could see that he was making their error a pleasant adventure to them which they could laugh over together, and write home about without a pang.

“And I,” said Mrs. March, shamelessly abandoning the party of the aristocracy, “prefer the manners of the lower classes.”

“Oh, yes,” he admitted. “The only manners we have at home are black ones. But you mustn’t lose courage. Perhaps the nobility are not always so baronial.”

“I don’t know whether we have manners at home,” she said, “and I don’t believe I care. At least we have decencies.”

“Don’t be a jingo,” said her husband.

XXVII.

Though Stoller had formally discharged Burnamy from duty for the day, he was not so full of resources in himself, and he had not so general an acquaintance in the hotel but he was glad to have the young fellow make up to him in the reading-room, that night. He laid down a New York paper ten days old in despair of having left any American news in it, and pushed several continental Anglo-American papers aside with his elbow, as he gave a contemptuous glance at the foreign journals, in Bohemian, Hungarian, German, French, and Italian, which littered the large table.

“I wonder,” he said, “how long it’ll take’em, over here, to catch on to our way of having pictures?”

Burnamy had come to his newspaper work since illustrated journalism was established, and he had never had any shock from it at home, but so sensitive is youth to environment that, after four days in Europe, the New York paper Stoller had laid down was already hideous to him. From the politic side of his nature, however, he temporized with Stoller’s preference. “I suppose it will be some time yet.”

“I wish,” said Stoller, with a savage disregard of expressed sequences and relevancies, “I could ha’ got some pictures to send home with that letter this afternoon: something to show how they do things here, and be a kind of object-lesson.” This term had come up in a recent campaign when some employers, by shutting down their works, were showing their employees what would happen if the employees voted their political opinions into effect, and Stoller had then mastered its meaning and was fond of using it. “I’d like ’em to see the woods around here, that the city owns, and the springs, and the donkey-carts, and the theatre, and everything, and give ’em some practical ideas.”

Burnamy made an uneasy movement.

“I’d ‘a’ liked to put ’em alongside of some of our improvements, and show how a town can be carried on when it’s managed on business principles.”

“Why didn’t you think of it?”

“Really, I don’t know,” said Burnamy, with a touch of impatience.

They had not met the evening before on the best of terms. Stoller had expected Burnamy twenty-four hours earlier, and had shown his displeasure with him for loitering a day at Leipsic which he might have spent at Carlsbad; and Burnamy had been unsatisfactory in accounting for the delay. But he had taken hold so promptly and so intelligently that by working far into the night, and through the whole forenoon, he had got Stoller’s crude mass of notes into shape, and had sent off in time for the first steamer the letter which was to appear over the proprietor’s name in his paper. It was a sort of rough but very full study of the Carlsbad city government, the methods of taxation, the municipal ownership of the springs and the lands, and the public control in everything. It condemned the aristocratic constitution of the municipality, but it charged heavily in favor of the purity, beneficence, and wisdom of the administration, under which there was no poverty and no idleness, and which was managed like any large business.

Stoller had sulkily recurred to his displeasure, once or twice, and
Burnamy suffered it submissively until now. But now, at the change in
Burnamy’s tone, he changed his manner a little.

“Seen your friends since supper?” he asked.

“Only a moment. They are rather tired, and they’ve gone to bed.”

That the fellow that edits that book you write for?”

“Yes; he owns it, too.”

The notion of any sort of ownership moved Stoller’s respect, and he asked more deferentially, “Makin’ a good thing out of it?”

“A living, I suppose. Some of the high-class weeklies feel the competition of the ten-cent monthlies. But ‘Every Other Week’ is about the best thing we’ve got in the literary way, and I guess it’s holding its own.”

“Have to, to let the editor come to Carlsbad,” Stoller said, with a return to the sourness of his earlier mood. “I don’t know as I care much for his looks; I seen him when he came in with you. No snap to him.” He clicked shut the penknife he had been paring his nails with, and started up with the abruptness which marked all his motions, mental and physical; as he walked heavily out of the room he said, without looking at Burnamy, “You want to be ready by half past ten at the latest.”

Stoller’s father and mother were poor emigrants who made their way to the West with the instinct for sordid prosperity native to their race and class; and they set up a small butcher shop in the little Indiana town where their son was born, and throve in it from the start. He could remember his mother helping his father make the sausage and head-cheese and pickle the pigs’ feet, which they took turns in selling at as great a price as they could extort from the townspeople. She was a good and tender mother, and when her little Yawcup, as the boys called Jacob in mimicry after her, had grown to the school-going age, she taught him to fight the Americans, who stoned him when he came out of his gate, and mobbed his home-coming; and mocked and tormented him at play-time till they wore themselves into a kindlier mind toward him through the exhaustion of their invention. No one, so far as the gloomy, stocky, rather dense little boy could make out, ever interfered in his behalf; and he grew up in bitter shame for his German origin, which entailed upon him the hard fate of being Dutch among the Americans. He hated his native speech so much that he cried when he was forced to use it with his father and mother at home; he furiously denied it with the boys who proposed to parley with him in it on such terms as “Nix come arouce in de Dytchman’s house.” He disused it so thoroughly that after his father took him out of school, when he was old enough to help in the shop, he could not get back to it. He regarded his father’s business as part of his national disgrace, and at the cost of leaving his home he broke away from it, and informally apprenticed himself to the village blacksmith and wagon-maker. When it came to his setting up for himself in the business he had chosen, he had no help from his father, who had gone on adding dollar to dollar till he was one of the richest men in the place.

Jacob prospered too; his old playmates, who had used him so cruelly, had many of them come to like him; but as a Dutchman they never dreamt of asking him to their houses when they were young people, any more than when they were children. He was long deeply in love with an American girl whom he had never spoken to, and the dream of his life was to marry an American. He ended by marrying the daughter of Pferd the brewer, who had been at an American school in Indianapolis, and had come home as fragilely and nasally American as anybody. She made him a good, sickly, fretful wife; and bore him five children, of whom two survived, with no visible taint of their German origin.

In the mean time Jacob’s father had died and left his money to his son, with the understanding that he was to provide for his mother, who would gladly have given every cent to him and been no burden to him, if she could. He took her home, and cared tenderly for her as long as she lived; and she meekly did her best to abolish herself in a household trying so hard to be American. She could not help her native accent, but she kept silence when her son’s wife had company; and when her eldest granddaughter began very early to have American callers, she went out of the room; they would not have noticed her if she had staid.

Before this Jacob had come forward publicly in proportion to his financial importance in the community. He first commended himself to the Better Element by crushing out a strike in his Buggy Works, which were now the largest business interest of the place; and he rose on a wave of municipal reform to such a height of favor with the respectable classes that he was elected on a citizens’ ticket to the Legislature. In the reaction which followed he was barely defeated for Congress, and was talked of as a dark horse who might be put up for the governorship some day; but those who knew him best predicted that he would not get far in politics, where his bull-headed business ways would bring him to ruin sooner or later; they said, “You can’t swing a bolt like you can a strike.”

When his mother died, he surprised his old neighbors by going to live in Chicago, though he kept his works in the place where he and they had grown up together. His wife died shortly after, and within four years he lost his three eldest children; his son, it was said, had begun to go wrong first. But the rumor of his increasing wealth drifted back from Chicago; he was heard of in different enterprises and speculations; at last it was said that he had bought a newspaper, and then his boyhood friends decided that Jake was going into politics again.

In the wider horizons and opener atmosphere of the great city he came to understand better that to be an American in all respects was not the best. His mounting sense of importance began to be retroactive in the direction of his ancestral home; he wrote back to the little town near Wurzburg which his people had come from, and found that he had relatives still living there, some of whom had become people of substance; and about the time his health gave way from life-long gluttony, and he was ordered to Carlsbad, he had pretty much made up his mind to take his younger daughters and put them in school for a year or two in Wurzburg, for a little discipline if not education. He had now left them there, to learn the language, which he had forgotten with such heart-burning and shame, and music, for which they had some taste.

The twins loudly lamented their fate, and they parted from their father with open threats of running away; and in his heart he did not altogether blame them. He came away from Wurzburg raging at the disrespect for his money and his standing in business which had brought him a more galling humiliation there than anything he had suffered in his boyhood at Des Vaches. It intensified him in his dear-bought Americanism to the point of wishing to commit lese majesty in the teeth of some local dignitaries who had snubbed him, and who seemed to enjoy putting our eagle to shame in his person; there was something like the bird of his step-country in Stoller’s pale eyes and huge beak.

XXVIII.

March sat with a company of other patients in the anteroom of the doctor, and when it came his turn to be prodded and kneaded, he was ashamed at being told he was not so bad a case as he had dreaded. The doctor wrote out a careful dietary for him, with a prescription of a certain number of glasses of water at a certain spring and a certain number of baths, and a rule for the walks he was to take before and after eating; then the doctor patted him on the shoulder and pushed him caressingly out of his inner office. It was too late to begin his treatment that day, but he went with his wife to buy a cup, with a strap for hanging it over his shoulder, and he put it on so as to be an invalid with the others at once; he came near forgetting the small napkin of Turkish towelling which they stuffed into their cups, but happily the shopman called him back in time to sell it to him.

At five the next morning he rose, and on his way to the street exchanged with the servants cleaning the hotel stairs the first of the gloomy ‘Guten Morgens’ which usher in the day at Carlsbad. They cannot be so finally hopeless as they sound; they are probably expressive only of the popular despair of getting through with them before night; but March heard the salutations sorrowfully groaned out on every hand as he joined the straggling current of invalids which swelled on the way past the silent shops and cafes in the Alte Wiese, till it filled the street, and poured its thousands upon the promenade before the classic colonnade of the Muhlbrunn. On the other bank of the Tepl the Sprudel flings its steaming waters by irregular impulses into the air under a pavilion of iron and glass; but the Muhlbrunn is the source of most resort. There is an instrumental concert somewhere in Carlsbad from early rising till bedtime; and now at the Muhlbrunn there was an orchestra already playing; and under the pillared porch, as well as before it, the multitude shuffled up and down, draining their cups by slow sips, and then taking each his place in the interminable line moving on to replenish them at the spring.

A picturesque majority of Polish Jews, whom some vice of their climate is said peculiarly to fit for the healing effects of Carlsbad, most took his eye in their long gabardines of rusty black and their derby hats of plush or velvet, with their corkscrew curls coming down before their ears. They were old and young, they were grizzled and red and black, but they seemed all well-to-do; and what impresses one first and last at Carlsbad is that its waters are mainly for the healing of the rich. After the Polish Jews, the Greek priests of Russian race were the most striking figures. There were types of Latin ecclesiastics, who were striking in their way too; and the uniforms of certain Austrian officers and soldiers brightened the picture. Here and there a southern face, Italian or Spanish or Levantine, looked passionately out of the mass of dull German visages; for at Carlsbad the Germans, more than any other gentile nation, are to the fore. Their misfits, their absence of style, imparted the prevalent effect; though now and then among the women a Hungarian, or Pole, or Parisian, or American, relieved the eye which seeks beauty and grace rather than the domestic virtues. There were certain faces, types of discomfort and disease, which appealed from the beginning to the end. A young Austrian, yellow as gold, and a livid South-American, were of a lasting fascination to March.

What most troubled him, in his scrutiny of the crowd, was the difficulty of assigning people to their respective nations, and he accused his years of having dulled his perceptions; but perhaps it was from their long disuse in his homogeneous American world. The Americans themselves fused with the European races who were often so hard to make out; his fellow-citizens would not be identified till their bad voices gave them away; he thought the women’s voices the worst.

At the springs, a line of young girls with a steady mechanical action dipped the cups into the steaming source, and passed them impersonally up to their owners. With the patients at the Muhlbrunn it was often a half-hour before one’s turn came, and at all a strict etiquette forbade any attempt to anticipate it. The water was merely warm and flat, and after the first repulsion one could forget it. March formed a childish habit of counting ten between the sips, and of finishing the cup with a gulp which ended it quickly; he varied his walks between cups by going sometimes to a bridge at the end of the colonnade where a group of Triestines were talking Venetian, and sometimes to the little Park beyond the Kurhaus, where some old women were sweeping up from the close sward the yellow leaves which the trees had untidily dropped overnight. He liked to sit there and look at the city beyond the Tepl, where it climbed the wooded heights in terraces till it lost its houses in the skirts and folds of the forest. Most mornings it rained, quietly, absent-mindedly, and this, with the chili in the air, deepened a pleasant illusion of Quebec offered by the upper town across the stream; but there were sunny mornings when the mountains shone softly through a lustrous mist, and the air was almost warm.

Once in his walk he found himself the companion of Burnamy’s employer, whom he had sometimes noted in the line at the Muhlbrunn, waiting his turn, cup in hand, with a face of sullen impatience. Stoller explained that though you could have the water brought to you at your hotel, he chose to go to the spring for the sake of the air; it was something you had got to live through; before he had that young Burnamy to help him he did not know what to do with his time, but now, every minute he was not eating or sleeping he was working; his cure did not oblige him to walk much. He examined March, with a certain mixture of respect and contempt, upon the nature of the literary life, and how it differed from the life of a journalist. He asked if he thought Burnamy would amount to anything as a literary man; he so far assented to March’s faith in him as to say, “He’s smart.” He told of leaving his daughters in school at Wurzburg; and upon the whole he moved March with a sense of his pathetic loneliness without moving his liking, as he passed lumberingly on, dangling his cup.

March gave his own cup to the little maid at his spring, and while she gave it to a second, who dipped it and handed it to a third for its return to him, he heard an unmistakable fellow-countryman saying good-, morning to them all in English. “Are you going to teach them United States?” he asked of a face with which he knew such an appeal would not fail.

“Well,” the man admitted, “I try to teach them that much. They like it. You are an American? I am glad of it. I have ‘most lost the use of my lungs, here. I’m a great talker, and I talk to my wife till she’s about dead; then I’m out of it for the rest of the day; I can’t speak German.”

His manner was the free, friendly manner of the West. He must be that sort of untravelled American whom March had so seldom met, but he was afraid to ask him if this was his first time at Carlsbad, lest it should prove the third or fourth. “Are you taking the cure?” he asked instead.

“Oh, no. My wife is. She’ll be along directly; I come down here and drink the waters to encourage her; doctor said to. That gets me in for the diet, too. I’ve e’t more cooked fruit since I been here than I ever did in my life before. Prunes? My Lord, I’m full o’ prunes! Well, it does me good to see an American, to know him. I couldn’t ‘a’ told you, it you hadn’t have spoken.”

“Well,” said March, “I shouldn’t have been so sure of you, either, by your looks.”

“Yes, we can’t always tell ourselves from these Dutch. But they know us, and they don’t want us, except just for one thing, and that’s our money. I tell you, the Americans are the chumps over here. Soon’s they got all our money, or think they have, they say, ‘Here, you Americans, this is my country; you get off;’ and we got to get. Ever been over before?”

“A great while ago; so long that I can hardly believe it.”

“It’s my first time. My name’s Otterson: I’m from out in Iowa.”

March gave him his name, and added that he was from New York.

“Yes. I thought you was Eastern. But that wasn’t an Eastern man you was just with?”

“No; he’s from Chicago. He’s a Mr. Stoller.”

“Not the buggy man?”

“I believe he makes buggies.”

“Well, you do meet everybody here.” The Iowan was silent for a moment, as if, hushed by the weighty thought. “I wish my wife could have seen him. I just want her to see the man that made our buggy. I don’t know what’s keeping her, this morning,” he added, apologetically. “Look at that fellow, will you, tryin’ to get away from those women!” A young officer was doing his best to take leave of two ladies, who seemed to be mother and daughter; they detained him by their united arts, and clung to him with caressing words and looks. He was red in the face with his polite struggles when he broke from them at last. “How they do hang on to a man, over here!” the Iowa man continued. “And the Americans are as bad as any. Why, there’s one ratty little Englishman up at our place, and our girls just swarm after him; their mothers are worse. Well, it’s so, Jenny,” he said to the lady who had joined them and whom March turned round to see when he spoke to her. “If I wanted a foreigner I should go in for a man. And these officers! Put their mustaches up at night in curl-papers, they tell me. Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson, Mr. March. Well, had your first glass, yet, Jenny? I’m just going for my second tumbler.”

He took his wife back to the spring, and began to tell her about Stoller; she made no sign of caring for him; and March felt inculpated. She relented a little toward him as they drank together; when he said he must be going to breakfast with his wife, she asked where he breakfasted, and said, “Why, we go to the Posthof, too.” He answered that then they should be sure some time to meet there; he did not venture further; he reflected that Mrs. March had her reluctances too; she distrusted people who had amused or interested him before she met them.

XXIX.

Burnamy had found the Posthof for them, as he had found most of the other agreeable things in Carlsbad, which he brought to their knowledge one by one, with such forethought that March said he hoped he should be cared for in his declining years as an editor rather than as a father; there was no tenderness like a young contributor’s.

Many people from the hotels on the hill found at Pupp’s just the time and space between their last cup of water and their first cup of coffee which are prescribed at Carlsbad; but the Marches were aware somehow from the beginning that Pupp’s had not the hold upon the world at breakfast which it had at the mid-day dinner, or at supper on the evenings when the concert was there. Still it was amusing, and they were patient of Burnamy’s delay till he could get a morning off from Stoller and go with them to the Posthof. He met Mrs. March in the reading-room, where March was to join them on his way from the springs with his bag of bread. The earlier usage of buying the delicate pink slices of Westphalia ham, which form the chief motive of a Carlsbad breakfast, at a certain shop in the town, and carrying them to the cafe with you, is no longer of such binding force as the custom of getting your bread at the Swiss bakery. You choose it yourself at the counter, which begins to be crowded by half past seven, and when you have collected the prescribed loaves into the basket of metallic filigree given you by one of the baker’s maids, she puts it into a tissue-paper bag of a gay red color, and you join the other invalids streaming away from the bakery, their paper bags making a festive rustling as they go.

Two roads lead out of the town into the lovely meadow-lands, a good mile up the brawling Tepl, before they join on the right side of the torrent, where the Posthof lurks nestled under trees whose boughs let the sun and rain impartially through upon its army of little tables. By this time the slow omnibus plying between Carlsbad and some villages in the valley beyond has crossed from the left bank to the right, and keeps on past half a dozen other cafes, where patients whose prescriptions marshal them beyond the Posthof drop off by the dozens and scores.

The road on the left bank of the Tepl is wild and overhung at points with wooded steeps, when it leaves the town; but on the right it is bordered with shops and restaurants a great part of its length. In leafy nooks between these, uphill walks begin their climb of the mountains, from the foot of votive shrines set round with tablets commemorating in German, French, Russian, Hebrew, Magyar and Czech, the cure of high-well-borns of all those races and languages. Booths glittering with the lapidary’s work in the cheaper gems, or full of the ingenious figures of the toy-makers, alternate with the shrines and the cafes on the way to the Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut about the feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails in mimic pride.

Burnamy got his charges with difficulty by the shrines in which they felt the far-reflected charm of the crucifixes of the white-hot Italian highways of their early travel, and by the toyshops where they had a mechanical, out-dated impulse to get something for the children, ending in a pang for the fact that they were children no longer. He waited politely while Mrs. March made up her mind that she would not buy any laces of the motherly old women who showed them under pent-roofs on way-side tables; and he waited patiently at the gate of the flower-gardens beyond the shops where March bought lavishly of sweetpease from the businesslike flower-woman, and feigned a grateful joy in her because she knew no English, and gave him a chance of speaking his German.

“You’ll find,” he said, as they crossed the road again, “that it’s well to trifle a good deal; it makes the time pass. I should still be lagging along in my thirties if it hadn’t been for fooling, and here I am well on in my fifties, and Mrs. March is younger than ever.”

They were at the gate of the garden and grounds of the cafe at last, and a turn of the path brought them to the prospect of its tables, under the trees, between the two long glazed galleries where the breakfasters take refuge at other tables when it rains; it rains nearly always, and the trunks of the trees are as green with damp as if painted; but that morning the sun was shining. At the verge of the open space a group of pretty serving-maids, each with her name on a silver band pinned upon her breast, met them and bade them a ‘Guten Morgen’ of almost cheerful note, but gave way, to an eager little smiling blonde, who came pushing down the path at sight of Burnamy, and claimed him for her own.

“Ah, Lili! We want an extra good table, this morning. These are some
American Excellencies, and you must do your best for them.”

“Oh, yes,” the girl answered in English, after a radiant salutation of the Marches; “I get you one.”

“You are a little more formerly, to-day, and I didn’t had one already.”

She ran among the tables along the edge of the western edge of the gallery, and was far beyond hearing his protest that he was not earlier than usual when she beckoned him to the table she had found. She had crowded it in between two belonging to other girls, and by the time her breakfasters came up she was ready for their order, with the pouting pretence that the girls always tried to rob her of the best places. Burnamy explained proudly, when she went, that none of the other girls ever got an advantage of her; she had more custom than any three of them, and she had hired a man to help her carry her orders. The girls were all from the neighboring villages, he said, and they lived at home in the winter on their summer tips; their wages were nothing, or less, for sometimes they paid for their places.

“What a mass of information!” said March. “How did you come by it?”

“Newspaper habit of interviewing the universe.”

“It’s not a bad habit, if one doesn’t carry it too far. How did Lili learn her English?”

“She takes lessons in the winter. She’s a perfect little electric motor.
I don’t believe any Yankee girl could equal her.”

“She would expect to marry a millionaire if she did. What astonishes one over here is to see how contentedly people prosper along on their own level. And the women do twice the work of the men without expecting to equal them in any other way. At Pupp’s, if we go to one end of the out-door restaurant, it takes three men to wait on us: one to bring our coffee or tea, another to bring our bread and meat, and another to make out our bill, and I have to tip all three of them. If we go to the other end, one girl serves us, and I have to give only one fee; I make it less than the least I give any three of the men waiters.”

“You ought to be ashamed of that,” said his wife.

“I’m not. I’m simply proud of your sex, my dear.”

“Women do nearly everything, here,” said Burnamy, impartially. “They built that big new Kaiserbad building: mixed the mortar, carried the hods, and laid the stone.”

“That makes me prouder of the sex than ever. But come, Mr. Burnamy! Isn’t there anybody of polite interest that you know of in this crowd?”

“Well, I can’t say,” Burnamy hesitated.

The breakfasters had been thronging into the grove and the galleries; the tables were already filled, and men were bringing other tables on their heads, and making places for them, with entreaties for pardon everywhere; the proprietor was anxiously directing them; the pretty serving-girls were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart with shrill, sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and dappled the figures of the men with harlequin patches of light and shade. A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial permanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trailing herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order, as she would not have had in ours. She was where she was by a toleration of certain social facts which corresponds in Europe to our reverence for the vested interests. In her history there, had been officers and bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullen young fellow . . . . Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his poem to March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.

“I don’t believe,” he said, “that I recognize-any celebrities here.”

“I’m sorry,” said March. “Mrs. March would have been glad of some Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere well-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness.”

“I’m satisfied with the picturesqueness,” said his wife. “Don’t worry about me, Mr. Burnamy.”

“Why can’t we have this sort of thing at home?”

“We’re getting something like it in the roof-gardens,” said March. “We couldn’t have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us. At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this. So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and the mosquito-line into the night air. I haven’t seen a fly since I came to Europe. I really miss them; it makes me homesick.”

“There are plenty in Italy,” his wife suggested.

“We must get down there before we go home.”

“But why did nobody ever tell us that there were no flies in Germany? Why did no traveller ever put it in his book? When your stewardess said so on the steamer, I remember that you regarded it as a bluff.” He turned to Burnamy, who was listening with the deference of a contributor: “Isn’t Lili rather long? I mean for such a very prompt person. Oh, no!”

But Burnamy got to his feet, and shouted “Fraulein!” to Lili; with her hireling at her heels she was flying down a distant aisle between the tables. She called back, with a face laughing over her shoulder, “In a minute!” and vanished in the crowd.

“Does that mean anything in particular? There’s really no hurry.”

“Oh, I think she’ll come now,” said Burnamy. March protested that he had only been amused at Lili’s delay; but his wife scolded him for his impatience; she begged Burnamy’s pardon, and repeated civilities passed between them. She asked if he did not think some of the young ladies were pretty beyond the European average; a very few had style; the mothers were mostly fat, and not stylish; it was well not to regard the fathers too closely; several old gentlemen were clearing their throats behind their newspapers, with noises that made her quail. There was no one so effective as the Austrian officers, who put themselves a good deal on show, bowing from their hips to favored groups; with the sun glinting from their eyeglasses, and their hands pressing their sword-hilts, they moved between the tables with the gait of tight-laced women.

“They all wear corsets,” Burnamy explained.

“How much you know already!” said Mrs. March. “I can see that Europe won’t be lost on you in anything. Oh, who’s that?” A lady whose costume expressed saris at every point glided up the middle aisle of the grove with a graceful tilt. Burnamy was silent. “She must be an American. Do you know who she is?”

“Yes.” He hesitated, a little to name a woman whose tragedy had once filled the newspapers.

Mrs. March gazed after her with the fascination which such tragedies inspire. “What grace! Is she beautiful?”

“Very.” Burnamy had not obtruded his knowledge, but somehow Mrs. March did not like his knowing who she was, and how beautiful. She asked March to look, but he refused.

“Those things are too squalid,” he said, and she liked him for saying it; she hoped it would not be lost upon Burnamy.

One of the waitresses tripped on the steps near them and flung the burden off her tray on the stone floor before her; some of the dishes broke, and the breakfast was lost. Tears came into the girl’s eyes and rolled down her hot cheeks. “There! That is what I call tragedy,” said March. “She’ll have to pay for those things.”

“Oh, give her the money, dearest!”

“How can I?”

The girl had just got away with the ruin when Lili and her hireling behind her came bearing down upon them with their three substantial breakfasts on two well-laden trays. She forestalled Burnamy’s reproaches for her delay, laughing and bridling, while she set down the dishes of ham and tongue and egg, and the little pots of coffee and frothed milk.

“I could not so soon I wanted, because I was to serve an American princess.”

Mrs. March started with proud conjecture of one of those noble international marriages which fill our women with vainglory for such of their compatriots as make them.

“Oh, come now, Lili!” said Burnamy. “We have queens in America, but nothing so low as princesses. This was a queen, wasn’t it?”

She referred the case to her hireling, who confirmed her. “All people say it is princess,” she insisted.

“Well, if she’s a princess we must look her up after breakfast,” said
Burnamy. “Where is she sitting?”

She pointed at a corner so far off on the other side that no one could be distinguished, and then was gone, with a smile flashed over her shoulder, and her hireling trying to keep up with her.

“We’re all very proud of Lili’s having a hired man,” said Burnamy. “We think it reflects credit on her customers.”

March had begun his breakfast with-the voracious appetite of an early-rising invalid. “What coffee!”

He drew a long sigh after the first draught.

“It’s said to be made of burnt figs,” said Burnamy, from the inexhaustible advantage of his few days’ priority in Carlsbad.

“Then let’s have burnt figs introduced at home as soon as possible. But why burnt figs? That seems one of those doubts which are much more difficult than faith.”

“It’s not only burnt figs,” said Burnamy, with amiable superiority, “if it is burnt figs, but it’s made after a formula invented by a consensus of physicians, and enforced by the municipality. Every cafe in Carlsbad makes the same kind of coffee and charges the same price.”

“You are leaving us very little to find out for ourselves,” sighed March.

“Oh, I know a lot more things. Are you fond of fishing?”

“Not very.”

“You can get a permit to catch trout in the Tepl, but they send an official with you who keeps count, and when you have had your sport, the trout belong to the municipality just as they did before you caught them.”

“I don’t see why that isn’t a good notion: the last thing I should want to do would be to eat a fish that I had caught, and that I was personally acquainted with. Well, I’m never going away from Carlsbad. I don’t wonder people get their doctors to tell them to come back.”

Burnamy told them a number of facts he said Stoller had got together about the place, and had given him to put in shape. It was run in the interest of people who had got out of order, so that they would keep coming to get themselves in order again; you could hardly buy an unwholesome meal in the town; all the cooking was ‘kurgemass’. He won such favor with his facts that he could not stop in time: he said to March, “But if you ever should have a fancy for a fish of your personal acquaintance, there’s a restaurant up the Tepl, where they let you pick out your trout in the water; then they catch him and broil him for you, and you know what you are eating.”

“Is it a municipal restaurant?”

“Semi-municipal,” said Burnamy, laughing.

“We’ll take Mrs. March,” said her husband, and in her gravity Burnamy felt the limitations of a woman’s sense of humor, which always define themselves for men so unexpectedly.

He did what he could to get back into her good graces by telling her what he knew about distinctions and dignities that he now saw among the breakfasters. The crowd had now grown denser till the tables were set together in such labyrinths that any one who left the central aisle was lost in them. The serving-girls ran more swiftly to and fro, responding with a more nervous shrillness to the calls of “Fraulein! Fraulein!” that followed them. The proprietor, in his bare head, stood like one paralyzed by his prosperity, which sent up all round him the clash of knives and crockery, and the confusion of tongues. It was more than an hour before Burnamy caught Lili’s eye, and three times she promised to come and be paid before she came. Then she said, “It is so nice, when you stay a little,” and when he told her of the poor Fraulein who had broken the dishes in her fall near them, she almost wept with tenderness; she almost winked with wickedness when he asked if the American princess was still in her place.

“Do go and see who it can be!” Mrs. March entreated. “We’ll wait here,” and he obeyed. “I am not sure that I like him,” she said, as soon as he was out of hearing. “I don’t know but he’s coarse, after all. Do you approve of his knowing so many people’s ‘taches’ already?”

“Would it be any better later?” he asked in tern. “He seemed to find you interested.”

“It’s very different with us; we’re not young,” she urged, only half seriously.

Her husband laughed. “I see you want me to defend him. Oh, hello!” he cried, and she saw Burnamy coming toward them with a young lady, who was nodding to them from as far as she could see them. “This is the easy kind of thing that makes you Blush for the author if you find it in a novel.”

XXX.

Mrs. March fairly took Miss Triscoe in her arms to kiss her. “Do you know I felt it must be you, all the time! When did you come? Where is your father? What hotel are you staying at?”

It appeared, while Miss Triscoe was shaking hands with March, that it was last night, and her father was finishing his breakfast, and it was one of the hotels on the hill. On the way back to her father it appeared that he wished to consult March’s doctor; not that there was anything the matter.

The general himself was not much softened by the reunion with his fellow-Americans; he confided to them that his coffee was poisonous; but he seemed, standing up with the Paris-New York Chronicle folded in his hand, to have drunk it all. Was March going off on his forenoon tramp? He believed that was part of the treatment, which was probably all humbug, though he thought of trying it, now he was there. He was told the walks were fine; he looked at Burnamy as if he had been praising them, and Burnamy said he had been wondering if March would not like to try a mountain path back to his hotel; he said, not so sincerely, that he thought Mrs. March would like it.

“I shall like your account of it,” she answered. “But I’ll walk back on a level, if you please.”

“Oh, yes,” Miss Triscoe pleaded, “come with us!”

She played a little comedy of meaning to go back with her father so gracefully that Mrs. March herself could scarcely have told just where the girl’s real purpose of going with Burnamy began to be evident, or just how she managed to make General Triscoe beg to have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. March back to her hotel.

March went with the young people across the meadow behind the Posthof and up into the forest, which began at the base of the mountain. At first they tried to keep him in the range of their talk; but he fell behind more and more, and as the talk narrowed to themselves it was less and less possible to include him in it. When it began to concern their common appreciation of the Marches, they even tried to get out of his hearing.

“They’re so young in their thoughts,” said Burnamy, “and they seem as much interested in everything as they could have been thirty years ago. They belong to a time when the world was a good deal fresher than it is now; don’t you think? I mean, in the eighteen-sixties.”

“Oh, yes, I can see that.”

“I don’t know why we shouldn’t be born older in each generation than people were in the last. Perhaps we are,” he suggested.

“I don’t know how you mean,” said the girl, keeping vigorously up with him; she let him take the jacket she threw off, but she would not have his hand at the little steeps where he wanted to give it.

“I don’t believe I can quite make it out myself. But fancy a man that began to act at twenty, quite unconsciously of course, from the past experience of the whole race—”

“He would be rather a dreadful person, wouldn’t he?”

“Rather monstrous, yes,” he owned, with a laugh. “But that’s where the psychological interest would come in.”

As if she did not feel the notion quite pleasant she turned from it. “I suppose you’ve been writing all sorts of things since you came here.”

“Well, it hasn’t been such a great while as it’s seemed, and I’ve had Mr.
Stoller’s psychological interests to look after.”

“Oh, yes! Do you like him?”

“I don’t know. He’s a lump of honest selfishness. He isn’t bad. You know where to have him. He’s simple, too.”

“You mean, like Mr. March?”

“I didn’t mean that; but why not? They’re not of the same generation, but
Stoller isn’t modern.”

“I’m very curious to see him,” said the girl.

“Do you want me to introduce him?”

“You can introduce him to papa.”

They stopped and looked across the curve of the mounting path, down on March, who had sunk on a way-side seat, and was mopping his forehead. He saw them, and called up: “Don’t wait for me. I’ll join you, gradually.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Burnamy called back, but he kept on with Miss Triscoe. “I want to get the Hirschensprung in,” he explained. “It’s the cliff where a hunted deer leaped down several hundred feet to get away from an emperor who was after him.”

“Oh, yes. They have them everywhere.”

“Do they? Well, anyway, there’s a noble view up there.”

There was no view on the way up. The Germans’ notion of a woodland is everywhere that of a dense forest such as their barbarous tribes primevally herded in. It means the close-set stems of trees, with their tops interwoven in a roof of boughs and leaves so densely that you may walk dry through it almost as long as a German shower lasts. When the sun shines there is a pleasant greenish light in the aisles, shot here and there with the gold that trickles through. There is nothing of the accident of an American wood in these forests, which have been watched and weeded by man ever since they burst the soil. They remain nurseries, but they have the charm which no human care can alienate. The smell of their bark and their leaves, and of the moist, flowerless earth about their roots, came to March where he sat rich with the memories of his country-bred youth, and drugged all consciousness of his long life in cities since, and made him a part of nature, with dulled interests and dimmed perspectives, so that for the moment he had the enjoyment of exemption from care. There was no wild life to penetrate his isolation; no birds, not a squirrel, not an insect; an old man who had bidden him good-morning, as he came up, kept fumbling at the path with his hoe, and was less intrusive than if he had not been there.

March thought of the impassioned existence of these young people playing the inevitable comedy of hide and seek which the youth of the race has played from the beginning of time. The other invalids who haunted the forest, and passed up and down before him in fulfilment of their several prescriptions, had a thin unreality in spite of the physical bulk that prevailed among them, and they heightened the relief that the forest-spirit brought him from the strenuous contact of that young drama. He had been almost painfully aware that the persons in it had met, however little they knew it, with an eagerness intensified by their brief separation, and he fancied it was the girl who had unconsciously operated their reunion in response to the young man’s longing, her will making itself electrically felt through space by that sort of wireless telegraphy which love has long employed, and science has just begun to imagine.

He would have been willing that they should get home alone, but he knew that his wife would require an account of them from him, and though he could have invented something of the kind, if it came to the worst, he was aware that it would not do for him to arrive without them. The thought goaded him from his seat, and he joined the upward procession of his fellow-sick, as it met another procession straggling downward; the ways branched in all directions, with people on them everywhere, bent upon building up in a month the health which they would spend the rest of the year in demolishing.

He came upon his charges unexpectedly at a turn of the path, and Miss Triscoe told him that he ought to have been with them for the view from the Hirschensprung. It was magnificent, she said, and she made Burnamy corroborate her praise of it, and agree with her that it was worth the climb a thousand times; he modestly accepted the credit she appeared willing to give him, of inventing the Hirschensprung.

XXXI.

Between his work for Stoller and what sometimes seemed the obstructiveness of General Triscoe, Burnamy was not very much with Miss Triscoe. He was not devout, but he went every Sunday to the pretty English church on the hill, where he contributed beyond his means to the support of the English clergy on the Continent, for the sake of looking at her back hair during the service, and losing himself in the graceful lines which defined, the girl’s figure from the slant of her flowery hat to the point where the pewtop crossed her elastic waist. One happy morning the general did not come to church, and he had the fortune to walk home with her to her pension, where she lingered with him a moment, and almost made him believe she might be going to ask him to come in.

The next evening, when he was sauntering down the row of glittering shops beside the Tepl, with Mrs. March, they overtook the general and his daughter at a place where the girl was admiring some stork-scissors in the window; she said she wished she were still little, so that she could get them. They walked home with the Triscoes, and then he hurried Mrs. March back to the shop. The man had already put up his shutters, and was just closing his door, but Burnamy pushed in, and asked to look at the stork-scissors they had seen in the window. The gas was out, and the shopman lighted a very dim candle, to show them.

“I knew you wanted to get them for her, after what she said, Mrs. March,” he laughed, nervously, “and you must let me lend you the money.”

“Why, of course!” she answered, joyfully humoring his feint. “Shall I put my card in for the man to send home to her with them?”

“Well — no. No. Not your card — exactly. Or, yes! Yes, you must, I suppose.”

They made the hushing street gay with their laughter; the next evening Miss Triscoe came upon the Marches and Burnamy where they sat after supper listening to the concert at Pupp’s, and thanked Mrs. March for the scissors. Then she and Burnamy had their laugh again, and Miss Triscoe joined them, to her father’s frowning mystification. He stared round for a table; they were all taken, and he could not refuse the interest Burnamy made with the waiters to bring them one and crowd it in. He had to ask him to sup with them, and Burnamy sat down and heard the concert through beside Miss Triscoe.

“What is so tremendously amusing in a pair of stork-scissors?” March demanded, when his wife and he were alone.

“Why, I was wanting to tell you, dearest,” she began, in a tone which he felt to be wheedling, and she told the story of the scissors.

“Look here, my dear! Didn’t you promise to let this love-affair alone?”

“That was on the ship. And besides, what would you have done, I should like to know? Would you have refused to let him buy them for her?” She added, carelessly, “He wants us to go to the Kurhaus ball with him.”

“Oh, does he!”

“Yes. He says he knows that she can get her father to let her go if we will chaperon them. And I promised that you would.”

“That I would?”

“It will do just as well if you go. And it will be very amusing; you can see something of Carlsbad society.”

“But I’m not going!” he declared. “It would interfere with my cure. The sitting up late would be bad enough, but I should get very hungry, and I should eat potato salad and sausages, and drink beer, and do all sorts of unwholesome things.”

“Nonsense! The refreshments will be ‘kurgemass’, of course.”

“You can go yourself,” he said.

A ball is not the same thing for a woman after fifty as it is before twenty, but still it has claims upon the imagination, and the novel circumstance of a ball in the Kurhaus in Carlsbad enhanced these for Mrs. March. It was the annual reunion which is given by municipal authority in the large hall above the bathrooms; it is frequented with safety and pleasure by curious strangers, and now, upon reflection, it began to have for Mrs. March the charm of duty; she believed that she could finally have made March go in her place, but she felt that she ought really to go in his, and save him from the late hours and the late supper.

“Very well, then,” she said at last, “I will go.”

It appeared that any civil person might go to the reunion who chose to pay two florins and a half. There must have been some sort of restriction, and the ladies of Burnamy’s party went with a good deal of amused curiosity to see what the distinctions were; but they saw none unless it was the advantages which the military had. The long hall over the bathrooms shaped itself into a space for the dancing at one end, and all the rest of it was filled with tables, which at half past eight were crowded with people, eating, drinking, and smoking. The military enjoyed the monopoly of a table next the rail dividing the dancing from the dining space. There the tight-laced Herr Hauptmanns and Herr Lieutenants sat at their sausage and beer and cigars in the intervals of the waltzes, and strengthened themselves for a foray among the gracious Fraus and Frauleins on the benches lining three sides of the dancing-space. From the gallery above many civilian spectators looked down upon the gayety, and the dress-coats of a few citizens figured among the uniforms.

As the evening wore on some ladies of greater fashion found their way to the dancing-floor, and toward ten o’clock it became rather crowded. A party of American girls showed their Paris dresses in the transatlantic versions of the waltz. At first they danced with the young men who came with them; but after a while they yielded to the custom of the place, and danced with any of the officers who asked them.

“I know it’s the custom,” said Mrs. March to Miss Triscoe, who was at her side in one of the waltzes she had decided to sit out, so as not to be dancing all the time with Burnamy, “but I never can like it without an introduction.”

“No,” said the girl, with the air of putting temptation decidedly away,
“I don’t believe papa would, either.”

A young officer came up, and drooped in mute supplication before her. She glanced at Mrs. March, who turned her face away; and she excused herself with the pretence that she had promised the dance, and by good fortune, Burnamy, who had been unscrupulously waltzing with a lady he did not know, came up at the moment. She rose and put her hand on his arm, and they both bowed to the officer before they whirled away. The officer looked after them with amiable admiration; then he turned to Mrs. March with a light of banter in his friendly eyes, and was unmistakably asking her to dance. She liked his ironical daring, she liked it so much that she forgot her objection to partners without introductions; she forgot her fifty-odd years; she forgot that she was a mother of grown children and even a mother-in-law; she remembered only the step of her out-dated waltz.

It seemed to be modern enough for the cheerful young officer, and they were suddenly revolving with the rest. . . A tide of long-forgotten girlhood welled up in her heart, and she laughed as she floated off on it past the astonished eyes of Miss Triscoe and Burnamy. She saw them falter, as if they had lost their step in their astonishment; then they seemed both to vanish, and her partner had released her, and was helping Miss Triscoe up from the floor; Burnamy was brushing the dust from his knees, and the citizen who had bowled them over was boisterously apologizing and incessantly bowing.

“Oh, are you hurt?” Mrs. March implored. “I’m sure you must be killed; and I did it! I don’t know, what I was thinking of!”

The girl laughed. “I’m not hurt a bit!”

They had one impulse to escape from the place, and from the sympathy and congratulation. In the dressing-room she declared again that she was all right. “How beautifully you waltz, Mrs. March!” she said, and she laughed again, and would not agree with her that she had been ridiculous. “But I’m glad those American girls didn’t see me. And I can’t be too thankful papa didn’t come!”

Mrs. March’s heart sank at the thought of what General Triscoe would think of her. “You must tell him I did it. I can never lift up my head!”

“No, I shall not. No one did it,” said the girl, magnanimously. She looked down sidelong at her draperies. “I was so afraid I had torn my dress! I certainly heard something rip.”

It was one of the skirts of Burnamy’s coat, which he had caught into his hand and held in place till he could escape to the men’s dressing-room, where he had it pinned up so skillfully that the damage was not suspected by the ladies. He had banged his knee abominably too; but they did not suspect that either, as he limped home on the air beside them, first to Miss Triscoe’s pension, and then to Mrs. March’s hotel.

It was quite eleven o’clock, which at Carlsbad is as late as three in the morning anywhere else, when she let herself into her room. She decided not to tell her husband, then; and even at breakfast, which they had at the Posthof, she had not got to her confession, though she had told him everything else about the ball, when the young officer with whom she had danced passed between the tables near her. He caught her eye and bowed with a smile of so much meaning that March asked, “Who’s your pretty young friend?”

“Oh, that!” she answered carelessly. “That was one of the officers at the ball,” and she laughed.

“You seem to be in the joke, too,” he said. “What is it?”

“Oh, something. I’ll tell you some time. Or perhaps you’ll find out.”

“I’m afraid you won’t let me wait.”

“No, I won’t,” and now she told him. She had expected teasing, ridicule, sarcasm, anything but the psychological interest mixed with a sort of retrospective tenderness which he showed. “I wish I could have seen you; I always thought you danced well.” He added: “It seems that you need a chaperon too.”

The next morning, after March and General Triscoe had started off upon one of the hill climbs, the young people made her go with them for a walk up the Tepl, as far as the cafe of the Freundschaftsaal. In the grounds an artist in silhouettes was cutting out the likenesses of people who supposed themselves to have profiles, and they begged Mrs. March to sit for hers. It was so good that she insisted on Miss Triscoe’s sitting in turn, and then Burnamy. Then he had the inspiration to propose that they should all three sit together, and it appeared that such a group was within the scope of the silhouettist’s art; he posed them in his little bower, and while he was mounting the picture they took turns, at five kreutzers each, in listening to American tunes played by his Edison phonograph.

Mrs. March felt that all this was weakening her moral fibre; but she tried to draw the line at letting Burnamy keep the group. “Why not?” he pleaded.

“You oughtn’t to ask,” she returned. “You’ve no business to have Miss
Triscoe’s picture, if you must know.”

“But you’re there to chaperon us!” he persisted.

He began to laugh, and they all laughed when she said, “You need a chaperon who doesn’t lose her head, in a silhouette.” But it seemed useless to hold out after that, and she heard herself asking, “Shall we let him keep it, Miss Triscoe?”

Burnamy went off to his work with Stoller, carrying the silhouette with him, and she kept on with Miss Triscoe to her hotel. In turning from the gate after she parted with the girl she found herself confronted with Mrs. Adding and Rose. The ladies exclaimed at each other in an astonishment from which they had to recover before they could begin to talk, but from the first moment Mrs. March perceived that Mrs. Adding had something to say. The more freely to say it she asked Mrs. March into her hotel, which was in the same street with the pension of the Triscoes, and she let her boy go off about the exploration of Carlsbad; he promised to be back in an hour.

“Well, now what scrape are you in?” March asked when his wife came home, and began to put off her things, with signs of excitement which he could not fail to note. He was lying down after a long tramp, and he seemed very comfortable.

His question suggested something of anterior import, and she told him about the silhouettes, and the advantage the young people had taken of their power over her through their knowledge of her foolish behavior at the ball.

He said, lazily: “They seem to be working you for all you’re worth. Is that it?”

“No; there is something worse. Something’s happened which throws all that quite in the shade. Mrs. Adding is here.”

“Mrs. Adding?” he repeated, with a dimness for names which she would not allow was growing on him.

“Don’t be stupid, dear! Mrs. Adding, who sat opposite Mr. Kenby on the
Norumbia. The mother of the nice boy.”

“Oh, yes! Well, that’s good!”

“No, it isn’t! Don’t say such a thing — till you know!” she cried, with a certain shrillness which warned him of an unfathomed seriousness in the fact. He sat up as if better to confront the mystery. “I have been at her hotel, and she has been telling me that she’s just come from Berlin, and that Mr. Kenby’s been there, and — Now I won’t have you making a joke of it, or breaking out about it, as if it were not a thing to be looked for; though of course with the others on our hands you’re not to blame for not thinking of it. But you can see yourself that she’s young and good-looking. She did speak beautifully of her son, and if it were not for him, I don’t believe she would hesitate—”

“For heaven’s sake, what are you driving at?” March broke in, and she answered him as vehemently:

“He’s asked her to marry him!”

“Kenby? Mrs. Adding?”

“Yes!”

“Well, now, Isabel, this won’t do! They ought to be ashamed of themselves. With that morbid, sensitive boy! It’s shocking—”

“Will you listen? Or do you want me to stop?” He arrested himself at her threat, and she resumed, after giving her contempt of his turbulence time to sink in, “She refused him, of course!”

“Oh, all right, then!”

“You take it in such a way that I’ve a great mind not to tell you anything more about it.”

“I know you have,” he said, stretching himself out again; “but you’ll do it, all the same. You’d have been awfully disappointed if I had been calm and collected.”

“She refused him,” she began again, “although she respects him, because she feels that she ought to devote herself to her son. Of course she’s very young, still; she was married when she was only nineteen to a man twice her age, and she’s not thirty-five yet. I don’t think she ever cared much for her husband; and she wants you to find out something about him.”

“I never heard of him. I—”

Mrs. March made a “tchck!” that would have recalled the most consequent of men from the most logical and coherent interpretation to the true intent of her words. He perceived his mistake, and said, resolutely: “Well, I won’t do it. If she’s refused him, that’s the end of it; she needn’t know anything about him, and she has no right to.”

“Now I think differently,” said Mrs. March, with an inductive air. “Of course she has to know about him, now.” She stopped, and March turned his head and looked expectantly at her. “He said he would not consider her answer final, but would hope to see her again and — She’s afraid he may follow her — What are you looking at me so for?”

“Is he coming here?”

“Am I to blame if he is? He said he was going to write to her.”

March burst into a laugh. “Well, they haven’t been beating about the bush! When I think how Miss Triscoe has been pursuing Burnamy from the first moment she set eyes on him, with the settled belief that she was running from him, and he imagines that he has been boldly following her, without the least hope from her, I can’t help admiring the simple directness of these elders.”

“And if Kenby wants to talk with you, what will you say?” she cut in eagerly.

“I’ll say I don’t like the subject. What am I in Carlsbad for? I came for the cure, and I’m spending time and money on it. I might as well go and take my three cups of Felsenquelle on a full stomach as to listen to Kenby.”

“I know it’s bad for you, and I wish we had never seen those people,” said Mrs. March. “I don’t believe he’ll want to talk with you; but if—”

“Is Mrs. Adding in this hotel? I’m not going to have them round in my bread-trough!”

“She isn’t. She’s at one of the hotels on the hill.”

“Very well, let her stay there, then. They can manage their love-affairs in their own way. The only one I care the least for is the boy.”

“Yes, it is forlorn for him. But he likes Mr. Kenby, and — No, it’s horrid, and you can’t make it anything else!”

“Well, I’m not trying to.” He turned his face away. “I must get my nap, now.” After she thought he must have fallen asleep, he said, “The first thing you know, those old Eltwins will be coming round and telling us that they’re going to get divorced.” Then he really slept.

XXXII.

The mid-day dinner at Pupp’s was the time to see the Carlsbad world, and the Marches had the habit of sitting long at table to watch it.

There was one family in whom they fancied a sort of literary quality, as if they had come out of some pleasant German story, but they never knew anything about them. The father by his dress must have been a Protestant clergyman; the mother had been a beauty and was still very handsome; the daughter was good-looking, and of a good-breeding which was both girlish and ladylike. They commended themselves by always taking the table d’hote dinner, as the Marches did, and eating through from the soup and the rank fresh-water fish to the sweet, upon the same principle: the husband ate all the compote and gave the others his dessert, which was not good for him. A young girl of a different fascination remained as much a mystery. She was small and of an extreme tenuity, which became more bewildering as she advanced through her meal, especially at supper, which she made of a long cucumber pickle, a Frankfort sausage of twice the pickle’s length, and a towering goblet of beer; in her lap she held a shivering little hound; she was in the decorous keeping of an elderly maid, and had every effect of being a gracious Fraulein. A curious contrast to her Teutonic voracity was the temperance of a young Latin swell, imaginably from Trieste, who sat long over his small coffee and cigarette, and tranquilly mused upon the pages of an Italian newspaper. At another table there was a very noisy lady, short and fat, in flowing draperies of white, who commanded a sallow family of South-Americans, and loudly harangued them in South-American Spanish; she flared out in a picture which nowhere lacked strong effects; and in her background lurked a mysterious black face and figure, ironically subservient to the old man, the mild boy, and the pretty young girl in the middle distance of the family group.

Amidst the shows of a hardened worldliness there were touching glimpses of domesticity and heart: a young bride fed her husband soup from her own plate with her spoon, unabashed by the publicity; a mother and her two pretty daughters hung about a handsome officer, who must have been newly betrothed to one of the girls; and, the whole family showed a helpless fondness for him, which he did not despise, though he held it in check; the girls dressed alike, and seemed to have for their whole change of costume a difference from time to time in the color of their sleeves. The Marches believed they had seen the growth of the romance which had eventuated so happily; and they saw other romances which did not in any wise eventuate. Carlsbad was evidently one of the great marriage marts of middle Europe, where mothers brought their daughters to be admired, and everywhere the flower of life was blooming for the hand of love. It blew by on all the promenades in dresses and hats as pretty as they could be bought or imagined; but it was chiefly at Pupp’s that it flourished. For the most part it seemed to flourish in vain, and to be destined to be put by for another season to dream, bulblike, of the coming summer in the quiet of Moldavian and Transylvanian homes.

Perhaps it was oftener of fortunate effect than the spectators knew; but for their own pleasure they would not have had their pang for it less; and March objected to having a more explicit demand upon his sympathy. “We could have managed,” he said, at the close of their dinner, as he looked compassionately round upon the parterre of young girls, “we could have managed with Burnamy and Miss Triscoe; but to have Mrs. Adding and Kenby launched upon us is too much. Of course I like Kenby, and if the widow alone were concerned I would give him my blessing: a wife more or a widow less is not going to disturb the equilibrium of the universe; but—” He stopped, and then he went on: “Men and women are well enough. They complement each other very agreeably, and they have very good times together. But why should they get in love? — It is sure to make them uncomfortable to themselves and annoying to others.” He broke off, and stared about him. “My dear, this is really charming — almost as charming as the Posthof.” The crowd spread from the open vestibule of the hotel and the shelter of its branching pavilion roofs until it was dimmed in the obscurity of the low grove across the way in an ultimate depth where the musicians were giving the afternoon concert. Between its two stationary divisions moved a current of promenaders, with some such effect as if the colors of a lovely garden should have liquefied and flowed in mingled rose and lilac, pink and yellow, and white and orange, and all the middle tints of modern millinery. Above on one side were the agreeable bulks of architecture, in the buff and gray of Carlsbad; and far beyond on the other were the upland slopes, with villas and long curves of country roads, belted in with miles of wall. “It would be about as offensive to have a love-interest that one personally knew about intruded here,” he said, “as to have a two-spanner carriage driven through this crowd. It ought to be forbidden by the municipality.”

Mrs. March listened with her ears, but not with her eyes, and she answered: “See that handsome young Greek priest! Isn’t he an archimandrite? The portier said he was.”

“Then let him pass for an archimandrite. Now,” he recurred to his grievance again, dreamily, “I have got to take Papa Triscoe in hand, and poison his mind against Burnamy, and I shall have to instil a few drops of venomous suspicion against Kenby into the heart of poor little Rose Adding. Oh;” he broke out, “they will spoil everything. They’ll be with us morning, noon, and night,” and he went on to work the joke of repining at his lot. The worst thing, he said, would be the lovers’ pretence of being interested in something besides themselves, which they were no more capable of than so many lunatics. How could they care for pretty girls playing tennis on an upland level, in the waning afternoon? Or a cartful of peasant women stopping to cross themselves at a way-side shrine? Or a whistling boy with holes in his trousers pausing from some wayside raspberries to touch his hat and say good-morning? Or those preposterous maidens sprinkling linen on the grass from watering-pots while the skies were full of rain? Or that blacksmith shop where Peter the Great made a horseshoe. Or the monument of the young warrior-poet Koerner, with a gentle-looking girl and her mother reading and knitting on a bench before it? These simple pleasures sufficed them, but what could lovers really care for them? A peasant girl flung down on the grassy road-side, fast asleep, while her yoke-fellow, the gray old dog, lay in his harness near her with one drowsy eye half open for her and the other for the contents of their cart; a boy chasing a red squirrel in the old upper town beyond the Tepl, and enlisting the interest of all the neighbors; the negro door-keeper at the Golden Shield who ought to have spoken our Southern English, but who spoke bad German and was from Cairo; the sweet afternoon stillness in the woods; the good German mothers crocheting at the Posthof concerts. Burnamy as a young poet might hate felt the precious quality of these things, if his senses had not been holden by Miss Triscoe; and she might have felt it if only he had done so. But as it was it would be lost upon their preoccupation; with Mrs. Adding and Kenby it would be hopeless.

A day or two after Mrs. March had met Mrs. Adding, she went with her husband to revere a certain magnificent blackamoor whom he had discovered at the entrance of one of the aristocratic hotels on the Schlossberg, where he performed the function of a kind of caryatid, and looked, in the black of his skin and the white of his flowing costume, like a colossal figure carved in ebony and ivory. They took a roundabout way through a street entirely of villa-pensions; every house in Carlsbad but one is a pension if it is not an hotel; but these were of a sort of sentimental prettiness; with each a little garden before it, and a bower with an iron table in it for breakfasting and supping out-doors; and he said that they would be the very places for bridal couples who wished to spend the honey-moon in getting well of the wedding surfeit. She denounced him for saying such a thing as that, and for his inconsistency in complaining of lovers while he was willing to think of young married people. He contended that there was a great difference in the sort of demand that young married people made upon the interest of witnesses, and that they were at least on their way to sanity; and before they agreed, they had come to the hotel with the blackamoor at the door. While they lingered, sharing the splendid creature’s hospitable pleasure in the spectacle he formed, they were aware of a carriage with liveried coachman and footman at the steps of the hotel; the liveries were very quiet and distinguished, and they learned that the equipage was waiting for the Prince of Coburg, or the Princess of Montenegro, or Prince Henry of Prussia; there were differing opinions among the twenty or thirty bystanders. Mrs. March said she did not care which it was; and she was patient of the denouement, which began to postpone itself with delicate delays. After repeated agitations at the door among portiers, proprietors, and waiters, whose fluttered spirits imparted their thrill to the spectators, while the coachman and footman remained sculpturesquely impassive in their places, the carriage moved aside and let an energetic American lady and her family drive up to the steps. The hotel people paid her a tempered devotion, but she marred the effect by rushing out and sitting on a balcony to wait for the delaying royalties. There began to be more promises of their early appearance; a footman got down and placed himself at the carriage door; the coachman stiffened himself on his box; then he relaxed; the footman drooped, and even wandered aside. There came a moment when at some signal the carriage drove quite away from the portal and waited near the gate of the stableyard; it drove back, and the spectators redoubled their attention. Nothing happened, and some of them dropped off. At last an indescribable significance expressed itself in the official group at the door; a man in a high hat and dresscoat hurried out; a footman hurried to meet him; they spoke inaudibly together. The footman mounted to his place; the coachman gathered up his reins and drove rapidly out of the hotel-yard, down the street, round the corner, out of sight. The man in the tall hat and dress-coat went in; the official group at the threshold dissolved; the statue in ivory and ebony resumed its place; evidently the Hoheit of Coburg, or Montenegro, or Prussia, was not going to take the air.

“My dear, this is humiliating.”

“Not at all! I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Think how near we came to seeing them!”

“I shouldn’t feel so shabby if we had seen them. But to hang round here in this plebeian abeyance, and then to be defeated and defrauded at last! I wonder how long this sort of thing is going on?”

“What thing?”

“This base subjection of the imagination to the Tom Foolery of the Ages.”

“I don’t know what you mean. I’m sure it’s very natural to want to see a
Prince.”

“Only too natural. It’s so deeply founded in nature that after denying royalty by word and deed for a hundred years, we Americans are hungrier for it than anybody else. Perhaps we may come back to it!”

“Nonsense!”

They looked up at the Austrian flag on the tower of the hotel, languidly curling and uncurling in the bland evening air, as it had over a thousand years of stupid and selfish monarchy, while all the generous republics of the Middle Ages had perished, and the commonwealths of later times had passed like fever dreams. That dull, inglorious empire had antedated or outlived Venice and Genoa, Florence and Siena, the England of Cromwell, the Holland of the Stadtholders, and the France of many revolutions, and all the fleeting democracies which sprang from these.

March began to ask himself how his curiosity differed from that of the Europeans about him; then he became aware that these had detached themselves, and left him exposed to the presence of a fellow countryman. It was Otterson, with Mrs. Otterson; he turned upon March with hilarious recognition. “Hello! Most of the Americans in Carlsbad seem to be hanging round here for a sight of these kings. Well, we don’t have a great many of ‘em, and it’s natural we shouldn’t want to miss any. But now, you Eastern fellows, you go to Europe every summer, and yet you don’t seem to get enough of ‘em. Think it’s human nature, or did it get so ground into us in the old times that we can’t get it out, no difference what we say?”

“That’s very much what I’ve been asking myself,” said March. “Perhaps it’s any kind of show. We’d wait nearly as long for the President to come out, wouldn’t we?”

“I reckon we would. But we wouldn’t for his nephew, or his second cousin.”

“Well, they wouldn’t be in the way of the succession.”

“I guess you’re right.” The Iowan seemed better satisfied with March’s philosophy than March felt himself, and he could not forbear adding:

“But I don’t, deny that we should wait for the President because he’s a kind of king too. I don’t know that we shall ever get over wanting to see kings of some kind. Or at least my wife won’t. May I present you to Mrs. March?”

“Happy to meet you, Mrs. March,” said the Iowan. “Introduce you to Mrs. Otterson. I’m the fool in my family, and I know just how you feel about a chance like this. I don’t mean that you’re—”

They all laughed at the hopeless case, and Mrs. March said, with one of her unexpected likings: “I understand, Mr. Otterson. And I would rather be our kind of fool than the kind that pretends not to care for the sight of a king.”

“Like you and me, Mrs. Otterson,” said March.

“Indeed, indeed,” said the lady, “I’d like to see a king too, if it didn’t take all night. Good-evening,” she said, turning her husband about with her, as if she suspected a purpose of patronage in Mrs. March, and was not going to have it.

Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly: “The trouble with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there’s such a flow of language it carries me away, and I don’t know just where I’m landing.”

XXXIII.

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer. One day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the Duke on his bicycle. After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries: two young French gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March’s exacting passion for an aristocratic air in their order. The Duke was fat and fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair, as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed as English tailors could imagine them.

“It wouldn’t do for the very highest sort of Highhotes,” March declared, “to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like everything else, to their inferiors.”

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March’s the German Hoheit had now become Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery which it poured upon the feudal structure of society. They applied it with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a few days after the Duke and Duchess: he was such a young King, and of such a little country. They watched for him from the windows of the reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him. His moderated approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she was ambuscading. Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator. She was destined to see him so often afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like himself, after the informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one night with some of his faithful followers. Burnamy had offered Mrs. March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him, places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father to join them.

“Why not?” she returned, with an arching of the eyebrows.

“Why,” he said, “perhaps I had better make a clean breast of it.”

“Perhaps you had,” she said, and they both laughed, though he laughed with a knot between his eyes.

“The fact is, you know, this isn’t my treat, exactly. It’s Mr. Stoller’s.” At the surprise in her face he hurried on. “He’s got back his first letter in the paper, and he’s so much pleased with the way he reads in print, that he wants to celebrate.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. March, non-committally.

Burnamy laughed again. “But he’s bashful, and he isn’t sure that you would all take it in the right way. He wants you as friends of mine; and he hasn’t quite the courage to ask you himself.”

This seemed to Mrs. March so far from bad that she said: “That’s very nice of him. Then he’s satisfied with — with your help? I’m glad of that.”

“Thank you. He’s met the Triscoes, and he thought it would be pleasant to you if they went, too.”

“Oh, certainly.”

“He thought,” Burnamy went on, with the air of feeling his way, “that we might all go to the opera, and then — then go for a little supper afterwards at Schwarzkopf’s.”

He named the only place in Carlsbad where you can sup so late as ten o’clock; as the opera begins at six, and is over at half past eight, none but the wildest roisterers frequent the place.

“Oh!” said Mrs. March. “I don’t know how a late supper would agree with my husband’s cure. I should have to ask him.”

“We could make it very hygienic,” Burnamy explained.

In repeating his invitation she blamed Burnamy’s uncandor so much that March took his part, as perhaps she intended, and said, “Oh, nonsense,” and that he should like to go in for the whole thing; and General Triscoe accepted as promptly for himself and his daughter. That made six people, Burnamy counted up, and he feigned a decent regret that there was not room for Mrs. Adding and her son; he would have liked to ask them.

Mrs. March did not enjoy it so much as coming with her husband alone when they took two florin seats in the orchestra for the comedy. The comedy always began half an hour earlier than the opera, and they had a five-o’clock supper at the Theatre-Cafe before they went, and they got to sleep by nine o’clock; now they would be up till half past ten at least, and that orgy at Schwarzkopf’s might not be at all good for him. But still she liked being there; and Miss Triscoe made her take the best seat; Burnamy and Stoller made the older men take the other seats beside the ladies, while they sat behind, or stood up, when they, wished to see, as people do in the back of a box. Stoller was not much at ease in evening dress, but he bore himself with a dignity which was not perhaps so gloomy as it looked; Mrs. March thought him handsome in his way, and required Miss Triscoe to admire him. As for Burnamy’s beauty it was not necessary to insist upon that; he had the distinction of slender youth; and she liked to think that no Highhote there was of a more patrician presence than this yet unprinted contributor to ‘Every Other Week’. He and Stoller seemed on perfect terms; or else in his joy he was able to hide the uneasiness which she had fancied in him from the first time she saw them together, and which had never been quite absent from his manner in Stoller’s presence. Her husband always denied that it existed, or if it did that it was anything but Burnamy’s effort to get on common ground with an inferior whom fortune had put over him.

The young fellow talked with Stoller, and tried to bring him into the range of the general conversation. He leaned over the ladies, from time to time, and pointed out the notables whom he saw in the house; she was glad, for his sake, that he did not lean less over her than over Miss Triscoe. He explained certain military figures in the boxes opposite, and certain ladies of rank who did not look their rank; Miss Triscoe, to Mrs. March’s thinking, looked their united ranks, and more; her dress was very simple, but of a touch which saved it from being insipidly girlish; her beauty was dazzling.

“Do you see that old fellow in the corner chair just behind the orchestra?” asked Burnamy. “He’s ninety-six years old, and he comes to the theatre every night, and falls asleep as soon as the curtain rises, and sleeps through till the end of the act.”

“How dear!” said the girl, leaning forward to fix the nonagenarian with her glasses, while many other glasses converged upon her. “Oh, wouldn’t you like to know him, Mr. March?”

“I should consider it a liberal education. They have brought these things to a perfect system in Europe. There is nothing to make life pass smoothly like inflexible constancy to an entirely simple custom. My dear,” he added to his wife, “I wish we’d seen this sage before. He’d have helped us through a good many hours of unintelligible comedy. I’m always coming as Burnamy’s guest, after this.”

The young fellow swelled with pleasure in his triumph, and casting an eye about the theatre to cap it, he caught sight of that other potentate. He whispered joyfully, “Ah! We’ve got two kings here to-night,” and he indicated in a box of their tier just across from that where the King of Servia sat, the well-known face of the King of New York.

“He isn’t bad-looking,” said March, handing his glass to General Triscoe. “I’ve not seen many kings in exile; a matter of a few Carlist princes and ex-sovereign dukes, and the good Henry V. of France, once, when I was staying a month in Venice; but I don’t think they any of them looked the part better. I suppose he has his dream of recurring power like the rest.”

“Dream!” said General Triscoe with the glass at his eyes. “He’s dead sure of it.”

“Oh, you don’t really mean that!”

“I don’t know why I should have changed my mind.”

“Then it’s as if we were in the presence of Charles II. just before he was called back to England, or Napoleon in the last moments of Elba. It’s better than that. The thing is almost unique; it’s a new situation in history. Here’s a sovereign who has no recognized function, no legal status, no objective existence. He has no sort of public being, except in the affection of his subjects. It took an upheaval little short of an earthquake to unseat him. His rule, as we understand it, was bad for all classes; the poor suffered more than the rich; the people have now had three years of self-government; and yet this wonderful man has such a hold upon the masses that he is going home to win the cause of oppression at the head of the oppressed. When he’s in power again, he will be as subjective as ever, with the power of civic life and death, and an idolatrous following perfectly ruthless in the execution of his will.”

“We’ve only begun,” said the general. “This kind of king is municipal, now; but he’s going to be national. And then, good-by, Republic!”

“The only thing like it,” March resumed, too incredulous of the evil future to deny himself the aesthetic pleasure of the parallel, “is the rise of the Medici in Florence, but even the Medici were not mere manipulators of pulls; they had some sort of public office, with some sort of legislated tenure of it. The King of New York is sovereign by force of will alone, and he will reign in the voluntary submission of the majority. Is our national dictator to be of the same nature and quality?”

“It would be the scientific evolution, wouldn’t it?”

The ladies listened with the perfunctory attention which women pay to any sort of inquiry which is not personal. Stoller had scarcely spoken yet; he now startled them all by demanding, with a sort of vindictive force, “Why shouldn’t he have the power, if they’re willing to let him?”

“Yes,” said General Triscoe, with a tilt of his head towards March.
“That’s what we must ask ourselves more and more.”

March leaned back in his chair, and looked up over his shoulder at Stoller. “Well, I don’t know. Do you think it’s quite right for a man to use an unjust power, even if others are willing that he should?”

Stoller stopped with an air of bewilderment as if surprised on the point of saying that he thought just this. He asked instead, “What’s wrong about it?”

“Well, that’s one of those things that have to be felt, I suppose. But if a man came to you, and offered to be your slave for a certain consideration — say a comfortable house, and a steady job, that wasn’t too hard — should you feel it morally right to accept the offer? I don’t say think it right, for there might be a kind of logic for it.”

Stoller seemed about to answer; he hesitated; and before he had made any response, the curtain rose.

XXXIV.

There are few prettier things than Carlsbad by night from one of the many bridges which span the Tepl in its course through the town. If it is a starry night, the torrent glides swiftly away with an inverted firmament in its bosom, to which the lamps along its shores and in the houses on either side contribute a planetary splendor of their own. By nine o’clock everything is hushed; not a wheel is heard at that dead hour; the few feet shuffling stealthily through the Alte Wiese whisper a caution of silence to those issuing with a less guarded tread from the opera; the little bowers that overhang the stream are as dark and mute as the restaurants across the way which serve meals in them by day; the whole place is as forsaken as other cities at midnight. People get quickly home to bed, or if they have a mind to snatch a belated joy, they slip into the Theater-Cafe, where the sleepy Frauleins serve them, in an exemplary drowse, with plates of cold ham and bottles of the gently gaseous waters of Giesshubl. Few are of the bold badness which delights in a supper at Schwarzkopf’s, and even these are glad of the drawn curtains which hide their orgy from the chance passer.

The invalids of Burnamy’s party kept together, strengthening themselves in a mutual purpose not to be tempted to eat anything which was not strictly ‘kurgemass’. Mrs. March played upon the interest which each of them felt in his own case so artfully that she kept them talking of their cure, and left Burnamy and Miss Triscoe to a moment on the bridge, by which they profited, while the others strolled on, to lean against the parapet and watch the lights in the skies and the water, and be alone together. The stream shone above and below, and found its way out of and into the darkness under the successive bridges; the town climbed into the night with lamp-lit windows here and there, till the woods of the hill-sides darkened down to meet it, and fold it in an embrace from which some white edifice showed palely in the farthest gloom.

He tried to make her think they could see that great iron crucifix which watches over it day and night from its piny cliff. He had a fancy for a poem, very impressionistic, which should convey the notion of the crucifix’s vigil. He submitted it to her; and they remained talking till the others had got out of sight and hearing; and she was letting him keep the hand on her arm which he had put there to hold her from falling over the parapet, when they were both startled by approaching steps, and a voice calling, “Look here! Who’s running this supper party, anyway?”

His wife had detached March from her group for the mission, as soon as she felt that the young people were abusing her kindness. They answered him with hysterical laughter, and Burnamy said, “Why, it’s Mr. Stoller’s treat, you know.”

At the restaurant, where the proprietor obsequiously met the party on the threshold and bowed them into a pretty inner room, with a table set for their supper, Stoller had gained courage to play the host openly. He appointed General Triscoe to the chief seat; he would have put his daughter next to him, if the girl had not insisted upon Mrs. March’s having the place, and going herself to sit next to March, whom she said she had not been able to speak a word to the whole evening. But she did not talk a great deal to him; he smiled to find how soon he dropped out of the conversation, and Burnamy, from his greater remoteness across the table, dropped into it. He really preferred the study of Stoller, whose instinct of a greater worldly quality in the Triscoes interested him; he could see him listening now to what General Triscoe was saying to Mrs. March, and now to what Burnamy was saying to Miss Triscoe; his strong, selfish face, as he turned it on the young people, expressed a mingled grudge and greed that was very curious.

Stoller’s courage, which had come and gone at moments throughout, rose at the end, and while they lingered at the table well on to the hour of ten, he said, in the sort of helpless offence he had with Burnamy, “What’s the reason we can’t all go out tomorrow to that old castle you was talking about?”

“To Engelhaus? I don’t know any reason, as far as I’m concerned,” answered Burnamy; but he refused the initiative offered him, and Stoller was obliged to ask March:

“You heard about it?”

“Yes.” General Triscoe was listening, and March added for him, “It was the hold of an old robber baron; Gustavus Adolphus knocked it down, and it’s very picturesque, I believe.”

“It sounds promising,” said the general. “Where is it?”

“Isn’t to-morrow our mineral bath?” Mrs. March interposed between her husband and temptation.

“No; the day after. Why, it’s about ten or twelve miles out on the old postroad that Napoleon took for Prague.”

“Napoleon knew a good road when he saw it,” said the general, and he alone of the company lighted a cigar. He was decidedly in favor of the excursion, and he arranged for it with Stoller, whom he had the effect of using for his pleasure as if he were doing him a favor. They were six, and two carriages would take them: a two-spanner for four, and a one-spanner for two; they could start directly after dinners and get home in time for supper.

Stoller asserted himself to say: “That’s all right, then. I want you to be my guests, and I’ll see about the carriages.” He turned to Burnamy: “Will you order them?”

“Oh,” said the young fellow, with a sort of dryness, “the portier will get them.”

“I don’t understand why General Triscoe was so willing to accept. Surely, he can’t like that man!” said Mrs. March to her husband in their own room.

“Oh, I fancy that wouldn’t be essential. The general seems to me, capable of letting even an enemy serve his turn. Why didn’t you speak, if you didn’t want to go?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I wanted to go.”

“And I knew it wouldn’t do to let Miss Triscoe go alone; I could see that she wished to go.”

“Do you think Burnamy did?”

“He seemed rather indifferent. And yet he must have realized that he would be with Miss Triscoe the whole afternoon.”

XXXV.

If Burnamy and Miss Triscoe took the lead in the one-spanner, and the others followed in the two-spanner, it was not from want of politeness on the part of the young people in offering to give up their places to each of their elders in turn. It would have been grotesque for either March or Stoller to drive with the girl; for her father it was apparently no question, after a glance at the more rigid uprightness of the seat in the one-spanner; and he accepted the place beside Mrs. March on the back seat of the two-spanner without demur. He asked her leave to smoke, and then he scarcely spoke to her. But he talked to the two men in front of him almost incessantly, haranguing them upon the inferiority of our conditions and the futility of our hopes as a people, with the effect of bewildering the cruder arrogance of Stoller, who could have got on with Triscoe’s contempt for the worthlessness of our working-classes, but did not know what to do with his scorn of the vulgarity and venality of their employers. He accused some of Stoller’s most honored and envied capitalists of being the source of our worst corruptions, and guiltier than the voting-cattle whom they bought and sold.

“I think we can get rid of the whole trouble if we go at it the right way,” Stoller said, diverging for the sake of the point he wished to bring in. “I believe in having the government run on business principles. They’ve got it here in Carlsbad, already, just the right sort of thing, and it works. I been lookin’ into it, and I got this young man, yonder” — he twisted his hand in the direction of the one-spanner! “to help me put it in shape. I believe it’s going to make our folks think, the best ones among them. Here!” He drew a newspaper out of his pocket, folded to show two columns in their full length, and handed it to Triscoe, who took it with no great eagerness, and began to run his eye over it. “You tell me what you think of that. I’ve put it out for a kind of a feeler. I got some money in that paper, and I just thought I’d let our people see how a city can be managed on business principles.”

He kept his eye eagerly upon Triscoe, as if to follow his thought while he read, and keep him up to the work, and he ignored the Marches so entirely that they began in self-defence to talk with each other.

Their carriage had climbed from Carlsbad in long irregular curves to the breezy upland where the great highroad to Prague ran through fields of harvest. They had come by heights and slopes of forest, where the serried stems of the tall firs showed brown and whitish-blue and grew straight as stalks of grain; and now on either side the farms opened under a sky of unwonted cloudlessness. Narrow strips of wheat and rye, which the men were cutting with sickles, and the women in red bodices were binding, alternated with ribands of yellowing oats and grass, and breadths of beets and turnips, with now and then lengths of ploughed land. In the meadows the peasants were piling their carts with heavy rowen, the girls lifting the hay on the forks, and the men giving themselves the lighter labor of ordering the load. From the upturned earth, where there ought to have been troops of strutting crows, a few sombre ravens rose. But they could not rob the scene of its gayety; it smiled in the sunshine with colors which vividly followed the slope of the land till they were dimmed in the forests on the far-off mountains. Nearer and farther, the cottages and villages shone in the valleys, or glimmered through the veils of the distant haze. Over all breathed the keen pure air of the hills, with a sentiment of changeless eld, which charmed March, back to his boyhood, where he lost the sense of his wife’s presence, and answered her vaguely. She talked contentedly on in the monologue to which the wives of absent-minded men learn to resign themselves. They were both roused from their vagary by the voice of General Triscoe. He was handing back the folded newspaper to Stoller, and saying, with a queer look at him over his glasses, “I should like to see what your contemporaries have to say to all that.”

“Well, sir,” Stoller returned, “maybe I’ll have the chance to show you.
They got my instructions over there to send everything to me.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape. They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the two-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel they had both read, and he was saying, “I suppose you think he was justly punished.”

“Punished?” she repeated. “Why, they got married, after all!”

“Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy.”

“Then it seems to me that she was punished; too.”

“Well, yes; you might say that. The author couldn’t help that.”

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

“I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl was very exacting.”

“Why,” said Burnamy, “I supposed that women hated anything like deception in men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn’t deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn’t that worse?”

“Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him for deceiving her.”

“Oh!”

“He might have had to do that. She wouldn’t have minded his fibbing outright, so much, for then it wouldn’t have seemed to come from his nature. But if he just let her believe what wasn’t true, and didn’t say a word to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak, something cowardly in him.”

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. “I suppose it did. But don’t you think it’s rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?”

“Yes, it is,” she assented. “That is why I say she was too exacting. But a man oughn’t to defend him.”

Burnamy’s laugh had more pleasure in it, now. “Another woman might?”

“No. She might excuse him.”

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since they had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. The detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.

“I believe,” Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to the ruin alone, “that if you hadn’t required any quarterings of nobility from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He’s a robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn’t have any scruple in levying tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike, probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union crossbowmen.”

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, “I don’t see how you can have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him.”

“Oh,” Burnamy replied in kind, “he buys my poverty and not my will. And perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more.”

“Have you been doing something very wicked?”

“What should you have to say to me, if I had?” he bantered.

“Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you,” she mocked back.

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A church at its base looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him. He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village’s claims upon the visitors’ interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.

XXXVI.

The path to the castle slanted upward across the shoulder of the hill, to a certain point, and there some rude stone steps mounted more directly. Wilding lilac-bushes, as if from some forgotten garden, bordered the ascent; the chickory opened its blue flower; the clean bitter odor of vermouth rose from the trodden turf; but Nature spreads no such lavish feast in wood or field in the Old World as she spoils us with in the New; a few kinds, repeated again and again, seem to be all her store, and man must make the most of them. Miss Triscoe seemed to find flowers enough in the simple bouquet which Burnamy put together for her. She took it, and then gave it back to him, that she might have both hands for her skirt, and so did him two favors.

A superannuated forester of the nobleman who owns the ruin opened a gate for the party at the top, and levied a tax of thirty kreutzers each upon them, for its maintenance. The castle, by his story, had descended from robber sire to robber son, till Gustavus knocked it to pieces in the sixteenth century; three hundred years later, the present owner restored it; and now its broken walls and arches, built of rubble mixed with brick, and neatly pointed up with cement, form a ruin satisfyingly permanent. The walls were not of great extent, but such as they were they enclosed several dungeons and a chapel, all underground, and a cistern which once enabled the barons and their retainers to water their wine in time of siege.

From that height they could overlook the neighboring highways in every direction, and could bring a merchant train to, with a shaft from a crossbow, or a shot from an arquebuse, at pleasure. With General Triscoe’s leave, March praised the strategic strength of the unique position, which he found expressive of the past, and yet suggestive of the present. It was more a difference in method than anything else that distinguished the levy of customs by the authorities then and now. What was the essential difference, between taking tribute of travellers passing on horseback, and collecting dues from travellers arriving by steamer? They did not pay voluntarily in either case; but it might be proof of progress that they no longer fought the customs officials.

“Then you believe in free trade,” said Stoller, severely.

“No. I am just inquiring which is the best way of enforcing the tariff laws.”

“I saw in the Paris Chronicle, last night,” said Miss Triscoe, “that people are kept on the docks now for hours, and ladies cry at the way their things are tumbled over by the inspectors.”

“It’s shocking,” said Mrs. March, magisterially.

“It seems to be a return to the scenes of feudal times,” her husband resumed. “But I’m glad the travellers make no resistance. I’m opposed to private war as much as I am to free trade.”

“It all comes round to the same thing at last,” said General Triscoe.
“Your precious humanity—”

“Oh, I don’t claim it exclusively,” March protested.

“Well, then, our precious humanity is like a man that has lost his road. He thinks he is finding his way out, but he is merely rounding on his course, and coming back to where he started.”

Stoller said, “I think we ought to make it so rough for them, over here, that they will come to America and set up, if they can’t stand the duties.”

“Oh, we ought to make it rough for them anyway,” March consented.

If Stoller felt his irony, he did not know what to answer. He followed with his eyes the manoeuvre by which Burnamy and Miss Triscoe eliminated themselves from the discussion, and strayed off to another corner of the ruin, where they sat down on the turf in the shadow of the wall; a thin, upland breeze drew across them, but the sun was hot. The land fell away from the height, and then rose again on every side in carpetlike fields and in long curving bands, whose parallel colors passed unblended into the distance. “I don’t suppose,” Burnamy said, “that life ever does much better than this, do you? I feel like knocking on a piece of wood and saying ‘Unberufen.’ I might knock on your bouquet; that’s wood.”

“It would spoil the flowers,” she said, looking down at them in her belt.
She looked up and their eyes met.

“I wonder,” he said, presently, “what makes us always have a feeling of dread when we are happy?”

“Do you have that, too?” she asked.

“Yes. Perhaps it’s because we know that change must come, and it must be for the worse.”

“That must be it. I never thought of it before, though.”

“If we had got so far in science that we could predict psychological weather, and could know twenty-four hours ahead when a warm wave of bliss or a cold wave of misery was coming, and prepare for smiles and tears beforehand — it may come to that.”

“I hope it won’t. I’d rather not know when I was to be happy; it would spoil the pleasure; and wouldn’t be any compensation when it was the other way.”

A shadow fell across them, and Burnamy glanced round to see Stoller looking down at them, with a slant of the face that brought his aquiline profile into relief. “Oh! Have a turf, Mr. Stoller?” he called gayly up to him.

“I guess we’ve seen about all there is,” he answered. “Hadn’t we better be going?” He probably did not mean to be mandatory.

“All right,” said Burnamy, and he turned to speak to Miss Triscoe again without further notice of him.

They all descended to the church at the foot of the hill where the weird sacristan was waiting to show them the cold, bare interior, and to account for its newness with the fact that the old church had been burnt, and this one built only a few years before. Then he locked the doors after them, and ran forward to open against their coming the chapel of the village cemetery, which they were to visit after they had fortified themselves for it at the village cafe.

They were served by a little hunch-back maid; and she told them who lived in the chief house of the village. It was uncommonly pretty; where all the houses were picturesque, and she spoke of it with respect as the dwelling of a rich magistrate who was clearly the great man of the place. March admired the cat which rubbed against her skirt while she stood and talked, and she took his praises modestly for the cat; but they wrought upon the envy, of her brother so that he ran off to the garden, and came back with two fat, sleepy-eyed puppies which he held up, with an arm across each of their stomachs, for the acclaim of the spectators.

“Oh, give him something!” Mrs. March entreated. “He’s such a dear.”

“No, no! I am not going to have my little hunchback and her cat outdone,” he refused; and then he was about to yield.

“Hold on!” said Stoller, assuming the host. “I got the change.”

He gave the boy a few kreutzers, when Mrs. March had meant her husband to reward his naivete with half a florin at least; but he seemed to feel that he had now ingratiated himself with the ladies, and he put himself in charge of them for the walk to the cemetery chapel; he made Miss Triscoe let him carry her jacket when she found it warm.

The chapel is dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and the Jesuit brother who designed it, two or three centuries ago, indulged a devotional fancy in the triangular form of the structure and the decorative details. Everything is three-cornered; the whole chapel, to begin with, and then the ark of the high altar in the middle of it, and each of the three side-altars. The clumsy baroque taste of the architecture is a German version of the impulse that was making Italy fantastic at the time; the carving is coarse, and the color harsh and unsoftened by years, though it is broken and obliterated in places.

The sacristan said that the chapel was never used for anything but funeral services, and he led the way out into the cemetery, where he wished to display the sepultural devices. The graves here were planted with flowers, and some were in a mourning of black pansies; but a space fenced apart from the rest held a few neglected mounds, overgrown with weeds and brambles: This space, he said, was for suicides; but to March it was not so ghastly as the dapper grief of certain tombs in consecrated ground where the stones had photographs of the dead on porcelain let into them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman, who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of irony, the magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house of the village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place, somewhere outside the gate. Was it the beginning, the promise of that reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened nerves?

“That is all?” he asked of the spectral sacristan.

“That is all,” the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something handsome.

“No, no,” said Stoller, detecting his gesture. “Your money a’n’t good.”

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so patient. In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and whispered a sad “Danke.”

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

“Oh, have I lost my glove in there?” said Mrs. March, looking at her hands and such parts of her dress as a glove might cling to.

“Let me go and find it for you,” Burnamy entreated.

“Well,” she consented, and she added, “If the sacristan has found it, give him something for me something really handsome, poor fellow.”

As Burnamy passed her, she let him see that she had both her gloves, and her heart yearned upon him for his instant smile of intelligence: some men would have blundered out that she had the lost glove in her hand. He came back directly, saying, “No, he didn’t find it.”

She laughed, and held both gloves up. “No wonder! I had it all the time.
Thank you ever so much.”

“How are we going to ride back?” asked Stoller.

Burnamy almost turned pale; Miss Triscoe smiled impenetrably. No one else spoke, and Mrs. March said, with placid authority, “Oh, I think the way we came, is best.”

“Did that absurd creature,” she apostrophized her husband as soon as she got him alone after their arrival at Pupp’s, “think I was going to let him drive back with Agatha?”

“I wonder,” said March, “if that’s what Burnamy calls her now?”

“I shall despise him if it isn’t.”

XXXVII.

Burnamy took up his mail to Stoller after the supper which they had eaten in a silence natural with two men who have been off on a picnic together. He did not rise from his writing-desk when Burnamy came in, and the young man did not sit down after putting his letters before him. He said, with an effort of forcing himself to speak at once, “I have looked through the papers, and there is something that I think you ought to see.”

“What do you mean?” said Stoller.

Burnamy laid down three or four papers opened to pages where certain articles were strongly circumscribed in ink. The papers varied, but their editorials did not, in purport at least. Some were grave and some were gay; one indignantly denounced; another affected an ironical bewilderment; the third simply had fun with the Hon. Jacob Stoller. They all, however, treated his letter on the city government of Carlsbad as the praise of municipal socialism, and the paper which had fun with him gleefully congratulated the dangerous classes on the accession of the Honorable Jacob to their ranks.

Stoller read the articles, one after another, with parted lips and gathering drops of perspiration on his upper lip, while Burnamy waited on foot. He flung the papers all down at last. “Why, they’re a pack of fools! They don’t know what they’re talking about! I want city government carried on on business principles, by the people, for the people. I don’t care what they say! I know I’m right, and I’m going ahead on this line if it takes all—” The note of defiance died out of his voice at the sight of Burnamy’s pale face. “What’s the matter with you?”

“There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Do you mean to tell me it is” — he could not bring himself to use the word— “what they say?”

“I suppose,” said Burnamy, with a dry mouth, “it’s what you may call municipal socialism.”

Stoller jumped from his seat. “And you knew it when you let me do it?”

“I supposed you knew what you were about.”

“It’s a lie!” Stoller advanced upon him, wildly, and Burnamy took a step backward.

“Look out!” shouted Burnamy. “You never asked me anything about it. You told me what you wanted done, and I did it. How could I believe you were such an ignoramus as not to know the a b c of the thing you were talking about?” He added, in cynical contempt, “But you needn’t worry. You can make it right with the managers by spending a little more money than you expected to spend.”

Stoller started as if the word money reminded him of something. “I can take care of myself, young man. How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing!” said Burnamy, with an effort for grandeur which failed him.

The next morning as the Marches sat over their coffee at the Posthof, he came dragging himself toward them with such a haggard air that Mrs. March called, before he reached their table, “Why, Mr. Burnamy, what’s the matter?”

He smiled miserably. “Oh, I haven’t slept very well. May I have my coffee with you? I want to tell you something; I want you to make me. But I can’t speak till the coffee comes. Fraulein!” he besought a waitress going off with a tray near them. “Tell Lili, please, to bring me some coffee — only coffee.”

He tried to make some talk about the weather, which was rainy, and the Marches helped him, but the poor endeavor lagged wretchedly in the interval between the ordering and the coming of the coffee. “Ah, thank you, Lili,” he said, with a humility which confirmed Mrs. March in her instant belief that he had been offering himself to Miss Triscoe and been rejected. After gulping his coffee, he turned to her: “I want to say good-by. I’m going away.”

“From Carlsbad?” asked Mrs. March with a keen distress.

The water came into his eyes. “Don’t, don’t be good to me, Mrs. March! I can’t stand it. But you won’t, when you know.”

He began to speak of Stoller, first to her, but addressing himself more and more to the intelligence of March, who let him go on without question, and laid a restraining hand upon his wife when he saw her about to prompt him. At the end, “That’s all,” he said, huskily, and then he seemed to be waiting for March’s comment. He made none, and the young fellow was forced to ask, “Well, what do you think, Mr. March?”

“What do you think yourself?”

“I think, I behaved badly,” said Burnamy, and a movement of protest from Mrs. March nerved him to add: “I could make out that it was not my business to tell him what he was doing; but I guess it was; I guess I ought to have stopped him, or given him a chance to stop himself. I suppose I might have done it, if he had treated me decently when I turned up a day late, here; or hadn’t acted toward me as if I were a hand in his buggy-works that had come in an hour after the whistle sounded.”

He set his teeth, and an indignant sympathy shone in Mrs. March’s eyes; but her husband only looked the more serious.

He asked gently, “Do you offer that fact as an explanation, or as a justification.”

Burnamy laughed forlornly. “It certainly wouldn’t justify me. You might say that it made the case all the worse for me.” March forbore to say, and Burnamy went on. “But I didn’t suppose they would be onto him so quick, or perhaps at all. I thought — if I thought anything — that it would amuse some of the fellows in the office, who know about those things.” He paused, and in March’s continued silence he went on. “The chance was one in a hundred that anybody else would know where he had brought up.”

“But you let him take that chance,” March suggested.

“Yes, I let him take it. Oh, you know how mixed all these things are!”

“Yes.”

“Of course I didn’t think it out at the time. But I don’t deny that I had a satisfaction in the notion of the hornets’ nest he was poking his thick head into. It makes me sick, now, to think I had. I oughtn’t to have let him; he was perfectly innocent in it. After the letter went, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t; and then I took the chances too. I don’t believe he could have ever got forward in politics; he’s too honest — or he isn’t dishonest in the right way. But that doesn’t let me out. I don’t defend myself! I did wrong; I behaved badly. But I’ve suffered for it.

“I’ve had a foreboding all the time that it would come to the worst, and felt like a murderer with his victim when I’ve been alone with Stoller. When I could get away from him I could shake it off, and even believe that it hadn’t happened. You can’t think what a nightmare it’s been! Well, I’ve ruined Stoller politically, but I’ve ruined myself, too. I’ve spoiled my own life; I’ve done what I can never explain to — to the people I want to have believe in me; I’ve got to steal away like the thief I am. Good-by!” He jumped to his feet, and put out his hand to March, and then to Mrs. March.

“Why, you’re not going away now!” she cried, in a daze.

“Yes, I am. I shall leave Carlsbad on the eleven-o’clock train. I don’t think I shall see you again.” He clung to her hand. “If you see General Triscoe — I wish you’d tell them I couldn’t — that I had to — that I was called away suddenly — Good-by!” He pressed her hand and dropped it, and mixed with the crowd. Then he came suddenly back, with a final appeal to March: “Should you — do you think I ought to see Stoller, and — and tell him I don’t think I used him fairly?”

“You ought to know—” March began.

But before he could say more, Burnamy said, “You’re right,” and was off again.

“Oh, how hard you were with him, my dear!” Mrs. March lamented.

“I wish,” he said, “if our boy ever went wrong that some one would be as true to him as I was to that poor fellow. He condemned himself; and he was right; he has behaved very badly.”

“You always overdo things so, when you act righteously!”

“Now, Isabel!”

“Oh, yes, I know what you will say. But I should have tempered justice with mercy.”

Her nerves tingled with pity for Burnamy, but in her heart she was glad that her husband had had strength to side with him against himself, and she was proud of the forbearance with which he had done it. In their earlier married life she would have confidently taken the initiative on all moral questions. She still believed that she was better fitted for their decision by her Puritan tradition and her New England birth, but once in a great crisis when it seemed a question of their living, she had weakened before it, and he, with no such advantages, had somehow met the issue with courage and conscience. She could not believe he did so by inspiration, but she had since let him take the brunt of all such issues and the responsibility. He made no reply, and she said: “I suppose you’ll admit now there was always something peculiar in the poor boy’s manner to Stoller.”

He would confess no more than that there ought to have been. “I don’t see how he could stagger through with that load on his conscience. I’m not sure I like his being able to do so.”

She was silent in the misgiving which she shared with him, but she said:
“I wonder how far it has gone with him and Miss Triscoe?”

“Well, from his wanting you to give his message to the general in the plural—”

“Don’t laugh! It’s wicked to laugh! It’s heartless!” she cried, hysterically. “What will he do, poor fellow?”

“I’ve an idea that he will light on his feet, somehow. But, at any rate, he’s doing the right thing in going to own up to Stoller.”

“Oh, Stoller! I care nothing for Stoller! Don’t speak to me of Stoller!”

Burnamy fond the Bird of Prey, as he no longer had the heart to call him, walking up and down in his room like an eagle caught in a trap. He erected his crest fiercely enough, though, when the young fellow came in at his loudly shouted, “Herein!”

“What do you want?” he demanded, brutally.

This simplified Burnamy’s task, while it made it more loathsome. He answered not much less brutally, “I want to tell you that I think I used you badly, that I let you betray yourself, that I feel myself to blame.” He could have added, “Curse you!” without change of tone.

Stoller sneered in a derision that showed his lower teeth like a dog’s when he snarls. “You want to get back!”

“No,” said Burnamy, mildly, and with increasing sadness as he spoke. “I don’t want to get back. Nothing would induce me. I’m going away on the first train.”

“Well, you’re not!” shouted Stoller. “You’ve lied me into this—”

“Look out!” Burnamy turned white.

“Didn’t you lie me into it, if you let me fool myself, as you say?” Stoller pursued, and Burnamy felt himself weaken through his wrath. “Well, then, you got to lie me out of it. I been going over the damn thing, all night — and you can do it for me. I know you can do it,” he gave way in a plea that was almost a whimper. “Look here! You see if you can’t. I’ll make it all right with you. I’ll pay you whatever you think is right — whatever you say.”

“Oh!” said Burnamy, in otherwise unutterable disgust.

“You kin,” Stoller went on, breaking down more and more into his adopted Hoosier, in the stress of his anxiety. “I know you kin, Mr. Burnamy.” He pushed the paper containing his letter into Burnamy’s hands, and pointed out a succession of marked passages. “There! And here! And this place! Don’t you see how you could make out that it meant something else, or was just ironical?” He went on to prove how the text might be given the complexion he wished, and Burnamy saw that he had really thought it not impossibly out. “I can’t put it in writing as well as you; but I’ve done all the work, and all you’ve got to do is to give it some of them turns of yours. I’ll cable the fellows in our office to say I’ve been misrepresented, and that my correction is coming. We’ll get it into shape here together, and then I’ll cable that. I don’t care for the money. And I’ll get our counting-room to see this scoundrel” — he picked up the paper that had had fun with him— “and fix him all right, so that he’ll ask for a suspension of public opinion, and — You see, don’t you?”

The thing did appeal to Burnamy. If it could be done, it would enable him to make Stoller the reparation he longed to make him more than anything else in the world. But he heard himself saying, very gently, almost tenderly, “It might be done, Mr. Stoller. But I couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t be honest — for me.”

“Yah!” yelled Stoller, and he crushed the paper into a wad and flung it into Burnamy’s face. “Honest, you damn humbug! You let me in for this, when you knew I didn’t mean it, and now you won’t help me out because it a’n’t honest! Get out of my room, and get out quick before I—”

He hurled himself toward Burnamy, who straightened himself, with “If you dare!” He knew that he was right in refusing; but he knew that Stoller was right, too, and that he had not meant the logic of what he had said in his letter, and of what Burnamy had let him imply. He braved Stoller’s onset, and he left his presence untouched, but feeling as little a moral hero as he well could.

XXXVIII.

General Triscoe woke in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day’s pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point of view for a time, and has to work back to it. He began at the belated breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when they did not go to the Posthof, “Didn’t you have a nice time, yesterday, papa?”

She sank into the chair opposite, and beamed at him across the little iron table, as she lifted the pot to pour out his coffee.

“What do you call a nice time?” he temporized, not quite able to resist her gayety.

“Well, the kind of time I had.”

“Did you get rheumatism from sitting on the grass? I took cold in that old church, and the tea at that restaurant must have been brewed in a brass kettle. I suffered all night from it. And that ass from Illinois—”

“Oh, poor papa! I couldn’t go with Mr. Stoller alone, but I might have gone in the two-spanner with him and let you have Mr. or Mrs. March in the one-spanner.”

“I don’t know. Their interest in each other isn’t so interesting to other people as they seem to think.”

“Do you feel that way really, papa? Don’t you like their being so much in love still?”

“At their time of life? Thank you it’s bad enough in young people.”

The girl did not answer; she appeared altogether occupied in pouring out her father’s coffee.

He tasted it, and then he drank pretty well all of it; but he said, as he put his cup down, “I don’t know what they make this stuff of. I wish I had a cup of good, honest American coffee.”

“Oh, there’s nothing like American food!” said his daughter, with so much conciliation that he looked up sharply.

But whatever he might have been going to say was at least postponed by the approach of a serving-maid, who brought a note to his daughter. She blushed a little at sight of it, and then tore it open and read:

“I am going away from Carlsbad, for a fault of my own which forbids me to look you in the face. If you wish to know the worst of me, ask Mrs. March. I have no heart to tell you.”

Agatha read these mystifying words of Burnamy’s several times over in a silent absorption with them which left her father to look after himself, and he had poured out a second cup of coffee with his own hand, and was reaching for the bread beside her before she came slowly back to a sense of his presence.

“Oh, excuse me, papa,” she said, and she gave him the butter. “Here’s a very strange letter from Mr. Burnamy, which I think you’d better see.” She held the note across the table to him, and watched his face as he read it.

After he had read it twice, he turned the sheet over, as people do with letters that puzzle them, in the vain hope of something explanatory on the back. Then he looked up and asked: “What do you suppose he’s been doing?”

“I don’t believe he’s been doing anything. It’s something that Mr.
Stoller’s been doing to him.”

“I shouldn’t infer that from his own words. What makes you think the trouble is with Stoller?”

“He said — he said yesterday — something about being glad to be through with him, because he disliked him so much he was always afraid of wronging him. And that proves that now Mr. Stoller has made him believe that he’s done wrong, and has worked upon him till he does believe it.”

“It proves nothing of the kind,” said the general, recurring to the note. After reading it again, he looked keenly at her: “Am I to understand that you have given him the right to suppose you would want to know the worst — or the best of him?”

The girl’s eyes fell, and she pushed her knife against her plate. She began: “No—”

“Then confound his impudence!” the general broke out. “What business has he to write to you at all about this?”

“Because he couldn’t go away without it!” she returned; and she met her father’s eye courageously. “He had a right to think we were his friends; and if he has done wrong, or is in disgrace any way, isn’t it manly of him to wish to tell us first himself?”

Her father could not say that it was not. But he could and did say, very sceptically: “Stuff! Now, see here, Agatha: what are you going to do?”

“I’m going to see Mrs. March, and then—”

“You mustn’t do anything of the kind, my dear,” said her father, gently. “You’ve no right to give yourself away to that romantic old goose.” He put up his hand to interrupt her protest. “This thing has got to be gone to the bottom of. But you’re not to do it. I will see March myself. We must consider your dignity in this matter — and mine. And you may as well understand that I’m not going to have any nonsense. It’s got to be managed so that it can’t be supposed we’re anxious about it, one way or the other, or that he was authorized to write to you in this way—”

“No, no! He oughtn’t to have done so. He was to blame. He couldn’t have written to you, though, papa—”

“Well, I don’t know why. But that’s no reason why we should let it be understood that he has written to you. I will see March; and I will manage to see his wife, too. I shall probably find them in the reading-room at Pupp’s, and—”

The Marches were in fact just coming in from their breakfast at the Posthof, and he met them at the door of Pupp’s, where they all sat down on one of the iron settees of the piazza, and began to ask one another questions of their minds about the pleasure of the day before, and to beat about the bush where Burnamy lurked in their common consciousness.

Mrs. March was not able to keep long from starting him. “You knew,” she said, “that Mr. Burnamy had left us?”

“Left! Why?” asked the general.

She was a woman of resource, but in a case like this she found it best to trust her husband’s poverty of invention. She looked at him, and he answered for her with a promptness that made her quake at first, but finally seemed the only thing, if not the best thing: “He’s had some trouble with Stoller.” He went on to tell the general just what the trouble was.

At the end the general grunted as from an uncertain mind. “You think he’s behaved badly.”

“I think he’s behaved foolishly — youthfully. But I can understand how strongly he was tempted. He could say that he was not authorized to stop Stoller in his mad career.”

At this Mrs. March put her hand through her husband’s arm.

“I’m not so sure about that,” said the general.

March added: “Since I saw him this morning, I’ve heard something that disposes me to look at his performance in a friendlier light. It’s something that Stoller told me himself; to heighten my sense of Burnamy’s wickedness. He seems to have felt that I ought to know what a serpent I was cherishing in my bosom,” and he gave Triscoe the facts of Burnamy’s injurious refusal to help Stoller put a false complexion on the opinions he had allowed him ignorantly to express.

The general grunted again. “Of course he had to refuse, and he has behaved like a gentleman so far. But that doesn’t justify him in having let Stoller get himself into the scrape.”

“No,” said March. “It’s a tough nut for the casuist to try his tooth on.
And I must say I feel sorry for Stoller.”

Mrs. March plucked her hand from his arm. “I don’t, one bit. He was thoroughly selfish from first to last. He has got just what he deserved.”

“Ah, very likely,” said her husband. “The question is about Burnamy’s part in giving him his deserts; he had to leave him to them, of course.”

The general fixed her with the impenetrable glitter of his eye-glasses, and left the subject as of no concern to him. “I believe,” he said, rising, “I’ll have a look at some of your papers,” and he went into the reading-room.

“Now,” said Mrs. March, “he will go home and poison that poor girl’s mind. And, you will have yourself to thank for prejudicing him against Burnamy.”

“Then why didn’t you do it yourself, my dear?” he teased; but he was really too sorry for the whole affair, which he nevertheless enjoyed as an ethical problem.

The general looked so little at the papers that before March went off for his morning walk he saw him come out of the reading-room and take his way down the Alte Wiese. He went directly back to his daughter, and reported Burnamy’s behavior with entire exactness. He dwelt upon his making the best of a bad business in refusing to help Stoller out of it, dishonorably and mendaciously; but he did not conceal that it was a bad business.

“Now, you know all about it,” he said at the end, “and I leave the whole thing to you. If you prefer, you can see Mrs. March. I don’t know but I’d rather you’d satisfy yourself—”

“I will not see Mrs. March. Do you think I would go back of you in that way? I am satisfied now.”

XXXIX.

Instead of Burnamy, Mrs. Adding and her son now breakfasted with the Marches at the Posthof, and the boy was with March throughout the day a good deal. He rectified his impressions of life in Carlsbad by March’s greater wisdom and experience, and did his best to anticipate his opinions and conform to his conclusions. This was not easy, for sometimes he could not conceal from himself, that March’s opinions were whimsical, and his conclusions fantastic; and he could not always conceal from March that he was matching them with Kenby’s on some points, and suffering from their divergence. He came to join the sage in his early visit to the springs, and they walked up and down talking; and they went off together on long strolls in which Rose was proud to bear him company. He was patient of the absences from which he was often answered, and he learned to distinguish between the earnest and the irony of which March’s replies seemed to be mixed. He examined him upon many features of German civilization, but chiefly upon the treatment of women in it; and upon this his philosopher was less satisfactory than he could have wished him to be. He tried to excuse his trifling as an escape from the painful stress of questions which he found so afflicting himself; but in the matter of the woman-and-dog teams, this was not easy. March owned that the notion of their being yokemates was shocking; but he urged that it was a stage of evolution, and a distinct advance upon the time when women dragged the carts without the help of the dogs; and that the time might not be far distant when the dogs would drag the carts without the help of the women.

Rose surmised a joke, and he tried to enjoy it, but inwardly he was troubled by his friend’s apparent acceptance of unjust things on their picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. “Ah, delightful!” March took off his hat as if to salute the pleasant sight.

“But don’t you think, Mr. March,” the boy ventured, “that the man had better be cutting the wheat, and letting the women watch the cows?”

“Well, I don’t know. There are more of them; and he wouldn’t be half so graceful as they are, with that flow of their garments, and the sway of their aching backs.” The boy smiled sadly, and March put his hand on his shoulder as they walked on. “You find a lot of things in Europe that need putting right, don’t you, Rose?”

“Yes; I know it’s silly.”

“Well, I’m not sure. But I’m afraid it’s useless. You see, these old customs go such a way back, and are so grounded in conditions. We think they might be changed, if those who rule could be got to see how cruel and ugly they are; but probably they couldn’t. I’m afraid that the Emperor of Austria himself couldn’t change them, in his sovereign plenitude of power. The Emperor is only an old custom too, and he’s as much grounded in the conditions as any.” This was the serious way Rose felt that March ought always to talk; and he was too much grieved to laugh when he went on. “The women have so much of the hard work to do, over here, because the emperors need the men for their armies. They couldn’t let their men cut wheat unless it was for their officers’ horses, in the field of some peasant whom it would ruin.”

If Mrs. March was by she would not allow him to work these paradoxes for the boy’s confusion. She said the child adored him, and it was a sacrilege to play with his veneration. She always interfered to save him, but with so little logic though so much justice that Rose suffered a humiliation from her championship, and was obliged from a sense of self-respect to side with the mocker. She understood this, and magnanimously urged it as another reason why her husband should not trifle with Rose’s ideal of him; to make his mother laugh at him was wicked.

“Oh, I’m not his only ideal,” March protested. “He adores Kenby too, and every now and then he brings me to book with a text from Kenby’s gospel.”

Mrs. March caught her breath. “Kenby! Do you really think, then, that she—”

“Oh, hold on, now! It isn’t a question of Mrs. Adding; and I don’t say Rose had an eye on poor old Kenby as a step-father. I merely want you to understand that I’m the object of a divided worship, and that when I’m off duty as an ideal I don’t see why I shouldn’t have the fun of making Mrs. Adding laugh. You can’t pretend she isn’t wrapped up in the boy. You’ve said that yourself.”

“Yes, she’s wrapped up in him; she’d give her life for him; but she is so light. I didn’t suppose she was so light; but it’s borne in upon me more and more.”

They were constantly seeing Rose and his mother, in the sort of abeyance the Triscoes had fallen into. One afternoon the Addings came to Mrs. March’s room to look from her windows at a parade of bicyclers’ clubs from the neighboring towns. The spectacle prospered through its first half-hour, with the charm which German sentiment and ingenuity, are able to lend even a bicycle parade. The wheelmen and wheelwomen filed by on machines wreathed with flowers and ribbons, and decked with streaming banners. Here and there one sat under a moving arch of blossoms, or in a bower of leaves and petals, and they were all gay with their club costumes and insignia. In the height of the display a sudden mountain shower gathered and broke upon them. They braved it till it became a drenching down-pour; then they leaped from their machines and fled to any shelter they could find, under trees and in doorways. The men used their greater agility to get the best places, and kept them; the women made no appeal for them by word or look, but took the rain in the open as if they expected nothing else.

Rose watched the scene with a silent intensity which March interpreted. “There’s your chance, Rose. Why don’t you go down and rebuke those fellows?”

Rose blushed and shrank away without answer, and Mrs. March promptly attacked her husband in his behalf. “Why don’t you go and rebuke them yourself?”

“Well, for one thing, there isn’t any conversation in my phrase-book Between an indignant American Herr and a Party of German Wheelmen who have taken Shelter from the Rain and are keeping the Wheelwomen out in the Wet.” Mrs. Adding shrieked her delight, and he was flattered into going on. “For another thing, I think it’s very well for you ladies to realize from an object-lesson of this sort what spoiled children of our civilization you are. It ought to make you grateful for your privileges.”

“There is something in that,” Mrs. Adding joyfully consented.

“Oh, there is no civilization but ours,” said Mrs. March, in a burst of vindictive patriotism. “I am more and more convinced of it the longer I stay in Europe.”

“Perhaps that’s why we like to stay so long in Europe; it strengthens us in the conviction that America is the only civilized country in the world,” said March.

The shower passed as quickly as it had gathered, and the band which it had silenced for a moment burst forth again in the music which fills the Carlsbad day from dawn till dusk. Just now, it began to play a pot pourri of American airs; at the end some unseen Americans under the trees below clapped and cheered.

“That was opportune of the band,” said March. “It must have been a telepathic impulse from our patriotism in the director. But a pot pourri of American airs is like that tablet dedicating the American Park up here on the Schlossberg, which is signed by six Jews and one Irishman. The only thing in this medley that’s the least characteristic or original is Dixie; and I’m glad the South has brought us back into the Union.”

“You don’t know one note from another, my dear,” said his wife.

“I know the ‘Washington Post.’”

“And don’t you call that American?”

“Yes, if Sousa is an American name; I should have thought it was
Portuguese.”

“Now that sounds a little too much like General Triscoe’s pessimism,” said Mrs. March; and she added: “But whether we have any national melodies or not, we don’t poke women out in the rain and keep them soaking!”

“No, we certainly don’t,” he assented, with such a well-studied effect of yielding to superior logic that Mrs. Adding screamed for joy.

The boy had stolen out of the room, and he said, “I hope Rose isn’t acting on my suggestion?”

“I hate to have you tease him, dearest,” his wife interposed.

“Oh, no,” the mother said, laughing still, but with a note of tenderness in her laugh, which dropped at last to a sigh. “He’s too much afraid of lese-majesty, for that. But I dare say he couldn’t stand the sight. He’s queer.”

“He’s beautiful!” said Mrs. March.

“He’s good,” the mother admitted. “As good as the day’s long. He’s never given me a moment’s trouble — but he troubles me. If you can understand!”

“Oh, I do understand!” Mrs. March returned. “By his innocence, you mean. That is the worst of children. Their innocence breaks our hearts and makes us feel ourselves such dreadful old things.”

“His innocence, yes,” pursued Mrs. Adding, “and his ideals.” She began to laugh again. “He may have gone off for a season of meditation and prayer over the misbehavior of these bicyclers. His mind is turning that way a good deal lately. It’s only fair to tell you, Mr. March, that he seems to be giving up his notion of being an editor. You mustn’t be disappointed.”

“I shall be sorry,” said the editor. “But now that you mention it, I think I have noticed that Rose seems rather more indifferent to periodical literature. I supposed he might simply have exhausted his questions — or my answers.”

“No; it goes deeper than that. I think it’s Europe that’s turned his mind in the direction of reform. At any rate he thinks now he will be a reformer.”

“Really! What kind of one? Not religious, I hope?”

“No. His reform has a religious basis, but its objects are social. I don’t make it out, exactly; but I shall, as soon as Rose does. He tells me everything, and sometimes I don’t feel equal to it, spiritually or even intellectually.”

“Don’t laugh at him, Mrs. Adding!” Mrs. March entreated.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind my laughing,” said the mother, gayly. Rose came shyly back into the room, and she said, “Well, did you rebuke those bad bicyclers?” and she laughed again.

“They’re only a custom, too, Rose,”, said March, tenderly. “Like the man resting while the women worked, and the Emperor, and all the rest of it.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” the boy returned.

“They ride modern machines, but they live in the tenth century. That’s what we’re always forgetting when we come to Europe and see these barbarians enjoying all our up-to-date improvements.”

“There, doesn’t that console you?” asked his mother, and she took him away with her, laughing back from the door. “I don’t believe it does, a bit!”

“I don’t believe she understands the child,” said Mrs. March. “She is very light, don’t you think? I don’t know, after all, whether it wouldn’t be a good thing for her to marry Kenby. She is very easygoing, and she will be sure to marry somebody.”

She had fallen into a tone of musing censure, and he said, “You might put these ideas to her.”

XL.

With the passage of the days and weeks, the strange faces which had familiarized themselves at the springs disappeared; even some of those which had become the faces of acquaintance began to go. In the diminishing crowd the smile of Otterson was no longer to be seen; the sad, severe visage of Major Eltwin, who seemed never to have quite got his bearings after his error with General Triscoe, seldom showed itself. The Triscoes themselves kept out of the Marches’ way, or they fancied so; Mrs. Adding and Rose alone remained of their daily encounter.

It was full summer, as it is everywhere in mid-August, but at Carlsbad the sun was so late getting up over the hills that as people went to their breakfasts at the cafes up the valley of the Tepl they found him looking very obliquely into it at eight o’clock in the morning. The yellow leaves were thicker about the feet of the trees, and the grass was silvery gray with the belated dews. The breakfasters were fewer than they had been, and there were more little barefooted boys and girls with cups of red raspberries which they offered to the passers with cries of “Himbeeren! Himbeeren!” plaintive as the notes of birds left songless by the receding summer.

March was forbidden the fruit, but his wife and Mrs. Adding bought recklessly of it, and ate it under his eyes with their coffee and bread, pouring over it pots of clotted cream that the ‘schone’ Lili brought them. Rose pretended an indifference to it, which his mother betrayed was a sacrifice in behalf of March’s inability.

Lili’s delays in coming to be paid had been such that the Marches now tried to pay her when she brought their breakfast, but they sometimes forgot, and then they caught her whenever she came near them. In this event she liked to coquet with their impatience; she would lean against their table, and say: “Oh, no. You stay a little. It is so nice.” One day after such an entreaty, she said, “The queen is here, this morning.”

Mrs. March started, in the hope of highhotes. “The queen!”

“Yes; the young lady. Mr. Burnamy was saying she was a queen. She is there with her father.” She nodded in the direction of a distant corner, and the Marches knew that she meant Miss Triscoe and the general. “She is not seeming so gayly as she was being.”

March smiled. “We are none of us so gayly as we were being, Lili. The summer is going.”

“But Mr. Burnamy will be returning, not true?” the girl asked, resting her tray on the corner of the table.

“No, I’m afraid he won’t,” March returned sadly.

“He was very good. He was paying the proprietor for the dishes that Augusta did break when she was falling down. He was paying before he went away, when he was knowing that the proprietor would make Augusta to pay.”

“Ah!” said March, and his wife said, “That was like him!” and she eagerly explained to Mrs. Adding how good and great Burnamy had been in this characteristic instance, while Lili waited with the tray to add some pathetic facts about Augusta’s poverty and gratitude. “I think Miss Triscoe ought to know it. There goes the wretch, now!” she broke off. “Don’t look at him!” She set her husband the example of averting his face from the sight of Stoller sullenly pacing up the middle aisle of the grove, and looking to the right and left for a vacant table. “Ugh! I hope he won’t be able to find a single place.”

Mrs. Adding gave one of her pealing laughs, while Rose watched March’s face with grave sympathy. “He certainly doesn’t deserve one. Don’t let us keep you from offering Miss Triscoe any consolation you can.” They got up, and the boy gathered up the gloves, umbrella, and handkerchief which the ladies let drop from their laps.

“Have you been telling?” March asked his wife.

“Have I told you anything?” she demanded of Mrs. Adding in turn.
“Anything that you didn’t as good as know, already?”

“Not a syllable!” Mrs. Adding replied in high delight. “Come, Rose!”

“Well, I suppose there’s no use saying anything,” said March, after she left them.

“She had guessed everything, without my telling her,” said his wife.

“About Stoller?”

“Well-no. I did tell her that part, but that was nothing. It was about
Burnamy and Agatha that she knew. She saw it from the first.”

“I should have thought she would have enough to do to look after poor old
Kenby.”

“I’m not sure, after all, that she cares for him. If she doesn’t, she oughtn’t to let him write to her. Aren’t you going over to speak to the Triscoes?”

“No, certainly not. I’m going back to the hotel. There ought to be some steamer letters this morning. Here we are, worrying about these strangers all the time, and we never give a thought to our own children on the other side of the ocean.”

“I worry about them, too,” said the mother, fondly. “Though there is nothing to worry about,” she added.

“It’s our duty to worry,” he insisted.

At the hotel the portier gave them four letters. There was one from each of their children: one very buoyant, not to say boisterous, from the daughter, celebrating her happiness in her husband, and the loveliness of Chicago as a summer city (“You would think she was born out there!” sighed her mother); and one from the son, boasting his well-being in spite of the heat they were having (“And just think how cool it is here!” his mother upbraided herself), and the prosperity of ‘Every Other Week’. There was a line from Fulkerson, praising the boy’s editorial instinct, and ironically proposing March’s resignation in his favor.

“I do believe we could stay all winter, just as well as not,” said Mrs.
March, proudly. “What does ‘Burnamy say?”

“How do you know it’s from him?”

“Because you’ve been keeping your hand on it! Give it here.”

“When I’ve read it.”

The letter was dated at Ansbach, in Germany, and dealt, except for some messages of affection to Mrs. March, with a scheme for a paper which Burnamy wished to write on Kaspar Hauser, if March thought he could use it in ‘Every Other Week’. He had come upon a book about that hapless foundling in Nuremberg, and after looking up all his traces there he had gone on to Ansbach, where Kaspar Hauser met his death so pathetically. Burnamy said he could not give any notion of the enchantment of Nuremberg; but he besought March, if he was going to the Tyrol for his after-cure, not to fail staying a day or so in the wonderful place. He thought March would enjoy Ansbach too, in its way.

“And, not a word — not a syllable — about Miss Triscoe!” cried Mrs. March.
“Shall you take his paper?”

“It would be serving him right, if I refused it, wouldn’t it?”

They never knew what it cost Burnamy to keep her name out of his letter, or by what an effort of the will he forbade himself even to tell of his parting interview with Stoller. He had recovered from his remorse for letting Stoller give himself away; he was still sorry for that, but he no longer suffered; yet he had not reached the psychological moment when he could celebrate his final virtue in the matter. He was glad he had been able to hold out against the temptation to retrieve himself by another wrong; but he was humbly glad, and he felt that until happier chance brought him and his friends together he must leave them to their merciful conjectures. He was young, and he took the chance, with an aching heart. If he had been older, he might not have taken it.

XLI.

The birthday of the Emperor comes conveniently, in late August, in the good weather which is pretty sure to fall then, if ever in the Austrian summer. For a week past, at Carlsbad, the workmen had been building a scaffolding for the illumination in the woods on a height overlooking the town, and making unobtrusive preparations at points within it.

The day was important as the last of March’s cure, and its pleasures began for him by a renewal of his acquaintance in its first kindliness with the Eltwins. He had met them so seldom that at one time he thought they must have gone away, but now after his first cup he saw the quiet, sad old pair, sitting together on a bench in the Stadt Park, and he asked leave to sit down with them till it was time for the next. Eltwin said that this was their last day, too; and explained that his wife always came with him to the springs, while he took the waters.

“Well,” he apologized, “we’re all that’s left, and I suppose we like to keep together.” He paused, and at the look in March’s face he suddenly went on. “I haven’t been well for three or four years; but I always fought against coming out here, when the doctors wanted me to. I said I couldn’t leave home; and, I don’t suppose I ever should. But my home left me.”

As he spoke his wife shrank tenderly near him, and March saw her steal her withered hand into his.

“We’d had a large family, but they’d all died off, with one thing or another, and here in the spring we lost our last daughter. Seemed perfectly well, and all at once she died; heart-failure, they called it. It broke me up, and mother, here, got at me to go. And so we’re here.” His voice trembled; and his eyes softened; then they flashed up, and March heard him add, in a tone that astonished him less when he looked round and saw General Triscoe advancing toward them, “I don’t know what it is always makes me want to kick that man.”

The general lifted his hat to their group, and hoped that Mrs. Eltwin was well, and Major Eltwin better. He did not notice their replies, but said to March, “The ladies are waiting for you in Pupp’s readingroom, to go with them to the Posthof for breakfast.”

“Aren’t you going, too?” asked March.

“No, thank you,” said the general, as if it were much finer not; “I shall breakfast at our pension.” He strolled off with the air of a man who has done more than his duty.

“I don’t suppose I ought to feel that way,” said Eltwin, with a remorse which March suspected a reproachful pressure of his wife’s hand had prompted in him. “I reckon he means well.”

“Well, I don’t know,” March said, with a candor he could not wholly excuse.

On his way to the hotel he fancied mocking his wife for her interest in the romantic woes of her lovers, in a world where there was such real pathos as these poor old people’s; but in the company of Miss Triscoe he could not give himself this pleasure. He tried to amuse her on the way from Pupp’s, with the doubt he always felt in passing the Cafe Sans-Souci, whether he should live to reach the Posthof where he meant to breakfast. She said, “Poor Mr. March!” and laughed inattentively; when he went on to philosophize the commonness of the sparse company always observable at the Sans-Souci as a just effect of its Laodicean situation between Pupp’s and the Posthof, the girl sighed absently, and his wife frowned at him.

The flower-woman at the gate of her garden had now only autumnal blooms for sale in the vases which flanked the entrance; the windrows of the rowen, left steeping in the dews overnight, exhaled a faint fragrance; a poor remnant of the midsummer multitudes trailed itself along to the various cafes of the valley, its pink paper bags of bread rustling like sere foliage as it moved.

At the Posthof the ‘schone’ Lili alone was as gay, as in the prime of July. She played archly about the guests she welcomed to a table in a sunny spot in the gallery. “You are tired of Carlsbad?” she said caressingly to Miss Triscoe, as she put her breakfast before her.

“Not of the Posthof,” said the girl, listlessly.

“Posthof, and very little Lili?” She showed, with one forefinger on another, how very little she was.

Miss Triscoe laughed, not cheerily, and Lili said to Mrs. March, with abrupt seriousness, “Augusta was finding a handkerchief under the table, and she was washing it and ironing it before she did bring it. I have scolded her, and I have made her give it to me.”

She took from under her apron a man’s handkerchief, which she offered to
Mrs. March. It bore, as she saw Miss Triscoe saw, the initials L. J. B.
But, “Whose can it be?” they asked each other.

“Why, Burnamy’s,” said March; and Lili’s eyes danced. “Give it here!”

His wife caught it farther away. “No, I’m going to see whose it is, first; if it’s his, I’ll send it to him myself.”

She tried to put it into the pocket which was not in her dress by sliding it down her lap; then she handed it to the girl, who took it with a careless air, but kept it after a like failure to pocket it.

Mrs. March had come out in her India-rubber sandals, but for once in Carlsbad the weather was too dry for them, and she had taken them off and was holding them in her lap. They fell to the ground when she now rose from breakfast, and she stooped to pick them up. Miss Triscoe was too quick for her.

“Oh, let me carry them for you!” she entreated, and after a tender struggle she succeed in enslaving herself to them, and went away wearing them through the heel-bands like manacles on her wrist. She was not the kind of girl to offer such pretty devotions, and Mrs. March was not the kind of woman to suffer them; but they played the comedy through, and let March go off for his last hill-climb with the promise to meet him in the Stadt Park when he came to the Kurhaus for his last mineral bath.

Mrs. March in the mean time went about some final shopping, and invited the girl’s advice with a fondness which did not prevent her rejecting it in every case, with Miss Triscoe’s eager approval. In the Stadt Park they sat down and talked; from time to time Mrs. March made polite feints of recovering her sandals, but the girl kept them with increased effusion.

When they rose, and strolled away from the bench where they had been sitting, they seemed to be followed. They looked round and saw no one more alarming than a very severe-looking old gentleman, whose hat brim in spite of his severity was limp with much lifting, as all Austrian hat brims are. He touched it, and saying haughtily in German, “Something left lying,” passed on.

They stared at each other; then, as women do, they glanced down at their skirts to see if there was anything amiss with them, and Miss Triscoe perceived her hands empty of Mrs. March’s sandals and of Burnamy’s handkerchief.

“Oh, I put it in one of the toes!” she lamented, and she fled back to their bench, alarming in her course the fears of a gendarme for the public security, and putting a baby in its nurse’s arms into such doubts of its personal safety that it burst into a desolate cry. She laughed breathlessly as she rejoined Mrs. March. “That comes of having no pocket; I didn’t suppose I could forget your sandals, Mrs. March! Wasn’t it absurd?”

“It’s one of those things,” Mrs. March said to her husband afterwards, “that they can always laugh over together.”

“They? And what about Burnamy’s behavior to Stoller?”

“Oh, I don’t call that anything but what will come right. Of course he can make it up to him somehow. And I regard his refusal to do wrong when Stoller wanted him to as quite wiping out the first offence.”

“Well, my dear, you have burnt your ships behind you. My only hope is that when we leave here tomorrow, her pessimistic papa’s poison will neutralize yours somehow.”

XLII.

One of the pleasantest incidents of March’s sojourn in Carlsbad was his introduction to the manager of the municipal theatre by a common friend who explained the editor in such terms to the manager that he conceived of him as a brother artist. This led to much bowing and smiling from the manager when the Marches met him in the street, or in their frequent visits to the theatre, with which March felt that it might well have ended, and still been far beyond his desert. He had not thought of going to the opera on the Emperor’s birthnight, but after dinner a box came from the manager, and Mrs. March agreed with him that they could not in decency accept so great a favor. At the same time she argued that they could not in decency refuse it, and that to show their sense of the pleasure done them, they must adorn their box with all the beauty and distinction possible; in other words, she said they must ask Miss Triscoe and her father.

“And why not Major Eltwin and his wife? Or Mrs. Adding and Rose?”

She begged him, simply in his own interest, not to be foolish; and they went early, so as to be in their box when their guests came. The foyer of the theatre was banked with flowers, and against a curtain of evergreens stood a high-pedestalled bust of the paternal Caesar, with whose side-whiskers a laurel crown comported itself as well as it could. At the foot of the grand staircase leading to the boxes the manager stood in evening dress, receiving his friends and their felicitations upon the honor which the theatre was sure to do itself on an occasion so august. The Marches were so cordial in their prophecies that the manager yielded to an artist’s impulse and begged his fellow-artist to do him the pleasure of coming behind the scenes between the acts of the opera; he bowed a heart-felt regret to Mrs. March that he could not make the invitation include her, and hoped that she would not be too lonely while her husband was gone.

She explained that they had asked friends, and she should not be alone, and then he entreated March to bring any gentleman who was his guest with him. On the way up to their box, she pressed his arm as she used in their young married days, and asked him if it was not perfect. “I wish we were going to have it all to ourselves; no one else can appreciate the whole situation. Do you think we have made a mistake in having the Triscoes?”

“We!” he retorted. “Oh, that’s good! I’m going to shirk him, when it comes to going behind the scenes.”

“No, no, dearest,” she entreated. “Snubbing will only make it worse. We must stand it to the bitter end, now.”

The curtain rose upon another laurelled bust of the Emperor, with a chorus of men formed on either side, who broke into the grave and noble strains of the Austrian Hymn, while every one stood. Then the curtain fell again, and in the interval before the opera could begin, General Triscoe and his daughter came in.

Mrs. March took the splendor in which the girl appeared as a tribute to her hospitality. She had hitherto been a little disappointed of the open homage to American girlhood which her readings of international romance had taught her to expect in Europe, but now her patriotic vanity feasted full. Fat highhotes of her own sex levelled their lorgnettes at Miss Triscoe all around the horseshoe, with critical glances which fell blunted from her complexion and costume; the house was brilliant with the military uniforms, which we have not yet to mingle with our unrivalled millinery, and the ardent gaze of the young officers dwelt on the perfect mould of her girlish arms and neck, and the winning lines of her face. The girl’s eyes shone with a joyful excitement, and her little head, defined by its dark hair, trembled as she slowly turned it from side to side, after she removed the airy scarf which had covered it. Her father, in evening dress, looked the Third Emperor complaisant to a civil occasion, and took a chair in the front of the box without resistance; and the ladies disputed which should yield the best place to the other, till Miss Triscoe forced Mrs. March fondly into it for the first act at least.

The piece had to be cut a good deal to give people time for the illuminations afterwards; but as it was it gave scope to the actress who, ‘als Gast’ from a Viennese theatre, was the chief figure in it. She merited the distinction by the art which still lingered, deeply embedded in her massive balk, but never wholly obscured.

“That is grand, isn’t it?” said March, following one of the tremendous strokes by which she overcame her physical disadvantages. “It’s fine to see how her art can undo, for one splendid instant, the work of all those steins of beer, those illimitable licks of sausage, those boundless fields of cabbage. But it’s rather pathetic.”

“It’s disgusting,” said his wife; and at this General Triscoe, who had been watching the actress through his lorgnette, said, as if his contrary-mindedness were irresistibly invoked:

“Well, I don’t know. It’s amusing. Do you suppose we shall see her when we go behind, March?”

He still professed a desire to do so when the curtain fell, and they hurried to the rear door of the theatre. It was slightly ajar, and they pulled it wide open, with the eagerness of their age and nation, and began to mount the stairs leading up from it between rows of painted dancing-girls, who had come out for a breath of air, and who pressed themselves against the walls to make room for the intruders. With their rouged faces, and the stare of their glassy eyes intensified by the coloring of their brows and lashes, they were like painted statues, as they stood there with their crimsoned lips parted in astonished smiles.

“This is rather weird,” said March, faltering at the sight. “I wonder if we might ask these young ladies where to go?” General Triscoe made no answer, and was apparently no more prepared than himself to accost the files of danseuses, when they were themselves accosted by an angry voice from the head of the stairs with a demand for their business. The voice belonged to a gendarme, who descended toward them and seemed as deeply scandalized at their appearance as they could have been at that of the young ladies.

March explained, in his ineffective German, with every effect of improbability, that they were there by appointment of the manager, and wished to find his room.

The gendarme would not or could not make anything out of it. He pressed down upon them, and laying a rude hand on a shoulder of either, began to force them back to the door. The mild nature of the editor might have yielded to his violence, but the martial spirit of General Triscoe was roused. He shrugged the gendarme’s hand from his shoulder, and with a voice as furious as his own required him, in English, to say what the devil he meant. The gendarme rejoined with equal heat in German; the general’s tone rose in anger; the dancing-girls emitted some little shrieks of alarm, and fled noisily up the stairs. From time to time March interposed with a word of the German which had mostly deserted him in his hour of need; but if it had been a flow of intelligible expostulation, it would have had no effect upon the disputants. They grew more outrageous, till the manager himself, appeared at the head of the stairs, and extended an arresting hand over the hubbub. As soon as the situation clarified itself he hurried down to his visitors with a polite roar of apology and rescued them from the gendarme, and led them up to his room and forced them into arm-chairs with a rapidity of reparation which did not exhaust itself till he had entreated them with every circumstance of civility to excuse an incident so mortifying to him. But with all his haste he lost so much time in this that he had little left to show them through the theatre, and their presentation to the prima donna was reduced to the obeisances with which they met and parted as she went upon the stage at the lifting of the curtain. In the lack of a common language this was perhaps as well as a longer interview; and nothing could have been more honorable than their dismissal at the hands of the gendarme who had received them so stormily. He opened the door for them, and stood with his fingers to his cap saluting, in the effect of being a whole file of grenadiers.

XLIII.

At the same moment Burnamy bowed himself out of the box where he had been sitting with the ladies during the absence of the gentlemen. He had knocked at the door almost as soon as they disappeared, and if he did not fully share the consternation which his presence caused, he looked so frightened that Mrs. March reserved the censure which the sight of him inspired, and in default of other inspiration treated his coming simply as a surprise. She shook hands with him, and then she asked him to sit down, and listened to his explanation that he had come back to Carlsbad to write up the birthnight festivities, on an order from the Paris-New York Chronicle; that he had seen them in the box and had ventured to took in. He was pale, and so discomposed that the heart of justice was softened more and more in Mrs. March’s breast, and she left him to the talk that sprang up, by an admirable effect of tact in the young lady, between him and Miss Triscoe.

After all, she decided, there was nothing criminal in his being in Carlsbad, and possibly in the last analysis there was nothing so very wicked in his being in her box. One might say that it was not very nice of him after he had gone away under such a cloud; but on the other hand it was nice, though in a different way, if he longed so much to see Miss Triscoe that he could not help coming. It was altogether in his favor that he was so agitated, though he was momently becoming less agitated; the young people were beginning to laugh at the notion of Mr. March and General Triscoe going behind the scenes. Burnamy said he envied them the chance; and added, not very relevantly, that he had come from Baireuth, where he had seen the last of the Wagner performances. He said he was going back to Baireuth, but not to Ansbach again, where he had finished looking up that Kaspar Hauser business. He seemed to think Mrs. March would know about it, and she could not help saying; Oh, yes, Mr. March was so much interested. She wondered if she ought to tell him about his handkerchief; but she remembered in time that she had left it in Miss Triscoe’s keeping. She wondered if the girl realized how handsome he was. He was extremely handsome, in his black evening dress, with his Tuxedo, and the pallor of his face repeated in his expanse of shirt front.

At the bell for the rising of the curtain he rose too, and took their offered hands. In offering hers Mrs. March asked if he would not stay and speak with Mr. March and the general; and now for the first time he recognized anything clandestine in his visit. He laughed nervously, and said, “No, thank you!” and shut himself out.

“We must tell them,” said Mrs. March, rather interrogatively, and she was glad that the girl answered with a note of indignation.

“Why, certainly, Mrs. March.”

They could not tell them at once, for the second act had begun when March and the general came back; and after the opera was over and they got out into the crowded street there was no chance, for the general was obliged to offer his arm to Mrs. March, while her husband followed with his daughter.

The facades of the theatre and of the hotels were outlined with thickly set little lamps, which beaded the arches of the bridges spanning the Tepl, and lighted the casements and portals of the shops. High above all, against the curtain of black woodland on the mountain where its skeleton had been growing for days, glittered the colossal effigy of the doubleheaded eagle of Austria, crowned with the tiara of the Holy Roman Empire; in the reflected splendor of its myriad lamps the pale Christ looked down from the mountain opposite upon the surging multitudes in the streets and on the bridges.

They were most amiable multitudes, March thought, and they responded docilely to the entreaties of the policemen who stood on the steps of the bridges, and divided their encountering currents with patient appeals of “Bitte schon! Bitte schon!” He laughed to think of a New York cop saying “Please prettily! Please prettily!” to a New York crowd which he wished to have go this way or that, and then he burned with shame to think how far our manners were from civilization, wherever our heads and hearts might be, when he heard a voice at his elbow:

“A punch with a club would start some of these fellows along quicker.”

It was Stoller, and March turned from him to lose his disgust in the sudden terror of perceiving that Miss Triscoe was no longer at his side. Neither could he see his wife and General Triscoe, and he began to push frantically about in the crowd looking for the girl. He had an interminable five or ten minutes in his vain search, and he was going to call out to her by name, when Burnamy saved him from the hopeless absurdity by elbowing his way to him with Miss. Triscoe on his arm.

“Here she is, Mr. March,” he said, as if there were nothing strange in his having been there to find her; in fact he had followed them all from the theatre, and at the moment he saw the party separated, and Miss Triscoe carried off helpless in the human stream, had plunged in and rescued her. Before March could formulate any question in his bewilderment, Burnamy was gone again; the girl offered no explanation for him, and March had not yet decided to ask any when he caught sight of his wife and General Triscoe standing tiptoe in a doorway and craning their necks upward and forward to scan the crowd in search of him and his charge. Then he looked round at her and opened his lips to express the astonishment that filled him, when he was aware of an ominous shining of her eyes and trembling of her hand on his arm.

She pressed his arm nervously, and he understood her to beg him to forbear at once all question of her and all comment on Burnamy’s presence to her father.

It would not have been just the time for either. Not only Mrs. March was with the general, but Mrs. Adding also; she had called to them from that place, where she was safe with Rose when she saw them eddying about in the crowd. The general was still, expressing a gratitude which became more pressing the more it was disclaimed; he said casually at sight of his daughter, “Ah; you’ve found us, have you?” and went on talking to Mrs. Adding, who nodded to them laughingly, and asked, “Did you see me beckoning?”

“Look here, my dear!” March said to his wife as soon as they parted from the rest, the general gallantly promising that his daughter and he would see Mrs. Adding safe to her hotel, and were making their way slowly home alone. “Did you know that Burnamy was in Carlsbad?”

“He’s going away on the twelve-o’clock train tonight,” she answered, firmly.

“What has that got to do with it? Where did you see him?”

“In the box, while you were behind the scenes.”

She told him all about it, and he listened in silent endeavor for the ground of censure from which a sense of his own guilt forced him. She asked suddenly, “Where did you see him?” and he told her in turn.

He added severely, “Her father ought to know. Why didn’t you tell him?”

“Why didn’t you?” she retorted with great reason.

“Because I didn’t think he was just in the humor for it.” He began to laugh as he sketched their encounter with the gendarme, but she did not seem to think it amusing; and he became serious again. “Besides, I was afraid she was going to blubber, any way.”

“She wouldn’t have blubbered, as you call it. I don’t know why you need be so disgusting! It would have given her just the moral support she needed. Now she will have to tell him herself, and he will blame us. You ought to have spoken; you could have done it easily and naturally when you came up with her. You will have yourself to thank for all the trouble that comes of it, now, my dear.”

He shouted in admiration of her skill in shifting the blame on him. “All right! I should have had to stand it, even if you hadn’t behaved with angelic wisdom.”

“Why,” she said, after reflection, “I don’t see what either of us has done. We didn’t get Burnamy to come here, or connive at his presence in any way.”

“Oh! Make Triscoe believe that! He knows you’ve done all you could to help the affair on.”

“Well, what if I have? He began making up to Mrs. Adding himself as soon as he saw her, to-night. She looked very pretty.”

“Well, thank Heaven! we’re off to-morrow morning, and I hope we’ve seen the last of them. They’ve done what they could to spoil my cure, but I’m not going to have them spoil my aftercure.”

XLIV.

Mrs. March had decided not to go to the Posthof for breakfast, where they had already taken a lavish leave of the ‘schone’ Lili, with a sense of being promptly superseded in her affections. They found a place in the red-table-cloth end of the pavilion at Pupp’s, and were served by the pretty girl with the rose-bud mouth whom they had known only as Ein-und-Zwanzig, and whose promise of “Komm’ gleich, bitte schon!” was like a bird’s note. Never had the coffee been so good, the bread so aerially light, the Westphalian ham so tenderly pink. A young married couple whom they knew came by, arm in arm, in their morning walk, and sat down with them, like their own youth, for a moment.

“If you had told them we were going, dear,” said Mrs. March, when the couple were themselves gone, “we should have been as old as ever. Don’t let us tell anybody, this morning, that we’re going. I couldn’t bear it.”

They had been obliged to take the secretary of the hotel into their confidence, in the process of paying their bill. He put on his high hat and came out to see them off. The portier was already there, standing at the step of the lordly two-spanner which they had ordered for the long drive to the station. The Swiss elevator-man came to the door to offer them a fellow-republican’s good wishes for their journey; Herr Pupp himself appeared at the last moment to hope for their return another summer. Mrs. March bent a last look of interest upon the proprietor as their two-spanner whirled away.

“They say that he is going to be made a count.”

“Well, I don’t object,” said March. “A man who can feed fourteen thousand people, mostly Germans, in a day, ought to be made an archduke.”

At the station something happened which touched them even more than these last attentions of the hotel. They were in their compartment, and were in the act of possessing themselves of the best places by putting their bundles and bags on them, when they heard Mrs. March’s name called.

They turned and saw Rose Adding at the door, his thin face flushed with excitement and his eyes glowing. “I was afraid I shouldn’t get here in time,” he panted, and he held up to her a huge bunch of flowers.

“Why Rose! From your mother?”

“From me,” he said, timidly, and he was slipping out into the corridor, when she caught him and his flowers to her in one embrace. “I want to kiss you,” she said; and presently, when he had waved his hand to them from the platform outside, and the train had started, she fumbled for her handkerchief. “I suppose you call it blubbering; but he is the sweetest child!”

“He’s about the only one of our Carlsbad compatriots that I’m sorry to leave behind,” March assented. “He’s the only unmarried one that wasn’t in danger of turning up a lover on my hands; if there had been some rather old girl, or some rather light matron in our acquaintance, I’m not sure that I should have been safe even from Rose. Carlsbad has been an interruption to our silver wedding journey, my dear; but I hope now that it will begin again.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “now we can have each other all to ourselves.”

“Yes. It’s been very different from our first wedding journey in that. It isn’t that we’re not so young now as we were, but that we don’t seem so much our own property. We used to be the sole proprietors, and now we seem to be mere tenants at will, and any interloping lover may come in and set our dearest interests on the sidewalk. The disadvantage of living along is that we get too much into the hands of other people.”

“Yes, it is. I shall be glad to be rid of them all, too.”

“I don’t know that the drawback is serious enough to make us wish we had died young — or younger,” he suggested.

“No, I don’t know that it is,” she assented. She added, from an absence where he was sufficiently able to locate her meaning, “I hope she’ll write and tell me what her father says and does when she tells him that he was there.”

There were many things, in the weather, the landscape, their sole occupancy of an unsmoking compartment, while all the smoking compartments round overflowed with smokers, which conspired to offer them a pleasing illusion of the past; it was sometimes so perfect that they almost held each other’s hands. In later life there are such moments when the youthful emotions come back, as certain birds do in winter, and the elderly heart chirps and twitters to itself as if it were young. But it is best to discourage this fondness; and Mrs. March joined her husband in mocking it, when he made her observe how fit it was that their silver wedding journey should be resumed as part of his after-cure. If he had found the fountain of youth in the warm, flat, faintly nauseous water of the Felsenquelle, he was not going to call himself twenty-eight again till his second month of the Carlsbad regimen was out, and he had got back to salad and fruit.

At Eger they had a memorable dinner, with so much leisure for it that they could form a life-long friendship for the old English-speaking waiter who served them, and would not suffer them to hurry themselves. The hills had already fallen away, and they ran along through a cheerful country, with tracts of forest under white clouds blowing about in a blue sky, and gayly flinging their shadows down upon the brown ploughed land, and upon the yellow oat-fields, where women were cutting the leisurely harvest with sickles, and where once a great girl with swarthy bare arms unbent herself from her toil, and rose, a statue of rude vigor and beauty, to watch them go by. Hedges of evergreen enclosed the yellow oat-fields, where slow wagons paused to gather the sheaves of the week before, and then loitered away with them. Flocks of geese waddled in sculpturesque relief against the close-cropt pastures, herded by little girls with flaxen pigtails, whose eyes, blue as corn-flowers, followed the flying train. There were stretches of wild thyme purpling long barren acreages, and growing up the railroad banks almost to the rails themselves. From the meadows the rowen, tossed in long loose windrows, sent into their car a sad autumnal fragrance which mingled with the tobacco smoke, when two fat smokers emerged into the narrow corridor outside their compartments and tried to pass each other. Their vast stomachs beat together in a vain encounter.

“Zu enge!” said one, and “Ja, zu enge!” said the other, and they laughed innocently in each other’s’ faces, with a joy in their recognition of the corridor’s narrowness as great as if it had been a stroke of the finest wit.

All the way the land was lovely, and as they drew near Nuremberg it grew enchanting, with a fairy quaintness. The scenery was Alpine, but the scale was toy-like, as befitted the region, and the mimic peaks and valleys with green brooks gushing between them, and strange rock forms recurring in endless caprice, seemed the home of children’s story. All the gnomes and elves might have dwelt there in peaceful fellowship with the peasants who ploughed the little fields, and gathered the garlanded hops, and lived in the farmsteads and village houses with those high timber-laced gables.

“We ought to have come here long ago with the children, when they were children,” said March.

“No,” his wife returned; “it would have been too much for them. Nobody but grown people could bear it.”

The spell which began here was not really broken by anything that afterwards happened in Nuremberg, though the old toy-capital was trolley-wired through all its quaintness, and they were lodged in a hotel lighted by electricity and heated by steam, and equipped with an elevator which was so modern that it came down with them as well as went up. All the things that assumed to be of recent structure or invention were as nothing against the dense past, which overwhelmed them with the sense of a world elsewhere outlived. In Nuremberg it is not the quaint or the picturesque that is exceptional; it is the matter-of-fact and the commonplace. Here, more than anywhere else, you are steeped in the gothic spirit which expresses itself in a Teutonic dialect of homely sweetness, of endearing caprice, of rude grotesqueness, but of positive grace and beauty almost never. It is the architectural speech of a strenuous, gross, kindly, honest people’s fancy; such as it is it was inexhaustible, and such as it is it was bewitching for the travellers.

They could hardly wait till they had supper before plunging into the ancient town, and they took the first tram-car at a venture. It was a sort of transfer, drawn by horses, which delivered them a little inside. of the city gate to a trolley-car. The conductor with their fare demanded their destination; March frankly owned that they did not know where they wanted to go; they wanted to go anywhere the conductor chose; and the conductor, after reflection, decided to put them down at the public garden, which, as one of the newest things in the city, would make the most favorable impression upon strangers. It was in fact so like all other city gardens, with the foliage of its trimly planted alleys, that it sheltered them effectually from the picturesqueness of Nuremberg, and they had a long, peaceful hour on one of its benches, where they rested from their journey, and repented their hasty attempt to appropriate the charm of the city.

The next morning it rained, according to a custom which the elevator-boy (flown with the insolent recollection of a sunny summer in Milan) said was invariable in Nuremberg; but after the one-o’clock table d’hote they took a noble two-spanner carriage, and drove all round the city. Everywhere the ancient moat, thickly turfed and planted with trees and shrubs, stretched a girdle of garden between their course and the wall beautifully old, with knots of dead ivy clinging to its crevices, or broad meshes of the shining foliage mantling its blackened masonry. A tile-roofed open gallery ran along the top, where so many centuries of sentries had paced, and arched the massive gates with heavily moulded piers, where so countlessly the fierce burgher troops had sallied forth against their besiegers, and so often the leaguer hosts had dashed themselves in assault. The blood shed in forgotten battles would have flooded the moat where now the grass and flowers grew, or here and there a peaceful stretch of water stagnated.

The drive ended in a visit to the old Burg, where the Hapsburg Kaisers dwelt when they visited their faithful imperial city. From its ramparts the incredible picturesqueness of Nuremberg best shows itself, and if one has any love for the distinctive quality of Teutonic architecture it is here that more than anywhere else one may feast it. The prospect of tower and spire and gable is of such a mediaeval richness, of such an abounding fulness, that all incidents are lost in it. The multitudinous roofs of red-brown tiles, blinking browsily from their low dormers, press upon one another in endless succession; they cluster together on a rise of ground and sink away where the street falls, but they nowhere disperse or scatter, and they end abruptly at the other rim of the city, beyond which looms the green country, merging in the remoter blue of misty uplands.

A pretty young girl waited at the door of the tower for the visitors to gather in sufficient number, and then led them through the terrible museum, discanting in the same gay voice and with the same smiling air on all the murderous engines and implements of torture. First in German and then in English she explained the fearful uses of the Iron Maiden, she winningly illustrated the action of the racks and wheels on which men had been stretched and broken, and she sweetly vaunted a sword which had beheaded eight hundred persons. When she took the established fee from March she suggested, with a demure glance, “And what more you please for saying it in English.”

“Can you say it in Russian?” demanded a young man, whose eyes he had seen dwelling on her from the beginning. She laughed archly, and responded with some Slavic words, and then delivered her train of sight-seers over to the custodian who was to show them through the halls and chambers of the Burg. These were undergoing the repairs which the monuments of the past are perpetually suffering in the present, and there was some special painting and varnishing for the reception of the Kaiser, who was coming to Nuremberg for the military manoeuvres then at hand. But if they had been in the unmolested discomfort of their unlivable magnificence, their splendor was such as might well reconcile the witness to the superior comfort of a private station in our snugger day. The Marches came out owning that the youth which might once have found the romantic glories of the place enough was gone from them. But so much of it was left to her that she wished to make him stop and look at the flirtation which had blossomed out between that pretty young girl and the Russian, whom they had scarcely missed from their party in the Burg. He had apparently never parted from the girl, and now as they sat together on the threshold of the gloomy tower, he most have been teaching her more Slavic words, for they were both laughing as if they understood each other perfectly.

In his security from having the affair in any wise on his hands, March would have willingly lingered, to see how her education got on; but it began to rain, The rain did not disturb the lovers, but it obliged the elderly spectators to take refuge in their carriage; and they drove off to find the famous Little Goose Man. This is what every one does at Nuremberg; it would be difficult to say why. When they found the Little Goose Man, he was only a mediaeval fancy in bronze, who stood on his pedestal in the market-place and contributed from the bill of the goose under his arm a small stream to the rainfall drenching the wet wares of the wet market-women round the fountain, and soaking their cauliflowers and lettuce, their grapes and pears, their carrots and turnips, to the watery flavor of all fruits and vegetables in Germany.

The air was very raw and chill; but after supper the clouds cleared away, and a pleasant evening tempted the travellers out. The portier dissembled any slight which their eagerness for the only amusement he could think of inspired, and directed them to a popular theatre which was giving a summer season at low prices to the lower classes, and which they surprised, after some search, trying to hide itself in a sort of back square. They got the best places at a price which ought to have been mortifyingly cheap, and found themselves, with a thousand other harmless bourgeois folk, in a sort of spacious, agreeable barn, of a decoration by no means ugly, and of a certain artless comfort. Each seat fronted a shelf at the back of the seat before it, where the spectator could put his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer passed constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet where he could stay himself with cold ham and other robust German refreshments.

It was “The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg” upon which they had oddly chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an American girl in it. She was an American girl of the advanced pattern, and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter. She seemed to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German conception of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the occasional English words which she used.

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the theatre it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as a night could be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content through the narrow streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor, beyond which their hotel lay. How pretty, they said, to call that charming port the Ladies’ Gate! They promised each other to find out why, and they never did so, but satisfied themselves by assigning it to the exclusive use of the slim maidens and massive matrons of the old Nuremberg patriciate, whom they imagined trailing their silken splendors under its arch in perpetual procession.

XLV.

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is still insistent in all its art. This expresses their pride at once and their simplicity with a childish literality. At its best it is never so good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its best. The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile. Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in the base of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely affecting in its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even more affecting than the sculptor imagined it; they have blurred the faces and figures in passing till their features are scarcely distinguishable; and the sleeping apostles seem to have dreamed themselves back into the mother-marble. It is of the same tradition and impulse with that supreme glory of the native sculpture, the ineffable tabernacle of Adam Krafft, which climbs a column of the church within, a miracle of richly carven story; and no doubt if there were a Nuremberg sculptor doing great things today, his work would be of kindred inspiration.

The descendants of the old patrician who ordered the tabernacle at rather a hard bargain from the artist still worship on the floor below, and the descendants of his neighbor patricians have their seats in the pews about, and their names cut in the proprietary plates on the pew-tops. The vergeress who showed the Marches through the church was devout in the praise of these aristocratic fellow-citizens of hers. “So simple, and yet so noble!” she said. She was a very romantic vergeress, and she told them at unsparing length the legend of the tabernacle, how the artist fell asleep in despair of winning his patron’s daughter, and saw in a vision the master-work with the lily-like droop at top, which gained him her hand. They did not realize till too late that it was all out of a novel of Georg Ebers’s, but added to the regular fee for the church a gift worthy of an inedited legend.

Even then they had a pleasure in her enthusiasm rarely imparted by the Nuremberg manner. They missed there the constant, sweet civility of Carlsbad, and found themselves falling flat in their endeavors for a little cordiality. They indeed inspired with some kindness the old woman who showed them through that cemetery where Albert Durer and Hans Sachs and many other illustrious citizens lie buried under monumental brasses of such beauty:

“That kings to have the like, might wish to die.”

But this must have been because they abandoned themselves so willingly to the fascination of the bronze skull on the tomb of a fourteenth-century patrician, which had the uncommon advantage of a lower jaw hinged to the upper. She proudly clapped it up and down for their astonishment, and waited, with a toothless smile, to let them discover the bead of a nail artfully figured in the skull; then she gave a shrill cackle of joy, and gleefully explained that the wife of this patrician had killed him by driving a nail into his temple, and had been fitly beheaded for the murder.

She cared so much for nothing else in the cemetery, but she consented to let them wonder at the richness of the sculpture in the level tombs, with their escutcheons and memorial tablets, overrun by the long grass and the matted ivy; she even consented to share their indignation at the destruction of some of the brasses and the theft of others. She suffered more reluctantly their tenderness for the old, old crucifixion figured in sculpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the Canossa palace at Verona. A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige was part of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg whenever they came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both to the German and northern Italian art. They knew that it was an effect which had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the older land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found it in its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsened in the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.

In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar. There was to be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers. She was of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred years ago. In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life of the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself after enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which seems the final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.

XLVI.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understood the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appeased the lingering conscience she had on this point by not going out till afternoon. Then she found nothing of the gayety which Sunday afternoon wears in Catholic lands. The people were resting from their week-day labors, but they were not playing; and the old churches, long since converted to Lutheran uses, were locked against tourist curiosity.

It was as it should be; it was as it would be at home; and yet in this ancient city, where the past was so much alive in the perpetual picturesqueness, the Marches felt an incongruity in it; and they were fain to escape from the Protestant silence and seriousness of the streets to the shade of the public garden they had involuntarily visited the evening of their arrival.

On a bench sat a quiet, rather dejected man, whom March asked some question of their way. He answered in English, and in the parley that followed they discovered that they were all Americans. The stranger proved to be an American of the sort commonest in Germany, and he said he had returned to his native country to get rid of the ague which he had taken on Staten Island. He had been seventeen years in New York, and now a talk of Tammany and its chances in the next election, of pulls and deals, of bosses and heelers, grew up between the civic step-brothers, and joined them is a common interest. The German-American said he was bookkeeper in some glass-works which had been closed by our tariff, and he confessed that he did not mean to return to us, though he spoke of German affairs with the impartiality of an outsider. He said that the Socialist party was increasing faster than any other, and that this tacitly meant the suppression of rank and the abolition of monarchy. He warned March against the appearance of industrial prosperity in Germany; beggary was severely repressed, and if poverty was better clad than with us, it was as hungry and as hopeless in Nuremberg as in New York. The working classes were kindly and peaceable; they only knifed each other quietly on Sunday evenings after having too much beer.

Presently the stranger rose and bowed to the Marches for good-by; and as he walked down the aisle of trees in which they had been fitting together, he seemed to be retreating farther and farther from such Americanism as they had in common. He had reverted to an entirely German effect of dress and figure; his walk was slow and Teutonic; he must be a type of thousands who have returned to the fatherland without wishing to own themselves its children again, and yet out of heart with the only country left them.

“He was rather pathetic, my dear,” said March, in the discomfort he knew his wife must be feeling as well as himself. “How odd to have the lid lifted here, and see the same old problems seething and bubbling in the witch’s caldron we call civilization as we left simmering away at home! And how hard to have our tariff reach out and snatch the bread from the mouths of those poor glass-workers!”

“I thought that was hard,” she sighed. “It must have been his bread, too.”

“Let’s hope it was not his cake, anyway. I suppose,” he added, dreamily, “that what we used to like in Italy was the absence of all the modern activities. The Italians didn’t repel us by assuming to be of our epoch in the presence of their monuments; they knew how to behave as pensive memories. I wonder if they’re still as charming.”

“Oh, no,” she returned, “nothing is as charming as it used to be. And now we need the charm more than ever.”

He laughed at her despair, in the tacit understanding they had lived into that only one of them was to be desperate at a time, and that they were to take turns in cheering each other up. “Well, perhaps we don’t deserve it. And I’m not sure that we need it so much as we did when we were young. We’ve got tougher; we can stand the cold facts better now. They made me shiver once, but now they give me a sort of agreeable thrill. Besides, if, life kept up its pretty illusions, if it insisted upon being as charming as it used to be, how could we ever bear to die? We’ve got that to consider.” He yielded to the temptation of his paradox, but he did not fail altogether of the purpose with which he began, and they took the trolley back to their hotel cheerful in the intrepid fancy that they had confronted fate when they had only had the hardihood to face a phrase.

They agreed that now he ought really to find out something about the contemporary life of Nuremberg, and the next morning he went out before breakfast, and strolled through some of the simpler streets, in the hope of intimate impressions. The peasant women, serving portions of milk from house to house out of the cans in the little wagons which they drew themselves, were a touch of pleasing domestic comedy; a certain effect of tragedy imparted itself from the lamentations of the sucking-pigs jolted over the pavements in handcarts; a certain majesty from the long procession of yellow mail-wagons, with drivers in the royal Bavarian blue, trooping by in the cold small rain, impassibly dripping from their glazed hat-brims upon their uniforms. But he could not feel that these things were any of them very poignantly significant; and he covered his retreat from the actualities of Nuremberg by visiting the chief book-store and buying more photographs of the architecture than he wanted, and more local histories than he should ever read. He made a last effort for the contemporaneous life by asking the English-speaking clerk if there were any literary men of distinction living in Nuremberg, and the clerk said there was not one.

He went home to breakfast wondering if he should be able to make his meagre facts serve with his wife; but he found her far from any wish to listen to them. She was intent upon a pair of young lovers, at a table near her own, who were so absorbed in each other that they were proof against an interest that must otherwise have pierced them through. The bridegroom, as he would have called himself, was a pretty little Bavarian lieutenant, very dark and regular, and the bride was as pretty and as little, but delicately blond. Nature had admirably mated them, and if art had helped to bring them together through the genius of the bride’s mother, who was breakfasting with them, it had wrought almost as fitly. Mrs. March queried impartially who they were, where they met, and how, and just when they were going to be married; and March consented, in his personal immunity from their romance, to let it go on under his eyes without protest. But later, when they met the lovers in the street, walking arm in arm, with the bride’s mother behind them gloating upon their bliss, he said the woman ought, at her time of life, to be ashamed of such folly. She must know that this affair, by nine chances out of ten, could not fail to eventuate at the best in a marriage as tiresome as most other marriages, and yet she was abandoning herself with those ignorant young people to the illusion that it was the finest and sweetest thing in life.

“Well, isn’t it?” his wife asked.

“Yes, that’s the worst of it. It shows how poverty-stricken life really is. We want somehow to believe that each pair of lovers will find the good we have missed, and be as happy as we expected to be.”

“I think we have been happy enough, and that we’ve had as much good as was wholesome for us,” she returned, hurt.

“You’re always so concrete! I meant us in the abstract. But if you will be personal, I’ll say that you’ve been as happy as you deserve, and got more good than you had any right to.”

She laughed with him, and then they laughed again to perceive that they were walking arm in arm too, like the lovers, whom they were insensibly following.

He proposed that while they were in the mood they should go again to the old cemetery, and see the hinged jaw of the murdered Paumgartner, wagging in eternal accusation of his murderess. “It’s rather hard on her, that he should be having the last word, that way,” he said. “She was a woman, no matter what mistakes she had committed.”

“That’s what I call ‘banale’,” said Mrs. March.

“It is, rather,” he confessed. “It makes me feel as if I must go to see the house of Durer, after all.”

“Well, I knew we should have to, sooner or later.”

It was the thing that they had said would not do, in Nuremberg, because everybody did it; but now they hailed a fiacre, and ordered it driven to Durer’s house, which they found in a remote part of the town near a stretch of the city wall, varied in its picturesqueness by the interposition of a dripping grove; it was raining again by the time they reached it. The quarter had lapsed from earlier dignity, and without being squalid, it looked worn and hard worked; otherwise it could hardly have been different in Durer’s time. His dwelling, in no way impressive outside, amidst the environing quaintness, stood at the corner of a narrow side-hill street that sloped cityward; and within it was stripped bare of all the furniture of life below-stairs, and above was none the cozier for the stiff appointment of a show-house. It was cavernous and cold; but if there had been a fire in the kitchen, and a table laid in the dining-room, and beds equipped for nightmare, after the German fashion, in the empty chambers, one could have imagined a kindly, simple, neighborly existence there. It in no wise suggested the calling of an artist, perhaps because artists had not begun in Durer’s time to take themselves so objectively as they do now, but it implied the life of a prosperous citizen, and it expressed the period.

The Marches wrote their names in the visitors’ book, and paid the visitor’s fee, which also bought them tickets in an annual lottery for a reproduction of one of Durer’s pictures; and then they came away, by no means dissatisfied with his house. By its association with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse than Ariosto’s house at Ferrara, or Petrarch’s at Arqua, or Michelangelo’s at Florence. “But what I admire,” he said, “is our futility in going to see it. We expected to surprise some quality of the man left lying about in the house because he lived and died in it; and because his wife kept him up so close there, and worked him so hard to save his widow from coming to want.”

“Who said she did that?”

“A friend of his who hated her. But he had to allow that she was a
God-fearing woman, and had a New England conscience.”

“Well, I dare say Durer was easy-going.”

“Yes; but I don’t like her laying her plans to survive him; though women always do that.”

They were going away the next day, and they sat down that evening to a final supper in such good-humor with themselves that they were willing to include a young couple who came to take places at their table, though they would rather have been alone. They lifted their eyes for their expected salutation, and recognized Mr. and Mrs. Leffers, of the Norumbia.

The ladies fell upon each other as if they had been mother and daughter; March and the young man shook hands, in the feeling of passengers mutually endeared by the memories of a pleasant voyage. They arrived at the fact that Mr. Leffers had received letters in England from his partners which allowed him to prolong his wedding journey in a tour of the continent, while their wives were still exclaiming at their encounter in the same hotel at Nuremberg; and then they all sat down to have, as the bride said, a real Norumbia time.

She was one of those young wives who talk always with their eyes submissively on their husbands, no matter whom they are speaking to; but she was already unconsciously ruling him in her abeyance. No doubt she was ruling him for his good; she had a livelier, mind than he, and she knew more, as the American wives of young American business men always do, and she was planning wisely for their travels. She recognized her merit in this devotion with an artless candor, which was typical rather than personal. March was glad to go out with Leffers for a little stroll, and to leave Mrs. March to listen to Mrs. Leffers, who did not let them go without making her husband promise to wrap up well, and not get his feet wet. She made March promise not to take him far, and to bring him back early, which he found himself very willing to do, after an exchange of ideas with Mr. Leffers. The young man began to talk about his wife, in her providential, her almost miraculous adaptation to the sort of man he was, and when he had once begun to explain what sort of man he was, there was no end to it, till they rejoined the ladies in the reading-room.

XLVII.

The young couple came to the station to see the Marches off after dinner the next day; and the wife left a bank of flowers on the seat beside Mrs. March, who said, as soon as they were gone, “I believe I would rather meet people of our own age after this. I used to think that you could keep young by being with young people; but I don’t, now. There world is very different from ours. Our world doesn’t really exist any more, but as long as we keep away from theirs we needn’t realize it. Young people,” she went on, “are more practical-minded than we used to be; they’re quite as sentimental; but I don’t think they care so much for the higher things. They’re not so much brought up on poetry as we were,” she pursued. “That little Mrs. Leffers would have read Longfellow in our time; but now she didn’t know of his poem on Nuremberg; she was intelligent enough about the place, but you could see that its quaintness was not so precious as it was to us; not so sacred.” Her tone entreated him to find more meaning in her words than she had put into them. “They couldn’t have felt as we did about that old ivied wall and that grassy, flowery moat under it; and the beautiful Damenthor and that pile-up of the roofs from the Burg; and those winding streets with their Gothic facades all, cobwebbed with trolley wires; and that yellow, aguish-looking river drowsing through the town under the windows of those overhanging houses; and the market-place, and the squares before the churches, with their queer shops in the nooks and corners round them!”

“I see what you mean. But do you think it’s as sacred to us as it would have been twenty-five years ago? I had an irreverent feeling now and then that Nuremberg was overdoing Nuremberg.”

“Oh, yes; so had I. We’re that modern, if we’re not so young as we were.”

“We were very simple, in those days.”

“Well, if we were simple, we knew it!”

“Yes; we used to like taking our unconsciousness to pieces and looking at it.”

“We had a good time.”

“Too good. Sometimes it seems as if it would have lasted longer if it had not been so good. We might have our cake now if we hadn’t eaten it.”

“It would be mouldy, though.”

“I wonder,” he said, recurring to the Lefferses; “how we really struck them.”

“Well, I don’t believe they thought we ought to be travelling about alone, quite, at our age.”

“Oh, not so bad as that!” After a moment he said, “I dare say they don’t go round quarrelling on their wedding journey, as we did.”

“Indeed they do! They had an awful quarrel just before they got to Nuremberg: about his wanting to send some of the baggage to Liverpool by express that she wanted to keep with them. But she said it had been a lesson, and they were never going to quarrel again.” The elders looked at each other in the light of experience, and laughed. “Well,” she ended, “that’s one thing we’re through with. I suppose we’ve come to feel more alike than we used to.”

“Or not to feel at all. How did they settle it about the baggage?”

“Oh! He insisted on her keeping it with her.” March laughed again, but this time he laughed alone, and after a while she said: “Well, they gave just the right relief to Nuremberg, with their good, clean American philistinism. I don’t mind their thinking us queer; they must have thought Nuremberg was queer.”

“Yes. We oldsters are always queer to the young. We’re either ridiculously lively and chirpy, or we’re ridiculously stiff and grim; they never expect to be like us, and wouldn’t, for the world. The worst of it is, we elderly people are absurd to one another; we don’t, at the bottom of our hearts, believe we’re like that, when we meet. I suppose that arrogant old ass of a Triscoe looks upon me as a grinning dotard.”

“I wonder,” said Mrs. March, “if she’s told him yet,” and March perceived that she was now suddenly far from the mood of philosophic introspection; but he had no difficulty in following her.

“She’s had time enough. But it was an awkward task Burnamy left to her.”

“Yes, when I think of that, I can hardly forgive him for coming back in that way. I know she is dead in love with him; but she could only have accepted him conditionally.”

“Conditionally to his making it all right with Stoller?”

“Stoller? No! To her father’s liking it.”

“Ah, that’s quite as hard. What makes you think she accepted him at all?”

“What do you think she was crying about?”

“Well, I have supposed that ladies occasionally shed tears of pity. If she accepted him conditionally she would have to tell her father about it.” Mrs. March gave him a glance of silent contempt, and he hastened to atone for his stupidity. “Perhaps she’s told him on the instalment plan. She may have begun by confessing that Burnamy had been in Carlsbad. Poor old fellow, I wish we were going to find him in Ansbach! He could make things very smooth for us.”

“Well, you needn’t flatter yourself that you’ll find him in Ansbach. I’m sure I don’t know where he is.”

“You might write to Miss Triscoe and ask.”

“I think I shall wait for Miss Triscoe to write to me,” she said, with dignity.

“Yes, she certainly owes you that much, after all your suffering for her. I’ve asked the banker in Nuremberg to forward our letters to the poste restante in Ansbach. Isn’t it good to see the crows again, after those ravens around Carlsbad?”

She joined him in looking at the mild autumnal landscape through the open window. The afternoon was fair and warm, and in the level fields bodies of soldiers were at work with picks and spades, getting the ground ready for the military manoeuvres; they disturbed among the stubble foraging parties of crows, which rose from time to time with cries of indignant protest. She said, with a smile for the crows, “Yes. And I’m thankful that I’ve got nothing on my conscience, whatever happens,” she added in dismissal of the subject of Burnamy.

“I’m thankful too, my dear. I’d much rather have things on my own. I’m more used to that, and I believe I feel less remorse than when you’re to blame.”

They might have been carried near this point by those telepathic influences which have as yet been so imperfectly studied. It was only that morning, after the lapse of a week since Burnamy’s furtive reappearance in Carlsbad, that Miss Triscoe spoke to her father about it, and she had at that moment a longing for support and counsel that might well have made its mystical appeal to Mrs. March.

She spoke at last because she could put it off no longer, rather than because the right time had come. She began as they sat at breakfast. “Papa, there is something that I have got to tell you. It is something that you ought to know; but I have put off telling you because—”

She hesitated for the reason, and “Well!” said her father, looking up at her from his second cup of coffee. “What is it?”

Then she answered, “Mr. Burnamy has been here.”

“In Carlsbad? When was he here?”

“The night of the Emperor’s birthday. He came into the box when you were behind the scenes with Mr. March; afterwards I met him in the crowd.”

“Well?”

“I thought you ought to know. Mrs. March said I ought to tell you.”

“Did she say you ought to wait a week?” He gave way to an irascibility which he tried to check, and to ask with indifference, “Why did he come back?”

“He was going to write about it for that paper in Paris.” The girl had the effect of gathering her courage up for a bold plunge. She looked steadily at her father, and added: “He said he came back because he couldn’t help it. He — wished to speak with me, He said he knew he had no right to suppose I cared anything about what had happened with him and Mr. Stoller. He wanted to come back and tell me — that.”

Her father waited for her to go on, but apparently she was going to leave the word to him, now. He hesitated to take it, but he asked at last with a mildness that seemed to surprise her, “Have you heard anything from him since?”

“No.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. I told him I could not say what he wished; that I must tell you about it.”

The case was less simple than it would once have been for General Triscoe. There was still his affection for his daughter, his wish for her happiness, but this had always been subordinate to his sense of his own interest and comfort, and a question had recently arisen which put his paternal love and duty in a new light. He was no more explicit with himself than other men are, and the most which could ever be said of him without injustice was that in his dependence upon her he would rather have kept his daughter to himself if she could not have been very prosperously married. On the other hand, if he disliked the man for whom she now hardly hid her liking, he was not just then ready to go to extremes concerning him.

“He was very anxious,” she went on, “that you should know just how it was. He thinks everything of your judgment and — and — opinion.” The general made a consenting noise in his throat. “He said that he did not wish me to ‘whitewash’ him to you. He didn’t think he had done right; he didn’t excuse himself, or ask you to excuse him unless you could from the stand-point of a gentleman.”

The general made a less consenting noise in his throat, and asked, “How do you look at it, yourself, Agatha?”

“I don’t believe I quite understand it; but Mrs. March—”

“Oh, Mrs. March!” the general snorted.

“ — says that Mr. March does not think so badly of it as Mr. Burnamy does.”

“I doubt it. At any rate, I understood March quite differently.”

“She says that he thinks he behaved very nobly afterwards when Mr. Stoller wanted him to help him put a false complexion on it; that it was all the more difficult for him to do right then, because of his remorse for what he had done before.” As she spoke on she had become more eager.

“There’s something in that,” the general admitted, with a candor that he made the most of both to himself and to her. “But I should like to know what Stoller had to say of it all. Is there anything,” he inquired, “any reason why I need be more explicit about it, just now?”

“N — no. Only, I thought — He thinks so much of your opinion that — if—”

“Oh, he can very well afford to wait. If he values my opinion so highly he can give me time to make up my mind.”

“Of course—”

“And I’m not responsible,” the general continued, significantly, “for the delay altogether. If you had told me this before — Now, I don’t know whether Stoller is still in town.”

He was not behaving openly with her; but she had not behaved openly with him. She owned that to herself, and she got what comfort she could from his making the affair a question of what Burnamy had done to Stoller rather than of what Burnamy had said to her, and what she had answered him. If she was not perfectly clear as to what she wanted to do, or wished to have happen, there was now time and place in which she could delay and make sure. The accepted theory of such matters is that people know their minds from the beginning, and that they do not change them. But experience seems to contradict this theory, or else people often act contrary to their convictions and impulses. If the statistics were accessible, it might be found that many potential engagements hovered in a doubtful air, and before they touched the earth in actual promise were dissipated by the play of meteorological chances.

When General Triscoe put down his napkin in rising he said that he would step round to Pupp’s and see if Stoller were still there. But on the way he stepped up to Mrs. Adding’s hotel on the hill, and he came back, after an interval which he seemed not to have found long, to report rather casually that Stoller had left Carlsbad the day before. By this time the fact seemed not to concern Agatha herself very vitally.

He asked if the Marches had left any address with her, and she answered that they had not. They were going to spend a few days in Nuremberg, and then push on to Holland for Mr. March’s after-cure. There was no relevance in his question unless it intimated his belief that she was in confidential correspondence with Mrs. March, and she met this by saying that she was going to write her in care of their bankers; she asked whether he wished to send any word.

“No. I understand,” he intimated, “that there is nothing at all in the nature of a — a — an understanding, then, with—”

“No, nothing.”

“Hm!” The general waited a moment. Then he ventured, “Do you care to say — do you wish me to know — how he took it?”

The tears came into the girl’s eyes, but she governed herself to say,
“He — he was disappointed.”

“He had no right to be disappointed.”

It was a question, and she answered: “He thought he had. He said — that he wouldn’t — trouble me any more.”

The general did not ask at once, “And you don’t know where he is now — you haven’t heard anything from him since?”

Agatha flashed through her tears, “Papa!”

“Oh! I beg your pardon. I think you told me.”

PART III.

XLVIII.

At the first station where the train stopped, a young German bowed himself into the compartment with the Marches, and so visibly resisted an impulse to smoke that March begged him to light his cigarette. In the talk which this friendly overture led to between them he explained that he was a railway architect, employed by the government on that line of road, and was travelling officially. March spoke of Nuremberg; he owned the sort of surfeit he had suffered from its excessive mediaevalism, and the young man said it was part of the new imperial patriotism to cherish the Gothic throughout Germany; no other sort of architecture was permitted in Nuremberg. But they would find enough classicism at Ansbach, he promised them, and he entered with sympathetic intelligence into their wish to see this former capital when March told him they were going to stop there, in hopes of something typical of the old disjointed Germany of the petty principalities, the little paternal despotisms now extinct.

As they talked on, partly in German and partly in English, their purpose in visiting Ansbach appeared to the Marches more meditated than it was. In fact it was somewhat accidental; Ansbach was near Nuremberg; it was not much out of the way to Holland. They took more and more credit to themselves for a reasoned and definite motive, in the light of their companion’s enthusiasm for the place, and its charm began for them with the drive from the station through streets whose sentiment was both Italian and French, and where there was a yellowish cast in the gray of the architecture which was almost Mantuan. They rested their sensibilities, so bruised and fretted by Gothic angles and points, against the smooth surfaces of the prevailing classicistic facades of the houses as they passed, and when they arrived at their hotel, an old mansion of Versailles type, fronting on a long irregular square planted with pollard sycamores, they said that it might as well have been Lucca.

The archway and stairway of the hotel were draped with the Bavarian colors, and they were obscurely flattered to learn that Prince Leopold, the brother of the Prince-Regent of the kingdom, had taken rooms there, on his way to the manoeuvres at Nuremberg, and was momently expected with his suite. They realized that they were not of the princely party, however, when they were told that he had sole possession of the dining-room, and they went out to another hotel, and had their supper in keeping delightfully native. People seemed to come there to write their letters and make up their accounts, as well as to eat their suppers; they called for stationery like characters in old comedy, and the clatter of crockery and the scratching of pens went on together; and fortune offered the Marches a delicate reparation for their exclusion from their own hotel in the cold popular reception of the prince which they got back just in time to witness. A very small group of people, mostly women and boys, had gathered to see him arrive, but there was no cheering or any sign of public interest. Perhaps he personally merited none; he looked a dull, sad man, with his plain, stubbed features; and after he had mounted to his apartment, the officers of his staff stood quite across the landing, and barred the passage of the Americans, ignoring even Mrs. March’s presence, as they talked together.

“Well, my dear,” said her husband, “here you have it at last. This is what you’ve been living for, ever since we came to Germany. It’s a great moment.”

“Yes. What are you going to do?”

“Who? I? Oh, nothing! This is your affair; it’s for you to act.”

If she had been young, she might have withered them with a glance; she doubted now if her dim eyes would have any such power; but she advanced steadily upon them, and then the officers seemed aware of her, and stood aside.

March always insisted that they stood aside apologetically, but she held as firmly that they stood aside impertinently, or at least indifferently, and that the insult to her American womanhood was perfectly ideal. It is true that nothing of the kind happened again during their stay at the hotel; the prince’s officers were afterwards about in the corridors and on the stairs, but they offered no shadow of obstruction to her going and coming, and the landlord himself was not so preoccupied with his highhotes but he had time to express his grief that she had been obliged to go out for supper.

They satisfied the passion for the little obsolete capital which had been growing upon them by strolling past the old Resident at an hour so favorable for a first impression. It loomed in the gathering dusk even vaster than it was, and it was really vast enough for the pride of a King of France, much more a Margrave of Ansbach. Time had blackened and blotched its coarse limestone walls to one complexion with the statues swelling and strutting in the figure of Roman legionaries before it, and standing out against the evening sky along its balustraded roof, and had softened to the right tint the stretch of half a dozen houses with mansard roofs and renaissance facades obsequiously in keeping with the Versailles ideal of a Resident. In the rear, and elsewhere at fit distance from its courts, a native architecture prevailed; and at no great remove the Marches found themselves in a simple German town again. There they stumbled upon a little bookseller’s shop blinking in a quiet corner, and bought three or four guides and small histories of Ansbach, which they carried home, and studied between drowsing and waking. The wonderful German syntax seems at its most enigmatical in this sort of literature, and sometimes they lost themselves in its labyrinths completely, and only made their way perilously out with the help of cumulative declensions, past articles and adjectives blindly seeking their nouns, to long-procrastinated verbs dancing like swamp-fires in the distance. They emerged a little less ignorant than they went in, and better qualified than they would otherwise have been for their second visit to the Schloss, which they paid early the next morning.

They were so early, indeed, that when they mounted from the great inner court, much too big for Ansbach, if not for the building, and rung the custodian’s bell, a smiling maid who let them into an ante-room, where she kept on picking over vegetables for her dinner, said the custodian was busy, and could not be seen till ten o’clock. She seemed, in her nook of the pretentious pile, as innocently unconscious of its history as any hen-sparrow who had built her nest in some coign of its architecture; and her friendly, peaceful domesticity remained a wholesome human background to the tragedies and comedies of the past, and held them in a picturesque relief in which they were alike tolerable and even charming.

The history of Ansbach strikes its roots in the soil of fable, and above ground is a gnarled and twisted growth of good and bad from the time of the Great Charles to the time of the Great Frederick. Between these times she had her various rulers, ecclesiastical and secular, in various forms of vassalage to the empire; but for nearly four centuries her sovereignty was in the hands of the margraves, who reigned in a constantly increasing splendor till the last sold her outright to the King of Prussia in 1791, and went to live in England on the proceeds. She had taken her part in the miseries and glories of the wars that desolated Germany, but after the Reformation, when she turned from the ancient faith to which she owed her cloistered origin under St. Gumpertus, her people had peace except when their last prince sold them to fight the battles of others. It is in this last transaction that her history, almost in the moment when she ceased to have a history of her own, links to that of the modern world, and that it came home to the Marches in their national character; for two thousand of those poor Ansbach mercenaries were bought up by England and sent to put down a rebellion in her American colonies.

Humanly, they were more concerned for the Last Margrave, because of certain qualities which made him the Best Margrave, in spite of the defects of his qualities. He was the son of the Wild Margrave, equally known in the Ansbach annals, who may not have been the Worst Margrave, but who had certainly a bad trick of putting his subjects to death without trial, and in cases where there was special haste, with his own hand. He sent his son to the university at Utrecht because he believed that the republican influences in Holland would be wholesome for him, and then he sent him to travel in Italy; but when the boy came home looking frail and sick, the Wild Margrave charged his official travelling companion with neglect, and had the unhappy Hofrath Meyer hanged without process for this crime. One of the gentlemen of his realm, for a pasquinade on the Margrave, was brought to the scaffold; he had, at various times, twenty-two of his soldiers shot with arrows and bullets or hanged for desertion, besides many whose penalties his clemency commuted to the loss of an ear or a nose; a Hungarian who killed his hunting-dog, he had broken alive on the wheel. A soldier’s wife was hanged for complicity in a case of desertion; a young soldier who eloped with the girl he loved was brought to Ansbach from a neighboring town, and hanged with her on the same gallows. A sentry at the door of one of the Margrave’s castles amiably complied with the Margrave’s request to let him take his gun for a moment, on the pretence of wishing to look at it. For this breach of discipline the prince covered him with abuse and gave him over to his hussars, who bound him to a horse’s tail and dragged him through the streets; he died of his injuries. The kennel-master who had charge of the Margrave’s dogs was accused of neglecting them: without further inquiry the Margrave rode to the man’s house and shot him down on his own threshold. A shepherd who met the Margrave on a shying horse did not get his flock out of the way quickly enough; the Margrave demanded the pistols of a gentleman in his company, but he answered that they were not loaded, and the shepherd’s life was saved. As they returned home the gentleman fired them off. “What does that mean?” cried the Margrave, furiously. “It means, gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight, for not having heard my pistols an hour sooner.”

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his moments of regret; but perhaps it is not altogether strange that when he died, the whole population “stormed through the streets to meet his funeral train, not in awe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall of human grandeur, but to unite in an eager tumult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who had long held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and in chains.” For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had reigned over his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right.

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their instinctive revolt from the belief that any man not untamably savage could be guilty of his atrocities; and they called his son the Last Margrave, with a touch of the poetry which perhaps records a regret for their extinction as a state. He did not harry them as his father had done; his mild rule was the effect partly of the indifference and distaste for his country bred, by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless also it was the effect of a kindly nature. Even in the matter of selling a few thousands of them to fight the battles of a bad cause on the other side of the world, he had the best of motives, and faithfully applied the proceeds to the payment of the state debt and the embellishment of the capital.

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the Great, and was so constantly at war with her husband that probably she had nothing to do with the marriage which the Wild Margrave forced upon their son. Love certainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Margrave early escaped from it to the society of Mlle. Clairon, the great French tragedienne, whom he met in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make her home with him in Ansbach. She lived there seventeen years, and though always an alien, she bore herself with kindness to all classes, and is still remembered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a Klarungswecke in its imperfect French.

No roll of butter records in faltering accents the name of the brilliant and disdainful English lady who replaced this poor tragic muse in the Margrave’s heart, though the lady herself lived to be the last Margravine of Ansbach, where everybody seems to have hated her with a passion which she doubtless knew how to return. She was the daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and the wife of Lord Craven, a sufficiently unfaithful and unworthy nobleman by her account, from whom she was living apart when the Margrave asked her to his capital. There she set herself to oust Mlle. Clairon with sneers and jests for the theatrical style which the actress could not outlive. Lady Craven said she was sure Clairon’s nightcap must be a crown of gilt paper; and when Clairon threatened to kill herself, and the Margrave was alarmed, “You forget,” said Lady Craven, “that actresses only stab themselves under their sleeves.”

She drove Clairon from Ansbach, and the great tragedienne returned to Paris, where she remained true to her false friend, and from time to time wrote him letters full of magnanimous counsel and generous tenderness. But she could not have been so good company as Lady Craven, who was a very gifted person, and knew how to compose songs and sing them, and write comedies and play them, and who could keep the Margrave amused in many ways. When his loveless and childless wife died he married the English woman, but he grew more and more weary of his dull little court and his dull little country, and after a while, considering the uncertain tenure sovereigns had of their heads since the French King had lost his, and the fact that he had no heirs to follow him in his principality, he resolved to cede it for a certain sum to Prussia. To this end his new wife’s urgence was perhaps not wanting. They went to England, where she outlived him ten years, and wrote her memoirs.

The custodian of the Schloss came at last, and the Marches saw instantly that he was worth waiting for. He was as vainglorious of the palace as any grand-monarching margrave of them all. He could not have been more personally superb in showing their different effigies if they had been his own family portraits, and he would not spare the strangers a single splendor of the twenty vast, handsome, tiresome, Versailles-like rooms he led them through. The rooms were fatiguing physically, but so poignantly interesting that Mrs. March would not have missed, though she perished of her pleasure, one of the things she saw. She had for once a surfeit of highhoting in the pictures, the porcelains, the thrones and canopies, the tapestries, the historical associations with the margraves and their marriages, with the Great Frederick and the Great Napoleon. The Great Napoleon’s man Bernadotte made the Schloss his headquarters when he occupied Ansbach after Austerlitz, and here he completed his arrangements for taking her bargain from Prussia and handing it over to Bavaria, with whom it still remains. Twice the Great Frederick had sojourned in the palace; visiting his sister Louise, the wife of the Wild Margrave, and more than once it had welcomed her next neighbor and sister Wilhelmina, the Margravine of Baireuth, whose autobiographic voice, piercingly plaintive and reproachful, seemed to quiver in the air. Here, oddly enough, the spell of the Wild Margrave weakened in the presence of his portrait, which signally failed to justify his fame of furious tyrant. That seems, indeed, to have been rather the popular and historical conception of him than the impression he made upon his exalted contemporaries. The Margravine of Baireuth at any rate could so far excuse her poor blood-stained brother-in-law as to say: “The Margrave of Ansbach . . . was a young prince who had been very badly educated. He continually ill-treated my sister; they led the life of cat and dog. My sister, it is true, was sometimes in fault . . . . Her education had been very bad. . . She was married at fourteen.”

At parting, the custodian told the Marches that he would easily have known them for Americans by the handsome fee they gave him; they came away flown with his praise; and their national vanity was again flattered when they got out into the principal square of Ansbach. There, in a bookseller’s window, they found among the pamphlets teaching different languages without a master, one devoted to the Amerikanische Sprache as distinguished from the Englische Sprache. That there could be no mistake, the cover was printed with colors in a German ideal of the star-spangled banner; and March said he always knew that we had a language of our own, and that now he was going in to buy that pamphlet and find out what it was like. He asked the young shop-woman how it differed from English, which she spoke fairly well from having lived eight years in Chicago. She said that it differed from the English mainly in emphasis and pronunciation. “For instance, the English say ‘HALF past’, and the Americans ‘Half PAST’; the English say ‘laht’ and the Americans say ‘late’.”

The weather had now been clear quite long enough, and it was raining again, a fine, bitter, piercing drizzle. They asked the girl if it always rained in Ansbach; and she owned that it nearly always did. She said that sometimes she longed for a little American summer; that it was never quite warm in Ansbach; and when they had got out into the rain, March said: “It was very nice to stumble on Chicago in an Ansbach book-store. You ought to have told her you had a married daughter in Chicago. Don’t miss another such chance.”

“We shall need another bag if we keep on buying books at this rate,” said his wife with tranquil irrelevance; and not to give him time for protest; she pushed him into a shop where the valises in the window perhaps suggested her thought. March made haste to forestall her there by saying they were Americans, but the mistress of the shop seemed to have her misgivings, and “Born Americans, perhaps?” she ventured. She had probably never met any but the naturalized sort, and supposed these were the only sort. March re-assured her, and then she said she had a son living in Jersey City, and she made March take his address that he might tell him he had seen his mother; she had apparently no conception what a great way Jersey City is from New York.

Mrs. March would not take his arm when they came out. “Now, that is what I never can get used to in you, Basil, and I’ve tried to palliate it for twenty-seven years. You know you won’t look up that poor woman’s son! Why did you let her think you would?”

“How could I tell her I wouldn’t? Perhaps I shall.”

“No, no! You never will. I know you’re good and kind, and that’s why I can’t understand your being so cruel. When we get back, how will you ever find time to go over to Jersey City?”

He could not tell, but at last he said: “I’ll tell you what! You must keep me up to it. You know how much you enjoy making me do my duty, and this will be such a pleasure!”

She laughed forlornly, but after a moment she took his arm; and he began, from the example of this good mother, to philosophize the continuous simplicity and sanity of the people of Ansbach under all their civic changes. Saints and soldiers, knights and barons, margraves, princes, kings, emperors, had come and gone, and left their single-hearted, friendly subjectfolk pretty much what they found them. The people had suffered and survived through a thousand wars, and apparently prospered on under all governments and misgovernments. When the court was most French, most artificial, most vicious, the citizen life must have remained immutably German, dull, and kind. After all, he said, humanity seemed everywhere to be pretty safe, and pretty much the same.

“Yes, that is all very well,” she returned, “and you can theorize interestingly enough; but I’m afraid that poor mother, there, had no more reality for you than those people in the past. You appreciate her as a type, and you don’t care for her as a human being. You’re nothing but a dreamer, after all. I don’t blame you,” she went on. “It’s your temperament, and you can’t change, now.”

“I may change for the worse,” he threatened. “I think I have, already. I don’t believe I could stand up to Dryfoos, now, as I did for poor old Lindau, when I risked your bread and butter for his. I look back in wonder and admiration at myself. I’ve steadily lost touch with life since then. I’m a trifler, a dilettante, and an amateur of the right and the good as I used to be when I was young. Oh, I have the grace to be troubled at times, now, and once I never was. It never occurred to me then that the world wasn’t made to interest me, or at the best to instruct me, but it does, now, at times.”

She always came to his defence when he accused himself; it was the best ground he could take with her. “I think you behaved very well with Burnamy. You did your duty then.”

“Did I? I’m not so sure. At any rate, it’s the last time I shall do it. I’ve served my term. I think I should tell him that he was all right in that business with Stoller, if I were to meet him, now.”

“Isn’t it strange,” she said, provisionally, “that we don’t come upon a trace of him anywhere in Ansbach?”

“Ah, you’ve been hoping he would turn up!”

“Yes. I don’t deny it. I feel very unhappy about him.”

“I don’t. He’s too much like me. He would have been quite capable of promising that poor woman to look up her son in Jersey City. When I think of that, I have no patience with Burnamy.”

“I am going to ask the landlord about him, now he’s got rid of his highhotes,” said Mrs. March.

XLIX.

They went home to their hotel for their midday dinner, and to the comfort of having it nearly all to themselves. Prince Leopold had risen early, like all the hard-working potentates of the continent, and got away to the manoeuvres somewhere at six o’clock; the decorations had been removed, and the court-yard where the hired coach and pair of the prince had rolled in the evening before had only a few majestic ducks waddling about in it and quacking together, indifferent to the presence of a yellow mail-wagon, on which the driver had been apparently dozing till the hour of noon should sound. He sat there immovable, but at the last stroke of the clock he woke up and drove vigorously away to the station.

The dining-room which they had been kept out of by the prince the night before was not such as to embitter the sense of their wrong by its splendor. After all, the tastes of royalty must be simple, if the prince might have gone to the Schloss and had chosen rather to stay at this modest hotel; but perhaps the Schloss was reserved for more immediate royalty than the brothers of prince-regents; and in that case he could not have done better than dine at the Golden Star. If he paid no more than two marks, he dined as cheaply as a prince could wish, and as abundantly. The wine at Ansbach was rather thin and sour, but the bread, March declared, was the best bread in the whole world, not excepting the bread of Carlsbad.

After dinner the Marches had some of the local pastry, not so incomparable as the bread, with their coffee, which they had served them in a pavilion of the beautiful garden remaining to the hotel from the time when it was a patrician mansion. The garden had roses in it and several sorts of late summer flowers, as well as ripe cherries, currants, grapes, and a Virginia-creeper red with autumn, all harmoniously contemporaneous, as they might easily be in a climate where no one of the seasons can very well know itself from the others. It had not been raining for half an hour, and the sun was scalding hot, so that the shelter of their roof was very grateful, and the puddles of the paths were drying up with the haste which puddles have to make in Germany, between rains, if they are ever going to dry up at all.

The landlord came out to see if they were well served, and he was sincerely obliging in the English he had learned as a waiter in London. Mrs. March made haste to ask him if a young American of the name of Burnamy had been staying with him a few weeks before; and she described Burnamy’s beauty and amiability so vividly that the landlord, if he had been a woman, could not have failed to remember him. But he failed, with a real grief, apparently, and certainly a real politeness, to recall either his name or his person. The landlord was an intelligent, good-looking young fellow; he told them that he was lately married, and they liked him so much that they were sorry to see him afterwards privately boxing the ears of the piccolo, the waiter’s little understudy. Perhaps the piccolo deserved it, but they would rather not have witnessed his punishment; his being in a dress-coat seemed to make it also an indignity.

In the late afternoon they went to the cafe in the old Orangery of the Schloss for a cup of tea, and found themselves in the company of several Ansbach ladies who had brought their work, in the evident habit of coming there every afternoon for their coffee and for a dish of gossip. They were kind, uncomely, motherly-looking bodies; one of them combed her hair at the table; and they all sat outside of the cafe with their feet on the borders of the puddles which had not dried up there in the shade of the building.

A deep lawn, darkened at its farther edge by the long shadows of trees, stretched before them with the sunset light on it, and it was all very quiet and friendly. The tea brought to the Marches was brewed from some herb apparently of native growth, with bits of what looked like willow leaves in it, but it was flavored with a clove in each cup, and they sat contentedly over it and tried to make out what the Ansbach ladies were, talking about. These had recognized the strangers for Americans, and one of them explained that Americans spoke the same language as the English and yet were not quite the same people.

“She differs from the girl in the book-store,” said March, translating to his wife. “Let us get away before she says that we are not so nice as the English,” and they made off toward the avenue of trees beyond the lawn.

There were a few people walking up and down in the alley, making the most of the moment of dry weather. They saluted one another like acquaintances, and three clean-shaven, walnut-faced old peasants bowed in response to March’s stare, with a self-respectful civility. They were yeomen of the region of Ansbach, where the country round about is dotted with their cottages, and not held in vast homeless tracts by the nobles as in North Germany.

The Bavarian who had imparted this fact to March at breakfast, not without a certain tacit pride in it to the disadvantage of the Prussians, was at the supper table, and was disposed to more talk, which he managed in a stout, slow English of his own. He said he had never really spoken English with an English-speaking person before, or at all since he studied it in school at Munich.

“I should be afraid to put my school-boy German against your English,”
March said, and, when he had understood, the other laughed for pleasure,
and reported the compliment to his wife in their own parlance. “You
Germans certainly beat us in languages.”

“Oh, well,” he retaliated, “the Americans beat us in some other things,” and Mrs. March felt that this was but just; she would have liked to mention a few, but not ungraciously; she and the German lady kept smiling across the table, and trying detached vocables of their respective tongues upon each other.

The Bavarian said he lived in Munich still, but was in Ansbach on an affair of business; he asked March if he were not going to see the manoeuvres somewhere. Till now the manoeuvres had merely been the interesting background of their travel; but now, hearing that the Emperor of Germany, the King of Saxony, the Regent of Bavaria, and the King of Wurtemberg, the Grand-Dukes of Weimar and Baden, with visiting potentates of all sorts, and innumerable lesser highhotes, foreign and domestic, were to be present, Mrs. March resolved that they must go to at least one of the reviews.

“If you go to Frankfort, you can see the King of Italy too,” said the Bavarian, but he owned that they probably could not get into a hotel there, and he asked why they should not go to Wurzburg, where they could see all the sovereigns except the King of Italy.

“Wurzburg? Wurzburg?” March queried of his wife. “Where did we hear of that place?”

“Isn’t it where Burnamy said Mr. Stoller had left his daughters at school?”

“So it is! And is that on the way to the Rhine?” he asked the Bavarian.

“No, no! Wurzburg is on the Main, about five hours from Ansbach. And it is a very interesting place. It is where the good wine comes from.”

“Oh, yes,” said March, and in their rooms his wife got out all their guides and maps and began to inform herself and to inform him about Wurzburg. But first she said it was very cold and he must order some fire made in the tall German stove in their parlor. The maid who came said “Gleich,” but she did not come back, and about the time they were getting furious at her neglect, they began getting warm. He put his hand on the stove and found it hot; then he looked down for a door in the stove where he might shut a damper; there was no door.

“Good heavens!” he shouted. “It’s like something in a dream,” and he ran to pull the bell for help.

“No, no! Don’t ring! It will make us ridiculous. They’ll think Americans don’t know anything. There must be some way of dampening the stove; and if there isn’t, I’d rather suffocate than give myself away.” Mrs. March ran and opened the window, while her husband carefully examined the stove at every point, and explored the pipe for the damper in vain. “Can’t you find it?” The night wind came in raw and damp, and threatened to blow their lamp out, and she was obliged to shut the window.

“Not a sign of it. I will go down and ask the landlord in strict confidence how they dampen their stoves in Ansbach.”

“Well, if you must. It’s getting hotter every moment.” She followed him timorously into the corridor, lit by a hanging lamp, turned low for the night.

He looked at his watch; it was eleven o’clock. “I’m afraid they’re all in bed.”

“Yes; you mustn’t go! We must try to find out for ourselves. What can that door be for?”

It was a low iron door, half the height of a man, in the wall near their room, and it yielded to his pull. “Get a candle,” he whispered, and when she brought it, he stooped to enter the doorway.

“Oh, do you think you’d better?” she hesitated.

“You can come, too, if you’re afraid. You’ve always said you wanted to die with me.”

“Well. But you go first.”

He disappeared within, and then came back to the doorway. “Just come in here, a moment.” She found herself in a sort of antechamber, half the height of her own room, and following his gesture she looked down where in one corner some crouching monster seemed showing its fiery teeth in a grin of derision. This grin was the damper of their stove, and this was where the maid had kindled the fire which had been roasting them alive, and was still joyously chuckling to itself. “I think that Munich man was wrong. I don’t believe we beat the Germans in anything. There isn’t a hotel in the United States where the stoves have no front doors, and every one of them has the space of a good-sized flat given up to the convenience of kindling a fire in it.”

L.

After a red sunset of shameless duplicity March was awakened to a rainy morning by the clinking of cavalry hoofs on the pavement of the long-irregular square before the hotel, and he hurried out to see the passing of the soldiers on their way to the manoeuvres. They were troops of all arms, but mainly infantry, and as they stumped heavily through the groups of apathetic citizens in their mud-splashed boots, they took the steady downpour on their dripping helmets. Some of them were smoking, but none smiling, except one gay fellow who made a joke to a serving-maid on the sidewalk. An old officer halted his staff to scold a citizen who had given him a mistaken direction. The shame of the erring man was great, and the pride of a fellow-citizen who corrected him was not less, though the arrogant brute before whom they both cringed used them with equal scorn; the younger officers listened indifferently round on horseback behind the glitter of their eyeglasses, and one of them amused himself by turning the silver bangles on his wrist.

Then the files of soldier slaves passed on, and March crossed the bridge spanning the gardens in what had been the city moat, and found his way to the market-place, under the walls of the old Gothic church of St. Gumpertus. The market, which spread pretty well over the square, seemed to be also a fair, with peasants’ clothes and local pottery for sale, as well as fruits and vegetables, and large baskets of flowers, with old women squatting before them. It was all as picturesque as the markets used to be in Montreal and Quebec, and in a cloudy memory of his wedding journey long before, he bought so lavishly of the flowers to carry back to his wife that a little girl, who saw his arm-load from her window as he returned, laughed at him, and then drew shyly back. Her laugh reminded him how many happy children he had seen in Germany, and how freely they seemed to play everywhere, with no one to make them afraid. When they grow up the women laugh as little as the men, whose rude toil the soldiering leaves them to.

He got home with his flowers, and his wife took them absently, and made him join her in watching the sight which had fascinated her in the street under their windows. A slender girl, with a waist as slim as a corseted officer’s, from time to time came out of the house across the way to the firewood which had been thrown from a wagon upon the sidewalk there. Each time she embraced several of the heavy four-foot logs and disappeared with them in-doors. Once she paused from her work to joke with a well-dressed man who came by; and seemed to find nothing odd in her work; some gentlemen lounging at the window over head watched her with no apparent sense of anomaly.

“What do you think of that?” asked Mrs. March. “I think it’s good exercise for the girl, and I should like to recommend it to those fat fellows at the window. I suppose she’ll saw the wood in the cellar, and then lug it up stairs, and pile it up in the stoves’ dressing-rooms.”

“Don’t laugh! It’s too disgraceful.”

“Well, I don’t know! If you like, I’ll offer these gentlemen across the way your opinion of it in the language of Goethe and Schiller.”

“I wish you’d offer my opinion of them. They’ve been staring in here with an opera-glass.”

“Ah, that’s a different affair. There isn’t much going on in Ansbach, and they have to make the most of it.”

The lower casements of the houses were furnished with mirrors set at right angles with them, and nothing which went on in the streets was lost. Some of the streets were long and straight, and at rare moments they lay full of sun. At such times the Marches were puzzled by the sight of citizens carrying open umbrellas, and they wondered if they had forgotten to put them down, or thought it not worth while in the brief respites from the rain, or were profiting by such rare occasions to dry them; and some other sights remained baffling to the last. Once a man with his hands pinioned before him, and a gendarme marching stolidly after him with his musket on his shoulder, passed under their windows; but who he was, or what he, had done, or was to suffer, they never knew. Another time a pair went by on the way to the railway station: a young man carrying an umbrella under his arm, and a very decent-looking old woman lugging a heavy carpet bag, who left them to the lasting question whether she was the young man’s servant in her best clothes, or merely his mother.

Women do not do everything in Ansbach, however, the sacristans being men, as the Marches found when they went to complete their impression of the courtly past of the city by visiting the funeral chapel of the margraves in the crypt of St. Johannis Church. In the little ex-margravely capital there was something of the neighborly interest in the curiosity of strangers which endears Italian witness. The white-haired street-sweeper of Ansbach, who willingly left his broom to guide them to the house of the sacristan, might have been a street-sweeper in Vicenza; and the old sacristan, when he put his velvet skull-cap out of an upper window and professed his willingness to show them the chapel, disappointed them by saying “Gleich!” instead of “Subito!” The architecture of the houses was a party to the illusion. St. Johannis, like the older church of St. Gumpertus, is Gothic, with the two unequal towers which seem distinctive of Ansbach; at the St. Gumpertus end of the place where they both stand the dwellings are Gothic too, and might be in Hamburg; but at the St. Johannis end they seem to have felt the exotic spirit of the court, and are of a sort of Teutonized renaissance.

The rococo margraves and margravines used of course to worship in St. Johannis Church. Now they all, such as did not marry abroad, lie in the crypt of the church, in caskets of bronze and copper and marble, with draperies of black samite, more and more funereally vainglorious to the last. Their courtly coffins are ranged in a kind of hemicycle, with the little coffins of the children that died before they came to the knowledge of their greatness. On one of these a kneeling figurine in bronze holds up the effigy of the child within; on another the epitaph plays tenderly with the fate of a little princess, who died in her first year.

    In the Rose-month was this sweet Rose taken.
     For the Rose-kind hath she earth forsaken.
     The Princess is the Rose, that here no longer blows.
     From the stem by death’s hand rudely shaken.
     Then rest in the Rose-house.
     Little Princess-Rosebud dear!
     There life’s Rose shall bloom again
     In Heaven’s sunshine clear.

While March struggled to get this into English words, two German ladies, who had made themselves of his party, passed reverently away and left him to pay the sacristan alone.

“That is all right,” he said, when he came out. “I think we got the most value; and they didn’t look as if they could afford it so well; though you never can tell, here. These ladies may be the highest kind of highhotes practising a praiseworthy economy. I hope the lesson won’t be lost on us. They have saved enough by us for their coffee at the Orangery. Let us go and have a little willow-leaf tea!”

The Orangery perpetually lured them by what it had kept of the days when an Orangery was essential to the self-respect of every sovereign prince, and of so many private gentlemen. On their way they always passed the statue of Count Platen, the dull poet whom Heine’s hate would have delivered so cruelly over to an immortality of contempt, but who stands there near the Schloss in a grass-plot prettily planted with flowers, and ignores his brilliant enemy in the comfortable durability of bronze; and there always awaited them in the old pleasaunce the pathos of Kaspar Hauser’s fate; which his murder affixes to it with a red stain.

After their cups of willow leaves at the cafe they went up into that nook of the plantation where the simple shaft of church-warden’s Gothic commemorates the assassination on the spot where it befell. Here the hapless youth, whose mystery will never be fathomed on earth, used to come for a little respite from his harsh guardian in Ansbach, homesick for the kindness of his Nuremberg friends; and here his murderer found him and dealt him the mortal blow.

March lingered upon the last sad circumstance of the tragedy in which the wounded boy dragged himself home, to suffer the suspicion and neglect of his guardian till death attested his good faith beyond cavil. He said this was the hardest thing to bear in all his story, and that he would like to have a look into the soul of the dull, unkind wretch who had so misread his charge. He was going on with an inquiry that pleased him much, when his wife pulled him abruptly away.

“Now, I see, you are yielding to the fascination of it, and you are wanting to take the material from Burnamy!”

“Oh, well, let him have the material; he will spoil it. And I can always reject it, if he offers it to ‘Every Other Week’.”

“I could believe, after your behavior to that poor woman about her son in
Jersey City, you’re really capable of it.”

“What comprehensive inculpation! I had forgotten about that poor woman.”

LI.

The letters which March had asked his Nuremberg banker to send them came just as they were leaving Ansbach. The landlord sent them down to the station, and Mrs. March opened them in the train, and read them first so that she could prepare him if there were anything annoying in them, as well as indulge her livelier curiosity.

“They’re from both the children,” she said, without waiting for him to ask. “You can look at them later. There’s a very nice letter from Mrs. Adding to me, and one from dear little Rose for you.” Then she hesitated, with her hand on a letter faced down in her lap. “And there’s one from Agatha Triscoe, which I wonder what you’ll think of.” She delayed again, and then flashed it open before him, and waited with a sort of impassioned patience while he read it.

He read it, and gave it back to her. “There doesn’t seem to be very much in it.”

“That’s it! Don’t you think I had a right to there being something in it, after all I did for her?”

“I always hoped you hadn’t done anything for her, but if you have, why should she give herself away on paper? It’s a very proper letter.”

“It’s a little too proper, and it’s the last I shall have to do with her. She knew that I should be on pins and needles till I heard how her father had taken Burnamy’s being there, that night, and she doesn’t say a word about it.”

“The general may have had a tantrum that she couldn’t describe. Perhaps she hasn’t told him, yet.”

“She would tell him instantly!” cried Mrs. March who began to find reason in the supposition, as well as comfort for the hurt which the girl’s reticence had given her. “Or if she wouldn’t, it would be because she was waiting for the best chance.”

“That would be like the wise daughter of a difficult father. She may be waiting for the best chance to say how he took it. No, I’m all for Miss Triscoe, and I hope that now, if she’s taken herself off our hands, she’ll keep off.”

“It’s altogether likely that he’s made her promise not to tell me anything about it,” Mrs. March mused aloud.

“That would be unjust to a person who had behaved so discreetly as you have,” said her husband.

They were on their way to Wurzburg, and at the first station, which was a junction, a lady mounted to their compartment just before the train began to move. She was stout and middle-aged, and had never been pretty, but she bore herself with a kind of authority in spite of her thread gloves, her dowdy gray travelling-dress, and a hat of lower middle-class English tastelessness. She took the only seat vacant, a backward-riding place beside a sleeping passenger who looked like a commercial traveller, but she seemed ill at ease in it, and March offered her his seat. She accepted it very promptly, and thanked him for it in the English of a German, and Mrs. March now classed her as a governess who had been teaching in England and had acquired the national feeling for dress. But in this character she found her interesting, and even a little pathetic, and she made her some overtures of talk which the other met eagerly enough. They were now running among low hills, not so picturesque as those between Eger and Nuremberg, but of much the same toylike quaintness in the villages dropped here and there in their valleys. One small town, completely walled, with its gray houses and red roofs, showed through the green of its trees and gardens so like a colored print in a child’s story-book that Mrs. March cried out for joy in it, and then accounted for her rapture by explaining to the stranger that they were Americans and had never been in Germany before. The lady was not visibly affected by the fact, she said casually that she had often been in that little town, which she named; her uncle had a castle in the country back of it, and she came with her husband for the shooting in the autumn. By a natural transition she spoke of her children, for whom she had an English governess; she said she had never been in England, but had learnt the language from a governess in her own childhood; and through it all Mrs. March perceived that she was trying to impress them with her consequence. To humor her pose, she said they had been looking up the scene of Kaspar Hauser’s death at Ansbach; and at this the stranger launched into such intimate particulars concerning him, and was so familiar at first hands with the facts of his life, that Mrs. March let her run on, too much amused with her pretensions to betray any doubt of her. She wondered if March were enjoying it all as much, and from time to time she tried to catch his eye, while the lady talked constantly and rather loudly, helping herself out with words from them both when her English failed her. In the safety of her perfect understanding of the case, Mrs. March now submitted farther, and even suffered some patronage from her, which in another mood she would have met with a decided snub.

As they drew in among the broad vine-webbed slopes of the Wurzburg, hills, the stranger said she was going to change there, and take a train on to Berlin. Mrs. March wondered whether she would be able to keep up the comedy to the last; and she had to own that she carried it off very easily when the friends whom she was expecting did not meet her on the arrival of their train. She refused March’s offers of help, and remained quietly seated while he got out their wraps and bags. She returned with a hardy smile the cold leave Mrs. March took of her; and when a porter came to the door, and forced his way by the Marches, to ask with anxious servility if she, were the Baroness von —— , she bade the man get them. a ‘traeger’, and then come back for her. She waved them a complacent adieu before they mixed with the crowd and lost sight of her.

“Well, my dear,” said March, addressing the snobbishness in his wife which he knew to be so wholly impersonal, “you’ve mingled with one highhote, anyway. I must say she didn’t look it, any more than the Duke and Duchess of Orleans, and yet she’s only a baroness. Think of our being three hours in the same compartment, and she doing all she could to impress us and our getting no good of it! I hoped you were feeling her quality, so that we should have it in the family, anyway, and always know what it was like. But so far, the highhotes have all been terribly disappointing.”

He teased on as they followed the traeger with their baggage out of the station; and in the omnibus on the way to their hotel, he recurred to the loss they had suffered in the baroness’s failure to dramatize her nobility effectually. “After all, perhaps she was as much disappointed in us. I don’t suppose we looked any more like democrats than she looked like an aristocrat.”

“But there’s a great difference,” Mrs. March returned at last. “It isn’t at all a parallel case. We were not real democrats, and she was a real aristocrat.”

“To be sure. There is that way of looking at it. That’s rather novel; I wish I had thought of that myself. She was certainly more to blame than we were.”

LII.

The square in front of the station was planted with flag-poles wreathed in evergreens; a triumphal arch was nearly finished, and a colossal allegory in imitation bronze was well on the way to completion, in honor of the majesties who were coming for the manoeuvres. The streets which the omnibus passed through to the Swan Inn were draped with the imperial German and the royal Bavarian colors; and the standards of the visiting nationalities decked the fronts of the houses where their military attaches were lodged; but the Marches failed to see our own banner, and were spared for the moment the ignominy of finding it over an apothecary shop in a retired avenue. The sun had come out, the sky overhead was of a smiling blue; and they felt the gala-day glow and thrill in the depths of their inextinguishable youth.

The Swan Inn sits on one of the long quays bordering the Main, and its windows look down upon the bridges and shipping of the river; but the traveller reaches it by a door in the rear, through an archway into a back street, where an odor dating back to the foundation of the city is waiting to welcome him.

The landlord was there, too, and he greeted the Marches so cordially that they fully partook his grief in being able to offer them rooms on the front of the house for two nights only. They reconciled themselves to the necessity of then turning out for the staff of the King of Saxony, the more readily because they knew that there was no hope of better things at any other hotel.

The rooms which they could have for the time were charming, and they came down to supper in a glazed gallery looking out on the river picturesque with craft of all fashions: with row-boats, sail-boats, and little steamers, but mainly with long black barges built up into houses in the middle, and defended each by a little nervous German dog. Long rafts of logs weltered in the sunset red which painted the swift current, and mantled the immeasurable vineyards of the hills around like the color of their ripening grapes. Directly in face rose a castled steep, which kept the ranging walls and the bastions and battlements of the time when such a stronghold could have defended the city from foes without or from tumult within. The arches of a stately bridge spanned the river sunsetward, and lifted a succession of colossal figures against the crimson sky.

“I guess we have been wasting our time, my dear,” said March, as they, turned from this beauty to the question of supper. “I wish we had always been here!”

Their waiter had put them at a table in a division of the gallery beyond that which they entered, where some groups of officers were noisily supping. There was no one in their room but a man whose face was indistinguishable against the light, and two young girls who glanced at them with looks at once quelled and defiant, and then after a stare at the officers in the gallery beyond, whispered together with suppressed giggling. The man fed on without noticing them, except now and then to utter a growl that silenced the whispering and giggling for a moment. The Marches, from no positive evidence of any sense, decided that they were Americans.

“I don’t know that I feel responsible for them as their fellow-countryman; I should, once,” he said.

“It isn’t that. It’s the worry of trying to make out why they are just what they are,” his wife returned.

The girls drew the man’s attention to them and he looked at them for the first time; then after a sort of hesitation he went on with his supper. They had only begun theirs when he rose with the two girls, whom Mrs. March now saw to be of the same size and dressed alike, and came heavily toward them.

“I thought you was in Carlsbad,” he said bluntly to March, with a nod at Mrs. March. He added, with a twist of his head toward the two girls, “My daughters,” and then left them to her, while he talked on with her husband. “Come to see this foolery, I suppose. I’m on my way to the woods for my after-cure; but I thought I might as well stop and give the girls a chance; they got a week’s vacation, anyway.” Stoller glanced at them with a sort of troubled tenderness in his strong dull face.

“Oh, yes. I understood they were at school here,” said March, and he heard one of them saying, in a sweet, high pipe to his wife:

“Ain’t it just splendid? I ha’n’t seen anything equal to it since the Worrld’s Fairr.” She spoke with a strong contortion of the Western r, and her sister hastened to put in:

“I don’t think it’s to be compared with the Worrld’s Fairr. But these German girls, here, just think it’s great. It just does me good to laff at ‘em, about it. I like to tell ’em about the electric fountain and the Courrt of Lionorr when they get to talkin’ about the illuminations they’re goun’ to have. You goun’ out to the parade? You better engage your carriage right away if you arre. The carrs’ll be a perfect jam. Father’s engaged ourrs; he had to pay sixty marrks forr it.”

They chattered on without shyness and on as easy terms with a woman of three times their years as if she had been a girl of their own age; they willingly took the whole talk to themselves, and had left her quite outside of it before Stoller turned to her.

“I been telling Mr. March here that you better both come to the parade with us. I guess my twospanner will hold five; or if it won’t, we’ll make it. I don’t believe there’s a carriage left in Wurzburg; and if you go in the cars, you’ll have to walk three or four miles before you get to the parade-ground. You think it over,” he said to March. “Nobody else is going to have the places, anyway, and you can say yes at the last minute just as well as now.”

He moved off with his girls, who looked over their shoulders at the officers as they passed on through the adjoining room.

“My dear!” cried Mrs. March. “Didn’t you suppose he classed us with
Burnamy in that business? Why should he be polite to us?”

“Perhaps he wants you to chaperon his daughters. He’s probably heard of your performance at the Kurhaus ball. But he knows that I thought Burnamy in the wrong. This may be Stoller’s way of wiping out an obligation. Wouldn’t you like to go with him?”

“The mere thought of his being in the same town is prostrating. I’d far rather he hated us; then he would avoid us.”

“Well, he doesn’t own the town, and if it comes to the worst, perhaps we can avoid him. Let us go out, anyway, and see if we can’t.”

“No, no; I’m too tired; but you go. And get all the maps and guides you can; there’s so very little in Baedeker, and almost nothing in that great hulking Bradshaw of yours; and I’m sure there must be the most interesting history of Wurzburg. Isn’t it strange that we haven’t the slightest association with the name?”

“I’ve been rummaging in my mind, and I’ve got hold of an association at last,” said March. “It’s beer; a sign in a Sixth Avenue saloon window Wurzburger Hof-Brau.”

“No matter if it is beer. Find some sketch of the history, and we’ll try to get away from the Stollers in it. I pitied those wild girls, too. What crazy images of the world must fill their empty minds! How their ignorant thoughts must go whirling out into the unknown! I don’t envy their father. Do hurry back! I shall be thinking about them every instant till you come.”

She said this, but in their own rooms it was so soothing to sit looking through the long twilight at the lovely landscape that the sort of bruise given by their encounter with the Stollers had left her consciousness before March returned. She made him admire first the convent church on a hill further up the river which exactly balanced the fortress in front of them, and then she seized upon the little books he had brought, and set him to exploring the labyrinths of their German, with a mounting exultation in his discoveries. There was a general guide to the city, and a special guide, with plans and personal details of the approaching manoeuvres and the princes who were to figure in them; and there was a sketch of the local history: a kind of thing that the Germans know how to write particularly, well, with little gleams of pleasant humor blinking through it. For the study of this, Mrs. March realized, more and more passionately, that they were in the very most central and convenient point, for the history of Wurzburg might be said to have begun with her prince-bishops, whose rule had begun in the twelfth century, and who had built, on a forgotten Roman work, the fortress of the Marienburg on that vineyarded hill over against the Swan Inn. There had of course been history before that, but ‘nothing so clear, nothing so peculiarly swell, nothing that so united the glory of this world and the next as that of the prince-bishops. They had made the Marienburg their home, and kept it against foreign and domestic foes for five hundred years. Shut within its well-armed walls they had awed the often-turbulent city across the Main; they had held it against the embattled farmers in the Peasants’ War, and had splendidly lost it to Gustavus Adolphus, and then got it back again and held it till Napoleon took it from them. He gave it with their flock to the Bavarians, who in turn briefly yielded it to the Prussians in 1866, and were now in apparently final possession of it.

Before the prince-bishops, Charlemagne and Barbarossa had come and gone, and since the prince-bishops there had been visiting thrones and kingdoms enough in the ancient city, which was soon to be illustrated by the presence of imperial Germany, royal, Wirtemberg and Saxony, grand-ducal Baden and Weimar, and a surfeit of all the minor potentates among those who speak the beautiful language of the Ja.

But none of these could dislodge the prince-bishops from that supreme place which they had at once taken in Mrs. March’s fancy. The potentates were all going to be housed in the vast palace which the prince-bishops had built themselves in Wurzburg as soon as they found it safe to come down from their stronghold of Marienburg, and begin to adorn their city, and to confirm it in its intense fidelity to the Church. Tiepolo had come up out of Italy to fresco their palace, where he wrought year after year, in that worldly taste which has somehow come to express the most sovereign moment of ecclesiasticism. It prevailed so universally in Wurzburg that it left her with the name of the Rococo City, intrenched in a period of time equally remote from early Christianity and modern Protestantism. Out of her sixty thousand souls, only ten thousand are now of the reformed religion, and these bear about the same relation to the Catholic spirit of the place that the Gothic architecture bears to the baroque.

As long as the prince-bishops lasted the Wurzburgers got on very well with but one newspaper, and perhaps the smallest amount of merrymaking known outside of the colony of Massachusetts Bay at the same epoch. The prince-bishops had their finger in everybody’s pie, and they portioned out the cakes and ale, which were made according to formulas of their own. The distractions were all of a religious character; churches, convents, monasteries, abounded; ecclesiastical processions and solemnities were the spectacles that edified if they did not amuse the devout population.

It seemed to March an ironical outcome of all this spiritual severity that one of the greatest modern scientific discoveries should have been made in Wurzburg, and that the Roentgen rays should now be giving her name a splendor destined to eclipse the glories of her past.

Mrs. March could not allow that they would do so; or at least that the name of Roentgen would ever lend more lustre to his city than that of Longfellow’s Walther von der Vogelweide. She was no less surprised than pleased to realize that this friend of the birds was a Wurzburger, and she said that their first pilgrimage in the morning should be to the church where he lies buried.

LIII.

March went down to breakfast not quite so early as his wife had planned, and left her to have her coffee in her room. He got a pleasant table in the gallery overlooking the river, and he decided that the landscape, though it now seemed to be rather too much studied from a drop-certain, had certainly lost nothing of its charm in the clear morning light. The waiter brought his breakfast, and after a little delay came back with a card which he insisted was for March. It was not till he put on his glasses and read the name of Mr. R. M. Kenby that he was able at all to agree with the waiter, who stood passive at his elbow.

“Well,” he said, “why wasn’t this card sent up last night?”

The waiter explained that the gentleman had just, given him his card, after asking March’s nationality, and was then breakfasting in the next room. March caught up his napkin and ran round the partition wall, and Kenby rose with his napkin and hurried to meet him.

“I thought it must be you,” he called out, joyfully, as they struck their extended hands together, “but so many people look alike, nowadays, that I don’t trust my eyes any more.”

Kenby said he had spent the time since they last met partly in Leipsic and partly in Gotha, where he had amused himself in rubbing up his rusty German. As soon as he realized that Wurzburg was so near he had slipped down from Gotha for a glimpse of the manoeuvres. He added that he supposed March was there to see them, and he asked with a quite unembarrassed smile if they had met Mr. Adding in Carlsbad, and without heeding March’s answer, he laughed and added: “Of course, I know she must have told Mrs. March all about it.”

March could not deny this; he laughed, too; though in his wife’s absence he felt bound to forbid himself anything more explicit.

“I don’t give it up, you know,” Kenby went on, with perfect ease. “I’m not a young fellow, if you call thirty-nine old.”

“At my age I don’t,” March put in, and they roared together, in men’s security from the encroachments of time.

“But she happens to be the only woman I’ve ever really wanted to marry, for more than a few days at a stretch. You know how it is with us.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” said March, and they shouted again.

“We’re in love, and we’re out of love, twenty times. But this isn’t a mere fancy; it’s a conviction. And there’s no reason why she shouldn’t marry me.”

March smiled gravely, and his smile was not lost upon Kenby. “You mean the boy,” he said. “Well, I like Rose,” and now March really felt swept from his feet. “She doesn’t deny that she likes me, but she seems to think that her marrying again will take her from him; the fact is, it will only give me to him. As for devoting her whole life to him, she couldn’t do a worse thing for him. What the boy needs is a man’s care, and a man’s will — Good heavens! You don’t think I could ever be unkind to the little soul?” Kenby threw himself forward over the table.

“My dear fellow!” March protested.

“I’d rather cut off my right hand!” Kenby pursued, excitedly, and then he said, with a humorous drop: “The fact is, I don’t believe I should want her so much if I couldn’t have Rose too. I want to have them both. So far, I’ve only got no for an answer; but I’m not going to keep it. I had a letter from Rose at Carlsbad, the other day; and—”

The waiter came forward with a folded scrap of paper on his salver, which March knew must be from his wife. “What is keeping you so?” she wrote. “I am all ready.” “It’s from Mrs. March,” he explained to Kenby. “I am going out with her on some errands. I’m awfully glad to see you again. We must talk it all over, and you must — you mustn’t — Mrs. March will want to see you later — I — Are you in the hotel?”

“Oh yes. I’ll see you at the one-o’clock table d’hote, I suppose.”

March went away with his head whirling in the question whether he should tell his wife at once of Kenby’s presence, or leave her free for the pleasures of Wurzburg, till he could shape the fact into some safe and acceptable form. She met him at the door with her guide-books, wraps and umbrellas, and would hardly give him time to get on his hat and coat.

“Now, I want you to avoid the Stollers as far as you can see them. This is to be a real wedding-journey day, with no extraneous acquaintance to bother; the more strangers the better. Wurzburg is richer than anything I imagined. I’ve looked it all up; I’ve got the plan of the city, so that we can easily find the way. We’ll walk first, and take carriages whenever we get tired. We’ll go to the cathedral at once; I want a good gulp of rococo to begin with; there wasn’t half enough of it at Ansbach. Isn’t it strange how we’ve come round to it?”

She referred to that passion for the Gothic which they had obediently imbibed from Ruskin in the days of their early Italian travel and courtship, when all the English-speaking world bowed down to him in devout aversion from the renaissance, and pious abhorrence of the rococo.

“What biddable little things we were!” she went on, while March was struggling to keep Kenby in the background of his consciousness. “The rococo must have always had a sneaking charm for us, when we were pinning our faith to pointed arches; and yet I suppose we were perfectly sincere. Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!” They were now making their way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the street leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the door of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; her body twisting to show the sculptor’s mastery of anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays. In fact, the Virgin’s whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in her arms. “Isn’t she delightful?”

“I see what you mean,” said March, with a dubious glance at the statue, “but I’m not sure, now, that I wouldn’t like something quieter in my Madonnas.”

The thoroughfare which they emerged upon, with the cathedral ending the prospective, was full of the holiday so near at hand. The narrow sidewalks were thronged with people, both soldiers and civilians, and up the middle of the street detachments of military came and went, halting the little horse-cars and the huge beer-wagons which otherwise seemed to have the sole right to the streets of Wurzburg; they came jingling or thundering out of the aide streets and hurled themselves round the corners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flattening themselves like posters against the house walls. There were peasants, men and women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country life had kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were citizens in the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were soldiers of all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time there were pretty young girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare arms gloved to the elbows, who were following a holiday custom of the place in going about the streets in ball costume. The shop windows were filled with portraits of the Emperor and the Empress, and the Prince-Regent and the ladies of his family; the German and Bavarian colors draped the facades of the houses and festooned the fantastic Madonnas posing above so many portals. The modern patriotism included the ancient piety without disturbing it; the rococo city remained ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovereignty of its King and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral, as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose. There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain, which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny that there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior came together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers had felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was, unimpeachably perfect in its way, “Just,” March murmured to his wife, “as the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth century was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is to find the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder how much the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo, too! Look at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What magnificent swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would like to get behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself to the baroque style. It expresses the eighteenth century, though. But how you long for some little hint of the thirteenth, or even the nineteenth.”

“I don’t,” she whispered back. “I’m perfectly wild with Wurzburg. I like to have a thing go as far as it can. At Nuremberg I wanted all the Gothic I could get, and in Wurzburg I want all the baroque I can get. I am consistent.”

She kept on praising herself to his disadvantage, as women do, all the way to the Neumunster Church, where they were going to revere the tomb of Walther von der Vogelweide, not so much for his own sake as for Longfellow’s. The older poet lies buried within, but his monument is outside the church, perhaps for the greater convenience of the sparrows, which now represent the birds he loved. The cenotaph is surmounted by a broad vase, and around this are thickly perched the effigies of the Meistersinger’s feathered friends, from whom the canons of the church, as Mrs. March read aloud from her Baedeker, long ago directed his bequest to themselves. In revenge for their lawless greed the defrauded beneficiaries choose to burlesque the affair by looking like the four-and-twenty blackbirds when the pie was opened.

She consented to go for a moment to the Gothic Marienkapelle with her husband in the revival of his mediaeval taste, and she was rewarded amidst its thirteenth-century sincerity by his recantation. “You are right! Baroque is the thing for Wurzburg; one can’t enjoy Gothic here any more than one could enjoy baroque in Nuremberg.”

Reconciled in the rococo, they now called a carriage, and went to visit the palace of the prince-bishops who had so well known how to make the heavenly take the image and superscription of the worldly; and they were jointly indignant to find it shut against the public in preparation for the imperialities and royalties coming to occupy it. They were in time for the noon guard-mounting, however, and Mrs. March said that the way the retiring squad kicked their legs out in the high martial step of the German soldiers was a perfect expression of the insolent militarism of their empire, and was of itself enough to make one thank Heaven that one was an American and a republican. She softened a little toward their system when it proved that the garden of the palace was still open, and yet more when she sank down upon a bench between two marble groups representing the Rape of Proserpine and the Rape of Europa. They stood each in a gravelled plot, thickly overrun by a growth of ivy, and the vine climbed the white naked limbs of the nymphs, who were present on a pretence of gathering flowers, but really to pose at the spectators, and clad them to the waist and shoulders with an effect of modesty never meant by the sculptor, but not displeasing. There was an old fountain near, its stone rim and centre of rock-work green with immemorial mould, and its basin quivering between its water-plants under the soft fall of spray. At a waft of fitful breeze some leaves of early autumn fell from the trees overhead upon the elderly pair where they sat, and a little company of sparrows came and hopped about their feet. Though the square without was so all astir with festive expectation, there were few people in the garden; three or four peasant women in densely fluted white skirts and red aprons and shawls wandered by and stared at the Europa and at the Proserpine.

It was a precious moment in which the charm of the city’s past seemed to culminate, and they were loath to break it by speech.

“Why didn’t we have something like all this on our first wedding journey?” she sighed at last. “To think of our battening from Boston to Niagara and back! And how hard we tried to make something of Rochester and Buffalo, of Montreal and Quebec!”

“Niagara wasn’t so bad,” he said, “and I will never go back on Quebec.”

“Ah, but if we could have had Hamburg and Leipsic, and Carlsbad and Nuremberg, and Ansbach and Wurzburg! Perhaps this is meant as a compensation for our lost youth. But I can’t enjoy it as I could when I was young. It’s wasted on my sere and yellow leaf. I wish Burnamy and Miss Triscoe were here; I should like to try this garden on them.”

“They wouldn’t care for it,” he replied, and upon a daring impulse he added, “Kenby and Mrs. Adding might.” If she took this suggestion in good part, he could tell her that Kenby was in Wurzburg.

“Don’t speak of them! They’re in just that besotted early middle-age when life has settled into a self-satisfied present, with no past and no future; the most philistine, the most bourgeois, moment of existence. Better be elderly at once, as far as appreciation of all this goes.” She rose and put her hand on his arm, and pushed him away in the impulsive fashion of her youth, across alleys of old trees toward a balustraded terrace in the background which had tempted her.

“It isn’t so bad, being elderly,” he said. “By that time we have accumulated enough past to sit down and really enjoy its associations. We have got all sorts of perspectives and points of view. We know where we are at.”

“I don’t mind being elderly. The world’s just as amusing as ever, and lots of disagreeable things have dropped out. It’s the getting more than elderly; it’s the getting old; and then—”

They shrank a little closer together, and walked on in silence till he said, “Perhaps there’s something else, something better — somewhere.”

They had reached the balustraded terrace, and were pausing for pleasure in the garden tops below, with the flowery spaces, and the statued fountains all coming together. She put her hand on one of the fat little urchin-groups on the stone coping. “I don’t want cherubs, when I can have these putti. And those old prince-bishops didn’t, either!”

“I don’t suppose they kept a New England conscience,” he said, with a vague smile. “It would be difficult in the presence of the rococo.”

They left the garden through the beautiful gate which the old court ironsmith Oegg hammered out in lovely forms of leaves and flowers, and shaped laterally upward, as lightly as if with a waft of his hand, in gracious Louis Quinze curves; and they looked back at it in the kind of despair which any perfection inspires. They said how feminine it was, how exotic, how expressive of a luxurious ideal of life which art had purified and left eternally charming. They remembered their Ruskinian youth, and the confidence with which they would once have condemned it; and they had a sense of recreance in now admiring it; but they certainly admired it, and it remained for them the supreme expression of that time-soul, mundane, courtly, aristocratic, flattering, which once influenced the art of the whole world, and which had here so curiously found its apotheosis in a city remote from its native place and under a rule sacerdotally vowed to austerity. The vast superb palace of the prince bishops, which was now to house a whole troop of sovereigns, imperial, royal, grand ducal and ducal, swelled aloft in superb amplitude; but it did not realize their historic pride so effectively as this exquisite work of the court ironsmith. It related itself in its aerial beauty to that of the Tiepolo frescoes which the travellers knew were swimming and soaring on the ceilings within, and from which it seemed to accent their exclusion with a delicate irony, March said. “Or iron-mongery,” he corrected himself upon reflection.

LIV.

He had forgotten Kenby in these aesthetic interests, but he remembered him again when he called a carriage, and ordered it driven to their hotel. It was the hour of the German mid-day table d’hote, and they would be sure to meet him there. The question now was how March should own his presence in time to prevent his wife from showing her ignorance of it to Kenby himself, and he was still turning the question hopelessly over in his mind when the sight of the hotel seemed to remind her of a fact which she announced.

“Now, my dear, I am tired to death, and I am not going to sit through a long table d’hote. I want you to send me up a simple beefsteak and a cup of tea to our rooms; and I don’t want you to come near for hours; because I intend to take a whole afternoon nap. You can keep all the maps and plans, and guides, and you had better go and see what the Volksfest is like; it will give you some notion of the part the people are really taking in all this official celebration, and you know I don’t care. Don’t come up after dinner to see how I am getting along; I shall get along; and if you should happen to wake me after I had dropped off—”

Kenby had seen them arrive from where he sat at the reading-room window, waiting for the dinner hour, and had meant to rush out and greet Mrs. March as they passed up the corridor. But she looked so tired that he had decided to spare her till she came down to dinner; and as he sat with March at their soup, he asked if she were not well.

March explained, and he provisionally invented some regrets from her that she should not see Kenby till supper.

Kenby ordered a bottle of one of the famous Wurzburg wines for their mutual consolation in her absence, and in the friendliness which its promoted they agreed to spend the afternoon together. No man is so inveterate a husband as not to take kindly an occasional release to bachelor companionship, and before the dinner was over they agreed that they would go to the Volksfest, and get some notion of the popular life and amusements of Wurzburg, which was one of the few places where Kenby had never been before; and they agreed that they would walk.

Their way was partly up the quay of the Main, past a barrack full of soldiers. They met detachments of soldiers everywhere, infantry, artillery, cavalry.

“This is going to be a great show,” Kenby said, meaning the manoeuvres, and he added, as if now he had kept away from the subject long enough and had a right to recur to it, at least indirectly, “I should like to have Rose see it, and get his impressions.”

“I’ve an idea he wouldn’t approve of it. His mother says his mind is turning more and more to philanthropy.”

Kenby could not forego such a chance to speak of Mrs. Adding. “It’s one of the prettiest things to see how she understands Rose. It’s charming to see them together. She wouldn’t have half the attraction without him.”

“Oh, yes,” March assented. He had often wondered how a man wishing to marry a widow managed with the idea of her children by another marriage; but if Kenby was honest; it was much simpler than he had supposed. He could not say this to him, however, and in a certain embarrassment he had with the conjecture in his presence he attempted a diversion. “We’re promised something at the Volksfest which will be a great novelty to us as Americans. Our driver told us this morning that one of the houses there was built entirely of wood.”

When they reached the grounds of the Volksfest, this civil feature of the great military event at hand, which the Marches had found largely set forth in the programme of the parade, did not fully keep the glowing promises made for it; in fact it could not easily have done so. It was in a pleasant neighborhood of new villas such as form the modern quarter of every German city, and the Volksfest was even more unfinished than its environment. It was not yet enclosed by the fence which was to hide its wonders from the non-paying public, but March and Kenby went in through an archway where the gate-money was as effectually collected from them as if they were barred every other entrance.

The wooden building was easily distinguishable from the other edifices because these were tents and booths still less substantial. They did not make out its function, but of the others four sheltered merry-go-rounds, four were beer-gardens, four were restaurants, and the rest were devoted to amusements of the usual country-fair type. Apparently they had little attraction for country people. The Americans met few peasants in the grounds, and neither at the Edison kinematograph, where they refreshed their patriotism with some scenes of their native life, nor at the little theatre where they saw the sports of the arena revived, in the wrestle of a woman with a bear, did any of the people except tradesmen and artisans seem to be taking part in the festival expression of the popular pleasure.

The woman, who finally threw the bear, whether by slight, or by main strength, or by a previous understanding with him, was a slender creature, pathetically small and not altogether plain; and March as they walked away lapsed into a pensive muse upon her strange employ. He wondered how she came to take it up, and whether she began with the bear when they were both very young, and she could easily throw him.

“Well, women have a great deal more strength than we suppose,” Kenby began with a philosophical air that gave March the hope of some rational conversation. Then his eye glazed with a far-off look, and a doting smile came into his face. “When we went through the Dresden gallery together, Rose and I were perfectly used up at the end of an hour, but his mother kept on as long as there was anything to see, and came away as fresh as a peach.”

Then March saw that it was useless to expect anything different from him, and he let him talk on about Mrs. Adding all the rest of the way back to the hotel. Kenby seemed only to have begun when they reached the door, and wanted to continue the subject in the reading-room.

March pleaded his wish to find how his wife had got through the afternoon, and he escaped to her. He would have told her now that Kenby was in the house, but he was really so sick of the fact himself that he could not speak of it at once, and he let her go on celebrating all she had seen from the window since she had waked from her long nap. She said she could never be glad enough that they had come just at that time. Soldiers had been going by the whole afternoon, and that made it so feudal.

“Yes,” he assented. “But aren’t you coming up to the station with me to see the Prince-Regent arrive? He’s due at seven, you know.”

“I declare I had forgotten all about it. No, I’m not equal to it. You must go; you can tell me everything; be sure to notice how the Princess Maria looks; the last of the Stuarts, you know; and some people consider her the rightful Queen of England; and I’ll have the supper ordered, and we can go down as soon as you’ve got back.”

LV.

March felt rather shabby stealing away without Kenby; but he had really had as much of Mrs. Adding as he could stand, for one day, and he was even beginning to get sick of Rose. Besides, he had not sent back a line for ‘Every Other Week’ yet, and he had made up his mind to write a sketch of the manoeuvres. To this end he wished to receive an impression of the Prince-Regent’s arrival which should not be blurred or clouded by other interests. His wife knew the kind of thing he liked to see, and would have helped him out with his observations, but Kenby would have got in the way, and would have clogged the movement of his fancy in assigning the facts to the parts he would like them to play in the sketch.

At least he made some such excuses to himself as he hurried along toward the Kaiserstrasse. The draught of universal interest in that direction had left the other streets almost deserted, but as he approached the thoroughfare he found all the ways blocked, and the horse-cars, ordinarily so furiously headlong, arrested by the multiple ranks of spectators on the sidewalks. The avenue leading from the railway station to the palace was decorated with flags and garlands, and planted with the stems of young firs and birches. The doorways were crowded, and the windows dense with eager faces peering out of the draped bunting. The carriageway was kept clear by mild policemen who now and then allowed one of the crowd to cross it.

The crowd was made up mostly of women and boys, and when March joined them, they had already been waiting an hour for the sight of the princes who were to bless them with a vision of the faery race which kings always are to common men. He thought the people looked dull, and therefore able to bear the strain of expectation with patience better than a livelier race. They relieved it by no attempt at joking; here and there a dim smile dawned on a weary face, but it seemed an effect of amiability rather than humor. There was so little of this, or else it was so well bridled by the solemnity of the occasion, that not a man, woman, or child laughed when a bareheaded maid-servant broke through the lines and ran down between them with a life-size plaster bust of the Emperor William in her arms: she carried it like an overgrown infant, and in alarm at her conspicuous part she cast frightened looks from side to side without arousing any sort of notice. Undeterred by her failure, a young dog, parted from his owner, and seeking him in the crowd, pursued his search in a wild flight down the guarded roadway with an air of anxiety that in America would have won him thunders of applause, and all sorts of kindly encouragements to greater speed. But this German crowd witnessed his progress apparently without interest, and without a sign of pleasure. They were there to see the Prince-Regent arrive, and they did not suffer themselves to be distracted by any preliminary excitement. Suddenly the indefinable emotion which expresses the fulfilment of expectation in a waiting crowd passed through the multitude, and before he realized it March was looking into the friendly gray-bearded face of the Prince-Regent, for the moment that his carriage allowed in passing. This came first preceded by four outriders, and followed by other simple equipages of Bavarian blue, full of highnesses of all grades. Beside the Regent sat his daughter-in-law, the Princess Maria, her silvered hair framing a face as plain and good as the Regent’s, if not so intelligent.

He, in virtue of having been born in Wurzburg, is officially supposed to be specially beloved by his fellow townsmen; and they now testified their affection as he whirled through their ranks, bowing right and left, by what passes in Germany for a cheer. It is the word Hoch, groaned forth from abdominal depths, and dismally prolonged in a hollow roar like that which the mob makes behind the scenes at the theatre before bursting in visible tumult on the stage. Then the crowd dispersed, and March came away wondering why such a kindly-looking Prince-Regent should not have given them a little longer sight of himself; after they had waited so patiently for hours to see him. But doubtless in those countries, he concluded, the art of keeping the sovereign precious by suffering him to be rarely and briefly seen is wisely studied.

On his way home he resolved to confess Kenby’s presence; and he did so as soon as he sat down to supper with his wife. “I ought to have told you the first thing after breakfast. But when I found you in that mood of having the place all to ourselves, I put it off.”

“You took terrible chances, my dear,” she said, gravely.

“And I have been terribly punished. You’ve no idea how much Kenby has talked to me about Mrs. Adding!”

She broke out laughing. “Well, perhaps you’ve suffered enough. But you can see now, can’t you, that it would have been awful if I had met him, and let out that I didn’t know he was here?”

“Terrible. But if I had told, it would have spoiled the whole morning for you; you couldn’t have thought of anything else.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, airily. “What should you think if I told you I had known he was here ever since last night?” She went on in delight at the start he gave. “I saw him come into the hotel while you were gone for the guide-books, and I determined to keep it from you as long as I could; I knew it would worry you. We’ve both been very nice; and I forgive you,” she hurried on, “because I’ve really got something to tell you.”

“Don’t tell me that Burnamy is here!”

“Don’t jump to conclusions! No, Burnamy isn’t here, poor fellow! And don’t suppose that I’m guilty of concealment because I haven’t told you before. I was just thinking whether I wouldn’t spare you till morning, but now I shall let you take the brunt of it. Mrs. Adding and Rose are here.” She gave the fact time to sink in, and then she added, “And Miss Triscoe and her father are here.”

“What is the matter with Major Eltwin and his wife being here, too? Are they in our hotel?”

“No, they are not. They came to look for rooms while you were off waiting for the Prince-Regent, and I saw them. They intended to go to Frankfort for the manoeuvres, but they heard that there was not even standing-room there, and so the general telegraphed to the Spanischer Hof, and they all came here. As it is, he will have to room with Rose, and Agatha and Mrs. Adding will room together. I didn’t think Agatha was looking very well; she looked unhappy; I don’t believe she’s heard, from Burnamy yet; I hadn’t a chance to ask her. And there’s something else that I’m afraid will fairly make you sick.”

“Oh, no; go on. I don’t think anything can do that, after an afternoon of
Kenby’s confidences.”

“It’s worse than Kenby,” she said with a sigh. “You know I told you at
Carlsbad I thought that ridiculous old thing was making up to Mrs.
Adding.”

“Kenby? Why of co—”

“Don’t be stupid, my dear! No, not Kenby: General Triscoe. I wish you could have been here to see him paying her all sort; of silly attentions, and hear him making her compliments.”

“Thank you. I think I’m just as well without it. Did she pay him silly attentions and compliments, too?”

“That’s the only thing that can make me forgive her for his wanting her. She was keeping him at arm’s-length the whole time, and she was doing it so as not to make him contemptible before his daughter.”

“It must have been hard. And Rose?”

“Rose didn’t seem very well. He looks thin and pale; but he’s sweeter than ever. She’s certainly commoner clay than Rose. No, I won’t say that! It’s really nothing but General Triscoe’s being an old goose about her that makes her seem so, and it isn’t fair.”

March went down to his coffee in the morning with the delicate duty of telling Kenby that Mrs. Adding was in town. Kenby seemed to think it quite natural she should wish to see the manoeuvres, and not at all strange that she should come to them with General Triscoe and his daughter. He asked if March would not go with him to call upon her after breakfast, and as this was in the line of his own instructions from Mrs. March, he went.

They found Mrs. Adding with the Triscoes, and March saw nothing that was not merely friendly, or at the most fatherly, in the general’s behavior toward her. If Mrs. Adding or Miss Triscoe saw more, they hid it in a guise of sisterly affection for each other. At the most the general showed a gayety which one would not have expected of him under any conditions, and which the fact that he and Rose had kept each other awake a good deal the night before seemed so little adapted to call out. He joked with Rose about their room and their beds, and put on a comradery with him that was not a perfect fit, and that suffered by contrast with the pleasure of the boy and Kenby in meeting. There was a certain question in the attitude of Mrs. Adding till March helped Kenby to account for his presence; then she relaxed in an effect of security so tacit that words overstate it, and began to make fun of Rose.

March could not find that Miss Triscoe looked unhappy, as his wife had said; he thought simply that she had grown plainer; but when he reported this, she lost her patience with him. In a girl, she said, plainness was unhappiness; and she wished to know when he would ever learn to look an inch below the surface: She was sure that Agatha Triscoe had not heard from Burnamy since the Emperor’s birthday; that she was at swords’-points with her father, and so desperate that she did not care what became of her.

He had left Kenby with the others, and now, after his wife had talked herself tired of them all, he proposed going out again to look about the city, where there was nothing for the moment to remind them of the presence of their friends or even of their existence. She answered that she was worrying about all those people, and trying to work out their problem for them. He asked why she did not let them work it out themselves as they would have to do, after all her worry, and she said that where her sympathy had been excited she could not stop worrying, whether it did any good or not, and she could not respect any one who could drop things so completely out of his mind as he could; she had never been able to respect that in him.

“I know, my dear,” he assented. “But I don’t think it’s a question of moral responsibility; it’s a question of mental structure, isn’t it? Your consciousness isn’t built in thought-tight compartments, and one emotion goes all through it, and sinks you; but I simply close the doors and shut the emotion in, and keep on.”

The fancy pleased him so much that he worked it out in all its implications, and could not, after their long experience of each other, realize that she was not enjoying the joke too, till she said she saw that he merely wished to tease. Then, too late, he tried to share her worry; but she protested that she was not worrying at all; that she cared nothing about those people: that she was nervous, she was tired; and she wished he would leave her, and go out alone.

He found himself in the street again, and he perceived that he must be walking fast when a voice called him by name, and asked him what his hurry was. The voice was Stoller’s, who got into step with him and followed the first with a second question.

“Made up your mind to go to the manoeuvres with me?”

His bluntness made it easy for March to answer: “I’m afraid my wife couldn’t stand the drive back and forth.”

“Come without her.”

“Thank you. It’s very kind of you. I’m not certain that I shall go at all. If I do, I shall run out by train, and take my chances with the crowd.”

Stoller insisted no further. He felt no offence at the refusal of his offer, or chose to show none. He said, with the same uncouth abruptness as before: “Heard anything of that fellow since he left Carlsbad?”

“Burnamy?”

“Mm.”

“No.”

“Know where he is?”

“I don’t in the least.”

Stoller let another silence elapse while they hurried on, before he said, “I got to thinking what he done afterwards. He wasn’t bound to look out for me; he might suppose I knew what I was about.”

March turned his face and stared in Stoller’s, which he was letting hang forward as he stamped heavily on. Had the disaster proved less than he had feared, and did he still want Burnamy’s help in patching up the broken pieces; or did he really wish to do Burnamy justice to his friend?

In any case March’s duty was clear. “I think Burnamy was bound to look out for you; Mr. Stoller, and I am glad to know that he saw it in the same light.”

“I know he did,” said Stoker with a blaze as from a long-smouldering fury, “and damn him, I’m not going to have it. I’m not going to, plead the baby act with him, or with any man. You tell him so, when you get the chance. You tell him I don’t hold him accountable for anything I made him do. That ain’t business; I don’t want him around me, any more; but if he wants to go back to the paper he can have his place. You tell him I stand by what I done; and it’s all right between him and me. I hain’t done anything about it, the way I wanted him to help me to; I’ve let it lay, and I’m a-going to. I guess it ain’t going to do me any harm, after all; our people hain’t got very long memories; but if it is, let it. You tell him it’s all right.”

“I don’t know where he is, Mr. Stoller, and I don’t know that I care to be the bearer of your message,” said March.

“Why not?”

“Why, for one thing, I don’t agree with you that it’s all right. Your choosing to stand by the consequences of Burnamy’s wrong doesn’t undo it. As I understand, you don’t pardon it—”

Stoller gulped and did not answer at once. Then he said, “I stand by what I done. I’m not going to let him say I turned him down for doing what I told him to, because I hadn’t the sense to know what I was about.”

“Ah, I don’t think it’s a thing he’ll like to speak of in any case,” said
March.

Stoller left him, at the corner they had reached, as abruptly as he had joined him, and March hurried back to his wife, and told her what had just passed between him and Stoller.

She broke out, “Well, I am surprised at you, my dear! You have always accused me of suspecting people, and attributing bad motives; and here you’ve refused even to give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. He merely wanted to save his savage pride with you, and that’s all he wants to do with Burnamy. How could it hurt the poor boy to know that Stoller doesn’t blame him? Why should you refuse to give his message to Burnamy? I don’t want you to ridicule me for my conscience any more, Basil; you’re twice as bad as I ever was. Don’t you think that a person can ever expiate an offence? I’ve often heard you say that if any one owned his fault, he put it from him, and it was the same as if it hadn’t been; and hasn’t Burnamy owned up over and over again? I’m astonished at you, dearest.”

March was in fact somewhat astonished at himself in the light of her reasoning; but she went on with some sophistries that restored him to his self-righteousness.

“I suppose you think he has interfered with Stoller’s political ambition, and injured him in that way. Well, what if he has? Would it be a good thing to have a man like that succeed in politics? You’re always saying that the low character of our politicians is the ruin of the country; and I’m sure,” she added, with a prodigious leap over all the sequences, “that Mr. Stoller is acting nobly; and it’s your duty to help him relieve Burnamy’s mind.” At the laugh he broke into she hastened to say, “Or if you won’t, I hope you’ll not object to my doing so, for I shall, anyway!”

She rose as if she were going to begin at once, in spite of his laughing; and in fact she had already a plan for coming to Stoller’s assistance by getting at Burnamy through Miss Triscoe, whom she suspected of knowing where he was. There had been no chance for them to speak of him either that morning or the evening before, and after a great deal of controversy with herself in her husband’s presence she decided to wait till they came naturally together the next morning for the walk to the Capuchin Church on the hill beyond the river, which they had agreed to take. She could not keep from writing a note to Miss Triscoe begging her to be sure to come, and hinting that she had something very important to speak of.

She was not sure but she had been rather silly to do this, but when they met the girl confessed that she had thought of giving up the walk, and might not have come except for Mrs. March’s note. She had come with Rose, and had left him below with March; Mrs. Adding was coming later with Kenby and General Triscoe.

Mrs. March lost no time in telling her the great news; and if she had been in doubt before of the girl’s feeling for Burnamy she was now in none. She had the pleasure of seeing her flush with hope, and then the pain which was also a pleasure, of seeing her blanch with dismay.

“I don’t know where he is, Mrs. March. I haven’t heard a word from him since that night in Carlsbad. I expected — I didn’t know but you—”

Mrs. March shook her head. She treated the fact skillfully as something to be regretted simply because it would be such a relief to Burnamy to know how Mr. Stoller now felt. Of course they could reach him somehow; you could always get letters to people in Europe, in the end; and, in fact, it was altogether probable that he was that very instant in Wurzburg; for if the New York-Paris Chronicle had wanted him to write up the Wagner operas, it would certainly want him to write up the manoeuvres. She established his presence in Wurzburg by such an irrefragable chain of reasoning that, at a knock outside, she was just able to kelp back a scream, while she ran to open the door. It was not Burnamy, as in compliance with every nerve it ought to have been, but her husband, who tried to justify his presence by saying that they were all waiting for her and Miss Triscoe, and asked when they were coming.

She frowned him silent, and then shut herself outside with him long enough to whisper, “Say she’s got a headache, or anything you please; but don’t stop talking here with me, or I shall go wild.” She then shut herself in again, with the effect of holding him accountable for the whole affair.

LVI.

General Triscoe could not keep his irritation, at hearing that his daughter was not coming, out of the excuses he made to Mrs. Adding; he said again and again that it must seem like a discourtesy to her. She gayly disclaimed any such notion; she would not hear of putting off their excursion to another day; it had been raining just long enough to give them a reasonable hope of a few hours’ drought, and they might not have another dry spell for weeks. She slipped off her jacket after they started, and gave it to Kenby, but she let General Triscoe hold her umbrella over her, while he limped beside her. She seemed to March, as he followed with Rose, to be playing the two men off against each other, with an ease which he wished his wife could be there to see, and to judge aright.

They crossed by the Old Bridge, which is of the earliest years of the seventh century, between rows of saints whose statues surmount the piers. Some are bishops as well as saints; one must have been at Rome in his day, for he wore his long thick beard in the fashion of Michelangelo’s Moses. He stretched out toward the passers two fingers of blessing and was unaware of the sparrow which had lighted on them and was giving him the effect of offering it to the public admiration. Squads of soldiers tramping by turned to look and smile, and the dull faces of citizens lighted up at the quaint sight. Some children stopped and remained very quiet, not to scare away the bird; and a cold-faced, spiritual-looking priest paused among them as if doubting whether to rescue the absent-minded bishop from a situation derogatory to his dignity; but he passed on, and then the sparrow suddenly flew off.

Rose Adding had lingered for the incident with March, but they now pushed on, and came up with the others at the end of the bridge, where they found them in question whether they had not better take a carriage and drive to the foot of the hill before they began their climb. March thanked them, but said he was keeping up the terms of his cure, and was getting in all the walking he could. Rose begged his mother not to include him in the driving party; he protested that he was feeling so well, and the walk was doing him good. His mother consented, if he would promise not to get tired, and then she mounted into the two-spanner which had driven instinctively up to their party when their parley began, and General Triscoe took the place beside her, while Kenby, with smiling patience, seated himself in front.

Rose kept on talking with March about Wurzburg and its history, which it seemed he had been reading the night before when he could not sleep. He explained, “We get little histories of the places wherever we go. That’s what Mr. Kenby does, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said March.

“I don’t suppose I shall get a chance to read much here,” Rose continued, “with General Triscoe in the room. He doesn’t like the light.”

“Well, well. He’s rather old, you know. And you musn’t read too much,
Rose. It isn’t good for you.”

“I know, but if I don’t read, I think, and that keeps me awake worse. Of course, I respect General Triscoe for being in the war, and getting wounded,” the boy suggested.

“A good many did it,” March was tempted to say.

The boy did not notice his insinuation. “I suppose there were some things they did in the army, and then they couldn’t get over the habit. But General Grant says in his ‘Life’ that he never used a profane expletive.”

“Does General Triscoe?”

Rose answered reluctantly, “If anything wakes him in the night, or if he can’t make these German beds over to suit him—”

“I see.” March turned his face to hide the smile which he would not have let the boy detect. He thought best not to let Rose resume his impressions of the general; and in talk of weightier matters they found themselves at that point of the climb where the carriage was waiting for them. From this point they followed an alley through ivied, garden walls, till they reached the first of the balustraded terraces which ascend to the crest of the hill where the church stands. Each terrace is planted with sycamores, and the face of the terrace wall supports a bass-relief commemorating with the drama of its lifesize figures the stations of the cross.

Monks and priests were coming and going, and dropped on the steps leading from terrace to terrace were women and children on their knees in prayer. It was all richly reminiscent of pilgrim scenes in other Catholic lands; but here there was a touch of earnest in the Northern face of the worshipers which the South had never imparted. Even in the beautiful rococo interior of the church at the top of the hill there was a sense of something deeper and truer than mere ecclesiasticism; and March came out of it in a serious muse while the boy at his side did nothing to interrupt. A vague regret filled his heart as he gazed silently out over the prospect of river and city and vineyard, purpling together below the top where he stood, and mixed with this regret was a vague resentment of his wife’s absence. She ought to have been there to share his pang and his pleasure; they had so long enjoyed everything together that without her he felt unable to get out of either emotion all there was in it.

The forgotten boy stole silently down the terraces after the rest of the party who had left him behind with March. At the last terrace they stopped and waited; and after a delay that began to be long to Mrs. Adding, she wondered aloud what could have become of them.

Kenby promptly offered to go back and see, and she consented in seeming to refuse: “It isn’t worth while. Rose has probably got Mr. March into some deep discussion, and they’ve forgotten all about us. But if you will go, Mr. Kenby, you might just remind Rose of my existence.” She let him lay her jacket on her shoulders before he left her, and then she sat down on one of the steps, which General Triscoe kept striking with the point of her umbrella as he stood before her.

“I really shall have to take it from you if you do that any more,” she said, laughing up in his face. “I’m serious.”

He stopped. “I wish I could believe you were serious, for a moment.”

“You may, if you think it will do you any good. But I don’t see why.”

The general smiled, but with a kind of tremulous eagerness which might have been pathetic to any one who liked him. “Do you know this is almost the first time I have spoken alone with you?”

“Really, I hadn’t noticed,” said Mrs. Adding.

General Triscoe laughed in rather a ghastly way. “Well, that’s encouraging, at least, to a man who’s had his doubts whether it wasn’t intended.”

“Intended? By whom? What do you mean, General Triscoe? Why in the world shouldn’t you have spoken alone with me before?”

He was not, with all his eagerness, ready to say, and while she smiled pleasantly she had the look in her eyes of being brought to bay and being prepared, if it must come to that, to have the worst over, then and there. She was not half his age, but he was aware of her having no respect for his years; compared with her average American past as he understood it, his social place was much higher, but, she was not in the least awed by it; in spite of his war record she was making him behave like a coward. He was in a false position, and if he had any one but himself to blame he had not her. He read her equal knowledge of these facts in the clear eyes that made him flush and turn his own away.

Then he started with a quick “Hello!” and stood staring up at the steps from the terrace above, where Rose Adding was staying himself weakly by a clutch of Kenby on one side and March on the other.

His mother looked round and caught herself up from where she sat and ran toward him. “Oh, Rose!”

“It’s nothing, mother,” he called to her, and as she dropped on her knees before him he sank limply against her. “It was like what I had in Carlsbad; that’s all. Don’t worry about me, please!”

“I’m not worrying, Rose,” she said with courage of the same texture as his own. “You’ve been walking too much. You must go back in the carriage with us. Can’t you have it come here?” she asked Kenby.

“There’s no road, Mrs. Adding. But if Rose would let me carry him—”

“I can walk,” the boy protested, trying to lift himself from her neck.

“No, no! you mustn’t.” She drew away and let him fall into the arms that Kenby put round him. He raised the frail burden lightly to his shoulder, and moved strongly away, followed by the eyes of the spectators who had gathered about the little group, but who dispersed now, and went back to their devotions.

March hurried after Kenby with Mrs. Adding, whom he told he had just missed Rose and was looking about for him, when Kenby came with her message for them. They made sure that he was nowhere about the church, and then started together down the terraces. At the second or third station below they found the boy clinging to the barrier that protected the bass-relief from the zeal of the devotees. He looked white and sick, though he insisted that he was well, and when he turned to come away with them he reeled and would have fallen if Kenby had not caught him. Kenby wanted to carry him, but Rose would not let him, and had made his way down between them.

“Yea, he has such a spirit,” she said, “and I’ve no doubt he’s suffering now more from Mr. Kenby’s kindness than from his own sickness he had one of these giddy turns in Carlsbad, though, and I shall certainly have a doctor to see him.”

“I think I should, Mrs. Adding,” said March, not too gravely, for it seemed to him that it was not quite his business to alarm her further, if she was herself taking the affair with that seriousness. He questioned whether she was taking it quite seriously enough, when she turned with a laugh, and called to General Triscoe, who was limping down the steps of the last terrace behind them:

“Oh, poor General Triscoe! I thought you had gone on ahead.”

General Triscoe could not enter into the joke of being forgotten, apparently. He assisted with gravity at the disposition of the party for the return, when they all reached the carriage. Rose had the place beside his mother, and Kenby wished March to take his with the general and let him sit with the driver; but he insisted that he would rather walk home, and he did walk till they had driven out of eight. Then he called a passing one-spanner, and drove to his hotel in comfort and silence.

LVII.

Kenby did not come to the Swan before supper; then he reported that the doctor had said Rose was on the verge of a nervous collapse. He had overworked at school, but the immediate trouble was the high, thin air, which the doctor said he must be got out of at once, into a quiet place at the sea-shore somewhere. He had suggested Ostend; or some point on the French coast; Kenby had thought of Schevleningen, and the doctor had said that would do admirably.

“I understood from Mrs. Adding,” he concluded, “that you were going. there for your after-cure, Mr. March, and I didn’t know but you might be going soon.”

At the mention of Schevleningen the Marches had looked at each other with a guilty alarm, which they both tried to give the cast of affectionate sympathy but she dismissed her fear that he might be going to let his compassion prevail with him to his hurt when he said: “Why, we ought to have been there before this, but I’ve been taking my life in my hands in trying to see a little of Germany, and I’m afraid now that Mrs. March has her mind too firmly fixed on Berlin to let me think of going to Schevleningen till we’ve been there.”

“It’s too bad!” said Mrs. March, with real regret. “I wish we were going.” But she had not the least notion of gratifying her wish; and they were all silent till Kenby broke out:

“Look here! You know how I feel about Mrs Adding! I’ve been pretty frank with Mr. March myself, and I’ve had my suspicions that she’s been frank with you, Mrs. March. There isn’t any doubt about my wanting to marry her, and up to this time there hasn’t been any doubt about her not wanting to marry me. But it isn’t a question of her or of me, now. It’s a question of Rose. I love the boy,” and Kenby’s voice shook, and he faltered a moment. “Pshaw! You understand.”

“Indeed I do, Mr. Kenby,” said Mrs. March. “I perfectly understand you.”

“Well, I don’t think Mrs. Adding is fit to make the journey with him alone, or to place herself in the best way after she gets to Schevleningen. She’s been badly shaken up; she broke down before the doctor; she said she didn’t know what to do; I suppose she’s frightened—”

Kenby stopped again, and March asked, “When is she going?”

“To-morrow,” said Kenby, and he added, “And now the question is, why shouldn’t I go with her?”

Mrs. March gave a little start, and looked at her husband, but he said nothing, and Kenby seemed not to have supposed that he would say anything.

“I know it would be very American, and all that, but I happen to be an American, and it wouldn’t be out of character for me. I suppose,” he appealed to Mrs. March, “that it’s something I might offer to do if it were from New York to Florida — and I happened to be going there? And I did happen to be going to Holland.”

“Why, of course, Mr. Kenby,” she responded, with such solemnity that
March gave way in an outrageous laugh.

Kenby laughed, and Mrs. March laughed too, but with an inner note of protest.

“Well,” Kenby continued, still addressing her, “what I want you to do is to stand by me when I propose it.”

Mrs. March gathered strength to say, “No, Mr. Kenby, it’s your own affair, and you must take the responsibility.”

“Do you disapprove?”

“It isn’t the same as it would be at home. You see that yourself.”

“Well,” said Kenby, rising, “I have to arrange about their getting away to-morrow. It won’t be easy in this hurly-burly that’s coming off.”

“Give Rose our love; and tell Mrs. Adding that I’ll come round and see her to-morrow before she starts.”

“Oh! I’m afraid you can’t, Mrs. March. They’re to start at six in the morning.”

“They are! Then we must go and see them tonight. We’ll be there almost as soon as you are.”

March went up to their rooms with, his wife, and she began on the stairs:

“Well, my dear, I hope you realize that your laughing so gave us completely away. And what was there to keep grinning about, all through?”

“Nothing but the disingenuous, hypocritical passion of love. It’s always the most amusing thing in the world; but to see it trying to pass itself off in poor old Kenby as duty and humanity, and disinterested affection for Rose, was more than I could stand. I don’t apologize for laughing; I wanted to yell.”

His effrontery and his philosophy both helped to save him; and she said from the point where he had side-tracked her mind: “I don’t call it disingenuous. He was brutally frank. He’s made it impossible to treat the affair with dignity. I want you to leave the whole thing to me, from this out. Now, will you?”

On their way to the Spanischer Hof she arranged in her own mind for Mrs. Adding to get a maid, and for the doctor to send an assistant with her on the journey, but she was in such despair with her scheme that she had not the courage to right herself when Mrs. Adding met her with the appeal:

“Oh, Mrs. March, I’m so glad you approve of Mr. Kenby’s plan. It does seem the only thing to do. I can’t trust myself alone with Rose, and Mr. Kenby’s intending to go to Schevleningen a few days later anyway. Though it’s too bad to let him give up the manoeuvres.”

“I’m sure he won’t mind that,” Mrs. March’s voice said mechanically, while her thought was busy with the question whether this scandalous duplicity was altogether Kenby’s, and whether Mrs. Adding was as guiltless of any share in it as she looked. She looked pitifully distracted; she might not have understood his report; or Kenby might really have mistaken Mrs. March’s sympathy for favor.

“No, he only lives to do good,” Mrs. Adding returned. “He’s with Rose; won’t you come in and see them?”

Rose was lying back on the pillows of a sofa, from which they would not let him get up. He was full of the trip to Holland, and had already pushed Kenby, as Kenby owned, beyond the bounds of his very general knowledge of the Dutch language, which Rose had plans for taking up after they were settled in Schevleningen. The boy scoffed at the notion that he was not perfectly well, and he wished to talk with March on the points where he had found Kenby wanting.

“Kenby is an encyclopaedia compared with me, Rose,” the editor protested, and he amplified his ignorance for the boy’s good to an extent which Rose saw was a joke. He left Holland to talk about other things which his mother thought quite as bad for him. He wished to know if March did not think that the statue of the bishop with the sparrow on its finger was a subject for a poem; and March said gayly that if Rose would write it he would print it in ‘Every Other Week’.

The boy flushed with pleasure at his banter. “No, I couldn’t do it. But I wish Mr. Burnamy had seen it. He could. Will you tell him about it?” He wanted to know if March had heard from Burnamy lately, and in the midst of his vivid interest he gave a weary sigh.

His mother said that now he had talked enough, and bade him say good-by to the Marches, who were coming so soon to Holland, anyway. Mrs. March put her arms round him to kiss him, and when she let him sink back her eyes were dim.

“You see how frail he is?” said Mrs. Adding. “I shall not let him out of my sight, after this, till he’s well again.”

She had a kind of authority in sending Kenby away with them which was not lost upon the witnesses. He asked them to come into the reading-room a moment with him, and Mrs. March wondered if he were going to make some excuse to her for himself; but he said: “I don’t know how we’re to manage about the Triscoes. The general will have a room to himself, but if Mrs. Adding takes Rose in with her, it leaves Miss Triscoe out, and there isn’t a room to be had in this house for love or money. Do you think,” he appealed directly to Mrs. March, “that it would do to offer her my room at the Swan?”

“Why, yes,” she assented, with a reluctance rather for the complicity in which he had already involved her, and for which he was still unpunished, than for what he was now proposing. “Or she could come in with me, and Mr. March could take it.”

“Whichever you think,” said Kenby so submissively that she relented, to ask:

“And what will you do?”

He laughed. “Well, people have been known to sleep in a chair. I shall manage somehow.”

“You might offer to go in with the general,” March suggested, and the men apparently thought this was a joke. Mrs. March did not laugh in her feminine worry about ways and means.

“Where is Miss Triscoe?” she asked. “We haven’t seen them.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Adding tell you? They went to supper at a restaurant; the general doesn’t like the cooking here. They ought to have been back before this.”

He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she said, “I suppose you would like us to wait.”

“It would be very kind of you.”

“Oh, it’s quite essential,” she returned with an airy freshness which
Kenby did not seem to feel as painfully as he ought.

They all sat down, and the Triscoes came in after a few minutes, and a cloud on the general’s face lifted at the proposition Kenby left Mrs. March to make.

“I thought that child ought to be in his mother’s charge,” he said. With his own comfort provided for, he made no objections to Mrs. March’s plan; and Agatha went to take leave of Rose and his mother. “By-the-way,” the general turned to March, “I found Stoller at the restaurant where we supped. He offered me a place in his carriage for the manoeuvres. How are you going?”

“I think I shall go by train. I don’t fancy the long drive.”

“Well, I don’t know that it’s worse than the long walk after you leave the train,” said the general from the offence which any difference of taste was apt to give him. “Are you going by train, too?” he asked Kenby with indifference.

“I’m not going at all,” said Kenby. “I’m leaving Wurzburg in the morning.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the general.

Mrs. March could not make out whether he knew that Kenby was going with Rose and Mrs. Adding, but she felt that there must be a full and open recognition of the fact among them. “Yes,” she said, “isn’t it fortunate that Mr. Kenby should be going to Holland, too! I should have been so unhappy about them if Mrs. Adding had been obliged to make that long journey with poor little Rose alone.”

“Yes, yes; very fortunate, certainly,” said the general colorlessly.

Her husband gave her a glance of intelligent appreciation; but Kenby was too simply, too densely content with the situation to know the value of what she had done. She thought he must certainly explain, as he walked back with her to the Swan, whether he had misrepresented her to Mrs. Adding, or Mrs. Adding had misunderstood him. Somewhere there had been an error, or a duplicity which it was now useless to punish; and Kenby was so apparently unconscious of it that she had not the heart to be cross with him. She heard Miss Triscoe behind her with March laughing in the gayety which the escape from her father seemed to inspire in her. She was promising March to go with him in the morning to see the Emperor and Empress of Germany arrive at the station, and he was warning her that if she laughed there, like that, she would subject him to fine and imprisonment. She pretended that she would like to see him led off between two gendarmes, but consented to be a little careful when he asked her how she expected to get back to her hotel without him, if such a thing happened.

LVIII.

After all, Miss Triscoe did not go with March; she preferred to sleep. The imperial party was to arrive at half past seven, but at six the crowd was already dense before the station, and all along the street leading to the Residenz. It was a brilliant day, with the promise of sunshine, through which a chilly wind blew, for the manoeuvres. The colors of all the German states flapped in this breeze from the poles wreathed with evergreen which encircled the square; the workmen putting the last touches on the bronzed allegory hurried madly to be done, and they had, scarcely finished their labors when two troops of dragoons rode into the place and formed before the station, and waited as motionlessly as their horses would allow.

These animals were not so conscious as lions at the approach of princes; they tossed and stamped impatiently in the long interval before the Regent and his daughter-in-law came to welcome their guests. All the human beings, both those who were in charge and those who were under charge, were in a quiver of anxiety to play their parts well, as if there were some heavy penalty for failure in the least point. The policemen keeping the people, in line behind the ropes which restrained them trembled with eagerness; the faces of some of the troopers twitched. An involuntary sigh went up from the crowd as the Regent’s carriage appeared, heralded by outriders, and followed by other plain carriages of Bavarian blue with liveries of blue and silver. Then the whistle of the Kaiser’s train sounded; a trumpeter advanced and began to blow his trumpet as they do in the theatre; and exactly at the appointed moment the Emperor and Empress came out of the station through the brilliant human alley leading from it, mounted their carriages, with the stage trumpeter always blowing, and whirled swiftly round half the square and flashed into the corner toward the Residenz out of sight. The same hollow groans of Ho-o-o-ch greeted and followed them from the spectators as had welcomed the Regent when he first arrived among his fellow-townsmen, with the same effect of being the conventional cries of a stage mob behind the scenes.

The Emperor was like most of his innumerable pictures, with a swarthy face from which his blue eyes glanced pleasantly; he looked good-humored if not good-natured; the Empress smiled amiably beneath her deeply fringed white parasol, and they both bowed right and left in acknowledgment of those hollow groans; but again it seemed, to March that sovereignty, gave the popular curiosity, not to call it devotion, a scantier return than it merited. He had perhaps been insensibly working toward some such perception as now came to him that the great difference between Europe and America was that in Europe life is histrionic and dramatized, and that in America, except when it is trying to be European, it is direct and sincere. He wondered whether the innate conviction of equality, the deep, underlying sense of a common humanity transcending all social and civic pretences, was what gave their theatrical effect to the shows of deference from low to high, and of condescension from high to low. If in such encounters of sovereigns and subjects, the prince did not play his part so well as the people, it might be that he had a harder part to play, and that to support his dignity at all, to keep from being found out the sham that he essentially was, he had to hurry across the stage amidst the distracting thunders of the orchestra. If the star staid to be scrutinized by the soldiers, citizens, and so forth, even the poor supernumeraries and scene-shifters might see that he was a tallow candle like themselves.

In the censorious mood induced by the reflection that he had waited an hour and a half for half a minute’s glimpse of the imperial party, March now decided not to go to the manoeuvres, where he might be subjected to still greater humiliation and disappointment. He had certainly come to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, but Wurzburg had been richly repaying in itself; and why should he stifle half an hour in an overcrowded train, and struggle for three miles on foot against that harsh wind, to see a multitude of men give proofs of their fitness to do manifold murder? He was, in fact, not the least curious for the sight, and the only thing that really troubled him was the question of how he should justify his recreance to his wife. This did alloy the pleasure with which he began, after an excellent breakfast at a neighboring cafe, to stroll about the streets, though he had them almost to himself, so many citizens had followed the soldiers to the manoeuvres.

It was not till the soldiers began returning from the manoeuvres, dusty-footed, and in white canvas overalls drawn over their trousers to save them, that he went back to Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe at the Swan. He had given them time enough to imagine him at the review, and to wonder whether he had seen General Triscoe and the Stollers there, and they met him with such confident inquiries that he would not undeceive them at once. He let them divine from his inventive answers that he had not gone to the manoeuvres, which put them in the best humor with themselves, and the girl said it was so cold and rough that she wished her father had not gone, either. The general appeared just before dinner and frankly avowed the same wish. He was rasping and wheezing from the dust which filled his lungs; he looked blown and red, and he was too angry with the company he had been in to have any comments on the manoeuvres. He referred to the military chiefly in relation to the Miss Stollers’ ineffectual flirtations, which he declared had been outrageous. Their father had apparently no control over them whatever, or else was too ignorant to know that they were misbehaving. They were without respect or reverence for any one; they had talked to General Triscoe as if he were a boy of their own age, or a dotard whom nobody need mind; they had not only kept up their foolish babble before him, they had laughed and giggled, they had broken into snatches of American song, they had all but whistled and danced. They made loud comments in Illinois English — on the cuteness of the officers whom they admired, and they had at one time actually got out their handkerchiefs. He supposed they meant to wave them at the officers, but at the look he gave them they merely put their hats together and snickered in derision of him. They were American girls of the worst type; they conformed to no standard of behavior; their conduct was personal. They ought to be taken home.

Mrs. March said she saw what he meant, and she agreed with him that they were altogether unformed, and were the effect of their own ignorant caprices. Probably, however, it was too late to amend them by taking them away.

“It would hide them, at any rate,” he answered. “They would sink back into the great mass of our vulgarity, and not be noticed. We behave like a parcel of peasants with our women. We think that if no harm is meant or thought, we may risk any sort of appearance, and we do things that are scandalously improper simply because they are innocent. That may be all very well at home, but people who prefer that sort of thing had better stay there, where our peasant manners won’t make them conspicuous.”

As their train ran northward out of Wurzburg that afternoon, Mrs. March recurred to the general’s closing words. “That was a slap at Mrs. Adding for letting Kenby go off with her.”

She took up the history of the past twenty-four hours, from the time March had left her with Miss Triscoe when he went with her father and the Addings and Kenby to see that church. She had had no chance to bring up these arrears until now, and she atoned to herself for the delay by making the history very full, and going back and adding touches at any point where she thought she had scanted it. After all, it consisted mainly of fragmentary intimations from Miss Triscoe and of half-uttered questions which her own art now built into a coherent statement.

March could not find that the general had much resented Burnamy’s clandestine visit to Carlsbad when his daughter told him of it, or that he had done more than make her promise that she would not keep up the acquaintance upon any terms unknown to him.

“Probably,” Mrs. March said, “as long as he had any hopes of Mrs. Adding, he was a little too self-conscious to be very up and down about Burnamy.”

“Then you think he was really serious about her?”

“Now my dear! He was so serious that I suppose he was never so completely taken aback in his life as when he met Kenby in Wurzburg and saw how she received him. Of course, that put an end to the fight.”

“The fight?”

“Yes — that Mrs. Adding and Agatha were keeping up to prevent his offering himself.”

“Oh! And how do you know that they were keeping up the fight together?”

“How do I? Didn’t you see yourself what friends they were? Did you tell him what Stoller had, said about Burnamy?”

“I had no chance. I don’t know that I should have done it, anyway. It wasn’t my affair.”

“Well, then, I think you might. It would have been everything for that poor child; it would have completely justified her in her own eyes.”

“Perhaps your telling her will serve the same purpose.”

“Yes, I did tell her, and I am glad of it. She had a right to know it.”

“Did she think Stoller’s willingness to overlook Burnamy’s performance had anything to do with its moral quality?”

Mrs. March was daunted for the moment, but she said, “I told her you thought that if a person owned to a fault they disowned it, and put it away from them just as if it had never been committed; and that if a person had taken their punishment for a wrong they had done, they had expiated it so far as anybody else was concerned. And hasn’t poor Burnamy done both?”

As a moralist March was flattered to be hoist with his own petard, but as a husband he was not going to come down at once. “I thought probably you had told her that. You had it pat from having just been over it with me. When has she heard from him?”

“Why, that’s the strangest thing about it. She hasn’t heard at all. She doesn’t know where he is. She thought we must know. She was terribly broken up.”

“How did she show it?”

“She didn’t show it. Either you want to tease, or you’ve forgotten how such things are with young people — or at least girls.”

“Yes, it’s all a long time ago with me, and I never was a girl. Besides, the frank and direct behavior of Kenby and Mrs. Adding has been very obliterating to my early impressions of love-making.”

“It certainly hasn’t been ideal,” said Mrs. March with a sigh.

“Why hasn’t it been ideal?” he asked. “Kenby is tremendously in love with her; and I believe she’s had a fancy for him from the beginning. If it hadn’t been for Rose she would have accepted him at once; and now he’s essential to them both in their helplessness. As for Papa Triscoe and his Europeanized scruples, if they have any reality at all they’re the residuum of his personal resentment, and Kenby and Mrs. Adding have nothing to do with their unreality. His being in love with her is no reason why he shouldn’t be helpful to her when she needs him, and every reason why he should. I call it a poem, such as very few people have the luck to live out together.”

Mrs. March listened with mounting fervor, and when he stopped, she cried out, “Well, my dear, I do believe you are right! It is ideal, as you say; it’s a perfect poem. And I shall always say—”

She stopped at the mocking light which she caught in his look, and perceived that he had been amusing himself with her perennial enthusiasm for all sorts of love-affairs. But she averred that she did not care; what he had said was true, and she should always hold him to it.

They were again in the wedding-journey sentiment in which they had left Carlsbad, when they found themselves alone together after their escape from the pressure of others’ interests. The tide of travel was towards Frankfort, where the grand parade was to take place some days later. They were going to Weimar, which was so few hours out of their way that they simply must not miss it; and all the way to the old literary capital they were alone in their compartment, with not even a stranger, much less a friend to molest them. The flying landscape without was of their own early autumnal mood, and when the vineyards of Wurzburg ceased to purple it, the heavy after-math of hay and clover, which men, women, and children were loading on heavy wains, and driving from the meadows everywhere, offered a pastoral and pleasing change. It was always the German landscape; sometimes flat and fertile, sometimes hilly and poor; often clothed with dense woods, but always charming, with castled tops in ruin or repair, and with levels where Gothic villages drowsed within their walls, and dreamed of the mediaeval past, silent, without apparent life, except for some little goose-girl driving her flock before her as she sallied out into the nineteenth century in search of fresh pasturage.

As their train mounted among the Thuringian uplands they were aware of a finer, cooler air through their open window. The torrents foamed white out of the black forests of fir and pine, and brawled along the valleys, where the hamlets roused themselves in momentary curiosity as the train roared into them from the many tunnels. The afternoon sunshine had the glister of mountain sunshine everywhere, and the travellers had a pleasant bewilderment in which their memories of Switzerland and the White Mountains mixed with long-dormant emotions from Adirondack sojourns. They chose this place and that in the lovely region where they lamented that they had not come at once for the after-cure, and they appointed enough returns to it in future years to consume all the summers they had left to live.

LIX.

It was falling night when they reached Weimar, where they found at the station a provision of omnibuses far beyond the hotel accommodations. They drove first to the Crown-Prince, which was in a promising state of reparation, but which for the present could only welcome them to an apartment where a canvas curtain cut them off from a freshly plastered wall. The landlord deplored the fact, and sent hospitably out to try and place them at the Elephant. But the Elephant was full, and the Russian Court was full too. Then the landlord of the Crown-Prince bethought himself of a new hotel, of the second class, indeed, but very nice, where they might get rooms, and after the delay of an hour, they got a carriage and drove away from the Crown-Prince, where the landlord continued to the last as benevolent as if they had been a profit instead of a loss to him.

The streets of the town at nine o’clock were empty and quiet, and they instantly felt the academic quality of the place. Through the pale night they could see that the architecture was of the classic sentiment which they were destined to feel more and more; at one point they caught a fleeting glimpse of two figures with clasped hands and half embraced, which they knew for the statues of Goethe and Schiller; and when they mounted to their rooms at the Grand-Duke of Saxe-Weimar, they passed under a fresco representing Goethe and four other world-famous poets, Shakspere, Milton, Tasso, and Schiller. The poets all looked like Germans, as was just, and Goethe was naturally chief among them; he marshalled the immortals on their way, and Schiller brought up the rear and kept them from going astray in an Elysium where they did not speak the language. For the rest, the hotel was brand-new, of a quite American freshness, and was pervaded by a sweet smell as of straw matting, and provided with steam-radiators. In the sense of its homelikeness the Marches boasted that they were never going away from it.

In the morning they discovered that their windows looked out on the grand-ducal museum, with a gardened space before and below its classicistic bulk, where, in a whim of the weather, the gay flowers were full of sun. In a pleasant illusion of taking it unawares, March strolled up through the town; but Weimar was as much awake at that hour as at any of the twenty-four, and the tranquillity of its streets, where he encountered a few passers several blocks apart, was their habitual mood. He came promptly upon two objects which he would willingly have shunned: a ‘denkmal’ of the Franco-German war, not so furiously bad as most German monuments, but antipathetic and uninteresting, as all patriotic monuments are; and a woman-and-dog team. In the shock from this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, and Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Wurzburg, to reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as characteristic of all Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over France.

The Goethe and Schiller monument which he had glimpsed the night before was characteristic too, but less offensively so. German statues at the best are conscious; and the poet-pair, as the inscription calls them, have the air of showily confronting posterity with their clasped hands, and of being only partially rapt from the spectators. But they were more unconscious than any other German statues that March had seen, and he quelled a desire to ask Goethe, as he stood with his hand on Schiller’s shoulder, and looked serenely into space far above one of the typical equipages of his country, what he thought of that sort of thing. But upon reflection he did not know why Goethe should be held personally responsible for the existence of the woman-and-dog team. He felt that he might more reasonably attribute to his taste the prevalence of classic profiles which he began to note in the Weimar populace. This could be a sympathetic effect of that passion for the antique which the poet brought back with him from his sojourn in Italy; though many of the people, especially the children, were bow-legged. Perhaps the antique had: begun in their faces, and had not yet got down to their legs; in any case they were charming children, and as a test of their culture, he had a mind to ask a little girl if she could tell him where the statue of Herder was, which he thought he might as well take in on his ramble, and so be done with as many statues as he could. She answered with a pretty regret in her tender voice, “That I truly cannot,” and he was more satisfied than if she could, for he thought it better to be a child and honest, than to know where any German statue was.

He easily found it for himself in the place which is called the Herder Platz after it. He went into the Peter and Paul Church there; where Herder used to preach sermons, sometimes not at all liked by the nobility and gentry for their revolutionary tendency; the sovereign was shielded from the worst effects of his doctrine by worshipping apart from other sinners in a glazed gallery. Herder is buried in the church, and when you ask where, the sacristan lifts a wooden trap-door in the pavement, and you think you are going down into the crypt, but you are only to see Herder’s monumental stone, which is kept covered so to save it from passing feet. Here also is the greatest picture of that great soul Luke Kranach, who had sincerity enough in his paining to atone for all the swelling German sculptures in the world. It is a crucifixion, and the cross is of a white birch log, such as might have been cut out of the Weimar woods, shaved smooth on the sides, with the bark showing at the edges. Kranach has put himself among the spectators, and a stream of blood from the side of the Savior falls in baptism upon the painter’s head. He is in the company of John the Baptist and Martin Luther; Luther stands with his Bible open, and his finger on the line, “The blood of Jesus cleanseth us.”

Partly because he felt guilty at doing all these things without his wife, and partly because he was now very hungry, March turned from them and got back to his hotel, where she was looking out for him from their open window. She had the air of being long domesticated there, as she laughed down at seeing him come; and the continued brilliancy of the weather added to the illusion of home.

It was like a day of late spring in Italy or America; the sun in that gardened hollow before the museum was already hot enough to make him glad of the shelter of the hotel. The summer seemed to have come back to oblige them, and when they learned that they were to see Weimar in a festive mood because this was Sedan Day, their curiosity, if not their sympathy, accepted the chance gratefully. But they were almost moved to wish that the war had gone otherwise when they learned that all the public carriages were engaged, and they must have one from a stable if they wished to drive after breakfast. Still it was offered them for such a modest number of marks, and their driver proved so friendly and conversable, that they assented to the course of history, and were more and more reconciled as they bowled along through the grand-ducal park beside the waters of the classic Ilm.

The waters of the classic Ilm are sluggish and slimy in places, and in places clear and brooklike, but always a dull dark green in color. They flow in the shadow of pensive trees, and by the brinks of sunny meadows, where the after-math wanders in heavy windrows, and the children sport joyously over the smooth-mown surfaces in all the freedom that there is in Germany. At last, after immemorial appropriation the owners of the earth are everywhere expropriated, and the people come into the pleasure if not the profit of it. At last, the prince, the knight, the noble finds, as in his turn the plutocrat will find, that his property is not for him, but for all; and that the nation is to enjoy what he takes from it and vainly thinks to keep from it. Parks, pleasaunces, gardens, set apart for kings, are the play-grounds of the landless poor in the Old World, and perhaps yield the sweetest joy of privilege to some state-sick ruler, some world-weary princess, some lonely child born to the solitude of sovereignty, as they each look down from their palace windows upon the leisure of overwork taking its little holiday amidst beauty vainly created for the perpetual festival of their empty lives.

March smiled to think that in this very Weimar, where sovereignty had graced and ennobled itself as nowhere else in the world by the companionship of letters and the arts, they still were not hurrying first to see the palace of a prince, but were involuntarily making it second to the cottage of a poet. But in fact it is Goethe who is forever the prince in Weimar. His greatness blots out its history, his name fills the city; the thought of him is its chiefest imitation and largest hospitality. The travellers remembered, above all other facts of the grand-ducal park, that it was there he first met Christiane Vulpius, beautiful and young, when he too was beautiful and young, and took her home to be his love, to the just and lasting displeasure of Fran von Stein, who was even less reconciled when, after eighteen years of due reflection, the love of Goethe and Christiane became their marriage. They, wondered just where it was he saw the young girl coming to meet him as the Grand-Duke’s minister with an office-seeking petition from her brother, Goethe’s brother author, long famed and long forgotten for his romantic tale of “Rinaldo Rinaldini.”

They had indeed no great mind, in their American respectability, for that rather matter-of-fact and deliberate liaison, and little as their sympathy was for the passionless intellectual intrigue with the Frau von Stein, it cast no halo of sentiment about the Goethe cottage to suppose that there his love-life with Christiane began. Mrs. March even resented the fact, and when she learned later that it was not the fact at all, she removed it from her associations with the pretty place almost indignantly.

In spite of our facile and multiple divorces we Americans are worshipers of marriage, and if a great poet, the minister of a prince, is going to marry a poor girl, we think he had better not wait till their son is almost of age. Mrs. March would not accept as extenuating circumstances the Grand-Duke’s godfatherhood, or Goethe’s open constancy to Christiane, or the tardy consecration of their union after the French sack of, Weimar, when the girl’s devotion had saved him from the rudeness of the marauding soldiers. For her New England soul there were no degrees in such guilt; and, perhaps there are really not so many as people have tried to think, in their deference to Goethe’s greatness. But certainly the affair was not so simple for a grand-ducal minister of world-wide renown, and he might well have felt its difficulties, for he could not have been proof against the censorious public opinion of Weimar, or the yet more censorious private opinion of Fran von Stein.

On that lovely Italo-American morning no ghost of these old dead embarrassments lingered within or without the Goethe garden-house. The trees which the poet himself planted flung a sun-shot shadow upon it, and about its feet basked a garden of simple flowers, from which the sweet lame girl who limped through the rooms and showed them, gathered a parting nosegay for her visitors. The few small livingrooms were above the ground-floor, with kitchen and offices below in the Italian fashion; in one of the little chambers was the camp-bed which Goethe carried with him on his journeys through Italy; and in the larger room at the front stood the desk where he wrote, with the chair before it from which he might just have risen.

All was much more livingly conscious of the great man gone than the proud little palace in the town, which so abounds with relics and memorials of him. His library, his study, his study table, with everything on it just as he left it when

“Cadde la stanca mana”

are there, and there is the death-chair facing the window, from which he gasped for “more light” at last. The handsome, well-arranged rooms are full of souvenirs of his travel, and of that passion for Italy which he did so much to impart to all German hearts, and whose modern waning leaves its records here of an interest pathetically, almost amusingly, faded. They intimate the classic temper to which his mind tended more and more, and amidst the multitude of sculptures, pictures, prints, drawings, gems, medals, autographs, there is the sense of the many-mindedness, the universal taste, for which he found room in little Weimar, but not in his contemporaneous Germany. But it is all less keenly personal, less intimate than the simple garden-house, or else, with the great troop of people going through it, and the custodians lecturing in various voices and languages to the attendant groups, the Marches had it less to themselves, and so imagined him less in it.

LX.

All palaces have a character of tiresome unlivableness which is common to them everywhere, and very probably if one could meet their proprietors in them one would as little remember them apart afterwards as the palaces themselves. It will not do to lift either houses or men far out of the average; they become spectacles, ceremonies; they cease to have charm, to have character, which belong to the levels of life, where alone there are ease and comfort, and human nature may be itself, with all the little delightful differences repressed in those who represent and typify.

As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was Goethe’s friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringing Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story of that great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as a palace can.

There are certain Poets’ Rooms, frescoed with illustrations of Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland; there is the room where Goethe and the Grand-Duke used to play chess together; there is the conservatory opening from it where they liked to sit and chat; everywhere in the pictures and sculptures, the engraving and intaglios, are the witnesses of the tastes they shared, the love they both had for Italy, and for beautiful Italian things. The prince was not so great a prince but that he could very nearly be a man; the court was perhaps the most human court that ever was; the Grand-Duke and the grand poet were first boon companions, and then monarch and minister working together for the good of the country; they were always friends, and yet, as the American saw in the light of the New World, which he carried with him, how far from friends! At best it was make-believe, the make-believe of superiority and inferiority, the make-believe of master and man, which could only be the more painful and ghastly for the endeavor of two generous spirits to reach and rescue each other through the asphyxiating unreality; but they kept up the show of equality faithfully to the end. Goethe was born citizen of a free republic, and his youth was nurtured in the traditions of liberty; he was one of the greatest souls of any time, and he must have known the impossibility of the thing they pretended; but he died and made no sign, and the poet’s friendship with the prince has passed smoothly into history as one of the things that might really be. They worked and played together; they dined and danced, they picnicked and poetized, each on his own side of the impassable gulf; with an air of its not being there which probably did not deceive their contemporaries so much as posterity.

A part of the palace was of course undergoing repair; and in the gallery beyond the conservatory a company of workmen were sitting at a table where they had spread their luncheon. They were somewhat subdued by the consciousness of their august environment; but the sight of them was charming; they gave a kindly interest to the place which it had wanted before; and which the Marches felt again in another palace where the custodian showed them the little tin dishes and saucepans which the German Empress Augusta and her sisters played with when they were children. The sight of these was more affecting even than the withered wreaths which they had left on the death-bed of their mother, and which are still mouldering there.

This was in the Belvedere, the country house on the height overlooking Weimar, where the grand-ducal family spend the month of May, and where the stranger finds himself amid overwhelming associations of Goethe, although the place is so full of relics and memorials of the owners. It seemed in fact to be a storehouse for the wedding-presents of the whole connection, which were on show in every room; Mrs. March hardly knew whether they heightened the domestic effect or took from it; but they enabled her to verify with the custodian’s help certain royal intermarriages which she had been in doubt about before.

Her zeal for these made such favor with him that he did not spare them a portrait of all those which March hoped to escape; he passed them over, scarcely able to stand, to the gardener, who was to show them the open-air theatre where Goethe used to take part in the plays.

The Natur-Theater was of a classic ideal, realized in the trained vines and clipped trees which formed the coulisses. There was a grassy space for the chorus and the commoner audience, and then a few semicircular gradines cut in the turf, one alcove another, where the more honored spectators sat. Behind the seats were plinths bearing the busts of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and Herder. It was all very pretty, and if ever the weather in Weimar was dry enough to permit a performance, it must have been charming to see a play in that open day to which the drama is native, though in the late hours it now keeps in the thick air of modern theatres it has long forgotten the fact. It would be difficult to be Greek under a German sky, even when it was not actually raining, but March held that with Goethe’s help it might have been done at Weimar, and his wife and he proved themselves such enthusiasts for the Natur-Theater that the walnut-faced old gardener who showed it put together a sheaf of the flowers that grew nearest it and gave them to Mrs. March for a souvenir.

They went for a cup of tea to the cafe which looks, as from another eyebrow of the hill, out over lovely little Weimar in the plain below. In a moment of sunshine the prospect was very smiling; but their spirits sank over their tea when it came; they were at least sorry they had not asked for coffee. Most of the people about them were taking beer, including the pretty girls of a young ladies’ school, who were there with their books and needle-work, in the care of one of the teachers, apparently for the afternoon.

Mrs. March perceived that they were not so much engaged with their books or their needle-work but they had eyes for other things, and she followed the glances of the girls till they rested upon the people at a table somewhat obliquely to the left. These were apparently a mother and daughter, and they were listening to a young man who sat with his back to Mrs. March, and leaned low over the table talking to them. They were both smiling radiantly, and as the girl smiled she kept turning herself from the waist up, and slanting her face from this side to that, as if to make sure that every one saw her smiling.

Mrs. March felt her husband’s gaze following her own, and she had just time to press her finger firmly on his arm and reduce his cry of astonishment to the hoarse whisper in which he gasped, “Good gracious! It’s the pivotal girl!”

At the same moment the girl rose with her mother, and with the young man, who had risen too, came directly toward the Marches on their way out of the place without noticing them, though Burnamy passed so near that Mrs. March could almost have touched him.

She had just strength to say, “Well, my dear! That was the cut direct.”

She said this in order to have her husband reassure her. “Nonsense! He never saw us. Why didn’t you speak to him?”

“Speak to him? I never shall speak to him again. No! This is the last of Mr. Burnamy for me. I shouldn’t have minded his not recognizing us, for, as you say, I don’t believe he saw us; but if he could go back to such a girl as that, and flirt with her, after Miss Triscoe, that’s all I wish to know of him. Don’t you try to look him up, Basil! I’m glad-yes, I’m glad he doesn’t know how Stoller has come to feel about him; he deserves to suffer, and I hope he’ll keep on suffering: You were quite right, my dear — and it shows how true your instinct is in such things (I don’t call it more than instinct) — not to tell him what Stoller said, and I don’t want you ever should.”

She had risen in her excitement, and was making off in such haste that she would hardly give him time to pay for their tea, as she pulled him impatiently to their carriage.

At last he got a chance to say, “I don’t think I can quite promise that; my mind’s been veering round in the other direction. I think I shall tell him.”

“What! After you’ve seen him flirting with that girl? Very well, then, you won’t, my dear; that’s all! He’s behaving very basely to Agatha.”

“What’s his flirtation with all the girls in the universe to do with my duty to him? He has a right to know what Stoller thinks. And as to his behaving badly toward Miss Triscoe, how has he done it? So far as you know, there is nothing whatever between them. She either refused him outright, that last night in Carlsbad, or else she made impossible conditions with him. Burnamy is simply consoling himself, and I don’t blame him.”

“Consoling himself with a pivotal girl!” cried Mrs. March.

“Yes, with a pivotal girl. Her pivotality may be a nervous idiosyncrasy, or it may be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge with one pretty girl from another. It’s what men have been doing from the beginning of time.”

“Oh, I dare say!”

“Men,” he went on, “are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly. They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had him first; and I’m all for her.”

LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg, and strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with himself. While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the attraction by which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere maid has for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at heart and ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne for the pain which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to forget it in her folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had been reckless of her rights came with it. He had done his best to make her think him in love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise to write to him from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he wished still less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that she had not promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to such fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted with Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the resentment with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the pivotal girl unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres, with all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary excitement among the people, at least enough to warrant him in making a paper about Sedan Day in Weimar, which he could sell somewhere; but the night was falling, and there was still no sign of popular rejoicing over the French humiliation twenty-eight years before, except in the multitude of Japanese lanterns which the children were everywhere carrying at the ends of sticks. Babies had them in their carriages, and the effect of the floating lights in the winding, up-and-down-hill streets was charming even to Burnamy’s lack-lustre eyes. He went by his hotel and on to a cafe with a garden, where there was a patriotic, concert promised; he supped there, and then sat dreamily behind his beer, while the music banged and brayed round him unheeded.

Presently he heard a voice of friendly banter saying in English, “May I sit at your table?” and he saw an ironical face looking down on him. “There doesn’t seem any other place.”

“Why, Mr. March!” Burnamy sprang up and wrung the hand held out to him, but he choked with his words of recognition; it was so good to see this faithful friend again, though he saw him now as he had seen him last, just when he had so little reason to be proud of himself.

March settled his person in the chair facing Burnamy, and then glanced round at the joyful jam of people eating and drinking, under a firmament of lanterns. “This is pretty,” he said, “mighty pretty. I shall make Mrs. March sorry for not coming, when I go back.”

“Is Mrs. March — she is — with you — in Weimar?” Burnamy asked stupidly.

March forbore to take advantage of him. “Oh, yes. We saw you out at Belvedere this afternoon. Mrs. March thought for a moment that you meant not to see us. A woman likes to exercise her imagination in those little flights.”

“I never dreamed of your being there — I never saw—” Burnamy began.

“Of course not. Neither did Mrs. Etkins, nor Miss Etkins; she was looking very pretty. Have you been here some time?”

“Not long. A week or so. I’ve been at the parade at Wurzburg.”

“At Wurzburg! Ah, how little the world is, or how large Wurzburg is! We were there nearly a week, and we pervaded the place. But there was a great crowd for you to hide in from us. What had I better take?” A waiter had come up, and was standing at March’s elbow. “I suppose I mustn’t sit here without ordering something?”

“White wine and selters,” said Burnamy vaguely.

“The very thing! Why didn’t I think of it? It’s a divine drink: it satisfies without filling. I had it a night or two before we left home, in the Madison Square Roof Garden. Have you seen ‘Every Other Week’ lately?”

“No,” said Burnamy, with more spirit than he had yet shown.

“We’ve just got our mail from Nuremberg. The last number has a poem in it that I rather like.” March laughed to see the young fellow’s face light up with joyful consciousness. “Come round to my hotel, after you’re tired here, and I’ll let you see it. There’s no hurry. Did you notice the little children with their lanterns, as you came along? It’s the gentlest effect that a warlike memory ever came to. The French themselves couldn’t have minded those innocents carrying those soft lights on the day of their disaster. You ought to get something out of that, and I’ve got a subject in trust for you from Rose Adding. He and his mother were at Wurzburg; I’m sorry to say the poor little chap didn’t seem very well. They’ve gone to Holland for the sea air.” March had been talking for quantity in compassion of the embarrassment in which Burnamy seemed bound; but he questioned how far he ought to bring comfort to the young fellow merely because he liked him. So far as he could make out, Burnamy had been doing rather less than nothing to retrieve himself since they had met; and it was by an impulse that he could not have logically defended to Mrs. March that he resumed. “We found another friend of yours in Wurzburg: Mr. Stoller.”

“Mr. Stoller?” Burnamy faintly echoed.

“Yes; he was there to give his daughters a holiday during the manoeuvres; and they made the most of it. He wanted us to go to the parade with his family but we declined. The twins were pretty nearly the death of General Triscoe.”

Again Burnamy echoed him. “General Triscoe?”

“Ah, yes: I didn’t tell you. General Triscoe and his daughter had come on with Mrs. Adding and Rose. Kenby — you remember Kenby, On the Norumbia? — Kenby happened to be there, too; we were quite a family party; and Stoller got the general to drive out to the manoeuvres with him and his girls.”

Now that he was launched, March rather enjoyed letting himself go. He did not know what he should say to Mrs. March when he came to confess having told Burnamy everything before she got a chance at him; he pushed on recklessly, upon the principle, which probably will not hold in morals, that one may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. “I have a message for you from Mr. Stoller.”

“For me?” Burnamy gasped.

“I’ve been wondering how I should put it, for I hadn’t expected to see you. But it’s simply this: he wants you to know — and he seemed to want me to know — that he doesn’t hold you accountable in the way he did. He’s thought it all over, and he’s decided that he had no right to expect you to save him from his own ignorance where he was making a show of knowledge. As he said, he doesn’t choose to plead the baby act. He says that you’re all right, and your place on the paper is open to you.”

Burnamy had not been very prompt before, but now he seemed braced for instant response. “I think he’s wrong,” he said, so harshly that the people at the next table looked round. “His feeling as he does has nothing to do with the fact, and it doesn’t let me out.”

March would have liked to take him in his arms; he merely said, “I think you’re quite right, as to that. But there’s such a thing as forgiveness, you know. It doesn’t change the nature of what you’ve done; but as far as the sufferer from it is concerned, it annuls it.”

“Yes, I understand that. But I can’t accept his forgiveness if I hate him.”

“But perhaps you won’t always hate him. Some day you may have a chance to do him a good turn. It’s rather banale; but there doesn’t seem any other way. Well, I have given you his message. Are you going with me to get that poem?”

When March had given Burnamy the paper at his hotel, and Burnamy had put it in his pocket, the young man said he thought he would take some coffee, and he asked March to join him in the dining-room where they had stood talking.

“No, thank you,” said the elder, “I don’t propose sitting up all night, and you’ll excuse me if I go to bed now. It’s a little informal to leave a guest—”

“You’re not leaving a guest! I’m at home here. I’m staying in this hotel too.”

March said, “Oh!” and then he added abruptly, “Good-night,” and went up stairs under the fresco of the five poets.

“Whom were you talking with below?” asked Mrs. March through the door opening into his room from hers.

“Burnamy,” he answered from within. “He’s staying in this house. He let me know just as I was going to turn him out for the night. It’s one of those little uncandors of his that throw suspicion on his honesty in great things.”

“Oh! Then you’ve been telling him,” she said, with a mental bound high above and far beyond the point.

“Everything.”

“About Stoller, too?”

“About Stoller and his daughters, and Mrs. Adding and Rose and Kenby and
General Triscoe — and Agatha.”

“Very well. That’s what I call shabby. Don’t ever talk to me again about the inconsistencies of women. But now there’s something perfectly fearful.”

“What is it?”

“A letter from Miss Triscoe came after you were gone, asking us to find rooms in some hotel for her and her father to-morrow. He isn’t well, and they’re coming. And I’ve telegraphed them to come here. Now what do you say?”

LXII.

They could see no way out of the trouble, and Mrs. March could not resign herself to it till her husband suggested that she should consider it providential. This touched the lingering superstition in which she had been ancestrally taught to regard herself as a means, when in a very tight place, and to leave the responsibility with the moral government of the universe. As she now perceived, it had been the same as ordered that they should see Burnamy under such conditions in the afternoon that they could not speak to him, and hear where he was staying; and in an inferior degree it had been the same as ordered that March should see him in the evening and tell him everything, so that she should know just how to act when she saw him in the morning. If he could plausibly account for the renewal of his flirtation with Miss Elkins, or if he seemed generally worthy apart from that, she could forgive him.

It was so pleasant when he came in at breakfast with his well-remembered smile, that she did not require from him any explicit defence. While they talked she was righting herself in an undercurrent of drama with Miss Triscoe, and explaining to her that they could not possibly wait over for her and her father in Weimar, but must be off that day for Berlin, as they had made all their plans. It was not easy, even in drama where one has everything one’s own way, to prove that she could not without impiety so far interfere with the course of Providence as to prevent Miss Triscoe’s coming with her father to the same hotel where Burnamy was staying. She contrived, indeed, to persuade her that she had not known he was staying there when she telegraphed them where to come, and that in the absence of any open confidence from Miss Triscoe she was not obliged to suppose that his presence would be embarrassing.

March proposed leaving her with Burnamy while he went up into the town and interviewed the house of Schiller, which he had not done yet; and as soon as he got himself away she came to business, breaking altogether from the inner drama with Miss Triscoe and devoting herself to Burnamy. They had already got so far as to have mentioned the meeting with the Triscoes in Wurzburg, and she said: “Did Mr. March tell you they were coming here? Or, no! We hadn’t heard then. Yes, they are coming to-morrow. They may be going to stay some time. She talked of Weimar when we first spoke of Germany on the ship.” Burnamy said nothing, and she suddenly added, with a sharp glance, “They wanted us to get them rooms, and we advised their coming to this house.” He started very satisfactorily, and “Do you think they would be comfortable, here?” she pursued.

“Oh, yes, very. They can have my room; it’s southeast; I shall be going into other quarters.” She did not say anything; and “Mrs. March,” he began again, “what is the use of my beating about the bush? You must know what I went back to Carlsbad for, that night—”

“No one ever told—”

“Well, you must have made a pretty good guess. But it was a failure. I ought to have failed, and I did. She said that unless her father liked it — And apparently he hasn’t liked it.” Burnamy smiled ruefully.

“How do you know? She didn’t know where you were!”

“She could have got word to me if she had had good news for me. They’ve forwarded other letters from Pupp’s. But it’s all right; I had no business to go back to Carlsbad. Of course you didn’t know I was in this house when you told them to come; and I must clear out. I had better clear out of Weimar, too.”

“No, I don’t think so; I have no right to pry into your affairs, but—”

“Oh, they’re wide enough open!”

“And you may have changed your mind. I thought you might, when I saw you yesterday at Belvedere—”

“I was only trying to make bad worse.”

“Then I think the situation has changed entirely through what Mr. Stoller said to Mr. March.”

“I can’t see how it has. I committed an act of shabby treachery, and I’m as much to blame as if he still wanted to punish me for it.”

“Did Mr. March say that to you?”

“No; I said that to Mr. March; and he couldn’t answer it, and you can’t.
You’re very good, and very kind, but you can’t answer it.”

“I can answer it very well,” she boasted, but she could find nothing better to say than, “It’s your duty to her to see her and let her know.”

“Doesn’t she know already?”

“She has a right to know it from you. I think you are morbid, Mr. Burnamy. You know very well I didn’t like your doing that to Mr. Stoller. I didn’t say so at the time, because you seemed to feel it enough yourself. But I did like your owning up to it,” and here Mrs. March thought it time to trot out her borrowed battle-horse again. “My husband always says that if a person owns up to an error, fully and faithfully, as you’ve always done, they make it the same in its consequences to them as if it had never been done.”

“Does Mr. March say that?” asked Burnamy with a relenting smile.

“Indeed he does!”

Burnamy hesitated; then he asked, gloomily again:

“And what about the consequences to the other fellow?”

“A woman,” said Mrs. March, “has no concern with them. And besides, I think you’ve done all you could to save Mr. Stoller from the consequences.”

“I haven’t done anything.”

“No matter. You would if you could. I wonder,” she broke off, to prevent his persistence at a point where her nerves were beginning to give way, “what can be keeping Mr. March?”

Nothing much more important, it appeared later, than the pleasure of sauntering through the streets on the way to the house of Schiller, and looking at the pretty children going to school, with books under their arms. It was the day for the schools to open after the long summer vacation, and there was a freshness of expectation in the shining faces which, if it could not light up his own graybeard visage, could at least touch his heart:

When he reached the Schiller house he found that it was really not the Schiller house, but the Schiller flat, of three or four rooms, one flight up, whose windows look out upon the street named after the poet. The whole place is bare and clean; in one corner of the large room fronting the street stands Schiller’s writing-table, with his chair before it; with the foot extending toward this there stands, in another corner, the narrow bed on which he died; some withered wreaths on the pillow frame a picture of his deathmask, which at first glance is like his dead face lying there. It is all rather tasteless, and all rather touching, and the place with its meagre appointments, as compared with the rich Goethe house, suggests that personal competition with Goethe in which Schiller is always falling into the second place. Whether it will be finally so with him in literature it is too early to ask of time, and upon other points eternity will not be interrogated. “The great, Goethe and the good Schiller,” they remain; and yet, March reasoned, there was something good in Goethe and something great, in Schiller.

He was so full of the pathos of their inequality before the world that he did not heed the warning on the door of the pastry-shop near the Schiller house, and on opening it he bedaubed his hand with the fresh paint on it. He was then in such a state, that he could not bring his mind to bear upon the question of which cakes his wife would probably prefer, and he stood helplessly holding up his hand till the good woman behind the counter discovered his plight, and uttered a loud cry of compassion. She ran and got a wet napkin, which she rubbed with soap, and then she instructed him by word and gesture to rub his hand upon it, and she did not leave him till his rescue was complete. He let her choose a variety of the cakes for him, and came away with a gay paper bag full of them, and with the feeling that he had been in more intimate relations with the life of Weimar than travellers are often privileged to be. He argued from the instant and intelligent sympathy of the pastry woman a high grade of culture in all classes; and he conceived the notion of pretending to Mrs. March that he had got these cakes from, a descendant of Schiller.

His deceit availed with her for the brief moment in which she always, after so many years’ experience of his duplicity, believed anything he told her. They dined merrily together at their hotel, and then Burnamy came down to the station with them and was very comfortable to March in helping him to get their tickets and their baggage registered. The train which was to take them to Halle, where they were to change for Berlin, was rather late, and they had but ten minutes after it came in before it would start again. Mrs. March was watching impatiently at the window of the waiting-room for the dismounting passengers to clear the platform and allow the doors to be opened; suddenly she gave a cry, and turned and ran into the passage by which the new arrivals were pouring out toward the superabundant omnibuses. March and Burnamy, who had been talking apart, mechanically rushed after her and found her kissing Miss Triscoe and shaking hands with the general amidst a tempest of questions and answers, from which it appeared that the Triscoes had got tired of staying in Wurzburg, and had simply come on to Weimar a day sooner than they had intended.

The general was rather much bundled up for a day which was mild for a German summer day, and he coughed out an explanation that he had taken an abominable cold at that ridiculous parade, and had not shaken it off yet. He had a notion that change of air would be better for him; it could not be worse.

He seemed a little vague as to Burnamy, rather than inimical. While the ladies were still talking eagerly together in proffer and acceptance of Mrs. March’s lamentations that she should be going away just as Miss Triscoe was coming, he asked if the omnibus for their hotel was there. He by no means resented Burnamy’s assurance that it was, and he did not refuse to let him order their baggage, little and large, loaded upon it. By the time this was done, Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe had so far detached themselves from each other that they could separate after one more formal expression of regret and forgiveness. With a lament into which she poured a world of inarticulate emotions, Mrs. March wrenched herself from the place, and suffered herself, to be pushed toward her train. But with the last long look which she cast over her shoulder, before she vanished into the waiting-room, she saw Miss Triscoe and Burnamy transacting the elaborate politenesses of amiable strangers with regard to the very small bag which the girl had in her hand. He succeeded in relieving her of it; and then he led the way out of the station on the left of the general, while Miss Triscoe brought up the rear.

LXIII.

From the window of the train as it drew out Mrs. March tried for a glimpse of the omnibus in which her proteges were now rolling away together. As they were quite out of sight in the omnibus, which was itself out of sight, she failed, but as she fell back against her seat she treated the recent incident with a complexity and simultaneity of which no report can give an idea. At the end one fatal conviction remained: that in everything she had said she had failed to explain to Miss Triscoe how Burnamy happened to be in Weimar and how he happened to be there with them in the station. She required March to say how she had overlooked the very things which she ought to have mentioned first, and which she had on the point of her tongue the whole time. She went over the entire ground again to see if she could discover the reason why she had made such an unaccountable break, and it appeared that she was led to it by his rushing after her with Burnamy before she had had a chance to say a word about him; of course she could not say anything in his presence. This gave her some comfort, and there was consolation in the fact that she had left them together without the least intention or connivance, and now, no matter what happened, she could not accuse herself, and he could not accuse her of match-making.

He said that his own sense of guilt was so great that he should not dream of accusing her of anything except of regret that now she could never claim the credit of bringing the lovers together under circumstances so favorable. As soon as they were engaged they could join in renouncing her with a good conscience, and they would probably make this the basis of their efforts to propitiate the general.

She said she did not care, and with the mere removal of the lovers in space, her interest in them began to abate. They began to be of a minor importance in the anxieties of the change of trains at Halle, and in the excitement of settling into the express from Frankfort there were moments when they were altogether forgotten. The car was of almost American length, and it ran with almost American smoothness; when the conductor came and collected an extra fare for their seats, the Marches felt that if the charge had been two dollars instead of two marks they would have had every advantage of American travel.

On the way to Berlin the country was now fertile and flat, and now sterile and flat; near the capital the level sandy waste spread almost to its gates. The train ran quickly through the narrow fringe of suburbs, and then they were in one of those vast Continental stations which put our outdated depots to shame. The good ‘traeger’ who took possession of them and their hand-bags, put their boxes on a baggage-bearing drosky, and then got them another drosky for their personal transportation. This was a drosky of the first-class, but they would not have thought it so, either from the vehicle itself, or from the appearance of the driver and his horses. The public carriages of Germany are the shabbiest in the world; at Berlin the horses look like old hair trunks and the drivers like their moth-eaten contents.

The Marches got no splendor for the two prices they paid, and their approach to their hotel on Unter den Linden was as unimpressive as the ignoble avenue itself. It was a moist, cold evening, and the mean, tiresome street, slopped and splashed under its two rows of small trees, to which the thinning leaves clung like wet rags, between long lines of shops and hotels which had neither the grace of Paris nor the grandiosity of New York. March quoted in bitter derision:

    ”Bees, bees, was it your hydromel,
     Under the Lindens?”

and his wife said that if Commonwealth Avenue in Boston could be imagined with its trees and without their beauty, flanked by the architecture of Sixth Avenue, with dashes of the west side of Union Square, that would be the famous Unter den Linden, where she had so resolutely decided that they would stay while in Berlin.

They had agreed upon the hotel, and neither could blame the other because it proved second-rate in everything but its charges. They ate a poorish table d’hote dinner in such low spirits that March had no heart to get a rise from his wife by calling her notice to the mouse which fed upon the crumbs about their feet while they dined. Their English-speaking waiter said that it was a very warm evening, and they never knew whether this was because he was a humorist, or because he was lonely and wished to talk, or because it really was a warm evening, for Berlin. When they had finished, they went out and drove about the greater part of the evening looking for another hotel, whose first requisite should be that it was not on Unter den Linden. What mainly determined Mrs. March in favor of the large, handsome, impersonal place they fixed upon was the fact that it was equipped for steam-heating; what determined March was the fact that it had a passenger-office where when he wished to leave, he could buy his railroad tickets and have his baggage checked without the maddening anxiety, of doing it at the station. But it was precisely in these points that the hotel which admirably fulfilled its other functions fell short. The weather made a succession of efforts throughout their stay to clear up cold; it merely grew colder without clearing up, but this seemed to offer no suggestion of steam for heating their bleak apartment and the chilly corridors to the management. With the help of a large lamp which they kept burning night and day they got the temperature of their rooms up to sixty; there was neither stove nor fireplace, the cold electric bulbs diffused a frosty glare; and in the vast, stately dining-room with its vaulted roof, there was nothing to warm them but their plates, and the handles of their knives and forks, which, by a mysterious inspiration, were always hot. When they were ready to go, March experienced from the apathy of the baggage clerk and the reluctance of the porters a more piercing distress than any he had known at the railroad stations; and one luckless valise which he ordered sent after him by express reached his bankers in Paris a fortnight overdue, with an accumulation of charges upon it outvaluing the books which it contained.

But these were minor defects in an establishment which had many merits, and was mainly of the temperament and intention of the large English railroad hotels. They looked from their windows down into a gardened square, peopled with a full share of the superabounding statues of Berlin and frequented by babies and nurse maids who seemed not to mind the cold any more than the stone kings and generals. The aspect of this square, like the excellent cooking of the hotel and the architecture of the imperial capital, suggested the superior civilization of Paris. Even the rows of gray houses and private palaces of Berlin are in the French taste, which is the only taste there is in Berlin. The suggestion of Paris is constant, but it is of Paris in exile, and without the chic which the city wears in its native air. The crowd lacks this as much as the architecture and the sculpture; there is no distinction among the men except for now and then a military figure, and among the women no style such as relieves the commonplace rash of the New York streets. The Berliners are plain and ill dressed, both men and women, and even the little children are plain. Every one is ill dressed, but no one is ragged, and among the undersized homely folk of the lower classes there is no such poverty-stricken shabbiness as shocks and insults the sight in New York. That which distinctly recalls our metropolis is the lofty passage of the elevated trains intersecting the prospectives of many streets; but in Berlin the elevated road is carried on massive brick archways and not lifted upon gay, crazy iron ladders like ours.

When you look away from this, and regard Berlin on its aesthetic, side you are again in that banished Paris, whose captive art-soul is made to serve, so far as it may be enslaved to such an effect, in the celebration of the German triumph over France. Berlin has never the presence of a great capital, however, in spite of its perpetual monumental insistence. There is no streaming movement in broad vistas; the dull looking population moves sluggishly; there is no show of fine equipages. The prevailing tone of the city and the sky is gray; but under the cloudy heaven there is no responsive Gothic solemnity in the architecture. There are hints of the older German cities in some of the remote and observe streets, but otherwise all is as new as Boston, which in fact the actual Berlin hardly antedates.

There are easily more statues in Berlin than in any other city in the world, but they only unite in failing to give Berlin an artistic air. They stand in long rows on the cornices; they crowd the pediments; they poise on one leg above domes and arches; they shelter themselves in niches; they ride about on horseback; they sit or lounge on street corners or in garden walks; all with a mediocrity in the older sort which fails of any impression. If they were only furiously baroque they would be something, and it may be from a sense of this that there is a self-assertion in the recent sculptures, which are always patriotic, more noisy and bragging than anything else in perennial brass. This offensive art is the modern Prussian avatar of the old German romantic spirit, and bears the same relation to it that modern romanticism in literature bears to romance. It finds its apotheosis in the monument to Kaiser Wilhelm I., a vast incoherent group of swelling and swaggering bronze, commemorating the victory of the first Prussian Emperor in the war with the last French Emperor, and avenging the vanquished upon the victors by its ugliness. The ungainly and irrelevant assemblage of men and animals backs away from the imperial palace, and saves itself too soon from plunging over the border of a canal behind it, not far from Rauch’s great statue of the great Frederic. To come to it from the simplicity and quiet of that noble work is like passing from some exquisite masterpiece of naturalistic acting to the rant and uproar of melodrama; and the Marches stood stunned and bewildered by its wild explosions.

When they could escape they found themselves so convenient to the imperial palace that they judged best to discharge at once the obligation to visit it which must otherwise weigh upon them. They entered the court without opposition from the sentinel, and joined other strangers straggling instinctively toward a waiting-room in one corner of the building, where after they had increased to some thirty, a custodian took charge of them, and led them up a series of inclined plains of brick to the state apartments. In the antechamber they found a provision of immense felt over-shoes which they were expected to put on for their passage over the waxed marquetry of the halls. These roomy slippers were designed for the accommodation of the native boots; and upon the mixed company of foreigners the effect was in the last degree humiliating. The women’s skirts some what hid their disgrace, but the men were openly put to shame, and they shuffled forward with their bodies at a convenient incline like a company of snow-shoers. In the depths of his own abasement March heard a female voice behind him sighing in American accents, “To think I should be polishing up these imperial floors with my republican feet!”

The protest expressed the rebellion which he felt mounting in his own heart as they advanced through the heavily splendid rooms, in the historical order of the family portraits recording the rise of the Prussian sovereigns from Margraves to Emperors. He began to realize here the fact which grew open him more and more that imperial Germany is not the effect of a popular impulse but of a dynastic propensity. There is nothing original in the imperial palace, nothing national; it embodies and proclaims a powerful personal will, and in its adaptations of French art it appeals to no emotion in the German witness nobler than his pride in the German triumph over the French in war. March found it tiresome beyond the tiresome wont of palaces, and he gladly shook off the sense of it with his felt shoes. “Well,” he confided to his wife when they were fairly out-of-doors, “if Prussia rose in the strength of silence, as Carlyle wants us to believe, she is taking it out in talk now, and tall talk.”

“Yes, isn’t she!” Mrs. March assented, and with a passionate desire for excess in a bad thing, which we all know at times, she looked eagerly about her for proofs of that odious militarism of the empire, which ought to have been conspicuous in the imperial capital; but possibly because the troops were nearly all away at the manoeuvres, there were hardly more in the streets than she had sometimes seen in Washington. Again the German officers signally failed to offer her any rudeness when she met them on the side-walks. There were scarcely any of them, and perhaps that might have been the reason why they were not more aggressive; but a whole company of soldiers marching carelessly up to the palace from the Brandenburg gate, without music, or so much style as our own militia often puts on, regarded her with inoffensive eyes so far as they looked at her. She declared that personally there was nothing against the Prussians; even when in uniform they were kindly and modest-looking men; it was when they got up on pedestals, in bronze or marble, that they, began to bully and to brag.

LXIV.

The dinner which the Marches got at a restaurant on Unter den Linden almost redeemed the avenue from the disgrace it had fallen into with them. It was, the best meal they had yet eaten in Europe, and as to fact and form was a sort of compromise between a French dinner and an English dinner which they did not hesitate to pronounce Prussian. The waiter who served it was a friendly spirit, very sensible of their intelligent appreciation of the dinner; and from him they formed a more respectful opinion of Berlin civilization than they had yet held. After the manner of strangers everywhere they judged the country they were visiting from such of its inhabitants as chance brought them in contact with; and it would really be a good thing for nations that wish to stand well with the world at large to look carefully to the behavior of its cabmen and car conductors, its hotel clerks and waiters, its theatre-ticket sellers and ushers, its policemen and sacristans, its landlords and salesmen; for by these rather than by its society women and its statesmen and divines, is it really judged in the books of travellers; some attention also should be paid to the weather, if the climate is to be praised. In the railroad cafe at Potsdam there was a waiter so rude to the Marches that if they had not been people of great strength of character he would have undone the favorable impression the soldiers and civilians of Berlin generally had been at such pains to produce in them; and throughout the week of early September which they passed there, it rained so much and so bitterly, it was so wet and so cold, that they might have come away thinking it’s the worst climate in the world, if it had not been for a man whom they saw in one of the public gardens pouring a heavy stream from his garden hose upon the shrubbery already soaked and shuddering in the cold. But this convinced them that they were suffering from weather and not from the climate, which must really be hot and dry; and they went home to their hotel and sat contentedly down in a temperature of sixty degrees. The weather, was not always so bad; one day it was dry cold instead of wet cold, with rough, rusty clouds breaking a blue sky; another day, up to eleven in the forenoon, it was like Indian summer; then it changed to a harsh November air; and then it relented and ended so mildly, that they hired chairs in the place before the imperial palace for five pfennigs each, and sat watching the life before them. Motherly women-folk were there knitting; two American girls in chairs near them chatted together; some fine equipages, the only ones they saw in Berlin, went by; a dog and a man (the wife who ought to have been in harness was probably sick, and the poor fellow was forced to take her place) passed dragging a cart; some schoolboys who had hung their satchels upon the low railing were playing about the base of the statue of King William III. in the joyous freedom of German childhood.

They seemed the gayer for the brief moments of sunshine, but to the Americans, who were Southern by virtue of their sky, the brightness had a sense of lurking winter in it, such as they remembered feeling on a sunny day in Quebec. The blue heaven looked sad; but they agreed that it fitly roofed the bit of old feudal Berlin which forms the most ancient wing of the Schloss. This was time-blackened and rude, but at least it did not try to be French, and it overhung the Spree which winds through the city and gives it the greatest charm it has. In fact Berlin, which is otherwise so grandiose without grandeur and so severe without impressiveness, is sympathetic wherever the Spree opens it to the sky. The stream is spanned by many bridges, and bridges cannot well be unpicturesque, especially if they have statues to help them out. The Spree abounds in bridges, and it has a charming habit of slow hay-laden barges; at the landings of the little passenger-steamers which ply upon it there are cafes and summer-gardens, and these even in the inclement air of September suggested a friendly gayety.

The Marches saw it best in the tour of the elevated road in Berlin which they made in an impassioned memory of the elevated road in New York. The brick viaducts which carry this arch the Spree again and again in their course through and around the city, but with never quite such spectacular effects as our spidery tressels, achieve. The stations are pleasant, sometimes with lunch-counters and news-stands, but have not the comic-opera-chalet prettiness of ours, and are not so frequent. The road is not so smooth, the cars not so smooth-running or so swift. On the other hand they are comfortably cushioned, and they are never overcrowded. The line is at times above, at times below the houses, and at times on a level with them, alike in city and in suburbs. The train whirled out of thickly built districts, past the backs of the old houses, into outskirts thinly populated, with new houses springing up without order or continuity among the meadows and vegetable-gardens, and along the ready-made, elm-planted avenues, where wooden fences divided the vacant lots. Everywhere the city was growing out over the country, in blocks and detached edifices of limestone, sandstone, red and yellow brick, larger or smaller, of no more uniformity than our suburban dwellings, but never of their ugliness or lawless offensiveness.

In an effort for the intimate life of the country March went two successive mornings for his breakfast to the Cafe Bauer, which has some admirable wall-printings, and is the chief cafe on Unter den Linden; but on both days there were more people in the paintings than out of them. The second morning the waiter who took his order recognized him and asked, “Wie gestern?” and from this he argued an affectionate constancy in the Berliners, and a hospitable observance of the tastes of strangers. At his bankers, on the other hand, the cashier scrutinized his signature and remarked that it did not look like the signature in his letter of credit, and then he inferred a suspicious mind in the moneyed classes of Prussia; as he had not been treated with such unkind doubt by Hebrew bankers anywhere, he made a mental note that the Jews were politer than the Christians in Germany. In starting for Potsdam he asked a traeger where the Potsdam train was and the man said, “Dat train dare,” and in coming back he helped a fat old lady out of the car, and she thanked him in English. From these incidents, both occurring the same day in the same place, the inference of a widespread knowledge of our language in all classes of the population was inevitable.

In this obvious and easy manner he studied contemporary civilization in the capital. He even carried his researches farther, and went one rainy afternoon to an exhibition of modern pictures in a pavilion of the Thiergarten, where from the small attendance he inferred an indifference to the arts which he would not ascribe to the weather. One evening at a summer theatre where they gave the pantomime of the ‘Puppenfee’ and the operetta of ‘Hansel and Gretel’, he observed that the greater part of the audience was composed of nice plain young girls and children, and he noted that there was no sort of evening dress; from the large number of Americans present he imagined a numerous colony in Berlin, where they mast have an instinctive sense of their co-nationality, since one of them in the stress of getting his hat and overcoat when they all came out, confidently addressed him in English. But he took stock of his impressions with his wife, and they seemed to him so few, after all, that he could not resist a painful sense of isolation in the midst of the environment.

They made a Sunday excursion to the Zoological Gardens in the Thiergarten, with a large crowd of the lower classes, but though they had a great deal of trouble in getting there by the various kinds of horsecars and electric cars, they did not feel that they had got near to the popular life. They endeavored for some sense of Berlin society by driving home in a drosky, and on the way they passed rows of beautiful houses, in French and Italian taste, fronting the deep, damp green park from the Thiergartenstrasse, in which they were confident cultivated and delightful people lived; but they remained to the last with nothing but their unsupported conjecture.

LXV.

Their excursion to Potsdam was the cream of their sojourn in Berlin. They chose for it the first fair morning, and they ran out over the flat sandy plains surrounding the capital, and among the low hills surrounding Potsdam before it actually began to rain.

They wished immediately to see Sans Souci for the great Frederick’s sake, and they drove through a lively shower to the palace, where they waited with a horde of twenty-five other tourists in a gusty colonnade before they were led through Voltaire’s room and Frederick’s death chamber.

The French philosopher comes before the Prussian prince at Sans Souci even in the palatial villa which expresses the wilful caprice of the great Frederick as few edifices have embodied the whims or tastes of their owners. The whole affair is eighteenth-century French, as the Germans conceived it. The gardened terrace from which the low, one-story building, thickly crusted with baroque sculptures, looks down into a many-colored parterre, was luxuriantly French, and sentimentally French the colonnaded front opening to a perspective of artificial ruins, with broken pillars lifting a conscious fragment of architrave against the sky. Within, all again was French in the design, the decoration and the furnishing. At that time there, was in fact no other taste, and Frederick, who despised and disused his native tongue, was resolved upon French taste even in his intimate companionship. The droll story of his coquetry with the terrible free spirit which he got from France to be his guest is vividly reanimated at Sans Souci, where one breathes the very air in which the strangely assorted companions lived, and in which they parted so soon to pursue each other with brutal annoyance on one side, and with merciless mockery on the other. Voltaire was long ago revenged upon his host for all the indignities he suffered from him in their comedy; he left deeply graven upon Frederick’s fame the trace of those lacerating talons which he could strike to the quick; and it is the singular effect of this scene of their brief friendship that one feels there the pre-eminence of the wit in whatever was most important to mankind.

The rain had lifted a little and the sun shone out on the bloom of the lovely parterre where the Marches profited by a smiling moment to wander among the statues and the roses heavy with the shower. Then they walked back to their carriage and drove to the New Palace, which expresses in differing architectural terms the same subjection to an alien ideal of beauty. It is thronged without by delightfully preposterous rococco statues, and within it is rich in all those curiosities and memorials of royalty with which palaces so well know how to fatigue the flesh and spirit of their visitors.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved in the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came to his kingdom. It is beautiful in its rococco way, swept up to on its terrace by most noble staircases, and swaggered over by baroque allegories of all sorts: Everywhere the statues outnumbered the visitors, who may have been kept away by the rain; the statues naturally did not mind it.

Sometime in the midst of their sight-seeing the Marches had dinner in a mildewed restaurant, where a compatriotic accent caught their ear in a voice saying to the waiter, “We are in a hurry.” They looked round and saw that it proceeded from the pretty nose of a young American girl, who sat with a party of young American girls at a neighboring table. Then they perceived that all the people in that restaurant were Americans, mostly young girls, who all looked as if they were in a hurry. But neither their beauty nor their impatience had the least effect with the waiter, who prolonged the dinner at his pleasure, and alarmed the Marches with the misgiving that they should not have time for the final palace on their list.

This was the palace where the father of Frederick, the mad old Frederick William, brought up his children with that severity which Solomon urged but probably did not practise. It is a vast place, but they had time for it all, though the custodian made the most of them as the latest comers of the day, and led them through it with a prolixity as great as their waiter’s. He was a most friendly custodian, and when he found that they had some little notion of what they wanted to see, he mixed zeal with his patronage, and in a manner made them his honored guests. They saw everything but the doorway where the faithful royal father used to lie in wait for his children and beat them, princes and princesses alike, with his knobby cane as they came through. They might have seen this doorway without knowing it; but from the window overlooking the parade-ground where his family watched the manoeuvres of his gigantic grenadiers, they made sure of just such puddles as Frederick William forced his family to sit with their feet in, while they dined alfresco on pork and cabbage; and they visited the room of the Smoking Parliament where he ruled his convives with a rod of iron, and made them the victims of his bad jokes. The measuring-board against which he took the stature of his tall grenadiers is there, and one room is devoted to those masterpieces which he used to paint in the agonies of gout. His chef d’oeuvre contains a figure with two left feet, and there seemed no reason why it might not. have had three. In another room is a small statue of Carlyle, who did so much to rehabilitate the house which the daughter of it, Wilhelmina, did so much to demolish in the regard of men.

The palace is now mostly kept for guests, and there is a chamber where Napoleon slept, which is not likely to be occupied soon by any other self-invited guest of his nation. It is perhaps to keep the princes of Europe humble that hardly a palace on the Continent is without the chamber of this adventurer, who, till he stooped to be like them, was easily their master. Another democracy had here recorded its invasion in the American stoves which the custodian pointed out in the corridor when Mrs. March, with as little delay as possible, had proclaimed their country. The custodian professed an added respect for them from the fact, and if he did not feel it, no doubt he merited the drink money which they lavished on him at parting.

Their driver also was a congenial spirit, and when he let them out of his carriage at the station, he excused the rainy day to them. He was a merry fellow beyond the wont of his nation, and he-laughed at the bad weather, as if it had been a good joke on them.

His gayety, and the red sunset light, which shone on the stems of the pines on the way back to Berlin, contributed to the content in which they reviewed their visit to Potsdam. They agreed that the place was perfectly charming, and that it was incomparably expressive of kingly will and pride. These had done there on the grand scale what all the German princes and princelings had tried to do in imitation and emulation of French splendor. In Potsdam the grandeur, was not a historical growth as at Versailles, but was the effect of family genius, in which there was often the curious fascination of insanity.

They felt this strongly again amidst the futile monuments of the Hohenzollern Museum, in Berlin, where all the portraits, effigies, personal belongings and memorials of that gifted, eccentric race are gathered and historically disposed. The princes of the mighty line who stand out from the rest are Frederick the Great and his infuriate. father; and in the waxen likeness of the son, a small thin figure, terribly spry, and a face pitilessly alert, appears something of the madness which showed in the life of the sire.

They went through many rooms in which the memorials of the kings and queens, the emperors and empresses were carefully ordered, and felt no kindness except before the relics relating to the Emperor Frederick and his mother. In the presence of the greatest of the dynasty they experienced a kind of terror which March expressed, when they were safely away, in the confession of his joy that those people were dead.

LXVI.

The rough weather which made Berlin almost uninhabitable to Mrs. March had such an effect with General Triscoe at Weimar that under the orders of an English-speaking doctor he retreated from it altogether and went to bed. Here he escaped the bronchitis which had attacked him, and his convalesence left him so little to complain of that he could not always keep his temper. In the absence of actual offence, either from his daughter or from Burnamy, his sense of injury took a retroactive form; it centred first in Stoller and the twins; then it diverged toward Rose Adding, his mother and Kenby, and finally involved the Marches in the same measure of inculpation; for they had each and all had part, directly or indirectly, in the chances that brought on his cold.

He owed to Burnamy the comfort of the best room in the hotel, and he was constantly dependent upon his kindness; but he made it evident that he did not over-value Burnamy’s sacrifice and devotion, and that it was not an unmixed pleasure, however great a convenience, to have him about. In giving up his room, Burnamy had proposed going out of the hotel altogether; but General Triscoe heard of this with almost as great vexation as he had accepted the room. He besought him not to go, but so ungraciously that his daughter was ashamed, and tried to atone for his manner by the kindness of her own.

Perhaps General Triscoe would not have been without excuse if he were not eager to have her share with destitute merit the fortune which she had hitherto shared only with him. He was old, and certain luxuries had become habits if not necessaries with him. Of course he did not say this to himself; and still less did he say it to her. But he let her see that he did not enjoy the chance which had thrown them again in such close relations with Burnamy, and he did pot hide his belief that the Marches were somehow to blame for it. This made it impossible for her to write at once to Mrs. March as she had promised; but she was determined that it should not make her unjust to Burnamy. She would not avoid him; she would not let anything that had happened keep her from showing that she felt his kindness and was glad of his help.

Of course they knew no one else in Weimar, and his presence merely as a fellow-countryman would have been precious. He got them a doctor, against General Triscoe’s will; he went for his medicines; he lent him books and papers; he sat with him and tried to amuse him. But with the girl he attempted no return to the situation at Carlsbad; there is nothing like the delicate pride of a young man who resolves to forego unfair advantage in love.

The day after their arrival, when her father was making up for the sleep he had lost by night, she found herself alone in the little reading-room of the hotel with Burnamy for the first time, and she said: “I suppose you must have been all over Weimar by this time.”

“Well, I’ve been here, off and on, almost a month. It’s an interesting place. There’s a good deal of the old literary quality left.”

“And you enjoy that! I saw” — she added this with a little unnecessary flush— “your poem in the paper you lent papa.”

“I suppose I ought to have kept that back. But I couldn’t.” He laughed, and she said:

“You must find a great deal of inspiration in such a literary place.”

“It isn’t lying about loose, exactly.” Even in the serious and perplexing situation in which he found himself he could not help being amused with her unliterary notions of literature, her conventional and commonplace conceptions of it. They had their value with him as those of a more fashionable world than his own, which he believed was somehow a greater world. At the same time he believed that she was now interposing them between the present and the past, and forbidding with them any return to the mood of their last meeting in Carlsbad. He looked at her ladylike composure and unconsciousness, and wondered if she could be the same person and the same person as they who lost themselves in the crowd that night and heard and said words palpitant with fate. Perhaps there had been no such words; perhaps it was all a hallucination. He must leave her to recognize that it was reality; till she did so, he felt bitterly that there was nothing for him but submission and patience; if she never did so, there was nothing for him but acquiescence.

In this talk and in the talks they had afterwards she seemed willing enough to speak of what had happened since: of coming on to Wurzburg with the Addings and of finding the Marches there; of Rose’s collapse, and of his mother’s flight seaward with him in the care of Kenby, who was so fortunately going to Holland, too. He on his side told her of going to Wurzburg for the manoeuvres, and they agreed that it was very strange they had not met.

She did not try to keep their relations from taking the domestic character which was inevitable, and it seemed to him that this in itself was significant of a determination on her part that was fatal to his hopes. With a lover’s indefinite power of blinding himself to what is before his eyes, he believed that if she had been more diffident of him, more uneasy in his presence, he should have had more courage; but for her to breakfast unafraid with him, to meet him at lunch and dinner in the little dining-room where they were often the only guests, and always the only English-speaking guests, was nothing less than prohibitive.

In the hotel service there was one of those men who are porters in this world, but will be angels in the next, unless the perfect goodness of their looks, the constant kindness of their acts, belies them. The Marches had known and loved the man in their brief stay, and he had been the fast friend of Burnamy from the moment they first saw each other at the station. He had tenderly taken possession of General Triscoe on his arrival, and had constituted himself the nurse and keeper of the irascible invalid, in the intervals of going to the trains, with a zeal that often relieved his daughter and Burnamy. The general in fact preferred him to either, and a tacit custom grew up by which when August knocked at his door, and offered himself in his few words of serviceable English, that one of them who happened to be sitting with the general gave way, and left him in charge. The retiring watcher was then apt to encounter the other watcher on the stairs, or in the reading-room, or in the tiny, white-pebbled door-yard at a little table in the shade of the wooden-tubbed evergreens. From the habit of doing this they one day suddenly formed the habit of going across the street to that gardened hollow before and below the Grand-Ducal Museum. There was here a bench in the shelter of some late-flowering bush which the few other frequenters of the place soon recognized as belonging to the young strangers, so that they would silently rise and leave it to them when they saw them coming. Apparently they yielded not only to their right, but to a certain authority which resides in lovers, and which all other men, and especially all other women, like to acknowledge and respect.

In the absence of any civic documents bearing upon the affair it is difficult to establish the fact that this was the character in which Agatha and Burnamy were commonly regarded by the inhabitants of Weimar. But whatever their own notion of their relation was, if it was not that of a Brant and a Brautigam, the people of Weimar would have been puzzled to say what it was. It was known that the gracious young lady’s father, who would naturally have accompanied them, was sick, and in the fact that they were Americans much extenuation was found for whatever was phenomenal in their unencumbered enjoyment of each other’s society.

If their free American association was indistinguishably like the peasant informality which General Triscoe despised in the relations of Kenby and Mrs. Adding, it is to be said in his excuse that he could not be fully cognizant of it, in the circumstances, and so could do nothing to prevent it. His pessimism extended to his health; from the first he believed himself worse than the doctor thought him, and he would have had some other physician if he had not found consolation in their difference of opinion and the consequent contempt which he was enabled to cherish for the doctor in view of the man’s complete ignorance of the case. In proof of his own better understanding of it, he remained in bed some time after the doctor said he might get up.

Nearly ten days had passed before he left his room, and it was not till then that he clearly saw how far affairs had gone with his daughter and Burnamy, though even then his observance seemed to have anticipated theirs. He found them in a quiet acceptance of the fortune which had brought them together, so contented that they appeared to ask nothing more of it. The divine patience and confidence of their youth might sometimes have had almost the effect of indifference to a witness who had seen its evolution from the moods of the first few days of their reunion in Weimar. To General Triscoe, however, it looked like an understanding which had been made without reference to his wishes, and had not been directly brought to his knowledge.

“Agatha,” he said, after due note of a gay contest between her and Burnamy over the pleasure and privilege of ordering his supper sent to his room when he had gone back to it from his first afternoon in the open air, “how long is that young man going to stay in Weimar?”

“Why, I don’t know!” she answered, startled from her work of beating the sofa pillows into shape, and pausing with one of them in her hand. “I never asked him.” She looked down candidly into his face where he sat in an easy-chair waiting for her arrangement of the sofa. “What makes you ask?”

He answered with another question. “Does he know that we had thought of staying here?”

“Why, we’ve always talked of that, haven’t we? Yes, he knows it. Didn’t you want him to know it, papa? You ought to have begun on the ship, then. Of course I’ve asked him what sort of place it was. I’m sorry if you didn’t want me to.”

“Have I said that? It’s perfectly easy to push on to Paris. Unless—”

“Unless what?” Agatha dropped the pillow, and listened respectfully. But in spite of her filial attitude she could not keep her youth and strength and courage from quelling the forces of the elderly man.

He said querulously, “I don’t see why you take that tone with me. You certainly know what I mean. But if you don’t care to deal openly with me, I won’t ask you.” He dropped his eyes from her face, and at the same time a deep blush began to tinge it, growing up from her neck to her forehead. “You must know — you’re not a child,” he continued, still with averted eyes, “that this sort of thing can’t go on… It must be something else, or it mustn’t be anything at all. I don’t ask you for your confidence, and you know that I’ve never sought to control you.”

This was not the least true, but Agatha answered, either absently or provisionally, “No.”

“And I don’t seek to do so now. If you have nothing that you wish to tell me—”

He waited, and after what seemed a long time, she asked as if she had not heard him, “Will you lie down a little before your supper, papa?”

“I will lie down when I feel like it,” he answered. “Send August with the supper; he can look after me.”

His resentful tone, even more than his words, dismissed her, but she left him without apparent grievance, saying quietly, “I will send August.”

LXVII.

Agatha did not come down to supper with Burnamy. She asked August, when she gave him her father’s order, to have a cup of tea sent to her room, where, when it came, she remained thinking so long that it was rather tepid by the time she drank it.

Then she went to her window, and looked out, first above and next below. Above, the moon was hanging over the gardened hollow before the Museum with the airy lightness of an American moon. Below was Burnamy behind the tubbed evergreens, sitting tilted in his chair against the house wall, with the spark of his cigar fainting and flashing like an American firefly. Agatha went down to the door, after a little delay, and seemed surprised to find him there; at least she said, “Oh!” in a tone of surprise.

Burnamy stood up, and answered, “Nice night.”

“Beautiful!” she breathed. “I didn’t suppose the sky in Germany could ever be so clear.”

“It seems to be doing its best.”

“The flowers over there look like ghosts in the light,” she said dreamily.

“They’re not. Don’t you want to get your hat and wrap, and go over and expose the fraud?”

“Oh,” she answered, as if it were merely a question of the hat and wrap,
“I have them.”

They sauntered through the garden walks for a while, long enough to have ascertained that there was not a veridical phantom among the flowers, if they had been looking, and then when they came to their accustomed seat, they sat down, and she said, “I don’t know that I’ve seen the moon so clear since we left Carlsbad.” At the last word his heart gave a jump that seemed to lodge it in his throat and kept him from speaking, so that she could resume without interruption, “I’ve got something of yours, that you left at the Posthof. The girl that broke the dishes found it, and Lili gave it to Mrs. March for you.” This did not account for Agatha’s having the thing, whatever it was; but when she took a handkerchief from her belt, and put out her hand with it toward him, he seemed to find that her having it had necessarily followed. He tried to take it from her, but his own hand trembled so that it clung to hers, and he gasped, “Can’t you say now, what you wouldn’t say then?”

The logical sequence was no more obvious than be fore; but she apparently felt it in her turn as he had felt it in his. She whispered back, “Yes,” and then she could not get out anything more till she entreated in a half-stifled voice, “Oh, don’t!”

“No, no!” he panted. “I won’t — I oughtn’t to have done it — I beg your pardon — I oughtn’t to have spoken, — even — I—”

She returned in a far less breathless and tremulous fashion, but still between laughing and crying, “I meant to make you. And now, if you’re ever sorry, or I’m ever too topping about anything, you can be perfectly free to say that you’d never have spoken if you hadn’t seen that I wanted you to.”

“But I didn’t see any such thing,” he protested. “I spoke because I couldn’t help it any longer.”

She laughed triumphantly. “Of course you think so! And that shows that you are only a man after all; in spite of your finessing. But I am going to have the credit of it. I knew that you were holding back because you were too proud, or thought you hadn’t the right, or something. Weren’t you?” She startled him with the sudden vehemence of her challenge: “If you pretend, that you weren’t I shall never forgive you!”

“But I was! Of course I was. I was afraid—”

“Isn’t that what I said?” She triumphed over him with another laugh, and cowered a little closer to him, if that could be.

They were standing, without knowing how they had got to their feet; and now without any purpose of the kind, they began to stroll again among the garden paths, and to ask and to answer questions, which touched every point of their common history, and yet left it a mine of inexhaustible knowledge for all future time. Out of the sweet and dear delight of this encyclopedian reserve two or three facts appeared with a present distinctness. One of these was that Burnamy had regarded her refusal to be definite at Carlsbad as definite refusal, and had meant never to see her again, and certainly never to speak again of love to her. Another point was that she had not resented his coming back that last night, but had been proud and happy in it as proof of his love, and had always meant somehow to let him know that she was torched by his trusting her enough to come back while he was still under that cloud with Mr. Stoller. With further logic, purely of the heart, she acquitted him altogether of wrong in that affair, and alleged in proof, what Mr. Stoller had said of it to Mr. March. Burnamy owned that he knew what Stoller had said, but even in his present condition he could not accept fully her reading of that obscure passage of his life. He preferred to put the question by, and perhaps neither of them cared anything about it except as it related to the fact that they were now each other’s forever.

They agreed that they must write to Mr. and Mrs. March at once; or at least, Agatha said, as soon as she had spoken to her father. At her mention of her father she was aware of a doubt, a fear, in Burnamy which expressed itself by scarcely more than a spiritual consciousness from his arm to the hands which she had clasped within it. “He has always appreciated you,” she said courageously, “and I know he will see it in the right light.”

She probably meant no more than to affirm her faith in her own ability finally to bring her father to a just mind concerning it; but Burnamy accepted her assurance with buoyant hopefulness, and said he would see General Triscoe the first thing in the morning.

“No, I will see him,” she said, “I wish to see him first; he will expect it of me. We had better go in, now,” she added, but neither made any motion for the present to do so. On the contrary, they walked in the other direction, and it was an hour after Agatha declared their duty in the matter before they tried to fulfil it.

Then, indeed, after they returned to the hotel, she lost no time in going to her father beyond that which must be given to a long hand-pressure under the fresco of the five poets on the stairs landing, where her ways and Burnamy’s parted. She went into her own room, and softly opened the door into her father’s and listened.

“Well?” he said in a sort of challenging voice.

“Have you been asleep?” she asked.

“I’ve just blown out my light. What has kept you?”

She did not reply categorically. Standing there in the sheltering dark, she said, “Papa, I wasn’t very candid with you, this afternoon. I am engaged to Mr. Burnamy.”

“Light the candle,” said her father. “Or no,” he added before she could do so. “Is it quite settled?”

“Quite,” she answered in a voice that admitted of no doubt. “That is, as far as it can be, without you.”

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Agatha,” said the general. “And let me try to get to sleep. You know I don’t like it, and you know I can’t help it.”

“Yes,” the girl assented.

“Then go to bed,” said the general concisely.

Agatha did not obey her father. She thought she ought to kiss him, but she decided that she had better postpone this; so she merely gave him a tender goodnight, to which he made no response, and shut herself into her own room, where she remained sitting and staring out into the moonlight, with a smile that never left her lips.

When the moon sank below the horizon, the sky was pale with the coming day, but before it was fairly dawn, she saw something white, not much greater than some moths, moving before her window. She pulled the valves open and found it a bit of paper attached to a thread dangling from above. She broke it loose and in the morning twilight she read the great central truth of the universe:

“I love you. L. J. B.”

She wrote under the tremendous inspiration:

“So do I. Don’t be silly. A. T.”

She fastened the paper to the thread again, and gave it a little twitch. She waited for the low note of laughter which did not fail to flutter down from above; then she threw herself upon the bed, and fell asleep.

It was not so late as she thought when she woke, and it seemed, at breakfast, that Burnamy had been up still earlier. Of the three involved in the anxiety of the night before General Triscoe was still respited from it by sleep, but he woke much more haggard than either of the young people. They, in fact, were not at all haggard; the worst was over, if bringing their engagement to his knowledge was the worst; the formality of asking his consent which Burnamy still had to go through was unpleasant, but after all it was a formality. Agatha told him everything that had passed between herself and her father, and if it had not that cordiality on his part which they could have wished it was certainly not hopelessly discouraging.

They agreed at breakfast that Burnamy had better have it over as quickly as possible, and he waited only till August came down with the general’s tray before going up to his room. The young fellow did not feel more at his ease than the elder meant he should in taking the chair to which the general waved him from where he lay in bed; and there was no talk wasted upon the weather between them.

“I suppose I know what you have come for, Mr. Burnamy,” said General Triscoe in a tone which was rather judicial than otherwise, “and I suppose you know why you have come.” The words certainly opened the way for Burnamy, but he hesitated so long to take it that the general had abundant time to add, “I don’t pretend that this event is unexpected, but I should like to know what reason you have for thinking I should wish you to marry my daughter. I take it for granted that you are attached to each other, and we won’t waste time on that point. Not to beat about the bush, on the next point, let me ask at once what your means of supporting her are. How much did you earn on that newspaper in Chicago?”

“Fifteen hundred dollars,” Burnamy answered, promptly enough.

“Did you earn anything more, say within the last year?”

“I got three hundred dollars advance copyright for a book I sold to a publisher.” The glory had not yet faded from the fact in Burnamy’s mind.

“Eighteen hundred. What did you get for your poem in March’s book?”

“That’s a very trifling matter: fifteen dollars.”

“And your salary as private secretary to that man Stoller?”

“Thirty dollars a week, and my expenses. But I wouldn’t take that,
General Triscoe,” said Burnamy.

General Triscoe, from his ‘lit de justice’, passed this point in silence.
“Have you any one dependent on you?”

“My mother; I take care of my mother,” answered Burnamy, proudly.

“Since you have broken with Stoller, what are your prospects?”

“I have none.”

“Then you don’t expect to support my daughter; you expect to live upon her means.”

“I expect to do nothing of the kind!” cried Burnamy. “I should be ashamed — I should feel disgraced — I should — I don’t ask you — I don’t ask her till I have the means to support her—”

“If you were very fortunate,” continued the general, unmoved by the young fellow’s pain, and unperturbed by the fact that he had himself lived upon his wife’s means as long as she lived, and then upon his daughter’s, “if you went back to Stoller—”

“I wouldn’t go back to him. I don’t say he’s knowingly a rascal, but he’s ignorantly a rascal, and he proposed a rascally thing to me. I behaved badly to him, and I’d give anything to undo the wrong I let him do himself; but I’ll never go back to him.”

“If you went back, on your old salary,” the general persisted pitilessly, “you would be very fortunate if you brought your earnings up to twenty-five hundred a year.”

“Yes—”

“And how far do you think that would go in supporting my daughter on the scale she is used to? I don’t speak of your mother, who has the first claim upon you.”

Burnamy sat dumb; and his head which he had lifted indignantly when the question was of Stoller, began to sink.

The general went on. “You ask me to give you my daughter when you haven’t money enough to keep her in gowns; you ask me to give her to a stranger—”

“Not quite a stranger, General Triscoe,” Burnamy protested. “You have known me for three months at least, and any one who knows me in Chicago will tell you—”

“A stranger, and worse than a stranger,” the general continued, so pleased with the logical perfection of his position that he almost smiled, and certainly softened toward Burnamy. “It isn’t a question of liking you, Mr. Burnamy, but of knowing you; my daughter likes you; so do the Marches; so does everybody who has met you. I like you myself. You’ve done me personally a thousand kindnesses. But I know very little of you, in spite of our three months’ acquaintance; and that little is — But you shall judge for yourself! You were in the confidential employ of a man who trusted you, and you let him betray himself.”

“I did. I don’t excuse it. The thought of it burns like fire. But it wasn’t done maliciously; it wasn’t done falsely; it was done inconsiderately; and when it was done, it seemed irrevocable. But it wasn’t; I could have prevented, I could have stooped the mischief; and I didn’t! I can never outlive that.”

“I know,” said the general relentlessly, “that you have never attempted any defence. That has been to your credit with me. It inclined me to overlook your unwarranted course in writing to my daughter, when you told her you would never see her again. What did you expect me to think, after that, of your coming back to see her? Or didn’t you expect me to know it?”

“I expected you to know it; I knew she would tell you. But I don’t excuse that, either. It was acting a lie to come back. All I can say is that I had to see her again for one last time.”

“And to make sure that it was to be the last time, you offered yourself to her.”

“I couldn’t help doing that.”

“I don’t say you could. I don’t judge the facts at all. I leave them altogether to you; and you shall say what a man in my position ought to say to such a man as you have shown yourself.”

“No, I will say.” The door into the adjoining room was flung open, and
Agatha flashed in from it.

Her father looked coldly at her impassioned face. “Have you been listening?” he asked.

“I have been hearing—”

“Oh!” As nearly as a man could, in bed, General Triscoe shrugged.

“I suppose I had, a right to be in my own room. I couldn’t help hearing; and I was perfectly astonished at you, papa, the cruel way you went on, after all you’ve said about Mr. Stoller, and his getting no more than he deserved.”

“That doesn’t justify me,” Burnamy began, but she cut him short almost as severely as she — had dealt with her father.

“Yes, it does! It justifies you perfectly! And his wanting you to falsify the whole thing afterwards, more than justifies you.”

Neither of the men attempted anything in reply to her casuistry; they both looked equally posed by it, for different reasons; and Agatha went on as vehemently as before, addressing herself now to one and now to the other.

“And besides, if it didn’t justify you, what you have done yourself would; and your never denying it, or trying to excuse it, makes it the same as if you hadn’t done it, as far as you are concerned; and that is all I care for.” Burnamy started, as if with the sense of having heard something like this before, and with surprise at hearing it now; and she flushed a little as she added tremulously, “And I should never, never blame you for it, after that; it’s only trying to wriggle out of things which I despise, and you’ve never done that. And he simply had to come back,” she turned to her father, “and tell me himself just how it was. And you said yourself, papa — or the same as said — that he had no right to suppose I was interested in his affairs unless he — unless — And I should never have forgiven him, if he hadn’t told me then that he that he had come back because he — felt the way he did. I consider that that exonerated him for breaking his word, completely. If he hadn’t broken his word I should have thought he had acted very cruelly and — and strangely. And ever since then, he has behaved so nobly, so honorably, so delicately, that I don’t believe he would ever have said anything again — if I hadn’t fairly forced him. Yes! Yes, I did!” she cried at a movement of remonstrance from Burnamy. “And I shall always be proud of you for it.” Her father stared steadfastly at her, and he only lifted his eyebrows, for change of expression, when she went over to where Burnamy stood, and put her hand in his with a certain childlike impetuosity. “And as for the rest,” she declared, “everything I have is his; just as everything of his would be mine if I had nothing. Or if he wishes to take me without anything, then he can have me so, and I sha’n’t be afraid but we can get along somehow.” She added, “I have managed without a maid, ever since I left home, and poverty has no terrors for me!”

LXVIII.

General Triscoe submitted to defeat with the patience which soldiers learn. He did not submit amiably; that would have been out of character, and perhaps out of reason; but Burnamy and Agatha were both so amiable that they supplied good-humor for all. They flaunted their rapture in her father’s face as little as they could, but he may have found their serene satisfaction, their settled confidence in their fate, as hard to bear as a more boisterous happiness would have been.

It was agreed among them all that they were to return soon to America, and Burnamy was to find some sort of literary or journalistic employment in New York. She was much surer than he that this could be done with perfect ease; but they were of an equal mind that General Triscoe was not to be disturbed in any of his habits, or vexed in the tenor of his living; and until Burnamy was at least self-supporting there must be no talk of their being married.

The talk of their being engaged was quite enough for the time. It included complete and minute auto-biographies on both sides, reciprocal analyses of character, a scientifically exhaustive comparison of tastes, ideas and opinions; a profound study of their respective chins, noses, eyes, hands, heights, complexions, moles and freckles, with some account of their several friends.

In this occupation, which was profitably varied by the confession of what they had each thought and felt and dreamt concerning the other at every instant since they met, they passed rapidly the days which the persistent anxiety of General Triscoe interposed before the date of their leaving Weimar for Paris, where it was arranged that they should spend a month before sailing for New York. Burnamy had a notion, which Agatha approved, of trying for something there on the New York-Paris Chronicle; and if he got it they might not go home at once. His gains from that paper had eked out his copyright from his book, and had almost paid his expenses in getting the material which he had contributed to it. They were not so great, however, but that his gold reserve was reduced to less than a hundred dollars, counting the silver coinages which had remained to him in crossing and recrossing frontiers. He was at times dimly conscious of his finances, but he buoyantly disregarded the facts, as incompatible with his status as Agatha’s betrothed, if not unworthy of his character as a lover in the abstract.

The afternoon before they were to leave Weimar, they spent mostly in the garden before the Grand-Ducal Museum, in a conference so important that when it came on to rain, at one moment, they put up Burnamy’s umbrella, and continued to sit under it rather than interrupt the proceedings even to let Agatha go back to the hotel and look after her father’s packing. Her own had been finished before dinner, so as to leave her the whole afternoon for their conference, and to allow her father to remain in undisturbed possession of his room as long as possible.

What chiefly remained to be put into the general’s trunk were his coats and trousers, hanging in the closet, and August took these down, and carefully folded and packed them. Then, to make sure that nothing had been forgotten, Agatha put a chair into the closet when she came in, and stood on it to examine the shelf which stretched above the hooks.

There seemed at first to be nothing on it, and then there seemed to be something in the further corner, which when it was tiptoed for, proved to be a bouquet of flowers, not so faded as to seem very old; the blue satin ribbon which they were tied up with, and which hung down half a yard, was of entire freshness except far the dust of the shelf where it had lain.

Agatha backed out into the room with her find in her hand, and examined it near to, and then at arm’s length. August stood by with a pair of the general’s trousers lying across his outstretched hands, and as Agatha absently looked round at him, she caught a light of intelligence in his eyes which changed her whole psychological relation to the withered bouquet. Till then it had been a lifeless, meaningless bunch of flowers, which some one, for no motive, had tossed up on that dusty shelf in the closet. At August’s smile it became something else. Still she asked lightly enough, “Was ist loss, August?”

His smile deepened and broadened. “Fur die Andere,” he explained.

Agatha demanded in English, “What do you mean by feardy ondery?”

“Oddaw lehdy.”

“Other lady?” August nodded, rejoicing in big success, and Agatha closed the door into her own room, where the general had been put for the time so as to be spared the annoyance of the packing; then she sat down with her hands in her lap, and the bouquet in her hands. “Now, August,” she said very calmly, “I want you to tell me-ich wunsche Sie zu mir sagen — what other lady — wass andere Dame — these flowers belonged to — diese Blumen gehorte zu. Verstehen Sie?”

August nodded brightly, and with German carefully adjusted to Agatha’s capacity, and with now and then a word or phrase of English, he conveyed that before she and her Herr Father had appeared, there had been in Weimar another American Fraulein with her Frau Mother; they had not indeed staid in that hotel, but had several times supped there with the young Herr Bornahmee, who was occupying that room before her Herr Father. The young Herr had been much about with these American Damen, driving and walking with them, and sometimes dining or supping with them at their hotel, The Elephant. August had sometimes carried notes to them from the young Herr, and he had gone for the bouquet which the gracious Fraulein was holding, on the morning of the day that the American Damen left by the train for Hanover.

August was much helped and encouraged throughout by the friendly intelligence of the gracious Fraulein, who smiled radiantly in clearing up one dim point after another, and who now and then supplied the English analogues which he sought in his effort to render his German more luminous.

At the end she returned to the work of packing, in which she directed him, and sometimes assisted him with her own hands, having put the bouquet on the mantel to leave herself free. She took it up again and carried it into her own room, when she went with August to summon her father back to his. She bade August say to the young Herr, if he saw him, that she was going to sup with her father, and August gave her message to Burnamy, whom he met on the stairs coming down as he was going up with their tray.

Agatha usually supped with her father, but that evening Burnamy was less able than usual to bear her absence in the hotel dining-room, and he went up to a cafe in the town for his supper. He did not stay long, and when he returned his heart gave a joyful lift at sight of Agatha looking out from her balcony, as if she were looking for him. He made her a gay flourishing bow, lifting his hat high, and she came down to meet him at the hotel door. She had her hat on and jacket over one arm and she joined him at once for the farewell walk he proposed in what they had agreed to call their garden.

She moved a little ahead of him, and when they reached the place where they always sat, she shifted her jacket to the other arm and uncovered the hand in which she had been carrying the withered bouquet. “Here is something I found in your closet, when I was getting papa’s things out.”

“Why, what is it?” he asked innocently, as he took it from her.

“A bouquet, apparently,” she answered, as he drew the long ribbons through his fingers, and looked at the flowers curiously, with his head aslant.

“Where did you get it?”

“On the shelf.”

It seemed a long time before Burnamy said with a long sigh, as of final recollection, “Oh, yes,” and then he said nothing; and they did not sit down, but stood looking at each other.

“Was it something you got for me, and forgot to give me?” she asked in a voice which would not have misled a woman, but which did its work with the young man.

He laughed and said, “Well, hardly! The general has been in the room ever since you came.”

“Oh, yes. Then perhaps somebody left it there before you had the room?”

Burnamy was silent again, but at last he said, “No, I flung it up there I had forgotten all about it.”

“And you wish me to forget about it, too?” Agatha asked in a gayety of tone that still deceived him.

“It would only be fair. You made me,” he rejoined, and there was something so charming in his words and way, that she would have been glad to do it.

But she governed herself against the temptation and said, “Women are not good at forgetting, at least till they know what.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you, if you want to know,” he said with a laugh, and at the words she — sank provisionally in their accustomed seat. He sat down beside her, but not so near as usual, and he waited so long before he began that it seemed as if he had forgotten again. “Why, it’s nothing. Miss Etkins and her mother were here before you came, and this is a bouquet that I meant to give her at the train when she left. But I decided I wouldn’t, and I threw it onto the shelf in the closet.”

“May I ask why you thought of taking a bouquet to her at the train?”

“Well, she and her mother — I had been with them a good deal, and I thought it would be civil.”

“And why did you decide not to be civil?”

“I didn’t want it to look like more than civility.”

“Were they here long?”

“About a week. They left just after the Marches came.”

Agatha seemed not to heed the answer she had exacted. She sat reclined in the corner of the seat, with her head drooping. After an interval which was long to Burnamy she began to pull at a ring on the third finger of her left hand, absently, as if she did not know what she was doing; but when she had got it off she held it towards Burnamy and said quietly, “I think you had better have this again,” and then she rose and moved slowly and weakly away.

He had taken the ring mechanically from her, and he stood a moment bewildered; then he pressed after her.

“Agatha, do you — you don’t mean—”

“Yes,” she said, without looking round at his face, which she knew was close to her shoulder. “It’s over. It isn’t what you’ve done. It’s what you are. I believed in you, in spite of what you did to that man — and your coming back when you said you wouldn’t — and — But I see now that what you did was you; it was your nature; and I can’t believe in you any more.”

“Agatha!” he implored. “You’re not going to be so unjust! There was nothing between you and me when that girl was here! I had a right to—”

“Not if you really cared for me! Do you think I would have flirted with any one so soon, if I had cared for you as you pretended you did for me that night in Carlsbad? Oh, I don’t say you’re false. But you’re fickle—”

“But I’m not fickle! From the first moment I saw you, I never cared for any one but you!”

“You have strange ways of showing your devotion. Well, say you are not fickle. Say, that I’m fickle. I am. I have changed my mind. I see that it would never do. I leave you free to follow all the turning and twisting of your fancy.” She spoke rapidly, almost breathlessly, and she gave him no chance to get out the words that seemed to choke him. She began to run, but at the door of the hotel she stopped and waited till he came stupidly up. “I have a favor to ask, Mr. Burnamy. I beg you will not see me again, if you can help it before we go to-morrow. My father and I are indebted to you for too many kindnesses, and you mustn’t take any more trouble on our account. August can see us off in the morning.”

She nodded quickly, and was gone in-doors while he was yet struggling with his doubt of the reality of what had all so swiftly happened.

General Triscoe was still ignorant of any change in the status to which he had reconciled himself with so much difficulty, when he came down to get into the omnibus for the train. Till then he had been too proud to ask what had become of Burnamy, though he had wondered, but now he looked about and said impatiently, “I hope that young man isn’t going to keep us waiting.”

Agatha was pale and worn with sleeplessness, but she said firmly, “He isn’t going, papa. I will tell you in the train. August will see to the tickets and the baggage.”

August conspired with the traeger to get them a first-class compartment to themselves. But even with the advantages of this seclusion Agatha’s confidences to her father were not full. She told her father that her engagement was broken for reasons that did not mean anything very wrong in Mr. Burnamy but that convinced her they could never be happy together. As she did not give the reasons, he found a natural difficulty in accepting them, and there was something in the situation which appealed strongly to his contrary-mindedness. Partly from this, partly from his sense of injury in being obliged so soon to adjust himself to new conditions, and partly from his comfortable feeling of security from an engagement to which his assent had been forced, he said, “I hope you’re not making a mistake.”

“Oh, no,” she answered, and she attested her conviction by a burst of sobbing that lasted well on the way to the first stop of the train.

LXIX.

It would have been always twice as easy to go direct from Berlin to the Hague through Hanover; but the Marches decided to go by Frankfort and the Rhine, because they wished to revisit the famous river, which they remembered from their youth, and because they wished to stop at Dusseldorf, where Heinrich Heine was born. Without this Mrs. March, who kept her husband up to his early passion for the poet with a feeling that she was defending him from age in it, said that their silver wedding journey would not be complete; and he began himself to think that it would be interesting.

They took a sleeping-car for Frankfort and they woke early as people do in sleeping-cars everywhere. March dressed and went out for a cup of the same coffee of which sleeping-car buffets have the awful secret in Europe as well as America, and for a glimpse of the twilight landscape. One gray little town, towered and steepled and red-roofed within its mediaeval walls, looked as if it would have been warmer in something more. There was a heavy dew, if not a light frost, over all, and in places a pale fog began to lift from the low hills. Then the sun rose without dispersing the cold, which was afterwards so severe in their room at the Russischer Hof in Frankfort that in spite of the steam-radiators they sat shivering in all their wraps till breakfast-time.

There was no steam on in the radiators, of course; when they implored the portier for at least a lamp to warm their hands by he turned on all the electric lights without raising the temperature in the slightest degree. Amidst these modern comforts they were so miserable that they vowed each other to shun, as long as they were in Germany, or at least while the summer lasted, all hotels which were steam-heated and electric-lighted. They heated themselves somewhat with their wrath, and over their breakfast they relented so far as to suffer themselves a certain interest in the troops of all arms beginning to pass the hotel. They were fragments of the great parade, which had ended the day before, and they were now drifting back to their several quarters of the empire. Many of them were very picturesque, and they had for the boys and girls running before and beside them, the charm which armies and circus processions have for children everywhere. But their passage filled with cruel anxiety a large old dog whom his master had left harnessed to a milk-cart before the hotel door; from time to time he lifted up his voice, and called to the absentee with hoarse, deep barks that almost shook him from his feet.

The day continued blue and bright and cold, and the Marches gave the morning to a rapid survey of the city, glad that it was at least not wet. What afterwards chiefly remained to them was the impression of an old town as quaint almost and as Gothic as old Hamburg, and a new town, handsome and regular, and, in the sudden arrest of some streets, apparently overbuilt. The modern architectural taste was of course Parisian; there is no other taste for the Germans; but in the prevailing absence of statues there was a relief from the most oppressive characteristic of the imperial capital which was a positive delight. Some sort of monument to the national victory over France there must have been; but it must have been unusually inoffensive, for it left no record of itself in the travellers’ consciousness. They were aware of gardened squares and avenues, bordered by stately dwellings, of dignified civic edifices, and of a vast and splendid railroad station, such as the state builds even in minor European cities, but such as our paternal corporations have not yet given us anywhere in America. They went to the Zoological Garden, where they heard the customary Kalmucks at their public prayers behind a high board fence; and as pilgrims from the most plutrocratic country in the world March insisted that they must pay their devoirs at the shrine of the Rothschilds, whose natal banking-house they revered from the outside.

It was a pity, he said, that the Rothschilds were not on his letter of credit; he would have been willing to pay tribute to the Genius of Finance in the percentage on at least ten pounds. But he consoled himself by reflecting that he did not need the money; and he consoled Mrs. March for their failure to penetrate to the interior of the Rothschilds’ birthplace by taking her to see the house where Goethe was born. The public is apparently much more expected there, and in the friendly place they were no doubt much more welcome than they would have been in the Rothschild house. Under that roof they renewed a happy moment of Weimar, which after the lapse of a week seemed already so remote. They wondered, as they mounted the stairs from the basement opening into a clean little court, how Burnamy was getting on, and whether it had yet come to that understanding between him and Agatha, which Mrs. March, at least, had meant to be inevitable. Then they became part of some such sight-seeing retinue as followed the custodian about in the Goethe horse in Weimar, and of an emotion indistinguishable from that of their fellow sight-seers. They could make sure, afterwards, of a personal pleasure in a certain prescient classicism of the house. It somehow recalled both the Goethe houses at Weimar, and it somehow recalled Italy. It is a separate house of two floors above the entrance, which opens to a little court or yard, and gives access by a decent stairway to the living-rooms. The chief of these is a sufficiently dignified parlor or salon, and the most important is the little chamber in the third story where the poet first opened his eyes to the light which he rejoiced in for so long a life, and which, dying, he implored to be with him more. It is as large as his death-chamber in Weimar, where he breathed this prayer, and it looks down into the Italian-looking court, where probably he noticed the world for the first time, and thought it a paved enclosure thirty or forty feet square. In the birth-room they keep his puppet theatre, and the place is fairly suggestive of his childhood; later, in his youth, he could look from the parlor windows and see the house where his earliest love dwelt. So much remains of Goethe in the place where he was born, and as such things go, it is not a little. The house is that of a prosperous and well-placed citizen, and speaks of the senatorial quality in his family which Heine says he was fond of recalling, rather than the sartorial quality of the ancestor who, again as Heine says, mended the Republic’s breeches.

From the Goethe house, one drives by the Goethe monument to the Romer, the famous town-hall of the old free imperial city which Frankfort once was; and by this route the Marches drove to it, agreeing with their coachman that he was to keep as much in the sun as possible. It was still so cold that when they reached the Romer, and he stopped in a broad blaze of the only means of heating that they have in Frankfort in the summer, the travellers were loath to leave it for the chill interior, where the German emperors were elected for so many centuries. As soon as an emperor was chosen, in the great hall effigied round with the portraits of his predecessors, he hurried out in the balcony, ostensibly to show himself to the people, but really, March contended, to warm up a little in the sun. The balcony was undergoing repairs that day, and the travellers could not go out on it; but under the spell of the historic interest of the beautiful old Gothic place, they lingered in the interior till they were half-torpid with the cold. Then she abandoned to him the joint duty of viewing the cathedral, and hurried to their carriage where she basked in the sun till he came to her. He returned shivering, after a half-hour’s absence, and pretended that she had missed the greatest thing in the world, but as he could never be got to say just what she had lost, and under the closest cross-examination could not prove that this cathedral was memorably different from hundreds of other fourteenth-century cathedrals, she remained in a lasting content with the easier part she had chosen. His only definite impression at the cathedral seemed to be confined to a Bostonian of gloomily correct type, whom he had seen doing it with his Baedeker, and not letting an object of interest escape; and his account of her fellow-townsman reconciled Mrs. March more and more to not having gone.

As it was warmer out-doors than in-doors at Frankfort, and as the breadth of sunshine increased with the approach of noon they gave the rest of the morning to driving about and ignorantly enjoying the outside of many Gothic churches, whose names even they did not trouble themselves to learn. They liked the river Main whenever they came to it, because it was so lately from Wurzburg, and because it was so beautiful with its bridges, old and new, and its boats of many patterns. They liked the market-place in front of the Romer not only because it was full of fascinating bargains in curious crockery and wooden-ware, but because there was scarcely any shade at all in it. They read from their Baedeker that until the end of the last century no Jew was suffered to enter the marketplace, and they rejoiced to find from all appearances that the Jews had been making up for their unjust exclusion ever since. They were almost as numerous there as the Anglo-Saxons were everywhere else in Frankfort. These, both of the English and American branches of the race, prevailed in the hotel diningroom, where the Marches had a mid-day dinner so good that it almost made amends for the steam-heating and electric-lighting.

As soon as possible after dinner they took the train for Mayence, and ran Rhinewards through a pretty country into what seemed a milder climate. It grew so much milder, apparently, that a lady in their compartment to whom March offered his forward-looking seat, ordered the window down when the guard came, without asking their leave. Then the climate proved much colder, and Mrs. March cowered under her shawls the rest of the way, and would not be entreated to look at the pleasant level landscape near, or the hills far off. He proposed to put up the window as peremptorily as it had been put down, but she stayed him with a hoarse whisper, “She may be another Baroness!” At first he did not know what she meant, then he remembered the lady whose claims to rank her presence had so poorly enforced on the way to Wurzburg, and he perceived that his wife was practising a wise forbearance with their fellow-passengers, and giving her a chance to turn out any sort of highhote she chose. She failed to profit by the opportunity; she remained simply a selfish, disagreeable woman, of no more perceptible distinction than their other fellow-passenger, a little commercial traveller from Vienna (they resolved from his appearance and the lettering on his valise that he was no other), who slept with a sort of passionate intensity all the way to Mayence.

LXX.

The Main widened and swam fuller as they approached the Rhine, and flooded the low-lying fields in-places with a pleasant effect under a wet sunset. When they reached the station in Mayence they drove interminably to the hotel they had chosen on the river-shore, through a city handsomer and cleaner than any American city they could think of, and great part of the way by a street of dwellings nobler, Mrs. March owned, than even Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. It was planted, like that, with double rows of trees, but lacked its green lawns; and at times the sign of Weinhandlung at a corner, betrayed that there was no such restriction against shops as keeps the Boston street so sacred. Otherwise they had to confess once more that any inferior city of Germany is of a more proper and dignified presence than the most parse-proud metropolis in America. To be sure, they said, the German towns had generally a thousand years’ start; but all the same the fact galled them.

It was very bleak, though very beautiful when they stopped before their hotel on the Rhine, where all their impalpable memories of their visit to Mayence thirty years earlier precipitated themselves into something tangible. There were the reaches of the storied and fabled stream with its boats and bridges and wooded shores and islands; there were the spires and towers and roofs of the town on either bank crowding to the river’s brink; and there within-doors was the stately portier in gold braid, and the smiling, bowing, hand-rubbing landlord, alluring them to his most expensive rooms, which so late in the season he would fain have had them take. But in a little elevator, that mounted slowly, very slowly, in the curve of the stairs, they went higher to something lower, and the landlord retired baked, and left them to the ministrations of the serving-men who arrived with their large and small baggage. All these retired in turn when they asked to have a fire lighted in the stove, without which Mrs. March would never have taken the fine stately rooms, and sent back a pretty young girl to do it. She came indignant, not because she had come lugging a heavy hod of coal and a great arm-load of wood, but because her sense of fitness was outraged by the strange demand.

“What!” she cried. “A fire in September!”

“Yes,” March returned, inspired to miraculous aptness in his German by the exigency, “yes, if September is cold.”

The girl looked at him, and then, either because she thought him mad, or liked him merry, burst into a loud laugh, and kindled the fire without a word more.

He lighted all the reluctant gas-jets in the vast gilt chandelier, and in less than half an hour the temperature of the place rose to at least sixty-five Fahrenheit, with every promise of going higher. Mrs. March made herself comfortable in a deep chair before the stove, and said she would have her supper there; and she bade him send her just such a supper of chicken and honey and tea as they had all had in Mayence when they supped in her aunt’s parlor there all those years ago. He wished to compute the years, but she drove him out with an imploring cry, and he went down to a very gusty dining-room on the ground-floor, where he found himself alone with a young English couple and their little boy. They were friendly, intelligent people, and would have been conversable, apparently, but for the terrible cold of the husband, which he said he had contracted at the manoeuvres in Hombourg. March said he was going to Holland, and the Englishman was doubtful of the warmth which March expected to find there. He seemed to be suffering from a suspense of faith as to the warmth anywhere; from time to time the door of the dining-room self-opened in a silent, ghostly fashion into the court without, and let in a chilling draught about the legs of all, till the little English boy got down from his place and shut it.

He alone continued cheerful, for March’s spirits certainly did not rise when some mumbling Americans came in and muttered over their meat at another table. He hated to own it, but he had to own that wherever he had met the two branches of the Anglo-Saxon race together in Europe, the elder had shown, by a superior chirpiness, to the disadvantage of the younger. The cast clothes of the old-fashioned British offishness seemed to have fallen to the American travellers who were trying to be correct and exemplary; and he would almost rather have had back the old-style bragging Americans whom he no longer saw. He asked of an agreeable fellow-countryman whom he found later in the reading-room, what had become of these; and this compatriot said he had travelled with one only the day before, who had posed before their whole compartment in his scorn of the German landscape, the German weather, the German government, the German railway management, and then turned out an American of German birth! March found his wife in great bodily comfort when he went back to her, but in trouble of mind about a clock which she had discovered standing on the lacquered iron top of the stove. It was a French clock, of architectural pretensions, in the taste of the first Empire, and it looked as if it had not been going since Napoleon occupied Mayence early in the century. But Mrs. March now had it sorely on her conscience where, in its danger from the heat of the stove, it rested with the weight of the Pantheon, whose classic form it recalled. She wondered that no one had noticed it before the fire was kindled, and she required her husband to remove it at once from the top of the stove to the mantel under the mirror, which was the natural habitat of such a clock. He said nothing could be simpler, but when he lifted it, it began to fall all apart, like a clock in the house of the Hoodoo. Its marble base dropped-off; its pillars tottered; its pediment swayed to one side. While Mrs. March lamented her hard fate, and implored him to hurry it together before any one came, he contrived to reconstruct it in its new place. Then they both breathed freer, and returned to sit down before the stove. But at the same moment they both saw, ineffaceably outlined on the lacquered top, the basal form of the clock. The chambermaid would see it in the morning; she would notice the removal of the clock, and would make a merit of reporting its ruin by the heat to the landlord, and in the end they would be mulcted of its value. Rather than suffer this wrong they agreed to restore it to its place, and, let it go to destruction upon its own terms. March painfully rebuilt it where he had found it, and they went to bed with a bad conscience to worse dreams.

He remembered, before he slept, the hour of his youth when he was in Mayence before, and was so care free that he had heard with impersonal joy two young American voices speaking English in the street under his window. One of them broke from the common talk with a gay burlesque of pathos in the line:

“Oh heavens! she cried, my Heeding country save!”

and then with a laughing good-night these unseen, unknown spirits of youth parted and departed. Who were they, and in what different places, with what cares or ills, had their joyous voices grown old, or fallen silent for evermore? It was a moonlight night, March remembered, and he remembered how he wished he were out in it with those merry fellows.

He nursed the memory and the wonder in his dreaming thought, and he woke early to other voices under his window. But now the voices, though young, were many and were German, and the march of feet and the stamp of hooves kept time with their singing. He drew his curtain and saw the street filled with broken squads of men, some afoot and some on horseback, some in uniform and some in civil dress with students’ caps, loosely straggling on and roaring forth that song whose words he could not make out. At breakfast he asked the waiter what it all meant, and he said that these were conscripts whose service had expired with the late manoeuvres, and who were now going home. He promised March a translation of the song, but he never gave it; and perhaps the sense of their joyful home-going remained the more poetic with him because its utterance remained inarticulate.

March spent the rainy Sunday, on which they had fallen, in wandering about the little city alone. His wife said she was tired and would sit by the fire, and hear about Mayence when he came in. He went to the cathedral, which has its renown for beauty and antiquity, and he there added to his stock of useful information the fact that the people of Mayence seemed very Catholic and very devout. They proved it by preferring to any of the divine old Gothic shrines in the cathedral, an ugly baroque altar, which was everywhere hung about with votive offerings. A fashionably dressed young man and young girl sprinkled themselves with holy water as reverently as if they had been old and ragged. Some tourists strolled up and down the aisles with their red guide-books, and studied the objects of interest. A resplendent beadle in a cocked hat, and with along staff of authority posed before his own ecclesiastical consciousness in blue and silver. At the high altar a priest was saying mass, and March wondered whether his consciousness was as wholly ecclesiastical as the beadle’s, or whether somewhere in it he felt the historical majesty, the long human consecration of the place.

He wandered at random in the town through streets German and quaint and old, and streets French and fine and new, and got back to the river, which he crossed on one of the several handsome bridges. The rough river looked chill under a sky of windy clouds, and he felt out of season, both as to the summer travel, and as to the journey he was making. The summer of life as well as the summer of that year was past. Better return to his own radiator in his flat on Stuyvesant Square; to the great ugly brutal town which, if it was not home to him, was as much home to him as to any one. A longing for New York welled up his heart, which was perhaps really a wish to be at work again. He said he must keep this from his wife, who seemed not very well, and whom he must try to cheer up when he returned to the hotel.

But they had not a very joyous afternoon, and the evening was no gayer. They said that if they had not ordered their letters sent to Dusseldorf they believed they should push on to Holland without stopping; and March would have liked to ask, Why not push on to America? But he forbore, and he was afterwards glad that he had done so.

In the morning their spirits rose with the sun, though the sun got up behind clouds as usual; and they were further animated by the imposition which the landlord practised upon them. After a distinct and repeated agreement as to the price of their rooms he charged them twice as much, and then made a merit of throwing off two marks out of the twenty he had plundered them of.

“Now I see,” said Mrs. March, on their way down to the boat, “how fortunate it was that we baked his clock. You may laugh, but I believe we were the instruments of justice.”

“Do you suppose that clock was never baked before?” asked her husband. “The landlord has his own arrangement with justice. When he overcharges his parting guests he says to his conscience, Well, they baked my clock.”

LXXI.

The morning was raw, but it was something not to have it rainy; and the clouds that hung upon the hills and hid their tops were at least as fine as the long board signs advertising chocolate on the river banks. The smoke rising from the chimneys of the manufactories of Mayence was not so bad, either, when one got them in the distance a little; and March liked the way the river swam to the stems of the trees on the low grassy shores. It was like the Mississippi between St. Louis and Cairo in that, and it was yellow and thick, like the Mississippi, though he thought he remembered it blue and clear. A friendly German, of those who began to come aboard more and more at all the landings after leaving Mayence, assured him that he was right, and that the Rhine was unusually turbid from the unusual rains. March had his own belief that whatever the color of the Rhine might be the rains were not unusual, but he could not gainsay the friendly German.

Most of the passengers at starting were English and American; but they showed no prescience of the international affinition which has since realized itself, in their behavior toward one another. They held silently apart, and mingled only in the effect of one young man who kept the Marches in perpetual question whether he was a Bostonian or an Englishman. His look was Bostonian, but his accent was English; and was he a Bostonian who had been in England long enough to get the accent, or was he an Englishman who had been in Boston long enough to get the look? He wore a belated straw hat, and a thin sack-coat; and in the rush of the boat through the raw air they fancied him very cold, and longed to offer him one of their superabundant wraps. At times March actually lifted a shawl from his knees, feeling sure that the stranger was English and that he might make so bold with him; then at some glacial glint in the young man’s eye, or at some petrific expression of his delicate face, he felt that he was a Bostonian, and lost courage and let the shawl sink again. March tried to forget him in the wonder of seeing the Germans begin to eat and drink, as soon as they came on boards either from the baskets they had brought with them, or from the boat’s provision. But he prevailed, with his smile that was like a sneer, through all the events of the voyage; and took March’s mind off the scenery with a sudden wrench when he came unexpectedly into view after a momentary disappearance. At the table d’hote, which was served when the landscape began to be less interesting, the guests were expected to hand their plates across the table to the stewards but to keep their knives and forks throughout the different courses, and at each of these partial changes March felt the young man’s chilly eyes upon him, inculpating him for the semi-civilization of the management. At such times he knew that he was a Bostonian.

The weather cleared, as they descended the river, and under a sky at last cloudless, the Marches had moments of swift reversion to their former Rhine journey, when they were young and the purple light of love mantled the vineyarded hills along the shore, and flushed the castled steeps. The scene had lost nothing of the beauty they dimly remembered; there were certain features of it which seemed even fairer and grander than they remembered. The town of Bingen, where everybody who knows the poem was more or less born, was beautiful in spite of its factory chimneys, though there were no compensating castles near it; and the castles seemed as good as those of the theatre. Here and there some of them had been restored and were occupied, probably by robber barons who had gone into trade. Others were still ruinous, and there was now and then such a mere gray snag that March, at sight of it, involuntarily put his tongue to the broken tooth which he was keeping for the skill of the first American dentist.

For natural sublimity the Rhine scenery, as they recognized once more, does not compare with the Hudson scenery; and they recalled one point on the American river where the Central Road tunnels a jutting cliff, which might very well pass for the rock of the Loreley, where she dreams

‘Solo sitting by the shores of old romance’

and the trains run in and out under her knees unheeded. “Still, still you know,” March argued, “this is the Loreley on the Rhine, and not the Loreley on the Hudson; and I suppose that makes all the difference. Besides, the Rhine doesn’t set up to be sublime; it only means to be storied and dreamy and romantic and it does it. And then we have really got no Mouse Tower; we might build one, to be sure.”

“Well, we have got no denkmal, either,” said his wife, meaning the national monument to the German reconquest of the Rhine, which they had just passed, “and that is something in our favor.”

“It was too far off for us to see how ugly it was,” he returned.

“The denkmal at Coblenz was so near that the bronze Emperor almost rode aboard the boat.”

He could not answer such a piece of logic as that. He yielded, and began to praise the orcharded levels which now replaced the vine-purpled slopes of the upper river. He said they put him in mind of orchards that he had known in his boyhood; and they, agreed that the supreme charm of travel, after all, was not in seeing something new and strange, but in finding something familiar and dear in the heart of the strangeness.

At Cologne they found this in the tumult of getting ashore with their baggage and driving from the steamboat landing to the railroad station, where they were to get their train for Dusseldorf an hour later. The station swarmed with travellers eating and drinking and smoking; but they escaped from it for a precious half of their golden hour, and gave the time to the great cathedral, which was built, a thousand years ago, just round the corner from the station, and is therefore very handy to it. Since they saw the cathedral last it had been finished, and now under a cloudless evening sky, it soared and swept upward like a pale flame. Within it was a bit over-clean, a bit bare, but without it was one of the great memories of the race, the record of a faith which wrought miracles of beauty, at least, if not piety.

The train gave the Marches another, and last, view of it as they slowly drew out of the city, and began to run through a level country walled with far-off hills; past fields of buckwheat showing their stems like coral under their black tops; past peasant houses changing their wonted shape to taller and narrower forms; past sluggish streams from which the mist rose and hung over the meadows, under a red sunset, glassy clear till the manifold factory chimneys of Dusseldorf stained it with their dun smoke.

This industrial greeting seemed odd from the town where Heinrich Heine was born; but when they had eaten their supper in the capital little hotel they found there, and went out for a stroll, they found nothing to remind them of the factories, and much to make them think of the poet. The moon, beautiful and perfect as a stage moon, came up over the shoulder of a church as they passed down a long street which they had all to themselves. Everybody seemed to have gone to bed, but at a certain corner a girl opened a window above them, and looked out at the moon.

When they returned to their hotel they found a highwalled garden facing it, full of black depths of foliage. In the night March woke and saw the moon standing over the garden, and silvering its leafy tops. This was really as it should be in the town where the idolized poet of his youth was born; the poet whom of all others he had adored, and who had once seemed like a living friend; who had been witness of his first love, and had helped him to speak it. His wife used to laugh at him for his Heine-worship in those days; but she had since come to share it, and she, even more than he, had insisted upon this pilgrimage. He thought long thoughts of the past, as he looked into the garden across the way, with an ache for his perished self and the dead companionship of his youth, all ghosts together in the silvered shadow. The trees shuddered in the night breeze, and its chill penetrated to him where he stood.

His wife called to him from her room, “What are you doing?”

“Oh, sentimentalizing,” he answered boldly.

“Well, you will be sick,” she said, and he crept back into bed again.

They had sat up late, talking in a glad excitement. But he woke early, as an elderly man is apt to do after broken slumbers, and left his wife still sleeping. He was not so eager for the poetic interests of the town as he had been the night before; he even deferred his curiosity for Heine’s birth-house to the instructive conference which he had with his waiter at breakfast. After all, was not it more important to know something of the actual life of a simple common class of men than to indulge a faded fancy for the memory of a genius, which no amount of associations could feed again to its former bloom? The waiter said he was a Nuremberger, and had learned English in London where he had served a year for nothing. Afterwards, when he could speak three languages he got a pound a week, which seemed low for so many, though not so low as the one mark a day which he now received in Dusseldorf; in Berlin he paid the hotel two marks a day. March confided to him his secret trouble as to tips, and they tried vainly to enlighten each other as to what a just tip was.

He went to his banker’s, and when he came back he found his wife with her breakfast eaten, and so eager for the exploration of Heine’s birthplace that she heard with indifference of his failure to get any letters. It was too soon to expect them, she said, and then she showed him her plan, which she had been working out ever since she woke. It contained every place which Heine had mentioned, and she was determined not one should escape them. She examined him sharply upon his condition, accusing him of having taken cold when he got up in the night, and acquitting him with difficulty. She herself was perfectly well, but a little fagged, and they must have a carriage.

They set out in a lordly two-spanner, which took up half the little Bolkerstrasse where Heine was born, when they stopped across the way from his birthhouse, so that she might first take it all in from the outside before they entered it. It is a simple street, and not the cleanest of the streets in a town where most of them are rather dirty. Below the houses are shops, and the first story of Heine’s house is a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where the Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker displayed their signs.

But did the Heine family really once live there? The house looked so fresh and new that in spite of the tablet in its front affirming it the poet’s birthplace, they doubted; and they were not reassured by the people who half halted as they passed, and stared at the strangers, so anomalously interested in the place. They dismounted, and crossed to the butcher shop where the provision man corroborated the tablet, but could not understand their wish to go up stairs. He did not try to prevent them, however, and they climbed to the first floor above, where a placard on the door declared it private and implored them not to knock. Was this the outcome of the inmate’s despair from the intrusion of other pilgrims who had wised to see the Heine dwelling-rooms? They durst not knock and ask so much, and they sadly descended to the ground-floor, where they found a butcher boy of much greater apparent intelligence than the butcher himself, who told them that the building in front was as new as it looked, and the house where Heine was really born was the old house in the rear. He showed them this house, across a little court patched with mangy grass and lilac-bushes; and when they wished to visit it he led the way. The place was strewn both underfoot and overhead with feathers; it had once been all a garden out to the street, the boy said, but from these feathers, as well as the odor which prevailed, and the anxious behavior of a few hens left in the high coop at one side, it was plain that what remained of the garden was now a chicken slaughteryard. There was one well-grown tree, and the boy said it was of the poet’s time; but when he let them into the house, he became vague as to the room where Heine was born; it was certain only that it was somewhere upstairs and that it could not be seen. The room where they stood was the frame-maker’s shop, and they bought of him a small frame for a memorial. They bought of the butcher’s boy, not so commercially, a branch of lilac; and they came away, thinking how much amused Heine himself would have been with their visit; how sadly, how merrily he would have mocked at their effort to revere his birthplace.

They were too old if not too wise to be daunted by their defeat, and they drove next to the old court garden beside the Rhine where the poet says he used to play with the little Veronika, and probably did not. At any rate, the garden is gone; the Schloss was burned down long ago; and nothing remains but a detached tower in which the good Elector Jan Wilhelm, of Heine’s time, amused himself with his many mechanical inventions. The tower seemed to be in process of demolition, but an intelligent workman who came down out of it, was interested in the strangers’ curiosity, and directed them to a place behind the Historical Museum where they could find a bit of the old garden. It consisted of two or three low trees, and under them the statue of the Elector by which Heine sat with the little Veronika, if he really did. Afresh gale blowing through the trees stirred the bushes that backed the statue, but not the laurel wreathing the Elector’s head, and meeting in a neat point over his forehead. The laurel wreath is stone, like the rest of the Elector, who stands there smirking in marble ermine and armor, and resting his baton on the nose of a very small lion, who, in the exigencies of foreshortening, obligingly goes to nothing but a tail under the Elector’s robe.

This was a prince who loved himself in effigy so much that he raised an equestrian statue to his own renown in the market-place, though he modestly refused the credit of it, and ascribed its erection to the affection of his subjects. You see him therein a full-bottomed wig, mounted on a rampant charger with a tail as big round as a barrel, and heavy enough to keep him from coming down on his fore legs as long as he likes to hold them up. It was to this horse’s back that Heine clambered when a small boy, to see the French take formal possession of Dusseldorf; and he clung to the waist of the bronze Elector, who had just abdicated, while the burgomaster made a long speech, from the balcony of the Rathhaus, and the Electoral arms were taken down from its doorway.

The Rathhaus is a salad-dressing of German gothic and French rococo as to its architectural style, and is charming in its way, but the Marches were in the market-place for the sake of that moment of Heine’s boyhood. They felt that he might have been the boy who stopped as he ran before them, and smacked the stomach of a large pumpkin lying at the feet of an old market-woman, and then dashed away before she could frame a protest against the indignity. From this incident they philosophized that the boys of Dusseldorf are as mischievous at the end of the century as they were at the beginning; and they felt the fascination that such a bounteous, unkempt old marketplace must have for the boys of any period. There were magnificent vegetables of all sorts in it, and if the fruits were meagre that was the fault of the rainy summer, perhaps. The market-place was very dirty, and so was the narrow street leading down from it to the Rhine, which ran swift as a mountain torrent along a slatternly quay. A bridge of boats crossing the stream shook in the rapid current, and a long procession of market carts passed slowly over, while a cluster of scows waited in picturesque patience for the draw to open.

They saw what a beautiful town that was for a boy to grow up in, and how many privileges it offered, how many dangers, how many chances for hairbreadth escapes. They chose that Heine must often have rushed shrieking joyfully down that foul alley to the Rhine with other boys; and they easily found a leaf-strewn stretch of the sluggish Dussel, in the Public Garden, where his playmate, the little Wilhelm, lost his life and saved the kitten’s. They were not so sure of the avenue through which the poet saw the Emperor Napoleon come riding on his small white horse when he took possession of the Elector’s dominions. But if it was that where the statue of the Kaiser Wilhelm I. comes riding on a horse led by two Victories, both poet and hero are avenged there on the accomplished fact. Defeated and humiliated France triumphs in the badness of that foolish denkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden Germany), and the memory of the singer whom the Hohenzollern family pride forbids honor in his native place, is immortal in its presence.

On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflections upon the open neglect, throughout Germany, of the greatest German lyrist, by which the poet might have profited if he had been present. He contended that it was not altogether an effect of Hohenzollern pride, which could not suffer a joke or two from the arch-humorist; but that Heine had said things of Germany herself which Germans might well have found unpardonable. He concluded that it would not do to be perfectly frank with one’s own country. Though, to be sure, there would always be the question whether the Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in the Germany he loved so tenderly and mocked so pitilessly. He had to own that if he were a negro poet he would not feel bound to measure terms in speaking of America, and he would not feel that his fame was in her keeping.

Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany and he accused her of taking a shabby revenge, in trying to forget him; in the heat of his resentment that there should be no record of Heine in the city where he was born, March came near ignoring himself the fact that the poet Freiligrath was also born there. As for the famous Dusseldorf school of painting, which once filled the world with the worst art, he rejoiced that it was now so dead, and he grudged the glance which the beauty of the new Art Academy extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and is so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that French supremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates the overthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on horseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, which the Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. It is in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patriotic monuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, which these never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dying warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts were moved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, which dropped into equivalent English verse in March’s note-book:

  Fame was enough for the Victors, and glory and verdurous laurel;
   Tears by their mothers wept founded this image of stone.

To this they could forgive the vaunting record, on the reverse, of the
German soldiers who died heroes in the war with France, the war with
Austria, and even the war with poor little Denmark!

The morning had been bright and warm, and it was just that the afternoon should be dim and cold, with a pale sun looking through a September mist, which seemed to deepen the seclusion and silence of the forest reaches; for the park was really a forest of the German sort, as parks are apt to be in Germany. But it was beautiful, and they strayed through it, and sometimes sat down on the benches in its damp shadows, and said how much seemed to be done in Germany for the people’s comfort and pleasure. In what was their own explicitly, as well as what was tacitly theirs, they were not so restricted as we were at home, and especially the children seemed made fondly and lovingly free of all public things. The Marches met troops of them in the forest, as they strolled slowly back by the winding Dussel to the gardened avenue leading to the park, and they found them everywhere gay and joyful. But their elders seemed subdued, and were silent. The strangers heard no sound of laughter in the streets of Dusseldorf, and they saw no smiling except on the part of a very old couple, whose meeting they witnessed and who grinned and cackled at each other like two children as they shook hands. Perhaps they were indeed children of that sad second childhood which one would rather not blossom back into.

In America, life is yet a joke with us, even when it is grotesque and shameful, as it so often is; for we think we can make it right when we choose. But there is no joking in Germany, between the first and second childhoods, unless behind closed doors. Even there, people do not joke above their breath about kings and emperors. If they joke about them in print, they take out their laugh in jail, for the press laws are severely enforced, and the prisons are full of able editors, serious as well as comic. Lese-majesty is a crime that searches sinners out in every walk of life, and it is said that in family jars a husband sometimes has the last word of his wife by accusing her of blaspheming the sovereign, and so having her silenced for three months at least behind penitential bars.

“Think,” said March, “how simply I could adjust any differences of opinion between us in Dusseldorf.”

“Don’t!” his wife implored with a burst of feeling which surprised him.
“I want to go home!”

They had been talking over their day, and planning their journey to Holland for the morrow, when it came to this outburst from her in the last half-hour before bed which they sat prolonging beside their stove.

“What! And not go to Holland? What is to become of my after-cure?”

“Oh, it’s too late for that, now. We’ve used up the month running about, and tiring ourselves to death. I should like to rest a week — to get into my berth on the Norumbia and rest!”

“I guess the September gales would have something to say about that.”

“I would risk the September gales.”

LXXII.

In the morning March came home from his bankers gay with the day’s provisional sunshine in his heart, and joyously expectant of his wife’s pleasure in the letters he was bringing. There was one from each of their children, and there was one from Fulkerson, which March opened and read on the street, so as to intercept any unpleasant news there might be in them; there were two letters for Mrs. March which he knew without opening were from Miss Triscoe and Mrs. Adding respectively; Mrs. Adding’s, from the postmarks, seemed to have been following them about for some time.

“They’re all right at home,” he said. “Do see what those people have been doing.”

“I believe,” she said, taking a knife from the breakfast tray beside her bed to cut the envelopes, “that you’ve really cared more about them all along than I have.”

“No, I’ve only been anxious to be done with them.”

She got the letters open, and holding one of them up in each hand she read them impartially and simultaneously; then she flung them both down, and turned her face into her pillow with an impulse of her inalienable girlishness. “Well, it is too silly.”

March felt authorized to take them up and read them consecutively; when he had done, so he did not differ from his wife. In one case, Agatha had written to her dear Mrs. March that she and Burnamy had just that evening become engaged; Mrs. Adding, on her part owned a farther step, and announced her marriage to Mr. Kenby. Following immemorial usage in such matters Kenby had added a postscript affirming his happiness in unsparing terms, and in Agatha’s letter there was an avowal of like effect from Burnamy. Agatha hinted her belief that her father would soon come to regard Burnamy as she did; and Mrs. Adding professed a certain humiliation in having realized that, after all her misgiving about him, Rose seemed rather relieved than otherwise, as if he were glad to have her off his hands.

“Well,” said March, “with these troublesome affairs settled, I don’t see what there is to keep us in Europe any longer, unless it’s the consensus of opinion in Tom, Bella, and Fulkerson, that we ought to stay the winter.”

“Stay the winter!” Mrs. March rose from her pillow, and clutched the home letters to her from the abeyance in which they had fallen on the coverlet while she was dealing with the others. “What do you mean?”

“It seems to have been prompted by a hint you let drop, which Tom has passed to Bella and Fulkerson.”

“Oh, but that was before we left Carlsbad!” she protested, while she devoured the letters with her eyes, and continued to denounce the absurdity of the writers. Her son and daughter both urged that now their father and mother were over there, they had better stay as long as they enjoyed it, and that they certainly ought not to come home without going to Italy, where they had first met, and revisiting the places which they had seen together when they were young engaged people: without that their silver wedding journey would not be complete. Her son said that everything was going well with ‘Every Other Week’, and both himself and Mr. Fulkerson thought his father ought to spend the winter in Italy, and get a thorough rest. “Make a job of it, March,” Fulkerson wrote, “and have a Sabbatical year while you’re at it. You may not get another.”

“Well, I can tell them,” said Mrs. March indignantly, “we shall not do anything of the kind.”

“Then you didn’t mean it?”

“Mean it!” She stopped herself with a look at her husband, and asked gently, “Do you want to stay?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he answered vaguely. The fact was, he was sick of travel and of leisure; he was longing to be at home and at work again. But if there was to be any self-sacrifice which could be had, as it were, at a bargain; which could be fairly divided between them, and leave him the self and her the sacrifice, he was too experienced a husband not to see the advantage of it, or to refuse the merit. “I thought you wished to stay.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “I did. It has been very, very pleasant, and, if anything, I have over-enjoyed myself. We have gone romping through it like two young people, haven’t we?”

“You have,” he assented. “I have always felt the weight of my years in getting the baggage registered; they have made the baggage weigh more every time.”

“And I’ve forgotten mine. Yes, I have. But the years haven’t forgotten me, Basil, and now I remember them. I’m tired. It doesn’t seem as if I could ever get up. But I dare say it’s only a mood; it may be only a cold; and if you wish to stay, why — we will think it over.”

“No, we won’t, my dear,” he said, with a generous shame for his hypocrisy if not with a pure generosity. “I’ve got all the good out of it that there was in it, for me, and I shouldn’t go home any better six months hence than I should now. Italy will keep for another time, and so, for the matter of that, will Holland.”

“No, no!” she interposed. “We won’t give up Holland, whatever we do. I couldn’t go home feeling that I had kept you out of your after-cure; and when we get there, no doubt the sea air will bring me up so that I shall want to go to Italy, too, again. Though it seems so far off, now! But go and see when the afternoon train for the Hague leaves, and I shall be ready. My mind’s quite made up on that point.”

“What a bundle of energy!” said her husband laughing down at her.

He went and asked about the train to the Hague, but only to satisfy a superficial conscience; for now he knew that they were both of one mind about going home. He also looked up the trains for London, and found that they could get there by way of Ostend in fourteen hours. Then he went back to the banker’s, and with the help of the Paris-New York Chronicle which he found there, he got the sailings of the first steamers home. After that he strolled about the streets for a last impression of Dusseldorf, but it was rather blurred by the constantly recurring pull of his thoughts toward America, and he ended by turning abruptly at a certain corner, and going to his hotel.

He found his wife dressed, but fallen again on her bed, beside which her breakfast stood still untasted; her smile responded wanly to his brightness. “I’m not well, my dear,” she said. “I don’t believe I could get off to the Hague this afternoon.”

“Could you to Liverpool?” he returned.

“To Liverpool?” she gasped. “What do you mean?”

“Merely that the Cupania is sailing on the twentieth, and I’ve telegraphed to know if we can get a room. I’m afraid it won’t be a good one, but she’s the first boat out, and—”

“No, indeed, we won’t go to Liverpool, and we will never go home till you’ve had your after-cure in Holland.” She was very firm in this, but she added, “We will stay another night, here, and go to the Hague tomorrow. Sit down, and let us talk it over. Where were we?”

She lay down on the sofa, and he put a shawl over her. “We were just starting for Liverpool.”

“No, no we weren’t! Don’t say such things, dearest! I want you to help me sum it all, up. You think it’s been a success, don’t you?”

“As a cure?”

“No, as a silver wedding journey?”

“Perfectly howling.”

“I do think we’ve had a good time. I never expected to enjoy myself so much again in the world. I didn’t suppose I should ever take so much interest in anything. It shows that when we choose to get out of our rut we shall always find life as fresh and delightful as ever. There is nothing to prevent our coming any year, now that Tom’s shown himself so capable, and having another silver wedding journey. I don’t like to think of it’s being confined to Germany quite.”

“Oh, I don’t know. We can always talk of it as our German-Silver Wedding
Journey.”

“That’s true. But nobody would understand nowadays what you meant by German-silver; it’s perfectly gone out. How ugly it was! A sort of greasy yellowish stuff, always getting worn through; I believe it was made worn through. Aunt Mary had a castor of it, that I can remember when I was a child; it went into the kitchen long before I grew up. Would a joke like that console you for the loss of Italy?”

“It would go far to do it. And as a German-Silver Wedding Journey, it’s certainly been very complete.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s given us a representative variety of German cities. First we had
Hamburg, you know, a great modern commercial centre.”

“Yes! Go on!”

“Then we had Leipsic, the academic.”

“Yes!”

“Then Carlsbad, the supreme type of a German health resort; then Nuremberg, the mediaeval; then Anspach, the extinct princely capital; then Wurzburg, the ecclesiastical rococo; then Weimar, for the literature of a great epoch; then imperial Berlin; then Frankfort, the memory of the old free city; then Dusseldorf, the centre of the most poignant personal interest in the world — I don’t see how we could have done better, if we’d planned it all, and not acted from successive impulses.”

“It’s been grand; it’s been perfect! As German-Silver Wedding Journey it’s perfect — it seems as if it had been ordered! But I will never let you give up Holland! No, we will go this afternoon, and when I get to Schevleningen, I’ll go to bed, and stay there, till you’ve completed your after-cure.”

“Do you think that will be wildly gay for the convalescent?”

She suddenly began to cry. “Oh, dearest, what shall we do? I feel perfectly broken down. I’m afraid I’m going to be sick — and away from home! How could you ever let me overdo, so?” She put her handkerchief to her eyes, and turned her face into the sofa pillow.

This was rather hard upon him, whom her vivid energy and inextinguishable interest had not permitted a moment’s respite from pleasure since they left Carlsbad. But he had been married, too long not to understand that her blame of him was only a form of self-reproach for her own self-forgetfulness. She had not remembered that she was no longer young till she had come to what he saw was a nervous collapse. The fact had its pathos and its poetry which no one could have felt more keenly than he. If it also had its inconvenience and its danger he realized these too.

“Isabel,” he said, “we are going home.”

“Very well, then it will be your doing.”

“Quite. Do you think you could stand it as far as Cologne? We get the sleeping-car there, and you can lie down the rest of the way to Ostend.”

“This afternoon? Why I’m perfectly strong; it’s merely my nerves that are gone.” She sat up, and wiped her eyes. “But Basil! If you’re doing this for me—”

“I’m doing it for myself,” said March, as he went out of the room.

She stood the journey perfectly well, and in the passage to Dover she suffered so little from the rough weather that she was an example to many robust matrons who filled the ladies’ cabin with the noise of their anguish during the night. She would have insisted upon taking the first train up to London, if March had not represented that this would not expedite the sailing of the Cupania, and that she might as well stay the forenoon at the convenient railway hotel, and rest. It was not quite his ideal of repose that the first people they saw in the coffee-room when they went to breakfast should be Kenby and Rose Adding, who were having their tea and toast and eggs together in the greatest apparent good-fellowship. He saw his wife shrink back involuntarily from the encounter, but this was only to gather force for it; and the next moment she was upon them in all the joy of the surprise. Then March allowed himself to be as glad as the others both seemed, and he shook hands with Kenby while his wife kissed Rose; and they all talked at once. In the confusion of tongues it was presently intelligible that Mrs. Kenby was going to be down in a few minutes; and Kenby took March into his confidence with a smile which was, almost a wink in explaining that he knew how it was with the ladies. He said that Rose and he usually got down to breakfast first, and when he had listened inattentively to Mrs. March’s apology for being on her way home, he told her that she was lucky not to have gone to Schevleningen, where she and March would have frozen to death. He said that they were going to spend September at a little place on the English coast, near by, where he had been the day before with Rose to look at lodgings, and where you could bathe all through the month. He was not surprised that the Marches were going home, and said, Well, that was their original plan, wasn’t it?

Mrs. Kenby, appearing upon this, pretended to know better, after the outburst of joyful greeting with the Marches; and intelligently reminded Kenby that he knew the Marches had intended to pass the winter in Paris. She was looking extremely pretty, but she wished only to make them see how well Rose was looking, and she put her arm round his shoulders as she spoke, Schevleningen had done wonders for him, but it was fearfully cold there, and now they were expecting everything from Westgate, where she advised March to come, too, for his after-cure: she recollected in time to say, She forgot they were on their way home. She added that she did not know when she should return; she was merely a passenger, now; she left everything to the men of the family. She had, in fact, the air of having thrown off every responsibility, but in supremacy, not submission. She was always ordering Kenby about; she sent him for her handkerchief, and her rings which she had left either in the tray of her trunk, or on the pin-cushion, or on the wash-stand or somewhere, and forbade him to come back without them. He asked for her keys, and then with a joyful scream she owned that she had left the door-key in the door and the whole bunch of trunk-keys in her trunk; and Kenby treated it all as the greatest joke; Rose, too, seemed to think that Kenby would make everything come right, and he had lost that look of anxiety which he used to have; at the most he showed a friendly sympathy for Kenby, for whose sake he seemed mortified at her. He was unable to regard his mother as the delightful joke which she appeared to Kenby, but that was merely temperamental; and he was never distressed except when she behaved with unreasonable caprice at Kenby’s cost.

As for Kenby himself he betrayed no dissatisfaction with his fate to March. He perhaps no longer regarded his wife as that strong character which he had sometimes wearied March by celebrating; but she was still the most brilliant intelligence, and her charm seemed only to have grown with his perception of its wilful limitations. He did not want to talk about her so much; he wanted rather to talk about Rose, his health, his education, his nature, and what was best to do for him. The two were on terms of a confidence and affection which perpetually amused Mrs. Kenby, but which left the sympathetic witness nothing to desire in their relation.

They all came to the train when the Marches started up to London, and stood waving to them as they pulled out of the station. “Well, I can’t see but that’s all right,” he said as he sank back in his seat with a sigh of relief. “I never supposed we should get out of their marriage half so well, and I don’t feel that you quite made the match either, my dear.”

She was forced to agree with him that the Kenbys seemed happy together, and that there was nothing to fear for Rose in their happiness. He would be as tenderly cared for by Kenby as he could have been by his mother, and far more judiciously. She owned that she had trembled for him till she had seen them all together; and now she should never tremble again.

“Well?” March prompted, at a certain inconclusiveness in her tone rather than her words.

“Well, you can see that it, isn’t ideal.”

“Why isn’t it ideal? I suppose you think that the marriage of Burnamy and Agatha Triscoe will be ideal, with their ignorances and inexperiences and illusions.”

“Yes! It’s the illusions: no marriage can be perfect without them, and at their age the Kenbys can’t have them.”

“Kenby is a solid mass of illusion. And I believe that people can go and get as many new illusions as they want, whenever they’ve lost their old ones.”

“Yes, but the new illusions won’t wear so well; and in marriage you want illusions that will last. No; you needn’t talk to me. It’s all very well, but it isn’t ideal.”

March laughed. “Ideal! What is ideal?”

“Going home!” she said with such passion that he had not the heart to point out that they were merely returning to their old duties, cares and pains, with the worn-out illusion that these would be altogether different when they took them up again.

LXXIII.

In fulfilment of another ideal Mrs. March took straightway to her berth when she got on board the Cupania, and to her husband’s admiration she remained there till the day before they reached New York. Her theory was that the complete rest would do more than anything else to calm her shaken nerves; and she did not admit into her calculations the chances of adverse weather which March would not suggest as probable in the last week in September. The event justified her unconscious faith. The ship’s run was of unparalled swiftness, even for the Cupania, and of unparalled smoothness. For days the sea was as sleek as oil; the racks were never on the tables once; the voyage was of the sort which those who make it no more believe in at the time than those whom they afterwards weary in boasting of it.

The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not show the slightest curiosity to know who her fellow-passengers were. She said that she wished to be let perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for this reason she forbade March to bring her a list of the passengers till after they had left Queenstown lest it should be too exciting. He did not take the trouble to look it up, therefore; and the first night out he saw no one whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at breakfast he found himself to his great satisfaction at the same table with the Eltwins. They were so much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin took part in the talk, and told him how they had spent the time of her husband’s rigorous after-cure in Switzerland, and now he was going home much better than they had expected. She said they had rather thought of spending the winter in Europe, but had given it up because they were both a little homesick. March confessed that this was exactly the case with his wife and himself; and he had to add that Mrs. March was not very well otherwise, and he should be glad to be at home on her account. The recurrence of the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin’s habitual gloom, and Mrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subject of their return for inquiry into Mrs. March’s condition; her interest did not so far overcome her shyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her; and March found that the fact of the Eltwins’ presence on board did not agitate his wife. It seemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hoped he would see all he could of the poor old things. She asked if he had met any one else he knew, and he was able to tell her that there seemed to be a good many swells on board, and this cheered her very much, though he did not know them; she liked to be near the rose, though it was not a flower that she really cared for.

She did not ask who the swells were, and March took no trouble to find out. He took no trouble to get a passenger-list, and he had the more trouble when he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished, as they have a habit of doing, after the first day; the one that he made interest for with the head steward was a second-hand copy, and had no one he knew in it but the Eltwins. The social solitude, however, was rather favorable to certain other impressions. There seemed even more elderly people than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmosphere was gray and sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward voyage; there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men who were going seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for the coming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke. They had eaten their cake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in the digestion. They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown summer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was to him. He hated to be of their dreary company, but spiritually he knew that he was of it; and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger passengers. Some matrons who went about clad in furs amused him, for they must have been unpleasantly warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope of being able to tell the customs inspector with a good conscience that the things had been worn, would have sustained one lady draped from head to foot in Astrakhan.

They were all getting themselves ready for the fray or the play of the coming winter; but there seemed nothing joyous in the preparation. There were many young girls, as there always are everywhere, but there were not many young men, and such as there were kept to the smoking-room. There was no sign of flirtation among them; he would have given much for a moment of the pivotal girl, to see whether she could have brightened those gloomy surfaces with her impartial lamp. March wished that he could have brought some report from the outer world to cheer his wife, as he descended to their state-room. They had taken what they could get at the eleventh hour, and they had got no such ideal room as they had in the Norumbia. It was, as Mrs. March graphically said, a basement room. It was on the north side of the ship, which is a cold exposure, and if there had been any sun it could not have got into their window, which was half the time under water. The green waves, laced with foam, hissed as they ran across the port; and the electric fan in the corridor moaned like the wind in a gable.

He felt a sinking of the heart as he pushed the state-room door open, and looked at his wife lying with her face turned to the wall; and he was going to withdraw, thinking her asleep, when she said quietly, “Are we going down?”

“Not that I know of,” he answered with a gayety he did not feel. “But
I’ll ask the head steward.”

She put out her hand behind her for him to take, and clutched his fingers convulsively. “If I’m never any better, you will always remember this happy, summer, won’t you? Oh, it’s been such a happy summer! It has been one long joy, one continued triumph! But it was too late; we were too old; and it’s broken me.”

The time had been when he would have attempted comfort; when he would have tried mocking; but that time was long past; he could only pray inwardly for some sort of diversion, but what it was to be in their barren circumstance he was obliged to leave altogether to Providence. He ventured, pending an answer to his prayers upon the question, “Don’t you think I’d better see the doctor, and get you some sort of tonic?”

She suddenly turned and faced him. “The doctor! Why, I’m not sick, Basil! If you can see the purser and get our rooms changed, or do something to stop those waves from slapping against that horrible blinking one-eyed window, you can save my life; but no tonic is going to help me.”

She turned her face from him again, and buried it in the bedclothes, while he looked desperately at the racing waves, and the port that seemed to open and shut like a weary eye.

“Oh, go away!” she implored. “I shall be better presently, but if you stand there like that — Go and see if you can’t get some other room, where I needn’t feel as if I were drowning, all the way over.”

He obeyed, so far as to go away at once, and having once started, he did not stop short of the purser’s office. He made an excuse of getting greenbacks for some English bank-notes, and then he said casually that he supposed there would be no chance of having his room on the lower deck changed for something a little less intimate with the sea. The purser was not there to take the humorous view, but he conceived that March wanted something higher up, and he was able to offer him a room of those on the promenade where he had seen swells going in and out, for six hundred dollars. March did not blench, but said he would get his wife to look at it with him, and then he went out somewhat dizzily to take counsel with himself how he should put the matter to her. She would be sure to ask what the price of the new room would be, and he debated whether to take it and tell her some kindly lie about it, or trust to the bracing effect of the sum named in helping restore the lost balance of her nerves. He was not so rich that he could throw six hundred dollars away, but there might be worse things; and he walked up and down thinking. All at once it flashed upon him that he had better see the doctor, anyway, and find out whether there were not some last hope in medicine before he took the desperate step before him. He turned in half his course, and ran into a lady who had just emerged from the door of the promenade laden with wraps, and who dropped them all and clutched him to save herself from falling.

“Why, Mr. March!” she shrieked.

“Miss Triscoe!” he returned, in the astonishment which he shared with her to the extent of letting the shawls he had knocked from her hold lie between them till she began to pick them up herself. Then he joined her and in the relief of their common occupation they contrived to possess each other of the reason of their presence on, the same boat. She had sorrowed over Mrs. March’s sad state, and he had grieved to hear that her father was going home because he was not at all well, before they found the general stretched out in his steamer-chair, and waiting with a grim impatience for his daughter.

“But how is it you’re not in the passenger-list?” he inquired of them both, and Miss Triscoe explained that they had taken their passage at the last moment, too late, she supposed, to get into the list. They were in London, and had run down to Liverpool on the chance of getting berths. Beyond this she was not definite, and there was an absence of Burnamy not only from her company but from her conversation which mystified March through all his selfish preoccupations with his wife. She was a girl who had her reserves, but for a girl who had so lately and rapturously written them of her engagement, there was a silence concerning her betrothed that had almost positive quality. With his longing to try Miss Triscoe upon Mrs. March’s malady as a remedial agent, he had now the desire to try Mrs. March upon Miss Triscoe’s mystery as a solvent. She stood talking to him, and refusing to sit down and be wrapped up in the chair next her father. She said that if he were going to ask Mrs. March to let her come to her, it would not be worth while to sit down; and he hurried below.

“Did you get it?” asked his wife, without looking round, but not so apathetically as before.

“Oh, yes. That’s all right. But now, Isabel, there’s something I’ve got to tell you. You’d find it out, and you’d better know it at once.”

She turned her face, and asked sternly, “What is it?”

Then he said, with, an almost equal severity, “Miss Triscoe is on board.
Miss Triscoe-and-her-father. She wishes to come down and see you.”

Mrs. March sat up and began to twist her hair into shape. “And Burnamy?”

“There is no Burnamy physically, or so far as I can make out, spiritually. She didn’t mention him, and I talked at least five minutes with her.”

“Hand me my dressing-sack,” said Mrs. March, “and poke those things on the sofa under the berth. Shut up that wash-stand, and pull the curtain across that hideous window. Stop! Throw those towels into your berth. Put my shoes, and your slippers into the shoe-bag on the door. Slip the brushes into that other bag. Beat the dent out of the sofa cushion that your head has made. Now!”

“Then — then you will see her?”

“See her!”

Her voice was so terrible that he fled before it, and he returned with Miss Triscoe in a dreamlike simultaneity. He remembered, as he led the way into his corridor, to apologize for bringing her down into a basement room.

“Oh, we’re in the basement, too; it was all we could get,” she said in words that ended within the state-room he opened to her. Then he went back and took her chair and wraps beside her father.

He let the general himself lead the way up to his health, which he was not slow in reaching, and was not quick in leaving. He reminded March of the state he had seen him in at Wurzburg, and he said it had gone from bad to worse with him. At Weimar he had taken to his bed and merely escaped from it with his life. Then they had tried Schevleningen for a week, where, he said in a tone of some injury, they had rather thought they might find them, the Marches. The air had been poison to him, and they had come over to England with some notion of Bournemouth; but the doctor in London had thought not, and urged their going home. “All Europe is damp, you know, and dark as a pocket in winter,” he ended.

There had been nothing about Burnamy, and March decided that he must wait to see his wife if he wished to know anything, when the general, who had been silent, twisted his head towards him, and said without regard to the context, “It was complicated, at Weimar, by that young man in the most devilish way. Did my daughter write to Mrs. March about — Well it came to nothing, after all; and I don’t understand how, to this day. I doubt if they do. It was some sort of quarrel, I suppose. I wasn’t consulted in the matter either way. It appears that parents are not consulted in these trifling affairs, nowadays.” He had married his daughter’s mother in open defiance of her father; but in the glare of his daughter’s wilfulness this fact had whitened into pious obedience. “I dare say I shall be told, by-and-by, and shall be expected to approve of the result.”

A fancy possessed March that by operation of temperamental laws General Triscoe was no more satisfied with Burnamy’s final rejection than with his acceptance. If the engagement was ever to be renewed, it might be another thing; but as it stood, March divined a certain favor for the young man in the general’s attitude. But the affair was altogether too delicate for comment; the general’s aristocratic frankness in dealing with it might have gone farther if his knowledge had been greater; but in any case March did not see how he could touch it. He could only say, He had always liked Burnamy, himself.

He had his good qualities, the general owned. He did not profess to understand the young men of our time; but certainly the fellow had the instincts of a gentleman. He had nothing to say against him, unless in that business with that man — what was his name?

“Stoller?” March prompted. “I don’t excuse him in that, but I don’t blame him so much, either. If punishment means atonement, he had the opportunity of making that right very suddenly, and if pardon means expunction, then I don’t see why that offence hasn’t been pretty well wiped out.

“Those things are not so simple as they used to seem,” said the general, with a seriousness beyond his wont in things that did not immediately concern his own comfort or advantage.

LXXVI.

In the mean time Mrs. March and Miss Triscoe were discussing another offence of Burnamy’s.

“It wasn’t,” said the girl, excitedly, after a plunge through all the minor facts to the heart of the matter, “that he hadn’t a perfect right to do it, if he thought I didn’t care for him. I had refused him at Carlsbad, and I had forbidden him to speak to me about — on the subject. But that was merely temporary, and he ought to have known it. He ought to have known that I couldn’t accept him, on the spur of the moment, that way; and when he had come back, after going away in disgrace, before he had done anything to justify himself. I couldn’t have kept my self-respect; and as it was I had the greatest difficulty; and he ought to have seen it. Of course he said afterwards that he didn’t see it. But when — when I found out that SHE had been in Weimar, and all that time, while I had been suffering in Carlsbad and Wurzburg, and longing to see him — let him know how I was really feeling — he was flirting with that — that girl, then I saw that he was a false nature, and I determined to put an end to everything. And that is what I did; and I shall always think I — did right — and—”

The rest was lost in Agatha’s handkerchief, which she put up to her eyes. Mrs. March watched her from her pillow keeping the girl’s unoccupied hand in her own, and softly pressing it till the storm was past sufficiently to allow her to be heard.

Then she said, “Men are very strange — the best of them. And from the very fact that he was disappointed, he would be all the more apt to rush into a flirtation with somebody else.”

Miss Triscoe took down her handkerchief from a face that had certainly not been beautified by grief. “I didn’t blame him for the flirting; or not so much. It was his keeping it from me afterwards. He ought to have told me the very first instant we were engaged. But he didn’t. He let it go on, and if I hadn’t happened on that bouquet I might never have known anything about it. That is what I mean by — a false nature. I wouldn’t have minded his deceiving me; but to let me deceive myself — Oh, it was too much!”

Agatha hid her face in her handkerchief again. She was perching on the edge of the berth, and Mrs. March said, with a glance, which she did not see, toward the sofa, “I’m afraid that’s rather a hard seat for you.

“Oh, no, thank you! I’m perfectly comfortable — I like it — if you don’t mind?”

Mrs. March pressed her hand for answer, and after another little delay, sighed and said, “They are not like us, and we cannot help it. They are more temporizing.”

“How do you mean?” Agatha unmasked again.

“They can bear to keep things better than we can, and they trust to time to bring them right, or to come right of themselves.”

“I don’t think Mr. March would trust things to come right of themselves!” said Agatha in indignant accusal of Mrs. March’s sincerity.

“Ah, that’s just what he would do, my dear, and has done, all along; and I don’t believe we could have lived through without it: we should have quarrelled ourselves into the grave!”

“Mrs. March!”

“Yes, indeed. I don’t mean that he would ever deceive me. But he would let things go on, and hope that somehow they would come right without any fuss.”

“Do you mean that he would let anybody deceive themselves?”

“I’m afraid he would — if he thought it would come right. It used to be a terrible trial to me; and it is yet, at times when I don’t remember that he means nothing but good and kindness by it. Only the other day in Ansbach — how long ago it seems! — he let a poor old woman give him her son’s address in Jersey City, and allowed her to believe he would look him up when we got back and tell him we had seen her. I don’t believe, unless I keep right round after him, as we say in New England, that he’ll ever go near the man.”

Agatha looked daunted, but she said, “That is a very different thing.”

“It isn’t a different kind of thing. And it shows what men are, — the sweetest and best of them, that is. They are terribly apt to be — easy-going.”

“Then you think I was all wrong?” the girl asked in a tremor.

“No, indeed! You were right, because you really expected perfection of him. You expected the ideal. And that’s what makes all the trouble, in married life: we expect too much of each other — we each expect more of the other than we are willing to give or can give. If I had to begin over again, I should not expect anything at all, and then I should be sure of being radiantly happy. But all this talking and all this writing about love seems to turn our brains; we know that men are not perfect, even at our craziest, because women are not, but we expect perfection of them; and they seem to expect it of us, poor things! If we could keep on after we are in love just as we were before we were in love, and take nice things as favors and surprises, as we did in the beginning! But we get more and more greedy and exacting—”

“Do you think I was too exacting in wanting him to tell me everything after we were engaged?”

“No, I don’t say that. But suppose he had put it off till you were married?” Agatha blushed a little, but not painfully, “Would it have been so bad? Then you might have thought that his flirting up to the last moment in his desperation was a very good joke. You would have understood better just how it was, and it might even have made you fonder of him. You might have seen that he had flirted with some one else because he was so heart-broken about you.”

“Then you believe that if I could have waited till — till — but when I had found out, don’t you see I couldn’t wait? It would have been all very well if I hadn’t known it till then. But as I did know it. Don’t you see?”

“Yes, that certainly complicated it,” Mrs. March admitted. “But I don’t think, if he’d been a false nature, he’d have owned up as he did. You see, he didn’t try to deny it; and that’s a great point gained.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Agatha, with conviction. “I saw that afterwards. But you don’t think, Mrs. March, that I was unjust or — or hasty?”

“No, indeed! You couldn’t have done differently under the circumstances.
You may be sure he felt that — he is so unselfish and generous—” Agatha
began to weep into her handkerchief again; Mrs. March caressed her hand.
“And it will certainly come right if you feel as you do.”

“No,” the girl protested. “He can never forgive me; it’s all over, everything is over. It would make very little difference to me, what happened now — if the steamer broke her shaft, or anything. But if I can only believe I wasn’t unjust—”

Mrs. March assured her once more that she had behaved with absolute impartiality; and she proved to her by a process of reasoning quite irrefragable that it was only a question of time, with which place had nothing to do, when she and Burnamy should come together again, and all should be made right between them. The fact that she did not know where he was, any more than Mrs. March herself, had nothing to do with the result; that was a mere detail, which would settle itself. She clinched her argument by confessing that her own engagement had been broken off, and that it had simply renewed itself. All you had to do was to keep willing it, and waiting. There was something very mysterious in it.

“And how long was it till—” Agatha faltered.

“Well, in our ease it was two years.”

“Oh!” said the girl, but Mrs. March hastened to reassure her.

“But our case was very peculiar. I could see afterwards that it needn’t have been two months, if I had been willing to acknowledge at once that I was in the wrong. I waited till we met.”

“If I felt that I was in the wrong, I should write,” said Agatha. “I shouldn’t care what he thought of my doing it.”

“Yes, the great thing is to make sure that you were wrong.”

They remained talking so long, that March and the general had exhausted all the topics of common interest, and had even gone through those they did not care for. At last the general said, “I’m afraid my daughter will tire Mrs. March.”

“Oh, I don’t think she’ll tire my wife. But do you want her?”

“Well, when you’re going down.”

“I think I’ll take a turn about the deck, and start my circulation,” said
March, and he did so before he went below.

He found his wife up and dressed, and waiting provisionally on the sofa. “I thought I might as well go to lunch,” she said, and then she told him about Agatha and Burnamy, and the means she had employed to comfort and encourage the girl. “And now, dearest, I want you to find out where Burnamy is, and give him a hint. You will, won’t you! If you could have seen how unhappy she was!”

“I don’t think I should have cared, and I’m certainly not going to meddle. I think Burnamy has got no more than he deserved, and that he’s well rid of her. I can’t imagine a broken engagement that would more completely meet my approval. As the case stands, they have my blessing.”

“Don’t say that, dearest! You know you don’t mean it.”

“I do; and I advise you to keep your hands off. You’ve done all and more than you ought to propitiate Miss Triscoe. You’ve offered yourself up, and you’ve offered me up—”

“No, no, Basil! I merely used you as an illustration of what men were — the best of them.”

“And I can’t observe,” he continued, “that any one else has been considered in the matter. Is Miss Triscoe the sole sufferer by Burnamy’s flirtation? What is the matter with a little compassion for the pivotal girl?”

“Now, you know you’re not serious,” said his wife; and though he would not admit this, he could not be seriously sorry for the new interest which she took in the affair. There was no longer any question of changing their state-room. Under the tonic influence of the excitement she did not go back to her berth after lunch, and she was up later after dinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparative study of the American swells, in the light of her late experience with the German highhotes. It is true that none of the swells gave her the opportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done. They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she could bear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal by an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at the thought; but she contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could give points to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americans did try to do a thing, they beat the world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke of them as “rich people,” and she seemed content to keep away from them with Mrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe had his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and mocked their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and the return of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into his own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find how much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. The conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East and the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his own region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that he should never go back to his native section. There was the comfort of kind in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, which March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrow upon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man’s habit of early rising, and they usually found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee, ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to people of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction, which he said could not be got anywhere out of the British Empire, and he asked Eltwin the first morning if he had noticed how instantly on the Channel boat they had dropped to it and to the sour, heavy, sodden British bread, from the spirited and airy Continental tradition of coffee and rolls.

The major confessed that he was no great hand to notice such things, and he said he supposed that if the line had never lost a passenger, and got you to New York in six days it had a right to feed you as it pleased; he surmised that if they could get their airing outside before they took their coffee, it would give the coffee a chance to taste better; and this was what they afterwards did. They met, well buttoned and well mined up, on the promenade when it was yet so early that they were not at once sure of each other in the twilight, and watched the morning planets pale east and west before the sun rose. Sometimes there were no paling planets and no rising sun, and a black sea, ridged with white, tossed under a low dark sky with dim rifts.

One morning, they saw the sun rise with a serenity and majesty which it rarely has outside of the theatre. The dawn began over that sea which was like the rumpled canvas imitations of the sea on the stage, under long mauve clouds bathed in solemn light. Above these, in the pale tender sky, two silver stars hung, and the steamer’s smoke drifted across them like a thin dusky veil. To the right a bank of dun cloud began to burn crimson, and to burn brighter till it was like a low hill-side full of gorgeous rugosities fleeced with a dense dwarfish growth of autumnal shrubs. The whole eastern heaven softened and flushed through diaphanous mists; the west remained a livid mystery. The eastern masses and flakes of cloud began to kindle keenly; but the stars shone clearly, and then one star, till the tawny pink hid it. All the zenith reddened, but still the sun did not show except in the color of the brilliant clouds. At last the lurid horizon began to burn like a flame-shot smoke, and a fiercely bright disc edge pierced its level, and swiftly defined itself as the sun’s orb.

Many thoughts went through March’s mind; some of them were sad, but in some there was a touch of hopefulness. It might have been that beauty which consoled him for his years; somehow he felt himself, if no longer young, a part of the young immortal frame of things. His state was indefinable, but he longed to hint at it to his companion.

“Yes,” said Eltwin, with a long deep sigh. “I feel as if I could walk out through that brightness and find her. I reckon that such hopes wouldn’t be allowed to lie to us; that so many ages of men couldn’t have fooled themselves so. I’m glad I’ve seen this.” He was silent and they both remained watching the rising sun till they could not bear its splendor. “Now,” said the major, “it must be time for that mud, as you call it.” Over their coffee and crackers at the end of the table which they had to themselves, he resumed. “I was thinking all the time — we seem to think half a dozen things at once, and this was one of them — about a piece of business I’ve got to settle when I reach home; and perhaps you can advise me about it; you’re an editor. I’ve got a newspaper on my hands; I reckon it would be a pretty good thing, if it had a chance; but I don’t know what to do with it: I got it in trade with a fellow who has to go West for his lungs, but he’s staying till I get back. What’s become of that young chap — what’s his name? — that went out with us?”

“Burnamy?” prompted March, rather breathlessly.

“Yes. Couldn’t he take hold of it? I rather liked him. He’s smart, isn’t he?”

“Very,” said March. “But I don’t know where he is. I don’t know that he would go into the country — . But he might, if—”

They entered provisionally into the case, and for argument’s sake supposed that Burnamy would take hold of the major’s paper if he could be got at. It really looked to March like a good chance for him, on Eltwin’s showing; but he was not confident of Burnamy’s turning up very soon, and he gave the major a pretty clear notion why, by entering into the young fellow’s history for the last three months.

“Isn’t it the very irony of fate?” he said to his wife when he found her in their room with a cup of the same mud he had been drinking, and reported the facts to her.

“Irony?” she said, with all the excitement he could have imagined or desired. “Nothing of the kind. It’s a leading, if ever there was one. It will be the easiest thing in the world to find Burnamy. And out there she can sit on her steps!”

He slowly groped his way to her meaning, through the hypothesis of Burnamy’s reconciliation and marriage with Agatha Triscoe, and their settlement in Major Eltwin’s town under social conditions that implied a habit of spending the summer evenings on their front porch. While he was doing this she showered him with questions and conjectures and requisitions in which nothing but the impossibility of going ashore saved him from the instant devotion of all his energies to a world-wide, inquiry into Burnamy’s whereabouts.

The next morning he was up before Major Eltwin got out, and found the second-cabin passengers free of the first-cabin promenade at an hour when their superiors were not using it. As he watched these inferiors, decent-looking, well-clad men and women, enjoying their privilege with a furtive air, and with stolen glances at him, he asked himself in what sort he was their superior, till the inquiry grew painful. Then he rose from his chair, and made his way to the place where the material barrier between them was lifted, and interested himself in a few of them who seemed too proud to avail themselves of his society on the terms made. A figure seized his attention with a sudden fascination of conjecture and rejection: the figure of a tall young man who came out on the promenade and without looking round, walked swiftly away to the bow of the ship, and stood there, looking down at the water in an attitude which was bewilderingly familiar. His movement, his posture, his dress, even, was that of Burnamy, and March, after a first flush of pleasure, felt a sickening repulsion in the notion of his presence. It would have been such a cheap performance on the part of life, which has all sorts of chances at command, and need not descend to the poor tricks of second-rate fiction; and he accused Burnamy of a complicity in the bad taste of the affair, though he realized, when he reflected, that if it were really Burnamy he must have sailed in as much unconsciousness of the Triscoes as he himself had done. He had probably got out of money and had hurried home while he had still enough to pay the second-cabin fare on the first boat back. Clearly he was not to blame, but life was to blame for such a shabby device; and March felt this so keenly that he wished to turn from the situation, and have nothing to do with it. He kept moving toward him, drawn by the fatal attraction, and at a few paces’ distance the young man whirled about and showed him the face of a stranger.

March made some witless remark on the rapid course of the ship as it cut its way through the water of the bow; the stranger answered with a strong Lancashire accent; and in the talk which followed, he said he was going out to see the cotton-mills at Fall River and New Bedford, and he seemed hopeful of some advice or information from March; then he said he must go and try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean his wife, and he hurried down to his own, to whom he related his hair-breadth escape from Burnamy.

“I don’t call it an escape at all!” she declared. “I call it the greatest possible misfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could have brought them together at once, just when she has seen so clearly that she was in the wrong, and is feeling all broken up. There wouldn’t have been any difficulty about his being in the second-cabin. We could have contrived to have them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst you could have lent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the first-cabin.”

“I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him,” said March, “and then he could have eaten with the swells.”

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally incapable of taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before the stewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling that if it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would really have been Burnamy.

LXXV.

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping of the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no perceptible motion save from her machinery.

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those early hours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the sailors scouring the promenades. He made little acquaintance with his fellow-passengers. One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker lady whom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from the churning screws; but he did not quite get the words out. On the contrary he talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm near Boulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-five years out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in all its purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board. Now and then March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of the usual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business; and he philosophized the race as so tiresome often because it seemed so often without philosophy. He made desperate attempts at times to interest himself in the pool-selling in the smoking-room where the betting on the ship’s wonderful run was continual.

He thought that people talked less and less as they drew nearer home; but on the last day out there was a sudden expansion, and some whom he had not spoken with voluntarily addressed him. The sweet, soft air was like midsummer the water rippled gently, without a swell, blue under the clear sky, and the ship left a wide track that was silver in the sun. There were more sail; the first and second class baggage was got up and piled along the steerage deck.

Some people dressed a little more than usual for the last dinner which was earlier than usual, so as to be out of the way against the arrival which had been variously predicted at from five to seven-thirty. An indescribable nervousness culminated with the appearance of the customs officers on board, who spread their papers on cleared spaces of the dining-tables, and summoned the passengers to declare that they had nothing to declare, as a preliminary to being searched like thieves at the dock.

This ceremony proceeded while the Cupania made her way up the Narrows, and into the North River, where the flare of lights from the crazy steeps and cliffs of architecture on the New York shore seemed a persistence of the last Fourth of July pyrotechnics. March blushed for the grotesque splendor of the spectacle, and was confounded to find some Englishmen admiring it, till he remembered that aesthetics were not the strong point of our race. His wife sat hand in hand with Miss Triscoe, and from time to time made him count the pieces of small baggage in the keeping of their steward; while General Triscoe held aloof in a sarcastic calm.

The steamer groped into her dock; the gangways were lifted to her side; the passengers fumbled and stumbled down their incline, and at the bottom the Marches found themselves respectively in the arms of their son and daughter. They all began talking at once, and ignoring and trying to remember the Triscoes to whom the young Marches were presented. Bella did her best to be polite to Agatha, and Tom offered to get an inspector for the general at the same time as for his father. Then March, remorsefully remembered the Eltwins, and looked about for them, so that his son might get them an inspector too. He found the major already in the hands of an inspector, who was passing all his pieces after carelessly looking into one: the official who received the declarations on board had noted a Grand Army button like his own in the major’s lapel, and had marked his fellow-veteran’s paper with the mystic sign which procures for the bearer the honor of being promptly treated as a smuggler, while the less favored have to wait longer for this indignity at the hands of their government. When March’s own inspector came he was as civil and lenient as our hateful law allows; when he had finished March tried to put a bank-note in his hand, and was brought to a just shame by his refusal of it. The bed-room steward keeping guard over the baggage helped put-it together after the search, and protested that March had feed him so handsomely that he would stay there with it as long as they wished. This partly restored March’s self-respect, and he could share in General Triscoe’s indignation with the Treasury ruling which obliged him to pay duty on his own purchases in excess of the hundred-dollar limit, though his daughter had brought nothing, and they jointly came far within the limit for two.

He found that the Triscoes were going to a quiet old hotel on the way to Stuyvesant Square, quite in his own neighborhood, and he quickly arranged for all the ladies and the general to drive together while he was to follow with his son on foot and by car. They got away from the scene of the customs’ havoc while the steamer shed, with its vast darkness dimly lit by its many lamps, still showed like a battle-field where the inspectors groped among the scattered baggage like details from the victorious army searching for the wounded. His son clapped him on the shoulder when he suggested this notion, and said he was the same old father; and they got home as gayly together as the dispiriting influences of the New York ugliness would permit. It was still in those good and decent times, now so remote, when the city got something for the money paid out to keep its streets clean, and those they passed through were not foul but merely mean.

The ignoble effect culminated when they came into Broadway, and found its sidewalks, at an hour when those of any European metropolis would have been brilliant with life, as unpeopled as those of a minor country town, while long processions of cable-cars carted heaps of men and women up and down the thoroughfare amidst the deformities of the architecture.

The next morning the March family breakfasted late after an evening prolonged beyond midnight in spite of half-hourly agreements that now they must really all go to bed. The children had both to recognize again and again how well their parents were looking; Tom had to tell his father about the condition of ‘Every Other Week’; Bella had to explain to her mother how sorry her husband was that he could not come on to meet them with her, but was coming a week later to take her home, and then she would know the reason why they could not all, go back to Chicago with him: it was just the place for her father to live, for everybody to live. At breakfast she renewed the reasoning with which she had maintained her position the night before; the travellers entered into a full expression of their joy at being home again; March asked what had become of that stray parrot which they had left in the tree-top the morning they started; and Mrs. March declared that this was the last Silver Wedding Journey she ever wished to take, and tried to convince them all that she had been on the verge of nervous collapse when she reached the ship. They sat at table till she discovered that it was very nearly eleven o’clock, and said it was disgraceful.

Before they rose, there was a ring at the door, and a card was brought in to Tom. He glanced at it, and said to his father, “Oh, yes! This man has been haunting the office for the last three days. He’s got to leave to-day, and as it seemed to be rather a case of life and death with him, I said he’d probably find you here this morning. But if you don’t want to see him, I can put him off till afternoon, I suppose.”

He tossed the card to his father, who looked at it quietly, and then gave it to his wife. “Perhaps I’d as well see him?”

“See him!” she returned in accents in which all the intensity of her soul was centred. By an effort of self-control which no words can convey a just sense of she remained with her children, while her husband with a laugh more teasing than can be imagined went into the drawing-room to meet Burnamy.

The poor fellow was in an effect of belated summer as to clothes, and he looked not merely haggard but shabby. He made an effort for dignity as well as gayety, however, in stating himself to March, with many apologies for his persistency. But, he said, he was on his way West, and he was anxious to know whether there was any chance of his ‘Kasper Hauler’ paper being taken if he finished it up. March would have been a far harder-hearted editor than he was, if he could have discouraged the suppliant before him. He said he would take the Kasper Hauler paper and add a band of music to the usual rate of ten dollars a thousand words. Then Burnamy’s dignity gave way, if not his gayety; he began to laugh, and suddenly he broke down and confessed that he had come home in the steerage; and was at his last cent, beyond his fare to Chicago. His straw hat looked like a withered leaf in the light of his sad facts; his thin overcoat affected March’s imagination as something like the diaphanous cast shell of a locust, hopelessly resumed for comfort at the approach of autumn. He made Burnamy sit down, after he had once risen, and he told him of Major Eltwin’s wish to see him; and he promised to go round with him to the major’s hotel before the Eltwins left town that afternoon.

While he prolonged the interview in this way, Mrs. March was kept from breaking in upon them only by the psychical experiment which she was making with the help and sympathy of her daughter at the window of the dining-room which looked up Sixteenth Street. At the first hint she gave of the emotional situation which Burnamy was a main part of, her son; with the brutal contempt of young men for other young men’s love affairs, said he must go to the office; he bade his mother tell his father there was no need of his coming down that day, and he left the two women together. This gave the mother a chance to develop the whole fact to the daughter with telegrammic rapidity and brevity, and then to enrich the first-outline with innumerable details, while they both remained at the window, and Mrs. March said at two-minutely intervals, with no sense of iteration for either of them, “I told her to come in the morning, if she felt like it, and I know she will. But if she doesn’t, I shall say there is nothing in fate, or Providence either. At any rate I’m going to stay here and keep longing for her, and we’ll see whether there’s anything in that silly theory of your father’s. I don’t believe there is,” she said, to be on the safe side.

Even when she saw Agatha Triscoe enter the park gate on Rutherford Place, she saved herself from disappointment by declaring that she was not coming across to their house. As the girl persisted in coming and coming, and at last came so near that she caught sight of Mrs. March at the window and nodded, the mother turned ungratefully upon her daughter, and drove her away to her own room, so that no society detail should hinder the divine chance. She went to the door herself when Agatha rang, and then she was going to open the way into the parlor where March was still closeted with Burnamy, and pretend that she had not known they were there. But a soberer second thought than this prevailed, and she told the girl who it was that was within and explained the accident of his presence. “I think,” she said nobly, “that you ought to have the chance of going away if you don’t wish to meet him.”

The girl, with that heroic precipitation which Mrs. March had noted in her from the first with regard to what she wanted to do, when Burnamy was in question, answered, “But I do wish to meet him, Mrs. March.”

While they stood looking at each other, March came out to ask his wife if she would see Burnamy, and she permitted herself so much stratagem as to substitute Agatha, after catching her husband aside and subduing his proposed greeting of the girl to a hasty handshake.

Half an hour later she thought it time to join the young people, urged largely by the frantic interest of her daughter. But she returned from the half-open door without entering. “I couldn’t bring myself to break in on the poor things. They are standing at the window together looking over at St. George’s.”

Bella silently clasped her hands. March gave cynical laugh, and said, “Well we are in for it, my dear.” Then he added, “I hope they’ll take us with them on their Silver Wedding Journey.”

THE FLIGHT OF PONY BAKER

This episodic children’s novel first appeared in 1902. The story takes place “fifty years ago” in the Boy’s Town of Ohio, the state where Howells was born and raised. It tells the story of the many attempts of young Frank “Pony” Baker to run away from his home where he lives with his mother, father and five sisters. By the end of the novel, however, he realises the value of a loving family environment, however stifling such a place can sometimes feel.

The book deals with the formation of identity – specifically the idea that parents should allow children to learn from their experiences, rather than adopt a policy of over-protection. Howells demonstrates an empathic understanding of a young boy’s psychology, turning his passion for realism on to his own childhood experiences and attitudes.

Cover of the first edition

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

Title page of the first edition

Frontispiece of the first edition

I

PONY’S MOTHER, AND WHY HE HAD A RIGHT TO RUN OFF

If there was any fellow in the Boy’s Town fifty years ago who had a good reason to run off it was Pony Baker. Pony was not his real name; it was what the boys called him, because there were so many fellows who had to be told apart, as Big Joe and Little Joe, and Big John and Little John, and Big Bill and Little Bill, that they got tired of telling boys apart that way; and after one of the boys called him Pony Baker, so that you could know him from his cousin Frank Baker, nobody ever called him anything else.

“being dressed so well was one of the
worst things that was done to him
by his mother”

You would have known Pony from the other Frank Baker, anyway, if you had seen them together, for the other Frank Baker was a tall, lank, tow-headed boy, with a face so full of freckles that you could not have put a pin-point between them, and large, bony hands that came a long way out of his coat-sleeves; and the Frank Baker that I mean here was little and dark and round, with a thick crop of black hair on his nice head; and he had black eyes, and a smooth, swarthy face, without a freckle on it. He was pretty well dressed in clothes that fitted him, and his hands were small and plump. His legs were rather short, and he walked and ran with quick, nipping steps, just like a pony; and you would have thought of a pony when you looked at him, even if that had not been his nickname.

That very thing of his being dressed so well was one of the worst things that was done to him by his mother, who was always disgracing him before the other boys, though she may not have known it. She never was willing to have him go barefoot, and if she could she would have kept his shoes on him the whole summer; as it was, she did keep them on till all the other boys had been barefoot so long that their soles were as hard as horn; and they could walk on broken glass, or anything, and had stumped the nails off their big toes, and had grass cuts under their little ones, and yarn tied into them, before Pony Baker was allowed to take his shoes off in the spring. He would have taken them off and gone barefoot without his mother’s knowing it, and many of the boys said that he ought to do it; but then she would have found it out by the look of his feet when he went to bed, and maybe told his father about it.

Very likely his father would not have cared so much; sometimes he would ask Pony’s mother why she did not turn the boy barefoot with the other boys, and then she would ask Pony’s father if he wanted the child to take his death of cold; and that would hush him up, for Pony once had a little brother that died.

Pony had nothing but sisters, after that, and this was another thing that kept him from having a fair chance with the other fellows. His mother wanted him to play with his sisters, and she did not care, or else she did not know, that a girl-boy was about the meanest thing there was, and that if you played with girls you could not help being a girl-boy. Pony liked to play with his sisters well enough when there were no boys around, but when there were his mother did not act as if she could not see any difference. The girls themselves were not so bad, and they often coaxed their mother to let him go off with the other boys, when she would not have let him without. But even then, if it was going in swimming, or fishing, or skating before the ice was very thick, she would show that she thought he was too little to take care of himself, and would make some big boy promise that he would look after Pony; and all the time Pony would be gritting his teeth, he was so mad.

Once, when Pony stayed in swimming all day with a crowd of fellows, she did about the worst thing she ever did; she came down to the river-bank and stood there, and called to the boys, to find out if Pony was with them; and they all had to get into the water up to their necks before they could bear to answer her, they were so ashamed; and Pony had to put on his clothes and go home with her. He could see that she had been crying, and that made him a little sorry, but not so very; and the most that he was afraid of was that she would tell his father. But if she did he never knew it, and that night she came to him after he went to bed, and begged him so not to stay in swimming the whole day any more, and told him how frightened she had been, that he had to promise; and then that made him feel worse than ever, for he did not see how he could break his promise.

She was not exactly a bad mother, and she was not exactly a good mother. If she had been really a good mother she would have let him do whatever he wanted, and never made any trouble, and if she had been a bad mother she would not have let him do anything; and then he could have done it without her letting him. In some ways she was good enough; she would let him take out things to the boys in the back yard from the table, and she put apple-butter or molasses on when it was hot biscuit that he took out. Once she let him have a birthday party, and had cake and candy-pulling and lemonade, and nobody but boys, because he said that boys hated girls; even his own sisters did not come. Sometimes she would give him money for ice-cream, and if she could have got over being particular about his going in swimming before he could swim, and pistols and powder and such things, she would have done very well.

She was first-rate when he was sick, and nobody could take care of him like her, cooling his pillow and making the bed easy, and keeping everybody quiet; and when he began to get well she would cook things that tasted better than anything you ever knew: stewed chicken, and toast with gravy on, and things like that. Even when he was well, and just lonesome, she would sit by his bed if he asked her, till he went to sleep, or got quieted down; and if he was trying to make anything she would help him all she could, but if it was something that you had to use a knife with she was not much help.

It always seemed to Pony that she begrudged his going with the boys, and she said how nice he used to keep his clothes before, and had such pretty manners, and now he was such a sloven, and was so rude and fierce that she was almost afraid of him. He knew that she was making fun about being afraid of him; and if she did hate to have him go with some of the worst boys, still she was willing to help in lots of ways. She gave him yarn to make a ball with, and she covered it for him with leather. Sometimes she seemed to do things for him that she would not do for his sisters, and she often made them give up to him when they had a dispute.

She made a distinction between boys and girls, and did not make him help with the housework. Of course he had to bring in wood, but all the fellows had to do that, and they did not count it; what they hated was having to churn, or wipe dishes after company. Pony’s mother never made him do anything like that; she said it was girls’ work; and she would not let him learn to milk, either, for she said that milking was women’s work, and all that Pony had to do with the cow was to bring her home from the pasture in the evening.

Sometimes when there was company she would let him bring in a boy to the second table, and she gave them all the preserves and cake that they could eat. The kind of company she had was what nearly all the mothers had in the Boy’s Town; they asked a whole lot of other mothers to supper, and had stewed chicken and hot biscuit, and tea and coffee, and quince and peach preserves, and sweet tomato pickles, and cake with jelly in between, and pound-cake with frosting on, and buttered toast, and maybe fried eggs and ham. The fathers never seemed to come; or, if the father that belonged in the house came, he did not go and sit in the parlor with the mothers after supper, but went up-town, to the post-office, or to some of the lawyers’ offices, or else a store, and talked politics.

Pony never thought his mother was good looking, or, rather, he did not think anything about that, and it always seemed to him that she must be a pretty old woman; but once when she had company, and she came in from the kitchen with the last dish, and put it on the table, one of the nicest of the other mothers came up, and put her arm around Pony’s mother, and said:

“How pretty you do look, Mrs. Baker! I just want to kiss you on those red cheeks. I should say you were a girl, instead of having all those children.”

Pony was standing out on the porch with his five sisters, and when he looked in through the door, and saw his mother with her head thrown back laughing, and her face flushed from standing over the stove to cook the supper, and her brown hair tossed a little, he did think that she was very nice looking, and like the girls at school that were in the fourth reader; and she was very nicely dressed, too, in a white muslin dress, with the blue check apron she had been working in flung behind the kitchen door, as she came into the sitting-room carrying the dish in one hand. He did not know what the other mother meant by saying “all those children”; for it was a small family for the Boy’s Town, and he thought she must just be fooling.

Sometimes his mother would romp with the children, or sing them funny, old-fashioned songs, such as people used to sing when the country was first settled and everybody lived in log cabins. When she got into one of her joking times she would call Pony “Honey! Honey!” like the old colored aunty that had the persimmon-tree in her yard; and if she had to go past him she would wind her arm around his head and mumble the top of it with her lips; and if there were any of the fellows there, and Pony would fling her arm away because he hated to have her do it before them, she would just laugh.

Of course, if she had been a good mother about everything else Pony would not have minded that, but she was such a very bad mother about letting him have fun, sometimes, that Pony could not overlook it, as he might have done. He did not think that she ought to call him Pony before the boys, for, though he did not mind the boys’ calling him Pony, it was not the thing for a fellow’s mother, and it was sure to give them the notion she babied him at home. Once, after she called him “Pony, dear!” the fellows mocked her when they got away, and all of them called him “Pony, dear!” till he began to cry and to stone them.

But the worst of her ways was about powder, and her not wanting him to have it, or not wanting him to have it where there was fire. She would never let him come near the stove with it, after one of the fellows had tried to dry his powder on the stove when it had got wet from being pumped on in his jacket-pocket while he was drinking at the pump, and the fellow forgot to take it off the stove quick enough, and it almost blew his mother up, and did pretty nearly scare her to death; and she would not let him keep it in a bottle, or anything, but just loose in a paper, because another of the fellows had begun to pour powder once from a bottle onto a coal of fire, and the fire ran up the powder, and blew the bottle to pieces, and filled the fellow’s face so full of broken glass that the doctor was nearly the whole of that Fourth of July night getting it out. So, although she was a good mother in some things, she was a bad mother in others, and these were the great things; and they were what gave him the right to run off.

II

THE RIGHT THAT PONY HAD TO RUN OFF, FROM THE WAY HIS FATHER ACTED

Pony had a right to run off from some of the things that his father had done, but it seemed to him that they were mostly things that his mother had put his father up to, and that his father would not have been half as bad if he had been let alone. In the Boy’s Town the fellows celebrated Christmas just as they did Fourth of July, by firing off pistols and shooting crackers, and one Christmas one of the fellows’ pistols burst and blew the ball of his thumb open, and when a crowd of the fellows helped him past Pony’s house, crying and limping (the pain seemed to go down his leg, and lame him), Pony’s mother made his father take Pony’s pistol right away from him, and not let him have it till after New Year’s; and what made it worse was that Pony had faithfully kept his promise to her that he would not fire anything out of his pistol but paper wads, while all the other fellows were firing shot, and tacks, and little marbles, out of theirs; and some of them tried to shame him into breaking his word, and he had to stand their calling him cry-baby, and everything.

Then, she would not let his father get him a gun to go hunting with, because he would have to fire something besides wads out of that, and would be sure to kill himself. Pony told her that he would not kill himself, and tried to laugh her out of the notion, but it was no use, and he never had a gun till he was twelve years old; he was nine at the time I mean. One of the fellows who was only eight was going to have a gun as soon as his brother got done with his.

She would hardly let his father get him a dog, and I suppose it was something but Pony’s disappointment about the gun that made her agree to the dog at last; even then she would not agree to his having it before it had its eyes open, when the great thing about a puppy was its not having its eyes open, and it was fully two weeks old before he was allowed to bring it home, though he was taken to choose it before it could walk very well, and he went every day afterwards to see how it was getting along, and to watch out that it did not get changed with the other little dogs. The first night after he got it to his own house, the dog whined so with homesickness that it kept everybody awake till Pony went to the woodshed, where it was in the clothes-basket, and took it into his own bed; then it went to sleep, and did not whine a bit. His father let him keep it there that one night, but the next he made him put it out again, because he said it would get the house full of fleas; and he said if it made much more trouble he would make Pony take it back.

He was not a very good father about money, because when Pony went to ask him for a five-cent piece he always wanted to know what it was for, and even when it was for a good thing a fellow did not always like to tell. If his father did not think it was a good thing he would not let Pony have it, and then Pony would be ashamed to go back to the boys, for they would say his father was stingy, though perhaps none of them had tried to get money from their own fathers.

Every now and then the fellows tried to learn to smoke, and that was a thing that Pony’s father would not let him do. He would let him smoke the drift-wood twigs, which the boys picked up along the river shore and called smoke-wood, or he would let him smoke grapevine or the pods of the catalpa, which were just like cigars, but he was mean about real tobacco. Once, when he found a cigar in Pony’s pocket, he threw it into the fire, and said that if he ever knew him to have another he would have a talk with him.

He was pretty bad about wanting Pony to weed his mother’s flower-beds and about going regularly to school, and always getting up in time for school. To be sure, if a show or a circus came along, he nearly always took Pony in, but then he was apt to take the girls, too, and he did not like to have Pony go off with a crowd of boys, which was the only way to go into a show; for if the fellows saw you with your family, all dressed up, and maybe with your shoes on, they would make fun of you the next time they caught you out.

He made Pony come in every night before nine o’clock, and even Christmas Eve, or the night before Fourth of July, he would not let him stay up the whole night. When he went to the city, as the boys called the large town twenty miles away from the Boy’s Town, he might get Pony a present or he might not, but he would not promise, because once when he promised, he forgot it, and then Pony’s mother scolded him.

There were some boys’ fathers in the Boy’s Town who were good fathers, and let their children do whatever they pleased, and Pony could not help feeling rather ashamed before these boys. If one of that sort of fellows’ fathers passed a crowd of boys, they would not take any notice of their boys; but if Pony’s father came along, he would very likely say, “Well, Pony!” or something like that, and then all the fellows would hollo, “Well, Pony! Well, Pony!” and make fun of his father, when he got past, and walk like him, or something, so that Pony would be so mad he would hardly know what to do. He hated to ask his father not to speak to him, or look at him, when he was with the fellows, but it seemed to him as if his father ought to know better without asking.

There were a great many things like that which no good father would have done, but the thing that made Pony lose all patience, and begin getting ready to run off right away, was the way his father behaved when Pony got mad at the teacher one day, and brought his books home, and said he was not going back to that school any more. The reason was because the teacher had put Pony back from third reader to the second and made him go into a class of little fellows not more than seven years old. It happened one morning, after a day when Pony had read very badly in the afternoon, and though he had explained that he had read badly because the weather was so hot, the teacher said he might try it in the second reader till the weather changed, at any rate; and the whole school laughed. The worst of it was that Pony was really a very good reader, and could speak almost the best of any of the boys; but that afternoon he was lazy, and would not pay attention.

At recess, after the teacher had put him back, all the fellows came round and asked him what he was going to do now; and he just shut his teeth and told them they would see; and at noon they did see. As soon as school was dismissed, or even before, Pony put all his books together, and his slate, and tied them with his slate-pencil string, and twitched his hat down off the peg, and strutted proudly out of the room, so that not only the boys but the teacher, too, could see that he was leaving school. The teacher looked on and pretended to smile, but Pony did not smile; he kept his teeth shut, and walked stiffly through the door, and straight home, without speaking to any one. That was the way to do when you left school in the Boy’s Town, for then the boys would know you were in earnest; and none of them would try to speak to you, either; they would respect you too much.

Pony’s mother knew that he had left school as soon as she saw him bringing home his books, but she only looked sorry and did not say anything. She must have told his father about it when he came to dinner, though, for as soon as they sat down at the table his father began to ask what the trouble was. Pony answered very haughtily, and said that old Archer had put him back into the second reader, and he was not going to stand it, and he had left school.

“Then,” said his father, “you expect to stay in the second reader the rest of your life?”

This was something that Pony had never thought of before; but he said he did not care, and he was not going to have old Archer put him back, anyway, and he began to cry.

It was then that his mother showed herself a good mother, if ever she was one, and said she thought it was a shame to put Pony back and mortify him before the other boys, and she knew that it must just have happened that he did not read very well that afternoon because he was sick, or something, for usually he read perfectly.

His father said, “My dear girl, my dear girl!” and his mother hushed up and did not say anything more; but Pony could see what she thought, and he accused old Archer of always putting on him and always trying to mortify him.

“That’s all very well,” said his father, “but I think we ought to give him one more trial; and I advise you to take your books back again this afternoon, and read so well that he will put you into the fourth reader to-morrow morning.”

Pony understood that his father was just making fun about the fourth reader, but was in earnest about his going back to school; and he left the table and threw himself on the lounge, with his face down, and cried. He said he was sick, and his head ached, and he could not go to school; his father said that he hoped his headache would wear off in the course of the afternoon, but if he was worse they would have the doctor when he came home from school.

Then he took his hat and went out of the front door to go up town, and Pony screamed out, “Well, I’ll run off; that’s what I’ll do!”

His father did not take any notice of him, and his mother only said, “Pony, Pony!” while his sisters all stood round frightened at the way Pony howled and thrashed the lounge with his legs.

But before one o’clock Pony washed his face and brushed his hair, and took his books and started for school. His mother tried to kiss him, but he pushed her off, for it seemed to him that she might have made his father let him stay out of school, if she had tried, and he was not going to have any of her pretending. He made his face very cold and hard as he marched out of the house, for he never meant to come back to that house any more. He meant to go to school that afternoon, but as soon as school was out he was going to run off.

When the fellows saw him coming back with his books they knew how it was, but they did not mock him, for he had done everything that he could, and all that was expected of anybody in such a case. A boy always came back when he had left school in that way, and nobody supposed but what he would; the thing was to leave school; after that you were not to blame, whatever happened.

Before recess it began to be known among them that Pony was going to run off, because his father had made him come back, and then they did think he was somebody; and as soon as they got out at recess they all crowded round him and began to praise him up, and everything, and to tell him that they would run off, too, if their fathers sent them back; and so he began to be glad that he was going to do it. They asked him when he was going to run off, and he told them they would see; and pretty soon it was understood that he was going to run off the same night.

When school was out a whole crowd of them started with him, and some of the biggest fellows walked alongside of him, and talked down over their shoulders to him, and told him what he must do. They said he must not start till after dark, and he must watch out for the constable till he got over the corporation line and then nobody could touch him. They said that they would be waiting round the corner for him as soon as they had their suppers, and one of them would walk along with him to the end of the first street and then another would be waiting there to go with him to the end of the next, and so on till they reached the corporation line. Very likely his father would have the constable waiting there to stop him, but Pony ought to start to run across the line and then the fellows would rush out and trip up the constable and hold him down till Pony got safe across. He ought to hollo, when he was across, and that would let them know that he was safe and they would be ready to let the constable up, and begin to run before he could grab them.

Everybody thought that was a splendid plan except Archy Hawkins, that all the fellows called Old Hawkins; his father kept one of the hotels, and Old Hawkins used to catch frogs for the table; he was the one that the frogs used to know by sight, and when they saw him they would croak out: “Here comes Hawkins! Here comes Hawkins! Look out!” and jump off the bank into the water and then come up among the green slime, where nobody but Old Hawkins could see them. He was always joking and getting into scrapes, but still the boys liked him and thought he was pretty smart, and now they did not mind it when he elbowed the big boys away that were talking to Pony and told them to shut up.

“You just listen to your uncle, Pony!” he said. “These fellows don’t know anything about running off. I’ll tell you how to do it; you mind your uncle! It’s no use trying to get away from the constable, if he’s there, for he’ll catch you as quick as lightning, and he won’t mind these fellows any more than fleas. You oughtn’t try to start till along about midnight, for the constable will be in bed by that time, and you won’t have any trouble. You must have somebody to wake you up, and some of the fellows ought to be outside, to do it. You listen to your grandfather! You ought to tie a string around your big toe, and let the string hang out of the window, the way you do Fourth of July eve; and then just as soon as it strikes twelve, the fellows ought to tug away at the string till you come hopping to the window, and tell ’em to stop. But you got to whisper, and the fellows mustn’t make any noise, either, or your father will be out on them in a minute. He’ll be watching out, to-night, anyway, I reckon, because—”

Old Hawkins was walking backward in front of Pony, talking to him, and showing him how he must hop to the window, and all at once he struck his heel against a root in the sidewalk, and the first thing he knew he sat down so hard that it about knocked the breath out of him.

All the fellows laughed, and anybody else would have been mad, but Old Hawkins was too good-natured; and he got up and brushed himself, and said: “Say! let’s go down to the river and go in, before supper, anyway.”

Nearly all the fellows agreed, and Old Hawkins said: “Come along, Pony! You got to come, too!”

But Pony stiffly refused, partly because it seemed to him pretty mean to forget all about his running away, like that, and partly because he had to ask his mother before he went in swimming. A few of the little fellows kept with him all the way home, but most of the big boys went along with Old Hawkins.

One of them stayed with Pony and the little boys, and comforted him for the way the rest had left him. He was a fellow who was always telling about Indians, and he said that if Pony could get to the Indians, anywhere, and they took a fancy to him, they would adopt him into their tribe, if it was just after some old chief had lost a son in battle. Maybe they would offer to kill him first, and they would have to hold a council, but if they did adopt him, it would be the best thing, because then he would soon turn into an Indian himself, and forget how to speak English; and if ever the Indians had to give up their prisoners, and he was brought back, and his father and mother came to pick him out, they might know him by some mark or other, but he would not know them, and they would have to let him go back to the Indians again. He said that was the very best way, and the only way, but the trouble would be to get to the Indians in the first place. He said he knew of one reservation in the north part of the State, and he promised to find out if there were any other Indians living nearer; the reservation was about a hundred miles off, and it would take Pony a good while to go to them.

The name of this boy was Jim Leonard. But now, before I go the least bit further with the story of Pony Baker’s running away, I have got to tell about Jim Leonard, and what kind of boy he was, and the scrape that he once got Pony and the other boys into, and a hair-breadth escape he had himself, when he came pretty near being drowned in a freshet; and I will begin with the hair-breadth escape, because it happened before the scrape.

III

JIM LEONARD’S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

Jim Leonard’s stable used to stand on the flat near the river, and on a rise of ground above it stood Jim Leonard’s log-cabin. The boys called it Jim Leonard’s log-cabin, but it was really his mother’s, and the stable was hers, too. It was a log stable, but up where the gable began the logs stopped, and it was weather-boarded the rest of the way, and the roof was shingled.

Jim Leonard said it was all logs once, and that the roof was loose clap-boards, held down by logs that ran across them, like the roofs in the early times, before there were shingles or nails, or anything, in the country. But none of the oldest boys had ever seen it like that, and you had to take Jim Leonard’s word for it if you wanted to believe it. The little fellows nearly all did; but everybody said afterwards it was a good thing for Jim Leonard that it was not that kind of roof when he had his hair-breadth escape on it. He said himself that he would not have cared if it had been; but that was when it was all over, and his mother had whipped him, and everything, and he was telling the boys about it.

He said that in his Pirate Book lots of fellows on rafts got to land when they were shipwrecked, and that the old-fashioned roof would have been just like a raft, anyway, and he could have steered it right across the river to Delorac’s Island as easy! Pony Baker thought very likely he could, but Hen Billard said:

“Well, why didn’t you do it, with the kind of a roof you had?”

Some of the boys mocked Jim Leonard; but a good many of them thought he could have done it if he could have got into the eddy that there was over by the island. If he could have landed there, once, he could have camped out and lived on fish till the river fell.

It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, which always came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember. The country above the Boy’s Town was under water, for miles and miles. The river bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all planted over again when the water went down. The freshet tore away pieces of orchard, and apple-trees in bloom came sailing along with logs and fence rails and chicken-coops, and pretty soon dead cows and horses. There was a dog chained to a dog-kennel that went by, howling awfully; the boys would have given anything if they could have saved him, but the yellow river whirled him out of sight behind the middle pier of the bridge, which everybody was watching from the bank, expecting it to go any minute. The water was up within four or five feet of the bridge, and the boys believed that if a good big log had come along and hit it, the bridge would have been knocked loose from its piers and carried down the river.

Perhaps it would, and perhaps it would not. The boys all ran to watch it as soon as school was out, and stayed till they had to go to supper. After supper some of their mothers let them come back and stay till bedtime, if they would promise to keep a full yard back from the edge of the bank. They could not be sure just how much a yard was, and they nearly all sat down on the edge and let their legs hang over.

Jim Leonard was there, holloing and running up and down the bank, and showing the other boys things away out in the river that nobody else could see; he said he saw a man out there. He had not been to supper, and he had not been to school all day, which might have been the reason why he would rather stay with the men and watch the bridge than go home to supper; his mother would have been waiting for him with a sucker from the pear-tree. He told the boys that while they were gone he went out with one of the men on the bridge as far as the middle pier, and it shook like a leaf; he showed with his hand how it shook.

Jim Leonard was a fellow who believed he did all kinds of things that he would like to have done; and the big boys just laughed. That made Jim Leonard mad, and he said that as soon as the bridge began to go, he was going to run out on it and go with it; and then they would see whether he was a liar or not! They mocked him and danced round him till he cried. But Pony Baker, who had come with his father, believed that Jim Leonard would really have done it; and at any rate, he felt sorry for him when Jim cried.

He stayed later than any of the little fellows, because his father was with him, and even all the big boys had gone home except Hen Billard, when Pony left Jim Leonard on the bank and stumbled sleepily away, with his hand in his father’s.

When Pony was gone, Hen Billard said: “Well, going to stay all night, Jim?”

And Jim Leonard answered back, as cross as could be, “Yes, I am!” And he said the men who were sitting up to watch the bridge were going to give him some of their coffee, and that would keep him awake. But perhaps he thought this because he wanted some coffee so badly. He was awfully hungry, for he had not had anything since breakfast, except a piece of bread-and-butter that he got Pony Baker to bring him in his pocket when he came down from school at noontime.

Hen Billard said, “Well, I suppose I won’t see you any more, Jim; good-bye,” and went away laughing; and after a while one of the men saw Jim Leonard hanging about, and asked him what he wanted there, at that time of night; and Jim could not say he wanted coffee, and so there was nothing for him to do but go. There was nowhere for him to go but home, and he sneaked off in the dark.

When he came in sight of the cabin he could not tell whether he would rather have his mother waiting for him with a whipping and some supper, or get to bed somehow with neither. He climbed softly over the back fence and crept up to the back door, but it was fast; then he crept round to the front door, and that was fast, too. There was no light in the house, and it was perfectly still.

All of a sudden it struck him that he could sleep in the stable-loft, and he thought what a fool he was not to have thought of it before. The notion brightened him up so that he got the gourd that hung beside the well-curb and took it out to the stable with him; for now he remembered that the cow would be there, unless she was in somebody’s garden-patch or corn-field.

He noticed as he walked down towards the stable that the freshet had come up over the flat, and just before the door he had to wade. But he was in his bare feet and he did not care; if he thought anything, he thought that his mother would not come out to milk till the water went down, and he would be safe till then from the whipping he must take, sooner or later, for playing hooky.

Sure enough, the old cow was in the stable, and she gave Jim Leonard a snort of welcome and then lowed anxiously. He fumbled through the dark to her side, and began to milk her. She had been milked only a few hours before, and so he got only a gourdful from her. But it was all strippings, and rich as cream, and it was smoking warm. It seemed to Jim Leonard that it went down to his very toes when he poured it into his throat, and it made him feel so good that he did not know what to do.

There really was not anything for him to do but to climb up into the loft by the ladder in the corner of the stable, and lie down on the old last year’s fodder. The rich, warm milk made Jim Leonard awfully sleepy, and he dropped off almost as soon as his head touched the corn-stalks. The last thing he remembered was the hoarse roar of the freshet outside, and that was a lulling music in his ears.

The next thing he knew, and he hardly knew that, was a soft, jolting, sinking motion, first to one side and then to another; then he seemed to be going down, down, straight down, and then to be drifting off into space. He rubbed his eyes, and found it was full daylight, although it was the daylight of early morning; and while he lay looking out of the stable-loft window and trying to make out what it all meant, he felt a wash of cold water along his back, and his bed of fodder melted away under him and around him, and some loose planks of the loft floor swam weltering out of the window. Then he knew what had happened. The flood had stolen up while he slept, and sapped the walls of the stable; the logs had given way, one after another, and had let him down, with the roof, into the water.

He got to his feet as well as he could, and floundered over the rising and falling boards to the window in the floating gable. One look outside showed him his mother’s log-cabin safe on its rise of ground, and at the corner the old cow, that must have escaped through the stable door he had left open, and passed the night among the cabbages. She seemed to catch sight of Jim Leonard when he put his head out, and she lowed to him.

Jim Leonard did not stop to make any answer. He clambered out of the window and up onto the ridge of the roof, and there, in the company of a large gray rat, he set out on the strangest voyage a boy ever made. In a few moments the current swept him out into the middle of the river, and he was sailing down between his native shore on one side and Delorac’s Island on the other.

All round him seethed and swirled the yellow flood in eddies and ripples, where drift of all sorts danced and raced. His vessel, such as it was, seemed seaworthy enough. It held securely together, fitting like a low, wide cup over the water, and perhaps finding some buoyancy from the air imprisoned in it above the window. But Jim Leonard was not satisfied, and so far from being proud of his adventure, he was frightened worse even than the rat which shared it. As soon as he could get his voice, he began to shout for help to the houses on the empty shores, which seemed to fly backward on both sides while he lay still on the gulf that swashed around him, and tried to drown his voice before it swallowed him up. At the same time the bridge, which had looked so far off when he first saw it, was rushing swiftly towards him, and getting nearer and nearer.

He wondered what had become of all the people and all the boys. He thought that if he were safe there on shore he should not be sleeping in bed while somebody was out in the river on a roof, with nothing but a rat to care whether he got drowned or not.

Where was Hen Billard, that always made fun so; or Archy Hawkins, that pretended to be so good-natured; or Pony Baker, that seemed to like a fellow so much? He began to call for them by name: “Hen Billard — O Hen! Help, help! Archy Hawkins, O Archy! I’m drowning! Pony, Pony, O Pony! Don’t you see me, Pony?”

He could see the top of Pony Baker’s house, and he thought what a good, kind man Pony’s father was. Surely he would try to save him; and Jim Leonard began to yell: “O Mr. Baker! Look here, Mr. Baker! It’s Jim Leonard, and I’m floating down the river on a roof! Save me, Mr. Baker, save me! Help, help, somebody! Fire! Fire! Fire! Murder! Fire!”

By this time he was about crazy, and did not half know what he was saying. Just in front of where Hen Billard’s grandmother lived, on the street that ran along the top of the bank, the roof got caught in the branches of a tree which had drifted down and stuck in the bottom of the river so that the branches waved up and down as the current swashed through them. Jim Leonard was glad of anything that would stop the roof, and at first he thought he would get off on the tree. That was what the rat did. Perhaps the rat thought Jim Leonard really was crazy and he had better let him have the roof to himself; but the rat saw that he had made a mistake, and he jumped back again after he had swung up and down on a limb two or three times. Jim Leonard felt awfully when the rat first got into the tree, for he remembered how it said in the Pirate Book that rats always leave a sinking ship, and now he believed that he certainly was gone. But that only made him hollo the louder, and he holloed so loud that at last he made somebody hear.

It was Hen Billard’s grandmother, and she put her head out of the window with her night-cap on, to see what the matter was. Jim Leonard caught sight of her and he screamed, “Fire, fire, fire! I’m drownding, Mrs. Billard! Oh, do somebody come!”

Hen Billard’s grandmother just gave one yell of “Fire! The world’s a-burnin’ up, Hen Billard, and you layin’ there sleepin’ and not helpin’ a bit! Somebody’s out there in the river!” and she rushed into the room where Hen was, and shook him.

He bounced out of bed and pulled on his pantaloons, and was down-stairs in a minute. He ran bareheaded over to the bank, and when Jim Leonard saw him coming he holloed ten times as loud: “It’s me, Hen! It’s Jim Leonard! Oh, do get somebody to come out and save me! Fire!”

As soon as Hen heard that, and felt sure it was not a dream, which he did in about half a second, he began to yell, too, and to say: “How did you get there? Fire, fire, fire! What are you on? Fire! Are you in a tree, or what? Fire, fire! Are you in a flat-boat? Fire, fire, fire! If I had a skiff — fire!”

He kept racing up and down the bank, and back and forth between the bank and the houses. The river was almost up to the top of the bank, and it looked a mile wide. Down at the bridge you could hardly see any light between the water and the bridge.

Pretty soon people began to look out of their doors and windows, and Hen Billard’s grandmother kept screaming, “The world’s a-burnin’ up! The river’s on fire!” Then boys came out of their houses; and then men with no hats on; and then women and girls, with their hair half down. The fire-bells began to ring, and in less than five minutes both the fire companies were on the shore, with the men at the brakes and the foremen of the companies holloing through their trumpets.

Then Jim Leonard saw what a good thing it was that he had thought of holloing fire. He felt sure now that they would save him somehow, and he made up his mind to save the rat, too, and pet it, and maybe go around and exhibit it. He would name it Bolivar; it was just the color of the elephant Bolivar that came to the Boy’s Town every year. These things whirled through his brain while he watched two men setting out in a skiff towards him.

They started from the shore a little above him, and they meant to row slanting across to his tree, but the current, when they got fairly into it, swept them far below, and they were glad to row back to land again without ever getting anywhere near him. At the same time, the tree-top where his roof was caught was pulled southward by a sudden rush of the torrent; it opened, and the roof slipped out, with Jim Leonard and the rat on it. They both joined in one squeal of despair as the river leaped forward with them, and a dreadful “Oh!” went up from the people on the bank.

Some of the firemen had run down to the bridge when they saw that the skiff was not going to be of any use, and one of them had got out of the window of the bridge onto the middle pier, with a long pole in his hand. It had an iron hook at the end, and it was the kind of pole that the men used to catch drift-wood with and drag it ashore. When the people saw Blue Bob with that pole in his hand, they understood what he was up to. He was going to wait till the water brought the roof with Jim Leonard on it down to the bridge, and then catch the hook into the shingles and pull it up to the pier. The strongest current set close in around the middle pier, and the roof would have to pass on one side or the other. That was what Blue Bob argued out in his mind when he decided that the skiff would never reach Jim Leonard, and he knew that if he could not save him that way, nothing could save him.

Blue Bob must have had a last name, but none of the little fellows knew what it was. Everybody called him Blue Bob because he had such a thick, black beard that when he was just shaved his face looked perfectly blue. He knew all about the river and its ways, and if it had been of any use to go out with a boat, he would have gone. That was what all the boys said, when they followed Blue Bob to the bridge and saw him getting out on the pier. He was the only person that the watchman had let go on the bridge for two days.

The water was up within three feet of the floor, and if Jim Leonard’s roof slipped by Blue Bob’s guard and passed under the bridge, it would scrape Jim Leonard off, and that would be the last of him.

All the time the roof was coming nearer the bridge, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, just as it got into an eddy or into the current; once it seemed almost to stop, and swayed completely round; then it just darted forward.

Blue Bob stood on the very point of the pier, where the strong stone-work divided the current, and held his hooked pole ready to make a clutch at the roof, whichever side it took. Jim Leonard saw him there, but although he had been holloing and yelling and crying all the time, now he was still. He wanted to say, “O Bob, save me!” but he could not make a sound.

It seemed to him that Bob was going to miss him when he made a lunge at the roof on the right side of the pier; it seemed to him that the roof was going down the left side; but he felt it quiver and stop, and then it gave a loud crack and went to pieces, and flung itself away upon the whirling and dancing flood. At first Jim Leonard thought he had gone with it; but it was only the rat that tried to run up Blue Bob’s pole, and slipped off into the water; and then somehow Jim was hanging onto Blue Bob’s hands and scrambling onto the bridge.

Blue Bob always said he never saw any rat, and a good many people said there never was any rat on the roof with Jim Leonard; they said that he just made the rat up.

He did not mention the rat himself for several days; he told Pony Baker that he did not think of it at first, he was so excited.

Pony asked his father what he thought, and Pony’s father said that it might have been the kind of rat that people see when they have been drinking too much, and that Blue Bob had not seen it because he had signed the temperance pledge.

“‘i’ll learn that limb to
sleep in a cow-barn!’”

But this was a good while after. At the time the people saw Jim Leonard standing safe with Blue Bob on the pier, they set up a regular election cheer, and they would have believed anything Jim Leonard said. They all agreed that Blue Bob had a right to go home with Jim and take him to his mother, for he had saved Jim’s life, and he ought to have the credit of it.

Before this, and while everybody supposed that Jim Leonard would surely be drowned, some of the people had gone up to his mother’s cabin to prepare her for the worst. She did not seem to understand exactly, and she kept round getting breakfast, with her old clay pipe in her mouth; but when she got it through her head, she made an awful face, and dropped her pipe on the door-stone and broke it; and then she threw her check apron over her head and sat down and cried.

But it took so long for her to come to this that the people had not got over comforting her and trying to make her believe that it was all for the best, when Blue Bob came up through the bars with his hand on Jim’s shoulder, and about all the boys in town tagging after them.

Jim’s mother heard the hurrahing and pulled off her apron, and saw that Jim was safe and sound there before her. She gave him a look that made him slip round behind Blue Bob, and she went in and got a table-knife, and she came out and went to the pear-tree and cut a sucker.

She said, “I’ll learn that limb to sleep in a cow-barn when he’s got a decent bed in the house!” and then she started to come towards Jim Leonard.

IV

THE SCRAPE THAT JIM LEONARD GOT THE BOYS INTO

As I said, it was in the spring that Jim Leonard’s hair-breadth escape happened. But it was late in the summer of that very same year that he got Pony Baker and all the rest of the boys into about one of the worst scrapes that the Boy’s Town boys were ever in.

At first, it was more like a dare than anything else, for when Jim Leonard said he knew a watermelon patch that the owner had no use for, the other boys dared him to tell where it was. He wagged his head, and said that he knew, and then they dared him to tell whose patch it was; and all at once he said it was Bunty Williams’s, and dared them to come and get the melons with him. None of the boys in the Boy’s Town would take a dare, and so they set off with Jim Leonard, one sunny Saturday morning in September.

Some of the boys had their arms round one another’s necks, talking as loud as they could into one another’s faces, and some whooping and holloing, and playing Indian, and some throwing stones and scaring cats. They had nearly as many dogs as there were boys, and there were pretty nearly all the boys in the neighborhood. There seemed to be thirty or forty of them, they talked so loud and ran round so, but perhaps there were only ten or eleven. Hen Billard was along, and so were Piccolo Wright and Archie Hawkins, and then a great lot of little fellows.

Pony Baker was not quite a little fellow in age; and there was something about him that always made the big boys let him go with their crowd. But now, when they passed Pony’s gate and his mother saw them, and because it was such a warm morning and she thought they might be going down to the river and called out to him, “You mustn’t go in swimming, Pony, dear; you’ll get the ague,” they began to mock Pony as soon as they got by, and to hollo, “No, Pony, dear! You mustn’t get the ague. Keep out of the water if you don’t want your teeth to rattle, Pony, dear!”

This made Pony so mad that he began to cry and try to fight them, and they all formed in a ring round him and danced and whooped till he broke through and started home. Then they ran after him and coaxed him not to do it, and said that they were just in fun. After that they used Pony first-rate, and he kept on with them.

Jim Leonard was at the head, walking along and holloing to the fellows to hurry up. They had to wade the river, and he was showing off how he could hop, skip, and jump through, when he stepped on a slippery stone and sat down in the water and made the fellows laugh. But they acted first-rate with him when they got across; they helped him to take off his trousers and wring them out, and they wrung them so hard that they tore them a little, but they were a little torn already; and they wrung them so dry that he said they felt splendid when he got them on again. One of his feet went through the side of the trouser leg that was torn before it got to the end, and made the fellows laugh.

When the boys first started Jim said he had got to go ahead so as to be sure that they found the right patch. He now said that Bunty Williams had two patches, one that he was going to sell the melons out of, and the other that he was going to let them go to seed in; and it was the second melon patch that he had deserted.

But pretty soon after they got over the river he came back and walked with the rest of the boys, and when they came to a piece of woods which they had to go through, he dropped behind. He said it was just the place for Indian, and he wanted to be where he could get at them if they started up when the boys got by, as they would very likely do.

Some of the big fellows called him a cowardy-calf; but he said he would show them when the time came, and most of the little boys believed him and tried to get in front. It was not long before he stopped and asked, What if he could not find the right patch? But the big boys said that they reckoned he could if he looked hard enough, and they made him keep on.

One of the dogs treed a squirrel, and Jim offered to climb the tree and shake the squirrel off; but Hen Billard said his watermelon tooth was beginning to trouble him, and he had no time for squirrels. That made all the big boys laugh, and they pulled Jim Leonard along, although he held back with all his might and told them to quit it. He began to cry.

Pony Baker did not know what to make of him. He felt sorry for him, but it seemed to him that Jim was acting as if he wanted to get out of showing the fellows where the patch was. Pony lent him his handkerchief, and Jim said that he had the toothache, anyway. He showed Pony the tooth, and the fellows saw him and made fun, and they offered to carry him, if his tooth ached so that he could not walk, and then suddenly Jim rushed ahead of the whole crowd.

They thought he was trying to run away from them, and two or three of the big fellows took after him, and when they caught up with him, the rest of the boys could see him pointing, and then the big boys that were with him gave a whoop and waved their hats, and all the rest of the boys tore along and tried which could run the fastest and get to the place the soonest.

They knew it must be something great; and sure enough it was a watermelon patch of pretty near an acre, sloping to the south from the edge of the woods, and all overrun with vines and just bulging all over with watermelons and muskmelons.

The watermelons were some of the big mottled kind, with lightish blotches among their darker green, like Georgia melons nowadays, and some almost striped in gray and green, and some were those big, round sugar melons, nearly black. They were all sizes, but most of them were large, and you need not “punk” them to see if they were ripe. Anybody could tell that they were ripe from looking at them, and the muskmelons, which were the old-fashioned long kind, were yellow as gold.

Now, the big fellows said, you could see why Bunty Williams had let this patch go to seed. It was because they were such bully melons and would have the best seeds; and the fellows all agreed to save the seeds for Bunty, and put them where he could find them. They began to praise Jim Leonard up, but he did not say anything, and only looked on with his queer, sleepy eyes, and said his tooth ached, when the fellows plunged down among the melons and began to burst them open.

They had lots of fun. At first they cut a few melons open with their knives, but that was too slow, and pretty soon they began to jump on them and split them with sharp-edged rocks, or anything, to get them open quick. They did not eat close to the rind, as you do when you have a melon on the table, but they tore out the core and just ate that; and in about a minute they forgot all about saving the seeds for Bunty Williams and putting them in one place where he could get them.

Some of the fellows went into the edge of the woods to eat their melons, and then came back for more; some took them and cracked them open on the top rail of the fence, and then sat down in the fence corner and plunged their fists in and tore the cores out. Some of them squeezed the juice out of the cores into the shells of the melons and then drank it out of them.

Piccolo Wright was stooping over to pull a melon and Archie Hawkins came up behind him with a big melon that had a seam across it, it was so ripe; and he brought it down on Piccolo’s head, and it smashed open and went all over Piccolo. He was pretty mad at first, but then he saw the fun of it, and he took one end of the melon and scooped it all out, and put it on in place of his hat and wore it like a helmet. Archie did the same thing with the other end, and then all the big boys scooped out melons and wore them for helmets. They were all drabbled with seeds and pulp, and some of the little fellows were perfectly soaked. None of them cared very much for the muskmelons.

Somehow Pony would not take any of the melons, although there was nothing that he liked so much. The fellows seemed to be having an awfully good time, and yet somehow it looked wrong to Pony. He knew that Bunty Williams had given up the patch, because Jim Leonard said so, and he knew that the boys had a right to the melons if Bunty had got done with them; but still the sight of them there, smashing and gorging, made Pony feel anxious. It almost made him think that Jim Leonard was better than the rest because he would not take any of the melons, but stayed off at one side of the patch near the woods, where Pony stood with him.

He did not say much, and Pony noticed that he kept watching the log cabin where Bunty Williams lived on the slope of the hill about half a mile off, and once he heard Jim saying, as if to himself: “No, there isn’t any smoke coming out of the chimbly, and that’s a sign there ain’t anybody there. They’ve all gone to market, I reckon.”

It went through Pony that it was strange Jim should care whether Bunty was at home or not, if Bunty had given up the patch, but he did not say anything; it often happened so with him about the things he thought strange.

The fellows did not seem to notice where he was or what he was doing; they were all whooping and holloing, and now they began to play war with the watermelon rinds. One of the dogs thought he smelled a ground-squirrel and began to dig for it, and in about half a minute all the dogs seemed to be fighting, and the fellows were yelling round them and sicking them on; and they were all making such a din that Pony could hardly hear himself think, as his father used to say. But he thought he saw some one come out of Bunty’s cabin, and take down the hill with a dog after him and a hoe in his hand.

He made Jim Leonard look, and Jim just gave a screech that rose above the din of the dogs and the other boys, “Bunty’s coming, and he’s got his bulldog and his shotgun!” And then he turned and broke through the woods.

All the boys stood still and stared at the hill-side, while the dogs fought on. The next thing they knew they were floundering among the vines and over the watermelon cores and shells and breaking for the woods; and as soon as the dogs found the boys were gone, they seemed to think it was no use to keep on fighting with nobody to look on, and they took after the fellows.

The big fellows holloed to the little fellows to come on, and the little fellows began crying. They caught their feet in the roots and dead branches and kept falling down, and some of the big fellows that were clever, like Hen Billard and Archie Hawkins, came back and picked them up and started them on again.

Nobody stopped to ask himself or any one else why they should be afraid of Bunty if he had done with his melon patch, but they all ran as if he had caught them stealing his melons, and had a right to shoot them, or set his dog on them.

They got through the woods to the shore of the river, and all the time they could hear Bunty Williams roaring and shouting, and Bunty Williams’s bulldog barking, and it seemed as if he were right behind them. After they reached the river they had to run a long way up the shore before they got to the ripple where they could wade it, and by that time they were in such a hurry that they did not stop to turn up their trousers’ legs; they just splashed right in and splashed across the best way they could. Some of them fell down, but everybody had to look out for himself, and they did not know that they were all safe over till they counted up on the other side.

Everybody was there but Jim Leonard, and they did not know what had become of him, but they were not very anxious. In fact they were all talking at the tops of their voices, and bragging what they would have done if Bunty had caught them.

Piccolo Wright showed how he could have tripped him up, and Archie Hawkins said that snuff would make a bulldog loosen his grip, because he would have to keep sneezing. None of them seemed to have seen either Bunty’s shotgun or his bulldog, but they all believed that he had them because Jim Leonard said so, just as they had believed that Bunty had got done with his melon patch, until all at once one of them said, “Where is Jim Leonard, anyway?”

Then they found out that nobody knew, and the little fellows began to think that maybe Bunty Williams had caught him, but Hen Billard said: “Oh, he’s safe enough, somewheres. I wish I had him here!”

Archie Hawkins asked, “What would you do to him?” and Hen said: “I’d show you! I’d make him go back and find out whether Bunty really had a bulldog with him. I don’t believe he had.”

Then all the big boys said that none of them believed so, either, and that they would bet that any of their dogs could whip Bunty’s dog.

Their dogs did not look much like fighting. They were wet with running through the river, and they were lying round with their tongues hanging out, panting. But it made the boys think that something ought to be done to Jim Leonard, if they could ever find him, and some one said that they ought to look for him right away, but the rest said they ought to stop and dry their pantaloons first.

Pony began to be afraid they were going to hurt Jim Leonard if they got hold of him, and he said he was going home; and the boys tried to keep him from doing it. They said they were just going to build a drift-wood fire and dry their clothes at it, and they told him that if he went off in his wet trousers he would be sure to get the ague. But nothing that the boys could do would keep him, and so the big fellows said to let him go if he wanted to so much; and he climbed the river bank and left them kindling a fire.

When he got away and looked back, all the boys had their clothes off and were dancing round the fire like Indians, and he would have liked to turn back after he got to the top, and maybe he might have done so if he had not found Jim Leonard hiding in a hole up there and peeping over at the boys. Jim was crying, and said his tooth ached awfully, and he was afraid to go home and get something to put in it, because his mother would whale him as soon as she caught him.

He said he was hungry, too, and he wanted Pony to go over into a field with him and get a turnip, but Pony would not do it. He had three cents in his pocket — the big old kind that were as large as half-dollars and seemed to buy as much in that day — and he offered to let Jim take them and go and get something to eat at the grocery.

They decided he should buy two smoked red herrings and a cent’s worth of crackers, and these were what Jim brought back after he had been gone so long that Pony thought he would never come. He had stopped to get some apples off one of the trees at his mother’s house, and he had to watch his chance so that she should not see him, and then he had stopped and taken some potatoes out of a hill that would be first-rate if they could get some salt to eat them with, after they had built a fire somewhere and baked them.

They thought it would be a good plan to dig one of these little caves just under the edge of the bank, and make a hole in the top to let the smoke out; but they would have to go a good way off so that the other fellows could not see them, and they could not wait for that. They divided the herrings between them, and they each had two crackers and three apples, and they made a good meal.

Then they went to a pump at the nearest house, where the woman said they might have a drink, and drank themselves full. They wanted awfully to ask her for some salt, but they did not dare to do it for fear she would make them tell what they wanted it for. So they came away without, and Jim said they could put ashes on their potatoes the way the Indians did, and it would be just as good as salt.

They ran back to the river bank, and ran along up it till they were out of sight of the boys on the shore below, and then they made their oven in it, and started their fire with some matches that Jim Leonard had in his pocket, so that if he ever got lost in the woods at night he could make a fire and keep from freezing. His tooth had stopped aching now, and he kept telling such exciting stories about Indians that Pony could not seem to get the chance to ask why Bunty Williams should take after the boys with his shotgun and bulldog if he had given up the watermelon patch and only wanted it for seed.

The question lurked in Pony’s mind all the time that they were waiting for the potatoes to bake, but somehow he could not get it out. He did not feel very well, and he tried to forget his bad feelings by listening as hard as he could to Jim Leonard’s stories. Jim kept taking the potatoes out to see if they were done enough, and he began to eat them while they were still very hard and greenish under the skin. Pony ate them, too, although he was not hungry now, and he did not think the ashes were as good as salt on them, as Jim pretended. The potato he ate seemed to make him feel no better, and at last he had to tell Jim that he was afraid he was going to be sick.

Jim said that if they could heat some stones, and get a blanket anywhere, and put it over Pony and the stones, and then pour water on the hot stones, they could give him a steam bath the way the Indians did, and it would cure him in a minute; they could get the stones easy enough, and he could bring water from the river in his straw hat, but the thing of it was to get the blanket.

He stood looking thoughtfully down at Pony, who was crying now, and begging Jim Leonard to go home with him, for he did not believe he could walk on account of the pain that seemed to curl him right up. He asked Jim if he believed he was beginning to have the ague, but Jim said it was more like the yellow janders, although he agreed that Pony had better go home, for it was pretty late, anyway.

He made Pony promise that if he would take him home he would let him get a good way off before he went into the house, so that Pony’s father and mother should not see who had brought him. He said that when he had got off far enough he would hollo, and then Pony could go in. He was first-rate to Pony on the way home, and helped him to walk, and when the pain curled him up so tight that he could not touch his foot to the ground, Jim carried him.

Pony could never know just what to make of Jim Leonard. Sometimes he was so good to you that you could not help thinking he was one of the cleverest fellows in town, and then all of a sudden he would do something mean. He acted the perfect coward at times, and at other times he was not afraid of anything. Almost any of the fellows could whip him, but once he went into an empty house that was haunted, and came and looked out of the garret windows, and dared any of them to come up.

He offered now, if Pony did not want to go home and let his folks find out about the melon patch, to take him to his mother’s log-barn, and get a witch-doctor to come and tend him; but Pony said that he thought they had better keep on, and then Jim trotted and asked him if the jolting did not do him some good. He said he just wished there was an Indian medicine-man around somewhere.

They were so long getting to Pony’s house that it was almost dusk when they reached the back of the barn, and Jim put him over the fence. Jim started to run, and Pony waited till he got out of sight and holloed; then he began to shout, “Father! Mother! O mother! Come out here! I’m sick!”

It did not seem hardly a second till he heard his mother calling back: “Pony! Pony! Where are you, child? Where are you?”

“Here, behind the barn!” he answered.

Pony’s mother came running out, and then his father, and when they had put him into his own bed up-stairs, his mother made his father go for the doctor. While his father was gone, his mother got the whole story out of Pony — what he had been doing all day, and what he had been eating — but as to who had got him into the trouble, she said she knew from the start it must be Jim Leonard.

After the doctor came and she told him what Pony had been eating, without telling all that he had been doing, the doctor gave him something to make him feel better. As soon as he said he felt better she began to talk very seriously to him, and to tell him how anxious she had been ever since she had seen him going off in the morning with Jim Leonard at the head of that crowd of boys.

“Didn’t you know he couldn’t be telling the truth when he said the man had left his watermelon patch? Didn’t any of the boys?”

“No,” said Pony, thoughtfully.

“But when he pretended that he shouldn’t know the right patch, and wanted to turn back?”

“We didn’t think anything. We thought he just wanted to get out of going. Ought they let him turn back? Maybe he meant to keep the patch all to himself.”

His mother was silent, and Pony asked, “Do you believe that a boy has a right to take anything off a tree or a vine?”

“No; certainly not.”

“Well, that’s what I think, too.”

“Why, Pony,” said his mother, “is there anybody who thinks such a thing can be right?”

“Well, the boys say it’s not stealing. Stealing is hooking a thing out of a wagon or a store; but if you can knock a thing off a tree, or get it through a fence, when it’s on the ground already, then it’s just like gathering nuts in the woods. That’s what the boys say. Do you think it is?”

“I think it’s the worst kind of stealing. I hope my boy doesn’t do such things.”

“Not very often,” answered Pony, thoughtfully. “When there’s a lot of fellows together, you don’t want them to laugh at you.”

“O Pony, dear!” said his mother, almost crying.

“Well, anyway, mother,” Pony said, to cheer her up, “I didn’t take any of the watermelons to-day, for all Jim said Bunty had got done with them.”

“I’m so glad to think you didn’t! And you must promise, won’t you, never to touch any fruit that doesn’t belong to you?”

“But supposing an apple was to drop over the fence onto the sidewalk, what would you do then?”

“I should throw it right back over the fence again,” said Pony’s mother.

Pony promised his mother never to touch other people’s fruit, but he was glad she did not ask him to throw it back over the fence if it fell outside, for he knew the fellows would laugh.

His father came back from going down-stairs with the doctor, and she told him all that Pony had told her, and it seemed to Pony that his father could hardly keep from laughing. But his mother did not even smile.

“How could Jim Leonard tell them that a man would give up his watermelon patch, and how could they believe such a lie, poor, foolish boys?”

“They wished to believe it,” said Pony’s father, “and so did Jim, I dare say.”

“He might have got some of them killed, if Bunty Williams had fired his gun at them,” said Pony’s mother; and he could see that she was not half-satisfied with what his father said.

“Perhaps it was a hoe, after all. You can’t shoot anybody with a hoe-handle, and there is nothing to prove that it was a gun but Jim’s word.”

“Yes, and here poor Pony has been so sick from it all, and Jim Leonard gets off without anything.”

“You are always wanting the tower to fall on the wicked,” said Pony’s father, laughing. “When it came to the worst, Jim didn’t take the melons any more than Pony did. And he seems to have wanted to back out of the whole affair at one time.”

“Oh! And do you think that excuses him?”

“No, I don’t. But I think he’s had a worse time, if that’s any comfort, than Pony has. He has suffered the fate of all liars. Sooner or later their lies outwit them and overmaster them, for whenever people believe a liar he is forced to act as if he had spoken the truth. That’s worse than having a tower fall on you, or pains in the stomach.”

Pony’s mother was silent for a moment as if she could not answer, and then she said, “Well, all I know is, I wish there was no such boy in this town as Jim Leonard.”

V

ABOUT RUNNING AWAY TO THE INDIAN RESERVATION ON A CANAL-BOAT, AND HOW THE PLAN FAILED

Now, anybody can see the kind of a boy that Jim Leonard was, pretty well; and the strange thing of it was that he could have such a boy as Pony Baker under him so. But, anyway, Pony liked Jim, as much as his mother hated him, and he believed everything Jim said in spite of all that had happened.

After Jim promised to find out whether there was any Indian reservation that you could walk to, he pretended to study out in the geography that the only reservation there was in the State was away up close to Lake Erie, but it was not far from the same canal that ran through the Boy’s Town to the lake, and Jim said, “I’ll tell you what, Pony! The way to do will be to get into a canal-boat, somehow, and that will take you to the reservation without your hardly having to walk a step; and you can have fun on the boat, too.”

Pony agreed that this would be the best way, but he did not really like the notion of living so long among the Indians that he would not remember his father and mother when he saw them; he would like to stay till he was pretty nearly grown up, and then come back in a chief’s dress, with eagle plumes all down his back and a bow in his hand, and scare them a little when he first came in the house and then protect them from the tribe and tell them who he was, and enjoy their surprise. But he hated to say this to Jim Leonard, because he would think he was afraid to live with the Indians always. He hardly dared to ask him what the Indians would do to him if they did not adopt him, but he thought he had better, and Jim said:

“Oh, burn you, maybe. But it ain’t likely but what they’ll adopt you; and if they do they’ll take you down to the river, and wash you and scrub you, so’s to get all the white man off, and then pull out your hair, a hair at a time, till there’s nothing but the scalp-lock left, so that your enemies can scalp you handy; and then you’re just as good an Indian as anybody, and nobody can pick on you, or anything. The thing is how to find the canal-boat.”

The next morning at school it began to be known that Pony Baker was going to run off on a canal-boat to see the Indians, and all the fellows said how he ought to do it. One of the fellows said that he ought to get to drive the boat horses, and another that he ought to hide on board in the cargo, and come out when the boat was passing the reservation; and another that he ought to go for a cabin-boy on one of the passenger-packets, and then he could get to the Indians twice as soon as he could on a freight-boat. But the trouble was that Pony was so little that they did not believe they would take him either for a driver or a cabin-boy; and he said he was not going to hide in the cargo, because the boats were full of rats, and he was not going to have rats running over him all the time.

Some of the fellows thought this showed a poor spirit in Pony, and wanted him to take his dog along and hunt the rats; they said he could have lots of fun; but others said that the dog would bark as soon as he began to hunt the rats, and then Pony would be found out and put ashore in a minute. The fellows could not think what to do till at last one of them said:

“You know Piccolo Wright?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you know his father has got a boat?”

“Yes. Well?”

“Well, and he’s got a horse, too; and everything.”

“Well, what of it?”

“Get Piccolo to hook the boat and take Pony to the reservation.”

The fellows liked this notion so much that they almost hurrahed, and they could hardly wait till school was out and they could go and find Piccolo and ask him whether he would do it. They found him up at the canal basin, where he was fishing off the stern of his father’s boat. He was a pretty big boy, though he was not so very old, and he had a lazy, funny face and white hair; and the fellows called him Piccolo because he was learning to play the piccolo flute, and talked about it when he talked at all, but that was not often. He was one of those boys who do not tan or freckle in the sun, but peel, and he always had some loose pieces of fine skin hanging to his nose.

All the fellows came up and began holloing at once, and telling him what they wanted him to do, and he thought it was a first-rate notion, but he kept on fishing, without getting the least bit excited; and he did not say whether he would do it or not, and when the fellows got tired of talking they left him and began to look round the boat. There was a little cabin at one end, and all the rest of the boat was open, and it had been raining, or else the boat had leaked, and it was pretty full of water; and the fellows got down on some loose planks that were floating there, and had fun pushing them up and down, and almost forgot what they had come for. They found a long pump leaning against the side of the boat, with its spout out over the gunwale, and they asked Piccolo if they might pump, and he said they might, and they pumped nearly all the water out after they had got done having fun on the planks.

Some of them went into the cabin and found a little stove there, where Pony could cook his meals, and a bunk where he could sleep, or keep in out of the rain, and they said they wished they were going to run off, too. They took more interest than he did, but they paid him a good deal of attention, and he felt that it was great to be going to run off, and he tried not to be homesick, when he thought of being down there alone at night, and nobody near but Piccolo out on the towpath driving the horse.

The fellows talked it all over, and how they would do. They said that Piccolo ought to hook the boat some Friday night, and the sooner the better, and get a good start before Saturday morning. They were going to start with Pony, and perhaps travel all night with him, and then get off and sleep in the woods, to rest themselves, and then walk home; and the reason that Piccolo ought to hook the boat Friday night was that they could have all Saturday to get back, when there was no school.

If the boat went two miles an hour, which she always did, even if she was loaded with stone from Piccolo’s father’s quarry, she would be fifteen miles from the Boy’s Town by daybreak; and if they kept on travelling night and day, and Pony drove the horse part of the time, they could reach the Indian reservation Monday evening, for they would not want to travel Sunday, because it was against the law, and it was wicked, anyway. If they travelled on Sunday, and a storm came up, just as likely as not the boat would get struck by lightning, and if it did, the lightning would run out along the rope and kill the horse and Piccolo, too, if he was riding. But the way for Piccolo to do was always to come aboard when it began to rain, and that would keep Pony company a little, and they could make the horse go by throwing stones at him.

Pony and Piccolo ought to keep together as much as they could, especially at night, so that if there were robbers, they could defend the boat better. Of course, they could not make the horse go by throwing stones at him in the dark, and the way for them to do was for Pony to get out and ride behind Piccolo. Besides making it safer against robbers, they could keep each other from going to sleep by talking, or else telling stories; or if one of them did doze off, the other could hold him on; and they must take turn about sleeping in the daytime.

But the best way of all to scare the robbers was to have a pistol, and fire it off every little once in a while, so as to let them know that the boat was armed. One of the fellows that had a pistol said he would lend it to Pony if Pony would be sure to send it back from the reservation by Piccolo, for he should want it himself on the Fourth, which was coming in about three weeks. Another fellow that had five cents, which he was saving up till he could get ten, to buy a pack of shooting-crackers, said he would lend it to Pony to buy powder, if he only felt sure that he could get it back to him in time. All the other fellows said he could do it easily, but they did not say how; one of them offered to go and get the powder at once, so as to have it ready.

But Pony told him it would not be of any use, for he had promised his mother that he would not touch a pistol or powder before the Fourth. None of the fellows seemed to think it was strange that he should be willing to run away from home, and yet be so anxious to keep his promise to his mother that he would not use a pistol to defend himself from robbers; and none of them seemed to think it was strange that they should not want Piccolo, if he hooked his father’s boat, to travel on Sunday with it.

After a while Piccolo came to the little hatch-door, and looked down into the cabin where the boys were sitting and talking at the tops of their voices; but in about a minute he vanished, very suddenly for him, and they heard him pumping, and then before they knew it, they heard a loud, harsh voice shouting, “Heigh, there!”

They looked round, and at the open window of the cabin on the land-side they saw a man’s face, and it seemed to fill the whole window. They knew it must be Piccolo’s father, and they just swarmed up the gangway all in a bunch. Some of them fell, but these hung on to the rest, somehow, and they all got to the deck of the cabin together, and began jumping ashore, so that Piccolo’s father could not catch them. He was standing on the basin bank, saying something, but they did not know what, and they did not stop to ask, and they began to run every which way.

They all got safely ashore, except Jim Leonard; he fell over the side of the boat between it and the bank, but he scrambled up out of the water like lightning, and ran after the rest. He was pretty long-legged, and he soon caught up, but he was just raining water from his clothes, and it made the fellows laugh so that they could hardly run, to hear him swish when he jolted along. They did not know what to do exactly, till one of them said they ought to go down to the river and go in swimming, and they could wring Jim Leonard’s clothes out, and lay them on the shore to dry, and stay in long enough to let them dry. That was what they did, and they ran round through the backs of the gardens and the orchards, and through the alleys, and climbed fences, so that nobody could see them. The day was pretty hot, and by the time they got to the river they were all sweating, so that Jim’s clothes were not much damper than the others. He had nothing but a shirt and trousers on, anyway.

After that they did not try to get Piccolo to hook his father’s boat, for they said that his father might get after them any time, and he would have a right to do anything he pleased to them, if he caught them. They could not think of any other boat that they could get, and they did not know how Pony could reach the reservation without a canal-boat. That was the reason why they had to give up the notion of his going to the Indians; and if anybody had told them that the Indians were going to come to Pony they would have said he was joking, or else crazy; but this was really what happened. It happened a good while afterwards; so long afterwards that they had about forgotten he ever meant to run off, and they had got done talking about it.

VI

HOW THE INDIANS CAME TO THE BOY’S TOWN AND JIM LEONARD ACTED THE COWARD

Jim Leonard was so mad because he lost his chip-hat in the canal basin, when he fell off the boat (and had to go home bareheaded and tell his mother all about what happened, though his clothes were dry enough, and he might have got off without her noticing anything, if it had not been for his hat) that he would not take any interest in Pony. But he kept on taking an interest in Indians, and he was the most excited fellow in the whole Boy’s Town when the Indians came.

The way they came to town was this: The white people around the reservation got tired of having them there, or else they wanted their land, and the government thought it might as well move them out West, where there were more Indians, there were such a very few of them on the reservation; and so it loaded them on three canal-boats and brought them down through the Boy’s Town to the Ohio River, and put them on a steamboat, and then took them down to the Mississippi, and put them on a reservation beyond that river.

“real indians, in blankets, with bows and arrows”

The boys did not know anything about this, and they would not have cared much if they had. All they knew was that one morning (and it happened to be Saturday) three canal-boats, full of Indians, came into the basin. Nobody ever knew which boy saw them first. It seemed as if all the fellows in the Boy’s Town happened to be up at the basin at once, and were standing there when the boats came in. When they saw that they were real Indians, in blankets, with bows and arrows, warriors, squaws, papooses, and everything, they almost went crazy, and when a good many of the Indians came ashore and went over to the court-house yard and began to shoot at quarters and half-dollars that the people stuck into the ground for them to shoot at, the fellows could hardly believe their eyes. They yelled and cheered and tried to get acquainted with the Indian boys, and ran and got their arrows for them, and everything; and if the Indians could only have stayed until the Fourth, which was pretty near now, they would have thought it was the greatest thing that ever happened. Jim Leonard said they belonged to a tribe that had been against the British in the last war, and were the friends of the Long Knives, as they called the Americans. He said that he read it in a book; and he hunted round for Pony Baker, and when he found him he said: “Come here, Pony; I want to tell you something.”

Any other time all the other fellows would have crowded around and wanted to know what it was, but now they were so much taken up with the Indians that none of them minded him, and so he got a good chance at Pony alone. Pony was afraid that Jim Leonard wanted him to run off with the Indians, and this was just what he did want.

He said: “You ought to get a blanket and stain your face and hands with walnut juice, and then no one could tell you from the rest of the tribe, and you could go out with them where they’re going and hunt buffaloes. It’s the greatest chance there ever was. They’ll adopt you into the tribe, maybe, as soon as the canal-boats leave, or as quick as they can get to a place where they can pull your hair out and wash you in the canal. I tell you, if I was in your place, I’d do it, Pony.”

Pony did not know what to say. He hated to tell Jim Leonard that he had pretty nearly given up the notion of running off for the present, or until his father and mother did something more to make him do it.

Ever since the boys failed so in trying to get Piccolo to hook his father’s boat for Pony to run off in, things had been going better with Pony at home. His mother did not stop him from half so many things as she used to do, and lately his father had got to being very good to him: let him lie in bed in the morning, and did not seem to notice when he stayed out with the boys at night, telling stories on the front steps, or playing hide-and-go-whoop, or anything. They seemed to be a great deal taken up with each other and not to mind so much what Pony was doing.

His mother let him go in swimming whenever he asked her, and did not make him promise to keep out of the deep water. She said she would see, when he coaxed her for five cents to get powder for the Fourth, and she let him have one of the boys to spend the night with him once, and she gave them waffles for breakfast. She showed herself something like a mother, and she had told him that if he would be very, very good she would get his father to give him a quarter, so that he could buy two packs of shooting-crackers, as well as five cents’ worth of powder for the Fourth. But she put her arms around him and hugged him up to her and kissed his head and said:

“You’ll be very careful, Pony, won’t you? You’re all the little boy we’ve got, and if anything should happen to you—”

She seemed to be almost crying, and Pony laughed and said: “Why, nothing could happen to you with shooting-crackers”; and she could have the powder to keep for him; and he would just make a snake with it Fourth of July night; put it around through the grass, loose, and then light one end of it, and she would see how it would go off and not make the least noise. But she said she did not want to see it; only he must be careful; and she kissed him again and let him go, and when he got away he could see her wiping her eyes. It seemed to him that she was crying a good deal in those days, and he could not understand what it was about. She was scared at any little thing, and would whoop at the least noise, and when his father would say: “Lucy, my dear girl!” she would burst out crying and say that she could not help it. But she got better and better to Pony all the time, and it was this that now made him ashamed with Jim Leonard, because it made him not want to run off so much.

He dug his toe into the turf in the court-house yard under the locust-tree, and did not say anything till Jim Leonard asked him if he was afraid to go off and live with the Indians, because if he was going to be a cowardy-calf like that, it was all that Jim Leonard wanted to do with him.

Pony denied that he was afraid, but he said that he did not know how to talk Indian, and he did not see how he was going to get along without.

Jim Leonard laughed and said if that was all, he need not be anxious. “The Indians don’t talk at all, hardly, even among each other. They just make signs; didn’t you know that? If you want something to eat you point to your mouth and chew; and if you want a drink, you open your mouth and keep swallowing. When you want to go to sleep you shut your eyes and lean your cheek over on your hand, this way. That’s all the signs you need to begin with, and you’ll soon learn the rest. Now, say, are you going with the Indians, or ain’t you going? It’s your only chance. Why, Pony, what are you afraid of? Hain’t you always wanted to sleep out-doors and not do anything but hunt?”

Pony had to confess that he had, and then Jim Leonard said: “Well, then, that’s what you’ll do if you go with the Indians. I suppose you’ll have to go on the warpath with them when you get out there; and if it’s against the whites you won’t like it at first; but you’ve got to remember what the whites have done to the Indians ever since they discovered America, and you’ll soon get to feeling like an Indian anyway. One thing is, you’ve got to get over being afraid.”

That made Pony mad, and he said: “I ain’t afraid now.”

“I know that,” said Jim Leonard. “But what I mean is, that if you get hurt you mustn’t hollo, or cry, or anything; and even when they’re scalping you, you mustn’t even make a face, so as to let them know that you feel it.”

By this time some of the other fellows began to come around to hear what Jim Leonard was saying to Pony. A good many of the Indians had gone off anyway, for the people had stopped sticking quarters into the ground for them to shoot at, and they could not shoot at nothing. Jim Leonard saw the fellows crowding around, but he went on as if he did not notice them. “You’ve got to go without eating anything for weeks when the medicine-man tells you to; and when you come back from the warpath, and they have a scalp-dance, you’ve got to keep dancing till you drop in a fit. When they give a dog feast you must eat dog stew until you can’t swallow another mouthful, and you’ll be so full that you’ll just have to lay around for days without moving. But the great thing is to bear any kind of pain without budging or saying a single word. Maybe you’re used to holloing now when you get hurt?”

Pony confessed that he holloed a little; the others tried to look as if they never holloed at all, and Jim Leonard went on:

“Well, you’ve got to stop that. If an arrow was to go through you and stick out at your back, or anywhere, you must just reach around and pull it out and not speak. When you’re having the sun-dance — I think it’s the sun-dance, but I ain’t really certain — you have to stick a hook through you, right here” — he grabbed Pony by the muscles on his shoulders— “and let them pull you up on a pole and hang there as long as they please. They’ll let you practise gradually so that you won’t mind hardly anything. Why, I’ve practised a good deal by myself, and now I’ve got so that I believe if you was to stick me with—”

All of a sudden something whizzed along the ground and Jim Leonard stooped over and caught one of his feet up in his hand, and began to cry and to hollo: “Oh, oh, oh! Ow, ow, ow! Oh, my foot! Oh, it’s broken; I know it is! Oh, run for the doctor, do, Pony Baker! I know I’m going to die! Oh, dear, oh dear, oh dear!”

All the boys came crowding around to see what the matter was, and the men came, too, and pretty soon some one found an arrow in the grass, and then they knew that it was a stray arrow that had hit Jim Leonard on the side of the foot, after missing one of the dimes that was stuck in the ground. It was blunt, and it had not hurt him that anybody could see, except rubbed the skin off a little on the ankle-bone. But Jim Leonard began to limp away towards home, and now, as the Indians had all gone back to their boats, and the fellows had nothing else to do, they went along with him.

Archy Hawkins held him up on one side, and Hen Billard on the other, and Archy said, “I tell you, when I heard Jim yell, I thought it was a real Indian,” and Hen said:

“I thought it was the scalp-halloo.”

Archy said, “The way I came to think it was a real Indian was that a real Indian never makes any noise when he’s hurt,” and Hen said:

“I thought it was the scalp-halloo, because Jim was stooping over as if he was tearing the scalp off of a white man. He’s been practising, you know.”

“Well, practice makes perfect. I reckon if Jim hasn’t got so far that he would smile when you scalped him, or just laugh if you shot an arrow through him, or would let you stick a hook into him, and pull him up to the top of a pole, it’s because he’s begun at the other end. I’ll bet he could eat himself full of dog stew, and lay around three days without stirring.”

Jim Leonard thought the fellows had come along to pity him and help him; but when he heard Archy Hawkins say that, and Hen Billard began to splutter and choke with the laugh he was holding in, he flung them off and began to fight at them with his fists, and strike right and left blindly. He broke out crying, and then the fellows made a ring around him and danced and mocked him.

“Hey, Jim, what’d you do if they pulled your hair out?”

“Jimmy, oh, Jim! Would you hollo much louder if they tomahawked you?”

“Show your uncle how to dance till you drop, Jim.”

They kept on till Jim Leonard picked up stones to stone them, and then they all ran away, jumping and jeering till they got out of sight. It was about dinner-time, anyway.

No one was left but Pony Baker. He stooped down over Jim when he sat crying over his foot. “Does it hurt you much, Jimmy?” he asked.

“Yes, it hurts dreadfully, Pony. The skin’s all rubbed off. I’m afraid it’s broken my leg.”

“Well, let me help you home,” said Pony. “Your mother can tie it up, then.”

He made Jim lean on him, and keep trying his foot, and pretty soon they found he could walk with it nearly the same as the other foot, and before they got to Jim’s house they were talking and laughing together.

After that, Pony Baker gave up running off to the Indians. He about gave up running off altogether. He had a splendid Fourth of July. His mother would not let him stay up the whole of the night before, but she let him get up at four o’clock, and fire off both his packs of shooting-crackers; and though she had forbidden him to go down to the river-bank where the men were firing off the cannon, he hardly missed it. He felt sleepy as soon as his crackers were done, and another fellow who was with him came into the parlor, and they both lay down on the carpet and went to sleep there, and slept till breakfast-time. After breakfast he went up to the court-house yard, with some other fellows, and then, after dinner, when they all came round and begged, and the big fellows promised to watch out for Pony, his mother let him go out to the second lock with them, and go in swimming in the canal. He did not know why this should be such a great privilege, but it was. He had never been out to the second lock before. It was outside of the corporation line, and that was a great thing in itself.

After supper, Pony’s mother let him fire off his powder-snake, and she even came out and looked at it, with her fingers in her ears. He promised her that it wouldn’t make any noise, but she could not believe him; and when the flash came, she gave a little whoop, and ran in-doors. It shamed him before the boys, for fear they would laugh; and she acted even worse when his father wished to let him go up to the court-house yard to see the fireworks.

A lot of the fellows were going, and he was to go with the crowd, but his father was to come a little behind, so as to see that nothing happened to him; and when they were just starting off what should she do but hollo to his father from the door where she was standing, “Do be careful of the child, Henry!” It did not seem as if she could be a good mother when she tried, and she was about the afraidest mother in the Boy’s Town.

All the way up to the court-house the boys kept snickering and whispering, “Don’t stump your toe, child,” and “Be careful of the child, boys,” and things like that till Pony had to fight some of them. Then they stopped. They were afraid his father would hear, anyway.

But the fireworks were splendid, and the fellows were very good to Pony, because his father stood in the middle of the crowd and treated them to lemonade, and they did not plague, any more, going home. It was ten o’clock when Pony got home; it was the latest he had ever been up.

The very Fourth of July before that one he had been up pretty nearly as late listening to his cousin, Frank Baker, telling about the fun he had been having at a place called Pawpaw Bottom; and the strange thing that happened there, if it did happen, for nobody could exactly find out. So I think I had better break off again from Pony, and say what it was that Frank told; and after that I can go on with Pony’s running off.

VII

HOW FRANK BAKER SPENT THE FOURTH AT PAWPAW BOTTOM, AND SAW THE FOURTH OF JULY BOY

It was the morning of the Fourth, and Frank was so anxious to get through with his wood-sawing, and begin celebrating with the rest of the boys, that he hardly knew what to do. He had a levvy (as the old Spanish real used to be called in southern Ohio) in his pocket, and he was going to buy a pack of shooting-crackers for ten cents, and spend the other two cents for powder. He had no pistol, but he knew a fellow that would lend him his pistol part of the time, and he expected to have about the best Fourth he ever had. He had been up since three o’clock watching the men fire the old six-pounder on the river-bank; and he was going to get his mother to let him go up to the fireworks in the court-house yard after dark.

But now it did not seem as if he could get wood enough sawed. Twice he asked his mother if she thought he had enough, but she said “Not near,” and just as Jake Milrace rode up the saw caught in a splinter of the tough oak log Frank was sawing and bumped back against Frank’s nose; and he would have cried if it had not been for what Jake began to say.

He said he was going to Pawpaw Bottom to spend the Fourth at a fellow’s named Dave Black, and he told Frank he ought to go too; for there were plenty of mulberries on Dave’s father’s farm, and the early apples were getting ripe enough to eat, if you pounded them on a rock; and you could go in swimming, and everything. Jake said there was the greatest swimming-hole at Pawpaw Bottom you ever saw, and they had a log in the water there that you could have lots of fun with. Frank ran into the house to ask his mother if he might go, and he hardly knew what to do when she asked him if there was wood enough yet to get dinner and supper. But his Aunt Manda was spending the summer with his mother, and she said she reckoned she could pick up chips to do all the cooking they needed, such a hot day; and Frank ran out to the cow-house, where they kept the pony, because the Bakers had no stable, and saddled him, and was off with Jake Milrace in about a minute.

The pony was short and fat and lazy, and he had to be whipped to make him keep up with Jake’s horse. It was not exactly Jake’s horse; it was his sister’s husband’s horse, and he had let Jake have it because he would not be using it himself on the Fourth of July. It was tall and lean, and it held its head so high up that it was no use to pull on the bridle when it began to jump and turn round and round, which it did every time Frank whipped his pony to keep even with Jake. It would shy and sidle, and dart so far ahead that the pony would get discouraged and would lag back, and have to be whipped up again; and then the whole thing would have to be gone through with the same as at first. The boys did not have much chance to talk, but they had a splendid time riding along, and when they came to a cool, dark place in the woods they pretended there were Indians; and at the same time they kept a sharp eye out for squirrels. If they had seen any, and had a gun with them, they could have shot one easily, for squirrels are not afraid of you when you are on horseback; and, as it was, Jake Milrace came pretty near killing a quail that they saw in the road by a wheat-field. He dropped his bridle and took aim with his forefinger, and pulled back his thumb like a trigger; and if his horse had not jumped, and his finger had been loaded, he would surely have killed the quail, it was so close to him. They could hear the bob-whites whistling all through the stubble and among the shocks of wheat.

Jake did not know just where Dave Black’s farm was, but after a while they came to a blacksmith’s shop, and the blacksmith told them to take a lane that they would come to on the left, and then go through a piece of woods and across a field till they came to a creek; then ford the creek and keep straight on, and they would be in sight of the house. It did not seem strange to Frank that they should be going to visit a boy without knowing where he lived, but afterwards he was not surprised when Dave Black’s folks did not appear to expect them. They kept on, and did as the blacksmith told them, and soon enough they got to a two-story log-cabin, with a man in front of it working at a wheat-fan, for it was nearly time to thresh the wheat. The man said he was Dave Black’s father; he did not act as if he was very glad to see them, but he told them to put their horses in the barn, and he said that Dave was out in the pasture hauling rails.

Frank thought that was a queer way of spending the Fourth of July, but he did not say anything, and on their way out to the pasture Jake explained that Dave’s father was British, and did not believe much in the Fourth of July, anyway. They found Dave easily enough, and he answered Jake’s “Hello!” with another when the boys came up. He had a two-horse wagon, and he was loading it with rails from a big pile; there were two dogs with him, and when they saw the boys they came towards them snarling and ruffling the hair on their backs. Jake said not to mind them — they would not bite; but they snuffed so close to Frank’s bare legs that he wished Dave would call them off. They slunk away, though, when they heard him speak to the boys; and then Jake Milrace told Dave Black who Frank was, and they began to feel acquainted, especially when Jake said they had come to spend the Fourth of July with Dave.

He said, “First rate,” and he explained that he had his foot tied up the way they saw because he had a stone-bruise which he had got the first day he began to go barefoot in the spring; but now it was better. He said there was a bully swimming-hole in the creek, and he would show them where it was as soon as he had got done hauling his rails. The boys took that for a kind of hint, and they pulled off their roundabouts and set to work with him.

Frank thought it was not exactly like the Fourth, but he did not say anything, and they kept loading up the rails and hauling them to the edge of the field where Dave’s father was going to build the fence, and then unloading them, and going back to the pile for more. It seemed to Frank that there were about a thousand rails in that pile, and they were pretty heavy ones — oak and hickory and walnut — and you had to be careful how you handled them, or you would get your hands stuck full of splinters. He wondered what Jake Milrace was thinking, and whether it was the kind of Fourth he had expected to have; but Jake did not say anything, and he hated to ask him. Sometimes it appeared to Frank that sawing wood was nothing to it; but they kept on loading rails, and unloading them in piles about ten feet apart, where they were wanted; and then going back to the big pile for more. They worked away in the blazing sun till the sweat poured off their faces, and Frank kept thinking what a splendid time the fellows were having with pistols and shooting-crackers up in the Boy’s Town; but still he did not say anything, and pretty soon he had his reward. When they got half down through the rail-pile they came to a bumblebees’ nest, which the dogs thought was a rat-hole at first. One of them poked his nose into it, but he pulled it out quicker than wink and ran off howling and pawing his face and rubbing his head in the ground or against the boys’ legs. Even when the dogs found out that it was not rats they did not show any sense. As soon as they rubbed a bee off they would come yelping and howling back for more; and hopping round and barking; and then when they got another bee, or maybe a half-dozen (for the bees did not always fight fair), they would streak off again and jump into the air, and roll on the ground till the boys almost killed themselves laughing.

The boys went into the woods, and got pawpaw branches, and came back and fought the bumblebees till they drove them off. It was just like the battle of Bunker Hill; but Frank did not say so, because Dave’s father was British, till Dave said it himself, and then they all pretended the bees were Mexicans; it was just a little while after the Mexican War. When they drove the bees off, they dug their nest out; it was beautifully built in regular cells of gray paper, and there was a little honey in it; about a spoonful for each boy.

Frank was glad that he had not let out his disappointment with the kind of Fourth they were having; and just then the horn sounded from the house for dinner, and the boys all got into the wagon, and rattled off to the barn. They put out the horses and fed them, and as soon as they could wash themselves at the rain-barrel behind the house, they went in and sat down with the family at dinner. It was a farmer’s dinner, as it used to be in southern Ohio fifty years ago: a deep dish of fried salt pork swimming in its own fat, plenty of shortened biscuit and warm green-apple sauce, with good butter. The Boy’s Town boys did not like the looks of the fat pork, but they were wolf-hungry, and the biscuit were splendid. In the middle of the table there was a big crock of buttermilk, all cold and dripping from the spring-house where it had been standing in the running water; then there was a hot apple-pie right out of the oven; and they made a pretty fair meal, after all.

After dinner they hauled more rails, and when they had hauled all the rails there were, they started for the swimming-hole in the creek. On the way they came to a mulberry-tree in the edge of the woods-pasture, and it was so full of berries and they were so ripe that the grass which the cattle had cropped short was fairly red under the tree. The boys got up into the tree and gorged themselves among the yellow-hammers and woodpeckers; and Frank and Jake kept holloing out to each other how glad they were they had come; but Dave kept quiet, and told them to wait till they came to the swimming-hole.

It was while they were in the tree that something happened which happened four times in all that day, if it really happened: nobody could say afterwards whether it had or not. Frank was reaching out for a place in the tree where the berries seemed thicker than anywhere else, when a strong blaze of light flashed into his eyes, and blinded him.

“Oh, hello, Dave Black!” he holloed. “That’s mean! What are you throwin’ that light in my face for?”

But he laughed at the joke, and he laughed more when Dave shouted back, “I ain’t throwin’ no light in your face.”

“Yes, you are; you’ve got a piece of look-in’-glass, and you’re flashin’ it in my face.”

“Wish I may die, if I have,” said Dave, so seriously that Frank had to believe him.

“Well, then, Jake Milrace has.”

“I hain’t, any such thing,” said Jake, and then Dave Black roared back, laughing: “Oh, I’ll tell you! It’s one of the pieces of tin we strung along that line in the corn-field to keep the crows off, corn-plantin’ time.”

The boys shouted together at the joke on Frank, and Dave parted the branches for a better look at the corn-field.

“Well, well! Heigh there!” he called towards the field. “Oh, he’s gone now!” he said to the other boys, craning their necks out to see, too. “But he was doing it, Frank. If I could ketch that feller!”

“Somebody you know? Let’s get him to come along,” said Jake and Frank, one after the other.

“I couldn’t tell,” said Dave. “He slipped into the woods when he heard me holler. If it’s anybody I know, he’ll come out again. Don’t seem to notice him; that’s the best way.”

For a while, though, they stopped to look, now and then; but no more flashes came from the corn-field, and the boys went on cramming themselves with berries; they all said they had got to stop, but they went on till Dave said: “I don’t believe it’s going to do us any good to go in swimming if we eat too many of these mulberries. I reckon we better quit, now.”

The others said they reckoned so, too, and they all got down from the tree, and started for the swimming-hole. They had to go through a piece of woods to get to it, and in the shadow of the trees they did not notice that a storm was coming up till they heard it thunder. By that time they were on the edge of the woods, and there came a flash of lightning and a loud thunder-clap, and the rain began to fall in big drops. The boys saw a barn in the field they had reached, and they ran for it; and they had just got into it when the rain came down with all its might. Suddenly Jake said: “I’ll tell you what! Let’s take off our clothes and have a shower-bath!” And in less than a minute they had their clothes off, and were out in the full pour, dancing up and down, and yelling like Indians. That made them think of playing Indians, and they pretended the barn was a settler’s cabin, and they were stealing up on it through the tall shocks of wheat. They captured it easily, and they said if the lightning would only strike it and set it on fire so it would seem as if the Indians had done it, it would be great; but the storm was going round, and they had to be satisfied with being settlers, turn about, and getting scalped.

It was easy to scalp Frank, because he wore his hair long, as the town boys liked to do in those days, but Jake lived with his sister, and he had to do as she said. She said a boy had no business with long hair; and she had lately cropped his close to his skull. Dave’s father cut his hair round the edges of a bowl, which he had put on Dave’s head for a pattern; the other boys could get a pretty good grip of it, if they caught it on top, where the scalp-lock belongs; but Dave would duck and dodge so that they could hardly get their hands on it. All at once they heard him call out from around the corner of the barn, where he had gone to steal up on them, when it was their turn to be settlers: “Aw, now, Jake Milrace, that ain’t fair! I’m an Indian, now. You let go my hair.”

“Who’s touchin’ your old hair?” Jake shouted back, from the inside of the barn. “You must be crazy. Hurry up, if you’re ever goin’ to attack us. I want to get out in the rain, myself, awhile.”

Frank was outside, pretending to be at work in the field, and waiting for the Indians to creep on him, and when Jake shouted for Dave to hurry, he looked over his shoulder and saw a white figure, naked like his own, flit round the left-hand corner of the barn. Then he had to stoop over, so that Dave could tomahawk him easily, and he did not see anything more, but Jake yelled from the barn: “Oh, you got that fellow with you, have you? Then he’s got to be settler next time. Come on, now. Oh, do hurry up!”

Frank raised his head to see the other boy, but there was only Dave Black, coming round the right-hand corner of the barn.

“You’re crazy yourself, Jake. There ain’t nobody here but me and Frank.”

“There is, too!” Jake retorted. “Or there was, half a second ago.”

But Dave was busy stealing on Frank, who was bending over, pretending to hoe, and after he had tomahawked Frank, he gave the scalp-halloo, and Jake came running out of the barn, and had to be chased round it twice, so that he could fall breathless on his own threshold, and be scalped in full sight of his family. Then Dave pretended to be a war-party of Wyandots, and he gathered up sticks, and pretended to set the barn on fire. By this time Frank and Jake had come to life, and were Wyandots, too, and they all joined hands and danced in front of the barn.

“There! There he is again!” shouted Jake. “Who’s crazy now, I should like to know?”

“Where? Where?” yelled both the other boys.

“There! Right in the barn door. Or he was, quarter of a second ago,” said Jake, and they all dropped one another’s hands, and rushed into the barn and began to search it.

They could not find anybody, and Dave Black said: “Well, he’s the quickest feller! Must ‘a’ got up into the mow, and jumped out of the window, and broke for the woods while we was lookin’ down here. But if I get my hands onto him, oncet!”

They all talked and shouted and quarrelled and laughed at once; but they had to give the other fellow up; he had got away for that time, and they ran out into the rain again to let it wash off the dust and chaff, which they had got all over them in their search. The rain felt so good and cool that they stood still and took it without playing any more, and talked quietly. Dave decided that the fellow who had given them the slip was a new boy whose folks had come into the neighborhood since school had let out in the spring, so that he had not got acquainted yet; but Dave allowed that he would teach him a few tricks as good as his own when he got at him.

The storm left a solid bank of clouds in the east for a while after it was all blue in the western half of the sky, and a rainbow came out against the clouds. It looked so firm and thick that Dave said you could cut it with a scythe. It seemed to come solidly down to the ground in the woods in front of the hay-mow window, and the boys said it would be easy to get the crock of gold at the end of it if they were only in the woods. “I’ll bet that feller’s helpin’ himself,” said Dave, and they began to wonder how many dollars a crock of gold was worth, anyhow; they decided about a million. Then they wondered how much of a crock full of gold a boy could get into his pockets; and they all laughed when Jake said he reckoned it would depend upon the size of the crock. “I don’t believe that fellow could carry much of it away if he hain’t got more on than he had in front of the barn.” That put Frank in mind of the puzzle about the three men that found a treasure in the road when they were travelling together: the blind man saw it, and the man without arms picked it up, and the naked man put it in his pocket. It was the first time Dave had heard the puzzle, and he asked, “Well, what’s the answer?” But before Frank could tell him, Jake started up and pointed to the end of the rainbow, where it seemed to go into the ground against the woods.

“Oh! look! look!” he panted out, and they all looked, but no one could see anything except Jake. It made him mad. “Why, you must be blind!” he shouted, and he kept pointing. “Don’t you see him? There, there! Oh, now, the rainbow’s going out, and you can’t see him any more. He’s gone into the woods again. Well, I don’t know what your eyes are good for, anyway.”

He tried to tell them what he had seen; he could only make out that it must be the same boy, but now he had his clothes on: white linen pantaloons and roundabout, like what you had on May day, or the Fourth if you were going to the Sunday-school picnic. Dave wanted him to tell what he looked like, but Jake could not say anything except that he was very smiling-looking, and seemed as if he would like to be with him; Jake said he was just going to hollo for him to come over when the rainbow began to go out; and then the fellow slipped back into the woods; it was more like melting into the woods.

“very smiling-looking”

“And how far off do you think you could see a boy smile?” Dave asked, scornfully.

“How far off can you say a rainbow is?” Jake retorted.

“I can say how far off that piece of woods is,” said Dave, with a laugh. He got to his feet, and began to pull at the other boys, to make them get up. “Come along, if you’re ever goin’ to the swimmin’-hole.”

The sun was bright and hot, and the boys left the barn, and took across the field to the creek. The storm must have been very heavy, for the creek was rushing along bank-full, and there was no sign left of Dave’s swimming-hole. But they had had such a glorious shower-bath that they did not want to go in swimming, anyway, and they stood and watched the yellow water pouring over the edge of a mill-dam that was there, till Dave happened to think of building a raft and going out on the dam. Jake said, “First rate!” and they all rushed up to a place where there were some boards on the bank; and they got pieces of old rope at the mill, and tied the boards together, till they had a good raft, big enough to hold them, and then they pushed it into the water and got on it. They said they were on the Ohio River, and going from Cincinnati to Louisville. Dave had a long pole to push with, like the boatmen on the keel-boats in the early times, and Jake had a board to steer with; Frank had another board to paddle with, on the other side of the raft from Dave; and so they set on their journey.

The dam was a wide, smooth sheet of water, with trees growing round the edge, and some of them hanging so low over it that they almost touched it. The boys made trips back and forth across the dam, and to and from the edge of the fall, till they got tired of it, and they were wanting something to happen, when Dave stuck his pole deep into the muddy bottom, and set his shoulder hard against the top of the pole, with a “Here she goes, boys, over the Falls of the Ohio!” and he ran along the edge of the raft from one end to the other.

Frank and Dave had both straightened up to watch him. At the stern of the raft Dave tried to pull up his pole for another good push, but it stuck fast in the mud at the bottom of the dam, and before Dave knew what he was about, the raft shot from under his feet, and he went overboard with his pole in his hand, as if he were taking a flying leap with it. The next minute he dropped into the water heels first, and went down out of sight. He came up blowing water from his mouth, and holloing and laughing, and took after the raft, where the other fellows were jumping up and down, and bending back and forth, and screaming and yelling at the way he looked hurrying after his pole, and then dangling in the air, and now showing his black head in the water like a musk-rat swimming for its hole. They were having such a good time mocking him that they did not notice how his push had sent the raft swiftly in under the trees by the shore, and the first thing they knew, one of the low branches caught them, and scraped them both off the raft into the water, almost on top of Dave. Then it was Dave’s turn to laugh, and he began: “What’s the matter, boys? Want to help find the other end of that pole?”

Jake was not under the water any longer than Dave had been, but Frank did not come up so soon. They looked among the brush by the shore, to see if he was hiding there and fooling them, but they could not find him. “He’s stuck in some snag at the bottom,” said Dave; “we got to dive for him”; but just then Frank came up, and swam feebly for the shore. He crawled out of the water, and after he got his breath, he said, “I got caught, down there, in the top of an old tree.”

“Didn’t I tell you so?” Dave shouted into Jake’s ear.

“Why, Jake was there till I got loose,” said Frank, looking stupidly at him.

“No, I wasn’t,” said Jake. “I was up long ago, and I was just goin’ to dive for you; so was Dave.”

“Then it was that other fellow,” said Frank. “I thought it didn’t look overmuch like Jake, anyway.”

“Oh, pshaw!” Dave jeered. “How could you tell, in that muddy water?”

“I don’t know,” Frank answered. “It was all light round him. Looked like he had a piece of the rainbow on him, or foxfire.”

“I reckon if I find him,” said Dave, “I’ll take his piece of rainbow off’n him pretty quick. That’s the fourth time that feller’s fooled us to-day. Where d’you s’pose he came up? Oh, I know! He got out on the other side under them trees, while we was huntin’ for Frank, and not noticin’. How’d he look, anyway?”

“I don’t know; I just saw him half a second. Kind of smiling, and like he wanted to play.”

“Well, I know him,” said Dave. “It’s the new boy, and the next time I see him — Oh, hello! There goes our raft!”

It was drifting slowly down towards the edge of the dam, and the boys all three plunged into the water again, and swam out to it, and climbed up on it.

They had the greatest kind of a time, and when they had played castaway sailors, Frank and Jake wanted to send the raft over the edge of the dam; but Dave said it might get into the head-race of the mill and tangle itself up in the wheel, and spoil the wheel.

So they took the raft apart and carried the boards on shore, and then tried to think what they would do next. The first thing was to take off their clothes and see about drying them. But they had no patience for that; and so they wrung them out as dry as they could and put them on again; they had left their roundabouts at Dave’s house, anyway, and so had nothing on but a shirt and trousers apiece. The sun was out hot after the rain, and their clothes were almost dry by the time they got to Dave’s house. They went with him to the woods-pasture on the way, and helped him drive home the cows, and they wanted him to get his mother to make his father let him go up to the Boy’s Town with them and see the fireworks; but he said it would be no use; and then they understood that if a man was British, of course he would not want his boy to celebrate the Fourth of July by going to the fireworks. They felt sorry for Dave, but they both told him that they had had more fun than they ever had in their lives before, and they were coming the next Fourth and going to bring their guns with them. Then they could shoot quails or squirrels, if they saw any, and the firing would celebrate the Fourth at the same time, and his father could not find any fault.

It seemed to Frank that it was awful to have a father that was British; but when they got to Dave’s house, and his father asked them how they had spent the afternoon, he did not seem to be so very bad. He asked them whether they had got caught in the storm, and if that was what made their clothes wet, and when they told him what had happened, he sat down on the wood-pile and laughed till he shook all over.

Then Frank and Jake thought they had better be going home, but Dave’s mother would not let them start without something to eat; and she cut them each a slice of bread the whole width and length of the loaf, and spread the slices with butter, and then apple-butter, and then brown sugar. The boys thought they were not hungry, but when they began to eat they found out that they were, and before they knew it they had eaten the slices all up. Dave’s mother said they must come and see Dave again some time, and she acted real clever; she was an American, anyway.

They got their horses and started home. It was almost sundown now, and they heard the turtle-doves cooing in the woods, and the bob-whites whistling from the stubble, and there were so many squirrels among the trees in the woods-pastures, and on the fences, that Frank could hardly get Jake along; and if it had not been for Jake’s horse, that ran whenever Frank whipped up his pony, they would not have got home till dark. They smelt ham frying in some of the houses they passed, and that made them awfully hungry; one place there was coffee, too.

When they reached Frank’s house he found that his mother had kept supper hot for him, and she came out and said Jake must come in with him, if his family would not be uneasy about him; and Jake said he did not believe they would. He tied his horse to the outside of the cow-house, and he came in, and Frank’s mother gave them as much baked chicken as they could hold, with hot bread to sop in the gravy; and she had kept some coffee hot for Frank, so that they made another good meal. They told her what a bully time they had had, and how they had fallen into the dam; but she did not seem to think it was funny; she said it was a good thing they were not all drowned, and she believed they had taken their deaths of cold, anyway. Frank was afraid she was going to make him go up stairs and change his clothes, when he heard the boys begin to sound their call of “Ee-o-wee” at the front door, and he and Jake snatched their hats and ran out. There was a lot of boys at the gate; Hen Billard was there, and Archy Hawkins and Jim Leonard; there were some little fellows, and Frank’s cousin Pony was there; he said his mother had said he might stay till his father came for him.

Hen Billard had his thumb tied up from firing too big a load out of his brass pistol. The pistol burst, and the barrel was all curled back like a dandelion stem in water; he had it in his pocket to show. Archy Hawkins’s face was full of little blue specks from pouring powder on a coal and getting it flashed up into his face when he was blowing the coal; some of his eye-winkers were singed off. Jim Leonard had a rag round his hand, and he said a whole pack of shooting-crackers had gone off in it before he could throw them away, and burned the skin off; the fellows dared him to let them see it, but he would not; and then they mocked him. They all said there had never been such a Fourth of July in the Boy’s Town before; and Frank and Jake let them brag as much as they wanted to, and when the fellows got tired, and asked them what they had done at Pawpaw Bottom, and they said, “Oh, nothing much; just helped Dave Black haul rails,” they set up a jeer that you could hear a mile.

Then Jake said, as if he just happened to think of it, “And fought bumblebees.”

And Frank put in, “And took a shower-bath in the thunder-storm.”

And Jake said, “And eat mulberries.”

And Frank put in again, “And built a raft.”

And Jake said, “And Dave got pulled into the mill-dam.”

And Frank wound up, “And Jake and I got swept overboard.”

By that time the fellows began to feel pretty small, and they crowded round and wanted to hear every word about it. Then Jake and Frank tantalized them, and said of course it was no Fourth at all, it was only just fun, till the fellows could not stand it any longer, and then Frank jumped up from where he was sitting on his front steps, and holloed out, “I’ll show you how Dave looked when his pole pulled him in,” and he acted it all out about Dave’s pole pulling him into the water.

Jake waited till he was done, and then he jumped up and said, “I’ll show you how Frank and me looked when we got swept overboard,” and he acted it out about the limb of the tree scraping them off the raft while they were laughing at Dave and not noticing.

As soon as they got the boys to yelling, Jake and Frank both showed how they fought the bumblebees, and how the dogs got stung, and ran round trying to rub the bees off against the ground, and your legs, and everything, till the boys fell down and rolled over, it made them laugh so. Jake and Frank showed how they ran out into the rain from the barn, and stood in it, and told how good and cool it felt; and they told about sitting up in the mulberry-tree, and how twenty boys could not have made the least hole in the berries. They told about the quails and the squirrels; and they showed how Frank had to keep whipping up his pony, and how Jake’s horse kept wheeling and running away; and some of the fellows said they were going with them the next Fourth.

Hen Billard tried to turn it off, and said: “Pshaw! You can have that kind of a Fourth any day in the country. Who’s going up to the court-house yard to see the fireworks?”

He and Archy Hawkins and the big boys ran off, whooping, and the little fellows felt awfully, because their mothers had said they must not go. Just then, Pony Baker’s father came for him, and he said he guessed they could see the fireworks from Frank’s front steps; and Jake stayed with Frank, and Frank’s father came out, and his aunt and mother leaned out of the window, and watched, while the Roman candles shot up, and the rockets climbed among the stars.

They were all so much taken up in watching that they did not notice one of the neighbor women who had come over from her house and joined them, till Mrs. Baker happened to see her, and called out: “Why, Mrs. Fogle, where did you spring from? Do come in here with Manda and me. I didn’t see you, in your black dress.”

“No, I’m going right back,” said Mrs. Fogle. “I just come over a minute to see the fireworks — for Wilford; you can’t see them from my side.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Baker, softly. “Well, I’m real glad you came. You ought to have heard the boys, here, telling about the kind of Fourth they had at Pawpaw Bottom. I don’t know when I’ve laughed so much.”

“Well, I reckon it’s just as well I wasn’t here. I couldn’t have helped in the laughing much. It seems pretty hard my Wilford couldn’t been having a good time with the rest to-day. He was always such a Fourth-of-July boy.”

“But he’s happy where he is, Mrs. Fogle,” said Mrs. Baker, gently.

“Well, I know he’d give anything to been here with the boys to-day — I don’t care where he is. And he’s been here, too; I just know he has; I’ve felt him, all day long, teasing at me to let him go off with your Frank and Jake, here; he just fairly loved to be with them, and he never done any harm. Oh, my, my! I don’t see how I used to deny him.”

She put up her apron to her face, and ran sobbing across the street again to her own house; they heard the door close after her in the dark.

“I declare,” said Mrs. Baker, “I’ve got half a mind to go over to her.”

“Better not,” said Pony Baker’s father.

“Well, I reckon you’re right, Henry,” Mrs. Baker assented.

They did not talk gayly any more; when the last rocket had climbed the sky, Jake Milrace rose and said in a whisper he must be going.

After he was gone, Frank told, as if he had just thought of it, about the boy that had fooled them so, at Pawpaw Bottom; and he was surprised at the way his mother and his Uncle Henry questioned him up about it.

“Well, now,” she said, “I’m glad poor Mrs. Fogle wasn’t here, or—” She stopped, and her brother-in-law rose, with the hand of his sleepy little son in his own.

“I think Pony had better say good-night now, while he can. Frank, you’ve had a remarkable Fourth. Good-night, all. I wish I had spent the day at Pawpaw Bottom myself.”

Before they slept that night, Pony’s mother said: “Well, I’d just as soon you’d kept that story to yourself till morning, Henry. I shall keep thinking about it, and not sleep a wink. How in the world do you account for it?”

“I don’t account for it,” said Pony’s father.

“Now, that won’t do! What do you think?”

“Well, if it was one boy that saw the fourth boy it might be a simple case of lying.”

“Frank Baker never told a lie in his life. He couldn’t.”

“Perhaps Jake could, or Dave. But as they all three saw the boy at different times, why, it’s—”

“What?”

“It’s another thing.”

“Now, you can’t get out of it that way, Henry. Do you believe that the child longed so to be back here that—”

“Ah, who knows? There’s something very strange about all that. But we can’t find our way out, except by the short-cut of supposing that nothing of the kind happened.”

“You can’t suppose that, though, if all three of the boys say it did.”

“I can suppose that they think it happened, or made each other think so.”

Pony’s mother drew a long sigh. “Well, I know what I shall always think,” she said.

VIII

HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS

Just before the circus came, about the end of July, something happened that made Pony mean to run off more than anything that ever was. His father and mother were coming home from a walk, in the evening; it was so hot nobody could stay in the house, and just as they were coming to the front steps Pony stole up behind them and tossed a snowball which he had got out of the garden at his mother, just for fun. The flower struck her very softly on her hair, for she had no bonnet on, and she gave a jump and a hollo that made Pony laugh; and then she caught him by the arm and boxed his ears.

“Oh, my goodness! It was you, was it, you good-for-nothing boy? I thought it was a bat!” she said, and she broke out crying and ran into the house, and would not mind his father, who was calling after her, “Lucy, Lucy, my dear child!”

Pony was crying, too, for he did not intend to frighten his mother, and when she took his fun as if he had done something wicked he did not know what to think. He stole off to bed and he lay there crying in the dark and expecting that she would come to him, as she always did, to have him say that he was sorry when he had been wicked, or to tell him that she was sorry, when she thought she had not been quite fair with him. But she did not come, and after a good while his father came and said: “Are you awake, Pony? I am sorry your mother misunderstood your fun. But you mustn’t mind it, dear boy. She’s not well, and she’s very nervous.”

“I don’t care!” Pony sobbed out. “She won’t have a chance to touch me again!” For he had made up his mind to run off with the circus which was coming the next Tuesday.

He turned his face away, sobbing, and his father, after standing by his bed a moment, went away without saying anything but, “Don’t forget your prayers, Pony. You’ll feel differently in the morning, I hope.”

Pony fell asleep thinking how he would come back to the Boy’s Town with the circus when he was grown up, and when he came out in the ring riding three horses bareback he would see his father and mother and sisters in one of the lower seats. They would not know him, but he would know them, and he would send for them to come to the dressing-room, and would be very good to them, all but his mother; he would be very cold and stiff with her, though he would know that she was prouder of him than all the rest put together, and she would go away almost crying.

He began being cold and stiff with her the very next morning, although she was better than ever to him, and gave him waffles for breakfast with unsalted butter, and tried to pet him up. That whole day she kept trying to do things for him, but he would scarcely speak to her; and at night she came to him and said, “What makes you act so strangely, Pony? Are you offended with your mother?”

“he began being cold and stiff
with her the very next morning”

“Yes, I am!” said Pony, haughtily, and he twitched away from where she was sitting on the side of his bed, leaning over him.

“On account of last night, Pony?” she asked, softly.

“I reckon you know well enough,” said Pony, and he tried to be disgusted with her for her being such a hypocrite, but he had to set his teeth hard, hard, or he would have broken down crying.

“If it’s for that, you mustn’t, Pony, dear. You don’t know how you frightened me. When your snowball hit me, I felt sure it was a bat, and I’m so afraid of bats, you know. I didn’t mean to hurt my poor boy’s feelings so, and you mustn’t mind it any more, Pony.”

She stooped down and kissed him on the forehead, but he did not move or say anything; only, after that he felt more forgiving towards his mother. He made up his mind to be good to her along with the rest when he came back with the circus. But still he meant to run off with the circus. He did not see how he could do anything else, for he had told all the boys that day that he was going to do it; and when they just laughed, and said: “Oh yes. Think you can fool your grandmother! It’ll be like running off with the Indians,” Pony wagged his head, and said they would see whether it would or not, and offered to bet them what they dared.

The morning of the circus day all the fellows went out to the corporation line to meet the circus procession. There were ladies and knights, the first thing, riding on spotted horses; and then a band chariot, all made up of swans and dragons. There were about twenty baggage wagons; but before you got to them there was the greatest thing of all. It was a chariot drawn by twelve Shetland ponies, and it was shaped like a big shell, and around in the bottom of the shell there were little circus actors, boys and girls, dressed in their circus clothes, and they all looked exactly like fairies. They scarce seemed to see the fellows, as they ran alongside of their chariot, but Hen Billard and Archy Hawkins, who were always cutting up, got close enough to throw some peanuts to the circus boys, and some of the little circus girls laughed, and the driver looked around and cracked his whip at the fellows, and they all had to get out of the way then.

Jim Leonard said that the circus boys and girls were all stolen, and nobody was allowed to come close to them for fear they would try to send word to their friends. Some of the fellows did not believe it, and wanted to know how he knew it; and he said he read it in a paper; after that nobody could deny it. But he said that if you went with the circus men of your own free will they would treat you first-rate; only they would give you burnt brandy to keep you little; nothing else but burnt brandy would do it, but that would do it, sure.

Pony was scared at first when he heard that most of the circus fellows were stolen, but he thought if he went of his own accord he would be all right. Still, he did not feel so much like running off with the circus as he did before the circus came. He asked Jim Leonard whether the circus men made all the children drink burnt brandy; and Archy Hawkins and Hen Billard heard him ask, and began to mock him. They took him up between them, one by his arms and the other by the legs, and ran along with him, and kept saying, “Does it want to be a great big circus actor? Then it shall, so it shall,” and, “We’ll tell the circus men to be very careful of you, Pony dear!” till Pony wriggled himself loose and began to stone them.

After that they had to let him alone, for when a fellow began to stone you in the Boy’s Town you had to let him alone, unless you were going to whip him, and the fellows only wanted to have a little fun with Pony. But what they did made him all the more resolved to run away with the circus, just to show them.

He helped to carry water for the circus men’s horses, along with the boys who earned their admission that way. He had no need to do it, because his father was going to take him in, anyway; but Jim Leonard said it was the only way to get acquainted with the circus men. Still Pony was afraid to speak to them, and he would not have said a word to any of them if it had not been for one of them speaking to him first, when he saw him come lugging a great pail of water, and bending far over on the right to balance it.

“That’s right,” the circus man said to Pony. “If you ever fell into that bucket you’d drown, sure.”

He was a big fellow, with funny eyes, and he had a white bulldog at his heels; and all the fellows said he was the one who guarded the outside of the tent when the circus began, and kept the boys from hooking in under the curtain.

Even then Pony would not have had the courage to say anything, but Jim Leonard was just behind him with another bucket of water, and he spoke up for him. “He wants to go with the circus.”

They both set down their buckets, and Pony felt himself turning pale when the circus man came towards them. “Wants to go with the circus, heigh? Let’s have a look at you.” He took Pony by the shoulders and turned him slowly round, and looked at his nice clothes, and took him by the chin. “Orphan?” he asked.

Pony did not know what to say, but Jim Leonard nodded; perhaps he did not know what to say, either; but Pony felt as if they had both told a lie.

“Parents living?” The circus man looked at Pony, and Pony had to say that they were.

He gasped out, “Yes,” so that you could scarcely hear him, and the circus man said:

“Well, that’s right. When we take an orphan, we want to have his parents living, so that we can go and ask them what sort of a boy he is.”

He looked at Pony in such a friendly, smiling way that Pony took courage to ask him whether they would want him to drink burnt brandy.

“What for?”

“To keep me little.”

“Oh, I see.” The circus man took off his hat and rubbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief, which he threw into the top of his hat before he put it on again. “No, I don’t know as we will. We’re rather short of giants just now. How would you like to drink a glass of elephant milk every morning and grow into an eight-footer?”

Pony said he didn’t know whether he would like to be quite so big; and then the circus man said perhaps he would rather go for an India-rubber man; that was what they called the contortionists in those days.

“Let’s feel of you again.” The circus man took hold of Pony and felt his joints. “You’re put together pretty tight; but I reckon we could make you do if you’d let us take you apart with a screw-driver and limber up the pieces with rattlesnake oil. Wouldn’t like it, heigh? Well, let me see!” The circus man thought a moment, and then he said: “How would double-somersaults on four horses bareback do?”

Pony said that would do, and then the circus man said: “Well, then, we’ve just hit it, because our double-somersault, four-horse bareback is just going to leave us, and we want a new one right away. Now, there’s more than one way of joining a circus, but the best way is to wait on your front steps with your things all packed up, and the procession comes along at about one o’clock in the morning and picks you up. Which’d you rather do?”

Pony pushed his toe into the turf, as he always did when he was ashamed, but he made out to say he would rather wait out on the front steps.

“Well, then, that’s all settled,” said the circus man. “We’ll be along,” and he was going away with his dog, but Jim Leonard called after him:

“You hain’t asked him whereabouts he lives.”

The circus man kept on, and he said, without looking around, “Oh, that’s all right. We’ve got somebody that looks after that.”

“It’s the magician,” Jim Leonard whispered to Pony, and they walked away.

IX

HOW PONY DID NOT QUITE GET OFF WITH THE CIRCUS

A crowd of the fellows had been waiting to know what the boys had been talking about to the circus man; but Jim Leonard said: “Don’t you tell, Pony Baker!” and he started to run, and that made Pony run, too, and they both ran till they got away from the fellows.

“You have got to keep it a secret; for if a lot of fellows find it out the constable’ll get to know it, and he’ll be watching out around the corner of your house, and when the procession comes along and he sees you’re really going he’ll take you up, and keep you in jail till your father comes and bails you out. Now, you mind!”

Pony said, “Oh, I won’t tell anybody,” and when Jim Leonard said that if a circus man was to feel him over, that way, and act so kind of pleasant and friendly, he would be too proud to speak to anybody, Pony confessed that he knew it was a great thing all the time.

“The way’ll be,” said Jim Leonard, “to keep in with him, and he’ll keep the others from picking on you; they’ll be afraid to, on account of his dog. You’ll see, he’ll be the one to come for you to-night; and if the constable is there the dog won’t let him touch you. I never thought of that.”

Perhaps on account of thinking of it now Jim Leonard felt free to tell the other fellows how Pony was going to run off, for when a crowd of them came along he told them. They said it was splendid, and they said that if they could make their mothers let them, or if they could get out of the house without their mothers knowing it, they were going to sit up with Pony and watch out for the procession, and bid him good-bye.

At dinner-time he found out that his father was going to take him and all his sisters to the circus, and his father and mother were so nice to him, asking him about the procession and everything, that his heart ached at the thought of running away from home and leaving them. But now he had to do it; the circus man was coming for him, and he could not back out; he did not know what would happen if he did. It seemed to him as if his mother had done everything she could to make it harder for him. She had stewed chicken for dinner, with plenty of gravy, and hot biscuits to sop in, and peach preserves afterwards; and she kept helping him to more, because she said boys that followed the circus around got dreadfully hungry. The eating seemed to keep his heart down; it was trying to get into his throat all the time; and he knew that she was being good to him, but if he had not known it he would have believed his mother was just doing it to mock him.

Pony had to go to the circus with his father and sisters, and to get on his shoes and a clean collar. But a crowd of the fellows were there at the tent door to watch out whether the circus man would say anything to him when he went in; and Jim Leonard rubbed up against him, when the man passed with his dog and did not even look at Pony, and said: “He’s just pretending. He don’t want your father to know. He’ll be round for you, sure. I saw him kind of smile to one of the other circus men.”

It was a splendid circus, and there were more things than Pony ever saw in a circus before. But instead of hating to have it over, it seemed to him that it would never come to an end. He kept thinking and thinking, and wondering whether he would like to be a circus actor; and when the one came out who rode four horses bareback and stood on his head on the last horse, and drove with the reins in his teeth, Pony thought that he never could learn to do it; and if he could not learn he did not know what the circus men would say to him. It seemed to him that it was very strange he had not told that circus man that he didn’t know whether he could do it or not; but he had not, and now it was too late.

A boy came around calling lemonade, and Pony’s father bought some for each of the children, but Pony could hardly taste his.

“What is the matter with you, Pony? Are you sick?” his father asked.

“No. I don’t care for any; that’s all. I’m well,” said Pony; but he felt very miserable.

After supper Jim Leonard came round and went up to Pony’s room with him to help him pack, and he was so gay about it and said he only wished he was going, that Pony cheered up a little. Jim had brought a large square of checked gingham that he said he did not believe his mother would ever want, and that he would tell her he had taken if she asked for it. He said it would be the very thing for Pony to carry his clothes in, for it was light and strong and would hold a lot. He helped Pony to choose his things out of his bureau drawers: a pair of stockings and a pair of white pantaloons and a blue roundabout, and a collar, and two handkerchiefs. That was all he said Pony would need, because he would have his circus clothes right away, and there was no use taking things that he would never wear.

Jim did these up in the square of gingham, and he tied it across cater-cornered twice, in double knots, and showed Pony how he could put his hand through and carry it just as easy. He hid it under the bed for him, and he told Pony that if he was in Pony’s place he should go to bed right away or pretty soon, so that nobody would think anything, and maybe he could get some sleep before he got up and went down to wait on the front steps for the circus to come along. He promised to be there with the other boys and keep them from fooling or making a noise, or doing anything to wake his father up, or make the constable come. “You see, Pony,” he said, “if you can run off this year, and come back with the circus next year, then a whole lot of fellows can run off. Don’t you see that?”

Pony said he saw that, but he said he wished some of the other fellows were going now, because he did not know any of the circus boys and he was afraid he might feel kind of lonesome. But Jim Leonard said he would soon get acquainted, and, anyway, a year would go before he knew it, and then if the other fellows could get off he would have plenty of company.

As soon as Jim Leonard was gone Pony undressed and got into bed. He was not sleepy, but he thought maybe it would be just as well to rest a little while before the circus procession came along for him; and, anyway, he could not bear to go down-stairs and be with the family when he was going to leave them so soon, and not come back for a whole year.

After a good while, or about the time he usually came in from playing, he heard his mother saying: “Where in the world is Pony? Has he come in yet? Have you seen him, girls? Pony! Pony!” she called.

But somehow Pony could not get his voice up out of his throat; he wanted to answer her, but he could not speak. He heard her say, “Go out to the front steps, girls, and see if you can see him,” and then he heard her coming up the stairs; and she came into his room, and when she saw him lying there in bed she said: “Why, I believe in my heart the child’s asleep! Pony! Are you awake?”

Pony made out to say no, and his mother said: “My! what a fright you gave me! Why didn’t you answer me? Are you sick, Pony? Your father said you didn’t seem well at the circus; and you didn’t eat any supper, hardly.”

Pony said he was first-rate, but he spoke very low, and his mother came up and sat down on the side of his bed.

“What is the matter, child?” She bent over and felt his forehead. “No, you haven’t got a bit of fever,” she said, and she kissed him, and began to tumble his short black hair in the way she had, and she got one of his hands between her two, and kept rubbing it. “But you’ve had a long, tiresome day, and that’s why you’ve gone to bed, I suppose. But if you feel the least sick, Pony, I’ll send for the doctor.”

Pony said he was not sick at all; just tired; and that was true; he felt as if he never wanted to get up again.

His mother put her arm under his neck, and pressed her face close down to his, and said very low: “Pony, dear, you don’t feel hard towards your mother for what she did the other night?”

He knew she meant boxing his ears, when he was not to blame, and he said: “Oh no,” and then he threw his arms round her neck and cried; and she told him not to cry, and that she would never do such a thing again; but she was really so frightened she did not know what she was doing.

When he quieted down she said: “Now say your prayers, Pony, ‘Our Father,’” and she said “Our Father” all through with him, and after that, “Now I lay me,” just as when he was a very little fellow. After they had finished she stooped over and kissed him again, and when he turned his face into his pillow she kept smoothing his hair with her hand for about a minute. Then she went away.

Pony could hear them stirring about for a good while down-stairs. His father came in from up-town at last and asked:

“Has Pony come in?” and his mother said:

“Yes, he’s up in bed. I wouldn’t disturb him, Henry. He’s asleep by this time.”

His father said: “I don’t know what to make of the boy. If he keeps on acting so strangely I shall have the doctor see him in the morning.”

Pony felt dreadfully to think how far away from them he should be in the morning, and he would have given anything if he could have gone down to his father and mother and told them what he was going to do. But it did not seem as if he could.

By-and-by he began to be sleepy, and then he dozed off, but he thought it was hardly a minute before he heard the circus band, and knew that the procession was coming for him. He jumped out of bed and put on his things as fast as he could; but his roundabout had only one sleeve to it, somehow, and he had to button the lower buttons of his trousers to keep it on. He got his bundle and stole down to the front door without seeming to touch his feet to anything, and when he got out on the front steps he saw the circus magician coming along. By that time the music had stopped and Pony could not see any procession. The magician had on a tall, peaked hat, like a witch. He took up the whole street, he was so wide in the black glazed gown that hung from his arms when he stretched them out, for he seemed to be groping along that way, with his wand in one hand, like a blind man.

He kept saying in a kind of deep, shaking voice: “It’s all glory; it’s all glory,” and the sound of those words froze Pony’s blood. He tried to get back into the house again, so that the magician should not find him, but when he felt for the door-knob there was no door there anywhere; nothing but a smooth wall. Then he sat down on the steps and tried to shrink up so little that the magician would miss him; but he saw his wide goggles getting nearer and nearer; and then his father and the doctor were standing by him looking down at him, and the doctor said:

“He has been walking in his sleep; he must be bled,” and he got out his lancet, when Pony heard his mother calling: “Pony, Pony! What’s the matter? Have you got the nightmare?” and he woke up, and found it was just morning.

The sun was shining in at his window, and it made him so glad to think that by this time the circus was far away and he was not with it, that he hardly knew what to do.

He was not very well for two or three days afterwards, and his mother let him stay out of school to see whether he was really going to be sick or not. When he went back most of the fellows had forgotten that he had been going to run off with the circus. Some of them that happened to think of it plagued him a little and asked how he liked being a circus actor.

Hen Billard was the worst; he said he reckoned the circus magician got scared when he saw what a whaler Pony was, and told the circus men that they would have to get a new tent to hold him; and that was the reason why they didn’t take him. Archy Hawkins said: “How long did you have to wait on the front steps, Pony, dear?” But after that he was pretty good to him, and said he reckoned they had better not any of them pretend that Pony had not tried to run off if they had not been up to see.

Pony himself could never be exactly sure whether he had waited on the front steps and seen the circus magician or not. Sometimes it seemed all of it like a dream, and sometimes only part of it. Jim Leonard tried to help him make it out, but they could not. He said it was a pity he had overslept himself, for if he had come to bid Pony good-bye, the way he said, then he could have told just how much of it was a dream and how much was not.

X

THE ADVENTURES THAT PONY’S COUSIN, FRANK BAKER, HAD WITH A POCKETFUL OF MONEY

Very likely Pony Baker would not have tried to run off any more if it had not been for Jim Leonard. He was so glad he had not got off with the circus that he did not mind any of the things at home that used to vex him; and it really seemed as if his father and mother were trying to act better. They were a good deal taken up with each other, and sometimes he thought they let him do things they would not have let him do if they had noticed what he asked. His mother was fonder of him than ever, and if she had not kissed him so much before the fellows he would not have cared, for when they were alone he liked to have her pet him. But one thing was, he could never get her to like Jim Leonard, or to believe that Jim was not leading him into mischief whenever they were off together. She was always wanting him to go with his cousin Frank, and he would have liked to ask Frank about running off, and whether a fellow had better do it; but he was ashamed, and especially after he heard his father tell how splendidly Frank had behaved with two thousand dollars he was bringing from the city to the Boy’s Town; Pony was afraid that Frank would despise him, and he did not hardly feel fit to go with Frank, anyway.

“frank baker was one of those fellows
that every mother would feel her boy
was safe with”

Frank Baker was one of those fellows that every mother would feel her boy was safe with. She would be sure that no crowd he was in was going to do any harm or come to any, for he would have an anxious eye out for everybody, and he would stand between the crowd and the mischief that a crowd of boys nearly always wants to do. His own mother felt easy about the younger children when they were with Frank; and in a place where there were more chances for a boy to get sucked under mill-wheels, and break through ice, and fall from bridges, or have his fingers taken off by machinery than any other place I ever heard of, she no more expected anything to happen to them, if he had them in charge, than if she had them in charge herself.

As there were a good many other children in the family, and Mrs. Baker did her own work, like nearly every mother in the Boy’s Town, Frank almost always had some of them in charge. When he went hunting, or fishing, or walnutting, or berrying, or in swimming, he usually had one or two younger brothers with him; if he had only one, he thought he was having the greatest kind of a time.

He did not mind carrying his brother on his back when he got tired, although it was not exactly the way to steal on game, and the gun was a heavy enough load, anyway; but if he had not got many walnuts, or any at all — as sometimes happened — it was not a great hardship to haul his brother home in the wagon. To be sure, when he wanted to swim out with the other big boys it was pretty trying to have to keep an eye on his brother, and see that he did not fall into the water from the bank where he left him.

He was a good deal more anxious about other boys than he was about himself, and once he came near getting drowned through his carelessness. It was in winter, and the canal basin had been frozen over; then most of the water was let out from under the ice, and afterwards partly let in again. This lifted the ice-sheet, but not back to its old level, and the ice that clung to the shores shelved steeply down to the new level. Frank stepped on this shore ice to get a shinny-ball, and slipped down to the edge of the ice-sheet, which he would be sure to go under into the water. He holloed with all his might, and by good luck some people came and reached him a stick, by which he pulled himself out.

The scare of it haunted him for long after, but not so much for himself. Whenever he was away from home in the winter he would see one of his younger brothers slipping down the shore ice and going under the ice-sheet, and he would break into a cold sweat at the idea. This shows just the worrying kind of boy Frank was; and it shows how used he was to having care put upon him, and how he would even borrow trouble when he had none.

It generally happens with any one who makes himself useful that other people make him useful, too, and all the neighbors put as much trust in Frank as his mother, and got him to do a good many things that they would not have got other boys to do. They could not look into his face, a little more careworn than it ought to be at his age, without putting perfect faith in him, and trying to get something out of him. That was how he came to do so many errands for mothers who had plenty of boys of their own; and he seemed to be called on in any sort of trouble or danger, when the fathers were up-town, and was always chasing pigs or cows out of other people’s gardens, and breaking up their hens from setting, or going up trees with hives to catch their bees when they swarmed.

I suppose this was how he came to be trusted with that pocketful of money, and why he had a young brother along to double his care at the time.

The money was given him in the city, as the Boy’s Town boys always called the large place about twenty miles away, where Frank went once with his mother when he was eleven years old. She was going to take passage there on a steamboat and go up the Ohio River to visit his grandmother with his sisters, while Frank was to go back the same day to the Boy’s Town with one of his young brothers.

They all drove down to the city together in the carriage which one of his uncles had got from the livery stable, with a driver who was to take Frank and his brother home. This uncle had been visiting Frank’s father and mother, and it was his boat that she was going on. It lay among a hundred other boats, which had their prows tight together along the landing for half a mile up and down the sloping shore. It was one of the largest boats of all, and it ran every week from Cincinnati to Pittsburgh, and did not take any longer for the round trip than an ocean steamer takes now for the voyage from New York to Liverpool.

The children all had dinner on board, such a dinner as there never was in any house: roast beef and roast chicken; beefsteak and ham in chafing-dishes with lamps burning under them to keep them hot; pound-cake with frosting on, and pies and pickles, corn-bread and hot biscuit; jelly that kept shaking in moulds; ice-cream and Spanish pudding; coffee and tea, and I do not know what all.

When the children had eaten all they could hold, and made their uncle laugh till he almost cried, to see them trying to eat everything, their mother went ashore with them, and walked up the landing towards the hotel where the carriage was left, so as to be with Frank and his little brother as long as she could before they started home. She was about one of the best mothers in the Boy’s Town, and Frank hated to have her go away even on a visit.

She kept giving him charges about all the things at home, and how he must take good care of his little brothers, and see that the garden gate was fastened so that the cows could not get in, and feed the chickens regularly, and put the cat out every night, and not let the dog sleep under his bed; and they were so busy talking and feeling sorry that they got to the hotel before they knew it.

There, whom should they see but one of the Boy’s Town merchants, who was in the city on business, and who seemed as glad to meet them as if they were his own relations. They were glad, too, for it made them feel as if they had got back to the Boy’s Town when he came up and spoke to Mrs. Baker. They had started from home after a very early breakfast, and she said it seemed as if they had been gone a year already. The merchant told her that he had been looking everywhere for somebody he knew who was going to the Boy’s Town; and then he told Mrs. Baker that he had two thousand dollars which he wanted to send home to his partner, and he asked her if she could take it for him when she went back.

“Well, indeed, indeed, I’m thankful I’m not going, Mr. Bushell!” Mrs. Baker said. “And I wouldn’t have supposed I could be, I’m so homesick. I’m going up the river on a visit to mother; but if I was going straight back, I wouldn’t take your two thousand dollars for the half of it. I would be afraid of losing it, or getting robbed and murdered. I don’t know what wouldn’t happen. I would be happy to oblige you, but indeed, indeed I couldn’t!”

The merchant said he was sorry, but if she was not going home he supposed he would have to find some one who was. It was before the days of sending money by express, or telegraphing it, and the merchant told her he was afraid to trust the money in the mail. He asked her who was going to take her carriage home, and she told him the name of the driver from the livery stable in the Boy’s Town, who had come to the city with them.

Mr. Bushell seemed dreadfully disappointed, but when she went on to say how anxious she was that the driver should get Frank and his brother home before dark, he brightened up all of a sudden, and he asked, “Is Frank going back?” and he looked down into Frank’s face and smiled, as most people did when they looked into Frank’s face, and he asked, “What’s the reason Frank couldn’t take it?”

Mrs. Baker put her arm across Frank’s breast and pulled him away, and said, “Indeed, indeed, the child just sha’n’t, and that’s all about it!”

But Mr. Bushell took the boy by the arm and laughed. “Let’s feel how deep your pants’ pocket is,” he said; and he put his hand into the pocket of Frank’s nankeen trousers and felt; and then, before Mrs. Baker could stop him, he drew a roll of bank-notes out of his own pocket and pushed it into Frank’s. “There, it’s just a fit! Do you think you’d lose it?”

“No, he wouldn’t lose it,” said his mother, “and that’s just it! He’d worry about it every minute, and I would worry about him!”

She tried to make the merchant take the money back, but he kept joking; and then he turned serious, and told her that the money had to be put in the bank to pay a note, and he did not know any way to get it to his partner if she would not let Frank take it; that he was at his wits’ end. He said he would as lief trust it with Frank as with any man he knew; that nobody would think the boy had any money with him; and he fairly begged her to let Frank take it for him.

He talked to her so much that she began to give way a little. She felt proud of his being willing to trust Frank, and at last she consented. Mr. Bushell explained that he wished his partner to have the money that evening, and she had to agree to let Frank carry it to him as soon as he got home.

The Boy’s Town was built on two sides of a river. Mr. Bushell’s store was across the river from where the Bakers lived, and she said she did not want the child to have to go through the bridge after dark. Perhaps it was her anxiety about this that began the whole trouble; for when the driver came with the carriage, she could not help asking him if he was sure to get home before sundown. That made him drive faster than he might have done, perhaps; at any rate, he set off at a quick trot after Mr. Bushell had helped put the two boys in. Mrs. Baker gathered her little girls together and went back to the boat with her heart in her mouth, as she afterwards said.

The driver got out of the city without trouble, but when he came to the smooth turnpike road, it seemed to Frank that the horses kept going faster and faster, till they were fairly flying over the ground. The driver pulled and pulled at the reins, and people began to hollo, “Look out where you’re going!” when they met them or passed them, and all at once Frank began to think the horses were running away. He had not much chance to think about it, though, he was so busy keeping his little brother from bouncing off the seat and out of the carriage, and in feeling if Mr. Bushell’s money was safe; and he was not certain that they were running away till he saw people stopping and staring, and then starting after the carriage.

The horses tore along for two or three miles; they thundered through the covered bridge on Mill’s Creek, and passed the Four-Mile House. By the time they reached the little village beyond it they had the turnpike to themselves; every team coming and going drove into the gutter.

At the village a large, fat butcher, who was sitting tilted back in a chair at the door of his shop, saw the carriage coming in a whirlwind of dust, and he knew what the matter was. There was a horse standing at the hitching rail, and the butcher just had time to untie him and jump into the saddle when the runaways flew by. He took after them as fast as his horse could go, and overhauled them at the end of the next bridge and brought them to a stand.

It had really been nothing but a race against time. No one was hurt; the horses were pretty badly blown, that was all; but the carriage was so much shaken up that it had to be left at a wagon-shop, where it could not be mended till morning. The two boys were taken back to Four-Mile House, where they would have to pass the night.

Frank worried about his father, who would be expecting them home that evening; but he was glad his mother did not know what had happened. He was thankful enough when he felt his brother all over and found him safe and sound, and then put his hand on his pocket and found that Mr. Bushell’s money was still there. He did not eat very much supper, and he went to bed early, after he had put his brother in bed and seen him fall asleep almost before he got through his prayers.

Frank was very tired, and pretty sore from the jouncing in the carriage; but he was too worried to be sleepy. He began to think, What if some one should get Mr. Bushell’s money away from him in the night, while he was asleep? And then he was glad that he did not feel like sleeping. He got up and put on his clothes and sat down by the window, listening to his brother’s breathing and looking out into the dark at the heat-lightning in the west. The day had been very hot and the night was close, without a breath of wind. By-and-by all the noises about the house died away, and he knew everybody had gone to bed. The lantern under the tavern porch threw a dim light out into the road; some dogs barked away off. There was no other sound, and the stillness was awful. He kept his hand on the pocket that had the money in it.

After a while Frank began to feel very drowsy, and he thought he would lie down again, but he promised himself he would not sleep, and he did not undress; for if he took his pantaloons off, he did not know how he could make sure every minute that the money was safe, unless he put it under his pillow. He was afraid if he did that he might forget it in the morning, and leave it when he got up.

He stretched himself on the bed beside his brother, and it seemed to him that it was hardly a second before he heard a loud crash that shook the whole house; and the room looked full of fire. Another crash came, and then another, with a loud, stony kind of rolling noise that seemed to go round the world. Then he knew that he had been asleep, and that this dreadful noise was the swift coming of a thunder-storm.

It was the worst storm that was ever known in Mill Creek Valley, so the people said afterwards, but as yet it was only beginning. The thunder was deafening, and it never stopped a moment. The lightning hardly stopped, either; it filled the room with a quivering blaze; at times, when it died down, the night turned black as ink, and then a flash came that lit up the fields outside, and showed every stick and stone as bright as the brightest day.

Frank was dazed at first by the glare and the noise; then he jumped out of bed, and tried for two things: whether the money was still safe in his pocket, and whether his brother was alive. He never could tell which he found out first; as soon as he knew, he felt a little bit better, but still his cheerfulness was not anything to brag of.

If his brother was alive, it seemed to be more than any one else in the house was besides himself. He could not hear a soul stirring, although in that uproar there might have been a full-dress parade of the Butler Guards in the tavern, firing off their guns, and he could not have heard them. He looked out in the entry, but it was all dark there except when he let the flashes of his room into it. He thought he would light his candle, for company, and so that the lightning would not be so awfully bright. He found his candlestick easily enough — he could have found a pin in that glare — but there were no matches.

So he decided to get along without the candle. Every now and then he put his hand in his pocket, or on the bulge outside, to make sure of the money; and whenever a very bright flash came, he would listen for his brother’s breathing, to tell whether he had been struck by lightning or not. But it kept thundering so that sometimes he could not hear. Then Frank would shake him till the boy gave a sort of snort, and that proved that he was still alive; or he would put his ear to his brother’s breast, and listen whether his heart was beating.

It always was, and by-and-by the rain began to fall. It fell in perfect sheets, and the noise it made could be heard through the thunder. But Frank had always heard that after it began to rain, a thunder-storm was not so dangerous, and the air got fresher. Still, it blazed and bellowed away, he could never tell how long, and it seemed to him that he must have felt a thousand times for Mr. Bushell’s money, and tried a thousand times to find whether his brother had been struck by lightning or not. Once or twice he thought he would call for help; but he did not think he could make anybody hear, and he was too much ashamed to do it, anyway.

Between the times of feeling for the money and seeing whether his brother was alive, he thought about his mother: how frightened she would be if she knew what had happened to him and his brother, after they left her. And he thought of his father: how troubled he must be at their not getting home. It seemed to him that he must be to blame, somehow, but he could not understand how, exactly; and he could not think of any way to help it.

He wondered if the storm was as bad on the river and in the Boy’s Town, and whether the lightning would strike the boat or the house; the house had a lightning-rod, but the boat could not have one, of course. He felt pretty safe about his father and the older-younger brother who had been left at home with him; but he was not sure about his mother and sisters, and he tried to imagine what people did on a steamboat in a thunder-storm.

After a long time had passed, and he thought it must be getting near morning, he lay down again beside his brother, and fell into such a heavy sleep that he did not wake till it was broad day, and the sun was making as much blaze in the curtainless tavern-room as the lightning had made. The storm was over, and everything was as peaceful as if there had never been any such thing as a storm in the world. The first thing he did was to make a grab for his pocket. The money was still there, and his brother sleeping as soundly as ever.

After breakfast, the livery-stable man came with the carriage, which he had got mended, and Frank started home with his brother once more. But they had sixteen miles to go before they would reach the Boy’s Town, and the carriage had been so badly shattered, or else the driver was so much afraid of the horses, that he would not let them go at more than a walk. Frank was anxious to get home on his father’s account; still he would rather get home safe, and he did not try to hurry the driver, for fear they might not get home at all.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when they stopped at his father’s house. His older-younger brother, and the hired girl, whom his mother had got to keep house while she was gone on her visit, came out and took his little brother in; and the girl told Frank his father had just been there to see whether he had got back. Then he knew that his father must have been as anxious as he had been afraid he was. He did not wait to go inside; he only kicked off the shoes he wore to the city and started off for his father’s office as fast as his bare feet could carry him.

He found his father at the door. He did not say very much, but Frank could see by his face that he had been worrying; and afterwards he said that he was just going round to the livery stable the next minute to get another team, and go down towards the city to see what had become of them all. Frank told him what had happened, and his father put his arms round him, but still did not say much. He did not say anything at all about Mr. Bushell’s money or seem to think about it till Frank asked:

“I’d better take it right straight over to his store, hadn’t I, father?”

His father said he reckoned he had, and Frank started away on the run again. He wanted to get rid of that money so badly, for it was all he had to worry about, after he had got rid of his brother, that he was out of breath, almost, by the time he reached Mr. Bushell’s store. But even then he could not get rid of the money. Mr. Bushell had told him to give it to his partner, but his partner had gone out into the country, and was not to be back till after supper.

Frank did not know what to do. He did not dare to give it to any one else in the store, and it seemed to him that the danger of having it got worse every minute. He hung about a good while, and kept going in and out of the store, but at last he thought the best thing would be to go home and ask his father; and that was what he did.

By this time his father had gone home to supper, and he found him there with his two younger brothers, feeling rather lonesome, with Frank’s mother and his sisters all away. But they cheered up together, and his father said he had done right not to leave the money, and he would just step over, after supper, and give it himself to Mr. Bushell’s partner. He took the roll of bills from Frank and put it into his own pocket, and went on eating his supper, but when they were done he gave the bills back to the boy.

“After all, Frank, I believe I’ll let you take that money to Mr. Bushell’s partner. He trusted it to you, and you ought to have the glory; you’ve had the care. Do you think you’ll be afraid to come home through the bridge after sunset?”

The bridge was one of those old-fashioned, wooden ones, roofed in and sided up, and it stretched from shore to shore, like a tunnel, on its piers. It was rather dim, even in the middle of the brightest day, and none of the boys liked to be caught in it after sunset.

Frank said he did not believe he should be afraid, for it seemed to him that if he had got through a runaway, and such a thunder-storm as that was the night before, without harm, he could surely get through the bridge safely. There was not likely to be anybody in it, at the worst, but Indian Jim, or Solomon Whistler, the crazy man, and he believed he could run by them if they offered to do anything to him. He meant to walk as slowly as he could, until he reached the bridge, and then just streak through it.

That was what he did, and it was still quite light when he reached Mr. Bushell’s store. His partner was there, sure enough, this time, and Frank gave him the money, and told him how he had been so long bringing it. The merchant thanked him, and said he was rather young to be trusted with so much money, but he reckoned Mr. Bushell knew what he was about.

“Did he count it when he gave it to you?” he asked.

“No, he didn’t,” said Frank.

“Did you?”

“I didn’t have a chance. He put it right into my pocket, and I was afraid to take it out.”

Mr. Bushell’s partner laughed, and Frank was going away, so as to get through the bridge before it was any darker, but Mr. Bushell’s partner said, “Just hold on a minute, won’t you, Frank, till I count this,” and he felt as if his heart had jumped into his throat.

What if he had lost some of the money? What if somebody had got it out of his pocket, while he was so dead asleep, and taken part of it? What if Mr. Bushell had made a mistake, and not given him as much as he thought he had? He hardly breathed while Mr. Bushell’s partner slowly counted the bank-notes. It took him a long time, and he had to wet his finger a good many times, and push the notes to keep them from sticking together. At last he finished, and he looked at Frank over the top of his spectacles. “Two thousand?” he asked.

“That’s what Mr. Bushell said,” answered the boy, and he could hardly get the words out.

“Well, it’s all here,” said Mr. Bushell’s partner, and he put the money in his pocket, and Frank turned and went out of the store.

He felt light, light as cotton, and gladder than he almost ever was in his life before. He was so glad that he forgot to be afraid in the bridge. The fellows who were the most afraid always ran through the bridge, and those who tried not to be afraid walked fast and whistled. Frank did not even think to whistle.

His father was sitting out on the front porch when he reached home, and he asked Frank if he had got rid of his money, and what Mr. Bushell’s partner had said. Frank told him all about it, and after a while his father asked, “Well, Frank, do you like to have the care of money?”

“I don’t believe I do, father.”

“Which was the greater anxiety to you last night, Mr. Bushell’s money, or your brother?”

Frank had to think awhile. “Well, I suppose it was the money, father. You see, it wasn’t my own money.”

“And if it had been your own money, you wouldn’t have been anxious about it? You wouldn’t have cared if you had lost it, or somebody had stolen it from you?”

Frank thought again, and then he said he did not believe he had thought about that.

“Well, think about it now.”

Frank tried to think, and at last he said. “I reckon I should have cared.”

“And if it had been your own money, would you have been more anxious about it than about your brother?”

This time Frank was more puzzled than ever; he really did not know what to say.

His father said: “The trouble with money is, that people who have a great deal of it seem to be more anxious about it than they are about their brothers, and they think that the things it can buy are more precious than the things which all the money in the world cannot buy.” His father stood up. “Better go to bed, Frank. You must be tired. There won’t be any thunder-storm to-night, and you haven’t got a pocketful of money to keep you awake.”

XI

HOW JIM LEONARD PLANNED FOR PONY BAKER TO RUN OFF ON A RAFT

Now we have got to go back to Pony Baker again. The summer went along till it got to be September, and the fellows were beginning to talk about when school would take up. It was almost too cold to go in swimming; that is, the air made you shiver when you came out, and before you got your clothes on; but if you stood in the water up to your chin, it seemed warmer than it did on the hottest days of summer. Only now you did not want to go in more than once a day, instead of four or five times. The fellows were gathering chinquapin acorns most of the time, and some of them were getting ready to make wagons to gather walnuts in. Once they went out to the woods for pawpaws, and found about a bushel; they put them in cornmeal to grow, but they were so green that they only got rotten. The boys found an old shanty in the woods where the farmer made sugar in the spring, and some of the big fellows said they were coming out to sleep in it, the first night they got.

It was this that put Jim Leonard in mind of Pony’s running off again. All the way home he kept talking to Pony about it, and Pony said he was going to do it yet, some time, but when Jim Leonard wanted him to tell the time, he would only say, “You’ll see,” and wag his head.

Then Jim Leonard mocked him and dared him to tell, and asked him if he would take a dare. After that he made up with him, and said if Pony would run off he would run off, too; and that the way for them to do would be to take the boards of that shanty in the woods and build a raft. They could do it easily, because the boards were just leaned up against the ridge-pole, and they could tie them together with pawpaw switches, they were so tough, and then some night carry the raft to the river, after the water got high in the fall, and float down on it to the city.

“Why, does the river go past the city?” Pony asked.

“Of course it does,” said Jim Leonard, and he laughed at Pony. “It runs into the Ohio there. Where’s your geography?”

Pony was ashamed to say that he did not suppose that geography had anything to do with the river at the Boy’s Town, for it was not down on the map, like Behring Straits and the Isthmus of Suez. But he saw that Jim Leonard really knew something. He did not see the sense of carrying the raft two miles through the woods when you could get plenty of drift-wood on the river shore to make a raft of. But he did not like to say it for fear Jim Leonard would think he was afraid to be in the woods after dark, and after that he came under him more than ever. Most of the fellows just made fun of Jim Leonard, because they said he was a brag, but Pony began to believe everything he said when he found out that he knew where the river went to; Pony had never even thought.

Jim was always talking about their plan of running off together, now; and he said they must fix everything so that it would not fail this time. If they could only get to the city once, they could go for cabin-boys on a steamboat that was bound for New Orleans; and down the Mississippi they could easily hide on some ship that was starting for the Spanish Main, and then they would be all right. Jim knew about the Spanish Main from a book of pirate stories that he had. He had a great many books and he was always reading them. One was about Indians, and one was about pirates, and one was about dreams and signs, and one was full of curious stories, and one told about magic and how to do jugglers’ tricks; the other was a fortune-telling book. Jim Leonard had a paper from the city, with long stories in, and he had read a novel once; he could not tell the boys exactly what a novel was, but that was what it said on the back.

After Pony and he became such friends he told him everything that was in his books, and once, when Pony went to his house, he showed him the books. Pony was a little afraid of Jim Leonard’s mother; she was a widow woman, and took in washing; she lived in a little wood-colored house down by the river-bank, and she smoked a pipe. She was a very good mother to Jim, and let him do whatever he pleased — go in swimming as much as he wanted to, stay out of school, or anything. He had to catch drift-wood for her to burn when the river was high; once she came down to the river herself and caught drift-wood with a long pole that had a nail in the end of it to catch on with.

By the time school took up Pony and Jim Leonard were such great friends that they asked the teacher if they might sit together, and they both had the same desk. When Pony’s mother heard that, it seemed as if she were going to do something about it. She said to his father:

“I don’t like Pony’s going with Jim Leonard so much. He’s had nobody else with him for two weeks, and now he’s sitting with him in school.”

Pony’s father said, “I don’t believe Jim Leonard will hurt Pony. What makes you like him, Pony?”

Pony said, “Oh, nothing,” and his father laughed.

“It seems to be a case of pure affection. What do you talk about together?”

“Oh, dreams, and magic, and pirates,” said Pony.

His father laughed, but his mother said, “I know hell put mischief in the child’s head,” and then Pony thought how Jim Leonard always wanted him to run off, and he felt ashamed; but he did not think that running off was mischief, or else all the boys would not be wanting to do it, and so he did not say anything.

His father said, “I don’t believe there’s any harm in the fellow. He’s a queer chap.”

“He’s so low down,” said Pony’s mother.

“Well, he has a chance to rise, then,” said Pony’s father. “We may all be hurrahing for him for President some day.” Pony could not always tell when his father was joking, but it seemed to him he must be joking now. “I don’t believe Pony will get any harm from sitting with him in school, at any rate.”

After that Pony’s mother did not say anything, but he knew that she had taken a spite to Jim Leonard, and when he brought him home with him after school he did not bring him into the woodshed as he did with the other boys, but took him out to the barn. That got them to playing in the barn most of the time, and they used to stay in the hay-loft, where Jim Leonard told Pony the stories out of his books. It was good and warm there, and now the days were getting chilly towards evenings.

Once, when they were lying in the hay together, Jim Leonard said, all of a sudden, “I’ve thought of the very thing, Pony Baker.”

Pony asked, “What thing?”

“How to get ready for running off,” said Jim Leonard, and at that Pony’s heart went down, but he did not like to show it, and Jim Leonard went on: “We’ve got to provision the raft, you know, for maybe we’ll catch on an island and be a week getting to the city. We’ve got to float with the current, anyway. Well, now, we can make a hole in the hay here and hide the provisions till we’re ready to go. I say we’d better begin hiding them right away. Let’s see if we can make a place. Get away, Trip.”

He was speaking to Pony’s dog, that always came out into the barn with him and stayed below in the carriage-room, whining and yelping till they helped him up the ladder into the loft. Then he always lay in one corner, with his tongue out, and looking at them as if he knew what they were saying. He got up when Jim Leonard bade him, and Jim pulled away the hay until he got down to the loft floor.

“Yes, it’s the very place. It’s all solid, and we can put the things down here and cover them up with hay and nobody will notice. Now, to-morrow you bring out a piece of bread-and-butter with meat between, and I will, too, and then we will see how it will do.”

Pony brought his bread-and-butter the next day. Jim said he intended to bring some hard-boiled eggs, but his mother kept looking, and he had no chance.

“Let’s see whether the butter’s sweet, because if it ain’t the provisions will spoil before we can get off.”

He took a bite, and he said, “My, that’s nice!” and the first thing he knew he ate the whole piece up. “Well, never mind,” he said, “we can begin to-morrow just as well.”

The next day Jim Leonard brought a ham-bone, to cook greens with on the raft. He said it would be first-rate; and Pony brought bread-and-butter, with meat between. Then they hid them in the hay, and drove Trip away from the place. The day after that, when they were busy talking, Trip dug the provisions up, and, before they noticed, he ate up Pony’s bread-and-butter and was gnawing Jim Leonard’s ham-bone. They cuffed his ears, but they could not make him give it up, and Jim Leonard said:

“Well, let him have it. It’s all spoilt now, anyway. But I’ll tell you what, Pony — we’ve got to do something with that dog. He’s found out where we keep our provisions, and now he’ll always eat them. I don’t know but what we’ll have to kill him.”

“Oh no!” said Pony. “I couldn’t kill Trip!”

“Well, I didn’t mean kill him, exactly; but do something. I’ll tell you what — train him not to follow you to the barn when he sees you going.”

Pony thought that would be a good plan, and he began the next day at noon. Trip tried to follow him to the barn, and Pony kicked at him, and motioned to stone him, and said: “Go home, sir! Home with you! Home, I say!” till his mother came to the back door.

“Why, what in the world makes you so cross with poor Trip, Pony?” she asked.

“I’ll teach him not to tag me round everywhere,” said Pony.

His mother said: “Why, I thought you liked to have him with you?”

“I’m tired of it,” said Pony; but when he put his mother off that way he felt badly, as if he had told her a lie, and he let Trip come with him and began to train him again the next day.

It was pretty hard work, and Trip looked at him so mournfully when he drove him back that he could hardly bear to do it; but Jim Leonard said it was the only way, and he must keep it up. At last Trip got so that he would not follow Pony to the barn. He would look at him when Pony started and wag his tail wistfully, and half jump a little, and then when he saw Pony frown he would let his tail drop and stay still, or walk off to the woodshed and keep looking around at Pony to see if he were in earnest. It made Pony’s heart ache, for he was truly fond of Trip; but Jim Leonard said it was the only way, and so Pony had to do it.

They provisioned themselves a good many times, but after they talked a while they always got hungry, or Jim Leonard did, and then they dug up their provisions and ate them. Once when he came to spend Saturday afternoon with Pony he had great news to tell him. One of the boys had really run off. He was a boy that Pony had never seen, though he had heard of him. He lived at the other end of the town, below the bridge, and almost at the Sycamore Grove. He had the name of being a wild fellow; his father was a preacher, but he could not do anything with him.

Now, Jim Leonard said, Pony must run off right away, and not wait for the river to rise, or anything. As soon as the river rose, Jim would follow him on the raft; but Pony must start first, and he must take the pike for the city, and sleep in fence corners. They must provision him, and not eat any of the things before he started. He must not take a bundle or anything, because if he did people would know he was running off, or maybe they would think he was a runaway slave from Kentucky, he was so dark-complexioned. At first Pony did not like it, because it seemed to him that Jim Leonard was backing out; but Jim Leonard said that if two of them started off at the same time, people would just know they were running off, and the constable would take them up before they could get across the corporation line. He said that very likely it would rain in less than a week, and then he could start after Pony on the raft, and be at the Ohio River almost as soon as Pony was.

“‘why, you ain’t afraid, are you, pony?’”

He said, “Why, you ain’t afraid, are you, Pony?” And Pony said he was not afraid; for if there was anything that a Boy’s Town boy hated, it was to be afraid, and Pony hated it the worst of any, because he was sometimes afraid that he was afraid.

They fixed it that Pony was to sleep the next Friday night in the barn, and the next morning, before it was light, he was to fill his pockets with the provisions and run off.

Every afternoon he took out a piece of bread-and-butter with meat between and hid it in the hay, and Jim Leonard brought some eggs. He said he had no chance to boil them without his mother seeing, but he asked Pony if he did not know that raw eggs were first-rate, and when Pony said no, he said, “Well, they are.” They broke one of the eggs when they were hiding them, and it ran over the bread-and-butter, but they wiped it off with hay as well as they could, and Jim Leonard said maybe it would help to keep it, anyway.

When he came round to Pony’s house the next Friday afternoon from school he asked him if he had heard the news, and when Pony said no, he said that the fellow that ran off had been taken up in the city by the watchman. He was crying on the street, and he said he had nowhere to sleep, and had not had anything to eat since the night before.

Pony’s heart seemed to be standing still. He had always supposed that as soon as he ran off he should be free from all the things that hindered and vexed him; and, although he expected to be sorry for his father and mother, he expected to get along perfectly well without them. He had never thought about where he should sleep at night after he got to the city, or how he should get something to eat.

“Now, you see, Pony,” said Jim Leonard, “what a good thing it was that I thought about provisioning you before you started. What makes you look so?”

Pony said, “I’m not looking!”

Jim Leonard said, “You’re not afraid, are you, just because that fellow got took up? You’re not such a cowardy-calf as to want to back out now?”

The tears came into Pony’s eyes.

“Cowardy-calf yourself, Jim Leonard! You’ve backed out long ago!”

“You’ll see whether I’ve backed out,” said Jim Leonard. “I’m coming round to sleep in the barn with you to-night, and help you to get a good start in the morning. And maybe I’ll start myself to-morrow. I will if I can get anybody to help me make the raft and bring it through the woods. Now let’s go up into the loft and see if the provisions are all safe.”

They dug the provisions up out of the hay and Jim Leonard broke one of the eggs against the wall. It had a small chicken in it, and he threw it away. Another egg smelt so that they could hardly stand it.

“I don’t believe these eggs are very good,” said Jim Leonard. “I got them out of a nest that the hen had left; mother said I might have them all.” He broke them one after another, and every one had a chicken in it, or else it was bad. “Well, never mind,” he said. “Let’s see what the bread-and-butter’s like.” He bit into a piece, but he did not swallow any. “Tastes kind of musty; from the hay, I reckon; and the meat seems kind of old. But they always give the sailors spoilt provisions, and this bread-and-butter will do you first-rate, Pony. You’ll be so hungry you can eat anything. Say, you ain’t afraid now, are you, Pony?”

“No, not now,” said Pony, but he did not fire up this time as he did before at the notion of his being afraid.

Jim Leonard said, “Because, maybe I can’t get mother to let me come here again. If she takes a notion, she won’t. But I’m going to watch out, and as soon as supper’s over, and I’ve got the cow into the lot, and the morning’s wood in, I’m going to try to hook off. If I don’t get here to stay all night with you I’ll be around bright and early in the morning, to wake you and start you. It won’t be light now much before six, anyway.”

XII

HOW JIM LEONARD BACKED OUT, AND PONY HAD TO GIVE IT UP

It all seemed very strange to Pony. First, Jim Leonard was going to run off with him on a raft, and then he was going to have Pony go by land and follow him on the raft; then suddenly he fixed it so that Pony was going alone, and he was going to pass the last night with him in the barn; and here, all at once, he was only coming, maybe, to see him off in the morning. It made Pony feel very forlorn, but he did not like to say anything for fear Jim Leonard would call him cowardy-calf.

It was near sunset, on a cool day in the beginning of October, and the wind was stirring the dry blades in the corn-patch at the side of the barn. They made a shivering sound, and it made Pony lonesomer and lonesomer. He did not want to run off, but he did not see how he could help it. Trip stood at the wood-house door, looking at him, but he did not dare to come to Pony as long as he was near the barn. But when Pony started towards the house Trip came running and jumping to him, and Pony patted him and said, “Poor Trip, poor old Trip!” He did not know when he should see such another dog as that.

The kitchen door was open, and a beautiful smell of frying supper was coming out. Pretty soon his mother came to the open door, and stood watching him patting Trip. “Well, have you made up with poor old Trip, Pony? Why don’t you come in, child? You look so cold, out there.”

Pony did not say anything, but he came into the kitchen and sat in a corner beyond the stove and watched his mother getting the supper. In the dining-room his sisters were setting the table and his father was reading by the lamp there. Pony would have given almost anything if something had happened just to make him tell what he was going to do, so that he could have been kept from doing it. He saw that his mother was watching him all the time, and she said: “What makes you so quiet, child?”

Pony said, “Oh, nothing,” and his mother asked, “Have you been falling out with Jim Leonard?”

Pony said no, and then she said, “I almost wish you had, then. I don’t think he’s a bad boy, but he’s a crazy fool, and I wish you wouldn’t go with him so much. I don’t like him.”

All of a sudden Pony felt that he did not like Jim Leonard very much himself. It seemed to him that Jim Leonard had not used him very well, but he could not have told how.

After supper the great thing was how to get out to the barn without any one’s noticing. Pony went to the woodshed door two or three times to look out. There were plenty of stars in the sky, but it seemed very dark, and he knew that it would be as black as pitch in the barn, and he did not see how he could ever dare to go out to it, much less into it. Every time he came back from looking he brought an armload of wood into the kitchen so that his mother would not notice.

The last time she said, “Why, you dear, good boy, what a lot of wood you’re bringing for your mother,” for usually Pony had to be told two or three times before he would get a single armload of wood.

When his mother praised him he was ashamed to look at her, and so he looked round, and he saw the lantern hanging by the mantel-piece. When he saw that lantern he almost wished that he had not seen it, for now he knew that his last excuse was gone, and he would really have to run off. If it had not been for the lantern he could have told Jim Leonard that he was afraid to go out to the barn on account of ghosts, for anybody would be afraid of ghosts; Jim Leonard said he was afraid of them himself. But now Pony could easily get the lantern and take it out to the barn with him, and if it was not dark the ghosts would not dare to touch you.

He tried to think back to the beginning of the time when he first intended to run off, and find out if there was not some way of not doing it; but he could not, and if Jim Leonard was to come to the barn the next morning to help him start, and should not find him there, Pony did not know what he would do. Jim Leonard would tell all the fellows, and Pony would never hear the last of it. That was the way it seemed to him, but his mind felt all fuzzy, and he could not think very clearly about it.

When his mother finished up her work in the kitchen he took the lantern from the nail and slipped up the back stairs to his little room, and then, after he heard his sisters going to bed and his father and mother talking together quietly, he lit the lantern and stole out to the barn with it. Nobody noticed him, and he got safely inside the barn. He used to like to carry the lantern very much, because it made the shadows of his legs, when he walked, go like scissors-blades, and that was fun; but that night it did not cheer him up, and it seemed as if nothing could cheer him up again. When Trip first saw him come out into the woodshed with the lantern he jumped up and pawed Pony and licked the lantern, he was so glad, but when Pony went towards the barn Trip stopped following him and went back into the wood-house very sadly. Pony would have given almost anything to have Trip come with him, only, as Jim Leonard said, Trip would whine or bark, or something, and then Pony would be found out and kept from running off.

The more he wanted to be kept from running off the more he knew he must not try to be, and he let Trip go back when he would have so gladly helped him up into the hay-loft and slept with him there. He would not have been afraid with Trip, and now he found that he was dreadfully afraid. The lantern-light was a charm against ghosts, but not against rats, and the first thing Pony knew when he got into the barn a rat ran across his foot. Trip would have kept the rats off. They seemed to just swarm in the loft when Pony got up there, and after he hung the lantern on a nail and lay down in the hay they did not mind him at all. They played all around, and two of them got up on their hind legs once and fought, or else danced, Pony could not tell which. He could not sleep, and after a while he felt the tears coming and he began to cry, and he kept sobbing, and could not stop himself.

When Pony’s mother was ready to go to bed she said to Pony’s father: “Did Pony say good-night to you?” and when he said no, she said, “But he must have gone to bed,” and she ran up the stairs to see. She came down again in about half a second and she said, “He doesn’t seem to be there,” and she raced all through the house hunting for him. In the kitchen she saw that the lantern was gone and then she said: “I might have known he was up to some mischief, he was so quiet. This is some more of Jim Leonard’s work. Henry, I want you to go right out and look for Pony. It’s half-past nine.”

Then Pony’s father knew that it would be no use to talk and he started out. But the whole street was quiet, and all the houses were dark as if the people had gone to bed. He went up town and to all the places where the big boys were apt to play at night, and he found Hen Billard and Archy Hawkins, but neither of them had seen Pony since school. They were both sitting on Hen Billard’s front steps, because Archy Hawkins was going to stay all night with him, and they were telling stories. When Pony’s father asked about Pony and seemed anxious they tried to comfort him, but they could not think where Pony could be. They said perhaps Jim Leonard would know.

Then Pony’s father went home, and the minute he opened the front door Pony’s mother called out: “Have you found him?”

His father said: “No. Hasn’t he come in yet?” and he told her how he had been looking everywhere, and she burst out crying.

“I know he’s fallen into the canal and got drowned, or something,” and she wrung her hands together; and then he said that Hen Billard and Archy Hawkins thought Jim Leonard would know, and he had only stopped to see whether Pony had happened to come in, and he was going straight to Jim Leonard’s mother’s house; and Pony’s mother said: “Oh, go, go, go!” and fairly pushed him out of the house.

By this time it was ten o’clock and going on eleven, and all the town was as still as death, except the dogs. Pony’s father kept on until he got down to the river-bank, where Jim Leonard’s mother lived, and he had to knock and knock before he could make anybody hear. At last Jim Leonard’s mother poked her head out of the window and asked who was there, and Pony’s father told her.

He said: “Is Jim at home, Mrs. Leonard?” and she said:

“Yes, and fast asleep three hours ago. What makes you ask?”

Then he had to tell her. “We can’t find Pony, and some of the boys thought Jim might know where he is. I’m sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Leonard. Good-night,” and he went back home.

When he got there he found Pony’s mother about crazy. He said now they must search the house thoroughly; and they went down into the cellar first, because she said she knew Pony had fallen down the stairs and killed himself. But he was not there, and then they hunted through all the rooms and looked under the tables and beds and into the cupboards and closets, and he was not there. Then they went into the wood-house and looked there, and up into the wood-house loft among the old stoves and broken furniture, and he was not there. Trip was there, and he made them think so of Pony that Pony’s mother took on worse than she had yet.

“Now I’m going out to look in the barn,” said Pony’s father. “You stay quietly in the house, Lucy.”

Trip started to go with Pony’s father, but when he saw that he was going to the barn he was afraid to follow him, Pony had trained him so; and Pony’s father went alone. He shaded the candle that he was carrying with his hand, and when he got into the barn he put it down and stood and looked and tried to think how he should do. It was dangerous to go around among the hay with the candle, and the lantern was gone.

Almost from the first Pony’s father thought that he heard a strange noise like some one sobbing, and then it seemed to him that there was a light up in the loft. He holloed out: “Who’s there?” and then the noise stopped, but the light kept on. Pony’s father holloed out again: “Pony! Is that you, Pony?” and then Pony answered, “Yes,” and he began sobbing again.

In less than half a second Pony’s father was up in the loft, and then down again and out of the barn and into the yard with Pony.

His mother was standing at the back door, for she could not bear to stay in the house, and Pony’s father holloed to her: “Here he is, Lucy, safe and sound!” and Pony’s mother holloed back:

“Well, don’t touch him, Henry! Don’t scold the child! Don’t say a word to him! Oh, I could just fall on my knees!”

Pony’s father came along, bringing Pony and the lantern. Pony’s hair and clothes were all stuck full of pieces of hay, and his face was smeared with hay-dust which he had rubbed into it when he was crying. He had got some of Jim Leonard’s mother’s hen’s eggs on him, and he did not smell very well. But his mother did not care how he looked or how he smelled. She caught him up into her arms and just fairly hugged him into the house, and there she sat down with him in her arms, and kissed his dirty face, and his hair all full of hay-sticks and spider-webs, and cried till it seemed as if she was never going to stop.

She would not let his father say anything to him, but after a while she washed him, and when she got him clean she made him up a bed on the lounge and put him to sleep there where she could see him. She said she was not going to sleep herself that night, but just stay up and realize that they had got Pony safe again.

One thing she did ask him, and that was: “What in the world made you want to sleep in the barn, Pony?” and Pony was ashamed to say he was getting ready to run off. He began:

“Jim Leonard—” and his mother broke out:

“I knew it was some of Jim Leonard’s work!” and she talked against Jim Leonard until Pony fell asleep, and said Pony should never speak to him again.

She and Pony’s father sat up all night talking, and about daybreak he recollected that he had left the candle burning in the barn, and he ran out with all his might to get it before it set the barn on fire. But it had burned out without catching anything, and he was coming back to the house when he met Jim Leonard sneaking towards the barn door. He pounced on him, and caught him by the collar, and he said as savagely as he could: “What are you doing here, Jim?”

Jim Leonard was too scared to speak, and Pony’s father hauled him to the house door, and holloed in to Pony’s mother: “I’ve got Jim Leonard here, Lucy”; and she holloed back:

“Oh, well, take him away, and don’t let me see the dreadful boy!” and Pony’s father said:

“I’ll take him home to his mother, and see what she has to say to him.”

All the way down to the river-bank he did not say a word to Jim Leonard, but when they got to Jim Leonard’s mother’s house, there she was with her pipe in her mouth coming out to get chips to kindle the fire with, and she said:

“I’d like to know what you’ve got my boy by the collar for, Mr. Baker?”

Pony’s father said: “I don’t know myself; I’ll let him tell you. Pony was hid in the barn last night, and I just now caught Jim prowling around on the outside. I should like to hear what he wanted.”

Jim Leonard did not say anything. His mother gave him one look, and then she went into the house and came out with a table-knife in her hand.

She said, “I reckon I can get him to tell you,” and she went to a pear-tree that there was before her house and cut a long sucker from the foot of it. She came up to Jim and then she said: “Tell!”

She did not have to say it twice, and in about half a second he told how Pony had intended to run off and how he put him up to it, and everything. Pony’s father did not wait to see what Jim Leonard’s mother did to Jim.

When Pony woke in the morning he heard his mother saying: “I could almost think he had bewitched the child.”

His father said: “It really seems like a case of mesmeric influence.”

Pony was sick for about a week after that. When he got better his father had a very solemn talk with him, and asked why he ever dreamed of running away from his home, where they all loved him so. Pony could not tell. All the things that he used to be so mad about were like nothing to him now, and he was ashamed of them. His father did not try hard to make him tell. He explained to him what a miserable boy he would have been if he had really got away, and said he hoped his night’s experience in the barn would be a lesson to him.

That was what it turned out to be. But it seemed to be a lesson to his father and mother, too. They let him do more things, and his mother did not baby him so much before the boys. He thought she was trying to be a better mother to him, and, perhaps, she did not baby him so much because now he had a little brother for her to baby instead, that was born about a week after Pony tried to run off.

THE END

THE KENTONS

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XV.

XXVI.

I.

The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they had spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had grown easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short outings, which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper Lakes in the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well anywhere as in the great square brick house which still kept its four acres about it, in the heart of the growing town, where the trees they had planted with their own hands topped it on three aides, and a spacious garden opened southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton had his library, where he transacted by day such law business as he had retained in his own hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife’s room and sit with her there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their girls, where they could hear them laughing with the young fellows who came to make the morning calls, long since disused in the centres of fashion, or the evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great world. She sewed, and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or they played checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she found herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let him make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes he laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be. They had long ago quarrelled out their serious differences, which mostly arose from such differences of temperament as had first drawn them together; they criticised each other to their children from time to time, but they atoned for this defection by complaining of the children to each other, and they united in giving way to them on all points concerning their happiness, not to say their pleasure.

They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war, and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice of the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second son died when he was yet a babe in his mother’s arms, and there was an interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their eldest son was already married, and settled next them in a house which was brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had grown naturally into a share of his father’s law practice, and he had taken it all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a show of giving it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton was well on in the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had become mainly the legal business of a large corporation. In this form it was distasteful to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in his hands, but he gave much of his time, which he saved his self-respect by calling his leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the war.

In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on the whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian, Pennsylvanian, and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of foreign strains, were of the purest American stock, and spoke the best English in the world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of happiness, and had incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate in the State. The growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had increased only to five thousand during the time he had known it, which was almost an ideal figure for a county-town. There was a higher average of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider and evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was fully up to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under the sun. It, was Kenton’s pride and glory that he had been a part of the finest army known in history. He believed that the men who made history ought to write it, and in his first Commemoration-Day oration he urged his companions in arms to set down everything they could remember of their soldiering, and to save the letters they had written home, so that they might each contribute to a collective autobiography of the regiment. It was only in this way, he held, that the intensely personal character of the struggle could be recorded. He had felt his way to the fact that every battle is essentially episodical, very campaign a sum of fortuities; and it was not strange that he should suppose, with his want of perspective, that this universal fact was purely national and American. His zeal made him the repository of a vast mass of material which he could not have refused to keep for the soldiers who brought it to him, more or less in a humorous indulgence of his whim. But he even offered to receive it, and in a community where everything took the complexion of a joke, he came to be affectionately regarded as a crank on that point; the shabbily aging veterans, whom he pursued to their workbenches and cornfields, for, the documents of the regimental history, liked to ask the colonel if he had brought his gun. They, always give him the title with which he had been breveted at the close of the war; but he was known to the younger, generation of his fellow-citizens as the judge. His wife called him Mr. Kenton in the presence of strangers, and sometimes to himself, but to his children she called him Poppa, as they did.

The steady-going eldest son, who had succeeded to his father’s affairs without giving him the sense of dispossession, loyally accepted the popular belief that he would never be the man his father was. He joined with his mother in a respect for Kenton’s theory of the regimental history which was none the less sincere because it was unconsciously a little sceptical of the outcome; and the eldest daughter was of their party. The youngest said frankly that she had no use for any history, but she said the same of nearly everything which had not directly or indirectly to do with dancing. In this regulation she had use for parties and picnics, for buggy-rides and sleigh-rides, for calls from young men and visits to and from other girls, for concerts, for plays, for circuses and church sociables, for everything but lectures; and she devoted herself to her pleasures without the shadow of chaperonage, which was, indeed, a thing still unheard of in Tuskingum.

In the expansion which no one else ventured, or, perhaps, wished to set bounds to, she came under the criticism of her younger brother, who, upon the rare occasions when he deigned to mingle in the family affairs, drew their mother’s notice to his sister’s excesses in carrying-on, and required some action that should keep her from bringing the name, of Kenton to disgrace. From being himself a boy of very slovenly and lawless life he had suddenly, at the age of fourteen, caught himself up from the street, reformed his dress and conduct, and confined himself in his large room at the top of the house, where, on the pursuits to which he gave his spare time, the friends who frequented his society, and the literature which nourished his darkling spirit, might fitly have been written Mystery. The sister whom he reprobated was only two years his elder, but since that difference in a girl accounts for a great deal, it apparently authorized her to take him more lightly than he was able to take himself. She said that he was in love, and she achieved an importance with him through his speechless rage and scorn which none of the rest of his family enjoyed. With his father and mother he had a bearing of repressed superiority which a strenuous conscience kept from unmasking itself in open contempt when they failed to make his sister promise to behave herself. Sometimes he had lapses from his dignified gloom with his mother, when, for no reason that could be given, he fell from his habitual majesty to the tender dependence of a little boy, just as his voice broke from its nascent base to its earlier treble at moments when he least expected or wished such a thing to happen. His stately but vague ideal of himself was supported by a stature beyond his years, but this rendered it the more difficult for him to bear the humiliation of his sudden collapses, and made him at other times the easier prey of Lottie’s ridicule. He got on best, or at least most evenly, with his eldest sister. She took him seriously, perhaps because she took all life so; and she was able to interpret him to his father when his intolerable dignity forbade a common understanding between them. When he got so far beyond his depth that he did not know what he meant himself, as sometimes happened, she gently found him a safe footing nearer shore.

Kenton’s theory was that he did not distinguish among his children. He said that he did not suppose they were the best children in the world, but they suited him; and he would not have known how to change them for the better. He saw no harm in the behavior of Lottie when it most shocked her brother; he liked her to have a good time; but it flattered his nerves to have Ellen about him. Lottie was a great deal more accomplished, he allowed that; she could play and sing, and she had social gifts far beyond her sister; but he easily proved to his wife that Nelly knew ten times as much.

Nelly read a great deal; she kept up with all the magazines, and knew all the books in his library. He believed that she was a fine German scholar, and in fact she had taken up that language after leaving school, when, if she had been better advised than she could have been in Tuskingum, she would have kept on with her French. She started the first book club in the place; and she helped her father do the intellectual honors of the house to the Eastern lecturers, who always stayed with the judge when they came to Tuskingum. She was faithfully present at the moments, which her sister shunned in derision, when her father explained to them respectively his theory of regimental history, and would just, as he said, show them a few of the documents he had collected. He made Ellen show them; she knew where to put her hand on the most characteristic and illustrative; and Lottie offered to bet what one dared that Ellen would marry some of those lecturers yet; she was literary enough.

She boasted that she was not literary herself, and had no use for any one who was; and it could not have been her culture that drew the most cultivated young man in Tuskingum to her. Ellen was really more beautiful; Lottie was merely very pretty; but she had charm for them, and Ellen, who had their honor and friendship, had no charm for them. No one seemed drawn to her as they were drawn to her sister till a man came who was not one of the most cultivated in Tuskingum; and then it was doubtful whether she was not first drawn to him. She was too transparent to hide her feeling from her father and mother, who saw with even more grief than shame that she could not hide it from the man himself, whom they thought so unworthy of it.

He had suddenly arrived in Tuskingum from one of the villages of the county, where he had been teaching school, and had found something to do as reporter on the Tuskingum ‘Intelligencer’, which he was instinctively characterizing with the spirit of the new journalism, and was pushing as hardily forward on the lines of personality as if he had dropped down to it from the height of a New York or Chicago Sunday edition. The judge said, with something less than his habitual honesty, that he did not mind his being a reporter, but he minded his being light and shallow; he minded his being flippant and mocking; he minded his bringing his cigarettes and banjo into the house at his second visit. He did not mind his push; the fellow had his way to make and he had to push; but he did mind his being all push; and his having come out of the country with as little simplicity as if he had passed his whole life in the city. He had no modesty, and he had no reverence; he had no reverence for Ellen herself, and the poor girl seemed to like him for that.

He was all the more offensive to the judge because he was himself to blame for their acquaintance, which began when one day the fellow had called after him in the street, and then followed down the shady sidewalk beside him to his hour, wanting to know what this was he had heard about his history, and pleading for more light upon his plan in it. At the gate he made a flourish of opening and shutting it for the judge, and walking up the path to his door he kept his hand on the judge’s shoulder most offensively; but in spite of this Kenton had the weakness to ask him in, and to call Ellen to get him the most illustrative documents of the history.

The interview that resulted in the ‘Intelligencer’ was the least evil that came of this error. Kenton was amazed, and then consoled, and then afflicted that Ellen was not disgusted with it; and in his conferences with his wife he fumed and fretted at his own culpable folly, and tried to get back of the time he had committed it, in that illusion which people have with trouble that it could somehow be got rid of if it could fairly be got back of; till the time came when his wife could no longer share his unrest in this futile endeavor.

She said, one night when they had talked late and long, “That can’t be helped now; and the question is what are we going to do to stop it.”

The judge evaded the point in saying, “The devil of it is that all the nice fellows are afraid of her; they respect her too much, and the very thing which ought to disgust her with this chap is what gives him his power over her. I don’t know what we are going to do, but we must break it off, somehow.”

“We might take her with us somewhere,” Mrs. Kenton suggested.

“Run away from the fellow? I think I see myself! No, we have got to stay and face the thing right here. But I won’t have him about the house any more, understand that. He’s not to be let in, and Ellen mustn’t see him; you tell her I said so. Or no! I will speak to her myself.” His wife said that he was welcome to do that; but he did not quite do it. He certainly spoke to his daughter about her, lover, and he satisfied himself that there was yet nothing explicit between them. But she was so much less frank and open with him than she had always been before that he was wounded as well as baffled by her reserve. He could not get her to own that she really cared for the fellow; but man as he was, and old man as he was, he could not help perceiving that she lived in a fond dream of him.

He went from her to her mother. “If he was only one-half the man she thinks he is!” — he ended his report in a hopeless sigh.

“You want to give in to her!” his wife pitilessly interpreted. “Well, perhaps that would be the best thing, after all.”

“No, no, it wouldn’t, Sarah; it would be the easiest for both of us, I admit, but it would be the worst thing for her. We’ve got to let it run along for a while yet. If we give him rope enough he may hang himself; there’s that chance. We can’t go away, and we can’t shut her up, and we can’t turn him out of the house. We must trust her to find him out for herself.”

“She’ll never do that,” said the mother. “Lottie says Ellen thinks he’s just perfect. He cheers her up, and takes her out of herself. We’ve always acted with her as if we thought she was different from other girls, and he behaves to her as if she was just like all of them, just as silly, and just as weak, and it pleases her, and flatters her; she likes it.”

“Oh, Lord!” groaned the father. “I suppose she does.”

This was bad enough; it was a blow to his pride in Ellen; but there was something that hurt him still worse. When the fellow had made sure of her, he apparently felt himself so safe in her fondness that he did not urge his suit with her. His content with her tacit acceptance gave the bitterness of shame to the promise Kenton and his wife had made each other never to cross any of their children in love. They were ready now to keep that promise for Ellen, if he asked it of them, rather than answer for her lifelong disappointment, if they denied him. But, whatever he meant finally to do, he did not ask it; he used his footing in their house chiefly as a basis for flirtations beyond it. He began to share his devotions to Ellen with her girl friends, and not with her girl friends alone. It did not come to scandal, but it certainly came to gossip about him and a silly young wife; and Kenton heard of it with a torment of doubt whether Ellen knew of it, and what she would do; he would wait for her to do herself whatever was to be done. He was never certain how much she had heard of the gossip when she came to her mother, and said with the gentle eagerness she had, “Didn’t poppa talk once of going South this winter?”

“He talked of going to New York,” the mother answered, with a throb of hope.

“Well,” the girl returned, patiently, and Mrs. Kenton read in her passivity an eagerness to be gone from sorrow that she would not suffer to be seen, and interpreted her to her father in such wise that he could not hesitate.

II.

If such a thing could be mercifully ordered, the order of this event had certainly been merciful; but it was a cruel wrench that tore Kenton from the home where he had struck such deep root. When he actually came to leave the place his going had a ghastly unreality, which was heightened by his sense of the common reluctance. No one wanted to go, so far as he could make out, not even Ellen herself, when he tried to make her say she wished it. Lottie was in open revolt, and animated her young men to a share in the insurrection. Her older brother was kindly and helpfully acquiescent, but he was so far from advising the move that Kenton had regularly to convince himself that Richard approved it, by making him say that it was only for the winter and that it was the best way of helping Ellen get rid of that fellow. All this did not enable Kenton to meet the problems of his younger son, who required him to tell what he was to do with his dog and his pigeons, and to declare at once how he was to dispose of the cocoons he had amassed so as not to endanger the future of the moths and butterflies involved in them. The boy was so fertile in difficulties and so importunate for their solution, that he had to be crushed into silence by his father, who ached in a helpless sympathy with his reluctance.

Kenton came heavily upon the courage of his wife, who was urging forward their departure with so much energy that he obscurely accused her of being the cause of it, and could only be convinced of her innocence when she offered to give the whole thing up if he said so. When he would not say so, she carried the affair through to the bitter end, and she did not spare him some, pangs which she perhaps need not have shared with him. But people are seldom man and wife for half their lives without wishing to impart their sufferings as well as their pleasures to each other; and Mrs. Kenton, if she was no worse, was no better than other wives in pressing to her husband’s lips the cup that was not altogether sweet to her own. She went about the house the night before closing it, to see that everything was in a state to be left, and then she came to Kenton in his library, where he had been burning some papers and getting others ready to give in charge to his son, and sat down by his cold hearth with him, and wrung his soul with the tale of the last things she had been doing. When she had made him bear it all, she began to turn the bright side of the affair to him. She praised the sense and strength of Ellen, in the course the girl had taken with herself, and asked him if he, really thought they could have done less for her than they were doing. She reminded him that they were not running away from the fellow, as she had once thought they must, but Ellen was renouncing him, and putting him out of her sight till she could put him out of her mind. She did not pretend that the girl had done this yet; but it was everything that she wished to do it, and saw that it was best. Then she kissed him on his gray head, and left him alone to the first ecstasy of his homesickness.

It was better when they once got to New York, and were settled in an apartment of an old-fashioned down-town hotel. They thought themselves very cramped in it, and they were but little easier when they found that the apartments over and under them were apparently thought spacious for families of twice their numbers. It was the very quietest place in the whole city, but Kenton was used to the stillness of Tuskingum, where, since people no longer kept hens, the nights were stiller than in the country itself; and for a week he slept badly. Otherwise, as soon as they got used to living in six rooms instead of seventeen, they were really very comfortable.

He could see that his wife was glad of the release from housekeeping, and she was growing gayer and seemed to be growing younger in the inspiration of the great, good-natured town. They had first come to New York on their wedding journey, but since that visit she had always let him go alone on his business errands to the East; these had grown less and less frequent, and he had not seen New York for ten or twelve years. He could have waited as much longer, but he liked her pleasure in the place, and with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he went about with her to the amusements which she frequented, as she said, to help Ellen take her mind off herself. At the play and the opera he sat thinking of the silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its leafless maples, and the life that was no more in it than if they had all died out of it; and he could not keep down a certain resentment, senseless and cruel, as if the poor girl were somehow to blame for their exile. When he betrayed this feeling to his wife, as he sometimes must, she scolded him for it, and then offered, if he really thought anything like that, to go back to Tuskingum at once; and it ended in his having to own himself wrong, and humbly promise that he never would let the child dream how he felt, unless he really wished to kill her. He was obliged to carry his self-punishment so far as to take Lottie very sharply to task when she broke out in hot rebellion, and declared that it was all Ellen’s fault; she was not afraid of killing her sister; and though she did not say it to her, she said it of her, that anybody else could have got rid of that fellow without turning the whole family out of house and home.

Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was as afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was thrown back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became friends in their common dislike of New York; and pending some chance of bringing each other under condemnation they lamented their banishment from Tuskingum together. But even Boyne contrived to make the heavy time pass more lightly than she in the lessons he had with a tutor, and the studies of the city which he carried on. When the skating was not good in Central Park he spent most of his afternoons and evenings at the vaudeville theatres. None of the dime museums escaped his research, and he conversed with freaks and monsters of all sorts upon terms of friendly confidence. He reported their different theories of themselves to his family with the same simple-hearted interest that he criticised the song and dance artists of the vaudeville theatres. He became an innocent but by no means uncritical connoisseur of their attractions, and he surprised with the constancy and variety of his experience in them a gentleman who sat next him one night. Boyne thought him a person of cultivation, and consulted him upon the opinion he had formed that there was not so much harm in such places as people said. The gentleman distinguished in saying that he thought you would not find more harm in them, if you did not bring it with you, than you would in the legitimate theatres; and in the hope of further wisdom from him, Boyne followed him out of the theatre and helped him on with his overcoat. The gentleman walked home to his hotel with him, and professed a pleasure in his acquaintance which he said he trusted they might sometime renew.

All at once the Kentons began to be acquainted in the hotel, as often happens with people after they have long ridden up and down in the elevator together in bonds of apparently perpetual strangeness. From one friendly family their acquaintance spread to others until they were, almost without knowing it, suddenly and simultaneously on smiling and then on speaking terms with the people of every permanent table in the dining-room. Lottie and Boyne burst the chains of the unnatural kindness which bound them, and resumed their old relations of reciprocal censure. He found a fellow of his own age in the apartment below, who had the same country traditions and was engaged in a like inspection of the city; and she discovered two girls on another floor, who said they received on Saturdays and wanted her to receive with them. They made a tea for her, and asked some real New Yorkers; and such a round of pleasant little events began for her that Boyne was forced to call his mother’s attention to the way Charlotte was going on with the young men whom she met and frankly asked to call upon her without knowing anything about them; you could not do that in New York, he said.

But by this time New York had gone to Mrs. Kenton’s head, too, and she was less fitted to deal with Lottie than at home. Whether she had succeeded or not in helping Ellen take her mind off herself, she had certainly freed her own from introspection in a dream of things which had seemed impossible before. She was in that moment of a woman’s life which has a certain pathos for the intelligent witness, when, having reared her children and outgrown the more incessant cares of her motherhood, she sometimes reverts to her girlish impulses and ideals, and confronts the remaining opportunities of life with a joyful hope unknown to our heavier and sullener sex in its later years. It is this peculiar power of rejuvenescence which perhaps makes so many women outlive their husbands, who at the same age regard this world as an accomplished fact. Mrs. Kenton had kept up their reading long after Kenton found himself too busy or too tired for it; and when he came from his office at night and fell asleep over the book she wished him to hear, she continued it herself, and told him about it. When Ellen began to show the same taste, they read together, and the mother was not jealous when the father betrayed that he was much prouder of his daughter’s culture than his wife’s. She had her own misgivings that she was not so modern as Ellen, and she accepted her judgment in the case of some authors whom she did not like so well.

She now went about not only to all the places where she could make Ellen’s amusement serve as an excuse, but to others when she could not coax or compel the melancholy girl. She was as constant at matinees of one kind as Boyne at another sort; she went to the exhibitions of pictures, and got herself up in schools of painting; she frequented galleries, public and private, and got asked to studio teas; she went to meetings and conferences of aesthetic interest, and she paid an easy way to parlor lectures expressive of the vague but profound ferment in women’s souls; from these her presence in intellectual clubs was a simple and natural transition. She met and talked with interesting people, and now and then she got introduced to literary people. Once, in a book-store, she stood next to a gentleman leaning over the same counter, whom a salesman addressed by the name of a popular author, and she remained staring at him breathless till he left the place. When she bragged of the prodigious experience at home, her husband defied her to say how it differed from meeting the lecturers who had been their guests in Tuskingum, and she answered that none of them compared with this author; and, besides, a lion in his own haunts was very different from a lion going round the country on exhibition. Kenton thought that was pretty good, and owned that she had got him there.

He laughed at her, to the children, but all the same she believed that she was living in an atmosphere of culture, and with every breath she was sensible of an intellectual expansion. She found herself in the enjoyment of so wide and varied a sympathy with interests hitherto strange to her experience that she could not easily make people believe she had never been to Europe. Nearly every one she met had been several times, and took it for granted that she knew the Continent as well as they themselves.

She denied it with increasing shame; she tried to make Kenton understand how she felt, and she might have gone further if she had not seen how homesick he was for Tuskingum. She did her best to coax him and scold him into a share of the pleasure they were all beginning to have in New York. She made him own that Ellen herself was beginning to be gayer; she convinced him that his business was not suffering in his absence and that he was the better from the complete rest he was having. She defied him, to say, then, what was the matter with him, and she bitterly reproached herself, in the event, for not having known that it was not homesickness alone that was the trouble. When he was not going about with her, or doing something to amuse the children, he went upon long, lonely walks, and came home silent and fagged. He had given up smoking, and he did not care to sit about in the office of the hotel where other old fellows passed the time over their papers and cigars, in the heat of the glowing grates. They looked too much like himself, with their air of unrecognized consequence, and of personal loss in an alien environment. He knew from their dress and bearing that they were country people, and it wounded him in a tender place to realize that they had each left behind him in his own town an authority and a respect which they could not enjoy in New York. Nobody called them judge, or general, or doctor, or squire; nobody cared who they were, or what they thought; Kenton did not care himself; but when he missed one of them he envied him, for then he knew that he had gone back to the soft, warm keeping of his own neighborhood, and resumed the intelligent regard of a community he had grown up with. There were men in New York whom Kenton had met in former years, and whom he had sometimes fancied looking up; but he did not let them know he was in town, and then he was hurt that they ignored him. He kept away from places where he was likely to meet them; he thought that it must have come to them that he was spending the winter in New York, and as bitterly as his nature would suffer he resented the indifference of the Ohio Society to the presence of an Ohio man of his local distinction. He had not the habit of clubs, and when one of the pleasant younger fellows whom he met in the hotel offered to put him up at one, he shrank from the courtesy shyly and almost dryly. He had outlived the period of active curiosity, and he did not explore the city as he world once have done. He had no resorts out of the hotel, except the basements of the secondhand book-dealers. He haunted these, and picked up copies of war histories and biographies, which, as fast as he read them, he sent off to his son at Tuskingum, and had him put them away with the documents for the life of his regiment. His wife could see, with compassion if not sympathy, that he was fondly strengthening by these means the ties that bound him to his home, and she silently proposed to go back to it with him whenever he should say the word.

He had a mechanical fidelity, however, to their agreement that they should stay till spring, and he made no sign of going, as the winter wore away to its end, except to write out to Tuskingum minute instructions for getting the garden ready. He varied his visits to the book-stalls by conferences with seedsmen at their stores; and his wife could see that he had as keen a satisfaction in despatching a rare find from one as from the other.

She forbore to make him realize that the situation had not changed, and that they would be taking their daughter back to the trouble the girl herself had wished to escape. She was trusting, with no definite hope, for some chance of making him feel this, while Kenton was waiting with a kind of passionate patience for the term of his exile, when he came in one day in April from one of his long walks, and said he had been up to the Park to see the blackbirds. But he complained of being tired, and he lay down on his bed. He did not get up for dinner, and then it was six weeks before he left his room.

He could not remember that he had ever been sick so long before, and he was so awed by his suffering, which was severe but not serious, that when his doctor said he thought a voyage to Europe would be good for him he submitted too meekly for Mrs. Kenton. Her heart smote her for her guilty joy in his sentence, and she punished herself by asking if it would not do him more good to get back to the comfort and quiet of their own house. She went to the length of saying that she believed his attack had been brought on more by homesickness than anything else. But the doctor agreed rather with her wish than her word, and held out that his melancholy was not the cause but the effect of his disorder. Then she took courage and began getting ready to go. She did not flag even in the dark hours when Kenton got back his courage with his returning strength, and scoffed at the notion of Europe, and insisted that as soon as they were in Tuskingum he should be all right again.

She felt the ingratitude, not to say the perfidy, of his behavior, and she fortified herself indignantly against it; but it was not her constant purpose, or the doctor’s inflexible opinion, that prevailed with Kenton at last a letter came one day for Ellen which she showed to her mother, and which her mother, with her distress obscurely relieved by a sense of its powerful instrumentality, brought to the girl’s father. It was from that fellow, as they always called him, and it asked of the girl a hearing upon a certain point in which, it had just come to his knowledge, she had misjudged him. He made no claim upon her, and only urged his wish to right himself with her because she was the one person in the whole world, after his mother, for whose good opinion he cared. With some tawdriness of sentiment, the letter was well worded; it was professedly written for the sole purpose of knowing whether, when she came back to Tuskingum, she would see him, and let him prove to her that he was not wholly unworthy of the kindness she had shown him when he was without other friends.

“What does she say?” the judge demanded.

“What do you suppose?” his wife retorted. “She thinks she ought to see him.”

“Very well, then. We will go to Europe.”

“Not on my account!” Mrs. Kenton consciously protested.

“No; not on your account, or mine, either. On Nelly’s account. Where is she? I want to talk with her.”

“And I want to talk with you. She’s out, with Lottie; and when she comes back I will tell her what you say. But I want to know what you think, first.”

III.

It was some time before they arrived at a common agreement as to what Kenton thought, and when they reached it they decided that they must leave the matter altogether to Ellen, as they had done before. They would never force her to anything, and if, after all that her mother could say, she still wished to see the fellow, they would not deny her.

When it came to this, Ellen was a long time silent, so long a time that her mother was beginning restively to doubt whether she was going to speak at all. Then she drew a long, silent breath. “I suppose I ought to despise myself, momma, for caring for him, when he’s never really said that he cared for me.”

“No, no,” her mother faltered.

“But I do, I do!” she gave way piteously. “I can’t help it! He doesn’t say so, even now.”

“No, he doesn’t.” It hurt her mother to own the fact that alone gave her hope.

The girl was a long time silent again before she asked, “Has poppa got the tickets?”

“Why, he wouldn’t, Ellen, child, till he knew how you felt,” her mother tenderly reproached her.

“He’d better not wait!” The tears ran silently down Ellen’s cheeks, and her lips twitched a little between these words and the next; she spoke as if it were still of her father, but her mother understood. “If he ever does say so, don’t you speak a word to me, momma; and don’t you let poppa.”

“No; indeed I won’t,” her mother promised. “Have we ever interfered, Ellen? Have we ever tried to control you?”

“He WOULD have said so, if he hadn’t seen that everybody was against him.” The mother bore without reply the ingratitude and injustice that she knew were from the child’s pain and not from her will. “Where is his letter? Give me his letter!” She nervously twitched it from her mother’s hand and ran it into her pocket. She turned away to go and put off her hat, which she still wore from coming in with Lottie; but she stopped and looked over her shoulder at her mother. “I’m going to answer it, and I don’t want you ever to ask me what I’ve said. Will you?”

“No, I won’t, Nelly.”

“Well, then!”

The next night she went with Boyne and Lottie to the apartment overhead to spend their last evening with the young people there, who were going into the country the next day. She came back without the others, who wished to stay a little longer, as she said, with a look of gay excitement in her eyes, which her mother knew was not happiness. Mrs. Kenton had an impulse to sweep into her lap the lithograph plans of the steamer, and the passage ticket which lay open on the table before herself and her husband. But it was too late to hide them from Ellen. She saw them, and caught up the ticket, and read it, and flung it down again. “Oh, I didn’t think you would do it!” she burst out; and she ran away to her room, where they could hear her sobbing, as they sat haggardly facing each other.

“Well, that settles it,” said Benton at last, with a hard gulp.

“Oh, I suppose so,” his wife assented.

On his part, now, he had a genuine regret for her disappointment from the sad safety of the trouble that would keep them at home; and on her part she could be glad of it if any sort of comfort could come out of it to him.

“Till she says go,” he added, “we’ve got to stay.”

“Oh yes,” his wife responded. “The worst of it is, we can’t even go back to Tuskingum.” He looked up suddenly at her, and she saw that he had not thought of this. She made “Tchk!” in sheer amaze at him.

“We won’t cross that river till we come to it,” he said, sullenly, but half-ashamed. The next morning the situation had not changed overnight, as they somehow both crazily hoped it might, and at breakfast, which they had at a table grown more remote from others with the thinning out of the winter guests of the hotel, the father and mother sat down alone in silence which was scarcely broken till Lottie and Boyne joined them.

“Where’s Ellen?” the boy demanded.

“She’s having her breakfast in her room,” Mrs. Kenton answered.

“She says she don’t want to eat anything,” Lottie reported. “She made the man take it away again.”

The gloom deepened in the faces of the father and mother, but neither spoke, and Boyne resumed the word again in a tone of philosophic speculation. “I don’t see how I’m going to get along, with those European breakfasts. They say you can’t get anything but cold meat or eggs; and generally they don’t expect to give you anything but bread and butter with your coffee. I don’t think that’s the way to start the day, do you, poppa?”

Kenton seemed not to have heard, for he went on silently eating, and the mother, who had not been appealed to, merely looked distractedly across the table at her children.

“Mr. Plumpton says he’s coming down to see us off,” said Lottie, smoothing her napkin in her lap. “Do you know the time of day when the boat sails, momma?”

“Yes,” her brother broke in, “and if I had been momma I’d have boxed your ears for the way you went on with him. You fairly teased him to come. The way Lottie goes on with men is a shame, momma.”

“What time does the boat sail, momma!” Lottie blandly persisted. “I promised to let Mr. Plumpton know.”

“Yes, so as to get a chance to write to him,” said Boyne. “I guess when he sees your spelling!”

“Momma! Do wake up! What time does our steamer sail?”

A light of consciousness came into Mrs. Renton’s eyes at last, and she sighed gently. “We’re not going, Lottie.”

“Not going! Why, but we’ve got the tickets, and I’ve told—”

“Your father has decided not to go, for the present. We may go later in the summer, or perhaps in the fall.”

Boyne looked at his father’s troubled face, and said nothing, but Lottie was not stayed from the expression of her feelings by any ill-timed consideration for what her father’s might be. “I just know,” she fired, “it’s something to do with that nasty Bittridge. He’s been a bitter dose to this family! As soon as I saw Ellen have a letter I was sure it was from him; and she ought to be ashamed. If I had played the simpleton with such a fellow I guess you wouldn’t have let me keep you from going to Europe very much. What is she going to do now? Marry him? Or doesn’t he want her to?”

“Lottie!” said her mother, and her father glanced up at her with a face that silenced her.

“When you’ve been half as good a girl as Ellen has been, in this whole matter,” he said, darkly, “it will be time for you to complain of the way you’ve been treated.”

“Oh yes, I know you like Ellen the best,” said the girl, defiantly.

“Don’t say such a thing, Lottie!” said her mother. “Your father loves all his children alike, and I won’t have you talking so to him. Ellen has had a great deal to bear, and she has behaved beautifully. If we are not going to Europe it is because we have decided that it is best not to go, and I wish to hear nothing more from you about it.”

“Oh yes! And a nice position it leaves me in, when I’ve been taking good-bye of everybody! Well, I hope to goodness you won’t say anything about it till the Plumptons get away. I couldn’t have the face to meet them if you did.”

“It won’t be necessary to say anything; or you can say that we’ve merely postponed our sailing. People are always doing that.”

“It’s not to be a postponement,” said Kenton, so sternly that no one ventured to dispute him, the children because they were afraid of him, and their mother because she was suffering for him.

At the steamship office, however, the authorities represented that it was now so near the date of his sailing that they could not allow him to relinquish his passages except at his own risk. They would try to sell his ticket for him, but they could not take it back, and they could not promise to sell it. There was reason in what they said, but if there had been none, they had the four hundred dollars which Kenton had paid for his five berths and they had at least the advantage of him in the argument by that means. He put the ticket back in his pocket-book without attempting to answer them, and deferred his decision till he could advise with his wife, who, after he left the breakfast-table upon his errand to the steamship office, had abandoned her children to their own devices, and gone to scold Ellen for not eating.

She had not the heart to scold her when she found the girl lying face downward in the pillow, with her thin arms thrown up through the coils and heaps of her loose-flung hair. She was so alight that her figure scarcely defined itself under the bedclothes; the dark hair, and the white, outstretched arms seemed all there was of her. She did not stir, but her mother knew she was not sleeping. “Ellen,” she said, gently, “you needn’t be troubled about our going to Europe. Your father has gone down to the steamship office to give back his ticket.”

The girl flashed her face round with nervous quickness. “Gone to give back his ticket!”

“Yes, we decided it last night. He’s never really wanted to go, and—”

“But I don’t wish poppa to give up his ticket!” said Ellen. “He must get it again. I shall die if I stay here, momma. We have got to go. Can’t you understand that?”

Mrs. Kenton did not know what to answer. She had a strong superficial desire to shake her daughter as a naughty child which has vexed its mother, but under this was a stir stronger pity for her as a woman, which easily, prevailed. “Why, but, Ellen dear! We thought from what you said last night—”

“But couldn’t you SEE,” the girl reproached her, and she began to cry, and turned her face into the pillow again and lay sobbing.

“Well,” said her mother, after she had given her a little time, “you needn’t be troubled. Your father can easily get the ticket again; he can telephone down for it. Nothing has been done yet. But didn’t you really want to stay, then?”

“It isn’t whether I want to stay or not,” Ellen spoke into her pillow. “You know that. You know that I have got to go. You know that if I saw him — Oh, why do you make me talk?”

“Yes, I understand, child.” Then, in the imperious necessity of blaming some one, Mrs. Kenton added: “You know how it is with your father. He is always so precipitate; and when he heard what you said, last night, it cut him to the heart. He felt as if he were dragging you away, and this morning he could hardly wait to get through his breakfast before he rushed down to the steamship office. But now it’s all right again, and if you want to go, we’ll go, and your father will only be too glad.”

“I don’t want father to go against his will. You said he never wanted to go to Europe.” The girl had turned her face upon her mother again; and fixed her with her tearful, accusing eyes.

“The doctors say he ought to go. He needs the change, and I think we should all be the better far getting away.”

“I shall not,” said Ellen. “But if I don’t—”

“Yes,” said her mother, soothingly.

“You know that nothing has changed. He hasn’t changed and I haven’t. If he was bad, he’s as bad as ever, and I’m just as silly. Oh, it’s like a drunkard! I suppose they know it’s killing them, but they can’t give it up! Don’t you think it’s very strange, momma? I don’t see why I should be so. It seems as if I had no character at all, and I despise myself so! Do you believe I shall ever get over it? Sometimes I think the best thing for me would be to go into an asylum.”

“Oh yes, dear; you’ll get over it, and forget it all. As soon as you see others — other scenes — and get interested—”

“And you don’t you don’t think I’d better let him come, and—”

“Ellen!”

Ellen began to sob again, and toss her head upon the pillow. “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she wailed. “He hasn’t ever done anything bad to me, and if I can overlook his — his flirting — with that horrid thing, I don’t know what the rest of you have got to say. And he says he can explain everything. Why shouldn’t I give him the chance, momma? I do think it is acting very cruel not to let him even say a word.”

“You can see him if you wish, Ellen,” said her mother, gravely. “Your father and I have always said that. And perhaps it would be the best thing, after all.”

“Oh, you say that because you think that if I did see him, I should be so disgusted with him that I’d never want to speak to him again. But what if I shouldn’t?”

“Then we should wish you to do whatever you thought was for your happiness, Ellen. We can’t believe it would be for your good; but if it would be for your happiness, we are willing. Or, if you don’t think it’s for your happiness, but only for his, and you wish to do it, still we shall be willing, and you know that as far as your father and I are concerned, there will never be a word of reproach — not a whisper.”

“Lottie would despise me; and what would Richard say?”

“Richard would never say anything to wound you, dear, and if you don’t despise yourself, you needn’t mind Lottie.”

“But I should, momma; that’s the worst of it! I should despise myself, and he would despise me too. No, if I see him, I am going to do it because I am selfish and wicked, and wish to have my own way, no matter who is harmed by it, or — anything; and I’m not going to have it put on any other ground. I could see him,” she said, as if to herself, “just once more — only once more — and then if I didn’t believe in him, I could start right off to Europe.”

Her mother made no answer to this, and Ellen lay awhile apparently forgetful of her presence, inwardly dramatizing a passionate scene of dismissal between herself and her false lover. She roused herself from the reverie with a long sigh, and her mother said, “Won’t you have some breakfast, now; Ellen?”

“Yes; and I will get up. You needn’t be troubled any more about me, momma. I will write to him not to come, and poppa must go back and get his ticket again.”

“Not unless you are doing this of your own free will, child. I can’t have you feeling that we are putting any pressure upon you.”

“You’re not. I’m doing it of my own will. If it isn’t my free will, that isn’t your fault. I wonder whose fault it is? Mine, or what made me so silly and weak?”

“You are not silly and weak,” said her mother, fondly, and she bent over the girl and would have kissed her, but Ellen averted her face with a piteous “Don’t!” and Mrs. Kenton went out and ordered her breakfast brought back.

She did not go in to make her eat it, as she would have done in the beginning of the girl’s trouble; they had all learned how much better she was for being left to fight her battles with herself singlehanded. Mrs. Kenton waited in the parlor till her husband same in, looking gloomy and tired. He put his hat down and sank into a chair without speaking. “Well?” she said.

“We have got to lose the price of the ticket, if we give it back. I thought I had better talk with you first,” said Kenton, and he explained the situation.

“Then you had better simply have it put off till the next steamer. I have been talking with Ellen, and she doesn’t want to stay. She wants to go.” His wife took advantage of Kenton’s mute amaze (in the nervous vagaries even of the women nearest him a man learns nothing from experience) to put her own interpretation on the case, which, as it was creditable to the girl’s sense and principle, he found acceptable if not imaginable. “And if you will take my advice,” she ended, “you will go quietly back to the steamship office and exchange your ticket for the next steamer, or the one after that, if you can’t get good rooms, and give Ellen time to get over this before she leaves. It will be much better for her to conquer herself than to run away, for that would always give her a feeling of shame, and if she decides before she goes, it will strengthen her pride and self-respect, and there will be less danger — when we come back.”

“Do you think he’s going to keep after her!”

“How can I tell? He will if he thinks it’s to his interest, or he can make anybody miserable by it.”

Kenton said nothing to this, but after a while he suggested, rather timorously, as if it were something he could not expect her to approve, and was himself half ashamed of, “I believe if I do put it off, I’ll run out to Tuskingum before we sail, and look after a little matter of business that I don’t think Dick can attend to so well.”

His wife knew why he wanted to go, and in her own mind she had already decided that if he should ever propose to go, she should not gainsay him. She had, in fact, been rather surprised that he had not proposed it before this, and now she assented, without taxing him with his real motive, and bringing him to open disgrace before her. She even went further in saying: “Very well, then you had better go. I can get on very well here, and I think it will leave Ellen freer to act for herself if you are away. And there are some things in the house that I want, and that Richard would be sure to send his wife to get if I asked him, and I won’t have her rummaging around in my closets. I suppose you will want to go into the house?”

“I suppose so,” said Renton, who had not let a day pass, since he left his house, without spending half his homesick time in it. His wife suffered his affected indifference to go without exposure, and trumped up a commission for him, which would take him intimately into the house.

IV

The piety of his son Richard had maintained the place at Tuskingum in perfect order outwardly, and Kenton’s heart ached with tender pain as he passed up the neatly kept walk from the gate, between the blooming ranks of syringas and snowballs, to his door, and witnessed the faithful care that Richard’s hired man had bestowed upon every detail. The grass between the banks of roses and rhododendrons had been as scrupulously lawn-mowered and as sedulously garden-hosed as if Kenton himself had been there to look after its welfare, or had tended the shrubbery as he used to do in earlier days with his own hand. The oaks which he had planted shook out their glossy green in the morning gale, and in the tulip-trees, which had snowed their petals on the ground in wide circles defined by the reach of their branches, he heard the squirrels barking; a red-bird from the woody depths behind the house mocked the cat-birds in the quince-trees. The June rose was red along the trellis of the veranda, where Lottie ought to be sitting to receive the morning calls of the young men who were sometimes quite as early as Kenton’s present visit in their devotions, and the sound of Ellen’s piano, played fitfully and absently in her fashion, ought to be coming out irrespective of the hour. It seemed to him that his wife must open the door as his steps and his son’s made themselves heard on the walk between the box borders in their upper orchard, and he faltered a little.

“Look here, father,” said his son, detecting his hesitation. “Why don’t you let Mary come in with you, and help you find those things?”

“No, no,” said Kenton, sinking into one of the wooden seats that flanked the door-way. “I promised your mother that I would get them myself. You know women don’t like to have other women going through their houses.”

“Yes, but Mary!” his son urged.

“Ah! It’s just Mary, with her perfect housekeeping, that your mother wouldn’t like to have see the way she left things,” said Kenton, and he smiled at the notion of any one being housekeeper enough to find a flaw in his wife’s. “My, but this is pleasant!” he added. He took off his hat and let the breeze play through the lank, thin hair which was still black on his fine, high forehead. He was a very handsome old man, with a delicate aquiline profile, of the perfect Roman type which is perhaps oftener found in America than ever it was in Rome. “You’ve kept it very nice, Dick,” he said, with a generalizing wave of his hat.

“Well, I couldn’t tell whether you would be coming back or not, and I thought I had better be ready for you.”

“I wish we were,” said the old man, “and we shall be, in the fall, or the latter part of the summer. But it’s better now that we should go — on Ellen’s account.”

“Oh, you’ll enjoy it,” his son evaded him.

“You haven’t seen anything of him lately?” Kenton suggested.

“He wasn’t likely to let me see anything of him,” returned the son.

“No,” said the father. “Well!” He rose to put the key into the door, and his son stepped down from the little porch to the brick walk.

“Mary will have dinner early, father; and when you’ve got through here, you’d better come over and lie down a while beforehand.”

Kenton had been dropped at eight o’clock from a sleeper on the Great Three, and had refused breakfast at his son’s house, upon the plea that the porter had given him a Southern cantaloupe and a cup of coffee on the train, and he was no longer hungry.

“All right,” he said. “I won’t be longer than I can help.” He had got the door open and was going to close it again.

His son laughed. “Better not shut it, father. It will let the fresh air in.”

“Oh, all right,” said the old man.

The son lingered about, giving some orders to the hired man in the vegetable garden, for an excuse, in the hope that his father might change his mind and ask him to come into the house with him; he felt it so forlorn for him to be going through those lifeless rooms alone. When he looked round, and saw his father holding the door ajar, as if impatiently waiting for him to be gone, he laughed and waved his hand to him. “All right, father? I’m going now.” But though he treated the matter so lightly with his father, he said grimly to his wife, as he passed her on their own porch, on his way to his once, “I don’t like to think of father being driven out of house and home this way.”

“Neither do I, Dick. But it can’t be helped, can it?”

“I think I could help it, if I got my hands on that fellow once.”

“No, you couldn’t, Dick. It’s not he that’s doing it. It’s Ellen; you know that well enough; and you’ve just got to stand it.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Richard Kenton.

“Of course, my heart aches for your poor old father, but so it would if Ellen had some kind of awful sickness. It is a kind of sickness, and you can’t fight it any more than if she really was sick.”

“No,” said the husband, dejectedly. “You just slip over there, after a while, Mary, if father’s gone too long, will you? I don’t like to have him there alone.”

“‘Deed and ‘deed I won’t, Dick. He wouldn’t like it at all, my spying round. Nothing can happen to him, and I believe your mother’s just made an excuse to send him after something, so that he can be in there alone, and realize that the house isn’t home any more. It will be easier for him to go to Europe when he finds that out. I believe in my heart that was her idea in not wanting me to find the things for him, and I’m not going to meddle myself.”

With the fatuity of a man in such things, and with the fatuity of age regarding all the things of the past, Kenton had thought in his homesickness of his house as he used to be in it, and had never been able to picture it without the family life. As he now walked through the empty rooms, and up and down the stairs, his pulse beat low as if in the presence of death. Everything was as they had left it, when they went out of the house, and it appeared to Kenton that nothing had been touched there since, though when he afterwards reported to his wife that there was not a speck of dust anywhere she knew that Mary had been going through the house, in their absence, not once only, but often, and she felt a pang of grateful jealousy. He got together the things that Mrs. Kenton had pretended to want, and after glancing in at the different rooms, which seemed to be lying stealthily in wait for him, with their emptiness and silence, he went down-stairs with the bundle he had made, and turned into his library. He had some thought of looking at the collections for his history, but, after pulling open one of the drawers in which they were stored, he pushed it to again, and sank listlessly into his leather-covered swivel-chair, which stood in its place before the wide writing-table, and seemed to have had him in it before he sat down. The table was bare, except for the books and documents which he had sent home from time to time during the winter, and which Richard or his wife had neatly arranged there without breaking their wraps. He let fall his bundle at his feet, and sat staring at the ranks of books against the wall, mechanically relating them to the different epochs of the past in which he or his wife or his children had been interested in them, and aching with tender pain. He had always supposed himself a happy and strong and successful man, but what a dreary ruin his life had fallen into! Was it to be finally so helpless and powerless (for with all the defences about him that a man can have, he felt himself fatally vulnerable) that he had fought so many years? Why, at his age, should he be going into exile, away from everything that could make his days bright and sweet? Why could not he come back there, where he was now more solitary than he could be anywhere else on earth, and reanimate the dead body of his home with his old life? He knew why, in an immediate sort, but his quest was for the cause behind the cause. What had he done, or left undone? He had tried to be a just man, and fulfil all his duties both to his family and to his neighbors; he had wished to be kind, and not to harm any one; he reflected how, as he had grown older, the dread of doing any unkindness had grown upon him, and how he had tried not to be proud, but to walk meekly and humbly. Why should he be punished as he was, stricken in a place so sacred that the effort to defend himself had seemed a kind of sacrilege? He could not make it out, and he was not aware of the tears of self-pity that stole slowly down his face, though from time to time he wiped them away.

He heard steps in the hall without, advancing and pausing, which must be those of his son coming back for him, and with these advances and pauses giving him notice of his approach; but he did not move, and at first he did not look up when the steps arrived at the threshold of the room where he sat. When he lifted his eyes at last he saw Bittridge lounging in the door-way, with one shoulder supported against the door-jamb, his hands in his pockets and his hat pushed well back on his forehead. In an instant all Kenton’s humility and soft repining were gone. “Well, what is it?” he called.

“Oh,” said Bittridge, coming forward. He laughed and explained, “Didn’t know if you recognized me.”

“I recognized you,” said Kenton, fiercely. “What is it you want?”

“Well, I happened to be passing, and I saw the door open, and I thought maybe Dick was here.”

It was on Kenton’s tongue to say that it was a good thing for him Dick was not there. But partly the sense that this would be unbecoming bluster, and partly the suffocating resentment of the fellow’s impudence, limited his response to a formless gasp, and Bittridge went on: “But I’m glad to find you here, judge. I didn’t know that you were in town. Family all well in New York?” He was not quelled by the silence of the judge on this point, but, as if he had not expected any definite reply to what might well pass for formal civility, he now looked aslant into his breast-pocket from which he drew a folded paper. “I just got hold of a document this morning that I think will interest you. I was bringing it round to Dick’s wife for you.” The intolerable familiarity of all this was fast working Kenton to a violent explosion, but he contained himself, and Bittridge stepped forward to lay the paper on the table before him. “It’s the original roster of Company C, in your regiment, and—”

“Take it away!” shouted Kenton, “and take yourself away with it!” and he grasped the stick that shook in his hand.

A wicked light came into Bittridge’s eye as he drawled, in lazy scorn, “Oh, I don’t know.” Then his truculence broke in a malicious amusement. “Why, judge, what’s the matter?” He put on a face of mock gravity, and Kenton knew with helpless fury that he was enjoying his vantage. He could fall upon him and beat him with his stick, leaving the situation otherwise undefined, but a moment’s reflection convinced Kenton that this would not do. It made him sick to think of striking the fellow, as if in that act he should be striking Ellen, too. It did not occur to him that he could be physically worsted, or that his vehement age would be no match for the other’s vigorous youth. All he thought was that it would not avail, except to make known to every one what none but her dearest could now conjecture. Bittridge could then publicly say, and doubtless would say, that he had never made love to Ellen; that if there had been any love-making it was all on her side; and that he had only paid her the attentions which any young man might blamelessly pay a pretty girl. This would be true to the facts in the case, though it was true also that he had used every tacit art to make her believe him in love with her. But how could this truth be urged, and to whom? So far the affair had been quite in the hands of Ellen’s family, and they had all acted for the best, up to the present time. They had given Bittridge no grievance in making him feel that he was unwelcome in their house, and they were quite within their rights in going away, and making it impossible for him to see her again anywhere in Tuskingum. As for his seeing her in New York, Ellen had but to say that she did not wish it, and that would end it. Now, however, by treating him rudely, Kenton was aware that he had bound himself to render Bittridge some account of his behavior throughout, if the fellow insisted upon it.

“I want nothing to do with you, sir,” he said, less violently, but, as he felt, not more effectually. “You are in my house without my invitation, and against my wish!”

“I didn’t expect to find you here. I came in because I saw the door open, and I thought I might see Dick or his wife and give them, this paper for you. But I’m glad I found you, and if you won’t give me any reason for not wanting me here, I can give it myself, and I think I can make out a very good case for you.” Kenton quivered in anticipation of some mention of Ellen, and Bittridge smiled as if he understood. But he went on to say: “I know that there were things happened after you first gave me the run of your house that might make you want to put up the bars again — if they were true. But they were not true. And I can prove that by the best of all possible witnesses — by Uphill himself. He stands shoulder to shoulder with me, to make it hot for any one who couples his wife’s name with mine.”

“Humph!” Kenton could not help making this comment, and Bittridge, being what he was, could not help laughing.

“What’s the use?” he asked, recovering himself. “I don’t pretend that I did right, but you know there wasn’t any harm in it. And if there had been I should have got the worst of it. Honestly, judge, I couldn’t tell you how much I prized being admitted to your house on the terms I was. Don’t you think I could appreciate the kindness you all showed me? Before you took me up, I was alone in Tuskingum, but you opened every door in the place for me. You made it home to me; and you won’t believe it, of course, because you’re prejudiced; but I felt like a son and brother to you all. I felt towards Mrs. Kenton just as I do towards my own mother. I lost the best friends I ever had when you turned against me. Don’t you suppose I’ve seen the difference here in Tuskingum? Of course, the men pass the time of day with me when we meet, but they don’t look me up, and there are more near-sighted girls in this town!” Kenton could not keep the remote dawn of a smile out of his eyes, and Bittridge caught the far-off gleam. “And everybody’s been away the whole winter. Not a soul at home, anywhere, and I had to take my chance of surprising Mrs. Dick Kenton when I saw your door open here.” He laughed forlornly, as the gleam faded out of Kenton’s eye again. “And the worst of it is that my own mother isn’t at home to me, figuratively speaking, when I go over to see her at Ballardsville. She got wind of my misfortune, somehow, and when I made a clean breast of it to her, she said she could never feel the same to me till I had made it all right with the Kentons. And when a man’s own mother is down on him, judge!”

Bittridge left Kenton to imagine the desperate case, and in spite of his disbelief in the man and all he said, Kenton could not keep his hardness of heart towards him. “I don’t know what you’re after, young man,” he began. “But if you expect me to receive you under my roof again—”

“Oh, I don’t, judge, I don’t!” Bittridge interposed. “All I want is to be able to tell my mother — I don’t care for anybody else — that I saw you, and you allowed me to say that I was truly sorry for the pain — if it was pain; or annoyance, anyway — that I had caused you, and to go back to her with the hope of atoning for it sometime or somehow. That’s all.”

“Look here!” cried Renton. “What have you written to my daughter for?”

“Wasn’t that natural? I prized her esteem more than I do yours even; but did I ask her anything more than I’ve asked you? I didn’t expect her to answer me; all I wanted was to have her believe that I wasn’t as black as I was painted — not inside, anyway. You know well enough — anybody knows — that I would rather have her think well of me than any one else in this world, except my mother. I haven’t got the gift of showing out what’s good in me, if there is any good, but I believe Miss Ellen would want to think well of me if I gave her a chance. If ever there was an angel on earth, she’s one. I don’t deny that I was hopeful of mercy from her, because she can’t think evil, but I can lay my hand on my heart and say that I wasn’t selfish in my hopes. It seemed to me that it was her due to understand that a man whom she had allowed to be her friend wasn’t altogether unworthy. That’s as near as I can come to putting into words the motive I had in writing to her. I can’t even begin to put into words the feeling I have towards her. It’s as if she was something sacred.”

This was the feeling Renton himself had towards his daughter, and for the first time he found himself on common ground with the scapegrace who professed it, and whose light, mocking face so little enforced his profession. If Bittridge could have spoken in the dark, his words might have carried a conviction of his sincerity, but there, in plain day, confronting the father of Ellen, who had every wish to believe him true, the effect was different. Deep within his wish to think the man honest, Kenton recoiled from him. He vaguely perceived that it was because she could not think evil that this wretch had power upon her, and he was sensible, as he had not been before, that she had no safety from him except in absence. He did not know what to answer; he could not repel him in open terms, and still less could he meet him with any words that would allow him to resume his former relations with his family. He said, finally: “We will let matters stand. We are going to Europe in a week, and I shall not see you again. I will tell Mrs. Kenton what you say.”

“Thank you, judge. And tell her that I appreciate your kindness more than I can say!” The judge rose from his chair and went towards the window, which he had thrown open. “Going to shut up? Let me help you with that window; it seems to stick. Everything fast up-stairs?”

“I — I think so,” Kenton hesitated.

“I’ll just run up and look,” said Bittridge, and he took the stairs two at a time, before Kenton could protest, when they came out into the hall together. “It’s all right,” he reported on his quick return. “I’ll just look round below here,” and he explored the ground-floor rooms in turn. “No, you hadn’t opened any other window,” he said, glancing finally into the library. “Shall I leave this paper on your table?”

“Yes, leave it there,” said Kenton, helplessly, and he let Bittridge close the front door after him, and lock it.

“I hope Miss Lottie is well,” he suggested in handing the key to Kenton. “And Boyne” he added, with the cordiality of an old family friend. “I hope Boyne has got reconciled to New York a little. He was rather anxious about his pigeons when he left, I understand. But I guess Dick’s man has looked after them. I’d have offered to take charge of the cocoons myself if I’d had a chance.” He walked, gayly chatting, across the intervening lawn with Kenton to his son’s door, where at sight of him bra. Richard Kenton evanesced into the interior so obviously that Bittridge could not offer to come in. “Well, I shall see you all when you come back in the fall, judge, and I hope you’ll have a pleasant voyage and a good time in Europe.”

“Thank you,” said Kenton, briefly.

“Remember me to the ladies!” and Bittridge took off his hat with his left hand, while he offered the judge his right. “Well, good-bye!”

Kenton made what response he could, and escaped in-doors, where his daughter-in-law appeared from the obscurity into which she had retired from Bittridge. “Well, that follow does beat all! How, in the world did he find you, father?”

“He came into the house,” said the judge, much abashed at his failure to deal adequately with Bittridge. He felt it the more in the presence of his son’s wife. “I couldn’t, seem to get rid of him in any way short of kicking him out.”

“No, there’s nothing equal to his impudence. I do believe he would have come in here, if he hadn’t seen me first. Did you tell him when you were going back, father? Because he’d be at the train to see you off, just as sure!”

“No, I didn’t tell him,” said Kenton, feeling move shaken now from the interview with Bittridge than he had realized before. He was ashamed to let Mary know that he had listened to Bittridge’s justification, which he now perceived was none, and he would have liked to pretend that he had not silently condoned his offences, but Mary did not drive him to these deceptions by any further allusions to Bittridge.

“Well, now, you must go into the sitting-room and lie down on the lounge; I promised Dick to make you. Or would you rather go up-stairs to your room?”

“I think I’ll go to my room,” said Kenton.

He was asleep there on the bed when Richard came home to dinner and looked softly in. He decided not to wake him, and Mary said the sleep would do him more good than the dinner. At table they talked him over, and she told her husband what she knew of the morning’s adventure.

“That was pretty tough for father,” said Richard. “I wouldn’t go into the house with him, because I knew he wanted to have it to himself; and then to think of that dirty hound skulking in! Well, perhaps it’s for the best. It will make it easier, for father to go and leave the place, and they’ve got to go. They’ve got to put the Atlantic Ocean between Ellen and that fellow.”

“It does seem as if something might be done,” his wife rebelled.

“They’ve done the best that could be done,” said Richard. “And if that skunk hasn’t got some sort of new hold upon father, I shall be satisfied. The worst of it is that it will be all over town in an hour that Bittridge has made up with us. I don’t blame father; he couldn’t help it; he never could be rude to anybody.”

“I think I’ll try if I can’t be rude to Mr. Bittridge, if he ever undertakes to show in my pretence that he has made it up with us,” said Mary.

Richard tenderly found out from his father’s shamefaced reluctance, later, that no great mischief had been done. But no precaution on his part availed to keep Bittridge from demonstrating the good feeling between himself and the Kentons when the judge started for New York the next afternoon. He was there waiting to see him off, and he all but took the adieus out of Richard’s hands. He got possession of the judge’s valise, and pressed past the porter into the sleeping-car with it, and remained lounging on the arm of the judge’s seat, making conversation with him and Richard till the train began to move. Then he ran outside, and waved his hand to the judge’s window in farewell, before all that leisure of Tuskingum which haunted the arrival and departure of the trains.

Mary Kenton was furious when her husband came home and reported the fact to her.

“How in the world did he find out when father was going?”

“He must have come to all the through trains since he say him yesterday. But I think even you would have been suited, Mary, if you had seen his failure to walk off from the depot arm-in-arm with me:

“I wouldn’t have been suited with anything short of your knocking, him down, Dick.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t have done,” said Richard. After a while he added, patiently, “Ellen is making a good deal of trouble for us.”

This was what Mary was thinking herself, and it was what she might have said, but since Dick had said it she was obliged to protest. “She isn’t to blame for it.”

“Oh, I know she isn’t to blame.”

V.

The father of the unhappy girl was of the same mixed mind as he rode sleeplessly back to New York in his berth, and heard the noises of slumber all round him. From time to time he groaned softly, and turned from one cheek to the other. Every half-hour or so he let his window-curtain fly up, and lay watching the landscape fleeting past; and then he pulled the curtain down again and tried to sleep. After passing Albany he dozed, but at Poughkeepsie a zealous porter called him by mistake, and the rest of the way to New York he sat up in the smoking-room. It seemed a long while since he had drowsed; the thin nap had not rested him, and the old face that showed itself in the glass, with the frost of a two days’ beard on it, was dry-eyed and limply squared by the fall of the muscles at the corners of the chin.

He wondered how he should justify to his wife the thing which he felt as accountable for having happened to him as if he could have prevented it. It would not have happened, of course, if he had not gone to Tuskingum, and she could say that to him; now it seemed to him that his going, which had been so imperative before he went, was altogether needless. Nothing but harm had come of it, and it had been a selfish indulgence of a culpable weakness.

It was a little better for Kenton when he found himself with his family, and they went down together to the breakfast which the mother had engaged the younger children to make as pleasant as they could for their father, and not worry him with talk about Tuskingum. They had, in fact, got over their first season of homesickness, and were postponing their longing for Tuskingum till their return from Europe, when they would all go straight out there. Kenton ran the gauntlet of welcome from the black elevator-boys and bell-boys and the head-waiter, who went before him to pull out the judge’s chair, with commanding frowns to his underlings to do the like for the rest of the family; and as his own clumsy Irish waiter stood behind his chair, breathing heavily upon the judge’s head, he gave his order for breakfast, with a curious sense of having got home again from some strange place. He satisfied Boyne that his pigeons and poultry had been well cared for through the winter, and he told Lottie that he had not met much of anybody except Dick’s family, before he recollected seeing half a dozen of her young men at differed times. She was not very exacting about them and her mind seemed set upon Europe, or at least she talked of nothing else. Ellen was quiet as she always was, but she smiled gently on her father, and Mrs. Kenton told him of the girl’s preparations for going, and congratulated herself on their wisdom in having postponed their sailing, in view of all they had to do; and she made Kenton feel that everything was in the best possible shape. As soon as she got him alone in their own room, she said, “Well, what is it, poppa?”

Then he had to tell her, and she listened with ominous gravity. She did not say that now he could see how much better it would have been if he had not gone, but she made him say it for her; and she would not let him take comfort in the notion of keeping the fact of his interview with Bittridge from Ellen. “It would be worse than useless. He will write to her about it, and then she will know that we have been, concealing it.”

Kenton was astonished at himself for not having thought of that. “And what are you going to do, Sarah?”

“I am going to tell her,” said Mrs. Kenton.

“Why didn’t poppa tell me before?” the girl perversely demanded, as soon as her another had done so.

“Ellen, you are a naughty child! I have a great mind not to have a word more to say to you. Your father hasn’t been in the house an hour. Did you want him to speak before Lottie and Boyne!”

“I don’t see why he didn’t tell me himself. I know there is something you are keeping back. I know there is some word—”

“Oh, you poor girl!” said her mother, melting into pity against all sense of duty. “Have we ever tried to deceive you?”

“No,” Ellen sobbed, with her face in her hands. “Now I will tell you every word that passed,” said Mrs. Kenton, and she told, as well as she could remember, all that the judge had repeated from Bittridge. “I don’t say he isn’t ashamed of himself,” she commented at the end. “He ought to be, and, of course, he would be glad to be in with us again when we go back; but that doesn’t alter his character, Ellen. Still, if you can’t see that yourself, I don’t want to make you, and if you would rather go home to Tuskingum, we will give up the trip to Europe.”

“It’s too late to do that now,” said the girl, in cruel reproach.

Her mother closed her lips resolutely till she could say, “Or you can write to him if you want to.”

“I don’t want to,” said Ellen, and she dragged herself up out of her chair, and trailed slowly out of the room without looking at her mother.

“Well?” the judge asked, impatiently, when he came in as soon after this as he decently could. They observed forms with regard to talking about Ellen which, after all, were rather for themselves than for her; Mrs. Kenton, at least, knew that the girl knew when they were talking about her.

“She took it as well as I expected.”

“What is she going to do?”

“She didn’t say. But I don’t believe she will do anything.”

“I wish I had taken our tickets for next Saturday,” said Kenton.

“Well, we must wait now,” said his wife. “If he doesn’t write to her, she won’t write to him.”

“Has she ever answered that letter of his?”

“No, and I don’t believe she will now.”

That night Ellen came to her mother and said she need not be afraid of her writing to Bittridge. “He hasn’t changed, if he was wrong, by coming and saying those things to poppa, and nothing has changed.”

“That is the way I hoped you would see it; Ellen.” Her mother looked wistfully at her, but the girl left her without letting her satisfy the longing in the mother’s heart to put her arms round her child, and pull her head down upon her breast for a cry.

Kenton slept better that night than his wife, who was kept awake by a formless foreboding. For the week that followed she had the sense of literally pushing the hours away, so that at times she found herself breathless, as if from some heavy physical exertion. At such times she was frantic with the wish to have the days gone, and the day of their sailing come, but she kept her impatience from her husband and children, and especially from Ellen. The girl was passive enough; she was almost willing, and in the preparation for their voyage she did her share of the shopping, and discussed the difficult points of this business with her mother and sister as if she had really been thinking about it all. But her mother doubted if she had, and made more of Ellen’s sunken eyes and thin face than of her intelligent and attentive words. It was these that she reported to her husband, whom she kept from talking with Ellen, and otherwise quelled.

“Let her alone,” she insisted, one morning of the last week. “What can you do by speaking to her about it? Don’t you see that she is making the best fight she can? You will weaken her if you interfere. It’s less than a week now, and if you can only hold out, I know she can.”

Kenton groaned. “Well, I suppose you’re right, Sarah. But I don’t like the idea of forcing her to go, unless—”

“Then you had better write to that fellow, and ask him to come and get her.”

This shut Kenton’s mouth, and he kept on with his shaving. When he had finished he felt fresher, if not stronger, and he went down to breakfast, which he had alone, not only with reference to his own family, but all the other guests of the hotel. He was always so early that sometimes the dining-room was not open; when this happened, he used to go and buy a newspaper at the clerk’s desk, for it was too early then for the news-stand to be open. It happened so that morning, and he got his paper without noticing the young man who was writing his name in the hotel register, but who looked briskly up when the clerk bade Kenton good-morning by name.

“Why, judge!” he said, and he put out a hand which Kenton took with trembling reluctance and a dazed stare. “I thought you sailed last Saturday!”

“We sail next Saturday,” said Kenton.

“Well, well! Then I misunderstood,” said Bittridge, and he added: “Why, this is money found in the road! How are all the family? I’ve got my mother here with me; brought her on for a kind of a little outing. She’ll be the most surprised woman in New York when I tell her you’re here yet. We came to this hotel because we knew you had been here, but we didn’t suppose you were here! Well! This is too good! I saw Dick, Friday, but he didn’t say anything about your sailing; I suppose he thought I knew. Didn’t you tell me you were going in a week, that day in your house?”

“Perhaps I did,” Kenton faltered out, his eyes fixed on Bittridge’s with a helpless fascination.

“Well, it don’t matter so long as you’re here. Mother’s in the parlor waiting for me; I won’t risk taking you to her now, judge — right off the train, you know. But I want to bring her to call on Mrs. Kenton as soon after breakfast as you’ll let me. She just idolizes Mrs. Kenton, from what I’ve told her about her. Our rooms ready?” He turned to the clerk, and the clerk called “Front!” to a bellboy, who ran up and took Bittridge’s hand-baggage, and stood waiting to follow him into the parlor. “Well, you must excuse me now, judge. So long!” he said, gayly, and Kenton crept feebly away to the dining-room.

He must have eaten breakfast, but he was not aware of doing so; and the events of his leaving the table and going up in the elevator and finding himself in his wife’s presence did not present themselves consecutively, though they must all have successively occurred. It did not seem to him that he could tell what he knew, but he found himself doing it, and her hearing it with strange quiet.

“Very well,” she said. “I must tell Ellen, and, if she wishes, we must stay in and wait for their call.”

“Yes,” the judge mechanically consented.

It was painful for Mrs. Kenton to see how the girl flushed when she announced the fact of Bittridge’s presence, for she knew what a strife of hope and shame and pride there was in Ellen’s heart. At first she said that she did not wish to see him, and then when Mrs. Kenton would not say whether she had better see him or not, she added, vaguely, “If he has brought his mother—”

“I think we must see them, Ellen. You wouldn’t wish to think you had been unkind; and he might be hurt on his mother’s account. He seems really fond of her, and perhaps—”

“No, there isn’t any perhaps, momma,” said the girl, gratefully. “But I think we had better see them, too. I think we had better ALL see them.”

“Just as you please, Ellen. If you prefer to meet them alone—”

“I don’t prefer that. I want poppa to be there, and Lottie and Boyne even.”

Boyne objected when he was told that his presence was requested at this family rite, and he would have excused himself if the invitation had been of the form that one might decline. “What do I want to see him for?” he puffed. “He never cared anything about me in Tuskingum. What’s he want here, anyway?”

“I wish you to come in, my son,” said his mother, and that ended it.

Lottie was not so tractable. “Very well, momma,” she said. “But don’t expect me to speak to him. I have some little self-respect, if the rest of you haven’t. Am I going to shake hands with him! I never took the least notice of him at home, and I’m not going to here.”

Bittridge decided the question of hand-shaking for her when they met. He greeted her glooming brother with a jolly “Hello, Boyne!” and without waiting for the boy’s tardy response he said “Hello, Lottie!” to the girl, and took her hand and kept it in his while he made an elaborate compliment to her good looks and her gain in weight. She had come tardily as a proof that she would not have come in at all if she had not chosen to do so, and Mrs. Bittridge was already seated beside Ellen on the sofa, holding her hand, and trying to keep her mobile, inattentive eyes upon Ellen’s face. She was a little woman, youthfully dressed, but not dressed youthfully enough for the dry, yellow hair which curled tightly in small rings on her skull, like the wig of a rag-doll. Her restless eyes were round and deep-set, with the lids flung up out of sight; she had a lax, formless mouth, and an anxious smile, with which she constantly watched her son for his initiative, while she recollected herself from time to time, long enough to smooth Ellen’s hand between her own, and say, “Oh, I just think the world of Clarence; and I guess he thinks his mother is about right, too,” and then did not heed what Ellen answered.

The girl said very little, and it was Bittridge who talked for all, dominating the room with a large, satisfied presence, in which the judge sat withdrawn, his forehead supported on his hand, and his elbow on the table. Mrs. Kenton held herself upright, with her hands crossed before her, stealing a look now and then at her daughter’s averted face, but keeping her eyes from Mrs. Bittridge, who, whenever she caught Mrs. Kenton’s glance, said something to her about her Clarence, and how he used to write home to her at Ballardsville about the Kentons, so that she felt acquainted with all of them. Her reminiscences were perfunctory; Mrs. Bittridge had voluntarily but one topic, and that was herself, either as she was included in the interest her son must inspire, or as she included him in the interest she must inspire. She said that, now they had met at last, she was not going to rest till the Kentons had been over to Ballardsville, and made her a good, long visit; her son had some difficulty in making her realize that the Kentons were going to Europe. Then she laughed, and said she kept forgetting; and she did wish they were all coming back to Tuskingum.

If it is a merit to treat a fatuous mother with deference, Bittridge had that merit. His deference was of the caressing and laughing sort, which took the spectator into the joke of her peculiarities as something they would appreciate and enjoy with him. She had been a kittenish and petted person in her youth, perhaps, and now she petted herself, after she had long ceased to be a kitten. What was respectable and what was pathetic in her was her wish to promote her son’s fortunes with the Kentons, but she tried to do this from not a very clear understanding of her part, apparently, and little sense of the means. For Ellen’s sake, rather than hers, the father and mother received her overtures to their liking kindly; they answered her patiently, and Mrs. Kenton even tried to lead the way for her to show herself at her best, by talking of her journey on to New York, and of the city, and what she would see there to interest her. Lottie and Boyne, sternly aloof together in one of their momentary alliances, listened to her replies with a silent contempt that almost included their mother; Kenton bore with the woman humbly and sadly.

He was, in fact, rather bewildered with the situation, for which he felt himself remotely if not immediately responsible. Bittridge was there among them not only on good terms, but apparently in the character of a more than tolerated pretendant to Ellen’s favor. There were passages of time is which the father was not sure that the fellow was not engaged to his daughter, though when these instants were gone he was aware that there had been no overt love-making between them and Bittridge had never offered himself. What was he doing there, then? The judge asked himself that, without being able to answer himself. So far as he could make out, his wife and he were letting him see Ellen, and show her off to his mother, mainly to disgust her with them both, and because they were afraid that if they denied her to him, it would be the worse for them through her suffering. The judge was not accustomed to apply the tests by which people are found vulgar or not; these were not of his simple world; all that he felt about Mrs. Bittridge was that she was a very foolish, false person, who was true in nothing but her admiration of her rascal of a son; he did not think of Bittridge as a rascal violently, but helplessly, and with a heart that melted in pity for Ellen.

He longed to have these people gone, not so much because he was so unhappy in their presence as because he wished to learn Ellen’s feeling about them from his wife. She would know, whether Allen said anything to her or not. But perhaps if Mrs. Kenton had been asked to deliver her mind on this point at once she would have been a little puled. All that she could see, and she saw it with a sinking of the heart, was that Ellen looked more at peace than she had been since Bittridge was last in their house at Tuskingum. Her eyes covertly followed him as he sat talking, or went about the room, making himself at home among them, as if he were welcome with every one. He joked her more than the rest, and accused her of having become a regular New-Yorker; he said he supposed that when she came back from Europe she would not know anybody in Tuskingum; and his mother, playing with Ellen’s fingers, as if they had been the fringe of a tassel, declared that she must not mind him, for he carried on just so with everybody; at the same time she ordered him to stop, or she would go right out of the room.

She gave no other sign of going, and it was her son who had to make the movement for her at last; she apparently did not know that it was her part to make it. She said that now the Kentons must come and return her call, and be real neighborly, just the same as if they were all at home together. When her son shook hands with every one she did so too, and she said to each, “Well, I wish you good-morning,” and let him push her before him, in high delight with the joke, out of the room.

When they were gone the Kentons sat silent, Ellen with a rapt smile on her thin, flushed face, till Lottie said, “You forgot to ask him if we might BREATHE, poppa,” and paced out of the room in stately scorn, followed by Boyne, who had apparently no words at the command of his dumb rage. Kenton wished to remain, and he looked at his wife for instruction. She frowned, and he took this for a sign that he had better go, and he went with a light sigh.

He did not know what else to do with himself, and he went down to the reading-room. He found Bittridge there, smoking a cigar, and the young man companionably offered to bestow one upon him; but the judge stiffly refused, saying he did not wish to smoke just then. He noted that Bittridge was still in his character of family favorite, and his hand trembled as he passed it over the smooth knob of his stick, while he sat waiting for the fellow to take himself away. But Bittridge had apparently no thought of going. He was looking at the amusements for the evening in a paper he had bought, and he wished to consult the judge as to which was the best theatre to go to that night; he said he wanted to take his mother. Kenton professed not to know much about the New York theatres, and then Bittridge guessed he must get the clerk to tell him. But still he did not part with the judge. He sat down beside him, and told him how glad he was to see his family looking so well, especially Miss Ellen; he could not remember ever seeing her so strong-looking. He said that girl had captured his mother, who was in love with pretty much the whole Kenton family, though.

“And by-the-way,” he added, “I want to thank you and Mrs. Kenton, judge, for the way you received my mother. You made her feel that she was among friends. She can’t talk about anything else, and I guess I sha’n’t have much trouble in making her stay in New York as long as you’re here. She was inclined to be homesick. The fact is, though I don’t care to have it talked about yet, and I wish you wouldn’t say anything to Dick about it when you write home, I think of settling in New York. I’ve been offered a show in the advertising department of one of the big dailies — I’m not at liberty to say which — and it’s a toss-up whether I stay here or go to Washington; I’ve got a chance there, too, but it’s on the staff of a new enterprise, and I’m not sure about it. I’ve brought my mother along to let her have a look at both places, though she doesn’t know it, and I’d rather you wouldn’t speak of it before her; I’m going to take her on to Washington before we go back. I want to have my mother with me, judge. It’s better for a fellow to have that home-feeling in a large place from the start; it keeps him out of a lot of things, and I don’t pretend to be better than other people, or not more superhuman. If I’ve been able to keep out of scrapes, it’s more because I’ve had my mother near me, and I don’t intend ever to be separated from her, after this, till I have a home of my own. She’s been the guiding-star of my life.”

Kenton was unable to make any formal response, and, in fact, he was so preoccupied with the question whether the fellow was more a fool or a fraud that he made no answer at all, beyond a few inarticulate grumblings of assent. These sufficed for Bittridge, apparently, for he went on contentedly: “Whenever I’ve been tempted to go a little wild, the thought of how mother would feel has kept me on the track like nothing else would. No, judge, there isn’t anything in this world like a good mother, except the right kind of a wife.”

Kenton rose, and said he believed he must go upstairs. Bittridge said, “All right; I’ll see you later, judge,” and swung easily off to advise with the clerk as to the best theatre.

VI.

Kenton was so unhappy that he could not wait for his wife to come to him in their own room; he broke in upon her and Ellen in the parlor, and at his coming the girl flitted out, in the noiseless fashion which of late had made her father feel something ghostlike in her. He was afraid she was growing to dislike him, and trying to avoid him, and now he presented himself quite humbly before his wife, as if he had done wrong in coming. He began with a sort of apology for interrupting, but his wife said it was all right, and she added, “We were not talking about anything in particular.” She was silent, and then she added again: “Sometimes I think Ellen hasn’t very fine perceptions, after all. She doesn’t seem to feel about people as I supposed she would.”

“You mean that she doesn’t feel as you would suppose about those people?”

Mrs. Kenton answered, obliquely. “She thinks it’s a beautiful thing in him to be so devoted to his mother.”

“Humph! And what does she think of his mother?”

“She thinks she has very pretty hair.”

Mrs. Kenton looked gravely down at the work she had in her hands, and Kenton did not know what to make of it all. He decided that his wife must feel, as he did, a doubt of the child’s sincerity, with sense of her evasiveness more tolerant than his own. Yet he knew that if it came to a question of forcing Ellen to do what was best for her, or forbidding her to do what was worst, his wife would have all the strength for the work, and he none. He asked her, hopelessly enough, “Do you think she still cares for him?”

“I think she wishes to give him another trial; I hope she will.” Kenton was daunted, and he showed it. “She has got to convince herself, and we have got to let her. She believes, of course, that he’s here on her account, and that flatters her. Why should she be so different from other girls?” Mrs. Kenton demanded of the angry protest in her husband’s eye.

His spirit fell, and he said, “I only wish she were more like them.”

“Well, then, she is just as headstrong and as silly, when it comes to a thing like this. Our only hope is to let her have her own way.”

“Do you suppose he cares for her, after all?”

Mrs. Kenton was silent, as if in exhaustive self-question. Then she answered: “No, I don’t in that way. But he believes he can get her.”

“Then, Sarah, I think we have a duty to the poor child. You must tell her what you have told me.”

Mrs. Kenton smiled rather bitterly, in recognition of the fact that the performance of their common duty must fall wholly to her. But she merely said: “There is no need of my telling her. She knows it already.”

“And she would take him in spite of knowing that he didn’t really care for her?”

“I don’t say that. She wouldn’t own it to herself.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“Nothing. We must let things take their course.”

They had a great deal more talk that came to the same end. They played their sad comedy, he in the part of a father determined to save his child from herself, and she in hers of resisting and withholding him. It ended as it had so often ended before — he yielded, with more faith in her wisdom than she had herself.

At luncheon the Bittridges could not join the Kentons, or be asked to do so, because the table held only four, but they stopped on their way to their own table, the mother to bridle and toss in affected reluctance, while the son bragged how he had got the last two tickets to be had that night for the theatre where he was going to take his mother. He seemed to think that the fact had a special claim on the judge’s interest, and she to wish to find out whether Mrs. Kenton approved of theatre-going. She said she would not think of going in Ballardsville, but she supposed it was more rulable in New York.

During the afternoon she called at the Kenton apartment to consult the ladies about what she ought to wear. She said she had nothing but a black ‘barege’ along, and would that do with the hat she had on? She had worn it to let them see, and now she turned her face from aide to side to give them the effect of the plumes, that fell like a dishevelled feather-duster round and over the crown. Mrs. Kenton could only say that it would do, but she believed that it was the custom now for ladies to take their hats off in the theatre.

Mrs. Bittridge gave a hoarse laugh. “Oh, dear! Then I’ll have to fix my hair two ways? I don’t know what Clarence WILL say.”

The mention of her son’s name opened the way for her to talk of him in relation to herself, and the rest of her stay passed in the celebration of his filial virtues, which had been manifest from the earliest period. She could not remember that she ever had to hit the child a lick, she said, or that he had ever made her shed a tear.

When she went, Boyne gloomily inquired, “What makes her hair so much darker at the roots than it is at the points?” and his mother snubbed him promptly.

“You had no business to be here, Boyne. I don’t like boys hanging about where ladies are talking together, and listening.”

This did not prevent Lottie from answering, directly for Boyne, and indirectly for Ellen, “It’s because it’s begun to grow since the last bleach.”

It was easier to grapple with Boyne than with Lottie, and Mrs. Kenton was willing to allow her to leave the room with her brother unrebuked. She was even willing to have had the veil lifted from Mrs. Bittridge’s hair with a rude hand, if it world help Ellen.

“I don’t want you to think, momma,” said the girl, “that I didn’t know about her hair, or that I don’t see how silly she is. But it’s all the more to his credit if he can be so good to her, and admire her. Would you like him better if he despised her?”

Mrs. Kenton felt both the defiance and the secret shame from which it sprang in her daughter’s words; and she waited for a moment before she answered, “I would like to be sure he didn’t!”

“If he does, and if he hides it from her, it’s the same as if he didn’t; it’s better. But you all wish to dislike him.”

“We don’t wish to dislike him, Ellen, goodness knows. But I don’t think he would care much whether we disliked him or not. I am sure your poor father and I would be only too glad to like him.”

“Lottie wouldn’t,” said Ellen, with a resentment her mother found pathetic, it was so feeble and aimless.

“Lottie doesn’t matter,” she said. She could not make out how nearly Ellen was to sharing the common dislike, or how far she would go in fortifying herself against it. She kept with difficulty to her negative frankness, and she let the girl leave the room with a fretful sigh, as if provoked that her mother would not provoke her further. There were moments when Mrs. Kenton believed that Ellen was sick of her love, and that she would pluck it out of her heart herself if she were left alone. She was then glad Bittridge had come, so that Ellen might compare with the reality the counterfeit presentment she had kept in her fancy; and she believed that if she could but leave him to do his worst, it would be the best for Ellen.

In the evening, directly after dinner, Bittridge sent up his name for Mrs. Kenton. The judge had remained to read his paper below, and Lottie and Boyne had gone to some friends in another apartment. It seemed to Mrs. Kenton a piece of luck that she should be able to see him alone, and she could not have said that she was unprepared for him to come in, holding his theatre-tickets explanatorily in his hand, or surprised when he began:

“Mrs. Kenton, my mother’s got a bad headache, and I’ve come to ask a favor of you. She can’t use her ticket for to-night, and I want you to let Miss Ellen come with me. Will you?”

Bittridge had constituted himself an old friend of the whole family from the renewal of their acquaintance, and Mrs. Kenton was now made aware of his being her peculiar favorite, in spite of the instant repulsion she felt, she was not averse to what he proposed. Her fear was that Ellen would be so, or that she could keep from influencing her to this test of her real feeling for Bittridge. “I will ask her, Mr. Bittridge,” she said, with a severity which was a preliminary of the impartiality she meant to use with Ellen.

“Well, that’s right,” he answered, and while she went to the girl’s room he remained examining the details of the drawing-room decorations in easy security, which Mrs. Kenton justified on her return.

“Ellen will be ready to go with you, Mr. Bittridge.”

“Well, that’s good,” said the young man, and while he talked on she sat wondering at a nature which all modesty and deference seemed left out of, though he had sometimes given evidence of his intellectual appreciation of these things. He talked to Mrs. Kenton not only as if they were in every-wise equal, but as if they were of the same age, almost of the same sex.

Ellen came in, cloaked and hatted, with her delicate face excited in prospect of the adventure; and her mother saw Bittridge look at her with more tenderness than she had ever seen in him before. “I’ll take good care of her, Mrs. Kenton,” he said, and for the first time she felt herself relent a little towards him.

A minute after they were gone Lottie bounced into the room, followed by Boyne.

“Momma!” she shouted, “Ellen isn’t going to the theatre with that fellow?”

“Yes, she is.”

“And you let her, momma! Without a chaperon?”

Boyne’s face had mirrored the indignation in his sister’s, but at this unprecedented burst of conventionality he forgot their momentary alliance. “Well, you’re a pretty one to talk about chaperons! Walking all over Tuskingum with fellows at night, and going buggy-riding with everybody, and out rowing, and here fairly begging Jim Plumpton to come down to the steamer and see you off again!”

“Shut up!” Lottie violently returned, “or I’ll tell momma how you’ve been behaving with Rita Plumpton yourself.”

“Well, tell!” Boyne defied her.

“Oh, it don’t matter what a brat of a boy says or does, anyway,” said Lottie. “But I think Ellen is disgracing the family. Everybody in the hotel is laughing at that wiggy old Mrs. Bittridge, with her wobbly eyes, and they can see that he’s just as green! The Plumptons have been laughing so about them, and I told them that we had nothing to do with them at home, and had fairly turned Bittridge out of the house, but he had impudence enough for anything; and now to find Ellen going off to the theatre with him alone!”

Lottie began to cry with vexation as she whipped out of the room, and Boyne, who felt himself drawn to her side again, said, very seriously: “Well, it ain’t the thing in New York, you know, momma; and anybody can see what a jay Bittridge is. I think it’s too bad to let her.”

“It isn’t for you to criticise your mother, Boyne,” said Mrs. Kenton, but she was more shaken than she would allow. Her own traditions were so simple that the point of etiquette which her children had urged had not occurred to her. The question whether Ellen should go with Bittridge at all being decided, she would, of course, go in New York as she would go in Tuskingum. Now Mrs. Kenton perceived that she must not, and she had her share of humiliation in the impression which his mother, as her friend, apparently, was making with her children’s acquaintances in the hotel. If they would think everybody in Tuskingum was like her, it would certainly be very unpleasant, but she would not quite own this to herself, still less to a fourteen-year-old boy. “I think what your father and I decide to be right will be sufficient excuse for you with your friends.”

“Does father know it?” Boyne asked, most unexpectedly.

Having no other answer ready, Mrs. Kenton said, “You had better go to bed, my son.”

“Well,” he grumbled, as he left the room, “I don’t know where all the pride of the Kentons is gone to.”

In his sense of fallen greatness he attempted to join Lottie in her room, but she said, “Go away, nasty thing!” and Boyne was obliged to seek his own room, where he occupied himself with a contrivance he was inventing to enable you to close your door and turn off your gas by a system of pulleys without leaving your bed, when you were tired of reading.

Mrs. Kenton waited for her husband in much less comfort, and when he came, and asked, restlessly, “Where are the children?” she first told him that Lottie and Boyne were in their rooms before she could bring herself to say that Ellen had gone to the theatre with Bittridge.

It was some relief to have him take it in the dull way he did, and to say nothing worse than, “Did you think it was well to have her!”

“You may be sure I didn’t want her to. But what would she have said if I had refused to let her go? I can tell you it isn’t an easy matter to manage her in this business, and it’s very easy for you to criticise, without taking the responsibility.”

“I’m not criticising,” said Kenton. “I know you have acted for the best.”

“The children,” said Mrs. Kenton, wishing to be justified further, “think she ought to have had a chaperon. I didn’t think of that; it isn’t the custom at home; but Lottie was very saucy about it, and I had to send Boyne to bed. I don’t think our children are very much comfort to us.”

“They are good children,” Kenton said, said — provisionally.

“Yes, that is the worst of it. If they were bad, we wouldn’t expect any comfort from them. Ellen is about perfect. She’s as near an angel as a child can be, but she could hardly have given us more anxiety if she had been the worst girl in the world.”

“That’s true,” the father sadly assented.

“She didn’t really want to go with him to-night, I’ll say that for her, and if I had said a single word against it she wouldn’t have gone. But all at once, while she sat there trying to think how I could excuse her, she began asking me what she should wear. There’s something strange about it, Rufus. If I believed in hypnotism, I should say she had gone because he willed her to go.”

“I guess she went because she wanted to go because she’s in love with him,” said Kenton, hopelessly.

“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton agreed. “I don’t see how she can endure the sight of him. He’s handsome enough,” she added, with a woman’s subjective logic. “And there’s something fascinating about him. He’s very graceful, and he’s got a good figure.”

“He’s a hound!” said Kenton, exhaustively.

“Oh yes, he’s a hound,” she sighed, as if there could be no doubt on that point. “It don’t seem right for him to be in the same room with Ellen. But it’s for her to say. I feel more and more that we can’t interfere without doing harm. I suppose that if she were not so innocent herself she would realize what he was better. But I do think he appreciates her innocence. He shows more reverence for her than for any one else.”

“How was it his mother didn’t go?” asked Kenton.

“She had a headache, he said. But I don’t believe that. He always intended to get Ellen to go. And that’s another thing Lottie was vexed about; she says everybody is laughing at Mrs. Bittridge, and it’s mortifying to have people take her for a friend of ours.”

“If there were nothing worse than that,” said Kenton, “I guess we could live through it. Well, I don’t know how it’s going to all end.”

They sat talking sadly, but finding a certain comfort in their mutual discouragement, and in their knowledge that they were doing the best they could for their child, whose freedom they must not infringe so far as to do what was absolutely best; and the time passed not so heavily till her return. This was announced by the mounting of the elevator to their landing, and then by low, rapid pleading in a man’s voice outside. Kenton was about to open the door, when there came the formless noise of what seemed a struggle, and Ellen’s voice rose in a muffed cry: “Oh! Oh! Let me be! Go away! I hate you!” Kenton the door open, and Ellen burst in, running to hide her face in her mother’s breast, where she sobbed out, “He — he kissed me!” like a terrified child more than an insulted woman. Through the open door came the clatter of Bittridge’s feet as he ran down-stairs.

VII.

When Mrs. Kenton came from quieting the hysterical girl in her room she had the task, almost as delicate and difficult, of quieting her husband. She had kept him, by the most solemn and exhaustive entreaty, from following Bittridge downstairs and beating him with his stick, and now she was answerable to him for his forbearance. “If you don’t behave yourself, Rufus,” she had to say, “you will have some sort of stroke. After all, there’s no harm done.”

“No harm! Do you call it no harm for that hound to kiss Ellen?”

“He wouldn’t have attempted it unless something had led up to it, I suppose.”

“Sarah! How can you speak so of that angel?”

“Oh, that angel is a girl like the rest. You kissed me before we were engaged.”

“That was very different.”

“I don’t see how. If your daughter is so sacred, why wasn’t her mother? You men don’t think your wives are sacred. That’s it!”

“No, no, Sarah! It’s because I don’t think of you as apart from myself, that I can’t think of you as I do of Ellen. I beg your pardon if I seemed to set her above you. But when I kissed you we were very young, and we lived in a simple day, when such things meant no harm; and I was very fond of you, and you were the holiest thing in the world to me. Is Ellen holy to that fellow?”

“I know,” Mrs. Kenton relented. “I’m not comparing him to you. And there is a difference with Ellen. She isn’t like other girls. If it had been Lottie—”

“I shouldn’t have liked it with Lottie, either,” said the major, stiffly. “But if it had been Lottie she would have boxed his ears for him, instead of running to you. Lottie can take care of herself. And I will take care of Ellen. When I see that scoundrel in the morning—”

“What will you do, an old man like you! I can tell you, it’s something you’ve just got to bear it if you don’t want the scandal to fill the whole hotel. It’s a very fortunate thing, after all. It’ll put an end to the whole affair.”

“Do you think so, Sarah? If I believed that. What does Ellen say?”

“Nothing; she won’t say anything — just cries and hides her face. I believe she is ashamed of having made a scene before us. But I know that she’s so disgusted with him that she will never look at him again, and if it’s brought her to that I should think his kissing her the greatest blessing in the world to us all. Yes, Ellen!”

Mrs. Kenton hurried off at a faint call from the girl’s room, and when she came again she sat down to a long discussion of the situation with her husband, while she slowly took down her hair and prepared it for the night. Her conclusion, which she made her husband’s, was that it was most fortunate they should be sailing so soon, and that it was the greatest pity they were not sailing in the morning. She wished him to sleep, whether she slept herself or not, and she put the most hopeful face possible upon the matter. “One thing you can rest assured of, Rufus, and that is that it’s all over with Ellen. She may never speak to you about him, and you mustn’t ever mention him, but she feels just as you could wish. Does that satisfy you? Some time I will tell you all she says.”

“I don’t care to hear,” said Kenton. “All I want is for him to keep away from me. I think if he spoke to me I should kill him.”

“Rufus!”

“I can’t help it, Sarah. I feel outraged to the bottom of my soul. I could kill him.”

Mrs. Kenton turned her head and looked steadfastly at him over her shoulder. “If you strike him, if you touch him, Mr. Kenton, you will undo everything that the abominable wretch has done for Ellen, and you will close my mouth and tie my hands. Will you promise that under no provocation whatever will you do him the least harm? I know Ellen better than you do, and I know that you will make her hate you unless—”

“Oh, I will promise. You needn’t be afraid. Lord help me!” Kenton groaned. “I won’t touch him. But don’t expect me to speak to him.”

“No, I don’t expect that. He won’t offer to speak to you.”

They slept, and in the morning she stayed to breakfast with Ellen in their apartment, and let her husband go down with their younger children. She could trust him now, whatever form his further trial should take, and he felt that he was pledging himself to her anew, when Bittridge came hilariously to meet him in the reading-room, where he went for a paper after breakfast.

“Ah, judge!” said the young man, gayly. “Hello, Boyne!” he added to the boy, who had come with his father; Lottie had gone directly up-stairs from the breakfast-room. “I hope you’re all well this morning? Play not too much for Miss Ellen?”

Kenton looked him in the face without answering, and then tried to get away from him, but Bittridge followed him up, talking, and ignoring his silence.

“It was a splendid piece, judge. You must take Mrs. Kenton. I know you’ll both like it. I haven’t ever seen Miss Ellen so interested. I hope the walk home didn’t fatigue her. I wanted to get a cab, but she would walk.” The judge kept moving on, with his head down. He did not speak, and Bittridge was forced to notice his silence. “Nothing the matter, I hope, with Miss Ellen, judge?”

“Go away,” said the judge, in a low voice, fumbling the head of his stick.

“Why, what’s up?” asked Bittridge, and he managed to get in front of Kenton and stay him at a point where Kenton could not escape. It was a corner of the room to which the old man had aimlessly tended, with no purpose but to avoid him:

“I wish you to let me alone, sir,” said Kenton at last. “I can’t speak to you.”

“I understand what you mean, judge,” said Bittridge, with a grin, all the more maddening because it seemed involuntary. “But I can explain everything. I just want a few words with you. It’s very important; it’s life or death with me, sir,” he said, trying to look grave. “Will you let me go to your rooms with you?”

Kenton made no reply.

Bittridge began to laugh. “Then let’s sit down here, or in the ladies’ parlor. It won’t take me two minutes to make everything right. If you don’t believe I’m in earnest I know you don’t think I am, but I can assure you — Will you let me speak with you about Miss Ellen?”

Still Kenton did not answer, shutting his lips tight, and remembering his promise to his wife.

Bittridge laughed, as if in amusement at what he had done. “Judge, let me say two words to you in private! If you can’t now, tell me when you can. We’re going back this evening, mother and I are; she isn’t well, and I’m not going to take her to Washington. I don’t want to go leaving you with the idea that I wanted to insult Miss Ellen. I care too much for her. I want to see you and Mrs. Kenton about it. I do, indeed. And won’t you let me see you, somewhere?”

Kenton looked away, first to one side and then to another, and seemed stifling.

“Won’t you speak to me! Won’t you answer me? See here! I’d get down on my knees to you if it would do you any good. Where will you talk with me?”

“Nowhere!” shouted Kenton. “Will you go away, or shall I strike you with my stick?”

“Oh, I don’t think,” said Bittridge, and suddenly, in the wantonness of his baffled effrontery, he raised his hand and rubbed the back of it in the old man’s face.

Boyne Kenton struck wildly at him, and Bittridge caught the boy by the arm and flung him to his knees on the marble floor. The men reading in the arm-chairs about started to their feet; a porter came running, and took hold of Bittridge. “Do you want an officer, Judge Kenton?” he panted.

“No, no!” Kenton answered, choking and trembling. “Don’t arrest him. I wish to go to my rooms, that’s all. Let him go. Don’t do anything about it.”

“I’ll help you, judge,” said the porter. “Take hold of this fellow,” he said to two other porters who came up. “Take him to the desk, and tell the clerk he struck Judge Kenton, but the judge don’t want him arrested.”

Before Kenton reached the elevator with Boyne, who was rubbing his knees and fighting back the tears, he heard the clerk’s voice saying, formally, to the porters, “Baggage out of 35 and 37” and adding, as mechanically, to Bittridge: “Your rooms are wanted. Get out of them at once!”

It seemed the gathering of neighborhood about Kenton, where he had felt himself so unfriended, against the outrage done him, and he felt the sweetness of being personally championed in a place where he had thought himself valued merely for the profit that was in him; his eyes filled, and his voice failed him in thanking the elevator-boy for running before him to ring the bell of his apartment.

VIII.

The next day, in Tuskingum, Richard, Kenton found among the letters of his last mail one which he easily knew to be from his sister Lottie, by the tightly curled-up handwriting, and by the unliterary look of the slanted and huddled address of the envelope: The only doubt he could have felt in opening it was from the unwonted length at which she had written him; Lottie usually practised a laconic brevity in her notes, which were suited to the poverty of her written vocabulary rather than the affluence of her spoken word.

  “Dear Dick” [her letter ran, tripping and stumbling in its course],

  “I have got to tell you about something that has just happened here,

  and you needent laugh at the speling, or the way I tell it, but just

  pay attention to the thing itself, if you please. That disgusting

  Bittridge has been here with his horrid wiggy old mother, and momma

  let him take Ellen to the theatre. On the way home he tried to make

  her promise she would marry him and at the door he kissed her. They

  had an awful night with her hiseterics, and I heard momma going in

  and out, and trying to comfort her till daylight, nearly. In the

  morning I went down with poppy and Boyne to breakfast, and after I

  came up, father went to the reading-room to get a paper, and that

  Bittridge was there waiting for him, and wanted to speak with him

  about Ellen. Poppa wouldent say a word to him, and he kept

  following poppa up, to make him. Boyne says be wouldent take no for

  an ansir, and hung on and hungon, till poppa threatened to hitt him

  with his cane. Then he saw it was no use, and he took his hand and

  rubbed it in poppa’s face, and Boyne believes he was trying to pull

  poppa’s nose. Boyne acted like I would have done; he pounded

  Bittridge in the back; but of course Bittridge was too strong for

  him, and threw him on the floor, and Boyne scraped his knee so that

  it bledd. Then the porters came up, and caught Bittridge, and

  wanted to send for a policeman, but father wouldent let them, and

  the porters took Bittridge to the desk and the clerk told him to get

  out instantly and they left as soon as old Wiggy could get her

  things on. I don’t know where they went, but he told poppa they

  were going home to-day any way. Now, Dick, I don’t know what you

  will want to do, and I am not going to put you up to anything, but I

  know what I would do, pretty well, the first time Bittridge showed

  himself in Tuskingum. You can do just as you please, and I don’t

  ask you to believe me if you’re think I’m so exciteable that I cant

  tell the truth. I guess Boyne will say the same. Much love to

  Mary. Your affectionate sister,

                        “Lottie.

  “P. S. — Every word Lottie says is true, but I am not sure he meant

  to pull his nose. The reason why he threw me down so easily is, I

  have grown about a foot, and I have not got up my strength. BOYNE.

  “This is strictly confidential. They don’t know we

  are writing. LATTIE.”

After reading this letter, Richard Kenton tore it into small pieces, so that there should not be even so much witness as it bore to facts that seemed to fill him with fury to the throat. His fury was, in agreement with his temperament, the white kind and cold kind. He was able to keep it to himself for that reason; at supper his wife knew merely that he had something on his mind that he did not wish to talk of; and experience had taught her that it would be useless to try making him speak.

He slept upon his wrath, and in the morning early, at an hour when he knew there would be no loafers in the place, he went to an out-dated saddler’s shop, and asked the owner, a veteran of his father’s regiment, “Welks, do you happen to have a cowhide among your antiquities?”

“Regular old style?” Welks returned. “Kind they make out of a cow’s hide and use on a man’s?”

“Something of that sort,” said Richard, with a slight smile.

The saddler said nothing more, but rummaged among the riff-raff on an upper shelf. He got down with the tapering, translucent, wicked-looking thing in his hand. “I reckon that’s what you’re after, squire.”

“Reckon it is, Welks,” said Richard, drawing it through his tubed left hand. Then he buttoned it under his coat, and paid the quarter which Welks said had always been the price of a cowhide even since he could remember, and walked away towards the station.

“How’s the old colonel” Welks called after him, having forgotten to ask before.

“The colonel’s all right,” Richard called back, without looking round.

He walked up and down in front of the station. A local train came in from Ballardsville at 8.15, and waited for the New York special, and then returned to Ballardsville. Richard had bought a ticket for that station, and was going to take the train back, but among the passengers who descended from it when it drew in was one who saved him the trouble of going.

Bittridge, with his overcoat hanging on his arm, advanced towards him with the rest, and continued to advance, in a sort of fascination, after his neighbors, with the instinct that something was about to happen, parted on either side of Richard, and left the two men confronted. Richard did not speak, but deliberately reached out his left hand, which he caught securely into Bittridge’s collar; then he began to beat him with the cowhide wherever he could strike his writhing and twisting shape. Neither uttered a word, and except for the whir of the cowhide in the air, and the rasping sound of its arrest upon the body of Bittridge, the thing was done in perfect silence. The witnesses stood well back in a daze, from which they recovered when Richard released Bittridge with a twist of the hand that tore his collar loose and left his cravat dangling, and tossed the frayed cowhide away, and turned and walked homeward. Then one of them picked up Bittridge’s hat and set it aslant on his head, and others helped pull his collar together and tie his cravat.

For the few moments that Richard Kenton remained in sight they scarcely found words coherent enough for question, and when they did, Bittridge had nothing but confused answers to give to the effect that he did not know what it meant, but he would find out. He got into a hack and had himself driven to his hotel, but he never made the inquiry which he threatened.

In his own house Richard Kenton lay down awhile, deadly sick, and his wife had to bring him brandy before he could control his nerves sufficiently to speak. Then he told her what he had done, and why, and Mary pulled off his shoes and put a hot-water bottle to his cold feet. It was not exactly the treatment for a champion, but Mary Kenton was not thinking of that, and when Richard said he still felt a little sick at the stomach she wanted him to try a drop of camphor in addition to the brandy. She said he must not talk, but she wished him so much to talk that she was glad when he began.

“It seemed to be something I had to do, Mary, but I would give anything if I had not been obliged to do it:

“Yes, I know just how you feel, Dick, and I think it’s pretty hard this has come on you. I do think Ellen might—”

“It wasn’t her fault, Mary. You mustn’t blame her. She’s had more to bear than all the rest of us.” Mary looked stubbornly unconvinced, and she was not moved, apparently, by what he went on to say. “The thing now is to keep what I’ve done from making more mischief for her.”

“What do you mean, Dick? You don’t believe he’ll do anything about it, do you?”

“No, I’m not afraid of that. His mouth is shut. But you can’t tell how Ellen will take it. She may side with him now.”

“Dick! If I thought Ellen Kenton could be such a fool as that!”

“If she’s in love with him she’ll take his part.”

“But she can’t be in love with him when she knows how he acted to your father!”

“We can’t be sure of that. I know how he acted to father; but at this minute I pity him so that I could take his part against father. And I can understand how Ellen — Anyway, I must make a clean breast of it. What day is this Thursday? And they sail Saturday! I must write—”

He lifted himself on his elbow, and made as if to throw off the shawl she had spread upon him.

“No, no! I will write, Dick! I will write to your mother. What shall I say?” She whirled about, and got the paper and ink out of her writing-desk, and sat down near him to keep him from getting up, and wrote the date, and the address, “Dear Mother Kenton,” which was the way she always began her letters to Mrs. Kenton, in order to distinguish her from her own mother. “Now what shall I say?”

“Simply this,” answered Richard. “That I knew of what had happened in New York, and when I met him this morning I cowhided him. Ugh!”

“Well, that won’t do, Dick. You’ve got to tell all about it. Your mother won’t understand.”

“Then you write what you please, and read it to me. It makes me sick to think of it.” Richard closed his eyes, and Mary wrote:

  “DEAR MOTHER KENTON, — I am sitting by Richard, writing at his

  request, about what he has done. He received a letter from New York

  telling him of the Bittridges’ performances there, and how that

  wretch had insulted and abused you all. He bought a cowhide;

  meaning to go over to Ballardsville, and use it on him there, but B.

  came over on the Accommodation this morning, and Richard met him at

  the station. He did not attempt to resist, for Richard took him

  quite by surprise. Now, Mother Kenton, you know that Richard

  doesn’t approve of violence, and the dear, sweet soul is perfectly

  broken-down by what he had to do. But he had to do it, and he

  wishes you to know at, once that he did it. He dreads the effect

  upon Ellen, and we must leave it to your judgment about telling her.

  Of course, sooner or later she must find it out. You need not be

  alarmed about Richard. He is just nauseated a little, and he will

  be all right as soon as his stomach is settled. He thinks you ought

  to have this letter before you sail, and with affectionate good-byes

  to all, in which Dick joins,

                 “Your loving daughter,

                           “Mary KENTON.”

“There! Will that do?”

“Yes, that is everything that can be said,” answered Richard, and Mary kissed him gratefully before sealing her letter.

“I will put a special delivery on it,” she said, and her precaution availed to have the letter delivered to Mrs. Kenton the evening the family left the hotel, when it was too late to make any change in their plans, but in time to give her a bad night on the steamer, in her doubt whether she ought to let the family go, with this trouble behind them.

But she would have had a bad night on the steamer in any case, with the heat, and noise, and smell of the docks; and the steamer sailed with her at six o’clock the next morning with the doubt still open in her mind. The judge had not been of the least use to her in helping solve it, and she had not been able to bring herself to attack Lottie for writing to Richard. She knew it was Lottie who had made the mischief, but she could not be sure that it was mischief till she knew its effect upon Ellen. The girl had been carried in the arms of one of the stewards from the carriage to her berth in Lottie’s room, and there she had lain through the night, speechless and sleepless.

IX.

Ellen did not move or manifest any consciousness when the steamer left her dock and moved out into the stream, or take any note of the tumult that always attends a great liner’s departure. At breakfast-time her mother came to her from one of the brief absences she made, in the hope that at each turn she should find her in a different mood, and asked if she would not have something to eat.

“I’m not hungry,” she answered. “When will it sail?”

“Why, Ellen! We sailed two hours ago, and the pilot has just left us.”

Ellen lifted herself on her elbow and stared at her. “And you let me!” she said, cruelly.

“Ellen! I will not have this!” cried her mother, frantic at the reproach. “What do you mean by my letting you? You knew that we were going to sail, didn’t you? What else did you suppose we had come to the steamer for?”

“I supposed you would let me stay, if I wanted to: But go away, momma, go away! You’re all against me — you, and poppa, and Lottie, and Boyne. Oh, dear! oh, dear!” She threw herself down in her berth and covered her face with the sheet, sobbing, while her mother stood by in an anguish of pity and anger. She wanted to beat the girl, she wanted to throw herself upon her, and weep with her in the misery which she shared with her.

Lottie came to the door of the state-room with an arm-load of long-stemmed roses, the gift of the young Mr. Plumpton, who had not had so much to be entreated to come down to the steamer and see her off as Boyne had pretended. “Momma,” she said, “I have got to leave these roses in here, whether Ellen likes it or not. Boyne won’t have them in his room, because he says the man that’s with him would have a right to object; and this is half my room, anyway.”

Mrs. Kenton frowned and shook her head, but Ellen answered from under the sheet, “I don’t mind the roses, Lottie. I wish you’d stay with me a little while.”

Lottie hesitated, having in mind the breakfast for which the horn had just sounded. But apparently she felt that one good turn deserved another, and she answered: “All right; I will, Nell. Momma, you tell Boyne to hurry, and come to Ellen as soon as he’s done, and then I will go. Don’t let anybody take my place.”

“I wish,” said Ellen, still from under the sheet, “that momma would have your breakfast sent here. I don’t want Boyne.”

Women apparently do not require any explanation of these swift vicissitudes in one another, each knowing probably in herself the nerves from which they proceed. Mrs. Kenton promptly assented, in spite of the sulky reluctance which Lottie’s blue eyes looked at her; she motioned her violently to silence, and said: “Yes, I will, Ellen. I will send breakfast for both of you.”

When she was gone, Ellen uncovered her face and asked Lottie to dip a towel in water and give it to her. As she bathed her eyes she said, “You don’t care, do you, Lottie?”

“Not very much,” said Lottie, unsparingly. “I can go to lunch, I suppose.”

“Maybe I’ll go to lunch with you,” Ellen suggested, as if she were speaking of some one else.

Lottie wasted neither sympathy nor surprise on the question. “Well, maybe that would be the best thing. Why don’t you come to breakfast?”

“No, I won’t go to breakfast. But you go.”

When Lottie joined her family in the dining-saloon she carelessly explained that Ellen had said she wanted to be alone. Before the young man, who was the only other person besides the Kentons at their table, her mother could not question her with any hope that the bad would not be made worse, and so she remained silent. Judge Kenton sat with his eyes fixed on his plate, where as yet the steward had put no breakfast for him; Boyne was supporting the dignity of the family in one of those moments of majesty from which he was so apt to lapse into childish dependence. Lottie offered him another alternative by absently laying hold of his napkin on the table.

“That’s mine,” he said, with husky gloom.

She tossed it back to him with prompt disdain and a deeply eye-lashed glance at a napkin on her right. The young man who sat next it said, with a smile, “Perhaps that’s yours-unless I’ve taken my neighbor’s.”

Lottie gave him a stare, and when she had sufficiently punished him for his temerity said, rather sweetly, “Oh, thank you,” and took the napkin.

“I hope we shall all have use for them before long,” the young man ventured again.

“Well, I should think as much,” returned the girl, and this was the beginning of a conversation which the young man shared successively with the judge and Mrs. Kenton as opportunity offered. He gave the judge his card across the table, and when the judge had read on it, “Rev. Hugh Breckon,” he said that his name was Kenton, and he introduced the young man formally to his family. Mr. Breckon had a clean-shaven face, with an habitual smile curving into the cheeks from under a long, straight nose; his chin had a slight whopper-jaw twist that was charming; his gay eyes were blue, and a full vein came down his forehead between them from his smooth hair. When he laughed, which was often, his color brightened.

Boyne was named last, and then Mr. Breckon said, with a smile that showed all his white teeth, “Oh yes, Mr. Boyne and I are friends already — ever since we found ourselves room-mates,” and but for us, as Lottie afterwards noted, they might never have known Boyne was rooming with him, and could easily have made all sorts of insulting remarks about Mr. Breckon in their ignorance.

The possibility seemed to delight Mr. Breckon; he invited her to make all the insulting remarks she could think of, any way, and professed himself a loser, so far as her real opinion was withheld from him by reason of his rashness in giving the facts away. In the electrical progress of their acquaintance she had begun walking up and down the promenade with him after they came up from breakfast; her mother had gone to Ellen; the judge had been made comfortable in his steamer-chair, and Boyne had been sent about his business.

“I will try to think some up,” she promised him, “as soon as I HAVE any real opinion of you,” and he asked her if he might consider that a beginning.

She looked at him out of her indomitable blue eyes, and said, “If it hadn’t been for your card, and the Reverend on it, I should have said you were an actor.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Breckon, with a laugh, “perhaps I am, in a way. I oughtn’t to be, of course, but if a minister ever forces himself, I suppose he’s acting.”

“I don’t see,” said Lottie, instantly availing herself of the opening, “how you can get up and pray, Sunday after Sunday, whether you feel like it or not.”

The young man said, with another laugh, but not so gay, “Well, the case has its difficulties.”

“Or perhaps you just read prayers,” Lottie sharply conjectured.

“No,” he returned, “I haven’t that advantage — if you think it one. I’m a sort of a Unitarian. Very advanced, too, I’m afraid.”

“Is that a kind of Universalist?”

“Not — not exactly. There’s an old joke — I’m not sure it’s very good — which distinguishes between the sects. It’s said that the Universalists think God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians think they are too good to be damned.” Lottie shrank a little from him. “Ah!” he cried, “you think it sounds wicked. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not clerical enough to joke about serious things.”

He looked into her face with a pretended anxiety. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, with a little scorn. “I guess if you can stand it, I can.”

“I’m not sure that I can. I’m afraid it’s more in keeping with an actor’s profession than my own. Why,” he added, as if to make a diversion, “should you have thought I was an actor?”

“I suppose because you were clean-shaved; and your pronunciation. So Englishy.”

“Is it? Perhaps I ought to be proud. But I’m not an Englishman. I am a plain republican American. May I ask if you are English?”

“Oh!” said Lottie. “As if you thought such a thing. We’re from Ohio.”

Mr. Breckon said, “Ah!” Lottie could not make out in just what sense.

By this time they were leaning on the rail of the promenade, looking over at what little was left of Long Island, and she said, abruptly: “I think I will go and see how my father is getting along.”

“Oh, do take me with you, Miss Kenton!” Mr. Breckon entreated. “I am feeling very badly about that poor old joke. I know you don’t think well of me for it, and I wish to report what I’ve been saying to your father, and let him judge me. I’ve heard that it’s hard to live up to Ohio people when you’re at your best, and I do hope you’ll believe I have not been quite at my best. Will you let me come with you?”

Lottie did not know whether he was making fun of her or not, but she said, “Oh, it’s a free country,” and allowed him to go with her.

His preface made the judge look rather grave; but when he came to the joke, Kenton laughed and said it was not bad.

“Oh, but that isn’t quite the point,” said Mr. Breckon. “The question is whether I am good in repeating it to a young lady who was seeking serious instruction on a point of theology.”

“I don’t know what she would have done with the instruction if she had got it,” said the judge, dryly, and the young man ventured in her behalf:

“It would be difficult for any one to manage, perhaps.”

“Perhaps,” Kenton assented, and Lottie could see that he was thinking Ellen would know what to do with it.

She resented that, and she was in the offence that girls feel when their elders make them the subject of comment with their contemporaries. “Well, I’ll leave you to discuss it alone. I’m going to Ellen,” she said, the young man vainly following her a few paces, with apologetic gurgles of laughter.

“That’s right,” her father consented, and then he seized the opening to speak about Ellen. “My eldest daughter is something of an invalid, but I hope we shall have her on deck before the voyage is over. She is more interested in those matters than her sister.”

“Oh!” Mr. Breckon interpolated, in a note of sympathetic interest. He could not well do more.

It was enough for Judge Kenton, who launched himself upon the celebration of Ellen’s gifts and qualities with a simple-hearted eagerness which he afterwards denied when his wife accused him of it, but justified as wholly safe in view of Mr. Breckon’s calling and his obvious delicacy of mind. It was something that such a person would understand, and Kenton was sure that he had not unduly praised the girl. A less besotted parent might have suspected that he had not deeply interested his listener, who seemed glad of the diversion operated by Boyne’s coming to growl upon his father, “Mother’s bringing Ellen up.”

“Oh, then, I mustn’t keep your chair,” said the minister, and he rose promptly from the place he had taken beside the judge, and got himself away to the other side of the ship before the judge could frame a fitting request for him to stay.

“If you had,” Mrs. Kenton declared, when he regretted this to her, “I don’t know what I would have done. It’s bad enough for him to hear you bragging about the child without being kept to help take care of her, or keep her amused, as you call it. I will see that Ellen is kept amused without calling upon strangers.” She intimated that if Kenton did not act with more self-restraint she should do little less than take Ellen ashore, and abandon him to the voyage alone. Under the intimidation he promised not to speak of Ellen again.

At luncheon, where Mr. Breckon again devoted himself to Lottie, he and Ellen vied in ignoring each other after their introduction, as far as words went. The girl smiled once or twice at what he was saying to her sister, and his glance kindled when it detected her smile. He might be supposed to spare her his conversation in her own interest, she looked so little able to cope with the exigencies of the talk he kept going.

When he addressed her she answered as if she had not been listening, and he turned back to Lottie. After luncheon he walked with her, and their acquaintance made such a swift advance that she was able to ask him if he laughed that way with everybody.

He laughed, and then he begged her pardon if he had been rude.

“Well, I don’t see what there is to laugh at so much. When you ask me a thing I tell you just what I think, and it seems to set you off in a perfect gale. Don’t you expect people to say what they think?”

“I think it’s beautiful,” said the young man, going into the gale, “and I’ve got to expecting it of you, at any rate. But — but it’s always so surprising! It isn’t what you expect of people generally, is it?”

“I don’t expect it of you,” said Lottie.

“No?” asked Mr. Breckon, in another gale. “Am I so uncandid?”

“I don’t know about uncandid. But I should say you were slippery.”

At this extraordinary criticism the young man looked graver than he had yet been able to do since the beginning of their acquaintance. He said, presently, “I wish you would explain what you mean by slippery.”

“You’re as close as a trap!”

“Really?”

“It makes me tired.”

“If you’re not too tired now I wish you would say how.”

“Oh, you understand well enough. You’ve got me to say what I think about all sorts of things, and you haven’t expressed your opinion on a single, solitary point?”

Lottie looked fiercely out to sea, turning her face so as to keep him from peering around into it in the way he had. For that reason, perhaps, he did not try to do so. He answered, seriously: “I believe you are partly right. I’m afraid I haven’t seemed quite fair. Couldn’t you attribute my closeness to something besides my slipperiness?” He began to laugh again. “Can’t you imagine my being interested in your opinions so much more than my own that I didn’t care to express mine?”

Lottie said, impatiently, “Oh, pshaw!” She had hesitated whether to say, “Rats!”

“But now,” he pursued, “if you will suggest some point on which I can give you an opinion, I promise solemnly to do so,” but he was not very solemn as he spoke.

“Well, then, I will,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s very strange, to say the least, for a minister to be always laughing so much?”

Mr. Breckon gave a peal of delight, and answered, “Yes, I certainly do.” He controlled himself so far as to say: “Now I think I’ve been pretty open with you, and I wish you’d answer me a question. Will you?”

“Well, I will — one,” said Lottie.

“It may be two or three; but I’ll begin with one. Why do you think a minister ought to be more serious than other men?”

“Why? Well, I should think you’d know. You wouldn’t laugh at a funeral, would you?”

“I’ve been at some funerals where it would have been a relief to laugh, and I’ve wanted to cry at some weddings. But you think it wouldn’t do?”

“Of course it wouldn’t. I should think you’d know as much as that,” said Lottie, out of patience with him.

“But a minister isn’t always marrying or burying people; and in the intervals, why shouldn’t he be setting them an example of harmless cheerfulness?”

“He ought to be thinking more about the other world, I should say.”

“Well, if he believes there is another world—”

“Why! Don’t you?” she broke out on him.

Mr. Breckon ruled himself and continued— “as strenuously and unquestionably as he ought, he has greater reason than other men for gayety through his faith in a happier state of being than this. That’s one of the reasons I use against myself when I think of leaving off laughing. Now, Miss Kenton,” he concluded, “for such a close and slippery nature, I think I’ve been pretty frank,” and he looked round and down into her face with a burst of laughter that could be heard an the other side of the ship. He refused to take up any serious topic after that, and he returned to his former amusement of making her give herself away.

That night Lottie came to her room with an expression so decisive in her face that Ellen, following it with vague, dark eyes as it showed itself in the glass at which her sister stood taking out the first dismantling hairpins before going to bed, could not fail of something portentous in it.

“Well,” said Lottie, with severe finality, “I haven’t got any use for THAT young man from this time out. Of all the tiresome people, he certainly takes the cake. You can have him, Ellen, if you want him.”

“What’s the matter with him?” asked Ellen, with a voice in sympathy with the slow movement of her large eyes as she lay in her berth, staring at Lottie.

“There’s everything the matter, that oughtn’t to be. He’s too trivial for anything: I like a man that’s serious about one thing in the universe, at least, and that’s just what Mr. Breckon isn’t.” She went at such length into his disabilities that by the time she returned to the climax with which she started she was ready to clamber into the upper berth; and as she snapped the electric button at its head she repeated, “He’s trivial.”

“Isn’t it getting rough?” asked Ellen. “The ship seems to be tipping.”

“Yes, it is,” said Lottie, crossly. “Good-night.”

If the Rev. Mr. Breckon was making an early breakfast in the hope of sooner meeting Lottie, who had dismissed him the night before without encouraging him to believe that she wished ever to see him again, he was destined to disappointment. The deputation sent to breakfast by the paradoxical family whose acquaintance he had made on terms of each forbidding intimacy, did not include the girl who had frankly provoked his confidence and severely snubbed it. He had left her brother very sea-sick in their state-room, and her mother was reported by her father to be feeling the motion too much to venture out. The judge was, in fact, the only person at table when Breckon sat down; but when he had accounted for his wife’s absence, and confessed that he did not believe either of his daughters was coming, Ellen gainsaid him by appearing and advancing quite steadily along the saloon to the place beside him. It had not gone so far as this in the judge’s experience of a neurotic invalid without his learning to ask her no questions about herself. He had always a hard task in refraining, but he had grown able to refrain, and now he merely looked unobtrusively glad to see her, and asked her where Lottie was.

“Oh, she doesn’t want any breakfast, she says. Is momma sick, too? Where’s Boyne?”

The judge reported as to her mother, and Mr. Breckon, after the exchange of a silent salutation with the girl, had a gleeful moment in describing Boyne’s revolt at the steward’s notion of gruel. “I’m glad to see you so well, Miss Kenton,” he concluded.

“I suppose I will be sick, too, if it gets rougher,” she said, and she turned from him to give a rather compendious order to the table steward.

“Well, you’ve got an appetite, Ellen,” her father ventured.

“I don’t believe I will eat anything,” she checked him, with a falling face.

Breckon came to the aid of the judge. “If you’re not sick now, I prophesy you won’t be, Miss Kenton. It can’t get much rougher, without doing something uncommon.”

“Is it a storm?” she asked, indifferently.

“It’s what they call half a gale, I believe. I don’t know how they measure it.”

She smiled warily in response to his laugh, and said to her father, “Are you going up after breakfast, poppa?”

“Why, if you want to go, Ellen—”

“Oh, I wasn’t asking for that; I am going back to Lottie. But I should think you would like the air. Won’t it do you good?”

“I’m all right,” said the judge, cheered by her show of concern for some one else. “I suppose it’s rather wet on deck?” he referred himself to Breckon.

“Well, not very, if you keep to the leeward. She doesn’t seem a very wet boat.”

“What is a wet boat” Ellen asked, without lifting her sad eyes.

“Well, really, I’m afraid it’s largely a superstition. Passengers like to believe that some boats are less liable to ship seas — to run into waves — than others; but I fancy that’s to give themselves the air of old travellers.”

She let the matter lapse so entirely that he supposed she had forgotten it in all its bearings, when she asked, “Have you been across many times?”

“Not many-four or five.”

“This is our first time,” she volunteered.

“I hope it won’t be your last. I know you will enjoy it.” She fell listless again, and Breckon imagined he had made a break. “Not,” he added, with an endeavor for lightness, “that I suppose you’re going for pleasure altogether. Women, nowadays, are above that, I understand. They go abroad for art’s sake, and to study political economy, and history, and literature—”

“My daughter,” the judge interposed, “will not do much in that way, I hope.”

The girl bent her head over her plate and frowned.

“Oh, then,” said Breckon, “I will believe that she’s going for purely selfish enjoyment. I should like to be justified in making that my object by a good example.”

Ellen looked up and gave him a look that cut him short in his glad note. The lifting of her eyelids was like the rise of the curtain upon some scene of tragedy which was all the more impressive because it seemed somehow mixed with shame. This poor girl, whom he had pitied as an invalid, was a sufferer from some spiritual blight more pathetic than broken health. He pulled his mind away from the conjecture that tempted it and went on: “One of the advantages of going over the fourth or fifth time is that you’re relieved from a discoverer’s duties to Europe. I’ve got absolutely nothing before me now, but at first I had to examine every object of interest on the Continent, and form an opinion about thousands of objects that had no interest for me. I hope Miss Kenton will take warning from me.”

He had not addressed Ellen directly, and her father answered: “We have no definite plans as yet, but we don’t mean to overwork ourselves even if we’ve come for a rest. I don’t know,” he added, “but we had better spend our summer in England. It’s easier getting about where you know the language.”

The judge seemed to refer his ideas to Breckon for criticism, and the young man felt authorized to say, “Oh, so many of them know the language everywhere now, that it’s easy getting about in any country.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” the judge vaguely deferred.

“Which,” Ellen demanded of the young man with a nervous suddenness, “do you think is the most interesting country?”

He found himself answering with equal promptness, “Oh, Italy, of course.”

“Can we go to Italy, poppa?” asked the girl.

“I shouldn’t advise you to go there at once” Breckon intervened, smiling. “You’d find it Pretty hot there now. Florence, or Rome, or Naples — you can’t think of them.”

“We have it pretty hot in Central Ohio,” said the judge, with latent pride in his home climate, “What sort of place is Holland?”

“Oh, delightful! And the boat goes right on to Rotterdam, you know.”

“Yes. We had arranged to leave it at Boulogne,” but we could change. “Do you think your mother would like Holland?” The judge turned to his daughter.

“I think she would like Italy better. She’s read more about it,” said the girl.

“Rise of the Dutch Republic,” her father suggested.

“Yes, I know. But she’s read more about Italy!”

“Oh, well,” Breckon yielded, “the Italian lakes wouldn’t be impossible. And you might find Venice fairly comfortable.”

“We could go to Italy, then,” said the judge to his daughter, “if your mother prefers.”

Breckon found the simplicity of this charming, and he tasted a yet finer pleasure in the duplicity; for he divined that the father was seeking only to let his daughter have her way in pretending to yield to her mother’s preference.

It was plain that the family’s life centred, as it ought, about this sad, sick girl, the heart of whose mystery he perceived, on reflection, he had not the wish to pluck out. He might come to know it, but he would not try to know it; if it offered itself he might even try not to know it. He had sometimes found it more helpful with trouble to be ignorant of its cause.

In the mean time he had seen that these Kentons were sweet, good people, as he phrased their quality to himself. He had come to terms of impersonal confidence the night before with Boyne, who had consulted him upon many more problems and predicaments of life than could have yet beset any boy’s experience, probably with the wish to make provision for any possible contingency of the future. The admirable principles which Boyne evolved for his guidance from their conversation were formulated with a gravity which Breckon could outwardly respect only by stifling his laughter in his pillow. He rather liked the way Lottie had tried to weigh him in her balance and found him, as it were, of an imponderable levity. With his sense of being really very light at most times, and with most people, he was aware of having been particularly light with Lottie, of having been slippery, of having, so far as responding to her frankness was concerned, been close. He relished the unsparing honesty with which she had denounced him, and though he did not yet know his outcast condition with relation to her, he could not think of her without a smile of wholly disinterested liking. He did not know, as a man of earlier date would have known, all that the little button in the judge’s lapel meant; but he knew that it meant service in the civil war, a struggle which he vaguely and impersonally revered, though its details were of much the same dimness for him as those of the Revolution and the War of 1812. The modest distrust which had grown upon the bold self-confidence of Kenton’s earlier manhood could not have been more tenderly and reverently imagined; and Breckon’s conjecture of things suffered for love’s sake against sense and conviction in him were his further tribute to a character which existed, of course, mainly in this conjecture. It appeared to him that Kenton was held not only in the subjection to his wife’s, judgment, which befalls, and doubtless becomes, a man after many years of marriage, but that he was in the actual performance of more than common renunciation of his judgment in deference to the good woman. She in turn, to be sure, offered herself a sacrifice to the whims of the sick girl, whose worst whim was having no wish that could be ascertained, and who now, after two days of her mother’s devotion, was cast upon her own resources by the inconstant barometer. It had become apparent that Miss Kenton was her father’s favorite in a special sense, and that his partial affection for her was of much older date than her mother’s. Not less charming than her fondness for her father was the openness with which she disabled his wisdom because of his partiality to her.

X

When they left the breakfast table the first morning of the rough weather, Breckon offered to go on deck with Miss Kenton, and put her where she could see the waves. That had been her shapeless ambition, dreamily expressed with reference to some time, as they rose. Breckon asked, “Why not now?” and he promised to place her chair on deck where she could enjoy the spectacle safe from any seas the boat might ship. Then she recoiled, and she recoiled the further upon her father’s urgence. At the foot of the gangway she looked wistfully up the reeling stairs, and said that she saw her shawl and Lottie’s among the others solemnly swaying from the top railing. “Oh, then,” Breckon pressed her, “you could be made comfortable without the least trouble.”

“I ought to go and see how Lottie is getting along,” she murmured.

Her father said he would see for her, and on this she explicitly renounced her ambition of going up. “You couldn’t do anything,” she said, coldly.

“If Miss Lottie is very sea-sick she’s beyond all earthly aid,” Breckon ventured. “She’d better be left to the vain ministrations of the stewardess.”

Ellen looked at him in apparent distrust of his piety, if not of his wisdom. “I don’t believe I could get up the stairs,” she said.

“Well,” he admitted, “they’re not as steady as land — going stairs.” Her father discreetly kept silence, and, as no one offered to help her, she began to climb the crazy steps, with Breckon close behind her in latent readiness for her fall.

From the top she called down to the judge, “Tell momma I will only stay a minute.” But later, tucked into her chair on the lee of the bulkhead, with Breckon bracing himself against it beside her, she showed no impatience to return. “Are they never higher than that” she required of him, with her wan eyes critically on the infinite procession of the surges.

“They must be,” Breckon answered, “if there’s any truth in common report. I’ve heard of their running mountains high. Perhaps they used rather low mountains to measure them by. Or the measurements may not have been very exact. But common report never leaves much to the imagination.”

“That was the way at Niagara,” the girl assented; and Breckon obligingly regretted that he had never been there. He thought it in good taste that she should not tell him he ought to go. She merely said, “I was there once with poppa,” and did not press her advantage. “Do they think,” she asked, “that it’s going to be a very long voyage?”

“I haven’t been to the smoking-room — that’s where most of the thinking is done on such points; the ship’s officers never seem to know about it — since the weather changed. Should you mind it greatly?”

“I wouldn’t care if it never ended,” said the girl, with such a note of dire sincerity that Breckon instantly changed his first mind as to her words implying a pose. She took any deeper implication from them in adding, “I didn’t know I should like being at sea.”

“Well, if you’re not sea-sick,” he assented, “there are not many pleasanter things in life.”

She suggested, “I suppose I’m not well enough to be sea-sick.” Then she seemed to become aware of something provisional in his attendance, and she said, “You mustn’t stay on my account. I can get down when I want to.”

“Do let me stay,” he entreated, “unless you’d really rather not,” and as there was no chair immediately attainable, he crouched on the deck beside hers.

“It makes me think,” she said, and he perceived that she meant the sea, “of the cold-white, heavy plunging foam in ‘The Dream of Fair Women.’ The words always seemed drenched!”

“Ah, Tennyson, yes,” said Breckon, with a disposition to smile at the simple-heartedness of the literary allusion. “Do young ladies read poetry much in Ohio?”

“I don’t believe they do,” she answered. “Do they anywhere?”

“That’s one of the things I should like to know. Is Tennyson your favorite poet?”

“I don’t believe I have any,” said Ellen. “I used to like Whither, and Emerson; aid Longfellow, too.”

“Used to! Don’t you now?”

“I don’t read them so much now,” and she made a pause, behind which he fancied her secret lurked. But he shrank from knowing it if he might.

“You’re all great readers in your family,” he suggested, as a polite diversion.

“Lottie isn’t,” she answered, dreamily. “She hates it.”

“Ah, I referred more particularly to the others,” said Breckon, and he began to laugh, and then checked himself. “Your mother, and the judge — and your brother—”

“Boyne reads about insects,” she admitted.

“He told me of his collection of cocoons. He seems to be afraid it has suffered in his absence.”

“I’m afraid it has,” said Ellen, and then remained silent.

“There!” the young man broke out, pointing seaward. “That’s rather a fine one. Doesn’t that realize your idea of something mountains high? Unless your mountains are very high in Ohio!”

“It is grand. And the gulf between! But we haven’t any in our part. It’s all level. Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?”

“Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to begin counting.”

“Yes,” said the girl, and she added, vaguely: “I suppose it’s like everything else in that. We have to make-believe before we can believe anything.”

“Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary,” Breckon assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. “We shouldn’t have the atomic theory without it.” She did not say anything, and he decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading. He tried to be more concrete. “We have to make-believe in ourselves before we can believe, don’t we? And then we sometimes find we are wrong!” He laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:

“And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in yourself?”

“That’s what I’m trying to decide,” he replied. “Sometimes I feel like renouncing myself altogether; but usually I give myself another chance. I dare say if I hadn’t been so forbearing I might have agreed with your sister about my unfitness for the ministry.”

“With Lottie?”

“She thinks I laugh too much!”

“I don’t see why a minister shouldn’t laugh if he feels like it. And if there’s something to laugh at.”

“Ah, that’s just the point! Is there ever anything to laugh at? If we looked closely enough at things, oughtn’t we rather to cry?” He laughed in retreat from the serious proposition. “But it wouldn’t do to try making each other cry instead of laugh, would it? I suppose your sister would rather have me cry.”

“I don’t believe Lottie thought much about it,” said Ellen; and at this point Mr. Breckon yielded to an impulse.

“I should think I had really been of some use if I had made you laugh, Miss Kenton.”

“Me?”

“You look as if you laughed with your whole heart when you did laugh.”

She glanced about, and Breckon decided that she had found him too personal. “I wonder if I could walk, with the ship tipping so?” she asked.

“Well, not far,” said Breckon, with a provisional smile, and then he was frightened from his irony by her flinging aside her wraps and starting to her feet. Before he could scramble to his own, she had slid down the reeling promenade half to the guard, over which she seemed about to plunge. He hurled himself after her; he could not have done otherwise; and it was as much in a wild clutch for support as in a purpose to save her that he caught her in his arms and braced himself against the ship’s slant. “Where are you going? What are you trying to do?” he shouted.

“I wanted to go down-stairs,” she protested, clinging to him.

“You were nearer going overboard,” he retorted. “You shouldn’t have tried.” He had not fully formulated his reproach when the ship righted herself with a counter-roll and plunge, and they were swung staggering back together against the bulkhead. The door of the gangway was within reach, and Breckon laid hold of the rail beside it and put the girl within. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No, no; I’m not hurt,” she panted, sinking on the cushioned benching where usually rows of semi-sea-sick people were lying.

“I thought you might have been bruised against the bulkhead,” he said. “Are you sure you’re not hurt that I can’t get you anything? From the steward, I mean?”

“Only help me down-stairs,” she answered. “I’m perfectly well,” and Breckon was so willing on these terms to close the incident that he was not aware of the bruise on his own arm, which afterwards declared itself in several primitive colors. “Don’t tell them,” she added. “I want to come up again.”

“Why, certainly not,” he consented; but Boyne Kenton, who had been an involuntary witness of the fact from a point on the forward promenade, where he had stationed himself to study the habits of the stormy petrel at a moment so favorable to the acquaintance of the petrel (having left a seasick bed for the purpose), was of another mind. He had been alarmed, and, as it appeared in the private interview which he demanded of his mother, he had been scandalized.

“It is bad enough the way Lottie is always going on with fellows. And now, if Ellen is going to begin!”

“But, Boyne, child,” Mrs. Kenton argued, in an equilibrium between the wish to laugh at her son and the wish to box his ears, “how could she help his catching her if he was to save her from pitching overboard?”

“That’s just it! He will always think that she did it just so he would have to catch her.”

“I don’t believe any one would think that of Ellen,” said Mrs. Kenton, gravely.

“Momma! You don’t know what these Eastern fellows are. There are so few of them that they’re used to having girls throw themselves at them, and they will think anything, ministers and all. You ought to talk to Ellen, and caution her. Of course, she isn’t like Lottie; but if Lottie’s been behaving her way with Mr. Breckon, he must suppose the rest of the family is like her.”

“Boyne,” said his mother, provisionally, “what sort of person is Mr. Breckon?”

“Well, I think he’s kind of frivolous.”

“Do you, Boyne?”

“I don’t suppose he means any harm by it, but I don’t like to see a minister laugh so much. I can’t hardly get him to talk seriously about anything. And I just know he makes fun of Lottie. I don’t mean that he always makes fun with me. He didn’t that night at the vaudeville, where I first saw him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember? I told you about it last winter.”

“And was Mr. Breckon that gentleman?”

“Yes; but he didn’t know who I was when we met here.”

“Well, upon my word, Boyne, I think you might have told us before,” said his mother, in not very definite vexation. “Go along, now!”

Boyne stood talking to his mother, with his hands, which he had not grown to, largely planted on the jambs of her state-room door. She was keeping her berth, not so much because she was sea-sick as because it was the safest place in the unsteady ship to be in. “Do you want me to send Ellen to you!”

“I will attend to Ellen, Boyne,” his mother snubbed him. “How is Lottie?”

“I can’t tell whether she’s sick or not. I went to see about her and she motioned me away, and fairly screamed when I told her she ought to keep out in the air. Well, I must be going up again myself, or—”

Before lunch, Boyne had experienced the alternative which he did not express, although his theory and practice of keeping in the open air ought to have rendered him immune. Breckon saw his shock of hair, and his large eyes, like Ellen’s in their present gloom, looking out of it on the pillow of the upper berth, when he went to their room to freshen himself for the luncheon, and found Boyne averse even to serious conversation: He went to lunch without him. None of the Kentons were at table, and he had made up his mind to lunch alone when Ellen appeared, and came wavering down the aisle to the table. He stood up to help her, but seeing how securely she stayed herself from chair to chair he sank down again.

“Poppy is sick, too, now,” she replied, as if to account for being alone.

“And you’re none the worse for your little promenade?” The steward came to Breckon’s left shoulder with a dish, and after an effort to serve himself from it he said, with a slight gasp, “The other side, please.” Ellen looked at him, but did not speak, and he made haste to say: “The doctor goes so far as to admit that its half a gale. I don’t know just what measure the first officer would have for it. But I congratulate you on a very typical little storm, Miss Kenton; perfectly safe, but very decided. A great many people cross the Atlantic without anything half as satisfactory. There is either too much or too little of this sort of thing.” He went on talking about the weather, and had got such a distance from the point of beginning that he had cause to repent being brought back to it when she asked:

“Did the doctor think, you were hurt?”

“Well, perhaps I ought to be more ashamed than I am,” said Breckon. “But I thought I had better make sure. And it’s only a bruise—”

“Won’t you let ME help you!” she asked, as another dish intervened at his right. “I hurt you.”

Breckon laughed at her solemn face and voice. “If you’ll exonerate yourself first,” he answered: “I couldn’t touch a morsel that conveyed confession of the least culpability on your part. Do you consent? Otherwise, I pass this dish. And really I want some!”

“Well,” she sadly consented, and he allowed her to serve his plate.

“More yet, please,” he said. “A lot!”

“Is that enough?”

“Well, for the first helping. And don’t offer to cut it up for me! My proud spirit draws the line at cutting up. Besides, a fork will do the work with goulash.”

“Is that what it is?” she asked, but not apparently because she cared to know.

“Unless you prefer to naturalize it as stew. It seems to have come in with the Hungarian bands. I suppose you have them in—”

“Tuskingum? No, it is too small. But I heard them at a restaurant in New York where my brother took us.”

“In the spirit of scientific investigation? It’s strange how a common principle seems to pervade both the Hungarian music and cooking — the same wandering airs and flavors — wild, vague, lawless harmonies in both. Did you notice it?”

Ellen shook her head. The look of gloom which seemed to Breckon habitual in it came back into her face, and he had a fantastic temptation to see how far he could go with her sad consciousness before she should be aware that he was experimenting upon it. He put this temptation from him, and was in the enjoyment of a comfortable self-righteousness when it returned in twofold power upon him with the coming of some cutlets which capriciously varied the repast.

“Ah, now, Miss Kenton, if you were to take pity on my helplessness!”

“Why, certainly!” She possessed herself of his plate, and began to cut up the meat for him. “Am I making the bites too small?” she asked, with an upward glance at him.

“Well, I don’t know. Should you think so?” he returned, with a smile that out-measured the morsels on the plate before her.

She met his laughing eyes with eyes that questioned his honesty, at first sadly, and then indignantly. She dropped the knife and fork upon the plate and rose.

“Oh, Miss Kenton!” he penitently entreated.

But she was down the slanting aisle and out of the reeling door before he could decide what to do.

XI.

It seemed to Breckon that he had passed through one of those accessions of temperament, one of those crises of natural man, to put it in the terms of an older theology than he professed, that might justify him in recurring to his original sense of his unfitness for his sacred calling, as he would hardly ham called it: He had allowed his levity to get the better of his sympathy, and his love of teasing to overpower that love of helping which seemed to him his chief right and reason for being a minister: To play a sort of poor practical joke upon that melancholy girl (who was also so attractive) was not merely unbecoming to him as a minister; it was cruel; it was vulgar; it was ungentlemanly. He could not say less than ungentlemanly, for that seemed to give him the only pang that did him any good. Her absolute sincerity had made her such an easy prey that he ought to have shrunk from the shabby temptation in abhorrence.

It is the privilege of a woman, whether she wills it or not, to put a man who is in the wrong concerning her much further in the wrong than he could be from his offence. Breckon did not know whether he was suffering more or less because he was suffering quite hopelessly, but he was sure that he was suffering justly, and he was rather glad, if anything, that he must go on suffering. His first impulse had been to go at once to Judge Kenton and own his wrong, and take the consequences — in fact, invite them. But Breckon forbore for two reasons: one, that he had already appeared before the judge with the confession of having possibly made an unclerical joke to his younger daughter; the other, that the judge might not consider levity towards the elder so venial; and though Breckon wished to be both punished and pardoned, in the final analysis, perhaps, he most wished to be pardoned. Without pardon he could see no way to repair the wrong he had done. Perhaps he wished even to retrieve himself in the girl’s eyes, or wished for the chance of trying.

Ellen went away to her state-room and sat down on the sofa opposite Lottie, and she lost herself in a muse in which she was found by the voice of the sufferer in the berth.

“If you haven’t got anything better to do than come in here and stare at me, I wish you would go somewhere else and stare. I can tell you it isn’t any joke.”

“I didn’t know I was staring at you,” said Ellen, humbly.

“It would be enough to have you rising and sinking there, without your staring at all: If you’re going to stay, I wish you’d lie down. I don’t see why you’re so well, anyway, after getting us all to come on this wild-goose chase.”

“I know, I know,” Ellen strickenly deprecated. “But I’m not going to stay. I jest came for my things.”

“Is that giggling simpleton sick? I hope he is!”

“Mr. Breckon?” Ellen asked, though she knew whom Lottie meant. “No, he isn’t sick. He was at lunch.”

“Was poppa?”

“He was at breakfast.”

“And momma?”

“She and Boyne are both in bed. I don’t know whether they’re very sick.”

“Well, then, I’ll just tell you what, Ellen Kenton!” Lottie sat up in accusal. “You were staring at something he said; and the first thing we all know it will be another case of Bittridge!” Ellen winced, but Lottie had no pity. “You don’t know it, because you don’t know anything, and I’m not blaming you; but if you let that simpleton — I don’t care if he is a minister! — go ‘round with you when your family are all sick abed, you’ll be having the whole ship to look after you.”

“Be still, Lottie!” cried Ellen. “You are awful,” and, with a flaming face, she escaped from the state-room.

She did not know where else to go, and she beat along the sides of the corridor as far as the dining-saloon. She had a dim notion of trying to go up into the music-room above, but a glance at the reeling steep of the stairs forbade. With her wraps on her arm and her sea-cap in her hand, she stood clinging to the rail-post.

Breckon came out of the saloon. “Oh, Miss Kenton,” he humbly entreated, “don’t try to go on deck! It’s rougher than ever.”

“I was going to the music-room,” she faltered.

“Let me help you, then,” he said again. They mounted the gangway-steps, but this time with his hand under her elbow, and his arm alert as before in a suspended embrace against her falling.

She had lost the initiative of her earlier adventure; she could only submit herself to his guidance. But he almost outdid her in meekness, when he got her safely placed in a corner whence she could not be easily flung upon the floor. “You must have found it very stuffy below; but, indeed, you’d better not try going out.”

“Do you think it isn’t safe here?” she asked.

“Oh yes. As long as you keep quiet. May I get you something to read? They seem to have a pretty good little library.”

They both glanced at the case of books; from which the steward-librarian was setting them the example of reading a volume.

“No, I don’t want to read. You musn’t let me keep you from it.”

“Well, one can read any time. But one hasn’t always the chance to say that one is ashamed. Don’t pretend you don’t understand, Miss Kenton! I didn’t really mean anything. The temptation to let you exaggerate my disability was too much for me. Say that you despise me! It would be such a comfort.”

“Weren’t you hurt?”

“A little — a little more than a little, but not half so much as I deserved — not to the point of not being able to cut up my meat. Am I forgiven? I’ll promise to cut up all your meat for you at dinner! Ah, I’m making it worse!”

“Oh no. Please don’t speak of it”

“Could you forbid my thinking of it, too?” He did not wait for her to answer. “Then here goes! One, two, three, and the thought is banished forever. Now what shall we speak of, or think of? We finished up the weather pretty thoroughly this morning. And if you have not the weather and the ship’s run when you’re at sea, why, you are at sea. Don’t you think it would be a good plan, when they stick those little flags into the chart, to show how far we’ve come in the last twenty-four hours, if they’d supply a topic for the day? They might have topics inscribed on the flags-standard topics, that would serve for any voyage. We might leave port with History — say, personal history; that would pave the way to a general acquaintance among the passengers. Then Geography, and if the world is really round, and what keeps the sea from spilling. Then Politics, and the comparative advantages of monarchical and republican governments, for international discussion. Then Pathology, and whether you’re usually sea-sick, and if there is any reliable remedy. Then — for those who are still up — Poetry and Fiction; whether women really like Kipling, and what kind of novels you prefer. There ought to be about ten topics. These boats are sometimes very slow. Can’t you suggest something, Miss Kenton? There is no hurry! We’ve got four to talk over, for we must bring up the arrears, you know. And now we’ll begin with personal history. Your sister doesn’t approve of me, does she?”

“My sister?” Ellen faltered, and, between the conscience to own the fact and the kindness to deny it, she stopped altogether.

“I needn’t have asked. She told me so herself, in almost as many words. She said I was slippery, and as close as a trap. Miss Kenton! I have the greatest wish to know whether I affect you as both slippery and close!”

“I don’t always know what Lottie means.”

“She means what she says; and I feel that I am under condemnation till I reform. I don’t know how to stop being slippery, but I’m determined to stop being close. Will you tell her that for me? Will you tell her that you never met an opener, franker person? — of course, except herself! — and that so far from being light I seemed to you particularly heavy? Say that I did nothing but talk about myself, and that when you wanted to talk about yourself you couldn’t get in a word edgewise. Do try, now, Miss Kenton, and see if you can! I don’t want you to invent a character for me, quite.”

“Why, there’s nothing to say about me,” she began in compliance with his gayety, and then she fell helpless from it.

“Well, then, about Tuskingum. I should like to hear about Tuskingum, so much!”

“I suppose we like it because we’ve always lived there. You haven’t been much in the West, have you?”

“Not as much as I hope to be.” He had found that Western people were sometimes sensitive concerning their section and were prepared to resent complacent ignorance of it. “I’ve always thought it must be very interesting.”

“It isn’t,” said the girl. “At least, not like the East. I used to be provoked when the lecturers said anything like that; but when you’ve been to New York you see what they mean.”

“The lecturers?” he queried.

“They always stayed at our house when they lectured in Tuskingum.”

“Ah! Oh yes,” said Breckon, grasping a situation of which he had heard something, chiefly satirical. “Of course. And is your father — is Judge Kenton literary? Excuse me!”

“Only in his history. He’s writing the history of his regiment; or he gets the soldiers to write down all they can remember of the war, and then he puts their stories together.”

“How delightful!” said Breckon. “And I suppose it’s a great pleasure to him.”

“I don’t believe it is,” said Ellen. “Poppa doesn’t believe in war any more.”

“Indeed!” said Breckon. “That is very interesting.”

“Sometimes when I’m helping him with it—”

“Ah, I knew you must help him!”

“And he comes to a place where there has been a dreadful slaughter, it seems as if he felt worse about it than I did. He isn’t sure that it wasn’t all wrong. He thinks all war is wrong now.”

“Is he — has he become a follower of Tolstoy?”

“He’s read him. He says he’s the only man that ever gave a true account of battles; but he had thought it all out for himself before he read Tolstoy about fighting. Do you think it is right to revenge an injury?”

“Why, surely not!” said Breckon, rather startled.

“That is what we say,” the girl pursued. “But if some one had injured you — abused your confidence, and — insulted you, what would you do?”

“I’m not sure that I understand,” Breckon began. The inquiry was superficially impersonal, but he reflected that women are never impersonal, or the sons of women, for that matter, and he suspected an intimate ground. His suspicions were confirmed when Miss Kenton said: “It seems easy enough to forgive anything that’s done to yourself; but if it’s done to some one else, too, have you the right — isn’t it wrong to let it go?”

“You think the question of justice might come in then? Perhaps it ought. But what is justice? And where does your duty begin to be divided?” He saw her following him with alarming intensity, and he shrank from the responsibility before him. What application might not she make of his words in the case, whatever it was, which he chose not to imagine? “To tell you the truth, Miss Kenton, I’m not very clear on that point — I’m not sure that I’m disinterested.”

“Disinterested?”

“Yes; you know that I abused your confidence at luncheon; and until I know whether the wrong involved any one else—” He looked at her with hovering laughter in his eyes which took wing at the reproach in hers. “But if we are to be serious—”

“Oh no,” she said, “it isn’t a serious matter.” But in the helplessness of her sincerity she could not carry it off lightly, or hide from him that she was disappointed.

He tried to make talk about other things. She responded vaguely, and when she had given herself time she said she believed she would go to Lottie; she was quite sure she could get down the stairs alone. He pursued her anxiously, politely, and at the head of her corridor took leave of her with a distinct sense of having merited his dismissal.

“I see what you mean, Lottie,” she said, “about Mr. Breckon.”

Lottie did not turn her head on the pillow. “Has it taken you the whole day to find it out?”

XII.

The father and the mother had witnessed with tempered satisfaction the interest which seemed to be growing up between Ellen and the young minister. By this time they had learned not to expect too much of any turn she might take; she reverted to a mood as suddenly as she left it. They could not quite make out Breckon himself; he was at least as great a puzzle to them as their own child was.

“It seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, in their first review of the affair, after Boyne had done a brother’s duty in trying to bring Ellen under their mother’s censure, “that he was the gentleman who discussed the theatre with Boyne at the vaudeville last winter. Boyne just casually mentioned it. I was so provoked!”

“I don’t see what bearing the fact has,” the judge remarked.

“Why, Boyne liked him very much that night, but now he seems to feel very much as Lottie does about him. He thinks he laughs too much.”

“I don’t know that there’s much harm in that,” said the judge. “And I shouldn’t value Boyne’s opinion of character very highly.”

“I value any one’s intuitions — especially children’s.”

“Boyne’s in that middle state where he isn’t quite a child. And so is Lottie, for that matter.”

“That is true,” their mother assented. “And we ought to be glad of anything that takes Ellen’s mind off herself. If I could only believe she was forgetting that wretch!”

“Does she ever speak of him?”

“She never hints of him, even. But her mind may be full of him all the time.”

The judge laughed impatiently. “It strikes me that this young Mr. Breckon hasn’t much advantage of Ellen in what Lottie calls closeness!”

“Ellen has always been very reserved. It would have been better for her if she hadn’t. Oh, I scarcely dare to hope anything! Rufus, I feel that in everything of this kind we are very ignorant and inexperienced.”

“Inexperienced!” Renton retorted. “I don’t want any more experience of the kind Ellen has given us.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean — this Mr. Breckon. I can’t tell what attracts him in the child. She must appear very crude and uncultivated to him. You needn’t resent it so! I know she’s read a great deal, and you’ve made her think herself intellectual — but the very simple-heartedness of the way she would show out her reading would make such a young man see that she wasn’t like the girls he was used to. They would hide their intellectuality, if they had any. It’s no use your trying to fight it Mr. Kenton. We are country people, and he knows it.”

“Tuskingum isn’t country!” the judge declared.

“It isn’t city. And we don’t know anything about the world, any of us. Oh, I suppose we can read and write! But we don’t know the a, b, c of the things he, knows. He, belongs to a kind of society — of people — in New York that I had glimpses of in the winter, but that I never imagined before. They made me feel very belated and benighted — as if I hadn’t, read or thought anything. They didn’t mean to; but I couldn’t help it, and they couldn’t.”

“You — you’ve been frightened out of your propriety by what you’ve seen in New York,” said her husband.

“I’ve been frightened, certainly. And I wish you had been, too. I wish you wouldn’t be so conceited about Ellen. It scares me to see you so. Poor, sick thing, her looks are all gone! You must see that. And she doesn’t dress like the girls he’s used to. I know we’ve got her things in New York; but she doesn’t wear them like a New-Yorker. I hope she isn’t going in for MORE unhappiness!”

At the thought of this the judge’s crest fell. “Do you believe she’s getting interested in him?” he asked, humbly.

“No, no; I don’t say that. But promise me you won’t encourage her in it. And don’t, for pity’s sake, brag about her to him.”

“No, I won’t,” said the judge, and he tacitly repented having done so.

The weather had changed, and when he went up from this interview with his wife in their stateroom he found a good many people strung convalescently along the promenade on their steamer-chairs. These, so far as they were women, were of such sick plainness that when he came to Ellen his heart throbbed with a glad resentment of her mother’s aspersion of her health and beauty. She looked not only very well, and very pretty, but in a gay red cap and a trig jacket she looked, to her father’s uncritical eyes, very stylish. The glow left his heart at eight of the empty seat beside her.

“Where is Lottie?” he asked, though it was not Lottie’s whereabouts that interested him.

“Oh, she’s walking with Mr. Breckon somewhere,” said Ellen.

“Then she’s made up her mind to tolerate him, has she?” the father asked, more lightly than he felt.

Ellen smiled. “That wasn’t anything very serious, I guess. At any rate, she’s walking with him.”

“What book is that?” he asked, of the volume she was tilting back and forth under her hand.

She showed it. “One of his. He brought it up to amuse me, he said.”

“While he was amusing himself with Lottie,” thought the judge, in his jealousy for her. “It is going the same old way. Well!” What he said aloud was, “And is it amusing you?”

“I haven’t looked at it yet,” said the girl. “It’s amusing enough to watch the sea. Oh, poppa! I never thought I should care so much for it.”

“And you’re glad we came?”

“I don’t want to think about that. I just want to know that I’m here.” She pressed his arm gently, significantly, where he sat provisionally in the chair beside her, and he was afraid to speak lest he should scare away the hope her words gave him.

He merely said, “Well, well!” and waited for her to speak further. But her impulse had exhausted itself, as if her spirit were like one of those weak forms of life which spend their strength in a quick run or flight, and then rest to gather force for another. “Where’s Boyne?” he asked, after waiting for her to speak.

“He was here a minute ago. He’s been talking with some of the deck passengers that are going home because they couldn’t get on in America. Doesn’t that seem pitiful, poppa? I always thought we had work enough for the whole world.”

“Perhaps these fellows didn’t try very hard to find it,” said the judge.

“Perhaps,” she assented.

“I shouldn’t want you to get to thinking that it’s all like New York. Remember how comfortable everybody is in Tuskingum.”

“Yes,” she said, sadly. “How far off Tuskingum seems!”

“Well, don’t forget about it; and remember that wherever life is simplest and purest and kindest, that is the highest civilization.”

“How much like old times it seems to hear you talk that way, poppa! I should think I was in the library at home. And I made you leave it!” she sighed.

“Your mother was glad of any excuse. And it will do us all good, if we take it in the right way,” said the judge, with a didactic severity that did not hide his pang from her.

“Poor poppa!” she said.

He went away, saying that he was going to look Lottie up. His simple design was to send Lottie to her mother, so that Breckon might come back to Ellen; but he did not own this to himself.

Lottie returned from another direction with Boyne, and Ellen said, “Poppa’s gone to look for you.”

“Has he?” asked Lottie, dropping decisively into her chair. “Well, there’s one thing; I won’t call him poppa any more.”

“What will you call him?” Boyne demanded, demurely.

“I’ll call him father, it you want to know; and I’m going to call momma, mother. I’m not going to have those English laughing at us, and I won’t say papa and mamma. Everybody that knows anything says father and mother now.”

Boyne kept looking from one sister to another during Lottie’s declaration, and, with his eyes on Ellen, he said, “It’s true, Ellen. All the Plumptons did.” He was very serious.

Ellen smiled. “I’m too old to change. I’d rather seem queer in Europe than when I get back to Tuskingum.”

“You wouldn’t be queer there a great while,” said Lottie. “They’ll all be doing it in a week after I get home.”

Upon the encouragement given him by Ellen, Boyne seized the chance of being of the opposition. “Yes,” he taunted Lottie, “and you think they’ll say woman and man, for lady and gentleman, I suppose.”

“They will as soon as they know it’s the thing.”

“Well, I know I won’t,” said Boyne. “I won’t call momma a woman.”

“It doesn’t matter what you do, Boyne dear,” his sister serenely assured him.

While he stood searching his mind for a suitable retort, a young man, not apparently many years his senior, came round the corner of the music-room, and put himself conspicuously in view at a distance from the Kentons.

“There he is, now,” said Boyne. “He wants to be introduced to Lottie.” He referred the question to Ellen, but Lottie answered for her.

“Then why don’t you introduce him?”

“Well, I would if he was an American. But you can’t tell about these English.” He resumed the dignity he had lost in making the explanation to Lottie, and ignored her in turning again to Ellen. “What do you think, Ellen?”

“Oh, don’t know about such things, Boyne,” she said, shrinking from the responsibility.

“Well; upon my word!” cried Lottie. “If Ellen can talk by the hour with that precious Mr. Breckon, and stay up here along with him, when everybody else is down below sick, I don’t think she can have a great deal to say about a half-grown boy like that being introduced to me.”

“He’s as old as you are,” said Boyne, hotly.

“Oh! I saw him associating with you, and I thought he was a boy, too. Pardon me!” Lottie turned from giving Boyne his coup-de-grace, to plant a little stab in Ellen’s breast. “To be sure, now Mr. Breckon has found those friends of his, I suppose he won’t want to flirt with Ellen any more.”

“Ah, ha, ha!” Boyne broke in. “Lottie is mad because he stopped to speak to some ladies he knew. Women, I suppose she’d call them.”

“Well, I shouldn’t call him a gentleman, anyway,” said Lottie.

The pretty, smooth-faced, fresh-faced young fellow whom their varying debate had kept in abeyance, looked round at them over his shoulder as he leaned on the rail, and seemed to discover Boyne for the first time. He came promptly towards the Kentons.

“Now,” said Lottie, rapidly, “you’ll just HAVE to.”

The young fellow touched his cap to the whole group, but he ventured to address only Boyne.

“Every one seems to be about this morning,” he said, with the cheery English-rising infection.

“Yes,” answered Boyne, with such snubbing coldness that Ellen’s heart was touched.

“It’s so pleasant,” she said, “after that dark weather.”

“Isn’t it?” cried the young fellow, gratefully. “One doesn’t often get such sunshine as this at sea, you know.”

“My sister, Miss Kenton, Mr. Pogis,” Boyne solemnly intervened. “And Miss Lottie Kenton.”

The pretty boy bowed to each in turn, but he made no pretence of being there to talk with Ellen. “Have you been ill, too?” he actively addressed himself to Lottie.

“No, just mad,” she said. “I wasn’t very sick, and that made it all the worse being down in a poky state-room when I wanted to walk.”

“And I suppose you’ve been making up for lost time this morning?”

“Not half,” said Lottie.

“Oh, do finish the half with me!”

Lottie instantly rose, and flung her sister the wrap she had been holding ready to shed from the moment the young man had come up. “Keep that for me, Nell. Are you good at catching?” she asked him.

“Catching?”

“Yes! People,” she explained, and at a sudden twist of the ship she made a clutch at his shoulder.

“Oh! I think I can catch you.”

As they moved off together, Boyne said, “Well, upon my word!” but Ellen did not say anything in comment on Lottie. After a while she asked, “Who were the ladies that Mr. Breckon met?”

“I didn’t hear their names. They were somebody he hadn’t seen before since the ship started. They looked like a young lady and her mother. It made Lottie mad when he stopped to speak with them, and she wouldn’t wait till he could get through. Ran right away, and made me come, too.”

XIII.

Breckon had not seen the former interest between himself and Ellen lapse to commonplace acquaintance without due sense of loss. He suffered justly, but he did not suffer passively, or without several attempts to regain the higher ground. In spite of these he was aware of being distinctly kept to the level which he accused himself of having chosen, by a gentle acquiescence in his choice more fatal than snubbing. The advances that he made across the table, while he still met Miss Kenton alone there, did not carry beyond the rack supporting her plate. She talked on whatever subject he started with that angelic sincerity which now seemed so far from him, but she started none herself; she did not appeal to him for his opinion upon any question more psychological than the barometer; and,

         “In a tumultuous privacy of storm,”

he found himself as much estranged from her as if a fair-weather crowd had surrounded them. He did not believe that she resented the levity he had shown; but he had reason to fear that she had finally accepted it as his normal mood, and in her efforts to meet him in it, as if he had no other, he read a tolerance that was worse than contempt. When he tried to make her think differently, if that was what she thought of him, he fancied her rising to the notion he wished to give her, and then shrinking from it, as if it must bring her the disappointment of some trivial joke.

It was what he had taught her to expect of him, and he had himself to blame. Now that he had thrown that precious chance away, he might well have overvalued it. She had certain provincialisms which he could not ignore. She did not know the right use of will and shall, and would and should, and she pronounced the letter ‘r’ with a hard mid-Western twist. Her voice was weak and thin, and she could not govern it from being at times a gasp and at times a drawl. She did not dress with the authority of women who know more of their clothes than the people they buy them of; she did not carry herself like a pretty girl; she had not the definite stamp of young-ladyism. Yet she was undoubtedly a lady in every instinct; she wore with pensive grace the clothes which she had not subjected to her personal taste; and if she did not carry herself like a pretty girl, she had a beauty which touched and entreated.

More and more Breckon found himself studying her beauty — her soft, brown brows, her gentle, dark eyes, a little sunken, and with the lids pinched by suffering; the cheeks somewhat thin, but not colorless; the long chin, the clear forehead, and the massed brown hair, that seemed too heavy for the drooping neck. It was not the modern athletic type; it was rather of the earlier period, when beauty was associated with the fragility despised by a tanned and golfing generation. Ellen Kenton’s wrists were thin, and her hands long and narrow. As he looked at her across the racks during those two days of storm, he had sometimes the wish to take her long, narrow hands in his, and beg her to believe that he was worthier her serious friendship than he had shown himself. What he was sure of at all times now was that he wished to know the secret of that patient pathos of hers. She was not merely, or primarily, an invalid. Her family had treated her as an invalid, but, except Lottie, whose rigor might have been meant sanatively, they treated her more with the tenderness people use with a wounded spirit; and Breckon fancied moments of something like humility in her, when she seemed to cower from his notice. These were not so imaginable after her family took to their berths and left her alone with him, but the touching mystery remained, a sort of bewilderment, as he guessed it, a surprise such as a child might show at some incomprehensible harm. It was this grief which he had refused not merely to know — he still doubted his right to know it — but to share; he had denied not only his curiosity but his sympathy, and had exiled himself to a region where, when her family came back with the fair weather, he felt himself farther from her than before their acquaintance began.

He had made an overture to its renewal in the book he lent her, and then Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter had appeared on deck, and borne down upon him when he was walking with Lottie Kenton and trying to begin his self-retrieval through her. She had left him; but they had not, and in the bonds of a prophet and his followers he found himself bound with them for much more conversation than he had often held with them ashore. The parochial duties of an ethical teacher were not strenuous, and Breckon had not been made to feel them so definitely before. Mrs. Rasmith held that they now included promising to sit at her table for the rest of the voyage; but her daughter succeeded in releasing him from the obligation; and it was she who smilingly detached the clinging hold of the elder lady. “We mustn’t keep Mr. Breckon from his friends, mother,” she said, brightly, and then he said he should like the pleasure of introducing them, and both of the ladies declared that they would be delighted.

He bowed himself off, and half the ship’s-length away he was aware, from meeting Lottie with her little Englishman, that it was she and not Ellen whom he was seeking. As the couple paused in whirring past Breckon long enough to let Lottie make her hat fast against the wind, he heard the Englishman shout:

“I say, that sister of yours is a fine girl, isn’t she?”

“She’s a pretty good — looker,” Lottie answered back. “What’s the matter with HER sister?”

“Oh, I say!” her companion returned, in a transport with her slangy pertness, which Breckon could not altogether refuse to share.

He thought that he ought to condemn it, and he did condemn Mrs. Kenton for allowing it in one of her daughters, when he came up to her sitting beside another whom he felt inexpressibly incapable of it. Mrs. Kenton could have answered his censure, if she had known it, that daughters, like sons, were not what their mothers but what their environments made them, and that the same environment sometimes made them different, as he saw. She could have told him that Lottie, with her slangy pertness, had the truest and best of the men she knew at her feet, and that Ellen, with her meekness, had been the prey of the commonest and cheapest spirit in her world, and so left him to make an inference as creditable to his sex as he could. But this bold defence was as far from the poor lady as any spoken reproach was from him. Her daughter had to check in her a mechanical offer to rise, as if to give Breckon her place, the theory and practice of Tuskingum being that their elders ought to leave young people alone together.

“Don’t go, momma,” Ellen whispered. “I don’t want you to go.”

Breckon, when he arrived before them, remained talking on foot, and, unlike Lottie’s company, he talked to the mother. This had happened before from him, but she had not got used to it, and now she deprecated in everything but words his polite questions about her sufferings from the rough weather, and his rejoicing that the worst was probably over. She ventured the hope that it was so, for she said that Mr. Kenton had about decided to keep on to Holland, and it seemed to her that they had had enough of storms. He said he was glad that they were going right on; and then she modestly recurred to the earlier opinion he had given her husband that it would be better to spend the rest of the summer in Holland than to go to Italy, as if she wished to conform herself in the wisdom of Mr. Kenton’s decision. He repeated his conviction, and he said that if he were in their place he should go to The Hague as soon as they had seen Rotterdam, and make it their headquarters for the exploration of the whole country.

“You can’t realize how little it is; you can get anywhere in an hour; the difficulty is to keep inside of Holland when you leave any given point. I envy you going there.”

Mrs. Kenton inferred that he was going to stop in France, but if it were part of his closeness not to tell, it was part of her pride not to ask. She relented when he asked if he might get a map of his and prove the littleness of Holland from it, and in his absence she could not well avoid saying to Ellen, “He seems very pleasant.”

“Yes; why not?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know. Lottie is so against him.”

“He was very kind when you were all sick.”

“Well, you ought to know better than Lottie; you’ve seen him so much more.” Ellen was silent, and her mother advanced cautiously, “I suppose he is very cultivated.”

“How can I tell? I’m not.”

“Why, Ellen, I think you are. Very few girls have read so much.”

“Yes, but he wouldn’t care if I were cultivated, Ha is like all the rest. He would like to joke and laugh. Well, I think that is nice, too, and I wish I could do it. But I never could, and now I can’t try. I suppose he wonders what makes me such a dead weight on you all.”

“You know you’re not that, Ellen! You musn’t let yourself be morbid. It hurts me to have you say such things.”

“Well, I should like to tell him why, and see what he would say.”

“Ellen!”

“Why not? If he is a minister he must have thought about all kinds of things. Do you suppose he ever knew of a girl before who had been through what I have? Yes, I would like to know what he would really say.”

“I know what he ought to say! If he knew, he would say that no girl had ever behaved more angelically.”

“Do you think he would? Perhaps he would say that if I hadn’t been so proud and silly — Here he comes! Shall we ask him?”

Breckon approached with his map, and her mother gasped, thinking how terrible such a thing would be if it could be; Ellen smiled brightly up at him. “Will you take my chair? And then you can show momma your map. I am going down,” and while he was still protesting she was gone.

“Miss Kenton seems so much better than she did the first day,” he said, as he spread the map out on his knees, and gave Mrs. Kenton one end to hold.

“Yes,” the mother assented, as she bent over to look at it.

She followed his explanation with a surface sense, while her nether mind was full of the worry of the question which Ellen had planted in it. What would such a man think of what she had been through? Or, rather, how would he say to her the only things that in Mrs. Kenton’s belief he could say? How could the poor child ever be made to see it in the light of some mind not colored with her family’s affection for her? An immense, an impossible longing possessed itself of the mother’s heart, which became the more insistent the more frantic it appeared. She uttered “Yes” and “No” and “Indeed” to what he was saying, but all the time she was rehearsing Ellen’s story in her inner sense. In the end she remembered so little what had actually passed that her dramatic reverie seemed the reality, and when she left him she got herself down to her state-room, giddy with the shame and fear of her imaginary self-betrayal. She wished to test the enormity, and yet not find it so monstrous, by submitting the case to her husband, and she could scarcely keep back her impatience at seeing Ellen instead of her father.

“Momma, what have you been saying to Mr. Breckon about me?”

“Nothing,” said Mrs. Kenton, aghast at first, and then astonished to realize that she was speaking the simple truth. “He said how much better you were looking; but I don’t believe I spoke a single word. We were looking at the map.”

“Very well,” Ellen resumed. “I have been thinking it all over, and now I have made up my mind.”

She paused, and her mother asked, tremulously, “About what, Ellen?”

“You know, momma. I see all now. You needn’t be afraid that I care anything about him now,” and her mother knew that she meant Bittridge, “or that I ever shall. That’s gone forever. But it’s gone,” she added, and her mother quaked inwardly to hear her reason, “because the wrong and the shame was all for me — for us. That’s why I can forgive it, and forget. If we had done anything, the least thing in the world, to revenge ourselves, or to hurt him, then — Don’t you see, momma?”

“I think I see, Ellen.”

“Then I should have to keep thinking about it, and what we had made him suffer, and whether we hadn’t given him some claim. I don’t wish ever to think of him again. You and poppa were so patient and forbearing, all through; and I thank goodness now for everything you put up with; only I wish I could have borne everything myself.”

“You had enough to bear,” Mrs. Kenton said, in tender evasion.

“I’m glad that I had to bear so much, for bearing it is what makes me free now.” She went up to her mother and kissed her, and gazed into her face with joyful, tearful looks that made her heart sink.

XIV.

Mrs. Kenton did not rest till she had made sure from Lottie and Boyne that neither of them had dropped any hint to Ellen of what happened to Bittridge after his return to Tuskingum. She did not explain to them why she was so very anxious to know, but only charged them the more solemnly not to let the secret, which they had all been keeping from Ellen, escape them.

They promised, but Lottie said, “She’s got to know it some time, and I should think the sooner the better.”

“I will be judge of that, Lottie,” said her mother, and Boyne seized his chance of inculpating her with his friend, Mr. Pogis. He said she was carrying on awfully with him already; and an Englishman could not understand, and Boyne hinted that he would presume upon her American freedom.

“Well, if he does, I’ll get you to cowhide him, Boyne,” she retorted, and left him fuming helplessly, while she went to give the young Englishman an opportunity of resuming the flirtation which her mother had interrupted.

With her husband Mrs. Kenton found it practicable to be more explicit. “I haven’t had such a load lifted off my heart since I don’t know when. It shows me what I’ve thought all along: that Ellen hasn’t really cared anything for that miserable thing since he first began going with Mrs. Uphill a year ago. When he wrote that letter to her in New York she wanted to be sure she didn’t, and when he offered himself and misbehaved so to both of you, she was afraid that she and you were somehow to blame. Now she’s worked it out that no one else was wronged, and she is satisfied. It’s made her feel free, as she says. But, oh, dear me!” Mrs. Kenton broke off, “I talk as if there was nothing to bind her; and yet there is what poor Richard did! What would she say if she knew that? I have been cautioning Lottie and Boyne, but I know it will come out somehow. Do you think it’s wise to keep it from her? Hadn’t we better tell her? Or shall we wait and see—”

Kenton would not allow to her or to himself that his hopes ran with hers; love is not business with a man as it is with a woman; he feels it indecorous and indelicate to count upon it openly, where she thinks it simply a chance of life, to be considered like another. All that Kenton would say was, “I see no reason for telling her just yet. She will have to know in due time. But let her enjoy her freedom now.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton doubtfully assented.

The judge was thoughtfully silent. Then he said: “Few girls could have worked out her problem as Ellen has. Think how differently Lottie would have done it!”

“Lottie has her good points, too,” said Mrs. Kenton. “And, of course, I don’t blame Richard. There are all kinds of girls, and Lottie means no more harm than Ellen does. She’s the kind that can’t help attracting; but I always knew that Ellen was attractive, too, if she would only find it out. And I knew that as soon as anything worth while took up her mind she would never give that wretch another thought.”

Kenton followed her devious ratiocinations to a conclusion which he could not grasp. “What do you mean, Sarah?”

“If I only,” she explained, in terms that did not explain, “felt as sure of him as I do about him!”

Her husband looked densely at her. “Bittridge?”

“No. Mr. Breckon. He is very nice, Rufus. Yes, he is! He’s been showing me the map of Holland, and we’ve had a long talk. He isn’t the way we thought — or I did. He is not at all clerical, or worldly. And he appreciates Ellen. I don’t suppose he cares so much for her being cultivated; I suppose she doesn’t seem so to him. But he sees how wise she is — how good. And he couldn’t do that without being good himself! Rufus! If we could only hope such a thing. But, of course, there are thousands after him!”

“There are not thousands of Ellens after him,” said the judge, before he could take time to protest. “And I don’t want him to suppose that she is after him at all. If he will only interest her and help her to keep her mind off herself, it’s all I will ask of him. I am not anxious to part with her, now that she’s all ours again.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Kenton soothingly assented. “And I don’t say that she dreams of him in any such way. She can’t help admiring his mind. But what I mean is that when you see how he appreciates her, you can’t help wishing he could know just how wise, and just how good she is. It did seem to me as if I would give almost anything to have him know what she had been through with that — rapscallion!”

“Sarah!”

“Oh, you may Sarah me! But I can tell you what, Mr. Kenton: I believe that you could tell him every word of it, and only make him appreciate her the more. Till you know that about Ellen, you don’t know what a character she is. I just ached to tell him!”

“I don’t understand you, my dear,” said Kenton. “But if you mean to tell him—”

“Why, who could imagine doing such a thing? Don’t you see that it is impossible? Such a thing would never have come into my head if it hadn’t been for some morbid talk of Ellen’s.”

“Of Ellen’s?”

“Oh, about wanting to disgust him by telling him why she was such a burden to us.”

“She isn’t a burden!”

“I am saying what she said. And it made me think that if such a person could only know the high-minded way she had found to get out of her trouble! I would like somebody who is capable of valuing her to value her in all her preciousness. Wouldn’t you be glad if such a man as he is could know how and why she feels free at last?”

“I don’t think it’s necessary,” said Kenton, haughtily, “There’s only one thing that could give him the right to know it, and we’ll wait for that first. I thought you said that he was frivolous.”

“Boyne said that, and Lottie. I took it for granted, till I talked with him to-day. He is light-hearted and gay; he likes to laugh and joke; but he can be very serious when he wants to.”

“According to all precedent,” said the judge, glumly, “such a man ought to be hanging round Lottie. Everybody was that amounted to anything in Tuskingum.”

“Oh, in Tuskingum! And who were the men there that amounted to anything? A lot of young lawyers, and two students of medicine, and some railroad clerks. There wasn’t one that would compare with Mr. Breckon for a moment.”

“All the more reason why he can’t really care for Ellen. Now see here, Sarah! You know I don’t interfere with you and the children, but I’m afraid you’re in a craze about this young fellow. He’s got these friends of his who have just turned up, and we’ll wait and see what he does with them. I guess he appreciates the young lady as much as he does Ellen.”

Mrs. Kenton’s heart went down. “She doesn’t compare with Ellen!” she piteously declared.

“That’s what we think. He may think differently.”

Mrs. Kenton was silenced, but all the more she was determined to make sure that Mr. Breckon was not interested in Miss Rasmith in any measure or manner detrimental to Ellen. As for Miss Rasmith herself, Mrs. Kenton would have had greater reason to be anxious about her behavior with Boyne than Mr. Breckon. From the moment that the minister had made his two groups of friends acquainted, the young lady had fixed upon Boyne as that member of the Kenton group who could best repay a more intimate friendship. She was polite to them all, but to Boyne she was flattering, and he was too little used to deference from ladies ten years his senior not to be very sensible of her worth in offering it. To be unremittingly treated as a grown-up person was an experience so dazzling that his vision was blinded to any possibilities in the behavior that formed it; and before the day ended Boyne had possessed Miss Rasmith of all that it was important for any fellow-being to know of his character and history. He opened his heart to eyes that had looked into others before his, less for the sake of exploiting than of informing himself. In the rare intelligence of Miss Rasmith he had found that serious patience with his problems which no one else, not Ellen herself, had shown, and after trying her sincerity the greater part of the day he put it to the supreme test, one evening, with a book which he had been reading. Boyne’s literature was largely entomological and zoological, but this was a work of fiction treating of the fortunes of a young American adventurer, who had turned his military education to account in the service of a German princess. Her Highness’s dominions were not in any map of Europe, and perhaps it was her condition of political incognito that rendered her the more fittingly the prey of a passion for the American head of her armies. Boyne’s belief was that this character veiled a real identity, and he wished to submit to Miss Rasmith the question whether in the exclusive circles of New York society any young millionaire was known to have taken service abroad after leaving west Point. He put it in the form of a scoffing incredulity which it was a comfort to have her take as if almost hurt by his doubt. She said that such a thing might very well be, and with rich American girls marrying all sorts of titles abroad, it was not impossible for some brilliant young fellow to make his way to the steps of a throne. Boyne declared that she was laughing at him, and she protested that it was the last thing she should think of doing; she was too much afraid of him. Then he began to argue against the case supposed in the romance; he proved from the book itself that the thing could not happen; such a princess would not be allowed to marry the American, no matter how rich he was. She owned that she had not heard of just such an instance, and he might think her very romantic; and perhaps she was; but if the princess was an absolute princess, such as she was shown in that story, she held that no power on earth could keep her from marrying the young American. For herself she did not see, though, how the princess could be in love with that type of American. If she had been in the princess’s place she should have fancied something quite different. She made Boyne agree with her that Eastern Americans were all, more or less, Europeanized, and it stood to reason, she held, that a European princess would want something as un-European as possible if she was falling in love to please herself. They had some contention upon the point that the princess would want a Western American; and then Miss Rasmith, with a delicate audacity, painted an heroic portrait of Boyne himself which he could not recognize openly enough to disown; but he perceived resemblances in it which went to his head when she demurely rose, with a soft “Good-night, Mr. Kenton. I suppose I mustn’t call you Boyne?”

“Oh yes, do!” he entreated. “I’m-I’m not grown up yet, you know.”

“Then it will be safe,” she sighed. “But I should never have thought of that. I had got so absorbed in our argument. You are so logical, Mr. Kenton — Boyne, I mean — thank you. You must get it from your father. How lovely your sister is!”

“Ellen?”

“Well, no. I meant the other one. But Miss Kenton is beautiful, too. You must be so happy together, all of you.” She added, with a rueful smile, “There’s only one of me! Good-night.”

Boyne did not know whether he ought not in humanity, if not gallantry, to say he would be a brother to her, but while he stood considering, she put out a hand to him so covered with rings that he was afraid she had hurt herself in pressing his so hard, and had left him before he could decide.

Lottie, walking the deck, had not thought of bidding Mr. Pogis good-night. She had asked him half a dozen times how late it was, and when he answered, had said as often that she knew better, and she was going below in another minute. But she stayed, and the flow of her conversation supplied him with occasion for the remarks of which he seldom varied the formula. When she said something too audacious for silent emotion, he called out, “Oh, I say!” If she advanced an opinion too obviously acceptable, or asked a question upon some point where it seemed to him there could not be two minds, he was ready with the ironical note, “Well, rather!” At times she pressed her studies of his character and her observations on his manner and appearance so far that he was forced to protest, “You are so personal!” But these moments were rare; for the most part, “Oh I say!” and “Well, rather!” perfectly covered the ground. He did not generally mind her parody of his poverty of phrase, but once, after she had repeated “Well rather!” and “Oh, I say!” steadily at everything he said for the whole round of the promenade they were making, he intimated that there were occasions when, in his belief, a woman’s abuse of the freedom generously allowed her sex passed the point of words.

“And when it passes the point of words” she taunted him, “what do you do?”

“You will see,” he said, “if it ever does,” and Lottie felt justified by her inference that he was threatening to kiss her, in answering:

“And if I ever SEE, I will box your ears.”

“Oh, I say!” he retorted. “I should like to have you try.”

He had ideas of the rightful mastery of a man in all things, which she promptly pronounced brutal, and when he declared that his father’s conduct towards his wife and children was based upon these ideas, she affirmed the superiority of her own father’s principles and behavior. Mr. Pogis was too declared an admirer of Judge Kenton to question his motives or method in anything, and he could only generalize, “The Americans spoil their women.”

“Well, their women are worth it,” said Lottie, and after allowing the paradox time to penetrate his intelligence, he cried out, in a glad transport:

“Oh, I SAY!”

At the moment Boyne’s intellectual seance with Miss Rasmith was coming to an end. Lottie had tacitly invited Mr. Pogis to prolong the comparison of English and American family life by stopping in front of a couple of steamer-chairs, and confessing that she was tired to death. They sat down, and he told her about his mother, whom, although his father’s subordinate, he seemed to be rather fonder of. He had some elder brothers, most of them in the colonies, and he had himself been out to America looking at something his father had found for him in Buffalo.

“You ought to come to Tuskingum,” said Lottie.

“Is that a large place?” Mr. Pogis asked. “As large as Buffalo?”

“Well, no,” Lottie admitted. “But it’s a growing place. And we have the best kind of times.”

“What kind?” The young man easily consented to turn the commercial into a social inquiry.

“Oh, picnics, and river parties, and buggy-rides, and dances.”

“I’m keen on dancing,” said Mr. Pogis. “I hope they’ll give us a dance on board. Will you put me down for the first dance?”

“I don’t care. Will you send me some flowers? The steward must have some left in the refrigerator.”

“Well, rather! I’ll send you a spray, if he’s got enough.”

“A spray? What’s a spray?”

“Oh, I say! My sister always wears one. It’s a long chain of flowers reachin’ from your shoulder diagonally down to your waist.”

“Does your sister always have her sprays sent to her?”

“Well, rather! Don’t they send flowers to girls for dances in the States?”

“Well, rather! Didn’t I just ask you?”

This was very true, and after a moment of baffle Mr. Pogis said, in generalization, “If you go with a young lady in a party to the theatre you send her a box of chocolates.”

“Only when you go to theatre! I couldn’t get enough, then, unless you asked me every night,” said Lottie, and while Mr. Pogis was trying to choose between “Oh, I say!” and something specific, like, “I should like to ask you every night,” she added, “And what would happen if you sent a girl a spray for the theatre and chocolates for a dance? Wouldn’t it jar her?”

Now, indeed, there was nothing for him but to answer, “Oh, I say!”

“Well, say, then! Here comes Boyne, and I must go. Well, Boyne,” she called, from the dark nook where she sat, to her brother as he stumbled near, with his eyes to the stars, “has the old lady retired?”

He gave himself away finely. “What old lady!”

“Well, maybe at your age you don’t consider her very old. But I don’t think a boy ought to sit up mooning at his grandmother all night. I know Miss Rasmith’s no relation, if that’s what you’re going to say!”

“Oh, I say!” Mr. Pogis chuckled. “You are so personal.”

“Well, rather!” said Lottie, punishing his presumption. “But I don’t think it’s nice for a kid, even if she isn’t.”

“Kid!” Boyne ground, through his clenched teeth.

By this time Lottie was up out of her chair and beyond repartee in her flight down the gangway stairs. She left the two youngsters confronted.

“What do you say to a lemon-squash?” asked Mr. Pogis, respecting his friend’s wounded dignity, and ignoring Lottie and her offence.

“I don’t care if I do,” said Boyne in gloomy acquiescence.

XV.

Few witnesses of the fact that Julia Rasmith and her mother had found themselves on the same steamer with the Rev. Hugh Breckon would have been of such a simple mind as to think they were there by accident, if they had also been witnesses of their earlier history. The ladies could have urged that in returning from California only a few days before the Amstel sailed, and getting a state-room which had been unexpectedly given up, they had some claim to a charitable interpretation of their behavior, but this plea could not have availed them with any connoisseur of women. Besides, it had been a matter of notoriety among such of Mr. Breckon’s variegated congregation as knew one another that Mrs. Rasmith had set her heart on him, it Julia had not set her cap for him. In that pied flock, where every shade and dapple of doubt, from heterodox Jew to agnostic Christian, foregathered, as it has been said, in the misgiving of a blessed immortality, the devotion of Mrs. Rasmith to the minister had been almost a scandal. Nothing had saved the appearance from this character but Mr. Breckon’s open acceptance of her flatteries and hospitalities; this was so frank, and the behavior of Julia herself so judicious under the circumstances, that envy and virtue were, if not equally silenced, equally baffled. So far from pretending not to see her mother’s manoeuvres, Julia invited public recognition of them; in the way of joking, which she kept within the limits of filial fondness, she made fun of her mother’s infatuation to Breckon himself, and warned him against the moment when her wiles might be too much for him. Before other people she did not hesitate to save him from her mother, so that even those who believed her in the conspiracy owned that no girl could have managed with more cleverness in a situation where not every one would have refused to be placed. In this situation Julia Rasmith had the service of a very clear head, and as was believed by some, a cool heart; if she and her mother had joint designs upon the minister, hers was the ambition, and her mother’s the affection that prompted them. She was a long, undulant girl, of a mixed blondness that left you in doubt, after you had left her, whether her hair or her complexion were not of one tint; but her features were good, and there could be no question of her captivating laugh, and her charming mouth, which she was always pulling down with demure irony. She was like her mother in her looks, but her indolent, droning temperament must have been from her father, whose memory was lost in that antiquity which swallows up the record of so many widows’ husbands, and who could not have left her what was left of her mother’s money, for none of it had ever been his. It was still her mother’s, and it was supposed to be the daughter’s chief attraction. There must, therefore, have been a good deal of it, for those who were harshest with the minister did not believe that a little money would attract him. Not that they really thought him mercenary; some of his people considered him gay to the verge of triviality, but there were none that accused him of insincerity. They would have liked a little more seriousness in him, especially when they had not much of their own, and would have had him make up in severity of behavior for what he lacked, and what they wished him to lack, in austerity of doctrine.

The Amstel had lost so much time in the rough weather of her first days out that she could not make it up with her old-fashioned single screw. She was at best a ten-day boat, counting from Sandy Hook to Boulogne, and she had not been four days out when she promised to break her record for slowness. Three days later Miss Rasmith said to Breckon, as he took the chair which her mother agilely abandoned to him beside her: “The head steward says it will be a twelve-day trip, end our bedroom steward thinks more. What is the consensus of opinion in the smoking-room? Where are you going, mother? Are you planning to leave Mr. Breckon and me alone again? It isn’t necessary. We couldn’t get away from each other if we tried, and all we ask — Well, I suppose age must be indulged in its little fancies,” she called after Mrs. Rasmith.

Breckon took up the question she had asked him. “The odds are so heavily in favor of a fifteen-days’ run that there are no takers.”

“Now you are joking again,” she said. “I thought a sea-voyage might make you serious.”

“It has been tried before. Besides, it’s you that I want to be serious.”

“What about? Besides, I doubt it.”

“About Boyne.”

“Oh! I thought you were going to say some one else.”

“No, I think that is very well settled.”

“You’ll never persuade my mother,” said Miss Rasmith, with a low, comfortable laugh.

“But if you are satisfied—”

“She will have to resign herself? Well, perhaps. But why do you wish me to be serious about Boyne?”

“I have no doubt he amuses you. But that doesn’t seem a very good reason why you should amuse yourself with him.”

“No? Why not?”

“Well, because the poor boy is in earnest; and you’re not exactly — contemporaries.”

“Why, how old is Boyne?” she asked, with affected surprise.

“About fifteen, I think,” said Breckon, gravely.

“And I’m but a very few months past thirty. I don’t see the great disparity. But he is merely a brother to me — an elder brother — and he gives me the best kind of advice.”

“I dare say you need it, but all the same, I am afraid you are putting ideas into his head.”

“Well, if he began it? If he put them in mine first?”

She was evidently willing that he should go further, and create the common ground between them that grows up when one gives a reproof and the other accepts it; but Breckon, whether he thought that he had now done his duty, and need say no more, or because he was vexed with her, left the subject.

“Mrs. Rasmith says you are going to Switzerland for the rest of the summer.”

“Yes, to Montreux. Are you going to spend it in Paris?”

“I’m going to Paris to see. I have had some thoughts of Etretat; I have cousins there.”

“I wish that I could go to the sea-side. But this happens to be one of the summers when nothing but mountains can save my mother’s life. Shall you get down to Rome before you go back?”

“I don’t know. If I sail from Naples I shall probably pass through Rome.”

“You had better stop off. We shall be there in November, and they say Rome is worth seeing,” she laughed demurely. “That is what Boyne understands. He’s promised to use his influence with his family to let him run down to see us there, if he can’t get them all to come. You might offer to personally conduct them.”

“Yes.” said Breckon, with the effect of cloture. “Have you made many acquaintances an board?”

“What! Two lone women? You haven’t introduced us to any but the Kentons. But I dare say they are the best. The judge is a dear, and Mrs. Kenton is everything that is motherly and matronly. Boyne says she is very well informed, and knows all about the reigning families. If he decides to marry into them, she can be of great use in saving him from a mesalliance. I can’t say very much for Miss Lottie. Miss Lottie seems to me distinctly of the minx type. But that poor, pale girl is adorable. I wish she liked me!”

“What makes you think she doesn’t like you?” Breckon asked.

“What? Women don’t require anything to convince them that other women can’t bear them. They simply know it. I wonder what has happened to her?”

“Why do you think anything has happened to her?”

“Why? Well, girls don’t have that air of melancholy absence for nothing. She is brooding upon something, you may be sure. But you have had so many more opportunities than I! Do you mean that you haven’t suspected a tragical past far her?”

“I don’t know,” said Breckon, a little restively, “that I have allowed myself to speculate about her past.”

“That is, you oughtn’t to have allowed yourself to do so. Well, there I agree with you. But a woman may do so without impertinence, and I am sure that Miss Kenton has a story. I have watched her, and her face has told me everything but the story.”

Breckon would not say that some such revelation had been made to him, and in the absence of an answer from him Miss Rasmith asked, “Is she cultivated, too?”

“Too?”

“Like her mother.”

“Oh! I should say she had read a good dial. And she’s bookish, yes, in a simple-hearted kind of way.”

“She asks you if you have read ‘the book of the year,’ and whether you don’t think the heroine is a beautiful character?”

“Not quite so bad as that. But if you care to be serious about her!”

“Oh, I do!”

“I doubt it. Then, I should say that she seems to have grown up in a place where the interests are so material that a girl who was disposed to be thoughtful would be thrown back upon reading for her society more than in more intellectual centres — if there are such things. She has been so much with books that she does not feel odd in speaking of them as if they were the usual topics of conversation. It gives her a certain quaintness.”

“And that is what constitutes her charm?”

“I didn’t know that we were speaking of her charm.”

“No, that is true. But I was thinking of it. She fascinates me. Are they going to get off at Boulogne?”

“No, they are going on to Rotterdam.”

“To be sure! Boyne told me. And are you going on with them?”

“I thought we talked of my going to Paris.” Breckon looked round at her, and she made a gesture of deprecation.

“Why, of course! How could I forget? But I’m so much interested in Miss Kenton that I can’t think of anything else.”

“Not even of Miss Rasmith?”

“Not even of Miss Rasmith. I know that she has a history, and that it’s a sad one.” She paused in ironical hesitation. “You’ve been so good as to caution me about her brother — and I never can be grateful enough — and that makes me almost free to suggest—”

She stopped again, and he asked, hardily, “What?”

“Oh, nothing. It isn’t for me to remind my pastor, my ghostly adviser” — she pulled down her mouth and glanced at him demurely— “and I will only offer the generalization that a girl is never so much in danger of having her heart broken as when she’s had it broken — Oh, are you leaving me?” she cried, as Breckon rose from his chair.

“Well, then, send Boyne to me.” She broke into a laugh as he faltered. “Are you going to sit down again? That is right. And I won’t talk any more about Miss Kenton.”

“I don’t mind talking of her,” said Breckon. “Perhaps it will even be well to do so if you are in earnest. Though it strikes me that you have rather renounced the right to criticise me.”

“Now, is that logical? It seems to me that in putting myself in the attitude of a final friend at the start, and refusing to be anything more, I leave established my right to criticise you on the firmest basis. I can’t possibly be suspected of interested motives. Besides, you’ve just been criticizing me, if you want a woman’s reason!”

“Well, go on.”

“Why, I had finished. That’s the amusing part. I should have supposed that I could go on forever about Miss Kenton, but I have nothing to go upon. She has kept her secret very well, and so have the rest of them. You think I might have got it out of Boyne? Perhaps I might, but you know I have my little scruples. I don’t think it would be quite fair, or quite nice.”

“You are scrupulous. And I give you credit for having been more delicate than I’ve been.”

“You don’t mean you’ve been trying to find it out!”

“Ah, now I’m not sure about the superior delicacy!”

“Oh, how good!” said Miss Rasmith. “What a pity you should be wasted in a calling that limits you so much.”

“You call it limiting? I didn’t know but I had gone too far.”

“Not at all! You know there’s nothing I like so much as those little digs.”

“I had forgotten. Then you won’t mind my saying that this surveillance seems to me rather more than I have any right to from you.”

“How exquisitely you put it! Who else could have told me to mind my own business so delightfully? Well, it isn’t my business. I acknowledge that, and I spoke only because I knew you would be sorry if you had gone too far. I remembered our promise to be friends.”

She threw a touch of real feeling into her tone, and he responded, “Yes, and I thank you for it, though it isn’t easy.”

She put out her hand to him, and, as he questioningly took it, she pressed his with animation. “Of course it isn’t! Or it wouldn’t be for any other man. But don’t you suppose I appreciate that supreme courage of yours? There is nobody else-nobody! — who could stand up to an impertinence and turn it to praise by such humility.”

“Don’t go too far, or I shall be turning your praise to impertinence by my humility. You’re quite right, though, about the main matter. I needn’t suppose anything so preposterous as you suggest, to feel that people are best left alone to outlive their troubles, unless they are of the most obvious kind.”

“Now, if I thought I had done anything to stop you from offering that sort of helpfulness which makes you a blessing to everybody, I should never forgive myself.”

“Nothing so dire as that, I believe. But if you’ve made me question the propriety of applying the blessing in all cases, you have done a very good thing.”

Miss Rasmith was silent and apparently serious. After a moment she said, “And I, for my part, promise to let poor little Boyne alone.”

Breckon laughed. “Don’t burlesque it! Besides, I haven’t promised anything.”

“That is very true,” said Miss Rasmith, and she laughed, too.

XVI.

In one of those dramatic reveries which we all hold with ourselves when fortune has pressingly placed us, Ellen Kenton had imagined it possible for her to tell her story to the man who had so gently and truly tried to be her friend. It was mostly in the way of explaining to him how she was unworthy of his friendship that the story was told, and she fancied telling it without being scandalized at violating the conventions that should have kept her from even dreaming of such a thing. It was all exalted to a plane where there was no question of fit or unfit in doing it, but only the occasion; and he would never hear of the unworthiness which she wished to ascribe to herself. Sometimes he mournfully left her when she persisted, left her forever, and sometimes he refused, and retained with her in a sublime kindness, a noble amity, lofty and serene, which did not seek to become anything else. In this case she would break from her reveries with self-accusing cries, under her breath, of “Silly, silly! Oh, how disgusting!” and if at that moment Breckon were really coming up to sit by her, she would blush to her hair, and wish to run away, and failing the force for this, would sit cold and blank to his civilities, and have to be skilfully and gradually talked back to self-respect and self-tolerance.

The recurrence of these reveries and their consequence in her made it difficult for him to put in effect the promise he had given himself in Miss Rasmith’s presence. If Ellen had been eager to welcome his coming, it would have been very simple to keep away from her, but as she appeared anxious to escape him, and had to be entreated, as it were, to suffer his society, something better than his curiosity was piqued, though that was piqued, too. He believed that he saw her lapsing again into that morbid state from which he had seemed once able to save her, and he could not help trying again. He was the more bound to do so by the ironical observance of Miss Rasmith, who had to be defied first, and then propitiated; certainly, when she saw him apparently breaking faith with her, she had a right to some sort of explanation, but certainly also she had no right to a blind and unreasoning submission from him. His embarrassment was heightened by her interest in Miss Kenton, whom, with an admirable show of now finding her safe from Breckon’s attractions, she was always wishing to study from his observation. What was she really like? The girl had a perfect fascination for her; she envied him his opportunities of knowing her, and his privileges of making that melancholy face light up with that heart-breaking smile, and of banishing that delicious shyness with which she always seemed to meet him. Miss Rasmith had noticed it; how could she help noticing it?

Breckon wished to himself that she had been able to help noticing it, or were more capable of minding her own business than she showed herself, and his heart closed about Ellen with a tenderness that was dangerously indignant. At the same time he felt himself withheld by Miss Rasmith’s witness from being all to the girl that he wished to be, and that he now seemed to have been in those first days of storm, while Miss Rasmith and her mother were still keeping their cabin. He foresaw that it would end in Miss Rasmith’s sympathetic nature not being able to withhold itself from Ellen’s need of cheerful companionship, and he was surprised, as little as he was pleased, one morning, when he came to take the chair beside her to find Miss Rasmith in it, talking and laughing to the girl, who perversely showed herself amused. Miss Rasmith made as if to offer him the seat, but he had to go away disappointed, after standing long enough before them to be aware that they were suspending some topic while he stayed.

He naturally supposed the topic to be himself, but it was not so, or at least not directly so. It was only himself as related to the scolding he had given Miss Rasmith for trifling with the innocence of Boyne, which she wished Miss Kenton to understand as the effect of a real affection for her brother. She loved all boys, and Boyne was simply the most delightful creature in the world. She went on to explain how delightful he was, and showed a such an appreciation of the infantile sweetness mingled with the mature severity of Boyne’s character that Ellen could not help being pleased and won. She told some little stories of Boyne that threw a light also their home life in Tuskingum, and Miss Rasmith declared herself perfectly fascinated, and wished that she could go and live in Tuskingum. She protested that she should not find it dull; Boyne alone would be entertainment enough; and she figured a circumstance so idyllic from the hints she had gathered, that Ellen’s brow darkened in silent denial, and Miss Rasmith felt herself, as the children say in the game, very hot in her proximity to the girl’s secret. She would have liked to know it, but whether she felt that she could know it when she liked enough, or whether she should not be so safe with Breckon in knowing it, she veered suddenly away, and said that she was so glad to have Boyne’s family know the peculiar nature of her devotion, which did not necessarily mean running away with him, though it might come to that. She supposed she was a little morbid about it from what Mr. Breckon had been saying; he had a conscience that would break the peace of a whole community, though he was the greatest possible favorite, not only with his own congregation, which simply worshipped him, but with the best society, where he was in constant request.

It was not her fault if she did not overdo these history, but perhaps it was all true about the number of girls who were ready and willing to marry him. It might even be true, though she had no direct authority for saying it, that he had made up his mind never to marry, and that was the reason why he felt himself so safe in being the nicest sort of friend. He was safe, Miss Rasmith philosophized, but whether other people were so safe was a different question. There were girls who were said to be dying for him; but of course those things were always said about a handsome young minister. She had frankly taken him on his own ground, from the beginning, and she believed that this was what he liked. At any rate, they had agreed that they were never to be anything but the best of friends, and they always had been.

Mrs. Kenton came and shyly took the chair on Miss Rasmith’s other side, and Miss Rasmith said they had been talking about Mr. Breckon, and she repeated what she had been saying to Ellen. Mrs. Kenton assented more openly than Ellen could to her praises, but when she went away, and her daughter sat passive, without comment or apparent interest, the mother drew a long, involuntary sigh.

“Do you like her, Ellen?”

“She tries to be pleasant, I think.”

“Do you think she really knows much about Mr. Breckon?”

“Oh yes. Why not? She belongs to his church.”

“He doesn’t seem to me like a person who would have a parcel of girls tagging after him.”

“That is what they do in the East, Boyne says.”

“I wish she would let Boyne alone. She is making a fool of the child. He’s round with her every moment. I think she ought to be ashamed, such an old thing!”

Ellen chose to protest, or thought it fair to do so. “I don’t believe she is doing him any harm. She just lets him talk out, and everybody else checks him up so. It was nice of her to come and talk with me, when we had all been keeping away from her. Perhaps he sent her, though. She says they have always been such good friends because she wouldn’t be anything else from the beginning.”

“I don’t see why she need have told you that.”

“Oh, it was just to show he was run after. I wonder if he thinks we are running after him? Momma, I am tired of him! I wish he wouldn’t speak to me any more.”

“Why! do you really dislike him, Ellen?”

“No, not dislike him. But it tires me to have him trying to amuse me. Don’t you understand?”

Mrs. Kenton said yes, she understood, but she was clear only of the fact that Ellen seemed flushed and weak at that moment. She believed that it was Miss Rasmith and not Mr. Breckon who was to blame, but she said: “Well, you needn’t worry about it long. It will only be a day or two now till we get to Boulogne, and then he will leave us. Hadn’t you better go down now, and rest awhile in your berth? I will bring your things.”

Ellen rose, pulling her wraps from her skirts to give them to her mother. A voice from behind said between their meeting shoulders: “Oh, are you going down? I was just coming to beg Miss Kenton to take a little walk with me,” and they looked round together and met Breckon’s smiling face.

“I’m afraid,” Mrs. Kenton began, and then, like a well-trained American mother, she stopped and left the affair to her daughter.

“Do you think you can get down with them, momma?” the girl asked, and somehow her mother’s heart was lightened by her evasion, not to call it uncandor. It was at least not morbid, it was at least like other girls, and Mrs. Kenton imparted what comfort there was in it to the judge, when he asked where she had left Ellen.

“Not that it’s any use,” she sighed, when she had seen him share it with a certain shamefacedness. “That woman has got her grip on him, and she doesn’t mean to let go.”

Kenton understood Miss Rasmith by that woman; but he would not allow himself to be so easily cast down. This was one of the things that provoked Mrs. Kenton with him; when he had once taken hope he would not abandon it without reason. “I don’t see any evidence of her having her grip on him. I’ve noticed him, and he doesn’t seem attentive to her. I should say he tried to avoid her. He certainly doesn’t avoid Ellen.”

“What are you thinking of, Rufus?”

“What are you? You know we’d both be glad if he fancied her.”

“Well, suppose we would? I don’t deny it. He is one of the most agreeable gentlemen I ever saw; one of the kindest and nicest.”

“He’s more than that,” said the judge. “I’ve been sounding him on various points, and I don’t see where he’s wrong. Of course, I don’t know much about his religious persuasion, if it is one, but I think I’m a pretty fair judge of character, and that young man has character. He isn’t a light person, though he likes joking and laughing, and he appreciates Ellen.”

“Yes, so do we. And there’s about as much prospect of his marrying her. Rufus, it’s pretty hard! She’s just in the mood to be taken with him, but she won’t let herself, because she knows it’s of no use. That Miss Rasmith has been telling her how much he is run after, and I could see that that settled it for Ellen as plainly as if she said so. More plainly, for there’s enough of the girl in her to make her say one thing when she means another. She was just saying she was sick of him, and never wanted to speak to him again, when he came up and asked her to walk, and she went with him instantly. I knew what she meant. She wasn’t going to let him suppose that anything Miss Rasmith had said was going to change her.”

“Well, then,” said the judge, “I don’t see what you’re scared at.”

“I’m not SCARED. But, oh, Rufus! It can’t come to anything! There isn’t time!” An hysterical hope trembled in her asseveration of despair that made him smile.

“I guess if time’s all that’s wanted—”

“He is going to get off at Boulogne.”

“Well, we can get off there, too.”

“Rufus, if you dare to think of such a thing!”

“I don’t. But Europe isn’t so big but what he can find us again if he wants to.”

“Ah, if he wants to!”

Ellen seemed to have let her mother take her languor below along with the shawls she had given her. Buttoned into a close jacket, and skirted short for the sea, she pushed against the breeze at Breckon’s elbow with a vigor that made him look his surprise at her. Girl-like, she took it that something was wrong with her dress, and ran herself over with an uneasy eye.

Then he explained: “I was just thinking how much you were like Miss Lottie-if you’ll excuse my being so personal. And it never struck me before.”

“I didn’t suppose we looked alike,” said Ellen.

“No, certainly. I shouldn’t have taken you for sisters. And yet, just now, I felt that you were like her. You seem so much stronger this morning — perhaps it’s that the voyage is doing you good. Shall you be sorry to have it end?”

“Shall you? That’s the way Lottie would answer.”

Breckon laughed. “Yes, it is. I shall be very sorry. I should be willing to have it rough again, it that would make it longer. I liked it’s being rough. We had it to ourselves.” He had not thought how that sounded, but if it sounded particular, she did not notice it.

She merely said, “I was surprised not to be seasick, too.”

“And should you be willing to have it rough again?”

“You wouldn’t see anything more of your friends, then.”

“Ah, yes; Miss Rasmith. She is a great talker, Did you find her interesting?”

“She was very interesting.”

“Yes? What did she talk about?”

Ellen realized the fact too late to withhold “Why, about you.”

“And was that what made her interesting?”

“Now, what would Lottie say to such a thing as that?” asked Ellen, gayly.

“Something terribly cutting, I’m afraid. But don’t you! From you I don’t want to believe I deserve it, no matter what Miss Rasmith said me.”

“Oh, she didn’t say anything very bad. Unless you mind being a universal favorite.”

“Well, it makes a man out rather silly.”

“But you can’t help that.”

“Now you remind me of Miss Lottie again!”

“But I didn’t mean that,” said Ellen, blushing and laughing. “I hope you wouldn’t think I could be so pert.”

“I wouldn’t think anything that wasn’t to your praise,” said Breckon, and a pause ensued, after which the words he added seemed tame and flat. “I suspect Miss Rasmith has been idealizing the situation. At any rate, I shouldn’t advise you to trust her report implicitly. I’m at the head of a society, you know, ethical or sociological, or altruistic, whatever you choose to call it, which hasn’t any very definite object of worship, and yet meets every Sunday for a sort of worship; and I have to be in the pulpit. So you see?”

Ellen said, “I think I understand,” with a temptation to smile at the ruefulness of his appeal.

Breckon laughed for her. “That’s the mischief and the absurdity of it. But it isn’t so bad as it seems. They’re really most of them hard-headed people; and those that are not couldn’t make a fool of a man that nature hadn’t begun with. Still, I’m not very well satisfied with my work among them — that is, I’m not satisfied with myself.” He was talking soberly enough, and he did not find that she was listening too seriously. “I’m going away to see whether I shall come back.” He looked at her to make sure that she had taken his meaning, and seemed satisfied that she had. “I’m not sure that I’m fit for any sort of ministry, and I may find the winter in England trying to find out. I was at school in England, you know.”

Ellen confessed that she had not known that.

“Yes; I suppose that’s what made me seem ‘so Englishy’ the first day to Miss Lottie, as she called it. But I’m straight enough American as far as parentage goes. Do you think you will be in England-later?”

“I don’t know. If poppa gets too homesick we will go back in the fall.”

“Miss Kenton,” said the young man, abruptly, “will you let me tell you how much I admire and revere your father?”

Tears came into her eyes and her throat swelled. “But you don’t know,” she begun; and then she stopped.

“I have been wanting to submit something to his judgment; but I’ve been afraid. I might seem to be fishing for his favor.”

“Poppa wouldn’t think anything that was unjust,” said Ellen, gravely.

“Ah,” Breckon laughed, “I suspect that I should rather have him unjust. I wish you’d tell me what he would think.”

“But I don’t know what it is,” she protested, with a reflected smile.

“I was in hopes Miss Rasmith might have told you. Well, it is simply this, and you will see that I’m not quite the universal favorite she’s been making you fancy me. There is a rift in my lute, a schism in my little society, which is so little that I could not have supposed there was enough of it to break in two. There are some who think their lecturer — for that’s what I amount to — ought to be an older, if not a graver man. They are in the minority, but they’re in the right, I’m afraid; and that’s why I happen to be here telling you all this. It’s a question of whether I ought to go back to New York or stay in London, where there’s been a faint call for me.” He saw the girl listening devoutly, with that flattered look which a serious girl cannot keep out of her face when a man confides a serious matter to her. “I might safely promise to be older, but could I keep my word if I promised to be graver? That’s the point. If I were a Calvinist I might hold fast by faith, and fight it out with that; or if I were a Catholic I could cast myself upon the strength of the Church, and triumph in spite of temperament. Then it wouldn’t matter whether I was grave or gay; it might be even better if I were gay. But,” he went on, in terms which, doubtless, were not then for the first time formulated in his mind, “being merely the leader of a sort of forlorn hope in the Divine Goodness, perhaps I have no right to be so cheerful.”

The note of a sad irony in his words appealed to such indignation for him in Ellen as she never felt for herself. But she only said, “I don’t believe Poppa could take that in the wrong way if you told him.”

Breckon stared. “Yes your father! What would he say?”

“I can’t tell you. But I’m sure he would know what you meant.”

“And you,” he pursued, “what should YOU say?”

“I? I never thought about such a thing. You mustn’t ask me, if you’re serious; and if you’re not—”

“But I am; I am deeply serious. I would like, to know how the case strikes you. I shall be so grateful if you will tell me.”

“I’m sorry I can’t, Mr. Breckon. Why don’t you ask poppa?”

“No, I see now I sha’n’t be able. I feel too much, after telling you, as if I had been posing. The reality has gone out of it all. And I’m ashamed.”

“You mustn’t be,” she said, quietly; and she added, “I suppose it would be like a kind of defeat if you didn’t go back?”

“I shouldn’t care for the appearance of defeat,” he said, courageously. “The great question is, whether somebody else wouldn’t be of more use in my place.”

“Nobody could be,” said she, in a sort of impassioned absence, and then coming to herself, “I mean, they wouldn’t think so, I don’t believe.”

“Then you advise—”

“No, no! I can’t; I don’t. I’m not fit to have an opinion about such a thing; it would be crazy. But poppa—”

They were at the door of the gangway, and she slipped within and left him. His nerves tingled, and there was a glow in his breast. It was sweet to have surprised that praise from her, though he could not have said why he should value the praise or a girl of her open ignorance and inexperience in everything that would have qualified her to judge him. But he found himself valuing it supremely, and wonderingly wishing to be worthy of it.

XVII.

Ellen discovered her father with a book in a distant corner of the dining-saloon, which he preferred to the deck or the library for his reading, in such intervals as the stewards, laying and cleaning the tables, left him unmolested in it. She advanced precipitately upon him, and stood before him in an excitement which, though he lifted his dazed eyes to it from his page, he was not entirely aware of till afterwards. Then he realized that her cheeks were full of color, and her eyes of light, and that she panted as if she had been running when she spoke.

“Poppa,” she said, “there is something that Mr. Breckon wants to speak to you — to ask you about. He has asked me, but I want you to see him, for I think he had better tell you himself.”

While he still stared at her she was as suddenly gone as she had come, and he remained with his book, which the meaning had as suddenly left. There was no meaning in her words, except as he put it into them, and after he had got it in he struggled with it in a sort of perfunctory incredulity. It was not impossible; it chiefly seemed so because it seemed too good to be true; and the more he pondered it the more possible, if not probable, it became. He could not be safe with it till he had submitted it to his wife; and he went to her while he was sure of repeating Ellen’s words without varying from them a syllable.

To his astonishment, Mrs. Kenton was instantly convinced. “Why, of course,” she said, “it can’t possibly mean anything else. Why should it be so very surprising? The time hasn’t been very long, but they’ve been together almost every moment; and he was taken with her from the very beginning — I could see that. Put on your other coat,” she said, as she dusted the collar of the coat the judge was wearing. “He’ll be looking you up, at once. I can’t say that it’s unexpected,” and she claimed a prescience in the matter which all her words had hitherto denied.

Kenton did not notice her inconsistency. “If it were not so exactly what I wished,” he said, “I don’t know that I should be surprised at it myself. Sarah, if I had been trying to imagine any one for Ellen, I couldn’t have dreamed of a person better suited to her than this young man. He’s everything that I could wish him to be. I’ve seen the pleasure and comfort she took in his way from the first moment. He seemed to make her forget — Do you suppose she has forgotten that miserable wretch Do you think—”

“If she hadn’t, could she be letting him come to speak to you? I don’t believe she ever really cared for Bittridge — or not after he began flirting with Mrs. Uphill.” She had no shrinking from the names which Kenton avoided with disgust. “The only question for you is to consider what you shall say to Mr. Breckon.”

“Say to him? Why, of course, if Ellen has made up her mind, there’s only one thing I can say.”

“Indeed there is! He ought to know all about that disgusting Bittridge business, and you have got to tell him.”

“Sarah, I couldn’t. It is too humiliating. How would it do to refer him to — You could manage that part so much better. I don’t see how I could keep it from seeming an indelicate betrayal of the poor child—”

“Perhaps she’s told him herself,” Mrs. Kenton provisionally suggested.

The judge eagerly caught at the notion. “Do you think so? It would be like her! Ellen would wish him to know everything.”

He stopped, and his wife could see that he was trembling with excitement. “We must find out. I will speak to Ellen—”

“And — you don’t think I’d better have the talk with him first?”

“Certainly not!”

“Why, Rufus! You were not going to look him up?”

“No,” he hesitated; but she could see that some such thing had been on his mind.

“Surely,” she said, “you must be crazy!” But she had not the heart to blight his joy with sarcasm, and perhaps no sarcasm would have blighted it.

“I merely wondered what I had better say in case he spoke to me before you saw Ellen — that’s all. Sarah! I couldn’t have believed that anything could please me so much. But it does seem as if it were the assurance of Ellen’s happiness; and she has deserved it, poor child! If ever there was a dutiful and loving daughter — at least before that wretched affair — she was one.”

“She has been a good girl,” Mrs. Kenton stoically admitted.

“And they are very well matched. Ellen is a cultivated woman. He never could have cause to blush for her, either her mind or her manners, in any circle of society; she would do him credit under any and all circumstances. If it were Lottie—”

“Lottie is all right,” said her mother, in resentment of his preference; but she could not help smiling at it. “Don’t you be foolish about Ellen. I approve of Mr. Breckon as much as you do. But it’s her prettiness and sweetness that’s taken his fancy, and not her wisdom, if she’s got him.”

“If she’s got him?”

“Well, you know what I mean. I’m not saying she hasn’t. Dear knows, I don’t want to! I feel just as you do about it. I think it’s the greatest piece of good fortune, coming on top of all our trouble with her. I couldn’t have imagined such a thing.”

He was instantly appeased. “Are you going to speak with Ellen” he radiantly inquired.

“I will see. There’s no especial hurry, is there?”

“Only, if he should happen to meet me—”

“You can keep out of his way, I reckon. Or You can put him off, somehow.”

“Yes,” Kenton returned, doubtfully. “Don’t,” he added, “be too blunt with Ellen. You know she didn’t say anything explicit to me.”

“I think I will know how to manage, Mr. Kenton.”

“Yes, of course, Sarah. I’m not saying that.”

Breckon did not apparently try to find the judge before lunch, and at table he did not seem especially devoted to Ellen in her father’s jealous eyes. He joked Lottie, and exchanged those passages or repartee with her in which she did not mind using a bludgeon when she had not a rapier at hand; it is doubtful if she was very sensible of the difference. Ellen sat by in passive content, smiling now and then, and Boyne carried on a dignified conversation with Mr. Pogis, whom he had asked to lunch at his table, and who listened with one ear to the vigorous retorts of Lottie in her combat with Breckon.

The judge witnessed it all with a grave displeasure, more and more painfully apparent to his wife. She could see the impatience, the gathering misgiving, in his face, and she perceived that she must not let this come to conscious dissatisfaction with Breckon; she knew her husband capable of indignation with trifling which would complicate the situation, if it came to that. She decided to speak with Ellen as soon as possible, and she meant to follow her to her state-room when they left the table. But fate assorted the pieces in the game differently. Boyne walked over to the place where Miss Rasmith was sitting with her mother; Lottie and Mr. Pogis went off to practise duets together, terrible, four-handed torments under which the piano presently clamored; and Ellen stood for a moment talked to by Mr. Breckon, who challenged her then for a walk on deck, and with whom she went away smiling.

Mrs. Kenton appealed with the reflection of the girl’s happiness in her face to the frowning censure in her husband’s; but Kenton spoke first. “What does he mean?” he demanded, darkly. “If he is making a fool of her he’ll find that that game can’t be played twice, with impunity. Sarah, I believe I should choke him.”

“Mr. Kenton!” she gasped, and she trembled in fear of him, even while she kept herself with difficulty from shaking him for his folly. “Don’t say such a thing! Can’t you see that they want to talk it over? If he hasn’t spoken to you it’s because he wants to know how you took what she said.” Seeing the effect of these arguments, she pursued: “Will you never have any sense? I will speak to Ellen the very minute I get her alone, and you have just got to wait. Don’t you suppose it’s hard for me, too? Have I got nothing to bear?”

Kenton went silently back to his book, which he took with him to the reading-room, where from time to time his wife came to him and reported that Ellen and Breckon were still walking up and down together, or that they were sitting down talking, or were forward, looking over at the prow, or were watching the deck-passengers dancing. Her husband received her successive advices with relaxing interest, and when she had brought the last she was aware that the affair was entirely in her hands with all the responsibility. After the gay parting between Ellen and Breckon, which took place late in the afternoon, she suffered an interval to elapse before she followed the girl down to her state-room. She found her lying in her berth, with shining eyes and glad, red cheeks; she was smiling to herself.

“That is right, Ellen,” her mother said. “You need rest after your long tramp.”

“I’m not tired. We were sitting down a good deal. I didn’t think how late it was. I’m ever so much better. Where’s Lottie?”

“Off somewhere with that young Englishman,” said Mrs. Kenton, as if that were of no sort of consequence. “Ellen,” she added, abruptly, trying within a tremulous smile to hide her eagerness, “what is this that Mr. Breckon wants to talk with your father about?”

“Mr. Breckon? With poppa?”

“Yes, certainly. You told him this morning that Mr. Breckon—”

“Oh! Oh yes!” said Ellen, as if recollecting something that had slipped her mind. “He wants poppa to advise him whether to go back to his congregation in New York or not.”

Mrs. Kenton sat in the corner of the sofa next the door, looking into the girl’s face on the pillow as she lay with her arms under her head. Tears of defeat and shame came into her eyes, and she could not see the girl’s light nonchalance in adding:

“But he hasn’t got up his courage yet. He thinks he’ll ask him after dinner. He says he doesn’t want poppa to think he’s posing. I don’t know what he means.”

Mrs. Kenton did not speak at once. Her bitterest mortification was not for herself, but for the simple and tender father-soul which had been so tried already. She did not know how he would bear it, the disappointment, and the cruel hurt to his pride. But she wanted to fall on her knees in thankfulness that he had betrayed himself only to her.

She started in sudden alarm with the thought. “Where is he now — Mr. Breckon?”

“He’s gone with Boyne down into the baggage-room.”

Mrs. Kenton sank back in her corner, aware now that she would not have had the strength to go to her husband even to save him from the awful disgrace of giving himself away to Breckon. “And was that all?” she faltered.

“All?”

“That he wanted to speak to your father about?”

She must make irrefragably sure, for Kenton’s sake, that she was not misunderstanding.

“Why, of course! What else? Why, momma! what are you crying about?”

“I’m not crying, child. Just some foolishness of your father’s. He understood — he thought—” Mrs. Kenton began to laugh hysterically. “But you know how ridiculous he is; and he supposed — No, I won’t tell you!”

It was not necessary. The girl’s mind, perhaps because it was imbued already with the subject, had possessed itself of what filled her mother’s. She dropped from the elbow on which she had lifted herself, and turned her face into the pillow, with a long wail of shame.

XVIII.

Mrs. Kenton’s difficulties in setting her husband right were indefinitely heightened by the suspicion that the most unsuspicious of men fell into concerning Breckon. Did Breckon suppose that the matter could be turned off in that way? he stupidly demanded; and when he was extricated from this error by his wife’s representation that Breckon had not changed at all, but had never told Ellen that he wished to speak with him of anything but his returning to his society, Kenton still could not accept the fact. He would have contended that at least the other matter must have been in Breckon’s mind; and when he was beaten from this position, and convinced that the meaning they had taken from Ellen’s words had never been in any mind but their own, he fell into humiliation so abject that he could hide it only by the hauteur with which he carried himself towards Breckon when they met at dinner. He would scarcely speak to the young man; Ellen did not come to the table; Lottie and Boyne and their friend Mr. Pogis were dining with the Rasmiths, and Mrs. Kenton had to be, as she felt, cringingly kind to Breckon in explaining just the sort of temporary headache that kept her eldest daughter away. He was more than ordinarily sympathetic and polite, but he was manifestly bewildered by Kenton’s behavior. He refused an hilarious invitation from Mrs. Rasmith, when he rose from table, to stop and have his coffee with her on his way out of the saloon. His old adorer explained that she had ordered a small bottle of champagne in honor of its being the night before they were to get into Boulogne, and that he ought to sit down and help her keep the young people straight. Julia, she brokenly syllabled, with the gay beverage bubbling back into her throat, was not the least use; she was worse than any. Julia did not look it, in the demure regard which she bent upon her amusing mother, and Breckon persisted in refusing. He said he thought he might safely leave them to Boyne, and Mrs. Rasmith said into her handkerchief, “Oh yes! Boyne!” and pressed Boyne’s sleeve with her knobbed and jewelled fingers.

It was evident where most of the small bottle had gone, but Breckon was none the cheerfuller for the spectacle of Mrs. Rasmith. He could not have a moment’s doubt as to the sort of work he had been doing in New York if she were an effect of it, and he turned his mind from the sad certainty back to the more important inquiry as to what offence his wish to advise with Judge Kenton could have conveyed. Ellen had told him in the afternoon that she had spoken with her father about it, and she had not intimated any displeasure or reluctance on him; but apparently he had decided not to suffer himself to be approached.

It might be as well. Breckon had not been able to convince himself that his proposal to consult Judge Kenton was not a pose. He had flashes of owning that it was contemplated merely as a means of ingratiating himself with Ellen. Now, as he found his way up and down among the empty steamer-chairs, he was aware, at the bottom of his heart, of not caring in the least for Judge Kenton’s repellent bearing, except as it possibly, or impossibly, reflected some mood of hers. He could not make out her not coming to dinner; the headache was clearly an excuse; for some reason she did not wish to see him, he argued, with the egotism of his condition.

The logic of his conclusion was strengthened at breakfast by her continued absence; and this time Mrs. Kenton made no apologies for her. The judge was a shade less severe; or else Breckon did not put himself so much in the way to be withheld as he had the night before. Boyne and Lottie carried on a sort of muted scrap, unrebuked by their mother, who seemed too much distracted in some tacit trouble to mind them. From time to time Breckon found her eyes dwelling upon him wonderingly, entreatingly; she dropped them, if she caught his, and colored.

In the afternoon it was early evident that they were approaching Boulogne. The hatch was opened and the sailors began getting up the baggage of the passengers who were going to disembark. It seemed a long time for everybody till the steamer got in; those going ashore sat on their hand-baggage for an hour before the tug came up to take, them off. Mr. Pogis was among them; he had begun in the forenoon to mark the approaching separation between Lottie and himself by intervals of unmistakable withdrawal. Another girl might have cared, but Lottie did not care, for her failure to get a rise out of him by her mockingly varied “Oh, I say!” and “Well, rather!” In the growth of his dignified reserve Mr. Pogis was indifferent to jeers. By whatever tradition of what would or would not do he was controlled in relinquishing her acquaintance, or whether it was in obedience to some imperative ideal, or some fearful domestic influence subtly making itself felt from the coasts of his native island, or some fine despair of equalling the imagined grandeur of Lottie’s social state in Tuskingum by anything he could show her in England, it was certain that he was ending with Lottie then and there. At the same time he was carefully defining himself from the Rasmiths, with whom he must land. He had his state-room things put at an appreciable distance, where he did not escape a final stab from Lottie.

“Oh, do give me a rose out of that,” she entreated, in travestied imploring, as he stood looking at a withered bouquet which the steward had brought up with his rugs.

“I’m takin’ it home,” he explained, coldly.

“And I want to take a rose back to New York. I want to give it to a friend of mine there.”

Mr. Pogis hesitated. Then he asked, “A man?” “Well, rather!” said Lottie.

He answered nothing, but looked definitively down at the flowers in his hand.

“Oh, I say!” Lottie exulted.

Boyne remained fixed in fealty to the Rasmiths, with whom Breckon was also talking as Mrs. Kenton came up with the judge. She explained how sorry her daughter Ellen was at not being able to say goodbye; she was still not at all well; and the ladies received her excuses with polite patience. Mrs. Rasmith said she did not know what they should do without Boyne, and Miss Rasmith put her arm across his shoulders and pulled him up to her, and implored, “Oh, give him to me, Mrs. Kenton!”

Boyne stole an ashamed look at his mother, and his father said, with an unbending to Breckon which must have been the effect of severe expostulation from Mrs. Kenton, “I suppose you and the ladies will go to Paris together.”

“Why, no,” Breckon said, and he added, with mounting confusion, “I — I had arranged to keep on to Rotterdam. I was going to mention it.”

“Keep on to Rotterdam!” Mrs. Rasmith’s eyes expressed the greatest astonishment.

“Why, of course, mother!” said her daughter. “Don’t you know? Boyne told us.”

Boyne, after their parting, seized the first chance of assuring his mother that he had not told Miss Rasmith that, for he had not known it, and he went so far in her condemnation to wonder how she could say such a thing. His mother said it was not very nice, and then suggested that perhaps she had heard it from some one else, and thought it was he. She acquitted him of complicity with Miss Rasmith in forbearing to contradict her; and it seemed to her a fitting time to find out from Boyne what she honestly could about the relation of the Rasmiths to Mr. Breckon. It was very little beyond their supposition, which every one else had shared, that he was going to land with them at Boulogne, and he must have changed his mind very suddenly. Boyne had not heard the Rasmiths speak of it. Miss Rasmith never spoke of Mr. Breckon at all; but she seemed to want to talk of Ellen; she was always asking about her, and what was the matter with her, and how long she had been sick.

“Boyne,” said his mother, with a pang, “you didn’t tell her anything about Ellen?”

“Momma!” said the boy, in such evident abhorrence of the idea that she rested tranquil concerning it. She paid little attention to what Boyne told her otherwise of the Rasmiths. Her own horizon were so limited that she could not have brought home to herself within them that wandering life the Rasmiths led from climate to climate and sensation to sensation, with no stay so long as the annually made in New York, where they sometimes passed months enough to establish themselves in giving and taking tea in a circle of kindred nomads. She conjectured as ignorantly as Boyne himself that they were very rich, and it would not have enlightened her to know that the mother was the widow of a California politician, whom she had married in the sort of middle period following upon her less mortuary survival of Miss Rasmith’s father, whose name was not Rasmith.

What Mrs. Kenton divined was that they had wanted to get Breckon, and that so far as concerned her own interest in him they had wanted to get him away from Ellen. In her innermost self-confidences she did not permit herself the notion that Ellen had any right to him; but still it was a relief to have them off the ship, and to have him left. Of all the witnesses of the fact, she alone did not find it awkward. Breckon himself found it very awkward. He did not wish to be with the Rasmiths, but he found it uncomfortable not being with them, under the circumstances, and he followed them ashore in tingling reveries of explanation and apology. He had certainly meant to get off at Boulogne, and when he had suddenly and tardily made up his mind to keep on to Rotterdam, he had meant to tell them as soon as he had the labels on his baggage changed. He had not meant to tell them why he had changed his mind, and he did not tell them now in these tingling reveries. He did not own the reason in his secret thoughts, for it no longer seemed a reason; it no longer seemed a cause. He knew what the Rasmiths would think; but he could easily make that right with his conscience, at least, by parting with the Kentons at Rotterdam, and leaving them to find their unconducted way to any point they chose beyond. He separated himself uncomfortably from them when the tender had put off with her passengers and the ship had got under way again, and went to the smoking-room, while the judge returned to his book and Mrs. Kenton abandoned Lottie to her own devices, and took Boyne aside for her apparently fruitless inquiries.

They were not really so fruitless but that at the end of them she could go with due authority to look up her husband. She gently took his book from him and shut it up. “Now, Mr. Kenton,” she began, “if you don’t go right straight and find Mr. Breckon and talk with him, I — I don’t know what I will do. You must talk to him—”

“About Ellen?” the judge frowned.

“No, certainly not. Talk with him about anything that interests you. Be pleasant to him. Can’t you see that he’s going on to Rotterdam on our account?”

“Then I wish he wasn’t. There’s no use in it.”

“No matter! It’s polite in him, and I want you to show him that you appreciate it.”

“Now see here, Sarah,” said the judge, “if you want him shown that we appreciate his politeness why don’t you do it yourself?”

“I? Because it would look as if you were afraid to. It would look as if we meant something by it.”

“Well, I am afraid; and that’s just what I’m afraid of. I declare, my heart comes into my mouth whenever I think what an escape we had. I think of it whenever I look at him, and I couldn’t talk to him without having that in my mind all the time. No, women can manage those things better. If you believe he is going along on our account, so as to help us see Holland, and to keep us from getting into scrapes, you’re the one to make it up to him. I don’t care what you say to show him our gratitude. I reckon we will get into all sorts of trouble if we’re left to ourselves. But if you think he’s stayed because he wants to be with Ellen, and—”

“Oh, I don’t KNOW what I think! And that’s silly I can’t talk to him. I’m afraid it’ll seem as if we wanted to flatter him, and goodness knows we don’t want to. Or, yes, we do! I’d give anything if it was true. Rufus, do you suppose he did stay on her account? My, oh my! If I could only think so! Wouldn’t it be the best thing in the world for the poor child, and for all of us? I never saw anybody that I liked so much. But it’s too good to be true.”

“He’s a nice fellow, but I don’t think he’s any too good for Ellen.”

“I’m not saying he is. The great thing is that he’s good enough, and gracious knows what will happen if she meets some other worthless fellow, and gets befooled with him! Or if she doesn’t take a fancy to some one, and goes back to Tuskingum without seeing any one else she likes, there is that awful wretch, and when she hears what Dick did to him — she’s just wrong-headed enough to take up with him again to make amends to him. Oh, dear oh, dear! I know Lottie will let it out to her yet!”

The judge began threateningly, “You tell Lottie from me—”

“What?” said the girl herself, who had seen her father and mother talking together in a remote corner of the music-room and had stolen light-footedly upon them just at this moment.

“Lottie, child,” said her mother, undismayed at Lottie’s arrival in her larger anxiety, “I wish you would try and be agreeable to Mr. Breckon. Now that he’s going on with us to Holland, I don’t want him to think we’re avoiding him.”

“Why?”

“Oh, because.”

“Because you want to get him for Ellen?”

“Don’t be impudent,” said her father. “You do as your mother bids you.”

“Be agreeable to that old Breckon? I think I see myself! I’d sooner read! I’m going to get a book now.” She left them as abruptly as she had come upon them, and ran across to the bookcase, where she remained two stepping and peering through the glass doors at the literature within, in unaccustomed question concerning it.

“She’s a case,” said the judge, looking at her not only with relenting, but with the pride in her sufficiency for all the exigencies of life which he could not feel in Ellen. “She can take care of herself.”

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Kenton sadly assented, “I don’t think anybody will ever make a fool of Lottie.”

“It’s a great deal more likely to be the other way,” her father suggested.

“I think Lottie is conscientious,” Mrs. Kenton protested. “She wouldn’t really fool with a man.”

“No, she’s a good girl,” the judge owned.

“It’s girls like Ellen who make the trouble and the care. They are too good, and you have to think some evil in this world. Well!” She rose and gave her husband back his book.

“Do you know where Boyne is?”

“No. Do you want him to be pleasant to Mr. Breckon?”

“Somebody has got to. But it would be ridiculous if nobody but Boyne was.”

She did not find Boyne, after no very exhaustive search, and the boy was left to form his bearing towards Breckon on the behavior of the rest of his family. As this continued helplessly constrained both in his father and mother, and voluntarily repellent in Lottie, Boyne decided upon a blend of conduct which left Breckon in greater and greater doubt of his wisdom in keeping on to Rotterdam. There was no good reason which he would have been willing to give himself, from the beginning. It had been an impulse, suddenly coming upon him in the baggage-room where he had gone to get something out of his trunk, and where he had decided to have the label of his baggage changed from the original destination at Boulogne to the final port of the steamer’s arrival. When this was once done he was sorry, but he was ashamed to have the label changed back. The most assignable motive for his act was his reluctance to go on to Paris with the Rasmiths, or rather with Mrs. Rasmith; for with her daughter, who was not a bad fellow, one could always manage. He was quite aware of being safely in his own hands against any design of Mrs. Rasmith’s, but her machinations humiliated him for her; he hated to see her going through her manoeuvres, and he could not help grieving for her failures, with a sort of impersonal sympathy, all the more because he disliked her as little as he respected her.

The motive which he did not assign to himself was that which probably prevailed with him, though in the last analysis it was as selfish, no doubt, as the one he acknowledged. Ellen Kenton still piqued his curiosity, still touched his compassion. He had so far from exhausted his wish or his power to befriend her, to help her, that he had still a wholly unsatisfied longing to console her, especially when she drooped into that listless attitude she was apt to take, with her face fallen and her hands let lie, the back of one in the palm of the other, in her lap. It was possibly the vision of this following him to the baggage-room, when he went to open his trunk, that as much as anything decided him to have the label changed on his baggage, but he did not own it then, and still less did he own it now, when he found himself quite on his own hands for his pains.

He felt that for some reason the Kentons were all avoiding him. Ellen, indeed, did not take part, against him, unless negatively, for she had appeared neither at lunch nor at dinner as the vessel kept on its way after leaving Boulogne; and when he ventured to ask for her Mrs. Kenton answered with embarrassment that she was not feeling very well. He asked for her at lunch, but not at dinner, and when he had finished that meal he went on the promenade-deck, and walked forlornly up and down, feeling that he had been a fool.

Mrs. Kenton went below to her daughter’s room, and found Ellen there on the sofa, with her book shut on her thumb at the place where the twilight had failed her.

“Ellen, dear,” her mother said, “aren’t you feeling well?”

“Yes, I’m well enough,” said the girl, sensible of a leading in the question. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing. Only — only I can’t make your father behave naturally with Mr. Breckon. He’s got his mind so full of that mistake we both came so near making that he can’t think of anything else. He’s so sheepish about it that he can hardly speak to him or even look at him; and I must confess that I don’t do much better. You know I don’t like to put myself forward where your father is, and if I did, really I don’t believe I could make up my mouth to say anything. I did want Lottie to be nice to him, but Lottie dislikes him so! And even Boyne — well, it wouldn’t matter about Boyne, if he didn’t seem to be carrying out a sort of family plan — Boyne barely answers him when he speaks to him. I don’t know what he can think.” Ellen was a good listener, and Mrs. Kenton, having begun, did not stop till she had emptied the bag. “I just know that he didn’t get off at Boulogne because he wanted to stay on with us, and thought he could be useful to us at The Hague, and everywhere; and here we’re acting as ungratefully! Why, we’re not even commonly polite to him, and I know he feels it. I know that he’s hurt.”

Ellen rose and stood before the glass, into which he asked of her mother’s reflected face, while she knotted a fallen coil of hair into its place, “Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He went on deck somewhere.”

Ellen put on her hat and pinned it, and put on her jacket and buttoned it. Then she started towards the door. Her mother made way for her, faltering, “What are you going to do, Ellen?”

“I am going to do right.”

“Don’t-catch cold!” her mother called after her figure vanishing down the corridor, but the warning couched in these terms had really no reference to the weather.

The girl’s impulse was one of those effects of the weak will in her which were apt to leave her short of the fulfilment of a purpose. It carried her as her as the promenade, which she found empty, and she went and leaned upon the rail, and looked out over the sorrowful North Sea, which was washing darkly away towards where the gloomy sunset had been.

Steps from the other side of the ship approached, hesitated towards her, and then arrested themselves. She looked round.

“Why, Miss Kenton!” said Breckon, stupidly.

“The sunset is over, isn’t it?” she answered.

“The twilight isn’t.” Breckon stopped; then he asked, “Wouldn’t you like to take a little walk?”

“Yes,” she answered, and smiled fully upon him. He had never known before how radiant a smile she lead.

“Better have my arm. It’s getting rather dark.”

“Well.” She put her hand on his arm and he felt it tremble there, while she palpitated, “We are all so glad you could go on to Rotterdam. My mother wanted me to tell you.”

“Oh, don’t speak of that,” said Breckon, not very appositely. Presently he forced a laugh, in order to add, with lightness, “I was afraid perhaps I had given you all some reason to regret it!”

She said, “I was afraid you would think that — or momma was — and I couldn’t bear to have you.”

“Well, then, I won’t.”

XIX.

Breckon had answered with gayety, but his happiness was something beyond gayety. He had really felt the exclusion from the Kentons in which he had passed the day, and he had felt it the more painfully because he liked them all. It may be owned that he liked Ellen best from the beginning, and now he liked her better than ever, but even in the day’s exile he had not ceased to like each of them. They were, in their family affection, as lovable as that sort of selfishness can make people. They were very united and good to one another. Lottie herself, except in her most lurid moments, was good to her brother and sister, and almost invariably kind to her parents. She would not, Breckon saw, have brooked much meddling with her flirtations from them, but as they did not offer to meddle, she had no occasion to grumble on that score. She grumbled when they asked her to do things for Ellen, but she did them, and though she never did them without grumbling, she sometimes did them without being asked. She was really very watchful of Ellen when it would least have been expected, and sometimes she was sweet. She never was sweet with Boyne, but she was often his friend, though this did not keep her from turning upon him at the first chance to give him a little dig, or a large one, for that matter. As for Boyne, he was a mass of helpless sweetness, though he did not know it, and sometimes took himself for an iceberg when he was merely an ice-cream of heroic mould. He was as helplessly sweet with Lottie as with any one, and if he suffered keenly from her treacheries, and seized every occasion to repay them in kind, it was clearly a matter of conscience with him, and always for the good. Their father and mother treated their squabbles very wisely, Breckon thought. They ignored them as much as possible, and they recognized them without attempting to do that justice between them which would have rankled in both their breasts.

To a spectator who had been critical at first, Mr. and Mrs. Kenton seemed an exemplary father and mother with Ellen as well as with their other children. It is easy to be exemplary with a sick girl, but they increasingly affected Breckon as exemplary with Ellen. He fancied that they acted upon each other beneficially towards her. At first he had foreboded some tiresome boasting from the father’s tenderness, and some weak indulgence of the daughter’s whims from her mother; but there was either never any ground for this, or else Mrs. Kenton, in keeping her husband from boasting, had been obliged in mere consistency to set a guard upon her own fondness.

It was not that. Ellen, he was more and more decided, would have abused the weakness of either; if there was anything more angelic than her patience, it was her wish to be a comfort to them, and, between the caprices of her invalidism, to be a service. It was pathetic to see her remembering to do things for them which Boyne and Lottie had forgotten, or plainly shirked doing, and to keep the fact out of sight. She really kept it out of sight with them, and if she did not hide it from so close an observer as Breckon, that was more his fault than hers. When her father first launched out in her praise, or the praise of her reading, the young man had dreaded a rustic prig; yet she had never been a prig, but simply glad of what book she had known, and meekly submissive to his knowledge if not his taste. He owned that she had a right to her taste, which he found almost always good, and accounted for as instinctive in the absence of an imaginable culture in her imaginable ambient. So far as he had glimpses of this, he found it so different from anything he had known that the modest adequacy of Mrs. Kenton in the political experiences of modern Europe, as well as the clear judgments of Kenton himself in matters sometimes beyond Breekon himself, mystified him no less than Ellen’s taste.

Even with the growth of his respect for their intelligence and his love of their kindliness, he had not been able to keep a certain patronage from mingling, and it was not till they evinced not only entire ability, but an apparent wish to get on without his approval, without his acquaintance even, that he had conceived a just sense of them. The like is apt to happen with the best of us, when we are also the finest, and Breckon was not singular in coming to a due consciousness of something valuable only in the hour of its loss. He did not know that the loss was only apparent. He knew that he had made a distinct sacrifice for these people, and that, when he had prepared himself to befriend them little short of self-devotion, they showed themselves indifferent, and almost repellent. In the revulsion of feeling, when Ellen gave him her mother’s message, and frankly offered him reparation on behalf of her whole family, he may have overdone his gratitude, but he did not overdo it to her perception. They walked up and down the promenade of the Amstel, in the watery North Sea moon, while bells after bells noted the hour unheeded, and when they parted for the night it was with an involuntary pressure of hands, from which she suddenly pulled hers, and ran down the corridor of her state-room and Lottie’s.

He stood watching the narrow space in which she had vanished, and thinking how gentle she was, and how she had contrived somehow to make him feel that now it was she who had been consoling him, and trying to interest him and amuse him. He had not realized that before; he had been used to interesting and amusing her, but he could not resent it; he could not resent the implication of superiority, if such a thing were possible, which her kindness conveyed. The question with Breckon was whether she had walked with him so long because she wished, in the hour, to make up as fully as possible for the day’s neglect, or because she had liked to walk up and down with him. It was a question he found keeping itself poignantly, yet pleasantly, in his mind, after he had got into his berth under the solidly slumberous Boyne, and inclining now to one solution and now to the other, with a delicate oscillation that was charming.

The Amstel took her time to get into Rotterdam, and when her passengers had gone ashore the next forenoon the train that carried Breckon to The Hague in the same compartment with the Kentons was in no greater hurry. It arrived with a deliberation which kept it from carrying them on to Amsterdam before they knew it, and Mrs. Kenton had time to place such parts of the wars in the Rise of the Dutch Republic as she could attach to the names of the stations and the general features of the landscape. Boyne was occupied with improvements for the windmills and the canal-boats, which did not seem to him of the quality of the Michigan aerometers, or the craft with which he was familiar on the Hudson River and on the canal that passed through Tuskingum. Lottie, with respect to the canals, offered the frank observation that they smelt, and in recognizing a fact which travel almost universally ignores in Holland, she watched her chance of popping up the window between herself and Boyne, which Boyne put down with mounting rage. The agriculture which triumphed everywhere on the little half — acre plots lifted fifteen inches above the waters of the environing ditches, and the black and white cattle everywhere attesting the immemorial Dutch ideal of a cow, were what at first occupied Kenton, and he was tardily won from them to the question of fighting over a country like that. It was a concession to his wife’s impassioned interest in the overthrow of the Spaniards in a landscape which had evidently not changed since. She said it was hard to realize that Holland was not still a republic, and she was not very patient with Breckon’s defence of the monarchy on the ground that the young Queen was a very pretty girl.

“And she is only sixteen,” Boyne urged.

“Then she is two years too old for you,” said Lottie.

“No such thing!” Boyne retorted. “I was fifteen in June.”

“Dear me! I should never have thought it,” said his sister.

Ellen seemed hardly to look out of the window at anything directly, but when her father bade her see this thing and that, it seemed that she had seen it already. She said at last, with a quiet sigh, “I never want to go away.”

She had been a little shy of Breckon the whole morning, and had kept him asking himself whether she was sorry she had walked so long with him the night before, or, having offered him due reparation for her family, she was again dropping him. Now and then he put her to the test by words explicitly directed at her, and she replied with the dreamy passivity which seemed her normal mood, and in which he could fancy himself half forgotten, or remembered with an effort.

In the midst of this doubt she surprised him — he reflected that she was always surprising him — by asking him how far it was from The Hague to the sea. He explained that The Hague was in the sea like all the rest of Holland, but that if she meant the shore, it was no distance at all. Then she said, vaguely, she wished they were going to the shore. Her father asked Breckon if there was not a hotel at the beach, and the young man tried to give him a notion of the splendors of the Kurhaus at Scheveningen; of Scheveningen itself he despaired of giving any just notion.

“Then we can go there,” said the judge, ignoring Ellen, in his decision, as if she had nothing to do with it.

Lottie interposed a vivid preference for The Hague. She had, she said, had enough of the sea for one while, and did not want to look at it again till they sailed for home. Boyne turned to his father as if a good deal shaken by this reasoning, and it was Mrs. Kenton who carried the day for going first to a hotel in The Hague and prospecting from there in the direction of Scheveningen; Boyne and his father could go down to the shore and see which they liked best.

“I don’t see what that has to do with me,” said Lottie. No one was alarmed by her announcement that if she did not like Scheveningen she should stay at The Hague, whatever the rest did; in the event fortune favored her going with her family.

The hotel in The Hague was very pleasant, with a garden behind it, where a companionable cat had found a dry spot, and where Lottie found the cat and made friends with it. But she said the hotel was full of Cook’s tourists, whom she recognized, in spite of her lifelong ignorance of them, by a prescience derived from the conversation of Mr. Pogis, and from the instinct of a society woman, already rife in her. She found that she could not stay in a hotel with Cook’s tourists, and she took her father’s place in the exploring party which went down to the watering-place in the afternoon, on the top of a tram-car, under the leafy roof of the adorable avenue of trees which embowers the track to Scheveningen. She disputed Boyne’s impressions of the Dutch people, whom he found looking more like Americans than any foreigners he had seen, and she snubbed Breckon from his supposed charge of the party. But after the start, when she declared that Ellen could not go, and that it was ridiculous for her to think of it, she was very good to her, and looked after her safety and comfort with a despotic devotion.

At the Kurhaus she promptly took the lead in choosing rooms, for she had no doubt of staying there after the first glance at the place, and she showed a practical sense in settling her family which at least her mother appreciated when they were installed the next day.

Mrs. Kenton could not make her husband admire Lottie’s faculty so readily. “You think it would have been better for her to sit down with Ellen, on the sand and dream of the sea,” she reproached him, with a tender resentment on behalf of Lottie. “Everybody can’t dream.”

“Yes, but I wish she didn’t keep awake with such a din,” said the judge. After all, he admired Lottie’s judgment about the rooms, and he censured her with a sigh of relief from care as he sank back in the easy-chair fronting the window that looked out on the North Sea; Lottie had already made him appreciate the view till he was almost sick of it.

“What is the matter?” said Mrs. Kenton, sharply. “Do you want to be in Tuskingum? I suppose you would rather be looking into Richard’s back-yard.”

“No,” said the judge, mildly, “this is very nice.”

“It will do Ellen good, every minute. I don’t care how much she sits on the sands and dream. I’ll love to see her.”

The sitting on the sand was a survival of Mr. Kenton’s preoccupations of the sea-side. As a mater of fact, Ellen was at that moment sitting in one of the hooked wicker arm-chairs which were scattered over the whole vast beach like a growth of monstrous mushrooms, and, confronting her in cosey proximity, Breckon sat equally hidden in another windstuhl. Her father and her mother were able to keep them placed, among the multitude of windstuhls, by the presence of Lottie, who hovered near them, and, with Boyne, fended off the demure, wicked-looking little Scheveningen girls. On a smaller scale these were exactly like their demure, wicked-looking Scheveningen mothers, and they approached with knitting in their hands, and with large stones folded in their aprons, which they had pilfered from the mole, and were trying to sell for footstools. The windstuhl men and they were enemies, and when Breckon bribed them to go away, the windstuhl men chased them, and the little girls ran, making mouths at Boyne over their shoulders. He scorned to notice them; but he was obliged to report the misconduct of Lottie, who began making eyes at the Dutch officers as soon as she could feel that Ellen was safely off her hands. She was the more exasperating and the more culpable to Boyne, because she had asked him to walk up the beach with her, and had then made the fraternal promenade a basis of operations against the Dutch military. She joined her parents in ignoring Boyne’s complaints, and continued to take credit for all the pleasant facts of the situation; she patronized her family as much for the table d’hote at luncheon as for the comfort of their rooms. She was able to assure them that there was not a Cook’s tourist in the hotel, where there seemed to be nearly every other kind of fellow-creature. At the end of the first week she had acquaintance of as many nationalities as she could reach in their native or acquired English, in all the stages of haughty toleration, vivid intimacy, and cold exhaustion. She had a faculty for getting through with people, or of ceasing to have any use for them, which was perhaps her best safeguard in her adventurous flirting; while the simple aliens were still in the full tide of fancied success, Lottie was sick of them all, and deep in an indiscriminate correspondence with her young men in Tuskingum.

The letters which she had invited from these while still in New York arrived with the first of those readdressed from the judge’s London banker. She had more letters than all the rest of the family together, and counted a half-dozen against a poor two for her sister. Mrs. Kenton cared nothing about Lottie’s letters, but she was silently uneasy about the two that Ellen carelessly took. She wondered who could be writing to Ellen, especially in a cover bearing a handwriting altogether strange to her.

“It isn’t from Bittridge, at any rate,” she said to her husband, in the speculation which she made him share. “I am always dreading to have her find out what Richard did. It would spoil everything, I’m afraid, and now everything is going so well. I do wish Richard hadn’t, though, of course, he did it for the best. Who do you think has been writing to her?”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“I suppose she will tell me after a while. I don’t like to seem to be following her up. One was from Bessie Pearl, I think.”

Ellen did not speak of her letters to her mother, and after waiting a day or two, Mrs. Kenton could not refrain from asking her.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Ellen. “I haven’t read them yet.”

“Haven’t read them!” said Mrs. Kenton. Then, after reflection, she added, “You are a strange girl, Ellen,” and did not venture to say more.

“I suppose I thought I should have to answer them, and that made me careless. But I will read them.” Her mother was silent, and presently Ellen added: “I hate to think of the past. Don’t you, momma?”

“It is certainly very pleasant here,” said Mrs. Kenton, cautiously. “You’re enjoying yourself — I mean, you seem to be getting so much stronger.”

“Why, momma, why do you talk as if I had been sick?” Ellen asked.

“I mean you’re so much interested.”

“Don’t I go about everywhere, like anybody?” Ellen pursued, ignoring her explanation.

“Yes, you certainly do. Mr. Breckon seems to like going about.”

Ellen did not respond to the suggestion except to say: “We go into all sorts of places. This morning we went up on that schooner that’s drawn up on the beach, and the old man who was there was very pleasant. I thought it was a wreck, but Mr. Breckon says they are always drawing their ships that way up on the sand. The old man was patching some of the wood-work, and he told Mr. Breckon — he can speak a little Dutch — that they were going to drag her down to the water and go fishing as soon as he was done. He seemed to think we were brother and sister.” She flushed a little, and then she said: “I believe I like the dunes as well as anything. Sometimes when those curious cold breaths come in from the sea we climb up in the little hollows on the other side and sit there out of the draft. Everybody seems to do it.”

Apparently Ellen was submitting the propriety of the fact to her mother, who said: “Yes, it seems to be quite the same as it is at home. I always supposed that it was different with young people here. There is certainly no harm in it.”

Ellen went on, irrelevantly. “I like to go and look at the Scheveningen women mending the nets on the sand back of the dunes. They have such good gossiping times. They shouted to us last evening, and then laughed when they saw us watching them. When they got through their work they got up and stamped off so strong, with their bare, red arms folded into their aprons, and their skirts sticking out so stiff. Yes, I should like to be like them.”

“You, Ellen!”

“Yes; why not?”

Mrs. Kenton found nothing better to answer than,

“They were very material looking.”

“They are very happy looking. They live in the present. That is what I should like: living in the present, and not looking backwards or forwards. After all, the present is the only life we’ve got, isn’t it?”

“I suppose you may say it is,” Mrs. Kenton admitted, not knowing just where the talk was leading, but dreading to interrupt it.

“But that isn’t the Scheveningen woman’s only ideal. Their other ideal is to keep the place clean. Saturday afternoon they were all out scrubbing the brick sidewalks, and clear into the middle of the street. We were almost ashamed to walk over the nice bricks, and we picked out as many dirty places as we could find.”

Ellen laughed, with a light-hearted gayety that was very strange to her, and Mrs. Kenton, as she afterwards told her husband, did not know what to think.

“I couldn’t help wondering,” she said, “whether the poor child would have liked to keep on living in the present a month ago.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t say so,” the judge answered.

XX.

From the easy conquest of the men who looked at her Lottie proceeded to the subjection of the women. It would have been more difficult to put these down, if the process had not been so largely, so almost entirely subjective. As it was, Lottie exchanged snubs with many ladies of the continental nationalities who were never aware of having offered or received offence. In some cases, when they fearlessly ventured to speak with her, they behaved very amiable, and seemed to find her conduct sufficiently gracious in return. In fact, she was approachable enough, and had no shame, before Boyne, in dismounting from the high horse which she rode when alone with him, and meeting these ladies on foot, at least half-way. She made several of them acquainted with her mother, who, after a timorous reticence, found them very conversable, with a range of topics, however, that shocked her American sense of decorum. One Dutch lady talked with such manly freedom, and with such untrammelled intimacy, that she was obliged to send Boyne and Lottie about their business, upon an excuse that was not apparent to the Dutch lady. She only complimented Mrs. Kenton upon her children and their devotion to each other, and when she learned that Ellen was also her daughter, ventured the surmise she was not long married.

“It isn’t her husband,” Mrs. Kenton explained, with inward trouble. “It’s just a gentleman that came over with us,” and she went with her trouble to her own husband as soon as she could.

“I’m afraid it isn’t the custom to go around alone with young men as much as Ellen thinks,” she suggested.

“He ought to know,” said the judge. “I don’t suppose he would if it wasn’t.”

“That is true,” Mrs. Kenton owned, and for the time she put her misgivings away.

“So long as we do nothing wrong,” the judge decided, “I don’t see why we should not keep to our own customs.”

“Lottie says they’re not ours, in New York.”

“Well, we are not in New York now.”

They had neither of them the heart to interfere with Ellen’s happiness, for, after all, Breckon was careful enough of the appearances, and it was only his being constantly with Ellen that suggested the Dutch lady’s surmise. In fact, the range of their wanderings was not beyond the dunes, though once they went a little way on one of the neatly bricked country roads that led towards The Hague. As yet there had been no movement in any of the party to see the places that lie within such easy tram-reach of The Hague, and the hoarded interest of the past in their keeping. Ellen chose to dwell in the actualities which were an enlargement of her own present, and Lottie’s active spirit found employment enough in the amusements at the Kurhaus. She shopped in the little bazars which make a Saratoga under the colonnades fronting two sides of the great space before the hotel, and she formed a critical and exacting taste in music from a constant attendance at the afternoon concerts; it is true that during the winter in New York she had cast forever behind her the unsophisticated ideals of Tuskingum in the art, so that from the first she was able to hold the famous orchestra that played in the Kurhaus concert-room up to the highest standard. She had no use for anybody who had any use for rag-time, and she was terribly severe with a young American, primarily of Boyne’s acquaintance, who tried to make favor with her by asking about the latest coon-songs. She took the highest ethical ground with him about tickets in a charitable lottery which he had bought from the portier, but could not move him on the lower level which he occupied. He offered to give her the picture which was the chief prize, in case he won it, and she assured him beforehand that she should not take it. She warned Boyne against him, under threats of exposure to their mother, as not a good influence, but one afternoon, when the young Queen of Holland came to the concert with the queen-mother, Lottie cast her prejudices to the winds in accepting the places which the wicked fellow-countryman offered Boyne and herself, when they had failed to get any where they could see the queens, as the Dutch called them.

The hotel was draped with flags, and banked with flowers about the main entrance where the queens were to arrive, and the guests massed themselves in a dense lane for them to pass through. Lottie could not fail to be one of the foremost in this array, and she was able to decide, when the queens had passed, that the younger would not be considered a more than average pretty girl in America, and that she was not very well dressed. They had all stood within five feet of her, and Boyne had appropriated one of the prettiest of the pretty bends which the gracious young creature made to right and left, and had responded to it with an ‘empressement’ which he hoped had not been a sacrifice of his republican principles.

During the concert he sat with his eyes fixed upon the Queen where she sat in the royal box, with her mother and her ladies behind her, and wondered and blushed to wonder if she had noticed him when he bowed, or if his chivalric devotion in applauding her when the audience rose to receive her had been more apparent than that of others; whether it had seemed the heroic act of setting forth at the head of her armies, to beat back a German invasion, which it had essentially been, with his instantaneous return as victor, and the Queen’s abdication and adoption of republican principles under conviction of his reasoning, and her idolized consecration as the first chief of the Dutch republic. His cheeks glowed, and he quaked at heart lest Lottie should surprise his thoughts and expose them to that sarcastic acquaintance, who proved to be a medical student resting at Scheveningen from the winter’s courses and clinics in, Vienna. He had already got on to many of Boyne’s curves, and had sacrilegiously suggested the Queen of Holland when he found him feeding his fancy on the modern heroical romances; he advised him as an American adventurer to compete with the European princes paying court to her. So thin a barrier divided that malign intelligence from Boyne’s most secret dreams that he could never feel quite safe from him, and yet he was always finding himself with him, now that he was separated from Miss Rasmith, and Mr. Breckon was taken up so much with Ellen. On the ship he could put many things before Mr. Breckon which must here perish in his breast, or suffer the blight of this Mr. Trannel’s raillery. The student sat near the Kentons at table, and he was no more reverent of the judge’s modest convictions than of Boyne’s fantastic preoccupations. The worst of him was that you could not help liking him: he had a fascination which the boy felt while he dreaded him, and now and then he did something so pleasant that when he said something unpleasant you could hardly believe it.

At the end of the concert, when he rose and stood with all the rest, while the royal party left their box, and the orchestra played the Dutch national hymn, he said, in a loud whisper, to Boyne: “Now’s your time, my boy! Hurry out and hand her into her carriage!”

Boyne fairly reeled at the words which translated a passage of the wild drama playing itself in his brain, and found little support in bidding his tormentor, “Shut up!” The retort, rude as it was, seemed insufficient, but Boyne tried in vain to think of something else. He tried to punish him by separating Lottie from him, but failed as signally in that. She went off with him, and sat in a windstuhl facing his the rest of the afternoon, with every effect of carrying on.

Boyne was helpless, with his mother against it, when he appealed to her to let him go and tell Lottie that she wanted her. Mrs. Kenton said that she saw no harm in it, that Ellen was sitting in like manner with Mr. Breckon.

“Mr. Breckon is very different, and Ellen knows how to behave,” he urged, but his mother remained unmoved, or was too absent about something to take any interest in the matter. In fact, she was again unhappy about Ellen, though she put on such an air of being easy about her. Clearly, so far as her maternal surmise could fathom the case, Mr. Breckon was more and more interested in Ellen, and it was evident that the child was interested in him. The situation was everything that was acceptable to Mrs. Kenton, but she shuddered at the cloud which hung over it, and which might any moment involve it. Again and again she had made sure that Lottie had given Ellen no hint of Richard’s ill-advised vengeance upon Bittridge; but it was not a thing that could be kept always, and the question was whether it could be kept till Ellen had accepted Mr. Breckon and married him. This was beyond the question of his asking her to do so, but it was so much more important that Mrs. Kenton was giving it her attention first, quite out of the order of time. Besides, she had every reason, as she felt, to count upon the event. Unless he was trifling with Ellen, far more wickedly than Bittridge, he was in love with her, and in Mrs. Kenton’s simple experience and philosophy of life, being in love was briefly preliminary to marrying. If she went with her anxieties to her husband, she had first to reduce him from a buoyant optimism concerning the affair before she could get him to listen seriously. When this was accomplished he fell into such despair that she ended in lifting him up and supporting him with hopes that she did not feel herself. What they were both united in was the conviction that nothing so good could happen in the world, but they were equally united in the old American tradition that they must not lift a finger to secure this supreme good for their child.

It did not seem to them that leaving the young people constantly to themselves was doing this. They interfered with Ellen now neither more nor less than they had interfered with her as to Bittridge, or than they would have interfered with her in the case of any one else. She was still to be left entirely to herself in such matters, and Mrs. Kenton would have kept even her thoughts off her if she could. She would have been very glad to give her mind wholly to the study of the great events which had long interested her here in their scene, but she felt that until the conquest of Mr. Breckon was secured beyond the hazard of Ellen’s morbid defection at the supreme moment, she could not give her mind to the history of the Dutch republic.

“Don’t bother me about Lottie, Boyne,” she said. “I have enough to think of without your nonsense. If this Mr. Trannel is an American, that is all that is necessary. We are all Americans together, and I don’t believe it will make remark, Lottie’s sitting on the beach with him.”

“I don’t see how he’s different from that Bittridge,” said Boyne. “He doesn’t care for anything; and he plays the banjo just like him.”

Mrs. Kenton was too troubled to laugh. She said, with finality, “Lottie can take care of herself,” and then she asked, “Boyne, do you know whom Ellen’s letters were from?”

“One was from Bessie Pearl—”

“Yes, she showed me that. But you don’t know who the other was from?”

“No; she didn’t tell me. You know how close Ellen is.”

“Yes,” the mother sighed, “she is very odd.”

Then she added, “Don’t you let her know that I asked you about her letters.”

“No,” said Boyne. His audience was apparently at an end, but he seemed still to have something on his mind. “Momma,” he began afresh.

“Well?” she answered, a little impatiently.

“Nothing. Only I got to thinking, Is a person able to control their — their fancies?”

“Fancies about what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. About falling in love.” Boyne blushed.

“Why do you want to know? You musn’t think about such things, a boy like you! It’s a great pity that you ever knew anything about that Bittridge business. It’s made you too bold. But it seems to have been meant to drag us down and humiliate us in every way.”

“Well, I didn’t try to know anything about it,” Boyne retorted.

“No, that’s true,” his mother did him the justice to recognize. “Well, what is it you want to know?” Boyne was too hurt to answer at once, and his mother had to coax him a little. She did it sweetly, and apologized to him for saying what she had said. After all, he was the youngest, and her baby still. Her words and caresses took effect at last, and he stammered out, “Is everybody so, or is it only the Kentons that seem to be always putting — well, their affections — where it’s perfectly useless?”

His mother pushed him from her. “Boyne, are you silly about that ridiculous old Miss Rasmith?”

“No!” Boyne shouted, savagely, “I’m NOT!”

“Who is it, then?”

“I sha’n’t tell you!” Boyne said, and tears of rage and shame came into his eyes.

XXI.

In his exile from his kindred, for it came practically to that, Boyne was able to add a fine gloom to the state which he commonly observed with himself when he was not giving way to his morbid fancies or his morbid fears, and breaking down in helpless subjection to the nearest member of his household. Lottie was so taken up with her student that she scarcely quarrelled with him any more, and they had no longer those moments of union in which they stood together against the world. His mother had cast him off, as he felt, very heartlessly, though it was really because she could not give his absurdities due thought in view of the hopeful seriousness of Ellen’s affair, and Boyne was aware that his father at the best of times was ignorant of him when he was not impatient of him. These were not the best of times with Judge Kenton, and Boyne was not the first object of his impatience. In the last analysis he was living until he could get home, and so largely in the hope of this that his wife at times could scarcely keep him from taking some step that would decide the matter between Ellen and Breckon at once. They were tacitly agreed that they were waiting for nothing else, and, without making their agreement explicit, she was able to quell him by asking what he expected to do in case there was nothing between them? Was he going to take the child back to Tuskingum, which was the same as taking her back to Bittridge? it hurt her to confront him with this question, and she tried other devices for staying and appeasing him. She begged him now, seeing Boyne so forlorn, and hanging about the hotel alone, or moping over those ridiculous books of his, to go off with the boy somewhere and see the interesting places within such easy reach, like Leyden and Delft if he cared nothing for the place where William the Silent was shot, he ought to see the place that the Pilgrims started from. She had counted upon doing those places herself, with her husband, and it was in a sacrifice of her ideal that she now urged him to go with Boyne. But her preoccupation with Ellen’s affair forbade her self-abandon to those high historical interests to which she urged his devotion. She might have gone with him and Boyne, but then she must have left the larger half of her divided mind with Ellen, not to speak of Lottie, who refused to be a party to any such excursion. Mrs. Kenton felt the disappointment and grieved at it, but not without hope of repairing it later, and she did not cease from entreating the judge to do what he could at once towards fulfilling the desires she postponed. Once she prevailed with him, and really got him and Boyne off for a day, but they came back early, with signs of having bored each other intolerably, and after that it was Boyne, as much as his father, who relucted from joint expeditions. Boyne did not so much object to going alone, and his father said it was best to let him, though his mother had her fears for her youngest. He spent a good deal of his time on the trams between Scheveningen and The Hague, and he was understood to have explored the capital pretty thoroughly. In fact, he did go about with a valet de place, whom he got at a cheap rate, and with whom he conversed upon the state of the country and its political affairs. The valet said that the only enemy that Holland could fear was Germany, but an invasion from that quarter could be easily repulsed by cutting the dikes and drowning the invaders. The sea, he taught Boyne, was the great defence of Holland, and it was a waste of money to keep such an army as the Dutch had; but neither the sea nor the sword could drive out the Germans if once they insidiously married a Prussian prince to the Dutch Queen.

There seemed to be no getting away from the Queen, for Boyne. The valet not only talked about her, as the pleasantest subject which he could find, but he insisted upon showing Boyne all her palaces. He took him into the Parliament house, and showed him where she sat while the queen-mother read the address from the throne. He introduced him at a bazar where the shop-girl who spoke English better than Boyne, or at least without the central Ohio accent, wanted to sell him a miniature of the Queen on porcelain. She said the Queen was such a nice girl, and she was herself such a nice girl that Boyne blushed a little in looking at her. He bought the miniature, and then he did not know what to do with it; if any of the family, if Lottie, found out that he had it, or that Trannel, he should have no peace any more. He put it in his pocket, provisionally, and when he came giddily out of the shop he felt himself taken by the elbow and placed against the wall by the valet, who said the queens were coming. They drove down slowly through the crowded, narrow street, bowing right and left to the people flattened against the shops, and again Boyne saw her so near that he could have reached out his hand and almost touched hers.

The consciousness of this was so strong in him that he wondered whether he had not tried to do so. If he had he would have been arrested — he knew that; and so he knew that he had not done it. He knew that he imagined doing so because it would be so awful to have done it, and he imagined being in love with her because it would be so frantic. At the same time he dramatized an event in which he died for her, and she became aware of his hopeless passion at the last moment, while the anarchist from whom he had saved her confessed that the bomb had been meant for her. Perhaps it was a pistol.

He escaped from the valet as soon as he could, and went back to Scheveningen limp from this experience, but the queens were before him. They had driven down to visit the studio of a famous Dutch painter there, and again the doom was on Boyne to press forward with the other spectators and wait for the queens to appear and get into their carriage. The young Queen’s looks were stamped in Boyne’s consciousness, so that he saw her wherever he turned, like the sun when one has gazed at it. He thought how that Trannel had said he ought to hand her into her carriage, and he shrank away for fear he should try to do so, but he could not leave the place till she had come out with the queen — mother and driven off. Then he went slowly and breathlessly into the hotel, feeling the Queen’s miniature in his pocket. It made his heart stand still, and then bound forward. He wondered again what he should do with it. If he kept it, Lottie would be sure to find it, and he could not bring himself to the sacrilege of destroying it. He thought he would walk out on the breakwater as far as he could and throw it into the sea, but when he got to the end of the mole he could not do so. He decided that he would give it to Ellen to keep for him, and not let Lottie see it; or perhaps he might pretend he had bought it for her. He could not do that, though, for it would not be true, and if he did he could not ask her to keep it from Lottie.

At dinner Mr. Trannel told him he ought to have been there to see the Queen; that she had asked especially for him, and wanted to know if they had not sent up her card to him. Boyne meditated an apt answer through all the courses, but he had not thought of one when they had come to the ‘corbeille de fruits’, and he was forced to go to bed without having avenged himself.

In taking rooms for her family at the hotel, Lottie had arranged for her emancipation from the thraldom of rooming with Ellen. She said that had gone on long enough; if she was grown up at all, she was grown up enough to have a room of her own, and her mother had yielded to reasoning which began and ended with this position. She would have interfered so far as to put Lottie into the room next her, but Lottie said that if Boyne was the baby he ought to be next his mother; Ellen might come next him, but she was going to have the room that was furthest from any implication of the dependence in which she had languished; and her mother submitted again. Boyne was not sorry; there had always been hours of the night when he felt the need of getting at his mother for reassurance as to forebodings which his fancy conjured up to trouble him in the wakeful dark. It was understood that he might freely do this, and though the judge inwardly fretted, he could not deny the boy the comfort of his mother’s encouraging love. Boyne’s visits woke him, but he slept the better for indulging in the young nerves that tremor from impressions against which the old nerves are proof. But now, in the strange fatality which seemed to involve him, Boyne could not go to his mother. It was too weirdly intimate, even for her; besides, when he had already tried to seek her counsel she had ignorantly repelled him.

The night after his day in The Hague, when he could bear it no longer, he put on his dressing-gown and softly opened Ellen’s door, “awake, Ellen?” he whispered.

“Yes, What is it, Boyne” her gentle voice asked.

“He came and sat down by her bed and stole his hand into hers, which she put out to him. The watery moonlight dripped into the room at the edges of the shades, and the long wash of the sea made itself regularly heard on the sands.

“Can’t you sleep?” Ellen asked again. “Are you homesick?”

“Not exactly that. But it does seem rather strange for us to be off here so far, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, I don’t see how I can forgive myself for making you come,” said Ellen, but her voice did not sound as if she were very unhappy.

“You couldn’t help it,” said Boyne, and the words suggested a question to him. “Do you believe that such things are ordered, Ellen?”

“Everything is ordered, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. And if they are, we’re not, to blame for what happens.”

“Not if we try to do right.”

“Of course. The Kentons always do that,” said Boyne, with the faith in his family that did not fail him in the darkest hour. “But what I mean is that if anything comes on you that you can’t foresee and you can’t get out of—” The next step was not clear, and Boyne paused. He asked,

“Do you think that we can control our feelings, Ellen?”

“About what?”

“Well, about persons that we like.” He added, for safety, “Or dislike.”

“I’m afraid not,” said Ellen, sadly, “We ought to like persons and dislike them for some good reason, but we don’t.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Borne, with a long breath. “Sometimes it seems like a kind of possession, doesn’t it?”

“It seems more like that when we like them,” Ellen said.

“Yes, that’s what I mean. If a person was to take a fancy to some one that was above him, that was richer, or older, he wouldn’t be to blame for it, would he?”

“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?”

Borne hesitated. “Yes” he said. He was in for it now.

Ellen had not noticed Boyne’s absorption with Miss Rasmith on the ship, but she vaguely remembered hearing Lottie tease him about her, and she said now, “He wouldn’t be to blame for it if he couldn’t help it, but if the person was much older it would be a pity!”

“Uh, she isn’t so very much older,” said Borne, more cheerfully than he had spoken before.

“Is it somebody that you have taken a fancy to Borne?”

“I don’t know, Ellen. That’s what makes it so kind of awful. I can’t tell whether it’s a real fancy, or I only think it is. Sometimes I think it is, and sometimes I think that I think so because I am afraid to believe it. Do you under Ellen?”

“It seems to me that I do. But you oughtn’t to let your fancy run away with you, Boyne. What a queer boy!”

“It’s a kind of fascination, I suppose. But whether it’s a real fancy or an unreal one, I can’t get away from it.”

“Poor boy!” said his sister.

“Perhaps it’s those books. Sometimes I think it is, and I laugh at the whole idea; and then again it’s so strong that I can’t get away from it. Ellen!”

“Well, Boyne?”

“I could tell you who it is, if you think that would do any good — if you think it would help me to see it in the true light, or you could help me more by knowing who it is than you can now.”

“I hope it isn’t anybody that you can’t respect, Boyne?”

“No, indeed! It’s somebody you would never dream of.”

“Well?” Ellen was waiting for him to speak, but he could not get the words out, even to her.

“I guess I’ll tell you some other time. Maybe I can get over it myself.”

“It would be the best way if you could.”

He rose and left her bedside, and then he came back. “Ellen, I’ve got something that I wish you would keep for me.”

“What is it? Of course I will.”

“Well, it’s — something I don’t want you to let Lottie know I’ve got. She tells that Mr. Trannel everything, and then he wants to make fun. Do you think he’s so very witty?”

“I can’t help laughing at some things he says.”

“I suppose he is,” Boyne ruefully admitted. “But that doesn’t make you like him any better. Well, if you won’t tell Lottie, I’ll give it to you now.”

“I won’t tell anything that you don’t want me to, Boyne.”

“It’s nothing. It’s just-a picture of the Queen on porcelain, that I got in The Hague. The guide took me into the store, and I thought I ought to get something.”

“Oh, that’s very nice, Boyne. I do like the Queen so much. She’s so sweet!”

“Yes, isn’t she?” said Boyne, glad of Ellen’s approval. So far, at least, he was not wrong. “Here it is now.”

He put the miniature in Ellen’s hand. She lifted herself on her elbow. “Light the candle and let me see it.”

“No, no!” he entreated. “It might wake Lottie, and — and — Good-night, Ellen.”

“Can you go to sleep now, Boyne?”

“Oh yes. I’m all right. Good-night.”

“Good-night, then.”

Borne stooped over and kissed her, and went to the door. He came back and asked, “You don’t think it was silly, or anything, for me to get it?”

“No, indeed! It’s just what you will like to have when you get home. We’ve all seen her so often. I’ll put it in my trunk, and nobody shall know about it till we’re safely back in Tuskingum.”

Boyne sighed deeply. “Yes, that’s what I meant. Good-night.”

“Good-night, Boyne.”

“I hope I haven’t waked you up too much?”

“Oh no. I can get to sleep easily again.”

“Well, good-night.” Boyne sighed again, but not so deeply, and this time he went out.

XXII.

Mrs. Kenton woke with the clear vision which is sometimes vouchsafed to people whose eyes are holden at other hours of the day. She had heard Boyne opening and shutting Ellen’s door, and her heart smote her that he should have gone to his sister with whatever trouble he was in rather than come to his mother. It was natural that she should put the blame on her husband, and “Now, Mr. Kenton,” she began, with an austerity of voice which he recognized before he was well awake, “if you won’t take Boyne off somewhere to-day, I will. I think we had better all go. We have been here a whole fortnight, and we have got thoroughly rested, and there is no excuse for our wasting our time any longer. If we are going to see Holland, we had better begin doing it.”

The judge gave a general assent, and said that if she wanted to go to Flushing he supposed he could find some garden-seeds there, in the flower and vegetable nurseries, which would be adapted to the climate of Tuskingum, and they could all put in the day pleasantly, looking round the place. Whether it was the suggestion of Tuskingum in relation to Flushing that decided her against the place, or whether she had really meant to go to Leyden, she now expressed the wish, as vividly as if it were novel, to explore the scene of the Pilgrims’ sojourn before they sailed for Plymouth, and she reproached him for not caring about the place when they both used to take such an interest in it at home.

“Well,” said the judge, “if I were at home I should take an interest in it here.”

This provoked her to a silence which he thought it best to break in tacit compliance with her wish, and he asked, “Do you propose taking the whole family and the appurtenances? We shall be rather a large party.”

“Ellen would wish to go, and I suppose Mr. Breckon. We couldn’t very well go without them.”

“And how about Lottie and that young Trannel?”

“We can’t leave him out, very well. I wish we could. I don’t like him.”

“There’s nothing easier than not asking him, if you don’t want him.”

“Yes, there is, when you’ve got a girl like Lottie to deal with. Quite likely she would ask him herself. We must take him because we can’t leave her.”

“Yes, I reckon,” the judge acquiesced.

“I’m glad,” Mrs. Kenton said, after a moment, “that it isn’t Ellen he’s after; it almost reconciles me to his being with Lottie so much. I only wonder he doesn’t take to Ellen, he’s so much like that—”

She did not say out what was in her mind, but her husband knew. “Yes, I’ve noticed it. This young Breckon was quite enough so, for my taste. I don’t know what it is that just saves him from it.”

“He’s good. You could tell that from the beginning.”

They went off upon the situation that, superficially or subliminally, was always interesting them beyond anything in the world, and they did not openly recur to Mrs. Kenton’s plan for the day till they met their children at breakfast. It was a meal at which Breckon and Trammel were both apt to join them, where they took it at two of the tables on the broad, seaward piazza of the hotel when the weather was fine. Both the young men now applauded her plan, in their different sorts. It was easily arranged that they should go by train and not by tram from The Hague. The train was chosen, and Mrs. Kenton, when she went to her room to begin the preparations for a day’s pleasure which constitute so distinctly a part of its pain, imagined that everything was settled. She had scarcely closed the door behind her when Lottie opened it and shut it again behind her.

“Mother,” she said, in the new style of address to which she was habituating Mrs. Kenton, after having so long called her momma, “I am not going with you.”

“Indeed you are, then!” her mother retorted. “Do you think I would leave you here all day with that fellow? A nice talk we should make!”

“You are perfectly welcome to that fellow, mother, and as he’s accepted he will have to go with you, and there won’t be any talk. But, as I remarked before, I am not going.”

“Why aren’t you going, I should like to know?”

“Because I don’t like the company.”

“What do you mean? Have you got anything against Mr. Breckon?”

“He’s insipid, but as long as Ellen don’t mind it I don’t care. I object to Mr. Trannel!”

“Why?”

“I don’t see why I should have to tell you. If I said I liked him you might want to know, but it seems to me that my not liking him is — my not liking him is my own affair.” There was a kind of logic in this that silenced Mrs. Kenton for the moment. In view of her advantage Lottie relented so far as to add, “I’ve found out something about him.”

Mrs. Kenton was imperative in her alarm. “What is it?” she demanded.

Lottie answered, obliquely: “Well, I didn’t leave The Hague to get rid of them, and then take up with one of them at Scheveningen.”

“One of what?”

“COOK’S TOURISTS, if you must know, mother. Mr. Trannel, as you call him, is a Cook’s tourist, and that’s the end of it. I have got no use for him from this out.”

Mrs. Kenton was daunted, and not for the first time, by her daughter’s superior knowledge of life. She could put Boyne down sometimes, though not always, when he attempted to impose a novel code of manners or morals upon her, but she could not cope with Lottie. In the present case she could only ask, “Well?”

“Well, they’re the cheapest of the cheap. He actually showed me his coupons, and tried to put me down with the idea that everybody used them. But I guess he found it wouldn’t work. He said if you were not personally conducted it was all right.”

“Now, Lottie, you have got to tell me just what you mean,” said Mrs. Kenton, and from having stood during this parley, she sat down to hear Lottie out at her leisure. But if there was anything more difficult than for Lottie to be explicit it was to make her be so, and in the end Mrs. Kenton was scarcely wiser than she was at the beginning to her daughter’s reasons. It appeared that if you wanted to be cheap you could travel with those coupons, and Lottie did not wish to be cheap, or have anything to do with those who were. The Kentons had always held up their heads, and if Ellen had chosen to disgrace them with Bittridge, Dick had made it all right, and she at least was not going to do anything that she would be ashamed of. She was going to stay at home, and have her meals in her room till they got back.

Her mother paid no heed to her repeated declaration. “Lottie,” she asked, with the heart-quake that the thought of Richard’s act always gave her with reference to Ellen, “have you ever let out the least hint of that?”

“Of course I haven’t,” Lottie scornfully retorted. “I hope I know what a crank Ellen is.”

They were not just the terms in which Mrs. Kenton would have chosen to be reassured, but she was glad to be assured in any terms. She said, vaguely: “I believe in my heart that I will stay at home, too. All this has given me a bad headache.”

“I was going to have a headache myself,” said Lottie, with injury. “But I suppose I can get on along without. I can just simply say I’m not going. If he proposes to stay, too, I can soon settle that.”

“The great difficulty will be to get your father to go.”

“You can make Ellen make him,” Lottie suggested.

“That is true,” said Mrs. Kenton, with such increasing absence that her daughter required of her:

“Are you staying on my account?”

“I think you had better not be left alone the whole day. But I am not staying on your account. I don’t believe we had so many of us better go. It might look a little pointed.”

Lottie laughed harshly. “I guess Mr. Breckon wouldn’t see the point, he’s so perfectly gone.”

“Do you really believe it, Lottie?” Mrs. Kenton entreated, with a sudden tenderness for her younger daughter such as she did not always feel.

“I should think anybody would believe it — anybody but Ellen.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Kenton dreamily assented.

Lottie made her way to the door. “Well, if you do stay, mother, I’m not going to have you hanging round me all day. I can chaperon myself.”

“Lottie,” her mother tried to stay her, “I wish you would go. I don’t believe that Mr. Trannel will be much of an addition. He will be on your poor father’s hands all day, or else Ellen’s, and if you went you could help off.”

“Thank you, mother. I’ve had quite all I want of Mr. Trannel. You can tell him he needn’t go, if you want to.”

Lottie at least did not leave her mother to make her excuses to the party when they met for starting. Mrs. Kenton had deferred her own till she thought it was too late for her husband to retreat, and then bunglingly made them, with so much iteration that it seemed to her it would have been far less pointed, as concerned Mr. Breckon, if she had gone. Lottie sunnily announced that she was going to stay with her mother, and did not even try to account for her defection to Mr. Trannel.

“What’s the matter with my staying, too?” he asked. “It seems to me there are four wheels to this coach now.”

He had addressed his misgiving more to Lottie than the rest; but with the same sunny indifference to the consequence for others that she had put on in stating her decision, she now discharged herself from further responsibility by turning on her heel and leaving it with the party generally. In the circumstances Mr. Trannel had no choice but to go, and he was supported, possibly, by the hope of taking it out of Lottie some other time.

It was more difficult for Mrs. Kenton to get rid of the judge, but an inscrutable frown goes far in such exigencies. It seems to explain, and it certainly warns, and the husband on whom it is bent never knows, even after the longest experience, whether he had better inquire further. Usually he decides that he had better not, and Judge Kenton went off towards the tram with Boyne in the cloud of mystery which involved them both as to Mrs. Kenton’s meaning.

XXIII.

Trannel attached himself as well as he could to Breckon and Ellen, and Breckon had an opportunity not fully offered him before to note a likeness between himself and a fellow-man whom he was aware of not liking, though he tried to love him, as he felt it right to love all men. He thought he had not been quite sympathetic enough with Mrs. Kenton in her having to stay behind, and he tried to make it up to Mr. Trannel in his having to come. He invented civilities to show him, and ceded his place next Ellen as if Trannel had a right to it. Trannel ignored him in keeping it, unless it was recognizing Breckon to say, “Oh, I hope I’m not in your way, old fellow?” and then making jokes to Ellen. Breckon could not say the jokes were bad, though the taste of them seemed to him so. The man had a fleeting wit, which scorched whatever he turned it upon, and yet it was wit. “Why don’t you try him in American?” he asked at the failure of Breckon and the tram conductor to understand each other in Dutch. He tried the conductor himself in American, and he was so deplorably funny that it was hard for Breckon to help being ‘particeps criminus’, at least in a laugh.

He asked himself if that were really the kind of man he was, and he grew silent and melancholy in the fear that it was a good deal the sort of man. To this morbid fancy Trannel seemed himself in a sort of excess, or what he would be if he were logically ultimated. He remembered all the triviality of his behavior with Ellen at first, and rather sickened at the thought of some of his early pleasantries. She was talking gayly now with Trannel, and Breckon wondered whether she was falling under the charm that he felt in him, in spite of himself.

If she was, her father was not. The judge sat on the other side of the car, and unmistakably glowered at the fellow’s attempts to make himself amusing to Ellen. Trannel himself was not insensible to the judge’s mood. Now and then he said something to intensify it. He patronized the judge and he made fun of the tourist character in which Boyne had got himself up, with a field-glass slung by a strap under one arm and a red Baedeker in his hand. He sputtered with malign laughter at a rather gorgeous necktie which Boyne had put on for the day, and said it was not a very good match for the Baedeker.

Boyne retorted rudely, and that amused Trannel still more. He became personal to Breckon, and noted the unclerical cut of his clothes. He said he ought to have put on his uniform for an expedition like that, in case they got into any sort of trouble. To Ellen alone he was inoffensive, unless he overdid his polite attentions to her in carrying her parasol for her, and helping her out of the tram, when they arrived, shouldering every one else away, and making haste to separate her from the others and then to walk on with her a little in advance.

Suddenly he dropped her, and fell back to Boyne and his father, while Breckon hastened forward to her side. Trannel put his arm across Boyne’s shoulders and asked him if he were mad, and then laughed at him. “You’re all right, Boyne, but you oughtn’t to be so approachable. You ought to put on more dignity, and repel familiarity!”

Boyne could only twitch away in silence that he made as haughty as he could, but not so haughty that Trannel did not find it laughable, and he laughed in a teasing way that made Breckon more and more serious. He was aware of becoming even solemn with the question of his likeness to Trannel. He was of Trannel’s quality, and their difference was a matter of quantity, and there was not enough difference. In his sense of their likeness Breckon vowed himself to a gravity of behavior evermore which he should not probably be able to observe, but the sample he now displayed did not escape the keen vigilance of Trannel.

“With the exception of Miss Kenton,” he addressed himself to the party, “you’re all so easy and careless that if you don’t look out you’ll lose me. Miss Kenton, I wish you would keep an eye on me. I don’t want to get lost.”

Ellen laughed — she could not help it — and her laughing made it less possible than before for Breckon to unbend and meet Trannel on his own ground, to give him joke for joke, to exchange banter with him. He might never have been willing to do that, but now he shrank from it, in his realization of their likeness, with an abhorrence that rendered him rigid.

The judge was walking ahead with Boyne, and his back expressed such severe disapproval that, between her fear that Trannel would say something to bring her father’s condemnation on him and her sense of their inhospitable attitude towards one who was their guest, in a sort, she said, with her gentle gayety, “Then you must keep near me, Mr. Trannel. I’ll see that nothing happens.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” said Trannel, soberly. Whether he had now vented his malicious humor and was ready to make himself agreeable, or was somewhat quelled by the unfriendly ambient he had created, or was wrought upon by her friendliness, he became everything that could be wished in a companion for a day’s pleasure. He took the lead at the station, and got them a compartment in the car to themselves for the little run to Leyden, and on the way he talked very well. He politely borrowed Boyne’s Baedeker, and decided for the party what they had best see, and showed an acceptable intelligence, as well as a large experience in the claims of Leyden upon the visitor’s interest. He had been there often before, it seemed, and in the event it appeared that he had chosen the days sightseeing wisely.

He no longer addressed himself respectfully to Ellen alone, but he re-established himself in Boyne’s confidence with especial pains, and he conciliated Breckon by a recognition of his priority with Ellen with a delicacy refined enough for even the susceptibility of a lover alarmed for his rights. If he could not overcome the reluctance of the judge, he brought him to the civil response which any one who tried for Kenton’s liking achieved, even if he did not merit it, and there remained no more reserve in Kenton’s manner than there had been with the young man from the first. He had never been a persona grata to the judge, and if he did not become so now, he at least ceased to be actively displeasing.

That was the year before the young Queen came to her own, and in the last days of her minority she was visiting all the cities of her future dominion with the queen-mother. When Kenton’s party left the station they found Leyden as gay for her reception as flags and banners could make the gray old town, and Trannel relapsed for a moment so far as to suggest that the decorations were in honor of Boyne’s presence, but he did not abuse the laugh that this made to Boyne’s further shame.

There was no carriage at the station which would hold the party of five, and they had to take two vehicles. Trannel said it was lucky they wanted two, since there were no more, and he put himself in authority to assort the party. The judge, he decided, must go with Ellen and Breckon, and he hoped Boyne would let him go in his carriage, if he would sit on the box with the driver. The judge afterwards owned that he had weakly indulged his dislike of the fellow, in letting him take Boyne, and not insisting on going himself with Tramiel, but this was when it was long too late. Ellen had her misgivings, but, except for that gibe about the decorations, Trannel had been behaving so well that she hoped she might trust Boyne with him. She made a kind of appeal for her brother, bidding him and Trannel take good care of each other, and Trannel promised so earnestly to look after Boyne that she ought to have been alarmed for him. He took the lead, rising at times to wave a reassuring hand to her over the back of his carriage, and, in fact, nothing evil could very well happen from him, with the others following so close upon him. They met from time to time in the churches they visited, and when they lost sight of one another, through a difference of opinion in the drivers as to the best route, they came together at the place Trannel had appointed for their next reunion.

He showed himself a guide so admirably qualified that he found a way for them to objects of interest that had at first denied themselves in anticipation of the visit from the queens; when they all sat down at lunch in the restaurant which he found for them, he could justifiably boast that he would get them into the Town Hall, which they had been told was barred for the day against anything but sovereign curiosity. He was now on the best term with Boyne, who seemed to have lost all diffidence of him, and treated him with an easy familiarity that showed itself in his slapping him on the shoulder and making dints in his hat. Trannel seemed to enjoy these caresses, and, when they parted again for the afternoon’s sight-seeing, Ellen had no longer a qualm in letting Boyne drive off with him.

He had, in fact, known how to make himself very acceptable to Boyne. He knew all the originals of his heroical romances, and was able to give the real names and the geographical position of those princesses who had been in love with American adventurers. Under promise of secrecy he disclosed the real names of the adventurers themselves, now obscured in the titles given them to render them worthy their union with sovereigns. He resumed his fascinating confidences when they drove off after luncheon, and he resumed them after each separation from the rest of the party. Boyne listened with a flushed face and starting eyes, and when at last Trannel offered, upon a pledge of the most sacred nature from him never to reveal a word of what he said, he began to relate an adventure of which he was himself the hero. It was a bold travesty of one of the latest romances that Boyne had read, involving the experience of an American very little older than Boyne himself, to whom a wilful young crown-princess, in a little state which Trannel would not name even to Boyne, had made advances such as he could not refuse to meet without cruelty. He was himself deeply in love with her, but he felt bound in honor not to encourage her infatuation as long as he could help, for he had been received by her whole family with such kindness and confidence that he had to consider them.

“Oh, pshaw!” Boyne broke in upon him, doubting, and yet wishing not to doubt, “that’s the same as the story of ‘Hector Folleyne’.”

“Yes,” said Trannel, quietly. “I thought you would recognize it.”

“Well, but,” Boyne went on, “Hector married the princess!”

“In the book, yes. The fellow I gave the story to said it would never do not to have him marry her, and it would help to disguise the fact. That’s what he said, after he had given the whole thing away.”

“And do you mean to say it was you? Oh, you can’t stuff me! How did you get out of marrying her, I should like to know, when the chancellor came to you and said that the whole family wanted you to, for fear it would kill her if—”

“Well, there was a scene, I can’t deny that. We had a regular family conclave — father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks — and we kept it up pretty much all night. The princess wasn’t there, of course, and I could convince them that I was right. If she had been, I don’t believe I could have held out. But they had to listen to reason, and I got away between two days.”

“But why didn’t you marry her?”

“Well, for one thing, as I told you, I thought I ought to consider her family. Then there was a good fellow, the crown-prince of Saxe-Wolfenhutten, who was dead in love with her, and was engaged to her before I turned up. I had been at school with him, and I felt awfully sorry for him; and I thought I ought to sacrifice myself a little to him. But I suppose the thing that influenced me most was finding out that if I married the princess I should have to give up my American citizenship and become her subject.”

“Well?” Boyne panted.

“Well, would you have done it?”

“Couldn’t you have got along without doing that?”

“That was the only thing I couldn’t get around, somehow. So I left.”

“And the princess, did she — die?”

“It takes a good deal more than that to kill a fifteen-year-old princess,” said Trannel, and he gave a harsh laugh. “She married Saxe-Wolfenhutten.” Boyne was silent. “Now, I don’t want you to speak of this till after I leave Scheveningen — especially to Miss Lottie. You know how girls are, and I think Miss Lottie is waiting to get a bind on me, anyway. If she heard how I was cut out of my chance with that princess she’d never let me believe I gave her up of my own free will?”

“NO, no; I won’t tell her.”

Boyne remained in a silent rapture, and he did not notice they were no longer following the rest of their party in the other carriage. This had turned down a corner, at which Mr. Breckon, sitting on the front seat, had risen and beckoned their driver to follow, but their driver, who appeared afterwards to have not too much a head of his own, or no head at all, had continued straight on, in the rear of a tram-car, which was slowly finding its way through the momently thickening crowd. Boyne was first aware that it was a humorous crowd when, at a turn of the street, their equipage was greeted with ironical cheers by a group of gay young Dutchmen on the sidewalk. Then he saw that the sidewalks were packed with people, who spread into the street almost to the tram, and that the house fronts were dotted with smiling Dutch faces, the faces of pretty Dutch girls, who seemed to share the amusement of the young fellows below.

Trannel lay back in the carriage. “This is something like,” he said. “Boyne, they’re on to the distinguished young Ohioan — the only Ohioan out of office in Europe.”

“Yes,” said Boyne, trying to enjoy it. “I wonder what they are holloing at.”

Trannel laughed. “They’re holloing at your Baedeker, my dear boy. They never saw one before,” and Boyne was aware that he was holding his red-backed guide conspicuously in view on his lap. “They know you’re a foreigner by it.”

“Don’t you think we ought to turn down somewhere? I don’t see poppa anywhere.” He rose and looked anxiously back over the top of their carriage. The crowd, closing in behind it, hailed his troubled face with cries that were taken up by the throng on the sidewalks. Boyne turned about to find that the tram-car which they had been following had disappeared round a corner, but their driver was still keeping on. At a wilder burst of applause Trannel took off his hat and bowed to the crowd, right and left.

“Bow, bow!” he said to Boyne. “They’ll be calling for a speech the next thing. Bow, I tell you!”

“Tell him to turn round!” cried the boy.

“I can’t speak Dutch,” said Trannel, and Boyne leaned forward and poked the driver in the back.

“Go back!” he commanded.

The driver shook his head and pointed forward with his whip. “He’s all right,” said Trannel. “He can’t turn now. We’ve got to take the next corner.” The street in front was empty, and the people were crowding back on the sidewalks. Loud, vague noises made themselves heard round the corner to which the driver had pointed. “By Jove!” Trannel said, “I believe they’re coming round that way.”

“Who are coming?” Boyne palpitated.

“The queens.”

“The queens?” Boyne gasped; it seemed to him that he shrieked the words.

“Yes. And there’s a tobacconist’s now,” said Trannel, as if that were what he had been looking for all along. “I want some cigarettes.”

He leaped lightly from the carriage, and pushed his way out of sight on the sidewalk. Boyne remained alone in the vehicle, staring wildly round; the driver kept slowly and stupidly on, Boyne did not know how much farther. He could not speak; he felt as if he could not stir. But the moment came when he could not be still. He gave a galvanic jump to the ground, and the friendly crowd on the sidewalk welcomed him to its ranks and closed about him. The driver had taken the lefthand corner, just before a plain carriage with the Queen and the queen-mother came in sight round the right. The young Queen was bowing to the people, gently, and with a sort of mechanical regularity. Now and then a brighter smile than that she conventionally wore lighted up her face. The simple progress was absolutely without state, except for the aide-de-camp on horseback who rode beside the carriage, a little to the front.

Boyne stood motionless on the curb, where a friendly tall Dutchman had placed him in front that he might see the Queen.

“Hello!” said the voice of Trannel, and elbowing his way to Boyne’s side, he laughed and coughed through the smoke of his cigarette. “I was afraid you had lost me. Where’s your carriage?”

Boyne did not notice his mockeries. He was entranced in that beatific vision; his boy-heart went out in worship to the pretty young creature with a reverence that could not be uttered. The tears came into his eyes.

“There, there! She’s bowing to you, Boyne, she’s smiling right at you. By Jove! She’s beckoning to you!”

“You be still!” Boyne retorted, finding his tongue. “She isn’t doing any such a thing.”

“She is, I swear she is! She’s doing it again! She’s stopping the carriage. Oh, go out and see what she wants! Don’t you know that a queen’s wish is a command? You’ve got to go!”

Boyne never could tell just how it happened. The carriage did seem to be stopping, and the Queen seemed to be looking at him. He thought he must, and he started into the street towards her, and the carriage came abreast of him. He had almost reached the carriage when the aide turned and spurred his horse before him. Four strong hands that were like iron clamps were laid one on each of Boyne’s elbows and shoulders, and he was haled away, as if by superhuman force. “Mr. Trannel!” he called out in his agony, but the wretch had disappeared, and Boyne was left with his captors, to whom he could have said nothing if he could have thought of anything to say.

The detectives pulled him through the crowd and hurried him swiftly down the side street. A little curiosity straggled after him in the shape of small Dutch boys, too short to look over the shoulders of men at the queens, and too weak to make their way through them to the front; but for them, Boyne seemed alone in the world with the relentless officers, who were dragging him forward and hurting him so with the grip of their iron hands. He lifted up his face to entreat them not to hold him so tight, and suddenly it was as if he beheld an angel standing in his path. It was Breckon who was there, staring at him aghast.

“Why, Boyne!” he cried.

“Oh, Mr. Breckon!” Boyne wailed back. “Is it you? Oh, do tell them I didn’t mean to do anything! I thought she beckoned to me.”

“Who? Who beckoned to you?”

“The Queen!” Boyne sobbed, while the detectives pulled him relentlessly on.

Breckon addressed them suavely in their owe tongue which had never come in more deferential politeness from human lips. He ventured the belief that there was a mistake; he assured them that he knew their prisoner, and that he was the son of a most respectable American family, whom they could find at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. He added some irrelevancies, and got for all answer that they had made Boyne’s arrest for sufficient reasons, and were taking him to prison. If his friends wished to intervene in his behalf they could do so before the magistrate, but for the present they must admonish Mr. Breckon not to put himself in the way of the law.

“Don’t go, Mr. Breckon!” Boyne implored him, as his captors made him quicken his pace after slowing a little for their colloquy with Breckon. “Oh, where is poppa? He could get me away. Oh, where is poppa?”

“Don’t! Don’t call out, Boyne,” Breckon entreated. “Your father is right here at the end of the street. He’s in the carriage there with Miss Kenton. I was coming to look for you. Don’t cry out so!”

“No, no, I won’t, Mr. Breckon. I’ll be perfectly quiet now. Only do get poppa quick! He can tell them in a minute that it’s all right!”

He made a prodigious effort to control himself, while Breckon ran a little ahead, with some wild notion of preparing Ellen. As he disappeared at the corner, Boyne choked a sob into a muffed bellow, and was able to meet the astonished eyes of his father and sister in this degree of triumph.

They had not in the least understood Breckon’s explanation, and, in fact, it had not been very lucid. At sight of her brother strenuously upheld between the detectives, and dragged along the sidewalk, Ellen sprang from the carriage and ran towards him. “Why, what’s the matter with Boyne?” she demanded. “Are you hurt, Boyne, dear? Are they taking him to the hospital?”

Before he could answer, and quite before the judge could reach the tragical group, she had flung her arms round Boyne’s neck, and was kissing his tear-drabbled face, while he lamented back, “They’re taking me to prison.”

“Taking you to prison? I should like to know what for! What are you taking my brother to prison for?” she challenged the detectives, who paused, bewildered, while all the little Dutch boys round admired this obstruction of the law, and several Dutch housewives, too old to go out to see the queens, looked down from their windows. It was wholly illegal, but the detectives were human. They could snub such a friend of their prisoner as Breckon, but they could not meet the dovelike ferocity of Ellen with unkindness. They explained as well as they might, and at a suggestion which Kenton made through Breckon, they admitted that it was not beside their duty to take Boyne directly to a magistrate, who could pass upon his case, and even release him upon proper evidence of his harmlessness, and sufficient security for any demand that justice might make for his future appearance.

“Then,” said the judge, quietly, “tell them that we will go with them. It will be all right, Boyne. Ellen, you and I will get back into the carriage, and—”

“No!” Boyne roared. “Don’t leave me, Nelly!”

“Indeed, I won’t leave you, Boyne! Mr. Breckon, you get into the carriage with poppa, and I—”

“I think I had better go with you, Miss Kenton,” said Breckon, and in a tender superfluity they both accompanied Boyne on foot, while the judge remounted to his place in the carriage and kept abreast of them on their way to the magistrate’s.

XXIV.

The magistrate conceived of Boyne’s case with a readiness that gave the judge a high opinion of his personal and national intelligence. He even smiled a little, in accepting the explanation which Breckon was able to make him from Boyne, but he thought his duty to give the boy a fatherly warning for the future. He remarked to Breckon that it was well for Boyne that the affair had not happened in Germany, where it would have been found a much more serious matter, though, indeed, he added, it had to be seriously regarded anywhere in these times, when the lives of sovereigns were so much at the mercy of all sorts of madmen and miscreants. He relaxed a little from his severity in his admonition to say directly to Boyne that queens, even when they wished to speak with people, did not beckon them in the public streets. When this speech translated to Boyne by Breckon, whom the magistrate complimented on the perfection of his Dutch, Boyne hung his head sheepishly, and could not be restored to his characteristic dignity again in the magistrate’s presence. The judge gratefully shook hands with the friendly justice, and made him a little speech of thanks, which Breckon interpreted, and then the justice shook hand with the judge, and gracefully accepted the introduction which he offered him to Ellen. They parted with reciprocal praises and obeisances, which included even the detectives. The judge had some question, which he submitted to Breckon, whether he ought not to offer them something, but Breckon thought not.

Breckon found it hard to abdicate the sort of authority in which his knowledge of Dutch had placed him, and when he protested that he had done nothing but act as interpreter, Ellen said, “Yes, but we couldn’t have done anything without you,” and this was the view that Mrs. Kenton took of the matter in the family conclave which took place later in the evening. Breckon was not allowed to withdraw from it, in spite of many modest efforts, before she had bashfully expressed her sense of his service to him, and made Boyne share her thanksgiving. She had her arm about the boy’s shoulder in giving Breckon her hand, and when Breckon had got away she pulled Boyne to her in a more peremptory embrace.

“Now, Boyne,” she said, “I am not going to have any more nonsense. I want to know why you did it.”

The judge and Ellen had already conjectured clearly enough, and Boyne did not fear them. But he looked at his younger sister as he sulkily answered, “I am not going to tell you before Lottie.”

“Come in here, then,” said his mother, and she led him into the next room and closed the door. She quickly returned without him. “Yes,” she began, “it’s just as I supposed; it was that worthless fellow who put him up to it. Of course, it began with those fool books he’s been reading, and the notions that Miss Rasmith put into his head. But he never would have done anything if it hadn’t been for Mr. Trannel.”

Lottie had listened in silent scorn to the whole proceedings up to this point, and had refused a part in the general recognition of Breckon as a special providence. Now she flashed out with a terrible volubility: “What did I tell you? What else could you expect of a Cook’s tourist? And mom — mother wanted to make me go with you, after I told her what he was! Well, if I had have gone, I’ll bet I could have kept him from playing his tricks. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have taken any liberties, with me along. I’ll bet if he had, it wouldn’t have been Boyne that got arrested. I’ll bet he wouldn’t have got off so easily with the magistrate, either! But I suppose you’ll all let him come bowing and smiling round in the morning, like butter wouldn’t melt in your mouths. That seems to be the Kenton way. Anybody can pull our noses, or get us arrested that wants to, and we never squeak.” She went on a long time to this purpose, Mrs. Kenton listening with an air almost of conviction, and Ellen patiently bearing it as a right that Lottie had in a matter where she had been otherwise ignored.

The judge broke out, not upon Lottie, but upon his wife. “Good heavens, Sarah, can’t you make the child hush?”

Lottie answered for her mother, with a crash of nerves and a gush of furious tears: “Oh, I’ve got to hush, I suppose. It’s always the way when I’m trying to keep up the dignity of the family. I suppose it will be cabled to America, and by tomorrow it will be all over Tuskingum how Boyne was made a fool of and got arrested. But I bet there’s one person in Tuskingum that won’t have any remarks to make, and that’s Bittridge. Not, as long as Dick’s there he won’t.”

“Lottie!” cried her mother, and her father started towards her, while Ellen still sat patiently quiet.

“Oh, well!” Lottie submitted. “But if Dick was here I know this Trannel wouldn’t get off so smoothly. Dick would give him a worse cowhiding than he did Bittridge.”

Half the last word was lost in the bang of the door which Lottie slammed behind her, leaving her father and mother to a silence which Ellen did not offer to break. The judge had no heart to speak, in his dismay, and it was Mrs. Kenton who took the word.

“Ellen,” she began, with compassionate gentleness, “we tried to keep it from you. We knew how you would feel. But now we have got to tell you. Dick did cowhide him when he got back to Tuskingum. Lottie wrote out to Dick about it, how Mr. Bittridge had behaved in New York. Your father and I didn’t approve of it, and Dick didn’t afterwards; but, yes, he did do it.”

“I knew it, momma,” said Ellen, sadly.

“You knew it! How?”

“That other letter I got when we first came — it was from his mother.”

“Did she tell—”

“Yes. It was terrible she seemed to feel so. And I was sorry for her. I thought I ought to answer it, and I did. I told her I was sorry, too. I tried not to blame Richard. I don’t believe I did. And I tried not to blame him. She was feeling badly enough without that.”

Her father and mother looked at each other; they did not speak, and she asked, “Do you think I oughtn’t to have written?”

Her father answered, a little tremulously: “You did right, Ellen. And I am sure that you did it in just the right way.”

“I tried to. I thought I wouldn’t worry you about it.”

She rose, and now her mother thought she was going to say that it put an end to everything; that she must go back and offer herself as a sacrifice to the injured Bittridges. Her mind had reverted to that moment on the steamer when Ellen told her that nothing had reconciled her to what had happened with Bittridge but the fact that all the wrong done had been done to themselves; that this freed her. In her despair she could not forbear asking, “What did you write to her, Ellen?”

“Nothing. I just said that I was very sorry, and that I knew how she felt. I don’t remember exactly.”

She went up and kissed her mother. She seemed rather fatigued than distressed, and her father asked her. “Are you going to bed, my dear?”

“Yes, I’m pretty tired, and I should think you would be, too, poppa. I’ll speak to poor Boyne. Don’t mind Lottie. I suppose she couldn’t help saying it.” She kissed her father, and slipped quietly into Boyne’s room, from which they could hear her passing on to her own before they ventured to say anything to each other in the hopeful bewilderment to which she had left them.

“Well?” said the judge.

“Well?” Mrs. Kenton returned, in a note of exasperation, as if she were not going to let herself be forced to the initiative.

“I thought you thought—”

“I did think that. Now I don’t know what to think. We have got to wait.”

“I’m willing to wait for Ellen!”

“She seems,” said Mrs. Kenton, “to have more sense than both the other children put together, and I was afraid—”

“She might easily have more sense than Boyne, or Lottie, either.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Mrs. Kenton began. But she did not go on to resent the disparagement which she had invited. “What I was afraid of was her goodness. It was her goodness that got her into the trouble, to begin with. If she hadn’t been so good, that fellow could never have fooled her as he did. She was too innocent.”

The judge could not forbear the humorous view. “Perhaps she’s getting wickeder, or not so innocent. At any rate, she doesn’t seem to have been take in by Trannel.”

“He didn’t pay any attention to her. He was all taken up with Lottie.”

“Well, that was lucky. Sarah,” said the judge, “do you think he is like Bittridge?”

“He’s made me think of him all the time.”

“It’s curious,” the judge mused. “I have always noticed how our faults repeat themselves, but I didn’t suppose our fates would always take the same shape, or something like it.” Mrs. Kenton stared at him. “When this other one first made up to us on the boat my heart went down. I thought of Bittridge so.”

“Mr. Breckon?”

“Yes, the same lightness; the same sort of trifling — Didn’t you notice it?”

“No — yes, I noticed it. But I wasn’t afraid for an instant. I saw that he was good.”

“Oh!”

“What I’m afraid of now is that Ellen doesn’t care anything about him.”

“He isn’t wicked enough?”

“I don’t say that. But it would be too much happiness to expect in one short life.”

The judge could not deny the reasonableness of her position. He could only oppose it. “Well, I don’t think we’ve had any more than our share of happiness lately.”

No one except Boyne could have made Trannel’s behavior a cause of quarrel, but the other Kentons made it a cause of coldness which was quite as effective. In Lottie this took the form of something so active, so positive, that it was something more than a mere absence of warmth. Before she came clown to breakfast the next morning she studied a stare in her mirror, and practised it upon Trannel so successfully when he came up to speak to her that it must have made him doubt whether he had ever had her acquaintance. In his doubt he ventured to address her, and then Lottie turned her back upon him in a manner that was perfectly convincing. He attempted a smiling ease with Mrs. Kenton and the judge, but they shared neither his smile nor his ease, and his jocose questions about the end of yesterday’s adventures, which he had not been privy to, did not seem to appeal to the American sense of humor in them. Ellen was not with them, nor Boyne, but Trannel was not asked to take either of the vacant places at the table, even when Breckon took one of them, after a decent exchange of civilities with him. He could only saunter away and leave Mrs. Kenton to a little pang.

“Tchk!” she made. “I’m sorry for him!”

“So am I,” said the judge. “But he will get over it — only too soon, I’m afraid. I don’t believe he’s very sorry for himself.”

They had not advised with Breckon, and he did not feel authorized to make any comment. He seemed preoccupied, to Mrs. Kenton’s eye, when she turned it upon him from Trannel’s discomfited back, lessening in the perspective, and he answered vaguely to her overture about his night’s rest. Lottie never made any conversation with Breckon, and she now left him to himself, with some remnants of the disapproval which she found on her hands after crushing Trannel. It could not be said that Breckon was aware of her disapproval, and the judge had no apparent consciousness of it. He and Breckon tried to make something of each other, but failed, and it all seemed a very defeating sequel to Mrs. Kenton after the triumphal glow of the evening before. When Lottie rose, she went with her, alleging her wish to see if Boyne had eaten his breakfast. She confessed, to Breckon’s kind inquiry, that Boyne did not seem very well, and that she had made him take his breakfast in his room, and she did not think it necessary to own, even to so friendly a witness as Mr. Breckon, that Boyne was ashamed to come down, and dreaded meeting Trannel so much that she was giving him time to recover his self-respect and courage.

XV.

As soon as she and Lottie were gone Breckon began, rather more formidably than he liked, but helplessly so: “Judge Kenton, I should be glad of a few moments with you on — on an important — on a matter that is important to me.”

“Well,” said the judge, cautiously. Whatever was coming, he wished to guard himself from the mistake that he had once so nearly fallen into, and that still made him catch his breath to think of. “How can I be of use to you?”

“I don’t know that you can be of any use — I don’t know that I ought to speak to you. But I thought you might perhaps save me from — save my taking a false step.”

He looked at Kenton as if he would understand, and Kenton supposed that he did. He said, “My daughter once mentioned your wish to talk with me.”

“Your daughter?” Breckon stared at him in stupefaction.

“Yes; Ellen. She said you wished to consult me about going back to your charge in New York, when we were on the ship together. But I don’t know that I’m very competent to give advice in such—”

“Oh!” Breckon exclaimed, in a tone of immense relief, which did not continue itself in what he went on to say. “That! I’ve quite made up my mind to go back.” He stopped, and then he burst out, “I want to speak with you about her.” The judge sat steady, still resolute not to give himself away, and the young man scarcely recovered from what had been a desperate plunge in adding: “I know that it’s usual to speak with her — with the lady herself first, but — I don’t know! The circumstances are peculiar. You only know about me what you’ve seen of me, and I would rather make my mistakes in the order that seems right to me, although it isn’t just the American way.”

He smiled rather piteously, and the judge said, rather encouragingly, “I don’t quite know whether I follow you.”

Breckon blushed, and sought help in what remained of his coffee. “The way isn’t easy for me. But it’s this: I ask your leave to ask Miss Ellen to marry me.” The worst was over now, and looked as if it were a relief. “She is the most beautiful person in the world to me, and the best; but as you know so little of me, I thought it right to get your leave — to tell you — to — to — That is all.” He fell back in his chair and looked a at Kenton.

“It is unusual,” the judge began.

“Yes, Yes; I know that. And for that reason I speak first to you. I’ll be ruled by you implicitly.”

“I don’t mean that,” Kenton said. “I would have expected that you would speak to her first. But I get your point of view, and I must say I think you’re right. I think you are behaving — honorably. I wish that every one was like you. But I can’t say anything now. I must talk with her mother. My daughter’s life has not been happy. I can’t tell you. But as far as I am concerned, and I think Mrs. Kenton, too, I would be glad — We like you Mr. Breckon. We think you are a good man.

“Oh, thank you. I’m not so sure—”

“We’d risk it. But that isn’t all. Will you excuse me if I don’t say anything more just yet — and if I leave you?”

“Why, certainly.” The judge had risen and pushed back his chair, and Breckon did the same. “And I shall — hear from you?”

“Why, certainly,” said the judge in his turn.

“It isn’t possible that you put him off!” his wife reproached him, when he told what had passed between him and Breckon. “Oh, you couldn’t have let him think that we didn’t want him for her! Surely you didn’t!”

“Will you get it into your head,” he flamed back, “that he hasn’t spoken to Ellen yet, and I couldn’t accept him till she had?”

“Oh yes. I forgot that.” Mrs. Kenton struggled with the fact, in the difficulty of realizing so strange an order of procedure. “I suppose it’s his being educated abroad that way. But, do go back to him, Rufus, and tell him that of course—”

“I will do nothing of the kind, Sarah! What are you thinking of?”

“Oh, I don’t know what I’m thinking of! I must see Ellen, I suppose. I’ll go to her now. Oh, dear, if she doesn’t — if she lets such a chance slip through her fingers — But she’s quite likely to, she’s so obstinate! I wonder what she’ll want us to do.”

She fled to her daughter’s room and found Boyne there, sitting beside his sister’s bed, giving her a detailed account of his adventure of the day before, up to the moment Mr. Breckon met him, in charge of the detectives. Up to that moment, it appeared to Boyne, as nearly as he could recollect, that he had not broken down, but had behaved himself with a dignity which was now beginning to clothe his whole experience. In the retrospect, a quiet heroism characterized his conduct, and at the moment his mother entered the room he was questioning Ellen as to her impressions of his bearing when she first saw him in the grasp of the detectives.

His mother took him by the arm, and said, “I want to speak with Ellen, Boyne,” and put him out of the door.

Then she came back and sat down in his chair. “Ellen. Mr. Breckon has been speaking to your father. Do you know what about?”

“About his going back to New York?” the girl suggested.

Her mother kept her patience with difficulty. “No, not about that. About you! He’s asked your father — I can’t understand yet why he did it, only he’s so delicate and honorable, and goodness known we appreciate it — whether he can tell you that — that—” It was not possible for such a mother as Mrs. Kenton to say “He loves you”; it would have sounded as she would have said, too sickish, and she compromised on: “He likes you, and wants to ask you whether you will marry him. And, Ellen,” she continued, in the ample silence which followed, “if you don’t say you will, I will have nothing more to do With such a simpleton. I have always felt that you behaved very foolishly about Mr. Bittridge, but I hoped that when you grew older you would see it as we did, and — and behave differently. And now, if, after all we’ve been through with you, you are going to say that you won’t have Mr. Breckon—”

Mrs. Kenton stopped for want of a figure that would convey all the disaster that would fall upon Ellen in such an event, and she was given further pause when the girl gently answered, “I’m not going to say that, momma.”

“Then what in the world are you going to say?” Mrs. Kenton demanded.

Ellen had turned her face away on the pillow, and now she answered, quietly, “When Mr. Breckon asks me I will tell him.”

“Well, you had better!” her mother threatened in return, and she did not realize the falsity of her position till she reported Ellen’s words to the judge.

“Well, Sarah, I think she had you there,” he said, and Mrs. Kenton then said that she did not care, if the child was only going to behave sensibly at last, and she did believe she was.

“Then it’s all right” said the judge, and he took up the Tuskingum Intelligencer, lying till then unread in the excitements which had followed its arrival the day before, and began to read it.

Mrs. Kenton sat dreamily watching him, with her hands fallen in her lap. She suddenly started up, with the cry, “Good gracious! What are we all thinking of?”

Kenton stared at her over the top of his paper. “How, thinking of?”

“Why Mr. Breckon! He must be crazy to know what we’ve decided, poor fellow!”

“Oh,” said the judge, folding the Intelligencer on his knee. “I had forgotten. Somehow, I thought it was all settled.”

Mrs. Kenton took his paper from him, and finished folding it. “It hasn’t begun to be settled. You must go and let him know.”

“Won’t he look me up?” the judge suggested.

“You must look him up. Go at once dear! Think how anxious he must be!”

Kenton was not sure that Breckon looked very anxious when he found him on the brick promenade before the Kurhaus, apparently absorbed in noting the convulsions of a large, round German lady in the water, who must have supposed herself to be bathing. But perhaps the young man did not see her; the smile on his face was too vague for such an interest when he turned at Kenton’s approaching steps.

The judge hesitated for an instant, in which the smile left Breckon’s face. “I believe that’s all right, Mr. Breckon,” he said. “You’ll find Mrs. Kenton in our parlor,” and then the two men parted, with an “Oh, thank you!” from Breckon, who walked back towards the hotel, and left Kenton to ponder upon the German lady; as soon as he realized that she was not a barrel, the judge continued his walk along the promenade, feeling rather ashamed.

Mrs. Kenton had gone to Ellen’s room again when she had got the judge off upon his mission. She rather flung in upon her. “Oh, you are up!” she apologized to Ellen’s back. The girl’s face was towards the glass, and she was tilting her head to get the effect of the hat on it, which she now took off.

“I suppose poppa’s gone to tell him,” she said, sitting tremulously down.

“Didn’t you want him to?” her mother asked, stricken a little at sight of her agitation.

“Yes, I wanted him to, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It makes it harder. Momma!”

“Well, Ellen?”

“You know you’ve got to tell him, first.”

“Tell him?” Mrs. Kenton repeated, but she knew what Ellen meant.

“About — Mr. Bittridge. All about it. Every single thing. About his kissing me that night.”

At the last demand Mrs. Kenton was visibly shaken in her invisible assent to the girl’s wish. “Don’t you think, Ellen, that you had better tell him that — some time?”

“No, now. And you must tell him. You let me go to the theatre with him.” The faintest shadow of resentment clouded the girl’s face, but still Mrs. Kenton, thought she knew her own guilt, could not yield.

“Why, Ellen,” she pleaded, not without a reproachful sense of vulgarity in such a plea, “don’t you suppose HE ever — kissed any one?”

“That doesn’t concern me, momma,” said Ellen, without a trace of consciousness that she was saying anything uncommon. “If you won’t tell him, then that ends it. I won’t see him.”

“Oh, well!” her mother sighed. “I will try to tell him. But I’d rather be whipped. I know he’ll laugh at me.”

“He won’t laugh at you,” said the girl, confidently, almost comfortingly. “I want him to know everything before I meet him. I don’t want to have a single thing on my mind. I don’t want to think of myself!”

Mrs. Kenton understood the woman — soul that spoke in these words. “Well,” she said, with a deep, long breath, “be ready, then.”

But she felt the burden which had been put upon her to be so much more than she could bear that when she found her husband in their parlor she instantly resolved to cast it upon him. He stood at the window with his hat on.

“Has Breckon been here yet?” he asked.

“Have you seen him yet?” she returned.

“Yes, and I thought he was coming right here. But perhaps he stopped to screw his courage up. He only knew how little it needed with us!”

“Well, now, it’s we who’ve got to have the courage. Or you have. Do you know what Ellen wants to have done?” Mrs. Kenton put it in these impersonal terms, and as a preliminary to shirking her share of the burden.

“She doesn’t want to have him refused?”

“She wants to have him told all about Bittridge.”

After a momentary revolt the judge said, “Well, that’s right. It’s like Ellen.”

“There’s something else that’s more like her,” said Mrs. Kenton, indignantly. “She wants him to told about what Bittridge did that night — about him kissing her.”

The judge looked disgusted with his wife for the word; then he looked aghast. “About—”

“Yes, and she won’t have a word to say to him till he is told, and unless he is told she will refuse him.”

“Did she say that?”

“No, but I know she will.”

“If she didn’t say she would, I think we may take the chances that she won’t.”

“No, we mustn’t take any such chances. You must tell him.”

“I? No, I couldn’t manage it. I have no tact, and it would sound so confoundedly queer, coming from one man to another. It would be — indelicate. It’s something that nobody but a woman — Why doesn’t she tell him herself?”

“She won’t. She considers it our part, and something we ought to do before he commits himself.”

“Very well, then, Sarah, you must tell him. You can manage it so it won’t by so — queer.

“That is just what I supposed you would say, Mr. Kenton, but I must say I didn’t expect it of you. I think it’s cowardly.”

“Look out, Sarah! I don’t like that word.”

“Oh, I suppose you’re brave enough when it comes to any kind of danger. But when it comes to taking the brunt of anything unpleasant—”

“It isn’t unpleasant — it’s queer.”

“Why do you keep saying that over and over? There’s nothing queer about it. It’s Ellenish but isn’t it right?”

“It’s right, yes, I suppose. But it’s squeamish.”

“I see nothing squeamish about it. But I know you’re determined to leave it to me, and so I shall do it. I don’t believe Mr. Breckon will think it’s queer or squeamish.”

“I’ve no doubt he’ll take it in the right way; you’ll know how to—” Kenton looked into his hat, which he had taken off and then put it on again. His tone and his manner were sufficiently sneaking, and he could not make them otherwise. It was for this reason, no doubt, that he would not prolong the interview.

“Oh yes, go!” said Mrs. Kenton, as he found himself with his hand on the door. “Leave it all to me, do!” and he was aware of skulking out of the room. By the time that it would have taken him so long as to walk to the top of the grand stairway he was back again. “He’s coming!” he said, breathlessly. “I saw him at the bottom of the stairs. Go into your room and wash your eyes. I’LL tell him.”

“No, no, Rufus! Let me! It will be much better. You’ll be sure to bungle it.”

“We must risk that. You were quite right, Sarah. It would have been cowardly in me to let you do it.”

“Rufus! You know I didn’t mean it! Surely you’re not resenting that?”

“No. I’m glad you made me see it. You’re all right, Sarah, and you’ll find that it will all come out all right. You needn’t be afraid I’ll bungle it. I shall use discretion. Go—”

“I shall not stir a step from this parlor! You’ve got back all your spirit, dear,” said the old wife, with young pride in her husband. “But I must say that Ellen is putting more upon you than she has any right to. I think she might tell him herself.”

“No, it’s our business — my business. We allowed her to get in for it. She’s quite right about it. We must not let him commit himself to her till he knows the thing that most puts her to shame. It isn’t enough for us to say that it was really no shame. She feels that it casts a sort of stain — you know what I mean, Sarah, and I believe I can make this young man know. If I can’t, so much the worse for him. He shall never see Ellen again.”

“Oh, Rufus!”

“Do you think he would be worthy of her if he couldn’t?”

“I think Ellen is perfectly ridiculous.”

“Then that shows that I am right in deciding not to leave this thing to you. I feel as she does about it, and I intend that he shall.”

“Do you intend to let her run the chance of losing him?”

“That is what I intend to do.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you what: I am going to stay right here. We will both see him; it’s right for us to do it.” But at a rap on the parlor door Mrs. Kenton flew to that of her own room, which she closed upon her with a sort of Parthian whimper, “Oh, do be careful, Rufus!”

Whether Kenton was careful or not could never be known, from either Kenton himself or from Breckon. The judge did tell him everything, and the young man received the most damning details of Ellen’s history with a radiant absence which testified that they fell upon a surface sense of Kenton, and did not penetrate to the all-pervading sense of Ellen herself below. At the end Kenton was afraid he had not understood.

“You understand,” he said, “that she could not consent to see you before you knew just how weak she thought she had been.” The judge stiffened to defiance in making this humiliation. “I don’t consider, myself, that she was weak at all.”

“Of course not!” Breckon beamed back at him.

“I consider that throughout she acted with the greatest — greatest — And that in that affair, when he behaved with that — that outrageous impudence, it was because she had misled the scoundrel by her kindness, her forbearance, her wish not to do him the least shadow of injustice, but to give him every chance of proving himself worthy of her tolerance; and—”

The judge choked, and Breckon eagerly asked, “And shall I — may I see her now?”

“Why — yes,” the judge faltered. “If you’re sure—”

“What about?” Breckon demanded.

“I don’t know whether she will believe that I have told you.”

“I will try to convince her. Where shall I see her?”

“I will go and tell her you are here. I will bring her—”

Kenton passed into the adjoining room, where his wife laid hold of him, almost violently. “You did it beautifully, Rufus,” she huskily whispered, “and I was so afraid you would spoil everything. Oh, how manly you were, and how perfect he was! But now it’s my turn, and I will go and bring Ellen — You will let me, won’t you?”

“You may do anything you please, Sarah. I don’t want to have any more of this,” said the judge from the chair he had dropped into.

“Well, then, I will bring her at once,” said Mrs. Kenton, staying only in her gladness to kiss him on his gray head; he received her embrace with a superficial sultriness which did not deceive her.

Ellen came back without her mother, and as soon as she entered the room, and Breckon realized that she had come alone, he ran towards her as if to take her in his arms. But she put up her hand with extended fingers, and held him lightly off.

“Did poppa tell you?” she asked, with a certain defiance. She held her head up fiercely, and spoke steadily, but he could see the pulse beating in her pretty neck.

“Yes, he told me—”

“And — well?”

“Oh, I love you, Ellen—”

“That isn’t it. Did you care?”

Breckon had an inspiration, an inspiration from the truth that dwelt at the bottom of his soul and had never yet failed to save him. He let his arms fall and answered, desperately: “Yes, I did. I wished it hadn’t happened.” He saw the pulse in her neck cease to beat, and he swiftly added, “But I know that it happened just because you were yourself, and were so—”

“If you had said you didn’t care,” she breathlessly whispered, “I would never have spoken to you.” He felt a conditional tremor creeping into the fingers which had been so rigid against his breast. “I don’t see how I lived through it! Do you think you can?”

“I think so,” he returned, with a faint, far suggestion of levity that brought from her an imperative, imploring —

“Don’t!”

Then he added, solemnly, “It had no more to do with you, Ellen, than an offence from some hateful animal—”

“Oh, how good you are!” The fingers folded themselves, and her arms weakened so that there was nothing to keep him from drawing her to him. “What — what are you doing?” she asked, with her face smothered against his.

“Oh, Ell-en, Ellen, Ellen! Oh, my love, my dearest, my best!”

“But I have been such a fool!” she protested, imagining that she was going to push him from her, but losing herself in him more and more.

“Yes, yes, darling! I know it. That’s why I love you so!”

XXVI.

“There is just one thing,” said the judge, as he wound up his watch that night, “that makes me a little uneasy still.”

Mrs. Kenton, already in her bed turned her face upon him with a despairing “Tchk! Dear! What is it? I thought we had talked over everything.”

“We haven’t got Lottie’s consent yet.”

“Well, I think I see myself asking Lottie!” Mrs. Kenton began, before she realized her husband’s irony. She added, “How could you give me such a start?”

“Well, Lottie has bossed us so long that I couldn’t help mentioning it,” said the judge.

It was a lame excuse, and in its most potential implication his suggestion proved without reason. If Lottie never gave her explicit approval to Ellen’s engagement, she never openly opposed it. She treated it, rather, with something like silent contempt, as a childish weakness on Ellen’s part which was beneath her serious consideration. Towards Breckon, her behavior hardly changed in the severity which she had assumed from the moment she first ceased to have any use for him. “I suppose I will have to kiss him,” she said, gloomily, when her mother told her that he was to be her brother, and she performed the rite with as much coldness as was ever put in that form of affectionate welcome. It is doubtful if Breckon perfectly realized its coldness; he never knew how much he enraged her by acting as if she were a little girl, and saying lightly, almost trivially, “I’m so glad you’re going to be a sister to me.”

With Ellen, Lottie now considered herself quits, and from the first hour of Ellen’s happiness she threw off all the care with all the apparent kindness which she had used towards her when she was a morbid invalid. Here again, if Lottie had minded such a thing, she might have been as much vexed by Ellen’s attitude as by Breckon’s. Ellen never once noticed the withdrawal of her anxious oversight, or seemed in the least to miss it. As much as her meek nature would allow, she arrogated to herself the privileges and prerogatives of an elder sister, and if it had been possible to make Lottie ever feel like a chit, there were moments when Ellen’s behavior would have made her feel like a chit. It was not till after their return to Tuskingum that Lottie took her true place in relation to the affair, and in the preparations for the wedding, which she appointed to be in the First Universalist Church, overruling both her mother’s and sister’s preferences for a home wedding, that Lottie rose in due authority. Mrs. Kenton had not ceased to feel quelled whenever her younger daughter called her mother instead of momma, and Ellen seemed not really to care. She submitted the matter to Breckon, who said, “Oh yes, if Lottie wishes,” and he laughed when Ellen confessed, “Well, I said we would.”

With the lifting of his great anxiety, he had got back to that lightness which was most like him, and he could not always conceal from Lottie herself that he regarded her as a joke. She did not mind it, she said, from such a mere sop as, in the vast content of his love, he was.

This was some months after Lottie had got at Scheveningen from Mr. Plumpton that letter which decided her that she had no use for him. There came the same day, and by the same post with it, a letter from one of her young men in Tuskingum, who had faithfully written to her all the winter before, and had not intermitted his letters after she went abroad. To Kenton he had always seemed too wise if not too good for Lottie, but Mrs. Kenton, who had her own doubts of Lottie, would not allow this when it came to the question, and said, woundedly, that she did not see why Lottie was not fully his equal in every way.

“Well,” the judge suggested, “she isn’t the first young lawyer at the Tuskingum bar.”

“Well, I wouldn’t wish her to be,” said Mrs. Kenton, who did not often make jokes.

“Well, I don’t know that I would,” her husband assented, and he added, “Pretty good, Sarah.”

“Lottie,” her mother summed up, “is practical, and she is very neat. She won’t let Mr. Elroy go around looking so slovenly. I hope she will make him have his hair cut, and not look as if it were bitten off. And I don’t believe he’s had his boots blacked since—”

“He was born,” the judge proposed, and she assented.

“Yes. She is very saving, and he is wasteful. It will be a very good match. You can let them build on the other corner of the lot, if Ellen is going to be in New York. I would miss Lottie more than Ellen about the housekeeping, though the dear knows I will miss them both badly enough.”

“Well, you can break off their engagements,” said the judge.

As yet, and until Ellen was off her hands, Lottie would not allow Mr. Elroy to consider himself engaged to her. His conditional devotion did not debar him from a lover’s rights, and, until Breckon came on from New York to be married, there was much more courtship of Lottie than of Ellen in the house. But Lottie saved herself in the form if not the fact, and as far as verbal terms were concerned, she was justified by them in declaring that she would not have another sop hanging round.

It was Boyne, and Boyne alone, who had any misgivings in regard to Ellen’s engagement, and these were of a nature so recondite that when he came to impart them to his mother, before they left Scheveningen, and while there was yet time for that conclusion which his father suggested to Mrs. Kenton too late, Boyne had an almost hopeless difficulty in stating them. His approaches, even, were so mystical that his mother was forced to bring him to book sharply.

“Boyne, if you don’t tell me right off just what you mean, I don’t know what I will do to you! What are you driving at, for pity’s sake? Are you saying that she oughtn’t to be engaged to Mr. Breckon?”

“No, I’m not saying that, momma,” said Boyne, in a distress that caused his mother to take a reef in her impatience.

“Well, what are you saying, then?”

“Why, you know how Ellen is, momma. You know how conscientious and — and — sensitive. Or, I don’t mean sensitive, exactly.”

“Well?”

“Well, I don’t think she ought to be engaged to Mr. Breckon out of — gratitude.”

“Gratitude?”

“Yes. I just know that she thinks — or it would be just like her — that he saved me that day. But he only met me about a second before we came to her and poppa, and the officers were taking me right along towards them.” Mrs. Kenton held herself stormily in, and he continued: “I know that he translated for us before the magistrate, but the magistrate could speak a little English, and when he saw poppa he saw that it was all right, anyway. I don’t want to say anything against Mr. Breckon, and I think he behaved as well any one could; but if Ellen is going to marry him out of gratitude for saving me—”

Mrs. Kenton could hold in no longer. “And is this what you’ve been bothering the life half out of me for, for the last hour?”

“Well, I thought you ought to look at it in that light, momma.”

“Well, Boyne,” said his mother, “sometimes I think you’re almost a fool!” and she turned her back upon her son and left him.

Boyne’s place in the Kenton family, for which he continued to have the highest regard, became a little less difficult, a little less incompatible with his self-respect as time went on. His spirit, which had lagged a little after his body in stature, began, as his father said, to catch up. He no longer nourished it so exclusively upon heroical romance as he had during the past year, and after his return to Tuskingum he went into his brother Richard’s once, and manifested a certain curiosity in the study of the law. He read Blackstone, and could give a fair account of his impressions of English law to his father. He had quite outlived the period of entomological research, and he presented his collections of insects (somewhat moth-eaten) to his nephew, on whom he also bestowed his postage-stamp album; Mary Kenton accepted them in trust, the nephew being of yet too tender years for their care. In the preoccupations of his immediate family with Ellen’s engagement, Boyne became rather close friends with his sister-in-law, and there were times when he was tempted to submit to her judgment the question whether the young Queen of Holland did not really beckon to him that day. But pending the hour when he foresaw that Lottie should come out with the whole story, in some instant of excitement, Boyne had not quite the heart to speak of his experience. It assumed more and more respectability with him, and lost that squalor which had once put him to shame while it was yet new. He thought that Mary might be reasoned into regarding him as the hero of an adventure, but he is still hesitating whether to confide in her. In the meantime she knows all about it. Mary and Richard both approved of Ellen’s choice, though they are somewhat puzzled to make out just what Mr. Breckon’s religion is, and what his relations to his charge in New York may be. These do not seem to them quite pastoral, and he himself shares their uncertainty. But since his flock does not include Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter, he is content to let the question remain in abeyance. The Rasmiths are settled in Rome with an apparent permanency which they have not known elsewhere for a long time, and they have both joined in the friendliest kind of letter on his marriage to their former pastor, if that was what Breckon was. They have professed to know from the first that he was in love with Ellen, and that he is in love with her now is the strong present belief of his flock, if they are a flock, and if they may be said to have anything so positive as a belief in regard to anything.

Judge Kenton has given the Elroys the other corner of the lot, and has supplied them the means of building on it. Mary and Lottie run diagonally into the home-house every day, and nothing keeps either from coming into authority over the old people except the fear of each other in which they stand. The Kentons no longer make any summer journeys, but in the winter they take Boyne and go to see Ellen in New York. They do not stay so long as Mrs. Kenton would like. As soon as they have fairly seen the Breckons, and have settled comfortably down in their pleasant house on West Seventy-fourth Street, she detects him in a secret habit of sighing, which she recognizes as the worst symptom of homesickness, and then she confides to Ellen that she supposes Mr. Kenton will make her go home with him before long. Ellen knows it is useless to interfere. She even encourages her father’s longings, so far as indulging his clandestine visits to the seedsman’s, and she goes with him to pick up second-hand books about Ohio in the War at the dealers’, who remember the judge very flatteringly.

As February draws on towards March it becomes impossible to detain Kenton. His wife and son return with him to Tuskingum, where Lottie has seen to the kindling of a good fire in the furnace against their arrival, and has nearly come to blows with Mary about provisioning them for the first dinner. Then Mrs. Kenton owns, with a comfort which she will not let her husband see, that there is no place like home, and they take up their life in the place where they have been so happy and so unhappy. He reads to her a good deal at night, and they play a game of checkers usually before they go to bed; she still cheats without scruple, for, as she justly says, he knows very well that she cannot bear to be beaten.

The colonel, as he is still invariably known to his veterans, works pretty faithfully at the regimental autobiography, and drives round the country, picking up material among them, in a buggy plastered with mud. He has imagined, since his last visit to Breckon, who dictates his sermons, if they are sermons, taking a stenographer with him, and the young lady, who is in deadly terror of the colonel’s driving, is of the greatest use to him, in the case of veterans who will not or cannot give down (as they say in their dairy-country parlance), and has already rescued many reminiscences from perishing in their faltering memories. She writes them out in the judge’s library when the colonel gets home, and his wife sometimes surprises Mr. Kenton correcting them there at night after she supposes he has gone to bed.

Since it has all turned out for the best concerning Bittridge, she no longer has those pangs of self-reproach for Richard’s treatment of him which she suffered while afraid that if the fact came to Ellen’s knowledge it might make her refuse Breckon. She does not find her daughter’s behavior in the matter so anomalous as it appears to the judge.

He is willing to account for it on the ground of that inconsistency which he has observed in all human behavior, but Mrs. Kenton is not inclined to admit that it is so very inconsistent. She contends that Ellen had simply lived through that hateful episode of her psychological history, as she was sure to do sooner or later and as she was destined to do as soon as some other person arrived to take her fancy.

If this is the crude, common-sense view of the matter, Ellen herself is able to offer no finer explanation, which shall at the same time be more thorough. She and her husband have not failed to talk the affair over, with that fulness of treatment which young married people give their past when they have nothing to conceal from each other. She has attempted to solve the mystery by blaming herself for a certain essential levity of nature which, under all her appearance of gravity, sympathized with levity in others, and, for what she knows to the contrary, with something ignoble and unworthy in them. Breckon, of course, does not admit this, but he has suggested that she was first attracted to him by a certain unseriousness which reminded her of Bittridge, in enabling him to take her seriousness lightly. This is the logical inference which he makes from her theory of herself, but she insists that it does not follow; and she contends that she was moved to love him by an instant sense of his goodness, which she never lost, and in which she was trying to equal herself with him by even the desperate measure of renouncing her happiness, if that should ever seem her duty, to his perfection. He says this is not very clear, though it is awfully gratifying, and he does not quite understand why Mrs. Bittridge’s letter should have liberated Ellen from her fancied obligations to the past. Ellen can only say that it did so by making her so ashamed ever to have had anything to do with such people, and making her see how much she had tried her father and mother by her folly. This again Breckon contends is not clear, but he says we live in a universe of problems in which another, more or less, does not much matter. He is always expecting that some chance shall confront him with Bittridge, and that the man’s presence will explain everything; for, like so many Ohio people who leave their native State, the Bittridges have come East instead of going West, in quitting the neighborhood of Tuskingum. He is settled with his idolized mother in New York, where he is obscurely attached to one of the newspapers. That he has as yet failed to rise from the ranks in the great army of assignment men may be because moral quality tells everywhere, and to be a clever blackguard is not so well as to be simply clever. If ever Breckon has met his alter ego, as he amuses himself in calling him, he has not known it, though Bittridge may have been wiser in the case of a man of Breckon’s publicity, not to call it distinction. There was a time, immediately after the Breckons heard from Tuskingum that the Bittridges were in New York, when Ellen’s husband consulted her as to what might be his duty towards her late suitor in the event which has not taken place, and when he suggested, not too seriously, that Richard’s course might be the solution. To his suggestion Ellen answered: “Oh no, dear! That was wrong,” and this remains also Richard’s opinion.

QUESTIONABLE SHAPES

CONTENTS

HIS APPARITION.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

THE ANGEL OF THE LORD.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

HIS APPARITION.

I.

The incident was of a dignity which the supernatural has by no means always had, and which has been more than ever lacking in it since the manifestations of professional spiritualism began to vulgarize it. Hewson appreciated this as soon as he realized that he had been confronted with an apparition. He had been very little agitated at the moment, and it was not till later, when the conflict between sense and reason concerning the fact itself arose, that he was aware of any perturbation. Even then, amidst the tumult of his whirling emotions he had a sort of central calm, in which he noted the particulars of the occurrence with distinctness and precision. He had always supposed that if anything of the sort happened to him he would be greatly frightened, but he had not been at all frightened, so far as he could make out. His hair had not risen, or his cheek felt a chill; his heart had not lost or gained a beat in its pulsation; and his prime conclusion was that if the Mysteries had chosen him an agent in approaching the material world they had not made a mistake. This becomes grotesque in being put into words, but the words do not misrepresent, except by their inevitable excess, the mind in which Hewson rose, and flung open his shutters to let in the dawn upon the scene of the apparition, which he now perceived must have been, as it were, self-lighted. The robins were yelling from the trees and the sparrows bickering under them; catbirds were calling from the thickets of syringa, and in the nearest woods a hermit-thrush was ringing its crystal bells. The clear day was penetrating the east with the subtle light which precedes the sun, and a summer sweetness rose cool from the garden below, gray with dew.

In the solitude of the hour there was an intimation of privity to the event which had taken place, an implication of the unity of the natural and the supernatural, strangely different from that robust gayety of the plain day which later seemed to disown the affair, and leave the burden of proof altogether to the human witness. By this time Hewson had already set about to putting it in such phrases as should carry conviction to the hearer, and yet should convey to him no suspicion of the pride which Hewson felt in the incident as a sort of tribute to himself. He dramatized the scene at breakfast when he should describe it in plain, matter-of-fact terms, and hold every one spellbound, as he or she leaned forward over the table to listen, while he related the fact with studied unconcern for his own part in it, but with a serious regard for the integrity of the fact itself, which he had no wish to exaggerate as to its immediate meaning or remoter implications. It did not yet occur to him that it had none; they were simply to be matters of future observation in a second ordeal; for the first emotion which the incident imparted was the feeling that it would happen again, and in this return would interpret itself. Hewson was so strongly persuaded of something of the kind, that after standing for an indefinite period at the window in his pajamas, he got hardily back into bed, and waited for the repetition. He was agreeably aware of waiting without a tremor, and rather eagerly than otherwise; then he began to feel drowsy, and this at first flattered him, as a proof of his strange courage in circumstances which would have rendered sleep impossible to most men; but in another moment he started from it. If he slept every one would say he had dreamt the whole thing; and he could never himself be quite sure that he had not.

He got up, and began to dress, thinking all the time, in a dim way, how very long it would be till breakfast, and wondering what he should do till then with his appetite and his apparition. It was now only a little after four o’clock of the June morning, and nobody would be down till after eight; most people at that very movable feast, which St. John had in the English fashion, did not show themselves before nine. It was impossible to get a book and read for five hours; he would be dropping with hunger if he walked so long. Yet he must not sleep; and he must do something to keep from sleeping. He remembered a little interloping hotel, which had lately forced its way into precincts sacred to cottage life, and had impudently called itself the St. Johnswort Inn, after St. John’s place, by a name which he prided himself on having poetically invented from his own and that of a prevalent wild flower. Upon the chance of getting an early cup of coffee at this hotel, Hewson finished dressing, and crept down stairs to let himself out of the house.

He not only found the door locked, as he had expected, but the key taken out; and after some misgiving he decided to lift one of the long library windows, from which he could get into the garden, closing the window after him, and so make his escape. No one was stirring outside the house any more than within; he knocked down a trellis by which a clematis was trying to climb over the window he emerged from, and found his way out of the grounds without alarming any one. He was not so successful at the hotel, where a lank boy, sweeping the long piazzas, recognized one of the St. Johnswort guests in the figure approaching the steps, and apparently had his worst fears roused for Hewson’s sanity when Hewson called to him and wondered if he could get a cup of coffee at that hour; he openly owned it was an unnatural hour, and he had a fine inward sense that it was supernatural. The boy dropped his broom without a word, and vanished through the office door, reappearing after a blank interval to pick up his broom and say, “I guess so,” as he began sweeping again. It was well, for one reason that he did not state his belief too confidently, Hewson thought; but after another interval of unknown length a rude, sad girl came to tell him his coffee was waiting for him. He followed her back into the still dishevelled dining room, and sat down at a long table to a cup of lukewarm drink that in color and quality recalled terrible mornings of Atlantic travel when he haplessly rose and descended to the dining-saloon of the steamer, and had a marine version of British coffee brought him by an alien table-steward.

He remembered the pock-marked nose of one alien steward, and how he had questioned whether he should give the fellow six-pence or a shilling, seeing that apart from this tribute he should have to fee his own steward for the voyage; at the same time his fancy played with the question whether that uncouth, melancholy waitress had found a moment to wash her face before hurrying to fetch his coffee. He amused himself by contrasting her sloven dejection with the brisk neatness of the service at St. Johnswort; but through all he never lost the awe, the sense of responsibility which he bore to the vision vouchsafed him, doubtless for some reason and to some end that it behooved him to divine.

He found a yesterday’s paper in the office of the hotel, and read it till he began to drowse over it, when he pulled himself up with a sharp jerk. He discovered that it was now six o’clock, and he thought if he could walk about for an hour he might return to St. Johnswort, and worry through the remaining hour till breakfast somehow. He was still framing in his thoughts some sort of statement concerning the apparition which he should make when the largest number of guests had got together at the table, with a fine question whether he should take them between the cantaloupe and the broiled chicken, or wait till they had come to the corn griddle-cakes, which St. John’s cook served of a filigree perfection in homage to the good old American breakfast ideal. There would be more women, if he waited, and he should need the sympathy and countenance of women; his story would be wanting in something of its supreme effect without the electrical response of their keener nerves.

II.

When Hewson came up to the cottage he was sensible of a certain agitation in the air, which was intensified to him by the sight of St. John, in his bare, bald head and the n�glig� of a flannel housecoat, inspecting, with the gardener and one of the grooms, the fallen trellis under the library window, which from time to time they looked up at, as they talked. Hewson made haste to join them, through the garden gate, and to say shamefacedly enough, “Oh, I’m afraid I’m responsible for that,” and he told how he must have thrown down the trellis in getting out of the window.

“Oh!” said St. John, while the two men walked away with dissatisfied grins at being foiled of their sensation. “We thought it was burglars. I’m so glad it was only you.” But in spite of his profession, St. John did not give Hewson any very lively proof of his enjoyment. “Deuced uncomfortable to have had one’s guests murdered in their beds. Don’t say anything about it, please, Hewson. The women would all fly the premises, if there’d been even a suspicion of burglars.”

“Oh, no; I won’t,” Hewson willingly assented; but he perceived a disappointment in St. John’s tone and manner, and he suspected him, however unjustly, of having meant to give himself importance with his guests by the rumor of a burglary in the house.

He was a man quite capable of that, Hewson believed, and failing it, capable of pretending that he wanted the matter hushed up in the interest of others.

In any case he saw that it was not to St. John primarily, or secondarily to St. John’s guests, that he could celebrate the fact of his apparition. In the presence of St. John’s potential vulgarity he keenly felt his own, and he recoiled from what he had imagined doing. He even realized that he would have been working St. John an injury by betraying his house to his guests as the scene of a supernatural incident.

Nobody believes in ghosts, but there is not one in a thousand of us who would not be uncomfortable in a haunted house, or a house so reputed. If Hewson told what he had seen, he would not only scatter St. John’s house-party to the four winds, but he would cast such a blight upon St. Johnswort that it would never sell for a tenth of its cost.

III.

From that instant Hewson renounced his purpose, and he remained true to this renunciation in spite of the behavior of St. John, which might well have tempted him to a revenge in kind. No one seemed to have slept late that morning; several of the ladies complained that they had not slept a wink the whole night, and two or three of the men owned to having waked early and not been able to hit it off again in a morning nap, though it appeared that they were adepts in that sort of thing. The hour of their vigils corresponded so nearly with that of Hewson’s apparition that he wondered if a mystical influence from it had not penetrated the whole house. The adventitious facts were of such a nature that he controlled with the greater difficulty the wish to explode upon an audience so aptly prepared for it the prodigious incident which he was keeping in reserve; but he did not yield even when St. John carefully led up to the point through the sensation of his guests, by recounting the evidences of the supposed visit of a burglar, and then made his effect by suddenly turning upon Hewson, and saying with his broad guffaw: “And here you have the burglar in person. He has owned his crime to me, and I’ve let him off the penalty on condition that he tells you all about it.” The humor was not too rank for the horsey people whom St. John had mainly about him, but some of the women said, “Poor Mr. Hewson!” when the host, failing Hewson’s confession, went on to betray that he had risen at that unearthly hour to go down to the St. Johnswort Inn for a cup of its famous coffee. The coffee turned out to be the greatest kind of joke; one of the men asked Hewson if he could say on his honor that it was really any better than St. John’s coffee there before them, and another professed to be in a secret more recondite than had yet been divined: it was that long grim girl, who served it; she had lured Hewson from his rest at five o’clock in the morning; and this humorist proposed a Welsh rarebit some night at the inn, where they could all see for themselves why Hewson broke out of the house and smashed a trellis before sunrise.

Hewson sat silent, not even attempting a defensive sally. In fact it was only his surface mind which was employed with what was going on; as before, his deeper thought was again absorbed with his great experience. He could not, if his conscience had otherwise suffered him, have spoken of it in that company, and the laughter died away from his silence as if it had been his offence. He was not offended, but he was ashamed, and not ashamed so much for St. John as for himself, that he could have ever imagined acquiring merit in such company by exploiting an experience which should have been sacred to him. How could he have been so shabby? He was justly punished in the humiliating contrast between being the butt of these poor wits, and the hero of an incident which, whatever its real quality was, had an august character of mystery. He had recognized this from the first instant; he had perceived that the occurrence was for him, and for him alone, until he had reasoned some probable meaning into it or from it; and yet he had been willing, he saw it, he owned it! to win the applause of that crowd as a man who had just seen a ghost.

He thought of them as that crowd, but after all, they were good-natured people, and when they fancied that he was somehow vexed with the turn the talk had taken, they began to speak of other things; St. John himself led the way, and when he got Hewson alone after breakfast, he made him a sort of amend. “I didn’t mean to annoy you, old fellow,” he said, “with my story about the burglary.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Hewson brisked up in response, as he took the cigar St. John offered him. “I’m afraid I must have seemed rather stupid. I had got to thinking about something else, and I couldn’t pull myself away from it. I wasn’t annoyed at all.”

Whether St. John thought this sufficient gratitude for his reparation did not appear. As Hewson did not offer to break the silence in which they went on smoking, his host made a pretext, toward the end of their cigars, after bearing the burden of the conversation apparently as long as he could, of being reminded of something by the group of women descending into the garden from the terraced walk beyond it and then slowly, with little pauses, trailing their summer draperies among the flower-beds and bushes toward the house.

“Oh, by-the-way,” he said, “I should like to introduce you to Miss Hernshaw; she came last night with Mrs. Rock: that tall girl, there, lagging behind a little. She’s an original.”

“I noticed her at breakfast,” Hewson answered, now first aware of having been struck with the strange beauty and strange behavior of the slim girl, who drooped in her chair, with her little head fallen forward, and played with her bread, ignoring her food otherwise, while she listened with a bored air to the talk which made Hewson its prey. She had an effect of being both shy and indifferent, in this retrospect; and when St. John put up the window, and led the way out to the women in the garden, and presented Hewson, she had still this effect. She did not smile or speak in acknowledgement of Hewson’s bow; she merely looked at him with a sort of swift intensity, and then, when one of the women said, “We were coming to view the scene of your burglarious exploit, Mr. Hewson. Was that the very window?” the girl looked impatiently away.

“The very window,” Hewson owned. “You wouldn’t know it. St. John has had the trellis put up and the spot fresh turfed,” and he detached the interlocutory widow in the direction of their bachelor host, as she perhaps intended he should, and dropped back to the side of Miss Hernshaw.

She was almost spiritually slender. In common with all of us, he had heard that shape of girl called willowy, but he made up his mind that sweetbriery would be the word for Miss Hernshaw, in whose face a virginal youth suggested the tender innocence and surprise of the flower, while the droop of her figure, at once delicate and self-reliant, arrested the fancy with a sense of the pendulous thorny spray. She looked not above sixteen in age, but as she was obviously out, in the society sense of the word, this must have been a moral effect; and Hewson was casting about in his mind for some appropriate form of thought and language to make talk in when she abruptly addressed him.

“I don’t see,” she said, with her face still away, “why people make fun of those poor girls who have to work in that sort of public way.”

Hewson silently picked his steps back through the intervening events to the drolling at breakfast, and with some misgiving took his stand in the declaration, “You mean the waitress at the inn?”

“Yes!” cried the girl, with a gentle indignation, which was so dear to the young man that he would have given anything to believe that it veiled a measure of sympathy for himself as well as for the waitress. “We went in there last night when we arrived, for some pins — Mrs. Rock had had her dress stepped on, getting out of the car — and that girl brought them. I never saw such a sad face. And she was very nice; she had no more manners than a cow.”

Miss Hernshaw added the last sentence as if it followed, and in his poor masculine pride of sequence Hewson wanted to ask if that were why she was so nice; but he obeyed a better instinct in saying, “Yes, there’s a whole tragedy in it. I wonder if it’s potential or actual.” He somehow felt safe in being so metaphysical.

“Does it make any difference?” Miss Hernshaw demanded, whirling her face round, and fixing him with eyes of beautiful fierceness. “Tragedy is tragedy, whether you have lived it or not, isn’t it? And sometimes it’s all the more tragical if you have it still to live: you’ve got it before you! I don’t see how any one can look at that girl’s face and laugh at her. I should never forgive any one who did.”

“Then I’m glad I didn’t do any of the laughing,” said Hewson, willing to relieve himself from the strain of this high mood, and yet anxious not to fall too far below it. “Perhaps I should, though, if I hadn’t been the victim of it in some degree.”

“It was the vulgarest thing I ever heard!” said the girl.

Hewson looked at her, but she had averted her face again. He had a longing to tell her of his apparition which quelled every other interest in him, and, as it were, blurred his whole consciousness. She would understand, with her childlike truth, and with her unconventionality she would not find it strange that he should speak to her of such a thing for no apparent reason or no immediate cause. He walked silent at her side, revolving his longing in his thought, and hating the circumstance which forbade him to speak at once. He did not know how long he was lost in this, when he was suddenly recalled to fearful question of the fact by her saying, with another flash of her face toward him, “You have lost sleep Mr. Hewson!” and she whipped forward, and joined the other women, who were following the lead of St. John and the widow.

Mrs. Rock, to whom Hewson had been presented at the same time as to Miss Hernshaw, looked vaguely back at him over her shoulder, but made no attempt to include him in her group, and he thought, for no reason, that she was kept from doing so on account of Miss Hernshaw. He thought he could be no more mistaken in this than in the resentment of Miss Hernshaw, which he was aware of meriting, however unintentionally. Later, after lunch, he made sure of this fact when Mrs. Rock got him into a corner, and cozily began, “I always feel like explaining Rosalie a little,” and then her vague, friendly eye wandered toward Miss Hernshaw across the room, and stopped, as if waiting for the girl to look away. But Miss Hernshaw did not look away, and that afternoon, Hewson’s week being up, he left St. Johnswort before dinner.

IV.

The time came, before the following winter, when Hewson was tempted beyond his strength, and told the story of his apparition. He told it more than once, and kept himself with increasing difficulty from lying about it. He always wished to add something, to amplify the fact, to heighten the mystery of the circumstances, to divine the occult significance of the incident. In itself the incident, when stated, was rather bare and insufficient; but he held himself rigidly to the actual details, and he felt that in this at least he was offering the powers which had vouchsafed him the experience a species of atonement for breaking faith with them. It seemed like breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw, too, though this impression would have been harder to reason than the other. Both impressions began to wear off after the first tellings of the story; the wound that Hewson gave his sensibility in the very first cicatrized before the second, and at the fourth or fifth it had quite calloused over; so that he did not mind anything so much as what always seemed to him the inadequate effect of his experience with his hearers. Some listened carelessly; some nervously; some incredulously, as if he were trying to put up a job on them; some compassionately, as if he were not quite right, and ought to be looked after. There was a consensus of opinion, among those who offered any sort of comment, that he ought to give it to the Psychical Research, and at the bottom of Hewson’s heart, there was a dread that the spiritualists would somehow get hold of him. This remained to stay him, when the shame of breaking faith with Miss Hernshaw and with Mystery no longer restrained him from exploiting the fact. He was aware of lying in wait for opportunities of telling it, and he swore himself to tell it only upon direct provocation, or when the occasion seemed imperatively to demand it. He commonly brought it out to match some experience of another; but he could never deny a friendly appeal when he sat with some good fellows over their five-o’clock cocktails at the club, and one of them would say in behalf of a newcomer, “Hewson, tell Wilkins that odd thing that happened to you up country, in the summer.” In complying he tried to save his self-respect by affecting a contemptuous indifference in the matter, and beginning reluctantly and pooh-poohingly. He had pangs afterwards as he walked home to dress for dinner, but his self-reproach was less afflicting as time passed. His suffering from it was never so great as from the slight passed upon his apparition, when Wilkins or what other it might be, would meet the suggestion that he should tell him about it, with the hurried interposition, “Yes, I have heard that; good story.” This would make Hewson think that he was beginning to tell his story too often, and that perhaps the friend who suggested his doing so, was playing upon his forgetfulness. He wondered if he were really something of a bore with it, and whether men were shying off from him at the club on account of it. He fancied that might be the reason why the circle at the five-o’clock cocktails gradually diminished as the winter passed. He continued to join it till the chance offered of squarely refusing to tell Wilkins, or whoever, about the odd thing that had happened to him up country in the summer. Then he felt that he had in a manner retrieved himself, and could retire from the five-o’clock cocktails with honor.

That it was a veridical phantom which had appeared to him he did not in his inmost at all doubt, though in his superficial consciousness he questioned it, not indeed so disrespectfully as he pooh-poohed it to others, but still questioned it. This he thought somehow his due as a man of intelligence who ought not to suffer himself to fall into superstition even upon evidence granted to few. Superficially, however, as well as interiorly, he was aware of always expecting its repetition; and now, six months after the occurrence this expectation was as vivid with him as it was the first moment after the vision had vanished, while his tongue was yet in act to stay it with speech. He would not have been surprised at any time in walking into his room to find It there; or waking at night to confront It in the electric flash which he kindled by a touch of the button at his bedside. Rather, he was surprised that nothing of the sort happened, to confirm him in his belief that he had been all but in touch with the other life, or to give him some hint, the slightest, the dimmest, why this vision had been shown him, and then instantly broken and withdrawn. In that inmost of his where he recognized its validity, he could not deny that it had a meaning, and that it had been sent him for some good reason special to himself; though at the times when he had prefaced his story of it with terms of slighting scepticism, he had professed neither to know nor to care why the thing had happened. He always said that he had never been particularly interested in the supernatural, and then was ashamed of a lie that was false to universal human experience; but he could truthfully add that he had never in his life felt less like seeing a ghost than that morning. It was not full day, but it was perfectly light, and there the thing was, as palpable to vision as any of the men that moment confronting him with cocktails in their hands. Asked if he did not think he had dreamed it, he answered scornfully that he did not think, he knew, he had not dreamed it; he did not value the experience, it was and had always been perfectly meaningless, but he would stake his life upon its reality. Asked if it had not perhaps been the final office of a nightcap, he disdained to answer at all, though he did not openly object to the laugh which the suggestion raised.

Secretly, within his inmost, Hewson felt justly punished by the laughter. He had been unworthy of his apparition in lightly exposing it to such a chance; he had fallen below the dignity of his experience. He might never hope to fathom its meaning while he lived; but he grieved for the wrong he had done it, as if at the instant of the apparition he had offered that majestic, silent figure some grotesque indignity: thrown a pillow at it, or hailed it in tones of mocking offence. He was profoundly and exquisitely ashamed even before he ceased to tell the story for his listeners’ idle amusement. When he stopped doing so, and snubbed solicitation with the curt answer that everybody had heard that story, he was retrospectively ashamed; and mixed with the expectation of seeing the vision again was the formless wish to offer it some sort of reparation, of apology.

He longed to prove himself not wholly unworthy of the advance that had been made him from the other world upon grounds which he had done his worst to prove untenable. He could not imagine what the grounds were, though he had to admit their probable existence; such an event might have no obvious or present significance, but it had not happened for nothing; it could not have happened for nothing. Hewson might not have been in what he thought any stressful need of ghostly comfort or reassurance in matters of faith. He was not inordinately agnostic, or in the way of becoming so. He was simply an average skeptical American, who denied no more than he affirmed, and who really concerned himself so little about his soul, though he tried to keep his conscience decently clean, that he had not lately asked whether other people had such a thing or not. He had not lost friends, and he was so much alone in this world that it seemed improbable the fate of any uncle or cousin, in the absence of more immediate kindred, should be mystically forecast to him. He was perfectly well at the time of the apparition, and it could not have been the figment of a disordered digestion, as the lusty hunger which willingly appeased itself with the coffee of the St. Johnswort Inn sufficiently testified. Yet, in spite of all this, an occurrence so out of the course of events must have had some message for him, and it must have been his fault that he could not divine it. A sense of culpability grew upon him with the sense of his ignominy in cheapening it by making it subservient to what he knew was, in the last analysis, a wretched vanity. At least he could refuse himself that miserable gratification hereafter, and he got back some measure of self-respect in forbidding himself the pleasure he might have taken in being noted for a strange experience he could never be got to speak of.

V.

The implication of any such study as this is that the subject of it is continuously if not exclusively occupied with the matter which is supposed to make him interesting. But of course it was not so with Hewson, who perhaps did not think of his apparition once in a fortnight, or oftener, say, than he thought of the odd girl with whom for no reason, except contemporaneity in his acquaintance, he associated with it. If he never thought of the apparition without subconsciously expecting its return, he equally expected when he thought of Miss Hernshaw that the chances of society would bring them together again, and it was with no more surprise than if the vision had intimated its second approach that he one night found her name in the minute envelope which the footman presented him at a house where he was going to dine, and realized that he was appointed to take her out. It was a house where he rather liked to go, for in that New York of his where so few houses had any distinctive character, this one had a temperament of its own in so far that you might expect to meet people of temperament there, if anywhere. They were indeed held in a social solution where many other people of no temperament at all floated largely and loosely about, but they were there, all the same, and it was worth coming on the chance of meeting them, though the indiscriminate hospitality of the hostess might let the evening pass without promoting the chance. Now, however, she had unwittingly put into Hewson’s keeping, for two hours at least, the very temperament that had kept his fancy for the last half-year and more. He fairly laughed at sight of the name on the little card, and hurried into the drawing-room, where the first thing after greeting his hostess, he caught the wandering look and vague smile of Mrs. Rock. The look and the smile became personal to him, and she welcomed him with a curious resumption of the confidential terms in which they had seemed to part that afternoon at St. Johnswort. He thought that she was going to begin talking to him where she had left off, about Rosalie, as she had called her, and he was disappointed in the commonplaces that actually ensued. At the end of these, however, she did say: “Miss Hernshaw is here with me. Have you seen her?”

“Oh, yes,” Hewson returned, for he had caught sight of the girl in a distant group, on his way up to Mrs. Rock, but in view of the affluent opportunity before him had richly forborne trying even to make her bow to him, though he believed she had seen him. “I am to have the happiness of going out with her.”

“Oh, indeed,” said Mrs. Rock, “that is nice,” and then the people began assorting themselves, and the man who was appointed to take Mrs. Rock out, came and bowed Hewson away.

He hastened to that corner of the room where Miss Hernshaw was waiting, and if he had been suddenly confronted with his apparition he could not have experienced a deeper and stranger satisfaction than he felt as the girl lifted up her innocent fierce face upon him.

It brought back that whole day at St. Johnswort, of which she, with his vision, formed the supreme interest and equally the mystery; and it went warmly to his heart to have her peremptorily abolish all banalities by saying, “I was wondering if they were going to give me you, as soon as you came in.”

She put her slim hand on his arm as she spoke, and he thought she must have felt him quiver at her touch. “Then you were not afraid they were going to give you me?” he bantered.

“No,” she said, “I wanted to talk with you. I wanted you to tell me what Mrs. Rock said about me!”

“Just now? She said you were here.”

“No, I mean that day at St. Johnswort.”

Hewson laughed out for pleasure in her frankness, and then he felt a gathering up of his coat-sleeve under her nervous fingers, as if (such a thing being imaginable) she were going unwittingly to pinch him for his teasing. “She said she wanted to explain you a little.”

“And then what!”

“And then nothing. She seemed to catch your eye, and she stopped.”

The fingers relaxed their hold upon that gathering up of his coat-sleeve. “I won’t be explained, and I have told her so. If I choose to act myself, and show out my real thoughts and feelings, how is it any worse than if I acted somebody else!”

“I should think it was very much better,” said Hewson, inwardly warned to keep his face straight.

VI.

They had time for no more talk between the drawing-room and the dinner table, and when Miss Hernshaw’s chair had been pushed in behind her, and she sat down, she turned instantly to the man on her right and began speaking to him, and left Hewson to make conversation with any one he liked or could.

He did not get on very well, not because there were not enough amusing people beside him and over against him, but because he was all the time trying to eavesdrop what was saying between Miss Hernshaw and the man on her right. It seemed to be absolute trivialities they were talking; so far as Hewson made out they got no deeper than the new play which was then commanding the public favor apparently for the reason that it was altogether surface, with no measure upwards or downwards. Upon this surface the comment of the man on Miss Hernshaw’s right wandered indefatigably.

Hewson could not imagine of her sincerity a deliberate purpose of letting the poor fellow show all the shallowness that was in him, and of amusing itself with his satisfaction in turning his empty mind inside out for her inspection. She seemed, if not genuinely interested, to be paying him an unaffected attention; but when the lady across the table addressed a word to him, Miss Hernshaw, as if she had been watching for some such chance, instantly turned to Hewson.

“What do you think of ‘Ghosts’?” she asked, with imperative suddenness.

“Ghosts?” he echoed.

“Or perhaps you didn’t go?” she suggested, and he perceived that she meant Ibsen’s tragedy. But he did not answer at once. He had had a shock, and for a timeless space he had been back in his room at St. Johnswort, with that weird figure seated at his table. It seemed to vanish again when he gave a second glance, as it had vanished before, and he drew a long sigh, and looked a little haggardly at Miss Hernshaw. “Ah, I see you did! Wasn’t it tremendous? I think the girl who did Regina was simply awful, don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” said Hewson, still so trammeled in his own involuntary associations with the word as not fully to realize the strangeness of discussing “Ghosts” with a young lady. But he pulled himself together, and nimbly making his reflection that the latitude of the stage gave room for the meeting of cultivated intelligences in regions otherwise tabooed, if they were of opposite sexes, he responded in kind. “I think that the greatest miracle of the play — and to me it was altogether miraculous” —

“Oh, I’m glad to hear you say that!” cried the girl. “It was the greatest experience of my life. I can’t bear to have people undervalue it. I want to hit them. But go on!”

Hewson went on as gravely as he could in view of her potential violence: he pictured Miss Hernshaw beating down the inadequate witnesses of “Ghosts” with her fan, which lay in her lap, with her cobwebby handkerchief, drawn through its ring, and her long limp gloves looking curiously like her pretty young arms in their slenderness. “I was merely going to say that the most prodigious effect of the play was among the actors — I won’t venture on the spectators—”

“No, don’t! It isn’t speakable.”

“It’s astonishing the effect a play of Ibsen’s has with the actors. They can’t play false. It turns the merest theatrical sticks into men and women, and it does it through the perfect honesty of the dramatist. He deals so squarely with himself that they have to deal squarely with themselves. They have to be, and not just seem.”

Miss Hernshaw sighed deeply. “I’m glad you think that,” she said, and Hewson felt very glad too that he thought that.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why? Because that is what I always want to do; and it’s what I always shall do, I don’t care what they say.”

“But I don’t know whether I understand exactly.”

“Deal squarely with everybody. Say what I really feel. Then they say what they really feel.”

There was an obscure resentment unworthily struggling at the bottom of Hewson’s heart for her long neglect of him in behalf of the man on her left. “Yes,” he said, “if they are capable of really feeling anything.”

“What do you mean? Everybody really feels.”

“Well, then, thinking anything.”

She drew herself up a little with an air of question. “I believe everybody really thinks, too, and it’s your duty to let them find out what they’re thinking, by truly saying what you think.”

“Then she isn’t dealing quite honestly with him,” said Hewson, with a malicious smile.

The man at Miss Hernshaw’s left was still talking about the play, and he was at that moment getting off a piece of pure parrotry about it to the lady across the table: just what everybody had been saying about it from the first.

“No, I should think she was not,” said the girl, gravely. She looked hurt, as if she had been unfairly forced to the logic of her postulate, and Hewson was not altogether pleased with himself; but at least he had had his revenge in making her realize the man’s vacuity.

He tried to get her back to talk about “Ghosts,” again, but she answered with indifference, and just then he was arrested by something a man was saying near the head of the table.

VII.

It was rather a large dinner, but not so large that a striking phrase, launched in a momentary lull, could not fuse all the wandering attentions in a sole regard. The man who spoke was the psychologist Wanhope, and he was saying with a melancholy that mocked itself a little in his smile: “I shouldn’t be particular about seeing a ghost myself. I have seen plenty of men who had seen men who had seen ghosts; but I never yet saw a man who had seen a ghost. If I had it would go a long way to persuade me of ghosts.”

Hewson felt his heart thump in his throat. There was a pause, and it was as if all eyes but the eyes of the psychologist turned upon him; these rested upon the ice which the servant had just then silently slipped under them. Hewson had no reason to think that any of the people present were acquainted with his experience, but he thought it safest to take them upon the supposition that they had, and after he had said to the psychologist, “Will you allow me to present him to you?” he added, “I’m afraid every one else knows him too well already.”

“You!” said his vis-�-vis, arching her eyebrows; and others up and down the table, looked round or over at Hewson where he sat midway of it with Miss Hernshaw drooping beside him. She alone seemed indifferent to his pretension; she seemed even insensible of it, as she broke off little corners of her ice with her fork.

The psychologist fixed his eyes on him with scientific challenge as well as scientific interest. “Do you mean that you have seen a ghost?”

“Yes — ghost. Generically — provisionally. We always consider them ghosts, don’t we, till they prove themselves something else? I once saw an apparition.”

Several people who were near-sighted or far-placed put on their eye-glasses, to make out whether Hewson were serious; a lady who had a handsome forearm put up a lorgnette and inspected him through it; she had the air of questioning his taste, and the subtle aura of her censure penetrated to him, though she preserved a face of rigid impassivity. He returned her stare defiantly, though he was aware of not reaching her through the lenses as effectively as she reached him. Most of those who prepared themselves to listen seemed to be putting him on trial, and they apparently justified themselves in this from the cross-questioning method the psychologist necessarily took in his wish to clarify the situation.

“How long ago was it?” he asked, coldly.

“Last summer.”

“Was it after dark?”

“Very much after. It was at day-break.”

“Oh! You were alone?”

“Quite.”

“You made sure you were not dreaming?”

“I made sure of that, instantly. I was not awakened by the apparition. I was already fully awake.”

“Had your mind been running on anything of the kind?”

“Nothing could have been farther from it. I was thinking what a very long while it would be till breakfast.” This was not true as to the order of the fact; but Hewson could not keep himself from saying it, and it made a laugh and created a diversion in his favor.

“How long did it seem to last?”

“The vision? That was very curious. The whole affair was quite achronic, as I may say. The figure was there and it was not there.”

“It vanished suddenly?”

“I can’t say it vanished at all. It ought still to be there. Have you ever returned to a place where you had always been wrong as to the points of the compass, and found yourself right up to a certain moment as you approached, and then without any apparent change, found yourself perfectly wrong again? The figure was not there, and it was there, and then it was not there.”

“I think I see what you mean,” said the psychologist, warily. “The evanescence was subjective.”

“Altogether. But so was the apparescence.”

“Ah!” said Wanhope. “You hadn’t any headache?”

“Not the least.”

“Ah!” The psychologist desisted with the effect of letting the defence take the witness.

A general dissatisfaction diffused itself, and Hewson felt it; but he disdained to do anything to appease it. He remained silent for that appreciable time which elapsed before his host said, almost compassionately, “Won’t you tell us all about it, Mr. Hewson.”

The guests, all but Miss Hernshaw, seemed to return to their impartial frame, with a leaning in Hewson’s favor, such as the court-room feels when the accused is about to testify in his own behalf; the listeners cannot help wishing him well, though they may have their own opinions of his guilt.

“Why, there isn’t any ‘all-about-it,’” said Hewson. “The whole thing has been stated as to the circumstances and conditions.” He could see the baffled greed in the eyes of those who were hungering for a morsel of the marvellous, and he made it as meagre as he could. He had now no temptation to exaggerate the simple fact, and he hurried it out in the fewest possible words.

VIII.

The general disappointment was evident in the moment of waiting which followed upon his almost contemptuous ending. His audience some of them took their cue from his own ironical manner, and joked; others looked as if they had been trifled with. The psychologist said, “Curious.” He did not go back to his position that belief in ghosts should follow from seeing a man who had seen one; he seemed rather annoyed by the encounter. The talk took another turn and distributed itself again between contiguous persons for the brief time that elapsed before the women were to leave the men to their coffee and cigars.

When their hostess rose Hewson offered his arm to Miss Hernshaw. She had not spoken to him since he had told the story of his apparition. Now she said in an undertone so impassioned that every vibration from her voice shook his heart, “If I were you, I would never tell that story again!” and she pressed his arm with unconscious intensity, while she looked away from him.

“You don’t believe it happened?” he returned.

“It did.”

“Of course it happened! Why shouldn’t I believe that? But that’s the very reason why I wouldn’t have told it. If it happened, it was something sacred — awful! Oh, I don’t see how you could bear to speak of it at a dinner, when people were all torpid with—”

She stopped breathlessly, with a break in her voice that sounded just short of a sob.

“Well, I’m sufficiently ashamed of doing it, and not for the first time,” he said, in sullen discontent with himself. “And I’ve been properly punished. You can’t think how sick it makes me to realize what a detestable sensation I was seeking.”

She did not heed what he was saying. “Was it that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early, and went for a cup of coffee at the inn?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so! I could follow every instant of it; I could see just how it was. If such a thing had happened to me, I would have died before I spoke of it at such a time as this. Oh, why do you suppose it happened to you?” the girl grieved.

“Me, of all men?” said Hewson, with a self-contemptuous smile.

“I thought you were different,” she said absently; then abruptly: “What are you standing here talking to me so long for? You must go back! All the men have gone back,” and Hewson perceived that they had arrived in the drawing-room, and were conspicuously parleying in the face of a dozen interested women witnesses.

In the dining-room he took his way toward a vacant place at the table near his host, who was saying behind his cigar to another old fellow: “I used to know her mother; she was rather original too; but nothing to this girl. I don’t envy Mrs. Rock her job.”

“I don’t know what the pay of a chaperon is, but I suppose Hernshaw can make it worth her while, if he’s like the rest out there,” said the other old fellow. “I imagine he’s somewhere in his millions.”

The host held up one of his fingers. “Is that all? I thought more. Mines?”

“Cattle. Ah, Mr. Hewson,” said the host, turning to welcome him to the chair on his other side. “Have a cigar. That was a strong story you gave us. It had a good fault, though. It was too short.”

IX.

Hewson had begun now to feel a keen, persistent, painful sympathy for the apparition itself as for some one whose confidence had been abused; and this feeling was none the less, but all the more, poignant because it was he himself who was guilty towards it. He pitied it in a sort as if it had been the victim of a wrong more shocking perhaps for the want of taste in it than for any real turpitude. This was a quality of the event not without a strange consolation. In arraying him on the side of the apparition, it antagonized him with what he had done, and enabled him to renounce and disown it.

From the night of that dinner, Hewson did not again tell the story of his apparition, though the opportunities to do so now sought him as constantly as he had formerly sought them. They offered him a fresh temptation through the different perversions of the fact that had got commonly abroad, but he resisted this temptation, and let the perversions, sometimes annoyingly, sometimes amusingly, but always more and more wildly, wide of the reality, take their course. In his reticence he had the sense of atoning not only to the apparition but to Miss Hernshaw too.

Before he met her again, Miss Hernshaw had been carried off to Europe by Mrs. Rock, perhaps with the purpose of trying the veteran duplicities of that continent in breaking down the insurgent sincerity of her ward. Hewson heard that she was not to be gone a great while; it was well into the winter when they started, and he understood that they were merely going to Rome for the end of the season, and were then going to work northward, and after June in London were coming home. He did not fail to see her again before she left for any want of wishing, but he did not happen to meet her at other houses, and at the house of Mrs. Rock, if she had one, he had not been asked to call, or invited to any function. In thinking the point over it occurred to Hewson that this was so because he was not wanted there, and not wanted by Miss Hernshaw herself; for it had been in his brief experience of her that she let people know what she wanted, and that with Mrs. Rock, whose character seemed to answer to her name but poorly, she had ways of getting what she wanted. If Miss Hernshaw had wished to meet him again, he could not doubt that she would have asked him, or at the least had him asked to come and see her, and not have left it to the social fortutities to bring them together. Towards the end of the term which rumor had fixed to her stay abroad Hewson’s folly was embittered to him in a way that he had never expected in his deepest shame and darkest forboding. But evil, like good, does not cease till it has fulfilled itself in every possible consequence. It seeing even more active and persistent. Good seems to satisfy itself sometimes in the direct effect, but evil winds sinuously in and out, and reaches round and over and under its wretched author, and strikes him in every tender and fatal place, with an ingenuity in finding the places out that seems truly of hell. Hewson thought he had paid the principal of his debt in full through the hurt to his vanity in failing to gain any sort of consequence from his apparition, but the interest of his debt had accumulated, and the sorest pinch was in paying the interest. His penalty took the form that was most of all distasteful to him: the form of publicity in the Sunday edition of a newspaper. A young lady attached to the staff of this journal had got hold of his story, and had made her reporter’s Story of it, which she imaginatively cast in the shape of an interview with Hewson. But worse than this, and really beyond the vagary of the wildest nightmare, she gave St. Johnswort as the scene of the apparition, with all the circumstances of the supposed burglary, while tastefully disguising Hewson’s identity in the figure of A Well-Known Society-man.

When Hewson read this Story (and it seemed to him that no means of bringing it to his notice at the club, and on the street, and by mail was left unemployed), he had two thoughts: one was of St. John, and one was of Miss Hernshaw. In all his exploitations of his experience he had carefully, he thought religiously, concealed the scene, except that one only time when Miss Hernshaw suddenly got it out of him by that demand of hers, “Was it that morning at St. Johnswort when you got up so early and went for a cup of coffee at the inn?” He had confided so absolutely in her that his admission had not troubled him at the time, and it had not troubled him since, till now when he found the fact given this hideous publicity, and knew that it could have become known only through her: through her who had seemed to make herself the protectress of his apparition and to guard it with indignation even against his own slight!

He could not tell himself what to think of her, and in this disability he had at least the sad comfort of literally thinking nothing of her; but he could not keep his thoughts away from St. John. It appeared to him that he thought and lived nothing else till his dread concreted itself in the letter which came from St. John as soon as that fatal newspaper could reach him, and his demand for an explanation could come back to Hewson. He wrote from St. Johnswort, where he had already gone for the season, and he assumed, as no doubt he had a right to do, that the whole thing was a fake, and that if Hewson was hesitating about denying it for fear of giving it further prominence, or out of contempt for it, he wished that he would not hesitate. There were reasons, which would suggest themselves to Hewson, why the thing, if merely and entirely a fake, should be very annoying, and he thought that it would be best to make the denial immediate and imperative. To this end he advised Hewson’s sending the newspaper people a lawyer’s letter; with the ulterior trouble which this would intimate they would move in the matter with a quickened conscience.

Apparently St. John was very much in earnest, and Hewson would eagerly have lied out of it, he felt in sudden depravity, from a just regard for St. John’s right to privacy in his own premises, but no lying, not the boldest, not the most ingenious, could now avail. Scores of people could witness that they had heard Hewson tell the story at first hand; at second hand hundreds could still more confidently affirm its truth. But if he admitted the truth of the fact and denied merely that it had happened at St. Johnswort, he would have Miss Hernshaw to deal with and what could he hope from truth so relentless as hers? She was of a moral make so awful that if he ventured to deny it without appeal for her support (which was impossible), she was quite capable of denying his denial.

He did the only thing he could. He wrote to St. John declaring that the newspaper story, though utterly false in its pretensions to be an interview with him, was true in its essentials. The thing had really happened, he had seen an apparition, and he had seen it at St. Johnswort that morning when St. John supposed his house to have been invaded by burglars. He vainly turned over a thousand deprecatory expressions in his mind, with which to soften the blow but he let his letter go without including one.

X.

A week of silence passed, and then one night St. John himself appeared at Hewson’s apartment. Hewson almost knew that it was his ring at the door, and in the tremulous note of his voice asking the man if he were at home, he recognized the great blubbery fellow’s most plaintive mood.

“Well, Hewson,” he whimpered, without staying for any form of greeting when they stood face to face, “this has been a terrible business for me. You can’t imagine how it’s broken me up in every direction.”

“I — I’m afraid I can, St. John,” Hewson began, but St. John cut him off.

“Oh, no, you can’t. Look here!” He showed a handful of letters. “All from people who had promised to stay with me, taking it back, since that infernal interview of yours, or from people who hadn’t answered before, saying they can’t come. Of course they make all sorts of civil excuses. I shouldn’t know what to do with these people if any of them came. There isn’t a servant left on the place, except the gardener who lives in his own house, and the groom who sleeps in the stable. For the last three days I’ve had to take my meals at that infernal inn where you got your coffee.”

“Is it so bad as that?” Hewson gasped.

“Yes, it is. It’s so bad that sometimes I can’t realize it. Do you actually mean to tell me, Hewson that you saw a ghost in my house?”

“I never said a ghost. I said an apparition. I don’t know what it was. It may have been an optical delusion. I call it an apparition, because that’s the shortest way out. You know I’m not a spiritualist.”

“Yes, that’s the devil of it,” said St. John. “That’s the very thing that makes people believe it is a ghost. There isn’t one of them that don’t say to himself and the other fellows that if a cool, clear-headed chap like you saw something queer, it must have been a ghost; and so they go on knocking my house down in price till I don’t believe it would fetch fifteen hundred under the hammer to-morrow. It’s simply ruin to me.”

“Ruin?” Hewson echoed.

“Yes, ruin,” St. John repeated. “Before this thing came out I refused twenty-five thousand for the place, because I knew I could get twenty-eight thousand. Now I couldn’t get twenty-eight hundred. Couldn’t you understand that the reputation of being haunted simply plays the devil with a piece of property?” “Yes; yes, I did understand that, and for that very reason I was always careful—”

“Careful! To tell people that you had seen a ghost in my house?”

“No! Not to tell them where I had seen a ghost. I never—”

“How did it get out then?”

“I,” Hewson began, and then he stood with his mouth open, unable to close it for the articulation of the next word, which he at last huskily whispered forth, “can’t tell you.”

“Can’t tell me?” wailed St. John. “Well, I call that pretty rough!”

“It is rough,” Hewson admitted; “and Heaven knows that I would make it smooth if I could. I never once — except once only — mentioned your place in connection with the matter. I was scrupulously careful not to do so, for I did imagine something like what has happened. I would do anything — anything — in reparation. But I can’t even tell you how the name of your place got out in the connection, though certainly you have a right to ask and to know. The circumstances were — peculiar. The person — was one that I wouldn’t have dreamt was capable of repeating it. It was as if I had said the words over to myself.”

“Well, I can’t understand all that,” said St. John, with rueful sulkiness, from which he brisked up to ask, as if by a sudden inspiration, “If it was only to one person, why couldn’t you deny it, and throw the onus on the other fellow?” He looked up at Hewson, standing nerveless before him, from where he lay mournfully wallowing in an easy-chair, as if now for the first time, there might be a gleam of hope for them both in some such notion.

Hewson slowly shook his head. “It wouldn’t work. The person — isn’t that kind of person.”

“Why, but see here,” St. John urged. “There must be something in the fellow that you can appeal to. If you went and told him how it was playing the very deuce with me pecuniarily, he would see the necessity of letting you deny it, and taking the consequences, if he was anything of a man at all.”

“He isn’t anything of a man at all,” said Hewson, in mechanical and melancholy parody.

“Then in Heaven’s name what is he?” demanded St. John, savagely.

“A woman.” “Oh!” St. John fell back in his chair. But he pulled himself up again with a sudden renewal of hope. “Why, see here! If she’s the right kind of woman, she’ll enjoy denying the story, and putting the people in the wrong that have circulated it!”

Hewson shook his head in rejection of the general principle, while, as to the particular instance, he could only say: “She isn’t that kind. She’s the kind that would rather die herself, and let everybody else die, than be party to any sort of deception.”

“She must be a queer woman,” St. John bewailed himself, looking at the point of his cigar, and discovering to his surprise that it was out. He did not attempt to light it. “Of course, I can’t ask you who she is; but why shouldn’t I see her, and try what I can do with her? I’m the one that’s the principal sufferer in this matter,” he added, perhaps seeing refusal in Hewson’s troubled eye.

“Because — for one reason — she’s in London.”

“Oh Lord!” St. John lamented.

“But if she were here in New York, I couldn’t allow it,” he continued. “It was in confidence between us.”

“She doesn’t seem to have thought so,” said St. John, with sarcasm which Hewson could not resent.

“There’s only one thing for me to do,” said Hewson, who had been thinking the point over, and saw no other way out for him as a gentleman, or even merely as a just man. He was not rich, and in the face of the mounting accumulations of other men he had grown comparatively poor, without actually losing money, since he had begun to lead the life which had long been his ideal. After carefully ascertaining at the time in question that he had sufficient income from inherited means to live without his profession, he had closed his law-office without shutting many clients out, and had contributed himself to the formation of a leisure class, which he conceived was regrettably lacking in our conditions. He had taste, he had reading, he had a pretty knowledge of the world from travel, he had observed manners, and it seemed to him that he might not immodestly pretend to supply, as far as one man went, a well-recognized want.

Hitherto he had been able to live up to his ideal with, sufficient satisfaction, and in proposing to himself never to marry, but to grow old gradually and gracefully as a bachelor of adequate income, he saw no difficulties in his way for the future, until this affair of the apparition. If now he incurred the chances of an open change in his way of living — the end was simply a question of very little time. He must not only declass, he must depatriate himself, for he would not have the means of living even much more economically than he now lived in New York, if he did what a sense of honor, of just responsibility urged him to do with regard to St. John.

He would have been glad of any interposition of Providence that would have availed him against his obvious duty. He would have liked to recall the words saying that there was only one thing for him to do, but he could not recall them and he was forced to go on. “Will you sell me your place?” he said to St. John, colorlessly.

“Sell you my place? What do you mean?”

“Simply that if you will, I shall be glad to buy it at your own valuation.”

“Oh, look here, now, Hewson! I can’t let you do this,” St. John began, trying to feel a magnanimity which proved impossible to him. “What do you want with my place? You couldn’t get anybody to live there with you.”

“I couldn’t afford to live there in any case,” said Hewson; “but I am entirely willing to risk the purchase.”

Was it possible that Hewson knew something of the neighborhood or its future, which encouraged him to take the chances of the property appreciating in value? This thought passed through St. John’s mind, and he was not the man to let himself be overreached in a deal. “The place ought to be worth thirty thousand,” he said, for a bluff.

It was a relief for Hewson to feel ashamed of St. John instead of himself, for a moment. “Very well, I’ll give you thirty thousand.”

St. John examined himself for a responsive generosity. The most he could say was, “You’re doing this because of what I’d said.”

“What does it matter? I make you a bonafide offer. I will give you thirty thousand dollars for St. Johnswort,” said Hewson, haughtily. “I ask you to sell me that place. I cannot see that it will ever be any good to me, but I can assure you that it would be a far worse burden for me to carry round the sense of having injured you, however unwillingly — God knows I never meant you harm! — than to shoulder the chance of your place remaining worthless on my hands.”

St. John caught at the hope which the form of words suggested. “If anything can bring it up, it will be the fact that you have bought it. Such a thing would give the lie to that ridiculous story, as nothing else could. Every one will see that a house can’t be very badly haunted, if the man that the ghost appeared to is willing to buy it.”

“Perhaps,” said Hewson sadly.

“No perhaps about it,” St. John retorted, all the more cheerfully because he would have been glad before this incident to take twenty thousand for his place. “It’s just on the borders of Lenox, and it’s bound to come up when this blows over.” He talked on for a time in an encouraging strain, while Hewson, standing with his back against the mantel, looked absently down upon him. St. John was inwardly struggling through all to say that Hewson might have the property for twenty-eight thousand, but he could not. Possibly he made himself believe that he was letting it go a great bargain at thirty; at any rate he ended by saying, “Well, it’s yours — if you really mean it.”

“I mean it,” said Hewson.

St. John floundered up out of his chair with seal-like struggles. “Do you want the furniture?” he panted.

“The furniture? Yes, why not?” said Hewson. He did not seem to know what he was saying, or to care.

“I will put that in for a mere nominal consideration — the rugs alone are worth the money — say a thousand more.”

Hewson’s man came in with a note. “The messenger is waiting, sir,” he said.

Hewson was aware of wondering that he had not heard any ring. “Will you excuse me?” he said, toward St. John.

“By all means,” said St. John.

Hewson opened the note, and read it with an expression which can only be described as a radiant frown. He sat down at his desk, and wrote an answer to the note, and gave it to his man, who was still waiting. Then he said to St. John, “What did you say the rugs were worth?”

“A thousand.”

“I’ll take them. And what do you want for the rest of the furniture?”

Clearly he had not understood that the furniture, rugs, and all, had been offered to him for a thousand dollars. But what was a man in St. John’s place to do? As it was he was turning himself out of house and home for Hewson, and that was sacrifice enough. He hesitated, sighed deeply, and then said, “Well, I will throw all that in for a couple of thousand more.”

“All right,” said Hewson, “I will give it. Have the papers made out and I will have the money ready at once.”

“Oh, there’s no hurry about that, my dear fellow,” said St. John, handsomely.

XI.

Hewson’s note was from Mrs. Rock, asking him to breakfast with her at the Walholland the next morning. She said that they were just off the steamer, which had got in late, and they had started so suddenly from London that she had not had time to write and have her apartment opened. She came to business in the last sentence where she said that Miss Hernshaw joined her in kind remembrances, and wished her to say that he must not fail them, or if he could not come to breakfast, to let them know at what hour during the day he would be kind enough to call; it was very important they should see him at the earliest possible moment.

Hewson instantly decided that this summons was related to the affair of his apparition, without imagining how or why, and when Miss Hernshaw met him, and almost before she could say that Mrs. Rock would be down in a moment, began with it, he made no feint of having come for anything else.

As he entered the door of Mrs. Rock’s parlor, where the breakfast table was laid, the girl came swiftly toward him, with the air of having turned from watching for him at the window. “Well, what do you think of me?” she demanded as soon as she had got over Mrs. Rock’s excuses for having her receive him. He had of course to repeat, “What do I think of you?” but he knew perfectly what she meant.

She disdained to help him pretend that he did not know. “It was I who told that horrible woman about your experience at St. Johnswort. I didn’t dream that she was an interviewer, but that doesn’t excuse me, and I am willing to take any punishment for my — I don’t know what to call it — mischief.”

She was so intensely ready, so magnificently prepared for the stake, if that should be her sentence, that Hewson could not help laughing. “Why there isn’t any punishment severe enough for a crime like that,” he began, but she would not allow him to trifle with the matter.

“Oh, I didn’t think you would be so uncandid! The instant I read that interview I made Mrs. Rock get ready to come. And we started the first steamer. It seemed to me that I could not eat or sleep, till I had seen you and told you what I had done and taken the consequences. And now do you think it right to turn it off as a joke?”

“I don’t wish to make a joke of it,” said Hewson, gravely, in compliance with her mood. “But I don’t understand, quite, how you could have got the story over there in time for you—”

“It was cabled to their London edition — that’s what it said in the paper; and by this time they must have it in Australia,” said Miss Hernshaw, with unrelieved severity.

“Oh!” said Hewson, giving himself time to realize that he was the psychical hero of two hemispheres. “Well,” he resumed “what do you expect me to say?”

“I don’t know what I expect. I expected you to say something without my prompting you. You know that it was outrageous for me to talk about your apparition without your leave, and to be the means of its getting into the newspapers.”

“I’m not sure you were the means. I have told the story a hundred times, myself.”

“But that doesn’t excuse me. You knew the kind of people to tell it to, and I didn’t.”

“Oh, I am afraid I was willing to tell it to all kinds of people — to any kind that would listen.”

“You are trying to evade me, Mr. Hewson,” she said, with a severity he found charming. “I didn’t expect that of you.”

The appeal was not lost upon Hewson. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you,” said Miss Hernshaw, with an effect of giving him another trial, “to say — to acknowledge that you were terribly annoyed by that interview.”

“If you will excuse me from attaching the slightest blame to you for it, I will acknowledge that I was annoyed.”

Miss Hernshaw drew a deep breath as of relief. “I will arrange about the blame,” she said loftily. “And now I wish to tell you how I never supposed that girl was an interviewer. We were all together at an artist’s house in Rome, and after dinner, we got to telling ghost-stories, the way people do, around the fire, and I told mine — yours I mean. And before we broke up, this girl came to me — it was while we were putting on our wraps — and introduced herself, and said how much she had been impressed by my story — of course, I mean your story — and she said she supposed it was made up. I said I should not dream of making up a thing of that kind, and that it was every word true, and I had heard the person it happened to tell it himself. I don’t know! I was vain of having heard it, so, at first hand.”

“I can understand,” said Hewson, sadly.

“And then I told her who the person was, and where it happened — and about the burglary. You can’t imagine how silly people get when they begin going in that direction.”

“I am afraid I can,” said Hewson.

“She seemed very grateful somehow; I couldn’t see why, but I didn’t ask; and then I didn’t think about it again till I saw it in that awful newspaper. She sent it to me herself; she was such a simpleton; she thought I would actually like to see it. She must have written it down, and sent it to the paper, and they printed it when they got ready to; she needed the money, I suppose. Then I began to wonder what you would say, when you remembered how I blamed you for telling the same story — only not half so bad — at that dinner.”

“I always felt you were quite right,” said Hewson. “I have always thanked you in my own mind for being so frank with me.”

“Well, and what do you think now, when you know that I was ten times as bad as you — ten times as foolish and vulgar!”

“I haven’t had time to formulate my ideas yet,” Hewson urged.

“You know perfectly well that you despise me. Can you say that I had any right to give your name?”

“It must have got out sooner or later. I never asked any one not to mention my name when I told the story—”

“I see that you think I took a liberty, and I did. But that’s nothing. That isn’t the point. How I do keep beating about the bush! Mrs. Rock says it was a great deal worse to tell where it happened, for that would give the place the reputation of being haunted and nobody could ever live there afterwards, for they couldn’t keep servants, even if they didn’t have the creeps themselves, and it would ruin the property.”

Hewson had not been able, when she touched upon this point, to elude the keen eye with which she read his silent thought.

“Is that true?” she demanded.

“Oh, no; oh, no,” he began, but he could not frame in plausible terms the lies he would have uttered. He only succeeded in saying, “Those things soon blow over.”

“Then how,” she said, sternly, “does it happen that in every town and village, almost, there are houses that you can hardly hire anybody to live in, because people say they are haunted? No, Mr. Hewson, it’s very kind of you, and I appreciate it, but you can’t make me believe that it will ever blow over, about St. Johnswort. Have you heard from Mr. St. John since?”

“Yes,” Hewson was obliged to own.

“And was he very much troubled about it? I should think he was a man that would be, from the way he behaved about the burglary. Was he?” she persisted, seeing that Hewson hesitated.

“Yes, I must say he was.”

There was a sound of walking to and fro in the adjoining room, a quick shutting as of trunk-lids, a noise as of a skirt shaken out, and steps advanced to the door. Miss Hernshaw ran to it and turned the key in the lock. “Not yet, Mrs. Rock,” she called to the unseen presence within, and she explained to Hewson, as she faced him again, “She promised that I should have it all out with you myself, and now I’m not going to have her in here, interrupting. Well, did he write to you?”

“Yes, he wrote to me. He wanted me to deny the story.”

“And did you?”

“Of course not!” said Hewson, with a note of indignation. “It was true. Besides it wouldn’t have been of any use.”

“No, it would have been wicked and it would have been useless. And then what did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? And you have never heard another word from him?”

“Yes, he came to see me last night.”

“Here in New York? Is he here yet?”

“I suppose so.”

“Where?”

“I believe at the Overpark.”

Miss Hernshaw caught her breath, as if she were going to speak, but she did not say anything.

“Why do you insist upon all this, Miss Hernshaw?” he entreated. “It can do you no good to follow the matter up!”

“Do you think I want to do myself good?” she returned. “I want to do myself harm! What did he say when he came to see you?”

“Well, you can imagine,” said Hewson, not able to keep out of his tone the lingering disgust he felt for St. John.

“He complained?”

“He all but shed tears,” said Hewson, recalled to a humorous sense of St. John’s behavior. “I felt sorry for him; though,” he added, darkly, “I can’t say that I do now.”

Miss Hernshaw didn’t seek to fathom the mystery of his closing words. “Had he been actually inconvenienced by that thing in the paper?”

“Yes — somewhat.”

“How much?”

“Oh,” Hewson groaned. “If you must know—”

“I must! The worst!”

“It had fairly turned him out of house and home. His servants had all left him, and he had been reduced to taking his meals at the inn. He showed me a handful of letters from people whom he had asked to visit him, withdrawing their acceptances, or making excuses for not accepting.”

“Ah!” said Miss Hernshaw, with a deep, inward breath, as if this now were indeed something like the punishment she had expected. “And will it — did he think — did he say anything about the pecuniary effect — the — whether it would hurt the property?”

“He seemed to think it would,” answered Hewson, reluctantly, and he added, unfortunately for his generous purpose, “I really can’t enter upon that part.”

She arched her eyebrows in grieved surprise. “But that is the very part that I want you to enter upon Mr. Hewson. You must tell me, now! Did he say that it had injured the property very much?”

“He did, but—”

“But what?”

“I think St. John is a man to put the worst face on that matter.”

“You are saying that to keep me from feeling badly. But I ought to feel badly — I wish to feel badly. I suppose he said that it wasn’t worth anything now.”

“Something of that sort,” Hewson helplessly admitted.

“Very well, then, I will buy it for whatever he chooses to ask!” With the precipitation which characterized all her actions, Miss Hernshaw rose from the chair in which she had been provisionally sitting, pushed an electric button in the wall, swirled away to the other side of the room, unlocked the door behind which those sounds had subsided, and flinging it open, said, “You can come out, Mrs. Hock; I’ve rung for breakfast.”

Mrs. Rock came smoothly forth, with her vague eyes wandering over every other object in the room, till they rested upon Hewson, directly before her. Then she gave him her hand, and asked, with a smile, as if taking him into the joke. “Well, has Rosalie had it out with you?”

“I have had it out with him, Mrs. Rock,” Miss Hernshaw answered, “and I will tell you all about it later. Now I want my breakfast.”

XII.

Hewson ate the meal before him, and it was a very good one, as from time to time he noted, in a daze which was as strange a confusion of the two consciousnesses as he had ever experienced. Whatever the convention was between Miss Hernshaw and Mrs. Rock with regard to the matter in hand, or lately in hand, it dropped, after a few uninterested inquiries from Mrs. Rock, who was satisfied, or seemed so, to know that Miss Hernshaw had got at the worst. She led the talk to other things, like the comparative comforts and discomforts of the line to Genoa and the line to Liverpool; and Hewson met her upon these polite topics with an apparent fulness of interest that would have deceived a much more attentive listener.

All the time he was arguing with Miss Hernshaw in his nether consciousness, pleading with her to keep her away from the fact that he had himself bought St. Johnswort, until he could frame some fitting form in which to tell her that he had bought it. With his outward eyes, he saw her drooping on the opposite side of the table, and in spite of her declaration that she wanted her breakfast, making nothing of it, after the preliminary melon, while to his inward vision she was passionately refusing, by every charming perversity, to be tempted away from the subject.

As the Cunard boats always get in on Saturday, this morrow of their arrival was naturally Sunday; and after a while Hewson fancied symptoms of going to church in Mrs. Rock. She could not have become more vague than she ordinarily was, but her wanderings were of a kind of devotional character. She spoke of the American church in Rome, and asked Hewson if he knew the rector. Then, when he said he was afraid he was keeping her from going to church, she said she did not know whether Rosalie intended going. At the same time she rose from the table, and Hewson found that he should not be allowed to sit down again, unless by violence. He had to go away, and he went, as little at ease in his mind as he very well could be.

He was no sooner out of the house than he felt the necessity of returning. He did not know how or when Miss Hernshaw would write to St. John, but that she would do so, he did not at all doubt, and then, when the truth came out, what would she think of him? He did not think her a very wise person; she seemed to him rather a wild and whirling person in her ideals of conduct, an unbridled and undisciplined person; and yet he was aware of profoundly and tenderly respecting her as a creature of the most inexpugnable innocence and final goodness. He could not bear to have her feel that he had trifled with her. There had not been many meetings between them, but each meeting had been of such event that it had advanced their acquaintance far beyond the point that it could have reached through weeks of ordinary association. From the first there had been that sort of intimacy which exists between spirits which encounter in the region of absolute sincerity. She had never used the least of those arts which women use in concealing the candor of their natures from men unworthy of it; she had not only practiced her rule of instant and constant veracity, but had avowed it, and as it were, invited his judgment of it. Hitherto, he had met her half-way at least, but now he was in the coil of a disingenuousness which must more and more trammel him from her, unless he found some way to declare the fact to her.

This ought to have been an easy matter, but it was not easy; upon reflection it grew rather more difficult. Hewson did not see how he could avow the fact, which he wished to avow, without intolerable awkwardness; without the effect of boasting, without putting upon her a burden which he had no right to put. To be sure, she had got herself in for it all by her divine imprudence, but she had owned her error in that as promptly as if it had been the blame of some one else. Still Hewson doubted whether her magnanimity was large enough to go round in the case of a man who tried to let his magnanimity come upon her with any sort of dramatic surprise. This was what he must seem to be doing if he now left her to learn from another how he had kept St. John from loss by himself assuming the chance of depreciation in his property. But if he went and told her that he had done it, how much better for him would that be?

He took a long, unhappy walk up into the Park, and then he walked back to the Walholland. By this time he thought Mrs. Rock and Miss Hernshaw must have been to church, but he had not the courage to send up his name to them. He waited about in the region of the dining-room, in the senseless hope that it would be better for him to surprise them on their way to luncheon, and trust to some chance for introducing his confession, than to seek a direct interview with Miss Hernshaw. But they did not come to luncheon, and then Hewson had the clerk send up his card. Word came back that the ladies would see him, and he followed the messenger to Mrs. Rock’s apartment, where if he was surprised, he was not disappointed to be received by Miss Hernshaw alone.

“Mrs. Rock is lying down,” she explained, “but I thought that it might be something important, and you would not mind seeing me.”

“Not at all,” said Hewson, with what seemed to him afterwards superfluous politeness, and then they both waited until he could formulate his business, Miss Hernshaw drooping forward, and looking down in a way that he had found was most characteristic of her. “It is something important — at least it is important to me. Miss Hernshaw, may I ask whether you have done anything — it seems a very unwarrantable question — about St. Johnswort?”

“About buying it?”

“Yes. It will be useless to make any offer for it.”

“Why will it be useless to do that?”

“Because — because I have bought it myself.”

“You have bought it?”

“Yes; when he came to me last night, and made those representations — Well, in short, I have bought the place.”

“To save him from losing money by that — story?”

“Well — yes. I ought to have told you the fact this morning, as soon as you said you would buy the place. I know that you like people to be perfectly truthful. But — I couldn’t — without seeming to — brag.”

“I understand,” said Miss Hernshaw.

“I took the risk of your writing to St. John; but then I realized that if he answered and told you what I ought to have told you myself, it would make it worse, and I came back.”

“I don’t know whether it would have made it worse; but you have come too late,” said Miss Hernshaw. “I’ve just written to Mr. St. John.”

They were both silent for what Hewson thought a long time. At the end of it, he asked, “Did you — you must excuse me — refer to me at all?”

“No, certainly not. Why should I?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know that it would have mattered.” He was silent again, with bowed head; when he looked up he saw tears in the girl’s eyes.

“I suppose you know where this leaves me?” she said gently.

“I can’t pretend that I don’t,” answered Hewson. “What can I do?”

“You can sell me the place for what it cost you.”

“Oh, no, I can’t do that,” said Hewson.

“Why do you say that? It isn’t as if I were poor; but even then you wouldn’t have the right to refuse me if I insisted. It was my fault that it ever came out about St. Johnswort. It might have come out about you, but the harm to Mr. St. John — I did that, and why should you take it upon yourself?”

“Because I was really to blame from the beginning to the end. If it had not been for my pitiful wish to shine as the confidant of mystery, nothing would have been known of the affair. Even when you asked me that night if it had not happened at St. Johnswort, I know now that I had a wretched triumph in saying that it had, and I was so full of this that I did not think to caution you against repeating what I had owned.”

“Yes,” said the girl, with her unsparing honesty, “if you had given me any hint, I would not have told for the world. Of course I did not think — a girl wouldn’t — of the effect it would have on the property.”

“No, you wouldn’t think of that,” said Hewson. Though he agreed with her, he would have preferred that she should continue to blame herself; but he took himself severely in hand again. “So, you see, the fault was altogether mine, and if there is to be any penalty it ought to fall upon me.”

“Yes,” said Miss Hernshaw, “and if there has been a fault there ought to be a penalty, don’t you think? It would have been no penalty for me to buy St. Johnswort. My father wouldn’t have minded it.” She blushed suddenly, and added, “I don’t mean that — You may be so rich that — I think I had better stop.”

“No, no!” said Hewson, amused, and glad of the relief. “Go on. I will tell you anything you wish to know.”

“I don’t wish, to know anything,” said Miss Hernshaw, haughtily.

Her words seemed to put an end to an interview for which there was no longer any excuse.

Hewson rose. “Good-by,” he said, and he was rather surprised at her putting out her hand, but he took it gratefully. “Will you make my adieux to Mrs. Rock? And excuse my coming a second time to trouble you!”

“I don’t see how you could have helped coming,” said Miss Hernshaw, “when you thought I might write to Mr. St. John at once.”

Whether this implied excuse or greater blame, Hewson had to go away with it as her final response, and he went away certainly in as great discomfort as he had come. He did not feel quite well used; it seemed to him that hard measure had been dealt him on all sides, but especially by Miss Hernshaw. After her futile effort at reparation to St. John she had apparently withdrawn from all responsibility in the matter. He did not know when he was to see her again, if ever, and he did not know what he was to wait for, if anything.

Still he had the sense of waiting for something, or for some one, and he went home to wait. There he perceived that it was for St. John, who did not keep him waiting long. His nervous ring roused Hewson half an hour after his return, and St. John came in with a look in his greedy eyes which Hewson rightly interpreted at the first glance.

“See here, Hewson,” St. John said, with his habitual lack of manners. “I don’t want to get you in for this thing at St. Johnswort. I know why you offered to buy the place, and though of course you are the original cause of the trouble, I don’t feel that it’s quite fair to let you shoulder the consequences altogether.”

“Have I been complaining?” Hewson asked, dryly.

“No, and that’s just it. You’ve behaved like a little man through it all, and I don’t like to take advantage of you. If you want to rue your bargain, I’ll call it off. I’ve had some fresh light on the matter, and I believe I can let you off without loss to myself. So that if it’s me you’re considering—”

“What’s your fresh light?” asked Hewson.

“Well,” said St. John, and he swallowed rather hard, as if it were a pill, “the fact is, I’ve had another offer for the place.”

“A better one?”

“Well, I don’t know that I can say that it is,” answered St. John, saving his conscience in the form of the words.

Hewson knew that he was lying, and he had no mercy on him. “Then I believe I’ll stick to my bargain. You say that the other party hasn’t bettered my offer, and so I needn’t withdraw on your account. I’m not bound to withdraw for any other reason.”

“No, of course not.” St. John rubbed his chin, as if hesitating to eat his words, however unpalatable; but in the end he seemed not to find it possible. “Well,” he said, disgustedly, as he floundered up to take his leave, “I thought I ought to come and give you the chance.”

“It’s very nice of you,” said Hewson, with a smile that made itself a derisive grin in spite of him, and a laugh of triumph when the door had closed upon St. John.

XIII.

After the first flush of Hewson’s triumph had passed he began to enjoy it less, and by-and-by he did not enjoy it at all. He had done right not only in keeping St. John from plundering Miss Hernshaw, but in standing firm and taking the punishment which ought to fall upon him and not on her. But the sense of having done right sufficed him no more than the sense of having got the better of St. John. What was lacking to him? In the casuistry of the moment, which was perhaps rather emotional than rational, it appeared to Hewson that he had again a duty toward Miss Hernshaw, and that his feeling of dissatisfaction was the first effect of its non-fulfilment. But it was clearly impossible that he should go again to see her, and tell her what had passed between him and St. John, and it was clearly impossible that he should write and tell her what it was quite as clearly her right to know from him. If he went to her, or wrote to her, he felt himself in danger of wanting to shine in the affair, as her protector against the rapacity of St. John, and as the man of superior quality who had outwitted a greedy fellow. The fear that she might not admire his splendor in either sort caused him to fall somewhat nervelessly back upon Providence; but if the moral government of the universe finally favored him it was not by traversing any of its own laws. By the time he had determined to achieve both the impossibilities which formed his dilemma — had decided to write to Miss Hernshaw and call upon her, and leave his letter in the event of failing to find her — his problem was as far solved as it might be, by the arrival of a note from Miss Hernshaw herself, hoping that he would come to see her on business of pressing importance.

She received him without any pretence of Mrs. Rock’s intermediary presence, and put before him a letter which she had received, before writing him, from St. John, and which she could not answer without first submitting it to him. It was a sufficiently straightforward expression of his regret that he could not accept her very generous offer for St. Johnswort because the place was already sold. He had the taste to forbear any allusion to the motives which (she told Hewson) she had said prompted her offer; but then he became very darkling and sinuous in a suggestion that if Miss Hernshaw wished to have her offer known as hers to the purchaser of St. Johnswort he would be happy to notify him of it.

“You see,” she eagerly commented to Hewson, “he does not give your name; but I know who it is, though I did not know when I made him my offer. I must answer his letter now, and what shall I say? Shall I tell him I know who it is? I should like to; I hate all concealments! Will it do any harm to tell him I know?”

Hewson reflected. “I don’t see how it can. I was trying to come to you, when I got your note, to say that St. John had been to see me, and offered to release me from my offer, because, as I thought, you had made him a better one. He’s amusingly rapacious, St. John is.”

“And what did you — I beg your pardon!”

“Oh, not at all. I said I would stand to my offer.”

She repressed, apparently, some form of protest, and presently asked, “And what shall I say?”

“Oh, if you like, that you have learned who the purchaser of St. Johnswort is, and that you know he will not give way.”

“Well!” she said, with a quick sigh, as of disappointment. After an indefinite pause, she asked, “Shall you be going to St. Johnswort?”

“Why, I don’t know,” Hewson answered. “I had thought of going to Europe. But, yes, I think I shall go to St. Johnswort, first, at any rate. One can’t simply turn one’s back on a piece of real estate in that way,” he said, recognizing a fact that would doubtless have presented itself in due order for his consideration. “My one notion was to forget it as quickly as possible.”

“I should not think you would want to do that,” said the girl, seriously.

“No, one oughtn’t to neglect an investment.”

“I don’t mean that. But if such a thing had happened to me, there, I should want to go again and again.”

“You mean the apparition? Did I tell you how I had always had the expectation that I should see it again, and perhaps understand it? But when I had behaved so shabbily about it, I began to feel that it would not come again.”

“If I were in your place,” said the girl, “I should never give up; I should spend my whole life trying to find out what it meant.”

“Ah!” he sighed. “I wish you could put yourself in my place.”

“I wish I could,” she returned, intensely.

They looked into each other’s faces.

“Miss Hernshaw,” he demanded, solemnly, “do you really like people to say what they think?”

“Of course I do!”

“Then I wish you would come to St. Johnswort with me!”

“Would that do?” she asked. “If Mrs. Rock—”

He saw how far she was from taking his meaning, but he pushed on. “I don’t want Mrs. Rock. I want you — you alone. Don’t you understand me? I love you. I — of course it’s ridiculous! We’ve only met three or four times in our lives, but I knew this as well the first moment as I do now. I knew it when you came walking across the garden that morning, and I haven’t known it any better since, and I couldn’t in a thousand years. But of course—”

“Sit down,” she said, wafting herself into a chair, and he obeyed her. “I should have to tell my father,” she began.

“Why, certainly,” and he sprang to his feet again.

She commanded him to his chair with an imperative gesture. “I have got to find out what I think, first, myself. If I were sure that I loved you — but I don’t know. I believe you are good. I believed that when they were all joking you there at breakfast, and you took it so nicely; I have always believed that you were good.”

She seemed to be appealing to him for confirmation, but he could not very well say that she was right, and he kept silent. “I didn’t like your telling that story at the dinner, and I said so; and then I went and did the same thing, or worse; so that I have nothing to say about that. And I think you have behaved very nobly to Mr. St. John.” As if at some sign of protest in Hewson, she insisted, “Yes, I do! But all this doesn’t prove that I love you.” Again she seemed to appeal to him, and this time he thought he might answer her appeal.

“I couldn’t prove that I love you, but I feel sure of it.”

“And do you believe that we ought to take our feelings for a guide?”

“That’s what people do,” he ventured, with the glimmer of a smile in his eyes, which she was fixing so earnestly with her own.

“I am not satisfied that it is the right way,” she answered. “If there is really such a thing as love there ought to be some way of finding it out besides our feelings. Don’t you think it’s a thing we ought to talk sensibly about?”

“Of all things in the world; though it isn’t the custom.”

Miss Hernshaw was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I believe I should like a little time.”

“Oh, I didn’t expect you to answer me at once, — I”

“But if you are going to Europe?”

“I needn’t go to Europe at all. I can go to St. Johnswort, and wait for your answer there.”

“It might be a good while,” she urged. “I should want to tell my father that I was thinking about it, and he would want to see you before he approved.”

“Why, of course!”

“Not,” she added, “that it would make any difference, if I was sure of it myself. He has always said that he would not try to control me in such a matter, and I think he would like you. I do like you very much myself, Mr. Hewson, but I don’t think it would be right to say I loved you unless I could prove it.”

Hewson was tempted to say that she could prove it by marrying him, but he had not the heart to mock a scruple which he felt to be sacred. What he did say was: “Then I will wait till you can prove it. Do you wish me not to see you again, before you have made up your mind?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see what harm there would be in our meeting.” “No, I can’t, either,” said Hewson, as she seemed to refer the point to him. “Should you mind my coming again, say, this evening?”

“To-night?” She reflected a moment. “Yes, come to-night.”

When he came after dinner, Hewson was sensible from the perfect unconsciousness of Mrs. Rock’s manner that Miss Hernshaw had been telling her. Her habit of a wandering eye, contributed to the effect she wished to produce, if this were the effect, and her success was such that it might easily have deceived herself. But when Mrs. Rock, in a supreme exercise of her unconsciousness, left him with the girl for a brief interval before it was time for him to go, Miss Hernshaw said, “Mrs. Rock knows about it, and she says that the best way for me to find out will be to try whether I can live without you.”

“Was that Mrs. Rock’s idea?” asked Hewson, as gravely as he could.

“No it was mine; I suggested it to her; but she approves of it. Don’t you like it?”

“Yes. I hope I sha’n’t die while you are trying to live without me. Shall you be very long?” She frowned, and he hastened to say, “I do like your idea; it’s the best way, and I thank you for giving me a chance.”

“We are going out to my father’s ranch in Colorado, at once,” she explained. “We shall start to-morrow morning.”

“Oh! May I come to see you off?”

“No, I would rather begin at once.”

“May I write to you?”

“I will write to you — when I’ve decided.”

She gave him her hand, but she would not allow him to keep it for more than farewell, and then she made him stay till Mrs. Rock came back, and take leave of her too; he had frankly forgotten Mrs. Rock, who bade him adieu with averted eyes, and many civilities about seeing him again. She could hardly have been said to be seeing him then.

XIV.

The difficulties of domestication at St. Johnswort had not been misrepresented by the late proprietor, Hewson found, when he went to take possession of his estate. He thought it right in engaging servants to say openly that the place had the reputation of being haunted, and if he had not thought it right he would have thought it expedient, for he knew that if he had concealed the fact it would have been discovered to them within twenty-four hours of their arrival. His declaration was sufficient at once with most, who recoiled from his service as if he had himself been a ghost; with one or two sceptics who seemed willing to take the risks (probably in a guilty consciousness of records that would have kept them out of other employ) his confession that he had himself seen the spectre which haunted St. Johnswort, was equally effective. He prevailed at last against the fact and his own testimony with a Japanese, who could not be made to understand the objection to the place, and who willingly went with Hewson as his valet and general house-workman. With the wife of the gardener coming in to cook for them during the long daylight, he got on in as much comfort as he could have expected, and by night he suffered no sort of disturbance from the apparition. He had expected to be annoyed by believers in spiritualism, and other psychical inquirers, but it sufficed with them to learn from him that he had come to regard his experience, of which he had no more question now than ever, as purely subjective.

It seemed to Hewson, in the six weeks’ time which he spent at St. Johnswort, waiting to hear from Rosalie (he had come already to think of her as Rosalie), that all his life was subjective, it passed so like a dream. He had some outward cares as to the place; he kept a horse in the stable, where St. John had kept half a dozen, and he had the gardener look after that as well as the shrubs and vegetables; but all went on in a suspensive and provisional sort. In the mean time Rosalie’s charm grew upon him; everything that she had said or looked, was hourly and daily sweeter and dearer; her truth was intoxicating, beyond the lures of other women, in which the quality of deceit had once fascinated him. Now, so late in his youthful life, he realized that there was no beauty but that of truth, and he pledged himself a thousand times that if she should say she could not live without him he would henceforward live for truth alone, and not for the truth merely as it was in her, but as it was in everything. In those day’s he learned to know himself, as he never had before, and to put off a certain shell of worldliness that had grown upon him. In his remoteness from it, New York became very distasteful to him; he thought with reluctance of going back to it; his club, which had been his home, now appeared a joyless exile; the life of a leisure class, which he had made his ideal, looked pitifully mean and little in the retrospect; he wondered how he could have valued the things that he had once thought worthy. He did not know what he should replace it all with, but Rosalie would know, in the event of not being able to live without him. In that event there was hardly any use of which he could not be capable. In any other event — he surprised himself by realizing that in any other event — still the universe had somehow more meaning than it once had. Somehow, he felt himself an emancipated man.

He began many letters to Rosalie, and some he finished and some not, but he sent none; and when her letter came at last, he was glad that he had waited for it in implicit trust of its coming, though he believed she would have forgiven him if he had not had the patience. The letter was quite what he could have imagined of her. She said that she had put herself thoroughly to the test, and she could not live without him. But if he had found out that he could live without her, then she should know that she had been to blame, and would take her punishment. Apparently in her philosophy, which now seemed to him so divine, without punishment there must be perdition; it was the penalty that redeemed; that was the token of forgiveness.

Hewson hurried out to Colorado, where he found Hernshaw a stout, silent, impersonal man, whose notion of the paternal office seemed to be a ready acquiescence in a daughter’s choice of a husband; he appeared to think this could be best expressed to Hewson in a good cigar He perceptibly enjoyed the business details of the affair, but he enjoyed despatching them in the least possible time and the fewest words, and then he settled down to the pleasure of a superficial passivity. Hewson could not make out that he regarded his daughter as at all an unusual girl, and from this he argued that her mother must have been a very unusual woman. His only reason for doubting that Rosalie must have got all her originality from her mother was something that fell from Hernshaw when they were near the end of their cigars. He said irrelevantly to their talk at that point, “I suppose you know Rosalie believes in that ghost of yours?”

“Was it a ghost? — I’ve never been sure, myself,” said Hewson.

“How do you explain it?” asked his prospective father-in-law.

“I don’t explain it. I have always left it just as it was. I know that it was a real experience.”

“I think I should have left it so, too,” said Hernshaw. “That always gives it a chance to explain itself. If such a thing had happened to me I should give it all the time it wanted.”

“Well, I haven’t hurried it,” Hewson suggested.

“What I mean,” and Hernshaw stepped to the edge of the porch and threw the butt of his cigar into the darkness, where it described a glimmering arc, “is that if anything came to me that would help shore up my professed faith in what most of us want to believe in, I would take the common-law view of it. I would believe it was innocent till it proved itself guilty. I wouldn’t try to make it out a fraud myself.”

“I’m afraid that’s what I’ve really done,” said Hewson. “But before people I’ve put up a bluff of despising it.”

“Oh, yes, I understand that,” said Hernshaw. “A man thinks that if he can have an experience like that he must be something out of the common, and if he can despise it—”

“You’ve hit my case exactly,” said Hewson, and the two men laughed.

XV.

After his marriage, which took place without needless delay, Hewson returned with his wife to spend their honey-moon at St. Johnswort. The honey-moon prolonged itself during an entire year, and in this time they contrived so far to live down its reputation of being a haunted house that they were able to conduct their m�nage on the ordinary terms. They themselves never wished to lose the sense of something supernatural in the place, and were never quite able to accept the actual conditions as final. That is to say, Rosalie was not, for she had taken Hewson’s apparition under her peculiar care, and defended it against even his question. She had a feeling (it was scarcely a conviction) that if he believed more strenuously in the validity of his apparition as an authorized messenger from the unseen world it would yet come again and declare its errand. She could not accept the theory that if such a thing actually happened it could happen for nothing at all, or that the reason of its occurrence could be indefinitely postponed. She was impatient of that, as often as he urged the possibility, and she wished him to use a seriousness of mind in speaking of his apparition which should form some sort of atonement to it for his past levity, though since she had taken his apparition into her keeping he had scarcely hazarded any suggestion concerning it; in fact it had become so much her apparition that he had a fantastic reluctance from meddling with it.

“You are always requiring a great occasion for it,” he said, at last. “What greater event could it have foreshadowed or foreshown, than that which actually came to pass?”

“I don’t understand you, Arthur,” she said, letting her hand creep into his, where it trembled provisionally as they sat together in the twilight.

“Why, that was the day I first saw you.”

“Now, you are laughing!” she said, pulling her hand away.

“Indeed, I’m not! I couldn’t imagine anything more important than the union of our lives. And if that was what the apparition meant to portend it could not have intimated it by a more noble and impressive behavior. Simply to be there, and then to be gone, and leave the rest to us! It was majestic, it was — delicate!”

“Yes, it was. But it was too much, for it was out of proportion. A mere earthly love-affair—” “Is it merely for earth?”

“Oh, husband, I hope you don’t think so! I wanted you to say you didn’t. And if you don’t think so, yes, I’ll believe it came for that!”

“You may be sure I don’t think so.”

“Then I know it will come again.”

THE ANGEL OF THE LORD.

I.

“All that sort of personification,” said Wanhope, “is far less remarkable than the depersonification which has now taken place so thoroughly that we no longer think in the old terms at all. It was natural that the primitive peoples should figure the passions, conditions, virtues, vices, forces, qualities, in some sort of corporal shape, with each a propensity or impulse of its own, but it does not seem to me so natural that the derivative peoples should cease to do so. It is rational that they should do so, and I don’t know that any stronger proof of our intellectual advance could be alleged than the fact that the old personifications survive in the parlance while they are quite extinct in the consciousness. We still talk of death at times as if it were an embodied force of some kind, and of love in the same way; but I don’t believe that any man of the commonest common-school education thinks of them so. If you try to do it yourself, you are rather ashamed of the puerility, and when a painter or a sculptor puts them in an objective shape, you follow him with impatience, almost with contempt.”

“How about the poets?” asked Minver, less with the notion, perhaps, of refuting the psychologist than of bringing the literary member of our little group under the disgrace that had fallen upon him as an artist.

“The poets,” said I, “are as extinct as the personifications.”

“That’s very handsome of you, Acton,” said the artist. “But go on, Wanhope.”

“Yes, get down to business,” said Rulledge. Being of no employ whatever, and spending his whole life at the club in an extraordinary idleness, Rulledge was always using the most strenuous expressions, and requiring everybody to be practical. He leaned directly forward with the difficulty that a man of his girth has in such a movement, and vigorously broke off the ash of his cigar against the edge of his saucer. We had been dining together, and had been served with coffee in the Turkish room, as it was called from its cushions and hangings of Indian and Egyptian stuffs. “What is the instance you’ve got up your sleeve?” He smoked with great energy, and cast his eyes alertly about as if to make sure that there was no chance of Wanhope’s physically escaping him, from the corner of the divan, where he sat pretty well hemmed in by the rest of us, spreading in an irregular circle before him.

“You unscientific people are always wanting an instance, as if an instance were convincing. An instance is only suggestive; a thousand instances, if you please, are convincing,” said the psychologist. “But I don’t know that I wish to be convincing. I would rather be enquiring. That is much more interesting, and, perhaps, profitable.”

“All the same,” Minver persisted, apparently in behalf of Rulledge, but with an after-grudge of his own, “you’ll allow that you were thinking of something in particular when you began with that generalization about the lost art of personifying?”

“Oh, that is very curious,” said the psychologist. “We talk of generalizing, but is there any such thing? Aren’t we always striving from one concrete to another, and isn’t what we call generalizing merely a process of finding our way?”

“I see what you mean,” said the artist, expressing in that familiar formula the state of the man who hopes to know what the other man means.

“That’s what I say,” Rulledge put in. “You’ve got something up your sleeve. What is it?”

Wanhope struck the little bell on the table before him, but, without waiting for a response, he intercepted a waiter who was passing with a coffee-pot, and asked, “Oh, couldn’t you give me some of that?”

The man filled his cup for him, and after Wanhope put in the sugar and lifted it to his lips, Rulledge said, with his impetuous business air, “It’s easy to see what Wanhope does his high thinking on.”

“Yes,” the psychologist admitted, “coffee is an inspiration. But you can overdo an inspiration. It would be interesting to know whether there hasn’t been a change in the quality of thought since the use of such stimulants came in — whether it hasn’t been subtilized—”

“Was that what you were going to say?” demanded Rulledge, relentlessly. “Come, we’ve got no time to throw away!”

Everybody laughed.

“You haven’t, anyway,” said I.

“Well, none of his own,” Minver admitted for the idler.

“I suppose you mean I have thrown it all away. Well, I don’t want to throw away other peoples’. Go on, Wanhope.”

II.

The psychologist set his cup down and resumed his cigar, which he had to pull at pretty strongly before it revived. “I should not be surprised,” he began, “if a good deal of the fear of death had arisen, and perpetuated itself in the race, from the early personification of dissolution as an enemy of a certain dreadful aspect, armed and threatening. That conception wouldn’t have been found in men’s minds at first; it would have been the result of later crude meditation upon the fact. But it would have remained through all the imaginative ages, and the notion might have been intensified in the more delicate temperaments as time went on, and by the play of heredity it might come down to our own day in certain instances with a force scarcely impaired by the lapse of incalculable time.”

“You said just now,” said Rulledge, in rueful reproach, “that personification had gone out.”

“Yes, it has. I did say that, and yet I suppose that though such a notion of death, say, no longer survives in the consciousness, it does survive in the unconsciousness, and that any vivid accident or illusory suggestion would have force to bring it to the surface.”

“I wish I knew what you were driving at,” said Rulledge.

“You remember Ormond, don’t you?” asked Wanhope, turning suddenly to me.

“Perfectly,” I said. “I — he isn’t living, is he?”

“No; he died two years ago.”

“I thought so,” I said, with the relief that one feels in not having put a fellow-creature out of life, even conditionally.

“You knew Mrs. Ormond, too, I believe,” the psychologist pursued.

I owned that I used to go to the Ormonds’ house.

“Then you know what a type she was, I suppose,” he turned to the others, “and as they’re both dead it’s no contravention of the club etiquette against talking of women, to speak of her. I can’t very well give the instance — the sign — that Rulledge is seeking without speaking of her, unless I use a great deal of circumlocution.” We all urged him to go on, and he went on. “I had the facts I’m going to give, from Mrs. Ormond. You know that the Ormonds left New York a couple of years ago?”

He happened to look at Minver as he spoke, and Minver answered: “No; I must confess that I didn’t even know they had left the planet.”

Wanhope ignored his irrelevant ignorance. “They went to live provisionally at a place up the Housatonic road, somewhere — perhaps Canaan; but it doesn’t matter. Ormond had been suffering some time with an obscure affection of the heart—”

“Oh, come now!” said Rulledge. “You’re not going to spring anything so pat as heart-disease on us?”

“Acton is all ears,” said Minver, nodding toward me. “He hears the weird note afar.”

The psychologist smiled. “I’m afraid you’re not interested. I’m not much interested myself in these unrelated instances.”

“Oh, no!” “Don’t!” “Do go on!” the different entreaties came, and after a little time taken to recover his lost equanimity, Wanhope went on: “I don’t know whether you knew that Ormond had rather a peculiar dread of death.” We none of us could affirm that we did, and again Wanhope resumed: “I shouldn’t say that he was a coward above other men I believe he was rather below the average in cowardice. But the thought of death weighed upon him. You find this much more commonly among the Russians, if we are to believe their novelists, than among Americans. He might have been a character out of one of Tourgu�nief’s books, the idea of death was so constantly present with him. He once told me that the fear of it was a part of his earliest consciousness, before the time when he could have had any intellectual conception of it. It seemed to be something like the projection of an alien horror into his life — a prenatal influence—”

“Jove!” Rulledge broke in. “I don’t see how the women stand it. To look forward nearly a whole year to death as the possible end of all they’re hoping for and suffering for! Talk of men’s courage after that! I wonder we’re not all marked.’

“I never heard of anything of the kind in Ormond’s history,” said Wanhope, tolerant of the incursion.

Minver took his cigar out to ask, the more impressively, perhaps, “What do you fellows make of the terror that a two months’ babe starts in its sleep with before it can have any notion of what fear is on its own hook?”

“We don’t make anything of it,” the psychologist answered. “Perhaps the pathologists do.”

“Oh, it’s easy enough to say wind,” Rulledge indignantly protested.

“Too easy, I agree with you,” Wanhope consented. “We cannot tell what influences reach us from our environment, or what our environment really is, or how much or little we mean by the word. The sense of danger seems to be inborn, and possibly it is a survival of our race life when it was wholly animal and took care of itself through what we used to call the instincts. But, as I was saying, it was not danger that Ormond seemed to be afraid of, if it came short of death. He was almost abnormally indifferent to pain. I knew of his undergoing an operation that most people would take ether for, and not wincing, because it was not supposed to involve a fatal result.

“Perhaps he carried his own anodyne with him,” said Minver, “like the Chinese.”

“You mean a sort of self-anaesthesia?” Wanhope asked. “That is very interesting. How far such a principle, if there is one, can be carried in practice. The hypnotists—”

“I’m afraid I didn’t mean anything so serious or scientific,” said the painter.

“Then don’t switch Wanhope off on a side track,” Rulledge implored. “You know how hard it is to keep him on the main line. He’s got a mind that splays all over the place if you give him the least chance. Now, Wanhope, come down to business.”

Wanhope laughed amiably. “Why, there’s so very little of the business. I’m not sure that it wasn’t Mrs. Ormond’s attitude toward the fact that interested me most. It was nothing short of devout. She was a convert. She believed he really saw — I suppose,” he turned to me, “there’s no harm in our recognizing now that they didn’t always get on smoothly together?”

“Did they ever?” I asked.

“Oh, yes — oh, yes,” said the psychologist, kindly. “They were very fond of each other, and often very peaceful.”

“I never happened to be by,” I said.

“Used to fight like cats and dogs,” said Minver. “And they didn’t seem to mind people. It was very swell, in a way, their indifference, and it did help to take away a fellow’s embarrassment.”

“That seemed to come mostly to an end that summer,” said Wanhope, “if you could believe Mrs. Ormond.”

“You probably couldn’t,” the painter put in.

“At any rate she seemed to worship his memory.”

“Oh, yes; she hadn’t him there to claw.”

“Well, she was quite frank about it with me,” the psychologist pursued. “She admitted that they had always quarreled a good deal. She seemed to think it was a token of their perfect unity. It was as if they were each quarreling with themselves, she said. I’m not sure that there wasn’t something in the notion. There is no doubt but that they were tremendously in love with each other, and there is something curious in the bickerings of married people if they are in love. It’s one way of having no concealments; it’s perfect confidence of a kind—”

“Or unkind,” Minver suggested.

“What has all that got to do with it!” Rulledge demanded.

“Nothing directly,” Wanhope confessed, “and I’m not sure that it has much to do indirectly. Still, it has a certain atmospheric relation. It is very remarkable how thoughts connect themselves with one another. It’s a sort of wireless telegraphy. They do not touch at all; there is apparently no manner of tie between them, but they communicate—”

“Oh, Lord!” Rulledge fumed.

Wanhope looked at him with a smiling concern, such as a physician might feel in the symptoms of a peculiar case. “I wonder,” he said absently, “how much of our impatience with a fact delayed is a survival of the childhood of the race, and how far it is the effect of conditions in which possession is the ideal!”

Rulledge pushed back his chair, and walked away in dudgeon. “I’m a busy man myself. When you’ve got anything to say you can send for me.”

Minver ran after him, as no doubt he meant some one should. “Oh, come back! He’s just going to begin;” and when Rulledge, after some pouting, had been pushed down into his chair again, Wanhope went on, with a glance of scientific pleasure at him.

III.

“The house they had taken was rather a lonely place, out of sight of neighbors, which they had got cheap because it was so isolated and inconvenient, I fancy. Of course Mrs. Ormond, with her exaggeration, represented it as a sort of solitude which nobody but tramps of the most dangerous description ever visited. As she said, she never went to sleep without expecting to wake up murdered in her bed.”

“Like her,” said Minver, with a glance at me full of relish for the touch of character which I would feel with him.

“She said,” Wanhope went on, “that she was anxious from the first for the effect upon Ormond. In the stress of any danger, she gave me to understand, he always behaved very well, but out of its immediate presence he was full of all sorts of gloomy apprehensions, unless the surroundings were cheerful. She could not imagine how he came to take the place, but when she told him so—”

“I’ve no doubt she told him so pretty promptly,” the painter grinned.

“ — he explained that he had seen it on a brilliant day in spring, when all the trees were in bloom, and the bees humming in the blossoms, and the orioles singing, and the outlook from the lawn down over the river valley was at its best. He had fallen in love with the place, that was the truth, and he was so wildly in love with it all through that he could not feel the defect she did in it. He used to go gaily about the wide, harking old house at night, shutting it up, and singing or whistling while she sat quaking at the notion of their loneliness and their absolute helplessness — an invalid and a little woman — in case anything happened. She wanted him to get the man who did the odd jobs about the house, to sleep there, but he laughed at her, and they kept on with their usual town equipment of two serving-women. She could not account for his spirits, which were usually so low when they were alone—”

“And not fighting,” Minver suggested to me.

“ — and when she asked him what the matter was he could not account for them, either. But he said, one day, that the fear of death seemed to be lifted from his soul, and that made her shudder.”

Rulledge fetched a long sigh, and Minver interpreted, “Beginning to feel that it’s something like now.”

“He said that for the first time within his memory he was rid of that nether consciousness of mortality which had haunted his whole life, and poisoned, more or less, all his pleasure in living. He had got a reprieve, or a respite, and he felt like a boy — another kind of boy from what he had ever been. He was full of all sorts of brilliant hopes and plans. He had visions of success in business beyond anything he had known, and talked of buying the place he had taken, and getting a summer colony of friends about them. He meant to cut the property up, and make the right kind of people inducements. His world seemed to have been emptied of all trouble as well as all mortal danger.”

“Haven’t you psychologists some message about a condition like that!” I asked.

“Perhaps it’s only the pathologists again,” said Minver.

“The alienists, rather more specifically,” said Wanhope. “They recognize it as one of the beginnings of insanit — folie des grandeurs as the French call the stage.”

“Is it necessarily that?” Rulledge demanded, with a resentment which we felt so droll in him that we laughed.

“I don’t know that it is,” said Wanhope. “I don’t know why we shouldn’t sometimes, in the absence of proofs to the contrary, give such a fact the chance to evince a spiritual import. Of course it had no other import to poor Mrs. Ormond, and of course I didn’t dream of suggesting a scientific significance.”

“I should think not!” Rulledge puffed.

Wanhope went on: “I don’t think I should have dared to do so to a woman in her exaltation concerning it. I could see that however his state had affected her with dread or discomfort in the first place, it had since come to be her supreme hope and consolation. In view of what afterward happened, she regarded it as the effect of a mystical intimation from another world that was sacred, and could not he considered like an ordinary fact without sacrilege. There was something very pathetic in her absolute conviction that Ormond’s happiness was an emanation from the source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the consciousness persists, comes to a death-bed. That the dying are not afraid of dying is a fact of such common, such almost invariable observation—”

“You mean,” I interposed, “when the vital forces are beaten so low that the natural dread of ceasing to be, has no play? It has less play, I’ve noticed, in age than in youth, but for the same reason that it has when people are weakened by sickness.”

“Ah,” said Wanhope, “that comparative indifference to death in the old, to whom it is so much nearer than it is to the young, is very suggestive. There may be something in what you say; they may not care so much because they have no longer the strength — the muscular strength — for caring. They are too tired to care as they used. There is a whole region of most important inquiry in that direction—”

“Did you mean to have him take that direction?” Rulledge asked, sulkily.

“He can take any direction for me,” I said. “He is always delightful.”

“Ah, thank you!” said Wanhope.

“But I confess,” I went on, “that I was wondering whether the fact that the dying are indifferent to death could be established in the case of those who die in the flush of health and strength, like, for instance, people who are put to death.”

Wanhope smiled. “I think it can — measurably. Most murderers make a good end, as the saying used to be, when they end on the scaffold, though they are not supported by religious fervor of any kind, or the exaltation of a high ideal. They go meekly and even cheerfully to their death, without rebellion or even objection. It is most exceptional that they make a fight for their lives, as that woman did a few years ago at Dannemora, and disgusted all refined people with capital punishment.”

“I wish they would make a fight always,” said Rulledge, with unexpected feeling. “It would do more than anything to put an end to that barbarity.”

“It would be very interesting, as Wanhope says,” Minver remarked. “But aren’t we getting rather far away? From the Ormonds, I mean.”

“We are, rather,” said Wanhope. “Though I agree that it would be interesting. I should rather like to have it tried. You know Frederick Douglass acted upon some such principle when his master attempted to whip him. He fought, and he had a theory that if the slave had always fought there would soon have been an end of whipping, and so an end of slavery. But probably it will be a good while before criminals are—”

“Educated up to the idea,” Minver proposed.

“Yes,” Wanhope absently acquiesced. “There seems to be a resignation intimated to the parting soul, whether in sickness or in health, by the mere proximity of death. In Ormond’s case there seems to have been something more positive. His wife says that in the beginning of those days he used to come to her and wonder what could be the matter with him. He had a joy he could not account for by anything in their lives, and it made her tremble.”

“Probably it didn’t. I don’t think there was anything that could make Mrs. Ormond tremble, unless it was the chance that Ormond would get the last word,” said Minver.

No one minded him, and Wanhope continued: “Of course she thought he must be going to have a fit of sickness, as the people say in the country, or used to say. Those expressions often survive in the common parlance long after the peculiar mental and moral conditions in which they originated have passed away. They must once have been more accurate than they are now. When one said ‘fit of sickness’ one must have meant something specific; it would be interesting to know what. Women use those expressions longer than men; they seem to be inveterate in their nerves; and women apparently do their thinking in their nerves rather than their brains.”

IV.

Wanhope had that distant look in his eyes which warned his familiars of a possible excursion, and I said, in the hope of keeping him from it, “Then isn’t there a turn of phrase somewhat analogous to that in a personification?”

“Ah, yes — a personification,” he repeated with a freshness of interest, which he presently accounted for. “The place they had taken was very completely furnished. They got it fully equipped, even to linen and silver; but what was more important to poor Ormond was the library, very rich in the English classics, which appeared to go with the house. The owner was a girl who married and lived abroad, and these were her father’s books. Mrs. Ormond said that her husband had the greatest pleasure in them: their print, which was good and black, and their paper, which was thin and yellowish, and their binding, which was tree calf in the poets, he specially liked. They were English editions as well as English classics, and she said he caressed the books, as he read them, with that touch which the book-lover has; he put his face into them, and inhaled their odor as if it were the bouquet of wine; he wanted her to like it, too.”

“Then she hated it,” Minver said, unrelentingly.

“Perhaps not, if there was nobody else there,” I urged.

For once Wanhope was not to be tempted off on another scent. “There was a good deal of old-fashioned fiction of the suspiratory and exclamatory sort, like Mackenzie’s, and Sterne’s and his followers, full of feeling, as people understood feeling a hundred years ago. But what Ormond rejoiced in most were the poets, good and bad, like Gray and Collins and Young, and their contemporaries, who personified nearly everything from Contemplation to Indigestion, through the whole range of the Vices, Virtues, Passions, Propensities, Attributes, and Qualities, and gave them each a dignified capital letter to wear. She said he used to come roaring to her with the passages in which these personifications flourished, and read them off with mock admiration, and then shriek and sputter with laughter. You know the way he had when a thing pleased him, especially a thing that had some relish of the quaint or rococo. As nearly as she would admit, in view of his loss, he bored her with these things. He was always hunting down some new personification, and when he had got it, adding it to the list he kept. She said he had thousands of them, but I suppose he had not so many. He had enough, though, to keep him amused, and she said he talked of writing something for the magazines about them, but probably he never would have done it. He never wrote anything, did he?” Wanhope asked of me.

“Oh, no. He was far too literary for that,” I answered. “He had a reputation to lose.”

“Pretty good,” said Minver, “even if Ormond is dead.”

Wanhope ignored us both. “After awhile, his wife said, she began to notice a certain change in his attitude toward the personifications. She noticed this, always expecting that fit of sickness for him; but she was not so much troubled by his returning seriousness. Oh, I ought to tell you that when she first began to be anxious for him she privately wrote home to their family doctor, telling him how strangely happy Ormond was, and asking him if he could advise anything. He wrote back that if Ormond was so very happy they had better not do anything to cure him; that the disease was not infectious, and was seldom fatal.”

“What an ass!” said Rulledge.

“Yes, I think he was, in this instance. But probably he had been consulted a good deal by Mrs. Ormond,” said Wanhope. “The change that began to set her mind at rest about Ormond was his taking the personifications more seriously. Why, he began to ask, but always with a certain measure of joke in it, why shouldn’t there be something in the personifications? Why shouldn’t Morn and Eve come corporeally walking up their lawn, with little or no clothes on, or Despair be sitting in their woods with her hair over her face, or Famine coming gauntly up to their back door for a hand-out? Why shouldn’t they any day see pop-eyed Rapture passing on the trolley, or Meditation letting the car she intended to take go by without stepping lively enough to get on board? He pretended that we could have the personifications back again, if we were not so conventional in our conceptions of them. He wanted to know what reason there was for representing Life as a very radiant and bounding party, when Life usually neither shone nor bounded; and why Death should be figured as an enemy with a dart, when it was so often the only friend a man had left, and had the habit of binding up wounds rather than inflicting them. The personifications were all right, he said, but the poets and painters did not know how they really looked. By the way,” Wanhope broke off, “did you happen to see Hauptmann’s ‘H�nnele’ when it was here?”

None of us had, and we waited rather restively for the passing of the musing fit which he fell into. After a while he resumed at a point whose relation to the matter in hand we could trace:

“It was extremely interesting for all reasons, by its absolute fearlessness and freshness in regions where there has been nothing but timid convention for a long time; but what I was thinking of was the personification of Death as it appears there. The poor little dying pauper, lying in her dream at the almshouse, sees the figure of Death. It is not the skeleton with the dart, or the phantom with the shrouded face, but a tall, beautiful young man, — as beautiful as they could get into the cast, at any rate, — clothed in simple black, and standing with his back against the mantlepiece, with his hands resting on the hilt of a long, two-handed sword. He is so quiet that you do not see him until some time after the child has seen him. When she begins to question him whether she may not somehow get to heaven without dying, he answers with a sort of sorrowful tenderness, a very sweet and noble compassion, but unsparingly as to his mission. It is a singular moment of pure poetry that makes the heart ache, but does not crush or terrify the spirit.”

“And what has it got to do with Ormond?” asked Rulledge, but with less impatience than usual.

“Why, nothing, I’m afraid, that I can make out very clearly. And yet there is an obscure connection with Ormond, or his vision, if it was a vision. Mrs. Ormond could not be very definite about what he saw, perhaps because even at the last moment he was not definite himself. What she was clear about, was the fact that his mood, though it became more serious, by no means became sadder. It became a sort of solemn joy instead of the light gaiety it had begun by being. She was no sort of scientific observer, and yet the keenness of her affection made her as closely observant of Ormond as if she had been studying him psychologically. Sometimes the light in his room would wake her at night, and she would go to him, and find him lying with a book faced down on his breast, as if he had been reading, and his fingers interlaced under his head, and a kind of radiant peace in his face. The poor thing said that when she would ask him what the matter was, he would say, ‘Nothing; just happiness,’ and when she would ask him if he did not think he ought to do something, he would laugh, and say perhaps it would go off of itself. But it did not go off; the unnatural buoyancy continued after he became perfectly tranquil. ‘I don’t know,’ he would say. ‘I seem to have got to the end of my troubles. I haven’t a care in the world, Jenny. I don’t believe you could get a rise out of me if you said the nastiest thing you could think of. It sounds like nonsense, of course, but it seems to me that I have found out the reason of things, though I don’t know what it is. Maybe I’ve only found out that there is a reason of things. That would be enough, wouldn’t it?’”

V.

At this point Wanhope hesitated with a kind of diffidence that was rather charming in him. “I don’t see,” he said, “just how I can keep the facts from this on out of the line of facts which we are not in the habit of respecting very much, or that we relegate to the company of things that are not facts at all. I suppose that in stating them I shall somehow make myself responsible for them, but that is just what I don’t want to do. I don’t want to do anything more than give them as they were given to me.”

“You won’t be able to give them half as fully,” said Minver, “if Mrs. Ormond gave them to you.”

“No,” Wanhope said gravely, “and that’s the pity of it; for they ought to be given as fully as possible.”

“Go ahead,” Rulledge commanded, “and do the best you can.”

“I’m not sure,” the psychologist thoughtfully said, “that I am quite satisfied to call Ormond’s experiences hallucinations. There ought to be some other word that doesn’t accuse his sanity in that degree. For he apparently didn’t show any other signs of an unsound mind.”

“None that Mrs. Ormond would call so,” Minver suggested.

“Well, in his case, I don’t think she was such a bad judge,” Wanhope returned. “She was a tolerably unbalanced person herself, but she wasn’t altogether disqualified for observing him, as I’ve said before. They had a pretty hot summer, as the summer is apt to be in the Housatonic valley, but when it got along into September the weather was divine, and they spent nearly the whole time out of doors, driving over the hills. They got an old horse from a native, and they hunted out a rickety buggy from the carriage-house, and they went wherever the road led. They went mostly at a walk, and that suited the horse exactly, as well as Mrs. Ormond, who had no faith in Ormond’s driving, and wanted to go at a pace that would give her a chance to jump out safely if anything happened. They put their hats in the front of the buggy, and went about in their bare heads. The country people got used to them, and were not scandalized by their appearance, though they were both getting a little gray, and must have looked as if they were old enough to know better.

“They were not really old, as age goes nowadays: he was not more than forty-two or -three, and she was still in the late thirties. In fact, they were

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita —

in that hour when life, and the conceit of life, is strongest, and when it feels as if it might go on forever. Women are not very articulate about such things, and it was probably Ormond who put their feeling into words, though she recognized at once that it was her feeling, and shrank from it as if it were something wicked, that they would be punished for; so that one day, when he said suddenly, ‘Jenny, I don’t feel as if I could ever die,’ she scolded him for it. Poor women!” said Wanhope, musingly, “they are not always cross when they scold. It is often the expression of their anxieties, their forebodings, their sex-timidities. They are always in double the danger that men are, and their nerves double that danger again. Who was that famous salonni�re — Mme. Geoffrin, was it? — that Marmontel says always scolded her friends when they were in trouble, and came and scolded him when he was put into the Bastille? I suppose Mrs. Ormond was never so tender of Ormond as she was when she took it out of him for suggesting what she wildly felt herself, and felt she should pay for feeling.”

Wanhope had the effect of appealing to Minver, but the painter would not relent. “I don’t know. I’ve seen her — or heard her — in very devoted moments.”

“At any rate,” Wanhope resumed, “she says she scolded him, and it did not do the least good. She could not scold him out of that feeling, which was all mixed up in her retrospect with the sense of the weather and the season, the leaves just beginning to show the autumn, the wild asters coming to crowd the goldenrod, the crickets shrill in the grass, and the birds silent in the trees, the smell of the rowan in the meadows, and the odor of the old logs and fresh chips in the woods. She was not a woman to notice such things much, but he talked of them all and made her notice them. His nature took hold upon what we call nature, and clung fondly to the lowly and familiar aspects of it. Once she said to him, trembling for him, ‘I should think you would be afraid to take such a pleasure in those things,’ and when he asked her why, she couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him; but he understood, and he said: ‘I’ve never realized before that I was so much a part of them. Either I am going to have them forever, or they are going to have me. We shall not part, for we are all members of the same body. If it is the body of death, we are members of that. If it is the body of life, we are members of that. Either I have never lived, or else I am never going to die.’ She said: ‘Of course you are never going to die; a spirit can’t die.’ But he told her he didn’t mean that. He was just as radiantly happy when they would get home from one of their drives, and sit down to their supper, which they had country-fashion instead of dinner, and then when they would turn into their big, lamplit parlor, and sit down for a long evening with his books. Sometimes he read to her as she sewed, but he read mostly to himself, and he said he hadn’t had such a bath of poetry since he was a boy. Sometimes in the splendid nights, which were so clear that you could catch the silver glint of the gossamers in the thin air, he would go out and walk up and down the long veranda. Once, when he coaxed her out with him, he took her under the arm and walked her up and down, and he said: ‘Isn’t it like a ship? The earth is like a ship, and we’re sailing, sailing! Oh, I wonder where!’ Then he stopped with a sob, and she was startled, and asked him what the matter was, but he couldn’t tell her. She was more frightened than ever at what seemed a break in his happiness. She was troubled about his reading the Bible so much, especially the Old Testament; but he told her he had never known before what majestic literature it was. There were some turns or phrases in it that peculiarly took his fancy and seemed to feed it with inexhaustible suggestion. ‘The Angel of the Lord’ was one of these. The idea of a divine messenger, embodied and commissioned to intimate the creative will to the creature: it was sublime, it was ineffable. He wondered that men had ever come to think in any other terms of the living law that we were under, and that could much less conceivably operate like an insensate mechanism than it could reveal itself as a constant purpose. He said he believed that in every great moral crisis, in every ordeal of conscience, a man was aware of standing in the presence of something sent to try him and test him, and that this something was the Angel of the Lord.

“He went off that night, saying to himself, ‘The Angel of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord!’ and when she lay a long time awake, waiting for him to go to sleep, she heard him saying it again in his room. She thought he might be dreaming, but when she went to him, he had his lamp lighted, and was lying with that rapt smile on his face which she was so afraid of. She told him she was afraid and she wished he would not say such things; and that made him laugh, and he put his arms round her, and laughed and laughed, and said it was only a kind of swearing, and she must cheer up. He let her give him some trional to make him sleep, and then she went off to her bed again. But when they both woke late, she heard him, as he dressed, repeating fragments of verse, quoting quite without order, as the poem drifted through his memory. He told her at breakfast that it was a poem which Longfellow had written to Lowell upon the occasion of his wife’s death, and he wanted to get it and read it to her. She said she did not see how he could let his mind run on such gloomy things. But he protested he was not the least gloomy, and that he supposed his recollection of the poem was a continuation of his thinking about the Angel of the Lord.

“While they were at table a tramp came up the drive under the window, and looked in at them hungrily. He was a very offensive tramp, and quite took Mrs. Ormond’s appetite away: but Ormond would not send him round to the kitchen, as she wanted; he insisted upon taking him a plate and a cup of coffee out on the veranda himself. When she expostulated with him, he answered fantastically that the fellow might be an angel of the Lord, and he asked her if she remembered Parnell’s poem of ‘The Hermit.’ Of course she didn’t, but he needn’t get it, for she didn’t want to hear it, and if he kept making her so nervous, she should be sick herself. He insisted upon telling her what the poem was, and how the angel in it had made himself abhorrent to the hermit by throttling the babe of the good man who had housed and fed them, and committing other atrocities, till the hermit couldn’t stand it any longer, and the angel explained that he had done it all to prevent the greater harm that would have come if he had not killed and stolen in season. Ormond laughed at her disgust, and said he was curious to see what a tramp would do that was treated with real hospitality. He thought they had made a mistake in not asking this tramp in to breakfast with them; then they might have stood a chance of being murdered in their beds to save them from mischief.”

VI.

“Mrs. Ormond really lost her patience with him, and felt better than she had for a long time by scolding him in good earnest. She told him he was talking very blasphemously, and when he urged that his morality was directly in line with Parnell’s, and Parnell was an archbishop, she was so vexed that she would not go to drive with him that morning, though he apologized and humbled himself in every way. He pleaded that it was such a beautiful day, it must be the last they were going to have; it was getting near the equinox, and this must be a weather-breeder. She let him go off alone, for he would not lose the drive, and she watched him out of sight from her upper window with a heavy heart. As soon as he was fairly gone, she wanted to go after him, and she was wild all the forenoon. She could not stay indoors, but kept walking up and down the piazza and looking for him, and at times she went a bit up the road he had taken, to meet him. She had got to thinking of the tramp, though the man had gone directly off down another road after he had his breakfast. At last she heard the old creaking, rattling buggy, and as soon as she saw Ormond’s bare head, and knew he was all right, she ran up to her room and shut herself in. But she couldn’t hold out against him when he came to her door with an armful of wild flowers that he had gathered for her, and boughs from some young maples that he had found all red in a swamp. She showed herself so interested that he asked her to come with him after their midday dinner and see them, and she said perhaps she would, if he would promise not to keep talking about the things that made her so miserable. He asked her, ‘What things?’ and she answered that he knew well enough, and he laughed and promised.

“She didn’t believe he would keep his word, but he did at first, and he tried not to tease her in any way. He tried to please her in the whims and fancies she had about going this way or that, and when she decided not to look up his young maples with him, because the first autumn leaves made her melancholy, he submitted. He put his arm across her shoulder as they drove through the woods, and pulled her to him, and called her ‘poor old thing,’ and accused her of being morbid. He wanted her to tell him all there was in her mind, but she could not; she could only cry on his arm. He asked her if it was something about him that troubled her, and she could only say that she hated to see people so cheerful without reason. That made him laugh, and they were very gay after she had got her cry out; but he grew serious again. Then her temper rose, and she asked, ‘Well, what is it?’ and he said at first, ‘Oh, nothing,’ as people do when there is really something, and presently he confessed that he was thinking about what she had said of his being cheerful without reason. Then, as she said, he talked so beautifully that she had to keep her patience with him, though he was not keeping his word to her. His talk, as far as she was able to report it, didn’t amount to much more than this: that in a world where death was, people never could be cheerful with reason unless death was something altogether different from what people imagined. After people came to their intellectual consciousness, death was never wholly out of it, and if they could be joyful with that black drop at the bottom of every cup, it was proof positive that death was not what it seemed. Otherwise there was no logic in the scheme of being, but it was a cruel fraud by the Creator upon the creature; a poor practical joke, with the laugh all on one side. He had got rid of his fear of it in that light, which seemed to have come to him before the fear left him, and he wanted her to see it in the same light, and if he died before her — But there she stopped him and protested that it would kill her if she did not die first, with no apparent sense, even when she told me, of her fatuity, which must have amused poor Ormond. He said what he wanted to ask was that she would believe he had not been the least afraid to die, and he wished her to remember this always, because she knew how he always used to be afraid of dying. Then he really began to talk of other things, and he led the way back to the times of their courtship and their early married days, and their first journeys together, and all their young-people friends, and the simple-hearted pleasure they used to take in society, in teas and dinners, and going to the theater. He did not like to think how that pleasure had dropped out of their life, and he did not know why they had let it, and he was going to have it again when they went to town.

“They had thought of staying a long time in the country, perhaps till after Thanksgiving, for they had become attached to their place; but now they suddenly agreed to go back to New York at once. She told me that as soon as they agreed she felt a tremendous longing to be gone that instant, as if she must go to escape from something, some calamity, and she felt, looking back, that there was a prophetic quality in her eagerness.”

“Oh, she was always so,” said Minver. “When a thing was to be done, she wanted it done like lightning, no matter what the thing was.”

“Well, very likely,” Wanhope consented. “I never make much account of those retroactive forebodings. At any rate, she says she wanted him to turn about and drive home so that they could begin packing, and when he demurred, and began to tease, as she called it, she felt as if she should scream, till he turned the old horse and took the back track. She was wild to get home, and kept hurrying him, and wanting him to whip the horse; but the old horse merely wagged his tail, and declined to go faster than a walk, and this was the only thing that enabled her to forgive herself afterward.”

“Why, what had she done?” Rulledge asked. “She would have been responsible for what happened, according to her notion, if she had had her way with the horse; she would have felt that she had driven Ormond to his doom.”

“Of course!” said Minver. “She always found a hole to creep out of. Why couldn’t she go back a little further, and hold herself responsible through having made him turn round?”

“Poor woman!” said Rulledge, with a tenderness that made Minver smile. “What was it that did happen?”

Wanhope examined his cup for some dregs of coffee, and then put it down with an air of resignation. I offered to touch the bell, but, “No, don’t,” he said. “I’m better without it.” And he went on: “There was a lonely piece of woods that they had to drive through before they struck the avenue leading to their house, which was on a cheerful upland overlooking the river, and when they had got about half-way through this woods, the tramp whom Ormond had fed in the morning, slipped out of a thicket on the hillside above them, and crossed the road in front of them, and slipped out of sight among the trees on the slope below. Ormond stopped the horse, and turned to his wife with a strange kind of whisper. ‘Did you see it?’ he asked, and she answered yes, and bade him drive on. He did so, slowly looking back round the side of the buggy till a turn of the road hid the place where the tramp had crossed their track. She could not speak, she says, till they came in sight of their house. Then her heart gave a great bound, and she broke out on him, blaming him for having encouraged the tramp to lurk about, as he must have done, all day, by his foolish sentimentality in taking his breakfast out to him. ‘He saw that you were a delicate person, and now to-night he will be coming round, and—’ She says Ormond kept looking at her, while she talked, as if he did not know what she was saying, and all at once she glanced down at their feet, and discovered that her hat was gone.

“That, she owned, made her frantic, and she blazed out at him again, and accused him of having lost her hat by stopping to look at that worthless fellow, and then starting up the horse so suddenly that it had rolled out. He usually gave her as good as she sent when she let herself go in that way, and she told me she would have been glad if he had done it now, but he only looked at her in a kind of daze, and when he understood, at last, he bade her get out and go into the house — they were almost at the door, — and he would go back and find her hat himself. ‘Indeed, you’ll do nothing of the kind,’ she said she told him. ‘I shall go back with you, or you’ll be hunting up that precious vagabond and bringing him home to supper.’ Ormond said, ‘All right,’ with a kind of dreamy passivity, and he turned the old horse again, and they drove slowly back, looking for the hat in the road, right and left. She had not noticed before that it was getting late, and perhaps it was not so late as it seemed when they got into that lonely piece of woods again, and the veils of shadow began to drop round them, as if they were something falling from the trees, she said. They found the hat easily enough at the point where it must have rolled out of the buggy, and he got down and picked it up. She kept scolding him, but he did not seem to hear her. He stood dangling the hat by its ribbons from his right hand, while he rested his left on the dashboard, and looking — looking down into the wooded slope where the tramp had disappeared. A cold chill went over her, and she stopped her scolding. ‘Oh, Jim,’ she said, ‘do you see something? What do you see?’ He flung the hat from him, and ran plunging down the hillside — she covered up her face when she told me, and said she should always see him running — till the dusk among the trees hid him. She ran after him, and she heard him calling, calling joyfully, ‘Yes, I’m coming!’ and she thought he was calling back to her, but the rush of his feet kept getting farther, and then he seemed to stop with a sound like falling. He couldn’t have been much ahead of her, for it was only a moment till she stood on the edge of a boulder in the woods, looking over, and there at the bottom Ormond was lying with his face turned under him, as she expressed it; and the tramp, with a heavy stick in his hand, was standing by him, stooping over him, and staring at him. She began to scream, and it seemed to her that she flew down from the brink of the rock, and caught the tramp and clung to him, while she kept screaming ‘Murder!’ The man didn’t try to get away; he only said, over and over, ‘I didn’t touch him, lady; I didn’t touch him.’ It all happened simultaneously, like events in a dream, and while there was nobody there but herself and the tramp, and Ormond lying between them, there were some people that must have heard her from the road and come down to her. They were neighbor-folk that knew her and Ormond, and they naturally laid hold of the tramp; but he didn’t try to escape. He helped them gather poor Ormond up, and he went back to the house with them, and staid while one of them ran for the doctor. The doctor could only tell them that Ormond was dead, and that his neck must have been broken by his fall over the rock. One of the neighbors went to look at the place the next morning, and found one of the roots of a young tree growing on the rock, torn out, as if Ormond had caught his foot in it; and that had probably made his fall a headlong dive. The tramp knew nothing but that he heard shouting and running, and got up from the foot of the rock, where he was going to pass the night, when something came flying through the air, and struck at his feet. Then it scarcely stirred, and the next thing, he said, the lady was onto him, screeching and tearing. He piteously protested his innocence, which was apparent enough, at the inquest, and before, for that matter. He said Ormond was about the only man that ever treated him white, and Mrs. Ormond was remorseful for having let him get away before she could tell him that she didn’t blame him, and ask him to forgive her.”

VII.

Wanhope desisted with a provisional air, and Rulledge went and got Himself a sandwich from the lunch-table.

“Well, upon my word!” said Minver. “I thought you had dined, Rulledge.”

Rulledge came back munching, and said to Wanhope, as he settled himself in his chair again: “Well, go on.”

“Why, that’s all.”

The psychologist was silent, with Rulledge staring indignantly at him.

“I suppose Mrs. Ormond had her theory?” I ventured.

“Oh, yes — such as it was,” said Wanhope. “It was her belief — her religion — that Ormond had seen Death, in person or personified, or the angel of it; and that the sight was something beautiful, and not terrible. She thought that she should see Death, too in the same way, as a messenger. I don’t know that it was such a bad theory,” he added impartially.

“Not,” said Minver, “if you suppose that Ormond was off his nut. But, in regard to the whole matter, there is always a question of how much truth there was in what she said about it.”

“Of course,” the psychologist admitted, “that is a question which must be considered. The question of testimony in such matters is the difficult thing. You might often believe in supernatural occurrences if it were not for the witnesses. It is very interesting,” he pursued, with his scientific smile, “to note how corrupting anything supernatural or mystical is. Such things seem mostly to happen either in the privity of people who are born liars, or else they deprave the spectator so, through his spiritual vanity or his love of the marvelous, that you can’t believe a word he says.

“They are as bad as horses on human morals,” said Minver. “Not that I think it ever needed the coming of a ghost to invalidate any statement of Mrs. Ormond’s.” Rulledge rose and went away growling something, partially audible, to the disadvantage of Minver’s wit, and the painter laughed after him: “He really believes it.”

Wanhope’s mind seemed to be shifted from Mrs. Ormond to her convert, whom he followed with his tolerant eyes. “Nothing in all this sort of inquiry is so impossible to predicate as the effect of any given instance upon a given mind. It would be very interesting—”

“Excuse me!” said Minver. “There’s Whitley. I must speak to him.”

He went away, leaving me alone with the psychologist.

“And what is your own conclusion in this instance?” I asked.

“Why, I haven’t formulated it yet.”

THOUGH ONE ROSE FROM THE DEAD.

I.

You are very welcome to the Alderling incident, my dear Acton, if you think you can do anything with it, and I will give it as circumstantially as possible. The thing has its limitations, I should think, for the fictionist, chiefly in a sort of roundedness which leaves little play to the imagination. It seems to me that it would be more to your purpose if it were less pat, in its catastrophe, but you are a better judge of all that than I am, and I will put the facts in your hands, and keep my own hands off, so far as any plastic use of the material is concerned.

The first I knew of the peculiar Alderling situation was shortly after William James’s “Will to Believe” came out. I had been telling the Alderlings about it, for they had not seen it, and I noticed that from time to time they looked significantly at each other. When I had got through he gave a little laugh, and she said, “Oh, you may laugh!” and then I made bold to ask, “What is it?”

“Marion can tell you,” he said. He motioned towards the coffee-pot and asked, “More?” I shook my head, and he said, “Come out and let us see what the maritime interests have been doing for us. Pipe or cigar?” I chose cigarettes, and he brought the box off the table, stopping on his way to the veranda, and taking his pipe and tobacco-pouch from the hall mantel.

Mrs. Alderling had got to the veranda before us, and done things to the chairs and cushions, and was leaning against one of the slender fluted pine columns like some rich, blond caryatid just off duty, with the blue of her dress and the red of her hair showing deliciously against the background of white house-wall. He and she were an astonishing and satisfying contrast; in the midst of your amazement you felt the divine propriety of a woman like her wanting just such a wiry, smoky-complexioned, black-browed, black-bearded, bald-headed little man as he was. Before he sat down where she was going to put him, he stood stoopingly, and frowned at the waters of the cove lifting from the foot of the lawn that sloped to it before the house. “Three lumbermen, two goodish-sized yachts, a dozen sloop-rigged boats: not so bad. About the usual number that come loafing in to spend the night. You ought to see them when it threatens to breeze up. Then they’re here in flocks. Go on, Marion.”

He gave a soft groan of comfort as he settled in his chair and began pulling at his short black pipe, and she let her eyes dwell on him in a rapture that curiously interested me. People in love are rarely interesting — that is, flesh-and-blood people. Of course I know that lovers are the life of fiction, and that a story of any kind can scarcely hold the reader without them. The love-interest, as they call it, is also supposed to be essential to the drama, and friends of mine who have tried to foist their plays upon managers have been overthrown by the objection that the love-interest is not strong enough in what they have done. Yet lovers in real life are, so far as I have observed them, bores. They are confessed to be disgusting before or after marriage when they let their fondness appear, but even when they try to hide it, they are tiresome. Character goes down before passion in them; nature is reduced to propensity. Then, how is it that the novelist manages to keep these, and to give us nature and character while seeming to offer nothing but propensity and passion? Perhaps he does not give them. Perhaps what he does is to hypnotize us so that we each of us identify ourselves with the lovers, and add our own natures and characters to the single principle that animates them. The reason we like, that we endure, to read about them, may be that they are ourselves rendered objective in an instant of intense vitality, without the least trouble or risk to us. But if we have them there before us in the tiresome reality, they exclude us from their pleasure in each other and stop up the perspective of our happiness with their hulking personalities, bare of all the iridescence of potentiality, which we could have cast about them. Something of this iridescence may cling to unmarried lovers, in spite of themselves, but wedded bliss is a sheer offence.

I do not know why it was not an offence in the case of the Alderlings, unless it was because they both, in their different ways, saw the joke of the thing. At any rate, I found that in their charm for each other they had somehow not ceased to be amusing for me, and I waited confidently for the answer she would make to his whimsically abrupt bidding. But she did not answer very promptly, even when he had added, “Wanhope, here, is scenting something psychological in the reason of my laughing at you, instead of accepting the plain inference in the case.”

“What is the plain inference?” I asked, partly to fill up Mrs. Alderling’s continued silence.

“When a man laughs at a woman for no apparent reason it is because he is amused at her being afraid of him when he is so much more afraid of her, or puzzled by him when she is such an incomparable riddle herself, or caring for him when he knows he is not worth his salt.”

“You don’t expect to put me off with that sort of thing,” I said.

“Well, then, go on Marion,” Alderling repeated.

II.

Mrs. Alderling stood looking at him, not me, with a smile hovering about the corners of her mouth, which, when it decided not to alight anywhere, scarcely left her aspect graver for its flitting. She said at last, in her slow, deep-throated voice, “I guess I will let you tell him.”

“Oh, I’ll tell him fast enough,” said Alderling, nursing his knee, and bringing it well up toward his chin, between his clasped hands. “Marion has always had the notion that I should live again if I believed I should, and that as I don’t believe I shall, I am not going to. The joke of it is,” and he began to splutter laughter round the stem of his pipe, “she’s as much of an agnostic as I am. She doesn’t believe she is going to live again, either.”

Mrs. Alderling said, “I don’t care for it in my case.” That struck me as rather touching, but I had no right to enter uninvited into the intimacy of her meaning, and I said, looking as little at her as I need, “Aren’t you both rather belated?”

“You mean that protoplasm has gone out?” he chuckled.

“Not exactly,” I answered. “But you know that a great many things are allowed now that were once forbidden to the True Disbeliever.”

“You mean that we may trust in the promises, as they used to be called, and still keep the Unfaith?”

“Something like that.”

Alderling took his pipe out, apparently to give his whole face to the pleasure of teasing his wife.

“That’ll be a great comfort to Marion,” he said, and he threw back his head and laughed.

She smiled faintly, vaguely, tolerantly, as if she enjoyed his pleasure in teasing her.

“Where have you been,” I asked, “that you don’t know the changed attitude in these matters?”

“Well, here for the last three years. We tried it the first winter after we came, and found it was not so bad, and we simply stayed on. But I haven’t really looked into the question since I gave the conundrum up twenty years ago, on what was then the best authority. Marion doesn’t complain. She knew what I was when she married me. She was another. We were neither of us very bigoted disbelievers. We should not have burned anybody at the stake for saying that we had souls.”

Alderling put back his pipe and cackled round it, taking his knee between his hands again.

“You know,” she explained, more in my direction than to me, “that I had none to begin with. But Alderling had. His people believed in the future life.”

“That’s what they said,” Alderling crowed. “And Marion has always thought that if she had believed that way, she could have kept me up to it; and so when I died I should have lived again. It is perfectly logical, though it isn’t capable of a practical demonstration. If Marion had come of a believing family, she could have brought me back into the fold. Her great mistake was in being brought up by an uncle who denied that he was living here, even. The poor girl could not do a thing when it came to the life hereafter.”

The smile now came hovering back, and alighted at a corner of Mrs. Alderling’s mouth, making it look, oddly enough, rather rueful. “It didn’t matter about me. I thought it a pity that Alderling’s talent should stop here.”

“Did you ever know anything like that?” he cried. “Perfectly willing to thrust me out into a cold other-world, and leave me to struggle on without her, when I had got used to her looking after me. Now I’m not so selfish as that. I shouldn’t want to have Marion living on through all eternity if I wasn’t with her. It would be too lonely for her.”

He looked up at her, with his dancing eyes, and she put her hand down over his shoulder into the hand that he lifted to meet it, in a way that would have made me sick in some people. But in her the action was so casual, so absent, that it did not affect me disagreeably.

“Do you mean that you haven’t been away since you came here three years ago?” I asked.

“We ran up to the theatre once in Boston last winter, but it bored us to the limit.” Alderling poked his knife-blade into the bowl of his pipe as he spoke, having freed his hand for the purpose, while Mrs. Alderling leaned back against the slim column again. He said gravely: “It was a great thing for Marion, though. In view of the railroad accident that didn’t happen, she convinced herself that her sole ambition was that we should die together. Then, whether we found ourselves alive or not, we should be company for each other. She’s got it arranged with the thunderstorms, so that one bolt will do for us both, and she never lets me go out on the water alone, for fear I shall watch my chance, and get drowned without her.”

I did not trouble myself to make out how much of this was mocking, and as there was no active participation in the joke expected of me, I kept on the safe side of laughing. “No wonder you’ve been able to do such a lot of pictures,” I said. “But I should have thought you might have found it dull — I mean dull together — at odd times.”

“Dull?” he shouted. “It’s stupendously dull! Especially when our country neighbors come in to ‘‘liven us up.’ We’ve got neighbors here that can stay longer in half an hour than most people can in a week. We get tired of each other at times, but after a call from the people in the next house, we return with rapture to our delusion that we are interesting.”

“And you never,” I ventured, making my jocosity as ironical as possible, “wear upon each other?”

“Horribly!” said Alderling, and his wife smiled contentedly, behind him. “We haven’t a whole set of china in the house, from exchanging it across the table, and I haven’t made a study of Marion — you must have noticed how many Marions there were that she hasn’t thrown at my head. Especially the Madonnas. She likes to throw the Madonnas at me.”

I ventured still farther, addressing myself to Mrs. Alderling. “Does he keep it up all the time — this blague?”

“Pretty much,” she answered passively, with entire acquiescence in the fact if it were the fact, or the joke if it were the joke.

“But I didn’t see anything of yours, Mrs. Alderling,” I said. She had had her talent, as a girl, and some people preferred it to her husband’s, — but there was no effect of it anywhere in the house.

“The housekeeping is enough,” she answered, with her tranquil smile.

There was nothing in her smile that was leading, and I did not push my inquiry, especially as Alderling did not seem disposed to assist. “Well,” I said, “I suppose you will forgive to science my feeling that your situation is most suggestive.”

“Oh, don’t mind us!” said Alderling.

“I won’t, thank you,” I answered. “Why, it’s equal to being cast away together on an uninhabited island.”

“Quite,” he assented.

“There can’t,” I went on, “be a corner of your minds that you haven’t mutually explored. You must know each other,” I cast about for the word, and added abruptly, “by heart.”

“I don’t suppose he meant anything pretty?” said Alderling, with a look up over his shoulder at his wife; and then he said to me, “We do; and there are some very curious things I could tell you, if Marion would ever let me get in a word.”

“Do let him, Mrs. Alderling,” I entreated, humoring his joke at her silence.

She smiled, and softly shrugged, and then sighed.

“I could make your flesh creep,” he went on, “or I could if you were not a psychologist. I assure you that we are quite weird at times.”

“As how?”

“Oh, just knowing what the other is thinking, at a given moment, and saying it. There are times when Marion’s thinking is such a nuisance to me, that I have to yell down to her from my loft to stop it. The racket it makes breaks me all up. It’s a relief to have her talk, and I try to make her, when she’s posing, just to escape the din of her thinking. Then the willing! We experimented with it, after we had first noticed it, but we don’t any more. It’s too dead easy.”

“What do you mean by the willing?” I asked.

“Oh, just wishing one that the other was there, and there he or she is.”

“Is he trying to work me, Mrs. Alderling?” I appealed to her, and she answered from her calm:

“It is very unaccountable.”

“Then you really mean it! Why can’t you give me an illustration?”

“Why, you know,” said Alderling more seriously than he had yet spoken, “I don’t believe those things, if they are real, can ever be got to show off. That’s the reason why your ‘Quests in the Occult’ are mainly such rubbish, as far as the evidences are concerned. If Marion and I tried to give you an illustration, as you call it, the occult would snub us. But, is there anything so very strange about it? The wonder is that a man and wife ever fail of knowing each what the other is thinking. They pervade each other’s minds, if they are really married, and they are so present with each other that the tacit wish should be the same as a call. Marion and I are only an intensified instance of what may be done by living together. There is something, though, that is rather queer, but it belongs to psychomancy rather than psychology, as I understand it.”

“Ah!” I said. “What is that queer something?”

“Being visibly present when absent. It has not happened often, but it has happened that I have seen Marion in my loft when she was really somewhere else and not when I had willed her or wished her to be there.”

“Now, really,” I said, “I must ask you for an instance.”

“You want to heap up facts, Lombroso fashion? Well, this is as good as most of Lombroso’s facts, or better. I went up one morning, last winter, to work at a study of a Madonna from Marion, directly after breakfast, and left her below in the dining-room, putting away the breakfast things. She has to do that occasionally, between the local helps, who are all we can get in the winter. She professes to like it, but you never can tell, from what a woman says; she has to do it, anyway.” It is hard to convey a notion of the serene, impersonal acquiescence of Mrs. Alderling in taking this talk of her. “I was banging away at it when I knew she was behind me looking over my shoulder rather more stormily than she usually does; usually, she is a dead calm. I glanced up, and saw the calm succeed the storm. I kept on, and after awhile I was aware of hearing her step on the stairs.”

Alderling stopped, and smoked definitively, as if that were the end.

“Well,” I said, after waiting a while, “I don’t exactly get the unique value of the incident.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he had accidentally forgotten the detail, “the steps were coming up?”

“Yes?”

“She opened the door, which she had omitted to do before, and when she came in she denied having been there already. She owned that she had been hurrying through her work, and thinking of mine, so as to make me do something, or undo something, to it; and then all at once she lost her impatience, and came up at her leisure. I don’t exactly like to tell what she wanted.”

He began to laugh provokingly, and she said, tranquilly, “I don’t mind your telling Mr. Wanhope.”

“Well, then, strictly in the interest of psychomancy, I will confide that she had found some traces of a model that I used to paint my Madonnas from, before we were married, in that picture. She had slept on her suspicion, and then when she could not stand it any longer, she had come up in the spirit to say that she was not going to be mixed up in a Madonna with any such minx. The words are mine, but the meaning was Marion’s. When she found me taking the minx out, she went quietly back to washing her dishes, and then returned in the body to give me a sitting.”

III.

We were silent a moment, till I asked, “Is this true, Mrs. Alderling?”

“About,” she said. “I don’t remember the storm, exactly.”

“Well, I don’t see why you bother to remain in the body at all,” I remarked.

“We haven’t arranged just how to leave it together,” said Alderling. “Marion, here, if I managed to get off first, would have no means of knowing whether her theory of the effect of my unbelief on my future was right or not; and if she gave me the slip, she would always be sorry that she had not stayed here to convert me.”

“Why don’t you agree that if either of you lives again, he or she shall make some sign to let the other know?” I suggested. “Well, that has been tried so often, and has it ever worked? It’s open to the question whether the dead do not fail to show up because they are forbidden to communicate with the living; and you are just where you were, as to the main point. No, I don’t see any way out of it.”

Mrs. Alderling went into the house and came out with a book in her hand, and her fingers in it at two places. It was that impressive collection of Christ’s words from the New Testament called “The Great Discourse.” She put the book before me, first at one place and then at another, and I read, “Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die,” and then, “Nay, but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” She did not say anything in showing me these passages, and I found something in her action touchingly childlike and elemental, as well as curiously heathenish. It was as if some poor pagan had brought me his fetish to test its effect upon me. “Yes,” I said, “those are things that we hardly know what to do with in our philosophy. They seem to be said as with authority, and yet, somehow, we cannot admit their validity in a philosophical inquiry as to a future life. Aren’t they generally taken to mean that we shall be unhappy or happy hereafter, rather than that we shall be or not be at all? And what is believing? Is it the mere act of acknowledgement, or is it something more vital, which expresses itself in conduct?”

She did not try to say. In fact she did not answer at all. Whatever point was in her mind she did not, or could not, debate it. I perceived, in a manner, that her life was so largely subliminal that if she had tried she could not have met my question any more than if she had not had the gift of speech at all. But, in her inarticulate fashion, she had exposed to me a state of mind which I was hardly withheld by the decencies from exploring. “You know,” I said, “that psychology almost begins by rejecting the authority of these sayings, and that while we no longer deny anything, we cannot allow anything merely because it has been strongly affirmed. Supposing that there is a life after this, how can it be denied to one and bestowed upon another because one has assented to a certain supernatural claim and another has refused to do so? That does not seem reasonable, it does not seem right. Why should you base your conclusion as to that life upon a promise and a menace which may not really refer to it in the sense which they seem to have?”

“Isn’t it all there is?” she asked, and Alderling burst into his laugh.

“I’m afraid she’s got you there, Wanhope. When it comes to polemics there’s nothing like the passive obstruction of Mrs. Alderling. Marion might never have been an early Christian herself — I think she’s an inexpugnable pagan — but she would have gone round making it awfully uncomfortable for the other unbelievers.”

“You know,” she said to him, and I never could decide how much she was in earnest, “that I can’t believe till you do. I couldn’t take the risk of keeping on without you.”

Alderling followed her in-doors, where she now went to put the book away, with the mock addressed to me, “Did you ever know such a stubborn woman?”

IV.

One conclusion from my observation of the Alderlings during the week I spent with them was that it is bad for a husband and wife to be constantly and unreservedly together, not because they grow tired of each other, but because they grow more intensely interested in each other. Children, when they come, serve the purpose of separating the parents; they seem to unite them in one care, but they divide them in their employments, at least in the normally constituted family. If they are rich, and can throw the care of the children upon servants, then they cannot enjoy the relief from each other that children bring to the mother who nurtures and teaches them, and to the father who must work for them harder than before. The Alderlings were not rich enough to have been freed from the wholesome responsibilities of parentage, but they were childless, and so they were not detached from the perpetual thought of each other. If they had only had different tastes, it might have been better, but they were both artists, she not less than he, though she no longer painted. When their common thoughts were not centred upon each other’s being, they were centred on his work, which, viciously enough, was the constant reproduction of her visible personality. I could always see them studying each other, he with an eye to her beauty, she with an eye to his power.

He was every now and then saying to her, “Hold on, Marion,” and staying her in some pose or movement, while he made mental note of it, and I was conscious of her preying upon his inmost thoughts and following him into the recesses of his reveries, where it is best for a man to be alone, even if he is sometimes a beast there. She was not like those wives who ask their husbands, when they do not happen to be talking, “What are you thinking about?” and I put this to her credit, till I realized that she had no need to ask, for she knew already. Now and then I saw him get up and shake himself restively, but I am bound to say in her behalf, that her pursuit of him seemed quite involuntary, and that she enjoyed it no more than he did. Twenty times I was on the point of asking, “Why don’t you people go in for a good long separation? Is there nothing to call you to Europe, Alderling? Haven’t you got a mother, or sister, or some one that you could visit, Mrs. Alderling? It would do you both a world of good.”

But it happened, oddly enough, that the Alderlings were as kinless as they were childless, and if he had gone to Europe he would have taken her with him, and prolonged their seclusion by the isolation in which people necessarily live in a foreign country. I found I was the only acquaintance who had visited them during the years of their retirement on the coast, where they had stayed, partly through his inertia, and partly from his superstition that he could paint better away from the ordinary associations and incentives; and they ceased, before I left, to get the good they might of my visit because they made me a part of their intimacy, instead of making themselves part of my strangeness.

After a day or two, their queer experiences began to resume themselves, unabashed by my presence. These were mostly such as they had already more than hinted to me: the thought-transferences, and the unconscious hypnotic suggestions which they made to each other. There was more novelty in the last than the first. If I could trust them, and they did not seem to wish to exploit their mysteries for the effect on me, they were with each other because one or the other had willed it. She would say, if we were sitting together without him, “I think Rupert wants me; I’ll be back in a moment,” and he, if she were not by, for some time, would get up with, “Excuse me, I must go to Marion; she’s calling me.”

I had to take a great deal of this on faith; in fact, none of it was susceptible of proof; but I have not been able since to experience all the skepticism which usually replaces the impression left by sympathy with such supposed occurrences. The thing was not quite what we call uncanny; the people were so honest, both of them, that the morbid character of like situations was wanting. The events, if they could be called so, were not invited, I was quite sure, and they were varied by such diversions as we had in reach. I went blueberrying with Mrs. Alderling in the morning after she had got her breakfast dishes put away, in order that we might have something for dessert at our midday dinner; and I went fishing off the old stone crib with Alderling in the afternoon, so that we might have cunners for supper. The farmerfolks and fisherfolks seemed to know them and to be on tolerant terms with them, though it was plain that they still considered them probational in their fellow-citizenship. I do not think they were liked the less because they did not assume to be of the local sort, but let their difference stand, if it would. There was nothing countrified in her dress, which was frankly conventional; the short walking-skirt had as sharp a slant in front as her dinner-gown would have had, and he wore his knickerbockers — it was then the now-faded hour of knickerbockers — with an air of going out golfing in the suburbs. They stood on ceremony in addressing the natives, who might have been Jim or Liza to each other, but were always Mr. Donald or Mrs. Moody, with the Alderlings. They said they would not like being called by their first names themselves, and they did not see why they should take that freedom with others. Neither by nature nor by nurture were they out of the ordinary in their ideals, and it was by a sort of accident that they were so different in their realities. She had stayed on with him through the first winter in the place they had taken for the summer, because she wished to be with him, rather than because she wished to be there, and he had stayed because he had not just found the moment to break away, though afterwards he pretended a reason for staying. They had no more voluntarily cultivated the natural than the supernatural; he kindled the fire for her, and she made the coffee for him, not because they preferred, but because they must; and they had arrived at their common ground in the occult by virtue of being alone together, and not by seeking the solitude for the experiment which the solitude promoted. Mrs. Alderling did not talk less, nor he more, when either was alone with me, than when we were all together; perhaps he was more silent, and she not quite so much; she was making up for him in his absence as he was for her in her presence. But they were always hospitable and attentive hosts, and though under the peculiar circumstances of Mrs. Alderling’s having to do the house-work I necessarily had to do a good many things for myself, there were certain little graces which were never wanting, from her hands: my curtains were always carefully drawn, and my coverlet triangularly opened, so that I did not have to pull it down myself. There was a freshly trimmed lamp on the stand at my bed-head, and a book and paper-cutter put there, with a decanter of whiskey and a glass of water. I note these things to you, because they are touches which help remove the sense of anything intentional in the occultism of the Alderlings.

I do not know whether I shall be able to impart the feeling of an obscure pathos in the case of Mrs. Alderling, which I certainly did not experience in Alderling’s. Temperamentally he was less fitted to undergo the rigors of their seclusion than she was; in his liking to talk, he needed an audience and a variety of listening, and she, in her somewhat feline calm, could not have been troubled by any such need. You can be silent to yourself, but you cannot very well be loquacious, without danger of having the devil for a listener, if the old saying is true. Yet still, I felt a keener poignancy in her sequestration. Her beauty had even greater claim to regard than his eloquence. She was a woman who could have commanded a whole roomful with it, and no one would have wanted a word from her. She could only have been entirely herself in society, where, and in spite of everything that can be said against it, we can each, if we will, be more natural than out of it. The reason that most of us are not natural in it is that we want to play parts for which we are more or less unfit, and Marion Alderling never wished to play a part, I was sure. It would have sufficed her to be herself wherever she was, and the more people there were by, the more easily she could have been herself.

I am not able to say now how much of all this is observation of previous facts, and how much speculation based upon subsequent occurrences. At the best I can only let it stand for characterization. In the same interest I will add a fact in relation to Mrs. Alderling which ought to have its weight against any undue appeal I have been making in her behalf. Without in the least blaming her, I will say that I think that Mrs. Alderling ate too much. She must have had naturally a strong appetite, which her active life sharpened, and its indulgence formed a sort of refuge from the pressure of the intense solitude in which she lived, and which was all the more a solitude because it was solitude � deux. I noticed that beyond the habit of cooks she partook of the dishes she had prepared, and that after Alderling and I had finished dinner, and he was impatient to get at his pipe, she remained prolonging her dessert. One night, when he and I came in from the veranda, she was standing at the sideboard, bent over a saucer of something, and she made me think of a large tortoise-shell cat which has got at the cream. I expected in my nerves to hear her lap, and my expectation was heightened by the soft, purring laugh with which she owned that she was hungry, and those berries were so nice.

At the risk of giving the effect of something sensuous, even sensual, in her, I find myself insisting upon this detail, which did not lessen her peculiar charm. As far as the mystical quality of the situation was concerned, I fancy your finding that rather heightened by her innocent gourmandise. You must have noticed how inextricably, for this life at least, the spiritual is trammeled in the material, how personal character and ancestral propensity seem to flow side by side in the same individual without necessarily affecting each other. On the moral side Mrs. Alderling was no more to be censured for the refuge which her nerves sought from the situation in over-eating than Alderling for the smoking in which he escaped from the pressure they both felt from one another; and she was not less fitted than he for their joint experience.

V.

I do not suppose it was with the notion of keeping her weight down that Mrs. Alderling rowed a good deal on the cove before the cottage; but she had a boat, which she managed very well, and which she was out in, pretty much the whole time when she was not cooking, or eating or sleeping, or roaming the berry-pastures with me, or sitting to Alderling for his Madonnas. He did not care for the water himself; he said he knew every inch of that cove, and was tired of it; but he rather liked his wife’s going, and they may both have had an unconscious relief from each other in the absences which her excursions promoted. She swam as well as she rowed, and often we saw her going down water-proofed to the shore, where we presently perceived her pulling off in her bathing-dress. Well out in the cove she had the habit of plunging overboard, and after a good swim, she rowed back, and then, discreetly water-proofed again, she climbed the lawn back to the house. Now and then she took me out in her boat, but so far as I remember, Alderling never went with her. Once I ventured to ask him if he never felt anxious about her. He said no, he should not have been afraid to go with her, and she could take better care of herself than he could. Besides, by means of their telepathy they were in constant communion, and he could make her feel at any sort of chance, that he did not wish her to take it, and she would not. This was the only occasion when he treated their peculiar psychomancy boastfully, and the only occasion when I felt a distinct misgiving of his sincerity.

The day before I left, Mrs. Alderling went down about eleven in the morning to her boat, and rowed out into the cove. She rowed far toward the other shore, whither, following her with my eyes from Alderling’s window, I saw its ridge blotted out by a long low cloud. It was straight and level as a wall, and looked almost as dense, and I called Alderling.

“Oh, that fog won’t come in before afternoon,” he said. “We usually get it about four o’clock. But even if it does,” he added dreamily, “Marion can manage. I’d trust her anywhere in this cove in any kind of weather.”

He went back to his work, and painted away for five or six minutes. Then he asked me, still at the window, “What’s that fog doing now?”

“Well, I don’t know,” I answered. “I should say it was making in.”

“Do you see Marion?”

“Yes, she seems to be taking her bath.”

Again he painted a while before he asked, “Has she had her dip?”

“She’s getting back into her boat.”

“All right,” said Alderling, in a tone of relief. “She’s good to beat any fog in these parts ashore. I wish you would come and look at this a minute.”

I went, and we lost ourselves for a time in our criticism of the picture. He was harder on it than I was. He allowed, ”C’est un bon portrait, as the French used to say of a faithful landscape, though I believe now the portrait can’t be too good for them. I can’t say about landscape. But in a Madonna I feel that there can be too much Marion, not for me, of course, but for the ideal, which I suppose we are bound to respect. Marion is not spiritual, but I would not have her less of the earth earthy, for all the angels that ever spread themselves ‘in strong level flight.’”

I recognized the words from “The Blessed Damozel,” and I made bold to be so personal as to say, “If her hair were a little redder than ‘the color of ripe corn’ one might almost feel that the Blessed Damozel had been painted from Mrs. Alderling. It’s the lingering earthiness in her that makes the Damozel so divine.”

“Yes, that was a great conception. I wonder none of the fellows do that kind of thing now.”

I laughed and said, “Well, so few of them have had the advantage of seeing Mrs. Alderling. And besides, Rosettis don’t happen every day.”

“It was the period, too. I always tell her that she belongs among the later eighteen sixties. But she insists that she wasn’t even born then. Marion is tremendously single-minded.”

“She has her mind all on you.”

He looked askance at me. “You’ve noticed—”

“I’ve noticed that your mind is all on her.”

“Not half as much!” he protested, fervidly. “I don’t think it’s good for her, though of course I like it. That is, in a way. Sometimes it’s rather too—” He suddenly flung his brush from him, and started up, with a loudly shouted, “Yes, yes! I’m coming,” and hurled himself out of the garret which he used for his studio, and cleared the stairs with two bounds.

By the time I reached the outer door of the cottage, he was a dark blur in the white blur of the fog which had swallowed up the cove, and was rising round the house-walls from the grass. I heard him shouting, “Marion!” and a faint mellow answer, far out in the cove, “Hello!” and then —

“Where are you?” and her answer “Here!” I heard him jump into a boat, and the thump of the oars in the row-locks, and then the rapid beat of the oars while he shouted, “Keep calling!” and she answered, —

“I will!” and called “Hello! Hello! Hello!”

I made my mental comment that this time their mystical means of communication was somehow not working. But after her last hello, no sound broke the white silence of the fog except the throb of Alderling’s oars. She was evidently resting on hers, lest she should baffle his attempts to find her by trying to find him.

I suppose ten minutes or so had passed, when the dense air brought me the sound of low laughing that was also like the sound of low sobbing, and then I knew that they had met somewhere in the blind space. I began to hear rowing again, but only as of one boat, and suddenly out of the mist, almost at my feet, Alderling’s boat shot up on the shelving beach, and his wife leaped ashore from it, and ran past me up the lawn, while he pulled her boat out on the gravel. She must have been trailing it from the stern of his.

VI.

I was abroad when Mrs. Alderling died, but I heard that it was from a typhoid fever which she had contracted from the water in their well, as was supposed. The water-supply all along that coast is scanty, and that summer most of the wells were dry, and quite a plague of typhoid raged among the people from drinking the dregs. The fever might have gone the worse with her because of her over-fed robustness; at any rate it went badly enough.

I first heard of her death from Minver at the club, and I heard with still greater astonishment that Alderling was down there alone where she had died. Minver said that somebody ought to go down and look after the poor old fellow, but nobody seemed to feel it exactly his office. Certainly I did not feel it mine, and I thought it rather a hardship when a few days after I found a letter from Alderling at the club quite piteously beseeching me to come to him. He had read of my arrival home, in a stray New York paper, and he was firing his letter, he said, at the club, with one chance in a thousand of hitting me with it. Rulledge was by when I read it, and he decided, with that unsparing activity of his, where other people are concerned, that I must go; I certainly could not resist such an appeal as that. He had a vague impression, he said, of something weird in the situation down there, and I ought to go and pull Alderling out of it; besides, I might find my account in it as a psychologist. I hesitated a day, out of self-respect, or self-assertion, and then, the weather coming on suddenly hot, in the beginning of September, I went.

Of course I had meant to go, all along, but I was not so glad when I arrived, as I might have been if Alderling had given me a little warmer welcome. His mood had changed since writing to me, and the strongest feeling he showed at seeing me was what affected me very like a cold surprise.

If I had broken in on a solitude in that place before, I was now the intruder upon a desolation. Alderling was living absolutely alone, except for the occasional presence of a neighboring widow — all the middle-aged women there are widows, with dim or dimmer memories of husbands lost off the Banks, or elsewhere at sea — who came in to get his meals and make his bed, and then had instructions to leave. It was in one of her prevailing absences that I arrived with my bag, and I had to hammer a long time with the knocker on the open door before Alderling came clacking down the stairs in his slippers from the top of the house, and gave me his somewhat defiant greeting. I could almost have said that he did not recognize me at the first bleared glance, and his inability, when he realized who it was, to make me feel at home, encouraged me to take the affair into my own hands.

He looked frightfully altered, but perhaps it was the shaggy beard that he had let grow over his poor, lean muzzle, that mainly made the difference. His clothes hung gauntly upon him, and he had a weak-kneed stoop. His coat sleeves were tattered at the wrists, and one of them showed the white lining at the elbow. I simply shuddered at his shirt.

“Will you smoke?” he asked huskily, almost at the first word, and with an effect of bewilderment in his hospitality that almost made me shed tears.

“Well, not just yet, Alderling,” I said. “Shall I go to my old room?”

“Go anywhere,” he answered, and he let me carry my bag to the chamber where I had slept before.

It was quite as his wife would have arranged it, even to the detail of a triangular portion of the bedding turned down as she used to do it for me. The place was well aired and dusted, and gave me the sense of being as immaculately clean and fresh as Alderling was not. He sat down in a chair by the window, and he remained, while I laid out my things and made my brief toilet, unabashed by those incidents for which I did not feel it necessary to banish him, if he liked staying.

We had supper by-and-by, a very well-cooked meal of fried fresh cod and potatoes, with those belated blackberries which grow so sweet when they hang long on the canes into September. There was a third plate laid, and I expected that when the housekeeper had put the dishes on the table, she would sit down with us, as the country-fashion still is, but she did not reappear till she came in with the dessert and coffee. Alderling ate hungrily, and much more than I had remembered his doing, but perhaps I formerly had the impression of Mrs. Alderling’s fine appetite so strongly in mind that I had failed to note his. Certainly, however, there was a difference in one sort which I could not be mistaken in, and that was in his not talking. Her mantle of silence had fallen upon him, and whereas he used hardly to give me a chance in the conversation, he now let me do all of it. He scarcely answered my questions, and he asked none of his own; but I saw that he liked being talked to, and I did my best, shying off from his sorrow, as people foolishly do, and speaking banalities about my trip to Europe, and the Psychological Congress in Geneva, and the fellows at the club, and heaven knows what rot else.

He listened, but I do not know whether he heard much of my clack, and I got very tired of it myself at last. When I had finished my blackberries, he asked mechanically, in an echo of my former visit, with a repetition of his gesture towards the coffee-pot, “More?” I shook my head, and then he led the way out to the veranda, stopping to get his pipe and tobacco from the mantel on the way. But when we sat down in the early falling September twilight outside, he did not light his pipe, letting me smoke my cigarette alone.

“Are you off your tobacco?” I asked.

“I don’t smoke,” he answered, but he did not explain why, and I did not feel authorized to ask.

The talk went on as lopsidedly as before, and I began to get sleepy. I made bold to yawn, but Alderling did not mind that, and then I made bold to say that I thought I would go to bed. He followed me indoors, saying that he would go to bed, too. The hall was lighted from a hanging-lamp and two clear-burning hand-lamps which the widow had put for us on a small table. She had evidently gone home, and left us to ourselves. He took one lamp and I the other, and he started up stairs before me. If he were not coming down again, he meant to let the hanging-lamp burn, and I had nothing to say about that; but I suggested, concerning the wide-open door behind me, “Shall I close the door, Alderling?” and he answered, without looking round, “I don’t shut it.”

He led the way into my room, and he sat down as when I had come, and absently watched my processes of getting into bed. There was something droll, and yet miserable, in his behavior. At first, I thought he might be staying merely for the comfort of a human presence, and again, I thought he might be afraid, for I felt a little creepy myself, for no assignable reason, except that Absence, which he must have been incomparably more sensible of than I. From certain ineffectual movements that he made, and from certain preliminary noises in his throat, which ended in nothing, I decided that he wished to say something to me, tell me something, and could not. But I was selfishly sleepy, and it seemed to me that anything he had on his mind would keep there till morning, at least, and that if he got it off on mine now, it might give me a night of wakeful speculation. So when I got into bed and pulled the sheet up under my chin, I said, “Well, I don’t want to turn you out, old fellow.”

He stared, and answered, “Oh!” and went without other words, carrying his lamp with him and moving with a weak-kneed shuffle, like a very old man.

He was going to leave the door open behind him, but I called out, “I wish you’d shut me in, Alderling,” and after a hesitation, he came back and closed the door.

VII.

We breakfasted as silently on his part as we had supped, but when we had finished, and I was wondering what he was going to let me do with myself, and on the whole what the deuce I had come for, he said, in the longest speech I had yet had from him, “Wouldn’t you like to come up and see what I’ve been doing?”

I said I should like it immensely, and he led the way up stairs, as far As his attic studio. The door of that, like the other doors in the house, stood open, and I got the emotion which the interior gave me, full force, at the first glance. The place was so startlingly alive with that dead woman on a score of canvases in the character in which he had always painted her, that I could scarcely keep from calling out; but I went about, pretending to examine the several Madonnas, and speaking rubbish about them, while he stood stoopingly in the midst of them like the little withered old man he looked. When I had emptied myself of my chaff, I perceived that the time had come.

I glanced about for a seat, and was going to take that in which Mrs. Alderling used to pose for him, but he called out with sudden sharpness, “Not that!” and without appearing to notice, I found a box which I inverted, and sat down on.

“Tell me about your wife, Alderling,” I said, and he answered with a sort of scream, “I wanted you to ask me! Why didn’t you ask me before? What did you suppose I got you here for?”

With that he shrank down, a miserable heap, in his own chair, and bowed his hapless head and cried. It was more affecting than any notion I can give you of it, and I could only wait patiently for his grief to wash itself out in one of those paroxysms which come to bereavement and leave it somehow a little comforted when they pass.

“I was waiting, for the stupid reasons you will imagine, to let you speak first,” I said, “but here in her presence I couldn’t hold in any longer.”

He asked with strange eagerness, “You noticed that?”

I chose to feign that he meant in the pictures. “Over and over again,” I answered.

He would not have my feint. “I don’t mean in these wretched caricatures!”

“Well?” I assented provisionally.

“I mean her very self, listening, looking, living — waiting!”

Whether I had insanity or sorrow to deal with, I could not gainsay the unhappy man, and I only said what I really felt: “Yes, the place seems strangely full of her. I wish you would tell me about her.”

He asked, with a certain slyness, “Have you heard anything about her already? At the club? From that fool woman in the kitchen?”

“For heaven’s sake, no, Alderling!”

“Or about me?”

“Nothing whatever!”

He seemed relieved of whatever suspicion he felt, but he said finally, and with an air of precaution, “I should like to know just how much you mean by the place seeming full of her.”

“Oh, I suppose the association of her personality with the whole house, and especially this room. I didn’t mean anything preternatural, I believe.”

“Then you don’t believe in a life after death?” he demanded with a kind of defiance.

I thought this rather droll, seeing what his own position had been, but that was not the moment for the expression of my amusement. “The tendency is to a greater tolerance of the notion,” I said. “Men like James and Royce, among the psychologists, and Shaler, among the scientists, scarcely leave us at peace in our doubts, any more, much less our denials.”

He said, as if he had forgotten the question: “They called it a very light case, and they thought she was getting well. In fact, she did get well, and then — there was a relapse. They laid it to her eating some fruit which they allowed her.”

Alderling spoke with a kind of bitter patience, but in my own mind I was not able to put all the blame on the doctors. Neither did I blame that innocently earthy creature, who was of no more harm in her strong appetite than any other creature which gluts its craving as simply as it feels it. The sense of her presence was deepened by the fact of those childlike self-indulgences which Alderling’s words recalled to me. I made no comment, however, and he asked gloomily, as if with a return of his suspicion, “And you haven’t heard of anything happening afterward?”

“I don’t know what you refer to,” I told him, “but I can safely say I haven’t, for I haven’t heard anything at all.”

“They contended that it didn’t happen,” he resumed. “She died, they said, and by all the tests she had been dead two whole days. She died with her hand in mine. I was not trying to hold her back; she had a kind of majestic preoccupation in her going, so that I would not have dared to detain her if I could. You’ve seen them go, and how they seem to draw those last, long, deep breaths, as if they had no thought in the world but of the work of getting out of it. When her breathing stopped I expected it to go on, but it did not go on, and that was all. Nothing startling, nothing dramatic, just simple, natural, like her! I gave her hand back, I put it on her breast myself, and crossed the other on it. She looked as if she were sleeping, with that faint color hovering in her face, which was not wasted, but I did not make-believe about it; I accepted the fact of her death. In your ‘Quests of the Occult,’” Alderling broke off, with a kind of superiority that was of almost the quality of contempt, “I believe you don’t allow yourself to be daunted by a diametrical difference of opinion among the witnesses of an occurrence, as to its nature, or as to its reality, even?” “Not exactly that,” I said. “I think I argued that the passive negation of one witness ought not to invalidate the testimony of another as to his experience. One might hear and see things, and strongly affirm them, and another, absorbed in something else, or in a mere suspense of the observant faculties, might quite as honestly declare that so far as his own knowledge was concerned, nothing of the kind happened. I held that in such a case, counter-testimony should not be allowed to invalidate the testimony for the fact.”

“Yes, that is what I meant,” said Alderling. “You say it more clearly in the book, though.”

“Oh, of course.”

VIII.

He began again, more remotely from the affair in hand than he had left off, as if he wanted to give himself room for parley with my possible incredulity. “You know how it was with Marion about my not believing that I should live again. Her notion was a sort of joke between us, especially when others were by, but it was a serious thing with her, in her heart. Perhaps it had originally come to her as a mere fancy, and from entertaining it playfully, she found herself with a mental inmate that finally dispossessed her judgment. You remember how literally she brought those Scripture texts to bear on it?”

“Yes. May I say that it was very affecting?”

“Affecting!” Alderling repeated in a tone of amaze at the inadequacy of my epithet. “She was always finding things that bore upon the point. After awhile she got to concealing them, as if she thought they annoyed me. They never did; they amused me; and when I saw that she had something of the sort on her mind, I would say, ‘Well, out with it, Marion!’ She would always begin, ‘Well, you may laugh!’” and as he repeated her words Alderling did laugh, forlornly, and as I must say, rather bloodcurdlingly.

I could not prompt him to go on, but he presently did so himself, desolately enough. “I suppose, if I was in her mind at all in that supreme moment, when she seemed to be leaving this life behind with such a solemn effect of rating it at nothing, it may have been a pang to her that I was not following her into the dark, with any ray of hope for either of us. She could not have returned from it with the expectation of convincing me, for I used to tell her that if one came back from the dead, I should merely know that he had been mistaken about being dead, and was giving me a dream from his trance. She once asked me if I thought Lazarus was not really dead, with a curious childlike interest in the miracle, and she was disheartened when I reminded her that Lazarus had not testified of any life hereafter, and it did not matter whether he had been really dead or not when he was resuscitated, as far as that was concerned. Last year, we read the Bible a good deal together here, and to tease her I pretended to be convinced of the contrary by the very passages that persuaded her. As she told you, she did not care for herself. You remember that?”

“Distinctly,” I said.

“It was always so. She never cared. I was perfectly aware that if she could have assured life hereafter to me, she would have given her life here to do it. You know how some women, when they are married, absolutely give themselves up, try to lose themselves in the behoof of their husbands? I don’t say it rightly; there are no words that will express the utterness of their abdication.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, “and it was one of the facts which most interested me in Mrs. Alderling.”

“Because I wasn’t worthy of it? No man is!”

“It wasn’t a question of that in my mind; I don’t believe that occurred to me. It was the Ding an sich that interested me, or as it related itself to her, and not the least as it related itself to you. Such a woman’s being is a cycle of self-sacrifice, so perfect, so essential, from birth to death, as to exclude the notion of volition. She is what she does. Of course she has to put her sacrifice into words from time to time, but its true language is acts, and the acts themselves only clumsily express it. There is a kind of tyranny in it for the man, of course. It requires self-sacrifice to be sacrificed to, and I don’t suppose a woman has any particular merit in what is so purely natural. It appears pathetic when it is met with ingratitude or rejection, but when it has its way it is no more deserving our reverence than eating or sleeping. It astonishes men because they are as naturally incapable of it as women are capable of it.” I was mounted and was riding on, forgetful of Alderling, and what he had to tell me, if he had anything, but he recalled me to myself by having apparently forgotten me, for when I paused, he took up his affair at a quite different point, and as though that were the question in hand.

“That gift, or knack, or trick, or whatever it was, of one compelling the presence of the other by thinking or willing it, was as much mine as hers, and she tried sometimes to get me to say that I would use it with her if she died before I did; and if she were where the conditions were opposed to her coming to me, my will would help her to overcome the hinderance; our united wills would form a current of volition that she could travel back on against all obstacles. I don’t know whether I make myself clear?” he appealed.

“Yes, perfectly,” I said. “It is very curious.” He said in a kind of muse, “I don’t know just where I was.” Then he began again, “Oh, yes! It was at the ceremony — down there in the library. Some of the country people came in; I suppose they thought they ought, and I suppose they wanted to; it didn’t matter to me. I had sent for Doctor Norrey, as soon as the relapse came, and he was there with me. Of course there was the minister, conducting the services. He made a prayer full of helpless repetitions, which I helplessly noticed, and some scrambling remarks, mostly misdirected at me, affirming and reaffirming that the sister they had lost was only gone before, and that she was now in a happier world.

“The singing and the praying and the preaching came to an end, and then there was that soul-sickening hush, that exanimate silence, of which the noise of rustling clothes and scraping feet formed a part, as the people rose in the hall, where chairs had been put for them, leaving me and Norrey alone with Marion. Every fibre of my frame recognized the moment of parting, and protested. A tremendous wave of will swept through me and from me, a resistless demand for her presence, and it had power upon her. I heard her speak, and say, as distinctly as I repeat the words, ‘I will come for you!’ and the youth and the beauty that had been growing more and more wonderful in her face, ever since she died, shone like a kind of light from it. I answered her, ‘I am ready now!’ and then Norrey scuffled to his feet, with a conventional face of sympathy, and said, ‘No hurry, my dear Alderling,’ and I knew he had not heard or seen anything, as well as I did afterwards when I questioned him. He thought I was giving them notice that they could take her away. What do you think?”

“How what do I think?” I asked.

“Do you think that it happened?”

There was something in Alderling’s tone and manner that made me, instead of answering directly that I did not, temporize and ask, “Why?”

“Because — because,” and Alderling caught his breath, like a child that is trying to keep itself from crying, “because I don’t.” He broke into a sobbing that seemed to wrench and tear his poor little body, and if I had thought of anything to say, I could not have said it to his headlong grief with any hope of assuaging it. “I am satisfied now,” he said, at last, wiping his wet face, and striving for some composure of its trembling features, “that it was all a delusion, the effect of my exaltation, of my momentary aberration, perhaps. Don’t be afraid of saying what you really think,” he added scornfully, “with the notion of sparing me. You couldn’t doubt it, or deny it, more completely than I do.”

I confess this unexpected turn struck me dumb. I did not try to say anything, and Alderling went on.

“I don’t deny that she is living, but I can’t believe that I shall ever live to see her again, or if you prefer, die to see her. There is the play of the poor animal instinct, or the mechanical persistence of expectation in me, so that I can’t shut the doors without the sense of shutting her out, can’t put out the lights without feeling that I am leaving her in the dark. But I know it is all foolishness, as well as you do, all craziness. If she is alive it is because she believed she should live, and I shall perish because I didn’t believe. I should like to believe, now, if only to see her again, but it is too late. If you disuse any member of your body, or any faculty of your mind, it withers away and if you deny your soul your soul ceases to be.”

I found myself saying, “That is very interesting,” from a certain force of habit, which you have noted in me, when confronted with a novel instance of any kind. “But,” I suggested, “why not act upon the reverse of that principle, and create the fact by affirmation which you think your denial destroys?”

“Because,” he repeated wearily, “it is too late. You might as well ask the fakir who has held his arm upright for twenty years, till it has stiffened there, to restore the dry stock by exercise. It is too late, I tell you.”

“But, look here, Alderling,” I pursued, beginning to taste the joy of argument. “You say that your will had such power upon her after you knew her to be dead that you made her speak to you?”

“No, I don’t say that now,” he returned. “I know now that it was a delusion.”

“But if you once had that power of summoning her to you, by strongly wishing for her presence, when you were both living here, why doesn’t it stand to reason that you could do it still, if she is living there and you are living here?”

“I never had any such power,” he replied, with the calm of absolute tragedy. “That was a delusion too. I leave the doors open for her, night and day, because I must, but if she came I should know it was not she.”

IX.

Of course you know your own business, my dear Acton, but if you think of using the story of the Alderlings — and there is no reason why you should not, for they are both dead, without kith or kin surviving, so far as I know, unless he has some relatives in Germany, who would never penetrate the disguise you could give the case — it seems to me that here is your true climax. But I necessarily leave the matter to you, for I shall not touch it at any point where we could come into competition. In fact, I doubt if I ever touch it at all, for though all psychology is in a manner dealing with the occult, still I think I have done my duty by that side of it, as the occult is usually understood; and I am shy of its grosser instances, as things that are apt to bring one’s scientific poise into question. However, you shall be the judge of what is best for you to do, when you have the whole story, and I will give it you without more ado, merely premising that I have a sort of shame for the aptness of the catastrophe. I shall respect you more if I hear that you agree with me as to the true climax of the tragedy, and have the heroism to reject the final event.

I stayed with Alderling nearly a week, and I will own that I bored myself. In fact, I am not sure but we bored each other. At any rate, when I told him, the night before I intended going, that I meant to leave him in the morning, he seemed resigned, or indifferent, or perhaps merely inattentive. From time to time we had recurred to the matter of his experience, or his delusion, but with apparently increasing impatience on his part, and certainly decreasing interest on mine; so that at last I think he was willing to have me go. But in the morning he seemed reluctant, and pleaded with me to stay a few days longer with him. I alleged engagements, more or less unreal, for I was never on such terms with Alderling that I felt I need make any special sacrifice to him. He gave way, suspiciously, rather, and when I came down from my room after having put the last touches to my packing, I found him on the veranda looking out to seaward, where a heavy fog-bank hung.

You will sense here the sort of patness which I feel cheapens the catastrophe; and yet, as I consider it, again, the fact is not without its curious importance, and its bearing upon what went before. I do not know but it gives the whole affair a relief which it would not otherwise have.

He was to have driven me to the station, some miles away, before noon, and I supposed we should sit down together, and try to have some sort of talk before I went. But Alderling appeared to have forgotten about my going, and after a while, took himself off to his studio, and left me alone to watch the inroads of the fog. It came on over the harbor rapidly, as on that morning when Mrs. Alderling had been so nearly lost in it, and presently the masts and shrouds of the shipping at anchor were sticking up out of it as if they were sunk into a body as dense as the sea under them.

I amused myself watching it blot out one detail of the prospect after another, while the fog-horn lowed through it, and the bell-buoy, far out beyond the light-house ledge, tolled mournfully. The milk-white mass moved landward, and soon the air was blind with the mist which hid the grass twenty yards away. There was an awfulness in the silence, which nothing broke but the lowing of the horn, and the tolling of the bell, except when now and then the voice of a sailor came through it, like that of some drowned man sending up his hail from the bottom of the bay.

Suddenly I heard a joyful shout from the attic overhead:

“I am coming! I am coming!”

It was Alderling calling out through his window, and then a cry came from over the water, which seemed to answer him, but which there is no reason in the world to believe was not a girlish shout from one of the yachts, swallowed up in the fog.

His lunging descent of the successive stairways followed, and he burst through the doorway beside me, and without heeding me, ran bareheaded down the sloping lawn.

I followed, with what notion of help or hinderance I should not find it easy to say, but before I reached the water’s edge — in fact I never did reach it, and had some difficulty making my way back to the house, — I heard the rapid throb of the oars in the row-locks as he pulled through the white opacity.

You know the rest, for it was the common property of our enterprising press at the time, when the incident was fully reported, with my ineffectual efforts to be satisfactorily interviewed as to the nothing I knew.

The oarless boat was found floating far out to sea after the fog lifted. It was useless to look for Alderling’s body, and I do not know that any search was made for it.

LETTERS HOME

In this novel, first published in 1903, Howells experimented with the epistolary form, enabling him to present the same event from various different character’s first-hand perspectives, across a range of social backgrounds, while adding a new dimension to his realist style. The novel was not well received in America, but was greeted with praise in Britain.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII.

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

XXXV.

XXXVI.

XXXVII.

XXXVIII.

XXXIX.

XL.

XLI.

XLII.

XLIII.

XLIV.

XLV.

XLVI.

XLVII.

XLVIII.

XLIX.

I.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING,. Boston.

                         NEW YORK, Dec. 12, 1901.

My Dear Margaret:

I am afraid it will not do, and that you will have your brother-in-law back on your hands again, for the winter, or lose him indefinitely. I do not mean, lose him to New York; far from that; as far as Europe, in fact; for if I were to take stock (the local commercialism instantly penetrates one’s vocabulary) of my emotions, I suspect I should find myself evenly balanced between the impulse to board the next train for Boston and the impulse to board the next steamer for Liverpool. The things are about equally simple: the facilities for getting away from New York compensate for the facilities for getting to New York; and I could keep my promise of amusing your invalid leisure by letter as well from one place as from another. Wherever I am to be, I am not to be pitied as one taxed beyond his strength in keeping a rash promise. Your rest-cure may be good for you, or it may not; but for me I am sure it will be good if it gives me back that boon period of life, when I wrote letters willingly and wrote them long. I have already a pleasing prescience of an earlier time; in the mere purpose of writing you, I feel the glow of that charming adolescence of the world, in the eighteenth century, when everybody, no matter of what age, willingly wrote such long letters as to give the epistolary novel a happy air of verisimilitude.

I wish I could be more definite as to the reasons of my doubts whether I shall stay here or not., Certainly the meteorological conditions have nothing to do with the matter. Up to the present date these have been the greatest amiability. About Thanksgiving there were some days of rough cold, which with our native climate still in my nerves, I expected to last for a week at least; but with the volatility of the New York nature, it all blew away in forty-eight hours. The like has happened several times since; a sort of corrupt warmth has succeeded the cold, affecting one as if the tissues of the season had broken down through sympathy with the municipal immorality. I should like to stay, if for nothing else, to see what the reformers will do in the way of an honest climate after they get into power at the end of the year, but I do not know whether I shall be able to do it. In the meantime, I like the mildness, though I can never get over my surprise at it; I enjoy it, as I suppose I should enjoy standing in with Tammany, in some enormously wicked deal that turned over half the streets to me for, say, automobile speedways. I had really forgotten what a Florentine sky New York often has in mid-December, by night and by day, with a suffusion of warm color from the sunsets, which is as different from the shrill pink of our Back Bay sunsets as the New York relaxation is from our moral tension. You have been here much later and oftener than I, and I dare say you take for granted all the unseasonable gentleness which I am finding so incredible, and so acceptable. But as yet I am not accustomed to it, and I have a bad conscience in celebrating it.

The whole place is filthier, witty the pulling down and building up, the delving for the Rapid Transit, and I do not know what else, than I have seen it since poor Waring first taught Father Knickerbocker (as their newspaper cartoonists like to figure the city), the novelty of purging and living cleanly like a gentleman, and I suppose it is the sense of the invasive, pervasive dirt that has much to do with my doubt whether I can stand it. Now and then a rain comes and washes it all away, and makes the old sloven look endimanché, but the filth begins again with the first week day, and you go about with your mouth and eyes full of malarious dust, as you did before. Of course, you will remind me that Boston is always pulling down and building up too; but her vices whiten into virtues beside New York’s in that way. Then the noise, the noise! All the money from all the stocks and bonds centering their wealth into the place, cannot buy exemption from it. Boston is noisy, too, but there are large spaces in Boston where you can get fairly well away from the noise, and I know of none here, though there is said to be one block up and down next the Riverside Drive which is tolerably free from it; but no one that is any one lives there, for New York is in nothing more anomalous than in having the east side for her fashionable quarter. Everywhere the noise buffets you, insults you; and the horrible means of transit, that add so much to the danger and the dirt, burst your ears with their din.

I am no longer young, and I am not very well; you are quite right on both of these points; but I am not a dotard quite, or quite an invalid, and I do not exaggerate the facts which you beautiful creatures in your later forties make so light of. I fancy there is a dreadful solidarity in New York. I dare not trust myself to the climate, for instance, which I know is doing me good, for fear there is something behind it, something colossally uncertain and unreliable, and that later I shall pay with pneumonia for the relief from my nervous dyspepsia.

Just now, indeed, we are in one of those psychological moments when there ought to be great safety for me. The better element, as it diffidently calls itself, has been given charge of the city, you know, by the recent election, and the experiment of self-government is to be tried once more by people who have apparently so little interest in it. As nearly as I can make out from chance encounters at the Perennial Club (where Malkin has had me elected a non-resident member; he left town as soon as he had done it), there seems to be what I should call an unexpectation in the genera] mind: a willingness to take things as they come, to wait on providence in a semi-cynical resignation, which in the last analysis might prove a kind of piety. They have been reformed so frequently, these poor New Yorkers, and then unreformed, that they have rather fallen into the habit of taking the good with the bad as if it might turn out the bad. The newspapers keep shouting away, but that does not count; there are only two or three of them that are ever regarded seriously; and the people at the Perennial, who do not get their politics from London quite so entirely as some of our fellows, are very placid about the municipal situation. They seem to rely altogether on the men who have been put into office, and not the least on those who put them in; in fact the government of New York is almost as personal as that of Germany.

You can read this to Walter; and tell him that the Perennial is certainly a club to be put up at if you must come to New York. There are interesting heads, inside and out, here; the house is wonderfully cosy and incredibly quiet, an oasis in a desert of noise; and the windows look out over two miles of woodland in the Park, where I have already begun to take my walks. You will say, Here are the elements of a pleasant sojourn; and I do not deny it; but they are only the elements. The chemistry of their combination is wanting; and what I fear is that at the end of the winter, I should look back over my experience, and find in it nothing but the elements of a pleasant sojourn.

Yours affectionately,

OTIS.

II.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. LINCOLN WIBBERT, Office of THE DAY, Wottoma, Iowa.

         NEW YORK, Dec. 15, 1901.

Dear Old Linc:

It is simply glorious, there is no other word for it. I have to keep pinching myself, to make sure that it is not some other fellow; but if it be I as I hope it be, I’ve a little Linc at home, and he’ll know me — or words to that effect. So I will try to sober down and make the appeal to you. But I feel that it is an awful waste of time, for the subjects crowd upon you here, and what I give to friendship I take from literature. I want you to appreciate that.

It seems strange that it should be only three nights ago that I parted from you with that awful wrench in the dirty old depot at Wottoma, and took the sleeper for Chicago. Aeons of experience, swept down by deluges of emotion, have passed since then, and I feel  older than the earth. I do not think I was very-young then; I had gone through what is supposed to age a man, and if it had not been for you, and your sympathy in it all, I do not know what I should have done. But I believe I was wise to wait till I had a better excuse for running away than I had six months ago. I am all right, now, and I am all the better for being at a distance from a Certain Person. If you happen to see her, will you kiss my hand to her, very airily, and say, “Merci, ma chère”? If she asks you why, will you tell her that you have heard from W. A., and that his health is perfectly restored? Understand, Linc, I don’t blame her now, if I ever did; you will bear me witness that I would not let you do it. She had a perfect right to turn me down, but to turn me down for him, oh, that hurt! I could stand being near her (and yet so far!) but it was being within nose-pulling distance of him that I could not stand. I am glad that I came here to face the ghost down in the midst of men, instead of taking the woods, as I was tempted to do. It would have faced me down, if I had gone home, and it would have killed my poor old mother to see my hopeless love-sickness.

That’s what I was, Linc: love-sick, and now I am love-well and it is New York that has completed my cure. Or rather, she has inspired me with a new passion; she herself is my passion, and I will never leave to love her evermore! Radiant, peerless divinity, but majestic and awful too, her splendor dazzles me, her sovereign beauty enthralls me, her charm intoxicates, maddens me! What is any mortal girl to this apotheosis of Opportunity, this myriad-visaged Chance, this Fortune on a million wheels! There is more material in a minute here, Linc, than there is in Wottoma in a year. I don’t want to go back on the dear old place — or to it, as George Ade said about Indiana; but there is no Wottoma when you think of New York; it wipes itself from the map, and vanishes from the gazetteer.

You will never understand why till you come here, but you will come some day, and then you will know all about it. I was wishing to-night when I came out of the little French restaurant where I dine (it was the first time, but I am always going to dine there) that you could have been here to put your hand in mine, and walk up Broadway with me, just for one breath, one glimpse of it all. You would not have needed that dinner — six courses, with wine included, for fifty cents — warm under your waistcoat, to make you feel yourself not merely a witness of the great procession of life, but a part of it. By that time every one’s work is over, and the people are streaming to the theatres, past the shining shops on foot, and cramming the trolleys, the women in furs and diamonds, and the men in crush hats and long overcoats, with just enough top buttons open to betray the dress tie and dress shirt. (I have laid in one of those majestic overcoats already, and I have got a silk hat, and I would like to show it to you in Wottoma, where you can’t buy a silk hat unless you send to Chicago for it.) At the doors of the theatres, more gorgeons women and more correct men are getting out of hansoms, and coupés, and automobiles, and trailing in over the pavements between rows of resplendent darkeys in livery; and life is worth living.

But when I begin anywhere on New York, I want to leave off and begin somewhere else, for the job is always hopeless. Take the Christmas streets alone, at three o’clock in the afternoon, and if you have a soul in you it soars sky-scraper high at the sight of the pavements packed with people, and the street jammed with cars, wagons, carriages, and every vehicle you can imagine, and many you can’t, you poor old provincial! I ache to get at it all in verse; I want to write the Epic of New York, and I am going to. I would like to walk you down Twenty-third Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues, and wake you up to the fact that you have got a country. Only you would think you were dreaming; and it is a dream. What impresses me most is the gratis exhibition that goes on all the time, the continuous performance of the streets that you could not get for money any where else, and that here is free to the poorest. In fact, is for the poor. There is one window on Fourteenth Street where the sidewalk is a solid mass of humanity from morning till night, entranced by the fairy scene inside; and most of the spectators look as if they had not been to breakfast or dinner, and were not going to supper. But they are enraptured; and that is the great secret of New York; she takes you out of yourself; she annihilates you and disperses you, and you might starve to death here without feeling hungry, for your mind wouldn’t be on it. That is what convinces me that I have come to the best place for that little heart-cure.

This afternoon I was in the Park; my hotel is only a few blocks below it, and the woods called to me across the roofs, and I went. The sunset was dying over the Seventh Avenue entrance as I went in and as I tramped up past a big meadow where they pasture a flock of sheep, and crossed a bridge to a path that follows the border of a lake into what they call the Ramble, far from hoofs and wheels. The twilight was hovering in the naked tree tops, but the sunset was still reflected from the water among the trunks below, and just as I got to a little corner under the hill where there is a bust of Schiller on a plinth, between evergreens that try to curtain it, the red radiance glorified a pair of lovers tilting on the air above the path before me. He had his arm across her shoulders, and she had hers flung round his waist; I stopped, for I felt myself intruding, and that made them look round, and they started apart. Then, after they had taken a few steps, she closed upon him again, and with an action of angelic defiance, as if she said, “I don’t care; suppose we are?” she flung her slim little arm round him, and ran him up the slope of the path past the bust, and round a rock out of sight. It was charming, Linc, but it made me faint, and I dropped down on a bench beside an old fellow who might have been a fellow-sufferer, though he didn’t look it. He was got up in things that reduced mine to an average value of thirty cents, and I saw that if I really meant business I must have a pair of drab gaiters inside of the next twenty-four hours. I don’t know what made me think he was also literary, but I did, and I was flattered to have him speak to me after he had given me a glance over the shoulder next me, through his extremely polite pince-nez. He was clean shaven, except for the neat side whiskers, of the period of 1840-60, as you see them in the old pictures; and very rosy about the gills, with a small, sweet smile. You could see that he was his own ideal of a gentleman, and he looked as if he had been used to being one for several generations; at least, that was the way I romanced him; and perhaps that was why I felt flattered when he suggested, as if I would perfectly understand, “That was rather pretty.” I ventured to answer, “Yes, very pretty, indeed.” I was just thinking how old Schiller would have liked to wink the other eye of his bust there, and tell them he knew how it was himself. So I quoted —

“Ich habe genossen das irdische Gluck,

Ich habe geleht und geliehet.”

My quotation seemed to startle the old fellow, and he said “Ah!” and faced around at me, and asked with an irony that caressed, “Made in Germany?” I made bold to answer, “The verses were. I was made in Iowa.” Then I felt rather flat, for having lugged in my autobiography, hut he did not mind, or if he did, he only laughed, and remarked, “A thing like that would make a nice effect on the stage, if you could get it in.”

“But you couldn’t,” I said, “you could only get it into a poem. It would be gross and palpable on the stage.”

“Was it gross and palpable here?”

“No, here it was the real thing.”

“I don’t see the logic of your position,” he said. “I don’t know that I could show it to you. It’s something you must feel.” He laughed again, with the revelation of some very well-dentistried teeth, and said, “Well, let’s hope that some time I may be fine enough to feel it. If I put it on the stage will it spoil it for a poem?”

“Not if I get it into a poem first.”

“I shouldn’t object to that; I could dramatize the poem. Or perhaps you could.” He got up, and made me a beautiful bow, with his hat off. “We may be rivals,” he said, “but I hope we part friends?” and I got back with, “Oh, yes, or the best of enemies.”

That made him smile again, and he walked away down the path I had come. He might have been a fine old actor: he had the effect of “going off” at the end of the scene. But think of this happening to me all at once, and out of a clear sky, after the chronic poverty of incident in Wottoma! I suppose I shall never see him again, but once is enough to enrich the imagination with boundless possibilities. He had an English accent, but I feel sure that he was not English; they study that accent for the stage, of course.

Well, I might as well stop first as last, if this is first; I never should get through; and I should have todispatch this letter in sections, like a big through train, if it went on much longer. Good-by. I shall not wait for you to write. It would kill me not to write, and you may expect something every day.

Yours ever,

W. ARDITH.

P. S. — I shall use that lovers incident in a story. Then I can get my unknown friend in, and I can make use of myself. I see a way to relate our common fortunes to those of the lovers. I believe I can make something out of it. But now I like to let it lie a silent joy in my soul — No, I don’t believe I can risk waiting. That old fellow may be going to use the material at once. I believe I shall try making a poem of it, and if I hit it off, I will send you a copy to let you see what I have done with it. If I could only get that thing out as it is in my mind! I think I will imagine some old fellow, seeing in that pair of lovers the phantom of his own love, dead forty years. That would allow me to put in some Thackeray touches, (that elderly unknown was quite a Thackeray type,) and I could use my own experience with a Certain Person. Linc, that girl looked just like a Certain Person: I mean her figure, so slight and light and electrical and the way she glanced defiantly back at us over her shoulder, when she put her arm round him again!

III.

From. ABNER J. BAYSLEY to Rev. WILLIAM BAYSLEY, Timber Creek, Iowa.

                  NEW YORK, December 19, 1901.

Dear Brother:

Yours of the 15th received, and contents noted. Would say that we are all usually well, and getting used to our life here as well as we can. It is worse for wife and I than it is for the girls, but I guess they are a little homesick, too. Am not sure but what it is worse for them, because the girls have not much to do, and mother and me are pretty well taken up, her with her housekeeping, and me getting settled in the business here, and feeling anxious whether I can make it go or not. When the company offered me the place here, at $2,500, I thought it was a fortune, but money does not go quite so far in New York as what it would in Timber Creek; I have to pay forty dollars a month for rent alone, and we live in a six-room flat, with two of the rooms so dark that we have to burn gas in them by day, and gas costs. But the kitchen is sunny, and Ma likes that. We set there of an evening when the girls are carrying on in the parlor, with their music, and try to make ourselves believe that we are in the old home-kitchen at Timber Creek; but with a gas range it is difficult. Was you really thinking of renting the old place? Would let you have it on easy terms. I can’t bear to think of it standing empty the whole winter long. Would say, go into it, William, and welcome, for anything you are a mind to pay. If you didn’t mean that, all right; Ma thought may he you did. I know your wife would use it well. Would say, you can have the horse over the winter for his keep, and if you can sell him for anything in the spring, will allow you a fair percentage. I know you will do the best you can for me. Perhaps Watson will take him off your hands; he wanted a horse.

My, but it brings the old place up to talk about these things! But a man can’t afford to indulge in much sentiment if he expects to get along in New York. He has got to be business from the word go. I try to push things all I can, but sometimes, William, I am most afraid I am getting too old for it, and if the company finds that out it will be all day with me. A trust has no bowels, but I don’t blame them, I suppose I should be just so myself. William do you ever think people live too long? There, you will say, he is flying in the face of providence, and the Lord knows I don’t mean to, but am thankful for all my blessings. I don’t know how ma and the girls could get along without me, old as I am, in this awful city, or me without them for that matter. The girls have not got acquainted much, if any, yet. It is not very sociable here. We have been in this house nearly two weeks, and although as much as twenty families live above and below us, in the six stories, nobody has called. Well its like this, its more like living in the same street than what it is in the same house, but in Timber Creek we wouldn’t have been in the same street or hardly in the same town without pretty much everybody calling inside of two weeks. But the girls say they like it, and that it gives them more of a chance to choose their own acquaintance. Speaking of acquaintance, they say that New-Yorkers never meet each other on the street, but if two country fellows happen to be in New York at the same time they are sure to bump against each other before the day’s out. And that is just exactly what happened to me this morning in Broadway. You remember the Widow Ardith’s boy that went onto the paper in Wottoma? Well, who should I run right into but him day before yesterday, just off the train with his grip in his hand. I told him to come round, and he said he would, the first chance he got, and its fired the girls all up, the idea of a gentleman caller. He always did dress pretty well when he come home from Wottoma on a visit, and he was looking just out of a bandbox, though he never was anyways stuck up. If we could get him for a boarder or to take one of the rooms it would help out considerable, but the girls said they would have my scalp if I dared to hint at such a thing to him, so I am going to lay low. Would say, take the old place William, and if you cannot afford to pay any rent till you have disposed of your house, all right; you can have it for nothing till then. I know you must be uncomfortable where you are, so far from your church, especially evening meetings. You could send us some of the apples. One of them old Bambos or Sheeps Noses would taste good. Ma and the girls joins me in love to you and Emmeline. When you write give our love to the rest of your family. I hope Sally is getting along all right.

To think of you being a grandfather before me when so much younger, but so it goes.

Your affectionate brother,

AB.

IV.

From Miss AMERICA RALSON to Miss CAROLINE DESCHENES, Wottoma.

My Dearest Caro:

I owe you a great many apologies for not writing before this, but if you only knew all I have been through you would not ask for a single one. I thought it was bad enough when we got here late in the spring after everybody one knows had gone out of town, but since the season began this fall it has been simply a whirl. It began with the Horse Show, of course, and now we are in the midst of the Dog Show which opened to-day with twelve hundred dogs; and I thought I should go insane with their barking all at once, and when I got mother home, I was afraid she was going to he down ill. But in New York you have got to get used to things, and that is what I keep telling mother, or else go back to Wottoma, where she never put her nose out of the house once in a month, and went to bed every night at nine. After the Dog Show there will not be much of anything till the opera begins. Father has taken a box for the nights when the owner does not go, and it is going to cost him a thousand dollars for the time he has it.

We have had a great many cards already, and invitations to Teas and At Homes; they seem to be the great thing in New York, and I think it is just as well to begin that way till we know the ropes a little better. You may be in society all your life in Wottoma, and yet you have got to go slow in New York. We have been to one dinner at a gentleman’s that father was thrown with in business, but they seemed to think we did not want to meet anybody but Western people; and there was nothing about it in the society column. Father had a good time, for he always takes his good time with him, and the lady and her daughter were as pleasant to me as could be; mother could not be got to go; but I did not come to New York to meet Western people, and I shall think over the next invitation we get from that house. They are in the Social Register, and so I suppose they are all right themselves, but if it had not been for a crowd of people that came in after dinner, I should not have thought they knew anybody but strangers. I should say nearly all of these after-dinner people were New-Yorkers; there is something about the New York way of dressing and talking that makes you know them at once as far as you can see them. I had some introductions, but I did not catch the names any of the time, and I could not ask for them the way father does, so I did not know who I was talking with.

They all seemed to talk about the theatre, and that was lucky for me, because you know I am so fond of it, and I have been to nearly everything since the season began: Irving, of course, and Maude Adams, and John Drew, and “Colorado,” and “Way Down East,” and “Eben Holden,” and I don’t know what all. Father likes one thing and I like another, and so we get in pretty much all the shows. We always take a box, and that gives father practice in wearing his dress suit every night for dinner; I could hardly get him to at first; and he kept wearing his derby hat with his frock coat till I had to hide it, and now I have to hide his sackcoats to keep him from wearing them with his top-hat.

Now, Caro, I know you will laugh, but I will let you all you want to; and I am not going to put on any airs with you, for you would know they were airs the minute you saw them. We do bump along in New York, but we are going to get there all the same, and we mean to have fun out of it on the way. Mother don’t because it is not her nature to, like father’s and mine. She still thinks we are going to pay for it, somehow, if we have fun, but that is only the New England in her, and does not really mean anything; as I tell her, she was not bred in Old Kentucky, but brown bread and baked beans in Old Massachusetts, and if ever she is born again it will be in South Reading. The fact of it is she is lonely, with father and me out so much, and I am trying to make her believe that she ought to have a companion, who can sit with her, and read to her, and chipper her up when we go out. I need some one myself to write notes for me, and my idea is that we can make one hand wash another by having some one to be a companion for mother who can be a chaperon for me when father cannot go with me. We have advertised, and we shall soon see whether the many in one that we want will appear.

If she will only appear, money will not stand in her way, for we are long on money whatever we are short on. Father is almost as much puzzled in New York as he was in Wottoma how to spend his income. I am doing my best to show him, and when we begin to build, in the spring, I guess the architect will give him some instructions. His plans do more than anything else to keep mother in good spirits, and he has made her believe she made them. He has made father believe he owns him, and I thought maybe I did till he let out one day that there was some one else. Well, you can’t have everything in this world, and I shall try to rub along.

How would you like to have me rub along with a cast-off shoe of yours? Not Mr. Ardith! Yes, Mr. Ardith! He turned up here, last night about dinner time, and we saw him wandering round with a waiter, looking for a vacant table, and trying to pretend that he was not afraid, when any one could see that the poor boy’s heart was in his mouth. The fright made him look more refined than ever with that cleanshaven face of his, and his pretty, pointed chin, and his nice little mouth. He was so scared that he did not know us, though he was staring straight at us, till father got up and sort of bulged down on him, and shouted out, “Well, Wottoma, every time!” And in about a second, Mr. Ardith was sitting opposite me, with a napkin across his knees, and talking his soup cold under the latest news from home. Well, Caro, it was like some of the old South High Street times, and it made me homesick to hear all the old names. And what do you think father did after dinner? He made Mr. Ardith come up to our rooms, and the first thing I knew he was asking him how he would like to go to the theatre with us, if he had nothing better to do. He made a failure of trying to think of something, and the next thing I knew, father was bending over us in the box after the first act, with a hand on a shoulder apiece of us, (have I got that straight?) and asking us if we minded his going, and letting us get home at our convenience. I looked up and tried to frown him still, but it was no use. He just said, “I’ll send the carriage back for you, Make,” and went.

I don’t believe Mr. Ardith knew there was anything unusual in it, and I never let on. I hurried up the talk, and we talked pure literature. I saw I was in for it, and I tried to make him believe that I had read all the latest publications, and was taking a course of George Meredith between times. After while he began to hint round after you, Caro: he did, honest! He said he supposed I heard from you, and I said, very rarely; you must be so much taken up with the Wottoma gayeties. He may have merely asked about you for a bluff, and to show that he was not going to ask. He went on and talked a little more about you, kind of with a ten-foot pole, and getting further and further off all the time, till he got clear to New York, and then he talked about nothing but New York. He is crazy about the place, and sees it as a poem, he says; goodness knows what he means! He got quite up into the clouds, and he did not come down again till we reached home.

I saw that he wanted to do the handsome thing, and I allowed him to order some expensive food at the table we usually take, for I knew that it would hurt his pride if I didn’t. He seemed to have a good appetite, but he went on more psychologically than ever, and I was never so glad as when he said goodnight to me at our door — except when father wanted him to come in, and he wouldn’t. Yes, Caro, Mr. Ardith is too many for me, but I respect him, and if I could scratch up a little more culture perhaps I could more than respect him. He certainly is a nice boy.

We shall probably be at the Walhondia, the whole winter. You see life here, and although it is not exactly the kind of New York life that I am after, it is New York life, because it’s all strangers. I would like you to see it once, and why couldn’t you come on and pay me that visit? I would like nothing better than to blow in a few thousand on a show for you, and ask the Four Hundred to meet you. Father would believe they all came, and he would like the blowing-in anyway. He is not going to die disgraced, as Mr. Carnegie says, and he can’t die poor if the Trust keeps soaring as it has for the last six months. Better come, Caro, for perhaps when we get into our new house on the East Side next winter, I may not want you, and now I do want you. Come! I’ll give a little theatre dinner for you, and I’ll ask Mr. Ardith. There!

As we used to say when we thought we knew French,

Toute à vous,

                 MAKE.

         NEW YORK, December the Eighteenth, Nineteen Hundred and One.

V.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. ANSEL G.

DENNAM, Lake Ridge, New York.

                    NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 1901.

Dear Mother:

I have the greatest mind to be like a good girl in a book, and tell you that I have got my ideal place; I know you are so anxious; but I guess I had better not. I am not the least bit discouraged, for I am sure to find it, though it does seem a little too much on the shrinking violet order. When I think of the number of ideal places that I am adapted to, I wonder they can all escape me; and I know I shall run one of them down at last. There are places which I could have got before now if I had not set my mark so high. Only yesterday I was offered a situation as hello-girl at a telephone station, and I could be sitting this moment with the transmitter at my mouth, and the receivers strapped to both ears, and looking as if I were just going to be electrocuted, if I had chosen.

Perhaps I may decide to go into Sunday journalism. How would you like that — if you knew what it was? My chum, Miss Hally, is a Sunday journalist, and perfect bundle of energy. I believe she could work me in easily. She is from the South, or Soath, as she calls it, and she is one of these Southern women you meet here in New York, who make you think Southern women got so much rest in the old slavery times, that they never want to rest any more. They beat us poor Northern things all hollow in getting places, and the fact is that the only place I’ve got yet is the place I live in. That boarding house got to be a little too much, and before my week was up, on Wednesday, I began prospecting. Miss Hally went round with me and it was very well she did, because it is easier to get out of a tight place if there are two of you, and to make up flattering excuses, than it is if there is only one. In New York you have to be so careful — you have no idea in Lake Ridge how careful. Whole neighborhoods are barred, and sometimes when the streets are nice you have to pass through others that are not; it’s horrid. Well, it all ended, much sooner than we could expect, in our finding these two rooms, five pair up, in an apartment with respectable people who are glad to let them, and let us get breakfast in their kitchen. We go out for our lunches and dinners to a French boarding-house in the neighborhood, where the food is wonderful and the men all smoke cigarettes at the table; but they do not mean anything by it. Our rooms look south over a beautiful landscape of chimneys, and it is astonishing how all chimneys seem to be out of order and have to have something done to them; there is not a perfectly well chimney as far as the eye can reach. One room we use as a parlor, and the other has two let-down beds in it, and both are full of sun. It is delightful, and I know things are going to turn out just as I wish, for if you wish hard enough they have got to.

You mustn’t fret, or else I shall come home and shake you. My hundred dollars will last three months, or I will know the reason why. I think I will advertise, and get Miss Hally to go over the answers with me, and tell me which ones I had better follow up. She knows New York through and through, and if any one can help me run down my ideal employer she can. I have not swerved from a single requirement: age, amiability, opulence, with an eye on Europe in the spring. She will not have much, for me to do: just notes to write, accounts to keep, friends to receive and excuse her to, reading aloud in the evenings, with a perfectly ridiculous consideration for my strength, because I am long and rather limp and slab-sided, and must be sick; I shall have to overcome her fears for my health before she will consent to take me even on trial, and nothing but something strangely fascinating in me will help me to win the day. The only condition she will make is that I shall pay you a good long visit in May, before we sail. Perhaps she will let me begin it before, if she sees I am homesick, which I shall not be, and you needn’t think it. But I suppose the sunset still has that burnished crimson through the orchard and over the lake, and the Ridge woods are all red in it, and the vineyards black — how purple they were with grapes when I left! The chickens have gone to roost in the peach trees, and the guinea-hens are trying to make up their minds to, and you are standing by the gate looking wistfully down to the desolate depot for your runaway girl, and wondering how she is. She is very, very well, mum, and she is coming home with a pocketful of money to pay off that mortgage. But if you stand there at the gate, looking that way, mother, you will break my heart! Go in, this minute, or you will take cold, and then what shall I do? Give my love to all inquiring friends — very nasal love, and not sweeter than you can conscientiously make it. Then the neighbors will know that it is honest. Love to Lizzie, and tell her to be very good to you.

Your affectionate daughter,

FRANCES.

VI.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to Mrs. A. G. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

              NEW YORK, December 26, 1901.

Dear Mother:

I was disappointed yesterday in not getting that ideal place to send you for a Christmas present. It would have been so nice, that I thought surely I should get it; but you must not lose faith in me, for I confidently expect it this week, and you shall have it on New Year’s at the latest. I may have to telegraph it; but you will not mind that. The truth is the day has been so exciting that I did not grieve much for the ideal place, and my disappointment was mostly for you, because I had promised you. I was almost entirely taken up with my chum, Miss Hally, who told me, when we were both in the melting mood of clawing the candies out of each other’s stockings, where we had put them the night before, all about herself, and now I will tell you: I forgot to before. She is Miss Custis Hally, and she says her father was always opposed to slavery, and would not go with the rest when Virginia seceded, but just stayed on his plantation and took no part in the war. Miss Hally came to New York, after he died, and has worked on a newspaper here, ever since. She has got one of the best places now, but I guess it has been a fight. She is only forty, but her hair is as white as snow. She is tall and straight, and beautiful, with a kind of fierceness in her looks, that all breaks up when she speaks of anything she pities, and she has been kinder to me than I could ever tell you, though some day I will try. She has taken my case in hand, and you can count upon getting that place from me on New Year’s without fail, for I have begun to have answers to my advertisement already. None of them are just what I wanted, but it is a good deal for some of them to be what I can get. I needn’t tell you about them till I have gone over them with Miss Hally. She is going to help me boil them down tonight, and I will start out with the residuum tomorrow, and see which I will take. This sounds rather majestic, but it is not as majestic as it sounds. I have only got two answers that seem honest; the rest are fates of one kind or another, to get money out of me; I can see that for myself; but I depend upon Miss Hally to advise me about these two. You will soon hear from me, if I have luck, and if I haven’t you won’t hear so soon.

Your gift and Lizzie’s came this morning, a day after the fair, which reopened on account of them. I was afraid you were going to forget me, and when you hadn’t, I wished you had. When I think of your using up your poor old eyes on that collar for me, I feel like giving you a good scolding for making me cry. Lizzie’s book-mark is beautiful, and when I get to reading aloud to the Unknown Lady that I am going to be companion to, I won’t use any other. I shall have the collar on, and she will try to beg them both of me, but of course I will be quite up and down with her. Good-by, you dear ones!

Your loving daughter and sister,

FRANCES.

VII.

From, WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

             NEW YORK, Dec. 18, 1901.

My dear Lincoln:

I do not want to crowd you with personal intelligence, but I shall not sleep to-night unless I tell someone that I have spent the evening with our old friends, the Ralsons, or rather our young friend, the Ralson.

The people at Lamarque’s would no more think of dressing for dinner than the most exclusive club men of Wottoma (if there were any,) but to-night I had the ambition to see how much a poor young man could dine for at the Walhondia and that was why I was all right as to clothes when I wandered into the glittering banquet hall, and found the Ralsons there. I knew they lived at the Walhondia, and I thought I might stumble on them, but when I did, I was able to give a good imitation of never being so much surprised in my life. The old gentleman had me down at their table in less time than I can tell it; and after dinner, before I knew it, he had me at the theatre with himself and America; and then as suddenly, as things happen in dreams, I was there alone with her. She seemed to think it tremendously exciting, being left with me in their box; and she treated her father’s abandoning us, on pretence of seeing a man somewhere after the first act, with a severity that slipped from her in one of those fine, large yawps of hers. She said, “O well, we’re all Wottoma innocents together, and nobody knows us, anyway,” and I could pass for her cousin, if not her mother or aunt, or some other elderly relative; and I realized that she was referring to the chaperonage that we are always reading about. After that we proceeded to have a good time, though we put up an icy front, that struck a chill to the beholder, whenever we found people looking at us.

They looked at us a good deal, and I didn’t wonder, for America is certainly beautiful to look at. Of course that hair of hers excites suspicion, but a woman has only got to behave as if she believed a thing was real herself, and she carries conviction. I could see doubt fade from the opera glasses of the observers at the theatre, and from their eyes at supper afterwards (I blew in about five dollars for a few gilded morsels, when we got back to the hotel), as they settled down to perfect faith in her particular rich mahogany shade of hair and gave themselves up to the joy of her sumptuous bloom and bulk, as something that there could never have been any question about. She was the handsomest girl in the theatre and the handsomest in the supper room, and she did not go half way down her spine to prove it, as some of the women did. I always did think her red, white and blue gorgeousness the richest type of beauty, even when my taste was more for something dark and fine. We got to talking about my taste at the theatre, after we had gone over the novel and the drama (she is more at home in the drama) and I thought it best to make a few careless inquiries about a Certain Person. The beauteous America corresponds with a Certain Person, but she pretended for my comfort that she had not heard from her for some time. She said she had asked a C. P. to visit her, and she put on ignorance enough to enable me to promise that I would be one of a theatre party if the C. P. came.

She said, when we parted at the door of her apartment, that I need not wait to hear that the C. P. was here before calling, and from this and other things that I have put with it, I infer that the divine America’s social progress in New York has not been quite equal to her social ambition. I don’t mean that she isn’t kind hearted enough to wish to make it pleasant for me here, but if she had a great many engagements, I doubt if she would have so much time for a country acquaintance. So far, I should think she had seen New York from her hotel, and that is not the best social basis, I imagine. Her hotel is New York, in a certain way, in the way of being a cluster of infinitely repellant particles, as Emerson says, of strangers. But there must be another New York, and I do not believe she has broken into that yet, but this may be because I am so entirely on the outside of it myself. Still I am within guessing distance, and what I guess is that in an old place like this there must be a society so sufficient to itself that it need not be at the pains to be exclusive, and so richly indifferent to what others can bring it that no amount of money can affect its imagination. I have an idea that it might be years before the people of such a society would ever hear of people like the Raisons. What could people with great-grandfathers in all the old grave-yards here, and with family trees to burn, want with the Raisons? That is what has begun to steal darkly in upon me from the Raison situation, and I guess that the divine America, who is as sharp as she is beautiful, knows the facts, and it is to her credit that she has not soured on them. She is as jolly as ever she was, and she is just as determined to make her way as if it were open before her. Perhaps it is, and perhaps I am mistaken.

Perhaps if I lived at the Walhondia I should see things in a different light. I wish on some accounts, if not others, that I did live there, for it is a great world. Simply to sit in the office, and watch the smooth working of the huge machine is to store up impressions for a life-time. The way the clerks, call-boys, and porters operate the arriving and departing guest is so wonderful in itself, that the glimpses of the dining rooms and drawing rooms, and the overdressed women guests trailing through the corridors, with their underdressed men after them, and the he and she New York swells of all sorts and conditions who come in for supper, (like myself!) are naughtinesses of superfluity, embarrassments of riches.

But I must stop, merely adding that the Raisons took me to and from the theatre in their electric coupé, and America has just sent me home in it! She wished her best regards to you, Linc, and she seems to have a soft place in her spacious heart for all Wottoma.

Yours ever,

W. ARDITH.

VIII.

From Wallace Ardith to A. L. Wibbert, Wottoma.

      NEW YORK, Dec. 19, 1901.

My dear Linc:

I have a misgiving that my letter of last night implied a sort of a slight for America Ralson which I certainly do not feel. She has lots of sense, and is as fine as she is frank in the things that become a girl. That is, she is not changed from what you knew, and if anything I wrote gave merely the impression of her physical beauty, it was unfair to her and disgraceful to me. I had no right to speculate about her society prospects even; they may be all she could wish, and still leave her time and place for kindness to me, unworthy. I never liked the Ralson money, but I must say that it seems to crowd my imagination less in New York than it did in Wottoma, and that in old Ralson’s civility to me last night I thought there was more personal friendliness than I had realized in him before. He is coarse, but he is not hard, and where there is any little question of his being good to his wife or daughter, he is not so coarse as at other times. These are the hasty conclusions of a man who has eaten his canvas-back and drunken his claret, and ridden in his electric. They might not stand the test of greater experience, but though I own that he is the sort of man born to make money, I do not believe he is altogether selfish, or at least that he is incapable of self-sacrifice where his loving, or even his liking lies. If he did not love you or like you no doubt he would be capable of another sort of sacrifice in which he would not figure as the offering.

As yet I do not know how many opportunities I shall have for studying him (he would be great material) for I do not know when I shall be living at the Wolhondia. The humiliating fact is, I have done the very thing I should not have done if I had not been more of an ass than I am willing to allow.

You remember old man Baysley, who used to come from Timber Creek up to Wottoma, in the infant days of Ralson’s Trust? Well, he is living now — he would say “residing,” and it’s hardly living — in New York where he has some employment from the Cheese and Churn Trust, and is as lonesome as a cat in a strange garret. As luck would have it, he was about the first human being out of two or three millions that I struck against when I got out of my train when I arrived, and he made me promise to come and see “the folks.” At the same time I promised myself that I would not do it, but in about a week I ran across him again and then I was in for it. He took me home with him “to supper” — they dine at twelve o’clock, just as they did in Timber Creek, — and Mrs. Baysley was so pitifully glad to see me, and the girls so proudly glad, that I was rather glad myself. I never really saw much of them at home, though I went to school with the girls when we were children; but country makes kind, and before I knew it, I was sitting before their radiator with them, swapping reminiscences, and making the old people laugh; such simple old souls, and so willing to laugh! The father and mother each confided to me how homesick the other was, and the girls said they did not think New York was half as nice as Timber Creek, to live in, though it would be a great place to come to, for a few weeks in the winter.

When I got up to go, Mrs. Baysley said, now father must show me the flat. But they all followed through it with me — six little boxes of rooms, counting the parlor and the girls’ bed-room portiered off it as two. The whole place was furnished with, their poor old Timber Creek things citified up, and their home carpets cut into rugs. They took me last into the “spare-room” at the back of the flat, and when the old lady let out that they really had more room than they wanted, for all the place seemed so small, and the old man looked anxious, and the girls hung their heads, the time had come for me to make an ass of myself, and I asked what was the matter with my taking that room. They made some decent demur, but not much, and we agreed on three dollars a week; and here I am, pretty far up on the west side of Central Park, about a block and a half from one of the gates, so that I can get in and meditate the thankless muse, as easily as I could from my hotel, where I was paying seven dollars a week for my room, without the sun, or the view of the neighborhood wash which I have here for less than half the money. The wash hangs from lines supported upon lofty flag staffs, behind the house, and it is very gay; if we are five flights up, still the halls and stairs are carpeted in a kind of blood-red tapestey brussels the whole way: Mrs. Baysley is very proud of that carpeting, though it is not hers. When I want to get in I touch a bell-button in the vestibule, and they free the latch by a sort of electric arrangement in their flat; but the old man promises me a latch-key when he can get round to it. When I’m late, he sits up and lets me in, and the girls keep breakfast for me long after he has gone down town next morning. I breakfast here, and browse about for lunch and dinner, and accumulate material. Now and then I take a turn at that Central Park incident of the lovers. I have tried it as an idyl, in hexameters, and as a Thackeray ballad, and I have tried it in prose; and it is getting as tough as a piece of bear’s meat which the more you chew it the more you can’t swallow it. But I don’t despair, and won’t, as long as you let me sign myself Your friend,

W. A.

IX.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

            NEW YORK, Jan. 10, 1902.

Well, mother dear:

I have got it! I’ve just sent you a telegram, (I knew they would make you pay fifteen cents for bringing it up from the station,) so as to take away the taste of my last two or three gloomy letters as soon as possible; and now I am going to tell you all about it. When I told you the failure of those two places, that I went to look at with Miss Hally, I was so down-hearted that I hardly knew what to do; I wanted to give up, and take the first train home, and try for a school again. But I used all the proverbs I could put my mind on, and I said my prayer when I went to bed, just like a little girl, and cried into my pillow like a big one, and woke the next morning as bold as brass. I went down town and put in a new advertisement setting forth my gifts and accomplishments, bought all the papers, and read their “wanteds” over my lunch at the Woman’s Exchange; and that night I got Miss Hally to go over them with me. We got a good deal of forlorn fun out of it, but not much encouragement, and then Miss Hally proposed a still hunt, as she called it. We put aside two or three selected wanteds that we decided to investigate and see if they were deserving; and Miss Hally said she would begin the still hunt at once, by writing letters to half a dozen different people who might or might not be looking for a prize of my description, and offer them a chance in the raffle. She said this sort of thing would take time, but the results, even if they were failures would be more satisfactory than the other failures we had made. She looked awfully tired, for she had been writing out a long story, as she called it — a biography-interview with a new English lecturess who has just come ashore — but she kindled up at the chance of killing herself for me, and when she put me out for the night she kind of held me off by both shoulders, and then pulled me up and kissed me, for luck, as she said. I was so overcome that I could not even shed a tear; I just gasped, and took it in frozen silence, like a true Lake Ridger.

It seemed to do as well as anything, though, so far as the luck was concerned, I got to thinking afterwards that perhaps it was not the right kind of kiss. The still hunt turned out as badly as the kind of gunning in the newspaper did when I first began to advertise, and when I felt as if everybody could see and hear me. Days, weeks, went by just as they do in novels when the author wants to skip; and yesterday I got word from the public telephone at our corner drug store that there was some one on the wire for me. You can bet, (or you could, if you ever did,) that I didn’t let the grass grow under my feet, either on the stairs down to the door, or in the street outside. Somehow I just knew that this time I was it; and sure enough I found it was Miss Hally on the wire. She was calling me from the Hotel Walhondia and she wanted to know if I could come right down, and I said I could come like lightning, and she told me to inquire for Miss Ralson and I would find her there too.

Well, I don’t know how I got to the hotel or how I lived through sending my name from the office, and then followed it; but before I wanted to be I was inside the Ralson apartment. Of course by that time I was in my usual frosty calm with strangers; but I tried to limber up enough to answer Miss Ralson’s questions, and to realize that Miss Hally was going away and leaving us to each other as soon as the questions began. She gave me a squeeze of the hand that said it was all right, and I felt how nice it was of her not to stay and hear that I wouldn’t do if I happened not to. Miss Ralson was pretty tremendous at first, and from time to time she was tremendous as we went on, but every now and then she broke down, and was not half so awful as I was. I think she saw that if she was to get at me at all, she would have to thaw me out to begin with. She asked me whether I had been to luncheon, and when I made out to remember I hadn’t, she said she thought we could talk so much better over a little lunch, and she ordered her maid to order it served to us there; and all the time she kept on talking, and now and then breaking into the largest kind of laugh. She has a head of dark red hair, and the bluest blue eyes, and white cheeks with soft pink in them, and she is built on the sky-scraping plan of the new girl, with shoulders and a neck to beat the band. I have got a fresh supply of slang from Miss Ralson, for after we cosied down to the lunch, she talked so much of it that I had to talk it too or seem impolite, and I was not going to do that. But she is business, every-time, in spite of her ups and downs of manner, and I can tell you she put me through my paces pretty thoroughly.

She said that they wanted me to be a companion to her mother, and read to her and amuse her any way I could when she and her father could not be at home with her. But they did not want me for that alone; she needed a secretary to write her notes, and keep track of her engagements, and to go with her where a chaperon was not exactly needed, but two girls would do. She asked me if I would just write her a little note, then and there, and say whether I liked the notion, and what salary I should expect; she must have talked that point over with Miss Hally, for she said I could mention twelve hundred if I liked. She put me down at her desk with some note paper, and went away to the window, while I struggled with the note, and she kept coming back to see if I had finished. When I had, she looked pretty hard at it, and compared it with some notes she had received, and then she said, Yes, that would do first-rate. She asked me if I was sure about the spelling, because she always spelt salary with two lls, and she offered to bet me what I dared that hers was the right way. We referred it to the dictionary leaves in her portefolio, and I won, of course, but we had forgot to say what we had bet, and so I didn’t win anything but the bet. She seemed perfectly delighted, and she said that if there was anything she did envy another person it was spelling; and now she felt sure of me, if I thought I could get along with her mother.

She took me to her mother in the next room, and introduced me, and I had a wicked pleasure in seeing that Mrs. Ralson was more scared than I was. She is a very small old lady, not the least like her daughter, and she began to question me about where I came from, and my family, and whether I was homesick, and didn’t I think New York was an awful place. I agreed to everything, and that seemed to cheer her up considerably, and she showed me the photograph of their house in Wottoma, Iowa, where they came from, and said it was considered the most beautiful “home” in the place. She pointed out the windows of her room, which Mr. Ralson had planned for her, and furnished himself, for a surprise, before she ever went into it, and she had never changed a thing. It was before they had formed the Cheese and Churn Trust, and always expected to live in Wottoma, but afterwards nothing would do America but to come to New York. That was better than Europe, anyway, where they had spent a year; and now Mr. Ralson had bought, up between Fifth Avenue and Madison, and they were going to build in the spring, and she supposed they should always live here, but she preferred Wottoma, herself, where you could have some ground around you, and everybody was neighborly.

Well, mother, it made me a little homesick to hear her go on, and I showed that I felt for her, and before we got through, we were old friends, and she said she knew we could get on together first-rate, and she would not work me too hard, and I must not let Make. Make was a good girl, but she was thoughtless, and wanted to be on the go the whole while. She got to talking of Miss Ralson by her nickname, (her whole name is America) and of her husband by his first name, and she was so helplessly humble and simple, that I was glad her daughter had gone out of the room, for I am afraid she would have checked her, and I wouldn’t have liked that. Mrs. Ralson is New England born, and I told her you were too, and then she seemed to think I was. I explained how Lake Ridge was settled from New England, and she said that if we were the same kind of people, it came to the same thing.

It is all as different from what I had planned, as could be, but I am not so sorry as I would have supposed. The Ralsons are not an old Knickerbocker family, with stately, highbred ways, and old mahogany sideboards and ancestral silver, but they will be, if they live here long enough; and I shall get on with them much better as they are at present. Perhaps an old Knickerbocker family would not have much use for me; and I shall have a better chance to grow up with the country here if I begin with an old Wottoma family. They may rot send me to Europe for my health, but I think they will let me go out to see you in May, about apple-blossom time, with a pocket full of money for the June interest. How thankful I ought to be, and how thankful I am! I am going to do everything I can to deserve my good fortune, and you need not be afraid to hear of my misbehaving! It is all settled that I am to begin earning my salary, with two lls, tomorrow. The arrangement is for me to keep on here with Miss Hally, and not to live with the Ralson’s, till they get into their house. When they keep me too late for me to get home alone, they will send me in their automobile or get me a room in the hotel. The way they don’t mind money, takes my breath away. After I got through with her mother to-day, Miss Ralson asked me how I would like to go shopping with her a little while, and in about two hours I saw her spend a thousand dollars. She bought anything she fancied, and some things that she didn’t fancy, as she found out later. But she said you could always exchange them, and if you couldn’t you could get rid of them somehow. It is a great thing to have a Cheese and Churn Trust for a father. I have not seen him, yet, but Mrs. Ralson says Miss Ralson is his “perfect image,” and they are just alike, every way.

I feel as if I had not said anything, and were horrid and unthankful, and I don’t know what all. But you musn’t. Tell Lizzie that if she is very, very good, I will let her have some of my old things as soon as I have any new ones.

With best love to you both,

FRANCES.

X.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

       NEW YORK, Jan’y 10, 1902.

You dear old fellow:

You really mustn’t print things from my letters, unless you want to take the frankness out of me. I can’t write to all Wottoma as ingenuously as I write to you; I can understand your grief at having my good things wasted on you alone, but I really can’t let you share my bounty with the public. If the Day people were to ask me for New York letters, and were to offer me decent pay for them, that would be something to consider — and refuse; for I am going to devote myself to pure literature here, at least till I starve at it; and I can’t let the Day have my impressions for nothing, or next to it.

I wish I had put them down, as I felt them, from moment to moment since I arrived, but perhaps they will be full enough in my letters; of course you will keep my letters, and let me recover them as material for my epic, later on. New York gains in epicality every day, and the wonder is that I don’t get familiar with it: I get more and more strange. The novelty of it is simply inexhaustible, and the drama of its tremendous being is past all saying. The other day, as I was walking up town after a cup of tea with the sumptuous America at her hotel, I struck into Broadway, and abandoned myself to the spectacle of the laborers digging the foundations for a sky-scraper at one of the corners. They had scooped forty or fifty feet into the earth, below the cellars of the old houses they had torn down, and were drilling into the everlasting rock with steam drills. A whole hive of men were let loose all over the excavation, pitching the earth and broken stones into carts, lifting the carts by derricks to the level of the street, and hitching the horses to them, and working the big steam shovels hanging from the derricks, and the engines were snorting and chuckling and the wheels grinding, and the big horses straining and the men silently shouting at them, — the whole thing muted by the streaming feet of the multitude, and the whine of the trolleys, and the clatter of the wagons, and the crash and roar of the elevated trains; and pretty soon, a mud-covered Italian ran out of the depths with a red flag, and the rest ran to cover, and puff! went a blast that tore up tons of rock, and made no more of a dint in the great mass of noise than if it had been the jet of white vapor that it looked like. Life here is on such a prodigious scale, and it is going on in so many ways at once that the human atom loses the sense of its own little aches and pains, and merges its weakness in the strenuousness of the human mass.

I suppose that is the reason why literature, as a New York interest, affects me less in New York than it did in Wottoma. I know here, as I knew there, that this is a literary centre, and now and then I catch a glimpse of authorship in the flesh. But either because the other interests dwarf the literary interests, or because literature is essentially subjective, it is, so far, disappointingly invisible and intangible. Some of the young fellows dine at Lamarque’s, and have a table to themselves in one corner, where they talk and smoke; but I don’t know any of them yet, and I haven’t quite the gall to make up to them. I suppose there must be literary houses where authors meet; but I have not begun to frequent them, and in my dearth of poets I try to make out with the poem which I find more and more in the personality of the divine America.

In fact, I am seeing a good deal of the Ralsons, these days; or they are seeing a good deal of me. I seem to represent home and mother to Mrs. Ralson, and she claims part of every call I make at the Walhondia for a terribly long talk about Wottoma; though, as for calling, I am mostly there by invitation to all the meals of the day, including supper after the theatre or opera.

America has set up a secretary for herself and a companion for her mother in the single person of a girl from western New York, somewhere, who does duty as a dragon when Ralson is away, or cannot be pressed into the service. She doesn’t look like a dragon exactly; in fact, with her shyness and brownness of hair and dress, she makes me think of a quail and its dead-leaf plumage; and she has a way of slipping under cover which I think would not be finally inconsistent with an ability to peck. To tell the truth, as nearly as I can make out on such short notice, the secretary-companion and I were born doubtful of each other; though I should be puzzled to say why. She seems, for reasons of her own, to look with a censorious eye upon America’s frank friendliness for me as something very mistakenly bestowed. This naturally puts me on my most cynical behavior; I say nothing but heartless things in the secretary’s presence; and if it goes on I shall turn out a hardened worldling, and be marrying America for her money before I know it. In view of this novel character, I do not understand how it is that the Mayor has not put me on the committee for the reception of Prince Henry. I think I could be guilty of a base servility that would satisfy the secretary’s worst expectation.

You must not, by the way, imagine that New York is as hysterical about the prince’s visit as the newspapers make her appear. Journalism, my dear Lincoln, I do not mind confiding to you, now I have left it, is feminine; it likes to talk, and to hear itself talk, and it does not mind what the topic is: it can be as shrill and voluble about one thing as another. But I assure you that between the morning and the evening editions, there are long moments when we forget the prince altogether and “Shouldn’t hardly notice it at all,” in the words of Dockstader’s latest song, if he forgot to come.

Yours ever,

W. A.

XI.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

             NEW YORK, Jan. 11, 1902.

My dear Margaret:

If it surprises you to find this post-marked New York, instead of London, I confess that it rather puzzles me to explain why I have no more taken the steamer for Liverpool than the train for Boston. I can merely say that New York has given me pause, which is the last thing one would expect New York to do. Three weeks ago I might have thought that I knew the place, but now I am not sure that I can more than conjecture it a little bit, or throw out a vague suggestion or two at it. I might analyze accurately enough, but the fancy of synthetizing has grown upon me, and to synthetize New York is impossible.

At least it is impossible for a Bostonian, of the Boston which, if it was as we believed it, is now certainly no more. We were (forgive the aoristic preterite; it is crueler for me than it is for you!) immensely, intensely, personal, and the note of New York is impersonality. If you wish to lose yourself, this is the shop; if you wish to find yourself, better go somewhere else. Our quality, and the defect of our quality, in that obsolete Boston, was from the wish to find ourselves, always. Here I feel resolved into my elements at times, in a measure which I do not believe would happen to me even in London or Paris. I am mere humanity; worse, I am mere mortality, as some one said of the people in Maeterlinck’s little mysteries, and I meet my fellow mortals in a sort of reciprocal dispersal; and yet, when I freely accept the conditions, the experience is rather pleasing. You will not believe it, or at least you will not believe it of me, and you could not acquire faith without coming here and staying rather longer than you are ever likely to do.

It is not that people do not talk of people in New York, but they do not talk of them in our way, as acquaintance from the cradle up, by their nicknames or pet names, with a constant sense of their lurking cousinship. There is of course, this sort of intimacy here, but it does not quite turn the sojourner out of doors. I have been to your Van der Doeses, and they have been hospitable, but they did not make me feel that I mattered. I did not wish to matter, and yet an expectation of that sort ought to be imagined. They were very light, as people of the old Dutch blood are apt to be (the Dutch Calvinism was so very different from our Puritanism!) and though they had the evidences of refinement about them, I had somehow a fear that they might any moment begin asking conundrums. I do not know how else to put it, and I am afraid my meaning will not be perfectly clear to you. Is it possible that there was something in the air of our elder Boston, breathed from the interstellar spaces where our lights of literature and learning, of poetry and philosophy shone so long, which penetrated our psychical substance as nothing of the kind has the New Yorkers’?

One curious experience as a Bostonian has come to me from these New Yorkers through their remote verification of the fact that we Bostonians are no longer so literary or philosophic as we once were. In that former time they imagined us lettered pedants or transcendantal cranks, and they laughed at their notion of us. Now they have somehow (their unintelligence is baffling) caught on to a change in us, and they no longer smile at our queerness; they no longer think of us at all; we suggest nothing to them. This is putting it rather crudely, and it is saying it in excess, of course, but a sad truth lies at the bottom of the well in which I hope this may not make you wish to drown yourself.

At the Van der Doeses’ I could naturally meet none but their own kind; but they have been retrospectively more attentive than they actually were, and they have taken me with them to several functions, and had cards sent me for others, where I have seen a greater variety of my fellow mortals. You know I never scorned those simple at-homes and teas which most men disdain, and now when dinners rather take it out of me, I have been going to afternoon receptions with more than my earlier ardor. I have had my reward, for I have met there some agreeable women (rather too shrieky; but the noise is great) and such men of aesthetic employment as business does not hold in its grip quite till dinner. At the house of an editor who has made so much money with his paper (The Signal; its name would say nothing to you; but it has been rather dreadful) that he is now in case to clean up, and who has begun by housing himself, on the East side, rather too magnificently, I found some Perennial men, the other day; and there was an author or two, as authors go in New York, and some painters who, as things go anywhere, are always more interesting than authors. We were not without actors, for it was not a matinée afternoon, and I saw in the flesh the prevailing actress, though in rather less of it than I had seen her on the stage. It was pleasant, or at least piquant; if I were to distinguish so closely I should say that New York always piques rather than pleases, and Boston — well Boston at least does not pique; and it was the more amusing because it was of that provisional character in which what one may roughly call celebrity rather than society played the chief part. The Van der Doeses felt obliged to account for their presence to some of their friends whom they met, and their friends were likewise exculpatory; you know what I mean. The celebrity was nothing to them, or rather worse; I do not care for it much myself, because it is tiresome; it does not know what to do with itself; and you do not know what to do with it; but there were people there who were all eyes and ears for it. There was a pretty boy (the boys are so pretty now, with their shaven faces, which make us eighteen-sixty fellows look so barbaric with our beards, even when they go no farther than an “educated whisker” or two) who told me afterwards that he was from Iowa, of all places, and teased me with the sense of having seen him before, somewhere. I can’t make out yet where it was, if it was really anywhere, but probably it was nowhere. He interested me past the vain quest by asking me when the prevalent actress had turned from me, whether it were she, and then rushed off to a large, flowery young woman — sun-flowery is not too much — and seemed to excite her with the fact as much as himself. Their emotion was so interesting that I did a thing I should not have done when I was under fifty. I followed him up and asked him if he would like to be presented, and the young woman to whom his eager eyes referred me, said, “She would give the world to,” and I led them up, and sacrificed them on the shrine of the amiable deity, who had instantly forgotten me, but received us as if we were her oldest friends. After her dispersing welcome, we rather had ourselves on each others’ hands, and following an interval in which we treated one another as veteran New Yorkers, we arrived at a sense of our common strangeness, and exchanged our geographical derivations. As the young woman said she had always wanted to see Boston, I could not do less than own that the disappointment of my life was never having seen Iowa. By and by, she asked the young man, who had naturally dropped out of the conversation, if he would not go and hunt up her father, and he presently came back with an old fellow so exactly of my years and of her looks that I had a difficulty in disentangling my consciousness from a tie of kindred. But my contemporary viewed me with an instant of suspicion which I had not experienced from his posterity. He asked, pretty stiffly, if she wanted to go, and she took a fonder leave of me than he. The Van der Doeses turned up in time to break my fall, and they had not quite finished asking me how in the world I had got hold of the Cheese and Churn Trust, when the father returned, with the air of having had it taken out of him by the sunflowery young woman, and said his daughter had been telling him how very kind I had been, and he wanted to thank me. He gave me his card, and when he went the Van der Doeses explained that this was the magnate whose financiering skill is going to embitter our bread to all of us who like butter and cheese with it, and sketched his social career in New York. It could be done briefly, because it had gone no farther than buying a lot worth its width in gold, to build on, and coasting along the shores of society. They added harrowing stories of Western millionaires who had failed to get in, and had gone to Europe to hide their sorrows in the bosom of the aristocracies there; but these Ralsons were inexhaustibly good natured, and the daughter seemed to know how to place the father’s money where it would do the most good. She had an instinct or an inspiration concerning the right sort of charities, and if she could find a foothold in Newport, the thing was done. They were very good-natured about it; New York is good-natured about everything; and they were not sorry not to despair of the Ralsons. They did not know who the pretty boy was; perhaps a reminiscence of pre-existence in Iowa (the terms are mine;) or a relation whom Papa Ralson was bringing up to inherit him in the Trust.

I may get very tired of all this. I may go to Europe or I may go to Boston, but if I stay, I shall certainly try to see the Ralsons again.

The excuse of this inordinate letter is that I have not written for so long before; but I will not be so long again. (I seem to be making a play upon words.) At any rate it will last you a day, if it is a day when you cannot go out in your chair. You see

I keep up with your convalescence; for Wally told me something about you, and made it easier for me to break my promise about writing you every week. But I won’t do it again — I mean, break my promise.

Yours affectionately,

OTIS.

XII.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

           NEW YORK, January 17, 1902.

Dear Linc:

I have not written for nearly a week, not because there was nothing to write, but because there was and always is only too much. I am one and New York is three or four millions, and she can beat me when it comes to a grapple. I want to tell you all about her, and how she gets me down and rolls me over, every time I go out of doors, but it is no use trying; her tricks are too many; she is Hildegunde, and I happen not to be Siegfried; or not so much Siegfried as I supposed when I first came here. If I were wrestling for some other fellow, I might do better, but I am in love with her myself, and more and more in love every day.

I am now seeing my beloved from the social whirl, so far as the Ralsons can drag me into the vortex.

Their hospitality continues beyond anything that merit, however modest, could have expected. It is so constant that I find myself getting critical of the cuisine at the Walhondia. In fact, Lamarque’s fifty cent table d’ hôte is better, in certain touches beyond the reach of art, in certain inspirations. Besides, at Lamarque’s the company is always more cultivated than it is at the Walhondia, and on very exceptional Fridays I have got bouillabaisse at Lamarque’s: the same bouillabaisse that Thackeray made his ballad about; at the Walhondia they never give you bouillabaisse, and I doubt if many of the guests ever heard of Thackeray. But there are worse things than ignorance of literature, and better things than bouilla-baissè and I manage to have a good time with the Ralsons at the hotel. I even think that I help them to have a good time, and I don’t find myself sorry or ashamed for it. You have to respect a man who has got to the top, and planted himself so squarely there as Ralson has, and America is the best fellow in the world. I take that back, if there is the shadow of slight in it: she is a good, whole-souled girl, and I hope she may get into all the society she wants.

In the meantime she isn’t worrying about whether she has reached the real thing or not. The other day they took me to an afternoon reception — or rather she did; her father came in later — at the editor of The Signal’s; a kind of housewarming that he was giving himself in the palace he’s just built, and I met more than four hundred delightful people, whether they were the four hundred that America is after or not. The most delightful of all turned out to be the charming old fellow whom I talked with in the Park the day I saw those unmanageable lovers of mine. The light of recognition faded into perplexity from the first glance he gave me, and I thought I would not press upon him the acquaintance which had evidently passed from his lax, senile hold; he proved even more satisfactory as a nice old Bostonian in whom I could not feel any menace of rival authorship. He was as old-school in his afternoon dress, as he was that day in the Park: very correct, with not just a New York correctness; but something more, and something less; it was as if his correctness were qualified by his intellectuality, which may make the Boston difference.

He wanted to talk, or to make me talk, of New York, and was gayly amused at my enthusiasm; he confessed he did not share it, but professed to be able to understand it, though I doubt if he did. I doubt if he quite grasped me as a product of the rolling prairie, but he did his best, and America seemed almost to take his mind off New York for a moment. Miss Everwort, the English actress was there, and he introduced us. When she got through with us, which she did in about half a second, as if we were so many seats in a house, not to be discriminated, he stayed chatting with Make and me, till some friends of his came up; Make told me afterwards they were the Van der Doeses, which means something supernal here. Miss Hally, the chief intervieweress of The Signal bowed to us from a distance, and he asked very eagerly who she was. Perhaps you will like to know, too, and I can tell you what I could not tell him, that she was much a type as he was. She is of a high old Southern family whose passive Unionism did not keep their fortunes from going down with the confederates’ in the Civil War, and after struggling along at home, putting up lady-like pickles and preserves for a reluctant market, she came North and went into journalism. When Casman took over The Signal, and began to clean it up, he asked her to join the staff, and that is why she was at his house the other day. She goes everywhere in the way of business, and is welcome to everybody either seeking or shunning publicity; for she is an artist and knows when to stop, or when not to begin. The Ralsons know her from her coming to make a story about Mr. R., shortly after their advent here, and they all like her, and help her in the little good turns her left hand does while her right is taking notes for Sunday stories. She got that combination secretary and companion for America and Mrs. Ralson, who has cast already the spell of her personality over the old lady, and the spell of her dictionary over the young one, and though she doesn’t like me, promises, I am bound to say, to be a great boon to both of them. I mustn’t let you get the notion that I am always on the society heights where you are now beholding me. If I spend my days there from one p m. to twelve a m. with the Ralsons, I dwell with the Baysley’s from one a m. till twelve m., in the valley of humiliation, and mostly curse the hour when I was fool enough to come here. They were poor enough before, but just now Baysley has the grippe and they all have their hearts in their mouths for fear he may lose his job if he is kept away from the office long. The old woman and the oldest girl are nursing him, and the youngest is looking after me. I found her waiting to let me in to-night, (or call it this morning,) for my door key hasn’t materialized yet; and when I said something decent about her father’s sickness she broke down and cried with her head on the table, so that I wanted to put my arms round her and comfort her. But I didn’t. She is pretty in a pale blonde way, and you must not put your arms round a girl to comfort her when she is pretty, and giveth her color in a pale, blonde way. I suppose she cried a little more confidentially with me because I got up and kindled the fire in the range for her this morning — or yesterday morning, it is now. She has been making my coffee, and broiling my bacon, since her sister detailed herself to help her mother look after the old man; and though she doesn’t do them so well as to make me anxious for either, I did kindle the fire for her, when I found she wasn’t awake at nine o’clock. You will say that was self-interest, but then you know I might have gone out and got a breakfast without smutting my hands. Which would you have done? I know you will say you would have made the fire, and I hope you would. It was rather amusing, and rather a touching experience, for it made me think how I used to kindle the fire for my mother at Timber Creek, before I went on to be a distinguished journalist in Wottoma. The poor, sleepy thing came in after I had got the range red-hot, and wailed out “Oh what did you do it for?” in a way that made the lump come in my throat. I am telling you of these squalid matters a 1:30 a m., with my dress coat still on, after getting home from the opera with the Ralsons, and gayly parting with Make and her father in their automobile at the door, which this wretched little Essie Baysley let me in at. Life is strange, my dear Linc, but as full of material as an egg is of meat.

Yours ever,

W. ARDITH.

XIII.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

        NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 1902.

Dear Mother:

I have been waiting till I could get warm in my place before writing again, and now I am not only warm, but I seem to be the centre of a life-giving heat for the whole Ralson family. This has its drawbacks. You may think it is easy to sit reading to Mrs. Ralson and cheering her up, and at the same time go out with Miss Ralson in her automobile to those semi-public functions where she needs a chaperon, and I do not need an invitation, only a ticket; but when it comes to the test, it is different. As for Mr. Ralson, I all but sew on his buttons: Miss Ralson seemed disposed, one while, to draw the line at mending his gloves, but she has since withdrawn it. They are all as good to me as they can be, and if I could ever love the daughter of a Trust, I should love Miss Ralson. I have gone back so far on my principles as to love the wife of a Trust, and she seems to reciprocate my passion. I have had to hear so much talk about the “beautiful home” in Wottoma, from her, that I begin to feel as if I had come from it, and I have made a picture of it from memory on the next leaf. You cannot see the Mississippi from Mrs. Ralson’s window, because it is not in the picture, but you could if you were in the room there, for the “home” stands on the bluff overlooking the river.

I am not the only pebble on the beach with the Ralsons, as Miss Ralson would say, or the only sun in the universe, as I should say. There is a young Wottoma man who comes to see them and seems to be a general favorite. Miss Ralson says he is “literary,” and has been disappointed, not in literature, but in love; and she is doing what she can to comfort him, by taking him out to teas, and matinées and operas, and giving him lunches and dinners here between times. The old folks are comforting him, too. Mrs. Ralson almost thinks he helped build the “beautiful home,” and he spells me with her when Miss America takes me out and talks to me about him. I don’t know whether I quite like his taking to comfort so kindly. He is very handsome and very pretty-behaved, but I thing a literary man ought to lit, sometimes, and I don’t see when Mr. Ardith does, unless it’s when he gets home from the opera, and ought to be in bed. He may burn the one o’clock oil, then, but he comes to lunch as blooming the next day as if he had not been sicklied over the least bit. I wouldn’t say it to everybody, but you’re a mother, or a sister if I include Lizzie, and I’m afraid Mr. Ardith is something of a social self-seeker, and has too good an appetite for the loaves and fishes. I don’t really know anything against him, and he’s always nice to me, and I’m quite ashamed, but that’s the way I feel about him. If you feel differently, don’t mind me!

The other day Miss Ralson came home from a tea with him, where they had met an old gentleman from Boston who seemed to take both their fancies. It seems that Mr. Ralson had been rather rough with the old Bostonian, and Miss Ralson made him go back and try to make it right, and Mr. Ralson asked him to call, and got a good going-over from his daughter for doing it, which he took as meekly as if he hadn’t a cent in the world. But it was not such a mistake after all, and yesterday afternoon Mr.

Binning’s card came up, and he after it. Nobody was at home but Miss Ralson and Mr. Ardith, and she sent him in to stay with her mother, and brought me out. She told him she was not going to have him hanging round, unless she could say he was a cousin, and she couldn’t conscientiously say any such thing; and she wanted me because I looked more proper, anyway. This Mr. Binning didn’t seem to think I did, but I could see that he didn’t know what to make of me, anyway, when she introduced him.

Mother, you’re such a purely country person that you won’t understand, but my presence said in much better English than I ever use, “Companion, or Secretary, or possibly Typewriter, or Provincial Friend, or Poor Relation, at the best;” and Mr. Binning was all the while trying to fit his behavior to one or the other or all of the possibilities. Every now and then he would say something to me so respectful that I could feel the consideration, and almost the compassion, sticking through, and before I could get off a half-frozen answer, he was switched onto the mainline after Miss Ralson. He had really come to see her, anyway, and I could see that he was perfectly struck up with her gorgeousness. She is gorgeous, and makes anybody else in the room look like thirty cents, as she would say; all the slang you find in my letters is from her. He was very cultivated and talked with her about Europe, and I don’t know what else, but especially pictures, I remember. I believe he led up to pictures, and got her to talking of the Titians, so that he could say he must have felt herself quite at home among them. Now, mother, this was where I fell down, (Miss Ralson’s expression) for I had to look in a cyclopedia at the Lenox Library to find out that Titian was a painter who mostly painted golden red blondes, and I didn’t know till then what Mr. Binning was driving at. But it was pretty when you got it, and Miss Ralson said it was one of the nicest compliments she ever had, when I explained it fully to her this morning. In fact he was as nice as he could be. He is very fine-looking, in an old family portrait way; we have been trying ever since to make out how old a family portrait he is. He is either preternaturally young or prematurely gray, and he is either exquisitely refined or inexpressibly rude. He brought the cards of some ladies of the name of Van der Does, which he framed in the most beautiful apologies for their not calling with him, and begged Miss Ralson’s acceptance of an invitation to a tea where there is to be a monologue by a famous monologuist. I shall never know exactly whether he made the invitation include me or not, but if it did it was so delicately done that I might have supposed that it didn’t.

It came quite at the end, and when he had gone Miss Ralson stood with the cards in her fingers, twisting them as if she were going to tear them in two, and getting redder and redder, till she was all over the color of her hair, and her blue eyes were like blue fire-works. Then she stopped, and opened her mother’s door, and called in, “Come out here, Mr. Ardith,” and when he came out she put the whole case to him. He didn’t hesitate a moment. “Why, go, of course,” he said. “It’s a semi-public thing, and you needn’t more than speak to your hostesses.” She ran toward him with her arms open as if she were going to hug him, and shouted out, “You good little worldly angel! You’ve been six weeks in New York and you know more about it already than I do after a year. But,” and this was where she seemed more disappointed than she had been offended before, “I almost wish it had been purely social.”

Mother, even the rich have to eat humble pie in New York, I can tell you. I can see that Miss Ralson is going to this function, as they call it, and I can see that this horrid Mr. Ardith wanted her to go because he saw that she wanted to go, and because he thinks he can get in with the Four Hundred himself. It fairly makes me despise him. She was ready to tear up the cards, if he said so, and fling them in the fire, and he ought to have been man enough to encourage her. She is a climber; they came here to get up; but such a fellow as this Mr. Ardith is a creeper and a crawler. Ugh!

Your affectionate daughter,

FRANCES

XIV.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

            NEW YORK, January 19, 1902.

My Dear Sister:

I am only too glad to respond to your curiosity as I find it framed in the fine doubts, the delicate sniffs, of your yesterday’s letter. I do not know that I can add new expression to the physiognimies of my fellow sojourners here, but perhaps I can treat the background so as to throw them into more significant relief.

You ask me whether these Ralson’s of mine (you are so good to give them me) are like certain types of the new rich who used to come on from the West to Boston in rather greater force than they do now, to see their sons through Harvard; and I must indefinitively answer, Not quite. They are Western and they are rich, but the sort of people you instance appeared among us on a semblance of the old duteous terms, which people like the Ralsons frankly ignore. They came among us because they believed, or made believe, that their sons could get through Harvard better with them than without them; and the fact that their presence proved to have nothing to do with the end in view, did not affect the moral elevation of their pretence. But people like the Ralsons come to New York simply because they have got too rich to stay at home, and because they think they can spend their money more agreeably here than where they made it. They come in numbers and variety unknown to our pastoral aforetimes, and without any stay in the St. Louises, the Chicagos, the Cincinnatis, the Pittsburgs, of their native regions. It is said that these provincial centres, which you might think would attract them for a winter or two, have not the social force, or the glamour of the unknown, or the charm of an incomparable grandeur. Boston itself has not this last, and they can come only to New York in the hope of getting their money’s worth of whatever they dream of buying here.

In a way their dream is sordid, but they are not always so sordid as their dream, and there is often an ingenuousness in their hope that touches. Some of them come without knowing a soul in the city, but trusting to the fortuities to bring them acquaintance; and they wait upon these with the patience of martyrs and heroes, or, rather, heroines: for it is not the men of their kind who have usually decided the family move on New York. The men might be satisfied to remain at home in the castles or palaces which they seem always to build in their first opulence, to over-awe the imaginations of their fellow-townsmen; but for their womenkind to be in, if they cannot be of, the metropolis, they leave their local supremacy behind, their great mansions, galleries, greenhouses, libraries of first editions, their whole undisputed state among people who envy if they do not revere them, and come here, and accept seats far below the salt at the second table or the third. They may not always know that they are not sitting in the best places, for there is a great deal of what is apparently society in New York, which is not the real thing, but which satisfies an ignorant aspiration as fully as if it were. The Walhondia for instance, looks like society; the fathers and husbands do not know the difference, and if the wives and daughters find it out, they say nothing about it beyond their family circles. At times, in fact, no one seems more on the outside of society here than another; that is, society itself seems to have no inside. If these newcomers do not find themselves in it, they may think that it is merely a mistake in regard to themselves; that they have been not counted in through accident. Coming here with their ten or twenty millions, they cannot disabuse themselves of the infatuation in which they have lived at home that they are persons of social consequence: they cannot imagine that there are native New Yorkers as rich as they, who are anxious to keep their riches unknown, and would not think it nice to be accepted on account of them; to whom the existence of the vulgar Four Hundred is a matter of supreme indifference; who figure in the society intelligence as little as possible.

But the new-comers are not all, or not altogether bad. My Ralsons are so far from altogether bad that they have a certain wilding charm, and if they can continue sylvanly themselves, they will be the fine fleur of the patriciate in a few generations. Their manner does not betray the delusion of so many parvenues that aristocrats are refined people, instead of being people who on coming into their social advantages have known how to keep the rude force of their disadvantages; whose cooks, coachmen and lackeys have, generally speaking, always had better manners, because they have been obliged to have them. My Ralson, for instance, is no better behaved now than he was when he was beginning to make his millions; he is probably not so well behaved, for then he was trying by every art, even by his notion of politeness, to get on; but now his native rudeness has already a kind of authority, and in his presence I am amused by a forecast of distinction in him which society will recognize later. In the meantime he is himself, for good or bad; he is not afraid to be anything that he really is. If he is repulsive in his savage sincerity, he is no more to blame than his daughter, who is alluring in her savage sincerity, and is so much like him in nature that I am always wondering she is not like him in character. They are both prodigiously simple, and their common satisfaction in that pretty literary youth of mine who is always with them, greatly commends itself to my fancy. With whatever dreams of the jeunesse dorée the daughter may have come to New York it would seem as if she had wakened from them to a delight in him which her father shares, because he is used to deferring to her in matters of taste, and perhaps because he secretly thinks that literature is something the pretty youth will outlive, when he can be eventually worked into the business; for my Ralson is business, “first, last, and all the time,” as he would say, and never so much business as in his abeyance to his daughter.

What the pretty youth thinks of them in his heart, or in that place where the literary soul has its being in the literary man’s frequent defect of heart, I do not know. He may not feel their difference from himself, so much as I see it, or he may perceive it as material for future literature. No doubt he is as business in his way as Ralson in his other way. At any rate he has come to New York in obedience to the same law of metropolitan attraction that has drawn the chief of the Cheese and Churn Trust. This law, if it was once operative in Boston is no longer so. I think we were once a capital, the capital of New England, but since New England has become more and more lost in the United States, we have ceased to be a capital. We may still be Athens, but we are not the Athens of Socrates, of Pericles; if Athens at all, we are the Athens of the middle or later Empire, whither the young men of generous ambitions resort for culture, but not for the fulfillment of their dreams of a literary career. We are no longer the literary, as we are no longer the commercial or the social metropolis, and the young Ardiths of the land (the youth’s name is Ardith) would no more think of coming up to us than the old Ralsons.

I am not sure that I have given you the notion of these people which lay so clear in my own mind; I am afraid that I have confused it even there a little; and I am not sure that I can be more convincing about their relation to each other, than about their several psychologies. But I think there can be no cloud in Miss Ralson’s mind, whatever vagueness there may be in the pretty boy’s; and when she makes it plain that she wants him, neither he nor her father will keep her from having him. It may seem to you a very insufficient outcome of her social aspirations — her father really has none, being purely commercial, though I do not mean by this that outside of his business he is immoral — and yet I cannot help thinking it would be very well. I wish I could make you see it as I do, for I should like you to enjoy with me a genuine New York idyl like this. As a mere witness of the affair, I have all sorts of tender perturbations, hopes, misgivings, desires, and at times, a rich potentiality of unhappiness in it. I am not sure that the youth is so consciously in love as the maiden, but I have been given to understand that in things of this kind both sides cannot be active, and I do not know why the youth should not be passive, sometimes, instead of the maiden. It adds a pleasing poignancy to the situation, and though the material is not that which I should once have fancied interesting me, I am now aware of a certain charm in it which I wish I could impart. But you, Margaret, are still in and of Boston, and I am in New York, liberated to the enjoyment of social spectacles which you could only view with abhorrence. If you tell me you cannot taste my pleasure in the loves of a young Western journalist and the daughter of one of the most offensive, and perhaps mischievous of the modern trusts, I shall not be hurt, but I shall not press my pleasure upon you. In fact, I am not sure that at my age I can altogether justify it to myself. We will suppose it is a book about some very commonplace people which I had liked for not very definable reasons, but which I will not insist upon lending you unless you urge me.

OTIS.

XV.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

                  NEW YORK, Jan. 17, 1902.

My dear Linc:

My letter of the 14th, which has crossed yours, must have given you much of the polite information you seek; but I will try to be a little more specific. The great difference between New York and Wottoma, is quantitative. Most Americans are like most other Americans, whether they have been here two hundred years or twenty, and the New Yorkers have the advantage of the rest principally in being here to the number of two or three millions instead of ten or twelve thousand. Take Wottoma, as a means of comparison. Well, when some high-born dame of yours, say a Daughter of the Black Hawk War, gives an afternoon reception in honor of some weary lecturer on South High Street, most of the ladies come on foot; at the outside you can count up ten or a dozen vehicles at the front gate, including family carryalls, and measly old third-hand hacks from the depot. The men all walk, and when they get inside they find the middle-aged and married women packed round the lecturer, trying to catch the well-worn pearls of wisdom that drop from his lips, and the young fellows carrying tea and chocolate from the tables where the young ladies are pouring, and doing their best to flirt a little on the way without spilling the fluids. The girls are willing enough not to be “presented,” and are having as good a time as they can among themselves in circles that it takes all a fellow’s courage to break into; and they try to act as if he were intruding when he does, or he feels as if they were. The old fellows hulk round on the outskirts, and keep a good deal on the front porch, and look superior and sarcastic. In all, there are about two or three hundred, and that takes in the whole society of the place.

Well, at this reception of Casman’s the other day, there were carriages stretching from his house to the ends of the block both ways, on both sides of the street, and coming and going all the time — all kinds of horse and horseless vehicles, glitteringly new and authoritatively old, with footmen and coachmen on the boxes, sitting on their overcoats like in the English illustrations, the footman with his hands on his knees, and the coachman holding the reins in one hand, and the butt of his whip on his thigh with the other. The people were streaming in and out, a steady current, under a long canopy from the curbstone to the door, and the barkers, as they call them, giving the coachmen their numbers when they came, and yelling out their numbers when they went. I suppose there were four or five thousand men and women at that reception, but after you got inside the house was so big that everybody had room. A desultory Hungarian band was modestly tucked away somewhere among the tubs of palms and banks of flowers, where it could be heard and not seen; and after you had got your hat and coat check, and joined the ladies of your party, and been inspected by old Casman and his sister-in-law, and been presented to his niece, and asked if you had met Miss Everwort, and told, Well, you must; you sidled off with your ladies, and looked round to see if you knew any one, and pretended to be glad you didn’t; and talked to America and her companion as vivaciously as if you had just been introduced. Then you asked them if they were not hungry, and when they owned up, you found them the way into the dining room, where a lot of men waiters were in charge, and you ordered anything you wanted, and they brought it to you. Everywhere were hundreds of people, looking like half a dozen in the big spaces, and all having the same good time you were. Then you went back to the drawing room to try for a glimpse of Miss Everwort, and if you had our luck with that nice old Bostonian, you were presented to her, and came away feeling that you had had the time of your life, among the five thousand if not the Four Hundred.

Of course, Casman had overdone it a little; he is new to the world, though he has been in it about sixty years; but his reception wasn’t a bad type; and you were excited by it, and leaned forward in the automobile, and flirted with America so far as to ask for a flower out of her bunch of violets, and tried to smell it, when she gave it to you, under the cold eye of the companion; the old gentleman, after a talking to America gave him for being rather curt with our nice old Bostonian, seemed to think he would rather walk. Yes, it was all mighty interesting, and I could feel it taking on just the right phrases, at the time. It was the best kind of material, but not socially the finest, though I don’t know whether I could make you understand the difference between that Afternoon, and another Afternoon, which my fine old Boston cock got us asked to yesterday at the Van der Doeses, whom he seems to be on familiar terms with. We couldn’t make out what the occasion was, but the excuse was a monologue by Miss Crawford; and I wouldn’t want a better excuse! It was the most exquisite piece of characterization I could have imagined; I never saw, or dreamt of seeing, anything like its perfection; and after it was over, a little well-bred murmur, and a little tender tapping of finger-tips ran round the room, and then the host and hostess went inconspicuously up to the monologuist — the wonderful little genius! — and inaudibly complimented her; and tea began to come round of itself, somehow. I did not know but America had made a break with that laugh of hers, but I guess not. The note of those people seemed to be doing what they pleased, if they had known what; and I suppose they would have laughed if they had felt like it; but if it wont appear invidious to such an aristocrat as you, I will say that they hardly seemed up to the art of the thing as the people at Casman’s would. Our old Bostonian was, though, and he asked America if she would like to speak to Miss Crawford, and he got Mrs. Van der Does to introduce her; and America took both her hands into hers, and I looked away for fear she was going to kiss her.

Now, what I mean by the quantitative difference between New York and other places, is that these two sorts of things keep going on here all the time, the Casman sort and the Van der Does sort, on a scale that you simply can’t imagine in Wottoma. You can have the Casman sort once in a winter, but of course not the Casman size, when the right lecturer comes along to make it with; and you have got the root of the Van der Does sort in the first settlers, which will break out a hundred years from now, maybe, like a century plant, but here the century plant blooms every day. Understand? No, you wont, you can’t! You will have to come here and see for yourself; and that makes me want to tell you something. Don’t give it away, especially in print, till I’ve tried my hand; but old Casman sent for me the morning after his reception, and asked me how I would like to do something for the Sunday Signal. I guess Miss Hally had been putting up a job on him, and he had got the idea that I could write, say, “The Impressions of a Provincial,” giving a simple, frank account of New York, from a fresh country arrival’s point of view, that would sweep “this fair land of ours” from ocean to ocean. I took to the notion, at once, and I am going to make the effort. It will give me a chance to work in the material that has been piling up on my hands since I came, and I believe I can do something that will plant me at the feet, at least, of George Ade, if I can get the right attitude; I’m going to invent a character for my provincial. And then, Linc, don’t you see? If I’m ever in the saddle, here, I am going to pull you up behind. If New York can’t carry double, I am very much mistaken.

The grippe still hangs on with poor old Baysley, but we manage to rub along, somehow; the old lady and Jenny have got it, but they are light cases. I still make the fires for Essie, though I feel as if I were kindling them with the budding laurels from my own brow.

Always yours,

Linc.

W.A.

XVI.

From Miss AMERICA RALSON to Miss CAROLINE

        DUCHENES, Wottoma.

THE WALHONDIA, January the nineteenth, Nineteen hundred and two.

My dear Caroline:

I am so glad you think you can come, and I will try to make a date for you — the earlier the better. I would have written sooner to say so, but I have had more on my hands than usual, as you will see by this being in typewriting. I will have to talk it over with father, and see what his engagements are. March is not a very good month, on account of being nearly all Lent, this year, but if you do not mind having rather a quiet time, it will be all right.

Thank you for the hint. I supposed it was off for good, but I see no reason why you should not try to have it on again, if you wish. There has been no allusion to the matter, since the first time, and I don’t know just how the land lies. I should say that your engagement had been accepted as final, and that the announcement to the contrary had better not come through me. If you prefer, you can let things rest, till you come on, and then you can look the ground over for yourself. I don’t see how there can be any objection to a girl’s changing her mind once or twice if she wants to.

Do let me hear from you soon again, and if you are still decided to come in March, I have no doubt that I can arrange for your visit then as well as later. The great thing is to have you here.

Yours affectionately,

AMERICA RALSON.

XVII.

From W. ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

          NEW YORK, Jan’y, 19, 1902.

Dear Linc:

This afternoon when I got home from a matinée with America Ralson and Miss Dennam, I found the Baysley family very much cheered up. The old gentleman had taken a decided turn for the better, and Jenny and the old lady were able to be about, helping Essie get the “tea” which I knew was to be their evening banquet. My heart smote me when I thought of the dinner I was going down to have at Lamarque’s, and I would have been glad to ask the whole family to join me there; but that was not practicable, and so I compromised on Essie. “What is the reason you can’t go with me to Lamarque’s this evening?” I said, as if we had talked before of her going with me sometime, though we never had; and the joyful color flushed up in her face and faded out, and she answered with another question, “What do you mean?” In answer I merely added, “Then we could take in a vaudeville show, and still get home early.”

“I couldn’t leave,” she said, and she put the plate she was holding softly down on the table, as if it were her last hope, and sighed so pathetically that I saw I must carry the thing through. “You might ask,” I suggested. “Or no, I will,” and I called into the kitchen from the dining-room where we were, “Mrs. Baysley, Essie says she won’t go with me to dinner at Lamarque’s, and to Keith’s afterwards. Can’t you make her?”

“Oh, you awful” — Essie began, catching her breath, but the joke was so prodigious that none of them were proof against it. When her mother made sure that I was joking in earnest — the Baysley’s think I am a tremendous joker — she said, “Why, of course Essie must;” and then Jenny began to offer Essie her best clothes; and between refusals and protests, and laughs and outcries from the women, and feeble crows of command from the old man in his room, Essie was forced to drop everything, and do as I bid.

They did get her very tastefully together, and in such good time that when she came to me in the parlor, with her mother and sister following limply but proudly after her, I was disposed to linger over her sympathetically as long as they liked. It is astonishing how soon women take on New York in their dress when they come here. Mrs. Baysley told me that these were just the girls’ old Timber Creek things; they had been too busy since they came to get anything for anybody. But it was Timber Creek with the difference that comes from studying the fashions on the streets and in the shop windows here.

Essie is too little to look distinguished, but no one is too little to be chic, and chic was what the eyes at Lamarque’s said of her when she showed like a pretty flower through the rifts of the cigarette smoke: the smoking goes on straight through the dinner at Lamarque’s. Those cub authors were out in force at their corner table, and between their talk about themselves and each other, I knew from the way they stared at us that we were giving them a topic. Every fellow there was making mental note of us, and heaven knows how many poems, sketches, studies and stories Essie went into on the spot. I laughed inside to think how I had got the start of them all, and how none of them saw us more objectively than I did, or felt our quality as material half as intelligently. I tried to make Essie understand who they were, and appreciate their greatness; but she was unconscious as a child through everything. Of course a child is not unconscious of its looks or its behavior, and I knew that she knew she was pretty and was anxious to be very correct. She peered round to see whether she should take her hat off, and then kept it on, as if she had dined at Lamarque’s all her life. The lady at the next table had her gloves on the table, and after the soup came I saw Essie’s gloves under the edge of her plate. The garçon — he knows me and my French and flattered me and it with a smiling “Bonsoir, monsieur,” that made Essie’s blue eyes dance — asked whether I would have red wine or white, and when it came white, as I had ordered, I offered to pour it into Essie’s glass, and I saw her tremble as she gasped out, “Oh, do you think I’d better?” I said, “Well, it isn’t very good,” and I put the cork back into the bottle for both of us, and I could feel her heart lighten of the misgivings that the wine had burdened it with. She began to be innocently gay, and to let out that she had noticed everything, and taken in that we were dining in the front parlor of what had been a private house, and that the other dining-room was the back parlor, and the wall-paper had not been changed since the family had left the place. She kept down her surprise at the alertness with which we were served, and she took Lamarque’s personal intervention, in the matter of crowding in a table for new-comers where there was already scarcely room to turn around, as things of a life-long experience, and she helped me receive with dignity the old fellow’s compliment when he visited us to hope that we found everything right. At first she was not going to speak of the food, but I spoke of it and then she was very glad to be allowed by politeness to praise its variety and novelty. I knew she had never seen a dinner in courses before, but she went through it as if it were her habit, keeping an eye on me to see what I liked or left, and following suit. I could see she was anxious not to disgrace me, in any way, and I made it easy for her now and then to pass a dish that she did not want, by saying that I never cared much for that dish. It was not a bouillabaisse night, and I pretended to be very sorry for that; but it was an ice-cream night, and I could see that when the small flat block of chocolate and vanilla came, Essie was without a regret. Over the little cups of coffee she began to betray that she had been noticing the company, and she gave an excellent imitation of being supremely interested in my favorites: the old Spaniard, or old Italian, who always gets half way through his dinner at a small corner table before he is joined by a deeply hatted lady and her husband coming freshly in from the cold outside, and pressing about the grate at their backs till they forget it in their criticism of the dishes; the prematurely grayhaired and eye-glassed lady whom I call my Mystery, and who eats all through her dinner with a book propped open against a tumbler; the middle-aged French mother with her daughter still in short skirts and very jeune fille, whom she lets see nothing except out of the corners of her eyes, but gives half a bottle of Lamarque’s California claret, while the girl sits demure, and does not speak even when Lamarque comes up to compliment her mother in their native tongue.

I looked at my watch at last, and said, If we expected to get in many of those stunts at Keith’s! and Essie started nervously, and then controlled herself and let old Lamarque help her on with her jacket (he likes to help the ladies on with their jackets) as unconsciously as if she were used to it every night. She bowed silently to his “Bon soir, madame!” and went out before me so gracefully, so prettily, that happening to look back over my shoulder at the cub authors’ table, I saw them all staring their admiration, and one fellow bowed involuntarily. “Do they know you?” she asked, and then I reflected that a girl always has eyes in the back of her head, and need not seem to be turning round to see what concerns her. I mumbled something about its being the custom for people to bow at Lamarque’s to the parting guests; but I was easily more rattled than she was.

In fact, her ignorance of the world that she has been living on the edge of for the last six months is so untroubled that everything but the innocent joy of our night’s adventure was lost upon her. She is scarcely more than a child in years, and she is still a child in nature, so that I could give her this pleasure as safely as if she were ten years old; and I decided not to do it by halves. The gorgeous old fellow in livery who stands before Keith’s and owns up when you put him on his honor, said there was not a seat left in the house, and her face fell; but I asked coolly, “What is the matter with a couple of box-seats?” and he confessed that there might be some box-seats; I could try inside. So I blew in two extra half dollars, and before Essie knew it we were in the stage-box rapt in the monologue of the Man in the Green Gloves.

I won’t go through the whole list of standard stunts: the girl with the Southern accent that sings pathetic ballads of the lost cause, and then coon songs for her recalls; the tramp-magician that praises and blames himself with “Oh, pretty good! oh, pretty rotten!” the tremendously fashionable comedy sketch, all butlers and footmen, and criss-cross love-making between Jack and some one else’s wife so as to cure Jack’s wife of making love with the other lady’s husband and convince her that there is nobody like Jack; the Viennese dancers, and the German acrobats and acrobatesses; the colored monologuist, and the man in a high hat and long overcoat, unbuttoned to show his evening dress, who balances feathers on the point of his nose and keeps a paper wad, an open umbrella and a small dinner bell tossing in the air: they were all there and more too, and nothing that any of them said or did was lost upon Essie Baysley. I could see her storing it up for the family’s joy at second hand; and she did not give herself away by any silly outcries or comments. She bore herself like a lady; if not like a real lady, then like an ideal lady; she watched the stage with one eye, and me with the other, and after she had taken a modest fill of these pleasures, she asked me the time, and said she ought to be going, for she did not want to leave them alone very long.

She meant the other Baysleys, and would not let me stop for ice-cream on the way home, and then was penitent and apologetic for not thinking I might have wanted it very much. As a study she was charming, but in and for herself, a little of little Essie I found went a long way; and an evening of her conversation did not end prematurely at half past ten. I delivered her over intact to her mother and sister, waiting up for us, without so much as claiming at the foot of the stairs the kiss that Timber Creek usage would have entitled me to. In fact I forced down the ghost of a silly apprehension about myself and the child which I had felt, off and on, ever since she broke down and cried that night when I condoled with her about her father’s sickness, and the trouble they were all in. I had given her the time of her life, and heaven had kept me from saying or doing anything to mar it. I had done the whole hapless family the greatest pleasure that they had had since they came to New York, and made them feel, as the old man, wakeful with the rest, croaked out from his sick room, like they were back in Timber Creek again. Their gratitude cost me just $3.50, counting in carfares and the fee to the waiter at Lamarque’s, and I call that cheap. I don’t exactly see how the experience will work into the “Impressions of a Provincial,” unless as an episode of Bohemia, or something of the sort, but it is pure literature as it lies in my mind, and I lend it to you, my dear Lincoln, for your exclusive enjoyment till I can get a scheme that will carry it to the public.

Yours ever,

W. A.

I find a note here from the glorious America, reminding me of my promise (I never made any!) for the opera Monday night. I am to dine at their hotel first, she tells me.

XVIII.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge, N. Y.

        NEW YORK, Jan. 19, 1902.

Dear Mother:

This has been “my busy day” with Miss Ralson, and Mrs. Ralson has not been in it for a moment. It has lasted for a good while, and I have just now got home after dining at the hotel, and talking over with Miss Ralson the matinée we were at this afternoon. That is, I talked of the matinée, and she talked of Mr. Ardith, who went with us. He came on here, you know, in December to put his broken heart together; and now it seems that the girl who broke it is sorry she did it. At any rate she has disengaged herself from the man that she jilted him for, and is feeling round to see how she can get Mr. Ardith back. This is the short of it, but the long of it is much more exciting, and I wish I could give it to you. As Miss Ralson says, it would make a book, and I am not writing a book. I am not sure that I ought to be writing this letter, but I know that you will be as silent as the grave, and so I will keep on.

The joke is that before Miss Ralson knew anything about the disengagement she had asked the girl here to visit her; they are old friends, and she was very cordial, but to-day I have written a letter for her, taking back a good deal of the cordiality, and a little of the invitation; and if you can’t guess why, you are not the mother I took you for. Mr. Ardith seems to have been here, day in and day out, ever since he came to New York, and he has not had to push in. There! I will say that much, and I am ashamed of saying anything. If I add that there is no accounting for tastes, and that if Mr. Ardith was the Last Man, I would take my chance with the next, you can understand how I feel about it. Of course I keep a straight face, and when Miss Ralson takes ground so high that no personal feeling can be supposed to be up there with her, I don’t do anything to let her dream that I am on, as she would say. It is no business of mine if she wants to throw herself away; only if she does I suppose I shall be out of a job.

And I had begun to like the job, so much! Yes mother, your bad little girl finds life in the Walhondia very, very comfortable, and if there were no money in the job still it is so comfortable that she could not bear to have it stop. Besides, I do like the Ralsons, the whole family, and I don’t know but my affections would go round the whole Trust. They are good people; even the wicked father is good in his way; and as for the mother, well, I won’t say you haven’t some cause to be jealous. She depends upon me so much that perhaps she would want me to keep on here, after her daughter left off; but I’m afraid I should be so heartbroken I couldn’t stay.

I got my envelope, as the wage-earners say, this evening, and I enclose the pleasing contents to you. I don’t suppose you will want to anticipate the interest, and I certainly don’t want to give old Grottel any agreeable surprises. But my first earnings were news too good to keep. They may be my last, so be careful of them. If Miss Ralson asked me my honest opinion of Mr. Ardith, and pressed me to give it, I am afraid I should, and that would settle me. With love to Lizzie,

Your affectionate daughter,

FRANCES,

XIX.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. LINCOLN WIBBERT, Wottoma.

            NEW YORK, Jan’y 20, 1902.

My dear Linc:

I wish, while it is fresh in my mind, that I could give you a notion of my whole evening, as a pendant for you to hang on memory’s wall with the picture of Bohemian life which I painted for you in my last. This has in fact been another episode of Bohemian life as far as I’m concerned, and in a kind of way — a more expensive way — the Ralsons are gypsying here, too. Perhaps even our ancient Boston friend has broken bounds in our company, and is secretly outlawed along with us; though as far as looks go we were all as absolutely conventional as any party in the boxes of the opera to-night.

Apparently the party was made for him, and I was asked to meet him at dinner, either from the social poverty of the Ralsons, or because I am social riches, which they chose to lavish on him with the gilt-edge victuals and drink. I leave you to decide the question, as old Ralson himself would. He was rather pressed into the service of America, and he did not go beyond looking the part of indulgent father, and munificent host. He had one of the best tables, especially decorated for the occasion, with the costliest floral exhibit that money could buy, and served by several of the handsomest and most exorbitant slaves, under the eye of their chief who kept it vigilantly out for them from any quarter where he happened to be. In that vast, indiscriminate splendor, Ralson had bought himself as much personal attention as he could have got at Larmarque’s for fifty cents; but having achieved the distinction, he rested in his dignity of host, and let his daughter manage the talk. I must say, he looked the part of an old barbaric aristocrat to perfection, with his long white mustache sweeping across his face, and his white hair snowily drifted on his head. I hope I am not indiscreet in saying that America’s shoulders dismayed me with their marble mass; I ought to be used to them by this time, but to-night they seemed to me a fresh revelation of her beauty.

I will not specify my own share in the ensemble, but together I think we gave an imitation of people who had always been in the habit of dining in that state and going to the opera afterwards, which ought to have imposed upon even such an old worldling as Mr. Binning. I do not know how far he divined us; in the talk between him and Mr. Ralson which I caught, I heard him gently offering the old fellow opportunities of self-interpretation which I do not believe were all wasted. They even left him exhausted in one sense if not another, and America promptly rescued Mr. Binning from his silence, and turned him over to me, with a trust in my ability to take care of him in conversation which I hope was not mistaken. I would rather have talked with her, to be honest, but I was not going back on her.

I believe the old fellow enjoyed every moment of it, but for us it was work; and it was work between the acts at the opera, where we renewed the struggle with fresh vigor. There is no use pretending, my dear Lincoln, that there is any common ground except mortality between youthfulness and elderliness; they can be a little curious about each other, but not interested after that little curiosity is satisfied. The best time of our evening was once when Mr. Binning went out to call on some friends of his in one of the boxes, and Mr. Ralson went out, as he did at the end of every act for something to support him through the next. Then America became suddenly psychological, and asked me what I thought all that display was like. She meant the necks and arms and dresses and jewels, and the black and blond heads, and the blur of faces, which the opera glass distinguishes and the eye leaves in a shining nebulosity. Of course I said, “Like a terraced garden of flowers,” but she answered, “No, like a glorified confectioner’s,”; and I had to own that with the weak, pale tones of the house decorations and the electric lights accenting the prevailing pinks and whites, and the golden and glassy surfaces of the women, and all the sharp variations of light colors, it was of the effect of candy. Then she rather astonished me by bursting out: “Huylers, Huylers! chocolates, and peppermint candies, and ice-cream sodas! And I am getting sick of it all! Those people seem to be willing to live on sweets, but I should like a few morsels of plain humanity, shouldn’t you?” I suggested that those would be cannibalism for me; and she said “Oh, pshaw! you know what I mean,” and without any act of transition, she said she would like to know what I really thought of her, anyway. I ventured to say, “Everything!” and that made her laugh, but sadly; and she said she hoped no friend of hers supposed she cared for the kind of life she had been leading, or trying to lead. Then again she leaped the chasm and demanded to know how I would like to be like Mr. Binning, at his age; she supposed he was intellectual, too. “If I could write poetry,” she zigzagged on, “I should write a poem about such a thing as this, where everybody is playing a part, as much off the stage as on it, and try to show what each one really was thinking, all the time. “A sort of masque,” I suggested, and she said, “I don’t know what a masque is,” and just then Mr. Binning came back, and began to make his neat, apt remarks about the opera. It was Tristan und Isolde, and he said he was of the age of Italian opera himself, and a thing like this made him feel as if he had outlived his youth, “Which people wouldn’t suspect, otherwise,” he concluded.

He seemed to have felt the hardship of having his flow of soul dammed up in him where he had been. But I wished he had stayed away longer, for that revelation of America was precious. There was a little more of it when we had dropped Mr. Binning at his hotel after the opera, and I could see her kick her revered father on the shin with her slipper; Mr. Binning’s going had left us both on the seat in front of her. “Don’t you wish you were back in Wottoma, old gentleman?” she asked, and when he grunted that New York was good enough for him, she said, “Well, I do.” She rather snubbed me when I offered some excuses for the metropolis, and said, “Oh, yes, it’s all copy for you.” (She has got the word from me, I suppose.) At the hotel she jumped out and ran over the carpeted pavement toward the door, as if she were not going to bid me good-night, and then she whirled round, and caught my hand in her large clasp. “Are you coming to lunch tomorrow — with Miss Dennam?” I answered mechanically, I supposed so, and she said, “Well, see that you do,” and wrung my hand, and ran on again, while her father smiled under one side of his mustache, and winked a sleepy eye at me.

As I understand it, what this wink expressed was nothing personal to me, but only something to the effect that America was doing exactly what she pleased; it recognized that she always had done so, and could be trusted always to do so, and still to do the right thing. It gave me the sense of a sublime faith in her on his part, which was to the credit of both, and it made me like the old fellow better than I have. I don’t know that I have disliked anything but his money, or rather the way he got it; but even that looks less baleful in the light of his wholesale love for such a wholesouled girl. There is growth in that girl; she can think as well as feel, and I begin to respect her mind as well as her nature, which is laid out on the largest scale. You are not to imagine that there is anything but the most dispassionate appreciation in this. I have had my medicine, and I am cured.

Yours ever,

W. Ardith

XX.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

                 NEW YORK, Jan. 21, 1902.

My Dear Sister:

Your letter found itself punctually at the Perennial, this morning, when less punctually I found myself at my nine o’clock breakfast there. It added the fragrant aroma of your spirit to that of my coffee, and the joint stimulus ought to be sufficient for the pleasing task of answering it as instantly as you require. But if, at this pleasant window overlooking two miles of woodland in the Park, I fail of the responsive inspiration, blame not me, but the hospitalities of my Ralsons, which began last night with dinner, and ended with opera. As you hardily deny and disclaim any interest in my generalizations concerning their kind, and desire only my personalizations concerning them, and more specifically her, you will perhaps forgive them for getting so promptly into the excuses with which every letter ought to open.

As nearly as I can understand, the affair was made for me, in recognition of some civilities of mine, and if they added my young friend from Iowa — I forget whether I have ever said his name was Ardith — it was no more from Miss Ralson’s wish to have him for herself than from her desire to save her father and me from each other. The mysterious Mrs. Ralson is so invalided as never to appear within my social ken, and the Trust himself is not of a conversation that holds out long in my quarter. He early decided that I was intellectual, I think, and with the admirable frankness of his class, he conceived of me — no doubt in a delicate compliment to your sex, — as a kind of mental and moral woman, to whom a real man, a business man, could have nothing to say after the primary politenesses. I do not know why he should rank me below Mr. Ardith, as I feel he does, unless it is because Mr. Ardith is still young enough to be finally saved from intellectuality, and subsequently dedicated to commerciality. But in the meantime he seems to have agreed with his daughter that the interposition of this nice boy’s mental substance was our only hope against wearing upon each other. The boy himself seemed to have the same inspiration, and Miss Ralson and he rent their souls asunder, from time to time, and filled the precarious space between the Trust and me when the friction of our reciprocal silences became too apparent.

They did not know it, but I fancy, my dear Margaret, that these sacrifices bored them. It was worse at the opera than at the dinner even, for the Trust went out at the end of each act and did not come back till the curtain had risen on the next; so that though it does not much amuse me to call on people in their boxes, I left those poor young things to themselves as often as I could. I would much rather have stayed and talked with them, but beside the congenital difficulty that youth has in orienting itself with age (or middle age, if you civilly insist) and getting all sorts of hindering scruples and respects that intercept the common view, out of the way, they were drawn exclusively together by the passion whose charming play I was so loath to miss the least of. It is in that exquisite moment when alone such a thing can interest a third person: it had not yet owned itself to either, I fancy; when both have owned it, then the blow is given; it might as well be marriage, and done with it.

That it is coming to that, with whatever fond delays and wanderings, I have no doubt, and that it is arriving more rapidly with her than with him is quite as certain. That is what forms for me its peculiar fascination, which is also a poignant regret that you are not here to share it with me at first hand. These young people are really worthy of your observance, Margaret; for though they are not, by the widest stretch of charity, to be accounted of that Boston cousinship which nature has made so large as to include nearly every type of merit, still they have a wilding beauty of being, at least in this supreme moment, which I think you would feel beyond any one else. You have the poetic imagination to which the girl’s greater courage of her emotions would justify itself; and when you saw her “eyes of sumptuous expectation,” fixed on him, as if in the brute phrase, she could eat him, your generous instinct would find the anthropophagy divine.

As for the youth, I am sure he would at least not be sorry to be eaten. Yes, I am sure of that; or else I am sure that in his place I should not. It was delightful, when I came back just before the last act, to see them struggle away from their interest in each other, and turn to me with the topic it had masked itself in. “We were talking,” she promptly began, “about the play off the stage here,” and he turned to me as if he were intensely anxious for my wisdom. “Have you ever noticed the programme?” and she gave me her play bill, opened to that monumental leaf on which the names of the box-owners, and the nights when they appear, are inscribed. “Do you think that is good taste?”

Then I began to take a Polonius part in another play, more subjective than the make-believe of the boxes, and entered upon a disquisition of American civilization, of which that leaf seemed to me one of the most signal expressions. I said that we were the frankest people in the world in recognizing the thing that was, and that when our democracy found itself in the possession of an aristocracy, with coronets and tiaras and diadems of precious stones, it wished to feel the fact in its bones. It was not the nobility in the boxes who wanted that list printed; they existed but for each other alone; and it was the commonalty in the parquet and uppermost galleries who enviously exulted in it. I added that of course it was droll, and that in the presence of the old American ideal it might make one’s flesh creep; but that the old American ideal was nowadays principally appreciable by its absence; and how, after all, did that leaf essentially differ from the repetitions of the society intelligence in all the papers?

The young people followed me with an ostensible constancy; they applauded the best points; I believe Mr. Ardith felt a literary quality in what I was saying; but she was hearing him in it all, and in the end my discourse was a solution of themselves, in which they were both chiefly conscious of each other. It amused me, but at last saddened me, and when I got home to bed, I reflected long upon the case. It was so old, that love business, and though it had the conceit of an eternal novelty in its dim antiquity and did freshen itself up in the perpetually changing conditions, it was really the most decrepit of the human interests.

I expect you to deny this, and in making you a present of my evening’s experience, I promise not to take it hard of you if you say it is perfectly charming, and altogether different from the stale rubbish in the novels you have been reading.

OTIS.

XXI.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, Jan’y 21, 1902.

Dear Folks:

I include Lizzie in the address because I know that she will enjoy this letter as much as you, mother, and because she ought to share fully in the guilt of it, if it is wrong to write it. I don’t know as it’s betraying a confidence, exactly, for there was nothing less confided, as I understand such things. But anyway, I am tempted beyond my strength, and here goes!

Miss Ralson certainly is funnier than a goat. She had Mr. Ardith here to-day again lunching, as usual; she has got to telling him it is to meet me; and after it was over, and he was gone, she began on him, almost as soon as his back was turned. I must try to give you what she said in her own words, for they are half the fun. She said, “Now, Miss Dennam, I really did make this lunch to have Mr. Ardith meet you; for I wanted you to look him carefully over, and tell me just what you think of him. You needn’t ask why, but when you have given me your candid opinion, I will tell you why. I don’t promise to be ruled by your opinion, so you needn’t be afraid to speak up, for you wont be held responsible. Begin! Do you think he’s handsome?”

Her way of talking helped me put my back up, and I answered as plumply as she asked, “He isn’t my style of beauty, but I do think he’s handsome. I like a larger man; and I’m so old-fashioned that I prefer a man with a beard, or a mustache, at least, instead of clean-shaved. I think your father must have been a very handsome man,” and I didn’t say this to flatter her, and she knew it. “Father was very well in his day, but the style is different, now, and Mr. Ardith is more in the style. Do you think he’s good?”

“I don’t know what he’s done!”

“Goodness is being as well as doing, and you needn’t try to slip out of it that way. Do you think he’s selfish?”

“Yes, I do. I think all the men I’ve ever seen are selfish, except my father.”

“Well, that’s so, and I don’t suppose some people would let me except my father, though I know he’s the best father in the world. Yes, I suppose Mr. Ardith may be called selfish.”

She looked a little down, and I had to say, “I shouldn’t call him selfish so much as self-centered. He’s so wrapped up in what he’s doing, or going to do, that he can’t think of anybody else. He never does nice little polite, thoughtful things like Mr. Binning, for instance. The woman that married Mr. Ardith”—” It hasn’t come to that point in the conversation yet,” she broke in, and I had to laugh; she kept her face straight. “But I see what you mean. She would have to go way back and sit down when he wanted to work. Well, go on!” She put up her hands and clasped them behind her neck, the way her father does, and she slid down in her chair like him, and — if I must say it — stretched her legs out before her, as he does his, when he is feeling just right; and I suppose she will be his figure at his age. “Do you think he’s in love?”

“No, I don’t. With Miss Deschenes, you mean?” She sat up. “With Miss Deschenes! He never was in love with that conceited, cold-hearted, lean, black little — Or, if he ever was, he’s good and over it long ago. I mean with me!”

Well, mother — and Lizzie — that did rather take my breath, used as I am to her frankness; but I was not going to be scared into saying anything I did not think, and I said, “I think he’s in love with himself.” I decided that this was noncommittal enough, but it did not daunt Miss Ralson. She laughed and said, “Well, so am I, and I don’t wonder at him a bit. He’ll be in love with me fast enough, when I say the word; and I’ve only been waiting to be sure that I’m in love with him. And now I am sure. I wanted to hug him, he’s so dear, all through the opera last night, but I didn’t because I hated to scandalize him; and to-day when he went away it was all I could do to keep from saying, ‘Take me with you, precious, and don’t remember to bring me back!’ He’s good, if he is selfish; and he’s pure, and he’s got more sense, and more wit, and more soul, and more intellect! And if he wants to, he is going to be the greatest writer that ever lived; and he shall, too, for all me. I would rather slave for him, scrub, cook, take in washing, and do plain sewing, than be Queen of the Four Hundred. The Four Hundred! What do I care for the Four Hundred? That dream is past, thank goodness, and it was he that come to wake me from the worst nightmare I ever had. We can go abroad — I know father will let us — and you can stay with mother; or go back to Wottoma with her; and we can settle down in some quiet place, like Rome, or London — and he can write his head off. My, but it’ll be great!” She jumped up, and caught me round the neck, and kissed me; and I could hardly get away. “You think I ought to be ashamed, but I’m not. What is there to be ashamed of? I shouldn’t be ashamed, now, if he didn’t have me; but he will. And I’ll get Caroline Deschenes to come on, and when I’ve got her here I’ll spring it on her that she is to be one of the bridesmaids, and you’ve got to be the other. We’ll have the greatest time!”

She smothered her face in my neck, and ran out of the room, and left me there not knowing what to think. I don’t know yet, and I wish you and Lizzie would take the job off my hands. I knew well enough what I ought to think; but when I remember how she has always been allowed to have and do all she pleased, and how, after all, she is so generous and big-hearted with everyone and not the least spoiled, I am not able to think what I ought. It isn’t exactly usual for a girl to talk out her feelings so; but if the feelings are right in themselves what harm is there in talking them out? That is what I ask myself, and then I say that if anyone is to blame it is I for telling you this, and you for letting me, and so we had better be pretty modest.

Your affectionate daughter and sister,

FRANCES.

For pity’s sake don’t let Lizzie suppose I want her to take after Miss Ralson! She hasn’t got the money, for one thing.

XXII.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wattoma.

                   NEW YORK, Jan. 23, 1902.

My Dear Lincoln:

I address you in this serious way not because I have got anything against you, but because I have got something against myself. I am to blame, for I put myself in the way of it when I might have seen it coming; but I can swear that I meant to do nothing to make it come. If I thought of it at all, I thought it would be a bore, but I never supposed it would be a tragedy. Of course, I was all kinds of an ass to come here, but I can bear myself witness that I did it from the kindest motive in the world, though it wasn’t any the less assinine on that account. I had a good deal better jumped at the poor old woman and swept her off the earth when she hinted at my coming.

Well, the grippe has begun to let up on the old man, so as to get a new hold of the old woman and Jenny, and if it had chosen either little Essie or me, it would have been better for us; I could have advised it what to do, if it had consulted me, but it didn’t. I have not only been kindling fires, and helping Essie with the housework generally, between the times of scrapping with the Ralsons on the ragged edge of the Four Hundred, but I have been taking my turn nursing old Baysley. I don’t know what I shall do now, with Jenny and her mother sick, except cook all the meals and lend Essie a hand with the wash; she isn’t much of a cook, or laundress either. I suppose it reads comically, but it doesn’t live so, and if you will add the fact that I have had to intercede personally with Mr. Ralson for old Baysley, you will have the touch of pathos that is always supposed to give the humorous such fine relief.

There has been pathos enough in it, ever since I knew that the old man here was in the employment of the Cheese and Churn Trust, and that he had found out I was a friend of the Ralsons, and believed that if I wanted to I could do something in the way of promotions and appropriations. I don’t say that I have seen this in either of the girls, or at least not in Essie, but I’ve divined it in the old people; they couldn’t have been more deferential if I had been Ralson in person. When Baysley began to get over the grippe so far as to be more anxious about living than dying, he couldn’t keep himself from asking me to “use my influence.” Imagine what a dose that was!

The Ralsons had brought me home here in their automobile several times, but I hadn’t found it essential to tell them who my landlord was, and now I would have to come out with it, when it would have the effect of something I had been hiding. Baysley was afraid of losing his job, and of course I couldn’t say no; I put the case to Mr. Ralson, last night, in the presence of America, and I had him whipped as badly as I was. We were at the play, and it was between the acts of Mrs. Pat Campbell’s “Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” when we were all rather broken up.

The old gentleman had forgotten about Baysley, whom he had sent on here I guess because he was not much use anywhere else, and I don’t believe he would have hesitated even if he had been alone with me. But it was all I could do to keep America from leaving the play and driving right up here with a hamper full of Christmas goods, like the good angels in those old Dickens stories. She got the facts of the family sickness out of me in about a minute, and when she found that the girls were not pretty, to speak of, and the youngest was doing the work herself (I suppressed my share) she wanted to fill the flat with trained nurses and professed cooks. After the play was over, and they brought me here her father had to use force to keep her from coming up-stairs with me to see how they were getting along; and nothing would do but to let her come here this morning. I don’t know how early she will come, but perhaps Nature may assist Art, and she will oversleep herself, though I am taking no chances, and am writing this letter between kindling the fire in the kitchen and calling the miserable Essie to get breakfast.

“And is that all?” I fancy you asking. I wish it were!

When I came home last night, the old man was waiting up along with the little girl, and he was so anxious that even when I shouted at him, “It’s all right, Mr. Baysley,” he couldn’t take it in. Essie had to say it over to him, and then he flopped into a chair, and cried for relief, and she cried, too. He got himself together to thank me, before she helped him off to bed, and when she had told her mother and sister the good news, she came back to me, to ask if she could get me a cup of tea, or something. Her face was so twisted with crying that she could hardly get the words out, and her head went down, down, as if I were some sort of deity, too great and good to look at.

What would you have done, Linc? I will tell you what I did, and if you will come on here and kick me, I will pay your fare both ways, including sleepers and diners. I took the little fool into my arms, and let her have her cry out on my shoulder, and I took my cry out on the top of her yellow head. We did not pass a word, but by and by she lifted up her face and looked into mine, as much as to say that we understood each other, and pulled herself up and kissed me, and then ran out of the room and left me to my thoughts, as they used to do in the novels.

The thoughts have gone on ever since, without any dreams to interrupt. They are to the effect that I am the prize idiot of the universe, and that if I could be wiped out of existence the average of common-sense would be so incalculably increased that this world would be a realm of supernal wisdom. If I am an honest man, if I am any sort of half-way decent scoundrel, I am now bound to this girl, without being the least in love with her, and I have deceived her without meaning her anything but truth. I do like her, Linc; I respect her; I would rather kill myself than do her harm, and here I have done her the deadliest kind of harm. Unless all the signs fail, I have either spoiled her peace or mine, forever. Well, you know me well enough to know that it won’t be her peace that will suffer.

Yours,

W. A.

XXIII.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

     NEW YORK, Jan. 24, 1902.

My dear Lincoln:

Your letter has crossed mine, or else you could understand how very little your news can concern me now. To tell you the truth, I had ceased to be interested in the heart affairs, or no-heart affairs, of a Certain Person some time ago, and now it matters no more to me that she is disengaged than that she was engaged. The only fact of that kind which makes any appeal to me is my own engagement, which there seems no doubt about, though it is still tacit. It is accepted by the whole Baysley family, of which I seem to be the idol. The old man is the only one well enough to show me an active adoration, but he is sufficient, and I am not praying for the rapid convalescence of Jenny and her mother. I suppose they will get well, and then there will have to be something explicit about Essie.

Linc, I don’t know what to do. When that child comes up to me, and expects me to do the lover-like thing, I have to do it, because I can’t bear to disappoint her; but when she wants me to say the lover-like thing, oh then! It’s comparatively easy to lie with my lips, but when it comes to lying with my tongue, that is so far beyond the limit, that I don’t know where I am. Upon my word and honor — honor! — I don’t know what I’m saying.

If you haven’t guessed anything yet, I will let you guess now how much I am comforted in getting a couple of notes a day from America, inquiring about the Baysleys, and pleading, threatening, to come up here and look after them herself, if I don’t come down and report. She writes me what you have written about a Certain Person, and says she is coming on to visit her in March. She adds to the gayety of nations, as far as I can share it, by joking me about her, and promising to do everything for me with her!

Best revise that obituary of mine which you are keeping in the A box, and add that the subject of the notice was a youth of so much promise that he couldn’t have done half he said he would if he had lived to be ninety.

Yours ever,

W. A.

You can imagine how nice all this is, coming on top of the chance that Casman has given me in The Signal. “Impressions of a Provincial”! If I could make them the Confessions, and make them honest, I should have fame and fortune in my hand, or infamy and misfortune, I don’t care which.

XXIV.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

            NEW YORK, January 21, 1902.

My dear Margaret;

I am glad to hear you are so much better, but having formed the habit of writing to you, I do not know that I can quite give it up, now, even in the presence of your convalescence. All that I can consent to do is to make my letters shorter, and confine them more to personal interests, leaving out those studies of New York with which I used to pad them. My opportunities, civic and social, continue much the same, though I have indulged rather more than usual in the theatre, that refuge of the society outcast in New York, and I am able to advise you to have yourself carried to see Mrs. Pat Campbell in “The Second Mrs. Tanqueray,” when she brings the play to Boston.

I went to see the piece alone, having declined a seat in the box of my Cheese and Churn Trust magnate; for knowing the play as I did I hardly saw how I could talk it over between the acts with his blooming daughter. Women talk almost anything with men nowadays, but I do not think a man of my epoch ought to talk some things over with a girl of Miss Ralson’s. Heaven knows how she and her young man from Iowa managed the topics suggested by the play, but perhaps they talked only of themselves — innocent topics enough. I saw her in one of the chief seats at the spectacle: a box, where she showed her fine lengths sidewise to the house, and talked up into the young man’s face, with a picturesque slant of her hat. Her father occupied another chief seat, and the young man stood behind her, and beside him darkled the quaint girl I have described to you as her secretary and her mother’s companion: I should like to hear her shrewd comments, but they are the last thing one is likely to hear, about Mrs. Tanqueray.

It was a most amusingly New Yorkish crowd that filled the theatre, dressing pretty much the same for the boxes and the orchestra places and balconies, and putting on all possible correctness in the men, and all fetching hattiness and cloakiness in the women.

I recognized some personalities of social validity, but the rest I took for hotel sojourners, or flat-dwellers of the better sort, or people in successful business, whose supreme society life the theatre party constitutes, shading into presences of harmless Bohemianism — artistic looking art-student girls, in large enough companies to dispense with chaperonage. I wondered how deep some of the awful implications of the play went with those children; but apparently the theatre is only for the surfaces of souls. I fancy most of these amusing New Yorkers were there for Mrs. Pat’s acting, and not for the play at all, except as it gave scope to her art and her beauty, and that it was she they talked about between the acts. Not all, however. A German American lady behind me talked incessantly neighborhood gossip of the feeblest and flattest description, passing insensibly from German into English, and from English into German again, without passing the shores of her small beer.

I occupied myself a good deal with the effect of the play in my neighbors, without definite conclusions. I was especially interested in a tall, gaunt figure of a man two vacant seats away, who had Down East written all over his fisherman’s face and his clothing-store best; and I decided that he had got there by mistake. This proved really to be the case, for when I made bold to speak to him, as I followed him oat at the end, and to ask him how he liked Mrs. Pat, he said that he liked her well enough, but had thought it was going to be some sort of burlesque show, with dancing. Then I asked him what he thought of the play; and he confessed that he did not know whether he had rightly taken it in. He could not understand what it was that made people shy of that Paula, or what there was in her old acquaintance with her stepdaughter’s fellow to make her husband break off the match, and Paula go and kill herself; but he presumed it was all right.

I have not seen my pretty boy from Iowa since that night, though I have been rather diligent in calling on the daughter of the Cheese and Churn Trust. He has not been at the Walhondia for several days, as I was given to understand, rather airily, there, yesterday, with an effect of dismissal for the subject as of great indifference. I hope no trouble is brewing, and yet, just for the peculiar interest of the fact, I should rather like to think he was triffling with fortune. He has an enemy, I fancy in the secretary-companion of Miss Ralson. Not from anything she said, but from the nothing she looked, when I mentioned him. She is my enemy, too, I believe, and I am rather sorry for that, for in her queer, angular way, she is charming, with a whimsical tremor round her prim mouth, and in her shy eyes. But I am proud to say that the daughter of the Trust seems to like me, and to be willing to make what she can of me in the absence of the pretty boy. Shall I confess that I amuse myself more in her gorgeous hotel parlor, where no one ever comes that any one knows, than in the hospitalities of the Van der Doeses and their friends? I am afraid I had always a vulgar streak. But do not disown

Your affectionate brother,

OTIS.

XXV.

From ABNER J. BAYSLEY to REV. WILLIAM BAYSLEY, Timber Creek.

         NEW YORK, January 25, 1902.

Dr. Bro. Wm.:

I’m thankful to say for wife and I that we are about well again. She still keeps her room, but is out of bed, and daughter Jenny is much the same, though not quite so far along as mother. Essie has not been sick at all, and we some hope that she will escape, though we don’t want to whistle till we are out of the woods. Will say right here that there never was a better child; and her and young Ardith have about fixed it up together, by the signs. He has been a true friend from first to last, helping Ess do the work like a good fellow when the rest of us was down sick, and using his influence with old Ralson to keep me from being thrown out when I could not get down town to look after things. I got a letter from the company this morning saying my salary was put up to the $3000 notch; so I guess I have been giving satisfaction right along. I did expect to send you a postal order for that loan, but there have been some extra expenses, and I do not believe I can get round to it till next pay day.

Neither Ess or him has said anything yet to me, but from what she told her mother I guess it’s a sure thing; and he’s as nice a young fellow as ever stepped, and talented. Although he has kept mum about it, I guess he has been pretty thick with the Ralsons. Went into regular Four Hundred circles with them, and them glad to have him. He is not one to brag, and so far as mother can make out, he does not say anything to Ess about it either. But if he was anyways taken up in that direction before, he sticks close enough here now. So it is satisfactory all round.

Hope you are getting the good out of the old place, and glad you can use the horse, riding round. They all join me in regards.

Your affec bro.,

ABNER.

XXVI.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, January 27, 1902.

Well, my dear Linc, the expected has happened. But where shall I begin to tell you how?

It is more than a week since I called on America, and during that time I have refused three or four invitations from her to breakfast and lunch and dinner, and I don’t know what else, each growing a little more formal, and a little less like the good terms we used to be on. All this while I had left her to her own conjectures about my real motives in staying away, for how could I tell her what they were? If I could not understand them, knowing the party as I do, how could she possibly believe in them? But it is dangerous to leave a girl to her conjectures, especially a girl who likes to do her thinking after she has done her acting, as most girls do.

What America conjectured, as nearly as I can make it out, was that not only all the Baysleys were at the point of death, but that I was not very well myself. The leap from this to the conclusion that it was the part of a friend to come and see what the facts were, was not beyond her powers, and this morning she came. Essie answered the ring from above by pulling the latch of the outside door, and then she had a call from the invalids, some of them, and she ran in where I was writing the “Impressions of a Provincial,” and asked if I would stand guard at the door of the apartment, and let in whoever was coming up.

I knew — long before America arrived with her secretary. She began to fill the hallway and staircase with the rich resonance of her laugh, and the proud frou-frou of her skirts against the blood-red tapestry carpet, from the moment she came in, while I stood transfixed at the door. She panted, and then laughed at herself for panting, and whispered to the girl with her, and then spoke aloud, and stopped, and came on. Suddenly she stood there on the platform before the Baysley portal, with her skirt in her hand, and the flare from the skylight full in her face, staring at me with a kind of challenge. “Oh!” she said, and the other girl slipped behind her. It was as if she had confronted my ghost, and I wish she had. I could see that somehow she was not prepared for my being there, though why, I could not understand then, even if I understand now. She turned red and then she turned white, but she did not say anything more; she only leaned against the wall, and waited for me. I asked her if she would not come in, and she said “Thank you,” in a kind of bewilderment, and she swept in, and the other girl eddied silently in after her. I showed them the way into the horrible little parlor, with the bed-alcove off it, and got them seated, somehow, and then she found presence of mind enough to say, “I hope Mr. and Mrs. Baysley are better.” I said they were all better, and Mr. Baysley was so well as to have gone down to the office. I volunteered that Miss Essie Baysley would be with us in a moment, and the conversation languished, till America remarked with the aimlessness of people who don’t know what they are saying or saying they don’t know what, “I didn’t understand that you were living with them, before.” I answered that I thought I had mentioned it, and I could see that America suspected I was lying, and that the secretary was making a tacit note of my mendacity. In fact, throughout this glad interview, the secretary had the effect of accumulating evidence against me, I don’t know why, and when Essie came in, and I tried to talk to her while America engaged Essie, I felt as if she were warning me that anything I said would be used against me. She has disliked me from the first, apparently, and it hasn’t been any better for me because I know she has a conscience against disliking me without reason.

If I had been trying to conceal anything, and certainly I felt as if I were, Essie gave everything away when she came in looking flurried, and then frightened, at the sight of my visitors, if they were mine. In the brief time of our intensified domesticity she has come to depend upon me for pretty much everything but breathing, and now she rubbed kitten-like up against me, with her eyes first on the magnificent America, and then on me, but mostly on me. I was as miserable as a guilty wretch can be, and be conscious of his innocence, but my confounded mind kept taking note of the situation, and in a hideous way rejoicing in it as material. I made out to introduce Essie to the company, and to detach her towards America, while I took the secretary off to the window, and showed her the view of the other side of the street, with the rock in the Park that you can get a glimpse of if you don’t mind a crick in your neck. The secretary treated me with merited severity, and gave evidence for the prosecution, and charged the jury, and brought in a verdict of puellicide in the first degree, and sentenced me, and had me in the electric chair, while I saw through the back of my head, all the time, America killing Essie with kindness, and heard her asking her with adamantine benevolence all about the family sickness, and trying to listen, if she died on the spot for it, to Essie’s terrified answers. I was actually aware of her holding the girl’s hands, and finding them as cold as ice. “Well, you must take care not to get the grippe yourself,” she said, and just then the secretary turned on the current, and I knew no more.

I seemed to come to life in another world, where America and the secretary were talking to Essie, and not minding me any more than if I were an invisible presence. America was saying that she had ventured to bring a few little things to tempt a sick appetite, and that if Essie would let her she would send them up by the man; I noted how she forebore to give Essie the coup de grâce by not saying footman. Essie went out to the top of the landing with them, and watched them down the stairs, and then she came back and looked at me. It could not have lasted a long time, but it took a small eternity to live through it, and when it ended in a cloud-burst of tears that seemed to sweep her out of the room, Methusaleh was no match for me in age. I don’t know why I waited for the Ralson’s James to come up with the hamper America had sent; perhaps I had nothing else to do. I had always been rather friendly with James, but this time I met him with a face as chill as his own imported cheerlessness, and I treated him not like a man, as I had made a point of doing before, but like a footman. He did not seem to notice. Now I am writing to you, and that is all I know.

Your distracted

W. A.

XXVII.

From Miss Ralson to Miss DESCHENES, Wottoma.

Jan. 27, Evening.

Dear Caroline:

I can’t remember just what I wrote, but if you understood that I did not want you to come, you must have been reading between the lines. I do want you. Come whenever you like, and as often and as long; you couldn’t come too soon, or too much, for me. I really and truly want you, and that’s no lie.

I wish I could be decided about Mr. Ardith. But you had better come on and see for yourself. He is living with some people from Timber Creek, up on the West side; I heard that they were all down with the grippe, and I went up to see about them this morning; the father is in the office of the Trust here, and I felt rather obliged to. I don’t think they were in much need of me, especially one of the daughters. But I may have been deceived by appearances; you might ask Mr. Ardith after you got here; I will have him to dinner.

I have a bad headache, and I hardly know what I am writing. Miss Dennam, mother’s companion and my secretary, would know if she was here, but she has gone home for the night; so you must try to make it out for yourself. But if you make out that I don’t want you, you will have to settle with me after you get here.

Devotedly yours,

AMERICA.

XXVIII.

From FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 1902.

Dear Mother:

Every now and then I have felt awfully for the way I have written you about Mr. Ardith: firstly because he is none of my business, and secondly because I really care nothing about him, and thirdly because I don’t want to wrong him. You know I wouldn’t hurt a fly, or even a spider that was eating a fly. Well, I don’t know now whether I have been wronging him, but if I lay the facts fully before you maybe I shall find out. I can’t very well face them till I get them down on paper, can I?

It seems sort of eavesdropping, but I know that the drops will go no farther with you and Lizzie, and so I will keep on, because it is so very interesting, if for no other reason. The first time I saw him and Miss Ralson together, I could see that she was perfectly gone on him, as you say at Lake Ridge, and the only thing that I really liked in him was his not being able to see it. That was certainly in the wretch’s favor; but whether his blindness was a remnant of the heartbreak (don’t mind the mixture of metaphors, mother! ) that he came on here from Wottoma with, I was not sure. They say that the human male when heartbroken is easily the prey of the first human female that makes up to him; but in Mr. Ardith’s case the male didn’t see it. I don’t believe, though, the female in Miss Ralson’s case was fully aware of it, as I told you in my last letter.

I suppose I have heard more about Mr. Ardith and his love affair with a Miss Deschenes, out in Wottoma, than would fill a volume; and from what I could learn, she behaved as badly to him as I could have wished in my most venomous moods. She led him on by every art known to her sex, and then tossed him, as Miss Ralson said, or gave him the grand bounce, as she explained. She said Miss Deschenes was very beautiful in a dark, thin, slight way, and knew how to dress, far beyond the dreams of Wottoma; she was very intellectual, too; and nobody could understand why she turned Mr. Ardith down when it came to the point. The worst of it was that she did not turn him down at once. They were engaged for a while, and then an able lawyer, well along in his thirties, and ripe for Congress, appeared on the scene. This was when the tossing, and bouncing, and turning down took place. In Wattoma it was considered very heartless, and nobody could account for it, but when I met Mr. Ardith, I thought I saw what she meant.

The redeeming feature in his case all along has been his not knowing that Miss Ralson was throwing herself at him. He thought, if he thought anything, that she was binding up his wounds, and perhaps she was, though it looked more like that trapeze act to the outsider. I don’t know whether the rest of the family noticed it or not; I rather think not. Mrs. Ralson has seldom seen them together that I know of, and Mr. Ralson’s great object seems to have been to see them together as much as possible, or at least to shirk going to places with America and sending Mr. Ardith instead. Where a third person was absolutely demanded by New York propriety, I have done duty, and Mr. Ralson has escaped everything but opera and theatre for the last month. Seven or eight nights ago they were at the theatre together, and when it was over, they took Mr. Ardith up to his lodgings, as usual; and they found out that he was living with some people from the little town in Iowa where he was born, and that they were mostly down with the grippe. She thinks he acted very strangely that night, because he wouldn’t let her think of coming to see them, or sending anything; and as the days have gone by he has acted still more strangely. He has not come near the Walhondia, and as for dropping in for lunch, as he had been in the habit of doing, he would not come when he was asked. I must say Miss Ralson gave him more chances of refusing than I should have done, and his excuses were shamefully shallow. Of course I could not say that to her; and I have done more passive fibbing than I should have liked to do in the best cause, let alone one like this. Things went on, Miss Ralson getting more and more anxious, and vibrating between renouncing him forever, and going to fetch him by main force. She decided at last that he was down with the grippe himself, and this morning his condition was so bad, (or hers,) that she could not stand it any longer. She sent out for a lot of things at a place where they keep delicacies for the sick, and took me in her automobile with her to succor the Baysley family, and to see what the matter with Mr. Ardith really was. She did not say that, of course, but went entirely in the character of an angel of mercy.

I do not know whether she felt like one when she got there, and found Mr. Ardith perfectly well; but I know how I should have felt in her place, when the youngest of the Baysley sisters, and the only one on foot, came in and went up to him, and sort of took refuge from her awe of America with him. The situation was quite unmistakable, but I must say that Miss Ralson ignored it magnificently; and I must say, though I hate to, that he did not quail either, though he looked like death. He left them together and talked with me till Miss Ralson was ready to go, and then he did what was polite, and we got away somehow. But there was no urging him to come down for lunch, or dinner, or breakfast, and there was no mention of him all the way home, except once. She looked out of the window most of the time, and I wonder what people could have thought of her, for when she turned to me, her eyes were simply raining tears. I do not believe she knew it, or was aware of the unnatural voice in which she asked me, “Do you think they are engaged?”

Mother, if we were not so poor, I would have been willing to give any money not to have had to answer, and as it is I would have given all Mr. Ralson’s money. But I had to do it. I had to say, “It seemed to look like it,” and then she turned her face away, and did not speak again. I don’t believe she was mortified at all thinking of how she had given herself away about Mr. Ardith the other day, and bragged that she could have him when she wanted. The hurt was something that went deeper than her pride, though it came out through that later; now it was pure heartbreak. I have scarcely seen her, this afternoon. She had her luncheon taken to her room, and I had mine with her mother. About four o’clock she came in to say that if I would like to go home, then, she would stay with Mrs. Ralson, and I was glad to get away; but before I could manage I had to hear her mother afflicting her with conjectures and questions. She usually does not notice, but she began at once to ask Miss Ralson whether Mr. Ardith was sick, and if that was the reason why he had not been there for so long. Her daughter fought her off as well as she could, and told her that Mr. Ardith had been kept by the sickness of the family he was staying with; that he had been helping take care of them. Her mother said, “Well, I always did say he was the best-hearted gentleman I ever saw.”

Now, what do you think, mother? For I confess I don’t know what to think. Of course if he is in love with that girl, he has a right to be engaged to her, but if he has been in love with her all along, I don’t think it was nice in him to come here so much. It is to his credit that he prefers a poor girl, if he really likes her the best, to a rich girl, but I do not understand how any one could like that girl better than America Ralson. For she is grand, if she is rich; and Miss Baysley struck me as about the commonest piece of prettiness that I ever saw; her grammar was frightful. Propinquity will do much, and he is not to be blamed for being thrown with her in the care of her family. I don’t know! The whole thing puzzles me more than it would if it were any of my business, and I don’t like to be puzzled, you know. The only thing I am sure of is that Miss Ralson is miserable from it, and that if a man doesn’t know enough not to make a girl like her miserable, he ought to; besides it is not very flattering to me, to have a man whom I had set down as a toad turn out something else. The logic of Mr. Ardith ought to have been trifling with that silly child’s affections while he was making love to Miss Ralson’s millions, but he does not seem to have been doing anything of the kind, unless appearances are deceiving. Sometimes they are!

Your affectionate daughter,

FRANCES.

XXIX.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT,  Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, Jan’y 28, 1902.

Dear Lincoln:

Of course I appreciate your friendly advice. If I were as far off as Wottoma, I have no doubt it would be perfectly easy for me to act upon it, and I wish to heaven I were. I might treat with poor Essie through the long distance telephone, and tell her that I never really cared for her, and all would be well. But in this comparative proximity, it is difficult. She might not understand my motives in the whole transaction any better than I do. After Miss Ralson was gone yesterday, Essie kept away from me, and I made it easy for her by going down town and staying till the play was over. Then I crept in and began to write. I expected that she would break in upon me at first, but nothing worse happened than old Baysley’s visiting me to ask if I knew what ailed Ess, who had gone to bed crying. I promptly lied to the effect that I did not, and then he stayed to rub the family gratitude into me for what I had done for him with Mr. Ralson, and to say he hoped Ess was not going to be sick, or anything, for he did not know what we should all do. He sat awhile longer in his shirtsleeves with his stocking-feet against the cooling radiator, and then he left me alone.

I suppose we are not responsible for our thoughts, are we? I should hate to answer for mine, and I don’t exactly know what I shall say at the day of judgment when I am asked, How about that little idea that Essie’s sickness might not be the worst thing for you? It was as bad as that, Linc, and before I went to bed, I got down on my knees, and prayed to be saved from a thought which, if it was not mine, must have been the devil’s own. You may imagine whether I slept very sweetly, but I did sleep, somehow, and I slept late, so late that I did not have the old gentleman’s company at breakfast. Essie heard me stirring, and when I came out, she was bringing my coffee and bacon, and her eyes were red and swollen. She put the things down, and then stood hesitating, and looking at me. She sobbed out some kind of pathetic apology to the effect that she didn’t mean to offend me, and hoped I was not mad at her: and she knew she was not educated up to me; and not fit for me, anyway, and she would rather die than keep me from being happy.

Isn’t life sweet, Linc, and isn’t it simple? Perhaps you will say, off there at Wottoma where things are so easy, that I ought to have reminded her that I had never said, by word of mouth that I loved her, and that so far as I was concerned there was no engagement between us, and she could not make me unhappy, for she had no claim on me whatever. Is that what you would have done? Perhaps you would, as far off as Wottoma; but if you had done it here, you would not have been fit to associate even with a miscreant like me.

No, Lincoln, I am in for it, and if the heavenly powers wont help me out, the infernal sha’n’t. I go round half-crazy. But if my mind is blurred I shall try to keep my soul clear. Don’t take anything amiss that I have said. I do value your interest, and I know your advice is good. The only thing the matter with it is that it is impossible.

Yours ever,

W. A.

XXX.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

         NEW YORK, February 5th, 1902.

Dear Margaret:

I am sorry to hear of your relapse, and I will gladly do what I can to comfort you with the woes of others, while you are renewing your care of yourself. I must say, however, that I cannot respect, — though I think I could account for it upon a principle which you would not allow, — your paramount interest in the affair of Miss Ralson and the pretty boy. It is very well for you to pretend that these two young persons are illustrations of New York conditions, but you must confess, before I go further, that they attract your fancy simply on the old human ground of their lovership, and that you prefer my writing about them because, after all, you like gossip better than anything else in the world. Having extorted this admission from you I do not mind saying that I have seen very little of them for the last ten days, and that this little has been very unsatisfactory. Your young man, in fact, I have not seen at all, and your young woman I have seen only in the most cursory manner. This has not been for want of trying. I have called several times at the Walhondia, but each time Miss Ralson has been out, or been out of repair; and when I have found her in, but ill, I have had to console myself as I could with her secretary, Miss Dennam. You will say that you care to hear nothing of Miss Dennam, and I can only say I am sorry you don’t, for I am sure if you could have seen the sort of conscientious tolerance of me, which marks the present extreme of her kindness, growing upon her, you would have been amused; and I think you would have admired the art with which I tried to convince her that I was not the heartless old worldling she had set me down for. I can feel that she has contested with herself every inch of the way to a better opinion of me. I believe she formerly regarded me as a sort of emissary from the mythical Four Hundred sent to beguile Miss Ralson, and bring her into its toils bereft of self-respect and the flower of her native ingenuousness. But now, if Miss Dennam still despises me, she also pities me; she has consented to talk with me, and has not altogether refused to satisfy a curiosity I betrayed concerning the civilization of Lake Ridge. She seems a survival of the old New England morality, and I was not surprised to find that she was of a New England stock, flourishing the more vigorously from its transplantation to western New York. Something ancestral in me sympathized with what I divined of her, while posterity as I represent it, kept itself with difficulty from smiling at her pathetic casuistries in the matters I made bold to touch on. I know you are impatient of this, Margaret, and yet I think you would have enjoyed the psychological spectacle, especially when I entered upon some question of Mr. Ardith, which I ventured to do, very, very discreetly after I found there was to be no question whatever of Miss Ralson. Her face involuntarily lighted up at my asking if she had seen him lately, and then darkened again as she answered, “Not for a week:” I could see her mentally making scrupulous count of the days, so as not sin against him by the smallest excess. I expressed the hope that he was well, and she answered that when they saw him he was well. Then I went so far as to say that he had a face which had interested me rather, from the first, as having a certain strength in spite of his apparent physical delicacy, which promised success for him; and she shot out, as if without intending it, that he seemed the kind of person who would probably get what he wanted in life.

I asked her if she would mind telling me just what she meant by that, and she said that she thought she had already expressed her meaning. Then I suggested, “You mean that he is selfish?” and I added that I had known some selfish people who had no more got what they wanted than some unselfish people. She protested that she did not mean to say Mr. Ardith was more selfish than others. He was very ambitious, and he was talented; and had I read any of his things? He was writing for the Signal now. She offered to get me a copy of the paper, if I liked; but I was afraid she wished to leave the subject, and I detained her with another question of psychological import. I began with the fact that from the first I had felt the attraction of something finally innocent in Mr. Ardith’s face, perhaps the air of one who could make sacrifices; and I proposed the inquiry whether we had always the grounds in ourselves for judging others. “Have I been judging him?” she wanted to know, and of course I answered, “Not in the least. I was thinking merely how outside of the current youth my age seemed to leave me,” and she made the instant reflection that a woman was always disabled from judging men, young or old, because she was a woman. I admitted that this was probably the case, and then I put before her a dissatisfaction I am beginning to experience with my judgments of New York, which I perceive more and more to be upon the Boston grounds, when they ought to be upon the New York grounds, if they are to have any value. That made her laugh, and she explained her laughing as from a sudden realization of the possibility that she had been judging New York on Lake Ridge grounds. She would not explain what these were, but promised sometime to do so if I would explain the Boston grounds. I offered to illustrate them by saying that in our Boston solar system the meteoric visitors that roam harmlessly through the spacious New York firmament would jar social planets of the first magnitude, and impart a thrill of anxious question to the whole social framework; but as if she felt a slant towards Miss Ralson in this, she refused to go farther, and although I believed that I had left her curious, I could be certain only that I had left her silent.

I tried boldly, for your sake, to discuss Miss Ralson in plain terms, but Miss Dennam would have none of it. When I ventured some analytical appreciations of the Trust himself, she did not refuse to join me, though again at my conjectures as to whether his charming daughter was more like her mother than like the Trust, I was aware of being delicately but firmly withheld. It was as if Miss Dennam’s loyalty included reservations such as a person of more than Lake Ridge experiences might have had, and she was defending the Ralson family from herself as well as from me. Yet, in spite of her, and rather from her repression than from her expression, I fancied — always in your interest, Margaret! — that there was some sort of trouble in the Ralson household, and that this was mystically related to the retrorsive Mr. Ardith. I have imagined — still in your interest! — that the beautiful America — that is really her spacious name; in the West they seem to require names of continental implication — has felt the charm that I have found in Mr. Ardith, without perhaps being able to make him responsive to her feeling. It would be a novel and fascinating situation, would not it? To have a beautiful millionairess in love with a poor young journalist, and to have the poor young journalist hesitating, or possibly not hesitating, about denying himself the boon fortune: that would be something so original as almost to be aboriginal. But what I want you to own, Margaret, is that I could not have done more handsomely by the leisure into which you have relapsed, or supplied you with a richer feast of surmise.

Your affectionate brother,

OTIS.

XXXI.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, Feb. 6, 1902.

My dear Lincoln: —

I hesitate to tell you what has happened, but of course I am going to do it.

As long as I could, I made an excuse to myself of the Baysleys’ sickness for not going to see the Raisons, or rather America; but to you I will lie as little about it as I can. When the other Baysleys had got well enough to do their own work, and Essie had not taken the grippe from the others, I had no excuse even with myself for staying away. You might say that common decency might still have been my excuse, but my experience is that common decency has nothing to do with affairs of the heart. Besides there was nothing explicit about the situation, and I had a feeling that it was rather loutish to let it make a break in the friendship between us; I mean between America and me. I was bound to ignore it, and ignore it actively as well as passively. So I went down to the Walhondia this afternoon, and sent up my name to the family; sometimes Mrs. Ralson likes to see me when America is out.

There was a longer hesitation in the bell-boy than usual, and I was beginning to be afraid he had got lost when he came back and said the ladies wished me to come up. I don’t believe the elevator ever took up a heavier load, but it got me to their floor without breaking down, and the maid let me in, as usual. While I waited, I perused the roofs of the city, and found a curious interest in impaling myself on a church steeple about fifty feet below the Ralsons’ windows. Then I heard a sort of shy stir behind me, and I knew that it was my enemy, the secretary, who had come into the drawing-room. I don’t know why that girl should hate me unless it is because she divines me, and I don’t know why I should hate her, for I entirely agree with her in her objections to me. But she was civil enough, and asked me to sit down, as if nothing had happened, since I was there the last time, to prevent it. She said Miss Ralson was not very well and was sorry she should not be able to see me, but that Mrs. Ralson had heard I was below and had wished me to come up. I said that was very kind of Mrs. Ralson, and I should like to see her and I hoped there was nothing serious the matter with Miss Ralson; of course I knew there was not, and Miss Dennam made my assurance doubly sure. After a little more skirmishing she got up, and said she would go and see if Mrs. Ralson were ready, for she would like me to come into her room, if I would not mind.

She went out, and I went back and re-impaled myself on the steeple, and this time when the door opened from the inner room, I knew it was not Miss Dennam who was returning. I knew that it was America who was sweeping toward me, and I felt the sort of authority that suppressed indignation lends a girl’s movement, in her swift progress towards my back. I faced about promptly, and put on as good a front as I could, though my heart was in my boots; but I left her the initiative. She was equal to it, and towered down upon me with an out-stretched hand. She said, “How do you do?” with all her robust presence, and there was not a moment’s fooling with the question of her not being well. I never saw her look better, and she was the more splendid for being mad through and through with me. (I speak with the light that subsequent events threw back upon the fact.) She said it was very kind of me to come when I must be so anxious about my friends; but perhaps there was no reason to be anxious about them any longer? She hoped they were better, and that that poor little thing had not worked herself to death taking care of the others: such a frail-looking little thing! I knew that she meant Essie, and I said that the whole Baysley family were convalescent, and the poor little thing was none the worse for her care of them. She did not appear to have noticed anything that did not refer to Essie, but to that she said, “Of course, you would see that she didn’t overdo. She told me how you had helped her.”

I had nothing in particular to answer, except to disown having done anything, and we talked a lot of inanities, and then I got up to go; I had quite forgotten her mother. She seemed to have forgotten her too, for she merely said, Oh, must I go so soon? and followed me to the door, where she put out her hand again, and suggested, “I don’t know whether you will allow me to congratulate you, Mr. Ardith?” I knew very well what she meant, but I got back with the established formula that we use when we know perfectly well what people mean: “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I beg your pardon for being indiscreet,” she said, and then I said, “I don’t know what you mean,” again. “I am quite willing to be congratulated upon anything there is cause for.”

“On your engagement to Miss Baysley, for instance?” she suggested. She tried to be arch, about it, but she smiled with her lips, not with her eyes, and I saw her chin tremble. I got the words up from somewhere inside of me, “I am not engaged to Miss Baysley,” and I waited for the next thing with a perfect quiet. One is quiet when one is dead, and I was dead at that moment.

She took a good long look at me, and we seemed tranced together in an endless moment. She gasped, “Not — engaged!”

“Certainly not to Miss Baysley,” I answered; but I did not add that, if I was not, I was a scoundrel. When you begin a bluff of that kind you have to go on, and I went on, “I am in love with some one else,” and again we held each other with a look. “Oh! Did you know she was coming here, — Miss Deschenes?” We had never mentioned her since that first night we were at the theatre together, and there must have been a great stress on her to make her do it now. I said, “No, I didn’t know. But I didn’t mean Miss Deschenes. I meant you.”

It was as if I had dealt her some kind of blinding stroke. She drooped forward with her left hand to her eyes, while she put out the other to me, as if to keep herself from reeling. She said, “Come!” and pulled me back into the room. “Now tell me what you mean!”

There would be a white line here if it were fiction, but it is fact, and I must ask you to imagine the rest without giving you a white line to do it in. I stayed down there the whole afternoon, then to dinner and then far into the evening. Now I am here, facing another order of realities, or rather fighting away from facing them. Every moment I expect Essie to come in for an explanation of my long absence, and consolation. She will come in, and hang upon me; and shall I deal as frankly with her as I dealt with America? Can a man be frank with two women at a time? I could make America understand how, without a promise from me, without one word of love-making, this poor girl should have come to look upon me as belonging to her, and should trust in me as wholly as if I had asked her in absolute terms to be my wife. And I do respect her, Linc; I do like her. She is an ignorant little thing, but she is true, and she is not vulgar, — not like me, who feel myself false to the finger tips, and vulgar to the bottom of my mean soul. While I was with America, I was safe. I accounted for myself, I justified myself, or else I let her do it for me, on condition that I would tell Essie everything at once. But now that I am away from her, I am afraid, and all my fine, bold pretences and purposes have tumbled into chaos. Not yours, for you won’t own me after this, but the devil’s own

W. A.

P. S. Jennie Baysley has just been in to tell me that Essie is down with the grippe, and they are afraid she is very bad. They want me to go for the doctor.

XXXII.

From Miss AMERICA RALSON to Miss CAROLINE DESCHENES, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, February the sixth, One thousand nine hundred and two.

My dear Caroline:

I do not know where to begin, and so I will begin in the middle. Mr. Ardith and I are engaged, and the circumstances are such that I think you ought to be the very first to know it, outside of my own family. It happened this afternoon, quite out of a clear sky, though I guess there must have been an electrical disturbance somewhere ever since we met here in December. The disturbance was increased by something I imagined, the other day, and there has been a very low pressure in the region of the heart for the whole week past. But now it is all over, and I am so happy! He has been so brave in explaining everything away; he is the soul of truth and honor, and if I had always understood the literary temperament as well as I do now, I would never have had the least anxiety.

It may seem rather heartless for me to be parading this before you, Caro, but I do not believe you ever really cared for him, or you would not have given him up; and now if I don’t let you have a second chance you can’t blame me, exactly, can you? My first idea was, “Now I must write to Caro Deschenes, and take back that invitation,” but I am not going to take it back, and you must come the same as ever. We haven’t either of us done anything to be ashamed of, have we? Any way, I’m not ashamed, and you must come and help me brazen it out. That is what we both think, Wallace and I, and he joins me in wishing to see you again, and in asking your blessing. I can’t exactly ask you to come and be my bridesmaid, for we haven’t got quite so far along as that, yet, but if you will come and visit me, you will be a ministering angel. I will not write the great news to any one else in Wottoma, and I will ask you not to say anything just at present. My, but what a chapter for the Sunday edition of the Day! If they come to you for a photograph, I wish you would give them that one with the lifted profile — the one with the Madonna look. Mr. Wibbert has got lots of Wallace. With all the love I can spare from him, Yours devotedly,

AMERICA.

XXXIII.

From WALLACE A. ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, Feb. 7th, 1902.

Dear Lincoln:

I feel that I left you at the close of an exciting installment last night, as if I were writing some wretched romance, instead of this wretched reality.

I posted my letter on the way to the doctor, who found things not so bad as they had looked to the family, but it is a severe case, with the peculiarities of the sudden sort of seizure. As I cannot go to the sick room, I am rather left out of it; and what do you think? I have spent the morning, while waiting to be sent on errands, and doing odd jobs about the house, in writing more “Impressions of a Provincial” for the Signal! How strangely we are made, we who are born to scribble! I feel a sort of disgrace in it, but it is not as bad as the other sort of disgrace I feel, and it is a change, any way.

I was to have gone down to the Walhondia this morning, to breakfast there, but I had to send a note instead. I was afraid it would bring America back with it, on one of her magnificent impulses, but women’s instincts are to be trusted in these matters. She merely answered me with a note of beautiful sympathy (that made me want to have the mountains fall on me,) and forbade me to think of coming near her if I could be of the least use in the world here. But I had better go, and I shall, as soon as old Baysley gets home this afternoon; there ought to be some man about, here. I beg his pardon for calling him old Baysley; my light-hearted disrespect for him is gone, along with the rest of my light-heartedness. I can only pity the poor old fellow, and hope that I am not pitying myself at the same time. I will keep you posted, of course.

Yours ever,

W. A.

XXXIV.

From Mr. Otis Binning to Mrs. WALTER Binning, Boston.

         NEW YORK, February 14, 1902.

My Dear Margaret:

In writing the date of this letter I have realized what day it is, and I venture to offer myself for your Valentine: I do not believe Wally will really mind much.

As a metropolis we are in tiptoe expectation of Prince Henry’s coming, and if we can believe the newspapers, which we never can, our businesses and bosoms are penetrated with a generous impatience, alloyed by no base respect of persons, or love of royalties, but inspired solely by a hitherto unimagined sympathy for the great German people and their magnanimous ruler. Some of us do not see quite how we are going to express this in the municipal reception of a representative who was born and not chosen for the business, but we are going to try, on a scale never before attempted. You will read all that in the public prints, and I have nothing subjective to offer you concerning it. If there is anything that really interests or amuses me it is the fact that while this storm is going on in the newspapers, the depths of our life are quite unstirred by it. We read of the Prince’s coming, and perhaps we fleetingly think of it, but, in a wonderful measure, nobody speaks of it. We are queer, we Americans, and if any one takes up the study of us in that dark future when we shall have ceased to be Americans, he will find the New Yorkers, and not the frontiersmen, the queerest Americans of all. In fact the New Yorkers are the frontiersmen, as I will explain to you, some day; but now the postulate would be too exhausting to handle.

I usually have a nap in a secluded armchair at the club after lunch, and then I cross the dangerous trolley lines for a stroll into the Park. In common with a great many other very young and very old people, I make it a large part of my business there to feed the squirrels, which are of a tameness curiously flattering to human pride. Privately, I think the squirrel is an extremely stupid little beast, with but small and imperfect use of even such minor perceptive faculties as seeing and hearing. But when, after starting up on his hind feet, and holding his forearms pressed to his throbbing breast, he makes me out at a little distance, and comes loping across the grass to get the nut I am holding out to him, I feel very much as I think I should if a great beauty should mistake me for a splendid youth, or Prince Henry should shake hands with me. It seems to single me out from my race as worthy the Creator’s peculiar confidence, which this small creature is commissioned to express; and though I see plenty of other squirrels making for nuts held out to them by other men, the fact does not affect my self-approval; I am still singly our Creator’s choice. In fact I think I have some really special reason to be satisfied with myself, for in the Ramble there is one squirrel who is my personal acquaintance: not because I think he knows me, for I doubt it, but because I know him, though I should not know him by his mental or moral difference from other squirrels so much as by the fact that one of his paws has been hurt, perhaps in the day of —

—” Old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago.”

The scar may be from a wound received in the worst of causes, but it serves: it distinguishes that squirrel, and gives him a limp to which my imagination bows. I am not sure that it does not make him cross; at any rate he is rather bad-tempered, and he does me the honor, when he climbs upon my knee, to bite my finger if I am slow in getting out the kernels of the nuts I give him. He prefers them crumbled up, and he noses for them in my palm like a minute pig. This gives me a delight which the cleanest conscience could not impart. I glow with the most agreeable self-righteousness, and I am aware of smiling in my rapture like a sinner who has made sure of the forgiveness he has been rather uncertain of.

This afternoon I found my squirrel, or my squirrel found me, with unusual ease in the Ramble, and I was sitting with him on my knee, feeding him crumbled peanuts (he prefers peanuts) and rejoicing in the excellent terms which I was on with my Maker through some merit of mine which that sagacious animal had divined, when I was sensible of being rather steadily gazed at. Steps had paused a little way from me and I surmised another squirrel amateur: we often stop to look at one another and envy one another in moments of high success. I enjoyed my triumph for a due space, and then I looked up to meet the gaze which I felt, and found that it was my pretty boy from Iowa who was looking at me. I dare say he would have respected my preoccupation with superior interests, and passed on, but just then the squirrel finished the last morsel of his peanuts, and ran away. This allowed me to give Mr. Ardith a less divided inspection, and I discovered such tragedy in his face as I have not often seen off the stage. What will you say, Margaret, when I declare that I discovered there a hardy cynicism, mixed with a fine grief, and an utter despondency, such as one does not often find in the human countenance even on the stage? But I know you will say that I discovered them there after he told me what was the matter.

The strange part is that he did not tell me. I asked him how he did, and he answered that he did very well, and while he informed himself of my health, I made room for him on my bench, and invited him to sit down. The day was so mild, and I was so well wrapped up that I did not mind his taking cold if he chose to risk it; in fact I was not conscious of his seeming rather pale and pinched till afterwards. He sat down, and told me that we had met first in that place, and I said, “Oh, yes, yes,” till he reminded me of an incident which I had forgotten, but which he seemed to have valued greatly. It was of two young lovers whom we had happened to notice, walking up toward that colossal bust of Schiller, which you may remember here, in a turn of the path by the lake with their arms round each other. They glanced back and saw us, and their arms dropped. Then the young girl in a brave defiance, made a fine rush at her lover, and flung her arm about him again, and so they passed from our sight into the nook beyond the bust. My youth and I had some banter about the little episode, and at his saying it ought to go into a poem, I suggested putting it into a play. But the thing quite went out of my mind, and though when I next met the Iowa youth, I was teased with the sense of having met him before, I took it for one of those intimations of pre-existance which are rather commoner with us as we get on in life than the intimations of postexistence. I now said, “Well, I suppose they are still liebing and lebing,” with Schiller’s line about having done so, in my mind. “Have you got them into a poem yet?” He said, “No more than you in a play, I suppose.” I confessed that I had not immortalized them in drama, and then I suggested that it was perhaps as well to leave them in life, and at that he dropped his head, with a sigh, and said, “Oh, yes; but if it was a mistake of theirs, literature could have helped them out of it much easier than life could.”

This notion, together with the sigh, interested me, and I scented a bit of psychology that I might purvey to you.  “Then you think,” I said, “that such things are sometimes mistakes?” and “Aren’t they usually?” he asked. I said, “Well, that is what they are supposed to be in the first blossoming of the affections,” and he asked again, “The affections are supposed to learn wisdom for the second or third blossoming?” This would have been a sneer, if it had not been so sad, and I did not pounce upon the young man for it, as, for instance, you would have done. I merely said, “That is the accepted attitude toward such matters. Then you think

‘They are false guides, the affections,’

 in affairs of the heart?” I claimed that I was quite disinterested in the inquiry, for I was past making a selfish use of any wisdom on the subject that he happened to have. My young man laughed rather desolately, and said the affections seemed to be of so many minds, and perhaps that was the reason why people of experience distrusted them, and thought them false when they were really sincere in their devotion to several objects. I said that was rather interesting, but I asked, “Was it true?” He allowed that it might not be true, and put the burden on me of saying whether it was so or not. I confess that in a swift review of my past, I seemed to find some proofs of his theory, but I said that in all such cases I thought I remembered a supreme goddess of my idolatry, though there might be other demi-goddesses at the same time. I expressed my surprise that the fact had never been adequately treated in literature, and he answered bitterly that life had never been adequately treated in literature, either because life was too bold, or because literature was too timid.

It seemed to me that this was a point at which I could becomingly put on the moralist with one so much my junior, and I intimated that the man who imagined himself in love with several women at the same time would do well to examine himself for the question whether he was not solely in love with himself. To my surprise, he was not daunted by my attitude, “Yes,” he said, “such a man might be a rascal, and yet he might be least a rascal in the reality of his varied preference. His only excuse for liking one woman for one thing, and another woman for another reason, would be the honesty of his liking.”

“Well, my dear young friend,” I answered, “I should much rather contemplate such a predicament in literature than in life. In literature, I might be psychologically interested in him, or the author’s skill in working him out, but in life, I am afraid I should wish to kick him.” My mind was playing with the thought of that glowing daughter of the Trust whom I have seen so much with this Mr. Ardith, and I was wondering if he were associating some inferior deity with her in the worship which I have fancied him paying her. I thought it as well to let him know how a dispassionate witness would feel in such an event; but he was not crushed, or at least not silenced by my severity. “The man might wish to kick himself,” he said, “ and yet he might feel a mystery in the affair which the spectator couldn’t, and he might feel that the mystery was something for which kicking was not the just meed. Perhaps the author who treated him in literature would do well to take into account a genuine shame in him for what was so adverse to the general acceptations in such matters; they can’t be called convictions.” His courage interested me, Margaret, and I asked with a tolerence which I hope you won’t call disgraceful.

“How would you justify him?” He answered, “I wouldn’t justify him; I would ascertain him,” and I thought that neat, if not acute, which I also thought it. “I would find out whether his condition was a real psychological condition, or whether it was only the sort of hallucination which the mere horror of a thing sometimes produces in us, and makes us feel as if it were ‘founded on fact.’” I could not deny that this was a very pretty conjecture, and I did not. “For literature?” he pursued. “Prettier than for life,” I said, and I said also that the thing might merit inquiry in life, too, where the first business of the inquirer would be to find out whether the fellow was not a plain rascal. He consented to that, and I went on. “Such a case I should think might very well be submitted to ‘the finer female sense’ that Tennyson believes more easily offended than ours.” Then I thought I might fitly cover all the possibilities while I was about it. “If it were a case in real life, the fellow couldn’t do better than go with it to some woman whom he suspected of not liking him. Then he would be apt to get an opinion worth having. And if it were a case in literature, he couldn’t have better criticism than such a woman’s mind.”

To be quite honest, I had begun to fancy something unwholesome in the young man, and I was now willing to defend myself from him at the cost of hurting him. I did not like the direction the conversation had taken, but I don’t say this was very handsome of me; I had led him on to talk freely, and I was making a personal affair of what might be quite an abstraction. He sat still without saying anything, and then he sneezed violently three times. This made me look at him, and I saw that he was wearing a fall overcoat; he shivered, and I said, “Aren’t you made up rather lightly for this evening air? “and he answered that he had put on that coat earlier in the afternoon, and had got warm with walking, but now he did feel the chill. He rose to take leave of me, and I put out my hand to shake his; it was cold. “You must look out for the grippe,” I said, and he answered, “I’ve been living with it for the last three or four weeks. The people where I lodge have all been down with it one after another, like a row of bricks.”

He lifted his hat, and went off down the walk away from the Schiller, and as he went I followed him with a forgiving pathos which I hope you will share, Margaret.

Yours affectionately,

OTIS.

XXXV.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, Feb. 14, 1902.

My Dear Mother:

I want to tell you to begin with, that I feel as if all my principles had been pulled up by the roots, and flung out on the woodpile in the back yard, like old geraniums that had failed to do their duty indoors, and did not deserve anything better. I haven’t got a single principle left, and though I am not immediately concerned, I feel that I have no dependence but Providence, in case anything should happen.

I wrote you about the call which Miss Raison made me make with her at the Baysleys’ to see what had become of Mr. Ardith; and I told you that we saw what, only too distinctly. But that seems to have been an optical delusion. Mr. Ardith certainly appeared to be engaged to the youngest Miss Baysley, but if we are to believe subsequent events, he was not engaged to her in the least. A week after we had settled down to our mistake, Mr. Ardith called, and asked for the ladies. This gave Miss Ralson a chance to say that she was sick, or something, but her mother had heard his name, and she insisted on having him come up. I received him, and then while I went in to make Mrs. Ralson up for company — I mean morally, for physically the maid looks after her, of course — Miss Ralson found that she could and would see him, and she did. What took place I shall probably never know in detail, but when I came back to get Mr. Ardith for her mother, he was gone, and Miss Ralson astounded me by grappling my unyielding form to her heart, and announcing that she was engaged to Mr. Ardith. She said that sometime she would tell me about it, but that now she merely wanted to celebrate, and she went on with a celebration in which Mr. Ardith was proclaimed the noblest and wisest and best of his sex. He seemed to have achieved his preeminence by having told her that he was not in love with the youngest Miss Baysley, but only and always with herself, and that the appearances which were so much against this theory could be easily accounted for on the ground that he had felt very sorry for Miss Baysley in her trials with her sick family, and had befriended her in every way he could, to the extent of helping her with the housework, but he had never told her that he cared for her, and he was not responsible for her thinking he did, if she thought so.

I must say, mother, that when Miss Ralson got that off to me, I felt that Mr. Ardith deserved all my original disapprobation, but I could not say so to Miss Ralson. I was so indignant I could hardly speak, but if I could have spoken I had no business to tell her that I always believed he was a heartless little wretch, and now I believed he was a wicked traitor. I wanted to fly out and declare that such a simpleton as that poor girl even, could not be so self-deluded as to think he cared for her, if he had not looked it and acted it, and that his not saying it did not matter. But I held in, and Miss Ralson went on, and did not notice my coolness, except to say that I was not celebrating worth a cent, and to laugh at what she considered my reserved nature. The most that I could do was to intimate that she would want to tell her father and mother at once, and then she said, No, she and Mr. Ardith had agreed to let it go, a little while, and it was to be a dead secret between her and me. She said it would be all right with her father and mother, whenever she told them, for they were both as much in love with Mr. Ardith as she was; and I could not deny that. Mrs. Ralson has been quite frank about it from the beginning with me, and has always hoped that Make would take a fancy to him, and Mr. Ralson has done everything that an entire resignation of his paternal duties to Mr. Ardith could do to show him that there would be no trouble when he wanted to assume any filial duties. Ever since Mr. Ardith has been coming here there has been a sort of lull in Miss Ralson’s social campaign, and I think her father has felt it such a blessed respite that he has been willing to prolong it on any terms. He has not had to go with her to any of the functions where she used to drag him, and she has left off a great many of them herself.

It was a week ago that she told me of her engagement, and he has been here a part of every day since, and I must say that he has seemed very much in love with her. They have kept up a pretty lively interchange of notes, and I have had to be consulted on many of the letters and answers; in fact I have had to help compose some of the answers, for Miss Ralson has held that she ought to make them the nicest kind, and as nearly up to his as possible. Sometimes I have wanted to resign and clear out altogether, for I could not approve of the affair as it stood, and I felt that if I was abetting it I was doing a thing that my conscience would give me gowdy for sooner or later. He has been staying on with the Baysleys, and has made an excuse of that girl’s having the grippe herself now for not leaving them. I don’t understand that he is actually helping nurse her, but the family have got to depending on him so that he cannot leave them. That is the prose of it, and what the poetry of it is that he makes up for Miss Ralson, I don’t know, of course; I have kept away from their poetry as much as I could; but any sort of doggerel would do for Miss Ralson in the state she is in. I don’t mean to say that he has been dishonest with her, about the Baysley girl, but if he had wanted to be, Miss Ralson has offered him every inducement by her blind faith in him. Any old thing that he chose to say would have gone with her. Her only trouble was that she couldn’t go and be with him, when he couldn’t come and be with her.

I don’t know whether this is preparing you for what has just happened or not, or whether anything could prepare you; nothing could have prepared me, I know. Mr. Ardith has been here, and he has left me in a state of mind that is worse than no mind. He asked for me, but I should not have been allowed to see him more than a minute alone if Miss Ralson had been at home; she happened to be out, and so I had the strange visit quite to myself. For an accepted lover, he has looked more excited than happy during the whole time since she announced their engagement to me, but when he came in to-day, he looked ghastly. He hardly took time to say how do you do, before he began on the business that apparently filled him to the brim.

He opened with the surprising remark, “I know you don’t like me, Miss Dennam.” I was not going to deny a thing of that kind, even if it were true, and so I smiled, and asked how he had happened to find out my secret; but he would not have any fooling. He said, “No matter; I know it, and I have come to you because I know it.” He stopped, and I just waited. “I have always felt that you were disposed to judge me severely, and now I want all the severity you can give my case. If I have been letting myself up too easily, I know you won’t abet me.” Of course, I suspected that this had something to do with his engagement to Miss Ralson, but still I did not say anything, and he went on again. “I saw what you thought that day at the Baysleys’, and now I have come to say that up to a certain point, you were right. I want to make a clean breast of it, if a breast like mine can be made clean, and to tell you that in a kind of way I did care for that poor girl.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Ardith,” I said, “I would rather you would not tell me this. I don’t want to know about your affairs.” But that was not the truth, and you know it, mother, and perhaps he saw it. At any rate he went on, just as if I had been dying, as I really was, to hear about his affairs.

He said, “I can’t help that: you have got to hear about them. The fact that you have always distrusted me has given me the right to make you hear, for you are the one person who can see these things in the true light, and do me justice.” He tried to keep quiet but he was trembling with excitement, and he looked fairly sick. “You know that whether I cared for her or not, she cared for me, and now you know that I have been telling America that I care for her. I do care for her — the whole world. She is the best and dearest thing in it to me; and yet I care for that other — too. I don’t defend myself, and if I try to explain myself it’s because — because I want to see if you can understand me. Sometimes it seems to me that I must be insane. My mind keeps working on that one point, and can’t leave it. I have thought that a word of blame, a verdict of guilty, would kill me. But now I believe that it is the only thing that can save me. And I’ve come to you for it; but I won’t let you think that I have meant any harm. I haven’t. I came to New York after a wretched business in Wottoma which I know you know about, and I have been in love with America ever since I saw her here, the first night, and I realized how good and beautiful she was: I had never known it before, but the time had come. Well, I got in with those people — the people I am living with — and I can say that I helped them in their helplessness. It was what anybody would have done under the same circumstances. They were from the town where I was born, and they were poor, and pretty soon they were sick, all but that girl. I don’t know whether she cared for me, at first, and it may have been my being friendly that made her. But I saw it coming, and I liked it — yes, I did! though I was in love with America then as much as I could be. I haven’t wronged the girl by one word of love-making, but I know she thinks I am in love with her. There you have the whole case — or not the whole, either. The others have had the grippe and got over it. Now she has it. At first I thought she was going to die, and — but she is getting better, though she is still very sick. The rest have taken care of her, of course, and my part has been what it is, yet, to keep up the ghastly fraud. But it isn’t altogether a fraud. I do like her — not as I like America, but as I can’t help liking any creature that likes me — that has trusted me. Oh! I know what my duty is! My duty is to tell her that I don’t care for her as she cares for me, to kill her with that, and then come and tell America that our engagement must be off because I have liked some one else while I was loving her. But I am not going to do either. I am going away.” He stopped, and while I still couldn’t make any reply, he went on: “When I began, I thought I wanted to know what you would say. But now I don’t. It wouldn’t matter what you said. It couldn’t make it any better if you justified me at every point, and it couldn’t make it worse if you condemned me.”

He got up, and began gathering his overcoat into his arm, and letting it drop, and then taking it up again, and he did not seem to know what he was doing, but he went toward the door, while I tried to gasp out something. And do you know what it was I gasped out, when it came? It was this: that I was sorry for him, and that if I had never believed in him before I believed in him now; and I begged him to tell Miss Ralson what he had told me, or if he couldn’t, to let me tell her; for I knew that she would take it in the right way, she was so large-minded and so noble and good. I forgot how I had always accused him in my own mind of being a sneak, and then of being a traitor, and had suspected him of deserting that Baysley girl because she was poor, and of trying to get Miss Ralson because she was rich; and now, simply because he had confessed the worst things about himself that a man could, I was trying to comfort him, and encourage him, and make him think that it was not such a desperate case, after all. He listened to me, in a sort of daze, and then as if he had realized what I was saying he fairly laughed in my face, and ran out of the room.

Now, what do you say, mother? Have I gone clear, stark, raving distracted, or is there something in what he said? I suppose that nobody but a man would know, and yet I don’t believe that any one but a woman could judge him fairly, and that is why my principles are out on the woodpile in the backyard. Don’t you see that if we let men go on at that rate, it would excuse every kind of wicked flirtation, and I don’t know but polygamy itself? I don’t know what the end of it will be or what anybody can do about it. I can’t tell whether I ought to let Miss Ralson know about it, or just leave it to fate, or nature, or Providence. It might be the best thing if he did go away, the best thing for her and for that wretched Baysley girl, not to mention your own bewildered daughter.

FRANCES.

XXXVI.

From W. ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, Feb.14, 1902.

My dear Linc, I guess I am going in for it; no one ever knows how the grippe is going to end, but I could tell you how it begins. My head is like lead, but through this density, the queerest little antic deliriums go capering as nimbly as if it were the finest ether; if I could note them down, or remember them for future use, they would be the weirdest sort of material.

I want to tell you something, but I do not know what it is long enough to get it out. It is something about that girl who secretaries and companions for the Raisons; I shall have it directly; never mind. That old Boston cock up in the Park, feeding the squirrels, where I first saw him, near the bust of Schiller, had something to do with it. America was not there —

Lord, how it keeps escaping me! But I shall get it, and I shall keep on writing.

I should like to make a fight of it, everyway, and see how long I could beat the thing off. I wonder if a man could give a thing of that sort the worst of it, if he held on to his courage. If my legs were good for it, I would go out, and walk it off. But my confounded legs won’t work. It is only the upper half of me that seems to have any sort of enterprise. I won’t go to bed; that is too base.

Let me see if I can’t nail that idea. It was about getting an unfavorable opinion — no, not that, but about putting my case in the hands of a just enemy; I can’t think what my case was; and the enemy seemed to play me false — came round to my side. How curious! I can’t get any nearer it than that. I have the strangest indifference about it all, and perhaps that is why I can’t express it. One torment drives another out. I suppose hell is having no change of subject; the damnable iteration makes the hellishness. In the last week I have known what this infernal monotony was; but I can’t remember what it was about.

I am going to keep writing away. If I pull through, I can make copy of it; if I don’t, you can.

What a disgusting pose! But there is an awful reality in it, too. I am going to reach that before I quit, and then I shall stop, and carry this out and mail it. There is a postal box just round the corner; my legs ought to do that much for me. I must keep on foot till morning, and then get an ambulance and go to some hospital; I won’t be sick on their hands, here; that would be too —

I should like to be at home, in Timber Creek. I used to hate it because it was like a prison, and I wanted to escape. Wottoma seemed a metropolis; but you must come to New York if you want to see what a metropolis is. I haven’t begun my epic yet. I haven’t written to my mother, for more than a week. I hate to write, for I don’t like her knowing that I have the grippe. I wish you — .

Don’t exploit me in the Day till I want the facts to come out. Perhaps — I shall have to stop, my head hurts so —

XXXVII.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, February 15, 1902.

Dear Mother:

Last night, I told you that I had pulled up my principles by the roots, and thrown them out on the woodpile in the backyard, and to-night I have to inform you that Miss Ralson has cast her proprieties to the four winds, and we are both luxuriating in a freedom from moral restraint which I don’t see any end to.

She came in a few minutes after Mr. Ardith left, yesterday, and when I told her that he had been there she was so angry with me for not keeping him that I did not know but she was going to hit me. She did manage to control herself long enough to let me explain that he had come to see me and not her, but not much longer. I had to tell her what he had said, and then I never saw such a passion as she flew out in. She wanted to know why Mr. Ardith should make a confidant of me, and appeal to me for my opinion in a matter that did not concern me; and when I made her realize that I had not asked for his confidence, and I had not given him any opinion, she was more furious than ever, and accused me of unjustly blaming him. She said she supposed I sided with those miserable Baysleys, because they were poor, and that she always knew I hated her. But she did not care, and if the whole Baysley family was at the point of death, it would not make the least difference to her. She said that she had seen from the first that I disliked Mr. Ardith as much as I did her, and that I had jumped at the chance to make him believe he had been doing wrong.

I can stand a good deal, and I had excused her unreasonableness to her unhappiness, but when it came to that, I flew out, too. Or rather, I flew in, for you know that when I am mad I do not say much about it. I suppose I got a little white, (whity-brown would suit my complexion better) for she looked scared; and when I went for my jacket and hat and started toward the door, without saying a single word, she began trying to make some sort of apology. She was so incoherent, that if I had not been mad through and through I should have wanted to laugh, and I did pity her enough to cry. She followed me into the vestibule, and asked me what I was doing, and where I was going; and when I would not answer, she called after me, “Go, then!” and burst out sobbing.

But I shut myself out, and I did not have a very good night. The fact is, I do love that family, if they are rich; and my heart ached for the poor soul, though she had said such insulting things that I could Dot bear it. Still, I knew I ought to have considered that as she could not hurt Mr. Ardith for the mischief he had made, she had to hurt me. I took it out of him for the mischief he had made in some one-sided dialogues of the sort we hold with people we are excited about, and they have not a word to say for themselves, and I made up for my mealy-mouthedness with him in the afternoon. I spoke daggers, I can tell you, but I retracted every single dagger when Miss Ralson came up in her automobile this morning to get me to go over to the Baysleys’ with her. Old Mr. Baysley had just been at the Walhondia to say that Mr. Ardith was down with the grippe, the worst way, and that he was out of his head, and they did not know what to do. He seemed to have been up all night, when Mr. Baysley found him in his room at breakfast time, and he had a letter before him on the table, and was trying to write. They got a doctor who found Mr. Ardith in a high fever, and got him to bed somehow; and Mr. Baysley seemed to have left pretty much the whole family watching with him, while he came to tell the Ralsons. Mr. Ralson is away at Washington, but America saw Mr. Baysley, and she telephoned their own doctor to send a trained nurse to the Baysleys’ instantly, and we found the nurse there taking possession when we arrived.

America wanted to go right in to see Mr. Ardith, but the nurse said she had better not, and we had to stay in the parlor at the other end of the flat, and hear his crazy talk coming through the corrider. The nurse would not say whether he was very bad or not, she said the case was one of the sudden kind, when the patients are delirious, and that she would rather we would talk with the doctor about it. She was so non-committal that it seemed to me as if I had never held my tongue in my life, and she scared us a great deal worse than if she had told us he was dying.

You remember how it was at Lake Ridge, when everybody had the grippe; some of them tried to kill themselves, and I guess Mr. Ardith is almost like that. The nurse would not stay with us a moment, hardly, but went right back to him, and shut his room door; she seemed to think he ought to have two nurses; but what they would do in that little bit of a flat I don’t see.

While we sat there waiting for the Ralsons’ doctor to come, ( America had asked him to, when she telephoned for the nurse,) the youngest Baysley girl came in with the unfinished letter that they had found Mr. Ardith writing at in the morning, and gave it to Miss Ralson. She looked awfully pale, and so weak she could hardly put one foot before the other, and I fairly hated America Ralson. But I know there was no sense in that, for if he did not care for the girl — Oh, I have got so mixed up, I don’t know what to think, and sometimes I feel as if there was no way to settle it but for Mr. Ardith — But that wouldn’t settle the eternal right and wrong of it, either. The wretched child coughed so when she tried to speak to America, that she could not really say anything coherent, and she handed America the letter without explaining, and went out of the room without hardly looking at us; but I knew what was in her heart.

Nobody could have explained the letter: it was a crazy whirl of words, almost from the beginning, and at the end it went off into mere scribble. But we made out that why they wanted us to see it was that in one place he spoke of his mother, and wished he was at home. The letter was to some friend of his in the Iowa town where the Ralsons used to live, and America said she knew where his mother lived, and she would telegraph her at once. She had been perfectly cowed ever since she came into the apartment, and the Baysley girl’s bringing her the letter, and making her feel how she hated her had been the last touch. But as soon as she could find something to do, she braced right up, and it didn’t make any difference whether it was the wrong thing. I had the greatest time to get her to wait till she had seen her own doctor and got his opinion of Mr. Ardith before she went out to telegraph his mother; but I did manage it, and when the doctor came at last, I persuaded her to let me speak with him first.

It was a good thing I did, and got him to modify what he said, for he told me it was the worst kind of an attack, and there were nine chances out of ten against Mr. Ardith. He said it was useless to telegraph his mother, at least till later in the day, for if he did not improve she could not get here in time, and if he did, we could send some encouraging message. I prepared him for America, with some hint of how the land lay, so that when he came in to see her, he fibbed nobly. He said there was absolutely nothing we could do there, and we had better go away. He promised to stay himself, and laughed at her anxiety. The nurse was the very best on his list, and besides — here he made his little break — the people of the house seemed to be devotedly attached to the young man, and would give any help that the nurse could need. We could come again when his fever had been subdued, but until it was, it would be worse than useless for his friends to see him. We could do no good; we could only do harm.

I could see America wince when he praised the devotion of the Baysleys, and I knew what a pang it was for her to think that other girl could be there with him and do things for him, and she could not. Don’t you think it was rather cruel yourself, mother? I changed all round, anyway, and pitied her as much as I had pitied the Baysley girl before; for whatever Mr. Ardith has done, America Ralson has done nothing wrong. She has as good a right to care for him as if there were no other girl in the world, and she hasn’t done the Baysley girl any more harm than the Baysley girl has done her. In fact they are both of them perfectly guiltless toward each other. It has taken me a good while to reason this out, but now I have got hold of the truth of the matter, I am going to hang on to it whether Mr. Ardith lives or dies. His living or dying has got nothing to do with the justice of the case; and the only thing that troubles me now is that those two innocent creatures should have such hate for each other in their hearts on his account. But that is perfectly inevitable, and I suppose that women will go on hating each other as they do as long as there is a man left to make trouble between them. When I realize that, I could almost wish there were no men, and I have to remember father, and what an angel he was, before I can reconcile myself. I do not know that men are so much to blame; they are just weak, and pulled about this way and that wherever they see a pretty face. Perhaps there ought not to be any pretty faces; if we were all plain, like me, I dare say the men would be all right. Not that I think Mr. Ardith has meant to do wrong: I want to keep that in mind, while I realize that Miss Ralson is as good as the Baysley girl, and that just now she is not as happy, and not as fortunate, with all the money of the Cheese and Churn Trust behind her.

I am writing this at the hotel, and America is in her room writing a letter to Mr. Ardith’s mother, to be sent as soon as the doctor says she can be told of his sickness. Every now and then she runs in to ask me whether she had better say this or that, or leave so and so out. My heart aches for her; but when she puts her tragedy face in to ask whether I spell grippe with one p and a final e, I want to laugh.

Your affectionate daughter,

FRANCES.

XXXVIII.

From Miss AMERICA RALSON to MRS. REBECCA ARDITH, Timber Creek, Iowa.

          THE WALHONDIA, NEW YORK, February the Fifteenth, Nineteen Hundred and Two.

Dear Mrs. Ardith:

I hope you will not be alarmed at getting this letter from a total stranger to you personally; though you may have heard your son speak of our family in Wottoma. The doctor wishes me to tell you that he is recovering from a pretty severe attack of the grippe, and will be about again in a few days. He is in good hands, and is having the best of medical care, and a trained nurse; so that you need feel no anxiety. The doctor did not want me to write to you, but I thought that if there was an interruption of his letters you would be uneasy, and I shall send this without consulting him, and keep you posted right along.

I do not know whether Mr. Ardith has told you how much he has let us see him this winter. It has been very pleasant for us, especially for my mother, who enjoys talking with him about Wottoma; and my father thinks there is no one like him. He is away from home, at Washington, just now, or he would join my mother and myself in best regards.

Yours sincerely,

AMERICA RALSON.

P. S. I will write again to-morrow, and let you know how Mr. Ardith is. I suppose he has told you that he has rooms with a family from your place. They are very good people, and have every reason to be kind to him, for he helped them in their own sickness, and I am afraid he has taken the disease from them. But that is not their fault, though I think that as soon as he can be moved, he ought to be in more comfortable quarters. I do not mean that his present room is uncomfortable. It is at the back, and has the sun, and it is very quiet, but the flat is small, and they are a good deal crowded, especially as some of them are not quite well themselves yet.

XXXIX.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, February 19, 1902.

Dear Mother:

I have been so busy, the last three or four days, flying back and forth between the Raisons and the Baysleys, that I have scarcely had time to write; and as I had nothing decided to write about Mr. Ardith, I thought I would wait. I knew, from your answer to my last, how much you were interested, and now I am glad to report that he is so much better as to be almost out of danger. There is always danger that pneumonia may set in, the doctor says, but as yet it has not. Day before yesterday they nearly lost hope, and when I found it out, I just wouldn’t hold in any longer. America was fairly frantic about him, in spite of the lies we had kept telling her, but when I told her the truth, it steadied her in the most wonderful way. She insisted on going up and staying under the same roof with him, and helping do what could be done for him outside of his room. Her idea seemed to be to do as much for him as any of the Baysleys were doing, and not to let that other girl have it to say or to think that she had failed in anything; which was perfectly natural. But really there was nothing that either of them could do. In fact it needed a man, and the doctor substituted a man nurse for the woman. Mr. Ardith was so delirious at one time that he had to be held, to keep him from getting out of the window. But now he is in his right mind, and they are not afraid of anything but pneumonia.

I have had to stay here most of the time with Mrs. Ralson, and I have slept here the whole week. Mr. Ralson is still at Washington. There is some trouble about the Trust, and he is there on that account; I guess he is afraid of the government prosecuting him, or something of that kind; I don’t know exactly. At any rate there he is, and we don’t know just when he will be back.

FRANCES.

P. S. Miss Ralson had put a postscript to her letter to Mrs. Ardith, kind of blaming the Baysleys for Mr. Ardith’s having got the grippe from them; but I persuaded her to leave it out, and write her letter over. It was just as well, for it seems that Mrs. Ardith is having some trouble with her eyes, and had to take the letter to Mr. Baysley’s brother, who is a minister out there, to have it read. He answered it for her and I don’t know what he would have thought if he had had to answer that postscript. But now, that many of the pieces have been saved.

XL.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, February 20, 1902.

Dear Mother:

All continues to go well with Mr. Ardith, who isn’t exactly bounding about yet, but is not so much in danger of pneumonia as the doctor thought. At any rate, Miss Ralson has felt it safe to come back here for the night, and I have got her in her room, making her write to her father, and tell him of her engagement. They take each other so casually that she thought it would be just as well if she waited till he got home. But I sat down on that good and hard, and she has listened to reason. She is not always as biddable as I should like, and I have just found out, by a letter that came from Timber Creek to-day, that she has not kept a promise she made me not to write anything to Mrs. Ardith without showing it to me. I do not blame her altogether, for when she found that Mr. Ardith was in danger, she felt the responsibility of not writing so awfully that she wrote, and told his mother the truth.

The letter that came back was not from her, but from that Rev. Mr. Baysley again. He said that at first he had hesitated about reading Miss Ralson’s letter to Mrs. Ardith, because she had not only the eye-trouble which prevented her from reading it herself, but was otherwise not able to take the journey to New York. Finally, he had decided to read it to her, and he said that he was glad, for she had taken it just as he could have wished. She sent messages to her son, to be given him as soon as he was in his right mind, telling him that she knew he would have patience with her not coming, and for him not to worry about her, for she would have courage for him. I thought when I was reading this word from her that if he was the kind of son that such a kind of mother could talk so to, he could not have acted heartlessly with that poor Baysley girl, and I have felt better about him than I did before.

But, mother, I wonder why people do not always come out with the whole truth at once when there is any kind of trouble or danger. The first thing when we knew that Mr. Ardith was very sick, we wanted to keep it from one another, but as soon as we owned the facts, Miss Ralson took courage from the instant she ought to have despaired, and when she told his mother how bad he was, his mother faced the chance of never seeing him again as bravely as if she could have come on here and saved him. I hope that if there is ever anything seriously the matter with you or Lizzie, you won’t spare me a moment, to see how the cat is going to jump; and if I get the grippe, I promise to let you hear of my very worst symptoms from the start.

I only wish I could tell you what a nice, dignified letter that Mr. Baysley wrote to America for Mr. Ardith’s mother. He is nothing but a poor country Baptist minister, and probably gets about five hundred dollars a year, and preaches the dullest kind of sermons. But when it came to being a ministering angel, he was there with the goods, as America would say; and I just know how he must have talked to that poor mother, and cheered her up. There wasn’t anything pious in his letter; it was humble Christianity all through, and it was so delicate and refined in feeling. You lose your bearings a good deal in New York, with the talk about classes, upper and lower and middle, and in some of the newspapers that try to be “smart” you read things about common Americans that make your blood boil, if you haven’t lost your bearings. But a letter like that country minister’s out there in Iowa, makes me glad that I am a common American, and I believe the commoner we are the better we are. Those other Baysleys are as common as they can be, but they have behaved like saints; perhaps the saints are common; and what makes me love these Ralsons is that they are just as common as the Baysleys, in spite of their money, and always will be whether they get into the Four Hundred or not. May be the Four Hundred themselves would be common if you boiled them down. But that doesn’t personally matter so much any more, for I don’t believe Miss Ralson —

She has just been in here to show me her letter to her father, and she has come very near making me change my mind about her. We decided on some changes in the letter and then we sat talking, and suddenly she came out with something that happened the other night at the Baysleys’. She was sitting up after the family had gone to bed, in hopes that she might be asked to do something for Mr. Ardith and when she heard his muffled raving from the other end of the flat, she could not bear it, and crept down the corridor to his room, to try and make out what he was saying. The light in the corridor had been turned out, and it was so dark that she had to feel her way to the door, but she found it, and crouched on the floor there. She heard her own name, and Essie Baysley’s, and he seemed to be talking to that friend of his in Wottoma that he was writing to when he was taken sick; but it was just a jumble of repetitions, and she could not make anything out of it. She was so anxious and absorbed that she did not notice at first something like some one catching their breath, very near her in the dark, but it must have come louder; and then she put out her hand. “And what do you think it was?” she fairly hissed out. “It was that Baysley girl! I felt as if I had touched a snake. She was there listening!”

She seemed to expect that I would be horrified and disgusted, but at first I could hardly help thinking that she must be joking. When I realized that she was not, I just hopped on her. “Why, what in the world were you doing? Hadn’t she as much right to, listen as you had? If that poor thing had left her own sick-bed, to come and hear his ravings, in the hopes of hearing something that would give her a little comfort or a little strength to bear her disappointment, I don’t see why you should call her a snake for it. She was no more snake than you were, and there is just one thing that keeps me from hating you, and that is that you’ve been up so much, and are so crazy for want of sleep that you don’t know what you’re saying.” I gave it to her good and hot, and she seemed perfectly dumbfounded. She turned white, and then red, and then she burst out, “I will never speak to you again!” and flung into her own room, and slammed the door after her.

I thought I knew just how much that meant, and I did not have to wait a great while, hearing her sob inside there, before she flung back again, and came and threw herself on her knees, and clutched me round the waist, and pulled me down to her. “I am crazy, and I don’t know what I’m saying! There!” she shouted, and she looked so much like a big, unhappy child, that I could not help bending over and kissing her, though you know I am not much on the kiss. She begged my pardon, and I said she had not done me any harm, and then she wanted to know what she should do to make that Baysley girl forgive her, and I tried to find out whether she had said anything to the poor child or not. She was so ashamed that she would hardly confess, hut it came out that she had said, “What are you eavesdropping here, for?” and the girl had burst out crying, and broken away from her, and run back to her room; and that was all.

You will think it was quite enough, and so do I; but what would you have advised Miss Ralson to do? She wanted to know whether she ought not to give Mr. Ardith up to that girl as soon as he was well enough for the sacrifice; but it seemed to me that this was the very last thing she ought to do, and that was what I said. I told her that it was for Mr. Ardith to give himself, or keep himself, and that her being willing to part with him had nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the case. I talked her quiet at last, and she decided that all she could do was to beg the girl’s pardon, and confess that she was sorry and ashamed. She has gone off to try and get some sleep, and in the morning she is going up to the Baysley’s to offer reparation. The good thing about her is that she can feel for that child, and that if she could, she would hate herself because he likes her the best. But is there any real harm in his doing that? He is cruelly to blame for letting that poor thing care for him, and yet perhaps he could not have prevented it, and he may have been very much tempted. I have never seen the girl yet that could make me lose my head, but I see more and more that men are different. You ought to be glad that I am not

Your affectionate son,

FRANCES.

XLI.

From MR. OTIS BINNTNG to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

         NEW YORK, February 23, 1902.

Dear Margaret:

The Prince of Prussia has gone off to the West, and given us a little breathing-space, and I am able to detach my thoughts from him, and devote them to this sort of one-sided communion with you. Do you know, I am becoming really fond of it, and should miss it if you happened to telegraph me some fine day that you were rather tired of my letters? I haven’t written such long ones since my first year at Harvard, when I “corresponded” with a young lady of this city, about whom I was just then very much in earnest. I have not the least notion what became of her, except that she married some one beside myself, and is perhaps no longer extant. I do not account for this conjecture except from the feeling that it is graceful and becoming for our first loves to die; I should hate meeting mine, in this world, of all things.

The literary superstition concerning us elderly fellows is (or used to be in the good old Thackeray times,) that we are always thinking of our first loves, and are going about rather droopingly on account of them. My own experience is that we are doing nothing of the kind. We are the only cheerful people in the world, and so long as we keep single, we are impartially impassioned of almost every interesting type of woman that we meet. I find the greatest pleasure in bestowing my affections right and left, and I enjoy a delightful surprise in finding them hold out in spite of my lavish use of them. If I totted up the number of my loves, young and old, since I came here early in December, Leperello’s list would be nothing to it. And they are such innocent infatuations! As you must own, they certainly do not interfere with my devotion to you, in that friendship which constitutes us the mirror of brothers-and-sisters-in-law, and I know you will not mind my being very much absorbed just now in Miss Ralson’s secretary. In fact, the absorption is quite in your interest, and involves the hope of surprising some further facts of the little romance in which I seem to have interested you so much beyond its merits or mine.

I do not know why I should have fancied, after I parted with my young Mr. Ardith the last time I saw him in the Park, that he might apply my counsel to an interview with Miss Dennam, on his way home to begin having the grippe. He has been having it ever since, in a form that at first alarmed his friends for him, though now he is out of danger. I understand, by no means so fully as I should like, that the glowing daughter of the Trust has seen that he wanted for nothing, in his sufferings, and I have found her away from home in both of the calls I have made at the Walhondia. Whether she was beside his couch or not, on these occasions, I cannot say, but for the sake of the old-fashioned fiction in which the heroines were always nursing their loves through critical sicknesses, let us hope so, Margaret. Her getting the grippe herself is something we would gladly have allowed in such a case.

Her absence has left me the freer opportunity for the employment of any subtlety I may possess in the study of her lieutenant, in whom I have joyfully divined a belated and dislocated Puritan. It has been very interesting to find what we call the New England conscience coming from Western New York, but that anxious and righteous spirit is always in the world, and owns no time or clime exclusively. The sense of personal responsibility for evil in one’s self and in others is as rife in every religion — and irreligion for that matter — as it was in Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century, and I will confess a malign pleasure which I have taken in teasing it in Miss Dennam. To indulge this, I have gone so far as to tell her of my last meeting with young Ardith, and of his strange problem, and I have admired the struggle in her transparent soul with the question whether it was quite truthful to forbear owning that she knew of it already. It was a spectacle the more interesting because of the humor which qualified her scruple, and enabled her to experience the ordeal objectively, as it were. This gave it the quaintness, which is perhaps the note of her whole personality, and which I despair of making you feel.

Though she could not hide the fact, she did hide the correlated facts, and I can only surmise a tragedy lurking below her silence. I am afraid there is something worse than the grippe in Mr. Ardith’s case. Just for the dramatic interest, wouldn’t you like to imagine his playing some sort of double part, with that single selfishness which is the unique force of duplicity? I hinted at some such mystery, but it was not intimated to me in return that I was right. It was there that my hermit thrush became a sphinx, and refused to read the riddle she had not asked. That is the reason I cannot be more explicit with you at present, and must leave you at such a poignant moment of the story, which I hope is to be continued. If you suffer, remember that I suffer with you.

Yours affectionately,

OTIS.

XLII.

From ABNER J. BAYSLEY to REV. WILLIAM BAYSLEY

             Timber Creek. N. Y. Feb. 23, 1902.

Dr Bro:

Yrs of Friday to hand. Would say that young Ardith is out of danger. He ought to be, with the care he has had from all hands, including two doctors, man nurse and our whole family, up with him day and night most of the time. You can tell his mother not to worry; he is getting along first rate.

I guess from this out we can do any worrying ourselves that there is any call for. There has been pretty curious goings on here since that he took to his bed, and unless I am a good deal mistaken somebody has got to pay for it. Looks now, when he was fooling with Essie, like he had somebody else on the hook at the same time. I don’t want to mention any names, yet, but you mustn’t be surprised if some things come out that wont show that fellow in the best of lights. I am not blaming anybody but him, and I hain’t blamed him to his face, for he ain’t strong enough to stand it. But if he thinks he can make a poor girl believe he’s engaged to her, and at the same time get engaged to a rich girl, he is mistaken. That is about the way the land lays, and it don’t seem to mother and I that it looks well for young A. I am not saying when we were all down with the grippe, here, but what he seemed to act the friend. He helped about the house like a good fellow, and when there was nobody around but Ess, he lent a hand at everything going. But the question is whether he done it for us, or done it for himself, or whether he was not just trying to have a good time as it went along.

Old Ralson’s girl seems to think he belongs to her, somehow, and she has been here ordering round as if she owned things. Ess and her come into collision one night when they were both hanging round outside his door, and America Ralson said things to Ess that I wont let any one say to a daughter of mine, I don’t care who she is, or what her father is. He may own the Cheese and Churn Trust, but he don’t own me. We would not found out anything about it if mother had not heard Ess crying when she got back to her room, and went in and just made her say what the matter was. I tell you I feel pretty mad, and I am not going to let myself be imposed on if I am a Christian.

So I think you can let up a little on the consolation with Mrs. Ardith till we see how this thing is going to come out. He has got to do the right thing by Essie, or I will know the reason why. No more at present, but I thought I would just give you a hint.

Will write you again when I have had my talk with Ardith. With our united love to your family,

Yr aff bro.

ABNER.

XLIII.

From MRS. ABNER J. BAYSLEY, to MRS. WM. BAYSLEY, Timber Creek.

         NEW YORK, February 24, 1902.

Dear Sister:

Father has sent off a letter to William that I do not know as I feel exactly right about. You know how all up or all down he is, and he never sees anything but what is either black as night or bright as the noonday. I have talked with Essie more than he has, and I know the rights of the case a good deal better. I put the blame, what there is, on Mr. Ardith; and yet I do not know as he meant any harm. It was wrong for him to fool with Essie, if he was honestly in love with some one else, but then I cannot say that it was anything more than fooling on his part. I suppose it is what goes on with young people most of the while, and though I never liked it, and do not approve of such things, I am not going to pretend that it was not the same with me in my young days, or you either. The children are as good girls as ever stepped, and just as particular; but I am not going to say they have never let fellows kiss them without meaning anything by it. I hear it is not so much the custom in the city, any more; but you and I both know that it is different in the country. Besides Essie was only sixteen last November, and he might have looked upon her as a child; he is ten years older. When the rest of us were sick, and he was helping her about the work that there was nobody but her to do, and he saw her so anxious and distracted, it was natural for him to try to comfort her; and you know how our feelings are mixed up at that age, so that we can hardly tell one from the other. One thing is certain: he never asked her to be engaged to him, and I am not going to have him treated as if he had broken a promise to her, in getting engaged to anybody else. It is very hard for her, and she feels it; but if we go back to bygones, it was our fault ever having him come here. Before father got his increase of salary, (and it was Mr. Ardith that got it for him,) we were so hard put to it to make both ends meet here, where everything is so high, that we fairly made a set at him to take our spare room. I am ashamed to think of it now, and so I tell father when he wants to bring him to book, as he calls it. I just know that he took the room out of the kindness of his heart, and he has been like a son and a brother to the whole family ever since. Any girl might be glad to get him, but I would not have a girl of mine try to get him, for the world, unless he wanted her. That is the way I feel about it; and Emmeline, I am not going to let my judgment be clouded. He is a good young man, I don’t care what they say, and all during his delirium he kept raving and explaining, first to one and then to another, that he was not engaged to Essie, and never had been, but he did like her, though not in that way exactly; or so much. I believe he has tried to be honest, and that he has suffered more than any one else, from letting his foolishness overcome him. Essie has got to stand it. She was not to blame, for she did not know that she was getting so attached to him; but I guess she is not so attached but what she can get over it.

You may think this is rather of an unnatural way for a mother to talk, but the way I look at it is that a mother can love her children all she need to, and still not be a fool about them, and I believe that is the way William will look at it too.

With love,

JANE BAYSLEY.

XLIV.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, March 1902.

Dear Mother:

I must say you do not seem very grateful for the letters that I have written to keep you and Lizzie along, you romantic things, while there has been nothing decisive happening here. You talk as if I had not told you anything worth knowing since my voluminous effort of February 20th. What did you expect, I wonder? Did you suppose I was writing a story, and could make up a chapter whenever I chose? Well, I almost wish I had done it, and stuffed you full of fibs. It would have been pleasanter than giving you the cold facts, now that something has happened, at last.

Mr. Ardith has just been here looking so sick, so sick, and coughing to break anybody’s heart. It is the first time he has been out since he was taken down three weeks ago, and I don’t believe the doctor knew he was coming now. I have been spending the nights at home, lately, and I could hardly recognize his voice, when I heard him talking, after the maid let me in, from where I stopped in the vestibule. He spoke so weakly and huskily, and every now and then he broke down coughing, and now and then laughing so sadly it made my flesh creep. The parlor of the apartment is between the vestibule and the little room that belongs to me, when I am here, and where I always write Miss Ralson’s letters; but a door opens from the vestibule into Mrs. Ralson’s room, and I decided to go there, when America seemed to hear me, and called out, “Come in here, Miss Dennam! Mr. Ardith is here. Come and hear what he is saying!”

Her voice sounded quite wild, and I hesitated, but before I could escape into her mother’s room she came running out, and pulled me in, like a crazy thing. Her face was drenched with crying, and there stood Mr. Ardith holding himself up by the table, and pale as death, trying to smile, when he put out his hand to me. She did not notice his gesture, but pushed me into a chair on the other side of the room and said, “Sit down, sit down, Mr. Ardith, and let Miss Dennam hear what you have been saying. I want her to be judge between us.”

She took a big chair herself, and leaned forward with her elbow on one of the arms, and her chin in her hand, with a mocking expression of attention. He sank into the chair behind him, not as if he wished to, but as if he were not able to keep on foot any longer, and she went on: “Come, begin! I have forgotten a good deal of what you said, and it will all be fresh to Miss Dennam.” I began, “Miss Ralson, I am going to your mother,” and I got up, but she ran and pushed me down again, and then took the same attitude as before in her own chair, and waited for him to speak. He only hung his head, with a pitiful, sidelong glance at me. “What! you are not going on?” she said. “Well, then, I will tell Miss Dennam, myself. Part of it is rather ancient history, but she wont mind hearing it once more.” Then she turned to me, “Mr. Ardith has just driven down to the Walhondia from his apartments on the West Side to announce the end of our engagement.”

You will say that I ought to have boxed her ears, and I felt like it; but I have not lived with her two months without understanding that a brutal speech like that was only the expression of suffering that could not relieve itself any other way. I hated her for it, but I pitied her too. Besides, it was not my business to box her ears, and the most I could do was to make another start for the door. This time it was Mr. Ardith who stopped me. “Don’t go,” he said hoarsely. “Let America tell you.”

“Yes, let me give you his reasons; he has reasons!” she broke in, but without noticing her, he went on, to me: “I came to you once before for your judgment.”

She did not seem to take that in, or else she was too preoccupied with what was in her mind. “Yes, indeed, he has reasons, and you will be surprised how good they are. He has found out — with the help of the Baysley family, of course — that he has been making love to that girl, up there, without realizing it, and that he has got her so much in love with him that it will kill her if he breaks with her. He says that he does not really care for her, and that he does not expect to be happy with her. His idea is that I have everything in the world to make me happy, and that I will not mind giving up a mere trifle like him to a poor girl who wants him so much worse.” That was frightfully vulgar, mother; but I am beginning to find out that real feeling is always vulgar; and I knew that if a girl like America Ralson would let herself say such things it must be because her soul was almost torn with red-hot pincers. She whirled her face round from me to him: “Is that it? Have I understated it, or overstated it?”

“No,” he said, “you have stated it,” and she turned back to me again, “Well, and what do you think of it?”

Then I broke out. “I don’t think anything about it, and I wont. You had no right to make me come in here. If you didn’t care for me, you ought to care for him.”

“I intend to care for myself,” she said. “He has been telling me that he cares the whole world for me, and no matter how much I care for him I must give him up to somebody he doesn’t care for at all. He can’t say why it would be better for me to suffer than for her. He has given me his word, and he hasn’t given her his word; perhaps that’s why he can take it back from me, and can’t from her.” I knew she was just saying that to hurt him, and she wished to hurt him because she worshipped him; but it seemed to me that she was talking sense, too, though I don’t believe she knew it. He must have felt something like that too, for he got up and steadied himself on his feet without the help of the table, and said, “I don’t take it back, and I wont. My love is yours, and my life.” It sounds rather silly, when you write such speeches, back and forth, but the poor things were in dead earnest, when they made them, and so was I when I heard them. I looked at America, for what she would do next, and I was ready to fly out of the room at short notice.

She had got up, too, and she said scornfully, “Oh, you’ve convinced me! I don’t want your love now, or your life.” He looked at her like death. “You mustn’t let me keep you, Mr. Ardith, from — your friends. Good-bye.” She held out her hand to him, but he did not offer to take it. He just kept looking at her, and then he turned away to the door. But she wailed after him in the greatest astonishment, “Why, are you going?” and he turned, and she held her arms toward him. I knew that this was the time for me to fly out of the room and I flew. With the door between them and me, I tried to collect my thoughts, as people used to do in the novels, but the most that I could scrape together was that they were acting sensibly, at last, if they were acting selfishly, and their love was keeping them from behaving falsely, no matter how cruelly he would have to behave to that other girl. Mother, I never had such hard work in the world to keep from listening at a keyhole as I did then, and I hope some day I shall be rewarded. You may be surprised, but I was so honorable that I went and raised the window, at the risk of taking my death of cold, and let the roar of the Avenue come in so that I could not hear anything through the door. I was determined to freeze rather than eavesdrop, and I had left my wraps in the vestibule. I could not get to Mrs. Ralson’s room without going back through the parlor, and I was in for it as long as they chose to keep me there. From the indications, I expected that they might keep me the whole forenoon, and I was composing a few last dying messages to you and Lizzie, when the door opened, and Miss Ralson came in.

“Well,” she said, calmly, “it’s over.”

“Over?” I gasped back at her. “You don’t mean that”—” We’ve given each other up! That’s what we’ve done. He’s gone back to her.” Before I could stop myself I had said, “What fools!” and she did not give me time to take it back. “Oh, fools, yes! What else did you expect?” and I came back with as much of an answer as she would let me: “I thought you were making up, and—”

“Did you suppose I could let him go against his conscience?” She sank down in an armchair, looking somehow shrunken and little, like the same person wrung out, if you can understand, and the sight of her, and the knowledge of what she must have been through, for a girl like her to come to that, made me furious.

“Why shouldn’t he have you on his conscience as well as her?” I said, but she only shook her head, and sort of sighed. “That is different. He was right. But if he was wrong, I had to give him up, just the same.”

Do you think she had, mother? And what does Lizzie think?

I can’t stand it anyhow; I know it can’t be right. That child has just set her heart on him because he has been good to her, and she would be over it in a few months; but America is a woman; she is twenty-five years old; as old as he is, nearly; and it is a serious thing with her; it is a matter of life and death.

It is none of my business, but I cannot let it go so. I feel like going up there to the Baysleys’ and having it out with them myself, and telling them what a pack of simpletons they are, and how they are just making misery for themselves, as well as everybody else.

But of course, that wouldn’t do. Thank goodness, Mr. Ralson is coming home to-night, and if there is the slightest opening, I think I can get in some good work with him. Anyway I have got my warpaint on, and I am not going to bury the hatchet in a hurry, I can tell you.

Your affectionate daughter,

BLOOD-IN-THE-EYES DENNAM.

XLV.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, March 1902.

My dear Lincoln:

I have been down, and nearly under, with the grippe, but am up at last, and it might have been better if I were not. Death would have been much simpler than life, for me.

I hope you will not be hurt at my asking you to send me back my letters. I have had my parting with A. R., preparatory to my meeting with E. B., and it seems right that I should destroy all written records of the past that relate to A. R. I have come back to this hotel, and you can send them here. I could not stay any longer at the B.s’ under the circumstances, but I shall go round there to-night and try to do what is right.

But what is right? Was breaking with A. R., right when I love her with my whole heart and soul, and is it right to make good to E. B. the things that she took for granted? Both of these alternatives are utterly false, and yet they seem my duty. Why? I know no other reason than because I wish to do neither, and that there is no other way to punish myself for what I have done. It is illogical and unreasonable, of course, but there seems nothing else.

I have not the strength to write more, at present. You can know the situation from what I have told you before; but if not, I cannot help it. I will write again as soon as there is something more. Send this letter back with the others, and I will feel that the incident is closed.

Yours faithfully,

W. ARDITH.

XLVI.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, March 5, 1902.

Dear Mother:

Yesterday was certainly a day of the craziest events that ever happened, and what to-day will be, goodness only knows. It has not had time to get in its work, yet, for it is only six o’clock in the morning, and I am scribbling this with a pencil in bed, to pass away the time till I can get up with the hope of something to eat: I am furiously hungry, and I have got to thinking, so I can’t sleep any longer. The principals of the affair are slumbering peacefully, while I. an innocent second, have hardly had two consecutive winks the whole night.

After I sent off my massive missive to you yesterday, I had to lunch with Miss Ralson, who had such an appetite as I have never seen outside of a house of mourning; the strongest emotions seem to leave one the hollowest. But I pitied her, and when she proposed going to a matinée, I perfectly understood her: she had got to kill time from this out, and she could not begin a moment too soon. And where do you think we decided to go? “Well, to a sort of burlesque place, where there are three broken-English-speaking Germans that get you into perfect gales. I do not know how we came to think of it, but we did, both together; and I suppose it was because we thought something like that would help her to take her mind off itself better than anything else. Well, it did, almost from the first moment of the sort of comic opera, with dancing in it, that I should blush to have you see me see. Then came a parody of a play that is running at another theatre, and that was just as killing, without being as scandalous as the opera; I suppose because several women’s part was taken by men: I don’t know why the men are always more decent on the stage than the women are, even when the men are acting women.

It seemed to be an actressy sort of matinée; you could tell the strong professional faces, and the intense professional hats and gowns; and you could be perfectly safe that you would not see anybody you knew in the whole crowd. I do not believe America cared what sort of crowd it was; what she wanted to do was not to think; and as I only know about ten people in New York, I was not anxious. But whom do you think we saw coming out of the vestibule of the theatre, a little ahead of us? The psychological Mr. Binning! He had been there, too, and he was looking at the photographs of the actresses on the easels in the corrider, standing slanted over, with his cane under his arm, and his silk-hatted head bent to one side, critically. Fortunately, he had his back to us, and I clutched America by the arm, and dragged her out, and never let her stop till we had mixed ourselves up with the crowd coming out of one of the proper theatres. Then I slowed up and explained, and after awhile Mr. Binning overtook us, and lifted his hat and asked us if we were walking, and might he walk with us as far as our hotel.

Of course, I shall never know whether he had seen us coming out of that place, but he confessed that he had been there himself, and said he had been immensely amused; it was so amusing that it was a pity it was not more adapted to ladies, and we pretended that we had hardly ever heard of it, and made him explain a little, which he did very skillfully; and then we talked of the piece at the theatre we had seemed to come out of; we had fortunately seen it just before Mr. Ardith was taken sick. If this was a little wicked, and I do not say it was perfectly truthful, I excused myself, because I could see that it was helping tide America over. Mr. Binning had been so nice that we asked him to come in and have tea with us, and you would never have imagined that America had been through anything half as bad as a hard day with the dress-maker. But I should, and when I saw the exhaustion in her eyes, and heard it in her voice, I got her away for an imaginary engagement, and made Mr. Binning believe that I wanted him to stay on with me. He seemed very glad to stay on with any one, and took cup after cup of tea, enough to keep him awake the whole night. He is a very sly old tommy, and I think he smelt a mouse of some sort, for every now and then he would come back from some other subject, and artfully bring the talk round to Mr. Ardith. He pretended to be ever so much interested in him; he thinks, or says he thinks, he is very talented, and that his greatest danger is getting himself involved in some sort of love-affair, and spoiling his career with some sort of disadvantageous early marriage. He was really very subtle in the analysis he made of Mr.

Ardith’s nature: he said he was the sort of person to increase the danger of any situation he found himself in by fancying things far beyond the reality; that he was capable of becoming anything he dreaded becoming; he had a supersensitive conscience, and would sacrifice himself or anybody else to its aberrations. I could hardly believe he was not onto the facts, especially when he asked where Mr. Ardith lived, and who had taken care of him in his grippe. When I told him, he asked if there were daughters, and I said there were two. He said, “Ah! “ as if that told the whole story, and then he said “Which?” so slyly that I wanted to get up and box his old ears. He asked all sorts of questions about the Baysleys, but I was a tabby, if he was a tommy, and he did not know anything I did not want him to. Suddenly he switched off to Miss Ralson, and asked if she were not very romantic. I asked him why he thought so, and he said, merely because she always seemed so matter-of-fact; he had noticed that practical people were always full of romantic potentialities. He began to talk about her beauty; and it seemed to him that she was built so generously, and he hoped that she would not throw herself away at the first opportunity; such a girl could make the right man supremely happy.

He suddenly asked when we expected Mr. Ralson back; he hoped he was not anxious about the Trust on account of the bluff the government was making; it was nothing but a bluff. Then, before I knew it, he was talking about Mr. Ardith again, and saying it was delightful to see two men of such different types as he and Mr. Ralson liking each other. Mr. Ralson was charmingly fond of the young fellow.

He had managed to make it so impersonal that I could not feel that it was impertinent. You might say it was patronizing, for he talked of the Ralsons and Mr. Ardith as if they were a different order of beings from himself. I was just getting ready to resent that when he asked Mr. Ardith’s address, and said he was going to venture to call upon him; then he rose, with the ease of a person who has been used to managing such things all his life, and shook hands with me, and got himself away before I could say Jack Robinson.

You will infer from my beginning to use ink here that I am out of bed. I have had my coffee, but the others have not breakfasted yet, and I have the time and have got the strength to go on with this yarn for a while longer.

Mr. Ralson arrived from Washington on the 6.23, last night and it seemed to me that he was in the hotel almost before Mr. Binning was out of it, but there must have been an interval, for I was with Mrs. Ralson, comforting her against her fears of accidents to Mr. Ralson, and reassuring her about America and her headache, and proving to her that it was mathematically impossible for Mr. Ardith to have a relapse from having come out too soon, when Mr. Ralson arrived to relieve me. Then he and I had rather a difficult dinner together, for it is hard to eat in absolute silence even when you do not want to talk; but long before I was ready for the order, he had pushed back his plate (as I suppose he used to do when he ate his whole dinner off one plate,) and lit his cigar, with his chair tilted on its hind legs, and was saying “Now tell me about Make.”

I do not believe I could ever have done it, if I had not been like the beaver that clomb the tree, and had to. But I did do it, with no more interruption from Mr. Ralson than an occasional snort, and “Humph!” and a question now and then to make me keep on. Things must have been going the way of the Trust at Washington, for he was in a very good humor, and when he began to speak, he took a very optimistic view of the matter. He just said, “I guess we can arrange that all right, if Ardith don’t insist on making a fool of himself. We’re a party in interest as much as the Baysleys, and I don’t propose to let them walk over us if they are dependent on me for their living.” That way of looking at the case seemed to amuse him, and he laughed. “Of course, I will do the fair thing by them,” he said.

He had made me tell all I knew, and now he began to cross-question me; and I suppose I looked worried, for he apologized, “I have to make sure of my ground, you know,” and then he went into a long revery, and smoked and smoked. Every now and then he seemed as if he were going to say something, but he only made a noise in his throat, and kept on smoking. I had not heard any ring, when the maid came in with the sort of card they give people to send up their names on from the office, and he said, “Heigh! What’s this?” and looked at it, at arm’s length, to make out the name, and then said, “Yes, certainly, have him up,” and kept smoking, and frowning through his smoke, while I was on pins and needles, till I heard some one being let into the vestibule, and hesitating there, and Mr. Ralson roared out, “Come in here!”

I had never seen Mr. Baysley before, but somehow I knew who it was the moment I set eyes on him; and mother, I am sorry to say I did not like his looks. My sympathies were naturally with him and against Mr. Ralson, for we belong to the poor side and not the rich, and I do think the Baysleys have had a good deal to bear. But it is no use to pretend that hard luck does not take the manhood out of a man; when he has an inferior part in life to play, he begins to look the part, and he looks the superior part when he has that to play. Mr. Ralson, with his cloud of white hair, and his red face crossed by his big white moustache, and his large stomach swelling out through his unbuttoned coat, was “all there” as he came forward with his napkin in his hand; and poor Mr. Baysley, in his shabby overcoat, with his silly Fedora hat in his hand, and his frightened eyes running from Mr. Ralson to me and back, seemed to have left the best of himself somewhere else. Mr. Ralson gave a roaring laugh and held out the hand that hadn’t the napkin in it. “Well, old Battery A!” he shouted out, and a pitiful kind of smile came into Mr. Baysley’s face, as if he did not dare quite believe in the appearance of friendliness. “What can I do for you? Have some coffee? Sit down — pull up!” and Mr. Ralson dragged him by the hand toward the table, and said to me, “Miss Dennam, will you make that girl fetch Mr. Baysley a cup? Do’ know whether you know Miss Dennam, Mr. Baysley. Take off your overcoat. Have a cigar? And tell her to put down the Scotch, too. I’m just off the train, and Miss Dennam and I have been having a bite here. Sorry my wife and daughter are not very well. How are your family?”

“Well sir, we have had a good deal of sickness this winter.”

“That so? Well, I’ve been away — but come to think, I had heard something about it. Grippe?”

“Yes, sir. We have all been down with it, and Mr. Ardith has had it too.”

“Oh, yes! Yes, yes!”

“He’s been out for the first time, to-day, and — he hasn’t got in yet, or hadn’t when I left home, and moth — Mrs. Baysley was feeling a little anxious. And I thought I would run down, and inquire if you had happened to see anything of him here.”

Mr. Baysley seemed to have hard work to get that out, and did not seem much relieved afterwards, but Mr. Ralson broke the ash of his cigar off into his saucer, and answered cosily, “Why, yes, Miss Dennam tells me he was here this afternoon — or morning, was it? — but I haven’t seen him myself. He’s probably met some friends — Sugar?” By this time Mr. Baysley had his coffee, and Mr. Ralson pushed the sugarbowl towards him; and offered him a lighted match for his cigar. “I like my tobacco along with my coffee.” Mr. Baysley submissively lighted his cigar, and with that and the coffee, he began to look a little less daunted in Mr. Ralson’s presence. “It seems like old times to be drinking coffee again with you, Baysley; we used to take it out of a tin cup, and we didn’t exactly have loaf sugar in it; we had to get our tobacco across the lines, when there was a Johnny handy that wanted coffee.” That made Mr. Baysley laugh, and show most of his upper teeth gone, and cough out through the smoke, “Gay times!” and wag his head with more courage. I could make out that they had been soldiers together, in the Civil War; and they went on talking, and getting friendlier. But that did not make me any happier, for I saw just as well that Mr. Ralson was working Mr. Baysley, and that the poor, weak old creature was flattered, and was like putty in his hands. I knew he had come to talk with Mr. Ralson about Mr. Ardith, and probably he had told his wife that he was not going to let the Ralsons walk over them; for if Mr. Ardith had not come back to them, yet, they might very well have supposed that he was not coming back at all, and the Ralsons knew it. That was what his first remark indicated, but Mr. Ralson had got him far beyond that. If he had met Mr. Baysley roughly, perhaps Mr. Baysley would have held his ground, but as it was he was not left a leg to stand on, whatever he thought his rights were. It made me fairly sick, and when Mr. Ralson said, “Why don’t that girl bring the Scotch?” I could not stand it any longer. I got up and said I would send her with it, and I went in to Mrs. Ralson, and let her talk her nerves down, after I had made excuses for Miss Ralson’s headache, and Mr. Ralson’s business caller. She did not ask who it was with him; and after awhile she said she believed she would go to bed, and I came to my own room, and have been writing to you ever since.

It is ten o’clock, and I have just heard Mr. Ralson and Mr. Baysley coming out into the vestibule together, shouting and laughing. Mr. Baysley’s voice was the same, but it was in quite another key, so I should have hardly known it, when I heard him saying, “Well, sir, you done the handsome thing, and I’ll see that there’s no trouble.”

“If it isn’t right,” I heard Mr. Ralson answer, “I’ll make it right.”

“Oh, it’s all right. It’ll fix the old place up in good shape; and if you make the salary the same in Timber Creek as what it is here”— “Sure!”

“Then we don’t need to say anything more about it. Well, sir, goodnight — Jim.”

“Good night, Ab.”

“He, he!”

“Haw, haw!”

I feel as if I had overheard something awful, and the cold chills are running down my back; but I do not know any more than you do what those two miserable men meant, and I leave you to find out for yourselves. I am going to bed.

I seem to be keeping a diary instead of writing a letter. I began this quite gaily on the 5th, expecting to mail it that day, and here I am dragging on through the 7th, and not seeing the end yet. Well, one thing: I will never keep another diary.

To my great surprise I did get to sleep towards morning, but a little after eight I was roused from my wicked dreams by the maid, who came to tell me that there was a lady in the vestibule wanting to see Mr. Ralson, and that she was afraid to call him, and what should she do? Of course I asked, “What kind of lady?” and what her name was, but the maid did not know, and my mind worked round from female anarchists to destitute females, and then I decided to get up and go see for myself, and get rid of the lady, who was unseasonable, whatever she was.

I was rewarded by finding Mrs. Baysley, who accounted for her getting into the apartment at that hour by saying that she had come directly up in the elevator to the number that her husband had given her. She was only anxious apparently to make sure that Mr. Ralson had not gone out, and said she was not in a hurry, but could wait till he had his breakfast, if he could not see her before. I made her come into the parlor, and asked her to share my coffee, but she said she had been to breakfast, and did not want anything more at present. I tried to talk with her, but her mind seemed so centered on something, that I could not get more than a word at a time out of her, and she would not give me any clew to what she wanted. She just sat there drooping in her chair, and holding something in her folded hands that was like a scrap of paper; and I decided that if Mr. Ralson kept her waiting a great while, I would go and knock on his door myself, and take the consequences, when America came into the room.

I did not know she was up, and it startled me, but I could not help noticing how fresh and strong and beautiful she looked. If she had shared my vigils, she did not show it, and Mrs., Baysley seemed to wither before her, as Mr. Baysley had withered before her father. She swept by her without seeing her, and said to me, “I wish you would give me some of your coffee, Miss Dennam; I’m half-starved,” and I had to say, “Mrs. Baysley is here,” before she noticed her. She gave a start, at the name, and as she whirled round, and looked at her, I could See the disgust come into her face. Mrs. Baysley stood up in front of her chair without offering to come forward, and for a dreadful moment America did not move, either. Then she went to her, and put out her hand. “Wont you have some breakfast, Mrs. Baysley!” she said, and Mrs. Baysley repeated her refusal, sinking down again into her chair without taking America’s hand. “I wanted to see your father,” she said, and I was afraid Miss Ralson would resent her bluntness, but she only answered, still more gently, “Father isn’t up yet, and he doesn’t like to have us call him. Wont I do?”

Mrs. Baysley didn’t say anything, and for awhile I did not see that she could not say anything. America poured out a cup of coffee, and went with it to her, and this time she did not refuse it. She put up her veil to drink it, and then I saw that she had been crying. She drank the whole cup off, and America went and got it from her, and sat down again, and waited patiently. It seemed a long time, but I do not suppose it was long, before Mrs. Baysley spoke again. She cleared her voice, and said, “I don’t know but what you’ll do just as well.”

“I’ll go and wake my father, if you are in a hurry,” said America. “No,” said Mrs. Baysley, “I guess I’d rather talk with you.” She stopped, and sat fumbling the paper in her hands; then she rose and came stiffly forward and laid it on the table before America, and I could not help seeing that it was a check, with Mr. Ralson’s flourishing signature.

America looked up at her puzzled, and Mrs. Baysley said, “I got it from Mr. Baysley, and I want you to give it to your father, and tell him that we can’t keep it. We don’t want to go back to Timber Creek — at least the girls and I don’t — and if we can just go on here, as if nothing had happened, it’s all we ask.”

“But didn’t — wasn’t the money coming to Mr. Baysley?” America asked, and Mrs. Baysley shook her head. “There ain’t any money coming to us.”

“But I don’t understand,” said America. “What should my father want to give it to Mr. Baysley for then?”

“I don’t know as I can explain,” said Mrs. Baysley, and she began edging toward the door.

“Maybe your father will tell you. Any rate I’ve got nothing to say. All we want is to stay on just as we were before. We shall get through.” She was looking down at the floor, as if she were ashamed of something, but now she looked up into America’s face “I want to say that there are not going to be any hard feelings in us.”

America’s nostrils puffed out with indignation in an instant. “Any hard feelings! Why in the world should you have hard feelings, I should like to know! You have him, and I have lost him!” Mrs. Baysley looked at her as if she did not understand. Then she seemed to realize something, and she asked, “Hasn’t he been here since?”

“Since?” said America. “Since when?”

“Since he was at our house last night,” Mrs. Baysley said, and America flashed out, “Now you just sit right down, and tell me what you mean.”

“There ain’t any call to sit down,” Mrs. Baysley said. “He came over from the hotel where he says he is going to put up, from this out, and wanted to see Essie, Well, I saw him, and I told him what she had agreed to tell him: that we did not feel he was beholden to her in any way or shape, and he was just as free as if he had never laid eyes on her. I don’t know what fath — Mr. Baysley — would have said if he had been there, but he had come here to see your father, and I spoke for myself; and I told him we felt as bad as he did, and we didn’t put the blame on him, altogether, if there was any blame, for we didn’t believe he wanted to fool the child. She ain’t anything but a child, anyway, and she’s got chances enough to get over it.” Mrs. Baysley was winking hard as she said this, and she had got her hand on the doorknob, when she let drop, the only bitterness that came from her: “Next time, I hope she wont be so ready to make a fool of herself because some simpleton is kind to her, and pets her up when he better keep his hands off. I wish you good morning.”

She opened the door and whisked out, and left America and me staring at each other. I don’t know which would have spoken first, or whether we should ever have spoken again, if we had not heard Mr. Ralson behind us saying, “What’s the row about! Who’s been here, asking for me at eight o’clock in the morning?” America turned and pounced on him. “Father, what did you give Mr. Baysley this check for?” and she poked it at him. He looked at it with a kind of shame-faced smile, and she rushed on, “Was it to buy Mr. Ardith from him?”

“Well, I shouldn’t call it that, exactly,” her father said. I supposed you wanted to make things smooth for them — it was nothing but a matter of business.”

“Oh, business!” she flung out. “You think everything is business! Well, there are some things that are not. Mrs. Baysley has been here to bring back your check, and give me Mr. Ardith for nothing. But I don’t want him, and you may have him, if you do. Perhaps he’ll sell himself to you a little cheaper.” She dashed the check at her father’s feet, and ran but of the room, and I could hear her crying on the way to her own room. Mr. Ralson just said, “Well, I’ll be damned,” and went in to breakfast, and left me to pick up the check, and put it into his desk.

Now, this is all at present, and I think it is enough for one while. I am finishing this, while the maid is giving Mrs. Ralson her breakfast, and I have nothing else to do. I do not know whether to send it by fast freight or not; the postage on such a letter would be something awful. I suppose that I will let you know the rest if anything else happens. I shall want to tell it as bad as you will want to have me.

Your affectionate daughter,

FRANCES.

XLVII.

From Miss FRANCES DENNAM to MRS. DENNAM, Lake Ridge.

         NEW YORK, March 10th., 1902.

Dear Mother:

I almost wish there was no “rest” to the story I have been telling you, but things have to end somehow, when they begin, no matter whether you like the ending or not.

The worst of women is that they take things out in talk, and when they have said a thing they are just as well satisfied as if they had done it, and seem to think they have. I never respected any one so much in my life as I did America Ralson when she had that scene with her father about the check, and I would have done anything to help her in the stand she had taken. For once, I was proud of my sex, for although we can despise men easily enough, it is not quite so easy to honor women; and I did honor her with my whole heart. She could not have taken Mr. Ardith back, under the circumstances, and kept a solitary rag of self-respect, and I gloried in her.

I did not see her the whole morning, and I had to lunch alone. About four o’clock this afternoon, she sent for me, and we had a long, splendid powwow. I never supposed she had such a clear mind, but she must have been thinking the whole affair over, and she was so logical that I could hardly believe it was the same harum-scarum person. She went over the case with me, from the time Mr. Ardith first appeared here, broken hearted from the way Miss Deschenes had used him in Wottoma, till he was taken down with the grippe there at the Baysley’s. She tried to do him justice at every step, but her conclusion was that he had been wickedly weak, if he had not been simply wicked, and that no girl could be happy with a man she could not look up to. She said that he might have done much worse things, and still kept her respect, but she could not respect a man who was so afraid of hurting people that he could not say his soul was his own, and really did more harm by his shilly-shallying than if he had taken a thoroughly selfish course throughout, and been guided by nothing but his own interests.

When I defended him a little, and said that I thought he ought not to be punished for the harm he had not meant to do, she said she was surprised at me, and she argued me out of it. She declared that if there was any such thing as justice, it had to be blind to everything but the facts, and could not have anything to do with the motives. She said, “Don’t you see that if I took Mr. Ardith back now we could never look each other in the face? We should always be remembering what had happened, and I should be thinking how he had been feebly led away by his pity, to let that girl get in love with him; and he would be thinking how I had let my silliness for him overcome my better judgment. No, there is just one thing for it. We are parted now, and we must stay parted.”

She said a great deal more, but it always came to this, and every now and then she would throw her arms round me, and cry, and make me promise never to leave her, but take her out to Lake Ridge, and we would start a grape farm together; we could make it pay by raising the early kinds, and getting them into the market before anybody else. She made me want to laugh, at times, but through it all, I honored her, and she talked herself quiet at last, and said she had not felt so strong in her life before. She kept up splendidly, that whole evening, and through the whole of Saturday. We went to a matinée, where there was rather a lovesick play, and she criticised it unmercifully; I never heard any one so funny about the plot, and the idiotic lovers. She would not let me go home in the evening; I slept in her room with her, and we talked till nearly morning, about all sorts of things, but mostly about girls and the kind of men they had married. She wanted to know if I had ever been engaged, and I tried to give her an idea of the kind of men I would have had to be engaged to in Lake Ridge; and she said that was just the place where she should like to spend the rest of her life, and not see another man to speak to as long as she breathed.

In the morning we went to church, and in the afternoon we talked again, and she made me say that I would write to you, and ask you if we might come out for a few days’ visit this week; but I don’t think you need get the spare room ready just yet. Suddenly, when she had arranged everything she said, “Don’t you think its rather queer he doesn’t write, and ask if he may come to see me!” I knew who he was, but I thought I would make her say Mr.

Ardith for the discipline, if her mind was veering round that way, so I asked whom she meant, and then I suggested that perhaps he was waiting for some sort of sign from her. She was very haughty at the idea, and said he would have to wait a good while, and then we branched off on other things, but in the midst of a discussion of Mr. Binning, and whether it would be much out of our way to go round by Boston when we went to Lake Ridge, she broke off with, “I’ll tell you what: if Mr. Ardith calls, you shall see him, and give him his letters; I’ve got them tied up. And I want you to put on your frozenest Lake Ridge behavior, and let him feel that you are handing him a small cake of ice from me. Will you?” She began to laugh, and I did not know what to make of her, when she said, “If he is anything of a man at all, he can’t let the thing drop just at this point; he must try to see me. I hate a boyish man. I believe if I ever marry, it will be somebody like Mr. Binning. A girl ought to marry somebody who can understand her, or at least analyze her, and I am sure he could do that. I wonder how I would go down in Boston. I believe I could get him if I tried, and I have got half a notion to try. It would be fun Yes, I am going in for Mr. Binning.”

She ran out of the room, and when she came back, I could see by her very bright-eyed look that she had been crying, and then washing away the tears. She said, “I have decided to send Mr. Ardith’s notes to him by a messenger, as soon as I know his address. I never want him to darken these doors again.” She had hardly got the words out of her mouth before we heard the scraping of Mr. Ralson’s latchkey, and then the opening of the door, and his saying, “Oh, come in, come right in!” and before I knew what I was about, he came in to where we were sitting, with Mr. Ardith by the arm. I expected to see America get up, and leave the room, and she did rise and stand looking at him magnificently, so that I should have thought he would have quailed at her glance. I don’t know exactly how people do quail, but if it is anything like getting down on the carpet, and crawling round on their hands and knees, Mr. Ardith did not do it. He just stood with his head flung back, and gazing at her with such an appealing look that I was glad I was not in America’s place. As it was I was perfectly dazed, but I managed to hear Mr. Ralson saying, “You come in here, and take a letter, Miss Dennam. Wallace, you’ll have to excuse me a minute,” and we left the two standing there together.

This was all I could write last night, for Mr. Ralson really had a business letter to dictate, and a pretty long one, which he wanted me to write out after I had taken it down in short hand, because he did not want the hotel type-writer to see it, even if she had been on duty, Sunday night. He went in to Mrs. Ralson’s room after I had taken the letter, and I was scribbling away at the long-hand copy of it, when I looked up, and there was America standing at my side and smiling down on me, but looking rather silly. She flung her arms round me, and hid her face in my neck, and kind of smothered out, “He is an angel! But don’t ask me, now!”

Of course I have heard since why he was an angel, but I guess you will have to wait till you see me before you find out. There are some things so sacred that they make you sick. But if those two simpletons were fated to come it over each other, they have done it, and they have done it whether they were fated to or not. “What I am now trying to do is to untangle my own ideas, and get the rights of it, somehow. It is straight, about America. She had to go through that humbugging with me for the last three days, because it was our woman’s nature to; but it is not straight about Mr. Ardith, and I am tempted to go back to my original opinion of him as a poor thing. Other people’s forgiving him and releasing him from the consequences of what he has done, has nothing to do with it; that does not change it, or lessen his responsibility in the least. The cold fact is that out of his weak pity he let that silly child get in love with him, when he was not only not in love with her but was actually in love with somebody else. That is what I cannot excuse him for, though to be sure he has not asked me to; and on the other hand I have to ask myself how I should have felt toward him if he had died from the grippe, there, when everybody expected it, instead of ignominiously getting well and remaining on everybody’s hands. Should I have thought he had expiated his offence, or doesn’t death really wipe out a wrong? It does in novels, but does it in real life?

“The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones.”

That is what Shakespeare says, and Shakespeare knew a thing or two, though he does not always let on. Am I mad with Mr. Ardith because he has made a farce out of his tragedy by living through it; and, if I am, how much better would the tragedy have been? And is he responsible for the harm he did not want to do, and did not mean to do, or was that just fate? If it was, what becomes of the suffering of that girl’s heart that he let trifle with itself? Of course she was very young, and she will get over it; her own mother says she will. But does her mother really believe it, or does she say so because she is poor and the Ralsons are rich, and she does not dare to quarrel with her family’s bread and butter? Any way, she seems to me the only one, except America, who is coming out of the difficulty with any chance of self-respect.

You see I am gathering up my principles from the woodpile, but they seem rather weather-beaten, and I don’t know whether I shall be able to use them as effectually as formerly. Some of them are considerably frayed round the roots.

FRANCES.

XLVIII.

From WALLACE ARDITH to A. L. WIBBERT, Wottoma.

         NEW YORK, March 10, 1902.

My Dear Lincoln:

I wanted to write you last night, but I was not equal to it. Since my letter of a week ago I have been through enough to try a well man, and I am not well, yet, by any means. But now I have something to get well for, and then I hadn’t.

I went that night to the Baysleys’, when I told you I should, expecting to see both of the old people, and tell them that it was off between America and me, and try to make it right with Essie. That is the brute fact; but of course I had got it into some heroic shape so that it was tolerable to the imagination. Jenny let me in, with her mouth pursed in hostility, and said her mother was at home, but her father was out, and she stood holding the door, so that I could go away if I chose. I said her mother would do, and in fact I suddenly felt that I could manage better with her, for I always respected her more than her husband. I found her alone in the parlor, though I knew that Essie had just crept out of it. She asked me if I would sit down, and, country fashion, if I would let her take my hat; and then she left the beginning to me. I do not think she meant to make it hard for me, but that did not make it easy; and I fought away from it as long as I could. Then I found a sort of relief in facing the business. But it was an ugly business, and I cannot pretend that I put a pleasant face on it. She listened patiently enough, and then she asked me if I cared for Essie the way I did for America; and the fine pretences that I had been preparing turned useless on my hands. In the presence of her honesty I was obliged to be honest myself. I said, No, I did not; and then she asked why I had come back; was it because I had made the child think I cared for her, or because I thought she cared for me? That was a bad moment, Linc, and the best I could do was to hang my head. Then she asked me if I thought that was a good reason, and whether I expected her daughter to accept such an offer, or would I have wanted a sister of mine to do it? I had to own that I would not, and she said maybe I would consider that an answer; she would send for Essie, and let her speak for herself, if I wished, after I had told her the same things. Silence might not have been the best thing for me, but it was the only thing, and I felt myself dwindling from a hero and martyr into something so infinitesimal that there is no name for it. That was when she began to have a little mercy on me, and to let me up from the dust. She told me that she had heard from Essie about our goings-on together, and that she did not blame me more than Essie, except that I was ten years older and knew more. She made a better defence for me than I could have made for myself, and she did not spare me her gratitude for what I had done for them in their sickness; she gave me credit for good motives, which I will not pretend was not my due, though I could never have claimed it: but I know I was not selfish in going to live with them, and I did my best to help them in their trouble; I see that as clearly as any one. After she had done that for me she signified, by holding her tongue, that I could go, and I went. I wonder I did not go through the keyhole; there would have been room.

I did not realize till afterwards that she had not said a word about America, and whether this was by accident or design, I could not help letting the fact praise her. I do not see how anybody could have done justice in the circumstances with greater dignity. She set me free, but she has bound me to her in ties which will last my life, and if ever the chance offers to do her or hers a good turn it will not be lost upon me. I have heard since that old Baysley had arranged it with Mr. Ralson that they were to go back on the same salary to Timber Creek, but Mrs. Baysley put her foot down on that. She and her girls have determined that they will stay in New York, and if any hint of their trouble gets home, it will not be through their bringing it.

I have written this out pretty squarely, and when I began, I thought I was going to tell you how I made it up with America. But it really made itself up; nobody had any sort of agency in it, and I least of all. Besides, I do not find it possible to write you the whole story as I intended, but sometime I will tell it, when we meet. I have talked every minute of my life over with America, and she knows just how unworthy I am. She agrees with Mrs. Baysley about me, but I guess she forgives me more because she loves me more.

Her forgiveness does not and cannot change the facts, and I am not bringing to the happiness in store for me any overpowering sense of desert. I wish I could, for her dear sake, for she is worthy of unalloyed rapture. I feel that my ignominy is a sort of slight to her, but I cannot help it. To such a girl her love should be “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” and I come clouded and fissured from an experience that I can never think of without shame. You can say I exaggerate, and I know that in a manner I do. But I am not wrong in recognizing that I have laid up for myself a life-long regret, which I may forget from time to time, but which, whenever I remember it, must be the pang that it is now. I forebode an inextinguishable vitality in the thing, and I know that in whatever happiest moment of the future I recur to it, the fact that I have hurt some one, that I have betrayed the creature that trusted me, that in my infernal soft-heartedness I have wronged the hope I inspired, will be a torture out of which the anguish cannot pass.

If you say I am not very well, and perhaps that I am looking at these things with sick eyes, I cannot deny it. I am not well yet, but there is nothing more serious than the cough that the grippe usually leaves behind it. There is talk of my going South somewhere for that, and the talk is that I am not to go alone. But I will write you later about that.

Yours ever,

W. ARDITH.

XLIX.

From MR. OTIS BINNING to MRS. WALTER BINNING, Boston.

         NEW YORK, March 12, 1902.

My dear Margaret:

I shall be glad to know, some day after we meet, just how a Boston woman so completely of our old tradition as you, should have allowed herself to become so absorbed in the loves of my wild Westerners. I could understand, of course, if you had met them in the fine ether of one of James’s stories — I wish he still wrote about Americans — you would have been bewitched with his delicate precis of that affair; but not how you could suffer the affair at first hand, with the heat of their savage life in it: not merely suffer it, but long for it more and more, and heap me with reproaches for not satisfying your famine for it.

In each letter I have written you since my letter of the 23d February, in which I intimated a tragic property in the situation, I have tried to feed your curiosity with divinations which I thought filling, but which you seem not to have found so; and at times your ingratitude has driven me almost to invention. The fact is I have felt myself becoming every day more peripheral to the situation. At the most I could catch a glimpse of its interior; I could chance a flying conjecture, I could seize a meteoric intimation, now from the secretary of the heroine, now from heroine herself. The heroine’s father has been mostly in Washington; the hero has been safe from me in the hold of his grippe. What I knew, what I guessed, I generously shared with you; but I have too manifestly failed to appease your impatience. Now, when I come to you at last with the substance of the accomplished fact, I have reason to fear that you will reject it as gross commonplace, wholly unworthy of the fine issues promised earlier, and declare that I tardily bring you tidings which every one else that cares can know a day later.

Yes, Miss Ralson and Mr. Ardith are engaged: I do not know how, or when, or why. But she has told me so herself, in my quality of old friend: my date, if not the date of my acquaintance, justifies the phrase. They are engaged, and they are going to be married, and going to the Bermudas: there is no such desperate haste for their marriage, but the voyage is in the urgent interest of his convalescence, for the grippe has left him with a cough, for which Miss Ralson has heard that the air of those semi-tropical islands is soveriegn; she is already talking of his health as if she had been in charge of it for years.

They are not going to take the secretary with them; she remains to console Miss Ralson’s parents, and she has been promised me for my own consolation in the absence of my lovers. But I do not know that I shall outstay them here. New York will be very empty without them. I cannot go back to any pleasure in the Van der Doeses after the spectacle of this elemental passion; Prince Henry has gone home, and there is little in the civic affairs of the metropolis to entertain me. I have not yet decided between the steamer for Liverpool and the train for Boston; but if you do not see me soon you will hear from me before you expect: one gets to Liverpool so suddenly. Perhaps if I take the steamer I shall find the Ardiths in Europe before I return; and I cannot imagine finding them in Boston.

What I seem to see (with, I own, a somewhat self distrustful forecast) is the end of those social ambitions, not very poignantly anxious, which have betrayed themselves to me in Miss Ralson. The house in the East side Nineties (have I never told you of that house? When I have been told so much of it!) will be built, but I doubt whether it will be made the basis of a more studied attack on the mythic Four Hundred: that poor Four Hundred which everyone who does not doubt it, abuses; and which has been driven to deny its own existence, by the intolerable self-consciousness created in it by the popular superstition. I hope rather that the Ralson residence may become the scene of those literary orgies which have been so lacking in New York, and without which it has been unable to realize itself a literary centre. I can imagine the energies of the young wife dedicated to culture in the interest of her young husband, and carrying him forward on the line of his aspirations with tireless devotion. The difficulty, if any, will be that she may not be able to distinguish between literature and journalism; in this she will be genuinely New York; and will conceive of accomplishing his career for him by making her father buy him a newspaper: say The Signal; I hear that her father already owns a controlling interest in it, and that Casman is merely his man.

I am not otherwise in the financial confidence of the Trust, though since his daughter’s engagement has been announced to me — the events have necessarily been prodigiously foreshortened in the brief time allowed them — he has, as a parent, taken me to his heart. After his daughter left us at dinner (which we had in their apartment) last night he approached the matter in a vein of jocose inquiry, and invited my opinion of Mr. Ardith by the subtle generality that these things were all in a lifetime. I ventured to say that they were very pleasant things to have in one’s lifetime; and he rejoined to the effect that if Make (so he shortens her name of America) was suited, he was; and though it was rather sudden, it was the kind of thing that would have seemed sudden, anyway. He laughed with a great spread of his white moustache, and pushed me the whiskey, and began to patronize me with condescensions suitable to a woman of my years. He cannot make me out, I believe, but these money-getters, though they are bewildered by the difference of some other man, are never abashed by it. I have no doubt but in his heart he despises the fineness of the pretty boy, and hopes to coarsen him to his own uses. The worst of it is that the fineness of Ardith will render him the easier victim; money compels even the poetic fancy, and he will misimagine this common millionaire into something rare and strange, and of rightful authority over such as himself.

But the daughter, who is of the father’s make, with the difference of “the finer female sense,” may be the poet’s refuge. I will not despair for him; at least I will not let you despair.

As you know I have sometimes had my misgivings that their affair was not worthy of your interest, but you have convinced me that it was worthy of mine. These people whom it seems to have concerned less intimately, who are as it were the material out of which our romance has fashioned itself, have certainly their limitations. They could not appeal to us from the past or present keeping of our own lives. If they were not so intensely real to themselves, they might seem to me characters in a rather crude American story. In fact are not they just that? They are certainly American and certainly crude; and now that they are passing beyond my social contact, I feel as safe from them, and from the necessity of explaining them or justifying them, as if they were shut in a book I had finished reading. I am rather disposed to rejoice that I have known them no more than I have. If I could find the author I should like to make him my compliment on having managed so skilfully that he left some passages to my conjecture. What was the trouble, for instance, of my poor boy’s— “half-broken and withdrawn” — that day in the park? What unknown shores of tragedy has not their story skirted in its course? Over what turbider social depths may not it have swum beyond my ken? Who was that mystical and subordinate second in his affections, if his darkling problem was one of conduct and not of art? Did it concern Miss Ralson, and if it did, how? I shall never know, and what is perhaps less acceptable, you, Margaret, never will, either

Your affectionate brother,

OTIS.

THE END

LETTERS OF AN ALTRURIAN TRAVELLER

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

The magazine in which the work was first published in serial format

I.

New York, September 1st, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

I hoped before this to have seen you again in Altruria, and given you by word of mouth some account of my experiences and observations in this country; but I have now been here more than a year, and I find myself still lingering here in a kind of fascination. At times I seem to myself to have been in a fantastic dream since I landed on its shores, with the spectacle of so many things before me happening without law and without reason, as things do in sleep; and then, again, it is as if I were carried by some enchantment back to the old competitive period in our own country; for, after all, America is like a belated Altruria, tardily repeating in the nineteenth century the errors which we committed in the tenth. In fact, if you could imagine an Altruria where the millennium had never yet come, you would have some conception of America; and, perhaps, I had better leave you with this suggestion, and not attempt farther to generalize from my impressions, but give you these at first hand and let you form your own idea of the American civilization from them.

I say civilization, because one has to use some such term to describe a state which has advanced beyond the conditions of cannibalism, tribalism, slavery, serfdom and feudalism; but, of course, no Altrurian would think America a civilized country, though many of the Americans are as truly civilized as ourselves. We should not think it a democratic country, though many of the Americans are really democrats, and they are all proud of their republican form of government, though it is now little but a form. Far less should we think it a Christian country, though it abounds in good people, who love one another, and lead lives of continual self-sacrifice. The paradox is intelligible when you reflect that these Americans are civilized, and democratic and Christian, in spite of their conditions and not because of them. In order to do them full justice, you must remember that they are still, socially as well as civically, sunk in the lowest depths of competition, and that, theoretically at least, they prize this principle as the spring of all the personal and public virtues. To us this is a frightful anomaly; but because they do not feel it so, they are often able to do and to will the good, as I have intimated. Nowhere else in the whole world is capitalism now carried to such brutal excess, and yet nowhere else have qualities which we should think impossible in a capitalistic state shown themselves so nobly, so beautifully. It is this fact, in its different aspects, which, I suppose, has formed for me that fascination I have felt almost from the first moment of my arrival.

I had hardly been in the country a week before an illustration of the facility with which human nature adjusts itself to bad conditions and makes them tolerable by its patience, eclipsed all the little instances that were every moment offering themselves to my notice. The great event at Homestead, which our Altrurian papers will have given you some account of, occurred little over a year ago, but it is already forgotten. To the Americans it was not astounding that a force of armed workmen should bloodily fight out their quarrel with the mercenaries of their masters. In many states no change of the laws in respect to the incident has taken place to prevent its repetition, on any larger or smaller scale. None of the legal procedures have resulted in anything, and so far as the arrests for murder on either side are concerned, the whole affair has ended like a comic opera; and the warring interests have left the stage singing the same chorus together. The affair is, in fact, so thoroughly bouffe that I have to take my imagination in both hands before I can conceive of it as a fact; but the Americans are so used to these private wars between the banded forces of labor and the hirelings of capital, that they accept it as something almost natural, or as a disease inherent in the nature of things, and having its own laws and limitations. The outbreak at Homestead, as you know, was followed by something like a civic convulsion among the miners in Tennessee and in Idaho, and by a strike of railroad employés at Buffalo, which destroyed immense values, delayed traffic, and shed blood on both sides. In this last strike it was thought a great gain that the railroad managers, instead of employing mercenaries to shoot down the strikers, appealed to the state for protection; and it was somehow felt to be a fine effect of patriotism that the militia should occupy the scene of the riot in force and bear themselves toward the strikers like the invaders of an enemy’s country.

If it had not all been so tragical in other aspects, the observer must have been amused by the attitude of most Americans towards these affairs. They seemed really to regard them as proofs of the superiority of the plutocracy which they call a republic, and to feel a kind of pride in the promptness and ferocity of the civil and military officials in suppressing symptoms which ought to have appealed to every sane person as signs of the gravest organic disorder. To my mind nothing seems so conclusive against their pretensions to civilization as the fact that these terrible occurrences are accepted as the necessary incidents of civilization.

There was, indeed, a certain small percentage of the people who felt the significance of the disasters; and I am anxious to have you understand that the average of intelligence among the Americans, as well as the average of virtue, is very high, not according to the Altrurian standard, of course, but certainty according to the European standard. Bad as their plutocracy is, it is still the best system known to competitional conditions, except perhaps that of Switzerland, where the initiative and the referendum enable the people to originate and to ultimate legislation, while the Americans can do neither. Here, the people, as you know, can only elect representatives; these again delegate their powers to committees, which in effect make the laws governing the nation. The American plutocracy is the old oligarchic conception of government in a new phase, and while it is established and maintained by a community mostly Christian, it is essentially pagan in its civic ideal. Yet this people, whose civic ideal is pagan, are, many of them, not only Christian in creed, but Christian in life, so far as their polity and their society permit them to think rightly and act generously. There are beautiful and pathetic instances of approach to our ideal among them which constantly win my admiration and compassion. That is to say, certain Americans are good and gentle not because of conditions that invite them to be so, but in spite of conditions that invite them to be otherwise, almost with the first economic and social lessons which they teach. Almost from the beginning the American is taught to look out for himself in business and in society, and if he looks out for others at the same time it is by a sacrifice of advantages which are vitally necessary to him in the battle of life. He may or he may not make these sacrifices; he very often does, to such effect that the loveliest and lovablest natures I have known here have been those of unsuccessful Americans, and the ugliest and hatefullest, those of successful Americans. But the sad thing, and the droll thing, is that they think their bad conditions the source of their virtues, and they realty believe that without the inducements to rapacity on every hand there would be no beauty in yielding and giving.

Certain persons have been instanced to me as embodying certain generous qualities, and when I explain that the man who had not all these qualities in Altruria would be as exceptional as the man who has them is here, I have seen that people either did not believe me or did not understand me. The Americans honor such qualities as much as we do, and they appreciate gentleness, unselfishness, and neighborliness as much as we do, but they expect them only so far as they do not cross a man’s self-interest; when they do that, he is a very unusual man if he continues to indulge in them, or, as they say, he is not business. When I tell them that the man who does not indulge them in Altruria is not business they look blank, or suspect me of a joke. When I try to make them understand that in their sense we have no self-interest in Altruria, and that if they had our conditions they would have no self-interest, it alarms them; they have so long been accustomed to live upon one another that they cannot imagine living for one another; they think self-interest a very good thing, the best sort of thing, and they ask what merit has a man in being good if he is not good to his disadvantage; they cannot conceive that a man should have no merit in being good. As for Christ’s coming to do away with the old pagan economics as well as the old pagan ethics, they hoot at the notion.

I will not try, in this letter, to tell you just how all this can be; you will, in some sort conceive of its possibility from what you know of the competitive world at second hand, but I hope to make it clearer to you by and by. You must always account for a sort of bewilderment in me, inevitable in the presence of a state of things which is the complete inversion of our own, and in which I seem to get the same effect of life that boys sometimes get of the landscape by putting down their heads and looking at it between their legs.

Just at present there is no violent outbreak in the economic world, no bloody collision between labor and capital, no private war to be fought out in the face of the whole acquiescent nation till the inconvenience forces the government to interfere and put down the weaker party. But though there is now an interval of quiet, no one can say how long it will last, and many feel that there is even something ominous in it, that it is something like the calm in the heart of the cyclone. The cyclone is financial, if I may carry out the figure, and it began to blow, no one knows why or whence, several months ago. A great many weather-wiseacres pretended to know, and began to prophesy that if the export of gold to Europe could be stopped, and the coinage of silver could be arrested, and the enormous imposts could be removed, the ship of state would have plain sailing again. But the outflow of gold ceased without the slightest effect upon the cyclone; the mere threat of touching the tariff caused the closure of factories and foundries by the score, and the otiosation of workmen by the hundred thousand; with every prospect that the coinage of silver would be arrested, there were failures of banking-houses and business-houses on every hand. It remains to be seen what effect the actual demonetization of silver will have upon the situation, but the situation is so chaotic that no one among all the weather-wiseacres ventures to prophesy when the storm will cease to rage. Perhaps it has already ceased, but so far as the logic of events is concerned we might as well be in the heart of the cyclone, as I suggested.

I am afraid that with all your reading, and with all your special study of American conditions you would be dismayed if you could be confronted with the financial ruin which I find myself in the midst of, but which this extremely amiable and hopeful people do not seem to think so desperate. Like their bloody industrial wars, it is of such frequent recurrence that they have come to look upon it as in the order of nature. Probably they would tell you, if criticised from our point of view, that it was human nature to go to pieces about once in so often, and that this sort of disintegration was altogether preferable to any hard and fast system that held it together by the cohesion of moral principles. In fact their whole business world is a world of chance, where nothing happens according to law, but follows a loose order of accident, which any other order of accident may change. The question of money is the prime question of American life, and you would think that the issue of money would be one of the most carefully guarded functions of the government. But curiously enough, most of the money in the hands of the American people is not issued by the government at all, but consists of the promissory notes of a multitude of banks, as was the case with us in the old competitive days. The government bonds, which perpetuate the national debt, that their circulation may be based on them, are exempted from taxation as a sort of reward for the usurpation of the governmental function by the banks; and these banks are supposed to serve the community by supplying business men with the means of carrying on the commercial warfare. But they do this only at the heaviest rates of interest, and in times of general prosperity: at the first signs of adversity they withhold their favors. You might think that the government which secures their notes would also secure their deposits, but the government does nothing of the kind, and the man who trusts his money to their keeping does so wholly at his own risk. When they choose, or when they are unable, they may cease to pay it back to him, and he has no recourse whatever.

With a financial system resting upon such a basis as this, and with the perpetual gambling in values, nominal and real, and in every kind of produce and manufacture, which goes on throughout the whole country, you can hardly be surprised at the recurrence of the panics which follow each other at irregular intervals in the American business world. Indeed, the Americans are not surprised themselves; they regard them as something that always must be because they always have been, though they own that each successive panic spreads wider disaster and causes deeper suffering. Still, they expect them to come, and they do not dream of contriving a system like ours, in which they are no more possible than human sacrifices. They say, that is all very well for us Altrurians, but it would not do for Americans, and they really seem to believe that misery on so vast a scale as they have it in one of their financial convulsions is a sort of testimony to their national greatness. When they begin to drag themselves up out of the pit of ruin, bewildered and bemired by their fall, they begin to boast of the magnificent recuperative energies of the country. Still, I think that the old American maxim that it will all come out right in the end, has less and less acceptance. Some of them are beginning to fear that it will come out wrong in the end, if they go their old gait, or that it will at least come out Europe in the end. I would not venture to say how common this doubt was, but it certainly exists, and there is no question but that some of the thoughtfulest and best Americans are beginning to look toward Altruria as the only alternative from Europe.

Such Americans see that Europe is already upon them in the conditions of the very rich and the very poor. Poverty is here upon the European terms, and luxury is here upon the European terms. There is no longer the American workingman as he once was; he still gets better wages than the European workingman, but his economic and social status is exactly the same. He has accepted the situation for the present, but what he intends to do about it hereafter, no man knows; he, least of all men, knows. The American plutocrat has accepted the situation even more frankly than the proletarian. He perceives distinctly that there is no American life for the very rich American, and when he does not go abroad to live, as he increasingly does, he lives at home upon the same terms and to the same effect that the Continental noble lives in Europe; for the English noble is usefuller to his country than the rich American. Of course the vast majority of Americans are of the middle class, and with them you can still find the old American life, the old American ideals, the old American principles; and if the old America is ever to prevail, it must be in their love and honor of it. I do not mean to say the American middle class are as a general thing consciously American, but it is valuable that they are even unconsciously so. As a general thing they are simply and frankly bent upon providing for themselves and for their own; but some of them already see that they cannot realize even this low ideal, as things are, and that it will be more and more difficult to do so hereafter. A panic like the present is a great object lesson to them, and teaches the essential insecurity of their system as nothing else could. It shows that no industry, no frugality, no sagacity can be proof against such a storm, and that when it conies, the prudent and the diligent must suffer from it like the imprudent and the indolent. At last some of them are asking themselves if there is not something wrong in the system itself, and if a system based upon self-seeking does not embody recurrent disaster and final defeat. They have heard of the Altrurian system, and they are inquiring whether the sole economic safety is not in some such system. You must not suppose their motive is so low as this makes it seem. They are people of fine courage, and they have accesses of a noble generosity, but they have been born and bred in the presence of the fact that each man can alone save himself and those dear to him, from want; and we must not blame them if they cannot first think of the beauty and the grandeur of saving others from want. For the present, we cannot expect that they will think of anything higher at first than the danger to themselves, respectively; when they grasp the notion of escape from that, they will think of the danger to others, and will be eager to Altrurianize, as they call it, for the sake of the common good as well as the personal good. I may be in error, through my zeal for Altrurian principles, but 1 think that the Altrurian idea has come to stay, as they say, with this class. At any rate, it is not the very rich or the very poor who are leading reform in our direction, but it is such of the comfortable middle class as have got the light. There is everything to hope from this fact, for it means that if the change comes at all, it will not come superficially and it will not come violently. The comfortable Americans are the most comfortable people in the world, and when they find themselves threatened in their comfort, they will deal with the danger seriously, deliberately, thoroughly.

But whatever the struggle is to be here, whether it will be a wild revolt of the poor against the rich, of laborer against capitalist, with all the sanguinary circumstance of such an outbreak, or whether it will be the quiet opposition of the old American instincts to the recent plutocratic order of things, ending in the overthrow of the pagan ideals and institutions, and the foundation of a commonwealth upon some such basis as ours, I am sure that some sort of conflict is coming. I may be unable to do the proletarians justice, but so far, I do not think they have shown great wisdom in their attitude. If you were here you would sympathize with them, as I do in their strikes; but I think that you too would feel that these were not the means to achieve the ends they seek, and that higher wages and fewer hours were not the solution. The solution is the complete control of the industries by the people, as we know, and the assurance to every man willing to work that he shall not want; yet I must confess that the workingmen in America have not often risen to the conception of this notion. It is from those who have not been forced to toil so exhaustively that they cannot think clearly; it is from the comfortable middle class, which sees itself more and more closely environed by the inimical factors of this so-called civilization that the good time is to come. It is by no means impossible, indeed, if things should now go on as they are going, and the proletarians should be more and more subjected to the plutocrats, that we should find the workingmen arrayed by their enemies against the only principles that can befriend them. This is to be seen already in the case of those small merchants and manufacturers whose business has been destroyed by the trusts and syndicates, but who have been received into the service of their destroyers; the plutocracy has no such faithful allies and followers. But it is not possible for all the small merchants and manufacturers to be disposed of in this way, and it is to such of these as perceive the fact, that the good cause can look for help. They have already fully imagined the situation, and some of them have imagined it actual. It is chiefly they, therefore, who are anxious to Altrurianize America, as the sole means of escape from their encompassing dangers. Their activity is very great and it is incessant; and they were able to shape and characterize the formless desires of a popular movement in the West, so that at the last presidential election twenty-two electoral votes were cast in favor of the Altrurian principles which formed the vital element of the uprising Nevertheless, as I have more than once suggested, I do not think any fundamental change is near. The Americans are a very conservative face, and much slower to move than the English, as the more intelligent English have often observed. The Altrurianization of England may take place first, but I do not think I am mistaken in believing that America will yet be entirely Altrurianized. Just at present the whole community is proletarianized, and is made to feel the poor man’s concern as to where the next day’s bread or the next day’s cake is to come from; if a man is used to having cake he will be as anxious to keep on having cake as the man who is used to having bread alone will be anxious to keep on having bread. In former times this experience would probably have been without definite significance or ultimate effect, but now I do not think it will be so. The friends of Altrurianization will be sure to press its lessons home; and the people have been so widely awakened to the possibility of escape from the evils of their system that they will not be so patient of them as they have been in former times.

You might infer from the apparently unbroken front that the Americans show on the side of competition in the great conflict dividing every nation into opposing canips, that there was no division amongst them. But there is very great division amongst them, and there is acceptance of one Altrurian principle or another to such a degree that there may be said to be almost a universal tendency toward Altrurianization, though, as a whole, the vast majority of Americans still regard the idea of human brotherhood with distrust and dislike. No doubt they will now patch up some sort of financial modus vivendi, and go on as before; in fact, there is no reason why they should not, in their conception of things. There was no reason why the panic should have come, and there is no reason why it should not go; but still, I do not think it will have come and gone without something more of question than former panics.

The friends of Altrurianization will not fail to bring before the American people some question of the very nature of money, and of the essential evil of it, as they understand money. They will try to show that accumulated money, as a means of providing against want, is always more or less a failure in private hands; that it does not do its office; that it evades the hardest clutch when its need is greatest. They will teach every man, from his own experience and conscience, that it is necessarily corrupting; that it is the source of most vices, and the incentive, direct or indirect, of almost every crime. They will prove that these are not the mere accidents of money, but are its essentials; and that a thing invented to create or to recognize economic inequality among men can never be otherwise than hurtful to them. They will preach the Altrurian notion of money, as the measure of work done and the warrant of need to be relieved, which in a civilized state can have no use but to issue from the commonwealth to the man who has worked, and return to the commonwealth from the man who has satisfied his wants with it. As yet, most Americans believe that money can be innocently gathered into one man’s hands by his cunning and his skill, and as innocently taken from another’s through his misfortune or his weakness. This primitive notion of money, which is known to us historically, is of actual effect among them; and though I was aware of the fact before I came to America, as you are now, I had no idea of the infernal variety of the evil.

In Altruria we cannot imagine a starving man in rags, passing the threshold of another man surfeited with every luxury and warranted in his opulence by the same law that dooms the beggar to destitution. But this is a spectacle so common in this great typical American city that no one would turn to look at it. In fact, both the beggar and the millionaire recognize the situation as something almost normal. Charity, the love of man and the fear of God, as the Americans know it, does not propose to equalize the monstrous conditions, or to do more than afford alleviation at the best, until the wretch in the gutter can somehow win from the wretch in the palace the chance to earn a miserable wage. This chance is regarded not as his right; it is his privilege, and it is accorded him usually at the cost of half a dozen other wretches, who are left outcast by it. It is money that creates this evil, and yet the Americans think that money is somehow a good thing; and they think they are the most prosperous people on earth, because they have more moneyed men among them than any other people.

I know, my dear Cyril, how strange all this will seem to you, how impossible, in spite of your study of American conditions. I remember how we used to talk of America together, before I planned my present visit, and how we disputed the general Altrurian notion of this country, as necessarily mistaken, because we said that such things could not be in a republic and a democracy. We had our dreams of a system different from ours, a system which vaunted itself the realization, above all others, of the individuality which we Altrurians prize more than everything else. We felt that our emissaries must have been hasty or mistaken in their observations, but you have only to visit this democratic republic, to understand that they have no such thing as individuality here, and that in conditions where one man depends upon another man for the chance of earning his bread, there can be no more liberty than there is equality.

The Americans still imagine that they have liberty, but as for the equality which we supposed the aim of their democracy, nobody any longer even pretends that it is, or that it can be. With the rich there is a cynical contempt of it; with the poor a cynical despair of it. The division into classes here is made as sharply as in any country of Europe, and the lines are passed only by the gain or the loss of money. I say only, but of course there are exceptions. The career is still open to the talents, and the plebeian rich here are glad to ally themselves with the patrician poor of Europe; but what I say holds good of the vast majority of cases. Every tendency of economic and social life is a tendency to greater and greater difference between the classes; and in New York, which is the most typical of American cities, the tendency is swifter and stronger than in other places.

It is for this reason that I have come here for the winter before I leave these shores, as I hope, forever. My American sojourn has been a passionate disappointment from first to last: it has been a grief which I cannot express to you, for the people are at heart so noble, so generous, so magnanimous, so infinitely better than their conditions that my pity for them has been as great as my detestation of the terms on which they accept life. I cannot convey to you the pathos with which the spectacle of their contradictions fills me; I can only say that if I were an American with nothing but a competitive conception of life, as a warfare in which the strong must perpetually and even involuntarily oppress the weak, as a race in which the swift must seize every advantage of the slow, as a game in which the shrewd must outwit the simple, I would not accept life at all. But, of course, I speak as an Altrurian, and I warn you that an utter abhorrence of the situation would ignore a thousand things that are lovely and of good report. It would ignore the most heroic self-sacrifice, the most romantic martyrdom, the Spectacle of unnumbered brave and good, who do not the less sublimely lay their hearts upon the altar, because they lay them futilely there.

It is the exceptional character of what is generous and noble in the Americans, this accidental, this vicarious nature of their heroism and their martyrdom, that moves me to a pity for which there seems no relief but laughter. They pray as we do that God’s will may be done here, and His kingdom come on earth as it is In heaven, but they reject both because, as they say, that they are against human nature. They do this in spite of those instances of heavenly goodness among them, which they honor as much as we do, and admire even more, since these things are not so difficult with us as with them. They fancy that goodness, and gentleness, and unselfishness, would somehow lose their value if they were the rule and not the exception, that they would become cheap in becoming common. Perhaps I can best make you understand all this by an illustration drawn from the aesthetic aspect of this vast city, which, I suppose is upon the whole, the ugliest city in the world. Ugliness is the rule in the architecture, which is for far the greatest part not merely ignoble and mean but positively offensive, insulting the eye by every conceivable or inconceivable stupidity and vulgarity of form. But in the midst of the chaotic ugliness there is from time to time, and from space to space, a beautiful edifice erected by some artist who has been able so far to circumvent some millionaire as to turn his money to that effect. I could instance half a score of exquisite masterpieces of this sort, but you would not be the wiser for my doing so. It is in architecture more than in any other art that the Americans have shown themselves gifted, but they have not shown it to such effect as to characterize their richest and greatest city with architectural beauty. On the contrary, so far from redeeming their environment, these gracious structures are lost and annulled in it. Your pleasure in them is spoiled by the sight of some monstrosity next to them, or by the sea of hideous forms that welters round them and overwhelms them from every side. They do not stand out from the sordid mass; they sink into it and leave you thinking of that and bruised and quivering from the affront and hurt of it.

Commend me lovingly to all the Altrurians, and believe me, dear Cyril, most affectionately and constantly,

Your friend,

ARISTIDES HOMOS.

II.

Chicago, Sept. 28, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

When I last wrote you, I thought to have settled quietly down in New York for the rest of my stay in America, and given my time wholly to the study of its life, which seemed to me typical of the life of the whole country. I do not know, even now, that I should wish altogether to revise this impression; it still appears to me just, if not so distinct and so decisive, as it appeared before I saw Chicago, or rather the World’s Fair City at Chicago, which is what I want to write you of. Chicago, one might say, was after all only a Newer York, an ultimated Manhattan, the realized ideal of that largeness, loudness and fastness, which New York has persuaded the Americans is metropolitan. But after seeing the World’s Fair City here, I feel as if I had caught a glimpse of the glorious capitals which will whiten the hills and shores of the east and the borderless plains of the west, when the New York and the Newer York of today shall seem to all the future Americans as impossible as they would seem to any Altrurian now.

To one of our philosophy it will not be wonderful that this Altrurian miracle should have been wrought here in the very heart, and from the very heart, of egoism seven times heated in the fiery competition hitherto the sole joy of this strange people. We know that like produces like only up to a certain point, and that then unlike conies of like since all things are of one essence; that from life conies death at last, and from death comes life again in the final issue. Yet it would be useless trying to persuade most Americans that the World’s Fair City was not the effect, the fine flower, of the competition which underlies their economy, but was the first fruits of the principle of emulation which animates our happy commonwealth, and gives men, as no where else on earth, a foretaste of heaven. If I were writing to an American I should have to supply him with proofs and argue facts at every moment, which will be self-evident to you in their mere statement.

I confess that I was very loth to leave New York, which I fancied I was beginning to see whole, after my first fragmentary glimpses of it. But I perceive now that without a sight of the White City (as the Americans with their instant poetry called the official group of edifices at the great Fair) and the knowledge of its history, which I could have realized nowhere but in its presence, New York would have wanted the relief, the projection, in which I shall hereafter be able to study it. For the worst effect of sojourn in an egoistic civilization (I always use this word for lack of a closer descriptive) is that Altrurian motives and efforts become incredible, and almost inconceivable. But the Fair City is a bit of Altruria: it is as if the capital of one of our Regions had set sail and landed somehow on the shores of the vast inland sea, where the Fair City lifts its domes and columns.

Its story, which I need not rehearse to you at any length, records the first great triumph of Altrurian principles among this people in a work of peace; in their mighty civil war they were Altrurian enough; and more than once they have proved themselves capable of a magnificent self-sacrifice in bloodshed, but here ‘for the first time in their pitiless economic struggle, their habitual warfare in which they neither give nor ask quarter, and take no prisoners, the interests submitted to the arts, and lent themselves as frankly to the work as if there had never been a question of money in the world. From the beginning it was believed that there could be no profit in the Fair; money loss was expected and accepted as a necessary part of the greater gain; and when the question passed from how much to how, in the discussion of the ways and means of creating that beauty which is the supreme use, the capitalists put themselves into the hands of the artists. They did not do it at once, and they did not all do it willingly. It is a curious trait of the American who has made money that he thinks he can make anything; and the Chicago millionaires who found themselves authorized by the nation to spend their money in the creation of the greatest marvel of the competitive world, thought themselves fully competent to work the miracle, or to choose the men who would work it according to their ideals. But their clarification, if it was not as swift as the passage of light was thorough, and I do not suppose there is now any group of rich men in Europe or America who have so luminous a sense of the true relations of the arts and the interests as they. The notion of a competition among the artists, which is the practical American’s notion of the way to get the best art, was at length rejected by these most practical Americans, and one mind large enough to conceive the true means and strong enough to give its conception effect was empowered to invite the free cooperation of the arts through the foremost artists of the country. As yet the governmental function is so weak here that the national part in the work was chiefly obstructive, and finally null; and when it came to this there remained an opportunity for the arts, unlimited as to means and unhampered by conditions.

For the different buildings to be erected, different architects were chosen; and for the first time since the great ages, since the beauty of antiquity and the elegance of the renaissance, the arts were reunited. The greatest landscape gardeners, architects, sculptors and painters, gathered at Chicago for a joyous interchange of ideas and criticisms; and the miracle of beauty which they have wrought grew openly in their breath and under their hands. Each did his work and had his way with it, but in this congress of gifted minds, of sensitive spirits, each profited by the censure of all, and there were certain features of the work — as for instance, the exquisite peristyle dividing the city from the lake — which were the result of successive impulses and suggestions from so many different artists that it would be hard to divide the honor among them with exactness. No one, however, seems to have been envious of another’s share, and each one gave his talent as freely as the millionaires gave their money. These great artists willingly accepted a fifth, a tenth, of the gain which they could have commanded in a private enterprise, and lavished their time upon the opportunity afforded them, for the pleasure of it, the pride of it, the pure good of it.

Of the effect, of the visible, tangible result, what better can I say, than that in its presence I felt myself again in Altruria? The tears came, and the pillared porches swam against my vision; through the hard nasal American tones, the liquid notes of our own speech stole to my inner ear; I saw under the careworn masks of the competitive crowds, the peace, the rest of the dear Altrurian face; the gay tints of our own simple costumes eclipsed the different versions of the Paris fashions about me. I was at home once more, and my heart overflowed with patriotic rapture in this strange land, so remote from ours in everything, that at times Altruria really seems to me the dream which the Americans think it.

I first saw the Fair City by night, from one of the electric launches which ply upon the lagoon; and under the dimmed heaven, in the splendor of the hundred moony arc-lamps of the esplanades, and the myriad incandescent bubbles that beaded the white quays, and defined the structural lines of dome and porch and pediment, I found myself in the midst of the Court of Honor, which you will recognize on the general plan and the photographs I enclose. We fronted the beautiful Agricultural building, which I think fitly the finest in the city, though many prefer the perfect Greek of the Art building; and on our right was the Administration building with its coroneted dome, and the magnificent sculptured fountain before it, turned silver in the radiance of the clustered electric jets at either side. On our right was the glorious peristyle, serene, pure, silent, lifting a population of statues against the night, and dividing the lagoon from the lake, whose soft moan came appealingly through the pillared spaces, and added a divine heartache to my ecstasy. Here a group of statuary showed itself prominently on quay or cornice; we caught the flamy curve of a bridge’s arch; a pale column lifted its jutting prores into the light; but nothing insisted; all was harmonized to one effect of beauty, as if in symbol of the concentered impulses which had created it. For the moment I could not believe that so foul a thing as money could have been even the means of its creation. I call the effect creation because it is divinely beautiful, but no doubt suggestion would be a better word, since they have here merely sketched in stucco what we have executed in marble in each of our Regionic capitals.

In grandeur of design and freedom of expression, it is perhaps even nobler than the public edifices of some of these, as I had to acknowledge at another moment, when we rounded the shores of the Wooded Island which forms the heart of the lagoon, and the launch slowed while we got the effect of its black foliage against the vast lateral expanse of the Liberal Arts building. Then, indeed, I was reminded of our national capitol, when it shows its mighty mass above the bosks around it, on some anniversary night of our Evolution.

But the illusion of Altruria was very vivid at many moments in the Fair City, where I have spent the happiest days of my stay in America, perhaps because the place is so little American in the accepted sense. It is like our own cities in being a design, the effect of a principle, and not the straggling and shapeless accretion of accident. You will see, from the charts and views I send you, something of the design in detail, but you can form only a dim conception of the skill with which the natural advantages of the site have been turned to account, and even its disadvantages have been transmuted to the beauty which is the highest and last result of all. There was not only the great lake here, which contributes so greatly to this beauty, but there were marshes to be drained and dredged before its pure waters could be invited in. The trees which at different points offer the contrast of their foliage to the white of the edifices, remain from wilding growths which overspread the swamps and sand dunes, and which had to be destroyed in great part before these lovely groves could be evoked from them. The earth itself, which now of all the earth seems the spot best adapted to the site of such a city, had literally to be formed anew for the use it has been put to. There is now no shadow, no hint of the gigantic difficulties of the undertaking, which was carried on in the true Altrurian spirit, so far as the capitalists and artists were concerned, and with a joy like ours in seeing nature yield herself to the enlightened will of man. If I told you how time itself was overcome in this work by the swiftness of modern methods, it would be nothing new to you, for we are used to seeing the powerful machinery of our engineers change the face of the landscape, without stay for the slow processes of other days, when the ax and the saw wrought for years in the destruction of the forests that now vanish in a night. But to the Americans these things are still novel, and they boast of the speed with which the trees were dragged from the soil where they were rooted, and the morasses were effaced, and the wastes of sand made to smile with the verdure that now forms the most enchanting feature of their normal city.

They dwell upon this, and they do not seem to feel as I do the exquisite simplicity with which its life is operated, the perfection with which it is policed, and the thoroughness with which it has been dedicated to health as well as beauty. In fact, I fancy that very few out of the millions who visit this gala town realize that it has its own system of drainage, lighting and transportation, and its own government, which looks as scrupulously to the general comfort and cleanliness, as if these were the private concern of each member of the government. This is, as it is with us, military in form, and the same precision and discipline which give us the ease and freedom of our civic life, proceed here from the same spirit and the same means. The Columbian Guards, as they are called, who are here at every turn, to keep order and to care for the pleasure as well as the welfare of the people, have been trained by officers of the United States army, who still command them, and they are amenable to the rules governing the only body in America whose ideal is not interest but duty. Every night, the whole place is cleansed of the rubbish which the visitors leave behind them, as thoroughly as if it were a camp. It is merely the litter of lunch-boxes and waste paper which has to be looked after, for there is little of the filth resulting in all other American cities from the use of the horse, which is still employed in them so many centuries after it has been banished from ours. The United States mail-carts and the watering-carts are indeed anomalously drawn through the Fair City thoroughfares by horses, but wheeled chairs pushed about by a corps of high school boys and college undergraduates form the means of transportation by land for those who do not choose to walk. On the water, the electric launches are quite of our own pattern, and steam is allowed only on the boats which carry people out into the lake for a view of the peristyle. But you can get this by walking, and as in Venice, which is represented here by a fleet of gondolas, there are bridges that enable you to reach every desirable point on the lagoon.

When I have spoken of all this to my American friends they have not perceived the moral value of it, and when I have insisted upon the practical perfection of the scheme apparent in the whole, they have admitted it, but answered me that it would never do for a business city, where there was something going on besides the pleasure of the eyes and the edification of the mind. When I tell them that this is all that our Altrurian cities are for, they do not understand me; they ask where the money is made that the people live on in such play-cities; and we are alike driven to despair when I try to explain that we have no money, and should think it futile and impious to have any.

I do not believe they quite appreciate the intelligence with which the Fair City proper has been separated, with a view to its value as an object lesson, from all the state and national buildings in the ground. Some of the national buildings, notably those of Germany and Sweden, are very picturesque, but the rest decline through various grades of inferiority, down to the level of the State buildings. Of these, only the California and the New York buildings have a beauty comparable to that of the Fair City: the California house, as a reminiscence of the Spanish ecclesiastical architecture in which her early history is recorded, and the New York house, as a sumptuous expression of the art which ministers to the luxury of the richest and greatest State of the Union By still another remove the competitive life of the present epoch is relegated to the long avenue remotest from the White City, which you will find marked as the Midway Plaisance. Even this, where a hundred shows rival one another in a furious advertisement for the favor of the passer, there is so much of a high interest that I am somewhat loth to instance it as actuated by an inferior principle; and I do so only for the sake of the contrast. In the Fair City, everything is free; in the Plaisance everything must be paid for. You strike at once here the hard level of the outside western world; and the Orient, which has mainly peopled the Plaisance, with its theaters and restaurants and shops, takes the tint of the ordinary American enterprise, and puts on somewhat the manners of the ordinary American hustler. It is not really so bad as that, but it is worse than American in some of the appeals it makes to the American public, which is decent if it is dull, and respectable if it is rapacious. The lascivious dances of the East are here, in the Persian and Turkish and Egyptian theaters, as well as the exquisite archaic drama of the Javanese and the Chinese in their village and temple. One could spend many days in the Plaisance, always entertainingly, whether profitably or unprofitably; but whether one visited the Samoan or Dahomeyan in his hut, the Bedouin and the Bap in their camps; the delicate Javanese in his bamboo cottage, or the American Indian in his tepee, one must be aware that the citizens of the Plaisance are not there for their health, as the Americans quaintly say, but for the money there is in it. Some of the reproductions of historical and foreign scenes are excellent, like the irregular square of Old Vienna, with its quaintly built and quaintly decorated shops; the German village, with its admirably realized castle and chalet; and the Cairene street, with its motley oriental life; but these are all there for the profit to be had from the pleasure of their visitors, who seem to pay as freely as they talk through their noses. The great Ferris wheel itself, with its circle revolving by night and by day in an orbit incomparably vast, is in the last analysis a moneymaking contrivance.

I have tried to make my American friends see the difference, as I do, between the motive that created the Fair City, and the motive that created the Plaisance, but both seem to them alike the outcome of the principle which they still believe animates their whole life. They think both an effect of the competitive conditions in which they glory, not knowing that their conditions are now purely monopolistic, and not perceiving that the White City is the work of an armistice between the commercial interests ruling them. I expressed this belief to one of them, the banker, whom I met last summer in the country, and whom I ran upon one night during the first week of my visit here; and he said there could certainly be that view of it. But, like the rest, he asked where the money would have come from without the warfare of competitive conditions, and he said he could not make out how we got the money for our public works in Altruria, or, in fact, how we paid the piper. When I answered that as each one of us was secured by all against want, every one could freely give his labor, without money and without price, and the piper could play for the pure pleasure of playing, he looked stupefied and said incredulously, “Oh, come, now!”

“Why, how strange you Americans are,” I could not help breaking out upon him, “with your talk about competition! There is no competition among you a moment longer than you can help, a moment after one proves himself stronger than another. Then you have monopoly, which even upon the limited scale it exists here is the only vital and fruitful principle, as you all see. And yet you are afraid to have it upon the largest possible scale, the national scale, the scale commensurate with the whole body politic, which implicates care for every citizen as the liege of the collectivity, When you have monopoly of such proportions money will cease to have any office among you, and such a beautiful creation as this will have effect from a consensus of the common wills and wishes.”

He listened patiently, and he answered amiably, “Yes, that is what you Altrurians believe, I suppose, and certainly what you preach; and if you look at it in that light, why there certainly is no competition left, except between the monopolies. But you must allow, my dear Homos,” he went on, “that at least one of the twin fetishes of our barbarous worship has had something to do with the creation of all this beauty. I’ll own that you have rather knocked the notion of competition on the head; the money that made this thing possible never came from competition at all; it came from some sort or shape of monopoly, as all money always does; but what do you say about individuality? You can’t say that individuality has had nothing to do with it. In fact, you can’t deny that it has had everything to do with it, from the individuality of the several capitalists, up or down, to the individuality of the several artists. And will you pretend in the face of all this wonderful work that individuality is a bad thing?”

“Have I misrepresented myself and country so fatally,” I returned, “as to have led you to suppose that the Altrurians thought individuality a bad thing? It seems to us the most precious gift of the Deity, the dearest and holiest possession of his creatures. What I lament in America at every moment, what I lament even here, in the presence of a work so largely Altrurian in conception and execution as this, is the wholesale effacement, the heartbreaking obliteration of individuality. I know very well that you can give me the name of the munificent millionaires — large-thoughted and noble-willed men — whose largesse made this splendor possible, and the name of every artist they freed to such a glorious opportunity. Their individuality is lastingly safe in your memories; but what of the artisans of every kind and degree, whose patience and skill realized their ideals? Where will you find their names?”

My companions listened respectfully, but not very seriously, and in his reply he took refuge in that humor peculiar to the Americans: a sort of ether where they may draw breath for a moment free from the stifling despair which must fill every true man among them when he thinks how far short of their ideal their reality has fallen.

For they were once a people with the noblest ideal; we were not mistaken about that; they did, indeed, intend the greatest good to the greatest number, and not merely the largest purse to the longest head. They are a proud people, and it is hard for them to confess that they have wandered from the right way, and fallen into a limitless bog, where they can only bemire themselves more and more till its miasms choke them or its foul waters close over them.

“My dear fellow,” the banker laughed, “you are very easily answered. You will find their names on the pay-rolls, where, I’ve no doubt, they preferred to have them. Why, there was an army of them; and we don’t erect monuments to private soldiers, except in the lump. How would you have managed it in Altruria?”

“In Altruria,” I replied, “every man who drove a nail, or stretched a line, or laid a trowel upon such a work, would have had his name somehow inscribed upon it, where he could find it, and point it out to those dear to him and proud of him. Individuality! I find no record of it here, unless it is the individuality of the few. That of the many makes no sign from the oblivion in which it is lost, either in these public works of artistic cooperation, or the exhibits of your monopolistic competition. I have wandered through these vast edifices and looked for the names of the men who wrought the marvels of ingenuity that fill them. But I have not often found the name even of a man who owns them. I have found the styles of the firms, the companies, the trusts which turn them out as impersonally as if no heart had ever ached or glowed in imagining and embodying them. This whole mighty industrial display is in so far dehumanized; and yet you talk of individuality as one of your animating principles!”

‘”You are hopelessly unbusinesslike, my dear Homos,” said the banker, “but I like your unpracticability. There is something charming in it; there is, really; and I enjoy it particularly at this moment because it has enabled me to get back my superiority to Chicago. I am a Bostonian, you know, and I came out here with all the misgivings which a Bostonian begins to secrete as soon as he gets west of the Back Bay Fens. It is a survival of Puritanism in us. In the old times, you know, every Bostonian, no matter how he prayed and professed, felt it in his bones that he was one of the elect, and we each feel so still; only, then God elected us, and now we elect ourselves. Fancy such a man confronted with such an achievement as this, and unfriended yet by an Altrurian traveller!

Why, J. have gone about the last three days inwardly bowed down before Chicago in the most humiliating fashion. I’ve said to myself that our eastern fellows did half the thing, perhaps the best half; but then I had to own it was Chicago that imagined letting them do it, that imagined the thing as a whole, and I had to give Chicago the glory. When I looked at it I had to forgive Chicago Chicago, but now that you’ve set me right about the matter, and I see that the whole thing is dehumanized, I shall feel quite easy, and I shall not give Chicago any more credit than is due.”

I saw that he was joking, but I did not see how far, and I thought it best not to take him in joke at all. “Ah, I don’t think you can give her too much credit, even if you take her at the worst. It seems to me, from what I have seen of your country — and, of course, I speak from a foreigner’s knowledge only — that no other American city could have brought this to pass.” — *

“You must come and stay with us a while in Boston,” said the banker; and he smiled. “One other city could have done it. Boston has the public spirit and Boston has the money, but perhaps Boston has not the ambition. Perhaps we give ourselves in Boston too much to a sense of the accomplished fact. If that is a fault, it is the only fault conceivable of us. Here in Chicago they have the public spirit, and they have the money, and they are still anxious to do; they are not content as we are, simply to be. Of course, they have not so much reason! I don’t know,” he added thoughtfully, “but it comes in the end to what you were saying, and no other American city but Chicago could have brought this to pass, heaving everything else out of the question, I doubt if any other community could have fancied the thing in its vastness; and the vastness seems an essential condition of the beauty. You couldn’t possibly say it was pretty, for instance; if you admitted it was fine you would have to say it was beautiful. To be sure, if it were possible to have too much of a good thing, there are certain states of one’s legs, here, when one could say there was too much of it; but that is not possible. But come, now; be honest for once, my dear fellow, and confess that you really prefer the Midway Plaisance to the Fair City!” I looked at him with silent reproach, and he broke out laughing, and took me by the arm.

“At any rate,” he said, “let us go down there, and get something to eat.

‘The glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome,’

 here, take it out of you so that I find myself wanting lunch about every three hours. It’s nearly as long as that now, since I dined, and I feel an irresistible yearning for Old Vienna, where that pinchbeck halberdier of a watchman is just now crying the hour of nine.”

“Oh, is it so late as that?” I began, for I like to keep our Altrurian hours even here, when I can, and I was going to say that I could not go with him when he continued:

“They won’t turn us out, if that’s what you mean. Theoretically, they do turn people out toward the small hours, but practically, one can stay here all night, I believe. That’s a charming thing about the Fair, and I suppose it’s rather Chicagoan; if we’d had the Fair in Boston, every soul would have had to leave before midnight. We couldn’t have helped turning them out, from the mere oldmaidishness of our Puritanic tradition, and not because we really minded their staying. In New York they would have put them out from Keltic imperiousness, and locked them up in the station-house when they got them out, especially if they were sober and inoffensive.”

I could not follow him in this very well, or in the playful allusiveness of his talk generally, though I have reported it, to give some notion of his manner; and so I said, by way of bringing him within easy range of my intelligence again, “I have seen no one here who showed signs of drink.”

“No,” he returned. “What a serious, and peaceable, and gentle crowd it is! I haven’t witnessed a rudeness, or even an unkindness, since I’ve been here, and nobody looks as if anything stronger than apollinaris had passed his lips for a fortnight. They seem, the vast majority of them, to pass their time in the Fair City, and I wish I could flatter myself that they preferred it, as you wish me to think you do, to the Plaisance. Perhaps they are really more interested in the mechanical arts, and even the fine arts, than they are in the muscle dances, but I’m afraid it’s partly because there isn’t an additional charge for admission to those improving exhibits in the official buildings. Though I dare say that most of the hardhanded folks here, are really concerned in transportation and agricultural implements to a degree that it is difficult for their more cultivated fellow-countrymen to conceive of. Then, the merely instructive and historical features must have an incredible lot to say to them. We people who have had advantages, as we call them, can’t begin to understand the state that most of us come here in, the state of enlightened ignorance, as one may call it, when we know how little we know, and are anxious to know more. But I congratulate you, Homos, on the opportunity you have to learn America personally, here; you won’t easily have such another chance. I’m glad for your sake, too, that it (the crowd) is mainly a western and southwestern crowd, a Mississippi Valley crowd. You can tell it by their accent. It’s a mistake to suppose that New England has a monopoly of the habit of speaking through the nose. We may have invented it, but we have imparted it apparently to the whole west, as the Scotch-Irish of Pennsylvania have lent the twist of their “r,” and the combined result is something frightful. But it’s the only frightful thing about the westerners, as I find them here. Their fashions are not the latest, but they are not only well behaved, they are on the average pretty well dressed, as the clothing store and the paper pattern dress our people. And they look pathetically good! When I think how hard-worked they all are, and what lonely lives most of them live on their solitary farms, I wonder they don’t descend upon me with the whoop of savages. You’re very fond of equality, my dear Homos! How do you like the equality of the American effect here? It’s a vast level, as unbroken as the plains that seemed to widen as I came over them in the cars to Chicago, and that go widening on, I suppose, to the sunset itself. I won’t speak of the people, but I will say the plains were dreary.”

“Yes,” I assented, for those plains had made me melancholy, too. They looked so habitable, and they were so solitary, though I could see that they were broken by the lines of cultivated fields, which were being plowed for wheat, or were left standing with their interminable ranks of maize. From time to time one caught sight of a forlorn farmstead, with a windmill beside it, making helpless play with its vanes as if it were vainly struggling to take flight from the monotonous landscape. There was nothing of the cheerfulness of our Altrurian farm villages; and I could understand how a dull uniformity of the human type might result from such an environment, as the banker intimated.

I have made some attempts, here, to get upon speaking terms with these average people, but I have not found them conversible. Very likely they distrusted my advances, from the warnings given them to beware of imposters and thieves at the Fair; it is one of the necessities of daily life in a competitive civilization, that you must be on your guard against strangers lest they cheat or rob you. It is hard for me to understand this, coming from a land where there is no theft and can be none, because there is no private property, and I have often bruised myself to no purpose in attempting the acquaintance of my fellow-visitors of the Fair. They never make any attempt at mine; no one has asked me a favor, here, or even a question; but each remains bent, in an intense preoccupation, upon seeing the most he can in the shortest time for the least money. Of course, there are many of the more cultivated visitors, who are more responsive, and who show themselves at least interested in me as a fellow-stranger; but these, though they are positively many, are, after all, relatively few. The vast bulk, the massed members of that immense equality which fatigued my friend, the banker, by its mere aspect, were shy of me, and I do not feel that I came to know any of them personally. They strolled singly, or in pairs, or by family groups, up and down the streets of the Fair City, or the noisy thoroughfare of the Plaisance, or through the different buildings, quiescent, patient, inoffensive, but reserved and inapproachable, as far as I was concerned. If they wished to know anything they asked the guards, who never failed in their duty of answering them fully and pleasantly.

The people from the different states visited their several State buildings, and seemed to be at home, there, with that instinctive sense of ownership which every one feels in a public edifice, and which is never tainted with the greedy wish to keep others out. They sat in long rows on the benches that lined the avenues, munching the victuals they had mostly brought with them in the lunch-boxes which strewed the place at nightfall, and were gathered up by thousands in the policing of the grounds. If they were very luxurious, they went to the tables of those eating-houses where, if they ordered a cup of tea or coffee, they could spread out the repast from their boxes and enjoy it more at their ease. But in none of these places did I see any hilarity in them, and whether they thought it unseemly or not to show any gayety, they showed none. They were peacefully content within the limits of their equality, and where it ended, as from time to time it must, they betrayed no discontent. That is what always astonishes me in America. The man of the harder lot accepts it unmurmuringly and with no apparent sense of injustice in the easier lot of another. He suffers himself, without a word, to be worse housed, worse clad, worse fed, than his merely luckier brother, who could give him no reason for his better fortune that an Altrurian would hold valid. Here, at the Fair, for example, on the days when the German village is open to the crowd without charge, the crowd streams through without an envious glance at the people dining richly and expensively at the restaurants, with no greater right than the others have to feed poorly and cheaply from their paper boxes. In the Plaisance, weary old farmwives and delicate women of the artisan class make way uncomplainingly for the ladies and gentlemen who can afford to hire wheeled chairs. As meekly and quietly they loiter by the shores of the lagoon and watch those who can pay to float upon their waters in the gondolas and electric launches. Everywhere the economic inequality is as passively accepted as if it were a natural inequality, like difference in height or strength, or as if it were something of immemorial privilege, like birth title in the feudal countries of Europe. Yet if one of these economically inferior Americans were told that he was not the peer of any and every other American, he would resent it as the grossest insult, such is the power of the inveterate political illusion in which the nation has been bred.

The banker and I sat long over our supper, in the graveled court of Old Vienna, talking of these things, and enjoying a bottle of delicate Rhenish wine under the mild September moon, not quite put out of countenance by the electric lamps. The gay parties about us broke up one after another, till we were left almost alone, and the watchman in his mediaeval dress, with a halberd in one hand, and a lantern in the other, came round to call the hour for the last time. Then my friend beckoned to the waiter for the account, and while the man stood figuring it up, the banker said to me: “Well, you must come to Boston a hundred years hence, to the next Columbian Fair, and we will show you every body trundled about and fed at the public expense. I suppose that’s what you would like to see?”

“It is what we always see in Altruria,” I answered. “I haven’t the least doubt it will be so with you in much less than a hundred years.”

The banker was looking at the account the waiter handed him. He broke into an absent laugh, and then said to me, “I beg your pardon! You were saying?”

“Oh, nothing,” I answered, and then, as he took out his pocket-book to pay, he laid the bill on the table, and I could not help seeing what our little supper had cost him. It was twelve dollars; and I was breathless; it seemed to me that two would have been richly enough.

“They give you a good meal here, don’t you think?” he said. “But the worst of having dined or supped well is reflecting that if you hadn’t you could have given ten or twelve fellows, who will have to go to bed supperless, a handsome surfeit; that you could have bought twenty-five hungry men a full meal each; that you could have supplied forty-eight with plenty; that you could have relieved the famine of a hundred and twenty-four. But what is the use? If you think of these things you have no peace of your life!”

I could not help answering, “We don’t have to think of them in Altruria.”

“Ah, I dare say,” answered the banker, as he tossed the waiter a dollar, and we rose and strolled out into the Plaisance. “If all men were unselfish, I should agree with you that Altrurianism was best.”

“You can’t have unselfishness till you have Altrurianism,” I returned. “You can’t put the cart before the horse.”

“Oh, yes, we can,” he returned in his tone of banter. “We always put the cart before the horse in America, so that the horse can see where the cart is going.”

We strolled up and down the Plaisance, where the crowd had thinned to a few stragglers like ourselves. Most of the show villages were silenced for the night. The sob of the Javanese water-wheel was hushed; even the hubbub of the Chinese theater had ceased. The Samoans slept in their stucco huts; the Bedouins were folded to slumber in their black tents. The great Ferris wheel hung motionless with its lamps like a planetary circle of fire in the sky. It was a moment that invited to musing, that made a tacit companionship precious. By an impulse to which my own feeling instantly responded, my friend passed his arm through mine.

“Don’t let us go home at all! Let us go over and sleep in the peristyle. I have never slept in a peristyle, and I have a fancy for trying it. Now, don’t tell me you always sleep in peristyles in Altruria!”

I answered that we did not habitually, at least, and he professed that this was some comfort to him; and then he went on to talk more seriously about the Fair, and the effect that it must have upon American civilization. He said that he hoped for an aesthetic effect from it, rather than any fresh impulse in material enterprise, which he thought the country did not need. It had inventions enough, millionaires enough, prosperity enough; the great mass of the people lived as well and travelled as swiftly as they could desire. Now what they needed was some standard of taste, and this was what the Fair City would give them. He thought that it would at once have a great influence upon architecture, and sober and refine the artists who were to house the people; and that one might expect to see everywhere a return to the simplicity and beauty of the classic forms, after so much mere wandering and maundering in design, without authority or authenticity.

I heartily agreed with him in condemning the most that had yet been done in architecture in America, but I tried to make him observe that the simplicity of Greek architecture came out of the simplicity of Greek life, and the preference given in the Greek state to the intellectual over the industrial, to art over business. I pointed out that until there was some enlightened municipal or national control of the matter, no excellence of example could avail, but that the classicism of the Fair City would become, among a wilful and undisciplined people, a fad with the rich and a folly with the poor, and not a real taste with either class. I explained how with us the state absolutely forbade any man to aggrieve or insult the rest by the exhibition of his ignorance in the exterior of his dwelling, and how finally architecture had become a government function, and fit dwellings were provided for all by artists who approved themselves to the public criticism. I ventured so far as to say that the whole competitive world, with the exception of a few artists, had indeed lost the sense of beauty, and I even added that the Americans as a people seemed never to have had it at all.

He was not offended, as I had feared he might be, but asked me with perfect good nature what I meant.

“Why, I mean that the Americans came into the world too late to have inherited that influence from the antique world which was lost even in Europe, when in mediaeval times the picturesque barbarously substituted itself for the beautiful, and a feeling for the quaint grew up in place of love for the perfect.”

“I don’t understand, quite,” he said, but I’m interested. Go on!”

“Why,” I went on, “I have heard people rave over the beauty of the Fair City, and then go and rave over the beauty of the German village, or of Old Vienna, in the Plaisance. They were cultivated people, too; but they did not seem to know that the reproduction of a feudal castle or of a street in the taste of the middle ages, could not be beautiful, and could at the best be only picturesque. Old Vienna is no more beautiful than the Javanese village, and the German village outrivals the Samoan village only in its greater adaptability to the purposes of the painter. There is in your modern competitive world very little beauty anywhere, but there is an abundance of picturesqueness, of forms that may be reflected upon canvas, and impart the charm of their wild irregularity to all who look at the picture, though many who enjoy it there would fail of it in a study of the original. I will go so far as to say that there are points in New York, intrinsically so hideous that it makes me shudder to recall them—”

“Don’t recall them!” he pleaded.

“Which would be much more capable of pictorial treatment than the Fair City, here,” I continued. We had in fact got back to the Court of Honor, in the course of our talk, which I have only sketched here in the meagerest abstract. The incandescent lamps had been quenched, and the arc-lights below and the moon above flooded the place with one silver, and the absence of the crowds that had earlier thronged it, left it to a solitude indescribably solemn and sweet. In that light, it was like a ghost of the antique world witnessing a loveliness lost to modern times everywhere but in our own happy country.

I felt that silence would have been a fitter tribute to it than any words of mine, but my companion prompted me with an eager, “Well!” and I went on.

“This beauty that we see here is not at all picturesque. If a painter were to attempt to treat it picturesquely, he must abandon it in despair, because the charm of the picturesque is in irregularity, and the charm of the beautiful is in symmetry, in just proportion, in equality. You Americans do not see that the work of man, who is the crown of animate life, can only be beautiful as it approaches the regularity expressive of beauty in that life. Any breathing thing that wants perfect balance of form or feature is in so far ugly; it is offensive and ridiculous, just as a perfectly balanced tree or hill would be. Nature is picturesque, but what man creates should be beautiful, or else it is inferior. Since the Greeks, no people have divined this but the Altrurians, until now; and I do not believe that you would have begun to guess at it as you certainly have here, but for the spread of our ideas among you, and I do not believe this example will have any lasting effect with you unless you become Altrurianized. The highest quality of beauty is a spiritual quality.”

“I don’t know precisely how far I have followed you,” said my companion, who seemed struck by a novelty in truisms which are so trite with us, “but I certainly feel that there is something in what you say. You are probably right in your notion that the highest quality of beauty is a spiritual quality, and I should like very much to know what you think that spiritual quality is here.”

“The quality of self-sacrifice in the capitalists who gave their money, and in the artists who gave their talent without hope of material return, but only for the pleasure of authorizing and creating beauty that shall last forever in the memory of those it has delighted.”

The banker smiled compassionately.

“Ah, my dear fellow, you must realize that this was only a spurt. It could be done once, but it couldn’t be kept up.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because people have got to live, even capitalists and artists have got to live, and they couldn’t live by giving away wealth and giving away work, in our conditions.”

“But you will change the conditions!”

“I doubt it,” said the banker with another laugh. One of the Columbian guards passed near us, and faltered a little in his walk. “Do you want us to go out?” asked my friend.

“No,” the young fellow hesitated. “Oh no!” and he continued his round.

“He hadn’t the heart to turn us out.” said the banker, “he would hate so to be turned out himself. I wonder what will become of all the poor fellows who are concerned in the government of the Fair City when they have to return to earth! It will be rough on them.” He lifted his head, and cast one long look upon the miracle about us. “Good heavens!” he broke out, “And when they shut up shop, here, will all this beauty have to be destroyed, this fabric of a vision demolished? It would be infamous, it would be sacrilegious! I have heard some talk of their burning it, as the easiest way, the only way of getting rid of it. But it musn’t be, it can’t be.”

“No, it can’t be,” I responded fervently. “It may be rapt from sight in the flames like the prophet in his chariot of fire; but it will remain still in the hearts of your great people. An immortal principle, higher than use, higher even than beauty, is expressed in it, and the time will come when they will look back upon it, and recognize in it the first embodiment of the Altrurian idea among them, and will cherish it forever in their history, as the earliest achievement of a real civic life.”

I believe this, my dear Cyril, and I leave it with you as my final word concerning the great Columbian Fair.

Yours in all brotherly affection, A. HOMOS.

III.

New York, October 24, 1893.

WELL, my dear Cyril, I have returned to this Babylon, you see, from my fortnight’s stay in that vision of Altruria at the great Fair in Chicago. I can, perhaps, give you some notion of the effect with me by saying that it is as if I were newly exiled and were exposing myself a second time to the shock of American conditions, stripped of the false hopes and romantic expectations which, in some sort, softened the impression at first. I knew what I had to look forward to when my eyes lost the last glimpse of the Fair City, and I confess that I had not much heart for it. If it had only been to arrive here, and at once take ship for home, I could have borne it; but I had denied myself this, in the interest of the studies of plutocratic civilization which I wish to make, and this purpose could not support me under the burden that weighed my spirits down. I had seen what might be, in the Fair City, and now I was to see again what the Americans say must be, in New York, and I shrank not only from the moral, but the physical ugliness of the thing.

But, in fact, do not the two kinds of ugliness go together f I asked myself the question as I looked about me in the ridiculous sleeping-car I had taken passage in from Chicago. Money had been lavished upon its appointments, as if it had been designed for the state progress of some barbarous prince through his dominions, instead of the conveyance of simple republican citizens from one place to another, on business. It was as expensively upholstered as the bad taste of its designer could contrive, and a rich carpet under foot caught and kept whatever disease-germs were thrown off by the slumbering occupant in their long journey; on the floor, at every seat, a silver-plated spittoon ministered to the filthy national habit. The interior was of costly foreign wood, which was every where covered with a foolish and meaningless carving; mirrors framed into the panels reflected the spendthrift absurdity through the whole length of the saloon. Of course, this waste in the equipment and decoration of the car meant the exclusion of the poorer sort of travellers, who were obliged to sit up all night in the day-cars, when they might have been lodged, for a fifth of what I paid, in a sleeping-car much more tasteful, wholesome and secure than mine, which was destined, sooner or later, in the furious risks of American travel, to be whirled over the side of an embankment, or plunged through a broken bridge, or telescoped in a collision, or piled in a heap of shattered and ruined splendors like its own, and consumed in a holocaust to the American god Hustle.

For not only are the comforts of travel here made so costly that none but the very well-to-do can afford them, but the service of the insufficiently manned trains and lines is overworked and underpaid. Even the poor negroes who make up the beds in the sleepers are scrimped of half a living by the companies which declare handsome dividends, and leave them to the charity of the fleeced and imperilled passengers. The Americans are peculiarly proud of their sleeping-car system, though I can hardly believe that when he is pinned into a broken seat, the most infatuated American can get much pleasure, while the flames advance swiftly upon him, out of the carving of the woodwork, or even the brass capitals of the onyx columns supporting nothing at either end of the car-roof. But until he is placed in some such predicament, the American hears with acquiescence, if not complacence, of the railroad slaughters which have brought the mortality of travel to and from the Fair during the past month up to a frightful sum. Naturally, if he does not mind the reports of these disasters, where his own name may any day appear in the list of killed or wounded, he is not vividly concerned in the fate of the thirty thousand trainmen who are annually mangled or massacred. He regards these dire statistics, apparently, as another proof of the immense activity of his country, and he does not stop, as he is hurled precariously over its continental spaces, and shot out of his train at his journey’s end, from two to six hours late, to consider whether a public management of public affairs is not as well in economics as in politics.

I was fortunate in my journey to New York; I arrived only two hours behind time, and I arrived safe and sound. The Americans are quite satisfied with the large average of people who arrive safe and sound, in spite of the large numbers who do neither; and from time to time their newspapers print exultant articles to show how many get home in the full enjoyment of life and limb. I do not see that they celebrate so often the seasonable arrival of the surviving travellers, and, in fact, my experience of railroads in America is that the trains seldom bring me to my journey’s end at the appointed hour.

On each great through - road there is one very rapid train, which has precedence of all other travel and traffic, and which does arrive at the hour fixed; but the other trains, swift or slow, seem to come lagging in at all sorts of intervals after their schedule-time. If I instance my experience and observation of this fact, my friends are inclined to doubt it; and if I insist upon matching it with their own, they allege the irregularity of the government trains in Germany, without seeming to know more about them than they know of their own trains. They at once begin to talk largely of the celerity and frequency of these, and to express their wonder that the companies should come so near keeping their word to the public as they sometimes do.

However, I was thankful for my safety and my soundness, when I found myself again in New York, though I felt so loth to be here. If I could fitly have done so I would very willingly have turned and taken the next train back to Chicago, since I must not take the next steamer on to Altruria. But if I had gone back, it could only have been for a fortnight more, since at the end of the month now so far spent, they must begin to destroy the beauty they have created in the Fair City there. I tried to console myself with this fact, but the sense of an irreparable loss, of banishment, of bereavement, remained with me for days, and is only now beginning to wear itself away into a kind of impersonal sorrow, and to blend with the bruise of my encounter with the brute ugliness of this place, which is none the less brute, because it is so often kindly. It is like the ugliness of some great unwieldy monster, which looks so helpless and so appealing, that you cannot quite abhor it, but experience a sort of compassion for its unloveliness. I had thought of it in that way at a distance, but when I came to see it again, I found that, even in this aspect it was hard to bear. So I came up from the station to this hotel where I am now lodged, and where my windows overlook the long reaches of the beautiful Central Park at such a height that unless I drop my glance, none of the shapeless bulks of the city intrude themselves between me and the effect of a vast forest. My hotel is itself one of the most preposterous of the structures which disfigure the city, if a city without a sky-line can be said to be disfigured by any particular structure. With several others as vast or as high, it forms a sort of gateway to the Park, from whose leafy depths, these edifices swaggering upward unnumbered stories, look like detached cliffs in some broken and jagged mountain range. They are built with savage disregard to one another, or to the other buildings about them, and with no purpose, apparently, but to get the most money out of the narrowest space of ground. Any objective sense of them is to the last degree painful, as any objective sense of the American life is, in its inequality and disproportion; but subjectively they are not so bad as that is, not so bad from the inside. At great cost they offer you an incomparable animal comfort, and they realize for the average American an ideal of princely magnificence, such as he has been instructed by all his traditions to regard as the chief good of success.

But for me the best thing about my hotel is that I can leave it when I will and descend to the level of the street below, where I can at once lose myself in woods as sweet and friendly as our groves at home, and wander through their aisles unmolested by the crowds that make them their resort so harmlessly that even the sylvan life there is unafraid. This morning, as I sat on a bench in one of the most frequented walks, I could almost have touched the sparrows on the sprays about me; a squirrel foraging for nuts, climbed on my knees, as if to explore my pockets. Of course, there is a policeman at every turn to see that no wrong is done these pretty creatures, and that no sort of trespass is committed by any in the domain of all; but I like to think that the security and immunity of the Park is proof of something besides the vigilance of its guardians; that it is a hint of a growing sense in the Americans that what is common is the personal charge of everyone in the community.

In the absence of the private interest here, I get back again to the Fair City, and the yet fairer cities of our own Altruria; and I hope that, if you cannot quite excuse my self-indulgence, in placing myself near the Park, you will at least be able to account for it. You must remember the perpetual homesickness gnawing at my heart, and you must realize how doubly strange an Altrurian finds himself in any country of the plutocratic world; and then, I think, you will understand why I spend, and even waste, so much of my time lingering in this lovely place. As I turn from my page and look out upon it, I see the domes and spires of its foliage beginning to feel the autumn and taking on those wonderful sunset tints of the American year in its decline; when I stray through its pleasant paths, I feel the pathos of the tender October air; but, better than these sensuous delights, in everything of it and in it, I imagine a prophecy’ of the truer state which I believe America is destined yet to see established. It cannot be that the countless thousands who continually visit it, and share equally in its beauty, can all come away insensible of the meaning of it; here and there someone must ask himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life should not be as generous and as just as this part of it; why he should not have a country as palpably his own as the Central Park is, where his ownership excludes the ownership of no other.

Some workman out of work, as he trudges aimlessly through its paths, must wonder why the city cannot minister to his need as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof from him till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it can give him this magnificent garden for his forced leisure, why cannot it give him a shop where he can earn his bread?

I may be mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all.

The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing different. But this is what I think for the poor people in the Park, not alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble, here, my dear Cyril: you cannot anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered so that they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the rich have gone since the beginning of time in those unhappy countries where there are rich and poor. Sometimes I think that as Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor here are “but as pictures” to one another, without vital reality. It is only a luckless exile from Altruria like myself who sees them in their dreadful verity, and has a living sense of them; and I, too, lose this at times.

Sometimes I am glad to lose it, and this is why I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets of the city, for the contrasts here are not so frequent, if they are glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been treated with an artistic sense which finds its best expression here, as with us, in the service of the community; but I do not think the Americans understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in them yet; and I doubt if the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given the chance to serve the community. But somehow, when this chance offers, it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in New York. Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a mood, where it is not merely peurile. The footways have been asphalted, and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place, but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is in nowise taken away from nature, but is rendered back to her, when all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart of the city, a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure. They are very simple woodland paths but for the asphalt; though here and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; once I mounted some steps graded in the rock, and came upon a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might have done in our gardens at home. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare of flowers on the sloping lawns. I send you a photograph of this point, and you will see the excess of the viaduct, with its sweeping stairways, and carven freestone massiveness; — but it is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of lotoses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze angel atop, who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is, in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which I was glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the landscape gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men came.

This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s prototype in the wolves at the menagerie here which the city offers free to the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses. The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good fellowship which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me at least, from tigers and lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much for the wallowing hippopotamuses, and the lumbering elephants, and the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the American pioneers: I have rather a preference for going and musing upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions of their kind, which a quarter of a century ago blackened the western plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty left; for of all the forces of the plutocratic conditions, so few are conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned American mechanic, proud of his independence, and glorying in his citizenship. certain days of the week. I like to watch them, and so do great numbers of other frequenters of the Park, apparently; and when I have walked far up beyond the reservoirs of city-water, which serve the purpose of natural lakes in the landscape, I like to come upon that expanse in the heart of the woods where the tennis-players have stretched their nets over a score of courts, and the art students have set up their easels on the edges of the lawns, for what effect of the autumnal foliage they have the luck or the skill to get. It is all very sweet and friendly, and in keeping with the purpose off the Park, and its frank and simple treatment throughout.

From an Altrurian point of view I think this treatment is best for the greatest number of those who visit the place, and for whom the aspect of simple nature is the thing to be desired. Their pleasure in it, as far as the children are concerned, is visible and audible enough, but I like, as I stroll along, to note the quiet comfort which the elder people take in this domain of theirs, as they sit on the benches in the woodland In some other enclosures are pairs of the beautiful native deer, which I wish might be enlarged to the whole extent of the Park, as we have them in our Regionic parks at home. But I can only imagine them on the great sweeps of grass, which recall the savannahs and prairies, though there is a very satisfactor flock of sheep which nibbles the herbage there, when these spaces are not thrown open to the ball - players who are allowed on ways, or under the arching trees of the Mall, unmolested by the company of some of the worst of all the bad statues in the plutocratic world. They are mostly foreigners, I believe, but I find every now and then an American among them, who has released himself, or has been forced by want of work, to share their leisure for the time; I fancy he has always a bad conscience, if he is taking the time off, for there is a continual pressure of duty here, to add dollar to dollar, and provide for the future as well as the present need. The foreigner, who has been bred up without the American’s hope of advancement, has not his anxiety, and is a happier man, so far as that goes; but the Park imparts something of its peace to every one, even to some of the people who drive, and form a spectacle for those who walk.

For me they all unite to form a spectacle I never cease to marvel at, with a perpetual hunger of conjecture as to what they really think of one another. Apparently, they are all, whether they walk or whether they drive, willing collectively, if not individually, to go on forever in the economy which perpetuates their inequality, and makes a mock of the polity which assures them their liberty. I cannot get used to the difference which money creates among men here, and whenever I take my eyes from it the thing ceases to be credible; yet this difference is what the vast majority of Americans have agreed to accept forever as right and justice, if I were to go and sit beside some poor man in the Park, and ask him why a man no better than he was driving before him in a luxurious carriage, he would say that the other man had the money to do it; and he would really think he had given me a reason; the man in the carriage himself could not regard the answer as more full and final than the man on the bench. They have both been reared in the belief that it is a sufficient answer, and they would both regard me with the same misgiving, if I ventured to say that it was not a reason; for if their positions were to be at once reversed, they would both acquiesce in the moral outlawry of their inequality. The man on foot would think it had simply come his turn to drive in a carriage and the man whom he ousted would think it was rather hard luck, but he would realize that it was what, at the bottom of his heart, he had always expected.

I have sometimes ventured to address a man walking or sitting by my side, if he appeared more than commonly intelligent, in the hope of getting at some personal philosophy, instead of this conventional acceptance of the situation, but I have only had short or suspicious answers, or a bewildered stare for my pains. Only once have I happened to find any one who questioned the situation from a standpoint outside of it, and that was a shabbily dressed man whom I overheard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleasant arbors which crown certain points of rising ground in the Park. She had a paper bundle on the seat beside her, and she looked like some workingwoman out of place, with that hapless, wistful air, which such people often have. Her poor little hands, which lay in her lap, were stiffened and hardened with work, but they were clean, except for the black of the nails, and she was very decently clad in garments beginning to fray into rags; she had a good, kind, faithful face, and she listened without rancor to the man as he unfolded the truth to her concerning the conditions in which they lived, if it may be called living. It was the wisdom of the poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes itself heard in the process of the years and ages in the plutocratic world, and then sinks again into silence. He showed her how she had no permanent place in the economy, not because she had momentarily lost work, but because in the nature of things as the Americans have them, it could only be a question of time when she must be thrown out of any place she found. He blamed no one; he only blamed the conditions, and with far more leniency than you or I should. I do not know whether his wisdom made the friendless women happier, but I could not gainsay it, when he saw me listening, and asked me, “Isn’t that the truth?” I left him talking sadly on, and I never saw him again. He looked very threadbare, but he too was cleanly and decent in his dress, and not at all of that type of agitators of whom the Americans have made an effigy like nothing I have ever found here, as if merely for the childish pleasure of reviling it.

The whole incident was infinitely pathetic to me; and yet I warn you, my dear Cyril, that you must not romance the poor, here, or imagine that they are morally better than the rich; you must not fancy that a poor man, when he ceases to be a poor man, would be kinder for having been poor. He would perhaps oftener, and certainly more logically, be unkinder, for there would be mixed with his vanity of possession a quality of cruel fear, an apprehension of loss, which the man who had always been rich would not feel. The self-made man in America, when he has made himself of money, seems to have been deformed by his original destitution, and I think that if I were in need I would rather take my chance of pity from the man who had never been poor. Of course, this is generalization, and there are instances to the contrary, which at once occur to me. But what is absolutely true, is that plutocratic prosperity, the selfish joy of having, at the necessary cost of those who cannot have, is blighted by the feeling of insecurity, which every man here has in his secret soul, and which the man who has known want must have in greater measure than the man who has never known want.

There is, indeed, no security for wealth, which the Americans think the chief good of life, in the system that warrants it. When a man has gathered his millions, he cannot be reduced to want, probably; but while he is amassing them, while he is in the midst of the fight, or the game, as most men are here, there are ninety-five chances out of a hundred that he will be beaten. Perhaps it is best so, and I should be glad it was so, if I could be sure that the common danger bred a common kindness between the rich and the poor here, but it seems not to do so. As far as I can see, the rule of chance, which they all live under, does nothing more than reduce them to a community of anxieties.

To the eye of the stranger they have the monotony of the sea, where some tenth wave runs a little higher than the rest, but sinks at last, or breaks upon the rocks or sands, as inevitably as the other nine. Their inequality is without picturesqueness and without distinction. The people in the carriages are better dressed than those on foot, especially the women; but otherwise they do not greatly differ from the most of these. The spectacle of the driving in the Park has none of that dignity which, our emissaries tell us, characterizes such spectacles in European capitals. This may be because many people of the finest social quality are still in the country, or it may be because the differences growing out of money can never have the effect of those growing out of birth; that a plutocracy can never have the last wicked grace of an aristocracy. It would be impossible, for instance, to weave any romance about the figures you see in the carriages here; they do not even suggest the poetry of ages of prescriptive wrong; they are of today, and there is no guessing whether they will be of tomorrow or not.

In Europe, this sort of tragicomedy is at least well played; but in America, you always have the feeling that the performance is that of second-rate amateurs, who, if they would really live out the life implied by America, would be the superiors of the whole world. I have, my dear Cyril, not a very keen sense of humor, as you know; but even I am sometimes moved to laughter by some of the things I see among them. Or, you perhaps think that I ought to be awed by the sight of a little, lavishly dressed lady, lolling in the corner of a ponderous landau, with the effect of holding fast lest she should be shaken out of it, while two powerful horses, in jingling, silver-plated harness, with the due equipment of coachman and footman, seated on their bright-buttoned overcoats on the box together, get her majestically over the ground at a slow trot. This is what I sometimes see, with not so much reverence as I feel for the simple mother pushing her baby-carriage on the asphalt beside me and doubtless envying the wonderful creature in the landau. Sometimes it is a fat old man in the landau; or a husband and wife, not speaking; or a pair of grim old ladies, who look as if they had lived so long aloof from their unluckier sisters that they could not be too severe with the mere sight of them. Generally speaking, the people in the carriages do not seem any happier for being there, though I have sometimes seen a jolly party of strangers in a public carriage, drawn by those broken-kneed horses which seem peculiarly devoted to this service.

The best place to see the driving is at a point where the different driveways converge, not far from the Egyptian obelisk which the Khedive gave the Americans some years ago, and which they have set up here in one of the finest eminences of the Park. He had of course no moral right to rob his miserable land of any one of its characteristic monuments, but I do not know that it is not as well in New York as in Alexandria. If its heart of aged stone could feel the terrible continuity of conditions in the world outside of Altruria, it must be aware of the essential unity of the civilizations beside the Nile and beside the Hudson; and if Cleopatra’s needle had really an eye to see, it must perceive that there is nothing truly civic in either. As the great tide of dissatisfied and weary wealth rolls by its base here, in the fantastic variety of its equipages, does it discern so much difference between their occupants and the occupants of the chariots that swept beneath it in the capital of the Ptolemies two thousand years ago? I can imagine it at times winking such an eye and cocking in derision the gilded cap with which the New Yorkers have lately crowned it. They pass it in all kinds of vehicles, and there are all kinds of people in them, though there are sometimes no people at all, as when the servants have been sent out to exercise the horses, for nobody’s good or pleasure, and in the spirit of that atrocious waste which runs through the whole plutocratic life. I have now and then seen a gentleman driving a four-in-hand, with everything to minister to his vanity in the exact imitation of a nobleman driving a four-in-hand over English roads, and with no one to be drawn by his crop-tailed bays or blacks, except himself and the solemn-looking groom on his perch; I have wondered how much more nearly equal they were in their aspirations and instincts than either of them imagined. A gentleman driving a pair, abreast or tandem, with a groom on the rumble, for no purpose except to express his quality, is a common sight enough; and sometimes you see a lady illustrating her consequence in like manner. A lady driving, while a gentleman occupies the seat behind her, is a sight which always affects me like the sight of a man taking a woman’s arm, in walking, as the man of an underbred sort is apt to do here.

Horsey-looking women, who are, to ladies at least, what horsey-looking men are to gentlemen, drive together; often they are really ladies, and sometimes they are nice young girls, out for an innocent dash and chat. They are all very much and very unimpressively dressed, whether they sit in state behind the regulation coachman and footman, or handle the reins themselves. Now and then you see a lady with a dog on the seat beside her, for an airing, but not often a child; once or twice I have seen one with a large spaniel seated comfortably in front of her, and I have asked myself what would happen if, instead of the dog, she had taken into her carriage some pale woman or weary old man, such as I sometimes see gazing patiently after her. The thing would be possible in Altruria; but I assure you, my dear Cyril, it would be altogether impossible in America. I should be the first to feel the want of keeping in it; for, however recent wealth may be here, it has equipped itself with all the apparatus of long inherited riches, which it is as strongly bound to maintain intact as if it were really old and hereditary — perhaps more strongly. I must say that, mostly, its owners look very tired of it, or of something, in public, and that the American plutocrats, if they have not the distinction of an aristocracy, have at least the ennui.

But these stylish turnouts form only a part of the spectacle in the Park driveways, though they form, perhaps, the larger part. Bicyclers weave their dangerous and devious way everywhere through the roads, and seem to be forbidden the bridle-paths, where from point to point you catch a glimpse of the riders. There are boys and girls in village carts, the happiest of all the people you see; and there are cheap-looking buggies, like those you meet in the country here, with each a young man and young girl in them, as if they had come in from some remote suburb; turnouts shabbier yet, with poor old horses, poke about with some elderly pair, like a farmer and his wife. There are family carryalls, with friendly looking families, old and young, getting the good of the Park together in a long, leisurely jog; and open buggies with yellow wheels and raffish men in them behind their wide-spread trotters; or with some sharp-faced young fellow getting all the speed out of a lively span that the mounted policemen, stationed at intervals along the driveways, will allow. The finer vehicles are of all types, patterned like everything else that is fine in America, upon something fine in Europe; but just now a very high-backed phaeton appears to be most in favor; and in fact I get a great deal of pleasure out of these myself, as I do not have to sit stiffly up in them. They make me think somehow of those eighteenth-century English novels, which you and I used to delight in so much, and which filled us with a romantic curiosity concerning the times when young ladies like Evelina drove out in phaetons, and were the passionate pursuit of Lord Orvilles and Sir Clement Willoughby s. You will be curious to know how far the Americans publicly carry their travesty of the European aristocratic life; and here I am somewhat at a loss, for I only know that life from the relations of our emissaries, and from the glimpses I had of it in my brief sojourn in England on my way here. But I should say, from what I have seen of the driving in the Park, where I suppose I have not yet seen the parody at its height, it does not err on the side of excess. The equipages, when they are fine, are rather simple; and the liveries are such as express a proprietary grandeur in coat buttons, silver or gilt, and in a darker or lighter drab of the cloth the servants wear; they are often in brown or dark green. Now and then you see the tightly cased legs and top boots and cockaded hat of a groom, but this is often est on a four-in-hand coach, or the rumble of a tandem cart; the soul of the free-born republican is rarely bowed before it on the box of a family carriage. I have seen nothing like an attempt at family colors in the trappings of the coachman and horses.

Yes, I should say that the imitation was quite within the bounds of good taste. The bad taste is in the wish to imitate Europe at all; but with the abundance of money, the imitation is simply inevitable. As I have told you before, and I cannot insist too much upon the fact, there is no American life for wealth; there is no native formula for the expression of social superiority; because America, like Altruria, means equality if it means anything, in the last analysis. But without economic equality there can be no social equality, and, finally, there can be no political equality; for money corrupts the franchise, the legislature and the judiciary here, just as it used to do with us in the old days before the Evolution. Of all the American fatuities, none seems to me more deplorable than the pretension that with their conditions it can ever be otherwise, or that simple manhood can assert itself successfully in the face of such power as money wields over the very soul of man. At best, the common man can only break from time to time-, into insolent defiance, pending his chance to make himself an uncommon man with money. In all this show here on the Park driveways, you get no effect so vivid as the effect of sterility in that liberty without equality which seems to satisfy the Americans. A man may come into the Park with any sort of vehicle, so that it is not for the carriage of merchandise, and he is free to spoil what might be a fine effect with the intrusion of whatever squalor of turnout he will. He has as much right there as any one, but the right to be shabby in the presence of people who are fine is not one that we should envy him. I do not think that he can be comfortable in it, for the superiority around him puts him to shame, as it puts the poor man to shame here at every turn in life, though some Americans, with an impudence that is pitiable, will tell you that it does not put him to shame; that he feels himself as good as any one. They are always talking about human nature and what it is, and what it is not; but they try in their blind worship of inequality, to refuse the first and simplest knowledge of human nature, which testifies of itself in every throb of their own hearts, as they try even to refuse a knowledge of the Divine nature, when they attribute to the Father of all a design in the injustice they have themselves created.

To me the lesson of Central Park is that where it is used in the spirit of fraternity and equality, the pleasure in it is pure and fine, and that its frequenters have for the moment a hint of the beauty which might be perpetually in their lives; but where it is invaded by the plutocratic motives of the strife that raves all round it in the city outside, its joys are fouled with contempt and envy, the worst passions that tear the human heart. Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred, have never seen a man in livery; they have never dreamt of such a display as this in the Park; the sight of it would be as strange to them as it would be to all the Altrurians. Yet with their conditions, I fear that at sight of it, ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred, would lust for their turn of the wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might succeed to a place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the face of poverty, and abash humility with their pride. They would not feel, as we should, the essential immorality of its deformity; they would not perceive that its ludicrous disproportion was the outward expression of an inward ugliness.

A. HOMOS.

IV.

New York, October 30, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

If you will look at a plan of New York, you will see that Central Park is really in the center of the place, if a thing which has length only, or is so nearly without breadth or thickness, can be said to have a center. South of the Park, the whole island is dense with life and business — it is pretty solidly built up on either side; but to the northward the blocks of houses are no longer of a compact succession; they struggle up, at irregular intervals, from open fields, and sink again, on the streets pushed beyond them into the simple country, where even a suburban character is lost. It can only be a few years, at most, before all the empty spaces will be occupied, and the town, such as it is, and such as it seems to have been ever since the colonial period, will have anchored itself fast in the rock that underlies the larger half of it, and imparted its peculiar effect to every street — an effect of arrogant untidiness, of superficial and formal gentility, of immediate neglect and overuse.

You will see more of the neglect and overuse in the avenues which penetrate the city’s mass from north to south, and more of the superficial and formal gentility in the streets that cross these avenues from east to west; but the arrogant untidiness you will find nearly everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters westward from the Park, and still further uptown. These are really very clean; but they have a bare look, as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in fact, many of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets are often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that run parallel with the river sides; and at least two of the avenues are as decent as the decentest cross-street. But all are more or less unkempt; the sweepings lie in little heaps in the gutters for days; and in a city without alleys barrels of ashes and kitchen offal line the curbstones and offer their offense to the nose and eye everywhere.

Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ iron shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements; scraps of paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish, litter both. Every city of the plutocratic world must be an outrage to Altrurian senses, as you already understand, but I doubt if I could ever make you understand the abominable condition of the New York streets during the snowy months of the past winter, when for weeks no attempt was made to remove their accumulated filth. At their best, they would be intolerable to us; at their worst, they are inconceivable and wholly indescribable. The senses witness their condition, but the mind refuses to receive the evidence of the senses; and nothing can be more pathetic, more comic, than the resolution of the New Yorkers in ignoring it.

But if I were once to go into detail, in my effort to make New York intelligible to you, there would be no end to it, and I think I had better get back to my topographical generalities. I have given you some notion of my position at the gate of Central Park, and you must imagine all my studies of the city beginning and ending here. I love to linger near it, because it affords a hope for New York that I feel so distinctly nowhere else in New York, though certain traits of the city’s essentially transitional and experimental nature sometimes also suggest that it may be the first city of America to Altrurianize. The upper classes are at least used to the political sway of the lower classes, and when they realize that they never can have any hope but in bettering the lot of their rulers, the end will not be far off, for it will then be seen that this can be lastingly done only through a change of the economic conditions.

In the meantime, the Park, which is the physical heart of New York, is Altrurian already. In the contrasts of rich and poor, which you can no more escape there than you can in the city streets, you are, indeed, afflicted with that sense of absurdity, of impossibility, so comforting to the American when he strives to imagine Altrurian conditions, and gets no farther than to imagine the creatures of a plutocratic civilization in them. He imagines that, in an Altrurian state, people must have the same motives, interests, anxieties, which he has always known them to have, and which they carry with them into Central Park, and only lay aside for a moment in response to the higher appeal which its equal opportunities make. But then, at moments these care-worn, greed-worn souls do put off the burden of their inequality, their superiority or their inferiority, and meet on the same broad level of humanity; and I wish, my dear Cyril, that you would always keep its one great oasis in your thoughts, as you follow me in my wanderings through this vast commercial desert. It is the token, if not the pledge, of happier things, and, while I remain here, it will be always to me a precious image of home.

When I leave it I usually take one of the avenues southward, and then turn eastward or westward on one of the crossstreets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity, and stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues, as you will see, are fifteen or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some farther than others, up and down the island, but most of them end in the old town, where its irregularity begins, at the south, and several are interrupted by the different parks at the north. Together with the streets that intersect them between the old town and Central Park, they form one of the most characteristic parts of modern New York. Like the streets, they are numbered, as you know, rather than named, from a want of imagination, or from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry and associations that cluster about a name, and can never cling to a number, or from a business impatience to be quickly done with the matter. This must rather defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes to tell you that he lives at three hundred and seventy-five on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh street. Towards the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and shabbier, though this statement must be qualified, like all general statements. Seventh avenue, on the west, is pleasanter than Sixth avenue, and Second avenue, on the east, is more agreeable than Third avenue. In fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East river, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs nearest it, very quiet, built up with comfortable dwellings, and even clean, as cleanliness is understood in New York.

But it is Fifth avenue which divides the city lengthwise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which affords the norm of style and comfort to the other avenues on either hand, and to all the streets that intersect it. Madison avenue is its rival, and has suffered less from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a long stretch of Fifth avenue is still the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and is upon the whole its finest thoroughfare. I need not say that we should not, in Altruria, think any New York street fine; but, generally, Fifth avenue and the crossstreets in its better part have a certain regularity in their mansions of brownstone, which recalls to one, if it does not actually give again, the pleasure we get from the symmetry at home. They are at least not so chaotic as they might be, and though they always suggest money more than taste, I cannot at certain moments, and under the favor of an evening sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding beauty.

There are not many of these cross-streets which have remained intact from the business of the other avenues. They have always a drinking saloon, or a provision store, or an apothecary’s shop, at the corners where they intersect; the modistes find lodgment in them almost before the residents are aware. Beyond Sixth avenue, or Seventh at furthest, on the west, and Fourth avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose their genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.

But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings far down town, which seem to have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability, and destroying its pleasant homes. They already have the whole of the old town to themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells but the janitors with their families, who keep the skyscraping edifices where business frets the time away; and by night, in the streets where myriads throng by day, no one walks but the outcast and the watch.

Many of these business streets are the handsomest in the city, with a good sky line, and an architectural ideal too good for the sordid uses of commerce.

This is often realized in antipathetic iron, but often there is good honest work in stone, and an effect better than the best of Fifth avenue.

But this is stupid and wasteful, as everything necessarily is in the plutocratic conditions. It is for the pleasure of no one’s taste or sense; the business men who traffic in these edifices have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it; the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil and moil in these thoroughfares, have no use for the grandeur that catches the eye of a chance passer from Altruria. a question of time before it shall wholly possess them. It is only a question of time before all the comfortable quarters of the city, northward from the old town to the Park, shall be invaded, and the people driven to the streets building up on the west and east of it for a little longer sojourn. Where their last stay shall be, heaven knows; perhaps they will be forced into the country; or before that happens they may be rescued from themselves by the advance of Altrurianization.

In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that seems mostly to come first, and it is business that follows and holds the conquest, though this is far from being always the case. Whether it is so or not, however, poverty is certain at some time to impart its taint; for it is perpetual here, from generation to generation, like death itself. In the plutocratic conditions, poverty is incurable; the very hope of cure is laughed to scorn by those who cling the closest to these conditions; it may be better at one time, Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which festers in the squalid houses and swarms day and night in the squalid streets; but business presses closer and harder upon these refuges of its fosterchild, not to say its offspring, and it is only and worse at another; but it must always be, somehow, till time shall be no more. It is from everlasting to everlasting, they say, with an unconscious blasphemy of the ever-enduring Good, and, unless the conditions change, I must confess that they have reason for their faith in evil.

When I come home from these walks of mine, heart-sick, as I usually do, I have a vision of the wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease upon the civic body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and deeper into it; and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all for a while. But when I am actually in these leprous spots, I become hardened, for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of human discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a devilish indifference to that ruin, or that defect, which must so largely constitute the charm of the picturesque. A street of tenement-houses is always more picturesque than a street of brownstone residences, which the same thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. The fronts of the edifices are decorated with the iron balconies and ladders of the fire-escapes, and have in the perspective a false air of gayety, which is travestied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the windows to the tall poles set between the backs of the houses, and fluttering with drying clothes as with banners,.

The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the mothers sit nursing their babes, and the old women gossip together; young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables, and then resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. The place has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love, and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama, with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly effective, for then you could be in it, and yet have the distance on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet fouler and dread fuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and beating each other in the face, and rolling each other in the gutter, like the little savage outlaws they are. It is to see the work-worn look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its shipping, and the wooded heights of its western bank.

I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to the North river, as the New Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could give you some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream. You must turn to the photographs I send you for that beauty and majesty, and for some sense of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all city waterfronts in plutocratic countries. Instead of pleasant homes, with green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, as we have them in Altruria, they have here the inexorable self-assertion of business, which is first in the people’s thoughts, and must necessarily be given the first place in their cities. Huge factories and foundries, lumber yards, breweries, slaughter-houses and warehouses, abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels, and drinking saloons, disfigure the shore, and in the nearest avenue, the freight trains come and go on lines of railroads, in all this middle portion of New York. South of it, in the business section, the poverty section, the river region is a mere chaos of industrial and commercial strife and pauper wretchedness. North of it there are gardened driveways following the shore; and even at many points between, when you finally reach the river, there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic activities of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind up and down the long piers, but on either side the docks are full of leisurely canal-boats, and if you could come with me in the late afternoon, you would see the smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell the evening meal cooking within, while the canal-wives lounged at the gangway hatches for a breath of the sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. All the hurry and turmoil of the city is lost among these people, whose clumsy craft recall the grassy inland levels remote from the metropolis, and the slow movement of life in the quiet country ways. Some of the mothers from the tenement-houses stroll down on the piers with their babies in their arms, and watch their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the sides of the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current at the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, and never large ones, but they silently enjoy the sport, which they probably find leisure for in the general want of work in these hard times; if they swear a little at their luck, now and then, it is, perhaps, no more than their luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but sit with their legs dangling over the water, and watch the swift tugs, or the lagging sloops that pass, with now and then a larger sail, or a towering passenger steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the forests of masts, fringing either shore, and following the point of the island round and up into the great channel called the East river. These ships seemed as multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere from them over the shore further than the eye can reach. They bring the commerce of the world to this mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the parent of such misery, and with all its traffic abounds in idle men who cannot find work. The ships look happy and free, in the stream, but they are of the plutocratic world, too, as well the houses; and let them spread their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them the slavery of the poor, as we know too well from the sorrowful tales of the castaways on our coast.

You must lose the thought of what is below the surface everywhere and in everything in America, if you would possess your soul from the pain perpetually threatening it; and I am afraid, my dear Cyril, that if you could be suddenly transported to my side, and behold what underlies all life here, with your fresh Altrurian eyes, you would not be more shocked at the sight than at me, who, knowing it all, can ever have a moment’s peace in my knowledge. But I do have many moments’ peace, through the mere exhaustion of consciousness, and I must own with whatever shame you would have me feel, that sometimes I have moments of pleasure. The other evening I walked over to the East river through one of those tenement streets, and I reached the waterside just as the soft night was beginning to fall in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died from the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ravened out of the bank for a street, and experienced that artistic delight which cultivated people are often proud of feeling here, in the aspect of the long prison island which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew the buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and women in them, bad before, could only come out of them worse than before, and doomed to a life of outlawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each an image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which the cruelty of men imagines God has prepared for the souls of the damned, but I could not see the barred windows of those hells in the waning light. I could only see the trees along their walks; their dim lawns and gardens, and the castellated forms of the prisons; and the esthetic sense, which in these unhappy lands is careful to keep itself pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable impression of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, and the vast steamboats which ply between the city and the New England ports on Long Island Sound, and daily convey whole populations of passengers between New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, swiftly, luminous masses on the black water. Their lights aloft at bow and stern, floated with them like lambent planets; the lights of lesser craft dipped by, and came and went in the distance; the lamps of the nearer and farther shores twinkled into sight, and a peace that ignored all the sorrow of it, fell upon the scene.

It was such peace as can alone come to you in a life like this. If you would have any rest you must ignore a thousand facts, which, if you recognize them, turn and rend you, and instil their poison into your lacerated soul. In your pleasures you must forget the deprivation which your indulgence implies; if you feast, you must shut out the thought of them that famish; when you lie down in your bed, you cannot sleep if you remember the houseless who have nowhere to lay their heads. You are everywhere beleaguered by the armies of want and woe, and in the still watches of the night you can hear their invisible sentinels calling to one another, “All is ill! All is ill!” and hushing their hosts to the apathy of despair.

Yes, if you would have any comfort of your life here, you must have it in disregard of your fellowmen, your kindred, your brothers, made like yourself and fashioned to the same enjoyments and sufferings, whose hard lot forbids them comfort. This is a fact, however, which the civilization of all plutocratic countries is resolute to deny, and the fortunate children of that civilization try to live in a fiction of the demerit of the unfortunate: they feign that these are more indolent or vicious than themselves, and so are, somehow, condemned by the judgments of God to their abasement and destitution. But at the bottom of their hearts they know that this pretense is false, and that it is a mere chance they are not themselves of the unfortunate. They must shut their minds to this knowledge as they must shut them to the thought of all the misery which their prosperity is based on, or, as I say, they can have no peace.

You can reason to the effect upon character among them, among the best of them. It is a consequence which you would find unspeakably shocking, yet which, if you personally knew their conditions, you would be lenient to, for you would perceive that, while the conditions endure, there is no help, no hope for them. The wonder is that, in such circumstances as theirs, they ever permit their sympathies the range that these sometimes take, only to return upon them in an anguish of impotency. None but the shortsighted and thoughtless in a plutocracy can lastingly satisfy themselves even with a constant giving, for the thoughtful know that charity corrupts and debases, and that finally it is no remedy. So these take refuge from themselves in a wilful ignorance, sometimes lasting, sometimes transient, of the things in their life that disturb and displease them. It is the only thing to do here, my dear Cyril, and I will not deny that I have come to do it, like the rest. Since I cannot relieve the wrong I see, I have learned often to shut my eyes to it, with the effect, which most Americans experience, that, since there seems to be no way of righting the wrong, the wrong must be a sort of right. Yes, this infernal juggle of the mind operates itself in me, too, at times, so that I doubt the reality of my whole happy life in the past, I doubt Altruria, I doubt you.

I beseech you, therefore, to write me as often as you can, and as fully and vividly. Tell me of our country, remind me of the state where men dwell together as brothers; use every device to make it living and real to me; for here I often lose the memory and the sense of it, and at all times I have a weakened sense of the justice and mercy that I once thought ruled this world, but which the Americans think rules only the world to come.

A. HOMOS.

V.

New York, November 15, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

In my last I tried to give 3’ou some notion of the form and structure of this strange city, but I am afraid that I did it very vaguely and insufficiently. I do not suppose that I could ever do it fully, and perhaps the attempt was foolish. But I hope that I may, without greater folly, at least offer to share with you the feeling I have concerning American life, and most of all concerning New York life, that it is forever on the way, and never arrives. This is the effect that I constantly receive in the streets here and especially in the avenues, which are fitly named so far as avenue means approach merely. They are roadways which people get back and forth by, in their haste from nowhere to nowhere, as it would seem to us. Of course they do physically reach their places of business downtown in the morning, and their places of eating and sleeping uptown in the evening; but morally they are forever in transition. Whether they are bent upon business, or bent upon pleasure, the Americans, or certainly the New Yorkers, perpetually postpone the good of life, as we know it in Altruria, and as it is known in some tranquiller countries even of the plutocratic world. They make money, but they do not have money, for there is no such thing as the sensible possession of money, and hardly of the things that money can buy. They seek enjoyment and they find excitement, for joy is the blessing of God, and like every good gift conies unsought, and flies pursuit. They know this, as well as we do, and in certain moments of dejection, in the hours of pain, in the days of sorrow, they realize it, but at other times they ignore it. If they did not ignore it they could not live, they say, and they appear to think that by ignoring it they do live, though to me there is nothing truly vital in their existence.

The greatest problem of their metropolis is not how best to be in this place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and they have made guesses at the riddle, bad and worse, on each of the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high and low, had chanced along their sides afterwards. This is not the fact, of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth avenue, and Madison avenue, and Lexington avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly built up, like the cross streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their ugliness. Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectator, there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down except on Fifth avenue, where they have stages, as the New Yorkers call the unwieldly and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and on Second avenue, where they have electric cars, something like our own, in principle. But the horse-cars run even under the elevated tracks, and you have absolutely no experience of noise in the Altrurian life which can enable you to conceive of the hellish din that bursts upon the sense when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take your life in your hand when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway, which traverses the district I am thinking of, in a diagonal line till it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of the cable cars. These are propelled by an endless chain running underneath the pavement with a silent speed that is more dangerous even than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute, with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot passenger has to look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding one car another roll him under its wheels.

Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can be, and it has simply to be taken into the account of life in New York, for it cannot be abated, and no one is to be blamed for what is the fault of everyone. It is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track in such a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove that people could get on without it, as they did before the theft of the street for the original horse-car track. Perhaps it was not a theft; but at all events, and at the best, the street was given away by the city to an adventurer who wished to lay the tracks in it for his private gain, and none of the property owners along the line could help themselves. There is nothing that the Americans hold so dear, 3’ou know, or count so sacred, as private property; life and limb are cheap in comparison; but private enterprise is allowed to violate the rights of private property, from time to time here, in the most dramatic way.

I do not speak, now, of the railroad companies, which have gridironed the country, in its whole length and breadth, and which are empowered by their franchises to destroy the homes of the living and desecrate the graves of the dead, in running their lines from point to point. These companies do pay something, as little as they may, or as much as they must; but the street-car company which took possession of Broadway never paid the abuttors anything, I believe; and the elevated railroad companies are still resisting payment of damages on the four avenues which they occupied for their way up and down the city without offering compensation to the property owners along their route. If the community had built these roads, it would have indemnified everyone, for the community is always just when it is the expression of the common honesty here; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.

Yet the Americans trust themselves so little in their civic embodiment that the movement for the public ownership of the railroads makes head slowly against an inconceivable prejudice. Last winter, when the problem of rapid transit pressed sorely upon the New Yorkers, the commission in charge could find no way to solve it but by offering an extension of franchise to the corporation which has already the monopoly of it. There was no question of the city’s building the roads, and working them at cost; and if there had been, there would have been no question of submitting the project to those whose interests are involved. They have no such thing here as the referendum, and the Americans who are supposed to make their own law’s, merely elect their representatives, and have no voice themselves in approving or condemning legislation.

The elevated roads and the cable read had no right to be, on the terms that the New Yorkers have them, but they are by far the best means of transit in the city, and I must say that if they were not abuses, they would offer great comfort and great facility to the public. This is especially true of the elevated roads, which, when you can put their moral offense out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and airy swiftness. The tracks are lifted upon iron piers, from twenty to fifty feet above the street, according to the inequality of the surface, and you fly smoothly along between the second and third story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above, on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of over-use, and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves; and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful.

They darken the avenues, of course, and fill them with an abominable uproar. Yet traffic goes underneath, and life goes on alongside and overhead, and the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts himself to a chronic disease. I do not know whether they add to the foulness of the streets they pass through or not; I hardly think they do. The mud lies longer, after a rain, in the interminable tunnels which they form over the horse-car tracks in the middle of the avenues, and which you can look through for miles; but the mud does not blow into your nose and mouth as the dust does, and that is, so far, a positive advantage. A negative advantage, which I have hinted, is that they hide so much of the street from sight, and keep you from seeing all its foulness and shabbiness, pitilessly open to the eye in the avenues which have only horse-car tracks in them. In fact, now that the elevated railroads are built, and the wrong they have done to persons is mainly past recall, perhaps the worst that can be said of them is that they do not serve their purpose. Of course, in plutocratic conditions, where ten men are always doing the work of one man in rivalry with each other, the passage of people to and from business is enormous: to get money, and the passage of women to spend it; and at the hours of the morning and the afternoon when the volume of travel is the greatest, the trains of the elevated roads offer a spectacle that is really incredible.

Every seat in them is taken, and every foot of space in the aisle between the seats is held by people standing, and swaying miserably to and fro by the leather straps dangling from the roofs. Men and women are indecently crushed together, without regard for that personal dignity which we prize, but which the Americans seem to know nothing of and care nothing for. The multitude overflows from the car, at either end, and the passengers are as tightly wedged on the platforms without as they are within. The long trains follow each other at intervals of two or three minutes, and at each station they make a stop of but a few seconds, when those who wish to alight fight their way through the struggling mass. Those who wish to mount fight their way into the car or onto the platform, where the guard slams an iron gate against the stomachs and in the faces of those arriving too late. Sometimes horrible accidents happen; a man clinging to the outside of the gate has the life crushed out of his body against the posts of the station as the train pulls out. But in this land, where people have such a dread of civic collectivism of any kind, lest individuality should suffer, the individual is practically nothing in the regard of the corporate collectivities which abound.

It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights, in America; where there is a question of interest, there seems to be no question of rights between individuals. They prey upon one another and seize advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways for me to hope to make the whole situation evident to you, but I may at least give you some notion of the wrong they do. The avenues to the eastward and westward have not grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any law of order, or in pursuance of any meditated design. They have been pushed along given lines, in fragments, as builders saw their interest in offering buyers a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut or trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, and counting upon some need of it, in the hope of extorting an unearned profit from it. In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or stone, and on each side of it or in front of it, a structure one-fourth as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes, not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board fence, shutting in vacant lots, usually the best lots on the street, which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from the building all round and beyond his property. In the meantime he pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved property pays, and gets some meager return for the use of his fence by the Italian fruiterers who build their stalls into it, and by the bill-posters who cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements, picturing the scenes of the different plays and the persons of the players. To the Altrurian public the selfishness of a man willing idly to benefit by the industry and energy of others in giving value to his possessions would be unimaginable. Yet this is so common here that it is accepted and honored as a proof of business sagacity; and the man who knows how to hold onto his land, until the very moment when it can enrich him most, though he has neither plowed nor sown it, or laid the foundation of a human dwelling upon it, is honored as a longheaded and solid citizen, who deserves well of his neighbors. There are many things which unite to render the avenues unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New Yorkers. But as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who breaks the skyline, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in design, a defeated purpose, and a chaos come again.

Even when the owners begin to build, to improve their real estate, as the phrase is, it is without regard to the rights of their neighbors, or the feelings or tastes of the public, so far as the public may be supposed to have any. This is not true of the shabbier avenues alone, but of the finest, and of all the streets. If you will look, for instance, at the enclosed photograph of the street facing the southern limit of the Park, you will get some notion of what I mean, and I hope you will be willing to suffer by a little study of it. At the western end you will see a vacant lot, with its high board fence covered with painted signs, then a tall mass of apartment houses; then a stretch of ordinary New York dwellings of the old commonplace brownstone sort; then a stable, and a wooden liquor saloon at the corner. Across the next avenue there rises far aloof the compact bulk of a series of apartment houses, which in color and design are the pleasantest in the city, and are so far worthy of their site. Beyond them to the eastward the buildings decline and fall, till they sink into another wooden drinking-shop on the corner of another avenue, where you will see the terminus of one of the elevated roads. Beyond this avenue is the fence of a large vacant lot, covered, as usual, with theatrical posters, and then there surges skyward another series of apartment houses. The highest of these is nearly fifty feet higher than its nearest neighbors, which sink again, till you suddenly drop from their nondescript monotony to the gothic façade of a house of a wholly different color, in its pale sandstone, from the red of their brick fronts.

A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of theatrical posters on its fence, and beyond this, on the corner, is a huge hotel, the most agreeable of the three that tower above the fine square at the gate of the Park. With that silly American weakness for something foreign, this square is called the Plaza; I believe that it is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offense. An irregular space in the center is planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed hacks of the public carriages droop their unhappy heads, without the spirit to bite the flies that trouble their dreams; and below this you get a glimpse of the conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza. At the eastern corner of the avenue is a vacant lot, with pictorial advertisements painted on its fence, and then you come to the second of the great hotels which give the Plaza such character as it has. It is of a light-colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which is of brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops abruptly in a flat roof. On the next corner north is another hotel, which rises six or seven stories higher yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping a romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I seek a term for the architectural order, but it may not be the right one. There is no term for the civic disorder of what succeeds. From the summit of this enormous acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to the roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and then to the florist’s and photographer’s next is another descent of three stories; on the corner is a drinking-saloon, one story in height, with a brick front and a wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with me; the avenue continues northward and southward in a delirium of lines and colors, a savage anarchy of shapes, which I should think the general experience of the beauty of the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the dull American sense. What exists is the necessary and inexorable effect of that uncivic individuality which the Americans prize, and which can manifest itself only in harm and wrong; but if you criticised it you would surprise and alarm them almost as much as if you attacked the atrocious economic inequality it springs from.

There are other points on Fifth avenue nearly as bad as this, but not quite, and there are long stretches of it, which, if dull, have at least a handsome uniformity. I have told you already that it is still upon the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode of the best, that is the richest people; the Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brownstone dwellings, as yet little invaded by business. Lexington avenue is of the same character, but of a humbler sort. On Second avenue, down town, there are large old mansions of the time when Fifth avenue was still the home of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are spared by the elevated roads, there are blocks of decent and comfortable dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of the competitive system the same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times. The Americans have no conception of our distribution; and though nearly everything they now use is made in large establishments, their wares are dispersed and sold in an infinitude of small stores.

One hears a good deal about the vast emporiums which are gathering the retail trade into themselves, and devastating the minor commerce, but there are perhaps a score of these at most, in New York; and on the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at least a hundred miles of little shops, where an immense population of little dealers levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by. Until you actually see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude of people taken away from the labor due to all from all, and solely devoted to marketing the things made by people who are overworked in making them. But bad as this is, and immoral as it is in Altrurian eyes, it is really harmless beside a traffic which is the most conspicuous on these avenues; I mean the traffic in intoxicating liquors, sold and drunk on the premises. I need not tell you that I still hold our national principles concerning the use of alcohol, but I have learned here to be lenient to its use, in a measure which you would not perhaps excuse. I perceive that as long as there is poverty there must be drunkenness, until the State interferes and sells a man only so much as he can safely drink. Yet, knowing as I do from the daily witness of the press and the courts, that drink is the source of most of the crimes and vices which curse this people, I find the private traffic in alcohol infinitely shocking, and the spectacle of it incredible. There is scarcely a block on any of the poorer avenues which has not its liquor store, and generally there are two; wherever a street crosses them there is a saloon on at least one of the corners; sometimes on two, sometimes on three, sometimes even on all four. I had one day the curiosity to count the saloons on Sixth avenue, between the Park, and the point down town where the avenue properly ends. In a stretch of some two miles I counted ninety of them, besides the eating houses where you can buy drink with your meat; and this avenue is probably far less infested with the traffic than some others.

You may therefore safely suppose that out of the hundred miles of shops, there are ten, or fifteen, or twenty miles of saloons. They have the best places on the avenues, and on the whole they make the handsomest show.

They all have a cheerful and inviting look, and if you step within, you find them cosy, quiet, and for New York, clean.

There are commonly tables set about in them, where their frequenters can take their beer or whisky at their ease, and eat the free lunch which is often given in them; in a rear room you see a billiard table. In fact, they form the poor man’s clubhouses and if he might resort to them with his family, and be in the control of the State as to the amount he should spend and drink there, I could not think them without their rightful place in an economy which saps the vital forces of the laborer with overwork, or keeps him in a fever of hope or a fever of despair, as to the chances of getting or not getting work when he has lost it. We at home, have so long passed the sad necessity to which such places minister, that we sometimes forget it, but you know how in our old competitive days, this traffic was one of the first to be taken out of private hands, and assumed by the State, which continued to manage it without a profit so long as the twin crazes of competition and drunkenness endured among us. If you suggested this to the average American, however, he would be horror-struck. He would tell you that what you proposed was little better than anarchy; that in a free country you must always leave private persons free to debauch men’s souls and bodies with drink, and make money out of their ruin; that anything else was contrary to human nature, and an invasion of the sacred rights of the individual. Here in New York, this valuable principle is so scrupulously respected, that the saloon controls the municipality, and the New Yorkers think this is much better than for the municipality to control the saloon. It is from the saloon that their political bosses rise to power; it is in the saloon that all the election frauds are planned and fostered; and it would be infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read the solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals which hold by the good old American doctrine of private trade in drink as one of the bulwarks of their constitution, and a chief defense against the advance of Altrurian ideas.

Without it, there would be far less poverty than there is, but poverty is a good old American institution, too; there would inevitably be less inequality, but inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself. In New York the inequality has that effect upon the architecture which I have tried to give you some notion of; but in fact it deforms life here at every turn, and in nothing more than in the dress of the people, high and low. New York is, on the whole, without doubt, the best dressed community in America, or at least there is a certain number of people here, more expensively and scrupulously attired than you will find anywhere else in the country. I do not say beautifully, for their dress is of the fashion which you have seen in our Regionic museum, where we used to laugh over it together when we fancied people in it, and is a modification of the fashions that prevail everywhere in plutocratic Christendom. The rich copy the fashion set for them in Paris or in London, and then the less rich, and the still less rich, down to the poor, follow them as they can, until you arrive at the very poorest, who wear the cast-off and tattered fashions of former years, and masquerade in a burlesque of the fortunate that never fails to shock and grieve me. They must all somehow be clothed; the climate and the custom require it; but sometimes I think their nakedness would be less offensive; and when I meet a wretched man, with his coat out at elbows, or split up the back, in broken shoes, battered hat, and frayed trousers, or some old woman or young girl in a worn-out, second-hand gown and bonnet, tattered and threadbare and foul, I think that if I were an American, as I am an Altrurian, I would uncover my head to them, and ask their forgiveness for the system that condemns some one always to such humiliation as theirs.

The Americans say such people are not humiliated, that they do not mind it, that they are used to it; but if they ever look these people in the eye, and see the shrinking, averted glance of their shame and tortured pride, they must know that what they say is a cruel lie. At any rate, the presence of these outcasts must spoil the beauty of any dress near them, and there is always so much more penury than affluence that the sight of the crowd in the New York streets must give more pain than pleasure. The other day on Fifth avenue, it did not console me to meet a young and lovely girl, exquisitely dressed in the last effect of Paris, after I had just parted from a young fellow who had begged me to give him a little money to get something to eat, for he had been looking for work a week and had got nothing. I suppose I ought to have doubted his word, he was so decently clad, but I had a present vision of him in rags, and I gave to the frowzy tramp he must soon become.

Of course, this social contrast was extreme, like some of those architectural contrasts I have been noting, but it was by no means exceptional, as those were not. In fact, I do not know but I may say that it was characteristic of the place, though you might say that the prevalent American slovenliness was also characteristic of the New York street crowds; I mean the slovenliness of the men; the women, of whatever order they are, are always as much dandies as they can be. But most American men are too busy to look much after their dress, and when they are very well to do they care very little for it. You see few men dressed with the distinction of the better class of Londoners, and when you do meet them, they have the air of playing a part, as in fact they are: they are playing the part of men of leisure in a nation of men whose reality is constant work, whether they work for bread or whether they work for money, and who, when they are at work, outdo the world, but sink, when they are at leisure, into something third rate and fourth rate. The commonness of effect in the street crowds, is not absent from Fifth avenue or from Madison avenue any more than it is from First avenue or Tenth avenue; and the tide of wealth and fashion that rolls up and down the better avenues in the splendid carriages, makes the shabbiness of the foot-passenger, when he is shabby, as he often is, the more apparent. On the far east side, and on the far west side, the horse-cars, which form the only means of transit, have got the dirt and grime of the streets and the dwellings on them and in them, and there is one tone of foulness in the passengers and the vehicles. I do not wish to speak other than tenderly of the poor but it is useless to pretend that they are other than offensive in aspect, and I have to take my sympathy in both hands when I try to bestow it upon them. Neither they nor the quarter they live in has any palliating quaintness; and the soul, starved of beauty, will seek in vain to feed itself with the husks of picturesqueness in their aspect.

As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a picturesqueness of their own, but it is a repulsive picturesqueness, as I have already suggested, except at a distance. There are some differences of level, on the avenues near the rivers, that give them an advantage of the more central avenues, and there is now and then a break of their line by the water, which is always good. I noticed this particularly on the eastern side of the city, which is also the older part, and which has been less subject to the changes perpetually going on elsewhere, so that First avenue has really a finer sky-line, in many parts, than most parts of Fifth avenue. There are certain bits, as the artists say, in the old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich village, which, when I think of them, make me almost wish to take back what I have said of the absence even of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect of Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth street, on a mild afternoon, when their Italian denizens are all either on the pavement or have their heads poked out of the windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words. But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in the quaintness, such as you are said to find in European cities. It has undergone the same sort of malign change here that has transformed the Italians from the friendly folk we are told they are at home, to the surly race, and even savage race they mostly show themselves here: shrewd for their advancement in the material things, which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all races, and fierce for their full share of the political pottage. The Italians have a whole region of the city to themselves, and they might feel at home in it if something more than the filth of their native environment could repatriate them.

As you pass through these streets, there is much to appeal to your pity in the squalid aspect of the people and the place, but nothing to take your fancy; and perhaps this is best, for I think that there is nothing more infernal than the juggle that transmutes for the tenderest hearted people here the misery of their fellows into something comic or poetic. Only very rarely have I got any relief from the sheer distress which the prevalent poverty gives; and perhaps you will not be able to understand how I could find this in the sight of some chickens going to roost on a row of carts drawn up by the street side, near a little hovel where some old people lived in a temporary respite from the building about them; or from a cottage in outlying suburban fields, with a tar-roofed shanty for a stable, and an old horse cropping the pasturage of the enclosure, with a brood of turkeys at his heels.

But in New York you come to be glad of anything that will suggest a sweeter and a gentler life than that which you mostly see. The life of the poor here seemed to me symbolized in a waste and ruined field that I came upon the other day in one of the westward avenues, which had imaginably once been the grounds about a pleasant home, or perhaps a public square. Till I saw this I did not think any piece of our mother earth could have been made to look so brutal and desolate amidst the habitations of men. Bat every spear of grass had been torn from it; the hardened and barren soil was furrowed and corrugated like a haggard face, and it was all strewn with clubs and stones, as if it had been a savage battleground. A few trees, that seemed beaten back, stood aloof from the borders next the streets, where some courses of an ancient stone wall rose in places above the pavement. I found the sight of it actually depraving; it made me feel ruffianly, and I mused upon it in helpless wonder as to the influence its ugliness must have had amidst the structural ugliness all about it, if some wretch had turned it in hopes of respite.

But probably none ever does. Probably the people on the shabby streets and avenues are no more sensible of their hideousness than the people in the finer streets and avenues are aware of their dulness or their frantic disproportion. I have never heard a New Yorker speak of these things, and I have no doubt that if my words could come to the eyes of the average cultivated New Yorker he would be honestly surprised that anyone should find his city so ugly as it is. Dirty he would cheerfully allow it to be, and he would be rather proud of telling you how much New York spent every year for not having herself cleaned; but that she was ludicrously and wilfully ugly he could not believe. As for that first lesson of civilization which my words implicate, a civic control of the private architecture of the place, he would shrink from it with about as much horror as from civic control of the liquor trade.

If he did not, he would still be unable to understand how the individual liberty that suffers a man to build offensively to his neighbor or to the public at large, is not liberty, but is a barbarous tyranny, which puts an end instantly to beauty, and extinguishes the common and the personal rights of every one who lives near the offender or passes by his edifice. The Americans are yet so far lost in the dark ages as to suppose that there is freedom where the caprice of one citizen can interfere with the comfort or pleasure of the rest.

A. HOMOS.

VI.

New York, November 9, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New Yorkers live, I should begin by saying that the New Yorkers did not live at all. But outside of our happy country, one learns to distinguish, and to allow that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would say that in conditions where men were embattled against one another by the greed, and the envy, and the ambition which these conditions perpetually appeal to, there could be no grace in life; but we must remember that men have always been better than their conditions, and that otherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or the wish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potential civility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge the peoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, who are above all others the devotees and exemplars of the plutocratic ideal, without limitation by any aristocracy, theocracy, or monarchy.

They are purely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold, has logically no place in their life. But life is not logical, outside of Altruria; we are the only people in the world, my dear Cyril, who are privileged to live reasonably; and again I say we must put by our own enterions if we wish to understand the Americans, or to recognize that measure of loveliness which their warped, and stunted, and perverted lives certainly show, in spice of theory and in spite of conscience, even. I can make this clear to you, I think, by a single instance, say that of the American who sees a case of distress, and longs to relieve it. If he is rich, he can give relief with a good conscience, except for the harm that may come to his beneficiary from being helped; but if he is not rich, or not finally rich, and especially if he has a family dependent upon him, he cannot give in anything like the measure Christ bade us give, without wronging those dear to him, immediately or remotely. That is to say, in conditions which oblige every man to look out for himself, a man cannot be a Christian without remorse; he cannot do a generous action without self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear of being a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and so without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often has its effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and many Americans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evil that may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts. This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is like the munificence of a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with his starving tribesmen, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait his return from the chase with food; for life in plutocratic countries is still a chase, and the game is wary and sparse, as the terrible average of failures witnesses.

Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all without sensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logical regret; but as I said, life with them is in nowise logical. They even applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount given, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The widow’s mite has little credit with them, but the rich man’s million has an acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift is made. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do by giving help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the people who are underpaid for their work, or cannot get work; and then his deed is famed throughout the continent as a thing really beyond praise. Yet any one who thinks about it must know that he never earned the millions he kept, or the million he gave, but made them from the labor of others somehow; that with all the wealth left him, he cannot miss the fortune he lavishes any more than if the check which conveyed it were a withered leaf, and not in anywise so much as an ordinary workingman might feel the bestowal of a postage stamp.

But in this study of the plutocratic mind, always so fascinating to me, I am getting altogether away from what I meant to tell you. I meant to tell you not how Americans live in the spirit, however illogically, however blindly and blunderingly, but how they live in the body, and more especially how they house themselves in this city of New York. A great many of them do not house themselves at all, but that is a class which we cannot now consider, and I will speak only of those who have some sort of roof over their heads.

Formerly the New Yorker lived in one of three different ways: in private houses, or boarding-houses, or hotels; there were few restaurants or public tables outside of the hotels, and those who had lodgings, and took their meals at eating-houses were but a small proportion of the whole number. The old classification still holds in a measure, but within the last thirty years, or ever since the Civil War, when the enormous commercial expansion of the country began, several different ways of living have been opened. The first and most noticeable of these is housekeeping in flats, or apartments of three or four rooms or more, on the same floor, as in all the countries of Europe except England; though the flat is now making itself known in London, too. Before the war, the New Yorker who kept house did so in a separate house, three or four stories in height, with a street door of its own. Its pattern within was fixed by long usage, and seldom varied; without, it was of brown-stone before, and brick behind, with an open space there for drying clothes, which was sometimes gardened or planted with trees and vines. The rear of the city blocks which these houses formed was more attractive than the front, as you may still see in the vast succession of monotonous cross-streets not yet invaded by poverty or business; and often the perspective of these areas is picturesque and pleasing. But with the sudden growth of the population when peace came, and through the acquaintance the hordes of American tourists had made with European fashions of living, it became easy, or at least simple, to divide the floors of many of these private dwellings into apartments, each with its own kitchen and all the apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then had the street entrance and the stairways in common, and they had in common the cellar and the furnace for heating; they had in common the disadvantage of being badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark, cramped and uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses, and they were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers of them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had been changed into them.

But the apartment as the New Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the same time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New York work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they still live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were called tenement houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is commonly packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where they eat and sleep, without the amenities and often without the decencies of life, and of course without light and air. The buildings in case of fire are death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders giving that festive air to their façades which I have already noted. The bare and dirty entries and stair-cases are really ramifications of the filthy streets without, and each tenement opens upon a landing as if it opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents extorted from the inmates is sometimes a hundred per cent., and is nearly always cruelly out of proportion to the value of the houses, not to speak of the wretched shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid the family in arrears is set with all its poor household gear upon the sidewalk, in a pitiless indifference to the season and the weather, which you could not realize without seeing it, and which is incredible even of plutocratic nature. Of course, landlordism, which you have read so much of, is at its worst in the case of the tenement houses. But you must understand that comparatively few people in New York own the roofs that shelter them. By far the greater number live, however they live, in houses owned by others, by a class who prosper and grow rich, or richer, simply by owning the roofs over other men’s heads. The landlords have, of course, no human relation with their tenants, and really no business relations, for all the affairs between them are transacted by agents. Some have the repute of being better than others; but they all live, or expect to live, without work, on their rents. They are very much respected for it; the rents are considered a just return from the money invested. You must try to conceive of this as an actual fact, and not merely as a statistical statement. I know it will not be easy for you; it is not easy for me, though I have it constantly before my face.

The tenement house, such as it is, is the original of the apartment house, which perpetuates some of its most characteristic features on a scale and in material undreamt of in the simple philosophy of the inventor of the tenement house. The worst of these features is the want of light and air, but as much more space, and as many more rooms are conceded as the tenant will pay for. The apartment house, however, soars to heights that the tenement house never half reached, and is sometimes ten stories high. It is built fire-proof, very often, and it is generally equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makes one level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which have departed less from the tenement house original, have no elevators, but the street door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by the tenant’s latchkey, or by the janitor having charge of the whole building. In the finer houses, there is a page whose sole duty it is to open and shut this door, and who is usually brass buttoned to one blinding effect of livery with the elevator boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found, the elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where he is not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, for each apartment, and you ring up the occupant, and talk to him as many stories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulge their pride will not live in this sort of apartment house, and the rents in them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort are vulgarly fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaic pavement, marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinet woodwork. But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in the things that are common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeeping are of all degrees of perfection, and except for the want of light and air, life in them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heated throughout with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimes lighted with both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will, though of course at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair of architecture, for no style has yet been invented which enables the artist to characterize them with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulks they deform the whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out of scale, and making it impossible for future edifices to assimilate themselves to the intruder.

There is no end to these apartment houses for multitude, and there is no street or avenue free from them. Of course the better sort are to be found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded. In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannot see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed in them. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and I believe the physicians really attribute something of the growing prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves from the vivid rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarring of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening in one of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks last spring (you can get them out of the season for any length of time), and as the weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we had the full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had become accustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give you any notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat as if I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst every sentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speech which we use so much at home, I never should have known what my friend was saying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made the mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the plutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it, bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.

Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are inhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot season when the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people who must dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure to get out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I could not bear for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in sickness it must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with a dying child in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her husband to catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a Harlem train of five or six cars goes roaring by the open window! What horror, what profanation!

The noise is bad everywhere in New York, but in some of the finer apartment houses on the better streets, you are as well out of it as you can be anywhere in the city. I have been a guest in these at different times, and in one of them I am such a frequent guest that I may be said to know its life intimately. In fact, my hostess (women transact society so exclusively in America that  you seldom think of your host) in the apartment I mean to speak of, invited me to explore it one night when I dined with her, so that I might, as she said, tell my friends when I got back to Altruria how people lived in America; and I cannot feel that I am violating her hospitality in telling you before I get back. She is that Mrs. Makely, whom I met last summer in the mountains, and whom you thought so strange a type, but who is not altogether uncommon here. I confess that with all her faults, I like her, and I like to go to her house. She is, in fact, a very good woman, perfectly selfish by tradition as the American women must be, and wildly generous by nature, as they nearly always are; and infinitely superior to her husband in cultivation, as is commonly the case here. As he knows nothing but business, he thinks it the only thing worth knowing, and he looks down on the tastes and interests of her more intellectual life, with amiable contempt, as something almost comic. She respects business, too, and so she does not despise his ignorance as you would suppose; it is at least the ignorance of a business man, who must have something in him beyond her ken, or else he would not be able to make money as he does.

With your greater sense of humor, I think you would be amused if you could see his smile of placid self-satisfaction as he listens to our discussion of questions and problems which no more enter his daily life than they enter the daily life of an Eskimo; but I do not find it altogether amusing myself, and I could not well forgive it, if I did not know that he was at heart so simple and good, in spite of his commerciality. But he is sweet and kind, as the American men so often are, and he thinks his wife is the delightfullest creature in the world, as the American husband nearly always does. As a matter of form, he keeps me a little while with him after dinner, when she has left the table, and smokes his cigar, after wondering why we do not smoke in Altruria; but I can see that he is impatient to get to her in their drawing-room, where we find her reading a book in the crimson light of the canopied lamp, and where he presently falls silent, perfectly happy to be near her. The drawing-room is of a good size itself, and it has a room opening out of it, called the library, with a case of books in it, and Mrs. Makely’s pianoforte. The place is rather too richly and densely rugged, and there is rather more curtaining and shading of the windows than we should like; but Mrs. Makely is too well up to date, as she would say, to have much of the bric-a-brac about which she tells me used to clutter people’s houses here. There are some pretty good pictures on the walls, and a few vases and bronzes, and she says she has produced a greater effect of space by quelling the furniture; she means, having few pieces and having them as small as possible. There is a little stand with her afternoon tea-set in one corner, and there is a pretty writing-desk in the library; I remember a sofa, and some easy chairs, but not too many of them. She has a table near one of the windows, with books and papers on it. She tells me that she sees herself that the place is kept just as she wishes it, for she has rather a passion for neatness, and you never can thrust servants not to stand the books on their heads, or study a vulgar symmetry in the arrangements. She never allows them in there, she says, except when they are at work under her eye; and she never allows anybody* there except her guests, and her husband after he has smoked. Of course her dog must be there; and one evening after her husband fell asleep in the armchair near her, the dog fell asleep on the fleece at her feet, and we heard them softly breathing in unison.

She made a pretty little mocking mouth when the sound first became audible, and said that she ought really to have sent Mr. Makely out with the dog, for the dog ought to have the air every day, and she had been kept indoors; but sometimes Mr. Makely came home from business so tired that she hated to send him out, even for the dog’s sake, though he was so apt to become dyspeptic. “They won’t let you have dogs in some of the apartment houses, but I tore up the first lease that had that clause in it, and I told Mr. Makely that I would rather live in a house all my days, than any flat where my dog wasn’t as welcome as I was. Of course, they’re rather troublesome.”

The Makelys had no children, but it is seldom that the occupants of apartment houses of a good class have children, though there is no clause in the lease against them. I verified this fact from Mrs. Makely herself, by actual inquiry, for in all the times that I had gone up and down in the elevator to her apartment, I had never seen any children. She seemed at first to think I was joking, and not to like it, but when she found that I was in earnest, she said that she did not suppose all the families living under that roof had more than four or five children among them. She said that it would be inconvenient; and I could not allege the tenement houses, where children seemed to swarm, for it is but too probable that they do not regard convenience in such places, and that neither parents nor children are more comfortable for their presence.

Comfort is the American ideal, in a certain way, and comfort is certainly what is studied in such an apartment as the Makelys inhabit. We got to talking about it, and the ease of life in such conditions, and it was then she made me that offer to show me her flat, and let me report to the Altrurians concerning it. She is all impulse, and she asked, how would I like to see it now? and when I said I should be delighted, she spoke to her husband, and told him that she was going to show me through the flat. He roused himself promptly, and went before us, at her bidding, to turn up the electrics in the passages and rooms, and then she led the way out through the dining-room.

“This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth room of the eight,” she said, and as she spoke she pushed open the door of a small room, blazing with light, and dense with the fumes of the dinner and the dishwashing which was now going on in a closet opening out of the kitchen.

She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an alcove, which she said went with the flat, and “Lena,” she said to the cook, “this is the Altrurian gentleman I was telling you about, and I want him to see your kitchen. Can I take him into your room?”

The cook said, “Oh, yes, ma’am,” and she gave me a good stare, while Mrs. Makely went to the kitchen window, and made me observe that it let in the outside air, though the court that it opened into was so dark that one had to keep the electrics going in the kitchen night and day. “Of course, it’s an expense,” she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She added in a low, rapid tone, “You must excuse my introducing the cook. She has read all about you in the papers — you didn’t know, I suppose, that there were reporters, that day of your delightful talk in the mountains, but I had them — and she was wild, when she heard you were coming, and made me promise to let her have a sight of you somehow. She says she wants to go and live in Altruria, and if you would like to take home a cook, or a servant of any kind, you wouldn’t have any trouble. Now here,” she ran on, without a moment’s pause, while she flung open another door, “is what you won’t find in every apartment house, even very good ones, and that’s a back-elevator. Generally, there are only stairs, and they make the poor things climb the whole way up from the basement, when they come in, and all your marketing has to be brought up that way, too; sometimes they send it up on a kind of dumb-waiter, in the cheap places, and you give your orders to the marketmen down below through a speaking-tube. But here we have none of that bother, and this elevator is for the kitchen and the housekeeping part of the flat. The grocer’s and the butcher’s man, and anybody who has packages for you, or trunks, or that sort of thing, use it, and, of course, it’s for the servants, and they appreciate not having to walk up, as much as anybody.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, and she shut the elevator door, and opened another a little beyond it.

“This is our guest-chamber,” she continued, as she ushered me into a very pretty room, charmingly furnished. “It isn’t very light by day, for it opens on a court, like the kitchen and the servants’ room here,” and with that she whipped out of the guest-chamber and into another doorway, across the corridor. This room was very much narrower, but there -were two small beds in it, very neat and clean, with some furnishings that were in keeping, and a good carpet under foot. Mrs. Makely was clearly proud of it, and expected me to applaud it; but I waited for her to speak, which upon the whole she probably liked as well.

“I only keep two servants, because in a flat there isn’t really room for more, and I put out the wash and get in cleaning-women when it’s needed. I like to use my servants well, because it pays, and I bate to see anybody imposed upon. Some people put in a double-decker, as they call it, a bedstead with two tiers, like the berths on a ship; but I think that’s a shame, and I give them two regular beds, even if it does crowd them a little more, and the beds have to be rather narrow. This room has outside air, from the court, and though it’s always dark, it’s very pleasant, as you see.” I did not say that I did not see, and this sufficed for Mrs. Makely.

“Now,” she said, “I’ll show you our rooms,” and she flew down the corridor toward two doors that stood open side by side, and flashed into them before me. Her husband was already in the first she entered, smiling in supreme content with his wife, his belongings and himself.

“This is a southern exposure, and it has a perfect gush of sun from morning till night. Some of the flats have the kitchen at the end, and that’s stupid; you can have a kitchen in any sort of hole, for you can keep on the electrics, and with them the air is perfectly good. As soon as I saw these chambers, and found out that they would let you keep a dog, I told Mr. Makely to sign the lease instantly, and I would see to the rest.”

She looked at me, and I praised the room and its dainty tastefulness to her heart’s content, so that she said: “Well, it’s some satisfaction to show you anything, Mr. Homos, you are so appreciative. I’m sure you’ll give a good account of us to the Altrurians. Well, now we’ll go back to the pa — drawing-room. This is the end of the story.”

“Well,” said her husband, with a wink at me, “I thought it was to be continued in our next,” and he nodded toward the door that opened from his wife’s bower into the room adjoining.

“Why, you poor old fellow!” she shouted. “I forgot all about your room,” and she dashed into it before us and began to show it off. It was equipped with every bachelor luxury, and with every appliance for health and comfort. “And here,” she said, “he can smoke, or anything, as long as he keeps the door shut.. — . — . Oh, good gracious! I forgot the bath-room,” and they both united in showing me this, with its tiled floor and walls and its porcelain tub; and then Mrs. Makely flew up the corridor before us. “Put out the electrics, Dick!” she called back over her shoulder.

When we were again seated in the drawing-room, which she had been so near calling a parlor, she continued to bubble over with delight in herself and her apartment. “Now, isn’t it about perfect?” she urged, and I had to own that it was indeed very convenient and very charming; and in the rapture of the moment, she invited me to criticise it.

“I see very little to criticise,” I said, “from your point of view; but I hope you won’t think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?”

She laughed. “Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your questions in the mountains.”

“She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones,” said her husband, helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me.

“It is about your servants,” I began.

“Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on!”

“You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or their bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?”

The lady laughed heartily. “The waitress is in the front of the house several hours every morning at her work, and they both have an afternoon off once a week. Some people only let them go once a fortnight; but I think they are human beings as well as we are, and I let them go every week.”

“But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in electric light perpetually?”

“Electric light is very healthy, and it doesn’t heat the air!” the lady triumphed. “I can assure you that she thinks she’s very well off; and so she is.” I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she asked me, rather stiffly: “Is there any other inquiry you would like to make?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I do not think you would like it.”

“Now, I assure you, Mr. Homos, you were never more mistaken in your life. I perfectly delight in your naïveté. I know that the Altrurians don’t think as we do about some things, and I don’t expect it. What is it you would like to ask?”

“Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different elevator from yourselves?”

A. HOMOS.

“Why, good gracious!” cried the lady. “Aren’t they different from us in every way? To be sure they dress up in their ridiculous best when they go out, but you couldn’t expect us to let them use the front elevator? I don’t want to go up and down with my own cook, and I certainly don’t with my neighbor’s cook!”

“Yes, I suppose you would feel that an infringement of your social dignity. But if you found yourself beside a cook in a horse-car or other public conveyance, you would not feel personally affronted?”

“No, that is a very different thing. That is something we cannot control. But, thank goodness, we can control our elevator, and if I were in a house where I had to ride up and down with the servants, I would no more stay in it than I would in one where I couldn’t keep a dog. I should consider it a perfect outrage. I cannot understand you, Mr. Homos! You are a gentleman, and you must have the traditions of a gentleman, and yet you ask me such a thing as that!”

I saw a cast in her husband’s eye which I took for a hint not to press the matter, and so I thought I had better say, “It is only that in Altruria we hold serving in peculiar honor.”

“Well,” said the lady scornfully, “if you went and got your servants from an intelligence office, and had to look up their references, you wouldn’t hold them in very much honor. I tell you they look out for their own interests as sharply as we do for ours, and it’s nothing between us but a question of—”

“Business,” suggested her husband. “Yes,” she assented, as if this clinched the matter.

“That’s what I’m always telling you, Dolly, and yet you will try to make them your friends, as soon as you get them into your house. You want them to love you, and you know that sentiment hasn’t got anything to do with it.”

“Well, I can’t help it, Dick. I can’t live with a person without trying to like them, — and wanting them to like me. And then, — when the ungrateful things are saucy, or leave me in the lurch as they do half the time, it almost breaks my heart. But I’m thankful to say that in these hard times they won’t be apt to leave a good place without a good reason.”

“Are there many seeking employment?” I asked this because I thought that it was safe ground.

“Well, they just stand around in the offices as thick!” said the lady. “And the Americans are trying to get places as well as the foreigners. But I won’t have Americans. They are too uppish, and they are never half as well trained as the Swedes or the Irish. They still expect to be treated as one of the family. I suppose,” she continued, with a lingering ire in her voice, “that in Altruria, you do treat them as one of the family?”

“We have no servants, in the American sense,” I answered as inoffensively as I could.

Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked her indignation. “And I should like to know how much worse it is to have a back elevator for the servants than it is to have the basement door for the servants, as you always do when you live in a separate house?”

“I should think it was no worse,” I admitted, and I thought this a good chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. “I wish, Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in separate houses in New York.”

She was instantly pacified. “Why, I should be delighted. I only wish my friend Mrs. Bellington Strange was back from Europe, and I could show you a model house. I mean to take you there, as soon as she gets home. She’s a kind of Altrurian herself, you know. She was my dearest friend at school, and it almost broke my heart when she married Mr. Strange, so much older, and her inferior every way. But she’s got his money now, and O, the good she does do with it! I know you’ll like each other, Mr. Homos. I do wish Eva was at home!”

I said that I should be very glad to meet an American Altrurian, but that now I wished she would tell me about the normal New York house, and what was its animating principle, beginning with the basement door.

She laughed and said, “Why it’s just like any other house!”

VII.

New York, November 25, 1893.

I CAN never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of American life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is; for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less dreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities of goodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator forbid the plutocratic man to be what the plutocratic scheme of life implies. He is often merciful, kindly and generous, as I have told you already, in spite of conditions absolutely egoistical. You would think that the Americans would be abashed in view of the fact that their morality is often in contravention of their economic principles, but apparently they are not so, and I believe that for the most part they are not aware of the fact. Nevertheless, the fact is there, and you must keep it in mind, if you would conceive of them rightly. You can in no other way account for the contradictions which you will find in my experiences among them; and these are often so bewildering, that I have to take myself in hand, from time to time, and ask myself what mad world have I fallen into, and whether, after all, it is not a ridiculous nightmare. I am not sure, that when I return, and we talk these things over together, I shall be able to overcome your doubts of my honesty, and I think that when I no longer have them before my eyes, I shall begin to doubt my own memory. But for the present, I can only set down what I at least seem to see, and trust you to accept it, if you cannot understand it.

Perhaps I can aid you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans should be what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief that all men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, since they still cling to the economical ideals of Europe, and hold that men are born socially unequal, and deny them the liberty and happiness which can come from equality alone. It is in their public life and civic life that Altruria prevails; it is in their social and domestic life that Europe prevails; and here, I think, is the severest penalty they must pay for excluding women from political affairs; for women are at once the best and the worst Americans: the best because their hearts are the purest, the worst because their heads are the idlest. “Another contradiction!” you will say, and I cannot deny it; for with all their cultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, but only intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, they reflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements which have made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them in such vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to the sphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has left them, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialities which engross the European women, and which have formed the life of the sex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and social freedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity and import. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more perspective than children, and their reading and their talking about their reading, seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what the American woman makes it, and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to be so or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that she in nowise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I had great difficulty in getting Mrs.

Makely to tell me, for, as she said quite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if I really wanted her to begin at the beginning, and when I said that I did, she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said: “I suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a block?”

“Yes, I think that is what I mean,” I said.

“Well,” she began, “those high steps that they all have, unless they’re English basement-houses, really gives them another story, for people used to dine in the front room of their basements. You’ve noticed the little front yard, about as big as a handkerchief, generally, and the steps leading down to the iron gate, which is kept locked, and the basement door inside the gate? Well, that’s what you might call the back-elevator of a house,’ for it serves the same purpose: the supplies are brought in there, and marketmen go in and out, and the ashes, and the swill, and the servants — that you object to so much. We have no alleys in New York, the blocks are so narrow, north and south; and, of course, we have no back doors; so we have to put the garbage out on the sidewalk; and it’s nasty enough, goodness knows. Underneath the sidewalk, there are bins where people keep their coal and kindling. You’ve noticed the gratings in the pavements?”

I said yes, and I was ashamed to own that at first I had thought them some sort of registers for tempering the cold in winter; this would have appeared ridiculous in the last degree to my hostess, for the Americans have as yet no conception of publicly modifying the climate, as we do.

“Back of what used to be the dining room, and what is now used for a laundry, generally, is the kitchen, with closets between, of course, and then the back yard, which some people make very pleasant with shrubs and vines; the kitchen is usually dark and close, and the girls can get a breath of fresh air in the yard; I like to see them; but generally it’s taken up with clothes-lines, for people in houses nearly all have their washing done at home. Over the kitchen is the dining-room, which takes up the whole of the first floor, with the pantry, and it almost always has a bay-window out of it; of course, that overhangs the kitchen, and darkens it a little more, but it makes the dining-room so pleasant. I tell my husband that I would be almost willing to live in a house again, just on account of the dining-room bay-window. I had it full of flowers in pots, for the southern sun came in; and then the yard was so nice for the dog; you didn’t have to take him out for exercise, yourself; he chased the cats there and got plenty of it. I must say that the cats on the back fences, were a drawback at night; to be sure, we have them here, too; it’s seven stories down, but you do hear them, along in the spring. The parlor, or drawing-room, is usually rather long, and runs from the dining-room to the front of the house, though where the house is very deep, they have a sort of middle-room, or back-parlor. Dick, get some paper and draw it! Wouldn’t you like to see a plan of the floor?”

I said that I would, and she bade her husband make it like their old house in West Thirty-third. We all looked at it together.

“This is the front door,” Mrs. Makely explained, “where people come in, and then begins the misery of a house: stairs! They mostly go up straight, but sometimes they have them curve a little, and in the new houses the architects have all sorts of little dodges for squaring them and putting landings. Then on the second floor — draw it, Dick! — you have two nice large chambers, with plenty of light and air, before and behind. I do miss the light and air in a flat, there’s no denying it.”

“You’ll go back to a house yet, Dolly,” said her husband.

“Never!” she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the best joke in the world. “Never, as long as houses have stairs!”

“Put you in an elevator,” he suggested.

“Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use it, too,” and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: “I suppose that would please you, Mr. Homos. Well, there’s a nice side-room over the front door here, and a bath-room at the rear. Then you have more stairs, and large chambers, and two side-rooms. That makes plenty of chambers for a small family. I used to give two of the third-story rooms to my two girls. I ought really to have made them sleep in one; it seemed such a shame to let the cook have a whole large room to herself; but I had nothing else to do with it, and she did take such comfort in it, poor old thing. You see, the rooms came wrong in our house, for it fronted north, and I had to give the girls sunny rooms, or else give them front rooms, so that it was as broad as it was long. I declare, I was perplexed about it the whole time we lived there, it seemed so perfectly anomalous.”

“And what is an English basement-house like?” I ventured to ask, in interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.

“Oh, never live in an English basement-house, if you value your spine!” cried the lady. “An English basement-house is nothing but stairs. In the first place, it’s only one room wide, and it’s a story higher than a high-stoop house. It’s one room forward and one back, the whole way up; and in an English basement it’s always up, and never down. If I had my way, there wouldn’t one stone be left upon another in the English basements in New York.”

I have suffered Mrs. Makely to be nearly as explicit to you as she was to me; for the kind of house she described is of the form ordinarily prevailing in all American cities, and you can form some idea from it how city people live here. I ought perhaps to tell you that such a house is fitted with every housekeeping convenience, and that there is hot and cold water throughout, and gas everywhere. It has fireplaces in all the rooms where fires are often kept burning for pleasure; but it is really heated from a furnace in the basement, through large pipes carried to the different stories, and opening into them by some such registers as we use. The separate houses sometimes have steam-lieating, but not often. They each have their drainage into the sewer of the street, and this is trapped and trapped again, as in the houses of our old plutocratic cities, to keep the poison of the sewer from getting into the houses.

You will be curious to know something concerning the cost of living in such a house, and you may be sure that I did not fail to question Mrs. Makely on this point. She was at once very volubly communicative; she told me all she knew, and, as her husband said, “a great deal more.”

“Why, of course,” she began, “you can spend all you have, in New York, if you like, and people do spend fortunes every year. But I suppose you mean the average cost of living in a brownstone house, in a good block, that rents for $1800 or $2000 a year, with a family of three or four children, and two servants. Well, what should you say, Dick?”

“Ten or twelve thousand a year,” answered her husband.

“Yes, fully that,” she answered, with an effect of disappointment in his figures. “We had just ourselves, and we never spent less than seven, and we didn’t dress, and we didn’t entertain, either, to speak of. But you have to live on a certain scale, and generally you live up to your income.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Makely.

“I don’t know what makes it cost so. Provisions are cheap enough, and they say people live in as good style for a third less in London. There used to be a superstition that you could live for less in a flat, and they always talk to you about the cost of a furnace, and a man to tend it, and keep the snow shoveled off your sidewalk, but that is all stuff. Five hundred dollars will make up the whole difference, and more. You pay quite as much rent for a decent flat, and then you don’t get half the room. No, if it wasn’t for the stairs, I wouldn’t live in a flat for an instant. But that makes all the difference.”

“And the young people,” I urged; “those who are just starting in life, how do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2500 a year?”

“Poor things!” she returned. “I don’t know how they manage. They board, till they go distracted, or they dry up, and blow away; or else the wife has a little money, too; and they take a small flat, and ruin themselves. Of course, they want to live nicely, and like other people.”

“But if they didn’t?”

“Why, then they could live delightfully. My husband says he often wishes he was a master-mechanic in New York, with a thousand a year, and a flat for twelve dollars a month; he would have the best time in the world.”

Her husband nodded his acquiescence. “Fighting-cock wouldn’t be in it,” he said. “Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing.”

“But you can’t all do it,” I ventured, “and from what I see of simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don’t all try.”

“Why, no,” he said. “Some of us were talking about that the other night at the club, and one of the fellows was saying that he believed there was as much old-fashioned, quiet, almost countrified life in New York, among the great mass of the people, as you’d find in any city in the world. Said you met old codgers that took care of their own furnaces, just as you would in a town of five thousand inhabitants.”

“Yes, that’s all very well,” said his wife. “But they wouldn’t be nice people. Nice people want to live nicely. And so they live beyond their means, or else they scrimp and suffer. I don’t know which is worst.”

“But there is no obligation to do either?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, there is,” she returned. “If you’ve been born in a certain way, and brought up in a certain way, you can’t get out of it. You simply can’t. You have got to keep in it till you drop. Or a woman has.”

“That means the woman’s husband, too,” said Mr. Makely, with his wink for me. “Always die together.”

In fact, there is the same competition in the social world as in the business world; and it is the ambition of every American to live in some such house as the New York house, and as soon as a village begins to grow into a town, such houses are built. Still, the immensely greater number of the Americans necessarily live so simply and cheaply, that such a house would be almost as strange to them as to an Altrurian. But while we should regard its furnishings as vulgar and unwholesome, most Americans would admire and covet its rich rugs or carpets, its papered walls, and thickly curtained windows, and all its foolish ornamentation, and most American women would long to have a house like the ordinary high-stoop New York house, that they might break their backs over its stairs, and become invalids, and have servants about them to harass them and hate them.

Of course, I put it too strongly, for there is often, illogically, a great deal of love between the American women and their domestics, though why there should be any at all I cannot explain, except by reference to that mysterious personal equation which modifies all stations here. You will have made your reflection that the servants, as they are cruelly called, (I have heard them called so in their hearing, and wondered they did not fly tooth and nail at the throat that uttered the insult), form really no part of the house, but are aliens in the household and the family life. In spite of this fact, much kindness grows up between them and the family, and they do not always slight the work that I cannot understand their ever having any heart in. Often they do slight it, and they insist unsparingly upon the scanty privileges which their mistresses seem to think a monstrous invasion of their own rights. The habit of oppression grows upon the oppressor, and you would find tenderhearted women here, gentle friends, devoted wives, loving mothers, who would be willing that their domestics should remain indoors, week in and week out, and, where they are confined in the ridiculous American flat, never see the light of day. In fact, though the Americans do not know it, and would be shocked to be told it, their servants are really slaves, who are none the less slaves, because they cannot be beaten, or bought and sold except by the week or month, and for the price which they fix themselves, and themselves receive in the form of wages. They are social outlaws, so far as the society of the family they serve is concerned, and they are restricted in the visits they receive and pay among themselves. They are given the worst rooms in the house, and they are fed with the food that they have prepared, only when it comes cold from the family table; in the wealthier houses, where many of them are kept, they are supplied a coarser and cheaper victual bought and cooked for them apart from that provided for the family. They are subject at all hours, from six in the morning till any time of night, to the pleasure or caprice of the master or mistress. In fine, every circumstance of their life is an affront to their pride, to that just selfrespect which even Americans allow is the right of every human being. With the rich, they are said to be sometimes indolent, dishonest, mendacious, and all that Plato long ago explained that slaves must be; but in the middle-class families they are mostly faithful, diligent, and reliable in a degree that would put to shame most business men who hold positions of trust in the plutocracy, and would leave many ladies whom they relieve of work without ground for comparison.

After Mrs. Makely had told me about the New York house, we began to talk of the domestic service, and I ventured to hint some of the things that I have so plainly said to you. She frankly consented to my whole view of the matter, for if she wishes to make an effect or gain a point, she has a magnanimity that stops at nothing short of self-devotion. “I know it,” she said. “You are perfectly right; but here we are, and what are we to do? What do you do in Altruria, I should like to know?”

I said that in Altruria we all worked, and that personal service was as honored among us as medical attendance in America; I did not know what other comparison to make; but that any one in health would think it as unwholesome and as immoral to let another serve him as to let a doctor physic him. At this Mrs. Makely and her husband laughed so that I found myself unable to go on for some moments, till Mrs. Makely, with a final shriek, shouted to him, “Dick, do stop, or I shall die! Excuse me, Mr. Homos, but you are so deliciously funny, and I know you’re just joking. You won’t mind my laughing. Do go on!”

I tried to give her some notion as to how we manage, in our common life, which we have simplified so much beyond anything that this barbarous people dream of; and she grew a little soberer as I went on, and seemed at least to believe that, as her husband said, I was not stuffing them; but she ended, as they always do here, by saying that it might be all very well in Altruria, but it would never do in America, and that it was contrary to human nature to have so many things done in common. “Now, I’ll tell you,” she said. “After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third street, we stored our furniture—”

“Excuse me!” I said. “How, stored?”

“Oh, I dare say you never store your furniture in Altruria. But here we have hundreds of storehouses of all sorts and sizes, packed with furniture that people put into them when they go to Europe, or get sick to death of servants and the whole bother of housekeeping; and that’s what we did; and, then, as my husband says, we browsed about for a year or two. First, we tried hotelling it, and we took a hotel apartment furnished, and dined at the hotel table, until I certainly thought I should go off, I got so tired of it. Then, we hired a suite in one of the family hotels that there are so many of, and got out enough of our things to furnish it, and had our meals in our rooms; they let you do that for the same price, often they are glad to have you, for the dining-room is so packed. But everything got to tasting just the same as everything else, and my husband had the dyspepsia so bad he couldn’t half attend to business, and I suffered from indigestion myself, cooped up in a few small rooms, that way; and the dog almost died; and finally, we gave that up, and took an apartment, and got out our things — the storage cost as much as the rent of a small house — and put them into it, and had a caterer send in the meals, as they do in Europe. But it isn’t the same here as it is in Europe, and we got so sick of it in a month that I thought I should scream when I saw the same old dishes coming on the table, day after day.

We had to keep one servant — excuse me, Mr. Homos; domestic — anyway, to look after the table and the parlor and chamber work, and my husband said we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and so we got in a cook; and bad as it is, it’s twenty million times better than anything else you can do. Servants are a plague, but you have got to have them, and so I have resigned myself to the will of Providence. If they don’t like it, neither do I, and so I fancy it’s about as broad as it’s long.” I have found this is a favorite phrase of Mrs. Makely’s, and that it seems to give her a great deal of comfort.

“And you don’t feel that there’s any harm in it?” I ventured to ask.

“Harm in it?” she repeated. “Why, aren’t the poor things glad to get the work? What would they do without it?”

“From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would starve,” I said.

“Yes, they can’t all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to do something, or starve, as you say,” she said; and she seemed to think what I had said was a concession to her position.

“But if it were your own case?” I suggested. “If you had no alternatives but starvation and domestic service, you would think there was harm in it, even although you were glad to take a servant’s place?”

I saw her flush, and she answered haughtily, “You must excuse me if I refuse to imagine myself taking a servant’s place, even for the sake of argument.”

“And you are quite right,” I said. “Your American instinct is too strong to brook even in imagination the indignities which seem daily, hourly and momently inflicted upon servants in your system.” To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. “Yes,” she said, and she smiled radiantly, “and now you understand how it is that American girls won’t go out to service, though the pay is so much better and they are so much better housed and fed; and everything. Besides,” she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband, though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of the civilization, “they’re not half so good as the foreign servants, even when you can get them. They’ve been brought up in homes of their own, and they’re uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate boarding-house cooking, and they’re always hoping to get married, so that, really, you have no peace of your life with them.”

“And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?” I asked.

“What relation?”

“That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.”

“Why, good gracious!” she burst out. “Didn’t Christ himself say that the laborer was worthy of his hire? And how would you get your work done, if you didn’t pay for it?”

“It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from affection.”

“From affection!” she returned, with the deepest derision. “Well, I rather think I shall have to do it myself if I want it done from affection! But I suppose you think I ought to do it myself, as the Altrurian ladies do? I can tell you that in America it would be impossible for a lady to do her own work, and there are no intelligence offices where you can find girls that want to work for love. It’s as broad as it’s long.”

“It’s simply business,” said her husband.

They were right, my dear Cyril, and I was wrong, strange as it must appear to you. The tie of service, which we think as sacred as the tie of blood, can be here only a business relation, and in these conditions service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself precisely in an American’s place, that degrades the poor creatures who serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such a taint of dishonor on their work, that one cannot even do it for oneself without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America, where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so, are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other things, related to the matters we had been discussing.

“The men,” said Mrs. Makely, “get out of the whole bother very nicely, as long as they are single, and even when they’re married, they are apt to run off to the club, when there’s a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen.”

“I don’t, Dolly,” suggested her husband.

“No, you don’t, Dick,” she returned, fondly. “But there are not many like you.”

He went on, with a wink at me: “I never live at the club, except in summer, when you go away to the mountains.”

“Well, you know I can’t very well take you with me,” she said.

“Oh, I couldn’t leave my business, anyway,” he said, and he laughed.

I had noticed the vast and splendid club-houses in the best places in the city, and I had often wondered about their life, which seemed to me a blind groping towards our own, though only upon terms that forbade it to those who most needed it. The clubs here are not like our groups, the free associations of sympathetic people, though one is a little more literary, or commercial, or scientific, or political than another; but the entrance to each is more or less jealously guarded; there is an initiation fee, and there are annual dues, which are usually heavy enough to exclude all but the professional and business classes, though there are, of course, successful artists and authors in them. During the past winter I visited some of the most characteristic, where I dined and supped with the members, or came alone when one of these put me down, for a fortnight or a month.

They are equipped with kitchens and cellars, and their wines and dishes are of the best. Each is, in fact, like a luxurious private house on a large scale; outwardly they are palaces, and inwardly they have every feature and function of a princely residence complete, even to a certain number of guest-chambers, where members may pass the night, or stay indefinitely, in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club, however, is known only to the cities and the larger towns, in this highly developed form; to the ordinary, simple American, of the country, or of the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.

“Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the clubs?” I asked.

“All that have a club, do,” he said. “Usually, there’s a very good table d’hôte dinner that you couldn’t begin to get for the same price anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can come pretty near forgetting that you’re homeless, or even that you’re married.”

He laughed, and his wife said: “You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me worrying about you all the time I’m away, and wondering what the cook gives you here. Yes,” she continued, addressing me, “that’s the worst thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say it’s one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don’t think of getting married. Of course,” she said with that wonderful, unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, “I don’t blame the clubs altogether. There’s no use denying that girls are expensively brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of them out of the kind of home she’s’ used to, and putting her into the kind of home he can give her. I suppose it’s as broad as it’s long. If the clubs have killed early marriages, the women have created the clubs.”

“Do women go much to them?” I asked, choosing this question as a safe one.

“Much!” she screamed. “They don’t go at all! They can’t! They won’t let us! To be sure, there are some that have rooms where ladies can go with their friends who are members, and have lunch or dinner; but as for seeing the inside of the club-house proper, where these great creatures” — she indicated her husband— “are sitting up, smoking and telling stories, it isn’t to be dreamed of.”

Her husband laughed. “You wouldn’t like the smoking, Dolly.”

“Nor the stories, either, some of them,” she retorted.

“Oh, the stories are always first rate,” he said, and he laughed more than before.

“And they never gossip, at the clubs, Mr. Homos, never!” she added.

“Well, hardly ever,” said her husband, with an intonation that I did not understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.

“All I know,” said Mrs. Makely, “is that I like to have my husband belong to his club. It’s a nice place for him in summer; and very often in winter, when I’m dull, or going out somewhere that he hates, he can go down to his club, and smoke a cigar, and come home just about the time I get in, and it’s much better than worrying through the evening with a book. He hates books, poor Dick!” She looked fondly at him, as if this were one of the greatest merits in the world. “But I must confess, I shouldn’t like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.”

“But how?” I asked.

“Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole time at them, when they’re not at business.”

There was a pause, and Mr. Makely put on an air of modest worth, which he carried off with his usual wink toward me. I said, finally, “And if the ladies are not admitted to the men’s clubs, why don’t they have clubs of their own?”

“Oh, they have, — several, I believe. But who wants to go and meet a lot of women? You meet enough of them in society, goodness knows. You hardly meet any one else, especially at afternoon teas. They bore you to death.”

Mrs. Makely’s nerves seemed to lie in the direction of a prolongation of this subject, and I asked my next question a little away from it. “I wish you would tell me, Mrs. Makely, something about your way of provisioning your household. You said that the grocer’s and butcher’s man came up to the kitchen with your supplies—”

“Yes, and the milkman and the iceman; the iceman always puts the ice into the refrigerator; it’s very convenient, and quite like your own house.”

“But you go out and select the things yourself, the day before, or in the morning?”

“Oh, not at all! The men come and the cook gives the order; she knows pretty well what we want on the different days, and I never meddle with it from one week’s end to the other, unless we have friends. The tradespeople send in their bills at the end of the month, and that’s all there is of it.” Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went on: “When we were younger, and just beginning housekeeping, I used to go out and order the things myself; I used even to go to the big markets, and half kill myself, trying to get things a little cheaper at one place than another, and waste more car-fare, and lay up more doctor’s bills than it would all come to, ten times over. I used to fret my life out, remembering the prices; but now, thank goodness, that’s all over. I don’t know any more what beef is a pound than my husband does; if a thing isn’t good, I send it straight back, and that puts them on their honor, you know, and they have to give me the best of everything. The bills average about the same, from month to month; a little more if we have company; but if they’re too outrageous, I make a fuss with the cook, and she scolds the men, and then it goes better for a while. Still, it’s a great bother.”

I confess that I did not see what the bother was, but I had not the courage to ask, for I had already conceived a wholesome dread of the mystery of an American lady’s nerves. So I merely suggested, “And that is the way that people usually manage?”

“Why,” she said, “I suppose that some old-fashioned people still do their marketing, and people that have to look to their outgoes, and know what every mouthful costs them. But their lives are not worth having. Eveleth Strange does it — or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare say she won’t when she gets back — just from a sense of duty, and because she says that a housekeeper ought to know about her expenses. But I ask her who will care whether she knows or not; and as for giving the money to the poor that she saves by spending economically, I tell her that the butchers and the grocers have to live, too, as well as the poor, and so it’s as broad as it’s long.”

I could not make out whether Mr. Makely approved of his wife’s philosophy or not; I do not believe he thought much about it. The money probably came easily with him, and he let it go easily, as an American likes to do. There is nothing penurious or sordid about this curious people, so fierce in the pursuit of riches. When these are once gained, they seem to have no value to the man who has won them, and he has generally no object in life but to see his womankind spend them.

This is the season of the famous Thanksgiving, which has now become the national holiday, but has no longer any savor in it of the grim Puritanism it sprang from. It is now appointed by the president and the governors of the several States, in proclamations enjoining a pious gratitude upon the people for their continued prosperity as a nation and a public acknowledgment of the divine blessings. The blessings are supposed to be of the material sort, grouped in the popular imagination as good times, and it is hard to see what they are in these days of adversity, when hordes of men and women of every occupation are feeling the pinch of poverty in their different degree. It is not merely those who have always the wolf at their doors, who are now suffering, but those whom the wolf never threatened before; those who amuse, as well as those who serve the rich, are alike anxious and fearful, where they are not already in actual want; thousands of poor players, as well as hundreds of thousands of poor laborers, are out of employment; and the winter threatens to be one of dire misery. Yet you would not imagine from the smiling face of things, as you would see it in the better parts of this great city, that there was a heavy heart or an empty stomach anywhere below it. In fact, people here are so used to seeing other people in want that it no longer affects them as reality, it is merely dramatic, or hardly so lifelike as that; it is merely histrionic. It is rendered still more spectacular to the imaginations of the fortunate by the melodrama of charity they are invited to take part in by endless appeals, and their fancy is flattered by the notion that they are curing the distress they are only slightly relieving by a gift from their superfluity. The charity, of course, is better than nothing, but it is a fleeting mockery of the trouble at the best. If it were proposed that the city should subsidize a theater at which the idle players could get employment in producing good plays at a moderate cost to the people, the notion would not be considered more ridiculous than that of founding municipal works for the different sorts of idle workers; and it would not be thought half so nefarious, for the proposition to give work by the collectivity is supposed to be in contravention of the sacred principle of monopolistic competition so dear to the American economist, and it would be denounced as an approximation to the surrender of the city to anarchism and destruction by dynamite.

But as I have so often said, the American life is in nowise logical, and you will not be surprised, though you may be shocked or amused to learn that the festival of Thanksgiving is now so generally devoted to witnessing a game of foot-ball between the Elevens of two great universities, that the services at the churches are very scantily attended. The Americans are practical, if they are not logical, and this preference of foot-ball to prayer and praise on Thanksgiving day has gone so far that now a principal church in the city holds its services on Thanksgiving eve, so that the worshippers may not be tempted to keep away from their favorite game.

There is always a heavy dinner at home after the game, to console the friends of those who have lost, and to heighten the joy of the winning side, among the comfortable people. The poor recognize the day largely as a sort of carnival. They go about in masquerade on the eastern avenues, and the children of the foreign races who populate that quarter, penetrate the better streets, blowing horns, and begging of the passers. They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival of catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times. Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a foot-ball game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent misapprehension of the holiday on the East side. I am not more censorious of it than I am of the displays of festival cheer at the provision stores, or green-groceries throughout the city at this time. They are almost as numerous on the avenues as the drinking saloons, and thanks to them, the wasteful housekeeping is at least convenient in a high degree. The waste is inevitable with the system of separate kitchens, and it is not in provisions alone, but in labor and in time, a hundred cooks doing the work of one; but the Americans have no conception of our cooperative housekeeping, and so the folly goes on. Meantime, the provision stores add much to their effect of crazy gayety on the avenues.

The variety and harmony of color is very great, and this morning I stood so long admiring the arrangement in one of them, that I am afraid I rendered myself a little suspicious to the policeman guarding the liquor store on the nearest corner; there seems always to be a policeman assigned to this duty. The display was on either side of the provisioner’s door, and began on one hand with a basal line of pumpkins well out on the sidewalk. Then it was built up with the soft white and cool green of cauliflowers, and open boxes of red and white grapes, to the window that flourished in banks of celery and rosy apples. On the other side, gray-green squashes formed the foundation, and the wall was sloped upward with the delicious salads you can find here, the dark red of beets, the yellow of carrots, and the blue of cabbages. The association of colors was very artistic and even the line of mutton carcases overhead, with each a brace of grouse, or half a dozen quail in its embrace, and flanked with long sides of beef at the four ends of the line, was picturesque, though the sight of the carnage at the provision stores here would always be dreadful to an Altrurian; in the great markets it is intolerable. This sort of business is mostly in the hands of the Germans, who have a good eye for such effects as may be studied in it; but the fruiterers are nearly all Italians, and their stalls are charming. I always like, too, the cheeriness of the chestnut and peanut ovens of the Italians; the pleasant smell and friendly smoke that rise from them suggest a simple and homelike life, which there are so many things in this great, weary, heedless city to make one forget.

A. HOMOS.

VIII.

New York, December 1, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

I did not suppose that I should be writing you so soon again, but I was out for my first dinner of the season, last night, and I must try to give you my impressions of it while they are still fresh. Only the day after I posted my last letter, I received the note which I enclose:

My dear Mr. Homos:

Will you give me the pleasure of your company, at dinner, on Thanksgiving Day, at eight o’clock, very informally. My friend, Mrs. Bellington Strange, has unexpectedly returned from Europe, within the week, and I am asking a few friends, whom I can trust to excuse this very short notice, to meet her.

With Mr. Makely’s best regards,

    Yours cordially,

                 Dorothea Makely.

The Sphinx,

     November the twenty-sixth,

            Eighteen hundred and Ninety-three.

I must explain to you that it has been a fad with the ladies here to spell out their dates, and though the fashion is waning, Mrs. Makely is a woman who would remain in such an absurdity among the very last. I will let you make your own conclusions concerning her, for though, as an Altrurian, I cannot respect her, I like her so much, and I have so often enjoyed her generous hospitality, that I cannot bring myself to criticise her except by the implication of the facts. She is anomalous, but to our way of thinking, all the Americans I have met are anomalous, and she has the merits that you would not logically attribute to her character. Of course, I cannot feel that her evident regard for me is the least of these, though I like to think that it is more founded in reason than the rest.

I have by this time become far too well versed in the polite insincerities of the plutocratic world to imagine, that because she asked me to come to her dinner, very informally, I was not to come in all the state I could put into my dress. You know what the evening dress of men is, here, from the costumes in our museum, and you can well believe that I never put on those ridiculous black trousers without a sense of their grotesqueness, that scrap of waistcoat reduced to a mere rim, so as to show the whole white breadth of the starched shirt bosom, and that coat chopped away till it seems nothing but tails and lapels. It is true that I might go out to dinner in our national costume; in fact, Mrs. Makely has often begged to me to wear it, for she says the Chinese wear theirs; but I have not cared to make the sensation which I must if I wore it; my outlandish views of life, and my frank study of theirs signalize me quite sufficiently among the Americans.

At the hour named, I appeared at Mrs. Makely’s drawing-room in all the formality that I knew her invitation, to come very informally, really meant. I found myself the first, as I nearly always do, but I had only time for a word or two with my hostess before the others began to come. She hastily explained that as soon as she knew Mrs. Strange was in New York, she had dispatched a note telling her that I was still here; and that as she could not get settled in time to dine at home, she must come and take Thanksgiving with her. “She will have to go out with Mr. Makely; but I am going to put you next to her at table, for I want you both to have a good time. But don’t you forget that you are going to take me out.” I said that I should certainly not forget it, and I showed her the envelope with my name on the outside, and hers on a card inside, which the serving man at the door had given me in the hall, as the first token, after her letter, that the dinner was to be in the last degree unceremonious. She laughed, and said: “I’ve had the luck to pick up two or three other agreeable people that I know will be glad to meet you. Usually, it’s such a scratch lot at Thanksgiving, for everybody dines at home that can, and you have to trust to the highways and the byways for your guests, if you give a dinner. But I did want to bring Mrs. Strange and you together, and so I chanced it. Of course, it’s a sent-in dinner, as you must have inferred from the man at the door; I’ve given my servants a holiday, and had Claret’s people do the whole thing. It’s as broad as it’s long, and as my husband says, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb; and it saves bother. Everybody will know it’s sent in, so that nobody will be deceived. There’ll be a turkey in it somewhere, and cranberry sauce; I’ve insisted on that: but it won’t be a regular American Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m rather sorry, on your account, for I wanted you to see one, and I meant to have had you here, just with ourselves; but Eveleth Strange’s coming back put a new face on things, and so I’ve gone in for this affair, which isn’t at all what you would like. That’s the reason I tell you at once, it’s sent in.”

I am so often at a loss for the connection in Mrs. Makely’s ideas that I am more patient with her incoherent jargon than you will be, I am afraid. It went on to much the effect that I have tried to report, until the moment she took the hand of the guest who came next. They arrived, until there were eight of us in all; Mrs. Strange coming last, with excuses for being late. I had somehow figured her as a person rather mystical and recluse in appearance, perhaps on account of her name, and I had imagined her tall and superb. But she was, really, rather small, though not below the woman’s average, and she had a face more round than otherwise, with a sort of businesslike earnestness, but a very charming smile, and presently, as I saw, an American sense of humor. She had brown hair and gray eyes, and teeth not too regular to be monotonous; her mouth was very sweet, whether she laughed, or sat gravely silent.

She at once affected me like a person who had been sobered beyond her nature by responsibilities, and had steadily strengthened under the experiences of life. She was dressed with a sort of personal taste, in a rich gown of black lace, which came up to her throat; and she did not subject me to that embarrassment I always feel in the presence of a lady who is much décolleté, when I sit next her, or face to face with her: I cannot always look at her without a sense of taking an immodest advantage. Sometimes I find a kind of pathos in this sacrifice to fashion, as if the poor lady were wearing that sort of gown because she thought she really ought, and then I keep my eyes firmly on hers, or avert them altogether; but there are other cases which have not this appealing quality. Yet in the very worst of the cases it would be a mistake to suppose that there was a display personally meant of the display personally made. Even then it would be found that the gown was worn so because the dressmaker had made it so, and, whether she had made it in this country or in Europe, that she had made it in compliance with a European custom. In fact, all the society customs of the Americans follow some European original, and usually some English original; and it is only fair to say that in this particular custom they do not go to the English extreme.

We did not go out to dinner at Mrs. Makely’s by the rules of English precedence, because there are nominally no ranks here, and we could not; but I am sure it will not be long before the Americans will begin playing at precedence just as they now play at the other forms of aristocratic society. For the present, however, there was nothing for us to do but to proceed, when dinner was served, in such order as offered itself, after Mr. Makely gave his arm to Mrs. Strange, though, of course, the white shoulders of the other ladies went gleaming out before the white shoulders of Mrs. Makely shone beside my black ones. I have now become so used to these observances that they no longer affect me as they once did, and as I suppose my account of them must affect you, painfully, comically. But I have always the sense of having a part in amateur theatricals, and I do not see how the Americans can fail to have the same sense, for there is nothing spontaneous in them, and nothing that has grown even dramatically out of their own life.

Often when I admire the perfection of the mise en scène, it is with a vague feeling that I am derelict in not offering it an explicit applause. In fact, this is permitted in some sort and measure, as now when we sat down at Mrs. Makely’s exquisite table, and the ladies frankly recognized her touch in it. One of them found a phrase for it at once, and pronounced it a symphony in chrysanthemums; for the color and the character of these flowers played through all the appointment of the table, and rose to a magnificent finale in the vast group in the middle of the board, infinite in their caprices of dye and design. Another lady said that, it was a dream, and then Mrs. Makely said: “No, a memory,” and confessed that she had studied the effect from her recollection of some tables at a chrysanthemum show held here last year, which seemed failures because they were so simply and crudely adapted in the china and napery to merely one kind and color of the flower.

“Then,” she added, “I wanted to do something very chrysanthemummy, because it seems to me the Thanksgiving flower, and belongs to Thanksgiving quite as much as holly belongs to Christmas.”

Everybody applauded her intention, and we hungrily fell to upon the excellent oysters, with her warning that we had better make the most of everything in its turn, for she had conformed her dinner to the brevity of the notice she had given her guests.

Just what the dinner was I will try to tell you, for I think that it will interest you to know what people here think a very simple dinner. That is, people of any degree of fashion; for the unfashionable Americans, who are innumerably in the majority, have no more than the Altrurians seen such a dinner as Mrs. Makely’s. This sort generally sit down to a single dish of meat, with two or three vegetables, and they drink tea or coffee, or water only, with their dinner. Even when they have company, as they say, the things are all put on the table at once; and the average of Americans who have seen a dinner served in courses, after the Russian manner, invariable in the fine world here, is not greater than those who have seen a serving-man in livery. Among these the host piles up his guest’s plate with meat and vegetables, and it is passed from hand to hand till it reaches him; his drink arrives from the hostess by the same means. One maid serves the table in a better class, and two maids in a class still better; it is only when you reach people of very decided form that you find a man in a black coat behind your chair; Mrs. Makely, mindful of the informality of her dinner in everything, had two men.

I should say the difference between the Altrurians and the unfashionable Americans, in view of such a dinner as she gave us, would be that, while it would seem to us abominable for its extravagance, and revolting in its appeals to appetite, it would seem to most of such Americans altogether admirable and enviable, and would appeal to their ambition to give such a dinner themselves as soon as ever they could.

Well, with our oysters, we had a delicate French wine, though I am told that formerly Spanish wines were served. A delicious soup followed the oysters, and then we had fish, with sliced cucumbers dressed with oil and vinegar, like a salad; and I suppose you will ask what we could possibly have eaten more. But this was only the beginning, and next there came a course of sweetbreads with green peas. With this the champagne began at once to flow, for Mrs. Makely was nothing if not original, and she had champagne very promptly. One of the gentlemen praised her for it, and said you could not have it too soon, and he had secretly hoped it would have begun with the oysters. Next, we had a remove, a tenderloin of beef, with mushrooms, fresh, and not of the canned sort which it is usually accompanied with. This fact won our hostess more compliments from the gentlemen, which could not have gratified her more if she had dressed and cooked the dish herself. She insisted upon our trying the stewed terrapin, for if it did come in a little by the neck and shoulders, it was still in place at a Thanksgiving dinner, because it was so American; and the stuffed peppers, which, if they were not American, were at least Mexican, and originated in the kitchen of a sister republic. There were one or two other side-dishes, and with all the burgundy began to be poured out.

Mr. Makely said that claret all came now from California, no matter what French château they named it after, but burgundy you could not err in. His guests were now drinking the different wines, and to much the same effect, I should think, as if they had mixed them all in one cup; though I ought to say that several of the ladies took no wine, and kept me in countenance after the first taste that I was obliged to take of each, in order to pacify my host.

You must know that all the time there were plates of radishes, olives, celery, and roasted almonds set about that every one ate of without much reference to the courses. The talking and the feasting were at their height, but there was a little flagging of the appetite, perhaps, when it received the stimulus of a water-ice flavored with rum. After eating it, I immediately experienced an extraordinary revival of my hunger (I am ashamed to confess that I was gorging myself like the rest), but I quailed inwardly when one of the men-servants set down before Mr. Makely, a roast turkey that looked as large as an ostrich. It was received with cries of joy, and one of the gentlemen said, “Ah, Mrs. Makely, I was waiting to see how you would interpolate the turkey, but you never fail. I knew you would get it in somewhere. But where,” he added in a burlesque whisper, behind his hand, “are the—”

“Canvasback duck?” she asked, and at that moment the servant set before the anxious inquirer a platter of these renowned birds, which you know something of already from the report our emissaries have given of their cult among the Americans.

Every one laughed, and after the gentleman had made a despairing flourish over them with a carving knife in emulation of Mr. Makely’s emblematic attempt upon the turkey, both were taken away, and carved at a sideboard. They were then served in slices, the turkey with cranberry sauce, and the ducks with currant jelly; and I noticed that no one took so much of the turkey that he could not suffer himself to be helped also to the duck. I must tell you that there was a salad with the duck, and after that there was an ice-cream, with fruit and all manner of candied fruits, and candies, different kinds of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs to drink after the coffee.

“Well, now,” Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, “I must let you imagine the pumpkin pie. I meant to have it, because it isn’t really Thanksgiving without it. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, see where it would come in.”

This made them all laugh, and they began to talk about the genuine American character of the holiday, and what a fine thing it was to have something truly national. They praised Mrs. Makely for thinking of so many American dishes, and the facetious gentleman said that she rendered no greater tribute than was due to the overruling Providence which had so abundantly bestowed them upon the Americans as a people. “You must have been glad, Mrs. Strange,” he said, to the lady at my side, “to get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else so potent to bring us home from Europe.”

“I’m afraid,” she answered, “that I don’t care so much for the American oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back.”

“In time for the turkey, perhaps?”

“No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native land,” said the lady.

“Ah, well, say the canvasback duck then. The canvasback duck is no alien. He is as thoroughly American as the turkey, or as any of us.”

“No, I should not have missed him, either,” persisted the lady.

“What could one have missed,” the gentleman said, with a bow to the hostess, “in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been nothing, I should not have missed it,” and when the laugh at his drolling had subsided, he asked Mrs. Strange: “Then, if it is not too indiscreet, might I inquire what in the world has lured you again to our shores, if it was not the oyster, nor the turkey, nor yet the canvasback.”

“The American dinner-party,” said the lady, with the same burlesque.

“Well,” he consented, “I think I understand you. It is different from the English dinner-party in being a festivity rather than a solemnity; though after all the American dinner is only a condition of the English dinner. Do you find us much changed, Mrs. Strange?”

“I think we are every year a little more European,” said the lady. “One notices it on getting home.”

“I supposed we were so European already,” returned the gentleman, “that a European landing among us would think he had got back to his starting point in a sort of vicious circle. I am myself so thoroughly Europeanized in all my feelings and instincts, that do you know, Mrs. Makely, if I may confess it without offence—”

“Oh, by all means!” cried the hostess.

“When that vast bird which we have been praising, that colossal roast turkey, appeared, I felt a shudder go through my delicate substance, such as a refined Englishman might have experienced at the sight, and I said to myself, quite as if I were not one of you, ‘Good heavens! now they will begin talking through their noses and eating with their knives. It’s what I might have expected!’”

It was impossible not to feel that this gentleman was talking at me; if the Americans have a foreign guest, they always talk at him more or less; and I was not surprised when he said,  ‘I think our friend, Mr. Homos, will conceive my fine revolt from the crude period of our existence which the roast turkey marks as distinctly as the graffiti of the cave-dweller proclaim his epoch.”

“No,” I protested, “I am afraid that I have not the documents for the interpretation of your emotion. I hope you will take pity On my ignorance, and tell me just what you mean.”

The others said they none of them knew either, and would like to know, and the gentleman began by saying that he had been going over the matter in his mind on his way to dinner, and he had really been trying to lead up to it ever since we sat down. “I’ve been struck, first of all, by the fact, in our evolution, that we haven’t socially evolved from ourselves; we’ve evolved from the Europeans, from the English. I don’t think you’ll find a single society rite with us now that had its origin in our peculiar national life, if we have a peculiar national life; I doubt it, sometimes. If you begin with the earliest thing in the day, if you begin with breakfast, as society gives breakfasts, you have an English breakfast, though American people and provisions.”

“I must say, I think they’re both much nicer,” said Mrs. Makely.

“Ah, there I am with you! We borrow the form, but we infuse the spirit. I am talking about the form, though. Then, if you come to the society lunch, which is almost indistinguishable from the society breakfast, you have the English lunch, which is really an undersized English dinner. The afternoon tea is English again, with its troops of eager females and stray, reluctant males; though I believe there are rather more men at the English teas, owing to the larger leisure class in England. The afternoon tea and the “at home” are as nearly alike as the breakfast and the lunch. Then, in the course of time, we arrive at the great society function, the dinner; and what is the dinner with us but the dinner of our mother-country?”

“It is livelier,” suggested Mrs. Makely, again.’

“Livelier, I grant you, but I am still speaking of the form, and not of the spirit. The evening reception, which is gradually fading away, as a separate rite, with its supper and its dance, we now have as the English have it, for the people who have not been asked to dinner. The ball, which brings us round to breakfast again, is again the ball of our Anglo-Saxon kin beyond the seas. In short, from the society point of view we are in everything their mere rinsings.”

“Nothing of the kind!” cried Mrs. Makely. “I won’t let you say such a thing! On Thanksgiving Day, too! Why, there is the Thanksgiving dinner itself! If that isn’t purely American, I should like to know what is.”

“It is purely American, but it is strictly domestic; it is not society. Nobody but some great soul like you, Mrs. Makely, would have the courage to ask any body to a Thanksgiving dinner, and even you ask only such easy-going house-friends as we are proud to be. You wouldn’t think of giving a dinner-party on Thanksgiving?”

“No, I certainly shouldn’t. I should think it was very presuming; and you are all as nice as you can be to have come today; I am not the only great soul at the table. But that is neither here nor there. Thanksgiving is a purely American thing, and it’s more popular than ever. A few years ago you never heard of it outside of New England.”

The gentleman laughed. “You are perfectly right, Mrs. Makely, as you always are. Thanksgiving is purely American. So is the corn-husking, so is the apple-bee, so is the sugar-party, so is the spelling-match, so is the church-sociable; but none of these have had their evolution in our society entertainments. The New Year’s call was also purely American, but that is now as extinct as the dodo, though I believe the other American festivities are still known in the rural districts.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “and I think it’s a great shame that we can’t have some of them in a refined form in society. I once went to a sugar-party up in New Hampshire, when I was a girl, and I never enjoyed myself so much in my life. I should like to make up a party to go to one somewhere in the Catskills, in March, Will you all go? It would be something to show Mr. Homos. I should like to show him something really American before he goes home. There’s nothing American left in society!”

“You forget the American woman,” suggested the gentleman. “She is always American, and she is always in society.”

“Yes,” returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, “you’re quite right in that. One always meets more women than men in society. But it’s because the men are so lazy, and so comfortable at their clubs, they won’t go. They enjoy themselves well enough in society after they get there, as I tell my husband, when he grumbles over having to dress.”

“Well,” said the gentleman, “a great many things, the day-time things, we really can’t come to, because we don’t belong to the aristocratic class, as you ladies do, and we are busy down town. But I don’t think we are reluctant about dinner; and the young fellows are nearly always willing to go to a ball, if the supper’s good, and it’s a house where they don’t feel obliged to dance. But what do you think, Mr. Homos?” he asked. “How does your observation coincide with my experience?”

I answered that I hardly felt myself qualified to speak, for though I had assisted at the different kinds of society rites he had mentioned, thanks to the generous hospitality of my friends in New York, I only knew the English functions from a very brief stay in England on my way here, and from what I had read of them in English fiction, and in the relations of our emissaries. He inquired into our emissary system, and the company appeared greatly interested in such account of it as I could briefly give.

“Well,” he said, “that would do while you kept to yourselves; but now that your country is opened to the plutocratic world, your public documents will be apt to come back to the countries your emissaries have visited, and make trouble. The first thing you know some of our bright reporters will get onto one of your emissaries, and interview him, and then we shall get what you think of us at first hands. By the way, have you seen any of those primitive social delights which Mrs. Makely regrets so much?”

“I?” our hostess protested. But, then, she perceived that he was joking, and she let me answer.

I said that I had seen them nearly all, during the past year, in New England and in the West, but they appeared to me inalienably of the simpler life of the country, and that I was not surprised they should not have found an evolution in the more artificial society of the cities.

“I see,” he returned, “that you reserve your opinion of our more artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it out of you yet, before you leave us.”

“Those horrid reporters!” one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.

The gentleman resumed:— “In the meantime, I don’t mind saying how it strikes me. I think you are quite right about the indigenous American things being adapted only to the simpler life of the country and the small towns. It is so everywhere. As soon as people become at all refined, they look down upon what is their own as something vulgar. But it is peculiarly so with us. We have nothing national that is not connected with the life of work, and when we begin to live the life of pleasure, we must borrow from the people abroad, who have always lived the life of pleasure.”

“Mr. Homos, you know,” Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the aptest moment, “thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn’t to have any servants.”

“Oh, no, dear lady,” I put in. “I don’t think that of you, as you are. None of you could see more plainly than I do, that in your conditions you must have servants, and that you cannot possibly work, unless poverty obliges you.”

The other ladies had turned upon me with surprise and horror at Mrs. Makely’s Words, but they now apparently relented, as if I had fully redeemed myself from the charge made against me. Mrs. Strange alone seemed  to have found nothing monstrous in my supposed position. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we could be freed from our servile bondage to servants.”

Several of the ladies admitted that it was the greatest slavery in the world, and that it would be comparative luxury to do one’s own work. But they all asked, in one form or another, what were they to do, and Mrs. Strange owned that she did not know. The facetious gentleman asked me how the ladies did in Altruria, and when I told them, as well as I could, they were, of course, very civil about it, but I could see that they all thought it impossible, or, if not impossible, then ridiculous. I did not feel bound to defend our customs, and I knew very well that each woman there was imagining herself in our conditions with the curse of her plutocratic tradition still upon her. They could not do otherwise, any of them, and they seemed to get tired of such effort as they did make.

Mrs. Makely rose, and the other ladies rose with her, for the Americans follow the English custom in letting the men remain at table after the women have left. But on this occasion I found it varied, by a pretty touch from the French custom, and the men, instead of merely standing up while the women filed out, gave each his arm, as far as the drawing-room, to the lady he had brought in to dinner. Then we went back, and what is the pleasantest part of the dinner to most men began for us.

I must say, to the credit of the Americans, that although the eating and drinking among them appear gross enough to an Altrurian, you are not often revolted by the coarse stories which the English tell as soon as the ladies have left them. If it is a men’s dinner, or more especially a men’s supper, these stories are pretty sure to follow the coffee; but when there have been women at the board, some sense of their presence seems to linger in the more delicate American nerves, and the indulgence is limited to two or three things off color, as the phrase is here, told with anxious glances at the drawing-room doors, to see if they are fast shut.

I do not remember just what brought the talk back from these primrose paths, to that question of American society forms, but presently some one said he believed the church sociable was the thing in most towns beyond the apple-bee and sugar-party stage, and this opened the inquiry as to how far the church still formed the social life of the people in cities. Some one suggested that in Brooklyn it formed it altogether, and then they laughed, for Brooklyn is always a joke with the New Yorkers; I do not know exactly why, except that this vast city is so largely a suburb, and that it has a great number of churches, and is comparatively cheap. Then another told of a lady who had come to New York (he admitted, twenty years ago,) and was very lonely, as she had no letters, until she joined a church. This at once brought her a general acquaintance, and she began to find herself in society; but as soon as she did so, she joined a more exclusive church where they took no notice of strangers. They all laughed at that bit of human nature, as they called it, and they philosophized the relation of women to society as a purely business relation. The talk ranged to the mutable character of society, and how people got into it, and were of it, and how it was very different from what it once was, except that with women it was always business. They spoke of certain new rich people with affected contempt; but I could see that they were each proud of knowing such millionaires as they could claim for acquaintance, though they pretended to make fun of the number of men-servants you had to run the gauntlet of in A. HOMOS. their houses before you could get to your hostess.

One of my commensals said he had noticed that I took little or no wine, and when I said that we seldom drank it in Altruria, he answered that he did not think I could make that go in America, if I meant to dine much. “Dining, you know, means overeating,” he explained, “and if you wish to overeat, you must overdrink. I venture to say that you will pass a worse night than any of us, Mr. Homos, and that you will be sorrier to-morrow than I shall.” They were all smoking, and I confess that their tobacco was secretly such an affliction to me that I was at one moment in doubt whether I should take a cigar myself, or ask leave to join the ladies.

The gentleman who had talked so much already said: “Well, I don’t mind dining so much, especially with Makely, here, but I do object to supping, as I have to do now and then, in the way of pleasure. Last Saturday night I sat down at eleven o’clock to blue-point oysters, consommé soup, stewed terrapin — yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had taken more of it — lamb chops with peas, redhead duck with celery mayonnaise, Nesselrode pudding, fruit, cheese, and coffee, with sausages, caviare, radishes, celery, and olives interspersed wildly, and drinkables and smokables ad libitum; and I can assure you that I felt very devout when I woke up after churchtime in the morning. It is this turning night into day that is killing us. We men, who have to go to business the next morning, ought to strike, and say we won’t go to anything later than eight o’clock dinner.’’

“Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four o’clock tea,” said another.

Our host seemed to be reminded of something by the mention of the women, and he said, after a glance round at the state of the different cigars, “Shall we join the ladies?”

One of the men-servants had evidently been waiting for this question. He held the door open, and we all filed into the drawing-room.

Mrs. Makely hailed me with, “Ah, Mr. Homos, I’m so glad you’ve come! We poor women have been having the most dismal time!”

“Honestly,” asked the funny gentleman, “don’t you always, without us?”

“Yes, but this has been worse than usual. Mrs. Strange has been asking us how many people we supposed there were in this city, within five minutes’ walk of us, who had no dinner to-day. Do you call that kind?”

“A little more than kin, and less than kind, perhaps,” the gentleman suggested.

“But what does she propose to do about it?”

He turned toward Mrs. Strange, who answered, “Nothing. What does any one propose to do about it?”

“Then, why do you think about it?”

“I don’t. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow’s, ‘The Challenge’?”

“No, I never heard of it.”

“Well, it begins in his sweet old way, about some Spanish king, who was killed before a city he was besieging, and one of his knights sallies out of the camp, and challenges the people of the city, the living and the dead, as traitors. Then the poet breaks off, apropos de rien:

‘There is a greater army

That besets us round with strife,

A numberless, starving army,

At all the gates of life.

The poverty-stricken millions

Who challenge our wine and bread.

And impeach us all for traitors,

Both the living and the dead.

And whenever I sit at the banquet,

Where the feast and song are high,

Amid the mirth and the music

I can hear that fearful cry.

And hollow and haggard faces

Look into the lighted hall,

And wasted hands are extended

To catch the crumbs that fall.

For within there is light and plenty,

And odors fill the air;

But without there is cold and darkness,

And hunger and despair.

And there, in the camp of famine,

In wind and cold and rain,

Christ, the great Lord of the Army,

Lies dead upon the plain.’”

“Ah,” said the facetious gentleman, “that is fine! We really forget how fine Longfellow was. It is so pleasant to hear you quoting poetry, Mrs. Strange. That sort of thing has almost gone out; and it’s a pity.”

IX.

New York, December 15, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

In answer to the inquiry in your last letter concerning the large shops here, I cannot say they are very attractive, and as I have told you, they are not so many as we have been led to suppose. There are, perhaps, fifty, at most, on Broadway and the different avenues. They are vast emporiums, sometimes occupying half a city-block, and multiplying their acreage of floor space by repeated stories, one above another, reached by elevators perpetually lifting and lowering the throngs of shoppers. But I do not find any principle of taste governing the arrangement of their multitudinous wares; and they have always a huddled and confused effect. I miss the precious and human quality of individuality in them. I meet no one who seems to have a personal interest in the goods or the customers; it is a dry and cold exchange of moneys and wares; and the process is made the more tedious by the checks used to keep the salesmen and saleswomen from robbing their employers. They take your money, but it must be sent with their written account and your purchase to a central bureau, where the account is audited and returned with your purchase, after a vexatious delay. But in the system of things here, fully a fifth of the people seem employed in watching that the rest do not steal, and fully a fifth of the time is lost.

You have perhaps imagined these great stores like our Regionic bazaars, where we go with our government orders to supply our needs, or indulge our fancies. But they are not at all like these, except in their vastness and variety. I cannot say that there is no aim at beauty in their display, but the sordid motive of advertising running through it all destroys this. You are not pressed to buy, here, any more than with us, and the salespeople are not allowed to misrepresent the quality of the goods, for that would be bad business; but the affair is a purely business transaction. That friendly hospitality which our bazaars show all comers, and that cordial endeavor to seek out and satisfy their desires are wholly unknown here. What you experience is the working of a vast, very intricate, and rather clumsy money-making machine, with yourself as a part of the mechanism.

For this reason I prefer the smaller shops where I can enter into some human relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have already tried to give you some notion of the multitude of these; and I must say now that they add much -in their infinite number and variety to such effect of gaiety as the city has. They are especially attractive at night, where, under favor of the prevailing dark, the shapeless monster is able to hide something of its deformity. Then the brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect of gaiety which the day will not allow.

The great stores contribute nothing to this, however, for they all close at six o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor beauty as the place has with the multitude of signs that the minor traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade, and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, you would think bad enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give you any notion of the horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?

But you could not imagine the least offensive of the signs that deface American cities, where they seem trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they cover the fronts and sides and tops of the edifices; they deface the rocks of the meadows and the cliffs of the rivers; they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands, and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty city edifices, the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.

The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary phase of the economic warfare in which this people live, for the most as unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.

Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after its architectural shapelessness, as the eating and drinking constantly going on in it. I do not mean, now, the eating and drinking in society alone, though from the fact that some sort of repast is made the occasion of nearly every social meeting, you might well suppose that society was altogether devoted to eating and drinking, and that this phase of the feasting might altogether occupy one. But I was thinking of the restaurants and hotels, of every kind and quality, and the innumerable saloons and bars. There may not be really more of them in New York, in proportion to the population than in other great plutocratic cities, but there are apparently more; for in this, as in all her other characteristics, New York is very open; her virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are in plain sight, so that no one can fail of them; and I fancy that a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the spectacle of people everywhere visible at sumptuous tables.

Many of the finest hotels, if not most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of the street, and the windows, whether curtained or uncurtained, reveal the continual riot within. I confess that the effect upon some hungry passer is always so present to my imagination that I shun the places near the windows; but the Americans are so used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit in their civilization, that they do not seem to mind it; and one of them very logically made me observe when he conceived my reluctance, that I was not relieving anybody’s want when I chose an uncomfortable place on the dark side of the room. It was, indeed, an instance of the unavailing self-denial so frequent here. Still, I prefer either the restaurants in the basements or on the second floor; and these are without number, too, though I do not think they are so many as the others; at least they do not make as much effect. But of every sort, as I say, there is an immense variety, because New York is so largely a city of strangers, whose pleasures or affairs call them here by whole populations. Every day the trains and boats fetch and carry hundreds of thousands of visitors, who must be somehow housed and fed, and who find shelter in the hotels, and food wherever they happen to be at the moment of lunch or dinner.

But the restaurants have to cater besides to the far vaster custom of the business men who live at such a distance from their shops and offices that they never take the midday meal with their families except on Sunday. So far they are like the workingmen, whom you see seated on piles of rubbish in the street, with their dinner-pails between their knees; but I need not tell you that the business men are not so simple or so sparing in the satisfaction of their hunger. I am not sure that they are always much more comfortable; and in fine weather I think I would rather sit out doors on a heap of brick or lumber than on a bracketed stool-top before a lunch - counter amidst a turmoil of crockery and cookery that I should in vain try to give you a sense of. These lunch-counters abound everywhere, and thousands throng them every day, snatching the meat and drink pushed across the counter to them by the waiters from the semi-circle within, and then making room for others. But of late, a new kind of lunchroom has come into fashion, which I wish you could see, both for the sake of the curious spectacle it affords, and the philosophy it involves. You would find yourself in a long room, if you came with me, where you would see rows of large chairs, each with one arm made wide enough to hold a cup and saucer, and a plate. At a convenient place in the room is a counter or table, with cups for tea and coffee set out on it, and plates of pie, sandwiches, and such viands as need not be cut with a knife, and may be gathered up in the fingers. Each corner goes up to the counter, and takes from it what he likes and carries it off to some chair, where he eats his lunch in peace, and then goes back to the counter and pays for it. His word is implicitly taken as to what he has had; he goes as he came, without question; and the host finds his account in the transaction; for even if he is now and then cheated, he saves the cost of a troop of waiters by letting his guests serve themselves, and he is able for the same reason to afford his provisions at half the price they must pay elsewhere. His experience is that he is almost never cheated, and the Altrurian theory of human nature, that if you will use men fairly and trust them courageously, they will not betray you, finds practical endorsement in it.

Most of the better class of clerks and small business men frequent the chop-houses, which affect the back rooms of old - fashioned dwellings, and the basement restaurants in the cellarways of business buildings, down town. Some of the lofty edifices which deform that quarter of the city have restaurants in them on a grand scale, as to prices and fare, and all the appointments of the table; these are for a still better sort of lunchers, or richer sort (you always say better when you mean richer, in America), and these often have lunch clubs, of difficult membership, and with rooms luxuriously appointed, where, if they choose, people can linger over their claret and cigars as quietly as if they were in their own houses. Sometimes a whole house is fitted up with all the comforts of a club, which is frequented by its members, or the greater part of them, only for luncheon. Others, of the kind which form effectively the home of their members, are resorted to at midday by all who do business within easy reach of them; though the breakfasting and dining goes on there, too, day in and day out, as constantly as at private houses. In fact, the chief use of the clubs is through their excellent kitchens.

There are foreign restaurants in all parts of the town, — French, German, Italian, Spanish, — where you can have your lunch served in courses at a fixed sum for the whole. The Hebrews, who are so large and so prosperous an element of the commercial body of New York, have restaurants of this sort, where they incur no peril of pork, or meat of any kind that is not kosher. Signs in Hebrew give them warrant of the fact that nothing unclean, or that has been rendered unlawful by hanging from a nail, is served within; and the Christian, if he sits down at a table, is warned that he can have neither milk nor butter with his meat, since this is against their ancient and most wholesome law.

Far round on the East side, and in all the poorer quarters of the town, there are eating-houses and cook-shops of lower and lower grade, which are resorted to by those workingmen who do not bring their dinners with them in pails, or who would rather take their drink and their food together. But these are seldom the older-fashioned laborers, of Irish or American descent; the frequenters of such places are Germans or Italians, or of the newer immigrations from eastern Europe, who find there some suggestions of their national dishes, and some touch of art in the cookery, no matter how common and vile the material. This, as you see it in the butcher-shops and the greengrocers of those parts, is often revolting and unwholesome enough — pieces of loathsome carnage, and bits of decaying vegetation. It is to be supposed that the poorer restaurants supply themselves from the superfluity of the better sort and of the hotels, but this is not always the case. In many cases, the hotels cast this into the great heap of offal, which the garbage carts of the city dump into the vessels used to carry it out to sea, so that not even the swine may eat of it, much less the thousands of hungering men and women and children, who never know what it is to have quite enough. But this is only one phase of the wilful waste that in manifold ways makes such woeful want in plutocratic conditions. Every comfortable family in this city throws away at every meal the sustenance of some other family; or, if not that then, so much at least as would keep it from starvation. The predatory instinct is very subtle, and people who live upon each other, instead of for each other, have shrewdly contrived profit within profit until it is hard to say whether many things you consume have any value in themselves at all. If they could be brought at once to the consumer they would cost infinitely little, almost nothing; but they reach him only after half a dozen sterile agencies have had their usury of them; and then they are most wonderfully, most wickedly wasted in the system of each household having its own black, noisy, unwholesome kitchen, with a cook in it chiefly skilled to spoil God’s gifts.

From time to time, there is great talk in the newspapers of abolishing the middlemen, as the successive hucksters are called; but there is no way of doing this, short of abolishing the whole plutocratic system, for the middleman is the business man, and the business man is the cornerstone of this civilization; if, indeed, a civilization which seems poised in air by studying the trick of holding itself from the ground by the waistband, can be said to have any foundation whatever.

There is not so much hope of the middleman’s going as there is of the individual kitchen’s, which really seems threatened, at times, by the different new ways of living which Mrs. Makely, you remember, told me of. It is, in fact, a survival of the simpler time when the housewife prepared the food of her family herself; but that time is long past, with the well-to-do Americans, and what was once the focal center of the home, has no longer any just place in it, and only forms the great rent through which half the husband’s earnings escape. Yet, if I tell them of our cooperative housekeeping, they make the answer which they seem to think serves all occasions, and say that such a system will do very well for Altruria, but that it is contrary to human nature, and it can never be made to work in America. They much prefer to go on wasting into the kitchen, and wasting out of it; the housewife either absolutely neglects her duty, or else she maddens herself with the care of it, and harries the poor drudge who slaves her life away in its heat and glare, and fails, with all her toil, of results which we have for a tithe of the cost and suffering.

But whenever I touch one of the points of economic contrast with ourselves, I feel as if I were giving it undue importance, for I think at once of a hundred others which seem to prove as conclusively that, as yet, the life of the Americans, in what most nearly concerns them, is not reasoned. They are where they are because some one else had arrived there before them, and they do most of the things that they do because the English do something like them. In a wholly different climate, a climate which touches both arctic and tropic extremes, they go on living as their ancestors lived in the equable seasons of the British Isles. They have not yet philosophized their food, or dress, or shelter, for their blazing summers, and swelter through them with such means of comfort as the ignorant usage of the mother-country provides.

In fact, the Americans have completed their reductio ad absurdum in pleasure as well as in business. Eating and drinking no longer suffice to bring people together, and the ladies say that if you want any one to come now, you must have something special to entertain your guests. You must have somebody sing, or recite, or play; I believe it has not yet come to a demand for hired dancing, as it presently will, if it does in London. Only very primitive people would now think of giving an afternoon tea without some special feature, though the at-homes still flourish, as a means of paying off the debts ladies owe one another for visits. Luncheons and dinners are given with a frequency that would imply the greatest financial prosperity, and the gayest social feeling as well as unlimited leisure, and unbounded hospitality. But these must always have some raison d’étre, such as we do not dream of offering, who in our simplicity think it reason enough to ask our friends to join us at meat if we wish for their company. Here, apparently, no one wishes for your company personally, the individual is as completely lost in the social as he is in the economic scheme. You are invited as a factor in the problem which your hostess wishes to work out, and you are invited many days in advance, and sometimes several weeks; for every one is supposed to be in great request, and it is thought to be a sort of slight to bid a guest for any entertainment under a week, so that people excuse themselves for doing it.

Our fashion of offering hospitality on the impulse, would be as strange here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance. The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have been done for pleasure, either by the host or the guest. The dinner is given in payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who are striving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who give regularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it is eaten from motives at once as impersonal and as selfish. I do not mean to say that I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctory either in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as at any of our own simple feasts. Still, I think your main impression of American hospitality would be that it was thoroughly infused with the plutocratic principle, and that it meant business.

I am speaking now of the hospitality of society people, who number, after all, but a few thousands out of the many millions of American people. These millions are so far from being in society, even when they are very comfortable, and on the way to great prosperity, if they are not already greatly prosperous, that if they were suddenly confronted with the best society of the great eastern cities they would find it almost as strange as so many Altrurians. A great part of them have no conception of entertaining except upon an Altrurian scale of simplicity, and they know nothing and care less for the forms that society people value themselves upon. Where they begin in the ascent of the social scale to adopt forms, it is still to wear them lightly and with an individual freedom and indifference; it is long before anxiety concerning the social law renders them vulgar.

Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a plutocracy the man who needs a dinner, is the man who is never asked to dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives him a meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with a hopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of the swine at their husks, and of Lazarus whose sores the dogs licked. Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him for any place in good society short of Abraham’s bosom; but even if he were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be possible for his benefactor, in any grade of society, to ask him to his table. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the back door.

We were talking of this the other night at the house of that lady whom Mrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving Day. It happened then, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, I saw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I have been asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole evening with them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely really gave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportant conversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-à-vis of me, who had a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk, that my acquaintance with Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she went away so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room, that I did not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive a note from her a few days later, asking me to dinner; and I finally went, I am ashamed to own, more from curiosity than from any other motive. I had been, in the meantime, thoroughly coached concerning her, by Mrs. Makely, whom I told of my invitation, and who said, quite frankly, that she wished Mrs. Strange had asked her, too. “But Eveleth Strange wouldn’t do that,” she explained, “because it would have the effect of paying me back. I’m so glad, on your account, that you’re going, for I do want you to know at least one American woman that you can unreservedly approve of; I know you don’t begin to approve of me; and I was so vexed that you really had no chance to talk with her that night you met her here; it seemed to me as if she ran away early, just to provoke me; and, to tell you the truth, I thought she had taken a dislike to you. I wish I could tell you just what sort of a person she is, but it would be perfectly hopeless, for you haven’t got the documents, and you never could get them. I used to be at school with her, and even then she wasn’t like any of the other girls. She was always so original, and did things from such a high motive, that afterwards, when we were all settled, I was perfectly thunderstruck at her marrying old Bellington Strange, who was twice her age, and had nothing but his money; he was not related to the New York Bellingtons at all, and nobody knows how he got the name; nobody ever heard of the Stranges. In fact, people said that he used to be plain Peter B. Strange, till he married Eveleth, and she made him drop the Peter, and blossom out in the Bellington, so that he could seem to have a social as well as a financial history. People who disliked her insisted that they were not in the least surprised at her marrying him; that the high-motive business was just her pose; and that she had simply got sick of being a teacher in a girls’ school, and had jumped at the chance of getting him. But I always stuck up for her, — and I know that she did it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and were dependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She was always as high-strung and as romantic as she could be, but I don’t believe that even then she would have taken Mr. Strange, if there had been anybody else. I don’t suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young men are pretty sharp nowadays, and are not going to marry girls without a cent, when there are so many rich girls, just as charming every way: you can’t expect them to. At any rate, whatever her motive was, she had her reward, for Mr. Strange died within a year of their marriage, and she got all his money. There was no attempt to break the will, for Mr. Strange seemed to be literally of no family; and she’s lived quietly on in the house he bought her, ever since, except when she’s in Europe, and that’s about two-thirds of the time. She has her mother with her, and I suppose that her sisters, and her cousins, and her aunts, come in for outdoor aid. She’s always helping somebody. They say that’s her pose, now; but if it is, I don’t think it’s a bad one; and certainly if she wanted to get married again, there would be no trouble, with her three millions. I advise you to go to her dinner, by all means, Mr. Homos. It will be something worth while, in every way, and perhaps you’ll convert her to Altrurianism; she’s as hopeful a subject as I know.”

I was one of the earliest of her guests, for I cannot yet believe that people do not want me to come exactly when they say they do. I perceived, however, that one other gentleman had come before me, and I was both surprised and delighted to find that this was my acquaintance, Mr. Bullion, the Boston banker. He professed as much pleasure at our meeting as I certainly felt; but after a few words he went on talking with Mrs. Strange, while I was left to her mother, an elderly woman of quiet and even timid bearing, who affected me at once as born and bred in a wholly different environment. In fact, every American of the former generation is almost as strange to it in tradition, though not in principle, as I am; and I found myself singularly at home with this sweet lady, who seemed glad of my interest in her. I was taken from her side to be introduced to a lady, on the opposite side of the room, who said she had been promised my acquaintance by a friend of hers, whom I had met in the mountains, — Mr. Twelvemough; did I remember him? She gave a little cry while still speaking, and dramatically stretched her hand toward a gentleman who entered at the moment, and whom I saw to be no other than Mr. Twelvemough himself. As soon as he had greeted our hostess he hastened up to us, and barely giving himself time to press the still outstretched hand of my companion, shook mine warmly, and expressed the greatest joy at seeing me. He said that he had just got back to town, in a manner, and had not known I was here, till Mrs. Strange had asked him to meet me. There were not a great many other guests, when they all arrived, and we sat down, a party not much larger than at Mrs. Makely’s.

I found that I was again to take out my hostess, but I was put next the lady with whom I had been talking; she had come without her husband, who was, apparently, of a different social taste from herself, and had an engagement of his own; there was an artist and his wife whose looks I liked; some others whom I need not specify, were there, I fancied, because they had heard of Altruria, and were curious to see me. As Mr. Twelvemough sat quite at the other end of the table, the lady on my right could easily ask me whether I liked his books. She said, tentatively, people liked them because they felt sure when they took up one of his novels they had not got hold of a tract on political economy in disguise.

It was this complimentary close of a remark which scarcely began with praise, that made itself heard across the table, and was echoed with a heartfelt sigh from the lips of another lady.

“Yes,” she said, “that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough’s books.”

“We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough’s books,” triumphed the first lady, and then several began to extol them for being fiction pure and simple, and not dealing with any question but the loves of young people.

Mr. Twelvemough sat looking as modest as he could under the praise, and one of the ladies said that in a novel she had lately read there was a description of a surgical operation, that made her feel as if she had been present at a clinic. Then the author said that he had read that passage, too, and found it extremely well done. It was fascinating, but it was not art.

The painter asked, “Why was it not art?”

The author answered, “Well, if such a thing as that was art, then anything that a man chose to do in a work of imagination was art.”

“Precisely,” said the painter, “art is choice.”

“On that ground,” the banker interposed, “you could say that political economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.”

“It would have its difficulties,” the painter admitted, “but there are certain phases of political economy, dramatic moments, human moments, which might be very fitly treated in art. For instance, who would object to Mr. Twelvemough’s describing an eviction from an East side tenement-house on a cold winter night, with the mother and her children huddled about the fire the father had kindled with pieces of the household furniture?”

“I should object very much, for one,” said the lady who had objected to the account of the surgical operation. “It would be too creepy. Art should give pleasure.”

“Then you think a tragedy is not art?” asked the painter.

“I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too much,” said the lady. “There are enough of them in real life, without filling all the novels with them. It’s terrible the number of beggars you meet on the street, this winter. Do you want to meet them in Mr. Twelvemough’s novels, too?”

“Well, it wouldn’t cost me any money, there. I shouldn’t have to give.”

“You oughtn’t to give money in real life,” said the lady. “You ought to give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are imposters.”

“It’s some comfort to know that the charities are so active,” said the elderly young lady, “even if half the letters one gets do turn out to be appeals from them.”

“It’s very disappointing to have them do it, though,” said the artist, lightly.

“I thought there was a society to abolish poverty. That doesn’t seem to be so active as the charities this winter. Is it possible they’ve found it a failure?”

“Well,” said Mr. Bullion, “perhaps they have suspended during the hard times.”

They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have, and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes’ walk of their warmth and surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, “Who goes there?” the houselessness that prowls the night, could have answered them from the street below, “Despair!”

“I had an amusing experience,” Mr. Twelvemough began, “when I was doing a little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.”

“For the sake of the literary material?” suggested the artist.

“Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor’s son, who had got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper any more.”

“A checkered employ,” the banker mused aloud.

“It was not of a simultaneous nature,” the novelist explained. “So he came on the charities, and as I knew the theatrical profession a little, and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a manager whom I knew to be a good fellow, and I asked him for some sort of work. He said, Yes, send the man round, and he would give him a job copying parts for a new play he had written.”

The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.

“It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than amusing,” said the banker. “It shows that something can be done, if you try.”

“Well,” said Mr. Twelvemough, “I thought that was the moral, myself, till the fellow came afterwards to thank me. He said that he considered himself very lucky, for the manager had told him that there were six other men had wanted that job.”

Everybody laughed, now, and I looked at my hostess in a little bewilderment. She murmured, “I suppose the joke is that he had befriended one man at the expense of six others.”

“Oh,” I returned, “is that a joke?” No one answered, but the lady at my right asked: “How do you manage with poverty in Altruria?”

I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, “In Altruria we have no poverty.”

“Ah, I knew you would say that!” he cried out. “That’s what he always does,” he explained to the lady. “Bring up any one of our little difficulties, and ask how they get over it in Altruria, and he says they have nothing like it. It’s very simple.”

They all began to ask me questions, but with a courteous incredulity, which I could feel well enough, and some of my answers made them laugh, all but my hostess, who received them with a gravity that finally prevailed. But I was not disposed to go on talking of Altruria then, though they all protested a real interest, and murmured against the hardship of being cut off with so brief an account of our country as I had given them.

“Well,” said the banker at last, “if there is no cure for our poverty, we might as well go on and enjoy ourselves.”

“Yes,” said our hostess, with a sad little smile, “we might as well enjoy ourselves.”

A. HOMOS.

X.

New York, December 16, 1893.

My dear Cyril:

The talk at Mrs. Strange’s table took a far wider range than my meager notes would intimate, and we sat so long that it was almost eleven before the men joined the ladies in the drawing-room. You will hardly conceive of remaining two, three, or four hours at dinner, as one often does here, in society. Out of society, the meals are dispatched with a rapidity unknown to the Altrurians. Our habit of listening to the lectors, especially at the evening repast, and then of reasoning upon what we have heard, prolongs our stay at the board; but the fondest listener, the greatest talker among us, would be impatient of the delay eked out here by the great number, and the slow procession of the courses served. Yet the poorest American would find his ideal realized rather in the long-drawn-out gluttony of the society dinner here, than in our temperate simplicity.

At such a dinner it is very hard to avoid a surfeit, and I have to guard myself very carefully, lest, in the excitement of the talk, I gorge myself with everything, in its turn. Even at the best, my overloaded stomach often joins with my conscience in reproaching me for what you would think a shameful excess at table. Yet, wicked as my riot is, my waste is worse, and I have to think with contrition, not only of what I have eaten, but of what I have left uneaten, in a city where so many wake and sleep in hunger.

The ladies made a show of lingering, after we joined them in the drawing-room; but there were furtive glances at the clock, and presently her guests began to bid Mrs. Strange good night. When I came up, and offered her my hand, she would not take it, but murmured, with a kind of passion: “Don’t go! I mean it! Stay, and tell us about Altruria, — my mother and me!”

I was by no means loth, for I must confess that all I had seen and heard of this lady interested me in her more and more. I felt at home with her, too, as with no other society woman I have met; she seemed to me not only good, but very sincere, and very good-hearted, in spite of the world she lived in. Yet I have met so many disappointments here, of the kind that our civilization wholly fails to prepare us for, that I should not have been surprised to find that Mrs. Strange had wished me to stay, not that she might hear me talk about Altruria, but that I might hear her talk about herself. You must understand that the essential vice of a system which concenters a human being’s thoughts upon his own interests, from the first moment of responsibility, colors and qualifies every motive with egotism. All egotists are unconscious, for otherwise they would be intolerable to themselves; but some are subtler than others; and as most women have finer natures than most men, everywhere, and in America most women have finer minds than most men, their egotism usually takes the form of pose. This is often obvious, but in some cases it is so delicately managed that you do not suspect it, unless some other woman gives you a hint of it, and even then you cannot be sure, of it, seeing the self-sacrifice, almost to martyrdom, which the poseuse makes for it. If Mrs. Makely had not suggested that some people attributed a pose to Mrs. Strange, I should certainly never have dreamed of looking for it, and I should have been only intensely interested, when she began, as soon as I was left alone with her and her mother; “You may not know how unusual I am in asking this favor of you, Mr. Homos; but you might as well learn from me as from others, that I am rather unusual in everything. In fact, you can report in Altruria, when you get home, that you found at least one woman in America, whom fortune had smiled upon in every way, and who hated her smiling fortune almost as much as she hated herself. I’m quite satisfied,” she went on, with a sad mockery, “that fortune is a man, and an American; when he has given you all the materials for having a good time, he believes that you must be happy, because there is nothing to hinder. It isn’t that I want to be happy in the greedy way that men think we do, for then I could easily be happy. If you have a soul which is not above buttons, buttons are enough. But if you expect to be of real use, to help on, and to help out, you will be disappointed. I have not the faith that they say upholds you Altrurians in trying to help out, if I didn’t see my way out. It seems to me that my reason has some right to satisfaction, and that, if I am a woman grown, I can’t be satisfied with the assurances they would give to little girls, that everything is going on well. Any one can see that things are not going on well. There is more and more wretchedness of every kind, not hunger of body alone, but hunger of soul. If you escape one, you suffer the other, because, if you have a soul, you must long to help, not for a time, but for all time. I suppose,” she asked, abruptly, “that Mrs. Makely has told you something about me?”

“Something,” I admitted.

“I ask,” she went on, “because I don’t want to bore you with a statement of my case, if you know it already. Ever since I heard you were in New York, I have wished to see you, and to talk with you about Altruria; I did not suppose that there would be any chance at Mrs. Makely’s, and there wasn’t; and I did not suppose there would be any chance here, unless I could take courage to do what I have done, now. You must excuse it, if it seems as extraordinary a proceeding to you as it really is; I wouldn’t at all have you think it is usual for a lady to ask one of her guests to stay after the rest, in order, if you please, to confess herself to him. It’s a crime without a name.”

She laughed, not gaily, but humorously, and then went on, speaking always with a feverish eagerness, which I find it hard to give you a sense of, for the women here have an intensity quite beyond our experience of the sex at home:

“But you are a foreigner, and you come from an order of things so utterly unlike ours, that perhaps you will be able to condone my offense. At any rate, I have risked it.” She laughed again, more gaily, and recovered herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. “Well, the long and the short of it is, that I have come to the end of my tether. I have tried, as truly as I believe any woman ever did, to do my share, with money and with work, to help make life better for those whose life is bad, and though one mustn’t boast of good works, I may say that I have been pretty thorough, and if I’ve given up, it’s because I see, in our state of things, no hope of curing the evil. It’s like trying to soak up the drops of a rainstorm. You do dry a drop here and there; but the clouds are full of them, and the first thing you know, you stand, with your blotting-paper in your hand, in a puddle over your shoe-top. There is nothing but charity, and charity is a failure, except for the moment. If you think of the misery around you, and that must remain around you, forever and ever, as long as you live, you have your choice — to go mad, and be put into an asylum, or go mad, and devote yourself to society.” While Mrs. Strange talked on, her mother listened quietly, with a dim, submissive smile, and her hands placidly crossed in her lap. She now said:

“It seems to be very different now from what it was in my time. There are certainly a great many beggars, and we used never to have one. Children grew up, and people lived and died, in large towns, without ever seeing one. I remember, when my husband first took me abroad, how astonished we were at the beggars. Now, I meet as many in New York, as I met in London, or in Rome. But if you don’t do charity, what can you do? Christ enjoined it, and Paul said—”

“Oh, people never do the charity that Christ meant,” said Mrs. Strange; “and, as things are now, how could they? Who would dream of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling all, and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We know that Christ was perfectly right, and that he was perfectly sincere in what he said to the good young millionaire; but we all go away exceeding sorrowful, just as the good young millionaire did. We have to, if we don’t want to come on charity ourselves. How do you manage about that?” she asked me; and then she added, “But, of course, I forgot that you have no need of charity.”

“Oh, yes, we have,” I returned; and I tried, once more, as I have tried so often with Americans, to explain how the heavenly need of giving the self continues with us, but on terms that do not harrow the conscience of the giver, as self-sacrifice always must here, at its purest and noblest. I sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one was secured against want by the common provision, and against the degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want. The “dead-level of equality” is what the Americans call the condition in which all would be as the angels of God, and they blasphemously deny that He ever meant His creatures to be alike happy, because some, through a long succession of unfair advantages, have inherited more brain, or brawn, or beauty, than others. I found that this gross and impious notion of God darkened even the clear intelligence of a woman like Mrs. Strange; and, indeed, it prevails here so commonly, that it is one of the first things advanced as an argument against the Altrurianization of America.

I believe I did, at last, succeed in showing her how charity still continues among us, but in forms that bring neither a sense of inferiority to him who takes, nor anxiety to him who gives. I said that benevolence here often seemed to involve, essentially, some such risk as a man should run if he parted with a portion of the vital air which belonged to himself and his family, in succoring a fellow-being from suffocation; but that with us, where it was no more possible for one to deprive himself of his share of the common food, shelter, and clothing, than of the air he breathed, one could devote one’s self utterly to others, without that foul alloy of fear, which I thought must basely qualify every good deed in plutocratic conditions.

She said that she knew what I meant, and that I was quite right in my conjecture, as regarded men, at least; a man who did not stop to think what the effect, upon himself and his own, his giving must have, would be a fool or a madman; but women could often give as recklessly as they spent, without any thought of consequences, for they did not know how money came.

“Women,” I said, “are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice themselves without wronging any one.”

“Or, rather,” she continued, “without the sense of wronging any one. Our men like to keep us in that innocence, or ignorance; they think it is pretty, or they think it is funny; and as long as a girl is in her father’s house, or a wife is in her husband’s, she knows no more of moneyearning, or money-making, than a child. Most grown women, among us, if they had a sum of money in the bank, would not know how to get it out. They would not know how to endorse a check, much less draw one. But there are plenty of women who are inside the conditions, as much as men are: poor women who have to earn their bread, and rich women who have to manage their property. I can’t speak for the poor women; but I can speak for the rich, and I can confess for them that what you imagine is true. The taint of unfaith and distrust is on every dollar that you dole out, so that, as far as the charity of the rich is concerned, I would read Shakespeare:

“It curseth him that gives, and Mm that takes.”

“Perhaps that is why the rich give comparatively so little! The poor can never understand how much the rich value their money, how much the owner of a great fortune dreads to see it less! If it were not so, they would surely give more than they do; for a man who has ten millions could give eight of them, without feeling the loss; the man with a hundred could give ninety, and be no nearer want. Ah, it’s a strange mystery! My poor husband and I used to talk of it a great deal, in the long year that he lay dying; and I think I hate my superfluity the more because I know he hated it so much.”

A little trouble had stolen into her impassioned tones, and there was a gleam, as of tears, in the eyes she dropped for a moment. They were shining still, when she lifted them again to mine.

“I suppose,” she said, “that Mrs. Makely told you something of my marriage?”

“Eveleth!” her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.

“Oh, I think I can be frank with Mr. Homos! He is not an American, and he will understand, or, at least, he will not misunderstand. Besides, I dare say I shall not say anything worse than Mrs. Makely has said already! My husband was much older than I, and I ought not to have married him; a young girl ought never to marry an old man, or even a man who is only a good many years her senior. But we both faithfully tried to make the best of our mistake, not the worst, and I think this effort helped us to respect each other, when there couldn’t be any question of more. He was a rich man, and he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have. He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated, and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had a tender heart, and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that money was an evil in itself.”

“That is what we think,” I ventured.

“Yes, I know. But he had thought this out for himself, and yet he had times when his thinking about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at any rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving it all to me. I suppose he thought that, perhaps, I could learn how to give it without hurting; and then he knew that, in our state of things, I must have some money to keep the wolf from the door. And I am afraid to part with it, too. I have given, and given; but there seems some evil spell on the principal, that guards it from encroachment, so that it remains the same, and, if I do not watch, the interest grows in the bank, with that frightful life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of dead people grows in the grave.”

“Eveleth!” her mother murmured again.

“Oh, yes,” she answered, “I dare say my words are wild. I dare say they only mean that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul, and long to be rid of it, if I only could, without harm to others, and with safety to myself.”

It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible to this luxury for the first time. I had certainly been aware that I was in a large and stately house, and that I had been served and banquetted with a princely pride and profusion. But there had, somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity, a sort of retrusive quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment, and its operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely’s far inferior scale of living; or, else, what with my going about so much in society, I was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange’s environment. There were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of thousands in the pictures on the walls. In a bronze group that withdrew itself into a certain niche, with a faint relucence, there was the value of a skilled artisan’s wage for five years of hard work; in the bindings of the books that showed from the library shelves, there was almost as much money as most of the authors had got for writing them. Every fixture, every movable, was an artistic masterpiece; a fortune, as fortunes used to be counted even in this land of affluence, had been lavished in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces of nobles and princes of other times had contributed to embellish.

“My husband,” Mrs. Strange went on, “bought this house for me, and let me furnish it after my own fancy. After it was all done, we neither of us liked it, and when he died, I felt as if he had left me in a tomb here.”

“Eveleth,” said her mother, “you ought not to speak so before Mr. Homos. He will not know what to think of you, and he will go back to Altruria with a very wrong idea of American women.” At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. “Yes,” she said, “you must excuse me. I have no right to speak so. But one is often much franker with foreigners than with one’s own kind, and, besides, there is something — I don’t know what! — that will not let me keep the truth from you.”

She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept her from her own hold, she broke out:

“He thought he would make some sort of atonement to me, as if I owed none to him! His money was all he had to do it with, and he spent that upon me in every way he could think of, though he knew that money could not buy anything that was really good, and that, if it bought anything beautiful, it uglified it with the sense of cost, to everyone who could value it in dollars and cents. He was a good man, far better than people ever imagined, and very simple-hearted and honest, like a child, in his contrition for his wealth, which he did not dare to get rid of; and though I know that, if he were to come back, it would be just as it was, his memory is as dear to me as if—”

She stopped, and pressed in her lip with her teeth, to stay its tremor. I was painfully affected. I knew that she had never meant to be so open with me, and was shocked and frightened at herself. I was sorry for her, and yet I was glad, for it seemed to me that she had given me a glimpse, not only of the truth in her own heart, but of the truth in the hearts of a whole order of prosperous people in these lamentable conditions, whom I shall hereafter be able to judge more leniently, more justly.

I began to speak of Altruria, as if that were what our talk had been leading up to, and she showed herself more intelligently interested concerning us, than any one I have yet seen in this country. We appeared, I found, neither incredible nor preposterous to her; our life, in her eyes, had that beauty of right living which the Americans so feebly imagine, or imagine not at all. She asked what route I had come by to America, and she seemed disappointed and aggrieved that we placed the restrictions we have felt necessary upon visitors from the plutocratic world. Were we afraid, she asked, that they would corrupt our citizens, or mar our content with our institutions? She seemed scarcely satisfied when I explained, as I have explained so often here, that the measures we had taken were taken rather in the interest of the plutocratic world, than of the Altrurians; and alleged the fact that no visitor from the outside had ever been willing to go home again, as sufficient proof that we had nothing to fear from the spread of plutocratic ideals among us. I assured her, and this she easily imagined, that the better known these became, the worse they appeared to us; and that the only concern our Priors felt, in regard to them, was that our youth could not conceive of them in all their enormity, but, in meeting plutocratic people, and seeing how estimable they often were, they would attribute to their conditions the inherent good of human nature. I said that our own life was so logical, so directly reasoned from its economic and political premises, that they could hardly believe the plutocratic life was often an absolute non sequitur of the plutocratic premises. I confessed that this error was at the bottom of my own wish to visit America, and study those premises for myself.

“And what has your conclusion been?” she said, leaning eagerly toward me, across the table between us, laden with the maps and charts we had been examining for the verification of the position of Altruria, and my own course here, by way of England.

I heard a slight sigh escape Mrs. Gray, which I interpreted as an expression of the fatigue she might well feel, for it was already past twelve o’clock; and I made it the pretext for an instant escape.

“You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly,” I said, “that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that question.”

She laughed, and did not try to detain me, now, when I offered my hand for good-night. I fancied her mother took leave of me coldly, and with a certain effect of inculpation.

A. HOMOS.

XI.

New York, April 20, 1894.

My dear Cyril:

It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason enough to be impatient of my silence. I submit to the reproaches of your letter, with a due sense of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you shall say after you have read this.

I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness, the greatest that could come to any man, or escaped the worst misfortune that could befall me. But such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly down.

I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from my repeated mention of a lady whose character greatly interested me, that I was in the way of feeling any other interest in her than my letters expressed. I am no longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian is by no means so old as an American at the same age. The romantic ideals of the American women which I had formed from the American novels had been dissipated; if I had any sentiment toward them, as a type, it was one of distrust, which my very sense of the charm in their inconsequence, their beauty, their brilliancy, served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly defended by that difference between their civilization and ours, which forbade any reasonable hope of happiness in a sentiment for them, tenderer than that of the student of new and strange effects in human nature. But we have not yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions, even in Altruria.

After I last wrote you, a series of accidents, or what appeared so, threw me more and more constantly into the society of Mrs. Strange. We began to laugh at the fatality with which we met everywhere, at teas, at lunches, at dinners, at evening receptions, and even at balls, where I have been a great deal, because, with all my thirty-five years, I have not yet outlived that fondness for dancing which has so often amused you in me. Wherever my acquaintance widened among cultivated people, they had no inspiration but to ask us to meet each other, as if there were really no other woman in New York who could be expected to understand me. “You must come to lunch (or tea, or dinner, whichever it might be), and we will have her. She will be so much interested to meet you.”

But perhaps we should have needed none of these accidents to bring us together. I, at least, can look back, and see that, when none of them happened, I sought occasions for seeing her, and made excuses of our common interest in this matter and in that, to go to her. As for her, I can only say that I seldom failed to find her at home, whether I called upon her nominal day or not, and more than once the man who let me in said he had been charged by Mrs. Strange to say that, if I called, she was to be back very soon; or, else, he made free to suggest that, though Mrs. Strange was not at home, Mrs. Gray was; and then I found it easy to stay until Mrs. Strange returned. The good old lady had an insatiable curiosity about Altruria, and, though I do not think she ever quite believed in our reality, she at least always treated me kindly, as if I were the victim of an illusion that was thoroughly benign.

I think she had some notion that your letters, which I used often to take with me, and read to Mrs. Strange and herself, were inventions of mine; and the fact that they bore only an English postmark, confirmed her in this notion, though I explained that in our present passive attitude toward the world outside, we had yet no postal relations with other countries, and, as all our communication at home was by electricity, that we had no letter post of our own. The very fact that she belonged to a purer and better age in America disqualified her to conceive of Altruria; her daughter, who had lived into a full recognition of the terrible anarchy in which the conditions have ultimated here, could far more vitally imagine us, and to her, I believe, we were at once a living reality. Her perception, her sympathy, her intelligence, became more and more to me, and I escaped to them oftener and oftener, from a world where any Altrurian must be so painfully at odds. In all companies here, I am aware that I have been regarded either as a good joke, or a bad joke, according to the humor of the listener, and it was grateful to be taken seriously.

From the first, I was sensible of a charm in her, different from that I felt in other American women, and impossible in our Altrurian women. She had a deep and almost tragical seriousness, masked with a most winning gaiety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment,; she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she necessarily remained in it, and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she said, she could not set herself up as censor of things that she must keep on doing as other people did. She could have renounced the world, as there are ways and means of doing, here; but she had no vocation to the religious life, and she could not feign it, without a sense of sacrilege. In fact, this generous, and magnanimous, and gifted woman was without that faith, that trust in God, which comes to us from living His law, and which I wonder any American can keep. She denied nothing; but she had lost the strength to affirm anything. She no longer tried to do good from her heart, though she kept on doing charity in what she said was a mere mechanical impulse from the belief of other days, but always with the ironical doubt that she was doing harm. Women are nothing by halves, as men can be, and she was in a despair which no man can realize, for we have always some if or and, which a woman of the like mood casts from her in wild rejection. Where, she could not clearly see her way to a true life, it was the same to her as an impenetrable darkness.

You will have inferred something of all this, from what I have written of her before, and from words of hers that I have reported to you. Do you think it so wonderful, then, that in the joy I felt at the hope, the solace which my story of our life seemed to give her, she should become more and more precious to me? It was not wonderful, either, I think, that she should identify me with that hope, that solace, and should suffer herself to lean upon me, in a reliance infinitely sweet and endearing. But what a fantastic dream it now appears!

I can hardly tell you just how we came to own our love to each other; but one day I found myself alone with her mother, with the sense that Eveleth had suddenly withdrawn from the room, at the knowledge of my approach Mrs. Gray was strongly moved by something; but she governed herself, and, after giving me a tremulous hand, bade me sit.

“Will you excuse me, Mr. Homos,” she began, “if I ask you whether you intend to make America your home, after this?”

“Oh, no!” I answered, and I tried to keep out of my voice the despair with which the notion filled me. I have sometimes had nightmares, here, in which I thought that I was an American by choice, and I can give you no conception of the rapture of awakening to the fact that I could still go back to Altruria, that I had not cast my lot with this wretched people. “How could I do that?” I faltered; and I was glad to perceive that I had imparted to her no hint of the misery which I had felt at such a notion.

“I mean, by getting naturalized, and becoming a citizen, and taking up your residence amongst us.”

“No,” I answered, as quietly as I could, “I had not thought of that.”

“And you still intend to go back to Altruria?”

“I hope so; I ought to have gone back long ago, and if I had not met the friends I have in this house—” I stopped, for I did not know how I should end what I had begun to say.

“I am glad you think we are your friends,” said the lady, “for we have tried to show ourselves your friends. I feel as if this had given me the right to say something to you, that you may think very odd.”

“Say anything to me, dear lady,” I returned. “I shall not think it unkind, no matter how odd it is.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s merely that — that when you are not here with us, I lose my grasp on Altruria; and — and I begin to doubt—”

I smiled. “I know! People here have often hinted something of that kind to me. Tell me, Mrs. Gray, do Americans generally take me for an impostor?”

“Oh, no!” she answered, fervently. “Everybody that I have heard speak of you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere. But—”

“But what?” I entreated.

“They think you may be mistaken.”

“Then they think I am out of my wits — that I am in an hallucination!”

“No, not that,” she returned. “But it is so very difficult for us to conceive of a whole nation living, as you say you do, on the same terms as one family, and no one trying to get ahead of another, or richer, and having neither inferiors nor superiors, but just one dead level of equality, where there is no distinction, except by natural gifts, and good deeds, or beautiful works. It seems impossible, it seems ridiculous.”

“Yes,” I confessed, “I know that it seems so to the Americans.”

“And I must tell you something else, Mr. Homos, and I hope you won’t take it amiss. The first night when you talked about Altruria, here, and showed us how you had come, by way of England, and the place where Altruria ought to be on our maps, I looked them over, after you were gone, and I could make nothing of it. As far as I could see, Australia and New Zealand occupied the place that Altruria ought to have had on the map.”

“Australia and New Zealand are more like Altruria than any other countries of the plutocratic world, in their constitution,” I said, “and perhaps that was what made them seem to occupy our place.”

“No, it wasn’t that; it couldn’t have been, for I didn’t know that they were like Altruria. I can’t explain it — I never could. I have often looked at the map since, but it was no use.”

“Why,” I said, “if you will let me have your atlas—”

She shook her head. “It would be the same again, as soon as you went away.” I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: “Now, you mustn’t mind what I say. I’m nothing but a silly old woman, and Eveleth would never forgive me if she could know what I’ve been saying.”

“Then Mrs. Strange isn’t troubled, as you are, concerning me?” I asked, and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.

Mrs. Gray shook her head vaguely. “She won’t admit that she is. It might be better for her if she would. But Eveleth is very true to her friends, and that — that makes me all the more anxious that she should not deceive herself.”

“Oh, Mrs. Gray!” I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my words.

She began to weep. “There! I knew I should hurt your feelings. But you mustn’t mind what I say. I beg your pardon! I take it all back—”

“Ah, I don’t want you to take it back! But what proof shall I give you that there is such a land as Altruria! If the darkness implies the day, America must imply Altruria. In what way do I seem false, or mad, except that I claim to be the citizen of a country where people love One another as the first Christians did?”

“That is just it,” she returned. “Nobody can imagine the first Christians, and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own day?”

“But Mrs. Strange — she imagines us, you say?”

“She thinks she does; but I am afraid she only thinks so, and I know her better than you do, Mr. Homos. I know how enthusiastic she always was, and how unhappy she has been since she has lost her hold on faith, and how eagerly she has caught at the hope you have given her of a higher life on earth than we live here. If she should ever find out that she was wrong, I don’t know what would become of her. You mustn’t mind me; you mustn’t let me wound you by what I say!”

“You don’t wound me, and I only thank you for what you say; but I entreat you to believe in me. Mrs. Strange has not deceived herself, and I have not deceived her. Shall I protest to you, by all that is sacred, that I am really what I told you I was; that I am not less, and that Altruria is infinitely more, happier, better, gladder, than any words of mine can say? Shall I not have the happiness to see your daughter to-day? I had something to say to her, something — and now I have so much more! If she is in the house, will not you send to her? I can make her understand—”

I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray’s face.

“Mr. Homos,” she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a vague misgiving, “sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter any more.”

“Not see her any more?” I gasped.

“Yes; I don’t see what good can come of it, and it’s all very strange, and uncanny. I don’t know how to explain it; but, indeed, it isn’t anything personal. It’s because you are of a state of things so utterly opposed to human nature, that I don’t see how — I am afraid that—”

“But I am not uncanny to her?” I entreated. “I am not unnatural, not incredible—”

“Oh, no; that is the worst of it. But I have said too much; I have said a great deal more than I ought. But you must excuse it: I am an old woman. I am not very well, and I suppose it’s that makes me talk so much.”

She rose from her chair, and I perforce rose from mine, and made a movement toward her.

“No, no,” she said, “I don’t need any help. You must come again soon, and see us, and show that you’ve forgotten what I’ve said.” She gave me her hand, and I could not help bending over it, and kissing it. She gave a little, pathetic whimper. “Oh, I know I’ve said the most dreadful things to you.”

“You haven’t said anything that takes your friendship from me, Mrs. Gray, and that is what I care for.” My own eyes filled with tears, I do not know why, and I groped my way from the room. Without seeing any one in the obscurity of the hallway, where I found myself, I was aware of some one there, by that sort of fine perception that makes us know the presence of a spirit.

“You are going?” a whisper said.

“Why are you going?” And Eveleth had me by the hand, and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that opened from the place.  “I don’t know all my mother has been saying to you. I had to let her say something; she thought she ought. I knew you would know how to excuse it.”

“Oh, my dearest!” I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we found ourselves in each other’s arms.

“What are we doing?” she murmured.

“You don’t believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary!” I besought her straining her closer to my heart.

“I believe in you, with all my soul!” she answered.

We sat down, side by side, and talked long. I did not go away the whole day. With a high disdain of convention, she made me stay. Her mother sent word that she would not be able to come to dinner, and we were alone together at table, in an image of what our united lives should be. We spent the evening in that happy interchange of trivial confidences that lovers use in symbol of the unutterable raptures that fill them. We were there in what seemed an infinite present, without a past, without a future.

Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to it that there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quite like that of two young persons, but people found in our character and circumstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement of the most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident, as one evening when we stood near a couple, and heard them talking. “It must be very weird,” the man said; “something like being engaged to a materialization.”

“Yes,” said the girl, “quite the Demon Lover business, I should think.” She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, at sight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked at Eveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxiety for me. But so far as the open attitude of society toward us was concerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly have been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of several of the great newspapers, our likenesses were printed, from photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our persons as to those points of coloring, and carriage, and stature, which the pictures could not give, and with biographies such as could be ascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the society papers, paragraphs of a surpassing scurrility appeared, attacking me as an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage, and treating her as a foolish crank, or an audacious flirt. The goodness of her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence counted for no more against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of my own; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me; but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because we formed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wild they were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurian plutocrat!

We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let it spend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both sexes came to interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinions of hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastly ignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds made up, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and a quality injected more in the taste of the special journals they represented, than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, I refused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then they printed the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that my silence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession of guilt upon the charges.

The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in a degree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined my distress, and when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she set herself to console and reassure me. She told me that this was something every one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before the public; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one else would think twice of it. This, I found was really so, for when I ventured tentatively to refer to some of these publications, I found that people, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and that they were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with our acquaintance, than something said under the breath in a corner. I found that some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which they had seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as the Americans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed the pictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine, they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr. Makely’s humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue, long after the interviews and the illustrations were forgotten.

I linger a little upon these trivial matters because I shrink from what must follow. They were scarcely blots upon our happiness; rather they were motes in the sunshine which had no other cloud. It is true that I was always somewhat puzzled by a certain manner in Mrs. Gray, which certainly was from no unfriendliness for me: she could not have been more affectionate to me, after our engagement, if I had been really her own son; and it was not until after our common kindness had confirmed itself upon the new footing that I felt this perplexing qualification on it. I felt it first one day when I found her alone, and I talked long and freely to her of Eveleth, and opened to her my whole heart of joy in our love. At one point she casually asked me how soon we should expect to return from Altruria after our visit; and at first I did not understand.

“Of course,” she explained, “you will want to see all your old friends, and so will Eveleth, for they will be her friends, too; but if you want me to go with you, as you say, you must let me know when I shall see New York again.”

“Why,” I said, “you will always be with us!”

“Well, then,” she pursued with a smile, “when shall you come back?”

“Oh, never!” I answered. “No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it, unless he is sent on a mission.”

She looked a little mystified, and I went on: “Of course, I was not officially authorized to visit the world outside, but I was permitted to do so, to satisfy a curiosity the Priors thought useful; but I have now had quite enough of it, and I shall never leave home again.”

“You won’t come to live in America?”

“God forbid!” said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran through me at the thought. “And when you once see our happy country, you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied spirit could be persuaded to return to the earth.”

She was silent, and I asked: “But, surely, you understood this, Mrs. Gray?”

“No,” she said, reluctantly.’ “Does Eveleth?”

“Why, certainly!” I said. “We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn’t she—”

“I don’t know,” she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes. “Perhaps I haven’t understood her exactly. Perhaps — but I shall be ready to do whatever you and she think best. I am an old woman, you know; and you know, I was born here, and I should feel the change.”

Her words conveyed to me a delicate reproach; I felt for the first time that, in my love of my own country, I had not considered her love of hers. It is said that the Icelanders are homesick when they leave their world of lava and snow; and I ought to have remembered that an American might have some such tenderness for his atrocious conditions, if he were exiled from them forever. I suppose it was the large and wide mind of Eveleth, with its openness to a knowledge and appreciation of better things, that had suffered me to forget this. She seemed always so eager to see Altruria, she imagined it so fully, so lovingly, that I had ceased to think of her as an alien; she seemed one of us, by birth as well as by affinity.

Yet, now, the words of her mother, and the light they threw upon the situation, gave me pause. I began to ask myself questions which I was impatient to ask Eveleth, so that there should be no longer any shadow of misgiving in my breast; and yet I found myself dreading to ask them, lest by some perverse juggle I had mistaken our perfect sympathy in all things for a perfect understanding.

Like all cowards who wait a happy moment for the duty that should not be suffered to wait at all, I was destined to have the affair challenge me, instead of seizing the advantage of it that instant frankness would have given me. Shall I confess that I let several days go by, and still had not spoken to Eveleth, when, at the end of a long evening — the last long evening we passed together — she said:

“What would you like to have me do with this house while we are gone?”

“Do with this house?” I echoed; and I felt as if I were standing on the edge of an abyss.

“Yes; shall we let it, or sell it; or what? Or give it away?” I drew a little breath at this; perhaps we had not misunderstood each other, after all. She went on: “Of course, I have a peculiar feeling about it, so that I wouldn’t like to get it ready, and let it furnished, in the ordinary way. I would rather lend it to some one, if I could be sure of any one who would appreciate it; but I can’t. Not one! And it’s very much the same when one comes to think about selling it. Yes, I should like to give it away for some good purpose, if there is any in this wretched state of things! What do you say, Aristide?”

She always used the French form of my name, because she said it sounded ridiculous in English, for a white man, though I told her that the English was nearer the Greek in sound.

“By all means, give it away,” I said. Give it to some public purpose. That will at least be better than any private purpose, and put it somehow in the control of the State, beyond the reach of individuals or corporations. Why not make it the foundation of a free school for the study of the Altrurian polity and economy?”

She laughed at this, as if she thought I must be joking. “It would be droll, wouldn’t it, to have Tammany appointees teaching Altrurianism?” Then she said, after a moment of reflection: “Why not? It needn’t be in the hands of Tammany. It could be in the hands of the United States; I will ask my lawyer if it couldn’t; and I will endow it with money enough to support the school handsomely. Aristide, you have hit it!”

I began: “You can give all your money to it, my dear—” But I stopped at the bewildered look she turned on me.

“All?” she repeated. “But what should we have to live on, then?”

“We shall need no money to live on, in Altruria,” I answered.

“Oh, in Altruria! But when we come back to New York?”

It was an agonizing moment, and I felt that shutting of the heart which blinds the eyes and makes the brain reel. “Eveleth,” I gasped, “did you expect to return to New York?”

“Why, certainly!” she cried. “Not at once, of course. But after you had seen all your friends, and made a good, long visit — Why surely, Aristide, you don’t understand that I — You didn’t mean to live in Altruria?”

“Ah!” I answered. “Where else could I live? Did you think for an instant that I could live in such a land as this?” I saw that she was hurt, and I hastened to say, “I know that it is the best part of the world outside of Altruria; but, oh, my dear, you cannot imagine how horrible the notion of living here seems to me. Forgive me! I am going from bad to worse. I don’t mean to wound you. After all, it is your country, and you must love it. But, indeed, I could not think of living here. I could not take the burden of its wilful, hopeless misery on my soul. I must live in Altruria, and you, when you have once seen my country, our country, will never consent to live in any other!”

“Yes,” she said, “I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn’t supposed — and yet I ought—”

“No, dearest, no! It was I who was to blame, for not being clearer from the first. But that is the way with us! We can’t imagine any people willing to live anywhere else when once they have seen Altruria; and I have told you so much of it, and we have talked of it together so often, that I must have forgotten you had not actually known it. But listen, Eveleth! We will agree to this. After we have been a year in Altruria, if you wish to return to America, I will come back and live with you here.”

“No, indeed!” she answered, generously. “If you are to be my husband,” and here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in their quaint English, “‘whither thou goest, I will go, and I will not return from following after thee. Thy country shall be my country, and thy God my God.’”

I caught her to my heart, in a rapture of tenderness, and the evening that had begun for us so forbiddingly, ended in a happiness such as not even our love had known before. I insisted upon the conditions I had made, as to our future home, and she agreed to them gaily, at last, as a sort of reparation which I might make my conscience, if I liked, for tearing her from a country which she had willingly lived out of for the far greater part of the last five years.

But when we met again, I could see that she had been thinking seriously.

“I won’t give the house absolutely away,” she said. “I will keep the deed of it myself, but I will establish that sort of school of Altrurian doctrine in it, and I will endow it, and when we come back here, for our experimental sojourn, after we’ve been in Altruria a year, will take up our quarters in it, — I won’t give the whole house to the school, — and we will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How will that do?”

She put her arms round my neck, and I said that it would do admirably; but I had a certain sinking of the heart, for I saw how hard it was even for Eveleth to part with her property.

“I’ll endow it,” she went on, “and I’ll leave the rest of my money at interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities—”

“No; there are no such things!” I cried.

“That was what I thought,” she returned; “and as it will cost us nothing while we are in Altruria, the interest will be something very handsome by the time we get back, even in United States bonds.”

“Something handsome!” I cried. “But, Eveleth, haven’t I heard you say yourself that the growth of interest from dead money was like—”

“Oh, yes; that!” she returned. “But you know you have to take it. You can’t let the money lie idle; that would be ridiculous; and then, with the good purpose we have in view, it is our duty to take the interest. How should we keep up the school, and pay the teachers, and everything?”

I saw that she had forgotten the great sum of the principal, or that, through life-long training and association, it was so sacred to her that she did not even dream of touching it. I was silent, and she thought that I was persuaded.

“You are perfectly right in theory, dear, and I feel just as you do about such things; I’m sure I’ve suffered enough from them; but if we didn’t take interest for your money, what should we have to live on?”

“Not my money, Eveleth!” I entreated. “Don’t say my money!”

“But whatever is mine is yours,” she returned, with a wounded air.

“Not your money; but I hope you will soon have none. We should need no money to live on in Altruria. Our share of the daily toil of all will amply suffice for our daily bread and shelter.”

“In Altruria, yes. But how about America? And you have promised to come back here in a year, you know. Ladies and gentlemen can’t share in the daily toil, here, even if they could get the toil, and where there are so many out of work, it isn’t probable they could.”

She dropped upon my knee, as she spoke, laughing, and put her hand under my chin, to lift my fallen face.

“Now, you mustn’t be a goose, Aristide, even if you are an angel! Now, listen! You know, don’t you, that I hate money just as badly as you?”

“You have made me think so, Eveleth,” I answered.

“I hate it and loathe it. I think it’s the source of all the sin and misery in the world; but you can’t get rid of it at a blow. For if you gave it away, you might do more harm than good with it.”

“You could destroy it,” I said.

“Not unless you were a crank,” she returned. “And that brings me just to the point. I know that I’m doing a very queer thing to get married, when we know so little, really, about you,” and she accented this confession with a laugh that was also a kiss. “But I want to show people that we are just as practical as anybody; and if they can know that I have left my money all in United States bonds, they’ll respect us, no matter what I do with the interest. Don’t you see? We can come back, and preach and teach Altrurianism, and as long as we pay our way, nobody will have the right to say a word. Why, Tolstoy himself doesn’t destroy his money, though he wants other people to do it. His wife keeps it, and supports the family. You have to do it.”

“He doesn’t do it willingly.”

“No. And we won’t. And after a while — after we’ve got back, and compared Altruria and America from practical experience, if we decide to go to live there altogether, I will let you do what you please with the hateful money. I suppose we couldn’t take it there with us.”

“No more than you could take it to heaven with you,” I answered solemnly; but she would not let me be altogether serious about it.

“Well, in either case, we could get on without it, though we certainly could not get on without it, here. Why, Aristide, it is essential to the influence we shall try to exert for Altrurianism; for if we came back here, and preached the true life without any money to back us, no one would pay any attention to us. But if we have a good house waiting for us, and are able to entertain nicely, we can attract the best people, and — and — really do some good.”

I rose in a distress which I could not hide. “Oh, Eveleth, Eveleth!” I cried. “You are like all the rest, poor child. You are the creature of your environment, as we all are. You cannot escape what you have been. It may be that I was wrong to wish or expect you to cast your lot with me in Altruria, at once and forever. It may be that it is my duty to return here with you after a time, not only to let you see that Altruria is best, but to end my days in this unhappy land, preaching and teaching Altrurianism; but we must not come as prophets to the comfortable people, and entertain nicely. If we are to renew the evangel, it must be in the life and the spirit of the First Altrurian: we must come poor to the poor; we must not try to win any one, save through his heart and his conscience; we must be simple and humble as the least of those that Christ bade follow Him. Eveleth, perhaps you have made a mistake! I love you too much to wish you to suffer even for your good. Yes, I am so weak as that! I did not think that this would be the sacrifice for you that it seems, and I will not ask it of you. I am sorry that we have not understood each other, as I supposed we had. I could never become an American; perhaps you could never become an Altrurian. Think of it, dearest! Think well of it, before you take the step which you cannot recede from. I hold you to no promise; I love you so dearly that I cannot let you hold yourself. But you must choose between me and your money — no; not me! — but between love and your money. You cannot keep both.”

She had stood listening to me; now she cast herself on my heart, and stopped my words with an impassioned kiss. “Then there is no choice for me. My choice is made, once for all.” She set her hands against my breast, and pushed me from her. “Go, now! But come again to-morrow. I want to think it all over again. Not that I have any doubt; but because you wish it — you wish it, don’t you? — and because I will not let you ever think I acted upon an impulse, and that I regretted it.”

“That is right, Eveleth! That is like you” I said, and I took her into my arms for good-night.

The next day, I came for her decision, or rather for her confirmation of it. The man who opened the door to me, met me with a look of concern and embarrassment. He said Mrs. Strange was not at all well, and had said lie was to give me the letter he handed me. I asked, in taking it, if I could see Mrs. Gray, and he answered that Mrs. Gray had not been down yet, either, but he would go and see. I was impatient to read my letter, and I made I know not what vague reply, and I found myself, I know not how, on the pavement, with the letter open in my hand. It began abruptly without date or address:

“You will believe that I have not slept, when you read this.

“I have thought it all over again, as you wished, and it is all over between us.

“I am what you said, the creature of my environment. I cannot detach myself from it; I cannot escape from what I have been.

“I am writing this with a strange coldness, like the chill of death in my very soul. I do not ask you to forgive me; I have your forgiveness already. Do not forget me; that is what I ask. Remember me as the unhappy woman who was not equal to her chance when heaven was opened to her: who could not choose the best, when the best came to her.

“There is no use writing; if I kept on forever, it would always be the same cry of shame, of love.

“EVELETH STRANGE.”

I reeled as I read the lines. The street seemed to weave itself into a circle around me. But I knew that I was not dreaming, that this was no delirium of my sleep.

It was three days ago, and I have not tried to see her again. I have written her a line, to say that I shall not forget her, and to take the blame upon myself. After all, I expected the impossible of her.

I have yet two days before me until the steamer sails; we were to have sailed together, and now I shall sail alone.

I will try to leave it all behind me forever; but while I linger out these last long hours here, I must think, and I must doubt.

Was she, then, the poseuse that they said? Had she really no heart in our love? Was it only a pretty drama she was playing, and were those generous motives, those lofty principles which seemed to actuate her, the poetical qualities of the play, the graces of her pose? I cannot believe it. I believe that she was truly what she seemed, for she had been that even before she met me. I believe that she was pure and lofty in soul as she appeared; but that her life was warped to such a form by the false conditions of this sad world, that, when she came to look at herself again, after she had been confronted with the sacrifice before her, she feared that she could not make it without in a manner ceasing to be.

She —

But I shall soon see you again; and, until then, farewell.

A. HOMOS.

SON OF ROYAL LANGBRITH

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XII

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

I

“WE’RE neither of us young people, I know, and I can very well believe that you had not thought of marrying again. I can account for your surprise at my offer, even your disgust—” Dr. Anther hesitated.

“Oh no!” Mrs. Langbrith protested.

“But I can’t see why it should be ‘terrible,’ as you call it. If you had asked me simply to take ‘no’ for an answer, I could have taken it. Or taken it better.”

He looked at her with a wounded air, and she said, “I didn’t mean ‘terrible’ in that way. I was only thinking of it for myself, or not so much myself as — some one.” She glanced at him, where, tenderly indignant with her, he stood by the window, quite across the room, and she seemed to wish to say more, but let her eyes drop without saying more.

He was silent, too, for a time which he allowed to prolong itself in the apparent expectation that she would break their silence. But he had to speak first. “I don’t like mysteries. I can forget — or ignore — any sense of ‘terrible’ you had in mind, if you will tell me one thing. Do you ask me now to take simply ‘no’ for an answer?”

“Oh no!” The words were as if surprised from her, and she made with her catching breath as if she would have caught them back.

He came quickly across the room to her. “What is it, Amelia?”

“I can’t tell you,” she shuddered out, and she recoiled, pulling herself up, as if she wished to escape but felt an impenetrable hinderance at her back. In the action, she showed taller than she was, and more girlishly slender. At forty, after her wifehood of three years and her widowhood of nineteen years, the inextinguishable innocence of girlhood, which keeps itself through all the experiences of a good woman’s life, was pathetic in her appealing eyes; and the mourning, subdued to the paler shades of purple, which she permanently wore, would have made a stranger think of an orphan rather than a widow in her presence.

Anther’s burly frame arrested itself at her recoil. His florid face, clean shaven at a time when nearly all men wore beards, was roughed to a sort of community of tint with his brown overcoat by the weather of many winters’ and summers’ driving in his country practice. His iron-gray hair, worn longer than the fashion was in towns, fell down his temples and neck from under his soft hat. He had on his driving-gloves, and he had his whip in one hand. He had followed Mrs. Langbrith indoors in that figure from the gate, where his unkempt old horse stood with his mud - spattered buggy, to pursue the question which she tried rather than wished to shun, and he did not know that he had not uncovered. At the pathos in her eyes and in her cheeks, which had the vertical hollows showing oftener in youth than in later life, the harshness of gathered will went out of his face. “I know what you mean,” he said; and at his words the tears began to drip down her face without the movement of any muscle in it, as if a habit of self-control which enabled her to command the inward effects of emotion had not been able to extend itself to its displays. “Poor thing!” he pitied her. “Must you always have a tyrant?”

“He isn’t a tyrant,” she said.

“Oh yes, he is! I know the type. I dare say v he doesn’t hit you, but he terrorizes you.”

Mrs. Langbrith did not speak. In her reticence, even her tears stopped.

“You tempt him to bully you. Lord bless me, you tempt me l But I won’t; no, I won’t. Amelia, why, in Heaven’s name, should he object? He has his own interests, quite apart from yours; his own world, which you couldn’t enter if he would let you.

A fellow in his junior year at college is as remote from his mother in everything as if he were in another planet!”

“We write to each other every Sunday,” she urged, diffidently.

“I have no doubt you try to keep along with him; that’s your nature; but I know that he cowed you before he left home, and I know that he cows you still. I could read your correspondence — the spirit — without seeing it. He isn’t to blame. You’ve let him walk over you till he thinks there is no other path to manhood. Remember, I don’t say Jim is a bad fellow. He is a very good fellow — considering.” The doctor went to the window and stooped to look out at his horse, which remained as he had left it, only more patiently sunken in a permanence expressed by the collapsing of its hind quarters into a comfortable droop, and a dreamy dejection of its large head. In the mean time, Mrs. Langbrith had sat down in a chair which she seemed to think had offered itself to her, and when the doctor came back he asked, “May I sit down?”

“Why, of course! I’m ashamed—”

“No, no! Don’t say that! Don’t say anything like that!”

In the act of sitting down, he realized that he had his hat on. He took it off and put it on the floor near his feet, where it toppled into a soft heap. His hair had partly lifted with it, and its disorder on his crown somewhat concealed its thinness. “I want to talk this matter over sensibly. We are not two young things that we need be scared at our own feelings, or each other’s. I suppose I may say we both knew it was coming to something like this?” She might not have let him say so for her, but in her silence he went on to say so for himself.

“I knew it was coming, anyway, and I’ve known it for a good while. I have liked you ever since I came to Saxmills” — she trembled and colored a little— “but I wouldn’t be saying what I am saying to you, if I had cared for you before Langbrith died as I care for you now. That would be, to my thinking, rather loathsome. I should despise myself for it; I should despise you; I couldn’t help it. But we are both fairly outside of that. I didn’t begin to realize how it was with me till about a year ago, and I don’t suppose that you—”

Mrs. Langbrith shifted her position slightly, but he did not notice, and he began again.

“So I feel that I can offer you a clean hand. I’m six years older than you are, which makes it just about right; and I’m not so poor that I need seem to be after your — thirds. I’ve got a good practice, and I don’t intend to take life so hard hereafter. I could give you as pleasant a home—”

“Oh, I couldn’t think of leaving this!” she broke out, helplessly.

Anther allowed himself to smile. “Well, well, there’s no hurry. But if Jim marries—”

“I should live with him.”

“I’m imagining that you would live with me.”

“You mustn’t.”

“I’m merely imagining; I’m not trying to commit you to anything, or to overrule you at all. My idea is, that there’s been enough of that in your life. I want you to overrule me, and if you don’t fancy settling down immediately, and would like a year or two in Europe first, I could freshen my science up in Vienna or Paris, and come back all the better prepared to keep on in my practice here; or I could give up my practice altogether.”

“You oughtn’t to do that.”

“No, I oughtn’t. But all this is neither here nor there, till the great point is settled. Do you think any one could care for me as I care for you?”

“Why, of course, Dr. Anther?”

“Do you care for me — that way — now?” He seemed to expect evasion or hesitation, even such elusion as might have expressed itself in material escape from him, and, unconsciously, he hitched his chair forward as if to hem her in.

It was a needless precaution. She answered instantly, “You know I do.”

“Amelia,” Anther asked solemnly, without changing his posture or the slant of his face in its lift towards hers, “have I put any pressure on you to say this? Do you say it as freely as if I hadn’t asked you?”

The absurdity of the question did not appear to either of them. She answered, “I say it as freely as if it had never been asked. I would have said it years ago. I have always liked you — that way. Or ever since—”

He leaned back in his chair and pushed his hands forward on the arms. “Then — then—” he began, bewilderedly, and she said:

“But—”

“Ah!” he broke out, “I know what that ‘but’ means. Why need there be any such ‘but’? Do you think he dislikes me?”

“No, he likes you; he respects you. He says you are a physician who would be famous in a large place. He—”

Anther put the rest aside with his hand. “Then he would object to any one? Is that it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Langbrith, with a drop to specific despair from her general hopelessness.

“I don’t recognize his right,” Anther said sharply, “unless he is ready to promise that he will never leave you to be pushed aside; turned from a mother into a mother-in-law. I don’t recognize his right. Why does he assume such a right?”

“Out of reverence for his father’s memory.”

II

ONE cannot look on a widow who has long survived her husband without a curiosity not easily put into terms. The curiosity is intensified and the difficulty enhanced if there are children to testify of a relation which, in the absence of the dead, has no other witness. The man has passed out of the woman’s life as absolutely as if he had never been there; it is conceivable that she herself does not always think of her children as also his. Yet they are his children, and there must be times when he holds her in mortmain through them, when he is still her husband, still her lord and master. But how much, otherwise, does she keep of that intimate history of emotions, experiences, so manifold, so recondite? Is he as utterly gone, to her sense, as to all others? Or is he in some sort there still, in her ear, in her eye, in her touch? Was it for the nothing which it now seems that they were associated in the most tremendous of the human dramas, the drama that allies human nature with the creative, the divine and the immortal, on one side, the bestial and the perishable on the other? Does oblivion pass equally over the tremendous and the trivial and blur them alike?

Anther looked at Mrs. Langbrith in a whirl of question: question of himself as well as of her. By virtue of his privity to her past, he was in a sort of authority over her; but it may have been because of his knowledge that he almost humbly forbore to use his authority.

“Amelia,” he entreated her, “have you brought him up in a superstition of his father?”

“Oh no!” She had the effect of hurrying to answer him. “Oh, never!”

“I am glad of that, anyway. But if you have let him grow up in ignorance—”

“How could I help that?”

“You couldn’t! He made himself solid, there. But the boy’s reverence for his father’s memory is sacrilege—”

“I know,” she tremulously consented; and in her admission there was no feint of sparing the dead, of defending the name she bore, or the man whose son she had borne. She must have gone all over that ground long ago, and abandoned it. “It ought to have come out,” she even added.

“Yes, but it never can come out now, while any of his victims live,” Anther helplessly raged. “I’m willing to help keep it covered up in his grave myself, because you’re one of them. If poor Hawberk had only taken to drink instead of opium!”

“Yes,” she again consented, with no more apparent feeling for the memory imperilled by the conjecture than if she had been nowise concerned in it.

“But you must, Amelia — I hate to blame you; I know how true you are — you must have let the boy think—”

“As a child, he used to ask me, but not much; and what would you have had I should answer him?”

“Of course, of course! You couldn’t.”

“I used to wonder if I could. Once, when he was little, he put his finger on this” — she put her own finger on a scar over her left eye—” and asked me what made it. I almost told him.”

Anther groaned and twisted in his chair. “The child always spoke of him,” she went on passionlessly, “as being in heaven. I found out, one night, when I was saying his prayers with him, that — you know how children get things mixed up in their thoughts — he supposed Mr. Langbrith was the father in heaven he was praying to.”

“Gracious powers!” Anther broke out.

“I suppose,” she concluded, with a faint sigh, “though it’s no comfort, that there are dark corners in other houses.”

“Plenty,” Anther grimly answered, from the physician’s knowledge. “But not many as dark as in yours, Amelia.”

“No,” she passively consented once more. “As he grew up,” she resumed the thread of their talk, without prompting, “he seemed less and less curious about it; and I let it go. I suppose I wanted to escape from it, to forget it.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“But, doctor,” she pleaded with him for the extenuation which she could not, perhaps, find in herself, “I never did teach him by any word or act — unless not saying anything was doing it — that his father was the sort of man he thinks he was. I should have been afraid that Mr. Langbrith himself would not have liked that. It would have been a fraud upon the child.”

“I don’t think Langbrith would have objected to it on that ground,” Anther bitterly suggested.

“No, perhaps not. But between Mr. Langbrith and me there were no concealments, and I felt that he would not have wished me to impose upon the child expressly.”

“Oh, he preferred the tacit deceit, if it would serve his purpose. I’ll allow that. And in this case it seems to have done it.”

“Do you mean,” she meekly asked, “that I have deceived James?”

“No,” said Anther, with a blurt of joyless laughter. “But if such a thing were possible, if it were not too sickeningly near some wretched superstition that doesn’t believe in itself, I should say that his father deceived him through you, that he diabolically acted through your love, and did the evil which we have got to face now. Amelia!” he startled her with the resolution expressed in his utterance of her name, “you say the boy will object to my marrying you. Do you object to my telling him?”

“Telling him?”

“Just what his father was!”

“Oh, you mustn’t! It would make him hate you.”

“What difference?”

“I couldn’t let him hate you. I couldn’t bear “that.” The involuntary tears, kept back in the abstracter passages of their talk, filled her eyes again, and trembled above her cheeks.

“If necessary, he has got to know,” Anther went on, obdurately. “I won’t give you up on a mere apprehension of his opposition.”

“Oh, do give me up!” she implored. “It would be the best way.”

“It would be the worst. I have a right to you, and if you care for me, as you say—”

“I do!”

“Then, Heaven help us, you have right to me. You have a right to freedom, to peace, to rest, to security; and you are going to have it. Now, will you let it come to the question without his having the grounds of a fair judgment, or shall we tell him what he ought to know, and then do what we ought to do: marry, and let me look after you as long as I live?”

She hesitated, and then said, with a sort of furtive evasion of the point: “There is something that I ought to tell you. You said that you would despise yourself if you had cared for me in Mr. Langbrith’s lifetime.” She always spoke of her husband, dead, as she had always addressed him, living, in the tradition of her great juniority, and in a convention of what was once polite form from wives to husbands, not to be dropped in the most solemn, the most intimate, moments.

Anther found nothing grotesque in it, and, therefore, nothing peculiarly pathetic. “Well?” he asked, impatiently trying for patience. “Well, I know that I cared for you then. I couldn’t help it. Now you despise me, and that ends it.”

Anther rubbed his hand over his face; then he said, “I don’t believe you, Amelia.”

“I did,” she persisted.

“Well, then, it was all right. You couldn’t have had a wrong thought or feeling, and the theory may go. After all, I was applying the principle in my own case, and trying to equal myself with you. If you choose to equal yourself with me by saying this, I must let you; but it makes no difference. You cared for me because I stood your helper when there was no other possible, and that was right. Now, shall we tell Jim, or not?”

She looked desperately round, as if she might escape the question by escaping from the room. As all the doors were shut, she seemed to abandon the notion of flight, and said, with a deep sigh, “I must see him first.”

Anther caught up his hat and put it on, and went out without any form of leave-taking. When the outer door had closed upon him, she stole to the window, and, standing back far enough not to be seen, watched him heavily tramping down the brick walk, with its borders of box, to the white gateposts, each under its elm, budded against a sky threatening rain, and trailing its pendulous spray in the wind. He jounced into his buggy, and drew the reins over his horse, which had been standing unhitched, and drove away. She turned from the window.

III

EASTER came late that year, and the jonquils were there before it, even in the Mid-New England latitude of Saxmills, when James Langbrith brought his friend Falk home with him for the brief vacation. The two fellows had a great time, as they said to each other, among the village girls; and perhaps Langbrith evinced his local superiority more appreciably by his patronage of them than by the colonial nobleness of the family mansion, squarely fronting the main village street, with gardened grounds behind dropping to the river. He did not dispense his patronage in all cases without having his hand somewhat clawed by the recipients, but still he dispensed it; and, though Falk laughed when Langbrith was scratched, still Langbrith felt that he was more than holding his own, and he made up for any defeat he met outside by the unquestioned supremacy he bore within his mother’s house. Her shyness, out of keeping with her age and stature, invited the sovereign command which Langbrith found it impossible to refuse, though he tempered his tyranny with words and shows of affection well calculated to convince his friend of the perfect intelligence which existed between his mother and himself. When he thought of it, he gave her his arm in going out to dinner; and, when he forgot, he tried to make up by pushing her chair under her before she sat down. He was careful at table to have the conversation first pay its respects to some supposed interest of hers, and to return to that if it strayed afterwards, and include her. He conspicuously kissed her every morning when he came down to breakfast, and he kissed her at night when she would have escaped to bed without the rite.

It was Falk’s own fault if he did not conceive from Langbrith’s tenderness the ideal of what a good son should be in all points. But, as the Western growth of a German stock transplanted a generation before, he may not have been qualified to imagine the whole perfection of Langbrith’s behavior from the examples shown him. His social conditions in the past may even have been such that the ceremonial he witnessed did not impress him pleasantly; but, if so, he made no sign of displeasure. He held his peace, and beyond grinning at Langbrith’s shoulders, as he followed him out to the dining-room, he did not go. He seemed to have made up his mind that, without great loss of self-respect, he could suffer himself to be used in illustration of Langbrith’s large-mindedness with other people whom Langbrith wished to impress. At any rate, it had been a choice between spending the Easter holiday at Cambridge, or coming home with Langbrith; and he was not sorry that he had come. He was getting as much good out of the visit as Langbrith.

One night, when Mrs. Langbrith came timidly into the library to tell the two young men that dinner was ready — she had shifted the dinner-hour, at her son’s wish, from one o’clock to seven — Langbrith turned from the shelf where he had been looking into various books with his friend, and said to his mother, in giving her his arm: “I can’t understand why my father didn’t have a book-plate, unless it was to leave me the pleasure of getting one up in good shape. I want you to design it for me, will you, Falk?” he asked over his shoulder. Without waiting for the answer, he went on, instructively, to his mother: “You know the name was originally Norman.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said, with a gentle self inculpation.

“Yes,” her son explained. “I’ve been looking it up. It was Longuehaleine, and they translated it after they came to England into Longbreath, or Langbrith, as we have it. I believe I prefer our final form. It’s splendidly suggestive for a bookplate, don’t you think, Falk?” By this time he was pushing his mother’s chair under her, and talking over her head to his friend. “A boat, with a full sail, and a cherub’s head blowing a strong gale into it: something like that.”

“They might think the name was Longboat, then,” said Falk.

Mrs. Langbrith started.

“Oh, Falk has to ‘have his joke,” her son explained, tolerantly, as he took his place; “nobody minds Falk. Mother, I wish you would give a dinner for him. Why not? And we could have a dance afterwards. The old parlors would lend themselves to it handsomely. What do you say, Falk?”

“Is it for me to say I will be your honored guest?”

“Well, we’ll drop that part. We won’t feature you, if you prefer not. Honestly, though, I’ve been thinking of a dinner, mother.”

Langbrith had now taken his place, and was poising the carving knife and fork over the roast turkey, which symbolized in his mother’s simple tradition the extreme of formal hospitality. She wore her purple silk in honor of it, and it was what chiefly sustained her in the presence of the young men’s evening dress. This was too much for her, perhaps, but not too much for the turkey. The notion of the proposed dinner, however, was something, as she conceived it, beyond the turkey’s support. Without knowing just what her son meant, she cloudily imagined the dinner of his suggestion to be a banquet quite unprecedented in Saxmills society. Dinners there, except in a very few houses, were family dinners, year out and year in. They were sometimes extended to include outlying kindred, cousins and aunts and uncles who chanced to be in town or came on a visit. Very rarely, a dinner was made for some distinguished stranger: a speaker, who was going to address a political rally in the afternoon, or a lecturer, who was to be heard in the evening at the town-hall, or the clerical supply in the person of one minister or another who came to be tried for the vacant pulpit of one of the churches. Then, a few principal citizens with their wives were asked, the ministers of the other churches, the bank president, some leading merchant, the magnates of the law or medicine. The dinner was at one o’clock, and the young people were rigidly excluded. They were fed either before or after it, or farmed out among the neighboring houses till the guests were gone. Ordinarily, guests were asked to tea, which was high, with stewed chicken, hot bread, made dishes and several kinds of preserves and sweet pickles, with many sorts of cake. The last was the criterion of tasteful and lavish hospitality.

Clearly, it was nothing of all this that Mrs. Langbrith’s son had in mind. After his first year in college, when he had been so homesick that everything seemed perfect under his mother’s roof in his vacation visits, he began to bring fellows with him. Then he began to make changes. The dinner-hour was advanced from mid-day to evening, and he and his friends dressed for it. He had still to carve, for the dinner in courses was really unmanageable and unimaginable in his mother’s house-keeping; but he professed a baronial preference for carving, and he fancied an old-fashioned, old-family effect from it. The service was such as the frightened inexperience of the elderly Irish second-girl could render; under Langbrith’s threatening eye, she succeeded in offering the dishes at the left hand, and, though she stood a good way off and rather pushed them at the guests, the thing somehow was done. At least, the covered dishes were no longer set on the table, as they used always to be.

Mrs. Langbrith had witnessed the changes with trepidation but absolute acquiescence even at the first, and finally with the submission in which her son held her in everything. In the afternoon, when he and his friend, whoever it might be, put on their top-hats and top-coats and went out to call on the village girls, who did not know enough of the world to offer them tea, she spent the interval before dinner in arranging for the meal with the faithful, faded Norah. After dinner, when the young men again put on their top-hats and top-coats to call again upon the village girls, whom they had impressed with the correctness of afternoon calls, and to whom they now relented in compliance with the village custom of evening calls, Mrs. Langbrith debated with Norah the success of the dinner, studied its errors, and joined her in vows for their avoidance.

IV

The event which confronted Mrs. Langbrith in her son’s words, as he sat behind the turkey and plunged the carving-fork into its steaming and streaming breast, was so far beyond the scope of her widened knowledge that she mutely waited for him to declare it.

“People,” he went on, “have been so nice to Falk and me, that I think we ought to make some return. I put the duty side first, because I know you’ll like that, mother, and it will help to reconcile you to the fun of it. Falk is such a pagan that he can’t understand, but it will be for his good, all the same. My notion is to have a good, big dinner — twelve or fourteen at table, and then a lot in afterwards, with supper about midnight. What do you say, mother? Don’t mind Falk, if you don’t agree quite.”

“There is no Falk, Mrs. Langbrith,” the young fellow said, with an intelligence which comforted her and emboldened her against her son.

“I don’t see—” she began, and then she stopped.

“That’s right!” her son encouraged her.

“James,” she said, desperately, “I wouldn’t know how to do it.”

“I don’t want you to do it.” He laughed exultantly. “I propose to do it myself. I will have the whole thing sent up from Boston.” Between her gasps, he went on: “All I have got to do is to write an order to White, the caterer, with particulars of quantity and quality, the date and the hour, and it comes on the appointed train with three men in plain clothes; two reappear in lustrous dress-suits at dinner and supper, and serve the things the other has cooked at our range. I press the button, White does the rest. He brings china, cutlery, linen — everything. All you have to do is to hide Jerry in the bam and keep Norah up-stairs to show the ladies into the back chamber to take off their things. You can put our own cook under the sink. You’ll be astonished at the ease of the whole thing.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Langbrith said, “it will be easy, but—”

“But would it be right?” her son tenderly mocked. “What did I tell you?” he asked towards his friend. “In New England, the notion of ease conveys the sense of culpability. My mother is afraid she would have a bad conscience. If she took all the work and worry on herself, she would feel that she was paying the penalty of her pleasure beforehand; if she didn’t, she would know that she must pay for it afterwards. Isn’t that so, mother? But now you leave it to me, you dear old thing.” Langbrith ran round the table and kissed her on top of the head, and made her blush like a girl, as he patted her shoulder. “Just imagine I was master, and you couldn’t help yourself.” He went back to his place. “What was the hugest dinner you ever had in the old time?”

She hesitated, as if for his meaning. “Mr. Langbrith once entertained a company of six gentlemen, who came up here and talked of locating some cotton-mills. We called it ‘supper.’”

“I can imagine them. Can’t you, Falk? The moneyed man to supply the funds, the lawyer to draw up the papers, the civil engineer to survey the property. Very solemn, and a little pompous, but secretly ready for a burst if the opportunity offered under the right auspices; something like an outing of city officials.”

“They were very pleasant gentlemen,” Mrs. Langbrith interposed, as from her conscience.

“Oh, I dare say they were when they had tasted my father’s madeira. But about our dinner now? I don’t think we’d better have more than twelve, and I should want them equally divided between youth and age.”

Mrs. Langbrith looked at him as if she did not quite understand him, and he said:

“Have Jessamy Colebridge and Hope Hawberk and Susie Johns and Bob Matthewson — he’s a good fellow — and make out the half-dozen with Falk and me; we’re both good fellows. Then, on your side of the line, yourself first of all, mother, and the rector and his wife, and Judge and Mrs. Garley, and — who else? Oh, Dr. Anther, of course! I want Falk to meet the doctor — the dearest and quaintest old type in the world. I don’t know why he hasn’t been in to see us, mother. Has he been here lately?”

“He was here a day or two before you came,” Mrs. Langbrith answered, with her eyes down. “Perhaps he has been waiting for me to call. Well, what do you think of my dinner-party?”

“It seems very nice,” Mrs. Langbrith sighed. “And haven’t you any preferences? Nobody you want to turn down?”

“It will be a good deal of a surprise for Saxmills,” she suffered herself to say.

“I flatter myself it will. I have been telling Falk that the mixed assembly of old and young is unknown in Saxmills.”

Falk had not troubled himself to take part in the discussion, if it was that, but had given himself to the turkey and the cranberry sauce, with the mashed potatoes and the stewed squash, which Mrs. Langbrith had very good. Her son had obliged her to provide claret, which Falk now drank out of an abnormal glass with a stout stem and pimpled cup, hitherto dedicated to currant wine, before saying: “It astonished me less than if I had been used to something different all my life. You ought to have tried the other thing on me.”

“Well, I only supposed from the smartness of the people in your Caricature pictures that you had always lived in a whirl of fashion.”

“That shows how little you know of fashion,” said Falk, and Langbrith laughed with the difficult joy of a man who owns a hit.

Mrs. Langbrith glanced from one to the other; from her son, with his long, distinguished face (he had decided that it was colonial), to the dark, aquiline type of Falk, with his blade hair, his upward-pointed moustache, his pouted lips, and his prominent, floating, brown eyes! In her abeyance, she was scared at the bold person who was not afraid of her son.

“Well,” said Langbrith, “I shall have to find some one to illustrate my vers de société who knows enough of the world for both.”

“You couldn’t!” Falk insinuated.

Mrs. Langbrith did not quite catch the point, but her son laughed again. “No one ever distances you, Falk!”

He discussed the arrangement of the affair with his mother. At the end, as she rose, obedient to his sign, and he came round to give her his arm, he said: “After all, perhaps, it wouldn’t be well to strike too hard a blow. If you think you can get it up by Saturday night, mother, we’ll drop the notion of having White. Make it tea, with turkey at one end of the table and chicken pie at the other, and all the sweet pickles and preserves and kinds of cake you can get together; coffee straight through, and a glass of the old Langbrith madeira to top off with.”

V

MRS. LANGBRITH went into the library with her son and his friend by the folding doors from the dining room, but only to go out of the door which opened into the hall, and escape by that route to the kitchen for an immediate conference with the cook.

The young men dropped into deep leather chairs at opposite comers of the fireplace, after lighting their cigars. Probably, the comfort of his seat suggested Langbrith’s reflection: “It is a shame I never knew my father. We should have had so much in common. I couldn’t imagine anything more adapted to the human back than these chairs.”

“His taste?” Falk asked, between whiffs.

“Everything in the house is his taste. I don’t believe my mother has changed a thing. He must have been a strong personality.” Langbrith followed his friend’s eye in its lift towards his father’s portrait over the mantel.

“I should think so,” Falk assented.

“Those old New England faces,” Langbrith continued, meditatively, “have a great charm. From a child, that face of my father’s fascinated me. As I got on, and began to be interested in my environment, I read into it all I had read out of Hawthorne about the Puritan type. I put the grim old chaps out of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables and the Twice-Told Tales into it, and interpreted my father by them. But, really, I knew very little about him. My mother’s bereavement seemed to have sealed her lips, and I preferred dreaming to asking. A kid is queer! Once or twice when I did ask, she evaded answering; that was after I was old enough to understand, and I didn’t press my questions. He was much older than she; twenty years, I believe. He couldn’t have been a Puritan in his creed; he was a Unitarian, as far as church-going went, and I believe my mother is a Unitarian yet; but she goes to the Episcopal Church, which makes itself a home for everybody, and she likes the rector, You’ll like him, too, Falk.”

“He won’t talk theology to me, I suppose,” Falk grumbled.

“He’ll talk athletics with you. The good thing about a man of his church is that he’s usually a man of the world, too. He’s an Enderby, you know.”

“I shouldn’t be much the wiser, if I did,” Falk said.

“I wouldn’t work that pose so hard, Falk. You can’t get even with the Enderbys by ignoring them; and you can’t pretend it’s meekness that makes you profess ignorance. The only thing I don’t like about you is your peasant pride.”

“I still have hopes of winning your whole heart then. I’ll study your peasant humility.”

Langbrith made as if he had not noticed the point. He rose and moved restively about the room, and then came back to his chair again, and said, as if he had really been thinking of something else: “If I should decide to take up dramatic literature, I believe I’ll go to Paris to continue my studies, and perhaps we’ll keep on there together. I wish we could! Can’t you manage it, somehow? Those things of yours in Caricature have attracted attention; and if Life has asked you to send something, why couldn’t you get a lot of orders, and go out with me?”

“Gentle dreamer!” Falk murmured.

“No, but why not, really?”

“Because a lot of orders are not to be got for the asking, and I’m a bad hand at asking. I think my cheek is good for applying to a New York paper for a chance to do scenes in court, and hurry-pictures of fires, and the persons in a vivid accident; but I don’t think it would hold out to invite Harper’s or Scribner’s to have me do high-class studies abroad for them. I may be a fool, but I am not that kind of fool. Unless,” Falk hastened to anticipate, “I’m all kinds.”

Langbrith was apparently not watching for the chance snatched from him. “Well, I think you could do it, somehow,” he insisted. “I’m going to Paris for my post-graduate business, and I’ve set my heart on having you with me. I wonder,” he mused aloud, “why I like you so much, Falk?”

“I couldn’t say,” Falk returned, without apparent interest in the mystery.

“You’re always saying nasty things to me,” Langbrith pursued. “You take every chance to give me a dig.”

“It’s all that keeps you in bounds.”

“No—”

“Yes, it is; your arrogance would naturally splay all over the place. But just at present, you’re in the melting mood that saps everybody’s manhood towards the end of the senior year. If I didn’t watch myself, I should feel a tenderness for you at times.”

“Would you, really, Falk?” Langbrith appeared touched, and interested.

“I shall never know, for I don’t mean to be taken off my guard.”

“What a delightful fellow you are, Falk!”

“Do you think so? I should suppose you were a woman.”

“Oh, it isn’t the women alone that love you, old man. I love you because you are the only one who is frank with me.”

“It takes courage to be candid with a prince. But, thank Heaven, I have it.”

“Oh, pshaw! There’s nobody by to admire your sarcasms.”

“I’m satisfied with you, my dear boy.”

“Will you answer me a serious question seriously?”

“Yes, if you keep your hands off, and don’t try to pat me on the head.”

Langbrith was silent, and he would not speak, in his resentment, till Falk said, “Fire away.”

Still it was an interval before Langbrith recovered poise enough to ask, “What do you think of Jessamy Colebridge?”

“Hope Hawberk, you mean,” Falk promptly translated.

Langbrith laughed, and said, “Well, make it Hope Hawberk.”

“She’s about the prettiest girl I’ve seen.”

“Isn’t she! And the gracefulest. There’s more charm in grace than in beauty, every time.”

“There is, this time, it seems.”

Langbrith laughed again for pleasure. “She has grace of mind. I don’t know where she gets it. Her father — well, that’s a tragedy.”

“Better tell it.”

“It would take a long time to do it justice. He was my father’s partner, here, when the mills were started, and I’ve heard he was a very brilliant fellow. They were great friends. But he must have had some sort of dry rot, always, and he took to opium.”

“Kill him?”

“No, it doesn’t kill on those terms, I believe. He’s away just now on one of his periodical retreats in a sanatorium, where they profess to cure opiumeating. There’s a lot of it among the country people about here — the women, especially. When Hawberk cranes out, he is fitter than ever for opium.”

“Well, that’s something.”

“I suppose it’s Dr. Anther that keeps him along. I want you to meet Dr. Anther, Falk.”

“I inferred as much from a remark you made at dinner.”

“Oh, I believe I did speak of it. Well, now you know I mean it. He’s one of those men — doctors or lawyers, mostly; you don’t catch the reverend clergy hiding their light under a bushel quite so much — who could have been something great in the larger world, if they hadn’t preferred a small world. I suppose it is a streak of indolence in them. Anther’s practice has kept him poor in Saxmills, but it would have made him rich in Boston. You mustn’t imagine that he’s been rusting scientifically here. He is thoroughly up to date as a physician; goes away now and then and rubs up in New York. He’s been our family physician ever since I can remember, and before. My father and he were great cronies, I believe, though he’s never boasted of it. I have inferred it from things my mother has dropped; or perhaps,” Langbrith laughed, “I’ve only imagined it. At any rate, he dates back to my father’s time, and two strong men, both willing to stay in Saxmills, must have had a good deal in common. He’s always been in and out of the house, more like a friend than a physician. A guardian couldn’t have looked after me better, when it was a question of advice; and, as a doctor, he pulled me through all the ills that flesh of kids is heir to. He has that abrupt quaintness that an old doctor gets. He would go into a play or a book just as he is. You don’t care so much for that sort of man as I do, I know, for you’re a sort of character yourself. Now, I’m different. I—”

“This seems getting to be more about you than your doctor,” Falk said. He rose, threw the end of his cigar into the fire, and stretched himself.

“What is the matter with our going to see some of those girls?”

Langbrith flushed, as he rose too, but he said nothing in malting for the door with his friend.

They met his mother before they reached the door, on her return from the kitchen. She gave the conscious start which every encounter with her son surprised from her since his home-coming, and gasped, “Will you — shall you — see the young people, James? Or shall I?”

“I can save you that trouble, mother. Falk and I were just going out to make some calls, and we can ask the girls.”

“Well,” his mother said, and she passed the young men on her way into the room, while they stood aside for her; she gave her housekeeping glance over it, to see what things would have to be put in place when they were gone. “Then, I will ask the others, and we will have the dance after supper. Were you going,” she turned to her son with, for the first time, something like interest, “to ask Hope?”

“Why, certainly!”

“Yes. That was what I understood.”

“Didn’t you want me to? — I mentioned her.”

“Yes, yes, oh yes. I forgot. And your uncle John?”

“Yes, certainly. But you know he won’t come. Wild horses couldn’t get him here.”

“You ought to ask him.”

“Now, that’s just like my mother,” Langbrith said, as he went out with Falk into the night. “Uncle John has had charge of the mills here ever since my father died, and he was nominally my guardian. But he hasn’t been inside of the house, I believe, half a dozen times, except on business, and he barely knows me by sight.”

“The one I met yesterday in the office?”

“Yes. That’s where he lives; that’s his home; though, of course, he has a place where he sleeps and eats, and has an old colored man to keep house for him. He’s a perfect hermit, and he’ll only hate a little less to be asked to come than he would to come. But mother wouldn’t omit asking him on any account. It makes me laugh.”

VI

THE young men walked away under the windy April sky, with the boughs of the elms that overhung the village street creaking in the starless dark. The smell of spring was in the air, which beat damply and refreshingly in their faces, hot from the indoors warmth.

Langbrith was the first to speak again; but he did not speak till he had opened the gate of the walk leading up to the door of the house where he decided to begin their rounds. “Hello! they’re at home, apparently,” he said.

The windows of the house before them, as they showed to their advance through the leafless spray of the shrubbery, were bright with lamplight, and the sound of a piano, broken in upon with gay shouts and shrieks of girls’ laughter, penetrated the doors and the casements. If there had been any doubt on the point made, it was dispersed at their ring. There came a nervous whoop from within, followed by whispering and tittering; and then the door was flung open by Jessamy Colebridge herself, obscured by the light which silhouetted her little head and limp figure to the young men on the threshold.

“Why, Mr. Langbrith! And Mr. Falk! Well, if this isn’t too much! We were just talking — weren’t we, girls?” she called over her shoulder into the room she had left, and Langbrith asked gravely: “May we come in? If you are at home?”

“At home! I should think so! Papa and mamma are at evening meeting, and I let the two girls go; and I have got in Hope and Susie here to cheer me up, for I’m down sick, if you want to know, with the most fearful cold. I only hope it isn’t grippe, but you can’t tell.”

She led them, chattering, into the parlor, where the other young ladies, stricken with sudden decorum, stood like statues of themselves in the attitude of joyous alarm which the ring at the door had surprised them into.

One of them, a slender girl, with masses of black hair, imperfectly put away from her face, which looked reddened beyond the tint natural to her type, flared at the young men with large black eyes, in a sort of defiant question. The other, short and dense of figure, was a decided blonde; her smooth hair was a pale gold, and her serenely smiling face, with its close-drawn eyelids — the lower almost touching the upper, and wrinkling the fine short nose — was what is called “funny.” It was flushed, too, but was of a delicacy of complexion duly attested by its freckles.

There was a strong smell of burning in the room, and, somehow, an effect of things having been scurried out of sight.

The slim girl gave a wild cry, and precipitated herself towards the fireplace as if plunging into it; but it was only to snatch from the bed of coals a long-handled wire cage, from the meshes of which a thick, acrid smoke was pouring. “Much good it did to hustle the plates away and leave this burning up! Open the window, Jessamy!”

But Jessamy left Langbrith to do it, while she clapped her hands and stood shouting: “We were popping corn! The furnace fire was out, and I lit this to keep the damp out, and we thought we would pop some corn! There was such a splendid bed of coals, and I was playing, and Susie and Hope were popping the corn! We were in such a gale, and we all hustled the things away when you rang, for we didn’t know who you were, and the girls thought it would be too absurd to be caught popping com, and in the hurry we forgot all about the popper itself, and left it burning up full of corn!’

Her voice rose to a screech, and she bowed herself with laughter, while she beat her hands together.

The young men listened according to their nature. Falk said: “I thought it was the house burning down. I didn’t know which of you ladies wanted to be saved first.”

The girl who had run to throw the corn-popper out of the window came back with Langbrith, who shut the window behind her. “Oh, I can swim,” she said, and they all laughed at her joke.

“Well, then, get the com, Hope,” Jessamy shrieked; “we may as well be hung for a sheep as a goat. It is a goat, isn’t it?” she appealed to the young men.

“It doesn’t seem as if it were,” Langbrith answered, with mock thoughtfulness.

“Some of those animals, then,” the girl laughed over her shoulder. “Where did I put the plates, Susie?”

“I know where I put the corn,” Hope said, going to the portière, where it touched the floor next the room beyond.

Falk ran after her. “Let me help carry it,” he entreated.

“Do get the salt, Susie,” Jessamy commanded. “I know where the plates are now.”

“We hadn’t got to the salt,” Susie Johns said; but Jessamy had not heard her when she stooped over the music-rack and handed up three plates to Langbrith.

Falk came with Hope, elaborately supporting one handle of the dish with a little heap of popped corn  in the bottom. She held the other and explained, “ We had only got to the first popping,” and Jessamy added:

“We were not expecting company.”

“We could go away,” Langbrith suggested.

“Susie, have you got the salt?” Jessamy implored, putting the plates on the piano. Susie stood smiling serenely, and again the hostess forgot her. “Shall we have it on the piano, girls? Oh, I know; let’s have it on the hearth-rug here.”

“Yes,” Langbrith said, doubling his lankness down before the fire. He went on:

“‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground, And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings.”

Jessamy had not minded the hoyden prank in which he took her at her word, but the name he seemed to invoke so lightly shocked her. She drew her face down and looked grave.

“It isn’t swearing, Jessamy,” Hope Hawberk reassured her; “it’s only Shakespeare. Mr. Langbrith  never talks anything but Shakespeare, you know.” She had a deep, throaty voice, which gave weight to her irony.

“Oh, all right,” said Jessamy. “Susie, you wicked thing, have you got that salt? Why, of course! I never brought it from the dining-room. Here, sit by Mr. Langbrith, as Hope calls him — his Christian name used to be Jim — and keep him from Shakespearing, while I go for it.”

“You might get him a plate, too,” Falk called after her. Susie coiled herself softly, kitten-like, down on the rug at Langbrith’s side. “I’m going to eat out of the dish.”

“Hope, don’t you let him!” Jessamy screamed on her way to the dining-room.

When she came back she distributed the plates among her guests, and with one, in which Hope had put her a portion of corn, she stood behind them. “Bless you, my children,” she said. “Now, trot out your kings, Jimmy — Mr. Langbrith, I should say.”

“Oh no,” Langbrith protested; “ghosts. We oughtn’t to tell anything less goose-fleshing than ghost-stories before this fire.”

“Why, I thought you said your kings were dead. Good kings, dead kings!” Jessamy added, with no relation of ideas. “Or is it Indians?”

Anything served. They were young, and alone — joyful mysteries to themselves and to one another. They talked and laughed. They hardly knew what they said, and not at all why they laughed.

At nine o’clock, Jessamy’s father and mother came home, and with them some one whose voice they knew. The elders discreetly went up-stairs, when Jessamy called out to whoever it was had come with them, “Come in here, Harry Matthewson.”

They received him with gay screams, Jessamy having dropped to her knees beside the others, for the greater effect upon the smiling young fellow who came in rubbing his hands.

“Well, well!” he said.

“Now this is a little too pat,” Langbrith protested, and he gave the invitation which he had come with, and which met with no dissent.

“It is a vote,” said Matthewson, with the authority of a young lawyer beginning to take part in town meetings.

“Well, now,” Langbrith said, getting to his feet, “the business of the meeting being over, I move Falk and I adjourn.”

“No, no, don’t let him, Mr. Falk! You don’t want to go, do you?”

“Only for a breath of air. I’m nearly roasted.”

Matthewson laughed. “I wondered what you were sitting round the fire for; it’s as mild as May out, and there’s a full moon.”

“A full moon?” Jessamy put out her hand for him to help her up. The other girls put out their hands for help, too. “Then I’ll tell you what.

We’ll go home with the poor things, and see that the goblins don’t get them. What do you say, girls?”

“Oh! they say ‘yes.’ Don’t you, girls?” Langbrith entreated, with clasped hand.

The young men helped them put on their wraps. Jessamy, when she was fully equipped for the adventure, called up-stairs to her mother: “Mamma, I am going out for a few minutes.” Her mother shrieked back: “Jessamy Colebridge, don’t you do it. You’ll take your death.”

“No, I won’t, mamma. The air will do my cold good,” and she closed the debate by shutting the door behind her. “Now, that’s settled,” she said. “Where shall we go first?”

The notion of going home with Langbrith and Falk seemed to be relinquished. They went about from one house to another, where there were girls of their acquaintance, and sang before their gates or under their windows. At the first sign of consciousness within, they fled with shrieks and shouts.

In the assortment of couples, Matthewson led the way with Susie Johns, Falk followed with Jessamy, Langbrith and Hope were paired. Sometimes, the girls ran on alone; sometimes, in the dark places, they took the young men’s arms.

They saw each other to their houses; then, not to be outdone in civility, the girls who were left came away with those who had left them. It promised never to end, and no one seemed to care. The joy of their youth had gone to their heads in a divine madness, in which differences of temperament were merged and they were all alike.

Langbrith did not know bow it happened that he was at last taking leave of Hope Hawberk alone at her gate. He stooped over to whisper something. She pulled her hand from his arm, and said, “Don’t be silly!” and ran up the walk to her door. The elastic weight of her hand remained on his arm.

VII

THE compromise between a Boston dinner and a Saxmills tea, which the mother and son had agreed upon, prospered beyond the wont of compromises. It was a very good meal of the older-fashioned sort, and it was better served by Norah, from her habit of such meals, than could have been expected, with the help of the niece she had got in for the evening. The turkey was set before Langbrith and the chicken pie before his mother. Norah asked the guests which they would have, in taking their plates, and brought the plates bade with the chosen portion, and the vegetables added by the host or hostess from the deep dishes on their right and left. There were small plates of subsidiary viands, such as brandied peaches and sweet pickles, which the guests passed to one another. Tea and coffee and cocoa were served through the supper by Norah’s niece from the pantry, where she had them hot from the kitchen stove. There was no wine till the ladies left the table, when Langbrith had Norah put down, with the cigars, some decanters of madeira from, as he said, his father’s stock. He had a little pomp in saying that; it seemed to him there was something ancestral in it.

Instead of letting all follow the hostess out to supper pell-mell, as the Saxmills custom had always been, he went about asking the men, sotto voce, if they would take out such and such ladies. “Will you take out my mother, Dr. Anther?” he said, with special graciousness. He told Falk to give his arm to Hope Hawberk, and he gave his own to the rector’s wife. But when they came to look up their places, and found their names, by Falk’s example, on cards beside their plates, Hope found hers on Langbrith’s left. That way of appointing people their chairs was an innovation at Saxmills, and the girls put their dinner cards where they should remember to take them away. But the effect of this innovation was lost in the great innovation of having old and young people together at tea. The like had not happened in Saxmills before; except at a church sociable or a Sunday-school picnic, it had scarcely happened that the different ages met at all. When they did, it was understood that the old people were to go away early, and leave the young people to take their pleasure in their own fashion.

At first, the affair went hitchily. The girls had confided to one another, in the library, their astonishment at finding themselves in the mixed company, and their wonder whether their elders were going to stay for the dance. But, partly through their fear of Langbrith, which they could overcome only when they had him on their own ground, and partly through their embarrassment at being obliged to talk with the rector and the doctor and the judge, they remained in a petrified decorum which lasted well into the supper. Even when Jessamy Colebridge caught the eye of Hope Hawberk from her place diagonally across the table, and saw its lid droop in a slow, deliberate wink, instead of bursting into a whoop of sympathetic intelligence, she blushed painfully and turned her face away, with a tendency to tears. She was not having, as she would have said, a bit good time, between the judge on one hand, who did not speak much to any one, and Mr. Matthewson on the other, who was talking to Susie Johns. And she felt the joyous mockery of Hope’s triumph, where she sat between Falk and Langbrith, without the ability to respond in kind. Besides, she could not see why her father and mother had not been invited, if there were going to be old people. She could not catch the words which were kindly cast her across the table, from time to time, by the judge’s wife. But good cheer is a solvent which few spiritual discomforts can resist. Before she left the table, Jessamy was beginning to have the good time which mounted as the evening went on, and culminated in Mr. Matthewson’s going home with her. Judge Garley had scarcely talked to a young girl since his wife had ceased to be one. But he was so little versed in the nature of girls that he did not know how much he had failed to enjoy Jessamy’s conversation till his wife asked him at home how he could manage to find things to say to that little simpleton. In fact, he had set her and young Matthewson talking across him, while Susie sat placidly silent, or funnily smiled to her indirect vis-à-vis, who happened to be Falk, released to her by Hope’s preoccupation with Langbrith. As he noted to Susie, those two seemed to be having rather a stormy time, springing from a radical difference of opinion upon a point of sociology advanced by Langbrith, who held that the unions ought to be broken up, and alleged their criminal incivism even in their strikes in such a small place as Saxmills, where labor and capital were personally acquainted.

Mrs. Enderby was heard saying affably, across the table to Hope: “I didn’t know young people took such an interest in those things. You ought to talk with Mr. Enderby. I’m afraid he finds me very lukewarm.”

“Oh, well, then, I’ll talk with you, Mrs. Enderby,” Langbrith promised. “There’s nothing I like so much as lukewarmness on these subjects. I’d no idea I should get into such hot water with Miss Hawberk. I believe she’s a walking delegate in disguise!”

“Well,” the girl said, “I shouldn’t like anything better than to lead your hands out on a strike. I think it would be fun.”

Mrs. Enderby said “Oh!” in compliance with the convention that one ought to be shocked by such audacity, but really amused with it.

“You’ll find me in the ranks of labor, if you ever do lead a strike,” Langbrith said, gallantly deserting his colors.

Hope went on: “I should like to be a great labor leader and start a revolution.”

“What salary would yoù want?” Langbrith asked.

“About half the profits of the employers!” the girl came back.

“Well, we must talk to Uncle John about that. He manages the mills. But if your strike cut the profits down to nothing?”

“There, there!” Mrs. Enderby interposed. “You mustn’t let your joke go too far.”

“Oh, I haven’t been joking,” Hope said.

“I was never more in earnest,” Langbrith followed, laughing.

His laughing provoked her. She wanted, somehow, to turn their banter into earnest — to say something saucy to him, something violent; something that would show Mrs. Enderby that she was not afraid of him. At the same time, she believed she did not care for Mrs. Enderby or what she might think, and in the midst of her insurrection it seemed to her that he was handsomer than she had ever supposed — that he had beautiful eyes. She noticed, for the first time, that they were gray, instead of black.

“How do you like my flowers?” he asked, as if their talk had been of the decorations of the table.

“Oh, did they all come out of your conservatory?” she returned, with an amiability which she could not account for. “It looks very pretty from here.” She glanced down the table, with a quick turn of her little head, towards the glass extension of the room, where the plants bedded in the ground showed their green and bloom in masses under the paper lanterns, and the fine spray of an inaudible fountain glimmered.

“Yes, doesn’t it? Everything that my mother touches flourishes.”

“Oh, I know that!” the girl said, with an intonation of wonder and reverence.

“There are very few things,” he said, from his proud satisfaction, “that my mother can’t do better than anybody else.”

“Did you have to go to Harvard to find that out? Everybody in Saxmills knew it!”

“But you haven’t,” he reverted, “said what you thought of the arrangement.” He indicated the flowers on the table with a turn of his head.

Another mood seized her. “You can’t spoil flowers!”

“Well, I did my worst.” He wished her to know that he had suggested their arrangement.

Mrs. Enderby was talking with her left-hand neighbor. Langbrith lowered his voice slightly in asking: “Are you going to give me the first dance, Hope?”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely; and then indifferently, “I suppose I must begin by dancing with somebody.”

He laughed and they were silent, while she kept herself from panting by drawing each breath very slowly and smoothly. Her breast heaved and her nostrils dilated.

There came a quick clash on the glass roof of the conservatory. “Rain?” she said. “Goodness! How are we going to get home?”

“Oh, don’t even talk of going home,” he implored, and she laughed.

He looked down the table to catch his mother’s eye, and give her the sign for rising with the ladies and leaving the room. That was a main part of his innovation and a thing unprecedented. But he had agreed with Falk that the stroke could be broken by each giving his arm, in the new fashion, to his partner, and taking her back to the library. The other men did not understand, and waited, on foot, for the cue from him. He lost his head, which seemed to whirl on his shoulders, and he was stooping to offer his arm to Hope when he remembered Mrs. Enderby.

He was stupefied into the awkwardness of saying, “Oh, I beg your pardon!”

The rector’s wife laughed, from a woman’s perennial joy in the sight of such feeling as his. “Oh, I shouldn’t have minded.”

Hope gave an imitation of not having noticed, which none but a connoisseur could have distinguished from the genuine.

VIII

“DR. ANTHER, I want to introduce Mr. Falk a little more particularly to my oldest and best friend.”

“Will he know what to do with such a treasure?” Dr. Anther returned Falk’s tentative bow with smiling irony, while he reached with his left hand for the cigars which Langbrith offered him.

Every one was still on foot, after leaving the ladies in the library, and Langbrith said to the group: “Sit down, gentlemen,” and placed himself before answering the doctor. “Yes, I think he will. You smoke, don’t you, Dr. Enderby? And you, Judge? Matthewson, I know, doesn’t. Start the madeira after the sun, Harry.” He pushed the cigars towards the elders and the decanter towards the young man, whom he bade give the smokers the candle. “Yes,” he went on, to put Falk and Dr. Anther at ease with each other, “Falk’s father is a physician, and my physician is the only father I have known.”

“Oh, you’re very good, James!” the doctor said, forgiving to the genuine feeling in the young fellow’s voice the patronage of his words: “I can’t say less than that no son of mine has given me less trouble.” The two laughed together, and Falk smiled conditionally, as if he suspected that this country practitioner had his knife out. “Are you going in for medicine, too?” the doctor asked.

“Worse yet,” Langbrith answered for him. “He’s going in for art. I don’t know whether my mother has shown you any copies of Caricature which I send her. But, if she has, you know Falk’s work. It’s the best part of Falk. Falk is Caricature himself — with my poor help in joking a picture now and then.”

“This puts me on my good behavior at once,” Anther said. “Mr. Falk may be looking for types.”

“No, no; Falk’s types always look for him,” said Langbrith. “Won’t you sit down?”

“I’ve been sitting,” Anther said, and he walked, Falk with him, towards the conservatory.

“Well, it’s a change, and your smoke will help the plants,” Langbrith called, and he turned to take part in the talk of the judge and the rector, to which Matthewson was listening with the two sorts of deference respectively due to the law and to the church.

“Well, Mr. Falk,” Anther said, “I suppose we must make the best of being two such remarkable people. I hope you’re enjoying your visit to Saxmills.”

“Oh, very much,” Falk answered, smiling less conditionally.

“I don’t know that it’s much adapted to pictorial satire.”

“You must make allowance for the stately layout Langbrith gives his friends,” said Falk, and the gleam of intelligence in the doctor’s shaggily pent-roofed eyes satisfied him of his ground.

“The place has always struck me as very picturesque,” the doctor continued. “Of course, I don’t know; but a good head of water seems to imply broken ground, and if there’s a fall, such as we have here, it means up and down hill and the broken banks and the rapids and other things that you artists are supposed to care for.”

“I don’t know whether we really do — or I do,” the young man said, modestly. “I’m rather more for the figure, I reckon.”

“Western?” the doctor asked, with a lift of the pent-roofs.

“Northern Kentucky; Catletsburg.”

“Curious! I thought of settling in that place, myself, before I came to Saxmills. Not New England people?”

“No, my people were German. My grandfather came out after the 1848 revolutions.”

“Oh, indeed! Rather odd I should meet some one from Catletsburg at this late day. I’ve hardly thought of it since I gave up going there. Except for a run to New York, at times, I have been twenty-two years in Saxmills, and I don’t suppose I shall ever go anywhere else to live. In that time, a man’s life shapes itself to the environment, and new surroundings hurt. Don’t you find it so?”

“Well, I’m just trying my first twenty-two years.”

“To be sure,” the doctor laughed. “I suppose you and James are thrown a good deal together at Harvard.”

“This last year, yes. Since he took the editorship of Caricature.”

“Oh, indeed! He must be very popular, then, to have that?”

“Not very,” Falk answered, tranquilly. He looked steadily at the doctor, in breaking off his cigar ash, as if asking his eyes how far he might go. Then he said, in a low tone, but with a certain indifference as to being overheard in his manner: “A good many of the fellows think he’s an ass. They can’t stand him. But they make a mistake. He’s got a lot of ability. He doesn’t do himself justice.”

“How?” the doctor asked, blowing his smoke out.

“Too patronizing. But he doesn’t mean anything by it, as I know. All you have got to do is to call him down. He stands that first rate, if he likes you, or if he thinks you are right. And he stands by his friends.”

“I’m glad to hear so much good of him. Naturally, I’m interested in him, knowing his — mother so long.”

Falk asked — from a feeling that the doctor had meant to say “family” rather than “mother”— “You knew his father?”

“Oh yes, but he died when James was a very little child.”

“He seems to have a sort of ancestor worship for him,” said Falk, with a slight amusement in his face.

“Yes,” the doctor dryly allowed.

Langbrith was talking gayly with his other guests at the farther end of the table, where his voice rose in somewhat noisy dominance. He seemed to be laying down the law on some point; and the others to be politely submitting rather than agreeing.

Anther stood looking at him. He turned to Falkland, with his face slightly canted towards Langbrith, he asked from one side of his mouth, “You’ve noticed his portrait in the library?”

“Jimmy doesn’t let you escape that!” Falk said. “How do you like it?”

“You mean artistically?”

“No, personally. How does the face strike you?”

“Well, I don’t think I could worship an ancestor like that. Perhaps it isn’t a good likeness.”

“It was painted from a photograph.”

“Yes, so he said. And that sort of portrait seems always to fail in conveying character.”

Doctor Anther made no reply for some time. In fact, he made no reply at all. He asked, “And such character as it does convey?”

“Well, he looks too much like a cat that has been at the cream. And it isn’t the feline slyness alone that’s there: there’s the feline ferocity. Perhaps it’s like a tiger that’s been at the cream.”

The doctor said gravely, “The artist had never seen Langbrith in life. You don’t find anything of that sort in James?”

“No, he’s like his mother in looks.”

“Oh yes. Don’t you find — as an artist — Miss Hawberk very striking?”

“Wonderful. If I may speak as an artist. That cloud of hair hanging over her little face, and those coal-black eyes, and that red mouth between the pale cheeks! If I were a painter, which I’m not, and never shall be, I should want nothing better than to spend my life studying such a face.”

“Her father,” the doctor said, looking at Falk, as if to question how much he knew already, “is an extraordinary man.”

“So Langbrith tells me. He told me about him.”

“Oh, then,” said the doctor with the effect of implying that there need be nothing more said on that point; “you must stop me when I seem to be asking unwarrantable things. Do you think that James—”

“Doctor! Won’t you come here?” Langbrith called to him from the other end of the table where he was sitting. “I’ve got three stubborn men against me here, on a point which I want you to settle in my favor.”

“Somebody must give way, and you know I can’t,” the rector said, using the well-known words of the Boston lady who appealed to reason against her adversaries.

“What is this point that only one of you can agree on?” the doctor asked, coming up.

Langbrith laughed with high good humor, as if still in the afterglow of Hope Hawberk’s playful hostilities. The qualities which gave his classmates the question whether he was not an ass were in abeyance. Even if he showed no such deference as Matthewson paid to the judge or the clergyman, he was withheld from patronizing them by the instinct of hospitality. At the worst, his superiority took the form of pressing the wine on them, and insisting that they had failed to get good cigars.

“Oh, I expect there will be two, now, doctor,” he crowed. “It’s a question of taste. I don’t know how we got to talking about it — do you, judge? or you, Dr. Enderby? But we were speaking of that immediate acquiescence of a community in a change of name — like that of Groton Junction to Ayer Junction. The pill-man gave a town-hall, or something like that, to the place, and the bargain was struck. Said, done: and from that day to this nobody has mentioned Groton Junction even by a slip of the tongue, though the school at Groton keeps the old name alive and honored. The judge, here, and Dr. Enderby were saying it was a pity that we had to keep such an ugly and indistinctive name as ‘Saxmills,’ and I was defending it, just because it was ugly and indistinctive. I was saying that the whole American thing was ugly and indistinctive, and that, if there was any choice, it was more so in New England than elsewhere. But now I want to tell you all something,” and he went eagerly on, as if to forestall any interruptive expression of opinion from the others on a point which did not really matter. He glanced at Falk, where he stood blowing rings of smoke into the air at the door of the conservatory, as if about to demand his nearer presence, but apparently decided to include him by lifting his voice. “There was a time when a change of name was suggested here. Did you ever know about it?” he asked the doctor.

The doctor shook his head with indifference.

“No? Well, that was just like my father, if I read his character right. He would have consulted with you, if he had not decided of himself to suppress the whole thing from himself, and by himself. It was after he had built the library, and given it to the town. There was a dedication, and all that; and in a little diary — one of those little pocket-almanac diaries, you know — which I came across the other day among my father’s papers, I found this laconic entry: ‘Library dedication. Had been some talk of changing Saxmills to Langbrith, but I squelched that so thoroughly that nobody peeped about it.’ Do you recall any such talk?”

Anther shook his head again. “It was before my time, here.”

“And mine,” the judge said.

The rector did not think it worth while saying it was before his, apparently; he was such a new-comer. But he said: “It was almost a pity he squelched it. Langbrith would have been a fine name.”

The young man could scarcely conceal his satisfaction. “Oh, it would have been rather too romantic and Old English for a New England paper-mill town. I’m afraid it would have given the expectation of laid note, with deckelled edges.” The rector owned that there might be something in that, but he insisted that the name was fine.

“I think my father was right. And it was like him; don’t you think so, doctor?”

“Very,” Anther assented briefly.

“I can imagine just how he would have squelched it when the committee — there must have been a committee — came to propose the new name to him. I should not have liked to be in their shoes. He was not a man, as I imagine him, to have stood anything he considered nonsense.” Langbrith looked at the doctor for confirmation, but Anther smoked on in silence. Langbrith was probably too well pleased to note his silence with offence. He asked abruptly, “Is that a good likeness of him in the library?”

“It was painted from a photograph, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Still, if it’s well done, it would convey his personality.”

“It’s fairly — characteristic.”

Falk, from his station between the conservatory doors, grinned.

Langbrith frowned slightly. “It doesn’t suit me, quite. And this brings me to something I want to talk with you gentlemen about. I’ve been thinking, for some time, of offering the town a medallion likeness of my father to be put up in front of the library somewhere.” He looked round at the others, but they waited as if for him to develop his idea fully. “My notion is, something in bronze; a low relief, of course, and a profile, or three-quarters face. The difficulty is about getting that view of him. The thing in the library is a full face, and I don’t feel somehow that it does him justice. Do you, doctor?”

“Not perfect justice, no.”

“He had a very strong character, but that painting conveys the notion of hardness rather than strength. Perhaps the hardness was something in the painter’s method, and he couldn’t eliminate it from the likeness.” The judge and the rector smiled. Anther said nothing.

“But if I could get hold of the right man to do the work, and could have you to help out from memory, doctor—”

“I couldn’t,” Anther said, abruptly.

The door-bell rang. Langbrith lost the frown in which his forehead had gathered, and smiled as he rose, and threw on the table the napkin he had been dragging across his lap while he talked. “There they come! This is something I should like to talk over with you gentlemen again.” The judge and the rector made murmurs of friendly assent in their throats; the doctor did nothing to signify his acquiescence. “But, in the meantime, I would rather you wouldn’t speak of it out of your own circle. Shall I follow you?” He made a motion for his guests to precede him, and called over his shoulder to his friend, “Come along, Falk.”

IX

THE dance was coming to an end, and the girls, some of them, followed by as many young men, strayed out between the waltzes into the conservatory, to escape the heat; after trying the air, they said it was no cooler, only damper, and rushed back at the first strain of the music for the last figure of the dance. Hope Hawberk stayed, and Langbrith stayed with her. “Why don’t you go back and look after your guests?” she challenged him.

“The guest that needs looking after most is here.” He broke a rose from the vine at his hand, and threw it across the little fountain at her, where she stood with her head framed in the pale greenery of a jasmine bush. She lifted herself, haughtily. “May I ask what you mean, Mr. Langbrith?” Suddenly, while he stood, mystified and sobered, by the severity of her tone, she brought one hand from behind her, where she had been keeping both, and dashed a rose in his face. She tried to escape by the path that led up to the dining-room door past the callas in the oval bed about the fountain. He was instantly there to meet her, to catch her by a slim wrist and hold her fast.

“You witch!” he panted. “Oh, Hope, may I go home with you? The way we used to?”

“Before you were such a great person?”

“Why do you say that to me?” he entreated.

“Because — because you are hurting my wrist,” she answered, with a child’s wilful inconsequence.

He released it with all but his thumb and forefinger, and bent over it as if to see what harm he had done, while she stood passive. He kissed the red marks his fingers had left.

“What next, Mr. Langbrith?” she said, with a feint of cold impersonality.

“You know! Will you let me go home with you?”

“You’re making me break your mother’s lilies!”

“I don’t care for the lilies. I care for you, you, you! May I go home with you?”

Another dash of the fitful April rain, which seemed to have gathered again, smote the glass roof; then it began to fall steadily. “You may lend me an umbrella,” she said.

“Well, if I may go along to carry it.”

“Oh, if you’re afraid of not getting it back!”

“Yes, I can’t trust you.”

“You’re hurting me again. Don’t make me cry. Everybody will know it,” she pleaded, releasing her wrist and passing her handkerchief over her eyes, with her face turned from the doors.

“Ah, Hope!” he tried to catch her hands, but she whipped them behind her, the handkerchief still in one of them, and ran, while he followed slowly.

The rain stopped again, before the dance was ended. The old people had gone home before, and the dancers now sallied out together into the air that had softened, since nightfall, under a sky where the moon sailed in seas of blue, among islands of white cloud. The girls started chattering, laughing, with meaningless cries, massing themselves at first, and then losing themselves from the group, one by one, and finding their way homeward with the young men who seemed to fall to their share, each as by divine accident.

Langbrith and Hope Hawberk were the foremost to put a space between themselves and the others, and he pressed closer and closer to his side the hand she let lie on his arm. “Will you say it now?” he was insisting.

“No more now than ever. What good would it do, I should like to know.”

“How delicious! All the good in the world!”

“Well, I shall not. Why should you want me to be engaged to you.”

“Oh, if you’ll only say you love me, we’ll let the engagement go!”

“Thank you! Well, we’ll let it go without my saying anything so silly.”

“But I may say that I love you.”

“Yes, so long as you don’t mean it.”

“But I do mean it — I do, heart and soul. Hope, can’t you be serious? May I write to you from Cambridge when I get back.”

“How can I help that? I suppose the mail will have to bring your letters!”

“But will you answer them?”

“Perhaps they won’t need answering.”

“Oh yes, they will. I shall ask questions.”

“Well, I never could answer questions. That’s the one thing I can’t do.”

“Then you don’t want me to write to you?”

“What an idea! I thought it was you that were doing the wanting.”

“And I may?”

“Well, you may write one letter.”

“Oh, how intoxicating you are, Hope!” He tried in his rapture to put his hand on hers, but it had slipped from his arm, and she was flying up the path before him. He followed after a moment of surprise; but, because she was fleet of foot, or because she had that little start of him, or because he felt the chase undignified, he did not overtake her till she had reached her gate. The little story-and-a-half house, overshadowed by two tall spruces, under the shoulder of the hill, was withdrawn only a few yards from the street, to which the gabled porch at the front-door brought it a few feet nearer.

She put her hand, panting, on the gate, and he had his on her shoulder, laughing, when, with an instinct of another presence, rather than a knowledge, she turned vividly towards him, and put her hand to her lip. He checked his laughter, and at her formal “Good-night” he said, reluctantly, “Well, goodnight,” and faltered outside the gate which she shut between them.

“Won’t you come in, Jim?” a voice called huskily from the darkness of the little portico, and before he could formulate his “Oh no, thank you, Mr. Hawberk, it’s rather late,” the figure of a man advanced from its shadow. Around this figure Hope faded into the shadow it had left.

“It’s only nine,” Hawberk said. “Come in, and we’ll have a bottle of champagne together. I’m just up from Boston, where I’ve been passing a week with some of your father’s old friends: gay people. I was out at Cambridge, where I met some of the college grandees. They gave me great accounts of you. I was coming round in the morning to see your mother. She’ll like to know direct from the university authorities that you are regarded as the most promising man there. I’ve been looking after an invention of mine, that I’ve succeeded in getting into good hands in Boston, and that will probably give me more money than I shall know what to do with. Have you ever thought of parting with the mills?”

“I don’t believe I have, Mr. Hawberk,” Langbrith  responded.

“If you ever do,” Hawberk said, “let me know. I’ve had an idea of taking them over, lately, and the income from this invention of mine will enable me to run them as they should be run. Your father and I were pretty close together in their management, at the outset, you know.”

“Yes,” Langbrith assented, while he retired a few steps from the gate, on which Hawberk was now lounging. In the moonlight, Hawberk’s face had a greenish hue, and his eyes shone vitreously.

“There is something fine about these gloomy autumn nights,” he suggested. “I sold him the mills, you recollect, and it would be sort of evening things up if you sold them back to me. Yes, your father and I were great friends. He liked to go off with me in my yacht. We made the trip to the Azores, together. I think I was the first to own a steam-yacht in Boston. I lived most of the time in Boston, then: looked after the city end of the business. Often had your father down. I was always giving dinners, and he used to enjoy them. You and Hope been at the play? Fine company, I’m told. Pity we don’t get them oftener in Saxmills.”

“Ah — I think I must say good night, Mr. Hawberk.” Langbrith moved a little farther away, backing. “It’s rather late—”

“Is it?” Hawberk took out his watch and held it up to the moonlight. “Why, so it is! Nearly morning. Well, good-night.” He did not offer to leave the gate, but remained lounging across it, while Langbrith turned and moved down the footpath towards the village.

X

IN the morning, the dissatisfactions which are apt to qualify the satisfactions of the night before made themselves felt in Langbrith. He had wanted to talk the satisfactions over with Falk, whom he found in bed, on his return from seeing Hope Hawberk home, with the disaster of meeting her father; but Falk was either sleepy from the fatigues of the evening, or cynical from the excess of its pleasures, and would not talk. He met Langbrith’s overtures to a confidence with a prayer for rest, with a counsel of forgetting, with an aspiration for help in his extremity against him from the powers which he did not often invoke. Langbrith was obliged to go to bed himself, without the light of Falk’s mind on the things which kept him turning from side to side till well towards morning. Then he slept so briefly that he woke to hear Falk still asleep in the next room, and went down alone to his breakfast.

He found his mother in the library ready to join him, and he said, rather crossly, that they would not wait for Falk, who would anyway not want anything but coffee. At first, it seemed as if he would himself not want anything else, but after he had drunk a cup he helped himself to the steak which his mother refused, and then to the rice-cakes, which Norah brought in relays, till he said, “I sha’n’t want any more, Norah,” and then she ceased to bring them, and shut the door into the kitchen definitely after her in going out.

If Mrs. Langbrith expected her son to begin by saying something of the pleasure she had tried to give him the night before, she was destined to disappointment, less, perhaps, from his ingratitude than from his preoccupation. “Mother,” he asked, in pouring the syrup over the last relay of cakes that Norah had brought, “do you know whether there was ever anything unpleasant between Dr. Anther and my father?”

She caught her breath in a way that was habitual with her at any sort of abruptness, and had a moment of hesitation in which she might have been deciding what form of evasion she should employ. Then she asked, “Why, James, what made you think so?”

“Something — nothing — that happened, or didn’t happen, last night, after you left us smoking in the dining-room.” Langbrith frowned, in what was resentment or what was perplexity. “It might have been my fancy, altogether. But he seemed to receive a suggestion I made very dryly, very coldly. I had always supposed they were great friends.”

Mrs. Langbrith quelled her respiration into long, smooth under-breaths, and said nothing.

Langbrith went on. “I had been thinking of something I meant to mention to you first — putting up a medallion of my father, with some sort of inscription, in the façade of the library, and last night I happened to come out with the notion in the course of some general talk, and Dr. Anther received it so blankly that I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt.”

“Perhaps,” Mrs. Langbrith said, with a drop of her eyes, “he didn’t take it in.”

“That was what I have been trying to think. People began to come for the dance just after that, and the subject couldn’t go any further. But, before Judge Garley and Mr. Enderby, Dr. Anther’s blankness had time to be painful. Well!” he broke off from the affair. “He may not have taken it in, as you say.”

Mrs. Langbrith rubbed her hand nervously up and down on the smooth, warm handle of the coffeepot, in the struggle with herself, rather than with her son, which was renewed whenever it came to any sort of question of his father between them. She was long past the superstition of her husband’s right, through the mere fact of his death, to her silence, her forbearance. Except for their son, she would have been willing that he should be known to the world as he was known to her and to Anther. But with reference to the dead man’s son, it still seemed to her that the truth would be defamation, as much as if his memory were really pure and holy. It always came to some sort of evasion. But this morning, somehow, it did not seem to her as if she could consent to that any longer. It was on her tongue to say, No, his father and Dr. Anther were not friends at last, and give, swiftly and unsparingly, the reasons why they could not be. But when she spoke, she got no further than saying, and it was with tremendous effect that she got so far from her wonted reserve, “If you think there was ever anything unpleasant between them, why don’t you ask Dr. Anther himself?”

There was a desperate challenge in her eyes, which she would have been miserably glad to have him see there, if only some counter of his would then push her past the silence which she could never traverse of herself alone. But he was looking down into his cup, and he did not see what was in her eyes. He stirred his coffee, and said: “It was not serious enough for that. Very likely it wasn’t anything at all. He may not have been giving the matter close attention, or he may have had something else on his mind. Doctors often have, I suppose; or he may have been vexed at something in my manner — what Falk calls my patronizing. Possibly he was thinking from his knowledge of my father that such a thing would be distasteful to him. But he might have left it all to me. Well, it doesn’t really amount to anything.”

She drew a long, deep breath, in the desperate relief of postponement, and he looked up affectionately. “It’s all a very old story for you, mother, and you can’t take much pleasure in knowing how the evening went off. You did manage it wonderfully.”

She flushed at his praise. “I tried to carry out your instructions.”

“You bettered them. It was a great little triumph. Don’t you think people enjoyed it?”

“Yes, I think so. But if you enjoyed it, that is quite enough for me.”

“Oh, for you, mother! But I’m unselfish enough for you to wish the rest had a good time. I thought the girls all looked very pretty, and they behaved prettily, too, which doesn’t always follow. Country girls — village girls — don’t always know the difference between being lively and being rowdy. I’m bound to say that sometimes city girls don’t either. The latest blossoming of buds in Boston — well! Don’t you think Hope is very beautiful?”

He seemed quite in good humor, now, and was smiling retrospectively. His mother said, from that remote caution, doubtless, which is in every woman where her son’s relations with other women are concerned, “She is a very good girl.”

Langbrith laughed out. “Well, I wasn’t thinking about the goodness, exactly! But I dare say she is good. What I’m sure of, though, is that she’s stunning. Mother!”

“Well, James?”

Langbrith’s face, so like her own face, in its contour and features, flushed as hers always did with any strong feeling; but whatever his feeling was, he did not put it into the words which followed as from a second impulse. He gave himself time to lose his flush, and to knit his brows, which approached very nearly together, before he asked, “How long has her father been an opium fiend? I mean, how long have people known that he eats opium?”

“A good many years, I’m afraid.”

“As long back as to my father’s time?”

“Yes — quite. Why, what makes you ask?”

“Oh, I saw him last night when I went home with Hope.”

“I thought he was away at the Retreat.”

“It seems not. At any rate, he was at home, and she didn’t seem surprised at his being there. It isn’t like alcoholism, is it? It doesn’t make him violent? So that he ever hurts them?”

“Oh no, not at all. Did Hope seem troubled?”

“No. She slipped into the house behind him, when he came out to the gate to talk to me. He was disposed to be rather expansive. Just in what way do you understand that he has been an affliction to them?”

“He has kept them poor.”

“Well, that might be remedied. And it isn’t the worst thing that could happen. A great many people are poor and happy. You don’t mean that they’re ever in anything like want?”

“Oh no,” Mrs. Langbrith sighed. “He has some of his inventions in the hands of other people, who pay him a percentage on them, and it is secured so that it goes to his family, instead of to him. The worst of him is that they can’t put the least dependence on him. They can’t trust anything he says. He is very kind to them when he is with them, and he is proud of Hope. But they can’t believe a word from him.”

“He got off twenty inventions to me, in as many sentences, while we stood talking over the gate. I had a notion of something of the kind you say. Doesn’t he ever blunder into the truth? He said my father and he used to be great chums. Was there nothing in that?”

“They were friends at one time, certainly.”

“Until he began to give way to all kinds of invention. Then, of course, it had to come to an end. Well, it’s interesting to know that he can sometimes make a straight statement. Don’t think I don’t feel the awfulness of it, mother. I do, and I pity Hope, and I can understand how she can’t help thinking that she is put wrong by it with — people. I suppose it’s that that makes her a little defiant, a little doubtful of — Have you ever, or has she ever, mentioned the subject?”

“Not to me, James, or to any one that I know of. Everybody knows it. It’s an old thing, and nobody talks of it, except new-comers. And there are not many new-comers here.”

“No,” Langbrith assented, with a smile. “Saxmills is static.”

His mother may not have known just what he meant, or it may have been from the country habit of making no comment in response to what was not a question.. She asked, “Will you have some more coffee, James?”

“No; but have them keep it hot for old Falk.”

“I will have some fresh for him.”

“There never was such thoughtful hospitality as yours, mother,” Langbrith said, rising and going round the table to where she had risen too, and putting his arm fondly across her shoulders. She was almost as tall as he, and their likeness showed as he laid his face against hers and rubbed his cheek on her own. “I believe that when I wake up in the other world you will be there to offer me something nice to eat. Old Falk is having a tremendously good time, don’t you think?”

Mrs. Langbrith said, “Everything has been done for him that could be, by everybody.”

“And I’m glad it’s happened to Falk, too. A great many of the fellows don’t know what a good fellow he is. They don’t get hold of him. Falk is proud, and that makes him shy. Last year I wouldn’t have thought of bringing him here, or getting him to come here. His people out in Kentucky are Germans, and they’ve always gone with the Germans. If Falk hadn’t come to Harvard, he never would have got into American society. Fellows from out that way, where the Germans are rather thick, say that the third generation gets in, and sometimes the second if the first has got rich. But Falk’s father is only a very musical doctor with a German practice, and no social instincts or aspirations. Of course, it’s Falk’s work in Caricature that’s brought him forward with the best fellows. He’s going to be a great artist, I believe, and I want to have a hand in helping him. It’s difficult. He would rather say a nasty thing than a nice thing to you, and that doesn’t cement friendship with everybody. But the way is not to mind it. He’s all right at heart, if he wasn’t so proud.”

“I don’t think it’s very polite,” Mrs. Langbrith ventured.

“Well, no,” her son owned, “but it’s better than being slimy.”

XII

LANGBRITH and his friend took the Northern Express in the afternoon, which would bring them to Boston just in time for dinner. Mrs. Langbrith gave them such a heavy lunch that, what with the sleep they had still to make up from the night before, they drowsed half the way to town in the smoking-car, which they had to themselves until the train began to stop at the suburban stations. Before this happened they woke, and Falk took a sheet of crumpled paper from his pocket, and spread it on the little stationary table between them which the commuters used for playing cards.

“How would that do for the next cartoon?” he asked.

He pushed it towards Langbrith, who smoothed it out again, and examined it carefully. “I don’t know what it means,” he said, at last.

“Neither do I,” Falk said. “I want you to joke it, so that I shall.”

Langbrith continued to look at the drawing, but apparently with less and less consciousness of it. He returned to it in pushing it away. “I don’t know that I feel much like joking, to-day.”

Falk crumpled the drawing up in his hand and threw it on the floor. “There oughtn’t to be any to-morrows. There ought to be nothing but yesterdays. Then we could manage.”

“What do you mean?” Langbrith demanded. “You’re thinking you went too far.”

“How do you know that?”

“I saw you going.”

They were silent, and then Langbrith said, with a laugh, “Well, if I went too far, I wasn’t met halfway.”

“He laughs bitterly,” Falk interpreted. “He has got his come-uppings.”

Langbrith looked angrily at him. Then his look softened, if that is the word, into something more like sulking than anger, and he said, “Sometimes I think you hate me, Falk.”

“No, you don’t. You merely think you deserve it. What have you been doing? You might as well out with it now as later; I don’t want you coming in to-night when I’ve got into my first sleep.”

“If I could only hope to make you understand!” Langbrith sighed. “It isn’t merely our having known each other since she and I were kids, and always been more or less together. And it isn’t the country freedom between fellows and girls. You could appreciate both those things. But you’re so confoundedly hard that you wouldn’t see why I should feel a peculiar tenderness — a kind of longing to shield her and save her: I don’t know! — when I think of her home life, and what it must be. I know what a brave fight she puts up against its seeming any way anomalous, and that makes her all the more pathetic. It makes her all the more fascinating — to a man of my temperament. She knows that, and that is why she is so defiant. I never knew she was so beautiful till this time. Weren’t you struck with it yourself, Falk?”

Falk nodded, and smoked on.

“The complication of qualities in her, and the complication of her conditions, are what make it impossible to decide whether one has gone too far or not. Her way of taking it doesn’t help you out a bit. She takes everything as if you didn’t mean it. «Of course, she knows that I’m in love with her. Everything I do tells her so, and so long as it isn’t put into words, it seems all right. But when it comes to words, she won’t stand it.”

“She threw you down? Is that it?”

Langbrith frowned, and then smiled, as if forgiving the slang that might well have offended against the dignity of the fact. He even adopted it. “Not just threw me down, I should say.”

“What happened, then?”

“Nothing. But I was in the mood for making her answer something more than she would answer, and I shouldn’t have left her without, if it hadn’t been for her father coming on the scene. He was an element that I hadn’t counted on, and he made the whole thing luridly impossible. He seemed to cast the malign shadow of his own perdition over her.”

“Good phrase,” Falk murmured.

“Oh, don’t mock me, old fellow!” Langbrith implored. “Of course, his being what he is wouldn’t make me give her up, though I believe it would make her give me up. Poor wretch! You can’t think how amusing he was, with the wild romances he got off to me by the dozen in the two or three minutes we talked together. Do you remember that wonderful liar in one of Thackeray’s stories, or sketches, who says he has just come from the Russian embassy in London, where he had seen a Russian princess knouted by secret orders of the Czar? It was something like that. That fellow must have been an opium-eater, too. One good thing about it,” Langbrith resumed, after a pause not broken by Falk, “my mother thinks the world of Hope. She’s always having her at the house, when she will come. I think she does it because my father was his friend in his better days, and she feels that he would like to have her do it. She is just so loyal to his memory. If she could imagine any wish for him, now, after twenty years, I believe she would want to carry it out, the same as if he were alive.”

Falk still said nothing, and Langbrith broke off to say, “There was something that gravelled me last night, a little. I don’t know whether you noticed it.”

“What was it?”

“Well, Dr. Anther’s snubbing way of meeting what I said of that medallion of my father which I suggested for the public library. It embarrassed me before the judge and Dr. Enderby; it made me feel like a fool. He had no business to do it. But, perhaps, he was merely not noticing. All the same, I’m going to do it. I think it’s a shame that in a place which a man has done so much for as my father did for Saxmills there shouldn’t be any public record of him. I’ll do it to show them they ought to have done it themselves, if for nothing else. But I know all this bores you,” Langbrith ended, vexed with his evident failure to interest his friend.

Falk yawned, but he said, with more than the usual scanty kindness he showed for the wounds of Langbrith’s vanity, “No, no, I’m just stupid from last night. One doesn’t have such a good time for nothing.”

“It was a good time, wasn’t it?” Langbrith gratefully exulted.

Falk said, “Fine.” He yawned again, and Langbrith lapsed into a smiling muse, in which he was climbing the hill with Hope Hawberk, flattered in the fondness she suffered him to show her, and sweetly contraried by her refusal to say the words which would have sealed the bond between them. Was it, he wondered, with a swelling throat, because she wished to let him feel himself wholly free, in the event of some disgrace or disaster to herself from her father? He would live to prove that he would not be free: that he was hers as she was his, and nothing on earth could part them. That would make right, it would consecrate, all his past love-making. Once he would have thought that no harm, if it had come to nothing. But now, in his knowledge of another world, with a different code, it was not to be thought of but as part of a common future for them which it began. He wanted to put the case concretely before Falk, but he could not. He could not generalize, as he would have liked to do, on that difference of code between city and country, with the risk of Falk’s making his abstractions concrete in some such way as only a blow could answer. Falk had his limitations. After all, he was only half an American, and he could only half understand an American’s feelings. He retreated from the temptation, and lost himself in a warm revery of the future, which he forecast in defiance of every obstacle.

He thought what friends Hope and his mother had always been, and he knew that there could be nothing but glad response in his mother’s heart to the feeling that was in his for Hope. Then he began to think of his mother apart from Hope, and of what she might have been like when she was a girl. She was younger even than Hope when she was married. She had been many more years a widow than a maid; and, in the light of his own love for Hope, he wondered if his mother had ever thought of marrying again. His father had been twice her age when he married her. Langbrith knew this in the casual way in which children know something of their parents’ history, and his father must have been an uncommon man to have won her with that difference of years between them, and to have kept her constant to his memory so many years after his death. After all, how little she had ever said of him! Langbrith romanced her as not being able, from deep feeling, from a grief ever new, to speak of him, and he ached at heart to think how his father’s personality seemed buried in his grave with his body. A tender, chivalrous longing to champion his forgotten father, to rehabilitate this vanished personality, replaced his heartache, and again he was indignant with Dr. Anther for his indifference, his coldness. He said to himself that he must have an explanation from Dr. Anther; he would write to him, and ask just what he meant. Perhaps he meant nothing. But he must be sure. Then he would see that young sculptor, that Italian, and tell him what he wanted; talk it over with him; find if he had any notions of his own.

The train slowed into the North station about five o’clock, just when he knew his mother would be talking with old Norah about the supper, to which, in his absence, she would revert from the late dinner. She would be bidding Norah tell the cook that she did not want anything but a cup of tea and a little milk-toast. Poor old mother! What a savorless, limp life she lived there alone! Yet it could not be otherwise, when he was away. How much she depended upon him! Somehow, he must manage for her to live with Hope and him. She must go out to Paris with them, where they should go after their marriage, and when they came back to Saxmills, where they would always have their summer home, she must be put bade mistress in the old house.

XII

THE neighbor over the way who saw Anther drop the hitching-weight of his buggy in front of the Langbrith house, late in the afternoon of the lengthening April day, decided that Mrs. Langbrith had been overdoing. She watched for him to come out until she could stay no longer at the window without making her own tea late, but she did not see him come out at all.

In fact, it was the doctor who appeared to have been overdoing. He looked so tired to Mrs. Langbrith that she asked him if he would not have a cup of tea. Upon second thought, she asked him if he would not have it with her. Supper would be ready very soon; and, without waiting for a refusal, she went into the kitchen to hurry it, and to have the cook add something to the milk-toast for the man-appetite, to which her hospitality was ministering with more impulsiveness and spontaneity than the wont of village hospitality is.

When they sat down together at the table, he did not eat much and he talked little; but he seemed to feel gratefully the comfort of the place and presence. She came into authority with him, as a woman does when the man dear to her is depressed. Her affection for him came out in little suggestions and insistencies about the food. Like most physicians, he kept his precepts for himself and his practices for his patients. He now ate rather recklessly, and he preferred the unwholesome things. At first she had to press him, and then she had to check him. At last she had to say to Norah, who came in with successive plates of the hot cakes which he devoured, “That will do, Norah,” and, when he had swept the final batch upon his plate and soaked them in butter and syrup, and then cut their layers into deep vertical sections, and gorged these with a kind of absent gluttony, while she looked on in patient amaze, she rose and led the way from the table into the parlor.

It lay beyond the library and had windows to the north and east. The library was lighted from the east alone, like the dining-room in the wing. The main house was square, and divided by an ample hall from front to back. Beyond the hall, the two drawing-rooms opening from it balanced the parlor and library. There was a fire of logs burning on the parlor hearth, and its glow alone lighted the place when the two came into it. He went first to the window and looked at his horse. When he came away she pulled down the curtains and shut out what was left of the pale day and the disappointment of the neighbor who had been waiting for the reappearance of the persons of a drama not played for her.

Mrs. Langbrith took the chair at the corner, and invited Anther to the deeper one in front of the fire by her action.

“I oughtn’t to stay,” he said, looking at his watch. But he sat down. Neither of them made haste to take up any talk for the entertainment of the other. What they were to say was to come because they were both thinking the same things, from interests that were no longer separable. Yet he began with as great apparent remoteness as possible from their common interests. “Hawberk is at home again,” he said, as if that followed from his saying he ought not to stay.

“James told me,” she responded. “He saw him last night.”

“And he has begun again.”

“Yes, I knew that from the way that James said he talked. It doesn’t seem much use his ever going.”

“It prolongs his life, if that’s any use. If he hadn’t pulled up completely, from time to time, he would have been dead ten years ago. It is a curious case. Mostly they keep on and on, till they kill themselves, but Hawberk seems disposed to see how much relief can be got out of it with the least danger. At the rate he is going, he can live as long as anybody. Of course, the moral effect always follows the indulgence of a morbid appetite. What did he say to James?”

“He just told him some of his wild stories. He boasted of being Mr. Langbrith’s greatest friend.”

“So he was, in a kind of way. An involuntary friend,” Anther said, with a smile. She smiled, too, strangely enough, but as people can smile, in dealing with an old wrong when it offers an ironical aspect to them. But she said, “Sometimes I wish it could be known what a deadly enemy Mr. Langbrith  had been to him. Why shouldn’t I tell it? I ought to feel guilty for not telling it. He robbed him, as much as if he had taken his money out of his pocket.”

“No doubt about that; and once it might have been best to own the fact publicly. But sometimes it seems to me that time is past. A wrong like that seems to gather a force that enslaves those who have done nothing worse than leave it unacknowledged through a good motive. You haven’t been silent for your own sake.”

“I am not sure it hasn’t been for my own sake.”

“I am.

“I wonder,” she said, “that Mr. Hawberk hasn’t told it himself.”

“Well, possibly, he thinks that it wouldn’t be credited, that it would be regarded as one of his wild inventions; that is, he thinks that when he is in his soberer moments. When he is under the influence of the drug, he likes to make pleasing romances, and has no desire to mix a tragical ingredient in them.”

“Then Mr. Langbrith has ruined a soul!”

“Yes,” Anther admitted, “he has done something like that. And the most terrible thing is, that he holds the man in bondage now much more securely than he could have held him living. If they were both still alive, there would be some means of righting the wrong that has been done. Some pressure could be brought upon him to make him do Hawberk justice.”

“No, no, he would know how to get out of that.” She rose and closed the door opening into the library. She had meant to do it quietly, and without self-betrayal; but, in the nervous stress that was on her, she brought it to with a clash, and then she felt obliged to explain: “It always seems as if it were listening,” and Anther knew that she meant the portrait over the library mantel.

“At any rate,” the doctor resumed, “he makes it hard for you to do him justice now. You do the best you can, and perhaps it is the best that any one could do. I suppose that a moralist, like Enderby, for instance, would say that the secrecy which Hawberk’s misfortune promotes is the worst part of it. You pay Hawberk an income from a stolen invention, and he goes about bragging of the inventions which he has in the hands of Boston capitalists. Perhaps it is not even possible for him to tell the truth, in the perversion of his nature through his habit.”

“What was he like before he took to it, Dr. Anther?” she asked, from the security she felt in shutting out the portrait. “I know that he took it up in the misery he felt at being trapped and robbed, and it was his only escape.”

“Do you mean, whether he was inclined some such way?”

“I have sometimes wished that he were.”

“He may have been,” the doctor mused. “I knew him very little before I came here. But there is a sort of crime, isn’t there, in pushing a man in the direction of a natural propensity? You don’t want to palliate what was done?”

“Mr. Langbrith was capable of any crime,” she answered. “Sometimes I have to shield his memory. But I don’t wish to do it when I needn’t. That is the comfort, the rest, of talking with you. I can’t tell you what a kind of awful happiness it is to say out to you the things I cannot say to any one else. You will think I am crazy, but the next greatest happiness I have is in hoping that his fancy is taken with her, and that somehow it can be made up to them in that way. And yet there is a ghastliness in that, too, that is awful.”

He knew that now she was talking of her son and of Hawberk’s daughter. When she added, “She ought to know, at least,” he said:

“Oh, everybody ought to know. But it is no more possible for her to be told than for any one else. I should be glad if he could get so good a girl. She is a beautiful creature, too, as well as good. Well!” He rose from his chair, but from hers she entreated almost unawares, “Oh, don’t go! Or, I oughtn’t to say it!”

“No, Amelia, you oughtn’t. If you said something else, I need never go.” He looked at her sadly, and her head drooped. “You let me see an image of home, like this, and then you take it from me. Well! I must submit. Good-night.” He put out his hand to her, but she would not take it.

She lifted her eyes to his, “You haven’t asked me if I tried to speak to James. I didn’t!”

“I knew that.”

“Perhaps I should — perhaps I should have tried, this morning, when we were alone, if — But perhaps I couldn’t.”

“If what?”

“If he hadn’t fancied that you did something last night that showed dislike of Mr. Langbrith.”

“What was it I did?”

“Something in the way you received his suggestion of the memorial tablet.”

“Oh, he noticed that? Well, I couldn’t help it.”

“I know you couldn’t. Do you think I blame you?”

“I believe we don’t blame each other, Amelia.”

“And you don’t feel hard towards me for not trying?”

“I didn’t expect you to try.”

“But why shouldn’t we go on like this — the way we have gone on for twenty years? Why shouldn’t you be just my friend as long as you live? We are not young, and we couldn’t expect what young people expect of marriage.”

“I expect a great deal more,” he said. “You are solitary, and so am I. I have never had a home, and you could give me one. I have never had companionship at the time when a man wants it most, and you could be my companion. I want some one to talk to and to be silent to, when I feel the need of either. You could be my daughter, my mother, my sister. Why do you make me say these things to you?”

“Well, then, why not come and let me be it here?

Why not come and make this your home? I know James wouldn’t object. I believe he would like to have you live with us. He has always been used to you—” Anther shook his head.

“Yes, yes,” she persisted. “We could give you all the room you wanted in the house here, and you could have Mr. Langbrith’s office for your office, out there by the gate. I have thought how it could be done—”

“It couldn’t be done, Amelia. The talk it would make in a place like Saxmills!”

“There wouldn’t be any talk. You have been here so long, and you are so respected. You have always been our doctor, and you have been in and out here day and night. You are like one of the family. You could come now, when Mrs. Burwell is going to give up her house, and you will have to go somewhere else, anyhow. It hasn’t made talk your living there with her all these years, and why should your living here do it? Sit down now, and let me tell you—”

She had put her hand unconsciously on his arm and was nervously pinching the sleeve. He took her hand away and held it in his own. “I never think of Mrs. Burwell, nor she of me; but we two would always be thinking of each other. It wouldn’t do, my dear, and you know it.”

She broke out piteously, “I am so afraid of James!”

“Yes, I understand that, and I should be afraid of him, too, if I came here to live with you, unless I came as your husband. In that case, I shouldn’t be afraid of him.”

“Ah, you hate him! I can see it by the way you say that. What shall I do?”

“Nothing, Amelia, except be reasonable. I don’t hate your son; how could I? Of course, your fear of him stands in our way, but I am not at all sure that he does. He might have done so, a few years ago, but there is less probability that he would now.”

“How do you mean?”

“He is more rational. He is of a nature that matures late; he is like you, in that, Amelia. That friend of his, that young man, told me how slowly James has won upon the liking and understanding of his college mates. They did not like him at first, but now, in his last year, they are beginning to value him, to make allowances for what repelled them, to see how he has changed, and to have an affection for him.” In his gloss of Falk’s laconic terms, Anther did not feel that he was misinterpreting his statement of Langbrith’s Harvard standing; his mother eagerly accepted the version, and imagined it insufficient. “I say this,” the doctor went on, “merely to illustrate my meaning. He is now at the age when the mind acts with an insight unknown to it before, and besides—” Anther broke off, and then asked, after a moment: “What reason have you for thinking that he is seriously taken with Hope? How is it different with them from what it has always been?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps it is his being away, and then coming back and finding her changed into a new person. Girls change so suddenly at her age. If he had stayed at home, they might have gone on being boy and girl together always. But as it is — Perhaps it is partly the way I have seen him look at her — with a kind of surprise. And this morning, he spoke of her with so much — Oh, if it only could be, what a load it would take off my heart!”

“It would take the main obstacle out of our path, too,” Anther responded. “He would judge you somewhat more from himself.”

Mrs. Langbrith colored faintly, with a kind of shame, which he saw and resented.

“You think it isn’t the same thing!”

“No,” she owned. “How could I? It is as right for us, though it is different, as it is for them. But—”

She stopped, and even after he had said, “Well?” she did not go on immediately.

Then she shook her head, and added, “It wouldn’t get over the great obstacle. There would still be — Mr. Langbrith.”

“Then,” said Anther, harshly, “we must remove that obstacle, that incubus, ourselves. That man’s memory mustn’t be allowed to be a lifelong nightmare to you. You suffered enough from him when he was alive. We must tell James about him.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Then you must let me.”

She slowly turned her head away. “It’s too late,” she sighed.

“No. Now is just the time. Before this, it would have been too soon. While he was a child, you could not have told him; I understand that; and you had to let him grow up in the superstition of such a father as he imagines. But now he is old enough and strong enough to have his fetish taken from him. You owe it to him to take it. Put me out of the question entirely. I will never speak to you again of what I wish—”

“Oh, do you think that would be any help?” she lamented.

“At any rate, it is the boy’s right to know the truth now.”

“I always,” she tried to evade him, “hoped that some accident—”

“But it never did. And it never will. That isn’t the way of accident. It doesn’t manage beneficent surprises.”

“It is too late. I can’t let you tell him the truth, and I can’t myself. It must be covered up, more and more! It must be hidden forever. But there is something — something you might do, and you could do it.”

“For you?”

“For him — for me.”

“Of course, I will do it.”

“I don’t know. You could help him — help me. What harm would there be in your humoring the child?”

“How, humoring him?”

“Why shouldn’t you encourage him — why should you oppose him in putting up that tablet? Or not that! Why should you be so cold with him about it?”

Anther walked out into the hall, and got his hat and coat from the rack there before he spoke. “Amelia!” he cried with a sternness that he let die out of his voice before he added, “Oh, poor woman! That scoundrel has had power to corrupt even you, even now.”

He opened the outer door, and, while she stood on the threshold of the parlor, with entreating hands stretched towards him, he closed the door behind him without looking back at her.

XIII

MRS. BURWELL came to call Dr. Anther to breakfast as soon as she heard him in his office. He had been up late overnight, and, with the fretful patience which had not failed her in twenty years of obedience, she had obeyed his instructions not to call him in such a case at the established hour of seven. His breakfast was always ready at seven, and it would have been some consolation to give him his breakfast cold, if he ever noticed whether it was cold or hot, but he did not, and she failed of this comfort. Among the reasons which had decided her at last to give up house-keeping and go to live with her married daughter in Nashua, the irregularity of Dr. Anther at breakfast would have been found first by any one who cared to study them, but it was one which she urged last upon the inquirer’s attention. She said that it had been clearly agreed upon at the beginning, and that she was not one to take back her word.

He sat before his desk opening his letters, with his revolving bookcase by his side, and, in the long case between the two windows behind him, the pendulent skeleton which he had bought with his practice, from his predecessor. When the case was closed, it looked like a grandfather’s clock in shape, and when it was open it still suggested the intimate relation of time and death. There was a table in the room, and over this were scattered medical periodicals, and other publications more suited to the taste and intelligence of patients waiting for his return when he was out. There were some hard chairs which did not invite their fancy from the stem realities of life by luxurious appeals to the senses.

“Lorenzo Hawberk’s b’en here,” Mrs. Burwell complained to the back of the doctor’s bowed head. “He said he would call in again. I don’t know but what you’ll find your coffee pretty cold,” she lamented further.

“I’ll be there in a minute,” Anther said, still without lifting his head, and, when he had quite finished with his morning’s mail, he followed her vanishing into the hall without, and thence into the dining-room.

If he had been the sort of man to realize the order of facts to which any article of food belonged by its condition, he would have found not only his coffee cold, but his biscuit and his steak cold, too. But he was only vaguely aware of something wrong, as a child is when it is in discomfort, and his sense extended itself still more vaguely to an impression of the room, and of Mrs. Burwell herself. They were both severely neat, and they were both of the same material and spiritual spareness. Beginning with the hard little knot which Mrs. Burwell’s silver-sanded hair was tightly drawn up into, away from her face, a more than classic temperance of ornament was characteristic of both. In her and in the room, everything was designed and disposed with a view to not catching dust. The clock on the mantel, supported by two Japanese fans, and the four prints on the four walls, representing severally the Lincoln Family at Breakfast, the Battle of Gettysburg, the long-extinct husband of Mrs. Burwell, and the United States Senate listening to the speech of Mr. Webster of Massachusetts in reply to Mr. Hayne of South Carolina, united with the sideboard, on which there was nothing that could not be shut away in its drawers the moment the breakfast things were washed up, in preserving a condition which not only would not catch dust, but in which there was no dust to catch.

“Did he leave any word?” Dr. Anther answered, not troubling himself to name Hawberk in his question.

“No, he just said he would be back; there was nothing particular the matter. I suppose he’s begun again.”

Hawberk’s habit was so notorious in Saxmills that Mrs. Burwell felt it no violation of that other convention between herself and her tenant, dating from the beginning, like the agreement in regard to breakfast, that she was not to offer any sort of comment upon his patients, their characters, their ailments, or affairs. All the same, he snubbed her by his tacit refusal to enter into the case of Hawberk with her.

“Have you heard from your daughter again, Mrs. Burwell?” he asked.

“No, I hain’t,” she said, with an effect of being resolved to have no concealments. “But, as far forth as that goes, I don’t know as I expected to.”

“Then you are still decided to go to her?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I am,” she said, as little decidedly in words as a woman well could.

“Supposing won’t do,” Anther pursued. “I must know whether you really intend to go or not, for I must find some other quarters if you do, and I want time.”

“Well, then, I am. I suppose I said ‘suppose’ because I didn’t want to seem to be hurrying you up any.”

“You’ll hurry me up if you don’t give me due notice.”

Mrs. Burwell’s hard mouth and hard eyes joined in the adamantine response which she made. “I’m goin’ to leave this house the first day of July, no sooner and no later, as far as I can humanly fix it.”

“Oh, well, then,” Anther said, “that gives me plenty of time to look about. I thought you were going in June.”

“Well,” she admitted, reluctantly, and without that bravado of frankness which she had shown before, “I did some think of goin’ in June, and I did think I might as well stay the summer out here. It’s full more comfortable than what it is in Nashua, with the heat, and it’s easier to begin in a new place where you’ve got to be shut up a good deal; anyway, by beginnin’ in the fall of the year.”

“Yes, that is so,” the doctor granted, and Mrs.

Burwell chose to read a sympathy into his words which they did not express.

“I presume that I shall feel the change, and I presume you will, some.”

“Yes, I shall hate the moving.”

“That’s what I mean. And I wonder you want to move. Why don’t you take the house yourself? It’ll be to rent when I give it up. You could keep your old rooms here, and get somebody in to do for you — I don’t know but what Orlando himself could. He’s real handy about a house, and he knows your ways — till you could get somebody to take the rest of the house. You could meal out; you’re so irregular, anyway. I declare I feel bad about breakin’ you up here, and I don’t like to have anybody comin’ in that I don’t know.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Burwell,” Anther said to the part of her speech that demanded thanks from him.

“I don’t, one bit,” she continued, with the other part. “And still I don’t want to have it, as you may say, layin’ empty.”

“No, it would be a certain expense, and you would get no return from it.”

“Yes, and a house wears out faster when it’s empty. I’d be willing to let it to anybody that would take good care of it for two hundred and fifty a year.”

“That would be reasonable.”

“Why, it wouldn’t hardly more than pay the repairs and taxes,” Mrs. Burwell urged. “I shouldn’t expect to make anything on it, though goodness knows I need to, with everything as dear as they say it is to Nashua. I expect to pay good board to my daughter, though I presume I shall do enough about the house to make up without payin’ anything.”

“Well, I’ll see about it.”

“So do.” Mrs. Burwell did not rise, but stretched her long arm across the table for the doctor’s plate; she cleaned it into her own, and began to put the table in order for his uncertain dinner before he left the room. He went out of the side door upon a back porch, where Mrs. Burwell considered it neater to do certain parts of her housework than indoors, and more convenient for the disposal of pea-pods, squash seeds, and all kinds of cores and peelings, as well as those bits of refuse from fowls and butcher’s-meat which she could throw to the hens, netted into their yard beside the stable, without having contaminated her kitchen with them. She preferred to work there not only in summer, but as far into the winter as she could bear the cold, and, wrapped up as to her head and shoulders, she defied the elements till after Thanksgiving and well towards Christmas. Her back yard, between this porch and the stable, was as clean as the front yard, which dropped from the terrace where the house stood, and sloped three yards and no more to the white paling fence in the gloom of four funereal firs, cropped upward, as their boughs died of their own denseness, till their trunks showed as high as the chamber windows. The house was painted of a whiteness which age had never been suffered to soften, but was as coldly fresh as the green of the shutters; it had been there thirty years, but it stood as prim and new to the eye in every detail as if it had been finished the week before. Mrs. Burwell herself never appeared in the front yard except to pick up the fir twigs dropped in the spindling grass that bearded the terrace; in the immediate shadow of the trees no grass grew, and the ground was matted with the dark-brown decay of their spray and spills, and looked as if it were burned over.

Dr. Anther noted that his buggy must have been driven to the front gate, since there were no signs of it at the stable door, and he walked round the house, and looked up at its frigid façade with a novel interest. It had been long since he had looked at it, though he had daily gone in and out, and had slept in the northeast chamber ever since he had been Mrs. Burwell’s lodger. A certain shallowness of the structure now appeared to him, and he realized that the front was but one room deep on each side of the door, and that it shrank behind into the ell which imperfectly supported its pretensions of squareness, by stretching into an indefinite extent of kitchen and woodshed beyond the dining-room. He perceived that he had the two best rooms, but that the parlor, and the chamber above it, which was kept as a guest-room, though he could not remember when there had been a guest in it, were as large, if not as pleasant, as his own. Prom the fact of back stairs, he had always inferred a chamber over the dining-room, and he had conjectured something of the sort in the sloping roof of the kitchen. There were, then, eight rooms in all, and it did not seem to Anther, though he gave the matter no very distinct thought, that there were too many for the money that Mrs. Burwell proposed getting for it in a place like Saxmills. He dropped his cursory glance from the façade to the front door, and noted, with the sort of novel interest that the whole had inspired, the name of Justin Anther, M.D., on its small, glass-foamed plate, and then he went in-doors.

There was some one waiting for him in his office, and he said, “Ah, Hawberk!” in greeting of the presence which he had inferred from the legs he had first seen, as they stretched across the perspective of the door-way.

The man got to his feet with a certain alertness, which was more like a reminiscence of past activity than an actual fact, and offered the doctor a wasted hand. He looked shrunken within his clothes, and his greenish-brown complexion, blotched with patches of deeper brown, where the skin showed above the lustreless beard, was lighted with eyes which were still beautiful, though their black was dimmed by the suffering through which they had sunk into their cavernous sockets.

“Good-morning, doctor,” Hawberk said, and he added, courteously, “I hope I see you well?”

“I’m fairly well,” Anther said, facing round in his swivel-chair, which he had taken at once. “Sit down, won’t you? When did you get back?”

“Oh, I’ve been back some time — about a fortnight, I should say. But I’ve been pretty busy with a little thing of mine that I’m working at, and I haven’t been about the town much.”

“I hope my old friend Fredericks was able to do for you what you wanted?”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” Hawberk answered, nervously, but with a vagueness that did not seem to belong with the quickness. “He set me up. I’m all right now.”

“Gone back to it since your return?”

“Well, no. I can’t say that exactly. Still I don’t think it’s well to make an entire break. I think the tonic effect is good, don’t you?”

“Perhaps. If you don’t make it too tonic. How much have you got back to?”

“Well, it ain’t worth mentioning. Two or three spoonfuls after meals, and as many more at night.”

“Dreams all they ought to be?”

“Oh yes, they’re all right, now. I’m out of that pit that used to give me so much trouble. I don’t have to keep digging at it the whole night now, as I used to before I went to the Retreat. Dr. Fredericks pulled me out of that fairly well. There is a small matter of old bones and a skull or two,” Hawberk added, with a jocosity that did not make Anther smile. “But the great thing is that I understand it’s a dream even while I’m dreaming it, and I guess I shall be able to break it up if I keep realizing it. And it doesn’t seem to last so long. I think that’s a decided gain, don’t you?”

“It’s not a loss,” the doctor admitted.

“It’s a fighting chance, and I’m taking all the fighting chances there are. I’ve fairly got the upperhand. If you were to tell me to leave the whole thing off, I could do it, and not turn a hair.”

Anther made no answer, and Hawberk sank from his bragging note into a dull, confused tone, as he rubbed his hand over his forehead tremulously. “There was something I wanted to tell you about—”

The doctor prompted him after a moment’s wait, “Anything about your condition?”

“No, no.” As if he could not recall the thing he was groping for, Hawberk said, with a sort of provisionality, “I stopped in Boston on my way up yesterday, and saw that man who has my new patent in hand. He’s a great fellow, and he’s working it for all it’s worth. He’s sold territory over the whole country, and up into Canada. Why, doctor, he’s got twenty thousand dollars for the Canadian rights alone, up to date, and I come in for a clean half of the money! I’m going to build, this spring. I’ve as good as bought that hill back of my house — got an option on it — and I’m going to build up there and keep the old place where we are for a shop. Have a walk slanting down to it over the corner of the hill, but have the main entrance to the new place by a flight of stone steps from the street. Have the whole front of the hill terraced. I’ve got a landscape architect in Boston studying it out for me. I was telling Jim Langbrith about it last night. He brought Hope home from the party at his mother’s, and we got talking, and — Oh yes. Now I know what it is I wanted to speak with you about, doctor, It’s a very confidential matter, and I don’t know anybody that I’d like to trust with it except you. You at their house last night?”

“Yes,” Anther owned.

“Well, all right. I couldn’t go with Hope myself, for I had that man up from Boston that’s handling my new patent. Had to send Mrs. Langbrith  an excuse by Hope. But you saw them together, didn’t you? And what did you think? Think there was anything serious? I mean in Hope. Because I know there is in him. He asked me last night if I had any objections to their getting married as soon as he is out of college. I haven’t talked with Hope, and I don’t know, except from him, how she feels.”

Hawberk tried to fix Anther with the dull eyes that had once been brilliantly black and bold, but now seemed to slip in their glance, and he paused in the monologue which was film sleep-talking, a continuous babble, unbroken in its flow by the questions that interspersed it.

The doctor rubbed his chin and stared back at him. “Are you sure of what you say, Hawberk?”

“Sure!”

“Because, you know, you sometimes can’t tell the facts from the dreams.”

“Oh, but I can this time. I couldn’t be mistaken about a thing like that. What do you advise me to do? I’ve got plenty of means to meet the Langbrith s half-way on any money proposition. As things are going with me now, I could give Hope a hundred thousand dollars the day she was married. And Jim Langbrith comes of good old stock. I consider his mother the finest lady I ever met, and he’s his mother all over again — looks like her, talks like her, walks like her. I haven’t forgot how she used to come up and nurse my poor wife, and it would be kind of appropriate having the two families brought together again, the same as Langbrith and I used to be in business. Well, now I’d like to get your opinion, doctor. I haven’t spoken to my mother-in-law yet, because if the thing doesn’t strike you favorably I don’t want it to go any further. I want to stop it right here.” He lowered his voice from the high note to which it had been climbing back, and looked round him furtively. “You don’t think there’s any likelihood of that little green fellow coming back? I can get along now with the bones and the skulls, but that dwarf—”

“Have you seen him again?” Anther asked, soberly.

“No, not what you may call seen. But I feel as if I might, any minute.”

“Well, you know there’s no more reality in him than there is in those other things.”

“Yes, I understand that.”

“But you will see him, if you get to letting yourself go.”

“Yes,” Hawberk assented, with a long breath. “If he wasn’t green — kind of mouldy—” He stared, and after a moment he said, “What I want is something that will take me out of myself, good and strong.”

Anther was apparently not heeding. He said sharply, “Hawberk! Can you carry your mind back to that old difficulty between you and James’s father?”

Hawberk glanced at the doctor, slyly. “What old difficulty?”

“You must know. When you first began to lose sleep, and took up this habit.”

The slyness passed into vagueness, then the vagueness gathered itself into a look of fury, which lost itself with the words in which it exploded: “Damn him!”

“Yes. Just what was it?” Anther pursued.

The vagueness came back, and then the slyness. “Why, there wa’n’t anything that you may call a difficulty, doctor. All that’s past and gone. We both agreed not to say anything more about it. He never did, and I haven’t. Ever strike you that that skull of mine — that one I’ve had so much trouble with — looked like — Well, I’ve been thinking, since I saw Jim, last night—”

Anther shook his head, kindly. “That’s your fancy, Hawberk. But you did feel injured, badly used, at the time, didn’t you? Try to think. You know you used to tell me things very different from those you have got to saying since, and I have a reason for wishing to find out the original facts, just now. They may have a bearing on an important matter — important to us both. You put in your invention, didn’t you, and then he forced you out?” Hawberk looked down and passed his hand over his forehead. “There was something like that. But he paid me a good round sum for the invention, and a big bonus for going out, didn’t he?”

“You ought to know. Was that really the case, or is it what you’ve imagined since?”

“Why, I should say it was the case.” A fear, the look of a man at some time deeply intimidated, supplanted the slyness in Hawberk’s blotched-brown visage. “It’s a thing I’ve agreed not to talk about. He lets me alone because I don’t. He’s got my promise, and I’ve got his. If I didn’t keep my word, he would be over the wall the first time I fell asleep. You don’t catch me.”

“Come! come!” Anther said, severely. “You mustn’t talk that kind of nonsense to me. I tell you, I am quite in earnest, and I would like to know the bottom facts. You needn’t be afraid of trusting me with them. You know, as well as I do, the unreality of those troubles of yours. They come from opium, and from nothing else. Now, was there any hold that Langbrith had on you, enabling him to force your consent to going out of business and giving him the entire usufruct of your invention? I want you to answer that fairly and squarely. Was there, or wasn’t there?” — I Hawberk passed his hand over his tormented brow again. “There was something, doctor. It’s strange. It seems as if there was a hold I had on him. But it must have been a hold he had on me. I can’t straighten that out. That appears to be the trouble with me. I don’t see why I didn’t use the hold if I was the one that had it, unless — unless it was something about Mrs. Langbrith. Do you suppose it was? She had been good to my wife; she took care of her in those last days — Oh, my God, how they come back! Doctor, do you wonder I took to it? To get a little sleep! Once I went a fortnight without knowing I had any, if I had any. It was hell. Nothing since from the opium — Ah, I can’t think it out!”

“Try,” Anther insisted. “It is very essential.” He rose from his chair, and began to walk restively up and down the room, while Hawberk lay dreamily staring at the windows, which Anther’s person showed itself against, now one and now the other, as he paced to and fro. “I — I don’t know but I’m getting it,” he began. The doctor’s foot struck a plank that gave under it, and the door of the long case fell softly open. Hawberk scrambled to his feet with a shuddering cry, “Oh, for God’s sake, what’s that?”

“You know — you know well enough!” Anther shouted. “Don’t be a fool! It’s that old skeleton that you’ve seen a hundred times. I’ve had it ever since I’ve been here, and Hillward before me. Now, do have a little sense. It’s a real one, and it can’t bother you like those fancy ones of yours.”

He went up to Hawberk, and put his hands on him to stay his trembling. “What — what does a man want to keep a thing like that around for?” Hawberk faltered out, helpless to take his eyes from the quivering thing that slightly turned as it dangled. “Shut it up!”

Anther obeyed, and Hawberk dropped nervelessly into his chair. “Lord, I don’t see how I’m to get home.”

The doctor looked at him grimly, then pityingly, then despairingly, as to any hope of further light from him then on the point he wished to clear.

“I’m driving up your way. I’ll take you. There’s my buggy at the door.”

“Oh, thank you, doctor,” Hawberk said, and he found strength to follow him out into the hall where his hat and coat hung, and got out of the house first.

XIV

LATE in the afternoon of the following Saturday, Anther stopped his horse in front of the business block, as it called itself, where Judge Garley had his office over the National Bank. It was the only brick building in Saxmills, and the office of the judge was itself approached by an outer stairway of the prevalent wooden construction. The doctor met him on the landing at the moment when he turned from turning the key in his door.

“Going for the day?” he asked, with a disappointment which he could not keep out of either his face or his voice.

“Not if you’re coming for it,” the judge placidly replied. He turned the key in his door again, and hospitably threw it open. “Walk in.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the doctor apologized, but the judge took no heed of his apology, except to push him in.

“Sit down,” he said, and he reached a book from the top of his roll-top desk. “There’s something I think you might find interesting. It’s more in your line than mine, and I’ve found it interesting. Well, it’s important as a matter of medical jurisprudence, too.”

“What is it?” the doctor asked, listlessly turning the book over in his lap and fluttering the leaves absently.

“Why, it’s a study of the criminal settlement on that island off the northeast coast of Japan where the Russians colonize their murderers. As they have no capital punishment, except for political offences, they have to do something with their homicides, and they collect them on that island and keep them there for life. It’s very curious, especially in its reversion to some old-fashioned theories — the book, I mean. When I was on the bench — and it has been my experience as a criminal lawyer, too — it seemed to me that very few criminals suffered what we called remorse. They wished to disown their crimes, to keep from realizing that they had committed them, and they wished to get off from the penalty; but I could not make out that they were consumingly sorry for them. This man seems to think differently, and he says some things to make you think he is right. We generally kill off our murderers before they have time to show remorse, but the Russians keep them, in a kind of cold storage, up there in the latitude of Siberia, and they have opportunities of studying effects that we precipitately deny ourselves the knowledge of. The remorse is long in getting to the surface, but, if this man is right, it is always there, and he has heard it comes out about three o’clock in the morning, in the murderers’ dormitories, when they wake rested from the fatigue of their hard day’s labor, and begin to think. An interesting phase of their remorse is the pity they feel for their victims.” Anther sat with the book fallen shut in his lap, and he did not seem to have been attentive to all that the judge was saying. When Garley stopped, the doctor asked, “What do you think of a man who takes the life of another’s soul — destroys his soul? It was a woman’s expression.”

The judge smiled intelligently. “I should imagine. But I should doubt whether it could be done. Do you want to engage me for the defence?”

“No,” said Anther, falling in with his humor, “he’s out of danger from the law — unless — unless some law follows up such fellows where they go.”

“The old theory was that some law did,” the judge suggested.

“Yes, and we can’t tell how much truth there was in it. The base of doubt in me is the immunity which wrong-doing seems to have here. But perhaps it’s only an appearance.”

The judge laughed now. “It serves the purpose of a reality in a great many cases. What scrape do you want me to get you out of?”

The doctor got no further than smiling, though he fell in with the judge’s mood, which is the prevailing American mood in the face of any mystery. “Nothing worse than allowing opium to a man who would take it anyway.”

“Well, I see that you’ve decided on your line of defence.”

It was a little time before Anther suggested, at an apparent remoteness from the point, “You were never here in Royal Langbrith’s day?”

“No, I came here first after my last term in the Assembly, when he had been dead some time. I believe you and I came here about the same time, didn’t we?”

“No, I preceded you several years. And I had known him before I came here. We were in college together?”

“Am I to infer something against him on that account?” the judge inquired, with the jocosity which the doctor had ceased to share, even by so much as a smile.

“He was the devil,” Anther said, with a brevity which was of almost a dispassionate effect.

The judge was amused by the succinctness so far as to observe, “In the case of a living person, that is a sort of language which we should consider actionable, I’m afraid.”

“The things I know of that man—”

Anther stopped, and sat staring at the judge’s law-books where they stood ranged on the shelves before him, showing their red labels on their sheepskin backs with a uniformity in height and shape, broken here and there by cases of pamphlets and documents, and stray pieces of fiction the judge was fond of reading.

“Would fill volumes,” the lawyer interpreted, with pleasant interest.

Anther came back to himself with a sharp “Yes!” and Judge Garley went on:

“Well, now, do you know, I’m not surprised, somehow. I’ve come upon one or two things lately, in a professional way, connected with the deceased, that did not smell as sweet as the conventional memory which seems to have blossomed in the dust all over the place. It is very curious! I have sensed for a good while, by that sixth sense which we haven’t got a name for yet, that there was something hushed up in regard to that man.”

“There is everything hushed up,” Anther nodded, frowningly.

“And you mean that you can tell me — ?” The judge checked himself, with a laugh for his weakness.

“Not everything, because I don’t know everything; but I know enough.”

“Squalid things — the kind we don’t like to handle, or pretend we don’t?”

“Squalid, and lurid, too. He was the devil.”

“There you are, with your actionable language again! It’s well for you that our ex-fellow-citizen is out of the way.”

“Do you believe,” Anther asked, “that one of us can do another a wrong so atrocious as to confound the sufferer’s conscience?”

“Cause his brother to offend? Isn’t that rather a question for our friend Enderby?”

“Perhaps. But what do you think?”

“I should say that it was a theory which a great many people would like to urge for a justification, or at least an explanation of their misdemeanors.” The doctor’s tragic humor broke in a joyless laugh. “Oh, of course, you are right. It is astonishing how these old theological cobwebs hang on in corners of the brain. What a comfort you legal minds are! Advocatus diaboli!”

“Ah, aren’t you playing that part now? I should be quite willing to leave our ex-townsman in the enjoyment of his canonization, but you seem to want to reopen the case.”

“No.” Anther relapsed into his gloom. “It can never be reopened. That is the worst of the evil that lives after men. It intertwines itself with so much of the good in the survivors that you can’t strike at it without wounding the best and gentlest of them. But I want to tell you, Garley, about that man — Or, no! Why should I bore you — burden you?”

“Oh, we always like scandal, even concerning the dead. I’ve allowed that, and I can enjoy yours all the more because I know it isn’t idle scandal. Go on, doctor!”

Anther had risen, and he did not sit down at the courteous gesture towards his chair which the judge made.

“Hawberk has got back,” he said.

“Ah!” Judge Garley brightened up. “It’s he whom you have been allowing the opium? I supposed he always came back permanently cured.”

“This time seems to be an exception. He has come back cured of seven-eighths of his ordinary dose, if you can believe him; which you can’t. I used to think I could follow his lies, or their probable direction. But I give it up. Beyond having mostly an optimistic character, and being the absolute reverse of the known fact, his mendacity is an ever-new surprise. I give it a harder name than it ought to have. He doesn’t mean to deceive, poor soul. It’s pure romancing, absolute fiction, but it’s no worse. What interested me to-day was the turn which he has taken towards the memory of the man who ruined him. He wanted to persuade me that Royal Langbrith was a fine fellow, with whom he had always been on the best of terms. The fact is — do you want to hear it? Well, I’ll tell you anyway — Langbrith did him one of the deadliest and crudest injuries that ever a man had to bear. You know they were partners in the mills here?”

“I have heard the poetic legend that Hawberk was an ingenious mechanic to whom Langbrith gave a share in the business, and then had to get rid of because he was an opium fiend. Is the legend a little too florid?”

Anther seemed to restrain a burst of fury. When he spoke it was quite pacifically. “You can decide. Hawberk was an ingenious mechanic, whose invention put the business on a prosperous basis. He discovered how to make from straw-pulp the light quality of printing-paper which is the specialty of the mills to-day, and which they still have the secret of. Langbrith wanted the whole business. Hawberk had been his partner from the beginning, and he forced Hawberk out under threat of exposing him to his wife, almost maniacally neurotic, in a foolish boy affair with a woman. Hawberk told me, while he could still tell the truth, that there was nothing guilty in the business; but his wife was frantically jealous, and the fact wouldn’t have mattered. She would have believed anything against him, because she must.” Prom his own science the judge acknowledged with a nod the point which the doctor made from his. “He brooded upon his injury night and day, till the night and day were one, and there was no sleep in them. Then he took to opium. I prescribed it, as I should have to do again in a case like his, if we were back where we were then with soporifics. He could not have taken chloral. But the opium mastered him, while he was still hoping for justice from a man who did not know what justice meant. His opium-eating could not be kept a secret in a place like this, and Langbrith  had it all his own way. The things that can be kept secret are the kind of things he did. He had two wives: one, the woman he threatened Hawberk with, in Boston, and never married, and one, the Mrs. Langbrith you know here. He went to town for his debauches of all kinds, and sometimes when he came home so much of his drink-fury remained that he taunted his wife with the other woman. He used to strike her — she has told me, because she had to, and that is how I came to know the other thing. She told me that, too, but not until it could not be kept from me any longer. What graves women are for the wickedness of men! I suppose you know it, in your profession; but in mine — !”

Anther had apparently come to an end, but he sank into the chair he had left.

“That does put another complexion on it,” the judge said, sobered in his irony, but ironical still. “ I don’t know that I can dispute your professional superiority as a repository of family mysteries. Your case rather goes beyond any I could boast of, in some features.”

“And this,” Anther broke out, taking away the handkerchief with which he had been wiping his face, “is the man whom, that poor young fool wants to put up a tablet to in the front of the Public Library!”

“I noticed,” the judge said, “that you seemed to receive the suggestion rather conservatively the other night. I laid it to envy of the deceased.”

“Oh, pooh! I know what you mean. I was going to tell you. I do wish to marry her. I don’t think she is perfect, and I’m long past the time of marrying for ‘love,’ as it is called. But to me she is the most sacred of human beings. I have known her from the first days of her hideous marriage, almost from the time when that man took her from her hard work in his mills and made her his slave; for she was that from the beginning.”

“Excuse me,” the judge interrupted. “I oughtn’t to let you go on, if you think I meant to imply what you have inferred. I didn’t intend to insinuate that you had the envy of a successor.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I don’t mind your knowing what I’ve told you.” Anther stopped there, as if he had lost the thread of his thinking, and the judge made his attempt to restore it to him.

“I had understood that Mrs. Langbrith was the daughter of a minister in the country near here, and was employed in the business in a clerical capacity.”

“She wasn’t,” the doctor said, bluntly. “Her father was a starving saint in the hill parish where she was born; but when Langbrith married her she was a hand in the mills, like forty other girls. It was her inherent dignity that may have given him the notion of something else. Or it may have been his dignity. At any rate, he married her and martyred her, even to the blows that fell upon her body as well as her soul. I don’t say he never fancied her; and she fancied him, poor soul, as long as he would let her; and when she lost all faith in him she was still his faithful victim. She was so gentle that, though she suffered, she could not resist evil. She was born to keep that commandment. He could outrage her nature, and abuse her to his heart’s content, and he could count absolutely upon her silence. He was as safe from her as from the God he found so complaisant to his wickedness.”

“Oh, come,” the judge remonstrated, ironically still, though he felt the indignant passion that throbbed in Anther’s words and respected it; “you mustn’t allow yourself to arraign the Deity for His way of doing business. How do you know but our friend is paying his shot now in what is not perhaps ‘the easiest room in hell’?”

“Why I have come to you” — Anther made another of his abrupt breaks from the direct line—” is because I want you to advise me what to do. It is all open between her and me, but she has to live in subjection to some one, and she lives in subjection to her son. She has never positively deceived him in regard to his father, but she has never found the time to tell him what sort of man his father was.”

“It would have been difficult,” the judge owned, somewhat more gravely.

“I have thought the matter over a thousand times, and tried to imagine some moment when she could have spoken to undeceive him, but I never could make it out. All that I could make out was that every moment’s delay rendered the truth more impossible.” The judge nodded his large head in unconscious assent. “As time went on, the man became a sort of town myth. He grew into the tradition of a conscript father, the founder of our prosperity, the benefactor of the community; and it would have been an insult to the public faith, as well as a terrible ordeal for the boy, if his real character had been proclaimed.”

“I see,” the judge assented, with a certain pleasure in the perfection of the situation.

“It became a sort of moral necessity,” Anther continued, “ to leave the past undisturbed, to let the lie remain. The only man who might have unmasked Langbrith living was held from it by the grip Langbrith had of his throat, and Langbrith dead has been safe from him through the optimistic turn his opium craze has taken in the direction of a legend of close friendship between them. Besides, Hawberk’s repute as a liar had become so firmly established that his word wouldn’t have counted in a place where Langbrith’s fair fame is the richest jewel of the local history. There couldn’t be a more acceptable, a more entirely popular, thing proposed in Saxmills than his commemoration in the way his son has suggested. It wouldn’t cost the town anything, and it would be such a credit to it!”

The doctor laughed for helplessness, and the judge joined in the bitter merriment. “Yes,” he assented, with the ponderous movement of his mind which found expression in his formal and weighty diction, whether he joked or whether he adjudicated. “There appears, as you say, doctor, to be a sort of moral necessity to let lying dogs sleep, if we may reverse the axiom, especially when they have slept long. What is the advantage, the better element might ask, of rending the veil of oblivion from errors which Providence has seen fit to leave in the shadow, doubtless for some wise purpose? The morals of the community, they would contend, would be more contaminated by the effluvium from our late fellow-townsman’s tomb, if we were to open its ponderous and marble jaws for the purpose of drawing his frailties from their dread abode, than if we were to leave the past undisturbed. They could argue that his success, which is now an example and an incentive to light our young men on the upward way, as long as they suppose it to be founded upon virtue, would be a means of endless corruption if it were known to be the putrescent splendor of his moral rottenness, and would prove an ignis fatuus to lure them into the abyss. As far as our community is concerned, doctor, I think you will do better to leave the late Royal Langbrith’s memory alone.”

“As far as the community is concerned, Garley,” the doctor returned, hotly, “I think you are perfectly right. But that isn’t the point, except for the psychological publicist, if there is such a thing. I am interested solely in the personal view.”

“And what is that?”

Anther replied, after a moment of silent chagrin: “I hoped you might have inferred. But it is simply this: Mrs. Langbrith and I both have the belief that our marriage would be abhorrent to her son, not because he has any dislike for me — he is rather fond of me, and I like the boy, when he is off his high horse and isn’t patronizing me—”

“He patronizes me, too,” the judge observed; the doctor ignored his reflection in proceeding.

“ — but because he has this extraordinary infatuation for his father’s memory, and would consider his mother’s second marriage with any one a desecration not to be voluntarily endured. Simply, she is afraid to bring our wish to his knowledge, and she is afraid to let me do so. I have been almost a father to the boy from his first years; and, under ordinary circumstances, there would be no reason to suppose that our marriage would be distasteful to him. But as it is—”

Anther stopped, and the judge said, with the air of summing-up, “Your conclusion is that the defamation of his father is the only means of—”

“Why do you speak,” Anther cried out, “as if his father were an innocent man, and not the wickedest and filthiest scoundrel that ever lived?”

“My dear old friend,” said the judge, leaning forward in his rocking-chair and laying his hand on the doctor’s arm, “let us be careful not to employ actionable language, even in regard to those who can only cite us to appear before the higher tribunal, which has no jurisdiction in this county, or, so far as I know, in this State. I quite enter into your feelings, and I should be the first to wish you joy of the fulfilment of your hopes, the fruition of your wishes. But you will certainly not further them by adopting anything like a violent line of expression. Now, go on. The boy has returned to Harvard. Have you seen Mrs. Langbrith since?”

“I parted with her in anger Sunday night. But she had tried my patience beyond endurance. She proposed to me, as a way of propitiating James, that—” Anther choked, and the judge had to prompt him:

“She proposed to you — ?”

“Well, that I should humor his notion of putting up this memorial to his father; that I should stultify myself, and help to perpetuate the — the—”

“Careful, careful!” his friend suggested.

“Oh, you know what I mean! I don’t believe she felt the enormity of it as I did. She couldn’t, in that meek forgivingness of hers. But I left her in anger — yes, for the first time; and I don’t see my way to making her understand the shame, the iniquity—”

“Really, you ought to have been a doctor of divinity! I think we can leave your reconciliation with her to nature,” and the judge finely smiled at the doctor. “But now, in regard to the son’s undeception — or shall we say enlightenment? — is it your notion that some third party might undertake the task of accomplishing the end desired?”

“Oh, I don’t know what my notion is,” Anther replied, rising with a finality which he expressed in superfluously buttoning his coat about him. The day was a warmish day in April, and he might well have found his winter great-coat uncomfortable, even in driving. With the afternoon sun pouring into the thinly shaded windows of the judge’s bare office, it was almost a summer heat in which he had been sitting. He added, with a quick sigh, “I didn’t know but you would be able to advise me—”

“I will think it over,” the judge promised, with bland placidity, and he turned from taking leave of his friend and rearranged some papers on his open desk. “By-the-way,” he called after Anther, “I meant to ask you: the brother, who has charge of the business, does he know anything of this double life and character?”

“John Langbrith?”

“Yes. How long has he been in charge?”

“Oh, ever since Langbrith’s death. Somebody had to take hold of the business. He was here before that.”

“But nothing has ever passed between you and him as to the facts?”

“Not a word. They were not things I could speak of first, and John Langbrith speaks of nothing. I suppose he talks business, but I have no business to talk with him.”

“Does Mrs. Langbrith know whether he knows?”

“We have never mentioned the matter, but I don’t believe she does. You know how close he is. He never goes to her except on business, and she has never seen the inside of his house. The mill is his home.”

“In his way, he is as successful a secret as his brother?”

“Quite,” the doctor said, gloomily.

XV

ON his way home to the early tea which Mrs. Burwell’s primitive tradition obliged him to accept, in place of anything like a late dinner or later supper, Dr. Anther drove by the Langbrith mansion, and looked hard at it. He turned, when he got by, drove back, stopped his buggy at the gate, and hurried up the brick walk to the door. It was opened, before he could ring, by Mrs. Langbrith. “Both the girls are out,” she partially explained, and she could have said further that the middle-aged serving-women, who were still girls to her, had not outlived their youthful passion for mingling with the crowds which thronged the long main street of Saxmills on pay-day, and that she had yielded to it for the sake of the pleasure which the fine weather would add to their outing. But he paid no heed to her opening words, and she did not go on.

“Amelia,” he said, with the fervid rashness that was natural to him, “I want to beg your pardon for the way I left you last night.”

“Oh!” she murmured, so deeply that the murmur was almost a sob.

Then these two elderly people did by one impulse what they had never done before. In the dim hall, beyond which Anther had not tried to penetrate, they cast themselves into each other’s arms, and he kissed one cheek of hers, while she buried the other in his neck, and smoothed her silvered brown hair, and kept saying softly, “Poor girl, poor girl, poor girl!”

He kissed her cheek again, and then he walked slowly and thoughtfully down to the gate, and got into his buggy and let his horse take its own gait and course. Not only a tender patience with her swelled Anther’s heart, but an unwonted tolerance for young Langbrith also found room for itself there. What wonder that the boy was reverent of his father’s memory, since he knew no evil of him? Was it for this he must be called fool and despised for an ass? Anther saw that there were yet many steps to be taken with regard both to him and his mother, and that they could not be separated in relation to himself. He softened more and more towards the whole situation, and momently the thought of the weakness he had surprised in her consecrated and endeared her to him.

He drove along the village street with his figure stooped well towards the dash-board, when his ears were saluted with a succession of girlish trebles. “How do, doctor!”

“How do, doctor!”

“How do, Dr. Anther!”

He looked up blankly, and presently realized that he saw Hope Hawberk, Jessamy Colebridge, and Susie Johns, walking, with arms more or less intertwined, along the pavement which he was closely skirting by the erratic preference of his horse. They smiled brightly upon his daze, and nodded gayly to him, hanging over one another and laughing at him over their shoulders when they got by. He gathered himself together to call back to them, “Oh, how do you do!” and the charm of their differing prettiness very sweetly possessed him. They were like his own children to him, in his long intimate acquaintance with their ailments as a physician, and with their accomplishments as chairman of the school board. Their young voices, and their arch, familiar, trustful tones made the blood play warmly about his heart, and he let his horse take him home to supper in a mood which he could not have imagined of himself when he parted such a little while ago from Judge Garley.

The girls walked on down the street towards the denser part of the town, chattering, singing snatches of song, humming and laughing, leaning over to mock one another, and then straining outward or forward in their fun. They sobered as they got more into the crowds thronging the sidewalks, till they distinguished themselves from the mill-girls by a demure state, which could not leave one in doubt of their quality as village girls who did not work in the mills. Mill-hands of both sexes were exuberantly filling the street, after their release from the week’s work, in a tumult of shopping, of carrying on, of courting, which would last far into the night. The young men stood at the corners or lounged along the curbstones, smoking, and challenging the girls to a stand which here and there stopped the way with giggling and slanging and tussling groups; the girls, when they did not stop, tossed chaff and sauce at the young men over their shoulders and tempted them to pursuit, as they passed chewing gum. But neither the young men nor the girls molested the three friends, who had now separated, and were pushing sinuously through the open spaces towards the post-office. The mill-hands knew who each of them was, and how they were nearly always together; some had been in school with them, or in Sunday-school, and these exchanged nods with them; others who were strangers to them looked inimically after them, as representatives of class.

The three were not equally friends, though they were all friends. Hope Hawberk was chief among them, and Susie Johns was next her in the understanding that Jessamy Colebridge was capable of being silly at moments when the others would rather have died. Without being untrue to her, they sometimes laughed a little at her; but that did not keep either of them from laughing a little with her at something queer in the other. Susie and Jessamy both knew about Hope’s father, but her grandmother was of a family which no one in Saxmills could look down on. Her grandfather had been Squire Southfield, once the chief lawyer of the place, and he had been in Congress; though that was a long time ago, and her mother had certainly married beneath her in taking Hope’s father. He was then a skilful young mechanic, but it quite passed the knowledge of Hope’s friends that he had been a very fascinating fellow, whom such a girl as Hope’s mother could not resist. Hope was like him in the dark coloring of her beauty, her dusky hair, and her black eyes; but there was a passionate irregularity of her mouth when she smiled which was the trace of her mother’s stormy temperament. She had really more of her father’s amiability, which, to the strict New England sense, erred almost to the guilt of easy-goingness! His dreams had not Begun with opium. There were psychologists among his critics who regarded the opium as the logical consequence of his dreams, and who, if they had been asked in time, could have prophesied from the first all that he had come to since.

Neither of the three girls expected a letter, but when it seemed that there really was a letter for Susie Johns, Jessamy confessed her own disappointment with a quick “Oh, dear!” in taking the letter from the girl clerk behind the boxes, who severely announced, “Ain’t nothing for you or Hope.” But Hope, if she had a disappointment, hid it under a laugh.

She caught the letter from Susie’s lax hand, and said, “Let me read it for you, Susie dear,” and Susie wrinkled her nose, and said, “Well, you may.” But Hope contented herself with looking at the post-mark.

Jessamy joined her in the inspection, and it was she who proclaimed their joint discovery. “It’s from Boston! Why, Susie Johns, who’s been writing to you from Boston? Oh, I’ll bet it’s Mr. Falk.”

It appeared that the letter was really from Mr. Falk, but not till the girls had left the anteroom of the post-office and made their way back homeward on the up-hill street leading out of the business thoroughfare. Then, when they could have the whole sidewalk to themselves again, each of the others passed a hand through Susie’s arms and prepared herself to help her make out any hard words, leaning forward in readiness. Jessamy kept babbling as Susie read her letter silently through, and by the time she reached the end Jessamy was offering the twentieth variant of her wonder: “What in the world is he writing to you about?”

“Oh, it’s just manners,” Susie responded serenely. “I suppose he thought he ought to write and say something pleasant about his visit here.”

“Is that all?” Jessamy innocently protested, and this made Hope laugh.

“What else did you expect there would be?” Susie folded the letter up and put it back in the envelope.

“Well, I don’t know. He might have sent some message!”

“He did. He said ‘give his regards to all inquiring friends.’”

“Oh, that sounds nice. It’s just what we say — village people. But I believe Mr. Falk isn’t from a very large town. Only you always think students must be like city folks. Dear, I wish I had a letter.”

“Well,” Hope said, “I’ll ask Harry Matthewson to write you one.”

“No, you mustn’t, Hope. Will you, really?”

Susie squealed, “Jessamy Colebridge, you certainly are almost a goose”; and Hope said, “Well, I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

They had come to Jessamy’s gate, and Hope pushed her arm through Susie’s and ran her on, while Jessamy stood looking in rueful puzzle after them.

“Jessamy is such a simpleton. I should think she was a child of ten yet.” Hope put her face down on Susie’s shoulder and laughed, and when she lifted it Susie put her face down on Hope’s shoulder and laughed. Then Susie offered to let Hope read Falk’s letter; but Hope had never shown her the letter which she had got from Langbrith the Monday before.

XVI

BEYOND the village, the little lake from which the mills drew their power had been clear of ice for weeks, but its waters had kept the look of winter. The logs weltering at the gates where the current which was to grind them into pulp left the lake, dipped and lifted with a cold, wet gleam as they pushed at the pales on the pull of the stream. A day came when the whole aspect of the landscape changed. No leaf had started, and scarcely a bud had swelled on the water-elms that showed their black trunks and boughs amid the green gloom of the pines and spruces overhanging the shores, and the white nakedness of the birches had not yet clothed itself, except for a thin veil of catkins. But the water had taken a warmth of tone from the sky, which was of a deep blue, heaped with milky clouds roughed to a superficial dusk by the southern wind. Bluebirds rose and sank with the rhythm of their querulous notes in their short flights about the farmsteads and village houses. The robins in the chilly mornings and evenings shouted from the door-yard trees. Ragged lines of blackbirds drifted with a glassy clatter over the woods and rested in their tops, or slanted towards the water, where they showed their iridescent splendors, as they strutted up and down on the logs and parleyed harshly together.

Hawberk sat tilted in his chair against the southern house-wall where the sun struck into the garden, and listened with a dim smile to their clatter, coming over to him through a cleft of the land that let the lake shine through below the hill. He had begun the joyful day with half a gill of laudanum, and he was feeling the primary effect of the drug in the delicious lassitude he won from it at continually increasing cost. He was smiling, not only at the noise of the blackbirds, but at the comfort of the cat, which had found the stone warm at the base of the sundial in the walk of the little garden, and lay coiled there. He liked the look of the dishevelled beds, where the dry litter of the last summer’s stalks and stems was mixed with the tawny blades of the grassy borders, and he liked the softly waving plumes of the pines which beckoned to him from the brow of the hill behind the little dwelling. He heard, with the same sensuous pleasure, the jar of the mills below the street on which the house fronted, and he vaguely recalled the relation his life once had to that busy sound, now no more to him than the idle sound of the wind in the pine tops with which it was effectively one. Exquisite thrills passed through his relaxing nerves, and the twitching of his muscles was divinely voluptuous. Then, suddenly, he was in that pit again, out of which he had slowly fought his way at the Retreat, but which he knew he must now sink back into day by day. The green dwarf was there as he had not been for a long time, and was at his work of slowly filling in the sides of the pit, making it smaller and smaller, and arabesquing its surfaces with patterns of men’s bones. He choked in the thickening air and dug his way upward with his hands, toiling for months, for years, for ages; but the pit was always filled in again, and its roof and sides faced with those hideous arabesques. After centuries, he saw the light break through from above; then the dwarf came slowly overhead, and covered him in again and shut out the light. The groans of his torment ascended continually; when the dwarf extinguished the last gleam, the horror was such that it burst into a scream of despair — a cry of agony so sharp that it cut his dream asunder, and he woke with cold sweat, and saw the cat dozing at the base of the dial.

“Father, father!” the voice of Hope called, while she caught his reeking hand in hers.

He tilted forward out of his chair, trembled to his feet, and stared around, gasping.

“Oh, Hope, child, don’t let me sleep, don’t ever let me sleep again. How long have I been here?”

“Only while I could go in and get my hat and a book to read to you. Grandma wanted me a minute.”

“It seemed eternity. Don’t let me sleep again. I’m all right if I don’t sleep. Promise me that.”

“Well, I won’t, father. But come now — or aren’t you able to go up the hill with me?” He had sunk back into his chair, and she kissed his forehead, blotched from the opium, with its sunken eyes beneath it, and the red scars seaming his cheeks, from which a sickening odor came. “But must you? — must you?”

“Yes, yes, I must. Don’t talk to me that way. I must, I tell you. If I had a little, now! Where is it?”

“In your room. I’ll get it, if you say so—”

“Well, get it then, quick, quick! I don’t want to sleep again.”

“Don’t be afraid. I’ll be back in a second.”

She vanished, and reappeared with a bottle in her hand which she put into his shaking hold.

He pushed it to his lips without looking at it. When he had drained it he glanced at the empty bottle. “Was that all?”

“Yes, every bit. But I can get some more this afternoon if you want it.”

“Of course I want it; it puts life into me. Ah!” He drew a long breath and stretched himself. “That’s something like. Now come on.” He laid his shaking hand on her arm, and they began to climb the hill together on the path that found its way upward by little juts of the ledge, and little turns round them, and over the rough surfaces where the thin soil left the rock bare. “It’s astonishing what it does for a man. It’s all that keeps me up, in these enterprises. But don’t you ever touch it, Hope. It’s the best of servants, but the worst of masters. If I didn’t know how to control it so well, it would play the mischief with me.” Hope said, with the lightness which all the horror of the situation could not sadden in her, “And even you don’t seem to have the upperhand always, father.”

Hawberk laughed in sympathy with her lightness. “That’s a fact, Hope. But it’s very seldom. The great thing is to know when to pull up. I’m all right as long as I’m awake, and there’s nothing like it to keep you awake. You’ve got to use it regularly if you want to get the good of it.”

“Well, you’ve wanted to get the good of it about two hours too soon to-day, father,” she said, with caressing mockery.

“Why, what time is it?”

“About eleven.”

“Lord, I thought it was after dinner, and I’d gone by my time. You oughtn’t to have given it all to me, Hope. I don’t know what I shall do now till night.”

“I’ll get some more for you from Dr. Anther. He wanted you to have it.”

“I don’t know about that. I believe he wants to keep it away from me, though he knows it’s the only thing that will carry me through this pinch of work. I want you to go right after dinner for it — before he starts on his visits.”

“I will, I will, father.”

“It’s the only thing that will keep me awake, and as long as I don’t sleep I’m all right.”

“Well, I should think you would find it pretty hard to manage without any sleep at all,” Hope said, always in the same drolling fashion. “Why don’t you try to stop it altogether?”

“That’s just what I’m going to do when I get through this pinch. I’ve talked it all over with Dr. Anther. We’ve got the whole thing mapped out, down to the last dot.”

They had reached the top of the hill in their talk, which had had as much silence as parlance in it.

Hawberk let go the arm to which he had been clinging less and less dependency, and straightened his bent, wasted frame.

“Fine! fine!” he said, looking dimly out of the caverns under his brows at the prospect. “I think I shall put the house right here. You know I’ve bought this hill, Hope?”

“No, I didn’t, father. But I’m not the least surprised to hear it. You keep buying all sorts of things.” She had settled herself on the warm, brown needles under the pine where he stood; and, as she spoke, she pulled her skirt closely about her knees and folded it under them. He looked down into her face, and they both laughed.

“But this is a fact, Hope. That last little thing of mine is doing so well in the hands of those people at Boston that I’ve decided to build here. We haven’t passed the papers yet, but I’ve got old Arlingham’s agreement to sell. Drew it up yesterday before Judge Garley, and left it with him. I’m going to have an architect make the plans. It’s to be for you, Hope.”

“Me? Oh my! I like the little old place at the foot of the hill well enough.”

“It’s well enough for your grandmother and me, but I want you to have a decent place when—”

“Well, well! That’s all right, father; and I’m ever so much obliged. But you better sit down and have a rest before you begin building.” She kept the same joking tone, but there was a sort of nervousness in the haste with which she cut him off from the topic, and hastened to say, “I’ll read to you now.”

Hawberk obeyed, and leaned his bared head against the trunk of the pine at whose foot he sank; his eyes closed, and he instantly started forward, with a shudder and a cry of “Ugh!”

She closed on her thumb the book which she had just opened, and asked, gravely, “Was it the green one?”

“It’s always the green one, now,” he lamented.

“Well, then, I’ll tell you what, father: you’re getting pretty bad again.”

“No, no! I’m all right — or I shall be, if I can keep awake. I guess you better talk to me, Hope. Better not read. Seems to set me off at once. You’d just as lief talk, wouldn’t you?”

“Oh yes. It doesn’t matter to me. You’ll do the talking, anyway.”

Hawberk laughed. “I guess that’s about so, Hope. The reason I want you to have this place here is because Langbrith and I used to talk about building here together. We used to be great cronies, Royal Langbrith and I did, and it seems quite appropriate—”

“Now, look here, father,” the girl broke in, “you’re getting on to forbidden ground. You may choose any other subject to talk about, and I’m with you, but I can’t follow you there.”

“Oh, all right, I wasn’t going to. But now let me tell you the kind of a house I’ve got in my head for this place. Of course, some of these pines will have to come down.” He got up, and began to walk about and take in the shape of the ground, and pace off certain measurements, and look up at the different trees. “But I shall leave a row of them in front, and a lot off to the side, here.” He gestured towards the right, as he came back, and sat down again. “But all back of here the trees have got to go. I want to have you a good big garden behind the house.”

“Well, I’m almost sorry for that,” Hope humored his fancy. “I believe I’d rather have the pines than the garden. They do smell so nice, with this sun on them.”

“That’s a fact,” her father assented, sniffing the balsamic odors that the heat drew from the boughs softly stirring themselves in the wind. “Well, I’ll leave as many as I can, Hope.” He broke off with, “What sort of young fellow is that one who was up here at Easter, with James?”

“He’s pretty nice, I believe. What makes you ask?” Her own question had something of the anxiety in it which marked her escape from his approaches to the forbidden topic of Langbrith.

“Oh, nothing. They tell me he’s something of a draughtsman — kind of artist.”

“Yes, I told you that. What of it?”

“Nothing. But I’ve thought some of employing him to illustrate the advertisements of that last little thing of mine. Those people down at Boston are going to have it written up in great shape for the back part of the magazines, and I want to have pictures. Suppose he could do them?”

“Yes, I should think so. But now, look here, father: you mustn’t go talking this around.”

“No, no! I just mentioned it to Dr. Anther the other day. He thinks very well of it.”

“Did you say anything about James, to him?”

“No, no, no! Not a word.”

“Nor to anybody else?”

“Why, I haven’t been home long enough to see anybody else.”

Hope left that subject. “Well, now, I’ll tell you what, father. I think after you get through this pinch, as you call it, you had better talk with Dr. Anther about leaving off, gradually.”

“Why, that’s exactly what we did talk about the last time I saw him. We’ve fixed up a splendid plan. The doctor’s all right. I told him what I thought the weak points at the Retreat were, and he agreed with me right along. He’s going to study into my case. It’s peculiar. I’ve kept it up so long, and yet there hasn’t been a day when I couldn’t have left it off. My idea is to stop the thing short off. No dilly-dallying.”

Hawberk’s words expressed an energy which his weak tones and his stumbling gait in his restless movement to and fro as he talked altogether belied. Hope sat watching him, with a face which her mocking words in turn belied when she spoke.

“Do you think you can manage to catch a little waking spell every now and then till I’ve been to the doctor’s? I don’t want that green one round when I’m gone, even if he isn’t real.”

Hawberk laughed joylessly. “He’s got to stay away till night, now, anyway. I can manage him. Don’t you be afraid. I’ll get your grandmother to give me a good strong cup of coffee at dinner, and that will help to keep him down.”

“Well, shall I read now?”

“Yes, read away. I’ll keep moving; or if I get to dozing when I stop to rest, poke me with this stick.” He gave her a fallen bough which he stripped of its dead needles and broke to a stout club, and she took it in the drolling humor which formed the atmosphere of their companionship.

There was enough of this feeling in her face and voice to make Anther pause a moment when she asked him, a few hours later, “Doctor, can’t something be done about father?” She sat with the stout bottle of laudanum which Anther had given her in her hand, and tilted it back and forth on her knee.

“How do you mean?” he finally asked.

“Well, to make him stop it.”

The doctor rose and closed his door, and then sat down again and kept his eyes absently on her smiling face, as if his mind were at work beneath its surface, seeking the measure of her portion in the suffering to which her young life was helplessly related. He was not likely to exaggerate her sympathetic suffering. He had seen how the young life is always defended from the worst misery of the old; how from their common source it flows on in the same channel, and takes no tint or taint from the concurrent stream, but keeps itself pure and glad side by side with the darkest anguish.

“Do you know how much he’s taking now?”

“I guess he’s got back to nearly the old quantity.” Anther waited again before he spoke. “I didn’t expect it so soon after he had got home.”

“I don’t think the Retreat did him much good. But I believe you could, Dr. Anther.”

“I don’t know, my dear! Does he believe it?”

“Oh, he believes in you; and I know he would like to make an effort to stop it. I know he’d help you. I don’t know what he’s going to do. He has got to sleep, of course, but the minute he goes off he begins dreaming, and that green one comes, he says, and tries to wall him in. It’s pretty awful.” She laughed in a queer way, and then the tears burst from her eyes. “You must think I’m a strange person, to laugh at such things.”

“No, no,” the doctor said, tenderly. “I understand, Hope.”

“I suppose it’s my being used to it all my life that I don’t realize it as some others would. And then father is so funny when he tells about it, and acts it out, as he does. I suppose I’m like him. He knows it’s nothing, as well as you do. But it’s real while it lasts.”

“Yes,” Anther said. “But you’re right not to distress yourself about it, Hope. That wouldn’t do any good, and you can help your father best as you are.”

“Well, I am afraid I am of a light nature. Grandma says so. Now and then it all comes to me, what he goes through, and then” — she quivered on the verge of a sob, but controlled herself and said, “Well, I didn’t make myself; and I haven’t got myself to blame for ever forgetting him, anyway.”

“I know that, my dear.” Anther sat thinking, till Hope recalled herself to him.

“Don’t you believe it’s worth while to try again, doctor?”

“Yes, indeed! We must never give up trying.” Anther rose again, and opened the silk-lined glass doors which shut in the shelves where he kept his office-supply of drugs, and began mixing a bottle from various bottles before him. He shook the mixture vigorously, with his thumb over the mouth of the bottle, and then corked it, made a little pencil-mark on the top of the cork, and gave the bottle to Hope. It was quite like the bottle of laudanum, in size and shape. “There!” he said. “I’ve marked the cork so that you’ll know it, and I want you to keep it where you can substitute if for the laudanum every other time. Understand?”

“Yes, I understand, but—”

“It won’t hurt him if he gets the laudanum bottle, now and then, instead of this; it may even help to tide him over a bad place. But try to make the alternations regular. Gradually—”

“Yes, but hadn’t he better break it off altogether — at once?”

The doctor shook his head. “It might do in some cases, but it won’t do in his.” At something insistent in the girl’s face he said: “You want a reason? Well, because we’ve tried it once. It was a good while ago, when you were little, and before you were old enough to know anything about it. We agreed to stop it short off. We agreed with Wason, the apothecary, he was then — young Wason’s father — that he wasn’t to let your father have anything without my orders on any conditions whatever. I took his laudanum away, and the third night he came to me half-dressed, through the blinding snow, and woke me, and made me give him the laudanum. I have always been humbly thankful that I had the sense to do it, and I have never tried to stop him short off since. I tell you this, for I don’t want you to let him tempt you into any experiment like that. He is quite likely to smash his laudanum and try to go it on the other alone.”

“I know it!” Hope smiled in recognition of her father’s optimism. “He does feel so sure of himself when he makes his good resolutions!”

She rose, with a large bottle in either hand, and the doctor, seeing how she was cumbered, said: “I’m going up your way. Get into the buggy with me, and let me take you home. Nobody else seems coming to-day.”

When she was tucked in beside him, he let the old horse jog at will in the direction he had given, and resumed the talk broken off in the office. “Does he take to the same hopeful view of things generally as ever?”

“Well, whenever he can get away from the green dwarf, he does,” the girl said. “You know,” she smiled across her shoulder into the doctor’s face, “he has bought the hill back of our house?”

“I think he mentioned it,” the doctor returned, with the same quality of smile.

“Yes, he’s going to build for me there. Nothing can stop him. Doctor,” she went on with a note of tragical imploring which had not got into anything else she had said of her father, “did he speak to you about — about — James Langbrith?”

She gasped out the name, and nervously put her hand on the doctor’s, pinching the buckskin of his glove between her little thumb and forefinger. “Because there isn’t — there isn’t — Oh, it would kill me if I thought he was talking to people!”

“Oh, poor thing!” said the doctor. “Don’t worry! He did speak to me, but, of course, I understood.”

“Oh, I don’t mind his speaking to you,” she said. “You’re like one of the family; but — but—”

“Well, you needn’t be afraid. You know he sees almost nobody out of your own house but me; I cautioned him against talking of that matter, and he usually regards what I say.”

“I suppose it’s just the dreadfulness of it that scares me. But it would be more than I could bear. Will you speak to him again, doctor?”

“Yes, yes, I will, my dear. Don’t you worry!” Anther turned his face away, and smiled to realize that the girl who could keep her courage in the face of misery like her father’s should lose all her strength at the thought of having her name coupled with the name of the young man who loved her, and made the talk of the village. But that was youth, and that was life. “Don’t you be troubled!” he said, looking at her again. “Nobody would mind what he said.”

“Is that much comfort?” she asked.

“It’s the most there is,” he answered. They drove along in silence broken by the rattling of the loosened nuts in the framework of the old buggy, and the dull clump-clump of the horse’s hoofs on the road. Suddenly, as if at the end of a sharp decision, he asked, “Hope, does your father ever speak of James’s father?”

“Why, yes, he always says what friends they used to be — cronies. He says he was the best friend he ever had. He was, wasn’t he?”

“Oh yes — yes,” Anther said in a lie that sickened him; but he had brought the necessity of it upon himself, and he could only hang his averted head in merited shame. “I didn’t know but sometimes he took the other turn. You know,” he went lying on, “how his mind works by contraries.”

“Oh yes, I know that,” Hope said, and she did not reason to the corollary, in her concern with the more personal fact. “But that wouldn’t help if he got people gossiping about me.”

It came to Anther again, as it had come before, that each generation exists to itself, and is so full of its own events that those of the past cannot be livingly transmitted to it; that it divinely refuses the burden which elder sins or sorrows would lay upon it, and that it must do this perhaps as a condition of bearing its own. He idly flicked the road with the lash of the whip which he so seldom laid upon the back of his lazy old horse.

XVII

A LETTER for Hope came from Langbrith the day after he went back to Cambridge, and letters had come from him at frequent, irregular intervals since. They were nearly all of the same tenor, growing more urgent and impatient in their protest of his love for her, and in his demand for some answer more definite than she had been willing to give. She had gone no further than to say, “I do not know whether I care for you or not, in the way you mean. I should not think our being children together had anything to do with it. If it had, I ought to hate you, because you always used to try to domineer over me. If it is any comfort to you, I will say that I do not hate you, but that is the most I can say now. As for promising anything, that is ridiculous as long as I am not certain. I am going to keep myself as free as the air, so that if any one comes along that I like better I shall not be bound to refuse him. But there are such droves of young men passing through Saxmills all the time, I may not be able to choose. If anything can make me choose somebody else, it will be asking so much to choose you. I don’t like to be followed up.” Langbrith tried to read the meaning into her letters which he could so little read out of them. But when it came to this last declaration of hers he thought it best to forbear, and in his answer he held his hand altogether. He did not recur to anything she had said, but made his letter, not without resentment, about Falk and their contributions to Caricature, and about some teas and dances which he had been going to in Boston. He wished to philosophize these social facts, and contrast the manners and customs of Saxmills with those of the town. It was his conclusion that, with some superficial advantages, the city was not politer than the village. “The society buds here have a rudeness which strikes me as worse than the freedom among our village girls, which would shock them. People talk of the decay of social life in the country; but I shall be very well satisfied to settle down at Saxmills, when I have got all my tools, and go to work there for life. By-the-way, I hope you will be interested to know that I have been talking with that young sculptor here whom I told you about, and he has taken my idea of a medallion of my father in a very intelligent way. He is a great worshipper of Saint-Gaudens, and he is quite with me in not wanting to do anything round or oval. He thinks of an oblong, with the greatest length horizontal, for a head of my father; in the upper left-hand comer, an inscription of three or four lines, with dates and the name, and in the right comer, a relief of the mills as they looked when my father first took hold of the business. He did want to have him holding a relief of them in his right hand, as people are shown holding cities and temples in some of the old sculptures, but I am afraid this would not be understood, and I do not want to have anything that could detract from the serious feeling which the tablet ought to inspire. I wish you would think it over and tell me how the notion strikes you. Don’t talk with any one else. I want your opinion alone. How would it do to have the dedication on Decoration Day?”

Hope wrote back a scoffing answer, so far as concerned the appeal for her judgment in such a matter, but she freely gave it against the archaic treatment. She said it would look funny. As to the best time for the ceremony of dedicating the tablet, she refused to say anything whatever. But she did say that it seemed to her Decoration Day belonged to the few old soldiers who were left and their families, and it ought to be left to them. It appeared that this notion struck Langbrith as of the most immediate importance. He did not wait to write an answer; he telegraphed: “Thanks about Decoration Day. Perfectly right. Would be ridiculous.”

The telegram was brought to Hope while she sat trying to talk her father out of a plan he had for taking Dr. Anther’s prescription only half as often as directed. His reason was that he had proved its efficacy so thoroughly that there was no hurry about his cure. He was satisfied now that he could drop the opium habit whenever he liked; but, at present, just while he was working at a new invention in his mind, he needed the tonic and strengthening effect of the laudanum. Hope argued the question with him half jocosely, as she treated all the phases of their common tragedy, and prevailed with him to continue the doctor’s treatment to the end of the week. “If you stop it now,” she urged, “you’ll have that green dwarf back the first time you drop asleep, and I can’t stand him. He’s made more trouble for this family — !”

The grandmother, a fierce little spectre of a woman, with burning blue eyes and a whorl of white hair crowning her wrinkled face, could not make the father and the daughter out. She kept the housekeeping fast in the strong, shrivelled hands into which Hope’s dying mother’s hands had let it fall, but she did not meddle with the girl and her father except in the way of censure and prophecy of doom. “If I had my say, I should fill that laudanum bottle up with good strong, black coffee, and not let him have anything but the coffee and the medicine.”

“Then you’d have him tearing the roof off. Father would know the difference between coffee and laudanum the first sip,” Hope said.

“And is it a daughter’s place to give her father poison?”

“It seems to be this daughter’s place, grandma. Besides, it isn’t poison for him, and it’s Dr. Anther’s orders.”

“Oh, a great doctor! I tell you, child,” and the old woman flared her fierce visage close in the girl’s face, “it won’t be the doctor that will have to answer for this.”

“Well, I hope nobody will. There must be a great deal of harm in the world that nobody in particular has to answer for.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” the old woman demanded, “that all the sin doesn’t come from sinners?”

“Now, grandmother, you know I don’t understand about those things, and I never did, even when I was little and expected to. You’d better ask the people at evening meeting some time. I can’t tell you. All that I know is that I’m going to follow the doctor’s directions in spite of father and you, both, and I’m not going to make it all medicine or all laudanum to please either of you. What is it, father?”

Hawberk had gone down to the side gate at the first menace of dispute, and left Hope and her grandmother to contend over him, while he remained beyond the hearing of the censure which the old woman could always make him feel that he merited, though he had his theories that he was the helpless prey of his evils. Hanging over the gate in his nerveless fashion, he was approached by the boy from the telegraph office, who preferred climbing the hill on a bicycle to bringing a message less laboriously on foot. At sight of him the old woman quenched her flaring presence in the dark of in-doors. She was afraid the boy had heard her lifted voice, and Hope sauntered across the grass while the boy was taking the despatch out of the inside of his cap.

Hawberk looked at the address, and then handed it up over his shoulder to her. “Why, who in the world,” she wondered, “has been sending me a telegram? Dear, I wish they wouldn’t, whoever it is,” she said in a laughing panic. And then, having read it and frowned darkly at it and puzzled over it in a second reading, she started back to the house with the laugh, but none of the panic, and the proclamation, “Well, certainly, he is the greatest—”

“Any answer?” the boy demanded, as sternly as a boy could in supporting himself on his stationary wheel by holding to a picket of the gate.

“No, of course not,” Hope called back, and she added, in a lower voice, “Goose!” which, if it was meant for the boy, did not reach him in the swift scorch on which he had instantly started down the hill, in compensation for his difficult climb.

Her grandmother, lurking in the shadow of the cramped entry, tried to stop the girl in her flight up the sharply cornering stairs to her room in the halfstory. “What is it, Hope?”

The girl called down from above, “Just some nonsense from James Langbrith,” and, with the telegram flattened and reperused on her table before her, she began to write.

“I have just received your despatch. At first I thought it must be somebody dying, or telling me that I had been left a fortune; but I decided against that before I opened it. Of course, I am proud to think my opinion is so important that it has to be acknowledged by telegraph. But I guess you had better wait and write the next time. I was not very likely to run off and see the Selectmen and have a town-meeting called before I could hear from you by mail. I hope you will not be disappointed if I don’t telegraph back. But if everything you have anything to do with is so important, perhaps you will be. I don’t know what that new telegraph-girl at the depot will think. She must be trying to puzzle it out by a cipher code and racking her brains over it. Why did you send it? Did you think what you had suggested was so very silly that you could not bear to let it go another night before taking it back?”

After venting the agitation of her fluttered nerves in these railleries, she went on to make Langbrith what amends for them she could by writing a longer and friendlier letter than usual; and, when she had finished it, she told her grandmother she was going to the post-office, and perhaps she would stop to see Susie Johns on the way, but she would be back again soon. She tilted down the long hill-side street, and her face was as gay with the fun reverberating in her mind from her letter as if she had left nothing but a sunny serenity in the house behind her, where her father was fighting away from the horrors of his dream, and her grandmother was gloomily exulting in the doom that must follow his ill-doing, as if for the reward of her well-doing. While Hope was with them, she felt the oppression of their unhappiness; but out of their presence, it existed for her only as something inevitable, which she must not take any more seriously than James Langbrith’s self-importance. The unhappiness made her laugh sometimes, as Langbrith’s pomposity did, or the thought of his clumsy truth and the humble pride with which he owned himself wrong in his absurdities.

“What long steps you take!” a voice called after her at a corner she was passing, and she whirled her face over her shoulder to see Mrs. Enderby hurrying to join her. “Hope,” the rector’s wife said, breathlessly, “you’re the brightest and blithest thing in this town.”

“Am I, Mrs. Enderby?” the girl laughed, slowing her pace for the friendly lady.

“Don’t you know it? Or perhaps you don’t, and that’s the reason why you can keep it up. Don’t try to realize it, child. How are you all at home this lovely morning?”

“Oh, we’re always well, Mrs. Enderby. That is—”

She stopped, and Mrs. Enderby went on for her. “I’m not going to make you conscious, and you mustn’t let me, but just to see that face of yours is inspiration. Were you always so?”

“Why, I don’t know what kind of ‘so’ you mean. I suppose I’m pretty well all the time, and that makes a difference.”

“And I’m not going to tell you that you’re pretty without the well, for that never makes any part of the difference. But, Hope, you are pretty, whether you know it or not.”

“Well,” the girl drolled, “I don’t know as I could do anything about it if I did.”

“No, and that’s what makes me feel so safe in praising you. I know it won’t spoil you. When you came rushing along past the comer, you made me think of some tall flower sloping in the wind. I wish you would tell me just what flower you made me think of! If there was some kind of black iris! Well, I must try to find out.”

They laughed together, and Hope said, “If I knew, I might think you wanted to flatter me, Mrs. Enderby.”

“No, I’m not flattering you. If I told you what I thought of you that night at Mrs. Langbrith’s, you might suppose I was. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you. And other people couldn’t. I dare say you didn’t know it?”

“If I did, I must have forgotten it by this time; it was such a long while ago.”

“Hope, you are not only the gayest and prettiest girl here, but you are the wittiest.”

“Well, now, I know you’re not flattering me. It’s no more than my just dues to have you say that.”

“Oh, I’m only repeating what I hear other people say. I wonder,” Mrs. Enderby went on, as if to the very next thing, “whether Mr. Langbrith spoke to you about a great scheme that he has in mind?” Mrs. Enderby was launched, and nothing in her own nature or the situation could keep her from sailing to her destination. As a Boston woman valiantly and loyally following her husband, not only from the Unitarian cult in which they were both born into the church on whose ritualistic heights the rector had planted his banner, but also from the many lively interests of her native city into the social desolation of Saxmills, she realized from time to time that she owed herself all the amends within her reach, and she was not one to be guilty of the injustice of withholding them. She had been charmed with Hope from the first, and when she perceived, as she did very early in the history of her establishment in Saxmills, what this poor, pretty, happy, tragical creature obviously was to the young owner of the local industry and prosperity, the mother-heart of her childlessness bowed itself upon them both, and held her in the hope of at least so revealing them to each other that they need not err as to their mutual meaning. The affair satisfied the most recondite demands of her soul by its romantic properties; and that disparity in the worldly fortunes of the pair did not affect her with a sense of unfitness, as it might have done if they had been Bostonians. They were both natives of a place that, without any sort of social traditions, had grown from a small village under the magic of the elder Langbrith’s enterprise into the busy little town she knew; and the picturesque legend of Langbrith’s forbearance with the infirmity of Hope’s father until he could forbear no longer, touched the fancy of Mrs. Enderby as the material of a peculiar tie between the young people. Something better than her fancy was pleased with the notion of the father’s reconciliation in their children.

“About what scheme?” Hope asked, with the inevitable hypocrisy.

“He was speaking of it to the gentlemen after the ladies left the table that night, and Dr. Enderby mentioned it to me. Why! I don’t know but it’s a tremendous secret, and I oughtn’t to talk of it!” Hope wished to talk of it, and now she had to unmask. “Was it the tablet he wants to put into the library to his father?”

“You do know about it, then!” Mrs. Enderby rejoiced. “What do you think about it?”

“Why, nobody could have any objections, could they? If his father gave the library building to the town?”

“No, certainly. I fancy they’ll be only too glad to have him do it. At any rate, he’s going on with it. He’s got a sculptor to design it, and as soon as it is finished he is going to have it dedicated here. He hasn’t fixed on just the time. Dr. Enderby had a letter from him this morning, saying he had thought of Decoration Day, but that he had consulted with some one in whose taste he had special confidence, and this mystical unknown had suggested to him that it would be taking the day from those whom it belonged to for something else; and he wanted Dr. Enderby to suggest another date not much later. Dr. Enderby proposed his father’s birthday, and very likely he will decide on that unless his unknown adviser counsels differently. Do you suppose it is that Mr. Falk who was here with him?”

“I think he would be likely to ask Mr. Falk,” Hope demurely conceded, with eyes that could not help falling under Mrs. Enderby’s.

“Well, whoever it is, Dr. Enderby admires his sense and his feeling.” And, at this, the question in Hope’s mind whether she should tell Susie Johns about the affair went out of it. She could not do so now without seeming to brag. She was not going to brag, but she felt proud of having the sense and the feeling that Dr. Enderby had praised. “Dr. Enderby liked Mr. Langbrith’s frankness, too, in confessing his own want of thoughtfulness.”

“Yes, that was nice,” Hope said, with some tacit misgiving for the sarcastic tenor of the letter in her pocket. She said to herself that it was the only way to get along with James Langbrith. If you did not laugh at him a little, he would be unbearable. But she thought that, if she found a letter from him in the post-office, she might not mail hers, at least till she read his.

“Dr. Enderby,” the rector’s wife pursued, “thinks very highly of Mr. Langbrith. Of course, every one has their faults, but he thinks Mr. Langbrith really tries to overcome his when he sees them, and he bears being shown his weaknesses very well. Dr. Enderby says that is the most uncommon kind of virtue. I didn’t quite like Mr. Falk’s sarcastic tone with him, but I suppose Mr. Langbrith knows how to take care of himself. Sometimes young men seem to enjoy that. It’s like their ‘scrapping,’ as they call it. But Dr. Enderby says that Mr. Langbrith was just as nice with the cold way Dr. Anther took his plan for the tablet.”

“Didn’t Dr. Anther like it?” Hope asked.

“Apparently not. He didn’t say why, and that made it all the more awkward for Mr. Langbrith. Dr. Anther didn’t seem to take any interest in the project, and yet Mr. Langbrith’s father was his old friend.”

Hope mused darkly for a moment, then she brightened to a laugh. “Well, it doesn’t seem to have discouraged Mr. Langbrith very much.”

“No, it hasn’t,” Mrs. Enderby recognized with a laugh of her own, “and I’m glad of it. I think it’s a very good plan, and it will be an attractive addition to the front of the library — so very plain. I believe in commemorating such things. It helps to make a place historical, and we have so little history. But Mr. Langbrith is so very sensitive, and I don’t like to have him hurt. I know he suffers very much when he has found himself in the wrong.”

“Nobody enjoys that,” Hope suggested.

“No, of course not; but his ideal is so very high. He does always want to do what is fine and noble. I can see that. I think he is rare. I almost trembled when you got into that little dispute with him that night: he’s not as quick as you, Hope.” Mrs. Enderby questioned with eager eyes the young face which masked itself against her pursuit in a smile.

“Oh, it wasn’t very serious.”

“Not for you, of course, but it was for him. He was making a brave show, but I could see how very — very — He isn’t as satirical as you are. You must be careful of that keen little tongue of yours. Oh, dear, what am I saying? You do forgive me? But girls don’t know how the things they say rankle in young men’s minds, and how eager young men are to have the approval of girls they respect. There! There comes Dr. Anther now. I wish I had the courage to ask him why he doesn’t approve of the tablet. Good-bye, dear; I’m going into this store. Are you going to the post-office? I believe I’ll go with you — or no! If I waited to meet Dr. Anther, I should be sure to ask him, and I’ve no right to. Well!”

Mrs. Enderby slipped into the door-way where she had scarcely halted the girl, and Hope tilted on towards the post-office with not so light nor so swift a gait as before. It was silly, of course, to mind what Mrs. Enderby said; but she had now fully agreed with herself that she would not mail her sarcastic note to Langbrith till she had seen whether there was a letter. She flushed when the girl clerk gave her a letter from him, and she turned the corner at the post-office to be able to read it unmolested in the by-street leading to Susie Johns’. It was so full of what seemed to her a swelling self-satisfaction that she did not look up the date to see whether it had been written before her last reached him, but pushed it into her pocket, and, hurrying round the square, without stopping to see Susie Johns, she reached the post-office again, and shot the note she had with her into the slot in the door, and walked vigorously homeward, with the full approval of her judgment and a just indignation for her momentary betrayal into a mistaken mercy for an offender so hardened as James Langbrith. She had to pass his mother’s house on the way, and she saw Mrs. Langbrith out in the sun before it, stooping to look at the perennials in their bed beside the door. But Mrs. Langbrith did not see her, and Hope got home in a defiance of Mrs. Enderby that kept itself from being articulate with difficulty.

XVIII

MRS. LANGBRITH came out every fine day to look over her flowers at first, and then to work over them. She made the man clean up round the tall syringas planted at intervals along the brick walk to the gate, and about the lilacs that overhung the fence. She followed him as he combed down the limp last year’s grass and raked the dead leaves and stems into heaps at the points she chose and then set fire to them. At tea, she liked to have the dining-room windows a little open, that the homely smell of their burning heaps might come in with the fresh evening air and possess her with the dreams of that girlhood which now no longer seemed so far past. She thought Dr. Anther might stop some evening in going by; but if she caught sight of him in the distance, she went in-doors. She realized that their embrace at their last meeting was more like a final parting than a pledge of union, unless she were ready to do what she wished but was afraid to do. Yet this thought of it had the greater sweetness for that reason; and the love that had come into her life so late was the more precious because it seemed to have come too late.

Towards her son, grown a man, she felt its indecorum in a kind which she could not quite formulate, but which was distinct enough. If her love had come when she was younger, and he still a child, it would have been different; and yet she could not blame her friend for not knowing himself sooner. That blame would have been as indecorous towards Anther as now the thought of him was towards her son. Before her marriage her fancy had scarcely been stirred. She had gone the round of the simple children’s amusements in her country neighborhood — the parties and picnics and school festivals; but no little boy had been her beau. She had not even been teased by her mates about any one. She was younger in experience than any girl she knew in the mill when Langbrith cast his eye her way, and suddenly, somehow, through her necessity and helplessness, made her his wife. She certainly was not aware of anything like love for him, so far as she imagined love; but she was flattered and dazzled and overcome, and she supposed that she was marrying as other people married, and for the reasons that they had. Her awakening from her illusion was like the terror of a child which has not enough knowledge of the world to match its experiences with those of others. In a fashion not definite or articulate, she accepted her lot as a common lot in wifehood; and, as she had supposed herself to have married from the usual motives, so she now supposed that what she underwent was not unusual. From her sufferings, she formed a notion of marriage grotesquely false, which was like a child’s misconception of life, and the spell of this kept her submissive. She did not talk of what she underwent; no one talked to her of such things, and apparently it was not the custom.

Her childlikeness so prolonged itself, not ignorantly, but innocently, through her wifehood and motherhood and widowhood, that, when at last she was aware of liking the man who later loved her, and of trusting him and longing for his affection, it was with a sense of shame as from unprecedented guilt. Before the thought of her son she was so ashamed that she knew she should never be able to tell him of Dr. Anther, nor even allow Anther to speak for himself. She did not feel that her tenderness for her friend could be wrong when she was with him. She was now glad of that sole embrace which they had ever suffered their love, and proud of it; but the knowledge of it sunk her at her son’s feet when she imagined his knowing it. Her face burned, and it did not avail her to remember the examples of mothers that had married again, and had lived on with their husbands, and their children by their dead husbands, in unimpaired harmony and mutual respect. She was moved late in her inextinguishable girlhood to her first passion, but only to find herself inexorably consecrated to her widowhood through her reverence for her son’s ideal of his father.

At sight of Hope Hawberk tilting lightly down the sidewalk, she was seized with the same impulse to flight as at the approach of the doctor in his vagarious buggy; and she had to conquer far more shyness when, one warm afternoon, Hope caught her so preoccupied with the hired man that it was too late for her to think of eluding her. She shrank together beyond a well-budded lilac, where Hope’s gay voice, as if it had a bright, entangling noose of sound, reached her in the chanted salutation, “How do you do, Mrs. Langbrith?” and held her fast. She came reluctantly from her shelter, and advanced slowly towards the gate, on the top of which the girl had laid her arms, and her red cheek for a moment in the hollow of one of them. “Isn’t it awfully warm?”

“Yes, it is. Though I haven’t noticed it so much, working about. Won’t you come in, Hope?”

“Why, I will, Mrs. Langbrith, if you’ll let me. I was just coming in, when I saw you.” She pushed the gate open and joined Mrs. Langbrith, who turned with her and walked towards the house. “How fast your things are coming on! It seems as if they were twice as forward as ours, and there are twice as many of them. I don’t suppose they help each other, do they?”

“I don’t believe they do,” Mrs. Langbrith answered so literally that it might have passed as a piece of the same whimsicality. “How is your grandmother?”

“She’s as energetic as ever. I don’t see how she can be. This weather takes all the good resolutions out of me, Mrs. Langbrith, and I don’t know how I’ve got together enough to come and see you. I want to tell you something that I don’t want to tell you.”

The girl’s humor was catching, and the woman caught it. “Well, what is it?” she asked, but she apparently did not expect Hope to answer till she had got her seated at an open window of the parlor, with a palm-leaf fan in her hand.

“Why, it’s just this, Mrs. Langbrith. I’ve got into a scrape with James, and if you can’t tell me how to get out of it, I don’t know who can.”

Mrs. Langbrith’s heart fluttered with a varied anticipation, but she united her emotions in the single inexpressive phrase, “I don’t believe it’s anything serious.”

“Yes, it is, Mrs. Langbrith. It’s very serious, and it has gone so far now that something has got to be done about it, and I can’t have the responsibility left to me.”

Mrs. Langbrith listened with the wish for one thing and the will for another, but her will prevailed over her wish, and she kept herself from saying anything leading. She believed that there was some sort of love-quarrel which Hope had come to own, but she was not going to tempt her to the confession. She said, non-committally, “I will try not to hold you responsible.”

Hope laughed rather distractedly. “I guess you will have to. It’s about that tablet he wants to put up in the front of the library.”

Mrs. Langbrith stiffened in her chair, and said, “Oh!”

“Well, James has been writing to me about it since he went back to Cambridge, and I guess he thinks I have been making fun of him, when I was only making fun of the notion that he should take something I said so seriously. Don’t you understand?”

“James is apt to take things seriously,” his mother said.

“And I’m not,” Hope retorted, with a touch of resentment, as if she felt a touch of reproach in Mrs. Langbrith’s tone, though the words themselves were so neutral. “And that’s just the difference, and always will be.” The last clause of the sentence was a generality, which the girl seemed to address to herself rather than Mrs. Langbrith. “Now, I’ll tell you what it is. He asked me What I thought about his having the dedication on Decoration Day, and I told him I didn’t think it was quite fair to take that day from the old soldiers and their families; and he saw it in the same light, and he telegraphed to say that I was right and he wouldn’t. And I wrote back making fun of his telegraphing, as if it couldn’t wait for a letter.”

“I don’t see any harm in that. James is very intense in his feelings, but he would see that you didn’t mean anything unfriendly — anything—”

“No, of course not. But now comes what I am really ashamed of. My making fun seems to have made him very mad, so mad that he says he is going to give up the whole idea, and won’t have anything done about it. He says I have made it seem ridiculous to him.”

Mrs. Langbrith cast down her eyes. “James is very sensitive in regard to — Mr. Langbrith.”

“Yes, I know that, and that’s what makes me sorry. Of course, I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings for his father. And now, Mrs. Langbrith, and now — I’ve got something else to tell you. You know how girls are?”

“Thoughtless, you mean?’’

“No — bad! Downright wicked! I told Susie Johns about James’s telegraphing. I don’t see why I should do such a thing. But we were laughing about a lot of things, and that came out. It was as mean as it could be. And now I would do anything in the world to make it right, but I don’t suppose I ever can. I don’t care a bit about his being mad at me for it; he has a perfect right to be; but what I hate is people laughing at him. I’ve been to tell Susie not to tell, since I got his last letter, but I know she will. He mustn’t give up the idea, because they will say that I laughed at it, and that was the reason, and I am not going to have them. Don’t you see? I expect you to blame me, Mrs. Langbrith, and never speak to me again; but I shall not care for that if you can think of some way to stop him — to make him not give it up. Why, he must go on with it, now. Everybody knows that he was going to do it, and he must. Was there ever such a scrape?”

Mrs. Langbrith sat silent, but this was quite what Hope seemed to expect, and the face that she turned upon the girl was by no means severe, but rather somewhat distressed and puzzled.

Hope went on. “I don’t believe it will do any good for me to write to him and tell him he must.” Mrs. Langbrith made no comment on this suggestion, and Hope owned, “Well, I have written to him, and he’s written back, and said that he knows my real feeling now, and he cannot go on. I don’t see why he minds my feeling, anyway, and that’s the reason why I’ve come to you. I don’t know what made me come to you about it, but I wanted to ask you if you thought it would do for me to ask Dr. Anther to write to James?”

“Dr. Anther?”

“Yes, and tell him not to mind a person who is not worth minding, but to go on and put up the tablet. Tell him that everybody approves of it, and expects it.”

Mrs. Langbrith emerged from her absence, but the stare which she bent upon the girl was as silent as her far-off look.

“Will it do for me to ask the doctor? I don’t want to do it, because — But I will, rather than let it go as it is. I will do anything. What do you think, Mrs. Langbrith?”

Mrs. Langbrith shook her head, and said, with something that she kept from being a shudder, “Oh no, it won’t do to speak to Dr. Anther.”

“For me? Or for any one?”

“For you. I — I will speak to him.”

“You? Oh, thank you, Mrs. Langbrith! I thought — I hoped — I didn’t dare to hope—” The pent emotions, kept in so bravely, broke in tears, and Hope caught her handkerchief from her belt and sobbed into it. “Oh, dear, I don’t see why you do it! I don’t see how you can bear to look at me, or speak to me, much less do anything I ask you to, after the mischief I’ve made. But I do, do thank you—”

She wavered towards the other, with what design she did not know; but, whatever it was, Mrs. Langbrith put her arms round her, and pulled her head down on her shoulder, and the girl had her cry out there. “Oh, I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed!” she kept saying. “I don’t know why you let me, Mrs. Langbrith!”

Mrs. Langbrith did not say, and perhaps could not; but when Hope’s passion of weeping was spent and she drew away to wipe her eyes, and compose her face, the woman said, irrelevantly, “How is your father, Hope?”

“Oh, much better. I believe the doctor thinks he can cure him.”

“That’s good,” Mrs. Langbrith said as irrelevantly as before, and now she let the girl, with a fling of her arms round her neck, run out of the house unhindered.

Half-way to the gate she met Mrs. Enderby coming up to make a call on Mrs. Langbrith; and, from behind the veil she had caught down over her face, she was able to chant a gay little “Good-afternoon, Mrs. Enderby!” without exciting any question in the lady, except as to how a girl whose life was so tragically conditioned could keep that blithe note in her voice.

XIX

ALMOST the first thing Mrs. Enderby said was, “That poor, pretty creature, how wonderfully she keeps up!” for this was what was still first in her mind when she took the place at the window which Hope had just left, and looked to see if she could still see her.

Mrs. Langbrith said, “Won’t you have a fan?” and Mrs. Enderby thanked her and took from her the fan which Hope had dropped on the table. “It is unseasonably warm.”

“We often have a hot day like this towards the beginning of May.”

“Oh yes, that is true. But the leaves not being out makes it so melting in the sun. Is there the least hope for the child’s father?”

“Dr. Anther has always believed his habit could be cured.”

“Oh yes, Dr. Anther: how we all depend upon him! Saxmills would be another place without him. We turn to him in so many things. I was just thinking about him — just speaking about him with Dr. Enderby. But, Mrs. Langbrith, what is this I hear about your son’s giving up the notion of the tablet to his father? I hope it isn’t true — just town gossip.”

“James hasn’t said anything to me about giving it up,” Mrs. Langbrith answered, and she quelled the outward signs of her wonder whether Hope had come to her with a half-confession, and had been twice as silly and light-tongued as she had owned. “He has given up having the dedication on Decoration Day.”

“Oh, well, perhaps that’s it, and it has got twisted into the other thing. May I say that you have heard nothing from him in regard to it?”

Mrs. Langbrith could truthfully assent to this, but she assented with so much coldness that Mrs. Enderby was struck by it, and a little hurt. In her kind heart, which was equal to most emergencies where excuses were needed for offences, she accounted for the coldness as the expression of rustic shyness. She had known village modesty to take the form of village pride, and, later, unmask itself in touching gratitude.

“We all,” she went on, after thanking Mrs. Langbrith for her assent, “think it such an admirable idea, and Dr. Enderby particularly favors it. He feels it so important to recognize character, especially when it has influenced a whole community as Mr. Langbrith’s has influenced Saxmills, and stamped his traits on the place, as Dr. Enderby says, that I believe he would have been glad to have a tablet to Mr. Langbrith’s memory in the church.”

At this point Mrs. Enderby certainly expected some sort of response; but Mrs. Langbrith preserved a silence of unbroken iciness. Perhaps she did not like the notion of a tablet in the church. Mrs. Enderby went on:

“But, of course, he feels that there is a peculiar fitness in its being in the library building. We all do, and I am sure every one will be glad to hear that there is nothing in that report, or nothing but a perversion of the Decoration Day part of it.”

Mrs. Langbrith made no sign of gratification in Mrs. Enderby’s conclusion, and Mrs. Enderby had to go away in an uncomfortable misgiving for the effect of the interest she had shown in the matter. She had no misgiving for the interest itself. That was simply a duty towards one of her husband’s parishioners, such as she had promised herself to fulfil towards all after she had so reluctantly consented to his taking the parish of St. Cuthbert’s at Saxmills. She felt that she was not only following him into the wilderness — anywhere over twenty miles from Boston was the wilderness for a Bostonian of her elect origin — but she had fears of the peculiar difficulties which a priest of Dr. Enderby’s socialistic — she called them “sociological” — tendencies would have in a cure of proletariat souls, housed in a temple built with money from their exploitation. Langbrith had given St. Cuthbert’s small but sufficient church to the parish, as well as the library to the town; and Mrs. Enderby’s question was whether her husband could keep that perfect conscience between a due sense of gratitude towards the giver’s memory and his duty towards the employés of his son’s milling property in the event of those differences which might any time arise between capital and labor. She had been wakened by this question one memorable night, and had not been able to wait till morning before submitting it to Dr. Enderby, in a conscience inherited from Calvinistic forefathers through a Unitarian father who had preserved nothing from his ancestral faith but the conscience transmitted to his family of daughters. Dr. Enderby’s own conscience was of the same lineage, and it cost them both a night’s sleep to decide the point. In fact, it was not until late into the next afternoon that they had reasoned to the conclusion that to do right was his sole duty, and that to shrink from conditions which might sometimes render the right embarrassing or difficult would be a confession of unworthiness for the office they both wished to magnify.

Mrs. Enderby came away from Boston with all the reluctance that she had foreseen; but, though she was followed by the sympathies of her friends, she had as yet experienced nothing which turned her mind towards them in longing for their pity. Saxmills had not proved quite the social desert, beset with dangers, which she had sometimes foreboded. She had there, as everywhere, her husband, first and foremost; and, besides, there were several people she liked. Not counting those she loved because they were poor and sick and dependent, there were, among those she liked, Judge Garley and his wife, who were agreeable mid-Massachusetts town-folk, reasonably cultivated and passably acquainted with life, by reason of several winters’ official residence in Boston; and she liked Mrs. Langbrith, ordinarily, very much, though she was not quite what Mrs. Enderby  would have quite called cultivated, and certainly not acquainted with life. But her shy charm was a great charm for Mrs. Enderby, and it was much in her favor that she always made Mrs. Enderby think of that old-fashioned, late-summer flower, mourning-bride. The abiding girlishness of the long-widowed, middle-aging woman responded to a girlishness of her own, from which she was fond of all the nice young girls of the village, like Hope Hawberk and Susie Johns and Jessamy Colebridge, and such others as did not dismay her by their fearlessness with the young men. Outside of the mills, the young men were, indeed, so few that there was, perhaps, not much reason to be afraid of them. But, above all, she liked and respected and honored Dr. Anther, whose life had such a daily beauty that she could better have expressed her sense of it if she were still a Unitarian than she could now she was a churchwoman. She was constantly finding him in the houses of affliction, which she visited in her own quality of good angel, and it was without surprise or any feeling of coincidence that she now met him coming to the gate of a common patient, which she opened next after closing Mrs. Langbrith’s.

She merely said, “ Oh, how delightful, Dr. Anther! I was just thinking of you.” And then she added, “I hope you leave our poor sufferer better?”

“You will, after you have seen her,” the doctor said, shifting his little bag of medicines from his right to his left hand, so as to take the hand of Mrs. Enderby put out to him. He had a fine perception of her lady-world in Mrs. Enderby, and liked to say as nice things as he could to her. “She needs cheering up, and you’ll be better for her than my medicine.”

“If I could believe you were serious in your civilities, I should be conceited; but I know you only, say such things to cheer me up — not that I need it just now. I’ve been to see Mrs. Langbrith, and she has reassured me in regard to a strange report I had heard. I wonder if you had?”

“Better try me,” Anther said, twitching his bag up and down with a latent impatience.

“Why, merely that her son had given up the notion of the memorial tablet for the library front. Had you?”

“No,” Anther replied, shortly, jerking his bag with open violence.

“Well, if you do, there’s nothing in it, as far as his mother has heard. He has changed his mind about having the dedication on Decoration Day, and the report probably arose from that.” The doctor said nothing, and once more Mrs. Enderby was bruised and disappointed by the bluntness of village manners — this time from one who had always been so responsive. But she rose above it, as she would have said, so far as to excuse him in consoling herself. “But I see your mind is on your next patient, doctor. It’s cruel of me to keep you, and I won’t any longer. Good-bye!”

She went in to cheer up the sick woman, but even after the exhilarating effort she came away with a little lingering impression of Dr. Anther’s indifference to her news. She submitted her impression to her husband, whom she found struggling with a sermon of an hour’s length rebellious to his ideal of twenty-five minutes. He detached himself to examine the impression, and to match it with one he had brought away from the supper at Mrs. Langbrith ‘s, when Dr. Anther had received young Langbrith’s proposal of the tablet with so little interest. “Perhaps,” he suggested, “it is not that country uncouthness altogether; there may not have been all that friendliness between the doctor and the elder Langbrith which we have inferred from his present relations to the family.”

“Why, have you heard anything of that kind?” Mrs. Enderby was of an eagerness in her inquiry which her husband thought it well to repress.

“No, nothing at all. It’s pure conjecture with me.

“It would be very interesting.” Mrs. Enderby sighed for the evident want of foundation in fact.

“Yes, but, Alice, don’t let it take possession of your fancy. It would be very unjust and it might be injurious.”

“Oh, I should not dream of mentioning it to any one. To whom could I? But it happens to tally — is that slang?”

“I don’t know that it is.”

“I oughtn’t to use it if it is, in a place like this. It happens to tally with something that has come into my mind. I have always wondered why Dr. Anther doesn’t marry Mrs. Langbrith.”

“He may not wish it, or she may not.”

“It would be such an appropriate thing. They are old friends, and they are not too old. Her son will soon be leaving her — I know he’s in love with that poor, pretty, joyous Hope Hawberk; and the doctor must have always been very uncomfortable at Mrs. Burwell’s, and now she’s going to break up, and where will he go?”

“He certainly might do worse than go to Mrs. Langbrith’s,” the rector allowed; “but still there is no more proof that he wishes to marry Langbrith’s widow than that he bears a grudge to his memory.”

“No, but don’t you see that, if he did want to marry Mrs. Langbrith, it would make him willing to have Mr. Langbrith forgotten? Wouldn’t that be natural?”

“I’m afraid it would, Alice,” the rector said, with a regretful recognition of a trait of fallen man.

“And wouldn’t it account both for the way Dr. Anther behaved that night and for the way he behaved just now?”

“It might; but don’t you see we are proceeding upon a pure hypothesis?”

“That is true,” she consented; and now, having not before removed her hat, she pulled out the long pins that pierced its sides into the mass of her handsome graying hair, and lifted it off, carried it out of the study on her hand, thoughtfully considering it as she went.

“Of course, Alice,” he called after her, “we must both be careful to keep our hypothesis to ourselves.”

“Oh yes, indeed! I shall be very careful not to speak of it.”

XX

AFTER indulging his resentment of Hope’s ridicule to the violent extreme of renouncing all intention of the memorial tablet, Langbrith allowed a natural revulsion of feeling to carry him so far back as a renunciation of Hope instead. He wrote her an angry letter, in answer to hers asking him not to mind anything she had said for the reason that she was not worth minding herself. Then he felt so much stronger that he returned to his intention, and got Falk to go with him into Boston to the studio of the young sculptor who was modelling the bas-relief. It had to be done from few and rather poor photographs, for it had not been one of his father’s excesses to sit often for his picture. There were some ferrotypes and still older daguerreotypes from which the sculptor had imagined a head more or less ideal. Falk tacitly considered the ideal an improvement on the portrait in the library at Saxmills, and he had kept Langbrith from sending for the painting by sufficiently offensive censures of its woodenness. Besides, as that was from a photograph, too, he held that there would be no advantage in studying the tablet from it.

The young sculptor was a find of Langbrith’s in the course of his own aesthetic development. He had seen some idealistic banalities of the artist in an art-dealer’s window, and had liked them so much that he had got Falk to come and look at them, too, and then join him in looking up the sculptor, who, when looked up, proved to be a beautiful, poverty-stricken young Jew, with black hair bushing out over a fine forehead, and, under the forehead, mobile, attentive eyes. He had a profile more Hellenic than Hebraic, and cheeks and chin already blue from shaving a dense beard. It appeared that he had made the banalities to sell, and that he could do stronger if not truer things, as the casts in his studio witnessed. He entered into the motive of the medallion, as Langbrith presented it, with an ardor that matched Langbrith’s, and he roughed it out in the clay so quickly that in twenty-four hours he had something to show his patron. He had conceived so aptly of his patron, if not of his subject, that he flattered the effigy of the elder Langbrith into a likeness of the son, who stood before it in content little short of ecstasy.

“Falk,” he said, “it has the ancestral look — the look of race. I can see myself in it. That must have been the way my father looked. Wonderful!”

“It is like you,” Falk said, with a glance at the sculptor, who was watching Langbrith with subtle and shifty eyes. “I always supposed you rather resembled your mother.”

“Not at all,” Langbrith retorted. “There may be something in our features, but her expression is totally different. I see nothing of my mother in this.”

“Well, if you’re satisfied, that’s the end of the story.”

“But look, Falk, look at these old pictures!” At the first question the sculptor had supplied them, and Langbrith now held them in his hand, studying them and then the sketch. “You can see that the outline is the same, and Mr. Lily has read the character into the face which these caricatures belie. It’s the artistic resurrection from the mechanical death of these tintypes. It’s miraculous!”

“Well, Mr. Lily probably believes in miracles.”

The sculptor presented an impervious surface to the smile of Falk’s irony, and Langbrith continued to effervesce without heeding his friend.

“And you’ve taken my notion most delightfully about the inscription, Mr. Lily. It’s just the effect I wanted, fronting the eyes there in those lines of compact capitals, and balanced by that low relief of the mills at the back of the head. Of course, I know that there’s nothing definite in those details yet; but the face is so perfect, so struck as if with a die, that I dread to have you touch it. Do you think you can keep just that look in working it up?”

The young sculptor pouted his handsome, thick, red lips, and said, “I think so,” stealing a glance from his subject to his patron.

“Well,” Langbrith sighed, “I shall have to trust you,” and Falk laughed out. “What’s the matter?” Langbrith demanded.

“Of course you’ll have to trust him! You’re not running this work of art.”

“Oh, I didn’t understand you. Of course! And how soon can you have it done, Mr. Lily?”

“How long can you give me?” the sculptor asked.

“I did think of Decoration Day for the dedication, but I’ve changed my mind about that. I think now I will have it on my father’s birthday — the 29th of June. Could you have it ready by that time?”

The sculptor seemed considering seriously, and at last he said, reluctantly, as certain people do to enhance the value of a concession, “I think I can, if there’s no delay in the foundry. If there is, you know you can dedicate a gilded plaster copy and put up the bronze later — any time.”

“Ah, I don’t believe I should like that. It wouldn’t be in character with my father. He always paid cash. I shall trust you to have it ready in time. I know you can have it done.”

Langbrith remained studying the sketch until Falk’s restiveness obliged him to break from it. The more he saw himself in his portrait of his father, the better he was pleased, and the truer he decided the likeness to be. The family look certainly was there, and what greater truth could he ask? With all the self-satisfaction of the academic side of his nature he rejoiced in what he decided to be an ideal presentation of his father’s face.

The sculptor followed him and Falk to the door of his studio, and bowed them out.

“Little Sheeny!” Falk observed, when the door had closed upon them.

“He says he is an Italian, but he’s all the finer artist for his drop of the ‘indelible blood,’” Langbrith  said, still rejoicing.

“Every drop of blood in his body is indelible. He ought to be a puller-in. He could sell you any misfit in the store. I’ll do a puller-in at a Roman statuary’s for Caricature, and I’ll have this fellow working off a Mercury on you, come up from your Sabine papyrus-mill.”

“If you didn’t like it, Falk—”

“Why not say so? What good would that have done, with your infatuation? Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t like it. There’s a lot of infernal chic about it. In its way it’s damnably good, but it’s you, you poor innocent, right over again, and that’s what he was aiming at from the first moment he got those eyes of his afloat on you.”

“If that’s the way you feel—” Langbrith began, half turning.

Falk caught him by the coat lapel and pulled him round again. “What are you going to do? Countermand it? You couldn’t get a better job, and the poor devil needs the job. Don’t I tell you it’s good? It’s all the better for having so much of you in it, if I do say it that hate to. Come! you’ve blundered and he’s swindled into the very thing. Let him go on!”

Langbrith moved reluctantly forward. “If I could trust you, Falk—”

“You’ve got to.”

“I never can make you understand how I feel about my father. He’s a religion with me, and anything that seems to belittle him or belie him is a profanation. If I didn’t feel that somehow the fellow had got my father into the thing, I wouldn’t let him go on. Of course, I can see that he has had to work back from me — get the life into it from me! But, apart from the question of the likeness, don’t you think it’s good?”

“Haven’t I said so? The fellow has done it mighty well.”

“He has taken all my suggestions,” Langbrith said, reaching out for a little more kindness.

“Yes, and Saint-Gaudensized them. That’s all right. That was the thing to do. At this time of day he couldn’t get away from Saint-Gaudens.”

“I’m anxious to have him go on,” Langbrith dreamily continued, “because he can get it done in time, and I don’t know who else could.” He hesitated, as he must, even in the intimacy of his confidence with Falk, before adding: “I’ve just told Hope that I’m having him do it. I’ve told her that I had taken it up again.”

“Why, had you dropped it?”

“Yes,” Langbrith owned, uneasily. “We had a little misunderstanding about having the dedication on Decoration Day. Falk, I want to tell you; but you’re so sharp—”

“Oh, go on. I’ll spare you on condition that you’re honest.”

“Well, you know she didn’t approve of that idea, and she put it in such a light about its not being fair to take the day from the old soldiers whom it belonged to that I saw it just as she did, and I telegraphed her—”

“Telegraphed!” Falk opened his mouth for a laugh, but shut it again without laughing.

“Oh, laugh! I don’t care now! And she came back at me with a letter that cut me to the quick. She’s terribly sarcastic, or can be. She made all sorts of fun of me for thinking my agreement with her opinion so important that it could not wait for a letter. Of course, she put it in the way of mocking at herself, saying that she never supposed before that she was of so much consequence that her opinions had to be accepted by telegraph. It ground me awfully, and I took it like a perfect ass.”

“Naturally!” Falk interjected.

“Oh, don’t mind me!” Langbrith exulted. “I wish I could always be an ass to such purpose. I wrote back to her that she needn’t be anxious hereafter, for I had given up the whole scheme of the tablet, and I should never trouble her again by my method of asking or acknowledging her opinions.”

“That sounds so wise that it must be true,” said Falk. “Go on. I thought I knew you, my young friend, but you are unfathomable.”

“I begin to believe it. And that brought a letter from her, protesting against my giving up — very dignified and impersonal, and all that; but I was still so sore that I let her letter go unanswered a couple of days, and then there came another from her, entreating me to go on with my plan, and saying if I didn’t she never could forgive herself; that she had not meant anything by what she said of my telegraphing; that it was only fun, and I oughtn’t to take it in earnest; but if I must, she withdrew it all. She said she knew that if it got about that I was going to give up the plan it would make all sorts of talk and be very disagreeable.”

“She had probably told about your telegraphing to some of the other girls,” Falk interpreted. “Susie Johns, likely. Or even Jessamy Colebridge.”

“That was what I thought at first, and it made me madder still.”

“Yes, you are that kind of ass,” Falk assented. “So I decided not to answer that second letter. And then came one that was fairly imploring. It was dated a day later, and she said in it that she was so miserable she had to write again, and she should not rest till she heard I was going on with my plan.”

“You must have felt proud.”

“No, I didn’t. I felt ashamed.”

“I’m surprised.”

“Oh, I deserve anything you can say. She kept up the effect of joking, but she must have been serious, or she wouldn’t have written three times.”

“And having brought the suppliant to her knees, what did the Prince of Saxmills graciously deign to answer?”

“The P. of S. had already answered the second letter, on second thoughts. He had written to tell her not to think of the matter again; for, on looking it all over, he found that he couldn’t relinquish the plan now. He tried to make his decision seem unrelated to her, because he didn’t think it fair to take the advantage she had given him.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Falk said. “It’s a little fact that enables me to continue your acquaintance, which I was just going to drop. Langbrith, don’t you know that that girl is one of the most—”

“I think I don’t need any one to tell me what she is,” Langbrith interrupted, haughtily. Then he instantly stooped from his height. “But I appreciate your feeling, and I thank you. I was glad that I had answered her second letter, and that my answer and her third had crossed, because I got a letter from my mother with the third from Hope, saying Hope had been to see her, and had told her the trouble she was in. I shouldn’t have liked her to think I had done for my mother, even, what I wouldn’t do for her.”

“Yes, you saved your distance. I congratulate you.”

“That’s mighty kind of you,” said Langbrith, fondly. “And you think — you think, don’t you, that the whole situation looks rather favorable for me?”

“Oh, come now! I can’t go into that, Langbrith. It’s more than I bargained for.”

Langbrith went on dreamily: “She must have been a good deal troubled. She asked my mother how it would do to get Dr. Anther to write to me, and my mother had to put her off by promising to ask him herself. Afterwards she decided not to ask, but to write to me instead. I rather wish she had asked the doctor,” he concluded, meditatively.

“Why?”

“Oh, there is something that has rankled in me  ever since the night of our supper-dance — the way Anther took my proposal of the tablet. Didn’t you notice anything peculiar in his manner?”

“He didn’t seem to take a great deal of interest,” Falk owned.

“He is the oldest living friend of my father. I didn’t like it. I had it out with my mother, the next morning, and perhaps that made her reluctant to ask him to take any part in it. She is very proud where there is any question of slight to me, and I suppose she felt as I did about my father. Perhaps she found she couldn’t do what she promised Hope. But that’s a small matter. The great thing is that I hadn’t waited for her letter before writing to Hope. I can’t be too glad of that. I should have hated even to seem to have done for another what I hadn’t done for her. I’m hard hit, and you know it, Falk, and now you’ve got to listen. That girl is the rarest human creature on this earth.”

“Why not say in the universe, and be done with it?”

“Because I don’t want to wrong her by any sort of extravagance. She’s so perfect, she has such poise, such spiritual proportion — through her sense of humor, I suppose — that any sort of excess seems an insult to her. She’s wonderful: I see that more and more. Sometimes, when I think of her hard life with that opium-eating father of hers and that belated old Puritan of a grandmother, and how her days must pass between the horrors of his narcotic and her religious frenzies, I wonder she can keep her sanity. But she is the sanest and sweetest and wholesomest and loveliest soul alive. She doesn’t seem any more related to her surroundings or origin than the singing that you hear come out of a church window in summer, and that you can’t connect with the stifling and perspiring congregation inside. It’s disembodied worship, and she’s just joyous girlhood incarnate.”

“Oh, Lord! I can’t stand much more of this!” Falk groaned.

“When I think of her,” Langbrith went on, careless of his sufferings, “I seem to myself the most contemptible and unworthy caricature of humanity — full of every kind of ridiculous imperfection and detestable defect; a wrong-headed, stubborn mule, with an instinct for kicking at the wrong time and in the wrong place, with a hide so thick and a fibre so coarse that any suggestion for its own good, short of a big stick, is lost on it.”

“Well, now,” Falk got in his revenge, “you can understand just how you seem to other people a good deal of the time when you’re not thinking of her.”

XXI

“WHAT’S this I hear?” Hope’s grandmother required of the gayety which, even beyond the girl’s cheerful wont, marked her rebound from her trouble after Langbrith’s second letter came. “Folks are sayin’ that James is not goin’ to put that inscription of his father on the library, and then again that he is. You know anything about it, Hope?”

“Yes, I know all about it, grandma. They’re right both ways. He wasn’t and he is, unless he’s changed his mind again.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s written to tell me.”

The old woman’s eyes flared on the smile in the  girl’s. “What’s James Langbrith writin’ to you so much for?”

“He seems to like to.”

“You engaged to him?”

“Not at present, grandma.”

“Better see’t you ain’t. I don’t like the breed any too well. I hain’t ever been satisfied at the way he got your father out of the business, and your mother wa’n’t at the time. But she’s in her grave now, and your father can’t ever be got to say a sensible word about it; just praises him up, if you try to talk with him, when everybody knows that Royal Langbrith never drew an unselfish breath. He never went to church and he never darkened anybody’s doors in the place, and why he gave that library to the town nobody will ever know. It wa’n’t like him to give anything; and I guess if your father could be got to tell the truth once, folks would sing a different song. I don’t like your closemouthed kind, that force one out of partnership and never say why nor wherefore.”

A yell from the chamber in the half-story over the room where the two women sat at breakfast offered itself an apt explanation. Groans and sighs followed, and gasps of prayer and thanksgiving, and then muffled fumblings and stumblings on the floor, as of a man getting out of bed and dressing.

“My! how it does always go through me!” the old woman quavered. “I don’t see how you can take it so, Hope! I can’t seem to get used to it!”

“I was born used to it,” the girl answered, with a patience that was cheerful, even smiling. “He hasn’t had such a dream for a good while. He must have been at the laudanum bottle, instead of the other. I’ll just look.” She ran quickly up the crooking stairs, and her voice made itself heard in fond reproach. “Now, father, how could you? What’s the use of my trying to trust you? And don’t you see what it does? Just throws away all the good effects, and brings us back where we were before.”

“Yes,” she reported triumphantly to her grandmother, as she reappeared with a large, empty bottle in her hand. “It’s just as I supposed, and I’ve got to go and tell Dr. Anther as soon as I’ve taken lather some coffee. Will you put it on the stove, grandma, while I help him dress? I must hurry.”

She found Anther at his office, after his somewhat later breakfast, and he could not refuse to smile when she reported the fact in its humorous aspect, with an unbroken trust in the fortunate result.

“I guess we’ve got to begin again, Dr. Anther,” she said, uncovering the empty bottle. “You see what father’s been doing!”

“How came you to notice?” he asked.

“Oh, a dream that almost raised the roof,” she laughed. “I should have thought it was the skeleton-man and the green dwarf both, but I didn’t ask. When I found this, it wasn’t necessary.” She offered him the bottle, which he received with a face losing its sympathetic cheerfulness. Her eager nerves took alarm at his gravity. “You don’t think he’s worse?”

“Oh no” — the doctor came back to his professional reassurance— “it’s a little disappointment when we had got him so far along, that’s all. But it’s not a thing to discourage us. We shall have to begin over again, as you say.” He set the bottle aside. “I’ll bring it to him, and have a talk with him.”

“Oh, do!” the girl said, back in her gayety again. “Your talks do him more good than the medicine, I believe. I wanted to have a talk with you myself the other day.”

“You haven’t taken to laudanum, I hope,” the doctor said, returning to his smile. “Well, it was something that gave me bad dreams while it lasted. I thought I had made mischief, and made it out of pure silliness.” The doctor’s smile took on the incredulity that prompted her to go on. “Yes, I did, I made mischief — set the gossip going. You know you have heard it, Dr. Anther — about James Langbrith giving up putting the tablet to his father, and then deciding to do it?” The doctor reluctantly assented. “Well, I did that.” She possessed him, laughing and blushing, of the whole case, and then waited confidently for her acquittal, or, rather, went confidently on without it as something that might be taken for granted. “Before James decided to do it, finally, I was so worked up that I went to Mrs. Langbrith, and coaxed her to ask you to write to him and tell him to go on. She promised, but concluded to write to him herself. By that time he had made up his mind to go on, anyway. You see what a narrow escape you had. I thought I ought to tell you.” The doctor said, “Yes, that’s right,” and then a vagueness came into his gaze that made the girl laugh.

“Well, I’m going now,” she said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that.”

“Well, I’m going before you do.”

“Hope, you’re a good girl,” Anther said. “I mustn’t praise you to your face; but if any one ever wonders to you that you can keep up as you do, you tell them I say they don’t know anything about it; that there isn’t one in ten thousand that could bear as you do what you have to bear; but don’t ever get to supposing that it’s your duty to be sad about it. It’s your duty to be gay.”

“Well, that’s what I like being, you know, Dr. Anther. It’s so easy that it doesn’t seem like very much of a duty.”

She had risen, and she stood prettily smiling at him; and he looked at her, and then suddenly turned his back on her, as if shunning a temptation. He longed to take her in his arms. “Well, I’ll be up in the course of the forenoon.”

Before he went to see Hawberk he dropped his buggy anchor before the Langbrith mills, and found his way through the works, where the odor of washday from the pulp-vats was only denser than it was outside, to the office partitioned off in a corner of the building. He pushed open the door, which closed with a weighted cord, and shut himself in with John Langbrith.

The manager was sitting at his desk, and at the opening and closing of the door, which, through the shuddering and muttering of the machinery, made itself seen rather than heard, he got lankly up and took the doctor’s offered hand, which he pushed horizontally back and forth without looking at him. “Good-morning, doctor,” he said, and then he glanced at the papers on his desk with a desperate sigh.

“John Langbrith,” Anther began, at once, “you know about this scheme of James’s for putting up a tablet to his father?”

“I’ve heard about it. I heard he had dropped it.”

“He’s going on with it.”

“Well, what have I got to do with it? I’ve got enough on my hands looking after my job here in the mills.”

“Has he consulted you about it?”

“No.”

“Well, I advise you to write to him and urge him to stop it.”

John Langbrith lifted his narrow, yellow eyes and met the doctor’s. “Why?”

“You know what your brother really was.”

“So do you. Why don’t you tell James to stop it?”

“That’s nonsense. Sometime the truth must come out.”

“You mean that you will give it away?”

“That’s stuff! But there are others.”

“Hawberk? What’s his word worth?”

“Nothing now. But if he pulls up—”

“He’ll never pull up.”

“I have hopes of curing him, and I tell you that, when the truth comes out, there will be shame and sorrow for that boy and scandal for the community. It isn’t for me to tell him about his father, and you know his mother can’t. It’s for you, or for Hawberk.”

“He’s making up to Hawberk’s girl, ain’t he? Then they can fix it with Hawberk. My job is to look after the mills. I’m not going outside of it.”

“It would be an outrage to let that girl marry the son of the man who ruined her father, and you will be a partaker in the wrong unless you speak. Tell James about it, and let him act from his instincts of honor and justice.”

“I can’t go outside of my job.”

“If he’s allowed to go on and marry that poor girl, it will be taking a cruel advantage of her. She will be marrying him blindfold. She will be trapped and fettered and manacled for life.”

“I can’t go outside of my job.”

“When the truth is known, and it must be known, the effect with the public will be hardening and depraving beyond that of any bad life openly lived. It will breed a spirit of defiant cynicism, and put a premium on hypocrisy. It will be inconceivably debauching and corrupting. Think it over, Langbrith!”

“I sha’n’t go outside of my job.”

The words came with an unexcited dryness which convinced Anther of their finality, and kept him from saying more. But Langbrith followed him to the door with words more forbidding still.

“I don’t owe that young man anything; let him make a fool of himself any shape he wants to. And I don’t owe this community anything; it may rot for all me. And I don’t owe you anything; you mind your own business! I don’t want you bothering round here any more.”

Anther made him no answer. He did not blame him greatly. He knew John Langbrith to be as clean a man as his brother had been foul; but he knew that it was not in the measure of his narrow nature to do what he had required of him. His job was the measure of him, and Anther owned to himself that John Langbrith could be safe only in keeping to that.

He was lifting his hitching-weight into the buggy when he felt a hand on his shoulder, and recognized in its touch the heavy mental method of Judge Garley. “Been asking brother John for help?’’ the judge conjectured.

With the weight dangling by its strap, Anther said, “Yes, I have.”

“Well, you didn’t get it, I presume. Brother John likes the safe side, which happens in this case to be the inside. I have been considering the matter you laid before me the other day, and my advice is to drop it.”

“I sha’n’t drop it!” Anther answered, sharply.

The judge did not mind his wilfulness. “At this late day, nothing can be done — nothing but mischief can be done — by drawing the frailties of our departed brother from their dread abode.”

“That’s what you said.”

“Well, that merely proves that I saw it in the right light at first, before taking time to reflect upon it. It increases my respect for myself without diminishing my regard for you, my dear friend. You can accomplish nothing whatever by the course you propose to pursue. An exposure would come from you with a peculiarly bad grace; it is hardly necessary for me to say why; and it would only convince the young man that you were his father’s enemy. You could not count upon his mother’s corroboration in such an event.”

“I could count upon her truth, in any event.”

The judge slowly shook his large head. “Not if she is the good woman I take her to be.” Anther nervelessly dropped the hitching - weight, and it fell so near the judge’s foot that he looked down at it, though he did not move. “My dear friend, you would stand unaided and alone, and the outraged sentiment of the community would be against you. The sentimentality of the community would overwhelm you. Your exposure of the boy’s father would be attributed to the worst motive, in the absence of any, and the tide of pity for him would bear you down.”

“Look here, Judge Garley,” Anther said, “would you deliver the dedication address, if you were asked, knowing what you do?”

“There will be time to consider that point when I have been asked. I may say in general terms that I would refuse to do nothing that I was required by my sense of public duty to do.”

“It’s a pity you went out of politics,” Anther said, dryly. He got a new grip of his anchor-strap, and lifted the weight into his buggy. Then he lifted himself in.

But the judge laid a detaining hand on the frame of the lowered top, and questioned with an anxious smile: “Anther, I hope you are not about to do anything precipitate?”

Anther braced himself for an angry reply, and then fell back against the seat. “Oh, precipitate! I don’t know that I’m going to do anything at all.”

“Well, that’s right,” the judge said, and let him drive away.

XXII

THE twenty-ninth of June was fixed for the dedication of the tablet, and the time that passed before that date seemed by no means too long for the work of preparation. The young sculptor, under the inspiration of Langbrith’s frequent visits, worked with such ardor that he finished the bas-relief early enough to send the model to Chicopee, and have it cast in the bronze which alone satisfied Langbrith’s sense of the sincerity essential in the tribute he was paying to his father’s memory; and Falk owned that the sculptor had done his work well. He had done it with a touch that suggested the most modem sculpture, and yet preserved a sort of allegiance to the stem Puritan nature of the subject. Royal Langbrith was there not only in the life, but in what his son felt to be that high personal character proper to him. Here was a man, not of the immediate moment, but of that hour of the later eighteen-sixties which created the immediate moment; the hour of the Republic’s supreme consciousness, when all the American forces, redeemed from their employment in the waste of war, were given to enterprises which have since enriched us, and, under the direction of such captains of industry as Langbrith’s father, have pressed forward to the commercial conquest of the world. The face, which the sculptor had imagined from the son’s face more than from the likenesses supplied him, wore not the old-fashioned Websterian frown of the ante-bellum Americans, when there was no greatness but political greatness in the popular ideal, but had almost an eager smile, full of business promptness, and yet with refined intelligence, a sagacity instantly self-helpful, but ultimately not unkindly. The son’s heart glowed within him as he looked at it, and he offered it the ancestor-worship of a man proud of his race, of a dreamer idealizing the future from the past. He wished Hope could see it with him, and the wish reddened him with a conscious blush.

He wrote home to his mother, declaring his entire satisfaction with the work, and predicting her own; and he betrayed his impatience for the event which should appeal with that sculptured face to the gratitude of the community at Saxmills. During his childhood and boyhood, when he had looked out upon the place always as through the windows of his father’s house, with a sense of being in it but not of it, he had nourished the arrogant, yet affectionate, longing to dominate it by winning its kindness for himself and his name. His impassioned reveries abounded in dramas of his acceptance by the matter-of-fact little Yankee town, in a sort of seigniorial supremacy, which should be its voluntary acknowledgment of what the Langbriths had done for it; and during the absences of his college years he had not wholly lost this ambition. His temperament had kept him from great knowledge of the world, and such knowledge as he had grown into had given his boyish fancies practical shape rather than destroyed them. He might be a disagreeable fool, as he often approved himself to his acquaintance, but he was not finally an ignoble fool.

At the bottom of Langbrith’s heart still rankled the obscure resentment for Dr. Anther’s obscure indifference to his scheme that he had instantly felt when he first spoke of the scheme before the village magnates in his mother’s house. The bruise of that obstruction against which he had so unexpectedly struck remained, and nothing could assuage the hurt but Anther’s conviction of wrong and his confession of it. He wondered at times if his mother had ever spoken of the matter to Anther. He had peremptorily forbidden her to do so, in the first letter he wrote home afterwards, but he had hoped she would. Yet no word came from her concerning it, and he could only suppose that she had too faithfully obeyed him. At times, he questioned his own impressions of the fact, and doubted whether it happened, with the significance which his veneration for his father and his affection for Dr. Anther both gave it; and again he could not rid himself of the belief that it had happened in the form and meaning which it first seemed to have.

Before it happened he had imagined asking Anther, as foremost of the Saxmills men who had known his father, to deliver the dedicatory address; but, with this bruise, this doubt, in his mind, it was impossible to do that; and he felt himself less able to demand the explanation from Anther which he sometimes trembled upon the point of asking than to turn to some one else for the address. He would have preferred Anther to all others, even if Anther had not been his father’s old friend; for the doctor had his repute as a speaker of simple effectiveness; his oration at the celebration of the first Decoration Day after the great war was remembered still in Saxmills with the exaggerated admiration which history compels when it becomes tradition. It seemed to Langbrith that no one could do such justice to the quiet, almost disdainful virtues of his father as the quiet, almost disdainful powers of his father’s friend. But now he had to devolve for the office of orator upon Judge Garley, a speaker of most respectable gifts, but pompous and ponderous, and of a personal ignorance of the man to be commemorated which, in Langbrith’s estimation, all but disqualified him. The sweet in the bitter was the hope that Anther might feel the slight of being passed over, and be duly humiliated; but this did not so much console Langbrith as it might if he had not been hurt in his love as well as his pride.

The judge met the doctor driving through the town the day after he had Langbrith’s letter requesting him to make the address, and he overcame a certain embarrassment he had in telling his old friend of it.

“I congratulate you,” the doctor said, with ironical dryness; but he did not ask the judge if he had consented.

“I do not know,” the judge said, “whether you will approve of my accepting the invitation.”

“Oh, approve!” the doctor said, with deprecation which was also ironical.

But the judge showed no resentment. “I didn’t think it was fair to bother you with the matter, or else I should have come to speak with you before writing. But I did not see how I could decline, and I believe you will be satisfied with the manner in which I shall treat the subject.”

Anther, if he was too much vexed to try penetrating the reserve which the judge’s words invited him to explore, felt also that he had no right to take any tone of censure with him. He said, “You couldn’t refuse without wounding the boy’s feelings.”

“That was what I felt,” the judge answered, with relief. “I might have pleaded an excuse of some kind, such as intended absence from the place, but I did not like to do so, in view of the fact that I shall be detained here by some business that is coming up at the time. He asked for an early answer, so that he might get ready some biographical material he wishes to supply me with.”

There was a twinkle in the judge’s legal eye, and a smile at the corner of his legal mouth, and he responded with a laugh to the doctor’s remark: “In addition to what I have given you?”

“Yes; I need all that I can get on account of that!” The judge roared at his own fun, and Anther drove slowly away at the jog-trot which was his horse’s habitual gait when they were both absorbed in thought. Their heads hung down with the same droop, and the horse looked as if he might be revolving the same distasteful thought as the doctor, with the same sense of helplessness.

Within the week that followed Anther was stopped at different times in his progresses through the main street of Saxmills by different, leading citizens, who invited him to consult with them upon points of the common interest. James Langbrith seemed not to have rested, after getting Judge Garley’s reply, before addressing himself to the selectmen, the high-school principal, and the Sunday-school superintendent, as well as the chief officers of the Sons of Pythias and the Saxmills Cadets, inviting their co-operation in the ceremony which he had so much at heart. Each of these dignitaries now addressed himself to Dr. Anther, in his succession, with the confident belief that Dr. Anther, as the oldest friend of Royal Langbrith in the community, and as the close friend of his son and widow, would be most concerned in the affair, and would perhaps have some inside authority and information to impart. He had necessarily to disappoint their hopes, but he found himself putting on more and more the air of at least civic sympathy, which they seemed to demand of him. He could not, indeed, show them his real mind without awakening a suspicion he was far from wishing to rouse, without starting gossip that would grow into scandal, and involve the Langbrith s and himself in mischievous conjecture. He carried his compliance with their obvious expectation to a point where it became almost intolerably irksome, without seeing the point at which he could refuse compliance. When it came to Mrs. Enderby’s calling gayly to him from the sidewalk, and halting him, like the rest, to announce that the rector had just had a letter from young Mr. Langbrith asking him to take part in the dedicatory ceremonies, Anther’s soul rose in insurrection. “But you knew he had written, I suppose,” the lady said.

“No, I certainly didn’t,” he answered, with a sharpness which suggested to her the possibility that the doctor resented the young man’s not consulting so old and so near a friend, but suggested it not so forcibly as to withhold her from saying: “Yes, he has asked Dr. Enderby and Father Cody, and Mr. Alway of the ‘orthodox’ church” — she said “orthodox” with the effect of humoring local usage, but also of putting the word between quotation marks— “all to take part. I believe Father Cody is to ask the blessing, and Mr. Alway is to make the opening prayer. Mr. Langbrith has asked my husband to say something from the altruistic stand-point, as it bears upon what his father did for labor in his time by profit-sharing, and, incidentally, if he pleases, to draw any lessons as to character building from the example of his personality.”

Mrs. Enderby ceased obviously reporting Langbrith’s diction, and continued: “Of course, he is rather vague about what he really does want, but Dr. Enderby found his wish, so far as he imagined it, rather suggestive, and he said at once that he would like to talk with you about it. When could he see you, at your entire leisure?” she could not help pushing officiously on, though she had no authority from her husband to ask the question. Anther did not know what to say, between his ire and his embarrassment. In his hesitation she added, “I know how difficult it will be for you to fix a time, but I knew how interested you would be.”

“Thank you. I’m afraid I should be very little use,” Anther began, but she broke in upon him, to make reparation for James Langbrith’s strange thoughtlessness, and to soothe the doctor’s wounded pride:

“I’m sure Mr. Langbrith will write you about it. I’m surprised — He probably knows how pressed you are, and wanted to save you all the trouble with details that he could. I rather like his going forward, and doing it all himself, don’t you? It shows such spirit, and such a pride in keeping it in his own hands!”

“Yes, yes,” Anther said.

“But, of course, you don’t have to wait for a direct application from him.”

“No.”

“Why!” she started in self - surprise.— “Why shouldn’t you stop in any evening, and have tea with us, and talk the matter over with Dr. Enderby, then? I should so like to hear you two discussing the civic and social significance of such a man as Royal Langbrith, and getting at the psychology of him. You will come, won’t you? Won’t that be the easiest for you? Will you come, say, to-morrow night?”

“Not to-morrow night. I can’t fix the time just now. But I will see. Will you excuse my hurrying off to a patient—”

“Why, of course! How thoughtless of me! But any night will do, doctor, so that it’s soon. Goodbye! good-bye!”

She turned from the gate where she had stopped the doctor, and went indoors to her husband.

“I think it’s strangely thoughtless of James Langbrith  not to have written to Dr. Anther about the measures he’s been taking. The doctor feels it, I know, but he’s so large-minded that he’ll not let it interfere. He’s coming here some evening to talk Royal Langbrith’s personality over with you.”

“Where have you seen him?”

“At the gate, just now. But I didn’t call you, because I didn’t want to interrupt you. I’ve told him all about it, and he’s coming the first evening he can. I told him any evening would do. I knew you’d want me to. And all I shall ask is to sit by and hear you two analyze Royal Langbrith. With the scientific stand-point which Doctor Anther can supply, and toe philosophic and religious view which you can give, I think it will be one of the most intensely interesting things that ever was. Don’t you?”

“I hope you’ll find it so, my dear. But, really, young Langbrith’s oversight seems an extraordinary—”

“Yes, doesn’t it! I hardly know how to account for it, but if the doctor can overlook it, we can, and he’s evidently disposed to overlook it. At any rate, I shall ‘keep right round after him,’ as the country people say, till he redeems his promise.” She so far redeemed her own promise as to halt Anther, whenever she could reach him, by hailing him with her voice, and, when she could not, by waving him to a stand with her fluttered handkerchief. But it was not till she had almost lost faith in his large-mindedness, and had many times sided with him and against him in his imaginable resentment of young Langbrith’s neglect; it was not till the eve of the day fixed for the dedication ceremonies that Anther appeared at the rectory. He came too late for tea; and, when he did come, he did not invite Mrs. Enderby’s presence at the psychological analysis of Royal Langbrith’s personality, which he did not enter upon till she no longer had the least excuse for not leaving him to her husband.

XXIII

AFTER Mrs. Enderby went out Dr. Anther remained in a silence which the rector could not quite bring himself to break. He thought that his visitor looked fagged, and that he looked even more sad than fagged. He would have liked to ask Anther about Hawberk, in the way of a beginning, but somehow he did not, though he had heard that Hawberk was holding up a little, and he was interested in the experiment of his physician, as it was known to any one who cared to listen to Hawberk’s sanguine prophecies of the outcome.

Mrs. Enderby, lingering honorably out of intelligible eavesdropping, but not out of ear-shot, was disinterestedly impatient of the interval before Anther spoke.

“What do you think,” he began, and at the sound of his voice she fled from temptation, “of evil done in the past, and so effectually covered up, except from two or three people, that for the public generally it never existed: should you think it the duty of the two or three, or any one of them, to make it known?”

“I’m not quite sure that I follow you,” said the rector, but confessing his interest by his look of prompt animation. He was seeking, as he professed, a stronger light upon it, but he could not feel that Anther cast this light upon it by what he said next.

“Take the case of — the doctor resumed, and he named a famous case which once agonized the public with a curiosity still unsatisfied. “He must have known, and a few others must have known quite as well, whether he was guilty or innocent in that business. Do you believe it would have been to the advantage of religion or morals to have had the fact generally known; or was it just as well to have had it hushed up forever, as it apparently was?”

“I don’t see what advantage the common knowledge of it would have been,” the rector said, still feeling his way rather blindly. “I can’t see what use it would have been as concerns this world, to have had the fact known. If the fact would benefit some one, save some one from unjust suspicion, relieve some burdened spirit, yes; but otherwise not, I should say.”

“You think the truth itself, merely as truth, has no claim upon our recognition?”

“What is truth?”

“Ah, that’s what jesting Pilate asked!”

“Isn’t the truth,” the rector pursued, “that absolute entirety of fact which includes not only every circumstance, but also every extenuation in motive and temperament?”

“Well?”

“That sort of truth can never be made known in this world, and the brute fact doesn’t express it.”

“You remand it to the Last Day?”

“I leave it to God. The Searcher of hearts can alone find it out, and judge it. If we press for judgment here, we are in danger of becoming executioners. But I am never able to deal with abstractions, such as this case has become. You can’t lay down any rule that will fit an abstraction. I don’t like to lay down any rule at all, except such as I find given us. If there were any particular case — any concrete instance—”

“There is a particular case,” the doctor said, “a concrete instance, but I’m afraid that the lapse of time has rendered it as much an abstraction as that other case — in fact, has outlawed it.”

The rector could only answer at first, “I should like to hear anything you have to tell me.” But he added, “Why are we fencing?”

“Are we fencing? I didn’t mean it,” the doctor said, with his fagged look and his sad look possessing he rector again with compassion. “I’ll lower my point, anyway. I’ll go back to the beginning. If a man had so successfully lived what they call a double life that he had kept each life largely a secret from the other, and kept everybody but those he had most wronged altogether out of the secret, and there were but one impartial witness of the facts, would it become the duty of that witness to make the facts known when the man was dead and the evil he did had not apparently lived after him?”

“I think you’ll have to be a little more specific.”

“Have we no such a thing as a duty to justice? Is there no such thing as justice?”

The rector looked grave. “I have never seen any instance of justice in the world. I have seen many instances of mercy. I should say we have a duty to mercy. We are warned more than once to make sure first of our own sinlessness before we offer to judge the sins of others.”

“But imagine that the guilt of the man I am imagining had imposed itself upon the public for virtue, and was apparently left to the Last Judgment, as so many things — most things, in fact, as I agree with you — seem left, and time had gone on till it became, by this chance and by that, the question of recognizing a cruel miscreant as a public benefactor, and holding him up as an example to the young, and celebrating some twopenny munificence of his as an act of characteristic virtue, of habitual greatness and goodness—”

The rector rose, and his face whitened, as the doctor’s had reddened with the rush of feeling into his voice. “Are you talking to me of Royal Langbrith?” he asked.

“I am talking to you of Royal Langbrith,” Anther replied. “And ever since I heard that you had been asked to take part in this preposterous business I have been talking to you about Royal Langbrith. Not to your knowledge, of course, but in those one-sided colloquies which, I dare say, you hold as well as I when you are working up to face some one whom they concern. When Mrs. Enderby first told me you had been invited by Langbrith’s son to join in honoring his father’s abominable memory, my impulse was to come at once and tell you what the man had really been. But when that impulse passed, I said to myself that I would think it over; and I have thought it over and thought it over, but never with so much justification in paltering with my duty as you have given me by the things you have just said. It seemed to me, on one side, that it was an outrage upon your own purity and uprightness to let you go on and unwittingly praise that infamous scoundrel. It seemed an atrocious invasion of your rights, an abuse of your ignorance as well as an insult to your office. Then, on the other hand, I asked myself what harm would be done if I let you go on, compared with the harm I should do if I stopped you — the pain I should needlessly inflict; for the truth would now probably never come out, and in the interest of public morals had much better remain hidden. I recognized this long ago. I saw that the time for a public exposure of the man’s evil had apparently passed; that it had paralyzed those who had left it hidden; but when I heard that you had been asked to eulogize such a miscreant in public, I felt a new responsibility. I realized that if I let you do so, I should be guilty towards you; yet, if I spoke, I should be putting my burden upon you, and compelling you to the sophistications with which I stifled my own conscience. You could not then stand up and declare the truth before the people; you could only reveal it to that miserable boy; or, if you had not the heart for that, you must stultify yourself and wound him with lying excuses. I paltered with my duty, and I have come at the eleventh hour to do what I ought to have done at once or never done at all.

Anther told his story with a fulness which he  had wanted even in telling it to Judge Garley. In the sympathy which he felt Enderby was giving him, with that instant self-forgetfulness natural to the born priest, there was invitation which the legal mind could not give him, with its concurrent criticism of his facts and motives. He was dealing now with a man who could appropriate his facts and realize his motives to their remotest intimations and finest significances. Science and religion met in the study of the life laid bare between them. At any detail from which Anther faltered, Enderby prompted him, and, in the end, nothing was left untold.

“Besides Hawberk and Mrs. Langbrith and yourself, is there any one knowing to the facts?”

“John Langbrith; but how intimately he knows them I can’t say. We have never exchanged confidences. He was on the train with his brother when Royal Langbrith died. Didn’t I say? Yes — he died in the smoking-car coming up from Boston, but so suddenly, so secretly, that John Langbrith did not notice anything till he put his hand on the dead man’s shoulder to arouse him from his nap when they reached Saxmills. He had died as secretly as he had lived.”

“What has become of the woman?”

“Who ever knows what becomes of the woman? Perhaps, in this case, John Langbrith does. I ought to tell you,” Anther added, “that I have put the case to Judge Garley.”

“How long ago?”

“Several weeks — a month.”

“And knowing the truth, he let me accept a part in this commemoration!”

“You might say the same of me.”

“No, I couldn’t say the same of you. I can understand the stress there has been upon you, and your reluctance — your fear of being misunderstood — misconstrued. But if Judge Garley had given me a hint — No, I don’t blame him either! I mustn’t be cowardly.”

The rector sat with his elbow on the arm of his chair, and his head propped on his hand, thinking. What he found first to say, with a sigh and a forlorn smile, was, “It’s part of my cowardice that I could wish you hadn’t told me.”

“I was obliged to do it. In this, at least, I have had no selfish motive.”

“Of course not. But I must go on all the same, you see.” Anther said nothing, and Enderby asked, “The boy is without the least suspicion, the slightest surmise?”

“Absolutely. He was not purposely kept so. But the time for telling him never seemed to come. Who could tell him?”

“It may never come,” the rector mused aloud, and he said to Anther, “It hasn’t come now.”

They were silent together, but the doctor spoke first: “It did cross my mind that you might feel authorized to—”

“No,” the rector stopped him; “ we must leave it all to God now, as it has been left hitherto. He will know when the son can best bear his father’s shame. He will know how to do justice, and when, on the memory of the dead; but until now, in mercy to the living, He has forborne. The circumstances will arrange themselves; the atoms will fall into the order of the divine scheme. We must keep our hands off. De mortuis — you know the saying; there is as much wisdom sis kindness in it. There is a feeling — it is mostly a vengeful feeling, I don’t know why — that men’s evil deeds must not be suffered to lurk in the dark; but perhaps they should, for this life. What would it avail to have them dragged into the light? Everything shall be made known, but perhaps not on earth. Whoever wished to hasten the knowledge of hidden evil, here and now, might well beware of forcing God’s purposes, as we understand or misunderstand them. It could not help this community to know the truth about that wretched man. It would only render it cynical and deprave it. But I am not concerned about the son, primarily, I am afraid; or about our fellow-citizens. I have the selfish concern of keeping myself clear from falsehood in what I have to do. At present, I don’t see how I can, but I shall try; and, meantime, between the two evils before me, I will choose that which seems likest virtue.”

Anther was struck with the similarity in the conclusions of the priest and those of the judge, but he did not comment on it. Enderby himself offered none of the reflections in which he seemed lost, and Anther, after a little longer stay, in which nothing suggested itself as a solution, took his leave, without protest from the rector. He carried with him, capriciously, the vision of the rector’s neatness, as to the black waistcoat, buttoned to his throat, which was without suspicion of those droppings from the rector’s full beard such as the doctor remembered noting on the vestments of some clergymen less conscientiously benzined by their wives.

Enderby’s wife was otherwise so conscientious that she would not join him in his study, after he returned from seeing Anther to the gate, till he called to her, “Come here, Alice.” Thai she rustled down-stairs and entered to him with a face eager for the account of his talk with the doctor. At sight of his face, looking up at her from the chair into which he had nervelessly dropped, hers fell.

“Dearest!” she said.

“I am in trouble,” he answered. “I want you to help me.”

Though a woman whose chief delight was, ordinarily, in the expression and examination of her emotions, she now postponed them, as she was able to do in great emergencies, and closed so promptly and directly with the trouble he owned to her that he was able after an hour to say, “Well, then, I will do it.”

“It’s the only thing you could do, and it’s the thing you must do. It’s what suggested itself to you at first; and I call it an inspiration.”

The notion of an inspiration was something left over from her Unitarian nurture, which she would not deny herself in the present exigency. It had a literary rather than a theological significance, and was less an article of faith than of critical appreciation. Then the rector went to bed, and, instead of harassing his worn-out brain by vain dramatizations of the predicament, surprised himself by falling almost immediately asleep.

It was for Dr. Anther to lie awake after he had driven home through the dim Saxmills streets, usually so quiet at half-past ten, but to-night only quiescing, after a tumultuous evening of last details in preparation for the morrow. His course lay by the open square on which the library faced, and he noted that the platform built up around the doorway, below the bas-relief, for the invited guests had been draped, since he passed earlier in the evening, with American flags. The tablet was veiled in white cotton cloth, which, in its association with the dead, gave Anther the sense of a shroud, so that he started at the light, gay laugh which burst from the lips of a girl pausing with a young man and looking up at the platform from the square below. He recognized the voice of Hope Hawberk in the laugh, and in the young man beside her he recognized James Langbrith, and he imagined her teasing him.

He smiled to himself in the prevision of his absence from the group of the invited guests who were to occupy that platform the next day. The committee of arrangements had promptly sent him an invitation; and a second card had come later, under a cover addressed in Langbrith’s hand-writing, as if he were not willing that Anther should by any chance be passed over. So far, indeed, Langbrith had subdued his rancor with his old friend. But Anther had determined, from the first, not to be present at the dedication, and he had not faltered since.

The figure of a woman, imaginably some patient who had waited for him in vain, slipped from his gate and went down the obscurity of the street, in the opposite direction, as he drove up to Mrs. Burwell’s darkened house. He put his horse and buggy into the bam, and then came round and let himself in at the front door. On the threshold within lay something white, which he felt to be a sealed letter; and, when he had turned up his office lamp, he found it addressed to him, in a hand which he knew. “Dr. Anther,” he read, “I want you should not fail to accept James’s invitation for to-morrow. He is feeling very anxious you should be there, though he will not say so. If you don’t choose to do it for his sake, do it for mine. I would give anything to have you. — AMELIA.”

He turned it over, as people turn letters over, rather when they have got everything out of them than when they have not, and he knew that the woman he had seen coming away from his gate was Mrs. Langbrith. Her anxiety must have been great, to bring her from home so far at that hour, and she must have wished to keep her writing him a secret from her household, if she could not send the letter. She might have hoped to see him, and carried the letter to leave in case she should not find him.

“Why,” he asked himself, bitterly, “should we be doing things by stealth? We hide our affection, as if it were something to be ashamed of. We behave like guilty persons, but you are the most innocent of victims, and I am to blame only for not forcing you to right yourself. I can’t stand it, Amelia!”

XXIV

LANGBRITH had at first meant to dedicate his father’s memorial on grand terms. It had seemed to him not out of scale with the merit of such a man to have the governor and his staff in full uniform present at the ceremony. But a few drops of ridicule sprinkled on the notion by Falk extinguished it, after an angry sputtering; and he reasoned that to confine the civic interest to Saxmills would be to intensify it, and to appeal still more strongly to the local pride. In his illumination, he declined the offer of even a band from the next town, when it was submitted to him through the committee of arrangements, and decided to have no music but such as the fifes and drums of the Saxmills cadets could make in their march through the streets. This, with the singing of the public-school and Sunday-school children, ranked below the platform where the invited guests were to be seated, before and after the unveiling of the tablet, would be tastefully sufficient in Langbrith’s more tempered ideal of the affair.

The cadets looked very well as they paraded, and the children, marshalled by their teachers, looked charming — the larger boys bearing school banners, supported by smaller boys holding the tassels on each side, as they marched to the library and formed themselves in the appointed order. They counted in their number all the children in town, except some inveterate truants in whom the Fourth-of-July excitement was beginning to work, and who opened their celebration at daybreak with the explosion of cannon-crackers. Throughout the morning, the sound of their torpedoes broke upon the more ceremonious sounds of public rejoicing; and, when the procession formed, they made themselves its straggling escort, and followed it in the mixed admiration and derision of boyish outlawry. It had been proposed, at one time, that the mill hands, men and women, should join the procession, in such gala as they chose; but John Langbrith had passively disfavored the plan, which had not found acceptance with the hands themselves. When it was brought to James Langbrith’s knowledge, he decided against it, as something perfunctory and out of keeping with the voluntary spirit of the affair.

Falk, who stayed over the week as Langbrith’s guest, praised his decision as a stroke of surprising wisdom. He mingled with the operatives, in the rear, where they formed the great mass of the spectators, and was able to report to Langbrith a satisfaction with their unalloyed holiday which he was sure they would not have felt in the procession. He himself refused any share in the ceremonies by refusing a seat among the invited guests; and when he was not going about and feeling the public pulse in Langbrith’s interest, he amused himself by making the three young girls under his charge laugh, or try to keep from laughing, at his remarks on the general and personal aspects of the occasion, especially on the activities of Langbrith, as host, and Matthewson, as chief-marshal. Susie Johns was not concerned in either of them, and could laugh at both, without the fond misgiving of Jessamy Colebridge or the perverse delight of Hope Hawberk, as Falk made them note the majesty of Matthewson in ushering the invited guests up the stairs of the platform, and the urbane hospitality of Langbrith in receiving them at the top and appointing them their seats. The girls laughed so much, and Falk kept so grave, that glances of reproval for them and sympathy for him were shot from neighboring eyes, while the band brayed on, and the crowd packed into the square before the library cheered each guest as he mounted and took his place.

They were, first of all, the oldest employés of the Langbrith paper-mills, women as well as men, who were given the seats next the speakers; veterans of the Civil War had the seats behind them; and then the village dignitaries, the selectmen, the high-school principal and the Sunday-school superintendent, with citizens of no official quality, but eminent in business, or entitled to recognition by their age or social standing. Before all sat Judge Garley, Mr. Enderby, Father Cody, the orthodox minister, and John Langbrith. At the last moment, Matthewson was seen receiving Dr. Anther at the foot of the steps, and then Langbrith, with a forward start and a flush of surprise, greeted him at the top. The young man’s face was lighted with a joyful smile as he clung to Anther’s hand and bubbled an incoherent welcome, looking round to see where he should place his father’s old friend. He restrained a movement of Anther towards the rear seats, and led him forward and put him between the judge and the rector, who made room for him with dumb shows of courtesy. The band brayed out afresh, and the general applause of the crowd rose in such personal cheers as: “Hurrah for Dr. Anther!”

“Hurrah for Dr. Anther!” Hope took out her handkerchief and waved it, and then Jessamy and Susie took out their handkerchiefs and waved them. The doctor sat down abashed, and his lowered gaze fell upon the veiled face of a woman sitting in the foremost row of chairs, placed in the little square before the library. At sight of Amelia Langbrith, a sad smile overspread Anther’s reddened visage, which he turned at the slight tumult caused by some unexpected event at the foot of the steps. The tumult passed with the slow mounting of a figure to the platform, and its momentary hesitation at the top; then the gaunt shape and blotched, brown visage, with the deeply sunken eyes, of Hiram Hawberk showed themselves spectrally to the crowd. Inarticulate cries and gasps broke from it, and shaped themselves in derisions like “Three cheers for Hawberk!”

“Hurrah for Hawberk!”

Langbrith turned from whispering to Judge Garley; at sight of Hawberk, he flashed a silencing glance at the crowd, with a scornful lift of his young head, and hurried towards him with outstretched hands. He seized Hawberk’s trembling hand as he had seized Anther’s, and then, placing it under his arm, led him forward. There was no place among the front seats, but every occupant of them rose and offered his place to Hawberk. Langbrith  waved the others down, while he spoke to his uncle. Then John Langbrith, chewing the splinter of wood on which he had been sardonically working his jaws from the first, shook hands with Hawberk, and pulled him into his place, where be took Anther’s hand, proffered across their knees, and remained dimly looking out over the people.

“Why, I thought your father wasn’t coming, Hope?” Jessamy Colebridge said.

“I suppose he changed his mind,” Hope answered, quietly. But she dropped her veil as she rose with the rest at the uplifting of Father Cody’s voice in the words of the invocation.

The priest had been chosen for the opening ceremony to satisfy him in certain scruples with reference to his association with the Protestant clergy, which the committee treated with the large indulgence of an underlying indifference in sectarian matters. But afterwards their choice was felt to be almost providential. The dignified form of his words, and the sort of sacerdotal authority with which he pronounced them, struck a note fortunate for the after proceedings, which these obeyed. It did not, indeed, form a law for the excursive generalities of the oration which Judge Garley delivered, but it tempered him to perhaps greater simplicity and directness than he would otherwise have had. He paid a tribute both to the secular and sacred character of the priest, which gathered all Father Cody’s parishioners to him, and carried them attentively with him wherever he strayed. But no one followed him so closely, so curiously, as Dr. Anther, who was, as anxiously as he was unwillingly, alert to see what course the legal mind would take among the difficulties so evident to him. It could not be said that Judge Garley made light of the difficulties; lightness was not a thing imaginable of him; but he won his way among them by leaps and bounds, which, if ponderous, certainly got him over the ground, and by turns which, if not agile, were undeniably effective. He made a background of the history of Saxmills, from the earliest colonial period down through the old French War, the Revolution, the last war with Great Britain, and the invasion of Mexico, to the great civil strife for the maintenance of the Union; and then, in the middle distance, he sketched the rise of the manufacturing interests of New England, with their share in the immense expansion of industries throughout the country, after the pacification of the South and the establishment of the great principle of manhood suffrage on the rock of the Constitution. Such, he said, was the time, such the place, such the situation that confronted the man whose far-seeing enterprise had given Saxmills its unsurpassed prosperity, and whose munificence, in one of its many instances, they were tardily recognizing to-day. They all knew who the man was; but what was he?

Anther held his breath as he watched his old friend standing before the impressive canvas he had prepared, and wondered what manner of heroic effigy he would paint upon it. From where he sat, beside Hawberk, feeling the tremor of his limbs when they chanced to touch his own, and breathing the narcotic odors that exhaled from his person, he could not catch the eye of the orator, which presented itself only in profile, as he shook his head in challenge and pounded the air with his fist in accentuation of his appeal. Except that he knew the judge to have justified himself invulnerably through his professional conscience, he might have thought that he kept his face purposely averted, and he held his breath when Garley resumed. “I never spoke with the man. I never saw him. I never heard his name till I came to live among you here. He was no friend of mine, not even my acquaintance, yet from his work I know him.” But when Garley reached the end of his characterization of Royal Langbrith, Anther laughed in his heart, with no wish to utter its bitterness to his old friend, as he resoundingly closed with the words: “Such was the man, such was the character, such was the personality whose counterfeit presentment shall be revealed to us this day, and each day shall show him to others after we are dust, as long as stone and bronze shall endure.”

On that magnificent background the scenic artist had really painted nothing; nothing but what might pass for one enterprising and successful American as well as another: the mere conventional outline of a face or a figure which a thousand names would fit as well as Royal Langbrith’s. He had carefully avoided not only distinctive traits, but he had, with purpose evident enough to Anther, kept a surface as impenetrable as it was shallow. He had given this surface a glare which dazzled the eye and distracted the thought from the performance to the performer; and Anther judged him less and less harshly as he considered that Garley had discharged a duty which he could not shun as harmlessly as it could be discharged. No one but the brother and the widow of Royal Langbrith knew how false an impression he had made; for it could not be said that his narcotized victim realized it, and none save the rector, who was to follow him, knew how false he had been in making it. Anther did not condemn him. Garley, too, was in the grip of that dead hand which seemed to clutch every one by the throat, and his severest feeling towards him was for the deceit which he had practised upon the son of Royal Langbrith. He could see James Langbrith, where he had retired from the platform to the place beside his mother, watching the speaker with what Anther felt a piteous intensity, and hanging upon every empty word. With tender compassion Anther wondered if he felt the hollowness of the tribute paid to his father’s memory. He was touched for that poor, generous boy, and ashamed more than he was amused for his old friend in the success of his fraud. When the applause swept the orator to his seat, and then refluently bore him, bowing and smiling, back to the front of the platform, the young fellow started forward, and, all glowing with tears and smiles, stretched his hand up to the judge, and the judge stooped down to take it. Anther dropped his eyes and hung his head, and he had not the courage to look up again till he heard Enderby beginning, very gravely and measuredly, the address which the dead man was requiring of him, in his turn. Then Anther’s pity was no longer for the trusting boy, but for the good man, compelled to this office, and he wondered how he would reconcile it with his conscience.

Enderby stood clutching the scant lapels of his clerical coat, and looking pale above its black. He said that he had been asked to speak some words concerning the ethical significance of the business they were about, and he would now only suggest a few general notions in regard to the respective attitudes of giver and receiver, in the matter of public benefactions. Such benefactions were likely to be more frequent in the future than in the past, when the town had become debtor to one of its citizens for this library, the most useful of its possessions, and the most sacred, after the houses of God; and they must be more and more impersonally regarded. The town was here in its collective capacity to make acknowledgment of the gift, tardily, it was true, but not the less gratefully; for, in the years that had elapsed, the people of Saxmills had fully experienced the great advantage bestowed upon them. It might, perhaps, have been wished — it might, perhaps, have been more graceful in some aspects if the town itself had offered the memorial it was accepting; but in that case it would have anticipated the act by which the son renewed, as it were, and confirmed the father’s deed. For himself, the rector said, he was more interested in this renewal and confirmation of it, than in the fact of the original gift. It spoke well for the young man whom in different ways they all knew, that he wished to testify his reverence for his father’s memory by doing again one of the best things that his father could have done. In this he had not only testified his reverence to his father’s memory, but had borne important witness to the imperishable vitality of a good deed in this world. It was not only the evil that men do which lived after them, but the good also lived, laying upon the future a more powerful obligation to virtue than any bond to vice that evil could impose. God had apparently willed that the good should continually and eternally show itself, and the evil should hide itself, for evil, brought into the light of day, corrupted, and good, whenever manifest, purified and restored and strengthened all men for good. Such, in fact, was the potency of a good deed that, if done from the most selfish motive, it took no color from the motive. It returned through its beneficent effect upon the world to the God of goodness. But they who were assembled to receive from the son the evidence that he renewed and confirmed his father’s gift to them had really nothing to do with the character of either. They had only to do with the good-will expressed in what was now their joint gift, and they were to honor neither of those men, but only their good deed, which was not of them, but of God. Few present had known the elder of the two; all present had known the younger, and it was he who stood for both before them. Every heart must respond to the impulse which had governed their fellow-townsman in his filial devotion to his father’s memory, and must rejoice with him in the beauty and fitness of the tribute he had paid it. If either were to be known by the other, though it was not necessary, for the present purpose, that either should be known apart from his gift, let the father be inferred from the son, and let them not be separated in the public acceptance of their benefaction.

The rector would have sat down; but James Langbrith, who had remained on the platform after Judge Garley’s oration, prevented him. He seized Enderby’s hand, and Anther heard him say, while he clung to it, “You have spoken just as I feel my father would have wished you to speak. He was the most reserved, the most impersonal of men, and I thank you, thank you, thank you for him as well as myself.”

“Oh,” the rector groaned, in a sort of protest; but before he could say anything the leading selectman rose in his place and commanded, “Three cheers for both the Langbriths!” James Langbrith stepped forward to acknowledge the applause, and Anther felt Enderby’s eye seek his own.

There was no defiance in the rector’s asking look, but a sort of entreaty, as if for the effect his words might have had with the man who knew how, primarily, they had been spoken to him. Enderby’s back had been turned to Anther while he addressed them to the people, but it had not needed the comment of the speaker’s face to convey all their latent meaning to Anther, whose eyes were as troubled as his own. He put out his hand and sadly pressed the hand of the rector, who miserably smiled a little.

“You did the best that any man could, in the circumstances,” Anther said, under cover of the uproar.

“Now, friends,” said the selectman to the Crowd, when the cheering had died away, “the tablet will be unveiled.”

At the moment James Langbrith stepped back to perform the office, Anther saw Hawberk put something into his mouth and heard him huskily explain, “Thought I might need some, and brought along a little of the gum.”

Langbrith pulled at the cord which had been contrived to separate the white curtains veiling the tablet, and slip them to the sides on the wire from which they hung. The contrivance would not work, though he tugged and twitched, and there began to be some nervous laughing in the crowd, which had its effect with him. He gave an impatient pull and the whole contrivance came away, dropping to the ground behind the platform. A girl’s hysterical cry went up, and the people began to clap and cheer. Langbrith had turned an angry face towards them, but their good-will was so manifest, their laughing had been clearly so helpless from the sense of humor which any unserious mischance appeals to in a crowd, that the anger went out of his face, and he, too, was smiling when the voice of the selectman announcing that the Rev. Mr. Alway would ask a blessing recalled him to the necessity of a more appropriate expression.

While the people were stirring vaguely from the attitude in which the benediction had left them, Langbrith came forward and shouted, “Friends, ladies and gentlemen, there’s a lunch at my mother’s, and everybody is invited — everybody!”

The crowd cheered and the band played and the square emptied itself in the direction of the Langbrith homestead.

XXV

THE last of the guests had got themselves away from the Langbrith grounds late in the afternoon, with the difficulty that people unaccustomed to social rites find in taking their leave. It was halfpast four o’clock when Langbrith stood, with his mother, in the porch at their front door, looking down, over the trampled lawn and dishevelled decorations, at that fellow-citizen who managed all the public functions of Saxmills, rushing about in his shirt-sleeves and directing his shirt-sleeved helpers in the work of dismantling and removing the long tables of rough board at which the hungry throng had lately joked and shouted and rioted.

The son noted the knot between his mother’s eyes, and laughed. “You’d like to go out there and take a hand, mother,” he interpreted; “but you’d better leave it to Danning. It’ll suit him better.” He sighed deeply. “It’s been perfect, mother, beyond my dreams. It’s been beautiful, ideal. I couldn’t tell you now, without disturbing my sense of it, how happy it’s made me. It’s made me feel as if the people here loved me, and I do like to be liked, though I don’t know how to show it, and that they cherish my father’s memory. How good everybody has been — how kind! It was awfully sweet of the old doctor to come and sit on the platform after his reluctance. I won’t forget it.” Langbrith gave a short laugh. “He knew father better than I do, and he probably felt for him against the affair; but if father had cared to look down on it to-day, I can fancy his being pleased with it in some shy, reticent way. I wish the doctor could have come to the lunch.”

“He said he had a patient — over at Wakeford,” Mrs. Langbrith said. “I asked him to come.”

“Yes, I know. I hoped he might have got back. Well, now, you must go in and lie down, mother. Take a good rest.” He put his arm round her waist and pressed her in-doors, and got his hat in the hall. “I’m going to pick up poor old Falk somewhere. I shall probably find him at the Johns’, unless Jessamy got away with him.”

He kissed his mother and left her, not to lie down, but to go and take counsel with Norah about the things that Danning’s men would be bringing in to be washed up and put away. He saved his conscience with respect to Falk by walking past the Johns’, and looking in over the fence, but he did not stay to ask for his friend on his way up to the Hawberks’. He did not know whether he had seen Falk sitting with Susie Johns at her door or not. Every sense of his was full of Hope Hawberk. Except as she was related to them, she pressed even the facts of this happy day out of his consciousness.

Hope’s grandmother came to the door, and said with grim directness, before he had asked, “She’s round in the garden.”

“Oh!” Langbrith answered, and he took the little path in the grass that the feet of the household had, traced round the corner of the house.

Hope was sitting in a low rocking-chair, by the dial, which the sun had relieved from duty for the day by getting down among the tops of the pines on the hill. She was reading a newspaper, but she was not so absorbed in it that she did not hear his step sweeping over the grass. As she looked up she laughed quietly, and in her laugh he felt a peculiar note of welcome. “Well, how did it go off?” she asked, and she let fall her paper and rocked back in her chair.

“Don’t let’s talk of it,” he said, and he crouched at her feet, with his back against the base of the dial. “Let’s talk of ourselves.”

“Well, what about you?”

“Nothing about me. When I say ourselves, I mean you, for you are ourselves. At least I am nobody without you.”

She laughed again, but her derision was full of the love which she did not try to keep out of her eyes. His own eyes glowed upon her. Neither felt the need of speaking till she turned her head away with a little difficult motion, almost as if it hurt.

“Then you will?” he murmured from somewhere deep in his throat, and she answered, low:

“Yes.”

He bent forward and put his head on her knee.

“Don’t be silly,” she said, with a catching of the breath, while she smoothed his hair with her hand.

There was no other demonstration between them,  because he knew that she liked best that there should be none, and it was a moment before he lifted his head, with a laugh of the joy otherwise unutterable: “I knew you would say yes, now. But why now? Why never before?”

She looked at him with the glowing eyes which she could not keep from his face, but it seemed to him that she no longer saw him so distinctly, for a mist that veiled their glow. Her lips twitched so that she could scarcely form the words: “Can’t you think?”

“No. What have I done?”

“You want to make me tell you! How you acted to father — when — when they laughed — I said that I would do anything for you, then; I said that I would do anything you asked—”

“Hope!”

“Don’t make me cry! I shall hate you if you do. When I need all the strength I have, so!”

“No, Hope; but listen to me. I must be honest. I didn’t do that for you. I did it for him. I like your father; he was my father’s friend; and I had nothing in my mind but the thought of their old friendship. That needn’t make you cry, or, if it does, it needn’t weaken you. Hope” — he kept getting her name in as often as he could, for the pleasure of speaking it—” I am not going to ask any promises of you, now. We will let the future take care of itself. But I want to tell you; I haven’t told my mother yet; I am going to Paris to study — to study the stage, and learn to write for it; I believe I can write plays, and Paris is the place to study the stage.

I thought I should ask you to go with me; but I see I can’t” — she shook her head in affirmation of his words—” but if I can take your love and leave you mine, will you — will you — wait?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Hope!” he sighed.

“Oh, James!” she sweetly mocked him.

“Where was I?”

“You had left me waiting.”

“Well, that is all, then.”

They both laughed.

“Of course,” he took up the broken thread, “I shall tell mother.”

“You couldn’t go without.”

“Oh, I mean about you. She will be glad. She likes you so much, Hope.”

“Well, I like her, too.”

“And you will go to see her often, Hope, won’t you?”

“Not often enough to cause remark,” she drolled, and he laughed and said:

“How funny you are, Hope! Falk thinks you are the wittiest girl he ever saw.”

“Well, you’ve always told me Mr. Falk hadn’t been in society a great deal. There must be lots of funny girls in Boston.”

Langbrith thought that droll, too. “I believe I love you more for your fun than your beauty, Hope.”

“Perhaps there’s more of the fun.”

“No, I don’t say that. You are the most beautiful creature in the world to me. And Falk thinks that your dark style—”

“Well, I always thought Mr. Falk was pretty, too. So it’s an equal thing. Now, we won’t talk of that any more; it’s too personal. We will talk about Paris. I shall never dare to tell grandmother that you are going to write plays. She thinks I’m bad enough as it is, and if she knew that I was engaged to a person who wrote plays, she would certainly give me up. Does Mr. Falk know about your plan?”

“Why, he’s going with me! Hope! May I tell you a secret?”

“Well, if it isn’t a very large one.”

“It’s nothing. You know he is going to be an artist, and Paris is the place for art as well as the stage, and I am going to lend him the money. I’d give it to him, if he’d let me. What better use could I make of it? But of course Falk won’t stand that.”

“No, I wouldn’t, in his place.”

“Does he care for — I mean does Susie Johns care for him?”

“She never said so. Perhaps she hadn’t been asked. She’s rather queer, that way. She never answers till she’s been asked. She’s very secretive.”

He laughed, and began in another place. “I wish I could have you with me to keep me from playing the fool.”

“Why, I’m the greatest fool myself,” she explained.

“No, you’re not. You’re the very soul of common-sense. But I shall keep writing to you, and consulting you about everything, and that will make me sensible. And perhaps — in about a year—”

She mocked, “I was just waiting to know how long!”

“Hope,” he asked at another tangent, “Dr. Anther does think your father’s getting better, doesn’t he?”

“He thinks his will is getting stronger.”

“I understand you can’t leave him, Hope, and that’s why I don’t ask you to go with me to Paris as well as Falk; but when your father is all right — and he will be, I know he will — then we will go out together — my mother and your father, as well as you.”

“What a beautiful vision! And what about grandmother?”

“Oh, we would take her, too.”

“I should like to see you getting grandmother on a steamer! Why, she thinks going on the cars is as much as her life’s worth.”

“We can manage, somehow.” They laughed together at his optimism, and he asked, “Do you know what I liked best in the whole thing to-day? I mean besides your father’s coming. Dr. Anther’s being there. He didn’t like the notion of the tablet at the first, and he let me feel it; but it was just his way — working round, and giving in handsomely in the end, without saying anything. My heart was in my mouth till he came onto the platform. It wouldn’t have been anything without him.”

“Of course it wouldn’t. But, of course, he was sure to come. He’s grand.”

“Yes, after my own father, as I imagine him, there’s nobody equal to Dr. Anther, as I know him.”

They talked rapturously away from themselves, and they talked back in ecstatic return, and an hour passed before he reverted to her with impatience of anything but her in her relation to himself. “What made you cry out that way?”

“Me? How did you know who it was?”

“Don’t you suppose I should know your voice, in the dark, anywhere in or out of the world? What made you do it?”

“As if you didn’t know! I was so worked up by those curtains not coming apart, and thinking how you felt, that I couldn’t help it, though I wasn’t sure but it was somebody else. If it had gone on much longer, I should have got onto the platform and married you on the spot.”

Langbrith jumped alertly to his feet, and Hope rose, too, laughing. He put out his arms towards her. “Now I think it’s full time for you—”

She did not try to escape, but a sound of lamentable groaning came between them, and she called out, “Oh, poor father!” and whirled from her lover into the house.

He stood dazed by the ghastly interruption, and remained bewildered when, a little after, she returned to him, somewhat paler, but not looking as distressed as he looked, and dropped again into her chair.

“Isn’t there anything I can do? Go for Dr. Anther?—”

“No, no! It’s all right, now. He was just dreaming — he has awful dreams, but they are only dreams.”

“Oh, Hope!” He stood before her, not offering to take his place at her feet again, but aching, as she saw, with pity for her.

“You mustn’t mind me. I’m used to it. And it isn’t anything real, you know.”

“It seems terrible. I don’t know how to bear it for you.”

Hope smiled. “Well, you don’t have to, and I can bear it for myself as long as — as long as father must bear it. Are you going away?”

“Yes, I must go back to mother—”

She rose, and, without his advance, put her arms round his neck and kissed him, and then began to cry against his cheek. It was not the passionate embrace with which he had often, in his burning reveries, sealed their betrothal, but it was something sacreder, sweeter, and he seemed purified and uplifted, as if her arms were raising him into heavenlier air. He knew now what misery and sorrow, what squalor, even, he was making his part; but he thought only of her with whom they came, and he was richly content.

“Your trouble shall be my trouble, after this,” he began, but she would not let him say more.

“Yes, yes! Don’t talk!” and while she brushed the tears from her eyes with her handkerchief, she pushed him from her with the other hand.

He accepted his dismissal. “I shall come back after supper,” he said, and she neither invited nor forbade him. He did not go home; he could not, without first using the new authority which her love had given him, and he went round by Dr. Anther’s office to ask him if nothing, nothing, could be done for her father. He tried to think about it all, and how he should press the doctor to some conclusion, to some definite promise, to some clear prophecy of a fortunate end; but it was confused in his mind with his love, and he was so lost in the sense of that as it concerned her and him alone that from step to step he forgot what he was about and had to recall himself to his errand. Once he went down a wrong turning, and, when he came to Mrs. Burwell’s at last, he recognized the house with a kind of astonishment.

“The doctor ain’t here,” Mrs. Burwell called down to him from the window over the door as he stood with his hand on the bell-pull. She had her head tied up in a handkerchief, as if she had been sweeping; the impression of this was strengthened by her having a broom in the hand that supported her on the window-sill. “He hain’t got back from that patient — drefful sick crittur, I guess — to Wakeford, and I’m givin’ the place one last dustin’; I don’t know when it’ll get another. I was ril sorry I couldn’t come to the ceremony to-day, but I got my mind set on finishin’ my movin’, and nothing couldn’t seem to stop me. I feel bad about leavin’ the doctor here, alone like a cat in a strange garret, as you may say, but I guess I got to. I don’t know who he’ll get in to care for him. As far forth as I can make out, he ha’n’t even thought of anybody.”

“He’ll be in after supper, I suppose?” Langbrith  said, with an imperfect sense of the words spilled on him, as in a stream, from above.

“Yes, if he gets any supper,” Mrs. Burwell responded with mystery lost upon Langbrith’s abstraction. “He’s always in nights, you know, without he’s got a call.”

“Then I’ll come round again, later.”

“So do!” Mrs. Burwell called after his averted figure as he stepped down the two yards of path to the gate, and moved away with feet that wandered with his wandering thoughts.

Something had penetrated the whirl of his mind which centred around the idea of Hope all kindly and pleasant things, and he was afterwards aware of some meaning in Mrs. Burwell as to Dr. Anther which he had not taken at once from her words. Had she meant that the doctor had bought her house or hired it? He had lived there a long time, and it might very well be. But a magnificent scheme now suggested itself to Langbrith, which he would consult his mother about, and then propose to the doctor, if she approved. He would offer Dr. Anther his father’s office, standing apart from the mansion, if he found he had not taken Mrs. Burwell’s house; it would be more convenient for him, and it would be near the hotel, where the poor old fellow could get a meal at any time without being subject to such severities as Mrs. Burwell had practised with him, and as he must fall under again if any village person took him to board. Langbrith himself would feel so safe, having him there near his mother, for all advising and helping in any sort of exigency. With that lifelong friend near her, he would not feel as if he were leaving her alone for the year he should spend in Paris, before he brought Hope home to the old place.

He glowed with the thought of what motherliness and daughterliness there would be between those dearest women, and how he would protect and cherish them both in their common reliance upon him. He wished Falk was there. He would like first to consult Falk about it. Falk had so much sense, and would put his finger on any weak spot in the plan and laugh him out of it if it would not do. He felt the need of Falk so much and the desire of immediate action so greatly, that he turned from going home and walked rapidly up the hill towards Susie Johns’. He wished he could go and ask Hope’s counsel, too, but it would be silly — he feared her thinking it silly — if he went back to her so soon; and if Falk approved, he knew that she would, and his perfected plan would be such a pleasant surprise for her:

He could make an excuse with Susie Johns, that he had come to fetch Falk home for tea; but, when he knocked at her door, the Irish girl who answered him said that Mr. Falk was at tea within.

“Oh, then, don’t bother him,” he said, and got quickly away, lest Susie should run out and hospitably seize upon him for another guest. “Don’t say who it was,” he called over his shoulder to the Irish girl, as he fled.

It would only be postponing the matter a little while. He could see Falk before he saw the doctor, which would be before he saw Hope again, and, with the affair settled in his mind, he pushed down the side-hill street up which his own house looked. He had not reached the bottom when he foreboded a temptation beyond his strength at sight of the doctor’s shabby old buggy and his sleepy horse slumped before the gate. But now he suddenly recurred to the thought of bringing him to book about Hope’s father, and getting his mother help to get something like a promise of Hawberk’s recovery from him. He fancied first telling his mother and their old friend together of his authority for anxiety in the matter. Both these things must come before the offer which he wished to make, and which he now knew he should make without asking Falk about it. But which of the two pleasant things in his mind should come out first was the happy question with him as he entered the wide-open front door and pushed into the twilighted parlor.

XXVI

ANTHER had driven home from Wakeford with a heart softened more and more towards what had been the odious self-compulsion of the day, by his thoughts of the pleasure that had shone upon him from James Langbrith’s face when they met upon the platform before the veiled effigy of Royal Langbrith. There had been a fantastic moment when it seemed to him as if the father’s misdeeds might be uncovered when the son tore those curtains from his face, but nothing had been revealed; and all the fortuities — one could not quite call them providences — had joined to keep his evil life still in the dark. Anther submitted; he had said to himself he could do no more than he had done; he was not sure that he had done unselfishly in the business, so far as he had acted, and yet he could not have done other than he did. That was his consolation; and now he was going to let events drift as they would; he would never again attempt to stay or steer their course. He had even meant to come to the luncheon at the Langbrith house, and though he had gladly spared himself at the call from Wakeford that reached him when he left the platform, yet he was coming now to make his excuses to the young man for having been unable to take a further part in the affairs of the day.

He found Langbrith’s mother alone when he went in at the door, on which he tapped with his whiphandle, and then entered without staying to ring. “James not here?” he promptly suggested in sitting down before her, with his hat on his knee; he waved her away when she offered, mechanically, to take it.

“No,” she answered, “he said he was going out to look for Mr. Falk. Perhaps he went to Hope’s, too.” She let her eyes fall and sighed “Yes” when Anther said, “It would be the best thing,” knowing that he meant as the only atonement the son could make for the father’s wrong. “He has always liked her,” she added, “but sometimes I have wondered whether she liked him. She’s a strange girl.” Anther said, suddenly turning from his wish to let things drift to something in his immediate thought, “And there is the question of how she would feel towards him if she found out, some time, the sort of injury she had suffered from his father through hers.”

“Surely she wouldn’t hold James responsible for that!” Mrs. Langbrith started as with a physical pang. “How will it ever come out now?”

“I don’t know. If Hawberk—”

“What?”

He did not answer, but, “Amelia,” he asked, with a compassionate intelligence for her helplessness, “why do you ding to this hope of concealment? We have let that poor boy go on and stultify himself, and involve, innocently enough on his part, two good men like Garley and Enderby in the fraud that he has practised on the community—”

“Do they know?”

“I had to tell them.” She caught her breath, but did not interrupt him. “That’s all nothing, though, in my regard, compared with the harm you are doing yourself and the trouble you are storing up for the future, when he finds it out, as he must some day, and asks you if you had known it all along. What will you say to him? I wish you would tell him now, my dear, as soon as you see him, without an instant’s delay—”

“I can’t, Dr. Anther; it’s too late. I can never tell him now.”

“Then let me!” It was always coming to that with him.

“No, that would be worse. What would he think of your concealment — your being there today. But I made you!”

“Yes,” Anther sadly owned, “ I was there because you asked it. I would certainly never have dreamt of being there otherwise.” He rose.

She rose, too, and wavered towards him. “Don’t you think I knew you did it for me? Don’t you think I felt it? And James,” she added, incoherently, “he felt it, too. He cared more for your being there than for anything else, he said.” Anther laughed forlornly. “Oh, don’t despise me! I know I’m a coward, but don’t you despise me, or I shall die!”

“Despise you! There’s nothing but love for you in my heart, Amelia. Why can’t we be all in all to each other?”

“Well,” she answered, abruptly, desperately, “I will do what you ask. Now I don’t care what happens. I care more for you than for all the world. Don’t you know that?” She stole her arm tenderly through his arm, and pulled herself towards him, but almost at the moment he saw the fondness die out of her face and her arm slipped from his.

He turned and confronted James Langbrith standing in the door-way and staring at them. It was his impulse, somehow, to put himself between the mother and the son, but a guiltless shame withheld him and silenced him when he tried to speak. He heard Mrs. Langbrith gasping, “James, I want to tell you that Dr. Anther — that I — that we — we are going to get married,” and he realized that, in anticipating him, she was heroically acting on her instinct as woman and mother.

“Married!” Langbrith echoed, and now he looked at Anther alone, as if for explanation of something unintelligible and incredible. He smiled faintly, and Anther replied with a sudden resentment.

“Yes, I have been attached to your mother for a long time. She has known it, and has consented to marry me.”

The resentment was for his own shame, rather than for the young man’s words; but not the less it kindled the cold amaze in Langbrith to a flame of hostility that lighted up the whole past of conjecture and misgiving. As one thing after another grew clear in this illumination, the young man’s anger burned within him, not so much for the fact immediately before him, as for the series of facts by which he had been duped. But curiously concurrent with his swift retrospect was the flow of his tenderness for Hope, his sense of her love for him and of his love for her, so that it was partly lost in this, and half incredulous, that he began:

“Have you kept it from me so that you can crown my father’s commemoration services with it? Was it a surprise you were holding back for me, or were you afraid of telling me?” His anger gained somewhat upon his love, through the mere utterance of the offensive words, but he did not yet speak with a single mind. What was this case, and how did his father enter? He had that still to work out in an unalloyed consciousness.

“Afraid!” Anther dropped Mrs. Langbrith’s hand, which he had caught up, and started forward, but he stopped at her cry of “Justin!”

“James,” she implored her son in turn, “you don’t know what you are saying! Yes — we were afraid. I wanted to spare you — I wanted to wait—”

Now he answered more definitely: “And this is your notion of sparing me! Did you choose this time, of all others, to tell me that you had forgotten my father?”

“Oh, you don’t know him. You don’t know what you’re saying. Indeed—”

“The trouble is that I don’t know what you’re saying. I can’t make it out. Is it some wretched joke? Dr. Anther, you know how I have always felt about my father. If you were in my place what should you say to a man in yours? It must be distasteful to any son for his mother to marry again, but perhaps you have special reasons that would reconcile me.”

His words were temperate, but Anther felt the bitterness that they covered, and he answered as caustically. “I think I could give you special reasons,” he said; but at Mrs. Langbrith’s imploring look he stopped.

Langbrith had missed the look and its significance. With the sense of Hope fading more and more, he was able to say: “I can imagine them. It isn’t the first time that I’ve suspected you of secretly hating my father, with some such just cause as a nature like his could give a treacherous nature like yours!” He knew, somehow, that he was hurting Anther less than he was hurting his mother, and less than he was hurting himself, even. His rhetoric rang false to him. He was aware that it did not apply. He forced the added words: “But I don’t care to know your reasons. I have done with you, sir. I don’t want to hear anything more from you.” He turned from Anther arrogantly. “Mother, what was it you were saying about my father?”

She found Anther’s hand again and clung to it. She only said, “I’m going to marry Dr. Anther.”

“Is that what you have to say about my father? Well, perhaps it is enough.”

“Dr. Anther is the best friend I’ve ever had in the world, and—” she hesitated. Langbrith stood silent, his mind whirling from point to point without seizing definitely upon any. His mother ended, “He will be a good father to you, James.”

At this feeble conclusion, Langbrith’s daze broke in cruel sneering. “I am of age, and I need no father but the one that I have lost, and that you have forgotten.”

“I haven’t forgotten him,” his mother answered, with a struggle for courage; “I’m remembering him now as I never did before.”

“I don’t understand this,” said Langbrith, haughtily. “But it doesn’t matter. I begin to understand some other things, though. I see now why this man has taken the part he has towards my father’s memory, but why he should have had the base hypocrisy to-day—”

“He was there because I asked him,” she interposed.

“No matter why he was there; his presence was an insult to the living and the dead, and as this happens to be my house, my father’s house, I object to his remaining in it another instant.”

“James!”

Anther’s hand shook in Mrs. Langbrith’s clutch, and he burst out: “How dare you talk so to me! If it wasn’t that you don’t know what you’re saying — if your ignorance wasn’t so monstrous — But I can tell you—”

“Oh, Dr. Anther!” Mrs. Langbrith implored him, and he stopped, panting. “Will you listen to me, James?” She turned to her son.

“Yes, mother, as much as you like. You can’t say anything that will change me towards this horrible business, but I will listen.”

“Oh, you don’t know what I could say to you!”  she broke out. But then she turned again helplessly to Anther. “Will you—”

“No, you must excuse me there, mother; I could not hear anything from a stranger about family affairs.”

“Dr. Anther is my family now,” she began, bravely.

“That is what saves him from the only answer a gentleman could make to his impudence.”

She felt Anther’s arm grow rigid under the hold she had laid on it. “Well,” she said, with a helpless pathos, “as my son will not let my husband speak for me, I will go with my husband and not speak.”

“No, Amelia,” Anther said, with the dignity he had lost in his angry burst; “I will go, and you can say what you wish to your son.”

“I will say it before you or not at all, and if you leave this house I will leave it with you. I’m not going to justify myself to you, James.” She turned to her son. “I need no justification—”

“I am not requiring you to say anything, mother.”

“And you won’t hear me then, my son?”

“If you have no need of being heard, as you say, why should I put you to the trouble of explaining anything? I ask no explanation now. It seems that I’ve been living all my life in a mistake. That’s all. I supposed we had the same ideal, and that the memory of my father was as sacred to you as to me; but it wasn’t, and that’s your sufficient justification.”

“Amelia,” Anther entreated, “let me leave you with James.”

“Not for a moment!” she returned. “I can’t stay without you, now.”

“Perhaps we can simplify the situation by my leaving you with him,” Langbrith said. “As it is not convenient for you to let me have my house on my own terms, I will go to the hotel. I can find Falk and go to Boston. When I come back, I hope I can have my house to myself.” He recalled himself to add, “You will always be welcome in it, mother.”

He turned and went out and left them standing there looking at each other.

“Why didn’t I speak? Why didn’t I tell him?” Mrs. Langbrith was the first to break their silence.

“I saw you try. It was too late; we’re always saying that. Amelia, if this trial is too great for you, I shall never blame you. It has been all sudden and unexpected; no one thing more than another. I didn’t dream of your consenting when I came here. Give me up, if you will—”

“And be left with James? Oh no! I care more for you now; perhaps I always did. He was always hard. It seems a strange thing for a mother to say of her son, but it’s true; and now he has been cruel. It’s worse even than I thought it would be. I’m afraid of him!”

Anther felt within him a curious shifting of the grounds of judgment, and he spoke from the change. “You mustn’t condemn him. You must remember how much he had to bear; thinking of his father, as he did, it must seem like sacrilege to him.”

“Unless he could know the truth. And if it’s too late for the truth now, take me away from the lie. I can’t bear it any longer. Can’t we live somewhere else?”

He took her literally, and her shapeless longings for escape crystallized as he answered, simply, “I’ve bought the house where I’ve lived.”

“Oh, have you?” she cried, with hysterical joy. “Then take me there. Let us go now — this instant.”

“To-morrow. We can’t go now, you know, Amelia.”

“I forgot. Now you see how long I have seemed to be married to you. Do you like that? I wish I were! I can’t endure to pass another night under this roof! It’s hateful! hateful! hateful!”

“Well, you must have patience. You must part kindly with your son.”

“With my son? With Royal Langbrith’s son?” Her bitterness expressed to him all the revolt of her soul from its long slavery.

He rose in his self-control over her headlong impulse. “You must try to be friends with your son. Nothing else will do, Amelia. If he comes back here, tell him we are to be married to-morrow. Ask him to be with us. You have hidden so much from the world so long that you can hide this, too. We mustn’t make our marriage a seven days’ wonder.’ You will feel differently towards James. I pity him from my heart.”

“I don’t.”

“You will, and you must do your best to be reconciled with him. I want your life to be free and happy, from this on. I can’t let you incur any shadow of self-reproach. You mustn’t have one regret to chain you to the past. Good-night, my dear. I must leave you here because there’s nowhere else. But when James comes back you will see him, and try — for my sake — to make peace with him. Remember that his error is not his fault!”

“It is my fault.”

“It is no one’s. I can understand — and tell him that I beg his pardon for not considering at once — what a bolt out of the blue this has been for him. We have known for a long time that we should marry, but he has never imagined it, and it seems a wrong to his father, as he has idealized him. He can’t help acting as he has done towards us, but he will learn to act differently. Yes, his common-sense — and he has plenty of it in the end — will teach him that we could have meant no wrong to his father if he were the best of men. Don’t let yourself be tempted, now, to tell him the truth. It could do no good: only harm. Be patient with him. Bear everything from him. He is deeply hurt in the part that is the best part of him; think of that. Amelia, ask him to be present at our marriage. You asked me to be present at—”

“Yes, yes, I will. I don’t care what he says to me!”

“That’s right. I’ll have Mr. Alway. It needn’t be in the church, then, it can be—”

“Here?” she shrieked. “In this house?”

“No, in the minister’s; and good-night again.”

XXVII

IN the quarrel which he had forced with his mother and Dr. Anther, Langbrith was sensible throughout of failing to say the worst. He had not put into words the outrage which was burning in his heart.

He had not expressed the amaze, and far less the abhorrence, which he felt. He had meant to hurt Anther to death, so far as insult could kill; and he had meant to wither his mother with shame. But the crudest blows he dealt them had seemed to fall like blows dealt in nightmare, as if they were dealt with balls of cotton or of down; and he had left them in possession of the place he ought to have driven them out of with ignominy.

He was aware of having been disabled for his part by the confusion which still kept him from a clear sense of what had befallen, and perhaps saved him from its full effect. He had entered upon that scene with his soul full of the good-will, the tender purpose towards Anther, which his happy love for Hope had inspired; and he had not, even yet, after all that had passed, wholly freed himself from it. He kept recurring to it with puzzle and interrogation, as something which in its strange metamorphosis he could not make out. It was still mixed with his thought of Hope. It seemed as if he were going to tell her of it still, as he had meant to do, and to taste the pleasure of her praise for it.

He could not make definitely out what he was now really going to do; but he acted upon the notion that he wished to find Falk and get him to take the train with him for Boston. He was sure that he wished to get as far away as he could. That was the first thing. The next thing was to get away from the humiliation of failing to do justice to himself and his cause. Now he saw a thousand proofs that the offence done him had been long impending; that if he had not been a fool, and blind, he must have known it; but the longer it had been impending, the greater the shame, the greater the defamation, the viler the insult to his father, to have it follow so instantly upon the consecration of his memory. His heart closed about the thought of his father with an indignant tenderness, which, somehow, could not leave his mother out. She had always been part of that thought, and he had an impulse to entreat her against herself, as if being a child she had struck him, and there was no one but her for him to go to for comfort.

His feet set themselves uncertainly, as if his vertigo were physical, while he pushed on, looking crazily for Falk. He could not go to Hope yet.

The Irish girl answered him, at the house which he had left so gayly such a little time before, that Falk had gone out to walk with Miss Susie. He asked “Where?’’ but the girl could not tell him, and he realized that he must not try to follow them. He could not go home, and he would not see Hope.

But he could pass her house; there was that left him to do in the wild need he had of doing something.

She was at her gate, waiting for him, as he knew, after he had bridged the hour of his absence with a recollection of the promise to come back which he had given her. The full moon was looking over the eastern shoulder of the hill, behind the house, into his face; but it was with an inner sense, the vision which love so soon supplies to women, that she read something strange in it.

“Why, James!” she said.

“Come with me, Hope,” he bade her, and, as she joined him, wonderingly, letting him seize her hand and pull it under his arm, as he pushed away from the house, up the road climbing into the shelter of the pine woods beyond, “I’ve got something to tell you, Hope; something to — tell — you,” he forced himself. “My mother is going to marry Dr. Anther.”

“How glorious!” she shouted, pulling her hand out of his to leave herself the freer to front him “Glorious?” he faltered back.

“Yes! I have always thought what a splendid thing it would be. They are such old friends, and they are just suited to each other: your mother is the best woman, and I think Dr. Anther is the best man, in the world. Yes, it’s what I call glorious.”

“I call it infamous!” he said, in a voice that struck her with greater amaze than his words by its dreadfulness.

“Why, James Langbrith!” she gasped.

“Infamous. Does no one,” he demanded, turning his severity upon her, “remember my father?”

“Why, yes — yes, of course—”

“Is it glorious for my mother to forget him? Could you forget met.”

“No, never! And I don’t believe she’s forgotten him. But it’s a different thing from you and me. She knows that you will be leaving her some day — why, I intend to take you from her myself, and, if I could do such a thing, what mightn’t others do! — and then she will be alone; and why in the world shouldn’t she marry such an old friend as Dr. Anther? It would be different if it were a stranger, and I shouldn’t blame you, then, if you were morbid about it. But Dr. Anther! Why, he’s always seemed to me like one of the family. Why, it’s ridiculous! What has it got to do with remembering your father? Now, James, if you let yourself get to thinking this way about things, I shall be afraid to marry you. I say it’s the best thing that could happen, and I can’t understand you.”

“No, it seems you can’t.”

“Oh, very well!”

“I don’t mean that,” he made haste to save himself. “No one can understand how I have always felt towards my father. You may call it superstition, if you like, but I have always felt him something sacred. I have felt as if he were a mysterious influence in my own life, shaping it for the highest things. And at the same time it’s as if he appealed to me, always, from his grave, for protection. Since I was old enough to realize that I had lost him, I have never been recreant to his trust in me.”

“Yes, I should feel just so about my own father,” Hope granted.

Langbrith put aside the comparison of his father with hers by something in his tone rather than in his words. “Yes,” he assented, though he refused her sympathy on those terms. “But it isn’t the same thing. My father is dead; and, while he lived, he was not a man who could make himself understood; I can’t explain; in all the letters he left, and his memorandum-books, it was implied. I thought my mother felt the same, and that was why she was so silent about him; and I thought that Dr. Anther — But if all the time they were conspiring to betray him — if they were thinking of themselves and each other, when they, of all people in the world, should have been the truest to him—”

“Oh, oh, what talk!” Hope broke in. “Why, James Langbrith, I should think you were insane.”

“I am! I am!” he choked out. “This thing is turning my brain. I try to realize it, and then when I. realize it I feel that I must go mad. Oh, you don’t understand; you can’t! you can’t! I feel so covered with shame for my mother.”

As they talked, they walked swiftly. Now and then the moon struck between the trees, upon them, but in the prevailing shadow they had the seclusion in which they willingly hid themselves, till they reached the top of the ridge that overlooked the house and below that the town. Its varied murmurs came up to them there, with the sound of the mills vibrating through all.

“I suppose,” he said, bitterly, “that they all think I am a fool to care for him, though he made their prosperity, and did more for them than they did for themselves all together.”

“Now, you sha’n’t be morbid, if I can help it,” she broke out upon him., “I don’t believe any such thing, and I don’t believe you will, when you come to think. Do you want me to talk up to you the way I used to at school, or to pretend I’m afraid of you, and flatter you and make you think you’ve been abused?”

“How do you mean?”

“Of course, we haven’t been together so much since you went to Harvard; but since — since this afternoon, I’ve been feeling the old way, as if we were children again, and we should always speak right out anything we thought. There wouldn’t be any use or sense in it if we couldn’t.”

“Why, of course.”

“And you believe that I care for you more than for any one else in the world?”

“That’s how I care for you.”

“And that I wouldn’t say anything I didn’t believe was for your good?”

“I can’t think of you apart from myself.”

“Well, then, listen: you know very well that everybody honors you for wanting to commemorate your father. They don’t know anything about him, but they think you do; so that’s settled, and we won’t have any misanthropy for the people down there. Now you’re sure I may say what else I think to you?”

“Anybody may say what they think to me.”

“Oh, if you want to be boyish!”

“Go on, Hope!” he said, humbly. “I beg your pardon.”

“There’s no pardon to be begged or granted. I just want you to see this in the right light, and I’ve got, first of all, to know what you said to your mother.”

“I don’t remember the words. But I let her know how I felt,” he gloomily answered.

“And to Dr. Anther?”

“Nothing! I wouldn’t speak to him. But I let him know that he was ordered out of the house.”

“You did! Well, I’ve half a mind never to speak to you again. And did he go?”

“No. I went,” Langbrith said, with sullenness, somewhat crestfallen. “I told my mother I was going to Boston with Falk, to-night. Did you expect me to stay and see them married?”

“Where is Mr. Falk?” Hope asked, as if to gain time before answering his question.

“I couldn’t find him. He was walking somewhere with Susie Johns.”

“And why didn’t you go to Boston without him?” He looked into her face in a daze that did not at once yield to her intention.

“Without coming to see you?”

“Oh, you stayed for that, and now it’s too late to go.”

“It’s too late.”

“And so you’re going back to your mother?”

“I’m going back to the hotel for the night; then—”

“No, James,” she said, gently, dropping her mockery in the seriousness which was in the veiled depth of her nature; “you mustn’t do that. I want you to do what I say. Will you?”

“I will listen to what you say.”

“No, that isn’t enough. I want you to go back to your mother, and say, ‘I was all wrong; I know I am wrong because I know you couldn’t be.’ Will you say that?”

“No, never! I wouldn’t say it if you made it a condition of my ever seeing you again.”

“Do you think I would do that, or do anything that would make me a tyrant over you? I am not so foolish, no matter how wicked I am. I wouldn’t give you up if you chose to stay in the wrong; but I know some day you will want to put yourself in the right, and I don’t want it to be too late. Now will you do this? Go and say, ‘Mother, I can’t withdraw what I said, but I know you believe that you are doing right, and I will stay here and be at your marriage.’ Will you?”

“Why do you wish me to do that?” he struggled against the sense that he was giving way to her.

“Because I hate you, and want to do you all the harm I can.”

He understood. “Well, I can’t tell her what you say; but if she wishes to marry that man, she mustn’t seem to do it against my will.”

“And you’ll promise her to be at the ceremony?”

“No, I won’t do that, Hope; I won’t do it even for you. How could I, without seeming to condone it, to approve of it, when my whole nature revolts against it? Would you want me to act such a lie as that?”

“You know that it would seem a quarrel with your mother if you didn’t.”

“Well, there is a quarrel. She’s no mother of mine if she marries that man.”

“But you said yourself that she mustn’t seem to do it against your will.”

“No matter for that. They can wait till I go away; till I put the ocean between me and the loathsome thought of it. I’ve promised enough. I can’t do more than I’ve said I would; no, not even for your asking, Hope!”

“Do you think I ask it for myself?”

“No.”

“For Dr. Anther, or your mother, even?”

“No.”

“For whom, then?”

“For me, I suppose. But you ask too much for me.”

She could not mistake his sullen finality. She sighed deeply, but not desperately. “Well then, tell her that you won’t oppose the marriage. And if you are going to do that, you can’t do it too soon”; and she began to find her way trippingly down the slope that led from the hill-top into the garden behind her house. Langbrith followed more heavily and more slowly, and less securely of the way, and she had to wait for him beside the gate, on which the moon was trying feebly to paint the hour. He felt that he had no right to her embrace; but, when she turned there and put her arms round his neck and kissed him, his sore heart melted within him.

He wanted to say that he would do what she asked, but somehow he could not, and they parted without further words, except a whispered “Goodnight!” from him, and a “Good-night, dearest! Be good!” from her.

A light showed in the roof-chamber which he knew, and as he turned the corner of the house, towards the street, a low moaning, the precursor of nightmare within, stole out of the lifted sash on the moonlit air. He thought of the burden and affliction her father was; but he did not think, he was too young for that, what a burden and affliction her husband might be; and, doubtless, Hope herself, strengthened for one trial by the other, did not feel either beyond her woman’s force, or both more than her woman’s share.

Langbrith pulled himself more and more slowly homeward. The outer door was open, as he had left it, and he passed in and stood a moment at the door of the parlor. The moonlight without showed him his mother sitting in the room, as if she had not stirred from the chair into which he had seen her sink when he madly broke from her entreaty.

“Mother,” he said, stonily, for all the pathos of the sight, “I know you think you’re right, and, if you’re going to be married soon, I will stay and be present.”

At first she did not answer; but, after he had begun to imagine she had not heard him, she said, “I am not going to be married.” Langbrith waited, in his turn, before he said, “I don’t understand; but I suppose you know what you mean, at any rate.” And he now felt himself speaking as much to Hope as to his mother; ‘‘I’ve done what I could.”

“Oh, yes,” she answered, with bitter rejection of the immediate purport of his words, “you’ve done what you could.”

XXVIII

MRS. LANGBRITH did not wait for Anther to come to her for the withdrawal of her promise: she could not take the chance of another meeting between him and her son. She sent him word the next morning, as soon as Norah was up. She had not slept, consciously waiting to send it, and he had not slept, unconsciously waiting to receive it.

He read her note without surprise; he read it almost, he felt, with a sort of expectation. “I must take back my word. I cannot keep it. You know why. We ought to have known I could not.” Within, the note was neither addressed nor signed. He read it passively, and folded it up and put it into his pocket-book. That day, as he made his visits, he thought recurrently of those weak forms of animal life which gather their strength for a sudden spurt, and then, when it is spent, rest helpless till their forces are renewed. He had taken her in a moment when her will had accumulated strength enough for action; but the impulse had exhausted itself, and now she could not act. At first, he said to himself that he must wait for another rise of her slight powers, and then help her to prevail with herself. But, at last, he said that this would be taking advantage of her weakness — making himself her tyrant, her oppressor. She was not less but more dear to him because of her feeble will. He had always pitied her for her subjection to the brute force of others — of her husband and of her son; and the love that had begun in pity continued increasingly in pity. She was never so dear to him as now when she had failed him. He could not decide that she had failed him more finally than before, but she had failed him more signally. He promised himself that he would not try to see her again, as long as her son was with her; and, in fact, it was not till the morning after Langbrith had been gone a week that he stopped his horse at her gate, and found his way up the box-bordered path to her door.

She had seen him coming, and met him at the threshold with a dismay and entreaty that went to his heart.

“How do you do, Amelia?” he asked. And she answered:

“Have you come to say that you despise me?”

“Do you know me so little as not to know that I care for you more than ever I did?” he protested. But at the kind of fluttering in her, he said: “I hadn’t come to speak of that; I never will be the first to speak of that again. I know that James has left you. I wouldn’t come till I knew that, though I wanted to assure myself with my own eyes that you were well.”

She looked at him in gratitude that included the larger with the lesser favor, and answered, evasively, “He went last Saturday; he sailed this morning.”

“Yes.”

“Hope Hawberk and he are engaged. She’s been to see me. But he told me before he left. She’s a good girl.”

Anther said, as if in reply, “James is a good man.” Those unfailing tears came into Mrs. Langbrith’s eyes.

“I know who is a good man,” she said.

“When are they to be married?” Anther asked, ignoring her worship.

“They don’t know, exactly; not for a year, at least. He says he wants to be sure that he is doing something over there, first. Do you understand what it is that he wants to do?”

“Not very well; but I have heard of other young men studying to write for the theatre, there. The French are supposed to do those things best.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Langbrith vaguely assented. “He’s got that Mr. Falk to go with him.”

“That’s good. He seems to be a good fellow.”

“I think he will be a good influence,” Mrs. Langbrith suggested.

“Oh yes, but James could be trusted to himself.”

“Yes. Dr. Anther,” she broke off, “do you think Mr. Hawberk is going to get well?”

He looked quickly at her.

“Why?”

“Hope thinks he is. She says he is trying harder than he ever did before; he’s paying more attention to what you want him to do. She says that the days when you want him to take the medicine instead of the laudanum he does not take the laudanum at all.”

“I haven’t seen him for more than a week. His gain depends upon how long he has been keeping faith with me.”

“I guess it’s more than five or six days, now. Dr. Anther, if Mr. Hawberk should get over it, would he begin to tell the truth, or would he go on talking the same as he does now?”

“Talking about what?”

“Oh, everything. You said that his opium-eating prevented his telling the truth.”

“The truth?”

“Well,” she said, desperately, “about Mr. Langbrith. If he got well, would he say what Mr. Langbrith  really was?”

Anther rose, and walked across the room and back; and he did not sit down again. “He would be apt to say what he really was.”

She drew a long breath. “I don’t know as I should like that,” she said, piteously, and her voice trembled. “It would get to James, and — and — I don’t know as I want he should ever know, now.”

They looked at each other, he searchingly, she beseechingly. He wondered, “What is she asking me?” and a pit, on the edge of which she seemed to tremble, opened to his conjecture. His gaze hardened, and hers sank under it. “I’ve nothing to do with that,” he said to her falling face. “My business is to cure Hawberk, if I can, at any risk, and with any consequence.”

She returned wildly, as if in terror of something she had barely escaped. “Yes, yes! You must! And, oh, I hope you can do it! I can’t help what he says about Mr. Langbrith; I don’t care who knows the truth. Only cure him! Why do you look at me so, Dr. Anther, as if you blamed me? Well, I am to blame. I did—”

“Hush, Amelia! I don’t blame you. I understand you. Don’t think I blame you, or hold you responsible for anything.” Whatever it was that had passed from one consciousness to the other was confessed and pardoned, and he took her hand in saying, while her tears rose without falling, “I have been thinking the whole matter over very anxiously since I saw you last, and I have asked myself, now that we can never be anything more to each other than we are, what would be the use of James’s ever knowing the sort of man his father was. I have had my impulses to revenge myself on him, to punish him for what I have considered his insolence to you as well as me; but I have fully realized that his wrong came from the illusion in which he lived, and that we could not destroy this illusion now to any good purpose, and I have no longer any wish to hurt him. Let it go. But as a physician,” he added, “there can be no doubt of my duty. Hawberk might live on indefinitely, as an opium-eater, and, again, he might die suddenly. It’s my business to keep him alive and get him well.”

“Oh yes, I know that. It was because,” she entreated, “I thought it would be so dreadful if I thought it that I thought it.”

He looked at her with a sad intelligence where she stood wavering. “I understand,” he said, and he took her hand, hesitating. Then he dropped it, saying “Good-bye,” and left the house.

He drove away hardly aware of anything outside himself, till he was aware of coming to the rectory. Then he realized that he was going to see Hawberk. He was beset by a sudden longing to speak with Enderby, and was staying himself against it in a sense of its meanness and unfairness, when Mrs. Enderby’s voice called to him from the yard, where she was gathering some flowers from the blossomed shrubbery. He perceived he had stopped at the gate.

“Won’t you come in and see Dr. Enderby?” she called.

“No, no, I thank you,” he returned. “I hope he’s well.”

“Oh, quite well,” she answered, looking at the sprays in her hand. “I was just getting some flowers to send to Hope,” she said, as she came to the gate. “Aren’t these roses magnificent?” She touched their cheeks with the hand from which she dangled her garden-shears. “They’re fit for any fiancée, even such a little dear as Hope. You’ve heard, of course?”

“Yes.”

“It’s too delightful! There’s something very romantic, don’t you think? in his remaining constant to her after all the nice girls he must have seen in Boston and Cambridge and Brookline, as a student. But she’s wonderful! Yes, she is. And so happy! Have you seen her since?”

“No, but I suppose I shall see her now. May I take her your flowers?”

“Oh, will you? Thank you, so much.” She came out and put the flowers on the seat, where he made room for them beside him. “It’s rather hard,” she ran on, “her being left behind here and he gone out to Paris. But her father’s being so much better is a great compensation. You must feel doubly anxious to cure him now. Of course, they never could think of marrying and going away from him while he’s in this state. And you really have hopes of him?”

Anther could not smile, even in his amusement with the comely, kindly woman beaming up at him with her hand above her eyes. “I’m doing my best,” he said, gravely.

“And you will succeed.”

“These cases are difficult; but I have my hopes.”

“And you shall have my prayers — our prayers!” she said, fervently. “You won’t come in and see Dr. Enderby?”

“.Not this morning. I have too much to say to him.”

“Yes,” she assented, dropping her eyes; and he knew that she knew what was in his thoughts.

XXIX

ANTHER did not find Hawberk. Hope said, from the steps of the house which the doctor could drive so near, that he had gone down into the village; she believed that he meant to call at the doctor’s office before he came back. She was always a cheerful presence, but now joy seemed to radiate from her like a rapturous effulgence. Anther felt it, and he felt that if she knew of his own reason for sadness, she had the same right to ignore it in her own nerves as she had to ignore her father’s misery. She looked as if lifted tiptoe by her happiness, and her voice danced with her dancing eyes.

“Why haven’t you been to congratulate me, Dr. Anther?” she challenged him, archly. “I do believe you don’t care!”

“Oh, I guess not,” he retorted, feeling his load raised in part by the mere ecstasy of her spirits. “I hadn’t been officially notified.”

“Well, you are now. I was waiting to come and tell you, when I was sure I could tell you how much better father was. He hasn’t disobeyed for nearly a week — ever since James left. It all seems to come together. It’s made me so wretched.”

“Well, you don’t look it,” he answered. But he did not smile at her mocking, and she recollected herself. She looked at him in wistful sympathy, but the years between them were so many, and Dr. Anther was such a really dignified person, that she could not venture to speak her sympathy, uninvited. He did not invite her. He felt himself blush at the pity of the joyous young creature who was imagining his case from her own, in an equality of passion. It embarrassed him in his consciousness of the difference. She grew a little embarrassed, herself, and he knew that he was wounding her. “Did you say your father had gone to see me?” he asked, gathering up his reins, while Hope stepped back from the wheels.

“Dr. Anther!” The hoarse croak of her grandmother intercepted her answer, and the doctor saw the stooping figure and fierce face of the old woman in the open doorway; “I want you should tell this crazy girl there can’t come any good from that Langbrith tribe. I know ’em root and branch, and I don’t know any good of ‘em. If ever Lorenzo Hawberk gets to be a man again, instead of a laudanum toper, I can tell him a thing or two about the Langbriths that’ll lock their wheels for ‘em.”

Hope turned and ran back to her grandmother, whom she gently pushed in-doors. “Now, grandmother, I guess Dr. Anther knows as much about the Langbriths as you do,” she said, and she turned her laughing face over her shoulder to show him that she was not taking her grandmother seriously. “Good-bye, Dr. Anther,” she shouted, and, suddenly remembering the flowers, he called out to her:

“Oh, hold on a moment, Hope; here’s something Mrs. Enderby sent you by me.”

“Well, I never did!” she rippled down to him with a laugh that denied any sadness in the world. “What would you have said if you’d forgotten altogether? Oh, how gorgeous!”

She fluttered up the steps again with her face buried in the flowers, and then she called back, “Oh, I forgot, this time. Thank you, Dr. Anther,” she sweetly chanted, and the doctor drove away.

He felt it an escape not to find Hawberk waiting for him. He found both the bottles, one for laudanum and one for medicine, which Hawberk had left, and a scribbled note from him: “Will call for these later. Guess we’re getting the upper hand of that green fellow a little. I couldn’t get him to come with me, anyway.”

Dr. Anther was taking his meals at the hotel when he could think of them or time them aright, and his hired man was in a sort of loose, general charge of his place, pending the installation of some specific house-keeper, of whom the doctor had as yet no distinct prevision. When the hired man was not about, the door was free to any one who would open it, and patients came in and waited for the doctor, or wrote their calls on his slate and went away.

He now examined his slate, and found no call so pressing but that he felt justified in sitting down and giving Hawberk a chance to return before he started on his rounds. He was perplexed by a situation which would once have been joy and triumph to him, mixed with the hope whose fierceness he now recognized with abhorrence. What had worn the high look of righteous retribution and been the promise of happiness was now more like a menace of the peace which alone remained his desire, as far as he had any desire. He had been beaten in the struggle. The dead hand had been too strong for him. If he could stall prevail, through Hawberk’s restoration to truth in his restoration to health, he would prevail in vain, for he would prevail too late. Nothing but his duty remained, a duty that was barren of personal reward, and that if done successfully, as regarded Hawberk, must be done at the risk of fruitless suffering for others. It was with a sense of reluctance close upon disgust that he pulled himself together, at the sound of shuffling steps, which he did not doubt were Hawberk’s, loosely dragging themselves up his walk.

John Langbrith came in, and lounged weakly into the easy-chair with a cursory nod to the doctor. “I want to see,” he said, without further greeting, “if you can do something for this dyspepsia of mine.” They had not parted friends, or even courteous acquaintances, at their last meeting; but, as John Langbrith ignored that, Anther ignored it, too, in the superior interest of their relation as patient and physician.

“Is it worse?” he asked.

“If it wasn’t worse, I shouldn’t have come. I can stand a good deal without squealing, but I can’t stand everything!” Langbrith began nervously swinging the leg he had crossed upon the other, and looked about for something to chew. In default of anything else, he tore a piece from the splint bottom of his chair and chewed upon that, as he laconically, almost sardonically, rehearsed his symptoms. Anther listened without prompting questions, and at the end John Langbrith said, “I presume you’ll come out with the old thing: overwork.”

Anther rubbed his hand all over his face, after his fashion. “That’s usually the trouble with nervous dyspeptics, when it isn’t overeating or overdrinking. Couldn’t you get a little time off and go somewhere for a change, as well as rest?”

“I guess I’ve got to. What can you give me to take, while I’m putting things in shape to leave?”

“I’ll do something to tide you along; but you understand that it’s merely temporary.” Anther turned in his chair to write a prescription, pausing and thinking over it, while John Langbrith continued talking to his back.

“If you could get off on a good long sea-voyage, it would be the best thing — two or three weeks.”

“I could get off on that as well as anything else. The devil of it is to get off on anything at all. There ain’t a soul to leave the business with, the way I want to. If that fool of a boy was worth the powder to blow him, I should be all right. What’s he going to do over there, anyway? You make it out?”

“He’s going to learn to write plays, as I understand.”

“Write plays!” John Langbrith grunted. “Who wants his plays?”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Well, I’m not goin’ to stan’ it. They’ll find that out, both of ‘em. If his mother hadn’t babied him up so, and kept him in cotton all his life, I could have worked him into the business before this, and now I could leave it in his hands.”

“You say you don’t sleep very well?”

“Sleep! How can a man sleep with a stomach like mine? But I shouldn’t care for the not sleeping. Never did want much sleep. The devil of it is, I don’t wake well. Sometimes I’m in such misery I don’t hardly know where I am. Why can’t you give me some of Hawberk’s dose?”

“I can if you want to come to Hawberk’s condition.”

“I suppose you could cure me if you have him?”

“I don’t boast of having cured him, yet.”

“I thought you did, the last time.” Langbrith chuckled with a dry pleasure, while he seemed indifferent as to the doctor’s sharing in the recollection. “If you could get him on to his legs again, I might leave him in charge of the mills. Maybe he wouldn’t want to blow on Royal, then!”

Anther still sat stooped over his desk, and gave no heed to Langbrith’s continued pleasantry. He wheeled abruptly in his chair, and held a prescription towards his patient. “There, that’s the best I can do for you now; but get away as soon as you can.”

Langbrith folded up the prescription, and put it into his pocket-book, but he did not rise at once. “I guess I shall have to, unless this does the business for me. I don’t know why I’m so anxious about the damned mills, anyway. Royal always treated me like a nigger — he did everybody he could get under his thumb, and this boy seems to think I’m part of the property. It wasn’t for either of them I couldn’t meet you on your proposition the other day.”

“Oh, that’s all right!” the doctor said.

“I shouldn’t care if Hawberk came out with the true story some day. But I don’t want to go outside of my job, if I don’t have to. That’s all there is to it. I’ve got enough to do, running the business, without looking for trouble with Royal’s ghost!”

Anther had nothing to offer on this point, and in the country fashion, in such cases, he said nothing at all. And he did not respond in any wise to the long-drawn, groaned-out “We-e-ell!” with which John Langbrith got himself away, as a form of leave-taking. He had been gone some time when Hawberk came in, with a step so much firmer and quicker than Anther had known it for a long time that he could not have known it as his.

“Well, Doct’ Anther,” he said, briskly, “have you got my bottles ready for me?”

“I’ve not got your prescriptions ready; I happen to be out of the drugs,” Anther said, with a returning sense of meaning in the duty which had lately seemed so purposeless, and a rise of liking for Hawberk in the place of his reluctance and disgust. He felt the charm of the man, which he had never quite ceased to feel, though it had been dulled by long disappointment with him. “Well, I don’t know,” Hawberk said, “but I guess we’re doing the business for that green fellow at last. I always did know what he was when he seemed to be coming at me by the thousand, like your reflection, you know, when you stand between a couple of glasses. That got to be a great trick of his one while; but he’s stopped it now. Why, Doct’ Anther,” he exclaimed, with a sort of impersonal pleasure in a fact which Anther must enjoy, “I’ve got so, inside of the last forty-eight hours, that I haven’t been afraid to go to sleep. He still keeps hanging round, but he seems to know I’m on to him, and he don’t try any of his old jinks with me; just comes and goes to let me know he’s around, but don’t make any particular trouble. Why, doctor, just to try myself, one day this week — day before yesterday, I guess it was — I got down to sixty drops of laudanum, and it was my laudanum day, too. Don’t I show it — in my looks, I mean?”

“Your complexion is clearing up. But go slow, Hawberk, even when you are going in the direction of my instructions. I don’t want you to tamper with my patient’s case.”

Hawberk tasted the humor. “Well, I won’t, doctor; I won’t,” he said, and he laughed in the free way that was natural to him, and that went to Anther’s heart.

The doctor turned a little grave, though. “How are the psychological symptoms? Do you see things, generally, as you have been seeing them?”

“I don’t know as I do — everything. There’s one thing I wanted to speak to you about.”

“That house you’re going to put up on the hill back of you?”

Hawberk smiled. “I guess that can wait awhile.” Then he said, seriously, “You know Hope and Jim Langbrith have fixed it up between them?”

“Yes, Hope told me this morning. I had heard of it before.”

“Well, that’s all right. He’s a good fellow, and I haven’t a word against him. I don’t know what he’s going to do out there in Paris, but I presume he does. Anyway, Hope believes in it, and if it never comes to anything, he’s got money enough without it.” Hawberk’s face clouded. “I suppose if everything had gone right, I should have had some money, too. That’s the way it looks, off and on. I’ve had times, of late, very curious times, Doct’ Anther, when it don’t seem as if the square thing had been done by me. Do your remember the circumstances of my leaving the mills? I ain’t clear, myself.”

The dawn in Hawberk’s mind had broken sooner than Anther expected, though it had come too late for any purpose of his. Now, if he had a wish, it must have been to darken it. When he thought how he would have once exulted in it, he had a kind of sickness of it; but his duty was still before him. He must do his best to cure his patient. As a physician, he could have no other concern; but he could keep himself out of the moral consequences. With these he had nothing, and must have nothing, to do.

“You’ll be clear enough if you get well,” he said. “All the facts of that matter are something you must work out for yourself. I wish to caution you only on one point. You must be very careful to verify any surmise you may have. I should urge you not to speak of it to any one but me. You can see how, under the present circumstances, it could make great unhappiness for James Langbrith, and through him, for Hope.”

“Yes, I see that, doctor. I’m not speaking of it. As I say, it’s something that comes and goes.” He added, with a laugh, “And it goes full as much as it comes. Well,” he rose and took his bottles from Anther’s table, “Emmering put these up for me? You ain’t afraid we’ll get our heads together and make ’em both laudanum?”

“I guess I can trust you,” the doctor answered, almost absently.

“Well, I guess you’re right. Anyway, that green fellow has got the job of watching after me, and he’s on the lookout. You’ve weakened on the laudanum a little this time, as I understand.”

“A little.”

Anther’s absence gained upon him so much that he scarcely noticed Hawberk’s going; and he sat long in a hapless muse, in which now and then he smiled in self-derision. If the situation had been contrived by the sardonic spirit of Royal Langbrith himself, it could not have had a more diabolical perfection.

XXX

LIFE is never the logical and consequent thing we argue from the moral and intellectual premises. There ought always to be evident reason in it; but such reason as it has is often crossed and obscured by perverse events, which, in our brief perspective, give it the aspect of a helpless craze. Obvious effect does not follow obvious cause; there is sometimes no perceptible cause for the effects we see. The law that we find at work in the material world is, apparently, absent from the moral world; not, imaginably, because it is without law, but because the law is of such cosmical vastness in its operation that it is only once or twice sensible to any man’s experience. The seasons come and go in orderly course, but the incidents of human life have not the orderly procession of the seasons; so far as the sages or the saints are able convincingly to affirm, they have only the capricious vicissitudes of weather.

Anther had been in charge of Hawberk’s case for twenty years; and, though he had always forbidden himself to despair of it, he had long ceased to hope for any final cure. He was used to changes for the better and changes for the worse in Hawberk’s habit, and to the psychological consequences when he limited his indulgence and when he lapsed again into his debauch. Under it all, though the man’s character was deteriorated or ameliorated, his temperament remained fundamentally the same, and Anther had never ceased to feel his gayety and his goodness, which, as they reappeared in Hope, charmed and deeply touched him. Hawberk’s recovery had become personally indifferent to him, so far as it concerned the hopes he had once built upon it; but the girl’s joy in it gave poignancy to the fears that had replaced his hopes. In a reasonable forecast of the effect, Hawberk must return in his self-restoration to a full sense of the reality concerning the wrong done him by Langbrith; and in place of the delusion he had promoted in the helpless mendacity of his habit, he must know and speak the truth. There had already been hints of such an eventuality; the hints that sickened Anther in his thought of the time when he would have welcomed them, and that made him tremble for the misery which the truth must bring upon Hope, through her love for the man whose father had so pitilessly wronged her own. Anther had believed that he wanted justice done. This had been his argument with Judge Garley; it had been his suggestion to Dr. Enderby. It ought to avail him in any emergency, but now it did not avail him, and he accused himself of having cared for the truth only in his own interest, as the truth would have promoted it with Mrs. Langbrith against her son.

What did avail him in the course he must pursue was his sense of professional duty; amid all the moral confusion, that was clear. He ought to have no question but of the recovery of his patient, and he tried to fix his mind upon this, and not let it stray to any question of consequences. He did his best to keep his study of the case physiological, and not to concern himself with those psychological aspects which Hawberk himself found more interesting, and which he was fond of turning to the light in his visits to his physician. With his escape from the terrors of his opium nightmares, he found a philosophic pleasure in noting facts from which even the physician was aware of shrinking.

Once, towards the end of summer, when they had been “taking stock,” as Hawberk called it, of his symptoms, and he was exulting in the reduction of his laudanum to the equivalent of three grains of morphine a day, he said: “The most curious thing about it is that I seem to be doing a sort of Rip Van Winkle act, and waking out of a dream of twenty years or so. It’s a dream that’s been going on steadily all the while that those little one-horse nightmares have been cavorting round, with green dwarfs on their backs, and playing the devil generally; and this steady dream has had a good genius in it that I’m beginning to have my doubts about, now that I’m waking up. It seems to me that Royal Langbrith wasn’t such a friend of mine as I’ve been trying to make out. What do you think? Or did I put this up on you once before?”

“Not just in so many words.”

“Well, I wasn’t certain. Royal Langbrith seems to have a better grip as a good genius when I’ve been dipping into the laudanum pretty freely than he does when I’ve kept to the medicine and the tonics. I have my ups and downs about him. But what do you think of him in the capacity of a good genius?”

“As I told you before, Hawberk, that’s something you’ve got to work out for yourself.”

“And if I’ve worked it out that he was an infernal scoundrel, and was ready to say so, what are the chances that folks would believe it?”

“The chances would be against you, with your past as an opium-eater.”

“They could say it was another of my pipe-dreams?”

“You would have to bring the strongest sort of proof.”

“With every one?”

“What makes you think now that you were mistaken about him before?”

“Look here, Doct’ Anther, what do you think about Royal Langbrith?”

Anther suddenly perceived that he had a duty towards Hawberk not contained in the duty of a physician to his patient: the duty one has to a man whom one knows to have been wronged. “I?” he hesitated. Then he plunged. “I think he was an infernal scoundrel!”

Hawberk laughed queerly. “Don’t you know he was?”

“Yes, I know he was.” The truth was open between them, and each was astonished at the effect the open truth had on himself.

“What,” Hawberk parleyed, with a smile as queer as his laugh, “should you say we’d ought to do about it?”

“I don’t know,” Anther candidly avowed. “Once I should have known.”

“So should I.” And now Hawberk roared with pleasure. “But I guess that devil has got us now. I’ve seen the time when I wanted to go into the cemetery and dig him up and burn him, but I don’t know as I do now. What do you say, Doct’ Anther? Let by-gones be by-gones, as the fellow said about his old debts when he started in to make some new ones? Still, it does gravel me when I think of that tablet in the front of the library. I was looking at it as I came along down. Kind of pathetic, too, when you think of Jim. How did they ever keep him in the dark about his father?”

“It happened naturally enough. It rested with his mother; and, when the time came for him to know the facts, the time for her to tell them was past.”

“I see. A good deal as it is with me now. You might almost say that devil had planned it out to have his boy make it up with my girl, so as to stop my mouth for good and all. First off, after I lost my wife, I used to think I should like to make him suffer for the lies he threatened me with. I wanted to kill him. Well, what’s the use? Somehow, I don’t feel that way now. I don’t want to revenge myself, and I don’t believe she’d want me to revenge her. Curious!” Hawberk reflected, with a pause, in view of the interesting predicament. After a while he said, “How that devil must have chuckled when he saw me up there, with the other leading citizens that day, dedicating that tablet to his memory! But, Doct’ Anther, there’s something I can’t get through me. I can understand why I should be there. I was game for anything, when I was filled up with laudanum; but I don’t see how you came to be celebrating the life, death, and Christian sufferings of Royal Langbrith. Never did you any harm, did he?”

“Not while he lived,” Anther said.

“Kind of fetched you a back-hander from the grave? Well, I don’t want to ask you what it was, but I should like to ask how you came, knowing all you did about him, to let Judge Garley and Dr. Enderby in for their share in the proceedings. They any notion of the peculiar virtues of the deceased?”

A painful flush overspread Anther’s face. “I felt it my duty to tell Judge Garley as soon as I found that the scheme had taken shape in James’s mind, and he held the legal view of it. He was duly warned, and I have nothing to blame myself with there. I don’t feel so easy about Dr. Enderby. I am afraid I let a personal motive influence me in withholding the truth from him until it was practically too late for him to withdraw. I can’t decide how much he wished to spare me in arriving at the conclusion he did. He agreed substantially with Garley that no good could come of exposing Langbrith at this late day, and much harm might come. Besides, James was to be considered.”

“Ah!” Hawberk said. “That’s where I come in. What about James? Hadn’t he ought to know about it? Hadn’t I ought to have it out with him before he marries a daughter of mine?”

“Dr. Enderby thought that no one should tell him now; that no one could, without interfering with the order of Providence, without forcing God’s purposes, as he put it. The truth could come out fully only when it could come out naturally, necessarily, inevitably.”

Hawberk fetched a long, deep sigh of relief. “Well, that lets me out. I was feeling my way in that direction, I guess. I guess Doct’ Enderby is right. Any rate, I’m going to let the thing rest for the present. I’m satisfied with what I’ve got. It wouldn’t help me any, and it wouldn’t help Hope, if the whole thing was out. Let the damned thing be, I say, and that’s what I understand Doct’ Enderby says: maybe not just in the same words. I don’t know as I should exactly want Hope to marry Jim Langbrith, without he had been told something about it — say enough to understand that there wa’n’t any flies on me when I was put out. That’s only fair to Hope; I don’t care for myself. But if there’s an order of Providence, I’m willing to wait for the procession. Yes, I’m willing to wait and see if there is any procession. If there ain’t, it’ll be time enough to start one. Well, Doct’ Anther,” Hawberk said, putting out his hand to the doctor as he rose, “I don’t want to holler before I’m out of the woods, but as far as I’m a judge, you’ve saved me, body and soul. I don’t know how you feel, but I should be glad to swap my feelings for yours, whatever they are. Yes,” and Hawberk broke down with his laugh from the height of sentiment he had reached; “I don’t know but I’d be willing to swap Royal Langbrith’s feelings for yours, this minute.”

Anther could not refuse to join in his laugh, but he felt it right to put in a word of caution. “We mustn’t brag about your case. But I’ll say that I’ve hopes of you that I never had before. It now rests with you, mainly. If we pull through together, I’ll be glad to swap feelings with you. We won’t say anything about Langbrith; he mightn’t be willing to trade.”

“Not without some boot, you may bet,” Hawberk shouted, with supreme joy in the joke, as he went out of the doctor’s door, where the doctor stood looking after him, not unhappy for himself, as he ought logically to have been in contrasting his hopeless life with the life that was beginning anew so hopefully for Hawberk, and with something of the peace that passes understanding in his heart.

XXXI

JOHN LANGBRITH continued to talk of going away. Upon the inspiration of meeting an old acquaintance whom he asked where he had been keeping himself of late, and who answered that he had been in Japan, John Langbrith began to think of going round the world, as a little experimental journey, since a man could go to Japan and back without being noticed. He asked Anther what he thought of circumnavigating the globe as a remedy for nervous dyspepsia, and the doctor told him he did not think it would be bad. Then John Langbrith said he had half a notion to go out to Paris, and see James; there had never been much affection between them, but John Langbrith considered that James could get him a comfortable boarding-place, where he could stay while he was picking out some German spring to go to more permanently. He asked Anther if he did not think some of those German springs would be good for him. Again-Anther said that he did not think it would be bad; and this suggested giving Saratoga a trial. John Langbrith could go to Saratoga for a week before the season ended, and he shaped his business so that he could put it in the hands of a young subordinate, with instructions to reach him by telegraph if needed, for he could return at a second’s notice; and he actually went. At Saratoga he drank impartially of all the waters, at all hours of the day, without regard to diet, and came home worse, if anything, than he went, but somehow with a sense of renewed energy.

He took hold with so much force that, before the snow flew, he had, as he phrased it to Anther, got round to a little back of where he started. Then the doctor indulged a sentiment of something like poetic justice, in suggesting a means of relief for John Langbrith from one side of his work, and of benefit for another patient.

“Why don’t you split up your responsibility?” he asked. “Shoulder the business half yourself, and let Hawberk look after the manufacturing. He needs something to help keep him out of mischief, and he is able now to take hold of the paper-making and run it as well as ever he did. He hasn’t forgotten how to use his own inventions, I guess.” John Langbrith’s jaundiced eyes emitted a yellow light of appreciative relish. “Lord! Make Royal turn in his grave — what there’s left of him to turn! Do you mean to say you could put any dependence on Hawberk?”

“Why not? It would be merely a mechanical exercise of his faculties, and it would occupy him and keep his mind off the opium.”

“Lord!” John Langbrith said again; and after a moment’s muse he said, “Send him round,” and so took himself away with a galvanic activity that supported him in his automatic progress towards the mills.

Hawberk had much the same sardonic pleasure as Langbrith had shown at the notion of his being reinstated in his old charge; but it was sweetened to something better by the virtues of temperament in him. “Now, Hope,” he bade his daughter, after the first day’s experiment had justified the confidence with which he entered on his work, “you write to James about this. He’ll like to hear about it, and he’ll like to hear about it from you. And you tell him it was Doct’ Anther’s idea. He’d ought to like that, too, and the doctor’d ought to have the credit of it, anyway. If I should make a slump, later on, I’ll take the credit of that. But I guess there ain’t going to be any slump.”

The few spectators of Hawberk’s experiment who could witness it with a fully comprehensive intelligence of the case regarded it according to their respective natures. To the community at large, it had the interest of something miraculous — something between rising from the dead and returning cured from an inebriate asylum. If anything could have rendered Hawberk a more dramatically notable member of society than he had been as an opium eater of twenty-five years’ standing, it was his novel quality of reformed opium-eater. This gave him a claim upon the wonder of every stranger who came to Saxmills, and it conferred the right on every citizen to point him out to the sojourner in his going and coming. The fascination of the fact extended itself to Hope, when she happened to be seen, and to the house where the Hawberks lived.

The general belief was that the thing would not last; and this was the particular belief of Judge Garley, who owned his scepticism to Dr. Anther, with some tendency to an amiable criticism of Anther’s share in the affair. He had seen so little of reform, in his acquaintance with the law, he said, that he was shy of it wherever he saw it. But he was willing to give it time; it never took much time. Perhaps, though, he suggested, this was a case not so much under the law as under the gospel. If that was so, he would like to know if the doctor really believed in the supernatural.

“No,” Anther said, “only in the natural.” And this was, substantially, the answer which he opposed to Mrs. Enderby’s secret wistfulness regarding a fact which she beheld as with clasped hands, uncertain how, as a church-woman, she ought to feel towards miracles post-dating those of Scripture. She would have liked to feel the hand of God in the tardy and partial retribution of a man cruelly wronged; and it is doubtful if she thought the rector quite level with his spiritual opportunities in his preference of Dr. Anther’s theory, that the unexpected was one of the things always to be looked for in the practice of medicine. What measurably consoled her was the tender seriousness of her husband in the whole matter — the brotherly affection which he showed Hawberk in the relation which he was able to form with him, as a man doing a man’s part in the world’s work after long uselessness, and the delicacy with which he forbore to recognize that there was anything novel in this performance of duty by Hawberk. She was peculiarly touched when he proposed that they should have Hope and her father to supper, and she promised that she should be forever ashamed that she had let her husband think of it first.

Mrs. Enderby atoned, as far as she could, by asking Mrs. Langbrith and Dr. Anther, but neither of them could come, and she wasn’t sorry that they had the Hawberks alone; with retrospective prevision she perceived that anything else would have been overdoing it. She found Hawberk very entertaining. He talked frankly of getting back to his old work in the mill, and he tried to make her understand an invention he had hopes of perfecting for the “Dandy Roll,” as he called it, so that the water-marking of paper could be done at an immense saving of time and money. He explained to her that the words, or designs, to be water-marked had now to be put in by hand with bits of fine wire, and sewed on a cylinder with fine metallic thread; but he was trying to make a Dandy Roll on which the design could be changed as easily as if it were a section of type in a printer’s form. It was very luminous while he talked, but it all faded away afterwards, and left in Mrs. Enderby’s intelligence only the words “Dandy Roll,” which had a queer fascination, together with a sense of Hawberk’s dignity and enthusiasm about it.

Hope was gay, as always; but it seemed to Mrs. Enderby that she was not so gay as she had sometimes seen her, when she had far less reason to be so. There was a shadow of anxiety in her beauty which Mrs. Enderby wondered never to have found there before, and a sound of anxiety in her lovely tones unheard before. She thought she could see the girl closely following all her father did and said; but perhaps it was only the effect in her of hopes not cherished till now, naturally betraying themselves in anxieties. As a matter of fact, Hope had no reason to feel anything but joy in her father’s restoration to his old usefulness. There was no poison of a gratified vengeance in her heart, for it was agreed almost tacitly between Hawberk and Anther that no good could come of her knowing, for the present at least, the outrage of the past. “Time enough,” her father had gone so far as to say, “for Hope to be brought into all that when we see that it’s got to come out generally. I don’t know as I should feel just right about letting her keep on with Jim, if she was one to blame a man for what she has to suffer instead of for what he has done. Any rate, till we see our way to telling Jim, I guess we’d better keep dark with Hope, heigh?”

Whatever might have been the full mind of Dr. Anther, he assented to Hawberk’s decision, though he had to hold to it against counter reasoning that searched his deeper nature or his complexer conscience. It was not finally strange to him that this reasoning should have come from one whose peace was more intimately involved than that of any one but Hope herself. Anther must long ago, if it had not been for his tenderness of her, have owned that Mrs. Langbrith had shown a moral cowardice concerning her son, which was hardly less than a culpable weakness; bat he defended her to himself, because he perceived that weakness could never be culpable. He might as well blame any of the feeble creatures which she made him think of for not being strong, and he was not ready with praise for the unexpected force which she showed, where he took her weakness for granted. He merely reflected that he had not taken into account the pity of women for women, when one of them has been able to put herself perfectly in another’s place, and to ignore in behalf of their sex’s helplessness the other claims of nature. A sense of this awed him at Mrs. Langbrith’s refusal to acquiesce in Hawberk’s notion of what was best to be done in regard to Hope. At first, she had seemed to acquiesce in it, as something that superiorly concerned the father and the daughter. Then one day, suddenly, she went to Anther, and, not finding him, she left a message of peremptory entreaty for him; and they found themselves together, in the early falling twilight of an autumn day, in the dim parlor where their middle-aged drama had already seemed to play itself out.

“I can’t let this go on. Dr. Anther,” she said, traversing any pretense of greeting between them when he appeared. “Mr. Hawberk is making a mistake. Hope ought to know. She ought to be told. James is his father’s son. He may be like him. He may make his wife suffer what his father made me suffer. How do we know what he is doing there in Paris, now?”

She was a woman of few words, and in these few she had compacted her suspicions, her reasons, her conclusions; and, though she pressed them upon Anther with hysterical nervousness, he had to respect the sense there was in them, as well as the anguish there was behind them.

He could only parley, for a beginning. “He is your son, too, Amelia.”

“And what if he is?” she retorted. “What is me in him will be crushed out by what is him in him,” and Anther saw that she had thought it better than she could speak it, though but for her erring grammar it was spoken well enough.

He said, “I should not fear for her in her marriage with James. She is a stronger character than he.”

“That was what I said when I began to think of it. But the weakest man can make the strongest woman suffer things worse than death; and I don’t care whether there would be any suffering or not. There would be wrong. She has a right to know. Her father has no right to keep her from knowing. Why, it’s wicked! What will she think, what will he say if she doesn’t find it out till afterwards?”

“He can say that he didn’t know himself. She will not blame him, at any rate.”

“That isn’t enough. She has got to have the right to say now she will not marry the son of such a man. Will you tell her?”

Anther reflected. “No, Amelia,” he said, “I don’t think that I will tell her.”

“Why?”

“Because I have only the relation of her father’s physician to her. If I could have had another relation to her,” and Mrs. Langbrith winced at the implication, so that he felt sorry for it, “I might have been justified in telling her. As it is, I don’t.”

“Well, then,” Mrs. Langbrith said, desperately, “I will tell her.”

“Before you tell him?”

The question daunted her; it was necessary, but he realized its cruelty as well as its necessity. She gasped inarticulately; the unfailing tears started into her eyes. She had, as he saw, reached the limit of her small strength. It must be days or weeks, possibly months, before she could gather force for a new effort.

Anther tried to say something consoling to her; he succeeded only in saying something compassionate, which did not avail. “You have taken away my chance,” she said, and he would not take from her the slight stay she found in her resentment.

XXXII

ANTHER noted in himself, with curious interest, the accomplished adjustment of the spirit to circumstances that once seemed impossible, and the acceptance of conditions which before had been intolerable. He had gone on to the end of a certain event, strongly willing and meaning something which then he no longer willed or meant. With a sense of acquiescent surprise he found himself at peace with desires and purposes that had long afflicted him with unrest, and it was not they, apparently, that differed, but himself. To the young this will be a mystery, but to those no longer young it will be of the quality of many experiences which, if still mysterious, are not more so than the whole texture of existence.

He had foregone a hope that had seemed essential to his life, but that, once foregone, was like other things outlived — like something of years ago, of his early manhood, almost of his boyhood. He was still baffled and disappointed, but he perceived that he did not care, did not suffer, as he supposed he should care and suffer. It was his compensation that what was ignoble in his regret was gone from it. Neither resentment nor the selfish sense of loss tinged it. Primarily, his regret was hardly for himself; and he perceived that, so far as it concerned another, it was mixed with a sense of escape from anxiety, from fears which the fulfilment of his hopes would have perpetuated. He realized more and more that he had been having to do with weakness, and he realized this not in contempt of weakness, but in the compassion which was the constant lesson of his calling. He blamed Mrs. Langbrith, in her shrinking from collision with her son’s will, no more than he would have blamed any timorous creature for seeking to shim a physical ordeal to which it was unequal. He had, at least, learned patience and mercy from his acquaintance with disease; and he had learned to distinguish between what was disease and what was an innate fault which no drugs, either for the soul or body, could medicine.

What surprised him and, when it first suggested itself, shocked him, was a sort of reason, which was not an excuse, for Royal Langbrith in the defect which he realized. Given such a predatory nature, as his, was it not in the order of things that there should be another nature formed for his prey? Must not the very helplessness of his victim have been the irresistible lure of his cruelty? We are not masters of those vagaries, good or evil, that fill the mind after its disoccupation by direct purposes; and Anther did not seriously blame himself for their wild play. He broke this up and banished the vagaries sometimes by calling to his help things that he ought to think of, or by confronting them with the woman they wronged and so rendered the more tenderly dear to him.

She was, in fact, never more tenderly dear to him than now, when he had abandoned the hope, almost the wish, of making her his wife. She had been a wife long ago, and yet he began to feel a sort of profanation in the idea of making her a wife. The time came when Anther wondered whether he had ever really felt a passion for her, such as even in middle life a man may feel for a woman, and whether, in that embrace into which they had once been surprised, there was any love other than the affection of a brother and sister, drawn heart to heart in a moment of supreme emotion. At such a time he made entire excuse for James Langbrith, and accounted for him as forgivingly as for her. If her son had instinctively the feeling which had tardily worked itself out in Anther’s consciousness, then, surely, it was not the son whom he could blame. One hints at cognitions which refuse anything more positive than intimation, and which can have no proof in the admissions of those who deal conventionally with their own consciences. It was because Anther was not one of these that he was a nature of exceptional type, and because he could accept the logic of his self-knowledge that he was a character of rare strength. He was strong enough not only to forgive the frantic boy who had insulted and outraged him in his pain, but to feel a share in the error which had kept him in ignorance of the truth. It was not the less his right to know this because there had never been the moment to make it known to him. Anther realized that the boy had been deeply injured, and he accepted his own share of the retribution as the just penalty of his share in the error. He saw, too late, that it was his weakness not to have overruled the weakness which he spared the supreme ordeal. He promised himself, somehow, sometime, to make good to James Langbrith  the wrong he had suffered.

In this self-promise, after the experience which had stirred his life to its depths, he found a limpid peace from which his dream of passion hung retreatingly aloof, like a cloud broken and drifting away. He had a gayety of heart for which he did not logically account, but in which he felt the power of consoling and supporting the weakness he had once imagined protecting through a husband’s rights. When he first saw Mrs. Langbrith after his tacit renunciation, much more real than that explicit renunciation which preceded it, he was aware of an apprehension in her which it was not for words to quiet. By what he forbore, he must make her know that he had ceased to think of her as he had thought, and that she was as safe from the pursuit of what had been his love as from the reproach which he would never join her in making herself.

They talked of Hope and Langbrith, and of the reason there was in believing that it might be safe for the girl to trust her father to himself, if James wished it, before very long. Mrs. Langbrith did not know directly of her son’s plans and purposes. Apparently, the communication between them was formal and restricted, and she spoke of what was in her mind rather because of the girl than of him. In an involuntary measurement of her interest with his own, it appeared to Anther that it was he who was the more concerned for James Langbrith; and it was with surprise that he saw she really did not understand him at first when he said, “I wish he could be assured that, when he comes home, there will be no question of its being the same home to him that it has always been.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” she returned.

“I really believe you don’t,” he said, musingly, with his unselfish gaze on her. “Well,” he explained, “that he need not be afraid of my making a difference in it.”

“Oh!” she evaded whatever challenge she might have fancied in the words, “he will have a home of his own. Dr. Anther,” she continued, “I don’t know what you’ll think of me, but I don’t feel the same towards James that I used to. I can’t make it out, exactly, but should you think it was wicked if I had changed so that I did not care for him so much? When I was a child I was that way, if ever they made me do what I didn’t want to do, and didn’t make me see the reason. I remember it about my mother once, when I was quite little. I had to do what she made me, but after that she wasn’t the same to me. It is so with James, now. He is not the same to me. I don’t want to punish him for it, but he is not the same. I don’t know whether I explain it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

“And do you blame me?”

“No, but I think you may change again towards him.” She shook her head doubtfully. “You’re one of those who need to get back their strength when they have been tried.”

His pitying intelligence was very sweet to her. “If I tried to say what I thought of you—” she began.

“Don’t try,” he said, simply, and she did not.

She said: “I don’t like to think how you have to live there in that way, taking your meals out, and your house so uncomfortable.”

“Is it uncomfortable? I don’t notice those things very much. I like going to the hotel; it gives variety, and it seems to me I don’t get things so cold as I did with Mrs. Burwell.”

She gave a house-keeper’s sigh of compassion, but she said, from a higher feeling, “I know why you bought it.”

“Yes, I told you. But that’s all past now.”

“Why is it past?” she demanded, almost resentfully. “Do you think I’ve changed towards you, too, Dr. Anther?”

“No, I don’t, Amelia. I believe you’re just what you always were towards me.”

“Then, if it’s all past, as you say, it must be you that have changed.”

“No. I am the same, too.”

She looked at him with a wistfulness which he knew to be entreaty of him for that strength to give herself to him which she did not feel in her own will.

“If you say so,” she tried her courage, “I will do it now — to-morrow — to-day, if you say so. I told you that James took back what he said; that he was willing. At any rate, what is the use? He can never feel right to me after this, no matter what I do. I know him — he can’t forgive the hurt to his pride.”

“It was a hurt to something better than his pride,” Anther said, justly.

“No matter. It’s something he can’t forgive me and I don’t care. You’re more than James is, and now he doesn’t want me — he won’t need me. If you ask me now to marry you, I will.”

He believed that he saw in her the little maximum of her force, which perhaps spent itself in the words and would have nothing left for the deed. The deed must be altogether his. In the sweetness that welled up in his soul from the consciousness of perfectly comprehending, not her intention merely, but her nature, he was happier than the fulfilment of his hopes could once have made him.

“Do you say that, Amelia, because you wish it or because you think I do?”

“I want to do everything that you want me to.”

“Then I don’t want you to do this, my dear. I know you will understand me. I don’t believe we ought to get married.”

“Because James — ?”

“He has nothing to do with it now. Because we can be more to each other if we remain as we are.”

She looked bewilderedly at him, but he believed that he saw in her the relief that weakness intimates to one who forbears demand upon it. She had fulfilled her impulse, and spent all her force on it. She was not hurt, either in her vanity or affection. He could see, indeed, that she trusted him too entirely for such an effect.

“Then,” she said, in simple abeyance to his judgment, “will you let me do anything for you that I think you need?”

“What is there that I need?” he parried her question. “I am very well as I am. I assure you that I am quite as I wish to be. I don’t feel what seems to you discomfort, and after this tinderstanding, that has no misunderstanding in it, I shall feel happier about you than I have ever felt. If I didn’t believe you would rather live your life alone, or if I could believe you wanted me to join mine with it for any help I could give, you know I would make you do what you have offered to let me. But I believe the one thing, and I don’t believe the other. I know you’re wanting to put yourself under my will — to sacrifice yourself to me.”

“No!”

“Yes, it is so. If you ever want my help or counsel or friendship, you know it is always here for you, as fully and freely as if I were your husband — perhaps more so. At any rate, I should not exact anything in return, for I need nothing!”

“But if you ever do need anything — me or anything I can do — will you promise — promise—”

“Oh, yes, I will ask you. I promise you that.” Nothing seems final in human experience, and neither of these two who now parted really accepted the conclusion to which they had come as the last word in their affair. It was to be held in that sort of solution in which all human affairs are held, until that happens which can alone precipitate them. She went on with the life to which alone she was, perhaps, equal. She was, at any rate, inveterately used to its abnegations, if they were abnegations; and he did the daily duties which were always full of interest and had the variety which keeps men from stagnating. He had not falsely pretended that he liked meeting the new people he met at the hotel, and he was richer in old companionships than most men of his age. The new people, it must be confessed, were oftenest the commercial travellers whose enterprises brought them to Saxmills. But, to a man who took other men as unconventionally as he offered himself, they were less typical and more personal than they are in common acceptance. The younger ones might be noisy in manner, and over-jocular with one another at table and in the hotel office, where Anther sometimes paused for a moment of digestion after his meals, before driving off on his calls. But with the old fellow, whose bounds they did not try to traverse, they were quiet and gentle. When they had identified him, through the landlord, they liked to ask him if there was much sickness around. Now and then, one submitted a malady of his own to Anther, and took his medicine with a deferential inquiry whether the doctor thought smoking hurt a man. Now and then, there was a young family-man among them, who was homesick for his wife and babies. The older family-men liked the quiet of Anther’s willing talk, and put before him their own philosophic conjectures and conclusions about life in general. Of their own sort of life they were confessedly tired, but what, at their time of day, could a man do? If they could get hold of a piece of land near a good market, they would be all right. What about abandoned farms in that neighborhood?

Among the transients there happened people who had chanced stopping at Saxmills because they had a fancy for seeing what such a place was like. They were people of independent tastes, from some of the larger cities, and of aesthetic occupations or none, who brought the waft of a larger life and the eagerness of a sympathetic intelligence. There was once an elderly couple from the West, who, after sparely owning that they were originally from this part of the country, developed into pilgrims to the old homestead of one or other of them, which they thought of buying back and fixing up for a summer place, if they could get the children to see it the same way. More than once there was a young couple, still in the flush of immediate marriage, who were breaking their wedding journey to Portland or Montreal or Boston, and were first diffident and then confident of Anther’s good-will in his approaches to their acquaintance.

Besides all these, there were regular boarders, as the bank cashier and his wife, somewhat arid financial and social types; and that young and foolish matron who seldom fails, in any village community, to supply food for general reflection, and who, in the idleness of the hotel, where her young husband, a travelling man, has left her, amuses herself by wearing a white yachting-cap and a toothpick about the verandas, and varies her monotonous leisure by buggy-rides with a merchant of the place old enough to behave better.

Anther liked to drop in on Judge Garley of a late afternoon, when he commonly found the jurist reading a novel; he preferred the translations of French novels, which he devoured insatiably, but was as fond, in another way, of scientific tracts, such as he found in the mustard-colored Humboldt series; he liked psychology in any sort and size. With Anther he had always a certain effect of consideration, as one to whom, if not apology, tenderness was due, because of his peculiarities of temperament. The Langbrith incident remained closed between them, and there was no reason for Anther to believe that Garley had any misgivings as to his own attitude in it. Such spare reference to that business as Anther permitted himself was in his talk with Dr. Enderby, whom he fancied of an uneasy mind concerning it, and with whom he had a humane interest in administering the anodyne of his own final peace. It was, in fact, from the rector’s reasoning to the conclusion he had reached before that Anther was most helpful to his friend; Enderby himself was never so much satisfied with being in the right as sure that he was right in what he had done. It was one of those experiences, he once owned, that intimate a less perfect adjustment of the moral elements in this life than we may hope for in the life hereafter; as if the earthly materials of conduct were cruder and coarser than the spirit which dealt with them, and which was attuned to finer issues of behavior. Occasionally he asked if Anther knew anything of James Langbrith’s immediate purposes, and if he might be expected to return at all soon. He betrayed that he was not at rest with regard to Langbrith’s unwittingly making another a sharer in the responsibilities which he must some day assume towards the past.

Mrs. Enderby kept herself as fully instructed as possible from Hope as to the future of the young people, and if she partook of her husband’s uneasiness, she did not show it. Perhaps, in that optimistic view of marriage which some of the best women take voluntarily, if not instinctively, she looked forward to that as the panacea of whatever ills life had in store for them. Of course, she allowed, Hope ought somehow to know the truth before she committed herself to the keeping of such a man’s son, but this she felt would be somehow divinely rather than humanely accomplished; in reverting to the comfort of a more positive faith from her ancestral Unitarianism, she grew constantly in the grace of a belief in, at least, subjective miracles. That everything would come out right in the end was so clearly a part of the universal justice that she could not have final question of it. When she permitted herself to join in any of the rare and guarded approaches of Anther and her husband to the matter, it was to interpose herself between what the doctor might say and its effect upon the rector. She made herself the interpreter of Anther’s acquiescence in the rector’s reasoning, so that it should be more of the nature of a robust and positive support. If it would not have taken from Enderby the honor of being first to reach a right conclusion, she might have argued that Anther had himself intimated it to him — when she was less confident of it she sometimes conjectured this. But, for the most part, she was sure that Dr. Enderby had been inspired to it, and that the notion of patiente, of waiting on the Supreme Will, of looking for what the older theology called a “leading,” was the true ground to take. She was the more to be praised in this because patience was not one of her innate virtues, and it was ordinarily her practice in life to anticipate the signs and tokens for which she was now willing to trust.

Something, in fact a great deal, she held, was to be hoped from Hawberk’s return to health and work. There, she argued, was proof that the case had never really lapsed into forgetfulness with the Power that makes for righteousness. It was affecting, it was enough to bring the tears — and she showed them in her eyes — to know, as she knew by her husband’s report of Anther’s confidences, how poor Hawberk was taking the cruel wrong that had been done him by that wretched creature. No one else, surely, ought to insist upon justice, if he preferred mercy; and, certainly, if Hawberk took such a large, humane view, her husband ought to feel himself fully confirmed in it. Such a man could be trusted with the decision of what ought to be done about Hope. If he was willing to let the matter go for the present, no one else need bother.

To this conclusion, in these terms, Mrs. Enderby came; and, without transgressing the bounds of confidence in her cordiality with Hawberk, she tried to throw into her manner an appreciation, an approbation, which should be a reward to him, even in its want of relevance. As nearly as she might with self-respect, she lay in wait for him in his goings and comings to and from the mills, and she sent the very latest of her autumn flowers home by him, now to his daughter, and now to his mother-in-law, so that the old lady might not feel neglected. After one of the gay confabulations which Hawberk was as willing to hold as herself, she told him that now she knew where Hope got her happiness, and he owned that, well, yes, that sort of thing seemed to run in the family. As to his infirmity and his recovery from it, she would have liked to question him about it; but no opening offered itself, though she felt that Mr. Hawberk would have been perfectly willing to talk if they had once begun.

He was the most enthusiastic and optimistic of convalescents, and Anther, who had always to count with some sort of weakness, physical or moral, in his patients, had not the worse weakness to deal with in Hawberk. It was weakness of body, not of spirit, that confronted the physician, who could caution, but must not alarm, his patient as to his limitations. Hawberk was more strenuous than Anther in pushing their advantages against the common enemy, when he had begun sensibly to realize them. Without instruction, he suspended the laudanum altogether for a week; and one morning, at the end of it, he fell in the street, and was carried home senseless. It was just when John Langbrith had summoned his forces to the point of putting the mills into the charge of Hawberk and his business assistant, preparatory to going round the world so quickly that he would not be missed before he got back. When they told him of what had happened to Hawberk he said, “Hell!” and took up his burden again.

Hawberk went back to the alternating bane and antidote, and was much sooner at his work than John Langbrith in his scepticism could have imagined; but Langbrith’s faith in him was gone, in spite of all that Anther could say or do to restore it. Even when, as the winter wore along towards the spring, and he was made to believe that Hawberk’s laudanum had been gradually reduced again to nothing, and he had the witness of Hawberk’s enthusiastic efficiency against his own doubts, he practised a sardonic self-denial with regard to the fact.

“You let it run along till winter,” he said to Anther, “and, if he keeps up till then, it’ll be time enough to talk to me about taking a vacation. But I guess I’ve got enough of putting an opium-eater in charge of the mills, for one while.”

In early April, when the first of the blackbirds had come prospecting as far north as Saxmills, Hawberk was one day making a personal examination of the logs in the boom at the head-gates, for certain sticks which he wished to experiment with, in a new idea of pulp which he had got. He slipped and fell into the water, still icy cold; but he easily climbed out, and hurried home, to laugh at the prophecies of his mother-in-law, who told him that he had taken his death, as soon as he came dripping into the house. For once, in a long series of gloomy forecasts, she was right. Pneumonia set in, and, twenty-four hours after it set in, death put his seal to the cure of opium-eating which Doctor Anther had effected in a typical case.

As long as she lived, the seeress could boast, not only that she knew Hawberk would die as soon as she laid eyes on him, but also that, if Doctor Anther could have attended him, Hawberk would not have died.

XXXIII

IN March, John Langbrith’s misery had pushed him to the desperate step of writing to his nephew that, somehow, at any risk or cost, he must get away from work for a while. It was not a case of life or death, and neither he nor Anther had pretended that it was so; but it was a case of what a man could stand and care to live. He said this to his nephew; but he said also that he had merely reached the point where he did not care what became of the business. If James Langbrith cared, he had better come home and look after it; for, in a month from the time he wrote, John Langbrith was going to leave it. Like some men who have found a grim pleasure in suppressing their feelings, and who, upon a sudden occasion, find a yet grimmer pleasure in freeing them, he poured out on his nephew the disgust he had bottled up in his heart for James Langbrith’s views and aims, and said that he had better learn to make paper than plays, for more people wanted it; there was more demand even for poor paper than for poor plays. He said something about James Langbrith’s being old enough to leave off being a loafer, and to turn to and do something for a living.

The letter, rightly read, was a cry of physical  pain; but there is no doubt that it was a vulgar and abusive cry, and it filled Langbrith with a fury which was not greater than his astonishment. In his whole life, his uncle had never spoken so many words to him on business, and had never offered him any criticism on what he was doing or proposing to do. He had felt a sardonic reserve in John Langbrith at their spare encounters, but so long as it continued reserve he did not care for it. He had a general contempt for his uncle, as a sort of mechanical-minded insect who could fulfil its office without volition or imagination, and now this insect had venomously risen and stung him in the tenderest part of his vanity. But he resolved to be a gentleman in repelling the attack. He determined not to answer John Langbrith’s letter till he had let his wrath cool; not to judge him till he had submitted the case to another. The other was, of course, Falk, who did not give the matter too great thought when Langbrith pushed the letter peremptorily between him and a sketch Falk was making, and required to know what he thought of it. Falk read it with the sort of amusement which the pain of such a man as Langbrith is apt to give those who know him, and even those who like him; but, though he smiled, he could not refuse his friend the justice of owning, “Pretty nasty letter.”

Langbrith briefly wrote back to his uncle that he was not prepared to leave Paris at the moment; but that, if John Langbrith wished to relinquish his charge of the mills, it would be entirely acceptable to have them left in the hands of his business lieutenant and of Mr. Hawberk, who, as the old and devoted friend of his father, would doubtless feel, as his father’s brother seemed not to have felt, the importance and sacred character of the charge. He made no reply to John Langbrith’s sarcasms, but suffered himself the expression of a high, impersonal regret that he should have always mistakenly inferred his uncle’s character from his father’s. He could not, however, be altogether sorry that he had credited John Langbrith with the noble nature and magnanimous ideals of Royal Langbrith. Brief as it was, the letter was as insolently foolish as it could well be, and John Langbrith, reading it on the way up to Hawberk’s house, where he had been summoned by news of Hawberk’s dangerous condition, pushed it into his pocket with a pleasure in not having been mistaken as to the writer which few men would have been able to feel.

He had been told that he had better go up, by the young doctor who was hopelessly looking after Hawberk in place of Dr. Anther, then in the second week of a typhoid fever. Anther had fought against the fever to the last, and when he succumbed to it he was already delirious, so that it was not known whether his asking for Mrs. Langbrith was or was not from a mind fully master of itself. But it did not matter. She was already on her way to him, at the first rumor of his sickness; and she carried her home into his homeless house, and gave him the tireless devotion in which alone she was not weak. She took her two women with her and installed them in the place, which she stripped the Langbrith homestead to make a little less comfortless. She published, so far as her action went, the fact of their affection to the whole village world. To some of those who came to offer the help she almost passionately refused, she said that Dr. Anther and she were engaged, and that they were to be married as soon as he was well again. In the sort of vehemence with which she declared this, she might well have wished to put her purpose beyond recall. Mrs. Enderby and Mrs. Garley would have helped her; there were few in the village who would not have been glad to offer help, if that of her nearest friends and his had been allowed. She was not stupidly and jealously set upon the sole charge of the sick man: it was she who had first thought of having a trained nurse from Boston, and had suggested it to the young doctor, who did not like to venture on it. She put herself second to the nurse, and subordinately shared her duties and vigils, claiming no rights and asserting no hopes they had not in common. She had not even the poor consolation of being the subject of the sick man’s ravings. His crazy thoughts ran mostly upon Hawberk, whom he fancied advising and cautioning as to his case. Two or three times he dimly knew Mrs. Langbrith, but supposed himself in her own house with her. He sometimes mistook the nurse for her. All the tragedy that had allied them in the past, the baffle, the defeat, the despair was wiped out; and a trivial cheerfulness replaced it in the sick man’s delirium.

John Langbrith came to tell her of Hawberk’s death, and he said to the bewilderment in which she listened, “What are you going to do about James? He ought to come home, if he ever means to; but I can’t make him.”

“I will,” she said from her daze, without asking him why he could not do it, as he, perhaps, intended. But she sat still without offering to put her will into any sort of effect.

“I’ve got the cablegram-blank with me,” John Langbrith said. “You want to cable him, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she answered. “What shall I say?” she asked.

“Oh,-anything — just ‘Hawberk dead: come immediately.’”

She wrote mechanically from his dictation; then she put in a word.

“Well,” John Langbrith said, with his grim smile, “it wa’n’t necessary to have the ‘Mister,’ but it only costs twenty-five cents more, and he didn’t get the ‘Mister’ so often while he was alive. Want to sign it, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” and she took the despatch from him. Then, after a hesitation, she signed it “Mother,” and gave it back, and let him go without asking anything about Hope.

John Langbrith stayed two days for Hawberk’s funeral; then, with some formality, referring to the favorable symptoms in Anther’s case, which he would not have observed, perhaps, if they had been unfavorable, he broke away from his work, and took his misery with him on a vacation. He had a blind notion that a sea-voyage would be the thing for him, and he thought of a trip to Bermuda. But he found that he could not get back under a week, and, desperate as he was, he could not bring himself to put that time between him and possible recall to his business cares. He devolved upon a trip to Old Point Comfort, and went and returned by the coastwise steamers, which encountered heavy weather enough to prolong both voyages, and to give him several days of haggard unrest at the beach hotel. He got in, he considered, a full week of sea-air by this means, and he arrived in New York one morning in time to take a Boston train which would connect for Saxmills, so that he could sleep at home that night.

He imagined it in this phrase before he realized, with a sardonic humor, that it would be going to bed, rather than sleeping, at home. He did not know how he was ever to sleep again anywhere; and the flame in his stomach fretted him to a white heat of exasperation with everything in life and the world. He was going back not better but worse, and he was going to take up alone the burden that Hawberk had divided with him during the last six months. Why need Hawberk have died now, damn him? He raged, and he cursed the fool for losing his life on that idiotic venture, when he could have sent any boy in the mills to pick out the right logs. In his thought he visited the insufficiency of this business lieutenant with equal fury and profanity, and wondered what hell of a muddle he would have contrived to make of things in the week that he had been left alone. He included Anther in the rage of his condemnation, for being down with typhoid just when his skill was needed to save Hawberk, and he included that young jackass of an Emering, who knew as much about practising medicine as John Langbrith knew about sailing a ship. The figure was an effect from his recent voyages, in which all forms of navigation had fallen under his contempt, as incompetent to supply a man with the seasickness on which he had counted as one of the means of relief from his dyspepsia. While the boat rolled and pitched, and cries for help hailed the stewards from every state-room, he had kept a steadfast stomach, such as it was; and he had maniacally calculated in his anguish that there was not enough water in the Atlantic Ocean to put out the fire that was burning in his hold.

It was still smoldering when the train stopped ten minutes for refreshments at New Haven, and Langbrith, who had started breakfastless from New York, recklessly decided to supply it with fresh fuel. As everything indifferently disagreed with him, he did not see why he should not have a cup of turbid coffee, a plate of cold beans, and a piece of apple-pie, as well as anything wholesome, and he was wiping the traces of this repast from his shaggy mustache when he ran for his train, and scrambled into his parlor-car, just before the porter picked up his carpeted step and swung himself aboard. As he crowded through the narrow aisle on his way to take his seat again, he glanced into the smoking-room and met the eye of his nephew, who turned at the same moment from watching the shipping in the harbor through the windows and over the platforms of the cars receding on the sidings.

They knew each other with less surprise on John Langbrith’s part than James Langbrith’s; but it was the uncle who expressed an ironical astonishment, when he decided to be first to break the silence in which they were glaring at each other. “Oh!” he said, “thought you’d come over!”

XXXIV

EVERYTHING in the sight of the young man made the older man hate him; but, most of all, it was the indefinable touch of Europe, of Prance, of the Latin Quarter in James Langbrith’s dress which, while it could not interpret itself explicitly to John Langbrith’s ignorance, expressed something superiorly and offensively alien.

“Uncle John” — the young man’s misfortune was to intensify this effect by the tone of his suggestion—” don’t you think we had better leave anything of this sort till after — till later?”

“No, I don’t,” John Langbrith sourly responded. And he came into the smoking-room, and sat down in a chair opposite the corner of the sofa where James had been looking out of the window.

They had the place to themselves. It was the train which used to be called the “ladies’ train,” because of its convenient hours and slower gait, suitable to the leisurely transit of the unbusiness sex; and James Langbrith, in entering the car, had noted that, but for one man, there were only women in it, and had taken possession of the smoking-room to think the more unmolestedly of things that had filled, it seemed almost to bursting, his mind for the last ten days. John Langbrith had made no such observation, but he saw that they were alone with an opportunity for quarrel, with which he luxuriously toyed before he fully grasped it.

“When did you come?” he asked, after looking vainly for a splinter to chew upon. He caught sight of the porter’s whisk-broom over the wash-bowl, and supplied himself with a straw.

In the mean time, James had said, “We got in this morning; our boat was thirty-six hours late; it was two days before I could get away after the cable reached me. She was the first boat out.”

The words were spare enough, but there was an exculpatory flavor in them that suited John Langbrith’s ferocious mood, and when James added, “How is my mother, and Hope?” he loosed himself upon the young man.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them for a week, and I don’t want to bandy any small-talk with you.

I got your answer to my letter all right, and I want to have a square understanding with you. I don’t know as we ever had a regular understanding, did we?”

“I don’t know that we did, if you mean about the mills.”

“I mean about the mills. What the devil else could I mean?”

“That,” said James, “was all arranged before I was old enough to have any understanding with you, and since then I have let my absolute trust in you take the place of an understanding.”

“I know that damn well. But the time has come now when I don’t want your absolute trust.”

It occurred again to James Langbrith, as it had occurred before, since getting his uncle’s astounding letter, that his uncle might be mad.

“I want to know whether you’ve come home for good, to take a grown man’s share in your own business?”

“That depends,” James parried the issue. He was really no more afraid of the impending quarrel than his uncle, but he was a dreamer, and he liked to nurse his conclusions before trying them: liked to shy off from them and feign that they were not immediate, and perhaps not at all. John Langbrith was concrete where the young man was abstract, and his pleasure was to force the issue.

“It don’t depend on me. I’m done with the thing. I’m going back to Saxmills, but it’s to pull out for good and all.”

“I suppose,” James Langbrith assented, “that there will be an accounting and a settlement?”

“Oh, don’t you be afraid of that, young man. There’ll be a settlement all right, and after I’ve been paid a little more than days’ wages, you can have the rest.” John Langbrith felt the coffee and beans and pie beginning to ignite, and he flamed out upon his nephew from that inner conflagration, “What do you mean by ‘an accounting,’ you — you whipper-snapper?”

James Langbrith made no answer, and his uncle pulled his chair closer, and put his face so near that the young man turned his own slightly aside, to get it out of the current of his uncle’s dyspeptic breath.

“What do you mean? What do you mean?” John Langbrith insisted. “Do you suppose Royal Langbrith was a man to put anybody slippery into his business?”

“You know,” James Langbrith disgustedly, but quietly, responded, “that I could not mean to impugn your honor.” With the effect of being pushed to the wall and menaced there, he looked like his mother, who had so often been in that place, first through his father’s duress and then through his own.

“Honor!” John Langbrith spat the word out of his mouth. “I’m talking business! What sort of man do you suppose your father was, anyway?”

A light, less of hate for his uncle than of love for his ideal of the father he had never known, kindled in James Langbrith’s eyes, the long eyes of his mother. “He was, at least, a gentleman.”

“That’s to say I’m not. Well, go on! We’ll take it for granted in my case. How do you know he was a gentleman, heigh?” He pressed him with the last word, and repeated it with a smile of scorn and pain. “Heigh? How do you know?” James Langbrith moved his head from side to side, as much now to escape what message of disaster might be coming as the effluvium that should bear it. But he made no answer, and John Langbrith hitched himself so near that his bony shins sawed against his nephew’s legs, and he tapped him on the knee with his spiky forefinger, in the habit he had when talking business with people. He was talking business now as he said: “You don’t know? Well, I do, because he was my brother, and I knew him up to within twenty minutes of his death. If he didn’t reform within them twenty minutes” — John Langbrith in his passion lost the grip, always uncertain, of his grammar—” he’d ought to have went smack, smooth to hell, like shot out of a shovel!” James Langbrith’s eyes dilated with the assured conviction of his uncle’s insanity, but at the same time his nostrils swelled with resentment of the maniac’s offence. John Langbrith gave him no chance for the expression of either the belief or the emotion. “Ever since I could remember him he was the coolest and slickest devil! I don’t know where he got it! He had the trick of making other folks do his dirty work — and he was full of that, I can tell you — and keeping such a hold of ’em that they never had the chance to squirm out of the blame. He had me fixed good and fast, while we were boys, by a scrape he hauled me into along with him, and when he wanted me, any time, and said ‘Come!’ you bet I went. That’s the way I came to be left in charge of his business when he died, and that poor fool of a Hawberk crowded out of it with lies that Royal threatened to tell his wife if he peeped. That’s the way the woman Royal lived with down to Boston came to take what he give her and no questions asked, without makin’ trouble for him, alive or dead. She was fixed so that she didn’t peep! And so right along the whole line! If he hadn’t cowed your mother for good and all she might have said something about the way he used to bully her, and when he came home from his Boston sprees used to pound her.

Oh, he was a gentleman, Royal was! And that poor sheep of an Anther might have spoke out in meetin’ if your mother hadn’t been so mollycoddlin’ about you that she couldn’t bear to have you told the truth when he wanted to marry her and couldn’t make her tell. But I’ll tell you now, and don’t you forget it. Royal was such a gentleman that he cooked it up with the devil how to fool the whole town, and make ’em believe he was a saint upon earth. That library buildin’! He gave it out of the profits of the first year after he choused Hawberk, and the mis’ble crittur was makin’ it all right for Royal by tryin’ to kill himself with laudanum! Why, he made Royal Langbrith rich with his inventions, and then Royal got the credit of ‘em; and he got the credit of doin’ the handsome thing by a man that was an opium-fiend, according to his tell, from the beginning. And when you took it into your fool head to put up that tablet to him in the front of the library, he had things so solid that all hell couldn’t bust ’em up. Anther did go round to Garley and tell him the rights of it, but that old chump honeyfugled him into believin’ that he better let by-gones be by-gones, for fear of the corruptin’ effects on the community. Then Anther come to me, the last thing, but I was stickin’ to my job, just about then, and I thought if your mother wouldn’t keep you from runnin’ your neck into the noose, I wouldn’t. I believe there wasn’t a last one of them jackasses up on the platform that wasn’t as big a fool as you, except me and Anther, and that old honeyfugler. And I ain’t sure,” John Langbrith said, withdrawing his furious face a little from its proximity to his nephew’s, “but what I’d have held my tongue, now, if you hadn’t put it to me that Royal Langbrith was a gentleman and I wasn’t; but now you’ve got it, I guess, about as strong as they make it, right in the collar-button!” He leaned forward again, and demanded in a fresh burst of fury: “I suppose you don’t believe me! I presume you think I’m tryin’ to work you, or off my nut, or just pure ugly! Well, you can ask Anther, when you get home. And you can ask your mother! And you can ask the mother of his children — I’ll give you her address. And you can ask that old honeyfugling fraud of a Garley. And you can ask Haw — Oh no, you can’t ask him! He’s out of it, but I guess his mother-in-law could tell you something she’s suspected, all right! Oh, you’ve got a nice job cut out for you, young man! Why, I wouldn’t be in your shoes—”

The parlor-car conductor put his head in at the door, and looked at them. John Langbrith fell suddenly as silent as James Langbrith had been throughout. With the shadow of a changing mind passing over his face, the conductor said, “See: d’ I get your tickets?” and James Langbrith, if not John Langbrith, knew that he had been drawn to them by the sound of a noisy, angry voice, and had meant to ask them to be quieter.

But the young man could not care. It would not have mattered to him now whether the whole world had overheard; the universal knowledge of the fact could be nothing,- compared with the fact itself.

His uncle got up and went out to his seat in the parlor, but James Langbrith did not move. He sat exposed to the tempest that had opened upon him without the shelter of a doubt. It seemed still to rage upon him like some war of the elements, and he was aware not only of the truth of what had been told him, but of its not being novel. He had that mystical sense of its having all happened before, long ago, and of a privity to it, in his inmost, dating back to his first consciousness. The awful conviction of the reality which held him like a demoniacal obsession was blended with a physical loathing of his uncle’s person, a disgust verging on sickness for his boiling hate, his vulgar profanities, mixed with the oldest and the newest slang, and the brute solecisms of the vernacular into which John Langbrith had lapsed in his passion. If he had wanted proof of what had been said of his father, the fact that John Langbrith was his father’s brother would have been proof enough to the young man’s shame.

From time to time, in the turmoil of his cognitions, he had a nerveless impulse to follow his uncle, where he had gone to his seat in the drawing-room, and ask him this and that, but he did not. He was not aware of stirring till the porter came for his bag at the South Terminals in Boston. Then the horrible dream went on like waking, as he drove across the city to the Northern Stations, and found his train for Saxmills. Till then he had lost sight of his uncle, but he saw him boarding the same train; he looked into the smoker, and, finding it fairly full, he got into it, making sure that John Langbrith  would not come to molest him there. He had no wish now but to keep away from him, to keep for the present out of the sight of the man who had heaped his dishonor upon him, and who alone of all that he could encounter would be knowing to it.

Apparently John Langbrith had no wish to look him up. He had doubtless poured the last drop from the vials of his wrath out upon him, and was without any purpose of breaking them upon his devoted head. At any rate, when they got out of the train at Saxmills, the uncle made no motion to approach his nephew. He stared at him, ignoring him as perfectly as if he were any other shadow of the vaguely lighted depot, and getting into one of the two ramshackle public carriages which had chanced a late passenger, drove off into the darkness. James Langbrith took the other, and bade the man, who was a stranger to him, drive to Mrs. Langbrith’s.

All the way he had a sinking of the heart which was not related to the failure of his mother to have him met, after he had telegraphed her from New York that he was coming on that train. There was no lifting at sight of a belated lamp in the parlor, or at its moving thence, when he knocked, and showing through the transom of the hall-door, which his mother opened to him herself.

XXXV

JAMES LANGBRITH took his mother in his arms with an emotion that he had never known before, with pity, with honor, with reverence due to mute suffering, with everything that endears and exalts an object long beloved and wronged. She seemed surprised at his warmth, and sparely kissed him, without even a lax return of his embrace.

“Mother,” he said, breaking from the sense of her coldness and from the subjective pressure of something unwonted in the absolutely unchanged environment, “I came from New York with Uncle John, and he told me about father.” As he said this, he noted that the place was lighted only by a hand-lamp, which she was nervously fingering. Her face was swollen as with weeping, and the red crescents under her eyes were tumid with tears unshed.

She said, beginning with the estrayal of his glance towards the lamp: “Norah is not here, and I have let the cook go to bed. I said I would sit up for you. She wanted to.”

“Thank you,” he said, mechanically, to her drooping head. “Uncle John,” he repeated, “told me about father.” Either she did not understand or she did not heed; it seemed impossible that she should not have done both; but he felt that it would be cruel to press her further with the fact of his knowledge now; he took his first lesson in forbearance with her. “I want to see Dr. Anther, at once. Do you suppose he is well enough to see me, tonight?”

“Dr. Anther?” she asked, with an accent that impressed him as having something in it as strange to herself as to him. “Why, you can’t see him!”

“Yes, I know he is sick; Hope wrote to me. I didn’t think — you must excuse — How is he?”

“He is dead,” she answered, simply. “He died early this morning. I wanted to stay and sit up, to-night, but they wouldn’t let me. They say it isn’t the custom, any more. I’ve just got back here. I brought the trained nurse. She ought to have a little rest before she goes back to Boston.” She added one fact to the other in the same quality of tone, with the same effect of not realizing any of them.

“Dead?” was all that James Langbrith could say. “They thought he was getting well, one while; or I did. But Dr. Emering said he was afraid, all along. He had splendid care. That trained nurse is as good as another doctor.” With the same lifelessness she said: “I’ve put you out a little supper; and then I suppose you’ll want to go to bed. I don’t know as you’ll find things very comfortable. I took both the girls with me, and, with Norah there still, things haven’t been put to rights, all. But I’ve got your room ready.”

She ceased to speak, and they both sat in a silence like that of the night when he found her in the moonlight there after his return to do Hope’s bidding, and consent to her marriage with Dr. Anther. Now as then it was as if there was to be no end to their sitting in silence together, but now it ought to be a silence that united, not parted, them.

Up to a certain moment in every evil predicament men are the victims of it, and after that, if they continue in it they are its agents, though as little its masters as before. They are exceptionally happy men if they realize this early enough in life to make choice of their better selves against their worse, and in that choice finally prevail over their evil predicament. The events of James Langbrith’s situation presented themselves with the simultaneity with which events are said to show themselves in instants of mortal peril. No detail was missing in the retrospect of wilful arrogance, of blind conceit, of vain folly, of baseless illusion; and yet, with it all, he justly felt that he was not so bad as any of the things he had done. At his age he could not be without hope: there could be as yet no error in life wholly irreparable. His soul seized upon renunciation, sacrifice, as its only refuge, and he said, as he thought, to himself — but from her response he knew that he must have also said it to his mother—” I must release Hope.”

She answered simply, “It’s too late, to-night.”

“Yes, but I will see her the first thing in the morning, and tell her. That will be the end between us.” His mother did not gainsay him, and he asked: “Does she know about it — what my father did to hers?”

His mother said impassively, “I don’t believe she does.”

“Then I must tell her, and let her take herself back. She would hate me.”

His mother looked at him in a daze; she seemed about to speak, but did not. “Mother,” his voice quivered in the question, “do you suppose Dr. Anther hated me?”

She took time, as if to consider. “I don’t believe he did — after the first — after you went away that day. As far as anything went that he said then or ever afterwards, he pitied you.”

“Oh!” Langbrith groaned.

“I don’t know,” she resumed, “how much for me it was that he pitied you. He was always wanting you to be told about — about Mr. Langbrith; but he wouldn’t force me, when he saw I couldn’t. I don’t know as I did right not to tell you, but the time never seemed to come.”

The words had a sound of excuse, and against this he protested, “Oh, mother!”

“He wanted me,” she continued emotionlessly, “to let him tell you, but he always said he wouldn’t be my tyrant; he thought I had had enough of tyrants.”

Her son winced with a cruel pang. “Did he think I had been your tyrant?”

“I guess he did, in some ways. But not that you meant to. He never liked to blame, a great deal.” She added, with finality, “He was a good man.”

“Yes, yes!” Langbrith wailed, in his intolerable regret. “He was a good man. And I insulted and outraged him when, because he meant the best a man could and had been your true and constant friend, I should have been on my knees to him. And mother, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Pity me, too? Forgive me?”

She drew a long, weary sigh. “Oh, what does it all matter?”

“Everything — the whole world, life, death!”

She appeared to consider again. Then she answered, “I don’t know as I ever felt but the one way to you. You were my son.”

He felt that to rise and kiss her for the assurance of her love would have been to profane it. He sat where he was, but he burst into a wild sobbing, the tears of a man who does not weep till the fountains of being are broken up. When he controlled himself he asked, “Who else knows about father?”

“Dr. Anther said he told Judge Garley and Mr. Enderby. I shouldn’t be surprised if Mrs. Enderby knows too, but I don’t believe Mrs. Garley does. Mr. Hawberk did. And your Uncle John. I guess that’s all.”

“And now everybody must know! I will begin with Hope.”

His mother said nothing to this; it was as if she considered it his affair, in which she had no longer any part. She sat awhile, but not apparently for further speech with him. Then she rose and took her lamp. “I guess I will go to bed, now.” She moved absently towards the door. She turned, and came back to light another lamp, which stood ready on a table. “I was leaving you in the dark—”

“I would rather,” he broke out. “Don’t light it! I can find my way. Good-night, mother!”

She looked at him, faltering, and then she stooped and kissed him on the forehead, and left him sitting in the dark. He realized that he was sitting before his father’s portrait, and that it had been witness of the scene which had passed. He mutely said to it, “ I must begin to undo.”

He sat through the night, and in the morning, Norah returning to the house, and letting herself in with a latch-key at the front door, woke him from the drowse he had fallen into, and after his bath forced him to drink the coffee she had brought him in the dining-room. She was very gentle with him, and he with her, like people sharing the sorrow of the same house of mourning, but beyond the exchange of a few questions and answers about his voyage home they did not speak till he said, “ What did my mother mean, Norah, about having just got back here? Has she been out of the house?”

“And didn’t she tell you? We all been up at the doctor’s keepin’ house there, and doin’ for him; me and Mary and your mother, ever since it was sure he was goin’ to be bad. I thought some one would be writin’ to you!”

“No,” Langbrith answered, briefly.

“Miss Hope was with us, too, some of the time, and Mrs. Enderby. But it was all no use, as far as the doctor went. He didn’t know one from another, after the first day or two. Mary has got ye some rice-cakes, Mr. James. Won’t ye have anny?” — .

Langbrith was pushing back his chair. “No, I don’t want anything more, Norah. I’ll be back before long; tell my mother, when she comes down.”

“And I hope, then, she won’t come down soon, if she’s sleeping. It’s more than she’s done for the last week.”

He went away with the trivial sense of Norah’s Yankee correction in her Irish parlance, which he did not remember to have noted before, and he had no question of going directly to find Hope at eight o’clock in the morning.

She was waiting for him, even then, though it could not be said that she was expecting him. He had figured holding himself from her out of duty to her, but they were in each other’s arms before he could help it. In that mutual transport, and while he still pressed her close to him, she divined his constraint, and asked, vividly, “What is the matter?”

“I want to tell you, but I don’t know how,” he began.

“Well, don’t mind now,” she said, with the first gleam of her inextinguishable gayety. “Do it anyhow,” she added. “There isn’t anything I can’t bear now — now you’re here.”

“Oh, Hope, dearest!”

“Is it something dreadful? something about us?”

“It’s about your father” — she pulled herself away, he felt indignantly—” and mine. I should think I was dreaming, but I know I’m awake for the first time in my life. Every one must know the truth, but I must begin with you.”

“What do you mean, James Langbrith?” she demanded, severely. And he found the strength of despair.

“My father was not what I believed. He was a man that — that — wronged every one he had to do with. He wronged your father so cruelly that he drove him to the opium.”

“Your father? Mine? Why, you must be crazy!”

“If you say that you will make me so. But I am perfectly sane at last. Uncle John told me about it yesterday coming up from New York, and I’ve come the first thing this morning to tell you. I told mother last night that I was coming to release you, and to give back all that my father had stolen — stolen! — from yours. It makes me feel as if I had stolen you.”

“Now, James Langbrith,” she broke out upon him from her bewilderment, “you just stop being silly, and tell me exactly what you’re talking about.” She took his hand, and pulled it vehemently while she fixed him with her eyes.

He began again, and now he told her the greater part of the story that John Langbrith had vindictively poured out upon him. He could not bring himself to speak of his father’s hidden life; the innocent shame that was between them forbade that; but, somehow, he possessed her of all else that he knew, while she kept clutching his hand convulsively, and pulling herself to him. “This has been my home-coming. I — didn’t sleep last night, and I’m rather broken up, or else I could have prepared you—”

“Oh, you poor thing!” She put forward her left hand and passed it over his reeking forehead, as if he were her child, in the divine mother-pity which is in a woman’s heart even for her husband or her lover. “You are the injured one, kept in the dark so, all your life.”

He tried to resist her compassion, but his head fell upon her breast. “It had to be so. And now,” he said, “the most I can do is to make restitution of what you have been robbed of, and give you back yourself.”

“Oh, how ridiculous!” she said, with a bewitching inadequacy, while she smoothed his hair with her hand. “Do you suppose father would want you to do that? And I won’t have myself back, as you call it! What would I do with myself, if I had it?” she added. “Now you be still, and let me talk awhile. I don’t believe it’s as bad as your Uncle John says, and, if it is, it don’t make any difference now. It’s all past and gone, isn’t it? I guess father got the fun out of his inventions, even if somebody else got the money. He was so happy this last year that it would have made up for anything. I do believe that he couldn’t have enjoyed it so much if it hadn’t been for what went before. He never said a word to me to show that he felt injured, and he liked you, James; he was proud of you, and he believed in what you were trying to do, over there, even when I couldn’t, always. Father was a genius, I think. Don’t you?”

“Yes—”

“Well, then, he had his good time as it went along. He took it with him, as you may say. And as far as I’m concerned, and that restitution of me that you talk about, I guess we’ll just have me in the family.”

If his despair had been what he thought it, he could not have resisted her sweetness, her greatness; he could not have denied himself the pardon and the blessing it assured him. But he could not speak, and a little hurt at his silence stole into her drolling voice.

“Still, if you don’t want me—”

“Oh, my dearest!” he cried out. “What are you saying?” and once more they took each other into a long embrace that said everything which they had both vainly tried to put into words. When they were so far parted that he could look into her eyes, he said, “How strange you are, Hope!”

“Am I? Well, that’s what Dr. Anther used to insinuate, so it’s a compliment that I’m used to. He seemed to think it was all right, even if you don’t.”

“I? Oh, Hope!”

“Well, some people, then. If they were in your place, they would say that it was very queer I shouldn’t act more as if I felt father’s going. And we haven’t spoken of it; poor father! What would you say if I said sometimes I was glad of it? He was well when he went, and he hadn’t touched a drop of laudanum for months and months. But I never felt sure about it, and I don’t believe Dr.

Anther did, and when I think how he used to suffer — well!” She was one of the women who rain and shine together, and now the tears fell over her pathetic smile.

“I know,” he gulped.

“Sometime I’ll tell you all about him, but not now. And I’ll tell you about Dr. Anther. He was the best man that ever lived. Are you glad that you went home that night and took it back, with your mother?”

“It’s what gives me the only courage I have left.”

“Well, I’d rather hear you say that than that I gave you courage,” she said; but he could see that she was a little jealous of the help of even a good conscience, and he answered, “You’re my Hope.” She laughed into a sob, and then laughed out of it. “Then you must be equal to seeing grandmother. Come in and speak with her.”

They had been sitting in the dim little parlor, and now Hope led him into the dining-room, where Mrs. Southfield was grimly chastizing the breakfast-table for the disorder in which Hope had left it when she flew to let Langbrith in at the front door. She paused with a plate in her hand, and transferred her fierceness to Langbrith’s face. “Here’s James, grandmother,” said Hope, recklessly; “can’t you stop and shake hands with him?”

“I don’t know,” the old woman said, “as I want to shake hands with any of his tribe.”

“Not when he’s going to be one of our tribe, grandmother? That’s what he says he is?”

“I wouldn’t trust anything a Langbrith says,’ Mrs. Southfield returned, with impartiality.

“Well, then, it’s what I say, too. Just shake hands, anyway,” Hope bade her cheerfully, and, after her grandmother had wiped her hand on her apron and given it to Langbrith, the girl pursued, “Well, now, that’s settled”; and when she had drawn him out of the room again by the hand that was still finding itself in his, she suddenly asked him, “Did you like it?” and at his stare she added, “The way grandmother welcomed you?”

“It was what I deserved,” he answered, stonily.

“No, it wasn’t, but it’s what you’ll get if you tell everybody about your father. Will you do it? Can you?”

“I will, whether I can or not.”

“I don’t like that hard look in your face,” she said, with a criticism that seemed general rather than special; then, with special application, she said, “It makes me afraid of you. I wonder if you’ll be stubborn.”

“Don’t you want me to be firm in the right?”

“Yes,” she sighed, “if you know what the right is.”

He looked at her, perplexed. “Have you told any one else? — or no, you said you wanted to tell me first. Are you going to tell other people right away?”

“Can it be known too soon?” he demanded, gloomily. “ I should like to stand by Dr. Anther’s open grave and proclaim it, and take my father’s shame on me before them all.”

She only said, “Oh!” with so little liking for the imaginary spectacle that he had to brace himself for the effort of going on.

“That tablet must come down out of the library as publicly as I put it there. I must tell the whole community the facts of my father’s life, so far as they can be decently known. I must own the wrongs he did, and ask any man who has a grievance against him to come forward and let me right him so far as I can.”

“It sounds like a play, doesn’t it?” she said, with a smile that was somehow loving as well as mocking. “Anybody can see that you will know how to write plays.” At sight of the dismay in his face, she turned wholly serious. “James, you are crazy! Don’t you see that it wouldn’t do?”

“Why not?” he faltered.

“Because it is too late! You would just disgrace yourself and not help anybody. It would make the greatest scandal! And what good would it do?”

“That is not the question.”

“Yes it is, James; and if we are going to bear this together—”

“What have you to do with it?”

“Well, if I don’t take myself back, I should say I had full as much to do with it as you!”

He stood daunted by what had not occurred to him before, and he could not answer her anything.

“Now do you understand?” she triumphed, tenderly. “I guess if it was my father that suffered the most I have the right to say the most; and I don’t believe I should like to have everybody know the kind of family I was marrying into. Why, if grandmother treats you the way she does because she felt it in her bones about your father, what would she do when all the neighbors knew it, and it got into the papers? Think what Jessamy Colebridge would say; and Susie Johns!”

He knew that she was entreating him lovingly as well as mockingly, and though it was sweet, yet he could not make sure of the reality of what was so opposite to the picture he had carried night-long in his mind of her instantly agreeing with him, and supporting him in the ordeal he proposed to himself, in the event of her refusing his renunciation. “I don’t understand you, Hope,” he hesitated.

“Yes, you do, James Langbrith!” she retorted. “You see that I’ve got just as much to do with this as you have. Don’t you suppose,” she softly reproached him, “that I know how you feel, and how proud I am of you for it? But I’m not sure about it — I’m not sine it’s right; and I’m not going to let you do it on your own responsibility, if I have any say in it. And I have, haven’t I?”

“Why, surely! If I hadn’t been so blindly selfish I should have seen that without your telling »» me.

“I will settle it about your selfishness some other time. It’s my selfishness now. This is something we can’t decide between us. Do you know what I was just thinking?”

“Yes,” he huskily responded. “That we could leave it to Dr. Anther.”

“Yes!” she said, solemnly.

“I am glad you knew. Who else is there?”

“My mother—”

“We mustn’t put anything on her. But she had a right that you should think of her. Well?”

“Uncle John would be no use.”

“No.”

“Judge Garley?”

“Of course you don’t mean it. He is a good man, but he would just laugh at us. Why are we beating about the bush so? We must go to Dr. Enderby!”

“Yes, I really thought of him next, when I remembered that Dr. Anther—”

“I knew you did. Well, we ought to go to Him at once. Don’t let us hesitate. Wait till I get my hat.”

She went up the cramped stairs, apparently into that chamber out of which he had once heard the nightmare groans of her father coming, and before she returned he heard her open some door downstairs, and call cheerfully through it, “Don’t you wash the dishes, grandma. I’ll be back soon,” and she joined him with her face freshened and brightened by the bathing away of her tears.

Her quick tilting was swifter than his long striding as they descended (he hill-side path towards the rectory, and she chanted to Mrs. Enderby among the flowers beyond the fence with a gayety that she could not quite keep out of her voice, “ How d’ ye do, Mrs. Enderby! Is Dr. Enderby at home?”

XXXVI

THE two young people were upon Mrs. Enderby before she could drop her garden-shears and dismiss from her consciousness a prescience of their coming for a purpose she had long associated with them and replace it with a decorous sense of all there was in the circumstances of their lives to banish that from them for the time. She was smiling too radiantly upon Langbrith, she felt, even when she had effected the substitution, but she could not help it. She could only make an apposite reflection on the strangeness of life as she asked him about himself and about his mother, and dedicated some just observations on the sad home-coming this must be for him in the losses which he shared with them all. Then she said, “The doctor is in his study. Won’t you go in?” and offered to remain outside; but Hope said:

“We want you, too, Mrs. Enderby. It’s something that we want you both to talk with us about; don’t we, James?” she ended, with a deference to him which seemed to Mrs. Enderby very pretty.

“He is trying to write his sermon — for to-morrow, you know,” she explained more directly towards Hope; but it was now Langbrith who answered:

“If it is the funeral sermon, what we may have to say will be fit, perhaps.”

“Oh, he will not mind being interrupted by you, in any case,” she said, with her mind playing mechanically away from the occasion to the general duty she had of always sequestering the rector when he was writing.

After the greeting to Hope and the formalities with himself, Langbrith took the word with a dignity and composure that Mrs. Enderby saw kindle the girl’s eyes with pride in him.

“I was saying to Mrs. Enderby that I hoped our errand wouldn’t be out of keeping with the subject of your sermon, if you are writing about Dr. Anther. He knew something — something of my — family history which never came to me till yesterday. My ignorance of it was the means of a cruel misconception on my part and of most generous forbearance on his; and it is a question now of what can be done in reparation from me — the sort and measure of it.”

Langbrith paused, and the rector sat kindly interpreting the young man’s thoughts by the light of his previous knowledge. But it was not for him to forestall the confidence which he felt was about to be offered to him. He merely said, “I could hardly imagine anything you could tell me that would heighten my sense of Dr. Anther’s worth.”

“Yes, I know that,” the young man assented, with a humility which made the other accuse himself of having not been quite clear. “But before I speak of him, I ought to say that I owe you some reparation. When I asked you to say some words at the dedication of the tablet to my father, I didn’t know that my father — that my father—” He choked. He had easily told Hope, not only because, as she had made him realize, it was as essentially her affair as his, but because, also, there was something in the confession of his father’s iniquity to one so supremely concerned which supported him; but his heart sank with a sense of the common shame awaiting him from the common knowledge, as it intimated itself to him from even such pity as Dr. Enderby’s. He perceived that it was not the victims of his father’s misdeeds that he feared, but the witnesses of these whom his confession would create. Instinctively, he looked towards Hope for help, but she dropped her face, and at the pathos of this Mrs. Enderby addressed a murmur of appeal to her husband.

Probably he saw no reason for putting Langbrith to the ordeal he shrank from, and he said: “You needn’t go on. I think I know what you want to say. I did not know it when you asked me to speak those words, but I knew it before I spoke them — from Dr. Anther.”

Langbrith fetched a sigh of relief that was almost a groan. “I won’t say,” the rector continued, “what I might have done if I had known it all when you asked me, for I am no longer master of such a situation, and I can’t go back to it and recreate it. But I was informed in time to refuse a part in that ceremony, and I did not, for reasons that still seem to me good.”

Langbrith passed his right hand over his forehead, and was aware of having Hope’s hand in his left as he did so. “Would you mind,” he huskily asked, “telling me your reasons?”

“They were not very profound. They related less to myself than to the effect of my refusal with the public — of the ultimate effect, if the cause of my refusal became, we will say, notorious. I had not much time to give to the matter, but I find that I don’t think differently now, upon further reflection. It seemed to me that no good and much harm could come of revealing the past; that so far as your father was concerned we had no right to enter into judgment, and that so far as God’s purposes were concerned we had no right to act upon our conception of what they might be in such a case. Do I make myself understood?”

“Yes,” Langbrith whispered.

“I believe that I said to Dr. Anther — in fact, I am sure I did — that to take upon ourselves any agency for supposed justice — for the discovery and the retribution implied by the concealment and the wrong in the case, would be in a manner forcing God’s purposes; I don’t like the phrase, now, but it expressed my meaning. May I ask how the matter has become known to you?”

“My uncle John told me yesterday, as we were coming up from New York. We have had a difference about — the business, and I am afraid I — I affronted him; and — and he told me.”

“In anger?”

“Yes, in anger.”

The rector thought how it was written, “Surely the wrath of man shall praise Thee.” It seemed to him that the Divine Providence had not acted inopportunely; and he was contented with the mode in which the young man had learned the worst; it was better that he should have come by the knowledge of it so than by any deliberate revelation, with the effect of such authority as an officious interference could have arrogated to itself. His mother could not have told him, and she could not suffer Dr. Anther to tell him; but his father’s brother might tell him, in anger and in hate, even, and out of his evil passions, and the evil passions they would arouse in the young man evoke the best result possible from the otherwise hopeless case.

Langbrith waited for him to speak; then he said: “And what do you think I ought to do now?”

“Oh, I beg your pardon. What had you thought of doing?”

“Of making it all known; of undoing my father’s wrong as far as I could, and of revoking my own acts in perpetuating his good name — the good name he has falsely borne in this community.”

“That is natural — for you, and you will let me say that it does you honor. But — What do you think, Hope?”

“I think he oughtn’t to do any such thing.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t see what good it would do, and it would make a great deal of misery for nothing. I know that the Bible says things have got to come out, but it doesn’t say that they need come out here, when there’s nobody left to suffer for them but those that didn’t do them.”

“What do you say, my dear?” The rector turned his head towards Mrs. Enderby.

“I say what Hope does.” Mrs. Enderby’s eyes shone with admiration of the girl, as she smiled on her.

“And I suppose there can be no doubt of your mother’s wish?” he asked Langbrith.

“I am afraid,” said the young man sadly, “I hadn’t considered her. I’m afraid that I have never considered her.”

The rector sat in a muse, which he was some time in breaking. “If it is something that you feel is for the good of your own soul,” he spoke solemnly, “I could adjure you to speak out and make confession of your father’s sins.”

“I was trying,” said Langbrith, “not to think of my own good.” He looked at Hope, as if there might be some help in her, but she would not meet his glance.

“Then,” said the rector, “though I know that it would be a relief to you to have all this known, and to take upon yourself the dishonor which the stupid and malignant love to visit upon the children of wrong-doers, I think you must not seek that relief. I would impose a more difficult, a heavier penance. I would bid you keep all this to yourself, as your mother has kept it to herself, and as your wife — Excuse me, I didn’t realize—”

“Oh, that is all right, Dr. Enderby!” Hope quaintly condoned his break.

“ — and as your wife,” the rector resumed with fresh courage, “wishes you to keep it. I know that from my talks with Dr. Anther; this was finally his mind in regard to the matter, and he told me this was finally, or indeed, long ago, the mind of Hope’s father. Yes, you must keep this secret locked in your own heart, until such time as the Infinite Mercy, which is the Infinite Justice, shall choose to free you of it. You will know the will of God when, if ever in this world, there is some event which may well seem a chance, leading to the discovery of what you have kept hid. Then you must own the truth promptly and fully. I believe in your good-will, and in your love of the truth, and I know that God will give you strength to do His purpose when He bids you.”

XXXVII

AT Anther’s grave, Enderby kept himself to the ritual of his church, and disappointed many who thought he would make some remarks, as they phrased it, on the dead man’s life, more final than anything he had said in his sermon the day before. There was some disappointment with the sermon itself, which the rector shared, for in his reluctance to make it the mere personal praise of his friend, he was aware of having kept it too general. He would have agreed, if he could from his own knowledge, with those who said it was the least moving of the discourses of the day which had all dealt with Anther’s character and career. At the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, the Methodist Church, and the Universalist Church, the qualities of the man who had now become a memory were dealt with directly, and his example interpreted as a lesson to those who heard. But Enderby shrank from eulogy, and while he knew that he was failing the expectations of his hearers, he had the consolation, such as it was, of knowing that he was dealing with Anther’s memory as Anther would have had him if it had been his to choose. Even this consolation was alloyed by the consciousness that it was no more for Anther to choose being made little of than to choose being made much of, and that in deferring to an imaginable preference of the man he was possibly as greatly in error as if he had pronounced the warmest and fullest panegyric of his virtues.

He could only say to himself that he had done what he could, when he feared, from the effect, that he had not done enough. He was curiously disabled by the personal considerations of the case, not only as concerned Anther himself, but as concerned Langbrith and his mother. In the friendship beginning tardily, but growing rapidly into something vitally strong between them, Anther had told the preacher of all that had passed with either of these and himself. He spoke of the affair as if it were a great while ago, and with a certain aloofness in which he judged himself as impartially as the others. From being the man in later middle life who had wished to form the happiness of a woman long dear to him, he had suddenly lapsed into an elderly man to whom it was appreciable that he could not have made her happy, but only more miserable, if he had pressed her to obey the prompting of her own affection for him. He had come to see that in a case where nothing was wrong, where everything was right, there were yet obstacles which could not be removed without a violence leaving a bruise destined to be lastingly sensitive. In his confidences to the man who understood him, he not only excused James Langbrith’s part in the matter, as something natural and inevitable, but his tolerance retracted towards the boy’s father, and he accounted for Royal Langbrith with a scientific largeness in which Enderby could not join him. He seemed to have exhausted the hoarded abhorrence with which he had hitherto visited the sinner’s memory, and to regard his evil life as a morbid condition with which the psychological side of pathology had to do rather than morals. He regarded him, apparently, with no more resentment than some treacherous and cruel beast whose propensities imply its prey, and which has satisfied them with a moral responsibility difficult or impossible for our ethics to adjust. In these speculations, Royal Langbrith seemed for him a part of the vast sum of evil, not personally detachable and punishable. As for that publicity which his revolted instincts had long demanded for Langbrith’s sins, he divined that it would have been the wildest and wantonest of errors. He alleged the attitude of Hawberk towards the memory of his pitiless enemy. Hawberk once said that he guessed Royal Langbrith was built that way, and that it was too late to give him a realizing sense that there was anything out of order in his machinery. Hawberk said he had no wish to make anybody else suffer for what Royal, as he called him, had done. He doubted whether, if Royal himself were on hand, he should want to collect anything from Royal out of his pocket or out of his hide. He guessed his claims were outlawed.

Anther himself more than once approved the position which Enderby had taken in regard to the public celebration of Langbrith’s public munificence, but in this he did not allay the disquiet of the rector’s own mind concerning it. In this Enderby insisted that he had done no better than choose the least of the evils presented, and that, somehow, some day, it behooved him to own the compromise made with his conscience. He did not see the way nor the hour, but he hoped that he was holding himself in readiness.

Early in the winter, the one vindictive foe of Royal Langbrith’s memory perished in Mrs. Southfield, who had, indeed, only a conjectured, or, as she believed, an inspired grievance. Such as it was, she wished to visit it on the sinner’s son rather than the sinner himself. Royal Langbrith had necessarily lapsed beyond her active hostility, and she turned this upon James Langbrith, whose engagement to Hope she never ceased to oppose. Hope herself took the humorous view of her grandmother’s opposition, as she had taken the humorous view of her father’s long tragedy, not because it was not real and terrible, but because temperamentally she had no other way of bearing it, because in that way she could transmute it into something fantastic, and smile at what otherwise must have broken her heart. She did not try to reconcile her grandmother to what her grandmother held her weak recreancy, but she reconciled herself to her grandmother, and assented and coaxed and had her way, and kept Langbrith from offering his antagonist a vain and exasperating propitiation. Mrs. Southfield’s antagonism endured to the end. On her death-bed she left Hope a hoarsely whispered warning against the Langbrith tribe, as her last charge.

She might be said to have died of her vivid sense of a vague and unavenged injury, but her injury died with her, and with her died the sole reason against Hope’s marriage.

There were people who contended for the fact of an unbecoming haste in her marriage, but these in their censure made no provision for the life of the girl, otherwise left absolutely alone in the world. Mrs. Enderby led the party against them, and with the support of Mrs. Garley, and their respective husbands, declared that Hope should not observe a vain decorum in waiting for a certain period of mourning to pass. She was married from the rectory, which Mrs. Enderby had made her make her home, three months after her father’s death, and something less than three weeks after her grandmother’s, and she went at Christmas to live with her husband in his father’s house. Mrs. Enderby would have liked to infer a mystical significance from the coincidence of the event with the sacred time, when peace on earth and good-will was prophesied in every sort. If Dr. Enderby had been still a Unitarian, she would have openly done so, but under the circumstances she was not sure how far she might loose her imagination without compromising some doctrinal position of his, or committing him to what he might have felt a sentimental fancy. She confined herself to suggesting the notion to him, and contented herself with his assent that they might tacitly draw what comfort they could from the notion.

She did not feel it right to share it with Hope, but she permitted herself to share fully with the girl the promise of her new happiness. There was no question of primacy, in the house where Hope went to live, between the elder and the younger Mrs. Langbrith. People are modified rather than essentially changed, and it would be fatuous to pretend that James Langbrith was not irked in his love of fitnesses by his wife’s continuing in certain things her relation of guest to the house where she was really mistress. She left her mother-in-law the head of the table, and the poor woman whose life had always been in such an abeyance seemed to satisfy an instinct of dominance, never gratified before, in this shadowy superiority. The two worked equally together in other things of the house, and there was no change except a turning, so gradual as to be almost imperceptible, of the old Norah and of Mary, the cook, to the younger Mrs. Langbrith for instructions.

The change did not awaken any apparent jealousy in the passive nature of the elder woman, whose bearing towards her son betrayed no trace of the past conflict of her weak will with his strong will. At times, when he feared himself to have been almost obviously impatient with her illusory headship, or when Hope interpreted his restiveness to him in that sense and blamed it, he sought little occasions of reparation. But those seemed to afflict her, and Hope had to warn him against being apparently other than he had always been to her. He had to bear with that as he had to bear with another trial, which was less real. He had imagined removing his father’s portrait from its place over the library mantel, but when he intimated his wish to Hope she vehemently forbade it. That, she said, was no more to be thought of, without the leading that Dr. Enderby had insisted upon as Langbrith’s rule of action, than the removal of the commemorative tablet from the front of the town library. They must both stay till the providential time came.

As a matter of fact that time has never come. The evil life of Royal Langbrith remains as he hid it, except for the few contemporary and subsequent witnesses of it. To the rest of the community nothing is known; but as happens with men sometimes of whom nothing is known, there has grown up in the public mind a certain conjecture of discredit. This may have sprung from chance expressions of Mrs. Southfield, in her theoretical distrust of the whole Langbrith tribe; she could not always be silent before people; but what is certain is that, from the moment of the dedication of the votive tablet by the son, the myth of the father suffered a kind of discoloration, not to say obscuration. Nobody could then say whether he was really the saint and sage that he was reputed, and of what nobody can say the contrary can be affirmed without contention, with, even some honor to the shrewd conjecture of those who affirm it.

The silence of Royal Langbrith’s widow continued as unbroken as that of Anther in his grave. It was so inveterately the habit of her life that she never betrayed herself to Hope, and what passed between her and her son is as if it had never passed. The whole incident of her proposed marriage with the man who was so truly her friend is without trace in her actual relation to her son. It may be that the forces of her nature exhausted themselves in the struggle to accomplish her happiness, or it may be that her happiness was never essentially involved, and that she submitted to her fate without the suffering which Mrs. Enderby preferred to imagine of her. She never spoke of Anther, and whether she ever thought of him in the tender reverence which was his due Mrs. Enderby could not decide. Sometimes she was intolerably vexed with Mrs. Langbrith, sometimes she was resigned to the submission in which she saw the life of Mrs. Langbrith passing. That, when she came to think of it, was not without its dignity; and it was not what Anther himself, she realized, would have had changed into a futile rebellion. She realized, in her most vehement emotion, that there were women who had been long happily married, and who when widowed lived on in the same silence concerning the happiness they had lost as Mrs. Langbrith kept concerning the happiness she never knew.

Whether she duly enjoyed the happiness of her son in his wife was another question which vexed the kindly witness; but she saw that at least Mrs. Langbrith lived in harmony with them, and that a quiet pervaded the whole household which might very well pass for peace. After a certain period, which John Langbrith himself fixed for the instruction of his nephew in the business of the mills, James Langbrith took charge of them, and released his uncle to that voyage round the world in whose course he was to lose his dyspepsia, perhaps, with that equatorial day which lapses from the circumnavigator’s calendar. He lost the day, if not the dyspepsia, and he returned with strength sufficiently renewed to bear it, which is probably the only real form of cure known to suffering. He then offered to let his nephew go back to Paris, if he wished, and resume his dramaturgical studies. There had been no explicit reconciliation between them, but a better reciprocal knowledge had done the effect of this, and it was with a respect for his nephew’s ambition which he had not felt before that John Langbrith  proposed to take up his job again in its entirety. The younger man did not respond directly. He asked his uncle, who had stopped in Paris on his way home, how Falk seemed to be getting on, and John Langbrith said Falk seemed to be doing well, and was at any rate working like a beaver; he had made a study of this fact, for he knew that James was paying his friend’s way, and he did not want him to waste his money. He was not a judge of painting, but he was a judge of working, and Falk was working.

James Langbrith asked, “Did you have any talk with him about me?”

“Yes, I did,” the uncle said, more promptly than willingly.

“What did he say?”

“Well, he said he would like to have you back, but—”

“Well?”

“If you really meant business, you could write  plays in Saxmills as well as in Paris. You could get it out of you, anywhere, if you had it in you.” James Langbrith did not ask if Falk had said anything of Susie Johns; he knew from Hope that their affair had been one of those without seriousness on either side, which pass with our young people in frequent succession, failing to eventuate in the matrimony which would be otherwise universal among us — without attaching blame to either side. There was something else that interested the young man infinitely more in the things that his uncle volunteered to tell him. John Langbrith, with greater reluctance than could have been predicated of him, either by himself or others, approached a fact which he said James ought to know, and when, without further preamble, he came out with it, his nephew agreed with him. One day, at his hotel in Paris, he had received the visit of a lady who seemed at first disposed to make a mystery of herself. She was the widow, she said, of a gentleman who had so far deceived her in marriage as not to have left her, at his death, so well provided for as she had expected, and she bore more heavily upon his’ want of candor in this respect than her own in another, though she was presently obliged to be entirely frank with. John Langbrith. She was, it then appeared, the mother of that other family of his brother, who had provided for her so well that she was able to figure as a widow in easy circumstances when contracting her subsequent marriage. But her money had gone in the speculations which her husband was always engaging in for the increase of his fortune, and, if her children had not been nearly all provided for in successful marriages, she would not have known what to do. She did not know what to do now, in the case of the daughter whom she had with her in Paris for the cultivation of her voice. She had, as she said, kept track of Mr. Langbrith’s family, and she had heard that he left a son — by another marriage, as she said; for in the retrospect she preferred to treat Royal Langbrith’s relation to her as bigamous — very comfortably off. Without actually putting it, she left with John Langbrith  the question whether this son might not like to do something for his sister, and, without actually putting it, John Langbrith now left the question with his nephew.

After a moment, James Langbrith asked, with a sickened face, “Did you see the girl?”

“Yes, I did.”

“What sort of a girl was she?”

“About the sort her mother was, I guess, at her age. Why not?”

“Did you hear her sing?”

“She can sing all right, I guess. Maybe that’ll keep her straight. Any rate, it don’t seem to matter so much in that line of life.”

“Yes,” James Langbrith assented, from the dark, unwilling knowledge of the theatre which in the way of his ambition had revolted more than it had ever interested him. He added, “I will speak to Hope,” and John Langbrith being apparently as sick of the subject as himself, they dropped it. James Langbrith took it up again that night with his wife, recurring to the general fact in his father’s history with the shrinking which he did not understand her not understanding. When he had got the fact before her, “What ought I to do?” he asked, with a frown of disgust, as at some loathsome sight.

“You ought to tell your mother, in the first place,” Hope said, and he answered, with still stronger repulsion:

“I don’t see how I can.”

“No,” she assented. “I guess I shall have to do it for you,” and Langbrith perhaps never felt so deeply her goodness and greatness as in this. With her wifely instinct, and the motherly instinct which was prophesying in her heart, she made known the fact to that virginal nature which never otherwise approached it. Mrs. Langbrith perhaps never fully realized the relation that established itself between her son and his father’s past in his assumption of his father’s cast responsibility, but Langbrith did so to the last fibre of his being. He needlessly stipulated with those people, as he always characterized them in his thought, that the recognition of the tie acknowledged was to be absolutely tacit; they had really no more wish to have it known than he; but at the bottom of Hope’s heart there was what must be called a curiosity concerning her half-sister-in-law which she did not venture to own till she had Langbrith at disadvantage where he was helpless. It was when they hung together one night over the cradle of their first-born, and felt the holiness of her innocence purify their hearts, that she said, dreamily, “If she were the child of people who had done wrong, I suppose she would be just as pure and sweet.”

“What do you mean, Hope?” he cried, and she told him how she often thought of that girl, and how she longed to know what she was like, or what she looked like.

“Hope,” he asked, “have you ever told Mrs. Enderby?”

“Indeed, I haven’t!” she said, and then, woundedly, she asked, “Do you think I would speak of it without your knowing?”

“No, and I beg your pardon. I will ask the woman to send her picture.”

But when the picture came, with the girl in the pose of the first part that had been given her in comic opera at Milan, which it had been her pride or her mother’s to perpetuate in photography, Hope first gave the laugh that had so often defended her against the trials of life, and then prepared to break the blow to her husband.

He only glanced at the picture and said, without offering to take it from her, “We must keep on with the allowance,” as if it had been in his mind instantly to withdraw it. He never asked her what she did with the picture, but when she had put it definitely away she remained with a longing to laugh herself over with somebody, in view of this oversatiation of her curiosity. She resisted her impulse to such a confidence with Mrs. Enderby not only because she was bound in honor against it, but because she did not believe Mrs. Enderby could enter perfectly into the spirit of the affair. The wife of the rector, and through her the rector himself, continued in that patience with Providence which those more intimately concerned were obliged to practise in a situation of apparently indefinite duration. Enderby’s patience was more tacit than that of Mrs. Enderby, with whom it often took the form of inquiry whether he thought there would ever be any revelation of the secrets of Royal Langbrith’s life. She alleged that passage of scripture to which she had recurred from the beginning of her own privity. “There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hid that shall not be known,” and required him to reconcile it with the case in hand. Though she had agreed with Hope about that when the girl first offered her interpretation of the text, she had since had her recurrent misgivings, and she wished for a fuller exegesis from her husband.

Enderby was loath to put his wife off with the only answer he could make, and to say that, in the spiritual continuity of existence, eternity was not too far a term for the judgment of offences. He did not suffer with her at the hold which a bad man’s life had kept after his death on those who survived him, and he reasoned in vain that good, evidently, and not evil, had come to others from leaving his life where the man himself had left it. In her soul she would have been willing the justice she longed for should have included the innocent as well as the guilty, but he gave her pause by making her reflect that in this instance earthly justice would include the innocent alone.

“Then you mean,” she persisted, “that it must all go over to the day of judgment?”

“You know,” he returned, “that I never like to say those positive things. But if we suppose that there is a day of judgment in the old sense, what else could it be for except for those sins on which justice has apparently been adjourned from the earthly tribunals?”

“There is something in that,” she was forced to own.

“Besides, how do we know that upon this particular sinner justice has not already been done?”

“Why, what ever happened to him?”

“The fortitude of a man is no more the measure of his suffering than his weakness is. The strong suffer as much as the weak — only, they do not show it.”

“Then you mean that Royal Langbrith suffered all that made his wife, and that other wretched woman, and Hope’s father, and Dr. Anther, and poor James Langbrith suffer?”

“I don’t say that. But could there be fearfuller suffering than his consciousness in his sudden death that he could not undo here the evil he had done? Why should we suppose him to have been without that anguish, if men in the presence of mortal peril are tormented with the instantaneous vision of their whole lives?”

Mrs. Enderby was silent, and measurably appeased. But then the rector went a step further, and in this it must be owned she could never follow him, great as her faith in him was. “How do we know but that in that mystical legislation, as to whose application to our conduct we have to make our guesses and inferences, there may not be a law of limitations by which the debts overdue through time are the same as forgiven? No one was the poorer through their non-payment in Royal Langbrith’s case; in every high sort each was the richer. It may be the complicity of all mortal being is such that the pain he inflicted was endured to his behoof, and that it has helped him atone for his sins as an acceptable offering in the sort of vicarious atonement which has always been in the world.”

“But the blight — the misery he has left behind him?” she protested.

“Why,” the rector said, “he seems to have left that around him rather than behind him. He made some of his own generation miserable — Hawberk and his wife, and his own wife, and that other woman, and Anther for them and with them. But Hope and James Langbrith are not unhappy. They are radiantly happy, and more wisely happy for tasting the sorrow which has not passed down to their generation.”

“Then you don’t believe that the children’s teeth are set on edge by the sour grapes their fathers have eaten? What does the scripture say?”

“There are many scriptures, my dear. The scripture also says that the son who has not done the iniquities of the father shall not pay their penalty.”

THE END

MISS BELLARD’S INSPIRATION

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

I

“My dear, will you please read that letter again?” Mrs. Crombie said, in tones that might either be those of entreaty for her husband’s compliance, or command of his obedience, or appeal to his clearer impression from the confusion which her niece’s letter had cast her into. She began in a high, imperative note, and ended in something like an imploring whimper. She had first read the letter herself, and then thrown it across the breakfast-table to Crombie; and as he began to read it to himself she now added, “Aloud!”

“I don’t see any use in that,” he said. “There’s no mystery about it.”

“No mystery, when a girl like Lillias Bellard starts up out of space and asks a thing like that? We might as well sell the place at once. It will be as bad as The Surges before the summer is over; and I did think that if we came and built inland we could have a little peace of our lives.” Crombie trivially thought of saying, “Little pieces of our lives,” but he did not, and she went on: “If it’s going on like this, the mountains will be as bad as the seashore, and there will be nothing left but Europe. Give me that letter, Archibald!”

She recovered it from his wanderingly extended left hand, his right being employed in filling up his cup with the exactly proportioned due of hot milk which he poured so as to make a bead on the surface of the coffee.

“I can’t make Lillias out,” Mrs. Crombie flamed forth again. “She is a sly girl; or at least I have always considered her so.”

“It isn’t a sly letter,” Crombie suggested, impartially.

“No; and that is just it. Anything franker, or bolder, even, I’ve never seen in my family.” Crombie might have felt the emphasis a blow at his own family, but as he had none except the wife before him, he did not suffer it to alienate his sympathy from her. “If it was anybody but my own sister’s child, I should call it brazen. It’s a liberty, yes, a liberty, even if I am her aunt. She had no right to presume upon our relationship. If the Mellays are not able to receive her now, she might go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere!”

“I don’t see where. Her people are abroad, and the Mellays’ telegram postponing her a week, seems to have caught her at the end of her stipulated stay with the Franklings; and she can’t go to a hotel alone.”

“I don’t see why she can’t, with these advanced ideas of hers.”

“Because the hotel men are not as advanced in their ideas, and won’t receive a pretty young girl if she presents herself with no escort but her youth and beauty. She might as well be a Hebrew or an Ethiopian.”

“Well, it’s a shame! There ought to be a law to make them.”

“Oh, I dare say there is one now,” Crombie easily assented. “But come, Hester! This isn’t going to kill you. A niece for a week is no such mortal matter. One voluntary, or involuntary, guest doesn’t imply a succession of house-parties.”

“No, but it is the disappointment! My family, at least, know that we sold The Surges because I was completely worn out with people, and that we came up here into this by-gone hollow of the hills, on the wrong side of the Saco, and built a tumble-down old farm-house over so as to be alone in it.”

“Then you oughtn’t to have built the old farm-house over so nicely. Lillias will go away, and tell everybody that you’ve got electric lights, and hot and cold water, and a furnace, and all the modem conveniences, and the most delightful rambling camp, with ten or twenty bedrooms, and open fires for cold days in every one. She will say that it isn’t dull here a bit; that there’s a hotel full of delightful people just across the Saco, which you get to by private ferry, and hops every night, with a young man to every ten girls, and picnics all the time, and lots of easy mountain-climbing.”

“Yes, that is the worst of it. Very well, I shall telegraph her not to come, I don’t care what happens. I shall say, ‘Very sorry. Uncle sick; not dangerously; but all taken up with him.’ That’s just ten words.”

“Twelve; and not one true. Besides, where will you telegraph her? She’s started. She left Kansas City yesterday.”

“Nonsense!”

“All the same, that’s what’s happened.”

“Very well, then, I know what I shall do. I shall engage a room for her at The Saco Shore, if it’s full of such delightful people—”

“Hold on, my dear! That was merely my forecast of her language.”

“No matter! And you can meet her at the station and tell her what I’ve done, and take her there. I am not going to be scooped up, even if she is my niece. And so Lillias Bellard will find out.”

Mrs. Crombie gathered the offending letter and its envelope violently together, and started from the table as if to go at once and carry out her declared purpose. But she really went up-stairs to decide which of the bedrooms she should give the girl. She began with the worst and ended with the best, which looked eastward in that particular crook of the river towards the Presidential range, and, if you poked your head out, commanded a glimpse of the almost eternal snows of Mount Washington where a drift of the belated winter was glimmering, now at the end of July, in a fold of the pachy-dermal slope. She had always to play some such comedy with herself before she could reconcile herself to the inevitable; and her husband was content to have her do so, as long as her drama did not involve his complexity with the inevitable. But the wildest stroke of her imagination could not inculpate him in the present affair; and though she felt it somewhat guilty of him to attempt any palliation of Lillias Bellard’s behavior, she also felt it kind, and was very good to him the whole day on account of it; so that he was able honestly to pity her for the base of real tragedy he knew in her comedy. They had not only sold The Surges, where they had spent twenty summers, because of the heavy drain of hospitality upon her energies there, but because they had been offered a very good price for it, and they believed that the air of the mountains would be better for their rheumatisms. It formed at any rate a more decided change from the air of Boston; and the sale of The Surges was not altogether that sacrifice to solitude which her passionate resentment of the first menace of it had made it seem to her. Still there were associations with the things brought from the seaside cottage which supported her in the change, and which now burdened her with unavailing suggestions of how easy it would have been to make Lillias have a nice time in the more familiar environment. She sighed to herself in owning that she did not know what she should do with the girl where they were; for already, as she went through the house, she forgot her own hardship in realizing how difficult, with only the Saco Shore House to draw upon, it would be to amuse the child.

It was an essential part of her comedy to keep this transmutation of moods from Crombie; her self-respect required it, and experience had taught her that the most generous of men would take a mean advantage if he could, and would turn from pitying to mocking her for the change. There was no outward change from the effect of plaintive submission into which she had sunk by their one-o’clock dinner-time, when, in the later afternoon she asked him to take her adrive: the last, she predicted, they should have alone together that summer. Some part of the way she dedicated to a decent pathos in the presence of scenery endeared by their unmolested meanderings, and the thought of the sweet intimacy in which they had all but got back their young married selves. But the time and the place came when she could stand it no longer, and he was hardly surprised to have her break out with the unrelated conjecture, “I wonder what she has got up her sleeve.”

“A young man, probably,” he suggested. “Don’t be coarse! What makes you think that?”

“I don’t know that I think that, or anything. What’s the use of worrying about it? She’ll be here so soon.”

“Well, I really believe she has. And I shall watch her, I can tell you. If Aggie Bellard” — Mrs. Crombie branched away in the direction of the girl’s mother— “thinks she can go off to Europe for the summer, and leave Lillias scattered broadcast over the continent, with no one to look after her, she is very much mistaken.” This was the expression of such very complex feeling that Crombie could reply with nothing so well as a spluttering laugh. His wife knew perfectly what his laugh meant, and she went on: “I never approved of her second marriage, any-way, and I am not going to have Lillias shouldered off on me to make room for a second family in her mother’s house. Archibald!” she cried, and she had to use him very sternly in the tone she was really taking with her sister and niece, “do you suppose it’s a plot between them to get Lillias here with us, so that she can ingratiate herself with me, and just keep staying on indefinitely? Because if you do,” she continued to threaten him, while she cast about in her mind for a penalty severe enough to fit the offence, “I won’t have it!”

This was so ineffective that he had to laugh again, but he reconciled her to his derision by the real compassion with which he said, “You know you don’t suppose anything of the kind yourself. It’s a perfectly simple case, and the only reasonable conjecture is that Lillias has told you the exact truth in her letter. She is coming here because she has nowhere else to put in the time till the Mellays are ready for her, and in a week she will be gone. I don’t think that will make any serious break in the quiet of our summer. At any rate, you can’t help yourself.”

“No, I can’t,” Mrs. Crombie recognized. “But if she imagines that she is going to hoodwink me!”

She did not attempt to say what she would do in such an event, and her husband felt no anxiety as to the sort of time Lillias would have under his roof.

II

THE maid met them on their return with word that a gentleman had called while they were away. On rigid question from Mrs. Crombie she confessed that he seemed rather short and fair, but this proved to be partially an effect from Mrs. Crombie’s displeasure with his being first long and dark. The girl was quite sure that he had a mustache, though she afterwards corrected herself so far as to say that his hair was cut close. He had asked for no one but Mr. Crombie, who evinced so little interest in his visitor that after a casual glance at his card he left it to the scrutiny by which his wife sought to divine him from it. From evidences not apparent to Crombie, she had decided that it was an English card, and that Mr. Edmund Craybourne was English himself, because he had no middle name, not even a middle initial.

“Did he leave any message?” She now turned upon the maid again.

“No, ma’am.”

“Did he say he would come back?”

“He didn’t say, m’m.”

“Did he tell you whether he was stopping at the Saco Shore House?”

“He didn’t tell anything, m’m.”

With these facts in hand, Mrs. Crombie followed her husband to his room, where he was washing the odor of his driving-gloves from his hands, and asked him what he had to say now about Lillias Bellard.

“Well, when I said there was a young man in question, you told me not to be indecent.”

“‘Coarse,’ I said; and it was coarse. Do you suppose this is the young man?”

“Not if there is none.”

“Well, I know it is. Now what are you going to do? He didn’t say where he was staying, and you will have to wait till he comes back. But what will you do, then?”

“I will settle that when I see him,” Crombie said, applying himself vigorously to the towel. “If he is short and fair and fat, I may fall upon him and rend him; but if he is long and lank and dark, I may consider about it; though I don’t know why I should do anything at all, come to think of it.”

“No,” Mrs. Crombie allowed, “I don’t know why you should. In fact, I should prefer to see him myself. I could get it out of him better.”

She did not say what it was, and the whole situation was simplified, as to action, by the young man’s not coming back, though it was intensified as a mystery by his failure to reappear. In this aspect it supplied Mrs. Crombie with conversation quite to the end of supper, when the barge of the Saco Shore House drove up, and left Lillias Bellard and her baggage at the cottage door. Her aunt welcomed her with a warmth which she could not have imagined of herself, and affectionately ignored the girl’s excuses for coming so much sooner than she had said, and so much later; for the train that brought her twenty-four hours ahead of time was a whole hour behind. For that reason she sat down to her retarded supper nearly a day before she should have had any supper at all. Her justification was that she had found people she knew coming on, and she had thought it best to come with them, hoping it would not make too much difference to her aunt Hester.

She was a pretty girl of what Crombie in his quality of incomplete artist decided was a silvery type, singularly paintable in the relation of her gray-green eyes to the argent tones of her travelling-costume, her hat and ribbons and her gloves. You must take her, of course, with the same intention and intelligence that she had taken herself with, or as much of it as you could get; for it was clear that she was dressed in the frankest sympathy with her own coloring, and in conscious rejection of all mistaken notions of contrast. If some girls made you think of May and others of July or August, the month that she made you think of was September: not the moods in which it mirrored the coming October, but those in which it suggested the youngest months of summer, or even spring. She was fairly mature, as he knew from his acquaintance with her history; she would not see twenty-seven again; but she gave you the same sort of contradictory impressions of youth and age that she gave you of knowingness and innocence, of self-reliance and helplessness, of ignorance and experience, and of energy that ended in indecision.

Crombie revolved these things in his mind, while he looked at her where she sat at table, talking with her aunt in a serenity like that of a September afternoon: her silvery veil misting her gray hat above her hair, sprinkled even at her age with gray, and her gray gloves lying beside her plate, physically but not spiritually detached from her gray costume. Her intelligent eyes, glancing from her aunt to him and back again to her, had lovely skyey lights in them, of the sort that haunt the horizons of the passing summer, when the deep turquoise of the upper heavens changes into the delicate emerald that seems a reflection of the green earth below. It struck him that if it were really a question of his wife’s knowing what her niece had up her sleeve, she would know no more than her niece chose to show; and if there were possibilities of her being quite willing to bare both her pretty arms to the elbows it might be in the confident skill with which the prestidigitator chooses to convince the witness that there is really nothing of preparation for the feat he is about to perform, in order to heighten the effect of it.

A sense of her contradictions persisted when she rose from the table and stood not so high as he had expected, and again when she followed her aunt up-stairs with a deceptive show of height from the skirt that trailed behind her. He was shut from the revelation of the slight and rather small figure which Lillias made to Mrs. Crombie, in her room, when she had reduced herself to the fact by putting off her jacket and hat, and stood waiting in her shirt-waist for her aunt to finish explaining why she gave her that room and not another. Mrs. Crombie ended by saying that she supposed Lillias must be very tired, and would want to be going to bed; but Lillias answered, not at all, and would not her aunt sit down? She said that one got so used to distances in the West that trains rather rested one than not. Besides, she had enjoyed a season of such entire vegetation, since Commencement, out on the Pacific coast, that a little fatigue would be an agreeable variety which she would be glad to be aware of. At the same time she hid a yawn with such skill that it made her aunt respect her, and resolve to spare her as soon as she got what she wished out of her.

She sat down provisionally and asked Lillias whether she was going back there in the fall, and when the girl said she did not know but she was, Mrs. Crombie said it must be very queer, co-education. “Aren’t they apt to get married?” she asked, with a frown of polite disgust.

“Well, yes, they are,” Lillias admitted. “But that isn’t considered such a very bad thing, out there. You might say that there was a good deal of courting, but there is very little flirting; and there is nothing that is so instantly sat upon by the girls themselves as the least fastness. But I don’t come in on the question anywhere. I’m ‘one of the faculty,’ but my professorship, if it’s that, is teaching the advanced pupils of the upper-grade schools that form part of the university. My undergraduate classes average about fourteen for girls, and fifteen or sixteen for boys, and there hasn’t been a marriage among them for the whole year past. My postgraduate lecture audiences are mostly made up of townspeople who are married already.”

She smiled very amusingly upon her aunt at the end of a speech which she made with pretty turns of her head and a final droop of her shoulders and a forward thrust of her chin above her hands fallen into each other in her lap. It was very young-ladyish, and as little academical as could be, so that her aunt, who had feared among other things that the child was going to be priggish, was entirely consoled. Lillias was in the department of oratory, and she might have been expected to have a public manner, or an elocutionary manner, but anything more private or colloquial than her manner Mrs. Crombie had not seen. It was with the determination not to be overcome by the peculiar charm which she felt in her, and yet not to use unnecessary violence in avoiding the dust which Lillias might attempt to throw into her eyes, that Mrs. Crombie now no longer delayed coming down to business.

“Lillias,” she said, with a skirmishing laugh, and trying not to say it with any change of note, “we have had a very strange call this afternoon. Some gentleman whom we don’t at all know asked for Mr. Crombie, while we were driving, and left his card. We thought perhaps he was an acquaintance of yours, or it may be some mistake of his; though the maid was very sure that he asked for Mr. Crombie by name.”

Mrs. Crombie gave Lillias Mr. Craybourne’s card, and that girl looked at it with a carelessness which only partially faded from her manner as she read. She said, “Really!” and she might apparently have contented herself with that brief comment if her aunt had not prompted her.

“You know him?”

“Yes,” Lillias said, promptly enough.

Mrs. Crombie, as lightly and brightly as she could, suggested, “And you expected him?”

Lillias laughed after a little absence and silence, “Well, not quite so soon, Aunt Hester. I didn’t expect him for a day or two yet. I won’t let him bother you.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Crombie said, with a flight of generous insincerity, “any friend of yours!” and she prepared, with an effect of going away, which did not even lift her out of her chair, to make her next approach still more delicately. “We thought, somehow, that he was an Englishman.”

The candor of Lillias in replying could not have been greater if she was actually trying to conceal something. “Well, he is, Aunt Hester. He’s one of those younger sons who rather abound out there.”

“Oh, indeed! And the eldest son—” It was a little too leading, even with the abrupt stop that Mrs. Crombie made.

“Isn’t a title, in this case. But there’s property, and Mr. Craybourne’s brother got it all, I guess, except the money that Mr. Craybourne has spent in amateur ranching. He’s very nice, I may as well tell you at once, Aunt Hester. He’s cultivated and well - read and well - mannered. Our men have no manners, though some of them will have when my boys grow up through the department of applied conduct, which is really my job, though I pretend to teach the niceties of speech and pronunciation only. Yes, I like Mr. Craybourne very, very much,” Lillias concluded, and she remained looking at the card in her left palm, as if it were the sort of photograph that used to be called a carte-de-visite.

Mrs. Crombie made several attempts to speak, which ended, as they began, in gasps, and left Lillias to go on, as she did, thoughtfully.

“He is very nice, and very bidable, though what he might be afterwards!—”

Now, indeed, Mrs. Crombie broke from her inarticulate struggles. “Why, Lillias Bellard, are you engaged to Mr. Craybourne?”

“Well, no. But we’re seeing.”

III

CROMBIE, when his wife had rejoined him, sat dripping, as it were, from the deluge of conjectures, facts, and reflections which she had hastened to pour out on him after coming away from Lillias.

“Anything more outspoken, more boldfaced, more unblushing! If those are the manners that she is teaching the youth out there under the guise of elocution!”

“There does seem to be a sort of brazen ingenuousness in it,” Crombie allowed. “But you can’t say there’s anything deceitful. And that’s what you dreaded.”

“I don’t know whether I dreaded it. But I did hope that if Lillias had anything to conceal she would manage it with a little finesse, a little delicacy. I hoped that if she was going to bring the burden of a love-affair into the house with her, she would have the grace to carry it off so that it shouldn’t seem to be a burden. But the brutal frankness with which she dumps it all on me!”

“I don’t call it brutal,” Crombie said, with an air of reasoning, “though it is certainly frank. I think it has its charm. It’s deliciously honest, and it ought to be a relief to you, after the duplicity you’ve been dreading — the finesse, as you call it.”

“I call it duplicity, pretending to come here for a week, so as to bridge over between visits, and meaning all the time to make us a base of operations, with him at the Saco Shore House, so that they can see each other constantly under my very wing. If that isn’t finesse, I don’t know what it is!”

“Then, I don’t see what you have to complain of, with frankness and finesse both on hand in one and the same Mephistophelean innocent.”

“Oh, Archie!” Mrs. Crombie whimpered. “It’s the care! It’s the terrible disappointment of a broken-up summer! It’s having the disturbance of it going on under our roof day after day, when I was looking forward to such a complete rest with you, dear! It’s enough to make me wish we were back at The Surges. You had better sell this place at once.”

“There’ll be time enough to think about that and to change our minds twice or thrice. Mountain property hasn’t the instant convertibility of shore property. I should find some difficulty in giving this place away if I was in a hurry to get rid of it. Fortunately I’m not. Did she tell you how they happened to meet?”

“Oh, romantically enough, I believe. After his last failure in ranching he was quite at leisure, and he came into town to pass the time at the hotel, and think. There he heard of Lillias’s lectures, or talks, which were open to the public — really, I can’t imagine it, but her lectures seem to be quite a fad, out there — and he went to one of them, and then he went to all that were left of them. At last he got himself introduced; though why he didn’t at first she couldn’t understand, unless it was his English shyness. After he did it seems to have been plain sailing, as far as they’ve gone.”

“And how far have they gone?”

“Well, she doesn’t seem to know, exactly. The case appears to be that she has some doubts of marriage itself.”

“Oh, come, now! A pretty girl like that?”

“I don’t see what her prettiness has to do with it. A great many girls are that way, now. They look at it very cool-headedly. They don’t like to give up their liberty unless they’re certain of their happiness, and they see, if they look round them at all, that there’s a great deal of unhappiness in marriage.”

“They could always get divorced.”

“Yes, but they don’t like that — nice girls don’t. They’d rather not go in for it, to begin with. It seems that Lillias has a great idea of being honest with herself. Really, to hear her talk — I wish you could have been at the key-hole!”

“I wish I could — if I may be as honest as Lillias.”

“It seems that it wasn’t the hard work, or the beginning at the bottom, or the personal exhibition, as Mrs. Kemble calls it, which kept her from going on the stage. There was a manager quite ready to take her from the dramatic school and feature her, as she said, in a new play—”

“Don’t go too far back!”

“I’m not, but you can’t understand if I don’t. — It was the perpetual pretence; what she felt was the essential and final falsity of a life that consisted in the representation of emotions that were not really felt. In short, the insincerity.”

“Well?”

“Well — where was I? Oh yes! She felt that if she had no doubt about marrying Mr. Craybourne she would have no misgivings about marriage; or if she had perfect faith in marriage she could confidently trust herself in marrying him. But as she has neither, she can’t.”

Crombie rubbed his forehead, as if to clear away a cloud within. “I don’t believe I’ve followed you,” he said.

“Why, he’s offered himself, but she hasn’t thought it out yet.”

“And she’s got him here to help her think?”

“That is where the sinuosity comes in; that is where Lillias shows herself a true girl.”

Crombie laughed. “And what does she expect us to do?”

“Do you know what she said to me? Not just in so many words, but that was the sum and substance of it. She made a long, sly preamble about having always thought us the happiest married couple she had ever seen, the most united and harmonious; and she wanted Mr. Craybourne to know us, too.”

“As a sort of object-lesson? I’m not sure that I should like to be studied. It would make me conscious.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Crombie said, with a seriousness which amazed him, “it’s very flattering.”

“It’s taffy of the most barefaced description. Now, my dear, you look out for that girl. Don’t trust her beyond your sight. Does she expect us to take any active part in regard to this Englishman of hers?”

“Oh no. And I quite agree with you about her slyness. There can’t be so much smoke without some fire, and I shall certainly watch her. She wants to commit us to some scheme in her mother’s absence, and I am not going to be used. She will find that out.”

The talk of the Crombies ended for the night in a very exhaustive analysis of the relations of Lillias to her more immediate family, then as remote in space as close in blood, and in a just recognition of how very little the girl, left to shift for herself, owed her mother in obedience or deference. Mrs. Crombie led the conclusion in censure of her sister, with those reserves in behalf of her peculiarities which a woman sometimes likes to make in judging her next of kin, as if their eccentricities somehow reflected picturesqueness if not praise upon herself. Lillias, she said, had come honestly by anything that was original in her; and she did not know but that if the girl was now hesitating in a way that was ridiculous about accepting Mr. Craybourne, she was certainly improving upon her mother, who used to be always hesitating about people after she had accepted them, and sometimes after she had married them. In the case of Lillias’s father, she reminded Crombie, Aggie’s misgiving had gone so far as to have the character of a provisional separation for a whole year before his death. She asked Crombie if he did not think that this showed a real honesty in the child; and he said that he did. By this time he was so sleepy that he would have said anything.

He was quite as compliant when he woke, but he found his wife of another mind, after a night passed beyond the influence of her niece. She came into his room before he was up, or fairly awake, fully dressed and with a defensive armor invisibly on, which she betrayed in saying, “Well, she is a case.”

“Why, what has she been doing now?” Crombie asked, instantly roused to consciousness.

“Oh, nothing. I have just been thinking her over, and I have gone back to my first impressions. I think what she has done is enough without anything more. The question is, what ought we to do? Shall we quietly ignore Mr. Craybourne until she chooses to make a move, or shall we ignore her, and you go over to the Saco Shore and call upon him, and take the bull by the horns? Do you know, my dear, I believe that’s just what she wants you to do. How can we tell but it’s a plot between them to force our hands? There’s every probability, to my mind, that she planned for him to get here before her, so that he would come and be looked over before she arrived, and we be driven at the point of the bayonet to say what we think of him. I’ll bet anything you dare that she was enraged beyond description when she found that she had missed fire, and that we hadn’t seen him, after all!”

“I don’t think it’s fair,” Crombie said, “to use such various and vigorous imagery with a man that’s still on his back.”

“Well, you must get up, then.” She had been going about, pulling up window-shades and throwing open shutters, as she talked, and she now confronted him in the full light of day. “It’s nearly breakfast-time, anyway; and I want to talk it thoroughly over with you after you’re shaved.”

“I shall be clearer, then; but I shall be a great deal hungrier, and I don’t believe I can talk it over till I’ve had my coffee.”

“You’ve got to,” she said, going out of the room.

But before he had half finished shaving, and while he was still grieving inwardly at having to help his wife make up her mind about her niece all over again, he heard her voice gayly lifted and the clash of enthusiastic kisses in a pause of the rustling skirts that he knew to be meeting in the upper hallway on which all the bedroom doors opened. He noticed that his wife’s and her niece’s voices were very much alike in the one asking, “Why, child, you poor thing, are you up already? Why didn’t you let me send your breakfast to your room?” and the other answering, “Oh, I’m always up to breakfast, aunt, and I’m so be-youthfully rested, I couldn’t think of it.”

“Well, then, come right down. It’ll be on the table instantly,” he heard his wife continue. “Your uncle will come any old time, as he says, and we needn’t wait for him.”

“Well, I am rather nippish,” he heard Lillias owning in the same note.

The girl was very amusing, he thought, when he found them at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie said she had been telling about her university life, out there, and bade her go on.

“Oh, I don’t believe Uncle Archibald will care for it,” Lillias said, but she corrected herself so far as to add, “It is rather funny, I suppose, to you, off here.” He liked her standing up so for her adoptive West, and he showed an immediate interest which inspired her. She was looking still prettier than the night before, and the flower-like freshness of her morning-dress was quite as becoming as the twilight tones which had clothed her as with a pensive music the night before. He tried to put out of his mind a saying to the effect that in the dark all cats are gray, while he found a singular pleasure in the pseudo-deference with which she addressed herself to him. “You see,” she continued, “that my lectures are rather outside of the regular courses, and that was the reason why the general public was always more or less at them. I believe they were popular, but I knew all the time that they would have been more popular if they had been more — well, humbuggy. And you know I couldn’t stand that, uncle,” she appealed to him with a sidelong glance.

“No,” he assented, in a way that made her laugh.

She went on: “People like that, both old and young, and I should have had all the unoccupied human material that goes into women’s clubs raving about me, if I had done some sort of Delsarte business; they would have much preferred a song and dance to the modesty of nature which I was trying to brag up by precept and practice. I was tolerably adored by my classes, as it was, but I should have had them in ecstasies if I had descended to the cheap kind of things we were taught to avoid in the dramatic school.”

“Yes,” Crombie said, and now Lillias did not immediately continue.

When she did, it was to say, with a silently accumulated frankness, “The only one, really, that thoroughly understood, from the first instant, what I was driving at, was Mr. Craybourne. I suppose,” she said, with another cast of her eyes, though this time it was rather defiant than appealing, towards Crombie, “Aunt Hester has told you about him?”

“Not at all! What about him?”

His effrontery made her laugh again.

“Oh, that’s another story, as Kipling says — or used to say; I believe he doesn’t say it now, any more. This story only relates to his telling me, as soon as he could manage to get introduced — which he did by very properly waiting and asking the president to perform the ceremony, when he could have got any soul in the place to do it at once — that I was the first person to give him the least notion of what nature was at.”

“Indeed!” Crombie said. “Did you believe him?”

“Not immediately. There’s nothing,” she deferred, “that we suspect so much as downright openness, is there?”

“It’s often very misleading.”

“Well, I found out afterwards that he really meant it. That,” she added, after a distinct interval, “was what gave me pause,” and Crombie felt that she had come to the other story. “There is no use beating about the bush, and I’m not going to. Aunt Hester,” she now turned to Mrs. Crombie, “I may as well say first as last that if the Mellays hadn’t providentially written to put me off a week I should have invented some providential excuse for coming to you and letting me meet Mr. Craybourne as nearly on the parental premises as I could get them.” Crombie stole a look at his wife, but he could detect nothing of resentment in her face; nothing but a generous and protecting welcome. She laid her left hand along the table towards the girl, and Lillias put hers gratefully into it. “You have done exactly right, my dear,” she said, and Lillias went on, piecing a little break in her voice:

“Even if mother were on the ground, and not off in the wilds of Europe somewhere, I should wish Uncle Archie’s approval, as I’ve no father of my own; for in the kind of scrambling life I’ve led I like to have a thing of this kind perfectly regular. I’m not the least bit bohemian, Aunt Hester, though I know you always thought me so—”

“No, my dear!” Mrs. Crombie protested, but Lillias tenderly insisted:

“Oh yes, you did, aunt, and I don’t blame you; I should have, myself. But at heart I’m deadly respectable, and Mr. Craybourne’s being an Englishman makes me all the more anxious to be more so; though he thinks the other kind of thing is charming, and was quite ready to be fetched by it — at least in my case. You see, I’m not having any concealments from you!”

“You needn’t have, poor child!” Mrs.

 Crombie said, so tenderly that Crombie kept himself with difficulty from a derisory snort.

“And now you have the whole thing before you. I have come to you simply for a social basis, a domestic hearth, a family fireside, and when Mr. Craybourne comes I want him to find me in a chimney-corner belonging to my own kith and kin.”

The terms of this declaration, and the mixed tones in which it was delivered, were such as to make Crombie feel that it need not be taken too seriously, though it could not be taken too earnestly; so, when his wife, with an adjuratory frown, indicated that it was for him, as head of the house, to make their joint response, he said, with a certain hardy gayety:

“And when is he coming?”

“Oh, any moment!” Lillias said, with a rueful little smile full of gladness at his light daring. “That is, if one can judge from his already being here before me. I suppose I may say that it wasn’t his fault that we are not here on our wedding journey.”

She turned from her uncle to her aunt in making this observation, and Mrs. Crombie met it in the same spirit. “Well, Lillias, I must say that you have done very wisely in the whole matter. I should never have forgiven myself if any fancied inconvenience to us had kept you from coming to us in such an emergency; and no matter how it turns out, I shall write to Aggie that you have done everything that a girl could do.”

“Thank you, Aunt Hester,” and the two women had a moment of mothering and daughtering in which Crombie could not join them.

“Well, I am prepared to do anything you want,” he said, with an ironical ease, and a genuine interest in the affair which he thought it more manly to conceal. “Do I understand that Mr. Craybourne will ask for me again?”

“Yes, indeed!” the girl said. “We are not out there now, and he knows it.”

“And what am I to say, when he asks to see you — if he does?”

Lillias looked at her aunt, who visibly failed to formulate a line of conduct for Crombie, and then she looked back at him, and said, caressingly, “Oh, just trust to the inspiration of the moment, uncle.”

“Then you leave it all to me?”

“Quite.”

“Well, I’ve never had the chance of forbidding a young man my house before, and perhaps I sha’n’t do it in just the way that this Mr. Craybourne is used to, but I think I can do it effectually.”

Crombie wore the mustache of his period branching into the side whiskers of the early eighteen-sixties, and it was with a fine flare of both that he now tilted his head on one side and waited for his wife and niece to precede him out of the breakfast-room. His beard and the gossamer traces of his hair were faded from their earlier red to an agreeable yellowish white, and his bulging blue eyes matched very well with them and with a complexion of ancestral Scotch floridity, so that as he stood leaning forward with his thumbs in his waistcoat-pockets he was such a fine elderly Du Maurier military type that Lillias could hardly forbear throwing him a kiss. She did forbear, but she forbore with a backward roll of her own eyes which had all the effect of a thrown kiss. “You’ll be splendid, Uncle Archie, whatever you do,” she encouraged him, though it made him tremble, almost, to see her put her arm round her aunt’s waist. He felt that she might carry it too far in constituting herself Mrs. Crombie’s protégée, and in fact he fancied Mrs. Crombie’s waist tacitly stiffening under the caress.

To make sure, he asked her, when Lillias had gone up to her room for a moment, “Then you’ve changed your mind about her?”

“Not at all!” his wife returned, in the scorn often used by women to give dignity to a misstatement. “I feel exactly as I did, though in an entirely different way. She is not underhanded, but overhanded, and she thinks that if she is perfectly transparent I shall not see through her. All is, I shall have to fight her in the open.”

“Where did you get that expression?” Crombie parleyed.

“I don’t know: in some of those English South African accounts. You know what I mean. She is determined to be married from this house.”

Crombie caught his breath, and then whistled.

“I can see it,” she went on, “as plain as the nose on my face. But I can tell her she won’t do it, without my knowing it.”

“I wish I knew what you meant by that,” Crombie sighed.

“Well, you will see.”

Just then Lillias’s trailing skirts were heard on the stairs like the drift of fallen leaves down a forest path.

IV

MR. CRAYBOURNE, whatever were his impulses to an earlier call, had quelled them so far as not to come before eleven o’clock in the morning, though why he should have come before the afternoon can be explained only on the ground that the country informality and the summer heat had relaxed him to a social freedom which he might not otherwise have permitted himself. When he did come, however, he was not relaxed to the extreme of asking for Miss Bellard. He asked for Mr. Crombie, and he was shown to him in the library, a room that few men could have had so little need of as the master of the house. It had some books, mostly dishevelled paper copies of novels, tumbling about on its shelves; and it was stuck round with Crombie’s sketches on pasteboard and canvas, memories of The Surges and its scenery, and forecasts of the White Mountain landscape, and bits of the Saco valley. Crombie was so old-fashioned in his methods that these attempts were like rejected studies by poorer masters of the extinct White Mountain school. He was ranging among them, trying, with his mouth puckered to an inaudible whistle, to make choice of some one or other that might be carried farther, when Mr. Craybourne rang. Crombie had almost forgotten about him, but he now started into a sense of him that took all nature out of his careless ease. He came forward, however, with outstretched hand, and welcomed him. He said, “Ah, how do you do, Mr. Craybourne?” in a tone of expectation that struck upon his own ear as not quite the thing; and he did not know whether he mended matters much or not by adding, “Sorry not to have been at home when you called yesterday. Sit down.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you,” Mr. Craybourne said, and after faltering a moment on foot he folded himself down and down, by what appeared to Crombie successive plications, into the rather low chair appointed him. The result of the process brought his face somewhat more on a level with Crombie’s, who was himself of such a good height that he was at least not used to being towered over, and who saw that Mr. Craybourne’s face was a decidedly handsome, tanned face, regular in feature, with rather deep-set blue eyes, and a skin burnished on the cheeks, chin, and upper lip by the very close shave which the barber at the Saco Shore House had just given him. He diffused, involuntarily, as Crombie decided, a faint and fainter odor of the bay-rum which he had not been quick enough to keep the barber from dabbling him with after the close shave; and he also seemed to have a good deal of wrist, from which, on the right and left, he nervously clasped his hat with slender, gentlemanly hands. His hands had been liberated from the labor of the fields by the failure of his ranching experiment so long as to have lost the brown of the sun and wind, but they had the tone of his complexion. The clasp he had given Crombie was soft, yet firm, and not at all damp, in spite of the nervousness that brought some perspiration to the young man’s straight, comely forehead.

The embarrassing variety of topics which Crombie had to choose from, in view of the intimate relations he found himself in with this perfect stranger through the frankness of Lillias Bellard, kept him silent for a breath or two. Then he said, “Fine day.”

“Yes,” Mr. Craybourne admitted, with an indrawn sigh, as if from the sense of reprieve. “But I suppose you expect fine weather at this time of year.”

Crombie saw his opening and said, “Yes, rather oftener than we get it,” and this made way for a mutual smile of such good-fellowship that it was easy for him to add, “I suppose I needn’t conceal that I know you wish to ask for Miss Bellard.” Mr. Craybourne could apparently do no more than laugh gratefully, and Crombie said, “She came last night, you know.”

“Yes, I know. I — I had the pleasure of seeing her at the station,” the young man innocently said, and Crombie concealed any surprise he felt at having ascertained a limit to Lillias Bellard’s frankness, which had seemed so unbounded. In fact, for a few seconds he felt no surprise, or anything at all, the effect of Mr. Craybourne’s simple statement was so benumbing. Then abysms of astonishment began to open within him, to which there was no bottom. Had the girl meant to tell her aunt of this meeting, and had the moment slipped by her in her first grapple with the fact of Craybourne’s presence, and got so far by that she could not overtake it? If she had meant to keep their meeting a secret, why had not she charged Craybourne not to speak of it? There was mystery here which Crombie’s plummet could not fathom, and before which he shuddered in conjecture, while he smiled to think how completely his wife had been taken in by her niece. He first abhorred the girl’s duplicity, and then his abhorrence yielded to pity for the unknown necessity which had forced her to it, and at the same time his bare scalp felt the ghost of its vanished hair rise on it at the thought of what Mrs. Crombie might do and say when she found out the fact.

“Oh, I didn’t know you met her,” he said, hollowly, and not very wisely.

“I said saw,” the young man returned. “I don’t think she saw me. I didn’t speak with her; she preferred that we should meet first at your house. That is why I — I have come so unwarrantably early.”

Crombie had two reasons for falling upon the young man: one, resentment for having been so misled, and the other relief for being rescued from the error, which, now it was gone, he knew must have left him without a shred of respect for the poor child whose difficult little romance had enlisted his interest. But he spared his guest, and merely said, “Oh, I see!” and smiled fatuously, in adding, “I thought it was rather odd she hadn’t mentioned it. Ah, ha, ha!” he ended, in rehearsal of the merriment of a man laughing to his wife at a good joke on himself. He experienced such a kindly revulsion toward Lillias, whom he had wronged by his error, that he could not bear any longer to keep her from her happiness in her lover’s presence. “If you will excuse me,” he said, with a politeness that was almost tender, “I will tell the ladies you are here.”

He was moving toward the door when he was arrested by a “Well — ah — well,” from Mr. Craybourne, which sounded like the preliminary of an entreaty for a stay of action. He turned, and the young man, still crouching over his hat, made a more successful effort for coherence, “I really oughtn’t to see Miss Bellard — or, I should say, Mrs. Crombie — till I have given you some notion of how matters stand with us — Miss Bellard, I mean. I don’t know what Miss Bellard has said, or whether she has told you how entirely I am without claim on her?”

Crombie rather liked this, which he thought manly, but he could only say, “Oh, we quite understand that it’s only in the pour parler stage, and nobody’s committed.” That was the year of the Spanish War, and every one spoke more or less in the diplomatic French of the opening negotiations for peace; the papers all had a touch of it.

The Englishman returned with a certain stiffness of self-assertion against the prompt American pliability of his host, “You’re very good, I’m sure. But I can’t allow you to suppose that I am not committed. If I had not felt myself so absolutely committed from the moment I first heard Miss Bellard speak, and first saw her, I should not have felt at liberty to address her, in the absence of her natural — her family. Of course, I had the countenance of the president of the university; I had the honor of an introduction from him; but it was the other — feeling that seemed to warrant me in — ah — going on.” The young man spoke with courage, but not steadily; Crombie noticed with a mixture of pathos and amusement that his chin was trembling.

“Oh yes. Quite right. I meant that she was not committed—”

“No,” the Englishman said, “and I am prepared now, if Mrs. Crombie thinks there has been anything irregular in my — my — procedure, to go away without seeing Miss Bellard, and wait till her mother returns; though I believe that is rather indefinite. Not that I couldn’t wait indefinitely.” Crombie had a notion of not being outdone in punctiliousness, if it came to that, and he put on the air of giving the matter thought. “She would want her mother’s approval, naturally. But — I don’t think it’s necessary for you to go away. In fact” — he caught at the inspiration—” Mrs. Crombie was rather hoping you would stay to lunch.”

“Why, you’re very good,” Craybourne said. “I’m sure I shall be very glad if — But I should like, if it won’t bore you, or if you won’t think it unnecessary — to tell you — I don’t know whether she has told you — that I have formally offered myself to Miss Bellard. It came to that very soon. Am I tiring you? Are you interested?”

“Oh, quite. Not at all, I assure you. Go on!” Crombie, in token of his patience and concern, relapsed into the chair from which he had risen, and took from the table a paper-knife offering itself there to his hand.

“The whole affair has been so — different, that I should be glad to make sure that from the — the — from your point of view, I have been — warranted.”

Crombie bowed seriously and the Englishman went on.

“I can’t say, looking back, that I was actuated by anything better than an idle curiosity in going, the first time, to hear Miss Bellard lecture. I should like you to know that; she knows it. I was at the hotel, with nothing to do, and I heard her lectures talked of. Not,” the young man made haste to add, “in any slighting way. But nearly everything is a joke, out there, and I can’t say that Miss Bellard’s lectures were taken very seriously by the hotel acquaintance who mentioned them: he spoke of them as a good show; he has apologized and explained that he meant nothing derogatory. They were very popular. Ah — have you — you have heard her — lecture?”

Crombie shook his head. “She took it up, I’ve understood, after leaving the dramatic school, as a means of — independence. We did not know of it till we heard of her appointment to a lectureship, out there. I must confess we had our misgivings.”

The young man ardently cried, “You needn’t have had! Anything more graceful, more beautiful, more natural, more artistic, more divine—” He stopped for want of words, and then resumed at another point. “I will say, that I was chiefly interested, as far as I was worthily interested, by the fact, which I heard, that Miss Bellard was doing it for, as you say, independence. You may think it odd, and you may not agree with me at all, but I go in for women doing that kind of thing. I suppose that I might be considered an extremist by some people. But I believe that marriage would be happier, generally speaking, if the wife and husband were always pecuniarily independent of each other.”

Crombie thought that he had heard of some marriages, especially international marriages, in which the wife alone had the means of pecuniary independence, but he could not note these instances, even in the way of jest, to the eager and ingenuous countenance of his visitor. He murmured, “Quite so,” and Mr. Craybourne went on.

“I am happy to say that Miss Bellard and I are of the same opinion on this point. In fact, it was the very first point that came up for discussion between us, and it was she who urged it first.”

It seemed, hazily enough, to Crombie’s intelligence, that the young pair who could have reached this point in their love-making, without anything more definite than the girl’s consent to be made love to, were modern beyond any fin-de-siècle newness of the century then ending; but it was easier not to grasp the fact, and he did not grasp it, at least very firmly. Hazily, also, he conceived of the young man’s liberal-mindedness as a willingness to let a wife make her own living, which he had known carried to the excess of letting her make her husband’s living too; but again he was unable to impart his reflections. He said, “I believe Lillias has developed in that direction since we — have seen much of her. One finds girls feeling like that a good deal, nowadays.”

“Yes,” the young man assented, “but not quite in her way, I believe.” He seemed proud of her singularity, and jealous of its attribution to any one else. “I don’t know,” he continued, “whether I can explain — and in fact it’s only in the most provisional way that I can allow myself to talk of it at all — how this breadth of view — it’s a kind of cant, but I don’t find just the words I want —

 added to the charm she had for me from the first moment. I understood, when I first saw her, that I saw her earning her living; and later I was told that she had prepared herself to earn her living on the stage. It was impossible for me, from the beginning, not to think of how I should feel toward such a fact if she were my wife; I don’t justify my presumption, because it was in no degree voluntary: the case, as it were, supposed itself, and I did ask myself the question on these very indefensible grounds. There could only be one answer. I ought to say that I had read myself and thought myself out of the prejudices of what I should once have called my class, and I could feel nothing but admiration and reverence for her — her attitude.” The young man’s words flowed rapidly enough, but there had not ceased to be in their stream that tremor, that vibrant eagerness which had moved Crombie. He pricked up his thin red ears at the spare allusion to Mr. Craybourne’s social rank, a thing which the true American prefers even in the Englishman who renounces it, especially if the Englishman is seeking an alliance with his family; yet the liking with which this Mr. Craybourne had inspired him was not mean. It was merely qualified with a satisfaction in his being socially a gentleman, which he would not have exacted from an American pretendant; such a pretendant would have been wholly left to the instinct and knowledge of the girl in that case.

He now merely said, “That’s all right, Mr. Craybourne. It’s a matter for you to settle with Lillias. In fact, with a girl who has been taking care of herself for the last year or two, I should be a little shy of interfering in any way. But she has a feeling, which we consider a very right one, that — that if she’s got some thinking over to do, she had better do it under her family roof, or as nearly as she can come to one.”

 Here, Crombie had got to the end of his tether, and had so literally nothing more to say that he was glad of Craybourne’s eager suggestion, “Then I have your permission? I may—”

“Why, certainly,” Crombie said, and again he started toward the door. “I will tell Mrs. Crombie you are here.”

“A moment!” the young man interposed. “I ought to apologize perhaps for — for turning up here yesterday, before Miss Bellard’s arrival — when—”

“I don’t think that’s a thing a girl could really object to, no matter how matters stood,” Crombie said.

“I was hoping,” the young man pursued, “for some such interview as this, and for the opportunity of speaking of a point on which I’m told that Americans are rather more sensitive than Englishmen. I wish to say that there is no question whatever of — of money in my mind; a dot, or that kind of thing. If the time ever came when Miss Bellard chose to abandon her independent career, there would be sufficient provision for the future. My elder brother was naturally my father’s heir; but an uncle of mine left me something which I haven’t quite made ducks and drakes of.”

He smiled a little anxiously, and Crombie said, largely, “Oh, that’s all right, Mr. Craybourne. The great thing is whether you can make up your minds to each other.”

“Yes!” the young man deeply sighed. “Whether she can.”

V

“WELL, I thoroughly like him,” Mrs. Crombie said, looking at the backs of Lillias and Craybourne narrowing in the perspective as they took their way down the lane that led from the cottage grounds to the banks of the Saco. The meeting of the lovers had taken place under her eye in Crombie’s library, and she had been pleased with his discreet ardor, and the girl’s plain good sense. They had all sat down for some time, and then Mrs. Crombie had eliminated herself in some housekeeping interest, discovering in the act that Crombie had already disappeared. Lillias and Craybourne remained together for some time longer, when she joined her aunt up-stairs, and said she had come for her hat: she was going out with Mr. Craybourne to explore. Mrs. Crombie bade her be sure and be back to lunch promptly, and she now added to Crombie, “And I like her. She is a good girl.”

“Almost too good to be true,” Crombie suggested cynically.

“No; I’ve quite changed my mind about that. I believe Lillias is just what we see her. What became of you so suddenly?”

“Was it sudden? I didn’t seem to be needed. I had had a good deal of him before you came in.”

“There is a good deal of him, in one way,” she reflected. “He is very tall; and Lillias is not a tall girl; she is certainly not ‘new’ in that way. But she can manage. She is managing now. Look at them! She is keeping just the right distance and at the proper angle from him, so that the difference won’t be noticed. I know that she got that summer hat of hers so as to reduce his height.”

“One would think,” Crombie said, gloomily, “that you liked her illusiveness.”

“She isn’t illusive in the essentials; but in some things a girl has to be illusive; and Lillias has been left to do for herself in a great many things where most girls’ mothers are illusive for them. I don’t see how Aggie can excuse herself. But you certainly have the gift of choosing the most offensive expressions! One would think you really disliked the child. Aren’t you glad to see her so happy?”

“Well, I haven’t quite adjusted myself yet to having such a well-spring of pleasure turned on in the house. I haven’t got over sympathizing with you at her breaking into your tranquillity.”

“Yes, there is that, and it is very nice of you to remember it, but you mustn’t lay it up against her. I didn’t know she was going to be so interesting. She is very interesting. I wish you could have heard her telling all about her life out there. What made you keep us waiting so long?”

“Was she impatient? I had to let him free his mind. He wanted to tell me a lot of things. Principally that he approved of her independence, but if she ever wanted to go back on it, he had money enough for them both.”

“He has? I don’t believe Lillias knows that. And well?”

“That he doesn’t expect anything with her.”

“Well, that is certainly ideal! He certainly isn’t a common Englishman.”

“He doesn’t seem to be a noble one, either. It’s the noble ones that go in for the money.”

“You know what I mean, and I hope Lillias will make up her mind to have him before he leaves. How long is he going to stay?”

“I didn’t ask him.”

“Of course not. But I thought he might have mentioned it. I’m glad, anyway, that you asked him to lunch.”

“Oh, I thought I might as well have a hand in bu’sting our blissful calm.”

“What’s the matter with you, Archibald?” she turned on him with the demand, and he at once denied that there was anything the matter.

Whether she believed him or not, or thought that she could get it out of him better some other time, she let him be for the present, and went about seeing that luncheon should be of the signal character which befitted the occasion, and they did not meet again till they sat down at table with the young people. Crombie went out, charged to go quite in the opposite direction from that they had taken, and did one of his ridiculous sketches, which he knew himself were bad, and could hardly forgive people for pretending to admire, but which amused for him a leisure otherwise intolerable. He did not come in till quite luncheon-time, and so escaped the duty of entertaining Mr. Craybourne in the library, when Lillias had brought the young man back with her half an hour earlier, so that she could change her dress, and talk with her aunt, whom she found to be lying in wait for her.

“Come in, Aunt Hester!” she invited the hungering apparition that showed itself at her doorway, and she added with her splendid frankness, “Well, it has been a perfect landslide.”

“What do you mean? Have you accepted him?”

“No, but I am quite prepared to do so — emotionally prepared. We went over to look at the slide, across the river, by your ferry, and when I saw how it had done the work of ages, in about three minutes from the time it started, as the owner of the farm said, and covered about twenty acres with granite and gravel, and leaves ground to pulp, and logs of big trees chewed off, and packed full of sand so that you couldn’t strike an axe into them, I felt just so myself. The undermining separation of the last four weeks had had its effect, and the first four minutes with him did the rest, and I should be asking your congratulations now, Aunt Hester, if it had not been for Mr. Craybourne’s delicacy in giving me more time than I wanted. He is a dear, but he is making it difficult.”

“Why, Lillias, I don’t suppose he thinks he is allowed to speak unless he has some hint from you,” Mrs. Crombie said, in high approval of him.

“Do you think so, Aunt Hester? Well, that is rather embarrassing. Is it usual for girls to hint?”

“Not unless it is absolutely necessary, my dear.”

“Did you — hint?”

“Certainly not! What a question!”

“Because if you did, I think I will. I think it had better be over.”

While they talked, Lillias was effecting what is called by performers in the drama where one actor takes several parts, a lightning change, and was reappearing from the pastoral simplicity of her walking-dress in the elaboration of an afternoon toilette. The change was not exactly imperative, under the circumstances, and yet both of the women felt that it was highly desirable, and were perhaps tacitly agreed that if a hint were not possible, there were means of otherwise doing its work quite as effectually. When Lillias came down to join Mr. Craybourne in the library before luncheon, and wait with him there for her aunt and uncle, she was what is known to her sex as a dream. The word is commonly used in description of a very visionary gown, but Lillias so thoroughly characterized her gown, and subdued it to her personality that she was herself the dream.

The young man glowed all over love at sight of her, and a landslide must have taken place in him too. He seized the first minutes or moments that they could have together, and huskily entreated, “Lillias, why not say it now?”

She smiled mystically, beatifically, and “Well!” she said.

Then everything was said between them, and Crombie and his wife coming in directly, Lillias told them.

There began with the whole household now a series of experiences as idyllic as any which have been put into poetry, but which would have very much the effect of prose if they were successively presented. They had for the lovers, in fact, no succession, but a sort of rapturous simultaneity, imaginable of a state of being in which the problem of time and space was eliminated. They were together, as it seemed, by mere volition, and the hotel was so near, and his presence in the Crombie cottage so constant, that there was no question to his consciousness of coming or going. Lillias knew of course that he took so many of his meals at her uncle’s table that the exception was when he remained at the hotel for any of them. He got to coming over to breakfast, and with her aunt’s habit of breakfasting in bed, and her uncle’s way of breakfasting whenever he happened to get up, they mostly had the meal alone together. Lillias would say to Mrs. Crombie’s neat waitress, “You needn’t stay, Norah. I think we can take care of ourselves,” and then Norah would not stay.

One morning, when Lillias and Norah had played this comedy, the young man said, with a worshipping look at the face which Lillias had given the effect of a very pretty girl’s, “I suppose it will be something like this when we are really—”

He hesitated with a fine modesty, and she suggested, “It?”

“Yes! And what a nice, comprehensive little word!”

“You can say a good deal,” she returned, thoughtfully, “with almost any sort of word when you mean it. But I was thinking,” she added, “that perhaps it mightn’t be always so.”

“Why not?”

“Well — is your coffee just right?”

“Sweetness and strength have kissed each other in it. But why mightn’t it be always so?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes we might be cross. I think I am rather apt to be cross in the morning.”

“I have never seen you so, Lillias!”

“You never have seen me in the morning more than half a dozen times, yet. But I suppose we shall have our little outs.”

“Quarrels?”

“Yes, regular rows.”

Craybourne no longer protested against the notion. He asked, “I wonder what made you think of that?”

“Why?”

“Because it was in my mind too, and I was trembling to think it mightn’t be always like this.”

“Probably, then, I got it out of your mind. It was a case of thought-transference.” She smiled in radiant burlesque, but immediately asked, with a dangerous little inflation of the nostrils, which escaped him, “Or perhaps there was something in my behavior that suggested it to you?”

“No,” he answered, so simply that the most impassioned suspicion must have been allayed in her, who saw that her suspicion was not suspected. “You are never otherwise than angelically peaceful. But — how very slight the partition walls in your summer hotels seem to be!”

“Was that what you were going to say?”

“Not at all. But it is on the way to it. I was kept awake last night by the sound of a ‘regular row’ in the room next mine.”

“It served you right — if you were eavesdropping.”

“Oh, but I wasn’t. That was the odd part. I was a perfectly helpless ear-witness, as one might call it. But I am afraid I recognized their voices as those of a couple who sat at table with me at supper. The husband seemed to be interested in the view of Mr. Crombie’s cottage, which he had had from the hotel veranda, and asked me if I knew who lived there. The wife manifested — what shall I say? — such an ostentatious indifference that I saw she was curious too. They had nothing to say to each other, and the question may have been merely to make conversation with a third person.”

“And did you tell them?”

“I don’t know why I didn’t. But I evaded the question.”

“You poor thing! It must have been a great strain on you — any sort of uncandor. Do you know, Edmund, I think your candor is the nicest thing about you?”

“Really? I must cultivate it.”

“No, if you did I should feel that I had made you conscious, and I could never forgive myself for that. What did they say to each other?”

“Nothing.”

“But when they kept you awake?”

The young man had a certain hesitation. “Well, I don’t know! Wasn’t it rather in the nature of a confidence? An involuntary confidence?”

“Yes, it was,” Lillias admitted, with all her frankness. But she added, with a courage which fetched, “Still, if we are one — or going to be — it wouldn’t be the same as if you spoke of it to another.”

“You darling!” Craybourne started up, all his length, and asked, “May I?”

“Well,” she said, “if you will be very quick.”

He ran round the table, and after he had been very quick, or very much quicker than he wished, he sat down, all his length, and asked, “Where was I?”

“On the point of telling me what they said.”

“It appeared to be principally names. But as far as the tenor of their discourse was coherent, it related to a separation. It was mixed up with a good deal of crying from her.”

“Edmund!”

“Yes, it was rather touching, in that.”

“Doesn’t it seem incredible,” Lillias mused, “that people who have once cared for each other should come to that? I can understand death, but I can’t understand divorce — between husband and wife, I mean.”

“And yet, that’s where it’s commonest,” he suggested, without apparent sense of the joke.

“It seems to be,” she agreed. “What else did they say?”

“The rest was mainly an exchange of insults.”

The lovers were silent for a little space, and then she asked, “Doesn’t it seem strange, that just in this supreme moment, when we are promising our lives to each other, and trying to join them in the sweetest hopes, those poor people should be so near us — in the next house, in the next room — tearing themselves apart in the darkest despair and the bitterest hate! Do you think there is anything ominous in it?”

“I don’t see why there should be. While I heard them talking, last night, of course I couldn’t help thinking of ourselves. But our love is very different, Lillias. It isn’t founded on any mere personal fancy. It is reasoned and reasonable. It has been thought out seriously and soberly from the very beginning. I was in love with the idea of you before I saw you — with the girl who was doing the sort of thing that you were doing, and must be the sort of girl you were. When I saw you, I saw that I had been merely fulfilling my destiny.”

“You said that.” Lillias paused from this beginning, and then continued. “I suppose there was some other — attraction. I’m free to say there was with me, Edmund,” she tenderly entreated him.

“Oh, there was with me, too — afterwards. So much so that at times, now, I’m afraid I forget the original motive, altogether.”

“Oh, how sweetly you say it,” she beamed upon him. She started up with him, and he was quicker than before because now they met half-way of the table. She said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I suppose, if we’re going for a walk, I had better get my hat.”

“Oh, certainly, dearest. And I will get mine, too.”

They laughed together at their reciprocal imbecility, and once more he was very quick; or rather they were both very quick.

VI

MRS. CROMBIE went into Crombie’s library to receive the stranger, whose card was coming up for her husband, an hour or so after Craybourne and Lillias had left the house. She intercepted the card, for she was just going in to see why Crombie was not getting up, even for the belated breakfast which he ordinarily made. He said, as if he needed any excuse for being lazy, that he was not feeling just like himself that morning, and he thought he would take it out in bed till luncheon. Then he should be fresher, and more equal to things. He did not say what the things were that he needed being equal to, and she did not press him for an explanation. He glanced drowsily at the card she gave him, and she descended to the library, prepared with a good conscience to say to the stranger that Mr. Crombie had begged her to see him, and was very sorry not to be well enough to come himself. She added, to a visible preoccupation of the stranger’s, that she hoped she could be Mr. Crombie’s substitute.

“Oh, by all means,” the stranger returned, standing up during these preliminaries, and supporting what seemed an habitual lameness on the stick he held in his hand. Mrs. Crombie asked him to sit down, and she was the more civil to him in her tone because of a certain distinction in his presence. He was very well set up, and his voice was well managed, and he had the air of the world which we all prize in ourselves and others.

“I don’t know why I should expect Mr. Crombie to remember me, after such a time,” he said, looking down as with an habitual glance and tapping his boot with his stick, “but when I made out that it was actually he who was living here, I couldn’t resist dropping over. I’m at the Saco Shore House.” He lifted his head. “My name is Mevison; Mr. Crombie and I knew each other in Paris.”

Mrs. Crombie started dramatically. “Not Arthur Mevison! Of Réné’s atelier?”

“Yes.”

“Why, Mr. Crombie did nothing but talk of you, after we were married, for years and years! I used to perfectly die of wonder that we never saw you; I saw all the rest of his bachelor friends, and he always said that you would be sure to turn up. But you never did. I’m so glad! I’ll rush up and tell him who it is; I don’t believe he really looked at your card. Why, he’ll be wild!” She bolted towards the door with an agility impredicable of her bulk, but something in his look indefinitely detained her.

“No, don’t disturb Crombie! I couldn’t wait till he’s dressed — if he’s still in bed. I just dropped over. We shall be at the hotel some days. Perhaps he’ll look in on me. It’s quite enough for the present to know that we’re so near each other. Don’t!” There was such a note of pathos in his entreaty that she provisionally forbore, but as much in curiosity as in compassion, and he added, “I’m rather glad not to see him this morning; he’ll know how to account for that, if he remembers me as well as I remember him. Do let me go, and come back again!”

“Will you come back soon? To luncheon?” she parleyed.

“Well — ah — perhaps not to luncheon—”

“I beg your pardon! Of course Mrs. Mevison is with you. I will go over and bring her back with me, and you will both stay to luncheon.”

“I don’t believe Mrs. Mevison—”

“Well, we will see!” Mrs. Crombie cried, in prepotent hospitality. “I know the table at the Saco Shore, and how glad hotel-bound people are of a little home food, if you put it on the lowest ground. Have they made you comfortable as to rooms?”

“Oh, I think so. They’ve done their best, I dare say. Mrs. Mevison is a nervous sufferer, and sometimes the best isn’t the most she could ask; but it’s very well; the rooms are rather high up—”

“Now, I’ll tell you what, Mr. Mevison,” Mrs. Crombie broke in upon him. “We’re not going to let you stay there. We are going to have you here. We have plenty of rooms that are mere aching voids at present, and it will be not only a pleasure but a mercy. This place is my doing, and Mr. Crombie misses the society we used to have at the sea-shore, and is always more or less pining for people. To have you, of all people — and Mrs. Mevison! Can’t you understand?”

“Dimly,” Mr. Mevison returned. “But the thing is simply impossible—”

“Not till Mrs. Mevison says so,” Mrs. Crombie gayly retorted. “It will be such a surprise for Mr. Crombie. Now, I won’t really take no for an answer, or at least any no but your wife’s. It won’t be the least disturbance to us, if that’s what you mean. It will be an unmitigated blessing. Don’t say another word. The thing is simply settled.”

“No, my dear Mrs. Crombie, it isn’t settled,” he protested, with a solemnity which in another mood must have impressed her. “It can’t be—”

But she took this for a polite pretence, and laughed him down, in saying, “Well, it shall be just as you wish, Mr. Mevison. Only, I suppose I may go and call upon Mrs. Mevison?”

“Mrs. Mevison will be very glad to see you,” he said, gravely, and after a little more hilarious fatuity of hers and embarrassed helplessness of his, he took his leave with her promise, or her threat, that she would bring Crombie with her to call upon Mrs. Mevison.

She meant to keep the matter a secret from Crombie, and to have an agreeable mystery for him in making him go to the inn, to call with her upon some old friends of his whom she should not name; but she did not find in herself the strength for this. As soon as Mr. Mevison was out of the house, she pounded breathlessly up-stairs to Crombie, who was still drowsing, in a vain security from what was about to happen, and called out to him as soon as she opened the door, “Well, now, Archibald, who do you think has been here?”

He said, of course, that he did not know, and then she came out with “Arthur Mevison!”

He returned sleepily, sceptically, conditionally, “What Arthur Mevison?”

“Why, your Arthur Mevison that you’ve always told me about — Paris Réné’s favorite pupil. Surely you’re not going to—” Crombie sat up in bed. “You don’t mean to tell me that Arthur Mevison — I thought he was dead!”

“He isn’t dead in the least. He’s staying at the Saco Shore with his wife—”

“With his wife?”

“Yes; what is there so strange about that? Did you know her?”

“Oh no.”

“What do you know about her? What have you ever heard of her?”

“Nothing definite. Only that she was a thundering fool of some sort.”

“Then that accounts for it. Tell me all about her, before you go one inch further, Archibald.”

“I’ve always told you all about her. How she broke him up as soon as she could, and made him leave off painting, and tag her round the world everywhere, and wouldn’t let him live six months in any one place, and quarrelled with all his friends and enemies, and led him a dog’s life, and played the devil generally.”

“You never told me one word of the kind.”

“Didn’t I?” he returned, easily. “I thought I did.”

“Not one word! And you have got me into an awful scrape.”

Crombie lay down again, and pulled the coverlet to his chin, as if he could take the consequences better in that posture. “What have you done?”

“Done? I have asked them to come and stay with us. I thought it would be such a pleasant surprise for you.”

“Why, you don’t mean to say that she’s been here in the house with him?”

“Not at all! But I’ve asked him, and I’ve said I was going over to ask her. And I shall have to do it.”

“Oh, well! Very likely there’s no harm done. But I thought you had your hands rather full with Lillias and her young man, and you wouldn’t want any more guests just now. Besides, if he wants to come, very likely she won’t. I’ve understood that it usually works that way with them.” He meant not only the Mevisons, but all people in the like case.

“But he doesn’t want to come! And I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I insisted upon going and asking her.”.

Crombie puckered his mouth to a long, low whistle.

“And that is the sort of scrape you have got me into, my dear. How often have I told you that your habit of supposing you had spoken of things would be the ruin of us some day!”

“Oh, well,” Crombie said after a moment’s reflection, “perhaps it isn’t so bad as I’ve heard. It was some talk of Minver’s at the club when I was down at New York last winter. He said she had spoiled the most promising career in the world. Minver seemed to want to kill her. But he’s an awful tongue, Minver is. Well, it can’t be helped now.”

“No, it can’t be helped now,” Mrs. Crombie echoed. “And the sooner I make the plunge the better,” she added, strenuously as to her words, but, as to her actions, with the effect of shivering on the verge. In order to gird herself up, she argued, “I said luncheon, and I suppose I ought to go at once.”

“Yes,” Crombie assented in great personal comfort, “I suppose you had. I can’t.”

His wife tacitly examined his moral armor for some crevice at which to pierce him with inculpation, but finding it proof against her she could only say, as she turned to sweep out of the room, “Well, for goodness’ sake, Archy, do be up to receive them if I bring them back with me!”

“Oh, that will be all right,” he answered cosily from the depths of his selfish security; but by-and-by, when she called through his closed door that she was going, he stretched himself in bed with decision, and really began to push off the blanket.

Mrs. Crombie, as she issued into the irregular avenue of elms that formed the approach to her cottage from the river, saw a couple advancing towards her. In the distance they seemed united by the simple device of the man’s having his arm round the woman’s waist; as they came nearer, this appearance yielded to the effect of her having her hand through his arm; and by the time they were unmistakably Lillias and Craybourne, they were walking less and less closely together. “Upon my word,” Mrs. Crombie said to herself, “Lillias is going it!” But to Lillias, then within hail, she called, “I’m just running over to the hotel, to see some old friends of your uncle’s. I shall have to leave the house in your charge while I’m gone.”

“Well, I dare say I can get Mr. Craybourne to help keep the robbers away.”

“I guess you’ll have to. Your uncle isn’t up yet. It’s a Mr. Mevison and his wife,” she explained at random. “He used to be in Réné’s atelier with your uncle, but he gave it up after he was married. She wouldn’t let him. I wonder if Mr. Craybourne has met them at the hotel.”

“One meets a great many people at the Saco Shore House,” the young man replied, not wholly able to keep his eyes away from Lillias’s waist.

“Do you suppose it could have been the people,” the girl asked him, “who were inquiring about aunty’s cottage?”

A look of alarm came into the dark face of the young man. “It’s possible. I’m sure I can’t say.”

“Well, you’d better, if they’re the ones you heard conversing so violently at night.”

Craybourne stood looking at her and wondering what she was giving him away for in that fashion. She explained indirectly. “Forewarned is forearmed, Aunt Hester. I hope it isn’t the couple that Mr. Craybourne says are carrying on a running fight, over there.”

“Horrors!” Mrs. Crombie said. “What does she mean?” she asked the young man.

“Really, it can’t be the same. I was telling Miss Bel — Lillias — of a family jar that I had been rather obliged to overhear part of last night; but there’s no reason to suppose—”

“He means there’s every reason to suppose,” the girl put in mischievously.

“I see,” Mrs. Crombie said, “and it coincides with your uncle’s view of her.” She turned from Lillias to the young man. “Was it very—”

Craybourne merely looked unhappy, but Lillias easily answered for him: “They didn’t throw things, as far as he could make out, but anything short of that!”

Mrs. Crombie remembered the dignity she had lost sight of in her curiosity. “I think there is some mistake. The Mr. and Mrs. Mevison I am speaking of are middle-aged people, and I have asked him to let me bring them over to stay with us. They are not very comfortable at the hotel.”

“It seems to be rather full,” Craybourne vaguely assented.

In the presence of a calamity on which Mrs. Crombie put so bold a face, the girl was sobered. “I’ve no idea they are the same people, aunty.” Then she gave way again to the spirit of mischief which her happiness seemed to have awakened in her. “But if they do happen to be, it’s the very contrast you want, to us. If you don’t get somebody of that kind into the house, I don’t see how you are going to live through us. We’re bad enough now, but we’re going to be worse. At least, Mr. Craybourne is.”

She looked teasingly from her aunt to her lover, and it seemed as if he were not able to gainsay her; as if he had no wish to do so; as if what she said was final wisdom as well as primal love. He was a sight to make another man sick, but his aspect filled Mrs. Crombie with reverence. She was not a ready or epigrammatical woman, but she had the inspiration of answering, “I should be willing to take my chances with you two alone.”

“Oh, poor aunty!” the girl cried, with a laugh, in which they all senselessly joined.

Mrs. Crombie moved on towards the ferry, and the young people towards the house. She had met them midway of the avenue, and at its foot Mrs. Crombie turned and looked back towards them at its head; they were turning, too, as well as they could, and she perceived that she had lost the intermediate step towards the closer union which had been represented before by Lillias’s having her hand through Craybourne’s arm.

VII

MRS. MEVISON received Mrs. Crombie in her husband’s presence, with the prompt and peculiar smile with which ladies know how to condone men’s clumsy blunders. He was getting lamely up from his newspaper to introduce the two women, when his wife came gracefully forward with outstretched hand, saying, in a sort of tender warble, “Mrs. Crombie?” She had certainly a very winning voice, and her manner was perfection; if it had been less perfect, perhaps it might have been better.

“Arthur,” she cried to her husband, “do get Mrs. Crombie a chair, and let us all sit down on the veranda here. The best part of these summer hotels is the outside, don’t you think? I was sure you would come, when Arthur told me he had been to look you up, though he always keeps such things as a little surprise for me.”

Mrs. Mevison was bending and smiling, and sweeping herself into a chair after Mrs. Crombie was seated, and wanting to give her a fan or take something from her, or make her have an easier seat, and ignoring her excuses for Crombie’s failure to come, too, with an angelic amiability which deceived neither of them. They both knew that Mevison had said nothing to his wife about the Crombies’ coming, and they understood that Mrs. Mevison was now taking it out of him for his failure to do so. He cast a certain look upon Mrs. Crombie, as if he would say: “Now, here is your chance to back out of your hospitality. I haven’t said anything about it, and you needn’t.”

Mrs. Crombie was above any such meanness. “Men are so forgetful!” she joined Mrs. Mevison in politely assuming. Then, for this would not quite do, she said, “They seem to have a passion for surprises, and are always keeping things back to spring them on you.”

“Mr. Mevison,” his wife said, with an arch glance at him which did not disperse the kind of darkness involving him, “likes to keep them back without springing them on you.” She continued to look tenderly across her shoulder at him while Mrs. Crombie went on, but her jaw was set.

“Well, I hope you Won’t find this surprise too formidable. It’s merely that I want you to come over and stay with us as long as you meant to stay at the hotel, and as much longer as we can make you. And I won’t take no for answer!”

“What do you say, dearest?” Mrs. Mevison asked, with melting meekness, in referring the question to her husband. Then she referred his attitude ironically to Mrs. Crombie. “You see what a tyrant I have! I can’t say my soul’s my own in these matters!” she concluded gayly.

Mevison ignored her in replying to Mrs. Crombie: “I really couldn’t think of our crowding in upon you. We’re very comfortable here, though that has nothing to do with it; and it wouldn’t be fair to sacrifice you to my old friendship with Crombie—” Mrs. Crombie would have lifted her voice in protest; she had indeed got it incoherently up, when Mrs. Mevison cut in under it with a warble of the sweetest caressingness: “Now, dearest! I must, just for once, put in my little plea! I don’t think it at all nice for you to say it’s quite comfortable here as a reason for refusing Mrs. Crombie’s kindness—”

“I admitted something like that,” he growled, without looking at her.

She patted the air towards him with a small, glittering, jewelled hand. “Now, now, now! You know I’m not criticising you, love. I simply can’t have Mrs. Crombie misunderstand you. I must have her know that it’s merely your delicacy, and that you’re dying to be with your old friend, for those long, late talks that men can have only when they’ve risen from the same table and are going to bed under the same roof. You must own, now, that I couldn’t keep you from rushing over to Mr. Crombie’s as soon as you had breakfast this morning, and that you’re just dying to accept Mrs. Crombie’s invitation.” She turned vividly to Mrs. Crombie. “That’s the true version, Mrs. Crombie, and I’m going to accept for him.” She warbled down the disclaimer that he tried to make. “We will be in good time for luncheon — half-past one? No, one! — and I will see to having our things sent over later in the day; you needn’t trouble about them! And Mr. Mevison won’t, either! He’s all a man when it comes to packing, though he doesn’t always have the courage of his preferences.”

She laughed to Mrs. Crombie at the discomfiture and confusion in his face, and Mrs. Crombie, presently getting up to go, with some polite fatuities about being so glad they could come, and all that, Mrs. Mevison rose too, of course, and went over to her husband where he had risen, and grouped herself affectionately with him, laying her pretty hand on his arm, which, while Mrs. Crombie still admired, twitched itself from her as with a nervous impatience.

They followed Mrs. Crombie down to the foot of the veranda stairs in her going, and there repeated their leave of her. Then Mrs. Mevison tripped girlishly up the stairs, and with a gay cry of laughter ran back into the hotel before her husband.

Mrs. Crombie walked very soberly home, and, as the sum of her reflections, said to her husband, whom she met in the avenue, going over at last to do the decencies in calling upon his friend: “Well, Archibald, I can’t make her out, and I don’t believe you can. But you needn’t go, now. They’ve accepted, or she has, and they’ll be to lunch. I’m afraid we’re in for something awful.”

He turned with her. “Why, what makes you think so?”

“Well, she may be thundering, but she’s no fool.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you. We’d better wait and see if you can see. I don’t want to prejudice you against her.”

“Apparently not.”

“But this I will say: she’s either the most consummate actress, or the fondest wife, or the most perfect little fiend that I ever did see.”

“Come! That’s something like impartial treatment. She couldn’t be all three?”

“She might. But didn’t you always tell me that Mevison was a man of the greatest courage?”

“He was the cock of the atelier. Was going to fight a duel with one of the Frenchmen, and cowed the fellow out by his choice of revolvers for weapons. He confessed that he couldn’t have hit the side of a bam, afterwards.”

“That is what I always understood. Well!”

“Do you mean that Mrs. Mevison has taken the pluck out of him?”

“Not that. But she has bewildered him. She does what she pleases with him, because he can’t follow her. Archibald, I never saw a man that I liked so much! — except you, of course!’’

“Thank you. I dare say he has his faults. He used to have them; perhaps Mrs. Mevison has reformed him. But I notice that a woman always attributes the fault in these cases to the wife, unless the case happens to be her own. What did you see or hear that made you suspect Mrs. Mevison of not being a saint upon earth?”

“Well, everything that I heard was in her favor. He seemed very sulky, though he was perfectly polite to me; and perhaps I only fancied what I saw.”

“What was it?”

“She laid her hand on his arm, when we all got up, and smoothed it, and suddenly he twitched away, as if something had stung him.”

“You mean, she pinched him?”

“I can’t be sure that she did.”

“And it’s that sort of calamity you’ve asked into our house! Perhaps it would have been as well to wait and make Mrs. Mevison’s acquaintance.”

“I did it for your sake. I thought you would like to have your old friend here.”

“I know you did, and I don’t blame you. Well, it will be rather interesting. It will be a show. Poor old Mevison!”

“Yes, my heart aches for him. Archibald, do you suppose there is much of that kind of misery in the world?”

“Lots.”

“Then marriage is a failure!”

“In those instances. It all comes from their expecting too much of it. I still incline to the theory that Mrs. Mevison is a thundering fool. Well, it will be a good object-lesson for Lillias and her love. It will teach them to go slow in their demands upon each other. I always heard that the Mevisons were furiously in love; and she seems to be in love yet.”

“Do you call pinching love?”

“It’s one form of it. It’s the hating and hurting form.”

“Now, Archibald, you are beginning to be disgusting again.”

VIII

MRS. MEVISON made the luncheon go off so nicely that Crombie, at least, began to think his wife’s eyes must have deceived her, and there could have been no pinching or baffling or bewildering on the part of such a woman as she showed herself. She deferred to Mevison in everything; when there was nothing to defer to him in, she invented things. She made Crombie tell her all about Mevison’s life and his in Réné’s atelier; she confessed that she was jealous of everybody who had known her husband before she had, and she said that if Réné had taken girl pupils, she did not know what she should do, so intimately as art students were thrown together.

“Oh, but he did,” Crombie said.

“He did? Why, dearest,” she turned to her husband, “didn’t you always tell me that Réné didn’t take girl pupils?”

“No,” Mevison answered, briefly.

“How very strange! I must have dreamed it. I knew that I couldn’t bear it if it was so, and so I simply dreamed it wasn’t.”

She took the able-minded Lillias and her lover into her especial favor, though she extended her favor to the whole household, and there was not a servant whom she came in contact with whose heart she did not make it her business to win. Mrs. Crombie had acquainted her at once with the absorbing psychological situation which Lillias and Craybourne embodied, and extracted from her a warble that was also a crow of sympathetic exultation. “Oh, how perfectly dear! It’s just as if it had been planned for us. Lovers! Arthur and I have never ceased to be lovers. And to think that it should be that delightful young Englishman who has been sitting at our table at the inn! I must tell Arthur? May I?”

She frankly possessed herself of Craybourne at once, and by her brave unconsciousness defied him beyond his powers to think evil of anything he had seen of her; as to what he had heard he began to doubt that too. While she captured Craybourne with one hand, she playfully threatened Lillias with the other. “Don’t you turn those pretty eyes of yours on my husband, Miss Bellard! I won’t have it! The poor fellow couldn’t stand their fire a half-minute if I were not here; or if Mr. Craybourne wasn’t; he’ll help me save him.”

She treated Lillias alternately as a chit and as a veteran worldling who knew it all, and whom nothing need be kept from. During the whole of the first day she pretended that the girl was Crombie’s niece, and insinuated a subtle and delicate compassion for Mrs. Crombie in having the burden of her affair in the house, together with the responsibility. When she consented to understand that Lillias was the daughter of Mrs. Crombie’s sister, nothing could exceed the pleasure she had in Crombie’s good nature and her sympathy with Mrs. Crombie’s sense of it. One did so hate to ask things of one’s husband! She had made it a principle to die before letting Arthur do anything for her that she could possibly help. She was struck with fresh wonder at Lillias: her remarkable beauty, which was so different from the ordinary beauty; her grace, which was as wholly her own as if she had invented the idea of grace; her brilliancy, which was so unlike the brilliancy of girls who were thought brilliant in the usual acceptation of the term. She said that Mrs. Crombie must tell her all about Lillias, and she made her tell her at least all she wished to know of the girl’s strange career, her odd notions of independence, how and where she met Mr. Craybourne, and what his credentials were, and how utterly devoted they were to each other. She said that very few Americans would have fallen in love with a girl under such very peculiar circumstances; it was only an Englishman who could do it, and everybody that knew said that Englishmen made the best of lovers and the worst of husbands.

By this time Crombie wanted to put her out of the house, to throw her into the Saco; and his fury gratified Mrs. Crombie as a generous tribute to her niece. “I don’t like her any more than you do, Archibald,” she said, “but she interests me, and you needn’t feel anxious about Lillias. She can be trusted to take care of herself, when she gets round to it, as the country people say. It’s very sweet of you to think of her, but you mustn’t, dearest, though I appreciate it. Everything is going swimmingly. I’ve given you and Mr. Mevison a chance to bring up your arrears of talk, and I don’t believe they’ll stay long. I noticed this morning when I was in her room that she had hardly hung up a thing; there’s one of her trunks that she hasn’t even unlocked. So you needn’t worry, you poor thing!”

She put her hand on the gloved hand of Crombie, in which he held the reins of the horse he was driving on an excursion stolen from their guests. She had done her duty in proposing a buckboard that they could all six have driven in; when Lillias declined that, and urged Mr. Craybourne to go, Mrs. Crombie devolved upon a carryall for four, but so forbiddingly that Mrs. Mevison laughed at the notion of Mevison and herself foisting themselves upon their hosts for the only relief they could have from their hospitalities. She said she would make Arthur take her a walk; it was a pity his lameness would not let him do any mountain-climbing; the mountain-climbing there must be so easy.

She must get Mr. Craybourne and Lillias to take her with them some time; she doted on mountain-climbing.

Lillias said, gravely, perhaps Mr. Craybourne would take her now; she would stay and see that Mr. Mevison came to no harm while they were gone; but after an infinitesimal moment in which Craybourne manifested a perdurable resolution not to take Mrs. Mevison mountain-climbing, she warbled back, Oh no! She could never leave Mr. Mevison alone while she was enjoying herself; and she warned Lillias against the insidious effect of giving way to the emotions, which was always in danger of becoming such a fixed habit that you had no peace of your life.

For these reasons the Crombies found themselves driving alone, and quit of the sight of all their guests until, on the homestretch, they arrived at a mowing-piece not far from their cottage, but secluded from the sight of it. There they saw the Mevisons walking together at the farther side of the meadow, and well beyond hearing of their wheels. He had his hands folded on his stick behind him, and was limping along between the hay-cocks which dotted the smoothly cropped stubble, while she playfully came and went, dropping after him, and then passing ahead of him, apparently saying something to him, and either laughing or crying, they could not make out which. Suddenly, she gave a scream of unmistakable rage, with a sort of rush at him; then he was gripping her wrists and vividly expostulating with her.

“Oh, Archibald!” Mrs. Crombie wailed: “Do you, can you, believe she meant to—”

“Not a doubt of it!” In his transport, Crombie gave a cut of the whip to the horse, which, after a moment of astonishment at treatment so unprecedented, bolted into a short trot that carried them temporarily past the belligerents. As soon as the horse slowed up, Crombie looked back round the side of his buggy.

“Can you see them?” his wife palpitated.

“Yes, and she’s walking beside him as peaceably as a lamb. Well, upon my soul, if she isn’t waving her handkerchief to me!”

“Then,” his wife commanded, “take off your hat and bow, so that she’ll think we haven’t seen them. Smile!”

“Not much!” Crombie said, grimly, without doing either, and this forced his wife, at great personal inconvenience, to get up and wave her handkerchief over the top of the buggy.

At dinner, Mrs. Mevison came radiantly down, warbling out as she took her place rather belatedly, “Such a game of romps as Arthur and I had in your hay-field, Mr. Crombie! You wouldn’t think, with his  lameness, how quick he is. I hope we didn’t spoil the hay.”

“Oh,” Crombie said, “if you were having fun, I don’t mind the hay.”

IX

THΕ Crombies decided that in the interest of young love they would; keep what they had seen in the I mowing-piece from Lillias and Craybourne. It was not that the girl was so ignorant of life as not to know that husbands and wives have their little tiffs, but a convention of the kind that forbids elders recognizing the knowledge of children concerning all sorts of things constrained them to the pretence that marriage is an indefinite continuation of love’s young dream. Craybourne, indeed, might be supposed acquainted with darkling things about life outside of matrimony, but he could not decently be imagined privy to the fact that people joined in wedlock ever chafed in their bonds.

Lillias, in her preparation for the stage, must have come so well in sight of the theatre as to have learned that there were such things as quarrels and separations among actors; but unless she recurred to her experience with her own father and mother she must have believed that such casualties were incidents solely of the histrionic temperament and profession. In spite of her frank recognition to her aunt of the situation which Craybourne had noted at the hotel, and had apparently talked over with her, the Crombies felt sacredly bound not to let her suspect it.

Crombie felt himself the more strictly enjoined to reticence from the girl by the enlargement of his own knowledge a few nights later. It came in the form of a confidence from Mevison as they sat smoking late on the veranda, watching the planets over the fiery points of their cigars and fighting the occasional mosquitoes which came just often enough to bear Crombie out in saying that they had no mosquitoes to speak of. It began with the voluntary confession that Mevison made of his not having slept very well the night before.

“What was the matter?” Crombie granted comfortably through his smoke. “Bed bad?”

“No, the fault was with the man in it. I’ve got the trick of not sleeping very well.”

“I remember when you couldn’t be kept awake.”

“Oh,” Mevison laughed, forlornly, “I didn’t have the right one to keep me awake, then.” He piteously burst out: “For God’s sake, Crombie, don’t pretend you don’t see how it is with my wife and me!”

“No, I won’t, Mevison,” his friend returned, kindly. “Do you want me to ask you what the trouble is?”

“Oh, the usual trouble: incompatibility. We’re fighting to a separation. I didn’t want it to go to the extreme — to a divorce; but I’m resigned to that now, because I see we are impossible to each other. I’ve seen it for years; I’ve seen it from the first.”

“Yes,” Crombie said, feeling that Mevison wished to be prompted.

“It isn’t that we don’t love each other, or that we haven’t. We’ve always loved each other too much. I won’t brag of my part, but I know that when she’s been the most impossible she’s been the most devoted to me. She cared for me so entirely that she could not bear that anybody — no! any thing — else should have the least part of me. You used to believe I could paint? Or could have painted if I had kept on?”

“You could have been a great painter.”

“Perhaps. But she broke it up. It wasn’t merely that the models drove her mad. I could excuse her for that; I think it’s pretty hard for an artist’s wife to bear, and I’ve come to think it’s an unhallowed thing for a man to keep looking at a woman’s nakedness and putting her beauty down in color. But when I left off working from models, and took to chicquing it — did the ideal business — it was just as bad. Then I found out that it was the painting itself which she felt between us. If there had been a necessity for my working, if there had been poverty, I might have gone on; I should have had to. But there was money, plenty of it — hers. So I left off, for peace’ sake, thinking I could begin again some time; and we began to drift. We’ve been round the world half a dozen times; we’ve lived in twenty countries; but we always had ourselves with us. She wasn’t jealous, or at least not of women more than of men. But she felt that I was all hers, and that she had a right to every atom, every instant of me. If I made a friend, she broke up the friendship. Not in any public way — I must say she always managed skilfully at first, though of late she’s been growing reckless. But it was slavery.”

“I see,” Crombie assented, but very gingerly, so as not to interrupt Mevison.

“Still,” he went on, “I was not the only sufferer. Slavery was always worse for the owner than the slave. I know it hurt her worse than it hurt me; that it was anguish for her to make me miserable, as she had to do, because she loved me, in her way so much. It caused her pain and shame and sorrow twice as much as it caused me. She knew that she spoiled my life, and that whether I was aware of it or not, at the bottom of my soul I longed to be rid of her; to break my chain, to pull my neck out of the halter at any cost. The conviction grew upon her, and goaded her, till she had to accuse me of it. I knew the truth first from her; and the time came when I couldn’t deny it; though I denied it at first a thousand times, I had to own it at last. That made things intolerable. What she could bear, so long as I denied it, she could not bear when I owned it, though she had divined it herself, and brought me to the sense of it. What is the use of making a short story long? She sees as well as I do that we must part; but it is her helpless fate to torment me more and more into what if we could we would both avoid.”

“I think I can understand,” Crombie said, modestly enough, for subtleties like these were not his strong point. He had a notion of suggesting that something might be done, but upon the whole he felt that nothing had better be done, even if it could, and that the most that could be hoped or asked for these miserable people was a separation for time, if not for eternity.

“I don’t mean to say,” Mevison continued, getting up and throwing the stump of his cigar over the veranda rail, “that I haven’t been to blame. But the accurate way of putting it would be to say that neither of us is to blame. We were simply born not to be mated, and we have been mated. That’s all.”

Crombie had his own opinion as to the totality. In his heart he did not the least blame his friend, and he did blame Mrs. Mevison. He was in the presence of his friend’s quivering anguish, his humiliation and despair, and he did not believe the woman who caused it could share it in the measure that Mevison believed. He would have liked to say something of the sort, but besides being a little insecure of his phrasing, he was uncertain how Mevison might take it. The next thing was to sympathize with Mevison about his not sleeping. “Did you ever try Scotch whiskey for your insomnia? I find that sets me off about as quick as anything.”

“I don’t know,” Mevison hesitated. “I think I can manage without, to-night, I’m so dead tired. The worst of it is that if the whiskey fails it leaves you twice as rotten as if you had simply lain awake without it. Still!”

“Better try it,” Crombie urged. “It can’t fail if you take enough of it.” They went in-doors and Crombie got a bottle down from one of the book-shelves in his library, where it seemed to be doing duty as literature. He found a tumbler on the shelf, and he went out to the dining-room for some water and sugar. Mevison refused the sugar, and Crombie said, “You don’t want to put in too much water, either.” Mevison put in so little as to leave the whiskey he drank off almost neat. “There,” Crombie said, “I guess that will fetch you.” He poured some water into a tumbler, and handed it to Mevison with the bottle of whiskey. “Better take it up with you. If the first dose don’t do the business, the second will, sure.”

Mevison obeyed him, and crept slowly up the stairs while Crombie stayed to put out the lights and follow him with a candle.

“Give me something to read,” he whispered on the upper landing. “Something good and dull. I find that sets me off at times.”

“Novel?” Crombie suggested.

“No; the cheapest story interests me too much. Haven’t you got some sort of travels — old sort?”

Crombie found on a hanging shelf in the hall a volume which Mevison said would do, and they bade each other good-night. Everybody else, plainly, was asleep, and Crombie, unused as he was to such psychological reflections, felt a fine conjecture penetrate him as to the dreams of the several people slumbering in their several rooms. He dismissed his wife’s briefly, because for one thing she would be sure to tell them to him when she woke; but he hung upon those of Lillias Bellard, whose chamber was on one side of Mevison’s room, with a doorless wall between, and those of Mrs. Mevison, whose room, on the other side, opened into her husband’s.

It occurred to Crombie that the girl’s visions probably concerned a radiant future, and the woman’s a radiant past, and that this state was in both cases the same. He did not know whether the hope of it or the despair of it was the worse, and, having no one there to help him guess, he gave it up, as if it were a conundrum, and opened his own door, across the hall from those of his three guests, and let himself in very softly, so as not to disturb his wife, who slept in the room next his.

X

MRS. MEVISON came down in the morning in a youthful freshness so alien to her years, though these were not very many, that every one noted it and was surprised: every one but poor Mr. Mevison, as she called him in reporting that he had had a bad night, and she had left him trying to catch a little beauty-nap. They must not wait breakfast for him; he would be all the better-looking for being allowed to take his chances later. She noted with explicit pleasure that they had not waited for her. She liked that English way of breakfasting catch-as-catch-can; perhaps that was not just the phrase. “I’m afraid your whiskey was a failure, Mr. Crombie,” she sweetly turned upon the host, “though Mr. Mevison gave it a fair trial, I should say, from the looks of the bottle!”

Crombie was driven to the mistake of excusing himself. “There wasn’t much in the bottle when he took it.”

“There certainly wasn’t much when he left it!” she crowed back. “There’s a little remedy of mine that I give him, when I find out he’s not been sleeping, that never fails. But the difficulty is to find out. Men are so odd! I’m the last to know such a thing; I suppose he thinks it will worry me. I shall give you some, Mr. Crombie, and the next time he complains to you I want you to offer it instead of the whiskey — as if it were your own invention. Won’t that be good!”

She bade them please not stay at table with her, and Crombie went into his library, while Mrs. Crombie went to interview the cook about luncheon and dinner. Lillias had already slipped away and found Craybourne mysteriously arrived on the veranda, where he must have been in telepathic communion with her for some minutes before she left the table. She sat down on the upper tread of the stairs leading to the lawn at the side of the house, and he on a tread lower, which brought his head on a level with hers. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, her hands pressed together, and her face slanted towards his in a pose favorable to the confidences they at once began exchanging.

“I never knew,” he said, “that your eyes were so very blue.”

“Nor I that yours were so very black. But mine are really bluish green. What are yours, really?”

“Blackish green, I suppose.” He took one of her hands from the other and examined it carefully, without and within, and then restored it to her.

“Will it do?” she asked. “Is it the rose-leaf pattern?”

“It’s exquisite,” he sighed. “It’s the prime agent of your grace. I remember it in the air, at your lectures out there; no more like a ‘gesture’ than the movement of a bough in the wind or the sweep of a bird’s wing.”

“Now, that is true poetry,” Lillias tenderly mocked. “What do you think of my looks generally, this morning?”

“Generally?”

“Yes; I flattered myself that I looked something like a faded flower.”

“You look like the red, red rose that’s newly something in June.”

“Tea, tea rose, you mean. But one gets credit for nothing!” she sighed. “I hardly slept last night.”

“Poor girl! What happened?”

“Dreadful things, grewsome things, things to take the heart out of one.” She looked round over her shoulder, and saw Mrs. Mevison advance from the doorway to the rail of the veranda, on which she leaned while examining the sky. She knew that Mrs. Mevison had seen her look round, but they both pretended unconsciousness; and Mrs. Mevison went in-doors. Then Lillias said, “I had bad dreams.”

“My bad dreams come from something I’ve eaten; but I know that yours must be purely psychological. What were they about?” he asked.

“I hate to tell you. About a lovers’ quarrel” — she looked again— “a married lovers’ quarrel.” She paused and then added, abruptly, “I dreamed that a woman came into her husband’s room, and woke him out of his sleep, and began accusing and upbraiding him. He groaned, and told her it was the first sleep he had had for nights, and implored her to go away. Then he began to threaten, and she to laugh — Oh, Edmund, it was terrible!”

The tears came, and she stretched her hands to him as for help. When he offered to take them she pulled them back. “No, no! I may be just so, sometime; and you—”

The soft plapping of a woman’s footfall made itself heard, and, with another glance over her shoulder, Lillias saw Mrs. Mevison prowling to and fro at the farther end of the veranda, and busying herself with putting in place some fallen trailers of honeysuckle. Lillias clutched her lover’s hand and pulled him away down over the lawn into the avenue leading to the river. There she bathed her eyes with water which he scooped up and held in his joined hands for her. Then, seated on a grassy bank, above a sunny ripple of the stream, they continued their study of the lamentable case that had fallen in their way, and tried to divine the lesson of it for themselves.

“There can’t be any doubt,” she said, “about her loving him. A woman couldn’t do such things to a man she was indifferent to, or one that she simply hated. She loves him, I can see it in every look she gives him; and what do you suppose is the trouble?”

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “he doesn’t love her, and she knows it.”

“No, that can’t be it. If he didn’t love her he would have left her long ago. He does love her; you mustn’t think he doesn’t.”

“Dearest, I won’t if you say so.”

“No, not because I say so, but because it isn’t true.”

“Then because it isn’t true.”

“That is something like.” She drooped a little nearer, so that their shoulders touched. “Where was I?”

“They are cruel because they are kind.”

“Something of that sort. But you see, now, that love in itself isn’t enough to keep people friends?”

“Do you mean that it has to be mixed with a little reason?”

“With a good deal of reason.”

“Well, you shall supply the reason and I will supply the love. I’ll tell you what I think the trouble is: Mrs. Mevison is a fool. I thought so the first time I saw her.”

“Then she’s a fool by her woman’s nature, as much as by her own.”

“Oh, I don’t blame her for being a fool, any more than I praise you for being a sage. She wants to exact everything from her husband because she would like to give him everything — if she could.”

“That doesn’t sound very logical.”

“It’s as logical as it can be under the circumstances.”

They both laughed at this, more and more fondly, and she said, “Well, then, what we have got to do is to love each other less and less.”

“Something like that,” he consented, and they began throwing little sticks into the stream and watching them drift off together over the ripple.

They named them after themselves, and she said, “Now Edmund is chasing Lillias!”

“No, it’s Lillias that’s chasing Edmund!” he retorted.

They sauntered back to the house buoyant from their nonsense, with renewed hope and faith in themselves, and Mrs. Mevison met them at the veranda steps. Mevison was sitting there, and she called gayly, as if for him to hear: “Ah, I saw you escaping me! I wanted to follow you and eavesdrop your billing and cooing. All the world loves a lover, they say, you know, and I’m hungry for a taste of your happiness. Yes, I would eavesdrop, if I could. Fair exchange is no robbery, is it, Miss Bellard? What do you call each other now? You won’t always call each other sweet names, but you’ll always mean sweetness by any name. You mustn’t be astonished at the change, Miss Bellard. Why, the first time Mr. Mevison said to me, ‘Stubborn little fool!’ I hardly knew where to look; but I soon found out that it meant the same as ducky or dovey. Didn’t it, ducky-dovey?”

She went up to Mevison, sitting gloomily tilted back in his chair, and from behind him clapped her hands on his cheeks and pressed her own cheek down on his head. When she released him, he flung his arms wildly about in the effort to recover his balance. Craybourne and Lillias ran too late to catch him from falling. Mrs. Mevison stopped herself in a shriek of laughter.

“Oh, what a shame! Do forgive me, Arthur!”

She lent her aid with the others; but Lillias saw him pushing his wife’s hands away, when he could, with looks of deadly rage.

“I’m afraid,” he said to Lillias, when he had got back to his pose, “that I was rather ridiculous.”

“Oh, no one thought of such a thing, Arthur,” his wife said, with indignant tenderness.

“I’m so glad we were in time, Mr. Mevison,” the girl said.

“You’re all right now?” Craybourne asked.

With a little more polite parley the lovers got themselves away, Craybourne declaring that he must go back to the hotel. Mrs. Mevison remained superfluously putting her husband in shape, and brushing specks of imaginary dust from his clothes, and compassionately cooing over him.

Lillias went down the avenue with Craybourne to the ferry, and then trailed slowly back over the stubble, with her head down. When she lifted it she saw Mrs. Mevison sweeping swiftly towards her.

“Just one moment, Miss Bellard!” Mrs. Mevison called to her. The voice was gay, and even arch, but there was a note of battle in it, which no woman could have mistaken, though a man might have been deceived. When she came up to the girl, who was staring fearlessly at her, she broke out in tones thick with fury: “Don’t think I don’t know that you heard, last night. I don’t say you listened!”

“No, Mrs. Mevison,” Lillias said, rather dreadfully.

The woman tossed her head. “If you had listened, you might have heard the good of yourself that listeners always hear. It is you, you that have added the last straw! Do you suppose I don’t know that from the first moment my husband entered that house you were making a set at him? Do you suppose I can’t see that your engagement to that wretched cockney is a mere blind, and that you’re waiting till my husband and I are separated to transfer your easy affections to him? Do you imagine I couldn’t feel the flirt-nature in you as soon as I came near you? Arthur and I might still have made it up; he was getting to see the trouble from my point of view, but when you came in between us—” She choked with her rage, and suddenly she changed from accusation to imploring. “Leave him to me, Miss Bellard, and it will all come right! I didn’t intend to push him over just now, but when I saw how it shocked you, with your goody-goody pretences, I laughed, and I was glad I did it. But now, now I would give anything — I take it all back about you! Yes, I do. And I beg your pardon! I don’t accuse you of anything. It is his fault, all his fault; and if you will only say that you will not encourage him—”

At this point Lillias did a wrong thing, but it may be contended that she was rather sorely tried. “Get away!” she said, with a contempt past description, and she advanced upon Mrs. Mevison as if she would tread her down. The other had no alternative but to slip aside.

“Don’t take it so!” she besought the pitiless girl. “I know that you love Mr. Craybourne. I take back calling him a cockney. He isn’t. He’s fine and good. Any one can see it. And you are going to have in him what I have lost in my husband! That ought to make you a little lenient. It ought, oughtn’t it? See how I humble myself to you! I hope you may never, never have to humble yourself to another woman as I am doing to you. We began as sweetly as you are beginning now. There was nothing I wouldn’t do for him, or he for me. There never were people so devoted. And it has come to this with us! We are going to part, unless — unless you can show him that you don’t care for him. I know you don’t, but he thinks you do! If he knew you didn’t, he would be reconciled to me, and we could be happy again. My life is wrapped up in  him. Oh, if you won’t have pity on me, have pity on yourself! You can’t expect to be happy in your marriage if you break up mine. Give me back my husband — no, give him back to himself, his better self! If you don’t, my misery will be upon you; it will bring you to judgment.”

Lillias strode relentlessly on in silent scorn of the frantic woman, who pursued her at last with a long-drawn, heart-broken, heartbreaking “Oh!”

XI

AT luncheon Mrs. Mevison was of a calm that betrayed no signs of the morning’s tempests. Lillias and she observed a truce that had the effect of a peace, unbroken by any hostile experience, and in the absence of Craybourne, who had apparently not found himself equal to further eventualities, Mrs. Mevison seemed less exasperated by the sense of the happiness so near and yet so far from her. She was very sweet and gentle with every one, from the waitress to Mevison, so that Crombie could scarcely credit his old friend when Mevison said, in the stroll which he took at Crombie’s side a few hours before dinner, “Well, it has been amicably arranged with Mrs. Mevison.”

“What do you mean?”

“We are going to part — friends.”

“Has it really come to that? I was in hopes, seeing you so pleasant together at luncheon—”

Mevison shook his head sadly. “All women like to put a good face on things, and Mrs. Mevison above all other women. After we had agreed to separate peaceably, it was an easy matter to agree upon behaving ourselves decently during the brief remnant of our union. She feels, as I do, that we owe that much to you and Mrs. Crombie, if not to each other.” To Crombie’s vast astonishment he added, “She isn’t unreasonable; you mustn’t think that; and you mustn’t think that in this business the fault has been altogether on her side, as I believe I told you before. I don’t pretend that I’m not a trying man to live with at times. Certainly I’m trying to such a woman as Clarice. And in our rows I do my full share  of the nagging. I’ve got a nasty temper of my own, and I give her as good as she sends, though I know all the time how much worse I’m hurting her than she is hurting me. It isn’t out of any wickedness she does it; I can’t make any one else understand. My God! how vulgar it all is! But it’s coming to an end, quickly and quietly.”

Through all this Crombie had a fuzzy notion that he was ill-used, or if not he, then Mrs. Crombie. She had asked these people into the house to do him a pleasure through her hospitality to his old friend, and now, confound them, they were abusing her hospitality with their infernal jangling, and they were going to set the seal to the outrage by breaking up under his roof. It was like having a double suicide on one’s premises. It was violating the sanctities of a Christian home. It was a species of sacrilege; it was a scandal. People would say — there was no saying what people would not say, if Mevison and his wife had this sort of burst-up on the place, with the subsequent proceedings for divorce. Mrs. Crombie and he might be dragged into the trial as witnesses. Lillias might; Craybourne might. He kept his injury out of his voice as well as he could in asking, “Do you mean that you are going to separate now, right off the handle?”

“We shall not even leave your house together, if you will allow me to leave her behind me for an hour or two. I expect to take the train for Quebec, and she will take the Boston express when it comes along. It’s all arranged. We were packed in view of this possibility, this moral certainty, before we came to you.”

“Well, see here, Mevison,” Crombie said, with a knotted brow of extreme perplexity, “I hope it won’t seem unreasonable to you if I ask you whether you can’t hold up a little.”

“How hold up?”

The two men paused in their ramble and stood facing each other.

“Hold up till you get away. Go off together, and separate at the Junction.” The word dimly suggested something different to Crombie, but he ignored its suggestion; or, rather, he postponed it to its possible effect upon Mevison when he got to the Junction. “This thing is going to make a lot of talk. It’s going to get into the papers; such things always do, nowadays. There’ll be a raft of reporters round. My house will be snapshotted, and my wife’s photograph and mine and Lillias’s and Craybourne’s will be grouped round yours and Mrs. Mevison’s, with bits of the Saco Valley scenery, in the Sunday editions. You see?”

Mevison’s jaw fell. “I see,” he admitted, in a kind of dismay.

Crombie had made his point, and he started on, with Mevison limping at his side. “I hope, old fellow, you feel that I’ve been with you in this deplorable business, first, last, and all the time. It’s very well for you to blame yourself; it’s handsome, and manly, and generous, and chivalrous, and all that rot, but unless you’ve changed most infernally from the fellow I used to know at Réné’s—”

“I have, Crombie,” Mevison sadly responded. “Marriage changes a man; or, rather, it finds him out. I’ve been to blame; but all that’s too late now.”

“I’m not advocating your remaining together. It’s probably best for both of you that you should separate. It seems to me that it’s come to that — for a while at least. But, Mevison, don’t do it here! It will break Mrs. Crombie up awfully.”

Mevison laughed miserably. “It will break Mrs. Mevison up, too.”

“Yes, I suppose it will. But, you see, Mrs. Crombie isn’t in it as Mrs. Mevison is.”

“No.”

“She’s tried to act nicely in the whole business, Mrs. Crombie has; but it’s killing her by inches.” When Crombie made use of this image, he could not help making the reflection that Mevison might think there were a good many inches of Mrs. Crombie to kill, and that her vitality would hold out a long while in the process. He made haste to add, “Of course, I beg your pardon. But what I’m getting at is the idea of making this business as easy for Mrs. Crombie as possible. Now, why can’t you two go off together and separate at the Junction? Why can’t you put that idea before Mrs. Mevison? She might take to it.”

Mevison frowned, in a recurrence of the disgust for his wife which Crombie’s championship of himself had momentarily dissipated. “Yes, she might consent, if it were not for her cursed histrionics. She consented to my leaving her in your house, I believe, as much for the dramatic effect as anything—”

“But, don’t you see? It will be a great deal more dramatic for you to part at the Junction. The up-train and the down-train meet there; you get aboard one and she gets aboard the other, and that ends it.”

Crombie’s voice rose in a cheerfulness, as he urged his point, which it had not expressed before. But Mevison apparently did not share his gay expectation. “There’s no telling how she will take the idea. I’m afraid it will lead to a review of the whole case. But I will try it with her. It is certainly your due in the matter, and Mrs. Crombie’s due. I hope, Crombie, you understand how very grateful I feel towards you both?”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mevison.”

They dismissed the matter, from their talk, at least, and finished their stroll in such remoteness from it that Crombie was able to gather some wild sweetbrier roses and bring them home. Mrs. Mevison admired them so much when he arrived with them on the veranda where she was sitting with his wife that he gave them to her, bidding her be careful not to scratch herself.

“Oh, I know how to manage,” she said. “Give me your handkerchief, Arthur,” and when he held it out to her she put it round the thorny stems, and said, with a triumphant smile up into Crombie’s face, “There!” It was all very lurid to Crombie. With his privity to the impending tragedy he felt like a fiend, and in this comedy he was playing with the victim-villain of the tragedy he felt like a fool.

He was still of no very determinate conviction with respect to himself at large, when, after the women had left them that night, and Mevison and he sat over their cigars on the veranda and absently marked the Big Dipper filling its bowl with the clear night above the Presidential Range, Mevison said, in a low voice, “Well, it’s all right.”

“You suggested my idea to Mrs. Mevison?”

“Yes, and she took to the notion of the Junction instantly. It satisfied the curious kind of poetry that Clarice has in her.” Crombie thought it a very curious kind of poetry, but he thought it best not to say so, and Mevison went on.

“I gave her some inkling of how you felt, and she instantly entered into your feeling. Clarice is a very reasonable woman in those things. She is very intelligent.”

Mevison heaved a long, low sigh, with which he exhaled a volume of smoke, whitening in the clear, chill night air.

“Well, then,” Crombie said, “if it’s all settled, I hope you’ll get a good night’s rest, and start fresh in the morning.” This was not quite what he would have wished to say, but he let it go.

“No doubt about that,” Mevison returned. “As I haven’t slept for several nights past, I should be pretty sure of sleeping to-night even if I didn’t feel so strangely at peace. I suppose it’s the peace of exhaustion.

I suppose Clarice feels the same, poor woman!”

“Better take the whiskey up with you,” Crombie said, as they rose from their tobacco at last.

“No, I’m all right without, don’t be afraid. Besides, Clarice has given me some sleep-medicine of hers that she finds never fails.”

XII

CROMBIE also felt something of that peace from exhaustion of which Mevison had all but boasted, as he entered his room very carefully, so as not to waken Mrs. Crombie, whom he imagined asleep beyond the door opening into her own room. He was surprised to have her look in at him, as if she had been waiting up for him. But he said, as if he had expected it:

“Well, you know they’re going, in the morning?”

“Yes, she told me.”

“And they’re going to separate, too.”

“Separate!”

“You must have seen it was coming to that. I had it out with Mevison this afternoon when we were walking; but I didn’t mean to tell you till they were out of the house. They meant to separate before they left us, he taking the up-train and she the down-train, an hour later. But I told him that it wouldn’t do; that it would make talk about us, and bring us into their row in all sorts of ways.”

“That was very thoughtful of you, Archibald.”

“He saw the point, too. I made him promise that they would decently leave the house together, and leave the Saco Shore station together, and do their confounded separating at the Junction.”

Crombie ended in an exasperation, in which he lifted his voice, out of the whisper they had been using, into a thick barytone.

“‘Sh!” she hissed. “Don’t speak so loud! You’ve done the wisest thing that could be done; but I don’t think it was delicate of them to come here at all. What do you suppose could have possessed them to do it, when they knew—”

“I don’t believe they did know. It’s something they couldn’t realize; at least, Mevison couldn’t. They’ve been fighting along for years, and as far as their nerves are concerned they’re no nearer the end now than they ever were; their consciousness doesn’t accept the fact. Mevison talked like a fool; I wanted to laugh. He would pitch into her, and pitch into himself, and then he would dwell on her good qualities, and he concluded, when we came off to bed, by refusing whiskey for his insomnia, because he was going to try some sleep-medicine that his wife had given him.” Crombie ended in a note of hollow laughter which attested the derision in which he held Mevison’s absurdity.

His laughter made his wife say “‘Sh!” again, but she smiled herself before she added, severely, “Well, I hope they will separate. It will be the best thing for them. They can’t respect each other after what they have done — or she has done. But what a dreadful thing to come into our lives!”

“I suppose we can stand it if they can,” Crombie gloomily suggested. “I can’t help being sorry for poor old Mevison.”

“I am sorry for her, too. You can see that she’s perfectly wrapped up in him.”

“Well, she has a queer way of showing it.”

“Not at all! But what I keep thinking of, all the time, is the effect it is going to have on Lillias.”

“What has it got to do with Lillias?”

“It is such an awful warning.”

“I hope it will be a warning to her to behave herself. She mustn’t suppose that an Englishman will stand any such jinks as Mrs. Mevison’s. It’s a very good thing for Lillias.”

“Perhaps. But oh, dear me! What a heart-breaking thing it is, Archibald, when you come to think of it! We’ve never come so near to a separation — other people’s, I mean — before. Isn’t it strange that with all the separating and divorcing that seems to be going on, one has so very little of it in one’s own circle?”

“I’m not sure but there had better be more of it.”

“You know you don’t think that, my dear!”

“Well, anyway, I think I’ll go to bed. I’m awfully sleepy.”

“Yes, you must be worn out by it. Goodnight, darling.”

The epithet would not have seemed a very close fit for Crombie with a dispassionate witness, but these things are never intended for the dispassionate witness, and perhaps the kindly pair looked much the same in each other’s eyes as a younger couple might have looked to one another.

Crombie might have been in bed half an hour, and he had got distinctly past the border between drowsing and sleeping, when he heard a sort of scraping sound. He was aware of it scraping and scraping as if it were scraping through his sleep, and getting down to a dream beneath, and finally reaching the quick of his waking. He roused himself with a sense of having a head of balloon-like vastness and lightness, which, when he sat up in bed, seemed to sway and swing on his shoulders as if impatient for an ascent to the ceiling.

The instant he sat up, the gnawing or the scraping ceased. But he got out of bed, and went and bathed his eyes, so as to be ready for any emergency, in which quickness of vision was requisite, like that of a rat. The precaution aided in rousing him fully, and at once reduced the dimensions of his head, so that he had no difficulty in putting it out of the door into the hall and peering with his candle into its emptiness and silence.

 It was so absolutely empty and so absolutely silent that the void seemed to mock his vision, and the stillness hummed in his ear with an audible derision. “Well,” he said to himself, “I don’t care what it was before, it isn’t anything now. I probably dreamed it.”

He went back into his room, however, and mechanically got into his clothes, and waited for that gnawing, or that scraping, to begin again. He was determined not to let it surprise him; he was determined to surprise it. With a resolution that affected him as adamantine, he drowsed again, and then started from his drowse, not to the accustomed noise, but to the sound, as he fancied, of a door in the hall quickly opened and quickly shut.

He flung his own door open, but again the innocent emptiness and silence of the dark hall offered themselves in a sort of gentle reproach of his turbulence. He waited, now, a considerable time, but the emptiness and silence maintained themselves in conscious innocence, and after a vain prolongation of his final scrutiny of the shadows he returned to his chair.

This time he did not drowse; he could not, he was so furious at being played upon — that is, he did not believe he was drowsing, but it was certainly not from a vigil that he again started to his feet. Now he did not fling his door open into the hall, but softly set it ajar and waited on the threshold for the scraping or the gnawing to begin. Then he was aware of a soft movement in the hall, and a figure, the figure of a woman fully dressed and bearing a candle in one hand while the other held her skirt behind from the floor, as the fashion of women is, or lately was, crept as with down-shod feet to the door of Mevison’s room and began to scrape on it with her finger-nails. It was unmistakably Mrs. Mevison, and, unless she was sleep-walking, it was Mrs. Mevison inspired by a fell intent of which the conception almost bereft Crombie of his habitual politeness and the hospitable sense of the sacred character of a guest.

“What are you doing that for?” he whispered, hoarsely, harshly.

She turned and looked at him where he stood at his door, and measured him in mass and detail with an imperious eye. “I am trying to waken my husband,” she answered, with a dignified calm which he could hope to emulate.

Crombie’s belief was that she was doing it for pure mischief, and with a diabolical intent of tormenting her husband, who had probably locked the door between them to prevent her talking to him, but this was a belief which he could not well express even to a woman for whom he had tacitly allowed himself a wide range of disrespect. All he could do was to say, “Oh!” and stand there till he heard a responsive stirring within Mevison’s room.

After an interval long enough for Mevison to light a candle and get to the door it was unlocked and thrown open, and he appeared on the threshold.

“Oh, Arthur,” she began, in the way people do who have been unexpectedly reminded, “I was just coming to tell you something I had thought of that will make us see everything in a new and different light; and—”

Her husband put his arm round her and looked over her shoulder at Crombie with a countenance of severe amaze. Then he murmured, “Come in, Clarice,” and drew her inside the room and closed the door in Crombie’s face.

The whole household slept late, and there was barely time for the Mevisons to get from the breakfast - table to the train that was to carry them to the Junction together. After what had happened at their last meeting, Crombie was not surprised that Mevison should bear himself somewhat awkwardly towards him. On the other hand, Mrs. Mevison was not only very sweet with Mrs. Crombie and Lillias, and tender with the waitress, to whom he afterwards saw her giving a tip out of all proportion to the length of her stay under his roof, but she behaved with extreme gentleness towards Crombie himself. He understood, as well as if she had put it in words, that this was in triumph over him and his suspicions; he surmised that she had been able to make Mevison make up their quarrel, and that between them they had offered him a sacrifice on the altar of their domestic happiness. As long as they were all together, Mevison did not relax from the stiffness with which he comported himself towards Crombie, but there came a moment when his wife did not keep the two men from meeting alone.

Mevison improved the chance, rather sheepishly. “My wife will tell Mrs. Crombie, but I think I ought to tell you, that Clarice and I are going to try it together again. She has seen our whole relation in a more possible light, and I must say that she has shown me where I have been in fault, and how I can avoid future causes of trouble. It’s only right I should tell you that when you saw her last night she was impatient to tell me what she had thought of, and was trying to waken me without disturbing any one else.”

“Oh, I understand that now, and I wish you would offer Mrs. Mevison my very sincere apologies for my seeming intrusion.”

“I will, Crombie, with the greatest pleasure, for I know how glad she will be to feel that you are doing her justice. There is not a more generous creature under the sun.”

“Oh, I can see that. I can see that it has been only her impulsiveness — I beg your pardon!”

“Not at all, old fellow. As I told you yesterday afternoon, though, I have been to blame myself. I see that more clearly than ever.” They were both silent, for now they seemed to have come to the end of their say, but Mevison added, with an appeal as if from some profound insecurity, which Crombie found very affecting, “We feel as if we were beginning all over again, and I know that we are going forward on ground where there will be no room for the old — anxieties.”

“I’m sure of that, Mevison.”

“Thank you, Crombie — thank you!” Mevison’s voice trembled a little, and he wrung his friend’s hand hard.

Mrs. Mevison parted emotionally with all. She pressed Crombie’s hand as if in recognition of a sacred confidence between them, and she exacted from Mrs. Crombie almost a promise that they would both come to see her when she and Arthur were settled in New York for the winter, though she knew how hard it would be for her to tear herself from her beloved Boston. She thanked Mrs. Crombie for having rescued them from that dreadful hotel, and she hoped they had not been too much trouble to her. She must let them pay her back for it somehow.

Lillias was the last to receive her adieux, and she told the girl she had purposely kept her for the last. “What shall I say to you, my dear?” she asked, from the sunny summit of her matronly felicity. “I wish you very, very happy, as the nice old phrase is. I wish you as happy as Arthur and I are going to be, for our honeymoon is just beginning over again. It seems a little selfish for us to be taking it before you have yours, but I suppose it can’t be helped.” She was clinging to the girl’s hand, and fondly bending her eyes upon her from this slant of the head and from that, and now she humbly entreated, “May I kiss you?”

Lillias did not say, but perhaps she inclined her cheek a little. At any rate, she did not forbid the endearment, and Mrs. Mevison bestowed it.

“There!” she cried. “That’s for good luck. Come, Arthur, dear! Good-bye, all! Oh! Why, Mr. Craybourne!” she called to the young man as he came round the corner of the house. “Just in time for hail and farewell!” She ran and seized his hand. “Goodbye! good-bye!” she cried, and she added in a stage whisper, for every one to hear, “Be good to that sweet girl!”

The carriage whirled her and Mevison away, but before it had traced the gravelled curve in front of the cottage Mrs. Crombie burst out with, “Treacherous, false, hypocritical, disagreeable woman!” in a diminuendo which seemed to do so little justice to the case that Crombie threw his arms desperately into the air and went in-doors without a word.

“I don’t know,” Lillias said, continuing to rub with her handkerchief at the cheek which Mrs. Mevison had kissed, and staring after the carriage in a blank forgetfulness of Craybourne, who stood submissively by in expectation of her return to herself.

“Lillias!” her aunt cried.

“She’s disagreeable, but you can’t say she’s insincere. She’s shown out the worst that’s in her, but can we be sure that he has?”

“Well, Lillias! After the rude way she behaved to you from the beginning!”

“I like to be just, Aunt Hester.”

“Well, I can’t make you out. Can you, Mr. Craybourne?”

Craybourne smiled. “Whenever I can’t, I trust to a period of unconscious cerebration.”

The girl looked at him with sudden wonder in her fine eyes and some apparent doubt.

“Well,” Mrs. Crombie said, “I’m glad she’s out of the house, anyway,” and she added, “What would you poor things like for luncheon?”

“Oh, anything, Aunt Hester. Or nothing.” Lillias turned distractedly to Craybourne. “I want you, Edmund. Aunt Hester, excuse us a moment. I want to speak to Mr. Craybourne. No, no!” she said. “Don’t go in! I’ll take him down to the river. Come, Mr. Craybourne.”

She left Mrs. Crombie looking after them as she led the way with Craybourne, swiftly swooping over the slope of the meadow, with her light skirt lifted before her and swirling in a fine eddy behind her.

She did not pause for the important talk which he felt impending till they reached that point of the river where they had sat the day before and thrown sticks into the stream and played the fool so gladly. Then she panted, “You see it won’t do, Edmund.” He was not the sort of man to repeat her words in idle question; he sat silently down, and, with his kind, intelligent looks bent on her, let her go on.

“I am too much like her. I have been feeling it more and more; and unless you can prove to me that there is some vital difference, so that, under the same conditions, I should behave otherwise, it had better be off, and the sooner the better. I would rather be dead than treat you as she treated him, and much rather you would be dead than have you treat me as he treated her. I couldn’t stand it for a moment, and I shouldn’t respect you if you could.”

Craybourne gave himself an interval of thoughtful silence before he asked, “Aren’t you taking it rather too much for granted that you are like her? I don’t see the least resemblance.”

He had, certainly not with her connivance, but certainly not without her consent, possessed himself of that hand of hers which hung next him; and, now finding it in his clasp, she pressed his hand gratefully. “I don’t mean in temperament—”

“And I am sure not in temper!”

She pressed his hand again, and smiled sidelong up at him. Then as he folded himself down on the bank, she could not well keep standing, and, besides, she thought she could think better sitting. “I don’t mean in temper, either; at least, I should hope not. But, Edmund, that has nothing to do with the kind of resemblance I had in mind. I am too much like her in being too much in love.”

She looked anxiously at him, and as he had the instinct, rare among men, of knowing when not to laugh at a woman’s seriousness, he did not even smile, and she went on:

“I should ask too much of you—”

“Ah, that,” he broke in, “you could not do. You couldn’t ask anything that I wouldn’t gladly do.”

“That is just what I should answer you, if you had said what I said; and that convinces me that it is quite as bad as I supposed, if not worse. We are both too much in love.”

He was as serious as she in replying, “Do you mean that people who are very much in love had better not marry?”

“That is what I mean. It is dangerous; it’s madness to do so.”

“I’ve sometimes vaguely felt it. But — Go on, Lillias.”

She took her hand from him, observing, “If we kept that up, we never could talk sensibly, and I wish to talk sensibly.”

“I’m afraid there’s something in what you say,” he sighed.

“Besides, this may be the beginning of the end, and we had better commence at once.”

“What do you mean?”

“I haven’t come to that, yet. But there is something — and it’s the great thing, that I’m sure of — and that is that if we’re marrying for love, we’re making a mistake, and the more love the more mistake. We ought to marry dispassionately.”

“I don’t know that I should go so far as that,” he said, with the fine reasonableness which she had early told him was his greatest charm. “But I certainly agree with you that love alone isn’t a sufficient motive. I always supposed,” he continued, with an introspective air, “that there was something besides love in our case. I thought there was a sense of character, an intellectual reciprocity, a mutual respect—”

“Yes,” she said, “there’s no denying that, and that’s just what makes the love so dangerous. It’s the mixture.”

“Why,” he argued, “you don’t mean to say that there oughtn’t to be any love?”

“No, I don’t mean that, quite. It would be repulsive if there were no love. To marry for reason would be almost as bad as to marry for money.”

“Then what do you think people ought to marry for?”

After a moment of sad reflection she said, “I’m not sure that they ought to marry at all.”

“Lillias!”

“Of course, I don’t mean that, either, quite. But after hearing what we’ve heard, and seeing what we’ve seen, all in a supposed union of hearts and hands that didn’t admit anything of the kind to the world—”

“But why need we think that our marriage would be like that?”

“How do we know but all marriages are like that?”

“I’m sure they’re not. There are your aunt and uncle: why shouldn’t we be like them in our marriage?”

Lillias gave a fine, small shrug. “My aunt and uncle are ridiculous. Would you like to be like them? Darby and Joan are not my ideal.”

“I don’t think Darby and Joan are so bad when you get to their time of life. People come to Darby and Joan because they are good, I suppose, and kind to each other, and patient, and all that.”

“Yes, but it may be the peace of exhaustion. They’ve simply fought to a finish.”

“Well, my dear — Or perhaps you don’t wish me to call you my dear?”

“You can call me so, provisionally.”

“Thank you. Then, Lillias, I should like to know what you think was the attraction that brought us together, to begin with?”

“I don’t know. Love, I suppose. At least, it was in my case.”

“It wasn’t in mine.”

“It wasn’t in yours!” She looked at him with the notion that he must be joking. But besides his being an Englishman, of whom joking could not always be predicated, especially on serious subjects, she saw that in this instance he was particularly in earnest. “I should like to know what it was, then!” she said, rather indignantly.

“It was interest in an experiment that had my respect. It was what you were doing, not what you were, that attracted me.”

“Oh, indeed!”

“Yes.”

“And may I ask what retained your interest?”

“It was you, your charming and adorable self. But the sense of that certainly came second and not first. Ah! I see I have wounded you.”

“Not at all. I like what you have told me. It restores my self-respect. But it shows me that men never can understand women. When all is said and done, we are of different natures.”

Craybourne laughed joyfully. “Now that is such an American way of putting it. So delightful, so mystical!”

“And that is such an English way of recognizing the fact. Yes, Mr. Craybourne,” the girl said, getting unexpectedly to her feet, “we are not only of different natures, but different races.”

“I always supposed the Americans and English were of the same race — the Anglo-Saxon race. Or if you won’t allow that we’re certainly of the same human race.”

“I’m not joking, Mr. Craybourne, as you seem to think. I see that we have never understood each other, and never can.”

“I think we can. But why ‘Mr. Craybourne,’ Lillias?”

“Because I think it had better come to it at once.”

“The—”

“Parting, yes.”

He turned very white, very suddenly, so that she entreated, “Don’t do that!”

“It isn’t a thing I can help, quite. Lillias, why should we part?”

“You have the same as told me you don’t love me—”

“No, dearest — or Miss Bellard, I mean — I said I didn’t love you at first. And you had been saying that we oughtn’t to love each other.”

“Then you were deceiving me?”

He looked a magnanimous reproach at her unreasonableness, her unfairness, and she was ashamed. She took up a stitch she had dropped.

“I could see that all along you didn’t care for me primarily as a woman. I piqued you and puzzled you as an American. I could see that you were always trying to make me out. And that was very offensive.”

“I am sorry that I was offensive, but certainly you did pique and puzzle me, not only as a woman but as an American. Perhaps I piqued and puzzled you as an Englishman?”

“Not a bit. You were so much of a man that I could see through you instantly.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s quite enough that we know our own minds at last. Our marriage would be unhappy because we are so hopelessly different, in nature, in nationality, in everything. I love you and I always shall—”

“And I you, Lillias, as long as I live.”

“That is very sweet of you, Edmund. But we have had our lesson in those wretched people, and we had better heed it. You see yourself, dearest, that we could never remain united!”

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t try.”

“Yes, dearest, you do. We can break now, and the cleavage would be absolute; but if we were married and broke there would be all sorts of pieces. We have never had the least sign of a quarrel.”

Craybourne was silent, perhaps absently, and she went on:

“And I determined from the first moment—”

“When was the first moment?”

“Why, I suppose it was the glimpse of you I caught that first day I saw you coming in to hear my lecture. I thought you were very distinguished, and I — well, I was taken with you. It began then.”

“Did it, really? How intoxicating! I never knew that, Lillias.”

“We’ve never talked out fully, yet.”

“Then suppose we do it now.”

“No, there isn’t time, now. It’s too late,” she sighed.

“Oh, don’t say that, dearest!”

“Yes, it’s too late. According to what you say, you were not at all impressed so soon.”

“Impressed?”

“Taken with me — it’s the same thing.”

“No,” he owned, “I can’t honestly say I was.” Then he explained, “But I was taken with the idea of you, or what you were doing. I’ve always fancied women leading men in thought, you know; they’re naturally our teachers. That sort of women were my heroines: Hypatia, and those two women who were university professors at Bologna, and the one at Padua; I don’t remember their names; and when I heard, out there, that there was a woman lecturing to the students, of course I was taken — with the idea. I have always fancied intellectual women. I think they’re peculiarly lovable. I dare say it’s rather odd; a sort of taste for olives—”

Lillias remained gravely looking at him. Now, at the break in his continuity, she said, aloud, but as if to herself, “How ecstatically offensive!”

He stared blankly at her.

“Then I am — olives!” she explained.

“In the highest sense — well, yes.”

“And I thought perhaps that I was roses, or violets, or lilies, poor fool!”

“Don’t take it in that way, dearest! I supposed it would please you to know—”

“Please me!”

He gazed at her in a perplexity of such childlike simplicity that she could not help a very miserable laugh. “Really, Edmund, “ she said, as she turned and began to move homeward, “you beat the band. Now, don’t,” she added, angrily, “ask me just what I mean by beating the band. Any American idiot would know that.”

She swept forward so swiftly that though he easily kept up with her, in his long, lank stride, his stride was quicker than usual. “Will you listen to me, Lillias?”

“No, I will not listen to you. I have heard too much already.” She stopped as suddenly as she had started, and fixed him with scornful defiance. “I dare say that if we were married, and quarrelling, this is the point where you would call me a stubborn little fool.”

“Oh, that abominable woman!” he groaned. “She has poisoned our love.”

“Our love for olives? Our peculiar passion for intellectual women?”

“You are cruel, Lillias, to take what I said in that way.”

“You were cruel to say what I couldn’t take in any other way.”

“Then have patience with me for expressing myself badly! For Heaven’s sake don’t let us quarrel!”

“Who is quarrelling?” she demanded.

“I mean, let us be reasonable. You have always wished me to regard our affair dispassionately, and now you are giving way to a very mistaken feeling—”

“I am not giving way to any sort of feeling! You are worse and worse.”

“Oh,” he said, sadly, “I do seem to roil the water somehow, whether I stand up-stream from you or down.”

“Poor lamb!” she retorted, contemptuously. Then, after a few steps, she stopped again and challenged him: “And I am the wolf, I suppose!”

“Do you think it fair to accuse me of calling you a wolf?”

“You insinuate that I am unjust to you, when you know that I am the soul of justice!”

“I insinuate nothing, my dear. But I see that you are determined to break with me.”

“Break with you? What is there left to break, I should like to know, after what has passed between us?”

“Very little, I’m afraid,” he answered, with dignity. “And you are quite right. I accuse you of nothing; I take all the blame to myself for the beastly row that I should never have believed we would come to.” She stared at him, and the heat went out of her face, and a light of intelligence came into it, which was also consternation. “Yes, it is a beastly row, as you say, Edmund,” she owned, with the frankness on which she prided herself. “It seems that we can’t even part without quarrelling. Who would have dreamt it! And I meant that it should all be with such dignity, such self-respect, such consideration for each other! Oh, it isn’t at all as I meant it to be! It’s as bad as if we were married already. But you see, dearest, don’t you, that we must part now? Doesn’t it show you that we are not suited to each other? That I was perfectly right? Oh, dearest, how can you ever forgive me?”

She looked at him so tenderly, so ruefully, that he could not forbear giving her an object-lesson in forgiveness. The spot was secluded and convenient for the purpose, and he took her in his arms and laid her head on his breast, and she lingered for a moment in his embrace, as if gathering strength from it for the ordeal before her. Then she gently repulsed him and wiped from her eyes the tears which had accompanied her self-analysis from the point where it began to break in self-condemnation.

“Now,” she said, “this is the end.”

He seemed surprised at her announcement, as if he had supposed it were rather the beginning, but he had apparently not the courage to protest.

“We are parting,” she continued, “not because we have quarrelled and are mad at each other, like two fractious children — though it nearly came to that — with me, at least; you are always divine — but because our reason is convinced that it is best; that we are not fit for each other, or at least I am not; and that if we married, we should go on squabbling to the bitter end. Oh, I am glad that it has turned out as it has, and that I have shown you what an unreasonable and impossible person I am, in time. So, good-bye, dear—”

“Don’t you think,” he inquired, very deferentially, “that it would be more, well, becoming, if I were to go back to the house with you, and—”

“Not for worlds! Why should you want to?”

“Merely for the effect with your family. I think it’s due to them that I should say — that I should formalize our position, that I shouldn’t seem to run away, or have been driven away—”

“I see what you mean, but I don’t believe it’s necessary, indeed I don’t, dearest. If I did—”

“I went to your uncle when we first came here, and had it all out with him, and received his approval of my remaining, and now I think I ought to notify him of the conclusion we’ve come to.”

“Yes, there’s something in that. But Uncle Archibald wouldn’t expect it. He wouldn’t feel that it was due to him.”

“I’m not sure that I don’t feel it due to myself,” Craybourne said, steadily. “I rather feel that it’s my right not to have the appearance of skulking off.”

“Oh, no one would dream of that! I can explain it to Uncle Archibald and to Aunt Hester both. You needn’t be troubled. You may be sure that I won’t let you suffer in their opinion. I shall take all the blame upon myself. But there is no blame! It’s simply the wisest and best and kindest thing we could do for ourselves.”

“Yes, I suppose it is—”

“Oh, it is! And now don’t come a step farther! No!” The last word was accompanied by a swift evasion of the arms lifted towards her, and she fled away from him up the meadow and over the line where it began to be lawn. There she passed from his sight through a clump of shrubbery, behind which she hid, and watched him standing motionless, and then turning, and so walking slowly, head down, a pathetic figure, towards the ferry at the foot of the field.

XIII

LILLIAS went to her aunt as soon as she got to the house, and found her, with her spectacles on, doing some mending that would not admit the casual help of eye-glasses. “Aunt Hester,” she said, sitting down without waiting to be asked, “Mr. Craybourne is not coming to lunch.”

“Not coming to lunch! Why, I have got broilers, and strawberry short—”

“It doesn’t matter. He probably couldn’t eat a broiler as big as a grasshopper; at least, I couldn’t. Or a single bite of strawberry short-cake. We have separated.”

She had to endure having her aunt repeat, “Separated?”

“Yes, it’s all off, and I propose being off to-morrow morning. My week is up, and the Mellays will be quite ready to receive me. But if they weren’t, I should go, anyway, somewhere, so that I could get away from this terrible place where I have been so happy.” At this point Lillias put up her hands to her face to hide the peculiar expression she had noticed it always had when she was crying.

Mrs. Crombie had dropped her mending, and she now went on with an exclamatory, interrogative, objurgatory comment, until Lillias had got through crying and again took up her story.

“It’s very nice of you to say that you can’t believe it, and all that; and don’t think I don’t appreciate it. And it’s very sweet of you to insist upon my staying, but my plans are made, and I shall go. And I’m not crying because I’m sorry that we’ve broken, but because we’ve broken in such a humiliating way.”

“I don’t see,” her aunt ventured, “what you mean by humiliating, or what difference it makes how you break, so long as you break.”

“It makes all the difference in the world when you have your ideal of breaking; and if you intend to do it with dignity, and carry conviction by reasoning it out, and the first thing you know you are trying to quarrel, it is humiliating. For the time being I felt just like Mrs. Mevison.”

“I should have supposed,” Mrs. Crombie said, very stupidly, as Lillias thought, “that if she occurred to you in any sort of way, it would have stopped you in your mad career.”

“It was she that started me in my mad career. It was seeing what marriage could come to with no end of love, and — and — esteem, that gave me pause, and made me resolve to break with Edmund before it came to the sin and shame of such squabbling as went on with the Mevisons here. I reasoned it out perfectly, to myself, and I had just the expressions in my mind that would have left him without a word to say against it, when something he said before I could come to them started me off in another direction, and I was scolding and upbraiding him before I knew it, just like Mrs. Mevison. But, thank Heaven! that was convincing, anyway; and no matter what he thinks of my arguments, and considers me a wilful, capricious child, he must be glad he’s well out of it. I certainly am. But what,” Lillias demanded, with spirit, “makes you call it my mad career, Aunt Hester? Of course I know that you’re my mother’s sister, and all that, but I’m used to taking care of myself, and I don’t think that as your guest I ought exactly to be called insane.”

“I didn’t mean that, Lillias. It was not the word I meant to use. I’m sure nobody could consider you more sane than I do. But—”

“But what? If you didn’t mean insanity by mad career, what do you mean?”

“Why, I mean that you’ve thrown away a great chance.”

“The chance to get married? I can get along perfectly well without being married. What great chance have I thrown away?”

“The chance of being married to such a man as Mr. Craybourne,” Mrs. Crombie said, and she took back her mending into her lap again.

Lillias hesitated; perhaps she felt that there was reason in what her aunt suggested; but with a little spitefulness she asked, “What is so very remarkable about Mr. Craybourne, I should like to know?”

“Well, he is very unlike you, Lillias.”

“Oh, thank you! Is that such a merit?” Mrs. Crombie was on the track of a reason, and she was not to be put off the scent.

“He is an Englishman, and you would interest him as long as you lived. An American wouldn’t be interested in you half so long. You would be just like a lot of other girls to him; like most of the other girls he had seen. But an Englishman is different. He has never seen any other girls like you — girls let loose, as it were — and he’d be always puzzling over you, and trying to make you out.”

“Now, Aunt Hester, you have touched upon the very point that has been troubling me, and that I couldn’t get at — like a pin somewhere. I don’t think it’s at all nice to have a man interested in you because you puzzle him; and in this case I don’t think it would be fair to Edmund. I should be an imposition. But that isn’t what I am getting at. Please go on.”

The Old Woman in Mrs. Crombie felt somewhat baffled at the New Woman in Lillias, whom she vaguely suspected to be her spiritual as well as her intellectual superior; but in her belated way, she tried to go on. “He is not only an Englishman — whether you think it’s an advantage or not to have your husband always interested in you; some girls would, I know — but he is a very good man. Any one can see that he’s good by looking at him. I know he’s rather romantic, but as long as he’s romantic about you, I don’t think that’s any great fault.”

“It is in a lover,” Lillias interpolated. “Then it isn’t in a husband. They make the happiest kind of wives. I’ve seen it.” Lillias wondered if this meant her uncle, but she merely said, “Well, go on.”

“And he is very intelligent. He is cultivated. He knows a great deal more than most American men. He’s read more, and thought more. He isn’t merely a business man.”

“No, he certainly isn’t a business man, poor fellow,” Lillias noted, “or he wouldn’t have made such a mess of his ranching.”

“And no matter how high you went intellectually, he could follow you.”

“Yes, he could even lead me; and our men, unless they make a profession of it, though they’re bright enough, are not intellectual,” Lillias reflected. “Well?”

“Well, that’s all, I think. I suppose that once we should have considered whether he was religious or not; but the world has got to the pass where we don’t consider that any more, when a man is good, and kind, and truthful, and fond of you. And so I say you have thrown a pearl away.”

The girl was silent, passing her hand across her lap, and looking down at it in its passage. Then, “I know it, Aunt Hester,” she said, “and it’s just because he’s a pearl that I’ve thrown him away — or it’s as much that as anything. If he were less of a pearl I might have kept him.”

“I can’t make you out, Lillias.”

“Why, it seems to me that I’m very clear. We should have fought like cats and dogs, or Mevisons, not because he wanted to, but because I did. I should have made him do it, too. I couldn’t have helped it. I’m so wrapped up in him, he’s so all this world and the next to me that I couldn’t have borne to have anybody else have the least look of him. I should have worried his life out of him. I saw it in time, and I stopped it. That’s all. And the only regret I have is that I couldn’t convince him of the fact without giving him an illustration. Well!” she rose with a quick sigh. “I suppose you will have to tell uncle?”

“Shouldn’t you wish him to know? Don’t you think it’s his due?”

“Well, not perhaps till I get out of the house. I shall go the first train in the morning. Do you think you could keep it till then?”

“If you very much wish it,” Mrs. Crombie said, with gravity bordering on offence. “I do. And don’t be vexed, Aunt Hester!”

“Oh no!”

“I think I should like to write to uncle about it. I believe he would understand. I’ll write as quick as I get to the Mellays’. Could you wait till then?”

Mrs. Crombie promised. “Yes, I will wait till you can write to him.”

“Thank you, Aunt Hester.”

Mrs. Crombie looked after her as she left the room, not less baffled by her behavior about her uncle than by her behavior to her lover. Lillias immediately returned. “I don’t think I shall stay with the Mellays long. I believe I shall go back almost immediately.”

“Out there?”

“Yes. They wanted me to go on with my work, and now I should like to do so. It will be something to do. And I like it. I will write to the president, and when I hear from him I will go out there and begin preparing my lectures for the fall term.”

“Well, you know what is best for you, Lillias.”

“I used to think so,” the girl said, sadly, and again she closed the door upon herself.

That afternoon, in default of anything else to say, Lillias having assigned a headache as her reason for not wishing to be provided for in any way, Crombie and his wife went on one of their drives. When they came back the girl could see by their looks of aggressive guiltlessness that her aunt had been telling her uncle everything. This was not unexpected to her, and Crombie was so openly embarrassed by the burden of the deceit imposed upon him, that she was fairly well amused by the spectacle, and she did not blame her aunt.

That night when Mrs. Crombie came in to help her with the last touches of her packing, or to offer help, she said, with a joyless laugh, “We had better not have any concealments, Aunt Hester, and I won’t pretend I don’t know you’ve been telling uncle. I had no right to ask you not.”

“Oh yes, you had,” her aunt nobly protested. “And I really didn’t expect to tell him. But I was so droopy that he noticed it, and then I had to tell him. We never keep anything from each other.”

“No, and that is right. It is something I can never say of Edmund and myself, now.”

“Oh yes, you can. That will all come right again. You are both so wise and sensible that I don’t believe you’ll let a little scare like those Mevisons spoil your lives.”

“It’s because we are so wise and sensible that we shall.”

Lillias was leaning over her trunk with her hand stayed upon the lifted lid, and looking absently down at the freshly done-up shirtwaists in the top of it. Some sudden tears ran down her face and dropped on the shirt-waists. Her aunt rose from where she was sitting, and looked at the splotches on the shirt-waists.

“Never mind,” she said. “If it leaves a blister, you can wait till you’ve had them washed.”

XIV

THE next afternoon when Crombie was napping in his library (one of the uses of his library was to be napped in), he was roused by the titter of the electric door-bell, and the maid brought in Craybourne’s card. Crombie was yet so dim with sleep that he looked at it for some time before he could say, with recognition, “Oh, send him in.” He also called through the open door, “Come in, Craybourne.” It had been such a relief to get the Mevisons out of the house, and then Lillias out of the house, that he had napped more deeply than usual, and it was not with a reasoned welcome that he hailed his visitor. As far as he could get himself aware of him, he realized that he thought he had gone, too, and it was something like this he said when he stumped heavily forward and shook hands with the young man in appointing him a chair.

“No,” Craybourne said, quietly, “I wished to see you before I went, and I didn’t wish to come before Lillias had gone.”

“You know she went this morning?”

“Yes, I saw her at the station.”

It recurred to Crombie that Craybourne had seen Lillias at the station when she came, and his sense of the coincidence was embarrassed by the doubt he had always had whether Craybourne had not spoken to her on that occasion, and they both had decided not to recognize the fact in their very natural surprise at meeting afterwards under his roof. Partly this kept him from asking whether Craybourne had spoken to her on the present occasion, and partly the feeling that it would be indelicate. Craybourne helped him out by saying:

“I didn’t speak with her, however.”

“Oh,” Crombie said.

“But I wished to speak with you, Mr. Crombie. I had a fancy it was your due, somehow, and at any rate the fact that I came here to talk with you about Lillias at first has controlled me so far that, well, here I am now. It may be the working of one of those odd subliminal—”

“Oh, don’t get me on that kind of thing, my dear fellow,” Crombie interrupted. “Smoke?” The young man shook his head, and Crombie said, “Ah, I remember,” and lighted a pipe for himself Then he remarked, as if it were a novelty, “Yes, she’s gone,” and sighed in a great whiff of nicotized expansion.

The young man took time, as if to let the fact sink in before he said, “When I came here first, a week ago — it seems much longer, and it seems no time at all; it’s very strange! — I came to put myself frankly in your hands; and if you bade me go away and not see Miss Bel — Lillias” — this new form of her name amused Crombie so that his mouth worked round the stem of his pipe in a smile which Craybourne was far too absorbed in himself to notice—” I was prepared to do so. Now I come prepared, if you say, to go after her.”

“It’s a free country,” Crombie said, with a corner of his eye on the young man.

“I mean, if you think it’s at all worth while. I don’t pretend to be an American in these things, though I’ve taken out my first naturalization papers.”

“One has to be more or less born to the case of a girl like Lillias,” her uncle reflected for her lover’s benefit.

“That is what I mean. You knew that we had broken, or rather that she had?” Crombie thought it fit to say, “Mrs. Crombie mentioned something of the kind,” not merely because it comported best with his own dignity to give it that casual turn, but because he felt that it politely reduced the fact to the insignificance it ought to have in Craybourne’s eyes.

“Then the question is,” the young man said, “whether, from the native American point of view, you not merely approve of my going after her, but whether you think it would be at all hopeful?”

Crombie got up for a match to relight his pipe, which he had been letting go out. “Do you mean to the Mellays’?”

“Has she gone to them? To be sure! I was thinking she had gone out there—”

“She’s going, I believe, as soon as she’s had her visit over with the Mellays. Excuse me, but how did you leave your affairs out there?”

“Oh, pretty much at sixes and sevens, I’m afraid.”

“So that you would feel yourself justified in going out to look after them a little?”

“Entirely.”

Crombie smoked a breath or two, nursing the knee he had taken between his hands in sitting down again. “It mightn’t be a bad idea for you to be on the ground.”

“On the ground?”

“When she gets there. I’m supposing you want it on again?”

“Decidedly, I want it on again!”

“Then it mightn’t be a bad idea, and it might be a very bad idea. You’d have to take the chances.”

The young man unfolded himself to his full height, as if about to take them on the instant. “Thank you, thank you—”

“Not at all. Though I don’t mind saying that I shouldn’t say this to everybody. But I think you’re the man for Lillias, if there is one. I think you know how to take her, or will know. She has her ups and downs, and she’s been looking after herself just long enough to suppose that she knows it all.

 But she isn’t a thundering fool, like that woman, Mrs. Mevison.”

Craybourne smiled all over hope and joy. “She seemed to feel that we were somehow entangled in their fate because we were very much in love.” He looked silly in taking the word on his lips, as a man always must before another man, as long as he is in love. “But I don’t see how it follows. They quarrel because they are of the temperament for it, not because they are in love.”

“There’s a good deal of sense in that.”

“It’s what I urged Lillias to consider, but she seemed morbid, and couldn’t bring her mind to it.”

“You’ll have to give her time. Perhaps she’ll have brought her mind to it by the time you meet out there. Women think very quickly — when they do think. And they veer round like lightning.”

“They’re very strange,” the young man said, blissfully.

“They’re the devil and all for strangeness.”

“But they’re charming!”

“Some of them.”

Craybourne put out his hand for good-bye and Crombie took it in getting up. “Going? I thought you might like to see Mrs. Crombie—”

“If it will do any good? Otherwise I don’t think I’ll disturb her, if you will make her my best compliments, and tell her how very kind I think she’s been. But if you think I’d better see her—”

“No, on second thoughts, better not. She might queer it, and I confess that it won’t stand queering, in my judgment. It’s a very delicate situation. Let it be between us. I hope it’ll come out all right, but if it doesn’t you mustn’t blame me.”

“No, certainly not. I—”

The stir of garments made itself heard, and Mrs. Crombie, who had been standing it as long as she could, up-stairs, after she knew Craybourne was in the house, came in upon the two men. Her husband said to her casually, while she was greeting Craybourne, “Mr. Craybourne is going out there to wind up his business, and I’ve been advising him to wait till Lillias comes.”

Mrs. Crombie seemed to have utterance, at first, for no more than a joyful “Oh!” though she made up for it afterwards, before Craybourne got away.

“Yes,” Crombie said, proud of her approval, “I couldn’t assure him that it would be all peaches and cream, but I think if they meet again on neutral ground there’s a chance she may feel differently.”

“Oh, I’m sure there is!” Mrs. Crombie breathed perfervidly. “Lillias is very reasonable. She was under the shadow of that terrible woman here, and she couldn’t get away from the idea that she might somehow be like her; but I know she won’t, and that she’ll think so, too.”

“It’s very curious, isn’t it?” Craybourne said. “It’s a sort of obsession.”

“Yes, indeed. All she has got to do is to forget her, and then she will see everything in its true light again. Lillias is very generous. She talked it over with me, and I know that she has no feeling against you; and that’s the main thing.”

“The other main thing,” Crombie ventured a joke, “is that she still has a feeling for him. But that’s what he’s got to find out.”

Craybourne would not let him have his laugh alone, but Mrs. Crombie remained grave, with her recurrent sense that Crombie was coarse, but her faith that he was always good even when he was coarse. “But Mr. Craybourne is coming to supper, isn’t he?” she said, as if that were relevant.

“By supper,” the young man answered, “I hope to be well started on my way. I shall take the five-o’clock train for Boston, and try to catch a Western train there. Or I can go by way of New York. I feel that everything depends upon my being out there somewhat before Lillias, so as not to have the appearance of following her.”

“Yes, she wouldn’t like that. But if you are there that will make all the difference.”

“That is what I think,” Craybourne said, and he and Mrs. Crombie went on talking it all over again, and leaving Crombie out more and more.

He was brought in again, after the young man had taken the leave he many times attempted, and Mrs. Crombie said to him, reproachfully, “Were you going to let him go, Archibald, without referring the matter to me?”

“Well, I didn’t see the use of disturbing you. I thought you were lying down.”

“And if it hadn’t turned out well? I don’t at all feel that it will. Where would you have been then?”

“Where I shall be now, if it doesn’t turn out well, I suppose. I shall be responsible in any event.”

“I don’t see why you say that, my dear. Lillias is my niece, and I ought to have been consulted.”

“Well, she’s my niece, too, by marriage, just as much as you are my wife.”

Mrs. Crombie looked baffled by his nonsense, as she finally looked grieved, but she left him, saying, there had been quarrelling enough in that house for one while, and that if he could laugh at such a serious matter she could not.

She forgave his offence, but it cannot be said that she entirely forgot it until she heard from Lillias, out there, a few days after her arrival. The girl wrote her aunt a very long letter and a sufficiently important letter, though Crombie professed to attach no special importance to it up to a certain point. Her letter came at breakfast, and Mrs. Crombie read it aloud, mumbling over the mechanical facts with which Lillias felt bound, as people do, to delay the appearance of the vital matters. Then Mrs. Crombie’s voice grew more distinct, and her utterance more coherent. “‘Of course,’” she read on, “‘I could not honestly say that I was surprised to see him. I might as well confess, “right here,” as the public speakers say in this section, that I should have been a little disappointed if I had not found him waiting for me, not exactly at the station, but somewhere on the municipal premises. His being here opened up the whole subject again, and when we had gone over it very thoroughly I could not see where the situation had changed in the least, and he was forced to acknowledge himself that it had not. The evening was ending — he came to call on me at the president’s house, where they had asked me to stay till I could get settled — with our having decided neither of us ever to marry, but both to remain friends, and see each other when we liked, without any silly consciousness, when he remembered something. He said he had forgotten to mention that Mrs. Mevison was staying at his hotel, and when I whooped at him, he said, Yes, he believed she had taken up her residence there in order to get a divorce. He had not spoken with her, but the young lawyer here who first told him about my lectures and brought him to hear me, has charge of her case, and he told Edmund.

“‘Somehow, that seemed to throw a new light on the whole affair. I can’t say just how it did, but it did. I sank down into one chair, and Edmund, who is only too glad to sink into chairs, so as to get rid of some of his ridiculous length, I suppose, sank into another. I instantly commanded him to tell me all about it, but it seems that he had told me at least all he knew, except the grounds for her divorce which her lawyer gave him. “She alleges extreme cruelty and gross neglect of duty,” Edmund said, and then we looked at each other, and though he has not the American sense of humor that we brag so about, even he could see the fun of this, and we burst out laughing in each other’s faces. When I could get my breath, I said, “So they are going to separate, after all.”

“Yes,” he said, and then before I knew it he was offering an argument that cleared me up to myself in the most wonderful way. I must try to give it to you in his own words, as nearly as I can, for I think it is very subtle, and does him great credit. He said, “Now you see, don’t you, that this removes the only obstacle, the only real obstacle, in your mind?” I asked him if he meant that strange sort of feeling I had that we should be like them, if we married, and that there was not room in the world for two such quarrelsome couples, and he said that was just what he meant. “If they are separated for good and all,” he said, “don’t you see that it gives us our chance? There is really no occasion for our breaking now, is there?”

“‘Of course, there was a great deal more, and it was midnight before we had talked it all out; but midnight is nothing here, when a young man is calling. The point was a very fine one, and I kept losing it; but he never did; he has so much intellectual tenacity; and he held me to it, so that when he did go away, I promised him that I would think about it. I did think about it, and before morning I had a perfect inspiration. My inspiration was that where I was so helpless to reason it out for myself, I ought to leave it altogether to him, and that is why we are going to be married in the spring. We have agreed to wait till the spring term of the court is over, and see whether Mrs. Mevison gets her divorce or not. I know she will, but I am still a little morbid about it, and Edmund waits to gratify me. I shall enjoy giving my lectures during the winter, and he is going to look after his ranch, and see if he can get it into shape again, so that we can go out and live there.’” There was more like this in the letter, but it was here that Mrs. Crombie broke off her reading to ask, “Did you ever hear of anything so absurd?”

“Absurd? No!” Crombie answered with robust decision. “I have had my moments of suspecting that Lillias was a fool, but this settles it. She has shown horse-sense.”

“How can you be so coarse?” his wife murmured, fondly, with tears of entire satisfaction in her eyes. “She can make him go to England and live now, if she wants to. He will do anything for her. But you can see it wasn’t a reason he gave her.”

“Well, I suppose she didn’t want a reason, if she had an inspiration.”

THE END

BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

I

A Sleep and a Forgetting

I

Matthew Lanfear had stopped off, between Genoa and Nice, at San Remo in the interest of a friend who had come over on the steamer with him, and who wished him to test the air before settling there for the winter with an invalid wife. She was one of those neurasthenics who really carry their climate — always a bad one — with them, but she had set her mind on San Remo; and Lanfear was willing to pass a few days in the place making the observations which he felt pretty sure would be adverse.

His train was rather late, and the sunset was fading from the French sky beyond the Italian shore when he got out of his car and looked round for a porter to take his valise. His roving eye lighted on the anxious figure, which as fully as the anxious face, of a short, stout, elderly man expressed a sort of distraction, as he stood loaded down with umbrellas, bags, bundles, and wraps, and seemed unable to arrest the movements of a tall young girl, with a travelling-shawl trailing from her arm, who had the effect of escaping from him towards a bench beside the door of the waiting-room. When she reached it, in spite of his appeals, she sat down with an absent air, and looked as far withdrawn from the bustle of the platform and from the snuffling train as if on some quiet garden seat along with her own thoughts.

In his fat frenzy, which Lanfear felt to be pathetic, the old gentleman glanced at him, and then abruptly demanded: “Are you an American?”

We knew each other abroad in some mystical way, and Lanfear did not try to deny the fact.

“Oh, well, then,” the stranger said, as if the fact made everything right, “will you kindly tell my daughter, on that bench by the door yonder” — he pointed with a bag, and dropped a roll of rugs from under his arm— “that I’ll be with her as soon as I’ve looked after the trunks? Tell her not to move till I come. Heigh! Here! Take hold of these, will you?” He caught the sleeve of a facchino who came wandering by, and heaped him with his burdens, and then pushed ahead of the man in the direction of the baggage-room with a sort of mastery of the situation which struck Lanfear as springing from desperation rather than experience.

Lanfear stood a moment hesitating. Then a glance at the girl on the bench, drooping a little forward in freeing her face from the veil that hung from her pretty hat, together with a sense of something quaintly charming in the confidence shown him on such purely compatriotic grounds, decided him to do just what he had been asked. The girl had got her veil up by this time, and as he came near, she turned from looking at the sunset over the stretch of wall beyond the halting train, and met his dubious face with a smile.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “I know I shall get well, here, if they have such sunsets every day.”

There was something so convincingly normal in her expression that Lanfear dismissed a painful conjecture. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I am afraid there’s some mistake. I haven’t the pleasure — You must excuse me, but your father wished me to ask you to wait here for him till he had got his baggage—”

“My father?” the girl stopped him with a sort of a frowning perplexity in the stare she gave him. “My father isn’t here!”

“I beg your pardon,” Lanfear said. “I must have misunderstood. A gentleman who got out of the train with you — a short, stout gentleman with gray hair — I understood him to say you were his daughter — requested me to bring this message—”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t know him. It must be a mistake.”

“The mistake is mine, no doubt. It may have been some one else whom he pointed out, and I have blundered. I’m very sorry if I seem to have intruded—”

“What place is this?” the girl asked, without noticing his excuses.

“San Remo,” Lanfear answered. “If you didn’t intend to stop here, your train will be leaving in a moment.”

“I meant to get off, I suppose,” she said. “I don’t believe I’m going any farther.” She leaned back against the bars of the bench, and put up one of her slim arms along the top.

There was something wrong. Lanfear now felt that, in spite of her perfect tranquillity and self-possession; perhaps because of it. He had no business to stay there talking with her, but he had not quite the right to leave her, though practically he had got his dismissal, and apparently she was quite capable of taking care of herself, or could have been so in a country where any woman’s defencelessness was not any man’s advantage. He could not go away without some effort to be of use.

“I beg your pardon,” he said. “Can I help you in calling a carriage; or looking after your hand-baggage — it will be getting dark — perhaps your maid—”

“My maid!” The girl frowned again, with a measure of the amazement which she showed when he mentioned her father. “I have no maid!”

Lanfear blurted desperately out: “You are alone? You came — you are going to stay here — alone?”

“Quite alone,” she said, with a passivity in which there was no resentment, and no feeling unless it were a certain color of dignity. Almost at the same time, with a glance beside and beyond him, she called out joyfully: “Ah, there you are!” and Lanfear turned, and saw scuffling and heard puffing towards them the short, stout elderly gentleman who had sent him to her. “I knew you would come before long!”

“Well, I thought it was pretty long, myself,” the gentleman said, and then he courteously referred himself to Lanfear. “I’m afraid this gentleman has found it rather long, too; but I couldn’t manage it a moment sooner.”

Lanfear said: “Not at all. I wish I could have been of any use to—”

“My daughter — Miss Gerald, Mr.—”

“Lanfear — Dr. Lanfear,” he said, accepting the introduction; and the girl bowed.

“Oh, doctor, eh?” the father said, with a certain impression. “Going to stop here?”

“A few days,” Lanfear answered, making way for the forward movement which the others began.

“Well, well! I’m very much obliged to you, very much, indeed; and I’m sure my daughter is.”

The girl said, “Oh yes, indeed,” rather indifferently, and then as they passed him, while he stood lifting his hat, she turned radiantly on him. “Thank you, ever so much!” she said, with the gentle voice which he had already thought charming.

The father called back: “I hope we shall meet again. We are going to the Sardegna.”

Lanfear had been going to the Sardegna himself, but while he bowed he now decided upon another hotel.

The mystery, whatever it was, that the brave, little, fat father was carrying off so bluffly, had clearly the morbid quality of unhealth in it, and Lanfear could not give himself freely to a young pleasure in the girl’s dark beauty of eyes and hair, her pale, irregular, piquant face, her slender figure and flowing walk. He was in the presence of something else, something that appealed to his scientific side, to that which was humane more than that which was human in him, and abashed him in the other feeling. Unless she was out of her mind there was no way of accounting for her behavior, except by some caprice which was itself scarcely short of insanity. She must have thought she knew him when he approached, and when she addressed him those first words; but when he had tried to set her right she had not changed; and why had she denied her father, and then hailed him with joy when he came back to her? She had known that she intended to stop at San Remo, but she had not known where she had stopped when she asked what place it was. She was consciously an invalid of some sort, for she spoke of getting well under sunsets like that which had now waned, but what sort of invalid was she?

II

Lanfear’s question persisted through the night, and it helped, with the coughing in the next room, to make a bad night for him. None of the hotels in San Remo receive consumptive patients, but none are without somewhere a bronchial cough. If it is in the room next yours it keeps you awake, but it is not pulmonary; you may comfort yourself in your vigils with that fact. Lanfear, however, fancied he had got a poor dinner, and in the morning he did not like his coffee. He thought he had let a foolish scruple keep him from the Grand Hotel Sardegna, and he walked down towards it along the palm-flanked promenade, in the gay morning light, with the tideless sea on the other hand lapping the rough beach beyond the lines of the railroad which borders it. On his way he met files of the beautiful Ligurian women, moving straight under the burdens balanced on their heads, or bestriding the donkeys laden with wine-casks in the roadway, or following beside the carts which the donkeys drew. Ladies of all nations, in the summer fashions of London, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York thronged the path. The sky was of a blue so deep, so liquid that it seemed to him he could scoop it in his hand and pour it out again like water. Seaward, he glanced at the fishing-boats lying motionless in the offing, and the coastwise steamer that runs between Nice and Genoa trailing a thin plume of smoke between him and their white sails. With the more definite purpose of making sure of the Grand Hotel Sardegna, he scanned the different villa slopes that showed their level lines of white and yellow and dull pink through the gray tropical greenery on the different levels of the hills. He was duly rewarded by the sight of the bold legend topping its cornice, and when he let his eye descend the garden to a little pavilion on the wall overlooking the road, he saw his acquaintances of the evening before making a belated breakfast. The father recognized Lanfear first and spoke to his daughter, who looked up from her coffee and down towards him where he wavered, lifting his hat, and bowed smiling to him. He had no reason to cross the roadway towards the white stairway which climbed from it to the hotel grounds, but he did so. The father leaned out over the wall, and called down to him: “Won’t you come up and join us, doctor?”

“Why, yes!” Lanfear consented, and in another moment he was shaking hands with the girl, to whom, he noticed, her father named him again. He had in his glad sense of her white morning dress and her hat of green-leafed lace, a feeling that she was somehow meeting him as a friend of indefinite date in an intimacy unconditioned by any past or future time. Her pleasure in his being there was as frank as her father’s, and there was a pretty trust of him in every word and tone which forbade misinterpretation.

“I was just talking about you, doctor,” the father began, “and saying what a pity you hadn’t come to our hotel. It’s a capital place.”

“I’ve been thinking it was a pity I went to mine,” Lanfear returned, “though I’m in San Remo for such a short time it’s scarcely worth while to change.”

“Well, perhaps if you came here, you might stay longer. I guess we’re booked for the winter, Nannie?” He referred the question to his daughter, who asked Lanfear if he would not have some coffee.

“I was going to say I had had my coffee, but I’m not sure it was coffee,” Lanfear began, and he consented, with some demur, banal enough, about the trouble.

“Well, that’s right, then, and no trouble at all,” Mr. Gerald broke in upon him. “Here comes a fellow looking for a chance to bring you some,” and he called to a waiter wandering distractedly about with a “Heigh!” that might have been offensive from a less obviously inoffensive man. “Can you get our friend here a cup and saucer, and some of this good coffee?” he asked, as the waiter approached.

“Yes, certainly, sir,” the man answered in careful English. “Is it not, perhaps, Mr. and Misses Gerald?” he smilingly insinuated, offering some cards.

“Miss Gerald,” the father corrected him as he took the cards. “Why, hello, Nannie! Here are the Bells! Where are they?” he demanded of the waiter. “Bring them here, and a lot more cups and saucers. Or, hold on! I’d better go myself, Nannie, hadn’t I? Of course! You get the crockery, waiter. Where did you say they were?” He bustled up from his chair, without waiting for a distinct reply, and apologized to Lanfear in hurrying away. “You’ll excuse me, doctor! I’ll be back in half a minute. Friends of ours that came over on the same boat. I must see them, of course, but I don’t believe they’ll stay. Nannie, don’t let Dr. Lanfear get away. I want to have some talk with him. You tell him he’d better come to the Sardegna, here.”

Lanfear and Miss Gerald sat a moment in the silence which is apt to follow with young people when they are unexpectedly left to themselves. She kept absently pushing the cards her father had given her up and down on the table between her thumb and forefinger, and Lanfear noted the translucence of her long, thin hand in the sunshine striking across the painted iron surface of the garden movable. The translucence had a pathos for his intelligence which the pensive tilt of her head enhanced. She stopped toying with the cards, and looked at the addresses on them.

“What strange things names are!” she said, as if musing on the fact, with a sigh which he thought disproportioned to the depth of her remark.

“They seem rather irrelevant at times,” he admitted, with a smile. “They’re mere tags, labels, which can be attached to one as well as another; they seem to belong equally to anybody.”

“That is what I always say to myself,” she agreed, with more interest than he found explicable.

“But finally,” he returned, “they’re all that’s left us, if they’re left themselves. They are the only signs to the few who knew us that we ever existed. They stand for our characters, our personality, our mind, our soul.”

She said, “That is very true,” and then she suddenly gave him the cards. “Do you know these people?”

“I? I thought they were friends of yours,” he replied, astonished.

“That is what papa thinks,” Miss Gerald said, and while she sat dreamily absent, a rustle of skirts and a flutter of voices pierced from the surrounding shrubbery, and then a lively matron, of as youthful a temperament as the lively girls she brought in her train, burst upon them, and Miss Gerald was passed from one embrace to another until all four had kissed her. She returned their greeting, and shared, in her quieter way, their raptures at their encounter.

“Such a hunt as we’ve had for you!” the matron shouted. “We’ve been up-stairs and down-stairs and in my lady’s chamber, all over the hotel. Where’s your father? Ah, they did get our cards to you!” and by that token Lanfear knew that these ladies were the Bells. He had stood up in a sort of expectancy, but Miss Gerald did not introduce him, and a shadow of embarrassment passed over the party which she seemed to feel least, though he fancied a sort of entreaty in the glance that she let pass over him.

“I suppose he’s gone to look for us!” Mrs. Bell saved the situation with a protecting laugh. Miss Gerald colored intelligently, and Lanfear could not let Mrs. Bell’s implication pass.

“If it is Mrs. Bell,” he said, “I can answer that he has. I met you at Magnolia some years ago, Mrs. Bell. Dr. Lanfear.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon, Dr. Lanfear,” Miss Gerald said. “I couldn’t think—”

“Of my tag, my label?” he laughed back. “It isn’t very distinctly lettered.”

Mrs. Bell was not much minding them jointly. She was singling Lanfear out for the expression of her pleasure in seeing him again, and recalling the incidents of her summer at Magnolia before, it seemed, any of her girls were out. She presented them collectively, and the eldest of them charmingly reminded Lanfear that he had once had the magnanimity to dance with her when she sat, in a little girl’s forlorn despair of being danced with, at one of those desolate hops of the good old Osprey House.

“Yes; and now,” her mother followed, “we can’t wait a moment longer, if we’re to get our train for Monte Carlo, girls. We’re not going to play, doctor,” she made time to explain, “but we are going to look on. Will you tell your father, dear,” she said, taking the girl’s hands caressingly in hers, and drawing her to her motherly bosom, “that we found you, and did our best to find him? We can’t wait now — our carriage is champing the bit at the foot of the stairs — but we’re coming back in a week, and then we’ll do our best to look you up again.” She included Lanfear in her good-bye, and all her girls said good-bye in the same way, and with a whisking of skirts and twitter of voices they vanished through the shrubbery, and faded into the general silence and general sound like a bevy of birds which had swept near and passed by.

Miss Gerald sank quietly into her place, and sat as if nothing had happened, except that she looked a little paler to Lanfear, who remained on foot trying to piece together their interrupted tête-à-tête, but not succeeding, when her father reappeared, red and breathless, and wiping his forehead. “Have they been here, Nannie?” he asked. “I’ve been following them all over the place, and the portier told me just now that he had seen a party of ladies coming down this way.”

He got it all out, not so clearly as those women had got everything in, Lanfear reflected, but unmistakably enough as to the fact, and he looked at his daughter as he repeated: “Haven’t the Bells been here?”

She shook her head, and said, with her delicate quiet: “Nobody has been here, except—” She glanced at Lanfear, who smiled, but saw no opening for himself in the strange situation. Then she said: “I think I will go and lie down a while, now, papa. I’m rather tired. Good-bye,” she said, giving Lanfear her hand; it felt limp and cold; and then she turned to her father again. “Don’t you come, papa! I can get back perfectly well by myself. Stay with—”

“I will go with you,” her father said, “and if Dr. Lanfear doesn’t mind coming—”

“Certainly I will come,” Lanfear said, and he passed to the girl’s right; she had taken her father’s arm; but he wished to offer more support if it were needed. When they had climbed to the open flowery space before the hotel, she seemed aware of the groups of people about. She took her hand from her father’s arm, as if unwilling to attract their notice by seeming to need its help, and swept up the gravelled path between him and Lanfear, with her flowing walk.

Her father fell back, as they entered the hotel door, and murmured to Lanfear: “Will you wait till I come down?” ... “I wanted to tell you about my daughter,” he explained, when he came back after the quarter of an hour which Lanfear had found rather intense. “It’s useless to pretend you wouldn’t have noticed — Had nobody been with you after I left you, down there?” He twisted his head in the direction of the pavilion, where they had been breakfasting.

“Yes; Mrs. Bell and her daughters,” Lanfear answered, simply.

“Of course! Why do you suppose my daughter denied it?” Mr. Gerald asked.

“I suppose she — had her reasons,” Lanfear answered, lamely enough.

“No reason, I’m afraid,” Mr. Gerald said, and he broke out hopelessly: “She has her mind sound enough, but not — not her memory. She had forgotten that they were there! Are you going to stay in San Remo?” he asked, with an effect of interrupting himself, as if in the wish to put off something, or to make the ground sure before he went on.

“Why,” Lanfear said, “I hadn’t thought of it. I stopped — I was going to Nice — to test the air for a friend who wishes to bring his invalid wife here, if I approve — but I have just been asking myself why I should go to Nice when I could stay at San Remo. The place takes my fancy. I’m something of an invalid myself — at least I’m on my vacation — and I find a charm in it, if nothing better. Perhaps a charm is enough. It used to be, in primitive medicine.”

He was talking to what he felt was not an undivided attention in Mr. Gerald, who said, “I’m glad of it,” and then added: “I should like to consult you professionally. I know your reputation in New York — though I’m not a New-Yorker myself — and I don’t know any of the doctors here. I suppose I’ve done rather a wild thing in coming off the way I have, with my daughter; but I felt that I must do something, and I hoped — I felt as if it were getting away from our trouble. It’s most fortunate my meeting you, if you can look into the case, and help me out with a nurse, if she’s needed, and all that!” To a certain hesitation in Lanfear’s face, he added: “Of course, I’m asking your professional help. My name is Abner Gerald — Abner L. Gerald — perhaps you know my standing, and that I’m able to—”

“Oh, it isn’t a question of that! I shall be glad to do anything I can,” Lanfear said, with a little pang which he tried to keep silent in orienting himself anew towards the girl, whose loveliness he had felt before he had felt her piteousness.

“But before you go further I ought to say that you must have been thinking of my uncle, the first Matthew Lanfear, when you spoke of my reputation; I haven’t got any yet; I’ve only got my uncle’s name.”

“Oh!” Mr. Gerald said, disappointedly, but after a blank moment he apparently took courage. “You’re in the same line, though?”

“If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an alienist, well, yes,” Lanfear admitted.

“That’s exactly what I mean,” the elder said, with renewed hopefulness. “I’m quite willing to risk myself with a man of the same name as Dr. Lanfear. I should like,” he said, hurrying on, as if to override any further reluctance of Lanfear’s, “to tell you her story, and then—”

“By all means,” Lanfear consented, and he put on an air of professional deference, while the older man began with a face set for the task.

“It’s a long story, or it’s a short story, as you choose to make it. We’ll make it long, if necessary, later, but now I’ll make it short. Five months ago my wife was killed before my daughter’s eyes—”

He stopped; Lanfear breathed a gentle “Oh!” and Gerald blurted out:

“Accident — grade crossing — Don’t!” he winced at the kindness in Lanfear’s eyes, and panted on. “That’s over! What happened to her — to my daughter — was that she fainted from the shock. When she woke — it was more like a sleep than a swoon — she didn’t remember what had happened.” Lanfear nodded, with a gravely interested face. “She didn’t remember anything that had ever happened before. She knew me, because I was there with her; but she didn’t know that she ever had a mother, because she was not there with her. You see?”

“I can imagine,” Lanfear assented.

“The whole of her life before the — accident was wiped out as to the facts, as completely as if it had never been; and now every day, every hour, every minute, as it passes, goes with that past. But her faculties—”

“Yes?” Lanfear prompted in the pause which Mr. Gerald made.

“Her intellect — the working powers of her mind, apart from anything like remembering, are as perfect as if she were in full possession of her memory. I believe,” the father said, with a pride that had its pathos, “no one can talk with her and not feel that she has a beautiful mind, that she can think better than most girls of her age. She reads, or she lets me read to her, and until it has time to fade, she appreciates it all more fully than I do. At Genoa, where I took her to the palaces for the pictures, I saw that she had kept her feeling for art. When she plays — you will hear her play — it is like composing the music for herself; she does not seem to remember the pieces, she seems to improvise them. You understand?”

Lanfear said that he understood, for he could not disappoint the expectation of the father’s boastful love: all that was left him of the ambitions he must once have had for his child.

The poor, little, stout, unpicturesque elderly man got up and began to walk to and fro in the room which he had turned into with Lanfear, and to say, more to himself than to Lanfear, as if balancing one thing against another: “The merciful thing is that she has been saved from the horror and the sorrow. She knows no more of either than she knows of her mother’s love for her. They were very much alike in looks and mind, and they were always together more like persons of the same age — sisters, or girl friends; but she has lost all knowledge of that, as of other things. And then there is the question whether she won’t some time, sooner or later, come into both the horror and the sorrow.” He stopped and looked at Lanfear. “She has these sudden fits of drowsiness, when she must sleep; and I never see her wake from them without being afraid that she has wakened to everything — that she has got back into her full self, and taken up the terrible burden that my old shoulders are used to. What do you think?”

Lanfear felt the appeal so keenly that in the effort to answer faithfully he was aware of being harsher than he meant. “That is a chance we can’t forecast. But it is a chance. The fact that the drowsiness recurs periodically—”

“It doesn’t,” the father pleaded. “We don’t know when it will come on.”

“It scarcely matters. The periodicity wouldn’t affect the possible result which you dread. I don’t say that it is probable. But it’s one of the possibilities. It has,” Lanfear added, “its logic.”

“Ah, its logic!”

“Its logic, yes. My business, of course, would be to restore her to health at any risk. So far as her mind is affected—”

“Her mind is not affected!” the father retorted.

“I beg your pardon — her memory — it might be restored with her physical health. You understand that? It is a chance; it might or it might not happen.”

The father was apparently facing a risk which he had not squarely faced before. “I suppose so,” he faltered. After a moment he added, with more courage: “You must do the best you can, at any risk.”

Lanfear rose, too. He said, with returning kindness in his tones, if not his words: “I should like to study the case, Mr. Gerald. It’s very interesting, and — and — if you’ll forgive me — very touching.”

“Thank you.”

“If you decide to stay in San Remo, I will — Do you suppose I could get a room in this hotel? I don’t like mine.”

“Why, I haven’t any doubt you can. Shall we ask?”

III

It was from the Hotel Sardegna that Lanfear satisfied his conscience by pushing his search for climate on behalf of his friend’s neurasthenic wife. He decided that Ospedaletti, with a milder air and more sheltered seat in its valley of palms, would be better for her than San Remo. He wrote his friend to that effect, and then there was no preoccupation to hinder him in his devotion to the case of Miss Gerald. He put the case first in the order of interest rather purposely, and even with a sense of effort, though he could not deny to himself that a like case related to a different personality might have been less absorbing. But he tried to keep his scientific duty to it pure of that certain painful pleasure which, as a young man not much over thirty, he must feel in the strange affliction of a young and beautiful girl.

Though there was no present question of medicine, he could be installed near her, as the friend that her father insisted upon making him, without contravention of the social formalities. His care of her hardly differed from that of her father, except that it involved a closer and more premeditated study. They did not try to keep her from the sort of association which, in a large hotel of the type of the Sardegna, entails no sort of obligation to intimacy. They sat together at the long table, midway of the dining-room, which maintained the tradition of the old table-d’hôte against the small tables ranged along the walls. Gerald had an amiable old man’s liking for talk, and Lanfear saw that he willingly escaped, among their changing companions, from the pressure of his anxieties. He left his daughter very much to Lanfear, during these excursions, but Lanfear was far from meaning to keep her to himself. He thought it better that she should follow her father in his forays among their neighbors, and he encouraged her to continue such talk with them as she might be brought into. He tried to guard her future encounters with them, so that she should not show more than a young girl’s usual diffidence at a second meeting; and in the frequent substitution of one presence for another across the table, she was fairly safe.

A natural light-heartedness, of which he had glimpses from the first, returned to her. One night, at the dance given by some of the guests to some others, she went through the gayety in joyous triumph. She danced mostly with Lanfear, but she had other partners, and she won a pleasing popularity by the American quality of her waltzing. Lanfear had already noted that her forgetfulness was not always so constant or so inclusive as her father had taught him to expect; Mr. Gerald’s statement had been the large, general fact from which there was sometimes a shrinking in the particulars. While the warmth of an agreeable experience lasted, her mind kept record of it, slight or full; if the experience were unpleasant the memory was more apt to fade at once. After that dance she repeated to her father the little compliments paid her, and told him, laughing, they were to reward him for sitting up so late as her chaperon. Emotions persisted in her consciousness as the tremor lasts in a smitten cord, but events left little trace. She retained a sense of personalities; she was lastingly sensible of temperaments; but names were nothing to her. She could not tell her father who had said the nice things to her, and their joint study of her dancing-card did not help them out.

Her relation to Lanfear, though it might be a subject of international scrutiny, was hardly a subject of censure. He was known as Dr. Lanfear, but he was not at first known as her physician; he was conjectured her cousin or something like that; he might even be her betrothed in the peculiar American arrangement of such affairs. Personally people saw in him a serious-looking young man, better dressed and better mannered than they thought most Americans, and unquestionably handsomer, with his Spanish skin and eyes, and his brown beard of the Vandyke cut which was then already beginning to be rather belated.

Other Americans in the hotel were few and transitory; and if the English had any mind about Miss Gerald different from their mind about other girls, it would be perhaps to the effect that she was quite mad; by this they would mean that she was a little odd; but for the rest they had apparently no mind about her. With the help of one of the English ladies her father had replaced the homesick Irish maid whom he had sent back to New York from Genoa, with an Italian, and in the shelter of her gay affection and ignorant sympathy Miss Gerald had a security supplemented by the easy social environment. If she did not look very well, she did not differ from most other American women in that; and if she seemed to confide herself more severely to the safe-keeping of her physician, that was the way of all women patients.

Whether the Bells found the spectacle of depravity at Monte Carlo more attractive than the smiling face of nature at San Remo or not, they did not return, but sent for their baggage from their hotel, and were not seen again by the Geralds. Lanfear’s friend with the invalid wife wrote from Ospedaletti, with apologies which inculpated him for the disappointment, that she had found the air impossible in a single day, and they were off for Cannes. Lanfear and the Geralds, therefore, continued together in the hotel without fear or obligation to others, and in an immunity in which their right to breakfast exclusively in that pavilion on the garden wall was almost explicitly conceded. No one, after a few mornings of tacit possession, would have disputed their claim, and there, day after day, in the mild monotony of the December sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road from the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of the sea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue as turquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath on the left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, and in making its climb of the spacious arc between, shed a heat as great as that of summer, but not the heat of summer, on the pretty world of villas and hotels, towered over by the olive-gray slopes of the pine-clad heights behind and above them. From these tops a fine, keen cold fell with the waning afternoon, which sharpened through the sunset till the dusk; but in the morning the change was from the chill to the glow, and they could sit in their pavilion, under the willowy droop of the eucalyptus-trees which have brought the Southern Pacific to the Riviera, with increasing comfort.

In the restlessness of an elderly man, Gerald sometimes left the young people to their intolerable delays over their coffee, and walked off into the little stone and stucco city below, or went and sat with his cigar on one of the benches under the palm-lined promenade, which the pale northern consumptives shared with the swarthy peasant girls resting from their burdens, and the wrinkled grandmothers of their race passively or actively begging from the strangers.

While she kept her father in sight it seemed that Miss Gerald could maintain her hold of his identity, and one morning she said, with the tender fondness for him which touched Lanfear: “When he sits there among those sick people and poor people, then he knows they are in the world.”

She turned with a question graver in her look than usual, and he said: “Yes, we might help them oftener if we could remember that their misery was going on all the time, like some great natural process, day or dark, heat or cold, which seems to stop when we stop thinking of it. Nothing, for us, at least, exists unless it is recalled to us.”

“Yes,” she said, in her turn, “I have noticed that. But don’t you sometimes — sometimes” — she knit her forehead, as if to keep her thought from escaping— “have a feeling as if what you were doing, or saying, or seeing, had all happened before, just as it is now?”

“Oh yes; that occurs to every one.”

“But don’t you — don’t you have hints of things, of ideas, as if you had known them, in some previous existence—”

She stopped, and Lanfear recognized, with a kind of impatience, the experience which young people make much of when they have it, and sometimes pretend to when they have merely heard of it. But there could be no pose or pretence in her. He smilingly suggested:

“‘For something is, or something seems,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.’

These weird impressions are no more than that, probably.”

“Ah, I don’t believe it,” the girl said. “They are too real for that. They come too often, and they make me feel as if they would come more fully, some time. If there was a life before this — do you believe there was? — they may be things that happened there. Or they may be things that will happen in a life after this. You believe in that, don’t you?”

“In a life after this, or their happening in it?”

“Well, both.”

Lanfear evaded her, partly. “They could be premonitions, prophecies, of a future life, as easily as fragmentary records of a past life. I suppose we do not begin to be immortal merely after death.”

“No.” She lingered out the word in dreamy absence, as if what they had been saying had already passed from her thought.

“But, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear ventured, “have these impressions of yours grown more definite — fuller, as you say — of late?”

“My impressions?” She frowned at him, as if the look of interest, more intense than usual in his eyes, annoyed her. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Lanfear felt bound to follow up her lead, whether she wished it or not. “A good third of our lives here is passed in sleep. I’m not always sure that we are right in treating the mental — for certainly they are mental — experiences of that time as altogether trivial, or insignificant.”

She seemed to understand now, and she protested: “But I don’t mean dreams. I mean things that really happened, or that really will happen.”

“Like something you can give me an instance of? Are they painful things, or pleasant, mostly?”

She hesitated. “They are things that you know happen to other people, but you can’t believe would ever happen to you.”

“Do they come when you are just drowsing, or just waking from a drowse?”

“They are not dreams,” she said, almost with vexation.

“Yes, yes, I understand,” he hesitated to retrieve himself. “But I have had floating illusions, just before I fell asleep, or when I was sensible of not being quite awake, which seemed to differ from dreams. They were not so dramatic, but they were more pictorial; they were more visual than the things in dreams.”

“Yes,” she assented. “They are something like that. But I should not call them illusions.”

“No. And they represent scenes, events?”

“You said yourself they were not dramatic.”

“I meant, represent pictorially.”

“No; they are like the landscape that flies back from your train or towards it. I can’t explain it,” she ended, rising with what he felt a displeasure in his pursuit.

IV

He reported what had passed to her father when Mr. Gerald came back from his stroll into the town, with his hands full of English papers; Gerald had even found a New York paper at the news-stand; and he listened with an apparent postponement of interest.

“I think,” Lanfear said, “that she has some shadowy recollection, or rather that the facts come to her in a jarred, confused way — the elements of pictures, not pictures. But I am afraid that my inquiry has offended her.”

“I guess not,” Gerald said, dryly, as if annoyed. “What makes you think so?”

“Merely her manner. And I don’t know that anything is to be gained by such an inquiry.”

“Perhaps not,” Gerald allowed, with an inattention which vexed Lanfear in his turn.

The elderly man looked up, from where he sat provisionally in the hotel veranda, into Lanfear’s face; Lanfear had remained standing. “I don’t believe she’s offended. Or she won’t be long. One thing, she’ll forget it.”

He was right enough, apparently. Miss Gerald came out of the hotel door towards them, smiling equally for both, with the indefinable difference between cognition and recognition habitual in her look. She was dressed for a walk, and she seemed to expect them to go with her. She beamed gently upon Lanfear; there was no trace of umbrage in her sunny gayety. Her face had, as always, its lurking pathos, but in its appeal to Lanfear now there were only trust and the wish of pleasing him.

They started side by side for their walk, while her father drove beside them in one of the little public carriages, mounting to the Berigo Road, through a street of the older San Remo, and issuing on a bare little piazza looking towards the walls and roofs of the mediaeval city, clustered together like cliff-dwellings, and down on the gardens that fell from the villas and the hotels. A parapet kept the path on the roadside nearest the declivities, and from point to point benches were put for the convenient enjoyment of the prospect. Mr. Gerald preferred to take his pleasure from the greater elevation of the seat in his victoria; his daughter and Lanfear leaned on the wall, and looked up to the sky and out to the sea, both of the same blue.

The palms and eucalyptus-trees darkened about the villas; the bits of vineyard, in their lingering crimson or lingering gold, and the orchards of peaches and persimmons enriched with the varying reds of their ripening leaves and fruits the enchanting color scheme. The rose and geranium hedges were in bloom; the feathery green of the pepper-trees was warmed by the red-purple of their grape-like clusters of blossoms; the perfume of lemon flowers wandered vaguely upwards from some point which they could not fix.

Nothing of all the beauty seemed lost upon the girl, so bereft that she could enjoy no part of it from association. Lanfear observed that she was not fatigued by any such effort as he was always helplessly making to match what he saw with something he had seen before. Now, when this effort betrayed itself, she said, smiling: “How strange it is that you see things for what they are like, and not for what they are!”

“Yes, it’s a defect, I’m afraid, sometimes. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps what?” she prompted him in the pause he made.

“Nothing. I was wondering whether in some other possible life our consciousness would not be more independent of what we have been than it seems to be here.” She looked askingly at him. “I mean whether there shall not be something absolute in our existence, whether it shall not realize itself more in each experience of the moment, and not be always seeking to verify itself from the past.”

“Isn’t that what you think is the way with me already?” She turned upon him smiling, and he perceived that in her New York version of a Parisian costume, with her lace hat of summer make and texture and the vivid parasol she twirled upon her shoulder, she was not only a very pretty girl, but a fashionable one. There was something touching in the fact, and a little bewildering. To the pretty girl, the fashionable girl, he could have answered with a joke, but the stricken intelligence had a claim to his seriousness. Now, especially, he noted what had from time to time urged itself upon his perception. If the broken ties which once bound her to the past were beginning to knit again, her recovery otherwise was not apparent. As she stood there her beauty had signally the distinction of fragility, the delicacy of shattered nerves in which there was yet no visible return to strength. A feeling, which had intimated itself before, a sense as of being in the presence of a disembodied spirit, possessed him, and brought, in its contradiction of an accepted theory, a suggestion that was destined to become conviction. He had always said to himself that there could be no persistence of personality, of character, of identity, of consciousness, except through memory; yet here, to the last implication of temperament, they all persisted. The soul that was passing in its integrity through time without the helps, the crutches, of remembrance by which his own personality supported itself, why should not it pass so through eternity without that loss of identity which was equivalent to annihilation?

Her waiting eyes recalled him from his inquiry, and with an effort he answered, “Yes, I think you do have your being here and now, Miss Gerald, to an unusual degree.”

“And you don’t think that is wrong?”

“Wrong? Why? How?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She looked round, and her eye fell upon her father waiting for them in his carriage beside the walk. The sight supplied her with the notion which Lanfear perceived would not have occurred otherwise. “Then why doesn’t papa want me to remember things?”

“I don’t know,” Lanfear temporized. “Doesn’t he?”

“I can’t always tell. Should — should you wish me to remember more than I do?”

“I?”

She looked at him with entreaty. “Do you think it would make my father happier if I did?”

“That I can’t say,” Lanfear answered. “People are often the sadder for what they remember. If I were your father — Excuse me! I don’t mean anything so absurd. But in his place—”

He stopped, and she said, as if she were satisfied with his broken reply: “It is very curious. When I look at him — when I am with him — I know him; but when he is away, I don’t remember him.” She seemed rather interested in the fact than distressed by it; she even smiled.

“And me,” he ventured, “is it the same with regard to me?”

She did not say; she asked, smiling: “Do you remember me when I am away?”

“Yes!” he answered. “As perfectly as if you were with me. I can see you, hear you, feel the touch of your hand, your dress — Good heavens!” he added to himself under his breath. “What am I saying to this poor child!”

In the instinct of escaping from himself he started forward, and she moved with him. Mr. Gerald’s watchful driver followed them with the carriage.

“That is very strange,” she said, lightly. “Is it so with you about everyone?”

“No,” he replied, briefly, almost harshly. He asked, abruptly: “Miss Gerald, are there any times when you know people in their absence?”

“Just after I wake from a nap — yes. But it doesn’t last. That is, it seems to me it doesn’t. I’m not sure.”

As they followed the winding of the pleasant way, with the villas on the slopes above and on the slopes below, she began to talk of them, and to come into that knowledge of each which formed her remembrance of them from former knowledge of them, but which he knew would fade when she passed them.

The next morning, when she came down unwontedly late to breakfast in their pavilion, she called gayly:

“Dr. Lanfear! It is Dr. Lanfear?”

“I should be sorry if it were not, since you seem to expect it, Miss Gerald.”

“Oh, I just wanted to be sure. Hasn’t my father been here, yet?” It was the first time she had shown herself aware of her father except in his presence, as it was the first time she had named Lanfear to his face.

He suppressed a remote stir of anxiety, and answered: “He went to get his newspapers; he wished you not to wait. I hope you slept well?”

“Splendidly. But I was very tired last night; I don’t know why, exactly.”

“We had rather a long walk.”

“Did we have a walk yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Then it was so! I thought I had dreamed it. I was beginning to remember something, and my father asked me what it was, and then I couldn’t remember. Do you believe I shall keep on remembering?”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

“Should you wish me to?” she asked, in evident, however unconscious, recurrence to their talk of the day before.

“Why not?”

She sighed. “I don’t know. If it’s like some of those dreams or gleams. Is remembering pleasant?”

Lanfear thought for a moment. Then he said, in the honesty he thought best to use with her: “For the most part I should say it was painful. Life is tolerable enough while it passes, but when it is past, what remains seems mostly to hurt and humiliate. I don’t know why we should remember so insistently the foolish things and wrong things we do, and not recall the times when we acted, without an effort, wisely and rightly.” He thought he had gone too far, and he hedged a little. “I don’t mean that we can’t recall those times. We can and do, to console and encourage ourselves; but they don’t recur, without our willing, as the others do.”

She had poured herself a cup of coffee, and she played with the spoon in her saucer while she seemed to listen. But she could not have been listening, for when she put down her spoon and leaned back in her chair, she said: “In those dreams the things come from such a very far way back, and they don’t belong to a life that is like this. They belong to a life like what you hear the life after this is. We are the same as we are here; but the things are different. We haven’t the same rules, the same wishes — I can’t explain.”

“You mean that we are differently conditioned?”

“Yes. And if you can understand, I feel as if I remembered long back of this, and long forward of this. But one can’t remember forward!”

“That wouldn’t be remembrance; no, it would be prescience; and your consciousness here, as you were saying yesterday, is through knowing, not remembering.”

She stared at him. “Was that yesterday? I thought it was — to-morrow.” She rubbed her hand across her forehead as people do when they wish to clear their minds. Then she sighed deeply. “It tires me so. And yet I can’t help trying.” A light broke over her face at the sound of a step on the gravel walk near by, and she said, laughing, without looking round: “That is papa! I knew it was his step.”

V

Such return of memory as she now had was like memory in what we call the lower lives. It increased, fluctuantly, with an ebb in which it almost disappeared, but with a flow that in its advance carried it beyond its last flood-tide mark. After the first triumph in which she could address Lanfear by his name, and could greet her father as her father, there were lapses in which she knew them as before, without naming them. Except mechanically to repeat the names of other people when reminded of them, she did not pass beyond cognition to recognition. Events still left no trace upon her; or if they did she was not sure whether they were things she had dreamed or experienced. But her memory grew stronger in the region where the bird knows its way home to the nest, or the bee to the hive. She had an unerring instinct for places where she had once been, and she found her way to them again without the help from the association which sometimes failed Lanfear. Their walks were always taken with her father’s company in his carriage, but they sometimes left him at a point of the Berigo Road, and after a long détour among the vineyards and olive orchards of the heights above, rejoined him at another point they had agreed upon with him. One afternoon, when Lanfear had climbed the rough pave of the footways with her to one of the summits, they stopped to rest on the wall of a terrace, where they sat watching the changing light on the sea, through a break in the trees. The shadows surprised them on their height, and they had to make their way among them over the farm paths and by the dry beds of the torrents to the carriage road far below. They had been that walk only once before, and Lanfear failed of his reckoning, except the downward course which must bring them out on the high-road at last. But Miss Gerald’s instinct saved them where his reason failed. She did not remember, but she knew the way, and she led him on as if she were inventing it, or as if it had been indelibly traced upon her mind and she had only to follow the mystical lines within to be sure of her course. She confessed to being very tired, and each step must have increased her fatigue, but each step seemed to clear her perception of the next to be taken.

Suddenly, when Lanfear was blaming himself for bringing all this upon her, and then for trusting to her guidance, he recognized a certain peasant’s house, and in a few moments they had descended the olive-orchard terraces to a broken cistern in the clear twilight beyond the dusk. She suddenly halted him. “There, there! It happened then — now — this instant!”

“What?”

“That feeling of being here before! There is the curb of the old cistern; and the place where the terrace wall is broken; and the path up to the vineyard — Don’t you feel it, too?” she demanded, with a joyousness which had no pleasure for him.

“Yes, certainly. We were here last week. We went up the path to the farm-house to get some water.”

“Yes, now I am remembering — remembering!” She stood with eagerly parted lips, and glancing quickly round with glowing eyes, whose light faded in the same instant. “No!” she said, mournfully, “it’s gone.”

A sound of wheels in the road ceased, and her father’s voice called: “Don’t you want to take my place, and let me walk awhile, Nannie?”

“No. You come to me, papa. Something very strange has happened; something you will be surprised at. Hurry!” She seemed to be joking, as he was, while she beckoned him impatiently towards her.

He had left his carriage, and he came up with a heavy man’s quickened pace. “Well, what is the wonderful thing?” he panted out.

She stared blankly at him, without replying, and they silently made their way to Mr. Gerald’s carriage.

“I lost the way, and Miss Gerald found it,” Lanfear explained, as he helped her to the place beside her father.

She said nothing, and almost with sinking into the seat, she sank into that deep slumber which from time to time overtook her.

“I didn’t know we had gone so far — or rather that we had waited so long before we started down the hills,” Lanfear apologized in an involuntary whisper.

“Oh, it’s all right,” her father said, trying to adjust the girl’s fallen head to his shoulder. “Get in and help me—”

Lanfear obeyed, and lent a physician’s skilled aid, which left the cumbrous efforts of her father to the blame he freely bestowed on them. “You’ll have to come here on the other side,” he said. “There’s room enough for all three. Or, hold on! Let me take your place.” He took the place in front, and left her to Lanfear’s care, with the trust which was the physician’s right, and with a sense of the girl’s dependence in which she was still a child to him.

They did not speak till well on the way home. Then the father leaned forward and whispered huskily: “Do you think she’s as strong as she was?”

Lanfear waited, as if thinking the facts over. He murmured back: “No. She’s better. She’s not so strong.”

“Yes,” the father murmured. “I understand.”

What Gerald understood by Lanfear’s words might not have been their meaning, but what Lanfear meant was that there was now an interfusion of the past and present in her daily experience. She still did not remember, but she had moments in which she hovered upon such knowledge of what had happened as she had of actual events. When she was stronger she seemed farther from this knowledge; when she was weaker she was nearer it. So it seemed to him in that region where he could be sure of his own duty when he looked upon it singly as concern for her health. No inquiry for the psychological possibilities must be suffered to divide his effort for her physical recovery, though there might come with this a cessation of the timeless dream-state in which she had her being, and she might sharply realize the past, as the anaesthete realizes his return to agony from insensibility. The quality of her mind was as different from the thing called culture as her manner from convention. A simplicity beyond the simplicity of childhood was one with a poetic color in her absolute ideas. But this must cease with her restoration to the strength in which she could alone come into full and clear self-consciousness. So far as Lanfear could give reality to his occupation with her disability, he was ministering to a mind diseased; not to “rase out its written trouble,” but if possible to restore the obliterated record, and enable her to spell its tragic characters. If he could, he would have shrunk from this office; but all the more because he specially had to do with the mystical side of medicine, he always tried to keep his relation to her free from personal feeling, and his aim single and matter-of-fact.

It was hard to do this; and there was a glamour in the very topographical and meteorological environment. The autumn was a long delight in which the constant sea, the constant sky, knew almost as little variance as the unchanging Alps. The days passed in a procession of sunny splendor, neither hot nor cold, nor of the temper of any determinate season, unless it were an abiding spring-time. The flowers bloomed, and the grass kept green in a reverie of May. But one afternoon of January, while Lanfear was going about in a thin coat and panama hat, a soft, fresh wind began to blow from the east. It increased till sunset, and then fell. In the morning he looked out on a world in which the spring had stiffened overnight into winter. A thick frost painted the leaves and flowers; icicles hung from pipes and vents; the frozen streams flashed back from their arrested flow the sun as it shone from the cold heaven, and blighted and blackened the hedges of geranium and rose, the borders of heliotrope, the fields of pinks. The leaves of the bananas hung limp about their stems; the palms rattled like skeletons in the wind when it began to blow again over the shrunken landscape.

VI

The caprice of a climate which vaunted itself perpetual summer was a godsend to all the strangers strong enough to bear it without suffering. For the sick an indoor life of huddling about the ineffectual fires of the south began, and lasted for the fortnight that elapsed before the Riviera got back its advertised temperature. Miss Gerald had drooped in the milder weather; but the cold braced and lifted her, and with its help she now pushed her walks farther, and was eager every day for some excursion to the little towns that whitened along the shores, or the villages that glimmered from the olive-orchards of the hills. Once she said to Lanfear, when they were climbing through the brisk, clear air: “It seems to me as if I had been here before. Have I?”

“No. This is the first time.”

She said no more, but seemed disappointed in his answer, and he suggested: “Perhaps it is the cold that reminds you of our winters at home, and makes you feel that the scene is familiar.”

“Yes, that is it!” she returned, joyously. “Was there snow, there, like that on the mountains yonder?”

“A good deal more, I fancy. That will be gone in a few days, and at home, you know, our snow lasts for weeks.”

“Then that is what I was thinking of,” she said, and she ran strongly and lightly forward. “Come!”

When the harsh weather passed and the mild climate returned there was no lapse of her strength. A bloom, palely pink as the flowers that began to flush the almond-trees, came upon her delicate beauty, a light like that of the lengthening days dawned in her eyes. She had an instinct for the earliest violets among the grass under the olives; she was first to hear the blackcaps singing in the garden-tops; and nothing that was novel in her experience seemed alien to it. This was the sum of what Lanfear got by the questioning which he needlessly tried to keep indirect. She knew that she was his patient, and in what manner, and she had let him divine that her loss of memory was suffering as well as deprivation. She had not merely the fatigue which we all undergo from the effort to recall things, and which sometimes reaches exhaustion; but there was apparently in the void of her oblivion a perpetual rumor of events, names, sensations, like — Lanfear felt that he inadequately conjectured — the subjective noises which are always in the ears of the deaf. Sometimes, in the distress of it, she turned to him for help, and when he was able to guess what she was striving for, a radiant relief and gratitude transfigured her face. But this could not last, and he learned to note how soon the stress and tension of her effort returned. His compassion for her at such times involved a temptation, or rather a question, which he had to silence by a direct effort of his will. Would it be worse, would it be greater anguish for her to know at once the past that now tormented her consciousness with its broken and meaningless reverberations? Then he realized that it was impossible to help her even through the hazard of telling her what had befallen; that no such effect as was to be desired could be anticipated from the outside.

If he turned to her father for counsel or instruction, or even a participation in his responsibility, he was met by an optimistic patience which exasperated him, if it did not complicate the case. Once, when Lanfear forbearingly tried to share with him his anxiety for the effect of a successful event, he was formed to be outright, and remind him, in so many words, that the girl’s restoration might be through anguish which he could not measure.

Gerald faltered aghast; then he said: “It mustn’t come to that; you mustn’t let it.”

“How do you expect me to prevent it?” Lanfear demanded, in his vexation.

Gerald caught his breath. “If she gets well, she will remember?”

“I don’t say that. It seems probable. Do you wish her being to remain bereft of one-half its powers?”

“Oh, how do I know what I want?” the poor man groaned. “I only know that I trust you entirely, Doctor Lanfear. Whatever you think best will be best and wisest, no matter what the outcome is.”

He got away from Lanfear with these hopeless words, and again Lanfear perceived that the case was left wholly to him. His consolation was the charm of the girl’s companionship, the delight of a nature knowing itself from moment to moment as if newly created. For her, as nearly as he could put the fact into words, the actual moment contained the past and the future as well as the present. When he saw in her the persistence of an exquisite personality independent of the means by which he realized his own continuous identity, he sometimes felt as if in the presence of some angel so long freed from earthly allegiance that it had left all record behind, as we leave here the records of our first years. If an echo of the past reached her, it was apt to be trivial and insignificant, like those unimportant experiences of our remotest childhood, which remain to us from a world outlived.

It was not an insipid perfection of character which reported itself in these celestial terms, and Lanfear conjectured that angelic immortality, if such a thing were, could not imply perfection except at the cost of one-half of human character. When the girl wore a dress that she saw pleased him more than another, there was a responsive pleasure in her eyes, which he could have called vanity if he would; and she had at times a wilfulness which he could have accused of being obstinacy. She showed a certain jealousy of any experiences of his apart from her own, not because they included others, but because they excluded her. He was aware of an involuntary vigilance in her, which could not leave his motives any more than his actions unsearched. But in her conditioning she could not repent; she could only offer him at some other time the unconscious reparation of her obedience. The self-criticism which the child has not learned she had forgotten, but in her oblivion the wish to please existed as perfectly as in the ignorance of childhood.

This, so far as he could ever put into words, was the interior of the world where he dwelt apart with her. Its exterior continued very like that of other worlds where two young people have their being. Now and then a more transitory guest at the Grand Hotel Sardegna perhaps fancied it the iridescent orb which takes the color of the morning sky, and is destined, in the course of nature, to the danger of collapse in which planetary space abounds. Some rumor of this could not fail to reach Lanfear, but he ignored it as best he could in always speaking gravely of Miss Gerald as his patient, and authoritatively treating her as such. He convinced some of these witnesses against their senses; for the others, he felt that it mattered little what they thought, since, if it reached her, it could not pierce her isolation for more than the instant in which the impression from absent things remained to her.

A more positive embarrassment, of a kind Lanfear was not prepared for, beset him in an incident which would have been more touching if he had been less singly concerned for the girl. A pretty English boy, with the dawn of a peachy bloom on his young cheeks, and an impulsiveness commoner with English youth than our own, talked with Miss Gerald one evening and the next day sent her an armful of flowers with his card. He followed this attention with a call at her father’s apartment, and after Miss Gerald seemed to know him, and they had, as he told Lanfear, a delightful time together, she took up his card from the table where it was lying, and asked him if he could tell her who that gentleman was. The poor fellow’s inference was that she was making fun of him, and he came to Lanfear, as an obvious friend of the family, for an explanation. He reported the incident, with indignant tears standing in his eyes: “What did she mean by it? If she took my flowers, she must have known that — that — they — And to pretend to forget my name! Oh, I say, it’s too bad! She could have got rid of me without that. Girls have ways enough, you know.”

“Yes, yes,” Lanfear assented, slowly, to gain time. “I can assure you that Miss Gerald didn’t mean anything that could wound you. She isn’t very well — she’s rather odd—”

“Do you mean that she’s out of her mind? She can talk as well as any one — better!”

“No, not that. But she’s often in pain — greatly in pain when she can’t recall a name, and I’ve no doubt she was trying to recall yours with the help of your card. She would be the last in the world to be indifferent to your feelings. I imagine she scarcely knew what she was doing at the moment.”

“Then, do you think — do you suppose — it would be any good my trying to see her again? If she wouldn’t be indifferent to my feelings, do you think there would be any hope — Really, you know, I would give anything to believe that my feelings wouldn’t offend her. You understand me?”

“Perhaps I do.”

“I’ve never met a more charming girl and — she isn’t engaged, is she? She isn’t engaged to you? I don’t mean to press the question, but it’s a question of life and death with me, you know.”

Lanfear thought he saw his way out of the coil. “I can tell you, quite as frankly as you ask, that Miss Gerald isn’t engaged to me.”

“Then it’s somebody else — somebody in America! Well, I hope she’ll be happy; I never shall.” He offered his hand to Lanfear. “I’m off.”

“Oh, here’s the doctor, now,” a voice said behind them where they stood by the garden wall, and they turned to confront Gerald with his daughter.

“Why! Are you going?” she said to the Englishman, and she put out her hand to him.

“Yes, Mr. Evers is going.” Lanfear came to the rescue.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said, and the youth responded.

“That’s very good of you. I — good-by! I hope you’ll be very happy — I—” He turned abruptly away, and ran into the hotel.

“What has he been crying for?” Miss Gerald asked, turning from a long look after him.

Lanfear did not know quite what to say; but he hazarded saying: “He was hurt that you had forgotten him when he came to see you this afternoon.”

“Did he come to see me?” she asked; and Lanfear exchanged looks of anxiety, pain, and reassurance with her father. “I am so sorry. Shall I go after him and tell him?”

“No; I explained; he’s all right,” Lanfear said.

“You want to be careful, Nannie,” her father added, “about people’s feelings when you meet them, and afterwards seem not to know them.”

“But I do know them, papa,” she remonstrated.

“You want to be careful,” her father repeated.

“I will — I will, indeed.” Her lips quivered, and the tears came, which Lanfear had to keep from flowing by what quick turn he could give to something else.

An obscure sense of the painful incident must have lingered with her after its memory had perished. One afternoon when Lanfear and her father went with her to the military concert in the sycamore-planted piazza near the Vacherie Suisse, where they often came for a cup of tea, she startled them by bowing gayly to a young lieutenant of engineers standing there with some other officers, and making the most of the prospect of pretty foreigners which the place afforded. The lieutenant returned the bow with interest, and his eyes did not leave their party as long as they remained. Within the bounds of deference for her, it was evident that his comrades were joking about the honor done him by this charming girl. When the Geralds started homeward Lanfear was aware of a trio of officers following them, not conspicuously, but unmistakably; and after that, he could not start on his walks with Miss Gerald and her father without the sense that the young lieutenant was hovering somewhere in their path, waiting in the hopes of another bow from her. The officer was apparently not discouraged by his failure to win recognition from her, and what was amounting to annoyance for Lanfear reached the point where he felt he must share it with her father. He had nearly as much trouble in imparting it to him as he might have had with Miss Gerald herself. He managed, but when he required her father to put a stop to it he perceived that Gerald was as helpless as she would have been. He first wished to verify the fact from its beginning with her, but this was not easy.

“Nannie,” he said, “why did you bow to that officer the other day?”

“What officer, papa? When?”

“You know; there by the band-stand, at the Swiss Dairy.”

She stared blankly at him, and it was clear that it was all as if it had not been with her. He insisted, and then she said: “Perhaps I thought I knew him, and was afraid I should hurt his feelings if I didn’t recognize him. But I don’t remember it at all.” The curves of her mouth drooped, and her eyes grieved, so that her father had not the heart to say more. She left them, and when he was alone with Lanfear he said:

“You see how it is!”

“Yes, I saw how it was before. But what do you wish to do?”

“Do you mean that he will keep it up?”

“Decidedly, he’ll keep it up. He has every right to from his point of view.”

“Oh, well, then, my dear fellow, you must stop it, somehow. You’ll know how to do it.”

“I?” said Lanfear, indignantly; but his vexation was not so great that he did not feel a certain pleasure in fulfilling this strangest part of his professional duty, when at the beginning of their next excursion he put Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to the point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their farther progress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded in very blunt Italian: “What do you want?”

The lieutenant stared him over with potential offence, in which his delicately pencilled mustache took the shape of a light sneer, and demanded in his turn, in English much better than Lanfear’s Italian: “What right have you to ask?”

“The right of Miss Gerald’s physician. She is an invalid in my charge.”

A change quite indefinable except as the visible transition from coxcomb to gentleman passed over the young lieutenant’s comely face. “An invalid?” he faltered.

“Yes,” Lanfear began; and then, with a rush of confidence which the change in the officer’s face justified, “one very strangely, very tragically afflicted. Since she saw her mother killed in an accident a year ago she remembers nothing. She bowed to you because she saw you looking at her, and supposed you must be an acquaintance. May I assure you that you are altogether mistaken?”

The lieutenant brought his heels together, and bent low. “I beg her pardon with all my heart. I am very, very sorry. I will do anything I can. I would like to stop that. May I bring my mother to call on Miss Gerald?”

He offered his hand, and Lanfear wrung it hard, a lump of gratitude in his throat choking any particular utterance, while a fine shame for his late hostile intention covered him.

When the lieutenant came, with all possible circumstance, bringing the countess, his mother, Mr. Gerald overwhelmed them with hospitality of every form. The Italian lady responded effusively, and more sincerely cooed and murmured her compassionate interest in his daughter. Then all parted the best of friends; but when it was over, Miss Gerald did not know what it had been about. She had not remembered the lieutenant or her father’s vexation, or any phase of the incident which was now closed. Nothing remained of it but the lieutenant’s right, which he gravely exercised, of saluting them respectfully whenever he met them.

VII

Earlier, Lanfear had never allowed himself to be far out of call from Miss Gerald’s father, especially during the daytime slumbers into which she fell, and from which they both always dreaded her awakening. But as the days went on and the event continued the same he allowed himself greater range. Formerly the three went their walks or drives together, but now he sometimes went alone. In these absences he found relief from the stress of his constant vigilance; he was able to cast off the bond which enslaves the physician to his patient, and which he must ignore at times for mere self-preservation’s sake; but there was always a lurking anxiety, which, though he refused to let it define itself to him, shortened the time and space he tried to put between them.

One afternoon in April, when he left her sleeping, he was aware of somewhat recklessly placing himself out of reach in a lonely excursion to a village demolished by the earthquake of 1887, and abandoned himself, in the impressions and incidents of his visit to the ruin, to a luxury of impersonal melancholy which the physician cannot often allow himself. At last, his care found him, and drove him home full of a sharper fear than he had yet felt since the first days. But Mr. Gerald was tranquilly smoking under a palm in the hotel garden, and met him with an easy smile. “She woke once, and said she had had such a pleasant dream. Now she’s off again. Do you think we’d better wake her for dinner? I suppose she’s getting up her strength in this way. Her sleeping so much is a good symptom, isn’t it?”

Lanfear smiled forlornly; neither of them, in view of the possible eventualities, could have said what result they wished the symptoms to favor. But he said: “Decidedly I wouldn’t wake her”; and he spent a night of restless sleep penetrated by a nervous expectation which the morning, when it came, rather mockingly defeated.

Miss Gerald appeared promptly at breakfast in their pavilion, with a fresher and gayer look than usual, and to her father’s “Well, Nannie, you have had a nap, this time,” she answered, smiling:

“Have I? It isn’t afternoon, is it?”

“No, it’s morning. You’ve napped it all night.”

She said: “I can’t tell whether I’ve been asleep or not, sometimes; but now I know I have been; and I feel so rested. Where are we going to-day?”

She turned to Lanfear while her father answered: “I guess the doctor won’t want to go very far, to-day, after his expedition yesterday afternoon.”

“Ah,” she said, “I knew you had been somewhere! Was it very far? Are you too tired?”

“It was rather far, but I’m not tired. I shouldn’t advise Possana, though.”

“Possana?” she repeated. “What is Possana?”

He told her, and then at a jealous look in her eyes he added an account of his excursion. He heightened, if anything, its difficulties, in making light of them as no difficulties for him, and at the end she said, gently: “Shall we go this morning?”

“Let the doctor rest this morning, Nannie,” her father interrupted, whimsically, but with what Lanfear knew to be an inner yielding to her will. “Or if you won’t let him, let me. I don’t want to go anywhere this morning.”

Lanfear thought that he did not wish her to go at all, and hoped that by the afternoon she would have forgotten Possana. She sighed, but in her sigh there was no concession. Then, with the chance of a returning drowse to save him from openly thwarting her will, he merely suggested: “There’s plenty of time in the afternoon; the days are so long now; and we can get the sunset from the hills.”

“Yes, that will be nice,” she said, but he perceived that she did not assent willingly; and there was an effect of resolution in the readiness with which she appeared dressed for the expedition after luncheon. She clearly did not know where they were going, but when she turned to Lanfear with her look of entreaty, he had not the heart to join her father in any conspiracy against her. He beckoned the carriage which had become conscious in its eager driver from the moment she showed herself at the hotel door, and they set out.

When they had left the higher level of the hotel and began their clatter through the long street of the town, Lanfear noted that she seemed to feel as much as himself the quaintness of the little city, rising on one hand, with its narrow alleys under successive arches between the high, dark houses, to the hills, and dropping on the other to sea from the commonplace of the principal thoroughfare, with its pink and white and saffron hotels and shops. Beyond the town their course lay under villa walls, covered with vines and topped by pavilions, and opening finally along a stretch of the old Cornice road.

“But this,” she said, at a certain point, “is where we were yesterday!”

“This is where the doctor was yesterday,” her father said, behind his cigar.

“And wasn’t I with you?” she asked Lanfear.

He said, playfully: “To-day you are. I mustn’t be selfish and have you every day.”

“Ah, you are laughing at me; but I know I was here yesterday.”

Her father set his lips in patience, and Lanfear did not insist.

They had halted at this point because, across a wide valley on the shoulder of an approaching height, the ruined village of Possana showed, and lower down and nearer the seat the new town which its people had built when they escaped from the destruction of their world-old home.

World-old it all was, with reference to the human life of it; but the spring-time was immortally young in the landscape. Over the expanses of green and brown fields, and hovering about the gray and white cottages, was a mist of peach and cherry blossoms. Above these the hoar olives thickened, and the vines climbed from terrace to terrace. The valley narrowed inland, and ceased in the embrace of the hills drawing mysteriously together in the distances.

“I think we’ve got the best part of it here, Miss Gerald,” Lanfear broke the common silence by saying. “You couldn’t see much more of Possana after you got there.”

“Besides,” her father ventured a pleasantry which jarred on the younger man, “if you were there with the doctor yesterday, you won’t want to make the climb again to-day. Give it up, Nannie!”

“Oh no,” she said, “I can’t give it up.”

“Well, then, we must go on, I suppose. Where do we begin our climb?”

Lanfear explained that he had been obliged to leave his carriage at the foot of the hill, and climb to Possana Nuova by the donkey-paths of the peasants. He had then walked to the ruins of Possana Vecchia, but he suggested that they might find donkeys to carry them on from the new town.

“Well, I hope so,” Mr. Gerald grumbled. But at Possana Nuova no saddle-donkeys were to be had, and he announced, at the café where they stopped for the negotiation, that he would wait for the young people to go on to Possana Vecchia, and tell him about it when they got back. In the meantime he would watch the game of ball, which, in the piazza before the café, appeared to have engaged the energies of the male population. Lanfear was still inwardly demurring, when a stalwart peasant girl came in and announced that she had one donkey which they could have with her own services driving it. She had no saddle, but there was a pad on which the young lady could ride.

“Oh, well, take it for Nannie,” Mr. Gerald directed; “only don’t be gone too long.”

They set out with Miss Gerald reclining in the kind of litter which the donkey proved to be equipped with. Lanfear went beside her, the peasant girl came behind, and at times ran forward to instruct them in the points they seemed to be looking at. For the most part the landscape opened beneath them, but in the azure distances it climbed into Alpine heights which the recent snows had now left to the gloom of their pines. On the slopes of the nearer hills little towns clung, here and there; closer yet farm-houses showed themselves among the vines and olives.

It was very simple, as the life in it must always have been; and Lanfear wondered if the elemental charm of the scene made itself felt by his companion as they climbed the angles of the inclines, in a silence broken only by the picking of the donkey’s hoofs on the rude mosaic of the pavement, and the panting of the peasant girl at its heels. On the top of the last upward stretch they stopped for the view, and Miss Gerald asked abruptly: “Why were you so sad?”

“When was I sad?” he asked, in turn.

“I don’t know. Weren’t you sad?”

“When I was here yesterday, you mean?” She smiled on his fortunate guess, and he said: “Oh, I don’t know. It might have begun with thinking —

‘Of old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.’

You know the pirates used to come sailing over the peaceful sea yonder from Africa, to harry these coasts, and carry off as many as they could capture into slavery in Tunis and Algiers. It was a long, dumb kind of misery that scarcely made an echo in history, but it haunted my fancy yesterday, and I saw these valleys full of the flight and the pursuit which used to fill them, up to the walls of the villages, perched on the heights where men could have built only for safety. Then, I got to thinking of other things—”

“And thinking of things in the past always makes you sad,” she said, in pensive reflection. “If it were not for the wearying of always trying to remember, I don’t believe I should want my memory back. And of course to be like other people,” she ended with a sigh.

It was on his tongue to say that he would not have her so; but he checked himself, and said, lamely enough: “Perhaps you will be like them, sometime.”

She startled him by answering irrelevantly: “You know my mother is dead. She died a long while ago; I suppose I must have been very little.”

She spoke as if the fact scarcely concerned her, and Lanfear drew a breath of relief in his surprise. He asked, at another tangent: “What made you think I was sad yesterday?”

“Oh, I knew, somehow. I think that I always know when you are sad; I can’t tell you how, but I feel it.”

“Then I must cheer up,” Lanfear said. “If I could only see you strong and well, Miss Gerald, like this girl—”

They both looked at the peasant, and she laughed in sympathy with their smiling, and beat the donkey a little for pleasure; it did not mind.

“But you will be — you will be! We must hurry on, now, or your father will be getting anxious.”

They pushed forward on the road, which was now level and wider than it had been. As they drew near the town, whose ruin began more and more to reveal itself in the roofless walls and windowless casements, they saw a man coming towards them, at whose approach Lanfear instinctively put himself forward. The man did not look at them, but passed, frowning darkly, and muttering and gesticulating.

Miss Gerald turned in her litter and followed him with a long gaze. The peasant girl said gayly in Italian: “He is mad; the earthquake made him mad,” and urged the donkey forward.

Lanfear, in the interest of science, habitually forbade himself the luxury of anything like foreboding, but now, with the passing of the madman, he felt distinctively a lift from his spirit. He no longer experienced the vague dread which had followed him towards Possana, and made him glad of any delay that kept them from it.

They entered the crooked, narrow street leading abruptly from the open country without any suburban hesitation into the heart of the ruin, which kept a vivid image of uninterrupted mediaeval life. There, till within the actual generation, people had dwelt, winter and summer, as they had dwelt from the beginning of Christian times, with nothing to intimate a domestic or civic advance. This street must have been the main thoroughfare, for stone-paved lanes, still narrower, wound from it here and there, while it kept a fairly direct course to the little piazza on a height in the midst of the town. Two churches and a simple town house partly enclosed it with their seamed and shattered façades. The dwellings here were more ruinous than on the thoroughfare, and some were tumbled in heaps. But Lanfear pushed open the door of one of the churches, and found himself in an interior which, except that it was roofless, could not have been greatly changed since the people had flocked into it to pray for safety from the earthquake. The high altar stood unshaken; around the frieze a succession of stucco cherubs perched, under the open sky, in celestial security.

He had learned to look for the unexpected in Miss Gerald, and he could not have said that it was with surprise he now found her as capable of the emotions which the place inspired, as himself. He made sure of saying: “The earthquake, you know,” and she responded with compassion:

“Oh yes; and perhaps that poor man was here, praying with the rest, when it happened. How strange it must all have seemed to them, here where they lived so safely always! They thought such a dreadful thing could happen to others, but not to them. That is the way!”

It seemed to Lanfear once more that she was on the verge of the knowledge so long kept from her. But she went confidently on like a sleepwalker who saves himself from dangers that would be death to him in waking. She spoke of the earthquake as if she had been reading or hearing of it; but he doubted if, with her broken memory, this could be so. It was rather as if she was exploring his own mind in the way of which he had more than once been sensible, and making use of his memory. From time to time she spoke of remembering, but he knew that this was as the blind speak of seeing.

He was anxious to get away, and at last they came out to where they had left the peasant girl waiting beside her donkey. She was not there, and after trying this way and that in the tangle of alleys, Lanfear decided to take the thoroughfare which they had come up by and trust to the chance of finding her at its foot. But he failed even of his search for the street: he came out again and again at the point he had started from.

“What is the matter?” she asked at the annoyance he could not keep out of his face.

He laughed. “Oh, merely that we’re lost. But we will wait here till that girl chooses to come back for us. Only it’s getting late, and Mr. Gerald—”

“Why, I know the way down,” she said, and started quickly in a direction which, as they kept it, he recognized as the route by which he had emerged from the town the day before. He had once more the sense of his memory being used by her, as if being blind, she had taken his hand for guidance, or as if being herself disabled from writing, she had directed a pen in his grasp to form the words she desired to put down. In some mystical sort the effect was hers, but the means was his.

They found the girl waiting with the donkey by the roadside beyond the last house. She explained that, not being able to follow them into the church with her donkey, she had decided to come where they found her and wait for them there.

“Does no one at all live here?” Lanfear asked, carelessly.

“Among the owls and the spectres? I would not pass a night here for a lemonade! My mother,” she went on, with a natural pride in the event, “was lost in the earthquake. They found her with me before her breast, and her arms stretched out keeping the stones away.” She vividly dramatized the fact. “I was alive, but she was dead.”

“Tell her,” Miss Gerald said, “that my mother is dead, too.”

“Ah, poor little thing!” the girl said, when the message was delivered, and she put her beast in motion, chattering gayly to Miss Gerald in the bond of their common orphanhood.

The return was down-hill, and they went back in half the time it had taken them to come. But even with this speed they were late, and the twilight was deepening when the last turn of their road brought them in sight of the new village. There a wild noise of cries for help burst upon the air, mixed with the shrill sound of maniac gibbering. They saw a boy running towards the town, and nearer them a man struggling with another, whom he had caught about the middle, and was dragging towards the side of the road where it dropped, hundreds of feet, into the gorge below.

The donkey-girl called out: “Oh, the madman! He is killing the signor!”

Lanfear shouted. The madman flung Gerald to the ground, and fled shrieking. Miss Gerald had leaped from her seat, and followed Lanfear as he ran forward to the prostrate form. She did not look at it, but within a few paces she clutched her hands in her hair, and screamed out: “Oh, my mother is killed!” and sank, as if sinking down into the earth, in a swoon.

“No, no; it’s all right, Nannie! Look after her, Lanfear! I’m not hurt. I let myself go in that fellow’s hands, and I fell softly. It was a good thing he didn’t drop me over the edge.” Gerald gathered himself up nimbly enough, and lent Lanfear his help with the girl. The situation explained itself, almost without his incoherent additions, to the effect that he had become anxious, and had started out with the boy for a guide, to meet them, and had met the lunatic, who suddenly attacked him. While he talked, Lanfear was feeling the girl’s pulse, and now and then putting his ear to her heart. With a glance at her father: “You’re bleeding, Mr. Gerald,” he said.

“So I am,” the old man answered, smiling, as he wiped a red stream from his face with his handkerchief. “But I am not hurt—”

“Better let me tie it up,” Lanfear said, taking the handkerchief from him. He felt the unselfish quality in a man whom he had not always thought heroic, and he bound the gash above his forehead with a reverence mingling with his professional gentleness. The donkey-girl had not ceased to cry out and bless herself, but suddenly, as her care was needed in getting Miss Gerald back to the litter, she became a part of the silence in which the procession made its way slowly into Possana Nuova, Lanfear going on one side, and Mr. Gerald on the other to support his daughter in her place. There was a sort of muted outcry of the whole population awaiting them at the door of the locanda where they had halted before, and which now had the distinction of offering them shelter in a room especially devoted to the poor young lady, who still remained in her swoon.

When the landlord could prevail with his fellow-townsmen and townswomen to disperse in her interest, and had imposed silence upon his customers indoors, Lanfear began his vigil beside his patient in as great quiet as he could anywhere have had. Once during the evening the public physician of the district looked in, but he agreed with Lanfear that nothing was to be done which he was not doing in his greater experience of the case. From time to time Gerald had suggested sending for some San Remo physician in consultation. Lanfear had always approved, and then Gerald had not persisted. He was strongly excited, and anxious not so much for his daughter’s recovery from her swoon, which he did not doubt, as for the effect upon her when she should have come to herself.

It was this which he wished to discuss, sitting fallen back into his chair, or walking up and down the room, with his head bound with a bloody handkerchief, and looking, with a sort of alien picturesqueness, like a kindly brigand.

Lanfear did not leave his place beside the bed where the girl lay, white and still as if dead. An inexpressible compassion for the poor man filled his heart. Whatever the event should be, it would be tragical for him. “Go to sleep, Mr. Gerald,” he said. “Your waking can do no good. I will keep watch, and if need be, I’ll call you. Try to make yourself easy on that couch.”

“I shall not sleep,” the old man answered. “How could I?” Nevertheless, he adjusted himself to the hard pillows of the lounge where he had been sitting and drowsed among them. He woke just before dawn with a start. “I thought she had come to, and knew everything! What a nightmare! Did I groan? Is there any change?”

Lanfear, sitting by the bed, in the light of the wasting candle, which threw a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, shook his head. After a moment he asked: “How long did you tell me her swoon had lasted after the accident to her mother?”

“I don’t think she recovered consciousness for two days, and then she remembered nothing. What do you think are the chances of her remembering now?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a kind of psychopathic logic — If she lost her memory through one great shock, she might find it through another.”

“Yes, yes!” the father said, rising and walking to and fro, in his anguish. “That was what I thought — what I was afraid of. If I could die myself, and save her from living through it — I don’t know what I’m saying! But if — but if — if she could somehow be kept from it a little longer! But she can’t, she can’t! She must know it now when she wakes.”

Lanfear had put up his hand, and taken the girl’s slim wrist quietly between his thumb and finger, holding it so while her father talked on.

“I suppose it’s been a sort of weakness — a sort of wickedness — in me to wish to keep it from her; but I have wished that, doctor; you must have seen it, and I can’t deny it. We ought to bear what is sent us in this world, and if we escape we must pay for our escape. It has cost her half her being, I know it; but it hasn’t cost her her reason, and I’m afraid for that, if she comes into her memory now. Still, you must do — But no one can do anything either to hinder or to help!”

He was talking in a husky undertone, and brokenly, incoherently. He made an appeal, which Lanfear seemed not to hear, where he remained immovable with his hand on the girl’s pulse.

“Do you think I am to blame for wishing her never to know it, though without it she must remain deprived of one whole side of life? Do you think my wishing that can have had anything to do with keeping her — But this faint may pass and she may wake from it just as she has been. It is logical that she should remember; but is it certain that she will?”

A murmur, so very faint as to be almost no sound at all, came like a response from the girl’s lips, and she all but imperceptibly stirred. Her father neither heard nor saw, but Lanfear started forward. He made a sudden clutch at the girl’s wrist with the hand that had not left it and then remained motionless. “She will never remember now — here.”

He fell on his knees beside the bed and began to sob. “Oh, my dearest! My poor girl! My love!” still keeping her wrist in his hand, and laying his head tenderly on her arm. Suddenly he started, with a shout: “The pulse!” and fell forward, crushing his ear against her heart, and listened with bursts of: “It’s beating! She isn’t dead! She’s alive!” Then he lifted her in his arms, and it was in his embrace that she opened her eyes, and while she clung to him, entreated:

“My father! Where is he?”

A dread fell upon both the men, blighting the joy with which they welcomed her back to life. She took her father’s head between her hands, and kissed his bruised face. “I thought you were dead; and I thought that mamma—” She stopped, and they waited breathless. “But that was long ago, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” her father eagerly assented. “Very long ago.”

“I remember,” she sighed. “I thought that I was killed, too. Was it all a dream?” Her father and Lanfear looked at each other. Which should speak? “This is Doctor Lanfear, isn’t it?” she asked, with a dim smile. “And I’m not dreaming now, am I?” He had released her from his arms, but she held his hand fast. “I know it is you, and papa; and yes, I remember everything. That terrible pain of forgetting is gone! It’s beautiful! But did he hurt you badly, papa? I saw him, and I wanted to call to you. But mamma—”

However the change from the oblivion of the past had been operated, it had been mercifully wrought. As far as Lanfear could note it, in the rapture of the new revelation to her which it scarcely needed words to establish, the process was a gradual return from actual facts to the things of yesterday and then to the things of the day before, and so back to the tragedy in which she had been stricken. There was no sudden burst of remembrance, but a slow unveiling of the reality in which her spirit was mystically fortified against it. At times it seemed to him that the effect was accomplished in her by supernatural agencies such as, he remembered once somewhere reading, attend the souls of those lately dead, and explore their minds till every thought and deed of their earthly lives, from the last to the first, is revealed to them out of an inner memory which can never, any jot or tittle, perish. It was as if this had remained in her intact from the blow that shattered her outer remembrance. When the final, long-dreaded horror was reached, it was already a sorrow of the past, suffered and accepted with the resignation which is the close of grief, as of every other passion.

Love had come to her help in the time of her need, but not love alone helped her live back to the hour of that supreme experience and beyond it. In the absorbing interest of her own renascence, the shock, more than the injury which her father had undergone, was ignored, if not neglected. Lanfear had not, indeed, neglected it; but he could not help ignoring it in his happiness, as he remembered afterwards in the self-reproach which he would not let the girl share with him. Nothing, he realized, could have availed if everything had been done which he did not do; but it remained a pang with him that he had so dimly felt his duty to the gentle old man, even while he did it. Gerald lived to witness his daughter’s perfect recovery of the self so long lost to her; he lived, with a joy more explicit than their own, to see her the wife of the man to whom she was dearer than love alone could have made her. He lived beyond that time, rejoicing, if it may be so said, in the fond memories of her mother which he had been so long forbidden by her affliction to recall. Then, after the spring of the Riviera had whitened into summer, and San Remo hid, as well as it could, its sunny glare behind its pines and palms, Gerald suffered one long afternoon through the heat till the breathless evening, and went early to bed. He had been full of plans for spending the rest of the summer at the little place in New England where his daughter knew that her mother lay. In the morning he did not wake.

“He gave his life that I might have mine!” she lamented in the first wild grief.

“No, don’t say that, Nannie,” her husband protested, calling her by the pet name which her father always used. “He is dead; but if we owe each other to his loss, it is because he was given, not because he gave himself.”

“Oh, I know, I know!” she wailed. “But he would gladly have given himself for me.”

That, perhaps, Lanfear could not have denied, and he had no wish to do so. He had a prescience of happiness for her which the future did not belie; and he divined that a woman must not be forbidden the extremes within which she means to rest her soul.

II

The Eidolons of Brooks Alford

I should like to give the story of Alford’s experiences just as Wanhope told it, sitting with us before the glowing hearth in the Turkish room, one night after the other diners at our club had gone away to digest their dinners at the theatre, or in their bachelor apartments up-town, or on the late trains which they were taking north, south, and west; or had hurried back to their offices to spend the time stolen from rest in overwork for which their famished nerves would duly revenge themselves. It was undoubtedly overwork which preceded Alford’s experiences if it did not cause them, for he was pretty well broken from it when he took himself off in the early summer, to put the pieces together as best he could by the seaside. But this was a fact which Wanhope was not obliged to note to us, and there were certain other commonplaces of our knowledge of Alford which he could omit without omitting anything essential to our understanding of the facts which he dealt with so delicately, so electly, almost affectionately, coaxing each point into the fittest light, and then lifting his phrase from it, and letting it stand alone in our consciousness. I remember particularly how he touched upon the love-affair which was supposed to have so much to do with Alford’s break-up, and how he dismissed it to its proper place in the story. As he talked on, with scarcely an interruption either from the eager credulity of Rulledge or the doubt of Minver, I heard with a sensuous comfort — I can use no other word — the far-off click of the dishes in the club kitchen, putting away till next day, with the musical murmur of a smitten glass or the jingle of a dropped spoon. But if I should try to render his words, I should spoil their impression in the vain attempt, and I feel that it is best to give the story as best I can in words of my own, so far from responsive to the requisitions of the occult incident.

The first intimation Alford had of the strange effect, which from first to last was rather an obsession than a possession of his, was after a morning of idle satisfaction spent in watching the target practice from the fort in the neighborhood of the little fishing-village where he was spending the summer. The target was two or three miles out in the open water beyond the harbor, and he found his pleasure in watching the smoke of the gun for that discrete interval before the report reached him, and then for that somewhat longer interval before he saw the magnificent splash of the shot which, as it plunged into the sea, sent a fan-shaped fountain thirty or forty feet into the air. He did not know and he did not care whether the target was ever hit or not. That fact was no part of his concern. His affair was to watch the burst of smoke from the fort and then to watch the upward gush of water, almost as light and vaporous to the eye, where the ball struck. He did not miss one of the shots fired during the forenoon, and when he met the other people who sat down with him at the midday dinner in the hotel, his talk with them was naturally of the morning’s practice. They one and all declared it a great nuisance, and said that it had shattered their nerves terribly, which was not perhaps so strange, since they were all women. But when they asked him in his quality of nervous wreck whether he had not suffered from the prolonged and repeated explosions, too, he found himself able to say no, that he had enjoyed every moment of the firing. He added that he did not believe he had even noticed the noise after the first shot, he was so wholly taken with the beauty of the fountain-burst from the sea which followed; and as he spoke the fan-like spray rose and expanded itself before his eyes, quite blotting out the visage of a young widow across the table. In his swift recognition of the fact and his reflection upon it, he realized that the effect was quite as if he had been looking at some intense light, almost as if he had been looking at the sun, and that the illusion which had blotted out the agreeable reality opposite was of the quality of those flying shapes which repeat themselves here, there, and everywhere that one looks, after lifting the gaze from a dazzling object. When his consciousness had duly registered this perception, there instantly followed a recognition of the fact that the eidolon now filling his vision was not the effect of the dazzled eyes, but of a mental process, of thinking how the thing which it reported had looked.

By the time Alford had co-ordinated this reflection with the other, the eidolon had faded from the lady’s face, which again presented itself in uninterrupted loveliness with the added attraction of a distinct pout.

“Well, Mr. Alford!” she bantered him.

“Oh, I beg your pardon! I was thinking—”

“Not of what I was saying,” she broke in, laughingly, forgivingly.

“No, I certainly wasn’t,” he assented, with such a sense of approaching creepiness in his experience that when she challenged him to say what he was thinking of, he could not, or would not; she professed to believe that he would not.

In the joking that followed he soon lost the sense of approaching creepiness, and began to be proud of what had happened to him as out of the ordinary, as a species of psychological ecstasy almost of spiritual value. From time to time he tried, by thinking of the splash and upward gush from the cannon-shot’s plunge in the sea, to recall the vision, but it would not come again, and at the end of an afternoon somewhat distraughtly spent he decided to put the matter away, as one of the odd things of no significance which happen in life and must be dealt with as mysteries none the less trifling because they are inexplicable.

“Well, you’ve got over it?” the widow joked him as he drew up towards her, smiling from her rocker on the veranda after supper. At first, all the women in the hotel had petted him; but with their own cares and ailments to reclaim them they let the invalid fall to the peculiar charge of the childless widow who had nothing else to do, and was so well and strong that she could look after the invalid Professor of Archaeology (at the Champlain University) without the fatigues they must feel.

“Yes, I’ve got over it,” he said.

“And what was it?” she boldly pursued.

He was about to say, and then he could not.

“You won’t tell?”

“Not yet,” he answered. He added, after a moment, “I don’t believe I can.”

“Because it’s confidential?”

“No; not exactly that. Because it’s impossible.”

“Oh, that’s simple enough. I understand exactly what you mean. Well, if ever it becomes less difficult, remember that I should always like to know. It seemed a little — personal.”

“How in the world?”

“Well, when one is stared at in that way—”

“Did I stare?”

“Don’t you always stare? But in this case you stared as if there was something wrong with my hair.”

“There wasn’t,” Alford protested, simple-heartedly. Then he recollected his sophistication to say: “Unless its being of that particular shade between brown and red was wrong.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford! After that I must believe you.”

They talked on the veranda till the night fell, and then they came in among the lamps, in the parlor, and she sat down with a certain provisionality, putting herself sideways on a light chair by a window, and as she chatted and laughed with one cheek towards him she now and then beat the back of her chair with her open hand. The other people were reading or severely playing cards, and they, too, kept their tones down to a respectful level, while she lingered, and when she rose and said good-night he went out and took some turns on the veranda before going up to bed. She was certainly, he realized, a very pretty woman, and very graceful and very amusing, and though she probably knew all about it, she was the franker and honester for her knowledge.

He had arrived at this conclusion just as he turned the switch of the electric light inside his door, and in the first flash of the carbon film he saw her sitting beside the window in such a chair as she had taken and in the very pose which she had kept in the parlor. Her half-averted face was lit as from laughing, and she had her hand lifted as if to beat the back of her chair.

“Good Heavens, Mrs. Yarrow!” he said, in a sort of whispered shout, while he mechanically closed the door behind him as if to keep the fact to himself. “What in the world are you doing here?”

Then she was not there. Nothing was there; not even a chair beside the window.

Alford dropped weakly into the only chair in the room, which stood next the door by the head of his bed, and abandoned himself a helpless prey to the logic of the events.

It was at this point, which I have been able to give in Wanhope’s exact words, that, in the ensuing pause, Rulledge asked, as if he thought some detail might be denied him: “And what was the logic of the events?”

Minver gave a fleering laugh. “Don’t be premature, Rulledge. If you have the logic now, you will spoil everything. You can’t have the moral until you’ve had the whole story. Go on, Wanhope. You’re so much more interesting than usual that I won’t ask how you got hold of all these compromising minutiae.”

“Of course,” Wanhope returned, “they’re not for the general ear. I go rather further, for the sake of the curious fact, than I should be warranted in doing if I did not know my audience so well.”

We joined in a murmur of gratification, and he went on to say that Alford’s first coherent thought was that he was dreaming one of those unwarranted dreams in which we make our acquaintance privy to all sorts of strange incidents. Then he knew that he was not dreaming, and that his eye had merely externated a mental vision, as in the case of the cannon-shot splash of which he had seen the phantom as soon as it was mentioned. He remembered afterwards asking himself in a sort of terror how far it was going to go with him; how far his thought was going to report itself objectively hereafter, and what were the reasonable implications of his abnormal experiences. He did not know just how long he sat by his bedside trying to think, only to have his conclusions whir away like a flock of startled birds when he approached them. He went to bed because he was exhausted rather than because he was sleepy, but he could not recall a moment of wakefulness after his head touched the pillow.

He woke surprisingly refreshed, but at the belated breakfast where he found Mrs. Yarrow still lingering he thought her looking not well. She confessed, listlessly, that she had not rested well. She was not sure, she said, whether the sea air agreed with her; she might try the mountains a little later. She was not inclined to talk, and that day he scarcely spoke with her except in commonplaces at the table. They had no return to the little mystery they had mocked together the day before.

More days passed, and Alford had no recurrence of his visions. His acquaintance with Mrs. Yarrow made no further advance; there was no one else in the hotel who interested him, and he bored himself. At the same time his recovery seemed retarded; he lost tone, and after a fortnight he ran up to talk himself over with his doctor in Boston. He rather thought he would mention his eidolons, and ask if they were at all related to the condition of his nerves. It was a keen disappointment, but it ought not to have been a surprise, for him to find that his doctor was off on his summer vacation. The caretaker who opened the door to Alford named a young physician in the same block of Marlborough Street who had his doctor’s practice for the summer, but Alford had not the heart to go to this alternate.

He started down to his hotel on a late afternoon train that would bring him to the station after dusk, and before he reached it the lamps had been lighted in his car. Alford sat in a sparsely peopled smoker, where he had found a place away from the crowd in the other coaches, and looked out of the window into the reflected interior of his car, which now and then thinned away and let him see the weeds and gravel of the railroad banks, with the bushes that topped them and the woods that backed them. The train at one point stopped rather suddenly and then went on, for no reason that he ever cared to inquire; but as it slowly moved forward again he was reminded of something he had seen one night in going to New York just before the train drew into Springfield. It had then made such another apparently reasonless stop; but before it resumed its course Alford saw from his window a group of trainmen, and his own Pullman conductor with his lantern on his arm, bending over the figure of a man defined in his dark clothing against the snow of the bank where he lay propped. His face was waxen white, and Alford noted how particularly black the mustache looked traversing the pallid visage. He never knew whether the man was killed or merely stunned; you learn nothing with certainty of such things on trains; but now, as he thought of the incident, its eidolon showed itself outside of his mind, and followed him in every detail, even to a snowy stretch of the embankment, until the increasing speed of the train seemed to sweep it back out of sight.

Alford turned his eyes to the interior of the smoker, which, except for two or three dozing commuters and a noisy euchre-party, had been empty of everything but the fumes and stale odors of tobacco, and found it swarming with visions, the eidolons of everything he remembered from his past life. Whatever had once strongly impressed itself upon his nerves was reported there again as instantly as he thought of it. It was largely a whirling chaos, a kaleidoscopic jumble of facts; but from time to time some more memorable and important experience visualized itself alone. Such was the death-bed of the little sister whom he had been wakened, a child, to see going to heaven, as they told him. Such was the pathetic, foolish face of the girl whom long ago he had made believe he cared for, and then had abruptly broken with: he saw again, with heartache, her silly, tender amaze when he said he was going away. Such was the look of mute astonishment, of gentle reproach, in the eyes of the friend, now long dead, whom in a moment of insensate fury he had struck on the mouth, and who put his hand to his bleeding lips as he bent that gaze of wonder and bewilderment upon him. But it was not alone the dreadful impressions that reported themselves. There were others, as vivid, which came back in the original joyousness: the face of his mother looking up at him from the crowd on a day of college triumph when he was delivering the valedictory of his class; the collective gayety of the whole table on a particularly delightful evening at his dining-club; his own image in the glass as he caught sight of it on coming home accepted by the woman who afterwards jilted him; the transport which lighted up his father’s visage when he stepped ashore from the vessel which had been rumored lost, and he could be verified by the senses as still alive; the comical, bashful ecstasy of the good fellow, his ancient chum, in telling him he had had a son born the night before, and the mother was doing well, and how he laughed and danced, and skipped into the air.

The smoker was full of these eidolons and of others which came and went with constant vicissitude. But what was of a greater weirdness than seeing them within it was seeing them without in that reflection of the interior which travelled with it through the summer night, and repeated it, now dimly, now brilliantly, in every detail. Alford sat in a daze, with a smile which he was aware of, fixed and stiff as if in plaster, on his face, and with his gaze bent on this or that eidolon, and then on all of them together. He was not so much afraid of them as of being noticed by the other passengers in the smoker, to whom he knew he might look very queer. He said to himself that he was making the whole thing, but the very subjectivity was what filled him with a deep and hopeless dread. At last the train ceased its long leaping through the dark, and with its coming to a stand the whole illusion vanished. He heard a gay voice which he knew bidding some one good-bye who was getting into the car just back of the smoker, and as he descended to the platform he almost walked into the arms of Mrs. Yarrow.

“Why, Mr. Alford! We had given you up. We thought you wouldn’t come back till to-morrow — or perhaps ever. What in the world will you do for supper? The kitchen fires were out ages ago!”

In the light of the station electrics she beamed upon him, and he felt glad at heart, as if he had been saved from something, a mortal danger or a threatened shame. But he could not speak at once; his teeth closed with tetanic force upon each other. Later, as they walked to the hotel, through the warm, soft night in which the south wind was roaming the starless heavens for rain, he found his voice, and although he felt that he was speaking unnaturally, he made out to answer the lively questions with which she pelted him too thickly to expect them to be answered severally. She told him all the news of the day, and when she began on yesterday’s news she checked herself with a laugh and said she had forgotten that he had only been gone since morning. “But now,” she said, “you see how you’ve been missed — how any man must be missed in a hotel full of women.”

She took charge of him when they got to the house, and said if he would go boldly into the dining-room, where they detected, as they approached, one lamp scantly shining from the else darkened windows, she would beard the lioness in her den, by which she meant the cook in the kitchen, and see what she could get him for supper. Apparently she could get nothing warm, for when a reluctant waitress appeared it was with such a chilly refection on her tray that Alford, though he was not very hungry, returned from interrogating the obscurity for eidolons, and shivered at it. At the same time the swing-door of the long, dim room opened to admit a gush of the outer radiance on which Mrs. Yarrow drifted in with a chafing-dish in one hand and a tea-basket in the other. She floated tiltingly towards him like, he thought, a pretty little ship, and sent a cheery hail before.

“I’ve been trying to get somebody to join you at a premature Welsh-rarebit and a belated cup of tea, but I can’t tear one of the tabbies from their cards or the kittens from their gambols in the amusement-hall in the basement. Do you mind so very much having it alone? Because you’ll have to, whether you do or not. Unless you call me company, when I’m merely cook.”

She put her utensils on the table beside the forbidding tray the waitress had left, and helped lift herself by pressing one hand on the top of a chair towards the electric, which she flashed up to keep the dismal lamp in countenance. Alford let her do it. He durst not, he felt, stir from his place, lest any movement should summon back the eidolons; and now in the sudden glare of light he shyly, slyly searched the room for them. Not one, fair or foul, showed itself, and slowly he felt a great weight lifting from his heart. In its place there sprang up a joyous gratitude towards Mrs. Yarrow, who had saved him from them, from himself. An inexpressible tenderness filled his breast; the tears rose to his eyes; a soft glow enveloped his whole being, a warmth of hope, a freshness of life renewed, encompassed him. He wished to take her in his arms, to tell her how he loved her; and as she bustled about, lighting the lamp of her chafing-dish, and kindling the little spirit-stove she had brought with her to make tea, he let his gaze dwell upon every pose, every motion of her with a glad hunger in which no smallest detail was lost. He now believed that without her he must die, without her he could not wish to live.

“Jove,” Rulledge broke in at this point of Wanhope’s story, which I am telling again so badly, “I think Alford was in luck.”

Minver gave a harsh cackle. “The only thing Rulledge finds fault with in this club is ‘the lack of woman’s nursing and the lack of woman’s tears.’ Nothing is wanting to his enjoyment of his victuals but the fact that they are not served by a neat-handed Phyllis, like Alford’s.”

Rulledge glanced towards Wanhope, and innocently inquired, “Was that her first name?”

Minver burst into a scream, and Rulledge looked red and silly for having given himself away; but he made an excursion to the buffet outside, and returned with a sandwich with which he supported himself stolidly under Minver’s derision, until Wanhope came to his relief by resuming his story, or rather his study, of Alford’s strange experience.

Mrs. Yarrow first gave Alford his tea, as being of a prompter brew than the rarebit, but she was very quick and apt with that, too; and pretty soon she leaned forward, and in the glow from the lamp under the chafing-dish, which spiritualized her charming face with its thin radiance, puffed the flame out with her pouted lips, and drew back with a long-sighed “There! That will make you see your grandmother, if anything will.”

“My grandmother?” Alford repeated.

“Yes. Wouldn’t you like to?” Mrs.. Yarrow asked, pouring the thick composition over the toast (rescued stone-cold from the frigid tray) on Alford’s plate. “I’m sure I should like to see mine — dear old gran! Not that I ever saw her — either of her — or should know how she looked. Did you ever see yours — either of her?” she pursued, impulsively.

“Oh yes,” Alford answered, looking intently at her, but with so little speculation in the eyes he glared so with that he knew her to be uneasy under them.

She laughed a little, and stayed her hand on the bail of the teapot. “Which of her?”

“Oh, both!”

“And — and — did she look so much like me?” she said, with an added laugh, that he perceived had an hysterical note in it. “You’re letting your rarebit get cold!”

He laughed himself, now, a great laugh of relaxation, of relief. “Not the least in the world! She was not exactly a phantom of delight.”

“Oh, thank you, Mr. Alford. Now, it’s your tea’s getting cold.”

They laughed together, and he gave himself to his victual with a relish that she visibly enjoyed. When that question of his grandmother had been pushed he thought of an awful experience of his childhood, which left on his infant mind an indelible impression, a scar, to remain from the original wound forever. He had been caught in a lie, the first he could remember, but by no means the last, by many immemorable thousands. His poor little wickedness had impugned the veracity of both these terrible old ladies, who, habitually at odds with each other, now united, for once, against him. He could always see himself, a mean little blubbering-faced rascal, stealing guilty looks of imploring at their faces, set unmercifully against him, one in sorrow and one in anger, requiring his mother to whip him, and insisting till he was led, loudly roaring, into the parlor, and there made a liar of for all time, so far as fear could do it.

When Mrs. Yarrow asked if he had ever seen his grandmother he expected instantly to see her, in duplicate, and as a sole refuge, but with little hope that it would save him, he kept his eyes fast on hers, and to his unspeakable joy it did avail. No other face, of sorrow or of anger, rose between them. For the time his thought was quit of its consequence; no eidolon outwardly repeated his inward vision. A warm gush of gratitude seemed to burst from his heart, and to bathe his whole being, and then to flow in a tide of ineffable tenderness towards Mrs. Yarrow, and involve her and bear them together heavenward. It was not passion, it was not love, he perceived well enough; it was the utterance of a vital conviction that she had saved him from an overwhelming subjective horror, and that in her sweet objectivity there was a security and peace to be found nowhere else.

He greedily ate every atom of his rarebit, he absorbed every drop of the moisture in the teapot, so that when she shook it and shook it, and then tried to pour something from it, there was no slightest dribble at the spout. But they lingered, talking and laughing, and perhaps they might never have left the place if the hard handmaiden who had brought the tea-tray had not first tried putting her head in at the swing-door from the kitchen, and then, later, come boldly in and taken the tray away.

Mrs. Yarrow waited self-respectfully for her disappearance, and then she said, “I’m afraid that was a hint, Mr. Alford.”

“It seemed like one,” he owned.

They went out together, gayly chatting, but she would not encourage the movement he made towards the veranda. She remained firmly attached to the newel-post of the stairs, and at the first chance he gave her she said good-night and bounded lightly upward. At the turn of the stairs she stopped and looked laughing down at him over the rail. “I hope you won’t see your grandmother.”

“Oh, not a bit of it,” he called back. He felt that he failed to give his reply the quality of epigram, but he was not unhappy in his failure.

Many light-hearted days followed this joyous evening. No eidolons haunted Alford’s horizon, perhaps because Mrs. Yarrow filled his whole heaven. She was very constantly with him, guiding his wavering steps up the hill of recovery, which he climbed with more and more activity, and keeping him company in those valleys of relapse into which he now and then fell back from the difficult steeps. It came to be tacitly, or at least passively, conceded by the other ladies that she had somehow earned the exclusive right to what had once been the common charge; or that if one of their number had a claim to keep Mr. Alford from killing himself by all sorts of imprudences, which in his case amounted to impieties, it was certainly Mrs. Yarrow. They did not put this in terms, but they felt it and acted it.

She was all the safer guardian for a delicate invalid because she loathed manly sports so entirely that she did not even pretend to like them, as most women, poor things, think themselves obliged to do. In her hands there was no danger that he would be tempted to excesses in golf. She was really afraid of all boats, but she was willing to go out with him in the sail-boat of a superannuated skipper, because to sit talking in the stern and stoop for the vagaries of the boom in tacking was such good exercise. She would join him in fishing from the rotting pier, but with no certainty which was a cunner and which was a sculpin, when she caught it, and with an equal horror of both the nasty, wriggling things. When they went a walk together, her notion of a healthful tramp was to find a nice place among the sweet-fern or the pine-needles, and sit down in it and talk, or make a lap, to which he could bring the berries he gathered for her to arrange in the shallow leaf-trays she pinned together with twigs. She really preferred a rocking-chair on the veranda to anything else; but if he wished to go to those other excesses, she would go with him, to keep him out of mischief.

There could be only one credible reading of the situation, but Alford let the summer pass in this pleasant dreaming without waking up till too late to the pleasanter reality. It will seem strange enough, but it is true, that it was no part of his dream to fancy that Mrs. Yarrow was in love with him. He knew very well, long before the end, that he was in love with her; but, remaining in the dark otherwise, he considered only himself in forbearing verbally to make love to her.

“Well!” Rulledge snarled at this point, “he was a chump.”

Wanhope at the moment opposed nothing directly to the censure, but said that something pathetically reproachful in Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling looks penetrated to Alford as she nodded gayly from the car window to him in the little group which had assembled to see her off at the station when she left, by no means the first of their happy hotel circle to go.

“Somebody,” Rulledge burst out again, “ought to have kicked him.”

“What’s become,” Minver asked, “of all the dear maids and widows that you’ve failed to marry at the end of each summer, Rulledge?”

The satire involved flattery so sweet that Rulledge could not perhaps wish to make any retort. He frowned sternly, and said, with a face averted from Minver: “Go on, Wanhope!”

Wanhope here permitted himself a philosophical excursion in which I will not accompany him. It was apparently to prepare us for the dramatic fact which followed, and which I suppose he was trying rather to work away from than work up to. It included some facts which he had failed to touch on before, and which led to a discussion very interesting in itself, but of a range too great for the limits I am trying to keep here. It seems that Alford had been stayed from declaring his love not only because he doubted of its nature, but also because he questioned whether a man in his broken health had any right to offer himself to a woman, and because from a yet finer scruple he hesitated in his poverty to ask the hand of a rich woman. On the first point, we were pretty well agreed, but on the second we divided again, especially Rulledge and Minver, who held, the one, that his hesitation did Alford honor, and quite relieved him from the imputation of being a chump; and the other that he was an ass to keep quiet for any such silly reason. Minver contended that every woman had a right, whether rich or poor, to the man who loved her; and, moreover, there were now so many rich women that, if they were not allowed to marry poor men, their chances of marriage were indefinitely reduced. What better could a widow do with the money she had inherited from a husband she probably did not love than give it to a man like Alford — or to an ass like Alford, Minver corrected himself.

His reductio ad absurdum allowed Wanhope to resume with a laugh, and say that Alford waited at the station in the singleness to which the tactful dispersion of the others had left him, and watched the train rapidly dwindle in the perspective, till an abrupt turn of the road carried it out of sight. Then he lifted his eyes with a long sigh, and looked round. Everywhere he saw Mrs. Yarrow’s smiling face with that inner pathos. It swarmed upon him from all points; and wherever he turned it repeated itself in the distances like that succession of faces you see when you stand between two mirrors.

It was not merely a lapse from his lately hopeful state with Alford, it was a collapse. The man withered and dwindled away, till he felt that he must audibly rattle in his clothes as he walked by people. He did not walk much. Mostly he remained shrunken in the arm-chair where he used to sit beside Mrs. Yarrow’s rocker, and the ladies, the older and the older-fashioned, who were “sticking it out” at the hotel till it should close on the 15th of September, observed him, some compassionately, some censoriously, but all in the same conviction.

“It’s plain to be seen what ails Mr. Alford, now.”

“Well, I guess it is.”

“I guess so.”

“I guess it is.”

“Seems kind of heartless, her going and leaving him so.”

“Like a sick kitten!”

“Well, I should say as much.”

“Your eyes bother you, Mr. Alford?” one of them chanted, breaking from their discussion of him to appeal directly to him. He was rubbing his eyes, to relieve himself for the moment from the intolerable affliction of those swarming eidolons, which, whenever he thought of this thing or that, thickened about him. They now no longer displaced one another, but those which came first remained fadedly beside or behind the fresher appearances, like the earlier rainbow which loses depth and color when a later arch defines itself.

“Yes,” he said, glad of the subterfuge. “They annoy me a good deal of late.”

“You want to get fitted for a good pair of glasses. I kept letting it go, when I first began to get old-sighted.”

Another lady came to Alford’s rescue. “I guess Mr. Alford has no need to get fitted for old sight yet a while. You got little spidery things — specks and dots — in your eyes?”

“Yes — multitudes,” he said, hopelessly.

“Well, I’ll tell you what: you want to build up. That was the way with me, and the oculist said it was from getting all run down. I built up, and the first thing I knew my sight was as clear as a bell. You want to build up.”

“You want to go to the mountains,” a third interposed. “That’s where Mrs. Yarrow’s gone, and I guess it’ll do her more good than sticking it out here would ever have done.”

Alford would have been glad enough to go to the mountains, but with those illusions hovering closer and closer about him, he had no longer the courage, the strength. He had barely enough of either to get away to Boston. He found his doctor this time, after winning and losing the wager he made himself that he would not have returned to town yet, and the good-fortune was almost too much for his shaken nerves. The cordial of his friend’s greeting — they had been chums at Harvard — completed his overthrow. As he sank upon the professional sofa, where so many other cases had been diagnosticated, he broke into tears. “Hello, old fellow!” the doctor said, encouragingly, and more tenderly than he would have dealt with some women. “What’s up?”

“Jim,” Alford found voice to say, “I’m afraid I’m losing my mind.”

The doctor smiled provisionally. “Well, that’s one of the signs you’re not. Can you say how?”

“Oh yes. In a minute,” Alford sobbed, and when he had got the better of himself he told his friend the whole story. In the direct examination he suppressed Mrs. Yarrow’s part, but when the doctor, who had listened with smiling seriousness, began to cross-examine him with the question, “And you don’t remember that any outside influence affected the recurrence of the illusions, or did anything to prevent it?” Alford answered promptly: “Oh yes. There was a woman who did.”

“A woman? What sort of a woman?”

Alford told.

“That is very curious,” the doctor said. “I know a man who used to have a distressing dream. He broke it up by telling his wife about it every morning after he had dreamt it.”

“Unluckily, she isn’t my wife,” Alford said, gloomily.

“But when she was with you, you got rid of the illusions?”

“At first, I used to see hers; then I stopped seeing any.”

“Did you ever tell her of them?”

“No; I didn’t.”

“Never tell anybody?”

“No one but you.”

“And do you see them now?”

“No.”

“Do you think, because you’ve told me of them?”

“It seems so.”

The doctor was silent for a marked space. Then he asked, smiling: “Well, why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Tell your wife.”

“How, my wife?”

“By marriage.”

Alford looked dazed. “Do you mean Mrs. Yarrow?”

“If that’s her name, and she’s a widow.”

“And do you think it would be the fair thing for a man on the verge of insanity — a physical and mental wreck — to ask a woman to marry him?”

“In your case, yes. In the first place, you’re not so bad as all that. You need nothing but rest for your body and change for your mind. I believe you’ll get rid of your illusions as soon as you form the habit of speaking of them promptly when they begin to trouble you. You ought to speak of them to some one. You can’t always have me around, and Mrs. Yarrow would be the next best thing.”

“She’s rich, and you know what I am. I’ll have to borrow the money to rest on, I’m so poor.”

“Not if you marry it.”

Alford rose, somewhat more vigorously than he had sat down. But that day he did not go beyond ascertaining that Mrs. Yarrow was in town. He found out the fact from the maid at her door, who said that she was nearly always at home after dinner, and, without waiting for the evening of another day, Alford went to call upon her.

She said, coming down to him in a rather old-fashioned, impersonal drawing-room which looked distinctly as if it had been left to her: “I was so glad to get your card. When did you leave Woodbeach?”

“Mrs. Yarrow,” he returned, as if that were the answer, “I think I owe you an explanation.”

“Pay it!” she bantered, putting out her hand.

“I’m so poverty-stricken that I don’t know whether I can. Did you ever notice anything odd about me?”

His directness seemed to have a right to directness from her. “I noticed that you stared a good deal — or used to. But people do stare.”

“I stared because I saw things.”

“Saw things?”

“I saw whatever I thought of. Whatever came into my mind was externated in a vision.”

She smiled, he could not make out whether uneasily or not. “It sounds rather creepy, doesn’t it? But it’s very interesting.”

“That’s what the doctor said; I’ve been to see him this morning. May I tell you about my visions? They’re not so creepy as they sound, I believe, and I don’t think they’ll keep you awake.”

“Yes, do,” she said. “I should like of all things to hear about them. Perhaps I’ve been one of them.”

“You have.”

“Oh! Isn’t that rather personal?”

“I hope not offensively.”

He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but that he saw it. At the end he said: “You may wonder that I come to you with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman.”

“No — no,” she hesitated.

“I came because I wished you to know everything about me before — before — I wouldn’t have come, you’ll believe me, if I hadn’t had the doctor’s assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity — Good Heavens! What am I saying? But the thought has tormented me so! And in the midst of it I’ve allowed myself to — Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don’t you know that?”

Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on.

“I’m not only sick — so sick that I sha’n’t be able to do any work for a year at least — but I’m poor, so poor that I can’t afford to be sick.”

She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, “I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“What do you mean?” He stared at her hard.

“Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?”

“No, you’re only one, and there’s none like you! I could never see any one else while I looked at you!” he cried, only half aware of his poetry, and meaning what he said very literally.

But she took only the poetry. “I shouldn’t wish you to,” she said, and she laughed.

He could not believe yet in his good-fortune. His countenance fell. “I’m afraid I don’t understand, or that you don’t. It doesn’t seem as if I could get to the end of my unworthiness, which isn’t voluntary. It seems altogether too base. I can’t let you say what you do, if you mean it, till you know that I come to you in despair as well as in love. You saved me from the fear I was in, again and again, and I believe that without you I shall — Ah, it seems very base! But the doctor — If I could always tell some one — if I could tell you when these things were obsessing me — haunting me — they would cease—”

Mrs. Yarrow rose, with rather a piteous smile. “Then, I am a prescription!” She hoped, woman-like, that she was solely a passion; but is any woman worth having, ever solely a passion?

“Don’t!” Alford implored, rising too. “Don’t, in mercy, take it that way! It’s only that I wish you to know everything that’s in me; to know how utterly helpless and worthless I am. You needn’t have a pang in throwing such a thing away.”

She put out her hand to him, but at arm’s-length. “I sha’n’t throw you away — at least, not to-night. I want to think.” It was a way of saying she wished him to go, and he had no desire to stay. He asked if he might come again, and she said, “Oh yes.”

“To-morrow?”

“Not to-morrow, perhaps. When I send. Was it young Doctor Enderby?”

They had rather a sad, dry parting; and when her door closed upon him he felt that it had shut him out forever. His shame and his defeat were so great that he did not think of his eidolons, and they did not come to trouble him. He woke in the morning, asking himself, bitterly, if he were cured already. His humiliation was such that he closed his eyes to the light, and wished he might never again open them to it.

The question that Mrs. Yarrow had to ask Dr. Enderby was not the question he had instantly forecast for her when she put aside her veil in his office and told him who she was. She did not seem anxious to be assured of Alford’s mental condition, or as to any risks in marrying him. Her inquiry was much more psychological; it was almost impersonal, and yet Dr. Enderby thought she looked as if she had been crying.

She had a difficulty in formulating her question, and when it came it was almost a speculation.

“Women,” she said, a little hoarsely, “have no right, I suppose, to expect the ideal in life. The best they can do seems to be to make the real look like it.”

Dr. Enderby reflected. “Well, yes. But I don’t know that I ever put it to myself in just those terms.”

Then she remarked, as if that were the next thing: “You’ve known Mr. Alford a long time.”

“We were at school together, and we shared the same rooms in Harvard.”

“He is very sincere,” she added, as if this were relevant.

“He’s a man who likes to have a little worse than the worst known about him. One might say he was excessively sincere.” Enderby divined that Alford had been bungling the matter, and he was willing to help him out if he could.

Mrs. Yarrow fixed dimly beautiful eyes upon him. “I don’t know,” she said, “why it wouldn’t be ideal — as much ideal as anything — to give one’s self absolutely to — to — a duty — or not duty, exactly; I don’t mean that. Especially,” she added, showing a light through the mist, “if one wanted to do it.”

Then he knew she had made up her mind, and though on some accounts he would have liked to laugh with her, on other accounts he felt that he owed it to her to be serious.

“If women could not fulfil the ideal in that way — if they did not constantly do it — there would be no marriages for love.”

“Do you think so?” she asked, with a shaking voice. “But men — men are ideal, too.”

“Not as women are — except now and then some fool like Alford.” Now, indeed, he laughed, and he began to praise Alford from his heart, so delicately, so tenderly, so reverently, that Mrs. Yarrow laughed too before he was done, and cried a little, and when she rose to leave she could not speak; but clung to his hand, on turning away, and so flung it from behind her with a gesture that Enderby thought pretty.

At this point, Wanhope stopped as if that were the end.

“And did she let Alford come to see her again?” Rulledge, at once romantic and literal, demanded.

“Oh yes. At any rate, they were married that fall. They are — I believe he’s pursuing his archaeological studies there — living in Athens.”

“Together?” Minver smoothly inquired.

At this expression of cynicism Rulledge gave him a look that would have incinerated another. Wanhope went out with Minver, and then, after a moment’s daze, Rulledge exclaimed: “Jove! I forgot to ask him whether it’s stopped Alford’s illusions!”

III

A Memory that Worked Overtime

Minver’s brother took down from the top of the low bookshelf a small painting on panel, which he first studied in the obverse, and then turned and contemplated on the back with the same dreamy smile. “I don’t see how that got here,” he said, absently.

“Well,” Minver returned, “you don’t expect me to tell you, except on the principle that any one would naturally know more about anything of yours than you would.” He took it from his brother and looked at the front of it. “It isn’t bad. It’s pretty good!” He turned it round. “Why, it’s one of old Blakey’s! How did you come by it?”

“Stole it, probably,” Minver’s brother said, still thoughtfully. Then with an effect of recollecting: “No, come to think of it,” he added, “Blakey gave it to me.” The Minvers played these little comedies together, quite as much to satisfy their tenderness for each other as to give their friends pleasure. “Think you’re the only painter that gets me to take his truck as a gift? He gave it to me, let’s see, about ten years ago, when he was trying to make a die of it, and failed; I thought he would succeed. But it’s been in my wife’s room nearly ever since, and what I can’t understand is what she’s doing with it down here.”

“Probably to make trouble for you, somehow,” Minver suggested.

“No, I don’t think it’s that, quite,” his brother returned, with a false air of scrupulosity, which was part of their game with each other. He looked some more at the picture, and then he glanced from it at me. “There’s a very curious story connected with that sketch.”

“Oh, well, tell it,” Minver said. “Tell it! I suppose I can stand it again. Acton’s never heard it, I believe. But you needn’t make a show of sparing him. I couldn’t stand that.”

“I certainly haven’t heard the story,” I said, “and if I had I would be too polite to own it.”

Minver’s brother looked towards the open door over his shoulder, and Minver interpreted for him: “She’s not coming. I’ll give you due warning.”

“It was before we were married, but not much before, and the picture was a sort of wedding present for my wife, though Blakey made a show of giving it to me. Said he had painted it for me, because he had a prophetic soul, and felt in his bones that I was going to want a picture of the place where I first met her. You see, it’s the little villa her mother had taken that winter on the Viale Petrarca, just outside of Florence. It was the first place I met her, but not the last.”

“Don’t be obvious,” Minver ordered.

His brother did not mind him. “I thought it was mighty nice of Blakey. He was barking away, all the time he was talking, and when he wasn’t coughing he was so hoarse he could hardly speak above a whisper; but he kept talking on, and wishing me happy, and fending off my gratitude, while he was finding a piece of manila paper to wrap the sketch in, and then hunting for a piece of string to tie it. When he handed it to me at last, he gasped out: ‘I don’t mind her knowing that I partly meant it as the place where she first met you, too. I’m not ashamed of it as a bit of color. Anyway, I sha’n’t live to do anything better.’

“‘Oh, yes, you will,’ I came back in that lying way we think is kind with dying people. I suppose it is; anyway, it turned out all right with Blakey, as he’ll testify if you look him up when you go to Florence. By the way, he lives in that villa now.”

“No?” I said. “How charming!”

Minver’s brother went on: “I made up my mind to be awfully careful of that picture, and not let it out of my hand till I left it with ‘her’ mother, to be put among the other wedding presents that were accumulating at their house in Exeter Street. So I held it on my lap going in by train from Lexington, where Blakey lived, and when I got out at the old Lowell Depot — North Station, now — and got into the little tinkle-tankle horse-car that took me up to where I was to get the Back Bay car — Those were the prehistoric times before trolleys, and there were odds in horse-cars. We considered the blue-painted Back Bay cars very swell. You remember them?” he asked Minver.

“Not when I can help it,” Minver answered. “When I broke with Boston, and went to New York, I burnt my horse-cars behind me, and never wanted to know what they looked like, one from another.”

“Well, as I was saying,” Minver’s brother went on, without regarding his impatriotism, “when I got into the horse-car at the depot, I rushed for a corner seat, and I put the picture, with its face next the car-end, between me and the wall, and kept my hand on it; and when I changed to the Back Bay car, I did the same thing. There was a florist’s just there, and I couldn’t resist some Mayflowers in the window; I was in that condition, you know, when flowers seemed to be made for her, and I had to take her own to her wherever I found them. I put the bunch between my knees, and kept one hand on it, while I kept my other hand on the picture at my side. I was feeling first-rate, and when General Filbert got in after we started, and stood before me hanging by a strap and talking down to me, I had the decency to propose giving him my seat, as he was about ten years older.”

“Sure?” Minver asked.

“Well, say fifteen. I don’t pretend to be a chicken, and never did. But he wouldn’t hear of it. Said I had a bundle, and winked at the bunch of Mayflowers. We had such a jolly talk that I let the car carry me a block by and had to get out at Gloucester and run back to Exeter. I rang, and, when the maid came to the door, there I stood with nothing but the Mayflowers in my hand.”

“Good coup de théâtre,” Minver jeered. “Curtain?”

His brother disdained reply, or was too much absorbed in his tale to think of any. “When the girl opened the door and I discovered my fix I burst out, ‘Good Lord!’ and I stuck the bunch of flowers at her, and turned and ran. I suppose I must have had some notion of overtaking the car with my picture in it. But the best I could do was to let the next one overtake me several blocks down Marlborough Street, and carry me to the little jumping-off station on Westchester Park, as we used to call it in those days, at the end of the Back Bay line.

“As I pushed into the railroad office, I bet myself that the picture would not be there, and, sure enough, I won.”

“You were always a lucky dog,” Minver said.

“But the man in charge was very encouraging, and said it was sure to be turned in; and he asked me what time the car had passed the corner of Gloucester Street. I happened to know, and then he said, Oh yes, that conductor was a substitute, and he wouldn’t be on again till morning; then he would be certain to bring the picture with him. I was not to worry, for it would be all right. Nothing left in the Back Bay cars was ever lost; the character of the abutters was guarantee for that, and they were practically the only passengers. The conductors and the drivers were as honest as the passengers, and I could consider myself in the hands of friends.

“He was so reassuring that I went away smiling at my fears, and promising to be round bright and early, as soon, the official suggested — the morrow being Sunday — as soon as the men and horses had had their baked beans.

“Still, after dinner, I had a lurking anxiety, which I turned into a friendly impulse to go and call on Mrs. Filbert, whom I really owed a bread-and-butter visit, and who, I knew, would not mind my coming in the evening. The general, she said, had been telling her of our pleasant chat in the car, and would be glad to smoke his after-dinner cigar with me, and why wouldn’t I come into the library?

“We were so very jolly together, all three, that I made light of my misadventure about the picture. The general inquired about the flowers first. He remembered the flowers perfectly, and hoped they were acceptable; he thought he remembered the picture, too, now I mentioned it; but he would not have noticed it so much, there by my side, with my hand on it. I would be sure to get it. He gave several instances, personal to him and his friends, of recoveries of lost articles; it was really astonishing how careful the horse-car people were, especially on the Back Bay line. I would find my picture all right at the Westchester Park station in the morning; never fear.

“I feared so little that I slept well, and even overslept; and I went to get my picture quite confidently, and I could hardly believe it had not been turned in yet, though the station-master told me so. The substitute conductor had not seen it, but more than likely it was at the stables, where the cleaners would have found it in the car and turned it in. He was as robustly cheerful about it as ever, and offered to send an inquiry by the next car; but I said, Why shouldn’t I go myself; and he said that was a good idea. So I went, and it was well I did, for my picture was not there, and I had saved time by going. It was not there, but the head man said I need not worry a mite about it; I was certain to get it sooner or later; it would be turned in, to a dead certainty. We became rather confidential, and I went so far as to explain about wanting to make my inquiries very quietly on Blakey’s account: he would be annoyed if he heard of its loss, and it might react unfavorably on his health.

“The head man said that was so; and he would tell me what I wanted to do: I wanted to go to the Company’s General Offices in Milk Street, and tell them about it. That was where everything went as a last resort, and he would bet any money that I would see my picture there the first thing I got inside the door. I thanked him with the fervor I thought he merited, and said I would go at once.

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘you don’t want to go to-day, you know. The offices are not open Sunday. And to-morrow’s a holiday. But you’re all right. You’ll find your picture there, don’t you have any doubts about it.’

“That was my next to last Sunday supper with my wife, before she became my wife, at her mother’s house, and I went to the feast with as little gayety as I suppose any young man ever carried to a supper of the kind. I was told, afterwards, that my behavior up to a certain point was so suggestive either of secret crime or of secret regret, that the only question was whether they should have in the police or I should be given back my engagement ring and advised to go. Luckily I ceased to bear my anguish just in time.

“The fact is, I could not stand it any longer, and as soon as I was alone with her I made a clean breast of it; partially clean, that is: I suppose a fellow never tells all to a girl, if he truly loves her.” Minver’s brother glanced round at us and gathered the harvest of our approving smiles. “I said to her, ‘I’ve been having a wedding present.’ ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ve come as near having no use for a wedding present as anybody I know. Was having a wedding present what made you so gloomy at supper? Who gave it to you, anyway?’ ‘Old Blakey.’ ‘A painting?’ ‘Yes — a sketch.’ ‘What of?’ This was where I qualified. I said: ‘Oh, just one of those Sorrento things of his.’ You see, if I told her that it was the villa where we first met, and then said I had left it in the horse-car, she would take it as proof positive that I did not really care anything about her or I never could have forgotten it.”

“You were wise as far as you went,” Minver said. “Go on.”

“Well, I told her the whole story circumstantially: how I had kept the sketch religiously in my lap in the train, and then held it down with my hand all the while beside me in the first horse-car, and did the same thing in the Back Bay car I changed to; and felt of it the whole time I was talking with General Filbert, and then left it there when I got out to leave the flowers at her door, when the awful fact came over me like a flash. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘Norah said you poked the flowers at her without a word, and she had to guess they were for me.’

“I had got my story pretty glib by this time; I had reeled it off with increasing particulars to the Westchester Park station-master, and the head man at the stables, and General Filbert, and I was so letter-perfect that I had a vision of the whole thing, especially of my talking with the general while I kept my hand on the picture — and then all was dark.

“At the end she said we must advertise for the picture. I said it would kill Blakey if he saw it; and she said: No matter, let it kill him; it would show him that we valued his gift, and were moving heaven and earth to find it; and, at any rate, it would kill me if I kept myself in suspense. I said I should not care for that; but with her sympathy I guessed I could live through the night, and I was sure I should find the thing at the Milk Street office in the morning.

“‘Why,’ said she, ‘to-morrow it’ll be shut!’ and then I didn’t really know what to say, and I agreed to drawing up an advertisement then and there, so as not to lose an instant’s time after I had been at the Milk Street office on Tuesday and found the picture had not been turned in. She said I could dictate the advertisement and she would write it down, and she asked: ‘Which one of his Sorrento things was it? You must describe it exactly, you know.’ That made me feel awfully, and I said I was not going to have my next-to-last Sunday evening with her spoiled by writing advertisements; and I got away, somehow, with all sorts of comforting reassurances from her. I could see that she was feigning them to encourage me.

“The next morning, I simply could not keep away from the Milk Street office, and my unreasonable impatience was rewarded by finding it at least ajar, if not open. There was the nicest kind of a young fellow there, and he said he was not officially present; but what could he do for me? Then I told him the whole story, with details I had not thought of before; and he was just as enthusiastic about my getting my picture as the Westchester Park station-master or the head man of the stables. It was morally certain to be turned in, the first thing in the morning; but he would take a description of it, and send out inquiries to all the conductors and drivers and car-cleaners, and make a special thing of it. He entered into the spirit of the affair, and I felt that I had such a friend in him that I confided a little more and hinted at the double interest I had in the picture. I didn’t pretend that it was one of Blakey’s Sorrento things, but I gave him a full and true description of it, with its length, breadth, and thickness, in exact measure.”

Here Minver’s brother stopped and lost himself in contemplation of the sketch, as he held it at arm’s-length.

“Well, did you get your picture?” I prompted, after a moment.

“Oh yes,” he said, with a quick turn towards me. “This is it. A District Messenger brought it round the first thing Tuesday morning. He brought it,” Minver’s brother added, with a certain effectiveness, “from the florist’s, where I had stopped to get those Mayflowers. I had left it there.”

“You’ve told it very well, this time, Joe,” Minver said. “But Acton here is waiting for the psychology. Poor old Wanhope ought to be here,” he added to me. He looked about for a match to light his pipe, and his brother jerked his head in the direction of the chimney.

“Box on the mantel. Yes,” he sighed, “that was really something very curious. You see, I had invented the whole history of the case from the time I got into the Back Bay car with my flowers. Absolutely nothing had happened of all I had remembered till I got out of the car. I did not put the picture beside me at the end of the car; I did not keep my hand on it while I talked with General Filbert; I did not leave it behind me when I left the car. Nothing of the kind happened. I had already left it at the florist’s, and that whole passage of experience which was so vividly and circumstantially stamped in my memory that I related it four or five times over, and would have made oath to every detail of it, was pure invention, or, rather, it was something less positive: the reflex of the first half of my horse-car experience, when I really did put the picture in the corner next me, and did keep my hand on it.”

“Very strange,” I was beginning, but just then the door opened and Mrs. Minver came in, and I was presented.

She gave me a distracted hand, as she said to her husband: “Have you been telling the story about that picture again?” He was still holding it. “Silly!”

She was a mighty pretty woman, but full of vim and fun and sense.

“It’s one of the most curious freaks of memory I ever heard of, Mrs. Minver,” I said.

Then she showed that she was proud of it, though she had called him silly. “Have you told,” she demanded of her husband, “how oddly your memory behaved about the subject of the picture, too?”

“I have again eaten that particular piece of humble-pie,” Minver’s brother replied.

“Well,” she said to me, “I think he was simply so possessed with the awfulness of having lost the picture that all the rest took place prophetically, but unconsciously.”

“By a species of inverted presentiment?” I suggested.

“Yes,” she assented, slowly, as if the formulation were new to her, but not unacceptable. “Something of that kind. I never heard of anybody else having it.”

Minver had got his pipe alight, and was enjoying it. “I think Joe was simply off his nut, for the time being.”

IV

A Case of Metaphantasmia

The stranger was a guest of Halson’s, and Halson himself was a comparative stranger, for he was of recent election to our dining-club, and was better known to Minver than to the rest of our little group, though one could not be sure that he was very well known to Minver. The stranger had been dining with Halson, and we had found the two smoking together, with their cups of black coffee at their elbows, before the smouldering fire in the Turkish room when we came in from dinner — my friend Wanhope the psychologist, Rulledge the sentimentalist, Minver the painter, and myself. It struck me for the first time that a fire on the hearth was out of keeping with a Turkish room, but I felt that the cups of black coffee restored the lost balance in some measure.

Before we had settled into our wonted places — in fact, almost as we entered — Halson looked over his shoulder and said: “Mr. Wanhope, I want you to hear this story of my friend’s. Go on, Newton — or, rather, go back and begin again — and I’ll introduce you afterwards.”

The stranger made a becoming show of deprecation. He said he did not think the story would bear immediate repetition, or was even worth telling once, but, if we had nothing better to do, perhaps we might do worse than hear it; the most he could say for it was that the thing really happened. He wore a large, drooping, gray mustache, which, with the imperial below it, quite hid his mouth, and gave him, somehow, a martial effect, besides accurately dating him of the period between the latest sixties and earliest seventies, when his beard would have been black; I liked his mustache not being stubbed in the modern manner, but allowed to fall heavily over his lips, and then branch away from the corners of his mouth as far as it would. He lighted the cigar which Halson gave him, and, blowing the bitten-off tip towards the fire, began:

“It was about that time when we first had a ten-o’clock night train from Boston to New York. Train used to start at nine, and lag along round by Springfield, and get into the old Twenty-sixth Street Station here at six in the morning, where they let you sleep as long as you liked. They call you up now at half-past five, and, if you don’t turn out, they haul you back to Mott Haven, or New Haven, I’m not sure which. I used to go into Boston and turn in at the old Worcester Depot, as we called it then, just about the time the train began to move, and I usually got a fine night’s rest in the course of the nine or ten hours we were on the way to New York; it didn’t seem quite the same after we began saying Albany Depot: shortened up the run, somehow.

“But that night I wasn’t very sleepy, and the porter had got the place so piping hot with the big stoves, one at each end of the car, to keep the good, old-fashioned Christmas cold out, that I thought I should be more comfortable with a smoke before I went to bed; and, anyhow, I could get away from the heat better in the smoking-room. I hated to be leaving home on Christmas Eve, for I never had done that before, and I hated to be leaving my wife alone with the children and the two girls in our little house in Cambridge. Before I started in on the old horse-car for Boston, I had helped her to tuck the young ones in and to fill the stockings hung along the wall over the register — the nearest we could come to a fireplace — and I thought those stockings looked very weird, five of them, dangling lumpily down, and I kept seeing them, and her sitting up sewing in front of them, and afraid to go to bed on account of burglars. I suppose she was shyer of burglars than any woman ever was that had never seen a sign of them. She was always calling me up, to go down-stairs and put them out, and I used to wander all over the house, from attic to cellar, in my nighty, with a lamp in one hand and a poker in the other, so that no burglar could have missed me if he had wanted an easy mark. I always kept a lamp and a poker handy.”

The stranger heaved a sigh as of fond reminiscence, and looked round for the sympathy which in our company of bachelors he failed of; even the sympathetic Rulledge failed of the necessary experience to move him in compassionate response.

“Well,” the stranger went on, a little damped perhaps by his failure, but supported apparently by the interest of the fact in hand, “I had the smoking-room to myself for a while, and then a fellow put his head in that I thought I knew after I had thought I didn’t know him. He dawned on me more and more, and I had to acknowledge to myself, by and by, that it was a man named Melford, whom I used to room with in Holworthy at Harvard; that is, we had an apartment of two bedrooms and a study; and I suppose there were never two fellows knew less of each other than we did at the end of our four years together. I can’t say what Melford knew of me, but the most I knew of Melford was his particular brand of nightmare.”

Wanhope gave the first sign of his interest in the matter. He took his cigar from his lips, and softly emitted an “Ah!”

Rulledge went further and interrogatively repeated the word “Nightmare?”

“Nightmare,” the stranger continued, firmly. “The curious thing about it was that I never exactly knew the subject of his nightmare, and a more curious thing yet was Melford himself never knew it, when I woke him up. He said he couldn’t make out anything but a kind of scraping in a door-lock. His theory was that in his childhood it had been a much completer thing, but that the circumstances had broken down in a sort of decadence, and now there was nothing left of it but that scraping in the door-lock, like somebody trying to turn a misfit key. I used to throw things at his door, and once I tried a cold-water douche from the pitcher, when he was very hard to waken; but that was rather brutal, and after a while I used to let him roar himself awake; he would always do it, if I trusted to nature; and before our junior year was out I got so that I could sleep through, pretty calmly; I would just say to myself when he fetched me to the surface with a yell, ‘That’s Melford dreaming,’ and doze off sweetly.”

“Jove!” Rulledge said, “I don’t see how you could stand it.”

“There’s everything in habit, Rulledge,” Minver put in. “Perhaps our friend only dreamt that he heard a dream.”

“That’s quite possible,” the stranger owned, politely. “But the case is superficially as I state it. However, it was all past, long ago, when I recognized Melford in the smoking-room that night: it must have been ten or a dozen years. I was wearing a full beard then, and so was he; we wore as much beard as we could in those days. I had been through the war since college, and he had been in California, most of the time, and, as he told me, he had been up north, in Alaska, just after we bought it, and hurt his eyes — had snow-blindness — and he wore spectacles. In fact, I had to do most of the recognizing, but after we found out who we were we were rather comfortable; and I liked him better than I remembered to have liked him in our college days. I don’t suppose there was ever much harm in him; it was only my grudge about his nightmare. We talked along and smoked along for about an hour, and I could hear the porter outside, making up the berths, and the train rumbled away towards Framingham, and then towards Worcester, and I began to be sleepy, and to think I would go to bed myself; and just then the door of the smoking-room opened, and a young girl put in her face a moment, and said: ‘Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought it was the stateroom,’ and then she shut the door, and I realized that she looked like a girl I used to know.”

The stranger stopped, and I fancied from a note in his voice that this girl was perhaps like an early love. We silently waited for him to resume how and when he would. He sighed, and after an appreciable interval he began again. “It is curious how things are related to one another. My wife had never seen her, and yet, somehow, this girl that looked like the one I mean brought my mind back to my wife with a quick turn, after I had forgotten her in my talk with Melford for the time being. I thought how lonely she was in that little house of ours in Cambridge, on rather an outlying street, and I knew she was thinking of me, and hating to have me away on Christmas Eve, which isn’t such a lively time after you’re grown up and begin to look back on a good many other Christmas Eves, when you were a child yourself; in fact, I don’t know a dismaler night in the whole year. I stepped out on the platform before I began to turn in, for a mouthful of the night air, and I found it was spitting snow — a regular Christmas Eve of the true pattern; and I didn’t believe, from the business feel of those hard little pellets, that it was going to stop in a hurry, and I thought if we got into New York on time we should be lucky. The snow made me think of a night when my wife was sure there were burglars in the house; and in fact I heard their tramping on the stairs myself — thump, thump, thump, and then a stop, and then down again. Of course it was the slide and thud of the snow from the roof of the main part of the house to the roof of the kitchen, which was in an L, a story lower, but it was as good an imitation of burglars as I want to hear at one o’clock in the morning; and the recollection of it made me more anxious about my wife, not because I believed she was in danger, but because I knew how frightened she must be.

“When I went back into the car, that girl passed me on the way to her stateroom, and I concluded that she was the only woman on board, and her friends had taken the stateroom for her, so that she needn’t feel strange. I usually go to bed in a sleeper as I do in my own house, but that night I somehow couldn’t. I got to thinking of accidents, and I thought how disagreeable it would be to turn out into the snow in my nighty. I ended by turning in with my clothes on, all except my coat; and, in spite of the red-hot stoves, I wasn’t any too warm. I had a berth in the middle of the car, and just as I was parting my curtains to lie down, old Melford came to take the lower berth opposite. It made me laugh a little, and I was glad of the relief. ‘Why, hello, Melford,’ said I. ‘This is like the old Holworthy times.’ ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said he, and then I asked something that I had kept myself from asking all through our talk in the smoking-room, because I knew he was rather sensitive about it, or used to be. ‘Do you ever have that regulation nightmare of yours nowadays, Melford? He gave a laugh, and said: ‘I haven’t had it, I suppose, once in ten years. What made you think of it?’ I said: ‘Oh, I don’t know. It just came into my mind. Well, good-night, old fellow. I hope you’ll rest well,’ and suddenly I began to feel light-hearted again, and I went to sleep as gayly as ever I did in my life.”

The stranger paused again, and Wanhope said: “Those swift transitions of mood are very interesting. Of course they occur in that remote region of the mind where all incidents and sensations are of one quality, and things of the most opposite character unite in a common origin. No one that I remember has attempted to trace such effects to their causes, and then back again from their causes, which would be much more important.”

“Yes, I dare say,” Minver put in. “But if they all amount to the same thing in the end, what difference would it make?”

“It would perhaps establish the identity of good and evil,” Wanhope suggested.

“Oh, the sinners are convinced of that already,” Minver said, while Rulledge glanced quickly from one to the other.

The stranger looked rather dazed, and Rulledge said: “Well, I don’t suppose that was the conclusion of the whole matter?”

“Oh no,” the stranger answered, “that was only the beginning of the conclusion. I didn’t go to sleep at once, though I felt so much at peace. In fact, Melford beat me, and I could hear him far in advance, steaming and whistling away, in a style that I recalled as characteristic, over a space of intervening years that I hadn’t definitely summed up yet. It made me think of a night near Narragansett Bay, where two friends of mine and I had had a mighty good dinner at a sort of wild club-house, and had hurried into our bunks, each one so as to get the start of the others, for the fellows that were left behind knew they had no chance of sleep after the first began to get in his work. I laughed, and I suppose I must have gone to sleep almost simultaneously, for I don’t recollect anything afterwards till I was wakened by a kind of muffled bellow, that I remembered only too well. It was the unfailing sign of Melford’s nightmare.

“I was ready to swear, and I was ashamed for the fellow who had no more self-control than that: when a fellow snores, or has a nightmare, you always think first off that he needn’t have had it if he had tried. As usual, I knew Melford didn’t know what his nightmare was about, and that made me madder still, to have him bellowing into the air like that, with no particular aim. All at once there came a piercing scream from the stateroom, and then I knew that the girl there had heard Melford and been scared out of a year’s growth.”

The stranger made a little break, and Wanhope asked, “Could you make out what she screamed, or was it quite inarticulate?”

“It was plain enough, and it gave me a clew, somehow, to what Melford’s nightmare was about. She was calling out, ‘Help! help! help! Burglars!’ till I thought she would raise the roof of the car.”

“And did she wake anybody?” Rulledge inquired.

“That was the strange part of it. Not a soul stirred, and after the first burst the girl seemed to quiet down again and yield the floor to Melford, who kept bellowing steadily away. I was so furious that I reached out across the aisle to shake him, but the attempt was too much for me. I lost my balance and fell out of my berth onto the floor. You may imagine the state of mind I was in. I gathered myself up and pulled Melford’s curtains open and was just going to fall on him tooth and nail, when I was nearly taken off my feet again by an apparition: well, it looked like an apparition, but it was a tall fellow in his nighty — for it was twenty years before pajamas — and he had a small dark lantern in his hand, such as we used to carry in those days so as to read in our berths when we couldn’t sleep. He was gritting his teeth, and growling between them: ‘Out o’ this! Out o’ this! I’m going to shoot to kill, you blasted thieves!’ I could see by the strange look in his eyes that he was sleep-walking, and I didn’t wait to see if he had a pistol. I popped in behind the curtains, and found myself on top of another fellow, for I had popped into the wrong berth in my confusion. The man started up and yelled: ‘Oh, don’t kill me! There’s my watch on the stand, and all the money in the house is in my pantaloons pocket. The silver’s in the sideboard down-stairs, and it’s plated, anyway.’ Then I understood what his complaint was, and I rolled onto the floor again. By that time every man in the car was out of his berth, too, except Melford, who was devoting himself strictly to business; and every man was grabbing some other, and shouting, ‘Police!’ or ‘Burglars!’ or ‘Help!’ or ‘Murder!’ just as the fancy took him.”

“Most extraordinary!” Wanhope commented as the stranger paused for breath.

In the intensity of our interest, we had crowded close upon him, except Minver, who sat with his head thrown back, and that cynical cast in his eye which always exasperated Rulledge; and Halson, who stood smiling proudly, as if the stranger’s story did him as his sponsor credit personally.

“Yes,” the stranger owned, “but I don’t know that there wasn’t something more extraordinary still. From time to time the girl in the stateroom kept piping up, with a shriek for help. She had got past the burglar stage, but she wanted to be saved, anyhow, from some danger which she didn’t specify. It went through me that it was very strange nobody called the porter, and I set up a shout of ‘Porter!’ on my own account. I decided that if there were burglars the porter was the man to put them out, and that if there were no burglars the porter could relieve our groundless fears. Sure enough, he came rushing in, as soon as I called for him, from the little corner by the smoking-room where he was blacking boots between dozes. He was wide enough awake, if having his eyes open meant that, and he had a shoe on one hand and a shoe-brush in the other. But he merely joined in the general up-roar and shouted for the police.”

“Excuse me,” Wanhope interposed. “I wish to be clear as to the facts. You had reasoned it out that the porter could quiet the tumult?”

“Never reasoned anything out so clearly in my life.”

“But what was your theory of the situation? That your friend, Mr. Melford, had a nightmare in which he was dreaming of burglars?”

“I hadn’t a doubt of it.”

“And that by a species of dream-transference the nightmare was communicated to the young lady in the stateroom?”

“Well — yes.”

“And that her call for help and her cry of burglars acted as a sort of hypnotic suggestion with the other sleepers, and they began to be afflicted with the same nightmare?”

“I don’t know that I ever put it to myself so distinctly, but it appears to me now that I must have reached some such conclusion.”

“That is very interesting, very interesting indeed. I beg your pardon. Please go on,” Wanhope courteously entreated.

“I don’t remember just where I was,” the stranger faltered.

Rulledge returned with an accuracy which obliged us all: “‘The porter merely joined in the general uproar and shouted for the police.’”

“Oh yes,” the stranger assented. “Then I didn’t know what to do, for a minute. The porter was a pretty thick-headed darky, but he was lion-hearted; and his idea was to lay hold of a burglar wherever he could find him. There were plenty of burglars in the aisle there, or people that were afraid of burglars, and they seemed to think the porter had a good idea. They had hold of one another already, and now began to pull up and down the aisles in a way that reminded me of the old-fashioned mesmeric lecturers, when they told their subjects that they were this or that, and set them to acting the part. I remembered how once when the mesmerist gave out that they were at a horse — race, and his subjects all got astride of their chairs, and galloped up and down the hall like a lot of little boys on laths. I thought of that now, and although it was rather a serious business, for I didn’t know what minute they would come to blows, I couldn’t help laughing. The sight was weird enough. Every one looked like a somnambulist as he pulled and hauled. The young lady in the stateroom was doing her full share. She was screaming, ‘Won’t somebody let me out?’ and hammering on the door. I guess it was her screaming and hammering that brought the conductor at last, or maybe he just came round in the course of nature to take up the tickets. It was before the time when they took the tickets at the gate, and you used to stick them into a little slot at the side of your berth, and the conductor came along and took them in the night, somewhere between Worcester and Springfield, I should say.”

“I remember,” Rulledge assented, but very carefully, so as not to interrupt the flow of the narrative. “Used to wake up everybody in the car.”

“Exactly,” the stranger said. “But this time they were all wide awake to receive him, or fast asleep, and dreaming their roles. He came along with the wire of his lantern over his arm, the way the old-time conductors did, and calling out, ‘Tickets!’ just as if it was broad day, and he believed every man was trying to beat his way to New York. The oddest thing about it was that the sleep-walkers all stopped their pulling and hauling a moment, and each man reached down to the little slot alongside of his berth and handed over his ticket. Then they took hold and began pulling and hauling again. I suppose the conductor asked what the matter was; but I couldn’t hear him, and I couldn’t make out exactly what he did say. But the passengers understood, and they all shouted ‘Burglars!’ and that girl in the stateroom gave a shriek that you could have heard from one end of the train to the other, and hammered on the door, and wanted to be let out.

“It seemed to take the conductor by surprise, and he faced towards the stateroom and let the lantern slip off his arm, and it dropped onto the floor and went out; I remember thinking what a good thing it didn’t set the car on fire. But there in the dark — for the car lamps went out at the same time with the lantern — I could hear those fellows pulling and hauling up and down the aisle and scuffling over the floor, and through all Melford bellowing away, like an orchestral accompaniment to a combat in Wagner opera, but getting quieter and quieter till his bellow died away altogether. At the same time the row in the aisle of the car stopped, and there was perfect silence, and I could hear the snow rattling against my window. Then I went off into a sound sleep, and never woke till we got into New York.”

The stranger seemed to have reached the end of his story, or at least to have exhausted the interest it had for him, and he smoked on, holding his knee between his hands and looking thoughtfully into the fire.

He had left us rather breathless, or, better said, blank, and each looked at the other for some initiative; then we united in looking at Wanhope; that is, Rulledge and I did. Minver rose and stretched himself with what I must describe as a sardonic yawn; Halson had stolen away before the end, as one to whom the end was known. Wanhope seemed by no means averse to the inquiry delegated to him, but only to be formulating its terms. At last he said:

“I don’t remember hearing of any case of this kind before. Thought-transference is a sufficiently ascertained phenomenon — the insistence of a conscious mind upon a certain fact until it penetrates the unconscious mind of another and is adopted as its own. But in the dream state the mind seems passive, and becomes the prey of this or that self-suggestion, without the power of imparting it to another dreaming mind. Yet here we have positive proof of such an effect. It appears that the victim of a particularly terrific nightmare was able to share its horrors — or rather unable not to share them — with a whole sleeping-car full of people whose brains helplessly took up the same theme, and dreamed it, as we may say, to the same conclusions. I said proof, but of course we can’t accept a single instance as establishing a scientific certainty. I don’t question the veracity of Mr.—”

“Newton,” the stranger suggested.

“Newton’s experience,” Wanhope continued, “but we must wait for a good many cases of the kind before we can accept what I may call metaphantasmia as being equally established with thought-transference. If we could it would throw light upon a whole series of most curious phenomena, as, for instance, the privity of a person dreamed about to the incident created by the dreamer.”

“That would be rather dreadful, wouldn’t it?” I ventured. “We do dream such scandalous, such compromising things about people.”

“All that,” Wanhope gently insisted, “could have nothing to do with the fact. That alone is to be considered in an inquiry of the kind. One is never obliged to tell one’s dreams. I wonder” — he turned to the stranger, who sat absently staring into the fire— “if you happened to speak to your friend about his nightmare in the morning, and whether he was by any chance aware of the participation of the others in it?”

“I certainly spoke to him pretty plainly when we got into New York.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he had never slept better in his life, and he couldn’t remember having a trace of nightmare. He said he heard me groaning at one time, but I stopped just as he woke, and so he didn’t rouse me as he thought of doing. It was at Hartford, and he went to sleep again, and slept through without a break.”

“And what was your conclusion from that?” Wanhope asked.

“That he was lying, I should say,” Rulledge replied for the stranger.

Wanhope still waited, and the stranger said, “I suppose one conclusion might be that I had dreamed the whole thing myself.”

“Then you wish me to infer,” the psychologist pursued, “that the entire incident was a figment of your sleeping brain? That there was no sort of sleeping thought-transference, no metaphantasmia, no — Excuse me. Do you remember verifying your impression of being between Worcester and Springfield when the affair occurred, by looking at your watch, for instance?”

The stranger suddenly pulled out his watch at the word. “Good Heavens!” he called out. “It’s twenty minutes of eleven, and I have to take the eleven-o’clock train to Boston. I must bid you good-evening, gentlemen. I’ve just time to get it if I can catch a cab. Good-night, good-night. I hope if you come to Boston — eh — Good-night! Sometimes,” he called over his shoulder, “I’ve thought it might have been that girl in the stateroom that started the dreaming.”

He had wrung our hands one after another, and now he ran out of the room.

Rulledge said, in appeal to Wanhope: “I don’t see how his being the dreamer invalidates the case, if his dreams affected the others.”

“Well,” Wanhope answered, thoughtfully, “that depends.”

“And what do you think of its being the girl in the stateroom?”

“That would be very interesting.”

V

Editha

The air was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will before she called aloud to him: “George!”

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, “Well?”

“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she swooped down the steps to him. “What is it?” she cried.

“It’s war,” he said, and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat. “How glorious!”

“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity. Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her — be a hero, her hero — it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression. Don’t you think so, too?”

“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”

“That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates.” She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: “But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our country.”

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, “Our country — right or wrong.”

“Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly. “I’ll go and get you some lemonade.” She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said, as if there had been no interruption: “But there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet.”

He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass down: “I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you I ought to doubt myself.”

A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.

Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way.

“You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right.” She seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into his. “Don’t you think so?” she entreated him.

He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added, “Have mine, too,” but he shook his head in answering, “I’ve no business to think so, unless I act so, too.”

Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to feel bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she pretended not, and she said, “Oh, I am not sure,” and then faltered.

He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: “There’s only one way of proving one’s faith in a thing like this.”

She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.

He went on again. “If I believed — if I felt as you do about this war — Do you wish me to feel as you do?”

Now she was really not sure; so she said: “George, I don’t know what you mean.”

He seemed to muse away from her as before.

“There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested, to see how he would act.”

“How can you talk in that ghastly way?”

“It is rather morbid. Still, that’s what it comes to, unless you’re swept away by ambition or driven by conviction. I haven’t the conviction or the ambition, and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I couldn’t have asked it of myself, as I must, now I’m a lawyer. And you believe it’s a holy war, Editha?” he suddenly addressed her. “Oh, I know you do! But you wish me to believe so, too?”

She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he always had with her plainer mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken with him.

“George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost. If I’ve tried to talk you into anything, I take it all back.”

“Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are, and how — I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I’ll think it over; I’d like to believe as you do. But I don’t, now; I don’t, indeed. It isn’t this war alone; though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it’s every war — so stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn’t this thing have been settled reasonably?”

“Because,” she said, very throatily again, “God meant it to be war.”

“You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what people will say.”

“Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn’t meant it?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into men’s keeping to work it as they pleased.”

“Now, George, that is blasphemy.”

“Well, I won’t blaspheme. I’ll try to believe in your pocket Providence,” he said, and then he rose to go.

“Why don’t you stay to dinner?” Dinner at Balcom’s Works was at one o’clock.

“I’ll come back to supper, if you’ll let me. Perhaps I shall bring you a convert.”

“Well, you may come back, on that condition.”

“All right. If I don’t come, you’ll understand.”

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows onto the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.

“Why didn’t he stay to dinner?”

“Because — because — war has been declared,” Editha pronounced, without turning.

Her mother said, “Oh, my!” and then said nothing more until she had sat down in one of the large Shaker chairs and rocked herself for some time. Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been in her mind with the spoken words: “Well, I hope he won’t go.”

“And I hope he will,” the girl said, and confronted her mother with a stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less unimpressionable than a cat.

Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What she arrived at in speech was: “Well, I guess you’ve done a wicked thing, Editha Balcom.”

The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother had come out by: “I haven’t done anything — yet.”

In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson, down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly yet strongly, and wrote:

“GEORGE: — I understood when you left me. But I think we had better emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in everything we had better be one in nothing. So I am sending these things for your keeping till you have made up your mind.

“I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never marry any one else. But the man I marry must love his country first of all, and be able to say to me,

“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.’

“There is no honor above America with me. In this great hour there is no other honor.

“Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had never expected to say so much, but it has come upon me that I must say the utmost.

EDITHA.”

She thought she had worded her letter well, worded it in a way that could not be bettered; all had been implied and nothing expressed.

She had it ready to send with the packet she had tied with red, white, and blue ribbon, when it occurred to her that she was not just to him, that she was not giving him a fair chance. He had said he would go and think it over, and she was not waiting. She was pushing, threatening, compelling. That was not a woman’s part. She must leave him free, free, free. She could not accept for her country or herself a forced sacrifice.

In writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse from which it sprang; she could well afford to wait till he had thought it over. She put the packet and the letter by, and rested serene in the consciousness of having done what was laid upon her by her love itself to do, and yet used patience, mercy, justice.

She had her reward. Gearson did not come to tea, but she had given him till morning, when, late at night there came up from the village the sound of a fife and drum, with a tumult of voices, in shouting, singing, and laughing. The noise drew nearer and nearer; it reached the street end of the avenue; there it silenced itself, and one voice, the voice she knew best, rose over the silence. It fell; the air was filled with cheers; the fife and drum struck up, with the shouting, singing, and laughing again, but now retreating; and a single figure came hurrying up the avenue.

She ran down to meet her lover and clung to him. He was very gay, and he put his arm round her with a boisterous laugh. “Well, you must call me Captain now; or Cap, if you prefer; that’s what the boys call me. Yes, we’ve had a meeting at the town-hall, and everybody has volunteered; and they selected me for captain, and I’m going to the war, the big war, the glorious war, the holy war ordained by the pocket Providence that blesses butchery. Come along; let’s tell the whole family about it. Call them from their downy beds, father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks!”

But when they mounted the veranda steps he did not wait for a larger audience; he poured the story out upon Editha alone.

“There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the fools set up a shout for me. It was all going one way, and I thought it would be a good joke to sprinkle a little cold water on them. But you can’t do that with a crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was sprinkling hell-fire on them. ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.’ That was the style. Now that it had come to the fight, there were no two parties; there was one country, and the thing was to fight to a finish as quick as possible. I suggested volunteering then and there, and I wrote my name first of all on the roster. Then they elected me — that’s all. I wish I had some ice-water.”

She left him walking up and down the veranda, while she ran for the ice-pitcher and a goblet, and when she came back he was still walking up and down, shouting the story he had told her to her father and mother, who had come out more sketchily dressed than they commonly were by day. He drank goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing who was giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing through his talk wildly. “It’s astonishing,” he said, “how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better. Why, I believe I was the first convert to the war in that crowd to-night! I never thought I should like to kill a man; but now I shouldn’t care; and the smokeless powder lets you see the man drop that you kill. It’s all for the country! What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”

Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration. She set down the ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and ran up-stairs and got the letter she had written him. When at last he noisily bade her father and mother, “Well, good-night. I forgot I woke you up; I sha’n’t want any sleep myself,” she followed him down the avenue to the gate. There, after the whirling words that seemed to fly away from her thoughts and refuse to serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize the moment that seemed so crazy, and pressed the letter she had written upon him.

“What’s this?” he said. “Want me to mail it?”

“No, no. It’s for you. I wrote it after you went this morning. Keep it — keep it — and read it sometime—” She thought, and then her inspiration came: “Read it if ever you doubt what you’ve done, or fear that I regret your having done it. Read it after you’ve started.”

They strained each other in embraces that seemed as ineffective as their words, and he kissed her face with quick, hot breaths that were so unlike him, that made her feel as if she had lost her old lover and found a stranger in his place. The stranger said: “What a gorgeous flower you are, with your red hair, and your blue eyes that look black now, and your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine! Let me hold you under the chin, to see whether I love blood, you tiger-lily!” Then he laughed Gearson’s laugh, and released her, scared and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never been before.

She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted the steps panting. Her mother and father were talking of the great affair. Her mother said: “Wa’n’t Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of mind? Didn’t you think he acted curious?”

“Well, not for a man who’d just been elected captain and had set ’em up for the whole of Company A,” her father chuckled back.

“What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom? Oh! There’s Editha!” She offered to follow the girl indoors.

“Don’t come, mother!” Editha called, vanishing.

Mrs. Balcom remained to reproach her husband. “I don’t see much of anything to laugh at.”

“Well, it’s catching. Caught it from Gearson. I guess it won’t be much of a war, and I guess Gearson don’t think so, either. The other fellows will back down as soon as they see we mean it. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. I’m going back to bed, myself.”

Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale and rather sick, but quite himself, even to his languid irony. “I guess I’d better tell you, Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of battles last night by pouring too many libations to him down my own throat. But I’m all right now. One has to carry off the excitement, somehow.”

“Promise me,” she commanded, “that you’ll never touch it again!”

“What! Not let the cannikin clink? Not let the soldier drink? Well, I promise.”

“You don’t belong to yourself now; you don’t even belong to me. You belong to your country, and you have a sacred charge to keep yourself strong and well for your country’s sake. I have been thinking, thinking all night and all day long.”

“You look as if you had been crying a little, too,” he said, with his queer smile.

“That’s all past. I’ve been thinking, and worshipping you. Don’t you suppose I know all that you’ve been through, to come to this? I’ve followed you every step from your old theories and opinions.”

“Well, you’ve had a long row to hoe.”

“And I know you’ve done this from the highest motives—”

“Oh, there won’t be much pettifogging to do till this cruel war is—”

“And you haven’t simply done it for my sake. I couldn’t respect you if you had.”

“Well, then we’ll say I haven’t. A man that hasn’t got his own respect intact wants the respect of all the other people he can corner. But we won’t go into that. I’m in for the thing now, and we’ve got to face our future. My idea is that this isn’t going to be a very protracted struggle; we shall just scare the enemy to death before it comes to a fight at all. But we must provide for contingencies, Editha. If anything happens to me—”

“Oh, George!” She clung to him, sobbing.

“I don’t want you to feel foolishly bound to my memory. I should hate that, wherever I happened to be.”

“I am yours, for time and eternity — time and eternity.” She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.

“Well, say eternity; that’s all right; but time’s another thing; and I’m talking about time. But there is something! My mother! If anything happens—”

She winced, and he laughed. “You’re not the bold soldier-girl of yesterday!” Then he sobered. “If anything happens, I want you to help my mother out. She won’t like my doing this thing. She brought me up to think war a fool thing as well as a bad thing. My father was in the Civil War; all through it; lost his arm in it.” She thrilled with the sense of the arm round her; what if that should be lost? He laughed as if divining her: “Oh, it doesn’t run in the family, as far as I know!” Then he added, gravely: “He came home with misgivings about war, and they grew on him. I guess he and mother agreed between them that I was to be brought up in his final mind about it; but that was before my time. I only knew him from my mother’s report of him and his opinions; I don’t know whether they were hers first; but they were hers last. This will be a blow to her. I shall have to write and tell her—”

He stopped, and she asked: “Would you like me to write, too, George?”

“I don’t believe that would do. No, I’ll do the writing. She’ll understand a little if I say that I thought the way to minimize it was to make war on the largest possible scale at once — that I felt I must have been helping on the war somehow if I hadn’t helped keep it from coming, and I knew I hadn’t; when it came, I had no right to stay out of it.”

Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her. She clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips: “Yes, yes, yes!”

“But if anything should happen, you might go to her and see what you could do for her. You know? It’s rather far off; she can’t leave her chair—”

“Oh, I’ll go, if it’s the ends of the earth! But nothing will happen! Nothing can! I—”

She felt herself lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with his arm still round her, to her father: “Well, we’re off at once, Mr. Balcom. We’re to be formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched up with the rest somehow, and sent into camp somewhere, and got to the front as soon as possible. We all want to be in the van, of course; we’re the first company to report to the Governor. I came to tell Editha, but I hadn’t got round to it.”

She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just before the train started southward with his regiment. He looked well, in his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes and the strong voice satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of duty flattered her. Other girls were weeping and bemoaning themselves, but she felt a sort of noble distinction in the abstraction, the almost unconsciousness, with which they parted. Only at the last moment he said: “Don’t forget my mother. It mayn’t be such a walk-over as I supposed,” and he laughed at the notion.

He waved his hand to her as the train moved off — she knew it among a score of hands that were waved to other girls from the platform of the car, for it held a letter which she knew was hers. Then he went inside the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him again. But she felt safe for him through the strength of what she called her love. What she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and with the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and keep him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life. She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm his father had lost.

There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote to his mother glorifying him as their hero, but the brief answer she got was merely to the effect that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write herself, and thanking her for her letter by the hand of some one who called herself “Yrs truly, Mrs. W.J. Andrews.”

Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the answer had been all she expected. Before it seemed as if she could have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the killed, which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was Gearson’s name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name and the company and the regiment and the State were too definitely given.

Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief, black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him, with George — George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of George’s mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid upon her — it buoyed her up instead of burdening her — she rapidly recovered.

Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to the little country town where George’s mother lived in a little house on the edge of the illimitable cornfields, under trees pushed to a top of the rolling prairie. George’s father had settled there after the Civil War, as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern people, and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the front door, and the garden with early summer flowers stretching from the gate of the paling fence.

It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds, that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a woman rested in a deep arm-chair, and the woman who had let the strangers in stood behind the chair.

The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman behind her chair: “Who did you say?”

Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, “I am George’s Editha,” for answer.

But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman’s voice, saying: “Well, I don’t know as I did get the name just right. I guess I’ll have to make a little more light in here,” and she went and pushed two of the shutters ajar.

Then Editha’s father said, in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks tone: “My name is Balcom, ma’am — Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom’s Works, New York; my daughter—”

“Oh!” the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that always surprised Editha from Gearson’s slender frame. “Let me see you. Stand round where the light can strike on your face,” and Editha dumbly obeyed. “So, you’re Editha Balcom,” she sighed.

“Yes,” Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.

“What did you come for?” Mrs. Gearson asked.

Editha’s face quivered and her knees shook. “I came — because — because George—” She could go no further.

“Yes,” the mother said, “he told me he had asked you to come if he got killed. You didn’t expect that, I suppose, when you sent him.”

“I would rather have died myself than done it!” Editha said, with more truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. “I tried to leave him free—”

“Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left him free.”

Editha saw now where George’s irony came from.

“It was not to be read before — unless — until — I told him so,” she faltered.

“Of course, he wouldn’t read a letter of yours, under the circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?” the woman abruptly demanded.

“Very sick,” Editha said, with self-pity.

“Daughter’s life,” her father interposed, “was almost despaired of, at one time.”

Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. “I suppose you would have been glad to die, such a brave person as you! I don’t believe he was glad to die. He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to. I suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him by what it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through one war before. When you sent him you didn’t expect he would get killed.”

The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. “No,” she huskily murmured.

“No, girls don’t; women don’t, when they give their men up to their country. They think they’ll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as they went, or if it’s an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it’s all the more glory, and they’re so much the prouder of them, poor things!”

The tears began to run down Editha’s face; she had not wept till then; but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came.

“No, you didn’t expect him to get killed,” Mrs. Gearson repeated, in a voice which was startlingly like George’s again. “You just expected him to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren’t there because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there, poor wretches — conscripts, or whatever they call ‘em. You thought it would be all right for my George, your George, to kill the sons of those miserable mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would never see the faces of.” The woman lifted her powerful voice in a psalmlike note. “I thank my God he didn’t live to do it! I thank my God they killed him first, and that he ain’t livin’ with their blood on his hands!” She dropped her eyes, which she had raised with her voice, and glared at Editha. “What you got that black on for?” She lifted herself by her powerful arms so high that her helpless body seemed to hang limp its full length. “Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your back!”

The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom’s Works was sketching Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her everything.

“To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!” the lady said. She added: “I suppose there are people who feel that way about war. But when you consider the good this war has done — how much it has done for the country! I can’t understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way out there to console her — got up out of a sick-bed! Well!”

“I think,” Editha said, magnanimously, “she wasn’t quite in her right mind; and so did papa.”

“Yes,” the lady said, looking at Editha’s lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. “But how dreadful of her! How perfectly — excuse me — how vulgar!”

A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the ideal.

VI

Braybridge’s Offer

We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. It was always a cosey place, whether you found yourself in it with cigars and coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other spot in the club.

Our rather limited little down-town dining-club was almost a celibate community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare what we liked. Some dozed away in the intervening time; some read the evening papers or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now, seeing the three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher range of thinking.

“I shouldn’t have supposed, somehow,” he said, with a knot of deprecation between his fine eyes, “that he would have had the pluck.”

“Perhaps he hadn’t,” Minver suggested.

Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. “You mean that she—”

“I don’t see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed, chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.

“I didn’t say it,” Minver contradicted.

“You implied it; and I don’t think it’s fair. It’s easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the case.”

“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn’t think you would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where Acton is, Rulledge.”

“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.

Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.

“Yes,” Minver said, facing about towards me. “How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you’re always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?”

“No, I can’t,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why.”

“No, you couldn’t, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It’s part of your swindle to assume that you do know why. You ought to find out.”

Wanhope interposed concretely, or as concretely as he could: “The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”

“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don’t you do it, Acton?”

I returned, as seriously as could have been expected:

“Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don’t like to talk of such things.”

“They’re ashamed,” Minver declared. “The lovers don’t either of them, in a given case, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little the man.”

Minver’s point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the same time. We begged each other’s pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I should go on.

“Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don’t think they’re so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say — ?”

“Very much what you said. It’s astonishing how people forget the vital things and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generations knows nothing of it.”

“That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But how do you know what you were saying, Wanhope?”

“I’ve ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn’t inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed.” Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them.”

“Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood—” Rulledge began, but Minver’s laugh arrested him.

“Nothing so concrete, I’m afraid,” Wanhope gently returned. “I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. It’s pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at.”

“They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game of love,” Minver said. “Especially when they’re not in earnest about it.”

“Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope admitted. “But I don’t mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with her.”

“Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge asked.

“You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, “that if she didn’t know it, he never would.” Then Wanhope answered for himself:

“I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any appeal.”

“And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I suggested.

“Yes,” Wanhope admitted, after a thoughtful reluctance.

“Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”

“If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the case in point; we won’t mention any names. She is sailing through time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can’t be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence.”

“Oh, I’m not sure about that, Professor,” Minver put in. “Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you.”

“It’s all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life,” Wanhope resumed. “I don’t believe I could make out the case as I feel it to be.”

“Braybridge’s part of the case is rather plain, isn’t it?” I invited him.

“I’m not sure of that. No man’s part of any case is plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the psychologist added, with one of his deep breaths, “is so complex as a simple nature.”

“Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if his case isn’t.”

“Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.

“My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”

“I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel the attraction of such a man — the fascination of his being grizzled and slovenly and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop. He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and I don’t vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess’s end of the party, and was watching for a chance to—”

Wanhope cast about for the word, and Minver supplied it— “Pull out.”

“Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him.”

“I don’t understand,” Rulledge said.

“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it’s rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?”

We looked at one another. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a jam of people; but this girl — I’ve understood it was she — looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”

“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. “Good selling name.”

“Don’t reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name.”

“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don’t see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women.”

“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.

“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.

“No; the response must be in kind to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn’t be afraid.”

“Oh! That’s the way you get out of it!”

“Well?” Rulledge urged.

“I’m afraid,” Wanhope modestly confessed, “that from this point I shall have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn’t able to be very definite, except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he had said he mustn’t think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped she had refused to hear of Braybridge’s going. She said she hadn’t heard of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn’t give Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin thought it was odd that Braybridge didn’t insist; and he made a long story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each other’s charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs. Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and — Well, their engagement has come out, and—” Wanhope paused, with an air that was at first indefinite, and then definitive.

“You don’t mean,” Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, “that that’s all you know about it?”

“Yes, that’s all I know,” Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised himself at the fact.

“Well!”

Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. “I can conjecture — we can all conjecture—”

He hesitated; then: “Well, go on with your conjecture,” Rulledge said, forgivingly.

“Why—” Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson, whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. “Private?”

“Come in! come in!” Minver called to him. “Thought you were in Japan?”

“My dear fellow,” Halson answered, “you must brush up your contemporary history. It’s more than a fortnight since I was in Japan.” He shook hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at once: “Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge’s engagement? It’s humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes and find the nation absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I’ve met here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I’d heard of it, and if I knew how it could have happened.”

“And do you?” Rulledge asked.

“I can give a pretty good guess,” Halson said, running his merry eyes over our faces.

“Anybody can give a good guess,” Rulledge said. “Wanhope is doing it now.”

“Don’t let me interrupt.” Halson turned to him politely.

“Not at all. I’d rather hear your guess, if you know Braybridge better than I,” Wanhope said.

“Well,” Halson compromised, “perhaps I’ve known him longer.” He asked, with an effect of coming to business: “Where were you?”

“Tell him, Rulledge,” Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked nothing better. He told him, in detail, all we knew from any source, down to the moment of Wanhope’s arrested conjecture.

“He did leave you at an anxious point, didn’t he?” Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge’s expense, and then said: “Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?”

“By sight, Minver does,” Rulledge answered for us. “Wants to paint her.”

“Of course,” Halson said, with intelligence. “But I doubt if he’d find her as paintable as she looks, at first. She’s beautiful, but her charm is spiritual.”

“Sometimes we try for that,” the painter interposed.

“And sometimes you get it. But you’ll allow it’s difficult. That’s all I meant. I’ve known her — let me see — for twelve years, at least; ever since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was bringing her up on the ranch. Her aunt came along by and by and took her to Europe — mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was always homesick for the ranch; she pined for it; and after they had kept her in Germany three or four years they let her come back and run wild again — wild as a flower does, or a vine, not a domesticated animal.”

“Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge.”

“Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver,” Halson said, almost austerely. “Her father died two years ago, and then she had to come East, for her aunt simply wouldn’t live on the ranch. She brought her on here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the girl didn’t take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the ranch.”

“She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those conventional people.”

Halson laughed at Minver’s thrust, and went on amiably: “I don’t suppose that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any man — or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you’ve done, that it was his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn’t that it?”

Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.

“And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic—”

“Lost?” Rulledge demanded.

“Why, yes. Didn’t you know? But I ought to go back. They said there never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously went for Braybridge the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child who wanted things frankly when she did want them. Then his being ten or fifteen years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it natural for a shy girl like her to assort herself with him when all the rest were assorting themselves, as people do at such things. The consensus of testimony is that she did it with the most transparent unconsciousness, and—”

“Who are your authorities?” Minver asked; Rulledge threw himself back on the divan and beat the cushions with impatience.

“Is it essential to give them?”

“Oh no. I merely wondered. Go on.”

“The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him before the others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no design in it; that would have been out of character. They had got to the end of the wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there wasn’t even a trail, and they walked round looking for a way out till they were turned completely. They decided that the only way was to keep walking, and by and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was some Canucks clearing a piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them in French they gave them full directions, and Braybridge soon found the path again.”

Halson paused, and I said: “But that isn’t all?”

“Oh no.” He continued thoughtfully silent for a little while before he resumed. “The amazing thing is that they got lost again, and that when they tried going back to the Canucks they couldn’t find the way.”

“Why didn’t they follow the sound of the chopping?” I asked.

“The Canucks had stopped, for the time being. Besides, Braybridge was rather ashamed, and he thought if they went straight on they would be sure to come out somewhere. But that was where he made a mistake. They couldn’t go on straight; they went round and round, and came on their own footsteps — or hers, which he recognized from the narrow tread and the dint of the little heels in the damp places.”

Wanhope roused himself with a kindling eye. “That is very interesting, the movement in a circle of people who have lost their way. It has often been observed, but I don’t know that it has ever been explained. Sometimes the circle is smaller, sometimes it is larger, but I believe it is always a circle.”

“Isn’t it,” I queried, “like any other error in life? We go round and round, and commit the old sins over again.”

“That is very interesting,” Wanhope allowed.

“But do lost people really always walk in a vicious circle?” Minver asked.

Rulledge would not let Wanhope answer. “Go on, Halson,” he said.

Halson roused himself from the revery in which he was sitting with glazed eyes. “Well, what made it a little more anxious was that he had heard of bears on that mountain, and the green afternoon light among the trees was perceptibly paling. He suggested shouting, but she wouldn’t let him; she said it would be ridiculous if the others heard them, and useless if they didn’t. So they tramped on till — till the accident happened.”

“The accident!” Rulledge exclaimed, in the voice of our joint emotion.

“He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot,” Halson explained. “It wasn’t a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. He turned so white that she noticed it, and asked him what was the matter. Of course that shut his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled his motive, and he kept himself from crying out till the sudden pain of the wrench was over. He said merely that he thought he had heard something, and he had an awful ringing in his ears; but he didn’t mean that, and he started on again. The worst was trying to walk without limping, and to talk cheerfully and encouragingly with that agony tearing at him. But he managed somehow, and he was congratulating himself on his success when he tumbled down in a dead faint.”

“Oh, come now!” Minver protested.

“It is like an old-fashioned story, where things are operated by accident instead of motive, isn’t it?” Halson smiled with radiant recognition.

“Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time enough,” I said.

“Had they got back to the other picnickers?” Rulledge asked, with a tense voice.

“In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn’t going to bring him into camp in that state; besides, she couldn’t. She got some water out of the trout-brook they’d been fishing — more water than trout in it — and sprinkled his face, and he came to, and got on his legs just in time to pull on to the others, who were organizing a search-party to go after them. From that point on she dropped Braybridge like a hot coal; and as there was nothing of the flirt in her, she simply kept with the women, the older girls, and the tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along with the secret of his turned ankle. He doesn’t know how he ever got home alive; but he did, somehow, manage to reach the wagons that had brought them to the edge of the woods, and then he was all right till they got to the house. But still she said nothing about his accident, and he couldn’t; and he pleaded an early start for town the next morning, and got off to bed as soon as he could.”

“I shouldn’t have thought he could have stirred in the morning,” Rulledge employed Halson’s pause to say.

“Well, this beaver had to,” Halson said. “He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him.”

“What!” Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and Wanhope’s eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.

“She came right towards him. ‘Mr. Braybridge,’ says she, ‘I couldn’t let you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn’t choose to have these people laughing at the notion of my having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn’t bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they’d have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don’t you see?’ Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and little. He said, ‘It would have seemed rather absurd,’ and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot.”

“It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the station,” Minver cynically suggested.

“Groom nothing!” Halson returned with spirit. “She paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station.”

“Jove!” Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.

“She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of praise — it made Braybridge feel awfully flat — and ran back through the bushes to the boat-landing, and — that was the last he saw of her till he met her in town this fall.”

“And when — and when — did he offer himself?” Rulledge entreated, breathlessly. “How—”

“Yes, that’s the point, Halson,” Minver interposed. “Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear him out.”

Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson’s answer even for the sake of righting himself.

“I have heard,” Minver went on, “that Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other shore for her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself.” We others stared at Minver in astonishment. Halson glanced covertly towards him with his gay eyes. “Then that wasn’t true?”

“How did you hear it?” Halson asked.

“Oh, never mind. Is it true?”

“Well, I know there’s that version,” Halson said, evasively. “The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer — the when and the how — I don’t know that I’m exactly at liberty to say.”

“I don’t see why,” Minver urged. “You might stretch a point for Rulledge’s sake.”

Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive passage of his eye over Rulledge’s intense face. “There was something rather nice happened after — But, really, now!”

“Oh, go on!” Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.

“I haven’t the right — Well, I suppose I’m on safe ground here? It won’t go any further, of course; and it was so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge — he’d followed her down to the shore of the lake — found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and called back: ‘Never mind. I can’t return for it now.’ Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and she said ‘Yes,’ over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and said: ‘No, no, you mustn’t, you mustn’t! You can send it to me.’ He asked where, and she said: ‘In New York — in the fall — at the Walholland.’ Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her — she was paddling on again— ‘May I bring it?’ and she called over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was enough: ‘If you can’t get any one to bring it for you.’ The words barely reached him, but he’d have caught them if they’d been whispered; and he watched her across the lake and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in time.”

Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said: “Yes, that’s rather nice.” After a moment he added: “Rulledge thinks she put it there.”

“You’re too bad, Minver,” Halson protested. “The charm of the whole thing was her perfect innocence. She isn’t capable of the slightest finesse. I’ve known her from a child, and I know what I say.”

“That innocence of girlhood,” Wanhope said, “is very interesting. It’s astonishing how much experience it survives. Some women carry it into old age with them. It’s never been scientifically studied—”

“Yes,” Minver allowed. “There would be a fortune for the novelist who could work a type of innocence for all it was worth. Here’s Acton always dealing with the most rancid flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness and beauty of a girlhood which does the cheekiest things without knowing what it’s about, and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes and fires at nothing. But I don’t see how all this touches the point that Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer.”

“Well, hadn’t the offer already been made?”

“But how?”

“Oh, in the usual way.”

“What is the usual way?”

“I thought everybody knew that. Of course, it was from Braybridge finally, but I suppose it’s always six of one and half a dozen of the other in these cases, isn’t it? I dare say he couldn’t get any one to take her the handkerchief. My dinner?” Halson looked up at the silent waiter, who had stolen upon us and was bowing towards him.

“Look here, Halson,” Minver detained him, “how is it none of the rest of us have heard all those details?”

“I don’t know where you’ve been, Minver. Everybody knows the main facts,” Halson said, escaping.

Wanhope observed, musingly: “I suppose he’s quite right about the reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There’s probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding before there’s an explanation. In many cases the offer and the acceptance must really be tacit.”

“Yes,” I ventured, “and I don’t know why we’re so severe with women when they seem to take the initiative. It’s merely, after all, the call of the maiden bird, and there’s nothing lovelier or more endearing in nature than that.”

“Maiden bird is good, Acton,” Minver approved. “Why don’t you institute a class of fiction where the love-making is all done by the maiden birds, as you call them — or the widow birds? It would be tremendously popular with both sexes. It would lift an immense responsibility off the birds who’ve been expected to shoulder it heretofore if it could be introduced into real life.”

Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. “Well, it’s a charming story. How well he told it!”

The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.

“Yes,” he said, as he rose. “What a pity you can’t believe a word Halson says.”

“Do you mean—” we began simultaneously.

“That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying, people don’t speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly remember it.”

“Yes, but see here, Minver!” Rulledge said, with a dazed look. “If it’s all a fake of his, how came you to have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?”

“That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I knew he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn’t strike you. It’s the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!”

He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to say: “That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself — how much he believes of his own fiction.”

“I don’t see,” Rulledge said, gloomily, “why they’re so long with my dinner.” Then he burst out: “I believe every word Halson said! If there’s any fake in the thing, it’s the fake that Minver owned to.”

VII

The Chick of the Easter Egg

The old fellow who told that story of dream-transference on a sleeping-car at Christmas-time was again at the club on Easter Eve. Halson had put him up for the winter, under the easy rule we had, and he had taken very naturally to the Turkish room for his after-dinner coffee and cigar. We all rather liked him, though it was Minver’s pose to be critical of the simple friendliness with which he made himself at home among us, and to feign a wish that there were fewer trains between Boston and New York, so that old Newton (that was his name) could have a better chance of staying away. But we noticed that Minver was always a willing listener to Newton’s talk, and that he sometimes hospitably offered to share his tobacco with the Bostonian. When brought to book for his inconsistency by Rulledge, he said he was merely welcoming the new blood, if not young blood, that Newton was infusing into our body, which had grown anaemic on Wanhope’s psychology and Rulledge’s romance; or, anyway, it was a change.

Newton now began by saying abruptly, in a fashion he had, “We used to hear a good deal in Boston about your Easter Parade here in New York. Do you still keep it up?”

No one else answering, Minver replied, presently, “I believe it is still going on. I understand that it’s composed mostly of milliners out to see one another’s new hats, and generous Jewesses who are willing to contribute the ‘dark and bright’ of the beauty in which they walk to the observance of an alien faith. It’s rather astonishing how the synagogue takes to the feasts of the church. If it were not for that, I don’t know what would become of Christmas.”

“What do you mean by their walking in beauty?” Rulledge asked over his shoulder.

“I shall never have the measure of your ignorance, Rulledge. You don’t even know Byron’s lines on Hebrew loveliness?

“‘She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes.’”

“Pretty good,” Rulledge assented. “And they are splendid, sometimes. But what has the Easter Parade got to do with it?” he asked Newton.

“Oh, only what everything has with everything else. I was thinking of Easter-time long ago and far away, and naturally I thought of Easter now and here. I saw your Parade once, and it seemed to me one of the great social spectacles. But you can’t keep anything in New York, if it’s good; if it’s bad, you can.”

“You come from Boston, I think you said, Mr. Newton,” Minver breathed blandly through his smoke.

“Oh, I’m not a real Bostonian,” our guest replied. “I’m not abusing you on behalf of a city that I’m a native proprietor of. If I were, I shouldn’t perhaps make your decadent Easter Parade my point of attack, though I think it’s a pity to let it spoil. I came from a part of the country where we used to make a great deal of Easter, when we were boys, at least so far as eggs went. I don’t know whether the grown people observed the day then, and I don’t know whether the boys keep it now; I haven’t been back at Easter-time for several generations. But when I was a boy it was a serious thing. In that soft Southwestern latitude the grass had pretty well greened up by Easter, even when it came in March, and grass colors eggs a very nice yellow; it used to worry me that it didn’t color them green. When the grass hadn’t got along far enough, winter wheat would do as well. I don’t remember what color onion husks would give; but we used onion husks, too. Some mothers would let the boys get logwood from the drug-store, and that made the eggs a fine, bold purplish black. But the greatest egg of all was a calico egg, that you got by coaxing your grandmother (your mother’s mother) or your aunt (your mother’s sister) to sew up in a tight cover of brilliant calico. When that was boiled long enough the colors came off in a perfect pattern on the egg. Very few boys could get such eggs; when they did, they put them away in bureau drawers till they ripened and the mothers smelt them, and threw them out of the window as quickly as possible. Always, after breakfast, Easter Morning, we came out on the street and fought eggs. We pitted the little ends of the eggs against one another, and the fellow whose egg cracked the other fellow’s egg won it, and he carried it off. I remember grass and wheat colored eggs in such trials of strength, and onion and logwood colored eggs; but never calico eggs; they were too precious to be risked; it would have seemed wicked.

“I don’t know,” the Boston man went musingly on, “why I should remember these things so relentlessly; I’ve forgotten all the important things that happened to me then; but perhaps these were the important things. Who knows? I only know I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Easter, not so much because of the calico eggs, perhaps, as because of the grandmothers and the aunts. I suppose the simple life is full of such aunts and grandmothers still; but you don’t find them in hotel apartments, or even in flats consisting of seven large, light rooms and bath.” We all recognized the language of the advertisements, and laughed in sympathy with our guest, who perhaps laughed out of proportion with a pleasantry of that size.

When he had subdued his mirth, he resumed at a point apparently very remote from that where he had started.

“There was one of those winters in Cambridge, where I lived then, that seemed tougher than any other we could remember, and they were all pretty tough winters there in those times. There were forty snowfalls between Thanksgiving and Fast Day — you don’t know what Fast Day is in New York, and we didn’t, either, as far as the fasting went — and the cold kept on and on till we couldn’t, or said we couldn’t, stand it any longer. So, along about the middle of March somewhere, we picked up the children and started south. In those days New York seemed pretty far south to us; and when we got here we found everything on wheels that we had left on runners in Boston. But the next day it began to snow, and we said we must go a little farther to meet the spring. I don’t know exactly what it was made us pitch on Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; but we had a notion we should find it interesting, and, at any rate, a total change from our old environment. We had been reading something about the Moravians, and we knew that it was the capital of Moravianism, with the largest Moravian congregation in the world; I think it was Longfellow’s ‘Hymn of the Moravian Nuns’ that set us to reading about the sect; and we had somehow heard that the Sun Inn, at Bethlehem, was the finest old-fashioned public house anywhere. At any rate, we had the faith of our youthful years, and we put out for Bethlehem.

“We arrived just at dusk, but not so late that we couldn’t see the hospitable figure of a man coming out of the Sun to meet us at the omnibus door and to shake hands with each of us. It was the very pleasantest and sweetest welcome we ever had at a public house; and though we found the Sun a large, modern hotel, we easily accepted the landlord’s assurance that the old Inn was built up inside of the hotel, just as it was when Washington stayed in it; and after a mighty good supper we went to our rooms, which were piping warm from two good base-burner stoves. It was not exactly the vernal air we had expected of Bethlehem when we left New York; but you can’t have everything in this world, and, with the snowbanks along the streets outside, we were very glad to have the base-burners.

“We went to bed pretty early, and I fell into one of those exemplary sleeps that begin with no margin of waking after your head touches the pillow, or before that, even, and I woke from a dream of heavenly music that translated itself into the earthly notes of bugles. It made me sit up with the instant realization that we had arrived in Bethlehem on Easter Eve, and that this was Easter Morning. We had read of the beautiful observance of the feast by the Moravians, and, while I was hurrying on my clothes beside my faithful base-burner, I kept quite superfluously wondering at myself for not having thought of it, and so made sure of being called. I had waked just in time, though I hadn’t deserved to do so, and ought, by right, to have missed it all. I tried to make my wife come with me; but after the family is of a certain size a woman, if she is a real woman, thinks her husband can see things for her, and generally sends him out to reconnoitre and report. Besides, my wife couldn’t have left the children without waking them, to tell them she was going, and then all five of them would have wanted to come with us, including the baby; and we should have had no end of a time convincing them of the impossibility. We were a good deal bound up in the children, and we hated to lie to them when we could possibly avoid it. So I went alone.

“I asked the night porter, who was still on duty, the way I wanted to take, but there were so many people in the streets going the same direction that I couldn’t have missed it, anyhow; and pretty soon we came to the old Moravian cemetery, which was in the heart of the town; and there we found most of the Moravian congregation drawn up on three sides of the square, waiting and facing the east, which was beginning to redden. Of all the cemeteries I have seen, that was the most beautiful, because it was the simplest and humblest. Generally a cemetery is a dreadful place, with headstones and footstones and shafts and tombs scattered about, and looking like a field full of granite and marble stumps from the clearing of a petrified forest. But here all the memorial tablets lay flat with the earth. None of the dead were assumed to be worthier of remembrance than another; they all rested at regular intervals, with their tablets on their breasts, like shields, in their sleep after the battle of life. I was thinking how right and wise this was, and feeling the purity of the conception like a quality of the keen, clear air of the morning, which seemed to be breathing straight from the sky, when suddenly the sun blazed up from the horizon like a fire, and the instant it appeared the horns of the band began to blow and the people burst into a hymn — a thousand voices, for all I know. It was the sublimest thing I ever heard, and I don’t know that there’s anything to match it for dignity and solemnity in any religious rite. It made the tears come, for I thought how those people were of a church of missionaries and martyrs from the beginning, and I felt as if I were standing in sight and hearing of the first Christians after Christ. It was as if He were risen there ‘in the midst of them.’”

Rulledge looked round on the rest of us, with an air of acquiring merit from the Bostonian’s poetry, but Minver’s gravity was proof against the chance of mocking Rulledge, and I think we all felt alike. Wanhope seemed especially interested, though he said nothing.

“When I went home I told my wife about it as well as I could, but, though she entered into the spirit of it, she was rather preoccupied. The children had all wakened, as they did sometimes, in a body, and were storming joyfully around the rooms, as if it were Christmas; and she was trying to get them dressed. ‘Do tell them what Easter is like; they’ve never seen it kept before,’ she said; and I tried to do so, while I took a hand, as a young father will, and tried to get them into their clothes. I don’t think I dwelt much on the religious observance of the day, but I dug up some of my profane associations with it in early life, and told them about coloring eggs, and fighting them, and all that; there in New England, in those days, they had never seen or heard of such a thing as an Easter egg.

“I don’t think my reminiscences quieted them much. They were all on fire — the oldest hoy and girl, and the twins, and even the two-year-old that we called the baby — to go out and buy some eggs and get the landlord to let them color them in the hotel kitchen. I had a deal of ado to make them wait till after breakfast, but I managed, somehow; and when we had finished — it was a mighty good Pennsylvania breakfast, such as we could eat with impunity in those halcyon days: rich coffee, steak, sausage, eggs, applebutter, buckwheat cakes and maple syrup — we got their out-door togs on them, while they were all stamping and shouting round and had to be caught and overcoated, and fur-capped and hooded simultaneously, and managed to get them into the street together. Ever been in Bethlehem?”

We all had to own our neglect of this piece of travel; and Newton, after a moment of silent forgiveness, said:

“Well, I don’t know how it is now, but twenty-five or thirty years ago it was the most interesting town in America. It wasn’t the old Moravian community that it had been twenty-five years before that, when none but Moravians could buy property there; but it was like the Sun Hotel, and just as that had grown round and over the old Sun Inn, the prosperous manufacturing town, with its iron-foundries and zinc-foundries, and all the rest of it, had grown round and over the original Moravian village. If you wanted a breath of perfect strangeness, with an American quality in it at the same time, you couldn’t have gone to any place where you could have had it on such terms as you could in Bethlehem. I can’t begin to go into details, but one thing was hearing German spoken everywhere in the street: not the German of Germany, but the Pennsylvania German, with its broad vowels and broken-down grammatical forms, and its English vocables and interjections, which you caught in the sentences which came to you, like av coorse, and yes and no for ja and nein. There were stores where they spoke no English, and others where they made a specialty of it; and I suppose when we sallied out that bright Sunday morning, with the baby holding onto a hand of each of us between us, and the twins going in front with their brother and sister, we were almost as foreign as we should have been in a village on the Rhine or the Elbe.

“We got a little acquainted with the people, after awhile, and I heard some stories of the country folks that I thought were pretty good. One was about an old German farmer on whose land a prospecting metallurgist found zinc ore; the scientific man brought him the bright yellow button by which the zinc proved its existence in its union with copper, and the old fellow asked in an awestricken whisper: ‘Is it a gold-mine?’ ‘No, no. Guess again.’ ‘Then it’s a brass-mine!’ But before they began to find zinc there in the lovely Lehigh Valley — you can stand by an open zinc-mine and look down into it where the rock and earth are left standing, and you seem to be looking down into a range of sharp mountain peaks and pinnacles — it was the richest farming region in the whole fat State of Pennsylvania; and there was a young farmer who owned a vast tract of it, and who went to fetch home a young wife from Philadelphia way, somewhere. He drove there and back in his own buggy, and when he reached the top overlooking the valley, with his bride, he stopped his horse, and pointed with his whip. ‘There,’ he said, ‘as far as the sky is blue, it’s all ours!’ I thought that was fine.”

“Fine?” I couldn’t help bursting out; “it’s a stroke of poetry.”

Minver cut in: “The thrifty Acton making a note of it for future use in literature.”

“Eh!” Newton queried. “Oh! I don’t mind. You’re welcome to it, Mr. Acton. It’s a pity somebody shouldn’t use it, and of course I can’t.”

“Acton will send you a copy with the usual forty-per-cent. discount and ten off for cash,” the painter said.

They had their little laugh at my expense, and then Newton took up his tale again. “Well, as I was saying — By the way, what was I saying?”

The story-loving Rulledge remembered. “You went out with your wife and children for Easter eggs.”

“Oh yes. Thank you. Well, of course, in a town geographically American, the shops were all shut on Sunday, and we couldn’t buy even an Easter egg on Easter Sunday. But one of the stores had the shade of its show-window up, and the children simply glued themselves to it in such a fascination that we could hardly unstick them. That window was full of all kinds of Easter things — I don’t remember what all; but there were Easter eggs in every imaginable color and pattern, and besides these there were whole troops of toy rabbits. I had forgotten that the natural offspring of Easter eggs is rabbits; but I took a brace, and remembered the fact and announced it to the children. They immediately demanded an explanation, with all sorts of scientific particulars, which I gave them, as reckless of the truth as I thought my wife would suffer without contradicting me. I had to say that while Easter eggs mostly hatched rabbits, there were instances in which they hatched other things, as, for instance, handfuls of eagles and half-eagles and double-eagles, especially in the case of the golden eggs that the goose laid. They knew all about that goose; but I had to tell them what those unfamiliar pieces of American coinage were, and promise to give them one each when they grew up, if they were good. That only partially satisfied them, and they wanted to know specifically what other kinds of things Easter eggs would hatch if properly treated. Each one had a preference; the baby always preferred what the last one said; and she wanted an ostrich, the same as her big brother; he was seven then.

“I don’t really know how we lived through the day; I mean the children, for my wife and I went to the Moravian church, and had a good long Sunday nap in the afternoon, while the children were pining for Monday morning, when they could buy eggs and begin to color them, so that they could hatch just the right kind of Easter things. When I woke up I had to fall in with a theory they had agreed to between them that any kind of two-legged or four-legged chick that hatched from an Easter egg would wear the same color, or the same kind of spots or stripes, that the egg had.

“I found that they had arranged to have calico eggs, and they were going to have their mother cover them with the same sort of cotton prints that I had said my grandmother and aunts used, and they meant to buy the calico in the morning at the same time that they bought the eggs. We had some tin vessels of water on our stoves to take the dryness out of the hot air, and they had decided that they would boil their eggs in these, and not trouble the landlord for the use of his kitchen.

“There was nothing in this scheme wanting but their mother’s consent — I agreed to it on the spot — but when she understood that they each expected to have two eggs apiece, with one apiece for us, she said she never could cover a dozen eggs in the world, and that the only way would be for them to go in the morning with us, and choose each the handsomest egg they could out of the eggs in that shop-window. They met this proposition rather blankly at first; but on reflection the big brother said it would be a shame to spoil mamma’s Easter by making her work all day, and besides it would keep till that night, anyway, before they could begin to have any fun with their eggs; and then the rest all said the same thing, ending with the baby: and accepted the inevitable with joy, and set about living through the day as well as they could.

“They had us up pretty early the next morning — that is, they had me up; their mother said that I had brought it on myself, and richly deserved it for exciting their imaginations, and I had to go out with the two oldest and the twins to choose the eggs; we got off from the baby by promising to let her have two, and she didn’t understand very well, anyway, and was awfully sleepy. We were a pretty long time choosing the six eggs, and I don’t remember now just what they were; but they were certainly joyous eggs; and — By the way, I don’t know why I’m boring a brand of hardened bachelors like you with all these domestic details?”

“Oh, don’t mind us,” Minver responded to his general appeal. “We may not understand the feelings of a father, but we are all mothers at heart, especially Rulledge. Go on. It’s very exciting,” he urged, not very ironically, and Newton went on.

“Well, I don’t believe I could say just how the havoc began. They put away their eggs very carefully after they had made their mother admire them, and shown the baby how hers were the prettiest, and they each said in succession that they must be very precious of them, for if you shook an egg, or anything, it wouldn’t hatch; and it was their plan to take these home and set an unemployed pullet, belonging to the big brother, to hatching them in the coop that he had built of laths for her in the back yard with his own hands. But long before the afternoon was over, the evil one had entered Eden, and tempted the boy to try fighting eggs with these treasured specimens, as I had told we boys used to fight eggs in my town in the southwest. He held a conquering course through the encounter with three eggs, but met his Waterloo with a regular Blücher belonging to the baby. Then he instantly changed sides; and smashed his Blücher against the last egg left. By that time all the other children were in tears, the baby roaring powerfully in ignorant sympathy, and the victor steeped in silent gloom. His mother made him gather up the ruins from the floor, and put them in the stove, and she took possession of the victorious egg, and said she would keep it till we got back to Cambridge herself, and not let one of them touch it. I can tell you it was a tragical time. I wanted to go out and buy them another set of eggs, and spring them for a surprise on them in the morning, after they had suffered enough that night. But she said that if I dared to dream of such a thing — which would be the ruin of the children’s character, by taking away the consequences of their folly — she should do, she did not know what, to me. Of course she was right, and I gave in, and helped the children forget all about it, so that by the time we got back to Cambridge I had forgotten about it myself.

“I don’t know what it was reminded the boy of that remaining Easter egg unless it was the sight of the unemployed pullet in her coop, which he visited the first thing; and I don’t know how he managed to wheedle his mother out of it; but the first night after I came home from business — it was rather late and the children had gone to bed — she told me that ridiculous boy, as she called him in self-exculpation, had actually put the egg under his pullet, and all the children were wild to see what it would hatch. ‘And now,’ she said, severely, ‘what are you going to do? You have filled their heads with those ideas, and I suppose you will have to invent some nonsense or other to fool them, and make them believe that it has hatched a giraffe, or an elephant, or something; they won’t be satisfied with anything less.’ I said we should have to try something smaller, for I didn’t think we could manage a chick of that size on our lot; and that I should trust in Providence. Then she said it was all very well to laugh; and that I couldn’t get out of it that way, and I needn’t think it.

“I didn’t, much. But the children understood that it took three weeks for an egg to hatch, and anyway the pullet was so intermittent in her attentions to the Easter egg, only sitting on it at night, or when held down by hand in the day, that there was plenty of time. One evening when I came out from Boston, I was met by a doleful deputation at the front gate, with the news that when the coop was visited that morning after breakfast — they visited the coop every morning before they went to school — the pullet was found perched on a cross-bar in a high state of nerves, and the shell of the Easter egg broken and entirely eaten out. Probably a rat had got in and done it, or, more hopefully, a mink, such as used to attack eggs in the town where I was a boy. We went out and viewed the wreck, as a first step towards a better situation; and suddenly a thought struck me. ‘Children,’ I said, ‘what did you really expect that egg to hatch, anyway?’ They looked askance at one another, and at last the boy said: ‘Well, you know, papa, an egg that’s been cooked—’ And then we all laughed together, and I knew they had been making believe as much as I had, and no more expected the impossible of a boiled egg than I did.”

“That was charming!” Wanhope broke out. “There is nothing more interesting than the way children join in hypnotizing themselves with the illusions which their parents think they have created without their help. In fact, it is very doubtful whether at any age we have any illusions except those of our own creation; we—”

“Let him go on, Wanhope,” Minver dictated; and Newton continued.

“It was rather nice. I asked them if their mother knew about the egg; and they said that of course they couldn’t help telling her; and I said: ‘Well, then, I’ll tell you what: we must make her believe that the chick hatched out and got away—’ The boy stopped me: ‘Do you think that would be exactly true, papa?’ ‘Well, not exactly true; but it’s only for the time being. We can tell her the exact truth afterwards,’ and then I laid my plan before them. They said it was perfectly splendid, and would be the greatest kind of joke on mamma, and one that she would like as much as anybody. The thing was to keep it from her till it was done, and they all promised that they wouldn’t tell; but I could see that they were bursting with the secret the whole evening.

“The next day was Saturday, when I always went home early, and I had the two oldest children come in with the second-girl, who left them to take lunch with me. They had chocolate and ice-cream, and after lunch we went around to a milliner’s shop in West Street, where my wife and I had stopped a long five minutes the week before we went to Bethlehem, adoring an Easter bonnet that we saw in the window. I wanted her to buy it; but she said, No, if we were going that expensive journey, we couldn’t afford it, and she must do without, that spring. I showed it to them, and ‘Now, children,’ I said, ‘what do you think of that for the chick that your Easter egg hatched?’ And they said it was the most beautiful bonnet they had ever seen, and it would just exactly suit mamma. But I saw they were holding something back, and I said, sharply, ‘Well?’ and they both guiltily faltered out: ‘The bird, you know, papa,’ and I remembered that they belonged to the society of Bird Defenders, who in that day were pledged against the decorative use of dead birds or killing them for anything but food. ‘Why, confound it,’ I said, ‘the bird is the very thing that makes it an Easter-egg chick!’ but I saw that their honest little hearts were troubled, and I said again: ‘Confound it! Let’s go in and hear what the milliner has to say.’ Well, the long and short of it was that the milliner tried a bunch of forget-me-nots over the bluebird that we all agreed was a thousand times better, and that if it were substituted would only cost three dollars more, and we took our Easter-egg chick home in a blaze of glory, the children carrying the bandbox by the string between them.

“Of course we had a great time opening it, and their mother acted her part so well that I knew she was acting, and after the little ones were in bed I taxed her with it. ‘Know? Of course I knew!’ she said. ‘Did you think they would let you deceive me? They’re true New-Englanders, and they told me all about it last night, when I was saying their prayers with them.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘they let you deceive me; they must be true Westerners, too, for they didn’t tell me a word of your knowing.’ I rather had her there, but she said: ‘Oh, you goose—’ We were young people in those days, and goose meant everything. But, really, I’m ashamed of getting off all this to you hardened bachelors, as I said before—”

“If you tell many more such stories in this club,” Minver said, severely, “you won’t leave a bachelor in it. And Rulledge will be the first to get married.”

THE END

THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE

This utopian novel was first published in 1907 and is the final volume in Howells’ “Altrurian” trilogy, following A Traveler in Altruria (1894) and Letters of an Altrurian Traveler (1904). This final volume retains the epistolary form of the second book in the trilogy, as the protagonist, Aristides Homos, writes a series of letters home from Altruria to his friend Cyril. Homos is now located in the densely urban environment of New York City, where he confronts the contrasts between America at the turn of the twentieth century, and the agrarian Utopianism of his native Altruria.

The dramatic center of the book is the love affair between Homos and Evelith Strange, a wealthy widow of the American plutocracy. Evelith has chosen the life of a socialite as she is frustrated by the limited effects of “good works” — though her routine of idleness conflicts with her Christian values and her conscience. Evelith must decide whether to abandon her social position and her fortune to follow Homos back to Altruria. The story also deals with Homos’ travels abroad, and his commentaries on the societies he visits.

Cover of the first edition

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART FIRST

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

PART SECOND

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

Title page of the first edition

INTRODUCTION

Aristides Homos, an Emissary of the Altrurian Commonwealth, visited the United States during the summer of 1893 and the fall and winter following. For some weeks or months he was the guest of a well-known man of letters at a hotel in one of our mountain resorts; in the early autumn he spent several days at the great Columbian Exhibition in Chicago; and later he came to New York, where he remained until he sailed, rather suddenly, for Altruria, taking the circuitous route by which he came. He seems to have written pretty constantly throughout his sojourn with us to an intimate friend in his own country, giving freely his impressions of our civilization. His letters from New York appear to have been especially full, and, in offering the present synopsis of these to the American reader, it will not be impertinent to note certain peculiarities of the Altrurian attitude which the temperament of the writer has somewhat modified. He is entangled in his social sophistries regarding all the competitive civilizations; he cannot apparently do full justice to the superior heroism of charity and self-sacrifice as practised in countries where people live upon each other as the Americans do, instead of for each other as the Altrurians do; but he has some glimmerings of the beauty of our living, and he has undoubtedly the wish to be fair to our ideals. He is unable to value our devotion to the spirit of Christianity amid the practices which seem to deny it; but he evidently wishes to recognize the possibility of such a thing. He at least accords us the virtues of our defects, and, among the many visitors who have censured us, he has not seen us with his censures prepared to fit the instances; in fact, the very reverse has been his method.

Many of the instances which he fits with his censures are such as he could no longer note, if he came among us again. That habit of celebrating the munificence of the charitable rich, on which he spends his sarcasm, has fallen from us through the mere superabundance of occasion. Our rich people give so continuously for all manner of good objects that it would be impossible for our press, however vigilant, to note the successive benefactions, and millions are now daily bestowed upon needy educational institutions, of which no mention whatever is made in the newspapers. If a millionaire is now and then surprised in a good action by a reporter of uncommon diligence, he is able by an appeal to their common humanity to prevail with the witness to spare him the revolting publicity which it must be confessed would once have followed his discovery; the right hand which is full to overflowing is now as skilled as the empty right hand in keeping the left hand ignorant of its doings. This has happened through the general decay of snobbishness among us, perhaps. It is certain that there is no longer the passion for a knowledge of the rich, and the smart, which made us ridiculous to Mr. Homos. Ten or twelve years ago, our newspapers abounded in intelligence of the coming and going of social leaders, of their dinners and lunches and teas, of their receptions and balls, and the guests who were bidden to them. But this sort of unwholesome and exciting gossip, which was formerly devoured by their readers with inappeasable voracity, is no longer supplied, simply because the taste for it has wholly passed away.

Much the same might be said of the social hospitalities which raised our visitor’s surprise. For example, many people are now asked to dinner who really need a dinner, and not merely those who revolt from the notion of dinner with loathing, and go to it with abhorrence. At the tables of our highest social leaders one now meets on a perfect equality persons of interesting minds and uncommon gifts who would once have been excluded because they were hungry, or were not in the hostess’s set, or had not a new gown or a dress-suit. This contributes greatly to the pleasure of the time, and promotes the increasing kindliness between the rich and poor for which our status is above all things notable.

The accusation which our critic brings that the American spirit has been almost Europeanized away, in its social forms, would be less grounded in the observance of a later visitor. The customs of good society must be the same everywhere in some measure, but the student of the competitive world would now find European hospitality Americanized, rather than American hospitality Europeanized. The careful research which has been made into our social origins has resulted in bringing back many of the aboriginal usages; and, with the return of the old American spirit of fraternity, many of the earlier dishes as well as amenities have been restored. A Thanksgiving dinner in the year 1906 would have been found more like a Thanksgiving dinner in 1806 than the dinner to which Mr. Homos was asked in 1893, and which he has studied so interestingly, though not quite without some faults of taste and discretion. The prodigious change for the better in some material aspects of our status which has taken place in the last twelve years could nowhere be so well noted as in the picture he gives us of the housing of our people in 1893. His study of the evolution of the apartment-house from the old flat-house, and the still older single dwelling, is very curious, and, upon the whole, not incorrect. But neither of these last differed so much from the first as the apartment-house now differs from the apartment-house of his day. There are now no dark rooms opening on airless pits for the family, or black closets and dismal basements for the servants. Every room has abundant light and perfect ventilation, and as nearly a southern exposure as possible. The appointments of the houses are no longer in the spirit of profuse and vulgar luxury which it must be allowed once characterized them. They are simply but tastefully finished, they are absolutely fireproof, and, with their less expensive decoration, the rents have been so far lowered that in any good position a quarter of nine or ten rooms, with as many baths, can be had for from three thousand to fifteen thousand dollars. This fact alone must attract to our metropolis the best of our population, the bone and sinew which have no longer any use for themselves where they have been expended in rearing colossal fortunes, and now demand a metropolitan repose.

The apartments are much better fitted for a family of generous size than those which Mr. Homos observed. Children, who were once almost unheard of, and quite unheard, in apartment-houses, increasingly abound under favor of the gospel of race preservation. The elevators are full of them, and in the grassy courts round which the houses are built, the little ones play all day long, or paddle in the fountains, warmed with steam-pipes in the winter, and cooled to an agreeable temperature in a summer which has almost lost its terrors for the stay-at-home New-Yorker. Each child has his or her little plot of ground in the roof-garden, where they are taught the once wellnigh forgotten art of agriculture.

The improvement of the tenement-house has gone hand in hand with that of the apartment-house. As nearly as the rate of interest on the landlord’s investment will allow, the housing of the poor approaches in comfort that of the rich. Their children are still more numerous, and the playgrounds supplied them in every open space and on every pier are visited constantly by the better-to-do children, who exchange with them lessons of form and fashion for the scarcely less valuable instruction in practical life which the poorer little ones are able to give. The rents in the tenement houses are reduced even more notably than those in the apartment-houses, so that now, with the constant increase in wages, the tenants are able to pay their rents promptly. The evictions once so common are very rare; it is doubtful whether a nightly or daily walk in the poorer quarters of the town would develop, in the coldest weather, half a dozen cases of families set out on the sidewalk with their household goods about them.

The Altrurian Emissary visited this country when it was on the verge of the period of great economic depression extending from 1894 to 1898, but, after the Spanish War, Providence marked the divine approval of our victory in that contest by renewing in unexampled measure the prosperity of the Republic. With the downfall of the trusts, and the release of our industrial and commercial forces to unrestricted activity, the condition of every form of labor has been immeasurably improved, and it is now united with capital in bonds of the closest affection. But in no phase has its fate been so brightened as in that of domestic service. This has occurred not merely through the rise of wages, but through a greater knowledge between the employing and employed. When, a few years since, it became practically impossible for mothers of families to get help from the intelligence-offices, and ladies were obliged through lack of cooks and chambermaids to do the work of the kitchen and the chamber and parlor, they learned to realize what such work was, how poorly paid, how badly lodged, how meanly fed. From this practical knowledge it was impossible for them to retreat to their old supremacy and indifference as mistresses. The servant problem was solved, once for all, by humanity, and it is doubtful whether, if Mr. Homos returned to us now, he would give offence by preaching the example of the Altrurian ladies, or would be shocked by the contempt and ignorance of American women where other women who did their household drudgery were concerned.

As women from having no help have learned how to use their helpers, certain other hardships have been the means of good. The flattened wheel of the trolley, banging the track day and night, and tormenting the waking and sleeping ear, was, oddly enough, the inspiration of reforms which have made our city the quietest in the world. The trolleys now pass unheard; the elevated train glides by overhead with only a modulated murmur; the subway is a retreat fit for meditation and prayer, where the passenger can possess his soul in a peace to be found nowhere else; the automobile, which was unknown in the day of the Altrurian Emissary, whirs softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit, with a sigh of gentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, “like the sweet South, taking and giving odor.” The streets that he saw so filthy and unkempt in 1893 are now at least as clean as they are quiet. Asphalt has universally replaced the cobble-stones and Belgian blocks of his day, and, though it is everywhere full of holes, it is still asphalt, and may some time be put in repair.

There is a note of exaggeration in his characterization of our men which the reader must regret. They are not now the intellectual inferior of our women, or at least not so much the inferiors. Since his day they have made a vast advance in the knowledge and love of literature. With the multitude of our periodicals, and the swarm of our fictions selling from a hundred thousand to half a million each, even our business-men cannot wholly escape culture, and they have become more and more cultured, so that now you frequently hear them asking what this or that book is all about. With the mention of them, the reader will naturally recur to the work of their useful and devoted lives — the accumulation of money. It is this accumulation, this heaping-up of riches, which the Altrurian Emissary accuses in the love-story closing his study of our conditions, but which he might not now so totally condemn.

As we have intimated, he has more than once guarded against a rash conclusion, to which the logical habit of the Altrurian mind might have betrayed him. If he could revisit us we are sure that he would have still greater reason to congratulate himself on his forbearance, and would doubtless profit by the lesson which events must teach all but the most hopeless doctrinaires. The evil of even a small war (and soldiers themselves do not deny that wars, large or small, are evil) has, as we have noted, been overruled for good in the sort of Golden Age, or Age on a Gold Basis, which we have long been enjoying. If our good-fortune should be continued to us in reward of our public and private virtue, the fact would suggest to so candid an observer that in economics, as in other things, the rule proves the exception, and that as good times have hitherto always been succeeded by bad times, it stands to reason that our present period of prosperity will never be followed by a period of adversity.

It would seem from the story continued by another hand in the second part of this work, that Altruria itself is not absolutely logical in its events, which are subject to some of the anomalies governing in our own affairs. A people living in conditions which some of our dreamers would consider ideal, are forced to discourage foreign emigration, against their rule of universal hospitality, and in at least one notable instance are obliged to protect themselves against what they believe an evil example by using compulsion with the wrongdoers, though the theory of their life is entirely opposed to anything of the kind. Perhaps, however, we are not to trust to this other hand at all times, since it is a woman’s hand, and is not to be credited with the firm and unerring touch of a man’s. The story, as she completes it, is the story of the Altrurian’s love for an American woman, and will be primarily interesting for that reason. Like the Altrurian’s narrative, it is here compiled from a succession of letters, which in her case were written to a friend in America, as his were written to a friend in Altruria. But it can by no means have the sociological value which the record of his observations among ourselves will have for the thoughtful reader. It is at best the record of desultory and imperfect glimpses of a civilization fundamentally alien to her own, such as would attract an enthusiastic nature, but would leave it finally in a sort of misgiving as to the reality of the things seen and heard. Some such misgiving attended the inquiries of those who met the Altrurian during his sojourn with us, but it is a pity that a more absolute conclusion should not have been the effect of this lively lady’s knowledge of the ideal country of her adoption. It is, however, an interesting psychological result, and it continues the tradition of all the observers of ideal conditions from Sir Thomas More down to William Morris. Either we have no terms for conditions so unlike our own that they cannot be reported to us with absolute intelligence, or else there is in every experience of them an essential vagueness and uncertainty.

PART FIRST

I

If I spoke with Altrurian breadth of the way New-Yorkers live, my dear Cyril, I should begin by saying that the New-Yorkers did not live at all. But outside of our happy country one learns to distinguish, and to allow that there are several degrees of living, all indeed hateful to us, if we knew them, and yet none without some saving grace in it. You would say that in conditions where men were embattled against one another by the greed and the envy and the ambition which these conditions perpetually appeal to here, there could be no grace in life; but we must remember that men have always been better than their conditions, and that otherwise they would have remained savages without the instinct or the wish to advance. Indeed, our own state is testimony of a potential civility in all states, which we must keep in mind when we judge the peoples of the plutocratic world, and especially the American people, who are above all others the devotees and exemplars of the plutocratic ideal, without limitation by any aristocracy, theocracy, or monarchy. They are purely commercial, and the thing that cannot be bought and sold has logically no place in their life. But life is not logical outside of Altruria; we are the only people in the world, my dear Cyril, who are privileged to live reasonably; and again I say we must put by our own criterions if we wish to understand the Americans, or to recognize that measure of loveliness which their warped and stunted and perverted lives certainly show, in spite of theory and in spite of conscience, even. I can make this clear to you, I think, by a single instance, say that of the American who sees a case of distress, and longs to relieve it. If he is rich, he can give relief with a good conscience, except for the harm that may come to his beneficiary from being helped; but if he is not rich, or not finally rich, and especially if he has a family dependent upon him, he cannot give in anything like the measure Christ bade us give without wronging those dear to him, immediately or remotely. That is to say, in conditions which oblige every man to look out for himself, a man cannot be a Christian without remorse; he cannot do a generous action without self-reproach; he cannot be nobly unselfish without the fear of being a fool. You would think that this predicament must deprave, and so without doubt it does; and yet it is not wholly depraving. It often has its effect in character of a rare and pathetic sublimity; and many Americans take all the cruel risks of doing good, reckless of the evil that may befall them, and defiant of the upbraidings of their own hearts. This is something that we Altrurians can scarcely understand: it is like the munificence of a savage who has killed a deer and shares it with his starving tribesmen, forgetful of the hungering little ones who wait his return from the chase with food; for life in plutocratic countries is still a chase, and the game is wary and sparse, as the terrible average of failures witnesses.

Of course, I do not mean that Americans may not give at all without sensible risk, or that giving among them is always followed by a logical regret; but, as I said, life with them is in no wise logical. They even applaud one another for their charities, which they measure by the amount given, rather than by the love that goes with the giving. The widow’s mite has little credit with them, but the rich man’s million has an acclaim that reverberates through their newspapers long after his gift is made. It is only the poor in America who do charity as we do, by giving help where it is needed; the Americans are mostly too busy, if they are at all prosperous, to give anything but money; and the more money they give, the more charitable they esteem themselves. From time to time some man with twenty or thirty millions gives one of them away, usually to a public institution of some sort, where it will have no effect with the people who are underpaid for their work or cannot get work; and then his deed is famed throughout the continent as a thing really beyond praise. Yet any one who thinks about it must know that he never earned the millions he kept, or the millions he gave, but somehow made them from the labor of others; that, with all the wealth left him, he cannot miss the fortune he lavishes, any more than if the check which conveyed it were a withered leaf, and not in any wise so much as an ordinary working-man might feel the bestowal of a postage-stamp.

But in this study of the plutocratic mind, always so fascinating to me, I am getting altogether away from what I meant to tell you. I meant to tell you not how Americans live in the spirit, illogically, blindly, and blunderingly, but how they live in the body, and more especially how they house themselves in this city of New York. A great many of them do not house themselves at all, but that is a class which we cannot now consider, and I will speak only of those who have some sort of a roof over their heads.

II

Formerly the New-Yorker lived in one of three different ways: in private houses, or boarding-houses, or hotels; there were few restaurants or public tables outside of the hotels, and those who had lodgings and took their meals at eating-houses were but a small proportion of the whole number. The old classification still holds in a measure, but within the last thirty years, or ever since the Civil War, when the enormous commercial expansion of the country began, several different ways of living have been opened. The first and most noticeable of these is housekeeping in flats, or apartments of three or four rooms or more, on the same floor, as in all the countries of Europe except England; though the flat is now making itself known in London, too. Before the war, the New-Yorker who kept house did so in a separate house, three or four stories in height, with a street door of its own. Its pattern within was fixed by long usage, and seldom varied; without, it was of brown-stone before, and brick behind, with an open space there for drying clothes, which was sometimes gardened or planted with trees and vines. The rear of the city blocks which these houses formed was more attractive than the front, as you may still see in the vast succession of monotonous cross-streets not yet invaded by poverty or business; and often the perspective of these rears is picturesque and pleasing. But with the sudden growth of the population when peace came, and through the acquaintance the hordes of American tourists had made with European fashions of living, it became easy, or at least simple, to divide the floors of many of these private dwellings into apartments, each with its own kitchen and all the apparatus of housekeeping. The apartments then had the street entrance and the stairways in common, and they had in common the cellar and the furnace for heating; they had in common the disadvantage of being badly aired and badly lighted. They were dark, cramped, and uncomfortable, but they were cheaper than separate houses, and they were more homelike than boarding-houses or hotels. Large numbers of them still remain in use, and when people began to live in flats, in conformity with the law of evolution, many buildings were put up and subdivided into apartments in imitation of the old dwellings which had been changed.

But the apartment as the New-Yorkers now mostly have it, was at the same time evolving from another direction. The poorer class of New York work-people had for a long period before the war lived, as they still live, in vast edifices, once thought prodigiously tall, which were called tenement-houses. In these a family of five or ten persons is commonly packed in two or three rooms, and even in one room, where they eat and sleep, without the amenities and often without the decencies of life, and of course without light and air. The buildings in case of fire are death-traps; but the law obliges the owners to provide some apparent means of escape, which they do in the form of iron balconies and ladders, giving that festive air to their fa�ades which I have already noted. The bare and dirty entries and staircases are really ramifications of the filthy streets without, and each tenement opens upon a landing as if it opened upon a public thoroughfare. The rents extorted from the inmates is sometimes a hundred per cent., and is nearly always cruelly out of proportion to the value of the houses, not to speak of the wretched shelter afforded; and when the rent is not paid the family in arrears is set with all its poor household gear upon the sidewalk, in a pitiless indifference to the season and the weather, which you could not realize without seeing it, and which is incredible even of plutocratic nature. Of course, landlordism, which you have read so much of, is at its worst in the case of the tenement-houses. But you must understand that comparatively few people in New York own the roofs that shelter them. By far the greater number live, however they live, in houses owned by others, by a class who prosper and grow rich, or richer, simply by owning the roofs over other men’s heads. The landlords have, of course, no human relation with their tenants, and really no business relations, for all the affairs between them are transacted by agents. Some have the reputation of being better than others; but they all live, or expect to live, without work, on their rents. They are very much respected for it; the rents are considered a just return from the money invested. You must try to conceive of this as an actual fact, and not merely as a statistical statement. I know it will not be easy for you; it is not easy for me, though I have it constantly before my face.

III

The tenement-house, such as it is, is the original of the apartment-house, which perpetuates some of its most characteristic features on a scale and in material undreamed of in the simple philosophy of the inventor of the tenement-house. The worst of these features is the want of light and air, but as much more space and as many more rooms are conceded as the tenant will pay for. The apartment-house, however, soars to heights that the tenement-house never half reached, and is sometimes ten stories high. It is built fireproof, very often, and is generally equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makes one level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which have departed less from the tenement-house original, have no elevators, but the street door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by the tenant’s latch-key or by the janitor having charge of the whole building. In the finer houses there is a page whose sole duty it is to open and shut this door, and who is usually brass-buttoned to one blinding effect of livery with the elevator-boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found, the elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where he is not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, for each apartment, and you ring up the occupant and talk to him as many stories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulge their pride will not live in this sort of apartment-house, and the rents in them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort are vulgarly fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaic pavement, marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinet wood-work. But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in the things that are common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeeping are of all degrees of perfection, and, except for the want of light and air, life in them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heated throughout with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimes lighted with both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will, though of course at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair of architecture, for no style has yet been invented which enables the artist to characterize them with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulks they deform the whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out of scale, and making it impossible for future edifices to assimilate themselves to the intruder.

There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is no street or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to be found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded. In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannot see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed in them. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of an uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and I believe the physicians really attribute something of the growing prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves from the rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarring of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening in one of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks last spring (you can get them out of season for any length of time), and as the weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we had the full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had become accustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give you any notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat as if I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst every sentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speech which we use so much at home I never should have known what my friend was saying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made the mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the plutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it, bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.

Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are inhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot season when the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people who must dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure to get out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I could not endure for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in sickness it must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with a dying child in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her husband to catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a train of five or six cars goes roaring by the open window! What horror! What profanation!

IV

The noise is bad everywhere in New York, but in some of the finer apartment-houses on the better streets you are as well out of it as you can be anywhere in the city. I have been a guest in these at different times, and in one of them I am such a frequent guest that I may be said to know its life intimately. In fact, my hostess (women transact society so exclusively in America that you seldom think of your host) in the apartment I mean to speak of, invited me to explore it one night when I dined with her, so that I might, as she said, tell my friends when I got back to Altruria how people lived in America; and I cannot feel that I am violating her hospitality in telling you now. She is that Mrs. Makely whom I met last summer in the mountains, and whom you thought so strange a type from the account of her I gave you, but who is not altogether uncommon here. I confess that, with all her faults, I like her, and I like to go to her house. She is, in fact, a very good woman, perfectly selfish by tradition, as the American women must be, and wildly generous by nature, as they nearly always are; and infinitely superior to her husband in cultivation, as is commonly the case with them. As he knows nothing but business, he thinks it is the only thing worth knowing, and he looks down on the tastes and interests of her more intellectual life with amiable contempt, as something almost comic. She respects business, too, and so she does not despise his ignorance as you would suppose; it is at least the ignorance of a business-man, who must have something in him beyond her ken, or else he would not be able to make money as he does.

With your greater sense of humor, I think you would be amused if you could see his smile of placid self-satisfaction as he listens to our discussion of questions and problems which no more enter his daily life than they enter the daily life of an Eskimo; but I do not find it altogether amusing myself, and I could not well forgive it, if I did not know that he was at heart so simple and good, in spite of his commerciality. But he is sweet and kind, as the American men so often are, and he thinks his wife is the delightfulest creature in the world, as the American husband nearly always does. They have several times asked me to dine with them en famille; and, as a matter of form, he keeps me a little while with him after dinner, when she has left the table, and smokes his cigar, after wondering why we do not smoke in Altruria; but I can see that he is impatient to get to her in their drawing-room, where we find her reading a book in the crimson light of the canopied lamp, and where he presently falls silent, perfectly happy to be near her. The drawing-room is of a good size itself, and it has a room opening out of it called the library, with a case of books in it, and Mrs. Makely’s piano-forte. The place is rather too richly and densely rugged, and there is rather more curtaining and shading of the windows than we should like; but Mrs. Makely is too well up-to-date, as she would say, to have much of the bric-�-brac about which she tells me used to clutter people’s houses here. There are some pretty good pictures on the walls, and a few vases and bronzes, and she says she has produced a greater effect of space by quelling the furniture — she means, having few pieces and having them as small as possible. There is a little stand with her afternoon tea-set in one corner, and there is a pretty writing-desk in the library; I remember a sofa and some easy-chairs, but not too many of them. She has a table near one of the windows, with books and papers on it. She tells me that she sees herself that the place is kept just as she wishes it, for she has rather a passion for neatness, and you never can trust servants not to stand the books on their heads or study a vulgar symmetry in the arrangements. She never allows them in there, she says, except when they are at work under her eye; and she never allows anybody there except her guests, and her husband after he has smoked. Of course, her dog must be there; and one evening after her husband fell asleep in the arm-chair near her, the dog fell asleep on the fleece at her feet, and we heard them softly breathing in unison. She made a pretty little mocking mouth when the sound first became audible, and said that she ought really to have sent Mr. Makely out with the dog, for the dog ought to have the air every day, and she had been kept indoors; but sometimes Mr. Makely came home from business so tired that she hated to send him out, even for the dog’s sake, though he was so apt to become dyspeptic. “They won’t let you have dogs in some of the apartment-houses, but I tore up the first lease that had that clause in it, and I told Mr. Makely that I would rather live in a house all my days than any flat where my dog wasn’t as welcome as I was. Of course, they’re rather troublesome.”

The Makelys had no children, but it is seldom that the occupants of apartment-houses of a good class have children, though there is no clause in the lease against them. I verified this fact from Mrs. Makely herself, by actual inquiry, for in all the times that I had gone up and down in the elevator to her apartment I had never seen any children. She seemed at first to think I was joking, and not to like it, but when she found that I was in earnest she said that she did not suppose all the families living under that roof had more than four or five children among them. She said that it would be inconvenient; and I could not allege the tenement-houses in the poor quarters of the city, where children seemed to swarm, for it is but too probable that they do not regard convenience in such places, and that neither parents nor children are more comfortable for their presence.

V

Comfort is the American ideal, in a certain way, and comfort is certainly what is studied in such an apartment as the Makelys inhabit. We got to talking about it, and the ease of life in such conditions, and it was then she made me that offer to show me her flat, and let me report to the Altrurians concerning it. She is all impulse, and she asked, How would I like to see it now? and when I said I should be delighted, she spoke to her husband, and told him that she was going to show me through the flat. He roused himself promptly, and went before us, at her bidding, to turn up the electrics in the passages and rooms, and then she led the way out through the dining-room.

“This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth room of the eight,” she said, and as she spoke she pushed open the door of a small room, blazing with light and dense with the fumes of the dinner and the dish-washing which was now going on in a closet opening out of the kitchen.

She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an alcove, which she said went with the flat, and, “Lena,” she said to the cook, “this is the Altrurian gentleman I was telling you about, and I want him to see your kitchen. Can I take him into your room?”

The cook said, “Oh yes, ma’am,” and she gave me a good stare, while Mrs. Makely went to the kitchen window and made me observe that it let in the outside air, though the court that it opened into was so dark that one had to keep the electrics going in the kitchen night and day. “Of course, it’s an expense,” she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She added, in a low, rapid tone, “You must excuse my introducing the cook. She has read all about you in the papers — you didn’t know, I suppose, that there were reporters that day of your delightful talk in the mountains, but I had them — and she was wild, when she heard you were coming, and made me promise to let her have a sight of you somehow. She says she wants to go and live in Altruria, and if you would like to take home a cook, or a servant of any kind, you wouldn’t have much trouble. Now here,” she ran on, without a moment’s pause, while she flung open another door, “is what you won’t find in every apartment-house, even very good ones, and that’s a back elevator. Sometimes there are only stairs, and they make the poor things climb the whole way up from the basement, when they come in, and all your marketing has to be brought up that way, too; sometimes they send it up on a kind of dumb-waiter, in the cheap places, and you give your orders to the market-men down below through a speaking-tube. But here we have none of that bother, and this elevator is for the kitchen and housekeeping part of the flat. The grocer’s and the butcher’s man, and anybody who has packages for you, or trunks, or that sort of thing, use it, and, of course, it’s for the servants, and they appreciate not having to walk up as much as anybody.”

“Oh yes,” I said, and she shut the elevator door and opened another a little beyond it.

“This is our guest chamber,” she continued, as she ushered me into a very pretty room, charmingly furnished. “It isn’t very light by day, for it opens on a court, like the kitchen and the servants’ room here,” and with that she whipped out of the guest chamber and into another doorway across the corridor. This room was very much narrower, but there were two small beds in it, very neat and clean, with some furnishings that were in keeping, and a good carpet under foot. Mrs. Makely was clearly proud of it, and expected me to applaud it; but I waited for her to speak, which upon the whole she probably liked as well.

“I only keep two servants, because in a flat there isn’t really room for more, and I put out the wash and get in cleaning-women when it’s needed. I like to use my servants well, because it pays, and I hate to see anybody imposed upon. Some people put in a double-decker, as they call it — a bedstead with two tiers, like the berths on a ship; but I think that’s a shame, and I give them two regular beds, even if it does crowd them a little more and the beds have to be rather narrow. This room has outside air, from the court, and, though it’s always dark, it’s very pleasant, as you see.” I did not say that I did not see, and this sufficed Mrs. Makely.

“Now,” she said, “I’ll show you our rooms,” and she flew down the corridor towards two doors that stood open side by side and flashed into them before me. Her husband was already in the first she entered, smiling in supreme content with his wife, his belongings, and himself.

“This is a southern exposure, and it has a perfect gush of sun from morning till night. Some of the flats have the kitchen at the end, and that’s stupid; you can have a kitchen in any sort of hole, for you can keep on the electrics, and with them the air is perfectly good. As soon as I saw these chambers, and found out that they would let you keep a dog, I told Mr. Makely to sign the lease instantly, and I would see to the rest.”

She looked at me, and I praised the room and its dainty tastefulness to her heart’s content, so that she said: “Well, it’s some satisfaction to show you anything, Mr. Homos, you are so appreciative. I’m sure you’ll give a good account of us to the Altrurians. Well, now we’ll go back to the pa — drawing-room. This is the end of the story.”

“Well,” said her husband, with a wink at me, “I thought it was to be continued in our next,” and he nodded towards the door that opened from his wife’s bower into the room adjoining.

“Why, you poor old fellow!” she shouted. “I forgot all about your room,” and she dashed into it before us and began to show it off. It was equipped with every bachelor luxury, and with every appliance for health and comfort. “And here,” she said, “he can smoke, or anything, as long as he keeps the door shut. Oh, good gracious! I forgot the bath-room,” and they both united in showing me this, with its tiled floor and walls and its porcelain tub; and then Mrs. Makely flew up the corridor before us. “Put out the electrics, Dick!” she called back over her shoulder.

VI

When we were again seated in the drawing-room, which she had been so near calling a parlor, she continued to bubble over with delight in herself and her apartment. “Now, isn’t it about perfect?” she urged, and I had to own that it was indeed very convenient and very charming; and in the rapture of the moment she invited me to criticise it.

“I see very little to criticise,” I said, “from your point of view; but I hope you won’t think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?”

She laughed. “Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your questions in the mountains.”

“She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones,” said her husband, helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me.

“It is about your servants,” I began.

“Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on.”

“You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or their bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?”

The lady laughed heartily. “The waitress is in the front of the house several hours every morning at her work, and they both have an afternoon off once a week. Some people only let them go once a fortnight; but I think they are human beings as well as we are, and I let them go every week.”

“But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in electric-light perpetually?”

“Electric-light is very healthy, and it doesn’t heat the air!” the lady triumphed, “I can assure you that she thinks she’s very well off; and so she is.” I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she asked me, rather stiffly, “Is there any other inquiry you would like to make?”

“Yes,” I said, “but I do not think you would like it.”

“Now, I assure you, Mr. Homos, you were never more mistaken in your life. I perfectly delight in your na�vet�. I know that the Altrurians don’t think as we do about some things, and I don’t expect it. What is it you would like to ask?”

“Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different elevator from yourselves?”

“Why, good gracious!” cried the lady.— “aren’t they different from us in every way? To be sure, they dress up in their ridiculous best when they go out, but you couldn’t expect us to let them use the front elevator? I don’t want to go up and down with my own cook, and I certainly don’t with my neighbor’s cook!”

“Yes, I suppose you would feel that an infringement of your social dignity. But if you found yourself beside a cook in a horse-car or other public conveyance, you would not feel personally affronted?”

“No, that is a very different thing. That is something we cannot control. But, thank goodness, we can control our elevator, and if I were in a house where I had to ride up and down with the servants I would no more stay in it than I would in one where I couldn’t keep a dog. I should consider it a perfect outrage. I cannot understand you, Mr. Homos! You are a gentleman, and you must have the traditions of a gentleman, and yet you ask me such a thing as that!”

I saw a cast in her husband’s eye which I took for a hint not to press the matter, and so I thought I had better say, “It is only that in Altruria we hold serving in peculiar honor.”

“Well,” said the lady, scornfully, “if you went and got your servants from an intelligence-office, and had to look up their references, you wouldn’t hold them in very much honor. I tell you they look out for their interests as sharply as we do for ours, and it’s nothing between us but a question of—”

“Business,” suggested her husband.

“Yes,” she assented, as if this clinched the matter.

“That’s what I’m always telling you, Dolly, and yet you will try to make them your friends, as soon as you get them into your house. You want them to love you, and you know that sentiment hasn’t got anything to do with it.”

“Well, I can’t help it, Dick. I can’t live with a person without trying to like them and wanting them to like me. And then, when the ungrateful things are saucy, or leave me in the lurch as they do half the time, it almost breaks my heart. But I’m thankful to say that in these hard times they won’t be apt to leave a good place without a good reason.”

“Are there many seeking employment?” I asked this because I thought it was safe ground.

“Well, they just stand around in the office as thick!” said the lady. “And the Americans are trying to get places as well as the foreigners. But I won’t have Americans. They are too uppish, and they are never half so well trained as the Swedes or the Irish. They still expect to be treated as one of the family. I suppose,” she continued, with a lingering ire in her voice, “that in Altruria you do treat them as one of the family?”

“We have no servants, in the American sense,” I answered, as inoffensively as I could.

Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked her indignation. “And I should like to know how much worse it is to have a back elevator for the servants than it is to have the basement door for the servants, as you always do when you live in a separate house?”

“I should think it was no worse,” I admitted, and I thought this a good chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. “I wish, Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in separate houses in New York.”

She was instantly pacified. “Why, I should be delighted. I only wish my friend Mrs. Bellington Strange was back from Europe; then I could show you a model house. I mean to take you there, as soon as she gets home. She’s a kind of Altrurian herself, you know. She was my dearest friend at school, and it almost broke my heart when she married Mr. Strange, so much older, and her inferior in every way. But she’s got his money now, and oh, the good she does do with it! I know you’ll like each other, Mr. Homos. I do wish Eva was at home!”

I said that I should be very glad to meet an American Altrurian, but that now I wished she would tell me about the normal New York house, and what was its animating principle, beginning with the basement door.

She laughed and said, “Why, it’s just like any other house!”

VII

I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of American life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is; for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less dreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities of goodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator forbid the plutocratic man to be what the plutocratic scheme of life implies. He is often merciful, kindly, and generous, as I have told you already, in spite of conditions absolutely egotistical. You would think that the Americans would be abashed in view of the fact that their morality is often in contravention of their economic principles, but apparently they are not so, and I believe that for the most part they are not aware of the fact. Nevertheless, the fact is there, and you must keep it in mind, if you would conceive of them rightly. You can in no other way account for the contradictions which you will find in my experiences among them; and these are often so bewildering that I have to take myself in hand, from time to time, and ask myself what mad world I have fallen into, and whether, after all, it is not a ridiculous nightmare. I am not sure that, when I return and we talk these things over together, I shall be able to overcome your doubts of my honesty, and I think that when I no longer have them before my eyes I shall begin to doubt my own memory. But for the present I can only set down what I at least seem to see, and trust you to accept it, if you cannot understand it.

Perhaps I can aid you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans should be what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief that all men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, since they still cling to the economical ideals of Europe, and hold that men are born socially unequal, and deny them the liberty and happiness which can come from equality alone. It is in their public life and civic life that Altruria prevails; it is in their social and domestic life that Europe prevails; and here, I think, is the severest penalty they must pay for excluding women from political affairs; for women are at once the best and the worst Americans: the best because their hearts are the purest, the worst because their heads are the idlest. “Another contradiction!” you will say, and I cannot deny it; for, with all their cultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, but only intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, they reflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements which have made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them in such vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to the sphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has left them, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialities which engross the European women, and which have formed the life of the sex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and social freedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity and import. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more perspective than children, and their reading and their talk about reading seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

In fine, the American house as it is, the American household, is what the American woman makes it and wills it to be, whether she wishes it to be so or not; for I often find that the American woman wills things that she in no wise wishes. What the normal New York house is, however, I had great difficulty in getting Mrs. Makely to tell me, for, as she said quite frankly, she could not imagine my not knowing. She asked me if I really wanted her to begin at the beginning, and, when I said that I did, she took a little more time to laugh at the idea, and then she said, “I suppose you mean a brown-stone, four-story house in the middle of a block?”

“Yes, I think that is what I mean,” I said.

“Well,” she began, “those high steps that they all have, unless they’re English-basement houses, really give them another story, for people used to dine in the front room of their basements. You’ve noticed the little front yard, about as big as a handkerchief, generally, and the steps leading down to the iron gate, which is kept locked, and the basement door inside the gate? Well, that’s what you might call the back elevator of a house, for it serves the same purpose: the supplies are brought in there, and market-men go in and out, and the ashes, and the swill, and the servants — that you object to so much. We have no alleys in New York, the blocks are so narrow, north and south; and, of course, we have no back doors; so we have to put the garbage out on the sidewalk — and it’s nasty enough, goodness knows. Underneath the sidewalk there are bins where people keep their coal and kindling. You’ve noticed the gratings in the pavements?”

I said yes, and I was ashamed to own that at first I had thought them some sort of registers for tempering the cold in winter; this would have appeared ridiculous in the last degree to my hostess, for the Americans have as yet no conception of publicly modifying the climate, as we do.

“Back of what used to be the dining-room, and what is now used for a laundry, generally, is the kitchen, with closets between, of course, and then the back yard, which some people make very pleasant with shrubs and vines; the kitchen is usually dark and close, and the girls can only get a breath of fresh air in the yard; I like to see them; but generally it’s taken up with clothes-lines, for people in houses nearly all have their washing done at home. Over the kitchen is the dining-room, which takes up the whole of the first floor, with the pantry, and it almost always has a bay-window out of it; of course, that overhangs the kitchen, and darkens it a little more, but it makes the dining-room so pleasant. I tell my husband that I should be almost willing to live in a house again, just on account of the dining-room bay-window. I had it full of flowers in pots, for the southern sun came in; and then the yard was so nice for the dog; you didn’t have to take him out for exercise, yourself; he chased the cats there and got plenty of it. I must say that the cats on the back fences were a drawback at night; to be sure, we have them here, too; it’s seven stories down, but you do hear them, along in the spring. The parlor, or drawing-room, is usually rather long, and runs from the dining-room to the front of the house, though where the house is very deep they have a sort of middle room, or back parlor. Dick, get some paper and draw it. Wouldn’t you like to see a plan of the floor?”

I said that I should, and she bade her husband make it like their old house in West Thirty-third Street. We all looked at it together.

“This is the front door,” Mrs. Makely explained, “where people come in, and then begins the misery of a house — stairs! They mostly go up straight, but sometimes they have them curve a little, and in the new houses the architects have all sorts of little dodges for squaring them and putting landings. Then, on the second floor — draw it, Dick — you have two nice, large chambers, with plenty of light and air, before and behind. I do miss the light and air in a flat, there’s no denying it.”

“You’ll go back to a house yet, Dolly,” said her husband.

“Never!” she almost shrieked, and he winked at me, as if it were the best joke in the world. “Never, as long as houses have stairs!”

“Put in an elevator,” he suggested.

“Well, that is what Eveleth Strange has, and she lets the servants use it, too,” and Mrs. Makely said, with a look at me: “I suppose that would please you, Mr. Homos. Well, there’s a nice side-room over the front door here, and a bath-room at the rear. Then you have more stairs, and large chambers, and two side-rooms. That makes plenty of chambers for a small family. I used to give two of the third-story rooms to my two girls. I ought really to have made them sleep in one; it seemed such a shame to let the cook have a whole large room to herself; but I had nothing else to do with it, and she did take such comfort in it, poor old thing! You see, the rooms came wrong in our house, for it fronted north, and I had to give the girls sunny rooms or else give them front rooms, so that it was as broad as it was long. I declare, I was perplexed about it the whole time we lived there, it seemed so perfectly anomalous.”

“And what is an English-basement house like?” I ventured to ask, in interruption of the retrospective melancholy she had fallen into.

“Oh, never live in an English-basement house, if you value your spine!” cried the lady. “An English-basement house is nothing but stairs. In the first place, it’s only one room wide, and it’s a story higher than the high-stoop house. It’s one room forward and one back, the whole way up; and in an English-basement it’s always up, and never down. If I had my way, there wouldn’t one stone be left upon another in the English-basements in New York.”

I have suffered Mrs. Makely to be nearly as explicit to you as she was to me; for the kind of house she described is of the form ordinarily prevailing in all American cities, and you can form some idea from it how city people live here. I ought perhaps to tell you that such a house is fitted with every housekeeping convenience, and that there is hot and cold water throughout, and gas everywhere. It has fireplaces in all the rooms, where fires are often kept burning for pleasure; but it is really heated from a furnace in the basement, through large pipes carried to the different stories, and opening into them by some such registers as we use. The separate houses sometimes have steam-heating, but not often. They each have their drainage into the sewer of the street, and this is trapped and trapped again, as in the houses of our old plutocratic cities, to keep the poison of the sewer from getting into the houses.

VIII

You will be curious to know something concerning the cost of living in such a house, and you may be sure that I did not fail to question Mrs. Makely on this point. She was at once very volubly communicative; she told me all she knew, and, as her husband said, a great deal more.

“Why, of course,” she began, “you can spend all you have in New York, if you like, and people do spend fortunes every year. But I suppose you mean the average cost of living in a brown-stone house, in a good block, that rents for $1800 or $2000 a year, with a family of three or four children, and two servants. Well, what should you say, Dick?”

“Ten or twelve thousand a year — fifteen,” answered her husband.

“Yes, fully that,” she answered, with an effect of disappointment in his figures. “We had just ourselves, and we never spent less than seven, and we didn’t dress, and we didn’t entertain, either, to speak of. But you have to live on a certain scale, and generally you live up to your income.”

“Quite,” said Mr. Makely.

“I don’t know what makes it cost so. Provisions are cheap enough, and they say people live in as good style for a third less in London. There used to be a superstition that you could live for less in a flat, and they always talk to you about the cost of a furnace, and a man to tend it and keep the snow shovelled off your sidewalk, but that is all stuff. Five hundred dollars will make up the whole difference, and more. You pay quite as much rent for a decent flat, and then you don’t get half the room. No, if it wasn’t for the stairs, I wouldn’t live in a flat for an instant. But that makes all the difference.”

“And the young people,” I urged— “those who are just starting in life — how do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000 a year?”

“Poor things!” she returned. “I don’t know how they manage. They board till they go distracted, or they dry up and blow away; or else the wife has a little money, too, and they take a small flat and ruin themselves. Of course, they want to live nicely and like other people.”

“But if they didn’t?”

“Why, then they could live delightfully. My husband says he often wishes he was a master-mechanic in New York, with a thousand a year, and a flat for twelve dollars a month; he would have the best time in the world.”

Her husband nodded his acquiescence. “Fighting-cock wouldn’t be in it,” he said. “Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing.”

“But you can’t all do it,” I ventured, “and, from what I see of the simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don’t all try.”

“Why, no,” he said. “Some of us were talking about that the other night at the club, and one of the fellows was saying that he believed there was as much old-fashioned, quiet, almost countrified life in New York, among the great mass of the people, as you’d find in any city in the world. Said you met old codgers that took care of their own furnaces, just as you would in a town of five thousand inhabitants.”

“Yes, that’s all very well,” said his wife; “but they wouldn’t be nice people. Nice people want to live nicely. And so they live beyond their means or else they scrimp and suffer. I don’t know which is worst.”

“But there is no obligation to do either?” I asked.

“Oh yes, there is,” she returned. “If you’ve been born in a certain way, and brought up in a certain way, you can’t get out of it. You simply can’t. You have got to keep in it till you drop. Or a woman has.”

“That means the woman’s husband, too,” said Mr. Makely, with his wink for me. “Always die together.”

In fact, there is the same competition in the social world as in the business world; and it is the ambition of every American to live in some such house as the New York house; and as soon as a village begins to grow into a town, such houses are built. Still, the immensely greater number of the Americans necessarily live so simply and cheaply that such a house would be almost as strange to them as to an Altrurian. But while we should regard its furnishings as vulgar and unwholesome, most Americans would admire and covet its rich rugs or carpets, its papered walls, and thickly curtained windows, and all its foolish ornamentation, and most American women would long to have a house like the ordinary high-stoop New York house, that they might break their backs over its stairs, and become invalids, and have servants about them to harass them and hate them.

Of course, I put it too strongly, for there is often, illogically, a great deal of love between the American women and their domestics, though why there should be any at all I cannot explain, except by reference to that mysterious personal equation which modifies all conditions here. You will have made your reflection that the servants, as they are cruelly called (I have heard them called so in their hearing, and wondered they did not fly tooth and nail at the throat that uttered the insult), form really no part of the house, but are aliens in the household and the family life. In spite of this fact, much kindness grows up between them and the family, and they do not always slight the work that I cannot understand their ever having any heart in. Often they do slight it, and they insist unsparingly upon the scanty privileges which their mistresses seem to think a monstrous invasion of their own rights. The habit of oppression grows upon the oppressor, and you would find tender-hearted women here, gentle friends, devoted wives, loving mothers, who would be willing that their domestics should remain indoors, week in and week out, and, where they are confined in the ridiculous American flat, never see the light of day. In fact, though the Americans do not know it, and would be shocked to be told it, their servants are really slaves, who are none the less slaves because they cannot be beaten, or bought and sold except by the week or month, and for the price which they fix themselves, and themselves receive in the form of wages. They are social outlaws, so far as the society of the family they serve is concerned, and they are restricted in the visits they receive and pay among themselves. They are given the worst rooms in the house, and they are fed with the food that they have prepared, only when it comes cold from the family table; in the wealthier houses, where many of them are kept, they are supplied with a coarser and cheaper victual bought and cooked for them apart from that provided for the family. They are subject, at all hours, to the pleasure or caprice of the master or mistress. Every circumstance of their life is an affront to that just self-respect which even Americans allow is the right of every human being. With the rich, they are said to be sometimes indolent, dishonest, mendacious, and all that Plato long ago explained that slaves must be; but in the middle-class families they are mostly faithful, diligent, and reliable in a degree that would put to shame most men who hold positions of trust, and would leave many ladies whom they relieve of work without ground for comparison.

IX

After Mrs. Makely had told me about the New York house, we began to talk of the domestic service, and I ventured to hint some of the things that I have so plainly said to you. She frankly consented to my whole view of the matter, for if she wishes to make an effect or gain a point she has a magnanimity that stops at nothing short of self-devotion. “I know it,” she said. “You are perfectly right; but here we are, and what are we to do? What do you do in Altruria, I should like to know?”

I said that in Altruria we all worked, and that personal service was honored among us like medical attendance in America; I did not know what other comparison to make; but I said that any one in health would think it as unwholesome and as immoral to let another serve him as to let a doctor physic him. At this Mrs. Makely and her husband laughed so that I found myself unable to go on for some moments, till Mrs. Makely, with a final shriek, shouted to him: “Dick, do stop, or I shall die! Excuse me, Mr. Homos, but you are so deliciously funny, and I know you’re just joking. You won’t mind my laughing? Do go on.”

I tried to give her some notion as to how we manage, in our common life, which we have simplified so much beyond anything that this barbarous people dream of; and she grew a little soberer as I went on, and seemed at least to believe that I was not, as her husband said, stuffing them; but she ended, as they always do here, by saying that it might be all very well in Altruria, but it would never do in America, and that it was contrary to human nature to have so many things done in common. “Now, I’ll tell you,” she said. “After we broke up housekeeping in Thirty-third Street, we stored our furniture—”

“Excuse me,” I said. “How — stored?”

“Oh, I dare say you never store your furniture in Altruria. But here we have hundreds of storage warehouses of all sorts and sizes, packed with furniture that people put into them when they go to Europe, or get sick to death of servants and the whole bother of house-keeping; and that’s what we did; and then, as my husband says, we browsed about for a year or two. First, we tried hotelling it, and we took a hotel apartment furnished, and dined at the hotel table, until I certainly thought I should go off, I got so tired of it. Then we hired a suite in one of the family hotels that there are so many of, and got out enough of our things to furnish it, and had our meals in our rooms; they let you do that for the same price, often they are glad to have you, for the dining-room is so packed. But everything got to tasting just the same as everything else, and my husband had the dyspepsia so bad he couldn’t half attend to business, and I suffered from indigestion myself, cooped up in a few small rooms, that way; and the dog almost died; and finally we gave that up, and took an apartment, and got out our things — the storage cost as much as the rent of a small house — and put them into it, and had a caterer send in the meals as they do in Europe. But it isn’t the same here as it is in Europe, and we got so sick of it in a month that I thought I should scream when I saw the same old dishes coming on the table, day after day. We had to keep one servant — excuse me, Mr. Homos: domestic — anyway, to look after the table and the parlor and chamber work, and my husband said we might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, and so we got in a cook; and, bad as it is, it’s twenty million times better than anything else you can do. Servants are a plague, but you have got to have them, and so I have resigned myself to the will of Providence. If they don’t like it, neither do I, and so I fancy it’s about as broad as it’s long.” I have found this is a favorite phrase of Mrs. Makely’s, and that it seems to give her a great deal of comfort.

“And you don’t feel that there’s any harm in it?” I ventured to ask.

“Harm in it?” she repeated. “Why, aren’t the poor things glad to get the work? What would they do without it?”

“From what I see of your conditions I should be afraid that they would starve,” I said.

“Yes, they can’t all get places in shops or restaurants, and they have to do something, or starve, as you say,” she said; and she seemed to think what I had said was a concession to her position.

“But if it were your own case?” I suggested. “If you had no alternatives but starvation and domestic service, you would think there was harm in it, even although you were glad to take a servant’s place?”

I saw her flush, and she answered, haughtily, “You must excuse me if I refuse to imagine myself taking a servant’s place, even for the sake of argument.”

“And you are quite right,” I said. “Your American instinct is too strong to brook even in imagination the indignities which seem daily, hourly, and momently inflicted upon servants in your system.”

To my great astonishment she seemed delighted by this conclusion. “Yes,” she said, and she smiled radiantly, “and now you understand how it is that American girls won’t go out to service, though the pay is so much better and they are so much better housed and fed — and everything. Besides,” she added, with an irrelevance which always amuses her husband, though I should be alarmed by it for her sanity if I did not find it so characteristic of women here, who seem to be mentally characterized by the illogicality of the civilization, “they’re not half so good as the foreign servants. They’ve been brought up in homes of their own, and they’re uppish, and they have no idea of anything but third-rate boarding-house cooking, and they’re always hoping to get married, so that, really, you have no peace of your life with them.”

“And it never seems to you that the whole relation is wrong?” I asked.

“What relation?”

“That between maid and mistress, the hirer and the hireling.”

“Why, good gracious!” she burst out. “Didn’t Christ himself say that the laborer was worthy of his hire? And how would you get your work done, if you didn’t pay for it?”

“It might be done for you, when you could not do it yourself, from affection.”

“From affection!” she returned, with the deepest derision. “Well, I rather think I shall have to do it myself if I want it done from affection! But I suppose you think I ought to do it myself, as the Altrurian ladies do! I can tell you that in America it would be impossible for a lady to do her own work, and there are no intelligence-offices where you can find girls that want to work for love. It’s as broad as it’s long.”

“It’s simply business,” her husband said.

They were right, my dear friend, and I was wrong, strange as it must appear to you. The tie of service, which we think as sacred as the tie of blood, can be here only a business relation, and in these conditions service must forever be grudgingly given and grudgingly paid. There is something in it, I do not quite know what, for I can never place myself precisely in an American’s place, that degrades the poor creatures who serve, so that they must not only be social outcasts, but must leave such a taint of dishonor on their work that one cannot even do it for one’s self without a sense of outraged dignity. You might account for this in Europe, where ages of prescriptive wrong have distorted the relation out of all human wholesomeness and Christian loveliness; but in America, where many, and perhaps most, of those who keep servants and call them so are but a single generation from fathers who earned their bread by the sweat of their brows, and from mothers who nobly served in all household offices, it is in the last degree bewildering. I can only account for it by that bedevilment of the entire American ideal through the retention of the English economy when the English polity was rejected. But at the heart of America there is this ridiculous contradiction, and it must remain there until the whole country is Altrurianized. There is no other hope; but I did not now urge this point, and we turned to talk of other things, related to the matters we had been discussing.

“The men,” said Mrs. Makely, “get out of the whole bother very nicely, as long as they are single, and even when they’re married they are apt to run off to the club when there’s a prolonged upheaval in the kitchen.”

“I don’t, Dolly,” suggested her husband.

“No, you don’t, Dick,” she returned, fondly. “But there are not many like you.”

He went on, with a wink at me, “I never live at the club, except in summer, when you go away to the mountains.”

“Well, you know I can’t very well take you with me,” she said.

“Oh, I couldn’t leave my business, anyway,” he said, and he laughed.

X

I had noticed the vast and splendid club-houses in the best places in the city, and I had often wondered about their life, which seemed to me a blind groping towards our own, though only upon terms that forbade it to those who most needed it. The clubs here are not like our groups, the free association of sympathetic people, though one is a little more literary, or commercial, or scientific, or political than another; but the entrance to each is more or less jealously guarded; there is an initiation-fee, and there are annual dues, which are usually heavy enough to exclude all but the professional and business classes, though there are, of course, successful artists and authors in them. During the past winter I visited some of the most characteristic, where I dined and supped with the members, or came alone when one of these put me down, for a fortnight or a month.

They are equipped with kitchens and cellars, and their wines and dishes are of the best. Each is, in fact, like a luxurious private house on a large scale; outwardly they are palaces, and inwardly they have every feature and function of a princely residence complete, even to a certain number of guest-chambers, where members may pass the night, or stay indefinitely in some cases, and actually live at the club. The club, however, is known only to the cities and larger towns, in this highly developed form; to the ordinary, simple American of the country, or of the country town of five or ten thousand people, a New York club would be as strange as it would be to any Altrurian.

“Do many of the husbands left behind in the summer live at the club?” I asked.

“All that have a club do,” he said. “Often there’s a very good table d’h�te dinner that you couldn’t begin to get for the same price anywhere else; and there are a lot of good fellows there, and you can come pretty near forgetting that you’re homeless, or even that you’re married.”

He laughed, and his wife said: “You ought to be ashamed, Dick; and me worrying about you all the time I’m away, and wondering what the cook gives you here. Yes,” she continued, addressing me, “that’s the worst thing about the clubs. They make the men so comfortable that they say it’s one of the principal obstacles to early marriages. The young men try to get lodgings near them, so that they can take their meals there, and they know they get much better things to eat than they could have in a house of their own at a great deal more expense, and so they simply don’t think of getting married. Of course,” she said, with that wonderful, unintentional, or at least unconscious, frankness of hers, “I don’t blame the clubs altogether. There’s no use denying that girls are expensively brought up, and that a young man has to think twice before taking one of them out of the kind of home she’s used to and putting her into the kind of home he can give her. If the clubs have killed early marriages, the women have created the clubs.”

“Do women go much to them?” I asked, choosing this question as a safe one.

“Much!” she screamed. “They don’t go at all! They can’t! They won’t let us! To be sure, there are some that have rooms where ladies can go with their friends who are members, and have lunch or dinner; but as for seeing the inside of the club-house proper, where these great creatures” — she indicated her husband— “are sitting up, smoking and telling stories, it isn’t to be dreamed of.”

Her husband laughed. “You wouldn’t like the smoking, Dolly.”

“Nor the stories, some of them,” she retorted.

“Oh, the stories are always first-rate,” he said, and he laughed more than before.

“And they never gossip at the clubs, Mr. Homos — never!” she added.

“Well, hardly ever,” said her husband, with an intonation that I did not understand. It seemed to be some sort of catch-phrase.

“All I know,” said Mrs. Makely, “is that I like to have my husband belong to his club. It’s a nice place for him in summer; and very often in winter, when I’m dull, or going out somewhere that he hates, he can go down to his club and smoke a cigar, and come home just about the time I get in, and it’s much better than worrying through the evening with a book. He hates books, poor Dick!” She looked fondly at him, as if this were one of the greatest merits in the world. “But I confess I shouldn’t like him to be a mere club man, like some of them.”

“But how?” I asked.

“Why, belonging to five or six, or more, even; and spending their whole time at them, when they’re not at business.”

There was a pause, and Mr. Makely put on an air of modest worth, which he carried off with his usual wink towards me. I said, finally, “And if the ladies are not admitted to the men’s clubs, why don’t they have clubs of their own?”

“Oh, they have — several, I believe. But who wants to go and meet a lot of women? You meet enough of them in society, goodness knows. You hardly meet any one else, especially at afternoon teas. They bore you to death.”

Mrs. Makely’s nerves seemed to lie in the direction of a prolongation of this subject, and I asked my next question a little away from it. “I wish you would tell me, Mrs. Makely, something about your way of provisioning your household. You said that the grocer’s and butcher’s man came up to the kitchen with your supplies—”

“Yes, and the milkman and the iceman; the iceman always puts the ice into the refrigerator; it’s very convenient, and quite like your own house.”

“But you go out and select the things yourself the day before, or in the morning?”

“Oh, not at all! The men come and the cook gives the order; she knows pretty well what we want on the different days, and I never meddle with it from one week’s end to the other, unless we have friends. The tradespeople send in their bills at the end of the month, and that’s all there is of it.” Her husband gave me one of his queer looks, and she went on: “When we were younger, and just beginning housekeeping, I used to go out and order the things myself; I used even to go to the big markets, and half kill myself trying to get things a little cheaper at one place and another, and waste more car-fare and lay up more doctor’s bills than it would all come to, ten times over. I used to fret my life out, remembering the prices; but now, thank goodness, that’s all over. I don’t know any more what beef is a pound than my husband does; if a thing isn’t good, I send it straight back, and that puts them on their honor, you know, and they have to give me the best of everything. The bills average about the same, from month to month; a little more if we have company but if they’re too outrageous, I make a fuss with the cook, and she scolds the men, and then it goes better for a while. Still, it’s a great bother.”

I confess that I did not see what the bother was, but I had not the courage to ask, for I had already conceived a wholesome dread of the mystery of an American lady’s nerves. So I merely suggested, “And that is the way that people usually manage?”

“Why,” she said, “I suppose that some old-fashioned people still do their marketing, and people that have to look to their outgoes, and know what every mouthful costs them. But their lives are not worth having. Eveleth Strange does it — or she did do it when she was in the country; I dare say she won’t when she gets back — just from a sense of duty, and because she says that a housekeeper ought to know about her expenses. But I ask her who will care whether she knows or not; and as for giving the money to the poor that she saves by spending economically, I tell her that the butchers and the grocers have to live, too, as well as the poor, and so it’s as broad as it’s long.”

XI

I could not make out whether Mr. Makely approved of his wife’s philosophy or not; I do not believe he thought much about it. The money probably came easily with him, and he let it go easily, as an American likes to do. There is nothing penurious or sordid about this curious people, so fierce in the pursuit of riches. When these are once gained, they seem to have no value to the man who has won them, and he has generally no object in life but to see his womankind spend them.

This is the season of the famous Thanksgiving, which has now become the national holiday, but has no longer any savor in it of the grim Puritanism it sprang from. It is now appointed by the president and the governors of the several states, in proclamations enjoining a pious gratitude upon the people for their continued prosperity as a nation, and a public acknowledgment of the divine blessings. The blessings are supposed to be of the material sort, grouped in the popular imagination as good times, and it is hard to see what they are when hordes of men and women of every occupation are feeling the pinch of poverty in their different degrees. It is not merely those who have always the wolf at their doors who are now suffering, but those whom the wolf never threatened before; those who amuse as well as those who serve the rich are alike anxious and fearful, where they are not already in actual want; thousands of poor players, as well as hundreds of thousands of poor laborers, are out of employment, and the winter threatens to be one of dire misery. Yet you would not imagine from the smiling face of things, as you would see it in the better parts of this great city, that there was a heavy heart or an empty stomach anywhere below it. In fact, people here are so used to seeing other people in want that it no longer affects them as reality; it is merely dramatic, or hardly so lifelike as that — it is merely histrionic. It is rendered still more spectacular to the imaginations of the fortunate by the melodrama of charity they are invited to take part in by endless appeals, and their fancy is flattered by the notion that they are curing the distress they are only slightly relieving by a gift from their superfluity. The charity, of course, is better than nothing, but it is a fleeting mockery of the trouble, at the best. If it were proposed that the city should subsidize a theatre a which the idle players could get employment in producing good plays at a moderate cost to the people, the notion would not be considered more ridiculous than that of founding municipal works for the different sorts of idle workers; and it would not be thought half so nefarious, for the proposition to give work by the collectivity is supposed to be in contravention of the sacred principle of monopolistic competition so dear to the American economist, and it would be denounced as an approximation to the surrender of the city to anarchism and destruction by dynamite.

But as I have so often said, the American life is in no wise logical, and you will not be surprised, though you may be shocked or amused, to learn that the festival of Thanksgiving is now so generally devoted to witnessing a game of football between the elevens of two great universities that the services at the churches are very scantily attended. The Americans are practical, if they are not logical, and this preference of football to prayer and praise on Thanksgiving-day has gone so far that now a principal church in the city holds its services on Thanksgiving-eve, so that the worshippers may not be tempted to keep away from their favorite game.

There is always a heavy dinner at home after the game, to console the friends of those who have lost and to heighten the joy of the winning side, among the comfortable people. The poor recognize the day largely as a sort of carnival. They go about in masquerade on the eastern avenues, and the children of the foreign races who populate that quarter penetrate the better streets, blowing horns and begging of the passers. They have probably no more sense of its difference from the old carnival of Catholic Europe than from the still older Saturnalia of pagan times. Perhaps you will say that a masquerade is no more pagan than a football game; and I confess that I have a pleasure in that innocent misapprehension of the holiday on the East Side. I am not more censorious of it than I am of the displays of festival cheer at the provision-stores or green-groceries throughout the city at this time. They are almost as numerous on the avenues as the drinking-saloons, and, thanks to them, the tasteful housekeeping is at least convenient in a high degree. The waste is inevitable with the system of separate kitchens, and it is not in provisions alone, but in labor and in time, a hundred cooks doing the work of one; but the Americans have no conception of our co-operative housekeeping, and so the folly goes on.

Meantime the provision-stores add much to their effect of crazy gayety on the avenues. The variety and harmony of colors is very great, and this morning I stood so long admiring the arrangement in one of them that I am afraid I rendered myself a little suspicious to the policeman guarding the liquor-store on the nearest corner; there seems always to be a policeman assigned to this duty. The display was on either side of the provisioner’s door, and began, on one hand, with a basal line of pumpkins well out on the sidewalk. Then it was built up with the soft white and cool green of cauliflowers and open boxes of red and white grapes, to the window that flourished in banks of celery and rosy apples. On the other side, gray-green squashes formed the foundation, and the wall was sloped upward with the delicious salads you can find here, the dark red of beets, the yellow of carrots, and the blue of cabbages. The association of colors was very artistic, and even the line of mutton carcasses overhead, with each a brace of grouse or half a dozen quail in its embrace, and flanked with long sides of beef at the four ends of the line, was picturesque, though the sight of the carnage at the provision-stores here would always be dreadful to an Altrurian; in the great markets it is intolerable. This sort of business is mostly in the hands of the Germans, who have a good eye for such effects as may be studied in it; but the fruiterers are nearly all Italians, and their stalls are charming. I always like, too, the cheeriness of the chestnut and peanut ovens of the Italians; the pleasant smell and friendly smoke that rise from them suggest a simple and homelike life which there are so any things in this great, weary, heedless city to make one forget.

XII

But I am allowing myself to wander too far from Mrs. Makely and her letter, which reached me only two days before Thanksgiving.

“MY DEAR MR. HOMOS, — Will you give me the pleasure of your company at dinner, on Thanksgiving-day, at eight o’clock, very informally. My friend, Mrs. Bellington Strange, has unexpectedly returned from Europe within the week, and I am asking a few friends, whom I can trust to excuse this very short notice, to meet her.

“With Mr. Makely’s best regards,

“Yours cordially,

“DOROTHEA MAKELY.

“The Sphinx,

“November the twenty sixth,

“Eighteen hundred and Ninety-three.”

I must tell you that it has been a fad with the ladies here to spell out their dates, and, though the fashion is waning, Mrs. Makely is a woman who would remain in such an absurdity among the very last. I will let you make your own conclusions concerning this, for though, as an Altrurian, I cannot respect her, I like her so much, and have so often enjoyed her generous hospitality, that I cannot bring myself to criticise her except by the implication of the facts. She is anomalous, but, to our way of thinking, all the Americans I have met are anomalous, and she has the merits that you would not logically attribute to her character. Of course, I cannot feel that her evident regard for me is the least of these, though I like to think that it is founded on more reason than the rest.

I have by this time become far too well versed in the polite insincerities of the plutocratic world to imagine that, because she asked me to come to her dinner very informally, I was not to come in all the state I could put into my dress. You know what the evening dress of men is here, from the costumes in our museum, and you can well believe that I never put on those ridiculous black trousers without a sense of their grotesqueness — that scrap of waistcoat reduced to a mere rim, so as to show the whole white breadth of the starched shirt-bosom, and that coat chopped away till it seems nothing but tails and lapels. It is true that I might go out to dinner in our national costume; in fact, Mrs. Makely has often begged me to wear it, for she says the Chinese wear theirs; but I have not cared to make the sensation which I must if I wore it; my outlandish views of life and my frank study of their customs signalize me quite sufficiently among the Americans.

At the hour named I appeared in Mrs. Makely’s drawing-room in all the formality that I knew her invitation, to come very informally, really meant. I found myself the first, as I nearly always do, but I had only time for a word or two with my hostess before the others began to come. She hastily explained that as soon as she knew Mrs. Strange was in New York she had despatched a note telling her that I was still here; and that as she could not get settled in time to dine at home, she must come and take Thanksgiving dinner with her. “She will have to go out with Mr. Makely; but I am going to put you next to her at table, for I want you both to have a good time. But don’t you forget that you are going to take me out.”

I said that I should certainly not forget it, and I showed her the envelope with my name on the outside, and hers on a card inside, which the serving-man at the door had given me in the hall, as the first token that the dinner was to be unceremonious.

She laughed, and said: “I’ve had the luck to pick up two or three other agreeable people that I know will be glad to meet you. Usually it’s such a scratch lot at Thanksgiving, for everybody dines at home that can, and you have to trust to the highways and the byways for your guests, if you give a dinner. But I did want to bring Mrs. Strange and you together, and so I chanced it. Of course, it’s a sent-in dinner, as you must have inferred from the man at the door; I’ve given my servants a holiday, and had Claret’s people do the whole thing. It’s as broad as it’s long, and, as my husband says, you might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb; and it saves bother. Everybody will know it’s sent in, so that nobody will be deceived. There’ll be a turkey in it somewhere, and cranberry sauce; I’ve insisted on that; but it won’t be a regular American Thanksgiving dinner, and I’m rather sorry, on your account, for I wanted you to see one, and I meant to have had you here, just with ourselves; but Eveleth Strange’s coming back put a new face on things, and so I’ve gone in for this affair, which isn’t at all what you would like. That’s the reason I tell you at once it’s sent in.”

XIII

I am so often at a loss for the connection in Mrs. Makely’s ideas that I am more patient with her incoherent jargon than you will be, I am afraid. It went on to much the effect that I have tried to report until the moment she took the hand of the guest who came next. They arrived, until there were eight of us in all, Mrs. Strange coming last, with excuses for being late. I had somehow figured her as a person rather mystical and recluse in appearance, perhaps on account of her name, and I had imagined her tall and superb. But she was, really, rather small, though not below the woman’s average, and she had a face more round than otherwise, with a sort of business-like earnestness, but a very charming smile, and presently, as I saw, an American sense of humor. She had brown hair and gray eyes, and teeth not too regular to be monotonous; her mouth was very sweet, whether she laughed or sat gravely silent. She at once affected me like a person who had been sobered beyond her nature by responsibilities, and had steadily strengthened under the experiences of life. She was dressed with a sort of personal taste, in a rich gown of black lace, which came up to her throat; and she did not subject me to that embarrassment I always feel in the presence of a lady who is much d�collet�e, when I sit next her or face to face with her: I cannot always look at her without a sense of taking an immodest advantage. Sometimes I find a kind of pathos in this sacrifice of fashion, which affects me as if the poor lady were wearing that sort of gown because she thought she really ought, and then I keep my eyes firmly on hers, or avert them altogether; but there are other cases which have not this appealing quality. Yet in the very worst of the cases it would be a mistake to suppose that there was a display personally meant of the display personally made. Even then it would be found that the gown was worn so because the dressmaker had made it so, and, whether she had made it in this country or in Europe, that she had made it in compliance with a European custom. In fact, all the society customs of the Americans follow some European original, and usually some English original; and it is only fair to say that in this particular custom they do not go to the English extreme.

We did not go out to dinner at Mrs. Makely’s by the rules of English precedence, because there are nominally no ranks here, and we could not; but I am sure it will not be long before the Americans will begin playing at precedence just as they now play at the other forms of aristocratic society. For the present, however, there was nothing for us to do but to proceed, when dinner was served, in such order as offered itself, after Mr. Makely gave his arm to Mrs. Strange; though, of course, the white shoulders of the other ladies went gleaming out before the white shoulders of Mrs. Makely shone beside my black ones. I have now become so used to these observances that they no longer affect me as they once did, and as I suppose my account of them must affect you, painfully, comically. But I have always the sense of having a part in amateur theatricals, and I do not see how the Americans can fail to have the same sense, for there is nothing spontaneous in them, and nothing that has grown even dramatically out of their own life.

Often when I admire the perfection of the stage-setting, it is with a vague feeling that I am derelict in not offering it an explicit applause. In fact, this is permitted in some sort and measure, as now when we sat down at Mrs. Makely’s exquisite table, and the ladies frankly recognized her touch in it. One of them found a phrase for it at once, and pronounced it a symphony in chrysanthemums; for the color and the character of these flowers played through all the appointments of the table, and rose to a magnificent finale in the vast group in the middle of the board, infinite in their caprices of tint and design. Another lady said that it was a dream, and then Mrs. Makely said, “No, a memory,” and confessed that she had studied the effect from her recollection of some tables at a chrysanthemum show held here year before last, which seemed failures because they were so simply and crudely adapted in the china and napery to merely one kind and color of the flower.

“Then,” she added, “I wanted to do something very chrysanthemummy, because it seems to me the Thanksgiving flower, and belongs to Thanksgiving quite as much as holly belongs to Christmas.”

Everybody applauded her intention, and they hungrily fell to upon the excellent oysters, with her warning that we had better make the most of everything in its turn, for she had conformed her dinner to the brevity of the notice she had given her guests.

XIV

Just what the dinner was I will try to tell you, for I think that it will interest you to know what people here think a very simple dinner. That is, people of any degree of fashion; for the unfashionable Americans, who are innumerably in the majority, have, no more than the Altrurians, seen such a dinner as Mrs. Makely’s. This sort generally sit down to a single dish of meat, with two or three vegetables, and they drink tea or coffee, or water only, with their dinner. Even when they have company, as they say, the things are all put on the table at once; and the average of Americans who have seen a dinner served in courses, after the Russian manner, invariable in the fine world here, is not greater than those who have seen a serving-man in livery. Among these the host piles up his guest’s plate with meat and vegetables, and it is passed from hand to hand till it reaches him; his drink arrives from the hostess by the same means. One maid serves the table in a better class, and two maids in a class still better; it is only when you reach people of very decided form that you find a man in a black coat behind your chair; Mrs. Makely, mindful of the informality of her dinner in everything, had two men.

I should say the difference between the Altrurians and the unfashionable Americans, in view of such a dinner as she gave us, would be that, while it would seem to us abominable for its extravagance, and revolting in its appeals to appetite, it would seem to most of such Americans altogether admirable and enviable, and would appeal to their ambition to give such a dinner themselves as soon as ever they could.

Well, with our oysters we had a delicate French wine, though I am told that formerly Spanish wines were served. A delicious soup followed the oysters, and then we had fish with sliced cucumbers dressed with oil and vinegar, like a salad; and I suppose you will ask what we could possibly have eaten more. But this was only the beginning, and next there came a course of sweetbreads with green peas. With this the champagne began at once to flow, for Mrs. Makely was nothing if not original, and she had champagne very promptly. One of the gentlemen praised her for it, and said you could not have it too soon, and he had secretly hoped it would have begun with the oysters. Next, we had a remove — a tenderloin of beef, with mushrooms, fresh, and not of the canned sort which it is usually accompanied with. This fact won our hostess more compliments from the gentlemen, which could not have gratified her more if she had dressed and cooked the dish herself. She insisted upon our trying the stewed terrapin, for, if it did come in a little by the neck and shoulders, it was still in place at a Thanksgiving dinner, because it was so American; and the stuffed peppers, which, if they were not American, were at least Mexican, and originated in the kitchen of a sister republic. There were one or two other side-dishes, and, with all, the burgundy began to be poured out.

Mr. Makely said that claret all came now from California, no matter what French ch�teau they named it after, but burgundy you could not err in. His guests were now drinking the different wines, and to much the same effect, I should think, as if they had mixed them all in one cup; though I ought to say that several of the ladies took no wine, and kept me in countenance after the first taste I was obliged to take of each, in order to pacify my host.

You must know that all the time there were plates of radishes, olives, celery, and roasted almonds set about that every one ate of without much reference to the courses. The talking and the feasting were at their height, but there was a little flagging of the appetite, perhaps, when it received the stimulus of a water-ice flavored with rum. After eating it I immediately experienced an extraordinary revival of my hunger (I am ashamed to confess that I was gorging myself like the rest), but I quailed inwardly when one of the men-servants set down before Mr. Makely a roast turkey that looked as large as an ostrich. It was received with cries of joy, and one of the gentlemen said, “Ah, Mrs. Makely, I was waiting to see how you would interpolate the turkey, but you never fail. I knew you would get it in somewhere. But where,” he added, in a burlesque whisper, behind his hand, “are the—”

“Canvasback duck?” she asked, and at that moment the servant set before the anxious inquirer a platter of these renowned birds, which you know something of already from the report our emissaries have given of their cult among the Americans.

Every one laughed, and after the gentleman had made a despairing flourish over them with a carving-knife in emulation of Mr. Makely’s emblematic attempt upon the turkey, both were taken away and carved at a sideboard. They were then served in slices, the turkey with cranberry sauce, and the ducks with currant jelly; and I noticed that no one took so much of the turkey that he could not suffer himself to be helped also to the duck. I must tell you that there a salad with the duck, and after that there was an ice-cream, with fruit and all manner of candied fruits, and candies, different kinds of cheese, coffee, and liqueurs to drink after the coffee.

“Well, now,” Mrs. Makely proclaimed, in high delight with her triumph, “I must let you imagine the pumpkin-pie. I meant to have it, because it isn’t really Thanksgiving without it. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, see where it would come in.”

XV

The sally of the hostess made them all laugh, and they began to talk about the genuine American character of the holiday, and what a fine thing it was to have something truly national. They praised Mrs. Makely for thinking of so many American dishes, and the facetious gentleman said that she rendered no greater tribute than was due to the overruling Providence which had so abundantly bestowed them upon the Americans as a people. “You must have been glad, Mrs. Strange,” he said to the lady at my side, “to get back to our American oysters. There seems nothing else so potent to bring us home from Europe.”

“I’m afraid,” she answered, “that I don’t care so much for the American oyster as I should. But I am certainly glad to get back.”

“In time for the turkey, perhaps?”

“No, I care no more for the turkey than for the oyster of my native land,” said the lady.

“Ah, well, say the canvasback duck, then? The canvasback duck is no alien. He is as thoroughly American as the turkey, or as any of us.”

“No, I should not have missed him, either,” persisted the lady.

“What could one have missed,” the gentleman said, with a bow to the hostess, “in the dinner Mrs. Makely has given us? If there had been nothing, I should not have missed it,” and when the laugh at his drolling had subsided he asked Mrs. Strange: “Then, if it is not too indiscreet, might I inquire what in the world has lured you again to our shores, if it was not the oyster, nor the turkey, nor yet the canvasback?”

“The American dinner-party,” said the lady, with the same burlesque.

“Well,” he consented, “I think I understand you. It is different from the English dinner-party in being a festivity rather than a solemnity; though, after all, the American dinner is only a condition of the English dinner. Do you find us much changed, Mrs. Strange?”

“I think we are every year a little more European,” said the lady. “One notices it on getting home.”

“I supposed we were so European already,” returned the gentleman, “that a European landing among us would think he had got back to his starting-point in a sort of vicious circle. I am myself so thoroughly Europeanized in all my feelings and instincts that, do you know, Mrs. Makely, if I may confess it without offence—”

“Oh, by all means!” cried the hostess.

“When that vast bird which we have been praising, that colossal roast turkey, appeared, I felt a shudder go through my delicate substance, such as a refined Englishman might have experienced at the sight, and I said to myself, quite as if I were not one of you, ‘Good Heavens! now they will begin talking through their noses and eating with their knives.’ It’s what I might have expected!”

It was impossible not to feel that this gentleman was talking at me; if the Americans have a foreign guest, they always talk at him more or less; and I was not surprised when he said, “I think our friend, Mr. Homos, will conceive my fine revolt from the crude period of our existence which the roast turkey marks as distinctly as the graffiti of the cave-dweller proclaim his epoch.”

“No,” I protested, “I am afraid that I have not the documents for the interpretation of your emotion. I hope you will take pity on my ignorance and tell me just what you mean.”

The others said they none of them knew, either, and would like to know, and the gentleman began by saying that he had been going over the matter in his mind on his way to dinner, and he had really been trying to lead up to it ever since we sat down. “I’ve been struck, first of all, by the fact, in our evolution, that we haven’t socially evolved from ourselves; we’ve evolved from the Europeans, from the English. I don’t think you’ll find a single society rite with us now that had its origin in our peculiar national life, if we have a peculiar national life; I doubt it, sometimes. If you begin with the earliest thing in the day, if you begin with breakfast, as society gives breakfasts, you have an English breakfast, though American people and provisions.”

“I must say, I think they’re both much nicer,” said Mrs. Makely.

“Ah, there I am with you! We borrow the form, but we infuse the spirit. I am talking about the form, though. Then, if you come to the society lunch, which is almost indistinguishable from the society breakfast, you have the English lunch, which is really an undersized English dinner. The afternoon tea is English again, with its troops of eager females and stray, reluctant males; though I believe there are rather more men at the English teas, owing to the larger leisure class in England. The afternoon tea and the ‘at home’ are as nearly alike as the breakfast and the lunch. Then, in the course of time, we arrive at the great society function, the dinner; and what is the dinner with us but the dinner of our mother-country?”

“It is livelier,” suggested Mrs. Makely, again.

“Livelier, I grant you, but I am still speaking of the form, and not of the spirit. The evening reception, which is gradually fading away, as a separate rite, with its supper and its dance, we now have as the English have it, for the people who have not been asked to dinner. The ball, which brings us round to breakfast again, is again the ball of our Anglo-Saxon kin beyond the seas. In short, from the society point of view we are in everything their mere rinsings.”

“Nothing of the kind!” cried Mrs. Makely. “I won’t let you say such a thing! On Thanksgiving-day, too! Why, there is the Thanksgiving dinner itself! If that isn’t purely American, I should like to know what is.”

“It is purely American, but it is strictly domestic; it is not society. Nobody but some great soul like you, Mrs. Makely, would have the courage to ask anybody to a Thanksgiving dinner, and even you ask only such easy-going house-friends as we are proud to be. You wouldn’t think of giving a dinner-party on Thanksgiving?”

“No, I certainly shouldn’t. I should think it was very presuming; and you are all as nice as you can be to have come to-day; I am not the only great soul at the table. But that is neither here nor there. Thanksgiving is a purely American thing, and it’s more popular than ever. A few years ago you never heard of it outside of New England.”

The gentleman laughed. “You are perfectly right, Mrs. Makely, as you always are. Thanksgiving is purely American. So is the corn-husking, so is the apple-bee, so is the sugar-party, so is the spelling-match, so is the church-sociable; but none of these have had their evolution in our society entertainments. The New Year’s call was also purely American, but that is now as extinct as the dodo, though I believe the other American festivities are still known in the rural districts.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Makely, “and I think it’s a great shame that we can’t have some of them in a refined form in society. I once went to a sugar-party up in New Hampshire when I was a girl, and I never enjoyed myself so much in my life. I should like to make up a party to go to one somewhere in the Catskills in March. Will you all go? It would be something to show Mr. Homos. I should like to show him something really American before he goes home. There’s nothing American left in society!”

“You forget the American woman,” suggested the gentleman. “She is always American, and she is always in society.”

“Yes,” returned our hostess, with a thoughtful air, “you’re quite right in that. One always meets more women than men in society. But it’s because the men are so lazy, and so comfortable at their clubs, they won’t go. They enjoy themselves well enough in society after they get there, as I tell my husband when he grumbles over having to dress.”

“Well,” said the gentleman, “a great many things, the day-time things, we really can’t come to, because we don’t belong to the aristocratic class, as you ladies do, and we are busy down-town. But I don’t think we are reluctant about dinner; and the young fellows are nearly always willing to go to a ball, if the supper’s good and it’s a house where they don’t feel obliged to dance. But what do you think, Mr. Homos?” he asked. “How does your observation coincide with my experience?”

I answered that I hardly felt myself qualified to speak, for though I had assisted at the different kinds of society rites he had mentioned, thanks to the hospitality of my friends in New York, I knew the English functions only from a very brief stay in England on my way here, and from what I had read of them in English fiction and in the relations of our emissaries. He inquired into our emissary system, and the company appeared greatly interested in such account of it as I could briefly give.

“Well,” he said, “that would do while you kept it to yourselves; but now that your country is known to the plutocratic world, your public documents will be apt to come back to the countries your emissaries have visited, and make trouble. The first thing you know some of our bright reporters will get on to one of your emissaries, and interview him, and then we shall get what you think of us at first hands. By-the-by, have you seen any of those primitive social delights which Mrs. Makely regrets so much?”

“I!” our hostess protested. But then she perceived that he was joking, and she let me answer.

I said that I had seen them nearly all, during the past year, in New England and in the West, but they appeared to me inalienable of the simpler life of the country, and that I was not surprised they should not have found an evolution in the more artificial society of the cities.

“I see,” he returned, “that you reserve your opinion of our more artificial society; but you may be sure that our reporters will get it out of you yet before you leave us.”

“Those horrid reporters!” one of the ladies irrelevantly sighed.

The gentleman resumed: “In the mean time, I don’t mind saying how it strikes me. I think you are quite right about the indigenous American things being adapted only to the simpler life of the country and the smaller towns. It is so everywhere. As soon as people become at all refined they look down upon what is their own as something vulgar. But it is peculiarly so with us. We have nothing national that is not connected with the life of work, and when we begin to live the life of pleasure we must borrow from the people abroad, who have always lived the life of pleasure.”

“Mr. Homos, you know,” Mrs. Makely explained for me, as if this were the aptest moment, “thinks we all ought to work. He thinks we oughtn’t to have any servants.”

“Oh no, my dear lady,” I put in. “I don’t think that of you as you are. None of you could see more plainly than I do that in your conditions you must have servants, and that you cannot possibly work unless poverty obliges you.”

The other ladies had turned upon me with surprise and horror at Mrs. Makely’s words, but they now apparently relented, as if I had fully redeemed myself from the charge made against me. Mrs. Strange alone seemed to have found nothing monstrous in my supposed position. “Sometimes,” she said, “I wish we had to work, all of us, and that we could be freed from our servile bondage to servants.”

Several of the ladies admitted that it was the greatest slavery in the world, and that it would be comparative luxury to do one’s own work. But they all asked, in one form or another, what were they to do, and Mrs. Strange owned that she did not know. The facetious gentleman asked me how the ladies did in Altruria, and when I told them, as well as I could, they were, of course, very civil about it, but I could see that they all thought it impossible, or, if not impossible, then ridiculous. I did not feel bound to defend our customs, and I knew very well that each woman there was imagining herself in our conditions with the curse of her plutocratic tradition still upon her. They could not do otherwise, any of them, and they seemed to get tired of such effort as they did make.

Mrs. Makely rose, and the other ladies rose with her, for the Americans follow the English custom in letting the men remain at table after the women have left. But on this occasion I found it varied by a pretty touch from the French custom, and the men, instead of merely standing up while the women filed out, gave each his arm, as far as the drawing-room, to the lady he had brought in to dinner. Then we went back, and what is the pleasantest part of the dinner to most men began for us.

XVI

I must say, to the credit of the Americans, that although the eating and drinking among them appear gross enough to an Altrurian, you are not revolted by the coarse stories which the English sometimes tell as soon as the ladies have left them. If it is a men’s dinner, or more especially a men’s supper, these stories are pretty sure to follow the coffee; but when there have been women at the board, some sense of their presence seems to linger in the more delicate American nerves, and the indulgence is limited to two or three things off color, as the phrase is here, told with anxious glances at the drawing-room doors, to see if they are fast shut.

I do not remember just what brought the talk back from these primrose paths to that question of American society forms, but presently some one said he believed the church-sociable was the thing in most towns beyond the apple-bee and sugar-party stage, and this opened the inquiry as to how far the church still formed the social life of the people in cities. Some one suggested that in Brooklyn it formed it altogether, and then they laughed, for Brooklyn is always a joke with the New-Yorkers; I do not know exactly why, except that this vast city is so largely a suburb, and that it has a great number of churches and is comparatively cheap. Then another told of a lady who had come to New York (he admitted, twenty years ago), and was very lonely, as she had no letters until she joined a church. This at once brought her a general acquaintance, and she began to find herself in society; but as soon as she did so she joined a more exclusive church, where they took no notice of strangers. They all laughed at that bit of human nature, as they called it, and they philosophized the relation of women to society as a purely business relation. The talk ranged to the mutable character of society, and how people got into it, or were of it, and how it was very different from what it once was, except that with women it was always business. They spoke of certain new rich people with affected contempt; but I could see that they were each proud of knowing such millionaires as they could claim for acquaintance, though they pretended to make fun of the number of men-servants you had to run the gantlet of in their houses before you could get to your hostess.

One of my commensals said he had noticed that I took little or no wine, and, when I said that we seldom drank it in Altruria, he answered that he did not think I could make that go in America, if I meant to dine much. “Dining, you know, means overeating,” he explained, “and if you wish to overeat you must overdrink. I venture to say that you will pass a worse night than any of us, Mr. Homos, and that you will be sorrier to-morrow than I shall.” They were all smoking, and I confess that their tobacco was secretly such an affliction to me that I was at one moment in doubt whether I should take a cigar myself or ask leave to join the ladies.

The gentleman who had talked so much already said: “Well, I don’t mind dining, a great deal, especially with Makely, here, but I do object to supping, as I have to do now and then, in the way of pleasure. Last Saturday night I sat down at eleven o’clock to blue-point oysters, consomm�, stewed terrapin — yours was very good, Makely; I wish I had taken more of it — lamb chops with peas, redhead duck with celery mayonnaise, Nesselrode pudding, fruit, cheese, and coffee, with sausages, caviare, radishes, celery, and olives interspersed wildly, and drinkables and smokables ad libitum; and I can assure you that I felt very devout when I woke up after church-time in the morning. It is this turning night into day that is killing us. We men, who have to go to business the next morning, ought to strike, and say that we won’t go to anything later than eight-o’clock dinner.”

“Ah, then the women would insist upon our making it four-o’clock tea,” said another.

Our host seemed to be reminded of something by the mention of the women, and he said, after a glance at the state of the cigars, “Shall we join the ladies?”

One of the men-servants had evidently been waiting for this question. He held the door open, and we all filed into the drawing-room.

Mrs. Makely hailed me with, “Ah, Mr. Homos, I’m so glad you’ve come! We poor women have been having a most dismal time!”

“Honestly,” asked the funny gentleman, “don’t you always, without us?” “Yes, but this has been worse than usual. Mrs. Strange has been asking us how many people we supposed there were in this city, within five minutes’ walk of us, who had no dinner to-day. Do you call that kind?”

“A little more than kin and less than kind, perhaps,” the gentleman suggested. “But what does she propose to do about it?”

He turned towards Mrs. Strange, who answered, “Nothing. What does any one propose to do about it?”

“Then, why do you think about it?”

“I don’t. It thinks about itself. Do you know that poem of Longfellow’s, ‘The Challenge’?”

“No, I never heard of it.”

“Well, it begins in his sweet old way, about some Spanish king who was killed before a city he was besieging, and one of his knights sallies out of the camp and challenges the people of the city, the living and the dead, as traitors. Then the poet breaks off, apropos de rien:

    ‘There is a greater army

      That besets us round with strife,

    A numberless, starving army,

      At all the gates of life.

    The poverty-stricken millions

      Who challenge our wine and bread

    And impeach us all for traitors,

      Both the living and the dead.

    And whenever I sit at the banquet,

      Where the feast and song are high,

    Amid the mirth and the music

      I can hear that fearful cry.

    And hollow and haggard faces

      Look into the lighted hall,

    And wasted hands are extended

      To catch the crumbs that fall.

    For within there is light and plenty,

      And odors fill the air;

    But without there is cold and darkness,

      And hunger and despair.

    And there, in the camp of famine,

      In wind and cold and rain,

    Christ, the great Lord of the Army,

      Lies dead upon the plain.’”

“Ah,” said the facetious gentleman, “that is fine! We really forget how fine Longfellow was. It is so pleasant to hear you quoting poetry, Mrs. Strange! That sort of thing has almost gone out; and it’s a pity.”

XVII

Our fashion of offering hospitality on the impulse would be as strange here as offering it without some special inducement for its acceptance. The inducement is, as often as can be, a celebrity or eccentricity of some sort, or some visiting foreigner; and I suppose that I have been a good deal used myself in one quality or the other. But when the thing has been done, fully and guardedly at all points, it does not seem to have been done for pleasure, either by the host or the guest. The dinner is given in payment of another dinner; or out of ambition by people who are striving to get forward in society; or by great social figures who give regularly a certain number of dinners every season. In either case it is eaten from motives at once impersonal and selfish. I do not mean to say that I have not been at many dinners where I felt nothing perfunctory either in host or guest, and where as sweet and gay a spirit ruled as at any of our own simple feasts. Still, I think our main impression of American hospitality would be that it was thoroughly infused with the plutocratic principle, and that it meant business.

I am speaking now of the hospitality of society people, who number, after all, but a few thousands out of the many millions of American people. These millions are so far from being in society, even when they are very comfortable, and on the way to great prosperity, if they are not already greatly prosperous, that if they were suddenly confronted with the best society of the great Eastern cities they would find it almost as strange as so many Altrurians. A great part of them have no conception of entertaining except upon an Altrurian scale of simplicity, and they know nothing and care less for the forms that society people value themselves upon. When they begin, in the ascent of the social scale, to adopt forms, it is still to wear them lightly and with an individual freedom and indifference; it is long before anxiety concerning the social law renders them vulgar.

Yet from highest to lowest, from first to last, one invariable fact characterizes them all, and it may be laid down as an axiom that in a plutocracy the man who needs a dinner is the man who is never asked to dine. I do not say that he is not given a dinner. He is very often given a dinner, and for the most part he is kept from starving to death; but he is not suffered to sit at meat with his host, if the person who gives him a meal can be called his host. His need of the meal stamps him with a hopeless inferiority, and relegates him morally to the company of the swine at their husks, and of Lazarus, whose sores the dogs licked. Usually, of course, he is not physically of such a presence as to fit him for any place in good society short of Abraham’s bosom; but even if he were entirely decent, or of an inoffensive shabbiness, it would not be possible for his benefactors, in any grade of society, to ask him to their tables. He is sometimes fed in the kitchen; where the people of the house feed in the kitchen themselves, he is fed at the back door.

We were talking of this the other night at the house of that lady whom Mrs. Makely invited me specially to meet on Thanksgiving-day. It happened then, as it often happens here, that although I was asked to meet her, I saw very little of her. It was not so bad as it sometimes is, for I have been asked to meet people, very informally, and passed the whole evening with them, and yet not exchanged a word with them. Mrs. Makely really gave me a seat next Mrs. Strange at table, and we had some unimportant conversation; but there was a lively little creature vis-�-vis of me, who had a fancy of addressing me so much of her talk that my acquaintance with. Mrs. Strange rather languished through the dinner, and she went away so soon after the men rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room that I did not speak to her there. I was rather surprised, then, to receive a note from her a few days later, asking me to dinner; and I finally went, I am ashamed to own, more from curiosity than from any other motive. I had been, in the mean time, thoroughly coached concerning her by Mrs. Makely, whom I told of my invitation, and who said, quite frankly, that she wished Mrs. Strange had asked her, too. “But Eveleth Strange wouldn’t do that,” she explained, “because it would have the effect of paying me back. I’m so glad, on your account, that you’re going, for I do want you to know at least one American woman that you can unreservedly approve of; I know you don’t begin to approve of me; and I was so vexed that you really had no chance to talk with her that night you met her here; it seemed to me as if she ran away early just to provoke me; and, to tell you the truth, I thought she had taken a dislike to you. I wish I could tell you just what sort of a person she is, but it would be perfectly hopeless, for you haven’t got the documents, and you never could get them. I used to be at school with her, and even then she wasn’t like any of the other girls. She was always so original, and did things from such a high motive, that afterwards, when we were all settled, I was perfectly thunderstruck at her marrying old Bellington Strange, who was twice her age and had nothing but his money; he was not related to the New York Bellingtons at all, and nobody knows how he got the name; nobody ever heard of the Stranges. In fact, people say that he used to be plain Peter B. Strange till he married Eveleth, and she made him drop the Peter and blossom out in the Bellington, so that he could seem to have a social as well as a financial history. People who dislike her insisted that they were not in the least surprised at her marrying him; that the high-motive business was just her pose; and that she had jumped at the chance of getting him. But I always stuck up for her — and I know that she did it for the sake of her family, who were all as poor as poor, and were dependent on her after her father went to smash in his business. She was always as high-strung and romantic as she could be, but I don’t believe that even then she would have taken Mr. Strange if there had been anybody else. I don’t suppose any one else ever looked at her, for the young men are pretty sharp nowadays, and are not going to marry girls without a cent, when there are so many rich girls, just as charming every way; you can’t expect them to. At any rate, whatever her motive was, she had her reward, for Mr. Strange died within a year of their marriage, and she got all his money. There was no attempt to break the will, for Mr. Strange seemed to be literally of no family; and she’s lived quietly on in the house he bought her ever since, except when she’s in Europe, and that’s about two-thirds of the time. She has her mother with her, and I suppose that her sisters and her cousins and her aunts come in for outdoor aid. She’s always helping somebody. They say that’s her pose, now; but, if it is, I don’t think it’s a bad one; and certainly, if she wanted to get married again, there would be no trouble, with her three millions. I advise you to go to her dinner, by all means, Mr. Homos. It will be something worth while, in every way, and perhaps you’ll convert her to Altrurianism; she’s as hopeful a subject as I know.”

XVIII

I was one of the earliest of the guests, for I cannot yet believe that people do not want me to come exactly when they say they do. I perceived, however, that one other gentleman had come before me, and I was both surprised and delighted to find that this was my acquaintance Mr. Bullion, the Boston banker. He professed as much pleasure at our meeting as I certainly felt; but after a few words he went on talking with Mrs. Strange, while I was left to her mother, an elderly woman of quiet and even timid bearing, who affected me at once as born and bred in a wholly different environment. In fact, every American of the former generation is almost as strange to it in tradition, though not in principle, as I am; and I found myself singularly at home with this sweet lady, who seemed glad of my interest in her. I was taken from her side to be introduced to a lady, on the opposite side of the room, who said she had been promised my acquaintance by a friend of hers, whom I had met in the mountains — Mr. Twelvemough; did I remember him? She gave a little cry while still speaking, and dramatically stretched her hand towards a gentleman who entered at the moment, and whom I saw to be no other than Mr. Twelvemough himself. As soon as he had greeted our hostess he hastened up to us, and, barely giving himself time to press the still outstretched hand of my companion, shook mine warmly, and expressed the greatest joy at seeing me. He said that he had just got back to town, in a manner, and had not known I was here, till Mrs. Strange had asked him to meet me. There were not a great many other guests, when they all arrived, and we sat down, a party not much larger than at Mrs. Makely’s.

I found that I was again to take out my hostess, but I was put next the lady with whom I had been talking; she had come without her husband, who was, apparently, of a different social taste from herself, and had an engagement of his own; there was an artist and his wife, whose looks I liked; some others whom I need not specify were there, I fancied, because they had heard of Altruria and were curious to see me. As Mr. Twelvemough sat quite at the other end of the table, the lady on my right could easily ask me whether I liked his books. She said, tentatively, people liked them because they felt sure when they took up one of his novels they had not got hold of a tract on political economy in disguise.

It was this complimentary close of a remark, which scarcely began with praise, that made itself heard across the table, and was echoed with a heartfelt sigh from the lips of another lady.

“Yes,” she said, “that is what I find such a comfort in Mr. Twelvemough’s books.”

“We were speaking of Mr. Twelvemough’s books,” the first lady triumphed, and several began to extol them for being fiction pure and simple, and not dealing with anything but loves of young people.

Mr. Twelvemough sat looking as modest as he could under the praise, and one of the ladies said that in a novel she had lately read there was a description of a surgical operation that made her feel as if she had been present at a clinic. Then the author said that he had read that passage, too, and found it extremely well done. It was fascinating, but it was not art.

The painter asked, Why was it not art?

The author answered, Well, if such a thing as that was art, then anything that a man chose to do in a work of imagination was art.

“Precisely,” said the painter— “art is choice.”

“On that ground,” the banker interposed, “you could say that political economy was a fit subject for art, if an artist chose to treat it.”

“It would have its difficulties,” the painter admitted, “but there are certain phases of political economy, dramatic moments, human moments, which might be very fitly treated in art. For instance, who would object to Mr. Twelvemough’s describing an eviction from an East Side tenement-house on a cold winter night, with the mother and her children huddled about the fire the father had kindled with pieces of the household furniture?”

“I should object very much, for one,” said the lady who had objected to the account of the surgical operation. “It would be too creepy. Art should give pleasure.”

“Then you think a tragedy is not art?” asked the painter.

“I think that these harrowing subjects are brought in altogether too much,” said the lady. “There are enough of them in real life, without filling all the novels with them. It’s terrible the number of beggars you meet on the street, this winter. Do you want to meet them in Mr. Twelvemough’s novels, too?”

“Well, it wouldn’t cost me any money there. I shouldn’t have to give.”

“You oughtn’t to give money in real life,” said the lady. “You ought to give charity tickets. If the beggars refuse them, it shows they are impostors.”

“It’s some comfort to know that the charities are so active,” said the elderly young lady, “even if half the letters one gets do turn out to be appeals from them.”

“It’s very disappointing to have them do it, though,” said the artist, lightly. “I thought there was a society to abolish poverty. That doesn’t seem to be so active as the charities this winter. Is it possible they’ve found it a failure?”

“Well,” said Mr. Bullion, “perhaps they have suspended during the hard times.”

They tossed the ball back and forth with a lightness the Americans have, and I could not have believed, if I had not known how hardened people become to such things here, that they were almost in the actual presence of hunger and cold. It was within five minutes’ walk of their warmth and surfeit; and if they had lifted the window and called, “Who goes there?” the houselessness that prowls the night could have answered them from the street below, “Despair!”

“I had an amusing experience,” Mr. Twelvemough began, “when I was doing a little visiting for the charities in our ward, the other winter.”

“For the sake of the literary material?” the artist suggested.

“Partly for the sake of the literary material; you know we have to look for our own everywhere. But we had a case of an old actor’s son, who had got out of all the places he had filled, on account of rheumatism, and could not go to sea, or drive a truck, or even wrap gas-fixtures in paper any more.”

“A checkered employ,” the banker mused aloud.

“It was not of a simultaneous nature,” the novelist explained. “So he came on the charities, and, as I knew the theatrical profession a little, and how generous it was with all related to it, I said that I would undertake to look after his case. You know the theory is that we get work for our patients, or clients, or whatever they are, and I went to a manager whom I knew to be a good fellow, and I asked him for some sort of work. He said, Yes, send the man round, and he would give him a job copying parts for a new play he had written.”

The novelist paused, and nobody laughed.

“It seems to me that your experience is instructive, rather than amusing,” said the banker. “It shows that something can be done, if you try.”

“Well,” said Mr. Twelvemough, “I thought that was the moral, myself, till the fellow came afterwards to thank me. He said that he considered himself very lucky, for the manager had told him that there were six other men had wanted that job.”

Everybody laughed now, and I looked at my hostess in a little bewilderment. She murmured, “I suppose the joke is that he had befriended one man at the expense of six others.”

“Oh,” I returned, “is that a joke?”

No one answered, but the lady at my right asked, “How do you manage with poverty in Altruria?”

I saw the banker fix a laughing eye on me, but I answered, “In Altruria we have no poverty.”

“Ah, I knew you would say that!” he cried out. “That’s what he always does,” he explained to the lady. “Bring up any one of our little difficulties, and ask how they get over it in Altruria, and he says they have nothing like it. It’s very simple.”

They all began to ask me questions, but with a courteous incredulity which I could feel well enough, and some of my answers made them laugh, all but my hostess, who received them with a gravity that finally prevailed. But I was not disposed to go on talking of Altruria then, though they all protested a real interest, and murmured against the hardship of being cut off with so brief an account of our country as I had given them.

“Well,” said the banker at last, “if there is no cure for our poverty, we might as well go on and enjoy ourselves.”

“Yes,” said our hostess, with a sad little smile, “we might as well enjoy ourselves.”

XIX

The talk at Mrs. Strange’s table took a far wider range than my meagre notes would intimate, and we sat so long that it was almost eleven before the men joined the ladies in the drawing-room. You will hardly conceive of remaining two, three, or four hours at dinner, as one often does here, in society; out of society the meals are despatched with a rapidity unknown to the Altrurians. Our habit of listening to lectors, especially at the evening repast, and then of reasoning upon what we have heard, prolongs our stay at the board; but the fondest listener, the greatest talker among us, would be impatient of the delay eked out here by the great number and the slow procession of the courses served. Yet the poorest American would find his ideal realized rather in the long-drawn-out gluttony of the society dinner here than in our temperate simplicity.

At such a dinner it is very hard to avoid a surfeit, and I have to guard myself very carefully, lest, in the excitement of the talk, I gorge myself with everything, in its turn. Even at the best, my overloaded stomach often joins with my conscience in reproaching me for what you would think a shameful excess at table. Yet, wicked as my riot is, my waste is worse, and I have to think, with contrition, not only of what I have eaten, but of what I have left uneaten, in a city where so many wake and sleep in hunger.

The ladies made a show of lingering after we joined them in the drawing-room; but there were furtive glances at the clock, and presently her guests began to bid Mrs. Strange good-night. When I came up and offered her my hand, she would not take it, but murmured, with a kind of passion: “Don’t go! I mean it! Stay, and tell us about Altruria — my mother and me!”

I was by no means loath, for I must confess that all I had seen and heard of this lady interested me in her more and more. I felt at home with her, too, as with no other society woman I have met; she seemed to me not only good, but very sincere, and very good-hearted, in spite of the world she lived in. Yet I have met so many disappointments here, of the kind that our civilization wholly fails to prepare us for, that I should not have been surprised to find that Mrs. Strange had wished me to stay, not that she might hear me talk about Altruria, but that I might hear her talk about herself. You must understand that the essential vice of a system which concentres a human being’s thoughts upon his own interests, from the first moment of responsibility, colors and qualifies every motive with egotism. All egotists are unconscious, for otherwise they would be intolerable to themselves; but some are subtler than others; and as most women have finer natures than most men everywhere, and in America most women have finer minds than most men, their egotism usually takes the form of pose. This is usually obvious, but in some cases it is so delicately managed that you do not suspect it, unless some other woman gives you a hint of it, and even then you cannot be sure of it, seeing the self-sacrifice, almost to martyrdom, which the poseuse makes for it. If Mrs. Makely had not suggested that some people attributed a pose to Mrs. Strange, I should certainly never have dreamed of looking for it, and I should have been only intensely interested, when she began, as soon as I was left alone with her and her mother:

“You may not know how unusual I am in asking this favor of you, Mr. Homos; but you might as well learn from me as from others that I am rather unusual in everything. In fact, you can report in Altruria, when you get home, that you found at least one woman in America whom fortune had smiled upon in every way, and who hated her smiling fortune almost as much as she hated herself. I’m quite satisfied,” she went on, with a sad mockery, “that fortune is a man, and an American; when he has given you all the materials for having a good time, he believes that you must be happy, because there is nothing to hinder. It isn’t that I want to be happy in the greedy way that men think we do, for then I could easily be happy. If you have a soul which is not above buttons, buttons are enough. But if you expect to be of real use, to help on, and to help out, you will be disappointed. I have not the faith that they say upholds you Altrurians in trying to help out, if I don’t see my way out. It seems to me that my reason has some right to satisfaction, and that, if I am a woman grown, I can’t be satisfied with the assurances they would give to little girls — that everything is going on well. Any one can see that things are not going on well. There is more and more wretchedness of every kind, not hunger of body alone, but hunger of soul. If you escape one, you suffer the other, because, if you have a soul, you must long to help, not for a time, but for all time. I suppose,” she asked, abruptly, “that Mrs. Makely has told you something about me?”

“Something,” I admitted.

“I ask,” she went on, “because I don’t want to bore you with a statement of my case, if you know it already. Ever since I heard you were in New York I have wished to see you, and to talk with you about Altruria; I did not suppose that there would be any chance at Mrs. Makely’s, and there wasn’t; and I did not suppose there would be any chance here, unless I could take courage to do what I have done now. You must excuse it, if it seems as extraordinary a proceeding to you as it really is; I wouldn’t at all have you think it is usual for a lady to ask one of her guests to stay after the rest, in order, if you please, to confess herself to him. It’s a crime without a name.”

She laughed, not gayly, but humorously, and then went on, speaking always with a feverish eagerness which I find it hard to give you a sense of, for the women here have an intensity quite beyond our experience of the sex at home.

“But you are a foreigner, and you come from an order of things so utterly unlike ours that perhaps you will be able to condone my offence. At any rate, I have risked it.” She laughed again, more gayly, and recovered herself in a cheerfuller and easier mood. “Well, the long and the short of it is that I have come to the end of my tether. I have tried, as truly as I believe any woman ever did, to do my share, with money and with work, to help make life better for those whose life is bad; and though one mustn’t boast of good works, I may say that I have been pretty thorough, and, if I’ve given up, it’s because I see, in our state of things, no hope of curing the evil. It’s like trying to soak up the drops of a rainstorm. You do dry up a drop here and there; but the clouds are full of them, and, the first thing you know, you stand, with your blotting-paper in your hand, in a puddle over your shoe-tops. There is nothing but charity, and charity is a failure, except for the moment. If you think of the misery around you, that must remain around you for ever and ever, as long as you live, you have your choice — to go mad and be put into an asylum, or go mad and devote yourself to society.”

XX

While Mrs. Strange talked on, her mother listened quietly, with a dim, submissive smile and her hands placidly crossed in her lap. She now said: “It seems to be very different now from what it was in my time. There are certainly a great many beggars, and we used never to have one. Children grew up, and people lived and died, in large towns, without ever seeing one. I remember, when my husband first took me abroad, how astonished we were at the beggars. Now I meet as many in New York as I met in London or in Rome. But if you don’t do charity, what can you do? Christ enjoined it, and Paul says—”

“Oh, people never do the charity that Christ meant,” said Mrs. Strange; “and, as things are now, how could they? Who would dream of dividing half her frocks and wraps with poor women, or selling all and giving to the poor? That is what makes it so hopeless. We know that Christ was perfectly right, and that He was perfectly sincere in what He said to the good young millionaire; but we all go away exceeding sorrowful, just as the good young millionaire did. We have to, if we don’t want to come on charity ourselves. How do you manage about that?” she asked me; and then she added, “But, of course, I forgot that you have no need of charity.”

“Oh yes, we have,” I returned; and I tried, once more, as I have tried so often with Americans, to explain how the heavenly need of giving the self continues with us, but on terms that do not harrow the conscience of the giver, as self-sacrifice always must here, at its purest and noblest. I sought to make her conceive of our nation as a family, where every one was secured against want by the common provision, and against the degrading and depraving inequality which comes from want. The “dead-level of equality” is what the Americans call the condition in which all would be as the angels of God, and they blasphemously deny that He ever meant His creatures to be alike happy, because some, through a long succession of unfair advantages, have inherited more brain or brawn or beauty than others. I found that this gross and impious notion of God darkened even the clear intelligence of a woman like Mrs. Strange; and, indeed, it prevails here so commonly that it is one of the first things advanced as an argument against the Altrurianization of America.

I believe I did, at last, succeed in showing her how charity still continues among us, but in forms that bring neither a sense of inferiority to him who takes nor anxiety to him who gives. I said that benevolence here often seemed to involve, essentially, some such risk as a man should run if he parted with a portion of the vital air which belonged to himself and his family, in succoring a fellow-being from suffocation; but that with us, where it was no more possible for one to deprive himself of his share of the common food, shelter, and clothing, than of the air he breathed, one could devote one’s self utterly to others without that foul alloy of fear which I thought must basely qualify every good deed in plutocratic conditions.

She said that she knew what I meant, and that I was quite right in my conjecture, as regarded men, at least; a man who did not stop to think what the effect, upon himself and his own, his giving must have, would be a fool or a madman; but women could often give as recklessly as they spent, without any thought of consequences, for they did not know how money came.

“Women,” I said, “are exterior to your conditions, and they can sacrifice themselves without wronging any one.”

“Or, rather,” she continued, “without the sense of wronging any one. Our men like to keep us in that innocence or ignorance; they think it is pretty, or they think it is funny; and as long as a girl is in her father’s house, or a wife is in her husband’s, she knows no more of money-earning or money-making than a child. Most grown women among us, if they had a sum of money in the bank, would not know how to get it out. They would not know how to indorse a check, much less draw one. But there are plenty of women who are inside the conditions, as much as men are — poor women who have to earn their bread, and rich-women who have to manage their property. I can’t speak for the poor women; but I can speak for the rich, and I can confess for them that what you imagine is true. The taint of unfaith and distrust is on every dollar that you dole out, so that, as far as the charity of the rich is concerned, I would read Shakespeare:

‘It curseth him that gives, and him that takes.’”

“Perhaps that is why the rich give comparatively so little. The poor can never understand how much the rich value their money, how much the owner of a great fortune dreads to see it less. If it were not so, they would surely give more than they do; for a man who has ten millions could give eight of them without feeling the loss; the man with a hundred could give ninety and be no nearer want. Ah, it’s a strange mystery! My poor husband and I used to talk of it a great deal, in the long year that he lay dying; and I think I hate my superfluity the more because I know he hated it so much.”

A little trouble had stolen into her impassioned tones, and there was a gleam, as of tears, in the eyes she dropped for a moment. They were shining still when she lifted them again to mine.

“I suppose,” she said, “that Mrs. Makely told you something of my marriage?”

“Eveleth!” her mother protested, with a gentle murmur.

“Oh, I think I can be frank with Mr. Homos. He is not an American, and he will understand, or, at least, he will not misunderstand. Besides, I dare say I shall not say anything worse than Mrs. Makely has said already. My husband was much older than I, and I ought not to have married him; a young girl ought never to marry an old man, or even a man who is only a good many years her senior. But we both faithfully tried to make the best of our mistake, not the worst, and I think this effort helped us to respect each other, when there couldn’t be any question of more. He was a rich man, and he had made his money out of nothing, or, at least, from a beginning of utter poverty. But in his last years he came to a sense of its worthlessness, such as few men who have made their money ever have. He was a common man, in a great many ways; he was imperfectly educated, and he was ungrammatical, and he never was at home in society; but he had a tender heart and an honest nature, and I revere his memory, as no one would believe I could without knowing him as I did. His money became a burden and a terror to him; he did not know what to do with it, and he was always morbidly afraid of doing harm with it; he got to thinking that money was an evil in itself.”

“That is what we think,” I ventured.

“Yes, I know. But he had thought this out for himself, and yet he had times when his thinking about it seemed to him a kind of craze, and, at any rate, he distrusted himself so much that he died leaving it all to me. I suppose he thought that perhaps I could learn how to give it without hurting; and then he knew that, in our state of things, I must have some money to keep the wolf from the door. And I am afraid to part with it, too. I have given and given; but there seems some evil spell on the principal that guards it from encroachment, so that it remains the same, and, if I do not watch, the interest grows in the bank, with that frightful life dead money seems endowed with, as the hair of dead, people grows in the grave.”

“Eveleth!” her mother murmured again.

“Oh yes,” she answered, “I dare say my words are wild. I dare say they only mean that I loathe my luxury from the bottom of my soul, and long to be rid of it, if I only could, without harm to others and with safety to myself.”

XXI

It seemed to me that I became suddenly sensible of this luxury for the first time. I had certainly been aware that I was in a large and stately house, and that I had been served and banqueted with a princely pride and profusion. But there had, somehow, been through all a sort of simplicity, a sort of quiet, so that I had not thought of the establishment and its operation, even so much as I had thought of Mrs. Makely’s far inferior scale of living; or else, what with my going about so much in society, I was ceasing to be so keenly observant of the material facts as I had been at first. But I was better qualified to judge of what I saw, and I had now a vivid sense of the costliness of Mrs. Strange’s environment. There were thousands of dollars in the carpets underfoot; there were tens of thousands in the pictures on the walls. In a bronze group that withdrew itself into a certain niche, with a faint reluctance, there was the value of a skilled artisan’s wage for five years of hard work; in the bindings of the books that showed from the library shelves there was almost as much money as most of the authors had got for writing them. Every fixture, every movable, was an artistic masterpiece; a fortune, as fortunes used to be counted even in this land of affluence, had been lavished in the mere furnishing of a house which the palaces of nobles and princes of other times had contributed to embellish.

“My husband,” Mrs. Strange went on, “bought this house for me, and let me furnish it after my own fancy. After it was all done we neither of us liked it, and when he died I felt as if he had left me in a tomb here.”

“Eveleth,” said her mother, “you ought not to speak so before Mr. Homos. He will not know what to think of you, and he will go back to Altruria with a very wrong idea of American women.”

At this protest, Mrs. Strange seemed to recover herself a little. “Yes,” she said, “you must excuse me. I have no right to speak so. But one is often much franker with foreigners than with one’s own kind, and, besides, there is something — I don’t know what — that will not let me keep the truth from you.”

She gazed at me entreatingly, and then, as if some strong emotion swept her from her own hold, she broke out:

“He thought he would make some sort of atonement to me, as if I owed none to him! His money was all he had to do it with, and he spent that upon me in every way he could think of, though he knew that money could not buy anything that was really good, and that, if it bought anything beautiful, it uglified it with the sense of cost to every one who could value it in dollars and cents. He was a good man, far better than people ever imagined, and very simple-hearted and honest, like a child, in his contrition for his wealth, which he did not dare to get rid of; and though I know that, if he were to come back, it would be just as it was, his memory is as dear to me as if—”

She stopped, and pressed in her lip with her teeth, to stay its tremor. I was painfully affected. I knew that she had never meant to be so open with me, and was shocked and frightened at herself. I was sorry for her, and yet I was glad, for it seemed to me that she had given me a glimpse, not only of the truth in her own heart, but of the truth in the hearts of a whole order of prosperous people in these lamentable conditions, whom I shall hereafter be able to judge more leniently, more justly.

I began to speak of Altruria, as if that were what our talk had been leading up to, and she showed herself more intelligently interested concerning us than any one I have yet seen in this country. We appeared, I found, neither incredible nor preposterous to her; our life, in her eyes, had that beauty of right living which the Americans so feebly imagine or imagine not at all. She asked what route I had come by to America, and she seemed disappointed and aggrieved that we placed the restrictions we have felt necessary upon visitors from the plutocratic world. Were we afraid, she asked, that they would corrupt our citizens or mar our content with our institutions? She seemed scarcely satisfied when I explained, as I have explained so often here, that the measures we had taken were rather in the interest of the plutocratic world than of the Altrurians; and alleged the fact that no visitor from the outside had ever been willing to go home again, as sufficient proof that we had nothing to fear from the spread of plutocratic ideals among us. I assured her, and this she easily imagined, that, the better known these became, the worse they appeared to us; and that the only concern our priors felt, in regard to them, was that our youth could not conceive of them in their enormity, but, in seeing how estimable plutocratic people often were, they would attribute to their conditions the inherent good of human nature. I said our own life was so directly reasoned from its economic premises that they could hardly believe the plutocratic life was often an absolute non sequitur of the plutocratic premises. I confessed that this error was at the bottom of my own wish to visit America and study those premises.

“And what has your conclusion been?” she said, leaning eagerly towards me, across the table between us, laden with the maps and charts we had been examining for the verification of the position of Altruria, and my own course here, by way of England.

A slight sigh escaped Mrs. Gray, which I interpreted as an expression of fatigue; it was already past twelve o’clock, and I made it the pretext for escape.

“You have seen the meaning and purport of Altruria so clearly,” I said, “that I think I can safely leave you to guess the answer to that question.”

She laughed, and did not try to detain me now when I offered my hand for good-night. I fancied her mother took leave of me coldly, and with a certain effect of inculpation.

XXII

It is long since I wrote you, and you have had reason enough to be impatient of my silence. I submit to the reproaches of your letter, with a due sense of my blame; whether I am altogether to blame, you shall say after you have read this.

I cannot yet decide whether I have lost a great happiness, the greatest that could come to any man, or escaped the worst misfortune that could befall me. But, such as it is, I will try to set the fact honestly down.

I do not know whether you had any conjecture, from my repeated mention of a lady whose character greatly interested me, that I was in the way of feeling any other interest in her than my letters expressed. I am no longer young, though at thirty-five an Altrurian is by no means so old as an American at the same age. The romantic ideals of the American women which I had formed from the American novels had been dissipated; if I had any sentiment towards them, as a type, it was one of distrust, which my very sense of the charm in their inconsequence, their beauty, their brilliancy, served rather to intensify. I thought myself doubly defended by that difference between their civilization and ours which forbade reasonable hope of happiness in any sentiment for them tenderer than that of the student of strange effects in human nature. But we have not yet, my dear Cyril, reasoned the passions, even in Altruria.

After I last wrote you, a series of accidents, or what appeared so, threw me more and more constantly into the society of Mrs. Strange. We began to laugh at the fatality with which we met everywhere — at teas, at lunches, at dinners, at evening receptions, and even at balls, where I have been a great deal, because, with all my thirty-five years, I have not yet outlived that fondness for dancing which has so often amused you in me. Wherever my acquaintance widened among cultivated people, they had no inspiration but to ask us to meet each other, as if there were really no other woman in New York who could be expected to understand me. “You must come to lunch (or tea, or dinner, whichever it might be), and we will have her. She will be so much interested to meet you.”

But perhaps we should have needed none of these accidents to bring us together. I, at least, can look back and see that, when none of them happened, I sought occasions for seeing her, and made excuses of our common interest in this matter and in that to go to her. As for her, I can only say that I seldom failed to find her at home, whether I called upon her nominal day or not, and more than once the man who let me in said he had been charged by Mrs. Strange to say that, if I called, she was to be back very soon; or else he made free to suggest that, though Mrs. Strange was not at home, Mrs. Gray was; and then I found it easy to stay until Mrs. Strange returned. The good old lady had an insatiable curiosity about Altruria, and, though I do not think she ever quite believed in our reality, she at least always treated me kindly, as if I were the victim of an illusion that was thoroughly benign.

I think she had some notion that your letters, which I used often to take with me and read to Mrs. Strange and herself, were inventions of mine; and the fact that they bore only an English postmark confirmed her in this notion, though I explained that in our present passive attitude towards the world outside we had as yet no postal relations with other countries, and, as all our communication at home was by electricity, that we had no letter-post of our own. The very fact that she belonged to a purer and better age in America disqualified her to conceive of Altruria; her daughter, who had lived into a full recognition of the terrible anarchy in which the conditions have ultimated here, could far more vitally imagine us, and to her, I believe, we were at once a living reality. Her perception, her sympathy, her intelligence, became more and more to me, and I escaped to them oftener and oftener, from a world where an Altrurian must be so painfully at odds. In all companies here I am aware that I have been regarded either as a good joke or a bad joke, according to the humor of the listener, and it was grateful to be taken seriously.

From the first I was sensible of a charm in her, different from that I felt in other American women, and impossible in our Altrurian women. She had a deep and almost tragical seriousness, masked with a most winning gayety, a light irony, a fine scorn that was rather for herself than for others. She had thought herself out of all sympathy with her environment; she knew its falsehood, its vacuity, its hopelessness; but she necessarily remained in it and of it. She was as much at odds in it as I was, without my poor privilege of criticism and protest, for, as she said, she could not set herself up as a censor of things that she must keep on doing as other people did. She could have renounced the world, as there are ways and means of doing here; but she had no vocation to the religious life, and she could not feign it without a sense of sacrilege. In fact, this generous and magnanimous and gifted woman was without that faith, that trust in God which comes to us from living His law, and which I wonder any American can keep. She denied nothing; but she had lost the strength to affirm anything. She no longer tried to do good from her heart, though she kept on doing charity in what she said was a mere mechanical impulse from the belief of other days, but always with the ironical doubt that she was doing harm. Women are nothing by halves, as men can be, and she was in a despair which no man can realize, for we have always some if or and which a woman of the like mood casts from her in wild rejection. Where she could not clearly see her way to a true life, it was the same to her as an impenetrable darkness.

You will have inferred something of all this from what I have written of her before, and from words of hers that I have reported to you. Do you think it so wonderful, then, that in the joy I felt at the hope, the solace, which my story of our life seemed to give her, she should become more and more precious to me? It was not wonderful, either, I think, that she should identify me with that hope, that solace, and should suffer herself to lean upon me, in a reliance infinitely sweet and endearing. But what a fantastic dream it now appears!

XXIII

I can hardly tell you just how we came to own our love to each other; but one day I found myself alone with her mother, with the sense that Eveleth had suddenly withdrawn from the room at the knowledge of my approach. Mrs. Gray was strongly moved by something; but she governed herself, and, after giving me a tremulous hand, bade me sit.

“Will you excuse me, Mr. Homos,” she began, “if I ask you whether you intend to make America your home after this?”

“Oh no!” I answered, and I tried to keep out of my voice the despair with which the notion filled me. I have sometimes had nightmares here, in which I thought that I was an American by choice, and I can give you no conception of the rapture of awakening to the fact that I could still go back to Altruria, that I had not cast my lot with this wretched people. “How could I do that?” I faltered; and I was glad to perceive that I had imparted to her no hint of the misery which I had felt at such a notion. “I mean, by getting naturalized, and becoming a citizen, and taking up your residence among us.”

“No,” I answered, as quietly as I could, “I had not thought of that.”

“And you still intend to go back to Altruria?”

“I hope so; I ought to have gone back long ago, and if I had not met the friends I have in this house—” I stopped, for I did not know how I should end what I had begun to say.

“I am glad you think we are your friends,” said the lady, “for we have tried to show ourselves your friends. I feel as if this had given me the right to say something to you that you may think very odd.”

“Say anything to me, my dear lady,” I returned. “I shall not think it unkind, no matter how odd it is.”

“Oh, it’s nothing. It’s merely that — that when you are not here with us I lose my grasp on Altruria, and — and I begin to doubt—”

I smiled. “I know! People here have often hinted something of that kind to me. Tell me, Mrs. Gray, do Americans generally take me for an impostor?”

“Oh no!” she answered, fervently. “Everybody that I have heard speak of you has the highest regard for you, and believes you perfectly sincere. But—”

“But what?” I entreated.

“They think you may be mistaken.”

“Then they think I am out of my wits — that I am in an hallucination!”

“No, not that,” she returned. “But it is so very difficult for us to conceive of a whole nation living, as you say you do, on the same terms as one family, and no one trying to get ahead of another, or richer, and having neither inferiors nor superiors, but just one dead level of equality, where there is no distinction except by natural gifts and good deeds or beautiful works. It seems impossible — it seems ridiculous.”

“Yes,” I confessed, “I know that it seems so to the Americans.”

“And I must tell you something else, Mr. Homos, and I hope you won’t take it amiss. The first night when you talked about Altruria here, and showed us how you had come, by way of England, and the place where Altruria ought to be on our maps, I looked them over, after you were gone, and I could make nothing of it. I have often looked at the map since, but I could never find Altruria; it was no use.”

“Why,” I said, “if you will let me have your atlas—”

She shook her head. “It would be the same again as soon as you went away.” I could not conceal my distress, and she went on: “Now, you mustn’t mind what I say. I’m nothing but a silly old woman, and Eveleth would never forgive me if she could know what I’ve been saying.”

“Then Mrs. Strange isn’t troubled, as you are, concerning me?” I asked, and I confess my anxiety attenuated my voice almost to a whisper.

“She won’t admit that she is. It might be better for her if she would. But Eveleth is very true to her friends, and that — that makes me all the more anxious that she should not deceive herself.”

“Oh, Mrs. Gray!” I could not keep a certain tone of reproach out of my words.

She began to weep. “There! I knew I should hurt your feelings. But you mustn’t mind what I say. I beg your pardon! I take it all back—”

“Ah, I don’t want you to take it back! But what proof shall I give you that there is such a land as Altruria? If the darkness implies the day, America must imply Altruria. In what way do I seem false, or mad, except that I claim to be the citizen of a country where people love one another as the first Christians did?”

“That is just it,” she returned. “Nobody can imagine the first Christians, and do you think we can imagine anything like them in our own day?”

“But Mrs. Strange — she imagines us, you say?”

“She thinks she does; but I am afraid she only thinks so, and I know her better than you do, Mr. Homos. I know how enthusiastic she always was, and how unhappy she has been since she has lost her hold on faith, and how eagerly she has caught at the hope you have given her of a higher life on earth than we live here. If she should ever find out that she was wrong, I don’t know what would become of her. You mustn’t mind me; you mustn’t let me wound you by what I say.”

“You don’t wound me, and I only thank you for what you say; but I entreat you to believe in me. Mrs. Strange has not deceived herself, and I have not deceived her. Shall I protest to you, by all I hold sacred, that I am really what I told you I was; that I am not less, and that Altruria is infinitely more, happier, better, gladder, than any words of mine can say? Shall I not have the happiness to see your daughter to-day? I had something to say to her — and now I have so much more! If she is in the house, won’t you send to her? I can make her understand—”

I stopped at a certain expression which I fancied I saw in Mrs. Gray’s face.

“Mr. Homos,” she began, so very seriously that my heart trembled with a vague misgiving, “sometimes I think you had better not see my daughter any more.”

“Not see her any more?” I gasped.

“Yes; I don’t see what good can come of it, and it’s all very strange and uncanny. I don’t know how to explain it; but, indeed, it isn’t anything personal. It’s because you are of a state of things so utterly opposed to human nature that I don’t see how — I am afraid that—”

“But I am not uncanny to her!” I entreated. “I am not unnatural, not incredible—”

“Oh no; that is the worst of it. But I have said too much; I have said a great deal more than I ought. But you must excuse it: I am an old woman. I am not very well, and I suppose it’s that that makes me talk so much.”

She rose from her chair, and I, perforce, rose from mine and made a movement towards her.

“No, no,” she said, “I don’t need any help. You must come again soon and see us, and show that you’ve forgotten what I’ve said.” She gave me her hand, and I could not help bending over it and kissing it. She gave a little, pathetic whimper. “Oh, I know I’ve said the most dreadful things to you.”

“You haven’t said anything that takes your friendship from me, Mrs. Gray, and that is what I care for.” My own eyes filled with tears — I do not know why — and I groped my way from the room. Without seeing any one in the obscurity of the hallway, where I found myself, I was aware of some one there, by that sort of fine perception which makes us know the presence of a spirit.

“You are going?” a whisper said. “Why are you going?” And Eveleth had me by the hand and was drawing me gently into the dim drawing-room that opened from the place. “I don’t know all my mother has been saying to you. I had to let her say something; she thought she ought. I knew you would know how to excuse it.”

“Oh, my dearest!” I said, and why I said this I do not know, or how we found ourselves in each other’s arms.

“What are we doing?” she murmured.

“You don’t believe I am an impostor, an illusion, a visionary?” I besought her, straining her closer to my heart.

“I believe in you, with all my soul!” she answered.

We sat down, side by side, and talked long. I did not go away the whole day. With a high disdain of convention, she made me stay. Her mother sent word that she would not be able to come to dinner, and we were alone together at table, in an image of what our united lives might be. We spent the evening in that happy interchange of trivial confidences that lovers use in symbol of the unutterable raptures that fill them. We were there in what seemed an infinite present, without a past, without a future.

XXIV

Society had to be taken into our confidence, and Mrs. Makely saw to it that there were no reserves with society. Our engagement was not quite like that of two young persons, but people found in our character and circumstance an interest far transcending that felt in the engagement of the most romantic lovers. Some note of the fact came to us by accident, as one evening when we stood near a couple and heard them talking. “It must be very weird,” the man said; “something like being engaged to a materialization.” “Yes,” said the girl, “quite the Demon Lover business, I should think.” She glanced round, as people do, in talking, and, at sight of us, she involuntarily put her hand over her mouth. I looked at Eveleth; there was nothing expressed in her face but a generous anxiety for me. But so far as the open attitude of society towards us was concerned, nothing could have been more flattering. We could hardly have been more asked to meet each other than before; but now there were entertainments in special recognition of our betrothal, which Eveleth said could not be altogether refused, though she found the ordeal as irksome as I did. In America, however, you get used to many things. I do not know why it should have been done, but in the society columns of several of the great newspapers our likenesses were printed, from photographs procured I cannot guess how, with descriptions of our persons as to those points of coloring and carriage and stature which the pictures could not give, and with biographies such as could be ascertained in her case and imagined in mine. In some of the society papers, paragraphs of a surprising scurrility appeared, attacking me as an impostor, and aspersing the motives of Eveleth in her former marriage, and treating her as a foolish crank or an audacious flirt. The goodness of her life, her self-sacrifice and works of benevolence, counted for no more against these wanton attacks than the absolute inoffensiveness of my own; the writers knew no harm of her, and they knew nothing at all of me; but they devoted us to the execration of their readers simply because we formed apt and ready themes for paragraphs. You may judge of how wild they were in their aim when some of them denounced me as an Altrurian plutocrat!

We could not escape this storm of notoriety; we had simply to let it spend its fury. When it began, several reporters of both sexes came to interview me, and questioned me, not only as to all the facts of my past life, and all my purposes in the future, but as to my opinion of hypnotism, eternal punishment, the Ibsen drama, and the tariff reform. I did my best to answer them seriously, and certainly I answered them civilly; but it seemed from what they printed that the answers I gave did not concern them, for they gave others for me. They appeared to me for the most part kindly and well-meaning young people, though vastly ignorant of vital things. They had apparently visited me with minds made up, or else their reports were revised by some controlling hand, and a quality injected more in the taste of the special journals they represented than in keeping with the facts. When I realized this, I refused to see any more reporters, or to answer them, and then they printed the questions they had prepared to ask me, in such form that my silence was made of the same damaging effect as a full confession of guilt upon the charges.

The experience was so strange and new to me that it affected me in a degree I was unwilling to let Eveleth imagine. But she divined my distress, and, when she divined that it was chiefly for her, she set herself to console and reassure me. She told me that this was something every one here expected, in coming willingly or unwillingly before the public; and that I must not think of it at all, for certainly no one else would think twice of it. This, I found, was really so, for when I ventured to refer tentatively to some of these publications, I found that people, if they had read them, had altogether forgotten them; and that they were, with all the glare of print, of far less effect with our acquaintance than something said under the breath in a corner. I found that some of our friends had not known the effigies for ours which they had seen in the papers; others made a joke of the whole affair, as the Americans do with so many affairs, and said that they supposed the pictures were those of people who had been cured by some patent medicine, they looked so strong and handsome. This, I think, was a piece of Mr. Makely’s humor in the beginning; but it had a general vogue long after the interviews and the illustrations were forgotten.

XXV

I linger a little upon these trivial matters because I shrink from what must follow. They were scarcely blots upon our happiness; rather they were motes in the sunshine which had no other cloud. It is true that I was always somewhat puzzled by a certain manner in Mrs. Gray, which certainly was from no unfriendliness for me; she could not have been more affectionate to me, after our engagement, if I had been really her own son; and it was not until after our common kindness had confirmed itself upon the new footing that I felt this perplexing qualification on it. I felt it first one day when I found her alone, and I talked long and freely to her of Eveleth, and opened to her my whole heart of joy in our love. At one point she casually asked me how soon we should expect to return from Altruria after our visit; and at first I did not understand.

“Of course,” she explained, “you will want to see all your old friends, and so will Eveleth, for they will be her friends, too; but if you want me to go with you, as you say, you must let me know when I shall see New York again.”

“Why,” I said, “you will always be with us.”

“Well, then,” she pursued, with a smile, “when shall you come back?”

“Oh, never!” I answered. “No one ever leaves Altruria, if he can help it, unless he is sent on a mission.”

She looked a little mystified, and I went on: “Of course, I was not officially authorized to visit the world outside, but I was permitted to do so, to satisfy a curiosity the priors thought useful; but I have now had quite enough of it, and I shall never leave home again.”

“You won’t come to live in America?”

“God forbid!” said I, and I am afraid I could not hide the horror that ran through me at the thought. “And when you once see our happy country, you could no more be persuaded to return to America than a disembodied spirit could be persuaded to return to the earth.”

She was silent, and I asked: “But, surely, you understood this, Mrs. Gray?”

“No,” she said, reluctantly. “Does Eveleth?”

“Why, certainly,” I said. “We have talked it over a hundred times. Hasn’t she—”

“I don’t know,” she returned, with a vague trouble in her voice and eyes. “Perhaps I haven’t understood her exactly. Perhaps — but I shall be ready to do whatever you and she think best. I am an old woman, you know; and, you know, I was born here, and I should feel the change.”

Her words conveyed to me a delicate reproach; I felt for the first time that, in my love of my own country, I had not considered her love of hers. It is said that the Icelanders are homesick when they leave their world of lava and snow; and I ought to have remembered that an American might have some such tenderness for his atrocious conditions, if he were exiled from them forever. I suppose it was the large and wide mind of Eveleth, with its openness to a knowledge and appreciation of better things, that had suffered me to forget this. She seemed always so eager to see Altruria, she imagined it so fully, so lovingly, that I had ceased to think of her as an alien; she seemed one of us, by birth as well as by affinity.

Yet now the words of her mother, and the light they threw upon the situation, gave me pause. I began to ask myself questions I was impatient to ask Eveleth, so that there should be no longer any shadow of misgiving in my breast; and yet I found myself dreading to ask them, lest by some perverse juggle I had mistaken our perfect sympathy for a perfect understanding.

XXVI

Like all cowards who wait a happy moment for the duty that should not be suffered to wait at all, I was destined to have the affair challenge me, instead of seizing the advantage of it that instant frankness would have given me. Shall I confess that I let several days go by, and still had not spoken to Eveleth, when, at the end of a long evening — the last long evening we passed together — she said:

“What would you like to have me do with this house while we are gone?”

“Do with this house?” I echoed; and I felt as if I were standing on the edge of an abyss.

“Yes; shall we let it, or sell it — or what? Or give it away?” I drew a little breath at this; perhaps we had not misunderstood each other, after all. She went on: “Of course, I have a peculiar feeling about it, so that I wouldn’t like to get it ready and let it furnished, in the ordinary way. I would rather lend it to some one, if I could be sure of any one who would appreciate it; but I can’t. Not one. And it’s very much the same when one comes to think about selling it. Yes, I should like to give it away for some good purpose, if there is any in this wretched state of things. What do you say, Aristide?”

She always used the French form of my name, because she said it sounded ridiculous in English, for a white man, though I told her that the English was nearer the Greek in sound.

“By all means, give it away,” I said. “Give it for some public purpose. That will at least be better than any private purpose, and put it somehow in the control of the State, beyond the reach of individuals or corporations. Why not make it the foundation of a free school for the study of the Altrurian polity?”

She laughed at this, as if she thought I must be joking. “It would be droll, wouldn’t it, to have Tammany appointees teaching Altrurianism?” Then she said, after a moment of reflection: “Why not? It needn’t be in the hands of Tammany. It could be in the hands of the United States; I will ask my lawyer if it couldn’t; and I will endow it with money enough to support the school handsomely. Aristide, you have hit it!”

I began: “You can give all your money to it, my dear—” But I stopped at the bewildered look she turned on me.

“All?” she repeated. “But what should we have to live on, then?”

“We shall need no money to live on in Altruria,” I answered.

“Oh, in Altruria! But when we come back to New York?”

It was an agonizing moment, and I felt that shutting of the heart which blinds the eyes and makes the brain reel. “Eveleth,” I gasped, “did you expect to return to New York?”

“Why, certainly!” she cried. “Not at once, of course. But after you had seen your friends, and made a good, long visit — Why, surely, Aristide, you don’t understand that I — You didn’t mean to live in Altruria?”

“Ah!” I answered. “Where else could I live? Did you think for an instant that I could live in such a land as this?” I saw that she was hurt, and I hastened to say: “I know that it is the best part of the world outside of Altruria, but, oh, my dear, you cannot imagine how horrible the notion of living here seems to me. Forgive me. I am going from bad to worse. I don’t mean to wound you. After all, it is your country, and you must love it. But, indeed, I could not think of living here. I could not take the burden of its wilful misery on my soul. I must live in Altruria, and you, when you have once seen my country, our country, will never consent to live in any other.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know it must be very beautiful; but I hadn’t supposed — and yet I ought—”

“No, dearest, no! It was I who was to blame, for not being clearer from the first. But that is the way with us. We can’t imagine any people willing to live anywhere else when once they have seen Altruria; and I have told you so much of it, and we have talked of it together so often, that I must have forgotten you had not actually known it. But listen, Eveleth. We will agree to this: After we have been a year in Altruria, if you wish to return to America I will come back and live with you here.”

“No, indeed!” she answered, generously. “If you are to be my husband,” and here she began with the solemn words of the Bible, so beautiful in their quaint English, “‘whither thou goest, I will go, and I will not return from following after thee. Thy country shall be my country, and thy God my God.”

I caught her to my heart, in a rapture of tenderness, and the evening that had begun for us so forbiddingly ended in a happiness such as not even our love had known before. I insisted upon the conditions I had made, as to our future home, and she agreed to them gayly at last, as a sort of reparation which I might make my conscience, if I liked, for tearing her from a country which she had willingly lived out of for the far greater part of the last five years.

But when we met again I could see that she had been thinking seriously.

“I won’t give the house absolutely away,” she said. “I will keep the deed of it myself, but I will establish that sort of school of Altrurian doctrine in it, and I will endow it, and when we come back here, for our experimental sojourn, after we’ve been in Altruria a year, we’ll take up our quarters in it — I won’t give the whole house to the school — and we will lecture on the later phases of Altrurian life to the pupils. How will that do?”

She put her arms around my neck, and I said that it would do admirably; but I had a certain sinking of the heart, for I saw how hard it was even for Eveleth to part with her property.

“I’ll endow it,” she went on, “and I’ll leave the rest of my money at interest here; unless you think that some Altrurian securities—”

“No; there are no such things!” I cried.

“That was what I thought,” she returned; “and as it will cost us nothing while we are in Altruria, the interest will be something very handsome by the time we get back, even in United States bonds.”

“Something handsome!” I cried. “But, Eveleth, haven’t I heard you say yourself that the growth of interest from dead money was like—”

“Oh yes; that!” she returned. “But you know you have to take it. You can’t let the money lie idle: that would be ridiculous; and then, with the good purpose we have in view, it is our duty to take the interest. How should we keep up the school, and pay the teachers, and everything?”

I saw that she had forgotten the great sum of the principal, or that, through lifelong training and association, it was so sacred to her that she did not even dream of touching it. I was silent, and she thought that I was persuaded.

“You are perfectly right in theory, dear, and I feel just as you do about such things; I’m sure I’ve suffered enough from them; but if we didn’t take interest for your money, what should we have to live on?”

“Not my money, Eveleth!” I entreated. “Don’t say my money!”

“But whatever is mine is yours,” she returned, with a wounded air.

“Not your money; but I hope you will soon have none. We should need no money to live on in Altruria. Our share of the daily work of all will amply suffice for our daily bread and shelter.”

“In Altruria, yes. But how about America? And you have promised to come back here in a year, you know. Ladies and gentlemen can’t share in the daily toil here, even if they could get the toil, and, where there are so many out of work, it isn’t probable they could.”

She dropped upon my knee as she spoke, laughing, and put her hand under my chin, to lift my fallen face.

“Now you mustn’t be a goose, Aristide, even if you are an angel! Now listen. You know, don’t you, that I hate money just as badly as you?”

“You have made me think so, Eveleth,” I answered.

“I hate it and loathe it. I think it’s the source of all the sin and misery in the world; but you can’t get rid of it at a blow. For if you gave it away you might do more harm than good with it.”

“You could destroy it,” I said.

“Not unless you were a crank,” she returned. “And that brings me just to the point. I know that I’m doing a very queer thing to get married, when we know so little, really, about you,” and she accented this confession with a laugh that was also a kiss. “But I want to show people that we are just as practical as anybody; and if they can know that I have left my money in United States bonds, they’ll respect us, no matter what I do with the interest. Don’t you see? We can come back, and preach and teach Altrurianism, and as long as we pay our way nobody will have a right to say a word. Why, Tolstoy himself doesn’t destroy his money, though he wants other people to do it. His wife keeps it, and supports the family. You have to do it.”

“He doesn’t do it willingly.”

“No. And we won’t. And after a while — after we’ve got back, and compared Altruria and America from practical experience, if we decide to go and live there altogether, I will let you do what you please with the hateful money. I suppose we couldn’t take it there with us?”

“No more than you could take it to heaven with you,” I answered, solemnly; but she would not let me be altogether serious about it.

“Well, in either case we could get on without it, though we certainly could not get on without it here. Why, Aristide, it is essential to the influence we shall try to exert for Altrurianism; for if we came back here and preached the true life without any money to back us, no one would pay any attention to us. But if we have a good house waiting for us, and are able to entertain nicely, we can attract the best people, and — and — really do some good.”

XXVII

I rose in a distress which I could not hide. “Oh, Eveleth, Eveleth!” I cried. “You are like all the rest, poor child! You are the creature of your environment, as we all are. You cannot escape what you have been. It may be that I was wrong to wish or expect you to cast your lot with me in Altruria, at once and forever. It may be that it is my duty to return here with you after a time, not only to let you see that Altruria is best, but to end my days in this unhappy land, preaching and teaching Altrurianism; but we must not come as prophets to the comfortable people, and entertain nicely. If we are to renew the evangel, it must be in the life and the spirit of the First Altrurian: we must come poor to the poor; we must not try to win any one, save through his heart and conscience; we must be as simple and humble as the least of those that Christ bade follow Him. Eveleth, perhaps you have made a mistake. I love you too much to wish you to suffer even for your good. Yes, I am so weak as that. I did not think that this would be the sacrifice for you that it seems, and I will not ask it of you. I am sorry that we have not understood each other, as I supposed we had. I could never become an American; perhaps you could never become an Altrurian. Think of it, dearest. Think well of it, before you take the step which you cannot recede from. I hold you to no promise; I love you so dearly that I cannot let you hold yourself. But you must choose between me and your money — no, not me — but between love and your money. You cannot keep both.”

She had stood listening to me; now she cast herself on my heart and stopped my words with an impassioned kiss. “Then there is no choice for me. My choice is made, once for all.” She set her hands against my breast and pushed me from her. “Go now; but come again to-morrow. I want to think it all over again. Not that I have any doubt, but because you wish it — you wish it, don’t you? — and because I will not let you ever think I acted upon an impulse, and that I regretted it.”

“That is right, Eveleth. That is like you” I said, and I took her into my arms for good-night.

The next day I came for her decision, or rather for her confirmation of it. The man who opened the door to me met me with a look of concern and embarrassment. He said Mrs. Strange was not at all well, and had told him he was to give me the letter he handed me. I asked, in taking it, if I could see Mrs. Gray, and he answered that Mrs. Gray had not been down yet, but he would go and see. I was impatient to read my letter, and I made I know not what vague reply, and I found myself, I know not how, on the pavement, with the letter open in my hand. It began abruptly without date or address:

“You will believe that I have not slept, when you read this.

“I have thought it all over again, as you wished, and it is all over between us.

“I am what you said, the creature of my environment. I cannot detach myself from it; I cannot escape from what I have been.

“I am writing this with a strange coldness, like the chill of death, in my very soul. I do not ask you to forgive me; I have your forgiveness already. Do not forget me; that is what I ask. Remember me as the unhappy woman who was not equal to her chance when heaven was opened to her, who could not choose the best when the best came to her.

“There is no use writing; if I kept on forever, it would always be the same cry of shame, of love.

“Eveleth Strange.”

I reeled as I read the lines. The street seemed to weave itself into a circle around me. But I knew that I was not dreaming, that this was no delirium of my sleep.

It was three days ago, and I have not tried to see her again. I have written her a line, to say that I shall not forget her, and to take the blame upon myself. I expected the impossible of her.

I have yet two days before me until the steamer sails; we were to have sailed together, and now I shall sail alone.

I will try to leave it all behind me forever; but while I linger out these last long hours here I must think and I must doubt.

Was she, then, the poseuse that they said? Had she really no hear in our love? Was it only a pretty drama she was playing, and were those generous motives, those lofty principles which seemed to actuate her, the poetical qualities of the play, the graces of her pose? I cannot believe it. I believe that she was truly what she seemed, for she had been that even before she met me. I believe that she was pure and lofty in soul as she appeared; but that her life was warped to such a form by the false conditions of this sad world that, when she came to look at herself again, after she had been confronted with the sacrifice before her, she feared that she could not make it without in a manner ceasing to be.

She —

But I shall soon see you again; and, until then, farewell.

PART SECOND

I

I could hardly have believed, my dear Dorothea, that I should be so late in writing to you from Altruria, but you can easily believe that I am thoroughly ashamed of myself for my neglect. It is not for want of thinking of you, or talking of you, that I have seemed so much more ungrateful than I am. My husband and I seldom have any serious talk which doesn’t somehow come round to you. He admires you and likes you as much as I do, and he does his best, poor man, to understand you; but his not understanding you is only a part of his general failure to understand how any American can be kind and good in conditions which he considers so abominable as those of the capitalistic world. He is not nearly so severe on us as he used to be at times when he was among us. When the other Altrurians are discussing us he often puts in a reason for us against their logic; and I think he has really forgotten, a good deal, how bad things are with us, or else finds his own memory of them incredible. But his experience of the world outside his own country has taught him how to temper the passion of the Altrurians for justice with a tolerance of the unjust; and when they bring him to book on his own report of us he tries to explain us away, and show how we are not so bad as we ought to be.

For weeks after we came to Altruria I was so unhistorically blest that if I had been disposed to give you a full account of myself I should have had no events to hang the narrative on. Life here is so subjective (if you don’t know what that is, you poor dear, you must get Mr. Twelvemough to explain) that there is usually nothing like news in it, and I always feel that the difference between Altruria and America is so immense that it is altogether beyond me to describe it. But now we have had some occurrences recently, quite in the American sense, and these have furnished me with an incentive as well as opportunity to send you a letter. Do you remember how, one evening after dinner, in New York, you and I besieged my husband and tried to make him tell us why Altruria was so isolated from the rest of the world, and why such a great and enlightened continent should keep itself apart? I see still his look of horror when Mr. Makely suggested that the United States should send an expedition and “open” Altruria, as Commodore Perry “opened” Japan in 1850, and try to enter into commercial relations with it. The best he could do was to say what always seemed so incredible, and keep on assuring us that Altruria wished for no sort of public relations with Europe or America, but was very willing to depend for an indefinite time for its communication with those regions on vessels putting into its ports from stress of one kind or other, or castaway on its coasts. They are mostly trading-ships or whalers, and they come a great deal oftener than you suppose; you do not hear of them afterwards, because their crews are poor, ignorant people, whose stories of their adventures are always distrusted, and who know they would be laughed at if they told the stories they could of a country like Altruria. My husband himself took one of their vessels on her home voyage when he came to us, catching the Australasian steamer at New Zealand; and now I am writing you by the same sort of opportunity. I shall have time enough to write you a longer letter than you will care to read; the ship does not sail for a week yet, because it is so hard to get her crew together.

Now that I have actually made a beginning, my mind goes back so strongly to that terrible night when I came to you after Aristides (I always use the English form of his name now) left New York that I seem to be living the tragedy over again, and this happiness of mine here is like a dream which I cannot trust. It was not all tragedy, though, and I remember how funny Mr. Makely was, trying to keep his face straight when the whole truth had to come out, and I confessed that I had expected, without really knowing it myself, that Aristides would disregard that wicked note I had written him and come and make me marry him, not against my will, but against my word. Of course I didn’t put it in just that way, but in a way to let you both guess it. The first glimmering of hope that I had was when Mr. Makely said, “Then, when a woman tells a man that all is over between them forever, she means that she would like to discuss the business with him?” I was old enough to be ashamed, but it seemed to me that you and I had gone back in that awful moment and were two girls together, just as we used to be at school. I was proud of the way you stood up for me, because I thought that if you could tolerate me after what I had confessed I could not be quite a fool. I knew that I deserved at least some pity, and though I laughed with Mr. Makely, I was glad of your indignation with him, and of your faith in Aristides. When it came to the question of what I should do, I don’t know which of you I owed the most to. It was a kind of comfort to have Mr. Makely acknowledge that though he regarded Aristides as a myth, still he believed that he was a thoroughly good myth, and couldn’t tell a lie if he wanted to; and I loved you, and shall love you more than any one else but him, for saying that Aristides was the most real man you had ever met, and that if everything he said was untrue you would trust him to the end of the world.

But, Dolly, it wasn’t all comedy, any more than it was all tragedy, and when you and I had laughed and cried ourselves to the point where there was nothing for me to do but to take the next boat for Liverpool, and Mr. Makely had agreed to look after the tickets and cable Aristides that I was coming, there was still my poor, dear mother to deal with. There is no use trying to conceal from you that she was always opposed to my husband. She thought there was something uncanny about him, though she felt as we did that there was nothing uncanny in him; but a man who pretended to come from a country where there was no riches and no poverty could not be trusted with any woman’s happiness; and though she could not help loving him, she thought I ought to tear him out of my heart, and if I could not do that I ought to have myself shut up in an asylum. We had a dreadful time when I told her what I had decided to do, and I was almost frantic. At last, when she saw that I was determined to follow him, she yielded, not because she was convinced, but because she could not give me up; I wouldn’t have let her if she could. I believe that the only thing which reconciled her was that you and Mr. Makely believed in him, and thought I had better do what I wanted to, if nothing could keep me from it. I shall never, never forget Mr. Makely’s goodness in coming to talk with her, and how skillfully he managed, without committing himself to Altruria, to declare his faith in my Altrurian. Even then she was troubled about what she thought the indelicacy of my behavior in following him across the sea, and she had all sorts of doubts as to how he would receive me when we met in Liverpool. It wasn’t very reasonable of me to say that if he cast me off I should still love him more than any other human being, and his censure would be more precious to me than the praise of the rest of the world.

I suppose I hardly knew what I was saying, but when once I had yielded to my love for him there was nothing else in life. I could not have left my mother behind, but in her opposition to me she seemed like an enemy, and I should somehow have forced her to go if she had not yielded. When she did yield, she yielded with her whole heart and soul, and so far from hindering me in my preparations for the voyage, I do not believe I could have got off without her. She thought about everything, and it was her idea to leave my business affairs entirely in Mr. Makely’s hands, and to trust the future for the final disposition of my property. I did not care for it myself; I hated it, because it was that which had stood between me and Aristides; but she foresaw that if by any wild impossibility he should reject me when we met, I should need it for the life I must go back to in New York. She behaved like a martyr as well as a heroine, for till we reached Altruria she was a continual sacrifice to me. She stubbornly doubted the whole affair, but now I must do her the justice to say that she has been convinced by the fact. The best she can say of it is that it is like the world of her girlhood; and she has gone back to the simple life here from the artificial life in New York, with the joy of a child. She works the whole day, and she would play if she had ever learned how. She is a better Altrurian than I am; if there could be a bigoted Altrurian my mother would be one.

II

I sent you a short letter from Liverpool, saying that by the unprecedented delays of the Urania, which I had taken because it was the swiftest boat of the Neptune line, we had failed to pass the old, ten-day, single-screw Galaxy liner which Aristides had sailed in. I had only time for a word to you; but a million words could not have told the agonies I suffered, and when I overtook him on board the Orient Pacific steamer at Plymouth, where she touched, I could just scribble off the cable sent Mr. Makely before our steamer put off again. I am afraid you did not find my cable very expressive, but I was glad that I did not try to say more, for if I had tried I should simply have gibbered, at a shilling a gibber. I expected to make amends by a whole volume of letters, and I did post a dozen under one cover from Colombo. If they never reached you I am very sorry, for now it is impossible to take up the threads of that time and weave them into any sort of connected pattern. You will have to let me off with saying that Aristides was everything that I believed he would be and was never really afraid he might not be. From the moment we caught sight of each other at Plymouth, he at the rail of the steamer and I on the deck of the tender, we were as completely one as we are now. I never could tell how I got aboard to him; whether he came down and brought me, or whether I was simply rapt through the air to his side. It would have been embarrassing if we had not treated the situation frankly; but such odd things happen among the English going out to their different colonies that our marriage, by a missionary returning to his station, was not even a nine days’ wonder with our fellow-passengers.

We were a good deal more than nine days on the steamer before we could get a vessel that would take us on to Altruria; but we overhauled a ship going there for provisions at last, and we were all put off on her, bag and baggage, with three cheers from the friends we were leaving; I think they thought we were going to some of the British islands that the Pacific is full of. I had been thankful from the first that I had not brought a maid, knowing the Altrurian prejudice against hireling service, but I never was so glad as I was when we got aboard that vessel, for when the captain’s wife, who was with him, found that I had no one to look after me, she looked after me herself, just for the fun of it, she said; but I knew it was the love of it. It was a sort of general trading-ship, stopping at the different islands in the South Seas, and had been a year out from home, where the kind woman had left her little ones; she cried over their photographs to me. Her husband had been in Altruria before, and he and Aristides were old acquaintances and met like brothers; some of the crew knew him, too, and the captain relaxed discipline so far as to let us shake hands with the second-mate as the men’s representative.

I needn’t dwell on the incidents of our home-coming — for that was what it seemed for my mother and me as well as for my husband — but I must give you one detail of our reception, for I still think it almost the prettiest thing that has happened to us among the millions of pretty things. Aristides had written home of our engagement, and he was expected with his American wife; and before we came to anchor the captain ran up the Emissary’s signal, which my husband gave him, and then three boats left the shore and pulled rapidly out to us. As they came nearer I saw the first Altrurian costumes in the lovely colors that the people wear here, and that make a group of them look like a flower-bed; and then I saw that the boats were banked with flowers along the gunwales from stem to stern, and that they were each not manned, but girled by six rowers, who pulled as true a stroke as I ever saw in our boat-races. When they caught sight of us, leaning over the side, and Aristides lifted his hat and waved it to them, they all stood their oars upright, and burst into a kind of welcome song: I had been dreading one of those stupid, banging salutes of ten or twenty guns, and you can imagine what a relief it was. They were great, splendid creatures, as tall as our millionaires’ tallest daughters, and as strong-looking as any of our college-girl athletes; and when we got down over the ship’s side, and Aristides said a few words of introduction for my mother and me, as we stepped into the largest of the boats, I thought they would crush me, catching me in their strong, brown arms, and kissing me on each cheek; they never kiss on the mouth in Altruria. The girls in the other boats kissed their hands to mother and me, and shouted to Aristides, and then, when our boat set out for the shore, they got on each side of us and sang song after song as they pulled even stroke with our crew. Half-way, we met three other boats, really manned, these ones, and going out to get our baggage, and then you ought to have heard the shouting and laughing, that ended in more singing, when the young fellows’ voices mixed with the girls, till they were lost in the welcome that came off to us from the crowded quay, where I should have thought half Altruria had gathered to receive us.

I was afraid it was going to be too much for my mother, but she stood it bravely; and almost at a glance people began to take her into consideration, and she was delivered over to two young married ladies, who saw that she was made comfortable, the first of any, in the pretty Regionic guest-house where they put us.

I wish I could give you a notion of that guest-house, with its cool, quiet rooms, and its lawned and gardened enclosure, and a little fountain purring away among the flowers! But what astonished me was that there were no sort of carriages, or wheeled conveyances, which, after our escort from the ship, I thought might very well have met the returning Emissary and his wife. They made my mother get into a litter, with soft cushions and with lilac curtains blowing round it, and six girls carried her up to the house; but they seemed not to imagine my not walking, and, in fact, I could hardly have imagined it myself, after the first moment of queerness. That walk was full of such rich experience for every one of the senses that I would not have missed a step of it; but as soon as I could get Aristides alone I asked him about horses, and he said that though horses were still used in farm work, not a horse was allowed in any city or village of Altruria, because of their filthiness. As for public vehicles, they used to have electric trolleys; in the year that he had been absent they had substituted electric motors; but these were not running, because it was a holiday on which we had happened to arrive.

There was another incident of my first day which I think will amuse you, knowing how I have always shrunk from any sort of public appearances. When Aristides went to make his report to the people assembled in a sort of convention, I had to go too, and take part in the proceedings; for women are on an entire equality with the men here, and people would be shocked if husband and wife were separated in their public life. They did not spare me a single thing. Where Aristides was not very clear, or rather not full enough, in describing America, I was called on to supplement, and I had to make several speeches. Of course, as I spoke in English, he had to put it into Altrurian for me, and it made the greatest excitement. The Altrurians are very lively people, and as full of the desire to hear some new things as Paul said the men of Athens were. At times they were in a perfect gale of laughter at what we told them about America. Afterwards some of the women confessed to me that they liked to hear us speaking English together; it sounded like the whistling of birds or the shrilling of locusts. But they were perfectly kind, and though they laughed it was clear that they laughed at what we were saying, and never at us, or at least never at me.

Of course there was the greatest curiosity to know what Aristides’ wife looked like, as well as sounded like; he had written out about our engagement before I broke it; and my clothes were of as much interest As myself, or more. You know how I had purposely left my latest Paris things behind, so as to come as simply as possible to the simple life of Altruria, but still with my big leg-of-mutton sleeves, and my picture-hat, and my pinched waist, I felt perfectly grotesque, and I have no doubt I looked it. They had never seen a lady from the capitalistic world before, but only now and then a whaling-captain’s wife who had come ashore; and I knew they were burning to examine my smart clothes down to the last button and bit of braid. I had on the short skirts of last year, and I could feel ten thousand eyes fastened on my high-heeled boots, which you know I never went to extremes in. I confess my face burned a little, to realize what a scarecrow I must look, when I glanced round at those Altrurian women, whose pretty, classic fashions made the whole place like a field of lilacs and irises, and knew that they were as comfortable as they were beautiful. Do you remember some of the descriptions of the undergraduate maidens in the “Princess” — I know you had it at school — where they are sitting in the palace halls together? The effect was something like that.

You may be sure that I got out of my things as soon as I could borrow an Altrurian costume, and now my Paris confections are already hung up for monuments, as Richard III. says, in the Capitalistic Museum, where people from the outlying Regions may come and study them as object-lessons in what not to wear. (You remember what you said Aristides told you, when he spoke that day at the mountains, about the Regions that Altruria is divided into? This is the Maritime Region, and the city where we are living for the present is the capital.) You may think this was rather hard on me, and at first it did seem pretty intimate, having my things in a long glass case, and it gave me a shock to see them, as if it had been my ghost, whenever I passed them. But the fact is I was more ashamed than hurt — they were so ugly and stupid and useless. I could have borne my Paris dress and my picture-hat if it had not been for those ridiculous high-heeled, pointed-toe shoes, which the Curatress had stood at the bottom of the skirts. They looked the most frantic things you can imagine, and the mere sight of them made my poor feet ache in the beautiful sandals I am wearing now; when once you have put on sandals you say good-bye and good-riddance to shoes. In a single month my feet have grown almost a tenth as large again as they were, and my friends here encourage me to believe that they will yet measure nearly the classic size, though, as you know, I am not in my first youth and can’t expect them to do miracles.

I had to leave off abruptly at the last page because Aristides had come in with a piece of news that took my mind off everything else. I am afraid you are not going to get this letter even at the late date I had set for its reaching you, my dear. It seems that there has been a sort of mutiny among the crew of our trader, which was to sail next week, and now there is no telling when she will sail. Ever since she came the men have been allowed their liberty, as they call it, by watches, but the last watch came ashore this week before another watch had returned to the ship, and now not one of the sailors will go back. They had been exploring the country by turns, at their leisure, it seems, and their excuse is that they like Altruria better than America, which they say they wish never to see again.

You know (though I didn’t, till Aristides explained to me) that in any European country the captain in such a case would go to his consul, and the consul would go to the police, and the police would run the men down and send them back to the ship in irons as deserters, or put them in jail till the captain was ready to sail, and then deliver them up to him. But it seems that there is no law in Altruria to do anything of the kind; the only law here that would touch the case is one which obliges any citizen to appear and answer the complaint of any other citizen before the Justiciary Assembly. A citizen cannot be imprisoned for anything but the rarest offence, like killing a person in a fit of passion; and as to seizing upon men who are guilty of nothing worse than wanting to be left to the pursuit of happiness, as all the Altrurians are, there is no statute and no usage for it. Aristides says that the only thing which can be done is to ask the captain and the men to come to the Assembly and each state his case. The Altrurians are not anxious to have the men stay, not merely because they are coarse, rude, or vicious, but because they think they ought to go home and tell the Americans what they have seen and heard here, and try and get them to found an Altrurian Commonwealth of their own. Still they will not compel them to go, and the magistrates do not wish to rouse any sort of sentiment against them. They feel that the men are standing on their natural rights, which they could not abdicate if they would. I know this will appear perfectly ridiculous to Mr. Makely, and I confess myself that there seems something binding in a contract which ought to act on the men’s consciences, at least.

III

Well, my dear Dorothea, the hearing before the Assembly is over, and it has left us just where it found us, as far as the departure of our trader is concerned.

How I wish you could have been there! The hearing lasted three days, and I would not have missed a minute of it. As it was, I did not miss a syllable, and it was so deeply printed on my mind that I believe I could repeat it word for word if I had to. But, in the first place, I must try and realize the scene to you. I was once summoned as a witness in one of our courts, you remember, and I have never forgotten the horror of it: the hot, dirty room, with its foul air, the brutal spectators, the policemen stationed among them to keep them in order, the lawyers with the plaintiff and defendant seated all at one table, the uncouth abruptness of the clerks and janitors, or whatever, the undignified magistrate, who looked as if his lunch had made him drowsy, and who seemed half asleep, as he slouched in his arm-chair behind his desk. Instead of such a setting as this, you must imagine a vast marble amphitheatre, larger than the Metropolitan Opera, by three or four times, all the gradines overflowing (that is the word for the “liquefaction of the clothes” which poured over them), and looking like those Bermudan waters where the colors of the rainbow seem dropped around the coast. On the platform, or stage, sat the Presidents of the Assembly, and on a tier of seats behind and above them, the national Magistrates, who, as this is the capital of the republic for the time being, had decided to be present at the hearing, because they thought the case so very important. In the hollow space, just below (like that where you remember the Chorus stood in that Greek play which we saw at Harvard ages ago), were the captain and the first-mate on one hand, and the seamen on the other; the second-mate, our particular friend, was not there because he never goes ashore anywhere, and had chosen to remain with the black cook in charge of the ship. The captain’s wife would rather have stayed with them, but I persuaded her to come to us for the days of the hearing, because the captain had somehow thought we were opposed to him, and because I thought she ought to be there to encourage him by her presence. She sat next to me, in a hat which I wish you could have seen, Dolly, and a dress which would have set your teeth on edge; but inside of them I knew she was one of the best souls in the world, and I loved her the more for being the sight she was among those wonderful Altrurian women.

The weather was perfect, as it nearly always is at this time of year — warm, yet fresh, with a sky of that “bleu impossible” of the Riviera on the clearest day. Some people had parasols, but they put them down as soon as the hearing began, and everybody could see perfectly. You would have thought they could not hear so well, but a sort of immense sounding-plane was curved behind the stage, so that not a word of the testimony on either side was lost to me in English. The Altrurian translation was given the second day of the hearing through a megaphone, as different in tone from the thing that the man in the Grand Central Station bellows the trains through as the vox-humana stop of an organ is different from the fog-horn of a light-house. The captain’s wife was bashful, in her odd American dress, but we had got seats near the tribune, rather out of sight, and there was nothing to hinder our hearing, like the frou-frou of stiff silks or starched skirts (which I am afraid we poor things in America like to make when we move) from the soft, filmy tissues that the Altrurian women wear; but I must confess that there was a good deal of whispering while the captain and the men were telling their stories. But, no one except the interpreters, who were taking their testimony down in short-hand, to be translated into Altrurian and read at the subsequent hearing, could understand what they were saying, and so nobody was disturbed by the murmurs. The whispering was mostly near me, where I sat with the captain’s wife, for everybody I knew got as close as they could and studied my face when they thought anything important or significant had been said. They are very quick at reading faces here; in fact, a great deal of the conversation is carried on in that way, or with the visible speech; and my Altrurian friends knew almost as well as I did when the speakers came to an interesting point. It was rather embarrassing for me, though, with the poor captain’s wife at my side, to tell them, in my broken Altrurian, what the men were accusing the captain of.

I talk of the men, but it was really only one of them who at first, by their common consent, spoke for the rest. He was a middle-aged Yankee, and almost the only born American among them, for you know that our sailors, nowadays, are of every nationality under the sun — Portuguese, Norwegians, Greeks, Italians, Kanucks, and Kanakas, and even Cape Cod Indians. He said he guessed his story was the story of most sailors, and he had followed the sea his whole life. His story was dreadful, and I tried to persuade the captain’s wife not to come to the hearing the next day, when it was to be read in Altrurian; but she would come. I was afraid she would be overwhelmed by the public compassion, and would not know what to do; for when something awful that the sailor had said against the captain was translated the women, all about us cooed their sympathy with her, and pressed her hand if they could, or patted her on the shoulder, to show how much they pitied her. In Altruria they pity the friends of those who have done wrong, and sometimes even the wrong-doers themselves; and it is quite a luxury, for there is so little wrong-doing here: I tell them that in America they would have as much pitying to do as they could possibly ask. After the hearing that day my friends, who were of a good many different Refectories, as we call them here, wanted her to go and lunch with them; but I got her quietly home with me, and after she had had something to eat I made her lie down awhile.

You won’t care to have me go fully into the affair. The sailors’ spokesman told how he had been born on a farm, where he had shared the family drudgery and poverty till he grew old enough to run away. He meant to go to sea, but he went first to a factory town and worked three or four years in the mills. He never went back to the farm, but he sent a little money now and then to his mother; and he stayed on till he got into trouble. He did not say just what kind of trouble, but I fancied it was some sort of love-trouble; he blamed himself for it; and when he left that town to get away from the thought of it, as much as anything, and went to work in another town, he took to drink; then, once, in a drunken spree, he found himself in New York without knowing how. But it was in what he called a sailors’ boarding-house, and one morning, after he had been drinking overnight “with a very pleasant gentleman,” he found himself in the forecastle of a ship bound for Holland, and when the mate came and cursed him up and cursed him out he found himself in the foretop. I give it partly in his own language, because I cannot help it; and I only wish I could give it wholly in his language; it was so graphic and so full of queer Yankee humor. From that time on, he said, he had followed the sea; and at sea he was always a good temperance man, but Altruria was the only place he had ever kept sober ashore. He guessed that was partly because there was nothing to drink but unfermented grape-juice, and partly because there was nobody to drink with; anyhow, he had not had a drop here. Everywhere else, as soon as he left his ship, he made for a sailors’ boarding-house, and then he did not know much till he found himself aboard ship and bound for somewhere that he did not know of. He was always, he said, a stolen man, as much as a negro captured on the west coast of Africa and sold to a slaver; and, he said, it was a slave’s life he led between drinks, whether it was a long time or short. He said he would ask his mates if it was very different with them, and when he turned to them they all shouted back, in their various kinds of foreign accents, No, it was just the same with them, every one. Then he said that was how he came to ship on our captain’s vessel, and though they could not all say the same, they nodded confirmation as far as he was concerned.

The captain looked sheepish enough at this, but he looked sorrowful, too, as if he could have wished it had been different, and he asked the man if he had been abused since he came on board. Well, the man said, not unless you called tainted salt-horse and weevilly biscuit abuse; and then the captain sat down again, and I could feel his poor wife shrinking beside me. The man said that he was comparatively well off on the captain’s ship, and the life was not half such a dog’s life as he had led on other vessels; but it was such that when he got ashore here in Altruria, and saw how white people lived, people that used each other white, he made up his mind that he would never go hack to any ship alive. He hated a ship so much that if he could go home to America as a first-class passenger on a Cunard liner, John D. Rockefeller would not have money enough to hire him to do it. He was going to stay in Altruria till he died, if they would let him, and he guessed they would, if what he had heard about them was true. He just wanted, he said, while we were about it, to have a few of his mates tell their experience, not so much on board the Little Sally, but on shore, and since they could remember; and one after another did get up and tell their miserable stories. They were like the stories you sometimes read in your paper over your coffee, or that you can hear any time you go into the congested districts in New York; but I assure you, my dear, they seemed to me perfectly incredible here, though I had known hundreds of such stories at home. As I realized their facts I forgot where I was; I felt that I was back again in that horror, where it sometimes seemed to me I had no right to be fed or clothed or warm or clean in the midst of the hunger and cold and nakedness and dirt, and where I could only reconcile myself to my comfort because I knew my discomfort would not help others’ misery.

I can hardly tell how, but even the first day a sense of something terrible spread through that multitude of people, to whom the words themselves were mere empty sounds. The captain sat through it, with his head drooping, till his face was out of sight, and the tears ran silently down his wife’s cheeks; and the women round me were somehow awed into silence. When the men ended, and there seemed to be no one else to say anything on that side, the captain jumped to his feet, with a sort of ferocious energy, and shouted out, “Are you all through, men?” and their spokesman answered, “Ay, ay, sir!” and then the captain flung back his grizzled hair and shook his fist towards the sailors. “And do you think I wanted to do it? Do you think I liked to do it? Do you think that if I hadn’t been afraid my whole life long I would have had the heart to lead you the dog’s life I know I’ve led you? I’ve been as poor as the poorest of you, and as low down as the lowest; I was born in the town poor-house, and I’ve been so afraid of the poor-house all my days that I hain’t had, as you may say, a minute’s peace. Ask my wife, there, what sort of a man I am, and whether I’m the man, really the man that’s been hard and mean to you the way I know I been. It was because I was afraid, and because a coward is always hard and mean. I been afraid, ever since I could remember anything, of coming to want, and I was willing to see other men suffer so I could make sure that me and mine shouldn’t suffer. That’s the way we do at home, ain’t it? That’s in the day’s work, ain’t it? That’s playing the game, ain’t it, for everybody? You can’t say it ain’t.” He stopped, and the men’s spokesman called back, “Ay, ay, sir,” as he had done before, and as I had often heard the men do when given an order on the ship.

The captain gave a kind of sobbing laugh, and went on in a lower tone. “Well, I know you ain’t going back. I guess I didn’t expect it much from the start, and I guess I’m not surprised.” Then he lifted his head and shouted, “And do you suppose I want to go back? Don’t you suppose I would like to spend the rest of my days, too, among white people, people that use each other white, as you say, and where there ain’t any want or, what’s worse, fear of want? Men! There ain’t a day, or an hour, or a minute, when I don’t think how awful it is over there, where I got to be either some man’s slave or some man’s master, as much so as if it was down in the ship’s articles. My wife ain’t so, because she ain’t been ashore here. I wouldn’t let her; I was afraid to let her see what a white man’s country really was, because I felt so weak about it myself, and I didn’t want to put the trial on her, too. And do you know why we’re going back, or want to go? I guess some of you know, but I want to tell these folks here so they’ll understand, and I want you, Mr. Homos,” he called to my husband, “to get it down straight. It’s because we’ve got two little children over there, that we left with their grandmother when my wife come with me this voyage because she had lung difficulty and wanted to see whether she could get her health back. Nothing else on God’s green earth could take me back to America, and I guess it couldn’t my wife if she knew what Altruria was as well as I do. But when I went around here and saw how everything was, and remembered how it was at home, I just said, ‘She’ll stay on the ship.’ Now, that’s all I got to say, though I thought I had a lot more. I guess it’ll be enough for these folks, and they can judge between us.” Then the captain sat down, and to make a long story short, the facts of the hearing were repeated in Altrurian the next day by megaphone, and when the translation was finished there was a general rush for the captain. He plainly expected to be lynched, and his wife screamed out, “Oh, don’t hurt him! He isn’t a bad man!” But it was only the Altrurian way with a guilty person: they wanted to let him know how sorry they were for him, and since his sin had found him out how hopeful they were for his redemption. I had to explain it to the sailors as well as to the captain and his wife, but I don’t believe any of them quite accepted the fact.

The third day of the hearing was for the rendering of the decision, first in Altrurian, and then in English. The verdict of the magistrates had to be confirmed by a standing vote of the people, and of course the women voted as well as the men. The decision was that the sailors should be absolutely free to go or stay, but they took into account the fact that it would be cruel to keep the captain and his wife away from their little ones, and the sailors might wish to consider this. If they still remained true to their love of Altruria they could find some means of returning.

When the translator came to this point their spokesman jumped to his feet and called out to the captain, “Will you do it?” “Do what?” he asked, getting slowly to his own feet. “Come back with us after you have seen the kids?” The captain shook his fist at the sailors; it seemed to be the only gesture he had with them. “Give me the chance! All I want is to see the children and bring them out with me to Altruria, and the old folks with them.” “Will you swear it? Will you say, ‘I hope I may find the kids dead and buried when I get home if I don’t do it’?” “I’ll take that oath, or any oath you want me to.” “Shake hands on it, then.”

The two men met in front of the tribunal and clasped hands there, and their reconciliation did not need translation. Such a roar of cheers went up! And then the whole assembly burst out in the national Altrurian anthem, “Brothers All.” I wish you could have heard it! But when the terms of the agreement were explained, the cheering that had gone before was a mere whisper to what followed. One orator after another rose and praised the self-sacrifice of the sailors. I was the proudest when the last of them referred to Aristides and the reports which he had sent home from America, and said that without some such study as he had made of the American character they never could have understood such an act as they were now witnessing. Illogical and insensate as their system was, their character sometimes had a beauty, a sublimity which was not possible to Altrurians even, for it was performed in the face of risks and chances which their happy conditions relieved them from. At the same time, the orator wished his hearers to consider the essential immorality of the act. He said that civilized men had no right to take these risks and chances. The sailors were perhaps justified, in so far as they were homeless, wifeless, and childless men; but it must not be forgotten that their heroism was like the reckless generosity of savages.

The men have gone back to the ship, and she sails this afternoon. I have persuaded the captain to let his wife stay to lunch with me at our Refectory, where the ladies wish to bid her good-bye, and I am hurrying forward this letter so that she can take it on board with her this afternoon. She has promised to post it on the first Pacific steamer they meet, or if they do not meet any to send it forward to you with a special-delivery stamp as soon as they reach Boston. She will also forward by express an Altrurian costume, such as I am now wearing, sandals and all! Do put it on, Dolly, dear, for my sake, and realize what it is for once in your life to be a free woman.

Heaven knows when I shall have another chance of getting letters to you. But I shall live in hopes, and I shall set down my experiences here for your benefit, not perhaps as I meet them, but as I think of them, and you must not mind having a rather cluttered narrative. To-morrow we are setting off on our round of the capitals, where Aristides is to make a sort of public report to the people of the different Regions on the working of the capitalistic conditions as he observed them among us. But I don’t expect to send you a continuous narrative of our adventures. Good-bye, dearest, with my mother’s love, and my husband’s as well as my own, to both of you; think of me as needing nothing but a glimpse of you to complete my happiness. How I should like to tell you fully about it! You must come to Altruria!

I came near letting this go without telling you of one curious incident of the affair between the captain and his men. Before the men returned to the ship they came with their spokesman to say good-bye to Aristides and me, and he remarked casually that it was just as well, maybe, to be going back, because, for one thing, they would know then whether it was real or not. I asked him what he meant, and he said, “Well, you know, some of the mates think it’s a dream here, or it’s too good to be true. As far forth as I go, I’d be willing to have it a dream that I didn’t ever have to wake up from. It ain’t any too good to be true for me. Anyway, I’m going to get back somehow, and give it another chance to be a fact.” Wasn’t that charming? It had a real touch of poetry in it, but it was prose that followed. I couldn’t help asking him whether there had been nothing to mar the pleasure of their stay in Altruria, and he answered: “Well, I don’t know as you could rightly say mar; it hadn’t ought to have. You see, it was like this. You see, some of the mates wanted to lay off and have a regular bange, but that don’t seem to be the idea here. After we had been ashore a day or two they set us to work at different jobs, or wanted to. The mates didn’t take hold very lively, and some of ’em didn’t take hold a bit. But after that went on a couple of days, there wa’n’t any breakfast one morning, and come noontime there wa’n’t any dinner, and as far forth as they could make out they had to go to bed without supper. Then they called a halt, and tackled one of your head men here that could speak some English. He didn’t answer them right off the reel, but he got out his English Testament and he read ’em a verse that said, ‘For even when we were with you this we commanded you, that if any one would not work neither should he eat.’ That kind of fetched ‘em, and after that there wa’n’t any sojerin’, well not to speak of. They saw he meant business. I guess it did more than any one thing to make ’em think they wa’n’t dreamin’.”

IV

You must not think, Dolly, from anything I have been telling you that the Altrurians are ever harsh. Sometimes they cannot realize how things really are with us, and how what seems grotesque and hideous to them seems charming and beautiful, or at least chic, to us. But they are wonderfully quick to see when they have hurt you the least, and in the little sacrifices I have made of my wardrobe to the cause of general knowledge there has not been the least urgence from them. When I now look at the things I used to wear, where they have been finally placed in the ethnological department of the Museum, along with the Esquiman kyaks and the Thlinkeet totems, they seem like things I wore in some prehistoric age —

“When wild in woods the noble savage ran.”

Now, am I being unkind? Well, you mustn’t mind me, Dolly. You must just say, “She has got it bad,” and go on and learn as much about Altruria as you can from me. Some of the things were hard to get used to, and at first seemed quite impossible. For one thing, there was the matter of service, which is dishonorable with us, and honorable with the Altrurians: I was a long time getting to understand that, though I knew it perfectly well from hearing my husband talk about it in New York. I believe he once came pretty near offending you by asking why you did not do your own work, or something like that; he has confessed as much, and I could not wonder at you in your conditions. Why, when we first went to the guest-house, and the pretty young girls who brought in lunch sat down at table to eat it with us, I felt the indignation making me hot all over. You know how democratic I am, and I did not mind those great, splendid boat-girls hugging and kissing me, but I instinctively drew the line at cooks and waitresses. In New York, you know, I always tried to be kind to my servants, but as for letting one of them sit down in my presence, much less sit down at table with me, I never dreamed of such a thing in my most democratic moments. Luckily I drew the line subjectively here, and later I found that these young ladies were daughters of some of the most distinguished men and women on the continent, though you must not understand distinction as giving any sort of social primacy; that sort of thing is not allowed in Altruria. They had drawn lots with the girls in the Regionic school here, and were proud of having won the honor of waiting on us. Of course, I needn’t say they were what we would have felt to be ladies anywhere, and their manners were exquisite, even to leaving us alone together as soon as we had finished luncheon. The meal itself was something I shall always remember for its delicious cooking of the different kinds of mushrooms which took the place of meat, and the wonderful salads, and the temperate and tropical fruits which we had for dessert.

They had to talk mostly with my husband, of course, and when they did talk to me it was through him. They were very intelligent about our world, much more than we are about Altruria, though, of course, it was by deduction from premises rather than specific information, and they wanted to ask a thousand questions; but they saw the joke of it, and laughed with us when Aristides put them off with a promise that if they would have a public meeting appointed we would appear and answer all the questions anybody could think of; we were not going to waste our answers on them the first day. He wanted them to let us go out and help wash the dishes, but they would not hear of it. I confess I was rather glad of that, for it seemed a lower depth to which I could not descend, even after eating with them. But they invited us out to look at the kitchen, after they had got it in order a little, and when we joined them there, whom should I see but my own dear old mother, with an apron up to her chin, wiping the glass and watching carefully through her dear old spectacles that she got everything bright! You know she was of a simpler day than ours, and when she was young she used to do her own work, and she and my father always washed the dishes together after they had company. I merely said, “Well, mother!” and she laughed and colored, and said she guessed she should like it in Altruria, for it took her back to the America she used to know.

I must mention things as they come into my head, and not in any regular order; there are too many of them. One thing is that I did not notice till afterwards that we had had no meat that first day at luncheon — the mushrooms were so delicious, and you know I never was much of a meat-eater. It was not till we began to make our present tour of the Regionic capitals, where Aristides has had to repeat his account of American civilization until I am sick as well as ashamed of America, that I first felt a kind of famine which I kept myself from recognizing as long as I could. Then I had to own to myself, long before I owned it to him, that I was hungry for meat — for roast, for broiled, for fried, for hashed. I did not actually tell him, but he found it out, and I could not deny it, though I felt such an ogre in it. He was terribly grieved, and blamed himself for not having thought of it, and wished he had got some canned meats from the trader before she left the port. He was really in despair, for nobody since the old capitalistic times had thought of killing sheep or cattle for food; they have them for wool and milk and butter; and of course when I looked at them in the fields it did seem rather formidable. You are so used to seeing them in the butchers’ shops, ready for the range, that you never think of what they have to go through before that. But at last I managed to gasp out, one day, “If I could only have a chicken!” and he seemed to think that it could be managed. I don’t know how he made interest with the authorities, or how the authorities prevailed on a farmer to part with one of his precious pullets; but the thing was done somehow, and two of the farmer’s children brought it to us at one of the guest-houses where we were staying, and then fled howling. That was bad enough, but what followed was worse. I went another day on mushrooms before I had the heart to say chicken again and suggest that Aristides should get it killed and dressed. The poor fellow did try, I believe, but we had to fall back upon ourselves for the murderous deed, and — Did you ever see a chicken have its head cut off, and how hideously it behaves? It made us both wish we were dead; and the sacrifice of that one pullet was quite enough for me. We buried the poor thing under the flowers of the guest-house garden, and I went back to my mushrooms after a visit of contrition to the farmer and many attempts to bring his children to forgiveness. After all, the Altrurian mushrooms are wonderfully nourishing, and they are in such variety that, what with other succulent vegetables and the endless range of fruits and nuts, one does not wish for meat — meat that one has killed one’s self!

V

I wish you could be making tour of the Regionic capitals with us, Dolly! There are swift little one-rail electric expresses running daily from one capital to another, but these are used only when speed is required, and we are confessedly in no hurry: Aristides wanted me to see as much of the country as possible, and I am as eager as he. The old steam-roads of the capitalistic epoch have been disused for generations, and their beds are now the country roads, which are everywhere kept in beautiful repair. There are no horse vehicles (the electric motors are employed in the towns), though some people travel on horseback, but the favorite means of conveyance is by electric van, which any citizen may have on proof of his need of it; and it is comfortable beyond compare — mounted on easy springs, and curtained and cushioned like those gypsy vans we see in the country at home. Aristides drives himself, and sometimes we both get out and walk, for there is plenty of time.

I don’t know whether I can make you understand how everything has tended to simplification here. They have disused the complicated facilities and conveniences of the capitalistic epoch, which we are so proud of, and have got back as close as possible to nature. People stay at home a great deal more than with us, though if any one likes to make a journey or to visit the capitals he is quite free to do it, and those who have some useful or beautiful object in view make the sacrifice, as they feel it, to leave their villages every day and go to the nearest capital to carry on their studies or experiments. What we consider modern conveniences they would consider a superfluity of naughtiness for the most part. As work is the ideal, they do not believe in what we call labor-saving devices.

When we approach a village on our journey, one of the villagers, sometimes a young man, and sometimes a girl, comes out to meet us, and when we pass through they send some one with us on the way a little. The people have a perfect inspiration for hospitality: they not only know when to do and how much to do, but how little and when not at all. I can’t remember that we have ever once been bored by those nice young things that welcomed us or speeded us on our way, and when we have stopped in a village they have shown a genius for leaving us alone, after the first welcome, that is beautiful. They are so regardful of our privacy, in fact, that if it had not been for Aristides, who explained their ideal to me, I should have felt neglected sometimes, and should have been shy of letting them know that we would like their company. But he understood it, and I must say that I have never enjoyed people and their ways so much. Their hospitality is a sort of compromise between that of the English houses where you are left free at certain houses to follow your own devices absolutely, and that Spanish splendor which assures you that the host’s house is yours without meaning it. In fact, the guest-house, wherever we go, is ours, for it belongs to the community, and it is absolutely a home to us for the time being. It is usually the best house in the village, the prettiest and cosiest, where all the houses are so pretty and cosey. There is always another building for public meetings, called the temple, which is the principal edifice, marble and classic and tasteful, which we see almost as much of as the guest-house, for the news of the Emissary’s return has preceded him, and everybody is alive with curiosity, and he has to stand and deliver in the village temples everywhere. Of course I am the great attraction, and after being scared by it at first I have rather got to like it; the people are so kind, and unaffected, and really delicate.

You mustn’t get the notion that the Altrurians are a solemn people at all; they are rather gay, and they like other people’s jokes as well as their own; I am sure Mr. Makely, with his sense of humor, would be at home with them at once. The one thing that more than any other has helped them to conceive of the American situation is its being the gigantic joke which we often feel it to be; I don’t know but it appears to them more grotesque than it does to us even. At first, when Aristides would explain some peculiarity of ours, they would receive him with a gale of laughing, but this might change into cries of horror and pity later. One of the things that amused and then revolted them most was our patriotism. They thought it the drollest thing in the world that men should be willing to give their own lives and take the lives of other men for the sake of a country which assured them no safety from want, and did not even assure them work, and in which they had no more logical interest than the country they were going to fight. They could understand how a rich man might volunteer for one of our wars, but when they were told that most of our volunteers were poor men, who left their mothers and sisters, or their wives and children, without any means of support, except their meagre pay, they were quite bewildered and stopped laughing, as if the thing had passed a joke. They asked, “How if one of these citizen soldiers was killed?” and they seemed to suppose that in this case the country would provide for his family and give them work, or if the children were too young would support them at the public expense. It made me creep a little when my husband answered that the family of a crippled or invalided soldier would have a pension of eight or ten or fifteen dollars a month; and when they came back with the question why the citizens of such a country should love it enough to die for it, I could not have said why for the life of me. But Aristides, who is so magnificently generous, tried to give them a notion of the sublimity which is at the bottom of our illogicality and which adjusts so many apparently hopeless points of our anomaly. They asked how this sublimity differed from that of the savage who brings in his game and makes a feast for the whole tribe, and leaves his wife and children without provision against future want; but Aristides told them that there were essential differences between the Americans and savages, which arose from the fact that the savage condition was permanent and the American conditions were unconsciously provisional.

They are quite well informed about our life in some respects, but they wished to hear at first hand whether certain things were really so or not. For instance, they wanted to know whether people were allowed to marry and bring children into the world if they had no hopes of supporting them or educating them, or whether diseased people were allowed to become parents. In Altruria, you know, the families are generally small, only two or three children at the most, so that the parents can devote themselves to them the more fully; and as there is no fear of want here, the state interferes only when the parents are manifestly unfit to bring the little ones up. They imagined that there was something of that kind with us, but when they heard that the state interfered in the family only when the children were unruly, and then it punished the children by sending them to a reform school and disgracing them for life, instead of holding the parents accountable, they seemed to think that it was one of the most anomalous features of our great anomaly. Here, when the father and mother are always quarrelling, the children are taken from them, and the pair are separated, at first for a time, but after several chances for reform they are parted permanently.

But I must not give you the notion that all our conferences are so serious. Many have merely the character of social entertainments, which are not made here for invited guests, but for any who choose to come; all are welcome. At these there are often plays given by amateurs, and improvised from plots which supply the outline, while the performers supply the dialogue and action, as in the old Italian comedies. The Altrurians are so quick and fine, in fact, that they often remind me of the Italians more than any other people. One night there was for my benefit an American play, as the Altrurians imagined it from what they had read about us, and they had costumed it from the pictures of us they had seen in the newspapers Aristides had sent home while he was with us. The effect was a good deal like that American play which the Japanese company of Sada Yacco gave while it was in New York. It was all about a millionaire’s daughter, who was loved by a poor young man and escaped with him to Altruria in an open boat from New York. The millionaire could be distinctly recognized by the dollar-marks which covered him all over, as they do in the caricatures of rich men in our yellow journals. It was funny to the last degree. In the last act he was seen giving his millions away to poor people, whose multitude was represented by the continually coming and going of four or five performers in and out of the door, in outrageously ragged clothes. The Altrurians have not yet imagined the nice degrees of poverty which we have achieved, and they could not have understood that a man with a hundred thousand dollars would have seemed poor to that multi-millionaire. In fact, they do not grasp the idea of money at all. I heard afterwards that in the usual version the millionaire commits suicide in despair, but the piece had been given a happy ending out of kindness to me. I must say that in spite of the monstrous misconception the acting was extremely good, especially that of some comic characters.

But dancing is the great national amusement in Altruria, where it has not altogether lost its religious nature. A sort of march in the temples is as much a part of the worship as singing, and so dancing has been preserved from the disgrace which it used to be in with serious people among us. In the lovely afternoons you see young people dancing in the meadows, and hear them shouting in time to the music, while the older men and women watch them from their seats in the shade. Every sort of pleasure here is improvised, and as you pass through a village the first thing you know the young girls and young men start up in a sort of girandole, and linking hands in an endless chain stretch the figure along through the street and out over the highway to the next village, and the next and the next. The work has all been done in the forenoon, and every one who chooses is at liberty to join in the fun.

The villages are a good deal alike to a stranger, and we knew what to expect there after a while, but the country is perpetually varied, and the unexpected is always happening in it. The old railroad-beds, on which we travelled, are planted with fruit and nut trees and flowering shrubs, and our progress is through a fragrant bower that is practically endless, except where it takes the shape of a colonnade near the entrance of a village, with vines trained about white pillars, and clusters of grapes (which are ripening just now) hanging down. The change in the climate created by cutting off the southeastern peninsula and letting in the equatorial current, which was begun under the first Altrurian president, with an unexpended war-appropriation, and finished for what one of the old capitalistic wars used to cost, is something perfectly astonishing. Aristides says he told you something about it in his speech at the White Mountains, but you would never believe it without the evidence of your senses. Whole regions to the southward, which were nearest the pole and were sheeted with ice and snow, with the temperature and vegetation of Labrador, now have the climate of Italy; and the mountains, which used to bear nothing but glaciers, are covered with olive orchards and plantations of the delicious coffee which they drink here. Aristides says you could have the same results at home — no! in the United States — by cutting off the western shore of Alaska and letting in the Japanese current; and it could be done at the cost of any average war.

VI

But I must not get away from my personal experiences in these international statistics. Sometimes, when night overtakes us, we stop and camp beside the road, and set about getting our supper of eggs and bread and butter and cheese, or the fruits that are ripening all round us. Since my experience with that pullet I go meekly mushrooming in the fields and pastures; and when I have set the mushrooms stewing over an open fire, Aristides makes the coffee, and in a little while we have a banquet fit for kings — or for the poor things in every grade below them that serve kings, political or financial or industrial. There is always water, for it is brought down from the snow-fields of the mountains — there is not much rainfall — and carried in little concrete channels along the road — side from village to village, something like those conduits the Italian peasants use to bring down the water from the Maritime Alps to their fields and orchards; and you hear the soft gurgle of it the whole night long, and day long, too, whenever you stop. After supper we can read awhile by our electric lamp (we tap the current in the telephone wires anywhere), or Aristides sacrifices himself to me in a lesson of Altrurian grammar. Then we creep back into our van and fall asleep with the Southern Cross glittering over our heads. It is perfectly safe, though it was a long time before I could imagine the perfect safety of it. In a country where there are no thieves, because a thief here would not know what to do with his booty, we are secure from human molestation, and the land has long been cleared of all sorts of wild beasts, without being unpleasantly tamed. It is like England in that, and yet it has a touch of the sylvan, which you feel nowhere as you do in our dear New England hill country. There was one night, however, when we were lured on and on, and did not stop to camp till fairly in the dusk. Then we went to sleep without supper, for we had had rather a late lunch and were not hungry, and about one o’clock in the morning I was awakened by voices speaking Altrurian together. I recognized my husband’s voice, which is always so kind, but which seemed to have a peculiarly tender and compassionate note in it now. The other was lower and of a sadness which wrung my heart, though I did not know in the least what the person was saying. The talk went on a long time, at first about some matter of immediate interest, as I fancied, and then apparently it branched off on some topic which seemed to concern the stranger, whoever he was. Then it seemed to get more indistinct, as if the stranger were leaving us and Aristides were going a little way with him. Presently I heard him coming back, and he put his head in at the van curtains, as if to see whether I was asleep.

“Well?” I said, and he said how sorry he was for having waked me. “Oh, I don’t mind,” I said. “Whom were you talking with? He had the saddest voice I ever heard. What did he want?”

“Oh, it seems that we are not far from the ruins of one of the old capitalistic cities, which have been left for a sort of warning against the former conditions, and he wished to caution us against the malarial influences from it. I think perhaps we had better push on a little way, if you don’t mind.”

The moon was shining clearly, and of course I did not mind, and Aristides got his hand on the lever, and we were soon getting out of the dangerous zone. “I think,” he said, “they ought to abolish that pest-hole. I doubt if it serves any good purpose, now, though it has been useful in times past as an object-lesson.”

“But who was your unknown friend?” I asked, a great deal more curious about him than about the capitalistic ruin.

“Oh, just a poor murderer,” he answered easily, and I shuddered back: “A murderer!”

“Yes. He killed his friend some fifteen years ago in a jealous rage, and he is pursued by remorse that gives him no peace.”

“And is the remorse his only punishment?” I asked, rather indignantly.

“Isn’t that enough? God seemed to think it was, in the case of the first murderer, who killed his brother. All that he did to Cain was to set a mark on him. But we have not felt sure that we have the right to do this. We let God mark him, and He has done it with this man in the sorrow of his face. I was rather glad you, couldn’t see him, my dear. It is an awful face.”

I confess that this sounded like mere sentimentalism to me, and I said, “Really, Aristides, I can’t follow you. How are innocent people to be protected against this wretch, if he wanders about among them at will?”

“They are as safe from him as from any other man in Altruria. His case was carefully looked into by the medical authorities, and it was decided that he was perfectly sane, so that he could be safely left at large, to expiate his misdeed in the only possible way that such a misdeed can be expiated — by doing good to others. What would you have had us do with him?”

The question rather staggered me, but I said, “He ought to have been imprisoned at least a year for manslaughter.”

“Cain was not imprisoned an hour.”

“That was a very different thing. But suppose you let a man go at large who has killed his friend in a jealous rage, what do you do with other murderers?”

“In Altruria there can be no other murderers. People cannot kill here for money, which prompts every other kind of murder in capitalistic countries, as well as every other kind of crime. I know, my dear, that this seems very strange to you, but you will accustom yourself to the idea, and then you will see the reasonableness of the Altrurian plan. On the whole, I am sorry you could not have seen that hapless man, and heard him. He had a face like death—”

“And a voice like death, too!” I put in.

“You noticed that? He wanted to talk about his crime with me. He wants to talk about it with any one who will listen to him. He is consumed with an undying pity for the man he slew. That is the first thing, the only thing, in his mind. If he could, I believe he would give his life for the life he took at any moment. But you cannot recreate one life by destroying another. There is no human means of ascertaining justice, but we can always do mercy with divine omniscience.” As he spoke the sun pierced the edge of the eastern horizon, and lit up the marble walls and roofs of the Regionic capital which we were approaching.

At the meeting we had there in the afternoon, Aristides reported our having been warned against our danger in the night by that murderer, and public record of the fact was made. The Altrurians consider any sort of punishment which is not expiation a far greater sin than the wrong it visits, and altogether barren and useless. After the record in this case had been made, the conference naturally turned upon what Aristides had seen of the treatment of criminals in America, and when, he told of our prisons, where people merely arrested and not yet openly accused are kept, I did not know which way to look, for you know I am still an American at heart, Dolly. Did you ever see the inside of one of our police-stations at night? Or smell it? I did, once, when I went to give bail for a wretched girl who had been my servant, and had gone wrong, but had been arrested for theft, and I assure you that the sight and the smell woke me in the night for a month afterwards, and I have never quite ceased to dream about it.

The Altrurians listened in silence, and I hoped they could not realize the facts, though the story was every word true; but what seemed to make them the most indignant was the treatment of the families of the prisoners in what we call our penitentiaries and reformatories. At first they did not conceive of it, apparently, because it was so stupidly barbarous; they have no patience with stupidity; and when Aristides had carefully explained, it seemed as if they could not believe it. They thought it right that the convicts should be made to work, but they could not understand that the state really took away their wages, and left their families to suffer for want of the support which it had deprived them of. They said this was punishing the mothers and sisters, the wives and children of the prisoners, and was like putting out the eyes of an offender’s innocent relatives as they had read was done in Oriental countries. They asked if there was never any sort of protest against such an atrocious perversion of justice, and when the question was put to me I was obliged to own that I had never heard the system even criticised. Perhaps it has been, but I spoke only from my own knowledge.

VII

Well, to get away from these dismal experiences, and come back to our travels, with their perpetual novelty, and the constantly varying beauty of the country!

The human interest of the landscape, that is always the great interest of it, and I wish I could make you feel it as I have felt it in this wonderful journey of ours. It is like the New England landscape at times, in its kind of gentle wildness, but where it has been taken back into the hand of man, how different the human interest is! Instead of a rheumatic old farmer, in his clumsy clothes, with some of his gaunt girls to help him, or perhaps his ageing wife, getting in the hay of one of those sweet meadows, and looking like so many animated scarecrows at their work; or instead of some young farmer, on the seat of his clattering mower, or mounted high over his tedder, but as much alone as if there were no one else in the neighborhood, silent and dull, or fierce or sullen, as the case might be, the work is always going on with companies of mowers or reapers, or planters, that chatter like birds or sing like them.

It is no use my explaining again and again that in a country like this, where everybody works, nobody over works, and that when the few hours of obligatory labor are passed in the mornings, people need not do anything unless they choose. Their working-dresses are very simple, but in all sorts of gay colors, like those you saw in the Greek play at Harvard, with straw hats for the men, and fillets of ribbon for the girls, and sandals for both. I speak of girls, for most of the married women are at home gardening, or about the household work, but men of every age work in the fields. The earth is dear to them because they get their life from it by labor that is not slavery; they come to love it every acre, every foot, because they have known it from childhood; and I have seen old men, very old, pottering about the orchards and meadows during the hours of voluntary work, and trimming them up here and there, simply because they could not keep away from the place, or keep their hands off the trees and bushes. Sometimes in the long, tender afternoons, we see far up on some pasture slope, groups of girls scattered about on the grass, with their sewing, or listening to some one reading. Other times they are giving a little play, usually a comedy, for life is so happy here that tragedy would not be true to it, with the characters coming and going in a grove of small pines, for the coulisses, and using a level of grass for the stage. If we stop, one of the audience comes down to us and invites us to come up and see the play, which keeps on in spite of the sensation that I can feel I make among them.

Everywhere the news of us has gone before us, and there is a universal curiosity to get a look at Aristides’ capitalistic wife, as they call me. I made him translate it, and he explained that the word was merely descriptive and not characteristic; some people distinguished and called me American. There was one place where they were having a picnic in the woods up a hillside, and they asked us to join them, so we turned our van into the roadside and followed the procession. It was headed by two old men playing on pipes, and after these came children singing, and then all sorts of people, young and old. When we got to an open place in the woods, where there was a spring, and smooth grass, they built fires, and began to get ready for the feast, while some of them did things to amuse the rest. Every one could do something; if you can imagine a party of artists, it was something like that. I should say the Altrurians had artists’ manners, free, friendly, and easy, with a dash of humor in everything, and a wonderful willingness to laugh and make laugh. Aristides is always explaining that the artist is their ideal type; that is, some one who works gladly, and plays as gladly as he works; no one here is asked to do work that he hates, unless he seems to hate every kind of work. When this happens, the authorities find out something for him that he had better like, by letting him starve till he works. That picnic lasted the whole afternoon and well into the night, and then the picnickers went home through the starlight, leading the little ones, or carrying them when they were too little or too tired. But first they came down to our van with us, and sang us a serenade after we had disappeared into it, and then left us, and sent their voices back to us out of the dark.

One morning at dawn, as we came into a village, we saw nearly the whole population mounting the marble steps of the temple, all the holiday dress of the Voluntaries, which they put on here every afternoon when the work is done. Last of the throng came a procession of children, looking something like a May-Day party, and midway of their line were a young man and a young girl, hand in hand, who parted at the door of the temple, and entered separately. Aristides called out, “Oh, it is a wedding! You are in luck, Eveleth,” and then and there I saw my first Altrurian wedding.

Within, the pillars and the altar and the seats of the elders were garlanded with flowers, so fresh and fragrant that they seemed to have blossomed from the marble overnight, and there was a soft murmur of Altrurian voices that might very well have seemed the hum of bees among the blossoms. This subsided, as the young couple, who had paused just inside the temple door, came up the middle side by side, and again separated and took their places, the youth on the extreme right of the elder, and the maiden on the extreme left of the eldresses, and stood facing the congregation, which was also on foot, and joined in the hymn which everybody sang. Then one of the eldresses rose and began a sort of statement which Aristides translated to me afterwards. She said that the young couple whom we saw there had for the third time asked to become man and wife, after having believed for a year that they loved each other, and having statedly come before the marriage authorities and been questioned as to the continuance of their affection. She said that probably every one present knew that they had been friends from childhood, and none would be surprised that they now wished to be united for life. They had been carefully instructed as to the serious nature of the marriage bond, and admonished as to the duties they were entering into, not only to each other, but to the community. At each successive visit to the authorities they had been warned, separately and together, against the danger of trusting to anything like a romantic impulse, and they had faithfully endeavored to act upon this advice, as they testified. In order to prove the reality of their affection, they had been parted every third month, and had lived during that time in different Regions where it was meant they should meet many other young people, so that if they felt any swerving of the heart they might not persist in an intention which could only bring them final unhappiness. It seems this is the rule in the case of young lovers, and people usually marry very young here, but if they wish to marry later in life the rule is not enforced so stringently, or not at all. The bride and groom we saw had both stood these trials, and at each return they had been more and more sure that they loved each other, and loved no one else. Now they were here to unite their hands, and to declare the union of their hearts before the people.

Then the eldress sat down and an elder arose, who bade the young people come forward to the centre of the line, where the elders and eldresses were sitting. He took his place behind them, and once more and for the last time he conjured them not to persist if they felt any doubt of themselves. He warned them that if they entered into the married state, and afterwards repented to the point of seeking divorce, the divorce would indeed be granted them, but on terms, as they must realize, of lasting grief to themselves through the offence they would commit against the commonwealth. They answered that they were sure of themselves, and ready to exchange their troth for life and death. Then they joined hands, and declared that they took each other for husband and wife. The congregation broke into another hymn and slowly dispersed, leaving the bride and groom with their families, who came up to them and embraced them, pressing their cheeks against the cheeks of the young pair.

This ended the solemnity, and then the festivity began, as it ended, with a wedding feast, where people sang and danced and made speeches and drank toasts, and the fun was kept up till the hours of the Obligatories approached; and then, what do you think? The married pair put off their wedding garments with the rest and went to work in the fields! Later, I understood, if they wished to take a wedding journey they could freely do so; but the first thing in their married life they must honor the Altrurian ideal of work, by which every one must live in order that every other may live without overwork. I believe that the marriage ceremonial is something like that of the Quakers, but I never saw a Quaker wedding, and I could only compare this with the crazy romps with which our house-weddings often end, with throwing of rice and old shoes, and tying ribbons to the bridal carriage and baggage, and following the pair to the train with outbreaks of tiresome hilarity, which make them conspicuous before their fellow-travellers; or with some of our ghastly church weddings, in which the religious ceremonial is lost in the social effect, and ends with that everlasting thumping march from “Lohengrin,” and the outsiders storming about the bridal pair and the guests with the rude curiosity that the fattest policemen at the canopied and carpeted entrance cannot check.

VIII

We have since been at other weddings and at christenings and at funerals. The ceremonies are always held in the temples, and are always in the same serious spirit. As the Altrurians are steadfast believers in immortality, there is a kind of solemn elevation in the funeral ceremonies which I cannot give you a real notion of. It is helped, I think, by the custom of not performing the ceremony over the dead; a brief rite is reserved for the cemetery, where it is wished that the kindred shall not be present, lest they think always of the material body and not of the spiritual body which shall be raised in incorruption. Religious service is held in the temples every day at the end of the Obligatories, and whenever we are near a village or in any of the capitals we always go. It is very simple. After a hymn, to which the people sometimes march round the interior of the temple, each lays on the altar an offering from the fields or woods where they have been working, if it is nothing but a head of grain or a wild flower or a leaf. Then any one is at liberty to speak, but any one else may go out without offence. There is no ritual; sometimes they read a chapter from the New Testament, preferably a part of the story of Christ or a passage from His discourses. The idea of coming to the temple at the end of the day’s labor is to consecrate that day’s work, and they do not call anything work that is not work with the hands. When I explained, or tried to explain, that among us a great many people worked with their brains, to amuse others or to get handwork out of them, they were unable to follow me. I asked if they did not consider composing music or poetry or plays, or painting pictures work, and they said, No, that was pleasure, and must be indulged only during the Voluntaries; it was never to be honored like work with the hands, for it would not equalize the burden of that, but might put an undue share of it on others. They said that lives devoted to such pursuits must be very unwholesome, and they brought me to book about the lives of most artists, literary men, and financiers in the capitalistic world to prove what they said. They held that people must work with their hands willingly, in the artistic spirit, but they could only do that when they knew that others differently gifted were working in like manner with their hands.

I couldn’t begin to tell you all our queer experiences. As I have kept saying, I am a great curiosity everywhere, and I could flatter myself that people were more eager to see me than to hear Aristides. Sometimes I couldn’t help thinking that they expected to find me an awful warning, a dreadful example of whatever a woman ought not to be, and a woman from capitalistic conditions must be logically. But sometimes they were very intelligent, even the simplest villagers, as we should call them, though there is such an equality of education and opportunity here that no simplicity of life has the effect of dulling people as it has with us. One thing was quite American: they always wanted to know how I liked Altruria, and when I told them, as I sincerely could, that I adored it, they were quite affecting in their pleasure. They generally asked if I would like to go back to America, and when I said No, they were delighted beyond anything. They said I must become a citizen and vote and take part in the government, for that was every woman’s duty as well as right; it was wrong to leave the whole responsibility to the men. They asked if American women took no interest in the government, and when I told them there was a very small number who wished to influence politics socially, as the Englishwomen did, but without voting or taking any responsibility, they were shocked. In one of the Regionic capitals they wanted me to speak after Aristides, but I had nothing prepared; at the next I did get off a little speech in English, which he translated after me. Later he put it into Altrurian, and I memorized it, and made myself immensely popular by parroting it.

The pronunciation of Altrurian is not difficult, for it is spelled phonetically, and the sounds are very simple. Where they were once difficult they have been simplified, for here the simplification of life extends to everything; and the grammar has been reduced in its structure till it is as elemental as English grammar or Norwegian. The language is Greek in origin, but the intricate inflections and the declensions have been thrown away, and it has kept only the simplest forms. You must get Mr. Twelvemough to explain this to you, Dolly, for it would take me too long, and I have so much else to tell you. A good many of the women have taken up English, but they learn it as a dead language, and they give it a comical effect by trying to pronounce it as it is spelled.

I suppose you are anxious, if these letters which are piling up and piling up should ever reach you, or even start to do so, to know something about the Altrurian cities, and what they are like. Well, in the first place, you must cast all images of American cities out of your mind, or any European cities, except, perhaps, the prettiest and stateliest parts of Paris, where there is a regular sky-line, and the public buildings and monuments are approached through shaded avenues. There are no private houses here, in our sense — that is, houses which people have built with their own money on their own land, and made as ugly outside and as molestive to their neighbors and the passers-by as they chose. As the buildings belong to the whole people, the first requirement is that they shall be beautiful inside and out. There are a few grand edifices looking like Greek temples, which are used for the government offices, and these are, of course, the most dignified, but the dwellings are quite as attractive and comfortable. They are built round courts, with gardens and flowers in the courts, and wide grassy spaces round them. They are rather tall, but never so tall as our great hotels or apartment-houses, and the floors are brought to one level by elevators, which are used only in the capitals; and, generally speaking, I should say the villages were pleasanter than the cities. In fact, the village is the Altrurian ideal, and there is an effort everywhere to reduce the size of the towns and increase the number of the villages. The outlying farms have been gathered into these, and now there is not one of those lonely places in the country, like those where our farmers toil alone outdoors and their wives alone indoors, and both go mad so often in the solitude. The villages are almost in sight of each other, and the people go to their fields in company, while the women carry on their house-keeping co-operatively, with a large kitchen which they use in common; they have their meals apart or together, as they like. If any one is sick or disabled the neighbors come in and help do her work, as they used with us in the early times, and as they still do in country places. Village life here is preferred, just as country life is in England, and one thing that will amuse you, with your American ideas, and your pride in the overgrowth of our cities: the Altrurian papers solemnly announce from time to time that the population of such or such a capital has been reduced so many hundreds or thousands since the last census. That means that the villages in the neighborhood have been increased in number and population.

Meanwhile, I must say the capitals are delightful: clean, airy, quiet, with the most beautiful architecture, mostly classic and mostly marble, with rivers running through them and round them, and every real convenience, but not a clutter of artificial conveniences, as with us. In the streets there are noiseless trolleys (where they have not been replaced by public automobiles) which the long distances of the ample ground-plan make rather necessary, and the rivers are shot over with swift motor-boats; for the short distances you always expect to walk, or if you don’t expect it, you walk anyway. The car-lines and boat-lines are public, and they are free, for the Altrurians think that the community owes transportation to every one who lives beyond easy reach of the points which their work calls them to.

Of course the great government stores are in the capitals, and practically there are no stores in the villages, except for what you might call emergency supplies. But you must not imagine, Dolly, that shopping, here, is like shopping at home — or in America, as I am learning to say, for Altruria is home now. That is, you don’t fill your purse with bank-notes, or have things charged. You get everything you want, within reason, and certainly everything you need, for nothing. You have only to provide yourself with a card, something like that you have to show at the Army and Navy Stores in London, when you first go to buy there, which certifies that you belong to this or that working-phalanx, and that you have not failed in the Obligatories for such and such a length of time. If you are not entitled to this card, you had better not go shopping, for there is no possible equivalent for it which will enable you to carry anything away or have it sent to your house. At first I could not help feeling rather indignant when I was asked to show my work-card in the stores; I had usually forgotten to bring it, or sometimes I had brought my husband’s card, which would not do at all, unless I could say that I had been ill or disabled, for a woman is expected to work quite the same as a man. Of course her housework counts, and as we are on a sort of public mission, they count our hours of travel as working-hours, especially as Aristides has made it a point of good citizenship for us to stop every now and then and join in the Obligatories when the villagers were getting in the farm crops or quarrying stone or putting up a house. I am never much use in quarrying or building, but I come in strong in the hay-fields or the apple orchards or the orange groves.

The shopping here is not so enslaving as it is with us — I mean, with you — because the fashions do not change, and you get things only when you need them, not when you want them, or when other people think you do. The costume was fixed long ago, when the Altrurian era began, by a commission of artists, and it would be considered very bad form as well as bad morals to try changing it in the least. People are allowed to choose their own colors, but if one goes very wrong, or so far wrong as to offend the public taste, she is gently admonished by the local art commission. If she insists, they let her have her own way, but she seldom wants it when she knows that people think her a fright. Of course the costume is modified somewhat for the age and shape of the wearer, but this is not so often as you might think. There are no very lean or very stout people, though there are old and young, just as there are with us. But the Altrurians keep young very much longer than capitalistic peoples do, and the life of work keeps down their weight. You know I used to incline a little to over-plumpness, I really believe because I overate at times simply to keep from thinking of the poor who had to undereat, but that is quite past now; I have lost at least twenty-five pounds from working out-doors and travelling so much and living very, very simply.

IX

I have to jot things down as they come into my mind, and I am afraid I forget some of the most important. Everybody is so novel on this famous tour of ours that I am continually interested, but one has one’s preferences even in Altruria, and I believe I like best the wives of the artists and literary men whom one finds working in the galleries and libraries of the capitals everywhere. They are not more intelligent than other women, perhaps, but they are more sympathetic; and one sees so little of those people in New York, for all they abound there.

The galleries are not only for the exhibition of pictures, but each has numbers of ateliers, where the artists work and teach. The libraries are the most wonderfully imagined things. You do not have to come and study in them, but if you are working up any particular subject, the books relating to it are sent to your dwelling every morning and brought away every noon, so that during the obligatory hours you have them completely at your disposition, and during the Voluntaries you can consult them with the rest of the public in the library; it is not thought best that study should be carried on throughout the day, and the results seem to justify this theory. If you want to read a book merely for pleasure, you are allowed to take it out and live with it as long as you like; the copy you have is immediately replaced with another, so that you do not feel hurried and are not obliged to ramp through it in a week or a fortnight.

The Altrurian books are still rather sealed books to me, but they are delightful to the eye, all in large print on wide margins, with flexible bindings, and such light paper that you can hold them in one hand indefinitely without tiring. I must send you some with this, if I ever get my bundle of letters off to you. You will see by the dates that I am writing you one every day; I had thought of keeping a journal for you, but then I should have had left out a good many things that happened during our first days, when the impressions were so vivid, and I should have got to addressing my records to myself, and I think I had better keep to the form of letters. If they reach you, and you read them at random, why that is very much the way I write them.

I despair of giving you any real notion of the capitals, but if you remember the White City at the Columbian Fair at Chicago in 1893, you can have some idea of the general effect of one; only there is nothing heterogeneous in their beauty. There is one classic rule in the architecture, but each of the different architects may characterize an edifice from himself, just as different authors writing the same language characterize it by the diction natural to him. There are suggestions of the capitals in some of our cities, and if you remember Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, you can imagine something like the union of street and garden which every street of them is. The trolleys run under the overarching trees between the lawns, flanked by gravelled footpaths between flower-beds, and you take the cars or not as you like. As there is no hurry, they go about as fast as English trams, and the clanger from them is practically reduced to nothing by the crossings dipping under them at the street corners. The centre of the capital is approached by colonnades, which at night bear groups of great bulbous lamps, and by day flutter with the Altrurian and Regionic flags. Around this centre are the stores and restaurants and theatres, and galleries and libraries, with arcades over the sidewalks, like those in Bologna; sometimes the arcades are in two stories, as they are in Chester. People are constantly coming and going in an easy way during the afternoon, though in the morning the streets are rather deserted.

But what is the use? I could go on describing and describing, and never get in half the differences from American cities, with their hideous uproar, and their mud in the wet, and their clouds of swirling dust in the wind. But there is one feature which I must mention, because you can fancy it from the fond dream of a great national highway which some of our architects projected while they were still in the fervor of excitement from the beauty of the Peristyle, and other features of the White City. They really have such a highway here, crossing the whole Altrurian continent, and uniting the circle of the Regionic capitals. As we travelled for a long time by the country roads on the beds of the old railways, I had no idea of this magnificent avenue, till one day my husband suddenly ran our van into the one leading up to the first capital we were to visit. Then I found myself between miles and miles of stately white pillars, rising and sinking as the road found its natural levels, and growing in the perspective before us and dwindling behind us. I could not keep out of my mind a colonnade of palm-trees, only the fronds were lacking, and there were never palms so beautiful. Each pillar was inscribed with the name of some Altrurian who had done something for his country, written some beautiful poem or story, or history, made some scientific discovery, composed an opera, invented a universal convenience, performed a wonderful cure, or been a delightful singer, or orator, or gardener, or farmer. Not one soldier, general or admiral, among them! That seemed very strange to me, and I asked Aristides how it was. Like everything else in Altruria, it was very simple; there had been no war for so long that there were no famous soldiers to commemorate. But he stopped our van when he came to the first of the many arches which spanned the highway, and read out to me in English the Altrurian record that it was erected in honor of the first President of the Altrurian Commonwealth, who managed the negotiations when the capitalistic oligarchies to the north and south were peacefully annexed, and the descendants of the three nations joined in the commemoration of an event that abolished war forever on the Altrurian continent.

Here I can imagine Mr. Makely asking who footed the bills for this beauty and magnificence, and whether these works were constructed at the cost of the nation, or the different Regions, or the abuttors on the different highways. But the fact is, you poor, capitalistic dears, they cost nobody a dollar, for there is not a dollar in Altruria. You must worry into the idea somehow that in Altruria you cannot buy anything except by working, and that work is the current coin of the republic: you pay for everything by drops of sweat, and off your own brow, not somebody else’s brow. The people built these monuments and colonnades, and aqueducts and highways and byways, and sweet villages and palatial cities with their own hands, after the designs of artists, who also took part in the labor. But it was a labor that they delighted in so much that they chose to perform it during the Voluntaries, when they might have been resting, and not during the Obligatories, when they were required to work. So it was all joy and all glory. They say there never was such happiness in any country since the world began. While the work went on it was like a perpetual Fourth of July or an everlasting picnic.

But I know you hate this sort of economical stuff, Dolly, and I will make haste to get down to business, as Mr. Makely would say, for I am really coming to something that you will think worth while. One morning, when we had made half the circle of the capitals, and were on the homestretch to the one where we had left our dear mother — for Aristides claims her, too — and I was letting that dull nether anxiety for her come to the top, though we had had the fullest telephonic talks with her every day, and knew she was well and happy, we came round the shoulder of a wooded cliff and found ourselves on an open stretch of the northern coast. At first I could only exclaim at the beauty of the sea, lying blue and still beyond a long beach closed by another headland, and I did not realize that a large yacht which I saw close to land had gone ashore. The beach was crowded with Altrurians, who seemed to have come to the rescue, for they were putting off to the yacht in boats and returning with passengers, and jumping out, and pulling their boats with them up on to the sand.

I was quite bewildered, and I don’t know what to say I was the next thing, when I saw that the stranded yacht was flying the American flag from her peak. I supposed she must be one of our cruisers, she was so large, and the first thing that flashed into my mind was a kind of amused wonder what those poor Altrurians would do with a ship-of-war and her marines and crew. I couldn’t ask any coherent questions, and luckily Aristides was answering my incoherent ones in the best possible way by wheeling our van down on the beach and making for the point nearest the yacht. He had time to say he did not believe she was a government vessel, and, in fact, I remembered that once I had seen a boat in the North River getting up steam to go to Europe which was much larger, and had her decks covered with sailors that I took for bluejackets; but she was only the private yacht of some people I knew. These stupid things kept going and coming in my mind while my husband was talking with some of the Altrurian girls who were there helping with the men. They said that the yacht had gone ashore the night before last in one of the sudden fogs that come up on that coast, and that some people whom the sailors seemed to obey were camping on the edge of the upland above the beach, under a large tent they had brought from the yacht. They had refused to go to the guest-house in the nearest village, and as nearly as the girls could make out they expected the yacht to get afloat from tide to tide, and then intended to re-embark on her. In the mean time they had provisioned themselves from the ship, and were living in a strange way of their own. Some of them seemed to serve the others, but these appeared to be used with a very ungrateful indifference, as if they were of a different race. There was one who wore a white apron and white cap who directed the cooking for the rest, and had several assistants; and from time to time very disagreeable odors came from the camp, like burning flesh. The Altrurians had carried them fruits and vegetables, but the men-assistants had refused them contemptuously and seemed suspicious of the variety of mushrooms they offered them. They called out, “To-stoo!” and I understood that the strangers were afraid they were bringing toad-stools. One of the Altrurian girls had been studying English in the nearest capital, and she had tried to talk with these people, pronouncing it in the Altrurian way, but they could make nothing of one another; then she wrote down what she wanted to say, but as she spelled it phonetically they were not able to read her English. She asked us if I was the American Altrurian she had heard of, and when I said yes she lost no time in showing us to the camp of the castaways.

As soon as we saw their tents we went forward till we were met at the largest by a sort of marine footman, who bowed slightly and said to me, “What name shall I say, ma’am?” and I answered distinctly, so that he might get the name right, “Mr. and Mrs. Homos.” Then he held back the flap of the marquee, which seemed to serve these people as a drawing-room, and called out, standing very rigidly upright, to let us pass, in the way that I remembered so well, “Mr. And Mrs. ‘Omos!” and a severe-looking, rather elderly lady rose to meet us with an air that was both anxious and forbidding, and before she said anything else she burst out, “You don’t mean to say you speak English?”

I said that I spoke English, and had not spoken anything else but rather poor French until six months before, and then she demanded, “Have you been cast away on this outlandish place, too?”

I laughed and said I lived here, and I introduced my husband as well as I could without knowing her name. He explained with his pretty Altrurian accent, which you used to like so much, that we had ventured to come in the hope of being of use to them, and added some regrets for their misfortune so sweetly that I wondered she could help responding in kind. But she merely said, “Oh!” and then she seemed to recollect herself, and frowning to a very gentle-looking old man to come forward, she ignored my husband in presenting me. “Mr. Thrall, Mrs. — —”

She hesitated for my name, and I supplied it, “Homos,” and as the old man had put out his hand in a kindly way I took it.

“And this is my husband, Aristides Homos, an Altrurian,” I said, and then, as the lady had not asked us to sit down, or shown the least sign of liking our being there, the natural woman flamed up in me as she hadn’t in all the time I have been away from New York. “I am glad you are so comfortable here, Mr. Thrall. You won’t need us, I see. The people about will do anything in their power for you. Come, my dear,” and I was sweeping out of that tent in a manner calculated to give the eminent millionaire’s wife a notion of Altrurian hauteur which I must own would have been altogether mistaken.

I knew who they were perfectly. Even if I had not once met them I should have known that they were the ultra-rich Thralls, from the multitudinous pictures of them that I had seen in the papers at home, not long after they came on to New York.

He was beginning, “Oh no, oh no,” but I cut in. “My husband and I are on our way to the next Regionic capital, and we are somewhat hurried. You will be quite well looked after by the neighbors here, and I see that we are rather in your housekeeper’s way.”

It was nasty, Dolly, and I won’t deny it; it was vulgar. But what would you have done? I could feel Aristides’ mild eye sadly on me, and I was sorry for him, but I assure him I was not sorry for them, till that old man spoke again, so timidly: “It isn’t my — it’s my wife, Mrs. Homos. Let me introduce her. But haven’t we met before?”

“Perhaps during my first husband’s lifetime. I was Mrs. Bellington Strange.”

“Mrs. P. Bellington Strange? Your husband was a dear friend of mine when we were both young — a good man, if ever there was one; the best in the world! I am so glad to see you again. Ah — my dear, you remember my speaking of Mrs. Strange?”

He took my hand again and held it in his soft old hands, as if hesitating whether to transfer it to her, and my heart melted towards him. You may think it very odd, Dolly, but it was what he said of my dear, dead husband that softened me. It made him seem very fatherly, and I felt the affection for him that I felt for my husband, when he seemed more like a father. Aristides and I often talk of it, and he has no wish that I should forget him.

Mrs. Thrall made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, “I think I have met Mr. Strange,” and now I saw in the background, sitting on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social Register, and that the girl’s search for me had been satisfactory, for she rose and came vaguely towards us, while the young man unfolded himself from the hammock, and stood hesitating, but looking as if he rather liked what had happened.

Mr. Thrall bustled about for camp-stools, and said, “Do stop and have some breakfast with us, it’s just coming in. May I introduce my daughter, Lady Moors and — and Lord Moors?” The girl took my hand, and the young man bowed from his place; but if that poor old man had known, peace was not to be made so easily between two such bad-tempered women as Mrs. Thrall and myself. We expressed some very stiff sentiments in regard to the weather, and the prospect of the yacht getting off with the next tide, and my husband joined in with that manly gentleness of his, but we did not sit down, much less offer to stay to breakfast. We had got to the door of the tent, the family following us, even to the noble son-in-law, and as she now realized that we are actually going, Mrs. Thrall gasped out, “But you are not leaving us? What shall we do with all these natives?”

This was again too much, and I flamed out at her. “Natives! They are cultivated and refined people, for they are Altrurians, and I assure you you will be in much better hands than mine with them, for I am only Altrurian by marriage!”

She was one of those leathery egotists that nothing will make a dint in, and she came back with, “But we don’t speak the language, and they don’t speak English, and how are we to manage if the yacht doesn’t get afloat?”

“Oh, no doubt you will be looked after from the capital we have just left. But I will venture to make a little suggestion with regard to the natives in the mean time. They are not proud, but they are very sensitive, and if you fail in any point of consideration, they will understand that you do not want their hospitality.”

“I imagine our own people will be able to look after us,” she answered quite as nastily. “We do not propose to be dependent on them. We can pay our way here as we do elsewhere.”

“The experiment will be worth trying,” I said. “Come, Aristides!” and I took the poor fellow away with me to our van. Mr. Thrall made some hopeless little movements towards us, but I would not stop or even look back. When we got into the van, I made Aristides put on the full power, and fell back into my seat and cried a while, and then I scolded him because he would not scold me, and went on in a really scandalous way. It must have been a revelation to him, but he only smoothed me on the shoulder and said, “Poor Eveleth, poor Eveleth,” till I thought I should scream; but it ended in my falling on his neck, and saying I knew I was horrid, and what did he want me to do?

After I calmed down into something like rationality, he said he thought we had perhaps done the best thing we could for those people in leaving them to themselves, for they could come to no possible harm among the neighbors. He did not believe from what he had seen of the yacht from the shore, and from what the Altrurians had told him, that there was one chance in a thousand of her ever getting afloat. But those people would have to convince themselves of the fact, and of several other facts in their situation. I asked him what he meant, and he said he could tell me, but that as yet it was a public affair, and he would rather not anticipate the private interest I would feel in it. I did not insist; in fact, I wanted to get that odious woman out of my mind as soon as I could, for the thought of her threatened to poison the pleasure of the rest of our tour.

I believe my husband hurried it a little, though he did not shorten it, and we got back to the Maritime Region almost a week sooner than we had first intended. I found my dear mother well, and still serenely happy in her Altrurian surroundings. She had begun to learn the language, and she had a larger acquaintance in the capital, I believe, than any other one person. She said everybody had called on her, and they were the kindest people she had ever dreamed of. She had exchanged cooking-lessons with one lady who, they told her, was a distinguished scientist, and she had taught another, who was a great painter, a peculiar embroidery stitch which she had learned from my grandmother, and which everybody admired. These two ladies had given her most of her grammatical instruction in Altrurian, but there was a bright little girl who had enlarged her vocabulary more than either, in helping her about her housework, the mother having lent her for the purpose. My mother said she was not ashamed to make blunders before a child, and the little witch had taken the greatest delight in telling her the names of things in the house and the streets and the fields outside the town, where they went long walks together.

X

Well, my dear Dorothea, I had been hoping to go more into detail about my mother and about our life in the Maritime Capital, which is to be our home for a year, but I had hardly got down the last words when Aristides came in with a despatch from the Seventh Regionic, summoning us there on important public business: I haven’t got over the feeling yet of being especially distinguished and flattered at sharing in public business; but the Altrurian women are so used to it that they do not think anything of it. The despatch was signed by an old friend of my husband’s, Cyril Chrysostom, who had once been Emissary in England, and to whom my husband wrote his letters when he was in America. I hated to leave my mother so soon, but it could not be helped, and we took the first electric express for the Seventh Regionic, where we arrived in about an hour and forty minutes, making the three hundred miles in that time easily. I couldn’t help regretting our comfortable van, but there was evidently haste in the summons, and I confess that I was curious to know what the matter was, though I had made a shrewd guess the first instant, and it turned out that I was not mistaken.

The long and the short of it was that there was trouble with the people who had come ashore in that yacht, and were destined never to go to sea in her. She was hopelessly bedded in the sand, and the waves that were breaking over her were burying her deeper and deeper. The owners were living in their tent as we had left them, and her crew were camped in smaller tents and any shelter they could get, along the beach. They had brought her stores away, but many of the provisions had been damaged, and it had become a pressing question what should be done about the people. We had been asked to consult with Cyril and his wife, and the other Regionic chiefs and their wives, and we threshed the question out nearly the whole night.

I am afraid it will appear rather comical in some aspects to you and Mr. Makely, but I can assure you that it was a very serious matter with the Altrurian authorities. If there had been any hope of a vessel from the capitalistic world touching at Altruria within a definite time, they could have managed, for they would have gladly kept the yacht’s people and owners till they could embark them for Australia or New Zealand, and would have made as little of the trouble they were giving as they could. But until the trader that brought us should return with the crew, as the captain had promised, there was no ship expected, and any other wreck in the mean time would only add to their difficulty. You may be surprised, though I was not, that the difficulty was mostly with the yacht-owners, and above all with Mrs. Thrall, who had baffled every effort of the authorities to reduce what they considered the disorder of their life.

With the crew it was a different matter. As soon as they had got drunk on the wines and spirits they had brought from the wreck, and then had got sober because they had drunk all the liquors up, they began to be more manageable; when their provisions ran short, and they were made to understand that they would not be allowed to plunder the fields and woods, or loot the villages for something to eat, they became almost exemplarily docile. At first they were disposed to show fight, and the principles of the Altrurians did not allow them to use violence in bringing them to subjection; but the men had counted without their hosts in supposing that they could therefore do as they pleased, unless they pleased to do right. After they had made their first foray they were warned by Cyril, who came from the capital to speak English with them, that another raid would not be suffered. They therefore attempted it by night, but the Altrurians were prepared for them with the flexible steel nets which are their only means of defence, and half a dozen sailors were taken in one. When they attempted to break out, and their shipmates attempted to break in to free them, a light current of electricity was sent through the wires and the thing was done. Those who were rescued — the Altrurians will not say captured — had hoes put into their hands the next morning, and were led into the fields and set to work, after a generous breakfast of coffee, bread, and mushrooms. The chickens they had killed in their midnight expedition were buried, and those which they had not killed lost no time in beginning to lay eggs for the sustenance of the reformed castaways. As an extra precaution with the “rescued,” when they were put to work, each of them with a kind of shirt of mail, worn over his coat, which could easily be electrized by a metallic filament connecting with the communal dynamo, and under these conditions they each did a full day’s work during the Obligatories.

As the short commons grew shorter and shorter, both meat and drink, at Camp Famine, and the campers found it was useless to attempt thieving from the Altrurians, they had tried begging from the owners in their large tent, but they were told that the provisions were giving out there, too, and there was nothing for them. When they insisted the servants of the owners had threatened them with revolvers, and the sailors, who had nothing but their knives, preferred to attempt living on the country. Within a week the whole crew had been put to work in the woods and fields and quarries, or wherever they could make themselves useful. They were, on the whole, so well fed and sheltered that they were perfectly satisfied, and went down with the Altrurians on the beach during the Voluntaries and helped secure the yacht’s boats and pieces of wreckage that came ashore. Until they became accustomed or resigned to the Altrurian diet, they were allowed to catch shell-fish and the crabs that swarmed along the sand and cook them, but on condition that they built their fires on the beach, and cooked only during an offshore wind, so that the fumes of the roasting should not offend the villagers.

Cyril acknowledged, therefore, that the question of the crew was for the present practically settled, but Mr. and Mrs. Thrall, and their daughter and son-in-law, with their servants, still presented a formidable problem. As yet, their provisions had not run out, and they were living in their marquee as we had seen them three weeks earlier, just after their yacht went ashore. It could not be said that they were molestive in the same sense as the sailors, but they were even more demoralizing in the spectacle they offered the neighborhood of people dependent on hired service, and in their endeavors to supply themselves in perishable provisions, like milk and eggs, by means of money. Cyril had held several interviews with them, in which he had at first delicately intimated, and then explicitly declared, that the situation could not be prolonged. The two men had been able to get the Altrurian point of view in some measure, and so had Lady Moors, but Mrs. Thrall had remained stiffly obtuse and obstinate, and it was in despair of bringing her to terms without resorting to rescue that he had summoned us to help him.

It was not a pleasant job, but of course we could not refuse, and we agreed that as soon as we had caught a nap, and had a bite of breakfast we would go over to their camp with Cyril and his wife, and see what we could do with the obnoxious woman. I confess that I had some little consolation in the hope that I should see her properly humbled.

XI

Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors must have seen us coming, for they met us at the door of the tent without the intervention of the footman, and gave us quite as much welcome as we could expect in our mission, so disagreeable all round. Mr. Thrall was as fatherly with me as before, and Lord Moors was as polite to Cyril and Mrs. Chrysostom as could have been wished. In fact he and Cyril were a sort of acquaintances from the time of Cyril’s visit to England where he met the late Earl Moors, the father of the present peer, in some of his visits to Toynbee Hall, and the Whitechapel Settlements. The earl was very much interested in the slums, perhaps because he was rather poor himself, if not quite slummy. The son was then at the university, and when he came out and into his title he so far shared his father’s tastes that he came to America; it was not slumming, exactly, but a nobleman no doubt feels it to be something like it. After a little while in New York he went out to Colorado, where so many needy noblemen bring up, and there he met the Thralls, and fell in love with the girl. Cyril had understood — or rather Mrs. Cyril, — that it was a love-match on both sides, but on Mrs. Thrall’s side it was business. He did not even speak of settlements — the English are so romantic when they are romantic! — but Mr. Thrall saw to all that, and the young people were married after a very short courtship. They spent their honeymoon partly in Colorado Springs and partly in San Francisco, where the Thralls’ yacht was lying, and then they set out on a voyage round the world, making stops at the interesting places, and bringing up on the beach of the Seventh Region of Altruria, on route for the eastern coast of South America. From that time on, Cyril said, we knew their history.

After Mr. Thrall had shaken hands tenderly with me, and cordially with Aristides, he said, “Won’t you all come inside and have breakfast with us? My wife and daughter” —

“Thank you, Mr. Thrall,” Cyril answered for us, “we will sit down here, if you please; and as your ladies are not used to business, we will not ask you to disturb them.”

“I’m sure Lady Moors,” the young nobleman began, but Cyril waved him silent.

“We shall be glad later, but not now! Gentlemen, I have asked my friends Aristides Homos and Eveleth Homos to accompany my wife and me this morning because Eveleth is an American, and will understand your position, and he has lately been in America and will be able to clarify the situation from both sides. We wish you to believe that we are approaching you in the friendliest spirit, and that nothing could be more painful to us than to seem inhospitable.”

“Then why,” the old man asked, with business-like promptness, “do you object to our presence here? I don’t believe I get your idea.”

“Because the spectacle which your life offers is contrary to good morals, and as faithful citizens we cannot countenance it.”

“But in what way is our life immoral? I have always thought that I was a good citizen at home; at least I can’t remember having been arrested for disorderly conduct.”

He smiled at me, as if I should appreciate the joke, and it hurt me to keep grave, but suspecting what a bad time he was going to have, I thought I had better not join him in any levity.

“I quite conceive you,” Cyril replied. “But you present to our people, who are offended by it, the spectacle of dependence upon hireling service for your daily comfort and convenience.”

“But, my dear sir,” Mr. Thrall returned, “don’t we pay for it? Do our servants object to rendering us this service?”

“That has nothing to do with the case; or, rather, it makes it worse. The fact that your servants do not object shows how completely they are depraved by usage. We should not object if they served you from affection, and if you repaid them in kindness; but the fact that you think you have made them a due return by giving them money shows how far from the right ideal in such a matter the whole capitalistic world is.”

Here, to my great delight, Aristides spoke up:

“If the American practice were half as depraving as it ought logically to be in their conditions, their social system would drop to pieces. It was always astonishing to me that a people with their facilities for evil, their difficulties for good, should remain so kind and just and pure.”

“That is what I understood from your letters to me, my dear Aristides. I am willing to leave the general argument for the present. But I should like to ask Mr. Thrall a question, and I hope it won’t be offensive.”

Mr. Thrall smiled. “At any rate I promise not to be offended.”

“You are a very rich man?”

“Much richer than I would like to be.”

“How rich?”

“Seventy millions; eighty; a hundred; three hundred; I don’t just know.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve always felt your great wealth a great blessing?”

“A blessing? There have been times when I felt it a millstone hanged about my neck, and could have wished nothing so much as that I were thrown into the sea. Man, you don’t know what a curse I have felt my money to be at such times. When I have given it away, as I have by millions at a time, I have never been sure that I was not doing more harm than good with it. I have hired men to seek out good objects for me, and I have tried my best to find for myself causes and institutions and persons who might be helped without hindering others as worthy, but sometimes it seems as if every dollar of my money carried a blight with it, and infected whoever touched it with a moral pestilence. It has reached a sum where the wildest profligate couldn’t spend it, and it grows and grows. It’s as if it were a rising flood that had touched my lips, and would go over my head before I could reach the shore. I believe I got it honestly, and I have tried to share it with those whose labor earned it for me. I have founded schools and hospitals and homes for old men and old women, and asylums for children, and the blind, and deaf, and dumb, and halt, and mad. Wherever I have found one of my old workmen in need, and I have looked personally into the matter, I have provided for him fully, short of pauperization. Where I have heard of some gifted youth, I have had him educated in the line of his gift. I have collected a gallery of works of art, and opened it on Sundays as well as week-days to the public free. If there is a story of famine, far or near, I send food by the shipload. If there is any great public calamity, my agents have instructions to come to the rescue without referring the case to me. But it is all useless! The money grows and grows, and I begin to feel that my efforts to employ it wisely and wholesomely are making me a public laughing-stock as well as an easy mark for every swindler with a job or a scheme.” He turned abruptly to me. “But you must often have heard the same from my old friend Strange. We used to talk these things over together, when our money was not the heap that mine is now; and it seems to me I can hear his voice saying the very words I have been using.”

I, too, seemed to hear his voice in the words, and it was as if speaking from his grave.

I looked at Aristides, and read compassion in his dear face; but the face of Cyril remained severe and judicial. He said: “Then, if what you say is true, you cannot think it a hardship if we remove your burden for the time you remain with us. I have consulted with the National and Regional as well as the Communal authorities, and we cannot let you continue to live in the manner you are living here. You must pay your way.”

“I shall be only too glad to do that,” Mr. Thrall returned, more cheerfully. “We have not a great deal of cash in hand, but I can give you my check on London or Paris or New York.”

“In Altruria,” Cyril returned, “we have no use for money. You must pay your way as soon as your present provision from your yacht is exhausted.”

Mr. Thrall turned a dazed look on the young lord, who suggested: “I don’t think we follow you. How can Mr. Thrall pay his way except with money?”

“He must pay with work. As soon as you come upon the neighbors here for the necessities of life you must all work. To-morrow or the next day or next week at the furthest you must go to work, or you must starve.”

Then he came out with that text of Scripture which had been so efficient with the crew of the Little Sally: “For even when we were with you this we commanded you, that if any would not work neither should he eat.”

Lord Moors seemed very interested, and not so much surprised as I had expected. “Yes, I have often thought of that passage and of its susceptibility to a simpler interpretation than we usually give it. But—”

“There is but one interpretation of which it is susceptible,” Cyril interrupted. “The apostle gives that interpretation when he prefaces the text with the words, ‘For yourselves know how you ought to follow us; for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you. Neither did we eat any man’s bread for nought; but wrought with travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you: not because we have not power, but to make ourselves an ensample unto you to follow us.’ The whole economy of Altruria is founded on these passages.”

“Literally?”

“Literally.”

“But, my dear sir,” the young lord reasoned, “you surely do not wrench the text from some such meaning as that if a man has money, he may pay his way without working?”

“No, certainly not. But here you have no money, and as we cannot suffer any to ‘walk among us disorderly, working not at all,’ we must not exempt you from our rule.”

XII

At this point there came a sound from within the marquee as of skirts sweeping forward sharply, imperiously, followed by a softer frou-frou, and Mrs. Thrall put aside the curtain of the tent with one hand, and stood challenging our little Altrurian group, while Lady Moors peered timidly at us from over her mother’s shoulder. I felt a lust of battle rising in me at sight of that woman, and it was as much as I could do to control myself; but in view of the bad time I knew she was going to have, I managed to hold in, though I joined very scantly in the polite greetings of the Chrysostoms and Aristides, which she ignored as if they had been the salutations of savages. She glared at her husband for explanation, and he said, gently, “This is a delegation from the Altrurian capital, my dear, and we have been talking over the situation together.”

“But what is this,” she demanded, “that I have heard about our not paying? Do they accuse us of not paying? You could buy and sell the whole country.”

I never imagined so much mildness could be put into such offensive words as Cyril managed to get into his answer. “We accuse you of not paying, and we do not mean that you shall become chargeable to us. The men and women who served you on shipboard have been put to work, and you must go to work, too.”

“Mr. Thrall — Lord Moors — have you allowed these people to treat you as if you were part of the ship’s crew? Why don’t you give them what they want and let them go? Of course it’s some sort of blackmailing scheme. But you ought to get rid of them at any cost. Then you can appeal to the authorities, and tell them that you will bring the matter to the notice of the government at Washington. They must be taught that they cannot insult American citizens with impunity.” No one spoke, and she added, “What do they really want?”

“Well, my dear,” her husband hesitated, “I hardly know how to explain. But it seems that they think our living here in the way we do is orderly, and — and they want us to go to work, in short.”

“To work!” she shouted.

“Yes, all of us. That is, so I understand.”

“What nonsense!”

She looked at us one after another, and when her eye rested on me, I began to suspect that insolent as she was she was even duller; in fact, that she was so sodden in her conceit of wealth that she was plain stupid. So when she said to me, “You are an American by birth, I believe. Can you tell me the meaning of this?” I answered:

“Cyril Chrysostom represents the authorities. If he asks me to speak, I will speak.” Cyril nodded at me with a smile, and I went on. “It is a very simple matter. In Altruria everybody works with his hands three hours a day. After that he works or not, as he likes.”

“What have we to do with that?” she asked.

“The rule has no exceptions.”

“But we are not Altrurians; we are Americans.”

“I am an American, too, and I work three hours every day, unless I am passing from one point to another on public business with my husband. Even then we prefer to stop during the work-hours, and help in the fields, or in the shops, or wherever we are needed. I left my own mother at home doing her kitchen work yesterday afternoon, though it was out of hours, and she need not have worked.”

“Very well, then, we will do nothing of the kind, neither I, nor my daughter, nor my husband. He has worked hard all his life, and he has come away for a much-needed rest. I am not going to have him breaking himself down.”

I could not help suggesting, “I suppose the men at work in his mines, and mills, and on his railroads and steamship lines are taking a much-needed rest, too. I hope you are not going to let them break themselves down, either.”

Aristides gave me a pained glance, and Cyril and his wife looked grave, but she not quite so grave as he. Lord Moors said, “We don’t seem to be getting on. What Mrs. Thrall fails to see, and I confess I don’t quite see it myself, is that if we are not here in forma pauperis—”

“But you are here in forma pauperis,” Cyril interposed, smilingly.

“How is that? If we are willing to pay — if Mr. Thrall’s credit is undeniably good—”

“Mr. Thrall’s credit is not good in Altruria; you can pay here only in one currency, in the sweat of your faces.”

“You want us to be Tolstoys, I suppose,” Mrs. Thrall said, contemptuously.

Cyril replied, gently, “The endeavor of Tolstoy, in capitalistic conditions, is necessarily dramatic. Your labor here will be for your daily bread, and it will be real.” The inner dullness of the woman came into her eyes again, and he addressed himself to Lord Moors in continuing: “If a company of indigent people were cast away on an English coast, after you had rendered them the first aid, what should you do?”

The young man reflected. “I suppose we should put them in the way of earning a living until some ship arrived to take them home.”

“That is merely what we propose to do in your case here,” Cyril said.

“But we are not indigent—”

“Yes, you are absolutely destitute. You have money and credit, but neither has any value in Altruria. Nothing but work or love has any value in Altruria. You cannot realize too clearly that you stand before us in forma pauperis. But we require of you nothing that we do not require of ourselves. In Altruria every one is poor till he pays with work; then, for that time, he is rich; and he cannot otherwise lift himself above charity, which, except in the case of the helpless, we consider immoral. Your life here offers a very corrupting spectacle. You are manifestly living without work, and you are served by people whose hire you are not able to pay.”

“My dear sir,” Mr. Thrall said at this point, with a gentle smile, “I think they are willing to take the chances of being paid.”

“We cannot suffer them to do so. At present we know of no means of your getting away from Altruria. We have disused our custom of annually connecting with the Australasian steamers, and it may be years before a vessel touches on our coast. A ship sailed for Boston some months ago, with the promise of returning in order that the crew may cast in their lot with us permanently. We do not confide in that promise, and you must therefore conform to our rule of life. Understand clearly that the willingness of your servants to serve you has nothing to do with the matter. That is part of the falsity in which the whole capitalistic world lives. As the matter stands with you, here, there is as much reason why you should serve them as they should serve you. If on their side they should elect to serve you from love, they will be allowed to do so. Otherwise, you and they must go to work with the neighbors at the tasks they will assign you.”

“Do you mean at once?” Lord Moors asked.

“The hours of the obligatory labors are nearly past for the day. But if you are interested in learning what you will be set to doing to-morrow, the Communal authorities will be pleased to instruct you during the Voluntaries this afternoon. You may be sure that in no case will your weakness or inexperience be overtasked. Your histories will be studied, and appropriate work will be assigned to each of you.”

Mrs. Thrall burst out, “If you think I am going into my kitchen—”

Then I burst in, “I left my mother in her kitchen!”

“And a very fit place for her, I dare say,” she retorted, but Lady Moors caught her mother’s arm and murmured, in much the same distress as showed in my husband’s mild eyes, “Mother! Mother!” and drew her within.

XIII

Well, Dolly, I suppose you will think it was pretty hard for those people, and when I got over my temper I confess that I felt sorry for the two men, and for the young girl whom the Altrurians would not call Lady Moors, but addressed by her Christian name, as they did each of the American party in his or her turn; even Mrs. Thrall had to answer to Rebecca. They were all rather bewildered, and so were the butler and the footmen, and the chef and his helpers, and the ladies’ maids. These were even more shocked than those they considered their betters, and I quite took to my affections Lord Moors’ man Robert, who was in an awe-stricken way trying to get some light from me on the situation. He contributed as much as any one to bring about a peaceful submission to the inevitable, for he had been a near witness of what had happened to the crew when they attempted their rebellion to the authorities; but he did not profess to understand the matter, and from time to time he seemed to question the reality of it.

The two masters, as you would call Mr. Thrall and Lord Moors, both took an attitude of amiable curiosity towards their fate, and accepted it with interest when they had partly chosen and partly been chosen by it. Mr. Thrall had been brought up on a farm till his ambition carried him into the world; and he found the light gardening assigned him for his first task by no means a hardship. He was rather critical of the Altrurian style of hoe at first, but after he got the hang of it, as he said, he liked it better, and during the three hours of the first morning’s Obligatoires, his ardor to cut all the weeds out at once had to be restrained rather than prompted. He could not be persuaded to take five minutes for rest out of every twenty, and he could not get over his life-long habit of working against time. The Altrurians tried to make him understand that here people must not work against time, but must always work with it, so as to have enough work to do each day; otherwise they must remain idle during the Obligatoires and tend to demoralize the workers. It seemed that Lady Moors had a passion for gardening, and she was set to work with her father on the border of flowers surrounding the vegetable patch he was hoeing. She knew about flowers, and from her childhood had amused herself by growing them, and so far from thinking it a hardship or disgrace to dig, she was delighted to get at them. It was easy to see that she and her father were cronies, and when I went round in the morning with Aristides to ask if we could do anything for them, we heard them laughing and talking gayly together before we reached them. They said they had looked their job (as Mr. Thrall called it) over the afternoon before during the Voluntaries, and had decided how they would manage, and they had set to work that morning as soon as they had breakfast. Lady Moors had helped her mother get the breakfast, and she seemed to regard the whole affair as a picnic, though from the look of Mrs. Thrall’s back, as she turned it on me, when I saw her coming to the door of the marquee with a coffee-pot in her hand, I decided that she was not yet resigned to her new lot in life.

Lord Moors was nowhere to be seen, and I felt some little curiosity about him which was not quite anxiety. Later, as we were going back to our quarters in the village, we saw him working on the road with a party of Altrurians who were repairing a washout from an overnight rain. They were having all kinds of a time, except a bad time, trying to understand each other in their want of a common language. It appeared that the Altrurians were impressed with his knowledge of road-making, and were doing something which he had indicated to them by signs. We offered our services as interpreters, and then he modestly owned in defence of his suggestions that when he was at Oxford he had been one of the band of enthusiastic undergraduates who had built a piece of highway under Mr. Ruskin’s direction. The Altrurians regarded his suggestions as rather amateurish, but they were glad to act upon them, when they could, out of pure good feeling and liking for him; and from time to time they rushed upon him and shook hands with him; their affection did not go further, and he was able to stand the handshaking, though he told us he hoped they would not feel it necessary to keep it up, for it was really only a very simple matter like putting a culvert in place of a sluice which they had been using to carry the water off. They understood what he was saying, from his gestures, and they crowded round us to ask whether he would like to join them during the Voluntaries that afternoon, in getting the stone out of a neighboring quarry, and putting in the culvert at once. We explained to him, and he said he should be very happy. All the time he was looking at them admirably, and he said, “It’s really very good,” and we understood that he meant their classic working-dress, and when he added, “I should really fancy trying it myself one day,” and we told them they wanted to go and bring him an Altrurian costume at once. But we persuaded them not to urge him, and in fact he looked very fit for his work in his yachting flannels.

I talked him over a long time with Aristides, and tried to get his point of view. I decided finally that an Englishman of his ancient lineage and high breeding, having voluntarily come down to the level of an American millionaire by marriage, could not feel that he was lowering himself any further by working with his hands. In fact, he probably felt that his merely undertaking a thing dignified the thing; but of course this was only speculation on my part, and he may have been resigned to working for a living because like poor people elsewhere he was obliged to do it. Aristides thought there was a good deal in that idea, but it is hard for an Altrurian to conceive of being ashamed of work, for they regard idleness as pauperism, and they would look upon our leisure classes, so far as we have them, very much as we look upon tramps, only they would make the excuse for our tramps that they often cannot get work.

We had far more trouble with the servants than we had with the masters in making them understand that they were to go to work in the fields and shops, quite as the crew of the yacht had done. Some of them refused outright, and stuck to their refusal until the village electrician rescued them with the sort of net and electric filament which had been employed with the recalcitrant sailors; others were brought to a better mind by withholding food from them till they were willing to pay for it by working. You will be sorry to learn, Dolly, that the worst of the rebels were the ladies’ maids, who, for the honor of our sex, ought not to have required the application of the net and filament; but they had not such appetites as the men-servants, and did not mind starving so much. However, in a very short time they were at work, too, and more or less resigned, though they did not profess to understand it.

You will think me rather fickle, I am afraid, but after I made the personal acquaintance of Mr. Thrall’s chef, Anatole, I found my affections dividing themselves between him and his lordship’s man Robert, my first love. But Anatole was magnificent, a gaunt, little, aquiline man, with a branching mustache and gallant goatee, and having held an exalted position at a salary of ten thousand a year from Mr. Thrall, he could easily stoop from it, while poor Robert was tormented with misgivings, not for himself, but for Lord and Lady Moors and Mr. Thrall. It became my pleasing office to explain the situation to Monsieur Anatole, who, when he imagined it, gave a cry of joy, and confessed, what he had never liked to tell Mr. Thrall, knowing the misconceptions of Americans on the subject, that he had belonged in France to a party of which the political and social ideal was almost identical with that of the Altrurians. He asked for an early opportunity of addressing the village Assembly and explaining this delightful circumstance in public, and he profited by the occasion to embrace the first Altrurian we met and kiss him on both cheeks.

His victim was a messenger from the Commune, who had been sent to inquire whether Anatole had a preference as to the employment which should be assigned to him, and I had to reply for him that he was a man of science; that he would be happy to serve the republic in whatever capacity his concitizens chose, but that he thought he could be most useful in studying the comestible vegetation of the neighborhood, and the substitution of the more succulent herbs for the flesh-meats to the use of which, he understood from me, the Altrurians were opposed. In the course of his preparation for the r�le of chef, which he had played both in France and America, he had made a specialty of edible fungi; and the result was that Anatole was set to mushrooming, and up to this moment he has discovered no less than six species hitherto unknown to the Altrurian table. This has added to their dietary in several important particulars, the fungi he has discovered being among those highly decorative and extremely poisonous-looking sorts which flourish in the deep woods and offer themselves almost inexhaustibly in places near the ruins of the old capitalistic cities, where hardly any other foods will grow. Anatole is very proud of his success, and at more than one Communal Assembly has lectured upon his discoveries and treated of their preparation for the table, with sketches of them as he found them growing, colored after nature by his own hand. He has himself become a fanatical vegetarian, having, he confesses, always had a secret loathing for the meats he stooped to direct the cooking of among the French and American bourgeoisie in the days which he already looks back upon as among the most benighted of his history.

XIV

The scene has changed again, Dolly, and six months have elapsed without your knowing it. Aristides and I long ago completed the tour of the capitals which the Thrall incident interrupted, and we have been settled for many months in the Maritime Capital, where it has been decided we had better fill out the first two years of my husband’s repatriation. I have become more and more thoroughly naturalized, and if I am not yet a perfect Altrurian, it is not for not loving better and better the best Altrurian of them all, and not for not admiring and revering this wonderful civilization.

During the Obligatories of the forenoons I do my housework with my own hands, and as my mother lives with us we have long talks together, and try to make each other believe that the American conditions were a sort of nightmare from which we have happily awakened. You see how terribly frank I am, my dear, but if I were not, I could not make you understand how I feel. My heart aches for you, there, and the more because I know that you do not want to live differently, that you are proud of your economic and social illogicality, and that you think America is the best country under the sun! I can never persuade you, but if you could only come here, once, and see for yourselves! Seeing would be believing, and believing would be the wish never to go away, but to be at home here always.

I can imagine your laughing at me and asking Mr. Makely whether the Little Sally has ever returned to Altruria, and how I can account for the captain’s failure to keep his word. I confess that is a sore point with me. It is now more than a year since she sailed, and, of course, we have not had a sign or whisper from her. I could almost wish that the crew were willing to stay away, but I am afraid it is the captain who is keeping them. It has become almost a mania with me, and every morning, the first thing when I wake, I go for my before-breakfast walk along the marble terrace that overlooks the sea, and scan the empty rounding for the recreant ship. I do not want to think so badly of human nature, as I must if the Little Sally never comes back, and I am sure you will not blame me if I should like her to bring me some word from you. I know that if she ever reached Boston you got my letters and presents, and that you have been writing me as faithfully as I have been writing you, and what a sheaf of letters from you there will be if her masts ever pierce the horizon! To tell the truth, I do long for a little American news! Do you still keep on murdering and divorcing, and drowning, and burning, and mommicking, and maiming people by sea and land? Has there been any war since I left? Is the financial panic as great as ever, and is there as much hunger and cold? I know that whatever your crimes and calamities are, your heroism and martyrdom, your wild generosity and self-devotion, are equal to them.

It is no use to pretend that in little over a year I can have become accustomed to the eventlessness of life in Altruria. I go on for a good many days together and do not miss the exciting incidents you have in America, and then suddenly I am wolfishly hungry for the old sensations, just as now and then I want meat, though I know I should loathe the sight and smell of it if I came within reach of it. You would laugh, I dare say, at the Altrurian papers, and what they print for news. Most of the space is taken up with poetry, and character study in the form of fiction, and scientific inquiry of every kind. But now and then there is a report of the production of a new play in one of the capitals; or an account of an open-air pastoral in one of the communes; or the progress of some public work, like the extension of the National Colonnade; or the wonderful liberation of some section from malaria; or the story of some good man or woman’s life, ended at the patriarchal age they reach here. They also print selected passages of capitalistic history, from the earliest to the latest times, showing how in war and pestilence and needless disaster the world outside Altruria remains essentially the same that it was at the beginning of civilization, with some slight changes through the changes of human nature for the better in its slow approaches to the Altrurian ideal. In noting these changes the writers get some sad amusement out of the fact that the capitalistic world believes human nature cannot be changed, though cannibalism and slavery and polygamy have all been extirpated in the so-called Christian countries, and these things were once human nature, which is always changing, while brute nature remains the same. Now and then they touch very guardedly on that slavery, worse than war, worse than any sin or shame conceivable to the Altrurians, in which uncounted myriads of women are held and bought and sold, and they have to note that in this the capitalistic world is without the hope of better things. You know what I mean, Dolly; every good woman knows the little she cannot help knowing; but if you had ever inquired into that horror, as I once felt obliged to do, you would think it the blackest horror of the state of things where it must always exist as long as there are riches and poverty. Now, when so many things in America seem bad dreams, I cannot take refuge in thinking that a bad dream; the reality was so deeply burnt into my brain by the words of some of the slaves; and when I think of it I want to grovel on the ground with my mouth in the dust. But I know this can only distress you, for you cannot get away from the fact as I have got away from it; that there it is in the next street, perhaps in the next house, and that any night when you leave your home with your husband, you may meet it at the first step from your door.

You can very well imagine what a godsend the reports of Aristides and the discussions of them have been to our papers. They were always taken down stenographically, and they were printed like dialogue, so that at a little distance you would take them at first for murder trials or divorce cases, but when you look closer, you find them questions and answers about the state of things in America. There are often humorous passages, for the Altrurians are inextinguishably amused by our illogicality, and what they call the perpetual non sequiturs of our lives and laws. In the discussions they frequently burlesque these, but as they present them they seem really beyond the wildest burlesque. Perhaps you will be surprised to know that a nation of working-people like these feel more compassion than admiration for our working-people. They pity them, but they blame them more than they blame the idle rich for the existing condition of things in America. They ask why, if the American workmen are in the immense majority, they do not vote a true and just state, and why they go on striking and starving their families instead; they cannot distinguish in principle between the confederations of labor and the combinations of capital, between the trusts and the trades-unions, and they condemn even more severely the oppressions and abuses of the unions. My husband tries to explain that the unions are merely provisional, and are a temporary means of enabling the employees to stand up against the tyranny of the employers, but they always come back and ask him if the workmen have not most of the votes, and if they have, why they do not protect themselves peacefully instead of organizing themselves in fighting shape, and making a warfare of industry.

There is not often anything so much like news in the Altrurian papers as the grounding of the Thrall yacht on the coast of the Seventh Region, and the incident has been treated and discussed in every possible phase by the editors and their correspondents. They have been very frank about it, as they are about everything in Altruria, and they have not concealed their anxieties about their unwelcome guests. They got on without much trouble in the case of the few sailors of the Little Sally, but the crew of the Saraband is so large that it is a different matter. In the first place, they do not like the application of force, even in the mild electrical form in which they employ it, and they fear that the effect with themselves will be bad, however good it is for their guests. Besides, they dread the influence which a number of people, invested with the charm of strangeness, may have with the young men and especially the young girls of the neighborhood. The hardest thing the Altrurians have to grapple with is feminine curiosity, and the play of this about the strangers is what they seek the most anxiously to control. Of course, you will think it funny, and I must say that it seemed so to me at first, but I have come to think it is serious. The Altrurian girls are cultivated and refined, but as they have worked all their lives with their hands they cannot imagine the difference that work makes in Americans; that it coarsens and classes them, especially if they have been in immediate contact with rich people, and been degraded or brutalized by the knowledge of the contempt in which labor is held among us by those who are not compelled to it. Some of my Altrurian friends have talked it over with me, and I could take their point of view, though secretly I could not keep my poor American feelings from being hurt when they said that to have a large number of people from the capitalistic world thrown upon their hands was very much as it would be with us if we had the same number of Indians, with all their tribal customs and ideals, thrown upon our hands. They say they will not shirk their duty in the matter, and will study it carefully; but all the same, they wish the incident had not happened.

XV

I am glad that I was called away from the disagreeable point I left in my last, and that I have got back temporarily to the scene of the Altrurianization of Mr. Thrall and his family. So far as it has gone it is perfect, if I may speak from the witness of happiness in those concerned, except perhaps Mrs. Thrall; she is as yet only partially reconstructed, but even she has moments of forgetting her lost grandeur and of really enjoying herself in her work. She is an excellent housekeeper, and she has become so much interested in making the marquee a simple home for her family that she is rather proud of showing it off as the effect of her unaided efforts. She was allowed to cater to them from the canned meats brought ashore from the yacht as long as they would stand it, but the wholesome open-air conditions have worked a wonderful change in them, and neither Mr. Thrall nor Lord and Lady Moors now have any taste for such dishes. Here Mrs. Thrall’s old-time skill as an excellent vegetable cook, when she was the wife of a young mechanic, has come into play, and she believes that she sets the best table in the whole neighborhood, with fruits and many sorts of succulents and the everlasting and ever-pervading mushrooms.

As the Altrurians do not wish to annoy their involuntary guests, or to interfere with their way of life where they do not consider it immoral, their control has ended with setting them to work for a living. They have not asked them to the communal refectory, but, as long as they have been content to serve each other, have allowed them their private table. Of course, their adaptation to their new way of life has proceeded more slowly than it otherwise would, but with the exception of Mrs. Thrall they are very intelligent people, and I have been charmed in talking the situation over with them. The trouble has not been so great with the ship’s people, as was feared. Such of these as have imagined their stay here permanent, or wished it to be so, have been received into the neighboring communes, and have taken the first steps towards naturalization; those who look forward to getting away some time, or express the wish for it, are allowed to live in a community of their own, where they are not molested as long as they work in the three hours of the Obligatoires. Naturally, they are kept out of mischief, but after their first instruction in the ideas of public property and the impossibility of enriching themselves at the expense of any one else, they have behaved very well. The greatest trouble they ever gave was in trapping and killing the wild things for food; but when they were told that this must not be done, and taught to recognize the vast range of edible fungi, they took not unwillingly to mushrooms and the ranker tubers and roots, from which, with unlimited eggs, cheese, milk, and shell-fish, they have constructed a diet of which they do not complain.

This brings me rather tangentially to Monsieur Anatole, who has become a fanatical Altrurian, and has even had to be restrained in some of his enthusiastic plans for the compulsory naturalization of his fellow castaways. His value as a scientist has been cordially recognized, and his gifts as an artist in the exquisite water-color studies of edible fungi has won his notice in the capital of the Seventh Regional where they have been shown at the spring water-color exhibition. He has printed several poems in the Regional Gazette, villanelles, rondeaux, and triolets, with accompanying versions of the French, into Altrurian by one of the first Altrurian poets. This is a widow of about Monsieur Anatole’s own age; and the literary friendship between them has ripened into something much more serious. In fact they are engaged to be married. I suppose you will laugh at this, Dolly, and at first I confess that there was enough of the old American in me to be shocked at the idea of a French chef marrying an Altrurian lady who could trace her descent to the first Altrurian president of the Commonwealth, and who is universally loved and honored. I could not help letting something of the kind escape me by accident, to a friend, and presently Mrs. Chrysostom was sent to interview me on the subject, and to learn just how the case appeared to me. This put me on my honor, and I was obliged to say how it would appear in America, though every moment I grew more and more ashamed of myself and my native country, where we pretend that labor is honorable, and are always heaping dishonor on it. I told how certain of our girls and matrons had married their coachmen and riding-masters and put themselves at odds with society, and I confessed that marrying a cook would be regarded as worse, if possible.

Mrs. Chrysostom was accompanied by a lady in her second youth, very graceful, very charmingly dressed, and with an expression of winning intelligence, whom she named to me simply as Cecilia, in the Altrurian fashion. She apparently knew no English, and at first Mrs. Chrysostom translated each of her questions and my answers. When I had got through, this lady began to question me herself in Altrurian, which I owned to understanding a little. She said:

“You know Anatole?”

“Yes, certainly, and I like him, as I think every one must who knows him.”

“He is a skillful chef?”

“Mr. Thrall would not have paid him ten thousand dollars a year if he had not been.”

“You have seen some of his water-colors?”

“Yes. They are exquisite. He is unquestionably an artist of rare talent.”

“And it is known to you that he is a man of scientific attainments?”

“That is something I cannot judge of so well as Aristides; but he says M. Anatole is learned beyond any man he knows in edible fungi.”

“As an adoptive Altrurian, and knowing the American ideas from our point of view, should you respect their ideas of social inequality?”

“Not the least in the world. I understand as well as you do that their ideas must prevail wherever one works for a living and another does not. hose ideas are practically as much accepted in America as they are in Europe, but I have fully renounced them.”

You see, Dolly, how far I have gone!

The unknown, who could be pretty easily imagined, rose up and gave me her hand. “If you are in the Region on the third of May you must come to our wedding.”

The same afternoon I had a long talk with Mr. Thrall, whom I found at work replanting a strawberry-patch during the Voluntaries. He rose up at the sound of my voice, and after an old man’s dim moment for getting me mentally in focus, he brightened into a genial smile, and said, “Oh, Mrs. Homos! I am glad to see you.”

I told him to go on with his planting, and I offered to get down on my knees beside him and help, but he gallantly handed me to a seat in the shade beside his daughter’s flower-bed, and it was there that we had a long talk about conditions in America and Altruria, and how he felt about the great change in his life.

“Well, I can truly say,” he answered much more at length than I shall report, “that I have never been so happy since the first days of my boyhood. All care has dropped from me; I don’t feel myself rich, and I don’t feel myself poor in this perfect safety from want. The only thing that gives me any regret is that my present state has not been the effect of my own will and deed. If I am now following the greatest and truest of all counsels it has not been because I have sold all and given to the poor, but because my money has been mercifully taken from me, and I have been released from its responsibilities in a state of things where there is no money.”

“But, Mr. Thrall,” I said, “don’t you ever feel that you have a duty to the immense fortune which you have left in America, and which must be disposed of somehow when people are satisfied that you are not going to return and dispose of it yourself?”

“No, none. I was long ago satisfied that I could really do no good with it. Perhaps if I had had more faith in it I might have done some good with it, but I believe that I never did anything but harm, even when I seemed to be helping the most, for I was aiding in the perpetuation of a state of things essentially wrong. Now, if I never go back — and I never wish to go back — let the law dispose of it as seems best to the authorities. I have no kith or kin, and my wife has none, so there is no one to feel aggrieved by its application to public objects.”

“And how do you imagine it will be disposed of?”

“Oh, I suppose for charitable and educational purposes. Of course a good deal of it will go in graft; but that cannot be helped.”

“But if you could now dispose of it according to your clearest ideas of justice, and if you were forced to make the disposition yourself, what would you do with it?”

“Well, that is something I have been thinking of, and as nearly as I can make out, I ought to go into the records of my prosperity and ascertain just how and when I made my money. Then I ought to seek out as fully as possible the workmen who helped me make it by their labor. Their wages, which, were always the highest, were never a fair share, though I forced myself to think differently, and it should be my duty to inquire for them and pay them each a fair share, or, if they are dead, then their children or their next of kin. But even when I had done this I should not be sure that I had not done them more harm than good.”

How often I had heard poor Mr. Strange say things like this, and heard of other rich men saying them, after lives of what is called beneficence! Mr. Thrall drew a deep sigh, and cast a longing look at his strawberry-bed. I laughed, and said, “You are anxious to get back to your plants, and I won’t keep you. I wonder if Mrs. Thrall could see me if I called; or Lady Moors?”

He said he was sure they would, and I took my way over to the marquee. I was a little surprised to be met at the door by Lord Moors’ man Robert. He told me he was very sorry, but her ladyship was helping his lordship at a little job on the roads, which they were doing quite in the Voluntaries, with the hope of having the National Colonnade extended to a given point; the ladies were helping the gentlemen get the place in shape. He was still sorrier, but I not so much, that Mrs. Thrall was lying down and would like to be excused; she was rather tired from putting away the luncheon things.

He asked me if I would not sit down, and he offered me one of the camp-stools at the door of the marquee, and I did sit down for a moment, while he flitted about the interior doing various little things. At last I said, “How is this, Robert? I thought you had been assigned to a place in the communal refectory. You’re not here on the old terms?”

He came out and stood respectfully holding a dusting-cloth in his hand. “Thank you, not exactly, ma’am. But the fact is, ma’am, that the communal monitors have allowed me to come back here a few hours in the afternoon, on what I may call terms of my own.”

“I don’t understand. But won’t you sit down, Robert?”

“Thank you, if it is the same to you, ma’am, I would rather stand while I’m here. In the refectory, of course, it’s different.”

“But about your own terms?”

“Thanks. You see, ma’am, I’ve thought all along it was a bit awkward for them here, they not being so much used to looking after things, and I asked leave to come and help now and then. Of course, they said that I could not be allowed to serve for hire in Altruria; and one thing led to another, and I said it would really be a favor to me, and I didn’t expect money for my work, for I did not suppose I should ever be where I could use it again, but if they would let me come here and do it for—”

Robert stopped and blushed and looked down, and I took the word, “For love?”

“Well, ma’am, that’s what they called it.”

Dolly, it made the tears come into my eyes, and I said very solemnly, “Robert, do you know, I believe you are the sweetest soul even in this and flowing with milk and honey?”

“Oh, you mustn’t say that, ma’am. There’s Mr. Thrall and his lordship and her ladyship. I’m sure they would do the like for me if I needed their help. And there are the Altrurians, you know.”

“But they are used to it, Robert, and — Robert! Be frank with me! What do you think of Altruria?”

“Quite frank, ma’am, as if you were not connected with it, as you are?”

“Quite frank.”

“Well, ma’am, if you are sure you wouldn’t mind it, or consider it out of the way for me, I should say it was — rum.”

“Rum? Don’t you think it is beautiful here, to see people living for each other instead of living on each other, and the whole nation like one family, and the country a paradise?”

“Well, that’s just it, ma’am, if you won’t mind my saying so. That’s what I mean by rum.”

“Won’t you explain?”

“It doesn’t seem real. Every night when I go to sleep, and think that there isn’t a thief or a policeman on the whole continent, and only a few harmless homicides, as you call them, that wouldn’t hurt a fly, and not a person hungry or cold, and no poor and no rich, and no servants and no masters, and no soldiers, and no — disreputable characters, it seems as if I was going to wake up in the morning and find myself on the Saraband and it all a dream here.”

“Yes, Robert,” I had to own, “that was the way with me, too, for a long while. And even now I have dreams about America and the way matters are there, and I wake myself weeping for fear Altruria isn’t true. Robert! You must be honest with me! When you are awake, and it’s broad day, and you see how happy every one is here, either working or playing, and the whole land without an ugly place in it, and the lovely villages and the magnificent towns, and everything, does it still seem — rum?”

“It’s like that, ma’am, at times. I don’t say at all times.”

“And you don’t believe that the rest of the world — England and America — will ever be rum, too?”

“I don’t see how they can. You see the poor are against it as well as the rich. Everybody wants to have something of his own, and the trouble seems to come from that. I don’t suppose it was brought about in a day, Altruria wasn’t, ma’am?”

“No, it was whole centuries coming.”

“That was what I understood from that Mr. Chrysostom — Cyril, he wants me to call him, but I can’t quite make up my mouth to it — who speaks English, and says he has been in England. He was telling me about it, one day when we were drying the dishes at the refectory together. He says they used to have wars and trusts and trades-unions here in the old days, just as we do now in civilized countries.”

“And you don’t consider Altruria civilized?”

“Well, not in just that sense of the word, ma’am. You wouldn’t call heaven civilized?”

“Well, not in just that sense of the word. Robert.”

“You see, it’s rum here, because, though everything seems to go so right, it’s against human nature.”

“The Altrurians say it isn’t.”

“I hope I don’t differ from you, ma’am, but what would people — the best people — at home say? They would say it wasn’t reasonable; they would say it wasn’t even possible. That’s what makes me think it’s a dream — that it’s rum. Begging your pardon, ma’am.”

“Oh, I quite understand, Robert. Then you don’t believe a camel can ever go through the eye of a needle?”

“I don’t quite see how, ma’am.”

“But you are proof of as great a miracle, Robert.”

“Beg your pardon, ma’am?”

“Some day I will explain. But is there nothing that can make you believe Altruria is true here, and that it can be true anywhere?”

“I have been thinking a good deal about that, ma’am. One doesn’t quite like to go about in a dream, or think one is dreaming, and I have got to saying to myself that if some ship was to come here from England or America, or even from Germany, and we could compare our feelings with the feelings of people who were fresh to it, we might somehow get to believe that it was real.”

“Yes,” I had to own. “We need fresh proofs from time to time. There was a ship that sailed from here something over a year ago, and the captain promised his crew to let them bring her back, but at times I am afraid that was part of the dream, too, and that we’re all something I am dreaming about.”

“Just so, ma’am,” Robert said, and I came away downhearted enough, though he called after me, “Mrs. Thrall will be very sorry, ma’am.”

Back in the Maritime Capital, and oh, Dolly, Dolly, Dolly! They have sighted the Little Sally from the terrace! How happy I am! There will be letters from you, and I shall hear all that has happened in America, and I shall never again doubt that Altruria is real! I don’t know how I shall get these letters of mine back to you, but somehow it can be managed. Perhaps the Saraband’s crew will like to take the Little Sally home again; perhaps when Mr. Thrall knows the ship is here he will want to buy it and go back to his money in America and the misery of it! Do you believe he will? Should I like to remind my husband of his promise to take me home on a visit? Oh, my heart misgives me! I wonder if the captain of the Little Sally has brought his wife and children with him, and is going to settle among us, or whether he has just let his men have the vessel, and they have come to Altruria without him? I dare not ask anything, I dare not think anything!

THE END

THE WHOLE FAMILY

A Novel by Twelve Authors

First serialised in Harper’s Bazaar in 1908, The Whole Family is a collaborative novel of twelve chapters, each told by a different author.  This unusual project was conceived by Howells and carried out under the direction of Harper’s Bazaar editor Elizabeth Jordan, who, like Howells, wrote one of the chapters herself. Howells’ idea for the novel was to show how an engagement or marriage would affect and be affected by an entire family. The project is entertaining by the way the authors’ contentious interrelationships mirror the sometimes dysfunctional family they describe in their chapters. The famous American novelist Henry James contributed ‘Chapter Seven – The Married Son’ to the novel.

The first edition

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I THE FATHER by William Dean Howells

CHAPTER II THE OLD-MAID AUNT by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

CHAPTER III THE GRANDMOTHER by Mary Heaton Vorse

CHAPTER IV THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW by Mary Stewart Cutting

CHAPTER V THE SCHOOL-GIRL by Elizabeth Jordan

CHAPTER VI THE SON-IN-LAW by John Kendrick Bangs

CHAPTER VII THE MARRIED SON by Henry James

CHAPTER VIII THE MARRIED DAUGHTER by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

CHAPTER IX THE MOTHER by Edith Wyatt

CHAPTER X THE SCHOOL-BOY by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

CHAPTER XI PEGGY by Alice Brown

CHAPTER XII THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY by Henry Van Dyke

Henry James, 1912

CHAPTER I THE FATHER by William Dean Howells

As soon as we heard the pleasant news — I suppose the news of an engagement ought always to be called pleasant — it was decided that I ought to speak first about it, and speak to the father. We had not been a great while in the neighborhood, and it would look less like a bid for the familiar acquaintance of people living on a larger scale than ourselves, and less of an opening for our own intimacy if they turned out to be not quite so desirable in other ways as they were in the worldly way. For the ladies of the respective families first to offer and receive congratulations would be very much more committing on both sides; at the same time, to avoid the appearance of stiffness, some one ought to speak, and speak promptly. The news had not come to us directly from our neighbors, but authoritatively from a friend of theirs, who was also a friend of ours, and we could not very well hold back. So, in the cool of the early evening, when I had quite finished rasping my lawn with the new mower, I left it at the end of the swath, which had brought me near the fence, and said across it,

“Good-evening!”

My neighbor turned from making his man pour a pail of water on the earth round a freshly planted tree, and said, “Oh, good-evening! How d’ye do? Glad to see you!” and offered his hand over the low coping so cordially that I felt warranted in holding it a moment.

“I hope it’s in order for me to say how very much my wife and I are interested in the news we’ve heard about one of your daughters? May I offer our best wishes for her happiness?”

“Oh, thank you,” my neighbor said. “You’re very good indeed. Yes, it’s rather exciting — for us. I guess that’s all for to-night, Al,” he said, in dismissal of his man, before turning to lay his arms comfortably on the fence top. Then he laughed, before he added, to me, “And rather surprising, too.”

“Those things are always rather surprising, aren’t they?” I suggested.

“Well, yes, I suppose they are. It oughtn’t be so in our case, though, as we’ve been through it twice before: once with my son — he oughtn’t to have counted, but he did — and once with my eldest daughter. Yes, you might say you never do quite expect it, though everybody else does. Then, in this case, she was the baby so long, that we always thought of her as a little girl. Yes, she’s kept on being the pet, I guess, and we couldn’t realize what was in the air.”

I had thought, from the first sight of him, that there was something very charming in my neighbor’s looks. He had a large, round head, which had once been red, but was now a russet silvered, and was not too large for his manly frame, swaying amply outward, but not too amply, at the girth. He had blue, kind eyes, and a face fully freckled, and the girl he was speaking of with a tenderness in his tones rather than his words, was a young feminine copy of him; only, her head was little, under its load of red hair, and her figure, which we had lately noticed flitting in and out, as with a shy consciousness of being stared at on account of her engagement, was as light as his was heavy on its feet.

I said, “Naturally,” and he seemed glad of the chance to laugh again.

“Well, of course! And her being away at school made it all the more so. If we’d had her under our eye, here — Well, we shouldn’t have had her under our eye if she had BEEN here; or if we had, we shouldn’t have seen what was going on; at least I shouldn’t; maybe her mother would. So it’s just as well it happened as it did happen, I guess. We shouldn’t have been any the wiser if we’d known all about it.” I joined him in his laugh at his paradox, and he began again. “What’s that about being the unexpected that happens? I guess what happens is what ought to have been expected. We might have known when we let her go to a coeducational college that we were taking a risk of losing her; but we lost our other daughter that way, and SHE never went to ANY kind of college. I guess we counted the chances before we let her go. What’s the use? Of course we did, and I remember saying to my wife, who’s more anxious than I am about most things — women are, I guess — that if the worst came to the worst, it might not be such a bad thing. I always thought it wasn’t such an objectionable feature, in the coeducational system, if the young people did get acquainted under it, and maybe so well acquainted that they didn’t want to part enemies in the end. I said to my wife that I didn’t see how, if a girl was going to get married, she could have a better basis than knowing the fellow through three or four years’ hard work together. When you think of the sort of hit-or-miss affairs most marriages are that young people make after a few parties and picnics, coeducation as a preliminary to domestic happiness doesn’t seem a bad notion.”

“There’s something in what you say,” I assented.

“Of course there is,” my neighbor insisted. “I couldn’t help laughing, though,” and he laughed, as if to show how helpless he had been, “at what my wife said. She said she guessed if it came to that they would get to know more of each other’s looks than they did of their minds. She had me there, but I don’t think my girl has made out so very poorly even as far as books are concerned.”

Upon this invitation to praise her, I ventured to say, “A young lady of Miss Talbert’s looks doesn’t need much help from books.”

I could see that what I had said pleased him to the core, though he put on a frown of disclaimer in replying, “I don’t know about her looks. She’s a GOOD girl, though, and that’s the main thing, I guess.”

“For her father, yes, but other people don’t mind her being pretty,” I persisted. “My wife says when Miss Talbert comes out into the garden, the other flowers have no chance.”

“Good for Mrs. Temple!” my neighbor shouted, joyously giving himself away.

I have always noticed that when you praise a girl’s beauty to her father, though he makes a point of turning it off in the direction of her goodness, he likes so well to believe she is pretty that he cannot hold out against any persistence in the admirer of her beauty. My neighbor now said with the effect of tasting a peculiar sweetness in my words, “I guess I shall have to tell my wife, that.” Then he added, with a rush of hospitality, “Won’t you come in and tell her yourself?”

“Not now, thank you. It’s about our tea-time.”

“Glad it isn’t your DINNER-time!” he said, heartily.

“Well, yes. We don’t see the sense of dining late in a place like this. The fact is, we’re both village-bred, and we like the mid-day dinner. We make rather a high tea, though.”

“So do we. I always want a dish of something hot. My wife thinks cake is light, but I think meat is.”

“Well, cake is the New England superstition,” I observed. “And I suppose York State, too.”

“Yes, more than pie is,” he agreed. “For supper, anyway. You may have pie at any or all of the three meals, but you have GOT to have cake at tea, if you are anybody at all. In the place where my wife lived, a woman’s social standing was measured by the number of kinds of cake she had.”

We laughed at that, too, and then there came a little interval and I said, “Your place is looking fine.”

He turned his head and gave it a comprehensive stare. “Yes, it is,” he admitted. “They tell me it’s an ugly old house, and I guess if my girls, counting my daughter-in-law, had their way, they would have that French roof off, and something Georgian — that’s what they call it — on, about as quick as the carpenter could do it. They want a kind of classic front, with pillars and a pediment; or more the Mount Vernon style, body yellow, with white trim. They call it Georgian after Washington?” This was obviously a joke.

“No, I believe it was another George, or four others. But I don’t wonder you want to keep your house as it is. It expresses something characteristic.” I saved myself by forbearing to say it was handsome. It was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof cut up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials, and with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the top, with a fence of iron filigree round it. The taste of 1875 could not go further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated paper of the day.

I suggested something of the kind to my neighbor, and he laughed. “I guess it cost all we had at the time. We had been saving along up, and in those days it used to be thought that the best investment you could make was to put your money in a house of your own. That’s what we did, anyway. I had just got to be superintendent of the Works, and I don’t say but what we felt my position a little. Well, we felt it more than we did when I got to be owner.” He laughed in good-humored self-satire. “My wife used to say we wanted a large house so as to have it big enough to hold me, when I was feeling my best, and we built the largest we could for all the money we had. She had a plan of her own, which she took partly from the house of a girl friend of hers where she had been visiting, and we got a builder to carry out her idea. We did have some talk about an architect, but the builder said he didn’t want any architect bothering around HIM, and I don’t know as SHE did, either. Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl’s room over that; wide front hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor. It was considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was. But now, I don’t say but what it’s old-fashioned. I have to own up to that with the girls, but I tell them so are we, and that seems to make it all right for a while. I guess we sha’n’t change.”

He continued to stare at the simple-hearted edifice, so simple-hearted in its out-dated pretentiousness, and then he turned and leaned over the top of the fence where he had left his arms lying, while contemplating the early monument of his success. In making my journalistic study, more or less involuntary, of Eastridge, I had put him down as materially the first man of the place; I might have gone farther and put him down as the first man intellectually. We folk who have to do more constantly with reading and writing are apt to think that the other folk who have more to do with making and marketing have not so much mind, but I fancy we make a mistake in that now and then. It is only another kind of mind which they have quite as much of as we have of ours. It was intellectual force that built up the Plated-Ware Works of Eastridge, where there was no other reason for their being, and it was mental grip that held constantly to the management, and finally grasped the ownership. Nobody ever said that Talbert had come unfairly into that, or that he had misused his money in buying men after he began to come into it in quantity. He was felt in a great many ways, though he made something of a point of not being prominent in politics, after being president of the village two terms. The minister of his church was certainly such a preacher as he liked; and nothing was done in the church society without him; he gave the town a library building, and a soldier’s monument; he was foremost in getting the water brought in, which was natural enough since he needed it the most; he took a great interest in school matters, and had a fight to keep himself off the board of education; he went into his pocket for village improvements whenever he was asked, and he was the chief contributor to the public fountain under the big elm. If he carefully, or even jealously guarded his own interests, and held the leading law firm in the hollow of his hand, he was not oppressive, to the general knowledge. He was a despot, perhaps, but he was Blackstone’s ideal of the head of a state, a good despot. In all his family relations he was of the exemplary perfection which most other men attain only on their tombstones, and I had found him the best of neighbors. There were some shadows of diffidence between the ladies of our families, mainly on the part of my wife, but none between Talbert and me. He showed me, as a newspaper man with ideals if not abilities rather above the average, a deference which pleased my wife, even more than me.

It was the married daughter whom she most feared might, if occasion offered, give herself more consequence than her due. She had tried to rule her own family while in her father’s house, and now though she had a house of her own, my wife believed that she had not wholly relinquished her dominion there. Her husband was the junior member of the law firm which Talbert kept in his pay, to the exclusion of most other clients, and he was a very good fellow, so far as I knew, with the modern conception of his profession which, in our smaller towns and cities, has resulted in corporation lawyers and criminal lawyers, and has left to a few aging attorneys the faded traditions and the scanty affairs of the profession. My wife does not mind his standing somewhat in awe of his father-in-law, but she thinks poorly of his spirit in relation to that managing girl he has married. Talbert’s son is in the business with him, and will probably succeed him in it; but it is well known in the place that he will never be the man his father is, not merely on account of his college education, but also on account of the easy temperament, which if he had indulged it to the full would have left him no better than some kind of artist. As it is, he seems to leave all the push to his father; he still does some sketching outside, and putters over the aesthetic details in the business, the new designs for the plated ware, and the illustrated catalogues which the house publishes every year; I am in hopes that we shall get the printing, after we have got the facilities. It would be all right with the young man in the opinion of his censors if he had married a different kind of woman, but young Mrs. Talbert is popularly held just such another as her husband, and easy-going to the last degree. She was two or three years at the Art Students’ League, and it was there that her husband met her before they both decided to give up painting and get married.

The two youngest children, or the fall chickens as they are called in recognition of the wide interval between their ages and those of the other children, are probably of the indeterminate character proper to their years. We think the girl rather inclines to a hauteur based upon the general neglect of that quality in the family, where even the eldest sister is too much engaged in ruling to have much force left for snubbing. The child carries herself with a vague loftiness, which has apparently not awaited the moment of long skirts for keeping pretenders to her favor at a distance. In the default of other impertinents to keep in abeyance we fancy that she exercises her gift upon her younger brother, who, so far as we have been able to note, is of a disposition which would be entirely sweet if it were not for the exasperations he suffers from her. I like to put myself in his place, and to hold that he believes himself a better judge than she of the sort of companions he chooses, she being disabled by the mental constitution of her sex, and the defects of a girl’s training, from knowing the rare quality of boys who present themselves even to my friendly eyes as dirty, and, when not patched, ragged. I please myself in my guesses at her character with the conjecture that she is not satisfied with her sister’s engagement to a fellow-student in a co-educational college, who is looking forward to a professorship.

In spite of her injustice in regard to his own companions, this imaginable attitude of hers impresses the boy, if I understand boys. I have no doubt he reasons that she must be right about something, and as she is never right about boys, she must be right about brothers-in-law, potential if not actual. This one may be, for all the boy knows, a sissy; he inclines to believe, from what he understands of the matter, that he is indeed a sissy, or he would never have gone to a college where half the students are girls. He himself, as I have heard, intends to go to a college, but whether Harvard, or Bryant’s Business College, he has not yet decided. One thing he does know, though, and that is there are not going to be any girls in it. We have not allowed our invention so great play in regard to the elder members of our neighbor’s family perhaps because we really know something more about them. Mrs. Talbert duly called after We came to Eastridge, and when my wife had self-respectfully waited a proper time, which she made a little more than a week lest she should feel that she had been too eager for the acquaintance, she returned the call. Then she met not only Mrs. Talbert, but Mrs. Talbert’s mother, who lives with them, in an anxiety for their health which would impair her own if she were not of a constitution such as you do not find in these days of unladylike athletics. She was inclined to be rather strict with my wife about her own health, and mine too, and told her she must be careful not to let me work too hard, or overeat, or leave off my flannels before the weather was settled in the spring. She said she had heard that I had left a very good position on a Buffalo paper when I bought the Eastridge Banner, and that the town ought to feel very much honored. My wife suppressed her conviction that this was the correct view of the case, in a deprecatory expression of our happiness in finding ourselves in Eastridge, and our entire satisfaction with our prospects and surroundings. Then Mrs. Talbert’s mother inquired, as delicately as possible, what denominations, religious and medical, we were of, how many children we had, and whether mostly boys or girls, and where and how long we had been married. She was glad, she said, that we had taken the place next them, after our brief sojourn in the furnished house where we had first lived, and said that there was only one objection to the locality, which was the prevalence of moths; they obliged you to put away your things in naphtha-balls almost the moment the spring opened. She wished to know what books my wife was presently reading, and whether she approved of women’s clubs to the extent that they were carried to in some places. She believed in book clubs, but to her mind it was very questionable whether the time that ladies gave to writing papers on so many different subjects was well spent. She thought it a pity that so many things were canned, nowadays, and so well canned that the old arts of pickling and preserving were almost entirely lost. In the conversation, where she bore a leading part as long as she remained in the room, her mind took a wide range, and visited more human interests than my wife was at first able to mention, though afterward she remembered so many that I formed the notion of something encyclopedic in its compass. When she reached the letter Z, she rose and took leave of my wife, saying that now she must go and lie down, as it appeared to be her invariable custom to do (in behalf of the robust health which she had inherited unimpaired from a New England ancestry), at exactly half-past four every afternoon. It was this, she said, more than any one thing that enabled her to go through so much as she did; but through the door which she left open behind her my wife heard Talbert’s voice saying, in mixed mockery and tenderness, “Don’t forget your tonic, mother,” and hers saying, “No, I won’t, Cyrus. I never forget it, and it’s a great pity you don’t take it, too.”

It was our conclusion from all the facts of this call, when we came to discuss them in the light of some friendly gossip which we had previously heard, that the eldest daughter of the Talberts came honestly by her love of ruling if she got it from her grandmother, but that she was able to indulge it oftener, and yet not so often as might have been supposed from the mild reticence of her mother. Older if not shrewder observers than ourselves declared that what went in that house was what Mrs. Talbert said, and that it went all the more effectively because what she said Talbert said too.

That might have been because she said so little. When her mother left the room she let a silence follow in which she seemed too embarrassed to speak for a while on finding herself alone with my wife, and my wife decided that the shyness of the girl whose engagement was soon afterward reported, as well as the easy-goingness of the eldest son, had come from their mother. As soon as Mrs. Talbert could command herself, she began to talk, and every word she said was full of sense, with a little gust of humor in the sense which was perfectly charming. Absolutely unworldly as she was, she had very good manners; in her evasive way she was certainly qualified to be the leader of society in Eastridge, and socially Eastridge thought fairly well of itself. She did not obviously pretend to so much literature as her mother, but she showed an even nicer intelligence of our own situation in Eastridge. She spoke with a quiet appreciation of the improvement in the Banner, which, although she quoted Mr. Talbert, seemed to be the result of her personal acquaintance with the paper in the past as well as the present. My wife pronounced her the ideal mother of a family, and just what the wife of such a man as Cyrus Talbert ought to be, but no doubt because Mrs. Talbert’s characteristics were not so salient as her mother’s, my wife was less definitely descriptive of her.

From time to time, it seemed that there was a sister of Mr. Talbert’s who visited in the family, but was now away on one of the many other visits in which she passed her life. She was always going or coming somewhere, but at the moment she was gone. My wife inferred from the generation to which her brother belonged that she had long been a lady of that age when ladies begin to be spoken of as maiden. Mrs. Talbert spoke of her as if they were better friends than sisters-in-law are apt to be, and said that she was to be with them soon, and she would bring her with her when she returned my wife’s call. From the general impression in Eastridge we gathered that Miss Talbert was not without the disappointment which endears maiden ladies to the imagination, but the disappointment was of a date so remote that it was only matter of pathetic hearsay, now. Miss Talbert, in her much going and coming, had not failed of being several times in Europe. She especially affected Florence, where she was believed to have studied the Tuscan School to unusual purpose, though this was not apparent in any work of her own. We formed the notion that she might be uncomfortably cultured, but when she came to call with Mrs. Talbert afterward, my wife reported that you would not have thought, except for a remark she dropped now and then, that she had ever been out of her central New York village, and so far from putting on airs of art, she did not speak of any gallery abroad, or of the pensions in which she stayed in Florence, or the hotels in other cities of Italy where she had stopped to visit the local schools of painting.

In this somewhat protracted excursion I have not forgotten that I left Mr. Talbert leaning against our party fence, with his arms resting on the top, after a keen if not critical survey of his dwelling. He did not take up our talk at just the point where we had been in it, but after a reflective moment, he said, “I don’t remember just whether Mrs. Temple told my mother-in-law you were homoeopaths or allopaths.”

“Well,” I said, “that depends. I rather think we are homoeopaths of a low-potency type.” My neighbor’s face confessed a certain disappointment. “But we are not bigoted, even in the article of appreciable doses. Our own family doctor in our old place always advised us, in stress of absence from him, to get the best doctor wherever we happened to be, so far as we could make him out, and not mind what school he was of. I suppose we have been treated by as many allopaths as homoeopaths, but we’re rather a healthy family, and put it all together we have not been treated a great deal by either.”

Mr. Talbert looked relieved. “Oh, then you will have Dr. Denbigh. He puts your rule the other way, and gets the best patient he can, no matter whether he is a homoeopath or an allopath. We have him, in all our branches; he is the best doctor in Eastridge, and he is the best man. I want you to know him, and you can’t know a doctor the way you ought to, unless he’s your family physician.”

“You’re quite right, I think, but that’s a matter I should have to leave two-thirds of to my wife: women are two-thirds of the patients in every healthy family, and they ought to have the ruling voice about the doctor.” We had formed the habit already of laughing at any appearance of joke in each other, and my neighbor now rolled his large head in mirth, and said:

“That’s so, I guess. But I guess there won’t be any trouble about Mrs. Temple’s vote when she sees Denbigh. His specialty is the capture of sensible women. They all swear by him. You met him, didn’t you, at my office, the other day?”

“Oh yes, and I liked him so much that I wished I was sick on the spot!”

“That’s good!” my neighbor said, joyfully.

“Well, you could meet the doctor there almost any afternoon of the week, toward closing-up hours, and almost any evening at our house here, when he isn’t off on duty. It’s a generally understood thing that if he isn’t at home, or making a professional visit, he’s at one place or the other. The farmers round stop for him with their buggies, when they’re in a hurry, and half our calls over the ‘phone are for Dr. Denbigh. The fact is he likes to talk, and if there’s any sort of man that I like to talk with better than another, it’s a doctor. I never knew one yet that didn’t say something worth while within five minutes’ time. Then, you know that you can be free with them, be yourself, and that’s always worth while, whether you’re worth while yourself or not. You can say just what you think about anybody or anything, and you know it won’t go farther. You may not be a patient, but they’ve always got their Hippocratic oath with them, and they’re safe. That so?”

My neighbor wished the pleasure of my explicit assent; my tacit assent he must have read in my smile. “Yes,” I said, “and they’re always so tolerant and compassionate. I don’t want to say anything against the reverend clergy; they’re oftener saints upon earth than we allow; but a doctor is more solid comfort; he seems to understand you exponentially.”

“That’s it! You’ve hit it! He’s seen lots of other cases like yours, and next to a man’s feeling that he’s a peculiar sufferer, he likes to know that there are other fellows in the same box.”

We both laughed at this; it was, in fact, a joke we were the joint authors of.

“Well, we don’t often talk about my ailments; I haven’t got a great many; and generally we get on some abstract topic. Just now we’re running the question of female education, perhaps because it’s impersonal, and we can both treat of it without prejudice.”

“The doctor isn’t married, I believe?”

“He’s a widower of long standing, and that’s the best kind of doctor to have: then he’s a kind of a bachelor with practical wisdom added. You see, I’ve always had the idea that women, beginning with little girls and ending with grandmothers, ought to be brought up as nearly like their brothers as can be — that is, if they are to be the wives of other women’s brothers. It don’t so much matter how an old maid is brought up, but you can’t have her destiny in view, though I believe if an old maid could be brought up more like an old bachelor she would be more comfortable to herself, anyway.”

“And what does Dr. Denbigh say?”

“Well, you must hear him talk. I guess he rather wants to draw me out, for the most part.”

“I don’t wonder at that. I wish you’d draw yourself out. I’ve thought something in the direction of your opinion myself.”

“Have you? That’s good! We’ll tackle the doctor together sometime. The difficulty about putting a thing like that in practice is that you have to co-operate in it with women who have been brought up in the old way. A man’s wife is a woman—”

“Generally,” I assented, as if for argument’s sake.

He gave himself time to laugh. “And she has the charge of the children as long as they’re young, and she’s a good deal more likely to bring up the boys like girls than the girls like boys. But the boys take themselves out of her hands pretty soon, while the girls have to stay under her thumb till they come out just the kind of women we’ve always had.”

“We’ve managed to worry along with them.”

“Yes, we have. And I don’t say but what we fancy them as they are when we first begin to ‘take notice.’ One trouble is that children are sick so much, and their mothers scare you with that, and you haven’t the courage to put your theories into practice. I can’t say that any of my girls have inherited my constitution but this one.” I knew he meant the one whose engagement was the origin of our conversation. “If you’ve heard my mother-in-law talk about her constitution you would think she belonged to the healthiest family that ever got out of New England alive, but the fact is there’s always something the matter with her, or she thinks there is, and she’s taking medicine for it, anyway. I can’t say but what my wife has always been strong enough, and I’ve been satisfied to have the children take after her; but when I saw this one’s sorrel-top as we used to call it before we admired red hair, I knew she was a Talbert, and I made up my mind to begin my system with her.” He laughed as with a sense of agreeable discomfiture. “I can’t say it worked very well, or rather that it had a chance. You see, her mother had to apply it; I was always too busy. And a curious thing was that though the girl looked like me, she was a good deal more like her mother in temperament and character.”

“Perhaps,” I ventured, “that’s the reason why she was your favorite.”

He dropped his head in rather a shamefaced way, but lifted it with another laugh. “Well, there may be something in that. Not,” he gravely retrieved himself, “that we have ever distinguished between our children.”

“No, neither have we. But one can’t help liking the ways of one child better than another; one will rather take the fancy more than the rest.”

“Well,” my neighbor owned, “I don’t know but it’s that kind of shyness in them both. I suppose one likes to think his girl looks like him, but doesn’t mind her being like her mother. I’m glad she’s got my constitution, though. My eldest daughter is more like her grandmother in looks, and I guess she’s got her disposition too, more. I don’t know,” he said, vaguely, “what the last one is going to be like. She seems to be more worldly. But,” he resumed, strenuously, as if the remembrance of old opposition remained in his nerves, “when it came to this going off to school, or college, or whatever, I put my foot down, and kept it down. I guess her mother was willing enough to do my way, but her sister was all for some of those colleges where girls are educated with other girls and not with young men. She said they were more ladylike, and a lot more stuff and nonsense, and were more likely to be fit for society. She said this one would meet a lot of jays, and very likely fall in love with one; and when we first heard of this affair of Peggy’s I don’t believe but what her sister got more satisfaction out of it than I did. She’s quick enough! And a woman likes to feel that she’s a prophetess at any time of her life. That’s about all that seems to keep some of them going when they get old.” I knew that here he had his mother-in-law rather than his daughter in mind, and I didn’t interrupt the sarcastic silence into which he fell. “You’ve never met the young man, I believe?” he asked, at quite another point, and to the negation of my look he added, “To be sure! We’ve hardly met him ourselves; he’s only been here once; but you’ll see him — you and Mrs. Temple. Well!” He lifted his head, as if he were going away, but he did not lift his arms from the fence, and so I knew that he had not emptied the bag of his unexpected confidences; I did not know why he was making them to me, but I liked him the better for them, and tried to feel that I was worthy of them. He began with a laugh, “They both paid it into me so,” and now I knew that he meant his eldest daughter as well as her grandmother, “that my wife turned round and took my part, and said it was the very best thing that could happen; and she used all the arguments that I had used with her, when she had her misgivings about it, and she didn’t leave them a word to say. A curious thing about it was, that though my arguments seemed to convince them, they didn’t convince me. Ever notice, how when another person repeats what you’ve said, it sounds kind of weak and foolish?” I owned that my reasons had at times some such way of turning against me from the mouths of others, and he went on: “But they seemed to silence her own misgivings, and she’s been enthusiastic for the engagement ever since. What’s the reason,” he asked, “why a man, if he’s any way impetuous, wants to back out of a situation just about the time a woman has got set in it like the everlasting hills? Is it because she feels the need of holding fast for both, or is it because she knows she hasn’t the strength to keep to her conclusion, if she wavers at all, while a man can let himself play back and forth, and still stay put.”

“Well, in a question like that,” I said, and I won my neighbor’s easy laugh, “I always like to give my own sex the benefit of the doubt, and I haven’t any question but man’s inconsistency is always attributable to his magnanimity.”

“I guess I shall have to put that up on the doctor,” my neighbor said, as he lifted his arms from the fence at last, and backed away from it. I knew that he was really going in-doors now, and that I must come out with what was in my mind, if I meant to say it at all, and so I said, “By-the-way, there’s something. You know I don’t go in much for what’s called society journalism, especially in the country press, where it mostly takes the form of ‘Miss Sadie Myers is visiting with Miss Mamie Peters,’ but I realize that a country paper nowadays must be a kind of open letter to the neighborhood, and I suppose you have no objection to my mentioning the engagement?”

This made Mr. Talbert look serious; and I fancy my proposition made him realize the affair as he had not before, perhaps. After a moment’s pause, he said, “Well! That’s something I should like to talk with my wife about.”

“Do so!” I applauded. “I only suggest it — or chiefly, or partly — because you can have it reach our public in just the form you want, and the Rochester and Syracuse papers will copy my paragraph; but if you leave it to their Eastridge correspondents—”

“That’s true,” he assented. “I’ll speak to Mrs. Talbert—” He walked so inconclusively away that I was not surprised to have him turn and come back before I left my place. “Why, certainly! Make the announcement! It’s got to come out. It’s a kind of a wrench, thinking of it as a public affair; because a man’s daughter is always a little girl to him, and he can’t realize — And this one — But of course!”

“Would you like to suggest any particular form of words?” I hesitated.

“Oh no! Leave that to you entirely. I know we can trust you not to make any blare about it. Just say that they were fellow-students — I should like that to be known, so that people sha’n’t think I don’t like to have it known — and that he’s looking forward to a professorship in the same college — How queer it all seems!”

“Very well, then, I’ll announce it in our next. There’s time to send me word if Mrs. Talbert has any suggestions.”

“All right. But she won’t have any. Well, good-evening.”

“Good-evening,” I said from my side of the fence; and when I had watched him definitively in-doors, I turned and walked into my own house.

The first thing my wife said was, “You haven’t asked him to let you announce it in the Banner?”

“But I have, though!”

“Well!” she gasped.

“What is the matter?” I demanded. “It’s a public affair, isn’t it?”

“It’s a family affair—”

“Well, I consider the readers of the Banner a part of the family.”

CHAPTER II THE OLD-MAID AUNT by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

I am relegated here in Eastridge to the position in which I suppose I properly belong, and I dare say it is for my best spiritual and temporal good. Here I am the old-maid aunt. Not a day, not an hour, not a minute, when I am with other people, passes that I do not see myself in their estimation playing that role as plainly as if I saw myself in a looking-glass. It is a moral lesson which I presume I need. I have just returned from my visit at the Pollards’ country-house in Lancaster, where I most assuredly did not have it. I do not think I deceive myself. I know it is the popular opinion that old maids are exceedingly prone to deceive themselves concerning the endurance of their youth and charms, and the views of other people with regard to them. But I am willing, even anxious, to be quite frank with myself. Since — well, never mind since what time — I have not cared an iota whether I was considered an old maid or not. The situation has seemed to me rather amusing, inasmuch as it has involved a secret willingness to be what everybody has considered me as very unwilling to be. I have regarded it as a sort of joke upon other people.

But I think I am honest — I really mean to be, and I think I am — when I say that outside Eastridge the role of an old-maid aunt is the very last one which I can take to any advantage. Here I am estimated according to what people think I am, rather than what I actually am. In the first place, I am only fifteen years older than Peggy, who has just become engaged, but those fifteen years seem countless aeons to the child herself and the other members of the family. I am ten years younger than my brother’s wife, but she and my brother regard me as old enough to be her mother. As for Grandmother Evarts, she fairly looks up to me as her superior in age, although she DOES patronize me. She would patronize the prophets of old. I don’t believe she ever says her prayers without infusing a little patronage into her petitions. The other day Grandmother Evarts actually inquired of me, of ME! concerning a knitting-stitch. I had half a mind to retort, “Would you like a lesson in bridge, dear old soul?” She never heard of bridge, and I suppose she would have thought I meant bridge-building. I sometimes wonder why it is that all my brother’s family are so singularly unsophisticated, even Cyrus himself, able as he is and dear as he is.

Sometimes I speculate as to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. Those bedrooms under the mansard-roof are miracles not only of ugliness, but discomfort, and there is no attic. I think that a house without a good roomy attic is like a man without brains. Possibly living in a brainless house has affected the mental outlook of my relatives, although their brains are well enough. Peggy is not exactly remarkable for hers, but she is charmingly pretty, and has a wonderful knack at putting on her clothes, which might be esteemed a purely feminine brain, in her fingers. Charles Edward really has brains, although he is a round peg in a square hole, and as for Alice, her brains are above the normal, although she unfortunately knows it, and Billy, if he ever gets away from Alice, will show what he is made of. Maria’s intellect is all right, although cast in a petty mould. She repeats Grandmother Evarts, which is a pity, because there are types not worth repeating. Maria if she had not her husband Tom to manage, would simply fall on her face. It goes hard with a purely patronizing soul when there is nobody to manage; there is apt to be an explosion. However, Maria HAS Tom. But none of my brother’s family, not even my dear sister-in-law, Cyrus’s wife, have the right point of view with regard to the present, possibly on account of the mansard-roof which has overshadowed them. They do not know that today an old-maid aunt is as much of an anomaly as a spinning-wheel, that she has ceased to exist, that she is prehistoric, that even grandmothers have almost disappeared from off the face of the earth. In short, they do not know that I am not an old-maid aunt except under this blessed mansard-roof, and some other roofs of Eastridge, many of which are also mansard, where the influence of their fixed belief prevails. For instance, they told the people next door, who have moved here recently, that the old-maid aunt was coming, and so, when I went to call with my sister-in-law, Mrs. Temple saw her quite distinctly. To think of Ned Temple being married to a woman like that, who takes things on trust and does not use her own eyes! Her two little girls are exactly like her. I wonder what Ned himself will think. I wonder if he will see that my hair is as red-gold as Peggy’s, that I am quite as slim, that there is not a line on my face, that I still keep my girl color with no aid, that I wear frills of the latest fashion, and look no older than when he first saw me. I really do not know myself how I have managed to remain so intact; possibly because I have always grasped all the minor sweets of life, even if I could not have the really big worth-while ones. I honestly do not think that I have had the latter. But I have not taken the position of some people, that if I cannot have what I want most I will have nothing. I have taken whatever Providence chose to give me in the way of small sweets, and made the most of them. Then I have had much womanly pride, and that is a powerful tonic.

For instance, years ago, when my best lamp of life went out, so to speak, I lit all my candles and kept my path. I took just as much pains with my hair and my dress, and if I was unhappy I kept it out of evidence on my face. I let my heart ache and bleed, but I would have died before I wrinkled my forehead and dimmed my eyes with tears and let everybody else know. That was about the time when I met Ned Temple, and he fell so madly in love with me, and threatened to shoot himself if I would not marry him. He did not. Most men do not. I wonder if he placed me when he heard of my anticipated coming. Probably he did not. They have probably alluded to me as dear old Aunt Elizabeth, and when he met me (I was staying at Harriet Munroe’s before she was married) nobody called me Elizabeth, but Lily. Miss Elizabeth Talbert, instead of Lily Talbert, might naturally set him wrong. Everybody here calls me Elizabeth. Outside Eastridge I am Lily. I dare say Ned Temple has not dreamed who I am. I hear that he is quite brilliant, although the poor fellow must be limited as to his income. However, in some respects it must be just as well. It would be a great trial to a man with a large income to have a wife like Mrs. Temple, who could make no good use of it. You might load that poor soul with crown jewels and she would make them look as if she had bought them at a department store for ninety-eight cents. And the way she keeps her house must be maddening, I should think, to a brilliant man. Fancy the books on the table being all arranged with the large ones under the small ones in perfectly even piles! I am sure that he has his meals on time, and I am equally sure that the principal dishes are preserves and hot biscuits and cake. That sort of diet simply shows forth in Mrs. Temple and her children. I am sure that his socks are always mended, but I know that he always wipes his feet before he enters the house, that it has become a matter of conscience with him; and those exactions are to me pathetic. These reflections are uncommonly like the popular conception as to how an old-maid aunt should reflect, had she not ceased to exist. Sometimes I wish she were still existing and that I carried out her character to the full. I am not at all sure but she, as she once was, coming here, would not have brought more happiness than I have. I must say I thought so when I saw poor Harry Goward turn so pale when he first saw me after my arrival. Why, in the name of common-sense, Ada, my sister-in-law, when she wrote to me at the Pollards’, announcing Peggy’s engagement, could not have mentioned who the man was, I cannot see.

Sometimes it seems to me that only the girl and the engagement figure at all in such matters. I suppose Peggy always alluded to me as “dear Aunt Elizabeth,” when that poor young fellow knew me at the Abercrombies’, where we were staying a year ago, as Miss Lily Talbert. The situation with regard to him and Peggy fairly puzzles me. I simply do not know what to do. Goodness knows I never lifted my finger to attract him. Flirtations between older women and boys always have seemed to me contemptible. I never particularly noticed him, although he is a charming young fellow, and there is not as much difference in our ages as in those of Harriet Munroe and her husband, and if I am not mistaken there is more difference between the ages of Ned Temple and his wife. Poor soul! she looks old enough to be his mother, as I remember him, but that may be partly due to the way she arranges her hair. However, Ned himself may have changed; there must be considerable wear and tear about matrimony, taken in connection with editing a country newspaper. If I had married Ned I might have looked as old as Mrs. Temple does. I wonder what Ned will do when he sees me. I know he will not turn white, as poor Harry Goward did. That really worries me. I am fond of little Peggy, and the situation is really rather awful. She is engaged to a man who is fond of her aunt and cannot conceal it. Still, the affection of most male things is curable. If Peggy has sense enough to retain her love for frills and bows, and puts on her clothes as well, and arranges her hair as prettily, after she has been married a year — no, ten years (it will take at least ten years to make a proper old-maid aunt of me) — she may have the innings. But Peggy has no brains, and it really takes a woman with brains to keep her looks after matrimony.

Of course, the poor little soul has no danger to fear from me; it is lucky for her that her fiance fell in love with me; but it is the principle of the thing which worries me. Harry Goward must be as fickle as a honey-bee. There is no assurance whatever for Peggy that he will not fall headlong in love — and headlong is just the word for it — with any other woman after he has married her. I did not want the poor fellow to stick to me, but when I come to think of it that is the trouble. How short-sighted I am! It is his perverted fickleness rather than his actual fickleness which worries me. He has proposed to Peggy when he was in love with another woman, probably because he was in love with another woman. Now Peggy, although she is not brilliant, in spite of her co-education (perhaps because of it), is a darling, and she deserves a good husband. She loves this man with her whole heart, poor little thing! that is easy enough to be seen, and he does not care for her, at least not when I am around or when I am in his mind. The question is, is this marriage going to make the child happy? My first impulse, when I saw Harry Goward and knew that he was poor Peggy’s lover, was immediately to pack up and leave. Then I really wondered if that was the wisest thing to do. I wanted to see for myself if Harry Goward were really in earnest about poor little Peggy and had gotten over his mad infatuation for her aunt and would make her a good husband. Perhaps I ought to leave, and yet I wonder if I ought. Harry Goward may have turned pale simply from his memory of what an uncommon fool he had been, and the consideration of the embarrassing position in which his past folly has placed him, if I chose to make revelations. He might have known that I would not; still, men know so little of women. I think that possibly I am worrying myself needlessly, and that he is really in love with Peggy. She is quite a little beauty, and she does know how to put her clothes on so charmingly. The adjustments of her shirt-waists are simply perfection. I may be very foolish to go away; I may be even insufferably conceited in assuming that Harry’s change of color signified anything which could make it necessary. But, after all, he must be fickle and ready to turn from one to another, or deceitful, and I must admit that if Peggy were my daughter, and Harry had never been mad about me six weeks ago, but about some other woman, I should still feel the same way.

Sometimes I wonder if I ought to tell Ada. She is the girl’s mother. I might shift the responsibility on to her. I almost think I will. She is alone in her room now, I know. Peggy and Harry have gone for a drive, and the rest have scattered. It is a good chance. I really don’t feel as if I ought to bear the whole responsibility alone. I will go this minute and tell Ada.

Well, I have told Ada, and here I am back in my room, laughing over the result. I might as well have told the flour-barrel. Anything like Ada’s ease of character and inability to worry or even face a disturbing situation I have never seen. I laugh, although her method of receiving my tale was not, so to speak, flattering to me. Ada was in her loose white kimono, and she was sitting at her shady window darning stockings in very much the same way that a cow chews her cud; and when I told her, under promise of the strictest secrecy, she just laughed that placid little laugh of hers and said, taking another stitch, “Oh, well, boys are always falling in love with older women.” And when I asked if she thought seriously that Peggy might not be running a risk, she said: “Oh dear, no; Harry is devoted to the child. You can’t be foolish enough. Aunt Elizabeth, to think that he is in love with you NOW?”

I said, “Certainly not.” It was only the principle involved; that the young man must be very changeable, and that Peggy might run a risk in the future if Harry were thrown in much with other women.

Ada only laughed again, and kept on with her darning, and said she guessed there was no need to worry. Harry seemed to her very much like Cyrus, and she was sure that Cyrus had never thought of another woman besides herself (Ada).

I wonder if another woman would have said what I might have said, especially after that imputation of the idiocy of my thinking that a young man could possibly fancy ME. I said nothing, but I wondered what Ada would say if she knew what I knew, if she would continue to chew her cud, that Cyrus had been simply mad over another girl, and only married her because he could not get the other one, and when the other died, five years after he was married to Ada, he sent flowers, and I should not to this day venture to speak that girl’s name to the man. She was a great beauty, and she had a wonderful witchery about her. I was only a child, but I remember how she looked. Why, I fell in love with her myself! Cyrus can never forget a woman like that for a cud-chewing creature like Ada, even if she does keep his house in order and make a good mother to his children. The other would not have kept the house in order at all, but it would have been a shrine. Cyrus worshipped that girl, and love may supplant love, but not worship. Ada does not know, and she never will through me, but I declare I was almost wicked enough to tell her when I saw her placidly darning away, without the slightest conception, any more than a feather pillow would have, of what this ridiculous affair with me might mean in future consequences to poor, innocent little Peggy. But I can only hope the boy has gotten over his feeling for me, that he has been really changeable, for that would be infinitely better than the other thing.

Well, I shall not need to go away. Harry Goward has himself solved that problem. He goes himself to-morrow. He has invented a telegram about a sick uncle, all according to the very best melodrama. But what I feared is true — he is still as mad as ever about me. I went down to the post-office for the evening mail, and was coming home by moonlight, unattended, as any undesirable maiden aunt may safely do, when the boy overtook me. I had heard his hurried steps behind me for some time. Up he rushed just as we reached the vacant lot before the Temple house, and caught my arm and poured forth a volume of confessions and avowals, and, in short, told me he did not love Peggy, but me, and he never would love anybody but me. I actually felt faint for a second. Then I talked. I told him what a dishonorable wretch he was, and said he might as well have plunged a knife into an innocent, confiding girl at once as to have treated Peggy so. I told him to go away and let me alone and write friendly letters to Peggy, and see if he would not recover his senses, if he had any to recover, which I thought doubtful; and then when he said he would not budge a step, that he would remain in Eastridge, if only for the sake of breathing the same air I did, that he would tell Peggy the whole truth at once, and bear all the blame which he deserved for being so dishonorable, I arose to the occasion. I said, “Very well, remain, but you may have to breathe not only the same air that I do, but also the same air that the man whom I am to marry does.” I declare that I had no man whatever in mind. I said it in sheer desperation. Then the boy burst forth with another torrent, and the secret was out.

My brother and my sister-in-law and Grandmother Evarts and the children, for all I know, have all been match-making for me. I did not suspect it of them. I supposed they esteemed my case as utterly hopeless, and then I knew that Cyrus knew about — well, never mind; I don’t often mention him to myself. I certainly thought that they all would have as soon endeavored to raise the dead as to marry me, but it seems that they have been thinking that while there is life there is hope, or rather, while there are widowers there is hope. And there is a widower in Eastridge — Dr. Denbigh. He is the candle about which the mothlike dreams of ancient maidens and widows have fluttered, to their futile singeing, for the last twenty years. I really did not dream that they would think I would flutter, even if I was an old-maid aunt. But Harry cried out that if I were going to marry Dr. Denbigh he would go away. He never would stay and be a witness to such sacrilege. “That OLD man!” he raved. And when I said I was not a young girl myself he got all the madder. Well, I allowed him to think I was going to marry Dr. Denbigh (I wonder what the doctor would say), and as a consequence Harry will flit to-morrow, and he is with poor little Peggy out in the grape-arbor, and she is crying her eyes out. If he dares tell her what a fool he is I could kill him. I am horribly afraid that he will let it out, for I never saw such an alarmingly impetuous youth. Young Lochinvar out of the west was mere cambric tea to him. I am really thankful that he has not a gallant steed, nor even an automobile, for the old-maid aunt might yet be captured as the Sabine women were.

Well, thank fortune, Harry has left, and he cannot have told, for poor little Peggy has been sitting with me for a solid hour, sniffing, and sounding his praises. Somehow the child made me think of myself at her age. I was about a year older when my tragedy came and was never righted. Hers, I think, will be, since Harry was not such an ass as to confess before he went away. But all the same, I am concerned for her happiness, for Harry is either fickle or deceitful. Sometimes I wonder what my duty is, but I can’t tell the child. It would do no more good for me to consult my brother Cyrus than it did to consult Ada. I know of no one whom I can consult. Charles Edward and his wife, who is just like Ada, pretty, but always with her shirt-waist hunching in the back, sitting wrong, and standing lopsided, and not worrying enough to give her character salt and pepper, are there. (I should think she would drive Charles Edward, who is really an artist, only out of his proper sphere, mad.) Tom and Maria are down there, too, on the piazza, and Ada at her everlasting darning, and Alice bossing Billy as usual. I can hear her voice. I think I will put on another gown and go for a walk.

I think I will put on my pink linen, and my hat lined with pink chiffon and trimmed with shaded roses. That particular shade of pink is just right for my hair. I know quite well how I look in that gown and hat, and I know, also, quite well how I shall look to the members of my family assembled below. They all unanimously consider that I should dress always in black silk, and a bonnet with a neat little tuft of middle-aged violets, and black ribbons tied under my chin. I know I am wicked to put on that pink gown and hat, but I shall do it. I wonder why it amuses me to be made fun of. Thank fortune, I have a sense of humor. If I did not have that it might have come to the black silk and the bonnet with the tuft of violets, for the Lord knows I have not, after all, so very much compared with what some women have. It troubles me to think of that young fool rushing away and poor, dear little Peggy; but what can I do? This pink gown is fetching, and how they will stare when I go down!

Well, they did stare. How pretty this street is, with the elms arching over it. I made quite a commotion, and they all saw me through their eyeglasses of prejudice, except, possibly, Tom Price, Maria’s husband. I am certain I heard him say, as I marched away, “Well, I don’t care; she does look stunning, anyhow,” but Maria hushed him up. I heard her say, “Pink at her age, and a pink hat, and a parasol lined with pink!” Ada really looked more disturbed than I have ever seen her. If I had been Godiva, going for my sacrificial ride through the town, it could not have been much worse. She made her eyes round and big, and asked, in a voice which was really agitated, “Are you going out in that dress. Aunt Elizabeth?” And Aunt Elizabeth replied that she certainly was, and she went after she had exchanged greetings with the family and kissed Peggy’s tear-stained little face. Charles Edward’s wife actually straightened her spinal column, she was so amazed at the sight of me in my rose-colored array. Charles Edward, to do him justice, stared at me with a bewildered air, as if he were trying to reconcile his senses with his traditions. He is an artist, but he will always be hampered by thinking he sees what he has been brought up to think he sees. That is the reason why he has settled down uncomplainingly in Cyrus’s “Works,” as he calls them, doing the very slight aesthetics possible in such a connection. Now Charles Edward would think that sunburned grass over in that field is green, when it is pink, because he has been taught that grass is green. If poor Charles Edward only knew that grass was green not of itself, but because of occasional conditions, and knew that his aunt looked — well, as she does look — he would flee for his life, and that which is better than his life, from the “Works,” and be an artist, but he never will know or know that he knows, which comes to the same thing.

Well, what does it matter to me? I have just met a woman who stared at me, and spoke as if she thought I were a lunatic to be afield in this array. What does anything matter? Sometimes, when I am with people who see straight, I do take a certain pleasure in looking well, because I am a woman, and nothing can quite take away that pleasure from me; but all the time I know it does not matter, that nothing has really mattered since I was about Peggy’s age and Lyman Wilde quarrelled with me over nothing and vanished into thin air, so far as I was concerned. I suppose he is comfortably settled with a wife and family somewhere. It is rather odd, though, that with all my wandering on this side of the water and the other I have never once crossed his tracks. He may be in the Far East, with a harem. I never have been in the Far East. Well, it does not matter to me where he is. That is ancient history. On the whole, though, I like the harem idea better than the single wife. I have what is left to me — the little things of life, the pretty effects which go to make me pretty (outside Eastridge); the comforts of civilization, travelling and seeing beautiful things, also seeing ugly things to enhance the beautiful. I have pleasant days in beautiful Florence. I have friends. I have everything except — well, except everything. That I must do without. But I will do without it gracefully, with never a whimper, or I don’t know myself. But now I AM worried over Peggy. I wish I could consult with somebody with sense. What a woman I am! I mean, how feminine I am! I wish I could cure myself of the habit of being feminine. It is a horrible nuisance; this wishing to consult with somebody when I am worried is so disgustingly feminine.

Well, I have consulted. I am back in my own room. It is after supper. We had three kinds of cake, hot biscuits, and raspberries, and — a concession to Cyrus — a platter of cold ham and an egg salad. He will have something hearty, as he calls it (bless him! he is a good-fellow), for supper. I am glad, for I should starve on Ada’s New England menus. I feel better, now that I have consulted, although, when I really consider the matter, I can’t see that I have arrived at any very definite issue. But I have consulted, and, above all things, with Ned Temple! I was walking down the street, and I reached his newspaper building. It is a funny little affair; looks like a toy house. It is all given up to the mighty affairs of the Eastridge Banner. In front there is a piazza, and on this piazza sat Ned Temple. Changed? Well, yes, poor fellow! He is thin. I am so glad he is thin instead of fat; thinness is not nearly so disillusioning. His hair is iron-gray, but he is, after all, distinguished-looking, and his manners are entirely sophisticated. He shows at a glance, at a word, that he is a brilliant man, although he is stranded upon such a petty little editorial island. And — and he saw ME as I am. He did not change color. He is too self-poised; besides, he is too honorable. But he saw ME. He rose immediately and came to speak to me. He shook hands. He looked at my face under my pink-lined hat. He saw it as it was; but bless him! that stupid wife of his holds him fast with his own honor. Ned Temple is a good man. Sometimes I wonder if it would not have been better if he, instead of Lyman — Well, that is idiotic.

He said he had to go to the post-office, and then it was time for him to go home to supper (to the cake and sauce, I suppose), and with my permission he would walk with me. So he did. I don’t know how it happened that I consulted with him. I think he spoke of Peggy’s engagement, and that led up to it. But I could speak to him, because I knew that he, seeing me as I really am, would view the matter seriously. I told him about the miserable affair, and he said that I had done exactly right. I can’t remember that he offered any actual solution, but it was something to be told that I had done exactly right. And then he spoke of his wife, and in such a faithful fashion, and so lovingly of his two commonplace little girls. Ned Temple is as good as he is brilliant. It is really rather astonishing that such a brilliant man can be so good. He told me that I had not changed at all, but all the time that look of faithfulness for his wife never left his handsome face, bless him! I believe I am nearer loving him for his love for another woman than I ever was to loving him for himself.

And then the inconceivable happened. I did what I never thought I should be capable of doing, and did it easily, too, without, I am sure, a change of color or any perturbation. I think I could do it, because faithfulness had become so a matter of course with the man that I was not ashamed should he have any suspicion of me also. He and Lyman used to be warm friends. I asked if he knew anything about him. He met my question as if I had asked what o’clock it was, just the way I knew he would meet it. He knows no more than I do. But he said something which has comforted me, although comfort at this stage of affairs is a dangerous indulgence. He said, very much as if he had been speaking of the weather, “He worshipped you, Lily, and wherever he is, in this world or the next, he worships you now.” Then he added: “You know how I felt about you. Lily. If I had not found out about him, that he had come first, I know how it would have been with me, so I know how it is with him. We had the same views about matters of that kind. After I did find out, why, of course, I felt different — although always, as long as I live, I shall be a dear friend to you. Lily. But a man is unfaithful to himself who is faithful to a woman whom another man loves and whom she loves.”

“Yes, that is true,” I agreed, and said something about the hours for the mails in Eastridge. Lyman Wilde dropped out of Ned’s life as he dropped out of mine, it seems. I shall simply have to lean back upon the minor joys of life for mental and physical support, as I did before. Nothing is different, but I am glad that I have seen Ned Temple again, and realize what a good man he is.

Well, it seems that even minor pleasures have dangers, and that I do not always read characters rightly. The very evening after my little stroll and renewal of friendship with Ned Temple I was sitting in my room, reading a new book for which the author should have capital punishment, when I heard excited voices, or rather an excited voice, below. I did not pay much attention at first. I supposed the excited voice must belong to either Maria or Alice, for no others of my brother’s family ever seem in the least excited, not to the extent of raising their voices to a hysterical pitch. But after a few minutes Cyrus came to the foot of the stairs and called. He called Aunt Elizabeth, and Aunt Elizabeth, in her same pink frock, went down. Cyrus met me at the foot of the stairs, and he looked fairly wild. “What on earth, Aunt Elizabeth!” said he, and I stared at him in a daze.

“The deuce is to pay,” said he. “Aunt Elizabeth, did you ever know our next-door neighbor before his marriage?”

“Certainly,” said I; “when we were both infants. I believe they had gotten him out of petticoats and into trousers, but much as ever, and my skirts were still abbreviated. It was at Harriet Munroe’s before she was married.”

“Have you been to walk with him?” gasped poor Cyrus.

“I met him on my way to the post-office last night, and he walked along with me, and then as far as his house on the way home, if you call that walking out,” said I. “You sound like the paragraphs in a daily paper. Now, what on earth do you mean, if I may ask, Cyrus?”

“Nothing, except Mrs. Temple is in there raising a devil of a row,” said Cyrus. He gazed at me in a bewildered fashion. “If it were Peggy I could understand it,” he said, helplessly, and I knew how distinctly he saw the old-maid aunt as he gazed at me. “She’s jealous of you, Elizabeth,” he went on in the same dazed fashion. “She’s jealous of you because her husband walked home with you. She’s a dreadfully nervous woman, and, I guess, none too well. She’s fairly wild. It seems Temple let on how he used to know you before he was married, and said something in praise of your looks, and she made a regular header into conclusions. You have held your own remarkably well, Elizabeth, but I declare—” And again poor Cyrus gazed at me.

“Well, for goodness’ sake, let me go in and see what I can do,” said I, and with that I went into the parlor.

I was taken aback. Nobody, not even another woman, can tell what a woman really is. I thought I had estimated Ned Temple’s wife correctly. I had taken her for a monotonous, orderly, dull sort of creature, quite incapable of extremes; but in reality she has in her rather large, flabby body the characteristics of a kitten, with the possibilities of a tigress. The tigress was uppermost when I entered the room. The woman was as irresponsible as a savage. I was disgusted and sorry and furious at the same time. I cannot imagine myself making such a spectacle over any mortal man. She was weeping frantically into a mussy little ball of handkerchief, and when she saw me she rushed at me and gripped me by the arm like a mad thing.

“If you can’t get a husband for yourself,” said she, “you might at least let other women’s husbands alone!”

She was vulgar, but she was so wild with jealousy that I suppose vulgarity ought to be forgiven her. I hardly know myself how I managed it, but, somehow, I got the poor thing out of the room and the house and into the cool night air, and then I talked to her, and fairly made her be quiet and listen. I told her that Ned Temple had made love to me when he was just out of petticoats and I was in short dresses. I stretched or shortened the truth a little, but it was a case of necessity. Then I intimated that I never would have married Ned Temple, anyway, and THAT worked beautifully. She turned upon me in such a delightfully inconsequent fashion and demanded to know what I expected, and declared her husband was good enough for any woman. Then I said I did not doubt that, and hinted that other women might have had their romances, even if they did not marry. That immediately interested her. She stared at me, and said, with the most innocent impertinence, that my brother’s wife had intimated that I had had an unhappy love-affair when I was a girl. I did not think that Cyrus had told Ada, but I suppose a man HAS to tell his wife everything.

I hedged about the unhappy love-affair, but the first thing I knew the poor, distracted woman was sobbing on my shoulder as we stood in front of her gate, and saying that she was so sorry, but her whole life was bound up in her husband, and I was so beautiful and had so much style, and she knew what a dowdy she was, and she could not blame poor Ned if — But I hushed her.

“Your husband has no more idea of caring for another woman besides you than that moon has of travelling around another world,” said I; “and you are a fool if you think so; and if you are dowdy it is your own fault. If you have such a good husband you owe it to him not to be dowdy. I know you keep his house beautifully, but any man would rather have his wife look well than his house, if he is worth anything at all.”

Then she gasped out that she wished she knew how to do up her hair like mine. It was all highly ridiculous, but it actually ended in my going into the Temple house and showing Ned’s wife how to do up her hair like mine. She looked like another woman when it was puffed softly over her forehead — she has quite pretty brown hair. Then I taught her how to put on her corset and pin her shirt-waist taut in front and her skirt behind. Ned was not to be home until late, and there was plenty of time. It ended in her fairly purring around me, and saying how sorry she was, and ashamed, that she had been so foolish, and all the time casting little covert, conceited glances at herself in the looking-glass. Finally I kissed her and she kissed me, and I went home. I don’t really see what more a woman could have done for a rival who had supplanted her. But this revelation makes me more sorry than ever for poor Ned. I don’t know, though; she may be more interesting than I thought. Anything is better than the dead level of small books on large ones, and meals on time. It cannot be exactly monotonous never to know whether you will find a sleek, purry cat, or an absurd kitten, or a tigress, when you come home. Luckily, she did not tell Ned of her jealousy, and I have cautioned all in my family to hold their tongues, and I think they will. I infer that they suspect that I must have been guilty of some unbecoming elderly prank to bring about such a state of affairs, unless, possibly, Maria’s husband and Billy are exceptions. I find that Billy, when Alice lets him alone, is a boy who sees with his own eyes. He told me yesterday that I was handsomer in my pink dress than any girl in his school.

“Why, Billy Talbert!” I said, “talking that way to your old aunt!”

“I suppose you ARE awful old,” said Billy, bless him! “but you are enough-sight prettier than a girl. I hate girls. I hope I can get away from girls when I am a man.”

I wanted to tell the dear boy that was exactly the time when he would not get away from girls, but I thought I would not frighten him, but let him find it out for himself.

Well, now the deluge! It is a week since Harry Goward went away, and Peggy has not had a letter, although she has haunted the post-office, poor child! and this morning she brought home a letter for me from that crazy boy. She was white as chalk when she handed it to me.

“It’s Harry’s writing,” said she, and she could barely whisper. “I have not had a word from him since he went away, and now he has written to you instead of me. What has he written to you for, Aunt Elizabeth?”

She looked at me so piteously, poor, dear little girl! that if I could have gotten hold of Harry Goward that moment I would have shaken him. I tried to speak, soothingly. I said:

“My dear Peggy, I know no more than you do why he has written to me. Perhaps his uncle is dead and he thought I would break it to you.”

That was rank idiocy. Generally I can rise to the occasion with more success.

“What do I care about his old uncle?” cried poor Peggy. “I never even saw his uncle. I don’t care if he is dead. Something has happened to Harry. Oh, Aunt Elizabeth, what is it?”

I was never in such a strait in my life. There was that poor child staring at the letter as if she could eat it, and then at me. I dared not open the letter before her. We were out on the porch. I said:

“Now, Peggy Talbert, you keep quiet, and don’t make a little fool of yourself until you know you have some reason for it. I am going up to my own room, and you sit in that chair, and when I have read this letter I will come down and tell you about it.”

“I know he is dead!” gasped Peggy, but she sat down.

“Dead!” said I. “You just said yourself it was his handwriting. Do have a little sense, Peggy.” With that I was off with my letter, and I locked my door before I read it.

Of all the insane ravings! I put it on my hearth and struck a match, and the thing went up in flame and smoke. Then I went down to poor little Peggy and patched up a story. I have always been averse to lying, and I did not lie then, although I must admit that what I said was open to criticism when it comes to exact verity. I told Peggy that Harry thought that he had done something to make her angry (that was undeniably true) and did not dare write her. I refused utterly to tell her just what was in the letter, but I did succeed in quieting her and making her think that Harry had not broken faith with her, but was blaming himself for some unknown and imaginary wrong he had done her. Peggy rushed immediately up to her room to write reassuring pages to Harry, and her old-maid aunt had the horse put in the runabout and was driven over to Whitman, where nobody knows her — at least the telegraph operator does not. Then I sent a telegram to Mr. Harry Goward to the effect that if he did not keep his promise with regard to writing F. L. to P. her A. would never speak to him again; that A. was about to send L., but he must keep his promise with regard to P. by next M.

It looked like the most melodramatic Sunday personal ever invented. It might have meant burglary or murder or a snare for innocence, but I sent it. Now I have written. My letter went in the same mail as poor Peggy’s, but what will be the outcome of it all I cannot say. Sometimes I catch Peggy looking at me with a curious awakened expression, and then I wonder if she has begun to suspect. I cannot tell how it will end.

CHAPTER III THE GRANDMOTHER by Mary Heaton Vorse

The position of an older woman in her daughter’s house is often difficult. It makes no difference to me that Ada is a mother herself; she might be even a great-grandmother, and yet in my eyes she would still be Ada, my little girl. I feel the need of guiding her and protecting her just as much this minute as when she was a baby in the nursery; only now the task is much more difficult. That is why I say that the position of women placed as I am is often hard, harder than if I lived somewhere else, because although I am with Ada I can no longer protect her from anything — not even from myself, my illnesses and weaknesses. It sometimes seems to me, so eagerly do I follow the lights and shadows of my daughter’s life, as if I were living a second existence together with my own. Only as I grow older I am less fitted physically to bear things, even though I take them philosophically.

When Ada and the rest of my children were little, I could guard against the menaces to their happiness; I could keep them out of danger; if their little friends didn’t behave, I sent them home. When it was needed, I didn’t hesitate to administer a good wholesome spanking to my children. There isn’t one of these various things but needs doing now in Ada’s house. I can’t, however, very well spank Cyrus, nor can I send Elizabeth home. All I CAN do is to sit still and hold my tongue, though I don’t know, I’m sure, what the end of it all is to be.

Life brings new lessons at every turn in the road, and one of the hardest of all is the one we older people have to learn — to sit still while our children hurt themselves, or, what is worse, to sit still while other people hurt our children. It is especially hard for me to bear, when life is made difficult for my Ada, for if ever any one deserved happiness my daughter does. I try to do justice to every one, and I hope I am not unfair when I say that the best of men, and Cyrus is one of them, are sometimes blind and obstinate. Of all my children, Ada gave me the least trouble, and was always the most loving and tender and considerate. Indeed, if Ada has a fault, it is being too considerate. I could, if she only would let me, help her a great deal more around the house; although Ada is a very good housekeeper, I am constantly seeing little things that need doing. I do my best to prevent the awful waste of soap that goes on, and there are a great many little ways Ada could let me save for her if she would. When I suggest this to her she laughs and says, “Wait till we need to save as badly as that, mother,” which doesn’t seem to me good reasoning at all. “Waste not, want not,” say I, and when it comes to throwing out perfectly good glass jars, as the girls would do if I didn’t see to it they saved them, why, I put my foot down. If Ada doesn’t want them herself to put things up in, why, some poor woman will. I don’t believe in throwing things away that may come in handy sometime. When I kept house nobody ever went lacking strings or a box of whatever size, to send things away in, or paper in which to do it up, and I can remember in mother’s day there was never a time she hadn’t pieces put by for a handsome quilt. Machinery has put a stop to many of our old occupations, and the result is a generation of nervous women who haven’t a single thing in life to occupy themselves with but their own feelings, while girls like Peggy, who are active and useful, have nothing to do but to go to school and keep on going to school. If one wanted to dig into the remote cause of things, one might find the root of our present trouble in these changed conditions, for Cyrus’s sister, Elizabeth, is one of these unoccupied women. Formerly in a family like ours there would have been so much to do that, whether she liked it or not, and whether she had married or not, Elizabeth would have had to be a useful woman — and now the less said the better.

It is hard, I say, to see the causes for unhappiness set in action and yet do nothing, or, if one speaks, to speak to deaf ears. Oh, it is very hard to do this, and this has been the portion of older women always. Our children sometimes won’t even let us dry their tears for them, but cry by themselves, as I know Ada has been doing lately — though in the end she came to me, or rather I went to her, for, after all, I am living in the same world with the rest of them. I have not passed over to the other side yet, and while I stay I am not going to be treated as if I were a disembodied spirit. I have eyes of my own, and ears too, and I can see as well as the next man when things go wrong.

I have always known that no good would come of sending Peggy to a coeducational college. I urged Ada to set her foot down, for Ada didn’t wish to send Peggy there, naturally enough, but she wouldn’t.

“Well,” said I, “I’M not afraid to speak my mind to your husband.” Now I very seldom open my mouth to Cyrus, or to any one else in this house, for it is more than ever the fashion for people to disregard the advice of others, and the older I get the more I find it wise to save my breath to cool my porridge — there come times, however, when I feel it my duty to speak.

“Mark my words, Cyrus,” I said. “You’ll be sorry you sent Peggy off to a boys’ school. Girls at her age are impressionable, and if they aren’t under their mothers’ roofs, where they can be protected and sheltered, why, then send them to a seminary where they will see as few young men as possible.”

Cyrus only laughed and said:

“Well, mother, you can say ‘I told you so’ if anything bad comes of it.”

“It’s all very well to laugh, Cyrus,” I answered, “but I don’t believe in putting difficulties into life that aren’t there already, and that’s what sending young men and young women off to the same college seems to ME!”

When Peggy came home engaged, after her last year, everybody was surprised.

“I’m sure I don’t know what Cyrus expected,” I said to Ada. “You can’t go out in the rain without getting wet. Let us pray that this young man will turn out to be all right, though we know so little about him.” For all we knew was what Peggy told us, and you know the kind of things young girls have to tell one about their sweethearts. Peggy didn’t even know what church his people went to! I couldn’t bear the thought of that dear child setting out on the long journey of marriage in such a fashion. I looked forward with fear to what Ada might have to go through if it didn’t turn out all right. For one’s daughter’s sorrows are one’s own; what she suffers one must suffer, too. It is hard for a mother to see a care-free, happy young girl turn into a woman before her eyes. Even if a woman is very happy, marriage brings many responsibilities, and a woman who has known the terror of watching beside a sick child can never be quite the same, I think. We ourselves grew and deepened under such trials, and we wouldn’t wish our daughters to be less than ourselves; but, oh, how glad I should be to have Peggy spared some things! How happy I should be to know that she was to have for her lot only the trials we all must have! I do not want to see my Ada having to bear the unhappiness of seeing Peggy unhappy. Even if Peggy puts up a brave face, Ada will know — she will know just as I have known things in my own children’s lives; and I shall know, too. This young man has it in his hands to trouble my old age.

No mother and daughter can live together as Ada and I have without what affects one of us affecting the other. When her babies were born I was with her; I helped her bring them up; as I have grown older, though she comes to me less and less, wishing to spare me, I seem to need less telling; for I know myself when anything ails her.

It amazed me to see how Ada took Peggy’s engagement, and when young Henry Goward came to visit, I made up my mind that he should not go away again without our finding out a little, at any rate, of what his surroundings had been, and what his own principles were. As we grow older we see more and more that character is the main thing in life, and I would rather have a child of mine marry a young man of sound principles whom she respected than one of undisciplined character and lax ideas whom she loved. When I said things like this to Ada, she replied:

“I’m afraid you’re prejudiced against that poor boy because he and Peggy happened to meet at college.”

I answered: “I am not prejudiced at all, Ada, but I feel that all of us, you especially, should keep our eyes and ears open. Wait! is all I say.”

I know my own faults, for I have always believed that one is never too old for character-building, and I know that being prejudiced is not one of them. I realize too keenly that as women advance in years they are very apt to get set in their ways unless they take care, and I am naturally too fair-minded to judge a man before I have seen him. Maria and Alice were prejudiced, if you like. Maria, indeed, had so much to say to Ada that I interfered, though it is contrary to my custom.

“I should think, Maria,” I said, “that however old you are, you would realize that your father and mother are EVEN better able to judge than you as to their children’s affairs.” I cannot imagine where Maria gets her dominant disposition. It is very unlike the women of our family.

When he came, however, Mr. Goward’s manners and appearance impressed me favorably. Neither Ada nor Cyrus, as far as I could see, tried in the least to draw him out. I sat quiet for a while, but at last for Peggy’s sake I felt I would do what I could to find out his views on important things. I was considerably relieved to hear that his mother was a Van Horn, a very good Troy family and distant connection of mother’s.

When I asked him what he was, “My PEOPLE are Episcopalians,” he replied.

“I suppose that means YOU are something else?” I asked him.

“I’m afraid it means I’m nothing else,” he answered; and while I was glad he was so honest, I couldn’t help feeling anxious at having Peggy engaged to a man so unformed in his beliefs. I do not care so much WHAT people believe, for I am not bigoted, as that they should believe SOMETHING, and that with their whole hearts. There are a great many young men like Henry Goward, to-day, who have no fixed beliefs and no established principles beyond a vague desire to be what they call “decent fellows.” One needs more than that in this world.

However, I found the boy likable, and everything went smoothly for a time, when all at once I felt something had gone wrong — what, I didn’t know. Mr. Goward received a telegram and left suddenly. Ada, I could see, was anxious; Peggy, tearful; and, as if this wasn’t enough, Mrs. Temple, our new neighbor, who had seemed a sensible body to me, had some sort of a falling-out with Aunt Elizabeth, who pretended that Mrs. Temple was jealous of her! After Mrs. Temple had gone home, Elizabeth Talbert went around pleased as Punch and swore us all to solemn secrecy never to tell any one about “Mrs. Temple’s absurd jealousy.”

“You needn’t worry about me, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said. “I’m not likely to go around proclaiming that ANOTHER woman has made a fool of herself.”

Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women who live on a false basis. She is a case of arrested development. She enjoys the same amusements that she did fifteen years ago. She is like a young fruit that has been put up in a preserving fluid and gives the illusion of youth; the preserving fluid in her case is the disappointment she suffered as a girl. I like useful women — women who, whether married or unmarried, bring things to pass in this world, and Elizabeth does not. Still, I can’t help feeling sorry for her, poor thing; in the end our own shortcomings and vanities hurt us more than they hurt any one else. I heartily wish she would get married — I have known women older than Elizabeth, and worse-looking, to find husbands — both for her own sake and for Ada’s, for her comings and goings complicate life for my daughter. She diffuses around her an atmosphere of criticism — I do not think she ever returns from a visit to the city without wishing that we should have dinner at night, and Alice is beginning to prick up her ears and listen to her. She spends a great deal of time over her dress, and, if she has grown no older, neither have her clothes — not a particle. She dresses in gowns suitable for Peggy, but which Maria, who is years younger than her aunt, would not think of wearing. Elizabeth is the kind of woman who is a changed being at the approach of a man; she is even different when Cyrus or Billy is around; she brightens up and exerts herself to please them; but when she is alone with Ada and me she is frankly bored and looks out of the window in a sad, far-away manner. The presence of men has a most rejuvenating effect on Aunt Elizabeth, although she pretends she has never been interested in any man since her disappointment years ago. When she got back and found Harry Goward here, instead of relapsing into her lack-lustre ways, as she generally does, she kept on her interested air.

I have always thought that houses have their atmosphere, like people, and this house lately has seemed bewitched. After Mr. Goward left, although every one tried to pretend things were as they should be, the situation grew more and more uncomfortable. I felt it, though no one told me a thing. I fancy that most older people have the same experience often that I have had lately. All at once you are aware something is wrong. You can’t tell why you feel this; you only know that you are living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness. You see no tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have been shed just the same. Why? You don’t know, and no one thinks of telling you. It is like seeing life from so far off that you cannot make out what has happened. I have sometimes leaned out of a window and have seen down the street a crowd of gesticulating people, but I was too far off to know whether some one was hurt or whether it was only people gathered around a man selling something. When I see such things my heart beats, for I am always afraid it is an accident, and so with the things I don’t know in my own household. I always fancy them worse than they are. There are so many things one can imagine when one doesn’t KNOW, and now I fancied everything. Such things, I think, tell on older people more than on younger ones, and at last I went to my room and kept there most of the time, reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. It is an excellent work in many ways. I am told it is given in sanitariums for nervous people to read, for the purpose of getting their minds off themselves. I found it useful to get my mind off others, for of late I have gotten to an almost morbid alertness, and I know by the very way Peggy ran up the stairs that something ailed her even before I caught a glimpse of her face, which showed me that she was going straight to her room to cry.

This sort of thing had happened too often, and I made up my mind I would not live in this moral fog another moment. So I went to Ada.

“Ada,” I said, “I am your mother, and I think I have a right to ask you a question. I want to know this: what has that young man been doing?”

“I suppose you mean Harry,” Ada answered. “He hasn’t been doing anything. Peggy’s a little upset because he isn’t a good correspondent. You know how girls feel—”

“Don’t tell ME, Ada,” said I. “I know better. There’s more in it than that. Peggy’s a sensible girl. There’s something wrong, and I want you to tell me what it is.” Younger people don’t realize how bad it can be to be left to worry alone in the dark.

Ada sat down with a discouraged air such as I have seldom seen her with. I went over to her and took her hand in mine.

“Tell mother what’s worrying you, dear,” I said, gently.

“Why, it’s all so absurd,” Ada answered. “I can’t make head or tail of it. Aunt Elizabeth came to me full of mystery soon after she came back, and told me that Harry Goward had become infatuated with her when she was off on one of her visits—”

I couldn’t help exclaiming, “Well, of all things!”

“That’s not the queerest part,” Ada went on. “She told me as confidently as could be that he is still in love with her.”

“Ada,” said I, “Elizabeth Talbert must be daft! Does she think that all the men in the world are in love with her — at her age? First Mrs. Temple making such a rumpus, and now this—”

“At first I thought just as you do,” Ada said, helplessly. “Of course there can’t be anything in it — and yet — I’m sure I don’t understand the situation at all. You know Harry left quite unexpectedly — soon after Elizabeth came; he didn’t write for a week — and then to her, and Peggy’s only had one short note from him—”

I can see through a hole in a millstone as well as any one, and a light dawned on me.

“You can depend upon it, Ada,” I said, “Aunt Elizabeth has been making trouble! I don’t know what she’s been up to, but she’s been up to something! I wondered why she had been having such a contented look lately — and now I know.”

“Oh, mother, I can’t believe that!” Ada protested. “I thought Elizabeth was a little vain and silly, and, though everything is so incomprehensible, I don’t believe for a moment that Aunt Elizabeth would do anything to hurt Peggy.”

My Ada is a truly good woman — so good that it is almost impossible for her to believe ill of any one, and she was profoundly shocked at what I suggested.

“I don’t think in the beginning Elizabeth intended to hurt Peggy,” I answered her, gently, “but when you’ve lived as long in the world as I have you’ll realize to what lengths a woman will go to show the world she’s still young. Just look at it for yourself. Everything was going smoothly until Elizabeth came. Now it’s not. Elizabeth has told you she’s had goings-on with Harry Goward. I don’t see, Ada, how you can be so blind as not to be willing to look the truth in the face. If it’s not Elizabeth’s fault, whose is it? I don’t suppose you believe Henry Goward’s dying for love of Aunt Elizabeth when he can look at Peggy! Oh, I’d like to hear his side of the story! For you may be sure that there is one!”

“Mother,” said Ada, “if I believed Elizabeth had done anything to mar that child’s happiness—”

She stopped for fear, I suppose, of what she might be led to say. “We mustn’t judge before we know,” she finished. But I knew by the look on her face that, if Aunt Elizabeth has made trouble, Ada will never forgive her.

“What does Cyrus say to all this?” I asked, by way of diversion.

“Oh, I haven’t told Cyrus anything about it. I didn’t intend to tell any one — about Aunt Elizabeth’s part in it. I think Cyrus is a little uneasy himself, but he’s been so busy lately—”

“Well,” I said, “I think Cyrus ought to be told! And you’re the one to do it. Don’t let’s judge, to be sure, before we know everything, but I think Cyrus ought to know the mischief his sister is making! Elizabeth simply makes a convenience of this house. It’s her basis of departure to pack her trunk from, that’s all your home means to her. She’s never lifted a finger to be useful beyond rearranging the furniture in a different way from what you’d arranged it. She acts exactly as if she were a young lady boarder. She’s nothing whatever to do in this world except make trouble for others. I think Cyrus should know, and then if he prefers his sister’s convenience to his wife’s happiness, well and good!” It’s not often I speak out, but now and then things happen which I can’t very well keep silent about. It did me good to ease my mind about Elizabeth Talbert for once.

Ada only said, “Elizabeth and I have always been such good friends, and she’s so fond of Peggy.”

Ada doesn’t realize that with some women vanity is stronger than loyalty. She kissed me. “It’s done me good to talk to you, mother,” she said, “because now it doesn’t seem, when I put it outside myself, that there’s very much of anything to worry about.”

Ada has always been like that — she seems to get rid of her troubles just by telling them. Now she had passed her riddle on to me, and I could not keep Peggy and her affairs from my mind. I tried to tell myself that it would be better for every one to find out now than later if Henry Goward was not worthy to be Peggy’s husband. But, oh, for all their sakes, how I hoped this cloud, whatever it was, would blow over! I have a very good constitution and I know how to take care of it, but when several more days passed without Peggy’s hearing from Henry again I gave way, but I tried to keep up on Ada’s account. I began to see how much this young man’s honor and faithfulness meant to Peggy, and I took long excursions back into the past to remember how I felt at her age. Mail-time was the difficult time for all three of us. Before the postman came Peggy would brighten up; not that she was drooping at any time, only I knew how tensely she waited, because Ada and I waited with her. When the man came, and again no letters, Peggy held up her head bravely as could be, but I could see, all the same, how the light had gone out. The worst of it was, everybody knew about it. It would have been twice as easy for the child if she could have borne it alone, but Elizabeth Talbert watched the mail like a cat, and even manoeuvred to try and get the letters before Peggy, while Alice went around with her nose in the air, and I heard Maria saying to Ada:

“What’s all this about Harry Goward’s not writing?”

To escape it all I took to my room, coming down only for meals. I couldn’t eat a thing, and Cyrus noticed it — it is queer how observant men are about some things and how unobservant about others. He didn’t tell me what he was going to do, but in the afternoon Dr. Denbigh came to see me. That’s the way they do — I’m liable to have the doctor sent in to look me over any time, whether I want him or not. Dr. Denbigh is an excellent friend and a good doctor, but at my time of life I should be lacking in intelligence if I didn’t understand my constitution better than any doctor can. They seem to think that there’s more virtue in a pill or a powder because a doctor gives it to one than because one’s common-sense tells one to take it. That afternoon I didn’t need him any more than a squirrel needs a pocket, and I told him so. He laughed, and then grew serious.

“You’re not looking as well as you did, Mrs. Evarts,” he said, “and Talbert told me that you had all the preliminary symptoms of one of your attacks and wanted me to ‘nip it in the bud,’ he said.”

“Dr. Denbigh,” said I, “if the matter with me could be cured by the things you know, there are other people in this house who need your attention more than I.” I wanted to add that if Cyrus would always be as far-sighted as he has been about me there wouldn’t be anything the matter to-day, but I held my tongue.

“I see you’re worried about something,” the doctor said, very kindly. “Mental anxiety pulls you down quicker than anything.”

Then as he sat chatting with me so kind and good — there’s something about Dr. Denbigh that makes me think of my own father, although he is young enough to be my son — I told him the whole thing, all except Aunt Elizabeth’s share in it. I merely told him that Henry Goward had written to her and not to Peggy.

I felt very much better. He took what I told him seriously, and yet not in the tragic way we did. He has a way of listening that is very comforting.

“It seems absurd, I know, for an old woman like me to get upset just because her grandchild does not get letters from her sweetheart,” I told him. “But you see, doctor, no one suffers alone in a family like ours. An event like this is like a wave that disturbs the whole surface of the water. Every one of us feels anything that happens, each in his separate way. Why, I can’t be sick without its causing inconvenience to Billy.” And it is true; people in this world are bound up together in an extraordinary fashion; and I wondered if Henry Goward’s mother was unhappy too, and was wondering what it was Peggy had done to her boy, for she, of course, will think whatever happens is Peggy’s fault. The engagement of these two young people has been like a stone thrown into a pond, and it takes only a very little pebble to ruffle the water farther than one would believe it possible.

After the doctor left, Ada came to sit with me. We were sewing quietly when I heard voices in the hall. I heard Peggy say, “I want you to tell mother.” Then Billy growled:

“I don’t see what you’re making such a kick for. I wouldn’t have told you if I’d known you’d be so silly.”

And I heard Peggy say again:

“I want you to tell mother.” Her tone was perfectly even, but it sounded like Cyrus when he is angry. They both came in. Peggy was flushed, and her lips were pressed firmly together. She looked older than I have ever seen her.

“What’s the matter?” Ada asked them.

“Tell her,” Peggy commanded. Billy didn’t know what it all was about.

“Why, I just said I wondered what Aunt Elizabeth was telegraphing Harry Goward about, and now she drags me in here and makes a fuss,” he said, in an aggrieved tone.

“He was over at Whitman playing around the telegraph-office — he had driven over on the express-wagon — and when Aunt Elizabeth drove up he hid because he didn’t want her to see him. Then he heard the operator read the address aloud,” Peggy explained, evenly.

“Is this so?” Ada asked.

“Sure,” Billy answered, disgustedly, and made off as fast as he could.

“Now,” said Peggy, “I want to know why Harry wrote to Aunt Elizabeth, and why she telegraphed him — over there where no one could see her!” She stood up very straight. “I think I ought to know,” she said, gently.

“Yes, dear,” Ada answered, “I think you ought.”

I shall be sorry for Elizabeth Talbert if she has been making mischief.

CHAPTER IV THE DAUGHTER-IN-LAW by Mary Stewart Cutting

I have never identified myself with my husband’s family, and Charles Edward, who is the best sort ever, doesn’t expect me to. Of course, I want to be decent to them, though I know they talk about me, but you can’t make oil and water mix, and I don’t see the use of pretending that you can. I know they never can understand how Charles Edward married me, and they never can get used to my being such a different type from theirs. The Talberts are all blue-eyed, fair-haired, and rosy, and I’m dark, thin, and pale, and Grandmother Evarts always thinks I can’t be well, and wants me to take the medicine she takes.

But, really, I see very little of the family, except Alice and Billy, who don’t count. Billy comes in at any time he feels like it to get a book and something to eat, though the others don’t know it, and Alice has fits of stopping in every afternoon on her way from school, and then perhaps doesn’t come near me for weeks. Alice is terribly discontented at home, and I think it’s a very good thing that she is; anything is better than sinking to that dreadful dead level. She doesn’t quite know whether to take up the artistic life or be a society queen, and she feels that nobody understands her at home. It makes her nearly wild when Aunt Elizabeth comes back from one of her grand visits and acts as if SHE wasn’t anything. She came over right after the row, of course, and told me all about it — she had on her new white China silk and her hat with the feathers. She said she was so excited about everything that she couldn’t stop to think about what she put on; she looked terribly dressed up, but she had come all through the village with her waist unfastened in the middle of the back — she said she couldn’t reach the hooks. Aunt Elizabeth had gone away that morning for overnight, so nobody could get at her to find out about her actions with Mr. Goward, and the telegram she had sent to him, until the next day, and every one was nearly crazy. They talked about it for two hours before Maria went home. Then Peggy had locked herself in her room, and her mother had gone out, and her grandmother was sitting now on the piazza, rocking and sighing, with her eyes shut. Alice said each person had got dreadfully worked up, not only about Aunt Elizabeth, but about all the ways every other member of the family had hurt that person at some time. Maria said that Peggy never would take HER advice, and Peggy returned that Maria had hurt her more than any one by her attitude toward Harry Goward, that she was so suspicious of him that it had made him act unnaturally from the first — that nothing had hurt her so much since the time Maria took away Peggy’s doll on purpose when she was a little girl — the doll she used to sleep with — and burned it; it was something she had NEVER got over.

Then her mother, who hadn’t been talking very much, said that Peggy didn’t realize the depth of Maria’s affection for her, and what a good sister she had been, and how she had taken care of Peggy the winter that Peggy was ill — and then she couldn’t help saying that, bad as was this affair about Harry Goward, it wasn’t like the anxiety one felt about a sick child; there were times when she felt that she could bear anything if Charles Edward’s health were only properly looked after. Of course Lorraine was young and inexperienced, but if she would only use her influence with him —

Alice broke off suddenly, and said she had to go — it was just as Dr. Denbigh’s little auto was coming down the street. She dashed out of the door and bowed to him from the crossing, quite like a young lady, for all her short skirts — she really did look fetching! Dr. Denbigh smiled at her, but not the way he used to smile at Peggy. I really thought he cared for Peggy once, though he’s so much older that nobody else seemed to dream of such a thing.

Of course, after Alice went, I just sat there in the chair all humped up, thinking of her last words.

The family are always harping on “Lorraine’s influence.” If they wanted their dear Charles Edward made different from the way he is, why on earth didn’t they do it themselves, when they had the chance? That’s what I want to know! I know they mean to be nice to me, but they take it for granted that every habit Charles Edward has or hasn’t, and everything he does or doesn’t, is because I didn’t do something that I ought to have done, or condoned something that I ought not. They seem to think that a man is made of soft, kindergarten clay, and all a wife has to do is to sit down and mould him as she pleases. Well, some men may be like that, but Peter isn’t. The family never really have forgiven me for calling their darling “Charles Edward” Peter. I perfectly loathe that long-winded Walter-Scotty name, and I don’t care how many grandfathers it’s descended from. I’m sorry, of course, if it hurts their feelings, but as long as I don’t object to their calling him what THEY like, I don’t see why they mind. And as for my managing Peter, they know perfectly well that, though he’s a darling, he’s just mulishly obstinate. He’s had his own way ever since he was born; the whole family simply adore him. His mother has always waited on him hand and foot, though she’s sensible enough with the other children. If he looks sulky she is perfectly miserable. I am really very fond of my mother-in-law — that is, I am fond of her IN SPOTS. There are times when she understands how I feel about Peter better than any one else — like that dreadful spring when he had pneumonia and I was nearly wild. I know she is dreadfully unselfish and kind, but she WILL think — they all do — that they know what Peter needs better than I do, and whenever they see me alone it’s to hint that I ought to keep him from smoking too much and being extravagant, and that I should make him wear his overcoat and go to bed early and take medicine when he has a cold. And through everything else they hark back to that everlasting, “If you’d only exert your influence, Lorraine dear, to make Charles Edward take more interest in the business — his father thinks so much of that.”

If I were to tell them that Charles Edward perfectly detests the business, and will NEVER be interested in it and never make anything out of it, they’d all go straight off the handle; yet they all know it just as well as I do. That’s the trouble — you simply can’t tell them the truth about anything; they don’t want to hear it. I never talk at all any more when I go over to the big house, for I can’t seem to without horrifying somebody.

I thought I should die when I first came here; it was so different from the way it is at home, where you can say or do anything you please without caring what anybody thinks. Dad has always believed in not restricting individuality, and that girls have just as much right to live their own lives as boys — which is a fortunate thing, for, counting Momsey, there are four of us.

We never had any system about anything at home, thank goodness! We just had atmosphere. Dad was an artist, you know, and he does paint such lovely pictures; but he gave it up as a profession when we were little, and went into business, because, he said, he couldn’t let his family starve — and we all think it was so perfectly noble of him! I couldn’t give up being an artist for anybody, no matter WHO starved, and Peter feels that way, too. Of course we both realize that we’re not LIVING here in this hole, we’re simply existing, and nothing matters very much until we get out of it. In six months, when Charles Edward is twenty-five, there’s a little money coming to him — three thousand dollars — and then we’re going to Paris to live our own lives; but nobody knows anything about that. One day I said something, without thinking, to my mother-in-law about that money; I’ve forgotten what it was, but she looked so horrified and actually gasped:

“You wouldn’t think of Charles Edward’s using his PRINCIPAL, Lorraine?”

And I said: “Why not? It’s his own principal.”

Well, I just made up my mind afterward that I’d never open my mouth again, while I live here, about ANYTHING I was interested in, even about Peter!

His father might have let him go to Paris that year before we met, when he was in New York at the Art League, just as well as not, but the family all consulted about it, Peter says, and concluded it wasn’t “necessary.” That is the blight that is always put on everything we want to do — it isn’t necessary. Oh, how Alice hates that word! She says she supposes it’s never “necessary” to be happy.

Well, Peter heard that when the Paris scheme came up — he’d written home that he couldn’t work without the art atmosphere — Grandmother Evarts said:

“Why, I’m sure he has the Metropolitan Museum to go to; and there’s Wanamaker’s picture-gallery, too. Has he been to Wanamaker’s?”

I thought I should throw a fit when Peter told me that!

I know, of course, that the family pity Peter for living in a house that’s all at sixes and sevens, and for not having everything the way he has been used to having it; and I know they think I keep him from going to see them all at home, when the truth is — although, as usual, I can’t say it — sometimes I absolutely have to HOUND him to go there; though, of course, he’s awfully fond of them all, and his mother especially; but he gets dreadfully lazy, and says they’re his own people, anyway, and he can do as he pleases about it. It’s their own fault, because they’ve always spoiled him. And if they only knew how he hates just that way of living he’s been always used to, with its little, petty cast-iron rules and regulations, and the stupid family meals, where everybody is expected to be on time to the minute! My father-in-law pulls out his chair at the dinner-table exactly as the clock is striking one, and if any member of the family is a fraction late all the rest are solemn and strained and nervous until the culprit appears. Peter says the way he used to suffer — he was NEVER on time.

The menu for each day of the week is as fixed as fate, no matter what the season of the year: hot roast beef, Sunday; cold roast beef, Monday; beef-steak, Tuesday; roast mutton, Wednesday; mutton pot-pie, Thursday; corned beef, Friday; and beef-steak again on Saturday. My father-in-law never eats fish or poultry, so they only have either if there is state company. There’s one sacred apple pudding that’s been made every Wednesday for nineteen years, and if you can imagine anything more positively dreadful than that, I can’t.

Every time, as soon as we sit down to the table, Grandmother Evarts always begins, officially:

“Well, Charles Edward, my dear boy, we don’t have you here very often nowadays. I said to your mother yesterday that it was two whole weeks since you had been to see her. What have you been doing with yourself lately?”

And when he says, as he always does, “Nothing, grandmother,” I know she’s disappointed, and then she starts in and tells what she has been doing, and Maria — Maria always manages to be there when we are — Maria tells what SHE has been doing, with little side digs at me because I haven’t been pickling or preserving or cleaning. Once, when I first went there, Maria asked me at dinner what days I had for cleaning. And I said, as innocently as possible, that I hadn’t any; that I perfectly loathed cleaning, and that we never cleaned at home! Of course it wasn’t true, but we never talk about it, anyway. Peter said he nearly shrieked with joy to hear me come out like that.

It was almost as bad as the time I wore that sweet little yellow Empire gown. It’s a dear, and Lyman Wilde simply raved over it when he painted me in it (not that he can really paint, but he has a TOUCH with everything he does). I noticed that everybody seemed solemn and queer, but I never dreamed that I was the cause until my mother-in-law came to me afterward, blushing, and told me that Mr. Talbert never allowed any of the family to wear Mother Hubbards around the house. MOTHER HUBBARDS! I could have moaned. Well, when I go around there now I never care what I have on, and I never pretend to talk at meals; I just sit and try and make my mind a blank until it’s over. You HAVE to make your mind a blank if you don’t want to be driven raving crazy by that dining-room. It has a hideous black-walnut sideboard, an “oil-painting” of pale, bloated fruit on one side, and pale, bloated fish on the other, and a strip of black-and-white marbled oil-cloth below.

I feel sometimes as if I could hardly live until my father-in-law rises from his chair and kisses his wife good-bye before going off to the factory. She always blushes so prettily when he kisses her — as if it were for the first time. Then everybody looks pained when Peter and I just nod at each other as he goes out — I cannot be affectionate to him before them — and then, thank Heaven! the rest of us escape from the dining-room.

How Peggy, who has been away from home and seen and done things, can stand it there now as it is, is a continual wonder to me.

Peggy is a dear little thing. Peter has always been awfully fond of her, but she doesn’t seem to have an idea in her head beyond her clothes and Harry Goward, though she’ll HAVE to have something more to her if she’s going to keep HIM. The moment I saw that boy, of course I knew that he had the artistic temperament; I’ve seen so much of it. He’s the kind that’s always awfully gloomy until eleven o’clock in the morning, and has to make love intensely to somebody every evening. What it must have been to that boy, after indulging in a romantic dream with poor little earnest, downright Peggy, to wake up and find the engagement taken seriously not only by her, but by all her relatives — find himself being welcomed into the family, introduced to them all as a future member — what it must have been to him I can’t imagine! Peggy has no more temperament than a cow — the combination of Maria and Tom, and Grandmother Evarts, and Billy with his face washed clean, and Alice with three enormous bows on her hair, all waiting to welcome him, standing by the pictorial lamp on the brown worsted mat on the centre-table, made me fairly howl when I sat at home and thought of it — and that was before I’d SEEN Harry.

The family were, of course, quite “hurt” that Peter and I wouldn’t assist at the celebration. I cannot see why people WILL want you to do things when they KNOW you don’t care to!

The next evening, however, we had to go, when Peggy herself came around and asked us. Of course Mr. Goward was with Peggy most of the time. They certainly looked charming together, but rather conscious and stiff. Every member of the family was watching his every motion. Oh, I’ve been there! I know what it is!

Some of the neighbors were there, too. Peter hardly ever plays on the big, old-fashioned grand-piano, but that night he was so bored he had to. The family always THINK they’re very musical — you can know the style when I tell you that after Peter has been rambling through bits from Schumann and Richard Strauss they always ask him if he won’t “play something.” Well, after Peggy had gone into the other room with her mother to do the polite to Mrs. Temple, Mr. Goward gravitated over to where I sat in the big bay-window behind the piano; he had that “be-good-to-me,-won’t-you?” air that I know so well! Then we got to talking and listening in between whiles — he knows lots of girls in the Art League — till Peter began playing that heart-breaking “Im Herbst” from the Franz Songs, and then he said:

“You’re going to be my sister, aren’t you? Won’t you let me hold your hand while your husband’s playing that? It makes me feel so lonely!”

I answered, promptly, “Certainly; hold both hands if you like!”

And we laughed, and Peter turned around for a moment and smiled, too. Oh, it WAS nice to meet somebody of one’s own kind! You get so sick of having everything taken seriously.

That night, after we’d left the house, Harry caught up with us at the corner on his way to the hotel, and went home with us, and we all talked until three o’clock in the morning. We simply ate all over the house — goodness! how hungry we were! At Peter’s home it’s an unheard-of thing to eat anything after half-past six — almost a crime, unless it’s a wedding or state reception. We began now with coffee in the dining-room, and jam and cheese, and ended by gradual stages at hot lobster in the chafing-dish in the studio — the darky was out all night, as usual.

Then Harry and Peter concluded that it was too late to go to bed at all — it was really daylight — so they took bath-towels and went down to the river and had a swim, and Harry slipped back to the house at six o’clock. He said we’d repeat it all the next night, but of course we didn’t. He’s the kind that, as soon as he’s promised to do a thing, feels at once that he doesn’t really want to do it.

The next day Peter’s Aunt Elizabeth came on the scene, and of course we stayed away as much as we could. She loves Peter — they all do — but she hasn’t any use for me, and shows it. She thinks I’m perfectly dumb and stupid. I simply don’t exist, and I’ve never tried to undeceive her — it’s too much trouble. She always wants to tell people how to do their hair and put on their clothes.

Miss Elizabeth Talbert is a howling swell; she only just endures it here. I’ve heard lots of things about her from Bell Pickering, who knows the Munroes — Lily Talbert, they call her there. She thinks she’s fond of Art, but she really doesn’t know the first thing about it — she doesn’t like anything that isn’t expensive and elegant and a la mode.

The only time she ever came to see me she actually PICKED her way around the house when I was showing it to her — there’s no other word to use — just because there was a glass of jelly on the sofa, and the painting things were all over the studio with Peter’s clothes. I perfectly hated her that day, yet I do love to look at her, and I can see how she might be terribly nice if you were any one she thought worth caring for. There have been times when I’ve seen a look on her face, like the clear ethereal light beyond the sunset, that just PULLED at me. She is very fond of Peggy; I know she would never do anything to injure Peggy.

Poor little Peggy! When I think of this affair about Harry Goward I don’t believe she ever felt sure of him; that is why she is so worked up over this matter now. I know there was something that I felt from the first through all her excitement, something that wasn’t quite happy in her happiness. I feel atmospheres at once; I just can’t help it. And when I get feeling other people’s atmospheres too much I lose my own, and then I can’t paint. I began so well the other day with the picture of that Armenian peddler, and now since Alice left I can’t do a thing with it; his bare yellow knees look just like ugly grape-fruit. I wish Sally was in. She can’t cook, but she can do a song-and-dance that’s worth its weight in gold when you’re down in the mouth.

 — Just then I looked out of the window and saw my mother-in-law coming in. For a minute I was frightened. I’d never seen her look like that before — so white and almost OLD; she seemed hardly able to walk, and I ran to the door and helped her in, and put her in a chair and her feet on a footstool, and got her my dear little Venetian bottle of smelling-salts with the long silver chain; it’s so beautiful it makes you feel better just to look at it. I whisked Peter’s shoes out into the hall, and when I sat down by her she put her hand out to me and said, “Dear child,” and I got all throaty, the way I do when any one speaks like that to me, for, oh, I HAVE been lonesome for Dad and Momsey and my own dear home! though no one ever seems to imagine it, and I said:

“Oh, can’t I do something for you, Madonna?” I usually just call her “you,” but once in a great while, when there’s nobody else around, I call her Madonna, and I know she likes it, even if she does think it a little Romish or sacrilegious or something queer.

But she said she didn’t want anything, only to rest a few minutes, and that there was something she wanted me to tell Peter. She couldn’t come in the evening to see him without every one wanting to know why she came. There was some terrible trouble about Peggy’s engagement. She flushed up and hesitated, and when I broke in to say, “You needn’t bother to explain, I know all about the whole thing,” she didn’t seem at all surprised or ask how I knew — she only seemed relieved to find that she could go right on. I never can be demonstrative to her before people, but I just put my arms around her now when she said:

“It’s a great comfort to be able to come to you, Lorraine, and speak out. At home your dear grandmother considers me so much — she only thinks of everything as it affects me, but it makes it so that I can’t always show what I feel, for if I do she gets ill. All I can think of is Peggy. If you knew what it was to me just now when my little Peggy went away from me and locked herself in her room — Peggy, who all her life has always come to me for comfort—”

She stopped for a minute, and I patted her. It was so unlike my mother-in-law to speak in this way; she’s usually so self-contained that it made me sort of awestruck. After a moment she went on in a different voice:

“They all want me to tell Cyrus — your father — that Aunt Elizabeth has been trying to take Mr. Goward’s affections away from Peggy. I’m afraid it’s just what she has been doing, though it seems incredible that she should have any attraction for a young man. I was glad Elizabeth had gone away overnight, for Maria is in such a state I don’t know what might have happened.”

“And don’t you want to tell — father?” I gulped, but I knew I must say it. “Why not, Madonna?”

She shook her head, with that look that makes you feel sometimes that she isn’t just the gentle and placid person that she appears to be. I seemed to catch a glimpse of something very clear and strong. If I could paint her with an expression like that I’d make my fortune.

“No, Lorraine. If it was about anybody but your aunt Elizabeth I would, but I can’t speak against her. It’s her home as well as mine; I’ve always realized that. I made up my mind, when I married, that I never would come between brother and sister, and I never have. Aunt Elizabeth doesn’t know how many times I have smoothed matters over for her, how many times Cyrus has been provoked because he thought she didn’t show enough consideration for me. I have always loved Aunt Elizabeth, and I believed she loved us — but when I saw my Peggy to-day, Lorraine, I couldn’t go and tell your father about Aunt Elizabeth while I feel as I do now! I couldn’t be just. If I made him angry with her—”

She stopped, and I didn’t need to have her go on. My father-in-law is one of those big, kind, sensible, good-natured men who, when they do get angry, go clear off the handle, and are so absolutely furious and unreasonable you can’t do anything with them. He got that way at Peter once — but it makes me so furious myself when I think of it that I never do.

“And, Lorraine,” Madonna went on, quite simply, “bringing all this home to Aunt Elizabeth and making her pay up for it really has nothing to do with Peggy’s happiness. It is my child’s happiness that I want, Lorraine. There may be a misunderstanding of some kind — misunderstandings are very cruel things sometimes, Lorraine. I cannot believe that boy doesn’t care for her — why, he loved her dearly! It seems to me far the best and most dignified thing to just write to Mr. Goward himself and find out the truth.”

“I think so, too!” said I. “Oh, Madonna, you’re a Jim Dandy!”

“And so,” she went on, “I want you to ask Charles Edward to write to-night. I’ll leave the address with you. As Peggy’s brother, it will be more suitable for him to attend to the matter.”

Charles Edward! I simply gasped. The idea of Peter’s writing to Harry Goward to ask him the state of his affections! If Peter’s mother couldn’t realize how perfectly impossible it was for even ME to make Peter do a thing that — Well — I was knocked silly.

Dear Madonna is the survival of a period when a woman always expected some man to face any crisis for her. All I could do was to say, resignedly:

“I’ll give him the address.” And when she got up I went to the gate with her. She was as dear as she could be; I just loved her until she happened to say:

“When I came in I thought you might be lying down, for I looked up and saw the shades were pulled down in your room, as they are now.”

“Oh,” I said, “I don’t suppose anybody has been back in the room since we got up.” And I was downright scared, she looked at me so strangely and began to tremble all over. “What IS the matter?” I cried. “Do come into the house again!” But she only grasped my arm and said, tragically:

“Lorraine, it isn’t POSSIBLE that you haven’t made your bed at four o’clock in the afternoon!” And I answered:

“Oh, I always make it up before I sleep in it.” And then I knew that I’d said just the wrong thing. What difference it can make to ANYBODY what time you make your OWN bed I can’t see! She tried to make me promise I’d always make it up before ten o’clock in the morning. Why, I wouldn’t even promise to always feel fond of Peter at ten o’clock in the morning! I NEVER have anything to do with the family without always feeling on edge afterward. Why, when she was so sweet and strong about Peggy and Aunt Elizabeth and all the rest of it, WHY should she get upset about such a trifle?

I stood there by the gate just glowering as she went off. I knew she thought I was going to perdition. I was sick of “the engagement.” What business was it of Peter’s and mine, anyhow? It had nothing to do with us, really. Then I thought of the time Peter and I quarrelled, and how DEAR Lyman Wilde was about it, and how he brought Peter back to me — just to say the name of Lyman Wilde always makes me feel better. I adore him, and always shall, and Peter knows it. If I could only go back to the Settlement and hear him say, “Little girl,” in that coaxing voice of his! He is one of those men who are always working so hard for other people that you forget he hasn’t anything for himself.

Thinking of him made me quite chipper again, and I went in and got his picture and stuck it up in the mantel-piece and put flowers in front of it. When Peter came in I told him about everything, and of course he refused to write to Harry Goward, as I knew he would. He said it was all rot, anyway, and that Harry was a nice boy, but not worth making such a fuss over. He didn’t know that he was particularly stuck on Peggy’s marrying Harry Goward, anyway — but there was no use in any one’s interfering. Peggy was the person to write. Finally he said he’d telephone to Harry the next day to come out and stay at our house over Sunday, and then he and Peggy could have a chance to settle it.

But Peter didn’t telephone. He was late at the Works the next day — though not nearly so late as he often is; but Mr. Talbert has a perfect fad about every one’s getting there on time; it’s one of the things there’s always been a tug about between him and Peter. I should think he’d have realized long ago that Peter NEVER will be on time, and just make up his mind to it, but he won’t. Well, Peter came back again to the house a little after nine, perfectly white; he said he’d never enter the factory again. . . .

His father was in a towering rage when Peter went in; he spoke to Peter so that every one could hear him, and then — Oh, it was a dreadful time!...

Alice told me afterward that Maria had found her father in the garden before breakfast. She insinuated, in HER way, all kinds of dreadful things about Harry Goward and Aunt Elizabeth, and there was a scene at the breakfast-table — and Peggy was taken so ill that they had to send for Dr. Denbigh. I don’t know what will happen when Aunt Elizabeth comes home.

CHAPTER V THE SCHOOL-GIRL by Elizabeth Jordan

Except for Billy, who is a boy and does not count, I am the youngest person in our family; and when I tell you that there are eleven of us — well, you can dimly imagine the kind of a time I have. Two or three days ago I heard Grandma Evarts say something to the minister about “the down-trodden and oppressed of foreign lands,” and after he had gone I asked her what they were. For a wonder, she told me; usually when Billy and I ask questions you would think the whole family had been struck dumb. But this time she answered and I remember every word — for if ever anything sounded like a description of Billy and me it was what Grandma Evarts said that day. I told her so, too; but, of course, she only looked at me over her spectacles and didn’t understand what I meant. Nobody ever does except Billy and Aunt Elizabeth, and they’re not much comfort. Billy is always so busy getting into trouble and having me get him out of it, and feeling sorry for himself, that he hasn’t time to sympathize with me. Besides, as I’ve said before, he’s only a boy, and you know what boys are and how they lack the delicate feelings girls have, and how their minds never work when you want them to. As for Aunt Elizabeth, she is lovely sometimes, and the way she remembers things that happened when she was young is simply wonderful. She knows how girls feel, too, and how they suffer when they are like Dr. Denbigh says I am — very nervous and sensitive and high-strung. But she admitted to me to-day that she had never before really made up her mind whether I am the “sweet, unsophisticated child” she calls me, or what Tom Price says I am, The Eastridge Animated and Undaunted Daily Bugle and Clarion Call. He calls me that because I know so much about what is going on; and he says if Mr. Temple could get me on his paper as a regular contributor there wouldn’t be a domestic hearth-stone left in Eastridge. He says the things I drop will break every last one of them, anyhow, beginning with the one at home. That’s the way he talks, and though I don’t always know exactly what he means I can tell by his expression that it is not very complimentary.

Aunt Elizabeth is different from the others, and she and I have inspiring conversations sometimes — serious ones, you know, about life and responsibility and careers; and then, at other times, just when I’m revealing my young heart to her the way girls do in books, she gets absent-minded or laughs at me, or stares and says, “You extraordinary infant,” and changes the subject. At first it used to hurt me dreadfully, but now I’m beginning to think she does it when she can’t answer my questions. I’ve asked her lots and lots of things that have made her sit up and gasp, I can tell you, and I have more all ready as soon as I get the chance.

There is another thing I will mention while I think of it. Grandma Evarts is always talking about “rules of life,” but the only rule of life I’m perfectly sure I have is to always mention things when I think of them. Even that doesn’t please the family, though, because sometimes I mention things they thought I didn’t know, and then they are annoyed and cross instead of learning a lesson by it and realizing how silly it is to try to keep secrets from me. If they’d TELL me, and put me on my honor, I could keep their old secrets as well as anybody. I’ve kept Billy’s for years and years. But when they all stop talking the minute I come into a room, and when mamma and Peggy go around with red eyes and won’t say why, you’d better believe I don’t like it. It fills me with the “intelligent discontent” Tom is always talking about. Then I don’t rest until I know what there is to know, and usually when I get through I know more than anybody else does, because I’ve got all the different sides — Maria’s and Tom’s and Lorraine’s and Charles Edward’s and mamma’s and papa’s and grandma’s and Peggy’s and Aunt Elizabeth’s. It isn’t that they intend to tell me things, either; they all try not to. Every one of them keeps her own secrets beautifully, but she drops things about the others. Then all I have to do is to put them together like a patch-work quilt.

You needn’t think it’s easy, though, for the very minute I get near any of the family they waste most of the time we’re together by trying to improve me. You see, they are all so dreadfully old that they have had time to find out their faults and youthful errors, and every single one of them thinks she sees ALL her faults in me, and that she must help me to conquer them ere it is too late. Aunt Elizabeth says they mean it kindly, and perhaps they do. But if you have ever had ten men and women trying to improve you, you will know what my life is. Tom Price, who married my sister Maria, told Dr. Denbigh once that “every time a Talbert is unoccupied he or she puts Alice or Billy, or both, on the family moulding-board and kneads awhile.” I heard him say it and it’s true. All I can say is that if they keep on kneading and moulding me much longer there won’t be anything left but a kind of a pulpy mass. I can see what they have done to Billy already; he’s getting pulpier every day, and I don’t believe his brain would ever work if I didn’t keep stirring it up.

However, the thing I want to say while I think of it is this. It is a question, and I will ask it here because there is no use of asking it at home: Why is it that grown-up men and women never have anything really interesting to say to a girl fifteen years old? Then, if you can answer that, I wish you would answer another: Why don’t they ever listen or understand what a girl means when she talks to them? Billy and I have one rule now when we want to say something serious. We get right in front of them and fix them with a glittering eye, the way the Ancient Mariner did, you know, and speak as slowly as we can, in little bits of words, to show them it’s very important. Then, sometimes, they pay attention and answer us, but usually they act as if we were babies gurgling in cunning little cribs. And the rude way they interrupt us often and go on talking about their own affairs — well, I will not say more, for dear mamma has taught me not to criticise my elders, and I never do. But I watch them pretty closely, just the same, and when I see them doing something that is not right my brain works so hard it keeps me awake nights. If it’s anything very dreadful, like Peggy’s going and getting engaged, I point out the error, the way they’re always pointing errors out to me. Of course it doesn’t do any good, but that isn’t my fault. It’s because they haven’t got what my teacher calls “receptive minds.”

I’m telling you all this before I tell you what has happened, so you will be sorry for Billy and me. If you are sorry already, as well indeed you may be, you will be a great deal more sorry before I get through. For if ever any two persons were “downtrodden and oppressed” and “struggling in darkness” and “feeling the chill waters of affliction,” it’s Billy and me to-night — all because we tried to help Peggy and Lorraine and Aunt Elizabeth after they had got everything mixed up! I told them I was just trying to help, and Tom Price said right off that there was only one thing for Billy and me to do in future whenever the “philanthropic spirit began to stir” in us, and that was to get on board the suburban trolley-car and go as far away from home as our nickels would take us, and not hurry back. So you see he is not a bit grateful for the interesting things I told Maria.

I will now tell what happened. It began the day Billy heard the station agent at Whitman read Aunt Elizabeth’s telegram to Harry Goward. The telegram had a lot of silly letters and words in it, so Billy didn’t know what it meant, and, of course, he didn’t care. The careless child would have forgotten all about it if I hadn’t happened to meet him at Lorraine’s after he got back from Whitman. He is always going to Lorraine’s for some of Sallie’s cookies — she makes perfectly delicious ones, round and fat and crumbly, with currants on the top. Billy had taken so many that his pockets bulged out on the sides, and his mouth was so full he only nodded when he saw me. So, of course, I stopped to tell him how vulgar that was, and piggish, and to see if he had left any for me, and he was so anxious to divert my mind that as soon as he could speak he began to talk about seeing Aunt Elizabeth over in Whitman. That interested me, so I got the whole thing out of him, and the very minute he had finished telling it I made him go straight and tell Peggy. I told him to do it delicately, and not yell it out. I thought it would cheer and comfort Peggy to know that some one was doing something, instead of standing around and looking solemn, but, alas! it did not, and Billy told me with his own lips that it was simply awful to see Peggy’s face. Even he noticed it, so it must have been pretty bad. He said her eyes got so big it made him think of the times she used to imitate the wolf in Red Riding-Hood and scare us ‘most to death when we were young.

When Billy told me that, I saw that perhaps we shouldn’t have told Peggy, so the next day I went over to Lorraine’s again to ask her what she thought about it. I stopped at noon on my way home from school, and I didn’t ring the bell, because I never do. I walked right in as usual, falling over the books and teacups and magazines on the floor, and I found Lorraine sitting at the tea-table with her head down among the little cakes and bits of toast left over from the afternoon before. She didn’t look up, so I knew she hadn’t heard me, and I saw her shoulders shake, and then I knew that she was crying. I had never seen Lorraine cry before, and I felt dreadfully, but I didn’t know just what to do or what to say, and while I stood staring at her I noticed that there was a photograph on the table with a lot of faded flowers. The face of the photograph was up and I saw that it was a picture of Mr. Wilde — the one that usually stands on the mantel-piece. Lorraine is always talking about him, and she has told me ever and ever so much about how nice and kind he was to her when she was studying art in New York. But, of course, I didn’t know she cared enough for him to cry over his picture, and it gave me the queerest feelings to see her do it — kind of wabbly ones in my legs, and strange, sinking ones in my stomach. You see, I had just finished reading Lady Hermione’s Terrible Secret. A girl at school lent it to me. So when I saw Lorraine crying over a photograph and faded flowers I knew it must mean that she had learned to love Mr. Wilde with a love that was her doom, or would be if she didn’t hurry and get over it. Finally I crept out of the house without saying a word to her or letting her know I was there, and I leaned on the gate to think it over and try to imagine what a girl in a book would do. In Lady Hermione her sister discovered the truth and tried to save the rash woman from the sad consequences of her love, so I knew that was what I must do, but I didn’t know how to begin. While I was standing there with my brain going round like one of Billy’s paper pinwheels some one stopped in front of me and said, “Hello, Alice,” in a sick kind of a way, like a boy beginning to recite a piece at school. I looked up. It was Harry Goward!

You’d better believe I was surprised, for, of course, when he went away nobody expected he would come back so soon; and after all the fuss and the red eyes and the mystery I hoped he wouldn’t come back at all. But here he was in three days, so I said, very coldly, “How do you do, Mr. Goward,” and bowed in a distant way; and he took his hat off quickly and held it in his hand, and I waited for him to say something else. All he did for a minute was to look over my head. Then he said, in the same queer voice: “Is Mrs. Peter in? I wanted to have a little talk with her,” and he put his hand on the gate to open it. I suppose it was dreadfully rude, but I stayed just where I was and said, very slowly, in icy tones, that he must kindly excuse my sister-in-law, as I was sure she wouldn’t be able to receive him. Of course I knew she wouldn’t want him or any one else to come in and see her cry, and besides I never liked Harry Goward and I never expect to. He looked very much surprised at first, and then his face got as red as a baby’s does when there’s a pin in it somewhere, and he asked if she was ill. I said, “No, she is not ill,” and then I sighed and looked off down the street as if I would I were alone. He began to speak very quickly, but stopped and bit his lip. Then he turned away and hesitated, and finally he came back and took a thick letter from his pocket and held it out to me. He was smiling now, and for a minute he really looked nice and sweet and friendly.

“Say, Alice,” he said, in the most coaxing way, “don’t YOU get down on me, too. Do me a good turn — that’s a dear. Take this letter home and deliver it. Will you? And say I’m at the hotel waiting for an answer.”

Now, you can see yourself that this was thrilling. The whole family was watching every mail for a letter from Harry Goward and here he was offering me one! I didn’t show how excited I was; I just took the letter and turned it over so I couldn’t see the address and slipped it into my pocket, and said, coldly, that I would deliver it with pleasure. Harry Goward was looking quite cheerful again, but he said, in a worried tone, that he hoped I wouldn’t forget, because it was very, very important. Then I dismissed him with a haughty bow, the way they do on the stage, and this time he put his hat on and really went.

Of course after that I wanted to go straight home with the letter, but I knew it wouldn’t do to leave Lorraine bearing her terrible burden without some one to comfort her. While I was trying to decide what to do I saw Billy a block away with Sidney Tracy, and I whistled to him to come, and beckoned with both hands at the same time to show it was important. I had a beautiful idea. In that very instant I “planned my course of action,” as they say in books. I made up my mind that I would send the letter home by Billy, and that would give me time to run over to Maria’s and get something to eat and ask Maria to go and comfort Lorraine. Maria and Lorraine don’t like each other very much, but I knew trouble might bring them closer, for Grandma Evarts says it always does. Besides, Maria is dreadfully old and knows everything and is the one the family always sends for when things happen. If they don’t send she comes anyhow and tells everybody what to do. So I pinned the letter in Billy’s pocket, so he couldn’t lose it, and I ordered him to go straight home with it. He said he would. He looked queer and I thought I saw him drop something near a fence before he came to me, but I was so excited I didn’t pay close attention. As soon as Billy started off I went to Maria’s.

She was all alone, for Tom was lunching with some one at the hotel. When we were at the table I told her about Lorraine, and if ever any one was excited and really listened this time it was sister Maria. She pushed back her chair, and spoke right out before she thought, I guess. “Charles Edward’s wife crying over another man’s picture!” she said. “Well, I like that! But I’m not surprised. I always said no good would come of THAT match!”

Then she stopped and made herself quiet down, but I could see how hard it was, and she added: “So THAT was the matter with Charles Edward when I met him this morning rushing along the street like a cyclone.”

I got dreadfully worried then and begged her to go to Lorraine at once, for I saw things were even more terrible than I had thought. But Maria said: “Certainly not! I must consult with father and mother first. This is something that affects us all. After I have seen them I will go to Lorraine’s.” Then she told me not to worry about it, and not to speak of it to any one else. I didn’t, either, except to Billy and Aunt Elizabeth; and when I told Aunt Elizabeth the man’s name I thought she would go up into the air like one of Billy’s skyrockets. But that part does not belong here, and I’m afraid if I stop to talk about it I’ll forget about Billy and the letter.

After luncheon Maria put her hat on and went straight to our house to see mother, and I went back to school. When I got home I asked, the first thing, if Billy had delivered the letter from Harry Goward, and for the next fifteen minutes you would have thought every one in our house had gone crazy. That wretched boy had not delivered it at all! They had not even seen him, and they didn’t know anything about the letter. After they had let me get enough breath to tell just how I had met Harry and exactly what he had said and done, mother rushed off to telephone to father, and Aunt Elizabeth came down-stairs with a wild, eager face, and Grandma Evarts actually shook me when she found I didn’t even know whom the letter was for. I hadn’t looked, because I had been so excited. Finally, after everybody had talked at once for a while. Grandma Evarts told me mamma had said Billy could go fishing that afternoon, because the weather was so hot and she thought he looked pale and overworked. The idea of Billy Talbert being overworked! I could have told mamma something about THAT.

Well, I saw through the whole thing then. Billy hadn’t told me, for fear I would want to go along; so he had sneaked off with Sidney Tracy, and if he hadn’t forgotten all about the letter he had made up his mind it would do as well to deliver it when he came home. That’s the way Billy’s mind works — like Tom Price’s stop-watch. It goes up to a certain instant and then it stops short. You’d better believe I was angry. And it didn’t make it any easier for me to remember that while I was having this dreadful time at home, and being reproached by everybody. Billy and Sidney Tracy were sitting comfortably under the willows on the edge of the river pulling little minnows out of the water. I knew exactly where they would be — I’d been there with Billy often enough. Just as I thought of that I looked at poor Peggy, sitting in her wrapper in papa’s big easy-chair, leaning against a pillow Grandma Evarts had put behind her back, and trying to be calm. She looked so pale and worn and worried and sick that I made up my mind I’d follow those boys to the river and get that letter and bring it home to Peggy — for, of course, I was sure it was for her. I wish you could have seen her face when I said I’d do it, and the way she jumped up from the chair and then blushed and sank back and tried to look as if it didn’t matter — with her eyes shining all the time with excitement and hope.

I got on my bicycle and rode off, and I made good time until I crossed the bridge. Then I had to walk along the river, pushing the bicycle, and I came to those two boys so quietly that they never saw me until I was right behind them. They were fishing still, but they had both been swimming — I could tell that by their wet hair and by the damp, mussy look of their clothes. When Billy saw me he turned red and began to make a great fuss over his line. He didn’t say a word; he never does when he’s surprised or ashamed, so he doesn’t speak very often, anyhow; but I broke the painful silence by saying a few words myself. I told Billy how dreadful he had made everybody feel and how they were all blaming me, and I said I’d thank him for that letter to take home to his poor suffering sister. Billy put down his rod, and all the time I talked he was going through his pockets one after the other and getting redder and redder. I was so busy talking that I didn’t understand at first just what this meant, but when I stopped and held out my hand and looked at him hard I saw in his guilty face the terrible, terrible fear that he had lost that letter; and I was so frightened that my legs gave way under me, and I sat down on the grass in my fresh blue linen dress, just where they had dripped and made it wet.

All this time Sidney Tracy was going through HIS pockets, too, and just as I was getting up again in a hurry he took off his cap and emptied his pockets into it. I wish you could have seen what that cap held then — worms, and sticky chewing-gum, and tops, and strings, and hooks, and marbles, and two pieces of molasses candy all soft and messy, and a little bit of a turtle, and a green toad, and a slice of bread-and-butter, and a dirty, soaking, handkerchief that he and Billy had used for a towel. There was something else there, too — a dark, wet, pulpy, soggy-looking thing with pieces of gum and molasses candy and other things sticking to it. Sidney took it out and held it toward me in a proud, light-hearted way:

“There’s your letter, all right,” he said, and Billy gave a whoop of joy and called out, “Good-bye, Alice,” as a hint for me to hurry home. I was so anxious to get the letter that I almost took it, but I stopped in time. I hadn’t any gloves on, and it was just too dreadful. If you could have seen it you would never have touched it in the world. I got near enough to look at it, though, and then I saw that the address was so dirty and so covered with gum and bait and candy that all I could read was a capital “M” and a small “s” at the beginning and an “ert” at the end; the name between was hidden. I covered my eyes with my hand and gasped out to the boys that I wanted the things taken off it that didn’t belong there, and when I looked again Sidney had scraped off the worst of it and was scrubbing the envelope with his wet handkerchief to make it look cleaner. After that you couldn’t tell what ANY letter was, so I just groaned and snatched it from his hands and left those two boys in their disgusting dirt and degradation and went home.

When I got back mamma and Grandma Evarts and Tom Price and Peggy and Aunt Elizabeth were in the parlor, looking more excited than ever, because Maria had been there telling the family about Lorraine. Then she had gone on to Lorraine’s and Tom had dropped in to call for her and was waiting to hear about the letter. They were all watching the door when I came in, and Peggy and Aunt Elizabeth started to get up, but sat down again. I stood there hesitating because, of course, I didn’t know who to give it to, and Grandma Evarts shot out, “Well, Alice! Well, Well!” as if she was blowing the words at me from a little peashooter. Then I began to explain about the address, but before I could say more than two or three words mamma motioned to me and I gave the letter to her.

You could have heard an autumn leaf fall in that room. Mamma put on her glasses and puzzled over the smear on the envelope, and Peggy drew a long breath and jumped up and walked over to mamma and held out her hand. Mamma didn’t hesitate a minute. “Certainly it must be for you, my dear,” she said, and then she added, in a very cold, positive way, “For whom else could it possibly be intended?” No one spoke; but just as Peggy had put her finger under the flap to tear it open, Aunt Elizabeth got up and crossed the room to where mamma and Peggy stood. She spoke very softly and quietly, but she looked queer and excited.

“Wait one moment, my dear,” she said to Peggy. “Very probably the letter IS for you, but it is just possible that it may be for some one else. Wouldn’t it be safer — wiser — for ME to open it?”

Then Peggy cried out, “Oh, Aunt Elizabeth, how dreadful! How can you say such a thing!” Mother had hesitated an instant when Aunt Elizabeth spoke, but now she drew Peggy’s head down to her dear, comfy shoulder, and Peggy stayed right there and cried as hard as she could — with little gasps and moans as if she felt dreadfully nervous. Then, for once in my life, I saw my mother angry. She looked over Peggy’s head at Aunt Elizabeth, and her face was so dreadful it made me shiver.

“Elizabeth,” she said, and she brought her teeth right down hard on the word, “this is the climax of your idiocy. Have you the audacity to claim here, before me, that this letter from my child’s affianced husband is addressed to you?”

Aunt Elizabeth looked very pale now, but when she answered she spoke as quietly as before.

“If it is, Ada,” she said, “it is against my wish and my command. But — it may be.” Then her voice changed as if she were really begging for something.

“Let me open it,” she said. “If it is for Peggy I can tell by the first line or two, even if he does not use the name. Surely it will do no harm if I glance at it.”

Mother looked even angrier than before.

“Well,” she said, “it could do no harm, you think, if you read a letter intended for Peggy, but you don’t dare to risk letting Peggy read a letter addressed by Harry Goward to you. This is intolerable, Elizabeth Talbert. You have passed the limit of my endurance — and of my husband’s.”

She brought out the last words very slowly, looking Aunt Elizabeth straight in the eyes, and Aunt Elizabeth looked back with her head very high. She has a lovely way of using such expressions as “For the rest” and “As to that,” and she did it now.

“As to that,” she said, “my brother must speak for himself. No one regrets more bitterly than I do this whole most unpleasant affair. I can only say that with all my heart I am trying to straighten it out.”

Grandma Evarts sniffed just then so loudly that we all looked at her, and then, of course, mamma suddenly remembered that I was still there, regarding the scene with wide, intelligent young eyes, and she nodded toward the door, meaning for me to go out. My, but I hated to! I picked up grandma’s ball of wool and drew the footstool close to her feet, and looked around to see if I couldn’t show her some other delicate girlish attention such as old ladies love, but there wasn’t anything, especially as grandma kept motioning for me to leave. So I walked toward the door very slowly, and before I got there I heard Tom Price say:

“Oh, come now; we’re making a lot of fuss about nothing. There’s a very simple way out of all this. Alice says Goward’s still at the hotel. I’ll just run down there and explain, and ask him to whom that letter belongs.”

Then I was at the door, and I HAD to open it and go out. The voices went on inside for a few minutes, but soon I saw Tom come out and I went to him and slipped my arm inside of his and walked with him across the lawn and out to the sidewalk. I don’t very often like the things Tom says, but I thought it was clever of him to think of going to ask Harry Goward about the letter, and I told him so to encourage him. He thanked me very politely, and then he stopped and braced his back against the lamp-post on the corner and “fixed me with a stern gaze,” as writers say.

“Look here, Clarry,” he said (“Clarry” is short, he says, for Daily Bugle and Clarion Call, which is “too lengthy for frequent use”), “you’re doing a lot of mischief to-day with your rural delivery system for Goward and your news extras about Lorraine. What’s this cock-and-bull story you’ve got up about her, anyway?”

I told him just what I had seen. When I got through he said there was “nothing in it.”

“That bit about her head being among the toast and cake,” he went on, “would be convincing circumstantial evidence of a tragedy if it had been any other woman’s head, but it doesn’t count with Lorraine — I mean it doesn’t represent the complete abandonment to grief which would be implied if it happened in the case of any one else. You must remember that when Lorraine wants to have a comfortable cry she’s got to choose between putting her head in the jam on the sofa, or among the wet paint and brushes in the easy-chair, or among the crumbs on the tea-table. As for that photograph, it probably fell off the mantel-piece to the tea-table, instead of falling, as usual, into the coal-hod. To sum up, my dear Clarry, if you had remembered the extreme emotionalism of your sister Lorraine’s temperament and the — er — eccentricity of her housekeeping, you would not have permitted yourself to be so sadly misled. Not remembering it, you’ve done a lot of mischief. All these things being so, no one will believe them. And to-night, when you are safely tucked into your little bed, if you hear the tramping of many feet on the asphalt walks you may know what it will mean. It will mean that your mother and father, and Elizabeth, and Grandma Evarts and Maria and Peggy will be dropping in on Lorraine, each alone and quite casually, of course, to find out what there really is in this terrible rumor. And some of them will believe to their dying day that there was something in it.”

Well, that made me feel very unhappy. For I could see that under Tom’s gay exterior and funny way of saying things he really meant every word. Of course I told him that I had wanted to help Lorraine and Peggy because they were so wretched, and he made me promise on the spot that if ever I wanted to help him I’d tell him about it first. Then he went off to the hotel looking more cheerful, and I was left alone with my sad thoughts.

When I got into the house the first thing I saw was Billy sneaking out of the back door. I had meant to have a long and earnest talk with Billy the minute he got home, and point out some of his serious faults, but when I looked at him I saw that mamma or grandma had just done it. He looked red eyed and miserable, and the minute he saw me he began to whistle. Billy never whistles except just before or just after a whipping, so my heart sank, and I was dreadfully sorry for him. I started after him to tell him so, but he made a face at me and ran; and just then Aunt Elizabeth came along the hall and dragged me up to her room and began to ask me all over again about Mr. Goward and all that he said — whether I was perfectly SURE he didn’t mention any name. She looked worried and unhappy. Then she asked about Lorraine, but in an indifferent voice, as if she was really thinking about something else. I told her all I knew, but she didn’t say a word or pay much attention until I mentioned that the man in the photograph was Mr. Lyman Wilde. Then — well, I wish you had seen Aunt Elizabeth! She made me promise afterwards that I’d never tell a single soul what happened, and I won’t. But I do wish sometimes that Billy and I lived on a desert island, where there wasn’t anybody else. I just can’t bear being home when everybody is so unhappy, and when not a single thing I do helps the least little bit!

CHAPTER VI THE SON-IN-LAW by John Kendrick Bangs

On the whole I am glad our family is no larger than it is. It is a very excellent family as families go, but the infinite capacity of each individual in it for making trouble, and adding to complications already sufficiently complex, surpasses anything that has ever before come into my personal or professional experience. If I handle my end of this miserable affair without making a break of some kind or other, I shall apply to the Secretary of State for a high place in the diplomatic service, for mere international complications are child’s-play compared to this embroglio in which Goward and Aunt Elizabeth have landed us all. I think I shall take up politics and try to get myself elected to the legislature, anyhow, and see if I can’t get a bill through providing that when a man marries it is distinctly understood that he marries his wife and not the whole of his wife’s family, from her grandmother down through her maiden aunts, sisters, cousins, little brothers, et al., including the latest arrivals in kittens. In my judgment it ought to be made a penal offence for any member of a man’s wife’s family to live on the same continent with him, and if I had to get married all over again to Maria — and I’d do it with as much delighted happiness as ever — I should insist upon the interpolation of a line in the marriage ceremony, “Do you promise to love, honor, and obey your wife’s relatives,” and when I came to it I’d turn and face the congregation and answer “No,” through a megaphone, so loud that there could be no possibility of a misunderstanding as to precisely where I stood.

If anybody thinks I speak with an unusual degree of feeling, I beg to inform him or her, as the case may be, that in the matter of wife’s relations I have an unusually full set, and, as my small brother-in-law says when he orates about his postage-stamp collection, they’re all uncancelled. Into all lives a certain amount of mother-in-law must fall, but I not only have that, but a grandmother-in-law as well, and maiden-aunt-in-law, and the Lord knows what else-in-law besides. I must say that as far as my mother-in-law is concerned I’ve had more luck than most men, because Mrs. Talbert comes pretty close to the ideal in mother-in-legal matters. She is gentle and unoffending. She prefers minding her own business to assuming a trust control of other people’s affairs, but HER mother — well, I don’t wish any ill to Mrs. Evarts, but if anybody is ambitious to adopt an orphan lady, with advice on tap at all hours in all matters from winter flannels to the conversion of the Hottentots, I will cheerfully lead him to the goal of his desires, and with alacrity surrender to him all my right, title, and interest in her. At the same time I will give him a quit-claim deed to my maiden-aunt-in-law — not that Aunt Elizabeth isn’t good fun, for she is, and I enjoy talking to her, and wondering what she will do next fills my days with a living interest, but I’d like her better if she belonged in some other fellow’s family.

I don’t suppose I can blame Maria under all the circumstances for standing up for the various members of her family when they are attacked, which she does with much vigorous and at times aggressive loyalty. We cannot always help ourselves in the matter of our relations. Some are born relatives, some achieve relatives, and others have relatives thrust upon them. Maria was born to hers, and according to all the rules of the game she’s got to like them, nay, even cherish and protect them against the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism. But, on the other hand, I think she ought to remember that while I achieved some of them with my eyes open, the rest were thrust upon me when I was defenceless, and when I find some difficulty in adapting myself to circumstances, as is frequently the case, she should be more lenient to my incapacity. The fact that I am a lawyer makes it necessary for me to toe the mark of respect for the authority of the courts all day, whether I am filled with contempt for the court or not, and it is pretty hard to find, when I return home at night, that another set of the judiciary in the form of Maria’s family, a sort of domestic supreme court, controls all my private life, so that except when I am rambling through the fields alone, or am taking my bath in the morning, I cannot give my feelings full and free expression without disturbing the family entente; and there isn’t much satisfaction in skinning people to a lonesome cow, or whispering your indignant sentiments into the ear of a sponge already soaked to the full with cold water. I have tried all my married life to agree with every member of the family in everything he, she, or it has said, but, now that this Goward business has come up, I can’t do that, because every time anybody says “Booh” to anybody else in the family circle, regarding this duplex love-affair, a family council is immediately called and “Booh” is discussed, not only from every possible stand-point, but from several impossible ones as well.

When that letter of Goward’s was rescued from the chewing-gum contingent, with its address left behind upon the pulpy surface of Sidney Tracy’s daily portion of peptonized-paste, it was thought best that I should call upon the writer at his hotel and find out to whom the letter was really written.

My own first thought was to seek out Sidney Tracy and see if the superscription still remained on the chewing-gum, and I had the good-fortune to meet the boy on my way to the hotel, but on questioning him I learned that in the excitement of catching a catfish, shortly after Alice had left the lads, Sidney had incontinently swallowed the rubber-like substance, and nothing short of an operation for appendicitis was likely to put me in possession of the missing exhibit. So I went on to the hotel, and ten minutes later found myself in the presence of an interesting case of nervous prostration. Poor Goward! When I observed the wrought-up condition of his nerves, I was immediately so filled with pity for him that if it hadn’t been for Maria I think I should at once have assumed charge of his case, and, as his personal counsel, sued the family for damages on his behalf. He did not strike me as being either old enough, or sufficiently gifted in the arts of philandery, to be taken seriously as a professional heart-breaker, and to tell the truth I had to restrain myself several times from telling him that I thought the whole affair a tempest in a teapot, because, in wanting consciously to marry two members of the family, he had only attempted to do what I had done unconsciously when I and the whole tribe of Talberts, remotely and immediately connected, became one. Nevertheless, I addressed him coldly.

“Mr. Goward,” I said, when the first greetings were over, “this is a most unfortunate affair.”

“It is terrible,” he groaned, pacing the thin-carpeted floor like a poor caged beast in the narrow confines of the Zoo. “You don’t need to tell me how unfortunate it all is.”

“As a matter of fact,” I went on, “I don’t exactly recall a similar case in my experience. You will doubtless admit yourself that it is a bit unusual for a man even of your age to flirt with the maiden aunt of his fiancee, and possibly you realize that we would all be very much relieved if you could give us some reasonable explanation of your conduct.”

“I’ll be only too glad to explain,” said Goward, “if you will only listen.”

“In my own judgment the best solution of the tangle would be for you to elope with a third party at your earliest convenience,” I continued, “but inasmuch as you have come here it is evident that you mean to pursue some course of action in respect to one of the two ladies — my sister or my aunt. Now what IS that course? and which of the two ladies may we regard as the real object of your vagrom affections? I tell you frankly, before you begin, that I shall permit no trifling with Peggy. As to Aunt Elizabeth, she is quite able to take care of herself.”

“It’s — it’s Peggy, of course,” said Goward. “I admire Miss Elizabeth Talbert very much indeed, but I never really thought of — being seriously engaged to her.”

“Ah!” said I, icily. “And did you think of being frivolously engaged to her?”

“I not only thought of it,” said Goward, “but I was. It was at the Abercrombies’, Mr. Price. Lily — that is to say, Aunt Elizabeth—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Goward,” I interrupted. “As yet the lady is not your Aunt Elizabeth, and the way things look now I have my doubts if she ever is your Aunt Elizabeth.”

“Miss Talbert, then,” said Goward, with a heart-rending sigh. “Miss Talbert and I were guests at the Abercrombies’ last October — maybe she’s told you — and on Hallowe’en we had a party — apple-bobbing and the mirror trick and all that, and somehow or other Miss Talbert and I were thrown together a great deal, and before I really knew how, or why, we — well, we became engaged for — for the week, anyhow.”

“I see,” said I, dryly. “You played the farce for a limited engagement.”

“We joked about it a great deal, and I — well, I got into the spirit of it — one must at house-parties, you know,” said Goward, deprecatingly.

“I suppose so,” said I.

“I got into the spirit of it, and Miss Talbert christened me Young Lochinvar, Junior,” Goward went on, “and I did my best to live up to the title. Then at the end of the week I was suddenly called home, and I didn’t have any chance to see Miss Talbert alone before leaving, and — well, the engagement wasn’t broken off. That’s all. I never saw her again until I came here to meet the family. I didn’t know she was Peggy’s aunt.”

“So that in reality you WERE engaged to both Peggy and Miss Talbert at the same time,” I suggested. “That much seems to be admitted.”

“I suppose so,” groaned Goward. “But not seriously engaged, Mr. Price. I didn’t suppose she would think it was serious — just a lark — but when she appeared that night and fixed me with her eye I suddenly realized what had happened.”

“It was another case of ‘the woman tempted me and I did eat,’ was it, Goward?” I asked.

Goward’s pale face hushed, and he turned angrily.

“I haven’t said anything of the sort,” he retorted. “Of all the unmanly, sneaking excuses that ever were offered for wrong-doing, that first of Adam’s has never been beaten.”

“You evidently don’t think that Adam was a gentleman,” I put in, with a feeling of relief at the boy’s attitude toward my suggestion.

“Not according to my standards,” he said, with warmth.

“Well,” I ventured, “he hadn’t had many opportunities, Adam hadn’t. His outlook was rather provincial, and his associations not broadening. You wouldn’t have been much better yourself brought up in a zoo. Nevertheless, I don’t think myself that he toed the mark as straight as he might have.”

“He was a coward,” said Goward, with a positiveness born of conviction. And with that remark Goward took his place in my affections. Whatever the degree of his seeming offence, he was at least a gentleman himself, and his unwillingness to place any part of the blame for his conduct upon Aunt Elizabeth showed me that he was not a cad, and I began to feel pretty confident that some reasonable way out of our troubles was looming into sight.

“How old are you, Goward?” I asked.

“Twenty-one,” he answered, “counting the years. If you count the last week by the awful hours it has contained I am older than Methuselah.”

At last I thought I had it, and a feeling of wrath against Aunt Elizabeth began to surge up within me. It was another case of that intolerable “only a boy” habit that so many women of uncertain age and character, married and single, seem nowadays to find so much pleasure in. We find it too often in our complex modern society, and I am not sure that it is not responsible for more deviations from the path of rectitude than even the offenders themselves imagine. Callow youth just from college is susceptible to many kinds of flattery, and at the age of adolescence the appeal which lovely woman makes to inexperience is irresistible.

I know whereof I speak, for I have been there myself. I always tell Maria everything that I conveniently can — it is not well for a man to have secrets from his wife — and when I occasionally refer to my past flames I find myself often growing more than pridefully loquacious over my early affairs of the heart, but when I thought of the serious study that I once made in my twentieth year of the dozen easiest, most painless methods of committing suicide because Miss Mehitabel Flanders, ætat thirty-eight, whom I had chosen for my life’s companion, had announced her intention of marrying old Colonel Barrington — one of the wisest matches ever as I see it now — I drew the line at letting Maria into that particular secret of my career. Miss Mehitabel was indeed a beautiful woman, and she took a very deep and possibly maternal interest in callow youth. She invited confidence and managed in many ways to make a strong appeal to youthful affections, but I don’t think she was always careful to draw the line nicely between maternal love and that other which is neither maternal, fraternal, paternal, nor even filial. To my eye she was no older than I, and to my way of thinking nothing could have been more eminently fitting than that we should walk the Primrose Way hand in hand forever.

While I will not say that the fair Mehitabel trifled with my young affections, I will say that she let me believe — nay, induced me to believe by her manner — that even as I regarded her she regarded me, and when at the end she disclaimed any intention to smash my heart into the myriad atoms into which it flew — which have since most happily reunited upon Maria — and asserted that she had let me play in the rose-garden of my exuberant fancy because I was “only a boy,” my bump upon the hard world of fact was an atrociously hard one. Some women pour passer le temps find pleasure in playing thus with young hopes and hearts as carelessly as though they were mere tennis-balls, to be whacked about and rallied, and volleyed hither and yon, without regard to their constituent ingredients, and then when trouble comes, and a catastrophe is imminent, the refuge of “only a boy” is sought as though it really afforded a sufficient protection against “responsibility.” The most of us would regard the hopeless infatuation of a young girl committed to our care, either as parents or as guardians, for a middle-aged man of the world with such horror that drastic steps would be taken to stop it, but we are not so careful of the love-affairs of our sons, and view with complaisance their devotion to some blessed damozel of uncertain age, comforting ourselves with the reflection that he is “only a boy” and will outgrow it all in good time. (There’s another mem. for my legislative career — a Bill for the Protection of Boys, and the Suppression of Old Maids Who Don’t Mean Anything By It.)

I don’t mean, in saying all this, to reflect in any way upon the many helpful friendships that exist between youngsters developing into manhood and their elders among women who are not related to them. There have been thousands of such friendships, no doubt, that have worked for the upbuilding of character; for the inspiring in the unfolding consciousness of what life means in the young boy’s being of a deeper, more lasting, respect for womanhood than would have been attained to under any other circumstances, but that has been the result only when the woman has taken care to maintain her own dignity always, and to regard her course as one wherein she has accepted a degree of responsibility second only to a mother’s, and not a by-path leading merely to pleasure and for the idling away of an unoccupied hour. Potential manhood is a difficult force to handle, and none should embark upon the parlous enterprise of arousing it without due regard for the consequences. We may not let loose a young lion from its leash, and, when dire consequences follow, excuse ourselves on the score that we thought the devastating feature was “only a cub.”

These things flashed across my mind as I sat in Goward’s room watching the poor youth in his nerve-distracting struggles, and, when I thought of the tangible evidence in hand against Aunt Elizabeth, I must confess if I had been juryman sitting in judgment of the case I should have convicted her of kidnapping without leaving the box. To begin with, there was the case of Ned Temple. I haven’t quite been able to get away from the notion that however short-sighted and gauche poor Mrs. Temple’s performance was in going over to the Talberts’ to make a scene because of Aunt Elizabeth’s attentions to Temple, she thought she was justified in doing so, and Elizabeth’s entire innocence in the premises, in view of her record as a man-snatcher, has not been proven to my satisfaction. Then there was that Lyman Wilde business, which I never understood and haven’t wanted to until they tried to mix poor Lorraine up in it. Certain it is that Elizabeth and Wilde were victims of an affair of the heart, but what Lorraine has had to do with it I don’t know, and I hope the whole matter will be dropped at least until we have settled poor Peggy’s affair. Then came Goward and this complication, and through it all Elizabeth has had a weather-eye open for Dr. Denbigh. A rather suggestive chain of evidence that, proving that Elizabeth seems to regard all men as her own individual property. As Mrs. Evarts says, she perks up even when Billie comes into the room — or Mr. Talbert, either; and as for me — well, in the strictest confidence, if Aunt Elizabeth hasn’t tried to flirt even with me, then I don’t know what flirtation is, and there was a time — long before I was married, of course — when I possessed certain well-developed gifts in that line. I know this, that when I was first paying my addresses to Maria, Aunt Elizabeth was staying at the Talberts’ as usual, and Maria and I had all we could do to get rid of her. She seemed to be possessed with the idea that I came there every night to see her, and not a hint in the whole category of polite intimations seemed capable of conveying any other idea to her mind, although she showed at times that even a chance remark fell upon heeding ears, for once when I observed that pink was my favorite color, she blossomed out in it the next day and met me looking like a peach-tree in full bloom, on Main Street as I walked from my office up home. And while we are discussing other people’s weaknesses I may as well confess my own, and say that I was so pleased at this unexpected revelation of interest in my tastes that when I called that evening I felt vaguely disappointed to learn that Aunt Elizabeth was dining out — and I was twenty-seven at the time, too, and loved Maria into the bargain! And after the wedding, when we came to say good-bye, and I kissed Aunt Elizabeth — I kissed everybody that day in the hurry to get away, even the hired man at the door — and said, “Good-bye, Aunty,” she pouted and said she didn’t like the title “a little bit.”

Now, of course, I wouldn’t have anybody think that I think Aunt Elizabeth was ever in love with me, but I mention these things to show her general attitude toward members of the so-called stronger sex. The chances are that she does not realize what she is doing, and assumes this coy method with the whole masculine contingent as a matter of thoughtless habit. What she wants to be to man I couldn’t for the life of me even guess — mother, sister, daughter, or general manager. But that she does wish to grab every male being in sight, and attach them to her train, is pretty evident to me, and I have no doubt that this is what happened in poor Harry Goward’s case. She has a bright way of saying things, is unmistakably pretty, and has an unhappy knack of making herself appear ten or fifteen years younger than she is if she needs to. She is chameleonic as to age, and takes on always something of the years of the particular man she is talking to. I saw her talking to the dominie the other night, and a more spiritual-looking bit of demure middle-aged piety you never saw in a nunnery, and the very next day when she was conversing with young George Harris, a Freshman at Yale, at the Barbers’ reception, you’d have thought she was herself a Vassar undergraduate. So there you are. With Goward she had assumed that same youthful manner, and backed by all the power other thirty-seven years of experience he was mere putty in her hands, and she played with him and he lost, just as any other man, from St. Anthony down to the boniest ossified man of to-day would have lost, and it wasn’t until he saw Peggy again and realized the difference between the real thing and the spurious that he waked up.

With all these facts marshalled and flashing through my brain much more rapidly than I can tell them, like the quick succession of pictures in the cinematograph, I made up my mind to become Goward’s friend in so far as circumstances would permit. With Aunt Elizabeth out of the way it seemed to me that we would find all plain sailing again, but how to get rid other was the awful question. Poor Peggy could hardly be happy with such a Richmond in the field, and nothing short of Elizabeth’s engagement to some other man would help matters any. She had been too long unmarried, anyhow. Maiden aunthood is an unhappy estate, and grows worse with habit. If I could only find Lyman Wilde and bring him back to her, or, perhaps, Dr. Denbigh — that was the more immediate resource, and surely no sacrifice should be too great for a family physician to make for the welfare of his patients. Maria and I would invite Dr. Denbigh to dinner and have Aunt Elizabeth as the only other guest. We could leave them alone on some pretext or other after dinner, and leave the rest to fate — aided and abetted by Elizabeth herself.

Meanwhile there was Goward still on my hands.

“Well, my boy,” I said, patting him kindly on the shoulder, “I hardly know what to say to you about this thing. You’ve got yourself in the dickens of a box, but I don’t mind telling you I think your heart is in the right place, and, whatever has happened, I don’t believe you have intentionally done wrong. Maybe at your age you do not realize that it is not safe to be engaged to two people at the same time, especially when they belong to the same family. Scientific heart-breakers, as a rule, take care that their fiancees are not only not related, but live in different sections of the country, and as I have no liking for preaching I shall not dwell further upon the subject.”

“I think I realize my position keenly enough without putting you to the trouble,” said Goward, gazing gloomily out of the window.

“What I will say, however,” said I, “is that I’ll do all I can to help you out of your trouble. As one son-in-law to another, eh?”

“You are very kind,” said he, gripping me by the hand.

“I will go to Mrs. Talbert — she is the best one to talk to — first, and tell her just what you have told me, and it is just possible that she can explain it to Peggy,” I went on.

“I — I think I could do that myself if I only had the chance,” he said, ruefully.

“Well, then — I’ll try to make the chance. I won’t promise that I will make it, because I can’t answer for anybody but myself. Some day you will find out that women are peculiar. But what I can do I will,” said I. “And, furthermore, as the general attorney for the family I will cross-examine Aunt Elizabeth — put her through the third degree, as it were, and try to show her how foolish it is for her to make so serious a matter of a trifling flirtation.”

“I wouldn’t, if I were you,” said Goward, with a frown. “She needn’t be involved in the affair any more than she already is. She is not in the least to blame.”

“Nevertheless,” said I, “she may be able to help us to an easy way out—”

“She can’t,” said Goward, positively.

“Excuse me, Mr. Goward,” said I, chilling a trifle in my newly acquired friendliness, “but is there any real reason why I should not question Miss Talbert—”

“Oh no, none at all,” he hastened to reply. “Only I — I see no particular object in vexing her further in a matter that must have already annoyed her sufficiently. It is very good of you to take all this trouble on my account, and I don’t wish you to add further to your difficulties, either,” he added.

I appreciated his consideration, with certain reservations. However, the latter were not of such character as to make me doubt the advisability of standing his friend, and when we parted a few minutes later I left him with the intention of becoming his advocate with Peggy and her mother, and at the same time of having it out with Aunt Elizabeth.

I was detained at my office by other matters, which our family troubles had caused me to neglect, until supper-time, and then I returned to my own home, expecting to have a little chat over the affair with Maria before acquainting the rest of the family with my impressions of Goward and his responsibility for our woe. Maria is always so full of good ideas, but at half-past six she had not come in, and at six-forty-five she ‘phoned me that she was at her father’s and would I not better go there for tea. In the Talbert family a suggestion of that sort is the equivalent of a royal command in Great Britain, and I at once proceeded to accept it. As I was leaving the house, however, the thought flashed across my mind that in my sympathy for Harry Goward I had neglected to ask him the question I had sought him out to ask, “To whom was the letter addressed?” So I returned to the ‘phone, and ringing up the Eagle Hotel, inquired for Mr. Goward.

“Mr. Goward!” came the answer.

“Yes,” said I. “Mr. Henry Goward.”

“Mr. Goward left for New York on the 5.40 train this afternoon,” was the reply.

The answer, so unexpected and unsettling to all my plans, stunned me first and then angered me.

“Bah!” I cried, impatiently. “The little fool! An attack of cold feet, I guess — he ought to spell his name with a C.”

I hung up the receiver with a cold chill, for frankly I hated to go to the Talberts’ with the news. Moreover, it would be a humiliating confession to make that I had forgotten to ask Goward about the letter, when everybody knew that that was what I had called upon him for, and when I thought of all the various expressions in the very expressive Talbert eyes that would fix themselves upon me as I mumbled out my confession, I would have given much to be well out of it. Nevertheless, since there was no avoiding the ordeal, I resolved to face the music, and five minutes later entered the dining-room at my father-in-law’s house with as stiff an upper lip as I could summon to my aid in the brief time at my disposal. They were all seated at the table already — supper is not a movable feast in that well-regulated establishment — save Aunt Elizabeth. Her place was vacant.

“Sorry to be late,” said I, after respectfully saluting my mother-in-law, “but I couldn’t help it. Things turned up at the last minute and they had to be attended to. Where’s Aunt Elizabeth?”

“She went to New York,” said my mother-in-law, “on the 5.40 train.”

CHAPTER VII THE MARRIED SON by Henry James

It’s evidently a great thing in life to have got hold of a convenient expression, and a sign of our inordinate habit of living by words. I have sometimes flattered myself that I live less exclusively by them than the people about me; paying with them, paying with them only, as the phrase is (there I am at it, exactly, again!) rather less than my companions, who, with the exception, perhaps, a little — sometimes! — of poor Mother, succeed by their aid in keeping away from every truth, in ignoring every reality, as comfortably as possible. Poor Mother, who is worth all the rest of us put together, and is really worth two or three of poor Father, deadly decent as I admit poor Father mainly to be, sometimes meets me with a look, in some connection, suggesting that, deep within, she dimly understands, and would really understand a little better if she weren’t afraid to: for, like all of us, she lives surrounded by the black forest of the “facts of life” very much as the people in the heart of Africa live in their dense wilderness of nocturnal terrors, the mysteries and monstrosities that make them seal themselves up in the huts as soon as it gets dark. She, quite exquisite little Mother, would often understand, I believe, if she dared, if she knew how to dare; and the vague, dumb interchange then taking place between us, and from the silence of which we have never for an instant deviated, represents perhaps her wonder as to whether I mayn’t on some great occasion show her how.

The difficulty is that, alas, mere intelligent useless wretch as I am, I’ve never hitherto been sure of knowing how myself; for am I too not as steeped in fears as any of them? My fears, mostly, are different, and of different dangers — also I hate having them, whereas they love them and hug them to their hearts; but the fact remains that, save in this private precinct of my overflow, which contains, under a strong little brass lock, several bad words and many good resolutions, I have never either said or done a bold thing in my life. What I seem always to feel, doubtless cravenly enough, under her almost pathetic appeal, has been that it isn’t yet the occasion, the really good and right one, for breaking out; than which nothing could more resemble of course the inveterate argument of the helpless. ANY occasion is good enough for the helpful; since there’s never any that hasn’t weak sides for their own strength to make up. However, if there COULD be conceivably a good one, I’ll be hanged if I don’t seem to see it gather now, and if I sha’n’t write myself here “poor” Charles Edward in all truth by failing to take advantage of it, (They have in fact, I should note, one superiority of courage to my own: this habit of their so constantly casting up my poverty at me — poverty of character, of course I mean, for they don’t, to do them justice, taunt me with having “made” so little. They don’t, I admit, take their lives in their hands when they perform that act; the proposition itself being that I haven’t the spirit of a fished-out fly.)

My point is, at any rate, that I designate THEM as Poor only in the abysmal confidence of these occult pages: into which I really believe even my poor wife — for it’s universal! — has never succeeded in peeping. It will be a shock to me if I some day find she has so far adventured — and this not on account of the curiosity felt or the liberty taken, but on account of her having successfully disguised it. She knows I keep an intermittent diary — I’ve confessed to her it’s the way in which I work things in general, my feelings and impatiences and difficulties, off. It’s the way I work off my nerves — that luxury in which poor Charles Edward’s natural narrow means — narrow so far as ever acknowledged — don’t permit him to indulge. No one for a moment suspects I have any nerves, and least of all what they themselves do to them; no one, that is, but poor little Mother again — who, however, again, in her way, all timorously and tenderly, has never mentioned it: any more than she has ever mentioned her own, which she would think quite indecent. This is precisely one of the things that, while it passes between us as a mute assurance, makes me feel myself more than the others verily HER child: more even than poor little Peg at the present strained juncture.

But what I was going to say above all is that I don’t care that poor Lorraine — since that’s my wife’s inimitable name, which I feel every time I write it I must apologize even to myself for! — should quite discover the moments at which, first and last, I’ve worked HER off. Yet I’ve made no secret of my cultivating it as a resource that helps me to hold out; this idea of our “holding out,” separately and together, having become for us — and quite comically, as I see — the very basis of life. What does it mean, and how and why and to what end are we holding? I ask myself that even while I feel how much we achieve even by just hugging each other over the general intensity of it. This is what I have in mind as to our living to that extent by the vain phrase; as to our really from time to time winding ourselves up by the use of it, and winding each other. What should we do if we didn’t hold out, and of what romantic, dramatic, or simply perhaps quite prosaic, collapse would giving in, in contradistinction, consist for us? We haven’t in the least formulated that — though it perhaps may but be one of the thousand things we are afraid of.

At any rate we don’t, I think, ever so much as ask ourselves, and much less each other: we’re so quite sufficiently sustained and inflamed by the sense that we’re just doing it, and that in the sublime effort our union is our strength. There must be something in it, for the more intense we make the consciousness — and haven’t we brought it to as fine a point as our frequently triumphant partnership at bridge? — the more it positively does support us. Poor Lorraine doesn’t really at all need to understand in order to believe; she believes that, failing our exquisite and intimate combined effort of resistance, we should be capable together of something — well, “desperate.” It’s in fact in this beautiful desperation that we spend our days, that we face the pretty grim prospect of new ones, that we go and come and talk and pretend, that we consort, so far as in our deep-dyed hypocrisy we do consort, with the rest of the Family, that we have Sunday supper with the Parents and emerge, modestly yet virtuously shining, from the ordeal; that we put in our daily appearance at the Works — for a utility nowadays so vague that I’m fully aware (Lorraine isn’t so much) of the deep amusement I excite there, though I also recognize how wonderfully, how quite charitably, they manage not to break out with it: bless, for the most part, their dear simple hearts! It is in this privately exalted way that we bear in short the burden of our obloquy, our failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other; and above all of our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness. We’re really not meek a bit — we’re secretly quite ferocious; but we’re held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business incompetence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well: it being now definitely on record that we’ve never yet designed a single type of ice-pitcher — since that’s the damnable form Father’s production more and more runs to; his uncanny ideal is to turn out more ice-pitchers than any firm in the world — that has “taken” with their awful public. We’ve tried again and again to strike off something hideous enough, but it has always in these cases appeared to us quite beautiful compared to the object finally turned out, on their improved lines, for the unspeakable market; so that we’ve only been able to be publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to plead practically, in extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle them with, that such things are, alas, the worst we can do.

We so far succeed in our plea that we’re held at least to sit, as I say, in contrition, and to understand how little, when it comes to a reckoning, we really pay our way. This actually passes, I think for the main basis of our humility, as it’s certainly the basis of what I feel to be poor Mother’s unuttered yearning. It almost broke her heart that we SHOULD have to live in such shame — she has only got so far as that yet. But it’s a beginning; and I seem to make out that if I don’t spoil it by any wrong word, if I don’t in fact break the spell by any wrong breath, she’ll probably come on further. It will glimmer upon her — some day when she looks at me in her uncomfortable bewildered tenderness, and I almost hypnotize her by just smiling inscrutably back — that she isn’t getting all the moral benefit she somehow ought out of my being so pathetically wrong; and then she’ll begin to wonder and wonder, all to herself, if there mayn’t be something to be said for me. She has limped along, in her more or less dissimulated pain, on this apparently firm ground that I’m so wrong that nothing will do for either of us but a sweet, solemn, tactful agreement between us never to mention it. It falls in so richly with all the other things, all the “real” things, we never mention.

Well, it’s doubtless an odd fact to be setting down even here; but I SHALL be sorry for her on the day when her glimmer, as I have called it, broadens — when it breaks on her that if I’m as wrong as this comes to, why the others must be actively and absolutely right. She has never had to take it quite THAT way — so women, even mothers, wondrously get on; and heaven help her, as I say, when she shall. She’ll be immense— “tactfully” immense, with Father about it — she’ll manage that, for herself and for him, all right; but where the iron will enter into her will be at the thought of her having for so long given raison, as they say in Paris — or as poor Lorraine at least says they say — to a couple like Maria and Tom Price. It comes over her that she has taken it largely from THEM (and she HAS) that we’re living in immorality, Lorraine and I: ah THEN, poor dear little Mother — ! Upon my word I believe I’d go on lying low to this positive pitch of grovelling — and Lorraine, charming, absurd creature, would back me up in it too — in order precisely to save Mother such a revulsion. It will be really more trouble than it will be worth to her; since it isn’t as if our relation weren’t, of its kind, just as we are, about as “dear” as it can be.

I’d literally much rather help her not to see than to see; I’d much rather help her to get on with the others (yes, even including poor Father, the fine damp plaster of whose composition, renewed from week to week, can’t be touched anywhere without letting your finger in, without peril of its coming to pieces) in the way easiest for her — if not easiest TO her. She couldn’t live with the others an hour — no, not with one of them, unless with poor little Peg — save by accepting all their premises, save by making in other words all the concessions and having all the imagination. I ask from her nothing of this — I do the whole thing with her, as she has to do it with them; and of this, au fond, as Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware — just as, FOR it, she’s ever so dumbly grateful. Let these notes stand at any rate for my fond fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood; let them do this even if everything else registers meaner things. I’m perfectly willing to recognize, as grovellingly as any one likes, that, as grown-up and as married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least as battered and seasoned (by adversity) as possible, I’m in respect to HER as achingly filial and as feelingly dependent, all the time, as when I used, in the far-off years, to wake up, a small blubbering idiot, from frightening dreams, and refuse to go to sleep again, in the dark, till I clutched her hands or her dress and felt her bend over me.

She used to protect me then from domestic derision — for she somehow kept such passages quiet; but she can’t (it’s where HER ache comes in!) protect me now from a more insidious kind. Well, now I don’t care! I feel it in Maria and Tom, constantly, who offer themselves as the pattern of success in comparison with which poor Lorraine and I are nowhere. I don’t say they do it with malice prepense, or that they plot against us to our ruin; the thing operates rather as an extraordinary effect of their mere successful blatancy. They’re blatant, truly, in the superlative degree, and I call them successfully so for just this reason, that poor Mother is to all appearance perfectly unaware of it. Maria is the one member of all her circle that has got her really, not only just ostensibly, into training; and it’s a part of the general irony of fate that neither she nor my terrible sister herself recognizes the truth of this. The others, even to poor Father, think they manage and manipulate her, and she can afford to let them think it, ridiculously, since they don’t come anywhere near it. She knows they don’t and is easy with them; playing over Father in especial with finger-tips so lightly resting and yet so effectively tickling, that he has never known at a given moment either where they were or, in the least, what they were doing to him. That’s enough for Mother, who keeps by it the freedom other soul; yet whose fundamental humility comes out in its being so hidden from her that her eldest daughter, to whom she allows the benefit of every doubt, does damnably boss her.

This is the one case in which she’s not lucid; and, to make it perfect, Maria, whose humility is neither fundamental nor superficial, but whose avidity is both, comfortably cherishes, as a ground of complaint — nurses in fact, beatifically, as a wrong — the belief that she’s the one person without influence. Influence? — why she has so much on ME that she absolutely coerces me into making here these dark and dreadful remarks about her! Let my record establish, in this fashion, that if I’m a clinging son I’m, in that quarter, to make up for it, a detached brother. Deadly virtuous and deadly hard and deadly charmless — also, more than anything, deadly sure I — how does Maria fit on, by consanguinity, to such amiable characters, such REAL social values, as Mother and me at all? If that question ceases to matter, sometimes, during the week, it flares up, on the other hand, at Sunday supper, down the street, where Tom and his wife, overwhelmingly cheerful and facetious, contrast so favorably with poor gentle sickly (as we doubtless appear) Lorraine and me. We can’t meet them — that is I can’t meet Tom — on that ground, the furious football-field to which he reduces conversation, making it echo as with the roar of the arena — one little bit.

Of course, with such deep diversity of feeling, we simply loathe each other, he and I; but the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none of the TRUE joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other. If we could intermit that vain superstition somehow, for about three minutes, I often think the air might clear (as by the scramble of the game of General Post, or whatever they call it) and we should all get out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from these positions a happy and natural defiance. Then I shouldn’t be thus nominally and pretendedly (it’s too ignoble!) on the same side or in the same air as my brother-in-law; whose value is that he has thirty “business ideas” a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth fraction of one in my whole life. He just hums, Tom Price, with business ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them; he moves in the densest we carry our heads here on August evenings, each with its own thick nimbus of mosquitoes. I’m but too conscious of how, on the other hand, I’m desolately outlined to all eyes, in an air as pure and empty as that of a fine Polar sunset.

It was Lorraine, dear quaint thing, who some time ago made the remark (on our leaving one of those weekly banquets at which we figure positively as a pair of social skeletons) that Tom’s facetae multiply, evidently, in direct proportion to his wealth of business ideas; so that whenever he’s enormously funny we may take it that he’s “on” something tremendous. He’s sprightly in proportion as he’s in earnest, and innocent in proportion as he’s going to be dangerous; dangerous, I mean, to the competitor and the victim. Indeed when I reflect that his jokes are probably each going to cost certain people, wretched helpless people like myself, hundreds and thousands of dollars, their abundant flow affects me as one of the most lurid of exhibitions. I’ve sometimes rather wondered that Father can stand so much of him. Father who has after all a sharp nerve or two in him, like a razor gone astray in a valise of thick Jager underclothing; though of course Maria, pulling with Tom shoulder to shoulder, would like to see any one NOT stand her husband.

The explanation has struck me as, mostly, that business genial and cheerful and even obstreperous, without detriment to its BEING business, has been poor Father’s ideal for his own terrible kind. This ideal is, further, that his home-life shall attest that prosperity. I think it has even been his conception that our family tone shall by its sweet innocence fairly register the pace at which the Works keep ahead: so that he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue. We of course don’t know — that is Mother and Grandmamma don’t, in any definite way (any more than I do, thanks to my careful stupidity) how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success; and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly fenced garden of our little life as could very well be crammed into the space.

Poor Grandmamma — since I’ve mentioned her — appears to me always the aged wan Flora of our paradise; the presiding divinity, seated in the centre, under whose pious traditions, REALLY quite dim and outlived, our fond sacrifices are offered. Queer enough the superstition that Granny is a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost. She knows as much about the world as a tin jelly-mould knows about the dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that don’t in the least matter and of bland failure to suspect things that intensely do. She lives in short in a weird little waste of words — over the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate; yet hasn’t a notion of any effective earnestness herself except on the subject of empty bottles, which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses. At this time of day it doesn’t matter, but if there could have been dropped into her empty bottles, at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn’t have figured so as the head and front of all our sentimentality.

I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat “modernity” in this order that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her among us this antique and austere consistency. I don’t talk things over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of perception we neither of us waste on the others. It’s the “antiquity of the age of crinoline,” she said the other day a propos of a little carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestress as a young woman of the time of the War; looking as if she had been violently inflated from below, but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity of expression, from her waist up. Mother, however, I must say, is as wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself, exactly, to appear a mere contemporary illustration (being all the while three times the true picture) in order that her parent shall have the importance of the Family Portrait. I don’t mean of course that she has told me so; but she cannot see that if she hasn’t that importance Granny has none other; and it’s therefore as if she pretended she had a ruff, a stomacher, a farthingale and all the rest — grand old angles and eccentricities and fine absurdities: the hard white face, if necessary, of one who has seen witches burned.

She hasn’t any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity: that’s a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but, exquisitely determined she shall have Character lest she perish — while it’s assumed we still need her — Mother makes it up for her, with a turn of the hand, out of bits left over from her own, far from economically as her own was originally planned; scraps of spiritual silk and velvet that no one takes notice of missing. And Granny, as in the dignity of her legend, imposes, ridiculous old woman, on every one — Granny passes for one of the finest old figures in the place, while Mother is never discovered. So is history always written, and so is truth mostly worshipped. There’s indeed one thing, I’ll do her the justice to say, as to which she has a glimmer of vision — as to which she had it a couple of years ago; I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent, to crown her culture, to that horrid co-educative college from which the poor child returned the other day so preposterously engaged to be married; and, if she had only been a little more actively with me we might perhaps between us have done something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious manner, down into one of the angles of the room — it reduces her protest to a feebleness: she’s incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of Criticism, which is the cardinal sin with her, to see all, or to follow any premise to it in the right direction.

Still, there was the happy chance, at the time the question came up, that she had retained, on the subject of promiscuous colleges, the mistrust of the age of crinoline: as to which in fact that little old photograph, with its balloon petticoat and its astonishingly flat, stiff “torso,” might have imaged some failure of the attempt to blow the heresy into her. The true inwardness of the history, at the crisis, was that our fell Maria had made up her mind that Peg should go — and that, as I have noted, the thing our fell Maria makes up her mind to among us is in nine cases out of ten the thing that is done. Maria still takes, in spite of her partial removal to a wider sphere, the most insidious interest in us, and the beauty of her affectionate concern for the welfare of her younger sisters is the theme of every tongue. She observed to Lorraine, in a moment of rare expansion, more than a year ago, that she had got their two futures perfectly fixed, and that as Peggy appeared to have “some mind,” though how much she wasn’t yet sure, it should be developed, what there was of it, on the highest modern lines: Peggy would never be thought generally, that is physically, attractive anyway. She would see about Alice, the brat, later on, though meantime she had her idea — the idea that Alice was really going to have the looks and would at a given moment break out into beauty: in which event she should be run for that, and for all it might be worth, and she, Maria, would be ready to take the contract.

This is the kind of patronage of us that passes, I believe, among her more particular intimates, for “so sweet” of her; it being of course Maria all over to think herself subtle for just reversing, with a “There — see how original I am?” any benighted conviction usually entertained. I don’t know that any one has ever thought Alice, the brat, intellectual; but certainly no one has ever judged her even potentially handsome, in the light of no matter which of those staggering girl-processes that suddenly produce features, in flat faces, and “figure,” in the void of space, as a conjurer pulls rabbits out of a sheet of paper and yards of ribbon out of nothing. Moreover, if any one SHOULD know, Lorraine and I, with our trained sense for form and for “values,” certainly would. However, it doesn’t matter; the whole thing being but a bit of Maria’s system of bluffing in order to boss. Peggy hasn’t more than the brain, in proportion to the rest of her, of a small swelling dove on a window-sill; but she’s extremely pretty and absolutely nice, a little rounded pink-billed presence that pecks up gratefully any grain of appreciation.

I said to Mother, I remember, at the time — I took that plunge: “I hope to goodness you’re not going to pitch that defenceless child into any such bear garden!” and she replied that to make a bear-garden you first had to have bears, and she didn’t suppose the co-educative young men could be so described. “Well then,” said I, “would you rather I should call them donkeys, or even monkeys? What I mean is that the poor girl — a perfect little DECORATIVE person, who ought to have iridescent-gray plumage and pink-shod feet to match the rest of her — shouldn’t be thrust into any general menagerie-cage, but be kept for the dovecote and the garden, kept where we may still hear her coo. That’s what, at college, they’ll make her unlearn; she’ll learn to roar and snarl with the other animals. Think of the vocal sounds with which she may come back to us!” Mother appeared to think, but asked me, after a moment, as a result of it, in which of the cages of the New York Art League menagerie, and among what sort of sounds, I had found Lorraine — who was a product of co-education if there ever had been one, just as our marriage itself had been such a product.

I replied to this — well, what I could easily reply; but I asked, I recollect, in the very forefront, if she were sending Peg to college to get married. She declared it was the last thing she was in a hurry about, and that she believed there was no danger, but her great argument let the cat out of the bag. “Maria feels the want of it — of a college education; she feels it would have given her more confidence”; and I shall in fact never forget the little look of strange supplication that she gave me with these words. What it meant was: “Now don’t ask me to go into the question, for the moment, any further: it’s in the acute stage — and you know how soon Maria can BRING a question to a head. She has settled it with your Father — in other words has settled it FOR him: settled it in the sense that we didn’t give HER, at the right time, the advantage she ought to have had. It would have given her confidence — from the want of which, acquired at that age, she feels she so suffers; and your Father thinks it fine of her to urge that her little sister shall profit by her warning. Nothing works on him, you know, so much as to hear it hinted that we’ve failed of our duty to any of you; and you can see how it must work when he can be persuaded that Maria — !”

“Hasn’t colossal cheek?” — I took the words out of her mouth. “With such colossal cheek what NEED have you of confidence, which is such an inferior form — ?”

The long and short was of course that Peggy went; believing on her side, poor dear, that it might for future relations give her the pull of Maria. This represents, really, I think, the one spark of guile in Peggy’s breast: the smart of a small grievance suffered at her sister’s hands in the dim long-ago. Maria slapped her face, or ate up her chocolates, or smeared her copy-book, or something of that sort; and the sound of the slap still reverberates in Peg’s consciousness, the missed sweetness still haunts her palate, the smutch of the fair page (Peg writes an immaculate little hand and Maria a wretched one — the only thing she can’t swagger about) still affronts her sight. Maria also, to do her justice, has a vague hankering, under which she has always been restive, to make up for the outrage; and the form the compunction now takes is to get her away. It’s one of the facts of our situation all round, I may thus add, that every one wants to get some one else away, and that there are indeed one or two of us upon whom, to that end, could the conspiracy only be occult enough — which it can never! — all the rest would effectively concentrate.

Father would like to shunt Granny — it IS monstrous his having his mother-in-law a fixture under his roof; though, after all, I’m not sure this patience doesn’t rank for him as one of those domestic genialities that allow his conscience a bolder and tighter business hand; a curious service, this sort of thing, I note, rendered to the business conscience throughout our community. Mother, at any rate, and small blame to her, would like to “shoo” off Eliza, as Lorraine and I, in our deepest privacy, call Aunt Elizabeth; the Tom Prices would like to extirpate US, of course; we would give our most immediate jewel to clear the sky of the Tom Prices; und so weiter. And I think we should really all band together, for once in our lives, in an unnatural alliance to get rid of Eliza. The beauty as to THIS is, moreover, that I make out the rich if dim, dawn of that last-named possibility (which I’ve been secretly invoking, all this year, for poor Mother’s sake); and as the act of mine own right hand, moreover, without other human help. But of that anon; the IMMEDIATELY striking thing being meanwhile again the strange stultification of the passions in us, which prevents anything ever from coming to an admitted and avowed head.

Maria can be trusted, as I have said, to bring on the small crisis, every time; but she’s as afraid as any one else of the great one, and she’s moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza. Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear — and for reasons I perfectly grasp; to which moreover, this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don’t fear Eliza in the least (and in fact promise myself before long to show it) and yet don’t at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to inspire my sister with the least terror in respect to myself. It’s very funny, the DEGREE of her dread of Eliza, who affects her, evidently, as a person of lurid “worldly” possibilities — the one innocent light in which poor Maria wears for me what Lorraine calls a weird pathos; and perhaps, after all, on the day I shall have justified my futile passage across this agitated scene, and my questionable utility here below every way, by converting our aunt’s lively presence into a lively absence, it may come over her that I AM to be recognized. I in fact dream at times, with high intensity, that I see the Prices some day quite turn pale as they look at each other and find themselves taking me in.

I’ve made up my mind at any rate that poor Mother shall within the year be relieved in one way or another of her constant liability to her sister-in-law’s visitations. It isn’t to be endured that her house should be so little her own house as I’ve known Granny and Eliza, between them, though after a different fashion, succeed in making it appear; and yet the action to take will, I perfectly see, never by any possibility come from poor Father. He accepts his sister’s perpetual re-arrivals, under the law of her own convenience, with a broad-backed serenity which I find distinctly irritating (if I may use the impious expression) and which makes me ask myself how he sees poor Mother’s “position” at all. The truth is poor Father never does “see” anything of that sort, in the sense of conceiving it in its relations; he doesn’t know, I guess, but what the prowling Eliza HAS a position (since this is a superstition that I observe even my acute little Lorraine can’t quite shake off). He takes refuge about it, as about everything, truly, in the cheerful vagueness of that general consciousness on which I have already touched: he likes to come home from the Works every day to see how good he really is, after all — and it’s what poor Mother thus has to demonstrate for him by translating his benevolence, translating it to himself and to others, into “housekeeping.” If he were only good to HER he mightn’t be good enough; but the more we pig together round about him the more blandly patriarchal we make him feel.

Eliza meanwhile, at any rate, is spoiling for a dose — if ever a woman required one; and I seem already to feel in the air the gathering elements of the occasion that awaits me for administering it. All of which it is a comfort somehow to maunder away on here. As I read over what I have written the aspects of our situation multiply so in fact that I note again how one has only to look at any human thing very straight (that is with the minimum of intelligence) to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism; or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere. I’ve often thought I should like some day to write a novel; but what would become of me in that case — delivered over, I mean, before my subject, to my extravagant sense that everything is a part of something else? When you paint a picture with a brush and pigments, that is on a single plane, it can stop at your gilt frame; but when you paint one with a pen and words, that is in ALL the dimensions, how are you to stop? Of course, as Lorraine says, “Stopping, that’s art; and what are we artists like, my dear, but those drivers of trolley-cars, in New York, who, by some divine instinct, recognize in the forest of pillars and posts the white-striped columns at which they may pull up? Yes, we’re drivers of trolley-cars charged with electric force and prepared to go any distance from which the consideration of a probable smash ahead doesn’t deter us.”

That consideration deters me doubtless even a little here — in spite of my seeing the track, to the next bend, so temptingly clear. I should like to note for instance, for my own satisfaction (though no fellow, thank God, was ever less a prey to the ignoble fear of inconsistency) that poor Mother’s impugnment of my acquisition of Lorraine didn’t in the least disconcert me. I did pick Lorraine — then a little bleating stray lamb collared with a blue ribbon and a tinkling silver bell — out of our New York bear-garden; but it interests me awfully to recognize that, whereas the kind of association is one I hate for my small Philistine sister, who probably has the makings of a nice, dull, dressed, amiable, insignificant woman, I recognize it perfectly as Lorraine’s native element and my own; or at least don’t at all mind her having been dipped in it. It has tempered and plated us for the rest of life, and to an effect different enough from the awful metallic wash of our Company’s admired ice-pitchers. We artists are at the best children of despair — a certain divine despair, as Lorraine naturally says; and what jollier place for laying it in abundantly than the Art League? As for Peg, however, I won’t hear of her having anything to do with this; she shall despair of nothing worse than the “hang” of her skirt or the moderation other hat — and not often, if I can help her, even of those.

That small vow I’m glad to register here: it helps somehow, at the juncture I seem to feel rapidly approaching, to do the indispensable thing Lorraine is always talking about — to define my position. She’s always insisting that we’ve never sufficiently defined it — as if I’ve ever for a moment pretended we have! We’ve REfined it, to the last intensity — and of course, now, shall have to do so still more; which will leave them all even more bewildered than the boldest definition would have done. But that’s quite a different thing. The furthest we have gone in the way of definition — unless indeed this too belongs but to our invincible tendency to refine — is by the happy rule we’ve made that Lorraine shall walk with me every morning to the Works, and I shall find her there when I come out to walk home with me. I see, on reading over, that this is what I meant by “our” in speaking above of our little daily heroism in that direction. The heroism is easier, and becomes quite sweet, I find, when she comes so far on the way with me and when we linger outside for a little more last talk before I go in.

It’s the drollest thing in the world, and really the most precious note of the mystic influence known in the place as “the force of public opinion” — which is in other words but the incubus of small domestic conformity; I really believe there’s nothing we do, or don’t do, that excites in the bosom of our circle a subtler sense that we’re “au fond” uncanny. And it’s amusing to think that this is our sole tiny touch of independence! That she should come forth with me at those hours, that she should hang about with me, and that we should have last (and, when she meets me again, first) small sweet things to say to each other, as if we were figures in a chromo or a tableau vivant keeping our tryst at a stile — no, this, quite inexplicably, transcends their scheme and baffles their imagination. They can’t conceive how or why Lorraine gets out, or should wish to, at such hours; there’s a feeling that she must violate every domestic duty to do it; yes, at bottom, really, the act wears for them, I discern, an insidious immorality, and it wouldn’t take much to bring “public opinion” down on us in some scandalized way.

The funniest thing of all, moreover, is that that effect resides largely in our being husband and wife — it would be absent, wholly, if we were engaged or lovers; a publicly parading gentleman friend and lady friend. What is it we CAN have to say to each other, in that exclusive manner, so particularly, so frequently, so flagrantly, and as if we hadn’t chances enough at home? I see it’s a thing Mother might accidentally do with Father, or Maria with Tom Price; but I can imagine the shouts of hilarity, the resounding public comedy, with which Tom and Maria would separate; and also how scantly poor little Mother would permit herself with poor big Father any appearance of a grave leave-taking. I’ve quite expected her — yes, literally poor little Mother herself — to ask me, a bit anxiously, any time these six months, what it is that at such extraordinary moments passes between us. So much, at any rate, for the truth of this cluster of documentary impressions, to which there may some day attach the value as of a direct contemporary record of strange and remote things, so much I here super-add; and verily with regret, as well, on behalf of my picture, for two or three other touches from which I must forbear.

There has lately turned up, on our scene, one person with whom, doors and windows closed, curtains drawn, secrecy sworn, the whole town asleep and something amber-colored a-brewing — there has recently joined us one person, I say, with whom we might really pass the time of day, to whom we might, after due deliberation, tip the wink. I allude to the Parents’ new neighbor, the odd fellow Temple, who, for reasons mysterious and which his ostensible undertaking of the native newspaper don’t at all make plausible, has elected, as they say, fondly to sojourn among us. A journalist, a rolling stone, a man who has seen other life, how can one not suspect him of some deeper game than he avows — some such studious, surreptitious, “sociological” intent as alone, it would seem, could sustain him through the practice of leaning on his fence at eventide to converse for long periods with poor Father? Poor Father indeed, if a real remorseless sociologist were once to get well hold of him! Lorraine freely maintains that there’s more in the Temples than meets the eye; that they’re up to something, at least that HE is, that he kind of feels us in the air, just as we feel him, and that he would sort of reach out to us, by the same token, if we would in any way give the first sign. This, however, Lorraine contends, his wife won’t let him do; his wife, according to mine, is quite a different proposition (much more REALLY hatted and gloved, she notes, than any one here, even than the belted and trinketed Eliza) and with a conviction of her own as to what their stay is going to amount to. On the basis of Lorraine’s similar conviction about ours it would seem then that we ought to meet for an esoteric revel; yet somehow it doesn’t come off. Sometimes I think I’m quite wrong and that he can’t really be a child of light: we should in this case either have seen him collapse or have discovered what inwardly sustains him. We ARE ourselves inwardly collapsing — there’s no doubt of that: in spite of the central fires, as Lorraine says somebody in Boston used to say somebody said, from which we’re fed. From what central fires is Temple nourished? I give it up; for, on the point, again and again, of desperately stopping him in the street to ask him, I recoil as often in terror. He may be only plotting to MAKE me do it — so that he may give me away in his paper!

“Remember, he’s a mere little frisking prize ass; stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything: it’s all you now know and all you need to know, and you’ll be as firm on it as on a rock!” This is what I said to poor Peg, on the subject of Harry Goward, before I started, in the glorious impulse of the moment, five nights ago, for New York; and, with no moment now to spare, yet wishing not to lose my small silver clue, I just put it here for one of the white pebbles, or whatever they were, that Hop o’ my Thumb, carried off to the forest, dropped, as he went, to know his way back. I was carried off the other evening in a whirlwind, which has not even yet quite gone down, though I am now at home and recovering my breath; and it will interest me vividly, when I have more freedom of mind, to live over again these strange, these wild successions. But a few rude notes, and only of the first few hours of my adventure, must for the present suffice. The mot, of the whole thing, as Lorraine calls it, was that at last, in a flash, we recognized what we had so long been wondering about — what supreme advantage we’ve been, all this latter time in particular, “holding out” for.

Lorraine had put it once again in her happy way only a few weeks previous; we were “saving up,” she said — and not meaning at all our poor scant dollars and cents, though we’ve also kept hold of some of THEM — for an exercise of strength and a show of character that would make us of a sudden some unmistakable sign. We should just meet it rounding a corner as with the rush of an automobile — a chariot of fire that would stop but long enough to take us in, when we should know it immediately for the vehicle of our fate. That conviction had somehow been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike on Peg’s coming back to us from her co-educative adventure so preposterously “engaged.” I didn’t believe in it, in such a manner of becoming so, one little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same; though that indeed seemed the last thing to trouble any one else. Her turning up in such a fashion with the whole thing settled before Father or Mother or Maria or any of us had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the tip of his nose, had too much in common, for my taste, with the rude betrothals of the people, with some maid-servant’s announcement to her employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy.

I was indignant, quite artlessly indignant I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. “Oh, I suppose they don’t pretend not to take their students at the young people’s own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their affections!” she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute either to Father or to herself any disposition to control Peggy’s. It was one of the few occasions of my life on which I’ve suffered irritation from poor Mother; and yet I’m now not sure, after all, that she wasn’t again but at her old game (even then, for she has certainly been so since) of protecting poor Father, by feigning a like flaccidity, from the full appearance, not to say the full dishonor, of his failure ever to meet a domestic responsibility. It came over me that there would be absolutely nobody to meet this one, and my own peculiar chance glimmered upon me therefore on the spot. I can’t retrace steps and stages; suffice it that my opportunity developed and broadened, to my watching eyes, with each precipitated consequence of the wretched youth’s arrival.

He proved, without delay, an infant in arms; an infant, either, according to circumstances, crowing and kicking and clamoring for sustenance, or wailing and choking and refusing even the bottle, to the point even, as I’ve just seen in New York, of imminent convulsions. The “arms” most appropriate to his case suddenly announced themselves, in fine, to our general consternation, as Eliza’s: but it was at this unnatural vision that my heart indeed leaped up. I was beforehand even with Lorraine; she was still gaping while, in three bold strokes, I sketched to her our campaign. “I take command — the others are flat on their backs.” I save little pathetic Peg, even in spite of herself; though her just resentment is really much greater than she dares, poor mite, recognize (amazing scruple!). By which I mean I guard her against a possible relapse. I save poor Mother — that is I rid her of the deadly Eliza — forever and a day! Despised, rejected, misunderstood, I nevertheless intervene, in its hour of dire need, as the good genius of the family; and you, dear little quaint thing, I take advantage of the precious psychological moment to whisk YOU off to Europe. We’ll take Peg with us for a year’s true culture; she wants a year’s true culture pretty badly, but she doesn’t, as it turns out, want Mr. Goward a ‘speck.’ And I’ll do it all in my own way, before they can recover breath; they’ll recover it — if we but give them time — to bless our name; but by that moment we shall have struck for freedom!”

Well, then, my own way — it was “given me,” as Lorraine says — was, taking the night express, without a word to any one but Peg, whom it was charming, at the supreme hour, to feel glimmeringly, all-wonderingly, with us: my own way, I say, was to go, the next morning, as soon as I had breakfasted, to the address Lorraine had been able, by an immense piece of luck, to suggest to me as a possible clue to Eliza’s whereabouts. “She’ll either be with her friends the Chataways, in East Seventy-third Street — she’s always swaggering about the Chataways, who by her account are tremendous ‘smarts,’ as she has told Lorraine the right term is in London, leading a life that is a burden to them without her; or else they’ll know where she is. That’s at least what I HOPE!” said my wife with infinite feminine subtlety. The Chataways as a subject of swagger presented themselves, even to my rustic vision, oddly; I may be mistaken about New York “values,” but the grandeur of this connection was brought home to me neither by the high lopsided stoop of its very, very East Side setting, nor by the appearance of a terrible massive lady who came to the door while I was in quite unproductive parley with an unmistakably, a hopelessly mystified menial, an outlandish young woman with a face of dark despair and an intelligence closed to any mere indigenous appeal. I was to learn later in the day that she’s a Macedonian Christian whom the Chataways harbor against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service; a romantic item that Eliza named to me in rueful correction of the absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough.

The powder on the massive lady’s face indeed transcended, I rather thought, the bounds of prose, did much to refer her to the realm of fantasy, some fairy-land forlorn; an effect the more marked as the wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow both voluminous and tense (flowing like a cataract in some places, yet in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream) reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be made. She apologized when I said I had come to inquire for Miss Talbert — mentioned (with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand) that she herself was “just being manicured in the parlor”; but was evidently surprised at my asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the question — it suffused her extravagant blondness with a troubled light, struggling there like a sunrise over snow — of whether she had better, confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity or, pretending to knowledge, baffle mine. But mine of course carried the day, for mine showed it could wait, while hers couldn’t; the final superiority of women to men being in fact, I think, that we are more PATIENTLY curious.

“Why, is she in the city?”

“If she isn’t, dear madam,” I replied, “she ought to be. She left Eastridge last evening for parts unknown, and should have got here by midnight.” Oh, how glad I was to let them both in as far as I possibly could! And clearly now I had let Mrs. Chataway, if such she was, in very far indeed.

She stared, but then airily considered. “Oh, well — I guess she’s somewheres.”

“I guess she is!” I replied.

“She hasn’t got here yet — she has so many friends in the city. But she always wants US, and when she does come — !” With which my friend, now so far relieved and agreeably smiling, rubbed together conspicuously the pair of plump subjects of her “cure.”

“You feel then,” I inquired, “that she will come?”

“Oh, I guess she’ll be round this afternoon. We wouldn’t forgive her — !”

“Ah, I’m afraid we MUST forgive her!” I was careful to declare. “But I’ll come back on the chance.”

“Any message then?”

“Yes, please say her nephew from Eastridge — !”

“Oh, her nephew — !”

“Her nephew. She’ll understand. I’ll come back,” I repeated. “But I’ve got to find her!”

And, as in the fever of my need, I turned and sped away.

I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, but instinctively and confidently westward. I felt, I don’t know why, miraculously sure of some favoring chance and as if I were floating in the current of success. I was on the way to our reward, I was positively on the way to Paris, and New York itself, vast and glittering and roaring, much noisier even than the Works at their noisiest, but with its old rich thrill of the Art League days again in the air, was already almost Paris for me — so that when I at last fidgeted into the Park, where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next thing to Europe, and in fact HAD to be, since it’s the very antithesis of Eastridge. I regularly revelled in that sense that Eliza couldn’t have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains of sense she would have put in an appearance at the Chataways’ with the lark, or at least with the manicure, who seems there almost as early stirring. Or rather, really, she would have reported herself as soon as their train, that of the “guilty couple,” got in; no matter how late in the evening. It was at any rate actually uplifting to realize that I had got thus, in three minutes, the pull of her in regard to her great New York friends. My eye, as Lorraine says, how she HAS, on all this ground of those people, been piling it on! If Maria, who has so bowed her head, gets any such glimpse of what her aunt has been making her bow it to — well, I think I shall then entertain something of the human pity for Eliza, that I found myself, while I walked about, fairly entertaining for my sister.

What were they, what ARE they, the Chataways, anyhow? I don’t even yet know, I confess; but now I don’t want to — I don’t care a hang, having no further use for them whatever. But on one of the Park benches, in the golden morning, the wonderment added, I remember, to my joy, for we hadn’t, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them: Lorraine only pretending a little, with her charming elfish art, that she occasionally was, in order to see how far Eliza would go. Well, that brilliant woman HAD gone pretty far for us, truly, if, after all, they were only in the manicure line. She was a-doing of it, as Lorraine says, my massive lady was, in the “parlor” where I don’t suppose it’s usually done; and aren’t there such places, precisely, AS Manicure Parlors, where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to? Oh, I do hope, for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from us! Otherwise, by all the gods, it’s just a boarding-house: there was exactly the smell in the hall, THE boarding-house smell, that pervaded my old greasy haunt of the League days: that boiled atmosphere that seems to belong at once, confusedly, to a domestic “wash” and to inferior food — as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the saucepan and the latter in the tubs.

There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chataway’s queer look at me on my saying I was Eliza’s nephew — the droll effect of her making on her side a discovery about ME. Yes, she made it, and as against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me; so that if Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged in New York about Eastridge. I didn’t clearly, for Mrs. Chataway, come up to the brag — or perhaps rather didn’t come down to it: since I dare say the poor lady’s consternation meant simply that my aunt has confessed to me but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at the most; or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not as — well, as what I am. Whatever I am, in any case, and however awkward a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty minutes of the Park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle justified.

I could of course scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet alley, pulling up to gape, I recognized in a young man brooding on a bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward! There he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard. There is certainly but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep — or even, for that matter, the hart ungalled play; the wonder of my coincidence shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young despair wishes to commune with immensity it can ONLY do so either in a hall bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on my prey. To sit down, in short, you’ve GOT to sit there; there isn’t another square inch of the whole place over which you haven’t got, as everything shrieks at you, to step lively. Poor Goward, I could see at a glance, wanted very much to sit down — looked indeed very much as if he wanted never, NEVER again to get up.

I hovered there — I couldn’t help it, a bit gloatingly — before I pounced; and yet even when he became aware of me, as he did in a minute, he didn’t shift his position by an inch, but only took me and my dreadful meaning, with his wan stare, as a part of the strange burden of his fate. He didn’t seem even surprised to speak of; he had waked up — premising his brief, bewildered delirium — to the sense that something NATURAL must happen, and even to the fond hope that something natural WOULD; and I was simply the form in which it was happening. I came nearer, I stood before him; and he kept up at me the oddest stare — which was plainly but the dumb yearning that I would explain, explain! He wanted everything told him — but every single thing; as if, after a tremendous fall, or some wild parabola through the air, the effect of a violent explosion under his feet, he had landed at a vast distance from his starting-point and required to know where he was. Well, the charming thing was that this affected me as giving the very sharpest point to the idea that, in asking myself how I should deal with him, I had already so vividly entertained.

CHAPTER VIII THE MARRIED DAUGHTER by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims — that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal, myself, because nobody — distinctly not one person — in our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves; nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether any one else in the world understood me or not.

I suppose — in fact, I know — that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy’s which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me.

Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of this family. But nobody knows as well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them, collectively and individually considered. An older sister, if she have any consciousness of responsibility at all, is, to my mind, not in an easy position. Her extra years give her an extra sense. One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety which the younger children cannot share. She has, in a way, the intelligence and forethought of a mother without a mother’s authority or privilege.

When father had that typhoid and could not sleep — dear father! in his normal condition he sleeps like a bag of corn-meal — who was there in all the house to keep those boys quiet? Nobody but me. When they organized a military company in our back yard directly under father’s windows — two drums, a fish-horn, a jews-harp, a fife, and three tin pans — was there anybody but me to put a stop to it? It was on this occasion that the pet name Moolymaria, afterward corrupted into Messymaria, and finally evolved into Meddlymaria, became attached to me. To this day I do not like to think how many cries I had over it. Then when Charles Edward got into debt and nobody dared to tell father; and when Billy had the measles and there wasn’t a throat in the house to read to him four hours a day except my unpopular throat; and when Charles Edward had that quarrel over a girl with a squash-colored dress and cerise hair-ribbons; or when Alice fell in love with an automobile, the chauffeur being incidentally thrown in, and took to riding around the country with him — who put a stop to it? Who was the only person in the family that COULD put a stop to it?

Then again — but what’s the use? My very temperament I can see now (I didn’t see it when I lived at home) is in itself an unpopular one in a family like ours. I forecast, I foresee, I provide, I plan — it is my “natur’ to.” I can’t go sprawling through life. I must know where I am to set my foot. Dear mother has no more sense of anxiety than a rice pudding, and father is as cool as one of his own ice-pitchers. We all know what Charles Edward is, and I didn’t count grandmother and Aunt Elizabeth.

There has been my blunder. I ought to have counted Aunt Elizabeth. I ought to have fathomed her. It never occurred to me that she was deep enough to drop a plummet in. I, the burden-bearer, the caretaker, the worrier; I, who am opprobriously called “the manager” in this family — I have failed them at this critical point in their household history. I did not foresee, I did not forecast, I did not worry, I did not manage. It did not occur to me to manage after we had got Peggy safely graduated and engaged, and now this dreadful thing has gaped beneath us like the fissures at San Francisco or Kingston, and poor little Peggy has tumbled into it. A teacupful of “management” might have prevented it; an ounce of worry would have saved it all. I lacked that teacupful; I missed that ounce. The veriest popular optimist could have done no worse. I am smothered with my own stupidity. I have borne this humiliating condition of things as long as I can. I propose to go over to that house and take the helm in this emergency. I don’t care whether I am popular or unpopular for it. But something has got to be done for Peggy, and I am going to do it.

I have been over and I have done it. I have taken the “management” of the whole thing — not even discouraged by this unfortunate word. I own I am rather raw to it. But the time has come when, though I bled beneath it, I must act as if I didn’t. At all events I must ACT. ... I have acted. I am going to New York by the early morning express — the 7.20. I would go to-night-in fact, I really ought to go to-night. But Tom has a supper “on” with some visitors to the Works. He won’t be home till late, and I can’t go without seeing Tom. It would hurt his feelings, and that is a thing no wife ought to do, and my kind of wife can’t do.

I found the house in its usual gelatinous condition. There wasn’t a back-bone in it, scarcely an ankle-joint to stand upon: plenty of crying, but no thinking; a mush of talk, but no decision. To cap the situation, Charles Edward has gone on to New York with a preposterous conviction that HE can clear it up. . . . CHARLES EDWARD! If there is a living member of the household — But never mind that. This circumstance was enough for me, that’s all. It brought out all the determination in me, all the manager, if you choose to put it so.

I shall go to New York myself and take the whole thing in hand. If I needed anything to padlock my purpose those dozen words with Peggy would have turned the key upon it. When I found that she wasn’t crying; when I got face to face with that soft, fine excitement in the eyes which a girl wears when she has a love-affair, not stagnant, but in action — I concluded at once that Peggy had her reservations and was keeping something from me. On pretence of wanting a doughnut I got her into the pantry and shut both doors.

“Peggy,” I said, “what has Charles Edward gone to New York for? Do you know?”

Peggy wound a big doughnut spinning around her engagement finger and made no reply.

“If it has anything to do with you and Harry Goward, you must tell me, Peggy. You must tell me instantly.”

Peggy put a doughnut on her wedding finger and observed, with pained perplexity, that it would not spin, but stuck.

“What is Charles Edward up to?” I persisted.

The opening rose-bud of Peggy’s face took on a furtive expression, like that of certain pansies, or some orchids I have seen. “He is going to take me to Europe,” she admitted, removing both her doughnut rings.

“YOU! To EUROPE!”

“He and Lorraine. When this is blown by. They want to get me away.”

“Away from what? Away from Harry Goward?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” blubbered Peggy.

She now began, in a perfectly normal manner, to mop her eyes with her handkerchief.

“Do you want to be got away from Harry Goward?” I demanded.

“I never said I did,” sobbed Peggy. “I never said so, not one little bit. But oh, Maria! Moolymaria! You can’t think how dreadful it is to be a girl, an engaged girl, and not know what to do!”

Then and there an active idea — one with bones in it — raced and overtook me, and I shot out: “Where is that letter?”

“Mother has it,” replied Peggy.

“Have you opened it?”

“No.”

“Has Aunt Elizabeth opened it?”

“Oh no!”

“Did Charlies Edward take it with him?”

“I don’t think he did. I will go ask mother.”

“Go ask mother for that letter,” I commanded, “and bring it to me.”

Peggy gave me one mutinous look, but the instinct of a younger sister was in her and she obeyed me. She brought the letter. I have this precious document in my pocket. I asked her if she would trust me to find out to whom that letter was addressed. After some hesitation she replied that she would. I reminded her that she was the only person in the world who could give me this authority — which pleased her. I told her that I should accept it as a solemn trust, and do my highest and best with it for her sake.

“Peggy,” I said, “this is not altogether a pleasant job for me, but you are my little sister and I will take care of you. Kiss your old Meddlymaria, Peggy.” She took down her sopping handkerchief and lifted her warm, wet face. So I kissed Peggy. And I am going on the 7.20 morning train.

It is now ten o’clock. My suit-case is packed, my ticket is bought, but Tom has not come back, and the worst of it is he can’t get back to-night. He telephoned between courses at his dinner that he had accepted an invitation to go home for the night with one of the men they are dining. It seems he is a “person of importance” — there is a big order behind the junket, and Tom has gone home with him to talk it over. The ridiculous thing about it is that I forget where he was going. Of course I could telephone to the hotel and find out, but men don’t like telephoning wives — at least, my man doesn’t. It makes it rather hard, going on this trip without kissing Tom good-bye. I had half made up my mind to throw the whole thing over, but Peggy is pretty young; she has a long life before her; there is a good deal at stake. So Tom and I kissed by electricity, and he said that it was all right, and to go ahead, and the other absurd thing about that is that Tom didn’t ask me for my New York address, and I forgot to tell him. We are like two asteroids spinning through space, neither knowing the other’s route or destination. In point of fact, I shall register at “The Sphinx,” that nice ladies’ hotel where mere man is never admitted.

I have always supposed that the Mrs. Chataway Aunt Elizabeth talks about kept a boarding-house. I think Aunt Elizabeth rolls in upon her like a spent wave between visits. I have no doubt that I shall be able to trace Aunt Elizabeth by her weeds upon this beach. After that the rest is easy. I must leave my address for Tom pinned up somewhere. Matilda’s mind wouldn’t hold it if I stuck it through her brain with a hat-pin. I think I will glue it to his library table, and I’ll do it this minute to make sure. ... I have directed Matilda to give him chicken croquettes for his luncheon, and I have written out the menu for every meal till I get home. Poor Tom! He isn’t used to eating alone. I wish I thought he would mind it as much as I do.

Eleven o’clock. — I am obsessed with an idea, and I have yielded to it; whether for good or ill, for wisdom or folly, remains to be proved. I have telephoned Dr. Denbigh and suggested to him that he should go to New York, too. Considered in any light but that of Peggy’s welfare — But I am not considering anything in any light but that of Peggy’s welfare. Dr. Denbigh used to have a little tendresse for Peggy — it was never anything more, I am convinced. She is too young for him. A doctor sees so many women; he grows critical, if not captious. Character goes for more with him than with most men; looks go for less; and poor little Peggy — who can deny? — up to this point in her development is chiefly looks.

I intimated to the doctor that my errand to New York was of an important nature: that it concerned my younger sister; that my husband was, unfortunately, out of town, and that I needed masculine advice. I am not in the habit of flattering the doctor, and he swallowed this delicate bait, as I thought he would. When I asked him if he didn’t think he needed a little vacation, if he didn’t think he could get the old doctor from Southwest Eastridge to take his practice for two days, he said he didn’t know but he could. The grippe epidemic had gone down, nothing more strenuous than a few cases of measles stood in the way; in fact, Eastridge at the present time, he averred, was lamentably healthy. When he had committed himself so far as this, he hesitated, and very seriously said:

“Mrs. Price, you have never asked me to do a foolish thing, and I have known you for a good many years. It is too late to come over and talk it out with you. If you assure me that you consider your object in making this request important I will go. We won’t waste words about it. What train do you take?”

I am not a person of divination or intuition. I think I have rather a commonplace, careful, painstaking mind. But if ever I had an inspiration in my life I think I have one now. Perhaps it is the novelty of it that makes me confide in it with so little reflection. My inspiration, in a word, is this:

Aunt Elizabeth has reached the point where she is ready for a new man. I know I don’t understand her kind of woman by experience. I don’t suppose I do by sympathy. I have to reason her out.

I have reasoned Aunt Elizabeth out to this conclusion: She always has had, she always must have, she always will have, the admiration of some man or men to engross her attention. She is an attractive woman; she knows it; women admit it; and men feel it. I don’t think Aunt Elizabeth is a heartless person; not an irresponsible one, only an idle and unhappy one. She lives on this intoxicant as other women might live on tea or gossip, as a man would take his dram or his tobacco. She drinks this wine because she is thirsty, and the plain, cool, spring-water of life has grown stale to her. It is corked up in bottles like the water sold in towns where the drinking-supply is low. It has ceased to be palatable to her.

My interpretation is, that there is no man on her horizon just now except Harry Goward, and I won’t do her the injustice to believe that she wouldn’t be thankful to be rid of him just for her own sake; to say nothing of Peggy’s.

Aunt Elizabeth, I repeat, needs a new man. If Dr. Denbigh is willing to fill this role for a few days (of course I must be perfectly frank with him about it) the effect upon Harry Goward will be instantaneous. His disillusion will be complete; his return to Peggy in a state of abject humiliation will be assured. I mean, assuming that the fellow is capable of manly feeling, and that Peggy has aroused it. That, of course, remains for me to find out.

How I am to fish Harry Goward out of the ocean of New York city doesn’t trouble me in the least. Given Aunt Elizabeth, he will complete the equation. If Mrs. Chataway should fail me — But I won’t suppose that Mrs. Chataway will fail. I must be sure and explain to Tom about Dr. Denbigh.

“The Sphinx,” New York, 10 P.M. — I arrived — that is to say, we arrived in this town at ten minutes past one o’clock, almost ten hours ago. Dr. Denbigh has gone somewhere — and that reminds me that I forgot to ask him where. I never thought of it until this minute, but it has just occurred to me that it may be quite as well from an ignorant point of view that “The Sphinx” excludes mere man from its portals.

He was good to me on the train, very good indeed. I can’t deny that he flushed a little when I told him frankly what I wanted of him. At first I thought that he was going to be angry. Then I saw the corners of his mustache twitch. Then our sense of humor got the better of us, and then I laughed, and then he laughed, and I felt that the crisis was passed. I explained to him while we were in the Pullman car, as well as I could without being overheard by a fat lady with three chins, and a girl with a permit for a pet poodle, what it was that I wanted of him. I related the story of Peggy’s misfortune — in confidence, of course; and explained the part he was expected to play — confidentially, of course; in fact, I laid my plot before him from beginning to end.

“If the boy doesn’t love her, you see,” I suggested, “the sooner we know it the better. She must break it off, if her heart is broken in the process. If he does love her — my private opinion is he thinks he does — I won’t have Peggy’s whole future wrecked by one of Aunt Elizabeth’s flirtations. The reef is too small for the catastrophe. I shall find Aunt Elizabeth. Oh yes, I shall find Aunt Elizabeth! I have no more doubt of that than I have that Matilda is putting too much onion in the croquettes for Tom this blessed minute. If I find her I shall find the boy; but what good is that going to do me, if I find either of them or both of them, if we can’t disillusionize the boy?”

“In a word,” interrupted the doctor, rather tartly, “all you want of me is to walk across the troubled stage—”

“For Peggy’s sake,” I observed.

“Of course, yes, for Peggy’s sake. I am to walk across this fantastic stage in the inglorious capacity of a philanderer.”

“That is precisely it,” I admitted. “I want you to philander with Aunt Elizabeth for two days, one day; two hours, one hour; just long enough, only long enough to bring that fool boy to his senses.”

“If I had suspected the nature of the purpose I am to serve in this complication” — began the doctor, without a smile. “I trusted your judgment, Mrs. Price, and good sense — I have never known either to fail before. However,” he added, manfully, “I am in for it now, and I would do more disagreeable things than this for Peggy’s sake. But perhaps,” he suggested, grimly, “we sha’n’t find either of them.”

He retired from the subject obviously, if gracefully, and began to play with the poodle that had the Pullman permit. I happen to know that if there is any species of dog the doctor does not love it is a poodle, with or without a permit. The lady with three chins asked me if my husband were fond of dogs — I think she said, so fond as THAT. She glanced at the girl whom the poodle owned.

I don’t know why it should be a surprise to me, but it was; that the chin lady and the poodle girl have both registered at “The Sphinx.”

Directly after luncheon, for I could not afford to lose a minute, I went to Mrs. Chataway’s; the agreement being that the doctor should follow me in an absent-minded way a little later. But there was a blockade on the way, and I wasn’t on time. What I took to be Mrs. Chataway herself admitted me with undisguised hesitation.

Miss Talbert, she said, was not at home; that is — no, she was not home. She explained that a great many people had been asking for Miss Talbert; there were two in the parlor now.

When I demanded, “Two what?” she replied, in a breathless tone, “Two gentlemen,” and ushered me into that old-fashioned architectural effort known to early New York as a front and back parlor.

One of the gentlemen, as I expected, proved to be Dr. Denbigh. The other was flatly and unmistakably Charles Edward. The doctor offered to excuse himself, but I took Charles Edward into the back parlor, and I made so bold as to draw the folding-doors. I felt that the occasion justified worse than this.

The colloquy between myself and Charles Edward was brief and pointed. He began by saying, “YOU here! What a mess!—”

My conviction is that he saved himself just in time from Messymaria.

“Have you found him?” I propounded.

“No.”

“Haven’t seen him?”

“I didn’t say I hadn’t seen him.”

“What did he say?” I insisted.

“Not very much. It was in the Park.”

“In the PARK? Not very MUCH? How could you let him go?”

“I didn’t let him go,” drawled Charles Edward. “He invited me to dinner. A man can’t ask a fellow what his intentions are to a man’s sister in a park. I hadn’t said very much up to that point; he did most of the talking. I thought I would put it off till we got round to the cigars.”

“Then?” I cried, impatiently, “and then?”

“You see,” reluctantly admitted Charles Edward, “there wasn’t any then. I didn’t dine with him, after all. I couldn’t find it—”

“Couldn’t find what?”

“Couldn’t find the hotel,” said Charles Edward, defiantly. “I lost the address. Couldn’t even say that it was a hotel. I believe it was a club. He seems to be a sort of a swell — for a coeducational professor — anyhow, I lost the address; and that is the long and short of it.”

“If it had been a studio or a Bohemian cafe—” I began.

“I should undoubtedly have remembered it,” admitted Charles Edward, in his languid way.

“You have lost him,” I replied, frostily. “You have lost Harry Goward, and you come here—”

“On the same errand, I presume, my distressed and distressing sister, that has brought you. Have you seen her?” he demanded, with sudden, uncharacteristic shrewdness.

At this moment a portiere opened at the side of my back parlor, and Mrs. Chataway, voluminously appearing, mysteriously beckoned me. I followed her into the dreariest hall I think I ever saw even in a New York boarding-house. There the landlady frankly told me that Miss Talbert wasn’t out. She was in her room packing to make one of her visits. Miss Talbert had given orders that she was to be denied to gentlemen friends.

No, she never said anything about ladies. (This I thought highly probable.) But if I were anything to her and chose to take the responsibility — I chose and I did. In five minutes I was in Aunt Elizabeth’s room, and had turned the key upon an interview which was briefer but more startling than I could possibly have anticipated.

Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women whose attraction increases with the negligee or the deshabille. She was so pretty in her pink kimono that she half disarmed me. She had been crying, and had a gentle look.

When I said, “Where is he?” and when she said, “If you mean Harry Goward — I don’t know,” I was prepared to believe her without evidence. She looked too pretty to doubt. Besides, I cannot say that I have ever caught Aunt Elizabeth in a real fib. She may be a “charmian,” but I don’t think she is a liar. Yet I pushed my case severely.

“If you and he hadn’t taken that 5.40 train to New York—”

“We didn’t take the 5.40 train,” retorted Elizabeth Talbert, hotly. “It took us. You don’t suppose — but I suppose you do, and I suppose I know what the whole family supposes — As if I would do such a dastardly! — As if I didn’t clear out on purpose to get away from him — to get out of the whole mix — As if I knew that young one would be aboard that train!”

“But he was aboard. You admit that.”

“Oh yes, he got aboard.”

“Made a pleasant travelling companion, Auntie?”

“I don’t know,” said Aunt Elizabeth, shortly. “I didn’t have ten words with him. I told him he had put me in a position I should never forgive. Then he told me I had put him in a worse. We quarrelled, and he went into the smoker. At the Grand Central he checked my suitcase and lifted his hat. He did ask if I were going to Mrs. Chataway’s. I have never seen him since.”

“Aunt Elizabeth,” I said, sadly, “I am younger than you—”

“Not so very much!” retorted Aunt Elizabeth.

“ — and I must speak to you with the respect due my father’s sister when I say that the nobility of your conduct on this occasion — a nobility which you will pardon me for suggesting that I didn’t altogether count on — is likely to prove the catastrophe of the situation.”

Aunt Elizabeth stared at me with her wet, coquettish eyes. “You’re pretty hard on me, Maria,” she said; “you always were.”

“Hurry and dress,” I suggested, soothingly; “there are two gentlemen to see you downstairs.”

Aunt Elizabeth shook her head. She asserted with evident sincerity that she didn’t wish to see any gentlemen; she didn’t care to see any gentlemen under any circumstances; she never meant to have anything to do with gentlemen again. She said something about becoming a deaconess in the Episcopal Church; she spoke of the attractions in the life of a trained nurse; mentioned settlement work; and asked me what I thought of Elizabeth Frye, Dorothea Dix, and Clara Barton.

“This is one advantage that Catholics have over us,” she observed, dreamily: “one could go into a nunnery; then one would be quite sure there would be no men to let loose the consequences of their natures and conduct upon a woman’s whole existence.”

“These two downstairs have waited a good while,” I returned, carelessly. “One of them is a married man and is used to it. But the other is not.”

“Very well,” said Aunt Elizabeth, with what (it occurred to me) was a smile of forced dejection. “To please you, Maria, I will go down.”

If Aunt Elizabeth’s dejection were assumed, mine was not. I have been in the lowest possible spirits since my unlucky discovery. Anything and everything had occurred to me except that she and that boy could quarrel. I had fancied him shadowing Mrs. Chataway for the slightest sign of his charmer. I don’t know that I should have been surprised to see him curled up, like a dog, asleep on the door-steps. At the present moment I have no more means of finding the wetched lad than I had in Eastridge; not so much, for doubtless Peggy has his prehistoric addresses. I am very unhappy. I have not had the heart left in me to admire Dr. Denbigh, who has filled his role brilliantly all the afternoon. In half an hour he and Aunt Elizabeth had philandered as deep as a six months’ flirtation; and I must say that they have kept at it with an art amounting almost to sincerity. Aunt Elizabeth did not once mention settlement work, and put no inquiries to Dr. Denbigh about Elizabeth Frye, Dorothea Dix, or Clara Barton.

I think he took her to the Metropolitan Museum; I know he invited her to the theatre; and there is some sort of an appointment for to-morrow morning, I forget what. But my marked success at this end of the stage only adds poignancy to my sense of defeat at the other.

I am very homesick. I wish I could see Tom. I do hope Tom found my message about Dr. Denbigh.

Twenty-four hours later. — The breeze of yesterday has spun into a whirlwind to-day. I am half stunned by the possibilities of human existence. One lives the simple life at Eastridge; and New York strikes me on the head like some heavy thing blown down. If these are the results of the very little love-affair of one very little girl — what must the great emotion, the real experience, the vigorous crisis, bring?

At “The Sphinx,” as is well known, no male being is admitted on any pretence. I believe the porter (for heavy trunks) is the only exception. The bell-boys are bell-girls. The clerk is a matron, and the proprietress a widow in half-mourning.

At nine o’clock this morning I was peremptorily summoned out of the breakfast-room and ordered to the desk. Two frowning faces received me. With cold politeness I was reminded of the leading clause in the constitution of that house.

“Positively,” observed the clerk, “no gentlemen callers are permitted at this hotel, and, madam, there are two on the door-steps who insist upon an interview with you; they have been there half an hour. One of them refuses to recognize the rule of the house. He insists upon an immediate suspension of it. I regret to tell you that he went so far as to mention that he would have a conversation with you if it took a search-warrant to get it.”

“He says,” interrupted the proprietress in half-mourning, “that he is your husband.”

She spoke quite distinctly, and as these dreadful words re-echoed through the lobby, I saw that two ladies had come out from the reception-room and were drinking the scene down. One of these was the fat lady with the three chins; the other was the poodle girl. She held him, at that unpleasant moment, by a lavender ribbon leash. It seems she gets a permit for him everywhere.

And he is the wrong sex, I am sure, to obtain any privileges at “The Sphinx.”

The mosaic of that beautiful lobby did not open and swallow me down as I tottered across it to the vestibule. A strapping door-girl guarded the entrance. Grouped upon the long flight of marble steps two men impatiently awaited me. The one with the twitching mustache was Dr. Denbigh. But he, oh, he with the lightning in his eyes, he was my husband, Thomas Price.

“Maria,” he began, with ominous composure, “if you have any explanations to offer of these extraordinary circumstances—” Then the torrent burst forth. Every expletive familiar to the wives of good North-American husbands broke from Tom’s unleashed lips. “I didn’t hear of it till afternoon. I took the midnight express. Billy told Matilda he saw you get aboard the 7.20 train It’s all over Eastridge. We have been married thirteen years, Maria, and I have always had occasion to trust your judgment and good sense till now.”

“That is precisely what I told her,” ventured Dr. Denbigh.

“As for you, sir!” Tom Price turned, towering. “It is fortunate for YOU that I find my wife in this darned shebang. — Any female policeman behind that door-girl? Doctor? Why, Doctor! Say, DOCTOR! Dr. Denbigh! What in thunder are you laughing at?”

The doctor’s sense of humor (a quality for which I must admit my dear husband is not so distinguished as he is for some more important traits) had got the better of him. He put his hands in his pockets, threw back his handsome head, and then and there, in that sacred feminine vestibule, he laughed as no woman could laugh if she tried.

In the teeth of the door-girl, the clerk, and the proprietress, in the face of the chin lady and the poodle girl, I ran straight to Tom and put my arms around his neck. At first I was afraid he was going to push me off, but he thought better of it. Then I cried out upon him as a woman will when she has had a good scare. “Oh, Tom! Tom! Tom! You dear old precious Tom! I told you all about it. I wrote you a note about Dr. Denbigh and — and everything. You don’t mean to say you never found it?”

“Where the deuce did you leave it?” demanded Thomas Price.

“Why, I stuck it on your pin-cushion! I pinned it there. I pinned it down with two safety-pins. I was very particular to.”

“PIN-CUSHION!” exploded Tom. “A message — an important message — to a MAN — on a PIN-cushion!”

Then, with that admirable self-possession which has been the secret of Tom Price’s success in life, he immediately recovered himself. “Next time, Maria,” he observed, with pitying gentleness, “pin it on the hen-coop. Or, paste it on the haymow with the mucilage-brush. Or, fasten it to the watering-trough in the square — anywhere I might run across it. — Doctor! I beg your pardon, old fellow. — Now madam, if you are allowed by law to get out of this blasted house I can’t get into, I will pay your bill, Maria, and take you to a respectable hotel. What’s that one we used to go to when we ran down to see Irving? I can’t think — Oh yes— ‘The Holy Family.’”

“Don’t be blasphemous, Price, whatever else you are!” admonished the doctor. He was choking with laughter.

“Perhaps it was ‘The Whole Family,’ Tom?” I suggested, meekly.

“Come to think of it,” admitted Tom, “it must have been ‘The Happy Family.’ Get your things on, Mysie, and we’ll get out of this inhuman place.”

I held my head as high as I could when I came back through the lobby, with a stout chambermaid carrying my suit-case. The clerk sniffed audibly; the proprietress met me with a granite eye; the lady with the three chins muttered something which I am convinced it would not have added to my personal happiness to hear; but I thought the girl with the lavender poodle watched me a little wistfully as I whirled away upon my husband’s big forgiving arm.

The doctor, who had really laughed until he cried, followed, wiping his merry eyes. These glistened when on the sidewalk directly opposite the hotel entrance we met Elizabeth Talbert, who had arranged, but in the agitation of the morning I had entirely forgotten it, to come to see me at that very hour.

So we fell into line, the doctor and Aunt Elizabeth, my husband and I, on our way to take the cars for “The Happy Family,” when suddenly Tom clapped his hands to his pockets and announced that he had forgotten — he must send a telegram. Coming away in such a hurry, he must telegraph to the Works. Tom is an incurable telegrapher (I have long cherished the conviction that he is the main support of the Western Union Telegraph Company), and we all followed him to the nearest office where he could get a wire.

Some one was before him at the window, a person holding a hesitant pencil above a yellow blank. I believe I am not without self-possession myself, partly natural, and partly acquired by living so long with Tom; but it took all I ever had not to utter a womanish cry when the young man turned his face and I saw that it was Harry Goward.

The boy’s glance swept us all in. When it reached Aunt Elizabeth and Dr. Denbigh he paled, whether with relief or regret I had my doubts at that moment, and I have them still. An emotion of some species possessed him so that he could not for the moment speak. Aunt Elizabeth was the first to recover herself.

“Ah?” she cooed. “What a happy accident! Mr. Goward, allow me to present you to my friend Dr. Denbigh.”

The doctor bowed with a portentous gravity. It was almost the equal of Harry’s own.

After this satisfactory incident everybody fell back instinctively and gave the command of the expedition to me. The boy anxiously yielded his place at the telegraph window to Tom; in fact, I took the pains to notice that Harry’s telegram was not sent, or was deferred to a more convenient season. I invited him to run over to “The Happy Family” with us, and we all fell into rank again on the sidewalk, the boy not without embarrassment. Of this I made it my first duty to relieve him. We chatted of the weather and the theatre and hotels. When we had walked a short distance, we met Charles Edward dawdling along over to “The Sphinx” (however reluctantly) to call upon his precious elder sister. So we paired off naturally: Aunt Elizabeth and the doctor in front, Goward and I behind them, and Tom and Charles Edward bringing up the rear.

My heart dropped when I saw what a family party air we had. I felt it to my finger-tips, and I could see that the lad writhed under it. His expression changed from misery to mutiny. I should not have been surprised if he had made one plunge into the roaring current of Broadway and sunk from sight forever. The thing that troubled me most was the poor taste of it: as if the whole family had congregated in the metropolis to capture that unhappy boy. For the first time I began to feel some sympathy for him.

“Mr. Goward,” I said, abruptly, in a voice too low even for Aunt Elizabeth to hear, “nobody wishes to make you uncomfortable. We are not here for any such purpose. I have something in my pocket to show you; that is all. It will interest you, I am sure. As soon as we get to the hotel, if you don’t mind, I will tell you about it — or, in fact, will give it to you. Count the rest out. They are not in the secret.”

“I feel like a convict arrested by plainclothes men,” complained Harry, glancing before and behind.

“You won’t,” I said, “when you have talked to me five minutes.”

“Sha’n’t I?” he asked, dully. He said nothing more, and we pursued our way to the hotel in silence. Elizabeth Talbert and Dr. Denbigh talked enough to make up for us.

Aunt Elizabeth made herself so charming, so acutely charming, that I heard the boy draw one quick, sharp breath. But his eyes followed her more sullenly than tenderly, and when she clung to the doctor’s arm upon a muddy crossing the young man turned to me with a sad, whimsical smile.

“It doesn’t seem to make much difference — does it, Mrs. Price? She treats us all alike.”

There is the prettiest little writing-room in “The Happy Family,” all blue and mahogany and quiet. This place was deserted, and thither I betook myself with Harry Goward, and there he began as soon as we were alone:

“Well, what is it, Mrs. Price?”

“Nothing but this,” I said, gently enough. “I have taken it upon myself to solve a mystery that has caused a good deal of confusion in our family.”

Without warning I took the muddy letter from my pocket, and slid it under his eyes upon the big blue blotter.

“I don’t wish to be intrusive or strenuous,” I pleaded, “none of us wishes to be that. Nobody is here to call you to account, Mr. Goward, but you see this letter. It was received at our house in the condition in which you find it. Would you be so kind as to supply the missing address? That is all I want of you.”

The boy’s complexion ran through the palette, and subsided from a dull Indian-red to a sickly Nile-green. “Hasn’t she ever read it?” he demanded.

“Nobody has ever read it,” I said. “Naturally — since it is not addressed. This letter went fishing with Billy.”

The young man took the letter and examined it in trembling silence.

Perhaps if Fate ever broke him on her wheel it was at that moment. His destiny was still in his own hands, and so was the letter. Unaddressed, it was his personal property. He could retain it if he chose, and the family mystery would darken into deeper gloom than ever. I felt my comfortable, commonplace heart beat rapidly.

Our silence had passed the point of discomfort, and was fast reaching that of anguish, when the boy lifted his head manfully, dipped one of “The Happy Family’s” new pens into a stately ink-bottle, and rapidly filled in the missing address upon the unfortunate letter. He handed it to me without a word. My eyes blurred when I read:

“Personal. Miss Peggy Talbert, Eastridge. (Kindness of Miss Alice Talbert.)”

“What shall I do with it?” I asked, controlling my agitation.

“Deliver it to her, if you please, as quickly as possible. I thought of everything else. I never thought of this.”

“Never thought of—”

“That she might not have got it.”

“Now then, Mr. Goward,” I ventured, still speaking very gently, “do you mind telling me what you took that 5.40 train for?”

“Why, because I didn’t get an answer from the letter!” exclaimed Harry, raising his voice for the first time. “A man doesn’t write a letter such as that more than once in a lifetime. It was a very important letter. I told her everything. I explained everything. I felt I ought to have a hearing. If she wanted to throw me over (I don’t deny she had the right to) I would rather she had taken some other way than — than to ignore such a letter. I waited for an answer to that letter until quarter-past five. I just caught the 5.40 train and went to my aunt’s house, the one — you know my uncle died the other day — I have been there ever since. By-the-way, Mrs. Price, if anything else comes up, and if you have any messages for me, I shall be greatly obliged if you will take my address.”

He handed me his card with an up-town street and number, and I snapped it into the inner pocket of my wallet.

“Do you think,” demanded Harry Goward, outright, “that she will ever forgive me, REALLY forgive me?”

“That is for you to find out,” I answered, smiling comfortably; for I could not possibly have Harry think that any of us — even an unpopular elder sister — could be there to fling Peggy at the young man’s head. “That is between you and Peggy.”

“When shall you get home with that letter?” demanded Harry.

“Ask my husband. At a guess, I should say tomorrow.”

“Perhaps I had better wait until she has read the letter,” mused the boy. “Don’t you think so, Mrs. Price?”

“I don’t think anything about it. I will not take any responsibility about it. I have got the letter officially addressed, and there my errand ends.”

“You see, I want to do the best thing,” urged Harry Goward. “And so much has happened since I wrote that letter — and when you come to think that she has never read it—”

“I will mail it to her,” I said, suddenly. “I will enclose it with a line and get it off by special delivery this noon.”

“It might not reach her,” suggested Harry, pessimistically. “Everything seems to go wrong in this affair.”

“Would you prefer to send it yourself?” I asked.

Harry Goward shook his head.

“I would rather wait till she has read it. I feel, under the circumstances, that I owe that to her.”

Now, at that critical moment, a wide figure darkened the entrance of the writing-room, and, plumping down solidly at another table, spread out a fat, ring-laden hand and began to write a laborious letter. It was the lady with the three chins. But the girl with the poodle did not put in an appearance. I learned afterward that the dog rule of “The Happy Family” admitted of no permits.

Harry Goward and I parted abruptly but pleasantly, and he earnestly requested the privilege of being permitted to call upon me to-morrow morning.

I mailed the letter to Peggy by special delivery, and just now I asked Tom if he didn’t think it was wise.

“I can tell you better, my dear, day after tomorrow,” he replied. And that was all I could get out of him.

“The Happy Family.” — It is day after tomorrow, and Tom and I are going to take the noon train home. Our purpose, or at least my purpose, to this effect has been confirmed, if not created, by the following circumstances:

Yesterday, a few hours after I had parted from Harry Goward in the blue writing-room of “The Happy Family,” Tom received from father a telegram which ran like this:

“Off for Washington — that Gooch business. Shall take Peggy. Child needs change. Will stop over from Colonial Express and lunch Happy Family. Explicitly request no outsider present. Can’t have appearance of false position. Shall take her directly out of New York, after luncheon. Cyrus Talbert.”

Torn between filial duty and sisterly affection, I sat twirling this telegram between my troubled fingers. Tom had dashed it there and blown off somewhere, leaving me, as he usually does, to make my own decisions. Should I tell Harry? Should I not tell Harry? Was it my right? Was it not his due? I vibrated between these inexorable questions, but, like the pendulum I was, I struck no answer anywhere. I had half made up my mind to let matters take their own course. If Goward should happen to call on me when Peggy, flying through New York beneath her father’s stalwart wing, alighted for the instant at “The Happy Family” — was I to blame? Could I be held responsible? It struck me that I could not. On the other hand, father could not be more determined than I that Peggy should not be put into the apparent position of pursuing an irresolute, however repentant, lover. ... I was still debating the question as conscientiously and philosophically as I knew how, when the bell-boy brought me a note despatched by a district messenger, and therefore constitutionally delayed upon the way.

The letter was from my little sister’s fiance, and briefly said:

“My dear Mrs. Price, — I cannot tell you how I thank you for your sisterly sympathy and womanly good sense. You have cleared away a lot of fog out of my mind. I don’t feel that I can wait an unnecessary hour before I see Peggy. I should like to be with her as soon as the letter is. If you will allow me to postpone my appointment with yourself, I shall start for Eastridge by the first train I can catch to-day.

 “Gratefully yours,

“Henry T. Goward.”

CHAPTER IX THE MOTHER by Edith Wyatt

I am sure that I shall surprise no mother of a large family when I say that this hour is the first one I have spent alone for thirty years. I count it, alone. For while I am driving back in the runabout along the six miles of leafy road between the hospital and Eastridge with mother beside me, she is sound asleep under the protection of her little hinged black sunshade, still held upright. She will sleep until we are at home; and, after our anxious morning at the hospital, I am most grateful to the fortune sending me this lucid interval, not only for thinking over what has occurred in the last three days, but also for trying to focus clearly for myself what has happened in the last week, since Elizabeth went on the 5.40 to New York; since Charles followed Elizabeth; since Maria, under Dr. Denbigh’s mysteriously required escort, followed Charles; since Tom followed Maria; and since Cyrus, with my dear girl, followed Tom.

On the warm afternoon before Elizabeth left, as I walked past her open door, with Lena, and carrying an egg-nog to Peggy, I could not avoid hearing down the whole length of the hall a conversation carried on in clear, absorbed tones, between my sister and Alice.

“Did I understand you to say,” said Elizabeth, in an assumption of indifference too elaborate, I think, to deceive even her niece, “that this Mr. Wilde you mention is now living in New York?”

“Oh yes. He conducts all the art-classes at the Crafts Settlement. He encouraged Lorraine’s sisters in their wonderful work. I would love to go into it myself.”

Lorraine’s sisters and her circle once entertained me at tea in their establishment when I visited Charles before his marriage, in New York. They are extremely kind young women, ladies in every respect, who have a workshop called “At the Sign of the Three-legged Stool.” They seem to be carpenters, as nearly as I can tell. They wear fillets and bright, loose clothes; and they make very rough-hewn burnt-wood footstools and odd settees with pieces of glass set about in them. It is all very puzzling. When Charles showed me a candlestick one of the young ladies had made, and talked to me about the decoration and the line, I could see that it was very gracefully designed and nicely put together. But when he noticed that in the wish to be perfectly open-minded to his point of view I was looking very attentively at a queer, uneven wrought-iron brooch with two little pendant polished granite rocks, he only laughed and put his hand on my shawl a minute and brought me more tea.

So that I could understand something of what Alice was mentioning as she went on: “You know Lorraine says that, though not the most PROMINENT, Lyman Wilde is the most RADICAL and TEMPERAMENTAL leader in the great handicraft development in this country. Even most of the persons in favor of it consider that he goes too far. She says, for instance, he is so opposed to machines of all sorts that he thinks it would be better to abolish printing and return to script. He has started what they call a little movement of the kind now, and is training two young scriveners.”

Elizabeth was shaking her head reflectively as I passed the door, and saying: “Ah — no compromise. And always, ALWAYS the love of beauty.” And I heard her advising Alice never, never to be one of the foolish women and men who hurt themselves by dreaming of beauty or happiness in their narrow little lives; repeating sagely that this dream was even worse for the women than for the men; and asked whether Alice supposed the Crafts Settlement address wouldn’t probably be in the New York telephone-book. Alice seemed to be spending a very gratifying afternoon.

My sister Elizabeth’s strongest instinct from her early youth has been the passion inspiring the famous Captain Parklebury Todd, so often quoted by Alice and Billy: “I do not think I ever knew a character so given to creating a sensation. Or p’r’aps I should in justice say, to what, in an Adelphi play, is known as situation.” Never has she gratified her taste in this respect more fully than she did — as I believe quite accidentally and on the inspiration of these words with Alice — in taking the evening train to New York with Mr. Goward.

Twenty or thirty people at the station saw them starting away together, each attempting to avoid recognition, each in the pretence of avoiding the other, each with excited manners. So that, as both Peggy and Elizabeth have been born and brought up here; as, during Mr. Goward’s conspicuous absence and silence, during Peggy’s illness, and all our trying uncertainties and hers, in the last weeks, my sister had widely flung to town talk many tacit insinuations concerning the character of Mr. Goward’s interest in herself; as none of the twenty or thirty people were mute beyond their kind; and as Elizabeth’s nature has never inspired high neighborly confidence — before night a rumor had spread like the wind that Margaret Talbert’s lover had eloped with her aunt.

Billy heard the other children talking of this news and hushing themselves when he came up. Tom learned of the occurrence by a telephone, and, after supper, told Cyrus and myself; Maria was informed of it by telephone through an old friend who thought Maria should know of what every one was saying. Lorraine, walking to the office to meet Charles, was overtaken on the street by Mrs. Temple, greatly concerned for us and for Peggy, and learned the strange story from our sympathetic neighbor, to repeat it to Charles. At ten o’clock there was only one person in the house, perhaps in Eastridge, who was ignorant of our daughter’s singular fortune. That person was our dear girl herself.

Since my own intelligence of the report I had not left her alone with anybody else for a moment; and now I was standing in the hall watching her start safely up-stairs, when to our surprise the front-door latch clicked suddenly; she turned on the stairs; the door opened, and we both faced Charles. From the first still glances he and I gave each other he knew she hadn’t heard. Then he said quietly that he had wished to see Peggy for a moment before she went to sleep. He bade me a very confiding and responsible good-night, and went out with her to the garden where they used to play constantly together when they were children.

Up-stairs, unable to lie down till she came back, I put on a little cambric sack and sat by the window waiting till I should hear her foot on the stairs again. “Charles is telling her,” I said to Cyrus. He was walking up and down the room, dumb with impatience and disgust, too pained for Peggy, too tried by his own helplessness to rest or even to sit still. In a way it has all been harder for him than for any one else. His impulses are stronger and deeper than my dear girl’s, and far less cool. She is very especially precious to him; and, whether because she looks so like him, or because he thinks her ways like my own, her youth and her fortune have always been at once a more anxious and a more lovely concern with him than any one else’s on earth. She is, somehow, our future to him.

While we waited here in this anxiety up-stairs, down in the garden I could hear not the words, but the tones of our children as they spoke together. Charles’s voice sounded first for a long time, with an air of calmness and directness; and Peggy answered him at intervals of listening, answered apparently less with surprise at what he told her than in a quiet acceptance, with a little throb of control, and then in accord with him. Then it was as though they were planning together.

In the still village night their voices sounded very tranquil; after a little while, even buoyant. Peggy laughed once or twice. Little by little a breath of relief blew over both her father’s solicitude and mine. It was partly from the coolness and freshness of the out-door air, and the half-unconscious sense it often brings, that beyond whatever care is close beside you at the instant there is — and especially for the young — so much else in all creation. Then, for me, there was a deep comfort in the knowledge that in this time of need my children had each other; that they could speak so together, in an intimate sympathy, and were, not only superficially in name, but really and beautifully, a brother and sister.

At last, as they parted at the gate, Charles said, in a spirited, downright tone: “Stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything. It’s all you now know and all you need to know, and you’ll be as firm on it as on a rock.”

The lamplight from the street filtering through the elm leaves glimmered on Peggy’s bright hair as she looked up at him. Her eyelashes were wet, but she was laughing as she said: “But, of course, I HAVE to cling to it. It’s the truth. Good-night! Good-night!” And her step on the stairs was light and even skipping.

On the next morning, when I knocked at her door to find whether she would rather breakfast up-stairs, I saw at once she had slept. She stood before the mirror fastening her belt ribbon, and looking so lovely it seemed impossible misfortune should ever touch her.

“Why, mother dear, you aren’t dressed for the library-board meeting! Isn’t that this morning?”

“Yes.”

She looked at me with her little, sweet, quick smile, and we sat down for a moment on her couch together, each with a sense that neither would say one word too sharply pressing.

“Dear mother, why NOT go to the board meeting? You don’t need to protect me so. You CAN’T protect me every minute. You see, of course, last night Charles — told me of what everybody thinks.” Her voice throbbed again. She stopped for a minute. “But for weeks and weeks I had felt something like this coming toward me. And now that it’s come,” she went on, bravely, “we can only just do as we always have done — and not make any difference — can we?”

“Except that I feel I must be here, because we can’t know from minute to minute what may come up.”

“You feel you can’t leave me, mother. But you can. I want to see whoever comes, just as usual. I’d have to at some time, you know, at any rate. And I mean to do it now — until I go away out of Eastridge. Charles is going to arrange that so very wonderfully. He has gone to New York now to see about it.”

“He has, my dear?” I said, in some surprise.

“Yes. And, mother, about — about what’s over,” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“Oh, just — just it couldn’t all have happened in this way if” — she spoke in quite a clear, soft voice, looking straight into my eyes, with one of her quick turns— “he were a real MAN — anybody I could think of as being my husband. It was just that I didn’t truly know him. That was all.”

We held each other’s hands fast for one moment of perfect understanding before we rose.

“Then I’ll go, dear, this morning, just as you like,” I said. She came into my room and fastened my cuff-pins for me. “Why, mother, I don’t believe you and your little duchesse cuffs and your little, fine, gold watch-chain have ever been away from the chair of the library committee at a board meeting for twenty years! Just think what a sensation you were going to make if I hadn’t interfered! There, how nice you look!”

The weather was so inclement during my absence that I felt quite secure concerning all intrusion for her. At noon the storm rose high, with a close-timed thunder and lightning; the Episcopal church spire was struck; two trees were blown over in the square; and, instead of ordering Dan and the horses out in this tumult, I dined with a board member living next the library, and drove home at three o’clock when the violence of the gale had abated.

The house was perfectly still when I reached it. The children were at school; Cyrus, at the factory; mother, napping, with her door closed. In her own room up-stairs, in the middle of the house, Peggy sat alone, in a loose wrapper, with her hair flying over her shoulders. An open book lay unnoticed in her lap. Her face was white and tear-stained, and her eyes looked wild and ill.

As her glance fell on me I saw her need of me, and hurried in to close the door. “Oh, mother; mother!” she moaned. “Such a morning! It’s all come back — all I fought against — all I was conquering. What does it mean? What does it mean?”

“What has happened? Who has been here?”

“Maria — sneering at Charles’s ideas, asking me questions, petting me and pitying me and making a baby of me, until I broke down at last and wanted all the things she wanted to have done, and let her kiss me good-bye for her kindness in doing them—”

In a passion of tears she walked up and down, up and down the room, as her father does, except with that quick, nervous grace she always has, and in a painful, sobbing excitement.

Every sense I had was for an instant’s passage fused in one clear, concentrated anger against a sister who could play so ruthlessly upon my poor child’s woman pulses and emotions, so disarm her of her self-control and right free spirit.

“Why did she come?” I said, at last, with the best calmness I could muster. Peggy stood still for a moment, startled by a coldness in my voice I couldn’t alter.

“She came to find out about things for herself. Then when she did find out about Charles’s way of helping us she simply hated it — and she sent me after — after the letter you had. I got it from your desk, and Maria took it to find out its real address.”

At that she sank again in a chair, and buried her face in her hands, hardly knowing what she was saying. “Oh, what shall I do? What shall I do?” she repeated, softly and wildly. “Yesterday I could behave so well by what I knew was true about him. Then, when Maria came and spoke as though I was three years old, and hadn’t any understanding nor any dignity of my own, and the best thing for any girl, at any rate, were to cling to the man she loved as though she were his mother and he were her dear, erring child” (she began to laugh a little), “the feebler he were the more credit to her for her devotion — then I couldn’t go on by what I knew was true about him — only back, back again to all my — old mistake.” She was laughing and crying now with little, quick gasps, in a sheer hysteria which no doubt would have given her sister entire satisfaction as a manifesto of her normal womanliness.

I brought her a glass of water, and, trying to conceal my own distress for her as well as I could, sat down, silently, near her. Gradually she grew quieter, until the room was so still that we could hear the raindrops from the eaves plash down outside. Peggy pushed back her cloud of bright hair and fastened it in the nape of her neck. At last she said, with conviction: “Mother, Maria didn’t say these things, but I know she thinks them for me, thinks that a woman’s love is just all forgiveness and indulgence. By that she could — she did work on my nerves. But” — and her gray eyes glanced so beautifully and so darkly with a girl’s fine, straight, native, healthy spirit as she said it— “I COULDN’T marry any man but one that I admired.”

“I’m sure you couldn’t,” I said, firmly. “And, my dear child, I must confess I fail to understand why your sister should wish so patronizingly for you a fortune she would never have accepted for herself. How can she possibly like for you such a mawkish and a morbid thing as the prospect of a marriage with a man in whom neither you nor any other person feels the presence of one single absolute and manly quality?”

“Why, mother, I have never heard you speak so strongly before—”

At that moment Lena came searching through the hall, and knocking at the door of my room, next Peggy’s, to announce Lorraine. The kind-hearted girl was with us constantly, and of the greatest unobtrusive solace to Peggy in those three days after our travellers had all gone, one after the other, like the fairy-tale family, at the chance word of Clever Alice.

It was on the fifth morning afterward, as I was sitting on the piazza hemming an organdie ruffle for my big little girl — she does shoot up so fast — that I heard on the gravel Charles’s footstep.

For some time after his arrival, as he sat, with his hat thrown off, talking lightly of his New York sojourn, I was so completely glad to see him, and to see him looking so well and in such buoyant spirits, that I could think of nothing else until he mentioned taking tea “At the Sign of the Three-legged Stool” with Lorraine’s sisters, with Lyman Wilde — and with Aunt Elizabeth.

My work dropped out of my hands.

He laughed. “Yes. Dear mother, since you never have seen him, I don’t know that I can hope to convey any right conception of Wilde’s truly remarkable character. He is, to begin with, the best of men. Picture, if you can, a nature with a soul completely beautiful and selfless, and a nervous surface quite as pachydermatous and indiscriminating as that of an ox. Wilde accepts everybody’s estimate of himself. Not only the quality of his mercy, but also of his admiration, is quite unstrained. So that he sees the friend of his youth not at all as I or any humanized perception at the Crafts Settlement would see her, but quite as she sees herself, as a fascinating, gifted, capricious woman of the world, beating the wings of her thwarted love of beauty against cruel circumstance. I noticed his attitude as soon as I mentioned to him that Lorraine had by chance discovered that he and my aunt were old acquaintances. He said that he would be very much interested in seeing her again. As he happened at the moment to be looking over a packet of postals announcing his series of talks on ‘Script,’ he asked me her address, called his stenographer, and had it added to his mailing-list. But before the postal reached her she had called him up to tell him she had lately heard of his work and of him for the first time after all these years, through Lorraine, and to ask him to come to see her. His call, I am sure, they spent in a rich mutual misunderstanding as thoroughly satisfactory to both as any one could wish. For, as I say, on my last visit in the Crafts neighborhood she was taking tea with all of them and Dr. Denbigh.”

“Dr. Denbigh!” I repeated, in surprise. “Oh, Charles, are any of them not well?”

“No, no. I think he’s been in New York” — he gave a groan— “on account of some delicate finesse on Maria’s part, some incomprehensible plan of hers for bringing Goward back here. The worst of it is that, like all her plans, I believe it’s going to be perfectly successful.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, in consternation.

“From every natural portent, I think that horrid infant in arms was, when I left New York, about to cast his handkerchief or rattle toward Peggy again. I’m morally certain that he and all his odious emotional disturbances will be presenting themselves for her consideration in Eastridge before long; and, since they strike me as quite too odious for the nicest girl in the world, I hope, before they reach here, she’ll be far away — absolutely out of reach.”

“I hope so, too.” But as I said it, for the first time there came around me, like a blank, rising mist, the prospect of a journey farther and a longer separation than any I had before imagined between us.

“I knew you’d think so. That was, partly, why I acted as I did, for her, dear mother” — he leaned forward a little toward me and took up one end of the ruffle I was stitching again to cover my excitement— “and for Lorraine and for me, in engaging our passage abroad.”

He seemed not to expect me to speak at once, but after a little quiet pause, while we both sat thinking, went on, with great gentleness: “You know it’s about our only way of really protecting her from any annoyance here, even that of thoughts of her own she doesn’t like. There will be so very wonderfully much for her to see, and I believe she’ll enjoy it. One of Lorraine’s younger sisters is coming to be with us, perhaps, for a while in Switzerland — and the Elliots — animal sculptors. You remember them, don’t you, and Arlington — studying decorative design that winter when you were in New York? They’ll be abroad this summer. I believe we’ll all have a very charming, care-free time walking and sketching and working — a time really so much more charming for a lovely and sensible young woman than sitting in a talking town subject to the incursions of a lover she doesn’t truly like.” He stopped a moment before he added, sincerely: “Then — it isn’t simply for her that this way would be better, mother, but for me, for every one.”

“For you and for every one?” I managed to make myself ask with tranquillity.

“Yes. Why wouldn’t this relieve immensely all the sufferers from my commercial career at the factory? Don’t you think that’s somewhat unjust, not simply to Maria’s and Tom’s requirements for the family standing and fortunes” — he laughed a moment— “but to father’s need there of a right-hand business man?” That was his way of putting it. “For a long time,” he pursued, more earnestly than I’ve ever heard him speak before in his life, “I’ve been planning, mother, to go away to study and to sketch. I’m doing nothing here. Maybe what I would do away from here might not seem to you so wonderful. But it would have one dignity — whatever else it were or were not, it would be my own.”

Perhaps it may seem strange, but in those few words and instants, when my son spoke so simply and sincerely of his own work, I felt, more than in his actual wedding with his wife, the cleaving pang of a marriage for him. At the same time I was stricken beyond all possible speech by my rising consciousness of the injustice of his sense of failure here in his own father’s house, in my house. How weakly I had been lost in the thousand little anxieties and preoccupations of my every-day, to let myself be unwittingly engulfed in his older sister’s strange, blank prejudice, to lose my own true understanding of the rights and the happiness of one of the children — I can think it, all unspoken and in silence — somehow most my own.

It seemed as though my heartstrings tightened. Everything blurred before me. I never in my life have tried so hard before to hold my soul absolutely still to see quite clearly, as though none of this were happening to myself, what would be best for my boy’s future, for Peggy’s, for their whole lives. It was in the midst of these close-pressing thoughts that I heard him saying: “So that perhaps this would truly be the right way for every one.” Only too inevitably I knew his words were true; and now I could force myself at last to say, quietly: “Why — yes — if that would make you happier, Charles.” He rose and came up to my chair then so beautifully, and moved it to a shadier place, as Peggy, catching sight of him from the garden, ran up with a cry of surprise to meet him, to talk about it all.

I scarcely know whether her father’s consciousness of the coming separation for me, or my consciousness of the coming separation for him, made things harder or easier for both of us. Cyrus was obliged to make a business trip to Washington on the next day, and it was decided that as Peggy especially wished to be with him now before her long absence, she should accompany him in the morning.

On the midnight before we were all startled from sleep by the clang of the door-bell. Good little Billy, always hoping for excitement, and besides extremely sweet in doing errands, answered it. The rest of us absurdly assembled in kimonos and bathrobes at the head of the stairs, dreading we scarcely knew what, for the members of the family not in the house. Within a few minutes Billy dashed up-stairs again, considerately holding high, so that we all could see it, a special-delivery letter, the very same illegible, bleared envelope which had before annoyed us so extremely. It was addressed in washed-out characters to Miss — Talbert. The word Peggy, very clear and black, had been lately inserted in the same handwriting; and below, the street and number had been recently refreshed, apparently by the hand of Maria.

As this familiar, wearisome object reappeared before us all, Peggy, with a little quiver of mirth, looking out between her long braids, cried: “Call back the boy!” By the time the messenger had returned she had readdressed the envelope, unopened, to Mr. Goward. Billy took it back down-stairs again; and every one trooped off to bed, Alice and mother with positive snorts and flounces of impatience.

Needless to say, Tom and Maria returned in perfect safety on Saturday. Before then, at twelve o’clock on the same morning, when Cyrus and Peggy had gone, I was sitting on the piazza making a little money-bag for her, with mother sitting rocking beside me, and complaining of every one in peace, when Dr. Denbigh drove up to the horse-block, flung his weight out of the buggy, and hurried up the steps. He shook hands with us hastily and abstractedly, and asked if he might speak to me inside the house.

“Mrs. Talbert,” he said, closing the door of the library as soon as we were inside it, “I am sure you will try not to feel alarmed at something I must tell you of at once. The early morning train I came on from New York, the one that ought to get in at Eastridge at eleven, was derailed two hours ago on a misplaced switch between here and Whitman. No one was killed, but many of the passengers were injured. Among the injured I took care of was Mr. Goward. His arm has been broken. He’s been badly shaken up — and he’s now in a state of shock at the Whitman Hospital. The boy has been asking for Peggy, and then for you. I promised him that after my work was done — all the injured were taken there by a special as soon as possible after the wreck — I’d ask you to drive back to see him. Will you come?”

Of course I went, then. And at Harry Goward’s request I have gone twice since. He is very ill, too ill to talk, and though Dr. Denbigh says he will outlive a thousand stronger men, he has been rather worse this morning. When I first saw him he asked for Peggy in one gasping word, and when he learned she had gone to Washington turned even whiter than he had been before. He is nervously quite wrecked and wretched; has no confidence in Dr. Denbigh; and either Maria or I will go to the hospital every day till the boy’s mother comes from California. It is a very trying situation. For his misfortune has, of course, not changed my knowledge of his nature. I dread telling Cyrus and Peggy, when I meet their returning noon train, after I have left mother at home, of everything that has happened here.

As though these difficulties were not enough, this morning, just before we started to Whitman, we were involved in another perplexity through the unwilling agency of Mr. Temple. He called me up to read me a bewildering telegram he had received an hour before from Elizabeth. It said:

“Please end Eastridge scandal by announcing my engagement in Banner. — Lily.”

“Engagement to whom?” Mr. Temple had asked by telephone of Charles, who said none of us could be responsible for any definite information in the matter unless, perhaps, Maria. On consultation, Maria had said to Mr. Temple that in New York Mr. Goward had imparted to her that Elizabeth had told him many weeks ago that she was irrevocably betrothed to Dr. Denbigh. Mr. Temple had finally referred unsuccessfully to me for Elizabeth’s address in order to ask her to send a complete announcement in the full form she wished printed.

(“Whoa, Douglas. Well — mother, you had a nice little nap, didn’t you. No, no; I won’t be late. It’s not more than five minutes to the station. Thanks, Lena. Yes, Billy dear, you can get in. Why, I don’t know why you shouldn’t drive.”)

The train is just pulling in. Charles is there and Maria, each standing on one side of the car-steps. Now I see them. That looks like Peggy’s suit-case the porter’s carrying down. Yes, it is. There — there they are, coming down the steps behind him, Cyrus and my dear girl — how well they look! Oh, how I hope everything will come right for them!

CHAPTER X THE SCHOOL-BOY by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

Rabbits.

Automobile. (Painted red, with yellow lines.)

Automatic reel. (The 3-dollar kind.)

New stamp-book. (The puppy chewed my other.)

Golly, I forgot. I suppose I mustn’t use this, but it’s my birthday next month, and I want ‘steen things, and I thought I’d better make a list to pin on the dining-room door, where the family could take their pick what to give me. Lorraine gave me this blank-book, and told me that if I’d write down everything that I knew about Peggy and Harry Goward and all that stuff, she’d have Sally make me three pounds of crumbly cookies with currants on top, in a box, to keep in my room just to eat myself, and she wouldn’t tell Alice, so I won’t be selfish not to offer her any as she won’t know about it and so won’t suffer. I’m going to keep them in the extra bureau drawer where Peg puts her best party dress, so I guess they’ll be et up before anybody goes there.

Peggy’s feeling pretty sick now to dress up for parties, but I know a thing or two that the rest don’t know. Wouldn’t Alice be hopping! She always thinks she’s wise to everything, and to have a thick-headed boy-person know a whacking secret that they’d all be excited about would make her mad enough to burst. She thinks she can read my ingrown soul too — but I rather think I have my own interior thoughts that Miss Alice doesn’t tumble to. For instance, Dr. Denbigh.

Golly, I forgot. Lorraine said she’d cut down the cookies if things weren’t told orderly the way they happened. So I’ve got to begin back. First then, I’ve had the best time since Peggy got engaged that I’ve ever had in my own home. Not quite as unbossed as when they sent me on the Harris farm last summer, and I slept in the stable if I wanted to, and nobody asked if I’d taken a bath. That was a sensible way to live, but yet it’s been unpecked at and pleasant even at home lately. You see, with such a lot of fussing about Peggy and Harry Goward, nobody has noticed what I did, and that, to a person with a taste for animals, is one of the best states of living. I’ve gone to the table without brushing my hair, and the puppy has slept in my bed, and I’ve kept a toad behind the wash-basin for two weeks, and though Lena, the maid, knew about it, she shut up and was decent because she didn’t want to worry mother. A toad is such an unusual creature to live with. I’ve got a string to his hind leg, but yet he gets into places where you don’t expect him, and it’s very interesting. Lena seemed to think it wasn’t nice to have him in the towels in the wash-stand drawer, but I didn’t care. It doesn’t hurt the towels and it’s cosey for the toad.

I had a little snake — a stunner — but Lena squealed when she found him in my collars, so I had to take him away. He looked awfully cunning inside the collars, but Lena wouldn’t stand for him, so I let well enough alone and tried to be contented with the toad and the puppy and some June-bugs I’ve got in boxes in the closet, and my lizard — next to mother, he’s my best friend — I’ve had him six months. I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather lose mother than him, because you can get a step-mother, but it’s awfully difficult to replace a lizard like Diogenes. I wonder if Lorraine will think I’ve written too much about my animals? They’re more fun than Peggy anyway, and as for Harry Goward — golly! The toad or lizard that couldn’t be livelier than he is would be a pretty sad animal.

A year ago I was fishing one day away up the river, squatting under a bush on a bank, when Peggy and Dr. Denbigh came and plumped right over my head. They didn’t see me — but it wasn’t up to me. They were looking the other way, so they didn’t notice my fish-line either. They weren’t noticing much of life as it appeared to me except their personal selves. I thought if they wouldn’t disturb me I wouldn’t disturb them. At first I didn’t pay attention to what they were saying, because there was a chub and a trout together after my bait, and I naturally was excited to see if the trout would take it. But when I’d lost both of them I had time to listen.

I wouldn’t have believed it of Dr. Denbigh, to bother about a girl like Peg, who can’t do anything. And he’s a whale, just a whale. He’s six feet-two, and strong as an ox. He went through West Point before he degraded himself into a doctor, and he held the record there for shot-putting, and was on the foot-ball team, and even now, when he’s very old and of course can’t last long, he plays the best tennis in Eastridge. He went to the Spanish War — quite awhile ago that was, but yet in modern times — and he was at San Juan. You can see he’s a Jim dandy — and him to be wasting time on Peggy — it’s sickening! Even for a girl she’s poor stuff. I don’t mean, of course, that she’s not all right in a moral direction, and I wouldn’t let anybody else abuse her. Everybody says she’s pretty, and I suppose she is, in a red-headed way, and she’s awfully kind, you know, but athletically — that’s what I’m talking about — she doesn’t amount to a row of pins. She can’t fish or play tennis or ride or anything.

Yet all the same it’s true, I distinctly heard him say he loved her better than anything on earth. I don’t think he could have meant better than Rapscallion; he’s awfully fond of that horse. Probably he forgot Rapscallion for the moment. Anyhow, Peg was sniffling and saying how she was going back to college — it was the Easter vacation — and how she was only a stupid girl and he would forget her. And he said he’d never forget her one minute all his life — which was silly, for I’ve often forgotten really important things. Once I forgot to stop at Lorraine’s for a tin of hot gingerbread she’d had Sally make for me to entirely eat by myself, and Alice got it and devoured it all up, the pig! Anyway, Dr. Denbigh said that, and then Peggy sniffled some more, and I heard him ask her:

“What is it, dear?”

“Dear,” your grandmother. She said, then, why wouldn’t he let her be engaged to him like anybody else, and it was hard on a girl to have to beg a man to be engaged, and then he laughed a little and they didn’t either of them say anything for a while, but there were soft, rustling sounds — a trout was after my bait, so I didn’t listen carefully. When I noticed again, Dr. Denbigh was saying how he was years and years older, and it was his duty to take care of her and not allow her to make a mistake that might ruin her life, and he wouldn’t let her hurry into a thing she couldn’t get out of, and a lot more. Peg said that forty wasn’t old, and he was young enough for her, and she was certain, CERTAIN — I don’t know what she was certain of, but she was horribly obstinate about it.

And then Dr. Denbigh said: “If I only dared let you, dear — if I only dared.”

And something about if she felt the same in two years, or a year, or something — I can’t remember all that truck — and they said the same thing over a lot. I heard him murmur:

“Call me Jack, just once.”

And she murmured back, as if it was a stunt, “Jack” — and then rustlings. I’d call him Jack all the afternoon if he liked.

Then, after another of those still games, Peggy said, “Ow!” as if somebody’d pinched her, and that seemed such a queer remark that I stood up to see what they were up to. Getting to my feet I swung the line around and the bait flopped up the bank and hit Peg square in the mouth — I give you my word I didn’t mean to, but it was awfully funny! My! didn’t she squeal bloody murder? That’s what makes a person despise Peggy. She’s no sort of sport. Another time I remember I had some worms in an envelope, and I happened to feel them in my pocket, so I pulled out one and slid it down the back of her neck, and you’d have thought I’d done something awful. She yelped and wriggled and cried — she did — she actually cried. And you wouldn’t believe what she finished up by doing — she went and took a bath! A whole bath — when she didn’t have to! She can’t see a joke at all. Now Alice is a horrid meddler — she and Maria. Yet Alice is a sport, and takes her medicine. I’ve seen that girl with a beetle in her hair, which I put there, keep her teeth shut and not make a sound — only a low gurgle — until she’d got him and slung him out of the window. Then she lammed me, I tell you — I respected her for it too — but she couldn’t now, I’m stronger.

Oh, golly! Lorraine will cut down the cookies if I don’t tell what happened. I don’t exactly know what was next, but Dr. Denbigh somehow had me by the collar and gave me a yank, like a big dog does a little one.

“See here, you young limb,” he said, “I’m — I’m going to—” and then he suddenly stopped and looked at Peggy and began to chuckle, and Peggy laughed and turned lobster color, and put her face in her hands and just howled.

Of course I grinned too, and then I glanced up at him lovingly and murmured “Jack,” just like Peggy did.

That seemed to sober him, and he considered a minute. “Listen, Billy,” he began, slowly; “we’re in your power, but I’m going to trust you.”

I just hooted, because there wasn’t much else he could do. But he didn’t smile, only his eyes sort of twinkled.

“Be calm, my son,” he said. “You’re a gentleman, I believe, and all I need do is to point out that what you’ve seen and heard is not your secret. I’m sure you realize that it’s unnecessary to ask you not to tell. Of course, you’ll never tell one word — NOT ONE WORD—” and he glared. “That’s understood, isn’t it?”

I said, “Yep,” sort of scared. He’s splendidly big and arrogant, and has that man-eating look, but he’s a peach all the same.

“Are we friends — and brothers?” he asked, and slid a look at Peg.

“Yep,” I said again, and I meant it.

“Shake,” said Dr. Denbigh, and we shook like two men.

That was about all that happened that day except about my fishing. There was a very interesting — but I suppose Lorraine wouldn’t care for that. It was a good deal of a strain on my feelings not to tell Alice, but of course I didn’t. But once in awhile I would glance up at Dr. Denbigh trustingly and murmur “Jack,” and he would be in a fit because I’d always do it when the family just barely couldn’t hear. As soon as Peg came home from college we skipped to the mountains, and she went back from there to college again, and I didn’t have a fair show to get rises out of them together, and in the urgency of ‘steen things like pigeons and the new puppy, I pretty nearly forgot their love’s young dream. I didn’t have a surmise that I was going to be interwoven among it like I was. I saw Aunt Elizabeth going out with Dr. Denbigh in his machine two or three times, but she’s a regular fusser with men, and he’s got a kind heart, so I wasn’t wise to anything in that. The day Peg came home for Christmas she was singing like the blue canaries down in the parlor, and I happened to pass Aunt Elizabeth’s door and she was lacing up her shoes.

“Oh, Billy, ask Peggy if she doesn’t want to go for a walk, will you? There’s a lamb,” she called to me.

So I happened to have intelligence from pristine sources that they went walking. And after that Peg had a grouch on and was off her feed the rest of the vacation — nobody knew why — I didn’t myself, even, and it didn’t occur to me that Aunt Elizabeth had probably been rubbing it in how well she knew Dr. Denbigh. The last day Peggy was home, at the table, they were chaffing Aunt Elizabeth about him, the way grown-ups do, instead of talking about the facts of life and different kinds of horse-feed, which is important in the winter. And I heard mother say in a “sort-of-vochy” tone to Peggy:

“They really seem to be fond of each other. Perhaps there may be an engagement to write you about, Peggy.”

I thought to myself that mother didn’t know that Dr. Denbigh was prejudiced to being engaged, but I didn’t say anything — it’s wise not to say anything to your family beyond the necessary jargon of living. Peggy seemed to think the same, for she didn’t answer a syllabus, but after dropping her glass of water into the fried potatoes which Lena was kindly handing to her, she jumped and scooted. A few minutes later I wanted her to sew a sail on a boat, so I tried her door and it was locked, and then I knocked and she took an awfully long time simply to open that door, and when she did her eyes were red and she was shivering as if she was cold.

“Oh, Billy, Billy!” she said, and then, of all things, she grabbed me and kissed me.

I wriggled loose, and I said: “Sew up this sail for me, will you? Hustle!”

But she didn’t pay attention. “Oh, Billy, be a little good to me!” she said. “I’m so wretched, and nobody knows but you. Oh, Billy — he likes somebody better than me!”

“Who does?” I asked. “Father?”

She half laughed, a sort of sickly laugh. “No, Billy. Not father — he — Jack — Dr. Denbigh. Oh, you know. Billy! You heard what mother said.”

“O — o — oh!” I answered her, in a contemplating slowness. “Oh — that’s so! Do you mind if he gets engaged to Aunt Elizabeth?”

“Do — I — MIND?” said Peggy, as if she was astonished. “Mind? Billy, I’ll love him till I die. It would break my heart.”

“Oh no, it wouldn’t,” I told her, because I thought I’d sort of comfort her. “That’s truck. You can’t break muscles just by loving. But I know how you feel, because that’s the way I felt when father gave that Irish setter to the Tracys.”

She went on chattering her teeth as if she was cold, so I put the table-cover around her. “You dear Billy,” she said. But that was stuff.

“I wouldn’t bother,” I said. “Likely he’s forgotten about you. I often forget things myself.” That didn’t seem to comfort her, for she began to sob out loud. “Oh, now. Peg, don’t cry,” I observed to her. “He probably likes Aunt Elizabeth better than you, don’t you see? I think she’s prettier, myself. And, of course, she’s a lot cleverer. She tells funny stories and makes people laugh; you never do that — You’re a good sort, but quiet and not much fun, don’t you see? Maybe he got plain tired of you.”

But instead of being cheered up by my explaining things, she put her head on the table and just yowled. Girls are a queer species.

“You’re cruel, cruel!” she sobbed out, and you bet that surprised me — me that was comforting her for all I was worth! I patted her on the back of the neck, and thought hard what other soothings I could squeeze out. Then I had an idea. “Tell you what, Peg,” I said, “it’s too darned bad of Dr. Denbigh, if he just did it for meanness, when you haven’t done anything to him. But maybe he got riled because you begged him so to let you be engaged to him. Of course a man doesn’t want to be bothered — if he wants to get engaged he wants to, and if he doesn’t want to he doesn’t, and that’s all. I think probably Dr. Denbigh was afraid you’d be at him again when you came home, so he hurried up and snatched Aunt Elizabeth.”

Peggy lifted her face and stared at me. She was a sight, with her eyes all bunged up and her cheeks sloppy. “You think he IS engaged to her, do you, Billy?” she asked me.

Her voice sort of shook, and I thought I’d better settle it for her one way or the other, so I nodded and said, “Wouldn’t be surprised,” and then, if you’ll believe it, that girl got angry — at ME. “Billy, you’re brutal — you’re like any other man-thing — cold-blooded and faithless — and—” And she began choking — choking again, and I was disgusted and cleared out.

I was glad when she went off to college, because, though she’s a kind-hearted girl, she was so peevish and untalkative it made me tired. I think people ought to be cheerful around their own homes. But the family didn’t seem to see it; there are such a lot of us that you have to blow a trumpet before you get any special notice — except me, when I don’t wash my hands. Yet, what’s the use of washing your hands when you’re certain to get them dirty again in five minutes?

Well, then, awhile ago Peggy wrote she was engaged to Harry Goward, and there was great excitement in the happy home. My people are mobile in their temperatures, anyway — a little thing stirs them up. I thought it was queerish, but I didn’t know but Peggy had changed her mind about loving Dr. Denbigh till she died. I should think that was too long myself. I was busy getting my saddle mended and a new bridle, so I didn’t have time for gossip.

Harry came to visit the family, and the minute I inspected him over I knew he was a sissy. If you’ll believe me, that grown-up man can’t chin himself. He sings and paints apple blossoms, but he fell three-cornered over a fence that I vaulted. He may be fascinating, as Lorraine says, but he isn’t worth saving, in my judgments. I said so to Dr. Denbigh one day when he picked me up in his machine and brought me home from school, and he was sympathetic and asked intelligent questions — at least, some of them were; some of them were just slow remarks about if Peggy seemed to be very happy, and that sort of stuff that doesn’t have any foundations. I told him particularly that I like automobiles, and he thought a minute, and then said:

“If you were going to be playing near the Whitman station to-morrow I’d pick you up and take you on a twenty-mile spin. I’m lunching with some people near Whitman, and going on to Elmville.”

“Oh, pickles!” said I. “Will you, really? Of course, I’ll be there. I’ll drive over with the expressman — he’s a friend of mine — right after lunch,” I said, “and I’ll wait around the station for you.”

So I did that, and while I was waiting I saw Aunt Elizabeth coming — I saw her first, so I hid — I was afraid if she saw me she’d find out I was going with Dr. Denbigh and snatch him herself. I heard her sending a crazy telegram to Harry Goward, and then I forgot all about it until I wanted to distract Alice’s mind off some cookies that I’d accumulated at Lorraine’s house. Alice is a pig. She never lets me stuff in peace. So I told her about the telegram — I knew Alice would be perturbed with that. She just loves to tell things, but she made me tell Peggy, and there was a hullabaloo promptly. Nobody confided a word to me, and I didn’t care much, but I saw them all whispering in low tones and being very busy about it, and Peg looking madder than a goat, and I guessed that Alice had made me raise Cain.

Now, I’ve got to back up and start over. Golly! it’s harder than you’d think just to write down things the way they happened, like I promised Lorraine. Let’s see — Oh yes, of course — about Dr. Denbigh and the bubble. I was in a fit for fear dear Aunt Elizabeth would linger around till the doctor came, and then somehow I’d be minus one drive in a machine. She didn’t; she cleared out with solidity and despatch, and my Aurora, as the school-teacher would say, came in his whirling car, and in I popped, and we had a corking time. He let me drive a little. You see, the machine is a — Oh, well, Lorraine said, specially, I was not to describe automobiles. That seems such a stupid restrictiveness, but it’s a case of cookies, so I’ll cut that out.

There really wasn’t much else to tell, only that Dr. Denbigh started right in and raked out the inmost linings of my soul about Peggy and Harry Goward. It wasn’t exactly cross-examination, because he wasn’t cross, yet he fired the questions at me like a cannon, and I answered quick, you bet. Dr. Denbigh knows what he wants, and he means to get it. Just by accident toward the last I let out about that day in the winter when they were chaffing Aunt Elizabeth at the table about him, and how he’d taken her out in the machine, and how mother had said there might be an engagement to write Peggy about.

“Oh!” said Dr. Denbigh. “Oh! — oh!”

Funny, the way he went on saying, “Oh! Oh!”

I thought if that interested him he might like to hear about Peg throwing a fit in her room after, so I told him that, and how I tried to comfort her, and how unreasonable she was. And what do you suppose he said? He looked at me a minute with his eyebrows away down, and his mouth jammed together, and then he brought out:

“You little devil!”

That’s not the worst he said, either. I guess mother wouldn’t let me go out with him if she knew he used profanity — Maria wouldn’t, anyway. I have decided I won’t tell them. It’s the only time I ever caught him. The other thing is this. He said to himself — but out loud — I think he had forgotten me: “So they made her believe I liked her aunt better.” And then, in a minute: “She said it would break her heart — bless her!” And two or three other interlocutory remarks like that, meaning nothing in particular. And then all of a sudden he brought his fist down on his knee with a bang and said, “Damn Aunt Elizabeth!” — not loud, but compressed and explodingly, you know. I looked at him, and he said: “Beg pardon. Billy. Your aunt’s a very charming woman, but I mean it. I only asked her to go out with me because she talked more about Peggy than anybody else would,” he went on.

I thought a minute, and put two and two together pretty quick. “You mind about Peggy’s being engaged to Harry Goward, don’t you?” I asked him; for I saw right through him then.

He looked queer. “Yes, I mind,” he said.

“But you wouldn’t be engaged to her yourself,” I propounded to him; and he grinned, and said something about more things in heaven and earth, and called me Horatio. I reckon he got struck crazy a minute. And then he made me tell him further what Peggy said and what I said, and he laughed that time about my comforting her, though I don’t see why. It doesn’t pay to give up important things, to be kind and thoughtful in this world — nobody appreciates it, and you are sure to be sorry you took the time. When I got up-stairs, after comforting Peggy, my toad had jumped in the water-pitcher and got about drowned — he never was the same toad after — and if I hadn’t stopped in Peg’s room to do good it wouldn’t have happened. And Dr. Denbigh laughed at me besides. However, for an old chap of forty, he’s a peach. I’m not kicking at Dr. Denbigh.

Then let’s see — (It makes me tired to go on writing this stuff — I wish I was through. But the cookies! I see a vision of a mountain range of cookies with currants on them — crumbly cookies. Up and at it again for me!)

The next stunt I had a shy at was a letter that Harry Goward asked Alice to give Peggy, and Alice gave it to me because she was up to something else just that minute. She didn’t look at the address, but you bet your sweet life I did, when I heard it was from Harry Goward. I saw it was addressed to Peg. Then I stuffed it in my pocket and plain forgot, because I was in a hurry to go fishing with Sid Tracy. I put a chub on top of it that I wanted to keep for bait, and when I pulled it out — the letter — the chub hadn’t helped much. The envelope was a little slimy. I said: “Gee!”

Sid said: “What’s that?”

“A letter to my sister from that chump. Harry Goward,” said I. “I’ve got to take it to her. Looks pretty sad now.”

Sid didn’t like Harry Goward any more than I did, because he’d borrowed Sid’s best racket and left it out in the rain, and then just laughed. So he said: “Not sad enough. Give it to me. I’ll fix it.”

He had some molasses candy that he’d bit, and he rubbed that over it a little, and then suddenly we heard Alice calling, and he crammed the letter in his pocket, candy and all, and there were some other things in there that stuck to it. We were so rattled when Alice appeared and demanded that very letter in her lordly way that I forgot if I had it or Sid, and I went all through my clothes looking for it, and then Sid found it in his, and, oh, my! Miss Alice turned up her nose when she saw it. It did look smudgy.

Sid hurriedly scrubbed it with his handkerchief, but even that didn’t really make it clean, and by that time you couldn’t read the address. Alice didn’t ask me if I’d read it, or I’d have told her.

There was a fuss afterward in the family, but I kept clear of it. I wouldn’t have time to get through what I have to do if I attended to their fusses, so all I knew was that it had something to do with that letter. All the family were taking trains, like a procession, for two or three days. I don’t know why, so Lorraine can’t expect me to write that down.

There’s only one other event of great signification that I know about, and nobody knows that except me and Dr. Denbigh and Peggy. It was this way. The doctor saw me on the street one afternoon — I can’t remember what day it was — and stopped his machine and motioned to me to get in. You bet I got. He shook hands with me just the way he would with father, and not as if I were a contemptible puppy.

“Billy, my son, I want you to do something for me,” he said.

“All right,” said I.

“I’ve got to see Peggy,” he went on. “I’ve got to!” And he looked as fierce as a circus tiger. “I can’t sit still and not lift a finger and let this wretched business go on. I won’t lose her for any silly scruples.”

I didn’t know what he was driving at, but I said, “I wouldn’t, either,” in a sympathetic manner.

“I’ve got to see her!” he fired at me again.

“Yep,” I said. “She’s up at the house now. Come on.” But that didn’t suit him. He explained that she wouldn’t look at him when the others were around, and that she slid off and wormed out of his way, so he couldn’t get at her, anyhow. Just like a girl, wasn’t it — not to face the music? Well, anyway, he’d cooked up a plan that he wanted me to do, and I promised I would. He wanted me to get Peggy to go up the river to their former spooning-resort (only he put it differently), and he would be there waiting and make Peggy talk to him, which he seemed to desire more than honey in the honeycomb.

Lovers are a strange animal. I may be foolish, but I prefer toads. With them you can tie a string around the hind leg, and you have got them. But with lovers it’s all this way one day and upside down the next, and wondering what’s hurt the feelings of her, and if he’s got tired of you, and polyandering around to get interviews up rivers when you could easier sit on the piazza and talk — and all such. It seems to me that things would go a lot simpler if everybody would cut out most of the feelings department, and just eat their meals and look after their animals and play all they get time for, and then go to sleep quietly. Fussing is such a depravity. But they wouldn’t do what I said, not if I told them, so I lie low and think.

Next morning I harnessed the pony in the cart and said, “Peg — take a drive with me — come on,” and Peg looked grattyfied, and mother said I was a dear, thoughtful child, and grandma said it would do the girl good, and I was a noble lad. So I got encombiums all round for once. Only Aunt Elizabeth — she looked thoughtful.

I rattled Hotspur — that’s the pony — out to the happy hunting-ground by the river, till I saw Dr. Denbigh’s gray cap behind a bush, and I rightly argued that his manly form was hitched onto it, for he arose up in his might as I stopped the cart. Peggy gasped and said, “Oh — oh! We must go home. Oh, Billy, drive on!” Which Billy didn’t do, not so you’d notice it. Then the doctor said, in his I-am-the-Ten-Commandments manner, “Get out, Peggy,” and held his hand.

And Peggy said, “I won’t — I can’t,” and immediately did, the goose.

Then he looked at me in a funny, fierce way he has, with his eyebrows away down, only you know he’s pleasant because his eyes jiggle.

“Billy, my son,” he said, “will you kindly deprive us of the light of your presence for one hour by the clock? Here’s my timepiece — one hour. Go!” And he gave Hotspur a slap so he leaped.

Dr. Denbigh is the most different person from Harry Goward I know.

Well, I drove round by the Red Bridge, and was gone an hour and twelve minutes, and I thought they’d be missing me and in a fit to get home, so I just raced Hotspur the last mile.

“I’m awfully sorry I’m so late,” said I. “I got looking at some pigs, so I forgot. I’m sorry,” said I.

Peg looked up at me as if she couldn’t remember who I was, and inquired, wonderingly: “Is it an hour yet?”

And Dr. Denbigh said, “Great Scott! boy, you needn’t have hurried!”

That’s lovers all over.

And they hadn’t finished yet, if you’ll believe me. Dr. Denbigh went on talking as they stood up, just as if I wasn’t living. “You won’t promise me?” he asked her.

And she said: “Oh, Jack, how can I? I don’t know what to do — but I’m engaged to him — that’s a solemn thing.”

“Solemn nonsense,” said the doctor. “You don’t love him — you never did — you never could. Be a woman, dearest, and end this wretched mess.”

“I never would have thought I loved him if I hadn’t believed I’d lost you,” Peggy ruminated to herself. “But I must think—” As if she hadn’t thunk for an hour!

“How long must you think?” the doctor fired at her.

“Don’t be cross at me,” said she, like a baby, and that big capable man picked up her hand and kissed it — shame on him!

“No, no, dear,” he said, as meek as pie. “I’ll wait — only you MUST decide the right way, and remember that I’m waiting, and that it’s hard.”

Then he put her into the cart clingingly — I’d have chucked her — and I leaned over toward him the last thing and threw my head lovingly on one side and rolled my eyes up and murmured at him, “Good-bye, Jack,” and started Hotspur before he could hit me.

Now, thank the stars, there’s just one or two little items more that I’ve got to write. One is what I heard mother tell father when they were on the front piazza alone, and I was teaching the puppy to beg, right in sight of them on the grass. They think I’m an earless freak, maybe. She told him that dear Peggy was growing into such a strong, splendid woman; that she’d been talking to her, and she thought the child would be able to give up her weak, vacillating lover with hardly a pang, because she realized that he was unworthy of her; that Peg had said she couldn’t marry a man she didn’t admire — and wasn’t that noble of her? Noble, your grandmother — to give up a perfect lady like Harry Goward, when she’s got a real man up her sleeve! I’d have made them sit up and take notice if I hadn’t promised not to tell. Which reminds me that I ought to explain how I got Dr. Denbigh to let me write this for Lorraine. I put it to him strongly, you see, about the cookies, and at first he said.

“Not on your life! Not in a thousand years!” And then —

But what’s the use of writing that? Lorraine is on to all that. But, my pickles! won’t there be a circus when Alice finds out that I’ve known things she didn’t! Won’t Alice be hopping — gee

CHAPTER XI PEGGY by Alice Brown

“Remember,” said Charles Edward — he had run in for a minute on his way home from the office where he has been clearing out his desk, “for good and all,” he tells us— “remember, next week will see us out of this land of the free and home of the talkative.” He meant our sailing. I shall be glad to be with him and Lorraine. “And whatever you do. Peg, don’t talk, except to mother. Talk to her all you want to. Mother has the making of a woman in her. If mother’d been a celibate, she’d have been, also, a peach.”

“But I don’t want to talk,” said I. “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

“Good for you,” said Charles Edward. “Now I’ll run along.”

I sat there on the piazza watching him, thinking he’d been awfully good to me, and feeling less bruised, somehow, than I do when the rest of the family advise me — except mother! And I saw him stop, turn round as if he were coming back, and then settle himself and plant his feet wide apart, as he does when the family question him about business. Then I saw somebody in light blue through the trees, and I knew it was Aunt Elizabeth. Alice was down in the hammock reading and eating cookies, and she saw her, too. Alice threw the book away and got her long legs out of the hammock and ran. I thought she was coming into the house to hide from Aunt Elizabeth. That’s what we all do the first minute, and then we recover ourselves and go down and meet her. But Alice dropped on her knees by my chair and threw her arms round me.

“Forgive, Peggy,” she moaned. “Oh, forgive!”

I saw she had on my fraternity pin, and I thought she meant that. So I said, “You can wear it today”; but she only hugged me the tighter and ran on in a rigmarole I didn’t understand.

“She’s coming, and she’ll get it out of Lorraine, and they’ll all be down on us.”

Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth stood talking together, and just then I saw her put her hand on his shoulder.

“She’s trying to come round him,” said Alice.

I began to see she was really in earnest now. “He’s squirming. Oh, Peggy, maybe she’s found it out some way, and she’s telling him, and they’ll tell you, and you’ll think I am false as hell!”

I knew she didn’t mean anything by that word, because whenever she says such things they’re always quotations. She began to cry real tears.

“It was Billy put it into my head,” said she, “and Lorraine put it into his. Lorraine wanted him to write out exactly what he knew, and he didn’t know anything except about the telegram and how the letter got wuzzled, and I told him I’d help him write it as it ought to be ‘if life were a banquet and beauty were wine’; but I told him we must make him say in it how he’d got to conceal it from me, or they’d think we got it up together. So I wrote it,” said Alice, “and Billy copied it.”

Perhaps I wasn’t nice to the child, for I couldn’t listen to her. I was watching Charles Edward and Aunt Elizabeth, and saying to myself that mother’d want me to sit still and meet Aunt Elizabeth when she came— “like a good girl,” as she used to say to me when I was little and begged to get out of hard things. Alice went on talking and gasping.

“Peg,” she said, “he’s perfectly splendid — Dr. Denbigh is.”

“Yes, dear,” said I, “he’s very nice.”

“I’ve adored him for years,” said Alice. “I could trust him with my whole future. I could trust him with yours.”

Then I laughed. I couldn’t help it. And Alice was hurt, for some reason, and got up and held her head high and went into the house. And Aunt Elizabeth came up the drive, and that is how she found me laughing. She had on a lovely light-blue linen. Nobody wears such delicate shades as Aunt Elizabeth. I remember, one day, when she came in an embroidered pongee over Nile-green, father groaned, and grandmother said: “What is it, Cyrus? Have you got a pain?” “Yes,” said father, “the pain I always have when I see sheep dressed lamb fashion.” Grandmother laughed, but mother said: “Sh!” Mother’s dear.

This time Aunt Elizabeth had on a great picture-hat with light-blue ostrich plumes; it was almost the shape of her lavender one that Charles Edward said made her look like a coster’s bride. When she bent over me and put both arms around me the plumes tickled my ear. I think that was why I was so cross. I wriggled away from her and said: “Don’t!”

Aunt Elizabeth spoke quite solemnly. “Dear child!” she said, “you are broken, indeed.”

And I began to feel again just as I had been feeling, as if I were in a show for everybody to look at, and I found I was shaking all over, and was angry with myself because of it. She had drawn up a chair, and she held both my hands.

“Peggy,” said she, “haven’t you been to the hospital to see that poor dear boy?”

I didn’t have to answer, for there was a whirl on the gravel, and Billy, on his bicycle, came riding up with the mail. He threw himself off his wheel and plunged up the steps as he always does, pretended to tickle his nose with Aunt Elizabeth’s feathers as he passed behind her, and whispered to me: “Shoot the hat!” But he had heard Aunt Elizabeth asking if I were not going to see that poor dear boy, and he said, as if he couldn’t help it:

“Huh! I guess if she did she wouldn’t get in. His mother’s walking up and down front of the hospital when she ain’t with him, and she’s got a hook nose and white hair done up over a roll and an eye-glass on a stick, and I guess there won’t be no nimps and shepherdesses get by HER.”

Aunt Elizabeth stood and thought for a minute, and her eyes looked as they do when she stares through you and doesn’t see you at all. Alice asked Charles Edward once if he thought she was sorrowing o’er the past when she had that look, and he said: “Bless you, chile, no more than a gentle industrious spider. She’s spinning a web.” But in a minute mother had stepped out on the piazza, and I felt as if she had come to my rescue. It was the way she used to come when I broke my doll or tore my skirt. But we didn’t look at each other, mother and I. We didn’t mean Aunt Elizabeth should see there was anything to rescue me from. Aunt Elizabeth turned to mother, and seemed to pounce upon her.

“Ada,” said she, “has my engagement been announced?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said mother. She spoke with a great deal of dignity. “I understood that the name of the gentleman had been withheld.”

“Withheld!” repeated Aunt Elizabeth. “What do you mean by ‘withheld’? Billy, whom are those letters for?”

In spite of ourselves mother and I started. Letters have begun to seem rather tragic to us.

“One’s the gas-bill,” said Billy, “and one’s for you.” Aunt Elizabeth took the large, square envelope and tore it open. Then she looked at mother and smiled a little and tossed her head.

“This is from Lyman Wilde,” said she.

I thought I had never seen Aunt Elizabeth look so young. It must have meant something more to mother than it did to me, for she stared at her a minute very seriously.

“I am truly glad for you, Elizabeth,” she said. Then she turned to me. “Daughter,” said she, “I shall need you about the salad.”

She smiled at me and went in. I knew what that meant. She was giving me a chance to follow her, if I needed to escape. But there was hardly time. I was at the door when Aunt Elizabeth rustled after so quickly that it sounded like a flight. There on the piazza she put her arms about me.

“Child!” she whispered. “Child! Verlassen! Verlassen!”

I drew away a little and looked at her. Then I thought: “Why, she is old!” But I hadn’t understood. I knew the word was German, and I hadn’t taken that in the elective course.

“What is it. Aunt Elizabeth?” I asked. I had a feeling I mustn’t leave her. She smiled a little — a queer, sad smile.

“Peggy,” said she, “I want you to read this letter.” She gave it to me. It was written on very thick gray paper with rough edges, and there was a margin of two inches at the left. The handwriting was beautiful, only not very clear, and when I had puzzled over it for a minute she snatched it back again.

“I’ll read it to you,” said she.

Well, I thought it was a most beautiful letter. The gentleman said she had always been the ideal of his life. He owed everything — and by everything he meant chiefly his worship of beauty — to her. He asked her to accept his undying devotion, and to believe that, however far distance and time should part them, he was hers and hers only. He said he looked back with ineffable contempt upon the days when he had hoped to build a nest and see her beside him there. Now he had reached the true empyrean, and he could only ask to know that she, too, was winging her bright way into regions where he, in another life, might follow and sing beside her in liquid, throbbing notes to pierce the stars. He ended by saying that he was not very fit — the opera season had been a monumental experience this year — and he was taking refuge with an English brotherhood to lead, for a time, a cloistered life instinct with beauty and its worship, but that there as everywhere he was hers eternally. How glad I was of the verbal memory I have been so often praised for! I knew almost every word of that lovely letter by heart after the one reading. I shall never forget it.

“Well?” said Aunt Elizabeth. She was looking at me, and again I saw how long it must have been since she was young. “Well, what do you think of it?”

I told the truth. “Oh,” said I, “I think it’s a beautiful letter!”

“You do!” said Aunt Elizabeth. “Does it strike you as being a love-letter!”

I couldn’t answer fast enough. “Why, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said, “he tells you so. He says he loves you eternally. It’s beautiful!”

“You fool!” said Aunt Elizabeth. “You pink-cheeked little fool! You haven’t opened the door yet — not any door, not one of them — oh, you happy, happy fool!” She called through the window (mother was arranging flowers there for tea): “Ada, you must telephone the Banner. My engagement is not to be announced.” Then she turned to me. “Peggy’” said she, in a low voice, as if mother was not to hear, “to-morrow you must drive with me to Whitman.”

Something choked me in my throat: either fear of her or dread of what she meant to make me do. But I looked into her face and answered with all the strength I had: “Aunt Elizabeth, I sha’n’t go near the hospital.”

“Don’t you think it’s decent for you to call on Mrs. Goward?” she asked.

She gave me a little shake. It made me angry. “It may be decent,” I said, “but I sha’n’t do it.”

“Very well,” said Aunt Elizabeth. Her voice was sweet again. “Then I must do it for you. Nobody asks you to see Harry himself. I’ll run in and have a word with him — but, Peggy, you simply must pay your respects to Mrs. Goward.”

“No! no! no!” I heard myself answering, as if I were in some strange dream. Then I said: “Why, it would be dreadful! Mother wouldn’t let me!”

Aunt Elizabeth came closer and put her hands on my shoulders. She has a little fragrance about her, not like flowers, but old laces, perhaps, that have been a long time in a drawer with orris and face-powder and things. “Peggy,” said she, “never tell your mother I asked you.”

I felt myself stiffen. She was whispering, and I saw she meant it.

“Oh, Peggy! don’t tell your mother. She is not — not simpatica. I might lose my home here, my only home. Peggy, promise me.”

“Daughter!” mother was calling from the dining-room.

I slipped away from Aunt Elizabeth’s hands. “I promise,” said I. “You sha’n’t lose your home.”

“Daughter!” mother called again, and I went in.

That night at supper nobody talked except father and mother, and they did every minute, as if they wanted to keep the rest of us from speaking a word. It was all about the Works. Father was describing some new designs he had accepted, and telling how Charles Edward said they would do very well for the trimmings of a hearse, and mother coughed and said Charles Edward’s ideas were always good, and father said not where the market was concerned. Aunt Elizabeth had put on a white dress, and I thought she looked sweet, because she was sad and had made her face quite pale; but I was chiefly busy in thinking how to escape before anybody could talk to me. It doesn’t seem safe nowadays to speak a word, because we don’t know where it will lead us. Alice, too, looked pale, poor child! and kept glancing at me in a way that made me so sorry. I wanted to tell her I didn’t care about her pranks and Billy’s, whatever they were. And whatever she had written, it was sure to be clever. The teacher says Alice has a positive genius for writing, and before many years she’ll be in all the magazines. When supper was over I ran up-stairs to my room. I sat down by the window in the dark and wondered when the moon would rise. I felt excited — as if something were going to happen. And in spite of all the dreadful things that had happened to us, and might keep on happening, I felt as if I could die with joy. There were steps on the porch below my window. I heard father’s voice.

“That’s ridiculous, Elizabeth,” he said— “ridiculous! If it’s a good thing for other girls to go to college, it’s been a good thing for her.”

“Ah,” said Aunt Elizabeth, “but is it a good thing?”

Then I knew they were talking about me, and I put my fingers in my ears and said the Latin prepositions. I have been talked about enough. They may talk, but I won’t hear. By-and-by I took my fingers out and listened. They had gone in, and everything was still. Then I began to think it over. Was it a bad thing for me to go to college? I’m different from what I was three years ago, but I should have been different if I’d stayed at home. For one thing, I’m not so shy. I remember the first day I came out of a class-room and Stillman Dane walked up to me and said; “So you’re Charlie Ned’s sister!” I couldn’t look at him. I stood staring down at my note-book, and now I should say, quite calmly: “Oh, you must be Mr. Dane? I believe you teach psychology.” But I stood and stared. I believe I looked at my hands for a while and wished I hadn’t got ink on my forefinger — and he had to say: “I’m the psychology man. Charlie Ned and I were college friends. He wrote me about you.” But though I didn’t look at him that first time, I thought he had the kindest voice that ever was — except mother’s — and perhaps that was why I selected psychology for my specialty. I was afraid I might be stupid, and I knew he was kind. And then came that happy time when I was getting acquainted with everybody, and Mr. Dane was always doing things for me. “I’m awfully fond of Charlie Ned, you know,” he told me. “You must let me take his place.” Then Mr. Goward told me all those things at the dance, how he had found life a bitter waste, how he had been betrayed over and over by the vain and worldly, and how his heart was dead and nobody could bring it to life but me. He said I was his fate and his guiding-star, and since love was a mutual flame that meant he was my fate, too. But it seemed as if that were the beginning of all my bad luck, for about that time Stillman Dane was different, and one day he stopped me in the yard when I was going to chapel.

“Miss Peggy,” said he, “don’t let’s quarrel.”

He held out his hand, and I gave him mine quickly.

“No,” said I, “I’m not quarrelling.”

“I want to ask you something,” said he. “You must answer, truly. If I have a friend and she’s doing something foolish, should I tell her? Should I write to her brother and tell him?”

“Why,” said I, “do you mean me?” Then I understood. “You think I’m not doing very well in my psychology,” I said. “You think I’ve made a wrong choice.” I looked at him then. I never saw him look just so. He had my hand, and now I took it away. But he wouldn’t talk about the psychology.

“Peggy,” said he, “do your people know Goward?”

“They will in vacation,” I said. “He’s going home with me. We’re engaged, you know.”

“Oh!” said he. “Oh! Then it is true. Let him meet Charles Edward at once, will you? Tell Charles Edward I particularly want him to know Goward.” His voice sounded sharp and quick, and he turned away and left me. But I didn’t give his message to Charles Edward, and somehow, I don’t know why, I didn’t talk about him after I came home. “Dane never wrote me whether he looked you up,” said Charles Edward one day. “Not very civil of him.” But even then I couldn’t tell him. Mr. Dane is one of the people I never can talk about as if they were like everybody else. Perhaps that is because he is so kind in a sort of intimate, beautiful way. And when I went back after vacation he had resigned, and they said he had inherited some money and gone away, and after he went I never understood the psychology at all. Mr. Goward used to laugh at me for taking it, only he said I could get honors in anything, my verbal memory is so good. But I told him, and it is true, that the last part of the book is very dull. While I was going over all this, still with that strange excited feeling of happiness, I heard Aunt Elizabeth’s voice from below. She was calling, softly: “Peggy! Peggy! Are you up there?”

I got on my feet just as quietly as I could, and slipped through mother’s room and down the back stairs. Mother was in the vegetable garden watering the transplanted lettuce. I ran out to her. “Mother,” I said, “may I go over to Lorraine’s and spend the night?”

“Yes, lamb,” said mother. That’s a good deal for mother to say.

“I’ll run over now,” I told her. “I won’t stop to take anything. Lorraine will give me a nightie.”

I went through the vegetable garden to the back gate and out into the street. There I drew a long breath. I don’t know what I thought Aunt Elizabeth could do to me, but I felt safe. Then — I could laugh at it all, because it seems as if I must have been sort of crazy that night — I began to run as if I couldn’t get there fast enough. But when I got to the steps I heard Lorraine laughing, and I stopped to listen to see whether any one was there.

“I tell Peter,” said she, “that it’s his opportunity. Don’t you remember the Great Magician’s story of the man who was always afraid he should miss his opportunity? And the opportunity came, and, sure enough, the man didn’t know it, and it slipped by. Well, that mustn’t be Peter.”

“It musn’t be any of us,” said a voice. “Things are mighty critical, though. It’s as if everybody, the world and the flesh and the Whole Family, had been blundering round and setting their feet down as near as they could to a flower. But the flower isn’t trampled yet. We’ll build a fence round it.” My heart beat so fast that I had to put my hand over it. I wondered if I were going to have heart-failure, and I knew grandmother would say, “Digitalis!” When I thought of that I laughed, and Lorraine called out, “Who’s there?” She came to the long window. “Why, Peggy, child,” said she, “come in.” She had me by the hand and led me forward. They got up as I stepped in, Charles Edward and Stillman Dane. Then I knew why I was glad. If Stillman Dane had been here all these dreadful things would not have happened, because he is a psychologist, and he would have understood everybody at once and influenced them before they had time to do wrong.

“Jove!” said Charles Edward. “Don’t you look handsome, Peg!”

“Goose!” said Lorraine, as if she wanted him to be still. “A good neat girl is always handsome. There’s an epigram for you. And Peggy’s hair is loose in three places. Let me fix it for you, child.”

So we all laughed, and Lorraine pinned me up in a queer, tender way, as if she were mother dress-me for something important, and we sat down, and began to talk about college. I am afraid Stillman Dane and I did most of the talking, for Lorraine and Charles Edward looked at each other and smiled a little, in a fashion they have, as if they understood each other, and Lorraine got up to show him the bag she had bought that day for the steamer; and while she was holding it out to him and asking him if it cost too much, she stopped short and called out, sharply, “Who’s there?” I laughed. “Lorraine has the sharpest ears,” I said. “Ears!” said Lorraine. “It isn’t ears. I smell orris. She’s coming. Mr. Dane, will you take Peggy out of that window into the garden? Don’t yip, either of you, while you’re within gunshot, and don’t appear till I tell you.”

“Lorraine!” came a voice, softly, from the front walk. It was Aunt Elizabeth. She has a way of calling to announce herself in a sweet, cooing tone. I said to Charles Edward once it was like a dove, and he said: “No, my child, not doves, but woodcock.” Alice giggled and called out, quite loudly, ‘“Springes to catch woodcock!’” And he shook his head at her and said, “You all-knowing imp! isn’t even Shakespeare hidden from you?” But now the voice didn’t sound sweet to me at all, because I wanted to get away. We rose at the same minute, Mr. Dane and I, and Lorraine seemed to waft us from the house on a kind little wind. At the foot of the steps we stopped for fear the gravel should crunch, and while we waited for Aunt Elizabeth to go in the other way I looked at Mr. Dane to see if he wanted to laugh as much as I. He did. His eyes were full of fun and pleasure, and he gave me a little nod, as if we were two children going to play a game we knew all about. Then I heard Aunt Elizabeth’s voice inside. It was low and broken — what Charles Edward called once her “come-and-comfort-me” voice.

“Dears,” said she, “you are going abroad?”

“Yes,” Charles Edward answered. “Yes, it looks that way now.”

“Yes,” said Lorraine, rather sharply, I thought, as if she meant to show him he ought to be more decisive, “we are.”

“Dears,” Aunt Elizabeth went on, “will you take me with you?”

Mr. Dane started as if he meant to go back into the house. I must have started, too, and my heart beat hard. There was a silence of a minute, two minutes, three perhaps. Then I heard Charles Edward speak, in a voice I didn’t know he had.

“No, Aunt Elizabeth, no. Not so you’d notice it.”

Mr. Dane gave a nod as if he were relieved, and we both began tiptoeing down the path in the dark. But it wasn’t dark any more. The moon was coming through the locust-trees, and I smelled the lindens by the wall. “Oh,” I said, “it’s summer, isn’t it? I don’t believe I’ve thought of summer once this year.”

“Yes,” said he, “and there never was a summer such as this is going to be.”

I knew he was very athletic, but I don’t believe I’d thought how much he cared for out-of-doors. “Come down here,” I said. “This is Lorraine’s jungle. There’s a seat in it, and we can smell the ferns.”

Charles Edward had been watering the garden, and everything was sweet. Thousands of odors came out such as I never smelled before. And all the time the moon was rising. After we had sat there awhile, talking a little about college, about my trip abroad, I suddenly found I could not go on. There were tears in my eyes. I felt as if so good a friend ought to know how I had behaved — for I must have been very weak and silly to make such a mistake. He ought to hear the worst about me. “Oh,” I said, “do you know what happened to me?”

He made a little movement toward me with both hands. Then he took them back and sat quite still and said, in that kind voice: “I know you are going abroad, and when you come back you will laugh at the dolls you played with when you were a child.” But I cried, softly, though, because it was just as if I were alone, thinking things out and being sorry, sorry for myself — and ashamed. Until now I’d never known how ashamed I was. “Don’t cry, child,” he was saying. “For God’s sake, don’t cry!” I think it came over me then, as it hadn’t before, that all that part of my life was spoiled. I’d been engaged and thought I liked somebody, and now it was all over and done. “I don’t know what I’m crying for,” I said, at last, when I could stop. “I suppose it’s because I’m different now, different from the other girls, different from myself. I can’t ever be happy any more.”

He spoke, very quickly. “Is it because you liked Goward so much?”

“Like him!” I said. “Like Harry Goward? Why, I—” There I stopped, because I couldn’t think of any word small enough, and I think he understood, for he laughed out quickly.

“Now,” said he, “I’m a psychologist. You remember that, don’t you? It used to impress you a good deal.”

“Oh,” said I, “it does impress me. Nobody has ever seemed so wise as you. Nobody!”

“Then it’s understood that I’m a sage from the Orient. I know the workings of the human mind. And I tell you a profound truth: that the only way to stop thinking of a thing is to stop thinking of it. Now, you’re not to think of Goward and all this puppet-show again. Not a minute. Not an instant. Do you hear?” He sounded quite stern, and I answered as if I had been in class.

“Yes, sir.”

“You are to think of Italy, and how blue the sea is — and Germany, and how good the beer is — and Charlie Ned and Lorraine, and what trumps they are. Do you hear?”

“Yes, sir,” said I, and because I knew we were going to part and there would be nobody else to advise me in the same way, I went on in a great hurry for fear there should not be time. “I can’t live at home even after we come back. I could never be pointed at, like Aunt Elizabeth, and have people whisper and say I’ve had a disappointment. I must make my own life. I must have a profession. Do you think I could teach? Do you think I could learn to teach — psychology?”

He didn’t answer for a long time, and I didn’t dare look at him, though the moon was so bright now that I could see how white his hand was, lying on his knee, and the chasing of the ring on his little finger. It had been his mother’s engagement ring, he told me once. But he spoke, and very gently and seriously. “I am sure you could teach some things. Whether psychology — but we can talk of that later. There’ll be lots of time. It proves I am going over on the same steamer with Charlie Ned and Lorraine and you.”

“You are!” I cried. “Why, I never heard of anything so—” I couldn’t find the word for it, but everything stopped being puzzling and unhappy and looked clear and plain.

“Yes,” said he. “It’s very convenient, isn’t it? We can talk over your future, and you could even take a lesson or two in psychology. But I fancy we shall have a good deal to do looking for porpoises and asking what the run is. People are terribly busy at sea.”

Then it occurred to me that he had never been here before, and why was he here now? “How did you happen to come?” I asked. I suppose I really felt as if God sent him.

“Why,” said he, “why—” Then he laughed. “Well,” said he, “to tell the truth, I was going abroad if — if certain things happened, and I needed to make sure. I didn’t want to write, so I ran down to see Charlie Ned.”

“But could he tell you?” said I. “And had they happened?”

He laughed, as if at something I needn’t share. “No,” he said, “the things weren’t going to happen. But I decided to go abroad.”

I was “curiouser and curiouser,” as Lorraine says.

“But,” I insisted, “what had Charles Edward to do with it?”

There were a great many pauses that night as if, I think, he didn’t know what was wise to say. I should imagine it would always be so with psychologists. They understand so well what effect every word will have.

“Well, to tell the truth,” he answered, at last, in a kind, darling way, “I wanted to make sure all was well with my favorite pupil before I left the country. I couldn’t quite go without it.”

“Mr. Dane,” I said, “you don’t mean me?”

“Yes,” he answered, “I mean you.”

I could have danced and sung with happiness. “Oh,” said I, “then I must have been a better scholar than I thought. I feel as if I could teach psychology — this minute.”

“You could,” said he, “this minute.” And we both laughed and didn’t know, after all, what we were laughing at — at least I didn’t. But suddenly I was cold with fear.

“Why,” I said, “if you’ve only really decided to go to-night, how do you know you can get a passage on our ship?”

“Because, sweet Lady Reason,” said he, “I used Charlie Ned’s telephone and found out.” (That was a pretty name — sweet Lady Reason.)

We didn’t talk any more then for a long time, because suddenly the moon seemed so bright and the garden so sweet. But all at once I heard a step on the gravel walk, and I knew who it was. “That’s Charles Edward,” I said. “He’s been home with Aunt Elizabeth. We must go in.”

“No!” said he. “No, Peggy. There won’t be such another night.” Then he laughed quickly and got up. “Yes,” he said, “there will be such nights — over and over again. Come, Peggy, little psychologist, we’ll go in.”

We found Lorraine and Charles Edward standing in the middle of the room, holding hands and looking at each other. “You’re a hero,” Lorraine was saying, “and a gentleman and a scholar and my own particular Peter.”

“Don’t admire me,” said Charles Edward, “or you’ll get me so bellicose I shall have to challenge Lyman Wilde. Poor old chap! I believe to my soul he’s had the spirit to make off.”

“Speak gently of Lyman Wilde,” said Lorraine. “I never forget what we owe him. Sometimes I burn a candle to his photograph. I’ve even dropped a tear before it. Well, children?” She turned her bright eyes on us as if she liked us very much, and we two stood facing them two, and it all seemed quite solemn. Suddenly Charles Edward put out his hand and shook Mr. Dane’s, and they both looked very much moved, as grandmother would say. I hadn’t known they liked each other so well.

“Do you know what time it is?” said Lorraine. “Half-past eleven by Shrewsbury clock. I’ll bake the cakes and draw the ale.”

“Gee whiz!” said Mr. Dane. I’d never heard things like that. It sounded like Billy, and I liked it. “I’ve got to catch that midnight train.”

For a minute it seemed as if we all stood shouting at one another, Lorraine asking him to stay all night, Charles Edward giving him a cigar to smoke on the way, I explaining to Lorraine that I’d sleep on the parlor sofa and leave the guest-room free, and Mr. Dane declaring he’d got a million things to do before sailing. Then he and Charles Edward dashed out into the night, as Alice would say, and I should have thought it was a dream that he’d been there at all except that I felt his touch on my hand. And Lorraine put her arms round me and kissed me and said, “Now, you sweet child, run up-stairs and look at the moonlight and dream — and dream — and dream.”

I don’t know whether I slept that night; but, if I did, I did not dream.

The next forenoon I waited until eleven o’clock before I went home. I wanted to be sure Aunt Elizabeth was safely away at Whitman. Yet, after all, I did not dread her now. I had been told what to do. Some one was telling me of a song the other day, “Command me, dear.” I had been commanded to stop thinking of all those things I hated. I had done it. Mother met me at the steps. She seemed a little anxious, but when she had put her hand on my shoulder and really looked at me she smiled the way I love to see her smile. “That’s a good girl!” said she. Then she added, quickly, as if she thought I might not like it and ought to know at once, “Aunt Elizabeth saw Dr. Denbigh going by to Whitman, and she asked him to take her over.”

“Did she?” said I. “Oh, mother, the old white rose is out!”

“There they are, back again,” said mother. “He’s leaving her at the gate.”

Well, we both waited for Aunt Elizabeth to come up the path. I picked the first white rose and made mother smell it, and when I had smelled it myself I began to sing under my breath, “Come into the garden, Maud,” because I remembered last night.

“Hush, child,” said mother, quickly. “Elizabeth, you are tired. Come right in.”

Aunt Elizabeth’s lip trembled a little. I thought she was going to cry. I had never known her to cry, though I had seen tears in her eyes, and I remember once, when she was talking to Dr. Denbigh, Charles Edward noticed them and laughed. “Those are not idle tears, Peg,” he said to me “They’re getting in their work.”

Now I was so sorry for her that I stopped thinking of last night and put it all away. It seemed cruel to be so happy. Aunt Elizabeth sat down on the step and mother brought her an eggnog. It had been all ready for grandmother, and I could see mother thought Aunt Elizabeth needed it, if she was willing to make grandmother wait.

“Ada,” said Aunt Elizabeth, suddenly, as she sipped it, “what was Dr. Denbigh’s wife like?”

“Why,” said mother, “I’d almost forgotten he had a wife, it was so long ago. She died in the first year of their marriage.”

Aunt Elizabeth laughed a little, almost as if no one were there. “He began to talk about her quite suddenly this morning,” she said. “It seems Peg reminds him of her. He is devoted to her memory. That’s what he said — devoted to her memory.”

“That’s good,” said mother, cheerfully, as if she didn’t know quite what to say. “More letters, Lily? Any for us?” I could see mother was very tender of her for some reason, or she never would have called her Lily.

“For me,” said Aunt Elizabeth, as if she were tired. “From Mrs. Chataway. A package, too. It looks like visiting-cards. That seems to be from her, too.” She broke open the package. “Why!” said she, “of all things! Why!”

“That’s pretty engraving,” said mother, looking over her shoulder. She must have thought they were Aunt Elizabeth’s cards. “Why! of all things!”

Aunt Elizabeth began to flush pink and then scarlet. She looked as pretty as a rose, but a little angry, I thought. She put up her head rather haughtily. “Mrs. Chataway is very eccentric,” she said. “A genius, quite a genius in her own line. Ada, I won’t come down to luncheon. This has been sufficient. Let me have some tea in my own room at four, please.” She got up, and her letter and one of the cards fell to the floor. I picked them up for her, and I saw on the card:

 Mrs. Ronald Chataway   Magnetic Healer and Mediumistic Divulger Lost Articles a Specialty

I don’t know why, but I thought, like mother and Aunt Elizabeth, “Well, of all things!”

But the rest of that day mother and I were too busy to exchange a word about Mrs. Chataway or even Aunt Elizabeth. We plunged into my preparations to sail, and talked dresses and hats, and ran ribbons in things, and I burned letters and one photograph (I burned that without looking at it), and suddenly mother got up quickly and dropped her lapful of work. “My stars!” said she, “I’ve forgotten Aunt Elizabeth’s tea.”

“It’s of no consequence, dear,” said Aunt Elizabeth’s voice at the door. “I asked Katie to bring it up.”

“Why,” said mother, “you’re not going?”

I held my breath. Aunt Elizabeth looked so pretty. She was dressed, as I never saw her before, a close-fitting black gown and a plain white collar and a little close black hat. She looked almost like some sister of charity.

“Ada,” said she, “and Peggy, I am going to tell you something, and it is my particular desire that you keep it from the whole family. They would not understand. I am going to ally myself with Mrs. Chataway in a connection which will lead to the widest possible influence for her and for me. In Mrs. Chataway’s letter to-day she urges me to join her. She says I have enormous magnetism and — and other qualifications.”

“Don’t you want me to tell Cyrus?” said mother. She spoke quite faintly.

“You can simply tell Cyrus that I have gone to Mrs. Chataway’s,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “You can also tell him I shall be too occupied to return. Good-bye, Ada. Good-bye, Peggy. Remember, it is the bruised herb that gives out the sweetest odor.”

Before I could stop myself I had laughed, out of happiness, I think. For I remembered how the spearmint had smelled in the garden when Stillman Dane and I stepped on it in the dark and how bright the moon was, and I knew nobody could be unhappy very long.

“I telephoned for a carriage,” said Aunt Elizabeth. “There it is.” She and mother were going down the stairs, and suddenly I felt I couldn’t have her go like that.

“Oh, Aunt — Aunt Lily!” I called. “Stop! I want to speak to you.” I ran after her. “I’m going to have a profession, too,” I said. “I’m going to devote my life to it, and I am just as glad as I can be.” I put my arms round her and kissed her on her soft, pink cheeks, and we both cried a little. Then she went away.

CHAPTER XII THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY by Henry Van Dyke

“Eastridge, June 3, 1907. “To Gerrit Wendell, The Universe Club, New York:

“Do you remember promise? Come now, if possible. Much needed.   Cyrus Talbert.”

This was the telegram that Peter handed me as I came out of the coat-room at the Universe and stood under the lofty gilded ceiling of the great hall, trying to find myself at home again in the democratic simplicity of the United States. For two years I had been travelling in the effete, luxurious Orient as a peace correspondent for a famous newspaper; sleeping under canvas in Syria, in mud houses in Persia, in paper cottages in Japan; riding on camel-hump through Arabia, on horseback through Afghanistan, in palankeen through China, and faring on such food as it pleased Providence to send. The necessity of putting my next book through the press (The Setting Splendors of the East) had recalled me to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Two hours after I had landed from the steamship, thirty seconds after I had entered the club, there was Peter, in his green coat and brass buttons, standing in the vast, cool hall among the immense columns of verd-antique, with my telegram on a silver tray, which he presented to me with a discreet expression of welcome in his well-trained face, as if he hesitated to inquire where I had been, but ventured to hope that I had enjoyed my holiday and that there was no bad news in my despatch. The perfection of the whole thing brought me back with a mild surprise to my inheritance as an American, and made me dimly conscious of the point to which New York has carried republicanism and the simple life.

But the telegram — read hastily in the hall, and considered at leisure while I took a late breakfast at my favorite table in the long, stately, oak-panelled dining-room, high above the diminished roar of Fifth Avenue — the telegram carried me out to Eastridge, that self-complacent overgrown village among the New York hills, where people still lived in villas with rubber-plants in the front windows, and had dinner in the middle of the day, and attended church sociables, and listened to Fourth-of-July orations. It was there that I had gone, green from college, to take the assistant-editorship of that flapping sheet The Eastridge Banner; and there I had found Cyrus Talbert beginning his work in the plated-ware factory — the cleanest, warmest, biggest heart of a man that I have known yet, with a good-nature that covered the bed-rock of his conscience like an apple orchard on a limestone ridge. In the give-and-take of every day he was easy-going, kindly, a lover of laughter; but when you struck down to a question of right and wrong, or, rather, when he conceived that he heard the divine voice of duty, he became absolutely immovable — firm, you would call it if you agreed with him, obstinate if you differed.

After all, a conscience like that is a good thing to have at the bottom of a friendship. I could be friends with a man of almost any religion, but hardly with a man of none. Certainly the intimacy that sprang up between Talbert and me was fruitful in all the good things that cheer life’s journey from day to day, and deep enough to stand the strain of life’s earthquakes and tornadoes. There was a love-affair that might have split us apart; but it only put the rivets into our friendship. For both of us in that affair — yes, all three of us, thank God — played a straight game. There was a time of loss and sorrow for me when he proved himself more true and helpful than any brother that I ever knew. I was best man at his wedding; and because he married a girl that understood, his house became more like a home to me than any other place that my wandering life has found.

I saw its amazing architectural proportions erupt into the pride of Eastridge. I saw Cyrus himself, with all his scroll-saw tastes and mansard-roof opinions, by virtue of sheer honesty and thorough-going human decency, develop into the unassuming “first citizen” of the town, trusted even by those who laughed at him, and honored most by his opponents. I saw his aggravating family of charming children grow around him — masterful Maria, aesthetic Charles Edward, pretty Peggy, fairy-tale Alice, and boisterous Billy — each at heart lovable and fairly good; but, taken in combination, bewildering and perplexing to the last degree.

Cyrus had a late-Victorian theory in regard to the education of children, that individuality should not be crushed — give them what they want — follow the line of juvenile insistence — all the opportunities and no fetters. This late-Victorian theory had resulted in the production of a collection of early-Rooseveltian personalities around him, whose simultaneous interaction sometimes made his good old head swim. As a matter of fact, the whole family, including Talbert’s preposterous old-maid sister Elizabeth (the biggest child of the lot), absolutely depended on the good sense of Cyrus and his wife, and would have been helpless without them. But, as a matter of education, each child had a secret illusion of superiority to the parental standard, and not only made wild dashes at originality and independent action, but at the same time cherished a perfect mania for regulating and running all the others. Independence was a sacred tradition in the Talbert family; but interference was a fixed nervous habit, and complication was a chronic social state. The blessed mother understood them all, because she loved them all. Cyrus loved them all, but the only one he thought he understood was Peggy, and her he usually misunderstood, because she was so much like him. But he was fair to them all — dangerously fair — except when his subcutaneous conscience reproached him with not doing his duty; then he would cut the knot of family interference with some tremendous stroke of paternal decision unalterable as a law of the Medes and Persians.

All this was rolling through my memory as I breakfasted at the Universe and considered the telegram from Eastridge.

“Do you remember promise?” Of course I remembered. Was it likely that either of us would forget a thing like that? We were in the dingy little room that he called his “den”; it was just after the birth of his third child. I had told my plan of letting the staff of The Banner fall into other hands and going out into the world to study the nations when they were not excited by war, and write about people who were not disguised in soldier-clothes. “That’s a big plan,” he said, “and you’ll go far, and be long away at times.” I admitted that it was likely. “Well,” he continued, laying down his pipe, “if you ever are in trouble and can’t get back here, send word, and I’ll come.” I told him that there was little I could do for him or his (except to give superfluous advice), but if they ever needed me a word would bring me to them. Then I laid down my pipe, and we stood up in front of the fire and shook hands. That was all the promise there was; but it brought him down to Panama to get me, five years later, when I was knocked out with the fever; and it would take me back to Eastridge now by the first train.

But what wasteful brevity in that phrase, “much needed”! What did that mean? (Why will a man try to put a forty-word meaning into a ten-word telegram?) Sickness? Business troubles? One of those independent, interfering children in a scrape? One thing I was blessedly sure of: it did not mean any difficulty between Cyrus and his wife; they were of the tribe who marry for love and love for life. But the need must be something serious and urgent, else he never would have sent for me. With a family like his almost anything might happen. Perhaps Aunt Elizabeth — I never could feel any confidence in a red-haired female who habitually dressed in pink. Or perhaps Charles Edward — if that young man’s artistic ability had been equal to his sense of it there would have been less danger in taking him into the factory. Or probably Maria, with her great head for business — oh, Maria, I grant you, is like what the French critic said of the prophet Habakkuk, “capable de tout.”

But why puzzle any longer over that preposterous telegram? If my friend Talbert was in any kind of trouble under the sun, there was just one thing that I wanted — to get to him as quickly as possible. Find when the first train started and arrived — send a lucid despatch — no expensive parsimony in telegraphing:

‘“To Cyrus Talbert, Eastridge, Massachusetts:

“I arrived this morning on the Dilatoria and found your telegram here. Expect me on the noon train due at Eastridge five forty-three this afternoon. I hope all will go well. Count on me always. Gerrit Wendell.”

It was a relief to find him on the railway platform when the train rolled in, his broad shoulders as square as ever, his big head showing only a shade more of gray, a shade less of red, in its strawberry roan, his face shining with the welcome which he expressed, as usual, in humorous disguise.

“Here you are,” he cried, “browner and thinner than ever! Give me that bag. How did you leave my friend the Shah of Persia?”

“Better,” I said, stepping into the open carriage, “since he got on the water-wagon — uses nothing but Eastridge silver-plated ice-pitchers now.”

“And my dear friend the Empress of China?” he asked, as he got in beside me.

“She has recovered her digestion,” I answered, “due entirely to the abandonment of chop-sticks and the adoption of Eastridge knives and forks. But now it’s my turn to ask a question. How are YOU?”

“Well,” said he. “And the whole family is well, and we’ve all grown tremendously, but we haven’t changed a bit, and the best thing that has happened to us for three years is seeing you again.”

“And the factory?” I asked. “How does the business of metallic humbug thrive?”

“All right,” he answered. “There’s a little slackening in chafing-dishes just now, but ice-cream knives are going off like hot cakes. The factory is on a solid basis; hard times won’t hurt us.”

“Well, then,” said I, a little perplexed, “what in Heaven’s name did you mean by sending that—”

“Hold on,” said Talbert, gripping my knee and looking grave for a moment, “just you wait. I need you badly enough or else the telegram never would have gone to you. I’ll tell you about it after supper. Till then, never mind — or, rather, no matter; for it’s nothing material, after all, but there’s a lot in it for the mind.”

I knew then that he was in one of his fundamental moods, imperviously jolly on the surface, inflexibly Puritan underneath, and that the only thing to do was to let the subject rest until he chose to take it up in earnest. So we drove along, chaffing and laughing, until we came to the dear, old, ugly house. The whole family were waiting on the veranda to bid me welcome home. Mrs. Talbert took my hands with a look that said it all. Her face had not grown a shade older, to me, since I first knew her; and her eyes — the moment you look into them you feel that she understands. Alice seemed to think that she had become too grown-up to be kissed, even by the friend of the family; and I thought so, too. But pretty Peggy was of a different mind. There is something about the way that girl kisses an old gentleman that almost makes him wish himself young again.

At supper we had the usual tokens of festivity: broiled chickens and pop-overs and cool, sliced tomatoes and ice-cream with real strawberries in it (how good and clean it tasted after Ispahan and Bagdad!) and the usual family arguing and joking (how natural and wholesome it sounded after Vienna and Paris!). I thought Maria looked rather strenuous and severe, as if something important were on her mind, and Billy and Alice, at moments, had a conscious air. But Charles Edward and Lorraine were distinctly radiant, and Peggy was demurely jolly. She sounded like her father played on a mandolin.

After supper Talbert took me to the summer-house at the foot of the garden to smoke. Our first cigars were about half burned out when he began to unbosom himself.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said, “an idiot, and, what is more, an unnatural and neglectful father, cruel to my children when I meant to be kind, a shirker of my duty, and a bringer of trouble on those that I love best.”

“As for example?” I asked.

“Well, it is Peggy!” he broke out. “You know, I like her best of them all, next to Ada; can’t help it. She is nearer to me, somehow. The finest, most unselfish little girl! But I’ve been just selfish enough to let her get into trouble, and be talked about, and have her heart broken, and now they’ve put her into a position where she’s absolutely helpless, a pawn in their fool game, and the Lord only knows what’s to come of it all unless he makes me man enough to do my duty.”

From this, of course, I had to have the whole story, and I must say it seemed to me most extraordinary — a flagrant case of idiotic interference. Peggy had been sent away to one of those curious institutions that they call a “coeducational college,” chiefly because Maria had said that she ought to understand the duties of modern womanhood; she had gone, without the slightest craving for “the higher education,” but naturally with the idea of having a “good time”; and apparently she had it, for she came home engaged to a handsome, amatory boy, one of her fellow “students,” named Goward. At this point Aunt Elizabeth, with her red hair and pink frock, had interfered and lured off the Goward, who behaved in a manner which appeared to me to reduce him to a negligible quantity. But the family evidently did not think so, for they all promptly began to interfere, Maria and Charles Edward and Alice and even Billy, each one with an independent plan, either to lure the Goward back or to eliminate him. Alice had the most original idea, which was to marry Peggy to Dr. Denbigh; but this clashed with Maria’s idea, which was to entangle the doctor with Aunt Elizabeth in order that the Goward might be recaptured. It was all extremely complicated and unnecessary (from my point of view), and of course it transpired and circulated through the gossip of the town, and poor Peggy was much afflicted and ashamed. Now the engagement was off; Aunt Elizabeth had gone into business with a clairvoyant woman in New York; Goward was in the hospital with a broken arm, and Peggy was booked to go to Europe on Saturday with Charles Edward and Lorraine.

“Quite right,” I exclaimed at this point in the story. “Everything has turned out just as it should, like a romance in an old-fashioned ladies’ magazine.”

“Not at all,” broke out Talbert; “you don’t know the whole of it, Maria has told me” (oh, my prophetic soul, Maria!) “that Charley and his wife have asked a friend of theirs, a man named Dane, ten years older than Peggy, a professor in that blank coeducational college, to go with them, and that she is sure they mean to make her marry him.”

“What Dane is that?” I interrupted. “Is his first name Stillman — nephew of my old friend Harvey Dane, the publisher? Because, if that’s so, I know him; about twenty-eight years old; good family, good head, good manners, good principles; just the right age and the right kind for Peggy — a very fine fellow indeed.”

“That makes no difference,” continued Cyrus, fiercely. “I don’t care whose nephew he is, nor how old he is, nor what his manners are. My point is that Peggy positively shall not be pushed, or inveigled, or dragooned, or personally conducted into marrying anybody at all! Billy and Alice were wandering around Charley’s garden last Friday night, and they report that Professor Dane was there with Peggy. Alice says that she looked pale and drooping, ‘like the Bride of Lammermoor.’ There has been enough of this meddling with my little Peggy, I say, and I’m to blame for it. I don’t know whether her heart is broken or not. I don’t know whether she still cares for that fellow Goward or not. I don’t know what she wants to do — but whatever it is she shall do it, I swear. She sha’n’t be cajoled off to Europe with Charles Edward and Lorraine to be flung at the head of the first professor who turns up. I’ll do my duty by my little girl. She shall stay at home and be free. There has been too much interference in this family, and I’m damned if I stand any more; I’ll interfere myself now.”

It was not the unusual violence of the language in the last sentence that convinced me. I had often seen religious men affected in that way after an over-indulgence in patience and mild behavior. It was that ominous word, “my duty,” which made me sure that Talbert had settled down on the bed-rock of his conscience and was not to be moved. Why, then, had he sent for me, I asked, since he had made up his mind?

“Well,” said he, “in the first place, I hadn’t quite made it up when I sent the telegram. And in the second place, now that you have helped me to see absolutely what is right to do, I want you to speak to my wife about it. She doesn’t agree with me, wants Peggy to go to Europe, thinks there cannot be any risk in it. You know how she has always adored Charles Edward. Will you talk to her?”

“I will,” said I, after a moment of reflection, “on one condition. You may forbid Peggy’s journey, to-morrow morning if you like. Break it off peremptorily, if you think it’s your duty. But don’t give up her state-room on the ship. And if you can be convinced between now and Saturday that the danger of interference with her young affections is removed, and that she really needs and wants to go, you let her go! Will you?”

“I will,” said he. And with that we threw away the remainder of our second cigars, and I went up to the side porch to talk with Mrs. Talbert. What we said I leave you to imagine. I have always thought her the truest and tenderest woman in the world, but I never knew till that night just how clear-headed and brave she was. She agreed with me that Peggy’s affair, up to now more or less foolish, though distressing, had now reached a dangerous stage, a breaking-point. The child was overwrought. A wrong touch now might wreck her altogether. But the right touch? Or, rather, no touch at all, but just an open door before her? Ah, that was another matter. My plan was a daring one; it made her tremble a little, but perhaps it was the best one; at all events, she could see no other. Then she stood up and gave me both hands again. “I will trust you, my friend,” said she. “I know that you love us and our children. You shall do what you think best and I will be satisfied. Good-night.”

The difficulty with the situation, as I looked it over carefully while indulging in a third cigar in my bedroom, was that the time was desperately short. It was now one o’clock on Tuesday morning. About nine Cyrus would perform his sacred duty of crushing his darling Peggy by telling her that she must stay in Eastridge. At ten o’clock on Saturday the Chromatic would sail with Charles Edward and Lorraine and Stillman Dane. Yet there were two things that I was sure of: one was that Peggy ought to go with them, and the other was that it would be good for her to — but on second thought I prefer to keep the other thing for the end of my story. My mind was fixed, positively and finally, that the habit of interference in the Talbert family must be broken up. I never could understand what it is that makes people so crazy to interfere, especially in match-making. It is a lunacy. It is presuming, irreverent, immoral, intolerable. So I worked out my little plan and went to sleep.

Peggy took her father’s decree (which was administered to her privately after breakfast on Tuesday) most loyally. Of course, he could not give her his real reasons, and so she could not answer them. But when she appeared at dinner it was clear, in spite of a slight rosy hue about her eyes, that she had decided to accept the sudden change in the situation like a well-bred angel — which, in fact, she is.

I had run down to Whitman in the morning train to make a call on young Goward, and found him rather an amiable boy, under the guard of an adoring mother, who thought him a genius and was convinced that he had been entrapped by designing young women. I agreed with her so heartily that she left me alone with him for a half-hour. His broken arm was doing well; his amatoriness was evidently much reduced by hospital diet; he was in a repentant frame of mind and assured me that he knew he had been an ass as well as a brute (synonymes, dear boy), and that he was now going West to do some honest work in the world before he thought any more about girls. I commended his manly decision. He was rather rueful over the notion that he might have hurt Miss Talbert by his bad conduct. I begged him not to distress himself, his first duty now was to get well. I asked him if he would do me the favor, with the doctor’s permission, of taking the fresh air with his mother on the terrace of the hospital about half-past five that afternoon. He looked puzzled, but promised that he would do it; and so we parted.

After dinner I requested Peggy to make me happy by going for a little drive in the runabout with me. She came down looking as fresh as a wild rose, in a soft, white dress with some kind of light greenery about it, and a pale green sash around her waist, and her pretty, sunset hair uncovered. If there is any pleasanter avocation for an old fellow than driving in an open buggy with a girl like that, I don’t know it. She talked charmingly: about my travels; about her college friends; about Eastridge; and at last about her disappointment in not going to Europe. By this time we were nearing the Whitman hospital.

“I suppose you have heard,” said she, looking down at her bare hands and blushing; “perhaps they have told you why I wanted especially to go away.”

“Yes, my dear child,” I answered, “they have told me a lot of nonsense, and I am heartily glad that it is all over. Are you?”

“More glad than I can tell you,” she answered, frankly, looking into my face.

“See,” said I, “there is the hospital. I believe there is a boy in there that knows you — name of Goward.”

“Yes,” she said, rather faintly, looking down again, but not changing color.

“Peggy,” I asked, “do you still — think now, and answer truly — do you still HATE him?”

She waited a moment, and then lifted her clear blue eyes to mine. “No, Uncle Gerrit, I don’t hate him half as much as I hate myself. Really, I don’t hate him at all. I’m sorry for him.”

“So am I, my dear,” said I, stretching my interest in the negligible youth a little. “But he is getting well, and he is going West as soon as possible. Look, is that the boy yonder, sitting on the terrace with a fat lady, probably his mother? Do you feel that you could bow to him, just to oblige me?”

She flashed a look at me. “I’ll do it for that reason, and for another, too,” she said. And then she nodded her red head, in the prettiest way, and threw in an honest smile and a wave of her hand for good measure. I was proud of her. The boy stood up and took off his hat. I could see him blush a hundred feet away. Then his mother evidently asked him a question, and he turned to answer her, and so EXIT Mr. Goward.

The end of our drive was even pleasanter than the beginning. Peggy was much interested in a casual remark expressing my pleasure in hearing that she had recently met the nephew of one of my very old friends, Stillman Dane.

“Oh,” she cried, “do you know HIM? Isn’t that lovely?”

I admitted that he was a very good person to know, though I had only seen a little of him, about six years ago. But his uncle, the one who lately died and left a snug fortune to his favorite nephew, was one of my old bachelor cronies, in fact, a member of the firm that published my books. If the young man resembled his uncle he was all right. Did Peggy like him?

“Why, yes,” she answered. “He was a professor at our college, and all the girls thought him a perfect dandy!”

“Dandy!” I exclaimed. “There was no sign of an excessive devotion to dress when I knew him. It’s a great pity!”

“Oh!” she cried, laughing, “I don’t mean THAT. It is only a word we girls use; it means the same as when you say, ‘A VERY FINE FELLOW INDEED.”’

From that point we played the Stillman Dane tune, with variations, until we reached home, very late indeed for supper. The domestic convulsion caused by the formal announcement of Talbert’s sudden decision had passed, leaving visible traces. Maria was flushed, but triumphant; Alice and Billy had an air of conscience-stricken importance; Charles Edward and Lorraine were sarcastically submissive; Cyrus was resolutely jovial; the only really tranquil one was Mrs. Talbert. Everything had been arranged. The whole family were to go down to New York on Thursday to stop at a hotel, and see the travellers off on Saturday morning — all except Peggy, who was to remain at home and keep house.

“That suits me exactly,” said I, “for business calls me to town to-morrow, but I would like to come back here on Thursday and keep house with Peggy, if she will let me.”

She thanked me with a little smile, and so it was settled. Cyrus wanted to know, when we were sitting in the arbor that night, if I did not think he had done right. “Wonderfully,” I said. He also wanted to know if he might not give up that extra state-room and save a couple of hundred dollars. I told him that he must stick to his bargain — I was still in the game — and then I narrated the afternoon incident at the hospital. “Good little Peggy!” he cried. “That clears up one of my troubles. But the great objection to this European business still holds. She shall not be driven.” I agreed with him — not a single step!

The business that called me to New York was Stillman Dane. A most intelligent and quick-minded young gentleman — not at all a beauty man — not even noticeably academic. He was about the middle height, but very well set up, and evidently in good health of body and mind; a clean-cut and energetic fellow, who had been matured by doing his work and had himself well in hand. There was a look in his warm, brown eyes that spoke of a heart unsullied and capable of the strongest and purest affection; and at the same time certain lines about his chin and his mouth, mobile but not loose lipped, promised that he would be able to take care of himself and of the girl that he loved. His appearance and his manner were all that I had hoped — even more, for they were not only pleasant but thoroughly satisfactory.

He was courteous enough to conceal his slight surprise at my visit, but not skilful enough to disguise his interest in hearing that I had just come from the Talberts. I told him of the agreement with Cyrus Talbert, the subsequent conversation with Mrs. Talbert, Peggy’s drive with me to Whitman, and her views upon dandies and other cognate subjects.

Then I explained to him quite clearly what I should conceive my duty to be if I were in his place. He assented warmly to my view. I added that if there were any difficulties in his mind I should advise him to lay the case before my dear friend the Reverend George Alexanderson, of the Irving Place Church, who was an extraordinarily sensible and human clergyman, and to whom I would give him a personal letter stating the facts. Upon this we shook hands heartily, and I went back to Peggy on Thursday morning.

The house was delightfully quiet, and she was perfection as a hostess. I never passed a pleasanter afternoon. But the evening was interrupted by the arrival of Stillman Dane, who said that he had run up to say good-bye. That seemed quite polite and proper, so I begged them to excuse me, while I went into the den to write some letters. They were long letters.

The next morning Peggy was evidently flustered, but divinely radiant. She said that Mr. Dane had asked her to go driving with him — would that be all right? I told her that I was sure it was perfectly right, but if they went far they would find me gone when they returned, for I had changed my mind and was going down to New York to see the voyagers off. At this Peggy looked at me with tears sparkling in the edge of her smile. Then she put her arms around my neck. “Good-bye,” she whispered, “good-bye! YOU’RE A DANDY TOO! Give mother my love — and THAT — and THAT — and THAT!”

“Well, my dear,” I answered, “I rather prefer to keep THOSE for myself. But I’ll give her your message. And mind this — don’t you do anything unless you really want to do it with all your heart. God bless you! Promise?”

“I promise, WITH ALL MY HEART,” said she, and then her soft arms were unloosed from my neck and she ran up-stairs. That was the last word I heard from Peggy Talbert.

On Saturday morning all the rest of us were on the deck of the Chromatic by half-past nine. The usual farewell performance was in progress. Charles Edward was expressing some irritation and anxiety over the lateness of Stillman Dane, when that young man quietly emerged from the music-room, with Peggy beside him in the demurest little travelling suit with an immense breast-plate of white violets. Tom Price was the first to recover his voice.

“Peggy!” he cried; “Peggy, by all that’s holy!”

“Excuse me,” I said, “Mr. and Mrs. Stillman Dane! And I must firmly request every one except Mr. and Mrs. Talbert, senior, to come with me at once to see the second steward about the seats in the dining-saloon.”

We got a good place at the end of the pier to watch the big boat swing out into the river. She went very slowly at first, then with astonishing quickness. Charles Edward and Lorraine were standing on the hurricane-deck, Peggy clos beside them. Dane had given her his walking-stick, and she had tied her handkerchief to the handle. She was standing up on a chair, with one of his hands to steady her. Her hat had slipped back on her head. The last thing that we could distinguish on the ship was that brave little girl, her red hair like an aureole, waving her flag of victory and peace. “And now,” said Maria, as we turned away, “I have a lovely plan. We are all going together to our hotel to have lunch, and after that to the matinee at—”

I knew it was rude to interrupt, but I could not help it.

“Pardon me, dear Maria,” I said, “but you have not got it quite right. You and Tom are going to escort Alice and Billy to Eastridge, with such diversions by the way as seem to you appropriate. Your father and mother are going to lunch with me at Delmonico’s — but we don’t want the whole family.”

FENNEL AND RUE

CONTENTS

I.

II.

III.

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

I.

The success of Verrian did not come early, and it did not come easily. He had been trying a long time to get his work into the best magazines, and when he had won the favor of the editors, whose interest he had perhaps had from the beginning, it might be said that they began to accept his work from their consciences, because in its way it was so good that they could not justly refuse it. The particular editor who took Verrian’s serial, after it had come back to the author from the editors of the other leading periodicals, was in fact moved mainly by the belief that the story would please the better sort of his readers. These, if they were not so numerous as the worse, he felt had now and then the right to have their pleasure studied.

It was a serious story, and it was somewhat bitter, as Verrian himself was, after his struggle to reach the public with work which he knew merited recognition. But the world which does not like people to take themselves too seriously also likes them to take themselves seriously, and the bitterness in Verrian’s story proved agreeable to a number of readers unexpectedly great. It intimated a romantic personality in the author, and the world still likes to imagine romantic things of authors. It likes especially to imagine them of novelists, now that there are no longer poets; and when it began to like Verrian’s serial, it began to write him all sorts of letters, directly, in care of the editor, and indirectly to the editor, whom they asked about Verrian more than about his story.

It was a man’s story rather than a woman’s story, as these may be distinguished; but quite for that reason women seemed peculiarly taken with it. Perhaps the women had more leisure or more courage to write to the author and the editor; at any rate, most of the letters were from women; some of the letters were silly and fatuous enough, but others were of an intelligence which was none the less penetrating for being emotional rather than critical. These maids or matrons, whoever or whichever they were, knew wonderfully well what the author would be at, and their interest in his story implied a constant if not a single devotion. Now and then Verrian was tempted to answer one of them, and under favor of his mother, who had been his confidant at every point of his literary career, he yielded to the temptation; but one day there came a letter asking an answer, which neither he nor his mother felt competent to deal with. They both perceived that they must refer it to the editor of the magazine, and it seemed to them so important that they decided Verrian must go with it in person to the editor. Then he must be so far ruled by him, if necessary, as to give him the letter and put himself, as the author, beyond an appeal which he found peculiarly poignant.

The letter, which had overcome the tacit misgivings of his mother as they read it and read it again together, was from a girl who had perhaps no need to confess herself young, or to own her inexperience of the world where stories were written and printed. She excused herself with a delicacy which Verrian’s correspondents by no means always showed for intruding upon him, and then pleaded the power his story had over her as the only shadow of right she had in addressing him. Its fascination, she said, had begun with the first number, the first chapter, almost the first paragraph. It was not for the plot that she cared; she had read too many stories to care for the plot; it was the problem involved. It was one which she had so often pondered in her own mind that she felt, in a way she hoped he would not think conceited, almost as if the story was written for her. She had never been able to solve the problem; how he would solve it she did not see how she could wait to know; and here she made him a confidence without which, she said, she should not have the courage to go on. She was an invalid, and her doctor had told her that, though she might live for months, there were chances that she might die at any moment suddenly. He would think it strange, and it was strange that she should tell him this, and stranger still that she should dare to ask him what she was going to ask. The story had yet four months to run, and she had begun to have a morbid foreboding that she should not live to read it in the ordinary course. She was so ignorant about writers that she did not know whether such a thing was ever done, or could be done; but if he could tell her how the story was to come out he would be doing more for her than anything else that could be done for her on earth. She had read that sometimes authors began to print their serial stories before they had written them to the end, and he might not be sure of the end himself; but if he had finished this story of his, and could let her see the last pages in print, she would owe him the gratitude she could never express.

The letter was written in an educated hand, and there were no foibles of form or excesses of fashion in the stationery to mar the character of sincerity the simple wording conveyed. The postal address, with the date, was fully given, and the name signed at the end was evidently genuine.

Verrian himself had no question of the genuineness of the letter in any respect; his mother, after her first misgivings, which were perhaps sensations, thought as he did about it. She said the story dealt so profoundly with the deepest things that it was no wonder a person, standing like that girl between life and death, should wish to know how the author solved its problem. Then she read the letter carefully over again, and again Verrian read it, with an effect not different from that which its first perusal had made with him. His faith in his work was so great, so entire, that the notion of any other feeling about it was not admissible.

“Of course,” he said, with a sigh of satisfaction, “I must show the letter to Armiger at once.”

“Of course,” his mother replied. “He is the editor, and you must not do anything without his approval.”

The faith in the writer of the letter, which was primary with him, was secondary with her, but perhaps for that reason, she was all the more firmly grounded in it.

II.

There was nothing to cloud the editor’s judgment, when Verrian came to him, except the fact that he was a poet as well as an editor. He read in a silence as great as the author’s the letter which Verrian submitted. Then he remained pondering it for as long a space before he said, “That is very touching.”

Verrian jumped to his question. “Do you mean that we ought to send her the proofs of the story?”

“No,” the editor faltered, but even in this decision he did not deny the author his sympathy. “You’ve touched bottom in that story, Verrian. You may go higher, but you can never go deeper.”

Verrian flushed a little. “Oh, thank you!”

“I’m not surprised the girl wants to know how you manage your problem — such a girl, standing in the shadow of the other world, which is always eclipsing this, and seeing how you’ve caught its awful outline.”

Verrian made a grateful murmur at the praise. “That is what my mother felt. Then you have no doubt of the good faith—”

“No,” the editor returned, with the same quantity, if not the same quality, of reluctance as before. “You see, it would be too daring.”

“Then why not let her have the proofs?”

“The thing is so unprecedented—”

“Our doing it needn’t form a precedent.”

“No.”

“And if you’ve no doubt of its being a true case—”

“We must prove that it is, or, rather, we must make her prove it. I quite feel with you about it. If I were to act upon my own impulse, my own convictions, I should send her the rest of the story and take the chances. But she may be an enterprising journalist in disguise it’s astonishing what women will do when they take to newspaper work — and we have no right to risk anything, for the magazine’s sake, if not yours and mine. Will you leave this letter with me?”

“I expected to leave the whole affair in your hands. Do you mind telling me what you propose to do? Of course, it won’t be anything — abrupt—”

“Oh no; and I don’t mind telling you what has occurred to me. If this is a true case, as you say, and I’ve no question but it is, the writer will be on confidential terms with her pastor as well as her doctor and I propose asking her to get him to certify, in any sort of general terms, to her identity. I will treat the matter delicately — Or, if you prefer to write to her yourself—”

“Oh no, it’s much better for you to do it; you can do it authoritatively.”

“Yes, and if she isn’t the real thing, but merely a woman journalist trying to work us for a ‘story’ in her Sunday edition, we shall hear no more from her.”

“I don’t see anything to object to in your plan,” Verrian said, upon reflection. “She certainly can’t complain of our being cautious.”

“No, and she won’t. I shall have to refer the matter to the house—”

“Oh, will you?”

“Why, certainly! I couldn’t take a step like that without the approval of the house.”

“No,” Verrian assented, and he made a note of the writer’s address from the letter. Then, after a moment spent in looking hard at the letter, he gave it back to the editor and went abruptly away.

He had proof, the next morning, that the editor had acted promptly, at least so far as regarded the house. The house had approved his plan, if one could trust the romantic paragraph which Verrian found in his paper at breakfast, exploiting the fact concerned as one of the interesting evidences of the hold his serial had got with the magazine readers. He recognized in the paragraph the touch of the good fellow who prepared the weekly bulletins of the house, and offered the press literary intelligence in a form ready for immediate use. The case was fairly stated, but the privacy of the author’s correspondent was perfectly guarded; it was not even made known that she was a woman. Yet Verrian felt, in reading the paragraph, a shock of guilty dismay, as if he had betrayed a confidence reposed in him, and he handed the paper across the table to his mother with rather a sick look.

After his return from the magazine office the day before, there had been a good deal of talk between them about that girl. Mrs. Verrian had agreed with him that no more interesting event could have happened to an author, but she had tried to keep him from taking it too personally, and from making himself mischievous illusions from it. She had since slept upon her anxieties, with the effect of finding them more vivid at waking, and she had been casting about for an opening to penetrate him with them, when fortune put this paragraph in her way.

“Isn’t it disgusting?” he asked. “I don’t see how Armiger could let them do it. I hope to heaven she’ll never see it!”

His mother looked up from the paragraph and asked,

“Why?”

“What would she think of me?”

“I don’t know. She might have expected something of the kind.”

“How expect something of the kind? Am I one of the self-advertisers?”

“Well, she must have realized that she was doing rather a bold thing.”

“Bold?”

“Venturesome,” Mrs. Verrian compromised to the kindling anger in her son’s eyes.

“I don’t understand you, mother. I thought you agreed with me about the writer of that letter — her sincerity, simplicity.”

“Sincerity, yes. But simplicity — Philip, a thoroughly single-minded girl never wrote that letter. You can’t feel such a thing as I do. A man couldn’t. You can paint the character of women, and you do it wonderfully — but, after all, you can’t know them as a woman does.”

“You talk,” he answered, a little sulkily, “as if you knew some harm of the girl.”

“No, my son, I know nothing about her, except that she is not single-minded, and there is no harm in not being single-minded. A great many single-minded women are fools, and some double-minded women are good.”

“Well, single-minded or double-minded, if she is what she says she is, what motive on earth could she have in writing to me except the motive she gives? You don’t deny that she tells the truth about herself?”

“Don’t I say that she is sincere? But a girl doesn’t always know her own motives, or all of them. She may have written to you because she would like to begin a correspondence with an author. Or she may have done it out of the love of excitement. Or for the sake of distraction, to get away from herself and her gloomy forebodings.”

“And should you blame her for that?”

“No, I shouldn’t. I should pity her for it. But, all the same, I shouldn’t want you to be taken in by her.”

“You think, then, she doesn’t care anything about the story?”

“I think, very probably, she cares a great deal about it. She is a serious person, intellectually at least, and it is a serious story. No wonder she would like to know, at first hand, something about the man who wrote it.”

This flattered Verrian, but he would not allow its reasonableness. He took a gulp of coffee before saying, uncandidly, “I can’t make out what you’re driving at, mother. But, fortunately, there’s no hurry about your meaning. The thing’s in the only shape we could possibly give it, and I am satisfied to leave it in Armiger’s hands. I’m certain he will deal wisely with it-and kindly.”

“Yes, I’m sure he’ll deal kindly. I should be very unhappy if he didn’t. He could easily deal more wisely, though, than she has.”

Verrian chose not to follow his mother in this. “All is,” he said, with finality, “I hope she’ll never see that loathsome paragraph.”

“Oh, very likely she won’t,” his mother consoled him.

III.

Only four days after he had seen Armiger, Verrian received an envelope covering a brief note to himself from the editor, a copy of the letter he had written to Verrian’s unknown correspondent, and her answer in the original. Verrian was alone when the postman brought him this envelope, and he could indulge a certain passion for method by which he read its contents in the order named; if his mother had been by, she would have made him read the girl’s reply first of all. Armiger wrote:

“MY DEAR VERRIAN, — I enclose two exhibits which will possess you of all the facts in the case of the young lady who feared she might die before she read the end of your story, but who, you will be glad to find, is likely to live through the year. As the story ends in our October number, she need not be supplied with advance sheets. I am sorry the house hurried out a paragraph concerning the matter, but it will not be followed by another. Perhaps you will feel, as I do, that the incident is closed. I have not replied to the writer, and you need not return her letter. Yours ever,

                   “M. ARMIGER.”

The editor’s letter to the young lady read:

“DEAR MADAM, — Mr. P. S. Verrian has handed me your letter of the 4th, and I need not tell you that it has interested us both.

“I am almost as much gratified as he by the testimony your request bears to the importance of his work, and if I could have acted upon my instant feeling I should have had no hesitation in granting it, though it is so very unusual as to be, in my experience as an editor, unprecedented. I am sure that you would not have made it so frankly if you had not been prepared to guard in return any confidence placed in you; but you will realize that as you are quite unknown to us, we should not be justified in taking a step so unusual as you propose without having some guarantee besides that which Mr. Verrian and I both feel from the character of your letter. Simply, then, for purposes of identification, as the phrase is, I must beg you to ask the pastor of your church, or, better still, your family physician, to write you a line saying that he knows you, as a sort of letter of introduction to me. Then I will send you the advance proofs of Mr. Verrian’s story. You may like to address me personally in the care of the magazine, and not as the editor.

              “Yours very respectfully,

                        “M. ARMIGER.”

The editor’s letter was dated the 6th of the month; the answer, dated the 8th, betrayed the anxious haste of the writer in replying, and it was not her fault if what she wrote came to Verrian when he was no longer able to do justice to her confession. Under the address given in her first letter she now began, in, a hand into which a kindlier eye might have read a pathetic perturbation:

“DEAR SIR, — I have something awful to tell you. I might write pages without making you think better of me, and I will let you think the worst at once. I am not what I pretended to be. I wrote to Mr. Verrian saying what I did, and asking to see the rest of his story on the impulse of the moment. I had been reading it, for I think it is perfectly fascinating; and a friend of mine, another girl, and I got together trying to guess how he would end it, and we began to dare each other to write to him and ask. At first we did not dream of doing such a thing, but we went on, and just for the fun of it we drew lots to see which should write to him. The lot fell to me; but we composed that letter together, and we put in about my dying for a joke. We never intended to send it; but then one thing led to another, and I signed it with my real name and we sent it. We did not really expect to hear anything from it, for we supposed he must get lots of letters about his story and never paid any attention to them. We did not realize what we had done till I got your letter yesterday. Then we saw it all, and ever since we have been trying to think what to do, and I do not believe either of us has slept a moment. We have come to the conclusion that there was only one thing we could do, and that was to tell you just exactly how it happened and take the consequences. But there is no reason why more than one person should be brought into it, and so I will not let my friend sign this letter with me, but I will put my own name alone to it. You may not think it is my real name, but it is; you can find out by writing to the postmaster here. I do not know whether you will publish it as a fraud for the warning of others, but I shall not blame you if you do. I deserve anything.

                 “Yours truly,

                    “JERUSHA PEREGRINE BROWN.”

If Verrian had been an older man life might have supplied him with the means of judging the writer of this letter. But his experience as an author had not been very great, and such as it was it had hardened and sharpened him. There was nothing wild or whirling in his mood, but in the deadly hurt which had been inflicted upon his vanity he coldly and carefully studied what deadlier hurt he might inflict again. He was of the crueller intent because he had not known how much of personal vanity there was in the seriousness with which he took himself and his work. He had supposed that he was respecting his ethics and aesthetics, his ideal of conduct and of art, but now it was brought home to him that he was swollen with the conceit of his own performance, and that, however well others thought of it, his own thought of it far outran their will to honor it. He wished to revenge himself for this consciousness as well as the offence offered him; of the two the consciousness was the more disagreeable.

His mother, dressed for the street, came in where he sat quiet at his desk, with the editor’s letters and the girl’s before him, and he mutely referred them to her with a hand lifted over his shoulder. She read them, and then she said, “This is hard to bear, Philip. I wish I could bear it for you, or at least with you; but I’m late for my engagement with Mrs. Alfred, as it is — No, I will telephone her I’m detained and we’ll talk it over—”

“No, no! Not on any account! I’d rather think it out for myself. You couldn’t help me. After all, it hasn’t done me any harm—”

“And you’ve had a great escape! And I won’t say a word more now, but I’ll be back soon, and then we — Oh, I’m so sorry I’m going.”

Verrian gave a laugh. “You couldn’t do anything if you stayed, mother. Do go!”

“Well—” She looked at him, smoothing her muff with her hand a moment, and then she dropped a fond kiss on his cheek and obeyed him.

IV

Verrian still sat at his desk, thinking, with his burning face in his hands. It was covered with shame for what had happened to him, but his humiliation had no quality of pity in it. He must write to that girl, and write at once, and his sole hesitation was as to the form he should give his reply. He could not address her as Dear Miss Brown or as Dear Madam. Even Madam was not sharp and forbidding enough; besides, Madam, alone or with the senseless prefix, was archaic, and Verrian wished to be very modern with this most offensive instance of the latest girl. He decided upon dealing with her in the third person, and trusting to his literary skill to keep the form from clumsiness.

He tried it in that form, and it was simply disgusting, the attitude stiff and swelling, and the diction affected and unnatural. With a quick reversion to the impossible first type, he recast his letter in what was now the only possible shape.

  “MY DEAR MISS BROWN, — The editor of the American Miscellany has

  sent me a copy of his recent letter to you and your own reply, and

  has remanded to me an affair which resulted from my going to him

  with your request to see the close of my story now publishing in his

  magazine.

  “After giving the matter my best thought, I have concluded that it

  will be well to enclose all the exhibits to you, and I now do this

  in the hope that a serious study of them will enable you to share my

  surprise at the moral and social conditions in which the business

  could originate. I willingly leave with you the question which is

  the more trustworthy, your letter to me or your letter to him, or

  which the more truly represents the interesting diversity of your

  nature. I confess that the first moved me more than the second,

  and I do not see why I should not tell you that as soon as I had

  your request I went with it to Mr. Armiger and did what I could to

  prompt his compliance with it. In putting these papers out of my

  hands, I ought to acknowledge that they have formed a temptation to

  make literary use of the affair which I shall now be the better

  fitted to resist. You will, of course, be amused by the ease with

  which you could abuse my reliance on your good faith, and I am sure

  you will not allow any shame for your trick to qualify your pleasure

  in its success.

  “It will not be necessary for you to acknowledge this letter and its

  enclosures. I will register the package, so that it will not fail

  to reach you, and I will return any answer of yours unopened, or, if

  not recognizably addressed, then unread.

              “Yours sincerely,

                      “P. S. VERRIAN.”

He read and read again these lines, with only the sense of their insufficiency in doing the effect of the bitterness in his heart. If the letter was insulting, it was by no means as insulting as he would have liked to make it. Whether it would be wounding enough was something that depended upon the person whom he wished to wound. All that was proud and vain and cruel in him surged up at the thought of the trick that had been played upon him, and all that was sweet and kind and gentle in him, when he believed the trick was a genuine appeal, turned to their counter qualities. Yet, feeble and inadequate as his letter was, he knew that he could not do more or worse by trying, and he so much feared that by waiting he might do less and better that he hurried it into the post at once. If his mother had been at hand he would have shown it her, though he might not have been ruled by her judgment of it. He was glad that she was not with him, for either she would have had her opinion of what would be more telling, or she would have insisted upon his delaying any sort of reply, and he could not endure the thought of difference or delay.

He asked himself whether he should let her see the rough first draft of his letter or not, and he decided that he would not. But when she came into his study on her return he showed it her.

She read it in silence, and then she seemed to temporize in asking, “Where are her two letters?”

“I’ve sent them back with the answer.”

His mother let the paper drop from her hands. “Philip! You haven’t sent this!”

“Yes, I have. It wasn’t what I wanted to make it, but I wished to get the detestable experience out of my mind, and it was the best I could do at the moment. Don’t you like it?”

“Oh—” She seemed beginning to say something, but without saying anything she took the fallen leaf up and read it again.

“Well!” he demanded, with impatience.

“Oh, you may have been right. I hope you’ve not been wrong.”

“Mother!”

“She deserved the severest things you could say; and yet—”

“Well?”

“Perhaps she was punished enough already.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t like your being-vindictive.”

“Vindictive?”

“Being so terribly just, then.” She added, at his blank stare, “This is killing, Philip.”

He gave a bitter laugh. “I don’t think it will kill her. She isn’t that kind.”

“She’s a girl,” his mother said, with a kind of sad absence.

“But not a single-minded girl, you warned me. I wish I could have taken your warning. It would have saved me from playing the fool before myself and giving myself away to Armiger, and letting him give himself away. I don’t think Miss Brown will suffer much before she dies. She will ‘get together,’ as she calls it, with that other girl and have ‘a real good time’ over it. You know the village type and the village conditions, where the vulgar ignorance of any larger world is so thick you could cut it with a knife. Don’t be troubled by my vindictiveness or my justice, mother! I begin to think I have done justice and not fallen short of it, as I was afraid.”

Mrs. Verrian sighed, and again she gave his letter back to her son. “Perhaps you are right, Philip. She is probably so tough as not to feel it very painfully.”

“She’s not so tough but she’ll be very glad to get out of it so lightly. She has had a useful scare, and I’ve done her a favor in making the scare a sharp one. I suppose,” Verrian mused, “that she thinks I’ve kept copies of her letters.”

“Yes. Why didn’t you?” his mother asked.

Verrian laughed, only a little less bitterly than before. “I shall begin to believe you’re all alike, mother.”

I didn’t keep copies of her letters because I wanted to get her and her letters out of my mind, finally and forever. Besides, I didn’t choose. to emulate her duplicity by any sort of dissimulation.

“I see what you mean,” his mother said. “And, of course, you have taken the only honorable way.”

Then they were both silent for a time, thinking their several thoughts.

Verrian broke the silence to say, “I wish I knew what sort of ‘other girl’ it was that she ‘got together with.’”

“Why?”

“Because she wrote a more cultivated letter than this magnanimous creature who takes all the blame to herself.”

“Then you don’t believe they’re both the same?”

“They are both the same in stationery and chirography, but not in literature.”

“I hope you won’t get to thinking about her, then,” his mother entreated, intelligibly but not definitely.

“Not seriously,” Verrian reassured her. “I’ve had my medicine.”

V.

Continuity is so much the lesson of experience that in the course of a life by no means long it becomes the instinctive expectation. The event that has happened will happen again; it will prolong itself in a series of recurrences by which each one’s episode shares in the unending history of all. The sense of this is so pervasive that humanity refuses to accept death itself as final. In the agonized affections, the shattered hopes, of those who remain, the severed life keeps on unbrokenly, and when time and reason prevail, at least as to the life here, the defeated faith appeals for fulfilment to another world, and the belief of immortality holds against the myriad years in which none of the numberless dead have made an indisputable sign in witness of it. The lost limb still reports its sensations to the brain; the fixed habit mechanically attempts its repetition when the conditions render it impossible.

Verrian was aware how deeply and absorbingly he had brooded upon the incident which he had done his utmost to close, when he found himself expecting an answer of some sort from his unknown correspondent. He perceived, then, without owning the fact, that he had really hoped for some protest, some excuse, some extenuation, which in the end would suffer him to be more merciful. Though he had wished to crush her into silence, and to forbid her all hope of his forgiveness, he had, in a manner, not meant to do it. He had kept a secret place in his soul where the sinner against him could find refuge from his justice, and when this sanctuary remained unattempted he found himself with a regret that he had barred the way to it so effectually. The regret was so vague, so formless, however, that he could tacitly deny it to himself at all times, and explicitly deny it to his mother at such times as her touch taught him that it was tangible.

One day, after ten or twelve days had gone by, she asked him, “You haven’t heard anything more from that girl?”

“What girl?” he returned, as if he did not know; and he frowned. “You mean the girl that wrote me about my story?”

He continued to frown rather more darkly. “I don’t see how you could expect me to hear from her, after what I wrote. But, to be categorical, I haven’t, mother.”

“Oh, of course not. Did you think she would be so easily silenced?”

“I did what I could to crush her into silence.”

“Yes, and you did quite right; I am more and more convinced of that. But such a very tough young person might have refused to stay crushed. She might very naturally have got herself into shape again and smoothed out the creases, at least so far to try some further defence.”

“It seems that she hasn’t,” Verrian said, still darkly, but not so frowningly.

“I should have fancied,” his mother suggested, “that if she had wanted to open a correspondence with you — if that was her original object — she would not have let it drop so easily.”

“Has she let it drop easily? I thought I had left her no possible chance of resuming it.”

“That is true,” his mother said, and for the time she said no more about the matter.

Not long after this he came home from the magazine office and reported to her from Armiger that the story was catching on more and more with the best class of readers. The editor had shown Verrian some references to it in newspapers of good standing and several letters about it.

“I thought you might like to look at the letters,” Verrian said, and he took some letters from his pocket and handed them to her across the lunch-table. She did not immediately look at them, because he went on to add something that they both felt to be more important. “Armiger says there has been some increase of the sales, which I can attribute to my story if I have the cheek.”

“That is good.”

“And the house wants to publish the book. They think, down there, that it will have a very pretty success — not be a big seller, of course, but something comfortable.”

Mrs. Verrian’s eyes were suffused with pride and fondness. “And you can always think, Philip, that this has come to you without the least lowering of your standard, without forsaking your ideal for a moment.”

“That is certainly a satisfaction.”

She kept her proud and tender gaze upon him. “No one will ever know as I do how faithful you have been to your art. Did any of the newspapers recognize that — or surmise it, or suspect it?”

“No, that isn’t the turn they take. They speak of the strong love interest involved in the problem. And the abundance of incident. I looked out to keep something happening, you know. I’m sorry I didn’t ask Armiger to let me bring the notices home to you. I’m not sure that I did wisely not to subscribe to that press-clippings bureau.”

His mother smiled. “You mustn’t let prosperity corrupt you, Philip. Wouldn’t seeing what the press is saying of it distract you from the real aim you had in your story?”

“We’re all weak, of course. It might, if the story were not finished; but as it is, I think I could be proof against the stupidest praise.”

“Well, for my part, I’m glad you didn’t subscribe to the clippings bureau. It would have been a disturbing element.” She now looked down at the letters as if she were going to take them up, and he followed the direction of her eyes. As if reminded of the fact by this, he said:

“Armiger asked me if I had ever heard anything more from that girl.”

“Has he?” his mother eagerly asked, transferring her glance from the letters to her son’s face.

“Not a word. I think I silenced her thoroughly.”

“Yes,” his mother said. “There could have been no good object in prolonging the affair and letting her confirm herself in the notion that she was of sufficient importance either to you or to him for you to continue the correspondence with her. She couldn’t learn too distinctly that she had done — a very wrong thing in trying to play such a trick on you.”

“That was the way I looked at it,” Verrian said, but he drew a light sigh, rather wearily.

“I hope,” his mother said, with a recurrent glance at the letters, “that there is nothing of that silly kind among these.”

“No, these are blameless enough, unless they are to be blamed for being too flattering. That girl seems to be sole of her kind, unless the girl that she ‘got together with’ was really like her.”

“I don’t believe there was any other girl. I never thought there was more than one.”

“There seemed to be two styles and two grades of culture, such as they were.”

“Oh, she could easily imitate two manners. She must have been a clever girl,” Mrs. Verrian said, with that admiration for any sort of cleverness in her sex which even very good women cannot help feeling.

“Well, perhaps she was punished enough for both the characters she assumed,” Verrian said, with a smile that was not gay.

“Don’t think about her!” his mother returned, with a perception of his mood. “I’m only thankful that she’s out of our lives in every sort of way.”

VI.

Verrian said nothing, but he reflected with a sort of gloomy amusement how impossible it was for any woman, even a woman so wide-minded and high-principled as his mother, to escape the personal view of all things and all persons which women take. He tacitly noted the fact, as the novelist notes whatever happens or appears to him, but he let the occasion drop out of his mind as soon as he could after it had dropped out of his talk.

The night when the last number of his story came to them in the magazine, and was already announced as a book, he sat up with his mother celebrating, as he said, and exulting in the future as well as the past. They had a little supper, which she cooked for him in a chafing-dish, in the dining-room of the tiny apartment where they lived together, and she made some coffee afterwards, to carry off the effect of the Newburg lobster. Perhaps because there was nothing to carry off the effect of the coffee, he heard her, through the partition of their rooms, stirring restlessly after he had gone to bed, and a little later she came to his door, which she set ajar, to ask, “Are you awake, Philip?”

“You seem to be, mother,” he answered, with an amusement at her question which seemed not to have imparted itself to her when she came in and stood beside his bed in her dressing-gown.

“You don’t think we have judged her too harshly, Philip?”

“Do you, mother?”

“No, I think we couldn’t be too severe in a thing like that. She probably thought you were like some of the other story-writers; she couldn’t feel differences, shades. She pretended to be taken with the circumstances of your work, but she had to do that if she wanted to fool you. Well, she has got her come-uppings, as she would probably say.”

Verrian replied, thoughtfully, “She didn’t strike me as a country person — at least, in her first letter.”

“Then you still think she didn’t write both?”

“If she did, she was trying her hand in a personality she had invented.”

“Girls are very strange,” his mother sighed. “They like excitement, adventure. It’s very dull in those little places. I shouldn’t wish you to think any harm of the poor thing.”

“Poor thing? Why this magnanimous compassion, mother?”

“Oh, nothing. But I know how I was myself when I was a girl. I used almost to die of hunger for something to happen. Can you remember just what you said in your letter?”

Verrian laughed. “NO, I can’t. But I don’t believe I said half enough. You’re nervous, mother.”

“Yes, I am. But don’t you get to worrying. I merely got to thinking how I should hate to have anybody’s unhappiness mixed up with this happiness of ours. I do so want your pleasure in your success to be pure, not tainted with the pain of any human creature.”

Verrian answered with light cynicism: “It will be tainted with the pain of the fellows who don’t like me, or who haven’t succeeded, and they’ll take care to let me share their pain if ever they can. But if you mean that merry maiden up country, she’s probably thinking, if she thinks about it at all, that she’s the luckiest girl in the United States to have got out of an awful scrape so easily. At the worst, I only had fun with her in my letter. Probably she sees that she has nothing to grieve for but her own break.”

“No, and you did just as you should have done; and I am glad you don’t feel bitterly about it. You don’t, do you?”

“Not the least.”

His mother stooped over and kissed him where he lay smiling. “Well, that’s good. After all, it’s you I cared for. Now I can say good-night.” But she lingered to tuck him in a little, from the persistence of the mother habit. “I wish you may never do anything that you will be sorry for.”

“Well, I won’t — if it’s a good action.”

They laughed together, and she left the room, still looking back to see if there was anything more she could do for him, while he lay smiling, intelligently for what she was thinking, and patiently for what she was doing.

VII.

Even in the time which was then coming and which now is, when successful authors are almost as many as millionaires, Verrian’s book brought him a pretty celebrity; and this celebrity was in a way specific. It related to the quality of his work, which was quietly artistic and psychological, whatever liveliness of incident it uttered on the surface. He belonged to the good school which is of no fashion and of every time, far both from actuality and unreality; and his recognition came from people whose recognition was worth having. With this came the wider notice which was not worth having, like the notice of Mrs. Westangle, since so well known to society reporters as a society woman, which could not be called recognition of him, because it did not involve any knowledge of his book, not even its title. She did not read any sort of books, and she assimilated him by a sort of atmospheric sense. She was sure of nothing but the attention paid him in a certain very goodish house, by people whom she heard talking in unintelligible but unmistakable praise, when she said, casually, with a liquid glitter of her sweet, small eyes, “I wish you would come down to my place, Mr. Verrian. I’m asking a few young people for Christmas week. Will you?”

“Why, thank you — thank you very much,” Verrian said, waiting to hear more in explanation of the hospitality launched at him. He had never seen Mrs. Westangle till then, or heard of her, and he had not the least notion where she lived. But she seemed to have social authority, though Verrian, in looking round at his hostess and her daughter, who stood near, letting people take leave, learned nothing from their common smile. Mrs. Westangle had glided close to him, in the way she had of getting very near without apparently having advanced by steps, and she stood gleaming and twittering up at him.

“I shall send you a little note; I won’t let you forget,” she said. Then she suddenly shook hands with the ladies of the house and was flashingly gone.

Verrian thought he might ask the daughter of the house, “And if I don’t forget, am I engaged to spend Christmas week with her?”

The girl laughed. “If she doesn’t forget, you are. But you’ll have a good time. She’ll know how to manage that.” Other guests kept coming up to take leave, and Verrian, who did not want to go just yet, was retired to the background, where the girl’s voice, thrown over her shoulder at him, reached him in the words, as gay as if they were the best of the joke, “It’s on the Sound.”

The inference was that Mrs. Westangle’s place was on the Sound; and that was all Verrian knew about it till he got her little note. Mrs. Westangle knew how to write in a formless hand, but she did not know how to spell, and she had thought it best to have a secretary who could write well and spell correctly. Though, as far as literacy was concerned, she was such an almost incomparably ignorant woman, she had all the knowledge the best society wants, or, if she found herself out of any, she went and bought some; she was able to buy almost anything.

Verrian thanked the secretary for remembering him, in the belief that he was directly thanking Mrs. Westangle, whose widespread consciousness his happiness in accepting did not immediately reach; and in the very large house party, which he duly joined under her roof, he was aware of losing distinctiveness almost to the point of losing identity. This did not quite happen on the way to Belford, for, when he went to take his seat in the drawing-room car, a girl in the chair fronting him put out her hand with the laugh of Miss Macroyd.

“She did remember you!” she cried out. “How delightful! I don’t see how she ever got onto you” — she made the slang her own— “in the first place, and she must have worked hard to be sure of you since.”

Verrian hung up his coat and put his suit-case behind his chair, the porter having put it where he could not wheel himself vis-a-vis with the girl. “She took all the time there was,” he answered. “I got my invitation only the day before yesterday, and if I had been in more demand, or had a worse conscience—”

“Oh, do say worse conscience! It’s so much more interesting,” the girl broke in.

“ — I shouldn’t have the pleasure of going to Seasands with you now,” he concluded, and she gave her laugh. “Do I understand that simply my growing fame wouldn’t have prevailed with her?”

Anything seemed to make Miss Macroyd laugh. “She couldn’t have cared about that, and she wouldn’t have known. You may be sure that it was a social question with her after the personal question was settled. She must have liked your looks!” Again Miss Macroyd laughed.

“On that side I’m invulnerable. It’s only a literary vanity to be soothed or to be wounded that I have,” Verrian said.

“Oh, there wouldn’t be anything personal in her liking your looks. It would be merely deciding that personally you would do,” Miss Macroyd laughed, as always, and Verrian put on a mock seriousness in asking:

“Then I needn’t be serious if there should happen to be anything so Westangular as a Mr. Westangle?”

“Not the least in the world.”

“But there is something?”

“Oh, I believe so. But not probably at Seasands.”

“Is that her house?”

“Yes. Every other name had been used, and she couldn’t say Soundsands.”

“Then where would the Mr. Westangular part more probably be found?”

“Oh, in Montana or Mesopotamia, or any of those places. Don’t you know about him? How ignorant literary people can be! Why, he was the Amalgamated Clothespin. You haven’t heard of that?”

She went on to tell him, with gay digressions, about the invention which enabled Westangle to buy up the other clothes-pins and merge them in his own — to become a commercial octopus, clutching the throats of other clothespin inventors in the tentacles of the Westangle pin. “But he isn’t in clothespins now. He’s in mines, and banks, and steamboats, and railroads, and I don’t know what all; and Mrs. Westangle, the second of her name, never was in clothespins.”

Miss Macroyd laughed all through her talk, and she was in a final burst of laughing when the train slowed into Stamford. There a girl came into the car trailing her skirts with a sort of vivid debility and overturning some minor pieces of hand-baggage which her draperies swept out of their shelter beside the chairs. She had to take one of the seats which back against the wall of the state-room, where she must face the whole length of the car. She sat weakly fallen back in the chair and motionless, as if almost unconscious; but after the train had begun to stir she started up, and with a quick flinging of her veil aside turned to look out of the window. In the flying instant Verrian saw a colorless face with pinched and sunken eyes under a worn-looking forehead, and a withered mouth whose lips parted feebly.

On her part, Miss Macroyd had doubtless already noted that the girl was, with no show of expensiveness, authoritatively well gowned and personally hatted. She stared at her, and said, “What a very hunted and escaping effect.”

“She does look rather-fugitive,” Verrian agreed, staring too.

“One might almost fancy — an asylum.”

“Yes, or a hospital.”

They continued both to stare at her, helpless for what ever different reasons to take their eyes away, and they were still interested in her when they heard her asking the conductor, “Must I change and take another train before we get to Belford? My friends thought—”

“No, this train stops at Southfield,” the conductor answered, absently biting several holes into her drawing-room ticket.

“Can she be one of us?” Miss Macroyd demanded, in a dramatic whisper.

“She might be anything,” Verrian returned, trying instantly, with a whir of his inventive machinery, to phrase her. He made a sort of luxurious failure of it, and rested content with her face, which showed itself now in profile and now fronted him in full, and now was restless and now subsided in a look of delicate exhaustion. He would have said, if he would have said anything absolute, that she was a person who had something on her mind; at instants she had that hunted air, passing at other instants into that air of escape. He discussed these appearances with Miss Macroyd, but found her too frankly disputatious; and she laughed too much and too loud.

VIII.

At Southfield, where they all descended, Miss Macroyd promptly possessed herself of a groom, who came forward tentatively, touching his hat. “Miss Macroyd?” she suggested.

“Yes, miss,” the man said, and led the way round the station to the victoria which, when Miss Macroyd’s maid had mounted to the place beside her, had no room; for any one else.

Verrian accounted for her activity upon the theory of her quite justifiable wish not to arrive at Seasands with a young man whom she might then have the effect of having voluntarily come all the way with; and after one or two circuits of the station it was apparent to him that he was not to have been sent for from Mrs. Westangle’s, but to have been left to the chances of the local drivers and their vehicles. These were reduced to a single carryall and a frowsy horse whose rough winter coat recalled the aspect of his species in the period following the glacial epoch. The mud, as of a world-thaw, encrusted the wheels and curtains of the carryall.

Verrian seized upon it and then went into the waiting-room, where he had left his suit-case. He found the stranger there in parley with the young woman in the ticket-office about a conveyance to Mrs. Westangle’s. It proved that he had secured not only the only thing of the sort, but the only present hope of any other, and in the hard case he could not hesitate with distress so interesting. It would have been brutal to drive off and leave that girl there, and it would have been a vulgar flourish to put the entire vehicle at her service. Besides, and perhaps above all, Verrian had no idea of depriving himself of such a chance as heaven seemed to offer him.

He advanced with the delicacy of the highest-bred hero he could imagine, and said, “I am going to Mrs. Westangle’s, and I’m afraid I’ve got the only conveyance — such as it is. If you would let me offer you half of it? Mr. Verrian,” he added, at the light of acceptance instantly kindling in her face, which flushed thinly, as with an afterglow of invalidism.

“Why, thank you; I’m afraid I must, Mr. Merriam,” and Verrian was aware of being vexed at her failure to catch his name; the name of Verrian ought to have been unmistakable. “The young lady in the office says there won’t be another, and I’m expected promptly.” She added, with a little tremor of the lip, “I don’t understand why Mrs. Westangle—” But then she stopped.

Verrian interpreted for her: “The sea-horses must have given out at Seasands. Or probably there’s some mistake,” and he reflected bitterly upon the selfishness of Miss Macroyd in grabbing that victoria for herself and her maid, not considering that she could not know, and has no business to ask, whether this girl was going to Mrs. Westangle’s, too. “Have you a check?” he asked. “I think our driver could find room for something besides my valise. Or I could have it come—”

“Not at all,” the girl said. “I sent my trunk ahead by express.”

A frowsy man, to match the frowsy horse, looked in impatiently. “Any other baggage?”

“No,” Verrian answered, and he led the way out after the vanishing driver. “Our chariot is back here in hiding, Miss—”

“Shirley,” she said, and trailed before him through the door he opened.

He felt that he did not do it as a man of the world would have done it, and in putting her into the ramshackle carryall he knew that he had not the grace of the sort of man who does nothing else. But Miss Shirley seemed to have grace enough, of a feeble and broken sort, for both, and he resolved to supply his own lack with sincerity. He therefore set his jaw firmly and made its upper angles jut sharply through his clean-shaven cheeks. It was well that Miss Shirley had some beauty to spare, too, for Verrian had scarcely enough for himself. Such distinction as he had was from a sort of intellectual tenseness which showed rather in the gaunt forms of his face than in the gray eyes, heavily lashed above and below, and looking serious but dull with their rank, black brows. He was chewing a cud of bitterness in the accusal he made himself of having forced Miss Shirley to give her name; but with that interesting personality at his side, under the same tattered and ill-scented Japanese goat-skin, he could not refuse to be glad, with all his self-blame.

“I’m afraid it’s rather a long drive-for you, Miss Shirley,” he ventured, with a glance at her face, which looked very little under her hat. “The driver says it’s five miles round through the marshes.”

“Oh, I shall not mind,” she said, courageously, if not cheerfully, and he did not feel authorized further to recognize the fact that she was an invalid, or at best a convalescent.

“These wintry tree-forms are fine, though,” he found himself obliged to conclude his apology, rather irrelevantly, as the wheels of the rattling, and tilting carry all crunched the surface of the road in the succession of jerks responding to the alternate walk and gallop of the horse.

“Yes, they are,” Miss Shirley answered, looking around with a certain surprise, as if seeing them now for the first time. “So much variety of color; and that burnished look that some of them have.” The trees, far and near, were giving their tones and lustres in the low December sun.

“Yes,” he said, “it’s decidedly more refined than the autumnal coloring we brag of.”

“It is,” she approved, as with novel conviction. “The landscape is really beautiful. So nice and flat,” she added.

He took her intention, and he said, as he craned his neck out of the carryall to include the nearer roadside stretches, with their low bushes lifting into remoter trees, “It’s restful in a way that neither the mountains nor the sea, quite manage.”

“Oh yes,” she sighed, with a kind of weariness which explained itself in what she added: “It’s the kind of thing you’d like to have keep on and on.” She seemed to say that more to herself than to him, and his eyes questioned her. She smiled slightly in explaining: “I suppose I find it all the more beautiful because this is my first real look into the world after six months indoors.”

“Oh!” he said, and there was no doubt a prompting in his tone.

She smiled still. “Sick people are terribly, egotistical, and I suppose it’s my conceit of having been the centre of the universe so lately that makes me mention it.” And here she laughed a little at herself, showing a charming little peculiarity in the catch of her upper lip on her teeth. “But this is divine — this air and this sight.” She put her head out of her side of the carryall, and drank them in with her lungs and eyes.

When she leaned back again on the seat she said, “I can’t get enough of it.”

“But isn’t this old rattletrap rather too rough for you?” he asked.

“Oh no,” she said, visiting him with a furtive turn of her eyes. “It’s quite ideally what invalids in easy circumstances are advised to take carriage exercise.”

“Yes, it’s certainly carriage exercise,” Verrian admitted in the same spirit, if it was a drolling spirit. He could not help being amused by the situation in which they had been brought together, through the vigorous promptitude of Miss Macroyd in making the victoria her own, and the easy indifference of Mrs. Westangle as to how they should get to her house. If he had been alone he might have felt the indifference as a slight, but as it was he felt it rather a favor. If Miss Shirley was feeling it a slight, she was too secret or too sweet to let it be known, and he thought that was nice of her. Still, he believed he might recognize the fact without deepening a possible hurt of hers, and he added, with no apparent relevance, “If Mrs. Westangle was not looking for us on this train, she will find that it is the unexpected which happens.”

“We are certainly going to happen,” the girl said, with an acceptance of the plural which deepened the intimacy of the situation, and which was not displeasing to Verrian when she added, “If our friend’s vehicle holds out.” Then she turned her face full upon him, with what affected him as austere resolution, in continuing, “But I can’t let you suppose that you’re conveying a society person, or something of that sort, to Mrs. Westangle’s.” His own face expressed his mystification, and she concluded, “I’m simply going there to begin my work.”

He smiled provisionally in temporizing with the riddle. “You women are wonderful, nowadays, for the work you do.”

“Oh, but,” she protested, nervously, anxiously, “it isn’t good work that I’m going to do — I understand what you mean — it’s work for a living. I’ve no business to be arriving with an invited guest, but it seemed to be a question of arriving or not at the time when I was due.”

IX.

Verrian stared at her now from a visage that was an entire blank, though behind it conjecture was busy, and he was asking himself whether his companion was some new kind of hair-dresser, or uncommonly cultivated manicure, or a nursery governess obeying a hurry call to take a place in Mrs. Westangle’s household, or some sort of amateur housekeeper arriving to supplant a professional. But he said nothing.

Miss Shirley said, with a distress which was genuine, though he perceived a trace of amusement in it, too, “I see that I will have to go on.”

“Oh, do!” he made out to utter.

“I am going to Mrs. Westangle’s as a sort of mistress of the revels. The business is so new that it hasn’t got its name yet, but if I fail it won’t need any. I invented it on a hint I got from a girl who undertakes the floral decorations for parties. I didn’t see why some one shouldn’t furnish suggestions for amusements, as well as flowers. I was always rather lucky at that in my own fam — at my father’s—” She pulled herself sharply up, as if danger lay that way. “I got an introduction to Mrs. Westangle, and she’s to let me try. I am going to her simply as part of the catering, and I’m not to have any recognition in the hospitalities. So it wasn’t necessary for her to send for me at the station, except as a means of having me on the ground in good season. I have to thank you for that, and — I thank you.” She ended in a sigh.

“It’s very interesting,” Verrian said, and he hoped he was not saying it in any ignoble way.

He was very presently to learn. Round a turn of the road there came a lively clacking of horses’ shoes on the hard track, with the muted rumble of rubber-tired wheels, and Mrs. Westangle’s victoria dashed into view. The coachman had made a signal to Verrian’s driver, and the vehicles stopped side by side. The footman instantly came to the door of the carryall, touching his hat to Verrian.

“Going to Mrs. Westangle’s, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Westangle’s carriage. Going to the station for you, sir.”

“Miss Shirley,” Verrian said, “will you change?”

“Oh no,” she answered, quickly, “it’s better for me to go on as I am. But the carriage was sent for you. You must—”

Verrian interrupted to ask the footman, “How far is it yet to Mrs. Westangle’s?”

“About a mile, sir.”

“I think I won’t change for such a short distance. I’ll keep on as I am,” Verrian said, and he let the goatskin, which he had half lifted to free Miss Shirley for dismounting, fall back again. “Go ahead, driver.”

She had been making several gasping efforts at speech, accompanied with entreating and protesting glances at Verrian in the course of his brief colloquy with the footman. Now, as the carryall lurched forward again, and the victoria wheeled and passed them on its way back, she caught her handkerchief to her face, and to Verrian’s dismay sobbed into it. He let her cry, as he must, in the distressful silence which he could not be the first to break. Besides, he did not know how she was taking it all till she suddenly with threw her handkerchief and pulled down her veil. Then she spoke three heart-broken words, “How could you!” and he divined that he must have done wrong.

“What ought I to have done?” he asked, with sullen humility.

“You ought to have taken the victoria.”

“How could I?”

“You ought to have done it.”

“I think you ought to have done it yourself, Miss Shirley,” Verrian said, feeling like the worm that turns. He added, less resentfully, “We ought both to have taken it.”

“No, Mrs. Westangle might have felt, very properly, that it was presumptuous in me, whether I came alone in it or with you. Now we shall arrive together in this thing, and she will be mortified for you and vexed with me. She will blame me for it, and she will be right, for it would have been very well for me to drive up in a shabby station carryall; but an invited guest—”

“No, indeed, she shall not blame you, Miss Shirley. I will make a point of taking the whole responsibility. I will tell her—”

“Mr. Merriam!” she cried, in anguish. “Will you please do nothing of the kind? Do you want to make bad worse? Leave the explaining altogether to me, please. Will you promise that?”

“I will promise that — or anything — if you insist,” Verrian sulked.

She instantly relented a little. “You mustn’t think me unreasonable. But I was determined to carry my undertaking through on business principles, and you have spoiled my chance — I know you meant it kindly or, if not spoiled, made it more difficult. Don’t think me ungrateful. Mr. Merriam—”

“My name isn’t Merriam,” he resented, at last, a misnomer which had annoyed him from the first.

“Oh, I am so glad! Don’t tell me what it is!” she said, giving a laugh which had to go on a little before he recognized the hysterical quality in it. When she could check it she explained: “Now we are not even acquainted, and I can thank a stranger for the kindness you have shown me. I am truly grateful. Will you do me another favor?”

“Yes,” Verrian assented; but he thought he had a right to ask, as though he had not promised, “What is it?”

“Not to speak of me to Mrs. Westangle unless she speaks of me first.”

“That’s simple. I don’t know that I should have any right to speak of you.”

“Oh yes, you would. She will expect you, perhaps, to laugh about the little adventure, and I would rather she began the laughing you have been so good.”

“All right. But wouldn’t my silence make it rather more awkward?”

“I will take care of the awkwardness, thank you. And you promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

“That is very good of you.” She put her hand impulsively across the goat-skin, and gave his, with which he took it in some surprise, a quick clasp. Then they were both silent, and they got out of the carryall under Mrs. Westangle’s porte-cochere without having exchanged another word. Miss Shirley did not bow to him or look at him in parting.

X.

Verrian kept seeing before his inner eyes the thin face of the girl, dimmed rather than lighted with her sick yes. When she should be stronger, there might be a pale flush in it, like sunset on snow, but Verrian had to imagine that. He did not find it difficult to imagine many things about the girl, whom, in another mood, a more judicial mood, he might have accused of provoking him to imagine them. As it was, he could not help noting to that second self which we all have about us, that her confidences, such as they were, had perhaps been too voluntary; certainly they had not been quite obligatory, and they could not be quite accounted for, except upon the theory of nerves not yet perfectly under her control. To be sure, girls said all sorts of things to one, ignorantly and innocently; but she did not seem the kind of girl who, in different circumstances, would have said anything that she did not choose or that she did not mean to say. She had been surprisingly frank, and yet, at heart, Verrian would have thought she was a very reticent person or a secret person — that is, mentally frank and sentimentally secret; possibly she was like most women in that. What he was sure of was that the visual impression of her which he had received must have been very vivid to last so long in his consciousness; all through his preparations for going down to afternoon tea her face remained subjectively before him, and when he went down and found himself part of a laughing and chattering company in the library he still found it, in his inner sense, here, there, and yonder.

He was aware of suffering a little disappointment in Mrs. Westangle’s entire failure to mention Miss Shirley, though he was aware that his disappointment was altogether unreasonable, and he more reasonably decided that if she knew anything of his arrival, or the form of it, she had too much of the making of a grande dame to be recognizant of it. He did not know from her whether she had meant to send for him at the station or not, or whether she had sent her carriage back for him when he did not arrive in it at first. Nothing was left in her manner of such slight specialization as she had thrown into it when, at the Macroyds’, she asked him down to her house party; she seemed, if there were any difference, to have acquired an additional ignorance of who and what he was, though she twittered and flittered up close to his elbow, after his impersonal welcome, and asked him if she might introduce him to the young lady who was pouring tea for her, and who, after the brief drama necessary for possessing him of a cup of it, appeared to have no more use for him than Mrs. Westangle herself had. There were more young men than young women in the room, but he imagined the usual superabundance of girlhood temporarily absent for repair of the fatigues of the journey. Every girl in the room had at least one man talking to her, and the girl who was pouring tea had one on each side of her and was trying to fix them both with an eye lifted towards each, while she struggled to keep her united gaze watchfully upon the tea-urn and those who came up with cups to be filled or refilled.

Verrian thought his fellow-guests were all amiable enough looking, though he made his reflection that they did not look, any of them, as if they would set the Sound on fire; and again he missed the companion of his arrival.

After he had got his cup of tea, he stood sipping it with a homeless air which he tried to conceal, and cast a furtive eye round the room till it rested upon the laughing face of Miss Macroyd. A young man was taking away her teacup, and Verrian at once went up and seized his place.

“How did you get here?” she asked, rather shamelessly, since she had kept him from coming in the victoria, but amusingly, since she seemed to see it as a joke, if she saw it at all.

“I walked,” he answered.

“Truly?”

“No, not truly.”

“But, truly, how did you? Because I sent the carriage back for you.”

“That was very thoughtful of you. But I found a delightful public vehicle behind the station, and I came in that. I’m so glad to know that it wasn’t Mrs. Westangle who had the trouble of sending the carriage back for me.”

Miss Macroyd laughed and laughed at his resentment. “But surely you met it on the way? I gave the man a description of you. Didn’t he stop for you?”

“Oh yes, but I was too proud to change by that time. Or perhaps I hated the trouble.”

Miss Macroyd laughed the more; then she purposely darkened her countenance so as to suit it to her lugubrious whisper, “How did she get here?”

“What she?”

“The mysterious fugitive. Wasn’t she coming here, after all?”

“After all your trouble in supposing so?” Verrian reflected a moment, and then he said, deliberately, “I don’t know.”

Miss Macroyd was not going to let him off like that. “You don’t know how she came, or you don’t know whether she was coming?”

“I didn’t say.”

Her laugh resounded again. “Now you are trying to be wicked, and that is very wrong for a novelist.”

“But what object could I have in concealing the fact from you, Miss Macroyd?” he entreated, with mock earnestness.

“That is what I want to find out.”

“What are you two laughing so about?” the voice of Mrs. Westangle twittered at Verrian’s elbow, and, looking down, he found her almost touching it. She had a very long, narrow neck, and, since it was long and narrow, she had the good sense not to palliate the fact or try to dress the effect of it out of sight. She took her neck in both hands, as it were, and put it more on show, so that you had really to like it. Now it lifted her face, though she was not a tall person, well towards the level of his; to be sure, he was himself only of the middle height of men, though an aquiline profile helped him up.

He stirred the tea which he had ceased to drink, and said, “I wasn’t ‘laughing so about,’ Mrs. Westangle. It was Miss Macroyd.”

“And I was laughing so about a mysterious stranger that came up on the train with us and got out at your station.”

“And I was trying to make out what was so funny in a mysterious stranger, or even in her getting out at your station.”

Mrs. Westangle was not interested in the case, or else she failed to seize the joke. At any rate, she turned from them without further question and went away to another part of the room, where she semi-attached herself in like manner to another couple, and again left it for still another. This was possibly her idea of looking after her guests; but when she had looked after them a little longer in that way she left the room and let them look after themselves till dinner.

“Come, Mr. Verrian,” Miss Macroyd resumed, “what is the secret? I’ll never tell if you tell me.”

“You won’t if I don’t.”

“Now you are becoming merely trivial. You are ceasing even to be provoking.” Miss Macroyd, in token of her displeasure, laughed no longer.

“Am I?” he questioned; thoughtfully. “Well, then, I am tempted to act upon impulse.”

“Oh, do act upon impulse for once,” she urged. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

“Do you mean that I’m never impulsive?”

“I don’t think you look it.”

“If you had seen me an hour ago you would have said I was very impulsive. I think I may have exhausted myself in that direction, however. I feel the impulse failing me now.”

XI.

His impulse really had failed him. It had been to tell Miss Macroyd about his adventure and frankly trust her with it. He had liked her at several former meetings rather increasingly, because she had seemed open and honest beyond the most of women, but her piggish behavior at the station had been rather too open and honest, and the sense of this now opportunely intervened between him and the folly he was about to commit. Besides, he had no right to give Miss Shirley’s part in his adventure away, and, since the affair was more vitally hers than his, to take it at all out of her hands. The early-falling dusk had favored an unnoticed advent for them, and there were other chances that had helped keep unknown their arrival together at Mrs. Westangle’s in that squalid carryall, such as Miss Shirley’s having managed instantly to slip indoors before the man came out for Verrian’s suit-case, and of her having got to her own appointed place long before there was any descent of the company to the afternoon tea.

It was not for him now to undo all that and begin the laughing at the affair, which she had pathetically intimated that she would rather some one else should begin. He recoiled from his imprudence with a shock, but he had the pleasure of having mystified Miss Macroyd. He felt dismissal in the roving eye which she cast from him round the room, and he willingly let another young man replace him at her side.

Yet he was not altogether satisfied. A certain meaner self that there was in him was not pleased with his relegation even merely in his own consciousness to the championship of a girl who was going to make her living in a sort of menial way. It had better be owned for him that, in his visions of literary glory, he had figured in social triumphs which, though vague, were resplendent with the glitter of smart circles. He had been so ignorant of such circles as to suppose they would have some use for him as a brilliant young author; and though he was outwearing this illusion, he still would not have liked a girl like Julia Macroyd, whose family, if not smart, was at least chic, to know that he had come to the house with a professional mistress of the revels, until Miss Shirley should have approved herself chic, too. The notion of such an employment as hers was in itself chic, but the girl was merely a paid part of the entertainment, as yet, and had not risen above the hireling status. If she had sunk to that level from a higher rank it would be all right, but there was no evidence that she had ever been smart. Verrian would, therefore, rather not be mixed up with her — at any rate, in the imagination of a girl like Julia Macroyd; and as he left her side he drew a long breath of relief and went and put down his teacup where he had got it.

By this time the girl who was “pouring” had exhausted one of the two original guards on whom she had been dividing her vision, and Verrian made a pretence, which she favored, that he had come up to push the man away. The man gracefully submitted to be dislodged, and Verrian remained in the enjoyment of one of the girl’s distorted eyes till, yet another man coming up, she abruptly got rid of Verrian by presenting him to yet another girl. In such manoeuvres the hour of afternoon tea will pass; and the time really wore on till it was time to dress for dinner.

By the time that the guests came down to dinner they were all able to participate in the exchange of the discovery which each had made, that it was snowing outdoors, and they kept this going till one girl had the good-luck to say, “I don’t see anything so astonishing in that at this time of year. Now, if it was snowing indoors, it would be different.”

This relieved the tension in a general laugh, and a young man tried to contribute further to the gayety by declaring that it would not be surprising to have it snow in-doors. He had once seen the thing done in a crowded hall, one night, when somebody put up a window, and the freezing current of air congealed the respiration of the crowd, which came down in a light fall of snow-flakes. He owned that it was in Boston.

“Oh, that excuses it, then,” Miss Macroyd said. But she lost the laugh which was her due in the rush which some of the others made to open a window and see whether it could be made to snow in-doors there.

“Oh, it isn’t crowded enough here,” the young man explained who had alleged the scientific marvel.

“And it isn’t Boston,” Miss Macroyd tried again on the same string, and this time she got her laugh.

The girl who had first spoken remained, at the risk of pneumonia, with her arm prettily lifted against the open sash, for a moment peering out, and then reported, in dashing it down with a shiver, “It seems to be a very soft snow.”

“Then it will be rain by morning,” another predicted, and the girl tried hard to think of something to say in support of the hit she had made already. But she could not, and was silent almost through the whole first course at dinner.

In spite of its being a soft snow, it continued to fall as snow and not as rain. It lent the charm of stormy cold without to the brightness and warmth within. Much later, when between waltzes some of the dancers went out on the verandas for a breath of air, they came back reporting that the wind was rising and the snow was drifting.

Upon the whole, the snow was a great success, and her guests congratulated Mrs. Westangle on having thought to have it. The felicitations included recognition of the originality of her whole scheme. She had downed the hoary superstition that people had too much of a good time on Christmas to want any good time at all in the week following; and in acting upon the well-known fact that you never wanted a holiday so much as the day after you had one, she had made a movement of the highest social importance. These were the ideas which Verrian and the young man of the in-doors snow-storm urged upon her; his name was Bushwick, and he and Verrian found that they were very good-fellows after they had rather supposed the contrary.

Mrs. Westangle received their ideas with the twittering reticence that deceived so many people when they supposed she knew what they were talking about.

XII.

At breakfast, where the guests were reasonably punctual, they were all able to observe, in the rapid succession in which they descended from their rooms, that it had stopped snowing and the sun was shining brilliantly.

“There isn’t enough for sleighing,” Mrs. Westangle proclaimed from the head of the table in her high twitter, “and there isn’t any coasting here in this flat country for miles.”

“Then what are we going to do with it?” one of the young ladies humorously pouted.

“That’s what I was going to suggest,” Mrs. Westangle replied. She pronounced it ‘sujjest’, but no one felt that it mattered. “And, of course,” she continued, “you needn’t any of you do it if you don’t like.”

“We’ll all do it, Mrs. Westangle,” Bushwick said. “We are unanimous in that.”

“Perhaps you’ll think it rather funny — odd,” she said.

“The odder the better, I think,” Verrian ventured, and another man declared that nothing Mrs. Westangle would do was odd, though everything was original.

“Well, there is such a thing as being too original,” she returned. Then she turned her head aside and looked down at something beside her plate and said, without lifting her eyes, “You know that in the Middle Ages there used to be flower-fights among the young nobility in Italy. The women held a tower, and the men attacked it with roses and flowers generally.”

“Why, is this a speech?” Miss Macroyd interrupted.

“A speech from the throne, yes,” Bushwick solemnly corrected her. “And she’s got it written down, like a queen — haven’t you, Mrs. Westangle?”

“Yes, I thought it would be more respectful.”

“She coming out,” Bushwick said to Verrian across the table.

“And if I got mixed up I could go back and straighten it,” the hostess declared, with a good — humored candor that took the general fancy, “and you could understand without so much explaining. We haven’t got flowers enough at this season,” she went on, looking down again at the paper beside her plate, “but we happen to have plenty of snowballs, and the notion is to have the women occupy a snow tower and the men attack them with snowballs.”

“Why,” Bushwick said, “this is the snow-fort business of our boyhood! Let’s go out and fortify the ladies at once.” He appealed to Verrian and made a feint of pushing his chair back. “May we use water-soaked snowballs, or must they all be soft and harmless?” he asked of Mrs. Westangle, who was now the centre of a storm of applause and question from the whole table.

She kept her head and referred again to her paper. “The missiles of the assailants are to be very soft snowballs, hardly more than mere clots, so that nobody can be hurt in the assault, but the defenders may repel the assailants with harder snowballs.”

“Oh,” Miss Macroyd protested, “this is consulting the weakness of our sex.”

“In the fury of the onset we’ll forget it,” Verrian reassured her.

“Do you think you really will, Mr. Verrian?” she asked. “What is all our athletic training to go for if you do?”

Mrs. Westangle read on:

“The terms of capitulation can be arranged on the ground, whether the castle is carried or the assailing party are made prisoners by its defenders.”

“Hopeless captivity in either case!” Bushwick lamented.

“Isn’t it rather academic?” Miss Macroyd asked of Verrian, in a low voice.

“I’m afraid, rather,” he owned.

“But why are you so serious?” she pursued.

“Am I serious?” he retorted, with a trace of exasperation; and she laughed.

Their parley was quite lost in the clamor which raged up and down the table till Mrs. Westangle ended it by saying, “There’s no obligation on any one to take part in the hostilities. There won’t be any conscription; it’s a free fight that will be open to everybody.” She folded the paper she had been reading from and put it in her lap, in default of a pocket. She went on impromptu:

“You needn’t trouble about building the fort, Mr. Bushwick. I’ve had the farmer and his men working at the castle since daybreak, and the ladies will find it all ready for them, when they’re ready to defend it, down in the meadow beyond the edge of the birch-lot. The battle won’t begin till eleven o’clock.”

She rose, and the clamor rose again with her, and her guests crushed about her, demanding to be allowed at least to go and look at the castle immediately.

One of the men’s voices asked, “May I be one of the defenders, Mrs. Westangle? I want to be on the winning side, sure.”

“Oh, is this going to be a circus chariot-race?” another lamented.

“No, indeed,” a girl cried, “it’s to be the real thing.”

It fell to Verrian, in the assortment of couples in which Mrs. Westangle’s guests sallied out to view the proposed scene of action, to find himself, not too willingly, at Miss Macroyd’s side. In his heart and in his mind he was defending the amusement which he instantly divined as no invention of Mrs. Westangle’s, and both his heart and his mind misgave him about this first essay of Miss Shirley in her new enterprise. It was, as Miss Macroyd had suggested, academic, and at the same time it had a danger in it of being tomboyish. Golf, tennis, riding, boating, swimming — all the vigorous sports in which women now excel — were boldly athletic, and yet you could not feel quite that they were tomboyish. Was it because the bent of Miss Shirley was so academic that she was periling upon tomboyishness without knowing it in this primal inspiration of hers? Inwardly he resented the word academic, although outwardly he had assented to it when Miss Macroyd proposed it. To be academic would be even more fatal to Miss Shirley’s ambition than to be tomboyish, and he thought with pathos of that touch about the Italian nobility in the Middle Ages, and how little it could have moved the tough fancies of that crowd of well-groomed young people at the breakfast-table when Mrs. Westangle brought it out with her ignorant acceptance of it as a social force. After all, Miss Macroyd was about the only one who could have felt it in the way it was meant, and she had chosen to smile at it. He wondered if possibly she could feel the secondary pathos of it as he did. But to make talk with her he merely asked:

“Do you intend to take part in the fray?”

“Not unless I can be one of the reserve corps that won’t need to be brought up till it’s all over. I’ve no idea of getting my hair down.”

“Ah,” he sighed, “you think it’s going to be rude:”

“That is one of the chances. But you seem to be suffering about it, Mr. Verrian!” she said, and, of course, she laughed.

“Who? I?” he returned, in the temptation to deny it. But he resisted. “I always suffer when there’s anything silly happening, as if I were doing it myself. Don’t you?”

“No, thank you, I believe not. But perhaps you are doing this? One can’t suppose Mrs. Westangle imagined it.”

“No, I can’t plead guilty. But why isn’t it predicable of Mrs. Westangle?”

“You mustn’t ask too much of me, Mr. Verrian. Somehow, I won’t say how, it’s been imagined for her. She’s heard of its being done somewhere. It can’t be supposed she’s read of it, anywhere.”

“No, I dare say not.”

Miss Macroyd came out with her laugh. “I should like to know what she makes of you, Mr. Verrian, when she is alone with herself. She must have looked you up and authenticated you in her own way, but it would be as far from your way as — well, say — the Milky Way.”

“You don’t think she asked me because she met me at your house?”

“No, that wouldn’t be enough, from her point of view. She means to go much further than we’ve ever got.”

“Then a year from now she wouldn’t ask me?”

“It depends upon who asks you in the mean time.”

“You might get to be a fad, and then she would feel that she would have to have you.”

“You’re not flattering me?”

“Do you find it flattering?”

“It isn’t exactly my idea of the reward I’ve been working for. What shall I do to be a fad?”

“Well, rather degrading stunts, if you mean in the smart set. Jump about on all fours and pick up a woman’s umbrella with your teeth, and bark. Anything else would be easier for you among chic people, where your brilliancy would count.”

“Brilliancy? Oh, thank you! Go on.”

“Now, a girl — if you were a girl—”

“Oh yes, if I were a girl! That will be so much more interesting.”

“A girl,” Miss Macroyd continued, “might do it by posing effectively for amateur photography. Or doing something original in dramatics or pantomimics or recitation — but very original, because chic people are critical. Or if she had a gift for getting up things that would show other girls off; or suggesting amusements; but that would be rather in the line of swell people, who are not good at getting up things and are glad of help.”

“I see, I see!” Verrian said, eagerly. But he walked along looking down at the snow, and not meeting the laughing glance that Miss Macroyd cast at his face. “Well?”

“I believe that’s all,” she said, sharply. She added, less sharply: “She couldn’t afford to fail, though, at any point. The fad that fails is extinguished forever. Will these simple facts do for fiction? Or is it for somebody in real life you’re asking, Mr. Verrian?”

“Oh, for fiction. And thank you very much. Oh, that’s rather pretty!”

XIII.

They had come into the meadow where the snow battle was to be, and on its slope, against the dark weft of the young birch-trees, there was a mimic castle outlined in the masonry of white blocks quarried from the drifts and built up in courses like rough blocks of marble. A decoration of green from the pines that mixed with the birches had been suggested rather than executed, and was perhaps the more effective for its sketchiness.

“Yes, it’s really beautiful,” Miss Macroyd owned, and though she did not join her cries to those of the other girls, who stood scattered about admiring it, and laughing and chattering with the men whose applause, of course, took the jocose form, there was no doubt but she admired it. “What I can’t understand is how Mrs. Westangle got the notion of this. There’s the soprano note in it, and some woman must have given it to her.”

“Not contralto, possibly?” Verrian asked.

“I insist upon the soprano,” she said.

But he did not notice what she said. His eyes were following a figure which seemed to be escaping up through the birches behind the snow castle and ploughing its way through the drifts; in front of the structure they had been levelled to make an easier battle-field. He knew that it was Miss Shirley, and he inferred that she had been in the castle directing the farm — hands building it, and now, being caught by the premature arrival of the contesting forces, had fled before them and left her subordinates to finish the work. He felt, with a throe of helpless sympathy, that she was undertaking too much. It was hazardous enough to attempt the practice of her novel profession under the best of circumstances, but to keep herself in abeyance so far as not to be known at all in it, and, at the same time, to give way to her interest in it to the extent of coming out, with her infirmly established health, into that wintry weather, and superintending the preparations for the first folly she had planned, was a risk altogether too great for her.

“Who in the world,” Miss Macroyd suddenly demanded, “is the person floundering about in the birch woods?”

“Perhaps the soprano,” Verrian returned, hardily.

Bushwick detached himself from a group of girls near by and intercepted any response from Miss Macroyd to Verrian by calling to her before he came up, “Are you going to be one of the enemy, Miss Macroyd?”

“No, I think I will be neutral.” She added, “Is there going to be any such thing as an umpire?”

“We hadn’t thought of that. There could be. The office could be created; but, you know, it’s the post of danger.”

Verrian joined the group that Bushwick has left. He found a great scepticism as to the combat, mixed with some admiration for the castle, and he set himself to contest the prevalent feeling. What was the matter with a snow-fight? he demanded. It would be great fun. Decidedly he was going in for it. He revived the drooping sentiment in its favor, and then, flown with his success, he went from group to group and couple to couple, and animated all with his zeal, which came, he hardly knew whence; what he pretended to the others was that they were rather bound not to let Mrs. Westangle’s scheme fall through. Their doubts vanished before him, and the terms of the battle were quickly arranged. He said he had read of one of those mediaeval flower-fights, and he could tell them how that was done. Where it would not fit into the snow-fight, they could trust to inspiration; every real battle was the effect of inspiration.

He came out, and some of the young women and most of the young men, who had dimly known of him as a sort of celebrity, and suspected him of being a prig, were reconciled, and accepted him for a nice fellow, and became of his opinion as to the details of the amusement before them.

It was not very Homeric, when it came off, or very mediaeval, but it was really lots of fun, or far more fun than one would have thought. The storming of the castle was very sincere, and the fortress was honestly defended. Miss Macroyd was made umpire, as she wished, and provided with a large snowball to sit on at a safe distance; as she was chosen by the men, the girls wanted to have an umpire of their own, who would be really fair, and they voted Verrian into the office. But he refused, partly because he did not care about being paired off with Miss Macroyd so conspicuously, and partly because he wished to help the fight along.

Attacks were made and repelled, and there were feats of individual and collective daring on the side of the defenders which were none the less daring because the assailants stopped to cheer them, and to disable themselves by laughing at the fury of the foe. A detachment of the young men at last stormed the castle and so weakened its walls that they toppled inward; then the defenders, to save themselves from being buried under the avalanche, swarmed out into the open and made the entire force of the enemy prisoners.

The men pretended that this was what might have been expected from the beginning, but by this time the Berserker madness had possessed Miss Macroyd, too; she left her throne of snow and came forward shouting that it had been perfectly fair, and that the men had been really beaten, and they had no right to pretend that they had given themselves up purposely. The sex-partisanship, which is such a droll fact in women when there is any question of their general opposition to men, possessed them all, and they stood as, one girl for the reality of their triumph. This did not prevent them from declaring that the men had behaved with outrageous unfairness, and that the only one who fought with absolute sincerity from first to last was Mr. Verrian.

Neither their unity of conviction concerning the general fact nor the surprising deduction from it in Verrian’s case operated to make them refuse the help of their captives in getting home. When they had bound up their tumbled hair, in some cases, and repaired the ravages of war among their feathers and furs and draperies, in other cases, they accepted the hands of the late enemy at difficult points of the path. But they ran forward when they neared the house, and they were prompt to scream upon Mrs. Westangle that there never had been such a success or such fun, and that they were almost dead, and soon as they had something to eat they were going to bed and never going to get up again.

In the details which they were able to give at luncheon, they did justice to Verrian’s noble part in the whole affair, which had saved the day, not only in keeping them up to the work when they had got thinking it couldn’t be carried through, but in giving the combat a validity which it would not have had without him. They had to thank him, next to Mrs. Westangle herself, whom they praised beyond any articulate expression, for thinking up such a delightful thing. They wondered how she could ever have thought of it — such a simple thing too; and they were sure that when people heard of it they would all be wanting to have snow battles.

Mrs. Westangle took her praises as passively, if not as modestly, as Verrian received his. She made no show of disclaiming them, but she had the art, invaluable in a woman who meant to go far in the line she had chosen, of not seeming to have done anything, or of not caring whether people liked it or not. Verrian asked himself, as he watched her twittering back at those girls, and shedding equally their thanks and praises from her impermeable plumage, how she would have behaved if Miss Shirley’s attempt had been an entire failure. He decided that she would have ignored the failure with the same impersonality as that with which she now ignored the success. It appeared that in one point he did her injustice, for when he went up to dress for dinner after the long stroll he took towards night he found a note under his door, by which he must infer that Mrs. Westangle had not kept the real facts of her triumph from the mistress of the revels.

    “DEAR MR. VERRIAN, I am not likely to see you, but I must

    thank you.

                   “M. SHIRLEY.

    “P. S. Don’t try to answer, please.”

Verrian liked, the note, he even liked the impulse which had dictated it, and he understood the impulse; but he did not like getting the note. If Miss Shirley meant business in taking up the line of life she had professed to have entered upon seriously, she had better, in the case of a young man whose acquaintance she had chanced to make, let her gratitude wait. But when did a woman ever mean business, except in the one great business?

XIV.

To have got that sillily superfluous note to Verrian without any one’s knowing besides, Miss Shirley must have stolen to his door herself and slipped it under. In order to do this unsuspected and unseen, she must have found out in some sort that would not give her away which his room was, and then watched her chance. It all argued a pervasiveness in her, after such a brief sojourn in the house, and a mastery of finesse that he did not like, though, he reflected, he was not authorized to like or dislike anything about her. He was thirty-seven years old, and he had not lived through that time, with his mother at his elbow to suggest inferences from facts, without being versed in wiles which, even when they were honest, were always wiles, and in lures which, when they were of the most gossamer tenuity, were yet of texture close enough to make the man who blundered through them aware that they had been thrown across his path. He understood, of course, that they were sometimes helplessly thrown across it, and were mere expressions of abstract woman with relation to abstract man, but that did not change their nature. He did not abhor them, but he believed he knew them, and he believed now that he detected one of them in Miss Shirley’s note. Of course, one could take another view of it. One could say to one’s self that she was really so fervently grateful that she could not trust some accident to bring them together in a place where she was merely a part of the catering, as she said, and he was a guest, and that she was excusable, or at least mercifully explicable, in her wish to have him know that she appreciated his goodness. Verrian had been very good, he knew that; he had saved the day for the poor thing when it was in danger of the dreariest kind of slump. She was a poor thing, as any woman was who had to make her own way, and she had been sick and was charming. Besides, she had found out his name and had probably recognized a quality of celebrity in it, unknown to the other young people with whom he found himself so strangely assorted under Mrs. Westangle’s roof.

In the end, and upon the whole, Verrian would rather have liked, if the thing could have been made to happen, meeting Miss Shirley long enough to disclaim meriting her thanks, and to ascribe to the intrinsic value of her scheme the brilliant success it had achieved. This would not have been true, but it would have been encouraging to her; and in the revery which followed upon his conditional desire he had a long imaginary conversation with her, and discussed all her other plans for the revels of the week. These had not the trouble of defining themselves very distinctly in the conversation in order to win his applause, and their consideration did not carry him with Miss Shirley beyond the strictly professional ground on which they met.

She had apparently invented nothing for that evening, and the house party was left to its own resources in dancing and sitting out dances, which apparently fully sufficed it. They were all tired, and broke up early. The women took their candles and went off to bed, and the men went to the billiard-room to smoke. On the way down from his room, where he had gone to put on his smoking-jacket, Verrian met Miss Macroyd coming up, candle in hand, and received from her a tacit intimation that he might stop her for a joking good-night.

“I hope you’ll sleep well on your laurels as umpire,” he said.

“Oh, thank you,” she returned, “and I hope your laurels won’t keep you awake. It must seem to you as if it was blowing a perfect gale in them.”

“What do you mean? I did nothing.”

“Oh, I don’t mean your promotion of the snow battle. But haven’t you heard?” He stared. “You’ve been found out!”

“Found out?” Verrian’s soul was filled with the joy of literary fame.

“Yes. You can’t conceal yourself now. You’re Verrian the actor.”

“The actor?” Verrian frowned blackly in his disgust, so blackly that Miss Macroyd laughed aloud.

“Yes, the coming matinee idol. One of the girls recognized you as soon as you came into the house, and the name settled it, though, of course, you’re supposed to be here incognito.”

The mention of that name which he enjoyed in common with the actor made Verrian furious, for when the actor first appeared with it in New York Verrian had been at the pains to find out that it was not his real name, and that he had merely taken it because of the weak quality of romance in it, which Verrian himself had always disliked. But, of course, he could not vent his fury on Miss Macroyd. All he could do was to ask, “Then they have got my photograph on their dressing-tables, with candles burning before it?”

“No, I don’t believe I can give you that comfort. The fact is, your acting is not much admired among the girls here, but they think you are unexpectedly nice as a private person.”

“That’s something. And does Mrs. Westangle think I’m the actor, too?”

“How should Mrs. Westangle know what she thinks? And if she doesn’t, how should I?”

“That’s true. And are you going to give me away?”

“I haven’t done it yet. But isn’t it best to be honest?”

“It mightn’t be a success.”

“The honesty?”

“My literary celebrity.”

“There’s that,” Miss Macroyd rejoiced. “Well, so far I’ve merely said I was sure you were not Verrian the actor. I’ll think the other part over.” She went on up-stairs, with the sound of her laugh following her, and Verrian went gloomily back to the billiard-room, where he found most of the smokers conspicuously yawning. He lighted a fresh cigar, and while he smoked they dropped away one by one till only Bushwick was left.

“Some of the fellows are going Thursday,” he said. “Are you going to stick it out to the bitter end?”

Till then it had not occurred to Verrian that he was not going to stay through the week, but now he said, “I don’t know but I may go Thursday. Shall you?”

“I might as well stay on. I don’t find much doing in real estate at Christmas. Do you?”

This was fishing, but it was better than openly taking him for that actor, and Verrian answered, unresentfully, “I don’t know. I’m not in that line exactly.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” Bushwick said. “I thought I had seen your name with that of a West Side concern.”

“No, I have a sort of outside connection with the publishing business.”

“Oh,” Bushwick returned, politely, and it would have been reassuringly if Verrian had wished not to be known as an author. The secret in which he lived in that regard was apparently safe from that young, amiable, good-looking real-estate broker. He inferred, from the absence of any allusion to the superstition of the women as to his profession, that it had not spread to Bushwick at least, and this inclined him the more to like him. They sat up talking pleasantly together about impersonal affairs till Bushwick finished his cigar. Then he started for bed, saying, “Well, good-night. I hope Mrs. Westangle won’t have anything so active on the tapis for tomorrow.”

“Try and sleep it off. Good-night.”

XV.

Verrian remained to finish his cigar, but at the end he was not yet sleepy, and he thought he would get a book from the library, if that part of the house were still lighted, and he looked out to see. Apparently it was as brilliantly illuminated as when the company had separated there for the night, and he pushed across the foyer hall that separated the billiard-room from the drawing-zoom and library. He entered the drawing-room, and in the depths of the library, relieved against the rows of books in their glass cases, he startled Miss Shirley from a pose which she seemed to be taking there alone.

At the instant of their mutual recognition she gave a little muted shriek, and then gasped out, “I beg your pardon,” while he was saying, too, “I beg your pardon.”

After a tacit exchange of forgiveness, he said, “I am afraid I startled you. I was just coming for a book to read myself asleep with. I—”

“Not at all,” she returned. “I was just—” Then she did not say what, and he asked:

“Making some studies?”

“Yes,” she owned, with reluctant promptness.

“I mustn’t ask what,” he suggested, and he made an effort to smile away what seemed a painful perturbation in her as he went forward to look at the book-shelves, from which, till then, she had not slipped aside.

“I’m in your way,” she said, and he answered, “Not at all.” He added to the other sentence he had spoken, “If it’s going to be as good as what you gave us today—”

“You are very kind.” She hesitated, and then she said, abruptly: “What I did to-day owed everything to you, Mr. Verrian,” and while he desisted from searching the book-shelves, she stood looking anxiously at him, with the pulse in her neck visibly throbbing. Her agitation was really painful, but Verrian did not attribute it to her finding herself there alone with him at midnight; for though the other guests had all gone to bed, the house was awake in some of the servants, and an elderly woman came in presently bringing a breadth of silvery gauze, which she held up, asking if it was that.

“Not exactly, but it will do nicely, Mrs. Stager. Would you mind getting me the very pale-blue piece that electric blue?”

“I’m looking for something good and dull,” Verrian said, when the woman was gone.

“Travels are good, or narratives, for sleeping on,” she said, with a breathless effort for calm. “I found,” she panted, “in my own insomnia, that merely the broken-up look of a page of dialogue in a novel racked my nerves so that I couldn’t sleep. But narratives were beautifully soothing.”

“Thank you,” he responded; “that’s a good idea.” And stooping, with his hands on his knees, he ranged back and forth along the shelves. “But Mrs. Westangle’s library doesn’t seem to be very rich in narrative.”

He had not his mind on the search perhaps, and perhaps she knew it. She presently said, “I wish I dared ask you a favor — I mean your advice, Mr. Verrian.”

He lifted himself from his stooping posture and looked at her, smiling. “Would that take much courage?” His smile was a little mocking; he was thinking that a girl who would hurry that note to him, and would personally see that it did not fail to reach him, would have the courage for much more.

She did not reply directly. “I should have to explain, but I know you won’t tell. This is going to be my piece de resistance, my grand stunt. I’m going to bring it off the last night.” She stopped long enough for Verrian to revise his resolution of going away with the fellows who were leaving the middle of the week, and to decide on staying to the end. “I am going to call it Seeing Ghosts.”

“That’s good,” Verrian said, provisionally.

“Yes, I might say I was surprised at my thinking it up.”

“That would be one form of modesty.”

“Yes,” she said, with a wan smile she had, “and then again it mightn’t be another.” She went on, abruptly, “As many as like can take part in the performance. It’s to be given out, and distinctly understood beforehand, that the ghost isn’t a veridical phantom, but just an honest, made-up, every-day spook. It may change its pose from time to time, or its drapery, but the setting is to be always the same, and the people who take their turns in seeing it are to be explicitly reassured, one after another, that there’s nothing in it, you know. The fun will be in seeing how each one takes it, after they know what it really is.”

“Then you’re going to give us a study of temperaments.”

“Yes,” she assented. And after a moment, given to letting the notion get quite home with her, she asked, vividly, “Would you let me use it?”

“The phrase? Why, certainly. But wouldn’t it be rather too psychological? I think just Seeing Ghosts would be better.”

“Better than Seeing Ghosts: A Study of Temperaments? Perhaps it would. It would be simpler.”

“And in this house you need all the simplicity you can get,” he suggested.

She smiled, intelligently but reticently. “My idea is that every one somehow really believes in ghosts — I know I do — and so fully expects to see one that any sort of make-up will affect them for the moment just as if they did see one. I thought — that perhaps — I don’t know how to say it without seeming to make use of you—”

“Oh, do make use of me, Miss Shirley!”

“That you could give me some hints about the setting, with your knowledge of the stage—” She stopped, having rushed forward to that point, while he continued to look steadily at her without answering her. She faced him courageously, but not convincingly.

“Did you think that I was an actor?” he asked, finally.

“Mrs. Westangle seemed to think you were.”

“But did you?”

“I’m sure I didn’t mean — I beg your pardon—”

“It’s all right. If I were an actor I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. But I was merely curious to know whether you shared the prevalent superstition. I’m afraid I can’t help you from a knowledge of the stage, but if I can be of use, from a sort of amateur interest in psychology, with an affair like this I shall be only too glad.”

“Thank you,” she said, somewhat faintly, with an effect of dismay disproportionate to the occasion.

She sank into a chair before which she had been standing, and she looked as if she were going to swoon.

He started towards her with an alarmed “Miss Shirley.”

She put out a hand weakly to stay him. “Don’t!” she entreated. “I’m a little — I shall be all right in a moment.”

“Can’t I get you something — call some one?”

“Not for the world!” she commanded, and she pulled herself together and stood up. “But I think I’ll stop for to-night. I’m glad my idea strikes you favorably. It’s merely — Oh, you found it, Mrs. Stager!” She broke off to address the woman who had now come back and was holding up the trailing breadths of the electric-blue gauze. “Isn’t it lovely?” She gave herself time to adore the drapery, with its changes of meteoric lucence, before she rose and took it. She went with it to the background in the library, where, against the glass door of the cases, she involved herself in it and stood shimmering. A thrill pierced to Verrian’s heart; she was indeed wraithlike, so that he hated to have her call, “How will that do?”

Mrs. Stager modestly referred the question to him by her silence. “I will answer for its doing, if it does for the others as it’s done for me.”

She laughed. “And you doubly knew what it was. Yes, I think it will go.” She took another pose, and then another. “What do you think of it, Mrs. Stager?” she called to the woman standing respectfully abeyant at one side.

“It’s awful. I don’t know but I’ll be afraid to go to my room.”

“Sit down, and I’ll go to your room with you when I’m through. I won’t be long, now.”

She tried different gauzes, which she had lying on one of the chairs, and crowned herself with triumph in the applauses of her two spectators, rejoicing with a glee that Verrian found childlike and winning. “If they’re all like you, it will be the greatest success!”

“They’ll all be like me, and more,” he said, “I’m really very severe.”

“Are you a severe person?” she asked, coming forward to him. “Ought people to be afraid of you?”

“Yes, people with bad consciences. I’m rattier afraid of myself for that reason.”

“Have you got a bad conscience?” she asked, letting her eyes rest on his.

“Yes. I can’t make my conduct square with my ideal of conduct.”

“I know what that is!” she sighed. “Do you expect to be punished for it?”

“I expect to be got even with.”

“Yes, one is. I’ve noticed that myself. But I didn’t suppose that actors — Oh, I forgot! I beg your pardon again, Mr. Verrian. Oh — Goodnight!” She faced him evanescently in going out, with the woman after her, but, whether she did so more in fear or more in defiance, she left him standing motionless in his doubt, and she did nothing to solve his doubt when she came quickly back alone, before he was aware of having moved, to say, “Mr. Verrian, I want to — I have to — tell you that — I didn’t think you were the actor.” Then she was finally gone, and Verrian had nothing for it but to go up to his room with the book he found he had in his hand and must have had there all the time.

If he had read it, the book would not have eased him off to sleep, but he did not even try, to read it. He had no wish to sleep. The waking dream in which he lost himself was more interesting than any vision of slumber could have been, and he had no desire to end it. In that he could still be talking with the girl whose mystery appealed to him so pleasingly. It was none the less pleasing because, at what might be called her first blushes, she did not strike him as altogether ingenuous, but only able to discipline herself into a final sincerity from a consciousness which had been taught wisdom by experience.

She was still a scarcely recovered invalid, and it was pathetic that she should be commencing the struggle of life with strength so little proportioned to the demand upon it; and the calling she had taken up was of a fantasticality in some aspects which was equally pathetic. But all the undertakings of women, he mused, were piteous, not only because women were unequal to the struggle at the best, but because they were hampered always with themselves, with their sex, their femininity, and the necessity of getting it out of the way before they could really begin to fight. Whatever they attempted it must be in relation to the man’s world in which livings were made; but the immemorial conditions were almost wholly unchanged. A woman approached this world as a woman, with the inborn instinct of tempting it as a woman, to win it to love her and make her a wife and mother; and although she might stoically overcome the temptation at last, it might recur at any moment and overcome her. This was perpetually weakening and imperilling her, and she must feel it at the encounter with each man she met. She must feel the tacit and even unconscious irony of his attitude towards her in her enterprise, and the finer her make the crueller and the more humiliating and disheartening this must be.

Of course, this Miss Shirley felt Verrian’s irony, which he had guarded from any expression with genuine compassion for her. She must feel that to his knowledge of life she and her experiment had an absurdity which would not pass, whatever their success might be. If she meant business, and business only, they ought to have met as two men would have met, but he knew that they had not done so, and she must have known it. All that was plain sailing enough, but beyond this lay a sea of conjecture in which he found himself without helm or compass. Why, should she have acted a fib about his being an actor, and why, after the end, should she have added an end, in which she returned to own that she had been fibbing? For that was what it came to; and though Verrian tasted a delicious pleasure in the womanish feat by which she overcame her womanishness, he could not puzzle out her motive. He was not sure that he wished to puzzle it out. To remain with illimitable guesses at his choice was more agreeable, for the present at least, and he was not aware of having lapsed from them when he woke so late as to be one of the breakfasters whose plates were kept for them after the others were gone.

XVI.

It was the first time that Verrian had come down late, and it was his novel experience to find himself in charge of Mrs. Stager at breakfast, instead of the butler and the butler’s man, who had hitherto served him at the earlier hour. There were others, somewhat remote from him, at table, who were ending when he was beginning, and when they had joked themselves out of the room and away from Mrs. Stager’s ministrations he was left alone to her. He had instantly appreciated a quality of motherliness in her attitude towards him, and now he was sensible of a kindly intimacy to which he rather helplessly addressed himself.

“Well, Mrs. Stager, did you see a ghost on your way to bed?”

“I don’t know as I really expected to,” she said. “Won’t you have a few more of the buckwheats?”

“Do you think I’d better? I believe I won’t. They’re very tempting. Miss Shirley makes a very good ghost,” he suggested.

Mrs. Stager would not at first commit herself further than to say in bringing him the butter, “She’s just up from a long fit of sickness.” She impulsively added, “She ain’t hardly strong enough to be doing what she is, I tell her.”

“I understood she had been ill,” Verrian said. “We drove over from the station together, the other day.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Stager admitted. “Kind of a nervous breakdown, I believe. But she’s got an awful spirit. Mrs. Westangle don’t want her to do all she is doing.”

Verrian looked at her in surprise. He had not expected that of the India-rubber nature he had attributed to Mrs. Westangle. In view of Mrs. Stager’s privity to the unimagined kindliness of his hostess, he relaxed himself in a further interest in Miss Shirley, as if it would now be safe. “She’s done splendidly, so far,” he said, meaning the girl. “I’m glad Mrs. Westangle appreciates her work.”

“I guess,” Mrs. Stager said, “that if it hadn’t been for you at the snow-fight — She got back from getting ready for it, that morning, almost down sick, she was afraid so it was going to fail.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Verrian said, putting the praise from him.

Mrs. Stager lowered her voice in an octave of deeper confidentiability. “You got the note? I put it under, and I didn’t know.”

“Oh yes, I got it,” Verrian said, sensible of a relief, which he would not assign to any definite reason, in knowing that Miss Shirley had not herself put it under his door. But he now had to take up another burden in the question whether Miss Shirley were of an origin so much above that of her confidant that she could have a patrician fearlessness in making use of her, or were so near Mrs. Stager’s level of life that she would naturally turn to her for counsel and help. Miss Shirley had the accent, the manners, and the frank courage of a lady; but those things could be learned; they were got up for the stage every day.

Verrian was roused from the muse he found he had fallen into by hearing Mrs. Stager ask, “Won’t you have some more coffee?”

“No, thank you,” he said. And now he rose from the table, on which he dreamily dropped his napkin, and got his hat and coat and went out for a walk. He had not studied the art of fiction so long, in the many private failures that had preceded his one public success, without being made to observe that life sometimes dealt in the accidents and coincidences which his criticism condemned as too habitually the resource of the novelist. Hitherto he had disdained them for this reason; but since his serial story was off his hands, and he was beginning to look about him for fresh material, he had doubted more than once whether his severity was not the effect of an unjustifiable prejudice.

It struck him now, in turning the corner of the woodlot above the meadow where the snow-battle had taken place, and suddenly finding himself face to face with Miss Shirley, that nature was in one of her uninventive moods and was helping herself out from the old stock-in-trade of fiction. All the same, he felt a glow of pleasure, which was also a glow of pity; for while Miss Shirley looked, as always, interesting, she look tired, too, with a sort of desperate air which did not otherwise account for itself. She had given, at sight of him, a little start, and a little “Oh!” dropped from her lips, as if it had been jostled from them. She made haste to go on, with something like the voluntary hardiness of the courage that plucks itself from the primary emotion of fear, “You are going down to try the skating?”

“Do I look it, without skates?”

“You may be going to try the sliding,” she returned. “I’m afraid there won’t be much of either for long. This soft air is going to make havoc of my plans for to-morrow.”

“That’s too bad of it. Why not hope for a hard freeze to-night? You might as well. The weather has been known to change its mind. You might even change your plans.”

“No, I can’t do that. I can’t think of anything else. It’s to bridge over the day that’s left before Seeing Ghosts. If it does freeze, you’ll come to Mrs. Westangle’s afternoon tea on the pond?”

“I certainly shall. How is it to be worked?”

“She’s to have her table on a platform, with runners, in a bower of evergreen boughs, and be pushed about, and the people are to skate up for the tea. There are to be tea and chocolate, and two girls to pour, just as in real life. It isn’t a very dazzling idea, but I thought it might do; and Mrs. Westangle is so good-natured. Now, if the thermometer will do its part!”

“I am sure it will,” Verrian said, but a glance at the gray sky did not confirm him in his prophetic venture. The snow was sodden under foot; a breath from the south stirred the pines to an Aeolian response and moved the stiff, dry leaves of the scrub-oaks. A sapsucker was marking an accurate circle of dots round the throat of a tall young maple, and enjoying his work in a low, guttural soliloquy, seemingly, yet, dismayingly, suggestive of spring.

“It’s lovely, anyway,” she said, following his glance with an upward turn of her face.

“Yes, it’s beautiful. I think this sort of winter day is about the best the whole year can do. But I will sacrifice the chance of another like it to your skating-tea, Miss Shirley.”

He did not know why he should have made this speech to her, but apparently she did, and she said, “You’re always coming to my help, Mr. Verrian.”

“Don’t mention it!”

“I won’t, then,” she said, with a smile that showed her thin face at its thinnest and left her lip caught on her teeth till she brought it down voluntarily. It was a small but full lip and pretty, and this trick of it had a fascination. She added, gravely, “I don’t believe you will like my ice-tea.”

“I haven’t any active hostility to it. You can’t always be striking twelve — twelve midnight — as you will be in Seeing Ghosts. But your ice-tea will do very well for striking five. I’m rather elaborate!”

“Not too elaborate to hide your real opinion. I wonder what you do think of my own elaboration — I mean of my scheme.”

“Yes?”

They had moved on, at his turning to walk with her, so as not to keep her standing in the snow, and now she said, looking over her shoulder at him, “I’ve decided that it won’t do to let the ghost have all the glory. I don’t think it will be fair to let the people merely be scared, even when they’ve been warned that they’re to see a ghost and told it isn’t real.”

She seemed to refer the point to him, and he said, provisionally, “I don’t know what more they can ask.”

“They can ask questions. I’m going to let each person speak to the ghost, if not scared dumb, and ask it just what they please; and I’m going to answer their questions if I can.”

“Won’t it be something of an intellectual strain?”

“Yes, it will. But it will be fun, too, a little, and it will help the thing to go off. What do you think?”

“I think it’s fine. Are you going to give it out, so that they can be studying up their questions?”

“No, their questions have got to be impromptu. Or, at least, the first one has. Of course, after the scheme has once been given away, the ghost-seers will be more or less prepared, and the ghost will have to stand it.”

“I think it’s great. Are you going to let me have a chance with a question?”

“Are you going to see a ghost?”

“To be sure I am. May I really ask it what I please?”

“If you’re honest.”

“Oh, I shall be honest—”

He stopped breathlessly, but she did not seem called upon to supply any meaning for his abruptness. “I’m awfully glad you like the idea,” she said, “I have had to think the whole thing out for myself, and I haven’t been quite certain that the question-asking wasn’t rather silly, or, at least, sillier than the rest. Thank you so much, Mr. Verrian.”

“I’ve thought of my question,” he began again, as abruptly as he had stopped before. “May I ask it now?”

Cries of laughter came up from the meadow below, and the voices seemed coming nearer.

“Oh, I mustn’t be seen!” Miss Shirley lamented. “Oh, dear! If I’m seen the whole thing is given away. What shall I do?” She whirled about and ran down the road towards a path that entered the wood.

He ran after her. “My question is, May I come to see you when you get back to town?”

“Yes, certainly. But don’t come now! You mustn’t be seen with me! I’m not supposed to be in the house at all.”

If Verrian’s present mood had been more analytic, it might have occurred to him that the element of mystery which Miss Shirley seemed to cherish in regard to herself personally was something that she could dramatically apply with peculiar advantage to the phantasmal part she was to take in her projected entertainment. But he was reduced from the exercise of his analytic powers to a passivity in which he was chiefly conscious of her pathetic fascination. This seemed to emanate from her frail prettiness no less than from the sort of fearful daring with which she was pushing her whole enterprise through; it came as much from her undecided blondness — from her dust-colored hair, for instance — as from the entreating look of her pinched eyes, only just lighting their convalescent fires, and from the weakness that showed, with the grace, in her run through the wintry woods, where he watched her till the underbrush thickened behind her and hid her from him. Altogether his impression was very complex, but he did not get so far even as the realization of this, in his mental turmoil, as he turned with a deep sigh and walked meditatively homeward through the incipient thaw.

It did not rain at night, as it seemed so likely to do, and by morning the cloudiness of the sky had so far thinned that the sun looked mildly through it without more than softening the frozen surface of the pond, so that Mrs. Westangle’s ice-tea (as everybody called it, by a common inspiration, or by whatever circuitous adoption of Verrian’s phrase) came off with great success. People from other houses were there, and they all said that they wondered how she came to have such a brilliant idea, and they kept her there till nearly dark. Then the retarded rain began, in a fine drizzle, and her house guests were forced homeward, but not too soon to get a good, long rest before dressing for dinner. She was praised for her understanding with the weather, and for her meteorological forecast as much as for her invention in imagining such a delightful and original thing as an ice-tea, which no one else had ever thought of. Some of the women appealed to Verrian to say if he had ever heard of anything like it; and they felt that Mrs. Westangle was certainly arriving, and by no beaten track.

None of the others put it in these terms, of course; it was merely a consensus of feeling with them, and what was more articulate was dropped among the ironies with which Miss Macroyd more confidentially celebrated the event. Out of hearing of the others, in slowly following them with Verrian, she recurred to their talk. “Yes, it’s only a question of money enough for Newport, after this. She’s chic now, and after a season there she will be smart. But oh, dear! How came she to be chic? Can you imagine?”

Verrian did not feel bound to a categorical answer, and in his private reflections he dealt with another question. This was how far Miss Shirley was culpable in the fraud she was letting Mrs. Westangle practise on her innocent guests. It was a distasteful question, and he did not find it much more agreeable when it subdivided itself into the question of necessity on her part, and of a not very clearly realized situation on Mrs. Westangle’s. The girl had a right to sell her ideas, and perhaps the woman thought they were her own when she had paid for them. There could be that view of it all. The furtive nature of Miss Shirley’s presence in the house might very well be a condition of that grand event she was preparing. It was all very mysterious.

XVII.

It rained throughout the evening, with a wailing of the wind in the gables, and a weeping and a sobbing of the water from the eaves that Mrs. Westangle’s guests, securely housed from the storm, made the most of for weirdness. There had been a little dancing, which gave way to so much sitting-out that the volunteer music abruptly ceased as if in dudgeon, and there was nothing left but weirdness to bring young hearts together. Weirdness can do a good deal with girls lounging in low chairs, and young men on rugs round a glowing hearth at their feet; and every one told some strange thing that had happened at first hand, or second or third hand, either to himself or herself, or to their fathers or brothers or grandmothers or old servants. They were stimulated in eking out these experiences not only by the wildness of the rain without, but by the mystery of being shut off from the library into the drawing-room and hall while the preparations for the following night were beginning. But weirdness is not inexhaustible, even when shared on such propitious terms between a group of young people rapidly advanced in intimacy by a week’s stay under the same roof, and at the first yawn a gay dispersion of the votaries ended it all.

The yawn came from Bushwick, who boldly owned, when his guilt was brought home to him, that he was sleepy, and then as he expected to be scared out of a year’s growth the next night, and not be able to sleep for a week afterwards, he was now going to bed. He shook hands with Mrs. Westangle for good-night. The latest to follow him was Verrian, who, strangely alert, and as far from drowsiness as he had ever known himself, was yet more roused by realizing that Mrs. Westangle was not letting his hand go at once, but, unless it was mere absent-mindedness, was conveying through it the wish to keep him. She fluttered a little more closely up to him, and twittered out, “Miss Shirley wants me to let you know that she has told me about your coming together, and everything.”

“Oh, I’m very glad,” Verrian said, not sure that it was the right thing.

“I don’t know why she feels so, but she has a right to do as she pleases about it. She’s not a guest.”

“No,” Verrian assented.

“It happens very well, though, for the ghost-seeing that people don’t know she’s here. After that I shall tell them. In fact, she wants me to, for she must be on the lookout for other engagements. I am going to do everything I can for her, and if you hear of anything—”

Verrian bowed, with a sense of something offensive in her words which he could not logically feel, since it was a matter of business and was put squarely on a business basis. “I should be very glad,” he said, noncommittally.

“She was sure from the first,” Mrs. Westangle went on, as if there were some relation between the fact and her request, “that you were not the actor. She knew you were a writer.”

“Oh, indeed!” Verrian said.

“I thought that if you were writing for the newspapers you might know how to help her-”

“I’m not a newspaper writer,” Verrian answered, with a resentment which she seemed to feel, for she said, with a sort of apology in her tone:

“Oh! Well, I don’t suppose it matters. She doesn’t know I’m speaking to you about that; it just came into my head. I like to help in a worthy object, you know. I hope you’ll have a good night’s rest.”

She turned and looked round with the air of distraction which she had after speaking to any one, and which Verrian fancied came as much from a paucity as from a multiplicity of suggestion in her brain, and so left him standing. But she came back to say, “Of course, it’s all between ourselves till after to-morrow night, Mr. Verrian.”

“Oh, certainly,” he replied, and went vaguely off in the direction of the billiard-room. It was light and warm there, though the place was empty, and he decided upon a cigar as a proximate or immediate solution. He sat smoking before the fire till the tobacco’s substance had half turned into a wraith of ash, and not really thinking of anything very definitely, except the question whether he should be able to sleep after he went to bed, when he heard a creeping step on the floor. He turned quickly, with a certain expectance in his nerves, and saw nothing more ghostly than Bushwick standing at the corner of the table and apparently hesitating how to speak to him.

He said, “Hello!” and at this Bushwick said:

“Look here!”

“Well?” Verrian asked, looking at him.

“How does it happen you’re up so late, after everybody else is wrapped in slumber?”

“I might ask the same of you.”

“Well, I found I wasn’t making it a case of sleep, exactly, and so I got up.”

“Well, I hadn’t gone to bed for much the same reason. Why couldn’t you sleep? A real-estate broker ought to have a clean conscience.”

“So ought a publisher, for that matter. What do you think of this ghost-dance, anyway?”

“It might be amusing — if it fails.” Verrian was tempted to add the condition by the opportunity for a cynicism which he did not feel. It is one of the privileges of youth to be cynical, whether or no.

Bushwick sat down before the fire and rubbed his shins with his two hands unrestfully, drawing in a long breath between his teeth. “These things get on to my nerves sometimes. I shouldn’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”

“On Mrs. Westangle’s account?”

“I guess Mrs. Westangle could stand it. Look here!” It was rather a customary phrase of his, Verrian noted. As he now used it he looked alertly round at Verrian, with his hands still on his shins. “What’s the use of our beating round the bush?”

Verrian delayed his answer long enough to decide against the aimless pun of asking, “What Bushwick?” and merely asked, “What bush?”

“The bush where the milk in the cocoanut grows. You don’t pretend that you believe Mrs. Westangle has been getting up all these fairy stunts?”

Verrian returned to his cigar, from which the ashen wraith dropped into his lap. “I guess you’ll have to be a little clearer.” But as Bushwick continued silently looking at him, the thing could not be left at this point, and he was obliged to ask of his own initiative, “How much do you know?”

Bushwick leaned back in his chair, with his eyes still on Verrian’s profile. “As much as Miss Macroyd could tell me.”

“Ah, I’m still in the dark,” Verrian politely regretted, but not with a tacit wish to wring Miss Macroyd’s neck, which he would not have known how to account for.

“Well, she says that Mrs. Westangle has a professional assistant who’s doing the whole job for her, and that she came down on the same train with herself and you.”

“Did she say that she grabbed the whole victoria for herself and maid at the station?” Verrian demanded, in a burst of rage, “and left us to get here the best way we could?”

Bushwick grinned. “She supposed there were other carriages, and when she found there weren’t she hurried the victoria back for you.”

“You think she believes all that? I’m glad she has the decency to be ashamed of her behavior.”

“I’m not defending her. Miss Macroyd knows how to take care of herself.”

The matter rather dropped for the moment, in which Bushwick filled a pipe he took from his pocket and lighted it. After the first few whiffs he took it from his mouth, and, with a droll look across at Verrian, said, “Who was your fair friend?”

If Verrian was going to talk of this thing, he was not going to do it with the burden of any sort of reserve or contrivance on his soul. “This afternoon?” Bushwick nodded; and Verrian added, “That was she.” Then he went on, wrathfully: “She’s a girl who has to make her living, and she’s doing it in a new way that she’s invented for herself. She has supposed that the stupid rich, or the lazy rich, who want to entertain people may be willing to pay for ideas, and she proposes to supply the ideas for a money consideration. She’s not a guest in the house, and she won’t take herself on a society basis at all. I don’t know what her history is, and I don’t care. She’s a lady by training, and, if she had the accent, I should say she was from the South, for she has the enterprise of the South that comes North and tries to make its living. It’s all inexpressibly none of my business, but I happen to be knowing to so much of the case, and if you’re knowing to anything else, Mr. Bushwick, I want you to get it straight. That’s why I’m talking of it, and not because I think you’ve any right to know anything about it.”

“Thank you,” Bushwick returned, unruffled. “It’s about what Miss Macroyd told me. That’s the reason I don’t want the ghost-dance to fail.”

Verrian did not notice him. He found it more important to say: “She’s so loyal to Mrs. Westangle that she wouldn’t have wished, in Mrs. Westangle’s interest, to have her presence, or her agency in what is going on, known; but, of course, if Mrs. Westangle chooses to, tell it, that’s her affair.”

“She would have had to tell it, sooner or later, Mrs. Westangle would; and she only told it to Miss Macroyd this afternoon on compulsion, after Miss Macroyd and I had seen you in the wood-road, and Mrs. Westangle had to account for the young lady’s presence there in your company. Then Miss Macroyd had to tell me; but I assure you, my dear fellow, the matter hasn’t gone any further.”

“Oh, it’s quite indifferent to me,” Verrian retorted. “I’m nothing but a dispassionate witness of the situation.”

“Of course,” Bushwick assented, and then he added, with a bonhomie really so amiable that a man with even an unreasonable grudge could hardly resist it, “If you call it dispassionate.”

Verrian could not help laughing. “Well, passionate, then. I don’t know why it should be so confoundedly vexatious. But somehow I would have chosen Miss Macroyd — Is she specially dear to you?”

“Not the least!”

“I would have chosen her as the last person to have the business, which is so inexpressibly none of my business—”

“Or mine, as I think you remarked,” Bushwick interposed.

“Come out through,” Verrian concluded, accepting his interposition with a bow.

“I see what you mean,” Bushwick said, after a moment’s thought. “But, really, I don’t think it’s likely to go further. If you want to know, I believe Miss Macroyd feels the distinction of being in the secret so much that she’ll prefer to hint round till Mrs. Westangle gives the thing away. She had to tell me, because I was there with her when she saw you with the young lady, to keep me from going with my curiosity to you. Come, I do think she’s honest about it.”

“Don’t you think they’re rather more dangerous when they’re honest?”

“Well, only when they’re obliged to be. Cheer up! I don’t believe Miss Macroyd is one to spoil sport.”

“Oh, I think I shall live through it,” Verrian said, rather stiffening again. But he relaxed, in rising from his chair, and said, “Well, good-night, old fellow. I believe I shall go to bed now.”

“You won’t wait for me till my pipe’s out?”

“No, I think not. I seem to be just making it, and if I waited I might lose my grip.” He offered Bushwick a friendly hand.

“Do you suppose it’s been my soothing conversation? I’m like the actor that the doctor advised to go and see himself act. I can’t talk myself sleepy.”

“You might try it,” Verrian said, going out.

XVIII.

The men who had talked of going away on Thursday seemed to have found it practicable to stay. At any rate, they were all there on the Saturday night for the ghost-seeing, and, of course, none of the women had gone. What was more remarkable, in a house rather full of girls, nobody was sick; or, at least, everybody was well enough to be at dinner, and, after dinner, at the dance, which impatiently, if a little ironically, preceded the supernatural part of the evening’s amusement. It was the decorum of a woman who might have been expected not to have it that Mrs. Westangle had arranged that the evening’s amusement should not pass the bound between Saturday night and Sunday morning. The supper was to be later, but that was like other eating and drinking on the Sabbath; and it was to be a cold supper.

At half-past ten the dancing stopped in the foyer and the drawing-room, and by eleven the guests were all seated fronting the closed doors of the library. There were not so many of them but that in the handsome space there was interval enough to lend a desired distance to the apparitions; and when the doors were slid aside it was applausively found that there was a veil of gauze falling from the roof to the floor, which promised its aid in heightening the coming mystery. This was again heightened by the universal ignorance as to how the apparitions were to make their advents and on what terms.

It was with an access of a certain nervous anxiety that Verrian found himself next Miss Macroyd, whose frank good-fellowship first expressed itself in a pleasure at the chance which he did not share, and then extended to a confidential sympathy for the success of the enterprise which he did not believe she felt. She laughed, but ‘sotto voce’, in bending her head close to his and whispering, “I hope she’ll be equal to her ‘mise en scene’. It’s really very nice. So simple.” Besides the gauze veil, there was no preparation except in the stretch of black drapery which hid the book-shelves at the farther wall of the library.

“Mrs. Westangle’s note is always simplicity,” Verrian returned.

“Oh yes, indeed! And you wish to keep up the Westangle convention?”

“I don’t see any reason for dropping it.”

“Oh, none in the world,” she mocked.

He determined to push her, since she had tried to push him, and he asked, “What reason could there be?”

“Now, Mr. Verrian, asking a woman for a reason! I shall begin to think some one else wrote your book, too! Perhaps she’ll take up supplying ideas to authors as well as hostesses. Of course, I mean Mrs. Westangle.”

Verrian wished he had not tried to push Miss Macroyd, and he was still grinding his teeth in a vain endeavor to get out some fit retort between them, when he saw Bushwick shuffling to his feet, in the front row of the spectators, and heard him beginning a sort of speech.

“Ladies and gentlemen: Mrs. Westangle has chosen me, because a real-estate broker is sometimes an auctioneer, and may be supposed to have the gift of oratory, to make known the conditions on which you may interview the ghosts which you are going to see. Anybody may do it who will comply with the conditions. In the first place, you have got to be serious, and to think up something that you would really like to know about your past, present, or future. Remember, this is no joking matter, and the only difference between the ghost that you will see here and a real materialization under professional auspices is that the ghost won’t charge you anything. Of course, if any lady or gentleman — especially lady — wishes to contribute to any charitable object, after a satisfactory interview with the ghost, a hat will be found at the hall-door for the purpose, and Mrs. Westangle will choose the object: I have put in a special plea for my own firm, at a season when the real-estate business is not at its best.” By this time Bushwick had his audience laughing, perhaps the more easily because they were all more or less in a hysterical mood, which, whether we own it or not, is always induced by an approximation to the supernatural. He frowned and said, “NO laughing!” and then they laughed the more. When he had waited for them to be quiet he went on gravely, “The conditions are simply these: Each person who chooses may interview the ghost, keeping a respectful distance, but not so far off but that the ghost can distinctly hear a stage whisper. The question put must be seriously meant, and it must be the question which the questioner would prefer to have answered above everything else at the time being. Certain questions will be absolutely ruled out, such as, ‘Does Maria love me?’ or, ‘Has Reuben ever been engaged before?’ The laughter interrupted the speaker again, and Verrian hung his head in rage and shame; this stupid ass was spoiling the hope of anything beautiful in the spectacle and turning it into a gross burlesque. Somehow he felt that the girl who had invented it had meant, in the last analysis, something serious, and it was in her behalf that he would have liked to choke Bushwick. All the time he believed that Miss Macroyd, whose laugh sounded above the others, was somehow enjoying his indignation and divining its reason.

“Other questions, touching intemperance or divorce, the questioner will feel must not be asked; though it isn’t necessary to more than suggest this, I hope; it will be left entirely to the good taste and good feeling of the — party. We all know what the temptations of South Dakota and the rum fiend are, and that to err is human, and forgive divine.” He paused, having failed to get a laugh, but got it by asking, confidentially, “Where was I? Oh!” — he caught himself up— “I remember. Those of you who are in the habit of seeing ghosts need not be told that a ghost never speaks first; and those who have never met an apparition before, but are in the habit of going to the theatre, will recall the fact that in W. Shakespeare’s beautiful play of ‘Hamlet’ the play could not have gone on after the first scene if Horatio had not spoken to the ghost of Hamlet’s father and taken the chances of being snubbed. Here there are no chances of that kind; the chances are that you’ll wish the ghost had not been entreated: I think that is the phrase.”

In the laugh that followed a girl on Miss Macroyd’s other hand audibly asked her, “Oh, isn’t he too funny?”

“Delicious!” Miss Macroyd agreed. Verrian felt she said it to vex him.

“Now, there’s just one other point,” Bushwick resumed, “and then I have done. Only one question can be allowed to each person, but if the questioner is a lady she can ask a question and a half, provided she is not satisfied with the answer. In this case, however, she will only get half an answer. Now I have done, and if my arguments have convinced any one within the sound of my voice that our ghost really means business, I shall feel fully repaid for the pains and expense of getting up these few impromptu remarks, to which I have endeavored to give a humorous character, in order that you may all laugh your laugh out, and no unseemly mirth may interrupt the subsequent proceedings. We will now have a little music, and those who can recall my words will be allowed to sing them.”

In the giggling and chatter which ensued the chords softly played passed into ears that might as well have been deaf; but at last there was a general quiescence of expectation, in which every one’s eyes were strained to pierce through the gauze curtain to the sombre drapery beyond. The wait was so long that the tension relaxed and a whispering began, and Verrian felt a sickness of pity for the girl who was probably going to make a failure of it. He asked himself what could have happened to her. Had she lost courage? Or had her physical strength, not yet fully renewed, given way under the stress? Or had she, in sheer disgust for the turn the affair had been given by that brute Bushwick, thrown up the whole business? He looked round for Mrs. Westangle; she was not there; he conjectured — he could only conjecture — that she was absent conferring with Miss Shirley and trying to save the day.

A long, deeply sighed “Oh-h-h-h!” shuddering from many lips made him turn abruptly, and he saw, glimmering against the pall at the bottom of the darkened library, a figure vaguely white, in which he recognized a pose, a gesture familiar to him. For the others the figure was It, but for him it was preciously She. It was she, and she was going to carry it through; she was going to triumph, and not fail. A lump came into his 96 throat, and a mist blurred his eyes, which, when it cleared again, left him staring at nothing.

A girl’s young voice uttered the common feeling, “Why, is that all?”

“It is, till some one asks the ghost a question; then it will reappear,” Bushwick rose to say. “Will Miss Andrews kindly step forward and ask the question nearest her heart?”

“Oh no!” the girl answered, with a sincerity that left no one quite free to laugh.

“Some other lady, then?” Bushwick suggested. No one moved, and he added, “This is a difficulty which had been foreseen. Some gentleman will step forward and put the question next his heart.” Again no one offered to go forward, and there was some muted laughter, which Bushwick checked. “This difficulty had been foreseen, too. I see that I shall have to make the first move, and all that I shall require of the audience is that I shall not be supposed to be in collusion with the illusion. I hope that after my experience, whatever it is, some young woman of courage will follow.”

He passed into the foyer, and from that came into the library, where he showed against the dark background in an attitude of entreaty slightly burlesqued. The ghost reappeared.

“Shall I marry the woman I am thinking of?” he asked.

The phantom seemed to hesitate; it wavered like a pale reflection cast against the pall. Then, in the tones which Verrian knew, the answer came:

“Ask her. She will tell you.”

The phantom had scored a hit, and the applause was silenced with difficulty; but Verrian felt that Miss Shirley had lost ground. It could not have been for the easy cleverness of such a retort that she had planned the affair. Yet, why not? He was taking it too seriously. It was merely business with her.

“And I haven’t even the right to half a question more!” Bushwick lamented, in a dramatized dejection, and crossed slowly back from the library to his place.

“Why, haven’t you got enough?” one of the men asked, amidst the gay clamor of the women.

The ghost was gone again, and its evanescence was discussed with ready wonder. Another of the men went round to tempt his fate, and the phantom suddenly reappeared so near him that he got a laugh by his start of dismay. “I forgot what I was going to ask, he faltered.

“I know what it was,” the apparition answered. “You had better sell.”

“But they say it will go to a hundred!” the man protested.

“No back — talk, Rogers!” Bushwick interposed. “That was the understanding.

“But we didn’t understand,” one of the girls said, coming to the rescue, “that the ghost was going to answer questions that were not asked. That would give us all away.”

“Then the only thing is for you to go and ask before it gets a chance to answer,” Bushwick said.

“Well, I will,” the girl returned. And she swept round into the library, where she encountered the phantom with a little whoop as it started into sight before her. “I’m not going to be scared out of it!” she said, defiantly. “It’s simply this: Did the person I suspect really take the ring.”

The answer came, “Look on the floor under your dressing-table!”

“Well, if I find it there,” the girl addressed the company, “I’m a spiritualist from this time forth.” And she came back to her place, where she remained for some time explaining to those near how she had lately lost her ring and suspected her maid, whom she had dismissed.

Upon the whole, the effect was serious. The women, having once started, needed no more urging. One after another they confronted and questioned the oracle with increasing sincerity.

Miss Macroyd asked Verrian, “Hadn’t you better take your chance and stop this flow of fatuity, Mr. Verrian?”

“I’m afraid I should be fatuous, too,” he said. “But you?”

“Oh, thank you, I don’t believe in ghosts, though this seems to be a very pretty one — very graceful, I mean. I suppose a graceful woman would be graceful even when a disembodied spirit. I should think she would be getting a little tried with all this questioning; but perhaps we’re only reading the fatigue into her. The ghost may be merely overdone.”

“It might easily be that,” Verrian assented.

“Oh, may I ask it something now?” a girl’s voice appealed to Bushwick. It was the voice of that Miss Andrews who had spoken first, and first refused to question the ghost. She was the youngest of Mrs. Westangle’s guests, and Verrian had liked her, with a sense of something precious in the prolongation of a child’s unconsciousness into the consciousness of girlhood which he found in her. She was always likelier than not to say the thing she thought and felt, whether it was silly and absurd, or whether, as also happened, there was a touch of inspired significance in it, as there is apt to be in the talk of children. She was laughed at, but she was liked, and the freshness of her soul was pleasant to the girls who were putting on the world as hard as they could. She could be trusted to do and say the unexpected. But she was considered a little morbid, and certainly she had an exaltation of the nerves that was at times almost beyond her control.

“Oh, dear!” Miss Macroyd whispered. “What is that strange simpleton going to do, I wonder?”

Verrian did not feel obliged to answer a question not addressed to him, but he, too, wondered and doubted.

The girl, having got her courage together, fluttered with it from her place round to the ghost’s in a haste that expressed a fear that it might escape her if she delayed to put it to the test. The phantom was already there, as if it had waited her in the curiosity that followed her. They were taking each other seriously, the girl and the ghost, and if the ghost had been a veridical phantom, in which she could have believed with her whole soul, the girl could not have entreated it more earnestly, more simply.

She bent forward, in her slim, tall figure, with her hands outstretched, and with her tender voice breaking at times in her entreaty. “Oh, I don’t know how to begin,” she said, quite as if she and the phantom were alone together, and she had forgotten its supernatural awfulness in a sense of its human quality. “But you will understand, won’t you! You’ll think it very strange, and it is very unlike the others; but if I’m going to be serious—”

The white figure stood motionless; but Verrian interpreted its quiet as a kindly intelligence, and the girl made a fresh start in a note a little more piteous than before. “It’s about the — the truth. Do you think if sometimes we don’t tell it exactly, but we wish we had very, very much, it will come round somehow the same as if we had told it?”

“I don’t understand,” the phantom answered. “Say it again — or differently.”

“Can our repentance undo it, or make the falsehood over into the truth?”

“Never!” the ghost answered, with a passion that thrilled to Verrian’s heart.

“Oh, dear!” the girl said; and then, as if she had been going to continue, she stopped.

“You’ve still got your half-question, Miss Andrews,” Bushwick interposed.

“Even if we didn’t mean it to deceive harmfully?” the girl pursued. “If it was just on impulse, something we couldn’t seem to help, and we didn’t see it in its true light at the time—”

The ghost made no answer. It stood motionless.

“It is offended,” Bushwick said, without knowing the Shakespearian words. “You’ve asked it three times half a question, Miss Andrews. Now, Mr. Verrian, it’s your turn. You can ask it just one-quarter of a question. Miss Andrews has used up the rest of your share.”

Verrian rose awkwardly and stood a long moment before his chair. Then he dropped back again, saying, dryly, “I don’t think I want to ask it anything.”

The phantom sank straight down as if sinking through the floor, but lay there like a white shawl trailed along the bottom of the dark curtain.

“And is that all?” Miss Macroyd asked Verrian. “I was just getting up my courage to go forward. But now, I suppose—”

“Oh, dear!” Miss Andrews called out. “Perhaps it’s fainted. Hadn’t we better—”

There were formless cries from the women, and the men made a crooked rush forward, in which Verrian did not join. He remained where he had risen, with Miss Macroyd beside him.

“Perhaps it’s only a coup de theatre!” she said, with her laugh. “Better wait.”

Bushwick was gathering the prostrate figure up. “She has fainted!” he called. “Get some water, somebody!”

XIX.

The early Monday morning train which brought Verrian up to town was so very early that he could sit down to breakfast with his mother only a little later than their usual hour.

She had called joyfully to him from her room, when she heard the rattling of his key as he let himself into the apartment, and, after an exchange of greetings, shouted back and forth before they saw each other, they could come at once to the history of his absence over their coffee. “You must have had a very good time, to stay so long. After you wrote that you would not be back Thursday, I expected it would be Saturday till I got your telegram. But I’m glad you stayed. You certainly needed the rest.”

“Yes, if those things are ever a rest.” He looked down at his cup while he stirred the coffee in it, and she studied his attitude, since she could not see his face fully, for the secret of any vital change that might have come upon him. It could be that in the interval since she had seen him he had seen the woman who was to take him from her. She was always preparing herself for that, knowing that it must come almost as certainly as death, and knowing that with all her preparation she should not be ready for it. “I’ve got rather a long story to tell you and rather a strange story,” he said, lifting his head and looking round, but not so impersonally that his mother did not know well enough to say to the Swedish serving-woman:

“You needn’t stay, Margit. I’ll give Mr. Philip his breakfast. Well!” she added, when they were alone.

“Well,” he returned, with a smile that she knew he was forcing, “I have seen the girl that wrote that letter.”

“Not Jerusha Brown?”

“Not Jerusha Brown, but the girl all the same.”

“Now go on, Philip, and don’t miss a single word!” she commanded him, with an imperious breathlessness. “You know I won’t hurry you or interrupt you, but you must — you really must-tell me everything. Don’t leave out the slightest detail.”

“I won’t,” he said. But she was aware, from time to time, that she was keeping her word better than he was keeping his, in his account of meeting Miss Shirley and all the following events.

“You can imagine,” he said, “what a sensation the swooning made, and the commotion that followed it.”

“Yes, I can imagine that,” she answered. But she was yet so faithful that she would not ask him to go on.

He continued, unasked, “I don’t know just how, now, to account for its coming into my head that it was Miss Andrews who was my unknown correspondent. I suppose I’ve always unconsciously expected to meet that girl, and Miss Andrews’s hypothetical case was psychologically so parallel—”

“Yes, yes!”

“And I’ve sometimes been afraid that I judged it too harshly — that it was a mere girlish freak without any sort of serious import.”

“I was sometimes afraid so, Philip. But—”

“And I don’t believe now that the hypothetical case brought any intolerable stress of conscience upon Miss Shirley, or that she fainted from any cause but exhaustion from the general ordeal. She was still weak from the sickness she had been through — too weak to bear the strain of the work she had taken up. Of course, the catastrophe gave the whole surface situation away, and I must say that those rather banal young people behaved very humanely about it. There was nothing but interest of the nicest kind, and, if she is going on with her career, it will be easy enough for her to find engagements after this.”

“Why shouldn’t she go on?” his mother asked, with a suspicion which she kept well out of sight.

“Well, as well as she could explain afterwards, the catastrophe took her work out of the category of business and made her acceptance in it a matter of sentiment.”

“She explained it to you herself?”

“Yes, the general sympathy had penetrated to Mrs. Westangle, though I don’t say that she had been more than negatively indifferent to Miss Shirley’s claim on her before. As it was, she sent for me to her room the next morning, and I found Miss Shirley alone there. She said Mrs. Westangle would be down in a moment.”

Now, indeed, Mrs. Verrian could not govern herself from saying, “I don’t like it, Philip.”

“I knew you wouldn’t. It was what I said to myself at the time. You were so present with me that I seemed to have you there chaperoning the interview.” His mother shrugged, and he went on: “She said she wished to tell me something first, and then she said, ‘I want to do it while I have the courage, if it’s courage; perhaps it’s just desperation. I am Jerusha Brown.’”

His mother began, “But you said—” and then stopped herself.

“I know that I said she wasn’t, but she explained, while I sat there rather mum, that there was really another girl, and that the other girl’s name was really Jerusha Brown. She was the daughter of the postmaster in the village where Miss Shirley was passing the summer. In fact, Miss Shirley was boarding in the postmaster’s family, and the girls had become very friendly. They were reading my story together, and talking about it, and trying to guess how it would come out, just as the letter said, and they simultaneously hit upon the notion of writing to me. It seemed to them that it would be a good joke — I’m not defending it, mother, and I must say Miss Shirley didn’t defend it, either — to work upon my feelings in the way they tried, and they didn’t realize what they had done till Armiger’s letter came. It almost drove them wild, she said; but they had a lucid interval, and they took the letter to the girl’s father and told him what they had done. He was awfully severe with them for their foolishness, and said they must write to Armiger at once and confess the fact. Then they said they had written already, and showed him the second letter, and explained they had decided to let Miss Brawn write it in her person alone for the reason she gave in it. But Miss Shirley told him she was ready to take her full share of the blame, and, if anything came of it, she authorized him to put the whole blame on her.”

Verrian made a pause which his mother took for invitation or permission to ask, “And was he satisfied with that?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t, and it’s only just to Miss Shirley to say that she wasn’t, either. She didn’t try to justify it to me; she merely said she was so frightened that she couldn’t have done anything. She may have realized more than the Brown girl what they had done.”

“The postmaster, did he regard it as anything worse than foolishness?”

“I don’t believe he did. At any rate, he was satisfied with what his daughter had done in owning up.”

“Well, I always liked that girl’s letter. And did they show him your letter?”

“It seems that they did.”

“And what did he say about that?”

“I suppose, what I deserved. Miss Shirley wouldn’t say, explicitly. He wanted to answer it, but they wouldn’t let him. I don’t know but I should feel better if he had. I haven’t been proud of that letter of mine as time has gone on, mother; I think I behaved very narrow-mindedly, very personally in it.”

“You behaved justly.”

“Justly? I thought you had your doubts of that. At any rate, I had when it came to hearing the girl accusing herself as if she had been guilty of some monstrous wickedness, and I realized that I had made her feel so.”

“She threw herself on your pity!”

“No, she didn’t, mother. Don’t make it impossible for me to tell you just how it was.”

“I won’t. Go on.”

“I don’t say she was manly about it; that couldn’t be, but she was certainly not throwing herself on my pity, unless — unless—”

“What?”

“Unless you call it so for her to say that she wanted to own up to me, because she could have no rest till she had done so; she couldn’t put it behind her till she had acknowledged it; she couldn’t work; she couldn’t get well.”

He saw his mother trying to consider it fairly, and in response he renewed his own resolution not to make himself the girl’s advocate with her, but to continue the dispassionate historian of the case. At the same time his memory was filled with the vision of how she had done and said the things he was telling, with what pathos, with what grace, with what beauty in her appeal. He saw the tears that came into her eyes at times and that she indignantly repressed as she hurried on in the confession which she was voluntarily making, for there was no outward stress upon her to say anything. He felt again the charm of the situation, the sort of warmth and intimacy, but he resolved not to let that feeling offset the impartiality of his story.

“No, I don’t say she threw herself on your mercy,” his mother said, finally. “She needn’t have told you anything.”

“Except for the reason she gave — that she couldn’t make a start for herself till she had done so. And she has got her own way to make; she is poor. Of course, you may say her motive was an obsession, and not a reason.”

“There’s reality in it, whatever it is; it’s a genuine motive,” Mrs. Verrian conceded.

“I think so,” Verrian said, in a voice which he tried to keep from sounding too grateful.

Apparently his mother did not find it so. She asked, “What had been the matter with her, did she say?”

“In her long sickness? Oh! A nervous fever of some sort.”

“From worrying about that experience?”

Verrian reluctantly admitted, “She said it made her want to die. I don’t suppose we can quite realize—”

“We needn’t believe everything she said to realize that she suffered. But girls exaggerate their sufferings. I suppose you told her not to think of it any more?”

Verrian gave an odd laugh. “Well, not unconditionally. I tried to give her my point of view. And I stipulated that she should tell Jerusha Brown all about it, and keep her from having a nervous fever, too.”

“That was right. You must see that even cowardice couldn’t excuse her selfishness in letting that girl take all the chances.”

“And I’m afraid I was not very unselfish myself in my stipulations,” Verrian said, with another laugh. “I think that I wanted to stand well with the postmaster.”

There was a note of cynical ease in this which Mrs. Verrian found morally some octaves lower than the pitch of her son’s habitual seriousness in what concerned himself, but she could not make it a censure to him. “And you were able to reassure her, so that she needn’t think of it any more?”

“What would you have wished me to do?” he returned, dryly. “Don’t you think she had suffered enough?”

“Oh, in this sort of thing it doesn’t seem the question of suffering. If there’s wrong done the penalty doesn’t right it.”

The notion struck Verrian’s artistic sense. “That’s true. That would make the ‘donnee’ of a strong story. Or a play. It’s a drama of fate. It’s Greek. But I thought we lived under another dispensation.”

“Will she try to get more of the kind of thing she was doing for Mrs. Westangle at once? Or has she some people?”

“No; only friends, as I understand.”

“Where is she from? Up country?”

“No, she’s from the South.”

“I don’t like Southerners!”

“I know you don’t, mother. But you must honor the way they work and get on when they come North and begin doing for themselves. Besides, Miss Shirley’s family went South after the war—”

“Oh, not even a REAL Southerner!”

“Mother!”

“I know! I’m not fair. I ought to beg her pardon. And I ought to be glad it’s all over. Shall you see her again?”

“It might happen. But I don’t know how or when. We parted friends, but we parted strangers, so far as any prevision of the future is concerned,” Verrian said.

His mother drew a long breath, which she tried to render inaudible. “And the girl that asked her the strange questions, did you see her again?”

“Oh yes. She had a curious fascination. I should like to tell you about her. Do you think there’s such a thing as a girl’s being too innocent?”

“It isn’t so common as not being innocent enough.”

“But it’s more difficult?”

“I hope you’ll never find it so, my son,” Mrs. Verrian said. And for the first time she was intentionally personal. “Go on.”

“About Miss Andrews?”

“Whichever you please.”

“She waylaid me in the afternoon, as I was coming home from a walk, and wanted to talk with me about Miss Shirley.”

“I suppose Miss Shirley was the day’s heroine after what had happened?”

“The half-day’s, or quarter-day’s heroine, perhaps. She left on the church train for town yesterday morning soon after I saw her. Miss Andrews seemed to think I was an authority on the subject, and she approached me with a large-eyed awe that was very amusing, though it was affecting, too. I suppose that girls must have many worships for other girls before they have any worship for a man. This girl couldn’t separate Miss Shirley, on the lookout for another engagement, from the psychical part she had played. She raved about her; she thought she was beautiful, and she wanted to know all about her and how she could help her. Miss Andrews’s parents are rich but respectable, I understand, and she’s an only child. I came in for a share of her awe; she had found out that I was not only not Verrian the actor, but an author of the same name, and she had read my story with passionate interest, but apparently in that unliterary way of many people without noticing who wrote it; she seemed to have thought it was Harding Davis or Henry James; she wasn’t clear which. But it was a good deal to have had her read it at all in that house; I don’t believe anybody else had, except Miss Shirley and Miss Macroyd.”

Mrs. Verrian deferred a matter that would ordinarily have interested her supremely to an immediate curiosity. “And how came she to think you would know so much about Miss Shirley?”

Verrian frowned. “I think from Miss Macroyd. Miss Macroyd seems to have taken a grandmotherly concern in my affairs through the whole week. Perhaps she resented having behaved so piggishly at the station the day we came, and meant to take it out of Miss Shirley and myself. She had seen us together in the woods, one day, and she must have told it about. Mrs. Westangle wouldn’t have spoken of us together, because she never speaks of anything unless it is going to count; and there was no one else who knew of our acquaintance.”

“Why, my son, if you went walking in the woods with the girl, any one might have seen you.”

“I didn’t. It was quite by accident that we met there. Miss Shirley was anxious to keep her presence in the house a secret from everybody.”

Mrs. Verrian would not take any but the open way, with this. She would not deal indirectly, with it, or in any wise covertly or surreptitiously. “It seems to me that Miss Shirley has rather a fondness for secrecy,” she said.

“I think she has,” Verrian admitted. “Though, in this case, it was essential to the success of her final scheme. But she is a curious study. I suppose that timidity is at the bottom of all fondness for secrecy, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. She doesn’t seem to be timid in everything.”

“Say it out, mother!” Verrian challenged her with a smile. “You’re not timid, anyway!”

“She had the courage to join in that letter, but not the courage to own her part in it. She was brave enough to confess that she had been sick of a nervous fever from the answer you wrote to the Brown girl, but she wouldn’t have been brave enough to confess anything at all if she had believed she would be physically or morally strong enough to keep it.”

“Perhaps nobody — nobody but you, mother — is brave in the right time and place.”

She knew that this was not meant in irony. “I am glad you say that, Philip.”

“It’s only your due. But aren’t you a little too hard upon cowards, at times? For the sort of person she is, if you infer the sort from the worst appearance she has made in the whole business, I think she has done pretty well.”

“Why had she left the Brown girl to take all your resentment alone for the last six or eight months?”

“She may have thought that she was getting her share of the punishment in the fever my resentment brought on?”

“Philip, do you really believe that her fever, if she had one, came from that?”

“I think she believes it, and there’s no doubt but she was badly scared.”

“Oh, there’s no doubt of that!”

“But come, mother, why should we take her at the worst? Of course, she has a complex nature. I see that as clearly as you do. I don’t believe we look at her diversely, in the smallest particular. But why shouldn’t a complex nature be credited with the same impulses towards the truth as a single nature? Why shouldn’t we allow that Miss Shirley had the same wish to set herself right with me as Miss Andrews would have had in her place?”

“I dare say she wished to set herself right with you, but not from the same wish that Miss Andrews would have had. Miss Andrews would not have wished you to know the truth for her own sake. Her motive would have been direct-straight.”

“Yes; and we will describe her as a straight line, and Miss Shirley as a waving line. Why shouldn’t the waving line, at its highest points, touch the same altitude as the straight line?”

“It wouldn’t touch it all the time, and in character, or nature, as you call it, that is the great thing. It’s at the lowest points that the waving line is dangerous.”

“Well, I don’t deny that. But I’m anxious to be just to a person who hasn’t experienced a great deal of mercy for what, after all, wasn’t such a very heinous thing as I used to think it. You must allow that she wasn’t obliged to tell me anything about herself.”

“Yes, she was, Philip. As I said before, she hadn’t the physical or moral strength to keep it from you when she was brought face to face with you. Besides—” Mrs. Verrian hesitated.

“Out with it, mother! We, at least, won’t have any concealments.”

“She may have thought, she could clinch it in that way.”

“Clinch what?”

“You know. Is she pretty?”

“She’s — interesting.”

“That can always be managed. Is she tall?”

“NO, I think she’s rather out of style there; she’s rather petite.”

“And what’s her face like?”

“Well, she has no particular complexion, but it’s not thick. Her eyes are the best of her, though there isn’t much of them. They’re the ‘waters on a starry night’ sort, very sweet and glimmering. She has a kind of ground-colored hair and a nice little chin. Her mouth helps her eyes out; it looks best when she speaks; it’s pathetic in the play of the lips.”

“I see,” Mrs. Verrian said.

XX.

The following week Verrian and his mother were at a show of paintings, in the gallery at the rear of a dealer’s shop, and while they were bending together to look at a picture he heard himself called to in a girlish voice, “Oh, Mr. Verrian!” as if his being there was the greatest wonder in the world.

His mother and he lifted themselves to encounter a tall, slim girl, who was stretching her hand towards him, and who now cried out, joyously, “Oh, Mr. Verrian, I thought it must be you, but I was afraid it wasn’t as soon as I spoke. Oh, I’m so glad to see you; I want so much to have you know my mother — Mr. Verrian,” she said, presenting him.

“And I you mine,” Verrian responded, in a violent ellipse, and introduced his own mother, who took in the fact of Miss Andrews’s tall thinness, topped with a wide, white hat and waving white plumes, and her little face, irregular and somewhat gaunt, but with a charm in the lips and eyes which took the elder woman’s heart with pathos. She made talk with Mrs. Andrews, who affected one as having the materials of social severity in her costume and manner.

“Oh, I didn’t believe I should ever see you again,” the girl broke out impulsively upon Verrian. “Oh, I wanted to ask you so about Miss Shirley. Have you seen her since you got back?”

“No,” Verrian said, “I haven’t seen her.”

“Oh, I thought perhaps you had. I’ve been to the address that Mrs. Westangle gave me, but she isn’t there any more; she’s gone up into Harlem somewhere, and I haven’t been able to call again. Oh, I do feel so anxious about her. Oh, I do hope she isn’t ill. Do you think she is?”

“I don’t believe so,” Verrian began. But she swept over his prostrate remark.

“Oh, Mr. Verrian, don’t you think she’s wonderful? I’ve been telling mother about it, and I don’t feel at all the way she does. Do you?”

“How does she feel? I must know that before I say.”

“Why, of course! I hadn’t told you! She thinks it was a make-up between Miss Shirley and that Mr. Bushwick. But I say it couldn’t have been. Do you think it could?”

Verrian found the suggestion so distasteful, for a reason which he did not quite seize himself, that he answered, resentfully, “It could have been, but I don’t think it was.”

“I will tell her what you say. Oh, may I tell her what you say?”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t. It isn’t very important, either way, is it?”

“Oh, don’t you think so? Not if it involved pretending what wasn’t true?”

She bent towards him in such anxious demand that he could not help smiling.

“The whole thing was a pretence, wasn’t it?” he suggested.

“Yes, but that would have been a pretence that we didn’t know of.”

“It would be incriminating to that extent, certainly,” Verrian owned, ironically. He found the question of Miss Shirley’s blame for the collusion as distasteful as the supposition of the collusion, but there was a fascination in the innocence before him, and he could not help playing with it.

Sometimes Miss Andrews apparently knew that he was playing with her innocence, and sometimes she did not. But in either case she seemed to like being his jest, from which she snatched a fearful joy. She was willing to prolong the experience, and she drifted with him from picture to picture, and kept the talk recurrently to Miss Shirley and the phenomena of Seeing Ghosts.

Her mother and Mrs. Verrian evidently got on together better than either of them at first expected. When it came to their parting, through Mrs. Andrews’s saying that she must be going, she shook hands with Mrs. Verrian and said to Philip, “I am so glad to have met you, Mr. Verrian. Will you come and see us?”

“Yes, thank you,” he answered, taking the hand she now offered him, and then taking Miss Andrews’s hand, while the girl’s eyes glowed with pleasure. “I shall be very glad.”

“Oh, shall you?” she said, with her transparent sincerity. “And you won’t forget Thursdays! But any day at five we have tea.”

“Thank you,” Verrian said. “I might forget the Thursdays, but I couldn’t forget all the days of the week.”

Miss Andrews laughed and blushed at once. “Then we shall expect you every day.”

“Well, every day but Thursday,” he promised.

When the mother and daughter had gone Mrs. Verrian said, “She is a great admirer of yours, Philip. She’s read your story, and I suspect she wants an opportunity to talk with you about it.”

“You mean Mrs. Andrews?”

“Yes. I suppose the daughter hasn’t waited for an opportunity. The mother had read that publisher’s paragraph about your invalid, and wanted to know if you had ever heard from her again. Women are personal in their literary interests.”

Philip asked, in dismay, “You didn’t give it away did you, mother?”

“Certainly not, my dear. You have brought me up too carefully.”

“Of course. I didn’t imagine you had.”

Then, as they could not pretend to look at the pictures any longer, they went away, too. Their issue into the open air seemed fraught with novel emotion for Mrs. Verrian. “Well, now,” she said, “I have seen the woman I would be willing my son should marry.”

“Child, you mean,” Philip said, not pretending that he did not know she meant Miss Andrews.

“That girl,” his mother returned, “is innocence itself. Oh, Philip, dear, do marry her!”

“Well, I don’t know. If her mother is behaving as sagely with her as you are with me the chances are that she won’t let me. Besides, I don’t know that I want to marry quite so much innocence.”

“She is conscience incarnate,” his mother uttered, perfervidly. “You could put your very soul in her keeping.”

“Then you would be out of a job, mother.”

“Oh, I am not worthy of the job, my dear. I have always felt that. I am too complex, and sometimes I can’t see the right alone, as she could.”

Philip was silent a moment while he lost the personal point of view. “I suspect we don’t see the right when we see it alone. We ought to see the wrong, too.”

“Ah, Philip, don’t let your fancy go after that girl!”

“Miss Andrews? I thought—”

“Don’t you be complex, my dear. You know I mean Miss Shirley. What has become of her, I wonder. I heard Miss Andrews asking you.”

“I wasn’t able to tell her. Do you want me to try telling you?”

“I would rather you never could.”

Philip laughed sardonically. “Now, I shall forget Thursdays and all the other days, too. You are a very unwise parent, mother.”

They laughed with each other at each other, and treated her enthusiasm for Miss Andrews as the joke it partly was. Mrs. Verrian did not follow him up about her idol, and a week or so later she was able to affect a decent surprise when he came in at the end of an afternoon and declined the cup of tea she proposed on the ground that he had been taking a cup of tea with the Andrewses. “You have really been there?”

“Didn’t you expect me to keep my promise?”

“But I was afraid I had put a stumbling-block in the way.”

“Oh, I found I could turn the consciousness you created in me into literary material, and so I was rather eager to go. I have got a point for my new story out of it. I shall have my fellow suffer all I didn’t suffer in meeting the girl he knows his mother wants him to marry. I got on very well with those ladies. Mrs. Andrews is the mother of innocence, but she isn’t innocence. She managed to talk of my story without asking about the person who wanted to anticipate the conclusion. That was what you call complex. She was insincere; it was the only thing she wanted to talk about.”

“I don’t believe it, Philip. But what did Miss Andrews talk about?”

“Well, she is rather an optimistic conscience. She talked about books and plays that some people do not think are quite proper. I have a notion that, where the point involved isn’t a fact of her own experience, she is not very severe about it. You think that would be quite safe for me?”

“Philip, I don’t like your making fun of her!”

“Oh, she wasn’t insipid; she was only limpid. I really like her, and, as for reverencing her, of course I feel that in a way she is sacred.” He added, after a breath, “Too sacred. We none of us can expect to marry Eve before the Fall now; perhaps we have got over wanting to.”

“You are very perverse, my dear. But you will get over that.”

“Don’t take away my last defence, mother.”

Verrian began to go rather regularly to the Andrews house, or, at least, he was accused of doing it by Miss Macroyd when, very irregularly, he went one day to see her. “How did you know it?” he asked.

“I didn’t say I knew it. I only wished to know it. Now I am satisfied. I met another friend of yours on Sunday.” She paused for him to ask who; but he did not ask. “I see you are dying to know what friend: Mr. Bushwick.”

“Oh, he’s a good-fellow. I wonder I don’t run across him.”

“Perhaps that’s because you never call on Miss Shirley.” Miss Macroyd waited for this to take effect, but he kept a glacial surface towards her, and she went on:

“They were walking together in the park at noon. I suppose they had been to church together.”

Verrian manifested no more than a polite interest in the fact. He managed so well that he confirmed Miss Macroyd in a tacit conjecture. She went on: “Miss Shirley was looking quite blooming for her. But so was he, for that matter. Why don’t you ask if they inquired for you?”

“I thought you would tell me without.”

“I will tell you if he did. He was very cordial in his inquiries; and I had to pretend, to gratify him, that you were very well. I implied that you came here every Tuesday, but your Thursdays were dedicated to Miss Andrews.”

“You are a clever woman, Miss Macroyd. I should never have thought of so much to say on such an uninteresting subject. And Miss Shirley showed no curiosity?”

“Ah, she is a clever woman, too. She showed the prettiest kind of curiosity — so perfectly managed. She has a studio — I don’t know just how she puts it to use — with a painter girl in one of those studio apartment houses on the West Side: The Veronese, I believe. You must go and see her; I’ll let you have next Tuesday off; Tuesday’s her day, too.”

“You are generosity itself, Miss Macroyd.”

“Yes, there’s nothing mean about me,” she returned, in slang rather older than she ordinarily used. “If you’re not here next Tuesday I shall know where you are.”

“Then I must take a good many Tuesdays off, unless I want to give myself away.”

“Oh, don’t do that, Mr. Verrian! Please! Or else I can’t let you have any Tuesday off.”

XXI.

Upon the whole, Verrian thought he would go to see Miss Shirley the next Tuesday, but he did not say so to Miss Macroyd. Now that he knew where the girl was, all the peculiar interest she had inspired in him renewed itself. It was so vivid that he could not pay his usual Thursday call at Miss Andrews’s, and it filled his mind to the exclusion of the new story he had begun to write. He loafed his mornings away at his club, and he lunched there, leaving his mother to lunch alone, and was dreamily preoccupied in the evenings which he spent at home, sitting at his desk, with the paper before him, unable to coax the thoughts from his brain to its alluring blank, but restive under any attempts of hers to talk with him.

In his desperation he would have gone to the theatre, but the fact that the ass who rightfully called himself Verrian was playing at one of them blocked his way, through his indignation, to all of them. By Saturday afternoon the tedious time had to be done something with, and he decided to go and see what the ass was like.

He went early, and found himself in the end seat of a long row of many rows of women, who were prolonging the time of keeping their hats on till custom obliged them to take them off. He gave so much notice to the woman next him as to see that she was deeply veiled as well as widely hatted, and then he lapsed into a dreary muse, which was broken by the first strains of the overture. Then he diverted himself by looking round at all those ranks of women lifting their arms to take out them hat-pins and dropping them to pin their hats to the seat-backs in front of them, or to secure them somehow in their laps. Upon the whole, he thought the manoeuvre graceful and pleasing; he imagined a consolation in it for the women, who, if they were forced by public opinion to put off their charming hats, would know how charmingly they did it. Each turned a little, either her body or her head, and looked in any case out of the corner of her eyes; and he was phrasing it all for a scene in his story, when he looked round at his neighbor to see how she had managed, or was managing, with her veil. At the same moment she looked at him, and their eyes met.

“Mr. Verrian!”

“Miss Shirley!”

The stress of their voices fell upon different parts of the sentences they uttered, but did not commit either of them to a special role.

“How very strange we should meet here!” she said, with pleasure in her voice. “Do you know, I have been wanting to come all winter to see this man, on account of his name? And to think that I should meet the other Mr. Verrian as soon as I yielded to the temptation.”

“I have just yielded myself,” Verrian said. “I hope you don’t feel punished for yielding.”

“Oh, dear, no! It seems a reward.”

She did not say why it seemed so, and he suggested, “The privilege of comparing the histrionic and the literary Verrian?”

“Could there be any comparison?” she came back, gayly.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen the histrionic Verrian yet.”

They were laughing when the curtain rose, and the histrionic Verrian had his innings for a long, long first act. When the curtain fell she turned to the literary Verrian and said, “Well?”

“He lasted a good while,” Verrian returned.

“Yes. Didn’t he?” She looked at the little watch in her wristlet. “A whole hour! Do you know, Mr. Verrian, I am going to seem very rude. I am going to leave you to settle this question of superiority; I know you’ll be impartial. I have an appointment — with the dressmaker, to be specific — at half-past four, and it’s half-past three now, and I couldn’t well leave in the middle of the next act. So I will say good-bye now—”

“Don’t!” he entreated. “I couldn’t bear to be left alone with this dreadful double of mine. Let me go out with you.”

“Can I accept such self-sacrifice? Well!”

She had put on her hat and risen, and he now stepped out of his place to let her pass and then followed her. At the street entrance he suggested, “A hansom, or a simple trolley?”

“I don’t know,” she murmured, meditatively, looking up the street as if that would settle it. “If it’s only half-past three now, I should have time to get home more naturally.”

“Oh! And will you let me walk with you?”

“Why, if you’re going that way.”

“I will say when I know which way it is.”

They started on their walk so blithely that they did not sadden in the retrospect of their joint experiences at Mrs. Westangle’s. By the time they reached the park gate at Columbus Circle they had come so distinctly to the end of their retrospect that she made an offer of letting him leave her, a very tacit offer, but unmistakable, if he chose to take it. He interpreted her hesitation as he chose. “No,” he said, “it won’t be any longer if we go up through the park.”

She drew in her breath softly, smoothing down her muff with her right hand while she kept her left in it. “And it will certainly be pleasanter.” When they were well up the path, in that part of it where it deflects from the drive without approaching the street too closely, and achieves something of seclusion, she said:

“Your speaking of him just now makes me want to tell you something, Mr. Verrian. You would hear of it very soon, anyway, and I feel that it is always best to be very frank with you; but you’ll regard it as a secret till it comes out.”

The currents that had been playing so warmly in and out of Verrian’s heart turned suddenly cold. He said, with joyless mocking, “You know, I’m used to keeping your secrets. I — shall feel honored, I’m sure, if you trust me with another.”

“Yes,” she returned, pathetically, “you have always been faithful — even in your wounds.” It was their joint tribute to the painful past, and they had paid no other. She was looking away from him, but he knew she was aware of his hanging his head. “That’s all over now,” she uttered, passionately. “What I wanted to say — to tell you — is that I am engaged to Mr. Bushwick.”

He could have answered that she had no need to tell him. The cold currents in and out of his heart stiffened frozenly and ceased to flow; his heart itself stood still for an eternal instant. It was in this instant that he said, “He is a fine fellow.” Afterwards, amid the wild bounding of his recovered pulse, he could add, “I congratulate him; I congratulate you both.”

“Thank you,” she said. “No one knows as I do how good he is — has been, all through.” Probably she had not meant to convey any reproach to Verrian by Bushwick’s praise, but he felt reproach in it. “It only happened last week. You do wish me happy, don’t you? No one knows what a winter I have had till now. Everything seeming to fail—”

She choked, and did not say more. He said, aimlessly, “I am sorry—”

“Let me sit down a moment,” she begged. And she dropped upon the bench at which she faltered, and rested there, as if from the exhaustion of running. When she could get her breath she began again: “There is something else I want to tell you.”

She stopped. And he asked, to prompt her, “Yes?”

“Thank you,” she answered, piteously. And she added, with superficial inconsequence, “I shall always think you were very cruel.”

He did not pretend not to know what she meant, and he said, “I shall always think so, too. I tried to revenge myself for the hurt your harmless hoax did my vanity. Of course, I made believe at the time that I was doing an act of justice, but I never was able to brave it out afterwards.”

“But you were — you were doing an act of justice. I deserved what you said, but I didn’t deserve what has followed. I meant no harm — it was a silly prank, and I have suffered for it as if it were a crime, and the consequences are not ended yet. I should think that, if there is a moral government of the universe, the Judge of all the earth would know when to hold his hand. And now the worst of it is to come yet.” She caught Verrian’s arm, as if for help.

“Don’t — don’t!” he besought her. “What will people think?”

“Yes, Yes!” she owned, releasing him and withdrawing to the other end of the seat.

“But it almost drives me wild. What shall I do? You ought to know. It is your fault. You have frightened me out of daring to tell the truth.”

Had he, indeed, done that? Verrian asked himself, and it seemed to him that he had done something like it. If it was so, he must help her over her fear now. He answered, bluntly, harshly: “You must tell him all about it—”

“But if he won’t believe me? Do you think he will believe me? Would you believe me?”

“You have nothing to do with that. There is nothing for you but to tell him the whole story. You mustn’t share such a secret with any one but your husband. When you tell him it will cease to be my secret.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, then, you must tell him, unless—”

“Yes,” she prompted.

Then they were both silent, looking intensely into each other’s eyes. In that moment all else of life seemed to melt and swim away from Verrian and leave him stranded upon an awful eminence confronting her.

“Hello, hello!” a gay voice called, as if calling to them both. “What are you two conspiring?” Bushwick, as suddenly as if he had fallen from the sky or started up from the earth, stood before them, and gave a hand to each — his right to Verrian, his left to Miss Shirley. “How are you, Verrian? How are you, Miss Shirley?” He mocked her in the formality of his address. “I’ve been shadowing you ever since you came into the park, but I thought I wouldn’t interrupt till you seemed to have got through your conversation. May I ask what it was all about? It seemed very absorbing, from a respectful distance.”

“Very absorbing, indeed,” Miss Shirley said, making room for him between them. “Sit down and let me tell you. You’re to be a partner in the secret.”

“Silent partner,” Bushwick suggested.

“I hope you’ll always be silent,” the girl shared in his drolling. She began and told the whole story to the last detail, sparing neither herself nor Verrian, who listened as if he were some one else not concerned, and kept saying to himself, “what courage!” Bushwick listened as mutely, with a face that, to Verrian’s eye, seemed to harden from its light jocosity into a severity he had not seen in it before. “It was something,” she ended towards Bushwick, with a catch in her breath, “that you had to know.”

“Yes,” he answered, tonelessly.

“And now” — she attempted a little forlorn playfulness— “don’t you think he gave me what I deserved?”

Bushwick rose up and took her hand under his arm, keeping his left hand upon hers.

“He! Who?”

“Mr. Verrian.”

“I don’t know any Mr. Verrian. Come, you’ll take cold here.”

He turned his back on Verrian, who fancied a tremor in her hat, as if she would look round at him; but then, as if she divined Bushwick’s intention, she did not look round, and together they left him.

It was days before Verrian could confess himself of the fact to his mother, who listened with the justice instinctive in her. She still had not spoken when he ended, and he said, “I have thought it all over, and I feel that he did right. He did the only thing that a man in love with her could do. And I don’t wonder he’s in love with her. Yes” — he stayed his mother, imperatively— “and such a man as he, though he ground me in the dirt and stamped on me, I will say, it, is worthy of any woman. He can believe in a woman, and that’s the first thing that’s needed to make a woman like her, true. I don’t envy his job.” He was speaking self-contradictorily, irrelevantly, illogically, as a man thinks. He went on in that way, getting himself all out. “She isn’t single-hearted, but she’s faithful. She’ll never betray him now. She’s never given him any reason to distrust her. She’s the kind that can keep on straight with any one she’s begun straight with. She told him all that before me be cause she wanted me to know — to realize — that she had told him. It took courage.”

Mrs. Verrian had thought of generalizing, but she seized a single point. “Perhaps not so much courage as you think. You mustn’t let such bravado impose upon you, Philip. I’ve no doubt she knew her ground.”

“She took the chance of his casting her off.”

“She knew he wouldn’t. She knew him, and she knew you. She knew that if he cast her off—”

“Mother! Don’t say it! I can’t bear it!”

His mother did not say it, or anything more, then. Late at night she came to him. “Are you asleep, Philip?”

“Asleep? I!”

“I didn’t suppose you were. But I have had a note to-day which I must answer. Mrs. Andrews has asked us to dinner on Saturday. Philip, if you could see that sweet girl as I do, in all her goodness and sincerity—”

“I think I do, mother. And I wouldn’t be guilty of her unhappiness for the world. You must decline.”

“Well, perhaps you are right.” Mrs. Verrian went away, softly, sighing. As she sealed her reply to Mrs. Andrews, she sighed again, and made the reflection which a mother seldom makes with regard to her son, before his marriage, that men do not love women for their goodness.

NEW LEAF MILLS: A CHRONICLE

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

I

THE opinions of Owen Powell marked a sharp difference between him and most of his fellow-townsmen in the town of the Middle West, where he lived sixty years ago. A man who condemned the recent war upon Mexico as a wicked crusade for the extension of slavery, and denounced the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law as infernal, would have done well to have a confession of spiritual faith like that of his neighbors; but here Owen Powell was still more widely at variance with them. He rejected the notion of a personal devil, and many others did that; but his hell was wholly at odds with the hell popularly accepted; it was not a place of torment where the lost sinner was sent, but a state which the transgressor himself chose and where he abode everlastingly bereft of the sense of better things. Even so poor a hell saved Powell from the reproach of Universalism; but in a person so one-ideaed, as people then said, through his abhorrence of slavery, it was not enough. He was valued, but he was valued in spite of his opinions; they were distinctly a fact to his disadvantage in that day and place.

His younger brother Felix, after the wont of prosperous merchants, kept out of politics, and he carried his prayer-book every Sunday to the Episcopal service.

But he quietly voted with Owen, and those who counted on a want of sympathy between the brothers were apt to meet with a prompt rebuff from Felix. He once stopped his subscription and took away his advertising from the Whig editor who spoke of a certain political expression of Owen’s (it was in a letter to the editor’s paper) as having the unimportance of small potatoes, and he extorted a printed retractation of the insult before he renewed his patronage. He felt, more than any of his words or acts evinced, the beauty of the large benevolent intention which was the basis of Owen’s character, and he was charmed, if he was not convinced, by his inextinguishable faith in mankind as a race merely needing good treatment to become everything that its friends could wish; by his simple courage, so entire that he never believed in danger; and by his sweet serenity of temperament. Felix was in delicate health, and he was given to some vague superstitions. He had lost several children, and he believed that he had in every case had some preternatural warning of their death; his young wife, who was less openly an invalid, shared his beliefs, as well as his half-melancholy fondness for his brother. She liked to have Owen Powell’s children in her childless house; and she had some pretty affectations of manner and accent which took them with the sense of elegance in a world beyond them.

They came to her with their mother every Sunday night, and heard their father and uncle talk of their boyhood in the backwoods; of their life in a log cabin, and of the privations they had gladly suffered there.

The passing years had endeared these hardships to the brothers, but their wives resented the early poverty which they held precious; and they hated the memory of that farm where the brothers had lived in a log cabin, and had run wild, as it appeared from the fond exaggeration of their reminiscences, in bare feet, tattered trousers, and hickory shirts. Sometimes the brothers reasoned of the questions of theology upon which the mind of the elder habitually dwelt; but Felix disliked argument, and Owen affectionately forebore to assail him as a representative of the Old Church. After the pioneer stories, the children fell asleep on the sofa and the carpet, and did not wake till they heard the piano, where their young aunt used to sing and their uncle accompany her with his flute; he remained associated in their memories with the pensive trebles of his instrument and the cadences of her gentle voice.

There came a time when the summer days were clouded in their home by an increasing care, which they felt at second hand from their father and mother; then there came a Sunday night when there were no rosy visions of the past; and, by the matter-of-fact light of the Monday following, Felix saw that the affairs of his brother were hopeless. Owen’s book and drug store had never been a flourishing business, and now it had gone from bad to worse beyond retrieval. On the afternoon of the morning when the store was not opened he walked with his boys a long way into the country. It was very sultry, and he repeated a description of summer from Thompson’s Seasons. As they returned along the river-shore he pointed out the lovely iridescence of the mussel-shells which he picked up, and geologized in passing on the stratification of the rocks in the bank.

An interval of suspense followed this stressful time, which their young memories took little note of. On the Sunday evenings at their uncle’s the talk seemed to the children to be all of a plan for going to live in the country. Apparently there was to be a property which the brothers were to hold in common, and it was to be bought as soon as the younger could get his business into shape. Two brothers in other towns were to be invited to close up their affairs and join in the enterprise. Then, with something of the unsurprising inconsequence of dreams, the notion of a farm had changed in the children’s apprehension to the notion of a mill, and more dimly a settlement of communal proportions about it. They heard their elders discussing the project one night when they woke from their nap, and crowded about their mother’s chair for warmth, with the fire now burning low upon the hearth.

“The best plan,” their uncle said, “will be to find a mill privilege with the buildings already on it. We could take out the burrs,” which the boys understood later were millstones, “and put in paper machinery. When we were once settled there we could ask people that we found adapted to join us, but at first it would have to be a purely family concern.”

“Yes,” their father said. “One condition of our being able to do any good from the start would be our unquestionable hold of the management. That would be the only orderly method. I would give all hands a share in the profits, so as to interest and attach them, but till they were educated up to our ideas they oughtn’t to be allowed any control.”

Felix cleared his throat by a husky effort habitual with him before speaking again. “We could indirectly benefit them from the beginning enough to satisfy any reasonable expectation.”

After that it might have been weeks before the enterprise took clearer shape. From time to time the children forgot it; they played through the long summer vacation; but when the first keen mornings of the autumn came, and the neighbors’ children went by with their books, they did not return to school. The privilege, with a grist-mill and sawmill on it, had been found and bought, they did not know where, any more than how, but it was ten or twelve miles from the town in another county. Their father and mother had driven out with their aunt and uncle to look at it; their uncle had taken his gun, and he brought back some squirrels in the bottom of his carriage; he said that he had almost got a shot at a wild turkey. With such facts before them Owen’s boys could not understand why their mother should be low-spirited about going to live at the mills. They heard their father talking with her after they went to bed, and she said: “But all that wildness makes my heart sink. I had enough of that when I was a girl, Owen. You know I never liked the country to live in.”

“I know, I know. But we shall soon have quite a village about us. At any rate, we shall have a chance to begin life again.”

“Oh yes. But it’s beginning so far back.”

In the morning she was cheerfuler, and their father told the children that they were to move out to the mills at once, and that he was to have charge of the property till the paper machinery could be put into the grist-mill. At the sawmill he was to get out the stuff for a new house that was to be built; but their hearts leaped when he told them that they were to live that winter in a log cabin.

It was Sunday, and the night was the last they spent at their uncle’s in the old way. It was not quite the old way, though. The piano was not opened, and the flute lay shut in its case. The brothers went over their plans, and they spoke of whom they might invite to join them after their success became apparent. It seemed that they meant to be careful, and ask only those who could take up the enterprise in an enlightened spirit. Owen Powell believed that a responsive feeling would be awakened in the neighbors when they saw that the new-comers did not wish merely to make money for themselves, but to benefit all by improvements that would increase the price of their land and give employment to their children.

Felix listened with his melancholy smile, absently rolling his cigar between his thumb and finger. “What shall we call the place?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Owen said. “Something that would imply our purpose of turning over quite a new leaf.”

They talked further of the details of their undertaking, and the children went on with their play. They were dramatizing their arrival at the mills, and one of them was shouting to a supposed inhabitant, “Is this place New Leaf Mills?”

“Hey? Hey?” their uncle called to them. “What’s that?”

“We’re just playing,” they explained.

“New Leaf — New Leaf Mills,” he repeated, musingly. “That wouldn’t be bad. What made you think of that name?” He bent a sidelong glance on the conscious group. —

The eldest of the boys ventured, “Why, father said you would turn over a new leaf at the mills, and we just called them that.”

“Yes, yes! Very good,” he said. “Do you hear that, Owen? We’ve got a name for our place. We can stencil it on our flour-barrels now, and when we get in our paper machinery we can make it our watermark.”

II

THE leaves were falling from the maples along the road, but they still hung brown and harsh on the sycamores that fringed the island between the tail-race and the river when Owen Powell and two of his boys passed the groaning and whistling mill and stopped with their wagon at the door of the old cabin. It was empty, but the door yielded to the hand that drew the leathern latch-string and lifted the rude wooden latch, and Powell made his boys note that this was a genuine log cabin, such as the pioneers of old dwelt in, and just such as he had himself lived in when a boy. He said that the string might have hung out of the cabin door of Daniel Boone; within, the ladder that climbed to the loft from a corner of the room could have led to the sleep that came from being chased by Indians; the hearth, that stretched half across the end of the cabin, was of the right backwoods dimensions; he excused the ax-hewn whitewashed walls as the sophistication of an age which had outgrown the round logs, chinked with moss and daubed with clay, of the true primitive architecture.

When he went back to the wagon to get their tools and provisions after the first moments of rejoicing, he dispersed the cows and pigs surrounding it as gently as if they had been a deputation from the neighbors who hung about the door of the mill and viewed with sardonic amusement the sole greeting offered the new-comers. They waited in silence till the Powells had gone into the cabin again, but they shouted together in laughter when the miller appeared at an upper door and launched a curse at the cabin walls. They tried to provoke him to greater bitterness as he rested his weight by one hand upon the rope that lowered the bags of flour to the backs of their horses; then one after another they mounted upon the balanced load and jogged away from the mill.

Powell was glad to find that his hand had not forgotten the cunning of one of the several crafts to which he had turned it in his early life when he came to glaze the broken panes in the small, weather-worn sashes of the four windows lighting the two rooms of the cabin; he had to replace the rotten flooring with smooth-sawn boards of poplar instead of the riven oak puncheons of pioneer times, but he was consoled to find that the floor of the garret could best be mended by throwing loose planks over its cracks and knot-holes. After their day’s work was done he strolled out with his boys to explore the region in which he hoped to found a new home. From the road that crossed the tail-race below the grist-mill and crept eastward into the woods rose an isolated hill to a height notable in that country of broad bottom-lands. It was steep on the north, next to the mill; it sloped more gently away toward the south, but on the east and west it was steep again. It was thickly wooded with broad-girthed oaks, slim maples and ashes, and a host of shag-bark hickories hanging full of the nuts that now shone white through the gaping seams of their greenish-brown husks, and dropped about the feet of the Powells as they climbed upward through the fallen leaves. A company of pigs feeding on the mast under the trees lifted their heads at the approaching steps with looks of impudent defiance; then they hooted in alarm and ran down the sides of the hill, just as they did in the passage which Powell remembered from Bloomfield’s poem of “The Farmer Boy.” A covey of quails throbbed away from a pile of brush; a squirrel clattered up the shaggy side of one of the hickories. The simple incidents touched his heart as he climbed to the top of the hill and looked out upon the peaceful landscape. Below was the huge grist-mill, gray and weather-beaten, but strong as when first built; a wall of primeval forest lowered the eastern horizon, but north and south the woods retreated and left the interval yellow with a hundred acres of standing corn, and green with broad spaces of meadow-land. The straight ribbon of the head-race stretched to the full dam of New Leaf Mills, whose smooth water spread up into the woods on the north. On the western hillsides were the openings of farms, where the blue smoke curled from the cabin chimneys. On the east a road stole out of the woods, down between the cornfields and the meadows, and lost itself in the woods upon the island framed between the mill-races and the river; another road wound round the hill and kept the course of the river southward out of sight.

The grist-mill fronted an acre of open space, with the hitching-rail for the farmers’ horses in the middle, and a few rods beyond it crouched the sawmill among piles of lumber and saw-logs. The saw, which had been hissing sharply at its work, now stopped for so long a breath that Powell knew the water-gate had been closed for the night, and the soft treble of the gristmill alone filled the nearer silence. From a distance the melancholy note of a farm boy calling his cows in the woods struck upon his ear; the miller appeared in the open space with a measure of bran under his arm, and, calling “Pig, pig, pig, poo-ee!” was answered from the fence corners and wayside nooks with greedy cries, and then with shrill laments and plaintive protests against the kicks which he distributed among them with savage fairness. He held the measure in his left hand like a tambourine, and danced a goblin figure with his floury face bobbing to and fro and up and down as he leaped and kicked.

“Come, boys,” said Powell; “I see the other!New-Leafers are having their supper. It’s time for ours, too.”

They descended to their cabin and broiled their rashers of pork on the hickory coals; the tea-kettle swung from the crane above, and sang to itself; almost with the last mouthful they stretched themselves on the floor, and, with the scanty bedding they had brought under and over them, they fell asleep.

In the night one of the boys woke, and saw his father sitting up, and heard him softly groaning.

“What are you doing, father?” he asked, sitting up himself and speaking for the companionship of his own voice in the weird play of the firelight dying on the hearth.

“I was wondering,” Powell said, “whether we hadn’t laid these boards with the hard side up.”

They had a laugh together, and lay down to sleep again. Before he slept the boy fancied something at the window, a face looking in like the white-painted face of a clown with dark streaks running downward from the corners of the mouth; it vanished, and in the morning he thought he had dreamed it. He told his father, and his father said, “Very likely; one might dream anything on a bed like that.”

III

THE miller at New Leaf Mills had been there many years before that name was imagined; so many that he felt the mills a part of himself. He always meant to buy the privilege, with the farm on the shore above the dam and the island in the river. He was not afraid that the property would be sold away from him; he had been as good friends with the two old brothers who owned the mills as it was in his nature to be; and he somehow thought they shared his expectation that he should one day buy them.

He was not of the Virginian poor white stock which mostly peopled the region up and down the river; he had wandered into the place from somewhere farther north when he was a half-grown boy, and finished his growth in the family of the old miller to whom he had apprenticed himself and whom he succeeded in his house and home after marrying his daughter. He was now a man of forty, surly, solitary, and of a rude force of will and savage temper such as none of the farmers who stored their wheat with him in the deep bins of the mill would have cared to trifle with. Some of them called him Jacob and some Jake in the neighborhood familiarity, but with him they did not pass to the jokes or pranks they played among themselves. He was sometimes hospitable with his jug, but no one ventured to make free with it; and usually he was a sober man for the time and place. When he heard that the Larrabee brothers had sold the mills away from him without giving him warning, he thought first of his gun, and of going to the little town where they lived, and killing them each with a barrel of it; then he thought of his jug, perhaps because both the gun and the jug stood in the same corner. But after faltering a moment between them he only cleared the place of the farmers, who had come with their grists, and went over to the sawmill, where he presented himself in such violent pantomime that the saw-miller, Bellam, stopped his saw in the middle of a log and submissively joined him in the spree with which Overdale began to solemnize his wrong.

On the second story of the mill where the runs of stone were, with the bolting-cloths and the barreling-machine, a small space had been portioned off to serve as an office and a sleeping-room for Overdale when he ran the burrs at night. On dull days it was haunted by country loafers sodden with rain and drink; when he came in the loafers usually slunk out with the dogs that shared the buffalo robe forming his bed. He now pushed Bellam into his den and steeped his brain in whiskey raw from the still two miles away; and he drank so deep of the scathing liquor himself that Bellam drunkenly argued with him that no man ought to swill so much whiskey as that under any provocation. He pleaded tenderly with the miller, who had such longing for pity through his fury that when Bellam put out his hand with a maudlin wish to soothe him Overdale caught it and rushed him crazily through the mill, shouting out the details of the bad news with a flame of oaths. “Yes, they’ve sold the mills, and never give me a show. Sold ’em to a pack of lily-livered city folks that don’t know an elevator from a cooling-floor, and couldn’t dress a burr to save their souls from brimstone. Look at that run of stones! I’ve dressed ’em ever since they came into the mill, and there ain’t flour anywhere on the river up to the flour they turn out; I can tell their tune as far as I can hear it! Who’ll set the bolting-cloths when I’m gone? They’ll be barreling shorts, I’ll take my oath, in less than a month, and their flour won’t be worth a curse in the market. Shorts? It’ll be bran!”

Bellam ventured in a doubt of getting so far away as the end of his sentence which gave stateliness to his speech, “I thought you said it was going to be turned into a paper-mill!”

“Hell, yes! So I did. The burrs has got to come out; and they’ll be setting up a lot of milk-poultice tubs in their place, and you won’t see clean wheat in the bins any more, but rags all over the place, and the air fit to kill you with the steam and stink.” —

He plunged about among the machinery with Bellam’s rough hand in one of his and a smoky lamp held even with his forehead in the other, throwing gigantic formless shadows on the walls, and on the windows delicately laced with cobwebs and drifted with the floating flour. The two men stumbled to the basement, where the tall turbine wheels stood motionless in their tubs, with the water sullenly wasting under them, and then clambered back to the floor, where the elevator filled the cups of its long belt with wheat and followed it to the top of the mill where it discharged them into the machine which blew it clean of cockle and smut and left it ready for the hoppers. Everything was in order, and at every point Overdale poured out his boastful lamentation. He gathered, as he passed the different heaps where they lay, now a handful of wheat, now of bran, now of middlings; he stopped at the bins under the bolting-cloths and swept up a double handful of the flour, white, airy, clinging and light as April snow, and played with it, testing its smoothness with tipsy pathos; and so lapsed from his noisy grief in a dumb despair.

As the miller grew silent Bellam grew sleepy; he was dimly aware at last of being dragged back to Overdale’s den and kicked forward onto the buffalo robe with a soft and muffled kick. When he woke the machinery of the mill was rattling and whistling round him; and he could hear the mad hum of the burrs, which sent out a gunpowdery odor from the flints triturated under the empty hoppers. He tumbled tremulously down to the gates to shut off the fearful head of water rushing on the wheels, and found Overdale stretched on the wet stones beside them. The miller’s face was always white from the flour, but now it was of such a different white that Bellam thought he was dead. He dragged him within reach of the spray from the tubs, and the miller opened his eyes. He opened his mouth, too, and blasphemed so lucidly that there could be no doubt for Bellam that he was in his right mind; without bating a curse he jumped to his feet and shut off the water. Bellam took the path that led to the sawmill and started the saw where he had stopped it the evening before, and then waited in a drowse till breakfast-time. As he went home to his cabin on the island, past the grist-mill, he saw Overdale sitting in the doorway of the second story. The machinery had got back its mellow note of contented industry, and the miller was smoking a quiet pipe. He drew down his shaggy brows in his habitual frown of greeting as Bellam passed, but neither spoke, though Overdale quelled in himself a crazy impulse to ask the saw-miller about the dream which was hanging cloudily in his brain. It was as if Bellam must know about it if he had broken in upon it when he pulled Overdale from the stones beside the wheels. Overdale was not sure that he was dreaming it precisely then, but he seemed to have first become aware of it when he came to himself, and he was conscious of an instant effort to resist it and put it away. That would have been easier if the thing had been at once anything but a formless dread in which the sale of the mills away from him had begun to weigh like doom. As nearly as he could grasp the significance of it, with his rude mind, unused to any hold on mystery, it meant that the mills from being the daily wont of him had suddenly become a vital part, and that he could not be separated from them and live. He would not have put his vague foreboding in these words if he could have put it in any, as yet. It was there in his sense, destined to gather weight and point, and have power upon him from every superstitious vagary which he had heretofore supposed unheeded hearsay, but which he should hereafter find inexorably remembered.

He let Bellam go, but he was still smoking, irresolutely wishing he had kept him and put his shapeless trouble to the best of his knowledge, when a voice before the mill door under him called up in a high thin pipe:

“Hello, Overdale! Have you heard the news?”

The miller leaned forward and glowered down into the face of the man below. It was the young lawyer, Captain Bickler. As he sat his horse there he showed himself a spare, graceful figure in a black broadcloth coat and black cassimere pantaloons covered to the knees with green baize leggins. He wore a silk velvet waistcoat, with a gold watch-chain crossing it; the peak of a flat oilcloth cap came over his forehead to his shifty hazel eyes; his dark hair fell from the sides in locks carefully turned in at the ends. His clothes were of a cut that the neighbors understood to be fashionable; it was known that he got them at a clothing-store in the City, as the people of the region called the large town that formed its center.

The miller paused long enough before answering to spit to the leeward of the horseman. “What news?” he grunted, with his pipe between his teeth.

“About the mills. You’re sold out of house and home,” the horseman said.

“I know it,” the miller answered, but so quietly that Captain Bickler must have felt at a loss how to go on. He said, with his eyes fixed in uneasy inquiry on the miller’s white mask, “They’re to put in paper machinery, I hear, in about a year from now.”

The pipe fell from the miller’s teeth and broke at the bay mare’s feet.

“Well, what of that?” he demanded.

“Nothing. But I think it’s a damn shame.”

“Yes. Is it any of your damn business?”

The lawyer took the retort as a joke, and forced a laugh. “Well, I just wanted you to know how we feel about it around here.”

“Well, now I know.”

“The Larrabees ought to have let you have notice. Wasn’t there some kind of promise?” The miller said nothing, and the lawyer added, “Well, you know where to come if you want any law; that’s all. It won’t cost you anything.” He waited for whatever answer did not come, then he shook his rein and rode from under the glare of the miller’s floury face, down into the road and across the tail-race.

Overdale looked after him with a pang such as holds one motionless and mute, while he felt the drunken dream which still hung in his brain shape itself as with an electric pulse into something definite, a prophecy of death, capriciously derived, but distinctly dated in event.

IV

IN the month that passed between the sale of the mills and the coming of Owen Powell with his boys, Overdale had begun trying to look upon his dread as something he should be ashamed to own. His success was greatest when he woke in the morning, for that moment when disaster seems improbable and death is not in the world. Through the forenoon the shadow of his fear was in abeyance, and at noon it shrank, like the shadow that he cast in the sun, almost to nothing, and troubled him as little as at dawn. The familiar tasks, the traits of custom and habit, made him forget it; the murmur of the grist-mill working so smoothly and quietly, and the shrill hissing of the sawmill filled his sense and stilled the dread within. As he sat smoking his pipe and looking out on the road, where now and then a farmer jogged by and sent him a hello, it seemed impossible that he should be troubled by it again. All the things of every-day life denied it. The ducks and geese waded about the edges of the pool backed up from the head-race, and made a vulgar, friendly clamor; his hounds slouched by drowsily in the warm sunlight, with their air of weariness from coon-hunting the night before; his pigs rooted among the leaves on the hillside, or paraded to and fro under the mill door, greedy for their noonday feed; the turkeys and chickens strayed over the open space before the mill and among the saw-logs, or rustled through the dry stalks of the corn. At times from the heart of the field came the note of a quail; from the pastures the sad trill of a belated meadow-lark.

The inward stress which these sights and sounds combined to banish had not yet grown to be that second consciousness through which everything must pass from the world to him, taking color of its dread. But when the shadow of the mill began to lengthen before it in the afternoon, and at last to be lost in the shadow of the western upland beyond the island, the miller found his place at the door intolerable, and went to look for something to do in the mill. If there was nothing, he left it and walked up the path beside the race to the sawmill, where the loud noise put him in some heart again, and he shouted in talk with Bellam. When he went back after his supper the rush of the water on wheels beat dreadfully upon him, and he ran up-stairs to light his lamp. The light cheered him for a little time, and he was glad of the growing cool of the evenings, that he might have some excuse to kindle a fire in his stove and listen to its roar. But his feints and defenses were of brief effect, and in the night hours that he spent in solitude he had but one other resource.

The neighbors saw that he had begun to drink a great deal; he offered his jug to all who came, and tilted it up himself whether they joined him or not; but no one could say that he had seen him drunk. His fear was like a strong poison in his veins; the fiery liquor did not consume him, but was consumed in him; it only raised his heart to the level of other men’s. The day when Powell came with his boys and began work upon their cabin the last of the farmers who rode away from the mill door left Overdale clinging to the rope that had lowered the grist to his horse’s back, and listening to the blows of the hammer in the cabin. They fell like shocks upon the miller’s heart; the invisible forces there seemed to embody his fear to him, and it passed crazily through him that he might wreak his anguish on them and annul his fear. The notion, diffuse as the floating dust that settled on the cobwebs in the mill, gathered shape in the will at least to look upon the impersonation of his fear; and with finally no clearer purpose than this he took his shotgun with him from the corner of his room when he yielded to his longing. If Powell, when he awoke that night and made his joke about his hard bed, could have looked through the window black before his eyes, he might have owned for once that there was danger in the world. But it would have been like him to contend afterward that Overdale was there through mere curiosity; and the miller himself, after he had looked upon his enemy’s face and heard his friendly voice, might not have confessed any other motive.

He stumbled back to his den in the mill and roused the fire in his stove, and then he went out to the door again to look at the night. It could hardly be called the night any longer. The pallor of dawn was beginning to steal into the east; a planet shone sharp above the kindling sun, and the stars crisply twinkled about the sky; but there was that warning of day in the air which did not need the corroboration of a cock crow sounding faintly from one of the distant farms. Overdale drowsed where he stood; he flung himself upon the buffalo robe in the corner of the warm room and fell into a heavy sleep.

V

WHEN Powell came back from town with his whole family to take possession of his new home, early in October, nothing about the place had kept quite the poetic aspect which rejoiced him when he first came with his boys. He was forced now to see it with the unsparing eyes of his wife, which robbed it of the glamour it had worn to his retrospective vision. The touches of construction and decoration which he had given the cabin showed bungling and ineffective; the floor wavered in spite of his relaying or on account of it; the repairs of the clapboarded roof did not keep out the rain, or, later, the snow when it came.

The pigs of the earlier tenants of the cabin had been sold to the miller, but they had not forgotten the comfort of their former home. When they had finished their midday feed before the mill they hurried to the cabin, and beaded the cleft between the door and the threshold with their pink snouts and appealed to the charity of the Powells with sharp menace and soft insinuation. After their evening feed they resorted to the warm chimney-back, at the base of the gable, as they had always done; the boys made forays into the dark to dislodge them, but the pigs returned before the boys were well indoors again. The mother could not share the younger children’s pleasure in making believe they were wolves; she remembered the real wolves of the mystical region which they knew from her abhorrence as Out on Sandy, where she used to hear them howling through the dark when she was a little girl; and she told the children the comfortable grunting of the quiescent pigs was nothing like it.

There was an echo of it in the nightly baying of the coon-dogs that came hulking to the mill at the heels of the farmers’ horses on grist-day and showed themselves large, lop-eared, liver-colored hounds. They were of no use by day, but by night when the moon was up, and they had treed a coon in some deadening where the girdled walnuts and hickories shone like bleached skeletons in the light, they called the boys and the loutish men of the farms from their beds to the supreme joy of the local year. There were other pleasures of the region which the women shared: the frolics where they met with the men for parching corn and candy-pulling; the huskings and apple-peelings, where neighborly help was given for neighborly hospitality; and the house-raisings and barn-raisings, where the women gathered and waited upon the men at the meals they had cooked for them. Separately the women had their quiltings, and the men at Christmas had their shooting-matches, where turkeys were the prizes of their rifles; they had their squirrel-hunts, in which the squirrel was the unit of every kind of game; and their wild frolics, where the jug went round and the stag-dance shook the beams and rafters. Quoits and foot-races and jumping-matches drew the men together, but the sexes united again in revivals and baptisms and spelling-matches. A fierce religiosity, choosing between salvation and perdition, was the spiritual life which an open atheist here and there sweepingly denied. Camp-meetings assembled old and young from far and near; the instinctive communism of the pioneer times prolonged itself in the social life by mutual help in the things which could not be done in severalty. But otherwise the farmers dwelt apart on their wide acreages in a solitude unbroken from Sunday to Sunday for their wives. When they came to the mill with their grists the men made it the center of neighborhood gossip or political debate, but, except for a visit with their women to one of the small towns of the region for buying or selling, they kept to their houses, or preferably their barns. The barns oftener than the houses were of frame and clapboarded; the dwellings were mostly reproductions of the log cabins of the first settlers; they repeated the primitive shapes of the past, but the logs were squared and plastered like those of the Powells’ cabin. The few houses were of brick, and faced upon the road with two front doors, one for visits of ceremony from the neighboring wives, and the other never opened except for weddings or funerals.

The Powells had come from town without provision for the winter, and they had to trust for supplies to the farmers, who sometimes granted them surlily and sometimes cheerfully, but always as a favor. Owen went for them with his boys or sent the boys alone with the small one-horse wagon provisionally representing the dignity of the New Leaf enterprise to the lords of three or four hundred acres, who took the road with teams of tall Hambletonians, shining with fatness in their brass-mounted harness. The farmers viewed the one-horse wagon with silent scorn or kindly derision; but they opened for Powell’s money the caves in their gardens where they kept their winter store of apples, potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, taking and giving odor and savor under a low roofing sodded over and banked in with earth against the frost.

Some of the kindlier farmers were German or Scotch-

Irish folk from western Pennsylvania, with here and there a French-Canadian family, but mostly the people were Virginians and Marylanders of a fierceness bred by contact with slavery and with a poor white revolt in their hearts against any one imaginably their betters. But their revolt did not include the superiority of the retired merchant who had come out from town and lived with his motherless daughter in a house having more than any the stateliness of a mansion. The gentleness of the Bladens was akin by blood to the fierceness of the rudest tribe of the neighborhood, and how the shy, pure girl could keep herself uncontaminate from that savage cousinhood was a riddle which remained unread for Ann Powell; she only saw that the tribe paid the Bladens, father and daughter alike, a deference which they rendered to no one else.

The women were better than the men, and they with the other farm wives of the little neighborhood which had formed itself within a mile of the mills came to offer Ann what welcome they knew how to give. With a few she found herself in neighborly kindness; but if she could have got away she would have been glad never to see any of them again. For her it was all a reversion to the barbarism of the new country where her childhood was passed, and which she had so gladly escaped from to the civility of the towns where she had lived ever since she left the farm with her young husband. Now, when they were both middle-aged people, she seemed to have been dragged back to conditions worse than those of the backwoods. Nothing at New Leaf Mills made her days endurable but the promise of the early coming of her sisters-in-law to form the heart of the communal body nebulously projected in the vision of their husbands. The change from town had been simple enough for Owen Powell, who had brought only the hope of a starry future from the ruin of his affairs; but his brothers had each to sell out or close up his business, and the delay was protracting itself to an end that seemed to his wife further off every day.

She could have borne the visits of the farmers’ wives, but she could not bear the visits of the farmers, who came on wet days to sit with her husband before the cabin fire. Their coats dripped with the rain, and their stoga-boots, that reeked of the pig-pen and the barnyard, gave out their stench in the heat while they told their long stories and cracked their old jokes and spat in the hot ashes or the bristling coals where she must cook the family supper when they were gone.

They had begun at once to call Powell by his first name, which she resented as a token of the general lapse from the town civilities she prized, and which she resented the more because she perceived that no friendliness went with the freedom. They could not help despising a man apparently so unfit to cope even tentatively and provisionally with the business he had undertaken. Felix Powell soon added a two-horse team and a blue-painted wagon of the proper pattern to the scanty equipment of Owen’s first days at New Leaf, but even this did not convince the neighbors of that future of universal prosperity which they believed they had been promised.

Owen Powell was personally unimpressive in his circumstances; yet he was finally of a dignity which in spite of his wife’s fears the neighbors did not growingly infringe. It was not their fault that they could not imagine him; he knew this; but it was not in him to feel unkindness toward them for it. He felt the sort of liking for them which tolerance breeds. If they laughed at his wit, he laughed at their rude drolling; he did not resent their conceit or their tedious advice; he knew as well as his wife that they were boors, and not pioneers; but it did not make him unhappy. It amused him that they cherished the largest landowners among them as a sort of social chiefs because of their more acres and their better horses, and valued their consequence above his own civilization. With his Quaker origin he could not mind their calling him by his given name or even trying for a nickname from it; but he could not help sharing his wife’s relief whenever the last of his visitors hulked out of the cabin door, which they did not always remember to shut after them.

The family was safe from them after nightfall. Then, when Mrs. Powell and her little girls had cleared the supper away, she sat down with her family in the firelight, while Powell read to them by the candles which in his retrospective romance he had cast in some old-fashioned candle-molds of their earliest housekeeping. He read poetry sometimes, sometimes a book of travel, sometimes a novel; on Sunday nights he read a chapter from Swedenborg’s Heavenly Arcana or a Memorable Relation of Things Seen and Heard in the Spiritual World, or a New Church sermon, which, by the virtue inherent in sermons, soon had the children scattered about him on the floor. When they were gathered up and got to bed, the boys in the cabin loft and the little girls in their mother’s room, Powell and his wife lingered awhile before the fire to talk of that future which had lured them to New Leaf Mills, but which from time to time needed for her the constructive touches he was so willing to give it.

She lived in the memories which he promised it should renew in the things dear to her home-keeping heart. All her married days she had worked hard with head and hand to get together and keep together the few things which dignified her simple house in town. There were notably six cane-seated chairs which Felix had given her for the distinction of her parlor, and which she now hid in her own room rather than set them out in the place where those hulking farmers could spoil them; she would indulge some of the neighbors’ wives with the use of them when these worthier women came alone; she would show them her pieces of old silver, and in moments of signal intimacy bring out her black silk and her best bonnet, which could not otherwise be seen; for the Powells did not go to the service of any sect of the Old Church in the village where the country women wore their finery. She had her air-tight parlor stove put up in her bedroom, with the bookcase which held her husband’s library, and his portrait done in his young manhood, and the mahoganyframed engraving of Swedenborg which visibly attested Owen’s religious persuasion and hers. She kept her flowered carpet there, sacred from the men’s boots, for the parlor of the new house. Powell was to begin building it in the spring, as the first of that group of dwellings in which the brothers were to embody their community to the sense of the neighborhood, and she trusted in that house with a faith potently helped by the accumulation of black-walnut logs at the sawmill for the weather-boarding and shingles which were to cover the frame in and save the cost of paint by their natural coloring. She measurably believed in all the things of her husband’s faith, even in the harp which he had made in his hours of leisure with his own hand, and which he expected some day to play upon when he had the opportunity of learning how; failing that hitherto, he already struck it with a hopeful if uncertain touch.

He was so wholly her spiritual life that she could give herself altogether to her house and her family; and if she was an earth-bound spirit it was because she realized in her home a heaven such as she could not imagine elsewhere. Of course she expected in due course that immortality which the Doctrines promised her with such scientific precision; but for the present she was content with the affection which came back to her here from those whom she loved and who made her paradise. If the log cabin and the conditions which it implied were not the setting for this paradise which her house in town had been, this could be fitly domiciled again when the new house was built after the plans which Owen’s invention supplied, and which he had begun to draw out in the evening as soon as they were settled for the winter in the cabin.

That helped keep her from fearing herself permanent in it; but there were other evenings when Powell put the harp in order after one of its frequent seasons of disuse and complicated disability. In form it was not as other harps are; it was triangular, with a slantting bar at top instead of the traditional sinuous arch; but he held that this structural aberration did not affect its musical potentiality and was of antique authority. For the present he struck the strings somewhat at hazard, but if he accompanied them with his voice loudly enough, he could drown anything like dissonance in their response. His wife listened with tolerance, if not unfailing acceptance, to his performance, and his children, without closely examining the evidence of their senses, thought that he played as well as sang the piece which he liked best to give them:

“When in death I shall calm recli-i-ne, Oh, bear my heart to my mistress dear; Tell her it lived upon smi-i-les and wi-i-ne Of the brightest hue while it lingered here. Bid her not shed one tear of sorrow, To sully a heart so brilliant and light, Bu-u-t balmy drops of the red grape borrow, To bathe the relic from morn till night.”

VI

His harp was one out of many proofs which Powell was always giving of his ingenious aptness with his hands and of his inventive skill. In the leisure from his failing business which had latterly grown so much too great he contrived himself a barometer, for which he long wanted a glass tube till once his eldest boy returned from a visit to his birthplace Up the River, bringing from the glass-works there a tube in the barrel of a gun which an uncle had given him. It exactly fitted the barrel and came endeared to Powell’s humor by the novelty of its conveyance; he framed it in a cedar case which he carved for it, and it entered upon a long lease of usefulness in predicting fair and rainy weather. It was really a more practicable instrument than the harp, or even the flute which he got for the next younger boy, and then left him to nature in the art of playing on it. He believed that you could do what you wished to do if you wished it potently enough; and he left the boy likewise to nature in his struggles with the grammars of some foreign languages which he began attempting while he was failing with the flute. He did not struggle very hard with the grammars; he preferred his reveries of triumphs achieved without a struggle which he could indulge when to other eyes he seemed to be hoeing com, or not hoeing, or wandering with the family gun on his shoulder through the woods. He amused his father, who called him the Dreamer, and let him off from going to school. Powell was more this boy’s companion than his eldest son’s, though he respected the business faculty of the other so much and relied upon his help in all practical matters; he talked most with the younger, and tried to have him like the same authors, but the boy could not always share his father’s tastes; he could not like Burns, though he liked Scott’s poetry enough for his father’s purposes and he liked Byron a little.

He could follow his father still less in the ingenious use of his hands, but there he could at least admire its effects with the rest. Before the family came to the mills, but when it was decided that the change from a grist-mill to a paper-mill was not to be made at once, Powell gratified his artistic instinct by cutting a stencil plate for the heads of the flour-barrels. He studied from nature a sycamore leaf, and crowned it with the legend of New Leaf Mills. When this, by the application of a shoe-brush, transferred its shape to a sheet of white pasteboard, it commanded the respect of the whole household. Ann herself could not deny it her praise, though she abhorred every mention of the mills; the children exulted in it as the anticipation of their brightest hopes; their young aunt was generously indignant in her admiration of it when Felix said, with his melancholy smile: “You can make so many other things, Owen, that it’s no wonder you never made your fortune. If the mills fail you can support us all by stencil-cutting,” and Powell had an affectionate laugh with him.

When he transferred his family to New Leaf, he lost no time in preparing for the navigation of the river. He shaped a skiff, very graceful and fit in its lines, from two elastic boards for the sides and a broad plank for the bottom, which was his pride and the joy of his boys, who stole in it on the wild ducks they never could shoot; he built a flatboat, commodious for the whole family, and on the still Sunday afternoons of the Indian Summer he made them all, mother and children, go with him up the stream, so wide and still above the dam. He punted against the slow current, walking down the gunwale with a pole pressed against his shoulder, as he told them the keel-boatmen used to do on the Ohio River; and then he let it drift back to the dam while they lay in the straw-strewn floor of the boat, and he talked and the rest listened, or he joked with them. When the mother did not wish to joke, for even in this safety from the intrusive neighborhood she could not forget her exile, Powell had to turn from his talking and laughing and hearten her with promises from his unfailing faith in the future. But the small pleasure she had in those flatboat voyages was spoiled one Sunday when they found the boat gone and had to wait till some of their bold young neighbors brought it back. Powell scolded them, saying, if it was worth having, it was worth asking for; and the fellow would not betray that one of Powell’s boys, flattered into authority by their asking him for it, had said he did not believe his father would mind their taking it. It was the Dreamer who had done this, and now he longed with his whole soul to own that he had given those fellows leave to take the boat, but he could not own it for the shame it must bring him. He passed days of wistful inability trying for some form of avowal by which he should appear so noble to his father that his father would praise him rather than blame him, but he could not contrive anything so imperatively magnanimous; or anything which would not lead to his going with his father and apologizing to those neighbors for his want of candor. He could not imagine any outcome creditable to himself even with his mother, who was so tender with him, but would not spare him in such a wrong, and he let her remain in her fear of the revenge which the neighbors would take on his father, though it never came to more than an increase of intangible ill-will.

Her refuge from this fear, as from her father’s troubles, was in the visits which Felix and Jessamy paid her in her exile. The Indian Summer lingered late into November, and on one of the dim afternoons Felix Powell drove from town to the mills with his wife. Ann kissed them, and got out for the early supper that best china which she could not have touched at any other time without a pang for the lost state which it symbolized. But for the dear young pair who seemed a part of the town life she had lost, she hurried forward one of the meals which her family thought matchless in cookery. Her husband sat the feast through with his innate gaiety of heart heightened by his brother’s presence, and did not seem to note any vagueness in the talk of Felix about the enterprise which he reported his progress in pioneering. If Ann felt something unwonted in the tone of her brother-in-law, pride kept her from pressing any question of it; and during a visit which left Powell with his spirits as high as ever, she could not bear to dash them with her secret fears. The most tangible reason for her fears was nothing more tangible than her sister’s letting fall in their women’s talk together her belief that Felix would never be willing to live beyond the sound of church-bells; and Ann remembered, with a sinking heart, that there were no church-bells within three miles of New Leaf Mills. She bade them both a cheerful good-by when they drove away from the cabin in their buggy, looking back, one on each side, to prolong their farewells, with smiles and nods; then she turned and ran back into the cabin with her apron over her head.

“What is the matter, what is the matter, my poor girl?” Powell entreated her, and she said, Oh, nothing; she was not feeling very well. But after the children were abed and she was alone with him she told him what she was afraid of.

“They will never come here in the world, Owen. She let it out in that about the church-bells. I don’t blame either of them. Who would want to live in such a God-forsaken hole?”

“Not quite a hole, my dear,” he tried to comfort her, “though it may look like one from the inside.” He became fascinated with his notion, and added: “But it isn’t really such a bad hole, even from the inside; and we will soon better it. I don’t wonder you’re disheartened with a winter in the cabin before you, but we shall begin to build our new house as soon as the frost is out of the ground in the spring. I have got together most of the logs already; and I was thinking” — but Powell had, perhaps, just that moment thought—” that we would go in the morning and definitely choose the site of the house. I have an idea that the level at the foot of the hill, just opposite the mill, would be the proper place. But you shall decide yourself.”

She probably knew that this decision of hers would be directed by his judgment, but she could not refuse the consolation his promise offered her, and with her reliance on his hopes she began to doubt her fears. A mild Sunday morning dawned in pale sunshine, and after the breakfast, which her little girls helped her redd up, she went for the walk with her husband and children which he considered so much better for them all than a religious service of the Old Church. No chime invited them to their worship, but when they had climbed the hill above the site fixed for their new house, he made her listen and almost made her hear the sound of a bell from the village three miles to the southward. The children were sure that they heard it, and Powell triumphed in their agreement. “There!” he said. “If Felix can’t live beyond the sound of the church-going bell, he can come up here, any Sunday morning when the wind is right, and hear it.”

He shared the shock which Ann felt at sight of the huddle of neglected graves on the hilltop, with their sunken barrows and their slanting stones, and the miller’s pigs rooting for the mast among the dead leaves; but he said that she must not judge their neighbors too harshly for the neglect; the state of these graves did not express the callousness it would in a more enlightened community. At any rate, one of the first things he should set about doing, as soon as he could spare the time, would be sawing out a lot of palings to fence the graveyard. That would be a lesson in civilization which could offend no one; he had perceived that he must not begin to educate the neighborhood without due tenderness for its barbarity. While he talked with the mother and cajoled her from her gloom into the sunshine of his own spirit, till she yielded with the lamentation, “Oh, Owen, Owen!” the children foraged for the fallen hickory-nuts, and filled the little bags they had brought with them. They came to him to show their store, and he made the elder even up with the younger ones for a lesson in the unselfishness which he told them was not only one of the first attributes of the angels in Heaven, but was due always from the stronger to the weaker in this world. Then he gave his hand to their mother and lifted her from the little knoll, where they had been lying, and raced her down the hillside. The young children ran screaming joyously after, and the elder boys bore with what patience they might the incorrigible youthfulness of their father.

It was the last pleasant day of a long series of pleasant days. In the night the autumnal haze turned to mist, the clouds gathered, and the boys, sleeping in the cabin loft, woke in rapture at the sound of rain on the clapboards over their heads and the pelting of the finer drops in their faces. The rain lasted, off and on, for a week, and by grist-day the open space before the mill, which had been so pleasant to their bare feet with its velvety dust, was trodden into mire by the miller’s pigs, and then patted smooth by the web feet of his geese, and again cut by the wheels and pitted by the hoofs of teams bringing in the farmers’ wheat for storage.

It was at the sawmill that Powell spent most of his time, coming home to his meals with aches and pains unfelt during the years of his town life, but now ungrudgingly recognized as experiences of his rustic past. He had mastered such simple science of the sawmill work as Bellam was able to impart, and he had applied his universal genius to the invention of improvements in the double tramway which carried the sawn lumber down from the mill and brought the logs up into it. The iron dogs which held the sticks of timber in place, and the cogs that pushed them against the saw, received some creative touches, and he added to the other equipments a circular saw that bit diagonally half through Bellam’s thumb the first time he pressed upon it the block of walnut which it was shredding into shingles for the new house. Owen stayed the sufferer in his burst of terror and put back the dangling fragment, which he secured so skilfully in place that, though it always stood a little awry afterward, it remained a monument to his surgery.

Ann refused to hear the particulars which the children would so willingly have furnished; they had enjoyed the most favorable places in the front row of the crowd which Bellam’s lamentations had called to witness their father’s skill; she told them she should be only too glad if they got away from the mills in pieces large enough to hold their lives. Overdale was left alone in the grist-mill during the affair, and he showed no more interest than Ann in the procession which took the saw-miller to his home on the island, mounted on a led horse, and supported in his seat by eager hands. When the doctor came he justified the popularity which Powell had won; he said that just the right thing had been done for Bellam’s thumb, and that nothing was left for him but to dress it now and then.

VII

POWELL had been careful not to add to the grudge in Overdale which he could not ignore, and he had left him in full control of the grist-mill until the paper machinery should be put in; the miller was told that the new owners would be glad to have him stay, and he signified a surly willingness to remain, more by staying than by saying that he would stay. His life did not vary under the new ownership; he came and went from his house beyond the sawmill so early before dawn and late after dark that he was seen to come and go only at noonday; he slept in the grist-mill, as he had always done. His sprees were wilder, but they were not so frequent, and they ended sooner in the drunken sleep in which the machinery was apt to run riot. The saw-miller had always taken leave to shut off the water at these times, and during Bellam’s disability Powell put himself briefly in authority. He no more disliked Overdale than he disliked any other fellow-creature, and he accounted for the miller’s rudeness toward himself as the impatience of a man who was somehow sick beyond self-command. What his sickness was, whether of soul or body, He could not make out. Sometimes he thought he must be the prey of a disease which he was trying to keep secret from himself; sometimes he conjectured that the miller had some misdeed of the past on his mind; he decided that more probably he was the victim of some form of hypochondria. He philosophised him to Ann, without effect other than to alarm her own safety.

“Well, Owen, be careful not to provoke him with you, if he’s crazy in some way, or beginning to go crazy. Oh, I wish we had never seen the mills! Now, you keep out of his way all you can, Owen, or I won’t have a minute’s peace, day or night.”

“You needn’t be afraid of my taking any chances,” Powell promised, in the cheerfulness he always had in disowning the possibility of danger; and then he began to laugh softly to himself as if he had not half taken her anxiety in.

“What is it?” she asked, hopelessly.

“Oh, nothing. But Elder Griswell says it’s the religion that is working in Overdale; all you’ve got to do is to throw the religion out, and nothing will throw it out like immersion. That will bring the religion to the surface, just like measles, and then Overdale will be all right.”

Ann laughed too at a phase of the Old Church theology which Powell could make so amusing. But her anxiety returned upon her when she went to pay that first visit to the miller’s wife which the woman had failed to make her as the new-comer. She had talked the matter over with her husband and had decided to waive ceremony in a case of what she had decided to be uncouth shyness and not intentional offense in the gaunt, silent slattern, whom she characterized in a parlance of her own as a harmless sloom. Her magnanimity was rewarded by such politeness in Mrs. Overdale as standing with her door ajar and speechlessly regarding the visitor outside.

“May I come in, Mrs. Overdale?” Ann asked; and the sloom set her door a little farther open.

“Why, I reckon,” she said; and when Ann entered, she so far realized her obligation to hospitality as to ask, “Won’t you set?”

She pushed Ann one of the wooden chairs of the dining-room, which was also the living-room of the low-ceiled, close-shuttered room, and then took a rocking chair herself and silently rocked in front of her while she studied her visitor’s face in an abstraction scarcely broken by her brief assents to Ann’s suggestions about the weather. But Ann soon came to the end of these, and then the miller’s wife broke the silence that followed.

“Your man got anything ag’inst him?”

Ann recalled the backwoods use of pronouns by which wives and husbands shunned explicit mention of each other.

“Why, no, Mrs. Overdale. What should Mr. Powell have against your husband?”

After a season of dreamy reflections the sloom responded, “I don’t know, but it ‘pears like, from his tell, that your man wanted to do him a mischief.”

“What in the world do you mean? What kind of mischief should my husband want to do yours?”

“Well, he don’t come round much, exceptin’ fur his meals. But from his tell one night after he’d been at the jug, when he wouldn’t have any supper, ‘pears like your man was goin’ to kill him, or somepin. He kep’ savin’ your folks buyin’ the privilege would be the death of him.”’

A hot flush of anger followed the cold thrill of dismay which the woman’s first words had sent through Ann Powell. “Well, I can tell you what, Mrs. Overdale, I won’t have any such talk about Mr. Powell in the neighborhood.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Overdale listlessly interrupted, “I reckon he don’t talk any. I reckon he don’t talk much to me when he’s sober. It’s on’y when he’s been at the jug.”

“He had better keep away from the jug, then,” Ann began again; but the miller’s wife put in:

“That’s what I always been tellin’ him, but he don’t seem to take any notice.”

Ann refused to be stayed by this impression. “Mr. Powell and all his brothers are good men; they don’t want to do anything but good here, and it’s abominable for any one to say anything else even when they’ve been at the jug.”

“Well, that’s what I told him at the time,” Mrs. Overdale agreed, as she rocked comfortably to and from her visitor. “I told him your man could have the law of him.”

“We don’t want the law,” Ann retorted, “but I shall certainly have my husband find out what Mr. Overdale means.” She said much more to the same purpose; she could not recur to the smooth generalities of a ceremonious call; and then she rose and made her way to the door.

She was fairly out of it before the miller’s wife remembered to rise and follow her for leave-taking. “Well, call ag’in,” she drawled.

Ann was still angry, but she answered, “I hope you will come to see me, Mrs. Overdale.”

“Well, I will, the first chance I git. But don’t you wait.”

VIII

AFTER the children left the dinner-table that day, and Powell had taken his hat to go out, Ann asked him, “Are you going to the grist-mill?”

“I’m going to the sawmill to help Bellam. He’s rather weak-handed still with that thumb of his.”

“Well, don’t saw your thumb off, Owen,” she said; and Powell laughed at the wild notion. “And another thing, I don’t want you to go near Overdale again till we’ve had a talk.”

“I don’t know that I follow you, exactly, Ann, but it’s easy for me not to go near Overdale. What is it?” She went to the cabin door and looked out. The children were playing Indians on the hillside well out of hearing across the road. She turned back to her husband. “I thought I could tell you to-night when they were all in bed, but I’d better do it now; I don’t want you to run any risks. Owen, that worthless drunkard has been saying dreadful things. I don’t feel as if your life was safe with him.”

Owen put down his hat, and at this sign of concern for her, if not for himself, she hurried to tell him what the miller’s wife had said.

He took her anxiety with seriousness instead of the teasing lightness which he so often tried her patience with. “Well, my dear, I don’t wonder you’re a little uncomfortable. But you mustn’t be troubled. There isn’t the least danger in the world, not the least,” he said, and his spirits mounted with the courage of a man who had never believed himself in any sort of peril. “But I promise you I won’t go to the gristmill till I’ve seen you again. I will talk with Bellam about the matter.”

“That poor lout?” Ann despaired “Really, Owen, you are enough to provoke a saint.”

“Yes, but we’re neither of us saints, Ann,” he answered, and she laughed helplessly. “Bellam has the making of a philosopher in him — that is, he believes I’m a much greater man than I am.”

Ann’s mind went off at a tangent “Has that old wretch been after him lately?”

“If you mean Elder Griswell, no; I believe not since last week. The elder is as much afraid of Overdale as you are, my dear. I understand that now, as he can’t get Bellam to go back to him and work out his debt, and can’t collect the money of him, he’s going to sue Overdale. He regards him as harboring his fugitive slave, but he doesn’t like coming in reach of him. Bellam wasn’t his slave exactly, either; only his peon.”

Ann sighed “If you get the right word for a thing, you feel almost as good as if you had righted it, Owen.”

“But peon is so uncommonly right. It’s about the only good thing we’ve ever got out of that rascally war.” Owen never spoke less violently of the Mexican War; but he valued the service which the volunteers had done in bringing back the name of a system of labor among the Mexicans so exactly fitting the case of Bellam and Elder Griswell.

The saw-miller had worked on the Elder’s farm for years as his insolvent debtor, and at the end of each year was no nearer industrial freedom than at the beginning; the Elder’s advances were always a little greater than Bellam’s wages, as they might easily be. But one day when Bellam came to the mill with his grist, he opened his heart to Overdale, and asked him what he would do in his place.

“Hell!” the miller said. “Walk off.”

The idea worked in Bellam’s intelligence, and he walked off between two days, or on a Sunday when the Elder had gone to church. He reported to Overdale with his wife and children, and his poor belongings on the cart drawn by the rangy colt which he had somehow kept his own in spite of the Elder. Overdale could not be bothered at the time by the implications of the case; but he felt bound by the counsel he had given, and he told Bellam to drive over to the empty cabin on the island and put up there till he could think.

“But if the Elder comes after me,” the escaped peon entreated.

“When he hears tell where you are I reckon he won’t come,” the miller said; and after he had time to hear from the Larrabees Bellam was put to work in the sawmill.

The picturesqueness of the incident had charmed Powell from his first knowledge of it. When he subjected it to examination in the light of the Doctrines, he had found it a singularly beautiful proof of those Remains of Good in a perverse soul like the miller’s, by which his chances in another life might be hopefully regarded. His action might be merely an effect of Natural Good, and was to be esteemed only as such, or it might be an Influx from the Spiritual World moving him to a right course in contravention of temperament. Powell had often recurred to it in talk with his wife, and always with a softening toward the miller and a trust to the Remains in him which she could not share.

“You needn’t be troubled, my dear,” he ended one of their talks. “I won’t take any chances with Overdale, or, for the matter of that, with Bellam, either — that is, I won’t be ruled by anything he says; I’ll only be ruled by what you say.”

He laughed again, and his wife sadly with him, and she watched him anxiously from the back door of the cabin as he made his way among the logs lying round the sawmill, like a herd of saurians crept up from the waters and sleeping on the muddy shore. The tramway, which from time to time carried one of them up into the mill, passed over the gate, letting the water in on the wheel, and Powell now mounted the track and disappeared within. He came out with Bellam and stood talking with him in the wide low doorway, while the yellow heads of Overdale’s children bobbed about in play along the banks of the head-race. Then a cry came from the children, and they ran toward the miller’s house, where their mother stood idly watching them. At the same time Ann saw her husband break from Bellam’s side and jump from the mill door to the bank and stoop over the race close to the head-gate. He rose with a child in his arms, and started with it toward the miller’s house. She began running to him, but before she reached him, stumbling over the rough ground in her heedless dismay, Owen was coming back to her laughing and flapping the water from his clothes.

“I haven’t been in the head-race myself,” he called, gaily, “but it was almost as wet work getting that little scamp home after I got him out. A moment more and he would have been in on the sawmill wheel, and then—”

She would not let him stop more than to explain that one of the miller’s boys had tumbled into the race; but as she hurried him to change his clothes she understood how he had saved the child’s life.

“And his mother — what did his mother say when you took him to her?” she required, after she gave Owen a dry coat and hung his wet one over a chair before the fire.

Owen laughed again. “She didn’t say anything; she spanked him.”

“But you — you; I meant you.”

“Well, she didn’t say anything to me, either.”

Ann Powell made “Tchk!” and did not speak; but he knew that at the back of her mind she was disappointed; he knew she had hoped that somehow this event would have been the promise of bringing about a better feeling between him and the savage whom she feared for him. He would not make her own it: he only suggested, “Well, perhaps Overdale will say something.”

IX

THE winter was wearing away without change in the lives of the Powells toward immediate fulfilment of the hopes which had brought them to New Leaf Mills. Ann thought her husband lapsing, with his amiable acceptance of the order of Providence, more and more into a country drudge. He worked like a laborer at anything he could find to do about the mills, and she fancied that with his growing content in the actual situation the discontent of the neighbors was growing; she suspected irony in the tones of the women’s greetings when she met them; she felt mocking in the slouch of the men’s hats and shoulders as they bestrode their grists to and from the mill, and turned their glowering or sneering faces toward her cabin windows. Perhaps the tones were not sarcastic or the faces derisive; but if they seemed so it was enough, and Powell could not persuade her against it with all his cheerfulness. Once, in the darkest hours of January, a New Church minister came, and stayed over a Sunday; and the familiar talk of the Doctrines went on in the old way, with the wonted jokes and stories in kindly satire of the Old Church superstitions. For the time she could almost believe herself back in Tuskingum, but she could hardly share Owen’s regret that there had not been time to notify the neighbors and have them gather in the mill for a New Church sermon; he had long given up his scheme of a Sunday-school there, which he once had.

The roads, with the changes of snow and rain and the freezing and thawing, were now so bad that Felix could not drive out to see his brother, as he had done every fortnight in better weather. He came only once during the month, and his wife did not come with him. Owen was as gay as at the other visits; and that night, after the older boys had gone to bed and the younger children had fallen asleep on the stone hearth, he tuned his harp and drowned the discords he extorted from it in his songs of “Roy’s Wife” and “Flow gently, Sweet Afton” and “Banks and Braes of Bonny Doon.” But as he was rolling out:

“Then merrily we’ll sing

As the storm rattles o’er us,

Till the dear shieling ring

With the light, lilting chorus—”

 his wife called to him:

“Owen, Owen, for goodness’ sake stop!”

He stopped, with his hands on the harp-strings. “Why, I won’t wake them.”

“No, but you’ll drive me crazy. I don’t know how you can bear to sing. How can you bear to live on in this hovel, with no prospect of anything else?”

“No prospect?” he returned.

“No! We are doomed to live and die here, with that wicked wretch hating you over there in the mill that will never be anything but a grist-mill. Didn’t you notice how Felix avoided the subject when you mentioned putting in the paper machinery?”

“I didn’t notice it. But I’m sure you’re mistaken if you think he isn’t going forward with the enterprise; and as for our living on in the cabin, you know that I’ve got out all the shingles for the new house, with most of the weather-boarding. We are beginning on the oak flooring now, and I will have that kiln-dried if we’re late with it. But we won’t be. As soon as the frost is out of the ground we will put in the foundations, and the carpenters will have the timbers ready for the raising in June. You mustn’t be downhearted about it; everything is going finely. But I know! You are run down. It’s been a hard time for you. Ann, you must have a girl. I wonder if Felix or his wife couldn’t get on the track of Rosy Hefmyer?”

“Oh, a girl!” Ann retorted. “Do you think a girl could take the real burden off of me?”

“Yes, the real burden; but you must bear the unreal burden yourself. I wish I could bear it for you.” Ann began to cry softly. Owen said, “Oh, my poor girl, my poor girl!” and between her crying and his coaxing she comforted herself.

“Oh, I can get along, Owen. You needn’t worry about me. But you must let me give way now and then. I only want to know that you haven’t forgotten what we came for.”

“Oh, my dear, don’t you suppose I think of it all the time?”

“Besides, I don’t believe they could find Rosy. With that old wretch of a mother of hers, there’s no telling what’s become of her by this time. She always said she would come back if I wanted her.”

It would have been natural in Owen to allow the affair to go with that, but Ann’s listless resignation remained after her rebellious outburst, and he saw that something must really be done for her. There came with February one of those interludes of soft weather which the midwinter knows in that region. The birds returned as if it were spring, bluebirds and robins; the frost came out of the ground, and the roads dried up. “Now, Ann,” Powell said one morning, “you had better take advantage of this open weather and go away for a while.”

He could see that the thought had been in her mind, too, for all she said: “Where can I go? And leave you and the children here?”

“Not all of them. Take Dick and the buggy and go down to Middleville, and see father and Jim’s family. You can hurry Jim up about coming here, and they will all be glad to see you.”

Ann’s despair lost its blackness in the notion of a family visit. “I might do that,” she consented, “if I could only believe that Jim was ever going to come.”

“Well, ask. It will do him good to be stirred up. He ought to have sold out by this time. Only don’t put too bright a face on things here.”

Ann laughed forlornly, but his teasing saved her further regret. “I believe in my heart I can really do something,” she said, defiantly; and in the morning she started with her son on the forty-mile drive to Middleville.

She was aware only of the impossibility of staying any longer at New Leaf Mills without going mad. She did not forecast the future so far as to imagine how she should keep sane after she came back. She was at that point of homesickness when she was willing to forsake every one dear to her for a glimpse of the life from which she had been parted: simple as it was, in contrast with the social squalor she had fallen into, it was rich and fine and beautiful. She longed to escape from her household back to the town which seemed to her full of the things, the cane-seat-chair things, that made living worth while. Tuskingum had become her dream, her poetry, and the day that she now passed with Felix and his wife was the realization of all that she had imagined of it. She sat up late with them in the pretty parlor, with its Venetian blinds and lace curtains, and they played, Felix on the flute and Jessamy on the piano, and she listened in her corner of the rosewood sofa. In the morning she went to a store with Jessamy, and Jessamy bought her a shawl, so that she could keep warm if she and Dick were driving in the cool of the evening or the weather turned; and after the midday dinner, which the hired girl had cooked without the least help from Jessamy, Ann started gaily on her journey again.

Jessamy was so much younger that she could daughter Ann, and the boy beside her on the buggy seat was so old that Ann could almost sister him. She talked gravely and confidentially to Dick of the state of things at New Leaf Mills, and how little his father, with his hopefulness and his trusting goodness, was fitted to cope with the rude conditions, and with the brutal men who could not understand him or value him. She criticized Owen in her mind, but tenderly, being at a distance from him; and she said: “He is the best man in the world; I know that well enough; the willingest to help others. He hasn’t a selfish thought or a mean one. But oh, if he would only be a little more afraid! I wish he could have some of my fear. But he is so contented, and so sure it will all come out right. If only he would lose heart a little I could have some.”

Richard tried to comfort her, but her spirits sank when they got beyond the outskirts of Tuskingum among the high woods and the lonely fields again, and she had to recover herself through tears. Then she was cheerfuler, and as they drove along over the good turnpike road she began to wonder what Jim’s wife would say when she saw them stopping at her door in Middleville.

“Well, she won’t see us till to-morrow, mother,” the boy said.

“Yes, we will have to pass the night at Shawnee,” she assented. “I was at the tavern there with your father once, and it’s a good piece from there to Middleville. I suppose we will go to your grandfather’s, anyway.”

It did not need the surprise they gave their kindred to win their welcome. The old people were not visibly moved, the grandfather from his gravity or the grandmother from her placidity; they were not only old, but they had the quiet of the Old World in their greeting; Jim’s wife was noisily glad to see them, and romped around Ann in claiming half their visit. She wanted to hear all about the mills; she was just crazy, she said, to have Jim sell out and go there at once; she was sick of Middleville.

She almost made Ann believe that she was a fortunate woman in getting there so soon, and she talked as if the new house was almost finished. When Jim came from his store he grinned at her excitement. He said he didn’t believe he could ever sell out. “Then you give your old business away,” his wife said; “I’m going to New Leaf Mills. Ann’ll take me back with her, I know.”

“How is it, Ann?” Jim asked. “Do they admit any but Bobolitionists yet? Let down the bars to the world’s people?”

He was anti-slavery, like all the Powells, but he liked to say Bobolitionist for Abolitionist; the sound pleased him, and he enjoyed the shock it gave his father by its irreverence.

Ann and Richard stayed three days, and she enjoyed every moment of it. Sally made a company tea for her, and asked a dozen other ladies, old and young. She let Ann help get the tea: stewed chicken, cold ham, shortened biscuit, boiled potatoes, sweet tomato pickles, pound-cake, cold slaw, and coffee. Throughout the feast she stormed down the praises of her guests with apologies for everything.

Ann noticed that the dishes, which were nicer than hers, were some of them cracked; the spout of the coffeepot was nicked, and Sally had no cane-seat chairs in her parlor; only yellow-painted Windsor chairs. When Ann started home Jim put a canvased ham in the back of the buggy. Grandmother Powell gave them a lunch of her nice bread and butter, with sugar-cakes for Dick and the children at home.

It was a happy time, and Dick thought they could drive the whole way back to Tuskingum in one day. But the heat increased, and the horse flagged. They had not got as far as Shawnee when the wind rose and blew the sky full of clouds. The thunder-heads mounted, and before sunset it began to lighten, and it grew so dark that they could scarcely see; but they followed the white turnpike. Ann was scared, and she was troubled about Owen and the children at the mills; but when in the blackness they came upon a man in the road, mixed up with three horses he was trying to lead and at the same time pick up his hat, which was blown off, she had to laugh with Dick.

The laugh seemed to carry away her care. She made Dick stop at the first house and ask if they might pass the night. The man of the house said they might, and when he had helped Dick put up his horse he led them in to his family, who were gathered round a wood-fire on the hearth; and while Ann dried herself at the blaze her thoughts went again to the family at New Leaf Mills in anxiety for its safety; it seemed to her she had been recreant to them all.

When the morning came, clear and cold after the storm, she decided that they would go straight on to the mills without stopping at Tuskingum; she did not wish to impose upon Jessamy, she said. Her heart did not go down, as she expected, at the sight of the mills. Powell was waiting at the door of the cabin, and the children ran out to welcome her and see what she had brought them. She felt a glow of happiness such as she had never known at New Leaf before, and she promised herself not to give way again.

“Well, I see it has done you good,” Powell said, with a look at her.

After a few days’ cold the weather turned warm again, and Felix came out sooner than Ann could have hoped, and Jessamy came with him. He went with Owen to the grist-mill, and looked it over with him; he said he had found a Fourdrinier machine which could be had cheap at second hand, and he would like to see if it could be put in without too much change. They came upon Overdale, who gave them no greeting before he could lurk into his den. Felix did not notice his rudeness, but it hurt Owen, who wished to be on gentle terms with the whole world and had not his brother’s business preoccupations to defend him. On their way back to the cabin he spoke of his vain efforts to get into kindlier relations with the miller.

“I don’t believe I’d worry about him, Owen,” Felix said. “Of course, he thinks he will be out of a place when we make the change, but we can work him into our scheme somehow. I feel more hopeful about it since I’ve looked over the mill.”

“Do tell Ann so!” his brother entreated.

“I will. It’s been a hard experience for Ann. She ought to have some help in her work. She ought to have a girl.” —

“That’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve been wondering if you could find out where Rosy Hefmyer is.”

They had come to the cabin, where the sisters-in-law stood before the door in the sun. Ann was admiring the fashions of the younger woman with unenvious pleasure, asking where she got her bonnet and whether she had trimmed it herself.

Felix called to her: “Ann, you remember that girl of yours you liked so much — Rosy Hefmyer?”

“Did Owen ask you to hunt her up? It’s too bad.”

“No, he didn’t; but she’s hunted herself up. She came to me at the store. She wants to get somewhere that her mother won’t find her; she’s just left a place to get rid of her. I told her about you here; and she’s crazy to come to you.”

“Oh, Felix!” Ann could say no more; but penitence for all her impatience with Providence and her husband glowed in her heart.

“I could have brought her with us to-day, but Jessamy thought there wasn’t room for three in the buggy.”

“Indeed, Ann, that wasn’t the reason. I thought you ought to have the chance of saying whether you wanted her first, and I promised Mr. Powell” — for so his wife always called Felix to himself as well as others— “that I wouldn’t tell you about it. And have I?”

“Not a single word, Jessamy; but if you had known what a blessing it would be to me, you could have. How can she get here, Felix? When can she come?”

“To-morrow, if you want. She can come by the stage to Spring Grove, and you can send for her there, can’t you?”

“Send? I would go and carry her here.” Ann had got her breath now.

“Well, then, that’s settled. Perhaps you’ll like to know that we can put the Fourdrinier machine into the mill with very little change.”

“You can? And when — But I won’t ask.”

Felix smiled, with a cast of his eye at his brother. “Owen’s thought of some improvements he can make in it already.”

“To be sure.” Ann recognized the joke with a laugh. “Well, it does seem as if the heavens were opening.”

“The Pit’s been yawning a good while, Ann thinks. She thinks it’s time the heavens took their turn,” Owen said.

Jessamy watched her sister-in-law’s face with shining eyes. She turned to her husband. “I didn’t tell her about the Fourdrinier machine, either.”

“That’s more self-denial than you asked of yourself, Jessamy.”

“I thought I’d better wait till you could see a place for it in the mill.”

“Well, Ann, I’ve found a second-hand machine, very good and very cheap,” Felix said.

She could only entreat him, “Oh, have you?” and then they all began to talk about it. They had talked about the Fourdrinier machine so much that the sisters-in-law believed they knew what it was like; the brothers really knew, and Owen knew best. He explained that his improvements were no joke, and specified them.

“Well, now, come in and have something to eat before you go, if you must go,” Ann said; and she led the way indoors.

They had a joyful meal together. The little girls helped their mother get it, and then asked to go with their brothers and play Indians on the island. In the talk the elders were left to themselves. Felix seemed in no haste to leave; he and Owen recalled again the jokes and joys of their boyhood.

When Felix rose from the table his wife said: “Now, Ann, I’m going to ask you to let him lie down on your bed a minute before we start. It does him so much good to get a little nap after dinner.”

“Oh, I don’t need a nap,” Felix protested.

But Ann said: “Take him right in, Jessamy. I’ll be redding up the table; I won’t make any noise.”

In a little while Jessamy came out, leaving the door ajar. “He wants me to sing,” she said, in a low voice. “I can’t, very well, without the piano, but—”

Owen cleared his throat; his wife thought he was going to say he would accompany Jessamy on his harp, and she frowned at him; Jessamy was swallowing as if she were choking down a sob; then she sang “The Watcher”:

“A watcher pale and weary

Looked forth with anxious eye.”

It was a song that every one sang in those days, a wail of grief in which happy young people poured out their joy. Jessamy sang it several times. When she ended they none of them spoke for a while.

The sisters-in-law parted sadly; they said they did not know why they should cry: everything was so promising now. The brothers took leave with gay hopefulness.

Ann and Owen watched their guests across the tail-race and out of sight. Then she asked, “How did you think he looked, Owen?”

“Why, uncommonly well.”

“She’s willing to have him come and live here now.

She thinks it will be better here than in town.” She scanned her husband’s face. “Owen, Felix has had a hemorrhage.”

“A hemorrhage!” Powell’s face twitched pitifully; then the light of temperamental hope glowed over it. “Oh, well, it will be all right with him by spring. It isn’t as if it had been in the fall. And isn’t it fortunate he should have such a place as the mills to come to? We must hurry forward the new house now. We can easily take them in with us there.”

“Yes.” Ann said; “there’ll be no trouble about that. But do hurry it, Owen! It does seem to me you have been such a long while about it. These delays, they almost kill me.”

“Yes, poor girl, I know that,” Powell said. “Depend upon it, I’ll hurry things forward.” Ann went into the other room and left him to cover the fire. His heart ached for Felix, but he could not refuse the comfort he found in the solid hickory chunk which he saw would make a glorious bed of coals. When he had bedded it deep in the ashes, he went to the cabin door for a look at the night. The sky bristled with stars, and he thought how the coals would bristle in the morning. He felt the sweet unity of creation, the little things and the great things, and he felt that life and death in the measureless scheme were the same. Ann, with her homesickness, was as important to the Maker of the world as the largest of these flaming planets; He would care for her as He cared for them. Powell looked across at the pretty place where the new house was to stand, and he could almost see it standing there. Already Felix had come to them practically well; and they were all living there together, and New Leaf Mills was fulfilling every promise of its imagined usefulness.

X

THERE was a typical delay next morning when Powell sent his eldest son to meet the stage at Spring Grove and fetch Rosy Hefmyer. But it was not his fault, exactly, that the only horse which consented to be caught in the pasture for the service should be found to have cast a shoe when she fell captive to a peck measure of bran. “You must drive fast, Richard,” he instructed his son, “so as not to keep Rosy waiting at the Grove; she won’t know what to do after the stage gets in, but you must drive very carefully. Remember, the mare has no shoe on her off hind foot. You’d better go the river road; it’s longer, but it’s soft dirt the whole way, and there are a good many stony spots on the hill road.”

With whatever speed he made, Richard did not get back to the mills till Rosy had been there an hour. She had come with Captain Bickler in his open buggy; he had found out at Spring Grove, where he had his law-office, that she wanted to go to the mills, and, as he was going that way, he brought her. He explained the fact to Owen, who stood with his hand on the buggy wheel talking politics with Bickler after thanking him for his neighborly act. They did not disagree widely. In his zeal for his own nomination for the legislature Captain Bickler did not widely disagree with any voter of the Whig ticket; and though Owen would naturally have disliked a man who had got his title of captain in the Mexican War, it was in Bickler’s favor that his company had been mustered in so late that he never went to the front. What Owen wished to make sure of was that Bickler favored a strong antislavery platform for the Whig party at the next State convention. There seemed no doubt of that, he reported to his wife, while confessing his impression that Bickler seemed rather a slippery character.

“Well, he’s brought Rosy, at any rate,” Ann said, looking off to the hill where the girl was playing with the children among the fallen leaves, which the sun of the warm, dry spell had crisped again. “She’s just crazy about the place.”

Ann’s motherly heart had not ceased to glow with the welcome she had given the girl when Rosy jumped down from the buggy and ignored her obligation to Captain Bickler in her shy escape to Ann’s arms. She began to romp with the children as soon as she put her little bundle of clothes into the house.

“I never expected to have you again, Rosy,” the mother said. “How well you do look!” she said the next thing. She recognized the girl’s beauty by this tribute to her health: her blue, sweet eyes, her cheeks like red peonies, and her smooth mass of yellow hair, her firm, straight features, and her strong, full young figure. She was rather short, but Mrs. Powell did not notice that.

“Well, now, you’ll feel more at home,” Powell said to his wife.

“Oh yes,” she answered. “I have nothing to ask for now. But we mustn’t stand here talking. I won’t have a moment’s peace till we get the frame of the new house up. Do hurry the stuff out, Owen.” She was always saying something like that. “I declare, when I think of Felix and Jessamy coming I can’t wait. It was like him to look Rosy up for me. He was thinking of me when he ought to have been thinking of himself, poor boy,”

“There is a great deal of Natural Good in Felix,” Owen allowed.

He started toward the sawmill; and after a moment of smiling silence Ann ran over to Rosy and the children at the foot of the hill. She pretended to catch up a stick from the ground as she came near, and she called out: “You good-for-nothing things! When do you suppose we’ll have dinner? And Rosy the worst of you! Come straight along home with you.”

The children shrieked joyfully and ran before her. Rosy stopped for her, panting. “Oh, Mrs. Powell, it just sets me crazy; it’s so nice here. It seems as if I couldn’t bear to go into the house yet. But I reckon I got to. You don’t want a hired girl to stay outdoors and help your children play.” She laughed at her own joke, and brushed away the dead leaves which the children had heaped over her dress.

Mrs. Powell took some twigs from the girl’s tumbled hair. “Indeed, indeed, I’d like to play with you all myself. But I suppose you’d better come and see where we’re going to put you. I don’t believe you’ll think it’s indoors much. It’s a good thing we had anywhere for you, but I’ve been at Mr. Powell ever since we came to put up an outside kitchen for me, and that’s where you’re going to live; he only got it done last week, and there’s no stove in it yet. When we get the stove I reckon you’ll have to camp out in the cornfield.”

“Well, I wouldn’t like anything better. It seems like as if it was summer a’ready.”

“Yes, it’s been so for three or four days now. I heard a blackbird this morning. But he’ll be sorry he came yet.”

“Yes, the birds don’t know everything about the seasons. They’re just as apt as not to take a warm spell for summer. Why, it ain’t Easter yet.”

“Well, the children are beginning to talk about coloring eggs.”

“I’ll be bound they are. Mrs. Powell, I speak to cover the calico eggs. I’ve got some pieces my cousin Polly give me that’ll make the nicest pattern for eggs you ever saw.”

“I won’t interfere with you,” Ann assented. “ But now come and see where you are going to live.”

She led Rosy through the cabin and out of the back door, where Powell had knocked together, as he said, a rude lean-to of slabs for a summer kitchen, and opening out of this at one side a small room where a cot-bed was placed under the window.

“Why, it’s great, Mrs. Powell,” the girl said, taking note of a washstand and looking-glass, and the pegs to hang her clothes on. “I just wisht Polly Nairns could see it. She hain’t got anything half like it on the canal-boat; she has to sleep right in the very kitchen, almost on top of the stove.”

Ann looked the joyous girl over with a new sense of her young beauty. “Well, I’ll just tell you what, Rosy; I’ll never let you sleep here in the world. It isn’t the place for you. We’ll put the boys in here, and you can have the loft.”

“Oh, Mrs. Powell!” the girl lamented. “What did you get it ready for me for, if you didn’t mean to let me have it?”

Ann faltered as to what she should say. Then she said: “You don’t know what an awful pack some of them are around here. I always thought of you as you used to be. But you’re — you’re grown up, Rosy.”

“Well, just as you say, Mrs. Powell,” Rosy complied, demurely.

“Rosy,” Mrs. Powell said, while she hesitated still, “have you seen your mother lately?”

“Not since the place before last. But I knowed she was on the track of me, and that’s why I was so glad to get here. Why, I just broke down and cried when your sister-in-law ast if I would like to live with you. It was at market, and I couldn’t hardly wait till I could get home and tell Mrs. Linsey I was goin’ to leave. She knows about mother, and she was real nice when she understood.”

“I hope Polly is keeping straight.”

“Oh yes. It ain’t very nice being on the boat with the men, do you think; but the captain he looks after her.”

“Rosy, it seems dreadful for me to ask you to warn her against your mother.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Powell. Polly’d never tell her where I am.”

“I didn’t mean that exactly.”

“Yes, I understand, Mrs. Powell. But Polly knows how to take care of herself a good sight better’n I do.”

Ann drew a long breath. “Well, now, we must see about dinner.”

She could not refuse the great relief that came into her heart; the clouds that had filled her home-bound heaven broke and drifted off to the far horizon of the outer world, and with the girl, who eagerly took up the household work, she could not refuse some share in Powell’s enjoyment of a thing that happened a few days later, though it was a thing that had struck terror to her heart while it was happening.

Owen had gone to one of the outlying farms to make favor for some turnips, and she was standing at the cabin door waiting to see him come out of the woods on the rise of the eastward hill, when the team emerged at a speed which she had never known in either the horse or driver before. They came flying over the intervening distances, and as they seemed to flash by her she was aware of Powell rocking helpless on the seat and the reins, which had escaped his hands, dragging on the road under the horse’s feet. The horse whirled round the corner of the cabin dooryard into the open space before the grist-mill, and there, as in a mystical vision, she was aware of Overdale at the head of the horse, as if he had leaped from his place at the door of the second story, while Powell appeared softly to bound from the wagon and light on his feet. The rest of the event was solely of Powell’s experience, for as soon as Ann saw him safe on the ground she ran into the cabin and sank down sick.

When he came to reassure her, he was laughing, and he justified his amusement as the effect of Overdale’s characteristic behavior. “When he decided that I wasn’t killed, or even seriously scared, he said, ‘ Now, dern you, we’re even,’ and he gave me the reins and turned his back on me and went into the mill.”

Powell laughed again, shaking his shoulders and nodding his head up and down as his fashion was, but Ann would not join him at once. “What did he mean by that?” she asked, conditionally.

“Why, you know,” Powell explained, struggling with his delight, “ you know he had never felt just right about my pulling his boy out of the water. I could see that it was worrying him all along. He felt that he ought to say something civil about it, but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t want to, besides. It would have been like giving up his grudge against us.

Well, as luck would have it, he thought he had saved my neck, and so we were quits. It’s deliciously like the fellow.”

Powell laughed again, but his wife frowned before she smiled.

“Why do you say he thought he saved you? He did save you.”

“Oh, there wasn’t the least danger! I was intending to roll out at the first soft spot I came to.”

“You were a long time coming to it, Owen.”

“Yes; I hadn’t made up my mind about the softness even at the last.”

He laughed now at his own humorous notion of himself; he found that as characteristic as the miller’s behavior; Ann made a despairing click of her tongue in her perplexity with the man who through their whole married life had puzzled her by the provisional levity tempering his final seriousness. At the moment, now, he turned serious, as much interested in another philosophy of the case which suggested itself as he had been in its grotesque phase.

“I shouldn’t be at all surprised if it worked out favorably, on the whole. Whether there was any real danger or not, Overdale believes he’s done me a good turn, and he’s relieved of the gratitude toward me which has been embittering him. At the same time he has involved himself in the obligation which binds us in kindness toward those we have benefited. If he’s saved my neck, as you think, he can’t help feeling friendlier toward me from that fact alone.”

“Well,” Ann said, “let us hope so. You’ll want your dinner now. But let me brush you. You’re all dust.”

“And I think I had better wash up a little,” Powell said, going before her into the kitchen, where she followed him, plying the whisk-broom on his shoulders.

XI

AT their next meeting Overdale did not pass Powell in surly avoidance so promptly as he usually did. He looked at him with a sort of novel interest, as if he might have seen something in him which had not caught his eye before. He said nothing, and Powell thought it best not to renew the offer of his gratitude for the miller’s timely aid; that was what he now called it to himself. But he halted the man, who, after the first hesitation, would have slouched by him with the peck measure of corn under his arm on the way to feed his pigs. “Mr. Overdale,” he said, “I suppose you know we are going to put in the paper machinery as soon as we can make the necessary changes. No, wait a moment,” he hurried on at sight of the frown darkening the miller’s white face. “I want to say now what I have wanted to say from the outset, that in any change we make we hope to keep you here with us. I’m not sure that we can’t keep something of the flouring apparatus,” the notion flashed into Owen’s hopeful mind, “but, whether we can or not, we want you to stay on, somehow. This is my brother’s wish as well — as well as my—”

“You tell your brother,” the miller blazed out, “to go to hell.”

“Oh, come, come,” Powell reasoned. “Let us consider this matter in its true light. I’ve wanted to have an opportunity to talk it over with you ever since I came here, for I know—”

“For half a cent,” the miller blazed out again, “I’d knock your head off.” But in spite of his furious words his tone was helplessly provisional.

“After just saving my neck? You ought to ask more,” Powell said; and he smiled so kindly that Overdale, who glowered still, might well have been moved by the joke. But he shifted the peck measure to his left side and pressed close, pushing his floury visage almost against Powell’s face and lifting his fist. The man who had never been in any danger that he knew of did not believe that the miller was going to strike him. “I think,” he argued, placidly, “that we can come to an understanding that will be of mutual advantage if we once reach it. I am not aware of ever harboring ill feeling toward you, and if I had I couldn’t do so now. But apparently there is something on your mind against my brothers and me — me more especially, as I’m their representative here. Should you mind frankly saying what it is?”

“You keep away from me!” Overdale shouted. “I’ll kill you some day.”

“I don’t believe you will. Perhaps you really meant to kill me the first night I was here, but you didn’t; and after what happened yesterday I feel pretty safe with you; in fact, you’ve just thrown away a chance that would have relieved you of responsibility. When it came to the point, you wouldn’t even let the pony kill me.”

“Do you suppose — curse you! — I done it for you?”

“‘No, you did it for your little boy; I understood that perfectly, and I accepted it on those terms. But what I am trying to get at is the thing you have on your mind against us. If we could sit down somewhere—” Powell looked about him for the log or fence-rail which commonly offered itself for the convenience of talk at New Leaf Mills, but he found none near, and he was afraid Over dale would escape him if they moved from the spot where they were.

“I don’t want to set down nowheres,” the miller said, but he did not go. It was as if the gentle philosopher held him by a mesmeric spell.

“Oh, well, we can as easily talk standing,” Powell lightly put the point aside. “I’m not aware of having offered you any personal offense. Have I?”

“Who said you had?”

“Well, I’m glad you don’t think I have. Then the question is whether we’ve done you some sort of injury by buying the mills?”

“No, you hain’t, unless the Larrabees told you I wanted ‘em.”

“They never did.”

“If I had ’em by the scruff of the neck and could crack their heads together—”

“Mind, I don’t say that we shouldn’t have bought them in any case.”

“Then, what the hell—”

“But we never meant to put you out of your place here. We have intended nothing but good by this whole neighborhood, and from the fact that we have gladly kept you on here—”

Overdale snorted disdainfully. “You knowed dern well you couldn’t ‘a’ got along without me.”

“Yes, we knew that. But now you see that when we could get on without you we still wish you to stay. We wish you to be one of us, to be in charge of the paper-mill, if possible, as you have been in charge of the grist-mill. Now, what is on your mind?”

The shame for his secret could not show its red through the flour of the miller’s face; but he dropped his eyes, turning his head first this way and then that.

Whatever longing was in his heart to free itself, he quelled it.

“Mrs. Overdale,” Powell continued, “ asked my wife the other day what I had against you. If I can convince you that I have only the kindest feeling toward you—” —

Overdale gave a formless bark. He showed his under teeth as a dog does; he squared his shoulders and pushed against Powell. “You git out o’ my road.”

Powell stood aside. “Well, some other time when you’re more in the mood for it. I won’t press the matter now.”

He praised himself for his forbearance when he reported the incident to his wife, who could only give a gasp of relief at the conclusion.

“I watched you talking with him,” Ann said. She was seldom of a satiric mood with the man whose philosophic mind held her respect even when it passed her patience, but now she added, “Did he seem to like you better because he had saved your life?”

“Oh, he didn’t save my life.” Powell was constant in his insistence on the point. “But apparently he doesn’t like me any better for his having stopped the pony. At one moment I certainly thought he was going to strike me.”

“I thought so too,” Ann said. “My heart was in my mouth.”

“There wasn’t the least danger, however, as it turned out.” Then Powell began to laugh in the way that tried her so.

“What is it now?” she required of him.

“Oh, I was thinking of the effect in myself of bearing with his violence. Whatever his feeling toward me was, I was aware of liking him better because I was still wishing to do him good in spite of himself. If he had really knocked me over” — Powell pursued his notion to its climax with joy in its absurdity—” I suppose I should have become his friend for life. There was no danger of his striking me,” he assured Ann again, “but now I shall have to fall back upon general principles. I shall have to love Overdale along with the rest of our neighbors; and certainly a more detestable crew never appealed to a man’s best feelings. I shall be glad when we get the paper machinery in and begin actively doing them good. If we don’t do it soon, I shall feel like packing up and leaving them to their evils.”

“That is the way I have felt all along, Owen,” Ann said, grimly. “But we can’t think of that now. If Felix is coming here to live we must surely stay, no matter what happens. We must hurry everything forward and have the new house ready for him before the summer begins. Oh, when I think how the thing has lagged along, it seems as if I must put it up with my own hands!”

“Well, I think the neighbors will help with the frame when they see you lifting those heavy sills, and Rosy and the children tugging the studs and scantling to you.” He mocked her, but he ended, as always, with the earnest cheer, which she ended by accepting with the trust which his hopefulness compelled. “Now that you’ve got Rosy you won’t even have to call on the neighbors’ wives to cook the dinner for the raising.”

XII

THE Powells had forecast the raising in every detail months before the day came, and after the masons had put in the foundation their fancy was busy completing the structure. It was the custom for the builders of a new house to ask the whole neighborhood to the raising. The invitation went out by word, direct or indirect, as convenience served. Those who were spoken to carried the message to those unspoken, and in response the farmers came to put the skeleton of the house together and leave it for the carpenters to line with sheathing and clothe on with clapboards and shingles; and the farmers’ wives came to help cook the feast which rewarded the labors of the day. Ann proudly felt herself equal to deal single-handed with the quality of the feast, but the quantity, she knew from the beginning, was beyond her, and there she was aware she must not fail, under pain of an indefinite increase of the unpopularity which she knew that she shared with Powell. With Rosy’s help no one could cook a better meal, but three times their joint efficiency would not suffice for the meal which must be cooked. She must rely upon the favor of her neighbors, but she could ask it by implication only in asking them to the raising.

She and her husband agreed about this necessity, as they agreed about the necessity of asking the men.

They got on confidently enough in the details till they came to a point where Powell sometimes seemed to waver and Ann always stood firm. The point was whether they should provide the whiskey, which was the free drink at raisings, or should offer unstinted coffee of a compensating strength, and of a brew which Ann was willing publicly to stake her housewifely reputation on.

“You know, Ann, I have never been a teetotaler,” he teased.

“When have you ever drunk anything?”

“That is true; but I mean a teetotaler on principle.”

“Well, you have never been an Abolitionist, but you have always been opposed to the extension of slavery, haven’t you?”

“Yes, but I don’t see—”

“Yes, Owen, you know you do. You want to restrict drunkenness, and though you may not be a teetotaler, you can’t do that unless you stop the drinking.”

Powell enjoyed her logic, but he could not forbear making her observe a break in it. “I am in favor of confining slavery to the present slave States, or against carrying it into Territories now free. On the same principle I ought to let the old topers get as drunk as they like, while I deny whiskey to those who have never been drunk. Suppose we let it be known that there is a jug for those who have the habit of it, and coffee for those who haven’t.”

“Now, Owen!” Ann cried, charmed with his joking, but vexed with him for it.

“Well, let us compromise, then; no whiskey for anybody; hard cider for everybody.”

“Have you ever been in favor of compromising with slavery? They can get drunk on hard cider as well as on whiskey; you know they can.”

“Well, not so fighting drunk. Unless we let some of them get peaceable drunk, we won’t have a friend in the neighborhood when the day’s over.”

“Nonsense! Elder Griswell never lets them have anything but molasses water in the harvest field.”

“And is the neighborhood full of his friends?” Powell saw that he had carried victory beyond its limits. “Oh, well,” he gave way, “have your old coffee then. But I shall reserve the privilege of getting drunk in private before I begin the day. What else are you going to have for the feast?”

“Never you mind; I’ll see to that. Just keep your jug to yourself; that’s all I ask.”

“I may offer Overdale a swig?”

“Overdale has a jug of his own.”

“I’ve sometimes suspected as much,” Powell said; and he went away lifting his shoulders and shaking with the fun.

He came back to say, seriously: “I think we had better make a special point of asking Bladen. He is the decentest man in the neighborhood, and his coming would give the occasion dignity in the eyes of the world here that nothing else would.”

“I didn’t know that you cared for the world anywhere, Owen.”

“No, I don’t. But this is a matter in which we ought to put our best foot forward, and he seems our best foot.”

“Well, make your special point, then.”

They had other hopeful talks of it before the day of the raising, and their children shared the talks with them. Rosy was like one of the children; she made no claim, as the others did, for special recognition in the arrangement of the rooms, but she freely gave her opinion. She was for conformity to the house-kite house, as she called the gambrel-roof pattern which had been the shape of the house where she first lived out and which all the best kites were modeled upon. While the father and mother sat with the plan of the house on the table before them in the lamplight, and the children hung upon the backs of their chairs looking over at it, Rosy went and came in and out of the shed kitchen humming to herself as she carried her dishes to the cupboard and stopping to glance down at the map. She interrupted the humming when she spoke, and began humming again when she had spoken. She gave the effect of perfect freedom while preserving an attitude of non-intervention, of being a friend of the family, but not a member of it.

Powell noticed how, with her shortness and straightness, she had yet a sort of stiff grace which expressed an inner rhythm and timed itself to the staccato tune she was humming. One night as he was winding his watch he said to his wife, “Rosy seems very happy.”

“Yes,” Ann consented, “she seems happy,” and she sighed.

“What do you mean by that?”

“She is very headstrong. She’s not a little girl any more. She has her own ideas; it’s hard to move her; I have to manage very carefully with her.”

“About her work?”

“About herself. There was never one like her to work; we are both agreed about the work; she knows my way, and all she wants is to do it.”

“Well, then?”

“She’s flattered.”

“Well, she ought to be, with the way you pet her.”

“Owen, have you seen that man lately to talk to? That Captain Bickler?”

“Why, no. Not since he came with the brooch he thought Rosy had lost in the buggy.”

“He never thought she lost it there.”

“Then why—”

“That’s what I don’t like. If he wanted to see the child, why didn’t he come and ask without making up that excuse and bringing her a present?”

“Well, I suppose he’s shamefaced if he fancies her. Do you think he does?” There was no reason in Powell’s scheme of life why Captain Bickler should not fancy a girl like Rosy and be shamefaced about it; that was right and in the nature of things; but now with his wife’s vision he pierced below the surface.

“I’ve got the brooch now.”

“But you told me she gave it back to him.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Then he’s been seeing her.”

“Yes, more than I supposed. He’s been coming by here in his electioneering, and he’s talked with Rosy when she was out with the children on the other side of the hill. He stops to talk with her, and the children get tired and go off playing. She told me about it, and gave me the brooch. He made her take it the other evening when he was passing by and we were out with the children in the flatboat; we ought to have taken Rosy. I had to speak very plainly to her, and I’ll give him his brooch the first time I see him.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know,” Owen demurred.

“Why don’t you know? Haven’t you always mistrusted him?”

“Yes, but I’ve had no real grounds.”

“Has he got round you by pretending to think as you do about the State platform? I heard him flattering you up that day while his eyes followed Rosy whenever she came into the room. And his pretending to be interested in the Doctrines!”

“We have no right to treat him as if he were guilty till he has done something wrong.”

“Well, now he has done something wrong. He has made Rosy take that brooch in spite of us, Owen. Any man in the world but you would see that he was coming here just to amuse himself with Rosy, and to get you to use your political influence to send delegates to the county convention that will vote for him.”

Now Powell thought he had reason to laugh. “My influence with Bellam?”

“Your influence with all the decent people in the neighborhood, and your influence with everybody except Overdale and his crew, as soon as it’s certain that the paper machinery is going in. But I don’t say that he’s here on your account; it’s on Rosy’s. He’s taken with her.”

“Why, naturally he admires her.”

“Oh!” Ann broke out at the end of her patience. “Certainly you are the most trying man!”

“What excuse did he make to her when he brought the brooch?”

“He didn’t make any. He said he wanted her to have it whether she had lost it or not; he said he couldn’t think of any one else to give it to.”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Yes. And of course it flattered her, poor child.”

“Have you got it here?” Ann took it out of her pocket. “You have dealt with Rosy,” Powell said, reaching his hand for it. “I will deal with Captain Bickler.”

“I can’t trust you. I will do it.”

“That wouldn’t be dignified, Ann.”

“Will you be plain with him?”

“I will use fairly clear dictionary English with him,” Powell said, beginning to joke again, now that he had the brooch in his keeping. He looked down at it in his palm and turned it over. “It doesn’t seem to be a great many carats fine. But I dare say Rosy isn’t a judge of jewelry. Or Bickler either, for that matter.” Powell hated the duty before him, but it was his duty, and not Ann’s, as she now perceived too.

XIII

POWELL was reluctant to think evil of any one, and his early want of perspective in the world made it hard for him to imagine a design of wrong from one social level to another. In the new country to which his family had first come, from the Old World in his own generation, he had not seen much of those differences; his father had left the Old World in abhorrence of the conditions which perpetuated social inequality there, and Powell had been taught by precept, if not practice, that such conditions were wicked and inhuman. His reading as a boy had been largely in the English poetry, where the life of simple villagers and rustics was celebrated as the ideal, and the cruelty of the Great was ascribed to the unjust structure of society. After his reading began to be so exclusively in the Doctrines, the questions of mundane difference sank more and more out of sight; they would settle themselves as man’s conduct grew more in accord with the Interior Sense of the Word.

Powell left his wife at the cabin busy with some work which she undertook after calling: “Rosy! Oh, Rosy! I wonder where that girl is!” and then setting about it alone, with the comforting conclusion, “Off with the children somewhere, I suppose.” She was inclined to be the less severe with Rosy because of the severity she had been obliged to use with her about the brooch, and she was glad to find her a child still with the other children; she did not want her to feel herself grown up.

“I will look for them on my way to Bladen’s,” Powell promised. “I want to see if he has any winter apples left.” —

“I wish we could get some dried peaches to make pies for the raising,” his wife said, casually, at parting; the raising had taken the first place among her cares already.

He walked southward by the road that curved round the hill and continued on to Spring Grove after it left the hill behind. But it was at the bottom of the hill that by a sudden turn he chanced upon Captain Bickler sitting his horse at the roadside next the river and looking up the shore over a growth of tall pawpaw bushes which covered it there. He was handsomely dressed in his one fine broadcloth suit, and he had an effect of military gallantry, with his slender, graceful figure showing itself above his horse’s neck as he stood up in his stirrups.

“Any pheasants over there?” Powell called to him for salutation.

“How do you do, Mr. Powell?” the young man called back, as he dropped into his saddle; and he rode forward and leaned over to give Powell his hand. “Why, no. I don’t know what it was exactly,” he added. “I was just going up to your place. I think I’ve got some news that will please you. The Capital City Whig says — I’ve got yesterday’s paper — that there will be no doubt of that anti-fugitive slave law plank going into the platform at the State convention. I’ve thought so all along myself. I want you to remember that, Mr. Powell.”

Powell smiled; he saw no reason why he should not give himself that pleasure and still do his duty in behalf of his wife. He took the paper from Bickler, who was holding his thumb at a certain place in it, and read it with satisfaction in its fact and in his own respite. “Yes, the Whig has always been on the right side. I didn’t know you had,” he said, giving the paper back with a sharper glance up at Bickler.

“Oh yes, I have,” the young man answered. “It won’t do to go too fast if you want to keep your influence in a community like this. It’s all well enough for you, Mr. Powell; you’ve got a different sort of hold, but I have to feel my way. That’s why I wouldn’t like to say just where I stand at present to everybody; but you’ll find me in the right place when the time comes. All well at home? It does me good every time I see Mrs. Powell. She’s about the nicest lady I know.”

“Thank you, we are all very well,” Powell answered, provisionally.

Bickler continued, with increasing smoothness: “That’s a great book you lent me. I want to keep it a while longer and go through it carefully. It’s a wonder how he maps the other world out. Makes this world seem all at sixes and sevens.”

Bickler laughed ingratiatingly; and Powell asked, “Do you mean that he makes too much of a map of the other world? That has been objected by some.”

“I don’t know if I should say that, exactly,” Bickler answered. “But that idea of the spiritual world being all in the shape of a Grand Man, with the different spirits in the different parts according to their being good or bad — well, some might say that was funny.”

“I see nothing funny in it,” Powell began, resentfully; and Bickler made haste to save himself.

“Oh, I don’t mean funny in the ridiculous sense. I mean strange and — and new; that’s all.”

“I think I can make it appear to you in its true light,” Powell said, putting his hand on the neck of Bickler’s horse and caressing it with a mounting kindness for Bickler himself. “We are so used to thinking of Heaven as in the sky over our heads and Hell as a pit under our feet that it is hard for us to conceive of them otherwise; but a very little reflection will convince you that the topography — if I may so express it — of the spiritual world is much more reasonably represented by our human figure, which was made in the likeness of the Divine.”

From time to time the young man said, “Yes, yes,” and, “To be sure,” and, “I reckon you’re right.” The horse stamped in the soft road, and sent gentle shivers over its silken surface, and tossed its fine head up and down, jingling its bit.

Powell at last took his hand away, saying, “You cannot go amiss if you look at it in the light of the Science of Correspondences.”

Bickler assented with a sigh: “I’ll keep that in mind. It’s a mighty new idea. But now about the two delegates from this township to the county convention. Can I count on your support if I arrange to have you sent as one of them?”

“Yes, certainly,” Powell assented, with the cordiality due a man who had shown such an intelligent interest in the matters he had laid before Bickler. “But I ought to say that I don’t think there is the least probability of my being sent. It may be different after we get the paper machinery in and the neighbors see that we mean to be as good as our word, but at present I realize that I am anything but popular in the neighborhood.”

Bickler laughed the notion away. “Why, Mr. Powell, there’s never been a man here more respected.

You’ll see, when the people turn out to your raising. When is the raising to be?”

“Just as soon as we can bring matters to a head with the carpenters, and my brother Felix can arrange to be with us. He’s winding up his business as fast as he can, and I am in hopes that my other brothers can join us soon. By the way, there’s a point on which I should like to consult you; my wife and I have differed about it somewhat. But I have detained you long enough already.”

“Well, I am in something of a hurry, that’s a fact,” the young man said. “But any time I can be of service to you—”

He indicated with a large flourish that he was at Powell’s disposition. “For the time being, as between Mrs. Powell and you, we’ll leave it that I’m on Mrs. Powell’s side.” He laughed at his joke, and it was something that Powell could not refuse to enjoy.

“Oh, I believe I’m on her side too,” he said; and now the young man laughed again, and shook his rein, and his horse ambled away.

At Mrs. Powell’s coming into the talk, something came into her husband’s mind, but too warily for him to seize it. When Bickler was almost out of sight, and quite beyond earshot, he realized that he had not given him back the brooch.

He followed vaguely homeward in the same direction, wondering what he should say to his wife. When he came in sight of her standing at the cabin door, she called to him, “Did you ask the Bladens about the dried peaches?”

“I declare,” he said, stopping short with the relief a man finds in balancing one trouble against another, “I forgot all about the Bladens. I’ll go right back—”

“No, no,” she said, coming out to him. “I’ve engaged some from Hurvey; he just went by. But where in the world have you been all this time?”

Then Powell had to confess what he felt to be the greater guilt of his other forgetfulness. When they had talked it over, Ann said, disappointedly, “Oh, well, you can do it the next time you meet him. I do hope that no harm will come from the delay.”

“Oh, there isn’t the least danger,” Owen answered, light-hearted at escaping so easily.

“Better let me have the brooch. I’ll remember to give it to Captain Bickler,” his wife suggested.

“No, Ann. It’s for me to do it. And I shall certainly not forget another time.”

XIV

THE children came home together, and directly afterward Rosy appeared alone.

“Why, Rosy,” Mrs. Powell called out to her, “I thought you and the children went off together.”

The eldest of the little girls answered for her. “So we did, mother, but Rosy wanted to go and see what was in the pawpaws by the river-bank, and we were afraid. We thought Rosy had got lost.”

Rosy laughed. “I came up over the hill. I’ll get you the water.”

She went toward Mrs. Powell, who still had the teakettle in her hand on the way to the well. There was something evasive in her looks, which arrested Ann in a sort of distraction. “Well, you may, Rosy. I’m about beat out with this hot weather. I don’t feel as if I could go near that stove. Now you set the table, children,” she commanded her little ones.

“Oh, mother, we hate to go in yet,” they pleaded, through the eldest girl. “Can’t we have supper over by the new house?” The other children stood with their hands ready to clap and their feet to jump into the air at her consent.

The younger boys counted with the little girls in the family. Richard almost counted with his father and mother; he shared his mother’s cares; his next brother, who somewhat darkled after him, had an ideal of devotion to her which he realized in many reveries. The eldest of the girls was like Richard; she had been a third hand for her mother about the house, but now that Rosy had come she became one of the little girls again. She played with them in the tall rows of rustling corn stretching far away in the eighty-acre field behind the cabin; she helped them build little cabins of twigs over the wild flowers; they all painted gloves on their hands with mulberry juice. Richard loved adventure; he wished to go to California and dig gold; his brother liked dreaming of himself in stately and splendid characters and situations, but he hated the trouble of any active undertaking; once when he went to visit his uncle in Tuskingum and see the boys he used to know he was deathly homesick. But the brothers were as good friends as elder and younger brothers usually are.

The island was the mystery and the desire of all the children; the boys had their Indian fights there, and they could go for a drink of well-water, when they were heated in battle, to Bellamys cabin; Mrs. Bellam drew the water with a bucket at the end of a long pole, and gave it to them in a gourd dipper. Richard was the friend and companion of Bellam in the sawmill; he helped him there; and Bellam helped the boys build the tent-shaped hut of boards their father planned for kiln-drying the flooring for the new house; sometimes he sat up with Richard at night, and when the boy fell asleep Bellam] shifted the boards and kept the fire going good and hot in the big oblong stove which they used for seasoning the lumber.

He liked to talk about the raising, and was as eager for it as the Powells themselves. He told just what he should do, and bespoke certain duties and privileges. Among the men in the neighborhood he most truly valued Powell and honored him; he said, whenever he could get any one to look at his thumb, that he reckoned if it had not been for Mr. Powell he would not have had any thumb by that time. He was welcome to Mrs. Powell in the cabin; when it came once to her offering him her cane-seat rocking-chair he said, “If I had a cheer like this, I’d stay at home all Sunday and rock.”

A few weeks before the time fixed for the raising in August, what people called the flux broke out, and many were sick. One of the Bellam children was taken, and then another, till all were taken. Lizzie Bladen and Richard helped their father and mother nurse them, sitting up through the night in the hot little single room of the cabin, and all but one of the children died in turn. Richard watched with the dead, a thing his brother could not have done to save himself alive; and Lizzie Bladen shared his watch, and walked home with him in the dim dawns across the island and through the sawmill.

It came Bellam’s own turn, and he was very sick for a week; then he seemed to be getting well; but in the early morning when his wife and Richard were lifting him to make him more comfortable on his pillow he fell back and died. Mrs. Bellam said: “Now he’ll be so disapp’inted about the raisin’. He ‘lowed all along to do the most of it hisself, by his tell.” That night Richard could not keep himself from telling his brother about it, and how solemn it seemed coming home with Lizzie Bladen. If it had not been for her not being afraid he said he could not have stood it. His brother listened with his tongue cleaving to the roof of his mouth, and silent in the horror of an experience which his fancy made tenfold his own. He knew that twenty Lizzie Bladens with twenty times her courage would not have helped him stand such a thing as seeing a man die. His brother slept, but the vision of what his brother had seen filled the dark of the cabin loft for the boy.

Bellam was buried beside the new graves of his children in the neglected place on the hill which Powell had not yet got the stuff out for fencing, in his preoccupation with the material for the new house. The minister at Spring Grove was sick, and could not come; Powell felt it would be a sacrilege to let Elder Griswell perform the service at the grave; he took the duty upon himself, and he had a peculiar joy in using the New Church Book of Worship. He always said that one ought not to proselyte, but in the remarks he made he contrived to bring in a good deal of the Doctrines, and apparently no one felt the worse for them, if they were none the wiser. The chance use of a passage from Revelation suggested the peculiar applicability of the Science of Correspondences to the mysteries of that book, and Powell branched off at some length on the interpretation of the words he had quoted. He recognized with humorous consciousness that his excursion had the more interest with his hearers because it involved an exposition of the spiritual sense of the word horse; but afterward he blamed himself for yielding to his opportunity, and he could not make Ann say she had liked it. At the close he announced that out of respect for the dead the raising, which would be a kind of frolic, was postponed for the present. He spoke of the great interest which Bellam had taken in the building of the new house, and how touching it had been for him to know this. Mrs. Bellam shed tears, and whispered to the neighbor at her elbow: “Just what I tole Richard. He’ll be so disapp’inted, s’d I.”

The whole countryside came to Bellam’s funeral, which was the climax of the general affliction; with his death the epidemic began to abate, and with some cool days toward the end of August it disappeared. Overdale did not come to the funeral, but he showed his white mask at the mill door as the procession passed, and then went in and shut off the water, so that the mill was silent at the time of the burial. When the people came away, the mill was running again, and, some of them thought, furiously. They said in the low tones to which the recent solemnity had reduced their utterance that they reckoned Overdalo had been at his jug again; they moralized the fact as a great pity for so smart a man as he was when sober.

Captain Bickler arrived too late for the funeral; he had been electioneering in another part of the county; and he told Powell he was truly sorry, for he would have liked to address the friends. It was an occasion which he might have hoped to improve politically, perhaps, but Powell was himself so moved by the whole affair that he could not make the ironical comment which tempted him. The sight of Bickler reminded him of the brooch which he had not yet returned to him; he felt in his waistcoat pocket for it, and he was rather glad to find that he had left it in his week-day clothes; it would have been no more the occasion for its return than for the irony which he forebore.

Though he had postponed the raising out of respect for Bellam, he had done so with a reluctance which Ann more than half shared with him. Felix and Jessamy had arranged to come out to the raising on the date fixed, and now Ann was afraid that they might not be able to come. But there was no help for it, and Powell held so strongly to their coming, if they possibly could, that he almost convinced Ann they would be sure to come.

XV

IN her borrowed trust Ann gave herself so entirely to the cares and labors which now fell to her that the days went by without her duly noticing the absence of any further word from Jessamy. When the time came for the raising, on a bright Saturday of September, she was so much more distracted that she accepted without the bitter regret which it would have brought to her in a freer mind the fact that Jessamy and Felix were really not coming. They sent out with their letter a basket of baker’s cakes, such as only the town could supply, with oranges up from New Orleans, and a bag of coffee to indemnify Ann for the coffee she must not stint for the raising. Jessamy wrote that Felix was not quite well enough to come, but she would write soon again; and in the excitement of applying their gifts to the feast, and the confusion of the time, Ann did not remember to grieve enough for him till the whole affair was over. She had made coffee by gallons; and there were crisp crusted chicken pies, wide and deep, which she baked in the brick out-oven in her milk-pans, and served smoking-hot with plates of cold ham and cold tongue, and platters of hot shortened biscuit, and bread and butter; it was the time for new apples, and dishes of apple-sauce alternated with the plates and platters.

The table was contrived of boards stretched on the carpenters’ trestles, and the cold things were placed on it early in the day and covered with mosquito-netting against the flies, after due debate with Rosy and the little girls, indulged in minor details but overruled in the great essentials. Some of the farm wives had come to help, and Lizzie Bladen came with her father. He lent all the consequence to the affair that Powell had hoped, and here and there he helped a little. Lizzie helped a great deal, in spite of the flourishing politeness of Captain Bickler. He had come earlier than he had come to Bellam’s funeral, and his courtly zeal in seconding the girl at every movement made her part of the joke which he became with the other men waiting to be served. The jokers spared her as much as they could, but they were not skilful; Bickler made believe to like it, and encouraged it for himself in defending her from it. Ann saw his neglect of Rosy, to whom he scarcely spoke, and her heart burned, though she could not have wanted him to notice Rosy; she saw with helpless compassion the pain of the young girl he was making conspicuous.

In all twenty six or seven farmers, counting their big boys, came to put up the frame which the carpenters had got ready. The smooth hewn sills, mortised for the studs, lay beside the stone foundation. When the sills had been placed and the studs and joists fitted into the mortises, the plates to bear the second story were raised with the heaviest lifting of the day, and a second row of joists and studs fitted into them. Then the timbers to support the roof were fitted on the studding, and the rafters raised in rows the whole length of the house on either side and pinned together at the comb of the roof.

The work went on in the rivalry of separate gangs, with captains for each. At raisings where whiskey was furnished, the work was delayed by fights over disputed points between the chosen or self-chosen champions. Even now without whiskey it was slow work getting the frame of the house together, and the hill on the southwest of it was casting long afternoon shadows over the grassy space in front of the frame before the last pin was driven into the posts. On this grassy space Ann had put her tables, and now in the pleasant shadow she invited her steaming guests to sit down. The jollity of the day mounted to a climax; jokes that went round for the second or third season were hailed with the same hospitality as the sarcasms and railleries that remembered the events of the work or greeted the feats of the workers at the feast. The men were in their shirt-sleeves and bare heads; the women who passed behind them and filled their cups and heaped their plates were demurely clad in their second best and hid their smiles in the depth of their sunbonnets.

The victuals were all praised, but Ann was praised most for her coffee and for holding out against whiskey. The men joked Powell for the weakening that some of them said he showed, when he asked them to the raising and acknowledged that there would be nothing stronger than coffee to drink. They roared at that, and then one of them called to him, “Owen, what did you say was the correspondence of a hoss?” and the rest waited for their pleasure in the gibe.

“Oh, you’ve got hold of the wrong word, Mr. Blakeley,” Powell answered, with smooth formality. “What you want to know is the correspondence of a donkey.”

The retort was on the local level; but it took time for it to reach home. Ann disliked it and dreaded the effect. Then the man rose jovially in the shout ‘ that went up, and stumbled over to Powell’s place, and put his arm round his shoulders and began to explain and apologize. The men all became better friends with Powell, and one after another they complimented him for his part in the raising, for his knowledge and his practical skill. Their praises brought him to his feet, and in a speech which made Ann ashamed and then proud as it went on he told how in his early backwoods days he had been captain at log-cabin raisings. He was beginning to own with modest pride, and Ann was beginning to fear for him again, that for notching a log to receive the next when it was in position, he had not his superior, if his equal, when he was stopped by one of his guests with a joyous shout.

“Hello, hello, hello!” Every one turned with him toward the frame of the new house. The upright supporting the peak of the nearest gable had broken from the pin that held it and now swung dangling.

Through the general laugh broke cries of “Why didn’t you drive in that pin, Owen?” and “I thought you was a better hand than that,” and “Oh, well, it ain’t a log cabin, anyway,” and “I reckon Owen was too excited to hit that last pin on the head.”

Powell stood fixed and silent, smiling shamefacedly, till one of the men said: “Well, I’d like to go up and fix that pin, just to show Owen how he used to do it. But I couldn’t do it on no coffee. Hain’t you got a jug of corn juice around somewheres, Mrs. Powell?” Powell called out: “Nobody must think of touching it. Keep on at what you’re doing, friends, and I’ll see to that piece of studding in good time.”

He was going to enlarge upon the incident and draw a moral from it for himself and others, but another noisy outbreak stopped him.

“Well, here comes Jake, and I reckon he’s going to take a hand; he’s had some corn juice of his own.”

“Why, he’s got it with him!”

Powell saw Overdale reeling across the road from the side door of the mill and floundering toward the new house; he had a black jug in his hand; he shouted, “I’ll show you how to fix that; I’ve got the thing to do it with.”

His voice was not drunk, though his gait was, but he corrected that, holding himself strongly erect as some of the men started toward him. “Better nobody touch me if he don’t want his head cracked,” and then he staggered on again, but securely enough.

Powell came politely forward. “If Mr. Overdale wants to strike a blow on my new house, and mend my unworkman-like job, he’ll want a tool.”

He held out the mallet he had used in failing to drive the pin home, and the miller took it, glancing back and forth from Powell to the mallet.

Then he flung it from him with a roar: “Didn’t I say I got the thing to do it with? What the hell—”

He got to the ladder which had been left standing against the house, and began to climb it. “Any one touch this ladder!” he threatened the half-dozen who rushed to stop him.

“Owen!” Ann appealed, in her terror.

“I’m going to, my dear,” Powell said, as if there had been a full explanation. He put his neighbors aside with authority, and took hold of the ladder. “ Get down, you tipsy fool! Do you think I’m going to have your blood on my house?” He shook the ladder and looked up at Overdale, lifting a hand to pull him down.

Instead of stooping over to strike him with the jug, as every one expected, in terror or amusement, Overdale gave a crazy laugh, and clambered out of reach. He swung himself upward with one hand, holding to his jug with the other, and when he reached the roof-plate he twisted himself in and out through the rafters till he reached the gable where the stud was dangling loose. He gathered it in and fixed it in its place, and then drew back to hammer the pin home with the jug. “I’ll show you what whiskey can do.”

The joking applause which would have hailed a safer feat failed on the open lips of the gazers below. Once, twice, three times the miller drove at the pin, shattering the jug and spilling the whiskey in the air. He drew back for a blow with what was left of the jagged neck and shoulders of the jug, but he missed his mark and lunged forward into the air. He turned and sprawled with a bat-like spread in his fall and struck in a heap at the base of the house on a loose mass of shingles lying there.

XVI

In the last hour which, close upon midnight, ended the day, Ann said to her husband, as she had said more than once before, “ I certainly thought he would kill you, Owen, when you shook the ladder under him.”

“Oh, there wasn’t the least danger! But he may thank his stars that he didn’t kill himself, in his fall. If it hadn’t been for those shingles I had left there to season he wouldn’t have got off with a few broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder.” Powell was tempted to say “shoulder or two” for the joke, but Ann did not look as if she could bear even so good a joke, and he stopped short of it.

“I suppose we’ll hear from Felix to-morrow. I’m glad, now, he and Jessamy didn’t come. It would have tried Felix. But still I’m anxious. I hope he isn’t worse.”

“Oh, you may be sure of that,” Powell answered.

“Dear, dear!” Ann said. “I don’t see how he can live on that hot feather-bed in that choking little room, swarming with mosquitoes.” She meant Overdale, now, in a natural reversion from Felix, and Powell understood.

“Oh, he’s used to it, and it’s an improvement on the buffalo robe in the mill. I’m sorry for Dick sitting up with him in that atmosphere. But he probably doesn’t mind it.”

“Yes, poor Richard! Everything comes on the child.”

“Well, he’s got that other child to help him bear it. Why her father chooses to live here, with such a girl as that! He is really a gentleman in his breeding. He wasn’t much use at the hard work of raising, but his being there kept the others in check, and certainly lent all dignity to the occasion I could have wished. He quite conceived of that when I asked him.”

“It was fortunate, after all, that Captain Bickler was there,” Ann said, reluctantly. “If it hadn’t been for him, I don’t know how we could have got the doctor so soon.”

“If it hadn’t been for Bickler’s horse we couldn’t,” Powell consented, “by at least fifteen minutes. However, it enabled Bickler to make a display of public spirit, and it was a good stroke of electioneering. Though, as for the matter of that, I had got Overdale into very fair shape before the doctor came.”

“Yes,” Ann assented, to his satisfaction. “Well, if it will only make them all like us a little better!”

“I’m afraid it won’t make Overdale. But as for the others, they will like us better because they’ve done us a good turn, and because you gave them such a good supper.”

Powell wound his watch for the night; but it was long before Ann slept, and she was up earlier than usual to have Dick’s breakfast for him as soon as he came home. He came at sunrise, and reported the miller restless through the night; he testified to the faithfulness of his own vigil by falling asleep in his chair. His mother had to wake him for his coffee.

“Poor boy!” she said; and then she asked, “Why didn’t you bring Lizzie with you?”

“I didn’t like to ask her, mother,” the boy explained. “Mrs. Overdale got her something. I’m going back, now, to let her off.”

It appeared that Richard was to relieve yet another watcher, in the miller’s wife herself. It seemed as if he had scarcely gone out of the front door when she came through the corn-field to the back, with the sun at her shoulders, throwing her long shadow on the floor.

Ann looked up from the table where she was pouring herself a cup of coffee.

“He in?” the woman asked; and Ann understood that she was asking if Mr. Powell was at home.

“Why, he’s still sleeping,” Ann said. “Won’t you come in and sit down — and have a cup of coffee?”

The woman made no answer, but remained in the doorway. “‘Pears like as if he wanted to see him.”

“Well, I will send him as soon as he’s had his breakfast. How did Mr. Overdale get through the night?” The miller’s wife remained irresponsive. “And you say he hain’t got nawthin’ ag’in’ him?”

“Why, certainly not. What do you mean by asking that again, Mrs. Overdale? What could my husband have against yours?”

“‘Pears like as if he thought he had.”

“Very well, then; he had better tell Mr. Powell what it is when he comes.”

“He won’t have to tell I been here?” the woman asked.

“Not unless you want him to.”

The miller’s wife made no more answer to this than to the other questions. After a moment of hesitation she went away as silently as she came.

Ann let Owen sleep on like a child from his fatigue, and she kept the other children from waking him by sending them to play in the new house.

By the time he had breakfasted and was looking for his hat to go over to the miller’s a friendly voice called to him from the front of the cabin. It was the doctor, who had his joke in saluting him as Dr. Powell, and said he had just come from the miller’s.

“And how did you find him?” Powell asked.

The doctor twisted himself between his saddle-bags and looked round. “It seems queer not to have either of your mills going.”

“Yes, we’re left in pretty bad shape, and the silence sounds rather solemn. By the way, it does sound?”

“So it does, so it does!”

“But that wasn’t what you wanted to talk about?”

“Well, not before company,” the doctor said, with a laugh. He lowered his voice. “There’s something I don’t understand about Overdale. He’s in no danger from his broken bones. But there’s something on his mind, and it seems to have been there a good while, and it seems to be about you—”

“Would you mind my wife’s hearing?” Powell asked.

“Why, if it won’t worry Mrs. Powell.”

“The things that worry my wife are the things she doesn’t hear,” Powell said, and the two men had their laugh; and then he called into the cabin, “Ann!” She came to the door. “The doctor wants to talk to us about Overdale.”

“Will he die?” Ann gasped.

“No, I don’t think he will,” the doctor said, “unless Owen here” — Ann did not mind the doctor’s calling her husband by his first name—” wants to do his worst by him.”

“What do you mean, doctor?” But Ann partly knew, though not clearly.

“I can’t say, exactly. But there’s something on his mind, about the sale of the mills to your family. It isn’t anything reasonable; it’s something he’s ashamed of while he’s afraid of it. He seems to think Owen knows, but he won’t tell it himself. It’s some sort of hallucination. I can’t get it out of him; but unless somebody does — and I believe Owen can — at any rate, it seems to be connected with him and his brothers—”

“I just knew it!” Ann broke in. That’s what that poor thing’s been groping after.” She told the doctor of the question the miller’s wife had only just now been with her to repeat from their first meeting. “She said he seemed to want to see Owen, and if you think—”

“I think Owen had better see him, then.”

Ann hesitated. “I don’t want him to take any risks with the crazy wretch.”

“Oh, there isn’t the least danger,” Powell put in, eagerly. “Where is my hat? I’ll go at once.”

“I’ve got half a mind to go with you,” she said. “If that wretch should have his shotgun—”

The doctor laughed. “He hasn’t got his shotgun in bed with him, Mrs. Powell.”

“Well, then go at once, Owen. But don’t be a minute longer than you can help.”

“I’ll be back directly, my dear,” and with the doctor’s riding off Powell was half-way to the miller’s house.

It was sultry with the heat which in the Middle West comes with September when the summer ought to be gone. A swarm of flies buzzed up from the bed and out of the room where the miller lay when Owen entered from the kitchen, where Mrs. Overdale met him. He sat down where he could look the bruised and broken man in the face.

“Now, what is it you’ve got on your mind, Overdale?” he demanded, severely. The fact, whatever it was, would interest him the more if it were something of mystical portent, but if it were merely resentment it would still interest him. “You have something on your mind concerning me, and for your own sake” — Powell was not indifferent for himself, but he repeated—” for your own sake, I want to know what it is.”

The miller seemed clear enough to this appeal. “You reckon I’m a-goin’ to tell you?” he returned, sulkily.

“Not necessarily. But I’m going to find out. When did you begin to harbor this grudge against my brothers and me? Was it because we bought the mills away from you?”

“What if it was?”

“Then that’s when it began. But we kept you on, and I have assured you that we wished to keep you, somehow, after we had put in the paper machinery. Then it wasn’t on business grounds that you hated us?”

“Who ever said I hated you?” the miller demanded.

“I didn’t know what other name to give your behavior. You must have had some strong objection, at any rate. Did you think we meant you some sort of harm?”

“I don’t know what you meant, or what you done, or whether you done it. But there it was.”

“What was?”

“You think I’ll tell? It can kill me, but I’ll keep it to myself.”

Powell glimpsed a darkling something which fascinated him. He took a longer turn about. “I know,” he said, almost tenderly, “that we often attach consequences to things which happen far beyond their reasonable effect. I remember when I was a boy that I would be throwing a stone at a tree or a post, and I would say to myself, ‘ Now if I hit it I shall live out the year, and if I don’t—’”

The miller lifted himself on his elbow; then he dropped back with a curse of pain; he would not let it be a groan. “What do you mean by living out the year?”

“Simply what I say. What could I mean?”

The miller lay silent. Then he turned his bandaged head on the pillow and said, as if he had been tacitly working to that conclusion, “I’ll be derned if I’ll tell you.”

Powell sat patiently confident of some other conclusion, and after a minute Overdale turned his face toward him again. “There’s always got to be two to a bargain. If it was a spell that you devils laid on me, to git me out of the way, you must ‘a’ knowed what it was before you agreed to pay the price, and all your pretendin’ to want me to stay couldn’t fool me. Your sayin’ that about a year’s time, just now, shows you always had it on your mind. But I’ll fool you yit. I’ll live the year out, in spite of you.”

It seemed to Powell that another and clearer glimpse of the miller’s trouble was offering itself; he thought he could best promote the revelation by postponing it, and he rose to go, but more than half feigning to go. “Very well, Overdale, when you feel ready to tell me what you mean I’ll try to help you; but as it is you won’t let me. I must leave you now; this excitement is bad for you—”

“No, you don’t! No, you don’t!” The miller shook his fist and tried to writhe up from his bed. “You know as well as I do that when you took the mills you’d fixed it so I wouldn’t live more’n a year after you bought ‘em.”

Now it was all plain before Powell. He was in the presence of the anguish of a foreboding; he had once known the terror and the stress of it in his hypochondriacal youth; he had seen his own brother again and again in its shadow; and his heart was glad that he could lift the incubus from the wretched soul which he seemed to see writhing before him. But he must treat the pseudo-foreknowledge reverently, though he could have laughed it away.

“Why, Overdale, you’ve lived the time out already. We bought the mills in August last year — two months before you knew about it.”

“What!” the miller shouted. In spite of his bruises and bandages, he raised himself on his sound arm and stared at Powell, as if to take in with his eyes what his ears had known. Then he dropped back and lay still.

XVII

“I CERTAINLY thought he was dead,” Powell said, telling it all in detail to his wife when he came home and found her on the point of following him to the miller’s house.  “It was not so long, though, before we brought him to. Or, rather, I did.” He corrected himself, not to refuse the credit justly his due. “The woman was not much help, though she knew that tea would have more effect with him than whiskey; be more of a contrast,” and Powell did not deny himself the comfort of a laugh. Then he mused the case in a silence which Ann interrupted.

“And what did he say when he came to?”

“Why, practically nothing. He wanted to get up and go over to the mill. The whole affair was as simple as having a tooth pulled. You nurse your terror of the pain to come in infinitely greater pain, and when the dentist jerks the tooth out and the whole thing is over you’re simply ashamed of yourself, and you don’t want to say anything about it. Not but what there are real presentiments; but for the most part they are lying intimations from the devils who delight in tormenting people in this world when they escape from the hells.” Ann was not satisfied with the Doctrinal philosophy of the case. She could not help thinking of the miller’s misery during the year past, but she put it out of her mind with a personal consideration. “Well, I hope he will behave himself now and treat you decently.”

“I don’t count on it,” Powell said. “His behavior is from the character that he’s been building up all his life. To change now would be like saving his soul by a death-bed repentance. He will be more likely to show that he doesn’t owe me anything by behaving worse than ever.” The notion moved Powell to his usual laughter, but he checked himself at the continued gravity of his wife’s face. “Well, what is it now, Ann?”

“Nothing. I thought if I once had Overdale off my mind I shouldn’t care for anything. But I do. There’s some trouble with Rosy. She’s been crying.”

Powell was guiltily sensible of the brooch in his waistcoat pocket; the crazy question whether it could be that which was making Rosy cry went through him, and he thought his wife might be going to speak of it; but she said:

“You noticed that fellow scarcely looked at her yesterday, and didn’t speak to her at all. He’s trying to break off.”

“Well, isn’t that what you wanted him to do?”

“Yes, but when it comes to it, and I see her taking on so! Oh, I wish the child had never set eyes on him! Of course he never did care for her, and now that he thinks he’s going to be elected he doesn’t want even to speak to her. And I know she’s got her heart set on him.”

“But do you know that, Ann?”

“What else would she be crying about?”

“You might ask her. But seriously, I don’t think there’s the least danger of trouble for her.”

“Oh, you never think there’s the least danger of anything, Owen!”

“Well, but how often has she met him? It couldn’t go on without our knowing. He’s been all over the county drumming up delegates. I haven’t seen him here once in a week, and then he hasn’t been near us.”

“No, not us; but Rosy has met him. I know she has. She goes out with the children, but they get separated, and she comes home alone. Not always, but often enough to make me anxious. Time and again I’ve been on the point of asking her, but I didn’t like to; Rosy is proud. She does her work, and she might say that was enough without answering questions. She’s queer; sometimes I think she’s sly.”

“Oh no, Ann! She may be secret, but she isn’t sly.”

“No, I mean secret; she’s keeping something to herself, and it troubles me. Well, I’m going to watch her. Here comes poor Bellam’s boy. He said he was going to Spring Grove, and I told him to ask if there were any letters for us.”

A barefooted boy on a barebacked horse, the last left of Bellam’s children and possessions, rode up to the cabin door, where the Powells were talking. “Here’s y’ur letter fur yuh,” he said to Ann, taking it out of his open shirt-front and holding it toward her.

“Oh, thank you, Jimmy. Wait and I’ll get you a slice of cake.” Jimmy waited; then he thumped his heels into the horse’s ribs, and rode away with his mouth instantly full. “It’s from Jessamy,” Ann said, opening her letter. “I expected she would write after not coming. I wish they could see how well the new house looks.” She delayed herself with a glance at the frame of her future home before she began to read. After the first look she said, “Why it’s dated from the City and—” She crushed the sheet together and gave it to Powell. “Felix has had another hemorrhage, and they’re on the way to New Orleans! You read it, dear!” she said, with the hem of her apron to her eyes.

“Well, well,” Powell complied. “There’s nothing to be alarmed about. We’ll see what Jessamy says. If they’re going South it’s the best thing, and we’ll be all the better prepared for them in the spring.” Then he read on to himself, as people begin doing when they are asked to read for others.

“Owen!” his wife sharply recalled him.

“Oh! Oh yes! Why, she just says that he’s had a little attack, and they’re very properly going South for the winter; and — there isn’t the least danger—”

“Read what she says out loud” Ann bade him, severely, and then he did so. But it came to no more in substance than the facts they both knew already. Jessamy sent her love and her husband’s to all. She said the doctor thought he ought to get away before the first chilly weather, and she was going to bring him back strong and well; and they were coming straight to the mills. If there was not room enough for them in the new house, Felix and she would live in the cabin till they could build for themselves; he was crazy for the place now, and Owen must hurry and get out the stuff. She wrote bravely, even gaily, and “You see,” Powell ended for her, “there isn’t any cause for anxiety.” —

Ann took the letter he held illustratively toward her, and, the sadder for his cheer, folded it carefully for another reading and went into the cabin.

Rosy was coming in at the back door from the shed outside, panting as if she had been running, and Ann thought she looked pale. “Where have you been, Rosy? Where are the children?”

“I do’ know where the children are,” the girl answered, sullenly. “I been up over the hill, if you want to know.”

“You mustn’t be saucy, Rosy,” Ann said; and she added, as if it were the reason why, “We’ve had bad news about Mr. Powell’s brother.”

Oh, have you, Mrs. Powell?” the girl broke in, with instant contrition. “I’d just lay down my life for him. Has he had another bleeding?”

“Yes. And they’re on their way South for the winter.”

Oh, Mrs. Powell! But that’ll do him good, won’t it?”

“The doctor thinks so; I hope so. And, Rosy, child, I’m troubled for you, too. I’m sorry for you. I saw what happened yesterday, but you won’t believe I’m sorry for you when I say I was glad of it.”

Yes, I will, Mrs. Powell! But I’m all right now, and you don’t need to worry a bit about me. I reckon he’s got as good as he give.”

XVIII

THAT morning, while the doctor was talking with the Powells at the cabin door about Overdale, Rosy had gone with the children to look the new house over and help rejoice at moving into it, which they thought could not be more than a week or two now. She left them there and kept on up over the hill. “I’ll be back directly,” she called down to them.

At the bottom of the hill on the other side a horse was grazing among the pawpaw bushes, with his bridle-rein hanging loosely behind his ears and dropping round his mouth. She pretended not to see the horse, so that she need not turn back; but a fire of consciousness blazed over her face.

Bickler spoke from the grass, where he was sitting near the horse’s head. “Hello, Rosy!”

She did not answer.

“You don’t seem to hear very well this morning, Rosy.”

Now she answered, “You didn’t seem to see very well yesterday, Captain Bickler.”

“Well, no, that’s a fact,” he said, easily. “That’s what I thought I’d explain if you happened to be coming over the hill this morning.”

“I reckon I don’t want any explaining from’ you,” she returned. “I reckon a hired girl knows when she’s a hired girl. And if I’d knowed you was here I wouldn’t ‘a’ happened to be comin’ over the hill, as you say.”

“Well, maybe you would, maybe you wouldn’t.” He laughed teasingly up into her face. “But I’m glad you have come. I didn’t see any one that looked like a hired girl yesterday; I saw a lady helping Mrs. Powell that I thought was too far above me to speak to.”

“Did you?” Rosy retorted, scornfully. “You spoke to her good and plenty all the same.”

“Oh, you mean that pale, little washed-out snip of a child? I mean the lady with the yellow hair, and the big blue eyes, and the cheeks as red as the roses she’s named after. You ain’t mad, are you, Rosy?”

“Yes, I am mad; and you mustn’t think you can come it over me any longer, Captain Bickler. I reckon I can see through you well enough.” Rosy ended ineffectually, and she knew it as well as the man, who laughed again.

“I didn’t know you were going anywhere, Rosy. If I had a chin like that — I wish you could just see it from here!”

“You quit your foolin’, Captain Bickler, and let me past or I’ll—”

“I didn’t know you were going anywhere, Rosy. But don’t hurry. I want to argue it out with you. What did you want me to do yesterday? Get up before ’em all and say, ‘ Ladies and gentlemen, I wish to announce the engagement of Miss Rose Hefmyer and Captain Harrison Bickler’? The fellows wouldn’t have done another stroke of work on Mrs. Powell’s chicken pie, and old Overdale wouldn’t have had a chance to fall off the top of the new house. I met Doc Jenner, here, just now; he thinks Overdale didn’t fracture enough ribs to hurt. But what I mean to say is this, Rosy. It won’t do for me to be courting you till I’m in a position to marry you.”

“Who as’t you to marry me?” she demanded, fiercely.

“Well, not you. And I’m not going to let you. When it comes to marrying I want to do the asking myself. But now I’m all tied up with this electioneering. If it was known I was running after a girl when I ought to be running for an office I wouldn’t get the office, I’m afraid.”

“You wouldn’t get the girl, neither, if I had any say!”

“Well, all right, Rosy, all right. We’ll see about that afterwards. You mustn’t think I don’t care for you if I don’t show it everywhere. It’s the whole world to me to meet you this way, every once in a while, and have a little friendly chat. I’ll tell you what, Rosy. If I’m elected, and I don’t see but what I will be the way things are going now, I’ll want some old friend to call on evenings after the legislature adjourns. I’ll want somebody to take to the theater, and then go round and have an oyster stew.”

Rosy stood looking at him where he sat with his face lifted toward her, but she said nothing, while he chewed on a blade of grass which he plucked up from between his feet.

“I know a lady up there who wants a girl. You don’t lay out to pass the winter here in the new house,” and Bickler laughed at the phrase which had become mockingly current in the neighborhood from the Powells’ use of it. “You would suit my friend first rate; kind of a parlor girl, with nothing to do but dust and keep the place in order, and all her evenings out. I’ll write and tell her I’ve found just the girl for her—”

“Mrs. Powell,” Rosy broke off at this point in telling Ann, “you’ll think I done a poorty awful thing.”

“Why, what did you do, Rosy?” Ann asked, fearfully.

“I just run right up to him and slapped him in the face good and hard so’t he most keeled over, and then I run home as fast as I could foot it.” Ann did not ask why she had done this; she did not need Rosy’s explanation: “A poor girl finds out a good many things, especially if she’s got worse than no mother; she ain’t like a girl that’s been raised in a decent family; and when she ain’t much more than a child she understands — understands — what the oldest woman in the world ortn’t to—”

Rosy’s hardness had given way now, and she was fetching her breath in dry sobs.

“Oh, poor thing!” Ann tried to comfort her, but she would not hear further.

“I wouldn’t ‘a’ minded his not noticin’ me yesterday; and I wouldn’t ‘a’ cared for his not likin’ me the way he’d like some one that wasn’t a hired girl; but for him to sejjest or even to hint — Oh, do you think I done right, Mrs. Powell?”

“‘Deed and ‘deed I think you did just exactly right, Rosy,” Ann could not help saying, though she felt that she ought to add: “I suppose Mr. Powell would say that you ought to bear anything rather than give a blow. But a good smack in the face is the only way with such a man if he meant what you think he did—”

“Oh, do you reckon he couldn’t ‘a’ meant it, Mrs. Powell? Say it if you do! I’d give the world to believe he didn’t! I’d just lay down and let him walk over me. I can’t help it, Mrs. Powell — I think he’s splendid and the handsomest and smartest man in the world, and I’d give my life if he didn’t mean it.”

She was crying her heart out in tears now, and Ann was puzzled between her pity for the girl and her hope that she had not been mistaken. That would be the quickest and easiest way out. “I will speak to Mr. Powell and—”

“If you do I’ll kill myself!” Rosy jumped up from where she sat bowed over, with her apron at her eyes.

Ann took her in her arms. “Well, well, I won’t, then. But now you go up to your bed and lie down awhile. I’ll get the dinner; and don’t you come till I call you. I want to think about it.”

When the dinner was out of the way Ann followed her husband over to the new house, where he stopped to speak with the carpenters, and they climbed part way up the hill to see how the frame looked from there. Then she told him what Rosy had told her; she knew that Rosy would expect her to break her promise.

Instead of blaming Rosy for her violence Powell said, “He ought to be cowhided!” and instantly Ann, terror-stricken to silence, saw him cowhiding Bickler. But after the silence Powell began to retreat from his impetuous outburst. “Of course, he could say he didn’t mean anything of the kind.”

“I was almost wishing he did mean it. It would put an end to the thing with Rosy. It’s the plague of my life.”

“Well, well,” Powell resumed. “We mustn’t misjudge him.” With that brooch in his pocket, which he had never yet found the chance of making Bickler take back, he was aware of wishing to give him more than the benefit of the doubt. “Very likely he does know a woman there who wants a girl; it may be nothing more than that, and I see no reason why he shouldn’t wish to marry Rosy.”

“Yes, you do, my dear,” Ann said. “She’s more than his equal in character and heart and good sense, but she hasn’t any education, and she never could get any; she doesn’t see the use of it. She’s a wild thing in all that, and she always will be. He’ll want somebody that will do him credit with her manners if he gets on; and he will get on; he’s the kind; and poor Rosy has no more manners than I don’t know what.”

“Very well. Then I must keep an eye on him. I’m glad it’s come to this. Perhaps he’ll be so angry that he won’t come near her again.”

“Trust him for that! And I’m afraid Rosy knew that when she struck him that way she lost the battle.”

“Do you think so, Ann? Now I see it in quite another light. I believe she’s finished with him, and he understands it. You must keep her up to that idea, Ann; and I will keep a sharp lookout for him.” This was the translation of Powell’s purpose to take the first opportunity for returning the brooch, and for speaking his mind freely to Bickler and appealing to his better nature. He did not see why he should not deal frankly with the fellow, and pending the cowhiding which Bickler possibly deserved put the case before him and shame him into letting the child alone or into marrying her. Upon reflection he did not see why marrying her should not be the more probable outcome. “As for his ultimately giving any trouble,” he said aloud, “I don’t believe there’s any danger of it.”

XIX

THE habit of drink, which had fouled the blood in Overdale, retarded his recovery. He had naturally what his neighbors called powerful healing flesh, such as would have responded with prompt self-cure to any hurt, but, as it was, his bruises and broken bones healed so slowly that it was well into October before he was out-of-doors. Even then he did not get back to his work in the mill. A temporary miller, as Powell carefully explained to him, supplied his place; an amiable and voluble Pennsylvania German, whom Ann had to give his meals, though he slept on the buffalo robes in Overdale’s den. He was acceptable to the younger boys because he let them play in the wheat-bins, where they buried each other in the grain and stuffed their garments out with it to unseemly corpulence. He allowed Richard to run the mill and dress the burrs; but at table he was dreadful to them all from his habit of helping himself to the butter with his knife after first sucking it clean. He was gentle with their father, and even respectful, so that Ann almost liked him.

Powell hurried the work forward on the new house with a constancy which the carpenters scarcely expected of him, and which he could himself scarcely have counted on. In the weeks that had passed the roof was shingled and the walls were weather-boarded, so that the black walnut gave its mellow color convincingly to the eye, and almost persuaded the neighborhood that its natural surface was as handsome as the white paint or the red brick of other houses. The sash was glazed and put in and the doors hung, and then the rooms were divided off and lathed for the plastering; but at this point Ann’s patience gave out, and she decided to leave the cabin and move into the house without further waiting. It seemed to her that if she were once in it the work could be pushed forward much more rapidly; even if it were not plastered till the spring came with its drying winds, they would suffer less discomfort from the cold than if they weathered the winter through in the old cabin.

When they were settled in it Powell found a beauty in the conditions which almost tempted him to delay. The rooms up stairs and down, with their neat lathing, were like a succession of latticed bowers which, he said, might be covered with vines; he made believe for the children that plants could be set in the ground beside the chimney and trained over the partitions and ceilings. There was an open hearth in each room; in the first cool evenings fires were kindled on them, and the soft play of the flames through the lathing was so much prettier than any foliage he could think of that he said there was no hurry to cover it even with vines. The children fell in with his humor, and if Ann held aloof it was without reproach, but not without anxiety. She was anxious about Felix, and the more so because she could not make Powell share her troubled mind. Letters came from Jessamy, not very often, but regularly enough, reporting at first that the warm climate was doing Felix all the good that they had expected; then she did not write so confidently, but only said that he was getting on and was waiting eagerly for the spring, so that he could go North and could come to them at the mills, As the weeks went by she merely told what they were doing; and Owen insisted that this no news was good news. He read hopeful auguries into Jessamy’s omissions, and Ann felt herself almost culpable in failing to share his confidence.

“The dear knows,” she said, after one of these letters came, “I’d like to believe it, Owen. And I will believe it if you say so. You ought to know best. But if Jessamy feels the way you say — Well, it is a good thing, her sending those messages from him, about hurrying up the work on the house; and I hope you’ll mind them, Owen. Don’t wait till spring before you plaster. We could get on very well ourselves, but an unplastered house will be no place for a sick person.”

“Felix won’t be sick when he gets here in April; and the more fresh air he can get the better.”

“We can let in enough air through the windows. I want the whole house finished before he sets foot in it, and I’m afraid if you feel that way about it you’ll let the plastering lag along and it won’t be done before summer.”

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid of that,” Powell said; and then, “Ann,” he continued, “do you know whether Rosy has seen anything of Bickler lately?”

“Why, no. What makes you think she has?”

Owen had not much reason, if any, to think she had, and he had brought the matter in partly to divert Ann from her anxieties about Felix; but he made the most of a fact in the matter.

“I met him yesterday when I was in Spring Grove, and I took occasion to speak plainly to him about Rosy.” Owen did not say that the occasion which he took was the long-delayed return of the brooch. He had so often forgotten to give it back that he acquired the greater merit with himself for remembering it in passing Bickler’s office and going in expressly to restore the gift. Bickler made no pretense of not knowing why; he said very seriously he was glad Owen had brought it, for he was afraid there was some misunderstanding on Rosy’s part. He looked on her as a child, but he saw how his giving her such a present might appear to Mrs. Powell, and he wanted Owen to tell Mrs. Powell so. Without telling her so now Owen said, with the assumed shrewdness of not crediting Bickler with too much goodness, “I think he wishes particularly to stand well with us at present, for the election is going to be very close, and he has an exaggerated notion of my influence in this neighborhood.”

“If he has any notion of it at all, Owen, it’s exaggerated. Now that poor Bellam is gone, I don’t believe you could influence a single vote,” Ann said.

Owen laughed. “Why, I don’t know but Overdale is working round to my way of thinking in some things.”

“Well, if Bickler will only let that poor child alone, I don’t care why he does it. Did you get any letters?”

“I declare, I quite forgot. There’s a letter for you from Jessamy. I just glanced into it; she seems to be writing in high spirits for some reason.”

“It’s because there’s such a decided turn for the better with Felix,” Ann said, running her eye down the page. “He’s better than he’s been yet, and they’re both so full of hope.” She kept on reading. “Yes, there isn’t one unfavorable symptom, and she’s just as confident now as he has always been. What a load it takes off my heart! Now we must begin really to get ready for them. If only you won’t let the plastering lag along!”

“Oh, you may rest assured I won’t do that.” Powell felt so sure of himself that for some days he allowed his interest in the political situation to occupy him, and did not agree with the plasterers to come until the day before the first Tuesday in October. “Well, to-morrow will tell the tale for Master Bickler,” he said, as if that could possibly interest Ann.

That night he got his harp out, for the first time in the new house, and tuned it. He believed that he really played “Rosin the Bow” on it, and the children recognized the song when he sang it. Ann went cheerfully to bed after sitting up rather late, in talk of Felix and Jessamy coming early in the spring. The children’s spirits had been damped a little by hearing that the mill would not make ruled writing-paper at first, but only yellow wrapping-paper; their father assured them that the wrapping-paper would be such as could be used for kites. He pretended to chase them upstairs to bed, and they had fun calling down through the latticework of the walls to Rosy, where she was washing the belated supper dishes in the kitchen.

Rosy slept in a little room lathed off from the kitchen on an entry leading to the back door; and the room of the Powells was on the same floor beside the front hall. Sometime after midnight Ann woke from a dream of Felix, and he seemed to be dying. Jessamy was crying over him, and a strange voice sounded through the room which in her breaking dream Ann thought was the voice of death. She started fully awake, and sat up in her bed to listen, while Powell slept on.

The crying continued; now Ann knew that it was Rosy crying in the kitchen, and the voice continued, low, coarse, and wheedling. It coaxed Rosy, and answered what seemed her bursts of protest.

The girl stopped her sobbing and wailed out: “Oh, mother, mother, mother! He’d never marry me in the world!”

The voice did not reply at once, then it said low, coarse, and wheedling, but clear, “Well, honey?”

A cry of grief came from the girl, and there was a rush as of steps and a sound as of a door flung open.

Ann jumped from her bed and ran to the kitchen. Beside the table, dim in the light of the dying fire of the stove-front, the shapeless bulk of a woman rose at Ann’s coming and stood holding a bundle as of clothes. Ann understood.

“You worthless, good - for - nothing, drunken old thing!” she shuddered at the apparition. “Go out of my house this minute!”

The woman did not speak, but stumbled through the door that Rosy had left open into the night. The dark gave no answer back to Ann as she called, at first softly and then loudly and imploringly, “Rosy, Rosy! Rosy, child!”

XX

THE candle which Ann lighted showed Rosy’s sun-bonnet hanging on its nail beside the door, and she went again and again to the outer steps and held the candle at her forehead and peered into the warm, windless dark. The rays which streamed to the border of the woods on the hill slope showed nothing, and Ann waited more and more hopelessly for the girl’s return. Neither her figure stealing back barefooted nor her mother’s bulk lurking in the shadows defined itself in the vague shapes which Ann conjured out of the trees and bushes. At last she went and wakened Powell, and they watched together till the daylight dimmed the candle-light.

Then she set about getting breakfast at the fire which they had kept going in the stove; the children woke, and the miller crossed from the mill, and the life of the household, broken in its course, began to make its way again over the interruption. It seemed every moment as if the girl must come back; all things were still so perfectly part of her presence that her absence was more and more incredible. Powell went away to vote at Spring Grove, and that was a relief to Ann, as if while he was gone Rosy would have more courage to return; she could not explain to the younger children; to Richard she could be clearer, and that was a comfort; and she could make him tell the others that Rosy had gone off in the night, but she expected her any time; the Dreamer knew of something tragical without the telling. Now and then Ann drowsed and had swift, long dreams which she woke from to the fancied sound of Rosy’s singing and her steps on the kitchen floor, or her calling to the chickens at the back porch.

Powell came home in the late afternoon, and she had to bear his disappointment that Rosy should be still away. He reported a very light vote at the polls; what really interested Ann at all was the fact that Bickler was running behind the ticket. The next morning news came by the first passer at the mill that the rest of the Whig ticket had been elected, but Bickler had been defeated. The rumor of Rosy’s absence had gone through the neighborhood the day before, though Ann had tried to keep it quiet. The miller must have told it, for she saw some of the farmers who had stopped at the mill on their way from the polls looking harder at the house than usual as they drove by. She did not care to blame the miller for it, and when some of the farm wives came the next morning to verify the rumor she confirmed it. She did not try to explain the fact, but her heart stood still when the first of her visitors offered to bet that Captain Bickler could tell where Rosy was.

The fear which she thought had been kept to Powell and herself she found was the common suspicion; the women who now talked of it to her were bitter against Bickler; they said he ought to be cowhided, that Mr. Powell ought to cowhide the truth out of him; there was blame for Rosy too on their tongues, but nothing like their blame for Bickler. His defeat at the polls was a judgment on him, but they did not believe that was the end of it. Ann alone seemed to know of the mother’s presence, with its sinister implications, and she could at least keep that to herself.

The neighborhood talk grew as each day went by; it spread to the children, and at the log schoolhouse two miles away the little Powells were asked if Rosy had come back or if they had heard from her. Ann silenced her own belief, but she could not silence the belief of others. It began to be said that Rosy had drowned herself, and it began to be said that Owen Powell ought to have the dam and the head-race dragged. The general gossip knit Rosy’s name closer and closer with Bickler’s, and from the depths of Ann’s remembrance of the girl’s cry and the mother’s answer by night there was proof which even the optimism of Powell could not always resist. She urged no duty in the matter upon him; she could trust him for his duty as he saw it; but they were both in doubt of what his duty would be.

If it was to summon Bickler and demand the truth of him, Powell was saved that extreme of action, so alien to his temperament, by Bickler’s coming to him unsummoned after the third day had gone by. He seemed to have timed his coming to the hour when the children were away playing on the other side of the hill, and he rode up to the back door of the new house and called softly to Ann in the kitchen. “Mrs. Powell, Mrs. Powell!”’

Ann looked out, dumb with abhorrence and then with pity of the man. His face was as if drenched from tears, and as she stared at him they began to stream afresh. He choked down the sobs to say, “I want to speak to you and Mr. Powell.”

“I’ll tell my husband,” Ann said, with more severity than she felt; and she called Owen from the front room, where he was arranging the volumes of the Heavenly Arcana and some Collateral Works on a shelf with some other books; he had not thought Pope’s Homer and Byron’s poems unfit for their company.

“Well, well!” he answered so dreamily that she doubted if he realized who it was wanted to speak to him. He came to the back door in his shirt-sleeves and stood in the soft October air, silent and waiting for Bickler to speak.

Bickler had dismounted and dropped the bridle on his horse’s neck; it was cropping the grass at his feet.

“You know why I’ve come, Mr. Powell. Have you found out where she’s gone yet?”

“I didn’t know but you might tell us, Captain Bickler.”

“Mr. Powell, you’re a good man, about the best man I ever saw, and I want you to believe me just as if I was saying it before the Judgment Seat. I don’t know any more than you do where Rosy Hefmyer is. I fooled with her, and I can’t say I didn’t mean her any harm, but for all the harm I ever did her she was like the babe unborn. I knew her mother was hunting for her, and I told her where Rosy was.”

At the confession of this atrocity Powell’s heart, which had begun to soften in pity of the wretched man, hardened again. “Bickler,” he said, dropping any formal address, “it isn’t merely the wrong we do that we’re guilty of—” —

“I know it, I know it!” the miserable man wailed out. “Don’t I know it, don’t I think it, don’t I feel it night and day, every minute, every second?”

The Doctrinal truth was precious to Powell, and he felt bound to retract what he had just said. He recognized that it was a Puritanic contravention of the New Church precept teaching that there are degrees in sin, that all sinning is not of one quantity of wickedness. “I don’t mean,” he said, “that you are as guiltless of what you meant as if you had not meant it; in the nature of things you must now suffer the same as if you had done it, and I couldn’t lessen your suffering if I wished.”

“I don’t want you to, Mr. Powell; and if you don’t believe what I tell you I want you to take this and lay it onto me for all you’re worth.”

He held out the cowhide which he carried for his whip. Powell remembered how for far less he had said that Bickler ought to be cowhided; with the culprit before him it was a different thing. “Throw it away I” he said with loathing, as if the cowhide were a snake. “You won’t have your punishment at my hands, if you’ve counted on that. We think Rosy may be dead. She ran away, we don’t know where, in the dark; she probably didn’t know, either; the poor wild thing may have fallen into the river, or the head-race, and been drowned. We are going to drag them, and if you choose to come and help—”

Ann had been listening within, and now she came to the door. “What are you thinking of, Owen? He shall not come! I wouldn’t let him help find that dead child to save his own life.”

She went further than she meant, and she was not proof against the man’s prayer. “Oh, do let me come, Mrs. Powell! I won’t make any trouble. I don’t believe she’s drowned, but if she is it’s for me more than anybody else to find her. I wouldn’t ask it to save my own life. What do I care for my life now? I’m done for. I can’t hold up my head in this neighborhood again. All I want now is to show people how I feel about it.”

“Yes, to show people, that’s what you want,” she said, with a cruelty which caused the relenting Owen to murmur, “Ann!”

“Well, you won’t come with my leave,” she ended, lamely.

“No, I don’t ask any one’s leave,” Bickler said, with fallen head. “All I want is just to come.” He pleaded with pitiful repetition; Ann went indoors again; and at last Owen, worn out by his reasons and entreaties, said:

“If we hear nothing of her, we are going to drag the dam to-morrow morning.” Then he turned away too, without other forms of parting, and Bickler thanked him haggardly and mounted his horse and rode off.

The neighbors came early with a seine. It was a long net with wide meshes, which they used for the larger fish whenever Powell invited them to the frolic of dragging the dam. “I reckon that’ll hold her,” one of them said, as he tested the strength of the twine with a pull.

They had shut the head-gates of the race, which they were to drain later if necessary, and now they set about dragging the waters of the dam in two parties, one in the flatboat which Powell kept there and one in the skiff which they had carried up from the river below. Bickler had promised to be there among the first, but Powell thought it quite like the man that he was not to be seen. He himself directed the course of the flatboat, close to the shore, and at a point where some bushes overhung it Bickler parted them and jumped aboard. No one spoke to him, but at his appearance there was a sensation in the men poling the heavy boat, as Powell bade them, in the low tones to which they dropped their voices with his. Bickler took his place at the bow and stooped over the still water with eyes that seemed to pierce its depths.

There was no wind, and the slow ripple of the flat-boat as it advanced scarcely broke the oily surface.

From time to time a red or yellow leaf dropped from an overhanging tree and made a faint circle in it. At the seine’s length away to the larboard the skiff kept even with the flatboat. When something caught the net below the waters, which had been lowered by opening the sluice in the dam, one of the men would say, “What’s that?” Then the course of the boats would be arrested till the net was carefully lifted and a decaying branch or sodden log released from it and thrown ashore. At such times Bickler would shrink back from where he knelt, or hold himself unmoved, with hands clenching the gunwale. When fish were brought up they were thrown back, not without mute appeals from the men which Powell denied, or protests from the boys on either shore who followed the course of the boats and saw the bass and mudcats and pickerel wastefully returned to their haunts among the roots holding the projecting banks together, or in the mats of withered iris along the shore.

The search went on for hours until the whole of the dam was dragged; then there had begun to be murmurs of impatience among the crews which Powell could not check. In fact, the event had been losing reality for him, and he was glad to be able to say at last: “Well, we might as well stop. There’s no use. Now we will try the head-race.” With the authority which would not have been conceded to him at other times he led the crowd of men, with its border of dogs and boys, down the banks of the race to the flood-gates below the sluice of the sawmill. In his progress he was aware of Bickler keeping close at his side, as if in terror of himself, and as the waters began their sheeted spurt from the opening valves of the gates he felt the man at his elbow.

Powell himself believed that the girl’s body, if she were drowned, might more probably be found in the race, which could, at any rate, be effectually searched; he seemed to draw breath in the wretch beside him and to watch with his vision for what the waters should reveal. He wanted to say to Bickler, whose gasping peculiarly molested him, to go away, but in pity he could not, and he was sensible of their calming their respiration together as the spurt from the gates grew weaker and lower without discovering what they mutually dreaded. With a sort of nether sense he perceived that Overdale had added himself to the crowd, and with bandaged head and one arm still in a sling was now appearing for the first time out-of-doors. No one noticed him, as if in the greater interest no one felt any strangeness in his presence.

At last the race was drained and the gates set wide. There was nothing but a heap of fish flapping and floundering in the scattered puddles left by the waste.

“Oh, blessed be God Almighty!” Powell heard Bickler groan out at his shoulder and then give a screech of terror and make a choking sound.

“Don’t you be too sure o’ God Almighty!” Overdale was shouting, and Powell saw him with his sound arm outstretched, as if he had leaped the pool that parted them; his hand was at Bickler’s throat, pushing him backward and making his head shake from side to side. “If Owen Powell, here,’ll say the word I’ll shake the life out of you!”

“What do you mean?” Powell shouted. “Let the man alone! Don’t any one touch him!” He turned to the others, for they seemed to be preparing for a rush upon Bickler. “He’s coming with me! Till there’s something proved against him he’s as innocent as any of you.” —

Some such disappointment as dumbly shows in a dog’s eyes when he is made to release his prey, and something of a man’s amaze at an unimaginable difference of opinion, was visible in Overdale; but he did as he was bid, and stood a little off so that Powell could put himself before Bickler and take, much against the grain, the wretch’s elbow in his hand and lead him away toward the new house. He turned and called back to the crowd: “There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have the fish now”; and this, if anything of the kind were needed, operated a diversion, and Bickler continued safe in his keeping.

XXI

“YES, Ann,” Powell said that night, after the children had gone to sleep, “you gave him shelter, I don’t deny, but can you say you gave him welcome?”

“I had no welcome to give him, and I don’t pretend that I had. All that I wanted after he got into the house was to get him safely out of it. I hate the sight of him, and I shouldn’t have been sorry if the crowd had seen him going.”

“Oh yes, you would, Ann. But the fish looked after that. If it hadn’t been for the fish, I doubt if your vigilance would have been enough to smuggle him through the back door and start him off to Spring Grove. But seriously, my dear, I think Bickler has behaved very well, considering the mischief he has made without meaning the whole of it. He certainly seems truly repentant.”

“I don’t care for his repentance. All the repenting in the world won’t bring poor Rosy back,” Ann said, with passionate pity for the girl.

“Well, perhaps she will come back of herself,”

Powell hopefully suggested.

“No, she never will come back. I just know her dreadful old mother has got her somewhere, and that’s the end of Rosy.”

In the morning it seemed as if Rosy might have stolen back. Her sunbonnet hung on its nail behind the kitchen door, and her shabby little shoes, side-worn at the heels, stood on the floor beneath it; but the day went by, and the days after that, and no Rosy returned to wear the bonnet and the shoes. Her poor best dress clung to the wall beside her bed in that mocking facsimile of the wearer which clothes have the trick of, and in her bureau drawer, among her ribbons and collars, Ann found the brooch which Bickler had given her.

“He must have made her take it again,” Ann said to her husband. “There is no telling how often the miserable scamp saw her or how he kept her from letting us know. We shall never have the truth from him.”

It was Powell’s belief, as the days and weeks went by, that they not only had the truth, but more than the truth from Bickler. He came almost daily, or, rather, nightly, to confess the wrong he had done and to repeat his repentance with some increasing form of selfaccusal. He owned that he had made the girl take back the brooch and keep it a secret from Mrs. Powell, and he exaggerated his guilt in the matter in order to extract the comfort from Powell which Powell more and more unwillingly ministered. He began escaping Bickler and leaving him to Ann, who healed his wounds by unsparing cautery rather than such medicament as Powell’s philosophic compassion supplied. The two, as they sat together in the kitchen, still haunted by the vanished presence of the girl, heard Powell tuning his harp, or striking it untuned, in the remotest front of the house, and singing to it some of the Scotch songs so alien to its Welsh nature. It tired Ann, too, having the man dwell upon his vain despair, his vain hope of finding Rosy; yet if he left these a moment with some hapless remark upon the minstrelsy she brought him pitilessly back and suffered on with him.

He still wore the fashionable clothes in which she had first seen him, for he had no others; but he seemed to have shrunk in them, and they hung about him in the neglect which they shared with his unshaven beard and unoiled hair. The splendor of his electioneering days was far from him; he remained visibly in the shame of his defeat at the polls. He rode up to the back of the house, and entered at the kitchen door with boots spattered from the mud of the country road. “I always think,” he would say, “that I’m going to find her here when you open the door. I reckon you haven’t heard anything yet?”

“Not yet, Bickler,” Powell would answer, kindly, “but I don’t give up the hope of doing so,” and then the wretched man would begin with the tale of his suffering and with his self-accusal mixed with self-pity.

“I don’t seem to care for eating any more, and I wake half a dozen times in the night. I always dream that she has come back, and as I get along nearer to your house I bet myself she won’t be here. God’s my judge, how glad I’d be to lose once.”

Powell could not forbear a smile. “Well, perhaps you will yet.”

“Mighty little chance, I reckon. Now, Mr. Powell, I’d like to go the case all over; go through it like as if it was in court.”

“Well, Bickler, you’ve done that already, you know.”

“But some points have come up in my mind. Still, I won’t to-night. There’s one thing, though, I wanted to speak about. Do you think it would do any good if I was to go into church, some church, and own up before everybody just how it was?”

“I doubt it, Bickler. Doesn’t everybody know the worst already?”

“Ah, they know more than the worst! They don’t know the best, bad as it is. I believe if it could be understood once — But what do I care what they think? It’s what I think myself that I care for. Do you suppose that if I made public confession it would help me to get the Lord’s forgiveness? I shouldn’t care whether it made them take after me, and tar and feather me, and ride me out of the county on a rail, if it would only help me to get a little peace of mind. But nothing will do it, and that’s a sign that the Lord isn’t going to forgive me. Oh my, oh my, oh my!”

They had talked again and again to this point, and again and again Powell had assured the sinner that if he owned his sin to himself he had disowned it, and that this renunciation made before himself and his wife was morally as effective as if made before the whole community.

“But what I want is punishment, something to take it out of me,” and it was at this point that the notion of relaxing him to the secular arm in the person of Mrs. Powell first occurred to her husband. He did not at once act upon it, but it finally formed his justification in summoning Ann to the conference, and when once the appeal had been made to her as a point for adjudication, retiring himself from the case and leaving it wholly to her.

She found at first a certain satisfaction in bringing his potential guilt before the wretched man, though in his collapse she could not always recognize him for the miscreant she theorized him, but at times felt as if he were some miserable boy, whose fault had found him out in worse guilt than it necessarily implied. From the pathos of this she had to recall herself to the abhorrence of his betrayal of Rosy to her mother; that was his greater guilt.

“There is one thing you can do, Mr. Bickler,” she” said at last, “and that is to look up that wicked old mother of hers.”

“What good would that do?” Bickler gasped, in the reluctance which he had for putting his remorse to a practical proof; it was much easier to suffer shame at the hands of the Powells than take some action that would entail the public consequences which he had professed himself so eager to meet.

“It would do the good that nothing else would. It would be the way of finding Rosy, if she is still alive. Her mother knows, if anybody. If you can’t find her mother, you can find that cousin of hers that cooks on the canal-boat. She could tell you where Rosy’s mother is, at any rate. But why do you make me tell you all this? You are a lawyer and you know how to act.”

Bickler answered, vaguely: “It’s like as if I couldn’t move. I can come here and talk with you, because you know about it, but it doesn’t seem as if I could speak to anybody else.”

“Well, then, I can tell you that’s very cowardly, and if you are as sorry as you pretend to be you’ll overcome it and do the only thing that’s left for you to do.”

“I’m afraid, I’m afraid; I don’t deny it. I can’t bear to speak her name anywhere, or to ask anybody, for fear I’ll find out that she’s dead, or worse than dead.”

“Then don’t come here any more, Mr. Bickler, for I won’t stand it. You pretend to be sorry and to want punishment, and you shirk it in the only shape you can get it.” Ann rose. “Now I want you to go and not come back unless you come to tell me that you’ve been to look for Rosy’s mother and cousin.”

Bickler got up perforce from the chair he was sunk in, and turned his cap on one hand with the other; he now always wore it pulled over his eyes and no longer jauntily slouched on one ear when he made his appearance at the hack door. “Don’t you think we had better talk it over with Mr. Powell?”

“No, I don’t. And if you want to know, Mr. Powell is sick and tired of your coming here, and he’ll never want to see you again unless you’ve really got something to tell.”

“That was rather severe, Ann,” Powell said when she repeated the fact to him. He looked down thoughtfully while she stared indignantly at him. “I am sick and tired of him. I realize that his repentance has worn out my patience. But it’s dreadful, isn’t it, that the remorse of a man should bore his fellow-creature?”

Ann was unable to enter into the psychological inquiry. “I don’t know anything about that, Owen, and I don’t care. It’s nearly enough, your taking it that way, to make me feel that there’s a pair of you — that you’re as bad as he is.”

Powell laughed now with a humorous sense of her excess. “Well, I hadn’t any part in driving poor Rosy away, exactly.”

“Perhaps you had. If you’d made him take his brooch back at once, or let me make him, it might never have come to his driving her away.”

This brought Powell’s guilt home to him. “Ann,” he said, solemnly, “you are right. I am to blame almost as much as Bickler himself. But it was mere forgetfulness—” —

“Forgetfulness may be a sin, too.”

Powell waived the point at least for the time being. “And what did he say when you told him I didn’t want to see him or wouldn’t?” —

“He didn’t say anything. Just went. What else could he do?”

“Nothing, I suppose. But it seems rather hard.” The tears of vexation came into Ann’s eyes. “Owen,” she said, “if I didn’t know how good you were, I should say you were the cruelest man in the world. And as it is, I will say you are the most trying.”

“Oh, my dear girl, I know I am trying, and I am sorry for it. You have done just exactly right with the fellow, and from this out I will take him in hand myself. I realize that I have been shirking him, and I assure you that I have been ashamed of myself for doing so. I ought to have borne with him to the bitter end, and the least reparation I can make him is to stand his remorse from now on.”

Bickler did not come the next night or the next, and then the third night Powell was true to his word and received him, though in illustration of her own regret for forcing the distasteful office upon him Ann presently joined them both. Perhaps a certain impatience for his report mixed with her compassion.

He showed a haggard face at the door, and asked, dry-tongued, to be allowed to sit down a moment first. He sat without offering to speak, and then had to be prompted by Powell with a “Well?” as sharp as he could make it.

“Well” — he took the word huskily on his own lips—” I didn’t see her mother. I found the canal-boat, and I saw her cousin. Rosy — Rosy has gone off somewhere with her mother. I’ve been in Tuskingum the last three days, and I’ve searched the place all over — everywhere that I was afraid she would be.”

He began to cry piteously, to sob and to moan, and to rock himself backward and forward in his chair.

Ann stared at him silently, but the sight wrought upon Powell so that he made several beginnings of consolation. “Oh, well, we mustn’t give up all — Certainly they can be found somewhere or other — There isn’t the least danger but what—”

Ann stopped him with a distracted cry of “Owen!”

XXII

No man lives well into the forties, as Owen Powell had lived, if he is of Owen Powell’s philosophic mind, without realizing that it is not a misfortune misfortunes come not single spies. He perceives that he borrows from one misfortune strength to support another, and power somehow from their successive help to turn the day against them all. The trouble lingers near, but the man is left in possession of the field.

It had often seemed to Powell that his life at New Leaf Mills had been a series of large and little tragedies which were none the less tragic because they were also rather squalidly comic. He had grieved most truly for the fate of the unhappy girl who was like a child in his family, and he had fully shared his wife’s anger with the means by which the offense came. His anger passed as Bickler’s remorse persisted, and, though the remorse bored him more and more, he could not refuse him the sympathy the man did not merit; the stress of its reason remained. The girl was gone in mysterious silence to a destiny that his wife and he, though it harrowed them with its dreadful possibility, did not explicitly forecast, but left in the silence into which Rosy herself had vanished. Now when a letter came from his brother James at Middleville definitely renouncing his hope of joining the family community at the mills, Powell found a sort of relief in thinking of Rosy and her intangible disaster; and again when the new miller said one morning that he had made up his mind not to stay any longer, and the running of the mills must fall into the unskilled hands of himself and Richard, he took comfort from his brother’s defection, and could at least join Ann in refusing to blame Jim and Sally for not wanting to come to such a hapless place.

But Ann’s real stay in the matter was her faith in the coming of Felix in the spring. That was to be atonement for all injuries, compensation for all losses, and it seemed to her that it was by the direct favor of Heaven that the day after Jim’s letter came there should be one from Jessamy reporting a great increasing improvement in Felix, so great that she was now fully sharing his never-failing hopefulness. The letter had been a week making its slow steamboat journey up the Mississippi and the Ohio, but Ann was not impatient with that. She began reading it aloud, and then she stopped her reading aloud and partly reported its tenor to Powell.

“Yes, there isn’t one unfavorable thing. He’s made such a wonderful gain in strength. Cough better; he sleeps better than he ever has. His appetite Has increased. He takes walks and doesn’t get so tired. They will be here in April if He keeps on gaining. And I had such a bad dream again last night about Felix! I suppose it was that miserable Bickler’s talking about Rosy and thinking she was dead. I hated to tell you what my dream was this morning, and now I needn’t tell you. Let’s go and look at their room. We ought to get it plastered right away, if we don’t the others, so that it will be good and dry for them.”

The Powells were standing on the sawn-off piece of sill which formed their provisional doorstep, and Ann had opened and read her letter there. As they turned to go in she caught sight over her shoulder of a boy on a horse splashing through the tail-race and waving what seemed a letter in his hand toward them.

“Oh, what can it he, Owen?” she implored.

Powell went down to the road to meet the boy. “It’s a telegraphic despatch,” he called to her; it was too early in the history of telegraphing to call the thing a telegram. He fumbled in his pocket for money to pay the boy, and Ann suffered at the door.

“Oh, open it, open it!” she lamented.

Powell opened it slowly as he came toward her. Then, standing beside her, with his encouraging smile still on his face, he read mechanically: “Felix died last night. Coming north with him. Have written. Jessamy.”

“My dream!” Ann said. “Oh, poor Jessamy!” And then she looked at her husband’s face, and she said, “Oh, poor Owen!” She knew that he loved Felix, as in large families the eldest is apt to love the youngest, with fatherly affection.

She cried. Owen did not cry with tears, but he whimpered like a child controlling itself.

“He didn’t think,” Ann said, finding help in the detail, “when he sent me that bag of coffee that he was going to die before I used half of it. Where will she have the funeral? They will bring him to Tuskingum. We must be there to meet Jessamy.”

The circumstances of their sorrow softened their sorrow, and their sorrow softened others toward them a little. The new miller promised he would stay until they could get somebody, and Owen left Richard to look after the younger children while he went with their mother to the funeral.

Ann told Richard about it when she came back. All the brothers of Felix had been at the funeral, but only one of them had talked as if he would come to the mills. He was the next to Owen in age, and was most in sympathy with him religiously. But he had not been able to wind up his business, as he said, and he was uncertain whether he could sell out.

“If he comes here,” Richard’s mother said to him, “I suppose we must go, and if he doesn’t I don’t know how we are to stay. I don’t believe your father could make enough out of the mills to keep them going; he’s only got along with your poor uncle’s help. I’m sorry for your poor father every way; I know he likes this dreadful place, and that it will be a struggle for him to go out into the world again and find something. You must help him all you can, Richard.”

She took the boy’s hand and smoothed it with her own. “Oh, surely we can get something, mother,” he said, and his adventurous spirit fired at the notion of getting it by some miraculous chance. “I don’t believe it’s too late yet for us to go to California. I could go ahead.”

“You mustn’t think of that, Dick, dear. But you might go down to the City and look round. You have such good business faculty. I have been thinking about it already, for we must settle somewhere or have the prospect of it before the winter. Your father has friends among the New Church people there, and you could see them for him.”

The two talked the chances over, and took more and more courage from their talk. Powell was out looking after the pigs and hens; he had almost a personal understanding with the pigs in their wildness among the fallen leaves on the hillside, and with the chickens in their home-loving tameness about the back yard; his familiarity always made it difficult to part with them for the ends that pork and poultry seem appointed to in the order of Providence; at such moments he owned that he was inclined to a vegetable diet. Now he came in flushed with interest in certain characters among them, and already so cheered from his contact with nature that Ann tried to hide her gloom from him; she knew he had not really forgotten his brother, and that he had comforted himself from supernature as well as nature.

“You’ll be wanting supper, Owen,” she said, putting on an apron over her dress, “and I reckon the children will, too.”

“Why, yes, I suppose I will, though I didn’t realize that I was hungry. I declare, I never saw such a sunset. It blazed through the trees on the western side of the hill like a fire. Do you know,” he added, fallenly, “that I wanted to tell Felix about it. Isn’t it strange? But perhaps he was seeing it too where he is.”

Ann could not say; she left him sitting before the hearth in the latticed bower which was to have been their parlor; and presently the cheerful hiss of frying made itself heard from the kitchen, where she was busy over the stove, while the children were setting the supper-table in the other latticed bower which was to have been the dining-room.

Richard had gone to get some apples from the Bladen orchard, where the Powells were always welcome without special leave. Lizzie Bladen was there picking mushrooms, and he helped her fill her apron with them before he filled his own hat and pockets with apples. They did not talk much; only a few shy words. She asked him if his father and mother had got back from the funeral, and she said she would like to see Tuskingum again. Dick was cautious even with her, and he said he believed if they ever left the mills they would go to the City to live.

She said, “I would like to see the City once, but I would rather live in Tuskingum.”

“That’s because we are more used to it, I suppose,” Richard said. When he remembered on the way home that he had said we, it seemed as if he had been rather bold. After supper he told his mother what Lizzie Bladen had said about Tuskingum, and she answered, Indeed she would rather live in Tuskingum, too, but she knew there was no chance for his father there; and they spent the evening planning for him in the City, while Powell was busy looking over his accounts by the parlor fire. He ended with more courage in the possibilities of the mills than he had when talking it over with Ann on their way back from the funeral. He had then taken the burden of her mood, but now he rose from his dejection. There was no longer any question of turning them into paper-mills or carrying out the scheme of a semi-communal settlement at New Leaf. That must be all given up, and Powell gave it up not without a pang then and there, though he must often recur to it regretfully afterward. What, seemed practicable was some arrangement with Overdale, who could contribute his experience and look to the joint profits of the concern for his compensation, while Powell would supply the capital for carrying it on. He did not at once determine where the capital was to come from, but on reflection it appeared to him that his brother David, whether he did or did not decide to take hold actively himself, might arrange to let him have something to keep on with.

The scheme still wore so hopeful an aspect in the morning that he approached Overdale confidently with it. He could not help believing that somehow the man’s nature should have been changed by his experiences, and, though this was quite as unreasonable, in his philosophy, as the saving effect of a death-bed repentance, he could not persuade himself that Overdale was not cherishing a secret amity toward him and would not be glad to show himself a friend if occasion offered, especially if the occasion embraced an obvious advantage. But when he opened the matter Overdale bluntly refused, not quite with his old savagery, but still gruffly and finally. He said that he was going away from New Leaf as soon as he could get away. He was going to sell his stock and furniture at vendue, and stay with his wife’s family near Spring Grove for the winter and then move West in the spring.

He did not vouchsafe an explanation or offer an acknowledgment of Powell’s good-will; and Powell, in philosophizing the fact to Ann, who had tried to dissuade him from approaching Overdale with his suggestion, interested himself without rancor in the study of human nature which the incident afforded. He decided that Overdale kept his moroseness on as a cloak to hide the shame he felt before him because Powell knew the cause of his baseless terror in the past. The fight against this terror had drawn out the man’s strength, and he could have died valiantly fighting, but his rescue had left him cowed. While the foreboding remained his secret he could keep his selfrespect, but when it became known he could not continue without humiliation in the presence of the man who shared it. In a sort of way he was perhaps grateful to Powell, and his attack on Bickler might be taken as an expression of gratitude which otherwise he could not own. He was like a man who had been dignified by the vision of a specter and then cast down by finding it a shadow or a dead tree. Or perhaps it was only the man’s nature to be surly and to find a supreme satisfaction in thwarting an expectation of friendliness; he was merely fulfilling the design of the Power which makes ugliness and makes beauty by the same creative impulse.

Powell allowed this possibility, which Ann, in language less psychological, suggested when she said she was glad that he was to have nothing to do with the sulky wretch, and hoped that now he would not try to make anything of him again. She did not otherwise betray her satisfaction in an event which took from Powell his last hope of remaining at New Leaf Mills. She realized too keenly the disappointment which she could not share, and she tried to make her gradual preparations for leaving the place as tacit as possible. Yet of course they could not be carried on, or even fairly begun, without his knowledge and connivance, and when she found him going about the wonted routine as if he were always to go about it she felt the necessity of coming to open terms. For a while she watched him dreamily denying by his actions the situation which his thoughts must have owned, and then she spoke.

“I know you hate to go, Owen,” she said one evening, when he came in from a walk with the children and was building a fire on the parlor hearth.

He looked round, with his face still hidden from her by the blaze behind his head. “To go?”

“Surely you don’t think we can keep on staying here?”

He sank back upon his heels where he knelt. “No, certainly not. But I see no occasion for hurry. If David should decide to come, perhaps we could arrange—”

“No, we couldn’t, Owen, and you know it well enough. This house wouldn’t be big enough for both families — let alone the living from the mills. Oh, don’t you see, my dear, that we have got to go whether David comes here or not?”

“Yes,” he said, so dispiritedly that she had hardly the heart to press on, as she knew she must. “I suppose so.”

“Don’t you know so?”

“I know it, but I don’t realize it. I will try to realize it, my dear,” he said.

“You must at once,” she persisted. “Richard and I, here, have been talking it over, and I want you to let him go down to the City and look round for something you can get hold of. He has such good business faculty I know he can find something. We don’t see why you shouldn’t get hold of the New Church bookstore—”

“Ann,” he said, and he got to his feet as he spoke, “I thought of that the instant you spoke of the City. It is strange that the same thing should have been in both of our minds at once,” he said, tasting the mystical quality of the fact.

“Yes, it is,” she owned, glad of his interest, even though it was so far from a practical interest.

“Perhaps,” he said, “it was an influx from the spiritual world in both our minds. We must act upon it,” he continued, with increasing energy; and that night he took the matter up with Richard and Ann. “Yes,” he concluded, as he rose to wind the clock, “the outlook is very hopeful. You could get something to do, Dick, until I could work you into the business, or perhaps I should need you from the start; certainly I should want your help for a while. I have an idea that a New Church periodical of some sort could be made to pay.” Ann looked a little troubled at this conjecture, but she would not discourage it.

“As jet we have nothing west of the Alleghanies in the way of a periodical. And in that event I should certainly require your help, Dick. You could solicit subscriptions and advertising.” He planned it vividly out. Then as he paused, with the shovel in his hand before covering the fire for the night, he asked, “When do you think he had better start, Ann?”

“Why, the sooner the better,” she said. “I could get him ready by to-morrow afternoon, poor boy; he hasn’t so much to take with him. He could walk to Spring Grove and take the railroad cars for the City there.”

“I don’t know about the sinews of war,” Powell mused, feeling in his pocket and finding a silver dollar there. “I declare, I hadn’t realized since I left Tuskingum that we were poor! We shall realize it more and more, Ann, in the City. We have been rich here, for we haven’t wanted anything; we shall have many wants there. I suppose a dollar wouldn’t go far there even with Dick; the hotels are a dollar a day.”

“Oh, if you are going to look at it in that light!” Ann lamented.

“I’m not. Walters has been talking about buying our pigs. I could send word in the morning, and if he pays cash in part we can start Dick off like a prince with five dollars in his pocket.”

“And I’m not afraid but what I can get something to do while I’m looking up the business for you, father,” Dick said. “If Uncle Ben’s boat happens to be in, I can stay on that till she goes out.”

“That is true,” Powell admitted. “Well, we will see what a night brings forth,” and now he covered the fire.

XXIII

THE farmer who wanted the pigs had not changed his mind about them, but he had changed his mind about the price and about the amount of cash which he would pay when he came to look them over in the morning, so that in the afternoon Dick started for the City with three dollars and seventy-five cents in his pocket; it seemed to him a good deal, and he regarded it as capital which would readily multiply. His heart was full of the hope of adventure, and he walked along with his brother, the Dreamer, toward Spring Grove. His brother thought it would be fine to tell about the adventures which Dick thought it would be fine to have; and that was the great difference between them. They were sorry to part, but the younger would not have gone with Dick if he could. When they came to the point where they had agreed that he was to turn back neither of them had any thought of his going farther. They kissed each other in the fashion of their childhood, and then Dick kept on, and his brother stood a moment watching him in the pale afternoon light of the early November day and wondering how it would feel to be going off in the night to a place where he knew no one. He dreamed instantly an awful dream of himself in the supposed case, but he did not notice that Dick had no overcoat and no precaution against a change of weather except the comforter he wore stringing from his shoulders. He, no more than his father, knew that they were poor, and Dick did not mean to be poor for more than a day or two, if there was any faith in adventure. He carried a little linen bag which his mother had made and put in it a shirt and two pairs of home-knit socks for his sole baggage. After he rounded the southern slope of the hill, which hid the new house from sight, he came to the Bladens’ house, with the orchard next the road. Dick thought he would get over the fence and pick up an apple or two When he put his hands on the top rail to spring over, he saw Lizzie Bladen under the best tree. She came toward the fence with one of the apples in her hand; and he thought her coloring was like the apple she held out to him — the ivory, almost sallow, white of the bellflower, brightened by her gentle dark eyes.

“Don’t you want it?” —

He took it absently. “I’m going to the City, he explained, as if his equipment needed explanation first of all.

“I heard so,” the girl answered, looking down at the foot she was pushing against a tuft of grass.

Then neither of them spoke until Dick said at last, “Thank you for the apple, Lizzie.”

“You’re entirely welcome. Would you like more?”

“No, this will be plenty.” Somehow it seemed now as if more apples would spoil her gift. “Well, I must be going, Lizzie.”

“Good-by, Dick.”

Neither could say more; and it was the last time they saw each other. —

For the rest of the family the days began to go with a sort of eager swiftness. The children were on fire with wild notions of the City; but the father went about the usual work of the place, overseeing the sawmill chiefly and keeping a slighter supervision of the grist-miller, who would have resented more and was, as he sometimes reminded Powell, just staying on to accommodate.

That week Overdale had his vendue, and auctioned off his pigs and poultry, and the larger household stuff which he did not care to take away. It was a stirring event for the neighborhood, and culminated in the departure of the miller and his family the next day for Spring Grove on the new wagon which he had bought to move West in. The children were scattered in different vantages of the bedding, and on the top, in a sort of triumph, rode the sloom deeply hidden in her sunbonnet. The miller drove, and Powell thought that as he passed the new house to cross the tail-race he might stop to say good-by. But he did not stop, and Powell did not attempt to stay him. Ann watched his passing with regret for Powell’s letting him. “Don’t you think you’d better go out and speak, Owen?”

“I’ve decided not. It’s better as it is — it might afflict him to have me. It’s more in his nature so, and he can manage better.”

“You as good as saved his life.”

“Oh, there wasn’t the least danger of his dying.”

In those days Ann relented more and more to the man whom she saw still so little able to realize their situation. One morning she found him, after seeking everywhere else for him, in the empty log cabin, coming down from the loft as if he had been looking the forlorn place over. “Owen,” she accused him, “I do believe you’ve been seeing if this hovel would do for us if David comes to live in the new house.”

He laughed in a guilty way. “I’ve been seeing that it would not do,” he ended, with a sigh.

“Oh,” she said, “if you could only see that the whole place won’t do, and never would!”

“I dare say I shall come to that,” he consented, sadly.

He moped, she felt, as the time went by, and he was cheerfuler only when some letter, full of hope without expectation, came from Dick. The boy had got a temporary place in the New Church book-store; but the business was not for sale, and he was looking for something else. The most discouraging of the letters seemed to cheer Powell most: he was like a condemned man to whom respite brings the hope of reprieve. That vexed Ann with him; but she knew he could not help it, and her heart ached for him. She had always had to fortify him for his encounters with the world, and she understood how in this retreat from it he had felt a safety and peace that he had never felt in its presence. With her practical mind she had not been able to enter into his poetic joy in a return to the simple things dear to him from his boyhood, but with her heart she could divine the anticipative homesickness that now possessed him.

Late one afternoon the Dreamer, who had been sent to Spring Grove for the mail, came back with a letter from Dick, which the mother tore open and read through with a flushing face, and then looked about her for the father. He was not in the house, and she ran to the back door and saw him stretched upon the hill slope above; there, propped on one elbow, he seemed to be gazing out over the landscape. She started eagerly toward him, but her steps grew slower, and she hid the letter in the pocket of her dress and kept her hand on it there as if it might escape.

As she came near and nearer the gentle child-hearted man, whom she knew so brave and wise for all high occasions, her breast filled with worship and pity of him), and it seemed to her as if she were going to deal him some cruel hurt with the news she had. She remembered how good and patient he had been through the trials of their life in the squalor of that place, which he could have liked no more than she; how hard he had worked; how he helped her keep her courage through their common trials from the rude conditions among the rude neighbors, in the hope of bettering both. She remembered the unselfish purpose which he had infused into the necessity of their coming, and how he had not chosen to come, but, being chosen, had sought for beauty in their squalid lot; how he had never repined at the worst of it, but with his sweet humor had tried to laugh the ugliness away. She knew the gifts of heart and mind which needed only the push of ambition to make him valued in the world, and she blamed herself for blaming him that he had taken so modestly the ignorant ill-will of the clowns and savages about him. She considered, swiftly, as she slowed her swift pace, that his solace and reparation were in her and in their children, and that he had not cared for anything outside of his home except for the aspect of those fields and woods which she abhorred. She perceived as never before that he loved the countenance of the seasons and the skies, unvexed by the noise and turmoil of the town where he had somehow found himself so unfitted for the struggle in which she believed he might have succeeded. She was going now to take him from the simple things of nature so dear to him, and hurry him back into the town, and plunge him again into the cares and troubles which might harass him into another failure. She could not bear it, and she ran toward him with the renunciation in her will that took her breath and made her heart beat so that she shook with it as she stood beside him.

“I was just thinking, Ann,” he said, smiling without waiting for her to speak, “how beautiful this prospect is. I suppose that in the spiritual world there will be scenery that will far surpass it; in fact, according as our mood is there, we shall create scenes of heavenly beauty. But — but — this is dear because it is familiar, because it is like a beloved face, because I know it — Why, Ann!”

She had sunk down beside him, and she began to cry, with her face in her hands. He took them down and wiped away her tears with his handkerchief, as if they were young people together. “What is the matter, my poor girl?”

She turned bravely upon him. “Owen,” she demanded, “would you like to stay here? Because if you would I am ready to stay, and I will never say another word against the place. I know we could make the log cabin do.”

“Have you had a letter from David? Have they decided to come?”

“No, it isn’t from him. But whether they come or not Pm ready to stay. Don’t you believe me, Owen?” He took the hand she had put on his knee and held it there in his hand. “I believe you would try, and that is all that is expected of us. But we can’t stay, Ann. The cabin is hardly fit for cattle, and, besides, how could I carry on the mills? I have no means, and I realize that I am unfit to deal with the people about here. I think they are friendlier than they were, but they don’t understand me, and I don’t believe I’ve ever understood them.”

“They are savages!” Ann passionately broke out.

“Oh no, oh no; not quite so bad as that, though they are not very polished. I fancy I can get on better with people of a somewhat more advanced civilization.

At any rate, I am willing to make the experiment.”

“Do you say that because you know I want it?”

“I know you want it, but I don’t say it for that reason. I rather want it myself at times. This has been a beautiful dream—”

“Owen, if ever I said a true word to you in my life I am saying it now! I want to stay here; I want to stay here, and not go to the City.”

“But you can’t stay, Ann; that dream is passed, and we can’t dream it over again.”

“Then, there!” she said, and she pulled Richard’s letter out of her pocket and threw it into his lap. “Dick has got the business for you. The Wilsons are willing to give up the store, and they will take your notes for the stock and good-will; they’ve just heard of a chance in Chicago; they say that’s quite a growing place, and there are more New Church people there. They have been very good to Dick, and they’ve asked him to stay with them till we can come down and take hold; and now we needn’t even hurry.”

“I think,” Powell said, formally, “that it will be better not to lose any time,” and now he lost none in confirming himself in the things she had said from Richard’s letter. “It seems a good opportunity, and we must not let it slip through our fingers by any sort of delay.”

He spent the evening in making a box to hold his books; but he decided to leave the harp, trusting it to the fraternal tenderness of David, in the possibility that some of David’s children might learn to play on it; his own had not, but Powell was inwardly aware that he himself had not. Ann and he sat up late talking the whole affair over, and it appeared to him more and more probable that something in the nature of a New Church periodical might succeed in connection with the book-store.

When they were settled in the City he was patient with the reasons which his New Church friends urged against the scheme. He had known some of them before, and he found them very agreeable and cultivated men. They were rather conservative in some things, but Powell himself, while holding fast to the fundamental principles of justice in politics, now confined his assertion of them to aiding the escape of fugitive slaves from Kentucky, whom he enjoyed hiding in the basement of his store, till he could forward them to some other underground station. He did not relinquish the ideal of a true state of things which he and his brothers had hoped to realize at New Leaf Mills, but he was inclined to regard the communistic form as defective. The communities of Robert Owen had everywhere failed as signally as that of New Leaf Mills, which indeed could scarcely be said to have passed the embryonic stage. But he argued, not so strenuously as he used to argue things, but as formally, that if some such conception of society could possess the entire State, a higher type of civilization would undoubtedly eventuate.

THE END

THE LEATHERWOOD GOD

CONTENTS

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

THE LEATHERWOOD GOD

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The author thinks it well to apprise the reader that the historical outline of this story is largely taken from the admirable narrative of Judge Taneyhill in the Ohio Valley Series, Robert Clarke Co., Cincinnati. The details are often invented, and the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events in its main development; but the vital incidents, or the vital uses of them, are the author’s. At times he has enlarged them; at times he has paraphrased the accounts of the witnesses; in one instance he has frankly reproduced the words of the imposter as reported by one who heard Dylks’s last address in the Temple at Leatherwood and as given in the Taneyhill narrative. Otherwise the story is effectively fiction.

THE LEATHERWOOD GOD

Already, in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the settlers in the valley of Leatherwood Creek had opened the primeval forest to their fields of corn and tobacco on the fertile slopes and rich bottom-lands. The stream had its name from the bush growing on its banks, which with its tough and pliable bark served many uses of leather among the pioneers; they made parts of their harness with it, and the thongs which lifted their door-latches, or tied their shoes, or held their working clothes together. The name passed to the settlement, and then it passed to the man, who came and went there in mystery and obloquy, and remained lastingly famed in the annals of the region as the Leatherwood God.

At the time he appeared the community had become a center of influence, spiritual as well as material, after a manner unknown to later conditions. It was still housed, for the most part, in the log cabins which the farmers built when they ceased to be pioneers, but in the older clearings, and along the creek a good many frame dwellings stood, and even some of brick. The population, woven of the varied strains from the North, East and South which have mixed to form the Mid-Western people, enjoyed an ease of circumstance not so great as to tempt their thoughts from the other world and fix them on this. In their remoteness from the political centers of the young republic, they seldom spoke of the civic questions stirring the towns of the East; the commercial and industrial problems which vex modern society were unknown to them. Religion was their chief interest and the seriousness which they had inherited from their Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and Moravian ancestry was expressed in their orderly and diligent lives; but the general prosperity had so far relaxed the stringency of their several creeds that their distinctive public rite had come to express a mutual toleration. The different sects had their different services; their ceremonies of public baptism, their revivals, their camp-meetings; but they gathered as one Christian people under the roof of the log-built edifice, thrice the size of their largest dwelling, which they called the Temple.

I

A storm of the afternoon before had cleared the mid-August air. The early sun was hot, but the wind had carried away the sultry mists, and infused fresh life into the day. Where Matthew Braile sat smoking his corncob pipe in the covered porchway between the rooms of his double-log cabin he insensibly shared the common exhilaration, and waited comfortably for the breakfast of bacon and coffee which his wife was getting within. As he smoked on he inhaled with the odors from her cooking the dense rich smell of the ripening corn that stirred in the morning breeze on three sides of the cabin, and the fumes of the yellow tobacco which he had grown, and cured, and was now burning. His serenity was a somewhat hawklike repose, but the light that came into his narrowed eyes was of rather amused liking, as a man on a claybank horse rode up before the cabin in the space where alone it was not hidden by the ranks of the tall corn. The man sat astride a sack with a grist of corn in one end balanced by a large stone in the other, and he made as if he were going on to the mill without stopping; but he yielded apparently to a temptation from within, since none had come from without. “Whoa!” he shouted at the claybank, which the slightest whisper would have stayed; and then he called to the old man on the porch, “Fine mornun’, Squire!”

Braile took out his pipe, and spat over the edge of the porch, before he called back, “Won’t you light and have some breakfast?”

“Well, no, thank you, Squire,” the man said, and at the same time he roused the claybank from an instant repose, and pushed her to the cabin steps. “I’m just on my way down to Brother Hingston’s mill, and I reckon Sally don’t want me to have any breakfast till I bring back the meal for her to git it with; anyway that’s what she said when I left.” Braile answered nothing, and the rider of the claybank added, with a certain uneasiness as if for the effect of what he was going to say, “I was up putty late last night, and I reckon I overslep’,” he parleyed. Then, as Braile remained silent, he went on briskly, “I was wonderin’ if you hearn about the curious doun’s last night at the camp-meetun’.”

Braile, said, without ceasing to smoke, “You’re the first one I’ve seen this morning, except my wife. She wasn’t at the camp-meeting.” His aquiline profile, which met close at the lips from the loss of his teeth, compressed itself further in leaving the whole burden of the affair to the man on the claybank, and his narrowed eyes were a line of mocking under the thick gray brows that stuck out like feathers above them.

“Well, sir, it was great doun’s,” the other said, wincing a little under the old man’s indifference. Braile relented so far as to ask, “Who was at the bellows?”

The other answered with a certain inward deprecation of the grin that spread over his face, and the responsive levity of his phrase, “There was a change of hands, but the one that kep’ the fire goun’ the hardes’ and the hottes’ was Elder Grove.”

Braile made “Hoonck!” in the scornful guttural which no English spelling can represent.

“Yes, sir,” the man on the claybank went on, carried forward by his own interest, but helpless to deny himself the guilty pleasure of falling in with Braile’s humor, “he had ’em goun’ lively, about midnight, now I tell you: whoopun’ and yellun’, and rippun’ and stavun’, and fallun’ down with the jerks, and pullun’ and haulun’ at the sinners, to git ’em up to the mourners’ bench, and hurrahun’ over ‘em, as fast as they was knocked down and drug out. I never seen the beat of it in all my born days.”

“You don’t make out anything very strange, Abel Reverdy,” Braile said, putting his pipe back into his mouth and beginning to smoke it again into a lost activity.

“Well, I hain’t come to it yit,” Reverdy apologized. “I reckon there never was a bigger meetun’ in Leatherwood Bottom, anywhere. Folks there from twenty mile round, just slathers; I reckon there was a thousand if there was one.”

“Hoonch!” Braile would not trouble to take out his pipe in making the sound now; the smoke got into his lungs, and he coughed.

Reverdy gained courage to go on, but he went on in the same strain, whether in spite of himself or not. “There was as many as four exhorters keepun’ her up at once to diff’rent tunes, and prayun’ and singun’ everywhere, so you couldn’t hear yourself think. Every exhorter had a mourners’ bench in front of him, and I counted as many as eighty mourners on ’em at one time. The most of ’em was settun’ under Elder Grove, and he was poundun’ the kingdom into ’em good and strong. When the Spirit took him he roared so that he had the Hounds just flaxed out; you couldn’t ketch a yelp from ‘em.”

“Many Hounds?” Braile asked, in a sort of cold sympathy with the riotous outlaws known to the religious by that name.

“Mought been ‘fore I got there. But by that time I reckon they was most of ’em on the mourners’ benches. They ought to tar and feather some of them fellers, or ride ’em on a rail anyway, comun’ round, and makun’ trouble on the edge of camp-meetun’s. I didn’t hear but one toot from their horns, last night, and either because the elder had shamed ’em back into the shadder of the woods, or brought ’em forwards into the light, there wasn’t a Hound, not to call a Hound, anywheres. I tell you it was a sight, Squire; you ought to ‘a’ been there yourself.” Reverdy grinned at his notion. “They had eight camp-fires goun’ instead o’ four, on top of the highest stageun’s yit, so the whole place was lit up as bright as day; and when the elder stopped short and sudden, and the other exhorters held back their tommyhawks, and all the saints and sinners left off their groanun’ and jerkun’ to see what was comun’, now it was a great sight, I tell you, Squire. The elder he put up his hand and says he, ‘Let us pray!’ and the blaze from all them stageun’s seemed to turn itself right onto him, and the smoke and the leaves hung like a big red cloud over him, and everybody had their eyes fastened tight on his face, like they couldn’t turn ’em anywhere else if they tried. But he didn’t begin prayun’ straight off. He seemed to stop, and then says he, ‘What shall we pray for?’ and just then there came a kind of a snort, and a big voice shouted out, ‘Salvation!’ and then there come another snort,— ‘Hooff!’ — like there was a scared horse got loose right in there among the people; and some of ’em jumped up from their seats, and tumbled over the benches, and some of ’em bounced off, and fell into fits, and the women screeched and fainted, thick as flies. It give me about the worst feelun’ I ever had in my life: went through me like a ax, and others said the same; some of ’em said it was like beun’ scared in the dark, or more like when you think you’re just goun’ to die.”

Abel Reverdy stopped for the effect on Braile, who had been smoking tranquilly throughout, and who now asked quietly, “And what was it?”

“What was it? A man! A stranger that nobody seen before, and nobody suspicioned was there till they hearn him give that kind of snort, and they seen him standun’ right in front of the mourners’ bench under Elder Grove’s pulpit. He was in his bare head, and he had a suit of long, glossy, jet-black hair hengun down back of his ears clean to his shoulders. He was kind of pale like, and sad-lookun’, and he had a Roman nose some like yourn, and eyes like two coals, just black fire, kind of. He was putty thickset, round the shoulders, but he slimmed down towards his legs, and he stood about six feet high. But the thing of it,” Reverdy urged, seeing that Braile remained outwardly unmoved, “was the way he was dressed. I s’pose the rest beun’ all in brown jeans, and linsey woolsey, made us notice it more. He was dressed in the slickest kind of black broadcloth, with a long frock-coat, and a white cravat. He had on a ruffled shirt, and a tall beaver hat, the color of the fur, and a pair of these here high boots, with his breeches strapped down under ‘em.”

Braile limbered himself from his splint-bottom chair, and came forward to the edge of the porch, as if to be sure of spitting quite under the claybank’s body. Not until he had folded himself down into his seat again and tilted it back did he ask, “Goin’ to order a suit?”

“Oh, well!” said Reverdy, with a mingling of disappointed hope, hurt vanity, and involuntary pleasure.

If he had been deeply moved by the incident which he had tried to make Braile see with his own sense of its impressiveness, it could not have been wholly with the hope of impressing Braile that he had stopped to tell it. His notion might have been that Braile would ridicule it, and so help him throw off the lingering hold which it had upon him. His pain and his pleasure both came from Braile’s leaving the incident alone and turning the ridicule upon him. That was cruel, and yet funny, Reverdy had inwardly to own, as it touched the remoteness from a full suit of black broadcloth represented by his hickory shirt and his butternut trousers held up by a single suspender passing over his shoulder and fastened before and behind with wooden pegs. His straw hat, which he had braided himself, and his wife had sewed into shape the summer before, was ragged round the brim, and a tuft of his yellow hair escaped through a break in the crown. It was as far from a tall hat of fur-colored beaver as his bare feet were from a pair of high boots such as the stranger at the camp-meeting had worn, though his ankles were richly shaded in three colors from the road, the field, and the barnyard. He liked the joke so well that the hurt of it could hardly keep him from laughing as he thumped his mare’s ribs with his naked heels and bade her get up.

She fetched a deep sigh, but she did not move.

“Better light,” Braile said; “you wouldn’t get that corn ground in time for breakfast, now.”

“I reckon,” Reverdy said aloud, but to himself, rather than Braile, and with his mind on his wife in the log cabin where he had left her in high rebellion which she promised him nothing but a bag of cornmeal could reduce, “she don’t need to wait for me, exactly. She could grate herself some o’ the new corn, and she’s got some bacon, anyway.”

“Better light,” Braile said again.

The sound of frying which had risen above their voices within had ceased, and after a few quick movements of feet over the puncheon floor, with some clicking of knives and dishes, the feet came to the door opening on the porch and a handsome elderly woman looked out.

She was neatly dressed in a home-woven linsey-woolsey gown, with a blue check apron reaching to its hem in front, and a white cloth passed round her neck and crossed over her breast; she had a cap on her iron gray hair.

Braile did not visibly note her presence in saying, “The woman will want to hear about it.”

“Hear about what?” his wife asked, and then she said to Reverdy, “Good morning, Abel. Won’t you light and have breakfast with us? It’s just ready. I reckon Sally will excuse you.”

“Well, she will if you say so, Mrs. Braile.” Reverdy made one action of throwing his leg over the claybank’s back to the ground, and slipping the bridle over the smooth peg left from the limb of the young tree-trunk which formed one of the posts of the porch. “My!” he said, as he followed his hostess indoors, “you do have things nice. I never come here without wantun’ to have my old shanty whitewashed inside like yourn is, and the logs plastered outside; the mud and moss of that chinkun’ and daubun’ keeps fallun’ out, and lettun’ all the kinds of weather there is in on us, and Sally she’s at me about it, too; she’s wuss’n I am, if anything. I reckon if she had her say we’d have a two-room cabin, too, and a loft over both parts, like you have, Mis’ Braile, or a frame house, even. But I don’t believe anybody but you could keep this floor so clean. Them knots in the puncheons just shine! And that chimbly-piece with that plaster of Paris Samuel prayin’ in it; well, if Sally’s as’t me for a Samuel once I reckon she has a hundred times; and that clock! It’s a pictur’.” He looked about the interior as he took the seat offered him at the table, and praised the details of the furnishing with a reference to the effect of each at home. In this he satisfied that obscure fealty of the husband who feels that such a connection of the absent wife with some actual experience of his is equivalent to their joint presence. It was not so much to praise Mrs. Braile’s belongings to her as to propitiate the idea of Mrs. Reverdy that he continued his flatteries. In the meantime Braile, who came in behind him, stood easing himself from one foot to the other, with an ironical eye slanted at Reverdy from under his shaggy brows; he dropped his head now, and began walking up and down the room while he listened in a sort of sarcastic patience.

“Ain’t you goin’ to have anything to eat, Mr. Braile?” his wife demanded, with plaintive severity.

Braile pulled at his cob-pipe which muttered responsively, “Not so long as I’ve got anything to smoke. Gets up,” he explained to Reverdy, “and jerks it out of my mouth, when we haven’t got company.”

“I reckon Abel knows how much to believe of that,” Mrs. Braile commented, and Reverdy gave the pleased chuckle of a social inferior raised above his level by amiable condescension. But as if he thought it safest to refuse any share in this intimacy, he ended his adulations with the opinion, “I should say that if these here two rooms was th’owed together they’d make half as much as the Temple.”

Braile stopped in his walk and bent his frown on Reverdy, but not in anger. “This is the Temple: Temple of Justice — Justice of the Peace. Do you people think there’s only one kind of temple in Leatherwood?”

Reverdy gave his chuckle again. “Well, Squire, I ought to know, anyway, all the log-rollin’ I done for you last ‘lection time. I didn’t hardly believe you’d git in, because they said you was a infidel.”

“Well, you couldn’t deny it, could you?” Braile asked, with increasing friendliness in his frown.

“No, I couldn’t deny it, Squire. But the way I told ’em to look at it was, Mis’ Braile was Christian enough for the whole family. Said you knowed more law and she knowed more gospel than all the rest of Leatherwood put together.”

“And that was what elected the family, was it?” Braile asked. “Well, I hope Mrs. Braile won’t refuse to serve,” he said, and he began his walk again. “Tell her about that horse that broke into the meetin’ last night, and tried to play man.”

Reverdy laughed, shaking his head over his plate of bacon and reaching for the corn-pone which Mrs. Braile passed him. “You do beat all, Squire, the way you take the shine off of religious experience. Why,” he addressed himself to Mrs. Braile, “it wasn’t much, as fur as anybody could make out. It was just the queerness of the whole thing.” Reverdy went over the facts again, beginning with deprecation for the Squire but gathering respect for them in the interest they seemed to have for Mrs. Braile.

She listened silently, and then she asked, “And what became of him?”

“Well, that’s where you got me, Mrs. Braile. Don’t anybody know what become of him. Just kind of went out like a fire, when the Power was workun’ the hardest, and wasn’t there next time you looked where he been. Kind o’ th’owed cold water on the meetun’ and folks begun goun’ home, and breakun’ up and turnun’ in; well it was pretty nigh sun-up, anyway, by that time. I don’t know! Made me feel all-overish. Seemed like I’d been dreamun’ and that man was a Vision.” Reverdy had lifted an enraptured face, but at sight of Braile pausing in sarcastic pleasure, he dropped his head with a snicker. “I know the Squire’ll laugh. But that’s the way it was.”

“He’ll laugh the other side of his mouth, some day, if he keeps on,” Mrs. Braile said with apparent reproof and latent pride. “Was Sally at the meetin’ with you?”

“Well, no, she wasn’t,” Reverdy began, and Braile asked:

“And did you wake her up and tell her about it?”

“Well, no, I didn’t, Squire, that’s a fact. She woke me up. I just crep’ in quiet and felt out the soft side of a puncheon for a nap, and the firs’ thing I know was Sally havin’ me by the shoulder, and wantun’ to know about gittun’ that corn groun’ for breakfas’. My! I don’t know what she’ll say, when I do git back.” Reverdy laughed a fearful pleasure, but his gaiety was clouded by a shadow projected from the cabin door.

“Well, I mought ‘a’ knowed it!” a voice at once fond and threatening called to Reverdy’s quailing figure. The owner of the voice was a young woman unkempt as to the pale hair which escaped from the knot at her neck, and stuck out there and dangled about her face in spite of the attempts made to gather it under the control of the high horn comb holding its main strands together. The lankness of her long figure showed in the calico wrapper which seemed her sole garment; and her large features were respectively lank in their way, nose and chin and high cheek bones; her eyes wabbled in their sockets with the sort of inquiring laughter that spread her wide, loose mouth. She was barefooted, like Reverdy, on whom her eyes rested with a sort of burlesque menace, so that she could not turn them to Mrs. Braile in the attention which manners required of her, even when she added, “I just ‘spicioned that he’d ‘a’ turned in here, soon’s I smelt your breakfas’, Mrs. Braile; and the dear knows whether I blame him so much, nuther.”

“Then you’d better draw up too, Sally,” Mrs. Braile said, without troubling herself to rise from her own chair in glancing toward another for Mrs. Reverdy.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t, Mrs. Braile. I on’y just meant how nice it smelt. I got me somepin at home before I left, and I ain’t a bit hungry.”

“Well, then, you eat breakfast for me; I’m hungry,” the Squire said. “Sit down! You couldn’t get Abel away now, not if you went on an hour. Don’t separate families!”

“Well, just as you say, Squire,” Mrs. Reverdy snickered, and she submitted to pull up the chair which Mrs. Braile’s glance had suggested. “It beats all what a excitement there is in this town about the goun’s on at the camp-meetun’, last night. If I’ve heard it from one I’ve heard it from a dozen. I s’pose Abel’s tol’ you?” — she addressed herself impartially to Mrs. Braile across the table and to the Squire tilted against the wall in his chair, smoking behind his wife.

“Not a word,” the Squire said, and his wife did not trouble herself to protest; Reverdy opened his mouth in a soundless laugh at the Squire’s humor, and then filled it with bacon and corn-pone, and ducked his head in silence over his plate. “What goings on?”

“Why, that man that came in while Elder Grove was snatchun’ the brands from the burnun’, and snorted like a horse — But I know Abel’s tol’ you! It’s just like one of your jokes, Squire Braile; ain’t it, Mrs. Braile?” Sally referred herself to one and the other.

“You won’t get either of us to say, Sally,” Mrs. Braile let the Squire answer for both. “You’d better go on. I couldn’t hear too often about a man that snorted like a horse, if Abel did tell. What did the horses hitched back of the tents think about it? Any of ’em try to shout like a man?”

“Well, you may laugh, Squire Braile,” Sally said with a toss of her head for the dignity she failed of. She slumped forward with a laugh, and when she lifted her head she said through the victual that filled her mouth, “I dunno what the horses thought, but the folks believe it was a apostle, or somepin.”

“Who said so? Abel?” “Oh, pshaw! D’you suppose I b’lieve anythin’ Abel Reverdy says?” and this gave Reverdy a joy which she shared with him; he tried to impart it to Mrs. Braile, impassively pouring him a third cup of coffee. “I jes’ met Mis’ Leonard comun’ up the crossroad, and she tol’ me she saw our claybank hitched here, and I s’picioned Abel was’nt fur off, and that’s why I stopped.”

The husband and wife looked across the table in feigned fear and threat that gave them pleasure beyond speech.

“She didn’t say it was your claybank that snorted?” the Squire gravely inquired.

“Squire Braile, you surely will kill me,” and the husband joined the wife in a shout of laughter. “Now I can’t hardly git back to what she did say. But, I can tell you, it wasn’t nawthun’ to laugh at. Plenty of ’em keeled over where they sot, and a lot bounced up and down like it was a earthquake and pretty near all the women screamed. But he stood there, straight as a ramrod, and never moved a eye-winker. She said his face was somepin awful: just as solemn and still! He never spoke after that one word ‘Salvation,’ but every once in a while he snorted. Nobody seen him come in, or ever seen him before till he first snorted, and then they didn’t see anybody else. The preacher, he preached along, and tried to act like as if nowthun’ had happened, but it was no use; nobody didn’t hardly pay no attention to him ‘ceptun’ the stranger himself; he never took his eyes off Elder Grove; some thought he was tryun’ to charm him, like a snake does a bird; but it didn’t faze the elder.”

“Elder too old a bird?” the Squire suggested.

“Yes, I reckon he mought been,” Sally innocently assented.

“And when he gave the benediction, the snorter disappeared in a flash, with a strong smell of brimstone, I suppose?”

“Why, that was the thing of it, Squire. He just stayed, and shuck hands with everybody, pleasant as a basket of chips; and he went home with David Gillespie. He was just as polite to the poorest person there, but it was the big bugs that tuck the most to him.”

“Well,” the Squire summed up, “I don’t see but what your reports agree, and I reckon there must be some truth in ‘em. Who’s that up there at the pike-crossing?” He did not trouble himself to do more than frown heavily in the attempt to make out the passer. Mrs. Reverdy jumped from her chair and ran out to look.

“Well, as sure as I’m alive, if it ain’t that Gillespie girl! I bet she’ll know all about it. I’ll just ketch up with her and git the news out of her, if there is any. Say, say, Jane!” she called to the girl, as she ran up the road with the cow-like gait which her swirling skirt gave her. The girl stopped for her; then in apparent haste she moved on again, and Sally moved with her out of sight; her voice still made itself heard in uncouth cries and laughter.

Braile called into the kitchen where Reverdy had remained in the enjoyment of Mrs. Braile’s patient hospitality, “Here’s your chance, Abel!”

“Chance?” Reverdy questioned back with a full mouth.

“To get that corn of yours ground, and beat Sally home.”

“Well, Squire,” Reverdy said, “I reckon you’re right.” He came out into the open space where Braile sat. “Well, I won’t fergit this breakfast very soon,” he offered his gratitude to Mrs. Braile over his shoulder, as he passed through the door.

“You’re welcome, Abel,” she answered kindly, and when he had made his manners to the impassive Squire and mounted his claybank and thumped the horse into motion with his naked heels, she came out into the porch and said to her husband, “I don’t know as I liked your hinting him out of the house that way.”

Braile did not take the point up, but remained thoughtfully smiling in the direction his guest had taken. “The idea is that most people marry their opposites,” he remarked, “and that gives the children the advantage of inheriting their folly from two kinds of fools. But Abel and Sally are a perfect pair, mental and moral twins; the only thing they don’t agree in is their account of what became of that snorting exhorter. But the difference there isn’t important. If an all-wise Providence has kept them from transmitting a double dose of the same brand of folly to posterity, that’s one thing in favor of Providence.” He took up his wife’s point now. “If I hadn’t hinted him away, he’d have stayed to dinner; you wouldn’t have hinted him away if he’d stayed to supper.”

“Well, are you going to have some breakfast?” his wife asked. “I’ll get you some fresh coffee.”

“Well, I would like a little — with the head on — Martha, that’s a fact. Have I got time for another pipe?”

“No, I don’t reckon you have,” his wife said, and she passed into the kitchen again, where she continued to make such short replies as Braile’s discourse required of her.

He knocked his pipe out on the edge of his still uptilted chair, as he talked. “One fool like Abel I can stand, and I was just going to come in when Sally came in sight; and then I knew that two fools like Abel would make me sick. So I waited till the Creator of heaven and earth could get a minute off and help me out. But He seemed pretty busy with the solar system this morning, and I had about given up when He sent that Gillespie girl in sight. I knew that would fetch Sally; but it was an inspiration of my own to suggest Abel’s chance to him; I don’t want to put that on your Maker, Martha.”

“It was your inspiration to get him to stay in the first place,” Mrs. Braile said within.

“No, Martha; that was my unfailing obedience to the sacred laws of hospitality; I didn’t expect to fall under their condemnation a second time, though.” Mrs. Braile did not answer, and by the familiar scent from within, Braile knew that his coffee must be nearly ready. As he dropped his chair forward, he heard a sound of frying, and “Pshaw, Martha!” he called. “You’re not getting me some fresh bacon?”

“Did you suppose there’d be some left?” she demanded, while she stepped to and fro at her labors. Her steps ceased and she called, “Well, come in now, Matthew, if you don’t want everything to get cold, like the pone is.”

Braile obeyed, saying, “Oh, I can stand cold pone,” and at sight of the table with the coffee and bacon renewed upon it, he mocked tenderly, “Now just to reward you, Martha, I’ve got half a mind to go with you to the next meeting in the Temple.”

“I don’t know as I’m goin’ myself,” she said, pouring the coffee.

“I wish you would, just to please me,” he teased.

II

No one could say quite how it happened that the stranger went home from the camp-meeting with old David Gillespie and his girl. Many had come forward with hospitable offers, and the stranger had been affable with all; but he had slipped through the hands he shook and had parried the invitations made him. Gillespie had not seemed to invite him, and his shy daughter had shrunk aside when the chief citizens urged their claims; yet the stranger went with them to their outlying farm, and spent all the next day there alone in the tall woods that shut its corn fields in.

Sally Reverdy had failed to get any light from the Gillespie girl when she ran out from Squire Braile’s cabin. The girl seemed still under the spell that had fallen upon many at the meeting, and it appeared to Sally that she did not want to talk; at any rate she did not talk to any satisfactory end. A squirrel hunter believed he had caught a glimpse of the stranger in the chestnut woods behind the Gillespie spring-house, but he was not a man whose oath was acceptable in the community and his belief was not generally shared. It was thought that the stranger would reappear at the last night of the camp-meeting, but the Gillespies came without him, and reported that they had expected he would come by himself.

The camp-meeting broke up after the Sunday morning service and most of the worshipers, sated with their devotional experience, went home, praising the Power in song as they rode away in the wagons laden with their camp furniture, and their children strewn over the bedding. But for others, the fire of the revival burned through the hot, long, August Sabbath day, and a devout congregation crowded the Temple.

The impulse of the week past held over to the night unabated. The spacious log-built house was packed from wall to wall; the men stood dense; the seats were filled with women; only a narrow path was left below the pulpit for those who might wish to rise and confess Christ before the congregation. The people waited in a silence broken by their deep breathing, their devout whispering, the scraping of their feet; now and then a babe, whose mother could not leave it at home, wailed pitifully or spitefully till it was coaxed or scolded still; now and then some one coughed. The air was thick; a bat scandalized the assemblage by flying in at the open door, and wavering round the tallow candles on the pulpit; one of the men beat it down with his hat, and then picked it up and crowded his way down the aisle, out into the night with it. When he came back it was as if he had found the stranger whom they were all consciously expecting, and had brought him in with David Gillespie and his girl. She was tall and straight, like her father, and her hair was red, like his; her eyes were gray blue, and the look in them was both wilful and dreamy.

The stranger smiled and took the hands stretched out to him in passing by several of the different sectarians who used the Temple. Gillespie seemed not to notice or to care for the greetings to his guest, and his girl wore her wonted look of vague aloofness.

Matthew Braile had been given a seat at the front, perhaps in deference to his age and dignity; perhaps in confusion at his presence. He glanced up at the stranger with a keen glint through his branching eyebrows, and made a guttural sound; his wife pushed him; and he said; “What?” and “Oh!” quite audibly; and she pushed him again for answer.

The Gillespies sat down with the stranger in the foremost bench. He wore the black broadcloth coat of the Friday night before; his long hair, combed back from his forehead, fell down his shoulders almost to his middle; the glances of his black eyes roved round the room, but were devoutly lowered at the prayer which opened the service. It was a Methodist who preached, but somehow to-night he had not the fervor of his sect; his sermon was cold, and addressed itself to the faith rather than the hope of his hearers. He spoke as from the hold of an oppressive spell; at times he was perplexed, and lost his place in his exhortation. In the close heat some drowsed, and the preacher was distracted by snoring from a corner near the door. He lifted his voice as if to rouse the sleeper, or to drown the noise; but he could not. He came to the blessing at last, and the disappointed congregation rose to go out. Suddenly the loud snort that had dismayed the camp-meeting sounded through the heavy air, and then there came the thrilling shout of “Salvation.”

The people did not need to look where the stranger had been sitting; he had done what they hoped, what they expected, and he was now towering over those near him, with his head thrown back, and his hair tossed like a mane on his shoulders. The people stopped; some who had gone out crowded in again; no one knew quite what to do. The minister halted on the pulpit stairs; he had done his part for the night, and he did not apparently resent the action of the man who now took it on him to speak.

A tall, stout man among those who had lingered, spoke from the aisle. He was the owner of the largest farm in the neighborhood and he had one of the mills on the creek. In his quality of miller everybody knew him, and he had the authority of a public character. Now he said:

“We want to hear something more than a snort and a shout from our brother here. We heard them Friday night, and we’ve been talkin’ about it ever since.”

The appeal was half joking, half entreating. The minister was still hesitating on the pulpit stairs, and he looked at the stranger. “Will you come up, Brother—”

“Call me Dylks — for the present,” the stranger answered with a full voice.

“Brother Dylks,” the minister repeated, and he came down, and gave him the right hand of fellowship.

The Gillespies looked on with their different indifference. Dylks turned to them: “Shall I speak?”

“Speak!” the girl said, but her father said nothing.

Dylks ran quickly up the pulpit steps: “We will join in prayer!” he called out, and he held the congregation, now returned to their places, in the spell of a quick, short supplication. He ended it with the Lord’s Prayer; then he said, “Let us sing,” and line after line he gave out the hymn,

 “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair

  We wretched sinners lay.”

He expounded each stanza, as to the religious sense and the poetic meaning, before he led the singing. He gave out a passage of Scripture, as a sort of text, but he did not keep to it; he followed with other passages, and his discourse was a rehearsal of these rather than a sermon. His memory in them was unerring; women who knew their Bibles by heart sighed their satisfaction in his perfectness; they did not care for the relevance or irrelevance of the passages; all was Scripture, all was the one inseparable Word of God, dreadful, blissful, divine, promising heaven, threatening hell. Groans began to go up from the people held in the strong witchery of the man’s voice. They did not know whether he spoke long or not. Before they knew, he was as if sweeping them to their feet with a repetition of his opening hymn, and they were singing with him:

 “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair

  We wretched sinners lay.”

It ended, and he gave his wild brutish snort, and then his heart-shaking cry of “Salvation!”

Some of the chief men remained to speak with him, to contend for him as their guest; but old David Gillespie did not contend with them. “You can have him,” he said to the miller, Peter Hingston, “if he wants to go with you.” He was almost rude, and his daughter was not opener with the women who crowded about her trying to make her say something that would feed their hunger to know more. She remained hard and cold, almost dumb; it seemed to them that she was not worthy to have had him under her father’s roof. As for her father, they had no patience with him for not putting in a word to claim the stranger while the others were pressing him to come home with them. In spite of the indifference of Gillespie and his girl, Dylks elected to remain with them, and when he could pull himself from the crowd he went away into the night between them.

When Matthew Braile made his escape with his wife from the crowd and began to walk home through the dim, hot night, he said, “Is Jane Gillespie any particular hand at fried chicken?”

“Now you stop, Matthew!” his wife said.

“Because that would account for it. I reckon it was fried chicken the ravens brought to Elijah. All men of God are fond of fried chicken.”

His wife would not dispute directly with his perversity; she knew that in this mood of his it would be useless trying to make him partake the wonder she shared with her neighbors that the stranger had chosen David Gillespie again for his host out of the many leading men who had pressed their hospitality upon him, and that he should have preferred his apathy to their eagerness.

“I wish he had worn his yellow beaver hat in the pulpit,” Braile went on. “It must have been a disappointment to Abe Reverdy, but perhaps he consoled himself with a full sight of the fellow’s long hair. He ought to part it in the middle, like Thomas Jefferson, and do it up in a knot like a woman. Well, we can’t have everything, even in a man of God; but maybe he isn’t really a man of God. That would account for a good many things. But I think he shows taste in preferring old Gillespie to Peter Hingston; next to Abe Reverdy he’s the biggest fool in Leatherwood. Maybe the prophet knew by instinct that there would be better fried chicken at Gillespie’s.”

His wife disdained to make a direct answer. “You may be sure they give him of their best, whatever it is. And the Gillespies may be poor, but when it comes to respectability and good works they’ve got a right to hold their heads up with the best in this settlement. That girl has done all the work of the house since her mother died, when she wasn’t a little thing half grown; and old David has slaved off his mortgage till his farm’s free and clear; and he don’t owe anybody a cent.”

“Oh, I don’t say anything against Gillespie; all I say is that Brother Dylks knows which side his bread is buttered on; inspired, probably.”

“What makes you so bitter, to-night, Matthew?” his wife halted him a little, with her question.

“Well, the Temple always leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I hate to see brethren agreeing together in unity. You oughtn’t to have taken me, Martha.”

“I’ll never take you again!” she said.

“And that man’s a rascal, if ever there was one. Real men of God don’t wear their hair down to their waists and come snorting and shouting in black broadcloth to a settlement like this for the good of folks’ souls.”

“You’ve got no right to say that, Matthew. And if you go round talking that way you’ll make yourself more unpopular than you are already.”

“Oh, I’ll be careful, Martha. I’ll just think it, and perhaps put two or three of the leading intellects like Abe and Sally on their guard. But come, come, Martha! You know as well as I do, he’s a rascal. Don’t you believe it?”

“I believe in giving everybody a chance. Don’t your own law books say a man’s innocent till he’s proved guilty?”

“Something like that. And I’m not trying Brother Dylks in open court at present. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt if he’s ever brought before my judgment seat. But you’ve got to allow that his long hair and black broadcloth and his snort and shout are against him.”

“I don’t believe in them any more than you do,” she owned. “But don’t you persecute him because he’s religious, Matthew.”

“Oh, I don’t object to him because he’s religious, though I think there’s more religion in Leatherwood already than any ten towns would know what to do with. He’s got to do more than preach his brand of religion before I’d want to trouble him.”

They were at the hewn log which formed the step to the porch between the rooms of their cabin. A lank hound rose from the floor, and pulled himself back from his forward-planted paws, and whimpered a welcome to them; a captive coon rattled his chain from his corner under the porch roof.

“Why don’t you let that poor thing go, Matthew?” Mrs. Braile asked.

“Well, I will, some day. But the little chap that brought it to me was like our—”

He stopped; both were thinking the same thing and knew they were. “I saw the likeness from the first, too,” the wife said.

III

The Gillespies arrived at their simpler log cabin half an hour later than the Brailes at theirs. It was on the border of the settlement, and beyond it for a mile there was nothing but woods, walnut and chestnut and hickory, not growing thickly as the primeval forest grew to the northward along the lake, but standing openly about in the pleasant park-like freedom of the woods-pastures of that gentler latitude. Beyond the wide stretch of trees and meadow lands, the cornfields and tobacco patches opened to the sky again. On their farther border stood a new log cabin, defined by its fresh barked logs in the hovering dark.

Gillespie pulled the leatherwood latch-string which lifted the catch of his door, and pushed it open. “Go in, Jane,” he said to his daughter, and the girl vanished slimly through, with a glance over her shoulder at Dylks where he stood aloof a few steps from her father.

Gillespie turned to his guest. “Did you see her?” he asked.

“Yes, I walked over to her house this morning.”

“Did any one see you?”

“No. Her man was away.”

Gillespie turned with an effect of helplessness, and looked down at the wood-pile where he stood. “I don’t know,” he said, “what keeps me from spliting your head open with that ax.”

“I do,” Dylks said.

“Man!” the old man threatened, “Don’t go too far.”

“It wasn’t the fear of God which you pretend is in your heart, but the fear of man.” Dylks added with a vulgar drop from the solemn words, “You would hang for it. I haven’t put myself in your power without counting all the costs to both of us.”

Gillespie waved his answer off with an impatient hand.

“Did she know you?”

“Why not? It hasn’t been so long. I haven’t changed so much. I wear my hair differently, and I dress better since I’ve been in Philadelphia. She knew me in a minute as well as I knew her. I didn’t ask for her present husband; I thought one at a time was enough.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing — first. I might have told her she had been in a hurry. But if she don’t bother me, I won’t her. We got as far as that. And I reckon she won’t, but I thought we’d better have a clear understanding, and she knows now it’s bigamy in her case, and bigamy’s a penitentiary offense. I made that clear. And now see here, David: I’m going to stay here in this settlement, and I don’t want any trouble from you, no matter what you think of my doings, past, present, or future. I don’t want you to say anything, or look anything. Don’t you let on, even to that girl of yours, that you ever saw me before in your life. If you do, you’ll wish you had split my head open with that ax. But I’m not afraid; I’ve got you safe, and I’ve got your sister safe.”

Gillespie groaned. Then he said desperately, “Listen here, Joseph Dylks! I know what you’re after, here, because you always was: other people’s money. I’ve got three hundred dollars saved up since I paid off the mortgage. If you’ll take it and go—”

“Three hundred dollars! No, no! Keep your money, old man. I don’t rob the poor.” Dylks lifted himself, and said with that air of mysterious mastery which afterwards won so many to his obedience, “I work my work. Let no man gainsay me or hinder me.” He walked to and fro in the starlight, swelling, with his head up and his mane of black hair cloudily flying over his shoulders as he turned. “I come from God.”

Gillespie looked at him as he paced back and forth. “If I didn’t know you for a common scoundrel that married my sister against my will, and lived on her money till it was gone, and then left her and let her believe he was dead, I might believe you did come from God — or the Devil, you — you turkey cock, you stallion! But you can’t prance me down, or snort me down. I don’t agree to anything. I don’t say I won’t tell who you are when it suits me. I won’t promise to keep it from this one or that one or any one. I’ll let you go just so far, and then—”

“All right, David, I’ll trust you, as I trust your sister. Between you I’m safe. And now, you lay low! That’s my advice.” He dropped from his mystery and his mastery to a level of colloquial teasing. “I’m going to rest under your humble roof to-night, and to-morrow I’m going to the mansion of Peter Hingston. His gates will be set wide for me, and all the double log-cabin palaces and frame houses of this royal city of Leatherwood will hunger for my presence. You could always hold your tongue, David, and you can easily leave all the whys and wherefores to me. I won’t go from your hospitality with an ungrateful tongue; I will proclaim before the assembled multitudes in your temple that I left you secure in the faith, and that I turned to others because they needed me more. I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance; they will understand that. So good night, David, and good morning. I shall be gone before even you are up.”

Gillespie made no answer as he followed his guest indoors. Long before he slept he heard the man’s powerful breathing like that of some strong animal in its sleep; an ox lying in the field, or a horse standing in its stall. At times it broke chokingly and then he snorted it smooth and regular again. At daybreak Gillespie thought of rising, but he drowsed, and he was asleep when his daughter came to the foot of the ladder which climbed to his chamber in the cabin loft, and called to him that his breakfast was ready.

IV

The figure of a woman who held her hooded shawl under her chin, stole with steps often checked through the limp, dew-laden grass of the woods-pasture and slipped on the rotting logs. But she caught herself from tumbling, and safely gained the border of Gillespie’s corn field. There she sat down trembling on the stone doorstep of the spring-house, and waited rather than rested in the shelter of the chestnut boughs that overhung the roof. She was aware of the spring gurgling under the stone on its way into the sunshine, from the crocks of cream-covered milk and of butter in the cool dark of the hut; she sensed the thick August heat of the sun already smiting its honeyed odors from the corn; she heard the scamper of the squirrels preying upon the ripening ears, and whisking in and out of the woods or dropping into the field from the tips of the boughs overhanging the nearer rows; but it all came blurred to her consciousness.

She was recognizably Gillespie’s sister, but her eyes and hair were black. She was wondering how she could get to speak with him when Jane was not by. He would send the girl away at a sign from her, but she could not have that; the thing must be kept from the girl but not seem to be kept.

She let her arms rest on her knees; her helpless hands hung heavy from them; her head was bowed, and her whole body drooped under the burden of her heart, as if it physically dragged her down. Jane would be coming soon with the morning’s milk to pour into the crocks; she heard a step; the girl was coming; but she must rest a moment.

“What are you doing here, Nancy?” her brother’s voice asked.

“Oh, is it you, David? Oh, blessed be the name of the Lord! Maybe He’s going to be good to me, after all. David, is he gone?”

“He’s gone, Nancy.”

“In anger?”

“He’s gone; I don’t care whether he’s gone in anger or not.”

“Did he tell you he saw me?”

“Yes.”

“And did you promise him not to tell on him? To Jane? To any one?”

“No.” Gillespie stood holding a bucket of milk in his hand; she sat gathering her shawl under her chin as if she were still coming through the suncleft shadows of the woods pasture.

“Oh, David!”

“What do you want me to do, Nancy?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. I haven’t slept all night.”

“You mustn’t give way like this. Don’t you see any duty for you in this matter?”

“Duty? Oh, David!” Her heart forboded the impossible demand upon it.

Gillespie set his bucket of milk down beside the spring. “Nancy,” he said, “a woman cannot have two husbands. It’s a crime against the State. It’s a sin against God.”

“But I haven’t got two husbands! What do you mean, David? Didn’t I believe he was dead? Didn’t you? Oh, David, what — Do you think I’ve done wrong? You let me do it!”

“I don’t think you’ve done wrong; but look out you don’t do it. You are doing it, now. I can’t let you do it. I can’t let you live in sin!”

“In sin? Me?”

“You. Every minute you live now with Laban you live in sin. Your first husband, that was dead, is alive. He can’t claim you unless you allow it; but neither can your second husband, now. If you live on with Laban a day longer — an hour — a minute — you live in deadly sin. I thought of it all night but I had not thought it out till this minute when I first saw you sitting there and I knew how miserable you were, and my heart seemed to bleed at the sight of you.”

“You may well say that, David,” the woman answered with a certain pride in the vastness of her calamity. “If it was another woman I couldn’t bear to think of it. Why does He do it? Why does He set such traps for us?”

“Nancy!” her brother called sternly.

“Oh, yes, it’s easy enough for you! But if Rachel was here, she’d see it different.”

“Woman!” her brother said, “don’t try to hide behind the dead in your sin.”

“It’s no sin! I was as innocent as the babe unborn when I married Laban — as innocent as he was, poor boy, when he would have me; and we all thought he was dead. Oh, why couldn’t he have been dead?”

“This is murder you have in your heart now, Nancy,” the old man said, with who knows what awful pleasure in his casuistry, so pitilessly unerring. “If the life of that wicked man could buy you safety in your sin you could wish it taken.”

“Oh, oh, oh! What shall I do, what shall I do.” She wailed out the words with her head fallen forward on her knees, and her loose hair dripping over them.

“Do? Go home, and bring your little one, and come to me. I will deal with Laban when he gets back tonight.”

She started erect. “And let him think I’ve left him? And the neighbors, let them think we’ve quarreled, and I couldn’t live with him?”

“It won’t matter what the world thinks,” Gillespie said, and he spoke of the small backwoods settlement as if it were some great center of opinion such as in great communities dispenses fame and infamy, and makes its judgments supremely dreaded. “Besides,” he faltered, “no one is knowing but ourselves to his coming back. It can seem as if he left you.”

“And I live such a lie as that? Is this you, David?”

It was she who rose highest now, as literally she did, in standing on the stone where she had crouched, above the level of his footing.

“I — I say it to spare you, Nancy. I don’t wish it. But I wish to make it easy — or a little bit easier — something you can bear better.”

“Oh, I know, David, I know! You would save me if you could. But maybe — maybe it ain’t what we think it is. Maybe he was outlawed by staying away so long?”

Neither of them named Dylks, but each knew whom the other meant, throughout their talk.

“A lawyer might let you think so till he got all your money.”

“Matthew Braile wouldn’t.”

“That infidel?”

She drooped again. “Oh, well, I must do it. I must do it. I’ll go and get ready and I’ll come to you. What will Jane think?”

“I’ll take care of what Jane thinks. When do you expect Laban back?”

“Not before sundown. I’ll not come till I see him.”

“We’ll be ready for you.” He moved now to open the spring-house door; she turned and was lost to him in the lights and shadows of the woods-pasture. On its further border her cabin stood, and from it came the sound of a pitiful wail; at the back door a little child stood, staying itself by the slats let into grooves in the jambs. She had left it in its low cradle asleep, and it must have waked and clambered out and crept to the barrier and been crying for her there; its small face was soaked with tears.

She ran forward with long leaps out of the cornfield and caught it to her neck and mumbled its wet cheeks with hungry kisses. “Oh, my honey, my honey! Did it think its mother had left—”

She stopped at the word with a pang, and began to go about the rude place that was the simple home where after years of hell she had found an earthly heaven. Often she stopped, and wondered at herself. It seemed impossible she could be thinking it, be doing it, but she was thinking and doing it, and at sundown, when she knew by the eager shadow of a man in the doorway, pausing to listen if the baby were awake, all had been thought and done.

V

The emotional frenzies, recurring through the day, were past, and she could speak steadily to the man, in the absence of greeting which often emphasizes the self-forgetfulness of love as well as marks the formlessness of common life: “Your supper’s waitin’ for you, Laban; I’ve had mine; you must be hungry. It’s out in the shed; it’s cooler there. Go round; baby’s asleep.”

The man obeyed, and she heard him drop the bucket into the well, and lift it by the groaning sweep, and pour the water into the basin, and then splash himself, with murmurs of comfort, presently muffled in the towel. Her hearing followed him through his supper, and she knew he was obediently eating it, and patiently waiting for her to account for whatever was unwonted in her greeting. She loved him most of all for his boylike submission to her will and every caprice of it, but now she hardly knew how to deny his tacit question as he ventured in from the shed.

“Don’t come near me, Laban,” she said with a stony quiet. “Don’t touch me. I ain’t your wife, any more.”

He could not speak at first; then it was like him to ask, “Why — why — What have I done, Nancy?”

“You, you poor soul?” she answered. “Nothing but good, all your days! He’s come back.”

He knew whom she meant, but he had to ask, “Joseph Dylks? Why I thought he was—”

“Don’t say it! It’s murder! I don’t want you to have his blood on you too. Oh, if he was only dead! Yes, yes! I have a right to wish it! Oh, God be merciful to me, a sinner!”

“When — when — how did you know it, Nancy?”

“Yesterday morning or day before — just after you left. I reckon he was waitin’ for you to go. I’m glad you went first.” The man looked up at the rifle resting on the pegs above the fireplace. “Laban, don’t!” she cried. “I looked at it when he was walkin’ away, and I know what you’re thinkin’.”

“What is he goin’ to do?” the man asked from his daze.

“Nothing. He said he wouldn’t do nothing if I didn’t. If he hadn’t said it I might believe it!”

Laban shifted his weight where he stood from one foot to the other.

“He passed the night at David’s. He’s passed two nights there.”

“Was it the snorting man?”

“I reckon.”

“I heard about him at the Cross Roads. Why didn’t David tell us yesterday?”

“Maybe he hadn’t thought it out. David thinks slow. He likes to be sure before he speaks. He was sure enough this morning!” the woman ended bitterly.

“What did he say?”

“He said it was living in sin for us to keep together if he was alive.”

Laban pondered it. “I reckon if we come together without knowing he was alive, it ain’t no sin.”

“Yes, it is!” she shrieked.

“We was married just like anybody; we didn’t make no secret of it; we’ve lived together four years. Are you goin’ to unlive them years by stoppin’ now?”

“Don’t you s’pose I been over all that a million times? My mind’s sore workin’ with it; there ain’t a thought in me that don’t ache from it. But David’s right. We’ve got to part. I put your things in this poke here,” she said, and she gave him a bag made from an old pillow tick, with a few clothes lumping it half full. “I’ll carry the baby, Laban.” She pulled back from him with the child in her arms. “Or no, you can carry her; you’ll have to leave her, too, and you’ve got a right to all the good you can get of her now. Don’t touch anything. I’ll stay at David’s, tonight, but I’ll come back in the morning, and then I’ll see what I’ll do — stay, or go and live with David. Come!”

“And what about Joey?” Laban asked, half turning with the child when they were outside.

“I declare I forgot about Joey! I’ll see, to-morrow. It seems as if my very soul was tired now.

“Joey will just think we’ve gone over to David’s for a minute; he’ll go to bed when he comes; he’ll have had his supper at Peter Hingston’s, anyway.”

As they walked away, she said, “You’re a good man, Laban Billings, to feel the way you always do about Joey. You’ve been a true father to him; I wonder what his own father’d have been.”

“No truer father to him than I’ve been a husband to you, Nancy,” the man said, and as they walked along together, so far apart, his speech came to him, and he began to plead their case with her as before an adverse judge. Worn as she was with the arguments for and against them after the long day of iteration, she could not refuse to let him plead. She scarcely answered him, but he knew when they reached Gillespie’s cabin that she had seen them in the fierce light of her conscience, where there was no shadow of turning.

David was alone; Jane, he said, had gone to the Reverdys, and was going with the woman to the Temple.

Nancy did not seem to hear him. She took the sleeping baby from its father’s arms. “Laban has come with me to say good-by before you, David. I hope you’ll be satisfied.”

“I hope your conscience will be satisfied, Nancy. It doesn’t matter about me. Laban, do you see this thing like I do?”

“I see it like Nancy does.”

“God will bless your effort for righteousness. Your path is dark before you now, but His light will shine upon it.”

The old man paused helplessly, and Nancy asked “Does Jane know?”

“Not yet. And I will confess I’m not certain what to do, about her, and about the neighbors. This is a cross to me, too, Nancy. I have lived a proud life here; there has never been talk about me or mine. Now when you and Laban are parted, there will be talk.”

“There’s no need to be,” Laban said; “not at once. They want me back at the Cross Roads, the Wilkinses do. I can go now as well as in the morning. I forgot to tell you,” he added to his wife. “It was drove out of my mind.”

“Oh, I don’t blame you,” she answered.

“I can have work there all the fall.”

David Gillespie rubbed his forehead, and said tremulously: “I don’t know what to say. I suppose I am weak. It’ll be one kind of a lie. But, Laban — I thank you—”

“I can come back here Sundays and see Nancy and the baby,” Laban suggested.

The old man’s voice shook. “You’ll be making it harder for yourself,” was all he could say.

“But perhaps — perhaps there’ll be light — that light you said — by and by—”

“Let us pray that there’ll be no light from the Pit. I am a sinful man, Laban, to let you do this thing. I ought to have strength for all of us. But I am older now, I’m not what I was — the day has tried me, Nancy.”

“Good-by, then, Laban,” the woman said. “And don’t you think hard of David. I don’t. And I’m not sure I’ll ever let you come. Say good-by as if it was for life.” She turned to her brother. “We can kiss, I reckon?”

“Oh, I reckon,” he lamented, and went indoors.

Laban opened his arms as if to take her in them; but she interposed the baby.

“Kiss her first. Me last. Just once. Now, go! I won’t be weak with you like David is. And don’t you be afraid for me. I can get along. I’m not a man!” She went into the cabin, with her baby over her shoulder; but in a little while she came back without it, and stared after the figure of Laban losing itself in the night. Then she sat down on the doorstep and cried; it seemed as if she never could stop; but the tears helped her.

When she lifted her head she caught the sounds of singing from the village below the upland where the cabin stood. It was the tune that carried, not the words, but she knew them from the tune; as well as if she were in the Temple with them she knew what the people were singing. While she followed the lines helplessly, almost singing them herself, she was startled by the presence of a boy, who had come silently round the cabin in his bare feet and stood beside her.

“Oh!” she cried out.

“Why, did I scare you, mom?” he asked tenderly. “I didn’t mean to.”

“No, Joey. I didn’t know any one was there; that’s all. I didn’t expect you. Why ain’t you at home in bed? You must be tired enough, poor boy.”

“Oh, no, I ain’t tired. Mr. Hingston is real good to me; he lets me rest plenty; and he says I’ll make a first rate miller. I helped to dress the burrs this morning — the millstones, you know,” the boy explained, proud of the technicality. “Oh, I tell you I just like it there,” he said, and he laughed out his joy in it.

“You always was a glad boy, Joey,” his mother said ruefully.

“Well, you wouldn’t thought so if you seen me over at our house. It seemed like there was somebody dead; I dasn’t hardly go in, it was so dark and still. Whyn’t you there? Didn’t pop come home?”

“Yes, but he had to go back to the Cross Roads; he’s got work there all the fall.”

“Well! We do seem to be gittin’ along!” He laughed again. “I reckon you come over here because it seemed kind o’ lonesome. Goin’ to stay all night with Uncle?”

“Yes. You won’t mind being there alone?”

“Oh, no! Not much, I reckon.”

“You can stay here too, if you want to—”

“Oh, no! Mom,” he confessed shyly, “I brung Benny Hingston with me. I thought you’d let him stay all night with me.”

“Why, certainly, Joey—”

“He’s just behind the house; I wanted to ask first—”

“You know you can always bring Benny. There’s plenty of room for both of you in your bed. But now when you go back with him be careful of the lamp. I put a fresh piece of rag in and there’s plenty of grease. You can blow up a coal on the hearth. I covered the fire; only be careful.”

“Oh, we’ll be careful. Benny’s about the carefullest boy the’ is in Leatherwood. Oh, I do like being in the mill with Mr. Hingston.” He laughed out his joy again, and then he asked doubtfully, “Mom?”

“Yes, Joey.”

“Benny and me was wonderin’ — we’d go straight back home, and not light any lamp at all — if you’d let us go to the Temple. There’s a big meetin’ there to-night.” The mother hesitated, and the boy urged, “They say that strange man — well, some calls him the Snorter and some the Exhorter — is goin’ to preach.” The mother was still silent, and the boy faltered on: “He dresses like the people do Over-the-Mountains, and he wears his hair down his back—”

The mother gasped. “I don’t like your being out late, Joey. I’d feel better if you and Benny was safe in bed.”

“Oh, well.” The boy’s voice sank to the level of his disappointment; but after a silent interval he caught it up again cheerily. “Oh, well, I reckon Benny won’t care much. We’ll go right back home. We can have a piece before we go to bed?”

“Yes—”

“Benny thinks our apple-butter is the best they is. Can we have some on bread, with sugar on top?”

His mother did not answer at once, and he said again, as if relinquishing another ideal, “Oh, well.”

Nancy rose up and kissed him. “Yes, go to the Temple. You might as well.”

“Truly, mom? Oh, Benny, hurrah! She’s let me! Come along!”

He ran round the cabin to his comrade, and she heard them shouting and laughing together, and then the muted scamper of their bare feet on the soft road toward the settlement.

The mother said to herself, “He’d get to see him sooner or later.” She drew her breath in a long sigh, and went into the cabin. “What a day, what a day! It seems a thousand years,” she said aloud.

“Are you talking to me, Nancy?” her brother asked from somewhere in the dark.

“No, no. Only to myself, David. Where did I put the baby? Oh! I know. I’ve let Joey go to the Temple to hear his father preach. Lord have mercy!”

VI

The discourse of Dylks the second night was a chain of biblical passages, as it had been the first night. But an apparent intention, which had been wanting before, ran through the incoherent texts, leaping as it were from one to another, and there binding them in an intimation of a divine mission. He did not say that he had been sent of God, but he made the texts which he gave, swiftly and unerringly, say something like that for him to such as were prepared to believe it. Not all were prepared; many denied; the most doubted; but those who accepted that meaning of the inspired words were of the principal people, respected for their higher intelligence and their greater wealth.

He had come to the Temple with Peter Hingston and he went with him from it. Hingston’s quarter section of the richest farmland in the bottom bordered his mill privilege, with barns and corncribs and tobacco sheds, and his brick house behind the mill was the largest and finest dwelling in the place. His flocks and herds abounded; his state was patriarchal; and in the neighborhood which loved and honored him, for some favor and kindness done nearly every man there: for money when the crops failed; for the storage of their wheat and corn in the deep bins of his mill when the yield was too great for their barns; for the use of his sheds in drying their tobacco before their own were ready. His growing sons and daughters, until they were grown men and women, obeyed his counsel as they had obeyed his will while children. But he was severe with no one; since his wife had died his natural gentleness was his manner as it had always been his make, and it tempered the piety, which in many was forbidding and compelling, to a wistful kindness. His faith admitted no misgiving, for himself, but his toleration of doubts and differences in others extended to the worst of skeptics. He believed that revelation had never ceased; he was of those who looked for a sign, because if God had ever given Himself in communion with His creatures it was not reasonable that he should afterwards always withhold Himself. A friendly humor looked from his dull eyes, and, in never quite coming to a formulated joke, stayed his utterance as if he were hopeful of some such event in time. He stood large in bulk as well as height, and drew his breath in slow, audible respirations.

The first people of the community tacitly recognized him as the first man in it, though none would have compared him in education with his nearest friend, Richard Enraghty, who had been the schoolmaster and was now the foremost of the United Brethren. He led their services in the Temple, and sometimes preached for them when it came their turn to occupy the house which they shared with the other sects. Hingston was a Methodist, but perhaps because their sects were so akin in doctrine and polity their difference made no division between the friends: Enraghty little and fierce and restless, Hingston large and kind and calm. What they joined in saying prevailed in questions of public interest; those who yielded to their wisdom liked to believe that Enraghty’s opinion ruled with Hingston. Matthew Braile alone had the courage to disable their judgment which he liked to say was no more infallible than so much Scripture, but the hardy infidel, who knew so much law and was inexpugnable in his office, owned that he could not make head against their gospel. He could darken their counsel with citations from “Common Sense” and “The Age of Reason,” but the piety of the community remained safe from his mockery.

The large charity of Hingston covered the multitude of the Squire’s sins; he would have argued that he had not been understood perhaps in the worst things he said; but the fiercer godliness of Enraghty was proof against the talk of a man whose conversation was an exhalation from the Pit. He had bitterly opposed Matthew Braile’s successive elections; he had made the pulpit of the Temple an engine of political warfare and had launched its terrors against the invulnerable heathen. He was like Hingston in looking for a sign; in that day of remoteness from any greater world the people of the backwoods longed to feel themselves near the greatest world of all, and well within the radius of its mysteries. They talked mostly of these when they met together, and in the solitude of their fields they dwelt upon them; on their week days and work days they turned over the threats and promises of the Sabbath and expected a light or a voice from on high which should burst their darkness and silence.

To most of them there was nothing sacrilegious in the pretensions which could be read into the closely scriptured discourse of Dylks when he preached the second time in the Temple. The affability which he used in descending from the pulpit among them, and shaking hands and hailing them Brother and Sister, and personally bidding each come to the mercy seat, convinced them of his authority; no common man would so fearlessly trust his dignity among those who had little of their own. They thronged upon him gladly, and the women, old and young alike, trembled before him with a strange joy.

“Where is your father, Sister Gillespie?” he demanded of the girl, who wavered in his strong voice like a plant in the wind.

“I don’t know — he’s at home,” she said.

“See that he comes, another time. I send him my peace, and tell him that it will not return to me. Say that I said he needs me.”

He went out between Enraghty and Hingston, and as they walked away, he sank his voice back in words of Scripture; farther away he began his hymn:

 “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair,

  We wretched sinners lay” —

and ended with his shout of “Salvation!”

VII

The cabin of the Reverdys stood on a byway beyond the Gillespies. Sally had joined the girl on her way out of the Temple, and was prancing beside her as they went homeward together. “Oh, ain’t it just great? I feel like as if I could fly. I never seen the Power in Leatherwood like it was to-night. He’s sent; you can tell that as plain as the nose on your face. How happy I do feel! I believe in my heart I got salvation this minute. Don’t you feel the Spirit any? But you was always such a still girl! I did like the way the women folks was floppun’ all round. I say, if you feel the Power workun’ in you, show it, and help the others to git it. What do you s’pose he meant by your paw’s needun’ him?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he will,” the girl answered briefly.

“Goun’ to tell him? Well, that’s right, Janey. I kep’ wonderun’ why he didn’t come to-night. If Abel hadn’t be’n so beat out with his work at the Cross Roads to-day, you bet I’d ‘a’ made him come; but he said I’d git enough glory for both. I believe his talkun’ with Squire Braile don’t do him no good. You b’lieve Washington and Jefferson was friends with Tom Paine? The Squire says they was, but I misdoubt it, myself; I always hearn them two was good perfessun’ Christians. Kind o’ lonesome along here where the woods comes so close’t, ain’t it? Say, Janey: I wisht you’d come a little piece with me, though I don’t suppose the bad spirits would dast to come around a body right on the way home from the Temple this way—”

They had reached the point where Sally must part with the girl, who stopped to lift the top rail of the bars to the lane leading from the road to her father’s cabin. She let it drop again. “Why, I’ll go the whole way with you, Sally.”

“Will you? Well, I declare to gracious, you’re the best girl I ever seen. I believe in my heart, I’ll rout Abel out and make him go back home with you.”

“You needn’t,” the girl said. “I’m not afraid to go alone in the dark.”

“Well, just as you say, Janey. What do you do to keep from beun’ afraid?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I just think, I suppose.”

“Well, I just want to squeal.” Sally had been talking in her loud, loose voice to keep her courage up. “Well, I declare if we ain’t there a’ready. If you just say the word I’ll have Abel out in half a minute, and—”

“No,” the girl said. “Good night.”

“Well, good night. I’ve got half a mind to go back with you myself,” Sally called, as she lifted her hand to pull the latchstring of her door.

Jane Gillespie found her father standing at the bars when she went back. He mechanically let them down for her.

“I thought you would be in bed, Father,” she said gently, but coldly.

“I’ve had things to keep me awake; and it’s hot indoors,” he answered, and then he demanded, “Well?”

If it was his way of bidding her tell him of her evening’s experience, she did not obey him, and he had to make another attempt on her silence. “Was Hughey there?”

“Hughey? I don’t know.”

“Didn’t he ask to come home with you?”

“I didn’t see him. Sally Reverdy came with me.”

“Yes, I knew that.”

She was silent for another moment and then she said, “Father, I have a message for you. He said, ‘I send my peace to him; and it will not return unto me.’ He said you needed him.”

Gillespie knew that she meant Dylks and he knew that she kept out of her voice whatever feeling she had in delivering his message.

In the dark, she could not see her father’s frown, but she was aware of it in his answer. “You went there against my will. Well?”

“I believe.”

“You believe? What do you believe?”

“Him. That he is sent.”

“Why?”

“I can’t tell you. He made me; he made all the people there.”

Her father was standing between her and the door. He stood aside. “Go to bed now. But be quiet. Your Aunt Nancy is there.”

“Aunt Nancy?”

“Laban came, but he went back to the Cross Roads, and she’s over for the night with the baby.”

“The baby? Oh, I’ll be careful!” A joy came into her voice, and the strain left it in something like a laugh.

Early in the morning she crept down the ladder from the loft; her father had looped his cot up against the cabin wall and gone out. Nancy was sitting up in the bed she had made for herself on the floor, coiling a rope of her black hair into a knot at her neck. The baby lay cooing and kicking in her lap. The morning air came in fresh and sweet at the open door.

“Oh, Aunt Nancy, may I take her?”

“Yes; I’ll get the breakfast. Your father’ll be hungry; he’s been up a good while, I reckon.”

“I’ll make the fire first, and then I’ll take the baby.”

The girl uncovered the embers on the hearth and blew them into life; then she ran out into the cornfield, and gathered her apron full of the milky ears, and grated them for the cakes which her aunt molded to fry for breakfast. She took the baby and washed its hands and face, talking and laughing with it.

“You talk to it a sight more than you do to anybody else, Jane,” the mother said. “Don’t put anything but its little shimmy on; it’s goin’ to be another hot day.”

“I believe,” the girl said, “I’ll get some water in the tub, and wash her all over. There’ll be time enough.”

“It’d be a good thing, I reckon. But you mustn’t forget your milkin’. I dunno what our cow’d do this morning if it wasn’t for Joey. But he’ll milk her, him and Benny Hingston, between them, somehow. Benny stayed with him last night.”

“I did forget the milking,” the girl said, putting the baby’s little chemise on. “But I’ll do it now. Sissy will have to wait till after breakfast for her washing.” She got the tin bucket from where it blazed a-tilt in the sun beside the back door of the cabin, and took her deep bonnet from its peg. She did not ask why the boys slept alone in the cabin, but her aunt felt that she must explain.

“Laban’s got work for the whole fall at the Cross Roads. He went straight back last night. I come here.” She had got through without telling the lie which she feared she must. “I’m goin’ home after breakfast.”

Jane asked nothing further, but called from the open door, “Sukey, Sukey! Suk, Suk, Suk!” A plaintive lowing responded; then the snapping sound of a cow’s eager hoofs; the hoarse drumming of the milk in the bucket followed, subduing itself to the soft final murmur of the strippings in the foam. Jane carried the milk to the spring house before she reappeared in the cabin with a cup of it for the baby.

“It’s so good for her to have it warm from the cow,” she said, as she tilted the tin for the last drop on the little one’s lips. “I wish you’d leave her here with me, Aunt Nancy.”

“It’s about time she was weaned,” the mother said. “I reckon you better call your father now. He must be ready for his breakfast, bendin’ over that tobacco ever since sun-up.”

Jane took down the tin dinner horn from its peg, and went to the back door with it, and blew a long, loud blast, crumbling away in broken sounds.

The baby was beating the air with its hands up and down, and gurgling its delight in the noise when she came back. “Oh, honey, honey, honey!” she cooed, catching it up and hugging it to her.

The mother looked at them over her shoulder as she put the cakes of grated corn in the skillet, and set it among the coals on the hearth. “It’s a pity you ha’n’t got one of your own.”

“I don’t want one of my own,” the girl said.

“I thought, a spell back,” — the woman took up the subject again after a decent interval— “that you and Hughey Blake was goin’ to make a match.” The girl said nothing, and her aunt pursued, “Was he there, last night?”

“I didn’t notice.”

“Many folks?” her aunt asked with whatever change or fulfilment of a first intent.

From kneeling over to play with the baby the girl sank back on her heels with her hands fallen before her.

“I don’t know.”

“What did he preach?”

“The Word of God; God’s own words. All Scripture; but it was like as if it was the first time you ever heard it.”

The girl was looking at the woman, but seemed rapt from the sight of her in a vision of the night before.

“I reckon Satan could make it sound that way,” Nancy said, but her niece seemed not to hear her. Nancy stood staring at her, with words bitter beyond saying in her heart; words that rose in her throat and choked her. When she spoke she only said, “Get up, Jane; your father’ll be here in a minute.”

“I’m not going to eat anything. I’m going into the woods.” She staggered to her feet, and dashed from the door. The child looked after her with outstretched arms and whimpered pitifully, but she did not mind its call.

“Where’s Jane?” her father said, coming in at the back door.

“Gone into the woods,” she said.

“To pray, I reckon.”

He sat down at the table-leaf lifted from the wall, and his sister served him his breakfast. He ate greedily, but his hand trembled so in lifting his cup that the coffee spilled from it.

When he had ended and sat leaning back from the board, she asked him: “What are you going to do?”

The old man cleared his throat. “Nothing, yet. Let the Lord work His will.”

“And let Joseph Dylks work his will, too! I’ll have something to say about that.”

“Be careful, woman. Be careful.”

“Oh, I’ll be careful. He has as much to lose as I have.”

“No, not half so much.”

VIII

Where Matthew Braile sat smoking most of the hot forenoon away on the porch of his cabin, there came to him rumor of the swift spread of the superstition running from mind to mind in the neighborhood, and catching like fire in dry grass. The rumor came in different voices, some piously meant to shake him with fear in the scorner’s seat which he held so stubbornly; some in their doubt seeking the help of his powerful unfaith; but he required their news from them all with the same mocking. They were not of the Scribes and Pharisees, the pillars of the Temple, the wise and rich and proud who had been the first to follow Dylks, but the poorer and lowlier sort who wavered before the example of their betters, and were willing to submit it to the searching of the old Sadducee’s scrutiny.

The morning after Abel Reverdy had finished his work at the Cross Roads, and had returned to the cares patiently awaiting him at home he rode his claybank so hesitantly toward the Squire’s cabin that his desire to stop and talk was plain, and Braile called to him: “Well, Abel, what do they think of the Prophet over at Wilkins’s? Many converts? Many dipped or sprinkled, as the case required?”

Reverdy drew rein and faced the Squire with a solemnity presently yielding to his natural desire to grin at any form of joke, and his belief that when the Squire indulged such flagrant irreverence as this he must be joking. Yet he answered evasively: “You hearn’t he says now he hain’t never go’n to die?”

“No. But I’m not surprised to hear it; about the next thing on the docket. Did he say that at the Cross Roads?”

“Said it right here in Leatherwood. Sally told me the first thing when I got home. You wasn’t at the Temple last night, I reckon?”

“Well, not last night,” Braile said with an implication that he had been at the Temple all the other nights, which made Reverdy laugh with guilty joy.

“One o’ the Hounds — no, it was Jim Redfield hisself — stopped on the way out, and he says, ‘What’s this I hear? You say you ain’t goin’ to die.’ And Dylks he lifts his hands up over his head and he says, ‘This shell will fall off’; and Jim he says, ‘I’ve got half a mind to crack your shell,’ and the believers they got round, and begun to hustle Jim off, but Dylks he told them to let him alone, and he says, ‘I can endure strong meat, but I must be fed on milk for a while.’ What you s’pose he meant, Squire?”

Braile took his pipe out and cackled toothlessly. “I’m almost afraid to think, Abel. Something awful, though. You say Sally told you?”

“Yes.”

“I should think Sally would know what he meant, if anybody.” He looked at Abel, and Sally’s husband joined him in safe derision. “Tell you anything else?”

“Well, no, not just in so many words. But it ‘pears he’s been teachun’ round all sorts of things in private, like. Who do you reckon he says he is?”

“Not John the Baptist, I hope. I don’t know where we should get the locusts and wild honey for him in this settlement. Might try grasshoppers, but the last bee-tree in the Bottom was cut down when I was a boy. I got a piece of the comb.”

“I don’t know if he said John the Baptist; but it was John, anyway. And they say — or that’s what Sally hearn tell — that when he was off with Enraghty and Hingston on some ‘pointments down round Seneca there was doun’s that ‘uld make your hair stand up.”

“You don’t happen to know just what the doings were?”

“Well, no, I don’t, Squire. But they was doun’s to deceive the very elec’, from all I hearn.”

“That’s just what Hingston and Enraghty both are — the very elect. What deceived them?”

“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire! You know I don’t mean they were deceived! That’s just a Bible sayin’. You see, Brother Briggs was sick and Brother Enraghty went along with Dylks and Brother Hingston to preach in his place.”

“Couldn’t Dylks have done the preaching?”

“I reckon he could. But there was three ‘p’intments, and may be Dylks couldn’t fill ’em all, and may be he didn’t want to. Fust Brother Enraghty preached in the Temple at Seneca, and then at Brother Christhaven’s house off south of that, and then at David Mason’s, the local preacher; but Brother Mason has got the consumption, and he couldn’t preach, so Brother Enraghty had to do all the preachun’.”

“I see. Well?”

“Well, that wasn’t anything out o’ the common, but what Dylks done to the Devil beat all the preachun’, I reckon.”

“How’d it get out? Devil tell?”

“No. Brother Enraghty told, and Sally she got it putty straight from the wife of the man that he told it to.”

“Go on,” Braile said. “I can hardly wait to hear.”

“Well, sir, they had just got acrost the Leatherwood, and Brother Enraghty felt as if he was lifted all at once into heaven; air diff’ent, and full of joy. Dylks’s face got brighter and brighter, and his voice sounded like music. When they got to the top of the hill where you can look back and see the Temple, Dylks turned his horse and stretched out his hands, and says he, ‘How ignorant them people is of my true natur’. But time will show ‘em.’ Well, not just them words, you know; more dictionary; and they preached with a great outpourun’ at Seneca. They didn’t go to bed that night at all, accordun’ to the woman’s tell that Enraghty told her man; sot up tell mornun’ prayun’, and singun’ hymns and readun’ the Bible. Next mornun’ when they started out Brother Enraghty seen a bright ring round Dylks’s head, and whenever Dylks got down to pray the ring just stayed in the air over the saddle tell he got back, and then it dropped round his head ag’in.”

Reverdy stopped for the effect, but Braile only said, “Go on! Go on!”

“Well, sir, so they kep’ on all that day and all the next night, prayun’, and singun’, and readun’ the Bible. The next mornun’ when they started Brother Enraghty felt kind o’ cold all over, and his teeth chattered, and Dylks looked at him hard in the face, and says he, ‘Time is precious now. This is the time for work. I now reveal unto you that you are Paul the Apostle.’”

“And what did Paul the Apostle say? Did he own up that he was Paul?”

Reverdy halted in his tale. “Look here, Squire! I don’t feel just right, havun’ you say such things. It sounds — well, like profane swearun’.”

“Any worse than Dylks or Enraghty? You go right ahead, Abel. I’ll take the responsibility before the law.”

“Well,” Reverdy continued with a reluctance that passed as he went on, “what Dylks told him was that he would increase his faith, so’t he could see the sights of his power, and glorify him among men, and then Enraghty he commenced to git warm ag’in, and Dylks he turned up his eyes and kep’ still, and it was so bright all round him that it made the daylight like dusk, and Dylks made him hark if he didn’t hear a kind of rush in the air, and Dylks said it was the adversary of souls, but he would conquer him. They came into a deep holler in the woods and there they see the devil standun’ in their way, and Dylks he lights and hollers out, ‘Fear not, Paul; this day my work is done,’ and he went towards Satan and Satan he raised his burnun’ wings and bristled his scales, and stuck out his forked tongue and dropped melted fire from it; and he rolled his eyes in his head, hissun’ and bubblun’ like sinners boilun’ in hell’s kittles. Then Dylks he got down on his knees and prayed, and got up and give his shout of Salvation, and the devil’s wings fell, and he took in his tongue, and his eyes stood still, and Dylks he blowed his breath at him, and Satan he turned and jumped, and every jump he give the ground shook, and Dylks and the balance of ’em follered him till the devil come to Brother Mason’s house, and then he jumped through the shut winder out of sight. They found Brother Mason’s son David in bed sick, but he got up and took Dylks in his arms and called him his Savior, and everybody got down on their knees and prayed, and their faces was shinun’ beautiful, and Dylks he walks round David Mason, and rubs his hands over him, and says, ‘I bind the devil for a thousand years,’ and he hugged David, and said, ‘The work is done.’ And he wouldn’t stay to preach there, but told ’em they must come back with him to the Temple here in Leatherwood. On the way back he wouldn’t talk at all, hardly, but just kep’ sayun’, ‘The perfect work is done,’ and he didn’t give his shout any more; just snorted.”

Braile’s pipe had gone out, but he pulled at it two or three times, before he said, “Well, Abel, I don’t wonder Sally is excited. I suppose you would be, if you believed a word of this yarn?”

“Well, it’s poorty cur’ous doun’s, Squire,” Reverdy said, daunted between his natural bent and his wish to be of the Squire’s thinking. “Don’t you believe it?”

“Oh, yes, I believe it. But you know I believe anything. If Dylks did it, and Enraghty says he did it, why there we’ve got the gospel for it — right from St. Paul himself.”

He said no more, and Reverdy lingered a moment in vague disappointment. Then he sighed out, “Well, I must be goun’, I reckon,” and thumped his bare heels into the claybank’s ribs and rode away.

Day by day the faith in Dylks spread with circumstance which strengthened it in the converts; they accepted the differences which parted husband and wife, parent and child, and set strife between brothers and neighbors as proof of his divine authority to bring a sword; they knew by the hate and dissension which followed from his claim that it was of supernatural force, and when the pillars of the old spiritual temple fell one after another under his blows, they exalted in the ruin as the foundation of a new sanctuary. They drove the worshipers out of the material Temple, Methodists and Moravians and Baptists who had used it in common. They met to dedicate it solely to the doctrine of the prophet who came teaching that neither he nor they should ever die, but should enter in the flesh into the New Jerusalem which should come down to them at Leatherwood. His steps in passing from teacher to prophet and to Messiah were contested by a few with bitter and strenuous dissent, but on the night when Dylks proclaimed before the thronging assembly in the stolen Temple, “I am God and there is none else,” they pressed round him, men and women and children, and worshiped him. “I am God and the Christ in one,” he proclaimed. “In me, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are met. There is no salvation except by faith in me. They who put their faith in me shall never taste death, but shall be translated into the New Jerusalem, which I am going to bring down from Heaven.” He snorted; the few unbelievers protested in abhorrence; but the Sisters in the faith shrieked and the Brothers shouted, “We shall never die!” Dylks came down from the pulpit among them, and Enraghty called out, “Behold our God!” and they fell on their knees before him. As it had been from the beginning, the wisest and best, the first in prayer and counsel, were foremost in the idolatry; and young girls, and wives and mothers joined in hailing Dylks as their Creator and Savior, and besought him to bless and keep them.

The believers were in such force that none of the Hounds, veteran disturbers of camp-meetings and revivals, who were there, dared molest them; the few members of the sects expelled from the Temple of their common worship held aloof from the tumult in dismay, and made no attempt to reclaim the sanctuary. One man, not of any church, but of standing in the community, tried to incite the sectarians to assert their rights, but found no following among them. They left the Temple together with certain others who had been trembling toward belief in Dylks, but whom the profanation repelled; when they were gone the tumult sank enough to let Enraghty announce another meeting a week hence, and then dismiss the congregation.

“An’ afore that we’re goin’ to have a murricle,” Sally Reverdy told Squire Braile, sitting early the next morning at the receipt of gossip on his cabin porch with his pipe between his teeth; her cow had not come up the night before, and Abel had not found her in the woods-pasture when he went to look. “An’ I couldn’t wait all day, an’ I just slipped over to git some milk of Mis’ Braile,” she explained to the Squire as she paused with the bucket in her hand. “I told her I’d bring it back the first chance’t I git at our cow; I reckon Abel will find her some time or ‘nuther; and I ‘lowed you had plenty.”

Braile had already heard her explaining all this to his wife, but now he kept her for the full personal detail of the last night’s event at the Temple. She ended an unsparing report of the wonders seen with a prophecy of wonders to come.

“Why,” Braile said, “I don’t see what you want of a miracle more than what you’ve had already. The fact that your cow didn’t come up last night, and Abel couldn’t find her in the woods-pasture this morning is miracle enough to prove that Dylks is God. Besides, didn’t he say it himself, and didn’t Enraghty say it?”

“Well, yes, they did,” Sally assented, overborne for the moment by his logic.

“And didn’t you all believe them?”

“Well, we all did,” Sally said. “But look here, Squire Braile, what about them that didn’t believe it?”

“Oh, then there were some there that didn’t believe it! Well, I suppose nothing less than more miracles will do for them. Who were they?”

“Well, of course, there was Jim Redfield; he’s been ag’inst him from the first; and there was old George Nixon, and there was Hughey Blake, and a passel of the Hounds that I don’t count.”

“Why, certainly not; the Hounds would doubt anything. But I’m surprised at Redfield and Nixon and Hughey Blake. What reason did they give for the faith that wasn’t in them? When a man stood up and snorted like a horse and said he was God, why didn’t they believe him? Or the other fellows that didn’t snort, but said they knew it was God from a sound that he made?”

“Oh, pshaw, now, Squire Braile!” Sally gurgled. She did not yield quite with Abel’s helplessness at a joke, but the Squire’s blasphemous irony had its force with her too, though she felt it right to bring herself back to her religious conviction with the warning, “Some day you’ll go too fur.”

“Yes, I’m always expecting the lightning to strike in the wrong place. Didn’t Nixon or Redfield or Hughey Blake say anything? Or did they just look ashamed of you, down there on your knees before a man that you worshiped for a God because he snorted like a horse? Didn’t anybody in their senses say anything, or couldn’t those that were out of their senses hear anything but their own ravings?”

The old man had pleased himself with his mockeries, but now he let the scorn which his irony had hidden blaze out. “Wasn’t anybody ashamed of it all? Weren’t you ashamed yourself, Sally?”

“Well, I dunno,” Sally said, easing herself from one foot to another and shifting the milk-bucket from her right hand to her left. “Where everybody is goun’ one way, you don’t know what to think exactly. Jane Gillespie was there, and she went on as bad as the best.”

“Jane Gillespie?”

“Yes. She come with me, and she was goun’ to come home with me, as fur’s the door, and she would ha’ done it, if it hadn’t ha’ been for her father. He bruk through the believers and drug her up from the floor where she was kneelun’ and stoopun’ her forehead over to the ground, and pulled her out through the crowd. ‘You come home with me!’ says he, kind o’ harsh like; and if it hadn’t ha’ been for Nancy Billuns’s Joey I’d ha’ had to git through the woods alone, and the dear knows I’m always skeered enough. But Joey and Benny Hingston they come with me, or I don’t feel as if I’d been here to tell it.”

“You’d have been safe from the devil, though; he stayed with Dylks. Didn’t David say anything to the girl?”

“Just, ‘You come home with me,’ and he looked so black that Hughey Blake he kind o’ started from where he was standun’ with the unbelievers, and he says, ‘Oh, don’t, Mr. Gillespie!’ — like that — and Jane she said, ‘It’s my father, Hugh,’ and she went along with him, kind o’ wild lookun’, like she was walkun’ in her sleep. I noticed it at the time.”

“Didn’t Dylks do anything — say anything?”

“Well, not that I seen or hearn. But some o’ them that was standun’ nigh him was talkun’ about it when we all got out, and they was sayun’ he said, ‘Go with your earthly father; your heavenly father will keep you safe!’ I don’t know whether he did or not; but that’s what they was sayun.”

“And did Gillespie say anything back?”

“Not’t anybody heared. Just give Dylks a look like he wanted to kill him, and then Dylks snorted, and yelled ‘Salvation!’ Squire,” Sally broke off, “some of us believers was talkun’ it over, when we started home, and wonderun’ what ought we to call him. Jest Dylks don’t sound quite right, and you can’t say Almighty, to a body, exactly, and you can’t say Lord. What should you think was the right way?”

Braile got back to his irony. “Well, that’s an important question, Sally. I should call him Beelzebub, myself; but then I’m not a believer. That night when he first came, didn’t he tell the people to call him just Dylks?”

“Yes, he did, but that was for the present, he said.”

“Has he given himself any other name?”

“Well, no.”

“Then I should let it go at Dylks.”

“Just plain Dylks? Mr. Dylks wouldn’t do; or Brother Dylks, wouldn’t. Father Dylks don’t sound quite the thing—”

“Might try Uncle Dylks,” Braile said, cackling round his pipe-stem, and now Sally perceived that it was in vain to attempt serious discussion of the point with him.

She said, “Oh, pshaw, Squire Braile,” and lankly let herself down sidewise from the porch, and flopped away on the road. Then she stopped, and called back, “Say, Squire, what do you think of the Good Old Man?”

“What good old man?”

“Why, Dylks. For a name. That’s what most of ’em wants to call him.”

“Sounds like a good name for them that like a name like it.”

“He calls us the Little Flock.”

“Well, well! Geese or sheep?”

“Oh, pshaw, now! I wouldn’t belong to the Herd of the Lost, anyway. That’s what he calls the unbelievers.”

“You don’t tell me! Well, now I will be scared in the dark.”

Failing of any retort, Sally now flopped definitively beyond calling back.

Braile watched her going with a sardonic smile, but when his wife, after waiting for her to be quite gone, came out to him, he was serious enough.

“Did that fool tell you of the goings on at the Temple last night?”

“As much as I would let her. I suppose it had to come to something like that. It seems as if the people had gone crazy.”

“Yes,” the Squire sighed heavily, “there’s no doubt about that. And it’s a pity. For such a religious community Leatherwood Creek used to be a very decent place to live in. They were a lot of zealots, but they got on well with one another; that Temple of theirs kept them together, and they didn’t quarrel much about doctrine. Now with the Dylksites driving the old-fashioned believers out of the sanctuary and dedicating it to the exclusive worship of Dylks, the other denominations are going to fight among themselves; and there’ll be no living with them. And that isn’t the worst of it. This new deity isn’t going to be satisfied with worship merely. Money, of course, he’ll want and get, and he’ll wear purple and fine linen, and feed upon fried chicken every day. Still the superstition might die out, and no great harm done, if the faith was confined to men. But you know what women are, Martha.”

“They’re what men make ‘em,” Mrs. Braile said sadly.

“It’s six of one and half a dozen of another, I’m afraid. But this god of theirs is a handsome devil, and some poor fool of a girl, or some bigger fool of a married woman, is going to fall in love with him, and then—”

“Did you just think of that? Well, you can’t help it by lettin’ your coffee get cold.”

Braile tilted his chair down and rose from its rebound to follow his wife stiffly indoors. “The question is, Who will it be? Which poor girl? Which bigger fool? And nothing can be done to prevent it! The Real God put it into human nature, and all Hell couldn’t stop it. Well, I suppose it’s for some wise purpose,” he ended, in parody of the pious resignation prevailing on the tongues of the preachers.

IX

David Gillespie woke later than his daughter, and when he had put away the shadows of his unhappy dreams he took up the burden of waking thoughts which weighed more heavily on him. The sight of his child groveling at the feet of that blasphemous impostor and adoring him as her God pitilessly realized itself to him as a thing shameful past experience and beyond credence, and yet as undeniable as his pulse, his breath, his seeing and hearing. The dread which a less primitive spirit would have forbidden itself as something too abominable, possessed him as wholly possible. He had lived righteously, and he had kept evil from those dear to him, both the dead and the quick, by the force of his strong unselfish will; now he had seen his will without power upon the one who was dearest, and whom he seemed to hold from evil only by the force of his right hand. But his hand could not be everywhere and at all times; and then?

The breakfast which the girl had got for him and left on the hearth was warm yet, when he put it on the table, and she could not have been gone more than a few minutes, but she had gone, he did not know where, without waiting to speak with him after the threats and defiances which they had slept upon. When he had poured the coffee after the mouthfuls he forced down, he acted on the only hope he had and crossed the woods-pasture to his sister’s cabin.

She understood the glance he gave within from the threshold where he paused, and said, “She ain’t here, David.” Nancy had cleared her breakfast away and was ironing at the shelf where she had eaten; the baby was playing on the floor.

Gillespie looked down at it. “I didn’t know but what she’d come over to dress it; she cares so much for it.”

“It cares for her, too. But what brings you after her?”

“She’s gone somewhere without her breakfast. We had high words last night after I brought her home.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have higher words, yet, David. Joey was at the Temple.”

“Nancy, I don’t know what to do about her.”

“You knew what to do about me, David.” She gave her stab, and then she pitied him, not for the pain she was willing he should feel from it, but for the pain he was feeling before. “I know it isn’t like that. I’m sorry for you both. You haven’t come to the end of your troubles.”

“I can’t understand the girl,” he said desolately. “Up to a year ago she was like she had always been, as biddable as a child, and meek and yielding every way. All at once she’s got stiff-necked and wilful.”

“She couldn’t tell you why, herself, David. We are all that way — good little girls — and then all of a sudden wilful women. I don’t know what changes us. It’s harder on us than it is on you. It came on me like a thief in the night and stole away my sense. It gave Joseph Dylks his chance over me; if it had been sooner or later I should have known he was a power of darkness as far as I could see him. But my eyes were holden by my self-conceit, and I thought he was an angel of light.”

“He’s got past being an angel now,” Gillespie said, forcing himself to the real matter of his errand, far from the question of his daughter’s estrangement from her old self. “Did Joey tell you about — last night?”

Nancy did not quit the psychological question at once. “Up to that time we think our fathers and brothers are something above the human; then we think they’re not even up to the common run of men. We think other men are different because we don’t know them. Yes,” she returned to his question with a sigh, “Joey told me something about it — enough about it. I suppose it isn’t right to let him be a spy on his father; but I have to. If I didn’t he might want to go, from the talk of those fools, and get to believin’ with them. He said there was boys and girls kneelin’ with the rest — little children, almost, and shoutin’ and prayin’ to Joseph. Did you see ‘em?”

“Yes; it was dreadful, Nancy. But it was worse to see the women, the grown-up girls, and the mothers of the children. It looked like they had been drinking. It fairly turned me sick. And my own daughter groveling on her knees with the worst! If I didn’t know Dylks for the thing he is, without an idea beyond victuals and clothes, I might ha’ thought he had thrown a spell on ‘em, just for deviltry. But they done it all themselves; he just gave them the chance to play the fool.”

Nancy resumed from her own more immediate interest, “Well, I let Joey go; and I don’t know whether it helps or hurts to have him come home feelin’ about him, and all the goings on, just like I would myself. He always says he’s glad I wasn’t there, and he pities the poor fool women more than he despises his father. Or I ortn’t to say despise; Joey don’t despise anybody; he’s all good, through and through; I don’t know where he gets it. He’s like Laban, and yet he ain’t any kin to Laban.”

“It must be hard on you, Nancy. I don’t know how you can bear up the way you do. It is like a living streak of fire in me.”

“That’s because there’s some hope left in you. I can bear what I’ve got to because the feeling is all burnt out of me. It’s like as if my soul was dead.”

“You mustn’t say that, Nancy.”

“I say anything I please, now; anything I think. I’m not afraid any more; I hain’t got anything left to be afraid of.”

“Well, I have,” David returned. “Something I’m ashamed to be afraid of it: his hold on Jane. I don’t understand it. We’ve always thought alike and believed alike, and now to see her gone crazy after a thief and liar like that! It’s enough to drive me mad the other way. I don’t only want to kill him; I want to kill—”

“David!” she stopped him, and in his pause she added, “You’re worse than what I ever was. Where is your religion?”

“Where is her religion? I raised her to fear God, the Bible God that I’ve prayed to for her since she was a little babe, but now since she’s turned to this heathen image I begin to turn from Him. What’s He been about if He’s All Seeing and All Powerful, to let loose such a devil on a harmless settlement like this where we were all brethren and dwelt together in unity, no matter whether we believed in dipping or sprinkling? We loved one another — in the Scripture sense — and now look! Families broken up, brothers not speaking, wives and husbands parting, parents cursing the day their children were born, and children flying in the face of their parents. Did you hear about Christopher Mills, how he come crying to his father and mother and tried to make them believe in Dylks, and when his father said it was all a snare and a delusion, Christopher went away telling them their damnation was sealed?”

“No,” the woman said with bitter pleasure in the mockery, “but I heard how our new Saint Paul Enraghty went over to his uncle’s the other day, and said he should never see corruption, and should never die, and told his uncle he couldn’t shoot him. Them that was there say the old man just reached for his rifle, and was going to shoot Saint Paul in the legs, and then Paul begged off and pretended that he was only in fun!”

She laughed, but David Gillespie looked sadly at her. “I don’t believe I like to hear you laugh, Nancy.”

“Why, are you turning believer too, David? It’ll be time for me next,” she mocked. “I couldn’t laugh at Joseph, may be, but Saint Paul Enraghty is a bigger rascal or a bigger fool than he is. Some say that Joseph is just crazy, and some that he’s after money, and that Enraghty’s put him up to everything.”

“Yes,” David moodily assented to the general tenor of her talk. “The way they’ve roped in between ’em that poor fool Davis who’d been preaching for the United Brethren, and now preaches Dylks! First he wouldn’t hardly go into the same house, and then he wouldn’t leave it till he could come with Dylks. I don’t know how they do it! Sometimes I think the decentest man left in the place is that red-mouthed infidel, Matthew Braile! Sometimes I’m a mind to go to his house and get him to tell me what Tom Paine would do in my place.”

“You are pretty far gone, David. But I don’t wonder at it; and I don’t believe I think so badly of Matthew Braile, either. He may be an infidel, but he believes in some kind of a God that wants people to do right; he don’t believe in mortal sin, and may be that’s where he’s out; and I hear tell he don’t think there’s going to be any raisin’ of the body, or any Last Day, or any Hell; but he keeps it to himself unless folks pester him. I was afraid once to have Joey talk with him, before the plow went over me. But now I let Joey go to him all he wants to. He lets Joey come and pet the coon Joey give him because he heard that the Squire’s little boy used to want one. From all I can make out they don’t do much but talk about the little boy; he seems to take comfort in Joey because Joey’s like him, or the Squire thinks so.”

“If Jane had died when she was his little boy’s age, I wouldn’t feel as if I had lost her half as much as I do now.”

Nancy lifted herself from her ironing-board and looked at her brother. “You told me what the duty of a woman was that found out she had two husbands. Don’t you know what the duty of a man is that has a daughter turned idolater?”

“No, I don’t, Nancy,” David answered doggedly.

“Then, why don’t you wrestle with the Lord in prayer? Perhaps He’d make you some sign.”

“Oh, prayer! The thought of it makes me sick since I saw them fools wallowing round at Dylks’s feet, and beseeching that heathen image to save them.”

“Then if you hain’t got any light of yourself, and you don’t believe the Lord can give you any, what do you expect me to do for you?”

“I don’t expect anything, Nancy. If she was a child I could whip it out of her, but when your child has got to be a woman you can’t whip her.”

They left the hopeless case, and began to talk of the things they had heard, especially the miracle which Dylks had promised to work. “He’s appointed it for to-night,” Gillespie said, “but I don’t believe but what he’ll put it off, if the coast ain’t clear when the time comes. He always had the knack of leaving the back door open when he saw trouble coming up to the front gate.”

“You can’t tell me anything about Joseph Dylks,” Nancy said. She was ironing, and at the last word she brought the iron down with the heavy thump that women give with it at an emphatic word in their talk. “What I wonder is that a man like you, David, could care what people in such a place as this would say if they found out that I was livin’ with Laban when I knowed Dylks was alive. There wouldn’t be any trouble with his followers, I reckon. He’d just tell ’em he never saw me in his life before, and that would do them.”

“Nancy,” her brother turned solemnly upon her, “as sure as I’m standing here I don’t care for that any more. If you say the word, I’ll go and tell Laban to come back to you.”

“You’re safe there, David. If you’ve parted with your conscience, I’ve got it from you. I wonder you don’t go and follow after Joseph Dylks too. All the best and smartest men in the place believe in him. Just look at Mr. Enraghty! A man with more brains and book learnin’ than all the rest put together; willin’ to be the Apostle Paul because Joseph Dylks called him it, and gets up in the Temple where he used to preach Christ Jesus and Him crucified, and tells the people to behold their God in Joseph Dylks! There’s just one excuse for him: he’s crazy. If he ain’t he’s the wickedest man in Leatherwood, the wickedest man in the whole world; he’s worse than Joseph Dylks, because he knows better. Joseph is such a liar that he could always make himself believe what he said. But it’s no use your stayin’ here, David!” She suddenly broke off to turn on her brother. “If you’re a mind to let Jane come, I’ll try what I can do with her.”

The old man faltered at the door. “Are you going to tell her, Nancy?”

“I’m not going to tell you, whether I am or not, David!”

Her words began harshly, but ended with his name tenderly, pitifully uttered.

She called after him as he moved from her door, heavily, weakly, more like an old man than she had noted him yet, “I’ll talk to Jane, and whatever I say will be for her good.” She watched him out of sight from where she was working; then she went to the door, with some mind to call more kindly yet to him; but he was not to be seen, and she went back to her ironing, and ironed more swiftly than before, moving her lips in a sort of wrathful revery. From time to time she changed her iron for one at the hearth, which she touched with her wetted finger to test its heat, and returned to her table with an unconscious smile of satisfaction in its quick responsive hiss. In her movements to and fro she spoke to the baby, which babbled inarticulately up to her from the floor. Then she seemed to forget it, and it was in one of these moments of oblivion that she was startled by a sharp cry of terror from it. A man was looking in at the door.

X

The man stood with one foot on the log doorstep outside and the other planted on the threshold of the cabin.

Nancy came toward him with her iron held at arms’ length before her. “What do you want?” she demanded fiercely.

“Give me to drink,” he said, with a grin.

“Go round to the well,” she answered.

The man bent his body a little forward, and looked in, but he did not venture to lift his other foot to the threshold. “Where is your husband?” he asked.

“I have no husband. What is it to you?”

“‘Thou sayest well ... for him whom thou now hast, is not thy husband.’ You don’t look a bit older, and you’re as handsome as ever, Nancy. I suppose that’s his,” he said, turning his eye towards the little one on the floor, lifted by her hands half upright, and peering at him, in conditional alarm.

“It’s mine,” she retorted.

“Oh, anybody could see that. It’s the image of you. And so is our Joey. You don’t let your young ones favor your husbands much, Nancy; and yet you was not always so set against me. What’s your notion letting Joey come to the Temple?”

“To see for himself what you are.”

“That’s what I thought, maybe. Well, he don’t seem to take to me much, if I can judge from his face when he looks my way. I hain’t been able to give him all the attention I may later. But you needn’t be troubled about him. I won’t do anything to make you anxious. Nancy, I wish you could feel as friendly to me as I do to you. Will you let me have something to drink out of?”

“Go round,” she said, “and I’ll bring the gourd to you.”

Dylks laughed, but he obeyed, and found his way to the well where he lowered the bucket at the end of the swoop, and stood waiting for Nancy to follow him with the dipper fashioned from a long-necked gourd, as the drinking cup oftenest was in the western country of those days. She held it out to him with her head turned and he carried it to his lips from the brimming bucket.

He drank it empty, and then turned it over with a long, deep “Ah — h — h!” of satisfaction. “That was good! Good as the buttermilk would have been that you didn’t think to offer me. Well, I thank you for the water, anyway, you woman of Samaria.” He held the gourd toward her but she did not take it, and he laughed again. “If you could have had your way without sin you’d have made it poison, I reckon. Don’t you know I could drink poison the same as water?”

“You don’t,” she said, and as he swung the gourd in tacit question what to do with it since she did not offer to take it, she bade him, “Put it down.”

He did so, and she set her foot on the thin bowl and crushed it like an egg shell. He laughed. “Is that the way you feel about me, Nancy? Pity for the gourd, but don’t you believe that if I was to will it so, it would come good and whole again?”

“You don’t believe it,” she said.

“It’s not for me to believe or to unbelieve,” he answered. “I am that I am.”

“Oh, yes,” she taunted him, “you’ve tried saying such things, and you’re not afraid because it ha’n’t killed you yet. You think if you was just a man it would kill you.”

“Who can tell what I think? Perhaps something like what you say has gone through my mind. Why, Nancy, if you would listen once, I could convince you of it, too. Come, now, look at it in this light! If God lets a man say and do what the man pleases — and He has to do it every now and then according to what the Book tells — why ain’t the man equal with God? You believe, maybe, that you would be struck dead if you said the things that I do; but why ain’t I struck dead? Why, either because it ain’t so, at all, or because I’m God. It stands to reason, don’t it? What is God, anyway? If He was so mighty and terrible, wouldn’t He have ways of showing it in these times just as much as in those old times that we read about in the Book?

“Don’t you know that if there was anything besides you and me, here now, it would have sent the lightning out of this clear sky and blasted me when I said, I was God? Well, now we’ll try it again. Listen! I am God, Jehovah, ruler of heaven and earth!” He stood a moment, smiling. “There you see! I’m safe and sound as ever. May be you think it would be worse if you said I was God. Lots have said it. Last night all Leatherwood was hanging to my arms and legs down there in the Temple worshiping me. If I hadn’t been God it would have made me sick! No mere man could stand the praising God gets in the churches all the time. Why that proves I’m what I say I am, if nothing else does. I saw it from the first; I felt it; I knew it.” He ended with his laugh.

She stayed herself by the trunk of the tree overhanging the well. “Yes, you’ve got all Leatherwood with you, or as good as all, and I don’t wonder it’s made you crazy. But don’t you be so sure. Some day there’s going to be a reckoning with you, and you’re going to wake up from this dream of yours.” She seemed to gather force as she faced him. “I could feel to be glad it was a dream; I could feel to pity you. But don’t you believe but what it’s going to turn against you. Some day, sooner or later, some man’s going to show the people what you are; some woman—”

“There you’ve said it,” he broke in. “That’s what I’ve come for. You’re the only woman that could hurt me, not because you think you know me the best, but because you’re the bravest woman that ever was. That’s why I’ve got to have you with me in my dispensation. Male and female created He them in His image. I can swing all Leatherwood by myself, but Leatherwood’s nothing. If I had you with me we could swing the world! Nancy, why don’t you come to me?” He flung his arms wide and bent his stalwart shape toward her. “Leatherwood’s nothing, I tell you. Why, you ought to see the towns Over-the-Mountains; you ought to see Philadelphia, where I came from the last thing. Everywhere the people are waiting for a sign, just as they’ve always been, and we would come with a sign — plenty of signs: the perfect Godhead, male and female, for the greatest sign of all. Why, I wonder there’s a Christian woman living, with the slur that the idea of just one male God throws on women! Don’t you know that the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans, and everybody but the Hebrews, had a married God, and that the Godhead was husband and wife? If you had ever read anything at all you would know that.”

The bad, vulgar beauty of his face, set in its flowing beard and hair, glowed on her.

“You needn’t look that way at me, Joseph Dylks,” she answered. “I don’t want any book-l’arning to know what you are. You’re what you always was, a lazy, good-for-nothing — Oh, I don’t say you wasn’t handsome; that was what done it for me when I made you my God; but I won’t make you my God now, though you’re as handsome as ever you was; handsomer, if that’s any comfort to you.”

“Nothing to what you’re coming to me would be, Nancy.”

“You’ll have to do without, then. You think you can twist me round your finger, like you used to, if you willed it, but I’ve outlived you, you and your will. Now I want you to go, and not ever come near me again; or I’ll have Laban here, the next time.”

“Laban? Laban? Oh, the man who is not thy husband! I’m not afraid of your having Laban, here; let him come. I’ve converted worse sinners than Laban.” He had remained, bent forward with his gaze still on her; now he lifted himself, and said, as if it were another word of his spell, “Come, Nancy!”

She answered, “If I thought there was any mercy in you—”

“Why, I’m All-merciful, as well as All-mighty, Nancy!” he jeered.

“No,” — as if concluding her thought, she said, “it’s no use! You couldn’t do a right thing if you wanted to; you can only do wrong things. I see that.”

“What is right and what is wrong? When you stand by my side in your half of the godhead, you will know that there is no difference. Why, even a poor human being can make wrong right by wanting it enough, and with God there is nothing but one kind of thing, the thing that God allows. It don’t matter whether it’s letting the serpent tempt that fool woman in Eden, or Joseph’s brethren selling him into Egypt, or Samuel hewing Agag in pieces, or the Israelites smiting the heathen, or David setting Uriah in the forefront of the battle, or Solomon having hundreds of wives; it’s all right if God wills it. You’ll say it’s put right by what happens to them that do wrong. Be God yourself and the right and the wrong will take care of themselves. I want you to come and help me. Why, with the sister and daughter of old David Gillespie both following me—”

She suddenly shrank from the grandeur of judging of him, to the measure of her need of his forbearance. “Oh, why can’t you let David alone? What’s he ever done to you?”

“What have I ever done to him?” Dylks demanded, temporizing on her ground.

“Why can’t you let Jane alone?”

He gave his equine snort, as if the sense of his power could best vent itself so. “Why can’t she let me alone? That girl bothers me worse than all the other women in Leatherwood put together. She won’t let me let her alone.”

“She was all right before you came. Why can’t you let her go back to Hughey Blake?”

“Hughey Blake? Oh! Then it wasn’t—” A light of malign intelligence shone in his eyes. “Well, I haven’t got anything against Hughey Blake.”

“Oh, if you’d only let her go back to Hughey! If you’d only let her alone, I’d—”

“You’d what?” He bounded toward her, and at her recoil he laughed and said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I wasn’t scared. You can’t scare me, Joseph Dylks. It’s past that, long ago, with you and me. But if I only knowed what you was up to — what you would really take to let David alone; to let her go back to Hughey Blake — But there ain’t any pity in you!”

“Don’t I tell you I’m full of pity? Look here, Nancy; I don’t ask you to come with me, to be one with me, to go halves in the godhead, all at once. It’s been step by step with me: first exhorter, then prophet, then disciple, then the Son, then the Father: but it’s been as easy! You don’t know how faith, the faith of the elect, helps along; and you would have that from the beginning; they would take you on my word, you wouldn’t have to say or do anything. But that’s not what I’m expecting now,” he hurried to add, smiling at the cloud of refusal in her face. “I’m not fooling; all I ask now is to have you come and see me do a miracle at Brother Hingston’s to-night. I’ll do two miracles if you’ll come, and one will be sending Jane Gillespie away from me and back to Hughey Blake. You’ll want to see that, even if you don’t want to see me turn a bolt of cloth into seamless raiment by the touch of my hand.”

“You are a wicked man, Joseph Dylks,” the woman solemnly answered. “And I’m sorry I asked you anything. You couldn’t do good, if you tried.” She pulled her sunbonnet across her face, as if to hide it for shame, and went back slowly toward the cabin.

“Salvation!” Dylks shouted after her, and gave his equine snort. He began to sing, as he took his way through the woods,

 “Plunged in a gulf of dark despair

  We wretched sinners lay.”

At first he sang boldly, filling the woods with the mocking of his hymn. But at the sound of footsteps crackling over the dry falling twigs toward him intermittently, as if they paused in question, and then resumed their course toward him, his voice fell, brokenly silencing itself till at the encounter of a man glimpsed through the trees, and pausing in a common arrest, it ceased altogether.

“Who are you?” Dylks demanded of the slight, workworn figure before him.

“Laban Billings,” the man faltered.

“Well, then, Laban Billings, make way for the Lord thy God,” Dylks powerfully returned, and as if he had borne the man down before him, he strode over the place where he had stood, and lost himself in the shadows beyond.

Laban hurried on, stumbling and looking back over his shoulder, till he found himself face to face with Nancy at the door of the shed behind the cabin. She was looking, too, in the direction Dylks had ceased from their sight in the woods. They started from each other in mutual fright.

“Nancy!” he entreated. “I didn’t see you. I — I wasn’t comin’ to see you, indeed, indeed I wasn’t. I just thought I might ketch sight of the baby — It’s pretty hard to do without you both! And I was just passin’ — Well, they’ve knocked off work at the Corners, so’s to come to the miracle at Hingston’s Mill to-night — But I’ll go right away again, Nancy.”

“You needn’t, Laban. Come in and see the baby.”

“Nancy!” he uttered joyfully. Then he faltered, “Do you think it will be right—”

“Oh, who knows what’s right?” she retorted. Then at his stare, she demanded, “Didn’t you run across anybody in the woods?”

“Yes.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like what they tell the Leatherwood God looks like. They’re half crazy about him at the Corners. They don’t hardly talk about anything else.”

“Did you think he looked like God?”

“More like Satan, I should say. He’s handsome enough for Satan.”

“It was Joseph Dylks.”

“Yes, I s’picioned that.”

“And he’s been here, wanting me to go away with him — Over-the-Mountains.”

Laban made a dry sound in his throat and it was by a succession of efforts that he could say, “And — and — and—”

“Oh, could you ask, Laban?” she lamented. “You’re my husband, don’t you know it?” At the sound of her lament a little voice of fear and hope answered from the cabin. The father-hunger came into the man’s weak face, making it strong. “Come in and see our baby, Laban.”

She put out her hand to him innocently like a little girl to a little boy, and he took it. “I know it’s just for the baby; and I feel to thank you, Nancy,” he said, and together they went into the cabin.

At sight of him the baby crowed recognition. “She knowed you in a minute,” the mother said, and she straightened the skirt of the little one which the father had deranged in lifting the child from the floor. “I don’t believe she’ll ever forget you; I reckon she won’t if I have any say in it. Me and Joey talks about you every night when we’re gettin’ her to sleep.” She gurgled out a half-sob, half-laugh, as the little one pulled and pushed at his face, which he twisted this way and that, to get her hand in his mouth. “She always cared more for you than she did for me. I’ll set you a piece, Laban; I was just going to get me a bite of something; I don’t take my meals very regular, with you not here.”

“Well, I am a little hungry with the walk from the Corners, after such an early breakfast.”

“Well, you just keep her.”

“Oh, I’ll keep her,” he exulted.

She hustled about the hearth, getting the simple meal, which she made more than she had meant, and they had a joyous strange time together at the leaf she stayed from the well.

He kept the baby in his lap while he ate. Then he walked the floor till she fell asleep in his arms. When he lifted himself from laying her in the rough cradle which he had himself made for her, he said, without looking at the mother, “Now, I must be going, Nancy.”

“Don’t go on account of me, Laban,” she said with the same fierce courage she had shown in driving him from her before. “If it’s for me—”

“Nancy, I’ve thought it all out since I been away. And I reckon I ain’t your husband, in the sight of God. You was right about that; and I won’t ever come back again till — as long as—” He glanced wistfully at the little one in the cradle, and then he turned to go out of the door. “And — and — good-by, Nancy.”

She followed him to the door. “Kiss me, Laban!”

He put away the arms she lifted toward him. “No,” he said, “I reckon it wouldn’t be right,” and he turned and walked swiftly away, without looking back.

XI

The woman stood watching the man, as long as she could see him, and long after, with her left hand lifted to the jamb of the door, higher than her head. Then from the distance where he passed from sight over the brow of the hill, another figure of a man appeared, and slowly made its way down to the cabin. As she knew while he was still far off, it was Matthew Braile who, as long as he sat in the seat of the scorner, with his chair tilted against the wall, seemed a strong middle-aged man; but when he descended from his habitual place, with the crook of his stick, worn smooth by use, in his hard palm, one saw that he was elderly and stiff almost to lameness. He carried himself with a forward droop, and his gaze bent ponderingly on the ground, as if he were not meaning to look her way, and would pass without seeing her.

“Squire Braile!” she called to him, and as he straightened himself and turned round toward her, she besought him, “Do you believe there’s any God?”

“Oh!” he answered, and he smiled at the challenge from the somewhat lonely elevation which he knew the thoughts of his neighbors kept, aloof from the sordid levels of politics and business. “Why, Nancy, haven’t we got one, right here in Leatherwood?”

“That’s what makes me think there ain’t any, Squire Braile. If you’re not in too much of a hurry, I wish you’d stop and talk to me a minute. I’m in trouble.”

“Most women are; or men, for the matter of that. What is it, Nancy? I’m rather stronger on law than gospel; but if I can be any help, why you know your Joey’s an old friend of mine, and I’ll be glad to help you.”

He came toward her where she had stepped from the threshold and sat crouched on the hewn log, and stood looking down at her before he sank at her side.

“You may think it’s pretty strange, my asking you for help. Won’t you set? I can’t let you come inside because the baby’s just got to sleep.”

“Well,” he assented, “if you’re not afraid to be seen with such an infidel in the full light of day,” he jested, confronting her from the log where he sank. “What would Brother Gillespie say?”

She ignored his kindly mockery, and again she began, “What makes you believe there’s a God? You don’t believe in the Bible?”

“Not altogether, Nancy.”

“Do you believe in the Bible God?”

“As much as the Bible’ll let me.”

“Then, do you believe in the miracles?”

“What are you after, Nancy Billings?”

“If you saw a miracle, would you believe it?”

“That would depend on who did it. Now, I want you to let me do a little of the catechizing. I’ve liked you and Laban ever since you came to Leatherwood, and you know how your Joey has all but brought my boy back to me. Well, do you believe in God?”

“No!”

“Why don’t you?”

“A God that would let Joseph Dylks claim to be Him, and let them poor fools kneel down to him and worship him? Would an all-wise and all-powerful God do that?”

“What makes you say all-powerful? Haven’t you seen time and time again when good didn’t prevail against evil, and don’t you suppose He’d have helped it if He could? And why do you call Him all-wise? Is it because men are no-wise? That wouldn’t prove it, would it? And about the miracles, what does a miracle prove? Does it prove that the person who does it is of God, or just that faith is stronger than reason in those who think it’s happened?”

“But sin: do you think there’s such a thing?” Nancy pursued.

“There you are, catechizing me again! Yes, I think there’s sin, because I’ve known it in myself, if I haven’t in others.”

“And what is it — sin?”

“Well, Nancy, it seems to vary according to the time and place. But I should say it was going against what you knew was right at the time being.”

“And do you always know?”

“Always!” the old man answered solemnly. “I never was mistaken in my life, whether I went for or against it, and I’ve done both.”

The woman drew a hapless sigh. “Yes, I reckon it’s so.”

Braile was putting out his stick to help himself in rising, after the silence she let follow. She came from it, and reached a staying hand toward him. “And supposin’ — supposin’ — there was a woman — that there was a woman, and her husband left her, and he kept away years and years, till she thought he was dead, and she married somebody else, and then he come back, would it be a sin for her to keep on with the other one when she knowed the first one was alive?”

“I reckon that’s what would be called a sin, Nancy. Not that I’d be very quick to condemn her—”

“And supposin’ that the first one hadn’t claimed her yet, and she’d made the other one leave her, and then the first one come and wanted her to join him in the wickedest thing that ever was, and she wasn’t as strong as she had been, and she felt to need the protection-like of the other one: would it be a sin for her to take him back?”

Braile made again as if to rise. “I reckon you’d better talk to Mis’ Braile about a thing like that. You see, a man—”

She stayed him again with a beseeching gesture.

“Squire Braile, do you believe that God is good?”

“Ah, now, I’m more at home in a question like that. You might say that if He lets evil prevail, it’s either because He can’t help it, or because He don’t care, or even because He thinks it’s best for mankind to let them have their swing when they choose to do evil. I incline to think that’s my idea. He’s made man, we’ll say, made him in His own image, and He’s put him here in a world of his own, to do the best or the worst with it. The way I look at it, He doesn’t want to keep interfering with man, but lets him play the fool or play the devil just as he’s a mind to. But every now and then He sends him word. If we’re going to take what the Book says, He sent him Word made flesh, once, and I reckon He sends him Word made Spirit whenever there’s a human creature comes into the world, all loving and all unselfish — like your Joey, or — my — my Jimmy—”

The old man’s voice died in his throat, and the woman laid her hand on his knee. He trembled to his feet, now. “When I think of such Spirits coming into this world, I’m not afraid of all the devils out of hell Dylksing round.”

He walked on down the road, and Nancy went indoors and went about her household work. She cleaned the dishes and trimmed the hearth; she spun the flax which tufted her wheel; then she took the rags of some garments past repair, and in the afternoon shadow of her threshold she cut them into ribbons and sewed them end to end and wound them into balls, for weaving into carpets.

People, as the evening drew on, went by, singly, in twos, in groups, silent for the most part, but some talking seriously. These looked at Nancy without speaking, but some asked, “Ain’t you goin’ to the Miracle?” and she shook her head for answer.

She had brushed her hair and put it up neatly after her indoors work was done, but she was in what she would have called her every-day clothes, and the passers had on their Sunday clothes; the girls wore their newest plaids of linsey-woolsy, and the young men wore tall beaver hats, and long high-collared coats, with tight pantaloons, which some pretenders to the latest fashions had strapped under their boots. They had on their Sunday faces, too; some severe, some sly, some simple and kind, but all with an effect of condition for whatever might be going to happen. They went as the people of Leatherwood went to the Temple on the Sabbaths before their meetings had been turned from the orderly worship of the Most High to the riot of emotions raised by the strange man who proclaimed himself God. In their expectations of the Sign which he had promised to give them, both those who believed and those who denied him found themselves in a sort of truce. They were as if remanded to the peace of the time before the difference which had rent the community into warring fragments. In this truce brothers were speaking who had not spoken since they accepted or refused the new God; families walked together in the harmony which he had lately counseled; children honored their believing or disbelieving parents; fathers and mothers ceased to abhor their children as limbs of Satan, according to their faith or unfaith. “Let everybody come to the Sign,” he had exhorted them when he promised them the miracle, “just as if they had never seen or heard me before, and let His creatures judge their Creator with love for one another in their hearts.”

In all there was an air of release, and the young people looked as if they were going to one of the social gatherings they would have called a frolic, in the backwoods phrase. Nancy heard a girl titter in response to her companion’s daring whisper, “Wonder if Mis’ Hingston’s going to pass round the apples and cider.” They walked in couples, openly or demurely glad of being together for the time; and as if the miracle before them were the wonder of coming home through the woods with their arms around each other, whether the miracle of the seamless raiment was wrought or not.

It was their elders who were more singly set upon the fulfilment of the sign, and who went with a more passionate expectation in the doubt or the faith which differenced them; children were more bent upon the affair of the evening than the young girls and the young men. They had been privileged in being allowed to go with their fathers and mothers when they had not been punished in being left at home and they subdued themselves as they could to the terms of keeping step beside them with the bare feet that felt winged and ached to fly. Old and young they passed Nancy’s cabin thinly or at intervals, but sometimes in close groups; they glanced kindly or unkindly askance at her when they did not question her, and very possibly they read in her sitting there boldly aloof from them a defiance of the question which had begun to gather about her in the common mind since Laban had left her for his work at the Cross Roads, with none of those Saturday night returns which it had at first expected. It was known that Laban was of the same opposition to Dylks as Nancy and her brother, and it could not be that Dylks had caused the break between her and Laban which no one would have noticed if it had been an effect of religion. It could only be that Laban had left her, or that her temper had driven him away.

With the last came a crowd of boys, whose lagging she understood when her own boy jumped down from the cabin door beside her.

“Did I scare you, mother?” he asked, at her start.

“No; I was expecting you, and you always come in at the back. You’ll want your supper, I’ll be bound. What made you so late, and all out of breath, so?”

“I been running. We just got the last of the tobacco in, this evening, and Mis’ Hingston made me stay and eat with Benny; she said she’d excuse me to you. I just left the other boys up over the hill, and run through the woods to get here in time and ask you.”

“To ask me what, Joey dear?” She put her arms fondly round the boy’s knees, and pulled him down to her.

“The boys said you let me go to the Temple all I want to; but I told them the Miracle was different, and I’d have to ask you first. I told Mis’ Hingston, and I told the boys. Me ‘n’ Benny got them to come round. Kin I, mother? Mis’ Hingston thought may be — may be — you might come yourself. But I told her I didn’t believe you would.”

“No, I won’t go, Joey. What makes you want to go?”

“Oh, I don’t know. All the boys are goin’. And I never seen a miracle yet.”

“Do you believe he can do a miracle?”

“Well, it would be some fun to see what he would do if he didn’t. I’d like to hear what he’d say.”

“And what would you think if he did do it? That he was — God?”

“Oh, no, mother! He couldn’t be. Mr. Dylks couldn’t. I ain’t ever thought for a minute that he was that.”

“And if he failed — if he tried, and put himself to shame before everybody, how would you feel?”

“Well, mother, nobody as’t him to.” Nancy was silent for so long that the boy said discouragedly, “But if you don’t want me to go—”

Her face hardened from the pity of her inward vision of the man’s humiliation, as if his own son had judged him justly. “Yes, you can go, Joey. But be careful, be careful! And don’t stay too late. And if anything happens—”

“Oh, surely, mother, nothing will happen,” he exulted, and he broke from her hold and ran down the road where the group of boys had waited for him, and as he ran he leaped into the air, and called to them, “She’s let me; she’s let me!” and the boys leaped up in response, and called back, “Hurrah, hurrah!” and when he had come up with them, they all tried to get their arms round him, and trod on his heels and toes in pushing one another from him.

In the August twilight which now began to pale the hot sunset glow, as if she had waited to come alone, in her pride or in her shame, the woman who was bearing the body of the miracle to the place where the wonder was to be wrought came last of all to pass Nancy where she sat at her door. She was that strong believer who in her utter trust, when she heard that cloth would be needed for the seamless raiment of his miracle, had offered to provide it; and now, neither in pride nor in shame, but in defiance of her unbelieving husband, she was bearing away from her house the bolt of linsey-woolsey newly home from the weaver, which was to have been cut into the winter’s clothing of her children. She had spun the threads herself and dyed them, and they had become as if they were of her own flesh and blood. She carried the bolt wrapped about with her shawl, bearing it tenderly in her arms, as if it were indeed her flesh and blood, her babe which she was going to lay upon an altar of sacrifice.

XII

The crowd at Hingston’s mill grew with the arrival of the unbelievers as well as the believers in Dylks. They came from all sides, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, and the groups came disputing as often as agreeing among themselves. When a group was altogether believing they exchanged defiances with a party of those religious outcasts, the Hounds, disturbers of camp-meetings and baptisms, and notorious mockers, now, of the Leatherwood god in his services at the Temple. But the invitation given to see the promised miracle had been to all; the Hounds had felt in it the tenor of a challenge, and they had accepted it defiantly. They jeered at the believers as these arrived, sometimes hailing them by name; they neighed and whinnied, and shouted “Salvation!” and in the intervals of silence they burst out with the first lines of the Believers’ hymn.

There were those who mocked, “I am God Almighty,” “The Father and the Son are one, and I am both of ’em put together,” and “Oh, Dylks, save us!” “Don’t leave us, Dylks!” “Make the Devil jump, Joseph! Make him rattle his scales for us!” “Fetch on your miracle!” The believing women turned away; some of the younger tittered hysterically at a droll profanation of their idol’s name, and then one of the ruffians applauded. “That’s right, sisters! We like to have you enjoy yourselves. Promised to let anybody in particular see you home to-night?” The girls tried to control themselves, and laughed the more, and the Hound called, “Say, girls, let’s have a dance — a dance before the Lord.”

Jane Gillespie had come with her father in the family pride which forbade them to reject each other publicly. The girl stood a little apart from her father, and near her hung, wistfully, fearfully, the young farmer whom the neighborhood gossip had assigned her for an acceptable if not accepted lover. She looked steadfastly away from Hughey Blake, with her head lifted and her cheeks coldly flushed under the flame of her vivid hair: she was taller than the other girls, and showed above the young man.

“Say, Hughey,” one of the Hounds spoke across the space they had left between them and the decent unbelievers, “Can’t you gimme a light? Reach up!” He held out a cigar, in the joke of kindling it at the girl’s hair.

Hughey Blake turned, and his helpless retort, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” redoubled the joy of the Hounds. The girl glanced quickly at him, with what meaning he could not have made out, and it might have been fear of her which kept him hesitating whether to cross over and fall upon his tormentor. He looked at her as if for a sign, but she made as if she had heard nothing; then while he still hesitated a slender, sinewy young fellow came down the open ground, with a soft jolt in his gait like that of a rangy young horse. He wore high boots with his trousers pushed carelessly into their tops, and for a sign of week-day indifference to the occasion, a checked shirt, of the sort called hickory; he struck up the brim of his platted straw hat in front with one hand, and with the other on his hip stood a figure of backwoods bravery, such as has descended to the romance of later times from the reality of the Indian-fighting pioneers.

“You fellows keep still!” he called out. “If you don’t I’ll make you.”

Retorts of varied sense and nonsense came from the Hounds, but without malice in their note. One voice answered, “I’d like to see you try, Jim Redfield!”

The other jolted closer toward the line of the Hounds, and leaned over. “Did I hear somebody speak?” he asked.

“I reckon not, Jim,” the voice of his challenger returned. “Come to join the band?”

“I didn’t come to worry helpless women,” Redfield said.

“That’s right, Jim. There’s where we’re with you. D’you reckon Apostle Hingston’ll let us in to see the miracle if we’ll keep the believers straight while the Almighty is at it?”

“I can’t say for Mr. Hingston,” Redfield returned. “But if I was in his place I’d want to keep my jug out of sight when you fellows were on duty.”

Redfield passed the Gillespies as he lounged back to his place with a covert glance at the girl, who made no sign of seeing her champion.

The woman who was bringing the body of the miracle came round the corner of the mill, and showed herself in the open space with the bolt of cloth borne carefully in her arms.

“Why, it’s a baby!” came from that merriest of the Hounds whom Redfield had turned from an enemy into a troublesome friend of the believers. “Reckon the women’ll have something to say to that if he tries to turn e’er a baby into seamless raiment.”

The fellow got the laugh he had tried for, and when Redfield looked toward him again he said, “All right, Jim. I’m keepin’ ’em quiet the best I can. But the elect will make a noise, sometimes.”

The woman with her bundle passed through the open door of the house behind the mill. The public entrance was at the front where by day the bags of grain were lifted by rope and tackle to the upper story, and the farmers who brought them climbed up by the inner stairways. The believers had expected that they were to come in by way of the dwelling, but now the burly figure of the miller, with the light of a candle behind it, showed black in the doorway, and he spoke up, in his friendly voice: “Neighbors, we want you all to go round to the front of the mill and come in there. The miracle is going to be done on the bolting-cloth floor, where there will be room for all that wants to see. We don’t mean to keep anybody out, whether they believe or don’t believe. The only thing we want is for you all to be quiet, and not make trouble. And now, come in as quick as you can, so you can be sure we haven’t had time to do anything to the cloth that the seamless raiment is going to be made out of.”

“Hounds and everybody?” called that gayest voice among the outcasts.

“Hounds and everybody,” the miller humorously assented, and his black bulk melted into the dark as the candle disappeared within.

The dim light from tin lanterns threw the pattern of their perforations on the walls and roofs of the interior, and showed the tracery of the floury cobwebs. The people could scarcely see their way to the stairs by the glimmer, and there was more talking with nervous laughter than there had been outside. One of the Hounds called out, “I don’t want any of you girls to kiss me!” and gave the relief of indignation to the hysterical emotion of the believers; the more serious of the unbelievers found escape in their helpless laughter from their tense expectation of triumph in the failure of the promised miracle.

The wide space on the bolting-cloth floor, before the bins mounded high with new wheat, and the rows of millstones, motionless under their empty hoppers, was lighted by candles in tin sconces, but these were so few that they shone only on the foremost faces and left those behind a gleam of eyes or teeth. The familiar machinery had put on a grewsome strangeness which had its final touch from the roll lying on the table like something dead. A table had been set in front of the barrels under the bolting cloths, and the muslin funnels, empty of flour, hung down into the barrels with the effect of colossal legs standing in them. The air of the hot night was close within; a damp odor from the water flowing under the motionless mill wheels seemed to cool it, but did not; the perspiration shone on the faces where the light fell on them.

The miller and his family had places in the front line of the spectators, and with them was the woman who had given the cloth for the miracle; and who stood staring at the stuff, which she had known so intimately in every thread and fiber, with an air of estrangement.

When the stumbling feet of the last arrivals ceased on the stairs, the miller stood out facing the crowd, and told them that he expected the Good Old Man, now, any minute, together with the Apostle Paul, whom they all knew by his earthly name as their neighbor, Mr. Enraghty. He asked them to be as still as they could, and especially after the Good Old Man came, to be perfectly silent; not to whisper, and not to move if they could help it. There was nothing, though, he said, to hinder the believers from joining in their favorite hymn; and at once the wailing of it began to fill the place. When it ended, the deep-drawn breath of some wearied expectant made itself heard with the shifting of tired feet easing themselves. The minutes grew into an hour, with no sign of Dylks or Enraghty, and the miller was again forced to ask the patience of his neighbors. But there began to be murmurs from the unbelievers, and more articulate protests from the Hounds. Some children, whom the believers had brought with them to see the divine power manifest itself, whimpered, and were suffered to lie down at the feet of their fathers and mothers and forget their disappointment in sleep. A babe, too young to be left at home, woke and cried, and was suckled to rest again, with ironical applause from the Hounds.

At the end of two hours of waiting, relieved with pleas and promises from the miller, there was no word from Dylks and no token of his bodily presence. With the scoffing of the unbelievers, the prayers of the faithful rose. “Come soon, oh Lord!” “Send thy Power!” “Remember thy Little Flock!” Upon these at last broke falteringly, stragglingly, a familiar voice, the voice of Abel Reverdy, kindly and uncouth as himself, and expressive, like his presence, of an impartial interest in the feelings of both the faithful and the unfaithful. He was there in the company of his wife, who held a steadfast place among the believers, while Abel ranged freely from one party to the other, and could not well have known himself of either, though friendly with both. He was of a sort of disapproving friendship even with the Hounds, and now his voice said in impartial suggestion, “Why not somebody go and fetch him?”

“Good for you, Abel!” came from the Hound who was oftenest spokesman for the others. “Why don’t you go yourself, Abel?”

Other voices applauded, and Abel was beginning to share a general confidence in his fitness for the mission, when his wife spoke up, “‘Deed and ‘deed, I can tell you he ain’t agoun’ to do no such a thing, not if we stay here all night, murricle or no murricle. I ain’t agoun’ to have him put his head into the Lion of Judah’s mouth, and have it bit off, like as not. I can’t tell from one minute to another whether he’s a believer or not, and if anybody is to go for the Good Old Man it’s got to be a studdy believer, and not a turncoat of many colors like Abel.”

If Sally had satisfied her need of chastizing her husband for his variableness, and found a comfort in her scriptural language, not qualified by its wandering application, Abel loyally accepted her open criticism. “That’s so, Sally, I ain’t the one to send. I misdoubted it myself, or I’d ‘a’ gone without sayin’ nothin’ in the first place. But, as Sally says,” he addressed the crowd, “it ought to be a believer.”

“Then why not Sally?” a scorner suggested. She did not refuse, and there was a whispering between her and those next her in debate of the question. But it was closed by the loud, austere voice of one of the believing matrons in the apostolic mandate, “Let your women keep silence in the churches.” The text was not closely apt; it was not a precept obeyed in the revivals of any of the sects in Leatherwood; it was especially ignored in the meetings of the Dylks believers; but its proclamation now satisfied the yearning always rife in them to affiliate their dispensation with the scriptural tradition.

“Well, that settles it, Sister Coombs,” Sally promptly assented, “I wasn’t agoun’ to, anyway, and I ain’t agoun’ to now, if I stay here all night, or the Good Old Man don’t ever come.”

“Why not Jim Redfield?” a Hound demanded, and the miller tried to be stern in calling out, “No trifling!” but lost effect by gently adding, “Friends.” The unbelievers laughed, but the miller’s retreat from the bold stand he had taken was covered by Redfield’s threat that if those fellows kept on he would give them something to laugh about.

As he stepped into the neutral space between the friends and enemies of Dylks, he had a sort of double fearfulness for the women, because he was not only not of their faith, but because he was of no religious sect in a community where every one but an open infidel like Matthew Braile was of some profession. He came to the Baptist services with his mother, but he had not been baptized, and he was not seen at the house to house prayer meetings, where the young people came with the old, or at the frolics where dancing was forbidden, but not kissing in their games or in their walks home through the woods. He was not supposed to be in love with any one, and he lived alone on a rich bottom-land farm with his mother, in a house which his father had built where his grandfather’s log cabin had stood. He was of a tradition which held him closer to the wilderness than most of the people of Leatherwood; in the two generations before him the Redfields had won and held their lands against the Indians, and had fought them in the duels, from tree to tree, which the pioneers taught the savages, or learned from them, risking their lives and scalps in the same chances. He was of the sort of standing which old family gives, even where all families are new, and he was now making his way politically, in spite of his irreligion; he meant to go to the legislature, eventually, and in a leisurely sort he was reading law, and reciting his Blackstone to Matthew Braile. As he came and went from the old infidel’s house, he was apt to stop at the tavern porch, where the few citizens who could detach their minds from the things of another world gave them in cloudy conjecture to the political affairs of this, or to scrutiny of the real motives actuating the occasional travelers who apparently arrived for a meal’s victuals or a night’s lodging. With these Redfield had scarcely a social life, but he could talk with them almost to the point of haranguing them, for they were men; at the store, where his mother’s errands sometimes took him, he shrank from the women as timid as they when they dismounted from their saddles or wagons, and slipped in with their butter and eggs, and passed out again deeply obscured in their sunbonnets.

They were mostly women past the time of life when men look at them curiously, but once Redfield was startled by meeting a young girl, as he was trying to go out, and began losing himself with her in that hopeless encounter of people who try to give way to each other and keep passing to the same side at once. Her face and her red hair burned one fire, but at last she stopped stone still, and let him go by, with a sort of angry challenge in her blue eyes. He knew that it was Jane Gillespie without knowing her to speak with, as he would have said, and he knew that against her father’s will she was one of the followers of Dylks. The idolatry was not yet open and scandalous, but since then he had heard his mother denouncing her as a worthless hussy with the other women who had worshiped Dylks in that frenzy at the Temple. He walked up and down, passing near where she stood with her father and Hughey Blake, and lost his breath at each approach and caught it again at each remove. It so vividly seemed that he must speak to her, though he did not know what he wished to say, that it was as if he really had done so, when he heard one of the Hounds saying, “Well, and what are you goin’ to do about it, Jim?”

Then he heard himself boasting, “I’m going after Dylks myself; and if he’ll come peaceably, and do his miracle I’ll take him for my god, and if he won’t, God have mercy on him!”

He was answering his jeering questioner in his words, but his eyes were on the girl; her own eyes were lowered after a glance at her father and Hughey Blake, and his vow remained in his ears a foolish vaunt. While he stood unable to return to his place, a voice which no one knew, came from the darkness outside.

“Behold,” it said, “I am the Presence of the Most High, and I come to you with my Peace. The miracle that ye wait to see has been wrought already unseen of you. The cloth before you has been touched by my Power, and turned into the seamless raiment which ye seek as a sign. But it shall not be shown to you now. Ye shall see it seven days and seven nights hence on the eighth night at the Temple. Till then, have patience, have faith. Thus saith the Lord.”

The voice died from the medley of scriptural phrase and a shiver of awe passed over those who had heard. One of the believing women called out, “Praise ye the Lord!” Then a yell of mockery broke from the Hounds and some one shouted, “Let’s have a look!” and the crowd rushed upon the roll of cloth which lay on the table, where the woman who had brought it in her arms had put it, and had stood patiently, anxiously, trustfully waiting.

She spread her arms out over it, with a piteous gesture, like a mother trying to keep her child from harm. “Oh, don’t! Oh, don’t!” she implored. “It’s my cloth! I spun it, I wove it, every thread! It’s all we’ve got for our clothes this winter! Don’t touch it, don’t tear it!”

Her prayer was like a signal for its denial. One of the Hounds pushed her away and caught the cloth up. “We won’t hurt it, Sister Bladen. We just want to see what a seamless garment looks like, anyway. Maybe it’ll fit some of us. Here, boys, take a hold!”

He held by the outer edge of the cloth, and flung the bolt unfurling itself toward his fellows over the heads of the believing men who had crowded forward to save it from the desecration, while the woman tried to seize it from him, beseeching, imploring, “Oh, don’t hurt it, Bill Murray! Oh, be careful! Don’t let it drop! Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t!”

“We can’t do it any hurt, Sister Bladen, if it’s got a miracle inside of it,” one of the ruffians mocked. “You tell her we wont hurt it, Jim Redfield! She’ll trust you!”

The women believers were sobbing; the men gathered themselves for a struggle with the surprise sprung upon them, but held back as if in a superstitious hope of help from the god whom the women seemed not to trust in his failure of them.

“Here, you fellows!” Redfield shouted over the tossing heads before him. “What do you want to spoil her cloth for?”

His look and voice had their effect with the angry, pushing, shuffling, elbowing, wailing, weeping crowd, in a pause like the arrest of curiosity.

“Let go that cloth, Bill,” he said, not with authority, but in a tone of good fellowship.

The miller interposed with his friendly voice, and it seemed as if the unbelievers would give way in pity of the poor woman who had brought the cloth. Suddenly the bolt of stuff which Murray had conditionally yielded was twitched from Redfield in boisterous fun, and then in the frenzy more of mischief than malice it was seized by the Hounds, and torn into shreds. “Find the seamless raiment!” they yelled to one another. The unbelievers stood aside; the believers did nothing, in a palsy of amaze; the poor woman, to whom her toil and pride in it had hallowed the stuff, sank down staying herself on her hands from the floor, in hapless despair. Her moaning and sobbing filled the place after the tumult of destruction had been stricken silent. “Oh, I don’t care for the miracle,” she kept lamenting, “but what are my children going to wear this winter? Oh, what will he say to me!” It was her husband she meant.

XIII

The riot in Hingston’s Mill, after the failure of Dylks to appear personally and work the promised miracle, left the question of his divinity where it had been. With no evident change in their numbers on either side, the believers assented, the unbelievers denied. The faithful held that the miracle had been wrought and the seamless raiment torn to pieces by the mob; some declared that they had seen the garments, and tried to keep them from the sacrilege but had been overpowered. The unfaithful laughed at the pretense, and defied the faithful to show any scrap of the cloth having the form of clothing. The pieces remained with the poor woman who had brought the cloth for the miracle; she carried them weeping home, and she and her husband remained like the rest, believing and unbelieving as before; but at every chance she scanned the dishonored fragments in secret, and pieced them together, trying to follow the lines of imaginary garments in them.

Throughout the week the excitement raged, silently for the most part, in the breasts of the two parties, but sometimes breaking out in furious affirmation and denial at such points of common meeting as the store, the tavern, and the postoffice. There the unbelievers outnumbered the believers, who met for mutual support and comfort at one another’s houses, but appeared nowhere in force until the Sunday night following; then they came three to one of the enemy, and filled the Temple to overflowing. Dylks was expected to meet them from the concealment or the absence in which he had passed the days; the unbelievers said that he was hiding in fear and shame; the believers that he was preaching to the heathen in other neighborhoods, and would come in power and glory with a great multitude of the converted following him. But the meeting in the Temple was opened by Enraghty, who, in front of the pulpit, rose saying, “The Good Old Man will not be here, to-night, but I will fill his place.” A thrill of exultation and disappointment ran through the congregation according as they believed or denied, but they all waited patiently.

Among the many families which had come in internecine enmity, Gillespie and his daughter strained in the unlove which was like hate up to the door of the Temple. He had taunted her with Dylks’s failure to work the miracle and with his absence during the week. “If I could get my hands on him, I would pull him out of his hole, and make him face the people he’s deceived. I would show him whether he was God or not.”

“If you touched him, your hands would be withered,” she said in an ecstasy of faith. “If you will bring me a single hair of his head I will deny him.”

“I’ll remember that,” he threatened bitterly, and in the loss of all the dignity of their relation as parent and child he cast a look of contemptuous triumph on her when Enraghty rose and said that he would take the place of Dylks for the night.

“Bring me one hair of his head,” she said again.

The people of both sides had supposed that Dylks was sitting behind the pulpit, as his habit was, with his head out of sight bowed in meditation. But when Enraghty, after a few words, sat down to await the coming of the Spirit, suddenly the minister whose turn to preach would have come that night, sprang to his full height in the pulpit and denounced Enraghty’s pretense. The believers rose shouting to their feet, and crying, “He is my God!” stormed out of the Temple in the night, where their voices were heard repeating, “He is my God!” till they swelled together in the hymn which was their confession of Dylks. A few of the unbelievers remained in the Temple, amazed, but the greater part followed the believers into the night.

They had the courage of their triumph through Dylks’s failure to work the miracle he had promised, and then his failure to show himself in the Temple; but they pushed on with no definite purpose except perhaps to break up some meeting of his followers, when one of the Hounds, yelping and baying in acceptance of their nickname, broke upon them from the woods they were passing with word that they had found Dylks in Enraghty’s house, where the believers were already gathering.

“We’ve treed him,” he said, “The whole pack’s round the place, and there’s no limb in reach for him to jump to. I reckon it’ll be the best coon hunt we’ve ever had in Leatherwood, yit.”

Redfield put himself in touch rather than in sight amidst the darkness which the disembodied voices broke upon. “Enraghty’s house? Then we’ve got him. Come on!”

The women of the unbelievers had fallen behind and finally gone home, but all the believers, the women as well as the men, had followed their apostle, and now their voices, in praying and singing, came from the house still hidden by a strip of woodland. In the bewilderment which had fallen upon David Gillespie amid the tumultuous rush from the Temple, he had been parted from his daughter; now he fumbled forward on the feet of an old man, and found himself beside Redfield. “I want you to let me at him first, Jim. I just want one hair of his head.”

“Why, don’t you know it’s death to touch him?” Redfield jeered.

“I know that,” Gillespie assented in the same mood. “But I’ll risk dying for that one hair.”

“What do you want with one hair? I’ll get you a handful,” Redfield said.

“One’ll do to work the miracle I’m after.”

“What miracle? None o’ your seamless raiment, is it?”

“It’s bringing a crazy girl to her senses. She’s said if I fetched her a single hair of his she’d renounce him.”

“Oh!” Redfield said with respectful understanding. Then he added, “I’ll get you the hair.”

The unbelievers crowded to the house in the light from the uncurtained windows. One of them stood tiptoe peering in while the others waited. “It’s chuck full,” he reported. “No room for sinners, I reckon.”

“Oh, if Dylks is in there he’ll work one of his miracles and make room,” another of the Hounds answered. Redfield stood trying the door. “Locked? Hammer on it! Break it in! Here! Give him a shoulder!”

The mob surged forward, laughing and shouting, and crushed Redfield against the door. The panel cracked and groaned; Redfield called to the crowd to hold back, but suddenly the door opened, and the fanatical face of Enraghty showed itself above Redfield’s back.

“What do you want?” he demanded. “This is the Lord’s house.”

“Then it’s as much ourn as what it is yourn,” some one shouted back.

“We want to see the Lord,” another called. “Just one look, just one lick.”

The old schoolmaster lost his self-control. “There are some of you out there that I’ve licked before now for your mischief.”

“Yes, we know that,” came back. “You didn’t lick us enough. We’d like to have you give us some more.”

The hindmost of the Hounds surged against those in front, and the whole mob fell forward upon Redfield; he staggered over the threshold to save himself, and struck Enraghty backward in his helpless plunge.

“Oh, look out there,” the nearest of the mob called back. “Your’re hurtin’ Mr. Enraghty!”

“Well, we don’t want to hurt old Saint Paul!” a mocker returned; but they pressed on wilfully, helplessly; they pushed those in front, who might have held back, and filled the entry-way and the rooms beyond. In a circle of his worshipers, kneeling at his feet, stood Dylks, while they hailed him as their God and entreated his mercy. At the scramble behind them, they sprang up and stood dazed, confronting their enemies.

“We want Dylks! We want the Good Old Man! We want the Lion of Judah! Out of the way, Little Flock!” came in many voices; but when the worshipers yielded, Dylks had vanished.

A moment of awe spread to their adversaries, but in another moment the riot began again. The unbelievers caught the spirit of the worse among them and stormed through the house, searching it everywhere, from the cellar to the garret. A yell rose from them when they found Dylks half way up the chimney of the kitchen. His captors pulled him forward into the light, and held him cowering under the cries of “Kill him!” “Tie him to a tree and whip him!” “Tar and feather him!” “Ride him on a rail!”

“No, don’t hurt him!” Redfield commanded. “Take him to a justice of the peace and try him.”

“Yes,” the leader of the Hounds assented. “Take him to Squire Braile. He’ll settle with him.”

The Little Flock rallied to the rescue, and some of the herd joined them. As an independent neutral, Abel Reverdy, whom his wife stirred to action, caught up a stool and joined the defenders.

“Why, you fool,” a leader of the Hounds derided him amiably, “what you want to do with that stool? If the Almighty can’t help himself, you think you’re goin’ to help him?”

Abel was daunted by the reasoning, and even Sally stayed her war cries.

“Well, I guess there’s sumpin’ in that,” Abel assented, and he lowered his weapon.

The incident distracted his captors and Dylks broke from them, and ran into the yard before the house. He was covered with soot and dust and his clothes were torn; his coat was stripped in tatters, and his long hair hung loose over it.

His prophecies of doom to those who should lay hands upon him had been falsified, but to the literal sense of David Gillespie he had not yet been sufficiently proved an impostor: till he should bring his daughter a strand of the hair which Dylks had proclaimed it death to touch, she would believe in him, and David followed in the crowd straining forward to reach Redfield, who with one of his friends had Dylks under his protection. The old man threw himself upon Dylks and caught a thick strand of his hair, dragging him backward by it. Redfield looked round. He said, “You want that, do you? Well, I promised.” He tore it from the scalp, and gave it into David’s hand, and David walked back with it into the house where his daughter remained with the wailing and sobbing women-worshipers of the desecrated idol.

He flung the lock at her feet. “There’s the hair that it was death to touch.” She did not speak; she only looked at it with horror.

“Don’t you believe it’s his?” her father roared.

“Yes, yes! I know it’s his; and now let’s go home and pray for him, and for you, father. We’ve both got the same God, now.”

A bitter retort came to the old man’s lips, but the abhorrent look of his daughter stayed his words, and they went into the night together, while the noise of the mob stormed back to them through the darkness, farther and farther away.

XIV

The captors of Dylks chose the Temple as the best place for keeping him till morning, when they could take him for trial to Matthew Braile; but they had probably no sense of the place where he had insolently triumphed so often as the fittest scene of his humiliation. They stumbled in a loose mob behind and before and beside him through the dim night, and tried to pass Redfield’s guard to strike him with their hands or the sticks which they tore from the wayside bushes. At a little distance, a straggling troop of the believers followed, men and women, wailing and sobbing, and adoring and comforting their idol with promises of fealty, in terms of pathetic grotesqueness. A well-known voice called to him, “Don’t you be afraid, God Almighty! They can’t hurt a hair of your head,” and the burst of savage mirth which followed Sally Reverdy’s words, drowned the retort of a scoffer, “Why, there ain’t hardly any left to hurt, Sally.”

The noise of the talking and laughing and the formless progress of the mob hushed the nearer night voices of the fields and woods; but from a distance the shuddering cry of a screech-owl could be heard; and the melancholy call of a killdee in a pasture beside the creek. The people, friends and foes together, made their way unlighted except by the tin lantern which some one had caught from where it stood on Enraghty’s gate-post.

With this one of the unbelievers took his stand at the door of the Temple after Redfield had passed in with his prisoner, and lifted it successively to the faces of those trying to enter. He allowed some and refused others, according as they were of those who denied or confessed Dylks, and a Hound at his elbow explained, “Don’t want any but goats in here, to-night.”

The common parlance was saturated with scriptural phrase, and the gross mockery would have been taken seriously if the speaker had not been so notoriously irreverent. As it was the words won him applause which Redfield and his friends were not able to quell. The joke was caught up and tossed back and forth; the Little Flock outside raised their hymn, the scoffers within joined in derision, and carried the hymn through to the end.

Dylks sat shrunken on the bench below the pulpit, his head fallen forward and his face hidden. Redfield and one of his friends sat on either side, and others tried to save him from those who from time to time pushed forward to strike him. They could not save him from the insults which broke again and again upon the silence; when Redfield rose and appealed to the people to leave the man to the law, they came back at him with shrieks and yells.

“Did the law keep my family from bein’ broke up by this devil? My wife left me and my own brother won’t speak to me because I wouldn’t say he was my Savior and my God.”

“I’m an old woman, and I lived with my son, but my son has quit me to starve, for all he cares, because I believe in the God of Jacob and he believes in this snorting, two-legged horse.”

“My sister won’t live with me, because I won’t fall down and worship her Golden Calf.”

“He’s spread death and destruction in my family. My daughters won’t look at me, and my two sons fought till they were all blood, about him.”

The accusings and upbraidings thickened upon him, but Dylks sat silent, except for a low groan of what might have seemed remorse. He put his hand to the place on his head where the hair had been torn away, and looked at the blood on his fingers.

A woman stole under the guard of his keepers, and struck him a savage blow on the cheeks, first one and then the other. “Now you can see how it feels to have your own husband slap you because you won’t say you believe in such a God as you are, you heathen pest!”

The guards struggled with her, and a man stooped over Dylks and voided a mouthful of tobacco juice in his face; another lashed him on the head with a switch of leatherwood: all in a squalid travesty of the supreme tragedy of the race. As if a consciousness of the semblance touched the gospel-read actors in the drama, they shrank in turn from what they had done, and lost themselves in the crowd.

The night wore away and when the red sunrise began to pierce the dusk of the Temple, where some had fallen asleep, and others drowsed as they walked to and fro to keep themselves awake, Redfield conferred with his lieutenants. Then they pulled their captive to his feet, not roughly, and moved with him down the aisle and out of the door. They left some of the slumberers still sleeping; of the others not all followed them on their way to Matthew Braile’s, up through the woods and past the cornfields and tobacco patches; but with those of the Little Flock who had hung night-long about the Temple, singing and praying to their idol, they arrived, some before and some after the prisoner, at the log cabin of the magistrate. He was sitting after his habit in his splint-bottomed chair tilted against the porch wall, waiting for the breakfast which his wife was getting within. As the crowd straggled up to the porch, he tilted his chair down, and came forward with a frown of puzzle. “What’s this?” he demanded; then, catching sight of a woman’s eager face among the foremost, his frown relaxed and he said, “Don’t all speak at once, Sally.”

“‘Deed and ‘deed, I’m not agoun’ to speak at all, Squire Braile; but if you want to know you can see for yourself that they’ve got the Good Old Man here, and from the tell I’ve hearn they want you to try him; they’ve been hittun’ him over the face and head all night.” She looked defiantly round on the unbelievers who so far joined in the Squire’s grin as to burst into a general laugh, and a cry of “Good for you, Sally. You’re about right.”

Braile referred himself to Redfield, who mounted to the porch with the other guards, and the tattered and bedraggled Dylks in their midst. “What are you doing with this man, Jim?”

“We’ve brought him to you to find out, Squire Braile. You know who he is, and all the mischief he’s been making in this settlement. We don’t need to go into that.”

“Wish you’d step in there,” the Squire said, nodding toward the room opposite the kitchen, “and bring me out the Laws of Ohio. You know where it is.”

His recognition of Redfield as a law-student pleased the Herd of the Lost, and one of the guards said, “All right, Jim. We’ll hold him.”

As Redfield disappeared within, the Squire called after him, “Bring out my table, too, will you. We’ll have the trial here.”

“That’s all right as fer as it goes, Squire,” one of the crowd before the cabin called out, “but there ain’t room enough for us up there.”

“Well,” the Squire answered, “you’ve got the whole State of Ohio down there. I reckon you can find room in it, if you stand close.”

He turned the joke on the crowd; which acquiesced with cheers. When Redfield returned with the large book and the small table he had been sent for, the Squire drew up to them and proclaimed silence in the Court. Then, “Who complains against this man? You, James Redfield?”

“I arrested him, but I don’t complain of him more than the rest. You know what he’s been doing in Leatherwood, as well as other places, for the last month or six weeks. We want his mischief stopped; we want to see what the law can do about it. We could have lynched him, but that ain’t the right way, and so we all feel.”

“Well, we’ve got to make a start, somewhere,” the justice returned. “What’s he accused of? What do you accuse him of?”

“Well, for one thing,” Redfield said, rather reluctantly, “he professes to be Almighty God.”

“And he is God, the Most High Jehovah, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” came in a varying cry, from the believers who had gathered increasingly on the skirts of their enemies.

Their voices seemed to put life and courage into the prisoner, who for the first time lifted his fallen face and looked at the justice with a light of hope in his dulled eyes.

“You hear that,” the old squire addressed him. “Is that your name? Are you God?”

“Thou sayest,” the prisoner answered, with a sudden effrontery.

“That will do!” the old man shouted. He might have been willing to burlesque the case from his own disbelief, but he could not suffer the desecration of the hallowed words; and Dylks shrank from his eyes of fierce rebuke. “Stand away from him,” he added to the guards. “Now, then, have you folks got any other charge against him? Has he stolen anything? Like a mule, for instance? Has he robbed a hen-roost? Has he assaulted anybody, or set a tobacco-shed on fire? Some one must make a charge; I don’t much care what it is.”

The old man scowled round on the people nearest him and down on the crowd below. The believers waited in anxious silence; the unbelievers applauded his humor with friendly laughter, and a kindlier spirit spread through them; they were beginning to see Dylks as a joke.

“Redfield,” — the Squire turned to the young man— “let’s have a look at the Laws of Ohio, in such case made and provided.” He opened the book which Redfield put on the table before him, and went carefully through the index; then he closed it. “There don’t seem,” he said, “to be any charge against the prisoner except claiming to be the Almighty; he pleads guilty to that, and he could be fined and imprisoned if there was any law against a man’s being God. But there isn’t, unless it’s some law of the Bible, which isn’t in force through reenactment in Ohio. He hasn’t offended against any of our statutes, neither he nor his followers. In this State every man has a right to worship what God he pleases, under his own vine and fig-tree, none daring to molest him or make him afraid. With religious fanaticism our laws have nothing to do, unless it be pushed so far as to violate some public ordinance. This I find the prisoner has not done. Therefore, he stands acquitted.”

A roar of protest, a shout of joy went up from the crowd according to their belief and unbelief. After his first plea Dylks had remained silent in becoming meekness and self-respect; now he looked wildly round in fear and hope; but he did not speak.

“Clear the way, you!” the Squire called to the people about him and below him, and he got slowly to his feet. He took the arm of the prisoner at one side, and said, “Here, Jim Redfield, you take this fellow’s other arm,” and as the young man helplessly obeyed, “Now!” he commanded, and with Dylks between them, they left the porch and passed through the severing crowd of friends and foes before the cabin. While they hesitated in doubt of his purpose, Braile led the way with the prisoner, acquitted, but still in custody, toward the turnpike road where the country lane passing the cabin joined it a little way off.

The crowd straggled after in patient doubt, but when the Squire halted with his captive and bade Redfield move back, the suspicions of the unbelievers began to stir.

“Now, put!” the Squire said in a low voice and loosed his hold. Dylks lifted his head alertly as he was accustomed to do when he gave his equine snort, but now he made no sound. He leaped forward and ran with vast bounds up the smooth turnpike toward the wall of woodland, where the whiteness of the highway ceased in the shadow of the trees. He far outdistanced the foremost of his pursuers, who stopped to gather the broken stone heaped along the roadside, and under the rain of these and the storm of curses that they sent after him, he escaped into the forest.

“Well, Abel,” the Squire said to Reverdy, whom he found, not unexpectedly, at his elbow when he looked round, “he may not be much of a god, but he’s a good deal of a racehorse, even if he didn’t give his snort.”

“Look here, Squire Braile,” Redfield broke out in the first realization of his defeat, “I’m not sure your decision was just right.”

“Well, you can appeal the case to the Supreme Court, Jim,” the old man returned. “It’s my breakfast time,” and he stamped stiffly away down the pike and up the road to his cabin, followed by the blessings of the Little Flock.

The Little Flock had remained in stupefaction at the junction of the country road and the turnpike, helplessly watching the flight of their idol from the Herd of the Lost. When Dylks vanished in the dusk of the forest, and the last of those who had followed him came lagging breathless back, and dropped from their hands the broken stone which they had unconsciously brought with them, the Little Flock involuntarily raised their hymn, as if it had been a song of triumph; an inglorious triumph, but an omen of final victory, and of the descent of the New Jerusalem in Leatherwood.

“Never mind!” one of the Herd panted. “We’ll have him out of that gulf of dark despair, yit!”

“The Lord will put forth His might,” one of the Flock defied him. “But if you fellows want to feel the arm of flesh, here and now, come on!”

The Squire put himself between the forces. “I want you to keep the peace; I command the peace,” he said with magisterial dignity.

“Oh, all right, Squire,” a Hound applauded him. “We know you’re on our side.”

“Brother Braile is on the side of righteousness,” the champion of the Flock answered.

The Squire turned a frowning face upon him. “If the law could have held your god, he’d have been on his way to the county jail by this time. Now, you fellows, both sides, go home, and look after your corn and tobacco; and you women, you go and get breakfast for them, and wash up your children and leave the Kingdom of Heaven alone for a while.”

The weight of condemnation was for the Little Flock, but there remained discomfort for the Herd of the Lost. “And you,” the Squire turned to them, “you let these folks worship any stock or stone they’re a mind to; and you find out the true God if you can, and stick to Him, and don’t bother the idolaters. I reckon He can take care of Himself. I command you all to disperse. Go home! Get out! Put!”

The saints and the sinners felt alike the mystical force of the law in his words and began to move away, not without threats and defiances, more or less straggling, and not altogether ceasing even after they had lost sight of one another in their parting ways.

Redfield stayed to walk home with the old man. “Of course, Squire Braile,” he said, “this ain’t the last of Dylks, and it ain’t the last of us. It’s a sin and a shame to have the thing going on among us. You know that as well as I do. It’s got to be stopped. If he’d got his just dues from you—”

“You young fool,” the Squire retorted, kindly, “haven’t you gone far enough yet in your Blackstone to know that justice is one thing and law is another? I gave Dylks his legal deserts.”

“Blackstone says the law is the perfection of reason.”

“Well, you think it don’t seem to be so in the State of Ohio. But I reckon it is, and so long as we look after our own souls, we can’t do better than let others look after theirs in their own way. Come in and have some breakfast!” He paused before his cabin with the young man.

“No, not this morning, Squire Braile,” Redfield lingered a moment, and then he said, askingly, “I didn’t see old Mr. Gillespie anywhere this morning.”

“I didn’t notice. Where it comes to a division in public, he doesn’t usually take sides against his daughter.”

“He won’t have to, after this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Didn’t you know she told him once that if he would bring her a hair of Dylks’s head she would deny him? I helped him to a whole lock of it.”

“Oh, you did that?” There was condemnation in the Squire’s tone, and as if he had been going to express a more explicit displeasure, he hesitated. Then he said, “Well, I must be going in,” and turned his back upon Redfield, who turned again into the turnpike road and took his way homeward past the long and deep stretch of woods where Dylks had found refuge.

XV

In the middle of the forest there was a dense thicket of lower growths on a piece of dry land lifted above the waters of a swamp. The place was the lair of such small wild things as still survived in the wilderness once the haunt of the wolf and the wild cat, and the resort of the bear allured by the profusion of the huckleberries which grew there. But, except in the early fall when the annual squirrel-hunt swept over the whole country side and the summer drought had made the swamp easily passable to the gunners, the place was unmolested. Even the country boy who seeks the bounty of nature wherever she offers it, and makes the outlying property of man his prey where nature has been dispossessed, did not penetrate the thicket in his search for hazelnuts or chinquapins; it was proofed against his venture by its repute of rattlesnakes and copperheads and the rumor of ghosts and witches. Few, of men or boys, knew the approach to the interior by the narrow ridge of dry land lifted above the marsh, and Dylks did not stop in his flight till he reached the thicket and saw in it his hope of securer refuge. He walked round it through the pools which the frog and turtle haunted, twice before he found this path, overhung by a tangle of grapevines. There his foot by the instinct which the foot has where the eye fails of a path, divined the scarcely trodden way, and he found himself in a central opening among the thickly growing bushes. It was warm there, without the close heat of the woodland, and dry except for the spring of clear water that bubbled up in the heart of it, and trickled out over green mosses into the outer waters of the swamp.

The man stooped over and drank his fill, and then made his greedy breakfast on the berries that grew abundantly round, and nodded hospitably to his hand. All the time he wept, and moaned to himself in the self-pity of a hunted, fearful wretch. Then he drank again from the spring, and without rising from his knees pushed himself back a little from it, and fell over in an instant sleep.

He slept through the whole day, and at night, falling early in the shadows of the forest which thickened over his retreat, he supped, as he had breakfasted, on the wild berries and spring water, but with protesting from a stomach habitually flattered by the luxury of fried chicken and ham, and corn-pone and shortened biscuit, and hot coffee, which his adorers put before him when he laid aside his divinity and descended to the gratification of his carnal greed. He was a gross feeder, and in the midst of his fear and the joy of his escape, he thought of these things and lusted for them with a sort of thankless resentment.

He looked about for something he might kill, and he found a wounded pigeon which had fluttered into his refuge from the shot of some gunner. But he could not bring himself to eat it raw, and if he could have kindled a fire to cook it, he reflected, it would have betrayed him to his pursuers who must now be searching the woods for him. He wrung the pigeon’s neck and flung it into the bushes, and then fell down and wept with his face in the grass. He had slept so long that now he could not sleep, and when his tears would come no more, he sat up and watched the night through till the dawn grayed the blue-black sky. The noises of the noiseless woods made themselves heard: the cry of a night hawk, the hooting of an owl, the whirring note of the whip-poor-will; the long, plunging down-rush of a dead branch breaking the boughs below it; even the snapping of twigs as if under the pressure of stealthy feet. These sounds, the most delicate of the sounds he heard, shook him most with fear and hope, and then with despair. The feet could be the feet of his enemies seeking him out, or of his friends coming to succor and save him; then they resolved themselves into the light pressure from little paws, the paws of the wildcat, or the coon, and there was nothing to be feared or hoped from them. The constellations wheeled over him in the clear sky, and the planets blazed. He made out the North Star from the lower lines of the Dipper; the glowing and fading of the August meteors that flitted across the heavens seemed to leave a black trace on his straining eyes. Texts of Scripture declaring how the splendors of the day and night showed forth the glory of the Being whose name he had usurped to the deceit and shame of those who trusted him, glowed and faded in his mind like those shooting stars in the sky. At one time he thought he had cried aloud for destruction in the sin which could not be forgiven, but it was only a dull, inarticulate moan bursting from his tortured breast.

The place where the hair had been torn from his head burned like fire; it burned like the wound of a man whom he had once heard tell how it felt to be scalped by an Indian; the man had recovered, but the wound had always hurt; and Dylks pitied himself that it should be so with him, and cursed himself for his unguarded boast that any one who touched a hair of his head should perish. He promised that if God would show him a little mercy, and send a raven with something for him to eat, something warm, or send him a cup of coffee, somehow, or even a raw egg, he would go forth before the people; he would get up in the Temple amidst his believers and declare himself a false prophet and a false god. He would not care what they did to him if only he had something cooked to eat, something hot to drink.

Towards morning he slept, and then for days and nights, how many he did not know, it seemed to him that he did not wake but dreamed through a changing time when he was dimly aware of contending voices: voices of his believers, the Little Flock, and voices of his unbelievers, the Herd of the Lost, pleading and threatening in the forest round his place of refuge. His followers were trying to bring him food and raiment, and his enemies were preventing them and boasting that they would keep guard over his refuge till they starved him out. Then all again was a blur, a texture of conscious and unconscious misery till a night came when the woof broke and trailed away from him, and he lifted himself on his elbow and after he had drunk a long draft from the spring, found tremulous strength to get to his feet. He tried some steps in the open space, where the light of the full moon fell, and found that he could walk. He reached the tangled entrance to his covert, and stealthily put the vines aside. He peered out into the shadows striped with moonshine and could see no one, and he was going to venture farther, when he stopped stone still at the figure of a man crouched in the middle of the causeway. The man’s head was fallen forward and his gun lay across his lap; he must be one of the guards that his enemies had set on his refuge to keep him there and starve him out; and he must be asleep. Dylks stooped and peered into his face and knew the man for one of the Hounds who had often disturbed his meetings, and now he looked about in the rage that surged up through his penitence and self-pity for a stone or a club to strike him senseless, or dead if need be. But there was no such weapon that he could see, and the risk of a struggle was greater than the risk of trying to pass the man without waking him. After long doubt he tried with one foot and then another and the man did not wake; then he crept slowly by, and then with softly dragging steps he got farther from the sleeper and pushed on through the woods in the direction of the turnpike, as he imagined it. But he came out in a clearing where a new log cabin showed clear in the open under the moon.

In the single room of the house a woman lay sleeping with a little child in its cradle beside her bed. She rose up and put out her hand instinctively to still the child, but it was sleeping quietly, and then she started up awake, and listened for the voice which she had dreamt was calling her. There was no voice, and then there was a voice calling hoarsely, weakly, “Nancy! Nancy!”

In her dream she had thought it was the voice of her husband stealing back to her in the night, and it was in the terror of her dream that she now sprang from her bed, with her heart aching for pity of him, to forbid him and rebuke him for breaking his promise, and to scold him away. But as she stood listening, and the voice came again she knew it was not the voice of Laban. She ran to the ladder which led to the cabin loft, and called up through the open trapdoor, “Jane! Jane! Come down here to the baby, will you? I’ve got to leave her a minute.”

“What for?” the girl answered sleepily. Then, “Oh, I’ll come. She ain’t sick, is she, Aunt Nancy? Oh, I do hope she ain’t sick!”

“No. She ain’t sick,” Nancy said, as she put her hands up to help the girl place her feet aright on the rungs of the ladder. “But — listen!” she whispered as the voice outside called again. “It’s that miser’ble wretch! It’s Joseph Dylks! I’ve got to go to him! Don’t you say a word, Jane Gillespie! He’s Joey’s father, and he must be at death’s door, or he wouldn’t come to mine.”

She left the girl standing dazed, and ran out and round the cabin. In the shadow that it cast in the moon, Dylks crouched close in the angle made by the chimney.

“Oh, Nancy!” he implored her, “do give me something to eat! Something warm. Coffee, if you’ve got it. I’ve been sick, and I’m starving.”

She knew without seeing it in the shadow how he was stretching out pleading hands to her, and she had mercy upon him. But she said stonily, “Wait a minute. Don’t be a cry-baby,” and ran back to the door, and called to the girl within, “Rake open the fire, Jane, and set the kittle on.” Then she ran back to Dylks and stood over him. “Where you been? Don’t you know they’ll kill you if they ketch you?”

“Yes, I know it, Nancy. But I knew this would be the last place they would come for me. Will the coffee be ready soon? Oh, I’m so faint! I reckon I’m going to die, Nancy.”

“I reckon you ain’t goin’ to die before you get your coffee. It’ll be ready as soon as the kittle boils.”

She stood looking grimly down at him, while he brokenly told, so far as he knew it, the story of the days he had passed in hiding.

“I reckon,” she said, with bitter scorn, “that I could have fetched you out. I’d ‘a’ brought you some hot coffee to the door of your den, and you’d ‘a’ come when you smelt it.”

“Yes, that’s true,” he owned in meek acceptance of her scorn.

The child cried, and she went in, but she had no need to comfort it except with a word. Jane had come to the little one, and was stooping above it, and cooing to it motherwise, and cuddling it to her body while it drowsed away to silence.

“You mind her, Jane,” the mother said, and she lifted the pot of coffee from the bed of coals, sending a dim glow into the room to meet the dawn at the open door. She put some sugar into the bowl she got from its shelf, and covered it with a piece of cold corn-pone, and then went out to Dylks who had remained on his knees, and now stretched out his trembling hands toward her.

She did not speak, but poured the bowl full of the steaming coffee, and watched him while he gulped half of it down. Then he reached eagerly for the bread. “Is it hot?” he asked.

“No, it ain’t,” the woman said. “You can eat cold pone, I reckon, can’t you?”

“Oh, yes; oh, yes, and glad to get it. Only I thought—” He stopped and washed down the mouthful he had torn from the cake with a draft of the coffee which emptied the bowl. She filled it mechanically from the pot in her hand, and he drank again more slowly, and devoured the pone as he drank.

“Now,” he said, “I should be all right if it wasn’t for my head where they tore out my hair. It burns like fire.”

She bent over him and looked at the wound unflinchingly. “I can’t see very good in this light; if I only had some goose-grease — but I reckon hog’s lard will do. Hold on till I can wash it.”

“Oh, Nancy,” he moaned gratefully.

She was gone rather long and there was talk within and the cooing and babble of the child. When she came out with a basin of warm water and some lard in a broken saucer in her hands, and a towel caught under her arm, he suggested, “I heard you talking with some one, Nancy.”

“And I suppose it scared you,” she answered unsparingly. “Well, you may thank your stars it wasn’t Laban. I do believe he’d kill you, meek as he is.”

Dylks drew a quivering breath. “Yes, I reckon he would. I suppose you must have told him about me.”

“Of course, I did. Here! Hold still!” She had begun to wash his wound, very gently, though she spoke so roughly, while he murmured with the pain and with the comfort of the pain. “If you want to know,” she continued, “it’s Jane. She’s been with me ever since that night they caught you. You made her ashamed before her father, and between her shame and his pride her and him don’t speak, or hain’t, since then. She stays with me and Joey stays with him.”

“Our Joey?” he asked plaintively.

“My Joey!” she returned, and she involuntarily twitched at the hair she was smoothing.

“Oh!” he cried from the pain, but she did not mind his pain.

“There!” she said, beginning to put on the lard. Then she bound over the wound the soft pledget of old linen she had brought, and tied round his head a cotton rag to hold the dressing in place. She said, “There!” again, “I reckon that will do.”

He moaned gratefully. “It’s the first time I’ve been out of pain for I don’t know how many days and nights. Nancy!” he burst out in all recognition of her goodness, “I oughtn’t to have left you.”

She had been kneeling before him in dressing his hurt, and then in critically regarding her handiwork, she got to her feet. “I know you oughtn’t,” she retorted, “but I’m glad you done it. And I’m thankful every breath I draw. And now I want you to go. And don’t you think I done what I done out of love for you, Joseph Dylks. I’d ‘a’ done it for any hurt or hungry dog.”

Dylks got to his feet too, with little moans for the stiffness in his joints. “I know you would, Nancy,” he said humbly, “but all the same I won’t forget it. If there was anything I could do to show—”

“There’s something you could do besides drownin’ yourself in the creek, which I don’t ask you: in the first place because I don’t want your death on my hands, and in the next place because you’re the un-fittin’est man to die that I can think of; but there’s something else, and you know it without my tellin’ you, and that is to stop all this, now and forever. Don’t you pretend you don’t know what I mean!”

“I know what you mean, Nancy, and the good Lord knows I would be glad enough to do it if I could. But I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

“Begin,” she said with a scornful glance at the long tangle of his hair, “begin by cuttin’ off that horse’s tail of yours, and then stop snortin’ like a horse.”

He shook his head hopelessly. “It wouldn’t do, Nancy. They wouldn’t let me draw back now. They would kill me.”

“They?”

“The — the — Little Flock,” he answered shamefacedly.

“The Herd of the Lost will kill you if you don’t.” She said it not in mocking, but in realization of the hopeless case, and not without pity. But at his next words, she hardened her heart again.

“I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to go. I have nowhere to lay my head.”

“Don’t you use them holy words, you wicked wretch! And if you’re hintin’ at hidin’ in my house, you can’t do it — not with Jane here — she would kill you, I believe — and not without her.”

“No, Nancy. I can see that. But where can I go? Even that place in the woods, they’re watching that, and they would have me if I tried to go back.”

From an impulse as of indifference rather than consideration she said, “Go to Squire Braile. He let you off; let him take care of you.”

“Nancy!” he exclaimed. “I thought of that.”

She gathered up the basin and the towel she brought, and without looking at him again she said, “Well, go, then,” and turned and left him where he stood.

XVI

Matthew Braile was sitting in his wonted place, with his chair tilted against his porch wall, smoking. Dylks faltered a moment at the bars of the lane from the field of tall corn where he had been finding his way unseen from Nancy’s cabin. He lowered two of the middle bars and when he had put them up on the other side he stood looking toward the old man. His long hair hung tangled on his shoulders; the white bandage, which Nancy had bound about his head, crossed it diagonally above one eye and gave this the effect of a knowing wink, which his drawn face, unshaven for a week, seemed to deprecate.

Braile stared hard at him. Then he tilted his chair down and came to the edge of his porch, and called in cruel mockery, “Why, God, is that you?”

“Don’t, Squire Braile!” Dylks implored in a hoarse undertone. “They’re after me, and if anybody heard you—”

“Well, come up here,” the Squire bade him. Dylks hobbled slowly forward, and painfully mounted the log steps to the porch, where Braile surveyed him in detail, frowning and twitching his long feathery eyebrows.

“I know I don’t look fit to be seen,” Dylks began “but—”

“Well,” the Squire allowed after further pause, “you don’t look as if you had just come ‘down from the shining courts above in joyful haste’! Had any breakfast?”

“Nancy — Nancy Billings — gave me some coffee, and some cold pone—”

“Well, you can have some hot pone pretty soon. Laban there?”

“No, he’s away at work still. But, Squire Braile—”

“Oh, I understand. I know all about Nancy, and her first husband and how he left her, and she thought he was dead, and married a good man, and when that worthless devil came back she thought she was living in sin with that good man — in sin! — and drove him away. But she’s as white as any of the saints you lie about. It was like you to go to her the first one in your trouble. Well, what did she say?” “She said—” Dylks stopped, his mouth too dry to speak; he wetted his lips and whispered— “She said to come to you; that you would know what it was best for me to do; to—” He stopped again and asked, “Do you suppose any one will see me here?”

“Oh, like as not. It’s getting time for honest folks to be up and going to work. But I don’t want any trouble about you this morning; I had enough that other morning. Come in here!” He set open the door of one of the rooms giving on the porch, and at Dylks’s fearful glance he laughed, not altogether unkindly. “Mis’ Braile’s in the kitchen, getting breakfast for you, though she don’t know it yet. Now, then!” he commanded when he sat down within, and pushed a chair to Dylks. “Tell me all about it, since I saw you going up the pike.”

In the broken story which Dylks told, Braile had the air of mentally checking off the successive facts, and he permitted the man a measure of self-pity, though he caught him up at the close. “Well, you’ve got a part of what you deserve, but as usually happens with us rascals, you’ve got too much, at the same time. And what did Nancy advise?”

“She told me to come to you—”

“What did Nancy advise?” the Squire repeated savagely.

“She advised me to stop all this” — he waved his hands outward, and the Squire nodded intelligently— “to tell them it wasn’t true; and I was sorry; and to go away—”

He stopped, and Braile demanded, “Well, and are you going to do it?”

“I want to do it, and — I can’t.”

“You can’t? What’s to hinder you?”

“I’m afraid to do it.”

“Afraid?”

“They would kill me, if I did.”

“They? Who? The Herd of the Lost?”

“The Little Flock.”

The men were both silent, and then after a long breath, the Squire said, “I begin to see—”

“No, no! You don’t begin to see, Squire Braile.” Dylks burst out sobbing, and uttering what he said between his sobs. “Nobody can understand it that hasn’t been through it! How you are tempted on, step by step, all so easy, till you can’t go back, you can’t stop. You’re tempted by what’s the best thing in you, by the hunger and thirst to know what’s going to be after you die; to get near to the God that you’ve always heard about and read about; near Him in the flesh, and see Him and hear Him and touch Him. That’s what does it with them, and that’s what does it in you. It’s something, a kind of longing, that’s always been in the world, and you know it’s in others because you know it’s in you, in your own heart, your own soul. When you begin to try for it, to give out that you’re a prophet, an apostle, you don’t have to argue, to persuade anybody, or convince anybody. They’re only too glad to believe what you say from the first word; and if you tell them you’re Christ, didn’t He always say He would come back, and how do they know but what it’s now and you?”

“Yes, yes,” the Squire said. “Go on.”

“When I said I was God, they hadn’t a doubt about it. But it was then that the trouble began.”

“The trouble?”

“I had to make some of them saints. I had to make Enraghty Saint Paul, and I had to make Hingston Saint Peter. You think I had to lie to them, to deceive them, to bewitch them. I didn’t have to do anything of the kind. They did the lying and deceiving and bewitching themselves, and when they done it, they and all the rest of the believers, they had me fast, faster than I had them.”

“I could imagine the schoolmaster hanging on to his share of the glory, tooth and nail,” the Squire said with a grim laugh. “But old Hingston, good old soul, he ought to have let go, if you wanted him to.”

“Oh, you don’t know half of it,” Dylks said, with a fresh burst of sobbing. “The worst of it is, and the dreadfulest is, that you begin to believe it yourself.”

“What’s that?” the Squire demanded sharply.

“Their faith puts faith into you. If they believe what you say, you say to yourself that there must be some truth in it. If you keep telling them you’re Jesus Christ, there’s nothing to prove you ain’t, and if you tell them you’re God, who ever saw God, and who can deny it? You can’t deny it yourself—”

“Hold on!” the old man said. He had risen, and he began to walk up and down, swaying his figure and tilting his head from side to side, and frowning his shaggy eyebrows together in a tangled hedge. Suddenly, he stopped before Dylks. “Why, you poor devil, you’re not in any unusual fix. It must have been so with all the impostors in the world, from Mahomet up and down! Why, there isn’t a false prophet in the Old Testament that couldn’t match experiences with you! That’s the way it’s always gone: first the liar tells his lie, and some of the fools believe it, and proselyte the other fools, and when there are enough of them, their faith begins to work on the liar’s own unbelief, till he takes his lie for the truth. Was that the way, you miserable skunk?”

“It was exactly the way, Squire Braile, and you can’t tell how it gains on you, step by step. You see all those educated people like Mr. Enraghty, and all those good men like Mr. Hingston taking it for gospel, and you can’t deny it yourself. They convince you of it.”

“Exactly! And then, when the Little Flock gathers in all the mentally lame, halt and blind in the settlement, you couldn’t get out of it if you had the whole Herd of the Lost to back you, with the Hounds yelping round to keep your courage up; you’ve got to stay just where you put yourself, heigh?”

“There wouldn’t,” Dylks said, drying his eyes on a tatter of his coat sleeve, “be so much trouble if it wasn’t for the miracles.”

“Yes,” Braile replied to the thoughtful mood which he had fallen into, rather than to Dylks, “the ignorant are sure to want a sign, though the wise could get along without it. And you have to promise them a sign; you have to be fool enough to do that, though you know well enough you can’t work the miracle.”

“You ain’t sure you can’t. You think, maybe—”

“Then, why,” the Squire shouted at him, “why in the devil’s name, didn’t you work the miracle at Hingston’s mill that night? Why didn’t you turn that poor fool woman’s bolt of linsey-woolsey into seamless raiment?”

Dylks did not answer.

“Why didn’t you do it? Heigh?”

“I thought maybe — I didn’t know but I did do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I came up outside and told them that the miracle had been worked and the seamless raiment was inside the bolt, I thought it must be there.”

“Why, in the name of—”

“I had prayed so hard for help to do it that I thought it must be.”

“You prayed? To whom?”

“To — God.”

“To yourself?”

Dylks was silent again in the silence of a self-convicted criminal. He did not move.

Braile had been walking up and down again in his excitement, in his enjoyment of the psychological predicament, and again he stopped before Dylks. “Why, you poor bag of shorts!” he said. “I could almost feel sorry for you, in spite of the mischief you’ve made. Why, you oughtn’t to be sent to the penitentiary, or even lynched. You ought to be put amongst the county idiots in the poorhouse, and—”

There came a soft plapping as of bare feet on the puncheon floor of the porch; hesitating about and then pausing at the door of the opposite room. Then there came with the increased smell of cooking, the talking of women. Presently the talking stopped and the plapping of the bare feet approached the door of the room shutting the two men in. The Squire set it slightly ajar, in spite of Dylks’s involuntary, “Oh, don’t!” and faced some one close to the opening.

“That you, Sally? You haven’t come to borrow anything at this hour of the night?”

“Well, I reckon if you was up as early as Mis’ Braile, you’d know it was broad day. No, I hain’t come to borry anything exactly, but I was just tellin’ her that if she’d lend me a fryun’ of bacon, I’d do as much for her some day. She ast me to tell you your breakfast was ready and not to wait till your comp’ny was gone, but bring anybody you got with you.”

Sally peered curiously in at the opening of the door, and Braile abruptly set it wide. “Perhaps you’d like to see who it is.”

Sally started back at sight of the figure within. When she could get her breath she gasped, “Well, for mercy’s sakes! If it ain’t the Good Old Man, himself!” But she made no motion of revering or any offer of saluting her late deity.

“Well, now, if you’ve got some bacon for Abel’s breakfast you better stop and have yours with us,” the Squire suggested.

“No, I reckon not,” Sally answered. “I ain’t exactly sure Abel would like it. He ain’t ever been one of the Flock, although at the same time he ain’t ever been one of the Herd: just betwixt and between, like.” As she spoke she edged away backward. “Well, I must be goun’, Squire. Much obleeged to you all the same.”

The Squire followed her backward steps with his voice. “If you should happen to see Jim Redfield on his way to his tobacco patch, I wish you’d tell him to come here; I’d like to see him.”

He went in again to Dylks.

“What are you going to do with me, Squire Braile?” he entreated. “You’re not going to give me up?”

“I know my duty to my Maker,” the old man answered. “I’ll take care of you, Jehovah Dylks. But now you better come in to breakfast — get some hot pone. I’ll bring you a basin of water to wash up in.”

He reopened the door in the face of Sally Reverdy, who gasped out before she plapped over to the steps and dropped away, “I just seen Jim Redfield, and I tole him you wanted him, and he said he would be here in half an hour, or as soon as he could see that the men had begun on his tubbacco. I didn’t tell him who you had here, and I won’t tell anybody else; don’t you be afraid.”

“Well, that’s a good girl, Sally. Abel couldn’t have done better himself,” the Squire called after her, and then he turned to Dylks. “Come along now, and get your hot pone. Jim Redfield won’t hurt you; I’ll go bail for him, and I’ll see that nobody else gets at you. I’ve got a loft over this room where you’ll be safe from everything but a pet coon that your Joey gave my little boy; and I reckon the coon won’t bite you. I wouldn’t, in his place.”

XVII

Redfield came rather later than he had promised, excusing himself for his delay. “I was afraid the frost had caught my tobacco, last night; but it seems to be all right, as far as I can see; I stayed till the sun was well up before I decided.”

“It was a pretty sharp night, but I don’t believe there was any frost,” the Squire said. “At least Dylks didn’t complain of it.”

“Dylks?” Redfield returned.

“Yes. Didn’t you know he was out again?”

“No, I didn’t. If I had that fellow by the scruff of the neck!”

The Squire knew he meant the sleeping sentinel at the thicket where Dylks had been hidden, and not Dylks. But he said nothing, and again Redfield spoke.

“Look here, Squire Braile, I think you did a bad piece of business letting that fellow go.”

“I know you do, Jim, but I expect you’ll think different when you’ve seen him.”

“Seen him? You mean you know where he is?”

“Yes.”

“Well, all I’ve got to say is that if I can lay hands on that fellow he won’t give me the slip again.”

“Well, suppose we try,” the Squire said, and he opened the door into the room where Dylks was cowering, and remarked with a sort of casualness, as if the fact would perhaps interest them both, “Here’s one of the Lost, Dylks. I thought you might like to see him. Now, sit down, both of you and let’s talk this thing over.”

He took a place on the side of the bed and the enemies each faltered to their chairs in mutual amaze.

“Oh, sit down, sit down!” the Squire insisted. “You might as well take it comfortably. Nobody’s going to kill either of you.”

“I don’t want to do anybody any harm,” Dylks began.

“You’d better not!” Redfield said between his set teeth; his hands had knotted themselves into fists at his side.

“I’m all weak yet from the fever I had there, with nothing but water and berries,” Dylks resumed in his self-pity. “I did think some of my friends might have come—”

“I took good care of that,” Redfield said. “They did come, at first, with something to eat, but they knew blame well we’d have wrung their necks if we’d ‘a’ caught ‘em. We meant to starve you out, that’s what, and we did it, and if it hadn’t been for that good-for-nothing whelp sleeping over his gun you wouldn’t have got out alive.”

“Well, that’s all right now, Jim, and you’d better forgive and forget, both of you,” the Squire interposed. “Dylks has reformed, he tells me; he’s sorry for having been a god, and he’s going to try to be a man, or as much of a man as he can. He’s going to tell the Little Flock so, and then he’s going to get out of Leatherwood right off—”

Dylks cleared his throat to ask tremulously, “Did I say that, Squire Braile?”

“Yes, you did, my friend, and what’s more you’re going to keep your word, painful as it may be to you. I’ll let you manage it your own way, but some way you’re going to do it; and in the meantime I’m going to put you under the protection of Jim Redfield, here—”

“My protection?” Redfield protested.

“Yes, I’ve sworn you in as special constable, or I will have as soon as I can make out the oath, and have you sign it. And Dylks will get out of the county as soon as he can — he tells me it won’t be so easy as we would think; and when he does, it will be much more to the purpose than riding on a rail in a coat of tar and feathers. Why!” he broke off, with a stare at Dylks as if he saw his raggedness for the first time, “you’ll want a coat of some kind to show yourself to the Little Flock in; the Herd of the Lost won’t mind; they don’t want to be so proud of you. I must look up something for you; or perhaps send to Brother Hingston; he’s about your size. But that don’t matter, now! What I want is your promise, Jim Redfield, and I know you’ll do what you say, that you won’t tell anybody that the Supreme Being is hiding in my loft, here, till I say so, and when I do, that you’ll see no harm comes to him from mortals — from Hounds, and such like, or even the Herd of the Lost. Do you promise?”

Redfield hesitated. “If he’ll leave the county, yes.”

“And you, ‘Jehovah, Jove or Lord’?”

“I will, as quick as I can, Squire Braile; I will, indeed.”

The Squire rose from the edge of the bed. “Then this court stands adjourned,” he said formally.

Redfield went out with him, leaving Dylks trembling behind. He said, “I ain’t sure you ain’t making a fool of me, Squire Braile.”

“Well, I am,” the Squire retorted. “And don’t you make one of yourself, and then there won’t be any.”

Redfield still hesitated. “I’d just like to had another pull at that horse-tail of his,” he said wistfully.

“Well, I knew old man Gillespie hadn’t quite the strength. But I thought maybe Hughey Blake helped pull—”

“Hughey Blake,” Redfield returned scornfully, “had nothing to do with it.”

“Well, anyway, I hear it’s converted Jane Gillespie, and she was worth it, though it was rather too much like scalping a live Indian.”

“She’s worth more than all the other girls in this settlement put together,” Redfield said, without comment on the phase of the act which had interested the Squire, and went down the cabin steps into the lane.

Braile turned back and opened the door of the room where Dylks was lurking.

“Better come out, now,” he said, not ungently, “and get into a safe place before folks begin to be about much. Or wait — I’ll put the ladder up first.” He brought the ladder from the kitchen where he exchanged a fleeting joke with his wife, still at her work of clearing the breakfast things away, and set it against the wall under the trapdoor of the loft. “Now, then!” he called and Dylks came anxiously out.

“Ain’t you afraid—” he began.

“No, but you are, and that’ll do for both of us. There’s nobody round, and if you’ll hurry, nobody’ll see you. Push the lid to one side, and get in, and you’ll be perfectly safe,” he said as Dylks tremulously mounted the ladder. “I don’t say you’ll be very comfortable. There’s a little window at one end, but it don’t give much air, and this August sun is apt to get a little warm on the clapboards. And I don’t suppose it smells very well in there; but the coon can’t help that; it’s the way nature scented him; she hadn’t any sweet brier handy at the time. And be careful not to step on him. He’s not very good-tempered, but I reckon he won’t bite you if you don’t bite him.”

The kitchen door opened and Mrs. Braile put her head out. She saw the ladder and the two men. Then she came out into the porch. “Well, Matthew Braile, I might have knowed from the sound of your voice that you was up to some mischief. Was you goin’ to send that poor man up into that hot loft? Well, I can tell you you’re not.” She went into the room they had left, and they heard her stirring vigorously about beyond its closed door, with a noise of rapid steps and hard and soft thumpings. She came out again and said, “Go in there, now, Mr. Dylks, and try to get some rest. I’ve made up the bed for you, and I’ll see that nobody disturbs you. Matthew Braile, you send and tell Mr. Hingston, — or go, if you can’t ketch anybody goin’ past, — and tell him he’s here, and bring some decent clothes; he ain’t fit to be seen.”

“Well, he don’t want to be,” the Squire said in the attempt to brave her onset. “But I reckon you’re right, mother. I should probably have thought of it myself — in time. I’ll send Sally or Abel, if they go past — and they nearly always do — or some of the hands from the tobacco patches. Or, as you say, I may go myself, towards evening. He won’t want to be troubled before then.”

XVIII

At the first meeting in the Temple after the open return of Dylks to his dispensation, the Little Flock had apparently suffered no loss in number. Some of his followers had left him, but his disciples had been busily preaching him during his abeyance, and the defection of old converts was more than made up by the number of proselytes. The room actually left by the Flock was filled by the Herd of the Lost who occupied all the seats on one side of the Temple, with Matthew Braile and his wife in a foremost place, the lower sort of them worsening into the Hounds who filled the doorway, and hung about the outside of the Temple.

The whole assembly was orderly. Those of the Little Flock who conducted the services had a quelled air, which might have been imparted to them by the behavior of Dylks; he sat bowed and humble on the bench below the pulpit, while Enraghty preached above him. It was rumored that at the house-meetings the worship of Dylks had been renewed with the earlier ardor; there had been genuflections and prostrations before him, with prayers for pardon and hymns of praise, especially from the proselytes. Dylks was said to have accepted their adoration with a certain passivity but to have done nothing to prevent it; there was not the more scandalous groveling at his feet which had stirred up the community to his arrest. There was as much decorum as could consist with the sacrilegious rites which were still practised with his apparent connivance.

He now sat without apparent restiveness under the eyes of the two men who had the greatest right to exact the fulfilment of his promise, to forbid this idolatry, to end the infamy of its continuance, and to go out from among the people whose instincts and conventions his presence outraged. Near Redfield sat David Gillespie with his eyes fixed on Dylks in a stare of hungry hate, and with him sat his daughter, who testified by her removal from the Little Flock her renunciation of her faith in him. Redfield showed greater patience than Gillespie, and at times his eyes wandered to the face of the girl who did not seem to feel them on her, but sat gazing at her forsaken idol in what might have seemed puzzle for him and wonder at herself. Others who had rejected him merely kept away; but she came as if she would face down the shame of her faith in him before the eyes of her little world. Sometimes Dylks involuntarily put his hand to the black silken cap which replaced the bandage Nancy Billings had tied over the place where the hair had been torn out. When he did this, the girl moved a little; her face hardened, and she stole a glance at Redfield.

The schoolmaster went on and on, preaching Dylks insistently, but not with the former defiance. He did not spare to speak of the cruel sufferings inflicted upon their Savior and their God, who had borne it with the meekness of the Son and the mercy of the Father. The divine being who had come to sojourn among them at Leatherwood in the flesh, for the purposes of his inscrutable wisdom might have blasted his enemies with a touch, a word, but he had spared them; he had borne insult and injury, but in the Last Day he would do justice, he the judge of all the earth. Till then, let the Little Flock have patience; let them have faith sustained by the daily, hourly miracles which he had wrought among them since his return to their midst, and rest secure in the strong arms which he folded about them.

Dylks sat motionless. “Well, mother,” Matthew Braile hoarsely whispered to his wife, “I reckon you’d better have let me put him up with the coon. The heat might have tried the mischief out of him. He hasn’t kept his word.”

“No, Matthew, he hasn’t,” she whispered back, “and I think his lying to you so is almost the worst thing he’s done. The next time you may put him with the coon. Only, the coon’s too good for him. But I reckon Jim Redfield will look out for him.”

“Jim’ll have to let him alone. We can’t have any more mobbing, and there’s no law that can touch Dylks in the State of Ohio. We settled that the first time.”

Enraghty abruptly closed his discourse with a demand for prayer, and addressed his supplication to the Savior and the Judge incarnate there among them. The Little Flock sang the hymn which always opened and closed its devotions, and at the end, Hingston, who sat by Dylks on the bench below the pulpit, made a movement as if to rise. But Dylks put out his hand and stayed him. He welcomed Enraghty to the place which he left beside Hingston, and slowly, with the step of one in a dream, mounted the stairs of the pulpit, amidst the silent amaze of the people. He began without preamble in the blend of scriptural text and crude every-day parlance which he ordinarily used.

“Ye have heard it said aforetime that the New Jerusalem would come down here in Leatherwood, but I say unto you that all that has passed away, that the words which were spoken by the prophet might be fulfilled, ‘Many are called but few are chosen.’ Verily, verily, I said unto you, that heaven and earth shall pass away, but the words I speak now shall not pass away. If the works which have been done in Leatherwood had been done in Tyre and Sidon, the New Jerusalem would have come down in both places, for they did not stone the prophets as the Herd of the Lost did in Leatherwood.”

“He means that morning when he took up the pike and the fellows chased him into the tall timber,” Braile whispered to his wife; “but I can’t tell what he’s driving at.”

“Be still!” she said.

Many of the Little Flock groaned and cried aloud; the Herd of the Lost, except for one shrill note of bitter laughter, were silent, and only those who sat near perceived that it was Jane Gillespie who had laughed.

Redfield looked round at her, unconscious of his look.

“I go a long way off,” Dylks proceeded, “and some of my beloved, even my Little Flock, cannot follow me; but though they cannot follow me, even the lame, halt, and blind shall be with me in the spirit, and shall behold the New Jerusalem where I will bring it down.”

Many of the Little Flock at this cried out, “Where will it be, Lord?” “Where will the New Jerusalem come down?” “How shall we see it?”

“With the eyes of faith, even as ye have seen the miracles I have wrought among ye, which were shown to babes and sucklings and were hidden from the wise of this world. But now I go from you, and my feet shall be upon the mountains and shall descend upon the other side and there I will bring down the New Jerusalem, and there ye shall be, in the flesh or in the spirit, to behold the wonder of it.”

Some of the Little Flock cried out again. “Oh, don’t leave us, Father!” “Take us all with you in the flesh!” “We want to be taken up with you!” and then some of them entreated, “Tell us about it; tell us what it will be like.”

Dylks lifted his eyes as if in the rapture of the vision. “‘Its light shall eclipse the splendor of the sun. The temples thereof, and the residences of the faithful will be built of diamonds excelling the twinkling beauty of the stars. Its walls will be of solid gold, and its gates silver. The streets will be covered with green velvet, richer in luster and fabric than mortal eye ever beheld. The gardens thereof will be filled with all manner of pleasant fruits, precious to the sight, and pleasant to the taste. The faithful shall ride in chariots of crimson, drawn by jet-black horses that need no drivers; and their joys shall go on increasing forever. The air of the city shall be scented with the smell of shrubs and flowers, and ten thousand different instruments all tuned to the songs of heaven shall fill the courts, and the streets and the temples, and the residences, and the gardens with music like ear hath not heard, swelling the soul of the saved with perpetual delight.’”

Sighs and groans of ecstasy went up from the Flock at each of the studied pauses which Dylks made in recounting the wonders of the heavenly city, fancied one after another at the impulse of their expectation. At the end they swarmed forward to the altar place and flung themselves on the ground, and heaped the pulpit steps with their bodies. “Take us with you, Lord!” they entreated. “Take us all with you in the flesh!” “Don’t leave us here to perish among the heathen and the ungodly when you go.” Then some began to ask, as if he had already consented, “But what shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed on that far journey?”

Dylks leaned forward against the pulpit desk and showed a few coins drawn from the pocket of Hingston’s pantaloons which he was wearing. “These shall be enough, for out of these three rusty old coppers I can make millions of gold and silver dollars.”

The frenzy mounted, and the Herd of the Lost who began to tire of the sight, left the temple. Redfield followed out behind Matthew Braile and his wife. “That settles it,” he said. “I’ll see to Mr. Dylks in the morning.”

“Now, I look at it differently. He’s going, like he said he would, and we’ve got to let him go in his own way, and bring down the New Jerusalem Over-the-Mountains, or anywhere else he pleases, so he don’t bring it down in Leatherwood.”

“I say so, too, Matthew. He’s keeping his word the best he can, poor lying soul. They wouldn’t let him back out now.”

“I don’t want you to trouble him, Jim Redfield, till you have a warrant from me,” Braile resumed, braced by his wife’s support. “And I want you to keep the Hounds away, and give Dylks a fair start. You know the law won’t let you touch him. Now do you hear?”

“I hear,” Redfield said sullenly, with the consent which Braile read in his words. “But if there’s any more such goings on as we’ve had here to-night, I won’t answer for the rest of his scalp.”

He hurried forward from the elderly couple and overtook the Gillespies walking rapidly. Hughey Blake had just fallen away from them and stood disconsolately looking after them.

“Is that you, James Redfield?” David Gillespie asked, peering at him in the night’s dimness. “This is the man that helped me to get you a lock of that scoundrel’s hair,” he said to his daughter.

She answered nothing in acknowledgment of the introduction, but Redfield said, coming round to her side and suiting his step to hers, “I would like to go home with you till my road passes yours.”

“Well,” she said, “if you ain’t ashamed to be seen with such a fool. Nobody can see you to-night,” she added, bitterly, including him in her self-scorn.

“You needn’t imply that I like it to be in the dark. I would like to walk with you in broad day past all the houses in Leatherwood. But I don’t suppose you’d let me.” She did not say anything, and he added, “I’m going to ask you to the first chance.” Still she did not say anything, though her father had fallen behind and left the talk wholly to them.

XIX

Nancy sat at her door in the warm September evening when the twilight was beginning to come earlier than in the August days, and her boy rushed round the corner of the cabin in a boy’s habitual breathlessness from running.

“Oh, mother, mother!” he called to her, as if he were a great way off. “Guess what!” He did not wait for her to guess. “The Good Old Man is goin’ to leave Leatherwood and go Over the Mountains with the Little Flock, and he says he’s goin’ to bring down the New Jerusalem at Philadelphy, and all that wants to go up with him kin go. Mr. Hingston’s goin’ with him, and he’s goin’ to let Benny. Benny don’t know whether he can get to go up in the New Jerusalem or not, but he’s goin’ to coax his father the hardest kind.”

He stopped panting at his mother’s knees where she sat on the cabin threshold nearly as high as he stood. She put up her hand and pushed the wet hair from his forehead. “How you do sweat, Joey! Go round and wash your face at the bench. Maybe Jane will give you a drink of the milk, while it’s warm yet, before she lets it down in the well. She’s just through milkin’.”

The boy tore himself away with a shout of “Oh, goody!” and his mother heard him at the well. “Wait a minute, Jane! Mother said I could have a drink before you let it down,” and then she heard him, between gulps, recounting to the girl’s silence the rumors she had already heard from him. He came running back, with a white circle of milk round his lips. “Mother,” he began, “have you ever been Over-the-Mountains?”

“No, I’ve never been anywhere but just here in the country, and where you was born, back where we moved from.”

“Well, mother, how old am I now?”

“You’re goin’ on twelve, Joey dear.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought. Benny ain’t on’y ten. And he ain’t as big for his age as what I am. He’s been to the circus, though; his father took him to it at Wheeling that time when he went on the steamboat. I wisht I could go to a circus.”

“Well, maybe you kin when you grow up. Circuses ain’t everything.”

“No,” the boy relucted. “Benny says the New Jerusalem will be a good deal like the circus. That’s the reason he coaxed his father to let him go. Is Philadelphy as far as Wheeling?”

“A good deal further, from what I’ve heard tell,” his mother said; she smiled at his innocently sinuous approach to his desire.

He broke out with it. “Mother, what’s the reason I can’t go with Benny, and Mr. Hingston, and the Little Flock? They’d take good care of me, and I wouldn’t make Mr. Hingston any trouble. Me ‘n’ Benny could sleep together. And the Good Old Man he’s always been very pleasant to me. Patted my head oncet, and ast me what my name was.”

“Did you tell him it was Billings?” his mother asked uneasily.

“No, just Joseph; and he said, well, that was his name, too. Don’t you think the Good Old Man is good?”

“We’re none of us as good as we ought to be, Joey. No, he ain’t a good man, I’m afraid.”

“My!” the boy said, and then after a moment: “I don’t want to go, Mother, unless you want to let me go.”

His mother did not speak for a while, and it seemed as if she were not going to speak at all, so that the boy said, with a little sigh of renunciation, “I didn’t expect you would. But I’d be as careful! And even if the Good Old Man ain’t so very good, Mr. Hingston is, and he wouldn’t let anything happen to me.”

The woman put her hand under the boy’s chin, and looked into his eager eyes which had not ceased their pleading. At last she said, “You can go, Joey!”

“Mother!” He jumped to his feet from his crouching at hers. “Oh, glory to God!”

“Hush, Joey, you mustn’t say things like that. It’s like swearing, dear.”

“I know it is, and I didn’t mean to. Of course it’s right, in meetin’, and it kind of slipped out when I wasn’t thinkin’. But I won’t say any bad things, you needn’t be afraid. Oh, I’ll be as good! But look a’here, mother! Why can’t you come, too?”

“And leave your little sister?” She smiled sadly.

“I didn’t think of that. But couldn’t Jane take care of her? She’s always carryin’ her around. And Uncle David could come here, and live with them. He wouldn’t want to stay there without me, or no one.”

“It wouldn’t do, Joey dear.”

“No,” the boy assented.

“You can go and tell Benny I said you might go, if his father will have you.”

“Oh, he will; he said so; Benny’s ast him! And he said he’d take good care of us both.”

“I’m not afraid. You know how to take care of yourself. And, Joey—”

She stopped, and the boy prompted her, “What, mom?”

“When I said the Good Old Man wasn’t a good man, I didn’t want to set you against him. I want you to be good to him.”

“Yes, mother,” the boy assented in a puzzle. “But if he ain’t good—”

“He ain’t, Joey. He’s a wicked man. Sometimes I think he’s the wickedest man in the world. But I want you to watch out, and if ever you can help him, or do anything for him, remember that I wanted you to do it: a boy can often help a man.”

“I will, mother. But I don’t see the reason, if he’s so very wicked, why—”

“That’s the very reason, Joey dear. And go and tell Benny now that I let you go. And — don’t tell him what I said about the Good Old Man.”

“Oh, I woon’t, I woon’t, mom! Oh, glory — Oh, I didn’t mean to say it, and I didn’t, really, did I? But I’m so glad, and Benny’ll be, too! Can I tell him now? To-night?”

“Yes. Run along.”

He hesitated; then he leaped into the air with a joyful yell and vanished round the corner of the cabin into the dusk.

His mother did not leave her place on the threshold, but sat with her face bowed in her hands. By and by Jane Gillespie came to the door from within, and then Nancy lifted her head and made room for her to sit beside her. She told her what had passed, and Jane said, “If I was a man I would — Well, I know what I would do!”

She did not sit down, but stood behind Nancy and talked down over her shoulder. “Yes,” Nancy said, “that’s what I used to say when I was a girl. But now I’m glad I ain’t a man, for I wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Well, I wouldn’t ‘a’ left a hair in his head. I’d ‘a’ — I’d ‘a’ half killed him! Oh, when I think what a fool that man made of me!”

“Don’t let Jim Redfield make a fool of you, then.”

“Who said I’m letting him?” the girl demanded fiercely.

“Nobody. But don’t.”

“Aunt Nancy! If it was anybody but you said such a thing! But I know! It’s because you’re so set on Hughey Blake. Hughey Blake!” she ended scornfully, and went back into the cabin.

Nancy rose from her place with a sigh. “Oh, I ‘spose you’re right about my lettin’ Joey go. I don’t know why I let him.”

XX

The meetings of the Little Flock had continued ever since the reappearance of Dylks, and in the earlier spirit. But the spring was broken, and since he had said that the New Jerusalem would not come down at Leatherwood, many had lost not faith but hope. Few could have the hope of following him as far as far-off Philadelphia, and sharing the glories which he promised them there. For a pioneer community the people were none of them poor; some were accounted rich, and among the richest were many followers of Dylks. But most of the Flock were hardworking farmers who could not spare the time or the money for that long journey Over-the-Mountains, even with the prospect of the heavenly city at the end. Yet certain of the poorest set their houses in order, and mortgaged their lands, and went with the richest, when on a morning after the last great meeting in the Temple, the Little Flock assembled for parting, some to go and some to stay.

Nancy did not come with her boy for the farewell. They had kissed each other at the cabin door, and then he had run light-heartedly away, full of wild expectation, to find Benny Hingston at the Cross Roads and then race with him to join the crowd before the Temple, where the Little Flock stood listening to the last words which the Good Old Man should speak to them in Leatherwood. Many wept; Dylks himself was crying. The enemies of their faith did not molest them except for a yelp of derision now and then, and a long-drawn howl from the Hounds, kept well back by the Herd of the Lost, under the command of Redfield. He stood in the chief place among these, and at his right hand Matthew Braile leaned on his stick.

When the last prayer had been said, and they who were going had kissed or shaken hands with those who were staying, and friends and foes had both scattered, Braile said to the young man whom he now faced, “Well, that’s the last of him.”

Redfield’s jaw was still set from the effort of seeing the affair through in as much decency as he had been able to enforce. “It ain’t the last of them. But I reckon, now he’s gone, they’ll behave themselves. None of the saints that are left will make trouble.”

“No, with Enraghty out of the way and that kind old fool Hingston, with his example of mistaken righteousness, we can get along fairly enough with the old dispensation. Well, Abel,” he called to Reverdy, who was lounging about in the empty space which the crowd had left, unwilling to leave the scene of so much excitement for the dull labors of the field, “you thought you wouldn’t go to see the New Jerusalem come down, after all. How’s the Good Old Man goin’ to work it without you?”

“He’s had to work things ‘thout me for a good while now, Squire,” Abel returned, not with perfect satisfaction in the part assigned him by the irony of the Squire. “Ever sence that night at Mr. Enraghty’s, I been putty much done with him. A god that couldn’t help hisself in a little trouble like that, he ain’t no god for me.”

“Oh, I remember. But what about Sally? She didn’t go with the Little Flock, either?”

“I reckon me ‘n’ Sally thinks putty much alike about the Little Flock,” Abel said with as much hauteur as a man in his bare feet could command. “We hain’t either of us got any use for Little Flocks, any more.”

“Well, I’m glad of it. But I thought she might have come to see them off.”

Abel relented. “Sally ain’t very well, this mornin’. Up all night with the toothache.” Redfield had turned from them, and Abel now remarked, “I was wonderin’ whether I couldn’t borry a little coffee from Mis’ Braile for breakfast; I been so took up ‘ith all these goun’s on that I hain’t had no time to go to the store.”

“Why, certainly,” the Squire replied, “and you’d better come and have breakfast with us on the way home. I came down without mine so as to see the Ancient of Days off, and make sure of his going.”

“Pshaw, Squire, it don’t seem quite right to have you usin’ them old Bible sayun’s so common like.”

“Well, Abel, perhaps it isn’t quite the thing. But you must make allowance for my being in such high spirits. I haven’t breathed so free in a coon’s age. I would like to have stowed Dylks for a little while in the loft with ours! But Mis’ Braile wouldn’t hear of it. Well, we’ve seen the last of him, I hope. And now we’re hearing the last of him.” He halted Abel in their walk, at a rise in the ground where they caught the sound of the hymn which the Little Flock, following Dylks for a certain way, were singing. “‘Sounds weel at a distance,’ as the Scotchman said of the bagpipes. And the farther the better. I don’t believe I should care if I never heard that tune again.” They reached Braile’s cabin, and he said, “Well, now come in and have something to stay your stomach while you’re waiting for Sally to make the coffee you’re going to borrow.”

“No, I reckon not, Squire,” Abel loyally held out.

“Well, then, come in and get the coffee, anyhow.”

“I reckon that’s a good idea, Squire,” Abel assented with a laugh for the joke at his cost. As they mounted the steps, Braile stopped him at the sound of voices in the kitchen.

A prevalent voice was the voice of Sally. “Well, just one sup more, Mis’ Braile. You do make the best coffee! I believe in my heart that it’s took my toothache all away a’ready, and I suppose poor Abel’ll be goun’ up home with some of that miser’ble stuff he gits at the store, and expectun’ to find me there in bed yit. I thought I’d jest slip down, and borry a little o’ your’n to surprise him with, but when I smelt it, I jest couldn’t hold out. I don’t suppose but what he stayed to see the Little Flock off, anyway, and you say Squire Braile went. Well, I reckon he had to, justice o’ the peace, that way. I’m thankful the Good Old Man’s gone, for one, and I don’t never want to see hide or hair of him ag’in in Leatherwood. There’s such a thing as gittun’ enough of a thing, and I’ve got enough of strange gods for one while.”

Murmurs of reply came from Mrs. Braile at times, but Sally mainly kept the word.

“Well, and what do you think of Nancy Billun’s lettun’ her Joey go off with the Little Flock, her talkun’ the way she always done about ‘em? Of course he’s safe with Mr. Hingston and Benny, and they’ll bring him back all right, but don’t you think she’d be afeared that he might be took up in the New Jerusalem when it riz ag’in?”

“Abel,” the Squire said, “I don’t like this. We seem to be listening. I don’t believe Sally will like our overhearing her; and we ought to warn her. It’s no use your stamping your bare feet, for they wouldn’t make any noise. I’ll rap my stick on the floor.” He also called out, “Hello, the house!” and Sally herself came to the kitchen door. She burst into her large laugh. “Well, I declare to goodness, if it ain’t Abel and the Squire! Well, if this ain’t the best joke on me! Did you see Dylks off, Squire Braile? And a good riddance to bad rubbage, I say.”

XXI

Hughey Blake, long-haired, barefooted and freckled, hung about the door of Nancy’s cabin, where she sat with her little girl playing in the weedy turf at her foot. The late October weather was sometimes hot at noon, but the evenings were cool and the evening air was sweet with the scent of the ripened corn, and the faint odor of the fallen leaves. The grasshoppers still hissed; at moments the crickets within and without the cabin creaked plaintively.

“I just come,” Hughey said, “to see if you thought she wouldn’t go to the Temple with me, to-night. The Flock lets us have our turn reg’lar now, and we’re goin’ to have Thursday evenin’ meetin’ like we used to.” In a discouraging silence from Nancy, he went on, “I’m just on my way home, now, and I’ll git my shoes there; and I don’t expect to wear this hickory shirt, and no coat—”

“Yes, I know, Hughey, but I don’t believe it’ll be any use. You can try; but I don’t believe it will. I reckon you’d find out that she’s goin’ with Jim Redfield, if anybody. She’s been off with him ‘most the whole afternoon, gatherin’ pawpaws — he knows the best places; I should think they could have got all the pawpaws in Leatherwood by this time. You know I’ve always liked you, Hughey, and so has her father, and you’ve played together ever since you was babies, and you’ve always been her beau from childern up. There ain’t a person in Leatherwood that don’t respect you and feel to think that any girl might be glad to get you; but I’m afraid it’s just your cleverness, and bein’ so gentle like—”

“Do you ‘spose, Nancy,” the young man faltered disconsolately, “it’s had anything to do with my not gettin’ her that hair? I could ‘a’ done it as easy as Jim Redfield; but to tear it right out of his head, that way, I couldn’t; it went ag’in my stommick.”

“I don’t believe it’s that, Hughey. If you must know, I believe it’s just Jim Redfield himself. He’s bewitched her and she’s got to be bewitched by somebody; if it ain’t one it’s another; it was him then, and it’s Jim, now.”

“I see,” the young man assented sadly.

“She ain’t good enough for you, that’s the truth, Hughey, though I say it, her own kith and kin. I can’t make you understand, I know; but she’s got to have somebody that she can feel the power of.”

“I’d do anything for her, Nancy.”

“That’s just it! She don’t want that kind of lovin’, as you may call it. I don’t believe my brother’s a very easy man to turn, but Jane has always done as she pleased with him; he’s been like clay in the hands of the potter with her. Many another girl would have been broken into bits before now; but she’s just as tough as so much hickory. I don’t say but what she’s a good girl; there ain’t a better in Leatherwood, or anywheres. She’s as true as a die, and tender as anything in sickness, and’d lay down and die where she saw her duty, and’d work till she dropped if need be; but, no, she ain’t one that wants softness in her friends. Well, she won’t git any too much of it in Jim Redfield. They’re of a piece, and she may find out that she’s made a mistake, after all.”

“Has she — she hain’t promised to marry him yit?”

“No, I don’t say that. But ever since that night at the Temple he’s been round after her. He’s been here, and he’s been at her father’s, and she can’t go down to the Corners for anything but what he comes home helpin’ her to bring it. You seen yourself, how he always gets her to come home from meetin’.”

“Yes,” Hughey assented forlornly. “I’m always too late at the door; he’s with her before a body can git the words out.”

“Well, that’s it. I don’t say she ain’t a good girl, one of the very best, but she’s hard, hard, hard; and I don’t see what’s ever to break her.”

The girl’s voice came from round the cabin, calling, “Honey, honey, honey!” and the little one started from her play at her mother’s feet, and ran toward the voice, which Jane now brought with her at the corner, and chuckling, and jug-jugging, birdlike, for joy, threw herself at Jane’s knees.

“See what I brought you, honey. It’s good and ripe, but it ain’t half as good as my honey, honey, honey!” She put the pawpaw into the child’s hands and mumbled her, with kisses of her eyes, cheeks, hair, and neck. “Oh, I could eat you, eat you!”

She must have seen the young fellow waiting for her notice, but Nancy had to say, “Here’s Hughey, Jane,” before she spoke to him.

“Oh! Hughey,” she said, not unkindly, but as if he did not matter.

He stood awkward and Nancy judged it best for all the reasons to add, “Hughey wants you to go to the Temple with him to-night,” and the young fellow smiled gratefully if not hopefully at her.

The girl stiffened herself to her full height from the child she was stooping over. She haughtily mounted the steps beside Nancy, and without other recognition of Hughey in the matter she said, “I’ve got company,” and disappeared into the cabin.

“Well, Hughey?” Nancy pityingly questioned.

“No, no, Nancy,” he replied with a manful struggle for manfulness, “I — I — It’s meant, I reckon,” and slunk away from the girl’s brutality as if it were his own shame.

Nancy picked up her little one, and followed indoors.

“Don’t you talk to me, Aunt Nancy!” the girl cried at her. “What does he keep askin’ me for?”

“He won’t ask you any more, Jane,” the woman quietly returned.

They joined in putting the little one to bed. Then, without more words, Jane kissed the child, and came back to kiss her again when she had got to the door. “Aunt Nancy, I hate you,” she said as she went out and left the woman alone.

Ever since Joey went away with the believers to see the New Jerusalem come down in Philadelphia, Jane had been sleeping at her father’s cabin in resentful duty to his years and solitude. She got him his breakfast and left it for him before she went to take her own with Nancy, and she had his dinner and supper ready for his return from the field, but she did not eat with him, and he was abed before she came home at night.

Joey had been gone nearly a month, and no word had come back from any of the Little Flock who went with Dylks. It was not the day of letters by mail; if some of the pilgrims had sent messages by the wagoners returning from their trips Over the Mountains, they had not reached the families left behind, and no angel-borne tidings came to testify of the wonder at Philadelphia. Those left behind waited in patience rather than anxiety; where life was often hard, people did not borrow trouble and add that needless debt to their load of daily cares. Nancy said to others that she did not know what to think, and others said the same to her, and they got what comfort they could out of that.

Now she did not light the little rag-lamp which she and Jane sometimes sat by with their belated sewing or darning if they had not kept the hearth-fire burning. She went to bed in the dark, and slept with the work-weariness which keeps the heart-heavy from waking.

She had work in her tobacco patch to do, as well as in the house, where Jane helped her; she would not let the girl help her get the logs and brush together on the clearing which Laban had begun burning to enrich the soil for the planting of the next year’s crop with the ashes.

She must have slept long hours when she heard the sound of a cry from the dark without.

“Mother! Mother! Oh, mother!” it came nearer and nearer, till it beat with the sound of a fist on the cabin door. In the piecing out of the instant dream which she started from, she thought as that night when Dylks called her, that it must be Laban; he sometimes called her mother after the baby came, and now she called back, “Laban! Laban!” but the voice came again, “It ain’t father; it’s me, mother; it’s Joey!”

“Oh, dear heart!” she joyfully lamented, and flung herself from her bed, and reeled still drunk with slumber, and pulled up the latch, and flung open the door, and caught her boy to her breast.

“Oh, mother!” he said, laughing and crying. “I’m so hungry!”

“To be sure you’re hungry, child; and I’ll have you your supper in half a minute, as soon as I can rake the fire open. Lay down on mother’s bed there, and rest while I’m gettin’ ready for you. The baby won’t wake, and I don’t care if she does.”

“I s’pose she’s grown a good deal. But I am tired,” the boy said, stretching himself out. “Me ‘n’ Benny run all the way as soon as we come in sight of the crick, and him ‘n’ Mis’ Hingston wanted me to stay all night, but I wouldn’t. I wanted to see you so much, mother.”

“Did Mr. Hingston come back with you? Or, don’t tell me anything; don’t speak, till you’ve had something to eat.”

“I woon’t, mother,” the boy promised, and then he said, “But you ought to see Philadelphy, mother. It’s twenty times as big as Wheeling, Benny says, and all red brick houses and white marble steps.” He was sitting up, and talking now; his mother flew about in the lank linsey-woolsey dress she had thrown over her nightgown in some unrealized interval of her labors and had got the skillet of bacon hissing over the coals.

“And to think,” she bleated in self-reproach, “that I’ll have to give you rye coffee! You know, Joey dear, there hain’t very much cash about this house, and the store won’t take truck for coffee. But with good cream in it, the rye tastes ‘most as good. Set up to the table, now,” she bade him, when she had put the rye coffee with the bacon and some warmed-up pone on the leaf lifted from the wall.

She let the boy silently glut himself till he glanced round between mouthfuls and said, “It all looks so funny and little, in here, after Philadelphy.”

Then she said, “But you don’t say anything about the New Jerusalem. Didn’t it come down, after all?” She smiled, but sadly rather than gladly in her skepticism.

“No, mother,” the boy answered solemnly. Then after a moment he said, “I got something to tell you, mother. But I don’t know whether I hadn’t better wait till morning.”

“It’s most morning, now, Joey, I reckon, if it ain’t already. That’s the twilight comin’ in at the door. If you wouldn’t rather get your sleep first—”

“No, I can’t sleep till I tell you, now. It’s about the Good Old Man.”

“Did he — did he go up?” she asked fearfully.

“No, mother, he didn’t. Some of them say he was took up, but, mother, I believe he was drownded!”

XXII

“Drownded?” the boy’s mother echoed. “What do you mean, Joey? What makes you believe he was drownded?”

“I seen him.”

“Seen him?”

“In the water. We was all walkin’ along the river bank, and some o’ the Flock got to complainin’ because he hadn’t fetched the New Jerusalem down yit, and wantin’ to know when he was goin’ to do it, and sayin’ this was Philadelphy, and why didn’t he; and Mr. Hingston he was tryin’ to pacify ‘em, and Mr. Enraghty he scolded ‘em, and told ’em to hesh up, or they’d be in danger of hell-fire; but they didn’t, and the Good Old Man he begun to cry. It was awful, mother.”

“Go on, Joey. Don’t stop.”

“Well, he’d been prayin’ a good deal, off and on, and actin’ like he wasn’t in his right senses, sometimes, talkin’ to hisself, and singin’ his hymn — that one, you know—”

“Never mind, Joey dear,” his mother said, “keep on.”

“And all at once, he up and says, ‘If I want to, I can turn this river into a river of gold,’ and one o’ the Flock, about the worst one, he hollers back, ‘Well, why don’t you do it, then?’ and Mr. Enraghty — well, they call him Saint Paul, you know — he told him to shut his mouth; and they got to jawin’, and I heard a rattlin’ of gravel, like it was slippin’ down the bank, and then there was the Good Old Man in the water, hollerin’ for help, and his hat off, floatin’ down stream, and his hair all over his shoulders. And before I knowed what to think, he sunk, and when he come up, I was there in the water puttin’ out for him.”

“Yes, Joey—”

“I can’t remember how I got there; must ‘a’ jumped in without thinkin’; he’d been so good to me, all along, and used to come to me in the nighttime when he ‘sposed I was asleep, and kiss me; and cry — But I’d ‘a’ done it for anybody, anyway, mother.”

“Yes. Go—”

“Some of ’em was takin’ their shoes and coats off to jump in, and some jest standin’ still, and hollerin’ to me not to let him ketch holt o’ me, or he’d pull me under. But I knowed he couldn’t do that, becuz I could ketch him by one arm, and hold him off — me ‘n’ Benny’s practised it in the crick — and I swum up to him; and he went down ag’in, and when he come up ag’in, his face was all soakin’ wet like he’d been cryin’ under the water, and he says, kind o’ bubblin’ — like this,” the boy made the sound. “He says, ‘Oh, my son, God help — bub-ub — bless you!’ and then he went down, and I swum round and round, expectin’ he’d come up somewheres; but he didn’t come up no more. It was awful, mother, becuz that didn’t seem to be the end of it; and it was. Just didn’t come up no more. They jawed some, before they got over the mountains,” the boy said reminiscently. “They hadn’t brung much money; even Mr. Hingston hadn’t, becuz they expected the Good Old Man to work miracles, and make silver and gold money out of red cents, like he said he would. All the nights we slep’ out o’ doors, and sometimes we had to ast for victuals; but the Good Old Man he always found places to sleep, nice caves in the banks and holler trees, and wherever he ast for victuals they give plenty. And Mr. Enraghty he said it was a miracle if he always knowed the best places to sleep, and the kindest women to ast for victuals. Do you believe it was, mother?”

Nancy said, after an effort for her voice, “He might have been there before.”

“Well, that’s so; but none of ’em thunk o’ that. And what Mr. Enraghty said stopped the jawin’ at the time. It all begun ag’in, worse than ever when we got almost to Philadelphy; and he said some of ’em must take the south fork of the road with Saint Paul and keep on till they saw a big light over Philadelphy, where the New Jerusalem was swellin’ up, and the rest would meet ’em there with him and Saint Peter. They said, ‘Why couldn’t we all go together?’ And it was pretty soon after that that he slipped into the river. Stumbled on a round stone, I reckon.”

The woman sat slowly smoothing the handle of the coffee-pot up and down, and staring at the boy; but she did not speak.

“Benny jumped in by that time, but it wasn’t any use. Oh! I seen the ocean, mother! Mr. Hingston took me ‘n’ Benny down on a boat; and I seen a stuffed elephant in a show, or a museum, they called it. Benny said it was just like the real one in the circus at Wheeling. Mother, do you believe he throwed hisself in?”

“Who, Joey?” she faintly asked.

“Why, the Good Old Man. That’s what some of ’em said, them that was disappointed about the New Jerusalem. But some said he did fetch it down; and they seen it, with the black horses and silver gates and velvet streets, and everything just the way he promised. And the others said he’d fooled ‘em, or else they was just lyin’. And they said he’d got to the end of his string; and that was why he throwed himself in, and when he got in, he was scared of drowndin’ and that was why he hollered for help. But I believe he just slipped in. Don’t you, mother?”

“Yes, Joey.”

“Mother, I don’t believe the Good Old Man had a grea’ deal of courage. All the way Over the Mountains, he’d seem to scare at any little noise, even in broad daylight. Oncet, when we was goin’ along through the woods, a pig jumped out of some hazel-nut bushes, and scared him so that he yelled and fell down in a fit, and they was a good while fetchin’ him to. Do you think he was God, mother?”

“No, Joey.”

“Well, that’s what I think, too. If he was God, he wouldn’t been afeared, would he? And in the night sometimes he’d come and git me to come and lay by him where he could put his arm round my neck, and feel me, like as if he wanted comp’ny. Well, now, that wasn’t much like God, was it? And when he thought I was asleep, I could hear him prayin’, ‘O merciful Savior!’ and things like that; and if he was God, who could he pray to? It wasn’t sense, was it? Well, I just believe he fell in, and he was afeared he was drowndin’ and that’s why he hollered out. Don’t you, mother?”

“Yes, I do, Joey.”

“And you think I done right, don’t you, to try to help him, even if it was some resk?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I knowed it was some resk, but I didn’t believe it was much, and I kind of thought you’d want me to.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” his mother said. “You did right, Joey. And you’re a good boy, and — Joey dear,” — and she rose from the bench where she was sitting with him— “I believe I’ll go and lay down on the bed a minute. Bein’ up, so—”

“Why, yes, mother! You lay down and I’ll clear up the breakfast, or supper if it’s it. It’ll be like old times,” he said in the pride of his long absence from home. His mother lay down on the bed with her face to the wall, and he went very quietly about his work, so as not to wake the baby. But after a moment he went to his mother, and whispered hoarsely, “You don’t suppose I could go and see Benny, a minute, after I’ve got done? It’s ‘most broad day, and I know he’ll be up, too.”

“Yes, go,” she said, without turning her face to him.

He kept tiptoeing about, and when he had finished, he stood waiting to be sure whether she was sleeping before he opened the door. Now she turned her face, and spoke: “Joey?”

“Yes, mother?” he whispered back, and ran to her softly, in his bare feet.

“Did you get to like him any better?”

He seemed not to take her question as anything strange, or to be in doubt of whom she meant.

“Why, there in the water, at the very last, when he kep’ goin’ down, I liked him. Yes, I must have. But all along, I felt more like sorry for him. He seemed so miser’ble, all the time, and so — well — scared.”

“Yes.” She had got the boy’s hand, and without turning her body with her face she held his hand in hers closely under her arm. “Joey, I told you he was a wicked man. I can’t tell you any different now. But I’m glad you was sorry for him. I am sorry too. Joey — he was your father.” She pressed his hand harder.

“Goodness!” he said, but he did not suffer himself to say more.

“He went away and left me when you was a little baby, and he never come back till he come back here. I never had any word from him. For all I could tell he was dead. I never wanted him to be dead,” she defended herself to herself in something above the intelligence of the boy. “I married Laban, who’s been more of a father to you than what he was.”

“Oh, yes, mother!”

“When your real father come here, I made your true father go away.” Now she turned and faced her son, keeping his hand tighter in hers. “Joey, I want to have you go and tell him to come back.”

“Right away, Mother?”

“Why, yes?” she said with question in her answer.

“I thought maybe you’d let me see Benny, first,” he suggested a little wistfully.

She almost laughed. “You dear boy! Go and see Benny on your way. Take him with you, if his father will let him go. You’re both such great travelers. Your father’s at the Wilkinses’ yit, I reckon; they hain’t finished with their cider, I don’t believe. Go, now!”

The boy had been poising as if on winged feet, and now he flew. He came back to say at the door, “I don’t believe I’ll want any breakfast, mother; we had such a late supper.”

It was a thoughtful suggestion, and she said “No,” but before her answer came he had flown again.

The baby woke, and she cooed to it, and she went about the one room of the little cabin trying to put it more in order than before. Some pieces of the moss in the chinking of the round logs near the chimney seemed loose, and she packed them tighter. As she worked she sang. She sang a hymn, but it was a hymn of thanksgiving.

The doorway darkened, and she turned to see the figure of her brother black in the light.

“I see, you’ve heard the news,” he said grimly. “I was afraid I might find you making a show of mourning. I don’t pretend to any. I haven’t had such a load off me since that rascal first come back.”

She answered resentfully, “What makes you so glad, David? He didn’t come back to make you drive your husband away!”

“I was always afraid he might make me kill him. He tried hard enough, and sometimes I thought he might. But blessed be the Lord, he’s dead. They’re holding a funeral for him in the Temple. The news is all through the Creek. I suppose you know how Jane has fixed it up with James Redfield. I feel to be sorry for Hughey Blake; but he never could have mastered her. She’s got an awful will, Jane has. But James has got an awful will too, as strong as Jane—”

Nancy cut him short: “David, I don’t care anything about Jane — now.”

“No,” he assented. “Where’s Joey?” he asked, leaning inward with his hands resting on either jamb of the door.

“Gone for Laban.”

“Well,” David said, with something like grudge. “You hain’t lost much time. But I don’t know as I blame you,” he relented.

“I wouldn’t care if you did, David,” she answered.

XXIII

Late in the long twilight of the early spring day a stranger who was traveling in the old fashion on horseback, with his legs swathed in green baize against the mud of the streaming roads, and with his spattered saddle-bags hung over the pommel before him, was riding into Leatherwood. He paused in a puddle of the lane that left the turnpike not far off, and curved between the new-plowed fields in front of a double log cabin, which had the air of being one of the best habitations of its time though its time was long past; the logs it was built of were squared; the chimneys at either end were of stone masonry instead of notched sticks laid in clay. Against the wall of the porch between the two rooms of the cabin an old man sat tilted back in his chair, smoking a pipe which he took from his mouth at sight of the stranger’s arrest.

“Can you tell me, please, which is my way to the tavern, or some place where I can find a night’s lodging?”

The old man dropped his chair forward, and got somewhat painfully out of it to toddle to the edge of his porch. “Why, there isn’t a tavern, rightly speaking, in Leatherwood, now, though for the backwoods we had a very passable one, once. I wish,” he said after a moment, “that we could offer you a lodging here; but if you’ll light and throw your horse’s rein over the peg in this post, I would be pleased to have you stay to supper with us. My wife is just getting it.”

“Why, thank you, thank you,” the stranger said. “I mustn’t think of troubling you. I dare say I can get something to eat at your tavern. I’ve often been over night in worse places, no doubt. I’ve been traveling through your State, and I’ve turned a little out of my way to stop at Leatherwood, because I’ve been interested in a peculiar incident of your local history.”

The two men perceived from something in each other’s parlance, though one spoke with the neat accent of the countries beyond the Alleghanies, and the other with the soft slurring Ohio River utterance, that they were in the presence of men different by thinking if not by learning from most men in the belated region of a new country.

“Oh, yes,” the old man said with instant intelligence, “the Leatherwood God.”

“Yes,” the other eagerly assented. “I was told, at your county seat, that I could learn all about it if I asked for Squire Braile, here.”

“I am Matthew Braile,” the old man said with dignity, and the stranger returned with a certain apology in his laugh:

“I must confess that I suspected as much, and I’m ashamed not to have frankly asked at once.”

“Better ‘light,” — the Squire condoned whatever offense there might have been in the uncandor. “I don’t often get the chance to talk of our famous imposture, and I can’t let one slip through my fingers. You must come in to supper, and if you smoke I can give you a pipe of our yellow tobacco, afterwards, and we can talk—”

“But I should tire you with my questions. In the morning—”

“We old men sometimes have a trick of not living till morning. You’d better take me while you can get me.”

“Well, if you put it in that way,” the stranger said, and he slipped down from his saddle.

The old man called out, “Here, Abel!” and the figure of what seemed an elderly boy came lurching and paddling round the corner of the cabin, and ducked his gray head hospitably toward the stranger. “Give this horse a feed while we’re taking ours.”

“All right, Squire. Jest helpin’ Sally put the turkey-chicks to bed out o’ the cold, or I’d ‘a’ been round at the first splashin’ in the road.”

“And now come in,” the Squire said, reaching a hand of welcome from the edge of the porch to the stranger as he mounted the steps. “Old neighbors of ours,” he explained Abel and the unseen Sally. “We’ve known them, boy and girl, from the beginning, and when their old cabin fell down in the tail-end of a tornado a few years back, we got them here in a new one behind ours, to take care of them, and let them take care of us. They don’t eat with us,” he added, setting open the kitchen door, and ushering the stranger into the warm glow and smell of the interior. “Mis’ Braile,” he said for introduction to his wife, and explained to her, “A friend that I caught on the wing. I don’t know that I did get your name?”

“Mandeville — T. J. Mandeville; I’m from Cambridge.”

“Thomas Jefferson, I suppose. Cambridge, Ohio — back here?”

“Massachusetts.”

“Well, you didn’t sound like Ohio. I always like to make sure. Well, you must pull up. Mother, have you got anything fit to eat, this evening?”

“You might try and see,” Mrs. Braile responded in what seemed their habitual banter.

“Well, don’t brag,” the Squire returned, and between them they welcomed the stranger to a meal that he said he had not tasted the like of in all his Western travel.

It seemed that their guest did not smoke, and the Squire alone lighted his pipe. Then he joked his wife. “Mother, will you let us stay by the fire here — it’s a little chilly outdoors, and those young frogs do take the heart of you with their peeping — if we don’t mind your bothering round? Mr. Mandeville wants to hear all about our Leatherwood God.”

“He’ll hear more about him than he wants to if he listens to all you tell, Matthew,” Mrs. Braile retorted.

“Oh, no; oh, no,” the stranger protested, and the Squire laughed.

“You wanted to know,” he said, well after the beginning of their talk, “whether there were many of the Little Flock left. Well, some; and to answer your other question, they’re as strong in the faith as ever. The dead died in the faith; the living that were young in it in the late eighteen-twenties are old in it now in the first of the fifties. It’s rather curious,” the Squire said, with a long sigh of satisfaction in the anomaly, “but after the arrest of Dylks, and his trial and acquittal before this court,” the Squire smiled, “when he came out of the tall timber, and had his scalp mended, and got into a whole suit of Saint Peter’s clothes, he didn’t find the Little Flock fallen off a great deal. They were a good deal scared, and so was he. That was the worst of the lookout for Dylks; his habit of being afraid; it was about the best thing, too; kept him from playing the very devil. There’s no telling how far he might have gone if he hadn’t been afraid: I mean, gone in personal mischief.”

“Yes,” the stranger assented. “And his failure in all his miracles had no effect on his followers?”

The Squire laughed, with a rattling of loose teeth on his pipe-stem. “Why, he didn’t fail according to the Little Flock; it was only the unbelievers that disbelieved in the miracles. Even those that went with him Over-the-Mountains to see the New Jerusalem come down got to having seen it as time went on, though some had their doubts when they first came back. Before they died, they’d all seen him go up in a chariot of fire with two black horses and no driver. Nobody but those two purblind ignorant boys that tried to keep him from drowning, when he fell into the river, could be got to say that the heavenly city didn’t come down and suck him up. Why, seven or eight years after he left there was a preacher who was one of his followers came back here, and preached in the Dylks Temple — the old Temple burned down, long ago and was never rebuilt — preached the divinity of Dylks, and said there was no true religion that didn’t recognize him as God. As for Christianity, he said it was just a hotch-potch of Judaism and heathenism. He saw the Good Old Man go right up into heaven, and said he was going to come back to earth before long and set up his kingdom here. He’s never done it, and that slick preacher never came back, either, after the first. He was very well dressed and looked as if he had been living on the fat of the land, somewhere, among the faithful Over-the-Mountains, I reckon. Knew where the fried chickens roosted. Excuse me, mother. She’s heard that joke before,” he explained to their guest.

“I’ve heard it too often to mind it,” Mrs. Braile mocked back.

“Well, it seems to be new to our friend here.”

Mr. Mandeville was laughing, but he controlled himself to ask, “And had the fellow no progressive doctrine, no steps of belief, no logical formulation of his claims? He couldn’t have been merely a dunder-headed, impudent charlatan, who expected to convince by the miracles he didn’t do?”

“Oh, no; oh, no. I didn’t mean to imply that,” the Squire explained. “He was a cunning rascal in his way, and he had the sort of brain that has served the purpose of the imposter in all ages. He had a plan of belief, as you may call it, which he must have thought out before he came here, if he hadn’t begged, borrowed, or stolen it from somebody else. At first he called himself a humble teacher of Christianity, but it wasn’t a great while before he pretended to be Jesus Christ who died on Calvary. That didn’t satisfy him long, though. When he had convinced some that he was Christ, he began to teach that the Christ who was crucified, though he was a real Messiah, was not a perfect Messiah, because he had died and been buried, and death had had power over him just as it has over any mortal. But the real Messiah would never taste death, and he was that Messiah. Dylks would never taste death, and as the real Messiah, he would be one with God, and in fact he was the one and only God. These were the steps, and the way to belief in the godhead was clear to the meanest understanding. The meaner the understanding, the clearer,” the Squire summed up, with another tattoo on his pipe-stem. “You see,” he resumed after a moment, “life is hard in a new country, and anybody that promises salvation on easy terms has got a strong hold at the very start. People will accept anything from him. Somewhere, tucked away in us, is the longing to know whether we’ll live again, and the hope that we’ll live happy. I’ve got fun out of that fact in a community where I’ve had the reputation of an infidel for fifty years; but all along I’ve felt it in myself. We want to be good, and we want to be safe, even if we are not good; and the first fellow that comes along and tells us to have faith in him, and he’ll make it all right, why we have faith in him, that’s all.”

“Well, then,” the stranger said, holding him to the logic of the facts, as he leaned toward him from his side of the fireplace, and fixed him with an eager eye, “I can’t see why he didn’t establish his superstition in universal acceptance, as, say, Mahomet did.”

“I’m glad you came to that,” the Squire blandly submitted. “For one thing, and the main thing, because he was a coward. He had plently of audacity but mighty little courage, and his courage gave out just when he needed it the most. And perhaps he hadn’t perfect faith in himself; he was a fool, but he wasn’t a crazy fool. Then again, my idea is that the scale was too small, or the scene, or the field, or whatever you call it. The backwoods, as Leatherwood was then, was not the right starting point for a world-wide imposture. Then again, as I said, Dylks was timid. He was not ready to shed blood for his lie, neither other people’s nor his own; and when it came to fighting for his doctrine, he was afraid; he wanted to run. And, in fact, he did run, first and last. No liar ever had such a hold on them that believed his lie; they’d have followed him any lengths; but he hadn’t the heart to lead them. When Redfield and I got hold of him, after he had tasted the fear of death, there that week in the tall timber, he was willing to promise anything we said. And he kept his promise; he wouldn’t if he could have helped it, but he knew Jim Redfield would hold him to it, if he squeezed his life out doing it.”

The stranger was silent, but not apparently convinced, and meanwhile he took up another point of interest in the story which he heard from the Squire. “And whatever became of his wife, and her ‘true’ husband?”

“Oh, they lived on together. Not very long, though. They died within a week of each other, about. Didn’t they, mother?”

“Just a week,” Mrs. Braile said, animated by the human touch in the discussion. “They lived mighty happy together, and it was as good a death as a body could want to die. It was that summer when the fever mowed the people down so. They took their little girl with them,” she sighed from a source of hidden sorrow. “They all went together.”

Braile took his pipe out and gulped before he could answer the stranger’s next question. “And the boy? Dylks’s son, is he living?”

“Oh, yes.” At the pleasant thought of the boy, the Squire began to smile. “He and Hingston’s son took over the mill from Hingston, after he got too old for it, and carried it on together. Hingston wasn’t one that hung on to the faith in Dylks, but he never made any fuss about giving it up. Just staid away from the Temple that the Little Flock built for themselves.”

“And is young Dylks still carrying on the milling business?”

“Who? Joey? Oh, yes. He married Benny Hingston’s sister. Benny’s wife died, and he lives with them.”

“And there ain’t a better man in the whole of Leatherwood than Joey Billin’s, as we always call him,” Mrs. Braile put in. “He was the best boy anywhere, and he’s the best man.”

“Well, it’s likely to come out that way, sometimes,” the Squire said with tender irony.

“And you can’t say,” Mrs. Braile continued with a certain note of indignation as for unjust neglect of the pair, “but what James Redfield and Jane has got along very well together.”

“Oh, yes, they’ve got along,” the Squire assented. “He’s got along with her, and she’s got along with the children — plenty of them. I reckon she’s what he wanted, and they’re what she did.”

The stranger looked a little puzzled.

“That instinct of maternity,” the Squire explained. “You may have noticed it in women — some of them.”

“Oh! Oh, yes,” Mr. Mandeville assented. He did not seem greatly interested.

“She’s always been just crazy about ‘em,” Mrs. Braile explained. “Beginnin’ with Nancy Billin’s’s little girl. Well!”

“Yes,” the Squire amplified. “It was the best thing, or at least the strongest thing in Jane. I don’t say anything against it, mother,” he said tenderly to his wife. “Jane was a good girl, especially after she got over her faith in Dylks, and she’s a good woman. At least, Jim thinks so.”

Mrs. Braile contented herself as she could with his ironical concession.

The stranger looked at his watch; he jumped to his feet. “Nine o’clock! Mrs. Braile, I’m ashamed. But you must blame your husband, partly. Good night, ma’am; good — Why, look here, Squire Braile!” he arrested himself in offering his hand. “How about the obscurity of the scene where Joe Smith founded his superstition, which bids fair to live right along with the other false religions? Was Leatherwood, Ohio, a narrower stage than Manchester, New York? And in point of time the two cults were only four years apart.”

“Well, that’s a thing that’s occurred to me since we’ve been talking. Suppose we look into it to-morrow? Come round to breakfast — about six o’clock. One point, though: Joe Smith only claimed to be a prophet, and Dylks claimed to be a god. That made it harder, maybe for his superstition.”

THE END

THE VACATION OF THE KELWYNS

AN IDYL OF THE MIDDLE EIGHTEEN-SEVENTIES

This posthumous novel appeared in 1920. Howells had left the book complete, but untitled at his death and the title was chosen by the publisher, Harper. The novel’s central theme is the difficulties faced by those in privileged, wealthy positions that wish to create social equality and transcend class barriers. Despite this intellectual theme, however, the novel is presented as an ‘idyll’, drawing on Howells’s nostalgic recollections of an American summer during the mid-eighteen-seventies, a time when the USA was celebrating its centenary.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI

XXVII

XXVIII

Frontispiece of the first edition

I

KELWYN’S salary as a lecturer in the post-graduate courses would not have been enough for his family to live upon; but his wife had some money of her own, and this with his salary enabled them to maintain themselves upon the scale of refined frugality which was the rule in the university town, and to indulge, now and then, a guarded hospitality. Like the other university people, they spent their whole income on their living, except the sum which Kelwyn paid for his life insurance. They kept two maids, and had, in common with four other university families, the use of one undivided one-fifth of a man, who took care of their furnace and shovelled the snow off their paths in winter, and cut their grass in the spring and fall; in the summer when they were away they let the grass tangle at will.

Mrs. Kelwyn passed this season largely in a terror of moths, especially the hairy sort called buffalo-bugs, which began to introduce themselves by that name at the date of our story. In dreams and in many a fearful revery she saw them gorging themselves upon her carpets and furniture and blankets and all her other woollens, and treating the camphor the things were put up in as an agreeable condiment. She was, in fact, a New England housekeeper of the most exacting sort, with a conscience that gave those she loved very little peace, in its manifold scruples, anxieties, and premonitions. She was so far in the divine confidence as to be able to prophesy events with much precision, especially disastrous events, and especially disastrous events which her husband thought would not come to pass. In this, as in other things, she was entirely devoted to him and to their children; to hear her talk you would suppose there was a multitude of them.

She pampered Kelwyn and flattered him, and she did what she could to make him believe that because he had, after many years as a post-graduate student, become a post-graduate lecturer, he was something different from other men, and merited attention from destiny. He was really a very well-read and careful scholar in his department of Historical Sociology, with no thought of applying his science to his own life or conduct. In person, he was not tall, but he was very straight; he carried himself with a sort of unintentional pomp, and walked with short, stiff steps. He was rather dim behind the spectacles he wore; but he was very pleasant when he spoke, and his mind was not as dry as his voice; when pushed to the wall he was capable of a joke; in fact, he had a good deal of ancestral Yankee humor which he commonly repressed, but which came out in the stress put upon him by his wife’s requisitions in hypothetical cases of principle and practice. He suffered at times from indigestion; but he was indefatigably industrious, and had thought the blond hair thin on his head in places; he wore a reddish mustache.

He was either not quite so tall as his wife, or he looked not quite so tall, because of her skirts, and her aquiline profile; she seemed always to have him in charge when they were together, which made him appear smaller still; they were both of about the same blondness, though hers tended rather more to dust color.

Kelwyn’s father had been first a farm boy, and then a country merchant, who reserved him for an intellectual career; and his career since he first entered school had been as purely intellectual as if he had been detached from the soil by generations of culture and affluence. His associations had always been with nice people, in college and afterward; he liked that sort, and they liked him, for Kelwyn was a pleasant fellow, and was noticeably a gentleman, if not a gentleman by birth. In America society does not insist that one shall be a gentleman by birth; that is generally impossible; but it insists that he shall be intelligent and refined, and have the right sort of social instincts; and then it yields him an acceptance which ignores any embarrassing facts in his origin, and asks nothing but that he shall ignore them too. Kelwyn did this so completely that he never thought of them. His father and mother were now dead, and he had been an only child, so that he had not even a duty to the past. All his duties were to the present, and they were so agreeable that he could easily discharge them with conscience and credit. In a day when people were just beginning to look into sociology, and most people were still regarding it as the driest branch on the tree of knowledge, he made it one of the most important of the post-graduate courses at the university. The students liked him, and they took such a gratifying interest in their work under him that some of them had a habit, which he encouraged, of coming to talk with him about it at his house out of hours. He made them very welcome in his library, and even offered to offer them cigars, which they refused out of regard to Kelwyn’s not smoking himself; and when one of them would begin, “Do you think, Mr. Kelwyn,” and then go on to ask him some question on one of his favorite points in the morning’s lecture, Kelwyn would feel that his office was a very high one, and could not be magnified too much.

His wife often wished that the faculty and the board of overseers could know the influence he had with the students; but, in fact, Kelwyn’s usefulness was well known to them, and his promotion to an underprofessorship in the body of the university was only a question of time. He was respected outside of the university as well as in it. In politics he was a reformer, and he was faithful in a good deal of committee work, when his college work alone was killing him, as Mrs. Kelwyn said more than once. She herself did not shirk a share in the local charities, and she would have done more in that way, if she had not felt that Mr. Kelwyn and the children had the first claim upon her.

II

ROBUST health would not have been in keeping with Kelwyn’s vocation or circumstances; but his digestion was not so delicate as Mrs. Kelwyn believed when she took him every summer away from the well-netted comfort of his study (they had wire nettings at every door and window of the house, and even over the tops of the chimneys, for it had been found that mosquitoes sometimes got in down the flues) and set him unnetted amid the insects of the open country. She had thought a great deal about the best places to go to, and she had gone to a great many places, each better in prospect and worse in retrospect than the other, but sufficing, for the time, to hold Kelwyn from his books, and give him what she called a rest; he felt it as an anguish of longing to get back to his work. They had not as yet imagined having a country house of their own, such as nearly everybody of their condition has now; even the summer shell was little known in the early eighteen-seventies, and the cheap and simple cottages of the better sort common in our day were undreamed of. Like other nice families of their circumstance and acquaintance, thirty or thirty-five years ago, the Kelwyns engaged board during the winter at some farm-house in the Massachusetts or New Hampshire hill country, going up to look at the place on a mild day of the January thaw, and settling themselves in it early in June. Their understanding would be for good beds and plain country fare, with plenty of milk and eggs and berries; and they would get mattresses of excelsior faced on one side with refuse wool; and premature beef and tardy lamb, with last year’s potatoes, and no leaf of the contemporary vegetation till far into July. Kelwyn himself had a respite from all this during commencement week, when he went home and slept in his own dwelling, taking his meals at the nearest boarding-house, where they had the spring fruits and vegetables, tender steak, and cream such as never appeared upon the unstinted milk of the farm.

Mrs. Kelwyn’s ideal was a place where there were no other boarders, and where they could have their meals at a table of their own, apart from the farmer’s family; but even when she could realize this it was not in the perfection that her nerves demanded. If she made Kelwyn take all the rooms in the house, still there was some nook where the farmer’s wife contrived to stow a boarder who ate with the farm family, or a visiting friend who woke the Kelwyns at dawn with the plaint of the parlor organ; the rest of the day they had the sole use of the parlor, and could keep the organ pacified. The farmer’s wife imagined that she had fulfilled the agreement for a private table when she had put everything on it at once, and shut the Kelwyns in to take care of themselves. After the first relay of griddle - cakes she expected them to come out to the kitchen for the next; and to get hot water from the kettle and cold water from the pump, as they needed either. Kelwyn did not mind this so much as his wife, who minded it chiefly for his sake as wholly out of keeping with the dignity of a university lecturer; for it fell to him mostly to do these things.

In the last place she had so often undergone the hardship of making Kelwyn hurry out untimely in the morning to fill the wash-pitcher, forgotten overnight by the hostess, that she was quite disheartened, and came home in the fall feeling that she must give up the notion of farm board thereafter, and try to find some small hotel not too public and not too expensive for them. The winter passed and the spring was well advanced, and still they had not found just such a hotel as they wanted, though they had asked among all the nice people they knew, and Kelwyn had looked several of the places up. He would have been willing to try another farm-house, and still more willing to pass the summer in town, under his own well-shaded roof; but Mrs. Kelwyn was not willing to do either, and he was by no means resting from his search, but merely rejoicing in a little respite, when one day he received a very odd visit.

This visit was paid him by a quaintly dressed old man, who said he was an Elder of the people called Shakers, and that he had come to Kelwyn because of some account he had read of the kind of work he was doing in the university, and had thought he would be pleased, in his quality of lecturer on Historical Sociology, to know something of the social experiment of the Shakers. It presently appeared that he had counted so much upon Kelwyn’s interest in it as to believe that he might make it the theme of a lecture, and he had come with a little printed tract on the Shaker life and doctrine which he had written himself, and which he now gave Kelwyn with the hope, very politely expressed, that it might be useful to him in the preparation of his lectures. The whole affair was to Kelwyn’s mind so full of a sweet innocence that he felt it invited the most delicate handling on his part, and he used all the niceness he was master of in thanking the old man for his pamphlet, without giving him the expectation that he would really treat of Shakerism before the students of his post-graduate course. Inwardly he was filled with amusement at the notion of his august science stooping to inquire into such a lowly experiment as that of those rustic communists; but outwardly he treated it with grave deference, and said that he should have the greatest pleasure in reading the pamphlet of the Elder. He was curious enough to ask some questions about the Family to which his visitor belonged, and then about the general conditions of Shakerism. It amused him again when his visitor answered, from a steadfast faith in its doctrine, that his sect was everywhere in decay, and that his own Family was now a community of aging men and women, and must soon die out unless it was recruited from the world-outside. He seemed to feel that he had a mission to the gentler phases of this world, and he did not conceal that he had come with some hope that if the character of Shakerism could be truly set forth to such cultivated youth as must attend Kelwyn’s lectures, considerable accessions from their number might follow. The worst thing in the present condition of Shakerism, he said, was that the community was obliged to violate the very law of its social being, for the brethren were too feeble to work in the fields themselves, and were forced to employ hireling labor. Kelwyn learned from his willing avowals that they had some thousands of acres which they could only let grow up in forests for the crops of timber they would finally yield, and that it was not easy always to find tenants for the farms they had to let. He spoke of one farm which would be given, with one of the Family dwellings, to a suitable tenant at a rent so ridiculously low that Kelwyn said, with a laugh, if the Shakers would furnish the house, though twenty-five rooms were rather more than his family needed, he did not know but he might take the farm himself for the summer. He went into a little history of their experience of farm board and the defeat of their aspirations for a house that they could control without putting the care of housekeeping upon his wife; and he ended by confessing that at the present moment they were without any prospects whatever for the summer.

III

THE Elder did not seem to enter very eagerly into the matter, as if he were not expected to do so; he said it would not he easy to find just what they wanted, and when he took his leave he left Kelwyn with the feeling that he regarded his aspiration with a certain cautious disapproval. Kelwyn made a joke of this to his wife, in telling her of his visitor, and he was the more surprised, two days later, to get a letter from him saying that he had talked over with the Family Kelwyn’s notion of furnishing the house, and they had decided to act upon it if he was still disposed to hire the place for a year. In this case, the Elder wrote, they knew of a man and his wife who would be willing to come into the house and board them at a much lower rate than usual, if he could have the produce of the farm, and the house for the rest of the year after they left it. The rent would be the same as for the house unfurnished.

Kelwyn’s wife first provisionally disciplined him for giving his correspondent a groundless hope that he would do anything so wild; but when he convinced her that he was innocent she began to find it not such a bad scheme, and she ended by driving him off that very day to look at the place, which was just over the border in southern New Hampshire. There was no time to be lost, for the Shakers might offer it to somebody else if he did not act promptly. She made him telegraph them that he was coming, and the boy who drove him over to the Shaker village from the station carried his despatch to them. He came home in a rapture with the place. The house, which had been left vacant by the shrinkage of the community, was almost as vast as a college dormitory, but it was curiously homelike at the same time, with a great kitchen, and a running spring of delicious water piped into it; a dining-room which had been the Family refectory and looked eastward through the leaves of embowering elms across beautiful country to Mount Ponkwasset in the distance; the choice of a multitude of airy bedrooms; and the hall where the Shaker Family used to dance for a parlor or sitting-room. The only trouble was that they might be lost in the huge mansion; but, if they settled themselves on one floor, they could perhaps find one another at meal-times. Kelwyn drew a plan, and showed how they could take the second story, and leave the first to the farmer’s family. The whole house was deliciously cool, and there were fireplaces where they could have a blaze in chilly weather, and cheer themselves with the flame at night. The high open plateau where the house stood, not far from the Shaker village which had dried away from it, was swept by pure breezes that blew in at every window, and made mosquitoes impossible and nettings superfluous.

“Flies,” Mrs. Kelwyn suggested.

“I don’t believe there would be any flies,” Kelwyn returned; and then she accused him of being infatuated.

She felt the need of greater strictness with him because she knew herself hopelessly taken with his report, which she did not believe exaggerated. “And the farmer, did you see him or his wife? Because that’s the most important matter.”

“Yes, I understood that. But they were not living in the neighborhood, and I couldn’t get at them. The man has been in the Shakers’ employ, off and on, and they said his habits were good; they described the woman as a quiet, inoffensive person. They are people who have always had rather a hard time, and have never been able to get a place of their own. They wanted to take this place, but they didn’t feel sure they could meet the rent. I suppose it would be a godsend if we took it for them. But we’re not to consider that The question is whether we want it; and I knew we couldn’t decide till we had seen the people. The Shakers thought they could send the man down in a day or two, and then we could satisfy ourselves.”

And you haven’t committed yourself?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, you have managed very prudently, Elmer,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. She added with an impulse of the sudden fear that springs from security itself, “I hope you haven’t lost the chance.”

Kelwyn resented the imputation of overcaution, but he only answered, rather loftily, “I don’t think there’s any danger.”

They began to talk of it as an accomplished fact, and it grew upon them in this vantage. They saw what a very perfect thing it would be if it were the thing at all. They would have complete control of the situation. The house would be their house, and the farmer would be their tenant at will. If they did not like him or his wife, if they did not find them capable or faithful, they could turn them out-of-doors any day; and they could not be turned out themselves, or molested, so long as they paid the Shakers the absurd trifle they asked for rent. It seemed impossible that they could fail of their pleasure in such circumstances, but Mrs. Kelwyn, merely in the interest of abstract knowledge, carried her scrutiny so far as to ask, “And could you turn him out of the farm, too, if they didn’t do well in the house?”

Kelwyn had really not considered this point, but he said, “I don’t know that I should think it quite right to do that after the man had got his crops in.”

“No,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, “of course not,” and in a generous revulsion of feeling she added, “It will be a great opportunity for the poor things.”

“Yes, I have thought of that,” said Kelwyn. “They will have their rent free so long as they behave themselves, and if we find the arrangement works there is no reason why we should not continue it from year to year indefinitely. Of course,” he added, “we mustn’t pretend that we are making the arrangement on their account. We are primarily doing it for ourselves.”

“Yes, charity begins at home,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, thoughtfully, but there was a vague dissatisfaction in her voice.

Kelwyn smiled. “Were you thinking it didn’t?” he asked.

“Why, yes,” she answered, as if surprised into the admission. “Were you, too?”

“It struck me as rather a hollow-hearted saying; I don’t know why. I never questioned it before. But I fancy it’s something else that begins at home, and that charity begins away from home.”

“I don’t believe it’s very well to look at those things in that spirit exactly,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. “We can make anything appear ugly by putting it in a strange light. Besides, I don’t think that this is a matter of charity, quite.”

“No, it’s most distinctly a matter of business. Ethically considered, it is merely a thing that is right in itself, and the good that may flow from it is none the less good for being incidental. That is the way that most of the good in the world has come about. The history of civilization is that of certain people who wished to better their own condition, and made others wish to do the same by the spectacle of their success.” Kelwyn made a mental note of his notion for use in a lecture. It seemed to him novel, but he must think a little more whether it was tenable. Perhaps he could throw it out in the form of a suggestion.

His wife could not dwell in the region of speculation even with him; it is perhaps the weakness of their sex that obliges women to secure themselves in the practical. She said, “Well, then, all we can do is to wait until the man comes. Then, if we think they can manage for us, we can close the bargain at once. But don’t let the place slip through your fingers, Elmer. The Shakers may have offered it to some one else, and you had better write to them, and tell them we think very well of it, and will decide as soon as we see the man.”

They talked a great deal of the affair for the next day or two, and they somehow transmuted the financial disability of their prospective-tenants into something physical; they formed the habit of speaking of them as “those poor little people,” and with perhaps undue sense of their own advantage they figured them as of anxious and humble presence, fearful of losing the great chance of their lives. It was impossible, in this view of them, for the Kelwyns to intend them anything but justice. Without being sentimentalists, they both saw that they must not abuse those people’s helplessness in any way. They decided that they would offer to pay them the full amount of board which they usually paid for board in the summer, after taking out, of course, a certain sum for the rent during the time they were with them; the rest of the year’s rent they would forgive them. This seemed to the Kelwyns very handsome on their part, and the fact that they were to have the range of the whole house, instead of two rooms, as they had hitherto had at farm-houses, did not appear to them too much in the circumstances.

IV

THEY had no right to complain, but it certainly did not comport with their prepossessions that the farmer, when he came, should arrive in the proportions of a raw-boned giant, with an effect of hard-woodedness, as if he were hewn out of hickory, with the shag-bark left on in places; his ready-made clothes looked as hard as he. He had on his best behavior as well as his best clothes, but the corners of his straight wide mouth dropped sourly at moments, and Kelwyn fancied both contempt and suspicion in his bony face, which was tagged with a harsh black beard. Those unpleasant corners of his mouth were accented by tobacco stain, for he had a form of the tobacco habit uncommon in New England; his jaw worked unceasingly with a slow, bovine grind; but when the moment came, after a first glance at Kelwyn’s neat fireplace, he rose and spat out of the window; after Mrs. Kelwyn joined them in her husband’s study, he made errands to the front door for the purpose of spitting.

Kelwyn expected that she would give him a sign of her instant rejection of the whole scheme at sight of the man, who had inspired him with a deep disgust; but to his surprise she did nothing of the kind; she even placated the man, by a special civility, as if she divined in him an instinctive resentment of her husband’s feeling. She made him sit down in a better place than Kelwyn had let him take, and she inspired him to volunteer an explanation of his coming alone, in the statement he had already made to Kelwyn, that he guessed the Woman would have come with him, but the Boy had got a pretty hard cold on him, and she was staying at home to fix him up.

Kelwyn said, to put a stop to the flow of sympathy which followed from his wife, that he had been trying to ask Mr. Kite something about the cooking, but he thought he had better leave her to make the inquiries.

“Oh yes,” she said, brightly. “You can give us light bread, I suppose?”

The man smiled scornfully, and looked round as if taking an invisible spectator into the joke, and said, “I guess the Woman can make it for you; I never touch it myself. We have hot biscuit.”

“We should like hot bread too, now and then,” Mrs. Kelwyn said.

“You can have it every meal, same’s we do,” the man said.

“We shouldn’t wish to give Mrs. Kite so much trouble,” Mrs. Kelwyn remarked, without apparent surprise at the luxury proposed. “I suppose she is used to broiling steak, and—”

“Always fry our’n,” the man said, “but I guess she can broil it for you.”

“I merely thought I would speak of it. We don’t care much for pies; but we should like a simple pudding now and then; though, really, with berries of all kinds, and the different fruits as they come, we shall scarcely need any other desserts. We should expect plenty of good sweet milk, and we don’t like to stint ourselves with the cream. I am sure Mrs. Kite will know how to cook vegetables nicely.”

“Well,” the farmer said, turning away from the Kelwyns to his invisible familiar for sympathy in his scorn, “what my wife don’t know about cookin’, I guess ain’t wo’th knowin’.”

“Because,” Mrs. Kelwyn continued, “we shall almost live upon vegetables.”

“I mean to put in a garden of ’em — pease, beans, and squash, and sweet-corn, and all the rest of ‘em. You sha’n’t want for vegetables. You’ve tasted the Shaker cookin’?”

“My husband dined with them the day he was up there.”

“Then he knows what Shaker cookin’ is. So do we. And I guess my wife ain’t goin’ to fall much below it, if any.”

He looked round once more to his familiar in boastful contempt, and even laughed. Kelwyn’s mouth watered at the recollection of the Shaker table, so simple, so wholesome, and yet so varied and appetizing, at a season when in the absence of fresh garden supplies art had to assist nature so much.

“Oh, I am sure we shall be very well off,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. “We shall bring our own tea — English breakfast tea.”

“Never heard of it,” Kite interrupted. “We always have Japan tea. But you can bring whatever you want to. Guess we sha’n’t steal it.” This seemed to be a joke, and he laughed at it.

“Oh no,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, in deprecation of the possibility that she might have given the ground for such a pleasantry. “Well, I think I have spoken of everything, and now I will leave you two to arrange terms.”

“No, no! Don’t go!” her husband entreated. “We’d better all talk it over together so that I can be sure that I am right.”

“That’s the way I do with my wife,” Kite said, with a laugh of approval.

The Kelwyns, with each other’s help, unfolded to him what they had proposed doing. As they did so, it seemed to them both a very handsome proposal, and they were aware of having considered themselves much less in it than they had feared. As it appeared now, they had thought so much more of their tenants than they had imagined that if it had not been too late they might have wished they had thought less. Afterward they felt that they had not kept many of the advantages they might very well have kept, though again they decided that this was an effect from their failure to stipulate them, and that they remained in their hands nevertheless.

Kite sat listening with silent intensity. He winked his hard eyes from time to time, but he gave no other sign of being dazzled by their proposal.

“You understand?” Kelwyn asked, to break the silence which the farmer let ensue when he ended.

“I guess so,” Kite answered, dryly. “I’ll have to talk to the woman about it. You must set it down, so I can show it to her the way you said.”

“Certainly,” Kelwyn said, and he hastily jotted down the points and handed the paper to Kite; it did not enter into Kite’s scheme of civility to rise and take it. He sat holding the paper in his hand and staring at it.

“I believe that’s right?” Kelwyn suggested.

“I guess so,” said Kite.

“I don’t believe,” Mrs. Kelwyn interposed, “that Mr. Kite can make it out in your handwriting, my dear. You do write such a hand!”

“Well, I guess I will have to get you to read it,” Kite said, reaching the paper to Kelwyn, without rising, but letting him rise to get it.

Kelwyn read it carefully over, dwelling on each point. Kite kept a wooden immobility; but when Kelwyn had finished he reared his length from the lounge where it had been half folded, and put his hat on. “Well, I’ll show this to the woman when I get back, and we’ll let you know how we feel about it. Well, good-morning.” He got himself out of the house with no further ceremony, and the Kelwyns remained staring at each other in a spell which they found it difficult to break.

“Don’t you suppose he could read it?” she asked, in a kind of a gasp.

“I have my doubts,” said Kelwyn.

“He didn’t seem to like the terms, did you think?”

“I don’t know. I feel as if we had been proposing to become his tenants, and had been acting rather greedily in the matter.”

“Yes, that was certainly the effect. Do you believe we offended him in some way? I don’t think I did, for I was most guarded in everything I said; and unless you went against the grain with him before I came down—”

“I was butter in a lordly dish to him, before you came down, my dear!”

“I don’t know. You were letting him sit in a very uncomfortable chair, and I had to think to put him on your lounge. And now, we’re not sure that he will accept the terms.”

“Not till he has talked it over with the ‘woman.’ I almost wish that the woman would refuse us.”

“It gives us a chance to draw back, too. He was certainly very disagreeable, though I don’t believe he meant it. He may have been merely uncouth. And, after all, it doesn’t matter about him. We shall never see him or have anything to do with him, indoors. He will have to hitch up the horse for us, and bring it to the door, and that will be the end of it. I wish we knew something about her, though.”

“He seemed to think his own knowing was enough,” Kelwyn mused. “She is evidently perfection — in his eyes.”

“Yes, his pride in her was touching,” said Mrs. Kelwyn. “That was the great thing about him. As soon as that came out, it atoned for everything. You can see that she twists him round her finger.”

“I don’t know whether that’s a merit or not.”

“It’s a great merit in such a man. She is probably his superior in every way. You can see how he looks up to her.”

“Yes,” Kelwyn admitted, rather absently. “Did you have a feeling that he didn’t exactly look up to us?”

“He despised us,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, very promptly. “But that doesn’t mean that he won’t use us well. I have often noticed that in country people, even when they are much smoother than he was, and I have noticed it in working-people of all kinds. They do despise us, and I don’t believe they respect anybody but working-people, really, though they’re so glad to get out of working when they can. They think we’re a kind of children, or fools, because we don’t know how to do things with our hands, and all the culture in us won’t change them. I could see that man’s eye taking in your books and manuscripts, and scorning them.”

“I don’t know but you’re right, Carry, and it is very curious. It’s a thing that hasn’t been taken into account in our studies of the conditions. We always suppose that the superiors despise the inferiors, but perhaps it is really the inferiors that despise the superiors, and it’s that which embitters the classes against one another.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, “what I hope is that the wife may have education enough to tolerate us, if we’re to be at their mercy.”

“I hope she can read writing, anyway,” Kelwyn said. “And it’s droll, but you’ve hit it in what you say; it’s been growing on me, too, that they will have us at their mercy. I had fancied that we were to have them at ours.”

The scheme looked more and more doubtful to the Kelwyns. There were times when they woke together in the night, and confessed the same horror of it, and vowed each other to break it off. Yet when daylight came it always looked very simple, and it had so many alluring aspects that they smiled, at their nightly terrors. It was true, after all, that they could command the situation, and whether they cared to turn the Kites out of the farm or not, they could certainly turn them out of the house if they proved unfit or unfaithful. They would have, for the first time, a whole house to themselves, for they should allow the Kites only servants’ quarters in it, and they would have the whole vast range and space for very little more money than they had ordinarily paid for farm board. They could undoubtedly control the table, and if the things were not good they could demand better. But a theory of Mrs. Kite grew upon Mrs. Kelwyn the more she thought of Kite’s faith in his wife, which comforted her in her misgivings. This was the theory of her comparative superiority, which Mrs. Kelwyn based upon the probability that she could not possibly be so ignorant and uncouth as her husband. It was, no doubt, her ambition to better their lot which was urging him to take the farm, and she would do everything she could to please. In this view of her, Mrs. Kelwyn resolved to meet her half-way; to be patient of any little failures at first, and to teach the countrywoman town ways by sympathy rather than by criticism. That was a duty she owed her, and Mrs. Kelwyn meant to shirk none of her duties, while eventually claiming all her rights. She said this to herself in her reveries, and she said it to her husband in their conferences during the days that followed one another after Kite’s visit. So many days followed before he made any further sign that Mrs. Kelwyn had time to work completely round from her reluctance to close the engagement with him, or his wife, rather, and to have wrought herself into an eagerness amounting to anxiety and bordering upon despair lest the Kites should not wish to close it. With difficulty she kept herself from making Kelwyn write and offer them better terms; she prevailed with herself so far, indeed, as to keep from making him write and ask for their decision. When it came unurged, however, she felt that she had made such a narrow escape that she must not risk further misgivings even. She argued the best from the quite mannerly and shapely letter (for a poor country person) which Mrs. Kite wrote in accepting the terms they offered. She did not express any opinion or feeling in regard to them, but she probably knew that they were very good; and Mrs. Kelwyn began to be proud of them again.

V

IT was the afternoon of such a spring day as comes nowhere but in New England that the Kelwyns arrived at their summer home. There was a little edge of cold in it, at four o’clock, which the bright high sun did not soften, and which gave a pleasant thrill to the nerves. The blue sky bent over the earth a perfect dome without the faintest cloud. The trees, full foliaged, whistled in the gale that swept the land, and billowed the long grass, and tossed the blades of the low corn. ‘All was sweet and clean, as if the spirit of New England housekeeping had entered into Nature, and she had set her house in order for company.

Mrs. Kelwyn kept feeling like a guest during the drive over from the station, and she had an obscure resentment of the feeling as a foreshadowed effect from an attempt on Mrs. Kite’s part to play the hostess. She must be the mistress from the first, and, though Mrs. Kite was not to be quite her servant, she must be made to realize distinctly that the house was Mrs. Kelwyn’s, and that she was in it by Mrs. Kelwyn’s favor; this realization could not begin too soon.

But it had apparently begun already, and when the caravan of the Kelwyns drew up under the elms at the gable of the old Shaker Family house, nothing could have been more to Mrs. Kelwyn’s mind than the whole keeping of the place, unless it was the behavior of Mrs. Kite. She did not come officiously forward in welcome, as Mrs. Kelwyn had feared she might; she stood waiting in the doorway for the Kelwyns to alight and introduce themselves; but Mrs. Kelwyn decided that this was from respect and not pride, for the woman seemed a humble creature enough when she spoke to her: not embarrassed, but not forth-putting.

She had the effect of having on the best dress she had compatible with household duties, and she looked neat and agreeable in it. She was rather graceful, and she was of a sort of blameless middlingness in looks. A boy, somewhat younger than the elder Kelwyn boy, stood beside her and stared at the two young Kelwyns with strange eyes of impersonal guile.

It was a relief for the moment, and then for another moment a surprise, not to see Kite himself about; but Mrs. Kelwyn had scarcely drawn an indignant breath when the man came hulking round the corner of the house, where he stopped to swear over his shoulder at the team he must have left somewhere, and then advanced to the wagon piled high with the Kelwyns’ trunks, and called out to them rather than to the Kelwyns, “Well, how are you!”

The house was everything Kelwyn had painted it. Mrs. Kelwyn explored it with him to give him the pleasure of her approval before she settled down to the minute examination of their quarters; and together, with their children, they ranged up and down stairs and through the long passages, feeling like a bath the delight of its cool cleanliness. Mrs. Kite, who met them on their return from their wanderings, said the Shaker ladies had been up the day before, putting on the last touches before they should come. It was pleasant to know that they had been expected and prepared for, but Mrs. Kelwyn fancied that, though the housekeeping had been instituted by the Shaker ladies, it must have been the Shaker gentlemen who had looked after the house furnishing. She had expected that there might he a Shaker stiffness in the appointments, but that there would also be a Shaker quaintness; and she had imagined her rooms dressed in the Shaker gear, which the house must once have worn, and which would have been restored from the garrets and basements of the other community dwellings. But the Shakers had not imagined anything of that kind. Whichever of them it had been left to had laid one kind of ingrain carpet in all the rooms, and furnished the chambers in a uniformity of painted pine sets. There was a parlor set of black walnut, and there were painted shades at the windows. All was new, and smelled fresh and wholesome, but the things had no more character than they had in the furniture warerooms where they were bought. Apparently the greatest good-will had been used, and Mrs. Kelwyn could well believe that the Shakers supposed they had dealt much more acceptably by them than if they had given them the rag carpets and the hooked rugs, the high-post bedsteads and splint chairs which she would have so much rather had.

The Kelwyns were a long time getting settled into temporary form; the robins were shouting their goodnights around them, and a thrush was shrilling from the woods that covered the hill slope behind the house, when the tinkle of a far-off bell called them to supper. Then they found themselves suddenly hungry, and they sat down in the old Shaker refectory with minds framed to eager appreciation of what good things might be set before them. Mrs. Kite gave a glance at the table before she left it to them; and said that she would be right there in the kitchen if they wanted anything. She really went down-stairs beyond the kitchen to the ground floor, where she had four or five rooms with her family.

The Kelwyns had a four-o’clock dinner at home, and now it was a quarter past seven as they sat down with their orderly little boys at the supper which Mrs. Kite had imagined for them. There were two kinds of cake on the table: three slices of pound-cake, translucent but solid, at one end of the table, and thicker slices of marble-cake, with veins of verde antique varying its surface of Siena yellow, at the other. A dish of stewed fruit stood in the centre, which proved to be dried apples; at Mrs. Kelwyn’s right elbow was the teapot; on one hand of Kelwyn was a plate of butter, and on the other a plate of bread cut from a loaf of which the half remained beside the pieces. In the bewilderment of realizing the facts he lifted successively the butter and the bread to his nose, which involuntarily curled from them, in the silence broken by Mrs. Kelwyn’s lifting the teapot lid an instant, and then clapping it to with a quick “Ugh!”

“Isn’t it our tea?” he asked, quietly.

“It’s all of it, I should think,” said his wife. “ She doesn’t know how to make English breakfast tea, evidently. She’s steeped it like green tea, and it’s as strong as lye. What’s the matter with the butter?”

“I don’t know what to liken its strength to.”

“And the bread?”

“It seems like what they used to call salt - rising bread. I haven’t smelt any since I was a boy.”

He stretched the plate toward her, and when she brought it within range of her nose she averted her face with a wild “Phew!” and an imploring cry of “Elmer!” while she made play with her hands as if fighting away mosquitoes.

“I remember that when it was hot you could eat it if you hurried; but when it was cold!”

He said no more, and his wife could not speak. The elder of the two well-behaved little boys made a preliminary noise in his throat, and then, not being quelled, ventured to ask, “Mamma, may I say something?”

“What is it, dear?” his mother returned, tenderly, as from the sense of a common sorrow.

“Oh, nothing,” the boy said, politely. “But is this all, or do they begin with the dessert in the country?” Kelwyn laughed harshly, and his wife looked at him with reproach. She had been about to bid the child eat what was set before him and not make remarks, but in despair of setting him the example she felt that she must forbear the precept. “I’m afraid it isn’t the dessert, dear,” she answered, gently. “I’m afraid it’s — all.”

“All?” the boy echoed, in a husky tone, and at the melancholy sound his younger brother, who took his cue from him in everything, silently put up his lip.

“Elmer!” their mother demanded. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to get something to eat.” Kelwyn pushed back his chair and launched himself forward as in act to start for the kitchen door.

His wife intercepted him with the appeal: “No! Wait, Elmer! We must begin as we can carry out.” This saying has always an implication of reserved wisdom, and besides Kelwyn was willing to be intercepted; he sank back into his chair.

“I must talk with her, and I must think what to say, what to do. We mustn’t be harsh, but we must be firm. I’m afraid she’s done her best on mistaken lines. She’s tried to realize our ideals, but if she had been left to her own it might have been different. We are bound to suppose so.”

“And in the mean time we are starving,” Kelwyn argued.

“I know all that, my dear,” his wife retorted. “But we must begin as we can carry out; and in the first place there must be no going to them: they must come to us. Will you bring the bell off the bureau in mamma’s room?” she bade the eldest boy, and the youngest ran with him; they returned in better spirits, and climbed back to their places in eager expectation.

“May I ring it?” the eldest brother asked.

“I want to ring it,” the youngest entreated.

“No, darlings, mamma must ring,” said the mother, with a tenderness meant for them and a stateliness meant for Mrs. Kite. She rang almost majestically at first; then indignantly; then angrily.

Mrs. Kite put her head in from the kitchen. “Oh! I thought I heard a bell ringin’ somewhere,” she concluded, in apology for her intrusion.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, with a sternness from which she gave herself time to relax before she added: “Could you give us some eggs, Mrs. Kite? Soft boiled?”

“Oh, fried, mamma!” the eldest boy, who was Francis, entreated.

“I want fried,” his younger brother whispered, with the lack of originality innate in younger brothers.

“‘Sh!” said their mother. “Francy, I’m astonished. Carl! Won’t you come in, Mrs. Kite?”

Mrs. Kite came in and sat down.

“And could you,” Mrs. Kelwyn pursued, in the petition which she tried to keep from making itself a command, “give us some of your hot biscuit?”

The children could not keep from noiselessly clapping their hands; arrested in the act by their mother’s frown, they held their hands joined and appeared to be saying a grace.

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Kite assented. “But I guess they ain’t very hot any more. The fire’s gone down—”

“I suppose you could make it up for the eggs,” Mrs. Kelwyn suggested.

“Oh, I guess Alvin can make it up again,” Mrs. Kite assented.

Kelwyn was taking involuntary notes of her, and he could not have said whether she was assenting willingly or unwillingly. She might have been meek or she might have been sly; she could have been pretty or plain, as you thought; her pale sandy hair might have been golden; her gray eyes blue. A neutrality which seemed the potentiality of better or worse things pervaded her.

“Well, we should like some soft - boiled eggs — or fried,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, in concession to her children, “if it’s just as easy. We have a late dinner at home, and we’re rather hungry.”

“Why,” said Mrs. Kite, “if you’d ‘a’ sent word I’d ‘a’ had a warm supper for you — milk toast and some kind of meat.”

“Oh, this is very nice,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, absently, from her apparent absorption with the milk which she was inspecting in its pitcher. “There seems to be something in the milk—”

“Is that so?” Mrs. Kite inquired, interestedly. “It does look kind of speckled.” She examined it, and then sat down again with the jug in her lap. “Must ‘a’ got in from the rafters in the cellar. But I can get you some warm from the cow as soon as Alvin comes in from milkin’. I guess that will be clean enough.”

“And could you get us a little fresher butter?” Mrs. Kelwyn pursued, passing the plate to Mrs. Kite, who took it passively.

“Why, ain’t the butter all right?” she asked.

“It’s rather strong,” Mrs. Kelwyn admitted.

“Well, I guess I can fix that.” Mrs. Kite put it in her lap with the milk-pitcher, and sat contentedly expectant.

“And I am afraid that the tea has stood rather long,” Mrs. Kelwyn said. “You know that with this kind, you merely pour on the hot water and bring it to the table.”

“My! We keep ours on the stove all day! I guess Alvin wouldn’t think he was drinking tea unless he could taste the bitter. Well,” Mrs. Kite rose in saying, “I’ll get you the things as soon as I can, but, as I said, the fire’s out, and—”

She left the rest to their imagination as she let herself into the kitchen, with the milk-pitcher in one hand, the teapot in the other, and the butter-plate in the hollow of her arm.

Kelwyn rose and put the bread beyond smelling-distance on the side-table.

“Now, don’t you say one word, please,” said his wife, “till we see what she can do.”

“Oh, I’m not disposed to be critical. I’m rather sorry for her, though she didn’t seem put to shame, much. I suppose I ought to have opened the door for her.”

“She managed,” said Mrs. Kelwyn, coldly.

In the kitchen presently they heard heavy clumping steps as of a man coming in, and after a moment what seemed a kind of hushed swearing. But a rattling of the stove-lids presently followed, and then the pungent odor of wood smoke stole encouragingly through the kitchen door. There was now and then the sound of steps, but there were spaces of silence in which the Kelwyn family drowsed in their chairs.

The door flew open at last, and Mrs. Kite came in with a pitcher. “Thought I’d bring in some milk for the little boys while it was warm. The things will be ready right away now.” She went out, cutting short with the shutting door the steady hiss of frying.

Mrs. Kelwyn put the pitcher to her face mechanically, and then set it down at arm’s-length. Her husband silently looked question, and she audibly explained, “Cowy.” They were helpless against a lack of neatness which gave the odor of the cow’s udder to the milk, and Kelwyn thought how promptly they had once dismissed their milkman at home for cowy milk. The children were eagerly intent on the frying eggs, which then ceased to fry, leaving a long silence to ensue, till Mrs. Kite pushed open the door with one of her elbows and one of her feet, and reappeared with the fried eggs on a platter, and the teapot; Kite hulked in after her with a plate of biscuit and butter, and set them down with a glower at his guests and hulked out.

“I don’t believe but what you’ll find everything all right now,” she said, “though I presume I did let the tea stand a little mite long, to your taste.”

Mrs. Kelwyn said, “Oh, I dare say it will be nice,” and Mrs. Kite, after a look at the table, flapped out, not cheerfully, but self - contentedly, on her heel-less shoes. Then the Kelwyns examined the food put before them.

The eggs, with their discolored edges limp from standing in the pork fat, stared up dimly, sadly; the biscuits, when broken open, emitted an alkaline steam from their greenish - yellow crumb; the tea was black again. Kelwyn remained scrutinizing the butter.

“What is it?” his wife asked.

“It looks like — sugar.”

“What?”

He pushed it to her, and she scrutinized it in her turn. “It is — it actually is! She’s tried to sweeten it by working sugar into it!” She fell back into her chair, and tears came into her eyes. “What are we going to do, Elmer?”

“Here, Carl,” said his father, recklessly, “have an egg. Have an egg, Francy.”

“And a biscuit, papa?” Francy asked; and Carl parroted after him, “And a biscuit, papa?”

“Yes, all you can eat.”

“Do you want to kill them, Elmer?” their mother palpitated.

“It’s filth, but it isn’t poison,” said Kelwyn, and he spread each of the boys a biscuit with the sugared butter, and set them the example of eating the things put before them. “Give me some of that bitter black tea, Carry, with plenty of cowy milk in it.”

“I want some cowy milk, papa,” Francy whispered; and Carl whispered, too, “I want some cowy milk, papa.”

“You shall have all the cowy milk you can drink,” said their father, and he commanded their mother, who was keeping one hand on the teapot and the other on the milk - pitcher: “Pass me the cowy milk, Carry; give me some bitter black tea. Eat your blear-eyed eggs, boys, and have some more. Take another bilious biscuit, with plenty of sugar-butter on it. My dear, you’re not eating anything!”

“Are you crazy, Elmer?” his wife demanded. “You won’t sleep a wink. You’ll be dead before morning.”

“I shall not be dead unless that brute murders me in my bed, and if I don’t sleep a wink I shall be awake to prevent him,” Kelwyn said, not fearlessly, but recklessly.

The boys, rapt in their supper, did not Hear him. His wife shuddered out: “What in the world shall we do?”

VI

THERE was that summer a great alarm of tramps. The times were had, as they must he every now and then, in an economy as little regulated as the weather, and men without work were prowling the country everywhere. They were mostly long past the hope of work, or the wish for it, but they still wanted to eat. They found shelter for themselves in barns and hay-stacks, and any rags sufficed in summer; but a handout was good for only a few hours at a time, and the newspapers teemed with stories of the insolence and even violence which repaid the charity done the vagabonds.

After Kelwyn’s visit to the place they had taken for the summer, it seemed more and more that it was a lonely place, and that he ought to have some means of defending himself and his family from tramps. While the farmer was about they need not fear, but he must often be away cutting the wood which was the Shaker Family’s chief crop, and then the Kelwyns would be left unprotected. The truculent giant laughed when the notion was suggested to him; but he loosely agreed never to be out of call when Kelwyn was absent.

For safety when he was not absent, Kelwyn bought himself a pistol. His sense of the sacredness of property rights was strong, as it should be in a lecturer on Historical Sociology, and the pistol was as much to save their belongings as their lives from the tramps. As regarded his own property, Kelwyn had ideas of peculiar force, which he made apply as well to the small estate brought him by his wife as to the little sum which he had put by from taking a pupil now and then; from his salary he could not put by anything. He held that if he caught a thief by night stealing his watch, for instance, or the silver which he had bought with his hard-earned savings, he would have a right to kill him. He often said this, and he believed that he should not have the least regret for such a deed.

When he went to buy his revolver he told the dealer that he would like something that was good for tramps, and the man offered him for ten dollars a pretty nickel-plated toy which he said was just the thing for tramps; Kelwyn rejected it in favor of a plain steel burnished affair at six dollars. He and the dealer had reciprocally admired each other’s nonchalance in the transaction, but on the way home Kelwyn lost something of his selfsatisfaction. There was a moment when, as the horse-car of those days tinkled toward his university suburb, with nothing to suggest a break in his monotonous revery, he suddenly realized with a neuralgic poignancy that his revolver was meant to kill a man, and that with it in his pocket he was a potential homicide.

These were the terms in which the case presented itself, and though Kelwyn perceived that they were so loosely descriptive as to be morally inapplicable, he could not instantly dismiss them. He had not dismissed them when he told his wife of his purchase. She had often agreed to his theory of the sacredness of all property, and the peculiar sacredness of his, and she had approved of his buying the pistol. But, as she said, she did not wish to see it. He asked her why, angrily, and whether she had not allowed him to get it. She said that she supposed she had, but she did not wish to see it. But the night after their first supper in the old Family house of the Shakers, when the boys had been put to bed, too sleepy for their belated prayers, she asked, in the act of taking out her hair-pins, “Have you got that pistol?”

“Yes, I have,” said Kelwyn.

“Let me see it!”

He went and got it out of his coat-pocket; he had not decided just where to keep it, and offered it to her. “Ugh!” She started back. “Don’t point it!”

“Who’s pointing it?” he retorted. “I’m holding it toward the floor.”

“I didn’t know which the end was. And it might go through the floor and kill somebody. Is it loaded?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I am! Look into the cartridge-chambers if you don’t believe me.”

Mrs. Kelwyn backed across the room. “That’s the way half the accidents happen. Don’t point it at your face!” Kelwyn was squinting into the chambers of the revolver. “How do you load it?”

“I’ll show you.” He got the box of cartridges from his trunk, and while his wife stood at the other side of the room he filled the chambers with them. “There!”

“Is that all? Is it loaded now?”

“Yes.”

“And do you have to shoot it off to unload it?”

“No, you can take the cartridges out,” he said, and he showed her how.

“And the cartridges can’t shoot off of themselves?”

“Certainly not.”

“And the pistol can’t shoot without them?”

“Of course it can’t!”

“Give them to me.” He obeyed, and she put the box on the stand at the bedside. “Now put the pistol on the chair on your side, and I shall feel perfectly safe. Promise me you won’t try to load it unless you hear some one coming into the room.”

“Much good it will do then! You mustn’t be ridiculous, my dear. If the pistol is to be of any use I must have it loaded where I can put my hand on it at the slightest alarm. Didn’t you understand that?”

“Yes, I understood it, but I didn’t realize it. I couldn’t bear to have you shoot any one, Elmer. Should you like to?”

“I shouldn’t choose it, but if a tramp—”

“We must risk the tramps. The Kites would hear any one from their room off the kitchen. I’m more afraid of him than of tramps.”

There was no logical sequence in her reasons or sensations, but both were intelligible to Kelwyn.

Shorter men will pityingly protect a tallish woman from her fears when she begins to whimper, and now, when Mrs. Kelwyn began to whimper, Kelwyn pulled her head over on his shoulder, and put his arms around her, and patted her on the back. “Come, come,” he said.

“Oh, Elmer,” she bleated, “we are in such a terrible box!”

“Oh no, we’re not, my dear. It’s been disappointing and disheartening. But it isn’t desperate. You’ll see everything in a different light to - morrow. Besides, we’re not bound to stay here, or to let the Kites stay. The place is ours; we’re masters of the situation.”

He imparted his own courage to her, and he was aware of her having it all when he had succeeded in quieting her nerves. From the distance to which the Shaker holdings had pushed the neighborhood there came not even the sound of dogs barking. The muffled noise of Kite’s horses stamping came from the old Family stable.

The whippoorwills, which seemed to abound in the woods and pastures, filled the moonlight with the whirring of their swift arrowy calls. One of the blood-curdling brood ventured from covert and perched on the, well-curb, where he sat and whistled in his ghastly muted note and would not be hushed away.

Just before daybreak Kelwyn was wakened by Kite swearing joyously at his horses in the stable. He dozed, and two hours later he was roused again by the parley between his tenant-host and the fish-man who halted his cart to join in the morning blasphemy of the farmer, and to sell him a mackerel for the Kelwyns’ breakfast. Mrs. Kelwyn slept through all, and she outslept the two boys, whom their father helped dress when they came tiptoeing in from the next room to see if he were awake.

VII

THE coffee that morning was worse than the tea; the milk was speckled from the cellar rafters again; the mackerel had been fried in lard. But the Kelwyn boys enjoyed the hot soggy biscuit, with the sugared butter on them; and then they asked to be excused, and stole out to make the acquaintance of Mrs. Kite’s boy, who had lurked at the kitchen door through the meal, looking in and luring the young Kelwyns when his mother passed to and fro.

“Now, Elmer,” Mrs. Kelwyn began, in a tone of reinvigorated virtue which in itself was an irritation to his spent nerves. It is one of the advantages of marriage that both the parties to the compact are seldom in the same mind or mood, and one of its disadvantages that with this useful variance they are as often hurtful as helpful to each other. They cannot always agree about a question, though they see both sides of it. If one is cheerful they keep a sort of balance, though the other is gloomy, even though they do not unite in a final gayety.

Mrs. Kelwyn made a sort of pause after challenging her husband’s attention, and he was rasped into rasping out, “Well?”

“Well, you see for yourself it won’t do.”

“Did I say it would do?”

“No, I don’t mean that. But last night you said I would see it differently in the morning.”

“That was to keep you from breaking down altogether. And it seems to have carried you through the night pretty well.”

“Yes, and I appreciate that. But now we have got to face the facts, and the facts are that she won’t do, and can’t do, and don’t seem to care to do. Now what shall you do?”

“It seems to me it’s for you to say what I shall do,” he temporized. “I’ll do whatever you say.”

Mrs. Kelwyn was appeased by the comparatively soft answer when she might have encountered active defiance. “I suppose that I could go to the kitchen and teach her, but do you think it is my place to do that?”

In their earlier life together, when life was simpler, it had sometimes happened that in the intervals of general housework girls whom they could alone afford to keep, Mrs. Kelwyn had not only cooked, but had done all her work. He aided her about it, and they always looked back rather fondly to those times when they seemed to draw closer to each other in their mutual help. It had now passed vaguely through his mind that she might, indeed, do just the thing she suggested; and something in his silence must have said so to her wifely subtlety.

“Well, then, I can tell you, Elmer,” she continued, as if he had spoken, “I’m not going to do it. I might as well ask you to go out and show him about his farm-work.” She knew very well that this did not follow, but he did not say so; he did not say anything; and she had to resume: “Besides, she couldn’t learn, and she wouldn’t wish to. We must go and see the Shakers at once. They are our landlords.”

“Well, I’ll get the horse.”

Mrs. Kelwyn lamented: “How precipitate you are! I want to talk it over first.”

It came to some such point again and again, but the days went by and the Kelwyns had done nothing decided. There were alleviations, or illusions of alleviations, when the Kites seemed to do better, or when the Kelwyns had become so used to their doing badly that they had lost the sense of better things. They accused themselves of lapsing into barbarism, of degenerating, and in a measure they were really corrupted by the many comforts, almost mounting to luxury, of the situation. Their housing had not ceased to be less delightful than at first, and Mrs. Kite’s housekeeping, when it was spread over the twenty-five rooms of the old Family house, ceased to have a positive ineffectiveness. If she did not sweep or dust, it was because the prevalent cleanliness demanded no sweeping or dusting from her: the cleanliness was as if permanent, like the floors, and walls, and windows. With Kite’s six feet of rugged strength between him and the tramps, Kelwyn slept more securely than if he had in each hand a revolver united with its cartridges. By day he went berrying in the pastures with his boys and the Kite boy, or wrote on the sociological lectures which were to be so impressive as to leave no room for question of a professorship with the overseers. He was inactively conscious that besides the small Kite boy, there was in the household a half-grown boy who had been adopted by the Kites, and a Canadian hired man, who helped about the place and did odd jobs of carpentering for the neighborhood. His name was René, and to make others sure of it he spelled it Raney. Like her husband and the big boy, he seemed to look up to the woman with implicit deference and admiration, which in its way became one of Mrs. Kelwyn’s trials, and remained for her to the last a baffling anomaly.

In the long evenings following the early supper, which in their eagerness to have it over they despatched promptly, Kelwyn sat with his family on the door-step, and listened to the hermit thrushes in the woods near by and then later to the muted whistling of the whippoorwills that whirred through the cool, damp air close about them and dropped like soft clots of earth in the grass. Now and then the Kites, unbidden, but unforbidden, joined them; the woman gliding back and forth in the dusk, after a fashion she had, and talking in her high, sweet voice; and the man listening to her with rapt admiration. One evening he told of his boyhood in northern Vermont, where he was born, and of the bears that came down from the hills and frightened the children going to school. He made a picture of the poor hard life his people had lived, and Kelwyn felt himself in danger of getting on human terms with him. Another evening he was mowing the grass around his wife’s clothes-line under the apple-trees, and he called to the Canadian farm-hand, who was in the way frolicking with the big boy, “Look out, Raney; I’ll couper your legs.” He drove his scythe into the ground.

“You’ll couper some little stones,” Raney joked back. He threw himself into one of the trees, and hung from a limb by his toes, and Mrs. Kite said:

“You didn’t know my husband could talk French. Well, he was brought up, part of the time, close to Montreal.”

She was proud of his talking French, though she must have known he could not read English; and apparently they had standing in the neighborhood. One evening a slattern woman with a baby in her arms, and a barefooted ragged little girl hanging to her skirt, came down the road, and halted across the way from the group at the door. “Look a-here, Mr. Kite, I want to know what you been say in’ to Tad about me. He’s turned me out-o’-doors.”

Kite was letting his horse crop the doorside grass while it cooled in the twilight, after a hot day’s work, and he answered, between jerks at the halter and curses of the beast, that he had not been saying anything. “But I can tell you, Tad and you are both as ugly as the devil; I sha’n’t meddle with you: but you’re a disgrace to the whole neighborhood. You go home and tell him I say if he don’t stop turnin’ you out-o’-doors he’ll get where he’ll want somebody should turn him out.”

Mrs. Kite watched the woman away in silence; then she explained to Mrs. Kelwyn: “He’s that drunken Tad Alison lives down the road here a piece, and they fight the whole while. I don’t see why they can’t live peaceable. One thing, Mr. Kite’s talked to ’em enough.” She put on the air of social leadership; she caught sight of the big boy coming from the bam with a pail in each hand, and said, with smooth selfapproval, “Well, I guess I must go and see after my milk.”

The Kelwyns passed from moods of hopeful forbearance to moods of intolerant despair, but there was no change in their condition. Often it seemed to them like a bad dream they were living, and once Kelwyn said that he felt as he did in a nightmare when he knew he should wake and find it was only a nightmare. But a month passed in their nightmare, and they did not wake from it. Then one morning they got back to that point where they must go and see the Shakers, and once more Kelwyn said he would get the horse.

He really went out to the barn and asked Kite to bring the horse and buggy to the house. Kite had his team hitched to his mower, and was beginning to curse them out into the road toward the mowing-piece of the Shakers.

He glared at Kelwyn, who stood firm for a man whose soul shook within him, and swore under his breath. But the terms of their contract seemed to recur to him, and he dropped the reins and went about harnessing the old mare appointed for the Kelwyns’ use. Kelwyn returned to the house with the perspiration starting in the palms of his hands, and did not come out again till he came out under Mrs. Kelwyn’s lee: by that time Kite had left the buggy at the door, and was hulking back to the barn full of hushed blasphemy from the crown of his flap-brimmed straw hat to the soles of his high-topped rubber boots.

Mrs. Kelwyn was preoccupied in dramatizing her scene with the Office Brother at the Shakers, and did not notice the fury of Kite. She rehearsed the scene aloud most of the way to the Office, and it appeared that the action was to fall altogether to Kelwyn; she was to remain one of the mute witnesses whose silence contributes on the stage to render dialogue effective.

At the door Brother Jasper met them with a letter, which he said he was just going to carry them: he wanted to ask them how they were getting on, anyway.

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Kelwyn answered, with a certain provisonality, and opened the letter after glancing at the superscription, and noting to her husband: “It’s from Cousin Thennie — Good gracious!” she gasped out, after a glimpse of the open sheet. “She’s coming to stay over Sunday! Well, she mustn’t; she can’t! Elmer, you must stop her! You must telegraph her! With everything going from bad to worse, you must see yourself that she can’t come. Now, what are you going to do?” she demanded, and at the same time she appealed from his face of helpless dismay to the Office Sisters’ faces of helpless sympathy. “I was just com-

“ ing to you,” she explained, “to know what in the world we can do about the Kites. They are impossible.”

The Office Sisters made a gentle movement of hopeless intelligence. Sister Saranna broke the silence with, “I don’t know as I want to criticise Jasper any, but I was afraid!” She shut her lips and softly shook her head, capped in stiff white gauze from the nape of her neck to the rims of her steel-bowed spectacles.

“And here’s my cousin,” Mrs. Kelwyn intensified the case, “coming out over Sunday for a little rest! A little rest in that house! Will you telegraph and stop her, Elmer?” She pushed the letter at him and he had to take it. “Drive to the station instantly, and I will stay and explain to the Sisters, and see what can be done. Don’t lose an instant!”

“But won’t it be rather awkward,” he began, “stopping her?”

“Don’t say such a thing, Elmer! Will it be graceful to let her come? Oh, go!”

With a man’s fatuous wish to escape from present trouble, no matter what destruction his flight leads to, Kelwyn went out of the door, and his wife heard him drive off, as she dropped into a rocking-chair and began to unfold her trouble to the Sisters, seated in rocking-chairs before her. At the climaxes she made pauses, and in the pauses the three women rocked excitedly toward one another.

At the last climax of all Mrs. Kelwyn arrested herself in the act of plunging violently forward on her rocker and asked, “What’s that?” It was a sound like the unfolding and folding of a newspaper, which seemed to be made purposely loud, as if to warn them of some unseen presence, or to keep a hidden witness from the involuntary guilt of eavesdropping. The noise came from the sort of parlor, or reading-room, which opened across the hallway from the Office. “Is there some one over there?”

The taciturn Sister tittered, and Saranna said: “Poor Jasper! I don’t know what’s to become of him, now. He was just going to ask if you could take the young man, there, in with you.”

“A boarder!” Mrs. Kelwyn thought she had shrieked it, but she had only gasped it, in the sort of hoarse whisper that people use in nightmares.

“Well, no,” Saranna said. “More like a roomer. He could get his meals here, I guess. But all our rooms that we give to the world outside are taken up by the visiting Brothers from Canbury for the week that’s to come.”

“We couldn’t think of it,” Mrs. Kelwyn returned, promptly, and a shade indignantly.

There came another newspaper stir from across the hallway, as if the young man in the parlor had heard but had tried not to hear.

Saranna said, an octave lower: “That’s what I told Jasper. But he seemed to think that if you felt lonely any, when Friend Kite was away, daytimes, it might comfort you to have another man about the house. I mean if Friend Kelwyn has to go to Boston, ever.” Mrs. Kelwyn suspended her answer with a frown. “Does he want to stay all summer?”

“He could come over here when the visiting Brothers are gone. He wants to work in the garden for us.” Mrs. Kelwyn did not relax her frown. “Is he a laboring-man?”

“I don’t know as he is.” Saranna rocked, and smoothed her lap with one hand, while she kept the other on her breast. “He ain’t sunburnt any, and his hands don’t look it.”

“What is he?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Well!”

The woman had sunk their voices low, and now they dropped into silence, unbroken by the creak of their rockers.

The young man made a louder rustling of his newspaper, and a clash, self-explained as final when it was followed by a sound of his rising. He came across the hall with what Mrs. Kelwyn, even in her dismay, decided to be a cultivated walk, and showed himself in the office doorway. He was well enough dressed, but by the clothier rather than the tailor; his bearing was gentle, with a trace of involuntary authority of some sort. He had a thoughtful knot between his thoughtful eyes; his face, of a clean-shavenness rare in those days, showed a delicate surface; his chin, to which he put up a long, spare hand, was fine; his cheeks were rather thin, as those of youth are apt to be; his still gray eyes looked out under straight, brownish brows, and a crop of light-colored hair refused to observe any careful order above it.

“I had to overhear what you ladies were saying,” he began, in a quiet, unimpassioned tone, as if he had thought the matter out and had made himself personally exterior to it as far as his sensibilities might have been concerned. “I wanted to tell you that you mustn’t have me on your minds, any of you. I can understand why it wouldn’t always be desirable to receive a stranger under one’s roof, and I’m not afraid but I can get a room somewhere if it is all right about the work. As for what I am, I am a laborer, in one sense. I am a teacher, or have been; but I was brought up on a farm, and I know about gardening. This is my vacation, and I like to work while I’m resting.” He paused, and then he made a seriously deferential bend toward the ladies, and turned and walked down the hall toward the threshold, where he stood leaning against the doorjamb looking out, while Mrs. Kelwyn and the Office Sisters sat looking at one another.

It appeared that he had gone to the front door to be the more readily rid of his embarrassment, for he returned presently toward the door of the parlor, where Mrs. Kelwyn arrested him with an apologetic noise in her throat. “I beg your pardon?” he questioned.

“I am sorry,” she said, “that you should have heard what I said. But perhaps it was best. I wish to explain that besides never having thought of an inmate, we are in the hands of such a terrible family that we don’t know from hour to hour whether we shall stay ourselves in the house we have taken. It’s a delightful house, and there is such an abundance of rooms that I don’t wonder Brother Jasper, and the Sisters here, thought we might spare one for you, and under some circumstances—” She found herself speaking from a kindness for this young man which had won upon her, and she had to check herself somewhat haughtily. “But as it is, it isn’t to be thought of.” She added, with new relenting: “I mean quite as much on your account as our own. I couldn’t give you an idea of the strait we are in. The people who have, as our tenants — it’s rather complicated, but I needn’t burden you with the details — undertaken to board us and keep house for us have turned out perfect failures. They can’t cook, and they are careless to the last degree; and what we shall do, after getting so well settled, I’m sure I don’t know.”

She addressed her troubles to a certain general interest in the young man’s face, but he caught at one point only. “Cook?” he tardily echoed.

“No, not cook! Not the least in the world!”

“I meant,” he said, “are they willing to learn?”

“Really,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, in a putting-down tone, “I don’t know. But I am not willing to teach.”

“I didn’t mean that,” the young man returned, gently.

Though he was still not what she would have called a gentleman, he was more and more evidently a person of some sort of refinement. She felt a rise of respect for him when he now added: “As a visitor for the Associated Charities, I saw a good deal of the domestic life of the poor, and I didn’t find the cooking so had in any of the foreign households as our New England country fare. Somebody ought to go into the farm kitchens and teach the women, by precept and example both, that cookery is a science, and that it is to be studied and respected as such.”

Mrs. Kelwyn had gone forward to the door of the parlor where the young man had halted when she addressed him, and they had remained there talking, while the Office Sisters went about their household functions. She was going to reply in cordial acquiescence with him, when she was arrested by the noise of wheels on the gravel before the office, and the voice of her husband calling a more vigorous “Whoa!” to their old mare than would have brought a far more impetuous animal to a stand. At the same time a girl’s voice joyously shouted, “Hello, Cousin Carry!”

“Good gracious!” Mrs. Kelwyn groaned, in a sotto voce dismay; but she cried gayly, as she hurried toward the front door, “Why, are you there, Thennie?”

“Yes,” the girl’s voice answered. “I decided I wouldn’t wait for my letter to reach you; I would come and tell you myself. Wasn’t that thoughtful of me?” An emotional tumult of cries and kisses now reached the young man where Mrs. Kelwyn had left him, and amid a jubilation of welcome from her, and ejaculated explanations from the girl, he heard from Mrs. Kelwyn such specific bursts of anxiety, addressed to her husband, as: “Did you get the steak? And some fresh butter? And bakers’ bread? I hope you remembered the bacon! And the prunes? You didn’t forget some English breakfast tea and a bit of cheese! The crackers? Well, then, I think we can live through your visit, Thennie.”

There followed question of whether the buggy seat would hold all three of them, and then there followed a sound of creaking springs and a crunching and grinding of wheels, with some laughs of terror, and the buggy rattled away, and the young man went to the parlor window and watched its retreat down the road toward the South Family House.

VIII

PARTHENOPE BROOK was not Kelwyn’s cousin, as one might have inferred from the note of inculpation in Mrs. Kelwyn’s voice when she read her letter over in the Office. She was a just woman, as she believed; Parthenope was her own cousin, and she could not deny it; she would not, perhaps, have denied it if she could. The girl was not even a first cousin; she was a first cousin once removed, and in this fact Mrs. Kelwyn had an additional motive for acquitting her husband of the blame which she at first involuntarily laid upon him. If the girl’s coming without being asked was, under the circumstances, an indiscretion not far from a liberty, still it was not a liberty from his side of the family, as she more and more clearly recognized in more and more reconciling herself to the situation. She began, on the way from the Office to the South Family House, to bow to the stroke, and before she reached the house she was ready to acknowledge that nobody was to blame; hardly the girl herself was to blame. The way Parthenope listened to the story which Mrs. Kelwyn more continuously than coherently poured out upon her was a positive merit, and it ended in a climax of the virtues inherent in Mrs. Kelwyn’s family.

The girl was no longer in her early twenties, but she seemed much younger, perhaps because she had been born of very youthful parents, who had gone out from a Boston suburb to Italy in those simple days when living in Italy was almost a brevet of genius. The Brooks were both artists, but after their baby came Mrs. Brook grew rather more a mother and less a painter, and her husband rather more a sculptor if not less a father. He devoted himself to the sort of genre sculpture which was then of easier sale than now, but he thought himself fortunate to be put under agreement with a Boston house which dealt in objects of art as well as watches, clocks, and jewelry to give it all he could do, or, as the contracting partner phrased it, his entire output, for a fixed sum annually. The first year of this arrangement had not expired when he and his wife both died of Roman fever, which foreigners living in Rome formerly contended could be taken only in Naples, where the Brooks had gone for some of the classic motives of genre sculpture to be best studied there in the Museo Borbonico.

It was in Naples that their little one was born, and in recognition of the classic name of the city they called her Parthenope. At times they did not know but they had weighed the child down with a name too massive for such a mite; but they justly held that Parthenope and Brook were words that flowed musically together; they began by calling her Thennie, and in their lifetime they never got so far as Parthenope. The aunt, who had brought her home after they died, had wished to use the full name, but she was not able to do so at once, in her tenderness for the orphan baby. Parthenope herself, as soon as she arrived at the consciousness of young ladyhood, and the sense of dignity which is more abounding at sixteen than at twenty-six, always wrote herself Parthenope Brook. She asked her girl friends to address her so, and two or three of the nearest tried to do it, but to the others she was Thennie Brook, as she continued to be with Miss Brook, her aunt, and with her cousins the Kelwyns, and all her elder contemporaries. The world had not yet arrived at the mood in which it now rejects pet names and nicknames, and gives young people the full count of their baptismal syllables, and with most of Parthenope’s fellow-students at the Art School, to whom she condescended from a higher social level, there was an instinctive reluctance to add possibly to the altitude she maintained by any sort of concession. She was not exactly conceited, the girls who analyzed their feelings toward her said; she was not exactly topping; but, if you could understand, she was so full of initiative (her critics valued themselves on the word, which one of them had got out of a review) as to need all the putting down you could quietly give her; in fact, her initiative might be called selfsufficiency, though that, her critics owned, was oversaying it rather. At the worst, perhaps, she was disposed to offer gratuitous instruction, which would have come with better grace from one who was herself a more devoted student, and did not help herself out so much with chic. But she was often really very nice, and her wish to control other people sometimes passed into selfcontrol, and then she really was nice.

Her initiative had early made itself felt with her aunt, who lapsed year by year from the pitying authority in which the child’s bereavement had placed her, and let Parthenope have her way in most things. The consequence was that Parthenope grew up with something like over - initiative as regarded her aunt, whose life she regulated according to her own conceptions of what was good for her, rather than her aunt’s vague preferences. Her aunt went, or came, or remained, much as Parthenope decided, and neither realized that Parthenope had decided, though the fact was clear to spectators. Certainly the girl was all affection and thoughtfulness; and if in the present late cold spring she had decided that they had better stay in Boston till well toward the summer instead of going as early as usual to Pigeon Cove, where one died of one’? own dulness in the old-fashioned resort, she had not decided selfishly, if she could judge from her sufferings in the wilderness that Boston had become in June. It was a wilderness that she said did not even howl, and amid its silence there had one night come to her the question whether she was getting all the good out of the Art School which might have come to her in some atelier abroad, say Paris. While her aunt, in the comfort of her old home on the Hill, contentedly waited Parthenope’s initiative, and sometimes even said that she did not see why they should go away at all, the girl began to let her initiative get the better of her in the direction of Europe. In tacitly yielding to it, she hoped that she was not unreasonable, and she knew she was not fantastic; but if not Europe, was there not some other place they could go to for the summer? This question recurred the more persistently because her aunt would have been so placidly willing to go anywhere she said, and thus put her on her conscience.

What she really wanted, it now came to her in a flash, was a fresh point of view, and in another flash it came to her that there could be no point of view so fresh as that of her cousins the Kelwyns, from that house which they had so quaintly taken from a Shaker community. It was a thing so original that she would not have expected it of them on any other ground than economy, for she knew they were rather poor; at the first she had felt some stirrings of curiosity as to their experiment, but these had already quite subsided before she now suddenly perceived that there was no one she could advise with so hopefully. She at first thought of surprising the Kelwyns and then not quite surprising them, and when she wrote that she was coming she did not really mean to leave them without the choice or the chance of forbidding her to come.

One of Parthenope Brook’s ideals was a regard for others which she did not attempt to realize in an altruistic devotion to need of any kind, so much as in the divination of comfortable people’s rights and the resolution to square them with her duties. She was strictly a product of the country and city which she could hardly remember were not her native country and city, and of her time, which was the same wherever cultivated persons were born. It was the time when youth was very much characterized by its reading, which was very much more in poetry than it is now, and by fiction which it must be owned was better, with all its faults, than the fiction glutting the souls of our contemporary youth. After the prevalence of Italian with the better class intellectuals, there had followed a tide of German, in the ebb of which Parthenope was stranded upon a narrow acquaintance with German poetry; she had read a few songs of Heine and ballads of Uhland in the original; she could sing two or three, and she was considered by other girls a perfect German scholar. In English literature Swinburne had then risen and filled the sky with a light which was not quite steadfast, and Browning was a growing cult, but Tennyson was supremely read and quoted in such measure as almost to color the whole parlance of emotion. Longfellow was held in a tender and reverent esteem; the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table still ruled the words and thoughts of his fellow-citizens and fellow-countrymen, and the cold fire of Emerson was increasingly lighting if not heating their minds. In Parthenope’s peculiar circle, Thackeray was held a cynic and a pessimist, especially regarding women, and was only found out by the prophetic few a kindly sentimentalist. She had been taken by her aunt to hear Dickens read in Tremont Temple, after her aunt’s serving-man had stood in line all night to get tickets for them in the coldest December weather known even in Boston. Lectures of all kinds were still much frequented, but they were already degenerating from the edification of the intellectually elect to the amusement of the common-schooled masses. The theatre held a doubtful place in the honor and pleasure of the great world, which was in Boston as elsewhere the small world. Fechter, Salvini, Bernhardt, Ristori, the younger Kean, were some of the planets from the remoter skies which lured the upper classes to the noble old Boston Theatre, where strange meteoric splendors of Offenbach opera misled them from the truth illustrated by the Symphony Concerts.

Girls of Parthenope’s age, however, were formed rather upon the novel than the drama. George Eliot, Charles Reade, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell and lesser sybils, with the nascent American fictionists of the Atlantic Monthly school, inculcated a varying doctrine of eager conscience, romanticized actuality, painful devotion, and bullied adoration, with auroral gleams of religious sentimentality. Womanhood stood high in the temple of the cult where the votaries of these authors worshipped. Parthenope herself had never observed among her acquaintance that girls were really nicer than young men, but she believed that they ought to be won by heroes who sacrificed or ventured a great deal for them, rescued them from some sort of peril, or risked their lives for them even when they were not in danger; if not, they must fall a prey themselves to some terrible accident, or be seized with some sickness in which the heroines could nurse them up from the brink of death to the loftier levels of life in happy marriage. If a hero would not fall sick, or imperil life or limb, or sublimely rest guiltless under the blame of some shame or crime that would otherwise be laid to the heroine’s charge, he could believe some other man in love with her and give her up to him. This would go far to win her, especially if the hero died of his renunciation or fell into a decline. On her part there was a reciprocal duty to give him up to some girl whom she knew to be in love with him, though she knew also that he was in love with herself. But, generally speaking, heroines were born, not made or selfmade; one need only be of the female sex in order to be the aim and desire of the noblest of men. As yet the baddish heroine did not abound, and the married flirt spread ruin only in a restricted area. A hero might properly be of the moneyed or leisure classes, but he was best as some sort of artist, because more portable than the business or professional man, who could not follow the heroine so far afield in her summer disoccupation. He must not keep a shop or be a mechanic, but he could very well be of the simplest origin, like David Dodd in Love Me Little, Love Me Long, and could easily win a fastidious and patrician heroine by the force of his native genius or fervent passion.

There was a moment when Parthenope had thought of writing stories; she sent a few manuscripts about to editors; but her attention was turned to art in time to console her for their rejection. Athletics, on anything like the present scale, were as yet not; but aesthetics were even more than they are now. In the form then called household art they abandoned themselves to the decoration of interiors; their storks stood about on one leg on stone bottles, flower-pots, and chair-backs everywhere; their lilies and rushes bent and bristled on the panels of all the doors. Almost anything might be done with tiles, especially encaustic tiles, and a great deal might be accomplished in the simpler interiors with square-headed brass spikes; Eastlake furniture and Morris’ wall-paper were equally sources of inspiration. Ruskin was the absolute authority in the realm of architecture; much was still expected of the Gothic; and in the mean time the cities and suburbs were filled with empirical guesses in brick and wood, which still largely remain the wonder of posterity. Parthenope had once fancied in her early revolt from the unrealities of household art of being herself an architect; but, as she was a girl of decided and unswerving purpose, she ended by entering the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, which she might or might not make the gateway to the great world of painting in Europe. In the mean time she drew with fitful industry under her masters, and chicqued a kind of water-colors, which she knew she had not invented and which she did not wholly respect.

IX

AFTER what Mrs. Kelwyn had now told her, and still more after what she had said she could not begin to tell her, Parthenope could not have been surprised that Mrs. Kite was not at the door to receive them. But with spirits uplifted by the glory of the June day, and with senses filled with the odor of the clover-heads and the blackberry blossoms of the roadsides, and the song of the bobolinks and orioles in the fields and dooryards on the way from the station, all the pathos of Mrs. Kelwyn’s squalid tragedy could not blight her. Prom the provisions which Kelwyn had laid in at the village store she capably helped prepare a meal at which she could not have imagined herself an unwelcome guest; she laid the table with a fresh cloth, and with cutlery and china rubbed for double assurance of cleanliness after Mrs. Kite’s washing and wiping; so that when Kelwyn had opened the can of tongue which he had got unbidden, and Mrs. Kelwyn had sliced it and cut the loaf of baker’s bread, they had what she hoped she was not swearing in calling a picnic for the gods. In order that the nectar to wash down the ambrosia should not be steeped to the strength of lye, which was still Mrs. Kite’s notion of tea, Mrs. Kelywn had asked her with careful politeness to let her have the canister on the table, and to bring a pitcher of hot water from the stove; she had to praise, almost with tears, the thoughtfulness of her husband in having provided a can of condensed milk which could not he cowy or speckled.

Parthenope had foraged for wild flowers among those which grew in the pasture just over the stone wall, and had filled a tall jug with columbines, clover-heads, and pink and white laurel; and she dropped, from the final task of arranging them, into her chair, and announced herself as hungry as a bear. Her coarse, yellowish-brown hair was, in fact, not unlike the pelt of a cinnamon bear in color, but in the classic knot at the nape of her rounded neck, and the dull rose of her cheeks, and her regular human features, there was nothing to remind one of a wild animal; even her eyes, which were gray and rather large, did not carry the idea of anything savage to the beholder. She was rather tall, in the fashion which quite so long ago as the early seventies was beginning to prevail among girls, but she was of no such towering height as now puts to shame the dwarfish stature of most men. One of the more noticeable features of her make-up, if hands are features, were her beautiful, long, rather large, and most capable-looking hands. Though she had used them mostly in drawing from the round, the flat, and the nude of late, and in chicquing her more original studies in composition, she had earlier employed them in putting and keeping her aunt’s house in order, both directly and indirectly. She could, almost congenitally, cook and sweep and sew, and the time had been when it had seemed as if her gift lay in the direction of being mistress of a house of her own. But this was distinctly before her genius for painting had so strongly manifested itself, though now she recurred to those earlier inspirations with a pleasure which she felt in all the fingers of her beautiful hands. But she had hardly begun to serve herself with them in the satisfaction of the sylvan famine she had boasted when she dropped her knife and fork and demanded, “Where are the boys?”

Mrs. Kelwyn started back, too. “Why, Elmer, where are the children?”

“The children?” he echoed. “I’m sure I don’t know. We left them playing about here with that Kite boy when we went to the Shakers’. Perhaps they haven’t heard the bell.”

“There hasn’t been any bell for them to hear,” the girl said, and she caught up the bell from the table, as she jumped from her chair, and rang it at the open window. “That will fetch them, I hope.”

It fetched Mrs. Kite, who appeared from the kitchen door. “Did anybody ring?” she asked, in her sweet treble.

“Oh!” the girl said, in dignified apology. “I was ringing for the boys. I suppose they don’t know luncheon is ready.”

In the anxieties of her hospitality, Mrs. Kelwyn had forgotten her children, but the fact seemed to her at first so much out of character that she made a feint of ignoring it. She had known mothers do very strange things with their families in moments of social preoccupation, and she would have excused this aberration of her own if she had been of a lower ideal concerning her duty to her children; but, as it was, some one must suffer for it, and now she said to Mrs. Kite, with severity, “If they’re with your little boy, will you please send them to luncheon immediately?”

Mrs. Kite relaxed in a laugh. “Well, I guess they’re with Arthur fast enough, wherever he is. They all went off together, the last I see of them, with that old hoss.”

Mrs. Kelwyn referred the strange fact to her husband, who asked, “What old horse?”

“Well,” Mrs. Kite responded, tolerantly, “I don’t know as you did notice him before you left this mornin’. He come up the road from down Ellison way, and all three boys piled after him. I guess he’s a hoss that somebody’s turned out to die; he’s a perfect stranger to me, though; large white hoss, blind on the off side, and awful frail-lookin’. Mr. Kite had gone off to his ploughin’ by that time, and one of the boys catched him by the foretop and they all three got onto him.”

Kelwyn followed her through the pronouns to the fact that the boys had mounted the horse and not Kite. “And where did they go?”

“Well, I guess you got me there,” she submitted, and she joined the Kelwyns at the window in looking up and down the road.

“They couldn’t got far,” she said. “That hoss couldn’t get anywhere with ’em if he done his best.” She bent this way and that, looking over one shoulder and then the other of Parthenope. “Why, there they are now, just risin’ the hill, and there’s somebody leadin’ him! Well, they didn’t have no bridle.”

The Kelwyns and their cousin ran down-stairs and out-of-doors to meet the wanderers. When they came near, the two Kelwyn boys burst into a loud crying; the Kite boy, from no personal motive, joined them, where they sat on the horse’s back with their little legs spread far apart, and clinging, the foremost to his mane, and the others keeping on their perch by clasping each other round the waist.

“We got lost, papa!” Francy  called to his father. Carl, apparently, could not do better than repeat, “We got lost, papa,” and he repeated his brother’s further explanation inculpating the Kite boy. “He wanted us to get on, and then we couldn’t stop him because we hadn’t any bridle, and we couldn’t get off because it was so hi-i-gh!” They rose an octave in the close and sobbed loudly.

Their father called, “Well, well! Never mind; it’s all right now. Don’t cry.” Whatever obscure notion he had of teaching them a hardy spirit was not shared by his wife and her cousin, who ran forward, the first with a cry of, “Hush, hush!” and the other with a laugh of, “Oh, you poor darlings!” and embraced each a leg of the Kelwyn boys, abandoning the Kite boy to a moral isolation on the horse’s neck, where he vainly continued to lift up his lament. The effect of his grief was to extract from his mother a promise which she kept her head out of the window above to deliver, “I’ll give it to you, Mr. Arthur, when I get round to you.” This at least was something, and it so far consoled the boy that he looked down at the face of the young man who was holding the old horse by his foretop, and smiled through his tears as if recognizing a kindred spirit who could enter into a joke. As yet, neither of the women who were clinging to the legs of the Kelwyn boys had made any sign of seeing their rescuer, but Kelwyn himself now came forward and said, politely: “You’re very good to have taken so much trouble with these scamps. Where did you find them?”

“Not very far off,” the young man answered. “Just beyond the Office at the Shakers’.”

The sound of his voice seemed to recall Mrs. Kelwyn to herself, and she said, “Oh!” As the young man released the foretop of the horse, which immediately fell to mumbling feebly at the wayside grass, and dusted his hands together, she began: “I beg your pardon. Isn’t this the gentleman I met at the Office?”

“Yes,” he said, and then there was a pause which she decided to terminate in the only possible way under the circumstances.

May I introduce my husband, Mr.—”

“My name is Emerance.”

“Oh, thank you! And my cousin, Miss Brook.” Parthenope and the young man bowed, Kelwyn shook his hand, and Mrs. Kelwyn said toward her husband, “Mr. Emerance is staying with the Shakers for a few days,” and she looked one of those comprehensive looks at Kelwyn which wives explain too late as meaning that their husbands shall be nice but cautious, and kind without committing themselves. Perhaps Kelwyn might have understood her look; but just then she loosed her grasp of her son’s leg, and Parthenope dropped the leg of the other boy. The old horse made a witless movement forward, and as if they were the crew of a ship dragging her anchor, the boys wailed over their shoulders, “We haven’t had anything to e-e-eat, mamma,” and, “We’re awfully hungry, mamma,” the younger echoing the elder, as before, and prolonging his cadences in a shriller key.

Then the mother in Mrs. Kelwyn betrayed the woman of the world, and she said, “Well, don’t cry; dinner is on the table now, and — Elmer! Will you lift them down?”

“Let me lift them down!” Parthenope demanded. She swung Carl earthward through the air, and the stranger did the like with Francy. Both boys stumbled, their legs having fallen asleep, and saved themselves from falling by a clutch on their cousin’s and mother’s skirts. The Kite boy, restored to cheerfulness, dug his heels into the horse’s ribs, and the horse, moved by an instinct of food and shelter, jolted crookedly off toward the barn.

X

MRS. KELWYN turned from watching him and bent a still absent-minded eye upon the young man whom his retreat had left upon her hands, but Kelwyn, realizing that the stranger, who had been so kind, had probably come out of his way and left his dinner at the Shakers’ to bring their lost boys to them, said: “Won’t you come and dine with us, Mr. Emerance? We were just sitting down.”

His words recalled Mrs. Kelwyn to herself; she said, in afterward reproving him, that she was just going to make the invitation; and whether this was so or not she now did it. “Why, yes, Mr. Emerance, you must stay, of course. I was so distracted by that wretched animal,” she apologized.

The young man demurred that the Shakers would be waiting his dinner for him, but he did not demur much. At the end Mrs. Kelwyn said, “Elmer, will you show Mr. Emerance to a room? And we will be ready as soon as you are.” As the two men moved away submissively she mused aloud, horror-strickenly, “I don’t suppose she’s put either water or towels!”

“Let me go and see, Cousin Carry,” Parthenope demanded, and she ran round the men and so quickly ahead that by the time Mrs. Kelywn had followed from the outside with her hungry and whimpering boys Parthenope was coming from her own room with a heavy water-pitcher between her hands and towels hanging from one of her tense arms.

“You were quite right, Cousin Carry,” she said, over her shoulder, “and I can get some for myself just as well afterward.” Then Mrs. Kelwyn heard her husband’s dry-voiced recognition of Parthenope’s service within the room where he had taken the guest, with the young man’s grave protest and the girl’s gay insistence.

After leaving the men to follow her to the diningroom, she had a moment there with Mrs. Kelwyn for one of those formulations of motive which women sometimes find essential with each other and sometimes not. “I thought I would do it, for if we kept him waiting till Mrs. Kite could get them it would embarrass him still more.”

“Yes, of course. Though I don’t know that he seems very embarrassed.”

“That’s what I meant. That stiffness of theirs is always so amusing. One wouldn’t do anything in the world to let them see that one noticed it.” She glanced at the table. “I’ll get a plate for him. If we made Mrs. Kite — Shall I put him with the boys or let him have your whole right-hand side to himself? Or would that be too ceremonious? He shall have Francy next him, and I will take Carl under my wing.”

“I think that will be best,” Mrs. Kelwyn assented, still from the daze that the whole incident had wrapt her in. Her distraction gave her an effect of hauteur toward their guest when her husband returned with him, and she assigned him, with more majesty than she meant, the place Parthenope had chosen for him. During the meal her condescension wore away so far that by the time Parthenope was making coffee with the new machine which the Kelwyns had brought with them, and stored in the pantry against some occasion of experimenting with it, the hostess had reached the level with her guest on which she had met him at the Office.

“As I told you, Mr. Emerance, we are here on the most provisional terms; and I feel like explaining that this is a—” She cast about for a descriptive phrase, and Parthenope, from peering anxiously into the performance of the coffee-machine, supplied it without looking up.

“Boughten lunch.” She spoke lightly, but with authority, as one who dignifies a phrase by using it.

“Yes, and certainly I can say, without boasting, Mrs. Kite had no hand in it. I don’t wish you to think I did her injustice in what I said this morning at the—”

She stopped and stared hard at the coffee-making, which had already fixed the gaze of Kelwyn, and now also held the eyes of the guest.

“Oh, don’t all look so!” the girl protested, turning a flushed face toward them.

“I think you turn it over,” Kelwyn suggested.

“Blow it out, my dear,” his wife commanded.

“Not till it begins to pour from the spout,” the guest interposed. “Now!” he bade her, and the fragrant stream fell smoking into the cup which Parthenope, with a shriek, had interposed in time.

If she obscurely resented his peremptory tone, she hospitably decided to say: “And you shall have the first sprightly runnings, Mr. Emerance, for truly instructing me. And, Cousin Carry, the next time you have a coffee-machine that you haven’t tried yourself, don’t let me try it. In another moment I should have been blown through the roof.”

“Not quite so bad as that,” the young man said. “They always look as if they would explode, but I believe they never do.”

The incident relieved the tension in which the meal had passed. The Kelwyn boys had, first the older and then the younger, asked to be excused, and tottered away in a repletion which would be proof for a while against the lures of the Kite boy; and the talk began to ease itself more and more under the spell of the little cups.

“You spoke as if from a wide experience of coffee-machines,” Kelwyn said, smiling over his drink.

“I’ve tried most of them,” the guest explained. “You can make good coffee or bad coffee with any of them, but neither so good nor so bad as you can make with the simple old-fashioned coffee-pot, if you have the art of it.”

“I should say Mrs. Kite hadn’t the art, though she has the pot. Better recommend the machine to her, my dear,” Kelwyn added to his wife. “You needn’t tell her just when to put it out, unless you mind it blowing her through the roof. I shouldn’t.”

Mrs. Kelwyn usually thought this sort of joking from, her husband rather coarse, but she herself was excited by the coffee and the escape to it from imminent danger, and now his joke did not seem so very coarse to her.

Kelwyn turned again to his guest. “You appear to have looked into the metaphysics of coffee-making.”

“Not so much as the physics, perhaps,” the young man answered. “I attended a cooking - school last winter.”

The two women leaned forward, and Kelwyn tempered the common curiosity to a polite “Ah?”

“I didn’t know,” Emerance continued, “but I might take it up.”

“I don’t quite understand,” Kelwyn ventured, with continued politeness.

“My digestion had given way in teaching, and I suppose that was what directed my attention to the matter. I had a notion at one time of starting a summer school of cooking.”

Mrs. Kelwyn shrank back in her chair, but Parthenope leaned farther forward. Kelwyn joined them in their silence, and the young man addressed him more especially. “And I still don’t see why it shouldn’t fall in with some of the modern humors of our civilization. People are going more and more into the country and for longer seasons, and the general tendency is a sort of reversion to nature in the way of camping in the Adirondacks and the Maine woods, away from the hotels and boarding-houses. I imagined a somewhat larger group of families than ordinarily camp together, who would be willing to form a school of cooking, if they could get teachers. If it became a fad first it might later become a serious study; and we all know how much knowledge in that direction is needed.”

“We certainly know how much it is needed in this house,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, and in her sense of injury through the ignorance which the young man’s notion might have helped ultimately to abate, even in such as Mrs. Kite, she relented to him still more.

“And did you ever make an experimental test of the matter?” Kelwyn asked, with a superior smile, at which Parthenope again inclined herself a little.

“Nο,” the young man hesitated, “I became interested in something else. My notion was not to let the school end with the summer people, but to work finally on the curiosity of the farmers and their wives. They suffer far more than townsfolk from wholesome food, badly cooked. The science of cooking interested me; it’s a kind of chemistry, you know.” He concluded toward Kelwyn, who nodded tolerantly, “No, I never brought the teaching to a practical test myself. But, after learning how to cook, I couldn’t help cooking for myself.”

Chafing-dish?” Kelwyn suggested.

“I went beyond the chafing-dish. I set up a little gas-stove in a room that I got next my study in the house where I lodged, and instead of going out to the meals which I used to get at the boarding-house across the street, I cooked my own meals, much more economically, and, I believed, aesthetically.”

At the word Parthenope leaned forward at the first angle of interest, and he said, rather more to her than the others: “It isn’t all fun. At least it wasn’t for me. I believe ladies don’t mind washing dishes—”

“As far as egg-shell china, we don’t,” the girl distinguished.

“I had no egg-shell china, and I minded the dishwashing. It was on that account that I was tempted to give up cooking, until I happened to think of wooden plates and paper plates, which could be cleansed by fire instead of water.”

“But they,” Parthenope instructed him, “want the woods and fields for a background; between walls they are hideous.”

“They are not finally hideous,” Emerance answered, with the deference that young men show in differing with girls, but not with all the submission she would have liked. “Their form is elementary yet, but that is something that might be studied, and their decoration might be carried much further than it has been.”

“I suppose so,” she assented, and then she suggested a step she believed he had missed. “But there would still be the pots and pans.”

“I didn’t know she had such a practical mind,” Kelwyn said, jocosely, to his wife.

“Of course a woman would think of that,” Mrs. Kelwyn explained.

“There would still be the pots and pans,” the young man owned. “You can’t boil and stew in wood, and you can’t roast and broil on paper. But I’ve no doubt something could be cheaply substituted for wood and paper that could be as easily destroyed. Perhaps—” Loud shrieks, as of a joyful dismay, rose from the roadside green under the dining-room windows: the voices of the two Kelwyn boys, and the voice of the Kite boy, who lifted it in a kind of mocking, as if at a mixed emotion in the others. To these the voice of Mrs. Kite was joined. “You come here, Arthur Kite; come right here, this minute! Boys, you look out he don’t catch you! Mrs. Kelwyn!”

At this appeal Mrs. Kelwyn called severely to her husband across the table, “Elmer!” and then they both went to a window. Parthenope ran to another, where, seeing that Emerance modestly held back, she made room for him. Leaning over the sill together, they saw slouching toward the house the figure of a man in a flat cap, a short velvet jacket, and immensely wide velvet trousers, with shoes as broad almost and as flat as his cap; he supported his steps with a heavy staff and led by a chain a bear of about his own stature. The chain was attached to a ring in the bear’s muzzled nose, and Emerance glanced for a moment from him at the pretty head beside him, as if involuntarily noting that the hair on it was of the same cinnamon color as the bear. He breathed a little sigh such as one gives when one has suddenly got the right word for something.

The man and the bear both looked hot and unhappy. The bear strained his small eyes round and upward, and the man let his glance follow, but neither made as if to stop, and the Kelwyns, who had called their children up to them, began to feel that they had been needlessly anxious; the boys begged their father to make the man stay. While Kelwyn hesitated, the hired man, Raney, came round the corner of the house and called to the bear-leader in French. The poor are too much preoccupied with their poverty to be surprised at things which give the well-to-do the pleasurable emotion of the unexpected, and the man merely looked round at the sound of the familiar words. Then, as if he uttered the general wish, Raney called to him again and bade him make the bear dance.

It seemed a great cruelty, for the heat had been gradually mounting ever since morning, but Kelwyn did not interfere, even at his wife’s urgence of the question of danger; he let the man, who had halted, slowly turn and come back. The bear, with a groan of compliance, rose to his hind legs and caught between his paws the staff which the man tossed him. But it seemed that he was not going to dance at once. He had histrionic gifts which were to be shown first in Le bon Filleul qui va la Chasse, and the staff was to play the part of a gun. At the successive stage directions of his leader he discovered the game, shouldered the gun, and fired. But apparently he always missed at first; at last when he hit, he was obliged to represent the victim himself. As Un beau Mort, he rolled in death, palpitant and stertorous; then he came to life, and rose to his hind legs and tilled the ground with his pole in the character of Le bon Jardinier. The dramatic passages of the entertainment now ended, and the ballet began. It was not intricate, but it was elaborate, and was faithfully performed to the music of the wild, brutal chant of which bear-leaders have the secret. The bear pranced and waddled, and snorted and panted through his muzzle while the man followed him up and retreated. The scene held the spectators spellbound till Parthenope put herself in the bear’s place and cried out, “I should think the poor thing would die of the heat!”

Mrs. Kelywn saw the reasonableness of the apprehension, and with Raney’s intervention she brought the ballet to a close. The boys were openly disappointed; but the bear was made to turn some lop-sided somersaults, which consoled them, and then the bear-leader called for some water, and Mrs. Kite brought it in a hand-basin, which the bear lay down to embrace with both paws, plunging his muzzle deep into the water and showing a joy pitiful to see. When he had sopped it all up the man asked for another basinful, and swashed it against the hairy breast of the bear which responded with grunts of rapture. He was so much refreshed that when the man lengthened his chain he climbed to the first crotch of the doorside elm, where he sat looking sleepily into the window to which the Kelwyn boys, with the unforbidden, if unbidden, company of the Kite boy, had rushed up-stairs to gloat upon him in the closest intimacy.

The bear-leader was himself a sight hardly less pitiable than the bear. He stood pallid and dripping with sweat; and with that dull, tormented air which seems proper to bear-leaders he told Raney the scant story of himself and his bear. He had himself taken the bear in the mountains near Toulouse; it was only fifteen months old now, and it was a little cub when he took it. He pulled on its chain; it reluctantly descended from its perch, and the two set off, equally inarticulate, after the man’s growled thanks for the reward which had been thrown him from the windows whither he scarcely lifted his eyes. Mrs. Kite and Raney stood watching him, and Raney said to the windows that he would rather work than do that; he added that he was going away to work for his board and two dollars and a half a day in Chester. He sauntered off toward the barn, and Mrs. Kite supplied for him the fact which Raney was perhaps too indifferent, or too proud, to declare himself: that his father lived in Nashua, where he owned a house of eight tenements, which he let for fifty dollars a month; there were a good many Kanucks living in Nashua. She then went indoors, and the others, who were still looking, as if helplessly, out of the window, were surprised by a sudden roar of thunder.

XI

“Why, I believe we’re going to have a storm!” Mrs. Kelwyn said. They all took their heads in apprehensively, but the two women put theirs out again curiously and made sure of the clouds which were beating up from the horizon and getting blacker and blacker below, while above they whitened densely toward the zenith. “Elmer,” she continued to her husband, “did you think it was gathering for a storm?”

“I’m sure I hadn’t noticed,” he answered. Parthenope said, with an inquiring glance at Emerance, “I’m sure I hadn’t, either.”

“I thought I heard thunder once before,” the young man answered her. “But I was so much absorbed in the show that I didn’t think of getting back to the Shakers’. Now I must make a run for it. Good-bye — good-bye!” He addressed himself to one after another and started for the door. “I think I left my hat below—”

“Why,” Kelwyn as host interposed, “you mustn’t think of going now till the rain’s over.”

“No, certainly not,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, less hospitably, but more finally.

Emerance urged, with another glance out of the window: “I’m afraid I must. I’m ashamed to have intruded on you so long.”

Mrs. Kelwyn rose to the occasion. “Not at all. I’m always so afraid of lightning.”

“I don’t know that I should be much protection; but—” He glanced at the sky again.

“I wonder,” Parthenope said, impartially, “why we always feel safer if there are others.”

“I suppose it’s really not so safe,” Emerance suggested.

She combated this from her experience. “My aunt and I always get together in the middle hall, where there’s no chimney, and she makes the servants come, too, and shuts all the doors and lights the gas; and then we scarcely notice it.”

“It will be well to close the windows, won’t it?” Kelywn asked, referring himself to the young man. The sky had blackened upward; the flashes were almost incessant; the wind came in rapid gusts, as if the storm were panting in from the outside. The room darkened.

The men moved each toward a window; a blinding glare came with an instant crash; Mrs. Kelwyn shrieked: “You’ll be killed! Shut them, shut them!”

They dashed the sashes down as a torrent of rain beat against the glass. Mrs. Kelwyn’s instincts put her in control. “Elmer! Come here away from the window! Mr. Emerance! Boys, stand back to the wall; but not against it, not tight together! Thennie — Arthur Kite, why aren’t you with your mother? But mercy! Mrs. Kite will be killed down there over the cook-stove — iron is such a conductor. Mrs. Kite! Mrs. Kite!” She ventured to the door and shrieked toward the kitchen. “Come here with us! You’ll be struck by lightning!”

“I ain’t afraid of lightnin’,” Mrs. Kite’s voice came sweetly back. “Me and Raney are watchin’ it. I hope Mr. Kite’s got under some tree with his hossis.”

“Shut your door and come up here,” Mrs. Kelwyn commanded, but there was no answer to this, and the interest of Mrs. Kite’s disobedience was lost in the tremendous drama of the elements. The world was wrapt in a darkness which the swift flashes rent from it, moment after moment, and showed it naked, dishevelled with the wind and deluged with rain.

“This is a storm,” Kelwyn remarked, inadequately, and his wife said:

“I never saw anything like it. Did you, Mr. Emerance?” She felt the need of hearing some voice besides her own amid the horror, and she appealed to her guest at the risk of making him feel more at home than she might have wished. If it had not been for the storm she would have liked to ask herself some questions about him. But she did not wait for his answer before calling to her cousin, “Where are you, Parthenope?”

“Here, in the middle of the room,” the girl answered. “Right by you.”

Mrs. Kelwyn, who had somehow thought she was with Emerance dangerously near the window, where he stood, said, with relief, “Oh!” At the same time a formless shout came from Emerance, and the next flash showed him pointing at something he saw through the window. She was torn between anxiety and curiosity. “What is it? What is it?” she implored. “Elmer! Parthenope! Why—”

It was the girl who obeyed the stronger instinct, and, running to the window, saw, through the shimmer of the lightning and the wind-driven welter of the rain, the figures of the bear-leader and the bear floundering toward the barn where it stretched in a line with the house toward the woods.

“What is it? What is it?” Mrs. Kelwyn demanded.

Before Parthenope could answer, the voice of Mrs. Kite came: “Raney, go out and tell him he can’t go into our barn! His bear’ll drive the hossis crazy.”

“Ketch me go out in that rain,” Raney’s voice replied. “No hosses there, anyway, till Mr. Kite come back.”

“Well, that’s so,” Mrs. Kite assented, in a lapse to her habitual ease of mind. “But we got to watch out when he does come. U-u-ugh!”

A long chain of flame swung from the woods beyond the open fields across the road, and from its hither end a vast globe of bluish fire dropped as if at the door, and the air was torn with an explosion which shook the house in every fibre; through the darkness and silence which followed, little crimson flakes like pieces of burning paper dropped earthward. A groan came from Mrs. Kelwyn; wails came from the boys; the hysterical laughter of Mrs. Kite, the shouts of Raney and Arthur, mixed with a cry from Parthenope. With her thought still on what she had last seen before that blinding flash and deafening roar, she entreated Emerance, “Oh, where are they, where are they?”

“I don’t know,” he answered. “Yes! Yes! There they are in the road—”

“They’ve been killed!” she shrieked. “They’re both lying down! Oh, Cousin Carry, Cousin Elmer!” She put her hands over her eyes, and, with her whirling toward them, the Kelwyns pressed forward, forgetful of danger and duty, and by the successive flashes they saw in the streaming highway the bear and his leader prostrate and motionless.

“I don’t believe they’re dead,” Emerance said. “I’m going to see—”

“I’m going with you,” Parthenope defied all forbidding.

They had run toward the door, followed by a cry of cumulative warning from Mrs. Kelwyn.

“You’ll be killed — you’ll be wet through.”

But the rain, in one of those sudden arrests which ensue upon such a violent burst, had ceased, and there was only the drip of the elms which overhung the road, where the play of the lightning now showed Emerance and Parthenope bringing help to the bear and his leader, Raney had joined them; but Mrs. Kite kept within her door, as firmly persuaded as Mrs. Kelwyn that her first duty was to herself. She could not keep her boy from running out to see the rescue, and in this Mrs. Kelwyn had the advantage; her boys preferred to look on with her from her window. Kelwyn said he was going to help, too, but his wife’s will was stronger.

“Don’t think of such a thing. You know they are doing everything, and if you go out into this storm you will die — you will be laid up with rheumatism.”

He pointed out that it was not raining and there was not the least risk; in the end he had to content himself with thinking that perhaps she was right, after all.

Parthenope came hurrying in. “He’s breathing,” she panted, thickly. “Mr. Emerance wants some brandy. Have you got any?”

“Now, Elmer!” Mrs. Kelywn said, disappearing and reappearing at her chamber door. “What will you say now to my bringing what was left in the bottle you wanted me to throw away?”

“Is the bear breathing, too, Cousin Thennie?” Francy wistfully entreated, and Carl, with the same gentleness, implored, “Is the bear breathing, too, Cousin Thennie?”

“Yes, yes!” she called back over her shoulder to them as she ran out with the brandy. “That is—”

“I’m so glad the bear’s breathing, too, mamma,” and, “I’m so glad the bear’s breathing, too, mamma,” the boys said, in the order of their ages.

Their mother twitched each of them by the hand. “Hush! Be good boys!”

“Can’t we go out?” they asked, in due succession. “Arthur’s there.”

“Certainly not. It might kill you.”

“If the bear’s alive he ought to be secured,” Kelwyn said, judicially.

“Well, don’t you try to secure him,” his wife exposed him in his brave impulse. “There! Raney is chaining him to the hitching-post now!”

Raney was really taking this provisional measure of safety; but the bear to the spectators above showed no more signs of returning consciousness than his leader, who sat in the mud with his head fallen forward and supported under his limply hanging arms by Parthenope; while Emerance knelt before him, trying to make him drink the brandy. In despair with his failure he cast his eye upward and Kelwyn caught their reproach.

“I am certainly going down to help,” Kelwyn was afterward always proud to remember now saying, and before his wife could prevent him he ran down-stairs and dropped on his knees beside Emerance. Between them they managed to get the man’s mouth open and let a little brandy trickle into it. Then the bear-leader gropingly possessed himself of the bottle and tilted it to his lips. A strong shiver ran through his frame, and Parthenope divined that she might withdraw her support. Kelwyn, having fulfilled his duty to humanity, returned to his family, and the bear-leader’s first thought was of his own.

“Ou est-ce quest l’ours?” he growled, and Raney vaingloriously exhibited his passive capture.

XII

THE man dragged himself painfully toward the prostrate beast, and examined him for the signs of life with hoarsely murmured laments. He put the brandy to the bear’s muzzle without effect; then he sank on his heels and growled to Raney, in their language, “If there were some coffee very hot!”

Parthenope understood, and she shouted up to Mrs. Kelwyn at the window, “Light the spirit-lamp under the coffee-pot!” The zeal of saving life had penetrated to Mrs. Kelwyn also, and she obeyed the order blindly. When Parthenope came following her mandate Mrs. Kelwyn was indignant that her succor should have been invoked for the bear; but it was now too late. The girl caught the pot from the flame, and, pouring all the coffee out into a bowl, hurried below with it.

The man slipped the muzzle from the bear and pried the beast’s jaws apart.

“Better let me give it him,” Emerance suggested, offering to take the bowl from Parthenope. It was an odd moment for her superiority to assert itself, but this was the moment it chose.

“If you will help keep the bear’s mouth open,” she said, severely, “I will pour the coffee in,” and she emptied the bowl into the red chasm, which suddenly shut like a trap. She caught her hand away with a little whoop.

“Oh, did he snap you?” the young man asked, anxiously.

“Not at all,” she snubbed his anxiety. “Don’t notice it.”

No one else seemed to have noticed it, and the bearleader slipped back the muzzle and, still kneeling beside the bear, waited results. The coffee wrought the miracle which the brandy had failed to work; the bear came to with a strong shudder, and rose to his hind legs with a heart-shaking roar which sent his deliverers flying. A crash of thunder followed, and the storm began again. Of the actors in the recent drama none remained on the scene but the bear and his leader. They began making for the barn again, and Mrs. Kite screamed: “Raney, tell him he mustn’t go to the barn! If Mr. Kite comes home and finds that bear in the barn he’ll shoot him!”

“He got to go somewhere,” Raney protested, sullenly.

“Take them to the woodhouse, then.”

After a hesitation of self-respect, Raney led the way with a Suivez-moi.”

On the stairs the girl stopped and looked at her hand, and Emerance asked again, “Did he hurt you?”

This time she answered, more gently, “Oh no,” and she laughed. “I would do it, you know. I was merely frightened by his jaws shutting so. But it was only mechanical.”

“Oh yes: he didn’t mean to bite,” Emerance said; and when they went in to the Kelwyns she made haste to declare:

“I insisted on giving ‘ first aid’ to the bear myself, and I thought he had bitten me. But he only shut his mouth mechanically.” The word seemed to repeat itself mechanically, and she laughed as she had laughed before. Then, rather white and tremulous, she hurried away toward her room.

Mrs. Kelwyn ran after her, and did not come hack at once. When she returned the electrical storm was passing; but the weather had settled for a steady downpour, and she said: “Of course, Mr. Emerance, you won’t dream of trying to get to the Shakers’ till it stops. You must stay and take supper with us, if we have any. Mrs. Kite is so uncertain—”

“And it’s been a very demoralizing afternoon for everybody,” Kelwyn continued for her. “But I dare say Mrs. Kite will pull herself together in time.” The young man said, “I hate to trouble you,” and then he ventured, after a moment, “If Mrs. Kite is very much preoccupied, do you think she would mind my trying a few tricks with her cook-stove?” To Mrs. Kelwyn’s look of uncertainty he added, “Then I could feel as if I were earning my board. I should like to get supper for you,” he ended, explicitly.

Mrs. Kelwyn was seldom at a loss for a decision, but now she cast glances of misgiving at her husband. He refused the responsibility, but her boys asked in chorus, “May we help him to get supper, mamma?” Emerance had not waited. The boys had followed him into the kitchen, where the Kelwyns presently heard him in amicable colloquy with Mrs. Kite. A third voice joined itself to theirs, and Kelwyn said, “Why, is that Parthenope?”

“Oh, I dare say!” his wife answered, impatiently. “She seemed quite unnerved, and I made her lie down. But I knew she would be up as soon as I left her. I suppose she went down the back way.”

“Well, she wasn’t very seriously wounded,” Kelwyn consoled himself. “And we couldn’t have allowed him to get our supper without letting some one help him.”

“No,” she consented. “Of course it’s better for Thennie to offer. But it’s rather odd. I can’t make him out. He seems to have been too many things — what I call a Jack of all trades.”

“In this case if he’s master of one,” Kelwyn said, “I shall forgive him. I think I’m going to be hungry. It’s turning cold, I fancy, or else the damp has got in. I believe I’ll make up a trash-wood fire on the hearth and dry the place out.”

He went for an armful of pine sticks, and when he came back Mrs. Kelwyn was returning from the kitchen. “I thought I ought to look in to show that I appreciated — But I didn’t stay; Thennie might think I was following her up. I don’t know that I liked his being in his shirt-sleeves. To be sure, with those woollen outing shirts that the young men are beginning to wear! And he’s given the boys some dough, and they’re as happy as kings. And Parthenope seems to be useful in spite of her scare. I think she’s rather ashamed of her whole performance.”

Kelwyn had laid his fire and was going to touch a match to it when her attention was directed to it, and she wished to lay it differently. In the lulls of their dispute they heard Mrs. Kite in the kitchen from time to time:

“There! Do you mean to tell me that that’s what they’re for? Well, I heard of gem-pans fast enough from the Shaker ladies, but I didn’t think these were them. And will they raise just from the heat? Arthur, you keep your hands off, or I’ll — Goin’ to broil it? We always fry ours; I don’t suppose I could get a bit of broiled steak down Mr. Kite any more than — That the way you make an omelet? I’ve heard of ‘em, but I never expected to see one. And you don’t let the tea stay a minute? And you got to have fresh boiled water every time? Well, no wonder I couldn’t seem to suit jour folks. You mind my settin’ here? If you do, just say the word, and I’ll—”

Her talk came with the sounds of walking to and fro, with serious answers from Emerance and gay comments from Parthenope, with shrill, despairing resentments of the Kite boy’s aggressions from the Kelwyn boys, the clash of stove-doors and stove-lids, and the hiss of broiling.

Kelwyn thought that he ought to show himself on the scene in his quality of a host courteous to his guest. But as often as he proposed this his wife forbade him on one pretext or another. At last she said: “Elmer, don’t say that again! I wouldn’t have Parthenope think we noticed!”

Then he said, “Oh!” A moment later the kitchen door was set officiously open by Mrs. Kite, and a procession of Parthenope and the Kelwyn boys came in bearing the firstlings of the feast; against a glare from the stove the figure of Emerance was silhouetted in the act of lifting the broiler from the clinging flames of the fat, and then he reappeared with his coat on, and between his hands the platter holding the beefsteak saved from the morning’s purchase, and now serving as the chief dish at a meal that almost rose to the dignity of dinner.

Mrs. Kite followed with a heaping plate of gems. “You’ve got to excuse me, Mrs. Kelwyn, if I almost forgot your supper. But I guess you won’t miss anything. I’ve been so anxious about him, out in all this rain, and I want you should save him a bite of everything, so he can see what gems and omelet are like for once in his life.”

Mrs. Kelwyn added some graces of jam and marmalade, and olives from the store she had brought into the country for occasions of feasting, and at the end of a meal from which her boys dropped torpid to their bed, their father philosophized the effect with himself as one of returning self-respect. His wife and her cousin were carrying the remnants out to Mrs. Kite in the kitchen, forbidding help from the men whom they left sitting each at a corner of the hearth.

“It is odd,” Kelwyn explained, “but it is true that under the regimen of Mrs. Kite I’ve had the sense of sinking lower and lower in my own opinion. I haven’t been able to recognize myself as a gentleman. You understand?”

“I get your drift,” the younger man said, with a smile of interest which brightened into speculation. “I wonder how much of what we call our personal dignity is really impersonal.”

“How do you mean?”

“How much is safeguarded from without, how much from within? Whether we are still in the bondage of the old superstition that the things which defile a man are those which happen to him rather than those which happen from him?”

It would not do for a lecturer on historical sociology to seem to himself at a loss on a point like that, and Kelwyn asked, in his turn, “Hasn’t it always been so?”

“Yes; or else I suppose we shouldn’t have been instructed against it. As yet I don’t believe there’s much personal dignity in the world. It’s impersonal, what there is of it. Why, for instance,” he pursued, “should you have felt degraded by the bad housekeeping of this woman, and especially her bad cooking? Or wasn’t it that, concretely, that you meant?”

Kelwyn reflected, and he owned from his conscience: “Yes, I fancy that’s just what I meant. And in the light you put it in it is rather droll. There seems to “Have been some force in the environment that vulgarized — that surrounded me with the social atmosphere of a mechanics’ boarding-house. There have been times when I rose from Mrs. Kite’s table — I can’t call it ours — with the feeling that I was not fit for society — that I ought to resign my position in the university.” He exaggerated, smiling and inviting Emerance to smile; but the young man smiled only indirectly, and he said, with apparent irrelevance, “I have heard a few of your lectures.”

This was something still further restorative; Kelwyn felt that he was getting securely back to his level. “Ah!” he prompted, hoping for praise, but decently wishing that he did not.

“Yes,” the young man responded, “I have been interested in the subject.” He dismissed that aspect of it. “But I don’t think environment is quite the name for the thing. If you put people who are used to simpler things than yourself in your place here, would they be humiliated by the environment?”

“Yes, I think they would, if they were people of any refinement at all,” Kelwyn had a sense of generous democracy in urging.

“They might be people of another kind of refinement. They might not feel the woman’s shiftlessness as much as you, and yet be grieved for her by it.”

“I believe,” Kelwyn said, “we have always tried to consider her.”

“I’ve expressed myself badly if I’ve suggested otherwise,” the young man returned, with gravity. “I’m trying to imagine the sort of religious — it isn’t the word — spiritual culture which seems to have pretty well gone out of the world, if it was ever much in it, and which once considered the uncultivated on their own ground and not on that of their superiors. I’m not sure — yet — that this sort of culture didn’t implicate a certain amount of sentimentality. I should like to ask your opinion.”

“Yes,” Kelwyn said, after taking a moment for thought, “I should think it did. And I suppose we should agree that sentimentality is always to be avoided.”

“Why, I’m not sure — yet,” the young man surprised him by answering.

“Then I don’t know that I follow you.”

“I suppose what I am driving at is this — or something like this: as long as we are in the keeping of our customary circumstances, the thing which we call environment and by which we always understand the personal environment, whether we recognize the fact or not, has very little influence on our character. If you had had these people serving you in your house at home you would not have felt degraded by the manner or make of their service? — For that’s what it comes to here.”

“No, I suppose we shouldn’t. That is — I should like to give the point further reflection.”

“The personal environment would be the same in both cases. But in one case you could keep your own level in spite of it, and in the other case you feel degraded by it. So the real agency would be in the circumstances, wouldn’t it? The conditions?”

“It’s an interesting point,” Kelwyn allowed.

“Perhaps I can put it in another way,” Emerance resumed. “If we had all been at a picnic together, and I had offered to be your cook, as I did when I proposed going into Mrs. Kite’s kitchen and getting your supper just now, we should have been remanded in common to the Golden Age, or at least to the Homeric epoch, and you would have found it poetic, primitive, delightful. But here we were not remanded to a period sufficiently remote — at least I wasn’t. I only got back so far as the era of the sons of the farm-houses who have served you in the kitchen and helped wait on you at table, and it gave you a little start when I sat down with you.”

“You have no right to say that—”

“But isn’t it true?” The young man laughed, and rose briskly and went to the window and looked out. “Starlight!” he exclaimed. “I must be going!”

“But surely,” Kelwyn began, rising in protest, “we hoped you would stay the night — Mrs. Kelwyn will wish — It will be late for you at the Shakers’, and that bit of road through the woods — you won’t be able to see your way.”

“I shall get to the Shakers’ in time for people who never lock their doors; and the stretch of black road through the woods will add a strain of mystery to my experience; I shall have the weird pleasure of feeling my way.” He added, musingly: “I imagine that the animals that prowl by night feel their way much oftener than they see it. I shall be remanded to my animal instincts. You would call it degraded?” He looked at Kelwyn with the eyes of a poet rather than a sociologist, but he broke abruptly from his question. “Good-night. Please say good-night for me to the—”

“But you mustn’t go without — Let me call them!”

“No, no! Don’t!”

Before Kelwyn could hinder, Emerance had found his hat and was gone.

XIII

When Mrs. Kelwyn and Parthenope came in from the kitchen, “Where is Mr. Emerance?” the elder woman asked with her tongue and the younger with her eyes.

“He has just gone; he insisted on going — he wouldn’t let me call you.”

“Well!” Mrs. Kelwyn said, and Parthenope said nothing. “Didn’t you ask him to stay? I expected him to stay!”

“Of course. But he was quite determined.”

“Very strange!” Mrs. Kelwyn was as silent for a while as Parthenope. Then she sighed with relief. “Perhaps it is just as well. He is a strange being. Only we oughtn’t to seem ungrateful.”

“I have been trying with all my might not to seem ungrateful,” Kelwyn retorted, in exasperation with the burden he felt unjustly cast upon him. “If you had been here you would have thought him still stranger.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have had a sociological inquiry.”

“Nonsense, Elmer!”

“That is what I thought it amounted to.”

“What was it?” she pursued him, and he repeated their talk in its essentials.

Mrs. Kelwyn listened in mounting disapproval. But at the end she did not express her censure directly. It was Parthenope who said: “I think that was rather snobbish.”

Kelwyn said, “I don’t think it was snobbish exactly.”

“If he was ashamed of what he had done it was snobbish,” she insisted.

“People,” Mrs. Kelwyn generalized, “who have risen above their origin are apt to be sensitive about such things. We can’t wonder at that.”

“No,” Kelwyn assented, so remote from his own origin that he did not wince. His mother had done her own work, and his father used to build the kitchen fire for her before he went down and swept out his store. “But I shouldn’t say he was a snob, exactly. If you speculate about such intimate things you are in danger of being misunderstood. But I thought his inquiry was rather interesting. I thought there was something in what he said.”

“You are always so open-minded, Elmer,” his wife applauded. “That, I think, is your greatest trait. It’s what gives you your influence.”

“I like to be fair,” he so far accepted, her praise.

“There is such a thing as being too fair,” Parthenope said, with scorn. “Don’t waste your fairness on Mr. Emerance, Cousin Elmer. He thought we would despise him for cooking our supper, and he was meanly writhing through his philosophy. Was he despising us, I wonder, for cleaning up the dishes after him?”

“He would feel it was different with women,” Kelwyn was beginning, but she cut in with the demand:

“Because women are naturally servile?”

“Because they are naturally domestic. But what he said really interested me. It seemed a survival of the sort of question that vexed Emerson and Lowell in their turn.”

“But I don’t think Emerson and Lowell would have shown that they were ashamed of getting supper,” the girl retorted.

“They were perplexed by their relation to those who got it for them,” Kelwyn insisted.

“Well, good-night, Cousin Elmer. Cousin Carry, good-night. I believe I’m going to bed.”

Kelwyn looked at his wife. “Isn’t this rather a strange turn that Parthenope is taking?”

“I don’t know. Of course she is a little disappointed at his not waiting for her to come back.” Kelwyn’s look deepened into a stare. Husbands live all their lives with their wives, and do not learn the difference between men and women in the most elementary things. “Can you make out who or what he is? Did he drop any hint about himself? Did he give you any clew?”

“I didn’t ask for any. He had told us all I know. He seems to have been a teacher in the public schools and a pupil in the cooking-schools. We’ve had practical proof of his gifts in one way, and he has tried to show himself a social philosopher with me. I must say his omelets are good, whatever his ideas are.”

Mrs. Kelwyn said, with apparent irrelevance: “You can see that her curiosity is piqued by him. That’s what made her so severe. Is he going to stay long with the Shakers?”

“Really, I don’t know. It appears that they have no room for him, from what you have told me. And I don’t understand that they have any work.”

“They would let him stay somehow. You know they never turn anybody away. It would be simply impossible to let him come here. And I am very glad he didn’t stay the night.” After a while she resumed, briefly: “I’ve been afraid that the intimacy was advancing faster than the acquaintance would bear. It was very intimate, their getting the supper together, that way; it was domestic. And now, her condemning him so harshly! I don’t like that. Yes, I’m glad he’s gone.”

The stars of the summer sky twinkled in the pools of the road and glinted from the dripping foliage of the wayside bushes. As Emerance kept on toward the blackness of the woods, the wagon-track lost its distinctness and dwindled into two parallel ruts which the grass overhung the more densely from the drenching of the recent rain. Before he entered the shadow his shoes were soaked through, but the moisture gave him a pleasure, and he exulted in the rich solitude and gloom. Presently he was aware of not being alone. There was a damp smell of horses and the sound of their long, sighing breath, and then there was a burst of blasphemy from a man who was apparently swearing to himself.

“Hello, there! Where you goin’? You’ll be right bunt into my hossis, fust thing you know!”

Emerance stopped and retorted, “What are you doing here with your horses, anyway, in the middle of the road?”

The cursing voice responded: “Where’d you want me to be with my hossis? Something’s broke ‘th my wagon. Got a match?”

“No, I haven’t,” Emerance said. “But can’t I help you somehow?”

“I don’t know how you can.” The wet crunching of heavy boots advanced toward Emerance, and a figure larger than life in the dim luminosity hulked over him. “If I had a match or something! Do you know where we are?”

“Not far from the edge of the woods. I’ve just got into it.”

“Well, but whare else are we?”

“About half a mile from the Shakers’ South Family House.”

“Oh! You come from there?”

“Yes; I’m on my way to the Office to sleep.”

“I guess Fm goin’ to sleep here in the woods, for all I can make out,” the hulking figure said, disconsolately. “No use to feel,” the vague giant added. “If feelin’ could ha’ done it I’d ha’ b’en home an hour ago.”

“Are you Mr. Kite?” Emerance asked, not desisting from his tactile examination of the case as he went and came round the team.

“My name’s Kite.”

“Well, what seems to be the matter?”

“You tell.”

“Why don’t you drive home?”

“Can’t start the hoesis.”

“Balk?”

“No! Never!”

They both stood still.

“I’ll go back for a lantern,” Emerance said. “Or, wait a moment.” He poked in among the horses’ heels, and rattled at the trace-chains and swingletrees, where the brutes patiently suffered him. “Whoa! Hold on! Yes! Just what I thought. You’ve backed up and caught this off horse’s swingletree into the wheel and locked it, somehow, so it can’t move.”

“Well!” Kite stupidly commented. “I thought something was wrong there, but I couldn’t see a mite, and—”

He had recovered his courage, and he now resumed command of the situation. He called to his horse.

“Hen-ep!” but after a forward strain they stood still in their tracks. The ingenious accident had not happened without due intricacy.

“Hold on!” Emerance called to him. “I didn’t say I’d got it free yet. It’s caught so that I can’t loosen it unless you can get me something to see by, and even then—”

“Look here!” Kite said, lunging back to him, with a sound as of cattle breaking through underbrush. “If us two can’t pull it loose I’m goin’ to untackle the hossis and leave the wagon here till mornin’. Ain’t nobody goin’ to run off with it, the wheel locked that way.”

“Might be a good idea,” Emerance consented, and after they had vainly tugged at the swingletree together it came to that end. Kite untackled his horses and got them by the bridles. “Livin’ about here?” he asked, as a preliminary to parting with Emerance.

“I’m staying with the Shakers for a few days. I thought I might get some sort of farm work. But they’ve got nothing for me to do.”

“Used to farm work?”

“I was brought up to it.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

“Oh, I’ve taught school a good while.”

“I don’t see,” Kite said, sulkily, rather to himself than Emerance, “how they s’pose I’m goin’ to get that piece of English grass cut.” He made a start, calling over his shoulder to Emerance for good-night, “Well, so long!”

“Better let me Help you.”

“I guess I can manage my Hossis alone,” Kite answered, haughtily.

“I meant the English grass.”

“Oh! Well. Why, what the — This Hoss is lame!” Emerance came forward out of the blacker darkness to the horses’ heads.

“I’ll go back with you and we’ll look him over in the barn. I can get into the Shakers’ any time; perhaps you’ll give me a shake-down in your haymow.”

If the offer of help had been for anything but his horse Kite might have refused it, but as it was he neither consented nor refused. He merely said, letting Emerance take the bridle of the sound horse: “He’s a funny devil. Don’t mind if he tries to nip you. He don’t mean nothing by it, but you want to look out.”

They went along over the way Emerance had come, splashing through the miry ruts and brushing the wet from the wayside bushes. As they came in front of the Family house, Parthenope had just blown her lamp out and was debating with herself how much of her window she should put down and how much leave up, in precaution against its growing hotter or colder toward morning, when she heard a noise as of the snorting and plunging of horses, with the rattling of chains, and the leathern creaking of harness. Then she heard a voice which she knew for Kite’s saying, “You just ketch a-hold of this other feller a minute, and I’ll git my lantern here in the woodhouse.”

A voice which she knew for Emerance’s answered, “Look out; there’s a bear in there!”

“A bear? What’s a bear doin’ in my woodhouse?” She heard Emerance explaining and Kite threatening to have the bear and his leader out of that, he did not care what happened, and then Emerance protesting, and at last the tinkling note of Mrs. Kite calling, as from an open doorway: “Here’s your lantern, Alvin; I got it out for you. Where have you been? I kep’ supper for you; but it’s pretty cold now, I guess, or it will be by the time you get through with your hossis. That Raney there with you?”

“No, it’s a feller that helped me with the hossis, back here in the woods a piece. He’s goin’ to sleep in the bam; I want you should bring him out something to eat.”

“All right,” Mrs. Kite answered back. “But you want to be careful who you let sleep in the barn, Alvin. Does he smoke?”

“No, I don’t smoke, Mrs. Kite. And I’m not hungry. I shall do very well.”

“Why, that you, Mr. Emerance?”

“Quiet! Whoa! Whoa! These horses smell the bear. Take hold of his head, Mrs. Kite! Whoa there! Back up!”

The red blot of a lantern came wavering from the door below, and, dipping and jerking through the dark, indicated the progress of Mrs. Kite toward the place where the horses made their terror heard.

A vague envy pierced Parthenope’s heart. She dropped on her knees at the window and put her head out to see all that she could of the drama which was more audible than visible. She would have liked to be there in Mrs. Kite’s place, holding the lantern and helping the men. She wanted to call, “Wait for me, Mrs. Kite; I’m coming!” and she wanted to do this so much that it seemed to her as if she had done it. But she knew she had not, and after a cry from Mrs. Kite, “He’s got away!” and her husband’s blast of curses and the rush of a clashing and snorting horse, with the pursuit of a man who must have been Emerance from his distant call, “It’s all right; I’ve got him,” she did nothing bolder than put her head farther out of the window and try to see better. But she could only hear Emerance coming back with the Horse and then his renewed struggle in getting him past the woodhouse; Kite must have already got by with the other horse, for his swearing sounded farther off, in the direction of the barn.

The struggle of the man and the brute ended in the man’s triumph; the red blot of the lantern followed with Mrs. Kite toward the barn. It was a long time before it came flickering back, but Parthenope could have waited till morning. She heard voices lifted, the voice of Kite saying, “Well, don’t oversleep yourself,” and the voice of Mrs. Kite calling, “Well, we’ll have breakfast at five o’clock,” and then she realized that Emerance was going to sleep in the barn. It was not the hardship of it, but the shame of it that made her wish to shake her kindred from their sleep and shock them into the hospitality they ought to offer from their superfluity of shelter in the great empty Family house; and when the Kites had got back within eavesdropping at their door under her window she caught certain generalities from them which she could not help knowing had a particular bearing on the case.

“I hated to leave him out there,” Mrs. Kite said, “but there wa’n’t a place where I could think to put him; I’d have made Arthur get in with me, but the child’s bed wouldn’t have been big enough, and Albert and Raney have only got one between them. I shouldn’t mind the bats, but the rats runnin’ all over him! Well, some folks don’t seem to care for any one else.”

“No,” Kite agreed. “Want you to slave your life out for ‘em, but when it comes to doin’ for anybody else, they got both hoofs in the troth every time.”

“He’s full as well educated as they be. He talks as correct.”

“I don’t care about the talkin’. It’s the doin’ I look at. He stood by like a major. Hadn’t been for him, I guess I should ha’ slep’ in the woods to-night, let alone the barn. Well, it takes all kinds to make a world. One thing, I’m glad I ain’t their kind.”

“We should ha’ had to call ’em up out of their sleep,” Mrs. Kite tittered.

“Should we ha’ minded bein’ called out of our sleep?”

“No; but then we don’t bange round all day!”

“That’s about the size of it, I guess. If we’d wore ourselves out findin’ fault, we’d want our rest.”

The Kites shut themselves in with the comfort of their opinions, and Parthenope heard no more. She left that question of how much window she should keep open, and crept into bed and tried to think of what could be said in defence of the Kelwyns. She loved her cousin, and in spite of what she felt to be the crude justice of the case against her she was indignantly loyal to her, and the more so because she knew that she and not Kelwyn was chiefly at fault. But had not they both treated Emerance as they would not have treated one whose place in the world they were surer of? Had not she herself been a little too topping in some particulars of consciousness? She did not abate even in her actual humiliation all sense of that superiority which she felt toward people she did not exactly understand; and undoubtedly she did not understand this very anomalous Mr. Emerance. But she could have wished at last that she had not insisted on giving the bear coffee herself; and in the one-sided colloquy she now held with Mr. Emerance she at once confessed that she had been very headstrong, and made him say that he had not thought of her action as an instance of obstinacy but rather of admirable courage. She wished that she had the courage to knock at Mrs. Kelwyn’s door and tell her that Mr. Emerance was going to sleep in the barn; but this, for more reasons than one, would have taken more courage than she had. It seemed to her that she should never get to sleep, but there are few moral causes that can keep youth awake the whole night, and Parthenope slept long before morning.

The hay in the barn was the last year’s hay, and Emerance’s bed was not so sweet as it was soft. But it was not the first time he had slept on old hay in a barn; he had dreamed Fourths of July in when he was a boy on such a bed, and sometimes when he was an older boy, coming home from a dance later than he wished his father to know, he had crept into the mow over the stall where he had bedded his horse, and got a full night’s rest between three o’clock and six of the morning. His reminiscences did not so perfume the hay but its mustiness was too much for him till he turned on his back and faced the roof, where the stars looked back at him through the crevices of the old shingles. He suspected that the small chirpings and squeakings from the rafters were the vigils of bats, but they were as possibly the somnambulic notes of swallows; and the logic of the situation was that he would be fast asleep before the rats would leave the oats in the bins of the horses below and begin their question of him in his loft.

He wondered if the Shakers would let him help Kite cut that piece of English grass. He did not wish to stay with them unless he could be of use; but he wished to stay with them, if indeed it was they with whom he wished to stay. The horses champed their oats, and pounded the floor with their hoofs, and heaved deep sighs of comfort. As if with no interval, he heard a loud clamor of cocks and a shouting of robins, and a fabric of joyous sound seemed risen from the earth to the sky where now the sun and not the stars shone down through the roof.

When the Kelwyns gathered for their eight-o’clock breakfast, and Mrs. Kite had left their coffee on the table, she smoothly reappeared with a plate of gems in her hand.

“Mr. Emerance made ‘em, and he thought you would like a pan, and I been trying to keep ’em warm; but it’s so late that I don’t know as I have, exactly.”

At the fact unfolded, bit by bit, from Parthenope’s admissions, Kelwyn showed a helpless regret; but Mrs. Kelwyn defended herself. “It can’t be helped now. But you ought to have insisted upon his staying, Elmer. Then nothing of all this would have happened.”

In the late evening Kite came home alone from the English meadow. The Kelwyns heard him telling his wife that Mr. Emerance had gone to the Shakers’ for the night, and they felt a rise of self-respect in the fact that he was not going to sleep another night in the bam. They were able to convict him of a certain want of consideration for them in having slept there at all. But the next morning, when Kelwyn went over to the Shakers’ for his mail, he brought back word that Emerance had left by an early train; the Office Sisters thought, for Boston. Kelwyn was somehow crestfallen at the fact, and they all went rather dully through the

XIV

FOR Parthenope the unexpected drama of her first afternoon seemed far removed in time. The woodhouse stood open and empty, as if consciously showing the absence of the bear and his leader, whom Mrs. Kite reported seeing make off toward the woods in the morning after when she got up to kindle the kitchen fire. Only one thing happened in the interval now following to divert the girl’s thoughts from their centripetal tendency; and the excitement of this she shared with the whole household. It was the disappearance of a series of Mrs. Kite’s pies from the hanging-shelf in the cellar where she had put them on Saturday night with her own hands duly numbered. Day after day, pie after pie, they disappeared for nearly a week, and then ceased to disappear. The fact would have suggested tramps; but the cellar doors remained locked, and Kelwyn contended that though a succession of tramps might steal pies of Mrs. Kite’s make not the same tramp or tramps would continue to steal them. The hypothesis of rats was untenable because of the height of the shelf, but in view of the fact that there is nothing rats cannot do, it was decided that the pies had been taken by rats. When the pies were no longer taken the hypothesis of rats was rejected, and then the excitement passed into a lulling sense of mystery.

Kelwyn wrote at his lectures all the morning, and Mrs. Kelwyn worked at her mending in the afternoon. The girl took long rambles with the Kelwyn boys through the woods and over the fields, when they would rather have been about the mischief in which the Kite boy abounded; but they submitted to her companionship, and the Kite boy made his excursions on the old white horse alone. He had found pasturage for him in a wood-lot which he made believe his mother had given to him for that use, and in the horse’s toothless incapacity for grazing he had fed him with soft mushes when he could filch the cornmeal for them and escape with them from the kitchen door. He had a hardy contempt for such pleasures as straw-berrying in the meadow, where the grass crept thinly up into the shelter of the pines, and where, over the mat of the fallen needles, the vines hung their crimson berries in clusters like chimes of fairy bells. The possibility of chipmunks and woodchucks reconciled him somewhat more to blueberrying in the burnt lands, which the forest fires had left charred, but which a dense growth of bushes had almost consoled for their blight, between the Family house and the pond in the chestnut woods; when Francy Kelwyn sprang shrieking from a clump of blueberry bushes, with the blood streaming from a dozen punctures in his smooth-shorn head, where a swarm of yellow-jackets had stung him, the Kite boy seemed to feel that his sacrifice had met some recognition, and he joyously invited the sufferer to remain with him and fight the enemy.

Mrs. Kelwyn lived in an unremitting anxiety concerning him. He was the confidant of nature in the most occult intimacies of animal life; he assisted with the same zeal at the births and deaths of the barn-yard; and Mrs. Kelwyn, who kept her boys as well as she could from sharing his bolder knowledge, could not always prevent them from claiming the previous acquaintance of the pork and veal and poultry which came to the table. She felt him to be a dangerous part of the hardships which she and her family endured in the keeping of his, and as noxious to her children’s morals as his mother to their digestions.

Mrs. Kite had quite lapsed from the ideal which she had imagined from Emerance’s example, and was the worse for her efforts to remember the things she imagined from it. Yet, if she had not been a wonder of such satisfied inefficiency, certain qualities of here might have won upon the tolerance if not the liking of the Kelwyns; preposterous as it was, she sometimes affected, them as a lady, or as a conditional entity which would have evolved in time into some ornamental type rather than another. Her cooking could be ignored in the supplies of canned foods and of baker’s bread from the village grocery, and now and then it was ameliorated by Parthenope’s visits to the kitchen, which Mrs. Kite suffered with placid indifference and Mrs. Kelwyn permitted with protests against the violation of principle involved. For the girl they were tinged with pensive associations from the gay afternoon and evening when she had been the handmaid of Emerance in the preparation of the picnic feasts of the memorable day which had ended in such inconclusion.

The week she had meant to spend with her cousins passed, but at a little urgence she stayed on. She could not exactly say that she had come to them merely for a fresh point of view; that would have been rather ungracious; but she said that she had been wondering whether it might not be better for her aunt’s health, and usefuler for her own art, to go to Europe for the summer, and spend the winter there. She wished to talk the matter over with the Kelwyns; for the present, however, they all put it by.

XV

THE fame of Parthenope’s coffee-making had spread from Mrs. Kite to the Shakers, and one afternoon some of the Sisters came, at Mrs. Kelwyn’s invitation, to see the girl make it and to drink it when it was made. Coffee, in their ethics, was not quite a sin; it was more like a venial excess; if now and then it must be permitted, as in their experience it was, then they might be partially redeemed from error if the coffee were very good. They clustered, dovelike in their soft drab, around the table where Parthenope watched the machine, and admired her beauty and grace and fashion in muted asides to Mrs. Kelwyn. When the smoking coffee spilled from the spout they broke into subdued cries of wonder, and when the girl filled their cups with it, one after another, and soothed its sparkle from the bottle of cream which they had brought with them for a present, they felt sure that such coffee as that could not hurt anybody; Sister Saranna said so, and they all said so.

They each took more than one cup, in the difficulty of making the coffee and the Peake & Frean wafers, with which their hostess surprised them, come out evenly together; and they stayed nearly the whole afternoon talking. In the security of their distance from the ground-floor ell, where the Kites lived, they talked of the Kites, and so justly and kindly that Mrs. Kelwyn could join them in the justice if not the kindness.

Sister Saranna talked the most because the others deferred, and not because she wished. She owned that she had never wanted Brother Jasper to keep the Kites after he had tried in vain to make them prepare for their guests; but there did not seem to be any one else. “Jasper was two weeks trying to get him to put up shelves for you in the milk-room instead of the cellar, where the dust from the beams used to speckle the cream so.”

“Used!” Mrs. Kelwyn exclaimed. “Why, it does so yet!”

“I want to know!” Saranna lamented. “And the butter?”

“Worse than ever. The last churning she let stand three days without working it, and it was so rancid that we could not eat it and had to get some from the village.”

Saranna was dumb. “I’m ‘most afraid,” she murmured, at last, “to ask anything about the beds.”

“We have attended to those ourselves, Sister Saranna,” Mrs. Kelwyn returned, with patience that she felt the sister ought to feel was saintly. “I cannot understand these people; and I hardly dare have Mr. Kelwyn speak to the man any more, he swears so, and he thinks that every complaint we make is an imputation on his wife’s character. He considers her perfect, and she’s just as devoted to him. Of course I like that in them, but their standing by each other doesn’t help us at all; it makes the situation worse, if anything. Don’t they wish to please us?”

“Why, she was quite proud at the idea of having you come, and of getting the Family house to live in after you go in the fall. I can’t make it out any more than you. But sometimes I think we ain’t quite fair to expect all women to be good housekeepers. Some of them are born to it and some ain’t, any more than men to the same trade, and they can’t seem to learn because they don’t take any interest. Don’t you think she’s got pretty manners?”

“Beautiful!” Mrs. Kelwyn conceded, in some excess, secure of her other grounds against Mrs. Kite. “She has almost the manners of a lady; she has repose.”

“Too much,” one of the younger Sisters ventured, and the rest tittered helplessly.

“Well, we must see what can be done,” Saranna ended the matter, and this gave Mrs. Kelwyn the courage which the good-will of the Shakers always gave her. When the Sisters were gone she and Parthenope talked them over, and agreed that no behavior they had seen in the world outside was so charming as theirs.

Mrs. Kelwyn could not formulate their joint sense of it; but she accepted the notion of Parthenope, who asked: “Don’t you think it must be their sincerity? I kept noticing, all the time, how they could express every shade of politeness in the simplest way without any of our compliments, and how they could make Nay sound as sweet and kind as Yee, I suppose they mean Yea.”

“Yes; I noticed it, too,” Mrs. Kelwyn sighed, “and when I could forget the Kites I enjoyed it. How those wretched Kites spoil everything! They’re as much a blight on the society of the Shakers as they are on the weather or the scenery. I don’t suppose,” she lamented, “that people who enjoy nice natural things, as Mr. Kelwyn and I do, were ever so baffled. When I can get the Kites out of my mind I’m radiantly happy.”

She expressed the idea of her radiant happiness in a wail that made the girl turn away her face. It would  Lave been cruel to laugh at Her cousin; and she felt the pity of her case the more when Mrs. Kelwyn owned: “The day I got your letter saying you were coming, I tried to make Mr. Kelwyn stop you; I was ashamed to have you find us in this squalor; but if you hadn’t come I don’t know what I should have done. You may be sure, Thennie, I appreciate your staying on.”

The example of the Shakers’ sincerity had so far wrought with the girl that she felt she must say, “Yes, but you know I oughtn’t to impose on your good nature.”

“Oh, impose!”

“I mean,” Parthenope added, more honestly, “Aunt Julia will be expecting me back any day, now. She’ll want to be getting off to Pigeon Cove, and she’ll need my help.”

“Oh, don’t go!” Mrs. Kelwyn entreated, with sudden tears. “I can’t let you — yet! I’ll write to Aunt Julia—”

“No! That wouldn’t do. But I will write, Cousin Carry; and she’ll let me stay, I know, till you’re more settled.” They kissed each other, and her burst of tears was such relief to Mrs. Kelwyn, and Mrs. Kite had so far mastered the art of toasting the baker’s bread without charring it, and had by such a happy chance brought hot water for steeping the tea on the table, that, with their chipped beef and their potted jam, the Kelwyn family were able to sup in self-respect verging on pride. Their mother put the boys to bed in a cheerfulness they could not share, and when they had said their prayers after her she left Parthenope to sit with them and keep the dark off till they fell asleep.

She was still more heartened before she slept by something Kelwyn had forgotten to tell her, though she was indignant with him for forgetting when he did tell her.

“I saw Brother Jasper to-day, and he’s found a family to put in the place of the Kites.”

“He has?” A note of joy came into Mrs. Kelwyn’s voice.

“Yes. The man has been in the Shakers’ employ and the woman is an excellent cook. Should you want to go away if they come?”

“That certainly puts a different face on the matter. But are you sure they will come?”

“The Shakers are to let me know to-morrow. Then they will arrange with the Kites.”

“I feel sorry for them,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, with dutiful compunction.

“Oh, so do I. But I feel sorry for myself and my family, too,” he said.

“It isn’t,” she reflected, “as if they had tried to do better, They really don’t seem to want to. And, as you say, we ought to consider ourselves.”

“Did I say that?”

“You the same as said it.”

Kelwyn hoped that somehow he had not, but he did not insist.

XVI

ONE afternoon, a few days later, Elder Nathaniel came with a bunch of sturdy flowers in his hand — coxcomb, and prince’s - feather, and balsam, and four-o’clock, and marigold. “For the young woman,” he said, gravely, when Kelwyn, whom he found lying on the grass under the elms, rose to greet him.

“For my cousin? She is out with the children somewhere.”

“Yee. You can give them to her later.”

“Well, then, take a stretch of turf,” Kelwyn said, and the two lay down together on the grass. It was becoming a habit of theirs when Elder Nathaniel called for a half-hour of the philosophic converse he loved. “The Sisters were much pleased with their visit.” He turned his delicate aquiline profile toward Kelwyn. “The coffee was pretty strong, I guess.”

“Miss Brook does make it rather strong. Were they excited?”

“They were still talking — a little. Friend Kelwyn, we are all much concerned that you are not more comfortable here. I did not think when I mentioned this house to you in the spring that it would be so bad.”

“Why, it might be worse,” Kelwyn said, by way of owning that it might be much better.

“We all tell Jasper that he did not use the best judgment in putting Friend Kite and his wife in to care for you, but he says he used the best judgment he had at the time. He is making careful inquiries about the people he has found to replace them, and as soon as he is satisfied we will make the change.”

Kelwyn waited a moment before he said: “I don’t feel quite easy about putting the Kites out. They are not fit to stay, of course, and there isn’t a day when they keep their agreement fully. They don’t know how; apparently they don’t want to. Sometimes we think they want to force us out.”

“Nay, we couldn’t allow that,” Elder Nathaniel protested.

“It all seemed very simple in prospect,” Kelwyn went on. “We had only to say, ‘You don’t do and you must go.’”

“Yee?” the Elder prompted.

“Of course we expected that it could be arranged so that they should lose nothing—”

“That could be arranged.”

“But that doesn’t seem so conclusive or inclusive as it did in prospect. There is something besides their interest to be considered. Their natural pride is to be considered, their unnatural self-respect — for they have no reason to respect themselves in their failure with us — and their real disgrace before the community if we should turn them out.”

“Yee,” Elder Nathaniel gently acquiesced. He added, sadly, “Life is not very logical, Friend Kelwyn.”

“No, or else its logic is in the consequences, not in the actions. Of course, consequences flow from causes, but the actions that relate the consequences to the causes often seem to be of a quality quite different from either.”

“Yee; but it is in them that our individual responsibility lies. We have nothing to do with causes or consequences. They seem to belong to God.”

Kelwyn smiled. “Well, that is why I feel slow to act, even in such a simple case as turning these miserable people out of a house where they have forfeited all right to remain. At any rate, I shall want to know fully about the couple that Brother Jasper proposes to put in their place.”

Elder Nathaniel forbore to recognize the inconsequence, if he saw it, which Kelwyn’s decision implied. He only said: “He is asking about them. We don’t want to make another mistake, either,” and then he said, with no apparent sense of relevance, “Friend Emerance has come back.”

“Emerance has come back!” Kelwyn echoed, with a joyousness which he could have proved no more logical than some other things in life. “When?”

“By the early train this morning. He walked up from the depot before breakfast.”

“Is he going to stay with you?”

“Nay; I don’t know that. There is nothing for him to do, and we have no room for permanent guests in the Office. And Friend Emerance does not give us the hope that he will ever be gathered in.”

“I shall be very glad to see him again,” Kelwyn said, ignoring the fact which Elder Nathaniel had owned with a sigh. He tried to continue the conversation on the impersonal, the psychological, the sociological terms, but it would not do. Probably Elder Nathaniel felt his inattention, of which Kelwyn himself was hardly aware, for presently he sat up on the grass, and presently he went away, as Kelwyn suspected, with an obscure pang, sooner than he had meant to go. He watched the Shaker’s quaint bowed figure down the road, and then he went in-doors to his wife, whose name he called before him, as if impatient to speak with her.

Parthenope, with the two boys, had wandered another way, and found herself going in the direction of a little roadside school-house which she had already noticed in her rambles. When they came up to it she saw some wagons and buggies hitched to the nearest trees and fence-posts, and she was sensible of some unwonted commotion in the simple place. As she hesitated before the door she heard voices unlike those of the routine recitations, and she saw the room fairly filled with people in hats and bonnets who were clearly visitors. A pretty girl of her own age, with locks matching the gold fillings in her teeth which chowed when she smiled sweetly upon Parthenope, came to the door.

“Won’t you come in?” she said. “We’re having our examinations for the end of the term, and the School Committee are conducting them just now. I’m the teacher. I should be much pleased to have you come in.”

She spoke with a little stiffness in her dignity which Parthenope found charming, and, after looking round at the eager faces of the boys, she said, “Oh, thank you,” and went in toward the seats against the wall to which the teacher led her.

“We are pretty nearly through with the examinations,” the teacher whispered, “and we are going to have a little scene — I don’t know what to call it exactly — something that the boys are going to represent. The young lady who is examining the children now is the first lady we have ever had elected on the School Committee here, and we think she’s splendid.”

The teacher nodded sweetly to Parthenope, and went forward to the platform where the school committee-girl sat with two committee-men, and took her place beside her. Parthenope thought them interesting contrasts — the pretty teacher, slender and erect and smiling on all with birdlike turns of her little head, and the committee-girl, to whom she seemed willingly subordinated, with close-cropped hair and a large-buttoned, loose jacket, wanting only the bifurcation of her plain skirt to seem a square - shouldered, short young man. She had a quick, useful, businesslike face, and she put with such force and distinctness the questions she had to ask in geography and arithmetic as to bring out what was best in the twenty-five or thirty children, mostly boys, answering from their regulation public-school desks, or working out the sums set them on the breadth of black-painted wall at the end of the room.

The place was garlanded with ground-pine caught up with knots and branches of the pink and white laurel still billowing the woods with their bloom. In the brief intermission which now followed the visitors talked together in low tones, and admired the decorations till the teacher rapped authoritatively upon her desk and said, “The scene we are going to have is out of the tragedy of Rollo. I don’t know as you’ve ever read it,” the teacher added, in a low murmur, to Parthenope, to whom she seemed to attach herself in a special hospitality, perhaps because they were both girls, and both young. “Well, I don’t know as I’ve read it all myself,” she hurried on, cutting herself short as two of the larger boys came out on the platform from some room behind it, and in their imagined costumes of ancient Peruvian and mediaeval Castilian began their dialogue.

“Inform, me, friend, is Alonso, the Peruvian, confined in this dungeon?”

“He is.”

“What is his fate?”

“He dies at sunrise.”

They went on with the passages which school-boys for a hundred years have recited upon like occasions, and then, with awkward bows to their audience, bumped one another out of the door by which they had entered.

The teacher rose and said, “If any of the friends would like to offer remarks, we should be pleased to have them.”

For a while no one stirred in response. Then, with a slight, nervous clearing of the throat, Emerance got to his feet in the place where Parthenope had all the time been subliminally aware he was sitting. She thought his thin, conscientious face, narrowing from the cheek-bones to the chin, which he fingered with the gesture somehow very familiar to her, was beautiful, and his figure, supported by one hand on the top of the chair before him, had grace in spite of its lean angularity.

“I should like,” he said, abruptly, “to have those boys come back a moment.”

“Why, certainly,” the teacher answered, in a tone not so acquiescent as her words. She looked at the committee-girl as if referring the matter to her, and at a nod from her she went to the door and returned with the Peruvian and the Castilian, hurriedly rehabilitated as to their costume and clearly much mystified.

“Now, boys,” Emerance briskly accosted them, “you aid that scene very well, in the way it has always been done. You had your parts perfectly, and you conveyed the sense. But now I want you to think how you would have spoken and acted if you had really been the friend of a man who was going to be put to death to-morrow morning, and the guard of his prison, who respected and pitied him. Then I want you to do it just as you feel it. Do you think you can?”

“I don’t believe we can,” the friend of Alonso confessed.

“Nobody could do it that way,” the Spanish sentinel was sure.

“Well, let’s try,” Emerance persisted. “Just do it as you think two boys would do it.”

“Boys wouldn’t talk that way,” one of them said. “If a fellow was to say, c Inform me, friend,’ the rest would say he was a fool.”

The other boy explained, “It’s poetry; or, anyway, elocution.”

“Oh, it’s elocution, I know. I’m not sure it’s poetry,” Emerance said. “But try it in the prose that boys talk.”

The boys grinned and looked at the teacher, who referred their glance to the committee-girl. She said: “I should like to have you try, boys. You’re not obliged to if you don’t wish.”

The Castilian answered for himself and the other: “We couldn’t do it, Miss Grove. Somebody would have to put it in common talk for us, and then maybe we could get it by heart and say it. But we couldn’t turn it into that kind of talk ourselves, right here before you. It would be ridic’lous.”

The committee - girl in her turn passed the matter with a glance to Emerance, who said: “You’re quite right, my boy. The fault is in the man who wrote the piece. He had a bit of nature to express, but he couldn’t do it naturally. It isn’t reasonable to expect you to improve on him offhand.”

He sat down, and the teacher murmured to Parthenope, “How very strange!” After a blank hesitation throughout the room, she rose and said: “If no one else has any remarks to offer, the exercises are concluded. Children, you must all be here in your places September 15th, at nine o’clock. Now you are dismissed.”

The little assembly dispersed with difficulty. Among the visitors every one was talking about the recent occurrence, with looks at Emerance, whom they left apart. The boys and girls made their way out, and their mocking shouts and laughter were heard from the road as they ran away in their different directions.

“What is his fate?”

“He dies at sunrise.”

“Say it in boy-talk!” one of the boys called far off, and jeers came back with hysterical shrieks from the girls. But the tumult had died away when Parthenope found herself outside with the two Kelwyns and confronted with Emerance’s absent-minded looks. She was not sure that his part in the incident had been altogether dignified. Perhaps that was because it had apparently brought him into ridicule with these boys; but she resented the ridicule for him, and what Emerance had said interested her. She would like to talk with him about it and convince him that his point of view was not artistic; there was the ideal to be considered in everything, and there were other points which she believed he had not considered as much as she had. But this went out of her mind when he spoke.

“Why, I didn’t know you were here!” he exclaimed, with a pleasure that imparted itself to her.

She put out her hand, and he clasped it eagerly. “Yes, I was there near the teacher. I didn’t see you till you rose.” She felt that she ought to have said “quite see you,” but it was too late, now.

“Are you going home? May I go with you?” he asked, and she felt herself singled out for public notice by his acquaintance, till gradually they made their way through the crowd and up the road together. They found a good many strawberries beside the walls, and they stopped to help the children gather them. At one place he got over the wall and stripped some leaves from a wild-grape vine, which she pinned together with little twigs into baskets to hold the berries. While he helped her fill them he was asking her about the people and events at the Family house, and telling her about his being in Boston. It had been very hot, there, for several days, and he said she was fortunate to be in the country, out of it. She said it had been hot in the country, too.

It was her chance to make that point about the ideal, but she must have made it very ineffectively, for he only looked dreamily at her when she recurred, abruptly and, she felt, awkwardly, to the incident in the school-house.

“Yes,” he assented, without apparent consciousness of his assent; “it’s an experiment I should like to try. I’ve thought of it a good deal in my teaching.”

“What experiment?” she asked.

“Oh!” He came back from his distance. “I haven’t touched your point. But the experiment I mean is the attempt to teach dramatically. All children delight in make-believe. Why shouldn’t they make-believe with facts instead of fancies?”

“I don’t believe I understand you,” Parthenope said, awed by the mystery, but still authoritatively. “I don’t believe you could apply the dramatic method to geography or arithmetic, for example.”

“Don’t you?” he deferred; but he had the courage to say: “Those were just the studies in which I thought it could be best employed: a commercial transaction, on any large or small scale, with buying and selling, and the necessary figuring, would interest the children. Or a lot of them coming from a far country or from round the world, and looking up their travels on maps and globes. Don’t you see?”

Parthenope shook her head. “It wouldn’t be either good playing or good learning; I’m afraid the children would care more for the fun than the useful knowledge. No, Mr. Emerance, it strikes me as fantastic.”

“It isn’t, it isn’t!” he protested. “I can convince you—”

“No, no,” she laughed. “You think it’s practicable because you wish to, and you wish to because you care more for the playing than for the teaching.”

“If I believed that — You throw light on the very point that has been pressing itself home with me. Sometimes I should like to talk it all out with you.”

“Well, there’s nothing I like better than throwing light on points,” she said, with the levity with which women know how to defer situations threatening a premature gravity.

He submitted, and they climbed back over the wall. While they stood waiting for the boys to accomplish their vainglorious feat of getting over unhelped, they heard the sound of wheels, and an open buggy came round a turn of the road. There were two women in the buggy — the teacher and the committee - girl. The teacher was driving, and Parthenope decided that she was the more practical. She seemed as if she were not going to stop after nodding to Parthenope, who said, “Won’t you have some strawberries?” and put up the leaf-basket she was carrying, to the open but politely silent dismay of the Kelwyn boys. “You were very kind to me,” she added, as if some justification were necessary. She was willing that her superior breeding should make itself felt in a superfluity of gratitude.

“Whoa!” the teacher called to her horse. “How beautiful they are! Oh, thank you! It was very nice of you to come in. We like to have people come to the examinations.”

She was pleased, but if she was impressed by Parthenope’s politeness she was not suppressed.

Emerance went round to the other side of the buggy, which began to move on again, and Parthenope, through her own talk with the teacher, heard the committee-girl saying: “I was very much interested by what you said to the boys. I’m afraid it wasn’t much understood.”

“I didn’t expect it to be entirely,” Emerance answered. “But I chose to take my chance. We must try to say something for that side when we can.”

“Oh yes,” the girl agreed. “And you mustn’t be discouraged by me. Perhaps they will understand it afterward.” But she seemed a little shy of Emerance, as a queer person of distinction, and she added to the teacher, “Nelly, I guess if we don’t hurry we shall be late for tea.”

“Well, I should say as much!” the teacher answered, gayly. “It was nearly five when we left the school, and it’s full five now. Well, good - afternoon,” she called over her shoulder to Parthenope when the horse had started forward at a pull of the reins.

In like manner the committee - girl called back to Emerance, “Well, good-afternoon,” and he and Parthenope called after them, “Good-bye.”

“Those are very able girls. They are both going to the Centennial, I hear,” he said; and though “able girls” seemed a funny phrase to Parthenope, she did not remark on it.

“Yes?” she prompted him.

“I went in,” He continued, “before the examinations began, and they showed me some of the children’s work in drawings. They were after nature — leaves; and there were geometrical designs; very creditable. I thought their pupils were well forward in all their studies; didn’t you?”

“I only got in for the ‘scene,’” Parthenope answered; and now she thought he would tell her why he had been so particularly interested in that. But he did not. He only said:

“The committee man — or girl — said there used to be sixty little ones in that school, and now there are barely half. But the population all about is decreasing. It makes it rather melancholy, don’t you think, to find so few houses?”

“Yes, indeed. And in the woods you come on old chimneys and cellars and bits of garden. I’m afraid of ghosts when I see them.”

“They are the ghosts,” the young man said. Parthenope had been deciding that Emerance would not have talked so exclusively to the committee - girl and now so much more of her if his mind had not been on the pretty teacher. She was pretty; Parthenope was not going to hide it from herself, and, indeed, she did not know why she should.

She recurred to the teacher openly: “I’ve been trying to think whether her rivalling the morning hour, with all that gold in her mouth, is disfiguring or not. Perhaps it’s charming, or makes her the more charming.”

Emerance gave her a candid stare.

“Oh! You haven’t followed my leaps and bounds back to that pretty teacher,” she exulted, without knowing she exulted, and in her joy she had strength to demand, “What is that point you want the light of wisdom on?” But again she saw that Emerance had not followed her.

When he did arrive, with a man’s successive steps, he said: “Oh! Perhaps I should have to talk too much about myself.”

“I can understand why you should hate that. There’s nothing I dislike so much. But I should like to hear when you’re ready.”

“I sha’n’t forget your promise,” he said.

“And I,” she challenged him, “shouldn’t mind keeping it at once.”

He hesitated, and then he said, thoughtfully, “It’s always a question how much good you can do by interfering with people when you find them going wrong.”

“Like those boys, you mean? If you want me to be perfectly frank, Mr. Emerance, I think there were two chances of being absurd to one of being useful in that case.”

“And you thought me absurd?”

“I didn’t say that; I say you took the chances.”

“And one ought never to take such chances?”

“I didn’t say that, either.” She stiffened a little at his pursuit.

“But you think one oughtn’t to act on impulse?”

“I can only say for myself,” she returned, “that I never do.” She remembered the incident of giving the coffee to the bear in time to save herself. “That is, I never do as a rule. And I believe it’s the only safe rule. One’s impulse may turn out inspiration, but it’s taking chances, and one oughtn’t to take chances. That’s gambling!” Having levelled him with the dust, she relented from her superiority gently, almost tenderly. Certainly she relented encouragingly in asking, “Don’t you think so?”

“I never thought of it in that way,” he owned.

“Well,” she conceded, “I don’t know that I ever did myself. But I can look back and see that I must always have been governed by some such principle, and if that is so, oughtn’t you to regard impulse as something coming within the region of ethics? Oughtn’t you to regard it as immoral?” Parthenope had been in the habit of posing girls with this sort of talk. But in her heart it rather surprised her that she should have posed a young man by it when Emerance said: “I should like to think the point over. I shouldn’t like to assent to it — it’s interesting — on impulse.”

“Oh no,” she returned, with bright tolerance. Then she did not know but he was making fun of her.

XVII

MRS. KITE, sitting at her door in the long leisure of the summer afternoon, called to Parthenope as she came round the corner of the house with Emerance and the boys: “Your folks have gone to the village to get some baker’s bread. I forgot to set mine last night. Why, Mr. Emerance! When did you get back?” She came gracefully forward to meet him, and he took off his hat to her as they shook hands.

“This morning. I hope you’re all well, Mrs. Kite.”

“I guess we’re always well,” she tinkled back. “Mr. Kite will be glad to see you; and Raney and Albert, too.”

“Has Mr. Kite got any work for me?” Emerance asked, laughing.

I don’t know as he has. But you better stay to supper and ask.”

“No, Mrs. Kite,” Parthenope interposed, with an impulse from her old indignation at her cousins’ inhospitality to Emerance, “he’s engaged to take supper with us.”

“All right,” Mrs. Kite easily assented; “first come, first served. I don’t know as I have got very much to offer visitors this evening.”

Emerance looked from one to the other with a troubled countenance. Mrs. Kite turned away, smiling contentedly, and Parthenope from her doorstep, as she sank down on it, asked, easily, from her satisfied superiority, “Won’t you Have a threshold, Mr. Emerance?”

“Why, yes, thank you.” He took his place on the wide stone lintel and faced her from the door-jamb opposite that against which she leaned, with the trouble still in his eyes.

She laughed with sudden misgiving. “You didn’t like my implying that I had asked you to stay already?”

“Well, I can’t say that. I liked it well enough; but that is one of the things I am uncertain about.” The two boys came to the girl’s knee and asked, successively, “May we go and play with Arthur?”

“Yes, run along,” she consented, and when the boys ran along, in that order of their years which regulated their whole lives, she pressed her question.

“I was thinking,” he answered, “about the Shakers. They have the perpetual comfort of saying the thing that is.”

“And not even implying the thing that is not?” she pursued him, in his reluctance.

“Now you are too hard on me! I didn’t mean to—”

“Let me see what you were thinking? I know you didn’t. But isn’t there such a thing as carrying the truth too far? I believe you often hurt people’s feelings by that, and cruelty is as bad as fibbing. Worse.”

“The Shakers never hurt people’s feelings; they are never cruel.”

“Why don’t you join them, then?”

“Ah,” he said, “that is a hard question.”

“Then you are quibbling as badly as I was.” He looked at her with a knot of mystification between his brows. Suddenly she started forward. “What in the world is that?”

He glanced round over his shoulder, and then rose, the more fully to take in the apparition. A large van, drawn by two horses, was coming up the road out of the shelter of the woods, and as it drew nearer it showed, gayly painted, a framework of wood under a dark tenting of oilcloth, all in very good repair, and with a certain consciousness of state in its leisurely advance. “It looks,” Emerance said, absently, “like a circus-wagon strayed or stolen.”

“No,” Parthenope exulted, getting to her feet, “it’s a gypsy-van. Where are the boys? They mustn’t miss it.”

They had not missed it. They had followed it out of the shadow of the woods, and Arthur Kite, who was with them, was already testing the temper of the swarthy men and of the three dogs which had accompanied it, a dog on either side, and another dog keeping sullenly under it.

The van stopped before the door, and Mrs. Kite came out to welcome it. Because she did so, perhaps, Parthenope remained standing on her threshold, with Emerance below her. “You want to come and see how nice it is inside,” Mrs. Kite called to them. “It’s a regular room.”

But Parthenope sat down again, and from the back door of the van the figure of a large, elderly woman descended and came toward her. She was very dark, with coal-black eyes and coal-black hair turning ashen. She wore a flowing dress of white with a green calash bonnet, and a green barbaric scarf loosely twisted round her neck; yet higher on her throat she had a deep necklace of branchy coral, and she bore a various burden of baskets and trays of laces, cheap jewels, combs, brushes, soaps, and many knickknacks. Without speaking, she first spread her treasures on the grass, and when she had disposed of them in a glittering array, to which her eyes and her white teeth and the jewels in her ears gleamed responsive, she invited the pretty miss to buy, squatting behind her wares and hugging her knees with hands which she detached now and then to take up the beads, or the machine laces which she pretended to have made herself, and dangling them before the girl. As she offered them she talked, answering willingly enough, at the young man’s prompting, that she had lived twenty years in Canada, and had come from England, and this was her first trip in the United States. She was quite patient of Parthenope’s refusals to buy, and said: “Look into our wagon, miss. My granddaughter is there; she will read your hand.”

“Your granddaughter?” Parthenope answered. “Don’t you want to look in?” she turned to Emerance, as if to justify her own weakness by his yielding, too.

“Why, yes,” he assented, following her quick flight from the doorway to the van.

It was luxuriously appointed, with cushioned seats, cotton lace curtains, and mirrors. A comfortable bed was set crosswise of the rear, and on the thickly rugged floor, with her back to a frowzy boy on the front seat, crouched a lazy-eyed little maid, with her feet drawn close up under her. While the boy spoke now and then to the dogs in his Romany, she answered Emerance’s questions in indifferent but not unamiable composure, to the effect chiefly that she was sixteen years old, and the wagon cost five hundred dollars, and her father dealt in horses. The man had untethered two colts from the tail of the wagon, and, holding by their halter - ropes, was letting them graze beside it. The old woman pressed toward the door with her trays and baskets. “Let her tell your fortune, my pretty young lady. She knows the stars. She has got charms, and if there’s anything bad in your stars the charm will make it all right. You needn’t be afraid. I can see by looking at you that you will be very happy.”

The gypsy girl rose and came nearer. “You must put out your hand,” she bade Parthenope, who glanced at Emerance’s grave face, in which she read misgiving. She perversely put out her hand in resentment of his tacit interference.

The gypsy studied it. “You will be married, and your husband will be a tall, thin man, with gray eyes and light hair.” Parthenope was conscious of the impudent portraiture of Emerance, but he seemed not to recognize it. “You will have to look out, because he will be very strong-willed, and you are set in your ways, too. You will quarrel and you will want to part, but you will make it up and live happy. He will die before you do, but so old you won’t want to marry again. Fifty cents.”

The demand came like a part of the prediction, and it was a moment before Parthenope realized her indebtedness. At the same time, she realized her insolvency with an alarm that extorted from her the cry, “But I haven’t any money!”

She had given her money to Kelwyn for safe-keeping on her arrival, going to him for her small occasions. Now he was away, and she knew that Mrs. Kelwyn had no change lying about.

“You can borrow it, pretty lady,” the old gypsy urged, caressingly. The girl crept back to her place and lounged there, looking at Parthenope with a smile of indifference.

“I will ask Mrs. Kite for the money,” Parthenope said. But she came back from her errand rueful. “The landlady’s husband is away. But my cousin, who has my money, will be back soon from the village and I will pay you.”

The old woman said something in Romany to the man with the colts; he answered gruffly. “He says we have got to go now; we can’t wait. The charm comes for the fifty cents, too; it will keep the quarrel from being bad.”

Emerance stood silently looking on. “Mr. Emerance,” Parthenope said, desperately, “will you lend me fifty cents till my cousins come back? I have been very foolish and I am ashamed. But—”

She stopped at a look of dismay in his face as great as her own. “Yes, yes,” he began. “Very gladly, if—”

He was feeling in his pockets, one after another — those eight or ten pockets with which his clothes seemed so needlessly equipped. It was still the day of fractional currency, and from one pocket he brought forth a small wad of greenish paper worth twenty-five cents; from another a ten-cent note, and from yet another two five-cent notes; it was apparently all his store, but a desperate search revealed a lurking nickel, and the sum was made up and put into the palm of the gypsy, which, it seemed to Parthenope, had been stretched out all the time. They both drew a great sigh.

The gypsy smiled. “Have your fortune told, too, gentleman!”

“Thank you,” Emerance replied; “I can’t afford it.”

As they walked back to their place on the threshold, Parthenope, with her face averse, seemed not to hear him as he said, “I will never try that again.” He went on, as if philosophically interested in his explanation: “I had the notion of bringing no money with me and frankly living on what I could earn by any work I happened to pick up. But it won’t answer. It’s too much like living off the country, as the tramps do.” —

“Yes,” she said, “I have been living off the country — like a tramp. Thank you, Mr. Emerance,” and she faced him flushed with a resentment that she knew was not real.

Apparently he knew it, too, for he was not abashed. “You don’t mean that,” he said, simply.

She was not to be outdone in frankness, if it came to that. “No; I said it because I was ashamed of my stubbornness and heedlessness.”

He protested. “Oh, I should have liked to try it myself if I had supposed I had the money,” he said.

“You didn’t think of my borrowing of you?”

“No, I didn’t think of that. I’m glad I had it to lend. It was a rather narrow escape.”

He did not laugh, as Parthenope now thought He might, to relieve the tension. Perhaps he would not feel it respectful to laugh, and that was nice of him. It was so nice that it encouraged her to take the aggressive with him again. “You seem to be quite in the experimental stage,” she mocked.

“I like to try things, yes,” he assented. “Don’t you?”

“Girls mustn’t. A girl couldn’t go about the country alone, even with her pocket — if she had one — full of money. I don’t believe that the Shakers themselves would take in a destitute girl if she strayed up to the Office door. Are you going to stay with them?”

“They have no work for me. I am going to ask Mr. Kite for farm-work, and then, if he has none for me, I shall inquire round among the other farmers.” Women like to take liberties with spirits that they feel they can trust any lengths, and Parthenope now abandoned Herself to the opportunity. “Shall you tell them you can sleep in the barn?”

“I wouldn’t specify it,” Emerance returned from the gravity which he had put on. “But I would rather sleep in some of their barns than some of their bedrooms. There’s more air.”

She came to him from another point: “I thought you were going to start a cooking-school for summer boarders.”

“Yes; I should really like to do that, but I haven’t found the right place.”

“You might,” she went on, “get the Shakers to give you a room and invite the country people in to learn. Only they wouldn’t come. No, you must begin with summer boarders. Why don’t you go down to Ellison, below here? There are lots of summer boarders there. But I believe you want to get them in a camp where they won’t have anything to eat but what you give them. Well, the Shaker woods, here, are big enough for a camp, and they would lend them to you.” He fell in with her joking: “The difficulty would be to get the summer boarders to camp; that would be harder than getting them to cook.”

“Yes, but if you like to try things! Do you mean to say that you expect to go experimenting through life?” she said, reverting to a former point.

“I hardly know what I expect.”

“It seems to me that the first thing is to have a definite ideal,” Parthenope urged, with a New England ideal indefinitely coming to the top in her speech.

“I’m not sure. But how can you have a definite ideal without experimenting for it?”

“You can think it out beforehand. Nothing was ever accomplished without a high ideal.” When she had said this it seemed to her that it was not absolutely true. So she hedged: “Of course there are a great many good things that one does from the impulse of the moment. But could you have that impulse without having the ideal?”

He did not answer directly. “I think you would have to experiment for a definite ideal.”

“No, you say that because you like experimenting. You said so yourself, or the same as said.”

“Yes, I do like it. That’s what makes life interesting. It’s all an experiment — life is.”

“Yes, and when you come to the end of life” — in her twenty-seventh year this seemed to her still ages away—” you have your experiment for your pains.”

“But you have been interested all the time.”

“I call that pagan.” She did not know why she called it so, but her words sounded convincing to her.

“I’m not sure the pagans were always wrong,” he said.

“They were wrong in the essentials,” she decided.

“Were they?” he asked.

“It doesn’t make them right to ask if they were.” They talked of various things, which she was always bringing back to the concrete, to herself and to him, when he had got them well away in the abstract. She had escaped from a great embarrassment, but she was not satisfied with her escape; she must somehow turn it into a triumph over him, but it was difficult, and there were phases of the situation in which it was as yet impossible. This Mr. Emerance was certainly a strange being. She had never felt before so much as if she were a disembodied spirit communing with another disembodied spirit, and she caught herself in a sigh as she saw the top of the wagon which held the returning Kelwyns rising above the swell of the road from the hollow toward the village.

She felt a subjective drop as from the clouds, but she alighted on her feet and ran toward them in the wagon, where before either of the Kelwyns had time to speak she said: “I want you to give me fifty cents, Cousin Elmer. I’ve had my fortune told, and Mr. Emerance lent it to me.”

Kelwyn stared, daunted by the violently foreshortened facts, but his wife easily grasped them and reached the vital point — that the girl was feverishly happy, and that it was doubtful whether she ought to be. As Emerance was slowly making his way toward them she explained to her husband that it was the gypsies whom they had met, and that, of course, Parthenope had had to borrow the money from Mr. Emerance.

She ended, to Kelwyn’s still clouded intelligence, “Give it to her, anyway, Elmer, and I will tell you about it afterward,” and with that he got the money out of his pocket and put it in the girl’s hand, which had been outstretched to him.

She turned and gave Emerance the fifty-cent note. “There!” she said, as if life, which was all experiment, could have had no more triumphant issue.

He asked Mrs. Kelwyn if he could not help her to get her purchases out of the wagon, while Kelwyn remained holding the horse, and Parthenope joined him in discharging the cargo.

Mrs. Kite witnessed their activities at her ease from her door in the ell. The sight of her seemed to remind Kelwyn of his wrongs. “I suppose Kite isn’t anywhere about,” he said. “Well, I will drive the horse into the barn and leave him there.”

“Let me take him, Mr. Kelwyn,” the young man entreated, putting himself at the horse’s head. “I’ll unharness the old fellow and give him his hay.”

Kelwyn refused. “No, I shall leave him in the wagon. It will be a lesson to them. These people are getting insufferable. Kite agreed to hitch and unhitch the horse for me always, but half the time I have to do it for myself.” He hesitated, and then he said to the young man, “If you will kindly throw the barndoors open, however, I shall be greatly obliged to you.”

“Why, certainly,” Emerance said, and he walked ahead toward the barn.

Before they reached it the barn-doors were slid back from within, and Raney stood in the open space with his hands in his pockets disinterestedly regarding their progress. When they mounted the incline to the doorway, he took out his hands and said, “I put up the horse, Mr. Kelwyn.”

“Where is Kite?” Kelwyn asked, in reluctantly parting with his grievance.

“I put up your horse,” Raney; repeated, noncommittally.

XVIII

WITH the reason for his vexation, Kelwyn’s vexation passed and it passed the more quickly for finding his wife in very good humor when, after he had washed the smell of the leathern reins from his hands and gone about the house looking for her, he discovered her in what they called the guest-chamber putting it in the order it was idle to expect from Mrs. Kite.

“Parthenope,” Mrs. Kelwyn explained, “is in the kitchen with Mrs. Kite, and Mr. Emerance has gone to help them. He is going to stay to supper, and I shall invite him to stay with us to-night; it’s no more than is due to ourselves.”

“Yes,” Kelwyn assented; “I felt shabby about our letting him go before.”

“It would have been forcing it if we had kept him,” Mrs. Kelwyn evaded the point. “But it’s pleasant to be able to make it up to him. He seems really nice.”

“Yes, but we know nothing more about him than we did at first.”

“Oh yes, we do. Parthenope found him at the school examination, and he corrected some of the exercises. He is cultivated, in a way. He seems to have all sorts of ideas, she says.”

“Plenty of people have all sorts of ideas, my dear.”

“Well, I’m glad on her account he is here to make another evening pass agreeably. It’s dull for her. She thinks he behaved very delicately about lending her the money. He didn’t offer to lend it. And it was by the merest chance that he had it. He was going about, expecting to live by the work he got from the farmers. I don’t understand it exactly; but as long as he doesn’t offer to borrow money himself—”

“Yes.”

The supper was not such a triumph as the former supper had been, or perhaps it was merely not such a novelty. Emerance had consented to be Mrs. Kelwyn’s guest, and she would not let him join in the help that Parthenope offered Mrs. Kite after the meal was over. Perhaps because it lacked the former inspiration of an open fire, or perhaps because Kelwyn was tired, the talk languished, and presently Emerance made an excuse of wishing to tell Mrs. Kite something about the bread for breakfast, and left the Kelwyns. He must have despatched his instructions very promptly, for they seemed at once to hear him talking with Parthenope under the window in the dry summer night.

“Well, now,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, “Parthenope is being amused, I am sure. Don’t you think he is really very delicate-minded?”

“He is rather vague-minded; but he may be delicate-minded, too.” Kelwyn took that tone toward his guest because he had found it well, in agreeing with his wife about people they both liked, to let her do most of the liking.

In the morning they all decided to go to the Shaker meeting, but at the hour when they were to start Emerance failed to join the Kelwyns, and Parthenope said she would go and look for him. Mrs. Kite was standing at her door dressed for the meeting, very ladylike in her Sunday gown and bonnet. She said she guessed Emerance and the boys were out in the barn, and Parthenope pushed on, thanking her. In the barn she saw the three boys through the open door, spellbound by something Mr. Emerance was doing. He was lifting a pitchfork, with a block of wood stuck on its tines, to the roof of the barn, where there was a cluster of swallows’ nests. He lowered it a little and then pushed it upward. Something fell from the block and struck on the barn floor at his feet like a small piece of wet clay. He bent over it with a sharp “Ah, that’s too bad!” while the boys clustered about him. “Well, we must keep on trying,” he said, and he put the thing, whatever it was, back on the block and lifted it again.

Francy  Kelwyn caught sight of Parthenope at the barn-door and explained to her, excitedly: “It’s a little swallow, and it fell out of the nest, and Mr. Emerance is putting it back to its father and mother.”

The parent birds were wheeling overhead with keen cries of anxiety, and, whether it was their interference or the sense of the girl looking that caused the young man’s aim to falter, he failed again, and the swallow fell with that moist thump as before. He took it up and examined it.

She came in and joined the group. “It’s done for,” Emerance said, sadly, and she rose to her normal height in suggesting, “Perhaps it’s been experimented with too much.”

“More than was good for it, anyway,” he assented. “It’s certainly dead. I ought to have got a ladder.”

“Now,” the Kite boy exulted, “we will have fun burying it.”

The Kelwyn boys, attaching themselves on either side to the girl’s skirt, implored her, “Oh, may we have fun burying it, Cousin Thennie?”

“No, no,” she answered, severely, shaking them loose. “There is no time if you are going to the Shaker meeting with us.”

“To see the Shakers dance?” They jumped up and down with clasped hands and ran out before her, the Kite boy with them. He was not asked to go to the meeting, but he would have the whole fun of burying the swallow to himself.

Emerance’s mind was apparently still dwelling on the tragedy. “I hope you don’t think I was experimenting recklessly with that wretched little swallow. I was really trying to befriend it.”

“Oh yes; I know,” the girl said, not sure that she did not find his tenderness a little weak. “But the carryall is at the door, and my cousins are in, and we shall be late—”

It was rather a close fit, with the two men in front and the women on the back seat, and a boy wedged between each couple. A little way from the house they overtook Mrs. Kite walking. Kelwyn leaned back toward his wife: “I didn’t know Mrs. Kite was going. Do you think we ought—”

“By no means! There isn’t an atom of room. Besides, she is used to it and wouldn’t thank us.”

A distress came into Emerance’s face. “Mrs. Kelwyn, I wish you would let me.”

“No, indeed, Mr. Emerance. I have my reasons.” She frowned mysteriously, and he submitted with a sigh.

The meeting was a large one that day. There were a number of visiting Brothers and Sisters from another family, and one of the Brothers, a noted preacher, was to speak. Whether it was knowledge of this fact or not, there was an unusual attendance from the world-outside, especially of summer-folks from Ellison. The singing was uncommonly brisk, and the Kelwyn boys had their reward in the dancing. After the Brothers and Sisters subsided from their thrilling march, and sat down motionless, with their large handkerchiefs opened napkinwise on their knees, the boys fell asleep in the warm air, one with his head in his cousin’s lap, and the other with his head boring into his mother’s side.

The visiting Brother launched into his discourse, and it proved an attack on the earthly order, on marriage and giving in marriage. He prefaced his polemic by telling the story of one of the Brothers lately gathered in at his village, whose conscience had not been at ease in the earthly order, and who had left his wife and children to live the angelic life in the Family there. The kindred on both sides had tried to prevent him, and had thrown all the social and legal obstacles they could in his way. The story was the inversion of some such experience as the effort to escape from the community into the world might have been if it had been recounted with like fervor and intensity. The preacher, a large man with a double chin and a burly paunch, praised the celibacy of the Shakers, and denounced marriage as it was in the country round. “Go through the graveyards,” he said, “and read the records on the tombstones of the delicate females, sometimes two or three, the wives of one husband, whose lives have been sacrificed. Look at the large families of children that wore their mothers out and grew up untrained and uneducated.” He did not see how any sensible man or woman could hesitate to choose the better part and come and live, as that new Brother was living, away from the world and its snares in the safety of the Shaker home.

He seemed bigoted and conceited, but he gave evidence of sincerity.

Mrs. Kelwyn glanced from the face of the girl beside her, who seemed puzzled rather than abashed or offended, and then let her eye range along the faces of the men sitting together in their ranks on the other side of the house. They expressed varying degrees of amusement, but no very deep concern; a strong indignation and dissent shone from the faces of most of the women. Emerance, as she saw him, sat still, with his face fixed in a sculpturesque quiet on the speaker. He seemed unconscious of him, and probably he had early seized some thread of the discourse and had gone into himself with it where he was no longer aware of what the preacher was saying. She was glad to see that Kelwyn looked as if he would like to get up and protest. Some of the Shaker Brothers seemed troubled, but the death-masks of the Sisters wore only a passive sadness, as if they were oppressed by the sense of a mystery beyond their powers.

When Elder Nathaniel came forward and said, after the preacher sat down, “The meeting is dismissed,” Mrs. Kelwyn woke her children and led them away, as if she were shaking the dust off her feet for all three, and for her husband and her cousin as well.

Emerance went forward to unhitch the horse from the post at which he was slumbering as sweetly as if he had been indoors and had gone to sleep at the sermon, and he helped Mrs. Kelwyn to her place. He seemed cheerful, even gay. “I believe,” he said, “I am going to walk back through the woods,” and at this the Kelwyn boys, who had not yet been lifted into the wagon, each implored their mother, “Oh, let us walk back through the woods, mamma!”

“Oh, do let them, Cousin Carry,” Parthenope joined in their prayer.

She was standing by the wheel with them, and Emerance challenged her with, “Why don’t you come, too?”

“I hadn’t been asked,” she answered.

“Well, neither had the boys.”

“I’m not a boy.”

“Oh, then I ask you.”

“Shall I, Cousin Carry?” Parthenope asked, in feigned subjection.

Mrs. Kelwyn said, as if the subjection were real “Why, certainly,” and the young man and young girl, with the two boys, struck into a wood-path from the road.

Mrs. Kite overtook the halting vehicle with a modest effect of not seeing it, but Mrs. Kelwyn, with the air of one who might as well suffer for a sheep as a lamb, called to her, “Won’t you let us take you home, Mrs. Kite?”

“Why, yes,” Mrs. Kite replied, with a ladylike acquiescence, which was partly temperamental and partly from the feeling of proprietorial right in the vehicle. She climbed to Mrs. Kelwyn’s side, and as Kelwyn started up the horse she said, “Elder Rufus gave it to us married folks pretty strong, didn’t he?”

Mrs. Kelwyn answered aloof, “I thought it in very poor taste.”

“Well, I don’t know. The more you see of the Shakers the more you think there is something to what they say. I don’t know as I should want to be one of them; but, the way I look at a couple like Tad Alison and his wife, I don’t think marriage is always such a great success.”

“I don’t suppose,” Mrs. Kelwyn returned, severely, “ that life among the Shakers would be a great success if the men were drunkards and the women were slatterns.”

Mrs. Kite laughed with smooth cheerfulness. “Well, I guess that’s something so.” She did not apparently take to herself the reproach of slattern, but if she had done so she would still have been secure in her husband’s one most conspicuous virtue — he, as she often said, chewed and he smoked, but he never touched a drop.

XIX

ON their way home by the road which they had taken with Mrs. Kite the Kelwyns found the air as sultry, if not as close, as it had been in the Shaker meeting-house. But for the young people in the woods it renewed its freshness and sweetness, as if the trees of the forest had drawn it in deep silent breaths from the heart of the earth and respired it from their leaves. The boys ran before the girl and the young man into the shadow and then ran back to them, and again ran forward and lagged behind them, in a theory of going a walk which is common to dogs and boys.

Parthenope and Emerance found themselves in a grass-grown track among the trees, which he said must have been a wagon-road for hauling out the timber when the forest was cut twenty years before. It grew fainter and vaguer as they advanced, and could scarcely be discerned when it ended in what had been a clearing, but was now grown up to underbrush and brambles, with here and there an old apple-tree looking scared amid the wildings round it. A weedy pit, with the brick and mortar of a fallen chimney in it, was the cellar of a vanished house, and near this pit there yawned suddenly at his feet a well-hole, like a cyclopean eye, with the sinister gleam of water far down in it. He called to Parthenope to keep the boys back, and hastened to cover it with pieces of the mouldering joists and boards lying about.

“That gave me a good start,” he said. “I wonder why the ruin of an old home like this is so dreadful.”

“You said that such ruins were ghosts.”

“Yes; I wonder why we should be afraid of the dead, anyway? I remember that after my father died I was afraid to be in the room with him, though he had never shown me anything but love and kindness all my life.”

“I can’t remember my father at all,” the girl said. “Or my mother, either. But if their spirits came back and told me who they were I don’t believe I should be afraid of them.”

“I must be nearer the aboriginal savage and his superstitions. The curious thing is that we modem people don’t believe in our superstitions.”

“Yes, that is true, and it is curious. But I don’t like bad signs. If that gypsy girl had told my fortune wrong, it would have made me miserable.”

“I don’t believe I should have minded that,” he said.

They talked on, noting their characteristic likenesses and unlikenesses to each other, sitting on a rough-hewn log that had once been the threshold of the house, while the boys played cautiously about, keeping near them, as from a sense of the loneliness of the place.

“Do you suppose,” Emerance asked, at a tangent, “that if this were the ruin of a Shaker family house it would be creepy?”

The girl reflected. “No, I don’t suppose it would. They seem like ghosts now, and I don’t believe they would want to haunt any place after they had got done with it. Besides — I don’t know how to express it exactly — their life wouldn’t have gone deep enough into it to keep them rooted.”

“That’s very interesting,” Emerance said, and he added, “Very interesting, indeed. Does their life seem so superficial, then?”

“Not that, exactly. But living that way in common, it seems more spread out — thinner.”

“I wonder if they feel that?” he mused. “There is something in what you say.”

“You oughtn’t to make fulsome compliments,” she said, stealing a look at him over her shoulder.

“How do you mean?”

“You’re surprised that I can think at all.”

“Oh no, oh no! Merely that — now this will offend you worse — that you care to think.”

“That doesn’t offend me, if it distinguishes between me and other girls. I don’t believe they like to think. Do men?”

He laughed. “Not usually.”

“Well, now, I am going to think very boldly,” she said, and as he looked at her inquiringly she rose and shook some clinging bark and chips from her skirt. “I think we shall be late for dinner if we don’t hurry home.”

They joined in a light-hearted laugh. She called to the boys, and they all struck through the woods into a piece of pasture-land beyond. It was a narrow strip dividing them from the highway, where a house stood, with a woman in the open door at the back brushing out her long hair. She saw them coming, and shouted to them to look out or they would be mired in the swampy ground which she pointed at with her brush. She beckoned them to the path that led across the pasture to her house.

“It’s that drunkard’s,” Parthenope explained. “He lent Mrs. Kite a book, an old novel, and I read the first volume. I wonder if we could get the second.”

“We might try,” Emerance suggested.

“For the sake of experiment?”

“Well, yes.”

They found the man sitting on the front doorstep smoking, with his unkempt brood about him. The youngest, a little barefooted boy of two years, sat beside him playing with the edge of an axe; the others stared up at the strangers with an interest which their father did not seem to share, even when Parthenope had courage to ask about the book. He answered civilly that she was welcome to the other volume. He went back into the house for it, and returned with two volumes. He forgot, he said, that there were three in all, and he seemed to have read them. Emerance took them; they were volumes of an early American romance, in the original edition.

“You know these are worth money?” Emerance said.

“They belong to an uncle of mine; I couldn’t sell them.” The man’s gaunt slip of a wife had joined them, with her hair now coiled in her neck; she was still pretty. “Go and get the rest,” he ordered, without looking at her, and she came again with her arms full of the same author and screeched her comments, which he received without a word or glance in her direction. But there seemed a community of pride between them in the possession of something that others could value; neither of them were of such evil or unhappy countenance as Parthenope said she had expected when they had thanked them for the volumes which Emerance carried away for her.

The Kelwyn boys ran ahead with the effect of having escaped with their lives from the boys and dogs silently surrounding them during the parley.

It seemed by an afterthought that the woman screamed after the girl, “Well, call again!”

Parthenope said she would, and that Mrs. Alison must come and see Mrs. Kelwyn. “I don’t know,” she confided to Emerance, “ whether I ought to have done that, but, if she comes, I can see her. Wasn’t it dreadful, that child playing with the axe, and his father and mother walking over him and not paying the least attention? I wonder how such children get through the world.”

“Perhaps,” Emerance suggested, “there’s a good deal more of what used to be called overruling Providence than people will allow nowadays.”

“There must be. Oh, boys, see the rabbit!” she called to the little Kelwyns, and she pointed to the young wild thing loping across the road before them.

Emerance began to whistle softly, and the rabbit stopped and sat up, with its long ears quivering and its body throbbing with the strong pulse of its frightened heart. When the warbling note ceased, it vanished at a gallop into the wayside brambles.

“How beautiful!” the girl sighed. “I wish I could have done that.”

“You had only to whistle.”

“But I can’t whistle.”

“I will teach you, so that you can charm the next rabbit.”

“A good many girls are learning to whistle now. I think they are overdoing it,” she evaded him.

That afternoon, when Emerance was taking leave before going back to the Shakers’, where a lodging had been fitted up for him in what he confessed was the house ordinarily occupied by tramps, Mrs. Kelwyn had a burst of hospitality which carried her so far that she said, “Why don’t you come and stay here with us till the Shakers can provide properly for you?”

No one could have been more surprised than her husband; but he said, as if the thing were not at all surprising: “Yes; why not? We have some eighteen or twenty rooms that you could have, if you don’t want beds in them all. And you would be a brother in misfortune.”

This was more than his wife meant him to say, but it was not more than enough to overcome the young man’s reluctance, apparently. His reluctance was silent, however, and, after a longish pause, he said, “If you wouldn’t mind my coming till the Shakers have some of their rooms free—”

“Why, certainly,” Kelwyn said, “as long or as short a time as you like.”

“And you would let me pay for my board—”

“It seems to me, Mr. Emerance, that you have been working for your board all along,” Mrs. Kelwyn hastily interposed, as if to keep her husband from saying it and taking the credit of their hospitality from her.

‘”Oh, but that was different. That was merely in the abstract.”

“Make it as much in the concrete as you like,” Kelwyn cut in before his wife could think of the antithesis; and on terms that allowed Emerance to contribute a fair share to the general expense for provisions, and to exercise the right of intervening between the Kelwyns and Mrs. Kite’s cooking when it became intolerable, the affair was arranged with the provisionality which he exacted. Parthenope had listened at the beginning in a dispassionate silence which she felt her due, but she did not wait for the end of the treaty. When he came out, Emerance found her sitting on the threshold stone with a listless and absent air.

“I don’t know but you’ll think I have acted on an impulse,” he said, with the gladness of his heart fading a little from his face at his doubt of hers.

“Yes?” she asked, indifferently. “What have you done?”

“I’ve let your cousins take pity on me and give me food and shelter.”

“Is it so had as that?”

“Not quite; they are to let me work for my living. All the same, I feel like an intruder, but I had no one to advise me.”

“Do you mean me?”

“Well, yes.”

“I couldn’t very well have advised you not to stay,” she said as carelessly as before, but she added more kindly, “I am an intruder, too, you know.” Then throwing her pretence of listlessness and absence to the winds she ended, “And as for impulse, I don’t think I’ve been much guided by principle myself.”

“Since when?” he asked, smiling gratefully.

“You think you couldn’t say?”

“I might if I were driven into a corner.”

“I won’t drive you into a corner. I think you are very good. Perhaps you would let me help you work for a living. Or teach me how to work for mine, I mean.”

“As far as I know I will. I suppose I shall always be a pedagogue of one kind or other.”

She considered now that he needed a little rap to restore a manly tone in him. It was the duty of a woman to keep a man from ever taking an unmanly tone, and if Emerance was humbled by an unworthy consciousness she would uplift him by humbling him still more.

“It’s a noble calling, pedagogy; I can’t think of anything higher than teaching the more advanced branches of cookery.”

Emerance looked at her and then he laughed. But whether at her irony or his own sense of deserving it she did not care. She laughed, too.

XX

THE simple idyl of the passing days varied little in its dramatic range, though there was difference enough in its incidents to keep the fancy and the sympathy amused. One morning when Parthenope and Emerance were getting the common breakfast, there came a family of organ-grinders, who paused under the elms as if arrested there by the scent of the coffee stealing from the kitchen. There were two men — an older man who sat silently apart in the shade and a young man who came forward and offered to play. He had the sardonic eyes of a goat, but the baby in the arms of a young mother had a Napoleonic face, classic and mature. She herself was beautiful, and she said they were all from the mountains near Genoa and were presently on their way to the next town. They were peasants, but they had a grace which made Parthenope sigh aloud in her thought of the contrast they offered to the mannerless uncouthness of the Yankee country-folks. The woman complained of the heat, but sweetly; and the young man said they liked their wandering life; the old man smiled benignly, but said nothing, except to thank Parthenope beautifully when she served him first with the coffee and bread which she brought out for the whole family.

In the understanding of their pastoral situation tacit between them, “What part of the idyl should you call this?” she asked Emerance when the Italians departed, scattering benedictions behind them; and he answered:

“Oh, a little dramatic interlude.”

“I don’t see much drama in it,” she said, looking after them down the road. “I wish they could have taken me with them. I could have got a tambourine, and played and danced, and people would have brought me out coffee.”

“Not as good as you make,” Emerance was sure. “Your gems are burning; I can smell them here,” she said, and she fled before him into the kitchen.

There seemed some mysterious property in his nature which had the virtue of turning the prose of every day into the poetry of every other day, but her youth accepted the poetry without the scrutiny which might have proved self-analysis in the end.

They let the Kelwyns take the carryall for the village shopping, and stayed at home that day, Parthenope to put the house in order, and Emerance to hoe the corn, which had been outstripped by the weeds in the hot weather. About noon an Irish linen-peddler showed a sulky visage in the doorway. Emerance came in from the garden, as if casually, and then they invited the peddler in, too; being so civilly treated, he promptly grew humbler and told his simple tale. He had been an iron-puddler in a Pittsburg foundry, and had turned linen-peddler because he was out of work. But prosperity fled before him as he wandered eastward. He did not sell much linen at the farm-houses; people thought they could get things cheaper at the stores, and generally he travelled by rail from village to village, and so found what market he could. Parthenope gave him a glass of lemonade, and then he shouldered his pack and strode out into the furnace of the heat, while they remained and philosophized his case.

“I could never be a peddler,” she said, thoughtfully. “I should not have the courage to push in.”

“But if necessity had the courage, and pushed you in?”

“It seemed impudence in his case at first. I’m glad it wasn’t. How hard life seems when you come face to face with it!”

They tried to be sad, but they could not. Perhaps life as they saw it reflected in each other’s eyes was not hard; the trouble they borrowed did not really harass them.

A storm came up and raged for an hour without cooling the air. One of the clouds hung so low as to mix with the pines in the horse - pasture, where the ghostly estray which the Kite boy had turned out to grass there wavered in and out of sight as the lightning rent the lowering vapor.

“This is like the day when the bear-leader came,” Parthenope mused aloud. “I hope my cousins and the boys are under shelter.”

“Oh, they have turned in somewhere with this storm coming up.”

“I’ve often wondered what became of that bearleader. What does become of bear-leaders when they are not leading their bears?” she questioned on. “They must find it hard to get lodgings. Are there hotels where they make a specialty of taking in bears and their leaders, do you suppose?”

They played with the question and then dropped it in gay hopelessness.

Emerance came to the window, where she was looking down, and saw a wayfarer leaving the kitchen steps with the hand-out which Mrs. Kite never refused his tribe.

He was squalid enough, but sometimes the tramps were interesting. Parthenope sketched one: a little, sailorlike Frenchman, with a swarthy face and black eyes and thin gold earrings that twinkled together. He stood for his portrait with his hands full of Mrs. Kite’s cold griddle - cakes, smiling, and he finally accepted a ten-cent note with charming effusion.

Another day, at the close of a long afternoon’s ramble with Emerance, as they were emerging from a wood-road into the highway, a tramp as far out of the average as this acceptable little Frenchman was in his way seemed to rise from the ground like a human cloud. He was a gigantic negro, with a sullen, bestial face, which looked the wickeder because of his vast, naked feet. He had his boots and a very good new-looking hand-bag slung on a stick. He faltered a moment, glaring at them with bloodshot eyes, and then lurked away into the shadow of the woods.

“What a horror, poor soul!” the voice of Emerance said close to her ear, and she realized that she had shrunk to his side.

“Yes,” she said, detaching herself with a quavering effort for lightness. “I much prefer the little Frenchman; but I suppose one mustn’t be too choice in tramps.” She tried to joke away the evidence of her fright.

“They probably don’t choose themselves,” Emerance said.

“Probably not,” she answered, with hauteur. “Something might be done about them.”

“Well, they’re arresting them a good deal, and banishing or imprisoning them, I suppose,” he concluded, sadly. “Something of the kind has to be done. A fellow like that makes one think.”

“My cousin has a pistol,” she said, severely.

Emerance only said, “Ah?” But that evening, after supper, he asked Kelwyn if he had ever used his pistol at all, and, without owning to the ignominy of Mrs.

Kelwyn’s control, Kelwyn said he had thought of shooting at a mark with it. They went out into the orchard, followed by the Kite boy, the young Kelwyns being forbidden by their mother, who had consented to her husband’s share in the danger because she was ashamed to deny him before another man. They tried shooting at a tin cup eight paces away, and missed it six times out of six; they reduced the distance by a half and still missed it.

“I hope, Mr. Emerance,” Kelwyn said, “that we are too civilized for this sort of thing. We have been aiming all our lives at something higher than tin cups with something more accurate than revolvers. If the custom of duelling should be restored, as some people think it ought, I shouldn’t mind fighting with you.”

“I might hit you by accident,” the young man suggested.

“That is true. Are you too young, I wonder, to have read the Reverend Doctor Knott’s funeral oration on the Burr-Hamilton duel? There were some fine things in it, especially about Burr, like: ‘If there be tears in heaven, a pious mother looks down and weeps.’ And the doctor got over his difficulty of saying that he aimed his pistol at Hamilton by a very handsome paraphrase: ‘He pointed at that incorruptible bosom the instrument of death.’”

“Yes,” Emerance said; “I know that oration. I have rather revived the old fashion with my boys of having them learn passages of eloquence. I think it lifts their thoughts somewhat, and for the moment it keeps their tongues from slang. I don’t know whether they realize the fact of the duel very clearly. It’s surprising how incredible the duel has become already, how impossible.”

“Still, there are a great many pistols made. I once saw a big mound of them in Colt’s factory. When I bought mine I realized that every one was made to kill a man. It was a heap of potential homicide.”

They walked homeward talking, and as they passed the old well near the barn, disused since the Shakers had brought the spring down from the upland above, Kelwyn said, “I wonder what effect this pistol would have on the water here if I dropped it in.”

“I should think the iron would make it tonic and good for the horses, if they ever drank of it again.”

Kelwyn let the pistol fall, and they listened an appreciable moment for the splash. “I shouldn’t have thought it was so deep.” When he told his wife, she was not as glad as he expected. She said, “I don’t know — if there are going to be black tramps about!”

The help which Emerance now rendered Mrs. Kite in the kitchen, and the help which Parthenope rendered him, eventuated in so large a release of Mrs. Kite from that part of her cares that she could sit much of the time and watch the two at work without having to join in it, except in shelling pease or stringing beans, or some other task that did not break the flow of conversation or require steps. She showed a gay surprise at their finding so much of the garden stuff ready to use when they came in from picking it, but this surprise, like the admiration she had expressed for their cooking, presently passed, and she accepted the situation with a serenity unruffled by a sense of responsibility for the other details of housework, which she left to Mrs. Kelwyn, and came back to after they were done in an amiable amusement that she should have forgotten them. She was, without too keenly realizing it, having a rest such as she had not known since she could remember. Emerance had cleared out the milkroom for her, and set the pans there after having instructed Raney and Albert how to guard against cowiness in milking; and there remained nothing very definite for her to do but to provide for her own family the food to which they were used and to which they continued loyal. Under these circumstances it was not strange that her thoughts should stray beyond their wonted limits, and she announced one day toward the end of June that she believed she should go and see her sister over in the edge of Hancock. She made a show of having been constantly employed in the service of her guests. “I can cook up enough things to last my folks over a few days, and you can make Raney and Albert help you while I’m gone.”

She had been having for her own immediate assistance the daughter of a neighbor, and the day after she went on her visit the neighbor came to fetch his daughter away. While the girl was putting her things together he stood on the green before the house leaning on a long staff like a classic shepherd, and with Parthenope surreptitiously sketching him he began to tell what he would do with that place if he had it and had five thousand dollars to spend on it. For one thing, he would put a piazza all round it. Then, before he could say what else, his daughter came out with her bundle, and they moved away together with visible reluctance. The old Family house was, in fact, the pride and envy of the whole region. All the neighbors wanted it, and each said how he would fit it up for a summer hotel if he had it. The Kites alone seemed satisfied with it as it was, and this, where there was so little in their favor, commended them to the Kelwyns, who were disturbed in their sense of possession by a sense of the covetous environment. It was a comfort, under the circumstances, to Have Emerance in the house with them, though his ideas of private property were of a latitude which Kelwyn’s science could not approve. Still, so long as he did not suggest filling the vacant rooms with a colony of houseless poor, which seemed to be his notion of the use that the empty summer hotels ought to be put to in the winter, his heresies could be tolerated.

Mrs. Kelwyn, in a revulsion from her earlier diffidence, trusted him in everything even more implicitly than her husband. She let him go off on long rambles in the wild region with her two boys, and with Parthenope to look after them; and she sent them all on the errands to the village grocer and butcher, which, in the frequent failure of the Kites’ provisioning, she used to do with Kelwyn. Her demoralization included the temperamental defects of the lazy old horse which Kite had provided them, and which she had early denounced as the worst horse in existence. She now began to say that the carryall was too heavy for him, but Emerance differed from her on that point, and then she contented herself with making him promise to drive very slowly and have everybody get out going up-hill. Sometimes he forgot her instruction in his talks with Parthenope, which were apt to take the form of dispute and a final difference of opinion. The girl felt that he was wrong in these differences, but she blamed herself more than she blamed him for her want of severity with him.

Emerance’s traditions were probably not those which would have made him feel it strange that he should be wandering about the lonely country with a young girl; and the conventions of Parthenope’s Boston were not yet so strict, thirty five or six years ago, that after the first days of strangeness she should be conscious in his companionship. Perhaps that something of a wilding quality in her nature came from her artist father and mother, and had never been quelled by her environment. Her aunt, though of a world much more regulated, lived rather out of her world; she had left the girl mostly to her own inspirations in conduct, and Parthenope had found these sufficient in the simple ways of society just beginning to imagine chaperonage. If it was not the first society of her ancestral city, it was society that read and thought and idealized, and was of a freedom gladder than that which has come in something like excess to the society which now neither reads nor thinks nor idealizes. If she had known it — but no girl could have known it — she was standing on the verge of that America which is now so remote in everything but time, and was even then rounding away with such girlhood as hers into the past which can hardly be recalled in any future of the world. It was sweet and dear; with its mixture of the simple and the gentle, it was nearer the Golden Age than any the race has yet known; and it followed fitly upon the great war which had established liberty on a wider basis than ever before in history. These two could not feel their relation to the conventional, the social, fact; they were a young man and a young girl walking or driving together in the pastures or along the wood-roads in the fragrant summer mornings; and in their intense personalization they could not know how elemental they were, how akin to earth and air, and of one blood with the grass and the trees, with the same ichor in their veins.

They often stopped at the Shakers for pleasure, but one morning they went on the business of selecting the stuff for a writing-desk, which was to be a surprise for Kelwyn. He had decided that he could not afford it at the figure named by Raney for making it, and Emerance, in conspiracy with Mrs. Kelwyn, had proposed building it from designs by Parthenope: he said he sometimes did odd jobs of carpentering. The designer came with him into the loft of the old Shaker shop to choose the plank, and afterward she sat by, most of the time, while he planed it and put it together, and corrected his errors as to her intentions in the plan. In that day of Eastlake furniture the desk was to be a remorseless sort of akimbo Gothic, which permitted no luxurious deviations from the most virtuous rigidity. When Parthenope was tired of sitting on a trestle and looking on, she went and chatted with the Office Sisters; they took a less fearful interest in her going about with a young man than the unworldlier inmates of the Family houses, who caught glimpses of them round the valves of half-open doors or through edges of lifted window-curtains, and forbiddenly conjectured, when they were gone, how such a girl must feel.

Once, as she was driving through the village with Emerance, they saw Elder Nathaniel lying beside a great fire of refuse broom-corn on the grass, which ho was keeping from running wild in the garden. He looked so sweet and beautiful as he lay there that Parthenope wanted to sketch him, but suddenly he caught sight of them and came forward to the fence, and began to chat courteously, while the flames behind him tossed richly against the green curtain of the raspberry vines. “Now and then,” he said, at parting, “I meet with some one who has ideas, and that brightens everything up. If you keep your hold of ideas, and do not lose yourselves in trivial cares, your lives will be as bright as you have made my half-hour.”

The old man seemed quite naturally to have joined their lives in his thought, and Emerance was silent as they drove away; but Parthenope was quite unconscious, and laughed and said How sweet the Elder was, and did not Emerance think him lovely, with his thin, aquiline face and his white hair? She was not so much at her ease as to Emerance’s looks, when her ownership of them was imagined by a great, silly, buxom girl, overripe for her years, when they stopped to ask her if she would sell them some cherries, at a wayside farm-house. She was talking to some guinea-fowls on terms of cosey confidence as if they were human hens, but she came forward in her bare head and large, white, bare feet. “My,” she gurgled, “if I thought I was goin? to have company I guess I should had my shoes on.” She apparently expected them to enjoy her predicament, and she told Emerance the family she lived with had gone to the village and she could not sell him any cherries, but she guessed he could pick all he wanted to eat. She got him a dish to pick them in, and while he mounted the tree she praised him over the palings to Parthenope in undertone. “He’s just about the handsomest fellow yet! I should be jealous if another girl as much as winked at him.” She was not discouraged by Parthenope’s failure to humor her joke, and when Emerance came out of the tree she laughed, “Got enough?” and she said to Parthenope: “Well, call again. Wish I could let you take the dish along too!” She warned them they would not find any thimble - berries on that road; there used to be plenty; but the farmers thought they hurt the looks of the walls, and they had cut the vines down that spring.

They ate the cherries, with the help of the boys, and pushed farther on, having the whole afternoon before them in the study of the pleasant country-side, and the villages which were sometimes clusters of farmhouses, and with once a little milling hamlet, and a millpond starred with white water-lilies, and yellow ones that looked like flights of canary birds stooping on the water. The low factory buildings that hummed so softly had taken, in the embrowning heat of many summers, the tone of the earthen banks; the hills around were lighted up with the stems of birches. The houses were homes of simple comfort, in their well-netted security from mosquitoes. Before a door four neighbor women sat in a row together sewing.

“This seems about the best that life can do,” Emerance suggested. “When I see something like this peacefulness I wonder why cities should be. Then I think I should like to spend the rest of my days here!”

“Sewing on a bench by a door, or working in a mill?” the girl asked, with an unreasoned necessity which was on her to combat anything that was too eccentric in him.

“Oh!” he laughed, “sewing on a bench by a door, of course. But working in an old, brown, wood-colored mill wouldn’t be so bad, with a Saturday half-holiday. No; you are right. The world is here, as it is everywhere, and it is always the same old world. I suppose those women were gossiping about some one. I wonder whom.”

“Us, probably.”

“Really? What were they saying?”

“That you must be very rich to afford driving about with a horse and carriage like this.”

“But I cant afford it. I drive about in this style because I’m out of work.”

“I didn’t say they were right.”

The social superiority to Emerance which Parthenope felt so distinctly at first had evanesced into something like a sense of moral seniority, though this is putting in terms still vaguer a feeling that was itself very vague. From her greater knowledge of the world, as she believed it, she was called to instruct him on points which were not always of worldly knowledge, but were matters on which he needed instruction or on which she saw the need of giving it.

In another drive they came on a turn of the road to a stone cottage standing among maple-trees on the brow of a hill overlooking a wide meadow. A mass of honeysuckle in blossom embowered the doorway and matted the hip-roof gables; the wooden extension of the cottage did not discord with the gray masonry; possibly because it looked old from its weather-worn red paint. Emerance stopped the horse and asked the way of a handsome, stout, blond man, who answered through his mouth and not through his nose.

“One doesn’t often see a stone house in the country,” Emerance suggested, when he had got his directions.

“That’s a fact,” the owner allowed. “But we built it ourselves because we liked stone.” By this time a comely, ladylike woman had joined him at the door. “Guess we’d better built it all stone. The ell part begins to want paint. And the worst of it is,” he added, with a laugh, in his rush of confidence, “we can’t agree what color to paint it. What should you say?”

Emerance glanced at the shutters of the stone structure. “I should say green — dark green.”

The man laughed again. “Well, that’s what I say.” Then, after some playful asides with the comely matron, he called toward Parthenope, “She wants to know what the lady thinks.”

“Who? I?” Parthenope called back. “Oh, red, by all means! The same red it was!”

The man clapped himself joyfully on the thigh; his wife gave his shoulder a little triumphant push. Emerance chirruped to his horse, but before he could start him the man of the cottage shouted, “Well, I guess the reds have it!” and his wife vanished indoors.

After the horse had really begun to move away, Emerance said, from a dreamy silence, “May I ask why you preferred red?”

“Why,” she answered, with the need she felt of marking an æsthetical inferiority in him, “I don’t suppose I can tell. It is impossible to explain a feeling.”

“A feeling for color?” he asked, idly flicking at the harness with his whip. “I don’t believe I have it. Is it something that can be acquired? Like right principles, for instance?”

“No, I don’t think it can. It has to be born in you. Perhaps it’s like right principles in that, though. Ruskin seems to think they’re the same: that the great colorists were morally great.”

“I wonder if that’s so,” the young man questioned, and he was pensively silent as if he were thinking the point over self-reproachfully. But he said, after a moment, “I don’t believe there is anything in that idea,” and then she was so abashed by his boldness that she became rather meek, and began trying quite humbly to say why dull red would be better than dark green for that wooden extension.

XXI

THE Fourth of July had been heralded by a summer evening of that exquisite New England quality which has its like nowhere else in the world. There was a clear sunset, and the young moon lingered in the western sky above the great stretch of forest. The two families, parted by the stretch of greensward before their separate doors, sat under the trees; Parthenope had been drawing pictures of the three boys pulling the spring wagon up and down the road. It was so peaceful that Kelwyn lost the feeling of nether unrest which at other times tormented him, and began to hope that somehow the Kites would yet do. He did not, in fact, much mind being wakened from his first sleep that night by the firing of cannon and ringing of bells in the surrounding villages, or being broken of his morning nap by the torpedoes and fire-crackers which the three boys exploded under his window.

The pyrotechnics of the evening were typically reluctant. Emerance had charge of them, with Raney’s help; but the pin-wheels caught and hung fizzing instead of revolving with a coruscation of sparks; the rockets shot sideways and ascended in unexpected tangeats; the Roman candles alone did well, and each of the boys was allowed to fire one off. The two Kelwyn boys had their hands held by their father; the Kite boy grasped his candle unhelped, and fired it into his family circle.

This had been enlarged by the return of his mother, who had come back with a serener self-satisfaction than she had shown before she went. She had begun by telling Parthenope and Emerance that she guessed she would get supper herself that evening, and in the meal she prepared she had so perfectly reverted to the original type of her cookery that the Kelwyns made their supper of canned tongue and of tea that they had brewed on the table.

At the show of fire-works she put on the hostess, as if the entertainment was hers, and invited the neighbors who came, out of apparent proportion to the scanty population, to take eligible places with her family. Lurking on the edge of this inner group Parthenope found the wife of the drunkard Alison, and when the display was over, she asked the wild girlish creature into the house. She stood with her baby in her arms while Mrs. Kelwyn bade her an exemplary good night, driving her boys before her to their beds; she followed their going with a sort of scorn.

“Your aunt got nothing but them two boys?” she asked.

“My cousin? That’s all.”

“My! I got six.”

“Why, how old are you?”

“I’m under twenty-nine, I guess.”

“And I’m twenty-seven myself.”

“You’re a regular old maid.”

“Well,” Parthenope retorted, with amusement, “you’re a regular young mother.”

“It’s full as bad, you mean. Well, I don’t know but it is. Sometimes I feel as if I should go crazy with ’em all, but then again I don’t know what I should do without ’em when Tad gets on one of his tears. You hear that Shaker Elder preach agin marryin’ last Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“I heard tell what he said. I guess He don’t know everything. If he did he wouldn’t said so much about the children. I guess there’d be more divorces and more killin’s if it wa’n’t for them. Tad ain’t bad when he’s himself, but when he’s been at the jug he don’t know what he’s up to. Well, there! I don’t know as I ought to talk to a young lady about such things, but it’s kind of curious about children. I thought I shouldn’t ever feel to’ds the rest the same as I did to the first; but there, the last is always the first, if you can understand.”

“I think I can,” Parthenope answered, gravely.

“It’s always the baby till the next baby comes. I guess they all have their turn of bein’ the first. Sometimes it don’t seem as if I could get through the trouble they give. But I hain’t ever lost a single one; I believe if I did it would about kill me. I should like the Shakers to understand that. The Shaker ladies do, I guess!”

Parthenope asked her if she would not sit down, but she said she guessed not; she guessed she must be going. “I guess your cousin thought it was time, too.” She looked around the great room. “My, but this is a nice place! I wish Jasper’d give us the chance. And he would, too, I believe, if he could ha’ placed any dependence on Tad. I could ha’ cooked for you! I bet.” Parthenope thought it best not to respond, and the mother said, “Well, I must be goin’.”

She shifted her baby from one arm to the other, and the child looked at Parthenope with sweet, sleepy eyes. “Oh, you dear!” the girl cooed to it. “May I kiss you good night, baby?”

“I guess she’s clean enough,” the mother said, pulling her baby’s stiff little dress straight. “I like to Have my children know it’s the Fourth. The rest has been to the Sunday-school picnic. I guess my hoys are waitin’ for me outside now. Say by-by to the lady. Well, she’s too sleepy, I guess. One thing,” she turned to Parthenope in parting, “Don’t you let them Shakers get around you with their talk. I’ve had as hard a time as any, but it’s more of an even thing than they say, marryin’ is. I know, and they don’t. Well, good night to you,” she ended abruptly.

Kelwyn was going to town in the morning, and Emerance with Parthenope drove to the station with him. She had errands at the village stores, and then the two started home together. At a turn where a wood road left the highways he proposed to follow it into the Shaker forest, in the belief that it would come out where he had seen a wood road going in near the old Family house. The woods, damped and cooled by an overnight rain, were scented with the leaves and bark of the trees, and the rich, melancholy odor of the rotting logs, felled or fallen long ago and left in an immemorial decay. They did not hurry because they could not, and also because they would not. At times Emerance got out and led the horse over a space where the road had forgotten itself, and helped it to remember where it was going. After such a moment he remounted to his place beside the girl with a long sigh of satisfaction.

“Are you so tired?” she asked, with a smile for his sigh. “You had better let me get out and lead the horse after this.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” he answered; “I was just thinking that I would like to ask you something — ask you about something—” He lifted his eyes and looked at her, but her face was averted. “Will you answer frankly?”

She now, as if she had gained time enough, faced him, and asked in answer, “Do you find it so difficult to be frank?”

“Sometimes. Or always with myself. Don’t you?” She hesitated. “I can tell better when I know what you want to ask.”

He did not respond to her prompting, but interposed a generalization.

“I suppose my indecision, my want of a fixed purpose in life, comes from my love of experimenting.”

“Was that what you wanted to ask me about?” she returned.

But he did not answer. He said, “You know I am going to the Centennial next week.”

“Oh yes,” she caught herself from betraying her surprise. “That is, I didn’t know it.”

“Yes, I’ve an idea it might be a turning-point for me. I’ve wasted too much time between doing and not doing; and something tremendously practical, like the Centennial, might have instruction for me.”

“I understand,” she said, but she did not. She was really wondering what he meant.

“I have been freer with my time,” he said, with the air of explaining, “because it seemed all to belong to me to do the most or the least with it for myself and very indirectly for other people. But of late I have begun to think — to hope — that my time might be more important, more directly important, to others; and I have wanted to decide upon the future without so much loss of the present.”

“Yes,” she said, evasively; “I think that we all live too much in the future. We ought to make more of the present, oughtn’t we?”

“That was what I meant,” he answered, with a breath irrelevantly deep. “I have had too many strings to my bow, I’m afraid. In a sort of way, or up to a certain point, I believe I could be one of several things. What I have been is a teacher, but I have sometimes thought of the law and sometimes of the ministry. They are a long road, though, and though I have so much time I have not so much money. Then I have thought of journalism; I have done some newspaper work, and I could get a reporter’s place. But there is something else, more to my fancy if not my reason. I suppose I’ve left mentioning it to the last because it mightn’t appear so wise to — others. Do you remember that day at the school examination?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” Parthenope said, and there flashed upon her the vision of that pretty young teacher with the golden hair and the gold filling in her teeth. But she dismissed it with the instant perception that the teacher could not be in the line of his thinking as a vocation.

“I have always been fond of the theatre,” he went on. “I have tried to make my school-boys realize the beauty of truth in their school theatricals. I have a very dear friend who is a great actor — though all the world doesn’t know it yet, as it will some day. He is a great citizen too, and we met first at a reform meeting, where I heard him speak. He let me come to some of his rehearsals, where he was training his company for one of his plays; he is a dramatist as well as an actor. Once, toward the end of my last summer’s vacation, he gave me a small part for a week to fill a vacant place.”

He had gone on incoherently, rapidly; now he paused promptingly, and she asked, “And did you like it?”

“It was the greatest joy of my life,” he answered. Then, as she remained silent, he added, rather blankly:

“You don’t like the notion? You don’t approve of the theatre?”

“I? But I don’t see what I have to do with it. It is very interesting.”

“And you don’t think me a less serious person because I love the theatre?”

“No, no; I know that there have been very good actors and actresses,” she said, from the ethicism which must always be the first thing with her. “My father and mother,” she particularized, “knew Charlotte Cushman when they were all living in Rome.”

“Did they? But you mustn’t misunderstand. If I didn’t love the art of the theatre I am afraid I shouldn’t care for what we call the ‘good’ it can do. If the art didn’t come first I would rather be a minister. A minister must be an actor, you know.”

“Do you think so?”

“Yes. But — I had better go on perhaps—”

“Do.” She could only be monosyllabic.

“It’s merely this: I enjoyed the acting, but first I want to live it. I want to act in a play of my own. I have an idea for one. I have the scene and the persons, but I want the experience. I will tell you about it.”

“Yes.”

“Of course, it has to be a love-story and it has to end well.”

He seemed to be consulting her, and she said, “If it isn’t a tragedy, of course it must end well.”

He laughed. “It isn’t exactly a comedy, either. Life isn’t, you know.”

“No,” she said in a sudden rueful sense of life’s anomalies.

“I thought of having the scene partly in a Shaker community; the principal characters wouldn’t be Shakers, but there are features of the Shaker life that would be very effective on the stage. Their dancing—”

“But that’s a part of their worship!” she broke in, horrified, and the more resolute not to yield the point because she felt its temptation for him.

“That’s true. But the Greek drama represented moments of worship. The Agamemnon of Æschylus, you know, begins with an act of worship.” She looked unconvinced, and he added: “To be sure, it was their own worship. I must think it over; I wouldn’t do anything to wound the Shakers for the world.”

“Of course not. Well?” she prompted.

He flicked at a fly with the limp whip-lash, and then he drew the lines taut and started the horse from his sleep-walking into a waking-walk. “I haven’t worked it out yet in my own mind. I can’t tell you, now. May I tell you when I come back from the Centennial?”

“Does the hero go to the Centennial?”

“Yes, the hero goes to the Centennial.”

“That is new. Does the heroine go, too?”

“That’s what I don’t know yet; I’m going to find out. What do you think of my notion?”

“Of going to the Centennial?”

“No, the larger notion: living a play and acting it.” She knew this was what he had meant, and she felt that in a manner they had changed natures; he was now direct and she was elusive.

“Oh, that is too large a question for me.”

“You don’t like the notion.”

“You mustn’t say that. I don’t like the notion of being judge. I don’t feel” — Parthenope did not realize how novel this attitude was for her— “competent to judge.” If the problem had not been so many-sided, if the dilemma had not had so many horns, if she had not felt so bound to him, her answer might have been different. As it was, she took refuge in an appearance little short of antipathetic reluctance.

“Ah,” he said, “I see you don’t like it. Well!” He set his jaw, but whether with the resolve to submit to her dislike or defy it she had not quite the courage to ask herself.

XXII

“Mr. EMERANCE is going to the Centennial, he says,” Parthenope began, abruptly, when she came in upon Mrs. Kelwyn, sitting distraught in the great dancing-room of the Family house which served them as a parlor, where she was pulling over some sewing.

“Is he?” Mrs. Kelwyn answered, absently.

“Yes; next week. Don’t you think it’s rather strange he’s not mentioned it before?”

Mrs. Kelwyn only heaved a long, inattentive sigh in answering, “Well, it may be the best thing.”

“He thinks it will decide his future in life. He is trying to think whether he had better be a lawyer, or a minister, or an actor, or a dramatist, or keep on a plain teacher.”

“An actor?” Mrs. Kelwyn caught at the word. “What nonsense!”

“He doesn’t think so.”

“When did he say that?”

“Just now — on the way home. He says he loves the art of the theatre, but he believes it can do a great deal of good. I suppose it can,” the girl sighed, questioningly. “But what I don’t like is any person’s being of so many minds. He is too experimental altogether.”

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Kelwyn said. “A good many young men must be so, especially when they are at all gifted.”

“Is Mr. Emerance so very gifted? How does he show it?” Parthenope somehow liked her cousin’s praise of him; and she was willing to provoke more of it by her blame. “If I were a man I should have one aim in life, and I should keep to it till I died. I wouldn’t let anything swerve me from it.”

Mrs. Kelwyn answered, in a certain remoteness from the case of Mr. Emerance: “It is very hard to keep to a single purpose — for men. The best of them can’t do it. I have just been blaming Elmer for his indecision, but I’m not sure I was right. Men see so many sides.”

“Cousin Elmer? I supposed he had never had but one ideal!”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” Mrs. Kelwyn almost moaned; “it’s this terrible situation. We don’t either of us know what to do next.”

“Why, has anything new happened?”

“I don’t know whether it’s new or not. Yes, I suppose it is. Brother Jasper has just been here to tell us that he has heard a bad account of the man he was going to put in the Kites’ place. He has an ugly temper, and he made a scandal where he came from by courting his present wife while the first was dying of consumption. Jasper must have had it on his conscience to let us know; he was worried in the spring by the Kites’ failure to get ready for us. But he let us come, and perhaps now he wants to make it up to us.”

“It seems to me,” the girl said, from her remoteness, “that country people are very strange about their marriages. No wonder the Shakers don’t approve of marriage.”

“Then,” Mrs. Kelwyn continued, ignoring the generality, “there has been a pettifogging lawyer here from the village to see the Kites. I’m afraid they are going to make trouble for us.”

“Why, they can’t have you arrested?”

“Not arrested, exactly; but they might sue us, or something like that. I don’t know what. But we have started in the direction of putting them out of the place, and it seems we can’t stop. There seems to be no end to it all. Did you have a pleasant drive?”

“Yes — yes. Very pleasant.”

The two boys came running up from below and announced, “The old Shaker gentleman is down-stairs.”

“Elder Nathaniel?” Mrs. Kelwyn conjectured. “You go down and see him, Thennie dear. He’s coming about the Kites, of course. I don’t believe I could bear to talk the situation over any more just now. When did Mr. Emerance say he was going to the Centennial?”

“He didn’t say what day. It seems to be rather sudden. But if it’s going to decide his future for him, he may think he can’t go too soon. It’s a good deal for the hundredth anniversary of our Independence to decide!”

Parthenope fancied herself saying this to Emerance, but it was really addressed to Mrs. Kelwyn, who answered, remotely: “Yes, yes. Do go down and see what Elder Nathaniel has to say.”

The girl found the old man sitting on the threshold-stone gently fanning himself with his wide straw hat, in the wind of which his thin white hair waved where it hung long in his neck. Two rocking-chairs stood on the turf under the great elm, and “Let us sit down here, Elder Nathaniel,” she said, leading the way to them; “that stone is so uncomfortable.”

“Oh, nay,” he returned; but he followed her, and they sat down together facing each other. “I am sorry Friend Kelwyn is not here. The boys said he had gone to Boston.”

“Yes, and Mrs. Kelwyn asked me to excuse her for not coming down; she is very tired.”

“She has been worried by what Jasper told them about those folks he was going to put here?”

“A little. But, Elder Nathaniel” — she left the question of the Kelwyns in the larger interest of a general inquiry—” are all the married people about here divorced, or living unhappily, or something?”

“Oh, nay,” the Elder answered, with a certain wariness. “There are many couples here living rightly in the earthly order.”

“Because,” she explained, “I never heard of such things in Boston.”

“People know more about each other in the country,” he said.

“Do you mean,” she asked, “that there is just as much unhappiness among the married people in Boston, only we don’t know it?”

“Nay, I didn’t say that.”

“Then” — she went forward at a great bound—” why don’t the Shakers approve of marriage?”

“We approve of it in the earthly order,” he answered. “ But we believe the angelic life is better. In the resurrection there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage.”

“Of course, after you are dead—”

“Nay, we think we are continuously alive to all eternity. In the Family the heavenly order is honored; in the world-outside, the earthly order. But we do not condemn the earthly order. When we see a married pair living peaceably and affectionately together we respect them.”

“Then, why don’t more of them live that way together?” As if she felt the futility of her question the girl smiled forlornly.

The old man smiled compassionately. “Nay, I cannot tell you that. Perhaps it is because they are too ignorant of life and expect too much of each other. They are mostly very young and inexperienced.”

“I see,” the girl said; “you think they ought to wait.”

“Nay, if they waited they might not wish to marry at all,” the Elder suggested.

“That is true,” she sighed; “it seems a difficult problem. They certainly ought to know each other a long time.”

She fell into a troubled muse, from which she was startled after what seemed to her a much greater interval than it really was by his saying, “My own partner and I had known each other from childhood.”

“Why, Elder Nathaniel!” she cried. “Were you ever married?”

“Oh, yee; we had a family of children when we were led to enter upon the angelic life here. It was quite a little trial for us to separate.”

“You had a family?” She started forward in her chair. “Did you have any — girls?”

“Yee; we had three daughters and two sons.”

“And what became — did they — were they gathered in, too?”

“They were children. The boys followed me into the Church Family and the girls went with their mother into the Family that lived here.” He looked up and around at the great old house before which they sat. “The Family was fairly large then.”

“Elder Nathaniel!” the girl said. After a moment of amaze, she asked, “And are you all living in the Church Family now?”

“Nay; my wife died before the Family left this house.”

“Oh!” the girl said, tenderly.

As if her compassion made it easier for him to go on, he continued: “My daughters got to feeling foolish about some of the young men in the Family and ran away to be married. One of my sons died, and the other left us for the world-outside. You have heard of Mabel Northland?”

“I think I have seen the name,” Parthenope said, suddenly inattentive to the general inquiry. “Isn’t she some kind of actress?”

“Yee; he is with her company.”

“And — and does he play, too? Is he on the stage?”

“Nay; he is her press agent, as they call it.”

“Oh,” she said, and she sat staring at Elder Nathaniel, who softly passed his tongue over his lower lip as he drooped forward in his chair. “Elder Nathaniel,” she began again, “I am afraid I have pained you — made you pain yourself.”

“Oh, nay; it is a long time ago. Now and then my son comes to see me. My daughters are settled in the West. They are well-to-do, and in the earthly order they are happy for what I know.”

“Yes,” she vaguely assented. “Do you — do you like your son being connected with the theatre?”

“I do not mind that. When Friend Mabel was in Boston last I went down to see her act; he wished it. I thought it was a foolish play; but the theatre is no worse than other things in the world-outside. I could see how it might do some good with the right kind of play.”

“Did you?” she asked, with an unreasoned gratitude. “You mean with a piece that teaches a good lesson?”

“Yee. Any piece that shows the life of the world outside as it really is would teach a good lesson. Friend Mabel’s piece was foolish because it did not do that. It pretended that when the young folks who had got foolish about each other were married they were going to be happy because they were married.”

“I see,” Parthenope said. “I suppose that is the way people want plays to end,” she reflected. “Thank you very much, Elder Nathaniel.”

She sat silent, and the Elder was silent too, but he did not offer to go at once. When at last he made a movement to go it seemed to her that she had been hinting him away.

“Elder Nathaniel,” she asked, more abruptly than perhaps she would if she had not wished to disabuse him of any such suspicion, “if your daughters — or one of them — had wished to marry an actor, would you have felt worse than for her to marry a Shaker?”

“When they married,” he answered, severely, “they ceased to be Shakers.”

“Yes, I know; I don’t mean Shakers, exactly. I mean some other kind of profession.”

“Nay, I cannot answer that. I have never thought of it.”

“

“Of course not. What you would wish them to do would be to think very seriously before they married at all.”

“Nay, the thinking seriously might better the case, but it would not change its nature. I could have had no wish but that they should remain Shakers.”

“Yes, I know. You must think I am very stupid.” He had risen, but he hesitated, as if he thought she was going to say more. Then he said: “I must be going, now. I bid you good-afternoon.”

She watched him up the path that led toward the Church Family house through the woods. Then she went indoors to her cousin, whom she found still busy putting the contents of her work-basket in order.

“Well,” Mrs. Kelwyn asked, without looking up, “what did Elder Nathaniel have to say?”

“He wasn’t so outright as that Brother from Canbury; but I believe he feels just the same about it.”

“Feels the same?” Now Mrs. Kelwyn looked up. “About what?”

“About marriage,” Parthenope answered.

Mrs. Kelwyn stared. “I thought you were talking about those people Jasper proposed putting in here?”

“Oh, we were” the girl answered, all too compliantly. “That was what led up to it. From what he said I shouldn’t think it would be easy to find any nice married couple to keep house for you. His own daughters ran away with Shaker Brothers and got married, and his son is the press agent of that Mabel Northland the actress.”

“Parthenope Brook, what are you talking about?”

“I forgot. You didn’t know that Elder Nathaniel came here with a family of his own?”

“No. But what in the world has that got to do with somebody in the place of the Kites?”

Parthenope had to own that directly it Had nothing to do. She escaped from the question with which Mrs. Kelwyn must have visited her in a less distracted moment, on the plea that she would have to see what she could get for supper, if Mrs. Kite would let her get anything at all.

The daze in which she Had returned from her drive with Emerance seemed to have been deepened by her efforts to escape from it. She had got no light upon herself either from Mrs. Kelwyn or Elder Nathaniel. Nevertheless, she was in a conditional clearness as to her part in the event which she forecast now this way and now that.

XXIII

MRS. KITE was less difficult than when she first returned from her visit to her friends. She had apparently relinquished the ideals they had inspired, or the prospect of change in her relations to the Kelwyns had softened her toward them. She now let Parthenope use her kitchen at will, and sat by, watching her and talking of what she and her family should do next, and how soon they would have to leave when the crops had been appraised and everything was settled.

She had taken no steps toward removal, but the rumor of the Kites’ going had spread so widely that Kelwyn had received three offers from families who were willing to take their place. It was more and more clear that in the neighbors’ estimation the Kites had wasted an enviable opportunity. Upon the whole, the knowledge of this public opinion had comforted and strengthened Kelwyn, and on his return from Boston he professed an appetite for supper such as he had not shown for breakfast. He had driven from the station to the Church Family, and Emerance had come home with him, but he had gone to Mrs. Kite’s door. He seemed to be helping Parthenope with the supper, and Mrs. Kite joined them in bringing in the dishes from the kitchen. All was, in fact, so quite as it had been at its best a month before that Mrs. Kelwyn could not believe in the events which had threatened a different catastrophe. Kite returned from his fields with the big boy and Raney; and, after they had eaten their evening meal, they came out and lounged upon the grass before the kitchen door and talked and smoked. When Kite rose to go and give a last look at his horses for the night, he called over his shoulder to Kelwyn, where he sat with his family group, “Want I should have you’ yer team ready to go to the Shakers after breakfast?”

“What does it mean, Elmer?” his wife entreated. “Surely they’re not expecting to stay, are they, after all that’s been done?”

“It seems like a convulsive effort to be commonly decent,” he assented, in a puzzle with the fact.

“Well, it’s sickening. She’s been hanging about, offering to do things, since you went this morning. Do you suppose they’ve just realized it?”

“Perhaps they’ve heard of the general willingness to replace them, and have begun to think they are losing something worth having. I wish they’d thought so sooner,” Kelwyn sighed, with a look up at the great friendly house. “If they’d only been half possible!”

“Yes. And now it’s too late. They must go. You see, don’t you?”

“Oh yes, I see.”

Parthenope and Emerance had been strolling down the dimming road, and now they came back and stood expectant.

“It’s the usual topic,” Mrs. Kelwyn explained. “We are wishing that the Kites wouldn’t try to do, since they can’t do, and they’re plainly trying to do. We hate to turn them out of the best home they’ve ever had.”

“Especially,” Kelwyn added, “as we. don’t know whom to put in their place.”

“No, Elmer, I won’t let you attribute a selfish motive to yourself.”

“Then, say a scientific motive. We are simply conforming to the course of civilization, Mr. Emerance. We are the stronger race pushing the weaker to the wall.”

Emerance consented, with a dreamy air, “That does seem the order of history.”

“I don’t see why you say that, Mr. Emerance,” Mrs. Kelwyn returned, in a note of indignation. “I should think any dispassionate person would say we had been pushed to the wall, even if we are the stronger race.”

“Oh,” the young man apologized, “ I meant that some such event is always inevitable. People seem to talk up, or they talk down, to one another, and not face to face on the same level. So there is never a perfect understanding between them.”

“Very well, then, Mr. Emerance, we will make you our ambassador to the Kites. I thought we had explained ourselves fully from the very beginning. There has been talking enough, but perhaps we don’t speak the same language. If you know theirs—”

“I can’t be sure,” Emerance returned, “and as your ambassador I might make bad worse. It might be better not to interrupt the order of history.”

Parthenope took no part in the discussion, which ended here with Mrs. Kelwyn’s saying, from the asperity of spent nerves, “Well, I must go in and put the boys to bed.”

“I’ll go and help you,” Parthenope volunteered. “Good-night.” She did not specialize Emerance, but he answered, “ Good-night,” as if she had. When she was alone with Mrs. Kelwyn she said, “I don’t believe he meant anything more than to agree to what Cousin Elmer said.”

“Oh, I knew that.”

“Then I don’t understand why you were so severe.”

In the ensuing days, which now prolonged themselves into a fortnight, Kelwyn hesitated over his duty to himself and family, which he felt to be more and more obvious. It was even a duty to the Kites, especially when they did worse than usual, if there could be any exception that was worse than the ordinary course of their inefficiency and inadequacy. But a thing that clarified itself more satisfactorily to Kelwyn than his obvious duty was the wrong he was suffering at the hands of the Shakers, or, rather, the hands of Brother Jasper. In the slow and painful evolution of his thoughts he realized that Brother Jasper was standing from under and letting him take the whole responsibility of dispossessing the Kites. He was letting them believe, and logically letting them say, that they could have got on with other people, and if they could not get on with the Kelwyns, then they were being turned out of house and home because the Kelwyns were unreasonable and unjust.

The time came when Kelwyn resolved he would endure the state of things no longer, and declared that Brother Jasper should take his full share in ending it.

“Don’t do anything rash, Elmler,” his wife cautioned him, from admiration of the inflexible decision she saw in his face.

“Rash doesn’t seem just the word for a delay of six or seven weeks. But rash or not, I am going to see Jasper at once and have it over.”

“Well, I hope you will act prudently,” she cautioned further, from that vague necessity wives feel of holding their husbands back from a step they have reached in common.

Kelwyn did not answer, but he got his hat and stick.

“You are going to walk?” she temporized.

“That is what the horse would do if I could get him, but I believe Kite has taken him for his work,” Kelwyn answered, and without more words he set off through the woods to the Church Family.

At the Office the Sisters told him that Jasper was at the bam hitching up, and Kelwyn found him there buckling the holdbacks of the harness round the shafts.

“Brother Jasper,” he said, without waiting for any form of greeting, “I want you to go with me to Kite where he is working and hear what I have to say to him.”

“I was just tackling up to go and see some folks we were going to put in for you,” Brother Jasper said, looking at him over the horse’s back.

“Well, never mind that now. We will cross that river when we come to it. Now you have got to face Kite with me and confirm what I say; you have got to take your share in turning him out. You put him in.”

Brother Jasper made no answer, but he scolded the horse with unshakerly violence in terms which, if they had been translated into the parlance of the world-outside, would have been of the effect of swearing, while he went on buckling the shaft-strap under the horse, running the reins through the rings on the hames to the bridle, and then giving a final pull at the whole harness to make sure that everything was secure. “If you’ll get in, now,” he said at last, and he mounted beside Kelwyn and drove off to the meadow where Kite was at work, and called him away from the other mowers.

Kite came up and sat down under the tree where Kelwyn was waiting for him, and took out his knife and began whittling a stick. He was pale, and to Kelwyn’s eyes hideous with hate, so that Kelwyn was glad that he sat aloof in the buggy, and sorry that he had thrown his revolver into the well; it would at least have been a show of weapon against weapon. But as it was, he would not fear.

“Mr. Kite,” he began, “I hear that you are holding me responsible for your going away, and I have brought Brother Jasper with me to tell you that it is he who is putting you out of the house,” and at this unsparing statement Jasper winced, and his face twisted itself in an expression of his helpless inner protest.

Kite whittled furiously at his stick, cutting large slices from it, while Kelwyn followed his blade in fearful fascination. “I’d like to know what’s gone wrong with you now? Was it that steak I got ye for your dinner yesterday? It was the best piece of steak in the meat-store, and you can ask Billings himself.”

“We won’t go into particulars,” Kelwyn said. “All there is of it is you won’t do, and you don’t seem to want to do.”

“No, I guess you don’t want to go into particulars,” Kite retorted. “There ain’t a single damn thing ye got against us. You’re mighty hard folks to suit; no boarder of mine ever complained before. You may bet your sweet life I wouldn’t take ye another year for all the money you got, even if you got enough to pay a decent price for your board.”

Kelwyn ignored the insinuation of his poverty, so far as open recognition went, but in the sting of the insult he forgot the stately position he had taken. He now went into the particulars of the wrongs he had suffered, and he enumerated them with a volubility worthy of a woman. He was not stayed by Kite’s denial of every instance, and, as happens with people who try to free their minds in anger, he found more and more rancor in his. At last they both stopped, breathless, and wiped the drops of fury from their faces.

It was very squalid, and Kelwyn felt the shame of the squabble the more because he suspected that at the bottom of his heart Brother Jasper thought he had been too exacting. When he got breath for a renewal of the dispute, he said, some octaves lower than before:

“It isn’t a question of another year; it’s a question of this year; and Brother Jasper will tell you that you are going, not because you can’t suit us, but because you are not fit to take boarders at all.”

Brother Jasper did not speak, and Kelwyn had to ask him, “Is that so, Brother Jasper?”

Then from Brother Jasper’s writhing features a kind of small scream emitted itself in a sharp “Yee” that was like the cry of a sufferer in having a tooth drawn.

“All right, Jasper,” Kite said, rising to his feet, with the open knife in his hand, to which Kelwyn’s eyes still clung. He snapped it to and slipped it into his pocket. “I know where you stand.” Then he added, with a glare at Kelwyn, “We’ll see what the law o’ this is,” and hulked away to join the mowers, who had been listening their best from the other side of the meadow.

Jasper remounted to the seat beside Kelwyn, but at a remove which symbolized the moral gulf between them.

“Want I should drive ye home?” he asked, but the brief transit was rather lengthened than shortened by the “Yees” and “Nays” with which he responded to the points of justification which Kelwyn turned toward him. —

In fact, he left Kelwyn to feel that he had played a cruel part, not only toward him, but toward Kite, from whom he had torn every tatter of self-respect in his effort to share the responsibility with Brother Jasper. It needed all the resentment he could heat up in his heart to support him in the retrospect of an action which had seemed to him so clear and right before he took it.

His wife’s praise of his courage and firmness failed of effect, and he was still ashamed, rather than proud, of his part when he met Elder Nathaniel on his way to the post-office in the afternoon, and the Elder expressed his personal regret for the hopeless pass the affair had come to. It appeared that something like a Family meeting had been held, and that the Office Sisters had pursuantly gone to see Mrs. Kite and urged her to advise her husband to go quietly. They had made her understand that the Family was determined to give the house to some one who could satisfy the Kelwyns, and that it was useless for her to hold out against them, and she had admitted the wisdom of this. “But,” Elder Nathaniel said, “she thought she had done everything she could to please you, and, if she could only find out where she hadn’t suited, she was sure she could make it right. I have no doubt now that they will give up peaceably, and we shall have no further trouble.”

If this was not soothing to Kelwyn’s feeling, in the circumstances, Mrs. Kite’s return to her futile efforts to please him and his family added to his self-reproach. He found greater comfort in Kite’s sullen attitude, where he held aloof from all part in her endeavors, and the whole Sunday morning that followed, when none of the Kelwyns had heart for going to the Shaker meeting, they saw him sulking at the barn-door. In the afternoon he drove about in a close, warm rain with two shabby friends, as if there were some sort of conspiracy afoot; but there was, apparently, no appeal to the law, and Kelwyn heard next day from the Shakers that Kite had agreed to go out; that referees were coming that week to appraise his crops and decide what would be due him from the Family. In the mean time Mrs. Kite resumed her confidence in their friendly relations, and talked to Parthenope as if they were going on together indefinitely. The storm had so far cleared the sky that in the ensuing calm a sort of toleration, if not kindness, grew up between the rival camps, and in this truce the Kelwyns could not refuse to acknowledge to themselves that the Kites were not wilfully bad. At the worst, they questioned, were they not ignorant and helpless? It was true that the renewal of the momentary amenities of the past were wholly through the woman’s efforts, but the man was not actively offensive.

A night or two after Kelwyn’s meeting with Kite in the meadow, Parthenope, leaning from her window and looking out into the dark, heard her cousin and Emerance talking in their chairs under the elm. Kelwyn was saying: “It is strange how difficult it is to withdraw from any human relation, no matter how provisional. There is always an unexpected wrench, a rending of fibres, a pang of remorse.”

The girl knew very well that Kelwyn was thinking of his quarrel with Kite, but she did not know how he was always trying to pull himself up from the degradation of an encounter which Mrs. Kelwyn had represented to her as something almost heroic, and from which he had barely escaped with his life.

She was more interested in what Emerance answered. “Yes, there seems to be a quality of death in every human parting. When we go a journey and leave friends behind it is like a voluntary dying.”

“But I didn’t mean that exactly,” Kelwyn returned, in a note of vexation. “I meant merely the termination of the common concords, agreements, partnerships.”

“Oh yes; I was following a suggestion from your thought rather than the thought itself. But if we carry your thought further to the most enduring of provisional relations—”

He paused, and Kelwyn asked, “To marriage?”

“Yes; I have often wondered how the parties to a divorce, people who had once cared for each other, really felt when it came to the point of severing.” Parthenope found herself listening acutely, eavesdropping, as it were, with all her might, though there was nothing that she would have abhorred more than eavesdropping. “I have wondered whether there wasn’t always a touch of regret, a lingering kindness as they had when their outlook was the brightest.”

This struck Parthenope as beautiful, and she was vexed more than she could have expressed with Kelwyn’s answering commonplace: “Every one has good qualities as well as bad. No doubt they see each other’s good qualities at such a time. But if there was any appreciable kindness, perhaps there would be no divorces.”

“No,” the young man assented; and then there was a little silence in which Parthenope tried to follow his course of thinking back to its real source, as she had so easily followed Kelwyn’s. They knew so little of Emerance; he might easily, in his obscure past, have been married and divorced; or much more probably he might have been engaged, and in the image of a divorce he might have been brooding on a broken engagement.

“But to return to the original point,” Kelwyn said, in breaking the silence, “I think that at the end of every relation in life there is a sort of blind desire, unreasonable and illogical, to have it on again. If it ends abruptly or inimically this is especially the case. We go back of the cause of disagreement and find potentialities of continued reciprocity. We see defects in ourselves and excellences in our antagonist — if it has come to antagonism — and we wish we could try it all over again. I am speaking in the abstract, of course.” Kelwyn recovered himself from a position that gave too much away to his own consciousness. “As a matter of fact, it might be quite the other way, and we be very glad to have the thing over for good and all.”

“Oh yes,” Emerance said, and then there was a sound of rising and of feet stirring in the dark.

“I think we’ll take these chairs in. It’s so very close that I shouldn’t be surprised if there were a storm before morning. Good-night,” she heard Kelwyn say, and then Emerance answer:

“Good-night.” But he added: “I don’t think I’ll go in just yet. It is pleasanter outdoors than in, such a night. Don’t trouble about the chairs; I’ll bring them.”

“All right,” Kelwyn said, and now Parthenope was aware of Emerance sitting there in the dark alone and thinking. What was he thinking? She would have liked to know. If it had been possible to eavesdrop his thoughts she would have done it; people often tried to penetrate one another’s thoughts, and she never heard that it was wrong or even disgraceful. She fancied keeping him company in the dark where he sat outside, and she held a long tacit colloquy with him on the most serious things. They were both very serious. They were confidential. They told each other the history of their lives. At last she lay down on her bed in the close, hot air, but she did not know she had slept when about midnight she was awakened by a wild screaming, which seemed to come from the dwelling of their nearest neighbor, an old woman, who lived a little way down the road, alone in her two rooms. Parthenope had been in during the forenoon to see her, and had found her lying on her high old-fashioned bed, with the sabre of her son, a soldier of the Civil War, crossed over a withered wreath, at the bed-head. She said she was not feeling just well, and now the girl imagined those shrieks coming from her. She roused her cousins and straggled forth with them into the cloud-broken moonlight that now hid and now rendered picturesque their common dishabille. The Kites were up and out with a lantern; Emerance was there, too, and they joined forces for the succor of their neighbor. Kite went to the window with his lantern and rapped on the pane, while his wife asked, in her sweet treble, “Are you sick, Mrs. Ager?”

After an interval, as if for waking and understanding, the old woman answered, No, she was very much better.

Then Mrs. Kite said, “We thought we heard you screaming. Well, good-night.”

“I guess,” her husband said, tolerantly, to Parthenope, “that it was a screech-owl we heard. But sometime there’s goin’ to be trouble if that old fool keeps on livin’ by herself there and these tramps get much thicker. She’d ought to be put somewheres, but as long as she’s got enough to live on the selectmen can’t touch her. She’ll die in that shanty of her’n some night if she don’t get killed first.”

The Kites went back to their place beyond the kitchen, and when they had disappeared with their lantern the Kelwyns lingered a moment at their door, looking up into the moon-broken clouds. Parthenope sat down on the threshold-stone. “I am not going in just yet,” she said; “it’s choking in my room, and it’s not going to rain.”

“I don’t wonder you don’t want to go in,” Mrs. Kelwyn conceded. “But I don’t like your staying out here alone, Thennie,” she added.

A cloud had passed over the moon, and it could not be seen that Emerance had sat down at the other end of the threshold, but his voice placed him when he said, “I will stay and protect her if you’ll let me, Mrs. Kelwyn.”

“I shall not need any protection,” Parthenope answered.

“Oh, well, then,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, vaguely, as she led her husband indoors.

Parthenope was the first to break the silence to which she was left with Emerance in a murmured, “How perfectly still it is.”

“Yes; we only need some sound to make the stillness evident, just as we need some one with us when we wish to feel ourselves alone.”

“I don’t know that I need any one,” she demurred, “to help me realize that I’m alone.”

“I didn’t mean you did. When I said we I meant “That is rather trivial, Mr. Emerance, if you’ll allow me to say so.”

“I like to have you frank with me. Do you think that I am trivial?”

“Not always. But often enough to provoke people with you.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” he said, with a sigh which she was not sure was sincere. “I suppose I’m nothing but a dreamer, after all.”

She defended him from himself. “I don’t think you’re a dreamer. Or not altogether. Doesn’t Emerson say, ‘Be true to the dream of thy youth’?”

“Ah, but which one?” he asked.

“Now that is what I call truly trivial — making light of serious things.”

“But I’m not; I’m quite in earnest. With all my various dreaming — my experimenting, as you call it—”

“Oh, if you mean that, yes,” she assented, and then, not knowing just where they were, or not being sure what next she should say in criticism of him, she remarked, abstractly, “Isn’t it strange what life seems to come to?”

“It certainly is,” he agreed, in turn. “But do you mean generally or particularly?”

“Oh, I was just thinking of poor Mrs. Ager yonder. I suppose she was a bright young girl once, and had a whole tribe of brothers and sisters, as they used to in the country, and believed she was having the gayest kind of times when she grew up; and then she got married and had a large family of her own, and her husband died, and her children got married, most of them, and one son went to the war and was killed, and they brought his sword home and put it over the head of her bed. And now she lives there alone, just one little shrivelled up old scrap of all the lives she once belonged to.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is very pathetic. If something like such a common history could be put whole into a play—”

“But it couldn’t. A play must be made up of a few great moments.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure of that!”

“Of course if you could hint at it all in a sort of prologue, and then get in the feeling of this wild neighborhood, and have it end tragically, with her getting killed in her house alone there by tramps — I do believe Mr. Kite is right about it! Some day the neighbors will find her dead there.”

“Yes. Or we could have it end well. Mrs. Ager could make an outcry, as we thought she did to-night; and Kite could come to the rescue. He seems to be the neighborhood moralist and philanthropist.”

“Now you are trivial again! I should think you would be awed by the sort of mixture such a man is; he and his wife both. Sometimes they really seem to want to do right.”

‘“I suppose we all do; but some of us find it more difficult than others.”

“Do you excuse them on that account?” she demanded, severely. “Perhaps you think they are more to be considered than my cousins, whose lives they have made so miserable here. I dare say you think that rather than put the Kites out we ought to go away ourselves and leave the house to them. I really believe you do!” If she expected him to be daunted by her charge she had to own to herself that he was right in answering nothing to it. She ended, ineffectively enough, “But where could we go?”

“Well,” he surprised her in answering, “I do happen to have heard of a place—”

“Oh! Have you been making inquiries?” she asked. But she felt that her question was vulgar, and she added, “I beg your pardon.”

He did not seem to have taken offence. “You remember that stone cottage?”

“Not the one where they couldn’t agree whether to paint the ell red or green?” she demanded, tumultuously.

“Yes; the people in it want to go to the seaside for July and August, and they had heard of your troubles here—”

“Our troubles seem to have filled the neighborhood for miles around!”

“And the man was at the post-office to-day when I went for my letters, and he asked if your cousins wouldn’t like to take his house. I hesitated about telling Mr. Kelwyn because I didn’t just know how to do it without seeming to meddle—”

“Don’t dream of apologizing. I’m not sure but we ought to be on our bended knees in gratitude, or that they won’t be as soon as I tell them. I’ll wake them out of their sleep to tell them!” she declared, with more irony than she meant as she showed herself in the dimness suddenly looming to her feet. But she did not go in at once. She said, as if it followed, “The moon feels fairly warm.”

A curtain of cloud had swept aside, and in a space of sheer blue the moon hung, round, with a soft glow of almost ivory-white.

“Perhaps there’s reflected heat as well as light from it,” he suggested, looking at her looking at the moon.

“You’ll be wanting to experiment with it on the crops,” she said.

“But you know that it’s the warm nights that make the corn grow. In the great corn-raising States they say you can hear it growing at night.”

She laughed. “You could probably. I doubt if I could. But there is one thing I don’t understand about you, Mr. Emerance. Why do you always take the part of these wretched beings around here, no matter how they behave or how degraded they are?”

“Do I do that?” he asked, but apparently with more curiosity than denial.

“I must leave you to think it out. Good-night,” she said, abruptly.

“Oh no! Don’t go!” he entreated, in what she thought a strange manner, though he really added nothing more than, “I’m going to Boston, and then to the Centennial to-morrow, you know.”

“To-morrow? Oh yes; I didn’t know it was tomorrow. Then I must change good-night to good-bye.”

“I shouldn’t like that any better — I—” But he stopped.

“How mysterious!” she said; but her heart beat quickly, for now if it was coming, that greatest it of all, she ought not to have let it come unless she wished for it as she believed a woman ought to wish with her whole soul. She had her ideal of this matter, as she had of the other great matters of life; her ideal was an instant and entire passion for surrender and possession, and as far as she could see in this rather dismaying moment there was and there had never been anything of the kind with her toward him. She did not fail to blame herself for having idly swayed and drifted on the surface of a current that had nothing torrential in it; but she believed that she could have made excuses for herself. She had always felt in many ways so much beyond him; not above him, but beyond him. It was not so much that his level was lower than hers, but his point of arrival was so much short of hers. She was older in spirit, more settled in principle, more convinced in opinion. She was of quite another civilization and an experience of the world altogether different. Yet she ought not to have let it come to what it was coming to. She had been wrong, and now she could only be right by being cruel. If Parthenope was rather cold she did not like being cruel.

One imperceptible instant she waited for him to go on before she said, “Well, I’ll keep to my original good-night.” He echoed, “Good-night,” with an accent of submission that haunted her to her room, but left her to a various mind. Among her ideals none was more distinct than that of the manliness which must take all the risks in love-making. Her temperamental adequacy to the demands of life upon herself left her without much compassion for those who paltered with destiny and feared to put their fate to the touch. She had a difficulty in the matter that did not leave her wholly at ease, for if she had encouraged Emerance to the point of asking her for herself, when she meant to deny him, she was clearly wrong according to her lowest ideal of herself; but if he believed she had encouraged him, and yet was so nerveless that he could not act upon his belief, she could only regard him with a pity close upon contempt. Her pitying contempt did not wholly exclude the remorse with which she began thinking the whole case over. Either she had or she had not encouraged him, and if she had she ought now to have discouraged him sharply, decisively. But had he been definite enough for this? If she had really left him to a sort of vague hope, was it because she was uncertain of his meaning? Had he led her on through her curiosity, tempted her to the uncandor of which she accused herself? Was it all a part, another phase of his temperamental experimenting? Had he been experimenting with her? The thought made Parthenope rebound where she lay in bed, as one does in a drowse-dream of having dropped from some height. It roused her to full waking, but it was of such comfort that now she could dismiss all regret. She dismissed it so absolutely that she passed from it into a slumber in which she knew nothing more till she heard a knocking on her door. Her cousin Kelwyn excused it as his, saying that he would like her to drive over to the Shakers with him, and it was past eight o’clock.

XXIV

FROM the sleepless remnant of the night, which Parthenope had found so refreshing after the clearing of her conscience toward Emerance, Kelwyn had risen with as generous a resolution as ever filled the breast of a lecturer on historical sociology. At the very first step toward its fulfilment he met with an experience which was the first of his difficulties. Kite was not there to hitch up the horse for him, and when he asked for Raney or Albert, Mrs. Kite said they had both gone to the field with her husband. But she added, lightly, that the horse was in the barn, and she guessed Kelwyn could hitch it up all right. She guessed truly, and by the time Parthenope had finished the belated breakfast she had got for herself Kelwyn had been so expeditious that he was sitting in the carryall waiting for her at the door.

As she mounted beside him the two Kelwyn boys came running from the kitchen to say, in their usual order: “We don’t want to go with you, papa. Arthur has give us the white horse.”

“Yes, yes,” their father said, absently; “given, not give.”

“Arthur says give; Mrs. Kite says give,” they defended themselves.

“I’ve no doubt,” Kelwyn said. “But you mustn’t. And don’t try to ride him.”

“No, we won’t,” they promised; and as Kelwyn drove off with Parthenope, who had tried, within the bounds of truth, to magnify the gift which the boys had asked her to appreciate, after their evident failure with their father, Kelwyn added: “I’m not sure that I know which they promised not to do. If we stayed here much longer they would not have a grammatical principle uncorrupted. But fortunately we are not going to stay. We are going to go.”

“Why, have the Shakers found that that last family won’t do?” the girl asked, glad of the fresh morning air in a world where there were many things one could not approve of.

“They will do only too well,” Kelwyn said, “and that makes the difficulty the greater. The whole matter is one that I should like to put before you, as Carry and I have been seeing it in the darkness of the night.”

“Oh, do, Cousin Elmer! You know I always feel so honored when you talk to me as if I were grown up. And I will try my very best to be grown up.”

“I want you to help me to be grown up, too, and I hope you won’t mind my being a little prolix and perhaps repeating what you know already.”

“Not at all; that’s the only way I can help you.” This was not very consequent, and Kelwyn frowned a little for the inconsequence as he went on. “You know the plain and logical view of the matter, the legal position, would be to stand upon our rights. Perhaps, in the interest of society, we should not enable the Kites to remain where they could impose upon other long suffering and unoffending people.”

“Yes,” Parthenope assented, with bright intelligence.

“But it is just there where we have found ourselves weak, and where we have decided to incur the measure of guilt that lies in what I may call a self-indulgent self-sacrifice. We have been talking it over the whole night, or what was left of the night, and we cannot bring ourselves to stand upon our rights. To put those people out would be to disgrace them before their neighbors, and cloud their future wherever the rumor of their disgrace followed them. I have realized more and more, from my last talk with Brother Jasper, that he would justify us in putting them out, not because they were unfit to keep the house for any one, but because they could not keep it to suit us, could not meet our tastes. This is the business view of it. I know that Elder Nathaniel and the Sisters feel differently, and that they truly regret what we have undergone; they have all said so, and they would approve our action understandingly, but Brother Jasper never would. To the last he would think we had been too particular, and he might even say so to justify himself for putting the Kites into the house at all. I don’t believe he has been very wise in his selection of their unsuccessive successors, though he seems at last to have found the right family for us. Until the other day, when I forced him to it explicitly, he has never talked the matter over with Kite in my presence either because he is afraid of him or because he does not wholly approve of us. I don’t like that in Brother Jasper, and I am going round to tell him so when I tell him that we have decided now, without further delay, to go out ourselves.”

“I am sure you owe it to yourself, Cousin Elmer, to do so,” Parthenope assented. But in listening to Kelwyn’s statement her mind had wandered to the toleration with which Emerance had always spoken of the Kites, and it seemed as if she had inspired her cousin to say:

“I don’t blame the Kites altogether, you understand. Carry and I have both come to the same conclusion.

“It’s even a little pathetic about them in their ignorance, their want of domestic civilization. He believes she is a perfect housekeeper so thoroughly that she believes it herself. That is the hopeless phase of the case, as it is the pathetic phase. Besides, they are not without human, without humane feeling. Kite thinks he is the superior of that drunken Alison, and is qualified to advise him and his wife for their good; and you saw last night how ready they were to go to the help of Mrs. Ager when they thought she was in trouble.”

“Yes; that is what complicates the matter,” Parthenope said, and it seemed to her as if she were saying it in assent to Emerance as well as to Kelwyn.

“And now I am going to the Shakers’ to have it out with Brother Jasper, and to make him go with me to the field again where Kite is working and have it out with him. Brother Jasper has got to listen while I tell Kite that we are not going to make him go, but are going ourselves, not because he cannot suit us, but because he can’t suit anybody. I shall have at least that satisfaction.”

“And I think you have a perfect right to it, Cousin Elmer,” Parthenope commented, with a judicial air which was not impaired for Kelwyn by her laying her hand on his and pressing it with impulsive approval. He liked it the more because it did not seem alloyed by the doubt of his course which he had felt himself, and which his wife had expressed in arriving with him at their present decision. “The worst of it,” he answered, with a sigh of disclaimer, “is that we don’t know where to go. It’s still a month or six weeks before we want to go back to town, and we haven’t the least idea where to put in the time.”

Parthenope hesitated, and a blush made its way through the tan which covered her face to her cinnamon hair.

“The only place that I have seen yet,” Kelwyn pursued, “is the one I saw with Carry the other day while you were off with Emerance. The place was charming, and the rooms were as many as we could ask; but they were stuffy and shabby, and the woman, though good-looking enough, was long, lank, and slatternly, and had drawn her hair up over her head and dyed the skull through it in spots!” But he broke away from the picture. “Part of my errand to the Shakers is to ask whether they don’t know of some decent people who will take us in when we turn ourselves out into the street; for that is what it practically comes to. They certainly owe us as much as that. I don’t know but I have a right to demand that they shall board us till we can find some place.”

“Yes,” Parthenope assented, provisionally. “You wouldn’t like to keep house for yourselves?”

“Isn’t that what we are and have been doing?” he asked, sarcastically.

“Then,” she said, “I believe I know of something. It is a house that Mr. Emerance and I saw. I didn’t suppose it could be had; but Mr. Emerance said last night that he had met the owner in the post-office, and he told him they were going to the seaside for August, and he wondered if you wouldn’t like his house, for he heard you were not satisfied with the Kites. But I didn’t know that Cousin Carry wanted the care of housekeeping, or even that you were going to leave the Kites—”

“Don’t keep me waiting, Parthenope! What is it? Where is it? Housekeeping! We are prepared for hotel keeping, rather than stay where we are.”

“Why, you remember that stone cottage round by the pond, or dam, where those wood-colored mills are?”

“You don’t mean that cottage where they can’t agree whether to paint the ell red or green? Do you mean that we could get that cottage for the rest of the summer?”

“That is what Mr. Emerance said; but—”

“Get up!” Kelwyn called to his horse; he almost shouted, in fact; and he pulled so hard on one of the reins that the girl cried out in alarm:

“Are you trying to turn the wagon over, Cousin Elmer?”

“I’m trying to turn the road round.”

“But that isn’t the way to the Shakers’!”

“No; but it’s the way to the stone cottage, and I’m going there as fast as this horse can crawl. Parthenope, you are an instrument of Providence, though you may never have suspected it. That stone cottage has dropped from heaven, and at your touch. I only hope no one else has taken it, or the people changed their minds.”

“But wait, Cousin Elmer,” she entreated, laying her hand on the reins. “You’re not going to take it without Cousin Carry’s seeing it?”

“Your seeing it will be enough. You know our wants quite as well as we do, and Caroline will trust your judgment.”

In his wilfulness Kelwyn became almost gay, and the girl caught his spirit, so that when they came in sight of the cottage at a turn of the road she was laughing.

The owners of the cottage were out in its grounds, looking up at the ell as before, but at sight of the carryall at their front door they both came to it questioningly.

“Your place gone yet?” Kelwyn asked, with the jocoseness which in him was always racial rather than personal.

“No,” the owner of the cottage said, in the same vein, “it seems to be here still. Professor Kelwyn? Thought it was you. Guess we know the young lady already. Won’t you come in and look round? Hitch your horse for you?”

“No,” Kelwyn said, alighting and helping Parthenope down. “He’ll stand — whenever he gets the chance.”

“Looks that way,” the other assented. “Well, it’s a great thing in a horse.”

The wife took friendly possession of Parthenope, and followed her indoors while the men talked of terms in walking about the grounds.

“And there isn’t an unpleasant room in the house,” the wife said, proudly, when their tour of it had ended, and Parthenope had to own:

“No; there isn’t, indeed. I think it’s perfect, but my cousin will have to see it. I couldn’t be responsible.”

“No, of course not,” the wife said, coming to the door with her. “She can have our girl, too.”

“Well, he’s taken it,” her husband said, referring to Kelwyn. “Has she?”

“The same as, I guess,” his wife humored him.

“He’s going to paint the ell dark green.”

“And she’s going to paint it red.”

They had their joke, and Parthenope praised the house, but cautioned Kelwyn that Mrs. Kelwyn, in justice to her, ought to see it.

“Have I the refusal till to-morrow?” he asked of the lady.

“Oh yes.”

“Just drop a postal,” the husband said, and Kelwyn got back into the carryall with Parthenope.

As he drove away, in high content with himself and the whole world, he said, “Now, I shall have courage to face the Shakers, and tell Brother Jasper what I have decided to do.”

Parthenope looked her surprise at his seeming to have just come to a conclusion which she had thought his prime errand, and he went on:

“Of course I should have done it in any case, but having a roof to put over one’s head beforehand makes a great difference. It gives one heart.”

“Of course,” she agreed; but it seemed to her that here was a point on which she ought to help Kelwyn clear his mind if she meant to be of the highest use to him. “I am glad you have that to fall back on.” She added, tactfully: “A woman wouldn’t have had the courage to take such a leap in the dark without it; I suppose that is where a man is different.”

After a moment Kelwyn said, rather dryly, “I suppose so.”

“I almost wish,” she continued, with a light of the ideal in the face she turned on him, but a modest ideal expressing a willingness for instruction, “that you could have told them you were going out before you really knew of anything else.”

“I think it quite enough as it is,” Kelwyn said, not liking to have what was left of his magnanimous position minimized.

“Yes,” Parthenope reflected. “And perhaps Cousin Carry may not like the house. There’s that.”

“I believe we can make sure of her liking it,” Kelwyn said, in refusing the high consolation.

But the chance of her not liking the house haunted his consciousness, and reinforced his pride of selfindulgent self-sacrifice when it came to his announcement of it. He had to suffer the disappointment of not finding Brother Jasper at the office; there was no one there hut Elder Nathaniel, with the two Office Sisters. They told him that Brother Jasper had gone to the field where Kite was working to meet the referees who were to value his crops before he could be put out of the place.

“The Family will have to take them at the referees’ valuation,” Elder Nathaniel said, with a dejection which the Sisters mutely shared. “And we wish to tell you again how greatly we regret the inconvenience you have suffered; and desire you to understand that our share of it is comparatively little. We would be pleased to do more if we could.”

“Yee, we would,” the Office Sisters united with the Elder. “We all would.”

“Thank you,” Kelwyn said, with a severity which was meant less to reproach them than to strengthen himself in his high purpose. “I have come to relieve you even of that part. My wife and I have decided not to put you to any further trouble, but to end the whole matter by going out ourselves and leaving the Kites in possession.”

“I have been afraid it might come to that,” Elder Nathaniel sadly admitted, without that explicit applause of Kelwyn’s decision which he certainly thought it merited.

The Sisters merely looked their distress, and while the men talked the matter over in detail they seemed glad to turn from it and enter into such gossip with Parthenope as they thought harmless.

“It seems as if a great many were going to the Centennial,” Saranna said. “Some of our Canbury Family are going, and the storekeeper in the village at the depot is taking his wife. We did hear that the folks in the stone cottage were going, too, if they could let their house right away.”

As her cousin Kelwyn had not thought fit to say that he expected to take the house, Parthenope did not feel warranted in doing so, though her higher ideal of truth demanded it of her. She said nothing, and Sister Saranna went on, placidly: “The teacher over at the school where Friend Caroline said you saw the exercises went this morning by the first train — her and the young woman on the school committee. They passed here early, and Friend Emerance got into their carryall with them and went to the depot. Did you hear that they were going to the Centennial together?”

“No,” Parthenope answered, briefly; and through a tumult of emotions and conjectures that whirled round her she heard Kelwyn saying as from a distance: “Then I will let you take the horse and drive on home, Parthenope, and I will walk over after I have seen Kite. Elder Nathaniel is going to show me where to find him. You can tell Carry what we have done.”

“Very well, Cousin Elmer,” she answered, in her remoteness.

The light which Sister Saranna’s news had thrown upon Emerance’s relation to herself was a sort of baleful dazzle which showed the facts but not the meaning of the facts. Its searching glare multiplied the whole question in the shape of doubts, of suspicions, which tormented and disgraced her before herself. Had he been, then, amusing himself with her? Had he dared to remain in some such uncertainty regarding her as she had remained in regarding him? Had he played off in his mind his preference for the school-teacher against his preference for her, and had the school-teacher won? If he had been opener, her course would have been clear. Even if he had cared most for her, it would have been in accordance with the canons of the high romance to give him up to that girl; and although she loved him herself, to deny her love until she died of it. But Parthenope was not convinced that she loved him, or would have, if he asked her, and she felt that as the affair stood he had, to formulate the vulgar fact vulgarly, been flirting with them both, in an insensibility to her superiority which was a part of his inferiority. She had to put it to herself as grossly as this before she could seize the reality and begin to take thought for action. But when she asked herself what she should do she felt stricken, wounded, lamed to helplessness. Like every other woman, since love began, to whom the like had happened, she could do nothing but stand still and take the blows of destiny, without returning them, till she sank under them. But she could not believe that anything so out of keeping with her character and experience could really happen to her

XXV

PARTHENOPE found Mrs. Kelwyn, in a pause of her packing, refreshing herself with an untimely cup of tea, which she seemed to he drinking merely because Mrs. Kite had offered to make it for her, and which she praised for its unexpected goodness. “It’s this sort of thing that makes it so distressing to leave them. Whether we turn ourselves out or them out, we disgrace them in their neighbors’ eyes. I have realized that more and more, and when the incapable creature makes one of her hopeless efforts to please I lose all resentment and wish we could stay. It isn’t such a simple matter! Nothing seems very simple, even the simplest thing. And that brings me to the point, Parthenope. There’s something I want to speak to you about, but I’ve been so distracted that I’m afraid I’ve put it off rather selfishly.”

“Yes,” the girl spiritlessly suggested, from the other side of the table.

“Is there anything between you and Mr. Emerance?”

“No,” Parthenope answered, as spiritlessly as before.

“Well, so far, so good,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, with an air of strict sequence. “Then I need say nothing about it. I was afraid you were allowing yourself to become interested in him, and such a thing would have been very unfortunate. I ought to have warned you before, but in the confusion here, the perfect topsyturviness of all our ideas, I Haven’t been able to bring my mind to bear upon it. You know yourself, Parthenope, that anything serious would be quite out of the question. The very fact that he was so different from ourselves in what Mr. Kelwyn calls his civilization had made me feel easier, but it doesn’t excuse me. If he had been a young man of your own class I certainly should have objected to your being about with him so much at all hours” — she helplessly flowed into the saying—” of the day and night.”

At another time Parthenope might have resented this way of putting it, but now she only said, lifelessly, “I understand.”

The want of opposition seemed to weaken Mrs. Kelwyn in her position. “Not that young people, in these picnicking and camping times, don’t throw off a good many social trammels, and it’s quite proper and harmless. With Mr. Emerance, too, I felt that his very want of any experience like your own added to the propriety. But I don’t think I have considered you enough in the matter, and I blame myself very much. I suppose we may both acknowledge that there is something very attractive about him. He is cultivated, in a certain way, and he has the good manners that come from a good heart. Though he seems such a dreamer, he is the most practical and efficient person I ever saw. And he is certainly very good-looking. You must acknowledge that yourself, Parthenope.”

“Oh yes,” the girl owned, “very handsome, indeed.”

“I shouldn’t really have wondered if you had become interested in him; I shouldn’t have been at all surprised if there had been something between you.”

“But there isn’t.”

“Yes; I know that, and I am glad you are not interested in him at all in that way.” Parthenope did not respond, and Mrs. Kelwyn went on as if less confident of her ground. “You are very much his superior in every respect.”

“I don’t know,” the girl said, coldly. “He has read quite as much as I have, and he has thought in directions where I haven’t thought at all.”

“I like your being impartial, but you must be just even to yourself, no matter how generous you feel like being. I don’t suppose he has the least notion of art?”

“None that I know of.”

“And that is what I mean by your superiority. I take that merely as a type. He is utterly wanting on the aesthetic side. I don’t suppose he has the least idea how perfectly you are dressed; how simply and yet how beautifully. And, though he has the good manners that come from a good heart, as I say, he hasn’t the least notion of society as we know it.”

“No.”

“Well,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, somewhat baffled by Parthenope’s acquiescences, “you see that it would never have done in the world. I don’t imagine, if there had been anything between you, that your aunt Julia would have objected; she never objects to anything you do. But that has made my responsibility all the greater, don’t you see? And I have felt my responsibility toward him as well as toward you. We have both got to confess that he has acted in everything with the most perfect delicacy. I think his behavior in every respect has been worthy of the highest ideal of a gentleman. But things like that have made me anxious not to let the affair go too far with him. I have been afraid that he was interested in you, and that he would feel it more than you realized when you had to tell him that there was no hope for him.” Parthenope was silent, and Mrs. Kelwyn added, almost interrogatively: “As you certainly would. You couldn’t have forgiven yourself for that. And that was what made me so anxious, all round.”

“There was no occasion for anxiety, Cousin Carry,” Parthenope replied, coldly. “Mr. Emerance has been consoling himself against the chances.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean — I mean — that he has gone to the Centennial with that — that school-teacher,” Parthenope answered.

“And you mean — you mean — that there is something between them?”

“I don’t mean anything but what I say.”

“But how do you know? Who told you?”

“Sister Saranna.”

“This morning?”

Parthenope nodded.

“But, Parthenope, how did Sister Saranna know it?”

“She saw him getting into the wagon at the Office with her and that committee-girl.”

“But, Parthenope, that may not mean anything. People of that sort could go to the Centennial on the same train, and still — and still—” Mrs. Kelwyn felt that she was failing to make out her case, and more remotely that she had no reason for trying to console her cousin under the circumstances, if she was glad that there was nothing between her and Emerance.

Parthenope turned upon her. “You seemed to think his being about with me meant something — meant something on his part.”

“Yes, but that was very different.”

“It was not the least different. It was exactly the same thing. But it doesn’t matter. It is all for the best, and it releases you from the responsibility which you dread so much.”

“I don’t understand. Had you any reason to suppose that he was interested in the school-teacher? She is certainly very pretty. But has he been” — the words framed themselves on Mrs. Kelwyn’s involuntary lips—” going with her?”

“Don’t be country, Cousin Carry. If he was ‘ going with’ me he may have been ‘ going with’ her, too.”

“That is true. But if you have never been interested in him, she may not have been, either.” Mrs. Kelwyn felt this a triumph of logic, almost a syllogism. “Don’t you see that it proves nothing?” she pursued.

“Cousin Carry, do you think I have no sense or no feeling?” Parthenope turned away and was, as she felt, sweeping from the room, when she was arrested by something she saw through the window.

“What is it?” Mrs. Kelwyn demanded, from where she still sat at the table.

“Nothing. Cousin Elmer is coming.” She spoke now in a wholly different note.

“Is Brother Jasper with him? I hope—”

“It isn’t Jasper. You can look for yourself,” and now Parthenope really swept from the room, and Mrs. Kelwyn heard her shutting her door before she made her own way to the window.

She saw her husband coming forward at a conversational pace, and with him was Emerance, sharing a discussion which seemed so far removed, to the eyes at least, from the pressing actualities of life that she provisionally lost all patience with them both. She hurried down to the door, and met them in time to hear Kelwyn saying, “Yes, that is an admirable subject, but everything, as you have realized, depends upon the treatment.”

She took no notice of her husband in challenging his companion, “Why, Mr. Emerance, I thought you had gone to the Centennial!”

“Oh no! I did intend to go to Boston this morning, but I found a letter at the post-office in the village which decided me to put off my whole trip for a week or two; and Mr. Kelwyn has let me come back with him.”

Mrs. Kelwyn stared at her husband with a severity which he met with a tone of comradery for Emerance, full of greater liking than he usually allowed himself to express. “Mr. Emerance has put it so succinctly that I needn’t explain that his object in returning is to help us pack and get off. He thinks we can’t manage without him.”

Mrs. Kelwyn’s mind reverted to the main point, on which it had been turning before flying off at a tangent to Parthenope and Emerance. “And you are really going?”

“Not unless you are, my dear,” Kelwyn answered, with sarcasm. “Didn’t you understand that I had gone to see Kite and arrange the matter with him once and for all?”

“Oh yes, but—”

“Well, that’s what I’ve done, and quite amicably, though he had his misgivings when I gave up every point to him; I might say he had his suspicions. But he seemed to overcome them, and I think we are going to part friends. I don’t believe we can part too soon, though, with all this ‘changin’ faces,’ as Brother Jasper calls it.”

“No, probably not,” Mrs. Kelwyn consented, with a sigh of lingering reluctance. “Well, now we mustn’t lose any time. Fortunately we are pretty well packed already.”

“That will disappoint Mr. Emerance. But you could let him cord a few trunks, couldn’t you? If you can’t, he has a notion of looking up transportation for us. You know we can’t get away without a good-sized vehicle to carry us and our things. If those gypsies would turn up again we might hire their van.”

At the sound of talking, which might or might not concern her, Mrs. Kite had come to her door, and she now hospitably joined in the question. “I don’t believe but what you could get a team to the village. There’s an express that could take you in two trips. I’m real sorry you feel you got to go. Mr. Kite and me been talkin’ it all over, and I don’t believe but what we could make out together somehow.”

“Well,” Kelwyn said, in acceptance of her friendly feeling, “Mr. Kite and I have been talking it over since, and he agrees with me that we had perhaps better part if I’ve engaged other quarters. Oh, by the way,” he turned to his wife, “I found out that the stone cottage we all liked so much was to be had, and I saw it with Parthenope this morning. I said I would take it if you approved.”

“Really, Elmer, you might have known I would simply jump at it!”

“Well, I’ll drop a postal to them at once—”

“No, that won’t do,” his wife said, with the eagerness of women not to let slip the chance which they might have been willing to renounce. “Some one else might—”

“Mrs. Kelwyn,” Emerance interposed, “let me go over and tell them that you are coming?”

“Well, the hoss ain’t unhitched yet,” Mrs. Kite intervened, with impartiality. “I guess he’s right there in the bam, where Miss Brook left him not more’n half an hour ago. She was sayin’ something about goin’ to the village after some canned goods for dinner, though I don’t believe but what we could get along without.”

“Perhaps Miss Brook will come with me,” Emerance suggested, “and we can combine the stone cottage and the canned goods and the transportation in one errand.”

“Capital!” Kelwyn agreed. “Our lease of the cottage will come more authoritatively from one of the family than even from a friend of the family. Where is Parthenope? Is she in the house?” He made a start toward the door, but faltered, aware for the first time of his wife frowning significantly at him.

“I will go, Elmer,” she said, sternly, and over her shoulder she showed him the same mystifying front that she had bent on him.

Whatever the arts or reasons she used to compel the appearance of the girl, they succeeded, and Parthenope appeared at the door without more delay than sufficed her to have had the situation placed attractively before her.

“How do you do?” Emerance called to her face, which lighted up only provisionally; and as if he assumed that she was there to accompany him on his errand, he added, “Well, I’ll go and get the horse.”

XXVI

THE morning had not yet got so far toward noon as to have lost the freshness in which the world renews itself every day in summer with something like the joy of spring. The year was as if in its second youth, and had some of those charms of maturity which add to the beauty of that renascence. There were not so many birds singing as there would have been at the same hour in June; but the air was as clear and bright, and from the stubble of a piece of the Shakers’ wheat the quails were calling, not with the amorous entreaty of their mating-time, but with the tender anxiety of parental love. At one point a mother - quail, which seemed to have been waiting for the opportunity to risk the lives of all her chickens at once, scuttled with them across the road through the thick dust almost under the horse’s feet.

“Ah,” Emerance said, “that was a narrow escape.”

“You’re sure it was an escape?” Parthenope looked over her shoulder at the road, which had become invisible in the dust.

“I didn’t count them, but I think so.” He leaned back in the carryall seat and drew a deep breath. “This is better than going to the Centennial.”

“Is it? I thought you wished to go.”

“I did and I didn’t. I can go later. But it’s so good to be driving along such a road, such a day as this, that I feel as if I had made an escape. That’s why I’m so sure those quails got safely away.”

Parthenope would not smile, though she knew that he expected it. She said, “I hope this is an escape, too.”

“You mean getting away from the Kites? I was afraid,” he said, seriously, “that Mrs. Kelwyn might be tempted to try staying on. It’s not my business, but I’ve seen more and more that it wouldn’t do.”

“You haven’t always shown it. You have seemed to think we were wronging them.”

“Not after you had given them a full trial. I didn’t want you to have a bad conscience.”

“Thank you. I don’t know that you’ve prevented that. My cousin thinks that they will feel disgraced before their friends as much by our going as by our turning them out.”

“Oh, no they won’t. They remain in possession of the field, and so the victory is theirs. They will console themselves.” —

“Mr. Emerance,” she said, severely, “sometimes I think you are really a cynic; you seem to have so little consideration for others.”

“Do I? I should be sorry to think that. I don’t pity the Kites a great deal, for I don’t believe they deserve it, and I don’t want them to; but when have I seemed wanting in consideration for any others?”

“Do you wish me to say?”

“I do, indeed.”

Parthenope gave herself time for reflection. She thought of doing an ideal thing, of performing an act of self - sacrifice which would cost her more than she had even allowed to herself that it would. Whether she was interested in Mr. Emerance herself or not, perhaps for the very reason that she was interested, if she was, it was her duty to remind him that he owed a duty to another whom he had given reason to think he was interested in her. This act must be performed heroically, and yet it must be performed delicately, and after reflection that would take the quality of rashness from it and leave her with no regret on her own account; the sublimity must not be marred by any absurdity; with whatever secret pain, it must be performed with the superiority of a witness of conduct on a level below her own. Yet she found herself, after due reflection, saying, rashly, personally, and, as it sounded to her, spitefully: “Don’t you think Miss Nichols has a right to think you’ve been inconsiderate?” She tried to look steadily at him, but failed a little before his steady stare.

“Miss Nichols? How? Why?”

“Your leaving her so abruptly, after you had promised to go with her and her friend to the Centennial?” Since she must be plain, Parthenope spared herself nothing, and she was strengthened for the effort by her rising anger with Emerance. She had turned pale with it, and she reddened with resentment when for first answer he laughed aloud, and then she waited indignantly for him to account for himself.

“I don’t think she will be disappointed. Or not, after she reaches Boston. I was only going as far as Boston, at any rate, and she was to meet some one there who would console her for any desertion of mine. He and his sister are going with her and her friend to Philadelphia at once, and I had expected to follow next week.”

Parthenope was silent, while he went on to explain the whole case with an increasing recognition of the motive from which she had spoken.

He carried this so far that at last she said, in bitter confusion: “Don’t let us speak of it any more. I had no business — And I beg your pardon.”

“Oh, but if I could only tell you how much I value your having spoken—”

“But you can’t, you mustn’t, and unless you want me to detest you—”

He stopped, and they drove on for what seemed the promise of indefinite silence.

At last he said, with an effort to command their lost cheerfulness, and a smile that was rueful enough, “And you won’t let me tell you what the letter was that turned me back?”

She consented, with an “Oh yes” so listless that it might well have discouraged a man less full of his object. But Emerance seemed to find sufficient incentive in it.

He brightened as he began. “It was from an actor — not the one who has let me learn the theatre from him, so far as I know it, but a friend of his, a younger man, who is looking for a play. My friend showed mine to him in the rough draft I had sent him, and he likes it. He likes it with enthusiasm; ‘ that is their way when they like a thing at all, though it doesn’t mean that they will take it. But this one wants to see me and talk it over, and he has proposed coming up here for Sunday — he’s in New York now — and, of course, I couldn’t miss such a chance.”

He seemed to refer the point to Parthenope, and she said, abstractedly, “No.”

“It will be more than the Centennial to me,” Emerance continued, “though I needn’t miss that, either, and do more to decide my future. In fact, if he takes my play my future is already decided.”

He clearly expected some response of interest and sympathy, and Parthenope could not withhold it. “You ought to be very happy.” But she spoke coldly. “Oh, I am. This chance has cleared up a lot of things. You can’t imagine what a light it has thrown on them.” As if he had not noticed her coldness, he talked on so joyously and so full of his theme that he forgot their errand, and he would have driven past the stone cottage, when they came to it, if she had not laid her hand on the reins. “What is it?” he asked, and then returned to his mission, with a laugh at himself and an “Oh! Somebody else might have got the place if you hadn’t stopped me.”

The husband and wife were sitting on the cottage steps, and the man came forward to the gate. “Thought you might be along, some of you. Well, I suppose you don’t want my place,” he added, ironically. “Paint the ell part any color you please,” he suggested.

Emerance left the answer to Parthenope. “Yes, we want it, and the question is how soon can we have it.”

“To-morrow do?”

“We didn’t quite expect it to-day,” she answered, in his humor.

“‘All right. To-morrow it is, then. That so?” he referred to the lady who now came to the gate, too.

“To-morrow afternoon,” she stipulated. “You’re sure your cousin will be satisfied without seeing it herself?”

“Oh, she will trust my report,” Parthenope answered, from the distance that persisted in putting itself between her and the actualities of life, where she was remotely dramatizing a scene of final character with Emerance, and defining her position in regard to his affairs with a distinctness which she felt had been wanting to it.

In the midst of this she heard him suggesting an interest very alien to it. “There’s a question of transportation,” he said to the man, “that I was to consult you about. Do you know where Professor Kelwyn could get a two-horse team to move his things over? He doesn’t want to make more than one trip of it.”

“I see,” the man said, intelligently, but without coming further to the rescue.

His wife said, “I don’t believe but what Benson could move them.” She referred her belief to her husband, who agreed.

“Guess you’re right — for once. Do you know Benson?” he queried of the pair before him.

Parthenope left Emerance to say, “I’m afraid we don’t know where he lives, anyway.”

“Well, that’s all right,” the owner of the cottage said. “You want to take the first turn to the left on the way to the Shakers, and, when you come to a barn with a wind-pump on it, that’s Benson’s. Guess you’ll find him there about now.”

Emerance drove to the Benson place without attempting to return to the subject which their business had interrupted. In front of the barn, under the shade of an elm a little at one side, they saw a handsome two-horse wagon, with wheels picked out in black and yellow; looking closer, they saw a man lying on his back under the wagon-bed, whistling thoughtfully and bestowing some touches of restoration where the paint had been chipped off.

At Emerance’s friendly hail he came out, and when he stood up he proved a tall, gaunt man, with a plastering of short, red beard on his face and a sort of lame wink.

He listened to the errand which Emerance said had brought them, and then he asked, “You the folks been staying in the old Family house over to the Shakers?”

“Partly,” Emerance admitted. “I’ve been a guest on sufferance, but Miss Brook is one of Professor Kelwyn’s family.”

Mr. Benson took Parthenope’s name for an introduction and offered his hand, from which he first wiped a little paint on his overalls. “How d’ye do? They say them Shakers believe they’re livin’ the angelic life, as they call it, right here and now; and I guess they are pretty good sort of folks. And some of ’em look ready to go, if they ain’t there already. I tell my wife, when I see one them Shaker ladies, I seem to feel as if she was all laid out for buryin’. They’re all finished up so, you know, round the neck” — he put his hand to his own throat—” and they keep themselves so neat lookin’.” Having freed his mind of the observation, he took up the business in hand, languidly: “I guess I can move ye. When d’you want I should come?”

“To-morrow afternoon,” Emerance said.

Mr. Benson turned and ran a critical eye over his wagon. “I been paintin’ her up some. But I guess she’ll be dry by to-morrow afternoon. Yes, I’ll be round about three o’clock, if that’ll do ye.”

“Terrible!” Parthenope said, as they drove away. “Yes,” Emerance admitted; “it was rather ghastly. But in town we forget what a large part death plays in the social interests in the country. A funeral is a prized event, and the particulars are talked over to the least detail for weeks, as often as friends of the family meet or go to the village for the exchange of gossip. We try to pass death over and hush it up with flowers, but they cherish its acquaintance, and value themselves on every step they see a neighbor taking toward it.”

“It’s ghoulish.”

“I don’t think it’s ghoulish. It’s a remnant of the strength of the old Puritan days when people faced not only death but damnation — when they were willing to be damned for the glory of God.”

It had always surprised Parthenope a little when Emerance ventured to differ with her, yet he differed, she had to realize, rather often. In some things she could put him down, but on grounds like this she felt her inadequacy. She said, wilfully: “Then it’s about the only remnant of Puritanism left them in this neighborhood. I think they’re all abominable.”

“You’ve seen the worst among them, but I think you’ve seen some good things in the worst. They’re not up to the moral level of the Shakers, who have the immediate and instant help of one another in their goodness, but the average life here is good, and it’s not affected by the intimate knowledge of evil around it; the sort of knowledge people don’t have in towns, and which would be depraving here if it were not guarded by the principles inherited from the past. If Puritanism was false in doctrine, as we both think, it was true in life, and it’s as true now as ever.”

When Emerance talked in this way his tone took on something magisterial, and Parthenope liked it, though it quelled her. Still, she would not yield to him till she had tried getting him on other ground by indirection, and now she said from her elevation, “I suppose your play is to celebrate country people, then.”

“If you mean their real character, yes, it is; but I don’t flatter them.”

“Oh, then you haven’t got a funeral in?”

Emerance frowned at what he might very well have felt an impertinent and wanton thrust. Then his brow cleared and his whole face brightened as with a sudden inspiration. “That would be great! And it could be staged wonderfully—”

She burst out upon him. “It would be sacrilegious.

Really, I wonder at you, Mr. Emerance. To Have a funeral on the stage! It would be horrible!”

“There’s one in Hamlet” he rejoined, steadily, and with a readiness that took her breath. “ But I wouldn’t have a graveyard scene, not the actual interment; just a country parlor, with the people seen, say, through an open door, sitting in rows and singing. Perhaps a girl at the melodeon. It could be made very effective.”

“And you are really going to have it?”

“No. Or not in this play. The scheme wouldn’t include it. But I shall certainly think the scene over for another play. I see a long series stretching out before me. Thank you for suggesting it.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest it, and your thanks don’t console me for having put such an idea into your head.” They both perceived at this point that the horse had come to a stop, and then they saw that from force of habit he had come to a stop in front of the Office at the Shakers.

Sister Saranna showed herself at the door. “Won’t you come in?” she called to them where they sat dazed in their wagon. “Why, Friend Emerance, I thought you had gone to the Centennial!”

He looked round at Parthenope for some motion on her part to alight; as she made none he briefly explained, without giving the nature of the business that had made him change his plans. But what he said seemed to suffice Sister Saranna. She smiled gently upon them both, and said she thought it was he when she saw them through the window; they appeared so natural, there, coming together.

Parthenope, as if this natural appearance needed excuse, said that they had been to the stone cottage to engage it, and to engage a wagon to take their things, and they were all going to move on the morrow. But she ended with a sort of disdain for the elaboration of her excuse, which was lost upon the Shakeress. She, it seemed, had no thought but for the annoyance of the Kelwyns, which was now ending in their banishment, and for the grief of the Family at their going. “Oh, we sha’n’t be so far away, Sister Saranna,” the girl consoled her. “We will come every Sunday to meeting, and as often to see you as you’ll let us.”

“But you won’t seem like part of the Family any more,” she lamented.

“Well, it can’t be helped, for now we really are going. Good-bye! Say good-bye to all the Sisters!” Even at this hint Emerance did not start, and Parthenope had to say to him: “I think we had better go on, Mr. Emerance. I shall have to help my cousin get lunch, and there’s a great deal of packing to do yet.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said, chirruping to the horse. “I was just thinking,” and he called his farewell in turn to Sister Saranna.

XXVII

AFTER helping Parthenope help get luncheon, Emerance helped her help get supper, Mrs. Kite sitting by throughout with the effect of being helped. “Well, it seems like old times to have you two out here together workin’ away just the way you done first off.” After reflection, she added: “I don’t see why we couldn’t get along together, after all. But maybe it wouldn’t be for the best. Land knows, we shall miss you bad enough!”

They let her begin inuring herself to the separation by washing the supper dishes alone. Emerance sat with Kelwyn talking under the elm-tree in the sweet, dry summer evening, while Parthenope bore her part in reconciling the boys first to their baths and then to their beds. She chased them in their nightgowns round the old Family meeting-room, and then left them to their dreams after tiding them over a gloomy moment of prayer.

When she came out to the threshold she had two books in her hand. “These ought to go back to the Alisons,” she said. “I don’t know how we overlooked them in the packing.”

“I’ll take them,” Emerance offered, getting to his feet from his place on the grass and coming for them. She did not give them up to him, or so quickly but he could say, “Why shouldn’t we both take them?”

“Well,” she temporized, rather than consented.

“We’re both very tired,” he suggested, “but we could drive, you know. The horse wouldn’t like anything better.”

“He’s tired, too, I’m afraid.” She continued: “If it wouldn’t be much farther round by the village, we could get some things at the store that my cousin wants to begin housekeeping with in the stone cottage. She wants a yeast-cake.”

She seemed to refer the point to Kelwyn, who said, gravely, “If it is a question of a yeast-cake, I don’t think it would be a great way round.”

“Very well,” she said, but Emerance had not waited for her to say that.

He returned with the carryall, while Mrs. Kelwyn, who had overheard part of the parley from the window overhead, called down some additional commissions.

She did not need the things immediately, but if Parthenope was bent upon a drive with Emerance, which she did not approve of, she felt that a mere yeast-cake was too barefaced.

They took the Alisons in on their way to the village, and found them, in the interval between two of the man’s sprees, the image of a happy family. He was smoking where he lay on the ground near the door, and Mrs. Alison was sitting on the threshold, with her children, corrected from their play by the approach of company, about her, and her baby in her lap asleep. She made the eldest girl take the books, and she said, “Well, I’m real sorry to have you go, and I guess the whole neighborhood’ll be.”

“We’re not going far off,” Parthenope said. “ We shall be coming to borrow more books of you.”

“So do. We shall be glad to have you. Want to take any now?”

“Not now. There isn’t time. We’re going on to the village, and it’s getting late.”

Parthenope shook Hands with the woman, and, after a hesitation, with her husband, who desisted from his talk with Emerance about crops. He had been giving it as his opinion that it would do more for the neighborhood if the Shakers raised something besides timber. So much woods kept a place back and made a hiding for tramps, besides looking so lonesome. “Well,” he said, hospitably, to Parthenope, “you must come over and see the woman.”

“Yes, call again,” his wife joined with him, as Emerance helped the girl into the carryall.

“We seem to be leaving friends everywhere,” Parthenope said, with a laugh. “We are universal favorites.”

“Yes, you are apparently,” the young man answered, but in a way as if he had not liked her laughing.

His tone provoked Her to say, “Perhaps I ought to be more respectful, if you are going to put the Alisons into a play.”

“Oh, I don’t know that I am,” he said, and, though she was vexed with his sensitiveness, she addressed herself to soothing his peasant-pride, as she called it to herself. The wound, if there was any, had not gone deep, and he accepted the kindly things she found to say of the Alisons as sufficient atonement to himself. They had both forgotten them by the time her shopping was done, and she remounted with him in the carryall, ready for an amicable discussion as to which way they should keep on to the village, whether by the Shakers or by a longer way and pleasanter road which the moonlight seemed to justify them in taking. They had a polite difficulty as to which should yield, where neither really cared, and the horse settled the point for them by taking the shorter road by the Shakers. They compromised with him, if they had a preference, by letting him walk, and prolonging the drive in that way.

Parthenope was the first to begin. “I don’t believe I have made you feel how glad I am that your play is going to have a chance. Now, you must tell me all about it, and just how much of a chance it has. Isn’t it very uncommon to have an actor willing to talk it over with you?”

“It’s uncommon with me,” he said. “It’s more to me than I could make you understand. It has settled one point effectually. If there is any such hope as there seems for me as a dramatist, I should never think of being an actor.”

“I’m awfully glad to hear you say that, Mr. Emerance. Of course, it’s your own affair, but none of us have liked the notion of the stage for you. Perhaps you think we had no business to talk you over.”

‘“I like your making it your business. But I’ve had my revenge, if I was wronged by your talking me over; I’ve been thinking you over.”

“And what did you think of us — from your point of view? Be candid! I should really like to know.”

“Collectively or individually?” he met her playfulness.

“Now you’re trying to shirk, or at least to temporize. Treat us any way you like.”

“Well, individually, then. And I’ll begin with you.” —

“No, not with me, decidedly!”

“But I’ve begun already.”

“Well, then, my faults first, if you have the courage.”

“Oh, I have the courage. That actor’s letter has given me courage for anything to-day. I shouldn’t be afraid to tell you of your faults, if you had any.”

“Now, that is a shirk.”

“He’s given me hope that I couldn’t have imagined having,” he waived her point. “He’s provided such a magnificent future for me that all my groping past and hesitating present have been redeemed by him.”

“Aren’t you rather figurative, Mr. Emerance, for a dramatist?”

“I wish I could believe you wanted me to be less so! Parthenope,” he said, and at this first sound of her name from his lips she felt a wild, glad thrilling, which she had to summon all her moral, social, and psychological forces to quell, “don’t you know what I mean? Don’t you know that this new hope of mine would be nothing if it were not the hope of you?” She was dumb past all her expectation and resolution, and he rushed on: “You must know that I care for you, and that the dearest wish of my life — You have been so good to me, so trustful of me, and hopeful for me that I’ve come to think — to think that you cared for me, too. Tell me I’m not wrong!”

He had possessed himself of her hands, which he had dropped the reins to seize, with a faith in the horse’s resources of self - guidance which it justified in continuing on at the same pace as when driven, and swerving neither to the right nor the left in the white moonlight.

Parthenope let him keep Her hands; it was somehow so sweet, for the appreciable instant before she began, as if struggling from some far trance: “Mr. Emerance, I’m sorry you’ve said this; very, very sorry,” and then she was strangely at the end of her words, and he had to prompt her.

“But surely you must have thought I cared for you?”

“If I did I was very wrong to let you. I blame myself, oh, very much. I’ve let my selfish pleasure in your society — it has been pleasant — blind me to what I ought to have seen — if you say I ought.”

“Ah, I don’t say it!” he said.

“No, no! You are too generous. But you think it; yes you have a right to think it. I can see that now, when it’s too late. But, indeed, it can never be.” Whether there was or not something indefinite, or only something withheld in her tone, he asked, “If there is some one else—”

“Oh, no! Never! You mustn’t think it’s that. But I can live my life more usefully by myself.”

“Do you say that,” he persisted, “to save me from thinking myself unworthy—”

“Don’t!” she entreated, “or I can’t forgive myself,” and now he was silent, and she could go on in such haphazard phrases as offered themselves. “We are too unlike — unlike in our ideals. I don’t mean yours are not better, higher than mine. But we’ve been brought up in such different worlds we never should understand each other. I should always be unjust to you.”

“Do you mean my experimenting, as you call it? That’s over, now.”

“No, no. It isn’t that.”

“I know,” he said, “that my world hasn’t been like yours. Our traditions are different, but I hope not our principles. I’ve tried to make the most of myself, and not selfishly, always—”

“Oh, Mr. Emerance!”

“Ever since I first saw you, Parthenope — But I mustn’t call you so!”

“Oh yes. What does it matter now?” she consented, desolately.

“You have been my ideal. It isn’t your beauty alone, but I love your beauty. I liked your selfreliance, even when I thought you were wrong. It charmed me. And I liked your absolute truth. That was charming, too. But what is the use, now?”

“I ought to hear anything you wish to say. You have the right to say anything to me.”

“That’s your justice. Your justice was what took me most of all.”

There was something intoxicating in his praises, but if she refused him she must refuse them. “You don’t know me. I’m not what you think. But you, you are a poet; you have imagination; you live in the ideal. Yes, I saw that from the first. You will succeed; you will be great, and you will be glad that you were not clogged with me.”

“I can never be anything without you — never anything but a dreamer and experimenter, a mere empiricist.”

Parthenope was not sure that she knew what this meant; the word was strange to her, but she understood a self-reproach from it which she must not suffer in him. “No,” she began.

He would not heed her protest. “But you, you could make up for all my shortcomings. You could make a man of me — any sort of man you wanted.”

“It’s very sweet of you to say that, and I ought to be proud. I ought to be grateful, and I am. But it all comes to nothing if I have not the feeling I ought to have.”

“But perhaps you have, Parthenope. Can’t we reason it out together?”

No; if I could reason about it I’m sure I shouldn’t have it.”

“That seems very strange: that reason can have nothing to do with the highest and humanest thing in the world. If you could give yourself time to look into your feelings—”

“No. If I cared for you I should know it without looking into my feelings, and it would be absurd to reason about it.”

This silenced him. “Well,” he said, at last, “that ends it, I suppose. Get up,” he said to the old horse, which had come to a stand unbidden, with a yearning twist of his head toward the Office of the Shakers, before which they found themselves pausing. The windows were dark, but those of one of the houses on the other hand were bright, and as they started on a burst of singing in one of the weird, sad Shaker tunes followed them from it. He said, with a bitterness that went to her heart, “They’ve got rid of it all.”

Parthenope suddenly realized it: the Shakers had got rid of love, and all that came of it. She had never meant to do that. She was rather vague about it, as cultivated girls often are; she had always expected to be married when she met her ideal; but there would be time enough. Now, however, it seemed to her that she had been very cruel, and her soul bowed in pity over the man who had offered her his love. She could not deny to herself that what had happened was something she ought to have expected; she knew very well that there had been moments when she had thought it would be best for it to come to this, if only it might well be over with. But it was not well over with as it ought logically to have been; it was very ill over with.

She imagined his anguish from her own pain and with some sense of the mortification a man must experience, even in the best conditions, at a woman’s refusal. She had sometimes fancied that a refusal could be made with expressions that would render it almost flatteringly acceptable; but now she realized that it never could be so. It must always be disappointment and humiliation; and she had inflicted these upon a man whose goodness she owned as greater than that of any man she had yet known; a generous spirit, full of ambition and the power that the future would turn into success. His very consciousness of this must add to his shame. She wished he would say something; in the time before the word had come into use she suggested his saying something, but her hypnotic forces failed. The moment came when she could bear it no longer, and as they passed into the shadow of the woods that darkened on each side of the road before they reached home she put out her hand on his that lay listlessly holding the reins on his knee. She wished to be appealing and consoling, and she could only say, “I am sorry for it.”

He answered in terms which she felt her atonement did not justify, but which she would not allow herself to resent, “Are you, dearest?” At the same time he put his right hand on hers and held it between his two.

She did not try to take it away, and it trembled there as she tried to explain. “Don’t you see that if I — It would only be from pity, and—”

“Pity would be good enough for me,” he answered, and his humility seemed the crowning effect of his magnanimity.

“Oh, but it oughtn’t to be,” she instructed him. “It would make it such an unequal thing. You wanted me to reason about it, and now I will, for that is your due. Yes, I owe you that. I don’t want you to regret me; I would rather you would think I was weak than heartless. Don’t you believe I understand you?”

She could not say, “How you feel,” but perhaps he knew what she meant.

“Don’t you think every one ought to marry their ideal?”

“You are my ideal,” he said, and he took the reins into his right hand that he might keep the better hold of hers in his left. It was absurd, and it was distracting; but, if she was to make atonement to him, it could not be helped, at once.

“But that isn’t enough,” she said, and she pressed his hand for emphasis, “if you are not my ideal — There, I have hurt you!” she said, feeling him wince.

“Nο. Will you tell me what your ideal is? I would try to realize it.”

“Well, you have said it. My ideal could never be realized by experimenting, and that is why I have always blamed you. Your aims have been too uncertain; you haven’t known your own mind.”

“I’ve known it on one point ever since I saw you, Parthenope.”

“You mustn’t be trivial. I thought you wanted me to reason with you.”

“I do.”

“Well” — she hesitated from a wandering thought— “then, a man,” she said, “ought to have one aim and pursue it unswervingly. It mustn’t be a selfish aim, and it must be a high one. He must want to be of use in the world, and yet he must have a love of the beautiful. He ought to be philanthropical, but not professionally philanthropical; that’s rather weakening. I should not care what his calling was, and I shouldn’t care what his looks were; he might be ugly and deformed and yet perfectly radiant. And — every woman likes to be thought worth an effort — he ought to have done something specially great, and for her. There! I know it sounds ridiculous, but you are too noble to laugh at it, and that has always been my ideal. Of course, I’m not worthy of it myself.” She did not take her hand away at this climax, though she made a slight effort to do so. “I could die for such an ideal, and, whatever you think, that is how I feel.”

“Then I think,” he said, with a kind of indignation, “that you are far more than worthy. And may I do a little reasoning, too?”

“Yes,” she said, with a slight push of her Hand in his, as if to fix her attention, “I expected you to.”

“Well, I would rather be an ideal which you would be willing to live for. I should like to be some faltering, imperfect creature that you could strengthen and straighten into the sort of man you would like him to be. I believe you would be happier in that than in dying for somebody who didn’t need you. How could you be of use to a man who didn’t need you? No, you are full of help, and uselessness would be solitude and exile to you, dearest. But with a man whom you could advise and inspire when he was going wrong, who would value your criticism and appreciate your taste, and come to know your sweetness and your brightness, to live in the light of your mind — Well, I suppose it is no use talking,” he ended, and his hand relaxed from hers as if she might have it back now. But she would not have it back; she caught his faster, and she said:

“And you would be willing to try—”

“To experiment?”

“Yes, experiment! And if I disappointed you — if I wasn’t at all what you expected—”

“I supposed we were reasoning!”

“And may I think — must I answer now — may I have time—”

“All the time there is, dear.”

“I’m not sure you ought to call me dear — yet.”

“I won’t till you let me.”

“I won’t make you wait. I should despise myself if I didn’t know now. And if you believe you’ll never be sorry—”

“With all my soul!”

“Then — then you may call me Parthenope.” She said, after a moment: “And I suppose I must call you Elihu. How came they to give you such a name?” She took refuge in the collateral question from the vital demands directly pressing upon her. “I’ve always wondered. Were they very Biblical?”

“Not very. They called me after Elihu Burritt.”

“Oh, that’s where the ‘ B’ came from. And who was he?”

“He was the learned blacksmith. He was a famous linguist, and my father admired him because he taught himself the languages.”

“Tell me about your father and your mother.” She questioned him, and he answered at what length she would; they had long been dead; he had two brothers living; she thought she could manage with them; and he had no sisters. “And do you want me to call you Elyhu or Ellihu? Ellihu is wrong, isn’t it?”

“Not if you call it so.”

“I don’t believe I like pretty speeches very much. But I don’t object for the time being. Did they call you Ellihu? Because if they did, I shall. If this” — she pressed his hand for explanation—” is for eternity, it’s for all our past as well as all our future. Ellihu, Ellihu, Ellihu,” she murmured, thoughtfully. “It’s nicer than Elyhu; yes, it’s rather nice.” She said, rather more shyly than her wont was, “You don’t ask me how I came to know your first name.”

“I hadn’t thought — I supposed you always knew it.”

Isn’t that a little conceited? And you haven’t any curiosity now? You don’t deserve to know! I saw it in a book of yours. Do you call that prying? But I couldn’t imagine what the ‘B’ was for. How do you like my name?”

“I always thought it was like you. How came they to call you so?”

Parthenope told gladly but quickly, so as not to delay another branch of the inquiry. “It’s rather formidable. But I shall never do anything in art; my mother didn’t at the last. I want to be completely subordinate to you in everything. I shall have no ambition except for you. I suppose some people would say that naturally I was rather topping in my general character. But with you I don’t care to be so because you’ve seen me humiliated so often. I sha’n’t mind you laughing, now and then, at me.”

“Oh!” he protested.

“Yes,” she persisted. “With the bear and the gypsies; you know I’ve been ridiculous. Now I shall have no pride except in you.”

“Do you want to spoil me at once?” he joked.

“It would be no use trying. You are too truly modest, too sweet.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m not sweet, generally speaking. You’ll find that out, too. But I shall be ashamed not to be, when I have you to rebuke me by your example. And from this time forth sweetness shall be one of my ideals. Oh yes, Aunt Julia will like you.” She put stress on the name, as if there were some other aunt who might be doubtful.

Parthenope came in to where Mrs. Kelwyn was putting some of the last touches to her packing, with her eyes blinking in the lamplight, but her face glowing with the impulse which had carried her to her decision and was still moving her to immediate action.

“Cousin Carry,” she said, abruptly, “I shall only stay with you to get you settled in the stone cottage. I must see my aunt Julia at once.”

“Why, Parthenope Brook!” Mrs. Kelwyn exclaimed, and in her exclamation she expressed, with a woman’s subtilized and compacted challenge, everything that she did not demand.

“Yes, I have” Parthenope responded to her implied question. “And he is going to Boston with me, for I want Aunt Julia to have the evidence of her senses when I tell her what a wild thing I have done.” She went out, and then she came back to add: “I know that you and Cousin Elmer won’t approve of it, and so I have not consulted you. It isn’t because I have such great faith in my own judgment; it’s because I trust his judgment. If he thinks it is right and wise! Don’t you see?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Kelwyn assented. But she qualified, “I see what your point of view is.”

They had to pretend they would go no further now than the general recognition of the great fact. Then they talked it out to the least historical and actual detail.

XXVIII

THE trials of the Kelwyns had become noted in the country round, and they both woke with the same vague dread in their mind, which resolved itself into the apprehension that the neighbors might come to see them off in a show of public sympathy. But on reflection this fear yielded to the fact that it was not yet known much beyond the Shakers that they were going; it was commonly supposed that the Kites were going, and no time was fixed yet for that.

In the forenoon Elder Nathaniel came with a final bunch of flowers for Parthenope, and with affectionate messages from the Sisters to Mrs. Kelwyn. He said that Brother Jasper had gone to Boston, and he added, indirectly, that perhaps it was just as well. The Family, he said, hoped that the Kelwyns and all their folks would come the same as ever; they would not be a great way off.

Mrs. Ager came from over the way, and in making her first and last call she did not spare the cause of their exile. She said that they ought to have turned the Kites out, and, in view of the good offices which they must often have rendered her in her loneliness, she was, Kelwyn thought, perhaps too impartially severe, but he attributed her censorious frame of mind rather to her years than to a temperamental harshness. What touched them all more than Mrs. Ager’s rigid virtue was the offering with which Mrs. Alison appeared, just before they sat down to luncheon, which they had early. She led the youngest of her children that could walk, in a gingham slip typically washed and ironed, with a remoter following of her uncombed and barefooted brood. She carried her baby in her arms, and made shift to hold in a hand tight pressed against its back a book which she presented to Parthenope. “It’s one,” she explained, with a country confidence in her pronouns, “that his uncle give him, and he wants you should have it,” and she held out a worn volume of Cooper, which Parthenope took, when she had made sure it was not merely a loan, with a gratitude which seemed to please, though it did not change the unsmiling face of the giver. “He ain’t ever read it, and he’d just as lieves you’d have it as not,” she said, in conclusion, leaving the remark to find its own place in the order of their conversation. “I told him about you makin’ me come in that night.”

“Oh, thank you, and thank Mr. Alison for me. I shall always keep the book to remember you by, both of you. I don’t suppose I can come to see you soon again; I’m going back to Boston in a few days.” Mrs. Alison had nothing to say in opposition to this, and she said nothing. “And I sha’n’t forget what you said that night, Mrs. Alison; it was beautiful. Might I kiss the baby?” Parthenope asked, impulsively, and, after a moment’s hesitation, she took the mother in her arms, too, and kissed her on either gaunt cheek. It was not quite in character with Parthenope, but it was not out of keeping with the mood toward all the world in which she found herself.

Mrs. Alison caught herself away, with a shrill screech to her children. “Come here this minute! You all want to get killed?”

Parthenope looked round and saw what Mrs. Alison had already seen over her shoulder: the bear-leader and the bear advancing doubtfully toward them, with a choral attendance of the two Kelwyn boys and the Kite boy leaping into the air with cries of joy.

“Oh, papa! Oh, mamma!” Francy shouted to the upper windows. “It’s the bear! It’s the same bear! Mayn’t he let him dance?”

Mrs. Kelwyn scolded them to silence from her window and bade them come in, but their father came down to the door, and then they stayed. Emerance appeared with Raney from the barn, where they had been mending the curtains of the carryall.

He was frowning as if in criticism of some suggestion that had tacitly offered itself, and he smiled rather absently when Kelwyn said: “This is getting to be something like the Vicar of Wakefield. But we need your gypsy van to complete the round-up of characters. Parthenope, where are your gypsies?”

For the first time the girl looked to a man for guidance in her reply. She looked to Emerance, who said: “I wish they were here. But I doubt whether their assortment of draft and led horses could stand the bear.”

He still wore his critical frown, and Parthenope interpreted while she submitted: “Are you going to have the bear in?”

Emerance laughed, shamefacedly, “It would make an effective episode!”

“I knew it,” she rejoiced, in a passage which left them in a secret together; but now she felt the necessity of using her novel powers of rule, which a girl who is engaged begins instinctively to use. “I wish you would go up into the dancing-room and get my sketching-block. I’ll scratch them down if Raney will ask them to pose.” Emerance obeyed in a lover’s glad servility, and she sat down on the threshold-stone to get her picture, after Raney had made the bear-leader comprehend that he and his bear were wanted to stand for their portraits instead of performing their drama.

Mrs. Kite had left something to burn in her oven, while she looked over the artist’s shoulder. “Well, the land!” she cried out, in wonder. A tell-tale odor stole from the kitchen, and she called, with a cheerful laugh, to Mrs. Kelwyn, “Well, I guess your cake will be done enough this time,” which was her way of letting Mrs. Kelwyn know that she had meant to make her an offering for the refreshment of the Kelwyn family on the way to their new place.

Parthenope felt Emerance’s eyes upon her. He thought they were on her work, but they were really on her; on her cinnamon hair; on the tilt of Her head this way and that, up and down, as the practice of her art required; on the nape of her neck and her close-set little ears; on the droop of her shoulders, and on the play of her long, capable fingers. She felt the warmth of his gaze in all these places as he stood behind her, and she felt a bliss in it such as she had never imagined before. It was not at all the exaltation she had expected in her love for the hero of her dreams, and, in fact, Emerance was not that hero, though she found that she liked him better than if he had been. In derivation and education he was entirely middle-class, as far removed from what was plebeian as what was patrician. He had not come out of the new earth, which would have been heroic; he had sprung from soil wrought for generations, on the common level, which was average. He had been public - schooled for a public-school teacher, and, if he had something like an impulse of genius, it had been toward a calling which at the bottom of her heart she did not respect.

If chance had saved him from responding to this, it was by too bare a chance that he should now succeed as a playwright instead of a player. He had been willing to experiment with either career; he was, as he said, an empiricist; he was a mere opportunist, as she would have said later; and he had no decision of character. Yet he had charm, charm that she felt now in his mere presence, in his nearness to her. What his charm was she could not have said, unless it was his goodness. It must be that, for now, when she was so blest in him, she did not feel any more or any less than she felt at the very beginning that he was good. There was rest in that, there was peace. When at last she lifted her head back and looked at her sketch, she turned her face up to ask him, “Is it anything like?”

“It’s wonderful,” he said, stooping on one knee beside her and bringing his face close to hers to get her point of view. “I don’t understand how you do it. Is it — is it — good?” he pursued, humbly.

“Good enough for me, if you think it’s wonderful.” She turned her eyes to his, and a mist came between them. “But otherwise I think it’s rather feeble. You’re not going to marry a Rosa Bonheur, you know.” She laughed, and he laughed with her; they did not know why.

“We’ll keep it as a memento of that first day,” he suggested.

“Well,” she assented, rising.

She felt in the pocket which women’s dresses had in that day, and Emerance saw from her face that she found it empty. He divined also that she wished to pay the man, if not the bear, for posing, and he said, “Let me give him something.”

She stared absently and then submitted. “I suppose you’ll have to, after this. It isn’t the first time.”

The bear-leader took the money, and, after recognizing himself in Parthenope’s sketch, he said goodbye, with ceremonies in which the bear was obliged to share. Then they went away down the road, and Raney started toward the barn. But Parthenope stayed him with a question which had occurred to her through her knowledge of French while she was sketching and trying not to be conscious of Emerance.

“What was that he kept saying to you about the brave boy?”

Raney grinned. “He want me to thank Arthur for bring him something to eat in that shanty in the woods when he’ll be sick with his bear.”

“When he was sick in the shanty?” she pursued.

“With rheumatism after that big storm.”

“And Arthur carried food to him?” Raney nodded. “Well! But what kind of food did you carry him?” Arthur had now become the centre of a general interest which did not inconvenience him, and he kept a stolid reserve under the pressure of this question.

Raney answered for him, still grinning, “The man said he bring those pies.”

“Well, Mr. Arthur!” his mother, who had hurried back from the kitchen, burst out in the sudden light which the fact cast upon a dark point of history, “so you was the rat, was you? I’ll attend to you when I get round to you once,” she threatened him, but with such open pride and joy in his guilt as not to alarm him seriously. It was not his principle to show any kind of feeling, and he now remained cold amidst the rays of wonder centring upon him from all eyes.

“Emerance,” Kelwyn said from that side of his mind which his wife never felt sure she approved, “we seem to be standing in the presence of a hero. What do you think ought to be done with him? It’s all very well for a hero to feed pies to a sick bearleader and his bear — the bear ate the pies, too?” he turned to the boy who rubbed the path with his toe and dropped his gaze. “But is it right for a hero to steal his mother’s pies for the purpose?”

“I suppose,” Emerance reflected, “that it’s always a question whether a child can steal, strictly speaking, from its parents; and I’ve understood that strategy of all kinds, even to the supression of truth, is allowable in a hero.”

“But if such a hero were a pupil of yours, what would you do with him?”

“Well, I should begin by keeping him after school and looking carefully into the case.”

“How perfectly cold - blooded!” Parthenope broke out. “I think he did right, and I should praise him before the whole school.”

Emerance looked round at her with returning seriousness. “I doubt if you could do that exactly.”

“So impossible is it,” Kelwyn interposed, “for a woman to enter into any question of sociology.”

“But if he were your son, Cousin Elmer?”

“Ah, there we have the personal appeal, the inevitable womanly, at once. Boys,” he called to his children, “did you know that Arthur was taking his mother’s pies and feeding them to the man and the bear?”

“Yes, papa,” they answered, cheerfully, in their succession.

“And why didn’t you tell us?” their mother put in; she had now joined the group before the house. “Didn’t you know it was wrong for Arthur to take his mother’s pies? Why didn’t you tell your father?”

“He said the bear would eat us,” the boys explained with full confidence in their justification.

“It seems to have been very simple,” Kelwyn said to his wife. He turned again to his children. “Did Arthur say why he was taking the pies to the bear-man?”

“He said he was going to run away with the man when he got well?”

“Ah, that’s simpler still,” Kelwyn said, and when his children entreated him, “May we go and play with Arthur?” he answered, “Yes — provisionally — you may.”

The case had passed beyond Mrs. Kelwyn’s protests; but she found solace in the thought that they were playing with Arthur for the last time. Mrs. Kite went into the house with another promise to give it to her son, and Parthenope said to Kelwyn: “If you are joking, I am sure I’m not, and I approve of what Arthur did. He couldn’t let the creatures starve. What do you think, Elder Nathaniel?” she turned to the Shaker, who had stood by, a silent witness.

“Nay, it is hard dealing with children; they must be judged according to their limited experience.”

“Well, let us hope we shall be judged according to our limited experience, too,” Kelwyn ended the inquiry.

Elder Nathaniel now took leave of the Kelwyns, so sadly and sweetly that they all felt a premature homesickness at their parting. “I am sorry,” he said, “that you are not going to stay and help us put the Kites out of the house. We shall surely not let them remain,” he ended, severely.

“Oh, you mustn’t turn them out now,” Kelwyn said. “At least, not for anything we’ve suffered. The few weeks we’ve been here do seem rather more like months, but it hasn’t been all suffering, by any means. It’s been, in some respects, highly educational; at least, it’s been instructive. I shall understand the sociology of the present, if not of the past, the better for my experience of the Kites. They seem a reversion to a type antedating Puritanism, which I couldn’t imagine finding in New England.”

“Yee, that is interesting,” Elder Nathaniel assented, and they had some moments of philosophy, which Mrs. Kelwyn interrupted with hospitable insistances that the Elder should stay to dinner, and so drove him away.

Mrs. Ager came over again from her house with some little cakes she had baked for provisioning the boys on their journey to their new home, and she bestowed them on Mrs. Kelwyn with assurances, intentionally loud enough for Mrs. Kite to hear in her kitchen, that they were not made with rancid butter or milk not fit for the pigs. She wrought herself into such a generous rage that she forgot to say good-bye, and had to shout her farewell from her own door when she got home.

“Ain’t she great?” Mrs. Kite asked, with humorous appreciation, as she came forward to the Kelwyns. “Well, I guess your dinner’s ready for you, if you are. I’ll bring it right in.”

They had a gayer meal than they had enjoyed since Parthenope and Emerance had first sat down with them, and their pleasure in it was not blighted by the skill of Mrs. Kite. There was no perceptible change for the better, either in the material or its treatment; but it was offered with a good-will and a regret that went far to supplement the stores of their own provision; and something like affection for the unteachable amiability of the woman qualified their sense of her final impossibility.

The Kelwyns were naturally much distracted from their victual by the anomalous aspect of the situation through the novel relation of Parthenope and Emerance to it. Having once firmly agreed with Parthenope that the relation was absolutely non-existent till it had been submitted to her aunt Julia and received her perfect, her even eager approval, Mrs. Kelwyn made such concession to it as to propose putting the young people together at the table. Parthenope rejected the notion, but when the boys had early excused themselves their father opened a small bottle of currant wine the Shaker sisters had given him, and proposed a toast significantly impersonal, “To the Future.”

Before they left the table Benson’s team appeared under their windows, and the two men had to go down and load it with the trunks and boxes which had already been gathered in the hallway below. They shared this labor with Raney and with Kite, who had stayed from his harvest in a conception of duty to his parting guests. Mrs. Kite cordially, almost tenderly, joined Mrs. Kelwyn and Parthenope in washing and packing the china and silver which belonged to the Kelwyns; she paused to say that she guessed she would not find anybody like them very soon.

When all was done, it appeared that Benson had not judged it necessary to stay and drive his wagon to the stone cottage, since Emerance, in all probability, could be trusted to do so, and to bring it back to him when it was unloaded. As it stood, finally, the wagon was so heaped with freight that the whole family could not hope to find transportation on it. It did not help that the Kelwyn boys were nowhere to be found. But when they had been looked for everywhere, they came running from the pasture, where they were seen afar in a distress that was not at first intelligible even when they came within hearing.

“He’s dead, papa! He’s dead, papa!” they called; but, as they were visibly followed at a discreet interval by the Kite boy, it could not be his death which they were lamenting, and when Francy had been twitched into coherence by his mother he sobbed out, “We wanted to ride him to the new house, and now he’s dead in the pasture and we can’t ride him.”

“We can’t r-i-i-de him,” Carl corroborated the report with tears.

“Who’s dead? What’s dead? What can’t you ride?” their mother demanded.

“The horse!” they roared together. “The old, white one that Arthur give us.”

“Well, stop crying,” their father intervened, “and don’t say ‘give’ us; I’ve told you before. Of course you can’t ride him if he’s dead and you want to go anywhere.”

Arthur Kite arrived on the scene. “Guess he must ‘a’ died in the night,” he explained, importantly.

“And what are we going to do-o-o?” the little Kelwyns wailed; and then, as from an inspiration, their eyes flashed hopefully through their tears. “Oh, may we ride on top of the trunks, papa?” Francy asked, and, “May we ride on the trunks, mamma?” Carl slightly varied him.

“I don’t see how we’re all going to ride on the trunks,” Kelwyn remarked, after a critical glance at the load.

“Guess ye won’t have to,” Kite said, turning his back on Kelwyn for a better effect of politeness. “Raney’s got the carryall hitched up, and he’ll take ye over.”

It was easy to be ungracious with Kite, and Kelwyn was aware of being so. “Very well; we shall have to accept your offer. What shall I pay you?”

“You don’t want to pay me anything,” Kite said, moving away to his own door and leaving Kelwyn to settle with himself what he should pay Raney.

The question which pair should go with the baggage and which should go in the carryall was determined by Parthenope, who ordered Emerance to find safe perches for the Kelwyn boys, and then mounted on her own trunk, which had been put on in front, and, when all was ready, bade Emerance get up beside her. If she had come into her empire with misgiving, she ruled it with none; all the morning she had commanded him in the successive details; the shadow of old-maidhood which had once hovered near her had vanished in the radiant sense of her matronly power over the man whom she was treating already like a lifelong vassal, and who submitted gladly to her commands. There had been a moment when she questioned, in the warmth of her feelings, whether she should not kiss Mrs. Kite in taking leave; but finally she decided not, and shook hands with her as if she had been taking leave of a society hostess.

“Now you come over and see me,” she charged the girl, who answered:

“I should like to, Mrs. Kite, but I’m going up to Boston on Saturday, and I don’t believe there’ll be time. But I sha’n’t forget you, you may be sure.”

The Kelwyns said much the same, except that they would stop some day when they were passing; and Mrs. Kite, on her part, offered to look them up. There was no leave-taking with Kite, but at the last moment there was a loud cry from the Kelwyn boys.

“We haven’t said good-bye to Arthur!” Their belated remembrance of him did not visibly move their stoical comrade as he stood beside his mother.

“Well, say it, then,” their father said, impatiently, and Parthenope suggested that Arthur should climb up and say good-bye to them. But her plan did not satisfy the boys’ ideal of friendship, and Emerance ended it by jumping from his place and lifting them down.

It appeared then that they wished to kiss Arthur, who took their embrace as if that kind of thing had never happened to him before, while his mother said, with amusement, “Well, the land!” Francy , with permission, gave him his knife for a keepsake, and Carl gave him a piece of lead-pencil. He, in his turn, gave them a small mud-turtle, which had survived captivity in the accumulations of his pocket; they were to share it between them as a souvenir, and feed it with earthworms if it could be got to eat them.

Emerance now put the boys, still calling their goodbyes to their stolid comrade, into their places and took his own place beside Parthenope. Then, with a backward look at the Kelwyns, to see that she was not seen, she passed one hand through his arm and locked it into the other.

“Can you drive if I do that?” she asked.

“I will make the experiment,” he answered, with his head bent low toward her.

“And are you happy?” she murmured, tenderly. “As happy as you expected to be?”

“Oh yes,” he sighed. “If Professor Kelwyn had put those people out of the house I’m afraid he would have had a lifelong regret. But now, in going himself, in owning defeat at the hands of fate, he’s won a victory that will always be a joy to him. I’m so glad for him.”

“Yes,” she said, in sinking a little from Emerance. But she pulled herself back with a sublime resolution never to let him know her disappointment After all, was not it finer, his not thinking of themselves, or of their selfish happiness, at this supreme moment? Could she stand so much impersonality through life, though? She decided that she could, and she said, bravely: “Oh, do go on, Ellihu,” and at her bidding he chirruped to Benson’s horses, which moved obediently, while she pushed still closer to him. “Well, now we’ve started in life together!”

Mrs. Kelwyn could not say quite the same of herself and her husband, but she felt as if she were almost beginning the world again, she was so richly content to be leaving her recent experience wholly behind her. She was therefore vexed the more with Kelwyn when he broke from a vague silence to say vaguely as if continuing aloud an inner strain of thinking:

“I suppose I might have been more patient, though whether with the patience of Job we could ever have brought them to our point of view, taught them anything? But oughtn’t we to have tried harder?”

His wife knew what he meant. “You think I ought to have gone into the kitchen and labored with her? Mr. Emerance did that and you saw what it came to.”

“Oh yes, you’re right. But I wish I had a better conscience in it all. It doesn’t seem my private debt that troubles me, but my private portion of the public debt which we all somehow owe to the incapable, the inadequate, the — the — shiftless.”

“Oh, very well,” Mrs. Kelwyn said, with the effect of renunciation which seldom failed to dismay Kelwyn. “If you are going to put that into your lectures you will lose all your influence.”

He laughed sadly. “Then I won’t do it. If I can’t exert my influence without losing it I won’t exert it.” The notion pleased him, and now he laughed cheerfully.

THE END

The Shorter Fiction

William Dean Howells with his wife, Elinor Mead, whom he married in 1862. The marriage was a long and happy one, ending with Elinor’s death in 1910.

SUBURBAN SKETCHES

CONTENTS

MRS. JOHNSON

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

A DAY’S PLEASURE

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

SCENE

JUBILEE DAYS

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS.

FLITTING

MRS. JOHNSON

It was on a morning of the lovely New England May that we left the horse-car, and, spreading our umbrellas, walked down the street to our new home in Charlesbridge, through a storm of snow and rain so finely blent by the influences of this fortunate climate, that no flake knew itself from its sister drop, or could be better identified by the people against whom they beat in unison. A vernal gale from the east fanned our cheeks and pierced our marrow and chilled our blood, while the raw, cold green of the adventurous grass on the borders of the sopping sidewalks gave, as it peered through its veil of melting snow and freezing rain, a peculiar cheerfulness to the landscape. Here and there in the vacant lots abandoned hoop-skirts defied decay; and near the half-finished wooden houses, empty mortar-beds, and bits of lath and slate strewn over the scarred and mutilated ground, added their interest to the scene. A shaggy drift hung upon the trees before our own house (which had been built some years earlier), while its swollen eaves wept silently and incessantly upon the embankments lifting its base several feet above the common level.

This heavenly weather, which the Pilgrim Fathers, with the idea of turning their thoughts effectually from earthly pleasures, came so far to discover, continued with slight amelioration throughout the month of May and far into June; and it was a matter of constant amazement with one who had known less austere climates, to behold how vegetable life struggled with the hostile skies, and, in an atmosphere as chill and damp as that of a cellar, shot forth the buds and blossoms upon the pear-trees, called out the sour Puritan courage of the currant-bushes, taught a reckless native grape-vine to wander and wanton over the southern side of the fence, and decked the banks with violets as fearless and as fragile as New England girls; so that about the end of June, when the heavens relented and the sun blazed out at last, there was little for him to do but to redden and darken the daring fruits that had attained almost their full growth without his countenance.

Then, indeed, Charlesbridge appeared to us a kind of Paradise. The wind blew all day from the southwest, and all day in the grove across the way the orioles sang to their nestlings. The butcher’s wagon rattled merrily up to our gate every morning; and if we had kept no other reckoning, we should have known it was Thursday by the grocer. We were living in the country with the conveniences and luxuries of the city about us. The house was almost new and in perfect repair; and, better than all, the kitchen had as yet given no signs of unrest in those volcanic agencies which are constantly at work there, and which, with sudden explosion, make Herculaneums and Pompeiis of so many smiling households. Breakfast, dinner, and tea came up with illusive regularity, and were all the most perfect of their kind; and we laughed and feasted in our vain security. We had out from the city to banquet with us the friends we loved, and we were inexpressibly proud before them of the Help, who first wrought miracles of cookery in our honor, and then appeared in a clean white apron, and the glossiest black hair, to wait upon the table. She was young, and certainly very pretty; she was as gay as a lark, and was courted by a young man whose clothes would have been a credit, if they had not been a reproach, to our lowly basement. She joyfully assented to the idea of staying with us till she married.

In fact, there was much that was extremely pleasant about the little place when the warm weather came, and it was not wonderful to us that Jenny was willing to remain. It was very quiet; we called one another to the window if a large dog went by our door; and whole days passed without the movement of any wheels but the butcher’s upon our street, which flourished in ragweed and butter-cups and daisies, and in the autumn burned, like the borders of nearly all the streets in Charlesbridge, with the pallid azure flame of the succory. The neighborhood was in all things a frontier between city and country. The horse-cars, the type of such civilization — full of imposture, discomfort, and sublime possibility — as we yet possess, went by the head of our street, and might, perhaps, be available to one skilled in calculating the movements of comets; while two minutes’ walk would take us into a wood so wild and thick that no roof was visible through the trees. We learned, like innocent pastoral people of the golden age, to know the several voices of the cows pastured in the vacant lots, and, like engine-drivers of the iron age, to distinguish the different whistles of the locomotives passing on the neighboring railroad. The trains shook the house as they thundered along, and at night were a kind of company, while by day we had the society of the innumerable birds. Now and then, also, the little ragged boys in charge of the cows — which, tied by long ropes to trees, forever wound themselves tight up against the trunks, and had to be unwound with great ado of hooting and hammering — came and peered lustfully through the gate at our ripening pears. All round us carpenters were at work building new houses; but so far from troubling us, the strokes of their hammers fell softly upon the sense, like one’s heart-beats upon one’s own consciousness in the lapse from all fear of pain under the blessed charm of an anaesthetic.

We played a little at gardening, of course, and planted tomatoes, which the chickens seemed to like, for they ate them up as fast as they ripened; and we watched with pride the growth of our Lawton blackberries, which, after attaining the most stalwart proportions, were still as bitter as the scrubbiest of their savage brethren, and which, when by advice left on the vines for a week after they turned black, were silently gorged by secret and gluttonous flocks of robins and orioles. As for our grapes, the frost cut them off in the hour of their triumph.

So, as I have hinted, we were not surprised that Jenny should be willing to remain with us, and were as little prepared for her desertion as for any other change of our moral state. But one day in September she came to her nominal mistress with tears in her beautiful eyes and protestations of unexampled devotion upon her tongue, and said that she was afraid she must leave us. She liked the place, and she never had worked for any one that was more of a lady, but she had made up her mind to go into the city. All this, so far, was quite in the manner of domestics who, in ghost stories, give warning to the occupants of haunted houses; and Jenny’s mistress listened in suspense for the motive of her desertion, expecting to hear no less than that it was something which walked up and down the stairs and dragged iron links after it, or something that came and groaned at the front door, like populace dissatisfied with a political candidate. But it was in fact nothing of this kind; simply, there were no lamps upon our street, and Jenny, after spending Sunday evening with friends in East Charlesbridge, was always alarmed, on her return, in walking from the horse-car to our door. The case was hopeless, and Jenny and our household parted with respect and regret.

We had not before this thought it a grave disadvantage that our street was unlighted. Our street was not drained nor graded; no municipal cart ever came to carry away our ashes; there was not a water-butt within half a mile to save us from fire, nor more than the one thousandth part of a policeman to protect us from theft. Yet, as I paid a heavy tax, I somehow felt that we enjoyed the benefits of city government, and never looked upon Charlesbridge as in any way undesirable for residence. But when it became necessary to find help in Jenny’s place, the frosty welcome given to application at the intelligence offices renewed a painful doubt awakened by her departure. To be sure, the heads of the offices were polite enough; but when the young housekeeper had stated her case at the first to which she applied, and the Intelligencer had called out to the invisible expectants in the adjoining room, “Anny wan wants to do giner’l housewark in Charlsbrudge?” there came from the maids invoked so loud, so fierce, so full a “No!” as shook the lady’s heart with an indescribable shame and dread. The name that, with an innocent pride in its literary and historical associations, she had written at the heads of her letters, was suddenly become a matter of reproach to her; and she was almost tempted to conceal thereafter that she lived in Charlesbridge, and to pretend that she dwelt upon some wretched little street in Boston. “You see,” said the head of the office, “the gairls doesn’t like to live so far away from the city. Now if it was on’y in the Port....”

This pen is not graphic enough to give the remote reader an idea of the affront offered to an inhabitant of Old Charlesbridge in these closing words. Neither am I of sufficiently tragic mood to report here all the sufferings undergone by an unhappy family in finding servants, or to tell how the winter was passed with miserable makeshifts. Alas! is it not the history of a thousand experiences? Any one who looks upon this page could match it with a tale as full of heartbreak and disaster, while I conceive that, in hastening to speak of Mrs. Johnson, I approach a subject of unique interest.

The winter that ensued after Jenny’s departure was the true sister of the bitter and shrewish spring of the same year. But indeed it is always with a secret shiver that one must think of winter in our regrettable climate. It is a terrible potency, robbing us of half our lives, and threatening or desolating the moiety left us with rheumatisms and catarrhs. There is a much vaster sum of enjoyment possible to man in the more generous latitudes; and I have sometimes doubted whether even the energy characteristic of ours is altogether to be praised, seeing that it has its spring not so much in pure aspiration as in the instinct of self-preservation. Egyptian, Greek, Roman energy was an inner impulse; but ours is too often the sting of cold, the spur of famine. We must endure our winter, but let us not be guilty of the hypocrisy of pretending that we like it. Let us caress it with no more vain compliments, but use it with something of its own rude and savage sincerity.

I say, our last Irish girl went with the last snow, and on one of those midsummer-like days that sometimes fall in early April to our yet bleak and desolate zone, our hearts sang of Africa and golden joys. A Libyan longing took us, and we would have chosen, if we could, to bear a strand of grotesque beads, or a handful of brazen gauds, and traffic them for some sable maid with crisped locks, whom, uncoffling from the captive train beside the desert, we should make to do our general housework forever, through the right of lawful purchase. But we knew that this was impossible, and that, if we desired colored help, we must seek it at the intelligence office, which is in one of those streets chiefly inhabited by the orphaned children and grandchildren of slavery. To tell the truth these orphans do not seem to grieve much for their bereavement, but lead a life of joyous and rather indolent oblivion in their quarter of the city. They are often to be seen sauntering up and down the street by which the Charlesbridge cars arrive, — the young with a harmless swagger, and the old with the generic limp which our Autocrat has already noted as attending advanced years in their race. They seem the natural human interest of a street so largely devoted to old clothes; and the thoughtful may see a felicity in their presence where the pawnbrokers’ windows display the forfeited pledges of improvidence, and subtly remind us that we have yet to redeem a whole race, pawned in our needy and reckless national youth, and still held against us by the Uncle of Injustice, who is also the Father of Lies. How gayly are the young ladies of this race attired, as they trip up and down the side walks, and in and out through the pendent garments at the shop doors! They are the black pansies and marigolds and dark-blooded dahlias among womankind. They try to assume something of our colder race’s demeanor, but even the passer on the horse-car can see that it is not native with them, and is better pleased when they forget us, and ungenteelly laugh in encountering friends, letting their white teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to their ears. In the streets branching upwards from this avenue, very little colored men and maids play with broken or enfeebled toys, or sport on the wooden pavements of the entrances to the inner courts. Now and then a colored soldier or sailor — looking strange in his uniform, even after the custom of several years — emerges from those passages; or, more rarely, a black gentleman, stricken in years, and cased in shining broadcloth, walks solidly down the brick sidewalk, cane in hand, — a vision of serene self-complacency, and so plainly the expression of virtuous public sentiment that the great colored louts, innocent enough till then in their idleness, are taken with a sudden sense of depravity, and loaf guiltily up against the house-walls. At the same moment, perhaps, a young damsel, amorously scuffling with an admirer through one of the low open windows, suspends the strife, and bids him, “Go along now, do!” More rarely yet than the gentleman described, one may see a white girl among the dark neighbors, whose frowzy head is uncovered, and whose sleeves are rolled up to her elbows, and who, though no doubt quite at home, looks as strange there as that pale anomaly which may sometimes be seen among a crew of blackbirds.

An air not so much of decay as of unthrift, and yet hardly of unthrift, seems to prevail in the neighborhood, which has none of the aggressive and impudent squalor of an Irish quarter, and none of the surly wickedness of a low American street. A gayety not born of the things that bring its serious joy to the true New England heart — a ragged gayety, which comes of summer in the blood, and not in the pocket or the conscience, and which affects the countenance and the whole demeanor, setting the feet to some inward music, and at times bursting into a line of song or a child-like and irresponsible laugh — gives tone to the visible life, and wakens a very friendly spirit in the passer, who somehow thinks there of a milder climate, and is half persuaded that the orange-peel on the sidewalks came from fruit grown in the soft atmosphere of those back courts.

It was in this quarter, then, that we heard of Mrs. Johnson; and it was from a colored boarding-house there that she came out to Charlesbridge to look at us, bringing her daughter of twelve years with her. She was a matron of mature age and portly figure, with a complexion like coffee soothed with the richest cream; and her manners were so full of a certain tranquillity and grace, that she charmed away all out will to ask for references. It was only her barbaric laughter and her lawless eye that betrayed how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilization that lay between her race and ours. But in fact, she was doubly estranged by descent; for, as we learned later, a sylvan wildness mixed with that of the desert in her veins: her grandfather was an Indian, and her ancestors on this side had probably sold their lands for the same value in trinkets that bought the original African pair on the other side.

The first day that Mrs. Johnson descended into our kitchen, she conjured from the malicious disorder in which it had been left by the flitting Irish kobold a dinner that revealed the inspirations of genius, and was quite different from a dinner of mere routine and laborious talent. Something original and authentic mingled with the accustomed flavors; and, though vague reminiscences of canal-boat travel and woodland camps arose from the relish of certain of the dishes, there was yet the assurance of such power in the preparation of the whole, that we knew her to be merely running over the chords of our appetite with preliminary savors, as a musician acquaints his touch with the keys of an unfamiliar piano before breaking into brilliant and triumphant execution. Within a week she had mastered her instrument; and thereafter there was no faltering in her performances, which she varied constantly, through inspiration or from suggestion. She was so quick to receive new ideas in her art, that, when the Roman statuary who stayed a few weeks with us explained the mystery of various purely Latin dishes, she caught their principle at once; and visions of the great white cathedral, the Coliseum, and the “dome of Brunelleschi” floated before us in the exhalations of the Milanese risotto, Roman stufadino, and Florentine stracotto that smoked upon our board. But, after all, it was in puddings that Mrs. Johnson chiefly excelled. She was one of those cooks — rare as men of genius in literature — who love their own dishes; and she had, in her personally child-like simplicity of taste, and the inherited appetites of her savage forefathers, a dominant passion for sweets. So far as we could learn, she subsisted principally upon puddings and tea. Through the same primitive instincts, no doubt, she loved praise. She openly exulted in our artless flatteries of her skill; she waited jealously at the head of the kitchen stairs to hear what was said of her work, especially if there were guests; and she was never too weary to attempt emprises of cookery.

While engaged in these, she wore a species of sightly handkerchief like a turban upon her head and about her person those mystical swathings in which old ladies of the African race delight. But she most pleasured our sense of beauty and moral fitness when, after the last pan was washed and the last pot was scraped, she lighted a potent pipe, and, taking her stand at the kitchen door, laded the soft evening air with its pungent odors. If we surprised her at these supreme moments, she took the pipe from her lips, and put it behind her, with a low mellow chuckle, and a look of half-defiant consciousness; never guessing that none of her merits took us half so much as the cheerful vice which she only feigned to conceal.

Some things she could not do so perfectly as cooking, because of her failing eyesight; and we persuaded her that spectacles would both become and befriend a lady of her years, and so bought her a pair of steel-bowed glasses. She wore them in some great emergencies at first, but had clearly no pride in them. Before long she laid them aside altogether, and they had passed from our thoughts, when one day we heard her mellow note of laughter and her daughter’s harsher cackle outside our door, and, opening it, beheld Mrs. Johnson in gold-bowed spectacles of massive frame. We then learned that their purchase was in fulfillment of a vow made long ago, in the life-time of Mr. Johnson, that, if ever she wore glasses, they should be gold-bowed; and I hope the manes of the dead were half as happy in these votive spectacles as the simple soul that offered them.

She and her late partner were the parents of eleven children, some of whom were dead, and some of whom were wanderers in unknown parts. During his life-time she had kept a little shop in her native town; and it was only within a few years that she had gone into service. She cherished a natural haughtiness of spirit, and resented control, although disposed to do all she could of her own motion. Being told to say when she wanted an afternoon, she explained that when she wanted an afternoon she always took it without asking, but always planned so as not to discommode the ladies with whom she lived. These, she said, had numbered twenty-seven within three years, which made us doubt the success of her system in all cases, though she merely held out the fact as an assurance of her faith in the future, and a proof of the ease with which places were to be found. She contended, moreover, that a lady who had for thirty years had a house of her own, was in nowise bound to ask permission to receive visits from friends where she might be living, but that they ought freely to come and go like other guests. In this spirit she once invited her son-in-law, Professor Jones of Providence, to dine with her; and her defied mistress, on entering the dining-room, found the Professor at pudding and tea there, — an impressively respectable figure in black clothes, with a black face rendered yet more effective by a pair of green goggles. It appeared that this dark professor was a light of phrenology in Rhode Island, and that he was believed to have uncommon virtue in his science by reason of being blind as well as black.

I am loath to confess that Mrs. Johnson had not a flattering opinion of the Caucasian race in all respects. In fact, she had very good philosophical and Scriptural reasons for looking upon us as an upstart people of new blood, who had come into their whiteness by no creditable or pleasant process. The late Mr. Johnson, who had died in the West Indies, whither he voyaged for his health in quality of cook upon a Down-East schooner, was a man of letters, and had written a book to show the superiority of the black over the white branches of the human family. In this he held that, as all islands have been at their discovery found peopled by blacks, we must needs believe that humanity was first created of that color. Mrs. Johnson could not show us her husband’s work (a sole copy in the library of an English gentleman at Port au Prince is not to be bought for money), but she often developed its arguments to the lady of the house; and one day, with a great show of reluctance, and many protests that no personal slight was meant, let fall the fact that Mr. Johnson believed the white race descended from Gehazi the leper, upon whom the leprosy of Naaman fell when the latter returned by Divine favor to his original blackness. “And he went out from his presence a leper as white as snow,” said Mrs. Johnson, quoting irrefutable Scripture. “Leprosy, leprosy,” she added thoughtfully,— “nothing but leprosy bleached you out.”

It seems to me much in her praise that she did not exult in our taint and degradation, as some white philosophers used to do in the opposite idea that a part of the human family were cursed to lasting blackness and slavery in Ham and his children, but even told us of a remarkable approach to whiteness in many of her own offspring. In a kindred spirit of charity, no doubt, she refused ever to attend church with people of her elder and wholesomer blood. When she went to church, she said, she always went to a white church, though while with us I am bound to say she never went to any. She professed to read her Bible in her bedroom on Sundays; but we suspected, from certain sounds and odors which used to steal out of this sanctuary, that her piety more commonly found expression in dozing and smoking.

I would not make a wanton jest here of Mrs. Johnson’s anxiety to claim honor for the African color, while denying this color in many of her own family. It afforded a glimpse of the pain which all her people must endure, however proudly they hide it or light-heartedly forget it, from the despite and contumely to which they are guiltlessly born; and when I thought how irreparable was this disgrace and calamity of a black skin, and how irreparable it must be for ages yet, in this world where every other shame and all manner of wilful guilt and wickedness may hope for covert and pardon, I had little heart to laugh. Indeed, it was so pathetic to hear this poor old soul talk of her dead and lost ones, and try, in spite of all Mr. Johnson’s theories and her own arrogant generalizations, to establish their whiteness, that we must have been very cruel and silly people to turn her sacred fables even into matter of question. I have no doubt that her Antoinette Anastasia and her Thomas Jefferson Wilberforce — it is impossible to give a full idea of the splendor and scope of the baptismal names in Mrs. Johnson’s family — have as light skins and as golden hair in heaven as her reverend maternal fancy painted for them in our world. There, certainly, they would not be subject to tanning, which had ruined the delicate complexion, and had knotted into black woolly tangles the once wavy blonde locks of our little maid-servant Naomi; and I would fain believe that Toussaint Washington Johnson, who ran away to sea so many years ago, has found some fortunate zone where his hair and skin keep the same sunny and rosy tints they wore to his mother’s eyes in infancy. But I have no means of knowing this, or of telling whether he was the prodigy of intellect that he was declared to be. Naomi could no more be taken in proof, of the one assertion than of the other. When she came to us, it was agreed that she should go to school; but she overruled her mother in this as in everything else, and never went. Except Sunday-school lessons, she had no other instruction than that her mistress gave her in the evenings, when a heavy day’s play and the natural influences of the hour conspired with original causes to render her powerless before words of one syllable.

The first week of her service she was obedient and faithful to her duties; but, relaxing in the atmosphere of a house which seems to demoralize all menials, she shortly fell into disorderly ways of lying in wait for callers out of doors, and, when people rang, of running up the front steps, and letting them in from the outside. As the season expanded, and the fine weather became confirmed, she modified even this form of service, and spent her time in the fields, appearing at the house only when nature importunately craved molasses. She had a parrot-like quickness, so far as music was concerned, and learned from the Roman statuary to make the groves and half-finished houses resound,

 “Camicia rossa,

  Ove t’ ascondi?

  T’ appella Italia, —

  Tu non respondi!”

She taught the Garibaldi song, moreover, to all the neighboring children, so that I sometimes wondered if our street were not about to march upon Rome in a body.

In her untamable disobedience, Naomi alone betrayed her sylvan blood, for she was in all other respects negro and not Indian. But it was of her aboriginal ancestry that Mrs. Johnson chiefly boasted, — when not engaged in argument to maintain the superiority of the African race. She loved to descant upon it as the cause and explanation of her own arrogant habit of feeling; and she seemed indeed to have inherited something of the Indian’s hauteur along with the Ethiop’s supple cunning and abundant amiability. She gave many instances in which her pride had met and overcome the insolence of employers, and the kindly old creature was by no means singular in her pride of being reputed proud.

She could never have been a woman of strong logical faculties, but she had in some things a very surprising and awful astuteness. She seldom introduced any purpose directly, but bore all about it and then suddenly sprung it upon her unprepared antagonist. At other times she obscurely hinted a reason, and left a conclusion to be inferred; as when she warded off reproach for some delinquency by saying in a general way that she had lived with ladies who used to come scolding into the kitchen after they had taken their bitters. “Quality ladies took their bitters regular,” she added, to remove any sting of personality from her remark; for, from many things she had let fall, we knew that she did not regard us as quality. On the contrary, she often tried to overbear us with the gentility of her former places; and would tell the lady over whom she reigned, that she had lived with folks worth their three and four hundred thousand dollars, who never complained as she did of the ironing. Yet she had a sufficient regard for the literary occupations of the family, Mr. Johnson having been an author. She even professed to have herself written a book, which was still in manuscript, and preserved somewhere among her best clothes.

It was well, on many accounts, to be in contact with a mind so original and suggestive as Mrs. Johnson’s. We loved to trace its intricate yet often transparent operations, and were perhaps too fond of explaining its peculiarities by facts of ancestry, — of finding hints of the Powwow or the Grand Custom in each grotesque development. We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and the untracked forest. She had scarcely any being apart from her affection; she had no morality, but was good because she neither hated nor envied; and she might have been a saint far more easily than far more civilized people.

There was that also in her sinuous yet malleable nature, so full of guile and so full of goodness, that reminded us pleasantly of lowly folk in elder lands, where relaxing oppressions have lifted the restraints of fear between master and servant, without disturbing the familiarity of their relation. She advised freely with us upon all household matters, and took a motherly interest in whatever concerned us. She could be flattered or caressed into almost any service, but no threat or command could move her. When she erred, she never acknowledged her wrong in words, but handsomely expressed her regrets in a pudding, or sent up her apologies in a favorite dish secretly prepared. We grew so well used to this form of exculpation, that, whenever Mrs. Johnson took an afternoon at an inconvenient season, we knew that for a week afterwards we should be feasted like princes. She owned frankly that she loved us, that she never had done half so much for people before, and that she never had been nearly so well suited in any other place; and for a brief and happy time we thought that we never should part.

One day, however, our dividing destiny appeared in the basement, and was presented to us as Hippolyto Thucydides, the son of Mrs. Johnson, who had just arrived on a visit to his mother from the State of New Hampshire. He was a heavy and loutish youth, standing upon the borders of boyhood, and looking forward to the future with a vacant and listless eye. I mean that this was his figurative attitude; his actual manner, as he lolled upon a chair beside the kitchen window, was so eccentric, that we felt a little uncertain how to regard him, and Mrs. Johnson openly described him as peculiar. He was so deeply tanned by the fervid suns of the New Hampshire winter, and his hair had so far suffered from the example of the sheep lately under his charge, that he could not be classed by any stretch of compassion with the blonde and straight-haired members of Mrs. Johnson’s family.

He remained with us all the first day until late in the afternoon, when his mother took him out to get him a boarding-house. Then he departed in the van of her and Naomi, pausing at the gate to collect his spirits, and, after he had sufficiently animated himself by clapping his palms together, starting off down the street at a hand-gallop, to the manifest terror of the cows in the pastures, and the confusion of the less demonstrative people of our household. Other characteristic traits appeared in Hippolyto Thucydides within no very long period of time, and he ran away from his lodgings so often during the summer that he might be said to board round among the outlying corn-fields and turnip-patches of Charlesbridge. As a check upon this habit, Mrs. Johnson seemed to have invited him to spend his whole time in our basement; for whenever we went below we found him there, balanced — perhaps in homage to us, and perhaps as a token of extreme sensibility in himself — upon the low window-sill, the bottoms of his boots touching the floor inside, and his face buried in the grass without.

We could formulate no very tenable objection to all this, and yet the presence of Thucydides in our kitchen unaccountably oppressed our imaginations. We beheld him all over the house, a monstrous eidolon, balanced upon every window-sill; and he certainly attracted unpleasant notice to our place, no less by his furtive and hang-dog manner of arrival than by the bold displays with which he celebrated his departures. We hinted this to Mrs. Johnson, but she could not enter into our feeling. Indeed, all the wild poetry of her maternal and primitive nature seemed to cast itself about this hapless boy; and if we had listened to her we should have believed there was no one so agreeable in society, or so quick-witted in affairs, as Hippolyto, when he chose. She used to rehearse us long epics concerning his industry, his courage, and his talent; and she put fine speeches in his mouth with no more regard to the truth than if she had been a historian, and not a poet. Perhaps she believed that he really said and did the things she attributed to him: it is the destiny of those who repeatedly tell great things either of themselves or others; and I think we may readily forgive the illusion to her zeal and fondness. In fact, she was not a wise woman, and she spoiled her children as if she had been a rich one.

At last, when we said positively that Thucydides should come to us no more, and then qualified the prohibition by allowing him to come every Sunday, she answered that she never would hurt the child’s feelings by telling him not to come where his mother was; that people who did not love her children did not love her; and that, if Hippy went, she went. We thought it a master-stroke of firmness to rejoin that Hippolyto must go in any event; but I am bound to own that he did not go, and that his mother stayed, and so fed us with every cunning propitiatory dainty, that we must have been Pagans to renew our threat. In fact, we begged Mrs. Johnson to go into the country with us, and she, after long reluctation on Hippy’s account, consented, agreeing to send him away to friends during her absence.

We made every preparation, and on the eve of our departure Mrs. Johnson went into the city to engage her son’s passage to Bangor, while we awaited her return in untroubled security.

But she did not appear till midnight, and then responded with but a sad “Well, sah!” to the cheerful “Well, Mrs. Johnson!” that greeted her.

“All right, Mrs. Johnson?”

Mrs. Johnson made a strange noise, half chuckle and half death-rattle, in her throat. “All wrong, sah. Hippy’s off again; and I’ve been all over the city after him.”

“Then you can’t go with us in the morning?”

“How can I, sah?”

Mrs. Johnson went sadly out of the room. Then she came back to the door again, and, opening it, uttered, for the first time in our service, words of apology and regret: “I hope I ha’n’t put you out any. I wanted to go with you, but I ought to knowed I couldn’t. All is, I loved you too much.”

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

Vagabonds the world would no doubt call many of my doorstep acquaintance, and I do not attempt to defend them altogether against the world, which paints but black and white and in general terms. Yet I would fain veil what is only half-truth under another name, for I know that the service of their Gay Science is not one of such disgraceful ease as we associate with ideas of vagrancy, though I must own that they lead the life they do because they love it. They always protest that nothing but their ignorance of our tongue prevents them from practicing some mechanical trade. “What work could be harder,” they ask, “than carrying this organ about all day?” but while I answer with honesty that nothing can be more irksome, I feel that they only pretend a disgust with it, and that they really like organ-grinding, if for no other reason than that they are the children of the summer, and it takes them into the beloved open weather. One of my friends, at least, who in the warmer months is to all appearance a blithesome troubadour, living

 “A merry life in sun and shade,”

as a coal-heaver in winter; and though this more honorable and useful occupation is doubtless open to him the whole year round, yet he does not devote himself to it, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay aside his grimy basket, and, shouldering his organ, to quit the dismal wharves and carts and cellars, and to wander forth into the suburbs, with his lazy, soft-eyed boy at his heels, who does nothing with his tambourine but take up a collection, and who, meeting me the other day in a chance passage of Ferry Street, knew me, and gave me so much of his father’s personal history.

It was winter even there in Ferry Street, in which so many Italians live that one might think to find it under a softer sky and in a gentler air, and which I had always figured in a wide unlikeness to all other streets in Boston, — with houses stuccoed outside, and with gratings at their ground-floor windows; with mouldering archways between the buildings, and at the corners feeble lamps glimmering before pictures of the Madonna; with weather-beaten shutters flapping overhead, and many balconies from which hung the linen swathings of young infants, and love-making maidens furtively lured the velvet-jacketed, leisurely youth below: a place haunted by windy voices of blessing and cursing, with the perpetual clack of wooden-heeled shoes upon the stones, and what perfume from the blossom of vines and almond-trees, mingling with less delicate smells, the travelled reader pleases to imagine. I do not say that I found Ferry Street actually different from this vision in most respects; but as for the vines and almond-trees, they were not in bloom at the moment of my encounter with the little tambourine-boy. As we stood and talked, the snow fell as heavily and thickly around us as elsewhere in Boston. With a vague pain, — the envy of a race toward another born to a happier clime, — I heard from him that his whole family was going back to Italy in a month. The father had at last got together money enough, and the mother, who had long been an invalid, must be taken home; and, so far as I know, the population of Ferry Street exists but in the hope of a return, soon or late, to the native or the ancestral land.

More than one of my doorstep acquaintance, in fact, seemed to have no other stock in trade than this fond desire, and to thrive with it in our sympathetic community. It is scarcely possible but the reader has met the widow of Giovanni Cascamatto, a Vesuvian lunatic who has long set fire to their home on the slopes of the volcano, and perished in the flames. She was our first Italian acquaintance in Charlesbridge, presenting herself with a little subscription-book which she sent in for inspection, with a printed certificate to the facts of her history signed with the somewhat conventionally Saxon names of William Tompkins and John Johnson. These gentlemen set forth, in terms vaguer than can be reproduced, that her object in coming to America was to get money to go back to Italy; and the whole document had so fictitious an air that it made us doubt even the nationality of the bearer; but we were put to shame by the decent joy she manifested in an Italian salutation. There was no longer a question of imposture in anybody’s mind; we gladly paid tribute to her poetic fiction, and she thanked us with a tranquil courtesy that placed the obligation where it belonged. As she turned to go with many good wishes, we pressed her to have some dinner, but she answered with a compliment insurpassably flattering, she had just dined — in another palace. The truth is, there is not a single palace on Benicia Street, and our little box of pine and paper would hardly have passed for a palace on the stage, where these things are often contrived with great simplicity; but as we had made a little Italy together, she touched it with the exquisite politeness of her race, and it became for the instant a lordly mansion, standing on the Chiaja, or the Via Nuovissima, or the Canalazzo.

I say this woman seemed glad to be greeted in Italian, but not, so far as I could see, surprised; and altogether the most amazing thing about my doorstep acquaintance of her nation is, that they are never surprised to be spoken to in their own tongue, or, if they are, never show it. A chestnut-roaster, who has sold me twice the chestnuts the same money would have bought of him in English, has not otherwise recognized the fact that Tuscan is not the dialect of Charlesbridge, and the mortifying nonchalance with which my advances have always been received has long since persuaded me that to the grinder at the gate it is not remarkable that a man should open the door of his wooden house on Benicia Street, and welcome him in his native language. After the first shock of this indifference is past, it is not to be questioned but it flatters with an illusion, which a stare of amazement would forbid, reducing the encounter to a vulgar reality at once, and I could almost believe it in those wily and amiable folk to intend the sweeter effect of their unconcern, which tacitly implies that there is no other tongue in the world but Italian, and which makes all the earth and air Italian for the time. Nothing else could have been the purpose of that image-dealer whom I saw on a summer’s day lying at the foot of one of our meeting-houses, and doing his best to make it a cathedral, and really giving a sentiment of medieval art to the noble sculptures of the facade which the carpenters had just nailed up, freshly painted and newly repaired. This poet was stretched upon his back, eating, in that convenient posture, his dinner out of an earthen pot, plucking the viand from it, whatever it was, with his thumb and fore-finger, and dropping it piecemeal into his mouth. When the passer asked him “Where are you from?” he held a morsel in air long enough to answer “Da Lucca, signore,” and then let it fall into his throat, and sank deeper into a reverie in which that crude accent even must have sounded like a gossip’s or a kinsman’s voice, but never otherwise moved muscle, nor looked to see who passed or lingered. There could have been little else in his circumstances to remind him of home, and if he was really in the sort of day-dream attributed to him, he was wise not to look about him. I have not myself been in Lucca, but I conceive that its piazza is not like our square, with a pump and horse-trough in the midst; but that it has probably a fountain and statuary, though not possibly so magnificent an elm towering above the bronze or marble groups as spreads its boughs of benison over our pump and the horse-car switchman, loitering near it to set the switch for the arriving cars, or lift the brimming buckets to the smoking nostrils of the horses, while out from the stable comes clanging and banging with a fresh team that famous African who has turned white, or, if he is off duty, one of his brethren who has not yet begun to turn. Figure, besides, an expressman watering his horse at the trough, a provision-cart backed up against the curb in front of one of the stores, various people looking from the car-office windows, and a conductor appearing at the door long enough to call out, “Ready for Boston!” — and you have a scene of such gayety as Lucca could never have witnessed in her piazza at high noon on a summer’s day. Even our Campo Santo, if the Lucchese had cared to look round the corner of the meeting-house at its moss-grown head stones, could have had little to remind him of home, though it has antiquity and a proper quaintness. But not for him, not for them of his clime and faith, is the pathos of those simple memorial slates with their winged skulls, changing upon many later stones, as if by the softening of creeds and customs, to cherub’s heads, — not for him is the pang I feel because of those who died, in our country’s youth exiles or exiles’ children, heirs of the wilderness and toil and hardship. Could they rise from their restful beds, and look on this wandering Italian with his plaster statuettes of Apollo, and Canovan dancers and deities, they would hold his wares little better than Romish saints and idolatries, and would scarcely have the sentimental interest in him felt by the modern citizen of Charlesbridge; but I think that even they must have respected that Lombard scissors-grinder who used to come to us, and put an edge to all the cutlery in the house.

He has since gone back to Milan, whence he came eighteen years ago, and whither he has returned, — as he told me one acute day in the fall, when all the winter hinted itself, and the painted leaves shuddered earthward in the grove across the way, — to enjoy a little climate before he died (per goder un po’ di dima prima di morire). Our climate was the only thing he had against us; in every other respect he was a New-Englander, even to the early stages of consumption. He told me the story of his whole life, and of how in his adventurous youth he had left Milan and sojourned some years in Naples, vainly seeking his fortune there. Afterwards he went to Greece, and set up his ancestral business of greengrocer in Athens, faring there no better, but rather worse than in Naples, because of the deeper wickedness of the Athenians, who cheated him right and left, and whose laws gave him no redress. The Neapolitans were bad enough, he said, making a wry face, but the Greeks! — and he spat the Greeks out in the grass. At last, after much misfortune in Europe, he bethought him of coming to America, and he had never regretted it, but for the climate. You spent a good deal here, — nearly all you earned, — but then a poor man was a man, and the people were honest. It was wonderful to him that they all knew how to read and write, and he viewed with inexpressible scorn those Irish who came to this country, and were so little sensible of the benefits it conferred upon them. Boston he believed the best city in America, and “Tell me,” said he, “is there such a thing anywhere else in the world as that Public Library?” He, a poor man, and almost unknown, had taken books from it to his own room, and was master to do so whenever he liked. He had thus been enabled to read Botta’s history of the United States, an enormous compliment both to the country and the work which I doubt ever to have been paid before; and he knew more about Washington than I did, and desired to know more than I could tell him of the financial question among us. So we came to national politics, and then to European affairs. “It appears that Garibaldi will not go to Rome this year,” remarks my scissors-grinder, who is very red in his sympathies. “The Emperor forbids! Well, patience! And that blessed Pope, what does he want, that Pope? He will be king find priest both, he will wear two pairs of shoes at once!” I must confess that no other of my door-step acquaintance had so clear an idea as this one of the difference between things here and at home. To the minds of most we seemed divided here as there into rich and poor, — signori, persone eivili, and povera gente, — and their thoughts about us did not go beyond a speculation as to our individual willingness or ability to pay for organ-grinding. But this Lombard was worthy of his adopted country, and I forgive him the frank expression of a doubt that one day occurred to him, when offered a glass of Italian wine. He held it daintily between him and the sun for a smiling moment, and then said, as if our wine must needs be as ungenuine as our Italian, — was perhaps some expression from the surrounding currant-bushes, harsh as that from the Northern tongues which could never give his language the true life and tonic charm,— “But I suppose this wine is not made of grapes, signor?” Yet he was a very courteous old man, elaborate in greeting and leave-taking, and with a quicker sense than usual. It was accounted delicacy in him, that, when he had bidden us a final adieu, he should never come near us again, though the date of his departure was postponed some weeks, and we heard him tinkling down the street, and stopping at the neighbors’ houses. He was a keen-faced, thoughtful-looking man; and he wore a blouse of blue cotton, from the pocket of which always dangled the leaves of some wild salad culled from our wasteful vacant lots or prodigal waysides.

Altogether different in character was that Triestine, who came one evening to be helped home at the close of a very disastrous career in Mexico. He Was a person of innumerable bows, and fluttered his bright-colored compliments about, till it appeared that never before had such amiable people been asked charity by such a worthy and generous sufferer. In Trieste he had been a journalist, and it was evident enough from his speech that he was of a good education. He was vain of his Italian accent, which was peculiarly good for his heterogeneously peopled native city; and he made a show of that marvelous facility of the Triestines in languages, by taking me down French books, Spanish books, German books, and reading from them all with the properest accent. Yet with this boyish pride and self-satisfaction there was mixed a tone of bitter and worldly cynicism, a belief in fortune as the sole providence. As nearly as I could make out, he was a Johnson man in American politics; upon the Mexican question he was independent, disdaining French and Mexicans alike. He was with the former from the first, and had continued in the service of Maximilian after their withdrawal, till the execution of that prince made Mexico no place for adventurous merit. He was now going back to his native country, an ungrateful land enough, which had ill treated him long ago, but to which he nevertheless returned in a perfect gayety of temper. What a light-hearted rogue he was, — with such merry eyes, and such a pleasant smile shaping his neatly trimmed beard and mustache! After he had supped, and he Stood with us at the door taking leave, something happened to be said of Italian songs, whereupon this blithe exile, whom the compassion of strangers was enabling to go home after many years of unprofitable toil and danger to a country that had loved him not, fell to caroling a Venetian barcarole, and went sweetly away in its cadence. I bore him company as far as the gate of another Italian-speaking signor, and was there bidden adieu with great effusion, so that I forgot till he had left me to charge him not to be in fear of the house-dog, which barked but did not bite. In calling this after him, I had the misfortune to blunder in my verb. A man of another nation — perhaps another man of his own nation — would have cared rather for what I said than how I said it; but he, as if too zealous for the honor of his beautiful language to endure a hurt to it even in that moment of grief, lifting his hat, and bowing for the last time, responded with a “Morde, non morsica, signore!” and passed in under the pines, and next day to Italy.

There is a little old Genoese lady comes to sell us pins, needles, thread, tape, and the like roba, whom I regard as leading quite an ideal life in some respects. Her traffic is limited to a certain number of families who speak more or less Italian; and her days, so far as they are concerned, must be passed in an atmosphere of sympathy and kindliness. The truth is, we Northern and New World folk cannot help but cast a little romance about whoever comes to us from Italy, whether we have actually known the beauty and charm of that land or not. Then this old lady is in herself a very gentle and lovable kind of person, with a tender mother-face, which is also the face of a child. A smile plays always upon her wrinkled visage, and her quick and restless eyes are full of friendliness. There is never much stuff in her basket, however, and it is something of a mystery how she manages to live from it. None but an Italian could, I am sure; and her experience must test the full virtue of the national genius for cheap salads and much-extenuated soup-meat. I do not know whether it is native in her, or whether it is a grace acquired from long dealing with those kindly-hearted customers of hers in Charlesbridge, but she is of a most munificent spirit, and returns every smallest benefit with some present from her basket. She makes me ashamed of things I have written about the sordidness of her race, but I shall vainly seek to atone for them by open-handedness to her. She will give favor for favor; she will not even count the money she receives; our bargaining is a contest of the courtliest civilities, ending in many an “Adieu!” “To meet again!” “Remain well!” and “Finally!” not surpassed if rivaled in any Italian street. In her ineffectual way, she brings us news of her different customers, breaking up their stout Saxon names into tinkling polysyllables which suggest them only to the practiced sense, and is perfectly patient and contented if we mistake one for another. She loves them all, but she pities them as living in a terrible climate; and doubtless in her heart she purposes one day to go back to Italy, there to die. In the mean time she is very cheerful; she, too, has had her troubles, — what troubles I do not remember, but those that come by sickness and by death, and that really seem no sorrows until they come to us, — yet she never complains. It is hard to make a living, and the house-rent alone is six dollars a month; but still one lives, and does not fare so ill either. As it does not seem to be in her to dislike any one, it must be out of a harmless guile, felt to be comforting to servant-ridden householders, that she always speaks of “those Irish,” her neighbors, with a bated breath, a shaken head, a hand lifted to the cheek, and an averted countenance.

Swarthiest of the organ-grinding tribe is he who peers up at my window out of infinitesimal black eyes, perceives me, louts low, and for form’s sake grinds me out a tune before he begins to talk. As we parley together, say it is eleven o’clock in the forenoon, and a sober tranquillity reigns upon the dust and nodding weeds of Benicia Street. At that hour the organ-grinder and I are the only persons of our sex in the whole suburban population; all other husbands and fathers having eaten their breakfasts at seven o’clock, and stood up in the early horse-cars to Boston, whence they will return, with aching backs and quivering calves, half-pendant by leathern straps from the roofs of the same luxurious conveyances, in the evening. The Italian might go and grind his organ upon the front stoop of any one of a hundred French-roof houses around, and there would be no arm within strong enough to thrust him thence; but he is a gentleman in his way, and, as he prettily explains, he never stops to play except where the window smiles on him: a frowning lattice he will pass in silence. I behold in him a disappointed man, — a man broken in health, and of a liver baked by long sojourn in a tropical clime. In large and dim outline, made all the dimmer by his dialect, he sketches me the story of his life; how in his youth he ran away from the Milanese for love of a girl in France, who, dying, left him with so little purpose in the world that, after working at his trade of plasterer for some years in Lyons, he listened to a certain gentleman going out upon government service to a French colony in South America. This gentleman wanted a man-servant, and he said to my organ-grinder, “Go with me and I make your fortune.” So he, who cared not whither he went, went, and found himself in the tropics. It was a hard life he led there; and of the wages that had seemed so great in France, he paid nearly half to his laundress alone, being forced to be neat in his master’s house. The service was not so irksome in-doors, but it was the hunting beasts in the forest all day that broke his patience at last.

“Beasts in the forest?” I ask, forgetful of the familiar sense of bestie, and figuring cougars at least by the word.

“Yes, those little beasts for the naturalists, — flies, bugs, beetles, — Heaven knows what.”

“But this brought you money?”

“It brought my master money, but me aches and pains as many as you will, and at last the fever. When that was burnt out, I made up my mind to ask for more pay, and, not getting it, to quit that service. I think the signor would have given it, — but the signora! So I left, empty as I came, and was cook on a vessel to New York.”

This was the black and white of the man’s story. I lose the color and atmosphere which his manner as well as his words bestowed upon it. He told it in a cheerful, impersonal kind of way as the romance of a poor devil which had interested him, and might possibly amuse me, leaving out no touch of character in his portrait of the fat, selfish master, — yielding enough, however, but for his grasping wife, who, with all her avarice and greed, he yet confessed to be very handsome. By the wave of a hand he housed them in a tropic residence, dim, cool, close shut, kept by servants in white linen moving with mute slippered feet over stone floors; and by another gesture he indicated the fierce thorny growths of the forest in which he hunted those vivid insects, — the luxuriant savannas, the gigantic ferns and palms, the hush and shining desolation, the presence of the invisible fever and death. There was a touch, too, of inexpressible sadness in his half-ignorant mention of the exiles at Cayenne, who were forbidden the wide ocean of escape about them by those swift gunboats keeping their coasts and swooping down upon every craft that left the shore. He himself had seen one such capture, and he made me see it, and the mortal despair of the fugitives, standing upright in their boat with the idle oars in their unconscious hands, while the corvette swept toward them.

For all his misfortunes, he was not cast down. He had that lightness of temper which seems proper to most northern Italians, whereas those from the south are usually dark-mooded, sad-faced men. Nothing surpasses for unstudied misanthropy of expression the visages of different Neapolitan harpers who have visited us; but they have some right to their dejected countenances as being of a yet half-civilized stock, and as real artists and men of genius. Nearly all wandering violinists, as well as harpers, are of their race, and they are of every age, from that of mere children to men in their prime. They are very rarely old, as many of the organ-grinders are; they are not so handsome as the Italians of the north, though they have invariably fine eyes. They arrive in twos and threes; the violinist briefly tunes his fiddle, and the harper unslings his instrument, and, with faces of profound gloom, they go through their repertory, — pieces from the great composers, airs from the opera, not unmingled with such efforts of Anglo-Saxon genius as Champagne Charley and Captain Jenks of the Horse Marines, which, like the language of Shakespeare and Milton, hold us and our English cousins in tender bonds of mutual affection. Beyond the fact that they come “dal Basilicat’,” or “dal Principat’,” one gets very little out of these Neapolitans, though I dare say they are not so surly at heart as they look. Money does not brighten them to the eye, but yet it touches them, and they are good in playing or leaving off to him that pays. Long time two of them stood between the gateway firs on a pleasant summer’s afternoon and twanged and scraped their harmonious strings, till all the idle boys of the neighborhood gathered about them, listening with a grave and still delight. It was a most serious company: the Neapolitans, with their cloudy brows, rapt in their music; and the Yankee children, with their impassive faces, warily guarding against the faintest expression of enjoyment; and when at last the minstrels played a brisk measure, and the music began to work in the blood of the boys, and one of them shuffling his reluctant feet upon the gravel, broke into a sudden and resistless dance, the spectacle became too sad for contemplation. The boy danced only from the hips down; no expression of his face gave the levity sanction, nor did any of his comrades: they beheld him with a silent fascination, but none was infected by the solemn indecorum; and when the legs and music ceased their play together, no comment was made, and the dancer turned unheated away. A chance passer asked for what he called the Gearybaldeye Hymn, but the Neapolitans apparently did not know what this was.

My doorstep acquaintance were not all of one race; now and then an alien to the common Italian tribe appeared, — an Irish soldier, on his way to Salem, and willing to show me more of his mutilation than I cared to buy the sight of for twenty-five cents; and more rarely yet an American, also formerly of the army, but with something besides his wretchedness to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such a one rang the bell, and was discovered on the threshold wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat that stood upon his forehead. There was still enough of the independent citizen in his maimed and emaciated person to inspire him with deliberation and a show of that indifference with which we Americans like to encounter each other; but his voice was rather faint when he asked if I supposed we wanted any starch to-day.

“Yes, certainly,” answered what heart there was within, taking note willfully, but I hope not wantonly, what an absurdly limp figure he was for a peddler of starch,— “certainly from you, brave fellow;” and the package being taken from his basket, the man turned to go away, so very wearily, that a cheap philanthropy protested: “For shame! ask him to sit down in-doors and drink a glass of water.”

“No,” answered the poor fellow, when this indignant voice had been obeyed, and he had been taken at a disadvantage, and as it were surprised into the confession, “my family hadn’t any breakfast this morning, and I’ve got to hurry back to them.”

“Haven’t you had any breakfast?”

“Well, I wa’n’t rightly hungry when I left the house.”

“Here, now,” popped in the virtue before named, “is an opportunity to discharge the debt we all owe to the brave fellows who gave us back our country. Make it beer.”

So it was made beer and bread and cold meat, and, after a little pressing, the honest soul consented to the refreshment. He sat down in a cool doorway and began to eat and to tell of the fight before Vicksburg. And if you have never seen a one-armed soldier making a meal, I can assure you the sight is a pathetic one, and is rendered none the cheerfuller by his memories of the fights that mutilated him. This man had no very susceptible audience, but before he was carried off the field, shot through the body, and in the arm and foot, he had sold every package of starch in his basket. I am ashamed to say this now, for I suspect that a man with one arm, who indulged himself in going about under that broiling sun of July, peddling starch, was very probably an impostor. He computed a good day’s profits of seventy-five cents, and when asked if that was not very little for the support of a sick wife and three children, he answered with a quaint effort at impressiveness, and with a trick, as I imagined, from the manner of the regimental chaplain, “You’ve done your duty, my friend, and more’n your duty. If every one did their duty like that, we should get along.” So he took leave, and shambled out into the furnace-heat, the sun beating upon his pale face, and his linen coat hugging him close, but with his basket lighter, and I hope his heart also. At any rate, this was the sentiment which cheap philanthropy offered in self-gratulation, as he passed out of sight: “There! you are quits with those maimed soldiers at last, and you have a country which you have paid for with cold victuals as they with blood.”

We have been a good deal visited by one disbanded volunteer, not to the naked eye maimed, nor apparently suffering from any lingering illness, yet who bears, as he tells me, a secret disabling wound in his side from a spent shell, and who is certainly a prey to the most acute form of shiftlessness. I do not recall with exactness the date of our acquaintance, but it was one of those pleasant August afternoons when a dinner eaten in peace fills the digester with a millennial tenderness for the race too rarely felt in the nineteenth century. At such a moment it is a more natural action to loosen than to tighten the purse-strings, and when a very neatly dressed young man presented himself at the gate, and, in a note of indescribable plaintiveness, asked if I had any little job for him to do that he might pay for a night’s lodging, I looked about the small domain with a vague longing to find some part of it in disrepair, and experienced a moment’s absurd relief when he hinted that he would be willing to accept fifty cents in pledge of future service. Yet this was not the right principle: some work, real or apparent, must be done for the money, and the veteran was told that he might weed the strawberry bed, though, as matters then stood, it was clean enough for a strawberry bed that never bore anything. The veteran was neatly dressed, as I have said: his coat, which was good, was buttoned to the throat for reasons that shall be sacred against curiosity, and he had on a perfectly clean paper collar; he was a handsome young fellow, with regular features, and a solicitously kept imperial and mustache; his hair, when he lifted his hat, appeared elegantly oiled and brushed. I did not hope from this figure that the work done would be worth the money paid, and, as nearly as I can compute, the weeds he took from that bed cost me a cent apiece, to say nothing of a cup of tea given him in grace at the end of his labors.

My acquaintance was, as the reader will be glad to learn, a native American, though it is to be regretted, for the sake of facts which his case went far to establish, that he was not a New-Englander by birth. The most that could be claimed was, that he came to Boston from Delaware when very young, and that there on that brine-washed granite he had grown as perfect a flower of helplessness and indolence, as fine a fruit of maturing civilization, as ever expanded or ripened in Latin lands. He lived, not only a protest in flesh and blood against the tendency of democracy to exclude mere beauty from our system, but a refutation of those Old World observers, who deny to our vulgar and bustling communities the refining and elevating grace of Repose. There was something very curious and original in his character, from which the sentiment of shame was absent, but which was not lacking in the fine instincts of personal cleanliness, of dress, of style. There was nothing of the rowdy in him; he was gentle as an Italian noble in his manners: what other traits they may have had in common, I do not know; perhaps an amiable habit of illusion. He was always going to bring me his discharge papers, but he never did, though he came often and had many a pleasant night’s sleep at my cost. If sometimes he did a little work, he spent great part of the time contracted to me in the kitchen, where it was understood, quite upon his own agency, that his wages included board. At other times, he called for money too late in the evening to work it out that day, and it has happened that a new second girl, deceived by his genteel appearance in the uncertain light, has shown him into the parlor, where I have found him to his and my own great amusement, as the gentleman who wanted to see me. Nothing else seemed to raise his ordinarily dejected spirits so much. We all know how pleasant it is to laugh at people behind their backs; but this veteran afforded me at a very low rate the luxury of a fellow-being whom one might laugh at to his face as much as one liked.

Yet with all his shamelessness, his pensiveness, his elegance, I felt that somehow our national triumph was not complete in him, — that there were yet more finished forms of self-abasement in the Old World, till one day I looked out of the window and saw at a little distance my veteran digging a cellar for an Irishman. I own that the spectacle gave me a shock of pleasure, and that I ran down to have a nearer view of what human eyes have seldom, if ever, beheld, — an American, pure blood, handling the pick, the shovel, and the wheelbarrow, while an Irishman directed his labors. Upon inspection, it appeared that none of the trees grew with their roots in the air, in recognition of this great reversal of the natural law; all the French-roof houses stood right side up. The phenomenon may become more common in future, unless the American race accomplishes its destiny of dying out before the more populatory foreigner, but as yet it graced the veteran with an exquisite and signal distinction. He, however, seemed to feel unpleasantly the anomaly of his case, and opened the conversation by saying that he should not work at that job to-morrow, it hurt his side; and went on to complain of the inhumanity of Americans to Americans. “Why,” said he, “they’d rather give out their jobs to a nigger than to one of their own kind. I was beatin’ carpets for a gentleman on the Avenue, and the first thing I know he give most of ’em to a nigger. I beat seven of ’em in one day, and got two dollars; and the nigger beat ’em by the piece, and he got a dollar an’ a half apiece. My luck!”

Here the Irishman glanced at his hireling, and the rueful veteran hastened to pile up another wheelbarrow with earth. If ever we come to reverse positions generally with our Irish brethren, there is no doubt but they will get more work out of us than we do from them at present.

It was shortly after this that the veteran offered to do second girl’s work in my house if I would take him. The place was not vacant; and as the summer was now drawing to a close, and I feared to be left with him on my hands for the winter, it seemed well to speak to him upon the subject of economy. The next time he called, I had not about me the exact sum for a night’s lodging, — fifty cents, namely — and asked him if he thought a dollar would do He smiled sadly, as if he did not like jesting upon such a very serious subject, but said he allowed to work it out, and took it.

“Now, I hope you won’t think I am interfering with your affairs,” said his benefactor, “but I really think you are a very poor financier. According to your own account, you have been going on from year to year for a long time, trusting to luck for a night’s lodging. Sometimes I suppose you have to sleep out-of-doors.”

“No, never!” answered the veteran, with something like scorn. “I never sleep out-doors. I wouldn’t do it.”

“Well, at any rate, some one has to pay for your lodging. Don’t you think you’d come cheaper to your friends, if, instead of going to a hotel every night, you’d take a room somewhere, and pay for it by the month?”

“I’ve thought of that. If I could get a good bed, I’d try it awhile anyhow. You see the hotels have raised. I used to get a lodgin’ and a nice breakfast for a half a dollar, but now it is as much as you can do to get a lodgin’ for the money, and it’s just as dear in the Port as it is in the city. I’ve tried hotels pretty much everywhere, and one’s about as bad as another.”

If he had been a travelled Englishman writing a book, he could not have spoken of hotels with greater disdain.

“You see, the trouble with me is, I ain’t got any relations around here. Now,” he added, with the life and eagerness of an inspiration, “if I had a mother and sister livin’ down at the Port, say, I wouldn’t go hunting about for these mean little jobs everywheres. I’d just lay round home, and wait till something come up big. What I want is a home.”

At the instigation of a malignant spirit I asked the homeless orphan, “Why don’t you get married, then?”

He gave me another smile, sadder, fainter, sweeter than before, and said: “When would you like to see me again, so I could work out this dollar?”

A sudden and unreasonable disgust for the character which had given me so much entertainment succeeded to my past delight. I felt, moreover, that I had bought the right to use some frankness with the veteran, and I said to him: “Do you know now, I shouldn’t care if I never saw you again?”

I can only conjecture that he took the confidence in good part, for he did not appear again after that.

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

Walking for walking’s sake I do not like. The diversion appears to me one of the most factitious of modern enjoyments; and I cannot help looking upon those who pace their five miles in the teeth of a north wind, and profess to come home all the livelier and better for it, as guilty of a venial hypocrisy. It is in nature that after such an exercise the bones should ache and the flesh tremble; and I suspect that these harmless pretenders are all the while paying a secret penalty for their bravado. With a pleasant end in view, or with cheerful companionship, walking is far from being the worst thing in life; though doubtless a truly candid person must confess that he would rather ride under the same circumstances. Yet it is certain that some sort of recreation is necessary after a day spent within doors; and one is really obliged nowadays to take a little walk instead of medicine; for one’s doctor is sure to have a mania on the subject, and there is no more getting pills or powders out of him for a slight indigestion than if they had all been shot away at the rebels during the war. For this reason I sometimes go upon a pedestrian tour, which is of no great extent in itself, and which I moreover modify by keeping always within sound of the horse-car bells, or easy reach of some steam-car station.

I fear that I should find these rambles dull, but that their utter lack of interest amuses me. I will be honest with the reader, though, and any Master Pliable is free to forsake me at this point; for I cannot promise to be really livelier than my walk. There is a Slough of Despond in full view, and not a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose so to call the high lands about Waltham, which we shall behold dark blue against the western sky presently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, the whole suburb of Charlesbridge stretches about me, — a vast space upon which I can embroider any fancy I like as I saunter along. I have no associations with it, or memories of it, and, at some seasons, I might wander for days in the most frequented parts of it, and meet hardly any one I know. It is not, however, to these parts that I commonly turn, but northward, up a street upon which a flight of French-roof houses suddenly settled a year or two since, with families in them, and many outward signs of permanence, though their precipitate arrival might cast some doubt upon this. I have to admire their uniform neatness and prettiness, and I look at their dormer-windows with the envy of one to whose weak sentimentality dormer-windows long appeared the supreme architectural happiness. But, for all my admiration of the houses, I find a variety that is pleasanter in the landscape, when I reach, beyond them, a little bridge which appears to span a small stream. It unites banks lined with a growth of trees and briers nodding their heads above the neighboring levels, and suggesting a quiet water-course, though in fact it is the Fitchburg Railroad that purls between them, with rippling freight and passenger trains and ever-gurgling locomotives. The banks take the earliest green of spring upon their southward slope, and on a Sunday morning of May, when the bells are lamenting the Sabbaths of the past, I find their sunny tranquillity sufficient to give me a slight heart-ache for I know not what. If I descend them and follow the railroad westward half a mile, I come to vast brick-yards, which are not in themselves exciting to the imagination, and which yet, from an irresistible association of ideas, remind me of Egypt, and are forever newly forsaken of those who made bricks without straw; so that I have no trouble in erecting temples and dynastic tombs out of the kilns; while the mills for grinding the clay serve me very well for those sad-voiced sakias or wheel-pumps which the Howadji Curtis heard wailing at their work of drawing water from the Nile. A little farther on I come to the boarding-house built at the railroad side for the French Canadians who have by this time succeeded the Hebrews in the toil of the brick-yards, and who, as they loiter in windy-voiced, good-humored groups about the doors of their lodgings, insist upon bringing before me the town of St. Michel at the mouth of the great Mont Cenis tunnel, where so many peasant folk like them are always amiably quarreling before the cabarets when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere, there must be a gendarme with a cocked hat and a sword on, standing with folded arms to represent the Empire and Peace among that rural population; if I looked in-doors, I am sure I should see the neatest of landladies and landladies’ daughters and nieces in high black silk caps, bearing hither and thither smoking bowls of bouillon and caf�-au-lait. Well, it takes as little to make one happy as miserable, thank Heaven! and I derive a cheerfulness from this scene which quite atones to me for the fleeting desolation suffered from the sunny verdure on the railroad bank. With repaired spirits I take my way up through the brick-yards towards the Irish settlement on the north, passing under the long sheds that shelter the kilns. The ashes lie cold about the mouths of most, and the bricks are burnt to the proper complexion; in others these are freshly arranged over flues in which the fire has not been kindled; but in whatever state I see them, I am reminded of brick-kilns of boyhood. They were then such palaces of enchantment as any architect should now vainly attempt to rival with bricks upon the most desirable corner lot of the Back Bay, and were the homes of men truly to be envied: men privileged to stay up all night; to sleep, as it were, out of doors; to hear the wild geese as they flew over in the darkness; to be waking in time to shoot the early ducks that visited the neighboring ponds; to roast corn upon the ends of sticks; to tell and to listen to stories that never ended, save in some sudden impulse to rise and dance a happy hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-fires. If by day they were seen to have the redness of eyes of men that looked upon the whiskey when it was yellow and gave its color in the flask; if now and then the fragments of a broken bottle strewed the scene of their vigils, and a head broken to match appeared among those good comrades, the boyish imagination was not shocked by these things, but accepted them merely as the symbols of a free virile life. Some such life no doubt is still to be found in the Dublin to which I am come by the time my repertory of associations with brick-kilns is exhausted, but, oddly enough, I no longer care to encounter it.

It is perhaps in a pious recognition of our mortality that Dublin is built around the Irish grave-yard. Most of its windows look out upon the sepulchral monuments and the pretty constant arrival of the funeral trains with their long lines of carriages bringing to the celebration of the sad ultimate rites those gay companies of Irish mourners. I suppose that the spectacle of such obsequies is not at all depressing to the inhabitants of Dublin; but that, on the contrary, it must beget in them a feeling which, if not resignation to death, is, at least, a sort of sub-acute cheerfulness in his presence. None but a Dubliner, however, would have been greatly animated by a scene which I witnessed during a stroll through this cemetery one afternoon of early spring. The fact that a marble slab or shaft more or less sculptured, and inscribed with words more or less helpless, is the utmost that we can give to one whom once we could caress with every tenderness of speech and touch, and that, after all, the memorial we raise is rather to our own grief, and is a decency, a mere conventionality, — this is a dreadful fact on which the heart breaks itself with such a pang, that it always seems a desolation never recognized, an anguish never felt before. Whilst I stood revolving this thought in my mind, and reading the Irish names upon the stones and the black head-boards, — the latter adorned with pictures of angels, once gilt, but now weather-worn down to the yellow paint, — a wail of intolerable pathos filled the air: “O my darling, O my darling! O — O — O!” with sobs and groans and sighs; and, looking about, I saw two women, one standing upright beside another that had cast herself upon a grave, and lay clasping it with her comfortless arms, uttering these cries. The grave was a year old at least, but the grief seemed of yesterday or of that morning. At times the friend that stood beside the prostrate woman stooped and spoke a soothing word to her, while she wailed out her woe; and in the midst some little ribald Irish boys came scuffling and quarreling up the pathway, singing snatches of an obscene song; and when both the wailing and the singing had died away, an old woman, decently clad, and with her many-wrinkled face softened by the old-fashioned frill running round the inside of her cap, dropped down upon her knees beside a very old grave, and clasped her hands in a silent prayer above it.

If I had beheld all this in some village campo santo in Italy, I should have been much more vividly impressed by it, as an aesthetical observer; whereas I was now merely touched as a human being, and had little desire to turn the scene to literary account. I could not help feeling that it wanted the atmosphere of sentimental association, the whole background was a blank or worse than a blank. Yet I have not been able to hide from myself so much as I would like certain points of resemblance between our Irish and the poorer classes of Italians. The likeness is one of the first things that strikes an American in Italy, and I am always reminded of it in Dublin. So much of the local life appears upon the street; there is so much gossip from house to house, and the talk is always such a resonant clamoring; the women, bareheaded, or with a shawl folded over the head and caught beneath the chin with the hand, have such a contented down-at-heel aspect, shuffling from door to door, or lounging, arms akimbo, among the cats and poultry at their own thresholds, that one beholding it all might well fancy himself upon some Italian calle or vicolo. Of course the illusion does not hold good on a Sunday, when the Dubliners are coming home from church in their best, — their extraordinary best bonnets and their prodigious silk hats. It does not hold good in any way or at any time, except upon the surface, for there is beneath all this resemblance the difference that must exist between a race immemorially civilized and one which has lately emerged from barbarism “after six centuries of oppression.” You are likely to find a polite pagan under the mask of the modern Italian you feel pretty sure that any of his race would with a little washing and skillful manipulation, restore, like a neglected painting, into something genuinely graceful and pleasing; but if one of these Yankeefied Celts were scraped, it is but too possible that you might find a kern, a Whiteboy, or a Pikeman. The chance of discovering a scholar or a saint of the period when Ireland was the centre of learning, and the favorite seat of the Church, is scarcely one in three.

Among the houses fronting on the main street of Dublin, every other one — I speak in all moderation — is a grocery, if I may judge by a tin case of corn-balls, a jar of candy, and a card of shirt-buttons, with an under layer of primers and ballads, in the windows. You descend from the street by several steps into these haunts, which are contrived to secure the greatest possible dampness and darkness; and if you have made an errand inside, you doubtless find a lady before the counter in the act of putting down a guilty-looking tumbler with one hand, while she neatly wipes her mouth on the back of the other. She has that effect, observable in all tippling women of low degree, of having no upper garment on but a shawl, which hangs about her in statuesque folds and lines. She slinks out directly, but the lady behind the counter gives you good evening with

 “The affectation of a bright-eyed ease,”

intended to deceive if you chance to be a State constable in disguise, and to propitiate if you are a veritable customer: “Who was that woman, lamenting so, over in the grave-yard?” “O, I don’t know, sir,” answered the lady, making change for the price of a ballad. “Some Irish folks. They ginerally cries that way.”

In yet earlier spring walks through Dublin, I found a depth of mud appalling even to one who had lived three years in Charlesbridge. The streets were passable only to pedestrians skilled in shifting themselves along the sides of fences and alert to take advantage of every projecting doorstep. There were no dry places, except in front of the groceries, where the ground was beaten hard by the broad feet of loafing geese and the coming and going of admirably small children making purchases there. The number of the little ones was quite as remarkable as their size, and ought to have been even more interesting, if, as sometimes appears probable, such increase shall — together with the well-known ambition of Dubliners to rule the land — one day make an end of us poor Yankees as a dominant plurality.

The town was somewhat tainted with our architectural respectability, unless the newness of some of the buildings gave illusion of this; and, though the streets of Dublin were not at all cared for, and though every house on the main thoroughfare stood upon the brink of a slough, without yard, or any attempt at garden or shrubbery, there were many cottages in the less aristocratic quarters inclosed in palings, and embowered in the usual suburban pear-trees and currant-bushes. These, indeed, were dwellings of an elder sort, and had clearly been inherited from a population now as extinct in that region as the Pequots, and they were not always carefully cherished. On the border of the hamlet is to be seen an old farm-house of the poorer sort, built about the beginning of this century, and now thickly peopled by Dubliners. Its gate is thrown down, and the great wild-grown lilac hedge, no longer protected by a fence, shows skirts bedabbled by the familiarity of lawless poultry, as little like the steady-habited poultry of other times, as the people of the house are like the former inmates, long since dead or gone West. I offer the poor place a sentiment of regret as I pass, thinking of its better days. I think of its decorous, hard-working, cleanly, school-going, church-attending life, which was full of the pleasure of duty done, and was not without its own quaint beauty and grace. What long Sabbaths were kept in that old house, what scanty holidays! Yet from this and such as this came the dominion of the whole wild continent, the freedom of a race, the greatness of the greatest people. It may be that I regretted a little too exultantly, and that out of this particular house came only peddling of innumerable clocks and multitudinous tin-ware. But as yet, it is pretty certain that the general character of the population has not gained by the change. What is in the future, let the prophets say; any one can see that something not quite agreeable is in the present; something that takes the wrong side, as by instinct, in politics; something that mainly helps to prop up tottering priestcraft among us; something that one thinks of with dismay as destined to control so largely the civil and religious interests of the country. This, however, is only the aggregate aspect. Mrs. Clannahan’s kitchen, as it may be seen by the desperate philosopher when he goes to engage her for the spring house-cleaning, is a strong argument against his fears. If Mrs. Clannahan, lately of an Irish cabin, can show a kitchen so capably appointed and so neatly kept as that, the country may yet be an inch or two from the brink of ruin, and the race which we trust as little as we love may turn out no more spendthrift than most heirs. It is encouraging, moreover, when any people can flatter themselves upon a superior prosperity and virtue, and we may take heart from the fact that the French Canadians, many of whom have lodgings in Dublin, are not well seen by the higher classes of the citizens there. Mrs. Clannahan, whose house stands over against the main gate of the grave-yard, and who may, therefore, be considered as moving in the best Dublin society, hints, that though good Catholics, the French are not thought perfectly honest,— “things have been missed” since they came to blight with their crimes and vices the once happy seat of integrity. It is amusing to find Dublin fearful of the encroachment of the French, as we, in our turn, dread the advance of the Irish. We must make a jest of our own alarms, and even smile — since we cannot help ourselves — at the spiritual desolation occasioned by the settlement of an Irish family in one of our suburban neighborhoods. The householders view with fear and jealousy the erection of any dwelling of less than a stated cost, as portending a possible advent of Irish; and when the calamitous race actually appears, a mortal pang strikes to the bottom of every pocket. Values tremble throughout that neighborhood, to which the new-comers communicate a species of moral dry-rot. None but the Irish will build near the Irish; and the infection of fear spreads to the elder Yankee homes about, and the owners prepare to abandon them, — not always, however, let us hope, without turning, at the expense of the invaders, a Parthian penny in their flight. In my walk from Dublin to North Charlesbridge, I saw more than one token of the encroachment of the Celtic army, which had here and there invested a Yankee house with besieging shanties on every side, and thus given to its essential and otherwise quite hopeless ugliness a touch of the poetry that attends failing fortunes, and hallows decayed gentility of however poor a sort originally. The fortunes of such a house are, of course, not to be retrieved. Where the Celt sets his foot, there the Yankee (and it is perhaps wholesome if not agreeable to know that the Irish citizen whom we do not always honor as our equal in civilization loves to speak of us scornfully as Yankees) rarely, if ever, returns. The place remains to the intruder and his heirs forever. We gracefully retire before him even in politics, as the metropolis — if it is the metropolis — can witness; and we wait with an anxious curiosity the encounter of the Irish and the Chinese, now rapidly approaching each other from opposite shores of the continent. Shall we be crushed in the collision of these superior races? Every intelligence-office will soon be ringing with the cries of combat, and all our kitchens strewn with pig-tails and bark chignons. As yet we have gay hopes of our Buddhistic brethren; but how will it be when they begin to quarter the Dragon upon the Stars and Stripes, and buy up all the best sites for temples, and burn their joss-sticks, as it were, under our very noses? Our grasp upon the great problem grows a little lax, perhaps? Is it true that, when we look so anxiously for help from others, the virtue has gone out of ourselves? I should hope not.

As I leave Dublin, the houses grow larger and handsomer; and as I draw near the Avenue, the Mansard-roofs look down upon me with their dormer-windows, and welcome me back to the American community. There are fences about all the houses, inclosing ampler and ampler dooryards; the children, which had swarmed in the thriftless and unenlightened purlieus of Dublin, diminish in number and finally disappear; the chickens have vanished; and I hear — I hear the pensive music of the horse-car bells, which in some alien land, I am sure, would be as pathetic to me as the Ranz des Vaches to the Swiss or the bagpipes to the Highlander: in the desert, where the traveller seems to hear the familiar bells of his far-off church, this tinkle would haunt the absolute silence, and recall the exile’s fancy to Charlesbridge; and perhaps in the mocking mirage he would behold an airy horse-car track, and a phantasmagoric horse-car moving slowly along the edge of the horizon, with spectral passengers closely packed inside and overflowing either platform.

But before I reach the Avenue, Dublin calls to me yet again, in the figure of an old, old man, wearing the clothes of other times, and a sort of ancestral round hat. In the act of striking a match he asks me the time of day, and, applying the fire to his pipe, he returns me his thanks in a volume of words and smoke. What a wrinkled and unshorn old man! Can age and neglect do so much for any of us? This ruinous person was associated with a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful; for though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with a very lugubrious creak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was to learn from the old man that there was, and had been, in his person, for thirteen years, such a thing in the world as a peddler of buttermilk, and that these cans were now filled with that pleasant drink. They did not invite me to prove their contents, being cans that apparently passed their vacant moments in stables and even manure-heaps, and that looked somehow emulous of that old man’s stubble and wrinkles. I bought nothing, but I left the old peddler well content, seated upon a thill of his cart, smoking tranquilly, and filling the keen spring evening air with fumes which it dispersed abroad, and made to itself a pleasant incense of.

I left him a whole epoch behind, as I entered the Avenue and lounged homeward along the stately street. Above the station it is far more picturesque than it is below, and the magnificent elms that shadow it might well have looked, in their saplinghood, upon the British straggling down the country road from the Concord fight; and there are some ancient houses yet standing that must have been filled with exultation at the same spectacle. Poor old revolutionaries! they would never have believed that their descendants would come to love the English as we do.

The season has advanced rapidly during my progress from Dublin to the Avenue; and by the time I reach the famous old tavern, not far from the station, it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the yellow sunlight falls upon a body of good comrades who are grooming a marvelous number of piebald steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these beasts — which always look so much more like works of art than of nature — I know that there is to be a circus somewhere very soon; and the gay bills pasted all over the stable-front tell me that there are to be two performances at the Port on the morrow. The grooms talk nothing and joke nothing but horse at their labor; and their life seems such a low, ignorant, happy life, that the secret nomad lurking in every respectable and stationary personality stirs within me and struggles to strike hands of fellowship with them. They lead a sort of pastoral existence in our age of railroads; they wander over the continent with their great caravan, and everywhere pursue the summer from South to North and from North to South again; in the mild forenoons they groom their herds, and in the afternoons they doze under their wagons, indifferent to the tumult of the crowd within and without the mighty canvas near them, — doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet-smelling grass; and in the starry midnight rise and strike their tents, and set forth again over the still country roads, to take the next village on the morrow with the blaze and splendor of their “Grand Entree.” The triumphal chariot in which the musicians are borne at the head of the procession is composed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal gilt swans, set tail to tail, with lifted wings and curving necks; but the chariot, as I behold it beside the stable, is mysteriously draped in white canvas, through which its gilding glitters only here and there. And does it move thus shrouded in the company’s wanderings from place to place, and is the precious spottiness of the piebalds then hidden under envious drapery? O happy grooms, — not clean as to shirts, nor especially neat in your conversation, but displaying a Wealth of art in India-ink upon your manly chests and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking in every movement your freedom from all conventional gyves and shackles, “seid umschlungen!” — in spirit; for the rest, you are rather too damp, and seem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impartially to your own trousers and the horses’ legs to receive an actual embrace from a dilettante vagabond.

The old tavern is old only comparatively; but in our new and changeful life it is already quaint. It is very long, and low-studded in either story, with a row of windows in the roof, and a great porch, furnished with benches, running the whole length of the ground-floor. Perhaps because they take the dust of the street too freely, or because the guests find it more social and comfortable to gather in-doors in the wide, low-ceiled office, the benches are not worn, nor particularly whittled. The room has the desolate air characteristic of offices which have once been bar-rooms; but no doubt, on a winter’s night, there is talk worth listening to there, of flocks, and herds and horse-trades, from the drovers and cattle-market men who patronize the tavern; and the artistic temperament, at least, could feel no regret if that sepulchrally penitent bar-room then developed a secret capacity for the wickedness that once boldly glittered behind the counter in rows of decanters.

The house was formerly renowned for its suppers, of which all that was learned or gifted in the old college town of Charlesbridge used to partake; and I have heard lips which breathe the loftiest song and the sweetest humor — let alone being “dewy with the Greek of Plato” — smacked regretfully over the memory of those suppers’ roast and broiled. No such suppers, they say, are cooked in the world any more; and I am somehow made to feel that their passing away is connected with the decay of good literature.

I hope it may be very long before the predestined French-roof villa occupies the tavern’s site, and turns into lawns and gardens its wide-spreading cattle-pens, and removes the great barn that now shows its broad, low gable to the street. This is yet older and quainter-looking than the tavern itself; it is mighty capacious, and gives a still profounder impression of vastness with its shed, of which the roof slopes southward down almost to a man’s height from the ground, and shelters a row of mangers, running back half the length of the stable, and serving in former times for the baiting of such beasts as could not be provided for within. But the halcyon days of the cattle-market are past (though you may still see the white horns tossing above the fences of the pens, when a newly arrived herd lands from the train to be driven afoot to Brighton), and the place looks now so empty and forsaken, spite of the circus baggage-wagons, that it were hard to believe these mangers could ever have been in request, but for the fact that they are all gnawed, down to the quick as it were, by generations of horses — vanished forever on the deserted highways of the past — impatient for their oats or hungering for more.

The day must come, of course, when the mangers will all be taken from the stable-shed, and exposed for sale at that wonderful second-hand shop which stands over against the tavern. I am no more surprised than one in a dream, to find it a week-day afternoon by the time I have crossed thither from the circus-men grooming their piebalds. It is an enchanted place to me, and I am a frequent and unprofitable customer there, buying only just enough to make good my footing with the custodian of its marvels, who is, of course, too true an American to show any desire to sell. Without, on either side of the doorway, I am pretty sure to find, among other articles of furniture, a mahogany and hair-cloth sofa, a family portrait, a landscape painting, a bath-tub, and a flower-stand, with now and then the variety of a boat and a dog-house; while under an adjoining shed is heaped a mass of miscellaneous movables, of a heavier sort, and fearlessly left there night and day, being on all accounts undesirable to steal. The door of the shop rings a bell in opening, and ushers the customer into a room which Chaos herself might have planned in one of her happier moments. Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures, mirrors, rocking-chairs, and blue overalls hang from the ceiling, and devious pathways wind amidst piles of ready-made clothing, show-cases filled with every sort of knick-knack and half hidden under heaps of hats and boots and shoes, bookcases, secretaries, chests of drawers, mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to the stairway of a loft similarly appointed, and to a back room overflowing with glassware and crockery. These things are not all second-hand, but they are all old and equally pathetic. The melancholy of ruinous auction sales, of changing tastes or changing fashions, clings to them, whether they are things that have never had a home and have been on sale ever since they were made, or things that have been associated with every phase of human life.

Among other objects, certain large glass vases, ornamented by the polite art of potichomanie, have long appealed to my fancy, wherein they capriciously allied themselves to the history of aging single women in lonely New England village houses, — pathetic sisters lingering upon the neutral ground between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet unrisen prospects of consumption. The work implies an imperfect yet real love of beauty, the leisure for it a degree of pecuniary ease: the thoughts of the sisters rise above the pickling and preserving that occupied their heartier and happier mother; they are in fact in that aesthetic, social, and intellectual mean, in which single women are thought soonest to wither and decline. With a little more power, and in our later era, they would be writing stories full of ambitious, unintelligible, self-devoted and sudden collapsing young girls and amazing doctors; but as they are, and in their time, they must do what they can. A sentimentalist may discern on these vases not only the gay designs with which they ornamented them, but their own dim faces looking wan from the windows of some huge old homestead, a world too wide for the shrunken family. All April long the door-yard trees crouch and shudder in the sour east, all June they rain canker-worms upon the roof, and then in autumn choke the eaves with a fall of tattered and hectic foliage. From the window the fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural liveliness of the summer streets through which the summer boarders are driving, or upon the death-white drifts of the intolerable winter. Their father, the captain, is dead; he died with the Calcutta trade, having survived their mother, and left them a hopeless competency and yonder bamboo chairs; their only brother is in California; one, though she loved, had never a lover; her sister’s betrothed married West, whither he went to make a home for her, — and ah! is it vases for the desolate parlor mantel they decorate, or funeral urns? And when in time, they being gone, the Californian brother sends to sell out at auction the old place with the household and kitchen furniture, is it withered rose-leaves or ashes that the purchaser finds in these jars?

They are empty now; and I wonder how came they here? How came the show-case of Dr. Merrifield, Surgeon-Chiropodist here? How came here yon Italian painting? — a poor, silly, little affected Madonna, simpering at me from her dingy gilt frame till I buy her, a great bargain, at a dollar. From what country church or family oratory, in what revolution, or stress of private fortunes, — then from what various cabinets of antiquities, in what dear Vicenza, or Ferrara, or Mantua, earnest thou, O Madonna? Whose likeness are you, poor girl, with your everyday prettiness of brows and chin, and your Raphaelesque crick in the neck? I think I know a part of your story. You were once the property of that ruined advocate, whose sensibilities would sometimes consent that a valet de place of uncommon delicacy should bring to his ancestral palace some singularly meritorious foreigner desirous of purchasing from his rare collection, — a collection of rubbish scarcely to be equaled elsewhere in Italy. You hung in that family-room, reached after passage through stately vestibules and grand stairways; and O, I would be cheated to the bone, if only I might look out again from some such windows as were there, upon some such damp, mouldy, broken-statued, ruinous, enchanted garden as lay below! In that room sat the advocate’s mother and hunchback sister, with their smoky scaldini and their snuffy priest; and there the wife of the foreigner, self-elected the taste of his party, inflicted the pang courted by the advocate, and asked if you were for sale. And then the ruined advocate clasped his hands, rubbed them, set his head heart-brokenly on one side, took you down, heaved a sigh, shrugged his shoulders, and sold you — you! a family heirloom! Well, at least you are old, and you represent to me acres of dim, religious canvas in that beloved land; and here is the dollar now asked for you: I could not have bought you for so little at home.

The Madonna is neighbored by several paintings, if the kind called Grecian for a reason never revealed by the inventor of an art as old as potichomanie itself. It was an art by which ordinary lithographs were given a ghastly transparency, and a tone as disagreeable as chromos; and I doubt if it could have been known to the Greeks in their best age. But I remember very well when it passed over whole neighborhoods in some parts of this country, wasting the time of many young women, and disfiguring parlor walls with the fruit of their accomplishment. It was always taught by Professors, a class of learned young men who acquired their title by abandoning the plough and anvil, and, in a suit of ready-made clothing, travelling about the country with portfolios under their arms. It was an experience to make loafers for life of them: and I fancy the girls who learnt their art never afterwards made so good butter and cheese.

 “Non-ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.”

Besides the Grecian paintings there are some mezzotints; full length pictures of presidents and statesmen, chiefly General Jackson, Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster, which have hung their day in the offices or parlors of country politicians. They are all statesmanlike and presidential in attitude; and I know that if the mighty Webster’s lips had language, he would take his hand out of his waistcoat front, and say to his fellow mezzotints: “Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation, bringing your household furniture and miscellaneous trumpery of all kinds with you.”

Some old-fashioned entry lanterns divide my interest with certain old willow chairs of an hour-glass pattern, which never stood upright, probably, and have now all a confirmed droop to one side, as from having been fallen heavily asleep in, upon breezy porches, of hot summer afternoons. In the windows are small vases of alabaster, fly-specked Parian and plaster figures, and dolls with stiff wooden limbs and papier-mach� heads, a sort of dolls no longer to be bought in these days of modish, blue-eyed blondes of biscuit and sturdy india-rubber brunettes. The show-case is full of an incredible variety, as photograph albums, fishing-hooks, socks, suspenders, steel pens, cutlery of all sorts, and curious old colored prints of Adelaide, and Kate, and Ellen. A rocking-horse is stabled near amid pendent lengths of second-hand carpeting, hat-racks, and mirrors; and standing cheek-by-jowl with painted washstands and bureaus are some plaster statues, aptly colored and varnished to represent bronze.

There is nothing here but has a marked character of its own, some distinct yet intangible trait acquired from former circumstances; and doubtless all these things have that lurking likeness to former owners which clothes and furniture are apt to take on from long association, and which we should instantly recognize could they be confronted with their late proprietors. It seems, in very imaginative moments, as if the strange assemblage of incongruities must have a consciousness of these latent resemblances, which the individual pieces betray when their present keeper turns the key upon them, and abandons them to themselves at night; and I have sometimes fancied such an effect in the late twilight, when I have wandered into their resting-place, and have beheld them in the unnatural glare of a kerosene lamp burning before a brightly polished reflector, and casting every manner of grotesque shadow upon the floor and walls. But this may have been an illusion; at any rate I am satisfied that the bargain-driving capacity of the storekeeper is not in the least affected by a weird quality in his wares; though they have not failed to impart to him something of their own desultory character. He sometimes leaves a neighbor in charge when he goes to meals, and then, if I enter, I am watchfully followed about from corner to corner, and from room to room, lest I pocket a mattress or slip a book-case under my coat. The storekeeper himself never watches me; perhaps he knows that it is a purely professional interest I take in the collection; that I am in the trade and have a secondhand shop of my own, full of poetical rubbish, and every sort of literary odds and ends, picked up at random, and all cast higgledy-piggledy into the same chaotic receptacle. His customers are as little like ordinary shoppers as he is like common tradesmen. They are in part the Canadians who work in the brickyards, and it is surprising to find how much business can be transacted, and how many sharp bargains struck without the help of a common language. I am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency; he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do not; and they equally wary and equally silent, unswayed by the glib allurements of a salesman, judge of price and quality for themselves, make their solitary offer, and stand or fall by it.

I am seldom able to conclude a pedestrian tour without a glance at the wonderful interior of this cheap store, and I know all its contents familiarly. I recognize wares that have now been on sale there for years; I miss at first glance such accustomed objects as have been parted with between my frequent visits, and hail with pleasure the additions to that extraordinary variety. I can hardly, I suppose, expect the reader to sympathize with the joy I felt the other night, in discovering among the latter an adventurous and universally applicable sign-board advertising This House and Lot for Sale, and, intertwined with the cast-off suspenders which long garlanded a coffee-mill pendent from the roof, a newly added second-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here and there, however, I hope a finer soul will relish, as I do, the poetry of thus buying and offering for sale the very most recondite, as well as the commonest articles of commerce, in the faith that one day the predestined purchaser will appear and carry off the article appointed him from the beginning of time. This faith is all the more touching, because the collector cannot expect to live until the whole stock is disposed of, and because, in the order of nature, much must at last fall to rein unbought, unless the reporter’s Devouring Element appears and gives a sudden tragical turn to the poem.

It is the whistle of a train drawing up at the neighboring station that calls me away from the second-hand store; for I never find myself able to resist the hackneyed prodigy of such an arrival. It cannot cease to be impressive. I stand beside the track while the familiar monster writhes up to the station and disgorges its passengers, — suburbanly packaged, and bundled, and bagged, and even when empty-handed somehow proclaiming the jaded character of men that hurry their work all day to catch the evening train out, and their dreams all night to catch the morning train in, — and then I climb the station-stairs, and “hang with grooms and porters on the bridge,” that I may not lose my ever-repeated sensation of having the train pass under my feet, and of seeing it rush away westward to the pretty blue hills beyond, — hills not too big for a man born in a plain-country to love. Twisting and trembling along the track, it dwindles rapidly in the perspective, and is presently out of sight. It has left the city and the suburbs behind, and has sought the woods and meadows; but Nature never in the least accepts it, and rarely makes its path a part of her landscape’s loveliness. The train passes alien through all her moods and aspects; the wounds made in her face by the road’s sharp cuts and excavations are slowest of all wounds to heal, and the iron rails remain to the last as shackles upon her. Yet when the rails are removed, as has happened with a non-paying track in Charlesbridge, the road inspires a real tenderness in her. Then she bids it take or the grace that belongs to all ruin; the grass creeps stealthily over the scarified sides of the embankments; the golden-rod, and the purple-topped iron-weed, and the lady’s-slipper, spring up in the hollows on either side, and — I am still thinking of that deserted railroad which runs through Charlesbridge — hide with their leafage the empty tomato-cans and broken bottles and old boots on the ash-heaps dumped there; Nature sets her velvety willows a waving near, and lower than their airy tops plans a vista of trees arching above the track, which is as wild and pretty and illusive a vista as the sunset ever cared to look through and gild a board fence beyond.

Most of our people come from Boston on the horse-cars, and it is only the dwellers on the Avenue and the neighboring streets whom hurrying homeward I follow away from the steam-car station. The Avenue is our handsomest street; and if it were in the cosmopolitan citizen of Charlesbridge to feel any local interest, I should be proud of it. As matters are, I perceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a pardonable satisfaction, that it is not only handsome, but probably the very dullest street in the world. It is magnificently long and broad, and is flanked nearly the whole way from the station to the colleges by pine palaces rising from spacious lawns, or from the green of trees or the brightness of gardens. The splendor is all very new, but newness is not a fault that much affects architectural beauty, while it is the only one that time is certain to repair: and I find an honest and unceasing pleasure in the graceful lines of those palaces, which is not surpassed even by my appreciation of the vast quiet and monotony of the street itself. Commonly, when I emerge upon it from the grassy-bordered, succory-blossomed walks of Benicia Street, I behold, looking northward, a monumental horse-car standing — it appears for ages, if I wish to take it for Boston — at the head of Pliny Street; and looking southward I see that other emblem of suburban life, an express-wagon, fading rapidly in the distance. Haply the top of a buggy nods round the bend under the elms near the station; and, if fortune is so lavish, a lady appears from a side street, and, while tarrying for the car, thrusts the point of her sun-umbrella into the sandy sidewalk. This is the mid-afternoon effect of the Avenue; but later in the day, and well into the dusk, it remembers its former gayety as a trotting-course, — with here and there a spider-wagon, a twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. On market-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks of bleating sheep, and a pastoral tone is thus given to its tranquillity; anon a herd of beef-cattle appears under the elms; or a drove of pigs, many pausing, inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they were the heirs of prosperity instead of doom, is slowly urged on toward the shambles. In the spring or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enlivened by the progress of a brace or so of students who, in training for one of the University Courses of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestly along the sidewalk, fists up, elbows down, mouths shut, and a sense of immense responsibility visible in their faces.

The summer is waning with the day as I turn from the Avenue into Benicia Street. This is the hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the Tuscan poet says, and, as one may add, the frying grasshopper yields to the shrilly cricket in noisiness. The embrowning air rings with the sad music made by these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the gardens round, and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the spirits not to be accounted for upon the theory that the street is duller than the Avenue, for it really is not so.

Quick now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene! — without their light, the cry of those crickets, dominated for an instant, but not stilled, by the bellowing of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a distant dog, were too much. If it were the last autumn that ever was to be, it could not be heralded with notes of dismaller effect. This is in fact the hour of supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but a newly-accepted lover can be happy at twilight. In the city, even, it is oppressive; in the country it is desolate; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it is ever lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet to stir the languid foliage of the sidewalk maples; the lamps are not yet lighted, to take away the gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses near; it is too late for letters, too early for a book. In town your fancy would turn to the theatres; in the country you would occupy yourself with cares of poultry or of stock: in the suburbs you can but sit upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mosquito.

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

At a former period the writer of this had the fortune to serve his country in an Italian city whose great claim upon the world’s sentimental interest is the fact that —

 “The sea is in her broad, her narrow streets

  Ebbing and flowing,”

and that she has no ways whatever for hoofs or wheels. In his quality of United States official, he was naturally called upon for information concerning the estates of Italians believed to have emigrated early in the century to Buenos Ayres, and was commissioned to learn why certain persons in Mexico and Brazil, and the parts of Peru, had not, if they were still living, written home to their friends. On the other hand, he was intrusted with business nearly as pertinent and hopeful by some of his own countrymen, and it was not quite with surprise that he one day received a neatly lithographed circular with his name and address written in it, signed by a famous projector of such enterprises, asking him to cooperate for the introduction of horse-railroads in Venice. The obstacles to the scheme were of such a nature that it seemed hardly worth while even to reply to the circular; but the proposal was one of those bold flights of imagination which forever lift objects out of vulgar association. It has cast an enduring, poetic charm even about the horse-car in my mind, and I naturally look for many unprosaic aspects of humanity there. I have an acquaintance who insists that it is the place above all others suited to see life in every striking phase. He pretends to have witnessed there the reunion of friends who had not met in many years, the embrace, figurative of course, of long lost brothers, the reconciliation of lovers; I do not know but also some scenes of love-making, and acceptance or rejection. But my friend is an imaginative man, and may make himself romances. I myself profess to have beheld for the most part only mysteries; and I think it not the least of these that, riding on the same cars day after day, one finds so many strange faces with so little variety. Whether or not that dull, jarring motion shakes inward and settles about the centres of mental life the sprightliness that should inform the visage, I do not know; but it is certain that the emptiness of the average passenger’s countenance is something wonderful, considered with reference to Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, and the intellectual repute which Boston enjoys among envious New-Yorkers. It is seldom that a journey out of our cold metropolis is enlivened by a mystery so positive in character as the young lady in black, who alighted at a most ordinary little street in Old Charlesbridge, and heightened her effect by going into a French-roof house there that had no more right than a dry goods box to receive a mystery. She was tall, and her lovely arms showed through the black gauze of her dress with an exquisite roundness and morbidezza. Upon her beautiful wrists she had heavy bracelets of dead gold, fashioned after some Etruscan device; and from her dainty ears hung great hoops of the same metal and design, which had the singular privilege of touching, now and then, her white columnar neck. A massive chain or necklace, also Etruscan, and also gold, rose and fell at her throat, and on one little ungloved hand glittered a multitude of rings. This hand was very expressive, and took a principal part in the talk which the lady held with her companion, and was as alert and quick as if trained in the gesticulation of Southern or Latin life somewhere. Her features, on the contrary, were rather insipid, being too small and fine; but they were redeemed by the liquid splendor of her beautiful eyes, and the mortal pallor of her complexion. She was altogether so startling an apparition, that all of us jaded, commonplace spectres turned and fastened our weary, lack-lustre eyes upon her looks, with an utter inability to remove them. There was one fat, unctuous person seated opposite, to whom his interest was a torture, for he would have gone to sleep except for her remarkable presence: as it was, his heavy eyelids fell half-way shut, and drooped there at an agonizing angle, while his eyes remained immovably fixed upon that strange, death-white face. How it could have come of that colorlessness, — whether through long sickness or long residence in a tropical climate, — was a question that perplexed another of the passengers, who would have expected to hear the lady speak any language in the world rather than English; and to whom her companion or attendant was hardly less than herself a mystery, — being a dragon-like, elderish female, clearly a Yankee by birth, but apparently of many years’ absence from home. The propriety of extracting these people from the horse-cars and transferring them bodily to the first chapter of a romance was a thing about which there could be no manner of doubt, and nothing prevented the abduction but the unexpected voluntary exit of the pale lady. As she passed out everybody else awoke as from a dream, or as if freed from a potent fascination. It is part of the mystery that this lady should never have reappeared in that theatre of life, the horse-car; but I cannot regret having never seen her more; she was so inestimably precious to wonder that it would have been a kind of loss to learn anything about her.

On the other hand, I should be glad if two young men who once presented themselves as mysteries upon the same stage could be so distinctly and sharply identified that all mankind should recognize them at the day of judgment. They were not so remarkable in the nature as in the degree of their offense; for the mystery that any man should keep his seat in a horse-car and let a woman stand is but too sadly common. They say that this, public unkindness to the sex has come about through the ingratitude of women, who have failed to return thanks for places offered them, and that it is a just and noble revenge we take upon them. There might be something advanced in favor of the idea that we law-making men, who do not oblige the companies to provide seats for every one, deserve no thanks from voteless, helpless women when we offer them places; nay, that we ought to be glad if they do not reproach us for making that a personal favor which ought to be a common right. I would prefer, on the whole, to believe that this selfishness is not a concerted act on our part, but a flower of advanced civilization; it is a ripe fruit in European countries, and it is more noticeable in Boston than anywhere else in America. It is, in fact, one of the points of our high polish which people from the interior say first strikes them on coming among us; for they declare — no doubt too modestly — that in their Boeotian wilds our Athenian habit is almost unknown. Yet it would not be fair to credit our whole population with it. I have seen a laborer or artisan rise from his place, and offer it to a lady, while a dozen well-dressed men kept theirs; and I know several conservative young gentlemen, who are still so old-fashioned as always to respect the weakness and weariness of women. One of them, I hear, has settled it in his own mind that if the family cook appears in a car where he is seated, he must rise and give her his place. This, perhaps, is a trifle idealistic; but it is magnificent, it is princely. From his difficult height, we decline — through ranks that sacrifice themselves for women with bundles or children in arms, for old ladies, or for very young and pretty ones — to the men who give no odds to the most helpless creature alive. These are the men who do not act upon the promptings of human nature like the laborer, and who do not refine upon their duty like my young gentlemen, and make it their privilege to befriend the idea of womanhood; they are men who have paid for their seats and are going to keep them. They have been at work, very probably, all day, and no doubt they are tired; they look so, and try hard not to look ashamed of publicly considering themselves before a sex which is born tired, and from which our climate and customs have drained so much health that society sometimes seems little better than a hospital for invalid woman, where every courtesy is likely to be a mercy done to a sufferer. Yet the two young men of whom I began to speak were not apparently of this class, and let us hope they were foreigners, — say Englishmen, since we hate Englishmen the most. They were the only men seated, in a car full of people; and when four or five ladies came in and occupied the aisle before them, they might have been puzzled which to offer their places to, if one of the ladies had not plainly been infirm. They settled the question — if there was any in their minds — by remaining seated, while the lady in front of them swung uneasily to and fro with the car, and appeared ready to sink at their feet. In another moment she had actually done so; and, too weary to rise, she continued to crouch upon the floor of the car for the course of a mile, the young men resolutely keeping their places, and not rising till they were ready to leave the car. It was a horrible scene, and incredible, — that well-dressed woman sitting on the floor, and those two well-dressed men keeping their places; it was as much out of keeping with our smug respectabilities as a hanging, and was a spectacle so paralyzing that public opinion took no action concerning it. A shabby person, standing upon the platform outside, swore about it, between expectorations: even the conductor’s heart was touched; and he said he had seen a good many hard things aboard horse-cars, but that was a little the hardest; he had never expected to come to that. These were simple people enough, and could not interest me a great deal, but I should have liked to have a glimpse of the complex minds of those young men, and I should still like to know something of the previous life that could have made their behavior possible to them. They ought to make public the philosophic methods by which they reached that pass of unshamable selfishness. The information would be useful to a race which knows the sweetness of self-indulgence, and would fain know the art of so drugging or besotting the sensibilities that it shall no feel disgraced by any sort of meanness. They might really have much to say for themselves; as, that the lady, being conscious she could no longer keep her feet, had no right to crouch at theirs, and put them to so severe a test; or that, having suffered her to sink there, they fell no further in the ignorant public opinion by suffering her to continue there.

But I doubt if that other young man could say anything for himself, who, when a pale, trembling woman was about to drop into the vacant place at his side, stretched his arm across it with, “This seat’s engaged,” till a robust young fellow, his friend, appeared, and took it and kept it all the way out from Boston. The commission of such a tragical wrong, involving a violation of common usage as well as the infliction of a positive cruelty, would embitter the life of an ordinary man, if any ordinary man were capable of it; but let us trust that nature has provided fortitude of every kind for the offender, and that he is not wrung by keener remorse than most would feel for a petty larceny. I dare say he would be eager at the first opportunity to rebuke the ingratitude of women who do not thank their benefactors for giving them seats. It seems a little odd, by the way, and perhaps it is through the peculiar blessing of Providence, that, since men have determined by a savage egotism to teach the offending sex manners, their own comfort should be in the infliction of the penalty, and that it should be as much a pleasure as a duty to keep one’s place.

Perhaps when the ladies come to vote, they will abate, with other nuisances, the whole business of overloaded public conveyances. In the mean time the kindness of women to each other is a notable feature of all horse-car journeys. It is touching to see the smiling eagerness with which the poor things gather close their volumed skirts and make room for a weary sister, the tender looks of compassion which they bend upon the sufferers obliged to stand, the sweetness with which they rise, if they are young and strong, to offer their place to any infirm or heavily burdened person of their sex.

But a journey to Boston is not entirely an experience of bitterness. On the contrary, there are many things besides the mutual amiability of these beautiful martyrs which relieve its tedium and horrors. A whole car-full of people, brought into the closest contact with one another, yet in the absence of introductions never exchanging a word, each being so sufficient to himself as to need no social stimulus whatever, is certainly an impressive and stately spectacle. It is a beautiful day, say; but far be it from me to intimate as much to my neighbor, who plainly would rather die than thus commit himself with me, and who, in fact, would well-nigh strike me speechless with surprise if he did so. If there is any necessity for communication, as with the conductor, we essay first to express ourselves by gesture, and then utter our desires with a certain hollow and remote effect, which is not otherwise to be described. I have sometimes tried to speak above my breath, when, being about to leave the car, I have made a virtue of offering my place to the prettiest young woman standing, but I have found it impossible; the genius loci, whatever it was, suppressed me, and I have gasped out my sham politeness as in a courteous nightmare. The silencing influence is quite successfully resisted by none but the tipsy people who occasionally ride out with us, and call up a smile, sad as a gleam of winter sunshine, to our faces by their artless prattle. I remember one eventful afternoon that we were all but moved to laughter by the gayeties of such a one, who, even after he had ceased to talk, continued to amuse us by falling asleep, and reposing himself against the shoulder of the lady next him. Perhaps it is in acknowledgment of the agreeable variety they contribute to horse-car life, that the conductor treats his inebriate passengers with such unfailing tenderness and forbearance. I have never seen them molested, though I have noticed them in the indulgence of many eccentricities, and happened once even to see one of them sit down in a lady’s lap. But that was on the night of Saint Patrick’s day. Generally all avoidable indecorums are rare in the horse-cars, though during the late forenoon and early afternoon, in the period of lighter travel, I have found curious figures there: — among others, two old women, in the old-clothes business, one of whom was dressed, not very fortunately, in a gown with short sleeves, and inferentially a low neck; a mender of umbrellas, with many unwholesome whity-brown wrecks of umbrellas about him; a peddler of soap, who offered cakes of it to his fellow-passengers at a discount, apparently for friendship’s sake; and a certain gentleman with a pock-marked face, and a beard dyed an unscrupulous purple, who sang himself a hymn all the way to Boston, and who gave me no sufficient reason for thinking him a sea-captain. Not far from the end of the Long Bridge, there is apt to be a number of colored ladies waiting to get into the car, or to get out of it, — usually one solemn mother in Ethiopia, and two or three mirthful daughters, who find it hard to suppress a sense of adventure, and to keep in the laughter that struggles out through their glittering teeth and eyes, and who place each other at a disadvantage by divers accidental and intentional bumps and blows. If they are to get out, the old lady is not certain of the place where, and, after making the car stop, and parleying with the conductor, returns to her seat, and is mutely held up to public scorn by one taciturn wink of the conductor’s eye.

Among horse-car types, I am almost ashamed to note one so common and observable as that middle-aged lady who gets aboard and will not see the one vacant seat left, but stands tottering at the door, blind and deaf to all the modest beckonings and benevolent gasps of her fellow-passengers. An air as of better days clings about her; she seems a person who has known sickness and sorrow; but so far from pitying her, you view her with inexpressible rancor, for it is plain that she ought to sit down, and that she will not. But for a point of honor the conductor would show her the vacant place; this forbidding, however, how can he? There she stands and sniffs drearily when you glance at her, as you must from time to time, and no wild turkey caught in a trap was ever more incapable of looking down than this middle-aged (shall I say also unmarried?) lady.

Of course every one knows the ladies and gentlemen who sit cater-cornered, and who will not move up; and equally familiar is that large and ponderous person, who, feigning to sit down beside you, practically sits down upon you, and is not incommoded by having your knee under him. He implies by this brutal conduct that you are taking up more space than belongs to you, and that you are justly made an example of.

I had the pleasure one day to meet on the horse-car an advocate of one of the great reforms of the day. He held a green bag upon his knees, and without any notice passed from a question of crops to a discussion of suffrage for the negro, and so to womanhood suffrage. “Let the women vote,” said he,— “let ’em vote if they want to. I don’t care. Fact is, I should like to see ’em do it the first time. They’re excitable, you know; they’re excitable;” and he enforced his analysis of female character by thrusting his elbow sharply into my side. “Now, there’s my wife; I’d like to see her vote. Be fun, I tell you. And the girls, — Lord, the girls! Circus wouldn’t be anywhere.” Enchanted with the picture which he appeared to have conjured up for himself, he laughed with the utmost relish, and then patting the green bag in his lap, which plainly contained a violin, “You see,” he went on, “I go out playing for dancing-parties. Work all day at my trade, — I’m a carpenter, — and play in the evening. Take my little old ten dollars a night. And I notice the women a good deal; and I tell you they’re all excitable, and I sh’d like to see ’em vote. Vote right and vote often, — that’s the ticket, eh?” This friend of womanhood suffrage — whose attitude of curiosity and expectation seemed to me representative of that of a great many thinkers on the subject — no doubt was otherwise a reformer, and held that the coming man would not drink wine — if he could find whiskey. At least I should have said so, guessing from the odors he breathed along with his liberal sentiments.

Something of the character of a college-town is observable nearly always in the presence of the students, who confound certain traditional ideas of students by their quietude of costume and manner, and whom Padua or Heidelberg would hardly know, but who nevertheless betray that they are banded to —

 “Scorn delights and live laborious days,”

by a uniformity in the cut of their trousers, or a clannishness of cane or scarf, or a talk of boats and base-ball held among themselves. One cannot see them without pleasure and kindness; and it is no wonder that their young-lady acquaintances brighten so to recognize them on the horse-cars. There is much good fortune in the world, but none better than being an undergraduate twenty years old, hale, handsome, fashionably dressed, with the whole promise of life before: it’s a state of things to disarm even envy. With so much youth forever in her heart, it must be hard for our Charlesbridge to grow old: the generations arise and pass away but in her veins is still this tide of warm blood, century in and century out, so much the same from one age to another that it would be hardy to say it was not still one youthfulness. There is a print of the village as it was a cycle since, showing the oldest of the college buildings and upon the street in front a scholar in his scholar’s-cap and gown, giving his arm to a very stylish girl of that period, who is dressed wonderfully like the girl of ours, so that but for the student’s antique formality of costume, one might believe that he was handing her out to take the horse-car. There is no horse-car in the picture, — that is the only real difference between then and now in our Charlesbridge, perennially young and gay. Have there not ever been here the same grand ambitions, the same high hopes, — and is not the unbroken succession of youth in these?

As for other life on the horse-car, it shows to little or no effect, as I have said. You can, of course, detect certain classes; as, in the morning the business-men going in, to their counters or their desks, and in the afternoon the shoppers coming out, laden with paper parcels. But I think no one can truly claim to know the regular from the occasional passengers by any greater cheerfulness in the faces of the latter. The horse-car will suffer no such inequality as this, but reduces us all to the same level of melancholy. It would be but a very unworthy kind of art which should seek to describe people by such merely external traits as a habit of carrying baskets or large travelling-bags in the car; and the present muse scorns it, but is not above speaking of the frequent presence of those lovely young girls in which Boston and the suburban towns abound, and who, whether they appear with rolls of music in their hands, or books from the circulating-libraries, or pretty parcels or hand-bags, would brighten even the horse-car if fresh young looks and gay and brilliant costumes could do so much. But they only add perplexity to the anomaly, which was already sufficiently trying with its contrasts of splendor and shabbiness, and such intimate association of velvets and patches as you see in the churches of Catholic countries, but nowhere else in the world except in our “coaches of the sovereign people.”

In winter, the journey to or from Boston cannot appear otherwise than very dreary to the fondest imagination. Coming out, nothing can look more arctic and forlorn than the river, double-shrouded in ice and snow, or sadder than the contrast offered to the same prospect in summer. Then all is laughing, and it is a joy in every nerve to ride out over the Long Bridge at high tide, and, looking southward, to see the wide crinkle and glitter of that beautiful expanse of water, which laps on one hand the granite quays of the city, and on the other washes among the reeds and wild grasses of the salt-meadows. A ship coming slowly up the channel, or a dingy tug violently darting athwart it, gives an additional pleasure to the eye, and adds something dreamy or vivid to the beauty of the scene. It is hard to say at what hour of the summer’s-day the prospect is loveliest; and I am certainly not going to speak of the sunset as the least of its delights. When this exquisite spectacle is presented, the horse-car passenger, happy to cling with one foot to the rear platform-steps, looks out over the shoulder next him into fairy-land. Crimson and purple the bay stretches westward till its waves darken into the grassy levels, where, here and there, a hay-rick shows perfectly black against the light. Afar off, southeastward and westward, the uplands wear a tinge of tenderest blue; and in the nearer distance, on the low shores of the river, hover the white plumes of arriving and departing trains. The windows of the stately houses that overlook the water take the sunset from it evanescently, and begin to chill and darken before the crimson burns out of the sky. The windows are, in fact, best after nightfall, when they are brilliantly lighted from within; and when, if it is a dark, warm night, and the briny fragrance comes up strong from the falling tide, the lights reflected far down in the still water, bring a dream, as I have heard travelled Bostonians say, of Venice and her magical effects in the same kind. But for me the beauty of the scene needs the help of no such association; I am content with it for what it is. I enjoy also the hints of spring which one gets in riding over the Long Bridge at low tide in the first open days. Then there is not only a vernal beating of carpets on the piers of the drawbridge, but the piles and walls left bare by the receding water show green patches of sea-weeds and mosses, and flatter the willing eye with a dim hint of summer. This reeking and saturated herbage — which always seems to me, in contrast with dry land growths, what the water-logged life of seafaring folk is to that which we happier men lead on shore, — taking so kindly the deceitful warmth and brightness of the sun, has then a charm which it loses when summer really comes; nor does one, later, have so keen an interest in the men wading about in the shallows below the bridge, who, as in the distance they stoop over to gather whatever shell-fish they seek, make a very fair show of being some ungainlier sort of storks, and are as near as we can hope to come to the spring-prophesying storks of song and story. A sentiment of the drowsiness that goes before the awakening of the year, and is so different from the drowsiness that precedes the great autumnal slumber, is in the air, but is gone when we leave the river behind, and strike into the straggling village beyond.

I maintain that Boston, as one approaches it and passingly takes in the line of Bunker Hill Monument, soaring pre�minent among the emulous foundry-chimneys of the sister city, is fine enough to need no comparison with other fine sights. Thanks to the mansard curves and dormer-windows of the newer houses, there is a singularly picturesque variety among the roofs that stretch along the bay, and rise one above another on the city’s three hills, grouping themselves about the State House, and surmounted by its India-rubber dome. But, after all, does human weakness crave some legendary charm, some grace of uncertain antiquity, in the picturesqueness it sees? I own that the future, to which we are often referred for the “stuff that dreams are made of,” is more difficult for the fancy than the past, that the airy amplitude of its possibilities is somewhat chilly, and that we naturally long for the snug quarters of old, made warm by many generations of life. Besides, Europe spoils us ingenuous Americans, and flatters our sentimentality into ruinous extravagances. Looking at her many-storied former times, we forget our own past, neat, compact, and convenient for the poorest memory to dwell in. Yet an American not infected with the discontent of travel could hardly approach this superb city without feeling something of the coveted pleasure in her, without a reverie of her Puritan and Revolutionary times, and the great names and deeds of her heroic annals. I think, however, we were well to be rid of this yearning for a native American antiquity; for in its indulgence one cannot but regard himself and his contemporaries as cumberers of the ground, delaying the consummation of that hoary past which will be so fascinating to a semi-Chinese posterity, and will be, ages hence, the inspiration of Pigeon-English poetry and romance. Let us make much of our two hundred and fifty years, and cherish the present as our golden age. We healthy-minded people in the horse-cars are loath to lose a moment of it, and are aggrieved that the draw of the bridge should be up, naturally looking on what is constantly liable to happen as an especial malice of the fates. All the drivers of the vehicles that clog the draw on either side have a like sense of personal injury; and apparently it would go hard with the captain of that leisurely vessel below if he were delivered into our hands. But this impatience and anger are entirely illusive.

We are really the most patient people in the world, especially as regards any incorporated, non-political oppressions. A lively Gaul, who travelled among us some thirty years ago, found that, in the absence of political control, we gratified the human instinct of obedience by submitting to small tyrannies unknown abroad, and were subject to the steamboat-captain, the hotel-clerk, the stage-driver, and the waiter, who all bullied us fearlessly; but though some vestiges of this bondage remain, it is probably passing away. The abusive Frenchman’s assertion would not at least hold good concerning the horse-car conductors, who, in spite of a lingering preference for touching or punching passengers for their fare instead of asking for it, are commonly mild-mannered and good-tempered, and disposed to molest us as little as possible. I have even received from one of them a mark of such kindly familiarity as the offer of a check which he held between his lips, and thrust out his face to give me, both his hands being otherwise occupied; and their lives are in nowise such luxurious careers as we should expect in public despots. The oppression of the horse-car passenger is not from them, and the passenger himself is finally to blame for it. When the draw closes at last, and we rumble forward into the city street, a certain stir of expectation is felt among us. The long and eventful journey is nearly ended, and now we who are to get out of the cars can philosophically amuse ourselves with the passions and sufferings of those who are to return in our places. You must choose the time between five and six o’clock in the afternoon, if you would make this grand study of the national character in its perfection. Then the spectacle offered in any arriving horse-car will serve your purpose. At nearly every corner of the street up which it climbs stands an experienced suburban, who darts out upon the car, and seizes a vacant place in it. Presently all the places are taken, and before we reach Temple Street, where helpless groups of women are gathered to avail themselves of the first seats vacated, an alert citizen is stationed before each passenger who is to retire at the summons, “Please pass out forrad.” When this is heard in Bowdoin Square, we rise and push forward, knuckling one another’s backs in our eagerness, and perhaps glancing behind us at the tumult within. Not only are all our places occupied, but the aisle is left full of passengers precariously supporting themselves by the straps in the roof. The rear platform is stormed and carried by a party with bundles; the driver is instantly surrounded by another detachment; and as the car moves away from the office, the platform steps are filled.

“Is it possible,” I asked myself, when I had written as far as this in the present noble history, “that I am not exaggerating? It can’t be that this and the other enormities I have been describing are of daily occurrence in Boston. Let me go verify, at least, my picture of the evening horse-car.” So I take my way to Bowdoin Square, and in the conscientious spirit of modern inquiry, I get aboard the first car that comes up. Like every other car, it is meant to seat twenty passengers. It does this, and besides it carries in the aisle and on the platform forty passengers standing. The air is what you may imagine, if you know that not only is the place so indecently crowded, but that in the centre of the car are two adopted citizens, far gone in drink, who have the aspect and the smell of having passed the day in an ash-heap. These citizens being quite helpless themselves, are supported by the public, and repose in singular comfort upon all the passengers near them; I, myself, contribute an aching back to the common charity, and a genteelly dressed young lady takes one of them from time to time on her knee. But they are comparatively an ornament to society till the conductor objects to the amount they offer him for fare; for after that they wish to fight him during the journey, and invite him at short intervals to step out and be shown what manner of men they are. The conductor passes it off for a joke, and so it is, and a very good one.

In that unhappy mass it would be an audacious spirit who should say of any particular arm or leg, “It is mine,” and all the breath is in common. Nothing, it would seem, could add to our misery; but we discover our error when the conductor squeezes a tortuous path through us, and collects the money for our transportation. I never can tell, during the performance of this feat, whether he or the passengers are more to be pitied.

The people who are thus indecorously huddled and jammed together, without regard to age or sex, otherwise lead lives of at least comfort, and a good half of them cherish themselves in every physical way with unparalleled zeal. They are handsomely clothed; they are delicately neat in linen; they eat well, or, if not well, as well as their cooks will let them, and at all events expensively; they house in dwellings appointed in a manner undreamt of elsewhere in the world, — dwellings wherein furnaces make a summer-heat, where fountains of hot and cold water flow at a touch, where light is created or quenched by the turning of a key, where all is luxurious upholstery, and magical ministry to real or fancied needs. They carry the same tastes with them to their places of business; and when they “attend divine service,” it is with the understanding that God is to receive them in a richly carpeted house, deliciously warmed and perfectly ventilated, where they may adore Him at their ease upon cushioned seats, — secured seats. Yet these spoiled children of comfort, when they ride to or from business or church, fail to assert rights that the benighted Cockney, who never heard of our plumbing and registers, or even the oppressed Parisian, who is believed not to change his linen from one revolution to another, having paid for, enjoys. When they enter the “full” horse-car, they find themselves in a place inexorable as the grave to their greenbacks, where not only is their adventitious consequence stripped from them, but the courtesies of life are impossible, the inherent dignity of the person is denied, and they are reduced below the level of the most uncomfortable nations of the Old World. The philosopher accustomed to draw consolation from the sufferings of his richer fellow-men, and to infer an overruling Providence from their disgraces, might well bless Heaven for the spectacle of such degradation, if his thanksgiving were not prevented by his knowledge that this is quite voluntary. And now consider that on every car leaving the city at this time the scene is much the same; reflect that the horror is enacting, not only in Boston, but in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, — wherever the horse-car, that tinkles well-nigh round the Continent, is known; remember that the same victims are thus daily sacrificed, without an effort to right themselves: and then you will begin to realize — dimly and imperfectly, of course — the unfathomable meekness of the American character. The “full” horse-car is a prodigy whose likeness is absolutely unknown elsewhere, since the Neapolitan gig went out; and I suppose it will be incredible to the future in our own country. When I see such a horse-car as I have sketched move away from its station, I feel that it is something not only emblematic and interpretative, but monumental; and I know that when art becomes truly national, the overloaded horse-car will be celebrated in painting and sculpture. And in after ages, when the oblique-eyed, swarthy American of that time, pausing before some commemorative bronze or historical picture of our epoch, contemplates this stupendous spectacle of human endurance, I hope he will be able to philosophize more satisfactorily than we can now, concerning the mystery of our strength as a nation and our weakness as a public.

A DAY’S PLEASURE

I. — THE MORNING.

They were not a large family, and their pursuits and habits were very simple; yet the summer was lapsing toward the first pathos of autumn before they found themselves all in such case as to be able to take the day’s pleasure they had planned so long. They had agreed often and often that nothing could be more charming than an excursion down the Harbor, either to Gloucester, or to Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach, or to Hull and Hingham, or to any point within the fatal bound beyond which is seasickness. They had studied the steamboat advertisements, day after day, for a long time, without making up their minds which of these charming excursions would be the most delightful; and when they had at last fixed upon one and chosen some day for it, that day was sure to be heralded by a long train of obstacles, or it dawned upon weather that was simply impossible. Besides, in the suburbs, you are apt to sleep late, unless the solitary ice-wagon of the neighborhood makes a very uncommon rumbling in going by; and I believe that the excursion was several times postponed by the tardy return of the pleasurers from dreamland, which, after all, is not the worst resort, or the least interesting — or profitable, for the matter of that. But at last the great day came, — a blameless Thursday alike removed from the cares of washing and ironing days, and from the fatigues with which every week closes. One of the family chose deliberately to stay at home; but the severest scrutiny could not detect a hindrance in the health or circumstances of any of the rest, and the weather was delicious. Everything, in fact, was so fair and so full of promise, that they could almost fancy a calamity of some sort hanging over its perfection, and possibly bred of it; for I suppose that we never have anything made perfectly easy for us without a certain reluctance and foreboding. That morning they all got up so early that they had time to waste over breakfast before taking the 7.30 train for Boston; and they naturally wasted so much of it that they reached the station only in season for the 8.00. But there is a difference between reaching the station and quietly taking the cars, especially if one of your company has been left at home, hoping to cut across and take the cars at a station which they reach some minutes later, and you, the head of the party, are obliged, at a loss of breath and personal comfort and dignity, to run down to that station and see that the belated member has arrived there, and then hurry back to your own, and embody the rest, with their accompanying hand-bags and wraps and sun-umbrellas, into some compact shape for removal into the cars, during the very scant minute that the train stops at Charlesbridge. Then when you are all aboard, and the tardy member has been duly taken up at the next station, and you would be glad to spend the time in looking about on the familiar variety of life which every car presents in every train on every road in this vast American world, you are oppressed and distracted by the cares which must attend the pleasure-seeker, and which the more thickly beset him the more deeply he plunges into enjoyment.

I can learn very little from the note-book of the friend whose adventures I am relating in regard to the scenery of Somerville, and the region generally through which the railroad passes between Charlesbridge and Boston; but so much knowledge of it may be safely assumed on the part of the reader as to relieve me of the grave responsibility of describing it. Still, I may say that it is not unpicturesque, and that I have a pleasure, which I hope the reader shares, in anything like salt meadows and all spaces subject to the tide, whether flooded by it or left bare with their saturated grasses by its going down. I think, also, there is something fine in the many-roofed, many-chimneyed highlands of Chelsea (if it is Chelsea), as you draw near the railroad bridge, and there is a pretty stone church on a hill-side there which has the good fortune, so rare with modern architecture and so common with the old, of seeming a natural outgrowth of the spot where it stands, and which is as purely an object of aesthetic interest to me, who know nothing of its sect or doctrine, as any church in a picture could be; and there is, also, the Marine Hospital on the heights (if it is the Marine Hospital), from which I hope the inmates can behold the ocean, and exult in whatever misery keeps them ashore.

But let me not so hasten over this part of my friend’s journey as to omit all mention of the amphibious Irish houses which stand about on the low lands along the railroad-sides, and which you half expect to see plunge into the tidal mud of the neighborhood, with a series of hoarse croaks, as the train approaches. Perhaps twenty-four trains pass those houses every twenty-four hours, and it is a wonder that the inhabitants keep their interest in them, or have leisure to bestow upon any of them. Yet, as you dash along so bravely, you can see that you arrest the occupations of all these villagers as by a kind of enchantment; the children pause and turn their heads toward you from their mud-pies (to the production of which there is literally no limit in that region); the matron rests one parboiled hand on her hip, letting the other still linger listlessly upon the wash-board, while she lifts her eyes from the suds to look at you; the boys, who all summer long are forever just going into the water or just coming out of it, cease their buttoning or unbuttoning; the baby, which has been run after and caught and suitably posed, turns its anguished eyes upon you, where also falls the mother’s gaze, while her descending palm is arrested in mid air. I forbear to comment upon the surprising populousness of these villages, where, in obedience to all the laws of health, the inhabitants ought to be wasting miserably away, but where they flourish in spite of them. Even Accident here seems to be robbed of half her malevolence; and that baby (who will presently be chastised with terrific uproar) passes an infancy of intrepid enjoyment amidst the local perils, and is no more affected by the engines and the cars than by so many fretful hens with their attendant broods of chickens.

When sometimes I long for the excitement and variety of travel, which, for no merit of mine, I knew in other days, I reproach myself, and silence all my repinings with some such question as, Where could you find more variety or greater excitement than abounds in and near the Fitchburg Depot when a train arrives? And to tell the truth, there is something very inspiring in the fine eagerness with which all the passengers rise as soon as the locomotive begins to slow, and huddle forward to the door, in their impatience to get out; while the suppressed vehemence of the hackmen is also thrilling in its way, not to mention the instant clamor of the baggage-men as they read and repeat the numbers of the checks in strident tones. It would be ever so interesting to depict all these people, but it would require volumes for the work, and I reluctantly let them all pass out without a word, — all but that sweet young blonde who arrives by most trains, and who, putting up her eye-glass with a ravishing air, bewitchingly peers round among the bearded faces, with little tender looks of hope and trepidation, for the face which she wants, and which presently bursts through the circle of strange visages. The owner of the face then hurries forward to meet that sweet blonde, who gives him a little drooping hand as if it were a delicate flower she laid in his; there is a brief mutual hesitation long enough merely for an electrical thrill to run from heart to heart through the clasping hands, and then he stoops toward her, and distractingly kisses her. And I say that there is no law of conscience or propriety worthy the name of law — barbarity, absurdity, call it rather — to prevent any one from availing himself of that providential near-sightedness, and beatifying himself upon those lips, — nothing to prevent it but that young fellow, whom one might not, of course, care to provoke.

Among the people who now rush forward and heap themselves into the two horse-cars and one omnibus, placed before the depot by a wise forethought for the public comfort to accommodate the train-load of two hundred passengers, I always note a type that is both pleasing and interesting to me. It is a lady just passing middle life; from her kindly eyes the envious crow, whose footprints are just traceable at their corners, has not yet drunk the brightness, but she looks just a thought sadly, if very serenely, from them. I know nothing in the world of her; I may have seen her twice or a hundred times, but I must always be making bits of romances about her. That is she in faultless gray, with the neat leather bag in her lap, and a bouquet of the first autumnal blooms perched in her shapely hands which are prettily yet substantially gloved in some sort of gauntlets. She can be easy and dignified, my dear middle-aged heroine, even in one of our horse-cars, where people are for the most part packed like cattle in a pen. She shows no trace of dust or fatigue from the thirty or forty miles which I choose to fancy she has ridden from the handsome elm-shaded New England town of five or ten thousand people, where I choose to think she lives. From a vague horticultural association with those gauntlets, as well as from the autumnal blooms, I take it she loves flowers, and gardens a good deal with her own hands, and keeps house-plants in the winter, and of course a canary. Her dress, neither rich nor vulgar, makes me believe her fortunes modest and not recent; her gentle face has just so much intellectual character as it is good to see in a woman’s face; I suspect that she reads pretty regularly the new poems and histories, and I know that she is the life and soul of the local book-club. Is she married, or widowed, or one of the superfluous forty thousand? That is what I never can tell. But I think that most probably she is married, and that her husband is very much in business, and does not share so much as he respects her tastes. I have no particular reason for thinking that she has no children now, and that the sorrow for the one she lost so long ago has become only a pensive silence, which, however, a long summer twilight can yet deepen to tears.... Upon my word! Am I then one to give way to this sort of thing? Madam, I ask pardon. I have no right to be sentimentalizing you. Yet your face is one to make people dream kind things of you, and I cannot keep my reveries away from it.

But in the mean time I neglect the momentous history which I have proposed to write, and leave my day’s pleasurers to fade into the background of a fantastic portrait. The truth is, I cannot look without pain upon the discomforts which they suffer at this stage of their joyous enterprise. At the best, the portables of such a party are apt to be grievous embarrassments: a package of shawls and parasols and umbrellas and India-rubbers, however neatly made up at first, quickly degenerates into a shapeless mass, which has finally to be carried with as great tenderness as an ailing child; and the lunch is pretty sure to overflow the hand-bags and to eddy about you in paper parcels; while the bottle of claret, that bulges the side of one of the bags, and

 “That will show itself without,”

defying your attempts to look as it were cold tea, gives a crushing touch of disreputability to the whole affair. Add to this the fact that but half the party have seats, and that the others have to sway and totter about the car in that sudden contact with all varieties of fellow-men, to which we are accustomed in the cars, and you must allow that these poor merrymakers have reasons enough to rejoice when this part of their day’s pleasure is over. They are so plainly bent upon a sail down the Harbor, that before they leave the car they become objects of public interest, and are at last made to give some account of themselves.

“Going for a sail, I presume?” says a person hitherto in conversation with the conductor. “Well, I wouldn’t mind a sail myself to-day.”

“Yes,” answers the head of the party, “going to Gloucester.”

“Guess not,” says, very coldly and decidedly, one of the passengers, who is reading that morning’s “Advertiser;” and when the subject of this surmise looks at him for explanations, he adds, “The City Council has chartered the boat for to-day.”

Upon this the excursionists fall into great dismay and bitterness, and upbraid the City Council, and wonder why last night’s “Transcript” said nothing about its oppressive action, and generally bewail their fate. But at last they resolve to go somewhere, and, being set down, they make up their warring minds upon Nahant, for the Nahant boat leaves the wharf nearest them; and so they hurry away to India Wharf, amidst barrels and bales and boxes and hacks and trucks, with interminable string-teams passing before them at every crossing.

“At any rate,” says the leader of the expedition, “we shall see the Gardens of Maolis, — those enchanted gardens which have fairly been advertised into my dreams, and where I’ve been told,” he continues, with an effort to make the prospect an attractive one, yet not without a sense of the meagreness of the materials, “they have a grotto and a wooden bull.”

Of course, there is no reason in nature why a wooden bull should be more pleasing than a flesh-and-blood bull, but it seems to encourage the company, and they set off again with renewed speed, and at last reach India Wharf in time to see the Nahant steamer packed full of excursionists, with a crowd of people still waiting to go aboard. It does not look inviting, and they hesitate. In a minute or two their spirits sink so low, that if they should see the wooden bull step out of a grotto on the deck of the steamer the spectacle could not revive them. At that instant they think, with a surprising singleness, of Nantasket Beach, and the bright colors in which the Gardens of Maolis but now appeared fade away, and they seem to see themselves sauntering along the beautiful shore, while the white-crested breakers crash upon the sand, and run up

 “In tender-curving lines of creamy spray,”

quite to the feet of that lotus-eating party.

“Nahant is all rocks,” says the leader to Aunt Melissa, who hears him with a sweet and tranquil patience, and who would enjoy or suffer anything with the same expression; “and as you’ve never yet seen the open sea, it’s fortunate that we go to Nantasket, for, of course, a beach is more characteristic. But now the object is to get there. The boat will be starting in a few moments, and I doubt whether we can walk it. How far is it,” he asks, turning toward a respectable-looking man, “to Liverpool Wharf?”

“Well, it’s consid’able ways,” says the man, smiling.

“Then we must take a hack,” says the pleasurer to his party. “Come on.”

“I’ve got a hack,” observes the man, in a casual way, as if the fact might possibly interest.

“O, you have, have you? Well, then, put us into it, and drive to Liverpool Wharf; and hurry.”

Either the distance was less than the hackman fancied, or else he drove thither with unheard-of speed, for two minutes later he set them down on Liverpool Wharf. But swiftly as they had come the steamer had been even more prompt, and she now turned toward them a beautiful wake, as she pushed farther and farther out into the harbor.

The hackman took his two dollars for his four passengers, and was rapidly mounting his box, — probably to avoid idle reproaches. “Wait!” said the chief pleasurer. Then, “When does the next boat leave?” he asked of the agent, who had emerged with a compassionate face from the waiting-rooms on the wharf.

“At half past two.”

“And it’s now five minutes past nine,” moaned the merrymakers.

“Why, I’ll tell you what you can do,” said the agent; “you can go to Hingham by the Old Colony cars, and so come back by the Hull and Hingham boat.”

“That’s it!” chorused his listeners, “we’ll go;” and “Now,” said their spokesman to the driver, “I dare say you didn’t know that Liverpool Wharf was so near; but I don’t think you’ve earned your money, and you ought to take us on to the Old Colony Depot for half-fares at the most.”

The driver looked pained, as if some small tatters and shreds of conscience were flapping uncomfortably about his otherwise dismantled spirit. Then he seemed to think of his wife and family, for he put on the air of a man who had already made great sacrifices, and “I couldn’t, really, I couldn’t afford it,” said he; and as the victims turned from him in disgust, he chirruped to his horses and drove off.

“Well,” said the pleasurers, “we won’t give it up. We will have our day’s pleasure after all. But what can we do to kill five hours and a half? It’s miles away from everything, and, besides, there’s nothing even if we were there.” At this image of their remoteness and the inherent desolation of Boston they could not suppress some sighs, and in the mean time Aunt Melissa stepped into the waiting-room, which opened on the farther side upon the water, and sat contentedly down on one of the benches; the rest, from sheer vacuity and irresolution, followed, and thus, without debate, it was settled that they should wait there till the boat left. The agent, who was a kind man, did what he could to alleviate the situation: he gave them each the advertisement of his line of boats, neatly printed upon a card, and then he went away.

All this prospect of waiting would do well enough for the ladies of the party, but there is an impatience in the masculine fibre which does not brook the notion of such prolonged repose; and the leader of the excursion presently pretended an important errand up town, — nothing less, in fact, than to buy a tumbler out of which to drink their claret on the beach. A holiday is never like any other day to the man who takes it, and a festive halo seemed to enwrap the excursionist as he pushed on through the busy streets in the cool shadow of the vast granite palaces wherein the genius of business loves to house itself in this money-making land, and inhaled the odors of great heaps of leather and spices and dry goods as he passed the open doorways, — odors that mixed pleasantly with the smell of the freshly watered streets. When he stepped into a crockery store to make his purchase a sense of pleasure-taking did not fail him, and he fell naturally into talk with the clerk about the weather and such pastoral topics. Even when he reached the establishment where his own business days were passed some glamour seemed to be cast upon familiar objects. To the disenchanted eye all things were as they were on all other dullish days of summer, even to the accustomed bore leaning up against his favorite desk and transfixing his habitual victim with his usual theme. Yet to the gaze of this pleasure-taker all was subtly changed, and he shook hands right and left as he entered, to the marked surprise of the objects of his effusion. He had merely come to get some newspapers to help pass away the long moments on the wharf, and when he had found these, he hurried back thither to hear what had happened during his absence.

It seemed that there had hardly ever been such an eventful period in the lives of the family before, and he listened to a minute account of it from Cousin Lucy. “You know, Frank,” says she, “that Sallie’s one idea in life is to keep the baby from getting the whooping-cough, and I declare that these premises have done nothing but re�cho with the most dolorous whoops ever since you’ve been gone, so that at times, in my fear that Sallie would think I’d been careless about the boy, I’ve been ready to throw myself into the water, and nothing’s prevented me but the doubt whether it wouldn’t be better to throw in the whoopers instead.”

At this moment a pale little girl, with a face wan and sad through all its dirt, came and stood in the doorway nearest the baby, and in another instant she had burst into a whoop so terrific that, if she had meant to have his scalp next it could not have been more dreadful. Then she subsided into a deep and pathetic quiet, with that air peculiar to the victims of her disorder of having done nothing noticeable. But her outburst had set at work the mysterious machinery of half a dozen other whooping-coughers lurking about the building, and all unseen they wound themselves up with appalling rapidity, and in the utter silence which followed left one to think they had died at the climax.

“Why, it’s a perfect whooping-cough factory, this place,” cries Cousin Lucy in a desperation. “Go away, do, please, from the baby, you poor little dreadful object you,” she continues, turning upon the only visible operative in the establishment. “Here, take this,” and she bribes her with a bit of sponge-cake, on which the child runs lightly off along the edge of the wharf. “That’s been another of their projects for driving me wild,” says Cousin Lucy,— “trying to take their own lives in a hundred ways before my face and eyes. Why will their mothers let them come here to play?”

Really, they were very melancholy little figures, and might have gone near to make one sad, even if they had not been constantly imperilling their lives. Thanks to its being summer-time, it did not much matter about the scantiness of their clothing, but their squalor was depressing, it seemed, even to themselves, for they were a mournful-looking set of children, and in their dangerous sports trifled silently and almost gloomily with death. There were none of them above eight or nine years of age, and most of them had the care of smaller brothers, or even babes in arms, whom they were thus early inuring to the perils of the situation. The boys were dressed in pantaloons and shirts which no excess of rolling up in the legs and arms could make small enough, and the incorrigible too-bigness of which rendered the favorite amusements still more hazardous from their liability to trip and entangle the wearers. The little girls had on each a solitary garment, which hung about her gaunt person with antique severity of outline; while the babies were multitudinously swathed in whatever fragments of dress could be tied or pinned or plastered on. Their faces were strikingly and almost ingeniously dirty, and their distractions among the coal-heaps and cord-wood constantly added to the variety and advantage of these effects.

“Why do their mothers let them come here?” muses Frank aloud. “Why, because it’s so safe, Cousin Lucy. At home, you know, they’d have to be playing upon the sills of fourth-floor windows, and here they’re out of the way and can’t hurt themselves. Why, Cousin Lucy, this is their park, — their Public Garden, their Bois de Boulogne, their Cascine. And look at their gloomy little faces! Aren’t they taking their pleasure in the spirit of the very highest fashion? I was at Newport last summer, and saw the famous driving on the Avenue in those pony phaetons, dog-carts, and tubs, and three-story carriages with a pair of footmen perching like storks upon each gable, and I assure you that all those ornate and costly phantasms (it seems to me now like a sad, sweet vision) had just the expression of these poor children. We’re taking a day’s pleasure ourselves, cousin, but nobody would know it from our looks. And has nothing but whooping-cough happened since I’ve been gone?”

“Yes, we seem to be so cut off from every-day associations that I’ve imagined myself a sort of tourist, and I’ve been to that Catholic church over yonder, in hopes of seeing the Murillos and Raphaels — but I found it locked up, and so I trudged back without a sight of the masterpieces. But what’s the reason that all the shops hereabouts have nothing but luxuries for sale? The windows are perfect tropics of oranges, and lemons, and belated bananas, and tobacco, and peanuts.”

“Well, the poor really seem to use more of those luxuries than anybody else. I don’t blame them. I shouldn’t care for the necessaries of life myself, if I found them so hard to get.”

“When I came back here,” says Cousin Lucy, without heeding these flippant and heartless words, “I found an old gentleman who has something to do with the boats, and he sat down, as if it were a part of his business, and told me nearly the whole history of his life. Isn’t it nice of them, keeping an Autobiographer? It makes the time pass so swiftly when you’re waiting. This old gentleman was born — who’d ever think it? — up there in Pearl Street, where those pitiless big granite stores are now; and, I don’t know why, but the idea of any human baby being born in Pearl Street seemed to me one of the saddest things I’d ever heard of.”

Here Cousin Lucy went to the rescue of the nurse and the baby, who had got into one of their periodical difficulties, and her interlocutor turned to Aunt Melissa.

“I think, Franklin,” says Aunt Melissa, “that it was wrong to let that nurse come and bring the baby.”

“Yes, I know, Aunty, you have those old-established ideas, and they’re very right,” answers her nephew; “but just consider how much she enjoys it, and how vastly the baby adds to the pleasure of this charming excursion!”

Aunt Melissa made no reply, but sat thoughtfully out upon the bay. “I presume you think the excursion is a failure,” she said, after a while; “but I’ve been enjoying every minute of the time here. Of course, I’ve never seen the open sea, and I don’t know about it, but I feel here just as if I were spending a day at the seaside.”

“Well,” said her nephew, “I shouldn’t call this exactly a watering-place. It lacks the splendor and gayety of Newport, in a certain degree, and it hasn’t the illustrious seclusion of Nahant. The surf isn’t very fine, nor the beach particularly adapted to bathing; and yet, I must confess, the outlook from here is as lovely as anything one need have.”

And to tell the truth, it was very pretty and interesting. The landward environment was as commonplace and mean as it could be: a yardful of dismal sheds for coal and lumber, and shanties for offices, with each office its safe and its desk, its whittled arm-chair and its spittoon, its fly that shooed not, but buzzed desperately against the grimy pane, which, if it had really had that boasted microscopic eye, it never would have mistaken for the unblemished daylight. Outside of this yard was the usual wharfish neighborhood, with its turmoil of trucks and carts and fleet express-wagons, its building up and pulling down, its discomfort and clamor of every sort, and its shops for the sale, not only of those luxuries which Lucy had mentioned, but of such domestic refreshments as lemon-pie and hulled-corn.

When, however, you turned your thoughts and eyes away from this aspect of it, and looked out upon the water, the neighborhood gloriously retrieved itself. There its poverty and vulgarity ceased; there its beauty and grace abounded. A light breeze ruffled the face of the bay, and the innumerable little sail-boats that dotted it took the sun and wind upon their wings, which they dipped almost into the sparkle of the water, and flew lightly hither and thither like gulls that loved the brine too well to rise wholly from it; larger ships, farther or nearer, puffed or shrank their sails as they came and went on the errands of commerce, but always moved as if bent upon some dreamy affair of pleasure; the steamboats that shot vehemently across their tranquil courses seemed only gayer and vivider visions, but not more substantial; yonder, a black sea-going steamer passed out between the far-off islands, and at last left in the sky above those reveries of fortification, a whiff of sombre smoke, dark and unreal as a memory of battle; to the right, on some line of railroad, long-plumed trains arrived and departed like pictures passed through the slide of a magic-lantern; even a pile-driver, at work in the same direction, seemed to have no malice in the blows which, after a loud clucking, it dealt the pile, and one understood that it was mere conventional violence like that of a Punch to his baby.

“Why, what a lotus-eating life this is!” said Frank, at last. “Aunt Melissa, I don’t wonder you think it’s like the seaside. It’s a great deal better than the seaside. And now, just as we’ve entered into the spirit of it, the time’s up for the ‘Rose Standish’ to come and bear us from its delights. When will the boat be in?” he asked of the Autobiographer, whom Lucy had pointed out to him.

“Well, she’s ben in half an hour, now. There she lays, just outside the ‘John Romer.’”

There, to be sure, she lay, and those pleasure-takers had been so lost in the rapture of waiting and the beauty of the scene as never to have noticed her arrival.

II — THE AFTERNOON

It is noticeable how many people there are in the world that seem bent always upon the same purpose of amusement or business as one’s self. If you keep quietly about your accustomed affairs, there are all your neighbors and acquaintance hard at it too; if you go on a journey, choose what train you will, the cars are filled with travellers in your direction. You take a day’s pleasure, and everybody abandons his usual occupation to crowd upon your boat, whether it is to Gloucester, or Nahant, or to Nantasket Beach you go. It is very hard to believe that, from whatever channel of life you abstract yourself, still the great sum of it presses forward as before: that business is carried on though you are idle, that men amuse themselves though you toil, that every train is as crowded as that you travel on, that the theatre or the church fills its boxes or pews without you perfectly well. I suppose it would not be quite agreeable to believe all this; the opposite illusion is far more flattering; for if each one of us did not take the world with him now at every turn, should he not have to leave it behind him when he died? And that, it must be owned, would not be agreeable, nor is the fact quite conceivable, though ever so many myriads in so many million years have proved it.

When our friends first went aboard the “Rose Standish” that day they were almost the sole passengers, and they had a feeling of ownership and privacy which was pleasant enough in its way, but which they lost afterwards; though to lose it was also pleasant, for enjoyment no more likes to be solitary than sin does, which is notoriously gregarious, and I dare say would hardly exist if it could not be committed in company. The preacher, indeed, little knows the comfortable sensation we have in being called fellow-sinners, and what an effective shield for his guilt each makes of his neighbor’s hard-heartedness.

Cousin Frank never felt how strange was a lonely transgression till that day, when in the silence of the little cabin he took the bottle of claret from the handbag, and prepared to moisten the family lunch with it. “I think, Aunt Melissa,” he said, “we had better lunch now, for it’s a quarter past two, and we shall not get to the beach before four. Let’s improvise a beach of these chairs, and that water-urn yonder can stand for the breakers. Now, this is truly like Newport and Nahant,” he added, after the little arrangement was complete; and he was about to strip away the bottle’s jacket of brown paper, when a lady much wrapped up came in, and, reclining upon one of the opposite seats, began to take them all in with a severe serenity of gaze that made them feel for a moment like a party of low foreigners, — like a set of German atheists, say. Frank kept on the bottle’s paper jacket, and as the single tumbler of the party circled from mouth to mouth, each of them tried to give the honest drink the false air of a medicinal potion of some sort; and to see Aunt Melissa sipping it, no one could have put his hand on his heart and sworn it was not elderberry wine, at the worst. In spite of these efforts, they all knew that they had suffered a hopeless loss of repute; yet after the loss was confessed, I am not sure that they were not the gayer and happier through this “freedom of a broken law.” At any rate, the lunch passed off very merrily, and when they had put back the fragments of the feast into the bags, they went forward to the bow of the boat, to get good places for seeing the various people as they came aboard, and for an outlook upon the bay when the boat should start.

I suppose that these were not very remarkable people, and that nothing but the indomitable interest our friends took in the human race could have enabled them to feel any concern in their companions. It was, no doubt, just such a company as goes down to Nantasket Beach every pleasant day in summer. Certain ones among them were distinguishable as sojourners at the beach, by an air of familiarity with the business of getting there, an indifference to the prospect, and an indefinable touch of superiority. These read their newspapers in quiet corners, or, if they were not of the newspaper sex, made themselves comfortable in the cabins, and looked about them at the other passengers with looks of lazy surprise, and just a hint of scorn for their interest in the boat’s departure. Our day’s pleasurers took it that the lady whose steady gaze had reduced them, when at lunch, to such a low ebb of shabbiness, was a regular boarder, at the least, in one of the beach hotels. A few other passengers were, like themselves, mere idlers for a day, and were eager to see all that the boat or the voyage offered of novelty. There were clerks and men who had book-keeping written in a neat mercantile hand upon their faces, and who had evidently been given that afternoon for a breathing-time; and there were strangers who were going down to the beach for the sake of the charming view of the harbor which the trip afforded. Here and there were people who were not to be classed with any certainty, — as a pale young man, handsome in his undesirable way, who looked like a steamboat pantry boy not yet risen to be bar-tender, but rapidly rising, and who sat carefully balanced upon the railing of the boat, chatting with two young girls, who heard his broad sallies with continual snickers, and interchanged saucy comments with that prompt up-and-coming manner which is so large a part of non-humorous humor, as Mr. Lowell calls it, and now and then pulled and pushed each other. It was a scene worth study, for in no other country could anything so bad have been without being vastly worse; but here it was evident that there was nothing worse than you saw; and, indeed, these persons formed a sort of relief to the other passengers, who were nearly all monotonously well-behaved. Amongst a few there seemed to be acquaintance, but the far greater part were unknown to one another, and there were no words wasted by any one. I believe the English traveller who has taxed our nation with inquisitiveness for half a century is at last beginning to find out that we do not ask questions because we have the still more vicious custom of not opening our mouths at all when with strangers.

It was a good hour after our friends got aboard before the boat left her moorings, and then it was not without some secret dreads of sea-sickness that Aunt Melissa saw the seething brine widen between her and the familiar wharf-house, where she now seemed to have spent so large a part of her life. But the multitude of really charming and interesting objects that presently fell under her eye soon distracted her from those gloomy thoughts.

There is always a shabbiness about the wharves of seaports; but I must own that as soon as you get a reasonable distance from them in Boston, they turn wholly beautiful. They no longer present that imposing array of mighty ships which they could show in the days of Consul Plancus, when the commerce of the world sought chiefly our port, yet the docks are still filled with the modester kinds of shipping, and if there is not that wilderness of spars and rigging which you see at New York, let us believe that there is an aspect of selection and refinement in the scene, so that one should describe it, not as a forest, but, less conventionally, as a gentleman’s park of masts. The steamships of many coastwise freight lines gloom, with their black, capacious hulks, among the lighter sailing-craft, and among the white, green-shuttered passenger-boats; and behind them those desperate and grimy sheds assume a picturesqueness, their sagging roofs and crooked gables harmonizing agreeably with the shipping; and then growing up from all, rises the mellow-tinted brick-built city, roof, and spire, and dome, — a fair and noble sight, indeed, and one not surpassed for a certain quiet and cleanly beauty by any that I know.

Our friends lingered long upon this pretty prospect, and, as inland people of light heart and easy fancy will, the ladies made imagined voyages in each of the more notable vessels they passed, — all cheap and safe trips, occupying half a second apiece. Then they came forward to the bow, that they might not lose any part of the harbor’s beauty and variety, and informed themselves of the names of each of the fortressed islands as they passed, and forgot them, being passed, so that to this day Aunt Melissa has the Fort Warren rebel prisoners languishing in Fort Independence. But they made sure of the air of soft repose that hung about each, of that exquisite military neatness which distinguishes them, and which went to Aunt Melissa’s housekeeping heart, of the green, thick turf covering the escarpments, of the great guns loafing on the crests of the ramparts and looking out over the water sleepily, of the sentries pacing slowly up and down with their gleaming muskets.

“I never see one of those fellows,” says Cousin Frank, “without setting him to the music of that saddest and subtlest of Heine’s poems. You know it, Lucy;” and he repeats: —

 “Mein Herz, mein Herz is traurig,

    Doch lustig leuchtet der Mai;

  Ich stehe gelehnt an der Linde,

    Hoch auf der alten Bastei.

 “Am alten grauen Thurme

    Ein Schilderhuschen steht;

  Ein rothger ckter Bursche

    Dort auf und nieder geht.

 “Er spielt mit seiner Flinte,

    Sie funkelt im Sonnenroth,

  Er presentirt, und schultert, —

    Ich wollt’, er schasse mich todt.”

“O!” says Cousin Lucy, either because the poignant melancholy of the sentiment has suddenly pierced her, or because she does not quite understand the German, — you never can tell about women. While Frank smiles down upon her in this amiable doubt, their party is approached by the tipsy man who has been making the excursion so merry for the other passengers, in spite of the fact that there is very much to make one sad in him. He is an old man, sweltering in rusty black, a two days’ gray beard, and a narrow-brimmed, livid silk hat, set well back upon the nape of his neck. He explains to our friends, as he does to every one whose acquaintance he makes, that he was in former days a seafaring man, and that he has brought his two little grandsons here to show them something about a ship; and the poor old soul helplessly saturates his phrase with the rankest profanity. The boys are somewhat amused by their grandsire’s state, being no doubt familiar with it, but a very grim-looking old lady who sits against the pilot-house, and keeps a sharp eye upon all three, and who is also doubtless familiar with the unhappy spectacle, seems not to find it a joke. Her stout matronly umbrella trembles in her hand when her husband draws near, and her eye flashes; but he gives her as wide a berth as he can, returning her glare with a propitiatory drunken smile and a wink to the passengers to let them into the fun. In fact, he is full of humor in his tipsy way, and one after another falls the prey of his free sarcasm, which does not spare the boat or any feature of the excursion. He holds for a long time, by swiftly successive stories of his seafaring days, a very quiet gentleman, who dares neither laugh too loudly nor show indifference for fear of rousing that terrible wit at his expense, and finds his account in looking down at his boots.

“Well, sir,” says the deplorable old sinner, “we was forty days out from Liverpool, with a cargo of salt and iron, and we got caught on the Banks in a calm. ‘Cap’n,’ says I, — I ‘us sec’n’ mate,—’’s they any man aboard this ship knows how to pray?’ ‘No,’ says the cap’n; ‘blast yer prayers!’ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘cap’n, I’m no hand at all to pray, but I’m goin’ to see if prayin’ won’t git us out ‘n this.’ And I down on my knees, and I made a first-class prayer; and a breeze sprung up in a minute and carried us smack into Boston.”

At this bit of truculent burlesque the quiet man made a bold push, and walked away with a somewhat sickened face, and as no one now intervened between them, the inebriate laid a familiar hand upon Cousin Frank’s collar, and said with a wink at his late listener: “Looks like a lerigious man, don’t he? I guess I give him a good dose, if he does think himself the head-deacon of this boat.” And he went on to state his ideas of religion, from which it seemed that he was a person of the most advanced thinking, and believed in nothing worth mentioning.

It is perhaps no worse for an Infidel to be drunk than a Christian, but my friend found this tipsy blasphemer’s case so revolting, that he went to the hand-bag, took out the empty claret-bottle, and seeking a solitary corner of the boat, cast the bottle into the water, and felt a thrill of uncommon self-approval as this scapegoat of all the wine at his grocer’s bobbed off upon the little waves. “Besides, it saves carrying the bottle home,” he thought, not without a half-conscious reserve, that if his penitence were ever too much for him, he could easily abandon it. And without the reflection that the gate is always open behind him, who could consent to enter upon any course of perfect behavior? If good resolutions could not be broken, who would ever have the courage to form them? Would it not be intolerable to be made as good as we ought to be? Then, admirable reader, thank Heaven even for your lapses, since it is so wholesome and saving to be well ashamed of yourself, from time to time.

“What an outrage,” said Cousin Frank, in the glow of virtue, as he rejoined the ladies, “that that tipsy rascal should be allowed to go on with his ribaldry. He seems to pervade the whole boat, and to subject everybody to his sway. He’s a perfect despot to us helpless sober people, — I wouldn’t openly disagree with him on any account. We ought to send a Round Robin to the captain, and ask him to put that religious liberal in irons during the rest of the voyage.”

In the mean time, however, the object of his indignation had used up all the conversible material in that part of the boat, and had deviously started for the other end. The elderly woman with the umbrella rose and followed him, somewhat wearily, and with a sadness that appeared more in her movement than in her face; and as the two went down the cabin, did the comical affair look, after all, something like tragedy? My reader, who expects a little novelty in tragedy, and not these stale and common effects, will never think so.

“You’ll not pretend, Frank,” says Lucy, “that in such an intellectual place as Boston a crowd as large as this can be got together, and no distinguished literary people in it. I know there are some notables aboard: do point them out to me. Pretty near everybody has a literary look.”

“Why, that’s what we call our Boston look, Cousin Lucy. You needn’t have written anything to have it, — it’s as general as tubercular consumption, and is the effect of our universal culture and habits of reading. I heard a New-Yorker say once that if you went into a corner grocery in Boston to buy a codfish, the man would ask you how you liked ‘Lucille,’ whilst he was tying it up. No, no; you mustn’t be taken in by that literary look; I’m afraid the real literary men don’t always have it. But I do see a literary man aboard yonder,” he added, craning his neck to one side, and then furtively pointing,— “the most literary man I ever knew, one of the most literary men that ever lived. His whole existence is really bound up in books; he never talks of anything else, and never thinks of anything else, I believe. Look at him, — what kind and pleasant eyes he’s got! There, he sees me!” cries Cousin Frank, with a pleasurable excitement. “How d’ye do?” he calls out.

“O Cousin Frank, introduce us,” sighs Lucy.

“Not I! He wouldn’t thank me. He doesn’t care for pretty girls outside of books; he’d be afraid of ‘em; he’s the bashfullest man alive, and all his heroines are fifty years old, at the least. But before I go any further, tell me solemnly, Lucy, you’re not interviewing me? You’re not going to write it to a New York newspaper? No? Well, I think it’s best to ask, always. Our friend there — he’s everybody’s friend, if you mean nobody’s enemy, by that, not even his own — is really what I say, — the most literary man I ever knew. He loves all epochs and phases of literature, but his passion is the Charles Lamb period and all Lamb’s friends. He loves them as if they were living men; and Lamb would have loved him if he could have known him. He speaks rapidly, and rather indistinctly, and when you meet him and say Good day, and you suppose he answers with something about the weather, ten to one he’s asking you what you think of Hazlitt’s essays on Shakespeare, or Leigh Hunt’s Italian Poets, or Lamb’s roast pig, or Barry Cornwall’s songs. He couldn’t get by a bookstall without stopping — for half an hour, at any rate. He knows just when all the new books in town are to be published, and when each bookseller is to get his invoice of old English books. He has no particular address, but if you leave your card for him at any bookstore in Boston, he’s sure to get it within two days; and in the summer-time you’re apt to meet him on these excursions. Of course, he writes about books, and very tastefully and modestly; there’s hardly any of the brand-new immortal English poets, who die off so rapidly, but has had a good word from him; but his heart is with the older fellows, from Chaucer down; and, after the Charles Lamb epoch, I don’t know whether he loves better the Elizabethan age or that of Queen Anne. Think of him making me stop the other day at a bookstall, and read through an essay out of the “Spectator!” I did it all for love of him, though money couldn’t have persuaded me that I had time; and I’m always telling him lies, and pretending to be as well acquainted as he is with authors I hardly know by name, — he seems so fondly to expect it. He’s really almost a disembodied spirit as concerns most mundane interests — his soul is in literature, as a lover’s in his mistress’s beauty; and in the next world, where, as the Swedenborgians believe, spirits seen at a distance appear like the things they most resemble in disposition, as doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I’m sure that I shall see his true and kindly soul in the guise of a noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across his back in old English text, Tom. I.”

While our friends talked and looked about them, a sudden change had come over the brightness and warmth of the day; the blue heaven had turned a chilly gray, and the water looked harsh and cold. Now, too, they noted that they were drawing near a wooden pier built into the water, and that they had been winding about in a crooked channel between muddy shallows, and that their course was overrun with long, disheveled sea-weed. The shawls had been unstrapped, and the ladies made comfortable in them.

“Ho for the beach!” cried Cousin Frank, with a vehement show of enthusiasm. “Now, then, Aunt Melissa, prepare for the great enjoyment of the day. In a few moments we shall be of the elves

     ‘That on the sand with printless foot

 Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him

 When he comes back.’

Come! we shall have three hours on the beach, and that will bring us well into the cool of the evening, and we can return by the last boat.”

“As to the cool of the evening,” said Aunt Melissa, “I don’t know. It’s quite cool enough for comfort at present, and I’m sure that anything more wouldn’t be wholesome. What’s become of our beautiful weather?” she asked, deeply plotting to gain time.

“It’s one of our Boston peculiarities, not to say merits,” answered Frank, “which you must have noticed already, that we can get rid of a fine day sooner than any other region. While you’re saying how lovely it is, a subtle change is wrought, and under skies still blue and a sun still warm the keen spirit of the east wind pierces every nerve, and all the fine weather within you is chilled and extinguished. The gray atmosphere follows, but the day first languishes in yourself. But for this, life in Boston would be insupportably perfect, if this is indeed a drawback. You’d find Bostonians to defend it, I dare say. But this isn’t a regular east wind to-day; it’s merely our nearness to the sea.”

“I think, Franklin,” said Aunt Melissa, “that we won’t go down to the beach this afternoon,” as if she had been there yesterday, and would go to-morrow. “It’s too late in the day; and it wouldn’t be good for the child, I’m sure.”

“Well, aunty, it was you determined us to wait for the boat, and it’s your right to say whether we shall leave it or not. I’m very willing not to go ashore. I always find that, after working up to an object with great effort, it’s surpassingly sweet to leave it unaccomplished at last. Then it remains forever in the region of the ideal, amongst the songs that never were sung, the pictures that never were painted. Why, in fact, should we force this pleasure? We’ve eaten our lunch, we’ve lost the warm heart of the day; why should we poorly drag over to that damp and sullen beach, where we should find three hours very long, when by going back now we can keep intact that glorious image of a day by the sea which we’ve been cherishing all summer? You’re right, Aunt Melissa; we won’t go ashore; we will stay here, and respect our illusions.”

At heart, perhaps, Lucy did not quite like this retreat; it was not in harmony with the youthful spirit of her sex, but she reflected that she could come again, — O beneficent cheat of Another Time, how much thou sparest us in our over-worked, over-enjoyed world! — she was very comfortable where she was, in a seat commanding a perfect view for the return trip; and she submitted without a murmur. Besides, now that the boat had drawn up to the pier, and discharged part of her passengers, and was waiting to take on others, Lucy was interested in a mass of fluttering dresses and wide-rimmed straw hats that drew down toward the “Rose Standish,” and gracefully thronged the pier, and prettily hesitated about, and finally came aboard with laughter and little false cries of terror, attended through all by the New England disproportion of that sex which is so foolish when it is silly. It was a large picnic party which had been spending the day upon the beach, as each of the ladies showed in her face, where, if the roses upon her cheeks were somewhat obscured by the imbrowning seaside sun, a bright pink had been compensatingly bestowed upon the point of her nose. A mysterious quiet fell upon them all when they were got aboard and had taken conspicuous places, which was accounted for presently when a loud shout was heard from the shore, and a man beside an ambulant photographic machine was seen wildly waving his hat. It is impossible to resist a temptation of this kind, and our party all yielded, and posed themselves in striking and characteristic attitudes, — even Aunt Melissa sharing the ambition to appear in a picture which she should never see, and the nurse coming out strong from the abeyance in which she had been held, and lifting the baby high into the air for a good likeness. The frantic gesticulator on the shore gave an impressive wave with both hands, took the cap from the instrument, turned his back, as photographers always do, with that air of hiding their tears, for the brief space that seems so long, and then clapped on the cap again, while a great sigh of relief went up from the whole boat-load of passengers. They were taken.

But the interval had been a luckless one for the “Rose Standish,” and when she stirred her wheels, clouds of mud rose to the top of the water, and there was no responsive movement of the boat. She was aground in the falling tide.

“There seems a pretty fair prospect of our spending some time here, after all,” said Frank, while the ladies, who had reluctantly given up the idea of staying, were now in a quiver of impatience to be off. The picnic was shifted from side to side; the engine groaned and tugged, Captain Miles Standish and his crew bestirred themselves vigorously, and at last the boat swung loose, and strode down the sea-weedy channels; while our friends, who had already done the great sights of the harbor, now settled themselves to the enjoyment of its minor traits and beauties. Here and there they passed small parties on the shore, which, with their yachts anchored near, or their boats drawn up from the water, were cooking an out-door meal by a fire that burned bright red upon the sands in the late afternoon air. In such cases, people willingly indulge themselves in saluting whatever craft goes by, and the ladies of these small picnics, as they sat round the fires, kept up a great waving of handkerchiefs, and sometimes cheered the “Rose Standish,” though I believe the Bostonians are ordinarily not a demonstrative race. Of course the large picnic on board fluttered multitudinous handkerchiefs in response, both to these people ashore and to those who hailed them from vessels which they met. They did not refuse the politeness even to the passengers on a rival boat when she passed them, though at heart they must have felt some natural pangs at being passed. The water was peopled everywhere by all sorts of sail lagging slowly homeward in the light evening breeze; and on some of the larger vessels there were family groups to be seen, and a graceful smoke, suggestive of supper, curled from the cook’s galley. I suppose these ships were chiefly coasting craft, of one kind or another, come from the Provinces at farthest; but to the ignorance and the fancy of our friends, they arrived from all remote and romantic parts of the world, — from India, from China, and from the South Seas, with cargoes of spices and gums and tropical fruits; and I see no reason why one should ever deny himself the easy pleasure they felt in painting the unknown in such lively hues. The truth is, a strange ship, if you will let her, always brings you precious freight, always arrives from Wonderland under the command of Captain Sinbad. How like a beautiful sprite she looks afar off, as if she came from some finer and fairer world than ours! Nay, we will not go out to meet her; we will not go on board; Captain Sinbad shall bring us the invoice of gold-dust, slaves, and rocs’ eggs to-night, and we will have some of the eggs for breakfast; or if he never comes, are we not just as rich? But I think these friends of ours got a yet keener pleasure out of the spectacle of a large and stately ship, that with all sails spread moved silently and steadily out toward the open sea. It is yet grander and sweeter to sail toward the unknown than to come from it; and every vessel that leaves port has this destination, and will bear you thither if you will.

 “It may be that the gulf shall wash us down;

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew,”

absently murmured Lucy, looking on this beautiful apparition.

“But I can’t help thinking of Ulysses’ cabin-boy, yonder,” said Cousin Frank, after a pause; “can you, Aunt Melissa?”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about Franklin,” answered Aunt Melissa, somewhat severely.

“Why, I mean that there is a poor wretch of a boy on board there, who’s run away, and whose heart must be aching just now at the thought of the home he has left. I hope Ulysses will be good to him, and not swear at him for a day or two, or knock him about with a belaying-pin. Just about this time his mother, up in the country, is getting ready his supper, and wondering what’s become of him, and torturing herself with hopes that break one by one; and to-night when she goes up to his empty room, having tried to persuade herself that the truant’s come back and climbed in at the window”— “Why, Franklin, this isn’t true, is it?” asks Aunt Melissa.

“Well, no, let’s pray Heaven it isn’t, in this case. It’s been true often enough to be false for once.”

“What a great, ugly, black object a ship is!” said Cousin Lucy.

Slowly the city rose up against the distance, sharpening all its outlines, and filling in all its familiar details, — like a fact which one dreams is a dream, and which, as the mists of sleep break away, shows itself for reality.

The air grows closer and warmer, — it is the breath of the hot and toil-worn land.

The boat makes her way up through the shipping, seeks her landing, and presently rubs herself affectionately against the wharf. The passengers quickly disperse themselves upon shore, dismissed each with an appropriate sarcasm by the tipsy man, who has had the means of keeping himself drunk throughout, and who now looks to the discharge of the boat’s cargo.

As our friends leave the wharf-house behind them, and straggle uneasily, and very conscious of sunburn, up the now silent length of Pearl Street to seek the nearest horse-cars, they are aware of a curious fidgeting of the nurse, who flies from one side of the pavement to the other and violently shifts the baby from one arm to the other.

“What’s the matter?” asks Frank; but before the nurse can answer, “Thim little divils,” he perceives that the whooping-coughers of the morning have taken the occasion to renew a pleasant acquaintance, and are surrounding the baby and nurse with an atmosphere of whooping-cough.

“I say, friends! we can’t stand this, you know,” says the anxious father. “We must part some time, and this is a favorable moment. Now I’ll give you all this, if you don’t come another step!” and he empties out to them, from the hand-bags he carries, the fragments of lunch which the frugal mind of Aunt Melissa had caused her to store there. Upon these the whooping-coughers hurl themselves in a body, and are soon left round the corner. Yet they would have been no disgrace to our party, whose appearance was now most disreputable: Frank and Lucy stalked ahead, with shawls dragging from their arms, the former loaded down with hand-bags and the latter with India-rubbers; Aunt Melissa came next under a burden of bloated umbrellas; the nurse last, with her hat awry, and the baby a caricature of its morning trimness, in her embrace. A day’s pleasure is so demoralizing, that no party can stand it, and come out neat and orderly.

“Cousin Frank,” asked Lucy, awfully, “what if we should meet the Mayflowers now?” — the Mayflowers being a very ancient and noble Boston family whose acquaintance was the great pride and terror of our friends’ lives.

“I should cut them dead,” said Frank, and scarcely spoke again till his party dragged slowly up the steps of their minute suburban villa.

At the door his wife met them with a troubled and anxious face.

“Calamities?” asked Frank, desperately.

“O, calamities upon calamities! We’ve got a lost child in the kitchen,” answered Mrs. Sallie.

“O good heavens!” cried her husband. “Adieu, my dreams of repose, so desirable after the quantity of active enjoyment I’ve had! Well, where is the lost child?”

III. — THE EVENING

“Where is the lost child?” repeats Frank, desperately. “Where have you got him?”

“In the kitchen.”

“Why in the kitchen?”

“How’s baby?” demands Mrs. Sallie, with the incoherent suddenness of her sex, and running halfway down the steps to meet the nurse. “Um, um, um-m-m-m,” sounds, which may stand for smothered kisses of rapture and thanksgiving that baby is not a lost child. “Has he been good, Lucy? Take him off and give him some cocoa, Mrs. O’Gonegal,” she adds in her business-like way, and with a little push to the combined nurse and baby, while Lucy answers, “O beautiful!” and from that moment, being warned through all her being by something in the other’s tone, casts aside the matronly manner which she has worn during the day, and lapses into the comfortable irresponsibility of young-ladyhood.

“What kind of a time did you have?”

“Splendid!” answers Lucy. “Delightful, I think,” she adds, as if she thought others might not think so.

“I suppose you found Gloucester a quaint old place.”

“O,” says Frank, “we didn’t go to Gloucester; we found that the City Fathers had chartered the boat for the day, so we thought we’d go to Nahant.”

“Then you’ve seen your favorite Gardens of Maolis! What in the world are they like?”

“Well; we didn’t see the Gardens of Maolis; the Nahant boat was so crowded that we couldn’t think of going on her, and so we decided we’d drive over to the Liverpool Wharf and go down to Nantasket Beach.”

“That was nice. I’m so glad on Aunt Melissa’s account. It’s much better to see the ocean from a long beach than from those Nahant rocks.”

“That’s what I said. But, you know, when we got to the wharf the boat had just left.”

“You don’t mean it! Well, then, what under the canopy did you do?”

“Why, we sat down in the wharf-house, and waited from nine o’clock till half-past two for the next boat.”

“Well, I’m glad you didn’t back out, at any rate. You did show pluck, you poor things! I hope you enjoyed the beach after you did get there.”

“Why,” says Frank, looking down, “we never got there.”

“Never got there!” gasps Mrs. Sallie. “Didn’t you go down on the afternoon boat?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you get to the beach, then?”

“We didn’t go ashore.”

“Well, that’s like you, Frank.”

“It’s a great deal more like Aunt Melissa,” answers Frank. “The air felt so raw and chilly by the time we reached the pier, that she declared the baby would perish if it was taken to the beach. Besides, nothing would persuade her that Nantasket Beach was at all different from Liverpool Wharf.”

“Never mind, never mind!” says Mrs. Sallie. “I don’t wish to hear anything more. That’s your idea of a day’s pleasure, is it? I call it a day’s disgrace, a day’s miserable giving-up. There, go in, go in; I’m ashamed of you all. Don’t let the neighbors see you, for pity’s sake. — We keep him in the kitchen,” she continues, recurring to Frank’s long-unanswered question concerning the lost child, “because he prefers it as being the room nearest to the closet where the cookies are. He’s taken advantage of our sympathies to refuse everything but cookies.”

“I suppose that’s one of the rights of lost childhood,” comments Frank, languidly; “there’s no law that can compel him to touch even cracker.”

“Well, you’d better go down and see what you can make of him. He’s driven us all wild.”

So Frank descends to the region now redolent of the preparing tea, and finds upon a chair, in the middle of the kitchen floor, a very forlorn little figure of a boy, mutely munching a sweet-cake, while now and then a tear steals down his cheeks and moistens the grimy traces of former tears. He and baby are, in the mean time regarding each other with a steadfast glare, the cook and the nurse supporting baby in this rite of hospitality.

“Well, my little man,” says his host, “how did you get here?”

The little man, perhaps because he is heartily sick of the question, is somewhat slow to answer that there was a fire; and that he ran after the steamer; and a girl found him and brought him up here.

“And that’s all the blessed thing you can get out of him,” says cook; and the lost boy looks as if he felt cook to be perfectly right.

In spite of the well-meant endeavors of the household to wash him and brush him, he is still a dreadfully travel-stained little boy, and he is powdered in every secret crease and wrinkle by that dust of old Charlesbridge, of which we always speak with an air of affected disgust, and a feeling of ill-concealed pride in an abomination so strikingly and peculiarly our own. He looks very much as if he had been following fire-engines about the streets of our learned and pulverous suburb ever since he could walk, and he certainly seems to feel himself in trouble to a certain degree; but there is easily imaginable in his bearing a conviction that after all the chief care is with others, and that, though unhappy, he is not responsible. The principal victim of his sorrows is also penetrated by this opinion, and after gazing forlornly upon him for a while, asks mechanically, “What’s your name?”

“Freddy,” is the laconic answer.

“Freddy — ?” trying with an artful inflection to lead him on to his surname.

“Freddy,” decidedly and conclusively.

“O, bless me! What’s the name of the street your papa lives on?”

This problem is far too deep for Freddy, and he takes a bite of sweet-cake in sign that he does not think of solving it. Frank looks at him gloomily for a moment, and then determines that he can grapple with the difficulty more successfully after he has had tea. “Send up the supper, Bridget. I think, my dear,” he says, after they have sat down, “we’d better all question our lost child when we’ve finished.”

So, when they have finished, they have him up in the sitting-room, and the inquisition begins.

“Now, Freddy,” his host says, with a cheerful air of lifelong friendship and confidence, “you know that everybody has got two names. Of course your first name is Freddy, and it’s a very pretty name. Well, I want you to think real hard, and then tell me what your other name is, so I can take you back to your mamma.”

At this allusion the child looks round on the circle of eager and compassionate faces, and begins to shed tears and to wring all hearts.

“What’s your name?” asks Frank, cheerfully,— “your other name, you know?”

“Freddy,” sobbed the forlorn creature.

“O good heaven! this’ll never do,” groaned the chief inquisitor. “Now, Freddy, try not to cry. What is your papa’s name, — Mr. — ?” with the leading inflection as before.

“Papa,” says Freddy.

“O, that’ll never do! Not Mr. Papa?”

“Yes,” persists Freddy.

“But, Freddy,” interposes Mrs. Sallie, as her husband falls back baffled, “when ladies come to see your mamma, what do they call her? Mrs. — ?” adopting Frank’s alluring inflection.

“Mrs. Mamma,” answers Freddy, confirmed in his error by this course; and a secret dismay possesses his questioners. They skirmish about him with every sort of query; they try to entrap him into some kind of revelation by apparently irrelevant remarks; they plan ambuscades and surprises; but Freddy looks vigilantly round upon them, and guards his personal history from every approach, and seems in every way so to have the best of it, that it is almost exasperating.

“Kindness has proved futile,” observes Frank, “and I think we ought as a last resort, before yielding ourselves to despair, to use intimidation. Now, Fred,” he says, with sudden and terrible severity, “what’s your father’s name?”

The hapless little soul is really moved to an effort of memory by this, and blubbers out something that proves in the end to resemble the family name, though for the present it is merely a puzzle of unintelligible sounds.”

“Blackman?” cries Aunt Melissa, catching desperately at these sounds.

On this, all the man and brother is roused in Freddy’s bosom, and he roars fiercely, “No! he ain’t a black man! He’s white!”

“I give it up,” says Frank, who has been looking for his hat. “I’m afraid we can’t make anything out of him; and I’ll have to go and report the case to the police. But, put him to bed, do, Sallie; he’s dropping with sleep.”

So he went out, of course supported morally by a sense of duty, but I am afraid also by a sense of adventure in some degree. It is not every day that, in so quiet a place as Charlesbridge, you can have a lost child cast upon your sympathies; and I believe that when an appeal is not really agonizing, we like so well to have our sympathies touched, we favorites of the prosperous commonplace, that most of us would enter eagerly into a pathetic case of this kind, even after a day’s pleasure. Such was certainly the mood of my friend, and he unconsciously prepared himself for an equal interest on the part of the police; but this was an error. The police heard his statement with all proper attention, and wrote it in full upon the station-slate, but they showed no feeling whatever, and behaved as if they valued a lost child no more than a child snug at home in his own crib. They said that no doubt his parents would be asking at the police-stations for him during the night, and, as if my friend would otherwise have thought of putting him into the street, they suggested that he should just keep the lost child till he was sent for. Modestly enough Frank proposed that they should make some inquiry for his parents, and was answered by the question whether they could take a man off his beat for that purpose; and remembering that beats in Charlesbridge were of such vastness that during his whole residence there he had never yet seen a policeman on his street, he was obliged to own to himself that his proposal was absurd. He felt the need of reinstating himself by something more sensible, and so he said he thought he would go down to the Port and leave word at the station there; and the police tacitly assenting to this he went.

I who have sometimes hinted that the Square is not a centre of gayety, or a scene of the greatest activity by day, feel it right to say that it has some modest charms of its own on a summer’s night, about the hour when Frank passed through it, when the post-office has just been shut, and when the different groups that haunt the place in front of the closing shops have dwindled to the loungers fit though few who will keep it well into the night, and may there be found, by the passenger on the last horse-car out from Boston, wrapt in a kind of social silence, and honorably attended by the policeman whose favored beat is in that neighborhood. They seem a feature of the bygone village life of Charlesbridge, and accord pleasantly with the town-pump and the public horse-trough, and the noble elm that by night droops its boughs so pensively, and probably dreams of its happy younger days when there were no canker-worms in the world. Sometimes this choice company sits on the curbing that goes round the terrace at the elm-tree’s foot, and then I envy every soul in it, — so tranquil it seems, so cool, so careless, so morrowless. I cannot see the faces of that luxurious society, but there I imagine is the local albino, and a certain blind man, who resorts thither much by day, and makes a strange kind of jest of his own, with a flicker of humor upon his sightless face, and a faith that others less unkindly treated by nature will be able to see the point apparently not always discernible to himself. Late at night I have a fancy that the darkness puts him on an equality with other wits, and that he enjoys his own brilliancy as well as any one.

At the Port station Frank was pleased and soothed by the tranquil air of the policeman, who sat in his shirt-sleeves outside the door, and seemed to announce, by his attitude of final disoccupation, that crimes and misdemeanors were no more. This officer at once showed a desirable interest in the case. He put on his blue coat that he might listen to the whole story in a proper figure, and then he took down the main points on the slate, and said that they would send word round to the other stations in the city, and the boy’s parents could hardly help hearing of him that night.

Returned home, Frank gave his news, and then he and Mrs. Sallie went up to look at the lost child as he slept. The sumptuous diet to which he had confined himself from the first seemed to agree with him perfectly, for he slept unbrokenly, and apparently without a consciousness of his woes. On a chair lay his clothes, in a dusty little pathetic heap; they were well-kept clothes, except for the wrong his wanderings had done them, and they showed a motherly care here and there, which it was not easy to look at with composure. The spectators of his sleep both thought of the curious chance that had thrown this little one into their charge, and considered that he was almost as completely a gift of the Unknown as if he had been following a steamer in another planet, and had thence dropped into their yard. His helplessness in accounting for himself was as affecting as that of the sublimest metaphysician; and no learned man, no superior intellect, no subtle inquirer among us lost children of the divine, forgotten home, could have been less able to say how or whence he came to be just where he found himself. We wander away and away; the dust of the road-side gathers upon us; and when some strange shelter receives us, we lie down to our sleep, inarticulate, and haunted with dreams of memory, or the memory of dreams, knowing scarcely more of the past than of the future.

“What a strange world!” sighed Mrs. Sallie; and then, as this was a mood far too speculative for her, she recalled herself to practical life suddenly. “If we should have to adopt this child, Frank”— “Why, bless my soul, we’re not obliged to adopt him! Even a lost child can’t demand that.”

“We shall adopt him, if they don’t come for him. And now, I want to know” (Mrs. Sallie spoke as if the adoption had been effected) “whether we shall give him our name, or some other?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s the first child I’ve ever adopted,” said Frank “and upon my word, I can’t say whether you have to give him a new name or not. In fact, if I’d thought of this affair of a name, I’d never have adopted him. It’s the greatest part of the burden, and if his father will only come for him, I’ll give him up without a murmur.”

In the interval that followed the proposal of this alarming difficulty, and while he sat and waited vaguely for whatever should be going to happen next, Frank was not able to repress a sense of personal resentment towards the little vagrant sleeping so carelessly there, though at the bottom of his heart there was all imaginable tenderness for him. In the fantastic character which, to his weariness, the day’s pleasure took on, it seemed an extraordinary unkindness of fate that this lost child should have been kept in reserve for him after all the rest; and he had so small consciousness of bestowing shelter and charity, and so profound a feeling of having himself been turned out of house and home by some surprising and potent agency, that if the lost child had been a regiment of Fenians billeted upon him, it could not have oppressed him more. While he remained perplexed in this perverse sentiment of invasion and dispossession, “Hark!” said Mrs. Sallie, “what’s that?”

It was a noise of dragging and shuffling on the walk in front of the house, and a low, hoarse whispering.

“I don’t know,” said Frank, “but from the kind of pleasure I’ve got out of it so far, I should say that this holiday was capable of an earthquake before midnight.”

“Listen!”

They listened, as they must, and heard the outer darkness rehearse a raucous dialogue between an unseen Bill and Jim, who were the more terrible to the imagination from being so realistically named, and who seemed to have in charge some nameless third person, a mute actor in the invisible scene. There was doubt, which he uttered, in the mind of Jim, whether they could get this silent comrade along much farther without carrying him; and there was a growling assent from Bill that he was pretty far gone, that was a fact, and that maybe Jim had better go for the wagon; then there were quick, retreating steps; and then there was a profound silence, in which the audience of this strange drama sat thrilled and speechless. The effect was not less dreadful when there rose a dull sound, as of a helpless body rubbing against the fence, and at last lowered heavily to the ground.

“O!” cried Mrs. Sallie. “Do go out and help. He’s dying!”

But even as she spoke the noise of wheels was heard. A wagon stopped before the door; there came a tugging and lifting, with a sound as of crunching gravel, and then a “There!” of great relief.

“Frank!” said Mrs. Sallie very solemnly, “if you don’t go out and help those men, I’ll never forgive you.”

Really, the drama had grown very impressive; it was a mystery, to say the least; and so it must remain forever, for when Frank, infected at last by Mrs. Sallie’s faith in tragedy, opened the door and offered his tardy services, the wagon was driven rapidly away without reply. They never learned what it had all been; and I think that if one actually honors mysteries, it is best not to look into them. How much finer, after all, if you have such a thing as this happen before your door at midnight, not to throw any light upon it! Then your probable tipsy man cannot be proved other than a tragical presence, which you can match with any inscrutable creation of fiction; and if you should ever come to write a romance, as one is very liable to do in this age, there is your unknown, a figure of strange and fearful interest, made to your hand, and capable of being used, in or out of the body, with a very gloomy effect.

While our friends yet trembled with this sensation, quick steps ascended to their door, and then followed a sharp, anxious tug at the bell.

“Ah!” cried Frank, prophetically, “here’s the father of our adopted son;” and he opened the door.

The gentleman who appeared there could scarcely frame the question to which Frank replied so cheerfully: “O yes; he’s here, and snug in bed, and fast asleep. Come up-stairs and look at him. Better let him be till morning, and then come after him,” he added, as they looked down a moment on the little sleeper.

“O no, I couldn’t,” said the father, con expressione; and then he told how he had heard of this child’s whereabouts at the Port station, and had hurried to get him, and how his mother did not know he was found yet, and was almost wild about him. They had no idea how he had got lost, and his own blind story was the only tale of his adventure that ever became known.

By this time his father had got the child partly awake, and the two men were dressing him in men’s clumsy fashion; and finally they gave it up, and rolled him in a shawl. The father lifted the slight burden, and two small arms fell about his neck. The weary child slept again.

“How has he behaved?” asked the father.

“Like a little hero,” said Frank, “but he’s been a cormorant for cookies. I think it right to tell you, in case he shouldn’t be very brilliant to-morrow, that he wouldn’t eat a bit of anything else.”

The father said he was the life of their house; and Frank said he knew how that was, — that he had a life of the house of his own; and then the father thanked him very simply and touchingly, and with the decent New England self-restraint, which is doubtless so much better than any sort of effusion. “Say good-night to the gentleman, Freddy,” he said at the door; and Freddy with closed eyes murmured a good-night from far within the land of dreams, and then was borne away to the house out of which the life had wandered with his little feet.

“I don’t know, Sallie,” said Frank, when he had given all the eagerly demanded particulars about the child’s father,— “I don’t know whether I should want many such holidays as this, in the course of the summer. On the whole, I think I’d better overwork myself and not take any relaxation, if I mean to live long. And yet I’m not sure that the day’s been altogether a failure, though all our purposes of enjoyment have miscarried. I didn’t plan to find a lost child here, when I got home, and I’m afraid I haven’t had always the most Christian feeling towards him; but he’s really the saving grace of the affair; and if this were a little comedy I had been playing, I should turn him to account with the jaded audience, and advancing to the foot-lights, should say, with my hand on my waistcoat, and a neat bow, that although every hope of the day had been disappointed, and nothing I had meant to do had been done, yet the man who had ended at midnight by restoring a lost child to the arms of its father, must own that, in spite of adverse fortune, he had enjoyed A Day’s Pleasure.”

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

It was long past the twilight hour, which has been already mentioned as so oppressive in suburban places, and it was even too late for visitors, when a resident, whom I shall briefly describe as a Contributor to the magazines, was startled by a ring at his door. As any thoughtful person would have done upon the like occasion, he ran over his acquaintance in his mind, speculating whether it were such or such a one, and dismissing the whole list of improbabilities, before he laid down the book he was reading, and answered the bell. When at last he did this, he was rewarded by the apparition of an utter stranger on his threshold, — a gaunt figure of forlorn and curious smartness towering far above him, that jerked him a nod of the head, and asked if Mr. Hapford lived there. The face which the lamp-light revealed was remarkable for a harsh two days’ growth of beard, and a single bloodshot eye; yet it was not otherwise a sinister countenance, and there was something in the strange presence that appealed and touched. The contributor, revolving the facts vaguely in his mind, was not sure, after all, that it was not the man’s clothes rather than his expression that softened him toward the rugged visage: they were so tragically cheap, and the misery of helpless needlewomen, and the poverty and ignorance of the purchaser, were so apparent in their shabby newness, of which they appeared still conscious enough to have led the way to the very window, in the Semitic quarter of the city, where they had lain ticketed, “This nobby suit for $15.”

But the stranger’s manner put both his face and his clothes out of mind, and claimed a deeper interest when, being answered that the person for whom he asked did not live there, he set his bristling lips hard together, and sighed heavily.

“They told me,” he said, in a hopeless way, “that he lived on this street, and I’ve been to every other house. I’m very anxious to find him, Cap’n,” — the contributor, of course, had no claim to the title with which he was thus decorated,— “for I’ve a daughter living with him, and I want to see her; I’ve just got home from a two years’ voyage, and” — there was a struggle of the Adam’s-apple in the man’s gaunt throat— “I find she’s about all there is left of my family.”

How complex is every human motive! This contributor had been lately thinking, whenever he turned the pages of some foolish traveller, — some empty prattler of Southern or Eastern lands, where all sensation was long ago exhausted, and the oxygen has perished from every sentiment, so has it been breathed and breathed again, — that nowadays the wise adventurer sat down beside his own register and waited for incidents to seek him out. It seemed to him that the cultivation of a patient and receptive spirit was the sole condition needed to insure the occurrence of all manner of surprising facts within the range of one’s own personal knowledge; that not only the Greeks were at our doors, but the fairies and the genii, and all the people of romance, who had but to be hospitably treated in order to develop the deepest interest of fiction, and to become the characters of plots so ingenious that the most cunning invention were poor beside them. I myself am not so confident of this, and would rather trust Mr. Charles Reade, say, for my amusement than any chance combination of events. But I should be afraid to say how much his pride in the character of the stranger’s sorrows, as proof of the correctness of his theory, prevailed with the contributor to ask him to come in and sit down; though I hope that some abstract impulse of humanity, some compassionate and unselfish care for the man’s misfortunes as misfortunes, was not wholly wanting. Indeed, the helpless simplicity with which he had confided his case might have touched a harder heart. “Thank you,” said the poor fellow, after a moment’s hesitation. “I believe I will come in. I’ve been on foot all day, and after such a long voyage it makes a man dreadfully sore to walk about so much. Perhaps you can think of a Mr. Hapford living somewhere in the neighborhood.”

He sat down, and, after a pondering silence, in which he had remained with his head fallen upon his breast, “My name is Jonathan Tinker,” he said, with the unaffected air which had already impressed the contributor, and as if he felt that some form of introduction was necessary, “and the girl that I want to find is Julia Tinker.” Then he added, resuming the eventful personal history which the listener exulted, while he regretted, to hear: “You see, I shipped first to Liverpool, and there I heard from my family; and then I shipped again for Hong-Kong, and after that I never heard a word: I seemed to miss the letters everywhere. This morning, at four o’clock, I left my ship as soon as she had hauled into the dock, and hurried up home. The house was shut, and not a soul in it; and I didn’t know what to do, and I sat down on the doorstep to wait till the neighbors woke up, to ask them what had become of my family. And the first one come out he told me my wife had been dead a year and a half, and the baby I’d never seen, with her; and one of my boys was dead; and he didn’t know where the rest of the children was, but he’d heard two of the little ones was with a family in the city.”

The man mentioned these things with the half-apologetic air observable in a certain kind of Americans when some accident obliges them to confess the infirmity of the natural feelings. They do not ask your sympathy, and you offer it quite at your own risk, with a chance of having it thrown back upon your hands. The contributor assumed the risk so far as to say, “Pretty rough!” when the stranger caused; and perhaps these homely words were best suited to reach the homely heart. The man’s quavering lips closed hard again, a kind of spasm passed over his dark face, and then two very small drops of brine shone upon his weather-worn cheeks. This demonstration, into which he had been surprised, seemed to stand for the passion of tears into which the emotional races fall at such times. He opened his lips with a kind of dry click, and went on:— “I hunted about the whole forenoon in the city, and at last I found the children. I’d been gone so long they didn’t know me, and somehow I thought the people they were with weren’t over-glad I’d turned up. Finally the oldest child told me that Julia was living with a Mr. Hapford on this street, and I started out here to-night to look her up. If I can find her, I’m all right. I can get the family together, then, and start new.”

“It seems rather odd,” mused the listener aloud, “that the neighbors let them break up so, and that they should all scatter as they did.”

“Well, it ain’t so curious as it seems, Cap’n. There was money for them at the owners’, all the time; I’d left part of my wages when I sailed; but they didn’t know how to get at it, and what could a parcel of children do? Julia’s a good girl, and when I find her I’m all right.”

The writer could only repeat that there was no Mr. Hapford living on that street, and never had been, so far as he knew. Yet there might be such a person in the neighborhood; and they would go out together, and ask at some of the houses about. But the stranger must first take a glass of wine; for he looked used up.

The sailor awkwardly but civilly enough protested that he did not want to give so much trouble, but took the glass, and, as he put it to his lips, said formally, as if it were a toast or a kind of grace, “I hope I may have the opportunity of returning the compliment.” The contributor thanked him; though, as he thought of all the circumstances of the case, and considered the cost at which the stranger had come to enjoy his politeness, he felt little eagerness to secure the return of the compliment at the same price, and added, with the consequence of another set phrase, “Not at all.” But the thought had made him the more anxious to befriend the luckless soul fortune had cast in his way; and so the two sallied out together, and rang door-bells wherever lights were still seen burning in the windows, and asked the astonished people who answered their summons whether any Mr. Hapford were known to live in the neighborhood.

And although the search for this gentleman proved vain, the contributor could not feel that an expedition which set familiar objects in such novel light? was altogether a failure. He entered so intimately into the cares and anxieties of his protege, that at times he felt himself in some inexplicable sort a shipmate of Jonathan Tinker, and almost personally a partner of his calamities. The estrangement of all things which takes place, within doors and without, about midnight may have helped to cast this doubt upon his identity; — he seemed to be visiting now for the first time the streets and neighborhoods nearest his own, and his feet stumbled over the accustomed walks. In his quality of houseless wanderer, and — so far as appeared to others — possibly worthless vagabond, he also got a new and instructive effect upon the faces which, in his real character, he knew so well by their looks of neighborly greeting; and it is his belief that the first hospitable prompting of the human heart is to shut the door in the eyes of homeless strangers who present themselves after eleven o’clock. By that time the servants are all abed, and the gentleman of the house answers the bell, and looks out with a loath and bewildered face, which gradually changes to one of suspicion, and of wonder as to what those fellows can possibly want of him, till at last the prevailing expression is one of contrite desire to atone for the first reluctance by any sort of service. The contributor professes to have observed these changing phases in the visages of those whom he that night called from their dreams, or arrested in the act of going to bed; and he drew the conclusion — very proper for his imaginable connection with the garroting and other adventurous brotherhoods — that the most flattering moment for knocking on the head people who answer a late ring at night is either in their first selfish bewilderment, or their final self-abandonment to their better impulses. It does not seem to have occurred to him that he would himself have been a much more favorable subject for the predatory arts that any of his neighbors, if his shipmate, the unknown companion of his researches for Mr. Hapford, had been at all so minded. But the faith of the gaunt giant upon which he reposed was good, and the contributor continued to wander about with him in perfect safety. Not a soul among those they asked had ever heard of a Mr. Hapford, — far less of a Julia Tinker living with him. But they all listened to the contributor’s explanation with interest and eventual sympathy; and in truth, — briefly told, with a word now and then thrown in by Jonathan Tinker, who kept at the bottom of the steps, showing like a gloomy spectre in the night, or, in his grotesque length and gauntness, like the other’s shadow cast there by the lamplight, — it was a story which could hardly fail to awaken pity.

At last, after ringing several bells where there were no lights, in the mere wantonness of good-will, and going away before they could be answered (it would be entertaining to know what dreams they caused the sleepers within), there seemed to be nothing for it but to give up the search till morning, and go to the main street and wait for the last horse-car to the city.

There, seated upon the curbstone, Jonathan Tinker, being plied with a few leading questions, told in hints and scraps the story of his hard life, which was at present that of a second mate, and had been that of a cabin-boy and of a seaman before the mast. The second mate’s place he held to be the hardest aboard ship. You got only a few dollars more than the men, and you did not rank with the officers; you took your meals alone, and in every thing you belonged by yourself. The men did not respect you, and sometimes the captain abused you awfully before the passengers. The hardest captain that Jonathan Tinker ever sailed with was Captain Gooding of the Cape. It had got to be so that no man would ship second mate under Captain Gooding; and Jonathan Tinker was with him only one voyage. When he had been home awhile, he saw an advertisement for a second mate, and he went round to the owners’. They had kept it secret who the captain was; but there was Captain Gooding in the owners’ office. “Why, here’s the man, now, that I want for a second mate,” said he, when Jonathan Tinker entered; “he knows me.”— “Captain Gooding, I know you ‘most too well to want to sail under you,” answered Jonathan. “I might go if I hadn’t been with you one voyage too many already.”

“And then the men!” said Jonathan, “the men coming aboard drunk, and having to be pounded sober! And the hardest of the fight falls on the second mate! Why, there isn’t an inch of me that hasn’t been cut over or smashed into a jell. I’ve had three ribs broken; I’ve got a scar from a knife on my cheek; and I’ve been stabbed bad enough, half a dozen times, to lay me up.”

Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much misery and such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing. “Well, what can you do?” he went on. “If you don’t strike, the men think you’re afraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard. I always tell a man, ‘Now, my man, I always begin with a man the way I mean to keep on. You do your duty and you’re all right. But if you don’t’ — Well, the men ain’t Americans any more, — Dutch, Spaniards, Chinese, Portuguee, — and it ain’t like abusing a white man.”

Jonathan Tinker was plainly part of the horrible tyranny which we all know exists on shipboard; and his listener respected him the more that, though he had heart enough to be ashamed of it, he was too honest not to own it.

Why did he still follow the sea? Because he did not know what else to do. When he was younger, he used to love it, but now he hated it. Yet there was not a prettier life in the world if you got to be captain. He used to hope for that once, but not now; though he thought he could navigate a ship. Only let him get his family together again, and he would — yes, he would — try to do something ashore.

No car had yet come in sight, and so the contributor suggested that they should walk to the car-office, and look in the “Directory,” which is kept there, for the name of Hapford, in search of whom it had already been arranged that they should renew their acquaintance on the morrow. Jonathan Tinker, when they had reached the office, heard with constitutional phlegm that the name of the Hapford, for whom he inquired was not in the “Directory.” “Never mind,” said the other; “come round to my house in the morning. We’ll find him yet.” So they parted with a shake of the hand, the second mate saying that he believed he should go down to the vessel and sleep aboard, — if he could sleep, — and murmuring at the last moment the hope of returning the compliment, while the other walked homeward, weary as to the flesh, but, in spite of his sympathy for Jonathan Tinker, very elate in spirit. The truth is, — and however disgraceful to human nature, let the truth still be told, — he had recurred to his primal satisfaction in the man as calamity capable of being used for such and such literary ends, and, while he pitied him, rejoiced in him as an episode of real life quite as striking and complete as anything in fiction. It was literature made to his hand. Nothing could be better, he mused; and once more he passed the details of the story in review, and beheld all those pictures which the poor fellow’s artless words had so vividly conjured up: he saw him leaping ashore in the gray summer dawn as soon as the ship hauled into the dock, and making his way, with his vague sea-legs unaccustomed to the pavements, up through the silent and empty city streets; he imagined the tumult of fear and hope which the sight of the man’s home must have caused in him, and the benumbing shock of finding it blind and deaf to all his appeals; he saw him sitting down upon what had been his own threshold, and waiting in a sort of bewildered patience till the neighbors should be awake, while the noises of the streets gradually arose, and the wheels began to rattle over the stones, and the milk-man and the ice-man came and went, and the waiting figure began to be stared at, and to challenge the curiosity of the passing policeman; he fancied the opening of the neighbor’s door, and the slow, cold understanding of the case; the manner, whatever it was, in which the sailor was told that one year before his wife had died, with her babe, and that his children were scattered, none knew where. As the contributor dwelt pityingly upon these things, but at the same time estimated their aesthetic value one by one, he drew near the head of his street, and found himself a few paces behind a boy slouching onward through the night, to whom he called out, adventurously, and with no real hope of information,— “Do you happen to know anybody on this street by the name of Hapford?”

“Why no, not in this town,” said the boy; but he added that there was a street of the same name in a neighboring suburb, and that there was a Hapford living on it.

“By Jove!” thought the contributor, “this is more like literature than ever;” and he hardly knew whether to be more provoked at his own stupidity in not thinking of a street of the same name in the next village, or delighted at the element of fatality which the fact introduced into the story; for Tinker, according to his own account, must have landed from the cars a few rods from the very door he was seeking, and so walked farther and farther from it every moment. He thought the case so curious, that he laid it briefly before the boy, who, however he might have been inwardly affected, was sufficiently true to the national traditions not to make the smallest conceivable outward sign of concern in it.

At home, however, the contributor related his adventures and the story of Tinker’s life, adding the fact that he had just found out where Mr. Hapford lived. “It was the only touch wanting,” said he; “the whole thing is now perfect.”

“It’s too perfect,” was answered from a sad enthusiasm. “Don’t speak of it! I can’t take it in.”

“But the question is,” said the contributor, penitently taking himself to task for forgetting the hero of these excellent misfortunes in his delight at their perfection, “how am I to sleep to-night, thinking of that poor soul’s suspense and uncertainty? Never mind, — I’ll be up early, and run over and make sure that it is Tinker’s Hapford, before he gets out here, and have a pleasant surprise for him. Would it not be a justifiable coup de th��tre to fetch his daughter here, and let her answer his ring at the door when he comes in the morning?”

This plan was discouraged. “No, no; let them meet in their own way. Just take him to Hapford’s house and leave him.”

“Very well. But he’s too good a character to lose sight of. He’s got to come back here and tell us what he intends to do.”

The birds, next morning, not having had the second mate on their minds either as an unhappy man or a most fortunate episode, but having slept long and soundly, were singing in a very sprightly way in the way-side trees; and the sweetness of their notes made the contributor’s heart light as he climbed the hill and rang at Mr. Hapford’s door.

The door was opened by a young girl of fifteen or sixteen, whom he knew at a glance for the second mate’s daughter, but of whom, for form’s sake, he asked if there were a girl named Julia Tinker living there.

“My name’s Julia Tinker,” answered the maid, who had rather a disappointing face.

“Well,” said the contributor, “your father’s got back from his Hong-Kong voyage.”

“Hong-Kong voyage?” echoed the girl, with a stare of helpless inquiry, but no other visible emotion.

“Yes. He had never heard of your mother’s death. He came home yesterday morning, and was looking for you all day.”

Julia Tinker remained open-mouthed but mute; and the other was puzzled at the want of feeling shown, which he could not account for even as a national trait. “Perhaps there’s some mistake,” he said.

“There must be,” answered Julia: “my father hasn’t been to sea for a good many years. My father,” she added, with a diffidence indescribably mingled with a sense of distinction,— “my father’s in State’s Prison. What kind of looking man was this?”

The contributor mechanically described him.

Julia Tinker broke into a loud, hoarse laugh. “Yes, it’s him, sure enough.” And then, as if the joke were too good to keep: “Miss Hapford, Miss Hapford, father’s got out. Do come here!” she called into a back room.

When Mrs. Hapford appeared, Julia fell back, and, having deftly caught a fly on the door-post, occupied herself in plucking it to pieces, while she listened to the conversation of the others.

“It’s all true enough,” said Mrs. Hapford, when the writer had recounted the moving story of Jonathan Tinker, “so far as the death of his wife and baby goes. But he hasn’t been to sea for a good many years, and he must have just come out of State’s Prison, where he was put for bigamy. There’s always two sides to a story, you know; but they say it broke his first wife’s heart, and she died. His friends don’t want him to find his children, and this girl especially.”

“He’s found his children in the city,” said the contributor, gloomily, being at a loss what to do or say, in view of the wreck of his romance.

“O, he’s found ’em has he?” cried Julia, with heightened amusement. “Then he’ll have me next, if I don’t pack and go.”

“I’m very, very sorry,” said the contributor, secretly resolved never to do another good deed, no matter how temptingly the opportunity presented itself. “But you may depend he won’t find out from me where you are. Of course I had no earthly reason for supposing his story was not true.”

“Of course,” said kind-hearted Mrs. Hapford, mingling a drop of honey with the gall in the contributor’s soul, “you only did your duty.”

And indeed, as he turned away he did not feel altogether without compensation. However Jonathan Tinker had fallen in his esteem as a man, he had even risen as literature. The episode which had appeared so perfect in its pathetic phases did not seem less finished as a farce; and this person, to whom all things of every-day life presented themselves in periods more or less rounded, and capable of use as facts or illustrations, could not but rejoice in these new incidents, as dramatically fashioned as the rest. It occurred to him that, wrought into a story, even better use might be made of the facts now than before, for they had developed questions of character and of human nature which could not fail to interest. The more he pondered upon his acquaintance with Jonathan Tinker, the more fascinating the erring mariner became, in his complex truth and falsehood, his delicately blending shades of artifice and na�vet�. He must, it was felt, have believed to a certain point in his own inventions: nay, starting with that groundwork of truth, — the fact that his wife was really dead, and that he had not seen his family for two years, — why should he not place implicit faith in all the fictions reared upon it? It was probable that he felt a real sorrow for her loss, and that he found a fantastic consolation in depicting the circumstances of her death so that they should look like his inevitable misfortunes rather than his faults. He might well have repented his offense during those two years of prison; and why should he not now cast their dreariness and shame out of his memory, and replace them with the freedom and adventure of a two years’ voyage to China, — so probable, in all respects, that the fact should appear an impossible nightmare? In the experiences of his life he had abundant material to furnish forth the facts of such a voyage, and in the weariness and lassitude that should follow a day’s walking equally after a two years’ voyage and two years’ imprisonment, he had as much physical proof in favor of one hypothesis as the other. It was doubtless true, also, as he said, that he had gone to his house at dawn, and sat down on the threshold of his ruined home; and perhaps he felt the desire he had expressed to see his daughter, with a purpose of beginning life anew; and it may have cost him a veritable pang when he found that his little ones did not know him. All the sentiments of the situation were such as might persuade a lively fancy of the truth of its own inventions; and as he heard these continually repeated by the contributor in their search for Mr. Hapford, they must have acquired an objective force and repute scarcely to be resisted. At the same time, there were touches of nature throughout Jonathan Tinker’s narrative which could not fail to take the faith of another. The contributor, in reviewing it, thought it particularly charming that his mariner had not overdrawn himself, or attempted to paint his character otherwise than as it probably was; that he had shown his ideas and practices of life to be those of a second mate, nor more nor less, without the gloss of regret or the pretenses to refinement that might be pleasing to the supposed philanthropist with whom he had fallen in. Captain Gooding was of course a true portrait; and there was nothing in Jonathan Tinker’s statement of the relations of a second mate to his superiors and his inferiors which did not agree perfectly with what the contributor had just read in “Two Years before the Mast,” — a book which had possibly cast its glamour upon the adventure. He admired also the just and perfectly characteristic air of grief in the bereaved husband and father, — those occasional escapes from the sense of loss into a brief hilarity and forgetfulness, and those relapses into the hovering gloom, which every one has observed in this poor, crazy human nature when oppressed by sorrow, and which it would have been hard to simulate. But, above all, he exulted in that supreme stroke of the imagination given by the second mate when, at parting, he said he believed he would go down and sleep on board the vessel. In view of this, the State’s Prison theory almost appeared a malign and foolish scandal.

Yet even if this theory were correct, was the second mate wholly answerable for beginning his life again with the imposture he had practiced? The contributor had either so fallen in love with the literary advantages of his forlorn deceiver that he would see no moral obliquity in him, or he had touched a subtler verity at last in pondering the affair. It seemed now no longer a farce, but had a pathos which, though very different from that of its first aspect, was hardly less tragical. Knowing with what coldness, or, at the best, uncandor, he (representing Society in its attitude toward convicted Error) would have met the fact had it been owned to him at first, he had not virtue enough to condemn the illusory stranger, who must have been helpless to make at once evident any repentance he felt or good purpose he cherished. Was it not one of the saddest consequences of the man’s past, — a dark necessity of misdoing, — that, even with the best will in the world to retrieve himself, his first endeavor must involve a wrong? Might he not, indeed, be considered a martyr, in some sort, to his own admirable impulses? I can see clearly enough where the contributor was astray in this reasoning, but I can also understand how one accustomed to value realities only as they resembled fables should be won with such pensive sophistry; and I can certainly sympathize with his feeling that the mariner’s failure to reappear according to appointment added its final and most agreeable charm to the whole affair, and completed the mystery from which the man emerged and which swallowed him up again.

SCENE

On that loveliest autumn morning, the swollen tide had spread over all the russet levels, and gleamed in the sunlight a mile away. As the contributor moved onward down the street, luminous on either hand with crimsoning and yellowing maples, he was so filled with the tender serenity of the scene, as not to be troubled by the spectacle of small Irish houses standing miserably about on the flats ankle deep, as it were, in little pools of the tide, or to be aware at first, of a strange stir of people upon the streets: a fluttering to and fro and lively encounter and separation of groups of bareheaded women, a flying of children through the broken fences of the neighborhood, and across the vacant lots on which the insulted sign-boards forbade them to trespass; a sluggish movement of men through all, and a pause of different vehicles along the sidewalks. When a sense of these facts had penetrated his enjoyment, he asked a matron whose snowy arms, freshly taken from the wash-tub, were folded across a mighty chest, “What is the matter?”

“A girl drowned herself, sir-r-r, over there on the flats, last Saturday, and they’re looking for her.”

“It was the best thing she could do,” said another matron grimly.

Upon this answer that literary soul fell at once to patching himself up a romantic story for the suicide, after the pitiful fashion of this fiction-ridden age, when we must relate everything we see to something we have read. He was the less to blame for it, because he could not help it; but certainly he is not to be praised for his associations with the tragic fact brought to his notice. Nothing could have been more trite or obvious, and he felt his intellectual poverty so keenly that he might almost have believed his discomfort a sympathy for the girl who had drowned herself last Saturday. But of course, this could not be, for he had but lately been thinking what a very tiresome figure to the imagination the Fallen Woman had become. As a fact of Christian civilization, she was a spectacle to wring one’s heart, he owned; but he wished she were well out of the romances, and it really seemed a fatality that she should be the principal personage of this little scene. The preparation for it, whatever it was to be, was so deliberate, and the reality had so slight relation to the French roofs and modern improvements of the comfortable Charlesbridge which he knew, that he could not consider himself other than as a spectator awaiting some entertainment, with a faint inclination to be critical.

In the mean time there passed through the motley crowd, not so much a cry as a sensation of “They’ve found her, they’ve found her!” and then the one terrible picturesque fact, “She was standing upright!”

Upon this there was wilder and wilder clamor among the people, dropping by degrees and almost dying away, before a flight of boys came down the street with the tidings, “They are bringing her — bringing her in a wagon.”

The contributor knew that she whom they were bringing in the wagon, had had the poetry of love to her dismal and otherwise squalid death; but the history was of fancy, not of fact in his mind. Of course, he reflected, her lot must have been obscure and hard; the aspect of those concerned about her death implied that. But of her hopes and her fears, who could tell him anything? To be sure he could imagine the lovers, and how they first met, and where, and who he was that was doomed to work her shame and death; but here his fancy came upon something coarse and common: a man of her own race and grade, handsome after that manner of beauty which is so much more hateful than ugliness is; or, worse still, another kind of man whose deceit must have been subtler and wickeder; but whatever the person, a presence defiant of sympathy or even interest, and simply horrible. Then there were the details of the affair, in great degree common to all love affairs, and not varying so widely in any condition of life; for the passion which is so rich and infinite to those within its charm, is apt to seem a little tedious and monotonous in its character, and poor in resources to the cold looker-on.

Then, finally, there was the crazy purpose and its fulfillment: the headlong plunge from bank or bridge; the eddy, and the bubbles on the current that calmed itself above the suicide; the tide that rose and stretched itself abroad in the sunshine, carrying hither and thither the burden with which it knew not what to do; the arrest, as by some ghastly caprice of fate, of the dead girl, in that upright posture, in which she should meet the quest for her, as it were defiantly.

And now they were bringing her in a wagon.

Involuntarily all stood aside, and waited till the funeral car, which they saw, should come up toward them through the long vista of the maple-shaded street, a noiseless riot stirring the legs and arms of the boys into frantic demonstration, while the women remained quiet with arms folded or akimbo. Before and behind the wagon, driven slowly, went a guard of ragged urchins, while on the raised seat above sat two Americans, unperturbed by anything, and concerned merely with the business of the affair.

The vehicle was a grocer’s cart which had perhaps been pressed into the service; and inevitably the contributor thought of Zenobia, and of Miles Coverdale’s belief that if she could have foreboded all the post-mortem ugliness and grotesqueness of suicide, she never would have drowned herself. This girl, too, had doubtless had her own ideas of the effect that her death was to make, her conviction that it was to wring one heart, at least, and to strike awe and pity to every other; and her woman’s soul must have been shocked from death could she have known in what a ghastly comedy the body she put off was to play a part.

In the bottom of the cart lay something long and straight and terrible, covered with a red shawl that drooped over the end of the wagon; and on this thing were piled the baskets in which the grocers had delivered their orders for sugar and flour, and coffee and tea. As the cart jolted through their lines, the boys could no longer be restrained; they broke out with wild yells, and danced madly about it, while the red shawl hanging from the rigid feet nodded to their frantic mirth; and the sun dropped its light through the maples and shone bright upon the flooded date.

JUBILEE DAYS

I believe I have no good reason for including among these suburban sketches my recollections of the Peace Jubilee, celebrated by a monster musical entertainment at Boston, in June, 1869; and I do not know if it will serve as excuse for their intrusion to say that the exhibition was not urban in character, and that I attended it in a feeling of curiosity and amusement which the Bostonians did not seem to feel, and which I suspect was a strictly suburban if not rural sentiment.

I thought, on that Tuesday morning, as our horse-car drew near the Long Bridge, and we saw the Coliseum spectral through the rain, that Boston was going to show people representing other parts of the country her Notion of weather. I looked forward to a forenoon of clammy warmth, and an afternoon of clammy cold and of east wind, with a misty nightfall soaking men to the bones. But the day really turned out well enough; it was showery, but not shrewish, and it smiled pleasantly at sunset, as if content with the opening ceremonies of the Great Peace Jubilee.

The city, as we entered it, gave due token of excitement, and we felt the celebration even in the air, which had a holiday quality very different from that of ordinary workday air. The crowds filled the decorous streets, and the trim pathways of the Common and the Public Garden, and flowed in an orderly course towards the vast edifice on the Back Bay, presenting the interesting points which always distinguish a crowd come to town from a city crowd. You get so used to the Boston face and the Boston dress, that a coat from New York or a visage from Chicago is at once conspicuous to you; and in these people there was not only this strangeness, but the different oddities that lurk in out-of-way corners of society everywhere had started suddenly into notice. Long-haired men, popularly supposed to have perished with the institution of slavery, appeared before me, and men with various causes and manias looking from their wild eyes confronted each other, let alone such charlatans as had clothed themselves quaintly or grotesquely to add a charm to the virtue of whatever nostrum they peddled. It was, however, for the most part, a remarkably well-dressed crowd; and therein it probably differed more than in any other respect from the crowd which a holiday would have assembled in former times. There was little rusticity to be noted anywhere, and the uncouthness which has already disappeared from the national face seemed to be passing from the national wardrobe. Nearly all the visitors seemed to be Americans, but neither the Yankee type nor the Hoosier was to be found. They were apparently very happy, too; the ancestral solemnity of the race that amuses itself sadly was not to be seen in them, and, if they were not making it a duty to be gay, they were really taking their pleasure in a cheerful spirit.

There was, in fact, something in the sight of the Coliseum, as we approached it, which was a sufficient cause of elation to whoever is buoyed up by the flutter of bright flags, and the movement in and about holiday booths, as I think we all are apt to be. One may not have the stomach of happier days for the swing or the whirligig; he may not drink soda-water intemperately; pop-corn may not tempt him, nor tropical fruits allure; but he beholds them without gloom, — nay, a grin inevitably lights up his countenance at the sight of a great show of these amusements and refreshments. And any Bostonian might have felt proud that morning that his city did not hide the light of her mercantile merit under a bushel, but blazoned it about on the booths and walls in every variety of printed and painted advertisement. To the mere aesthetic observer, these vast placards gave the delight of brilliant color, and blended prettily enough in effect with the flags; and at first glance I received quite as much pleasure from the frescoes that advised me where to buy my summer clothing, as from any bunting I saw.

I had the good fortune on the morning of this first Jubilee day to view the interior of the Coliseum when there was scarcely anybody there, — a trifle of ten thousand singers at one end, and a few thousand other people scattered about over the wide expanses of parquet and galleries. The decorations within, as without, were a pleasure to the eyes that love gayety of color; and the interior was certainly magnificent, with those long lines of white and blue drapery roofing the balconies, the slim, lofty columns festooned with flags and drooping banners, the arms of the States decking the fronts of the galleries, and the arabesques of painted muslin everywhere. I do not know that my taste concerned itself with the decorations, or that I have any taste in such things; but I testify that these tints and draperies gave no small part of the comfort of being where all things conspired for one’s pleasure. The airy amplitude of the building, the perfect order and the perfect freedom of movement, the ease of access and exit, the completeness of the arrangements that in the afternoon gave all of us thirty thousand spectators a chance to behold the great spectacle as well as to hear the music, were felt, I am sure, as personal favors by every one. These minor particulars, in fact, served greatly to assist you in identifying yourself, when the vast hive swarmed with humanity, and you became a mere sentient atom of the mass.

It was rumored in the morning that the ceremonies were to begin with prayer by a hundred ministers, but I missed this striking feature of the exhibition, for I did not arrive in the afternoon till the last speech was being made by a gentleman whom I saw gesticulating effectively, and whom I suppose to have been intelligible to a matter of twenty thousand people in his vicinity, but who was to me, of the remote, outlying thirty thousand, a voice merely. One word only I caught, and I report it here that posterity may know as much as we thirty thousand contemporaries did of

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

. . . . . . . (sensation.) . . . . . . . . . . (cheers.). . . . refinement . . . . . . . . . . (great applause.)

I do not know if I shall be able to give an idea of the immensity of this scene; but if such a reader as has the dimensions of the Coliseum accurately fixed in his mind will, in imagination, densely hide all that interminable array of benching in the parquet and the galleries and the slopes at either end of the edifice with human heads, showing here crowns, there occiputs, and yonder faces, he will perhaps have some notion of the spectacle as we beheld it from the northern hill-side. Some thousands of heads nearest were recognizable as attached by the usual neck to the customary human body, but for the rest, we seemed to have entered a world of cherubim. Especially did the multitudinous singers seated far opposite encourage this illusion; and their fluttering fans and handkerchiefs wonderfully mocked the movement of those cravat-like pinions which the fancy attributed to them. They rose or sank at the wave of the director’s baton; and still looked like an innumerable flock of cherubs drifting over some slope of Paradise, or settling upon it, — if cherubs can settle.

The immensity was quite as striking to the mind as to the eye, and an absolute democracy was appreciable in it. Not only did all artificial distinctions cease, but those of nature were practically obliterated, and you felt for once the full meaning of unanimity. No one was at a disadvantage; one was as wise, as good, as handsome as another. In most public assemblages, the foolish eye roves in search of the vanity of female beauty, and rests upon some lovely visage, or pretty figure; but here it seemed to matter nothing whether ladies were well or ill-looking; and one might have been perfectly ascetic without self-denial. A blue eye or a black, — what of it? A mass of blonde or chestnut hair, this sort of walking-dress or that, — you might note the difference casually in a few hundred around you; but a sense of those myriads of other eyes and chignons and walking-dresses absorbed the impression in an instant, and left a dim, strange sense of loss, as if all women had suddenly become Woman. For the time, one would have been preposterously conceited to have felt his littleness in that crowd; you never thought of yourself in an individual capacity at all. It was as if you were a private in an army, or a very ordinary billow of the sea, feeling the battle or the storm, in a collective sort of way, but unable to distinguish your sensations from those of the mass. If a rafter had fallen and crushed you and your unimportant row of people, you could scarcely have regarded it as a personal calamity, but might have found it disagreeable as a shock to that great body of humanity. Recall, then, how astonished you were to be recognized by some one, and to have your hand shaken in your individual character of Smith. “Smith? My dear What’s-your-name, I am for the present the fifty-thousandth part of an enormous emotion!”

It was as difficult to distribute the various facts of the whole effect, as to identify one’s self. I had only a public and general consciousness of the delight given by the harmony of hues in the parquet below; and concerning the orchestra I had at first no distinct impression save of the three hundred and thirty violin-bows held erect like standing wheat at one motion of the director’s wand, and then falling as if with the next he swept them down. Afterwards files of men with horns, and other files of men with drums and cymbals, discovered themselves; while far above all, certain laborious figures pumped or ground with incessant obeisance at the apparatus supplying the organ with wind.

What helped, more than anything else, to restore you your dispersed and wandering individuality was the singing of Parepa-Rosa, as she triumphed over the harmonious rivalry of the orchestra. There was something in the generous amplitude and robust cheerfulness of this great artist that accorded well with the ideal of the occasion; she was in herself a great musical festival; and one felt, as she floated down the stage with her far-spreading white draperies, and swept the audience a colossal courtesy, that here was the embodied genius of the Jubilee. I do not trust myself to speak particularly of her singing, for I have the natural modesty of people who know nothing about music, and I have not at command the phraseology of those who pretend to understand it; but I say that her voice filled the whole edifice with delicious melody, that it soothed and composed and utterly enchanted, that, though two hundred violins accompanied her, the greater sweetness of her note prevailed over all, like a mighty will commanding many. What a sublime ovation for her when a hundred thousand hands thundered their acclaim! A victorious general, an accepted lover, a successful young author, — these know a measure of bliss, I dare say; but in one throb, the singer’s heart, as it leaps in exultation at the loud delight of her applausive thousands, must out-enjoy them all. Let me lay these poor little artificial flowers of rhetoric at the feet of the divine singer, as a faint token of gratitude and eloquent intention.

When Parepa (or Prepper, as I have heard her name popularly pronounced) had sung, the revived consciousness of an individual life rose in rebellion against the oppression of that dominant vastness. In fact, human nature can stand only so much of any one thing. To a certain degree you accept and conceive of facts truthfully, but beyond this a mere fantasticality rules; and having got enough of grandeur, the senses played themselves false. That array of fluttering and tuning people on the southern slope began to look minute, like the myriad heads assembled in the infinitesimal photograph which you view through one of those little half-inch lorgnettes; and you had the satisfaction of knowing that to any lovely infinitesimality yonder you showed no bigger than a carpet-tack. The whole performance now seemed to be worked by those tireless figures pumping at the organ, in obedience to signals from a very alert figure on the platform below. The choral and orchestral thousands sang and piped and played; and at a given point in the scena from Verdi, a hundred fairies in red shirts marched down through the sombre mass of puppets and beat upon as many invisible anvils.

This was the stroke of anti-climax; and the droll sound of those anvils, so far above all the voices and instruments in its pitch, thoroughly disillusioned you and restored you finally to your proper entity and proportions. It was the great error of the great Jubilee, and where almost everything else was noble and impressive, — where the direction was faultless, and the singing and instrumentation as perfectly controlled as if they were the result of one volition, — this anvil-beating was alone ignoble and discordant, — trivial and huge merely. Not even the artillery accompaniment, in which the cannon were made to pronounce words of two syllables, was so bad.

The dimensions of this sketch bear so little proportion to those of the Jubilee, that I must perforce leave most of its features unnoticed; but I wish to express the sense of enjoyment which prevailed (whenever the anvils were not beaten) over every other feeling, even over wonder. To the ear as to the eye it was a delight, and it was an assured success in the popular affections from the performance of the first piece. For my own part, if one pleasurable sensation, besides that received from Parepa’s singing, distinguished itself from the rest, it was that given by the performance of the exquisite Coronation March from Meyerbeer’s “Prophet;” but I say this under protest of the pleasure taken in the choral rendering of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Closely allying themselves to these great raptures were the minor joys of wandering freely about from point to point, of receiving fresh sensations from the varying lights and aspects in which the novel scene presented itself with its strange fascinations, and of noting, half consciously, the incessant movement of the crowd as it revealed itself in changing effects of color. Then the gay tumult of the fifteen minutes of intermission between the parts, when all rose with a susurrus of innumerable silks, and the thousands of pretty singers fluttered about, and gossiped tremulously and delightedly over the glory of the performance, revealing themselves as charming feminine personalities, each with her share in the difficulty and the achievement, each with her pique or pride, and each her something to tell her friend of the conduct, agreeable or displeasing, of some particular him! Even the quick dispersion of the mass at the close was a marvel of orderliness and grace, as the melting and separating parts, falling asunder, radiated from the centre, and flowed and rippled rapidly away, and left the great hall empty and bare at last.

And as you emerged from the building, what bizarre and perverse feeling was that you knew? Something as if all-out-doors were cramped and small, and it were better to return to the freedom and amplitude of the interior?

On the second day, much that was wonderful in a first experience of the festival was gone; but though the novelty had passed away, the cause for wonder was even greater. If on the first day the crowd was immense, it was now something which the imperfect state of the language will not permit me to describe; perhaps awful will serve the purpose as well as any other word now in use. As you looked round, from the centre of the building, on that restless, fanning, fluttering multitude, to right and left and north and south, all comparisons and similitudes abandoned you. If you were to write of the scene, you felt that your effort, at the best, must be a meagre sketch, suggesting something to those who had seen the fact, but conveying no intelligible impression of it to any one else. The galleries swarmed, the vast slopes were packed, in the pampa-like parquet even the aisles were half filled with chairs, while a cloud of placeless wanderers moved ceaselessly on the borders of the mass under the balconies.

When that common-looking, uncommon little man whom we have called to rule over us entered the house, and walked quietly down to his seat in the centre of it, a wild, inarticulate clamor, like no other noise in the world, swelled from every side, till General Grant rose and showed himself, when it grew louder than ever, and then gradully subsided into silence. Then a voice, which might be uttering some mortal alarm, broke repeatedly across the stillness from one of the balconies, and a thousand glasses were leveled in that direction, while everywhere else the mass hushed itself with a mute sense of peril. The capacity of such an assemblage for self-destruction was, in fact, but too evident. From fire, in an edifice of which the sides could be knocked out in a moment, there could have been little danger; the fabric’s strength had been perfectly tested the day before, and its fall was not to be apprehended; but we had ourselves greatly to dread. A panic could have been caused by any mad or wanton person, in which thousands might have been instantly trampled to death; and it seemed long till that foolish voice was stilled, and the house lapsed back into tranquillity, and the enjoyment of the music. In the performance I recall nothing disagreeable, nothing that to my ignorance seemed imperfect, though I leave it to the wise in music to say how far the great concert was a success. I saw a flourish of the director’s wand, and I heard the voices or the instruments, or both, respond, and I knew by my programme that I was enjoying an unprecedented quantity of Haydn or Handel or Meyerbeer or Rossini or Mozart, afforded with an unquestionable precision and promptness; but I own that I liked better to stroll about the three-acre house, and that for me the music was, at best, only one of the joys of the festival.

There was good hearing outside for those that desired to listen to the music, with seats to let in the surrounding tents and booths; and there was unlimited seeing for the mere looker-on. At least fifty thousand people seemed to have come to the Jubilee with no other purpose than to gaze upon the outside of the building. The crowd was incomparably greater than that of the day before; all the main thoroughfares of the city roared with a tide of feet that swept through the side streets, and swelled aimlessly up the places, and eddied there, and poured out again over the pavements. The carriage-ways were packed with every sort of vehicle, with foot-passengers crowded from the sidewalks, and with the fragments of the military parade in honor of the President, with infantry, with straggling cavalrymen, with artillery. All the paths of the Common and the Garden were filled, and near the Coliseum the throngs densified on every side into an almost impenetrable mass, that made the doors of the building difficult to approach and at times inaccessible.

The crowd differed from that of the first day chiefly in size. There were more country faces and country garbs to be seen, though it was still, on the whole, a regular-featured and well-dressed crowd, with still very few but American visages. It seemed to be also a very frugal-minded crowd, and to spend little upon the refreshments and amusements provided for it. In these, oddly enough, there was nothing of the march of mind to be observed; they Were the refreshments and amusements of a former generation. I think it would not be extravagant to say that there were tons of pie for sale in a multitude of booths, with lemonade, soda-water, and ice-cream in proportion; but I doubt if there was a ton of pie sold, and towards the last the venerable pastry was quite covered with dust. Neither did people seem to care much for oranges or bananas or peanuts, or even pop-corn, — five cents a package and a prize in each package. Many booths stood unlet, and in others the pulverous ladies and gentlemen, their proprietors, were in the enjoyment of a leisure which would have been elegant if it had not been forced. There was one shanty, not otherwise distinguished from the rest, in which French soups were declared to be for sale; but these alien pottages seemed to be no more favored than the most poisonous of our national viands. But perhaps they were not French soups, or perhaps the vicinage of the shanty was not such as to impress a belief in their genuineness upon people who like French soups. Let us not be too easily disheartened by the popular neglect of them. If the daring reformer who inscribed French soups upon his sign will reappear ten years hence, we shall all flock to his standard. Slavery is abolished; pie must follow. Doubtless in the year 1900, the managers of a Jubilee would even let the refreshment-rooms within their Coliseum to a cook who would offer the public something not so much worse than the worst that could be found in the vilest shanty restaurant on the ground. At the Jubilee, of which I am writing, the unhappy person who went into the Coliseum rooms to refresh himself was offered for coffee a salty and unctuous wash, in one of those thick cups which are supposed to be proof against the hard usage of “guests” and scullions in humble eating-houses, and which are always so indescribably nicked and cracked, and had pushed towards him a bowl of veteran sugar, and a tin spoon that had never been cleaned in the world, while a young person stood by, and watched him, asking, “Have you paid for that coffee?”

The side-shows and the other amusements seemed to have addressed themselves to the crowd with the same mistaken notion of its character and requirements; though I confess that I witnessed their neglect with regret, whether from a feeling that they were at least harmless, or an unconscious sympathy with any quite idle and unprofitable thing. Those rotary, legless horses, on which children love to ride in a perpetual sickening circle, — the type of all our effort, — were nearly always mounted; but those other whirligigs, or whatever the dreadful circles with their swinging seats are called, were often so empty that they must have been distressing, from their want of balance, to the muscles as well as the spirits of their proprietors. The society of monsters was also generally shunned, and a cow with five legs gave milk from the top of her back to an audience of not more than six persons. The public apathy had visibly wrought upon the temper of the gentleman who lectured upon this gifted animal, and he took inquiries in an ironical manner that contrasted disadvantageously with the philosophical serenity of the person who had a weighing-machine outside, and whom I saw sitting in the chair and weighing himself by the hour, with an expression of profound enjoyment. Perhaps a man of less bulk could not have entered so keenly into that simple pleasure.

There was a large tent on the grounds for dramatical entertainments, with six performances a day, into which I was lured by a profusion of high-colored posters, and some such announcement, as that the beautiful serio-comic danseuse and world-renowned cloggist, Mile. Brown, would appear. About a dozen people were assembled within, and we waited a half-hour beyond the time announced for the curtain to rise, during which the spectacle of a young man in black broadcloth, eating a cocoa-nut with his pen-knife, had a strange and painful fascination. At the end of this half-hour, our number was increased to eighteen, when the orchestra appeared, — a snare-drummer and two buglers. These took their place at the back of the tent; the buglers, who were Germans, blew seriously and industriously at their horns; but the native-born citizen, who played the drum, beat it very much at random, and in the mean time smoked a cigar, while his humorous friend kept time upon his shoulders by striking him there with a cane. How long this might have lasted, I cannot tell; but, after another delay, I suddenly bethought me whether it were not better not to see Mile. Brown, after all? I rose, and stole softly out behind the rhythmic back of the drummer; and the world-renowned cloggist is to me at this moment only a beautiful dream, — an airy shape fashioned upon a hint supplied by the engraver of the posters.

What, then, did the public desire, if it would not smile upon the swings, or monsters, or dramatic amusements that had pleased so long? Was the music, as it floated out from the Coliseum, a sufficient delight? Or did the crowd, averse to the shows provided for it, crave something higher and more intellectual, — like, for example, a course of the Lowell Lectures? Its general expression had changed: it had no longer that entire gayety of the first day, but had taken on something of the sarcastic pathos with which we Americans bear most oppressive and fatiguing things as a good joke. The dust was blown about in clouds; and here and there, sitting upon the vacant steps that led up and down among the booths, were dejected and motionless men and women, passively gathering dust, and apparently awaiting burial under the accumulating sand, — the mute, melancholy sphinxes of the Jubilee, with their unsolved riddle, “Why did we come?” At intervals, the heavens shook out fierce, sudden showers of rain, that scattered the surging masses, and sent them flying impotently hither and thither for shelter where no shelter was, only to gather again, and move aimlessly and comfortlessly to and fro, like a lost child.

So the multitude roared within and without the Coliseum as I turned homeward; and yet I found it wandering with weary feet through the Garden, and the Common, and all the streets, and it dragged its innumerable aching legs with me to the railroad station, and, entering the train, stood up on them, — having paid for the tickets with which the companies professed to sell seats.

How still and cool and fresh it was at our suburban station, when the train, speeding away with a sardonic yell over the misery of the passengers yet standing up in it, left us to walk across the quiet fields and pleasant lanes to Benicia Street, through groups of little idyllic Irish boys playing base-ball, with milch-goats here and there pastorally cropping the herbage!

In this pleasant seclusion I let all Bunker Hill Day thunder by, with its cannons, and processions, and speeches, and patriotic musical uproar, hearing only through my open window the note of the birds singing in a leafy coliseum across the street, and making very fair music without an anvil among them. “Ah, signer!” said one of my doorstep acquaintance, who came next morning and played me Captain Jenks, — the new air he has had added to his instrument,— “never in my life, neither at Torino, nor at Milano, nor even at Genoa, never did I see such a crowd or hear such a noise, as at that Colosseo yesterday. The carriages, the horses, the feet! And the dust, O Dio mio! All those millions of people were as white as so many millers!”

On the afternoon of the fourth day the city looked quite like the mill in which these millers had been grinding; and even those unpromisingly elegant streets of the Back Bay showed mansions powdered with dust enough for sentiment to strike root in, and so soften them with its tender green against the time when they shall be ruinous and sentiment shall swallow them up. The crowd had perceptibly diminished, but it was still great, and on the Common it was allured by a greater variety of recreations and bargains than I had yet seen there. There were, of course, all sorts of useful and instructive amusements, — at least a half-dozen telescopes, and as many galvanic batteries, with numerous patented inventions; and I fancied that most of the peddlers and charlatans addressed themselves to a utilitarian spirit supposed to exist in us. A man that sold whistles capable of reproducing exactly the notes of the mocking-bird and the guinea-pig set forth the durability of the invention. “Now, you see this whistle, gentlemen. It is rubber, all rubber; and rubber, you know, enters into the composition of a great many valuable articles. This whistle, then, is entirely of rubber, — no worthless or flimsy material that drops to pieces the moment you put it to your lips,” — as if it were not utterly desirable that it should. “Now, I’ll give you the mocking-bird, gentlemen, and then I’ll give you the guinea-pig, upon this pure India-rubber whistle.” And he did so with a great animation, — this young man with a perfectly intelligent and very handsome face. “Try your strength, and renovate your system!” cried the proprietor of a piston padded at one end and working into a cylinder when you struck it a blow with your fist; and the owners of lung-testing machines called upon you from every side to try their consumption cure; while the galvanic-battery men sat still and mutely appealed with inscriptions attached to their cap-visors declaring that electricity taken from their batteries would rid you of every ache and pain known to suffering humanity. Yet they were themselves as a class in a state of sad physical disrepair, and one of them was the visible prey of rheumatism which he might have sent flying from his joints with a single shock. The only person whom I saw improving his health with the battery was a rosy-faced school-boy, who was taking ten cents’ worth of electricity; and I hope it did not disagree with his pop-corn and soda-water.

Farther on was a picturesque group of street-musicians, — violinists and harpers; a brother and four sisters, by their looks, — who afforded almost the only unpractical amusement to be enjoyed on the Common, though not far from them was a blind old negro, playing upon an accordion, and singing to it in the faintest and thinnest of black voices, who could hardly have profited any listener. No one appeared to mind him, till a jolly Jack-tar with both arms cut off, but dressed in full sailor’s togs, lurched heavily towards him. This mariner had got quite a good effect of sea-legs by some means, and looked rather drunker than a man with both arms ought to be; but he was very affectionate, and, putting his face close to the other’s, at once entered into talk with the blind man, forming with him a picture curiously pathetic and grotesque. He was the only tipsy person I saw during the Jubilee days, — if he was tipsy, for after all they may have been real sea-legs he had on.

If the throng upon the streets was thinner, it was greater in the Coliseum than on the second day; and matters had settled there into regular working order. The limits of individual liberty had been better ascertained; there was no longer any movement in the aisles, but a constant passing to and fro, between the pieces, in the promenades. The house presented, as before, that appearance in which reality forsook it, and it became merely an amazing picture. The audience supported the notion of its unreality by having exactly the character of the former audiences, and impressed you, despite its restlessness and incessant agitation, with the feeling that it had remained there from the first day, and would always continue there; and it was only in wandering upon its borders through the promenades, that you regained possession of facts concerning it. In no other way was its vastness more observable than in the perfect indifference of persons one to another. Each found himself, as it were, in a solitude; and, sequestered in that wilderness of strangers, each was freed of his bashfulness and trepidation. Young people lounged at ease upon the floors, about the windows, on the upper promenades; and in this seclusion I saw such betrayals of tenderness as melt the heart of the traveller on our desolate railway trains, — Fellows moving to and fro or standing, careless of other eyes, with their arms around the waists of their Girls. These were, of course, people who had only attained a certain grade of civilization, and were not characteristic of the crowd, or, indeed, worthy of notice except as expressions of its unconsciousness. I fancied that I saw a number of their class outside listening to the address of the agent of a patent liniment, proclaimed to be an unfailing specific for neuralgia and headache, — if used in the right spirit. “For,” said the orator, “we like to cure people who treat us and our medicine with respect. Folks say, ‘What is there about that man? — some magnetism or electricity.’ And the other day at New Britain, Connecticut, a young man he come up to the carriage, sneering like, and he tried the cure, and it didn’t have the least effect upon him.” There seemed reason in this, and it produced a visible sensation in the Fellows and Girls, who grinned sheepishly at each other.

Why will the young man with long hair force himself at this point into a history, which is striving to devote itself to graver interests? There he stood with the other people, gazing up at the gay line of streamers on the summit of the Coliseum, and taking in the Anvil Chorus with the rest, — a young man well-enough dressed, and of a pretty sensible face, with his long black locks falling from under his cylinder hat, and covering his shoulders. What awful spell was on him, obliging him to make that figure before his fellow-creatures? He had nothing to sell; he was not, apparently, an advertisement of any kind. Was he in the performance of a vow? Was he in his right mind? For shame! a person may wear his hair long if he will. But why not, then, in a top-knot? This young man’s long hair was not in keeping with his frock-coat and his cylinder hat, and he had not at all the excuse of the old gentleman who sold salve in the costume of Washington’s time; one could not take pleasure in him as in the negro advertiser, who paraded the grounds in a costume compounded of a consular chapeau bras and a fox-hunter’s top-boots — the American diplomatic uniform of the future — and offered every one a printed billet; he had not even the attraction of the cabalistic herald of Hunkidori. Who was he? what was he? why was he? The mind played forever around these questions in a maze of hopeless conjecture.

Had all those quacks and peddlers been bawling ever since Tuesday to the same listeners? Had all those swings and whirligigs incessantly performed their rounds? The cow that gave milk from the top of her back, had she never changed her small circle of admirers, or ceased her flow? And the gentleman who sat in the chair of his own balance, how much did he weigh by this time? One could scarcely rid one’s self of the illusion of perpetuity concerning these things, and I could not believe that, if I went back to the Coliseum grounds at any future time, I should not behold all that vast machinery in motion.

It was curious to see, amid this holiday turmoil men pursuing the ordinary business of their lives, and one was strangely rescued and consoled by the spectacle of the Irish hod-carriers, and the bricklayers at work on a first-class swell-front residence in the very heart of the city of tents and booths. Even the locomotive, being associated with quieter days and scenes, appealed, as it whistled to and fro upon the Providence Railroad, to some soft bucolic sentiment in the listener, and sending its note, ordinarily so discordant, across that human uproar, seemed to “babble of green fields.” And at last it wooed us away, and the Jubilee was again swallowed up by night.

There was yet another Jubilee Day, on the morning of which the thousands of public-school children clustered in gauzy pink and white in the place of the mighty chorus, while the Coliseum swarmed once more with people who listened to those shrill, sweet pipes blending in unison; but I leave the reader to imagine what he will about it. A week later, after all was over, I was minded to walk down towards the Coliseum, and behold it in its desertion. The city streets were restored to their wonted summer-afternoon tranquillity; the Public Garden presented its customary phases of two people sitting under a tree and talking intimately together on some theme of common interest,— “Bees, bees, was it your hydromel?” — of the swans sailing in full view upon the little lake of half a dozen idlers hanging upon the bridge to look at them; of children gayly dotting the paths here and there; and, to heighten the peacefulness of the effect, a pretty, pale invalid lady sat, half in shade and half in sun, reading in an easy-chair. Far down the broad avenue a single horse-car tinkled slowly; on the steps of one of the mansions charming little girls stood in a picturesque group full of the bright color which abounds in the lovely dresses of this time. As I drew near the Coliseum, I could perceive the desolation which had fallen upon the festival scene; the white tents were gone; the place where the world-renowned cloggist gave her serio-comic dances was as lonely and silent as the site of Carthage; in the middle distance two men were dismantling a motionless whirligig; the hut for the sale of French soups was closed; farther away, a solitary policeman moved gloomily across the deserted spaces, showing his dark-blue figure against the sky. The vast fabric of the Coliseum reared itself, hushed and deserted within and without; and a boy in his shirt-sleeves pressed his nose against one of the painted window-panes in the vain effort to behold the nothing inside. But sadder than this loneliness surrounding the Coliseum, sadder than the festooned and knotted banners that drooped funereally upon its facade, was the fact that some of those luckless refreshment-saloons were still open, displaying viands as little edible now as carnival confetti. It was as if the proprietors, in an unavailing remorse, had condemned themselves to spend the rest of their days there, and, slowly consuming their own cake and pop-corn, washed down with their own soda-water and lemonade, to perish of dyspepsia and despair.

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS.

Any study of suburban life would be very imperfect without some glance at that larger part of it which is spent in the painful pursuit of pleasures such as are offered at the ordinary places of public amusement; and for this reason I excuse myself for rehearsing certain impressions here which are not more directly suburban, to say the least, than those recounted in the foregoing chapter.

It became, shortly after life in Charlesbridge began, a question whether any entertainment that Boston could offer were worth the trouble of going to it, or, still worse, coming from it; for if it was misery to hurry from tea to catch the inward horse-car at the head of the street, what sullen lexicon will afford a name for the experience of getting home again by the last car out from the city? You have watched the clock much more closely than the stage during the last act, and have left your play incomplete by its final marriage or death, and have rushed up to Bowdoin Square, where you achieve a standing place in the car, and, utterly spent as you are with the enjoyment of the evening, you endure for the next hour all that is horrible in riding or walking. At the end of this time you declare that you will never go to the theatre again; and after years of suffering you come at last to keep your word.

While yet, however, in the state of formation as regards this resolution, I went frequently to the theatre — or school of morals, as its friends have humorously called it. I will not say whether any desired amelioration took place or not in my own morals through the agency of the stage; but if not enlightened and refined by everything I saw there, I sometimes was certainly very much surprised. Now that I go no more, or very, very rarely, I avail myself of the resulting leisure to set down, for the instruction of posterity, some account of performances I witnessed in the years 1868-69, which I am persuaded will grow all the more curious, if not incredible, with the lapse of time.

There is this satisfaction in living, namely, that whatever we do will one day wear an air of picturesqueness and romance, and will win the fancy of people coming after us. This stupid and commonplace present shall yet appear the fascinating past; and is it not a pleasure to think how our rogues of descendants — who are to enjoy us aesthetically — will be taken in with us, when they read, in the files of old newspapers, of the quantity of entertainment offered us at the theatres during the years mentioned, and judge us by it? I imagine them two hundred years hence looking back at us, and sighing, “Ah! there was a touch of the old Greek life in those Athenians! How they loved the drama in the jolly Boston of that day! That was the golden age of the theatre: in the winter of 1868-69, they had dramatic performances in seven places, of every degree of excellence, and the managers coined money.” As we always figure our ancestors going to and from church, they will probably figure us thronging the doors of theatres, and no doubt there will be some historical gossiper among them to sketch a Boston audience in 1869, with all our famous poets and politicians grouped together in the orchestra seats, and several now dead introduced with the pleasant inaccuracy and uncertainty of historical gossipers. “On this night, when the beautiful Tost�e reappeared, the whole house rose to greet her. If Mr. Alcott was on one of his winter visits to Boston, no doubt he stepped in from the Marlborough House, — it was a famous temperance hotel, then in the height of its repute, — not only to welcome back the great actress, but to enjoy a chat between the acts with his many friends. Here, doubtless, was seen the broad forehead of Webster; there the courtly Everett, conversing in studied tones with the gifted So-and-so. Did not the lovely Such-a-one grace the evening with her presence? The brilliant and versatile Edmund Kirke was dead; but the humorous Artemas Ward and his friend Nasby may have attracted many eyes, having come hither at the close of their lectures, to testify their love of the beautiful in nature and art; while, perhaps, Mr. Sumner, in the intervals of state cares, relaxed into the enjoyment,” etc. “Vous voyez bien le tableau!”

That far-off posterity, learning that all our theatres are filled every night, will never understand but we were a theatre-going people in the sense that it is the highest fashion to be seen at the play; and yet we are sensible that it is not so, and that the Boston which makes itself known in civilization — in letters, politics, reform — goes as little to the theatre as fashionable Boston.

The stage is not an Institution with us, I should say; yet it affords recreation to a very large and increasing number of persons, and while it would be easy to over-estimate its influence for good or evil even with these, there is no doubt that the stage, if not the drama, is popular. Fortunately an inquiry like this into a now waning taste in theatricals concerns the fact rather than the effect of the taste otherwise the task might become indefinitely hard alike for writer and for reader. No one can lay his hand on his heart, and declare that he is the worse for having seen “La Belle H�l�ne,” for example, or say more than that it is a thing which ought not to be seen by any one else; yet I suppose there is no one ready to deny that “La Belle H�l�ne” was the motive of those performances that have most pleased the most people during recent years. There was something fascinating in the circumstances and auspices under which the united Irma and Tost�e troupes appeared in Boston — op�ra bouffe led gayly forward by finance bouffe, and suggesting Erie shares by its watered music and morals; but there is no doubt that Tost�e’s grand reception was owing mainly to the personal favor which she enjoyed here and which we do not vouchsafe to every one. Ristori did not win it; we did our duty by her, following her carefully with the libretto, and in her most intense effects turning the leaves of a thousand pamphlets with a rustle that must have shattered every delicate nerve in her; but we were always cold to her greatness. It was not for Toste�s singing, which was but a little thing in itself; it was not for her beauty, for that was no more than a reminiscence, if it was not always an illusion; was it because she rendered the spirit of M. Offenbach’s operas so perfectly, that we liked her so much? “Ah, that movement!” cried an enthusiast, “that swing, that — that — wriggle!” She was undoubtedly a great actress, full of subtle surprises, and with an audacious appearance of unconsciousness in those exigencies where consciousness would summon the police — or should; she was so near, yet so far from, the worst that could be intended; in tones, in gestures, in attitudes, she was to the libretto just as the music was, now making it appear insolently and unjustly coarse, now feebly inadequate in its explicit immodesty.

To see this famous lady in “La Grande Duchesse” or “La Belle H�l�ne” was an experience never to be forgotten, and certainly not to be described. The former opera has undoubtedly its proper and blameless charm. There is something pretty and arch in the notion of the Duchess’s falling in love with the impregnably faithful and innocent Fritz; and the extravagance of the whole, with the satire upon the typical little German court, is delightful. But “La Belle Helene” is a wittier play than “La Grande Duchesse,” and it is the vividest expression of the spirit of op�ra bouffe. It is full of such lively mockeries as that of Helen when she gazes upon the picture of Leda and the Swan: “J’aime � me recueiller devant ce tableau de famille! Mon p�re, ma m�re, les voici tous les deux! O mon p�re, tourne vers ton enfant un bec favorable!” — or of Paris when he represses the zeal of Calchas, who desires to present him at once to Helen: “Soit! mais sans lui dire qui je suis; — je d�sire garder le plus strict incognito, jusq’au moment o� la situation sera favorable � un coup de th��tre.” But it must be owned that our audiences seemed not to take much pleasure in these and other witticisms, though they obliged Mademoiselle Tost�e to sing “Un Mari sage” three times, with all those actions and postures which seem incredible the moment they have ceased. They possibly understood this song no better than the strokes of wit, and encored it merely for the music’s sake. The effect was, nevertheless, unfortunate, and calculated to give those French ladies but a bad opinion of our morals. How could they comprehend that the taste was, like themselves, imported, and that its indulgence here did not characterize us? It was only in appearance that, while we did not enjoy the wit we delighted in the coarseness. And how coarse this travesty of the old fable mainly is! That priest Calchas, with his unspeakable snicker his avarice, his infidelity, his hypocrisy, is alone infamy enough to provoke the destruction of a city. Then that scene interrupted by Menelaus! It is indisputably witty, and since all those people are so purely creatures of fable, and dwell so entirely in an unmoral atmosphere, it appears as absurd to blame it as the murders in a pantomime. To be sure there is something about murder, some inherent grace or refinement perhaps, that makes its actual representation upon the stage more tolerable than the most diffident suggestion of adultery. Not that “La Belle H�l�ne” is open to the reproach of over-delicacy in this scene, or any other, for the matter of that, though there is a strain of real poetry in the conception of this whole episode of Helen’s intention to pass all Paris’s love-making off upon herself for a dream, — poetry such as might have been inspired by a muse that had taken too much nectar. There is excellent character, also, as well as caricature in the drama; not only Calchas is admirably done, but Agamemnon, and Achilles, and Helen, and Menelaus, “pas un mari ordinaire ... un mari �pique,” — and the burlesque is good of its kind. It is artistic, as it seems French dramatic effort must almost necessarily be. It could scarcely be called the fault of the op�ra bouffe that the English burlesque should have come of its success; nor could the public blame it for the great favor the burlesque won in those far-off winters, if indeed the public wishes to bestow blame for this. No one, however, could see one of these curious travesties without being reminded, in an awkward way, of the morale of the op�ra bouffe, and of the personnel — as I may say — of “The Black Crook,” “The White Fawn,” and the “Devil’s Auction.” There was the same intention of merriment at the cost of what may be called the marital prejudices, though it cannot be claimed that the wit was the same as in “La Belle H�l�ne;” there was the same physical unreserve as in the ballets of a former season; while in its dramatic form the burlesque discovered very marked parental traits.

This English burlesque, this child of M. Offenbach’s genius, and the now somewhat faded spectacular muse, flourished at the time of which I write in three of our seven theatres for months, — five, from the highest to the lowest being in turn open to it, — and had begun, in a tentative way, to invade the deserted stage even so long ago as the previous summer; and I have sometimes flattered myself that it was my fortune to witness the first exhibition of its most characteristic feature in a theatre into which I wandered one sultry night because it was the nearest theatre. They were giving a play called “The Three Fast Men,” which had a moral of such powerful virtue that it ought to have reformed everybody in the neighborhood. Three ladies being in love with the three fast men, and resolved to win them back to regular hours and the paths of sobriety by every device of the female heart, dress themselves in men’s clothes, — such is the subtlety of the female heart in the bosoms of modern young ladies of fashion, — and follow their lovers about from one haunt of dissipation to another and become themselves exemplarily vicious, — drunkards, gamblers, and the like. The first lady, who was a star in her lowly orbit, was very great in all her different r�les, appearing now as a sailor with the hornpipe of his calling, now as an organ-grinder, and now as a dissolute young gentleman, — whatever was the exigency of good morals. The dramatist seemed to have had an eye to her peculiar capabilities, and to have expressly invented edifying characters and situations that her talents might enforce them. The second young lady had also a personal didactic gift, rivaling, and even surpassing in some respects, that of the star; and was very rowdy indeed. In due time the devoted conduct of the young ladies has its just effect: the three fast men begin to reflect upon the folly of their wild courses; and at this point the dramatist delivers his great stroke. The first lady gives a soir�e dansante et chantante, and the three fast men have invitations. The guests seat themselves, as at a fashionable party, in a semicircle, and the gayety of the evening begins with conundrums and playing upon the banjo; the gentlemen are in their morning-coats, and the ladies in a display of hosiery which is now no longer surprising, and which need not have been mentioned at all except for the fact that, in the case of the first lady, it seemed not to have been freshly put on for that party. In this instance an element comical beyond intention was present, in three young gentlemen, an amateur musical trio, who had kindly consented to sing their favorite song of “The Rolling Zuyder Zee,” as they now kindly did, with flushed faces, unmanageable hands, and much repetition of

 The ro-o-o-o-

 The ro-o-o-o-

 The ro-o-o-o-ll-

 Ing Zuyder Zee,

 Zuyder Zee,

 Zuyder Zee-e-e!

Then the turn of the three guardian angels of the fast men being come again they get up and dance each one a breakdown which seems to establish their lovers (now at last in the secret of the generous ruse played upon them) firmly in their resolution to lead a better life. They are in nowise shaken from it by the displeasure which soon shows itself in the manner of the first and second ladies. The former is greatest in the so-called Protean parts of the play, and is obscured somewhat by the dancing of the latter; but she has a daughter who now comes on and sings a song. The pensive occasion, the favorable mood of the audience, the sympathetic attitude of the players, invite her to sing “The Maiden’s Prayer,” and so we have “The Maiden’s Prayer.” We may be a low set, and the song may be affected and insipid enough, but the purity of its intention touches, and the little girl is vehemently applauded. She is such a pretty child with her innocent face, and her artless white dress, and blue ribbons to her waist and hair, that we will have her back again; whereupon she runs out upon the stage, strikes up a rowdy, rowdy air, dances a shocking little dance, and vanishes from the dismayed vision, leaving us a considerably lower set than we were at first, and glad of our lowness. This is the second lady’s own ground, however, and now she comes out — in a way that banishes far from our fickle minds all thoughts of the first lady and her mistaken child — with a medley of singing and dancing, a bit of breakdown, of cancan, of jig, a bit of “Le Sabre de mon P�re,” and of all memorable slang songs, given with the most grotesque and clownish spirit that ever inspired a woman. Each member of the company follows in his or her pas seul, and then they all dance together to the plain confusion of the amateur trio, whose eyes roll like so many Zuyder Zees, as they sit lonely and motionless in the midst. All stiffness and formality are overcome. The evening party in fact disappears entirely, and we are suffered to see the artists in their moments of social relaxation sitting as it were around the theatrical fireside. They appear to forget us altogether; they exchange winks, and nods, and jests of quite personal application; they call each other by name, by their Christian names, their nicknames. It is not an evening party, it is a family party, and the suggestion of home enjoyment completes the reformation of the three fast men. We see them marry the three fast women before we leave the house.

On another occasion, two suburban friends of the drama beheld a more explicit precursor of the coming burlesque at one of the minor theatres last summer. The great actress whom they had come to see on another scene was ill, and in their disappointment they embraced the hope of entertainment offered them at the smaller playhouse. The drama itself was neither here nor there as to intent, but the public appetite or the manager’s conception of it — for I am by no means sure that this whole business was not a misunderstanding — had exacted that the actresses should appear in so much stocking, and so little else, that it was a horror to look upon them. There was no such exigency of dialogue, situation, or character as asked the indecorum, and the effect upon the unprepared spectator was all the more stupefying from the fact that most of the ladies were not dancers, and had not countenances that consorted with impropriety. Their faces had merely the conventional Yankee sharpness and wanness of feature, and such difference of air and character as should say for one and another, shop-girl, shoe-binder, seamstress; and it seemed an absurdity and an injustice to refer to them in any way the disclosures of the ruthlessly scant drapery. A grotesque fancy would sport with their identity: “Did not this or that one write poetry for her local newspaper?” so much she looked the average culture and crudeness, and when such a one, coldly yielding to the manager’s ideas of the public taste, stretched herself on a green baize bank with her feet towards us, or did a similar grossness, it was hard to keep from crying aloud in protest, that she need not do it; that nobody really expected or wanted it of her. Nobody? Alas! there were people there — poor souls who had the appearance of coming every night — who plainly did expect it, and who were loud in their applauses of the chief actress. This was a young person of a powerful physical expression, quite unlike the rest, — who were dyspeptic and consumptive in the range of their charms, — and she triumphed and wantoned through the scenes with a fierce excess of animal vigor. She was all stocking, as one may say, being habited to represent a prince; she had a raucous voice, an insolent twist of the mouth, and a terrible trick of defying her enemies by standing erect, chin up, hand on hip, and right foot advanced, patting the floor. It was impossible, even in the orchestra seats, to look at her in this attitude and not shrink before her; and on the stage she visibly tyrannized over the invalid sisterhood with her full-blown fascinations. These unhappy girls personated, with a pathetic effect not to be described, such arch and fantastic creations of the poet’s mind as Bewitchingcreature and Exquisitelittlepet, and the play was a kind of fairy burlesque in rhyme, of the most melancholy stupidity that ever was. Yet there was something very comical in the conditions of its performance, and in the possibility that public and manager were playing at cross-purposes. There we were in the pit, an assemblage of hard-working Yankees of decently moral lives and simple traditions, country-bred many of us and of plebeian stock and training, vulgar enough perhaps, but probably not depraved, and, excepting the first lady’s friends, certainly not educated to the critical enjoyment of such spectacles; and there on the stage were those mistaken women, in such sad variety of boniness and flabbiness as I have tried to hint, addressing their pitiable exposure to a supposed vileness in us, and wrenching from all original intent the innocent dullness of the drama, which for the most part could have been as well played in walking-dresses, to say the least.

The scene was not less amusing, as regarded the audiences, the ensuing winter, when the English burlesque troupes which London sent us, arrived; but it was not quite so pathetic as regarded the performers. Of their beauty and their abandon, the historical gossiper, whom I descry far down the future, waiting to refer to me as “A scandalous writer of the period,” shall learn very little to his purpose of warming his sketch with a color from mine. But I hope I may describe these ladies as very pretty, very blonde, and very unscrupulously clever, and still disappoint the historical gossiper. They seemed in all cases to be English; no Yankee faces, voices, or accents were to be detected among them. Where they were associated with people of another race, as happened with one troupe, the advantage of beauty was upon the Anglo-Saxon side, while that of some small shreds of propriety was with the Latins. These appeared at times almost modest, perhaps because they were the conventional ballerine, and wore the old-fashioned ballet-skirt with its volumed gauze, — a coyness which the Englishry had greatly modified, through an exigency of the burlesque, — perhaps because indecorum seems, like blasphemy and untruth, somehow more graceful and becoming in southern than in northern races.

As for the burlesques themselves, they were nothing, the performers personally everything. M. Offenbach had opened Lempri�re’s Dictionary to the authors with “La Belle H�l�ne,” and there, was commonly a flimsy raveling of parodied myth, that held together the different dances and songs, though sometimes it was a novel or an opera burlesqued; but there was always a song and always a dance for each lady, song and dance being equally slangy, and depending for their effect mainly upon the natural or simulated personal charms of the performer.

It was also an indispensable condition of the burlesque’s success, that the characters should be reversed in their representation, — that the men’s r�les should be played by women, and that at least one female part should be done by a man. It must be owned that the fun all came from this character, the ladies being too much occupied with the more serious business of bewitching us with their pretty figures to be very amusing; whereas this wholesome man and brother, with his blonde wig, his panier, his dainty feminine simperings and languishings, his falsetto tones, and his general air of extreme fashion, was always exceedingly droll. He was the saving grace of these stupid plays; and I cannot help thinking that the cancan, as danced, in “Ivanhoe,” by Isaac of York and the masculine Rebecca, was a moral spectacle; it was the cancan made forever absurd and harmless. But otherwise, the burlesques were as little cheerful as profitable. The playwrights who had adapted them to the American stage — for they were all of English authorship — had been good enough to throw in some political allusions which were supposed to be effective with us, but which it was sad to see received with apathy. It was conceivable from a certain air with which the actors delivered these, that they were in the habit of stirring London audiences greatly with like strokes of satire; but except where Rebecca offered a bottle of Medford rum to Cedric the Saxon, who appeared in the figure of ex-President Johnson, they had no effect upon us. We were cold, very cold, to suggestions of Mr. Reverdy Johnson’s now historical speech-making and dining; General Butler’s spoons moved us just a little; at the name of Grant we roared and stamped, of course, though in a perfectly mechanical fashion, and without thought of any meaning offered us; those lovely women might have coupled the hero’s name with whatever insult they chose, and still his name would have made us cheer them. We seemed not to care for points that were intended to flatter us nationally. I am not aware that anybody signified consciousness when the burlesque supported our side of the Alabama controversy, or acknowledged the self-devotion with which a threat that England should be made to pay was delivered by these English performers. With an equal impassiveness we greeted allusions to Erie shares and to the late Mr. Fiske.

The burlesque chiefly betrayed its descent from the spectacular ballet in its undressing; but that ballet, while it demanded personal exposure, had something very observable in its scenic splendors, and all that marching and processioning in it was rather pretty; while in the burlesque there seemed nothing of innocent intent. No matter what the plot, it led always to a final great scene of breakdown, — which was doubtless most impressive in that particular burlesque where this scene represented the infernal world, and the ladies gave the dances of the country with a happy conception of the deportment of lost souls. There, after some vague and inconsequent dialogue, the wit springing from a perennial source of humor (not to specify the violation of the seventh commandment), the dancing commenced, each performer beginning with the Walk-round of the negro minstrels, rendering its grotesqueness with a wonderful frankness of movement, and then plunging into the mysteries of her dance with a kind of infuriate grace and a fierce delight very curious to look upon. I am aware of the historical gossiper still on the alert for me, and I dare not say how sketchily these ladies were dressed or indeed, more than that they were dressed to resemble circus-riders of the other sex, but as to their own deceived nobody, — possibly did not intend deceit. One of them was so good a player that it seemed needless for her to go so far as she did in the dance; but she spared herself nothing, and it remained for her merely stalwart friends to surpass her, if possible. This inspired each who succeeded her to wantoner excesses, to wilder insolences of hose, to fiercer bravadoes of corsage; while those not dancing responded to the sentiment of the music by singing shrill glees in tune with it, clapping their hands, and patting Juba, as the act is called, — a peculiarly graceful and modest thing in woman. The frenzy grew with every moment, and, as in another Vision of Sin, —

“Then they started from their places,

    Moved with violence, changed in hue,

  Caught each other with wild grimaces,

    Half-invisible to the view,

  Wheeling with precipitate paces

    To the melody, till they flew,

  Hair, and eyes, and limbs, and faces

  Twisted hard in fierce embraces,

  Like to Furies, like to Graces,” —

with an occasional exchange of cuffs and kicks perfectly human. The spectator found now himself and now the scene incredible, and indeed they were hardly conceivable in relation to each other. A melancholy sense of the absurdity, of the incongruity, of the whole absorbed at last even a sense of the indecency. The audience was much the same in appearance as other audiences, witnessing like displays at the other theatres, and did not differ greatly from the usual theatrical house. Not so much fashion smiled upon the efforts of these young ladies, as upon the cancan of the Signorina Morlacchi a winter earlier; but there was a most fair appearance of honest-looking, handsomely dressed men and women; and you could pick out, all over the parquet, faces of one descent from the deaconship, which you wondered were not afraid to behold one another there. The truth is, we spectators, like the performers themselves, lacked that tradition of error, of transgression, which casts its romance about the people of a lighter race. We had not yet set off one corner of the Common for a Jardin Mabille; we had not even the concert-cellars of the gay and elegant New Yorker; and nothing, really, had happened in Boston to educate us to this new taste in theatricals, since the fair Quakers felt moved to testify in the streets and churches against our spiritual nakedness. Yet it was to be noted with regret that our innocence, our respectability, had no restraining influence upon the performance; and the fatuity of the hope cherished by some courageous people, that the presence of virtuous persons would reform the stage, was but too painfully evident. The doubt whether they were not nearer right who have denounced the theatre as essentially and incorrigibly bad would force itself upon the mind, though there was a little comfort in the thought that, if virtue had been actually allowed to frown upon these burlesques, the burlesques might have been abashed into propriety. The caressing arm of the law was cast very tenderly about the performers, and in the only case where a spectator presumed to hiss, — it was at a pas seul of the indescribable, — a policeman descended upon him, and with the succor of two friends of the free ballet, rent him from his place, and triumphed forth with him. Here was an end of ungenial criticism; we all applauded zealously after that.

The peculiar character of the drama to which they devoted themselves had produced, in these ladies, some effects doubtless more interesting than profitable to observe. One of them, whose unhappiness it was to take the part of soubrette in the Laughable Commedietta preceding the burlesque, was so ill at ease in drapery, so full of awkward jerks and twitches, that she seemed quite another being when she came on later as a radiant young gentleman in pink silk hose, and nothing of feminine modesty in her dress excepting the very low corsage. A strange and compassionable satisfaction beamed from her face; it was evident that this sad business was the poor thing’s forte. In another company was a lady who had conquered all the easy attitudes of young men of the second or third fashion, and who must have been at something of a loss to identify herself when personating a woman off the stage. But Nature asserted herself in a way that gave a curious and scarcely explicable shock in the case of that dancer whose impudent song required the action of fondling a child, and who rendered the passage with an instinctive tenderness and grace, all the more pathetic for the profaning boldness of her super masculine dress or undress. Commonly, however, the members of these burlesque troupes, though they were not like men, were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame. Yet whoever beheld these burlesque sisters, must have fallen into perplexing question in his own mind as to whose was the wrong involved. It was not the fault of the public — all of us felt that: was it the fault of the hard-working sisterhood, bred to this as to any other business, and not necessarily conscious of the indecorum which pains my reader, — obliged to please somehow, and aiming, doubtless, at nothing but applause? “La Belle H�l�ne” suggests the only reasonable explanation: “C’est la fatalit�.”

FLITTING

I would not willingly repose upon the friendship of a man whose local attachments are weak. I should not demand of my intimate that he have a yearning for the homes of his ancestors, or even the scenes of his own boyhood; that is not in American nature; on the contrary, he is but a poor creature who does not hate the village where he was born; yet a sentiment for the place where one has lived two or three years, the hotel where one has spent a week, the sleeping car in which one has ridden from Albany to Buffalo, — so much I should think it well to exact from my friend in proof of that sensibility and constancy without which true friendship does not exist. So much I am ready to yield on my own part to a friend’s demand, and I profess to have all the possible regrets for Benicia Street, now I have left it. Over its deficiencies I cast a veil of decent oblivion, and shall always try to look upon its worthy and consoling aspects, which were far the more numerous. It was never otherwise, I imagine, than an ideal region in very great measure; and if the reader whom I have sometimes seemed to direct thither, should seek it out, he would hardly find my Benicia Street by the city sign-board. Yet this is not wholly because it was an ideal locality, but because much of its reality has now become merely historical, a portion of the tragical poetry of the past. Many of the vacant lots abutting upon Benicia and the intersecting streets flourished up, during the four years we knew it, into fresh-painted wooden houses, and the time came to be when one might have looked in vain for the abandoned hoop-skirts which used to decorate the desirable building-sites. The lessening pasturage also reduced the herds which formerly fed in the vicinity, and at last we caught the tinkle of the cow-bells only as the cattle were driven past to remoter meadows. And one autumn afternoon two laborers, hired by the city, came and threw up an earthwork on the opposite side of the street, which they said was a sidewalk, and would add to the value of property in the neighborhood. Not being dressed with coal-ashes, however, during the winter, the sidewalk vanished next summer under a growth of rag-weed, and hid the increased values with it, and it is now an even question whether this monument of municipal grandeur will finally be held by Art or resumed by Nature, — who indeed has a perpetual motherly longing for her own, and may be seen in all outlying and suburban places, pathetically striving to steal back any neglected bits of ground and conceal them under her skirts of tattered and shabby verdure. But whatever is the event of this contest, and whatever the other changes wrought in the locality, it has not yet been quite stripped of the characteristic charms which first took our hearts, and which have been duly celebrated in these pages.

When the new house was chosen, we made preparations to leave the old one, but preparations so gradual, that, if we had cared much more than we did, we might have suffered greatly by the prolongation of the agony. We proposed to ourselves to escape the miseries of moving by transferring the contents of one room at a time, and if we did not laugh incredulously at people who said we had better have it over at once and be done with it, it was because we respected their feelings, and not because we believed them. We took up one carpet after another; one wall after another we stripped of its pictures; we sent away all the books to begin with; and by this subtle and ingenious process, we reduced ourselves to the discomfort of living in no house at all, as it were, and of being at home in neither one place nor the other. Yet the logic of our scheme remained perfect; and I do not regret its failure in practice, for if we had been ever so loath to quit the old house, its inhospitable barrenness would finally have hurried us forth. In fact, does not life itself in some such fashion dismantle its tenement until it is at last forced out of the uninhabitable place? Are not the poor little comforts and pleasures and ornaments removed one by one, till life, if it would be saved, must go too? We took a lesson from the teachings of mortality, which are so rarely heeded, and we lingered over our moving. We made the process so gradual, indeed, that I do not feel myself all gone yet from the familiar work-room, and for aught I can say, I still write there; and as to the guest-chamber, it is so densely peopled by those it has lodged that it will never quite be emptied of them. Friends also are yet in the habit of calling in the parlor, and talking with us; and will the children never come off the stairs? Does life, our high exemplar, leave so much behind as we did? Is this what fills the world with ghosts?

In the getting ready to go, nothing hurt half so much as the sight of the little girl packing her doll’s things for removal. The trousseaux of all those elegant creatures, the wooden, the waxen, the biscuit, the india-rubber, were carefully assorted, and arranged in various small drawers and boxes; their house was thoughtfully put in order and locked for transportation; their innumerable broken sets of dishes were packed in paper and set out upon the floor, a heart-breaking little basketful. Nothing real in this world is so affecting as some image of reality, and this travesty of our own flitting was almost intolerable. I will not pretend to sentiment about anything else, for everything else had in it the element of self-support belonging to all actual afflictions. When the day of moving finally came, and the furniture wagon, which ought to have been only a shade less dreadful to us than a hearse, drew up at our door, our hearts were of a Neronian hardness.

“Were I Diogenes,” says wrathful Charles Lamb in one of his letters, “I would not move out of a kilderkin into a hogshead, though the first had nothing but small beer in it, and the second reeked claret.” I fancy this loathing of the transitionary state came in great part from the rude and elemental nature of the means of moving in Lamb’s day. In our own time, in Charlesbridge at least, everything is so perfectly contrived, that it is in some ways a pleasant excitement to move; though I do not commend the diversion to any but people of entire leisure, for it cannot be denied that it is, at any rate, an interruption to work. But little is broken, little is defaced, nothing is heedlessly outraged or put to shame. Of course there are in every house certain objects of comfort and even ornament which in a state of repose derive a sort of dignity from being cracked, or scratched, or organically debilitated, and give an idea of ancestral possession and of long descent to the actual owner; and you must not hope that this venerable quality will survive their public exposure upon the furniture wagon. There it instantly perishes, like the consequence of some country notable huddled and hustled about in the graceless and ignorant tumult of a great city. To tell the truth, the number of things that turn shabby under the ordeal of moving strikes a pang of unaccustomed poverty to the heart which, loving all manner of makeshifts, is rich even in its dilapidations. For the time you feel degraded by the spectacle of that forlornness, and if you are a man of spirit, you try to sneak out of association with it in the mind of the passer-by; you keep scrupulously in-doors, or if a fancied exigency obliges you to go back and forth between the old house and the new, you seek obscure by-ways remote from the great street down which the wagon flaunts your ruin and decay, and time your arrivals and departures so as to have the air of merely dropping in at either place. This consoles you; but it deceives no one; for the man who is moving is unmistakably stamped with transition.

Yet the momentary eclipse of these things is not the worst. It is momentary; for if you will but plant them in kindly corners and favorable exposures of the new house, a mould of respectability will gradually overspread them again, and they will once more account for their presence by the air of having been a long time in the family; but there is danger that in the first moments of mortification you will be tempted to replace them with new and costly articles. Even the best of the old things are nothing to boast of in the hard, unpitying light to which they are exposed, and a difficult and indocile spirit of extravagance is evoked in the least profuse. Because of this fact alone I should not commend the diversion of moving save to people of very ample means as well as perfect leisure; there are more reasons than the misery of flitting why the dweller in the kilderkin should not covet the hogshead reeking of claret.

But the grosser misery of moving is, as I have hinted, vastly mitigated by modern science, and what remains of it one may use himself to with no tremendous effort. I have found that in the dentist’s chair, — that ironically luxurious seat, cushioned in satirical suggestion of impossible repose, — after a certain initial period of clawing, filing, scraping, and punching, one’s nerves accommodate themselves to the torment, and one takes almost an objective interest in the operation of tooth-filling; and in like manner after two or three wagon-loads of your household stuff have passed down the public street, and all your morbid associations with them have been desecrated, you begin almost to like it. Yet I cannot regard this abandon as a perfectly healthy emotion, and I do not counsel my reader to mount himself upon the wagon and ride to and fro even once, for afterwards the remembrance of such an excess will grieve him.

Of course, I meant to imply by this that moving sometimes comes to an end, though it is not easy to believe so while moving. The time really arrives when you sit down in your new house, and amid whatever disorder take your first meal there. This meal is pretty sure to be that gloomy tea, that loathly repast of butter and toast, and some kind of cake, with which the soul of the early-dining American is daily cast down between the hours of six and seven in the evening; and instinctively you compare it with the last meal you took in your old house, seeking in vain to decide whether this is more dispiriting than that. At any rate that was not at all the meal which the last meal in any house which has been a home ought to be in fact, and is in books. It was hurriedly cooked; it was served upon fugitive and irregular crockery; and it was eaten in deplorable disorder, with the professional movers waiting for the table outside the dining-room. It ought to have been an act of serious devotion; it was nothing but an expiation. It should have been a solemn commemoration of all past dinners in the place, an invocation to their pleasant apparitions. But I, for my part, could not recall these at all, though now I think of them with the requisite pathos, and I know they were perfectly worthy of remembrance. I salute mournfully the companies that have sat down at dinner there, for they are sadly scattered now; some beyond seas, some beyond the narrow gulf, so impassably deeper to our longing and tenderness than the seas. But more sadly still I hail the host himself, and desire to know of him if literature was not somehow a gayer science in those days, and if his peculiar kind of drolling had not rather more heart in it then. In an odd, not quite expressible fashion, something of him seems dispersed abroad and perished in the guests he loved. I trust, of course, that all will be restored to him when he turns — as every man past thirty feels he may when he likes, and has the time — and resumes his youth. Or if this feeling is only a part of the great tacit promise of eternity, I am all the more certain of his getting back his losses.

I say that now these apposite reflections occur to me with a sufficient ease, but that upon the true occasion for them they were absent. So, too, at the first meal in the new house, there was none of that desirable sense of setting up a family altar, but a calamitous impression of irretrievable upheaval, in honor of which sackcloth and ashes seemed the only wear. Yet even the next day the Lares and Penates had regained something of their wonted cheerfulness, and life had begun again with the first breakfast. In fact, I found myself already so firmly established that, meeting the furniture cart which had moved me the day before, I had the face to ask the driver whom they were turning out of house and home, as if my own flitting were a memory of the far-off past.

Not that I think the professional mover expects to be addressed in a joking mood. I have a fancy that he cultivates a serious spirit himself, in which he finds it easy to sympathize with any melancholy on the part of the moving family. There is a slight flavor of undertaking in his manner, which is nevertheless full of a subdued firmness very consoling and supporting; though the life that he leads must be a troubled and uncheerful one, trying alike to the muscles and the nerves. How often must he have been charged by anxious and fluttered ladies to be very careful of that basket of china, and those vases! How often must he have been vexed by the ignorant terrors of gentlemen asking if he thinks that the library-table, poised upon the top of his load, will hold! His planning is not infallible, and when he breaks something uncommonly precious, what does a man of his sensibility do? Is the demolition of old homes really distressing to him, or is he inwardly buoyed up by hopes of other and better homes for the people he moves? Can there be any ideal of moving? Does he, perhaps, feel a pride in an artfully constructed load, and has he something like an artist’s pang in unloading it? Is there a choice in families to be moved, and are some worse or better than others? Next to the lawyer and the doctor, it appears to me that the professional mover holds the most confidential relations towards his fellow-men. He is let into all manner of little domestic secrets and subterfuges; I dare say he knows where half the people in town keep their skeleton, and what manner of skeleton it is. As for me, when I saw him making towards a certain closet door, I planted myself firmly against it. He smiled intelligence; he knew the skeleton was there, and that it would be carried to the new house after dark.

I began by saying that I should wish my friend to have some sort of local attachment; but I suppose it must be owned that this sentiment, like pity, and the modern love-passion, is a thing so largely produced by culture that nature seems to have little or nothing to do with it. The first men were homeless wanderers; the patriarchs dwelt in tents, and shifted their place to follow the pasturage, without a sigh; and for children — the pre-historic, the antique people, of our day — moving is a rapture. The last dinner in the old house, the first tea in the new, so doleful to their elders, are partaken of by them with joyous riot. Their shrill trebles echo gleefully from the naked walls and floors; they race up and down the carpetless stairs; they menace the dislocated mirrors and crockery; through all the chambers of desolation they frolic with a gayety indomitable save by bodily exhaustion. If the reader is of a moving family, — and so he is as he is an American, — he can recall the zest he found during childhood in the moving which had for his elders — poor victims of a factitious and conventional sentiment! — only the salt and bitterness of tears. His spirits never fell till the carpets were down; no sorrow touched him till order returned; if Heaven so blessed him that his bed was made upon the floor for one night, the angels visited his dreams. Why, then, is the mature soul, however sincere and humble, not only grieved but mortified by flitting? Why cannot one move without feeling the great public eye fixed in pitying contempt upon him? This sense of abasement seems to be something quite inseparable from the act, which is often laudable, and in every way wise and desirable; and he whom it has afflicted is the first to turn, after his own establishment, and look with scornful compassion upon the overflowing furniture wagon as it passes. But I imagine that Abraham’s neighbors, when he struck his tent, and packed his parlor and kitchen furniture upon his camels, and started off with Mrs. Sarah to seek a new camping-ground, did not smile at the procession, or find it worthy of ridicule or lament. Nor did Abraham, once settled, and reposing in the cool of the evening at the door of his tent, gaze sarcastically upon the moving of any of his brother patriarchs.

To some such philosophical serenity we shall also return, I suppose, when we have wisely theorized life in our climate, and shall all have become nomads once more, following June and October up and down and across the continent, and not suffering the full malice of the winter and summer anywhere. But as yet, the derision that attaches to moving attends even the goer-out of town, and the man of many trunks and a retinue of linen-suited womankind is a pitiable and despicable object to all the other passengers at the railroad station and on the steamboat wharf.

This is but one of many ways in which mere tradition oppresses us. I protest that as moving is now managed in Charlesbridge, there is hardly any reason why the master or mistress of the household should put hand to anything; but it is a tradition that they shall dress themselves in their worst, as for heavy work, and shall go about very shabby for at least a day before and a day after the transition. It is a kind of sacrifice, I suppose, to a venerable ideal; and I would never be the first to omit it. In others I observe that this vacant and ceremonious zeal is in proportion to an incapacity to do anything that happens really to be required; and I believe that the truly sage person would devote moving-day to paying visits of ceremony in his finest clothes.

As to the house which one has left, I think it would be preferable to have it occupied as soon as possible after one’s flitting. Pilgrimages to the dismantled shrine are certainly to be avoided by the friend of cheerfulness. A day’s absence and emptiness wholly change its character, though the familiarity continues, with a ghastly difference, as in the beloved face that the life has left. It is not at all the vacant house it was when you came first to look at it: for then hopes peopled it, and now memories. In that golden prime you had long been boarding, and any place in which you could keep house seemed utterly desirable. How distinctly you recall that wet day, or that fair day, on which you went through it and decided that this should be the guest chamber and that the family room, and what could be done with the little back attic in a pinch! The children could play in the dining-room; and to be sure the parlor was rather small if you wanted to have company; but then, who would ever want to give a party? and besides, the pump in the kitchen was a compensation for anything. How lightly the dumb waiter ran up and down, —

“Qual piuma al vento!”

you sang, in very glad-heartedness. Then estimates of the number of yards of carpeting; and how you could easily save the cost from the difference between boarding and house-keeping. Adieu, Mrs. Brown! henceforth let your “desirable apartments, en suite or single, furnished or unfurnished, to gentlemen only!” — this married pair is about to escape forever from your extortions.

Well, if the years passed without making us sadder, should we be much the wiser for their going? Now you know, little couple, that there are extortions in this wicked world beside Mrs. Brown’s; and some other things. But if you go into the empty house that was lately your home, you will not, I believe, be haunted by these sordid disappointments, for the place should evoke other regrets and meditations. Truly, though the great fear has not come upon you here, in this room you may have known moments when it seemed very near, and when the quick, fevered breathings of the little one timed your own heart-beats. To that door, with many other missives of joy and pain, came haply the dispatch which hurried you off to face your greatest sorrow — came by night, like a voice of God, speaking and warning, and making all your work idle and your aims foolish. These walls have answered, how many times, to your laughter; they have had friendly ears for the trouble that seemed to grow by utterance. You have sat upon the threshold so many summer days; so many winter mornings you have seen the snows drifted high about it; so often your step has been light and heavy upon it. There is the study, where your magnificent performances were planned, and your exceeding small performances were achieved; hither you hurried with the first criticism of your first book, and read it with the rapture that nothing but a love-letter and a favorable review can awaken. Out there is the well-known humble prospect, that was commonly but a vista into dreamland; on the other hand is the pretty grove, — its leaves now a little painted with the autumn, and faltering to their fall.

Yes, the place must always be sacred, but painfully sacred; and I say again one should not go near it unless as a penance. If the reader will suffer me the confidence, I will own that there is always a pang in the past which is more than any pleasure it can give, and I believe that he, if he were perfectly honest, — as Heaven forbid I or any one should be, — would also confess as much. There is no house to which one would return, having left it, though it were the hogshead out of which one had moved into a kilderkin; for those associations whose perishing leaves us free, and preserves to us what little youth we have, were otherwise perpetuated to our burden and bondage. Let some one else, who has also escaped from his past, have your old house; he will find it new and untroubled by memories, while you, under another roof, enjoy a present that borders only upon the future.

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY

CONTENTS

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY.

TURKEYS TURNING THE TABLES.

THE PONY ENGINE AND THE PACIFIC EXPRESS.

THE PUMPKIN-GLORY

BUTTERFLYFLUTTERBY AND FLUTTERBYBUTTERFLY.

“HAVING BONFIRES IN THE BACK YARD OF THE PALACE.”

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY.

The little girl came into her papa’s study, as she always did Saturday morning before breakfast, and asked for a story. He tried to beg off that morning, for he was very busy, but she would not let him. So he began:

“Well, once there was a little pig—”

She put her hand over his mouth and stopped him at the word. She said she had heard little pig-stories till she was perfectly sick of them.

“Well, what kind of story shall I tell, then?”

“About Christmas. It’s getting to be the season. It’s past Thanksgiving already.”

“It seems to me,” her papa argued, “that I’ve told as often about Christmas as I have about little pigs.”

“No difference! Christmas is more interesting.”

“Well!” Her papa roused himself from his writing by a great effort. “Well, then, I’ll tell you about the little girl that wanted it Christmas every day in the year. How would you like that?”

“First-rate!” said the little girl; and she nestled into comfortable shape in his lap, ready for listening.

“Very well, then, this little pig — Oh, what are you pounding me for?”

“Because you said little pig instead of little girl.”

“I should like to know what’s the difference between a little pig and a little girl that wanted it Christmas every day!”

“Papa,” said the little girl, warningly, “if you don’t go on, I’ll give it to you!” And at this her papa darted off like lightning, and began to tell the story as fast as he could.

Well, once there was a little girl who liked Christmas so much that she wanted it to be Christmas every day in the year; and as soon as Thanksgiving was over she began to send postal-cards to the old Christmas Fairy to ask if she mightn’t have it. But the old fairy never answered any of the postals; and after a while the little girl found out that the Fairy was pretty particular, and wouldn’t notice anything but letters — not even correspondence cards in envelopes; but real letters on sheets of paper, and sealed outside with a monogram — or your initial, anyway. So, then, she began to send her letters; and in about three weeks — or just the day before Christmas, it was — she got a letter from the Fairy, saying she might have it Christmas every day for a year, and then they would see about having it longer.

The little girl was a good deal excited already, preparing for the old-fashioned, once-a-year Christmas that was coming the next day, and perhaps the Fairy’s promise didn’t make such an impression on her as it would have made at some other time. She just resolved to keep it to herself, and surprise everybody with it as it kept coming true; and then it slipped out of her mind altogether.

She had a splendid Christmas. She went to bed early, so as to let Santa Claus have a chance at the stockings, and in the morning she was up the first of anybody and went and felt them, and found hers all lumpy with packages of candy, and oranges and grapes, and pocket-books and rubber balls, and all kinds of small presents, and her big brother’s with nothing but the tongs in them, and her young lady sister’s with a new silk umbrella, and her papa’s and mamma’s with potatoes and pieces of coal wrapped up in tissue-paper, just as they always had every Christmas. Then she waited around till the rest of the family were up, and she was the first to burst into the library, when the doors were opened, and look at the large presents laid out on the library-table — books, and portfolios, and boxes of stationery, and breastpins, and dolls, and little stoves, and dozens of handkerchiefs, and ink-stands, and skates, and snow-shovels, and photograph-frames, and little easels, and boxes of water-colors, and Turkish paste, and nougat, and candied cherries, and dolls’ houses, and waterproofs — and the big Christmas-tree, lighted and standing in a waste-basket in the middle.

She had a splendid Christmas all day. She ate so much candy that she did not want any breakfast; and the whole forenoon the presents kept pouring in that the expressman had not had time to deliver the night before; and she went round giving the presents she had got for other people, and came home and ate turkey and cranberry for dinner, and plum-pudding and nuts and raisins and oranges and more candy, and then went out and coasted, and came in with a stomach-ache, crying; and her papa said he would see if his house was turned into that sort of fool’s paradise another year; and they had a light supper, and pretty early everybody went to bed cross.

Here the little girl pounded her papa in the back, again.

“Well, what now? Did I say pigs?”

“You made them act like pigs.”

“Well, didn’t they?”

“No matter; you oughtn’t to put it into a story.”

“Very well, then, I’ll take it all out.”

Her father went on:

The little girl slept very heavily, and she slept very late, but she was wakened at last by the other children dancing round her bed with their stockings full of presents in their hands.

“What is it?” said the little girl, and she rubbed her eyes and tried to rise up in bed.

“Christmas! Christmas! Christmas!” they all shouted, and waved their stockings.

“Nonsense! It was Christmas yesterday.”

Her brothers and sisters just laughed. “We don’t know about that. It’s Christmas to-day, anyway. You come into the library and see.”

Then all at once it flashed on the little girl that the Fairy was keeping her promise, and her year of Christmases was beginning. She was dreadfully sleepy, but she sprang up like a lark — a lark that had overeaten itself and gone to bed cross — and darted into the library. There it was again! Books, and portfolios, and boxes of stationery, and breastpins —

“You needn’t go over it all, papa; I guess I can remember just what was there,” said the little girl.

Well, and there was the Christmas-tree blazing away, and the family picking out their presents, but looking pretty sleepy, and her father perfectly puzzled, and her mother ready to cry. “I’m sure I don’t see how I’m to dispose of all these things,” said her mother, and her father said it seemed to him they had had something just like it the day before, but he supposed he must have dreamed it. This struck the little girl as the best kind of a joke; and so she ate so much candy she didn’t want any breakfast, and went round carrying presents, and had turkey and cranberry for dinner, and then went out and coasted, and came in with a —

“Papa!”

“Well, what now?”

“What did you promise, you forgetful thing?”

“Oh! oh yes!”

Well, the next day, it was just the same thing over again, but everybody getting crosser; and at the end of a week’s time so many people had lost their tempers that you could pick up lost tempers anywhere; they perfectly strewed the ground. Even when people tried to recover their tempers they usually got somebody else’s, and it made the most dreadful mix.

The little girl began to get frightened, keeping the secret all to herself; she wanted to tell her mother, but she didn’t dare to; and she was ashamed to ask the Fairy to take back her gift, it seemed ungrateful and ill-bred, and she thought she would try to stand it, but she hardly knew how she could, for a whole year. So it went on and on, and it was Christmas on St. Valentine’s Day and Washington’s Birthday, just the same as any day, and it didn’t skip even the First of April, though everything was counterfeit that day, and that was some little relief.

After a while coal and potatoes began to be awfully scarce, so many had been wrapped up in tissue-paper to fool papas and mammas with. Turkeys got to be about a thousand dollars apiece —

“Papa!”

“Well, what?”

“You’re beginning to fib.”

“Well, two thousand, then.”

And they got to passing off almost anything for turkeys — half-grown humming-birds, and even rocs out of the Arabian Nights — the real turkeys were so scarce. And cranberries — well, they asked a diamond apiece for cranberries. All the woods and orchards were cut down for Christmas-trees, and where the woods and orchards used to be it looked just like a stubble-field, with the stumps. After a while they had to make Christmas-trees out of rags, and stuff them with bran, like old-fashioned dolls; but there were plenty of rags, because people got so poor, buying presents for one another, that they couldn’t get any new clothes, and they just wore their old ones to tatters. They got so poor that everybody had to go to the poor-house, except the confectioners, and the fancy-store keepers, and the picture-book sellers, and the expressmen; and they all got so rich and proud that they would hardly wait upon a person when he came to buy. It was perfectly shameful!

Well, after it had gone on about three or four months, the little girl, whenever she came into the room in the morning and saw those great ugly, lumpy stockings dangling at the fire-place, and the disgusting presents around everywhere, used to just sit down and burst out crying. In six months she was perfectly exhausted; she couldn’t even cry any more; she just lay on the lounge and rolled her eyes and panted. About the beginning of October she took to sitting down on dolls wherever she found them — French dolls, or any kind — she hated the sight of them so; and by Thanksgiving she was crazy, and just slammed her presents across the room.

By that time people didn’t carry presents around nicely any more. They flung them over the fence, or through the window, or anything; and, instead of running their tongues out and taking great pains to write “For dear Papa,” or “Mamma,” or “Brother,” or “Sister,” or “Susie,” or “Sammie,” or “Billie,” or “Bobbie,” or “Jimmie,” or “Jennie,” or whoever it was, and troubling to get the spelling right, and then signing their names, and “Xmas, 18 — ,” they used to write in the gift-books, “Take it, you horrid old thing!” and then go and bang it against the front door. Nearly everybody had built barns to hold their presents, but pretty soon the barns overflowed, and then they used to let them lie out in the rain, or anywhere. Sometimes the police used to come and tell them to shovel their presents off the sidewalk, or they would arrest them.

“I thought you said everybody had gone to the poor-house,” interrupted the little girl.

“They did go, at first,” said her papa; “but after a while the poor-houses got so full that they had to send the people back to their own houses. They tried to cry, when they got back, but they couldn’t make the least sound.”

“Why couldn’t they?”

“Because they had lost their voices, saying ‘Merry Christmas’ so much. Did I tell you how it was on the Fourth of July?”

“No; how was it?” And the little girl nestled closer, in expectation of something uncommon.

Well, the night before, the boys stayed up to celebrate, as they always do, and fell asleep before twelve o’clock, as usual, expecting to be wakened by the bells and cannon. But it was nearly eight o’clock before the first boy in the United States woke up, and then he found out what the trouble was. As soon as he could get his clothes on he ran out of the house and smashed a big cannon-torpedo down on the pavement; but it didn’t make any more noise than a damp wad of paper; and after he tried about twenty or thirty more, he began to pick them up and look at them. Every single torpedo was a big raisin! Then he just streaked it up-stairs, and examined his fire-crackers and toy-pistol and two-dollar collection of fireworks, and found that they were nothing but sugar and candy painted up to look like fireworks! Before ten o’clock every boy in the United States found out that his Fourth of July things had turned into Christmas things; and then they just sat down and cried — they were so mad. There are about twenty million boys in the United States, and so you can imagine what a noise they made. Some men got together before night, with a little powder that hadn’t turned into purple sugar yet, and they said they would fire off one cannon, anyway. But the cannon burst into a thousand pieces, for it was nothing but rock-candy, and some of the men nearly got killed. The Fourth of July orations all turned into Christmas carols, and when anybody tried to read the Declaration, instead of saying, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary,” he was sure to sing, “God rest you, merry gentlemen.” It was perfectly awful.

The little girl drew a deep sigh of satisfaction.

“And how was it at Thanksgiving?”

Her papa hesitated. “Well, I’m almost afraid to tell you. I’m afraid you’ll think it’s wicked.”

“Well, tell, anyway,” said the little girl.

Well, before it came Thanksgiving it had leaked out who had caused all these Christmases. The little girl had suffered so much that she had talked about it in her sleep; and after that hardly anybody would play with her. People just perfectly despised her, because if it had not been for her greediness it wouldn’t have happened; and now, when it came Thanksgiving, and she wanted them to go to church, and have squash-pie and turkey, and show their gratitude, they said that all the turkeys had been eaten up for her old Christmas dinners, and if she would stop the Christmases, they would see about the gratitude. Wasn’t it dreadful? And the very next day the little girl began to send letters to the Christmas Fairy, and then telegrams, to stop it. But it didn’t do any good; and then she got to calling at the Fairy’s house, but the girl that came to the door always said, “Not at home,” or “Engaged,” or “At dinner,” or something like that; and so it went on till it came to the old once-a-year Christmas Eve. The little girl fell asleep, and when she woke up in the morning —

“She found it was all nothing but a dream,” suggested the little girl.

“No, indeed!” said her papa. “It was all every bit true!”

“Well, what did she find out, then?”

“Why, that it wasn’t Christmas at last, and wasn’t ever going to be, any more. Now it’s time for breakfast.”

The little girl held her papa fast around the neck.

“You sha’n’t go if you’re going to leave it so!”

“How do you want it left?”

“Christmas once a year.”

“All right,” said her papa; and he went on again.

Well, there was the greatest rejoicing all over the country, and it extended clear up into Canada. The people met together everywhere, and kissed and cried for joy. The city carts went around and gathered up all the candy and raisins and nuts, and dumped them into the river; and it made the fish perfectly sick; and the whole United States, as far out as Alaska, was one blaze of bonfires, where the children were burning up their gift-books and presents of all kinds. They had the greatest time!

The little girl went to thank the old Fairy because she had stopped its being Christmas, and she said she hoped she would keep her promise and see that Christmas never, never came again. Then the Fairy frowned, and asked her if she was sure she knew what she meant; and the little girl asked her, Why not? and the old Fairy said that now she was behaving just as greedily as ever, and she’d better look out. This made the little girl think it all over carefully again, and she said she would be willing to have it Christmas about once in a thousand years; and then she said a hundred, and then she said ten, and at last she got down to one. Then the Fairy said that was the good old way that had pleased people ever since Christmas began, and she was agreed. Then the little girl said, “What’re your shoes made of?” And the Fairy said, “Leather.” And the little girl said, “Bargain’s done forever,” and skipped off, and hippity-hopped the whole way home, she was so glad.

“How will that do?” asked the papa.

“First-rate!” said the little girl; but she hated to have the story stop, and was rather sober. However, her mamma put her head in at the door, and asked her papa:

“Are you never coming to breakfast? What have you been telling that child?”

“Oh, just a moral tale.”

The little girl caught him around the neck again.

“We know! Don’t you tell what, papa! Don’t you tell what!”

TURKEYS TURNING THE TABLES.

 “Well, you see,” the papa began, on Christmas morning, when the little girl had snuggled in his lap into just the right shape for listening, “it was the night after Thanksgiving, and you know how everybody feels the night after Thanksgiving.”

“Yes; but you needn’t begin that way, papa,” said the little girl; “I’m not going to have any moral to it this time.”

“No, indeed! But it can be a true story, can’t it?”

“I don’t know,” said the little girl; “I like made-up ones.”

“Well, this is going to be a true one, anyway, and it’s no use talking.”

All the relations in the neighborhood had come to dinner, and then gone back to their own houses, but some of the relations had come from a distance, and these had to stay all night at the grandfather’s. But whether they went or whether they stayed, they all told the grandmother that they did believe it was the best Thanksgiving dinner they had ever eaten in their born days. They had had cranberry sauce, and they’d had mashed potato, and they’d had mince-pie and pandowdy, and they’d had celery, and they’d had Hubbard squash, and they’d had tea and coffee both, and they’d had apple-dumpling with hard sauce, and they’d had hot biscuit and sweet pickle, and mangoes, and frosted cake, and nuts, and cauliflower —

“Don’t mix them all up so!” pleaded the little girl. “It’s perfectly confusing. I can’t hardly tell what they had now.”

“Well, they mixed them up just in the same way, and I suppose that’s one of the reasons why it happened.”

Whenever a child wanted to go back from dumpling and frosted cake to mashed potato and Hubbard squash — they were old-fashioned kind of people, and they had everything on the table at once, because the grandmother and the aunties cooked it, and they couldn’t keep jumping up all the time to change the plates — and its mother said it shouldn’t, its grandmother said, Indeed it should, then, and helped it herself; and the child’s father would say, Well, he guessed he would go back, too, for a change; and the child’s mother would say, She should think he would be ashamed; and then they would get to going back, till everything was perfectly higgledy-piggledy.

“Oh, shouldn’t you like to have been there, papa?” sighed the little girl.

“You mustn’t interrupt. Where was I?”

“Higgledy-piggledy.”

“Oh yes!”

Well, but the greatest thing of all was the turkey that they had. It was a gobbler, I tell you, that was nearly as big as a giraffe.

“Papa!”

It took the premium at the county fair, and when it was dressed it weighed fifteen pounds — well, maybe twenty — and it was so heavy that the grandmothers and the aunties couldn’t put it on the table, and they had to get one of the papas to do it. You ought to have heard the hurrahing when the children saw him coming in from the kitchen with it. It seemed as if they couldn’t hardly talk of anything but that turkey the whole dinner-time.

The grandfather hated to carve, and so one of the papas did it; and whenever he gave anybody a piece, the grandfather would tell some new story about the turkey, till pretty soon the aunties got to saying, “Now, father, stop!” and one of them said it made it seem as if the gobbler was walking about on the table, to hear so much about him, and it took her appetite all away; and that made the papas begin to ask the grandfather more and more about the turkey.

“Yes,” said the little girl, thoughtfully; “I know what papas are.”

“Yes, they’re pretty much all alike.”

And the mammas began to say they acted like a lot of silly boys; and what would the children think? But nothing could stop it; and all through the afternoon and evening, whenever the papas saw any of the aunties or mammas round, they would begin to ask the grandfather more particulars about the turkey. The grandfather was pretty forgetful, and he told the same things right over. Well, and so it went on till it came bedtime, and then the mammas and aunties began to laugh and whisper together, and to say they did believe they should dream about that turkey; and when the papas kissed the grandmother good-night, they said, Well, they must have his mate for Christmas; and then they put their arms round the mammas and went out haw-hawing.

“I don’t think they behaved very dignified,” said the little girl.

“Well, you see, they were just funning, and had got going, and it was Thanksgiving, anyway.”

Well, in about half an hour everybody was fast asleep and dreaming —

“Is it going to be a dream?” asked the little girl, with some reluctance.

“Didn’t I say it was going to be a true story?”

“Yes.”

“How can it be a dream, then?”

“You said everybody was fast asleep and dreaming.”

“Well, but I hadn’t got through. Everybody except one little girl.”

“Now, papa!”

“What?”

“Don’t you go and say her name was the same as mine, and her eyes the same color.”

“What an idea!”

This was a very good little girl, and very respectful to her papa, and didn’t suspect him of tricks, but just believed everything he said. And she was a very pretty little girl, and had red eyes, and blue cheeks, and straight hair, and a curly nose —

“Now, papa, if you get to cutting up—”

“Well, I won’t, then!”

Well, she was rather a delicate little girl, and whenever she over-ate, or anything,

“Have bad dreams! Aha! I told you it was going to be a dream.”

“You wait till I get through.”

She was apt to lie awake thinking, and some of her thinks were pretty dismal. Well, that night, instead of thinking and tossing and turning, and counting a thousand, it seemed to this other little girl that she began to see things as soon as she had got warm in bed, and before, even. And the first thing she saw was a large, bronze-colored —

“Turkey gobbler!”

“No, ma’am. Turkey gobbler’s ghost.”

“Foo!” said the little girl, rather uneasily; “whoever heard of a turkey’s ghost, I should like to know?”

“Never mind, that,” said the papa. “If it hadn’t been a ghost, could the moonlight have shone through it? No, indeed! The stuffing wouldn’t have let it. So you see it must have been a ghost.”

It had a red pasteboard placard round its neck, with First Premium printed on it, and so she knew that it was the ghost of the very turkey they had had for dinner. It was perfectly awful when it put up its tail, and dropped its wings, and strutted just the way the grandfather said it used to do. It seemed to be in a wide pasture, like that back of the house, and the children had to cross it to get home, and they were all afraid of the turkey that kept gobbling at them and threatening them, because they had eaten him up. At last one of the boys — it was the other little girl’s brother — said he would run across and get his papa to come out and help them, and the first thing she knew the turkey was after him, gaining, gaining, gaining, and all the grass was full of hen-turkeys and turkey chicks, running after him, and gaining, gaining, gaining, and just as he was getting to the wall he tripped and fell over a turkey-pen, and all at once she was in one of the aunties’ room, and the aunty was in bed, and the turkeys were walking up and down over her, and stretching out their wings, and blaming her. Two of them carried a platter of chicken pie, and there was a large pumpkin jack-o’-lantern hanging to the bedpost to light the room, and it looked just like the other little girl’s brother in the face, only perfectly ridiculous.

“THE OLD GOBBLER ‘FIRST PREMIUM’ SAID THEY WERE GOING TO TURN THE TABLES NOW.”

Then the old gobbler, First Premium, clapped his wings, and said, “Come on, chick-chickledren!” and then they all seemed to be in her room, and she was standing in the middle of it in her night-gown, and tied round and round with ribbons, so she couldn’t move hand or foot. The old gobbler, First Premium, said they were going to turn the tables now, and she knew what he meant, for they had had that in the reader at school just before vacation, and the teacher had explained it. He made a long speech, with his hat on, and kept pointing at her with one of his wings, while he told the other turkeys that it was her grandfather who had done it, and now it was their turn. He said that human beings had been eating turkeys ever since the discovery of America, and it was time for the turkeys to begin paying them back, if they were ever going to. He said she was pretty young, but she was as big as he was, and he had no doubt they would enjoy her.

The other little girl tried to tell him that she was not to blame, and that she only took a very, very little piece.

“But it was right off the breast,” said the gobbler, and he shed tears, so that the other little girl cried, too. She didn’t have much hopes, they all seemed so spiteful, especially the little turkey chicks; but she told them that she was very tender-hearted, and never hurt a single thing, and she tried to make them understand that there was a great difference between eating people and just eating turkeys.

“What difference, I should like to know?” says the old hen-turkey, pretty snappishly.

“People have got souls, and turkeys haven’t,” says the other little girl.

“I don’t see how that makes it any better,” says the old hen-turkey. “It don’t make it any better for the turkeys. If we haven’t got any souls, we can’t live after we’ve been eaten up, and you can.”

The other little girl was awfully frightened to have the hen-turkey take that tack.

“I should think she would ‘a’ been,” said the little girl; and she cuddled snugger into her papa’s arms. “What could she say? Ugh! Go on.”

Well, she didn’t know what to say, that’s a fact. You see, she never thought of it in that light before. All she could say was, “Well, people have got reason, anyway, and turkeys have only got instinct; so there!”

“You’d better look out,” says the old hen-turkey; and all the little turkey chicks got so mad they just hopped, and the oldest little he-turkey, that was just beginning to be a gobbler, he dropped his wings and spread his tail just like his father, and walked round the other little girl till it was perfectly frightful.

“I should think they would ‘a’ been ashamed.”

Well, perhaps old First Premium was a little; because he stopped them. “My dear,” he says to the old hen-turkey, and chick-chickledren, “you forget yourselves; you should have a little consideration. Perhaps you wouldn’t behave much better yourselves if you were just going to be eaten.”

And they all began to scream and to cry, “We’ve been eaten, and we’re nothing but turkey ghosts.”

“There, now, papa,” says the little girl, sitting up straight, so as to argue better, “I knew it wasn’t true, all along. How could turkeys have ghosts if they don’t have souls, I should like to know?”

“Oh, easily,” said the papa.

“Tell how,” said the little girl.

“Now look here,” said the papa, “are you telling this story, or am I?”

“You are,” said the little girl, and she cuddled down again. “Go on.”

“Well, then, don’t you interrupt. Where was I? Oh yes.”

Well, he couldn’t do anything with them, old First Premium couldn’t. They acted perfectly ridiculous, and one little brat of a spiteful little chick piped out, “I speak for a drumstick, ma!” and then they all began: “I want a wing, ma!” and “I’m going to have the wish-bone!” and “I shall have just as much stuffing as ever I please, shan’t I, ma?” till the other little girl was perfectly disgusted with them; she thought they oughtn’t to say it before her, anyway; but she had hardly thought this before they all screamed out, “They used to say it before us,” and then she didn’t know what to say, because she knew how people talked before animals.

“I don’t believe I ever did,” said the little girl. “Go on.”

Well, old First Premium tried to quiet them again, and when he couldn’t he apologized to the other little girl so nicely that she began to like him. He said they didn’t mean any harm by it; they were just excited, and chickledren would be chickledren.

“Yes,” said the other little girl, “but I think you might take some older person to begin with. It’s a perfect shame to begin with a little girl.”

“Begin!” says old First Premium. “Do you think we’re just beginning? Why, when do you think it is?”

“The night after Thanksgiving.”

“What year?”

“1886.”

They all gave a perfect screech. “Why, it’s Christmas Eve, 1900, and every one of your friends has been eaten up long ago,” says old First Premium, and he began to cry over her, and the old hen-turkey and the little turkey chicks began to wipe their eyes on the backs of their wings.

“I don’t think they were very neat,” said the little girl.

Well, they were kind-hearted, anyway, and they felt sorry for the other little girl. And she began to think she had made some little impression on them, when she noticed the old hen-turkey beginning to untie her bonnet strings, and the turkey chicks began to spread round her in a circle, with the points of their wings touching, so that she couldn’t get out, and they commenced dancing and singing, and after a while that little he-turkey says, “Who’s it?” and the other little girl, she didn’t know why, says, “I’m it,” and old First Premium says, “Do you promise?” and the other little girl says, “Yes, I promise,” and she knew she was promising, if they would let her go, that people should never eat turkeys any more. And the moon began to shine brighter and brighter through the turkeys, and pretty soon it was the sun, and then it was not the turkeys, but the window-curtains — it was one of those old farm-houses where they don’t have blinds — and the other little girl —

“Woke up!” shouted the little girl. “There now, papa, what did I tell you? I knew it was a dream all along.”

“No, she didn’t,” said the papa; “and it wasn’t a dream.”

“What was it, then?”

“It was a — trance.”

The little girl turned round, and knelt in her papa’s lap, so as to take him by the shoulders and give him a good shaking. That made him promise to be good, pretty quick, and, “Very well, then,” says the little girl; “if it wasn’t a dream, you’ve got to prove it.”

“But how can I prove it?” says the papa.

“By going on with the story,” says the little girl, and she cuddled down again.

“Oh, well, that’s easy enough.”

As soon as it was light in the room, the other little girl could see that the place was full of people, crammed and jammed, and they were all awfully excited, and kept yelling, “Down with the traitress!” “Away with the renegade!” “Shame on the little sneak!” till it was worse than the turkeys, ten times.

She knew that they meant her, and she tried to explain that she just had to promise, and that if they had been in her place they would have promised too; and of course they could do as they pleased about keeping her word, but she was going to keep it, anyway, and never, never, never eat another piece of turkey either at Thanksgiving or at Christmas.

“Very well, then,” says an old lady, who looked like her grandmother, and then began to have a crown on, and to turn into Queen Victoria, “what can we have?”

“Well,” says the other little girl, “you can have oyster soup.”

“What else?”

“And you can have cranberry sauce.”

“What else?”

“You can have mashed potatoes, and Hubbard squash, and celery, and turnip, and cauliflower.”

“What else?”

“You can have mince-pie, and pandowdy, and plum-pudding.”

“And not a thing on the list,” says the Queen, “that doesn’t go with turkey! Now you see.”

The papa stopped.

“Go on,” said the little girl.

“There isn’t any more.”

The little girl turned round, got up on her knees, took him by the shoulders, and shook him fearfully. “Now, then,” she said, while the papa let his head wag, after the shaking, like a Chinese mandarin’s, and it was a good thing he did not let his tongue stick out. “Now, will you go on? What did the people eat in place of turkey?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know, you awful papa! Well, then, what did the little girl eat?”

“She?” The papa freed himself, and made his preparation to escape. “Why she — oh, she ate goose. Goose is tenderer than turkey, anyway, and more digestible; and there isn’t so much of it, and you can’t overeat yourself, and have bad—”

“Dreams!” cried the little girl.

“Trances,” said the papa, and she began to chase him all round the room.

THE PONY ENGINE AND THE PACIFIC EXPRESS.

Christmas Eve, after the children had hung up their stockings and got all ready for St. Nic, they climbed up on the papa’s lap to kiss him good-night, and when they both got their arms round his neck, they said they were not going to bed till he told them a Christmas story. Then he saw that he would have to mind, for they were awfully severe with him, and always made him do exactly what they told him; it was the way they had brought him up. He tried his best to get out of it for a while; but after they had shaken him first this side, and then that side, and pulled him backward and forward till he did not know where he was, he began to think perhaps he had better begin. The first thing he said, after he opened his eyes, and made believe he had been asleep, or something, was, “Well, what did I leave off at?” and that made them just perfectly boiling, for they understood his tricks, and they knew he was trying to pretend that he had told part of the story already; and they said he had not left off anywhere because he had not commenced, and he saw it was no use. So he commenced.

“Once there was a little Pony Engine that used to play round the Fitchburg Depot on the side tracks, and sleep in among the big locomotives in the car-house—”

The little girl lifted her head from the papa’s shoulder, where she had dropped it. “Is it a sad story, papa?”

“How is it going to end?” asked the boy.

“Well, it’s got a moral,” said the papa.

“Oh, all right, if it’s got a moral,” said the children; they had a good deal of fun with the morals the papa put to his stories. The boy added, “Go on,” and the little girl prompted, “Car-house.”

The papa said, “Now every time you stop me I shall have to begin all over again.” But he saw that this was not going to spite them any, so he went on: “One of the locomotives was its mother, and she had got hurt once in a big smash-up, so that she couldn’t run long trips any more. She was so weak in the chest you could hear her wheeze as far as you could see her. But she could work round the depot, and pull empty cars in and out, and shunt them off on the side tracks; and she was so anxious to be useful that all the other engines respected her, and they were very kind to the little Pony Engine on her account, though it was always getting in the way, and under their wheels, and everything. They all knew it was an orphan, for before its mother got hurt its father went through a bridge one dark night into an arm of the sea, and was never heard of again; he was supposed to have been drowned. The old mother locomotive used to say that it would never have happened if she had been there; but poor dear No. 236 was always so venturesome, and she had warned him against that very bridge time and again. Then she would whistle so dolefully, and sigh with her air-brakes enough to make anybody cry. You see they used to be a very happy family when they were all together, before the papa locomotive got drowned. He was very fond of the little Pony Engine, and told it stories at night after they got into the car-house, at the end of some of his long runs. It would get up on his cow-catcher, and lean its chimney up against his, and listen till it fell asleep. Then he would put it softly down, and be off again in the morning before it was awake. I tell you, those were happy days for poor No. 236. The little Pony Engine could just remember him; it was awfully proud of its papa.”

The boy lifted his head and looked at the little girl, who suddenly hid her face in the papa’s other shoulder. “Well, I declare, papa, she was putting up her lip.”

“I wasn’t, any such thing!” said the little girl. “And I don’t care! So!” and then she sobbed.

“Now, never you mind,” said the papa to the boy. “You’ll be putting up your lip before I’m through. Well, and then she used to caution the little Pony Engine against getting in the way of the big locomotives, and told it to keep close round after her, and try to do all it could to learn about shifting empty cars. You see, she knew how ambitious the little Pony Engine was, and how it wasn’t contented a bit just to grow up in the pony-engine business, and be tied down to the depot all its days. Once she happened to tell it that if it was good and always did what it was bid, perhaps a cow-catcher would grow on it some day, and then it could be a passenger locomotive. Mammas have to promise all sorts of things, and she was almost distracted when she said that.”

“I don’t think she ought to have deceived it, papa,” said the boy. “But it ought to have known that if it was a Pony Engine to begin with, it never could have a cow-catcher.”

“Couldn’t it?” asked the little girl, gently.

“No; they’re kind of mooley.”

The little girl asked the papa, “What makes Pony Engines mooley?” for she did not choose to be told by her brother; he was only two years older than she was, anyway.

“Well; it’s pretty hard to say. You see, when a locomotive is first hatched—”

“Oh, are they hatched, papa?” asked the boy.

“Well, we’ll call it hatched,” said the papa; but they knew he was just funning. “They’re about the size of tea-kettles at first; and it’s a chance whether they will have cow-catchers or not. If they keep their spouts, they will; and if their spouts drop off, they won’t.”

“What makes the spout ever drop off?”

“Oh, sometimes the pip, or the gapes—”

The children both began to shake the papa, and he was glad enough to go on sensibly. “Well, anyway, the mother locomotive certainly oughtn’t to have deceived it. Still she had to say something, and perhaps the little Pony Engine was better employed watching its buffers with its head-light, to see whether its cow-catcher had begun to grow, than it would have been in listening to the stories of the old locomotives, and sometimes their swearing.”

“Do they swear, papa?” asked the little girl, somewhat shocked, and yet pleased.

“Well, I never heard them, near by. But it sounds a good deal like swearing when you hear them on the up-grade on our hill in the night. Where was I?”

“Swearing,” said the boy. “And please don’t go back, now, papa.”

“Well, I won’t. It’ll be as much as I can do to get through this story, without going over any of it again. Well, the thing that the little Pony Engine wanted to be, the most in this world, was the locomotive of the Pacific Express, that starts out every afternoon at three, you know. It intended to apply for the place as soon as its cow-catcher was grown, and it was always trying to attract the locomotive’s attention, backing and filling on the track alongside of the train; and once it raced it a little piece, and beat it, before the Express locomotive was under way, and almost got in front of it on a switch. My, but its mother was scared! She just yelled to it with her whistle; and that night she sent it to sleep without a particle of coal or water in its tender.

“But the little Pony Engine didn’t care. It had beaten the Pacific Express in a hundred yards, and what was to hinder it from beating it as long as it chose? The little Pony Engine could not get it out of its head. It was just like a boy who thinks he can whip a man.”

The boy lifted his head. “Well, a boy can, papa, if he goes to do it the right way. Just stoop down before the man knows it, and catch him by the legs and tip him right over.”

“Ho! I guess you see yourself!” said the little girl, scornfully.

“Well, I could!” said the boy; “and some day I’ll just show you.”

“Now, little cock-sparrow, now!” said the papa; and he laughed. “Well, the little Pony Engine thought he could beat the Pacific Express, anyway; and so one dark, snowy, blowy afternoon, when his mother was off pushing some empty coal cars up past the Know-Nothing crossing beyond Charlestown, he got on the track in front of the Express, and when he heard the conductor say ‘All aboard,’ and the starting gong struck, and the brakemen leaned out and waved to the engineer, he darted off like lightning. He had his steam up, and he just scuttled.

“Well, he was so excited for a while that he couldn’t tell whether the Express was gaining on him or not; but after twenty or thirty miles, he thought he heard it pretty near. Of course the Express locomotive was drawing a heavy train of cars, and it had to make a stop or two — at Charlestown, and at Concord Junction, and at Ayer — so the Pony Engine did really gain on it a little; and when it began to be scared it gained a good deal. But the first place where it began to feel sorry, and to want its mother, was in Hoosac Tunnel. It never was in a tunnel before, and it seemed as if it would never get out. It kept thinking, What if the Pacific Express was to run over it there in the dark, and its mother off there at the Fitchburg Depot, in Boston, looking for it among the side-tracks? It gave a perfect shriek; and just then it shot out of the tunnel. There were a lot of locomotives loafing around there at North Adams, and one of them shouted out to it as it flew by, ‘What’s your hurry, little one?’ and it just screamed back, ‘Pacific Express!’ and never stopped to explain. They talked in locomotive language—”

“Oh, what did it sound like?” the boy asked.

“Well, pretty queer; I’ll tell you some day. It knew it had no time to fool away, and all through the long, dark night, whenever, a locomotive hailed it, it just screamed, ‘Pacific Express!’ and kept on. And the Express kept gaining on it. Some of the locomotives wanted to stop it, but they decided they had better not get in its way, and so it whizzed along across New York State and Ohio and Indiana, till it got to Chicago. And the Express kept gaining on it. By that time it was so hoarse it could hardly whisper, but it kept saying, ‘Pacific Express! Pacific Express!’ and it kept right on till it reached the Mississippi River. There it found a long train of freight cars before it on the bridge. It couldn’t wait, and so it slipped down from the track to the edge of the river and jumped across, and then scrambled up the embankment to the track again.”

“Papa!” said the little girl, warningly.

“Truly it did,” said the papa.

“Ho! that’s nothing,” said the boy. “A whole train of cars did it in that Jules Verne book.”

“Well,” the papa went on, “after that it had a little rest, for the Express had to wait for the freight train to get off the bridge, and the Pony Engine stopped at the first station for a drink of water and a mouthful of coal, and then it flew ahead. There was a kind old locomotive at Omaha that tried to find out where it belonged, and what its mother’s name was, but the Pony Engine was so bewildered it couldn’t tell. And the Express kept gaining on it. On the plains it was chased by a pack of prairie wolves, but it left them far behind; and the antelopes were scared half to death. But the worst of it was when the nightmare got after it.”

“The nightmare? Goodness!” said the boy.

“I’ve had the nightmare,” said the little girl.

“Oh yes, a mere human nightmare,” said the papa. “But a locomotive nightmare is a very different thing.”

“Why, what’s it like?” asked the boy. The little girl was almost afraid to ask.

“Well, it has only one leg, to begin with.”

“Pshaw!”

“Wheel, I mean. And it has four cow-catchers, and four head-lights, and two boilers, and eight whistles, and it just goes whirling and screeching along. Of course it wobbles awfully; and as it’s only got one wheel, it has to keep skipping from one track to the other.”

“I should think it would run on the cross-ties,” said the boy.

“Oh, very well, then!” said the papa. “If you know so much more about it than I do! Who’s telling this story, anyway? Now I shall have to go back to the beginning. Once there was a little Pony En—”

They both put their hands over his mouth, and just fairly begged him to go on, and at last he did. “Well, it got away from the nightmare about morning, but not till the nightmare had bitten a large piece out of its tender, and then it braced up for the home-stretch. It thought that if it could once beat the Express to the Sierras, it could keep the start the rest of the way, for it could get over the mountains quicker than the Express could, and it might be in San Francisco before the Express got to Sacramento. The Express kept gaining on it. But it just zipped along the upper edge of Kansas and the lower edge of Nebraska, and on through Colorado and Utah and Nevada, and when it got to the Sierras it just stooped a little, and went over them like a goat; it did, truly; just doubled up its fore wheels under it, and jumped. And the Express kept gaining on it. By this time it couldn’t say ‘Pacific Express’ any more, and it didn’t try. It just said ‘Express! Express!’ and then ‘‘Press! ‘Press!’ and then ‘‘Ess! ‘Ess!’ and pretty soon only ‘‘Ss! ‘Ss!’ And the Express kept gaining on it. Before they reached San Francisco, the Express locomotive’s cow-catcher was almost touching the Pony Engine’s tender; it gave one howl of anguish as it felt the Express locomotive’s hot breath on the place where the nightmare had bitten the piece out, and tore through the end of the San Francisco depot, and plunged into the Pacific Ocean, and was never seen again. There, now,” said the papa, trying to make the children get down, “that’s all. Go to bed.” The little girl was crying, and so he tried to comfort her by keeping her in his lap.

The boy cleared his throat. “What is the moral, papa?” he asked, huskily.

“Children, obey your parents,” said the papa.

“And what became of the mother locomotive?” pursued the boy.

“She had a brain-fever, and never quite recovered the use of her mind again.”

The boy thought awhile. “Well, I don’t see what it had to do with Christmas, anyway.”

“Why, it was Christmas Eve when the Pony Engine started from Boston, and Christmas afternoon when it reached San Francisco.”

“Ho!” said the boy. “No locomotive could get across the continent in a day and a night, let alone a little Pony Engine.”

“But this Pony Engine had to. Did you never hear of the beaver that clomb the tree?”

“No! Tell—”

“Yes, some other time.”

“But how could it get across so quick? Just one day!”

“Well, perhaps it was a year. Maybe it was the next Christmas after that when it got to San Francisco.”

The papa set the little girl down, and started to run out of the room, and both of the children ran after him, to pound him.

When they were in bed the boy called down-stairs to the papa, “Well, anyway, I didn’t put up my lip.”

THE PUMPKIN-GLORY

The papa had told the story so often that the children knew just exactly what to expect the moment he began. They all knew it as well as he knew it himself, and they could keep him from making mistakes, or forgetting. Sometimes he would go wrong on purpose, or would pretend to forget, and then they had a perfect right to pound him till he quit it. He usually quit pretty soon.

The children liked it because it was very exciting, and at the same time it had no moral, so that when it was all over, they could feel that they had not been excited just for the moral. The first time the little girl heard it she began to cry, when it came to the worst part; but the boy had heard it so much by that time that he did not mind it in the least, and just laughed.

The story was in season any time between Thanksgiving and New Years; but the papa usually began to tell it in the early part of October, when the farmers were getting in their pumpkins, and the children were asking when they were going to have any squash pies, and the boy had made his first jack-o’-lantern.

“Well,” the papa said, “once there were two little pumpkin seeds, and one was a good little pumpkin seed, and the other was bad — very proud, and vain, and ambitious.”

The papa had told them what ambitious was, and so the children did not stop him when he came to that word; but sometimes he would stop of his own accord, and then if they could not tell what it meant, he would pretend that he was not going on; but he always did go on.

“Well, the farmer took both the seeds out to plant them in the home-patch, because they were a very extra kind of seeds, and he was not going to risk them in the cornfield, among the corn. So before he put them in the ground, he asked each one of them what he wanted to be when he came up, and the good little pumpkin seed said he wanted to come up a pumpkin, and be made into a pie, and be eaten at Thanksgiving dinner; and the bad little pumpkin seed said he wanted to come up a morning-glory.

“‘Morning-glory!’ says the farmer. ‘I guess you’ll come up a pumpkin-glory, first thing you know,’ and then he haw-hawed, and told his son, who was helping him to plant the garden, to keep watch of that particular hill of pumpkins, and see whether that little seed came up a morning-glory or not; and the boy stuck a stick into the hill so he could tell it. But one night the cow got in, and the farmer was so mad, having to get up about one o’clock in the morning to drive the cow out, that he pulled up the stick, without noticing, to whack her over the back with it, and so they lost the place.

“But the two little pumpkin seeds, they knew where they were well enough, and they lay low, and let the rain and the sun soak in and swell them up; and then they both began to push, and by-and-by they got their heads out of the ground, with their shells down over their eyes like caps, and as soon as they could shake them off and look round, the bad little pumpkin vine said to his brother:

“‘Well, what are you going to do now?’

“The good little pumpkin vine said, ‘Oh, I’m just going to stay here, and grow and grow, and put out all the blossoms I can, and let them all drop off but one, and then grow that into the biggest and fattest and sweetest pumpkin that ever was for Thanksgiving pies.’

TWO LITTLE PUMPKIN SEEDS.

“‘Well, that’s what I am going to do, too,’ said the bad little pumpkin vine, ‘all but the pies; but I’m not going to stay here to do it. I’m going to that fence over there, where the morning-glories were last summer, and I’m going to show them what a pumpkin-glory is like. I’m just going to cover myself with blossoms; and blossoms that won’t shut up, either, when the sun comes out, but ‘ll stay open, as if they hadn’t anything to be ashamed of, and that won’t drop off the first day, either. I noticed those morning-glories all last summer, when I was nothing but one of the blossoms myself, and I just made up my mind that as soon as ever I got to be a vine, I would show them a thing or two. Maybe I can’t be a morning-glory, but I can be a pumpkin-glory, and I guess that’s glory enough.’

“It made the cold chills run over the good little vine to hear its brother talk like that, and it begged him not to do it; and it began to cry —

“What’s that?” The papa stopped short, and the boy stopped whispering in his sister’s ear, and she answered:

“He said he bet it was a girl!” The tears stood in her eyes, and the boy said:

“Well, anyway, it was like a girl.”

“Very well, sir!” said the papa. “And supposing it was? Which is better: to stay quietly at home, and do your duty, and grow up, and be eaten in a pie at Thanksgiving, or go gadding all over the garden, and climbing fences, and everything? The good little pumpkin vine was perfectly right, and the bad little pumpkin would have been saved a good deal if it had minded its little sister.

“The farmer was pretty busy that summer, and after the first two or three hoeings he had to leave the two pumpkin vines to the boy that had helped him to plant the seed, and the boy had to go fishing so much, and then in swimming, that he perfectly neglected them, and let them run wild, if they wanted to; and if the good little pumpkin vine had not been the best little pumpkin vine that ever was, it would have run wild. But it just stayed where it was, and thickened up, and covered itself with blossoms, till it was like one mass of gold. It was very fond of all its blossoms, and it couldn’t bear hardly to think of losing any of them; but it knew they couldn’t every one grow up to be a very large pumpkin, and so it let them gradually drop off till it only had one left, and then it just gave all its attention to that one, and did everything it could to make it grow into the kind of pumpkin it said it would.

“All this time the bad little pumpkin vine was carrying out its plan of being a pumpkin-glory. In the first place it found out that if it expected to get through by fall it couldn’t fool much putting out a lot of blossoms and waiting for them to drop off, before it began to devote itself to business. The fence was a good piece off, and it had to reach the fence in the first place, for there wouldn’t be any fun in being a pumpkin-glory down where nobody could see you, or anything. So the bad little pumpkin vine began to pull and stretch towards the fence, and sometimes it thought it would surely snap in two, it pulled and stretched so hard. But besides the pulling and stretching, it had to hide, and go round, because if it had been seen it wouldn’t have been allowed to go to the fence. It was a good thing there were so many weeds, that the boy was too lazy to pull up, and the bad little pumpkin vine could hide among. But then they were a good deal of a hinderance, too, because they were so thick it could hardly get through them. It had to pass some rows of pease that were perfectly awful; they tied themselves to it and tried to keep it back; and there was one hill of cucumbers that acted ridiculously; they said it was a cucumber vine running away from home, and they would have kept it from going any farther, if it hadn’t tugged with all its might and main, and got away one night when the cucumbers were sleeping; it was pretty strong, anyway. When it got to the fence at last, it thought it was going to die. It was all pulled out so thin that it wasn’t any thicker than a piece of twine in some places, and its leaves just hung in tatters. It hadn’t had time to put out more than one blossom, and that was such a poor little sickly thing that it could hardly hang on. The question was, How can a pumpkin vine climb a fence, anyway?

“Its knees and elbows were all worn to strings getting there, or that’s what the pumpkin thought, till it wound one of those tendrils round a splinter of the fence, without thinking, and happened to pull, and then it was perfectly surprised to find that it seemed to lift itself off the ground a little. It said to itself, ‘Let’s try a few more,’ and it twisted some more of the tendrils round some more splinters, and this time it fairly lifted itself off the ground. It said, ‘Ah, I see!’ as if it had somehow expected to do something of the kind all along; but it had to be pretty careful getting up the fence not to knock its blossom off, for that would have been the end of it; and when it did get up among the morning-glories it almost killed the poor thing, keeping it open night and day, and showing it off in the hottest sun, and not giving it a bit of shade, but just holding it out where it could be seen the whole time. It wasn’t very much of a blossom compared with the blossoms on the good little pumpkin vine, but it was bigger than any of the morning-glories, and that was some satisfaction, and the bad little pumpkin vine was as proud as if it was the largest blossom in the world.

“When the blossom’s leaves dropped off, and a little pumpkin began to grow on in its place, the vine did everything it could for it; just gave itself up to it, and put all its strength into it. After all, it was a pretty queer-looking pumpkin, though. It had to grow hanging down, and not resting on anything, and after it started with a round head, like other pumpkins, its neck began to pull out, and pull out, till it looked like a gourd or a big pear. That’s the way it looked in the fall, hanging from the vine on the fence, when the first light frost came and killed the vine. It was the day when the farmer was gathering his pumpkins in the cornfield, and he just happened to remember the seeds he had planted in the home-patch, and he got out of his wagon to see what had become of them. He was perfectly astonished to see the size of the good little pumpkin; you could hardly get it into a bushel basket, and he gathered it, and sent it to the county fair, and took the first premium with it.”

“How much was the premium?” asked the boy. He yawned; he had heard all these facts so often before.

TOOK THE FIRST PREMIUM AT THE COUNTY FAIR.

“It was fifty cents; but you see the farmer had to pay two dollars to get a chance to try for the premium at the fair; and so it was some satisfaction. Anyway, he took the premium, and he tried to sell the pumpkin, and when he couldn’t, he brought it home and told his wife they must have it for Thanksgiving. The boy had gathered the bad little pumpkin, and kept it from being fed to the cow, it was so funny-looking; and the day before Thanksgiving the farmer found it in the barn, and he said,

“‘Hollo! Here’s that little fool pumpkin. Wonder if it thinks it’s a morning-glory yet?’

“And the boy said, ‘Oh, father, mayn’t I have it?’

“And the father said, ‘Guess so. What are you going to do with it?’

“But the boy didn’t tell, because he was going to keep it for a surprise; but as soon as his father went out of the barn, he picked up the bad little pumpkin by its long neck, and he kind of balanced it before him, and he said, ‘Well, now, I’m going to make a pumpkin-glory out of you!’

“‘HERE’S THAT LITTLE FOOL PUMPKIN,’ SAID THE FARMER.”

“And when the bad little pumpkin heard that, all its seeds fairly rattled in it for joy. The boy took out his knife, and the first thing the pumpkin knew he was cutting a kind of lid off the top of it; it was like getting scalped, but the pumpkin didn’t mind it, because it was just the same as war. And when the boy got the top off he poured the seeds out, and began to scrape the inside as thin as he could without breaking through. It hurt awfully, and nothing but the hope of being a pumpkin-glory could have kept the little pumpkin quiet; but it didn’t say a word, even after the boy had made a mouth for it, with two rows of splendid teeth, and it didn’t cry with either of the eyes he made for it; just winked at him with one of them, and twisted its mouth to one side, so as to let him know it was in the joke; and the first thing it did when it got one was to turn up its nose at the good little pumpkin, which the boy’s mother came into the barn to get.”

“Show how it looked,” said the boy.

And the papa twisted his mouth, and winked with one eye, and wrinkled his nose till the little girl begged him to stop. Then he went on:

“The boy hid the bad pumpkin behind him till his mother was gone, because he didn’t want her in the secret; and then he slipped into the house, and put it under his bed. It was pretty lonesome up there in the boy’s room — he slept in the garret, and there was nothing but broken furniture besides his bed; but all day long it could smell the good little pumpkin, boiling and boiling for pies; and late at night, after the boy had gone to sleep, it could smell the hot pies when they came out of the oven. They smelt splendid, but the bad little pumpkin didn’t envy them a bit; it just said, ‘Pooh! What’s twenty pumpkin pies to one pumpkin-glory?’”

“It ought to have said ‘what are,’ oughtn’t it, papa?” asked the little girl.

“It certainly ought,” said the papa. “But if nothing but it’s grammar had been bad, there wouldn’t have been much to complain of about it.”

“I don’t suppose it had ever heard much good grammar from the farmer’s family,” suggested the boy. “Farmers always say cowcumbers instead of cucumbers.”

“Oh, do tell us about the Cowcumber, and the Bullcumber, and the little Calfcumbers, papa!” the little girl entreated, and she clasped her hands, to show how anxious she was.

“What! And leave off at the most exciting part of the pumpkin-glory?”

The little girl saw what a mistake she had made; the boy just gave her one look, and she cowered down into the papa’s lap, and the papa went on.

“Well, they had an extra big Thanksgiving at the farmer’s that day. Lots of the relations came from out West; the grandmother, who was living with the farmer, was getting pretty old, and every year or two she thought she wasn’t going to live very much longer, and she wrote to the relations in Wisconsin, and everywhere, that if they expected to see her alive again, they had better come this time, and bring all their families. She kept doing it till she was about ninety, and then she just concluded to live along and not mind how old she was. But this was just before her eighty-ninth birthday, and she had drummed up so many sons and sons-in-law, and daughters and daughters-in-law, and grandsons and great-grandsons, and granddaughters and great-granddaughters, that the house was perfectly packed with them. They had to sleep on the floor, a good many of them, and you could hardly step for them; the boys slept in the barn, and they laughed and cut up so the whole night that the roosters thought it was morning, and kept crowing till they made their throats sore, and had to wear wet compresses round them every night for a week afterwards.”

When the papa said anything like this the children had a right to pound him, but they were so anxious not to have him stop, that this time they did not do it. They said, “Go on, go on!” and the little girl said, “And then the tables!”

“Tables? Well, I should think so! They got all the tables there were in the house, up stairs and down, for dinner Thanksgiving Day, and they took the grandmother’s work-stand and put it at the head, and she sat down there; only she was so used to knitting by that table that she kept looking for her knitting-needles all through dinner, and couldn’t seem to remember what it was she was missing. The other end of the table was the carpenter’s bench that they brought in out of the barn, and they put the youngest and funniest papa at that. The tables stretched from the kitchen into the dining-room, and clear through that out into the hall, and across into the parlor. They hadn’t table-cloths enough to go the whole length, and the end of the carpenter’s bench, where the funniest papa sat, was bare, and all through dinner-time he kept making fun. The vise was right at the corner, and when he got his help of turkey, he pretended that it was so tough he had to fasten the bone in the vise, and cut the meat off with his knife like a draw-shave.”

“It was the drumstick, I suppose, papa?” said the boy. “A turkey’s drumstick is all full of little wooden splinters, anyway.”

“And what did the mamma say?” asked the little girl.

“CAUGHT HIS TROUSERS ON A SHINGLE-NAIL, AND STUCK.”

“Oh, she kept saying, ‘Now you behave!’ and, ‘Well, I should think you’d be ashamed!’ but the funniest papa didn’t mind her a bit; and everybody laughed till they could hardly stand it. All this time the boys were out in the barn, waiting for the second table, and playing round. The farmer’s boy went up to his room over the wood-shed, and got in at the garret window, and brought out the pumpkin-glory. Only he began to slip when he was coming down the roof, and he’d have slipped clear off if he hadn’t caught his trousers on a shingle-nail, and stuck. It made a pretty bad tear, but the other boys pinned it up so that it wouldn’t show, and the pumpkin-glory wasn’t hurt a bit. They all said that it was about the best jack-o’-lantern they almost ever saw, on account of the long neck there was to it; and they made a plan to stick the end of the neck into the top of the pump, and have fun hearing what the folks would say when they came out after dark and saw it all lit up; and then they noticed the pigpen at the corner of the barn, and began to plague the pig, and so many of them got up on the pen that they broke the middle board off; and they didn’t like to nail it on again because it was Thanksgiving Day, and you mustn’t hammer or anything; so they just stuck it up in its place with a piece of wood against it, and the boy said he would fix it in the morning.

“The grown folks stayed so long at the table that it was nearly dark when the boys got to it, and they would have been almost starved if the farm-boy hadn’t brought out apples and doughnuts every little while. As it was, they were pretty hungry, and they began on the pumpkin pie at once, so as to keep eating till the mother and the other mothers that were helping could get some of the things out of the oven that they had been keeping hot for the boys. The pie was so nice that they kept eating at it all along, and the mother told them about the good little pumpkin that it was made of, and how the good little pumpkin had never had any wish from the time it was nothing but a seed, except to grow up and be made into pies and eaten at Thanksgiving; and they must all try to be good, too, and grow up and do likewise. The boys didn’t say anything, because their mouths were so full, but they looked at each other and winked their left eyes. There were about forty or fifty of them, and when they all winked their left eyes it made it so dark you could hardly see; and the mother got the lamp; but the other mothers saw what the boys were doing, and they just shook them till they opened their eyes and stopped their mischief.”

“Show how they looked!” said the boy.

“I can’t show how fifty boys looked,” said the papa. “But they looked a good deal like the pumpkin-glory that was waiting quietly in the barn for them to get through, and come out and have some fun with it. When they had all eaten so much that they could hardly stand up, they got down from the table, and grabbed their hats, and started for the door. But they had to go out the back way, because the table took up the front entry, and that gave the farmer’s boy a chance to find a piece of candle out in the kitchen and some matches; and then they rushed to the barn. It was so dark there already that they thought they had better light up the pumpkin-glory and try it. They lit it up, and it worked splendidly; but they forgot to put out the match, and it caught some straw on the barn floor, and a little more and it would have burnt the barn down. The boys stamped the fire out in about half a second; and after that they waited till it was dark outside before they lit up the pumpkin-glory again. Then they all bent down over it to keep the wind from blowing the match anywhere, and pretty soon it was lit up, and the farmer’s boy took the pumpkin-glory by its long neck, and stuck the point in the hole in the top of the pump; and just then the funniest papa came round the corner of the wood-house, and said:

“‘What have you got there, boys? Jack-o’-lantern? Well, well. That’s a good one!’

“He came up and looked at the pumpkin-glory, and he bent back and he bent forward, and he doubled down and he straightened up, and laughed till the boys thought he was going to kill himself.

“They had all intended to burst into an Indian yell, and dance round the pumpkin-glory; but the funniest papa said, ‘Now all you fellows keep still half a minute,’ and the next thing they knew he ran into the house, and came out, walking his wife before him with both his hands over her eyes. Then the boys saw he was going to have some fun with her, and they kept as still as mice, and waited till he walked her up to the pumpkin-glory; and she was saying all the time, ‘Now, John, if this is some of your fooling, I’ll give it to you.’ When he got her close up he took away his hands, and she gave a kind of a whoop, and then she began to laugh, the pumpkin-glory was so funny, and to chase the funniest papa all round the yard to box his ears, and as soon as she had boxed them she said, ‘Now let’s go in and send the rest out,’ and in about a quarter of a second all the other papas came out, holding their hands over the other mothers’ eyes till they got them up to the pumpkin-glory; and then there was such a yelling and laughing and chasing and ear-boxing that you never heard anything like it; and all at once the funniest papa hallooed out: ‘Where’s gramma? Gramma’s got to see it! Grandma’ll enjoy it. It’s just gramma’s kind of joke,’ and then the mothers all got round him and said he shouldn’t fool the grandmother, anyway; and he said he wasn’t going to: he was just going to bring her out and let her see it; and his wife went along with him to watch that he didn’t begin acting up.

“The grandmother had been sitting all alone in her room ever since dinner; because she was always afraid somehow that if you enjoyed yourself it was a sign you were going to suffer for it, and she had enjoyed herself a good deal that day, and she was feeling awfully about it. When the funniest papa and his wife came in she said, ‘What is it? What is it? Is the world a-burnin’ up? Well, you got to wrap up warm, then, or you’ll ketch your death o’ cold runnin’ and then stoppin’ to rest with your pores all open!’

“The funniest papa’s wife she went up and kissed her, and said, ‘No, grandmother, the world’s all right,’ and then she told her just how it was, and how they wanted her to come out and see the jack-o’-lantern, just to please the children; and she must come, anyway; because it was the funniest jack-o’-lantern there ever was, and then she told how the funniest papa had fooled her, and then how they had got the other papas to fool the other mothers, and they had all had the greatest fun then you ever saw. All the time she kept putting on her things for her, and the grandmother seemed to get quite in the notion, and she laughed a little, and they thought she was going to enjoy it as much as anybody; they really did, because they were all very tender of her, and they wouldn’t have scared her for anything, and everybody kept cheering her up and telling her how much they knew she would like it, till they got her to the pump. The little pumpkin-glory was feeling awfully proud and self-satisfied; for it had never seen any flower or any vegetable treated with half so much honor by human beings. It wasn’t sure at first that it was very nice to be laughed at so much, but after a while it began to conclude that the papas and the mammas were just laughing at the joke of the whole thing. When the old grandmother got up close, it thought it would do something extra to please her; or else the heat of the candle had dried it up so that it cracked without intending to. Anyway, it tried to give a very broad grin, and all of a sudden it split its mouth from ear to ear.”

“‘MY SAKES! IT’S COMIN’ TO LIFE!’”

“You didn’t say it had any ears before,” said the boy.

“No; it had them behind,” said the papa; and the boy felt like giving him just one pound; but he thought it might stop the story, and so he let the papa go on.

“As soon as the grandmother saw it open its mouth that way she just gave one scream, ‘My sakes! It’s comin’ to life!’ And she threw up her arms, and she threw up her feet, and if the funniest papa hadn’t been there to catch her, and if there hadn’t been forty or fifty other sons and daughters, and grandsons and daughters, and great-grandsons and great-granddaughters, very likely she might have fallen. As it was, they piled round her, and kept her up; but there were so many of them they jostled the pump, and the first thing the pumpkin-glory knew, it fell down and burst open; and the pig that the boys had plagued, and that had kept squealing all the time because it thought that the people had come out to feed it, knocked the loose board off its pen, and flew out and gobbled the pumpkin-glory up, candle and all, and that was the end of the proud little pumpkin-glory.”

“And when the pig ate the candle it looked like the magician when he puts burning tow in his mouth,” said the boy.

“Exactly,” said the papa.

The children were both silent for a moment. Then the boy said, “This story never had any moral, I believe, papa?”

“Not a bit,” said the papa. “Unless,” he added, “the moral was that you had better not be ambitious, unless you want to come to the sad end of this proud little pumpkin-glory.”

“Why, but the good little pumpkin was eaten up, too,” said the boy.

“That’s true,” the papa acknowledged.

“Well,” said the little girl, “there’s a great deal of difference between being eaten by persons and eaten by pigs.”

“All the difference in the world,” said the papa; and he laughed, and ran out of the library before the boy could get at him.

BUTTERFLYFLUTTERBY AND FLUTTERBYBUTTERFLY.

One morning when the papa was on a visit to the grandfather, the nephew and the niece came rushing into his room and got into bed with him. He pretended to be asleep, and even when they grabbed hold of him and shook him, he just let his teeth clatter, and made no sign of waking up. But they knew he was fooling, and they kept shaking him till he opened his eyes and looked round, and said, “Oh, oh! where am I?” as if he were all bewildered.

“You’re in bed with us!” they shouted; and they acted as if they were afraid he would try to get away from them by the way they held on to his arms.

But he lay quite still, and he only said, “I should say you were in bed with me. It seems to be my bed.”

“It’s the same thing!” said the nephew.

“How do you make that out?” asked the papa. “It’s the same thing if it’s enchantment. But if it isn’t, it isn’t.”

The niece said, “What enchantment?” for she thought that would be a pretty good chance to get what they had come for.

She was perfectly delighted, and gave a joyful thrill all over when the papa said, “Oh, that’s a long story.”

“Well, the longer the better, I should say; shouldn’t you, brother?” she returned.

The nephew hemmed twice in his throat, and asked, drowsily, “Is it a little-pig story, or a fairy-prince story?” for he had heard from his cousins that their papa would tell you a little-pig story if he got the chance; and you had to look out and ask him which it was going to be beforehand.

“Well, I can’t tell,” said the papa. “It’s a fairy-prince story to begin with, but it may turn out a little-pig story before it gets to the end. It depends upon how the Prince behaves. But I’m not anxious to tell it,” and the papa put his face into the pillow and pretended to fall instantly asleep again.

“Now, brother, you see!” said the niece. “Being so particular!”

“Well, sister,” said the nephew, “it wasn’t my fault. I had to ask him. You know what they said.”

“Well, I suppose we’ve got to wake him up all over again,” said the niece, with a little sigh; and they began to pull at the papa this way and that, but they could not budge him. As soon as they stopped, he opened his eyes.

“Now don’t say, ‘Where am I?’” said the niece.

The papa could not help laughing, because that was just the very thing he was going to say. “Well, all right! What about that story? Do you want to hear it, and take your chances of its being a Prince to the end?”

“I suppose we’ll have to; won’t we, sister?”

“Yes, we’ll leave it all to you, uncle,” said the niece; and she thought she would coax him up a little, and so she went on: “I know you won’t be mean about it. Will he, brother?”

“No,” said the nephew. “I’ll bet the Prince will keep a Prince all the way through. What’ll you bet, sister?”

“I won’t bet anything,” said the niece, and she put her arm round the papa’s neck, and pressed her cheek up against his. “I’ll just leave it to uncle, and if it does turn into a little-pig story, it’ll be for the moral.”

The nephew was not quite sure what a moral was; but at the bottom of his heart he would just as soon have it a little-pig story as not. He had got to thinking how funny a little pig would look in a Prince’s clothes, and he said, “Yes, it’ll be for the moral.”

The papa was very contrary that morning. “Well,” said he, “I don’t know about that. I’m not sure there’s going to be any moral.”

“Oh, goody!” said the niece, and she clapped her hands in great delight. “Then it’s going to be a Prince story all through!”

“If you interrupt me in that way, it’s not going to be any story at all.”

“I didn’t know you had begun it, uncle,” pleaded the niece.

“Well, I hadn’t. But I was just going to.” The papa lay quiet a while. The fact is, he had not thought up any story at all; and he was so tired of all the stories he used to tell his own children that he could not bear to tell one of them, though he knew very well that the niece and nephew would be just as glad of it as if it were new, and maybe gladder; for they had heard a great deal about these stories, how perfectly splendid they were — like the Pumpkin-Glory, and the Little Pig that took the Poison Pills, and the Proud Little Horse-car that fell in Love with the Pullman Sleeper, and Jap Doll Hopsing’s Adventures in Crossing the Continent, and the Enchantment of the Greedy Travellers, and the Little Boy whose Legs turned into Bicycle Wheels. At last the papa said, “This is a very peculiar kind of a story. It’s about a Prince and a Princess.”

“Oh!” went both of the children; and then they stopped themselves, and stuffed the covering into their mouths.

The papa lifted himself on his elbow and stared severely at them, first at one, and then at the other. “Have you finished?” he asked, as if they had interrupted him; but he really wanted to gain time, so as to think up a story of some kind. The children were afraid to say anything, and the papa went on with freezing politeness: “Because if you have, I might like to say something myself. This story is about a Prince and a Princess, but the thing of it is that they had names almost exactly alike. They were twins; the Prince was a boy and the Princess was a girl; that was a point that their fairy godmother carried against the wicked enchantress who tried to have it just the other way; but it made the wicked enchantress so mad that the fairy godmother had to give in to her a little, and let them be named almost exactly alike.”

Here the papa stopped, and after waiting for him to go on, the nephew ventured to ask, very respectfully indeed, “Would you mind telling us what their names were, uncle?”

The papa rubbed his forehead. “I have such a bad memory for names. Hold on! Wait a minute! I remember now! Their names were Butterflyflutterby and Flutterbybutterfly.” Of course he had just thought up the names.

“And which was which, uncle dear?” asked the niece, not only very respectfully, but very affectionately, too; she was so afraid he would get mad again, and stop altogether.

“Why, I should think you would know a girl’s name when you heard it. Butterflyflutterby was the Prince and Flutterbybutterfly was the Princess.”

“I don’t see how we’re ever going to keep them apart,” sighed the niece.

“You’ve got to keep them apart,” said the papa. “Because it’s the great thing about the story that if you can’t remember which is the Prince and which is the Princess whenever I ask you, the story has to stop. It can’t help it, and I can’t help it.”

They knew he was just setting a trap for them, and the same thought struck them both at once. They rose up and leaned over the papa, with their arms across and their fluffy heads together in the form of a capital letter A, and whispered in each other’s ears, “You say it’s one, and I’ll say it’s the other, and then we’ll have it right between us.”

They dropped back and pulled the covering up to their chins, and shouted, “Don’t you tell! don’t you tell!” and just perfectly wriggled with triumph.

The papa had heard every word; they were laughing so that they whispered almost as loud as talking; but he pretended that he had not understood, and he made up his mind that he would have them yet. “A little and a more,” he said, “and I should never have gone on again.”

“Go on! Go on!” they called out, and then they wriggled and giggled till anybody would have thought they were both crazy.

“Well, where was I?” This was another of the papa’s tricks to gain time. Whenever he could not think of anything more, he always asked, “Well, where was I?” He now added: “Oh yes! I remember! Well, once there were a Prince and a Princess, and their names were Butterflyflutterby and Flutterbybutterfly; and they were both twins, and both orphans; but they made their home with their fairy godmother as long as they were little, and they used to help her about the house for part board, and she helped them about their kingdom, and kept it in good order for them, and left them plenty of time to play and enjoy themselves. She was the greatest person for order there ever was; and if she found a speck of dust or dirt on the kingdom anywhere, she would have out the whole army and make them wash it up, and then sand-paper the place, and polish it with a coarse towel till it perfectly glistened. The father of the Prince and Princess had taken the precaution, before he died, to subdue all his enemies; and the consequence was that the longest kind of peace had set in, and the army had nothing to do but keep the kingdom clean. That was the reason why the fairy godmother had made the General-in-Chief take their guns away, and arm them with long feather-dusters. They marched with the poles on their shoulders, and carried the dusters in their belts, like bayonets; and whenever they came to a place that the fairy godmother said needed dusting — she always went along with them in a diamond chariot — she made the General halloo out: ‘Fix dusters! Make ready! Aim! Dust!’ And then the place would be cleaned up. But the General-in-Chief used to go out behind the church and cry, it mortified him so to have to give such orders, and it reminded him so painfully of the good old times when he would order his men to charge the enemy, and cover the field with gore and blood, instead of having it so awfully spick-and-span as it was now. Still he did what the fairy godmother told him, because he said it was his duty; and he kept his troops supplied with sudsine and dustene, to clean up with, and brushes and towels. The fairy godmother—”

“‘FIX DUSTERS! MAKE READY! AIM! DUST!’”

“Excuse me, uncle,” said the nephew, with extreme deference, “but I should just like to ask you one question. Will you let me?”

“What is it?” said the papa, in the grimmest kind of manner he could put on.

“Ah, brother!” murmured the niece; for she knew that he was rather sarcastic, and she was afraid that something ironical was coming.

“THE GENERAL-IN-CHIEF USED TO GO BEHIND THE CHURCH AND CRY.”

“Well, I just wanted to ask whether this story was about the fairy godmother, or about the Prince and Princess.”

“Very well, now,” said the papa. “You’ve asked your question. I didn’t promise to answer it, and I’m happy to say it stops the story. I’ll guess I’ll go to sleep again. I don’t like being waked up this way in the middle of the night, anyhow.”

“Now, brother, I hope you’re satisfied!” said the niece.

The nephew evaded the point. He said: “Well, sister, if the story really isn’t going on, I should like to ask uncle another question. How big was the fairy godmother’s diamond chariot?”

“It was the usual sized chariot,” answered the papa.

“Whew! It must have been a pretty big diamond, then!”

“It was a very big diamond,” said the papa; and he seemed to forget all about being mad, or else he had thought up some more of the story to tell, for he went on just as if nothing had happened. “The fairy godmother was so severe with the dirt she found because it was a royal prerogative — that is, nobody but the King, or the King’s family, had a right to make a mess, and if other people did it, they were infringing on the royal prerogative.

“You know,” the papa explained, “that in old times and countries the royal family have been allowed to do things that no other family would have been associated with if they had done them. That is about the only use there is in having a royal family. But the fairy godmother of Prince—”

“Butterflyflutterby,” said the niece.

“And Princess—”

“Flutterbybutterfly,” said the nephew.

“Correct,” said the papa.

The children rose up into a capital A again, and whispered, “He didn’t catch us that time,” and fell back, laughing, and the papa had to go on.

“The fairy godmother thought she would try to bring up the Prince and Princess rather better than most Princes and Princesses were brought up, and so she said that the only thing they should be allowed to do different from other people was to make a mess. If any other persons were caught making a mess they were banished; and there was another law that was perfectly awful.”

“What-was-it-go-ahead?” said the nephew, running all his words together, he was so anxious to know.

“Why, if any person was found clearing up anywhere, and it turned out to be a mess that the royal twins had made, the person was thrown from a tower.”

“Did it kill them?” the niece inquired, rather faintly.

“Well, no, it didn’t kill them exactly, but it bounced them up pretty high. You see, they fell on a bed of India-rubber about twenty feet deep. It gave them a good scare; and that’s the great thing in throwing persons from a high tower.”

The nephew hastened to improve the opportunity which seemed to be given for asking questions.

“What do you mean exactly by making a mess, uncle?”

“Oh, scattering scraps of paper about, or scuffing the landscape, or getting jam or molasses on the face of nature, or having bonfires in the back yard of the palace, or leaving dolls around on the throne. But what did I say about asking questions? Now there’s another thing about this story: when it comes to the exciting part, if you move the least bit, or even breathe loud, the story stops, just as if you didn’t know which was the Prince and which was the Princess. Now do you understand?”

The children both said “Yes” in a very small whisper, and cowered down almost under the clothing, and held on tight, so as to keep from stirring.

“THE YOUNG KHAN AND KHANT ENTERED THE KINGDOM WITH A MAGNIFICENT RETINUE.”

The papa went on: “Well, about the time they had got these two laws in full force, and forty or fifty thousand boys girls had been banished for making a mess, and pretty nearly all the neat old ladies in the kingdom had been thrown from a high tower for cleaning up after the Prince and Princess Butterflyflutterby and Flutterbybutterfly, the young Khan and Khant of Tartary entered the kingdom with a magnificent retinue of followers, to select a bride and groom from the children of the royal family. As there were no children in the royal family except the twins, the choice of the Khan and Khant naturally fell upon the Prince—”

“Butterflyflutterby!”

“And the Princess—”

“Flutterbybutterfly!”

“Correct. It also happened that the Khan and the Khant were brother and sister; but if you can’t tell which was the brother and which was the sister, the story stops at this point.”

“Why, but, uncle,” said the little girl, reproachfully, “you haven’t ever told us which is which yourself yet!”

“I know it. Because I’m waiting to find out. You see, with these Asiatic names it’s impossible sometimes to tell which is which. You have to wait and see how they will act. If there had been a battle anywhere, and one of them had screamed, and run away, then I suppose I should have been pretty sure it was the sister; but even then I shouldn’t know which was the Khan and which was the Khant.”

“Well, what are we going to do about it, then?” asked the nephew.

“I don’t know,” said the papa. “We shall just have to keep on and see. Perhaps when they meet the Prince and Princess we shall find out. I don’t suppose a boy would fall in love with a boy.”

“No,” said the niece; “but he might want to go off with him and have fun, or something.”

“That’s true,” said the papa. “We’ve got to all watch out. Of course the Khan and the Khant scuffed the landscape awfully, as they came along through the kingdom, and got the face of nature all daubed up with marmalade — they were the greatest persons for marmalade — and when they reached the palace of the Prince and Princess they had to camp out in the back yard, and they had to have bonfires to cook by, and they made a frightful mess.

“Well, there was the greatest excitement about it that there ever was. The General-in-Chief kept his men under arms night and day, and the fairy godmother was so worked up she almost had a brain-fever; and if she had not taken six of aconite every night when she went to bed she would have had. You see, the question was what to do about the mess that the Khan and Khant made. They were visitors, and it wouldn’t have been polite to banish them; and they belonged to a royal family, and so nobody dared to clean up after them. The whole kingdom was in the most disgusting state, and whenever the fairy godmother looked into the back yard of the palace she felt as if she would go through the floor.

“SHE WAS GOING TO TAKE THE CASE INTO HER OWN HANDS.”

“Well, it kept on going from bad to worse. The only person that enjoyed herself was the wicked enchantress; she never had such a good time in her life; and when the fairy godmother got hold of the Grand Vizier and the Cadi, and told them to make a new law so as to allow the army to clean up after royal visitors, without being thrown from a high tower, the wicked enchantress enchanted the whole mess, so that the army could not tell which the Prince and Princess had made, and which the Khan and Khant had made; they were all four always playing together, anyway.

“It seemed as if the poor old fairy godmother would go perfectly wild, and she almost made the General crazy giving orders in one breath, and taking them back in the next. She said that now something had got to be done; she had stood it long enough; and she was going to take the case into her own hands. She saw that she should have no peace of her life till the Prince and Princess and the Khan and Khant were married. She sent for the head Imam, and told him to bring those children right in and marry them, and she would be responsible.

“The Imam put his head to the floor — and it was pretty hard on him, for he was short and stout, and he had to do it kind of sideways — and said to hear was to obey; but he could not marry them unless he knew which was which.

“The fairy godmother screamed out: ‘I don’t care which is which! Marry them all, just as they are!’

“But when she came to think it over, she saw that this would not do, and so she tried to invent some way out of the trouble. One morning she woke up with a splendid idea, and she could hardly wait to have breakfast before she sent for the General-in-Chief. Her nerves were all gone, and as soon as she saw him, she yelled at him: ‘A sham battle — to-day — now — this very instant! Right away, right away, right away!’

“THE IMAM PUT HIS HEAD TO THE FLOOR.”

“The General got her to explain herself, and then he understood that she wanted him to have a grand review and sham battle of all the troops, in honor of the Khan and Khant; and the whole court had to be present, and especially the timidest of the ladies, that would almost scare a person to death by the way they screamed when they were frightened. The General was just going to say that the guns and cannon had all got rusty, and the powder was spoiled from not having been used for so long, with the everlasting cleaning up that had been going on; but the fairy godmother stamped her foot and sent him flying. So the only thing he could do was to set all the gnomes at work making guns and cannon and powder, and about twelve o’clock they had them ready, and just after lunch the sham battle began.

“The troops marched and counter-marched, and fired away the whole afternoon, and sprang mines and blew up magazines, and threw cannon crackers and cannon torpedoes. There was such an awful din and racket that you couldn’t hear yourself think, and some of the court ladies were made perfectly sick by it. They all asked to be excused, but the fairy godmother wouldn’t excuse one of them. She just kept them there on the seats round the battle-field, and let them shriek themselves hoarse. So many of them fainted that they had to have the garden hose brought, and they kept it sprinkling away on their faces all the afternoon.

“THEY BEGAN TO SCREAM, ‘OH, THE COW! THE COW!’”

“But it was a failure as far as the Khan and the Khant were concerned. The fairy godmother expected that as soon as the loudest firing began, the girl, whichever it was, would scream, and so they would know which was which. But the Khan and Khant’s father had been a famous warrior, and he had been in the habit of taking his children to battle with him from their earliest years, partly because his wife was dead and he didn’t dare trust them with the careless nurse at home, and partly because he wanted to harden their nerves. So now they just clapped their hands, and enjoyed the sham battle down to the ground.

“About sunset the fairy godmother gave it up. She had to, anyway. The troops had shot away all their powder, and the gnomes couldn’t make any more till the next day. So she set out to return to the city, with all the court following her diamond chariot, and I can tell you she felt pretty gloomy. She told the Grand Vizier that now she didn’t see any end to the trouble, and she was just going into hysterics when a barefooted boy came along driving his cow home from the pasture. The fairy godmother didn’t mind it much, for she was in her chariot; but the court ladies were on foot, and they began to scream, ‘Oh, the cow! the cow!’ and to take hold of the knights, and to get on to the fence, till it was perfectly packed with them; and who do you think the fairy godmother found had scrambled up on top of her chariot?”

The nephew and niece were afraid to risk a guess, and the papa had to say:

“The Khant! The fairy godmother pulled her inside and hugged her and kissed her, she was so glad to find out that she was the one; and she stopped the procession on the spot, and she called up the Imam, and he married the Khant to Prince—”

The papa stopped, and as the niece and nephew hesitated, he said, very sternly, “Well?”

The fact is, they had got so mixed up about the Khan and the Khant of Tartary that they had forgotten which was Butterflyflutterby and which was Flutterbybutterfly. They tried, shouting out one the one and the other the other, but the papa said:

“Oh no! That won’t work. I’ve had that sort of thing tried on me before, and it never works. I heard you whispering what you would do, and you have simply added the crime of double-dealing to the crime of inattention. The story has stopped, and stopped forever.”

The nephew stretched himself and then sat up in bed. “Well, it had got to the end, anyway.”

“Oh, had it? What became of the wicked enchantress?” The nephew lay down again, in considerable dismay.

“Uncle,” said the niece, very coaxingly, “I didn’t say it had come to the end.”

“But it has,” said the papa. “And I’m mighty glad you forgot the Prince’s name, for the rule of this story is that it has to go on as long as any one listening remembers, and it might have gone on forever.”

“I suppose,” the nephew said, “a person may guess?”

“He may, if he guesses right. If he guesses wrong, he has to be thrown from a high tower — the same one the wicked enchantress was thrown from.”

“There!” shouted the nephew; “you said you wouldn’t tell. How high was the tower, anyway, uncle? As high as the Eiffel Tower in Paris?”

“Not quite. It was three feet and five inches high.”

“Ho! Then the enchantress was a dwarf!”

“Who said she was a dwarf?”

“There wouldn’t be any use throwing her from the tower if she wasn’t.”

“I didn’t say it was any use. They just did it for ornament.”

This made the nephew so mad that he began to dig the papa with his fist, and the papa began to laugh. He said, as well as he could for laughing: “You see, the trouble was to keep her from bouncing up higher than the top of the tower. She was light weight, anyway, because she was a witch; and after the first bounce they had to have two executioners to keep throwing her down — a day executioner and a night executioner; and she went so fast up and down that she was just like a solid column of enchantress. She enjoyed it first-rate, but it kept her out of mischief.”

“Now, uncle,” said the niece, “you’re just letting yourself go. What did the fairy godmother do after they all got married?”

“Well, the story don’t say exactly. But there’s a report that when she became a fairy grandgodmother, she was not half so severe about cleaning up, and let the poor old General-in-Chief have some peace of his life — or some war. There was a rebellion among the genii not long afterwards, and the General was about ten or fifteen years putting them down.”

The nephew had been lying quiet a moment. Now he began to laugh.

“What are you laughing at?” demanded his uncle.

“The way that Khant scrambled up on top of the chariot when the cow came along. Just like a girl. They’re all afraid of cows.”

The tears came into the niece’s eyes; she had a great many feelings, and they were easily hurt, especially her feelings about girls.

“Well, she wasn’t afraid of the cannon, anyway.”

“That is a very just remark,” said the uncle. “And now what do you say to breakfast?”

The children sprang out of bed, and tried which could beat to the door. They forgot to thank the uncle, but he did not seem to have expected any thanks.

EDITHA

First published in Harper’s Monthly 110 (Jan. 1905).

EDITHA

THE AIR was thick with the war feeling, like the electricity of a storm which had not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still leafless avenue, making slowly up towards the house, with his head down and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with her will before she called him aloud to him: “George!”

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence, before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, “Well?”

“Oh, how united we are!” she exulted, and then she swooped down the steps to him, “What is it?” she cried.

“It’s war,” he said. and he pulled her up to him and kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion, and uttered from deep in her throat. “How glorious!”

“It’s war,” he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship, which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the miracle was already wrought in him. In the presence of the tremendous fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him; she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her question of the origin and authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity. Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him, without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could do something worthy to have won her — be a hero, her hero — it would be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

“But don’t you see, dearest,” she said, “that it wouldn’t have come to this if it hadn’t been in the order of Providence? And I call any war glorious that is for the liberation of people who have been struggling for years against the cruelest oppression. Don’t you think so, too?”

“I suppose so,” he returned, languidly. “But war! Is it glorious to break the peace of the world?”

“That ignoble peace! It was no peace at all, with that crime and shame at our very gates.” She was conscious of parroting the current phrases of the newspapers, but it was no time to pick and choose her words. She must sacrifice anything to the high ideal she had for him, and after a good deal of rapid argument she ended with the climax: “But now it doesn’t matter about the how or why. Since the war has come, all that is gone. There are no two sides any more. There is nothing now but our country.”

He sat with his eyes closed and his head leant back against the veranda, and he remarked, with a vague smile, as if musing aloud, “Our country — right or wrong.”

“Yes, right or wrong!” she returned, fervidly. “I’ll go and get you some lemonade.” She rose rustling, and whisked away; when she came back with two tall glasses of clouded liquid on a tray, and the ice clucking in them, he still sat as she had left him, and she said, as if there had been no interruption: “But there is no question of wrong in this case. I call it a sacred war. A war for liberty and humanity, if ever there was one. And I know you will see it just as I do, yet.”

He took half the lemonade at a gulp, and he answered as he set the glass down: “I know you always have the highest ideal. When I differ from you I ought to doubt myself.”

A generous sob rose in Editha’s throat for the humility of a man, so very nearly perfect, who was willing to put himself below her.

Besides, she felt, more subliminally, that he was never so near slipping through her fingers as when he took that meek way.

“You shall not say that! Only, for once I happen to be right.” She seized his hand in her two hands, and poured her soul from her eyes into his. “Don’t you think so?” she entreated him.

He released his hand and drank the rest of his lemonade, and she added, “Have mine, too,” but he shook his head in answering, “I’ve no business to think so, unless I act so, too.”

Her heart stopped a beat before it pulsed on with leaps that she felt in her neck. She had noticed that strange thing in men: they seemed to feel bound to do what they believed, and not think a thing was finished when they said it, as girls did. She knew what was in his mind, but she pretended not, and she said, “Oh, I am not sure,” and then faltered.

He went on as if to himself, without apparently heeding her: “There’s only one way of proving one’s faith in a thing like this.”

She could not say that she understood, but she did understand.

He went on again. “If I believed — if I felt as you do about this war — Do you wish me to feel as you do?”

Now she was really not sure; so she said: “George, I don’t know what you mean.”

He seemed to muse away from her as before. “There is a sort of fascination in it. I suppose that at the bottom of his heart every man would like at times to have his courage tested, to see how he would act.”

“How can you talk in that ghastly way?”

“It is rather morbid. Still, that’s what it comes to, unless you’re swept away by ambition or driven by conviction. I haven’t the conviction or the ambition, and the other thing is what it comes to with me. I ought to have been a preacher, after all; then I couldn’t have asked it of myself, as I must, now I’m a lawyer. And you believe it’s a holy war, Editha?” he suddenly addressed her. “Oh, I know you do! But you wish me to believe so, too?”

She hardly knew whether he was mocking or not, in the ironical way he always had with her plainer mind. But the only thing was to be outspoken with him.

“George, I wish you to believe whatever you think is true, at any and every cost. If I’ve tried to talk you into anything, I take it all back.”

“Oh, I know that, Editha. I know how sincere you are, and how — I wish I had your undoubting spirit! I’ll think it over; I’d like to believe as you do. But I don’t, now; I don’t, indeed. It isn’t this war alone; though this seems peculiarly wanton and needless; but it’s every war — so stupid; it makes me sick. Why shouldn’t this thing have been settled reasonably?”

“Because,” she said, very throatily again, “God meant it to be war.”

“You think it was God? Yes, I suppose that is what people wi11 say.”

“Do you suppose it would have been war if God hadn’t meant it?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes it seems as if God had put this world into men’s keeping to work it as they pleased.”

“Now, George, that is blasphemy.”

“Well, I won’t blaspheme. I’ll try to believe in your pocket Providence,” he said, and then he rose to go.

“Why don’t you stay to dinner?” Dinner at Balcom’s Works was at one o’clock.

“I’ll come back to supper, if you’ll let me. Perhaps I shall bring you a convert.”

“Well, you may come back, on that condition.”

“All right. If I don’t come, you’ll understand.”

He went away without kissing her, and she felt it a suspension of their engagement. It all interested her intensely; she was undergoing a tremendous experience, and she was being equal to it. While she stood looking after him, her mother came out through one of the long windows onto the veranda, with a catlike softness and vagueness.

“Why didn’t he stay to dinner?”

“Because — because — war has been declared,” Editha pronounced, without turning.

Her mother said, “Oh, my!” and then said nothing more until she had sat down in one of the large Shaker chairs and rocked herself for some time. Then she closed whatever tacit passage of thought there had been in her mind with the spoken words: “Well, I hope he won’t go.”

“And I hope he will,” the girl said, and confronted her mother with a stormy exaltation that would have frightened any creature less unimpressionable than a cat.

Her mother rocked herself again for an interval of cogitation. What she arrived at in speech was: “Well, I guess you’ve done a wicked thing, Editha Balcom.”

The girl said, as she passed indoors through the same window her mother had come out by: “I haven’t done anything — yet.”

In her room, she put together all her letters and gifts from Gearson, down to the withered petals of the first flower he had offered, with that timidity of his veiled in that irony of his. In the heart of the packet she enshrined her engagement ring which she had restored to the pretty box he had brought it her in. Then she sat down, if not calmly yet strongly, and wrote:

“George: — I understood when you left me. But I think we had better emphasize your meaning that if we cannot be one in everything we had better be one in nothing. So I am sending these things for your keeping till you have made up your mind.

“I shall always love you, and therefore I shall never marry any one else. But the man I marry must love his country first of all, and be able to say to me,

“‘I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.’

“There is no honor above America with me. In this great hour there is no other honor.

“Your heart will make my words clear to you. I had never expected to say so much, but it has come upon me that I must say the utmost. Editha.”

She thought she had worded her letter well, worded it in a way that could not be bettered; all had been implied and nothing expressed.

She had it ready to send with the packet she had tied with red, white, and blue ribbon, when it occurred to her that she was not just to him, that she was not giving him a fair chance. He had said he would go and think it over, and she was not waiting. She was pushing, threatening, compelling. That was not a woman’s part. She must leave him free, free, free. She could not accept for her country or herself a forced sacrifice.

In writing her letter she had satisfied the impulse from which it sprang; she could well afford to wait till he had thought it over. She put the packet and the letter by, and rested serene in the consciousness of having done what was laid upon her by her love itself to do, and yet used patience, mercy, justice.

She had her reward. Gearson did not come to tea, but she had given him till morning, when, late at night there came up from the village the sound of a fife and drum, with a tumult of voices, in shouting, singing, and laughing. The noise drew nearer and nearer; it reached the street end of the avenue; there it silenced itself, and one voice, the voice she knew best, rose over the silence. It fell; the air was filled with cheers; the fife and drum struck up, with the shouting, singing, and laughing again, but now retreating; and a single figure came hurrying up the avenue.

She ran down to meet her lover and clung to him. He was very gay, and he put his arm round her with a boisterous laugh. “Well, you must call me Captain now; or Cap, if you prefer; that’s what the boys call me. Yes, we’ve had a meeting at the town-hall, and everybody has volunteered; and they selected me for captain, and I’m going to the war, the big war, the glorious war, the holy war ordained by the pocket Providence that blesses butchery. Come along; let’s tell the whole family about it. Call them from their downy beds, father, mother, Aunt Hitty, and all the folks!”

But when they mounted the veranda steps he did not wait for a larger audience; he poured the story out upon Editha alone.

“There was a lot of speaking, and then some of the fools set up a shout for me. It was all going one way, and I thought it would be a good joke to sprinkle a little cold water on them. But you can’t do that with a crowd that adores you. The first thing I knew I was sprinkling hell-fire on them. ‘Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.’ That was the style. Now that it had come to the fight, there were no two parties; there was one country, and the thing was to fight to a finish as quick as possible. I suggested volunteering then and there, and I wrote my name first of all on the roster. Then they elected me — that’s all. I wish I had some ice-water.”

She left him walking up and down the veranda, while she ran for the ice-pitcher and a goblet, and when she came back he was still walking up and down, shouting the story he had told her to her father and mother, who had come out more sketchily dressed than they commonly were by day. He drank goblet after goblet of the ice-water without noticing who was giving it, and kept on talking, and laughing through his talk wildly. “It’s astonishing,” he said, “how well the worse reason looks when you try to make it appear the better. Why, I believe I was the first convert to the war in that crowd to-night! I never thought I should like to kill a man; but now I shouldn’t care; and the smokeless powder lets you see the man drop that you kill. It’s all for the country! What a thing it is to have a country that can’t be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!”

Editha had a great, vital thought, an inspiration. She set down the ice-pitcher on the veranda floor, and ran up-stairs and got the letter she had written him. When at last he noisily bade her father and mother, “Well, good-night. I forgot I woke you up; I sha’n’t want any sleep myself,” she followed him down the avenue to the gate. There, after the whirling words that seemed to fly away from her thoughts and refuse to serve them, she made a last effort to solemnize the moment that seemed so crazy, and pressed the letter she had written upon him.

“What’s this?” he said. “Want me to mail it?”

“No, no. It’s for you. I wrote it after you went this morning. Keep it — keep it — and read it sometime—” She thought, and then her inspiration came: “Read it if ever you doubt what you’ve done, or fear that I regret your having done it. Read it after you’ve started.”

They strained each other in embraces that seemed as ineffective as their words, and he kissed her face with quick, hot breaths that were so unlike him, that made her feel as if she had lost her old lover and found a stranger in his place. The stranger said: “What a gorgeous flower you are, with your red hair, and your blue eyes that look black now, and your face with the color painted out by the white moonshine! Let me hold you under the chin, to see whether I love blood, you tiger-lily!” Then he laughed Gearson’s laugh, and released her, scared and giddy. Within her wilfulness she had been frightened by a sense of subtler force in him, and mystically mastered as she had never been before.

She ran all the way back to the house, and mounted the steps panting. Her mother and father were talking of the great affair. Her mother said: “Wa’n’t Mr. Gearson in rather of an excited state of mind? Didn’t you think he acted curious?”

“Well, not for a man who’d just been elected captain and had set ’em up for the whole of Company A,” her father chuckled back.

“What in the world do you mean, Mr. Balcom? Oh! There’s Editha!” She offered to follow the girl indoors.

“Don’t come, mother!” Editha called, vanishing.

Mrs. Balcom remained to reproach her husband. “I don’t see much of anything to laugh at.”

“Well, it’s catching. Caught it from Gearson. I guess it won’t be much of a war, and I guess Gearson don’t think so either. The other fellows will back down as soon as they see we mean it. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. I’m going back to bed, myself.”

Gearson came again next afternoon, looking pale and rather sick, but quite himself, even to his languid irony. “I guess I’d better tell you, Editha, that I consecrated myself to your god of battles last night by pouring too many libations to him down my own throat. But I’m all right now. One has to carry off the excitement, somehow.”

“Promise me,” she commanded, “that you’ll never touch it again!”

“What! Not let the cannikin clink? Not let the soldier drink? Well, I promise.”

“You don’t belong to yourself now; you don’t even belong to me. You belong to your country, and you have a sacred charge to keep yourself strong and well for your country’s sake. I have been thinking, thinking all night and all day long.”

“You look as if you had been crying a little, too,” he said, with his queer smile.

“That’s all past. I’ve been thinking, and worshipping you. Don’t you suppose I know all that you’ve been through, to come to this? I’ve followed you every step from your old theories and opinions.”

“Well, you’ve had a long row to hoe.”

“And I know you’ve done this from the highest motives—”

“Oh, there won’t be much pettifogging to do till this cruel war is—”

“And you haven’t simply done it for my sake. I couldn’t respect you if you had.”

“Well, then we’ll say I haven’t. A man that hasn’t got his own respect intact wants the respect of all the other people he can corner. But we won’t go into that. I’m in for the thing now, and we’ve got to face our future. My idea is that this isn’t going to be a very protracted struggle; we shall just scare the enemy to death before it comes to a fight at all. But we must provide for contingencies, Editha. If anything happens to me—”

“Oh, George!” She clung to him, sobbing.

“I don’t want you to feel foolishly bound to my memory. I should hate that, wherever I happened to be.”

“I am yours, for time and eternity — time and eternity.” She liked the words; they satisfied her famine for phrases.

“Well, say eternity; that’s all right; but time’s another thing; and I’m talking about time. But there is something! My mother! If anything happens—”

She winced, and he laughed. “You’re not the bold soldier-girl of yesterday!” Then he sobered. “If anything happens, I want you to help my mother out. She won’t like my doing this thing. She brought me up to think war a fool thing as well as a bad thing. My father was in the Civil War; all through it; lost his arm in it.” She thrilled with the sense of the arm round her; what if that should be lost? He laughed as if divining her: “Oh, it doesn’t run in the family, as far as I know!” Then he added gravely: “He came home with misgivings about war, and they grew on him. I guess he and mother agreed between them that I was to be brought up in his final mind about it; but that was before my time. I only knew him from my mother’s report of him and his opinions; I don’t know whether they were hers first; but they were hers last. This will be a blow to her. I shall have to write and tell her—”

He stopped, and she asked: “Would you like me to write, too, George?”

“I don’t believe that would do. No, I’ll do the writing. She’ll understand a little if I say that I thought the way to minimize it was to make war on the largest possible scale at once — that I felt I must have been helping on the war somehow if I hadn’t helped keep it from coming, and I knew I hadn’t; when it came, I had no right to stay out of it.”

Whether his sophistries satisfied him or not, they satisfied her. She clung to his breast, and whispered, with closed eyes and quivering lips: “Yes, yes, yes!”

“But if anything should happen, you might go to her and see what you could do for her. You know? It’s rather far off; she can’t leave her chair—”

“Oh, I’ll go, if it’s the ends of the earth! But nothing will happen! Nothing can! I—”

She felt her lifted with his rising, and Gearson was saying, with his arm still round her, to her father: “Well, we’re off at once, Mr. Balcom. We’re to be formally accepted at the capital, and then bunched up with the rest somehow, and sent into camp somewhere, and got to the front as soon as possible. We all want to be in the van, of course; we’re the first company to report to the Governor. I came to tell Editha, but I hadn’t got round to it.”

She saw him again for a moment at the capital, in the station, just before the train started southward with his regiment. He looked well, in his uniform, and very soldierly, but somehow girlish, too, with his clean-shaven face and slim figure. The manly eyes and the strong voice satisfied her, and his preoccupation with some unexpected details of duty flattered her. Other girls were weeping and bemoaning themselves, but she felt a sort of noble distinction in the abstraction, the almost unconsciousness, with which they parted. Only at the last moment he said: “Don’t forget my mother. It mayn’t be such a walk-over as I supposed,” and he laughed at the notion.

He waved his hand to her as the train moved off — she knew it among a score of hands that were waved to other girls from the platform of the car, for it held a letter which she knew was hers. Then he went inside the car to read it, doubtless, and she did not see him again. But she felt safe for him through the strength of what she called her love. What she called her God, always speaking the name in a deep voice and with the implication of a mutual understanding, would watch over him and keep him and bring him back to her. If with an empty sleeve, then he should have three arms instead of two, for both of hers should be his for life. She did not see, though, why she should always be thinking of the arm his father had lost.

There were not many letters from him, but they were such as she could have wished, and she put her whole strength into making hers such as she imagined he could have wished, glorifying and supporting him. She wrote to his mother glorifying him as their hero, but the brief answer she got was merely to the effect that Mrs. Gearson was not well enough to write herself, and thanking her for her letter by the hand of someone who called herself “Yrs truly, Mrs. W. J. Andrews.”

Editha determined not to be hurt, but to write again quite as if the answer had been all she expected. Before it seemed as if she could have written, there came news of the first skirmish, and in the list of the killed, which was telegraphed as a trifling loss on our side, was Gearson’s name. There was a frantic time of trying to make out that it might be, must be, some other Gearson; but the name and the company and the regiment and the State were too definitely given.

Then there was a lapse into depths out of which it seemed as if she never could rise again; then a lift into clouds far above all grief, black clouds, that blotted out the sun, but where she soared with him, with George — George! She had the fever that she expected of herself, but she did not die in it; she was not even delirious, and it did not last long. When she was well enough to leave her bed, her one thought was of George’s mother, of his strangely worded wish that she should go to her and see what she could do for her. In the exaltation of the duty laid upon her — it buoyed her up instead of burdening her — she rapidly recovered.

Her father went with her on the long railroad journey from northern New York to western Iowa; he had business out at Davenport, and he said he could just as well go then as any other time; and he went with her to the little country town where George’s mother lived in a little house on the edge of the illimitable cornfields, under trees pushed to a top of the rolling prairie. George’s father had settled there after the Civil War, as so many other old soldiers had done; but they were Eastern people, and Editha fancied touches of the East in the June rose overhanging the front door, and the garden with early summer flowers stretching from the gate of the paling fence.

It was very low inside the house, and so dim, with the closed blinds, that they could scarcely see one another: Editha tall and black in her crapes which filled the air with the smell of their dyes; her father standing decorously apart with his hat on his forearm, as at funerals; a woman rested in a deep arm-chair, and the woman who had let the strangers in stood behind the chair.

The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman behind her chair: “Who did you say?”

Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, “I am George’s Editha,” for answer.

But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman’s voice, saying: “Well, I don’t know as I did get the name just right. I guess I’ll have to make a little more light in here,” and she went and pushed two of the shutters ajar.

Then Editha’s father said, in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks tone: “My name is Balcom, ma’am — Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom’s Works, New York; my daughter—”

“Oh!” the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that always surprised Editha from Gearson’s slender frame. “Let me see you. Stand round where the light can strike on your face,” and Editha dumbly obeyed. “So, you’re Editha Balcom,” she sighed.

“Yes,” Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.

“What did you come for?” Mrs. Gearson asked.

Editha’s face quivered and her knees shook. “I came — because — because George—” She could go no further.

“Yes,” the mother said, “he told me he had asked you to come if he got killed. You didn’t expect that, I suppose, when you sent him.”

“I would rather have died myself than done it!” Editha said, with more truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. “I tried to leave him free—”

“Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left him free.”

Editha saw now where George’s irony came from.

“It was not to be read before — unless — until — I told him so,” she faltered.

“Of course, he wouldn’t read a letter of yours, under the circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?” the woman abruptly demanded.

“Very sick,” Editha said, with self-pity.

“Daughter’s life,” her father interposed, “was almost despaired of, at one time.”

Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. “I suppose you would have been glad to die, such a brave person as you! I don’t believe he was glad to die. He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to. I suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him by what it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through one war before. When you sent him you didn’t expect he would get killed.”

The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. “No,” she huskily murmured.

“No, girls don’t; women don’t, when they give their men up to their country. They think they’ll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as they went, or if it’s an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it’s all the more glory, and they’re so much the prouder of them, poor things!”

The tears began to run down Editha’s face; she had not wept till then; but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came.

“No, you didn’t expect him to get killed,” Mrs. Gearson repeated, in a voice which was startlingly like George’s again. “You just expected him to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren’t there because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there, poor wretches — conscripts, or whatever they call ‘em. You thought it would be all right for my George, your George, to kill the sons of those miserable mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would never see the faces of.” The woman lifted her powerful voice in a psalmlike note. “I thank my God he didn’t live to do it! I thank my God they killed him first, and that he ain’t livin’ with their blood on his hands!” She dropped her eyes, which she had raised with her voice, and glared at Editha. “What you got that black on for?” She lifted herself by her powerful arms so high that her helpless body seemed to hang limp its full length. “Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your back!”

The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom’s Works was sketching Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her everything.

“To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!” the lady said. She added: “I suppose there are people who feel that way about war. But when you consider the good this war has done — how much it has done for the country! I can’t understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way out there to console her — got up out of a sick-bed! Well!”

“I think,” Editha said, magnanimously, “she wasn’t quite in her right mind; and so did papa.”

“Yes,” the lady said, looking at Editha’s lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. “But how dreadful of her! How perfectly — excuse me — how vulgar!”

A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the ideal.

STORIES OF OHIO

CONTENTS

THE ICE FOLK AND THE EARTH FOLK.

OHIO AS A PART OF FRANCE.

OHIO BECOMES ENGLISH.

THE FORTY YEARS’ WAR FOR THE WEST.

THE CAPTIVITY OF JAMES SMITH

THE CAPTIVITY OF BOONE AND KENTON.

THE RENEGADES.

THE WICKEDEST DEED IN OUR HISTORY.

THE TORTURE OF COLONEL CRAWFORD

THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.

THE INDIAN WARS AND ST. CLAIR’S DEFEAT.

THE INDIAN WARS AND WAYNE’S VICTORY.

INDIAN FIGHTERS.

LATER CAPTIVITIES.

INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.

LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS.

THE FIRST GREAT SETTLEMENTS.

THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.

A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC.

WAYS OUT.

THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.

THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO

FAMOUS OHIO SOLDIERS

OHIO STATESMEN

OTHER NOTABLE OHIOANS

INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS.

PREFACE.

In the following stories, drawn from the annals of Ohio, I have tried to possess the reader with a knowledge, in outline at least, of the history of the State from the earliest times. I cannot suppose that I have done this with unfailing accuracy in respect to fact, but with regard to the truth, I am quite sure of my purpose at all times to impart it.

The books which have been of most use to me in writing this are the histories of Francis Parkman; the various publications of Messrs. Robert Clarke and Co. in the “Ohio Valley Series”; McClung’s “Sketches of Western Adventure”; “Ohio” (in the American Commonwealths Series) by Ruf us King; “History and Civil Government of Ohio,” by B. A. Hinsdale and Mary Hinsdale; “Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley,” by W. H. Venable; Theodore Roosevelt’s “Winning of the West”; Whitelaw Reid’s “Ohio in the War”; and above all others, the delightful and inexhaustible volumes of Henry Howe’s “Historical Collections of Ohio.”

W. D. H.

THE ICE FOLK AND THE EARTH FOLK.

The first Ohio stories are part of the common story of the wonderful Ice Age, when a frozen deluge pushed down from the north, and covered a vast part of the earth’s surface with slowly moving glaciers. The traces that this age left in Ohio are much the same as it left elsewhere, and the signs that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers began to melt and the land became fit to live in again, are such as have been found in the glacier drift in many other countries. Even before the ice came creeping southwestwardly from the region of Niagara, and passed over two thirds of our state, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River there were people here of a race older than the hills, as the hills now are; for the glaciers ground away the hills as they once were, and made new ones, with new valleys between them, and new channels for the streams to run where there had never been water courses before. These earliest Ohioans must have been the same as the Ohioans of the Ice Age, and when they had fled southward before the glaciers, they must have followed the retreat of the melting ice back into Ohio again. No one knows how long they dwelt here along its edges in a climate like that of Greenland, where the glaciers are now to be seen as they once were in the region of Cincinnati. But it is believed that these Ice Folk, as we may call them, were of the race which still roams the Arctic snows. They seem to have lived as the Eskimos of our day live: they were hunters and fishers, and in the gravelly banks of the new rivers, which the glaciers upheaved, the Ice Folk dropped the axes of chipped stone which are now found there. They left nothing else behind them; but similar tools or weapons are found in the glacier-built river banks of Europe, and so it is thought that the race of the earliest Ohio men lived pretty much all over the world in the Ice Age.

One of the learned writers[*] who is surest of them and has told us most about them, holds that they were for their time and place as worthy ancestors as any people could have; and we could well believe this because the Ohio man has, in all ages, been one of the foremost men.

   * Professor G. F. Wright.

Our Ice Folk were sturdy, valiant, and cunning enough to cope with the fierce brute life and the terrible climate of their day, but all they have left to prove it is the same kind of stone axes that have been found in the drift of the glaciers, along the water courses in Northern France and Southern England.

Our Ice Folk must have dressed like their far-descended children, the Eskimos, in furs and skins, and like them they must have lived upon fish and the flesh of wild beasts. The least terrible of these beasts would have been the white bear; the mammoth and mastodon were among the animals the Ice Folk hunted for game, and slew without bows or arrows, for there was no wood to make these of. The only weapon the Ice Folk had was the stone ax which they may have struck into their huge prey when they came upon it sleeping or followed in the chase till it dropped with fatigue. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacial terrace, as the bank of this drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas, in 1889, perhaps ten thousand years after it was left there. It was wrought from a piece of black flint, four inches long and two inches wide; at the larger end it was nearly as thick as it was wide, and it was chipped to a sharp edge all round. Within the present year another of the Ice Folk’s axes has been found near New London, twenty-two feet under ground, in the same kind of glacial drift as the first. But it seems to have been made of a different kind of stone, and to have been so deeply rotted by the long ages it had been buried that when its outer substance was scratched away, hardly anything of the hard green rock was left.

After the glaciers were gone, the Ohio climate was still very cold, and vast lakes stretched over the state, freezing in the long winters, and thawing in the short summers. One of these spread upward from the neighborhood of Akron to the east and west of where Cleveland stands; but by far the largest flooded nearly all that part of Ohio which the glaciers failed to cover, from beyond where Pittsburg is to where Cincinnati is. At the last point a mighty ice dam formed every winter till as the climate grew warmer and the ice thawed more and more, the waters burst the dam, and poured their tide down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, while those of the northern lake rushed through the Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and both lakes disappeared forever. For the next four or five thousand years the early Ohio men kept very quiet; but we need not suppose for that reason that there were none. Our Ice Folk, who dropped their stone axes in the river banks, may have passed away with the Ice Age, or they may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take on some faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that they went, and there is nothing to prove that they staid; but Ohio must always have been a pleasant place to live in after the great thaw, and it seems reasonable to think that the Ice Folk lingered, in part at least, and changed with the changing climate, and became at last the people who left the signs of their presence in almost every part of the state.

Those were the Mound Builders, whose works are said to be two or three thousand years old, though we cannot be very sure of that. There are some who think that the mounds are only a few hundred years old, and that their builders were the race of red men whom the white men found here. One may think very much as one likes, and I like to think that the Mound Builders were a very ancient people, who vanished many ages before the Indians came here. They could not have been savages, for the region where they dwelt could not have fed savages enough to heap up the multitude of their mounds. Each wild man needs fifty thousand acres to live upon, as the wild man lives by hunting and fishing; in the whole Ohio country, the earliest white adventurers found only two or three thousand Indians at the most; and the people who built those forts and temples and tombs, and shaped from the earth the mighty images of their strange bird-gods and reptile-gods, could have lived only by tilling the soil. Their mounds are found everywhere in the west between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, but they are found mostly in Ohio, where their farms and gardens once bordered the Muskingum, the Scioto, the two Miamis, and our other large streams, which they probably used as highways to the rivers of the southwest.

Their forts were earthworks, but they were skillfully planned, with a knowledge which no savage race has shown. They were real strongholds, and they are so large that some of them inclose hundreds of acres within walls of earth which still rise ten and twelve feet from the ground. They are on a far grander scale than the supposed temples or religious works; and there are more of them than of all the other ruins, except the small detached mounds, which are almost numberless.

These, from the charred bones found among the ashes in them, are known to be tombs, and they were probably the sepulchers of the common people, whose bodies were burned. The large mounds are heaped above walled chambers, and in these were platforms, supposed to have been altars, and whole skeletons, supposed to be the skeletons of priests buried there. The priests are supposed to have been the chiefs of the people, and to have ruled them through their superstitions; but there is nothing to prove this, for their laws were never put in written words or any other sign of speech. In some of the mounds little figures of burnt clay have been found, which may be idols, and pieces of ancient pottery, which may be fragments of sacred vessels, and small plates of copper, with marks or scratches on them, which may be letters. Some antiquarians have tried to read these letters, if they are letters, and to make sense out of them, but no seeker after true Ohio stories can trust their interpretations.

The Mound Builders used very little stone and showed no knowledge of masonry. But they built so massively out of the earth, that their works have lasted to this day in many places, just as they left them, except for the heavy growth of trees, which the first settlers found covering them, and which were sometimes seven or eight hundred years old. At Marietta, these works when the white people came were quite perfect and inclosed fifty acres on the bank of the Muskingum, overlooking the Ohio. They were in great variety of design. The largest mound was included in the grounds of the present cemetery, and so has been saved, but the plow of the New England emigrant soon passed over the foundations of the Mound Builders’ temples. At Circleville the shape of their fortifications gave its name to the town, which has long since hid them from sight. One of them was almost perfectly round, and the other nearly square. The round fort was about seventy feet in diameter, and was formed of two walls twenty feet high, with a deep ditch between; the other fort was fifty-five rods square, and it had no ditch; seven gateways opened into it at the side and corners, and it was joined to the round fort by an eighth. It is forever to be regretted that these precious ancient works should have been destroyed to make place for the present town; but within a few years one of the most marvelous of the Mound Builders’ works, the great Serpent Mound near Loudon, in Adams County, has been preserved to after time by the friends of science, and put in the keeping of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.

The state of Ohio has passed a law protecting the land around it as a park, and there is now reason to hope that the mound will last as long as the rocky bluff on which the serpent lies coiled. This huge idol is more than twelve hundred feet long, and is the most wonderful symbol in the world of the serpent worship, which was everywhere the earliest religion of our race.

The largest military ruin is the famous Fort Ancient in Warren County, where, on a terrace above the Little Miami River, five miles of wall, which can still be easily traced, shut in a hundred acres. In Highland County, about seventeen miles southeast of Hillsborough, another great fortress embraces thirty-five acres oh the crest of a hill overlooking Brush Creek. Itswalls are some twenty-five feet wide at the base, and rise from &ix to ten feet above the ground. Within their circuit are two ponds which could supply water in time of siege, and in the valley, which the hill commands, are the ruins of the Mound Builders’ village, whose people could take refuge in the fort on the hilltop and hold it against any approaching force.

For the rest, the works of the Mound Builders, except such as were too large to be destroyed by the farmer, have disappeared almost as wholly as the Mound Builders themselves. Their mole-like race threw up their ridges and banks and larger and lesser heaps, and then ceased from the face of the earth, as utterly as if they had burrowed into its heart. They may have fled before the ancestors of the savages whom our ancestors found here; they may have passed down peacefully into Mexico and built the cities which the Spaniards destroyed there. Or, they may have come up out of Mexico, and lost the higher arts of their civilization in our northern woods, warring with the wild tribes who were here before them. In either case, it is imaginable that the Mound Builders were of the same race as the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, and it is probable that they were akin to the Zufiis of our own day. The snake dances of the Zufiis are a relic of the old serpent worship; and the fear and hate which the Zufiis bear the red savages of the plains may be another heritage from the kindred race which once peopled our Ohio valleys.

OHIO AS A PART OF FRANCE.

If the people of Ohio were Eskimos in the ages before history began, and then thousands of years after, but still thousands of years ago were Aztecs, there is no doubt that when history first knew of them they were Frenchmen. The whole Great West, in fact, was once as much a province of France as Canada; for the dominions of Louis XV. were supposed to stretch from Quebec to New Orleans, and from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi. The land was really held by savages who had never heard of this king; but that was all the same to the French. They had discovered the Great Lakes, they had discovered the Mississippi, they had discovered the Ohio; and they built forts at Detroit, at Kaskaskia, and at Pittsburg, as well as at Niagara; they planted a colony at the mouth of our mightiest river, and opened a highway to France through the Gulf of Mexico, as well as through the Gulf of St. Lawrence; and they proclaimed their king sovereign over all.

In Ohio they had a post on the Maumee, and everywhere they had settlements at each of the forts, where there was always a chapel and a priest for the conversion of the Indians. With the French, the sword and the cross went together, but very few of the savages knew that they were either conquered or converted. From time to time they knew that companies of picturesque strangers visited their towns, and promised them the favor of the French king if they would have nothing to do with the traders from the English colonies on the Atlantic, and threatened them with his displeasure if they refused. When these brilliant strangers staid among them, and built a fort and a chapel, and laid out farms, then the savages willingly partook of the great king’s bounty, and clustered around the French post in their wigwams and settled down to the enjoyment of his brandy, his tobacco, his ammunition, and his religion. When the strangers went away, almost as soon as they had promised and threatened, then the savages went back to business with the English traders.

The company of Frenchmen who visited our Miami Indians at their town of Pickawillany, on the head waters of the Miami River in 1749, was of this last sort. It was commanded by the Chevalier C�loron de Bienville, and it counted some two hundred Canadians and French troops, officered by French gentlemen, and attended by one of those brave priests who led or followed wherever the French flag was carried in the wilderness. C�loron was sent by the governor of Canada to lay claim to the Ohio valley for his king, and he did this by very simple means. He nailed plates of tin to certain trees, and he buried plates of lead at the mouths of the larger streams. The leaden plates no one ever saw for a hundred years, till some boys going to bathe found them here and there in the wave-worn banks; but if the Indians could have read anything, or if the English traders could have read French, they might have learned at once from the tin plates that the king of France owned the “Ohio River and all the waters that fell into it, and all the lands on both sides.” As it was, however, it is hard to see how anybody was the wiser for them, or could know that the king had upheld his right to the Ohio country by battle and by treaty and would always defend it.

In fact, neither the battles nor the treaties between the French and English in Europe had really settled the question of their claim to the West in America, and both sides began to urge it in a time of peace by every kind of secret and open violence. As for the Miamis and their allies among the neighboring tribes, they believed that God had created them on the very spot where C�loron found them living, and when he asked them to leave their capital at Pickawillany, and go to live near the French post on the Maumee, they answered him that they would do so when it was more convenient. He bade them banish the English traders, but they merely hid them, while he was with them, and as soon as he was gone, they had them out of hiding, and began to traffic with them. They never found it more convenient to leave their town, until a few years later, when a force of Canadians and Christian Indians came down from the post on the Maumee, and destroyed Pickawillany.

C�loron came into the Ohio country through the western part of New York. He launched his canoes on the head waters of the Beautiful River, as the French called the Ohio, and drifted down its current till he reached the mouth of the Great Miami. He worked up this shallow and uncertain stream into Shelby County, where he had his friendly but fruitless meeting with the chief of the Miamis. After that he kept on northward to the Maumee, and then embarked on Lake Erie, and so got back to Canada. It could not be honestly said that he had done much to make good his king’s claim to the country with his plates of tin and lead. He had flattered and threatened the Indians at several places; and the Indians had promised, over the cups of brandy and pipes of tobacco which he supplied them, to be good subjects to Louis XV., who was such a very bad king that he did not deserve even such subjects as they meant to be. They seem not to have taken C�loron’s warnings very seriously, though he told them that the English traders would ruin them, and that they were preparing the way for the English settlers, who would soon swarm into their country, and drive them out.

The Indians did not believe C�loron, and yet he told them the truth. The English traders were often men of low character, thoroughly dishonest in their dealings, and the English settlers were only waiting for the end of the struggle with the French to come and take the Indians’ lands from them. If the French soldiers and the French priests had won in that struggle, Ohio and the whole West might now be something like the Province of Quebec as it was then. The Indians would have been converted to the Catholic faith, and they would still be found in almost as great numbers as ever throughout the vast region where hardly one of their blood remains.

But this was not to be. The French built their forts with a keen eye for the strongest points in the wilderness, and the priests planted the cross even beyond the forts. But all around and between the forts and the missions, the traders from our colonies, which afterwards became our states, stole into the country claimed for the king of France. At that time, there was peace between the king of France and the king of England in Europe, and they pretended that there was peace between their nations in America. They were very civil to each other through their ministers and ambassadors, over there, but their governors and captains here never ceased to fight and trick for the ownership of the West. From their forts, built to curb the English settlers, the French set the savages on to harass the frontier of our colonies, which their war parties wasted with theft and fire and murder. Our colonies made a poor defense, because they were suspicious of one another. New England was suspicious of New York, New York of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania of Virginia, and the mother country was suspicious of them all. She was willing that the French should hold Canada, and keep the colonies from joining together in a revolt against her, when she could easily have taken that province and freed them from the inroads of the Canadian Indians. The colonies would not unite against the common enemy, for fear one would have more advantage than another from their union; but their traders went out singly, through the West, and trading companies began to be formed in Pennsylvania and Virginia. While C�loron was in Ohio claiming the whole land for the king of France, the king of England was granting a great part of the same to a company of Virginians, with the right to settle it and fortify it The Virginia Company sent its agents to visit the Miamis at Pickawillany a year later, and bound them to the English by gifts of brandy, tobacco, beads, gay cloths, and powder.

The allied tribes, who had their capital at Pickawillany, numbered some two thousand in all. The Miamis themselves are said to have been of the same family as the great Iroquois nation of the East, who had beaten their rivals of the Algonquin nation, and forced them to bear the name of women. But many of the Ohio Indians were Delawares, who were of the Algonquin family; they were by no means patient of the name of women, and they and their friends now took the side of the French against the English. When at last the West, together with the whole of Canada, fell to the English and there presently began to be trouble between the American colonists and the English king, all the Indians, both Iroquois and Algonquins took part against the Americans. A little victory for either side, however, with gifts of brandy and tobacco, would turn their savage hearts toward the victors; and one must not be too confident in saying that the Indians were always for the French against the English, or always for the English against the Americans.

In fact, one must speak mostly of the Indians in words that have a double sense. The old explorers, missionaries, soldiers, and traders all talk of nations, towns, villages, kings, half-kings, queens, and princes, but these words present false images to our minds. Calling the chief town of the Miamis at Pickawillany their capital gives the notion of some such capital as Columbus or Washington; but if we imagine the chief town of the Miamis as it really was, we see some hundreds of wigwams in straggling clusters along the banks of the river, in the shadow of the ancient woods, or in the sunshine of the beautiful meadows, as the earliest white visitors to Ohio called the small prairies which they came upon in the heart of the forests. We see a large council house of bark, as nearly in the midst of the scattered huts as may be, where the Miamis hold their solemn debates, receive embassies from other tribes, welcome their warriors home from their forays, and celebrate their feasts and dances. We see fields bordering the village, where the squaws plant their corn and beans, and the maple groves where they make their sugar. Among the men and boys we see the busy idleness of children, all day long, except when the grown-up children go out upon a hunt, or take the warpath. Sometimes we see an English trader coming with his merchandise and presents, or a captive brought in to be tortured and burnt, or adopted into the tribe.

The tribes in the Ohio country were far abler than those that the English first met to the eastward, and they were fiercer than the fiercest which the Americans have at last brought under control in the plains of the Far West. Pitiless as Sioux and Apache and Comanche have shown themselves in their encounters with the whites in our day, they were surpassed in ferocity by the Shawnees, the Wyandots, and the Miamis whom the backwoodsmen met in a thousand fights, a century or a century and a half ago. The Ohio Indians were unspeakably vicious, treacherous, and filthy, but they were as brave as they were vile, and they were as sagacious as they were false. They produced men whom we must call orators, statesmen, and generals, even when tested by the high standards of civilization. They excelled us in the art of war as it was adapted to the woods, and they despised the stupid and wasteful courage of the disciplined English soldier. Till the white men studied war from them they were always beaten in their fights with the red men, and it was hardly the fault of the Indians if the pioneers learned from them to be savages: to kill women and children as well as armed men, to tomahawk and scalp the wounded, to butcher helpless prisoners. But this befell, and it is this which makes many of the stories of Ohio so bloody. We must know their hideous facts fully if we would know them truly, or if we would realize the life that once passed in the shadows of our woods.

The region that we now call Ohio was wonderfully varied and pleasant. The many rivers that watered it cleared their space to the sky where they ran, and here and there the meadows or prairies smiled to the sun in grass and flowers. But everywhere else there was the gloom of forests unbroken since the Mound Builders left the land. The long levels that bordered the great lake at the north, the noble hills that followed the course of the Beautiful River, the gently varied surfaces of the center, and the southwest, the swamps and morasses of the northwest, were nearly everywhere densely wooded. Our land was a woodland, and its life, when it first became known to the white man, was the stealthy and cruel life of the forest. Where the busy Mound Builders once swarmed, scanty tribes of savages lurked in the leafy twilight, hunting and fishing, and warring upon one another. They came and went upon their errands of death and rapine by trails unseen to other eyes, till the keen traders of Pennsylvania and Virginia began to find their way over them to their villages, and to traffic with the savages for the furs which formed their sole wealth.

All is dim and vague in any picture of the time and place that we can bring before us. There are the fathomless forests, broken by the prairies and rivers; there are the Indian towns widely scattered along the larger streams throughout the whole region; there are the French posts on the northern border, with each a priest and a file of soldiers, and a few Canadian farmers and traders. Under the cover of peace between the French king and the English king, there is a constant grapple between the French soldiers and the English settlers for the possession of the wilds which shall one day be the most magnificent empire under the sun; there are the war parties of Indians falling stealthily upon the English borders to the eastward; there is the steady pressure of the backwoodsman westward, in spite of every hardship and danger, in spite of treaties, in spite of rights and promises. These are the main features of the picture whose details the imagination strives to supply, with a teasing sense of the obscurity resting upon the whole. It is all much farther off than ancient Rome, much stranger than Greece; but it is the beginning of a mighty history, which it rests with the children of this day, and their children after them, to make the happiest and noblest chapter in the history of the world. It is a part of that greater history, and I should like my young readers to remember that the Ohio stories which I hope to tell them are important chiefly because they are human stories, and record incidents in the life of the whole race. They cannot be taken from this without losing their finest meanings.

OHIO BECOMES ENGLISH.

Neither the French nor the English had any right to the Ohio country which they both claimed. If it belonged to any people of right, it belonged to the savages, who held it in their way before the whites came, and who now had to choose which nation should call itself their master. They chose the French, and they chose wisely for themselves as savages; for, as I have said, if the French had prevailed in the war that was coming, the Indians could have kept their forests and lived their forest life as before. The French would have been satisfied in the West as they had been in the North, with their forts and trading stations, and the Indians could have hunted, and fished, and trapped, as they had always done. In fact, the French people would often have become like them. They understood the Indians and liked them; sometimes they mated with them, and their children grew up as wild as their mothers. The religion that the French priests taught the Indians, pleased while it awed them, and it scarcely changed their native customs.

Wherever the English came, the Indians’ woods were wasted, and the Indians were driven out of the land.

The English tried neither to save their souls nor to win their hearts; they both hated and despised the savages, and ruthlessly destroyed them. Now, when the smoldering strife between the French and English in the West burst into an open flame of war between the two nations, the Western tribes took the side of those whom reason and instinct taught them to know as their best friends.

But ten years after C�loron visited Ohio, Wolfe captured Quebec, and France gave up to England not only the whole of Canada, but the whole of the vast region between the lakes and the Gulf of Mexico, and kept for herself only the Province of Louisiana. The Indians were left to their fate, and they made what terms they could with the English. They promised peace, but they broke their promises, and constantly harassed the outlying English settlements. At one time they joined together under the great chief Pontiac, and tried to win back the West for themselves. The French forts had been ceded to Great Britain and garrisoned with British troops, and the allied Indians now took all of these but Detroit and Fort Pitt. In the end they failed, and then they made peace again, but still they kept up their forays along the English borders. They stole horses and cattle, they burned houses and barns, they killed men, women, and children, or carried them off into captivity. In the Ohio country alone their captives counted hundreds, though the right number could never be known, for they could easily be kept out of the way when the tribes were summoned to give them up.

It was the same story in the West that it had been in the East, and the North, and the South, wherever the savages fell upon the lonely farms or the scattered hamlets of the frontiers, and it was not ended until our own day, when the Indians were at last shut up in reservations.

It was their custom to carry off the women and children. If the children were hindered the march of their mothers, or if they cried and endangered or annoyed their captors, they were torn a hawked, or their brains were dashed out against the trees. But if they were well grown, and strong enough to keep up with the rest, they were hurried sometimes hundreds of miles into the wilderness. There the fate of all prisoners was decided in solemn council of the tribe. If any men had been taken, especially such as had made a hard fight for their freedom and had given proof of their courage, they were commonly tortured to death by fire in celebration of the victory won over them; though it sometimes happened that young men who had caught the fancy or affection of the Indians were adopted by the fathers of sons lately lost in battle. The older women became the slaves and drudges of the squaws and the boys and girls were parted from their mothers and scattered among the savage families. The boys grew up hunters and trappers, like the Indian boys, and the girls grew up like the Indian girls, and did the hard work which the warriors always left to the women. The captives became as fond of their wild, free life as the savages themselves, and they found wives and husbands among the youths and maidens of their tribe. If they were given up to their own people, as might happen in the brief intervals of peace, they pined for the wilderness, which called to their homesick hearts, and sometimes they stole back to it. They seem rarely to have been held for ransom, as the captives of the Indians of the Western plains were in our time. It was a tie of real love that bound them and their savage friends together, and it was sometimes stronger than the tie of blood. But this made their fate all the crueler to their kindred; for whether they lived or whether they died, they were lost to the fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters whom they had been torn from; and it was little consolation to these that they had found human mercy and tenderness in the breasts of savages who in all else were like ravening beasts. It was rather an agony added to what they had already suffered to know that somewhere in the trackless forests to the westward there was growing up a child who must forget them. The time came when something must be done to end all this and to put a stop to the Indian attacks on the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The jealous colonies united with the jealous mother country, and a little army of British regulars and American recruits was sent into Ohio under the lead of Colonel Henry Bouquet to force the savages to give up their captives.

This officer, who commanded the king’s troops at Philadelphia, was a young Swiss who had fought in the great wars of Europe, in the service of the king of Piedmont and of the Dutch republic, before he was given a commission by the king of Great Britain. He had distinguished himself by his bravery, his skill, and his good sense. He seems to have been the first European commander to disuse the rules of European warfare, and to take a lesson from our pioneers in fighting the Indians, and the year before he set out for the Ohio country, he had beaten the tribes in a battle that taught them to respect him. They found that they had no such wrong-headed leader as Braddock to deal with; and that they could not hope to ambush Bouquet’s troops, and shoot them down like cattle in a pen; and the news of his coming spread awe among them.

He gathered his forces together at Fort Pitt, after many delays. At one time a full third of his colonial recruits deserted him, but he waited till he had made up their number again, and then he started at the head of fifteen hundred men, on the 3d of October, 1764. A body of Virginians went first in three scouting parties, one on the right and one on the left, to beat up the woods for lurking enemies, and one in the middle with a guide, to lead the way. Then came the pioneers with their axes, and two companies of light infantry followed, to clear the way for the main body of the troops. A column of British regulars, two deep, marched in the center with a file of regulars on their right, and a file of Pennsylvanian recruits on their left.

Two platoons of regulars came after these; then came a battalion of Pennsylvanians in single file on the right and left, and between them the convoy, with the ammunition and tools first, then the officers’ baggage and tents, then the sheep and oxen in separate droves for the subsistence of the army, then the pack horses with other provisions. A party of light horsemen followed, and last of all another body of Virginians brought up the rear. The men marched in silence, six feet from one another, ready, if any part of the force halted, to face outward, and prepare to meet an attack.

The Indians hung upon Bouquet’s march in large numbers at first, but when they saw the perfect order and discipline of his army, and the knowledge of their own tactics which he showed in disposing his men, they fell away, and he kept his course unmolested, so that in two weeks he reached a point in the Ohio country which he could now reach in two hours, if he took rail from Pittsburg direct. But the wonder is for what he did then, and not for what he could do now. His two weeks’ march through the wilderness was a victory such as had never been achieved before, and it moved the imagination of the Indians more than if he had fought them the whole way.

His quiet firmness in establishing his force in the heart of their country, where they had gathered the strength of their tribes from all the outlying regions, must have affected them still more. At the first halt he made on the Muskingum, they sent some of their chiefs to parley with him, but he gave them short and stern answers, bidding them be ready to bring in their captives from every tribe and family; and again took up his march along the river till he reached the point where the Tuscarawas and Waldhonding meet to form the Muskingum. There his axmen cleared a space in the forest, and his troops built a town, rather than pitched a camp. They put up four redoubts, one at each corner of the town, and fortified it with a strong stockade. Within this they built a council house, where the Indians could come and make speeches to their hearts’ content, and deliver up their captives. Three separate buildings, one for the captives from each of the colonies, with the officers’ quarters, the soldiers’ cabins, the kitchens, and the ovens, were inclosed within the fort, and the whole was kept in a neatness and order such as the savages had never seen, with military severity.

The tribes soon began to bring in their prisoners, each chief giving up the captives of his tribe with long harangues, and many gifts of wampum, as pledges of good faith, and promises of a peace never to be broken. They said they had not merely buried the hatchet now, where it might sometime be dug up, but they had thrown it into the sky to the Great Spirit, who would never give it back again. They wished Bouquet to notice that they no longer called the English brothers, as they commonly did when they were friendly, but they called them fathers, and they meant to be their children and to do their bidding like children. They made him a great number of flattering speeches, and he gravely listened to their compliments, but as to the reasons they gave for breaking their promises in the past he dealt very frankly with them. He reminded them of their treacheries, and cruelties of all kinds, and of their failure to restore their captives after they had pledged themselves to do so, and he said, “This army shall not leave your country till you have fully complied with every condition that is to precede my treaty with you.... I give you twelve days from this date to deliver into my hands all the prisoners in your possession, without any exception; Englishmen, Frenchmen, women and children, whether adopted into your tribes, married or living amongst you under any pretense whatsoever, together with all negroes. And you are to furnish the said prisoners with clothing, provisions, and horses, to carry them to Fort Pitt.... You shall then know on what terms you may obtain the peace you sue for.”

These words are said to have quite broken the spirit of the savages, already overawed by the presence of such an army as they had never seen in their country before. One of the great chiefs of the Delawares said: “With this string of wampum we wipe the tears from your eyes, we deliver you these prisoners... we gather and bury with this belt all the bones of the people that have been killed during this unhappy war, which the Evil Spirit occasioned among us. We cover the bones that have been buried, that they may never more be remembered. We again cover their place with leaves that it may no more be seen. As we have been long astray, and the path between you and us stopped, we extend this belt that it may be again cleared.... While you hold it fast by one end, and we by the other, we shall always be able to discover anything that may disturb our friendship.”

Bouquet answered that he had heard them with pleasure, and that in receiving these last prisoners from them he joined with them in burying the bones of those who had fallen in the war, so that the place might no more be known. “The peace you ask for, you shall now have,” he said, but he told them that it was his business to make war, and the business of others to make peace, and he instructed them how and with whom they were to treat. He took hostages from them, and he dealt with the other tribes on the same terms as they brought in their captives. On the 18th of November, he broke up his camp and marched back to Fort Pitt, with more than two hundred men, women, and children whom he had delivered from captivity among the savages.

It is believed that six hundred others were never given up. The captives were not always glad to go back to their old homes, and the Indians had sometimes to use force in bringing them to the camp where their friends and kindred who had come with Bouquet’s army were waiting to receive them. Many had been taken from their homes when they were so young that they could not remember them, and they had learned to love the Indians, who had brought them up like their own children, and treated them as lovingly as the fathers and mothers from whom they had been stolen. In the charm of the savage life these children of white parents had really become savages; and certain of the young girls had grown up and married Indian husbands to whom they were tenderly attached. The scenes of parting between all these were very touching on both sides, and it is told of one Indian who had married a Virginian girl that he followed her back to the frontier at the risk of his life from her people. The Indians gave up the captives often so dear to them, with tears and lamentations, while on the other hand their kindred waited to receive them in an anguish of hope and fear. As the captives came into the camp, parents sought among them for the little ones they had lost, and husbands for the wives who had been snatched from their desolated homes. Brothers and sisters met after a parting so long that one or other had forgotten the language they once spoke in common. The Indians still hung about the camp, and came every day to visit their former prisoners and bring them gifts. When the army took up its march some of them asked leave to follow it back to Fort Pitt, and on the way they supplied their adopted children and brothers with game, and sought in every way to show their love for them.

Bouquet reached Pittsburg in ten days, without the loss of a single life at the hands of the savages, and with all his men in excellent health. Each day of his march he had pitched his camp among scenes of sylvan loveliness, on the banks of the pleasant streams that watered the fertile levels and the wild meadows, or wound through the rich valleys between the low hills. It would have been wonderful if his Pennsylvanian and Virginian recruits had not looked upon the land with covetous eyes: even the fathers and husbands and brothers who had come seeking their kindred among the Indians, had seen it with a longing to plant their homes in it. Its charms had been revealed to great numbers of the people who had known of it only from the traders before, and the savage was doomed from that time to lose it; for it already belonged to the king of England, and it rested with the English colonists to come and take it; or so, at least, they thought.

THE FORTY YEARS’ WAR FOR THE WEST.

The French king gave up the West to the English king in 1763, but, as we have seen, the Indians had no part in the bargain. They only knew that they were handed over by those who had been their friends to those who had been their enemies, and they did not consent. They had made war upon the English colonists before, and now, in spite of the failure of Pontiac, and in spite of Bouquet’s march into the Ohio country, they kept up their warfare for forty years, with a truce when it was convenient, and a treaty of peace when it was convenient, but with a steadfast purpose to drive the English settlers out, and to hold the wilderness for themselves. It was not until long after their power was broken by the American arms in 1794 that their struggle ended in the region which ten years later became the state of Ohio.

There was misunderstanding on both sides. The Indians naturally supposed that their own country belonged to them, and the colonists supposed that their eastern and western borders were the two oceans. These were commonly the boundaries which the English king had given them; and when he had not been quite clear about it in his grants of territory which he had never even imagined, they did not allow him to deal less splendidly with them than such a prince ought. He had, as we know, given the Ohio Company of Virginia a large tract of the best land beyond the Ohio even while the French still claimed the West, and he had encouraged the Virginians to believe they had a right to settle it and to fortify it. But after the capture of Quebec, when the West, as well as Canada, fell into the power of Great Britain, the English king, or rather his ministers, began to change their minds about letting the colonists take up lands in the Back Country, as they called it. The jealousy between the colonies grew less, but the jealousy between them and Great Britain grew greater; there were outbreaks here and there against her rule, and there was discontent nearly everywhere. The colonists were disappointed and embittered that the West should be treated as a part of Canada, by the mother country, when it ought to have been shared among the English provinces. The British government tried to hinder the settlement of the whites on the Indians’ lands; and though it could not keep them off altogether, it did enough to make the savages feel that it was their friend against its own subjects. In 1774, Parliament passed a law which declared the whole West, between the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and below the Great Lakes, a part of the Province of Quebec. This was felt by our colonies to be so great an injury that it was charged against Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence, as one of the causes for separation. It was in fact an act hostile to a people of the British race, language, and religion, and it was meant not so much to help the savages, as to hurt the colonists, though it did really help the savages. When the Revolutionary War broke out a year or two later, the British government did not scruple to make use of the cruel hatred of the Indians against its rebellious subjects.

It set on the war parties that harried the American border, and when the blood-stained braves came back with their plunder, their captives, and the scalps of the men, women, and children they had murdered, they were welcomed at the British forts as friends and allies. In certain cases, to be sure, British officers did what they could to soften the hard fate of the prisoners, but the British government was guilty, nevertheless, of the barbarous deeds done by the Indians. Its agents furnished them with arms and ammunition, and its ministers upheld them in the same atrocities against the American rebels as the French in their time had urged and tempted them to commit against the settlers when they were English subjects.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Indians were as slow to lay down their arms as they had been after the French War. In each case they fought the victors, as far as they could get at them in the persons of the hapless backwoodsmen and their wives and children. These backwoodsmen did not change greatly, in their way of life, during that long Indian war of forty years. They were of the hardy English, Welsh, and Scotch-Irish stock which a generation or two in the wilderness had toughened and strengthened. They had not yet ciphered it out that one red hunter and trapper must waste the fifty thousand acres which would support the families of a hundred white farmers in comfort and prosperity; but they knew that to the westward there was a region, vast and rich beyond anything words could say, and they longed to possess it, with a hunger that was sometimes a pitiless greed, and always a resistless desire. Yet it was not until the French gave up this region that they could even venture lawlessly into it, and it was not until it fell from Great Britain to the new power of the United States that the borderers began openly to press into the backwoods, singly as hunters and trappers, in families as neighborhoods as the founders of villages and towns. The pioneers felt that they were going to take their own wherever they found it, from the savages who could not and would not use it, and they were right, for the land truly belongs to him who will use it. The savages felt that the pioneers were coming to take their own from them, for in their way they were using the land; and they were right, too. All that is left for us to ask at this late day is which could use the land best and most; and there can hardly be any doubt of the answer.

To understand the situation clearly, the reader must keep in mind certain dates. C�loron de Bienville visited the Miamis in 1749, and the French kept the Ohio Indians on the warpath against the English settlements to the eastward until 1763, when they gave up the West to Great Britain. Then, until 1775, the savages alone fought the settlers as the subjects of the English king. The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Indians became the allies of the British. Then, in 1783, their country was given up to the United States, and they still fought their old enemies, who had not changed their nature by changing their name to Americans. In 1794, the great battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the banks of the Maumee, and the long struggle was ended.

It had grown more and more fierce and cruel as time passed, and only three years before General Wayne won his lasting victory, General St. Clair had suffered his terrible defeat by the Indians. Through this defeat, the power of the whites in the West was shaken as it had never been before; the savages were filled with pride and hope by the greatest triumph they had achieved over their enemies; and all the settlements in the Northwestern Territory were endangered.

Perhaps I had better say seemed endangered. The Indians were really less to be feared than at any time before. They were weaker, and the whites were stronger. They were striving against destiny; and though their fate was sealed with the blood of their enemies, their fate was sealed. All the chances that had favored them had favored them in vain, and neither their wily courage nor their pitiless despair availed them against the people who outnumbered them, as the stems of the harvest field outnumber the trees of the forest.

THE CAPTIVITY OF JAMES SMITH

The stories of captivity among the Ohio Indians during the war that ended in 1794 would of themselves fill a much larger book than this is meant to be. Most of them were never set down, but some of them were very thrillingly told, and others very touchingly, either by the captives themselves, or by such of their friends as were better able to write them out. One, at least, is charming, and the narrative of Colonel James Smith deserves a chapter by itself, not only because it is charming, but because it shows the Indians in a truer and kindlier light than they were often able to show themselves.

Smith was born in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, which in 1737 was the frontier of the white settlement, and he was taken prisoner in 1755, by a small party of Delawares, near Bedford, while he was helping to cut a road for the passage of General Braddock’s ill-fated expedition against the French. The Indians hurried from the English border, and forced him to run with them nearly the whole way to Fort Duquesne, which afterwards became Fort Pitt, and is now Pittsburg. A large body of savages was encamped outside the post, and there Smith expected to be burned to death with the tortures he afterwards saw inflicted upon many other prisoners; but he was only made to run the gantlet. Two lines of Indians were drawn up, with sticks in their hands, and Smith dashed at the top of his speed between their ranks. He was cruelly beaten, and before he reached the goal he fell senseless. When he came to himself he was in the hands of a French surgeon. He was well cared for, and he lived in hopes of rescue by Braddock’s army, which was marching against Fort Duquesne in greater force than had ever been sent into the wilderness. But while he was still so broken and bruised as to be scarcely able to walk, the Indians came in with plunder and prisoners from the scene of their bloody victory over the British troops.

A little later, Smith’s captors claimed him from the French, and carried him to an Indian town on the Muskingum. The day after their arrival a number of the Indians came to him, and one of them began to pull out his hair, dipping his fingers in ashes to get a better hold, and plucking it away hair by hair till it was all gone except a lock on the crown. This they plaited with strings of beadwork and silver brooches, and then they bored his ears and nose and put rings in them. They painted his face and body in different colors, hung a band of wampum about his neck, and fitted his arm with bracelets of silver. An old chief led him into the street of the village, and gave the alarm halloo, when all the Delawares, Caughnewagas, and Mohicans of the place came running, and formed round the chief, who held Smith by the hand, and made them a long speech. He then gave Smith over to three young squaws, who pulled him into the river waist-deep, and made signs to him that he should plunge his head into the water. But Smith’s head was full of the tortures of the prisoners whom he had seen burnt at Fort Duquesne; he believed all these ceremonies were the preparations for his death, and he would neither duck.

He struggled with them, amidst the shouts and laughter of the Indians on the shore, until one of them managed to say in English, “No hurt you,” when he suffered them to plunge him under the water and rub at him as long as they chose.

By this means they washed away his white blood, and he was adopted into the tribe in place of a great chief who had lately died. He seems never to have known why this honor was done him; but he was then a lusty young fellow of eighteen who might well have taken the fancy of some of his captors; and he probably fell into their hands at a moment which their superstition rendered fortunate for him.

When the squaws had done with him, he was taken up into the council house of the village, where he was dressed in a new ruffled shirt, leggins trimmed with ribbons and wrought with beads, and moccasins embroidered with porcupine quills. His face was painted afresh, and his scalp lock tied up with red feathers; he was given a pipe and tobacco pouch and seated upon a bear skin, while one of the chiefs addressed him in the presence of the assembled warriors. “My son,” so the speech was interpreted to Smith, “you are now flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. You are taken into the Caughnewaga nation, and initiated into a warlike tribe; you are adopted into a great family... in the room and place of a great man. After what has passed this day, you are now one of us by an old strong law and custom. My son, you have now nothing to fear; we are now under the same obligations to love, support, and defend you, that we are to love and defend one another; therefore you are to consider yourself as one of our people.”

A grand feast of boiled venison and green corn followed, and Smith took part in it on the same terms as all the rest of his tribe and family. In due time he found out that no word the chief had addressed him was idly spoken, and he began to live the life of the savages like one of themselves, under the affectionate care and constant instruction of his brethren. He was given a gun, at first, and sent to hunt turkeys, but he came upon the trace of buffalo, and was lured on by the hope of larger game, and so lost his way. The Indians found him again easily enough, but as a punishment for his rashness his gun was taken from him, and for two years he was allowed to carry only a bow and arrows. Once when the hunters had killed a bear and he went out with a party to bring in the meat, Smith complained of the weight of his load; the Indians laughed at him, and to shame him they gave part of his burden to a young squaw who already had as much as he to carry. At another time, he went to the fields with some other young men to watch the squaws hoeing corn; one of these challenged him to take her hoe, and he did so, and hoed for some time with the women. They were delighted and praised his skill, but when he came back to the village, the old chiefs rebuked him, telling him that he was adopted in the place of a great man, and it was unworthy of him to hoe corn like a squaw.

Smith owns that he never gave them a chance to chide him a second time for such unseemly behavior. After that he left all the hard work to the squaws like a true Indian, and guarded his dignity as a hunter. He was never trusted, or at least he was never asked, to take part in any of the forays against the white frontier, when from time to time parties were sent to the Pennsylvania borders to take scalps and steal horses. It was a sorrowful thing for him when his savage brethren set forth on these errands of theft and murder among his kindred by race, and it was long before he could make the least show of returning their affection.

It was not until they gave him back some books which they had brought him from other prisoners, but had then taken from him for some caprice, that he says he felt his heart warm towards them. They pretended that the books had been lost, but declared that they were glad they had been found, for they knew that he was grieved at the loss of them. “Though they had been exceedingly kind to me,” he says, “I still as before detested them, on account of the barbarity I beheld after Braddock’s defeat. Neither had I ever before pretended kindness, or expressed myself in a friendly manner; but now I began to excuse the Indians on account of their want of information.”

The family which Smith had been taken into did not stay long in the Muskingum country, but began the wandering life of the hunters and trappers, working northward mostly, and visiting the shores and waters of Lake Erie. It was all very pleasant and full of a wild charm while the fine weather lasted, especially for the men, who had nothing to do but to bring in the game and fish for the squaws to cook and care for. The squaws made the sugar in the spring; they felled the trees and fashioned from the barks the troughs to catch the maple sap, which they boiled down into sugar; they planted and tended the fields of corn and beans; they did everything that was like work, indoors and out, and the men did nothing that was not like play or war. While their plenty lasted, it was for all; when the dearth came, every one shared it. But in this free, sylvan life there was the grace of an unstinted hospitality. The stranger was pressed to make the lodge of his host his home, and he was given the best of his store. One day when his Indian brother came in from the hunt, Smith told him that a passing Wyandot had visited their camp, and he had given him roast venison. “And I suppose you gave him also sugar and bear’s oil to eat with his venison?” Smith confessed that as the sugar and bear’s oil were in the canoe, he did not go for them. His brother told him he had behaved just like a Dutchman, and he asked, “Do you not know that when strangers come to our camp we are to give them the best we have?” Smith owned that he had been wrong, and then his brother excused him because he was so young; but he bade him learn to behave like a warrior, and do great things, and never be caught in any such mean actions again.

The Indians were as prompt to praise and reward what they thought fine in him, as to rebuke what they deemed unworthy; and the second winter that they spent in Northern Ohio, they gave him a gun again for the courage and endurance he twice showed when he had lost his way from camp. Once when he was caught in a heavy storm of snow; he passed the night in the hollow of a tree, which he made snug by blocking it up with brush and pieces of wood, and by chopping the rotten inside of the trunk with his hatchet until he had a soft, warm bed. Another time, when he was looking at his beaver traps he was overtaken by the dark, and kept himself from freezing by dancing and shouting till daylight. His Indian friends honored him for his wise behavior, and as they had now beaver skins enough, they carried them to the French post at Detroit, where they bought a gun for him. They bought for themselves a keg of brandy, and they paid Smith the compliment, when he refused to drink, of making him one of the guards set over the drinkers to keep them from killing one another. He helped bring them safely through their debauch, but nothing could prevent their spending all they had got for their beaver skins in more and more brandy. Then they went back sick and sorry to the woods again.

The family Smith was taken into was honored for its uncommon virtue and wisdom. His two brothers, Tontileaugo and Tecaughretanego were men of great sense, with good heads and good hearts. They treated Smith with the greatest love and patience, and took him to task with affectionate mildness when he transgressed the laws of taste or feeling. The Indians all despised the white settlers, whom they thought stupid and cowardly, and they expected to drive them beyond the sea. They despised them for their impiety, and Tecaughretanego once said to Smith, “As you have lived with the white people, you have not had the same advantage of knowing that the Great Being above feeds his people and gives them their meat in due season, as we Indians have, who are wonderfully supplied, and that so frequently that it is evidently the hand of the Great Owaneeyo that doeth this; whereas the white people have commonly large flocks of tame cattle, that they can kill when they please, and also their barns and cribs filled with grain, and therefore have not the same opportunity of seeing and knowing that they are supported by the ruler of Heaven and Earth.”

At this time the Indians were suffering from the famine that their waste and improvidence had brought upon them; and perhaps Smith might have said something on the white man’s side. But he had nothing to say when rebuked for smiling at Tecaughretanego’s sacrifice of the last leaf of his tobacco to the Great Spirit “Brother, I have something to say to you, and I hope you will not be offended when I tell you of your faults. You know that when you were reading your books, I would not let the boys or any one disturb you; but now when I was praying I saw you laughing. I do not think you look upon praying as a foolish thing; I believe you pray yourself. But perhaps you think my mode or manner of prayer foolish; if so, you ought in a friendly manner to instruct me, and not make sport of sacred things.”

The prayer which Tecaughretanego thought ought to have escaped Smith’s derision was one which he made after he began to get well from a long sickness; and it was certainly very quaint; but if the Father of all listens most kindly to those children of his who come to him simply and humbly, he could not have been displeased with this old Indian’s petition.

“Oh, Great Being, I thank thee that I have obtained the use of my legs again, that I am now able to walk about and kill turkeys without feeling exquisite pain and misery: I know that thou art a hearer and a helper, and therefore I will call upon thee. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that my ankles and knees may be right well, and that I may be able not only to walk, but to run and to jump as I did last fall. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that on this voyage we may frequently kill bears, as they may be crossing the Scioto and Sandusky. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that we may kill plenty of turkeys along the banks, to stew with our bear meat. Oh, ho, ho, ho! grant that rain may come to raise the Olentangy about two or three feet, that we may cross in safety down to the Scioto, without danger of our canoe being wrecked on the rocks. And now, oh, Great Being, thou knowest how matters stand — thou knowest that I am a great lover of tobacco, and that though I know not when I may get any more, I now make a present of the last I have unto thee, as a free burnt offering. Therefore I request that thou wilt hear and grant these requests, and I thy servant will return thee thanks, and love thee for thy gifts.”

Smith tells us that a few days after Tecaughretanego made his prayer and offered up his tobacco, rain came and raised the Olentangy high enough to let them pass safely into the Scioto. He does not say whether he thought this was the effect of the old Indian’s piety, but he always speaks reverently of Tecaughretanego’s religion. He is careful to impress the reader again and again with the importance of the Indian family he had been taken into, and with the wisdom as well as the goodness of Tecaughretanego, who held some such place among the Ottawas, he says, as Socrates held among the Athenians. He was against the Indians’ taking part in the war between the French and English; he believed they ought to leave these to fight out their own quarrels; and in all the affairs of his people, he favored justice, truth, and honesty. The Indians, indeed, never stole from one another, but they thought it quite right to rob even their French allies; and it will help us to a real understanding of their principles, if we remember that the good and wise Tecaughretanego is never shown as rebuking the cruelty and treachery of the war parties in their attacks on the English settlements. The Indian’s virtues are always for his own tribe; outside of it, all the crimes are virtues, and it is right to lie, to cheat, to steal, to kill; as it was with our own ancestors when they lived as tribes.

Smith was always treated like one of themselves by his Indian brothers, and he had a deep affection for them. Once, in a time of famine, when Tecaughretanego lay helpless in his cabin, suffering patiently with the rheumatism which crippled him, Smith hunted two whole days without killing any game, and then came home faint with hunger and fatigue. Tecaughretanego bade his little son bring him a broth which the boy had made with some wildcat bones left by the buzzards near the camp, and when Smith had eaten he rebuked him for his despair, and charged him never again to doubt that God would care for him, because God always cared for those children of his who trusted in him, as the Indians did, while the white men trusted in themselves. The next day Smith went out again, but the noise made by the snow crust breaking under his feet frightened the deer he saw, and he could not get a shot at them. Suddenly, he felt that he could bear his captivity no longer, and he resolved to try and make his way back to Pennsylvania. The Indians might kill him, long before he could reach home; but if he staid, he must die of hunger. He hurried ten or twelve miles eastward, when he came upon fresh buffalo tracks, and soon caught sight of the buffalo. He shot one of them, but he could not stop to cook the meat, and he ate it almost raw. Then the thought of the old man and little child whom he had left starving in the cabin behind him became too much for him. He remembered what Tecaughretanego had said of God’s care for those who trusted in him; and he packed up all the meat he could carry, and went back to the camp. The boy ate ravenously of the half-raw meat, as Smith had done, but the old man waited patiently till it was well boiled. “Let it be done enough,” he said, when Smith wished to take off the kettle too soon; and when they had all satisfied their hunger, he made Smith a speech upon the duty of receiving the bounty of Owaneeyo with thankfulness. After this, Smith seems to have had no farther thoughts of running away, and he made no attempt to escape until he had been four years in captivity. He was then at Caughnewaga, the old Indian village which the traveler may still see from his steamboat on the St. Lawrence River near Montreal. He had come to this place with Tecaughretanego and his little son in an elm-bark canoe, all the way from Detroit; and now, hearing that a French ship was at Montreal with English prisoners of war, he stole away from the Indians and got on board with the rest. The prisoners were shortly afterwards exchanged, and Smith got home to his friends early in 1760. They had never known whether he had been killed or captured, and they were overjoyed to see him, though they found him quite like an Indian in his walk and bearing.

He married, and settled down on a farm, but he was soon in arms against the Indians. He served as a lieutenant in Bouquet’s expedition, and became a colonel of the Revolutionary army. After the war he took his family to Kentucky, where he lived until he died in 1812. The Indians left him unmolested in his reading or writing while he was among them, and he had kept a journal, which he wrote out in the delightful narrative of his captivity, first published in 1799. He modestly says in his preface that the chief use he hopes for it is from his observations on Indian warfare; but these have long ceased to be of practical value, while his pictures of Indian life and his studies of Indian character have a charm that will always last.

THE CAPTIVITY OF BOONE AND KENTON.

Colonel Smith was not the first whose captivity was passed in the Ohio country, but there is no record of any earlier captivity, though hundreds of captives were given up to Bouquet by the Indians. In spite of the treaties and promises on both sides, the fighting went on, and the wilderness was soon again the prison of the white people whom the savages had torn from their homes. The Ohio tribes harassed the outlying settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia, whose borders widened westward with every year; but they were above all incensed against the pioneers of Kentucky. Ohio was their home; there they had their camps and towns; there they held their councils and festivals; there they buried their dead and guarded their graves. But Kentucky was the pleasance of all the nations, the hunting ground kept free by common consent, and left to the herds of deer, elk, and buffalo, which ranged the woods and savannas, and increased for the common use. When the white men discovered this hunter’s paradise, and began to come back with their families and waste the game and fell the trees and plow the wild meadows, no wonder the Indians were furious, and made Kentucky the Dark and Bloody Ground for the enemies of their whole race, which they had already made it for one another in the conflicts between the hunting parties of rival tribes. It maddened them to find the cabins and the forts of the settlers in the sacred region where no red man dare pitch his wigwam; and they made a fierce and pitiless effort to drive out the invaders.

Among these was the famous Daniel Boone. He had heard of the glories of the land from a hunter who wandered into Kentucky by chance and returned to North Carolina to tell of it among his neighbors. Two years afterwards, in 1769, when a man of forty, Boone came to see for himself the things that he knew by hearsay, and he found that the half had not been told. But among other surprises in store for him was falling into the clutches of an Indian hunting party which ambushed him and the friend who was with him. They both escaped, and soon afterwards Boone’s brother and a neighbor, who had followed him from North Carolina, chanced upon their camp. Boone’s friend was before long shot and scalped by the Indians; the brother’s neighbor was lost in the woods and devoured by the wolves. Then the brother went home for ammunition, and Boone was left a whole year alone in the wilderness. The charm of its life was so great for him that after two years more he returned to North Carolina, sold his farm, and came to Kentucky with his family. Other families joined them, and the little settlement founded in the woods where he had ranged solitary with no friend but his rifle and with foes everywhere, was called Boonesborough.

The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Ohio Indians, who had hitherto fought the pioneers as Englishmen, now fought them as Americans with fresh fury, under the encouragement of the British commandant at Detroit. In January, of 1778, Boone took thirty of his men, and went to make salt at the Blue Licks, where, shortly after, while he was hunting in the woods, he found himself in the midst of two hundred Indian warriors, who were on their way to attack Boonesborough. He was then fifty years old, and the young Indians soon overtook him when he tried to escape by running, and made him their prisoner. His captors treated him kindly, as their custom was with prisoners, until they decided what should be done with them, and at the Licks his whole party gave themselves up on promise of the same treatment. This was glory enough for the present; the Indians, as they always did when they had won a victory, went home to celebrate it, and left Boonesborough unmolested.

They took all their prisoners to the town of Old Chillicothe, on the banks of the Little Miami in Greene County. What became of his men we are not told; none of them kept a journal, as Smith did, but it is certain that Boone was adopted into an Indian family as Smith was. The Indians, in fact, all became fond of him, perhaps because he was so much like themselves in temperament and behavior, for he was a grave, silent man, very cold and wary, with a sort of savage calm. He was well versed in their character, and knew how to play upon their vanity. One of the few things he seems to have told of his captivity was that when they asked him to take part in their shooting matches he beat them just often enough to show them his wonderful skill with the rifle, and then allowed them the pleasure of beating such a splendid shot as he had proved himself. But probably he had other engaging qualities, or so it appeared when the Indians took him with them to Detroit. The British commandant offered them a ransom of a hundred pounds for him, while several other Englishmen, who liked and pitied him, pressed him to take money and other favors from them. Boone stoically refused because he could never hope to make any return to them, and his red brethren refused because they loved Boone too well to part with him at any price, and they took him back to Old Chillicothe with them.

He never betrayed the anxiety for his wife and children that constantly tormented him, for fear of rousing the suspicions of the Indians; but when he reached Old Chillicothe, and found a large party painted and ready to take the warpath in a new attack upon Boones-borough, he could bear it no longer. He showed no sign of his misery, however; he joined the Indians in all their sports as before, but he was always watching for some chance to escape, and one morning in the middle of June he stole away from his captors. He made his way a hundred and sixty miles through the woods, and on the ninth day entered Boonesborough, faint with the fast which he had broken but once in his long flight, to find that he had been given up for dead and his family had gone back to North Carolina.

Boone spent the rest of his days fighting wild men and hunting wild beasts in Kentucky, until both were well-nigh gone and the tamer life of civilization pressed closer about him. Then he set out for Missouri, where he found himself again in the wilderness, and dwelt there in his beloved solitude till he died. Nothing ever moved him so much as the memoir which a young man wrote down for him and had printed. He was fond of having it read to him (for he could not read any more than he could write), and he would cry out in delight over it, “All true; not a lie in it!” But it is recorded that he once allowed himself to be so far excited by the heroic behavior of a friend who had saved his life in an Indian fight, at the risk of his own, as to say, “You behaved like a man, that time.”

This friend was Simon Kenton, or rather Simon Butler, one of the greatest of all the Indian hunters of Kentucky and Ohio. He had changed his name to escape pursuit from his old home in Virginia, when he fled leaving one of his neighbors, as he supposed, dead on the ground after a fight, and he kept the name he had taken through the rest of his life. He wandered about on the frontier and in the wilderness beyond it for several years, fighting the savages single handed or with a few comrades, and at times serving as scout or spy in the expeditions of the English against them. When the Revolution began, he sided of course with his own people, and he stood two sieges by the Indians in Boonesborough. It was here that Boone found him in 1778 when he escaped from Old Chillicothe, and they promptly made a foray together into the Ohio country, against an Indian town on Paint Creek. They fell in with a war party on the way, and after some fighting, Boone went back, but Kenton kept on with another friend, and did not return till they had stolen some Indian horses. As soon as they reached Boonesborough the commandant sent them into Ohio again to reconnoiter a town on the Little Miami which he wished to attack, and here once more Kenton was tempted by the chance to steal horses. He could not bear to leave any, and he and his men started homeward through the woods with the whole herd. When they came to the Ohio, it was so rough that Kenton was nearly drowned in trying to cross the river. He got back to the northern shore, where they all waited for the wind to go down, and the waves to fall, and where the Indians found them the second morning. His comrades were killed and Kenton was taken prisoner by the Indians whose horses they had stolen. The Indians were always stealing white men’s horses, but they seemed to think it was very much more wicked and shameful for white men to steal Indians’ horses. They fell upon Kenton and beat him over the head with their ramrods and mocked him with cries of, “Steal Indians’ hoss, hey!” But this was only the beginning of his sufferings. They fastened him for the night by stretching him on the ground with one stick across his breast and another down his middle, and tying his hands and feet to these with thongs of buffalo skin: stakes were driven into the earth, and his pinioned arms and legs were bound to them, while a halter, which was passed round his neck and then round a sapling near by, kept him from moving his head. All the while they were making sure in this way that he should not escape, the Indians were cuffing his ears, and reviling him for a “Tief! A hoss steal! A rascal!” In the morning they mounted him on an unbroken colt, with his hands tied behind him and his legs tied under the horse, and drove it into the briers and underbrush, where his face and hands were torn by the brambles, until the colt quieted down of itself, and followed in line with the other horses. The third day, as they drew near the town of Old Chillicothe, where Boone had been held captive, they were met by the chief Blackfish, who said sternly to Kenton in English, “You have been stealing horses.” “Yes, sir.” “Did Captain Boone tell you to steal our horses?” “No, sir, I did it on my own accord.” Blackfish then lashed him over the naked back with a hickory switch till the blood ran, and with blows and taunts from all sides Kenton was marched forward to the village.

The Indians could not wait for his arrival. They came out, men, women, and children, to meet him, with whoops and yells, and when they had made his captors fasten him to a stake, they fell upon him, and tore off all that was left of his clothes, and amused themselves till midnight by dancing and screaming round him, and beating him with rods and their open hands. In the morning he was ordered to run the gantlet, through two rows of Indians of all ages and sexes, armed with knives, clubs, switches, and hoe handles, and ready to cut, strike, and stab at him as he dashed by them on his way to the council house, a quarter of a mile from the point of starting. But Kenton was too wary to take the risks before him. He suddenly started aside from the lines; he turned and doubled in his course, and managed to reach the council house unhurt except for the blows of two Indians who threw themselves between him and its door. Here a council was held at once, and he was sentenced to be burnt at the stake, but the sentence was ordered to be carried out at the town of Wapatimika on Mad River. A white renegade among the Indians told him of his fate with a curse, and Kenton resolved that rather than meet it he would die in the attempt to escape. On the way to Wapatimika he gave his guard the slip and dashed into the woods; and he had left his pursuers far behind, when he ran into the midst of another party of Indians, who seized him and drove him forward to the town. A second council was now held, and after Kenton had run the gantlet a second time and been severely hurt, the warriors once more gathered in the council house, and sitting on the ground in a circle voted his death by striking the earth with a war club, or by passing it to the next if inclined to mercy. He was brought before them, as he supposed, to be told when he was to die, but a blanket was thrown upon the ground for him to sit upon in the middle of the circle, and Simon Girty, the great renegade, who was cruder to the whites than the Indians themselves, began harshly to question him about the number of men in Kentucky. A few words passed, and then Girty asked, “What is your name?” “Simon Butler,” said Kenton, and Girty jumped from his seat and threw his arms around Kenton’s neck. They had been scouts together in the English service, before the Revolution began, and had been very warm friends, and now Girty set himself to save Kenton’s life. He pleaded so strongly in his favor that the council at last voted to spare him, at least for the time being.

Three weeks of happiness for Kenton followed in the society of his old friend, who clothed him at his own cost from the stores of an English trader in the town, and took him to live with him; and it is said that if the Indians had continued to treat him kindly, Kenton might perhaps have cast his lot with them, for he could not hope to go back to his own people, with the crime of murder, as he supposed, hanging over him, and he had no close ties binding him to the whites elsewhere. But at the end of these days of respite, a war party came back from the Virginian border, where they had been defeated, and the life of the first white man who fell into their power must pay, by the Indian law, for the life of the warrior they had lost. The leaders of this party found Kenton walking in the woods with Girty, and met him with scowls of hate, refusing his hand when he offered it. The rage of the savages against him broke out afresh. One of them caught an ax from his squaw who was chopping wood, and as Kenton passed him on his way into the village, dealt him a blow that cut deep into his shoulder. For a third time a council was held, and for a third time Kenton was doomed to die by fire. Nothing that Girty could say availed, and he was left to tell his friend that he must die.

Kenton’s sentence was to be now carried out at Sandusky, and with five Indian guards he set out for that point. On their way they stopped at a town on the waters of the Scioto, where the captive found himself in the presence of a chief of noble and kindly face, who said to him, in excellent English, “Well, young man, these young men seem very mad at you.” Kenton had to own that they were so, indeed, and then the Indian said, “Well, don’t be discouraged. I am a great chief. You are to go to Sandusky; they speak of burning you there, but I will send two runners tomorrow to speak good for you.”

This was the noble chief Logan, whose beautiful speech ought to be known to every American boy and girl, and who, in spite of all he had suffered from them, was still the friend of the white men. He kept his word to Kenton, though he seemed to fail, as Girty had failed, to have his sentence set aside, and Kenton was taken on to Sandusky. But here, the day before that set for him to die, a British Indian agent, a merciful man whose name, Drewyer, we ought to remember, made the Indians give him up, that the commandant at Detroit might find out from him the state of the American forces in Kentucky. He had to promise the savages that Kenton should afterwards be returned to them; but though Kenton could not or would not tell him what he wished to know, Drewyer assured him that he would never abandon any white prisoner to their cruelty.

At Detroit Kenton was kindly treated by the English, and beyond having to report himself daily to the officer who had charge of him, there was nothing to make him feel that he was a prisoner. But he grew restive in his captivity, and after he had borne seven months of it, and got well of all his wounds and bruises, he plotted with two young Kentuckians, who had been taken with Boone at the Blue Licks, to attempt his escape with them. They bought guns from some drunken Indians, and hid them in the woods. Then in the month of June, 1778, they started southward through the wilderness, and after thirty days reached Louisville in safety. Kenton continued to fight the Indians in all the wars, large and little, till they were beaten by General Wayne in 1794. Eight years later he came to live in Ohio, settling near Urbana, but removing later to Zanesfield, on the site of the Indian town Wapatimika, where he was once to have been burned, and where he died peaceably in 1836, when he was eighty-one years old. He is described as a tall, handsome man, of an erect figure and carriage, a fair complexion, and a most attractive countenance. “He had,” his biographer tells us, “a soft, tremulous voice, very pleasing to the hearer, and laughing gray eyes that appeared to fascinate the beholder,” except in his rare moments of anger, when their fiery glance would curdle the blood of those who had roused his wrath. He was above all the heroes of Ohio history, both in his virtues and his vices, the type of the Indian fighter. He was ready to kill or to take the chances of being killed, but he had no more hate apparently for the wild men than for the wild beasts he hunted.

THE RENEGADES.

Simon Girty, who tried so hard to save Kenton’s life at Wapatimika, was the most notorious of those white renegades who abounded in the Ohio country during the Indian wars. The life of the border was often such as to make men desperate and cruel, and the life of the wilderness had a fascination which their fierce natures could hardly resist. Kenton himself, as we have seen, might perhaps have willingly remained with the Indians if they had wished him to be one of them, though he was at heart too kindly and loyal ever to have become the enemy of his own people, and if he had been adopted into an Indian family he would probably have been such an Indian as Smith was. But in the sort of backwoodsman he had been there was such stuff as renegades were made of. Like him these desperadoes had mostly fled from the settlements after some violent deed, and could not have gone back to their homes there if they would. Yet they were not much worse than the traders who came and went among the Indians in times of peace, and supplied them with the weapons and the ammunition they might use at any moment against the settlers.

Indeed, wherever the two races touched they seemed to get all of each other’s vices, and very few of each other’s virtues; and it is doubtful if the law breakers who escaped from the borders to the woods were more ferocious than many whom they left behind. Neither side showed mercy; their warfare was to the death; the white men tomahawked and scalped the wounded as the red men did, and if the settlers were not always so pitiless to their prisoners or to the wives and children of their warriors, they were guilty of many acts of murderous treachery and murderous fury. One of the best and truest friends they ever had, the great Mingo chief Logan, who was at last the means of Kenton’s escape from the stake, bore witness to these facts in his famous speech; for in spite of his friendship for the whites, he had suffered the worst that they could do to the worst of their foes. When such white men as butchered Logan’s kindred sided with the Indians, they only changed their cause; their savage natures remained unchanged; but very few of these, even, seem to have been so far trusted in their fear and hate for their own people as to be taken by the Indians in their forays against the whites.

The great Miami chief Little Turtle, who outgeneralled the Americans at the defeat of St. Clair, used to tell with humorous relish how he once trusted a white man adopted into his tribe. This white man was very eager to go with him on a raid into Kentucky, and when they were stealing upon the cabin they were going to attack, nothing could restrain his desire to be foremost. When they got within a few yards, he suddenly dashed forward with a yell of “Indians, Indians!” and left his red brethren to get out of the range of the settlers’ rifles as fast as they could.

But Simon Girty led many of the savage attacks, and showed himself the relentless enemy of the American cause at every chance, though more than once he used his power with the Indians to save prisoners from torture and death. He was born in Pennsylvania, and he was captured with his brothers, George and James, during Braddock’s campaign. They were all taken to Ohio, where George was adopted by the Delawares, James by the Shawnees, and Simon by the Senecas. George died a drunken savage; James became the terror of the Kentucky border, and infamous throughout the West by his cruelty to the women among the Indians’ captives; he seems to have been without one touch of pity for the fate of any of their prisoners, and his cruelties were often charged upon Simon, who had enough of his own to answer for. Yet he seems to have been the best as well as the ablest of the three brothers whose name is the blackest in Ohio history. Many of the stories about him are evidently mere romance, and they often conflict. As he was captured when very young, he never learned to read or write; and it is said that he was persuaded by worse and wiser men to take sides with the British in the Revolution. But we need not believe that he was so ignorant or so simple as this in accounting for his preference of his red brethren and their cause. In fact, several letters attributed to him exist, though he may have dictated these, and may not have known how to write after all.

It is certain that he was a man of great note and power among the Indians, and one of their most trusted captains. He led the attack on Wheeling in 1777, where he demanded the surrender of the fort to the English king, whose officer he boasted himself. In 1782 he attacked Bryan’s Station in Kentucky with a strong force of Indians, but met with such a gallant resistance that he attempted to bring the garrison to terms by telling them who he was and threatening them with the re�nforcements and the cannon which he said he expected hourly. He promised that all their lives should be spared if they yielded, but while he waited with the white flag in his hand on the stump where he stood to harangue them, a young man answered him from the fort: “You need not be so particular to tell us your name; we know your name and you, too. I’ve had a villainous untrustworthy cur dog this long while named Simon Girty, in compliment to you, he’s so like you, just as ugly and just as wicked. As to the cannon, let them come on; the country’s aroused, and the scalps of your red cutthroats, and your own too, will be drying in our cabins in twenty-four hours; and if, by chance, you or your allies do get into the fort, we’ve a big store of rods laid in to scourge you out again.”

The Indians retreated, but Girty glutted his revenge for the failure and the insult in many a fight afterwards with the Americans and in many a scene of torture and death. The Kentuckians now followed his force to the Blue Licks, where the Indians ambushed them and beat them back with fearful slaughter.

Girty remained with the savages and took part in the war which they carried on against our people long after our peace with the British. He was at the terrible defeat of St. Clair in 1791, and he had been present at the burning of Colonel Crawford in 1782. By some he is said to have tried to beg and to buy their prisoner off from the Wyandots, and by others to have taken part in mocking his agonies, if not in torturing him. It seems certain that he lived to be a very old man, and it is probable that he died fighting the Americans in our second war with Great Britain.

But the twilight of the forest rests upon most of the details of his history and the traits of his character. The truth about him seems to be that he had really become a savage, and it would not be strange if he felt all the ferocity of a savage, together with the rare and capricious emotions of pity and generosity which are apt to visit the savage heart. There have always been good Indians and bad Indians, and Simon Girty was simply a bad Indian.

THE WICKEDEST DEED IN OUR HISTORY.

The Indians despised the white men for what they thought their stupidity in warfare, when they stood up in the open to be shot at, as the soldiers who were sent against them mostly did, instead of taking to trees and hiding in tall grass and hollows of the ground, as the backwoodsmen learned to do. Smith tells us that when Tecaughretanego heard how Colonel Grant, in the second campaign against Fort Duquesne, outwitted the French and Indians by night and stole possession of a hill overlooking the post, he praised his craft as that of a true warrior; but as to his letting his pipers play at daybreak, and give the enemy notice of his presence, so that the Indians could take to trees and shoot his Highlanders down with no danger to themselves, he could only suppose that Colonel Grant had got drunk over night.

The savages respected the whites when they showed cunning, and they did not hate them the more for not showing mercy in fight; but we have seen how fiercely they resented the crime of horse stealing in Kenton’s case, though they were always stealing horses themselves from the settlers; and any deed of treachery against themselves they were eager and prompt to punish, though they were always doing such deeds against their enemies. Still, it is doubtful whether with all their malignity they were ever guilty of anything so abominable as the massacre of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten, by the Americans; and if there is record of any wickeder act in the history not only of Ohio, but of the whole United States, I do not know of it. The Spaniards may have outdone it in some of their dealings with the Indians, but I cannot call to mind any act of theirs that seems so black, so wholly without justice and without reason. It is no wonder that it embittered the hostilities between the red men and the white men and made the war, which outlasted our Revolution ten years, more and more unmerciful to the very end.

The missionaries of the Moravian Church were more successful than any others in converting the Indians, perhaps because they asked the most of them. They made them give up all the vices which the Indians knew were vices, and all the vices that the Indians thought were virtues when practiced outside of their tribe. They forbade them to lie, to steal, to kill; they taught them to wash themselves, to put on clothes, to work, and to earn their bread. Upon these hard terms they had congregations and villages in several parts of Connecticut, New York, and Pennsylvania, which flourished for a time against the malice of the disorderly and lawless settlers around them, but which had yielded to the persecutions of white men and red men alike when, in 1771, the chiefs of the Delawares sent messages to the Moravians and invited them to come out and live among them in Ohio. The Lenni-lenape, as the Delawares called themselves, had left the East, where they were subject to the Iroquois, and they now had their chief towns on the Muskingum. Near the place where the Tuscarawas and Walhonding meet to form the Muskingum they offered lands to the Moravians, and in 1772 the Christian Indians left their last village in Western Pennsylvania and settled there at three points which they called Sch�nbrun, the Beautiful Spring, Lichtenau, Field of Light, and Gnadenhutten, the Tents of Grace.

It was in the very heart of the Western wilderness, but the land was rich and the savages friendly, and in a few years the teachers and their followers had founded a fairer and happier home than they had known before, and had begun to spread their light around them. The Indians came from far and near to see their fields and orchards and gardens, with the houses in the midst of them, built of squared logs and set on streets branching to the four quarters from the chapel, which was the peaceful citadel of each little town. It must have seemed a stately edifice to their savage eyes, with its shingled roof, and its belfry, where, ten years before any white man had settled beyond the Ohio, the bell called the Christian Indians to prayer. No doubt the creature comforts of the Christians had their charm, too, for the hungry pagans. They were not used elsewhere to the hospitality that could set before them such repasts as one of the missionaries tells us were spread for the guest at Gnadenhutten. A table furnished with “good bread, meat, butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate,” and such fruits and vegetables as the season afforded could hardly have been less wonderful in the Indian’s eyes than red men with their hair cut, and without paint or feathers, at work in the fields like squaws.

Their heathen neighbors began to come into the Moravians’ peaceful fold, and the three villages grew and flourished till the war broke out between the colonies and Great Britain. Then the troubles and sorrows of the Moravians, white and red, began again. They were too weak to keep the savage war parties from passing through their towns, and they dared not refuse them rest and food. The warriors began to come with the first leaves of spring, and they came and went till the first snows of autumn made their trail too plain for them to escape pursuit from the border. The Moravians did what they could to ransom their captives and to save them from torture when the warriors returned after their raids, but all their goodness did not avail them against the suspicion of the settlers. The backwoodsmen looked on them as the spies and allies of the savages, and the savages on their side believed them in league with the Americans.

The Delawares had promised the Moravian teachers that if they settled among them, the Delaware nation would take no part in the war, and the most of ‘them kept their promise. But some of the young men broke it, and the nation would not forbid the Wyandots from passing through their country to and from the Virginia frontier. It was true that the Moravians held thousands of Delaware warriors neutral, and that our American officers knew their great power for good among the Indians; but the backwoodsmen hated them as bitterly as they hated the Wyandots. Their war parties passed through the Christian villages, too, when they went and came on their forays beyond the Ohio, and at one time their leaders could hardly keep them from destroying a Moravian town, even while they were enjoying its hospitality.

This situation could not last. In August, 1781, a chief of the Hurons, called the Half King, came with a large body of Indians flying the English flag and accompanied by an English officer, to urge the Christians to remove to Sandusky, where they were told they could be safe from the Virginians. They refused, and then the Half King shot their cattle, plundered their fields and houses, and imprisoned their teachers, and at last forced them away. When the winter came on, the exiles began to suffer from cold and hunger, and many of their children died. To keep themselves and their little ones from starving, parties stole back from Sandusky throughout the winter to gather the corn left standing in the fields beside the Muskingum.

In March a larger party than usual returned to the deserted villages with a number of women and children, all unarmed, except for the guns that the men carried to shoot game. But in February the savages had fallen upon a lonely cabin and butchered all its inmates with more than common cruelty, and the whole border was ablaze with fury against the redskins, whether they called themselves Christians or not. A hundred and sixty backwoodsmen gathered at Mingo Bottom under the lead of Colonel David Williamson, who had once disgraced himself among them by preventing them from killing some Moravian prisoners, and who now seems to have been willing to atone for his humanity. They marched swiftly to the Muskingum, where they stole upon the Indians in the cornfields, and seized their guns. They told them at first that they were going to take them to Fort Pitt, and at the vote held to decide whether they should burn their prisoners alive or simply tomahawk and scalp them, there was really some question of their transfer to Pittsburg. This plan was favored by the leaders, and it is believed that if Colonel Williamson could have had his way, it would have been carried out. But there is no proof of this, and the rest, who were by no means the worst men of the border, but some of the best, voted by a large majority to kill their prisoners.

They gave them the night to prepare for death. One poor woman fell on her knees before Williamson and begged for her life, but the most of them seem to have submitted without a word. They spent the night in prayer and singing, and when their butchers sent at daybreak to know if they were ready, they answered that they had received the assurance of God’s peace. Then the murderers parted the women and children from the men and shut them up in another cabin, and the two cabins they fitly called the slaughterhouses. One of them found a cooper’s mallet in the cooper’s shop, where the men were left, and saying: “How exactly this will answer for the business,” he made his way through the kneeling ranks to one of the most fervent of the converts, and struck him down.

While the Indians still prayed and sang, he killed twelve more of them, and then passed the mallet to another butcher with the words: “My arm fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well.” Among the women and children the slaughter began with a very old and pious widow, and soon the sound of the singing and the praying was silenced in death.

The victims were scalped as they fell, and when the bloody work was done, the cabins were set on fire and the bodies burned in the burning buildings. Two boys who had been scalped with the rest feigned death, and when the murderers had left them they tried to escape. One stuck fast in the window and was burned, but the other got safely away and lived to tell the awful tale.

The backwoodsmen themselves seem not to have been ashamed of their work, though it is said that Williamson could never be got to speak of it. The event was so horrible that it killed the Moravians’ hopes of usefulness among the Ohio Indians. The teachers settled with the remnant of their converts in Canada, but the Christian Indians always longed for Gnadenhutten, where they had lived so happily, and where ninety-six of their brethren had suffered so innocently. Before the close of the century Congress confirmed the Delawares’ grant of the Muskingum lands to them, and they came back. But they could not survive the crime committed against them. The white settlers pressed close about them; the War of 1812 enkindled all the old hate against their race. Their laws were trampled upon and their own people were seen drunk in the streets.

Some of the Christians had fallen back into heathen savagery. One of these, who was found in a war party, painted and armed like the rest for a foray against the whites, said to a Christian brother: “I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so many of our countrymen were murdered in Gnadenhutten. They betrayed us.... Tell me now, is this the truth or not?” He had lost his children and all his kindred in that fearful carnage, and yet he could not believe his own accusations against the Moravians. He added mournfully: “I have now a wicked and malicious heart, and therefore my thoughts are evil. As I look outwardly, so is my heart within. What would it avail, if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of evil?”

THE TORTURE OF COLONEL CRAWFORD

The slaughter of the Christian Indians at Gnadenhutten took place in March, 1782, and in May ol the same year, four hundred and fifty horsemen from the American border met at Mingo Bottom, where the murderers had rendezvoused, and set out from that point to massacre the Moravian converts who had taken refuge among the Wyandots on the Sandusky. They expected, of course, to fight the warlike Indians, but they openly avowed their purpose of killing all Indians, Christian or heathen, and women and children, as well as warriors. We must therefore call them murderers, but we must remember that they had been hardened against mercy by the atrocities of the savages, and we must make allowance for men who had seen their wives and little ones tomahawked and scalped or carried off into captivity, their homes burnt, and their fields wasted. The life of the frontier at a time when all life was so much ruder than now was as fierce, if not as cruel, among the white men as among the red men.

The murderers at Mingo Bottom voted whether Colonel David Williamson or Colonel William Crawford should lead them, and their choice fell upon Crawford. He seems to have been a man of kinder heart than his fellows, and he unwillingly took command of the turbulent and disorderly band, which promptly set out on its march through the wilderness towards the Sandusky country. They had hoped to surprise the Indians, but spies had watched their movements from the first, and when they reached the Moravian villages on the Sandusky River, they found them deserted. They decided then to go on toward Upper Sandusky, and if they could not reach that town in a day’s march, to beat a quick retreat. The next day they started, but at two o’clock in the afternoon they were attacked by large numbers of Indians hidden in the tall grass of the prairies, and they fought a running battle till nightfall. Then both sides kindled large fires along their lines, and fell back from them to prevent a surprise.

In the morning the Americans began their retreat, and the Indians renewed their attack with great fury in the afternoon, on all sides except the northeast, where the invaders were hemmed in by swamps. There seems to have been no cause for their retreat, except the danger of an overwhelming onset by the savages, which must have been foreseen from the start. But the army, as it was called, was wholly without discipline; during the night not even a sentry had been posted; and now their fear became a panic, their retreat became a rout. They made their way as best they could through the marshes, where the horses stuck fast, and had to be abandoned, and the men themselves sometimes sank to their necks in the soft ooze. Instead of keeping together, as Crawford advised but had no power to compel, the force broke up into small parties, which the Indians destroyed or captured. Many perished in the swamps; some were followed as far as the Ohio River. The only one of the small parties which escaped was that of forty men under Colonel Williamson, the leader of the Gnadenhiitten massacre, who enjoyed the happier fortune denied to Colonel Crawford.

This ill-fated officer was tormented after the retreat began by his fear for the safety of his son, his son-in-law, and his nephews, and he left his place at the head of the main body and let the army file past him while he called and searched for the missing men. He did not try to overtake it till it was too late to spur his wearied horse forward. He fell in with Dr. John Knight, who accompanied the expedition as surgeon, and who now generously remained with Crawford. They pushed on together with two others through the woods, guided by the north star, but on the second day after the army had left them behind, a party of Indians fell upon them and made them prisoners.

Their captors killed their two companions, Captain Biggs and Lieutenant Ashley, the following day, but Crawford and Knight were taken to an Indian camp at a little distance, and then to the old Wyandot town of Sandusky, where preparations were made for burning Crawford. He seems to have had great hopes that Simon Girty, who was then at Sandusky, would somehow manage to save him, and it is said that the renegade really offered three hundred dollars for Crawford’s life, knowing that he would be many times repaid by Crawford’s friends. But the chief whom Girty tried to bribe answered, “Do you take me for a squaw?” and threatened, if Girty said more, to burn him along with Crawford. This is the story told in Girty’s favor; other stories represent him as indifferent if not cruel to Crawford throughout. In any case, it ended in Crawford’s return to the Indian camp, eight miles from the Indian town, where he suffered death.

The chiefs who had been put in charge of him were two Delawares of great note, Captain Pipe and Captain Wingenund. They were chosen his guards because the Christian Indians were of their nation, and the Delawares, more than any other nation, were held to have been injured and insulted by their massacre. It was Captain Pipe who refused Girty’s offer, if Girty ever made it, and it was Captain Pipe who urged the death of the prisoners, while treating them with mock politeness. Nine others were brought back from the town with Knight and Crawford, and Captain Pipe now painted all their faces black, the sign of doom. While he was painting Knight’s face, he told him that he should be taken to see his friends at the Shawnee village, and he told Crawford that his head should be shaved, meaning that he should be made an Indian and adopted into the tribe. But when they came to the place where Crawford was to suffer, Captain Pipe threw off the mask of kindness; he made a speech to the forty warriors and seventy squaws and papooses met to torture him, and used all his eloquence to inflame their hate.

The other Delaware chief, Captain Wingenund, had gone into his cabin, that he might not see Crawford’s death. They knew each other, and more than once Crawford had been good to Wingenund. The captive now sent for the chief, and Wingenund came unwillingly to speak with him, for he was already tied to the stake, and his friend knew that he could not save him. The chief acknowledged the kindness that they had once felt for each other, but he said that Crawford had put it out of his power to give him help.

“How so, Captain Wingenund?” asked Crawford.

“By joining yourself to that execrable man, Williamson; the man who but the other day murdered such a number of Moravian Indians, knowing them to be friends; knowing that he ran no risk in murdering a people who would not fight, and whose only business was praying.”

In vain, Crawford declared that he would never have suffered the massacre if he had been present. Wingenund was willing to believe this, but he reminded him that the men whom he had led to Sandusky had declared that they came to murder the remaining Moravians. No one, he said, would now dare to speak a word for him; the king of England, if he came with all his treasure, could not save him from the vengeance which the Indians were going to take upon him for the slaughter of their innocent brethren.

“Then my fate is fixed,” said Crawford.

Wingenund turned away weeping, and could never afterwards speak of the scene without deep feeling.

Crawford had already undergone the first of his punishment. The savages stripped him naked and made him sit down on the ground before the fire kindled to burn him, and beat him with their fists and with sticks till they had heated their rage. Then they tied his wrists together and fastened the rope that bound them to a post strongly planted in the ground with leash enough to let him walk round it once or twice, five or six yards away from the fire. Girty was present, and Crawford asked if the Indians meant to burn him; the renegade briefly answered, “Yes.” Then Captain Pipe spoke, and Wingenund saw his friend for the last time. After this chief left Crawford, the Indians broke into a loud yell and began the work of torture which ended only with his death.

At one point he besought Simon Girty to put an end to his sufferings; but Girty would not, or dared not.

Then Crawford began to pray, imploring God to have mercy upon him, and bore his torment for an hour and a half longer with manly courage. It is not known how long his torture lasted; Knight was now taken away, and no friend remained to witness Crawford’s agony to the end.

I have thought it well to recount his story, for without it we could not fully realize what the white people of that day underwent in their long struggle with the Ohio Indians. Cruelty so fiendish could never have a cause, but it cannot be denied that the torture of Crawford was the effect of the butchery of the Christian Indians. That awful deed was an act of even greater wickedness, for it was the act of men who were not savage by birth or race or creed. It was against the white man’s law, while the torture of Crawford was by the red man’s law. It is because of their laws that the white men have overcome and the red men have gone under in the order of mercy, for whenever we sin against that order, contrary to our law, or according to our law, we weaken ourselves, and if we continue in our sin, we doom ourselves in the end to perish.

THE ESCAPE OF KNIGHT AND SLOVER.

When the Indians made a raid on the settlements, they abandoned even victory if they had once had enough fighting; as when they had a feast they glutted themselves, and then wasted what they had not eaten. They seemed now to have had such a surfeit of cruelty in the torture of Crawford that they took little trouble to secure Knight for a future holiday. They promised themselves that he should be burnt, too, at the town of the Shawnees, but in their satiety they left him unbound in the charge of a young Indian who was to take him there from Sandusky. It is true that Knight was very weak, and that they may have thought he was unable to escape, though even in this case they would probably have sent him under a stronger guard at another time, when they were not gorged with blood.

His Indian guard was armed and was mounted on a pony, while Knight went on foot; but Knight had made up his mind that he would escape at any risk rather than be burned like Crawford. His face had again been painted black; and he had Simon Girty’s word, given him before Crawford was put to death, that he was to be burned at Old Chillicothe. But he pretended not to know what the Indians were going to do with him there, and he easily deceived his guard, who seems to have been a good-natured, simple fellow. Knight asked him if they were going to live together like brothers in the same wig-wam, and the Indian answered they were, and they went in very friendly talk. At night-fall when they camped, Knight let his guard bind him, but he spent the hours till daybreak trying secretly to free himself. At dawn the Indian rose and unbound his captive. Then he rekindled the fire, at the same time fighting the gnats that swarmed upon his naked body. He willingly consented that Knight should make a smoke to drive them from his back, and Knight took a heavy stick from the fire as if to do this; but when he got behind the Indian he struck him on the head with all his strength. The Indian fell forward into the fire, but quickly gathered himself up and ran off howling. Knight wanted to shoot him as he ran; in his eagerness to cock the rifle he broke the lock, and the Indian escaped. He got safely to the Shawnee town, where he described the fight in terms that transformed the little doctor into a furious giant, whom no amount of stabbing had any effect upon.

The other Indians, who seem to have understood this cowardly boaster, received his story with shouts of laughter. But Knight was very glad to make off with his gun and ammunition, and leave them to settle the affair among themselves. When he came to the prairies he hid himself in the grass and waited till dark before venturing to cross them, and by daybreak he was in the woods again. He could kill nothing with his broken gun, and he lived for twenty-one days on wild gooseberries, with two young blackbirds and a tortoise, which he ate raw. He reached the Ohio River on the twenty-second day, and crossed in safety to Fort Mcintosh.

The tragic adventures of the Indian captives must often have been relieved by comic incidents like those of Knight’s escape from his guard; but there is very little record of anything except sorrow and suffering, danger and death. Certainly in the captivity of John Slover, another of Crawford’s ill-starred and ill-willed crew of marauders, there were few gleams of happier chance to distinguish it from most histories of the sort. He had been captured by the Indians when a boy of eight years, and carried from his home in Virginia to their town of Sandusky, where he was adopted into their nation, and where he lived quite happily till his twentieth year, when he was given up to his own people.

He fought through two years of the Revolutionary War, and he was thoroughly fitted to act as a guide for Crawford.

After the battle, or rather the disorderly rout, he was one of those who was mired in the swamps. He left his horse there, and with a few others tried to make his way to Detroit. Twice the party escaped capture by hiding in the grass, as the Indians passed near them, but on the third morning they were ambushed; two were killed, one ran away, and the remaining three gave themselves up on the promise of good treatment. They were taken to Wapatimika, where Simon Kenton was to have been burned, and they soon proved how far the promises of the savages were to be trusted.

The Indians knew Slover at once, and they bitterly reproached him with having come to betray his friends. At the council held to try him, James Girty urged them to put him to death for his treason. But Slover strongly defended himself, reminding the Indians that they had freely given him up, and had no longer any claim upon him. His words had such weight that the council put off its decision. In the meantime he was left with an old squaw, who hid him under a bear skin, and scolded off the messengers who came to bring him before a grand council of Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Chippewa, and Mingo warriors. But shortly after, Girty came with forty braves and seized him. Slover was now stripped, and with his hands tied and his face painted black, he was taken to a village five miles off, where he was beaten as usual by the people, and then driven a little farther to another village, where he found everything made ready to burn him, as Crawford had been burned. He was tied to the stake, and the fire was lighted; an orator began to kindle the anger of the savages; but at the last moment a heavy shower of rain burst over the roofless council house where they had gathered to torture their captive, put out the fire, and drove them to a sheltered part of the lodge, where they consoled themselves as best they could by beating him till midnight, and promising him that he should be burned the next day. He was then carried to the blockhouse and left bound with two guards, who entertained themselves, but did not amuse Slover, by talking over his probable behavior under the torture that awaited him. They fell asleep, worn out, about daybreak, when Slover made a desperate effort to free himself, and to his own astonishment, succeeded. He stepped across his snoring guards out into the open air. No one was astir in the village, and he ran to hide himself in a cornfield, where he nearly fell over a sleeping squaw and her papooses. On the other side of the field he found some horses, and making a halter of the buffalo thong that had bound him, and that still hung upon his arm, he leaped upon one of them and dashed through the woods. By ten o’clock in the forenoon he had reached the Scioto fifty miles away.

He allowed his horse to breathe here; then he remounted, crossed the river, and galloped half as far again. At three o’clock his horse gave out, and Slover left him and ran forward afoot, spurred on by the yells of the pursuers close behind him. The moon came up, and knowing that his trail could be easily followed by her light, he ran till daybreak. The next night he reached the Muskingum, naked, torn by briers, and covered with the mosquitoes which swarmed upon his bleeding body. A few wild raspberries enabled him to break his fast for the first time, but the next day he feasted upon two crawfish. When he came to the Ohio, just across from Wheeling, and called to a man whom he saw on the island there, to bring his canoe and take him over, it is not strange that the man should have hesitated at the sight of the figure on the Ohio shore. Not till Slover had given him the names of many men in Crawford’s army, as well as his own name, did the man come to his rescue and ferry him over to the fort, where he was safe at last.

THE INDIAN WARS AND ST. CLAIR’S DEFEAT.

The Indians and the renegades at Sandusky would not believe their prisoners when Crawford’s men told them that Cornwallis and his army had surrendered to Washington; but the Revolutionary War had now really come to an end. The next year Great Britain acknowledged the independence of the United States, and gave up the whole West to them, as France had given it up to her before. Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia claimed each the country lying westward of them, but the other states denied this claim. The West was finally declared the property of the whole Union, and in 1784 the first ordinance was passed by Congress for its government. It was not until 1787 that the great ordinance was passed which gave the future empire of the world to the West on terms of freedom to all men: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory otherwise than in the punishment of crime.”

This made the West free forever, but no law of Congress could make it safe without the consent of the savage nations which had again changed masters by the treaty of foreign powers. The war between England and America was over, but the war between white men and red men raged more fiercely after our peace with Great Britain than before. The backwoodsmen took this peace for a sign that they might now cross the river from New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia to settle in the Ohio country; and they were soon there by hundreds. It is true that the United States had made treaties with the United Tribes for certain tracts beyond the Ohio River, but the Indians declared that they had been tricked into these treaties. It is true that Congress meant to deal fairly by them so far as to drive the hard bargains with them for their lands which the white men had always driven with the Indians; but the backwoodsmen waited for nothing, and the old story of surprises and slaughters, of captivities and tortures, went on, with the difference that the war parties now need not cross the Ohio to take scalps and prisoners, and the vengeance of the pioneers had not so far to follow them in their return to the woods.

The first white settlers in Ohio were largely the kind of half-savages who had butchered the Christians at Gnadenhiitten. They built their cabins and cleared their fields on lands so shamelessly stolen that in 1785 a force of United States troops was sent to drive them out of their holdings. They seemed to go, but in reality they staid, and wherever the backwoodsman planted his foot west of the Ohio, he never turned his face eastward again.

He was unlawfully there, but from the Indian’s point of view he was no more unrightfully there than the settlers who came a few years later to take up farms under the land companies authorized by Congress. If any other proof were wanting that these companies possessed themselves of land which the Indians believed they had never sold, it would appear in the fact that the first thing the settlers did was to build a stockade, or high bullet-proof fence of logs with a strong blockhouse for a kind of citadel, where they might gather for safety in case of attacks from any of the wild natives of the woods about them.

The invaders were from New England, from New Jersey, from Pennsylvania, and from Virginia, and with their coming, nearly all in the same year, there began that mingling of the American strains which has since made Ohio the most American state in the Union, first in war and first in peace; which has given the nation such soldiers as Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, McPherson; such presidents as Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley; such statesmen and jurists as Ewing, Cor-win, Wade, Chase, Giddings, Sherman, Waite. We have to own, in truth and honesty, that the newcomers might be unlawfully and unrightfully in the great territory which was destined to be the great state, but it is consoling to realize that they were not unreasonably there. It was not reasonable that the land should be left to savages who must each keep fifty thousand acres of it wild for his needs as a hunter. The earth is for those who will use it, and not for those who will waste it, and the Indians who would not suffer themselves to be tamed could not help wasting the land.

If the whites made any mistake, it was in allowing any man to own more land than he could use; but this is a mistake which prevails in our own day as it prevailed in the days of the pioneers, and they were not to blame for being no wiser at the end of the eighteenth century than we are at the end of the nineteenth. The states consenting to the organization of the Northwest Territory meant that their citizens who had fought for the independence of the nation in the Revolutionary War should first of all have their choice of its lands, and so we find Ohio divided up into the Virginia Military District, the Connecticut Western Reserve, and the Bounty Lands of Pennsylvania. But large grants were made to land companies, and the innumerable acres were juggled out of the hands of the people into the hands of the speculators, as the public lands have been ever since, until now there are no public lands left worth having.

The Ohio Indians knew nothing of all this, or as little as they have ever known of the fate of their ancient homes on the frontier which we have pressed further and further westward. They held in their stubborn way that the line between them and the whites was still the Ohio River, as it had been for fifty years; and they made war upon the invaders wherever they found them. At times they gathered force for a great battle, and in the first two of these battles they were the victors, but in the third they were beaten and their strength and spirits were broken. In 1790 General Harmar destroyed the towns of the Miamis on the Wabash; but they ambushed his retreat and punished his fifteen hundred men so severely that he was forced back to the Ohio. In 1791 General Arthur St. Clair led an army against the Indians in the Maumee country, and was attacked and routed with greater havoc than the savages had ever yet made of the whites, except perhaps in Braddock’s defeat. In 1792 General Anthony Wayne set about gathering another army for the Indian campaign. He moved into the enemy’s country slowly, building forts in Darke County and Mercer (where St. Clair was routed) as he advanced. In 1794, at the meeting of the Auglaize and Maumee, twenty miles from the last post, which he named Fort Defiance, he finally met the tribes in great force, and defeated them so thoroughly that for sixteen years they never afterwards made head against the Americans.

At this day we can hardly imagine the dismay that the rout of St. Clair and the slaughter of his men spread through the Ohio country. He was a gallant officer, the governor of the Northwest Territory, and the trusted friend of Washington. It is true that his army was largely the refuse of the Eastern States, picked up in the streets of the larger towns and lured into the wilderness with the promise of three dollars a month; that these men were badly fed, badly clothed, and badly drilled; and that they were led by a general whose strength and spirits were impaired by sickness. But with them was a large body of Kentuckians and other backwoodsmen, skilled in Indian warfare, and eager for the red foes with whom they had long arrears of mutual injury to bring up; and the hopes of the settlers rested securely upon these. The Indians were led by Little Turtle, one of their greatest war chiefs, and at the point where General Wayne two years later built one of his forts, and called it Recovery, they surprised St. Clair’s troops.

It was an easy slaughter. St. Clair was suffering so much with gout that he could not move from his horse when he was helped to the saddle, and was wholly unfit to fight. Yet he went undauntedly through the battle; horse after horse was shot under him, and his clothes were pierced with nine of the bullets which the Indians rained upon his men from every tree of the forest. The backwoodsmen had hardly a chance to practice the Indians’ arts against them before the rout began. The cannon which St. Clair had brought into the wilderness with immense waste of time and toil, proved useless under the fire that galled the artillerymen. The weak, undisciplined, and bewildered army was hemmed in on every side, and the men were shot down as they huddled together or tried to straggle away, till half their number was left upon the field. Of course none of the wounded were spared. The Americans were tomahawked and scalped where they fell; one of the savages told afterwards that he plied his hatchet until he could hardly lift his arm. All the Ohio tribes shared in the glory of this greatest victory of their race, — Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, Ottawas, Chippeways, and Pottawottomies. There had been plenty of game that year; they were all in the vigor and force which St. Clair’s ill-fated army lacked; and they lustily took their fill of slaughter.

Many stories of the battle were told by those who escaped. Major Jacob Fowler, of Kentucky, an old hunter, who went with the army as surveyor, carried his trusty rifle, but he had run short of bullets, the morning of the fight, which began at daybreak. He was going for a ladle to melt more lead, when he met a Kentucky rifleman driven in by the savages, and begged some balls of him. The man had been shot through the wrist, and he told Fowler to help himself from his pouch. Fowler was pouring out a double handful, when the man said, “Stop; you had better count them.” Fowler could not help laughing, though it was hardly the time for gayety. “If we get through this scrape, my dear fellow,” said he, “I will return you twice as many.” But they never met again, and Fowler could only suppose that his cautious friend was soon tomahawked and scalped with the other wounded. Fowler took to a tree, and shot Indians till his gunlock got out of order. Then he picked up a rifle which had been thrown away, and which he found his bullets would fit, and renewed the fight. It was a very cold November morning, and his fingers became so stiff that he could not hold the bullets, which he had to keep in his mouth, and feed into his rifle from it. At one time he was behind a very small tree, and two Indians fired on him at such close range that he felt the smoke of their guns and gave himself up for dead. But both had missed him, and he got away from the battlefield unhurt.

Another Kentuckian, a young ranger named William Kennan, was one of the first riflemen driven back by the overwhelming force of Indians. He tried to hide in the tall grass, but found that his only hope was in his heels. The savages endeavored to cut him off, but he distanced all except one, who followed him only three yards away. Kennan expected him every moment his tomahawk at him, and he felt in his belt for his own. It had slipped from its place, and he found himself wholly unarmed, just as he came to a tree which the wind had blown down, and which spread before him a mass of roots and earth eight or nine feet high. He gathered all his strength, bounded into the air, and cleared it, while a yell of wonder rose from the baffled Indians behind him. A little later he came upon General Madison of Kentucky sitting on a log, so spent with the day’s work and loss of blood from a wound, that he could no longer walk, and waiting for the Indians to come up and kill him. Kennan ran back and caught a horse which he had seen grazing, put Madison on it, and walked by his side till they were out of danger. The friendship thus begun lasted through their lives.

This is one of the few softer lights in the picture whose darker features we must not fail to look upon. One of the grimmest of them was the war chief of the Missasagos, Little Turtle, who planned the surprise, against the advice of all the other chiefs, and who merits the fame of the awful day. To the Americans who saw him then, he was a sullen and gloomy giant, who fought with his men throughout the battle, arrayed in the conspicuous splendor of a great war, chief, with silver ornaments dangling from his nose and ears. Hardly less terrible than the figure of this magnificent butcher is that of the Chickasaw warrior who accompanied the American army, to glut the hate of his nation for the Northern tribesmen. When the fight began, he said he would not stand for the Shawnees to shoot him down like a wild pigeon, and he left the ranks and took to a fallen log, where he fired with unfailing aim. But he could not be kept from leaving it to scalp the other Indians as he shot them, and his own turn to be shot and scalped came at last.

The battle ground was covered with a thick slush from the new-fallen snow, and this made the retreat more exhausting. A poor mother, perhaps one of the soldiers’ or pioneers’ wives, staggered along with a baby in her arms till she fell with it. The ranger McDowell then carried it awhile for her. When he gave it back, she threw it away in the snow, to save her own life, and the Indians found it, and took it to Sandusky, where they brought it up as their own.

Two years after, when a detachment of Wayne’s army camped upon the scene of the carnage, they had to scrape away the heaps of bones and carry them out of their tents before they could make their beds, and they buried six hundred skulls on the field. Such is war, and we cannot look too closely on its hideous face, which is often so alluringly painted that we forget it is the face of a pitiless demon.

THE INDIAN WARS AND WAYNE’S VICTORY.

The Indians who had been so well generaled and had fought so ably, failed as usual to follow up their victory by moving on the American settlements in force. They kept on harassing the pioneers in small war parties, but gave the country time to send an army, thoroughly equipped and thoroughly disciplined, against them. They made a second attack on the Americans on the old battle ground where General Wayne had built his Fort Recovery, but they were beaten off with severe loss, though in their attack they had the aid of many white Canadians and even of some British officers, or at least of men wearing the uniform of British officers.

By the treaty of 1783 Great Britain agreed to give us the whole West below a certain line, but when the time came for the surrender, she refused to yield the forts south of this line. With the bad faith of wanton power she kept her posts at Oswego, Niagara, Detroit, and Mackinaw, because we were weak and she was strong; and from these points her agents abetted the savages in their war upon the American frontiers. Just before the battle of Fallen Timbers, where Wayne won his victory, the Lieutenant Governor of Canada marched a force of Canadian militia and British regulars into the Ohio country, and built a fort on the Maumee, near the battle ground, which he held until 1796, when Great Britain at last gave up all the places she had unrightfully kept. The Indians expected this fort to open its gates to them, when they fled before Wayne’s men, and were astonished and indignant at the behavior of then-British friends in denying them refuge. This was not from want of ill will toward the Americans, who taunted them as they passed, and whom the garrison wished to fire upon for approaching the post in force. Sharp letters passed between the American general and the British commandant, but it ended in nothing worse, and our jealous army, which remained in the neighborhood laying waste the Indian fields and villages, could not perceive that the British gave any aid or comfort to the savages.

The battle of Fallen Timbers was fought on the 20th of August, 1794, on the banks of the Maumee, near a rising ground called Presque Isle, about two miles south of the present Maumee City, and four miles from the British Fort Miami. The place was called Fallen Timbers because it was covered with trees blown down long before in a tornado. These formed a natural stronghold for the savages, but Wayne had every other advantage, especially in numbers; he had almost twice as many men, well drilled, armed, and clothed, while the miserable and disorderly army of St. Clair had fallen a prey to a far greater force of Indians.

On the morning of the battle, Wayne sent a flag of truce to the united tribes, offering peace, but he did not wait for its return. He met his envoy coming back with an evasive answer, and he pushed on to Fallen Timbers without stopping. As soon as he reached the battlefield, he ordered his infantry to beat up the covert of the enemy, who were hidden among the logs, brush, and grass, with the bayonet, and as they rose to deliver their fire. His order was carried out so thoroughly and promptly that this charge of nine hundred men began and ended the fight. Two thousand; Indians, Canadian militia and volunteers fled before them, and the rout was complete.

The affair was so quickly over that there was no time for the incidents of heroism and suffering which heightened the tragedy of St. Clair’s defeat. At the beginning of the action, General William Henry Harrison, afterwards President of the United States, but then one of Wayne’s aids, said to him, “General Wayne, I’m afraid you will get into the battle yourself, and forget to give us the necessary field orders.” “Perhaps I may,” said Wayne, “and if I do, recollect the standing order for the day is, Charge the rascals with the bayonets!” Wayne had got his nickname of Mad Anthony in the Revolution from his habit of swearing furiously in battle, and now he called the Indians something more than simply rascals. We have seen how his men carried out the spirit of his instructions, and it is told of one of them who got astray from the rest that he met an Indian alone and gave him the bayonet. At the same time the Indian gave the American the tomahawk, and they were found dead together, one with the blade in his breast, the other with the hatchet in his skull.

A runaway negro who had followed the Kentucky horsemen to the battle, saw three Indians swimming the river from the shore where the cavalry were posted, and shot one of them. The other two tried to swim on with the body. The negro fired again with deadly aim, and the only Indian left was now in water so shallow that he was dragging the bodies to land when once more the negro fired and killed his man. Then he ran up to look at the dead men and found them so like one another that he knew they must be brothers.

A strange and romantic incident of the campaign, before the battle, occurred while three American scouts, Wells, McClellan, and Miller, were ranging the woods to bring in some Indians for Wayne to question. They came upon a party of three Indians; Wells shot one, and Miller another, while McClellan, who was very swift of foot, ran down the third. Pursuer and pursued both stuck in the oozy bottom of a stream, and when Wells and Miller came up, they were threatening each other with knife and tomahawk. Miller had been taken captive when a child with one of his brothers; he had escaped, but this brother had remained with the savages, and somehow Miller felt that the Indian confronting Mc-Clellan was his brother. They seized him and washed off his paint; he was white; he was Miller’s brother. They persuaded him, with much trouble at first, to join Wayne’s army, and he fought through the rest of the war on the American side.

At another time as Wells and a party of his scouts came to the banks of a stream, they saw on the opposite shore a family of savages who began to cross the river towards them in a canoe. The scouts, taking them for Indians, were about to fire on them when Wells suddenly called out that the first who fired should have a bullet through his own head. He had recognized the Indians, and he said that when he was a captive in their tribe, this family had fed and clothed him, and nursed him in sickness, and treated him as tenderly as one of themselves. The backwoodsmen joined Wells in talk with his friends, urging them to do what they could for peace among their people, and left them to paddle away in their canoe unharmed.

Wells had been the adoptive son of Little Turtle, who led the Indians at St. Clair’s defeat, and he had fought on the side of the savages in that battle. But after it was over he foresaw that the war must end in favor of the white men, and he decided to abandon his wild brethren. He spoke first with Little Turtle as they were walking in the woods together and warned him in words that a real Indian might have used. “When the sun reaches the meridian, I leave you for the whites; and whenever you meet me in battle you must try to kill me, as I shall try to kill you.”

But the real Indians had not Wells’s forecast, and they continued the war till they were beaten by Wayne, in whose army Little Turtle might have found his adoptive son. Little Turtle was himself one of the last chiefs to yield, but he came in with the rest at Greenville, and one year after the battle of Fallen Timbers signed the treaty by which ninety chiefs and the deputies of twelve tribes gave up the Ohio River as the Indian border, and ceded half the Ohio lands to the United States.

Little Turtle, or Moshokonoghua, as he was called in the tongue of his nation, the Miamis, lived for thirty years after signing the treaty, and then died of gout at Fort Wayne. He traveled through the Eastern States in the first years of the peace, and gave people there a different impression from that received by those who knew him before the defeat of St. Clair, and saw him leading the victors in that battle. He struck all who met him as a man of intelligence and wit; he got the habit of high living and bore himself like the gentlemen whose company he loved to frequent. At Philadelphia the famous Polish exile and patriot Kosciusko gave him his pistols and bade him shoot dead with them any man who attempted to rob him of his country.

His business in the East was to interest people in the civilization of his tribe, but he had no purpose of living among the whites. In Philadelphia, he said, “When I walk through the streets I see every person in his shop employed about something: one makes shoes, another pots, a third sells cloth. I say to myself, which of these things can you do? Not one. I can make a bow or an arrow, catch fish, kill game, and go to war; but none of these things is of any use here. To learn what is done here would require a long time. Old age comes on. I should be a useless piece of furniture, useless to my nation, useless to myself. I must go back to my own country.”

This was what he did, and as long as he lived he was steadfast for peace, for he remembered that it would be foolish for the Indians to fight the Americans, and Little Turtle was not a fool. Even before the battle of the Fallen Timbers, he urged his people to treat with Wayne rather than fight. “We have beaten the enemy twice under separate commanders,” he said, referring to Har-mar and St. Clair. “The Americans are now led by a chief who never stops; the night and the day are alike to him. And during all the time that he has been marching upon your villages, notwithstanding the watchfulness of our young men, we have never been able to surprise him. Think well of it. There is something which whispers to me that it will be prudent to listen to his offers of peace.”

INDIAN FIGHTERS.

In the long war with the Indians, the great battles were nearly all fought within the region that afterwards became our state, and the smaller battles went on there pretty constantly. The first force on the scale of an army sent against the Ohio tribes was that of Colonel Bouquet in 1766; but, as we have seen, the chief object of this was to treat for the return of their white captives. In 1774 Lord Dunmore marched with three thousand Virginians to destroy the Indian towns on the Scioto in Pickaway County. He cannot be said to have led his men, who believed in neither his courage nor his good faith, and who thought that he was more anxious to treat with the savages for the advantage of England in the Revolutionary War, which he knew was coming, than to attack their capital. This was that Old Chillicothe, which has been so often mentioned before, and here Dunmore made peace with the Indians, instead of punishing them, as the backwoodsmen expected. The feeling among them was so bitter that one of them fired through Dunmore’s tent where he sat with two chiefs, hoping to kill all three. He missed, but he easily escaped among his comrades, who looked upon Dunmore as an enemy of their country and a traitor to their cause.

Their spirit, both lawless and fearless, was the spirit of that race of Indian Fighters, as they were called, which grew up on the border in the war ending with Wayne’s victory. It led them into countless acts of daring and into many acts of cruelty, and the story of their adventures is too bloody to be fully told. But unless something of it is told we cannot have a true notion of what the life of our backwoodsmen was. We have seen what they could do when they were at their worst in the Gnadenhutten massacre; but we cannot understand them unless we realize that they not only held all life cheap, but held the life of an Indian no dearer than that of a wolf.

Belmont County was the scene of two exploits of Lewis Wetzel, perhaps the most famous of these Indian fighters. One day he went home with a young man whom he met while hunting, and they found the cabin burnt and the whole family murdered except a girl who had lived with them, and whom the young man was in love with. They started on the trail of the Indians who had done the cruel deed, and came up with them after nightfall sleeping round their camp-fire. The girl was awake, crying and lamenting, and Wetzel had great ado to keep her lover from firing at once upon the Indians. But he made him wait for daylight, so that they could be sure of their aim; and then at the first light of dawn, they each chose his mark and fired. Each killed his Indian, but two others escaped into the woods, while the lover rushed, knife in hand, to free the girl. Wetzel made after the Indians, firing into the air to draw them out of their concealment. Then he turned, loading as he ran, and wheeled about and shot the Indian nearest him. He fled again, dodging from tree to tree till his gun was reloaded, when he shot the last Indian left. He took their scalps, and got home with the girl and her lover unhurt.

In 1782, together with one of Crawford’s men, he fell in with a party of forty Indians about two miles from St. Clairsville. Both sides fired; Wetzel killed one of the Indians, but his friend was wounded and promptly scalped, while four of the Indians followed Wetzel. He turned, shot the foremost, and ran on, loading his rifle. The next was so close upon him that when Wetzel turned again, the Indian caught the muzzle of his gun. After a fearful struggle Wetzel got it against the Indian’s breast, pulled the trigger, and killed him. The remaining two followed him a mile farther, and then Wetzel shot one of them as he was crossing a piece of open ground. The last left of the Indians stopped with a yell, and Wetzel heard him say as he turned back, “No catch that man; gun always loaded.”

Wetzel had fought Indians nearly all his life. When he was a boy of fourteen they attacked his father’s cabin in Virginia, and Wetzel was wounded before he was taken prisoner, with a younger brother, and carried into the Ohio wilderness. One night the Indians forgot to tie their captives, and the two boys escaped. Lewis returned to the camp, after they had stolen away, for a pair of moccasins, and again for his father’s rifle, which the Indians had carried off. They followed the boys, but the young Wetzels got safely back to the Ohio, and crossed the river on a raft which they made of logs.

In 1786 the settlers of Wheeling, who had been troubled by Indians, offered a purse of a hundred dollars to the man who should first bring in a scalp. A party crossed the Ohio, but after some days turned back, leaving Wetzel alone in the woods, where he roamed about looking for Indians. The second morning he came upon one sleeping, and drove his knife through his heart. Then he went home with his scalp, and got the reward.

One of the tricks of the savages was to imitate the cry, or call, of the wild turkey and then to shoot the hunter who came looking for the bird. Wetzel was one day in the woods when this call came to his ear from the mouth of a cave, a place where several whites had been found scalped. He watched till the feathered tuft of an Indiana head appeared from the cave. The call of the wild turkey sounded, and at the same time the sharp crack of Wetzel’s rifle noted the Indian’s death.

It was Wetzel’s habit in the autumn to go on a long hunt into the Ohio country. Once he went as far as the Muskingum, some ninety miles from Wheeling, when he came on a camp of four Indians. He crept upon them with no weapon but his knife, which he drove through the skulls of two as they lay asleep. The two others struggled to their feet stupefied; Wetzel killed one of them, but the fourth escaped in the shadow of the woods. When Wetzel returned and was asked what his luck in hunting had been, he said, “Not much; I treed four Indians, but one got away.”

These were acts of war, but they were very like mere murders, and one of Wetzel’s exploits could hardly be called anything but murder. General Har-mar in 1779 had invited the Indians to come and make peace with him in the fort near where Marietta now stands. Wetzel and another Indian fighter lay in wait for the envoys who passed from the tribes to the general, and in pure wantonness, shot one. He then took refuge with his friends at Mingo Bottom, where the officer sent by Harmar to arrest him, dared not even attempt it. Wetzel was the hero and darling of the border, where the notion of punishing a man for shooting an Indian was laughed at. But after a while he was taken, and lodged, heavily ironed, in the fort. He sent for the general and asked him to give him up, with a tomahawk, to a large band of armed Indians present, and let him fight for his life with them. Of course Harmar could not do this, but Wetzel won upon him so far that the general had his fetters removed, leaving only the manacles on his wrists, and allowed him to walk about outside the fort. He made a sudden dash for the woods; the guards fired upon him, but Wetzel got safely away; and at a distant point he reached the Ohio. He could not swim, with his hands in irons, but by good luck he saw a friend on the Virginia shore, who came in answer to his signs and set him over in his canoe. Later the soldiers found him in a tavern at Marysville, and arrested him again. He was taken to the fort at Cincinnati, where Harmar was now in command, but he was released by a judge of the court just in time to save the fort from an attack by the backwoodsmen, who were furious that Wetzel should be so persecuted simply for killing an Indian.

One of the stories told of Wetzel’s skill in Indian warfare relates to an adventure he had after his escape from hanging by the soldiers. He was coming home at the end of a hunt in the Ohio woods when he saw an Indian lifting up his gun to fire. Each sprang behind a tree, and each waited patiently for the other to expose himself. At last Wetzel put his bearskin cap on his ramrod, and pushed it a little beyond the edge of his shelter. The Indian took it for his enemy’s head and fired. Before he could load again Wetzel was upon him, and his end had come.

It is not easy for us at this day to understand how a man so blood-stained as this should be by no means the worst man of the border. Wetzel is said to have been even exemplary in his life apart from his Indian killing, which, indeed, was accounted no wrong, but rather a virtue by his savage white friends. In person he might well take their rude fancy. He was tall, full-chested, and broad-shouldered; his dark face was deeply pitted with smallpox; his hair, which he was very proud of, fell to his knees when loose; his black eyes, when he was roused, shone with dangerous fire. He was silent and shy with strangers, but the life of any party of comrades. It is not certainly known how or where he died. Some say that he went South, and ended his stormy life quietly at Natchez; others that he went West, and remained a woodsman to the last, hunting wild beasts and killing wild men.

Lewis Wetzel had two brothers only less famous than himself in the backwoods warfare, and more than once Indian fighting seems to have run in families. Adam Poe and Andrew Poe were brothers whose names have come down in the story of deadly combats with the savages. They are most renowned for their heroic struggle with a party of seven Wyandots near the mouth of Little Yellow Creek, in 1782. The Wyandots, led by a great warrior named Big Foot, had fallen suddenly on a settlement just below Fort Pitt, killed one old man in his cabin, and begun their retreat with what booty they could gather. Eight borderers, the two Poes among them, followed in hot haste across the river into the Ohio country, where the next morning Andrew Poe came suddenly on Big Foot and a small warrior talking together by their raft at the water’s edge. They stood with their guns cocked, and Poe aimed at Big Foot; but his piece missed fire. The Indians turned at the click of the lock, and Poe, who was too close to them for any chance of escape, leaped upon them both and threw them to the ground together. The little warrior freed himself, and got his tomahawk from the raft to brain Poe, whom he left in deadly clutch with Big Foot. Twice he struck, but Poe managed each time, by twisting and dodging, to keep his head away from the hatchet, and as the warrior struck the third time, Poe, though badly hurt on the arm by one of his blows, wrenched himself free from Big Foot, caught up one of the Indians’ guns, and shot the little warrior through the breast. Then Big Foot seized him again, and they floundered together into the water, where each tried to drown the other. Poe held Big Foot under the water so long that he thought he must be dead, but the moment he loosed his hold upon his scalp lock, the Wyandot renewed the fight. They presently found themselves in water beyond their depths, and let go to swim for their lives. The Indian reached the shore first, and got hold of one of the guns to shoot Poe, but luckily for Poe it was the gun he had fired in killing the little warrior.

Adam had heard the shot, and he now came hurrying up. His gun was empty, too, and it was a question Whether he or Big Foot should load first: he shot the Indian as he was lifting his gun to fire. But Big Foot was not killed, and Andrew shouted to Adam not to mind him, but to keep the Indian from rolling himself into the water. Big Foot was too quick for them: he got into the current, which whirled him away, and so saved his scalp in death. About the same time another of the party who came up took Andrew Poe for an Indian and shot him in the shoulder. Poe got well of his wounds and lived for many years, proud of his fight with Big Foot, who was a generous foe, and had often befriended white captives among his tribe.

It is told of Adam Poe that five Indians, all rather drunk, once came to his cabin, and tried to force the door open. He sent his wife with the children out into the cornfield behind the house, remarking, “There is a fight and fun ahead,” but when he saw the state the Indians were in, he did not fire at them. He fell upon them with his fists, knocked them all down, and then threw them one after another over the fence, and the fun was ended.

One of the hunters detailed from Wayne’s command to supply the officers with game while the army lay at Greenville in 1793 was the Indian fighter, Josiah Hunt, who died a peaceful Methodist many years afterwards. When he passed a winter in the woods he had to build a fire to keep from freezing, and yet guard against letting the slightest gleam of light be seen by a prowling foe. So he dug a hole six or seven inches deep with his tomahawk, filled it with the soft lining of dead oak bark, and with his flint started a fire. He left two holes at the edges to breathe the flame; then covered the pit with earth, spread brush over it, and seated himself on the heap, with his blanket drawn over his head, and dozed through the night. The Indians had a great honor and admiration for him, and when they came to make peace at Greenville, after Fallen Timbers, they all wanted to see Captain Hunt. “Great man, Captain Hunt,” they said. “Great warrior — good hunting man-Indian no can kill,” and they told him they had tried to find out the secret of his fire, and catch him off his guard so that they could get his scalp, which they felt would have been the highest distinction they could have achieved, next to getting General Wayne’s scalp. He was indeed both hunted and hunter. He never fired at a deer without first putting a bullet in his mouth to reload for an Indian, who might be about to fire on him. When he skinned a deer, he planted his back against a tree, and stood his rifle by his side; from time to time he stopped and listened for the slightest noise that hinted danger. His life had its disappointments as well as its perils. Once he saw three Indians whom he might easily have killed at one shot if he could have got them in range, but they persisted in walking Indian file. If he fired and killed only one, the other two would have killed him; so he was obliged to let them all go. Captain Hunt was a quiet, modest man, very frank and sincere, and seems never to have boasted of his exploits; we have no means of knowing whether he was glad or sorry that those Indians got away in safety. Probably he was not very glad; for though the fighters on both sides could admire, they could never spare one another.

The Indian fighters were commoner in the southern and eastern parts of Ohio than in the north, but there was at least one whose chief exploit had the north for its scene. Captain Samuel Brady, in 1780, gathered a number of his neighbors and pursued a retreating war party of Indians from the Ohio as far as the Cuyahoga, near Ravenna. Here he found that the savages far outnumbered his force, and he decided that it would be better for him to retreat in his turn, and he bade each of his men look out for himself. He discovered that the Indians were pressing him hard with the purpose of taking him alive and glutting many an old grudge against him by torture. But he knew his ground, for he had often hunted there with them in friendlier days, and he saw a chance for his life at a point where another man would have despaired. This was where the river narrowed to a gorge twenty feet wide, with walls of precipitous rock. As he neared this chasm in his flight, Brady gathered himself for the leap and cleared it. He caught at some low bushes where he alighted and pulled himself up the steep, while the Indians stood stupefied. They had now no hope of taking him alive, and they all fired upon him. One bullet wounded him badly in the hip, but he managed to swim a pond which he came to, and to hide himself behind a log near the shore. When the Indians came up and saw the blood on its surface, they decided that he was drowned, and gave up the chase. Some of them stood on the very log that hid him while they talked over his probable fate, and then they left him to make his long way home unmolested.

Duncan McArthur, an early governor of Ohio, though not an Indian fighter like these others, was in many fights with the Indians. In the summer of 1794 he was hunting deer in the hills near the mouth of the Scioto, when two Indians fully armed came in sight. McArthur was waiting for the deer behind a screen or blind near the salt lick which they frequented, and he took aim at one of the Indians and shot him. The other did not stir till McArthur broke from his covert and ran. He plunged heedlessly into the top of a fallen tree, and before he could disentangle himself, he heard the crack of the Indian’s rifle, and the bullet hissed close to his ear. He freed himself and ran, followed now by several other Indians, but he managed to distance them all and reached the Ohio River in safety.

It was war to the death between the red and white borderers. Neither spared the other, except in some rare mood of caprice or pity. A life granted on either side meant perhaps many lives lost, and the foes vied with one another in being the first to shed the blood which seems, as you read their savage annals, to stain every acre of the beautiful Ohio country.

LATER CAPTIVITIES.

The Indians seem to have kept on carrying the whites into captivity, to the very end of the war, which closed with the Greenville treaty of 1795. As they had always done, they adopted some of them into their tribes and devoted others to torture. Nothing more clearly shows how little they realized that their power was coming to an end, and that they could no longer live their old life, or follow their immemorial customs.

The first captive in Ohio, of whom there is any record, was Mary Harris; she had been stolen from her home in New England when a child, by the French Indians, and was found at White Woman Creek in Coshocton County, about the year 1750. When the last captive was taken is not certainly known, but two white boys were captured so late as 1791, and one of these was adopted by the Delawares in Auglaize County. His name was Brickell, and he was carried off from the neighborhood of Pittsburg when nine years old. He wrote a narrative of his life among the Indians, and gave an account of his parting with them which is very touching. After the first exchange of prisoners Brickell was left because there was no Indian among the whites to exchange for him, but later his adoptive father went with him to Fort Defiance, and gave him up. Brickell had hunted with the rest of the children, and shared in all their sports and pleasures, and they now clung about him crying, when their father told them he must go with him to the fort. They asked him if he was going to leave them, and he could only answer that he did not know. At the fort, his Indian father, Whingy Pooshies, bade him stand up before the officers, and then spoke to him.

“My son, these are men the same color as yourself, and some of your kin may be here, or they may be a great way off. You have lived a long time with us. I call on you to say if I have not been a father to you, if I have not used you as a father would a son.”

“You have used me as well as a father could use a son,” said Brickell.

“I am glad you say so,” Whingy Pooshies returned. “You have lived long with me; you have hunted for me; but your treaty says you must be free. If you choose to go with the people of your own color, I have no right to say a word; if you choose to stay with me, your people have no right to speak. Now reflect on it, and take your choice, and tell us as soon as you make up your mind.”

Brickell says that he thought of the children he had left crying, and of all the Indians whom he loved; but he remembered his own people at last, and he answered, “I will go with my kin.”

Then Whingy Pooshies said, “I have reared you; I have taught you to hunt; you are a good hunter; you are better to me than my own sons. I am now getting old and I cannot hunt. I thought you would be a support to my old age. I leaned on you as on a staff. Now it is broken; you are going to leave me; and I have no right to say a word, but I am ruined.”

He sank into his seat, weeping, and Brickell wept too; then they parted and never saw each other again.

One of the later captivities was that of Israel Donolson, who has told the story himself. The night before he was captured, he says that he dreamed of Indians, and took it as a sign of coming trouble; but in the morning, the 22d of April, 1791, he went prospecting for land with another young surveyor, named Lytte, and a friend named Tittle. They worked together along the Ohio River in Adams County till they came to one of the ancient works of the Mound Builders. The surveyors were joking Tittle, and telling him what a fine place that would be for him to build his house, when they saw a party of Frenchmen in two canoes. The Frenchmen turned out to be Indians, who landed and instantly gave chase to the white men. Donolson tripped and fell, and three warriors were quickly upon him. He offered no resistance; they helped him up, and had leisure to secure him in full sight of the blockhouse on the Kentucky shore, where they could all see men moving about, but Donolson could not call to them for help. His captors pushed off with him northward. The next morning it rained, and one of the Indians took Donolson’s hat; he complained to a large warrior, who gave him a blanket cap, and helped him through the swollen streams. When they killed a bear, and wanted to make their captive carry the meat, he flung it down; and then his big friend carried it for him.

One day an Indian, while they were resting, built a little fence of sticks, and planted some grains of corn inside of it, saying, “Squaw!” as a hint to Donolson that he should be put to work with the women. When they got to the Shawnee camp, they dressed his hair in Indian fashion, and put a tin jewel in his nose, and upon the whole they treated him kindly enough. But almost every day he saw war parties setting off for Kentucky, or coming back with scalps and horses, and he was always watching for a chance to escape. One night he encamped with two guards who had bound him as usual with a rope of bark. He gnawed at it all night long, and just at daybreak he freed himself. After his first dash he stopped to put on his moccasins, and knew that he was missed, by the terrific yells that the Indians were giving. He ran on, and to hide his trail kept as much as he could on fallen trees. At ten o’clock he hid between two logs and slept till dark; then he started again, and passed that night in a hollow tree. The day following he came to the Miami River, and tried to drift down its current on a raft which he made of logs tied together with bark, but he was soon forced to the shore again. He broke his long fast on two eggs he found in a wild turkey’s nest; they proved to have each two yolks, and he made them last for two days. In the woods he caught a horse and tried to ride it with a bark halter; but the halter rubbed a sore on its lip, and the horse threw him, and hurt him so badly that he lay insensible for a time; then he rose up and pressed on, but very slowly, for his feet were full of thorns. The twelfth day after his capture he heard the sound of an ax, and found himself in the neighborhood of Fort Washington, or Cincinnati.

In 1793, the year before Wayne’s victory, Andrew Ellison was taken by the Indians in a clearing near his cabin in Adams County, and was hurried off before his family knew that anything had happened. They roused the neighborhood, and the Indians were hotly pursued, but they got away with their prisoner, and made swiftly off to Upper Sandusky, where they forced him to run the gantlet. He was a heavy man, not fleet of foot, and he was terribly beaten; but he got through alive, and at Detroit a British officer ransomed him for a hundred dollars. By that time prisoners must have been getting cheap: it was perhaps more and more difficult to hold them.

Two boys, John Johnson, thirteen years old, and Henry Johnson, eleven, were captured in 1788 near their home at Beach Bottom in Monroe County. They were cracking nuts in the woods, and when the Indians came upon them the boys thought that they were two of their neighbors. They were seized and hurried away, one Indian going before and one following the boys, who told them their father treated them badly, and tried to make their captors believe they were glad to be leaving home. The Indians spent the day in a vain attempt to steal horses, and stopped to pass the night only four miles from the place where they had taken the boys. After supper they lay down with the prisoners between them, and when they supposed the boys were asleep one of the Indians went and stretched himself on the other side of the fire. Presently he began snoring, and John rose, cocked one of the guns, and left it with Henry aimed at this Indian’s head, while he took his station with a tomahawk held over the head of the other. Henry fired and John struck at the same time; neither Indian was killed at once, but both were too badly hurt to prevent the boys’ escape, and the brothers found their way to the settlement by daybreak. The neighbors who returned to their camp with them found the body of the Indian who had been tomahawked, but the other had vanished. Years afterwards a skeleton with a gun was discovered in the woods, where he must have crept after he was shot.

In the autumn of 1792 Samuel Davis and William Campbell set out from Massie’s Station, now Manchester, to trap beaver on the Big Sandy. One night as they lay asleep beside their camp fire they were roused by a voice saying in broken English, “Come, come; get up, get up!” and they woke to find themselves in the clutches of a large party of Indians returning from a raid into Virginia. The Indians bound their captives and started, driving before them a herd of stolen horses. They crossed the Ohio country, and pushed on toward Sandusky, for they were Shawnees. At night they tied each prisoner with buffalo thongs and made these fast to the waist of two Indians, who lay down one on either side of him, and quieted him with blows if he became restive. At daylight the captives were untied, but they were warned that they would be instantly killed if they attempted to escape. Davis was in dread of being burned at Sandusky, and as the Indians, encumbered with their booty, made only ten or twelve miles a day, the terror had full time to grow upon him. At last one morning just before dawn he woke one of the Indians beside him and asked to be untied; he was answered with a blow of the savage’s fist. He waited a moment, and then woke the other guard, who lifted his head, and seeing some of his people building a fire, released Davis.

It was still too dark for any of them to get a good shot at him if he made a dash from their midst, and Davis decided to try for life and liberty. He knocked a large warrior before him into the fire, bounded over him, burst through the group around him, and before they could seize their rifles, which were all stacked together, he had vanished in the shadows of the forest. They followed him, whooping and yelling, but none could draw a bead on him, and not a shot was fired. One Indian was so near that Davis fancied he felt his grasp at times, but he fell behind, and Davis kept on. When he had distanced them all, he stopped to tear up his waistcoat, and wrap his feet, naked and bleeding from the sharp stones which had cut them in his wild flight, and then hurried on toward the Ohio. Three days without food or fire, in the cold of the early winter, passed before he reached the river, eight or ten miles below the mouth of the Scioto. He then saw a large boat coming down the stream, but his troubles did not end with this joyful sight. One of the dreadful facts of the dreadful time was the frequent deception of boatmen by Indians and renegades who pretended to be escaping prisoners, and who lured them to their destruction by piteous appeals for help. The boatmen now refused to land for Davis; they told him they had heard too many stories like his, and they kept on down the stream, while he followed wearily along the shore. At last he entreated them to row in a little nearer, so that he could swim out to them. They consented to this, and he plunged into the icy water, and was taken on board just as his strength was spent.

In 1782, John Alder, then a child of eight years, was captured in Wythe County, Virginia, by a party of Min-goes, who at the same time wounded and killed his brother. They already had two prisoners, Mrs. Martin, the wife of a neighbor, and her little one four or five years old: it proved troublesome, on their rapid march across the Ohio country to their village on Mad River, and they tomahawked and scalped it. The next morning little Alder was somewhat slow in rising from his breakfast when bidden, and on the ground he saw the shadow of an arm with a lifted tomahawk. He glanced upward and found an Indian standing over him, who presently began to feel of Alder’s thick black hair. He afterwards confessed that he had been about to kill him, but when he met his pleasant smile he could not strike, and then he thought that a boy with hair of that color would make a good Indian, and so spared him.

At the Mingo village Alder was made to run the gantlet between lines of children armed with switches, but he was not much hurt, and he was now taken into the tribe. He was given to a Mingo family, and the mother washed him and dressed him in the Indian costume. They were kind to him, but for a month he was very homesick, and used to go every day to a large walnut tree near the town and cry for the friends and home he had lost. After he had learned the Mingo language he began in time to be more contented. He had no complaint to make of any of the family, except one sister, who despised him as a prisoner, and treated him like a slave. Another sister and her husband were his special friends, and he relates that when he used to sit up with the Indians round their camp fire, listening to their stories, he would sometimes drowse; then this gentle sister and her husband would take him up in their arms and carry him to bed, and he would hear them saying, “Poor fellow! We have sat up too long for him, and he has fallen asleep on the cold ground.”

About a year after he was adopted, Alder met that poor mother, whose little one the Indians had cruelly murdered before her eyes. “When she saw me, she came smiling, and asked if it was me. I told her it was. She asked me how I had been. I told her I had been very unwell, for I had had fever and ague for a long time. So she took me off to a log, and there we sat down; and she combed my head, and asked a great many questions about how I lived, and if I didn’t want to see my mother and little brothers. I told her I should be glad to see them, but never expected to see them again. We took many a cry together, and when we parted, took our last and final farewell, for I never saw her again.”

Alder always remained delicate, and could not thrive on the Indians’ fare of meat and hominy, with no bread or salt; of sugar and honey there was plenty; but he missed the things he was used to at home. When he grew older he was given a gun, and sent hunting, and whenever he came back with game the Indians praised his skill and promised him he should be a great hunter some day. He continued with them until the peace of 1795, which followed Wayne’s victory, and even then he stayed for a time in the region where he had dwelt so long. He had married a squaw, and had become a complete Indian, so that the first settlers in his neighborhood had to teach him to speak English. But he did not live happily with his Indian wife; they agreed to part, and then Alder thought of going back to his own people. He reached the house of one of his brothers in the neighborhood of his old home, one Sunday afternoon, and found several of his brothers and sisters there, and his mother with them. They could scarcely be persuaded that it was their son and brother come back to them, and he had to tell them of some things that no one else could know before they would believe him. His old, white-haired mother whom he remembered in her youth with a “head as black as a crow,” was the first to take him in her arms, and she said, as she wept over him, “How you have grown! I dreamed that you had come to see me, but you was a little ornary-looking fellow, and I would not own you for my son; but now I find I was mistaken, that it is entirely the reverse, and I am proud to own you for my son.”

In 1792, Moses Hewit was taken near Neil’s Station, on the Little Kanawha, by three Indians, who at once pushed off with him towards Sandusky. They used him very kindly, and shared fully with him the wild honey which they found in the bee trees, and invited him to take part in their foot races and other sports. He found that he could outrun two of them, and he resolved to try for his liberty, though he kept a cheerful outside with them, and seemed contented with his lot. One day they left him tied hand and foot and fastened to two small trees while they went on a hunt, but he contrived to free himself, and made his escape with their whole stock of provisions, two small pieces of venison. He struck out for the settlements on the Muskingum, and the first night his captors passed so near him in pursuit that he might have touched them in the darkness. Nine days later he came in sight of a station on the Muskingum, so spent with hunger and fatigue that he could not halloo to the garrison. He had nothing on his wasted and bleeding body, which was all torn by briers and brushwood, except a cloth about his loins, and he was afraid of being mistaken and shot for an Indian. He waited till nightfall and then crept to the station, where his presence was unknown till a young man of his acquaintance caught sight of his face in the firelight, and called out, “Here is ‘Hewit!”

Captain Charles Builderback and his wife were surprised by a party of Indians while they were looking for cattle in the Ohio country, near Wheeling, in 1789. Mrs. Builderback hid herself, but the Indians had captured her husband, and now they forced him to call out to her. She hesitated to answer, thinking of the children they had left at home in the cabin which she could see across the river, and knowing how useless it would be to give herself up. But he called again, saying that if she surrendered, it might save his life. Then she showed herself, and was seized and hurried away by one band of savages, while her husband remained with the others. A few days later these came up and showed her his scalp: he was one of the assassins of the Gnadenhiitten Indians, and he was doomed as soon as they knew his name. She was taken to their towns on the Great Miami, where she lived nine months, drudging with the squaws and suffering from the rude and filthy life of the savages, but not ill-treated. Then the commandant at Cincinnati ransomed her and sent her home to her two orphan children.

So lately as 1812 two little girls were stolen from their fathers’ houses in Preble County by the Indians. They could not be traced, but twenty-five years later, one of them, named Parker, was found living with her savage husband in Indiana. She refused then to go home with her father, saying coldly that she should be ridiculed there for her Indian customs.

INDIAN HEROES AND SAGES.

The Ohio Indians were of almost as mixed origin as the white people of Ohio, and if they had qualities beyond those of any other group of American savages, it was from much the same causes which have given the Ohioans of our day distinction as citizens. They made the Ohio country their home by a series of chances, and they defended it against the French, the English, and Americans in turn, because it had bounds which seemed to form the natural frontier between them and the Europeans.

It is now believed that before the coming of our race there was a balance of power between those two great North American nations, the Iroquois and the Algonquins, and that our wars and intrigues destroyed this balance, which was never restored, and put an end to all hope of advance in the native race. Whether this is true or not, it is certain that the hostilities between the tribes raged down to our day, and that these seem to have continued if not begun through one family, the Algonquins, siding with the French, and the other family, the Iroquois, siding with the English. The Algonquins were most powerful in New England and Canada, and the Iroquois in New York. Their struggle ended in the overthrow of the Algonquins in the regions bordering on the English colonies, where, as has been told, a great branch of that people who called themselves the Lenni-lenape, and whom we called the Delawares, dwelt in a sort of vassalage to the Iroquois.

In Ohio, however, these families, so long broken elsewhere by their feuds, united in a common fear and hate of the white men. Many of the Ohio Indians were Delawares, but the Miamis were Iroquois, while the Wyandots again were Hurons, one of the finest and ablest of the Iroquois nation. They ceased to make war upon each other, and in their union the strongest traits of both were blended. Their character appears at its’ best, I think, in Tecaughretanego, the adoptive brother of James Smith, and in the great Mingo chief, Logan.

Of Tecaughretanego, his unselfishness, his piety, his common sense, his wisdom, we already know something from Smith’s narrative, which I wish every boy and girl might read; and of Logan’s noble spirit we have had a glimpse in the story of Kenton’s captivity. He was the son of Shikellimy, a Cayuga chief who lived at Shamokin, Pennsylvania, and who named him after James Logan, the Secretary of the Province. Shikellimy was a convert of the Moravian preachers, and it is thought that Logan himself was baptized in the Christian faith. He spent the greater portion of his early life in Pennsylvania, and he took no part in the war between the French and English, except to do what he could for peace. When he came to Ohio, he dwelt for a time at Mingo Bottom in Jefferson County, the rendezvous of the assassins who marched against Gnadenhiitten under Williamson, and of the assassins who were beaten back from Sandusky under Crawford. Here, as before, Logan was the friend of the white man, and it was not till the murder of his father, brother, and sister, cried to him for vengeance, that he made war upon them.

His kindred were of a small party of Indians whom some Virginians lured across the Ohio near the mouth of Yellow Creek in 1774. On the Virginia side the murderers made three of the Indians drunk and tomahawked them, and when they had tricked the others into discharging their guns at a mark, and so had them defenseless, they ruthlessly shot them down. Logan’s sister, who was the only woman in the party, tried to escape, but a bullet cut short her flight, and she died praying her murderers to have mercy on the babe she held in her arms. They spared it, and he who tells the cruel tale saw it the next day in his own mother’s arms smiling up into her face, while she fed and fondled it.

The news came to Logan while he was speaking at a council of the Indians, and urging them to make peace with the whites. He instantly changed his plea; he lifted up his hatchet, and yowed never to lay it down till he had avenged himself tenfold. He kept his word, and that summer thirty scalps and prisoners bore witness to his fury.

But it was a short-lived impulse of a nature essentially so good that it could not long keep the memory of even such an injury. In this very war, or this out-Durst of the long Indian war, Logan showed himself as before the friend of the white men. He had pity on many of the captives he made, and when he could he tried to move other captors to pity. Major William Robinson, who was one of Logan’s prisoners, tells how he was surprised, together with two friends, by a party of Indians who fired on them. Robinson ran with a savage in hot chase behind him, who called to him in English, “Stop; I won’t hurt you.” “Yes, you will,” Robinson retorted. “No, I won’t,” the Indian insisted; “but if you don’t stop, I’ll shoot you.” Robinson fell over a log, and the Indian seized him. It was Logan, who told him not to be frightened for he should be adopted into his own tribe when they reached his village. There he was made to run the gantlet, but Logan instructed him how to manage so that he got through without harm. Robinson was then tied to the stake and the Indians prepared to burn him. It was the summer after the murder of Logan’s kindred, and they had already whipped one Virginian to death merely because his brother was present at the massacre. They could not forgive, but Logan rose before the council and pleaded with all his eloquence for Robinson’s life. Three times the captive was untied from the stake, and three times tied to it again before Logan’s words prevailed. At last the great chief was allowed to lay the belt of wampum on the prisoner for a sign that he was adopted. Then he gave him in charge to a young Indian, saying, “This is your cousin; you are to go home with him, and he will take care of you.”

But still the sense of his wrong, and the hunger for revenge, gnawed at Logan’s heart, and one day he came to Robinson with a piece of paper and bade him write a letter for him. He said he meant to leave it in the cabin of a white man which he was going, to attack, and it was afterwards found there tied to a war club. He made Robinson write it several times before he thought the words strong enough. It was addressed to the man whom Logan thought guilty of the death of his kindred, but who was afterwards known to have been not even present at their murder.

   “Captain Cresap: What did you kill my people on

   Yellow Creek for? The white people killed my kin at

   Conestoga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing

   of that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow Creek,

   and took my cousin prisoner. Then I thought I must

   kill, too. I have been three times to war since then;

   but the Indians are not angry; only myself.

   “July 21, 1774.

   “Captain John Logan.”

Both the matter and the language of this letter are so like those of Logan’s famous speech, that it is clear he must often have thought his wrongs over in the same terms, brooding upon them with an aching heart, but not with hate so much as grief. The speech was made at the Chillicothe town where Lord Dunmore treated with the Ohio tribes for peace in the August after Logan had written his letter, but it was not spoken in the council. Logan held aloof from the council, and Dunmore sent to his cabin for him. It is said by some that his messenger was the great renegade Simon Girty, who had not yet turned against his own people, and was then, with his friend Simon Kenton, a scout in Dunmore’s service. Others say that the messenger was a young man named Gibson, but whoever he was, Logan met him at the door, and coming out into the woods sat down under a tree which was long known as Logan’s Elm. Here, with a burst of tears, he told the story of his wrongs in language which cannot be forgotten as long as men have hearts to thrill for others’ sorrows.

“I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan’s cabin and I gave him not meat; if ever he came cold and naked and I gave him not clothing. During the course of the last long and bloody war Logan remained in his tent an advocate of peace. Nay, such was my love for the whites that those of my own country pointed at me as they passed, and said, ‘Logan is the friend of the white man.’ I had even thought to live with you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, cut off all the relatives of Logan, not sparing even my women and children. There runs not a drop of my blood in the veins of any human creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many. I have fully glutted my vengeance. For my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. Yet do not harbor the thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one.”

This speech, or rather this message, which Logan sent to Lord Dunmore, has come down to us in two forms, one which Dunmore’s officers wrote out from the report of the message, and one which Thomas Jefferson framed upon it. They do not differ greatly, and I have given Jefferson’s version here, because it best expresses the noble mind of a noble man, a savage, indeed, but far less savage than many of the white men of that day or any day. A pioneer of Western Pennsylvania, William Brown, who afterwards became a judge of the Mifflin County courts, calls him “the best specimen of humanity he ever met with, white or red,” He first saw him in the woods, while stooping to drink at a spring. The figure of a tall Indian showed itself to him in the water, and he sprang for his rifle, but the Indian knocked the priming out of his own gun, and offered his hand. It was Logan, and he guided Brown to the hunting camp of another white man, with whom he afterwards visited Logan’s camp. There they all shot at a mark for a dollar each round, and Logan lost. A deerskin was worth a dollar, and Logan offered five skins for his five failures. Brown’s friend refused them, saying they were his guests and had shot with him merely for a trial of skill. Logan answered with dignity, “Me try to make you shoot your best; me gentlemen, and me take your dollar if me beat,” and he would not allow the victor even to give him a horn of powder in return.

A lovely story was told by the daughter of Judge Brown concerning Logan, who was one day at her father’s camp when her mother happened to regret that she had no shoes for her little one then just beginning to walk. Logan said nothing, but shortly after he came and asked the mother to let the child spend the day with him at his camp. The mother trembled, but she knew the delicacy of Logan, and she would not wound him by showing fear of him. He took the child away, and the long hours passed till nightfall. Then she saw the great chief coming with his tiny guest through the woods, and the next moment the child bounded into the mother’s arms, proud and glad to show her feet in the moccasins which Logan had made for her.

In his old age Logan wandered from place to place, broken by the misfortunes of his people, and homeless in his own land. He fell a prey to drink, the enemy of all his race, and he was at last murdered near Detroit, where, as the story goes, he was sitting by his camp fire, with his blanket over his head, and lost in gloomy thought, when an Indian whom he had offended stole upon him and sank his tomahawk in Logan’s skull.

Of all the Indians he seems to me the grandest because he was the kindest. Tecaughretanego was wise and good. He had a thoughtful mind and a serene spirit; he could be just and loving to the white man whom he had taken for his brother, but he had not so noble an ideal of conduct as Logan. This chief grasped the notion of friendship with all the whites; he was more than a tribesman; he imagined what it was to be a citizen. Among the Ohio men of the past there is no nature more beautiful, no memory worthier than his. He was a savage, and his thirst for vengeance, or rather the smoldering thought of his wrongs, lowered him for a time to the level of the white and red men about him. Yet he was framed for gentleness, and he surpassed another great Ohio Indian as much in breadth of character, as he surpassed Tecaughretanego in an ideal of conduct.

Tecumseh, the famous war chief of the Shawnees, was born at the ancient town of Piqua on Mad River, not far from the present city of Springfield, in Clark County. His name means Shooting Star, and he was indeed the meteoric light of his people while he lived. He was of a high Indian, family of the Turtle Tribe, and his father had come with his clan to Ohio from their home in Florida, about the middle of the last century. Tecumseh was born, as nearly as can be reckoned, in the year 1768, and from his earliest childhood he showed the passion for war which ruled him through life. He led his playmates in their mimic fights, and at seventeen he went on his first war party against the Kentuckians. The Indians attacked some boats on the Ohio River, and killed all the boatmen but one, whom they brought back and burned at the stake. Tecumseh was present, and though he said nothing, the sight of the torture filled him with such horror, that he used his power with the Indians to put a stop forever to the burning of prisoners. He was such a hater of our race that, as he once confessed, the mere presence of a white man made the flesh of his face creep; but he hated cruelty more, and in the bloody events which he spent all his power in bringing about, he could always be trusted to keep the captives from torture, and to save the lives of women and children.

In spite of his hatred of white men, it is said that he was once in love with a white woman, the daughter of a settler in Greene County. He offered her fifty silver brooches if she would marry him; but she refused, saying that she did not wish to be a wild woman and drudge like a squaw; and she would not be tempted even when he promised her that she should not work, but should be a great squaw.

He was not always terrible, even with white men, and it is told of him that once meeting in a settler’s cabin a stranger who showed alarm at sight of him, Tecumseh went up and amiably shook him, saying, “Big baby, Big baby.” But he could be fierce and arrogant when he chose, and he delighted to make the Americans bend to him. At one of their parleys, General Harrison asked him to sit on his veranda with him. Tecumseh haughtily refused, and forced the general to come out and meet him under the trees, on the breast of the earth, who was, he said, the Indian’s mother.

He was in every fight with the Americans before Wayne’s victory, but he was not made a chief until the year following that battle. Then, though he seemed resigned to the fate of his people, he became the leader in their discontent, and in the parts of Ohio and Indiana where he lived he kept it alive. In this he had the help of his brother Elkskuatawa, the Prophet, who pretended to have dreams and revelations favorable to Tecumseh’s designs. In 1806, while they were at Greenville, the Prophet somehow learned that there was to be an eclipse of the sun; he foretold the coming miracle, and excited the savages through their superstitions so dangerously that Governor Harrison urged them to banish the Prophet. They made evasive answers, and kept the Prophet with them, while Tecumseh amused the governor with meetings and parleys, and went and came upon his errands among the Southern tribes stirring them up to join the Northern nations in a revolt against the Americans. He used all his eloquence and reason in trying to form this union of the red men, and when these would not avail, he did not scruple to employ the arts of his brother. In exhorting one of the Southern tribes he rebuked their coldness, and told them that when he reached Detroit, he would stamp his foot, and they should feel the earth tremble as a sign of his divine authority for his work. About the time it would have taken him to reach Detroit, the great earthquake of 1810 shook the Seminoles with terror of the man whose arguments they had rejected.

In fact, Tecumseh and the Prophet constantly played into each other’s hands, but in one of Tecumseh’s absences the Prophet made the mistake of attacking General Harrison at Tippecanoe, and the savages were severely beaten. The Prophet had also made the mistake of promising them a victory, and after the defeat he lost his power over them.

This was in 1811, but the next year the war between the United States and Great Britain broke out, and then Tecumseh seized his chance for renewing the war against the Americans. He served so faithfully against them that the king made him brigadier general, and Tecumseh tried to fight according to the laws of civilized warfare. At the attack on Fort Meigs in Wood County, he stopped, at the risk of his own life, the massacre of the American prisoners, and he bade the British commandant, who declared that the Indians could not be controlled, go and put on petticoats. An American who saw him at this time says, “This celebrated chief was a noble, dignified personage. His face was finely proportioned, his nose inclined to be aquiline, and his eye displayed none of that savage and ferocious triumph common to the other Indians on that occasion.”

Tecumseh with his Indians witnessed the battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, where Perry defeated the English fleet, and he was not deceived by the pretense of General Proctor that the Americans were beaten and the English ships were merely putting in there for repairs. Proctor was then preparing to retreat into Canada from Detroit, and Tecumseh demanded to be heard in the name of the Indians. He had some very bitter words to say: “The war before this our British father gave the hatchet to his red children.... In that war our father was thrown upon his back by the Americans, and our father took them by the hand without our knowledge, and we are afraid our father will do so again at this time.... Our ships have gone away, and we are much astonished to see our father tying up everything and preparing to run away.... We are sorry to see our father doing so without seeing the enemy. We must compare our father’s conduct to a fat dog that carries his tail on his back, and when affrighted drops it between his legs and runs off.

“Father, you have got the arms and ammunition which our great father sent for his children. If you have an idea of going away, give them to us, and you may go and welcome. Our lives are in the hands of the Great Spirit. We are determined to defend our lands, and if it be his will, we wish to leave our bones upon them.”

But the British retreated, and the Indians had to follow them into Canada. There in the battle of the Thames the Americans defeated them and their savage allies with great slaughter, and Tecumseh, whose war-cry had been heard above the tumult of the onset, was among the slain. He is supposed to have been killed by a pistol shot fired by Colonel Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, and it is said that the body of this generous enemy did not escape barbarous usage at the hands of Johnson’s men, who literally flayed it and bore portions of their ghastly trophy home with them in triumph.

Tecumseh played at a later day the part which Pontiac attempted at the end of the old French War. He tried to unite the Indians in a general uprising against the Americans as Pontiac had united them against the English. He used the same arts, and he showed himself shrewd and skillful in paltering with our leaders till he was ready to strike his blow against them, for he managed to remain in the Ohio country unmolested while he was getting ready to drive the Americans out of it. When the war with Great Britain began, he might very well have believed that his hopes were about to be fulfilled; but he seems, though a brave warrior, never to have shown such generalship as that of Little Turtle at St. Clair’s defeat. He was a great orator, of such a fiery eloquence that the interpreters often declared it impossible for them to give the full sense of his words; but none of his many recorded speeches have the pathos of Logan’s. He was, on the savage lines, a statesman and a patriot, but unlike the wiser and gentler Logan he never could rise to the wisdom of living in peace with the whites. He was always an Indian; even at his best he was a savage, just as the backwoodsman was a savage at his worst. Yet his memory remains honored in tradition beyond that of any other Ohio Indian, and his name was given to one of the most heroic Ohio Americans, William Tecumseh Sherman. Such as he was, and such as Logan was, it must be owned that they seem now of a far nobler mold than any white men in early Ohio history.

The Prophet outlived his brother many years, and died dishonored, and stripped of all the great power he had once wielded. At one time he wrought so strongly upon the Indians through their superstition of witchcraft, that they put many to death at his accusal. One of the victims was the Wyandot chief Leatherlips, whom six Wyandot warriors came from Tippecanoe to try where he lived near the site of Columbus. They found him guilty and sentenced him to death, of course upon no evidence. A white man who wished to save him asked what he had done, and was answered, “Very bad Indian; make good Indian sick; make horse sick; make die; very bad chief.” When he heard his sentence, Leatherlips ate a hearty dinner, dressed himself in his finest clothes, painted his face, and at the hour fixed for his death walked from his lodge to his grave, chanting his death song while he went. Then as he knelt in prayer beside the shallow pit, one of the six Wyandots tomahawked him.

The persecutions for witchcraft under the Prophet continued until at last a young warrior, whose sister was accused in the council, had the courage to rise and lead her out of the house. He came back and said to the council, pointing at the Prophet, “The Devil has come amongst us, and we are killing each other.” This bold good sense brought the Indians to a pause in a frenzy which has raged among every people in times past.

LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS.

Amidst all this tomahawking and scalping, this shooting and stabbing, this shedding of blood and of tears, this heartbreak of captivity, this torture, this peril by day and by night, the flower of home was springing up wherever the ax let the sun into the woods. It would be a great pity if the stories of cruelty and suffering which seem, while we read them, to form the whole history of the Ohio country, should be left without the relief of facts quite as true as these sad tales. Life was hard in those days, but it was sweet too, and it was often gay and glad. In times of constant danger, and even while the merciless savages were beleaguering the lonely clusters of cabins, there was frolicking among the young people in the forts, and the old people looked on at their joys in sympathy as well as wonder. The savages themselves had their harmless pleasures, and their wild life was so free that those who once knew it did not willingly forsake it. They were not bad-hearted so much as wrong-headed, and they were mostly what they were, because they knew no better. More than once we read how the lurking hunter heard them joking and laughing when off their guard in the wood; and in their towns, on the Miamis or the Muskingum or the Sandusky, they had their own games, and feasts, and merrymakings. Much that was beautiful and kindly and noble was possible to them, but they belonged to the past, and the white men belonged to the future; and the war between the two races had to be. Our race had outgrown the order which theirs clung to helplessly as well as willfully, and it was fated that we must found our homes upon their graves.

These homes were at first of the rude and simple sort, which a thousand narratives and legends have made familiar, and which every Ohio boy and girl has heard of. It would not be easy to say where or when the first log cabin was built, but it is safe to say that it was somewhere in the English colonies of North America, and it is certain that it became the type of the settler’s house throughout the whole middle west. It may be called the American house, the Western house, the Ohio house. Hardly any other house was built for a hundred years by the men who were clearing the land for the stately mansions of our day. As long as the primeval forests stood, the log cabin remained the woodsman’s home; and not fifty years ago, I saw log cabins newly built in one of the richest and most prosperous regions of Ohio. They were, to be sure, log cabins of a finer pattern than the first settler reared. They were of logs handsomely shaped with the broadax; the joints between the logs were plastered with mortar; the chimney at the end was of stone; the roof was shingled, the windows were of glass, and the door was solid and well hung. They were such cabins as the Christian Indians dwelt in at Gnadenhutten, and such as were the homes of the well-to-do settlers in all the older parts of the West. But throughout that region there were many log cabins, mostly sunk to the uses of stables and corn cribs, of the kind that the borderers built in the times of the Indian War, from 1750 to 1800. They were framed of the round logs, untouched by the ax except for the notches at the ends where they were fitted into one another; the chimney was of small sticks stuck together with mud, and was as frail as a barn swallow’s nest; the walls were stuffed with moss, plastered with clay; the floor was of rough boards called puncheons, riven from the block with a heavy knife; the roof was of clapboards split from logs and laid loosely on the rafters, and held in place with logs fastened athwart them.

There is a delightful account of such a log cabin by John S. Williams, whose father settled in the woods of Belmont County in 1800. “Our cabin,” he says, “had been raised, covered, part of the cracks chinked, and part of the floor laid, when we moved in on Christmas day. There had not been a stick cut except in building the cabin, which was so high from the ground that a bear, wolf, panther, or any animal less in size than a cow could enter without even a squeeze.... The green ash puncheons had shrunk so as to leave cracks in the floor and doors from one to two inches wide. At both the doors we had high, unsteady, and sometimes icy steps, made by piling the logs cut out of the walls, for the doors and the window, if it could be called a window, when perhaps it was the largest spot in the top, bottom, or sides of the cabin where the wind could not enter. It was made by sawing out a log, and placing sticks across, and then by pasting an old newspaper over the hole, and applying hog’s lard, we had a kind of glazing which shed a most beautiful and mellow light across the cabin when the sun shone on it. All other light entered at the doors, cracks, and chimneys. Our cabin was twenty-four by eighteen. The west end was occupied by two beds, the center of each side by a door.... On the opposite side of the window, made of clapboards, supported on pins driven into the walls, were our shelves. On these shelves my sister displayed in simple order, a host of pewter plates, and dishes and spoons, scoured and bright.... Our chimney occupied most of the east end; with pots and kettles opposite the window, under the shelves, a gun on hooks over the north door, four split-bottomed chairs, three three-legged stools, and a small eight by ten looking glass sloped from the wall over a large towel and comb case.... We got a roof laid over head as soon as possible, but it was laid of loose clapboards split from a red-oak, and a cat might have shaken every board in our ceiling.... We made two kinds of furniture. One kind was of hickory bark, with the outside shaved off. This we would take off all around the tree, the size of which would determine the caliber of our box. Into one end we would place a flat piece of bark or puncheon, cut round to fit in the bark, which stood on end the same as when on the tree.... A much finer article was made of slippery-elm bark, shaved smooth, with the inside out, bent round and sewed together, where the end of the hoop or main bark lapped over.... This was the finest furniture in a lady’s dressing room,” and such a cabin and its appointments were splendor and luxury beside those of the very earliest pioneers, and many of the latest. The Williamses were Quakers, and the mother was recently from England; they were of far gentler breeding and finer tastes than most of their neighbors, who had been backwoodsmen for generations.

When the first settlers broke the silence of the woods with the stroke of their axes, and hewed out a space for their cabins and their fields, they inclosed their homes with a high stockade of logs, for defense against the Indians; or if they built their cabins outside the wooden walls of their stronghold, they always expected to flee to it at the first alarm, and to stand siege within it. The Indians had no cannon, and the logs of the stockade were proof against their rifles; if a breach was made, there was still the blockhouse left, the citadel of every little fort. This was heavily built, and pierced with loopholes for the riflemen within, whose wives ran bullets for them at its mighty hearth, and who kept the savage foe from its sides by firing down upon them through the projecting timbers of its upper story; but in many a fearful siege the Indians set the roof ablaze with arrows wrapped in burning tow, and then the fight became desperate indeed. After the Indian War ended, the stockade was no longer needed, and the settlers had only the wild beasts to contend with, and those constant enemies of the poor in all ages and conditions, — hunger and cold.

Winter after winter, the Williamses heard the wolves howling round them in the woods, and this music was familiar to the ears of all the Ohio pioneers, who trusted their rifles for both the safety and support of their families. They deadened the trees around them by girdling them with the ax, and planted the spaces between the leafless trunks with corn and beans and pumpkins. These were their necessaries, but they had an occasional luxury in the wild honey from the hollow of a bee tree when the bears had not got at it. In its season, there was an abundance of wild fruit, plums and cherries, haws and grapes, berries, and nuts of every kind, and the maples yielded all the sugar they chose to make from them. But it was long before they had, at any time, the profusion which our modern arts enable us to enjoy the whole year round, and in the hard beginnings the orchard and the garden were forgotten for the fields. Their harvests must pay for the acres bought of the government, or from some speculator who had never seen the land; and the settler must be prompt in paying, or else see his home pass from him after all his toil into the hands of strangers. He worked hard and he fared hard, and if he was safer when peace came, it is doubtful if he were otherwise more fortunate. As the game grew scarcer, it was no longer so easy to provide food for his family, the change from venison and wild turkey to the pork, which early began to prevail in his diet, was hardly a wholesome one. Besides, in cutting down the trees, he opened spaces to the sun which had been harmless enough in the shadow of the woods, but which now sent up their ague-breeding miasms. Ague was the scourge of the whole region, and it was hard to know whether the pestilence was worse on the rich levels beside the rivers, or on the stony hills where the settlers sometimes built to escape it. Fevers of several kinds prevailed, and consumption was common in the climates that ague spared. There was little knowledge of the rules of health, and little medical skill for those who lost it; most of the remedies for disease and accident were such only as home nursing and home treatment could supply.

When once the settler was housed against the weather, he had the conditions of a certain rude comfort indoors. If his cabin was not proof against the wind and rain or snow, its vast fireplace formed the means of heating, while the forest was an inexhaustible store of fuel. At first he dressed in the skins and pelts of the deer and fox and wolf, and his costume could have varied little from that of the red savage about him, for we often read how’ he mistook Indians for white men at first sight, and how the Indians in their turn mistook white men for their own people. The whole family went barefoot in the summer, but in winter the pioneer wore moccasins of buckskin, and buckskin leggins or trousers; his coat was a hunting shirt belted at the waist and fringed where it fell to his knees. It was of homespun, a mixture of wool and flax called linsey-woolsey, and out of this the dresses of his wife and daughters were made; the wool was shorn from the sheep, which were so scarce that they were never killed for their flesh, except by the wolves, which were very fond of mutton, but had no use for wool. For a wedding dress a cotton check was thought superb, and it really cost a dollar a yard; silks, satins, laces, were unknown. A man never left his house without his rifle; the gun was a part of his dress, and in his belt he carried a hunting knife and a hatchet; on his head he wore a cap of squirrel skin, often with the plumelike tail dangling from it.

The furniture of the cabins was, like the clothing of the pioneers, homemade. A bedstead was contrived by stretching poles from forked sticks driven into the ground, and laying clapboards across them; the bedclothes were bearskins. Stools, benches, and tables were roughed out with auger and broadax; the puncheon floor was left bare, and if the earth formed the floor, no rug ever replaced the grass which was its first carpet. The cabin had but one room where the whole of life went on by day; the father and mother slept there at night, and the children mounted to their chamber in the loft by means of a ladder.

The food was what has been already named. The meat was venison, bear, raccoon, wild turkey, wild duck, and pheasant; the drink was water, or rye coffee, or whisky which the little stills everywhere supplied only too abundantly. Wheat bread was long unknown, and corn cakes of various makings and bakings supplied its place. The most delicious morsel of all was corn grated while still in the milk and fashioned into round cakes eaten hot from the clapboard before the fire, or from the mysterious depths of the Dutch oven, buried in coals and ashes on the hearth. There was soon a great flow of milk from the kine that multiplied in the pastures in the woods, and there was sweetening enough from the maple tree and the bee tree, but salt was very scarce and very dear, and long journeys were made through the perilous woods to and from the licks, or salt springs, which the deer had discovered before the white man or the red man knew them.

The bees which hived their honey in the hollow trees were tame bees gone wild, and with the coming of the settlers, some of the wild things increased so much that they became a pest. Such were the crows which literally blackened the fields after the settlers plowed, and which the whole family had to fight from the corn when it was planted. Such were the rabbits, and such, above all, were the squirrels which overran the farms, and devoured every green thing till the people combined in great squirrel hunts and destroyed them by tens of thousands. The larger game had meanwhile disappeared. The buffalo and the elk went first; the deer followed, and the bear, and even the useless wolf. But long after these the poisonous reptiles lingered, the rattlesnake, the moccasin, and the yet deadlier copperhead; and it was only when the whole country was cleared that they ceased to be a very common danger.

For a long time there were no mills to grind the corn, and it was pounded into meal for bread with a heavy wooden pestle in a mortar made by hollowing out some tough-grained log. The first mills were horse power; then small water-power mills were put up on the streams, and in the larger rivers boats were anchored, with mill wheels which the rapid current turned. But the stills were plentier than the mills, and as much corn was made into whisky as into bread. Men drank hard to soften their hard life, to lighten its heaviness, to drown its cares, to heighten its few pleasures. Drink was free and common not only at every shooting match, where men met alone, but at every log rolling or cabin raising, where the women met with them, to cook for them, and then to dance away the night that followed the toilsome day.

There were no rich people then, but all were poor together, and there were no classes. They were so helpless without one another that people were kindlier and friendlier as well as freer then than now, and they made the most of the corn huskings and quilting bees that brought old and young together in harmless frolics. The greatest frolic of all was a wedding; the guests gathered from twenty miles around, and the frolic did not end with the dancing at night. Next day came the infair at the house of the bridegroom, and all set off together. When they were within a mile or two, they raced for the bottle which was always waiting for them at the house, and the guest whose horse was fleetest brought it back, and made all drink from it, beginning with the bride and groom.

Religion soon tempered the ruder pleasures of the backwoods, but the dancing ceased before the drinking. Camp meetings were frolics of a soberer sort, where whole neighborhoods gathered and dwelt in tents for days in the beautiful autumn weather, and spent the nights in prayer and song. Little log churches were built at the crossroads, and these served the purpose of schoolhouses on week days. But there was more religion than learning in the backwoods, and the preacher came before the teacher.

He was often a very rude, unlearned man himself, and the teacher was sometimes a rude man, harsh and severe, when he was learned. Often he was a Scotch-Irishman, whose race gave schoolmasters to the West before New England began to send her lettered legions to the frontier.

Such a teacher was Francis Glass, who was born in Dublin in 1790, and came to Ohio in 1817, to teach the children of the backwoods. One of these afterwards remembered a log-cabin schoolhouse where Glass taught, in the twilight let through the windows of oiled paper. The seats were of hewn blocks, so heavy that the boys could not upset them; in the midst was a great stove; and against the wall stood the teacher’s desk, of un-planed plank. But as Glass used to say to his pupils, “The temple of the Delphian god was originally a laurel hut, and the muses deign to dwell accordingly in very rustic abodes.” His labors in the school were not suffered to keep him from higher aims: he wrote a life of Washington in Latin, which was used for a time as a text-book in the Ohio schools.

In the early days all books were costly, and they were even fewer than they were costly; but those who longed for them got them somehow, and many a boy who studied them by the cabin fire became afterwards a great statesman, a great lawyer, or a great preacher. In fact, almost every distinguished Ohioan of the past generations seems to have begun life in a log cabin, and to have found his way out of the dark of ignorance by the light of its great hearth fire. Their stories are such as kindle the fancy and touch the heart; but now they are tales that are told.

Among the stories of life in the backwoods, none are more affecting than those of lost children. In the forests which hemmed in the homes and fields of the settlers, the little ones often strayed away, or in their bewilderment failed to find a path back to the cabin they had left among the stumps of the clearing, or the leafless trunks of the deadening. In 1804, two children, Lydia and Matilda Osborn, eleven and seven years old, went to fetch the cows from their pasture a mile from their home in Williamsburg, Clermont County. Lydia, the elder of the sisters, left the younger in a certain spot while she tried to head off the wandering cows. It is supposed that she failed, and came back to get Matilda. Then it is supposed that, after searching for her, Lydia gave up in despair and started homeward, but found that she no longer knew the way. In the meantime the cows had left their pasture, and the younger girl had followed the sound of their bells and got safely back to the village. Night came, but no Lydia, and now the neighborhood turned out and helped the hopeless father to search for the lost child. They carried torches, and rang bells, and blew horns, and fired guns, so that she might see and hear and come to them, and before them all, day and night, ran the father calling, “Lydia, Lydia.” Five hundred men, a thousand men at last, joined in the quest, and on the fifteenth morning, they found in the heart of the woods a tiny hut, such as a child might build, of sticks and moss, with a bed of leaves inside; a path which led from it to a blackberry patch near by was beaten hard by the little feet of the wanderer. The rough backwoodsmen broke into tears when the father came up and at sight of the poor shelter called out, “Oh, Lydia, Lydia, my dear child, are you yet alive?”

They never found her. A mile or two from the hut they found her bonnet, and a few miles further on an Indian camp. They could only guess that the Indians had carried her away, and go back to their homes without her. The father never gave up, but as long as he lived he searched for her among the Indians. It was thought afterwards that the very means, the lights and the noises, used to attract the child, might have frightened her from her rescuers; for a strange craze would come upon lost people after a time, and they would hide from those who were looking for them. Others became hopelessly bewildered, and it is told of a pioneer, Samuel Davy, who was lost near Galion, that he wandered about till he reached a log cabin in a clearing. There he asked of the woman at the door if she knew where Samuel Davy lived. She laughed and bade him come in and see. Then he knew that it was his own wife speaking to him from his own threshold.

Whenever a lost child could not be found, the Indians were naturally suspected of stealing it; and this was probably the fate of a little one whom her mother lifted over the fence into the dooryard of her cabin, near Galion, and then went back to her work of making sugar in the woods. When she came home at nightfall, the child was not there, and no search afterwards availed to find her, though the whole neighborhood searched the woods for days and nights. It was known only that a party of Indians had lately camped near, and that they might have taken the child and brought it up as their own; but the mother never heard of her again.

Galion is rather famous for lost people, but at least one of them was found again. This was a little girl of the name of Bashford, who was sent to bring home the cows. In trying to return she became confused, and she wisely decided to keep with the cattle. When they lay down for the night, she sheltered herself against the warm back of a motherly old cow, and then followed them about in the morning till the neighbors found her.

She was none the worse for the night’s adventure except for her fright at the howling of the wolves, and from the pain of her slightly frost-bitten feet. But the fate of a little boy who wandered from home in Williams County was of a singular pathos. He was found dead after a three-days search, when the poor little body, which was half clad, was still warm. It was supposed that he had undressed each night when he lay down to sleep, as he was used to do at home, and that the third night he had been so chilled by the October cold that he could not put on all his clothes again, and so strayed feebly about till he lay down and died just before rescue came.

Encounters with wolves and bears were not so common as these animals were, by any means; but now and then the settlers came in conflict with them. In Crawford County so lately as 1826, a young man named Enoch Baker, in coming home from rather a late call on a young lady, fought a running fight with wolves, which left him only when he reached the clearing where his father’s cabin stood; then they fell back into the woods. Daniel Cloe, a boy of the same neighborhood, was attacked by a pack of eleven wolves one morning before daybreak, but was saved by his bulldog, which seized the foremost wolf by the throat, and gave the boy time to climb a tree.

A brother of this boy found his dogs one morning in ferocious clamor about some animal which they seemed afraid to grapple with. He came up and found that it was a bear. He had no gun, but he caught up a club, and when he had contrived to catch the bear by one of his hind legs, and to throw him over, he beat him about the head with his bludgeon and killed him.

This was pretty well for a boy of sixteen, but the reader must not award the palm to him without first knowing the adventure of John Gillett of Williams County, who clambered down a hollow tree to get some bear cubs. While he was securing them, the opening overhead was darkened by the body of the mother bear. There was only one thing to do, and Gillett drove his knife into the haunch of the bear, which scrambled out in surprise and terror, and pulled him and the cubs out with her. She did not stay to look after her family, and Gillett took the cubs to the next town, and got five dollars apiece for them. As he told this story himself, I suppose it must have been true.

There are some stories of wolves and bears in Ashtabula County which are by no means bad. Not the worst of these is told of Elijah Thompson, who was hunting in the woods near Geneva, when a pack of seven wolves fell upon his dog. He clubbed his rifle and beat them off; then when the last had slunk away, he gathered up his wounded dog under his arm, and walked away with the barrel, which was all that was left of his rifle, on his shoulder.

Bears were very common, and very fond of pork. One night two ladies who were alone in their cabin, were alarmed by wild appeals from the pigpen, and found it invaded by a bear. They tried to frighten the intruder away with firebrands, but failed. Then they loaded the family rifle, which they had heard the men folks say took two fingers of powder. They therefore poured in the powder to the depth of six inches, and drove home the bullet. One held a light while the other pulled the trigger. Both were knocked down by the recoil of the gun, which flew into the bushes. What became of the bear was never known; but it was probably blown to atoms.

Other pioneer women were effective with firearms, and Mrs. Sarah Thorp of Ashtabula County was one of these. The family fell short of food in their first year in the backwoods, and in June, 1799, the husband started to Pennsylvania, twenty miles away, to get supplies. Before he could return, his wife and little girls had begun to live upon roots and the few grains of wheat which she found in the straw of her bed. When these were all gone, and she was in despair, a wild turkey one day alighted near the cabin. She found that there was barely powder enough left in the house for the lightest charge; but she loaded her husband’s rifle and crept on her hands and knees from bush to bush and log to log, till she was close upon the bird, wallowing in the loose plowed earth. Then she fired and killed it, and her children were saved.

Starvation was one of the horrors which often threatened the newcomers in the wilderness, as it had often beset its improvident red children. In the first year of the settlement at Conneaut, James Kingsbury was forced to leave his family and go some distance into New York state. He fell sick, and was unable to return before winter set in. Then he hurried homeward as fast as he could with a sack of flour on horseback. His horse became disabled, and then he carried the flour on his shoulders. He reached home one day at nightfall, and found his older children starving; his wife, wasted with famine, lay on the floor, and near her the little one born in his absence, already dead for want of the nourishment which the poor mother could not give it.

THE FIRST GREAT SETTLEMENTS.

General Rufus Putnam, a brave officer of the Revolutionary war, was the first to call the attention of the Eastern States to the rich territory opened to settlement west of the Ohio by the peace with Great Britain, and he was one of the earliest band of pioneers which landed on the shores of the Muskingum. In 1787 Rev. Manasseh Cutler of Ipswich, Massachusetts, published a description of the Ohio country, which left little to the liveliest imagination. If anything was naturally lacking for the wants of man in a land abounding in wild fruits, “herds of deer, elk, buffalo, and bear,” and flocks of “turkeys, geese, ducks, swans, teal, pheasants, partridges, etc.,... in greater plenty than the tame poultry are in any part of the old settlements of America,” and in rivers “stored with fish, especially catfish, the largest, and of a delicious flavor,” which “weighs from thirty to eighty pounds,” it could be easily supplied by art. “The advantages of every climate,” Dr. Cutler told his readers, “are here blended together,” and the rich soil, everywhere underlain with valuable minerals, and covered with timber waiting to be built into ships and floated down the rivers to the sea, would produce not only “wheat, rye, Indian corn, buckwheat, oats, barley, flax, hemp, tobacco,” but even “indigo, silk, wine, and cotton.”

It is no wonder that the Ohio Company found the New Englanders eager to come out and possess this goodly heritage, and that the first band should have started from Dr. Cutler’s own village. At dawn, on the 30th of December, 1787, they paraded before his church and parsonage, twenty-two men with their families. After listening to a short speech from him, they fired a salute, and set off, as the lettering on their leading wagon made known, “For the Ohio Country.” It was eight weeks before they reached the headwaters of the Beautiful River, and began to build boats to float down its current to the mouth of the Muskingum. In the meantime, on the 1st of January, 1788, another company left Hartford, Connecticut, and in four weeks joined the first. They could not embark on their voyage together until April 2d, but in five days they arrived at Fort Harmar, beside the Muskingum, and were at their journey’s end. They did not find the shores waving with indigo, silk, and cotton, but they saw that the soil could produce almost any crop, and the weather was so mild and lovely that they must have been confirmed in their belief of all that Dr. Cutler had told them of the climate. Captain Pipe, the Delaware chief who had brought Crawford to his death of cruel torment a few years before, was encamped for trade near the military post, and with seventy other Indians he welcomed the newcomers to the Muskingum, where they wisely built a stockade as soon as they could for defense against their red friends. They settled down at once to hew their fields out of the forest, and the very next year they had a school for their children. Bathsheba Rouse taught this first Ohio school, and Ohio women may well be proud that she taught it a whole year before a man taught the next Ohio school. The settlers called their town Adelphia, but soon changed its name to Marietta, which they made up from the name of the French queen Marie Antoinette, though Marietta was a common enough name in Italian before their invention of it.

They built mills on the streams, and in the streams, where the current turned their wheels, and after a first summer of rejoicing they quieted down to the serious business of clearing farms, having ague, and saving their scalps from the hospitable Delawares and their allies. The very year after their arrival the wonderful climate behaved so ungratefully that the corn crop was cut off by an early frost; and something like a famine followed; but still the year of the settlement was one of high hopes and sober jollity. The pioneers celebrated the Fourth of July, 1788, with a grand banquet of “venison barbecued, buffalo steaks, bear meat, wild fowl, and a little pork, as the choicest luxury of all;” and at least “one fish, a great pike, weighing one hundred pounds, and over six feet long,” which could easily be “the largest ever taken by white men in the waters of the Muskingum.” Several of the Indians, who were always ready for eating and drinking, took part in the celebration, and the settlers saw with pleasure that they did not like the sound of the cannon. They all “kept it up till after twelve o’clock at night, and then went home and slept till daylight.”

The Marietta people knew how to enjoy themselves, but they had not come to Ohio for pastime, and they were soon all hard at work improving themselves as well as their lands. They not only had the first school in Ohio, but the first Sunday school. They had a public library in 1796, and preaching in the blockhouse from the beginning. It was ordered that every one should keep the Sabbath by going to church, and all men between eighteen and forty should do four days of military duty every year, as well as “entertain emigrants, visit the sick, clothe the naked, feed the hungry, attend funerals, cabin raisings, log rollings, huskings; have their latchstrings always out.” Perhaps the reader has heard before this of having the latchstring out, but has not known just what the phrase meant. The log cabin door in those days was fastened with a wooden latch on the inside, which could be lifted on the outside by a leathern string passed through a small hole in the door above it. When the string was pulled in, the door was locked; but the free-hearted man always left his latchstring out, so that every comer could enter and share his fireside with him.

The good people of Marietta had soon occasion for all the kindness enjoined by their laws in befriending a hapless colony of Frenchmen, whom certain speculators known as the Scioto Company had lured from their homes in the Old World, and then abandoned to their fate in the heart of the Western wilderness, where they had been promised that they were to find “a climate wholesome and delightful, frost even in winter almost entirely unknown, a river called, by way of eminence, the beautiful and abounding in excellent fish of a vast size; noble forests consisting of trees that spontaneously produce sugar, and a plant that yields ready-made candles; venison in plenty, the pursuit of which is uninterrupted by wolves, foxes, lions, or tigers; no taxes to pay, no military services to be performed.”

Some of the adventurers who came to Ohio on these flattering terms were destitute people who agreed to work three years for the company and were then, each to receive from it in reward for their labors fifty acres of land, a house, and a cow. But others were people of means, who joyfully sold their property in the French cities and came out to found new homes in the Western woods, with money in their hands, but with no knowledge of woodcraft, or farming, and able neither to hunt, chop, plow, sow, or reap for themselves. They were often artisans, masters of trades utterly useless in that wild country, for what were carvers and gilders, cloak-makers, wigmakers and hairdressers to do on the banks of the Ohio in 1790? Some ten or twelve peasants came with the rest, but they were helpless too in the strange conditions, and if it had not been for the settlers at Marietta, they would all have fared miserably indeed.

The Scioto Company had so far provided for them as to agree with the Ohio Company for the erection of a little town or village where Gallipolis now stands; and when the first boats arrived with the strangely assorted company, they found a space cut out of the forest, and in the clearing eighty log cabins standing upon four streets fronting the river, with a square inclosed by a high stockade and fortified with blockhouses, where they might take shelter from the Indians. The cabins forming this square were of a better sort than those on the streets, and there was one meant to serve for a council chamber, where the newcomers promptly began to give balls. They arrived late in October, and there was nothing for them to do but to wait for the spring, even if they had known how to farm, and in the meanwhile they had as good a time as they could. They did not yet know that the Scioto Company, which failed to pay the Marietta people for building their village, had no power to give them titles to their land, and they hopefully spent their money in hiring American hunters to supply them with game. They seem to have been rather a light-hearted crew, in spite of their misfortunes and sufferings, and they not only amused themselves, but they amused their neighbors by their gay unfitness for the backwoods. If they went to fell a tree, half a dozen of them set to work on it with their axes at once, and when they had chopped it all round, they pulled it down with a rope, to the great danger of their lives and limbs. When they began to make gardens in the spring they followed the rules laid down in some books on gardening which they had brought with them from France, and they planted the seeds of such vegetables as they were used to at home. In a climate where “frost even in winter was almost unknown,” the Ohio River froze solidly over the year after they came, and the hunters brought in little or none of the promised venison, though certainly not molested in the chase “by tigers, lions, or foxes.” The colonists were in danger of starving, and many of them were already sick of the fevers bred by the past summer’s sun on the swamp lands about them. It was one of their few advantages that the Indians did not trouble them much, but after killing one of them in mistake for an American, contented themselves with stealing the Frenchmen’s cattle.

When the colonists found that the Scioto Company could not give them titles to the farms they had bought with their money or their toil, they began to stray away from the settlement. Some went down the rivers to New Orleans, others wandered off elsewhere, perhaps to St. Louis, or to the French towns in Indiana and Illinois; and when Congress at last came to their relief with a grant of twenty-four thousand acres, there were left at Gallipolis only ninety-two persons, out of the original five hundred colonists, to profit by the nation’s generosity. In 1807 few or none of them remained on the spot where they had fondly hoped to make peaceful and happy homes for themselves and their children. It was a sad ending to a romantic story, the most romantic of all the Ohio stories that I know, but we must not blame those who deceived the colonists (not quite wittingly, it seems) for all their woes and disasters. These were partly owing to themselves. The New Englanders who settled at Marietta did not find eighty comfortable cabins waiting for them, and they did not hire hunters to provide their food, or begin by giving balls. The able and educated men among the French colonists seem to have cowered under their disasters like the rest; and some were incurable dreamers. One of the best of them used afterwards to tell how he was descending the Ohio with two philosophers who believed so firmly in the natural innocence and goodness of men, that they invited some Indians aboard their boat and were at once tomahawked. Their skeptical companion shot two of the savages and then jumped into the river, where he swam for his life, diving at the flash of their guns, till he got safe to the farther shore.

The Frenchmen at Gallipolis were not the stuff that the founders of great states are made of; but the New Englanders at Marietta were, and so were the New Jerseymen at Cincinnati, who followed next after them in time. These had even a harder struggle in their beginnings than the people at Marietta, for there the emigrants made their settlement under the guns of Fort Harmar, in a region loosely held by the milder Delaware tribe of the Algonquin nation; but the lands between the Great Miami and Little Miami were claimed and held by the fierce Miamis and Shawnees, and they had been so long the battle ground of the Indians and the Kentuckians that the region was called the Shawnee Slaughter House. The great warpath of the tribes ran through it from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, and the first white settlers had to build stations with blockhouses and stockades before they could begin to till the ancient fields, where from time to time immemorial the Indians had planted and gathered their harvests of corn. The first settlers arrived from New Jersey in December, 1788, some eight months after the settlement at Marietta, and in a little more than a year a fort was built at Cincinnati and garrisoned with United States troops; but in 1791 a band of five hundred Indians, led by Simon Girty, attacked Dunlap’s Station at Colerain. They were beaten off only after a stubborn fight, though the Americans were armed with the cannon which the savages so much dreaded; and before they raised the siege they burned a white prisoner near the station.

This was a surveyor, and one of those New Jersey men of education and substance who were the earliest settlers in the Symmes Purchase, as the tract between the two Miamis was called. John Cleves Symmes, a prominent citizen of Trenton, had bought the land of the government, and he came himself with his friends to make the place his home. The events of this emigration were not so poetic as those of the New Englanders who settled on the Muskingum, but they resulted in the foundation of our greatest city; and if the first school in Ohio was at Marietta, the first church was built at Cincinnati. The hamlet opposite the mouth of the Licking was first known as Losantiville, a name made up of Greek and Latin words describing its situation, but this was soon changed to Cincinnati. The fort was built in 1790, and called Fort Washington; it was the strongest fort in the Northwest Territory, and to its strength Cincinnati owed her freedom from attacks by the Indians; it was of hewn timber, and was eighty feet square. At Cincinnati, Harmar and St. Clair began their march to defeat; here too the recruits for Wayne’s army gathered and encamped before they began their march to victory.

The past of the place is not so rich in legend as that of much humbler localities, but there is at least one Indian story which will bear telling over again. It concerns Jacob Wetzel, the brother of the famous Lewis Wetzel, who was one day returning from a hunt well within the bounds of the present city, and had sat down on a log to rest, when a growl from his dog warned him of danger. He instantly treed, or jumped behind a tree, and then saw an Indian treed behind a neighboring oak. They both fired; the Indian missed, but Wetzel’s bullet had broken the savage’s arm. They rushed at each other with their drawn hunting knives, and fell in a fearful struggle. Wetzel unhurt was no match for the wounded Indian, who sat astride of him with his knife lifted when Wetzel’s dog sprung at his throat. Wetzel now flung him off, and while the dog held him helpless, easily dispatched him. Another story is of the usual ghastliness relieved by a touch of the comic. Colonel Robert Elliott was shot by the Indians near the northern line of Hamilton County. One of them sprang upon him to scalp him, but at a touch the poor man’s wig came off in his hand. He lifted it and was heard to say with an oath, “Lie!” while he stared at his trophy in bewilderment.

One of the later captives of the Indians was a boy of eleven named O. M. Spencer, who was seized near Cincinnati in 1792, and carried to a Shawnee village on the Maumee, where he was taken into a family. His case is peculiarly interesting because Washington himself asked his release through the British governor of Canada; and he was at last returned to his friends by canoe to Detroit, by sailing vessel to Erie, by land to Albany, by water to New York, and by land through Pennsylvania to Cincinnati. He was two years in getting back to his friends. .

The next settlement in Ohio, and the first within the Virginia Military District, was at Massie’s Station, now Manchester, where Colonel Nathaniel Massie, with thirty families, arrived in 1790. They at once made themselves safe in an inclosure of strong pickets, fortified with blockhouses, and as the woods and rivers abounded in game and fish, they began to lead a life of as much comfort as people could enjoy who were surrounded by a wilderness, with the lurking danger of captivity and death on every hand.

Six years later, Colonel Massie laid out the town of Chillicothe, which became the first capital of Ohio, and in the same year, 1796, the earliest settlers from Connecticut landed at Conneaut in Ashtabula County. They were led by Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer of Canterbury, Connecticut, a man of substance and ability, and they had come from Buffalo, some by land and some by water, but they arrived within a few hours of one another. It was the Fourth of July, and Cleaveland wrote in his journal: “We gave three cheers and christened the place Fort Independence; and, after many difficulties, perplexities, and hardships were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut. Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails of grog. Supped and retired in good order.”

This was the order of the four lawful settlements in the Ohio country: first that of the Massachusetts men at Marietta in July, 1788; next, that of the New Jersey men at Cincinnati in December, 1788; then that of the Virginia men at Manchester in 1790; and then that of the Connecticut men at Conneaut in 1796.

THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.

We may now begin to speak of the State of Ohio, for with the opening of the present century her borders were defined. The rest of the Northwest Territory was called Indiana Territory, and by 1804, Ohio found herself a state of the Union. There has never since been any doubt of her being there, and if it had not been for the great Ohio generals there might now be no Union for any of the states to be in. But it is nevertheless true that Ohio was never admitted to the Union by act of Congress, and her life as a state dates only from the adoption of her final constitution, or from the meeting of her first legislature at Chillicothe, on the 1st of March, 1803.

The most memorable fact concerning the adoption of this constitution was the great danger there was that it might allow some form of slavery in the new state. Slavery had been forbidden from the beginning in the Northwest Territory, but many of the settlers of the Ohio country were from the slave states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, and there was a strong feeling in favor of allowing women to be held as slaves till they were thirty-five and men till they were twenty-eight years old. But in the end, thanks to one of the Massachusetts men of Marietta, Judge Ephraim Cutler, the friends of slavery were beaten, and it was forbidden in Ohio in the same words which had forbidden it in the Northwest Territory.

It had been a long fight and a narrow chance, and the clause that gave the future to freedom was carried by one vote only. Edward Tiffin was chosen governor, and the new state entered upon a career of peace and comfort if not of great prosperity or rapid progress. The Indians if not crushed were quelled, and the settlers at last lived without fear of them, until Tecumseh began his intrigues. In the mean time there was plenty to eat, and enough to wear for all; there was the shelter of the log cabin, and the fire of its generous hearth. The towns grew, if they did not grow very rapidly; new towns were founded, and the country gradually filled up with settlers, or at least the land was claimed. Immense crops were raised on the fertile soil, and these were mainly fed to hogs and cattle, which more rapidly found a way to market than the grain: they could be driven over the bad roads, and the grain had to be carried. The very richness of the soil when turned to mud forbade good roads in the new country; and the most thriving settlements were on the rivers, which, as in the days of the Mound Builders, formed the natural highways. Many streams were navigable then, which the clearing of the woods from their banks has since turned to shallow pools in the time of drouth and to raging torrents in the time of rain; and one of the most hopeful industries was ship building. The trees turned to masts where they grew, and many a stately vessel slid into the waters that had washed its living fibers and glided down the Ohio into the Mississippi to the sea.

The Ohio people toiled and waited for the inventions of the future to open ways out into the world for them with the great riches to which they were shut up in their own borders; but it must have been with a growing uneasiness. Great Britain, as we know, had long held the forts in the West which she had agreed to give up to the United States, and after she surrendered them, her agents and subjects in Canada abetted the Indians in their rising against the Americans under Tecumseh and the Prophet. The trouble with the Indians would probably have ended at Tippecanoe, if it had not been for the outbreak of war between the two countries; yet this outbreak must have been a kind of relief to the Ohio people. The English insisted upon the right of searching our vessels on the high seas, and pressing into their navy any sailors whom they decided to be British subjects, and though the Ohio people could not feel the injury of this, as it was felt in the seaboard states whose citizens were forced into the English service by thousands, they could feel the insult. They were used to fighting, and they welcomed the war which at least unmasked their enemies. Their ardor was chilled, however, by one of its first events, which was the surrender of Detroit by General Hull. This threw the state open to invasion by the British and Indians, and the danger was felt in every part of it. The militia were called out, troops poured in from Kentucky, and General Harrison marched into the northwest to recapture Detroit. A detachment of his army was beaten in the first action, which took place beyond the Ohio limits, and after yielding to the British was butchered in cold blood by their Indian allies. The next spring Harrison built Fort Meigs on the Maumee; from this point he hoped to strike a severe blow at the enemy in Canada, but he was himself attacked here by General Proctor, who marched down from Maiden with a large force of British regulars, Canadian militia, and Indians led by Tecumseh.

Proctor planted batteries on the shore of the river, and Tecumseh’s Indians climbed trees and poured down a galling fire on the besieged. The British commander then summoned the fort to surrender, but Harrison answered his messenger, “As General Proctor did not send me a summons on his first arrival, I had supposed that he believed me determined to do my duty,” and he dismissed the envoy with the assurance that if the post fell into Proctor’s hands it would be in a manner to do him more honor than any surrender could do. The fight then continued until the British general found his fickle savage friends deserting him, and on the 12th day raised the siege.

It is probable that the Indians were following their old custom of leaving off fighting to enjoy a sense of victory when they had won it. A large body of Kentucky horse had by Harrison’s orders attacked one of the British positions, and carried it. After spiking the enemy’s guns they pursued the flying British, and suddenly fell into an ambush of Indians. Out of eight hundred only one hundred escaped, and the work of murdering the prisoners at once began. It was on this occasion that Tecumseh tried to save the lives of the helpless Americans, appealing to the British general to support him, and even tomahawking with his own hatchet a disobedient chief who would not give up the work of death.

The allies made a second attempt on Fort Meigs, but they were foiled in this too, and then they turned their attention to Fort Sandusky, where the town of Fremont now stands. General Harrison held a council of war, and it was decided that Fort Sandusky could not resist an attack and must be abandoned. But when the order to retire reached the gallant young officer in command it was too late, for the Indians were already in force around the post. Major Croghan therefore wrote a reply which he thought might fall into the enemy’s hands, and which he worded for their eyes rather than his general’s. “Sir, I have just received yours of yesterday, 10 o’clock p.m., ordering me to destroy this place and make good my retreat, which was received too late to be carried into execution. We have determined to maintain this place, and by heavens we can!”

This answer got safely through to General Harrison, who promptly resented what he thought its presumption and sent to remove Major Croghan from his command. Croghan went to explain in person and was allowed to return to his post. The British and Indians appeared in force the next day, July 31st, and on the 2d of August made their first and last assault. Colonel Short of the British regulars led a force of 350 men against the fort, and set them the example of leaping into the ditch before it. When the ditch was full, Croghan opened upon them from a masked porthole with a six pounder, and raked them from the distance of thirty-feet. Colonel Short, who had ordered his men to give the Americans no quarter, fell mortally wounded; he tied his handkerchief to his sword and waved it in prayer for mercy, and not in vain. Croghan did all in his power to relieve his disabled foes; he passed buckets of water to them over the pickets, he opened a space under the pickets that those who could might creep through into the fort out of their comrades’ fire.

That night the whole force of the enemy retreated in such haste that they left many stores and munitions behind them. They were commanded by General Proctor, who had already failed at Fort Meigs against Harrison, and who now dreaded an attack from him. None was made, but Harrison had the pleasure of writing in his report of the victory won by Major Croghan at Fort Stephenson: “It will not be among the least of General Proctor’s mortifications that he has been baffled by a youth who had just passed his twenty-first year.”

A little more than a month after this repulse the British were defeated in the battle of Lake Erie by Commodore Perry, at Put-in-Bay. The action itself is by no means the most impressive part of the wonderful story of that great victory. Perry had not only to cope with the British in waters where they had been undisputed masters, but he had to create the means of doing so. He brought ship builders, naval stores, guns and ammunition, as well as sailors for his fleet, four hundred miles through the wilderness of New York to the wilderness at Erie, Pennsylvania, and there he hewed out of the forest the stuff which he wrought almost alive into his ships. On the 1st of August he was ready to sail with two large vessels of twenty guns each, and seven smaller craft carrying fourteen guns in all. With these, he met the enemy’s force of six vessels carrying sixty-four guns, and on the beautiful sunny morning of the 10th of September the famous fight took place. The Americans at first had the worst of it; the British guns were of longer range, and Perry’s flag-ship, the Lawrence, was so badly disabled that he had to abandon it for the Niagara, The Lawrence was in fact an unmanageable wreck; her decks were streaming with blood, but nothing broke the awful order of the carnage. The men fell at their guns; if wounded, they were carried below; if killed, they were left where they dropped, while others took their places.

Perry hauled down his colors with his own hand, and with his flag under his arm was rowed to the Niagara through a storm of musketry. Once on board this vessel, he began to change defeat into victory, and after a fight lasting more than three hours in all, he could send to General Harrison his memorable dispatch, “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

The next day the mournful sequel to this tragedy followed, when the crews of both fleets, victors and vanquished, joined in burying their dead on the shore of the bay. The sailors slain in the battle had been already sunken in the lake, but now to the sound of the minute guns from the ships, with the sad music of funeral marches, the measured dip of oars, and the flutter of half-masted flags, the last sad rites were paid to the fallen officers. Perhaps the Indians under Tecumseh who had seen with stupid dismay the great battle of the rival squadrons, witnessed this pathetic spectacle too, before they sullenly withdrew into Canada after Proctor’s army. There Harrison pursued them, and in his victory on the banks of the Thames, their mighty chieftain fell, and their cause perished with him.

A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC.

“Who is Blennerhassett?” asked William Wirt, at the trial of Aaron Burr for treason, and many a schoolboy since has echoed the question, as many a schoolboy will hereafter, while impassioned oratory is music to the ear and witchery to the breast. The eloquent lawyer went on to answer himself, and painted in glowing colors a character which history sees in a colder light. But though Blennerhassett was not the ideal that Wirt imagined, he was the generous victim of a cold and selfish man’s ambition, and the ruin of his happy home and gentle hope is none the less pathetic because his own folly was partly to blame for it.

We must go back of the events which we have been following to an earlier date, if we wish to find Harman Blennerhassett dwelling with his beautiful wife on their fairy island in the Ohio. Their earthly paradise lay in the larger stream at the mouth of the Kanawha, not far from the present town of Belpre, and there in the first year of the century, Blennerhassett built a mansion which became the wonder of the West. The West was not then very well able to judge of the magnificence which it celebrated, but there seems no reason to doubt that Blennerhassett’s mansion was fine, and of a grandeur unexampled in that new country where most men lived in log cabins, and where any framed house was a marvel. He was of English birth, but of Irish parentage, and to the ardor of his race he added the refinement of an educated taste. He was a Trinity College man, and one of his classmates at Dublin was the Irish patriot, Emmet, who afterwards suffered death for his country. But it does not appear that Blennerhassett came to America for political reasons, and he seems to have made his home in the West from the impulse of a poetic nature, with the wealth and the leisure to realize the fancies of his dream. “A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied,” says Wirt, “blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and her nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures before him. A philosophical apparatus offers him all the secrets and mysteries of nature. Peace, tranquillity, and innocence shed their mingled delights around him. And to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who is said to be lovely even beyond her sex, and graced with every accomplishment that can render it irresistible, had blessed him with her love.”

Whatever may be the facts concerning the home of the Blennerhassetts, the memories of those who knew its mistress bear witness to the truth of these glowing words. They testify that she was not only brilliant, accomplished, exquisite in manner, but good to every one, kind to the poor, and devoted to her husband and children. She was a faultless housewife, as well as a fearless horsewoman, and she was strong in body as she was active in mind. “She could leap a five-rail fence, walk ten miles at a stretch, and ride with the boldest dragoon. Robed in scarlet broadcloth, with a white beaver hat, on a spirited horse, she might be seen dashing through the dark woods, reminding one of the flight and gay plumage of a tropical bird.”

To this home and its inmates came Aaron Burr, as bad, brave, and brilliant a man as ever figured in our public life. He had been a gallant officer in the Revolution, he had been Vice President of the United States, he had come within a vote of being President. But he had killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel which he forced upon him, and all his knowledge of the world and men had taught him to worship power and despise virtue. It has not yet been clearly shown what Burr meant or hoped to do, and possibly he could not have very well said himself; but it is certain that in a general way he was trying to separate the West from the East, and to commit the warlike people of the backwoods to a fine scheme for conquering Mexico from Spain, and setting up an imperial throne there for him to sit upon. He was always willing to sell out his fine scheme to France, to England, to any power that would buy, even to Spain herself; and in the mean time he came and went in the West and Southwest and built up a party in his favor, which fell to pieces at the first touch of real adversity. General Wilkinson, of the United States army, who had been plotting and scheming with Burr, arrested him; he was tried for treason, and those who had cast their fortunes with him were carried down in his fall. The most picturesque of the sufferers was Blennerhassett, who was one of the most innocent. Burr had found other Ohio people too plodding, as he said, but the Blennerhassetts took him seriously, and when Burr in his repeated visits tempted the husband, and flattered the wife, who was ambitious only for her husband, he easily beguiled them into a belief in his glorious destiny.

Blennerhassett put all his fortune into the venture. He ordered fifteen large boats built for transporting five hundred men down the Mississippi, he contracted for provisioning them, and pledged himself for the payments of all kinds of debts. His friends tried to reason with his folly in vain. Governor Tiffin called out a company of militia to prevent his boats from leaving the Muskingum; Blennerhassett heard that he was to be arrested, and fled; a troop of Virginians seized his island, pillaged his house and ruined his grounds; and Mrs. Blennerhassett with her children embarked amid the ice-floes of the Ohio on a small flatboat and made her way to her husband in Louisiana. Here he was taken, but discharged after a few weeks’ imprisonment. They came back to their island, but they never lived there again, and in 1811 the house was burned. They wandered from place to place, and grew poorer and poorer; in 1831 he died at the house of his sister in the island of Guernsey, and seven years later his wife ended her days in a New York tenement house.

Another picturesque figure of our early times was one who never meant and never imagined harm to any living creature, man or beast, but gave his simple, humble life to doing good, with no thought of his own advantage. Perhaps as the world grows more truly civilized the name of Johnny Apple-seed will be honored above that of some heroes of the Ohio country. Like so many of our distinguished men, he was not born in our state, but he came here in his young manhood from his birthplace in Massachusetts, and began at once to plant the apple seeds which gave him his nickname.

Few knew that his real name was John Chapman, but it did not matter; and Johnny Appleseed became his right name if men are rightly named from their works. Wherever he went he carried a store of apple seeds with him, and when he came to a good clear spot on the bank of a stream, he planted his seeds, fenced the place in, and left them to sprout and grow into trees for the orchards of the neighborhood. He soon had hundreds of these little nurseries throughout Ohio, which he returned year after year to watch and tend, and which no one molested. When the trees were large enough he sold them to the farmers for a trifle, an old coat or an old shirt, and when he needed nothing he gave them for nothing. He went barefoot in the warm weather, and in winter he wore cast-off shoes; when he could get none and the ways were very rough he protected his feet with rude sandals of his own making. His hats were of his own making too, and were usually of pasteboard with a broad brim in front to shield his eyes from the sun; but otherwise he dressed in the second-hand clothing of others, for he thought it wrong to spend upon the vanities of dress. He dwelt close to the heart of nature, whose dumb children he would not wound or kill, even poisonous snakes or noxious insects. The Indians knew him and loved him for the goodness of his life, and they honored him for the courage with which he bore the pain he never would inflict. He could drive pins into his flesh without wincing; if he got hurt he burned the place, and then treated it as a burn; he bore himself in all things, to their thinking, far above other white men.

It was believed that he had come into the backwoods to forget a disappointment in love, but there is no proof that he had ever suffered this. What is certain is that he was a man of beautiful qualities of heart and mind, who could at times be divinely eloquent about the work he had chosen to do in this world. He was a believer in the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg; he carried books of that doctrine in his bosom, and constantly read them, or shared them with those who cared to know it, even to tearing a volume in two. If his belief was true and we are in this world surrounded by spirits, evil or good, which our evil or good behavior invites to be of our company, then this harmless, loving, uncouth, half-crazy man walked daily with the angels of God.

In those early days when the people were poor and ignorant, and had little hope of bettering themselves in this world, their thoughts turned much to the other world. The country was often swept by storms of religious excitement; at the camp-meetings the devout fell in fits and trances or were convulsed with strange throes called the jerks, and all sorts of superstitions grew up easily among them. The wildest of these perhaps was that of the Leatherwood God which flourished in Guernsey County, about the year 1828. The name of this fanatic or impostor, who was indeed both one and the other, was Joseph C. Dylks, and his title was given him because of his claim to be the Supreme Being, and because he first appeared to his worshipers on Leather-wood Creek at the town of Salesville. The leatherwood tree which gave this creek its name had a soft and pliable bark, which could be easily tied into knots, and was used as cordage by the pioneers; and the dwellers on Leatherwood Creek had a faith of much the same easy texture. Yet they were of rather more than the average intelligence, and they were so far from bigoted or intolerant that all sects among them worshiped in one sanctuary, a large cabin which they had built in common, and which they called the Temple. Here on a certain night, while they sat listening to one of their preachers, they were thrilled by a loud cry of “Salvation!” followed by a fierce snort, like that of a startled horse, and they discovered in their midst a stranger of a grave and impressive aspect, who had come no one knew whence or how. When he rose he stood nearly six feet high, and showed himself of a perfect figure, with flashing black eyes, a low broad forehead and a fine arched nose; his hair, black and thick, fell in a mass behind his ears over his shoulders; he wore a suit of black broadcloth, a white neckcloth, and a yellow beaver hat. His weird snort and his striking presence seem to have been his sole equipment for swaying the faith of the people; though some of the earliest believers saw a heavenly radiance streaming from his countenance at times, and when he rode, they beheld above his head a ring of light which hung in the air over the saddle if he dismounted. But he soon began to make converts, and he had quickly enough, of the best among those good men and women, to gain the sole use of the Temple. At first he claimed merely to be the Lord Jesus Christ, but he presently announced himself God Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth; and his followers readily believed him, though he failed in the simple miracle of making a seamless garment out of a bolt of linsey-woolsey cloth, and kept none of his promises to them. He probably found it sufficient to be the Deity, and his worshipers, among whom were two ministers, were certainly content; but the unbelievers felt the scandal to be too great. They had Dylks arrested, and brought before two justices of the peace, who one after the other decided that there was no law of Ohio which forbade a man to declare himself the Almighty.

The wretched creature was acquitted, but he was thoroughly frightened. He made his escape from his guards, and took to the woods, where he was some time in hiding. When he came back to the believers, he had bated nothing of his claim to divinity, but he was no longer so bold. He now told them that the New Jerusalem would not come down at Leatherwood Creek, but in the city of Philadelphia, and he departed to the scene of his glory. Three of the believers followed him over the rugged mountains and through the pathless woods, finding food and shelter by hardly less than a miracle; but they did not find the New Jerusalem at their journey’s end. Dylks had told them that where they should see the heavenly light the brightest, there they should behold the beginning of the New Jerusalem; but they nowhere saw this light, though they walked the streets of the earthly city night and day. Two of them were substantial farmers, and when they had lost all hope, and had lost even Dylks himself (for he soon vanished), they pledged their tobacco crops and so got money enough to come home, where they lived and died in the full faith that Joseph C. Dylks was God Almighty, though he never did anything to prove it but snort like a startled horse, wear long hair on foot and a halo on horseback, and fail in everything else he attempted. The third of this company of his followers, a young minister of the United Brethren, did not return for some years; then he came, well dressed and looking fat and sleek, and preached to the people on Leatherwood Creek the faith in which he had not faltered. He accounted for the disappearance of Dylks from the eyes of his other worshipers in Philadelphia very simply: he had seen him taken up into heaven.

But the people had merely his word for the fact; Dylks never descended to earth again as his apostle promised, and the belief in his divinity died out with those who first accepted him.

WAYS OUT.

In 1893 Jacob S. Coxey, a respectable citizen of Massillon, started a movement in favor of good roads which took the form of a pilgrimage to Washington to petition Congress for its object. Several armies, as they were called, from different parts of the country, met in Massillon, and under Mr. Coxey’s leadership, set out on a long and toilsome march over the Alleghanies to the capital, living by charity on the way. Many of the soldiers of these armies might well have been idle and worthless persons; there were doubtless others who were sincere and sane in their hope that the representatives of the people might be persuaded to do something for bettering the highways; but the affair was so managed as to meet with nothing but ridicule, and in trying to force a hearing from Congress Mr. Coxey and some of his followers were arrested for trespassing on the Capitol grounds, and were sentenced to several weeks in jail. This ended the latest crusade for good roads from Ohio; but there is no Ohio idea more fixed than that we ought to have good roads, and this was by no means the first time that Ohio men had asked the nation to lend a hand in making them. The first time they succeeded as signally as they failed the last time; but that was very long ago, and it may surprise some of my readers to know that we have a National Road crossing our whole state, which is still the best road in it.

Almost as soon as the Western people had broken into the backwoods it became their necessity to break out again, to find and to make roads between them and the civilization they had left. The ways of the different emigrations in reaching Ohio were: for the New Engenders, through New York state to Lake Erie, and westwardly along the shore of that water; for the Pennsylvanians, through their own state to the headwaters of the Ohio, and then down the river and inwardly from it; for the Virginians, Marylanders, and Carolinians, the valley of the Shenandoah and the mountain gaps to Kentucky, and so into Southwestern Ohio. At first the white men came by the streets, as the pioneers called the trails that the buffalo and deer had made; but they soon cut traces through the woods, and later these traces became wagon roads. Of course they used the rivers wherever they could and traveled by canoe, by flatboat, by keelboat, and by ark; and there grew up on the rivers a wild life which had its adventures and heroes like the Indian warfare. The most famous of the boatmen was Mike Fink, who drank hard and fought hard, and was a miraculous shot with his rifle. He was captain of a keelboat, which was the craft mostly used in ascending the river. The flatboats were broken up and sold as lumber when they had drifted down to their points of destination on the lower rivers, but the keelboat could make a return trip by dint of pushing with a long pole on the shore side and rowing on the other; sometimes even sails were used, and then the keelboat sped up stream at the rate of fifty miles instead of twelve miles a day.

But these means of traffic and travel soon ceased to suffice. Then the Ohio people felt the need of getting out with their increasing crops, their multiplying flocks and herds, and they made their need known to the nation, to which they were everywhere akin, and the nation answered through Congress by beginning, in 1806, the National Road, which was finished by 1838, from Baltimore as far as Indiana. This road first opened the East to Ohio; then in 1811 a steamboat made its appearance on the Beautiful River, and after that steam commanded all the Southern and Southwestern waters for us, as well as those of the inland seas on the North. Then, that all these waters might be united, the state began in 1825 to build a system of canals, from Cleveland to Portsmouth and from Toledo to Cincinnati. When these canals were completed, with their branches, they gave the people some nine hundred miles of navigable waters within their own borders. The main lines were built, not by companies for private profit as the railroads have since been built, but by the people for the people, and it may be said that the great prosperity of Ohio began with them. Wherever they ran they drained the swamps and made the land not only habitable but beautiful. They were dug by Ohio people, and the sixteen millions of dollars that they cost came back into the hands of the men who gladly taxed themselves for the outlay. The towns along their course grew, and new towns rose out of the forests and prairies.

The Ohio people had the impulse to this great work from the New York people, who had built the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, and whose governor, De Witt Clinton, had urged forward that work. Now, when our whole state was ablaze with joy at the action of the legislature in providing for the work, Governor Clinton was invited to come and first strike the spade into the earth in digging the new canals. He arrived by steamboat at Cleveland, where the people received him and his train of distinguished New Yorkers with rejoicings worthy of the great event. He took stage for Newark, and on the 4th of July, 1825, when our state had just come of age, in the presence of all the Ohio magnates and dignitaries, and a mighty throng of citizens, he lifted a spadeful from the ground on the Licking Summit. Governor Morrow of Ohio lifted the second spadeful, and then followed a struggle among the distinguished men as to which should lift the third. New Yorkers and Ohioans vied in filling a wheelbarrow with successive spadefuls, and a happy citizen of Chillicothe had the honor of wheeling it away and dumping it over a bank. He was the captain of a company of militia, and the crowd was so great that a squadron of cavalry had to keep a space for the speakers in the midst of their hollow square. Thomas Ewing delivered the oration, and men all round him wept for joy.

There were like scenes when the canals were completed. Multitudes gathered to see the water let into the channels which to their impatience had been so long in digging, and they took hopefully the disappointment of having it sink into the gravelly beds, before it could slowly fill the banks, instead of rushing like a flood to their brims. At Dayton, 1829, when the first fleet of three canal boats arrived from Cincinnati, it was greeted with the firing of cannon and the shouts of an immense crowd lining the canal banks. This was as it should be, and will be wherever a great work is done for the common good; and it ought never to be forgotten that the canals of Ohio were dug by Ohio men that all Ohio men might freely prosper more and more, and not that a few rich men might get richer.

After the National Road, which was our first way out, came the steam navigation of the lake and the river, and after that came the railroad, which will be our main reliance for getting back and forth over the state and to and from it, till some of the many schemes of travel through the air are realized. We cannot tell how far off the event may be; but in the mean time it is curious, if not very flattering to our Ohio pride, to learn that the first railroad enterprise within our borders was fostered by Michigan. The legislature of that state granted the charter of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which opened in 1836. The line ran from Toledo to Adrian, thirty-three miles, but when it was projected the matter was so far from serious with the legislature which authorized it, that it was granted because it was “merely a fanciful scheme that could do no harm, and would greatly please” certain citizens of Toledo; just as now a balloon line might be laughingly authorized. It was entirely successful, however, as far as the running was concerned, though the road was so hampered by the cost of fighting enemies and the expenses of building that it was seized for debt seven years later.

This has been the history of many railroads since in Ohio, and if we could read between the lines that now cobweb the map of the state, we should come to know many tales of broken fortunes and of broken hopes. The railroads are no different in this from other business enterprises, but they are different from the canals. These, as we have seen, were the work of the state for the advantage of the whole people, while the railroads were from the beginning private schemes for making money. Each kind of highway came in its time, and each in its way served the purpose of Ohio. At the time the companies began to build their railroads, the state system of canals was in its highest usefulness, and it is no wonder that the people should have regarded the railroads as fanciful schemes. No one could then have dreamed how rapidly they would increase and multiply, and that in less than fifty years they should so far surpass the canals in service to the public that some of these would be abandoned by the state, and become grass-grown ditches hardly distinguishable in their look of ancient ruin from the works of the Mound Builders. At the most there were once nine hundred miles of canals in Ohio, and now there are twelve or fourteen thousand miles of railroads. Yet the canals were a greater achievement for Ohio in 1837 than the railroads are in 1897.

The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a threshing-machine engine. These amazed by a speed of ten or twelve miles an hour the gaping spectator whose grandchildren do not turn their heads to look at the express as it makes its sixty miles in sixty minutes. In the very beginning, indeed, the carriages were drawn by horses, and it was several years before steam was used.

Little by little the railroads began to be built on the easy levels of the state, and before a great while a line was projected from Cincinnati to Columbus along the course of the Little Miami River. This was completed piecemeal, from point to point, and at last carried through. In the mean time other lines were laid out, and then all at once the railroad era was at hand. It was a time of great excitement and expectation, if not of that public rejoicing which had welcomed the canals.

In a few years the magnificent fleets of the river began to feel the fatal rivalry of the trains that swept along its borders. Travel deserted them, and traffic sought the surer and swifter transportation of the shore. The great packets that had carried swarms of passengers to and from Pittsburg and Cincinnati and all the points between, disappeared or were converted into freight-boats, and then these began to fail for want of traffic, and the Beautiful River was almost abandoned to the stern-wheeler pushing a flotilla of coal-barges. A like change took place upon the lake; steamers which formed the means of communication between the towns and cities from Cleveland to Buffalo, and from Cleveland to Detroit, ceased to touch at the smaller ports, and became the pleasure-craft of the summer tourists, or the carriers of heavy freight, and the ports which did not become the feeders of the railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the canals, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed to them.

Except for the occasional breaking of an embankment, the history of the canals could hardly be marked by any incidents of exciting interest. It was not so with steamboating and railroading, which has each its long tale of disasters such as give times of peace almost as dark a record as those of war. The most tragical of these events took place at the opposite extremities of the state, in Cincinnati and in Ashtabula, and they occurred at the beginning and the end of an interval of nearly forty years.

The rise of steamboating on the Western rivers was perhaps all the more rapid because of the daring and reckless spirit of the Western people, who took almost any risk in order to carry a point in their rivalries or to gain an end of their ambition. It is certain at any rate that the builders and the crews of the popular boats joined in contriving and urging them to a speed that should leave all competitors behind. There was frequent racing between the packets on the Ohio and Mississippi, and the frightful calamities from bursting boilers continued for a long time before public opinion quelled the boyish love of victory which tempted not only the steamboatmen but their passengers too. These joined with the captain in forcing the boat to the top of its speed, at the risk of a swift or agonizing death to all on board; and it was no doubt with their full approval that the master of the beautiful new steamer Moselle took the chance that resulted in the loss of more than two hundred lives on the 26th of April, 1838. She had just left her moorings at Cincinnati for her trip to Louisville, and had run up to take on a family from a raft a little way above the city. In order that she might show her speed before the crowd on the landing, and pass a rival boat in sight of all as she returned, the captain held to the full head of steam with which he had started. Her wheels had scarcely turned, after she parted from the raft, when her boilers burst with a roar like thunder. The air was instantly filled with the flying fragments of the wreck, and with the bodies and the heads and limbs of men, women, and children. These fell, strewing the shore and dropping into the river, where what was left of the Moselle sank within fifteen minutes. Cries of anguish, groans and shrieks from the sufferers, followed the awful sound of the explosion. Many of the victims whom the accident had spared were drowned before boats could reach them. The mangled body of the captain was hurled into the street; the pilot was thrown a hundred feet into the air and fell back into the stream.

In 1876, on the evening of December 29, an express train of the Lake Shore Railroad, broke through the bridge at Ashtabula, and plunged seventy-five feet down into the bed of the creek below. The train was of eleven cars with a hundred and fifty-six passengers on board, and the bridge was further strained by the weight of the two massive locomotives which drew it. The night was extremely cold, and a blinding snow storm was raging, while the freezing wind blew a gale. The wreck at once took fire, and with the cries of the wounded were now mingled the agonized prayers of those who saw themselves doomed to death in the blazing ruins which imprisoned them. Nearly every one on the train was hurt more or less severely; eighty persons perished in the fall or the fire, and five died after they were rescued.

There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a station or a junction on it; or rather, as they had things in these days, a milestone or a finger-post.

The great glory and strength of the Ohio people, as I have hinted before, came from their varied origin.

They have shown themselves among the first of the Americans, not because they were born in Ohio, but because they were born of the Massachusetts and Connecticut men, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the New Jerseymen and Marylanders, the Virginians and Carolinians and Kentuckians who made Ohio what it was to be by the mixture of their characteristics and qualities here. It is of no use to pretend, however, that it was their virtues alone which got into the Ohio people; their foibles got in too, and their prejudices and their vices. A traveler in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless, and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry, but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other things was from the North. It was the aristocratic indifference of the South to public schools that for twenty-four years after Ohio became a state kept her from profiting by the magnificent provision of school lands made for her by the whole nation through Congress. It was not until almost a generation after Ohio became a state that she began to have schools partly free, and it was still a generation later before the men of New England blood framed the present school law, and got it enacted by the legislature. This was in 1853, but in 1825 the first great effort for public schools was made. There was then a party in favor of canals in the legislature, and another party in favor of schools, and these two parties fought each other a long time. At last they united, and together gave the people canals and schools, the two ways out of the wilderness.

Our canals are no longer the great avenues of commerce, because the modern needs and means are different from those of former days, but our schools are still the royal roads, the people’s roads, to and from the world of letters and arts. Ohio is now second to no other state in her public school system: and well-nigh three-quarters of a century ago, when General Lafayette visited Cincinnati in his tour of the Republic which he had helped to found, nothing surprised and charmed him more than the greeting which the children of her public schools gave him. It spoke to him of a refined and graceful life, such as he could never have imagined in the young city so lately carven out the forests; and such proofs of the general culture must have done more than all the signs of material prosperity, all the objects of industry so proudly shown him, to make him regard Ohio (to use his own words) as the eighth wonder of the world. Six hundred boys and girls from the public schools met him at sunrise, on the morning of his arrival, and scattered flowers under his feet and made the air ring with their shouts of “Welcome to Lafayette!”

As for the Indians, who fought so long and so hard here for the graves of their fathers and the homes of their children, they had to find their ways out too. But it would not be easy to say what became of them all, for they went such various ways out of Ohio and out of the world. Some remained in the country which they had lost, and in a few cases they tried to take on the likeness of civilized men. But oftener they only took on the vices of civilization; they were the drunkards and the vagrants of their neighborhoods, living by a little work and by the contemptuous charity of the settlers. In them the proud spirit of their race was broken; they suffered insult and outrage from their conquerors without resisting; a small white Titian might knock a stalwart Indian down with his fist, and the Indian would not attempt to revenge himself. For a while, the settlers feared the lingering red men, but they soon learned to despise them, and it was seldom that they troubled the whites by theft or violence.

A good many of the tribesmen followed the British into Canada, after the War of 1812, where it must be owned to our shame as Americans that they had wiser, kinder, and juster treatment than we gave those who remained with us, and who followed westward from their old hunting grounds in Ohio the buffalo, the elk, the beaver, and the deer. Several nations, or parts of nations, were gathered on reservations in Seneca, Lucas, and Wyandot counties, where they were given land and taught farming and other trades. Missionaries came to dwell among them and try to make them Christians, and many were converted. The Quakers seem to have done the best work in this way, for the Indians always trusted and loved the men of peace.

But although their friends could teach the Indians to plow and sow, to build houses and barns, to make tools and mend them, to sing and to pray, and to wear clothes and to lead decent and sober lives, they could not uproot all their old customs and superstitions. The superstition that seemed to last longest was the belief in witchcraft, which was indeed very common among their white neighbors. Nearly all forms of sickness were treated as the effect of witchcraft by the Indians, and the afflicted were carried into the woods and left alone with none near them except the medicine man whose business it was to expel the witch.

A suspected witch or wizard might be safely killed by any kinsman of the sufferer; and it is said that Indians were known to walk all the way from the Mississippi to the Ohio reservations in order to shoot down persons accused of witchcraft, and then return unmolested. In 1828, the Mingo chief Seneca John was put to death by two of his tribesmen as ruthlessly as Leatherlips in 1812. He was accused of having bewitched the chief Comstock, and though he protested, “I loved my brother Comstock better than the green earth. I stand upon; I would shed my blood, drop by drop, to bring him back to life,” yet he was sentenced to die, and Comstock’s brothers, Coonstick and Steel, carried out the sentence.

In 1831 the Senecas ceded their lands, forty thousand acres on the Sandusky, to the United States, and were removed to the southwest of the Missouri. Each of the other reservations was given up in turn for lands in the Far West, and in the early forties I myself, when a boy living in Hamilton, saw the last of the Ohio Indians passing through the town on the three canal boats which carried the small remnant of their nation southward and westward out of the hind that was to know them no more forever.

It was quite time. I cannot say how far they had been civilized, and for all I know they may have been tame farmers and mechanics, but in their moccasins and blankets, with their bows and arrows, they looked like wild hunters; and Ohio was no longer a good hunting ground. All the larger game had long been killed off or driven away, and the smaller game was fast vanishing before the rifle and the shotgun. As if its destruction by gunners singly was not rapid enough it was the custom in somewhat earlier days for whole neighborhoods to meet together for the wholesale slaughter of the sylvan creatures which still abounded. One of these great hunts took place in Medina County, in 1818, when the region was as yet very sparsely settled. The drive, as it was called, was fixed for the 24th of December, and at sunrise, six hundred men and boys drew up their far-spreading lines. They were armed with rifles, shotguns, old muskets, pistols, knives, axes, hatchets, bayonets fastened to long poles, and whatever other weapons they could lay hands on, to shoot, strike, or stab with, and they began to draw their vast circle together with a hideous uproar of horn, conchshells, and voices. The deer fled inward from all sides; bear and wolf left their coverts in terror; foxes and raccoons joined the panic rout, and the air was full of the flight of wild turkeys. Then the slaughter began, and before it ended three hundred deer, twenty-one bears, and seventeen wolves were killed; of the turkeys and the smaller game no tale was kept.

Later these drives were common in the years whenever game was abundant in any neighborhood. They were called squirrel-hunts, because the squirrel was the unit, and larger or smaller game counted so many squirrels, or went to make up the value of a squirrel. I knew of one of these hunts during the late fifties in Northern Ohio, when the wild pigeons were still in such multitude that their flight darkened the sky, where now one of them is rarely seen.

THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.

Almost from the beginning Ohio was called the Yankee state by her Southern neighbors. Burr had found her people too plodding for him, as he said, and it would not have been strange if the older slave-holding communities on her southern and eastern border had seen with distrust and dislike the advance of the young free state, and had given her that nickname partly out of envy and partly out of contempt. Their citizens were high-spirited and generous, but they had not the public spirit which New England had imparted to Ohio, for public spirit comes from equality and from the feeling for others’ rights, and the very supremacy which the slaveholders enjoyed was fatal to this feeling. Virginia and Kentucky were rich in independent character, but public spirit is better than this, for it cares for the independence of all through the self-sacrifice of each. That was the secret which Ohio early learned from New England, and which kept her safe from slavery when it pressed so hard upon her in the friendship as well as the enmity of her neighbors.

We know that the Northwestern Territory was devoted to freedom by the law that created it, but we have seen that slavery was kept out of Ohio by one vote only when her first constitution was adopted; and for a very long time there was a very large party favorable to slavery in our state. It will seem strange to many of my readers that Ohio people of color were once not only not allowed to vote, but were not allowed to give testimony in the courts of law. They were treated in this like the Southern slaves, and in fact there was really a sort of slaveholding in Ohio, in spite of the law. In the river counties many farmers hired slaves from their masters in Virginia and Kentucky; and when the Southerners traveled through Ohio, they brought their slaves into the state with them, and took them out again. But when the conscience of the Northern people began to stir against slavery, the Ohio abolitionists coaxed away the slaves of these Southern travelers and sojourners, and this, with the constant escape of runaway slaves by their help, infuriated the friends of slavery inside as well as outside of the state. The abolitionists had what they called the Underground Railroad, with stations at their houses in town and country, and they sped the fugitives from one to another till they reached Canada. Their enemies accused them of tempting slaves across the Ohio, in order to give them their freedom, and in a little while the rage against them broke out in mobs and riots.

It would not be easy to trace here the course of events which led to these outbreaks. It is no doubt true that the abolitionists were often rash, if not reckless, and that when they were maddened by the coldness or the hostility of the people to the cause of human freedom they did not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they made a bloody resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest, were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and harried everywhere in Southern Ohio.

In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830, and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton, was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below. He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.

The anti-slavery meetings were often broken in upon by mobs and sometimes broken up. One of these riots took place in 1834 at Granville, in Licking County, where the Ohio Anti-slavery Convention held its anniversary in a barn on the outskirts. The members were returning to the village in a procession when the mob met them, and at sight of the ladies among them shouted, “Egg the squaws!” and began to pelt them with eggs and other missiles, while some ran and tried to trip them up. Many of the men were beaten and egged, and the manes and tails of their horses were shaved. This was a favorite argument with the friends of slavery, and if shaving horses’ manes and tails could have availed, their party would easily have won.

Some of the anti-slavery speakers and lecturers came on missions from the Eastern States, but several of the fiercest and bravest were like the Rev. John Rankin, of Clermont County, who had emigrated from Tennessee to Ohio, because he would not live in a slaveholding community. He used to preach against slavery at frequent peril of his life, and his son tells how a mob leader once mounted to his pulpit, and threatened him with his club. “Stop speaking, or I will burst your head,” he shouted, but Rankin went quietly on as if nothing had been said, and one of his friends dragged the ruffian from his side. Of course, he was always coming home with his horse’s mane and tail shaved, and of course his house was a station on the underground railroad to freedom.

One of the boldest of the abolitionists was James G. Birney, who like Rankin had come to Ohio from the South. He started a newspaper called The Philanthropist in Cincinnati, and for three months attacked slavery unsparingly in it. Then, on the 23d of July, 1836, the mob rose, broke into the printing office, threw the types into the street, tore down the press, and cast the fragments into the river. Then they assailed the black people living in one of the alleys, and shots were exchanged but no lives were lost. A few years later, however, in 1841, a general assault was made upon the negroes by the mob; several on both sides were killed and many wounded, and the office of The Philanthropist was again destroyed. Of course these things did not stop the fight against slavery, and it did not help slavery at all when the authorities of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati forbade the students to write or to talk about it. That was foolish and useless; it only hurt the seminary, and drove many students from it to the college at Oberlin, then newly founded in the woods of Lorain County. There they could not only discuss slavery, but they could learn about it at first hand from the negro students. The founders of Oberlin were not abolitionists, but it is related that when they took Christ for their guide, they found that they could not shut out the friendless people whom the law kept from the schools, the polls, and the courts.

These few scattered facts will give some notion of the bitter feeling that prevailed during the first ten or twelve years of the fight against slavery in Ohio. Afterwards it became less intense, as slavery became a political question between the two great parties of that day, the Whigs and the Democrats. Neither party expected to abolish slavery, but the Whigs hoped to keep it out of the territories and all the new states. Both parties split upon this question at last, and in 1856 the anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats joined in forming the Republican party, which in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln upon its promise to shut slavery up to the states where it already existed.

But it must not be supposed, because the first bitter feeling had passed away, that the facts were changed or that the tragedies and outrages had ceased. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, there was a new hunt for runaways all over the state, and business on the underground railroad was never so brisk. The hatred of slavery was revived in all its intensity by such cases as that of Margaret Gorden in 1856. This unhappy mother had escaped from Kentucky with her four children to the house of a free colored man below Mill Creek in Hamilton County, where they remained concealed with thirteen other fugitives. One night the place was suddenly attacked by the slavehunters under the lead of the United States officers. A fight followed, and several on both sides were wounded, but at last the slaves were overpowered. While the officers were dragging the others from the house, Margaret seized a knife from the table, and killed her little daughter rather than see it taken back to slavery, and then turned the bloody weapon against herself, but failed in the attempt on her own life. She was taken to Cincinnati and tried, not for murder, but for escaping from slavery, together with the other fugitives, who said they would “go singing to the gallows,” if only they need not go back to the South. They were all found guilty of seeking to be free, and were returned to their owners. On her way down the river it is said that Margaret jumped from the boat with one of her remaining little ones in her arms. The child was drowned, but Margaret was saved for the fate which she dreaded, and which she had twice risked her own and her children’s life to shun. What became of her at last was never known; it is only known that she was carried back to her owner. She had two deep scars on her black face. At her trial she was asked what made them, and she answered “White man struck me.”

In Champaign County, a fugitive slave named Ad White resisted the attempt of the slavehunters to take him, in 1857, and fired upon one of the United States marshals, whose life was saved by the negro’s bullet striking against the marshal’s gunbarrel. The people and their officers took the slave’s side, and the case was fought in and out of court. The sheriff of the county was brutally beaten with a slungshot by the marshal who had so narrowly escaped death himself, and never take a thousand dollars for him; the money was promptly raised and paid over, and White lived on unmolested.

As late as the summer of 1860 a fugitive slave was arrested near Iberia, in Morrow County. A party of young men caught one of the marshals and shaved his head, while others beat his comrades. Rev. Mr. Gordon, President of Ohio Central College, stood by trying to prevent the punishment, but he alone was arrested. He was sentenced to prison, where he lay till Lincoln pardoned him. The pardon did not recognize his innocence, and he would not leave his cell until his friends forced him to do so. By this time the damp jail air had infected him, and he died, shortly after, of consumption.

One would think that such things as these would have cured the Ohio people of all sentiment for slavery, for they had no real interest in it. But even in the second year of the Civil War, which the love of slavery had stirred up against the Union, the famous anti-slavery orator, Wendell Phillips, was stoned and egged while trying to lecture in Cincinnati. Before this time, however, events had gone so far that there was no staying them. One of the earliest and chiefest of these events was the attempt of John Brown to free the slaves in Virginia. He had already fought slavery in Kansas, where it was trying to invade free soil, and in 1859 he thought that the time had come to carry the war into the enemy’s country. He did this by placing himself with a small force of daring young men, several of his own sons among the rest, in the mountains near Harper’s Ferry. He hoped that when he had seized the United States Arsenal at that point, and given them arms the slaves would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his lead. But when they were attacked in the Arsenal, Brown and his men were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Washington; several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.

Some think that Brown was mad, some that he was inspired, some that he was right, some that he was wrong; but whatever men think of him, there are none who doubt that he was a hero, ready to shed his blood for the cause he held just. His name can never die, so long as the name of America lives, and it is part of the fame of Ohio that he dwelt many years in our state. For many years of his younger manhood Brown had lived at Hudson, in Summit County; for months before his attempt in Virginia he and his men were coming and going at different points in the Western Reserve, and in Ashtabula County where one of his sons then had a farm, he kept hidden the pikes with which he hoped to arm the slaves. One of the young men who died with him on the scaffold at Charlestown was the Quaker lad, Edwin Coppock, of Columbiana County, who wrote, two days before he suffered, a touching letter of farewell to his friends. “I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration of Independence fully realized; I had hoped to see the dark stain of slavery blotted from our land.... But two more short days remain to me to fulfill my earthly destiny. At the expiration of those days I shall stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe that I am innocent of any crime justifying such a punishment. But by the taking of my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on the day when the slave will rejoice in his freedom.”

THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO

Though the Ohio people were too plodding for Aaron Burr, and though they were taunted almost from the first as the Yankee state of the West, they seem to have had war in their blood, which may have been their heritage from the long struggle with the Indians. But after the peace with Great Britain in 1815 there was no war cloud in the Ohio sky until Morgan swept across our horizon with his hard-riders, except at one time in 1835. There had then arisen between our state authorities and those of Michigan a dispute concerning the border line between the two commonwealths, and matters went so far that the governors of both States called out their militia. The Michigan troops actually invaded Ohio, and overran the watermelon patches near Toledo, ate the chickens of the neighborhood, destroyed an ice house, and carried off one Ohioan prisoner. But the mere terror of the Ohio name sufficed to send them flying home again when they heard that our riflemen were waiting for them in Toledo, and many deserters from their ranks took to the woods on their way back. This vindicated the glory of our state; we cheerfully submitted when the arbitrators chosen to settle the dispute decided it mainly in favor of Michigan, and we have ever since lived at peace with that commonwealth.

All this seems now like a huge joke, and so it has ever since been regarded, but a war was coming which was serious enough. It might be said that the great Civil War began with “John Brown’s invasion of Virginia,” in 1859, but it might just as well be said that it began with the fighting for and against freedom in Kansas in 1856. In fact it might be said that it began with the mobbing of anti-slavery speakers and the rescue of runaway slaves all over the North, from 1830 onwards. Yet this would be fantastic, even if it were true, and we had better accept the dates which history gives. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President by the men opposed to the spread of slavery, and in 1861 the slave states, feeling that their mastery of the Union was gone, left it one after another, and the first fighting took place through the effort of the United States government to hold its forts in the South.

In this war, Ohio played so great a part, that it is hard for Ohio people to keep from claiming that she played the first part. Remembering that General Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, the three greatest soldiers of the war, were all Ohio men, we might be tempted to claim that without these the war would not have been won for the Union, but it is safer to claim nothing more than that Ohio gave the nation the generals who won the war. Our three greatest soldiers were only chief among many others under whose lead Ohio sent to the war some three hundred and twenty thousand men, during the four years of fighting, a force almost as great as that of whole nations in other times.

Ohio men shed their blood on all the battlefields of the South, but only once was the war which consumed her children by tens of thousands brought home to her own hearths. This was when the state was invaded by John Morgan and his hard-riders in 1863. Morgan was born at Huntsville in Alabama, and was of the true Southern type, gallant, reckless, independent. He was one of the bravest and luckiest chiefs of Confederate cavalry, and when he was ordered to march northward from Tennessee through Kentucky, and attempt the capture of Louisville, but not to pass the Ohio, he trusted to his fortune, and crossed the river into Indiana at the head of some twenty-three hundred horsemen. On the 13th of July he entered the state of Ohio, a few miles north of Cincinnati, and passed eastward unmolested by the Union general Burnside, who preferred not to bring him to battle in the neighborhood of the city, but to wait some chance of attacking him elsewhere. The militia had been called out by the governor, and the whole country was on the alert. But Morgan’s men passed through Clermont, Brown, Adams, Pike, Jackson, Vinton, Athens, and Gallia counties into Meigs with comparatively little molestation, though the militia learned rapidly to embarrass if not to imperil his course. His men suffered terribly in their long ride. They had to live on the country as best they could, and they were literally dropping with sleep as they pushed their jaded horses along the roads, everywhere threatened by the Ohio sharpshooters. They fell from their saddles and were left behind; they crawled off in the darkness and threw themselves down in the woods and fields, glad to awaken prisoners in the hands of their pursuers. At first the large towns were alarmed by the fear of pillage, but Morgan had hardly got into Ohio before it became his chief aim to get out again. His hard-riders were confined in their depredations mainly to the plunder of the country stores on their route. They stole what they could, but they stole without method or reason, except in the matter of horses, which they really needed and could use. They commonly left their worn-out chargers in exchange, but they took the freshest and strongest horses they could get, at any rate. In their horse stealing they were not so very unlike the Kentucky pioneers, who used to cross into the Ohio country for the ponies of the Indians, and they practiced it at much the same risk; for the Ohio people were becoming every moment madder and more mischievous. At first they only cut down trees to check Morgan’s march after he got by, but they soon began to obstruct the roads in front of him; and though they burned one bridge over a river that he could easily ford, it was not long before they learned to destroy bridges where the streams were otherwise impassable.

By the time he reached Portland the militia were closing in around him, and the next morning two detachments of United States cavalry struck him, while the gunboats which had been watching for him on the river, opened fire on him. In a few minutes the fight was over. Morgan left seven hundred of his men prisoners behind him, and with twelve hundred others fled north and east to seek a new way out of Ohio. The fight at Buffington Island took place on the 18th, five days after Morgan crossed the Ohio line into Hamilton County, and on the 26th he surrendered with the constantly lessening remnant of his force seven miles from New Lisbon in Columbiana County.

The prisoners were all sent for safe keeping to the penitentiary at Columbus, but on the night of November 7th, Morgan and six of his comrades made their escape, by digging into an air-space under the floor of his cell with their table-knives, passing through this to the prison walls, and letting themselves down with ropes made of their bed-clothes. At the station where they were to take the train for Cincinnati, Morgan was dismayed to realize that he had no money to buy a ticket; but one of his officers had been supplied by a young lady who sent him some bank notes concealed in a book. They rode all night in great fear and anxiety, and just before the train drew into Cincinnati they put on the brakes and slowed it enough to drop from it with safety. Then they lost no time in making for the Ohio River, where they hired a boy to set them over to Kentucky in his boat. Morgan had not found the Ohio people too plodding for him, as Aaron Burr had, but he was quite as glad to leave their state, which he never revisited, for he was killed the next year in Tennessee. He left behind him in Ohio by no means a wholly evil name, and some stories are told of him that more than hint at a generous nature. A Union soldier whom his men had taken tried to break his musket across a stone, and one of the Confederate officers drew his pistol to shoot him. Morgan forbade it. “Never harm a man who has surrendered,” he said. “He was only doing what I should have done in his place.”

We may be sure that such an enemy inflicted no wanton injury upon the country, and there was something in Morgan’s presence that corresponded with this magnanimity of his character. He was a man of powerful frame, large beyond the common, of great endurance, and able to outride any of his men, without sleep or rest. He had a fresh complexion, with fair hair and beard, and his face was rather mild. When he gave himself up at last, it was with an apparently cheerful unconcern at the turn of luck which in other raids had enabled him to break bridges, capture trains, and destroy millions of value in military stores.

Ohio is herself built upon so grand a scale that even her enemies seem to have been cast in a noble mold; and the jokes upon her own people that form the life of most of the stories of Morgan’s raid are as large as he. At one point, forty miles from their line of march, a good lady saved the family horse from the southern troopers by locking him into the parlor, where his stamping on the hollow floor kept the neighborhood awake the whole night through.

One of Morgan’s men, who plundered wildly, but not very wickedly, carried for two days a bird cage with three canaries in it; another, at the looting of a country store, filled his pockets with bone-buttons; they were only dangerous when they met reluctance in their frequent horse trades. They called at the house of a gentleman in Hamilton County at one o’clock in the morning, and asked for breakfast; when he objected that there was no fire at that time, they suggested that they could kindle one for him that it might be hard to put out; then he made one himself and they got their breakfast.

In Carroll County Morgan himself called for dinner at the house of a lady whose maiden name was Morgan, and at table they fell into such kindly chat about their cousinship, that she ended by giving him a clean shirt, which he needed badly, and gratefully wore away.

A farmer in Morgan County took refuge in his pigpen, where one of the raiders found him trying to hide behind a fat mother of a family, who was suckling her farrow. The raider grinned: “Hello! How did you get here? Did you all come in the same litter?” A stuttering hero who had been bragging of what he would do to the enemy if he got at them, was surprised by Morgan’s men with a demand for his surrender. He flung up his hands instantly. “I s-s-surrendered f-f-f-five minutes ago!”

One of the greatest jokes of all was played upon a friend of the South in Hamilton County. My younger readers may not suppose that there could be any friends of the South in Ohio, at that time; but in truth there were a great many, and far more than there were at the outbreak of the war. Then most of us believed that it would be quickly fought to an end; but after it had dragged on for two years, when its drain on the blood and the money of the nation was severest, and the end seemed as far off as at the beginning, those who had never loved the cause of freedom could easily blow the smoldering fires of discontent into a wide and far-raging flame. It must not be imagined that the Northern enemies of the North were all bad men; they were sometimes men of conscience, and sincerely opposed to the war against the South as unjust and hopeless. But they were called copperheads, because for a long time they lurked silently among the people, like that deadly snake which used to haunt the grass of the backwoods, and bite without warning. They were still called copperheads when they lifted their heads and struck boldly at the Union cause, under the lead of a very able man, Clement L. Vallandigham, whom we shall presently learn more of; and it was an old copperhead who followed Morgan’s rear guard with the best horse the hard-riders had left him, and who tried to get speech with the officer in command. He explained that he was a follower of Vallandigham and against the war, and he pleaded that on this ground he ought to have his horses back. The Morgan colonel said they could not stop to listen, but they would hear him if he would drive along with them. He added that as some of his soldiers were worn out, the copperhead had better give them his wagon; and when the copperhead said that he could not ride, the colonel answered that he should be allowed to walk. After walking awhile, he complained that his boots hurt him, and the colonel ordered them taken off. The copperhead was obliged to follow in his stockings till the raiders camped. Then, to amuse their leisure, they taught him a Morgan song, and obliged him to dance, fat and fagged as he was, to his own music, while they applauded him with shouts of “Go it, old Yank! Louder!” till their commanding officer ordered them to harness a worn-out crow bait to his wagon, and bring him three wretched jades for the horses he wanted to recover, and let him go.

It is not known whether this behavior of his friends turned the copperheads against them or not But in spite of the Morgan raid, and in spite of all the reasons and victories of a North, the largest vote that the Democratic party had ever polled, up to that time, was cast in favor of a man who had been bitterest against the war, and who was then in exile from his native country because of his treasonable words and practices. Even three thousand soldiers in the field voted for him, and this is far more surprising than that forty thousand voted against him. As we look back through the perspective of history, our state seems to have been solid for the Union and for freedom; but this is an appearance only, and it is better that we should realize the truth. It will do no harm even to realize that the man who embodied the copperhead feeling was by no means a malignant man, however mistaken.

Clement Laird Vallandigham was born in 1820 at New Lisbon, of mixed Huguenot and Scotch-Irish ancestry, a stock which has given us some of our best and greatest men. His father was a Presbyterian minister, who eked out his poor salary by teaching a classical school in his own house. Clement was ready for college long before he was old enough to be received; and when he was graduated from Jefferson College, at Cannonsburg in Pennsylvania, he came back to New Lisbon and began to practice law.

So far all the influences of his life should have been at least as good for the generous side of politics as for the ungenerous; but from the first he cast his lot with the oppressor. In 1845 he was sent to the legislature, where he took a leading part in opposing the repeal of the Black Laws, which kept the negro from voting at the polls or testifying in the courts. Two years later he fixed his home in Dayton, where he quickly came to the front as a States Rights Democrat in the full Southern sense. He was given by a Democratic house the seat to which Lewis D. Campbell was elected in 1856, and he remained in Congress till defeated in 1862. Up to the last moment he never ceased to vote and to speak against the war, because he believed it impossible to conquer the South; and when he came back to Ohio he kept on saying what he believed.

This brought him under condemnation of General Order No. 38, issued by General Burnside at Cincinnati, forbidding any person to express sympathy for the enemy under pain of being sent out of the Union lines into the lines of the Confederates. Vallandigham defied this order; he was arrested by a company of the 115th Ohio, and taken to Cincinnati from Dayton, where a mob of his friends broke out the next day, and burned the office of the leading Republican newspaper. General Burnside sent a force and quelled the mob, and promptly had Vallandigham tried by a court-martial, which sentenced him to imprisonment in Fort Warren at Boston during the war. President Lincoln changed this sentence to transportation through our lines into the borders of the Southern Confederacy, and Vallandigham was hurried by special train from Cincinnati to Murfreesboro, in Tennessee, where General Rosecrans was in command. In a long interview, General Rosecrans tried to convince him of his wrongdoing, and asked if he did not know that but for his protection the soldiers would tear him to pieces in an instant. Vallandigham answered, “Draw your soldiers up in a hollow square to-morrow morning, and announce to them that Vallandigham desires to vindicate himself, and I will guarantee that when they have heard me through they will be more willing to tear Lincoln and yourself to pieces than they will Vallandigham.” The general said he had too much regard for his prisoner’s life to try it; but the charm of the man had won upon him. “He don’t look a bit like a traitor, now, does he, Joe?” he remarked to one of his staff, and he warmly shook hands with Vallandigham when they parted at two o’clock on the morning of May 25.

Vallandigham mounted into the spring wagon provided for the rest of his journey, and was driven rapidly out of the sleeping town toward the Confederate lines. It was still in the forenoon when, in response to a Federal flag of truce, Colonel Webb of the 51st Alabama sent word to say that he was ready to receive him; two Federal officers crossed the enemy’s lines with him, where he was met by one private soldier, and after some hours taken into the presence of the commander. General Bragg received him very kindly at Shelbyville, and allowed him to report on parole at Wilmington, North Carolina. There he took a blockade runner for Nassau, where he found a steamer for Canada.

He arrived in the British province early in July, to find that the Ohio Democrats had nominated him for governor, and that his party throughout the country had expressed its sympathy with him. President Lincoln met one of their committees, and agreed with them that Vallandigham’s arrest was unusual, but he quaintly added: He could not be persuaded that the government should not take measures in time of war which must not be taken in time of peace, any more than he could be persuaded that a sick man must not take medicine which was not good food for a well one.

So thought the great majority of the Ohio people, who duly chose John Brough, a War Democrat, for their governor in October. Vallandigham remained in Canada until 1864, when he returned to Dayton, where he was warmly received by his friends, and not molested by the authorities. But he had never afterwards any political importance, in spite of his great abilities and the peculiar charm of his manner for all kinds of people. After the war was over, he accepted its conclusions with earnest good faith, and three years later he met his death by a curious accident. He was showing a friend, in behalf of a client in whom he was greatly interested, how a pistol might go off in a pocket and cause a mortal wound such as his client was accused of inflicting on another. The pistol in his hand was really discharged; Vallandigham was fatally wounded and died shortly afterwards.

FAMOUS OHIO SOLDIERS

First among these I count the great chief Pontiac, who led the rebellion of the mid-western tribes against the English after the French had abandoned them, and who was born in Auglaize County. I count the renowned chief Tecumseh, too, that later and lesser Pontiac, who attempted to do against the Americans what Pontiac tried to do against the English.

It was some time before the great white men of Ohio began to be born here, but in the meanwhile there were those born elsewhere who, like General Harrison, became Ohioans, and so did what they could to repair the defect of birth. There is no reason to think that such men were shaped by Ohio influences, but it is the habit of our generous Ohio state patriotism to claim as Ohioans not only those who were born here, and those who came to live here, but those who were born here and then went to live elsewhere.

Valiant and able generals came from the different parts of Ohio, and from the different races which settled there. But the Scotch race, descending through New England, has the highest place in our soldiers’ ancestry, and the county of Clermont has the deathless glory of being the birthplace of Ulysses Simpson Grant, one of the greatest captains of all time, one of the purest patriots, one of the best and gentlest men. I need not speak of his career as a soldier, for that has become a part of the nation’s history. The beginnings of his life were rude and hard; it was afterwards often clouded with failure; it brightened out into such splendid success as few lives have ever known; it was again darkened by trouble and disaster, and it closed in a long anguish of suffering. But if ever a life was worth living it was his, and his memory is safe forever in the love of his country and the honor of the world.

His parents removed soon after he was born to Brown County, where Georgetown was his home until he was sent to West Point at seventeen. His whole boyhood, therefore, was spent in Southwestern Ohio, where a boy may live the happiest life on earth, and where Grant played, worked, planned, and studied not only without a dream of the place he was to take in history, but without special thought or liking for the calling in which he was to stand with Caesar and with Napoleon.

When he was eight years old, he began to work in his father’s tannery, where he drove the horse that turned the bark mill, and broke the bark into the hopper. He did not like the work, and he escaped from it when he could, and did jobs of wagoning about the village. He loved his horses and kept them sleek and fat; and it is told of him that when he first traded horses he was so eager to get a certain colt that he offered the man even more than he asked. He was fond of all boyish sports, but he was never rough, or profane, or foul-mouthed, and he was noted among his mates for his truth and honesty. The girls liked him for his gentleness, the younger children for his kindness; he never teased them, and he never tormented any living creature. There may have been better boys, but I have never heard of them; and if Grant passed only his first seventeen years in his native state, they were years of as true a greatness relatively as any that followed. From the first he was self-reliant, and taught himself to trust to his own powers and resources. When seven years old, he got an unbroken colt from the stable in his father’s absence, hitched it to a sled which he loaded with wood in the forest, and then drove home with a single line. He once wished to ride his father’s pacer on an errand he was sent upon; but his father could not spare it and the boy took his colt. “I will break him to pace,” he said, and he came back with the colt pacing. At twelve he hauled logs with a heavy draft team. Once the men who were to load for him did not come, and Grant managed with the help of a fallen tree to get the logs on the truck alone and drove home with them. After eleven he had scarcely any schooling except that of hard work, until he was appointed to West Point.

From Georgetown, another Ohioan famous in the great war was sent about the same time to the Naval Academy at Annapolis. This was the boy Daniel Am-men, who was destined to become Admiral Ammen. He had saved Grant’s life when they were bathing together in White Oak Creek, and Grant remembered him with his high office and title when he became President.

But Ammen had won both by his services during the war, for the Ammens were fighters. The admiral’s brother Jacob had early distinguished himself by gallantry that won him a generalship. Long before this their father had begun the good fight by printing John Rankin’s letters against slavery in his newspaper at Ripley.

From Carroll County came that wonderful race of fighters, the McCooks. Daniel McCook, Presbyterian elder and Sunday-school superintendent, went into the war at sixty-three with his sons, and two years later was killed in the engagement with Morgan at Buffington Island. Latimer A. McCook died in 1869 of wounds received during his service as surgeon in the battles of the war. General Robert Latimer McCook was murdered by guerrillas as he lay sick and wounded near Salem, Alabama, in 1862. General A. McDowell McCook was a West Pointer who won his major generalship by his gallantry at Shiloh. General Daniel McCook, Jr., led the assault at Kenesaw Mountain, where he was mortally wounded. Edwin Stanton McCook was graduated at Annapolis, but preferred the land service, and rose to the rank of brevet major general, through the courage and ability he had shown at Fort Henry, at Fort Donelson, at Chickamauga, and in Sherman’s March to the Sea. Charles Morris McCook was killed at the first Bull Run in 1861, while in his Freshman year at Gam-bier. His father saw him overwhelmed by the enemy and called out to him to surrender; but he answered “Father, I will never surrender to a rebel,” and was shot down by one of the Black Horse Cavalry. John J. McCook served in the campaigns of the West and with Grant from the battle of the Wilderness onward to the end. He was severely wounded at Shady Grove, and left the army with the rank of colonel.

Dr. John McCook, another Sunday-school superintendent, was the father of Edwin Moody McCook, who rendered brilliant service early in the war and left the army at its close with the rank of major general. His greatest exploit was breaking through the enemy’s lines before Sherman began his march to the sea, and effecting a diversion by the damage he did and the prisoners he took. His brother Anson George McCook was at the first Bull Run and in the great battles of the Southwest, and was brevetted Brigadier General at the end of the war. Rev. Henry C. McCook enlisted first as a private soldier and became chaplain of a regiment, but did no actual fighting. He is well known as a naturalist and theologian, and his youngest brother John James is distinguished as a linguist. His brother left the army as colonel after seeing some of the first fighting and became an Episcopal minister. Roderick Sheldon McCook left Annapolis in 1859 and promptly shared in the capture of a slaver off the African coast. From 1861 to 1865 he was engaged in all the naval movements at Newbern, Wilmington, Charleston, Fort Fisher, and on the James, and suffered lasting injury to his health on the monitors. He left the navy with the rank of commodore. All these McCooks, except the Rev. J. J. McCook, now professor in Trinity College, Hartford, remained of the Presbyterian faith, which seems natural to their Scotch-Irish race.

Of all the Americans who have lived, none is securer of lasting remembrance than Rutherford B. Hayes, who was born in Delaware, October 4, 1822. He was a great lawyer, a great soldier, a great statesman, a great philanthropist, a man without taint or stain. He had to suffer the doubt thrown by his enemies upon his right to the high office they had themselves conceded to him, but he was never wounded in his own conscience or in the love of the people. He was three times governor of Ohio, and when he became President of the United States he devoted himself to healing the hurts left by the war he had helped to fight. He made the North and South friends in the love he had for both sections, and then he gladly laid down his charge and went back to private life, after giving the country peace with honor. His presidency was not only one of the most distinguished and enlightened statesmanship, but it was consecrated by the virtues of the woman who made the White House the happiest home in the land. Lucy Webb Hayes, who had been like a mother to the soldiers of her husband’s command, gave the social side of his administration the grace and charm of her surpassingly wise and lovely character. He never knew in his youth the poverty and hard work which narrowed the early life of Grant and Garfield. He was born to comfort and lived in greater and greater affluence; he had only to profit by his opportunities, while they had to make theirs; but he did profit by them. From school to college, and from college to the study of law, he passed easily successful in all that he tried to do, and he always tried to do his duty. Like Grant, he was of farther Scotch and nearer New England origin, but the next most distinguished native of Delaware County was of Dutch stock, as his name witnesses. William Starke Rosecrans was born in 1819, and entered West Point when only fifteen years old. He was in civil life when the war broke out in 1861, but of course he at once took part in it, and fought through a series of most brilliant campaigns, without one defeat, until the battle of Chickamauga in 1863. Even this he won, but the trust President Lincoln had felt in him and expressed up to the last moment was shaken by Rosecrans’s enemies, and he was removed from his command. He left the army with the rank of major general, and he held afterwards places of high honor, but he felt that the wrong done him was never atoned for. Twenty-five years after his removal he told a meeting of his old comrades the touching story of how the stroke fell and how he bore it. “It was at night that I received the order, and I sent for General Thomas,” who was to replace him, “He came to the tent and took his seat. I handed him the letter. He read it and as he did so his breast began to swell and he turned pale. He did not want to accept the command, but we agreed on consideration that he must do so, and I told him that I could not bear to meet my troops afterwards. ‘I want to leave,’ I said, ‘before the announcement is made, and I will start early in the morning.’ I packed up that night, and early in the morning, about seven o’clock, I rode away through the fog that then hung over the camp.”

William Tecumseh Sherman, who was born at Lancaster, Fairfield County, in 1820, was like his comrade and beloved friend Grant in the poverty he was born to. But his family was of historical distinction, while Grant’s had always been obscure, and his father died a judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio. As he died poor, his large family of children were left to their mother, whose means were not equal to their maintenance and education. Thomas Ewing, the great man of the place, had been the father’s friend, and he wished to adopt “the smartest of the children.” It is not known how his choice fell upon Sherman, who was playing with some other boys on a sand bank near Ewing’s house when it was made, and had apparently nothing to do with it.

His father had called him Tecumseh because he admired the Indian chief’s noble character and his merciful treatment of prisoners, and because he wished the boy to be a soldier. Ewing fulfilled the father’s wish by appointing the son to a West Point cadetship at sixteen. Sherman had meantime fallen in love with Miss Ellen Ewing, and he married her in 1850. Then he left the army and tried banking and the law, but liked neither, and he was President of the Louisiana state military academy when the Civil War began. With his frank, bold, impetuous nature, he forewarned the governor that he should side with the Union, and he asked to be notified in time before the state seceded.

He received the surrender of the last great Confederate army, after a series of the most splendid strokes of generalship. His March to the Sea will be forever famous. The highest British military criticism pronounced his attempt “the most brilliant or the most foolish thing ever attempted by a military leader,” and we all know how it turned out. Grant called him “the best field officer the war had produced,” and there has been nothing in history more sweet and beautiful than the friendship between these two great men. They were unlike in everything but their unselfishness and single-hearted patriotism, and they trusted as wholly as they loved each other.

Irvin McDowell, born at Franklinton, Franklin County, in 1818, was the brave and gifted officer who lost the first battle of Bull Run, where he failed less ruinously than any other general of that moment of the war would have done. His name and fame have outlived that disaster, though the people did not then know enough to forgive him for his army’s defeat. He was again of that tough Scotch-Irish breed that so many Ohioans are of; like our other great generals, he was a West Pointer, and he was of the high and kindly personal character common to them.

George A. Custer put into his life of vivid action the splendor of romance. His figure stands foremost in any picture of the war as that of the most dashing and daring cavalier of his time; but if his bearing was that of a young hero of fiction, his deeds were those of an accomplished and disciplined modern soldier. He was born at New Rumley in Harrison County, of a Hessian ancestor who had come over to fight for King George against the country which Custer lived and died to serve, and he inherited from him the blue German eyes, and the yellow German hair which he loved to wear long, and flying about his neck in his gallant charges. But otherwise he was of the simple matter-of-fact Ohio character. He got himself sent to West Point by means of a letter which he wrote to the congressman of his district. He frankly owned himself “a Democrat boy,” and though the congressman was a Republican his fancy was taken with the honesty of the youth, whom he never saw till one day a young officer “with long yellow hair, hanging like Absalom’s,” presented himself at his house in Washington as Lieutenant Custer. “Mr. Bingham, I’ve been in my first battle,” he said, “and I’ve come to tell you I’ve tried not to show the coward.” After that, in numberless bold forays and fierce battles, he displayed such dauntless bravery, such brilliant prowess, that General Sheridan, in sending Mrs. Custer the table on which Lee signed his surrender, could write, “I know of no person more instrumental in bringing about this desirable event than your own most gallant husband.” All the world knows how this glorious hero fell in the West, long after the war, before an overwhelming force of Indians.

If Custer was the romance of our history, James A. Garfield was its tragedy, the sort of noble tragedy which exalts while it awes. Again we have in his life the story, so often told in the Ohio annals, of early struggles with poverty, and of triumph over unfriendly fate. The child who was born in the rude farmhouse in Orange, Cuyahoga County, in 1831, was of Puritan lineage on his father’s side and Huguenot blood on his mother’s; and throughout his life he showed the qualities of both strains. He was left the youngest of four children to the care of his widowed mother, soon after his birth, and at the very beginning his blithe and dauntless spirit felt the stress of want. But he began to help himself and school himself, as the children of the poor must and do, and he early showed a passion for literature and adventure; he wanted to read; he wanted to go to sea; he actually tried to ship on a schooner at Cleveland, but, failing this, he got a chance to drive a canal-boat team. He fell sick and came home, and when he got well he learned carpentering. With his earnings in that trade he helped himself through the Academy at Chardon in Geauga County. From there he went to Hiram College, in Portage County, and then to Williams College, in Massachusetts. He studied law, and was elected to the Ohio Senate, which he left to enter the army. He was a brave and able soldier, and rose from lieutenant to be major general, before he left the service of his country in the field, to serve her in Congress. After sixteen years in the House, his state sent him to the Senate, and then his fellow-citizens chose him their President. He had been only four months in the White House, when the wretched Guiteau, a fool maddened by his own vanity and the sight of others’ malevolence toward the man who never hated any one, shot him down; and he lingered amidst the fervent sympathy of the whole world, till he died nine or ten weeks later. Of all the great Ohioans he was the gentlest and kindest nature; he never did harm to any man, and his heart was as high as his aspiring intellect above anything base or low. His ambition was in all things for what was fine and noble.

Quincy Adams Gilmore, who was born on a farm in Lorain County in 1825, was graduated at the head of his class from West Point. He achieved lasting fame in the siege of Fort Pulaski in Georgia, which other engineers had said could never be taken. Gilmore reduced it in two days by a feat in gunnery which changed forever the science and practice of that branch of the military art. In the ooze of a trembling marsh, which scarcely lifted its uncertain surface above the tides, he planted his heavy rifled cannon at three times the distance that siege artillery was believed effective, and battered down the walls of the fort with perfect ease, and with the loss of only one life in his command.

The doubt as to the birthplace of Philip H. Sheridan, with a choice between Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, seems not to have been felt by Sheridan himself. He decided that he was born in Somerset, Perry County, Ohio, in March, 1831, and there is no good reason to suppose that he did not know. While so many of our soldiers were of Scotch-Irish origin, he was simply of Irish origin, and his father and mother were poor Irish laboring people, Catholics in religion, and careful to rear their son in their faith. Many stories are told of his boyhood, which seems to have been like that of most other Ohio boys of his generation. The most significant of these stories are those relating to his childish love and knowledge of horses and horsemanship; for they seem the prophecy of the greatest cavalry commander of modern times, who invented that branch of the service anew, as Gilmore reinvented gunnery. Sheridan’s first famous ride was on a barebacked, bridleless horse which he mounted in the pasture where it was feeding, and clung to with his knees and elbows in its long flight down the highway. No poet has yet put this legendary feat into verse, but all my readers know the poem which celebrates Sheridan’s ride from Winchester to Cedar Creek. This ride not only saved the day, but it stamped with the fiery little man’s character the history of the whole campaign in the Valley of the Shenandoah; and in it, as it were, he met Sherman halfway on his March to the Sea, and completed the deadly circuit in which the great rebellion died.

Of all our commanders he was perhaps the best beloved by his men, for he fought with his men. He tried to account for their liking him on no other ground. He once said, “These men all know that where it is the hottest there I am, and they like it, and that is the reason they like me.” He was in the hottest place because he thought it was his duty to be there, and not because he was fearless. “The man who says he isn’t afraid under fire, is a liar. I am afraid,” he frankly said, with a touch of that profanity which Grant never used, “and if I followed my own impulse I should turn and get out. It is all a question of the power of mind over body.”

As a boy he had some schooling at a Catholic school, under an eccentric Irish master whom he used to play tricks upon, and who used to thrash him impartially with the rest. When he left school, he became a clerk in a hardware store in his native village, and then in a dry-goods store. From the last place, he was appointed in 1848 to West Point and his destiny was fixed. In his class was another Ohio boy, born not far from Sheridan’s birthplace, at the little town of Clyde, Sandusky County, in the year 1828. This was James B. McPherson, Scotch-Irish by race as his name shows, and, as his history was to show later, one of the worthiest scions of that soldier-bearing stock. If Sheridan was the well-beloved of his men, McPherson was singularly dear to those who were closest to him and should have known him best. He was of a most affectionate nature, tenderly attached to his home and kindred, as men are apt to be if their homes are poor and their kindred have shared privation with them; but McPherson kept through all his prosperity and success the qualities which endear men to their fellows and comrades. The noble friendship between Grant and Sherman is one of the most precious of our national memories, but these great commanders seem to have loved McPherson next after one another.

His father was a farmer who worked at the trade of blacksmithing when he was not following the plow; and the boy helped him in the field and at the forge. When James was thirteen, his father died, and then he got a place in a village store, and did what he could to support his widowed mother and orphan brothers and sisters. It is told that when he left them on the farm he ran tear-blinded till he got out of sight, and then sat down with his little bundle in the woods and cried with homesickness. But he went to work, and he studied and read in his hours of leisure, and when he got the promise of a nomination to West Point he managed to spend two terms at the Norwalk Academy in preparing himself. He was then so old that he was afraid he would not be admitted to West Point; but once in the army he seemed to regain his youth. When he took command of the Army of the Tennessee, under Sherman, he was only thirty-two years old.

In one of the battles before Atlanta, in July, 1864, he was fired upon by a Confederate skirmish line, while personally leading a movement of his troops, and received a mortal wound. He rode a little way into the woods to avoid capture, and then fell from his horse; and as he lay there dying alone a private of an Iowa regiment found him, and cared for him till he expired.

Sherman’s grief for his loss was open and passionate. He wept over his dead face, and in the report of his loss to headquarters he said, “Those whom he commanded loved him even to idolatry; and I, his associate and commander, fail in words adequate to express my opinion of his great worth.” Grant wrote to McPherson’s aged grandmother: “The nation had more to expect from him than from almost any one living.” He wished to express the grief of personal love for the departed, and he testified to “his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability, and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander.”

Such were the greatest of the great Ohio soldiers. To say that they were, each in his different way, the first soldiers of the war, is to keep well within the modest truth. They believed in one another, they trusted one another, for they knew one another. The love between them, impassioned in Sherman, frank and hearty in Sheridan, tender in McPherson, deep and constant in Grant, is one of the most beautiful facts of our history, or of any history, a feeling without one ungenerous quality. It was indeed,

“A goodly fellowship of noble knights,”

such as has not been since that of King Arthur’s Table Round.

OHIO STATESMEN

The men who have given distinction to our state in politics could hardly be more than named in a record like this; and I shall not try to speak of them all or try to keep any order in my mention of them except the alphabetical order of the counties where they were born, or where they lived.

From Ashtabula County, the names that will come at once to the reader’s mind are those of Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both of a national fame inseparable from the history of the struggle with slavery. Giddings was first to cast his lot with the almost hopeless cause of freedom, but the fiery nature of Wade served to keep it warm in the hearts of its later adherents and to spread its light. Neither of these great Ohioans were Ohioans by birth. Giddings was born in Athens, Pennsylvania, in 1795, and came to Ashtabula County in 1806, where he dwelt until within a few years of his death, which took place at Montreal in 1864, while he was Consul General for Canada. He studied law, and succeeded at the bar before he entered political life. He was then twenty years in Congress as representative from the Ashtabula district, which promptly returned him when he was expelled from the House of Representatives for presenting a petition against slavery. His courage was so unconscious that he seemed never to assert it in his long career of defiance at Washington, but it never failed him in the presence of the dangers that often beset him there. In early life his people were desperately poor; he had scarcely a thought of school till he was twenty-three, and it was not until he had conquered from the wilderness a farm for his father and himself that he found time for study. He always loved the simplicity of the new country, and when he came home to the village of Jefferson from the sessions of Congress, he liked to “turn himself out to grass,” as he called it: to put on old clothes and a straw hat, and walk barefoot through the streets which he had known when they were forest trails.

Wade was born at Hills Parish, Massachusetts, in 1800, and he too was born in utter poverty. He worked on a farm, and then worked with pick and spade on the Erie Canal; but by the time he was twenty-one he knew much science and philosophy through studies he had pursued in a woodchopper’s hut by the light of pine knots. In Jefferson he read law and became Giddings’s partner. He was sent to the United States Senate in 1851 as an antislavery Whig, and he continued to stand four-square for freedom there during nearly twenty years. He was frank, bluff, even harsh in his speech and manner, but kind at heart, and it is told of him that once when he discovered a wretched neighbor robbing his corn crib, he moved out of sight that the man might not know he had been caught in the misdeed to which want had driven him.

Thomas Ewing, at one time United States senator from Ohio, and at all times a leading statesman and lawyer, was a citizen of Athens County, where his father settled in 1798. There the boy led the backwoods life, and struggled with all its adversities in his love of books, until he was nineteen. He loved the woods, too, and his boyhood was not unhappy, though his ambition was for the things of the mind. In his reminiscences, he tells of his early privations and of his delight in the first books which came to his hands: the “Vicar of Wakefield,” which he learned largely by heart, and the “Aeneid” of Virgil, which he used to read aloud to the farm hands on Sundays, and at such other leisure times as they all had amidst the work of clearing the land. At nineteen, he went to earn some money at the Salines on the Kanawha, and then lavished it upon the luxury of three months’ study at Athens. After several years’ labor in the salt works, he entered college at Athens, teaching school between terms, and going to Gallipolis to pick up French among the survivors of the disastrous settlement there. Then he turned to the law, and won his way to ease and honor. One of his daughters, as we know, became the wife of General Sherman, whom he had adopted as his son.

Benjamin Lundy, the meek and dauntless Quaker who was called the Father of Abolitionism, lived a long time in Belmont County, at St. Clairsville, where he founded his Union Humane Society, in 1815, and inspired the formation of like societies throughout the country. He was born in New Jersey, and had settled in Wheeling, Virginia, but life there became un endurable to him from the sight of slaves chained and driven in gangs through the streets, on their way to be sold in the Southern markets. In Belmont County, also, the first native Ohio governor, Wilson Shannon, was born.

One of the Ohioans whom history will not forget was Robert Morris, of Clermont County, our United States senator from 1813 till 1839. He was one of the earliest American statesman to own the right of the slave and to defend it. In his last speech he startled the Senate with the prophetic words in which he recognized the danger hanging over the Union, and he said, “That all may be safe, I conclude that the negro will yet be free.”

Benjamin Harrison, one of the five presidents whom Ohio has given the country within thirty years, was born at North Bend in Hamilton County, where his grandfather General William Henry Harrison lived until chosen President in 1840. He remained in Ohio until he was twenty-one; then he went to Indianapolis, and it was from Indiana that he went to the war, where he achieved rank and distinction by his talent and courage.

He is a great lawyer, as well as a soldier and politician, and a speaker of almost unsurpassed gifts.

Salmon P. Chase, governor of Ohio and United States senator, Lincoln’s first Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was an Ohioan by grace of New Hampshire, where he was born, and where he lived till he was a well-grown boy. In 1830, when he was twenty-two years old, he began the practice of law in Cincinnati, and prospered in spite of his bold sympathy with the slave and the friends of the slave. The Kentuckians called him the attorney-general of the negroes, and the negroes gave him a silver pitcher, in gratitude for his “public services in behalf of the oppressed.” He was first an abolitionist, but later became a leader of the anti-slavery party, and was one of the first and foremost Republicans. As Secretary of the Treasury his mastery in finance was as essential to our success in the war as the statesmanship of Lincoln or the generalship of Grant. He was followed in the office of Chief Justice by another Ohioan of New England birth, who, like Chase, had passed all the years of his public life in our state. Morrison R. Waite, of Toledo, was perhaps even more Ohioan in those traits of plainness and simplicity in greatness which we like to claim for Ohio, only upon sober second thought to acknowledge that they are the distinctive American traits.

An Ohio Secretary of the Treasury assured to the nation the means of meeting the expenses of the Civil War, Ohio generals fought it to a victorious close, and an Ohio Secretary of War knew how to deal best with both the men and the money, so as to turn the struggle from its doubtful course. Without Edwin M. Stanton neither Chase nor Grant, with Sherman and Sheridan, could have availed. He was born at Steubenville in 1814, of a family of North Carolina Quakers, and as a boy his tastes were as peaceful as those of his ancestors. He had pets of all kinds, and he made collections of birds and insects. He was pretty diligent at school, but his studies there were not of the severer kind. He loved poetry; he founded a circulating library; and both before and after he went to Kenyon College, he was clerk in a bookstore. But deep within this quiet outside was the hot nature which fused the forces of the great war, and shaped them according to his relentless will. He became a successful lawyer, and had been President Buchanan’s Attorney-General when Lincoln made him Secretary of War. He left that office worn out with the duties to which he gave mind and body, and died soon after Grant had appointed him, in 1869, to the bench of the Supreme Court No man in office ever deserved more friends, or made more enemies. He was tender and kindly with the friendless and hapless, but with the strong and the fortunate, when they crossed his mood, he was rude to savagery.

The chief citizen of Richland County is John Sherman, who is also one of the chief citizens of Ohio, and of the United States. He has been in Congress ever since 1855, and ever since 1861 he has been in the Senate, except for the four years when he was Secretary of the Treasury under President Hayes. If any man in our public life during this long period merits more than he the name of statesman, it would be hard to say who he may be. But in his boyhood he gave promise of anything but the sort of career which he has dignified. He had all the impulsiveness of his famous brother, General Sherman, and something more than his turbulence. He himself, with that charming frankness which seems peculiarly a Sherman trait, tells in his autobiography what reckless things he did, even to coming to blows with his teacher; but all this heat seems later to have gone to temper a most manly and courageous character for a career of the greatest public usefulness.

He was born at Lancaster in 1810, and the second President who has called him from the Senate to a seat in his cabinet was born at Niles in Trumbull County, in 1844. William McKinley entered the army as a private in the famous 23d Ohio, when he was only seventeen, and fought through the war. When it ended he had won the rank of brevet major, but he had then his beginning to make in civil life. He studied law, and settled in Canton, where he married, and began to be felt in politics. He was thrice sent to Congress, and then defeated; but in 1896 he was elected the fifth President of the United States from the state of Ohio.

It is a long step backward in time, in fact more than a hundred years, before we reach the birthday, in 1794, of Thomas Corwin, one of the most gifted Ohioans who has ever lived.

He was born in Kentucky and was brought, a child of four years, by his parents to Ohio, when they settled at Lebanon in Warren County. He grew up in the backwoods, but felt the poetry as well as the poverty of the pioneer days, and it is told that the great orator showed his passion for eloquence at the first school he attended. He excelled in recitations and dialogues; but he was not meant for a scholar by his father and he was soon taken from school, and put to work on the farm. In the War of 1812 he drove a wagon in the supply train for General Harrison’s army, and the people liked to call him the Wagoner Boy, when he came forward in politics. A few years later he read law, and with the training which he had given himself at school as well as in the old-fashioned debating societies which flourished everywhere in that day, he quickly gained standing at the bar as an advocate. He was all-powerful with juries, and with the people he was always a favorite. Such a man could not long be kept out of public life. He was called to serve seven years in the state legislature, and ten in Congress; then he was elected governor. He was so beloved that when he was nominated a second time for the governorship it was taken for granted that he would be elected, but so few of his friends were at the trouble to vote for him that he was, to the profound astonishment of everybody, defeated.

It was a joke which no one could enjoy more than Corwin himself; for he was not only an impassioned orator, but a delightful humorist. He could put a principle or a reason in the form of a jest so that it would go farther than even eloquence could carry it with the whimsical Western people; and perhaps nothing more effective was said against the infamous Black Laws which forbade the testimony of negroes in the courts than Corwin put in the form of self-satire. He was of a very dark complexion, so that he might have been taken for a light mulatto; and he used to say that it was only when a man got to be of about his color that he could be expected to tell the truth.

He was sent to the United States Senate soon after his defeat for the governorship, and it was there that in 1847 he made his great speech against the war with Mexico, as a war of conquest for the spread of slavery. It may be that there are more eloquent passages in English than some of the finest in this speech, where he warned the American people against the doom of unjust ambition, but I do not know them. It was the supreme effort of his life, but it was addressed to a time of unwholesome patriotic frenzy, and Corwin’s popularity suffered fatally from it. He never disowned it; he defended and justified it before the people; but he declined from the high stand he had taken as the champion of freedom and justice, and the later years of his political life were marked by rather an anxious conservatism. His final efforts were unavailingly made to stay the course of secession by suggestions of impossible compromise between the North and South. At the close of the war he was stricken with paralysis while visiting as a private citizen the Capitol at Washington, where he had triumphed as representative and senator, and he died almost before the laughter had left the lips of the delighted groups which hung about him. Of all our public men he was most distinctively what is called, for want of some closer term, a man of genius, and he shares with but three or four other Americans the fame of qualities that made men love while they honored and revered him. In the presence of this great soul, so simple, so sweet, so true, so winning, so wise, I think the reader will scarcely care to be reminded that among the notable Ohio men of our day are some of the richest, if not the very richest, American millionaires.

OTHER NOTABLE OHIOANS

Two names well-known in literature belong to Ashtabula County. Albion W. Tourgee was born there in 1838, and made a wide reputation by his novels, “A Fool’s Errand” and “Bricks without Straw,” — impassioned and vivid reports of life in the South during the period of reconstruction; and Edith Thomas, who was born in Medina County, made Ashtabula her home till she went to live near New York. While she was still in Ohio, the poems which are full of the love of nature and the sense of immortal things began to win her a fame in which she need envy no others of our time.

One of the earlier Ohioans of note was John Cleves Symmes, of Butler County, who believed that the earth was penetrated at the poles by openings into a habitable region within it. He petitioned Congress for means to explore the Arctic seas and verify his theory; of course he petitioned in vain, but he won world-wide attention and made some converts. He had been a gallant officer of the United States Army, and had fought well in the War of 1812, but he died poor and neglected. He was of New Jersey birth, and of that stanch New Jersey stock which gave character to the whole southwestern part of Ohio.

Another and still more famous theorist, who is not generally known to have been an Ohioan, was Delia Bacon, who first maintained that the plays and poems of Shakespeare were written, by Sir Francis Bacon. She was born in Portage County at Tallmadge, where her father was settled as minister.

A sculptor who, if not the greatest American sculptor, has yet achieved in his art the most American things ever done in it, is J. Q. A. Ward, the author of the “Indian Hunter,” and many other noble if less native works. He was born at Urbana, in Champaign County, of the old pioneer stock; and in a region remote from artistic influences, he felt the artistic impulse in his boyhood. His earliest attempt was a figure modeled in the wax which one of his sisters used in making wax flowers, and which he clandestinely borrowed. Then he made a bas-relief of the first train of cars he ever saw, but this he did in clay at the village potter’s; and he also modeled in clay the head of a negro, well known in the place, which all the neighbors recognized. A few years later he was sent to school in Brooklyn, where he used every day to pass the studio of the sculptor H. K. Browne, and long for some accident that would give him entrance. The chance came at last; he told the sculptor the wish of his heart, and Browne consented to let him try his hand under his eye. From that time the boy’s future was assured. The famous sculptor lives absorbed in his work in New York, where his ripe years find him crowned with the honor that will survive him as long as his bronzes and marbles endure.

To Clinton County belongs the name of Addison P. Russell, whose charming books of literary comment have so widely endeared him to book lovers; but whose public services in his own state are scarcely known outside of it among the readers of “Library Notes,” or of “A Club of One.”

The inventor of the first successful electric light, Charles Francis Brush, was born on his father’s farm in Euclid, Cuyahoga County, in 1840, and still pursues in Cleveland the studies which have literally illumined the world. One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor. He was born in Maine; but his fun tastes of the West rather than the East.

Thomas A. Edison, the electrician whose inventions are almost of the quality of miracles, and have given him worldwide celebrity, was born in Milan, Erie County, in 1847, of mixed American and Canadian parentage. His early boyhood was passed in Ohio, but he went later to Michigan, where he began his studies in a railroad telegraph office, after serving as a train boy.

Another noted name in science is that of T. G. Wormley, long a citizen of Columbus, though a native of Pennsylvania. He wrote his work on poisons in our capital, where he had studied their effects on animal life, in several thousand cats and dogs, while a professor in Starling Medical College. His microscopical analysis was illustrated by drawings of the poison crystals, made by his wife, who learned the art of steel engraving for the purpose, when it was found that no one else could give the exquisite delicacy and precision of the original designs. Her achievement in this art was hardly less than her husband’s in science, and it is a pleasure to record that she was born in Columbus.

To Franklin County also belongs the honor of being the birthplace of the botanist, William S. Sullivant. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences recognized him as the most accomplished student of mosses whom this country has produced.

I do not think it at all the least of her honors that Franklin County should be the birthplace of the horse tamer John S. Rarey, for whose celebrity the world was once not too large. He imagined a gentle art of managing horses by study of their nature and character, and in Europe, as well as America, he showed how he could subdue the fiercest of them to his will, through his patient kindness. In England the ferocious racing colt Cruiser yielded to Rarey, and everywhere the most vicious animals felt his magic. He was the author of a “Treatise on Horse Taming” which had a great vogue in various languages, and he achieved a reputation which was by no means mere notoriety.

Coates Kinney of Xenia was not born in Greene County, or even in Ohio; but he came to our state from New York when a boy, he has lived here ever since, and has been shaped by its life. His poem of “Rain on the Roof” is a household word, and it is the poem which will first come into the reader’s mind at the mention of his name. But his greatest poem is “Optim and Pessim,” which is one of the subtlest and strongest passages of human thought concerning the mystery of the universe; and his next greatest is his “Ode for the Ohio Centennial,” delivered at Columbus in 1888. It merits a place with the best that have celebrated, like Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode,” the achievements of the people.

In Greene County began the long journalistic life of William D. Gallagher, who was born in Philadelphia in 1808, but came while a child to Southern Ohio, and grew up in the impassioned love of that beautiful country. There was not much besides its beauty to endear it to him, for his life was a long struggle there with adverse conditions. But he never lost heart or hope; he failed cheerfully in one literary enterprise after another, and turned from literature to politics until he found the means and the chance to fail again in the field where his heart was always. In Xenia, in Cincinnati, in Columbus, in Louisville, he lived, now here, now there, as his hopes and enterprises called him, and ended at last on a little farm in Kentucky. His poetic vein was genuine; it was sometimes overworked, but at least one poem of entire loveliness was minted from it; and there are few American poems which impart a truer and tenderer feeling for nature than Gallaghers “August,” beginning —

“Dust on thy summer mantle, dust.”

The life of Whitelaw Reid, who was born near Xenia in 1837, is a romance of success from the beginning, of the kind that seems peculiarly American. His people were Scotch Covenanters, with the stern convictions of that race. It is said that his grandfather first settled in Hamilton County, but rather than run a ferry boat on Sunday, as the deed of his land bound him to do, he sold it and removed to Greene County, where his father was a farmer when the boy White-law was born. He sent his son to school and to college, and then left him to make his own way in the world, which he did by first becoming a country editor, and then going to the war as a newspaper correspondent, and taking part in several battles as an aid-de-camp. He learned to know the war at first hand, and he was well fitted to make his history of “Ohio in the War” the most important of all the state histories. He spent two years in writing this work of truly Ohioan proportions and of unfailing interest, and then he became Horace Greeley’s assistant on the New York Tribune. It was in the course of nature that after Greeley’s death he should become its owner and director, and should take a leading part in national politics. He has been our minister to France, and has acquired great wealth as well as honor; but he has remained affectionately true to the home of his youth, as his care of the old farmstead at Cedarville evinces.

Among the most eminent and useful citizens of the state was Nicholas Longworth, who came from New Jersey to Cincinnati, when just of age, in 1803. He was first to introduce the culture of grapes and the making of wine into Ohio; he planted the Catawba vine on the uplands of Cincinnati, where it flourished till the destruction of the forests changed the climate. He became very rich by his investments in lands, but he never outgrew his sympathy with the poor and struggling, and his hand was open to every one who could intelligently profit by his help. Many stories are told of his eccentricity. He was so simple in his dress that he was once mistaken for one of his own workmen by a stranger whom he had shown through his grounds, and who gave him a dime; Longworth thanked him and put it in his pocket For a long time he received the poor every Monday morning at his house, and gave whoever asked a loaf of bread, or a peck of meal, or their worth in money. His charity was of the divine order which does not seek desert in its objects. “I will help the devil’s poor,” he said, “the miserable drunken dog, whom nobody else will do anything for but despise and kick,” and he left the deserving poor to others, knowing that they were sure of friends.

Hiram Powers was the first American sculptor to give us rank in Europe. Longworth, who loved the arts as well as the industries, helped him to go to Florence from Cincinnati, where he had begun by modeling wax figures for a local museum. James H. Beard came from Painesville to Cincinnati, and won there his first success as a portrait painter. He was later to reveal the peculiar satirical gift for expressing human character in animals, for which his brother William H. Beard is perhaps even more famed. Among later artists, either born or bred in Cincinnati, Frank Dengler in sculpture, and Mr. Frank Duvaneck in painting, have shown extraordinary qualities. Dengler died at twenty-four, but not too soon to have given proof of his great talent; Mr. Duvaneck did such things in painting as to attract wide notice in America and Europe, where he headed a revolt of the young painters from the Munich School, and may be said almost to have founded a school of his own. These two young men were of the German stock which flourishes amid the Rhine-like hills of the Ohio; but another gifted Ohioan, who began his art life at Cincinnati, though he was born in Trumbull County, is of that pure American lineage commonest in the Western Reserve. Kenyon Cox, now president of the Art Student’s League in New York, is the son of the distinguished statesman and soldier, General J. D. Cox, who was one of the first to enter the army from civil life, and with Garfield and Hayes, to show military qualities second only to those of the West Point men.

Of this class of our generals was Ormsby M. Mitchell, the eminent astronomer in charge of the observatory at Cincinnati, who was among the first to go from that city to the war. He won rank and honor without fighting a battle, by virtue of the same qualities which enabled him to do more than any one else towards founding a public observatory at Cincinnati before any city in the East had one.

He was of Kentucky birth, and came a child to Ohio; but William H. Lytle, dear to lovers of poetry as the author of the fine lyric, “Antony and Cleopatra,” was born in Cincinnati, of the old Scotch-Irish stock, in 1826. He had everything pleasant in life and he enjoyed his prosperity, but when the war came he met its call halfway. At Chickamauga he fell, pierced by three bullets, in the thick of the fight. As he dropped from his horse into the arms of friends, he smiled his gratitude, and spent his last breath in urging them to save themselves, and leave him to his fate. The poem which begins with the well-known words,

“I am dying, Egypt, dying,”

will keep the name of Lytle in remembrance perhaps longer than all the poems of Phoebe and Alice Cary shall live, such are the caprices of fame; but the verse of these sisters is a part of American literature, as they themselves are a part of its history. They were true poets, and in their work a sense of

“The broad horizons of the West”

first made itself felt. They left the farm where they were born near College Hill and came to live in Cincinnati after they began to be known in literature, and later they went to dwell among the noises of New York, where they died; but the country, the sweet Miami country, remained a source of their inspiration, and now and again the reader tastes its charm in their verse.

They were undeniably Ohioan, while Pennsylvania may dispute our right to the fame of Thomas Buchanan Read, though his most famous poem, “Sheridan’s Ride,” was written and first recited in Cincinnati. We must not more than remind ourselves that Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe passed part of her early life in that city, and is known to have gathered much of the suggestion for “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” among the Ohio scenes where some of its most vivid events occur.

In the county of Huron a man of unquestionable claim to remembrance was born. George Kennan, whose enviable privilege it was to let the light in upon the misery of Siberian exile and to awaken the abhorrence of the world for Russian tyranny, was a native of Norwalk, where he grew up a telegraph operator. He worked at night and went to school by day, and when only nineteen, while one of the chief operators in Cincinnati, he applied for leave to join an expedition for laying a cable from Alaska to Siberia by way of Bering Strait. He was asked if he could get ready to start in two weeks, and he answered that he could get ready to start in two hours. He was appointed, and in this way he came to know the horrors which he afterwards studied more fully in a second visit to Siberia. He traveled fifteen hundred miles through that wintry prison of Russia, and saw and heard the sorrowful things which the despotism of the Czar has done to men who dare to love freedom.

His report of these cruelties has at least put their authors to shame before the civilized world, if it has not wrought so great an open change as the work of another Ohio man in dealing with even greater atrocities. It is interesting to note that Januarius A. Mac-Gahan was born in the same county as Philip H. Sheridan, of the same Irish parentage, to the same Catholic religion, and the same early poverty. He saw the light in July, 1844, in a log cabin on his father’s little farm among the woods near New Lexington in Perry County. He studied hard at school, and read constantly out of school, when a boy. When a little older, he worked for the neighboring farmers; he hoped to get a school to teach; but he could not get it in his own home, where he was thought too young, and he had to go to Indiana for it. From there he went to St Louis, where he became a newspaper reporter. In 1868 he sailed for Europe to study French and German, hoping to come home and practice law in that city. But his duty as correspondent took him to the scenes of various European wars, and launched him at last amidst the barbaric outrages of the Turks in Bulgaria. His exposure of their abominable misdeeds in 1876 roused the whole world; the English government officially examined his facts and found them indisputable. The war began between Russia and Turkey, and MacGahan returned to Bulgaria with the victorious Russian troops. There, wherever the people knew him, they hailed him as their savior. He had made their miseries so widely known to mankind as to render it impossible that they should continue. It is not strange that they thronged upon him, and kissed his hands, his boots, his saddle, his horse. In the peace that followed, a whole empire was torn from the bloody hands of the Turks, and four Christian peoples were saved from their savage rule. Bulgaria, Roumania, Roumelia, and Servia now belong to themselves, and all this has come about from the efforts of an unknown young Ohio man, who went abroad to study the languages, and changed the map of Europe. It reads like wild romance, but it is sober history.

Among all these Ohioans of celebrity we must not forget Johnnie Clem, the Drummer Boy of Shiloh. He ran away from his home in Newark, his native city, in 1861, when he was not yet ten years old, and joined the 24th Ohio as drummer; but he was afraid to be seen and sent home by an uncle who was in that regiment, and he cast his lot with the 22d Michigan. He was not only at Shiloh, but the battles of Perryville, Murfreesboro, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, Nashville, and Kenesaw. He was taken prisoner in Georgia, and when his captors stripped him of his clothes he grieved for the loss of nothing except his cap, which had three bullet holes in it. After his release, he came home to get well, and then returned to the army, where General Thomas attached him to his staff. Later he was sent to West Point, where he could not be regularly entered because he was too small; but he made his studies, and Grant commissioned him as lieutenant, and he rose to be captain of infantry. He won the love and respect of all his generals, and while they lived they wrote him letters of affectionate friendship. He was once wounded by a shell, and once he lost his drum by the fragment of a bursting bomb.

J. J. Platt, who is first among Ohio poets, was born in Indiana; but his boyhood was passed mostly in Ohio, where he grew up on his father’s farm, amidst the scenes which he has loved to depict in his verse, until he became a printer’s apprentice. Since then he has dwelt in cities, both at home and abroad; but he is always happiest in dealing with the traits and aspects of country life, especially in the earlier times. He was for many years consul at different points in Ireland; and he has found in England even greater recognition for the distinctively mid-western quality of his poems than he has enjoyed among ourselves. So far as he is of Ohio, he is of Logan County, which has been the seat of his family from the settlement of the country; as his name suggests, he is of French descent.

Of Toledo, and therefore of Lucas County, was David R. Locke, who was born in New York state, but lived in Ohio from his fifth year onward. He was a printer and an editor, and after the war, he suddenly won national fame as the author of the Petroleum V. Naseby letters. These were satires of the old proslavery spirit which retarded the reconstruction of the South and harried the freedmen by mobs and lynchings. Their humor gave Locke a place in our literature which no history of it can ignore.

Another literary man who must be taken account of in the summing up of American literature was S. S. Cox, who made himself known early in the fifties when Ohio was far less heard of than now, by his lively book of travels, “A Buckeye Abroad.” He was a journalist and a politician; he was three times elected to Congress from Columbus, and when he went to live in New York, he was three times sent to the House of Representatives from that city, where he is commemorated by a statue. He was a native of Muskingum County, and was born in 1824 at Zanesville.

The latest and most brilliant contribution of Ohio to the scholarship of the East is Professor W. M. Sloane, now of Princeton University, but by birth of Jefferson County. He must rank by his “Life of Napoleon” among the American historians of the first class. He is of Scotch Calvinistic ancestry, and the son of a Presbyterian minister.

In this list of Ohioans who have done honor to our state, Mr. James Ford Rhodes happens to be last, though chance might well have placed him among the first He is the author of “A History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850,” which has a peculiar value in the field of American history, and which has given Mr. Rhodes prominent standing, with a constantly growing reputation. He is of the New England race of the Western Reserve; until within a few years his home was in Cleveland, but he now lives in Boston.

INCIDENTS AND CHARACTERISTICS.

Nearly all the Ohio stories since 1812 have been stories of business enterprise and industrial adventure. I dare say that if these could be fully told, we should have tales as exciting, as romantic and pathetic as any I have set down concerning the Indian wars. But such stories are usually forgotten in the material interest of the affairs, and it is only when some tragedy or comedy arising from them finds chance record that we realize how full of human interest they are. The decay of steamboating and the rise of railroading is in itself a romance if it could be rightly seen, and if the facts could be clearly set before us, the story of commercial triumph by a great monopoly would not be less fascinating than that of any war of conquest.

The greatest monopoly of ancient or modern times, the Standard Oil Company, had its rise in Ohio, and there is no more impressive chapter in the annals of our country than its history forms. In fact, everything concerning the discovery of the great underground lakes of petroleum, and subterranean spaces of natural gas, which suddenly enriched certain sections of the state, and then with their exhaustion left them to lapse into ruin, is picturesque and dramatic. Many tales are told of poor farmers who struck oil on their lands, and sold them for sums greater than they had ever dreamed of, and then went out into the world to waste their wealth in a few years of wild riot, or sank down and led idle and useless lives in sight of the fields they had once tilled. Similar stories are told of the regions where natural gas has been found, and some day, when the chronicles of Findlay, in Hancock County are fully written we shall know all these romantic episodes in their grotesqueness and their pathos. It had been known from the earliest settlement of the country that the natural gas underlay the town, and fifty years ago two small wells were sunk. But it was not until after the discovery of the natural gas at Pittsburg that the people of Findlay began to think of turning their treasure to account. Then, in the year 1884, the first great well was bored, and sent into the startled air a shaft of flame sixty feet high. Other wells were sunk, and the greatest of all, the famous Karg well, shook its flag of fire against the sky with a roar like that of Niagara, and made its voice heard fifteen miles away. It was winter when it was first lighted, but it made summer for two hundred yards around. The snow melted, the grass and wild flowers sprang up, and the crickets came and trilled in the grateful warmth. By a sad irony this source of future wealth became the refuge of homeless men, and within its genial circuit many tramps slept sweetly, secure from the winter beyond.

Findlay grew from five thousand to fifteen thousand inhabitants in a year. The municipality wisely possessed itself of the most important wells, and supplied the gas so cheaply and abundantly to the people that no company could rival it. In June, 1887, it celebrated the anniversary of the first use of the natural gas in the industrial arts, and for three days the town was given over to rejoicing in its glory and prosperity. The streets were arched with flame, the great wells flaunted their banners night and day, and the gas flared from innumerable pipes and jets through sun and rain in every part of the town.

No such festival has commemorated the introduction of the grape culture in Ohio, though this is one of the most poetic facts of our history. When the changes of climate along the Ohio River rendered it unprofitable in the region of Cincinnati, where the imaginative genius of Longworth had first invented the Catawba wine which the poetic genius of Longfellow celebrated in graceful song, the vine found home and welcome along the shores of Lake Erie. There thousands upon thousands of acres now spread interminable vineyards, and the grapes of every American variety purple in autumn to an almost unfailing harvest.

It was at first only a dream when Longworth transplanted the wild vine from the woods, and it might well have been scoffed at as akin to dreams of the past which never were realized. One of these was the silk culture, which people believed was to be one of our greatest sources of wealth sixty or seventy years ago, when they planted millions of mulberry trees to nourish the silkworms which died rather than become citizens of Ohio. Another was the culture of the Chinese sorghum cane, which for many years tantalized our farmers with the hopes of native sugar never fulfilled.

Still other kinds of dreams there have been native to our air or naturalized to it. The Leatherwood God was by no means the only religious impostor who has flourished among us. In 1831 Joseph Smith, the first of the Mormon prophets and the founder of Mormon-ism, came to Portage County, with one of his disciples, and began to preach. They made so many converts that some shortsighted people of Hiram thought to stop their work by tarring and feathering them. This only drove them from the place; but the next year, they settled in Kirtland, Lake County, where, in 1834, their followers built the first Mormon temple, for the worship of God according to the Book of Mormon. It was this sacred book, written on gold plates, which Smith, a native of Vermont, pretended to find, in a hill near Palmyra, New York, where he was leading an idle and useless life. His converts at Kirtland increased to three thousand, but they founded a bank as well as a temple, and so got into debt and trouble. Smith left the state to escape the sheriff, and went to Missouri, where the great mass of the believers joined him, seven hundred leaving Kirtland in one day. Before long the Missourians foolishly began to persecute them, and then the Mormons settled at Nauvoo, in Illinois, where they built their second temple, far more magnificent than the first at Kirtland. But here again their unwise neighbors began to molest them, and Joseph Smith and his brother Hiram were thrown into jail. A mob attacked the jail, and the Smiths were murdered. The Mormons then abandoned Nauvoo, and took their way through the desert to Salt Lake, in Utah, where they laid the foundations of a great commonwealth. They still own their first temple at Kirtland, however, and it is said to be the hope of one sect among them yet to return and dwell there.

Among the fanaticisms or enthusiasms which flourished among our people, none was more striking than that which moved the Woman’s Temperance Crusade in Hillsborough, Highland County, in 1873. Under the influence of a fervent speaker, who told how the women of his native village in New England had joined in beseeching the liquor sellers of the place to give up their traffic, a hundred and fifty ladies of Hillsborough banded together and went about to the different saloons, entreating their owners not to sell strong drink any more. By day and by night, in wet and in cold, through menace and insult, they kept up their effort the whole winter long. Where the dealer was very obstinate, they knelt down at his door, and prayed and sang till he yielded. After the crusade ended, the liquor selling began again, but though it seemed to have done little good, yet it is said that there has been far less drunkenness in the region than before, and public opinion was roused to enforce the laws against liquor selling. Among the crusaders were some of the first ladies of the neighborhood, and good women emulated their efforts in several other places.

I am willing to leave the reader with the impression that the people of Ohio are that sort of idealists who have the courage of their dreams. By this courage they have made the best of them come true, and it is well for them in their mainly matter-of-fact and practical character that they show themselves at times enthusiasts and even fanatics. It is not ill for them that they should now and then have been mistaken. This has helped to keep them modest in the midst of their prosperity, and their eminence in saving and governing the union of these states. Such as they are, they seem to me, historically, the first of the Americans. The whole country on the eastward characterized them, and they, more than the people of any other state, have perpetuated and imparted their character to the whole country on the westward.

SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

A FANTASY

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

CHAPTER I

WE lingered amidst the pleasant avenues and crescents of Cheltenham, chiefly taken with the stately old-fashioned Parade, where, overlooking a Roman fountain, we found an American roof-garden. That is, it called itself a roof-garden, but it was silent about being American, and was really a canopied tea-room, only one flight up from the sidewalk instead of twenty stories; the fountain did not say it was Roman, but it was of a lavish spilth, and tumbled over marble shelves among mythological men and beasts, and so was Roman enough for us. A pleasant wind lifted the leaves up and down the Parade, where we did not mind the repair of the roadway going on with stone-breakers breaking stone, and a steamroller steam-rolling the pieces into a tarry bed. We could go away from the roof-garden tea-room when we liked, and walk or drive among the lawned and embowered mansions and lodges and villas, and educational establishments for both sexes, and think of our last King, our poor George the Third, who, though he alienated our affections, discovered the virtues of the medicinal waters of Cheltenham, and established the pleasant resort in a favor long since faded, but all the fitter for the retired Indian officers who now mostly dwell there, and apter to their strictly measured means. We did not personally verify the fact of their residence, for they were away on their holidays, as Englishmen always are at the beginning of August; but there were the large handsome houses of Georgian architecture, and we easily persuaded ourselves that they lived in these when they were at home.

In other words, we were so glad of Cheltenham by day and by night that we doubted very much whether we should hurry on to Stratford-on-Avon for the Shakespearean Festivals, held there throughout the month, on the brink of whose Bank Holiday we trembled. It seemed to us that we could do much better staying in Cheltenham, say a fortnight, with that Roman fountain and American roof-garden for our solace every day, and then go to Stratford; and the very last night of our stay we almost thought we should spend our whole August there, running over to Stratford for certain plays and coming back. What brought us to this conditional decision was our pleasure in the open-air performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in the park under the stars and the stir of leaves overhead, with the fine shiver of the natural and artificial bushes which the actors went and came through. They were very good actors, or at least as good as we deserved, both men and women; and the children that danced bare-legged and gauze-winged as fairies were adorable in that moment when the lovely English children are hesitating about growing plainer instead of simply growing older. We spectators were not in multitude, but we were fairly many, and we seemed to be fairly good society. We were very willing to be pleased with the playing, and we clapped handsomely at any chance, and so almost unanimously that I was a little vexed by the reticence of two gentlemen who sat directly in front of us and whom I was disposed to wish away at first. But as the time passed I forgot my grievance with them, if it was a grievance, and began to be interested in their peculiar interest in the performance, which they did not hide from me so much as I expected. They were of fairly good height, but one was much bulkier than the other and he seemed somehow of a cheerfuler make, though I imagined this rather from his carriage than from any expression of his face, which, in fact, I could not see at once. They both wore, or appeared to wear, the fashions of a West End tailor; they had on very-well-cut lounge suits, such as Englishmen almost live in when they are not on social duty and may indulge themselves in the excess of informality which the most formal of nations then likes to abandon itself to. But as the time passed their dress seemed to change, in a manner I hardly know how to describe, to something not old-fashioned but out-fashioned. Broad flat collars grew about their necks in place of the limp turn-down outing affairs they had worn; their jackets were replaced by slashed doublets of velvet; their trousers, slightly pegtop, turned to trunk hose. But what was more puzzling was an effect of luminous transparency which their persons now presented. I found that so far from incommoding me by their interposition between me and the play, I could see it none the worse but all the better for their presence, just as I could hear the actors more clearly, or more intelligently, for the talk which the two kept up pretty constantly. I cannot yet quite account for this curious fact (whether it was an illusion or not, I hope it remains a fact of my experience) and I give it to the reader for what it is worth. They sat rather silently through the opening passages of the play, where the lovers were having their misadventures contrived for them, but became restive, both of them, in that long, long scene where Bottom and Snug and Starveling and their brother mechanicals tediously rehearse their parts for the interlude which they are to play before the Duke.

At the end of it the slighter of my neighbors leaned toward the other and said, “It always seemed to me that this was one of the places where you fell down.”

“I know,” the stout gentleman acknowledged. “But,” he said, “it always got a laugh.”

“From the groundlings.”

“From her Grace herself.”

“The taste of her Grace was not always to be trusted. In matters of humor, of fun, it was a little gross, no? A little rank?”

“She certainly had a gust for the high-flavored in anecdote; but I don’t know that this scene is exactly of that sort. Coom to think of it, Oi—”

“Coom? Oi?” the other challenged.

“Come and I, Oi mane,” the stout gentleman owned with a laugh. “I do forget my London accent mostly, now that I’ve got permanently back to my Warwickshire; it’s so easy; after a language a dialect is like slippers after tight shoes. But what I mane — mean — is that I think these mechanicals are fairly decent; much more than they would have been in life. Her Grace would have relished what they would really have said, with the loves of Pyramus and Thisbe for a theme, if I had let them give way to their sprightly fancy without restraint; they had to be held up with a strong hand at times.” The comfortable gentleman laughed with a pleasure his companion apparently did not share, though, I fancied, less from a hurt moral sense than from a natural gravity.

“I never liked your bringing such fellows in as you often were doing. They are beneath the dignity of the drama. If you had taken my advice you would certainly have left the Gravedigger out of ‘Hamlet’; and your Touchstone and Audrey — I suppose you’ll say they always got a laugh, too. And that fat rascal Falstaff, and that drunken Bardolph, and that swaggering blackguard Pistol — I never could suffer them, though I suffered enough from them.” He laughed as at a neat point he had made, and then lapsed into what appeared a habit of melancholy.

“I won’t save myself from you behind Nature’s farthingale,” the other said, gently, “and I’ll own that these fellows here are not so amusing as I once thought them. The fashion of fun changes. I’ve heard that Mark Twain used to say my humor made him want to cry; perhaps in a century or two I shall have my revenge. But now, this scene of Hermia and Helena and their lovers in the forest here, I call that rather nice — their jealous fury, I mean; it has its pathos, too, I think.”

“I don’t deny it,” the gloomier gentleman said. “But I’m not sure I like the passions painted quite so nakedly. I should have preferred a more veiled presentment of these ladies’ hate as well as love. But it’s good, very good, very good indeed; or, as we used to say, very excellent good. Ah! That was well done of Hermia!”

“Yes,” the stout gentleman sighed, acquiescing, “I never saw it done quite so well in my time, when we had boys for the part.”

He put a certain stress on the word time, as playing upon it, and the other returned in like humor: “Yes; eternity has its compensations, and actresses are of them, though one wouldn’t always think so. They’re certainly better than those beardless boys of your time.”

The stout gentleman laughed dutifully, and the two went on concurrently with the play in their talk.

The play was a good deal cut, as I thought to its advantage, and I began to hope we should escape the scene of Pyramus and Thisbe: it did seem too much to have it after the rehearsal; and the rest was so charming. But we were not to escape so lightly. Bottom and the rest came on in due course, and I wondered how I should live through the joke. Suddenly I started, as if from sleep, and found that I really had been drowsing.

This will not seem so incredible if I allege that not very long before I had slept through a séance at the dentist’s in Boston, while he filled a tooth for me with the delicate skill of American dentists. Any one who can believe this will not doubt that I was saved from that tedious scene by Nature’s anesthetic, and that I stood up greatly refreshed, as if the operation had been entirely successful.

The wind that was still lightly fingering the leaves seemed to have grown a little chillier, and a thin cloud had blown over the stars. The people were streaming away from the seats; the scene looked all the emptier for the want of a curtain to hide its hollowness.

“Did you notice what became of those two men in front of us?” I asked. “Or which way they went?”

“What two men in front of us?” it was replied; and I began to think I had invented them in the swift dream I must have had during my life-saving nap. I suppose the reader has guessed at the identity of one of them, and I could have done so myself if I had not been rigidly principled against ever guessing in England about anything; it so unmistakably marks you for an American, and if you are trying to pass for English it is so defeating.

I said no more about the strange companions, but I declared that while I appeared to have been sleeping (as I was now promptly accused of doing) I had been thinking the whole problem over, and had decided that we had better not try to do the August rites of Stratford-on-Avon from Cheltenham, but go at once and settle in that town, and seize whatever advantages propinquity offered for enjoyment. As nobody objected I began to have some doubts of my decision; but after rather a poor night, and some very disappointing coffee at breakfast, I held firmly to it. I was all the firmer in it when I found that the head porter at our hotel had sent us to the station to take a train which did not go; I then felt that we must leave Cheltenham, even if it was not for Stratford. The railway porter who labeled our baggage for Stratford said that the first train leaving before five-forty was a motor-train, which left at three-thirty. I tried to make him tell me what a motor-train was, and he did his best, but fell back upon a solid ground of fact in assuring me that I should see.

CHAPTER II

WHEN I did see the motor-train I was richly content with it, and more content as time (a good deal of time) went on. The train was formed of one long car, with a smoking and a baggage compartment at the forward end, the rest opening airily into a saloon with seats on each side, as in our pleasant day-coaches at home. We had tried in vain to buy first-class tickets, and now we had all this delight at third-class rates, which alone are recognized on motor-trains. We slipped sleekly out of Cheltenham, which tried to detain us at two suburban stations (halts, such stops are called on the motor route), and sleekly ran through the grain-fields and meadow-lands and broad-bean patches, where the yellowing wheat stood dense, hanging its blond heads, and the haycocks covered the ground almost as thickly as the unfallen stems, and the lentils blackened in innumerable sheaves, and all the landscape stretched away in dreamy levels to a low horizon, where the afternoon hid them in its mellow mists. There were so few people in the car that we could change from side to side and seat to seat, and when we had done with the landscape we could give ourselves to conjecture of our fellow-passengers. Two of these were ladies, each reading a copy of The Nation (the London, not the New York one), and I tried my best to make out from it who and what they were, but I had arrived at no more than the conclusion that they were persons of intellectual as well as social quality, when they rose together from the place where they were sitting and left the car at I forget just what halt. I followed them with famishing curiosity, but when the train started again I was obliged to try doing what I could with their vacant places.

Then I found that their places were not really vacant, but were taken by the companions who had sat together in front of us at the open-air theater the night before. I was glad to note that by daylight they seemed more substantial than they had looked in the glare of the electric-lamps. It was as if they had chosen to put off whatever had been apparitional about them, and to be plain middle-aged Englishmen of comfortable condition. I observed that the stouter of the two now wore a Norfolk jacket, with knickerbockers and low tan shoes, as if he chose to do something more rustic in his dress than the other, who was dressed as if he had just come down from the waning season in London, and had not yet got into his outing things. I fancied that in this effect he was choosing not to be mixed up in anybody’s mind with the Bank-Holiday makers, who were already swarming over the country, and were giving every outward token of having a whole three days off; for it was Saturday afternoon, and Monday would be the great day of all. There was something less than kind in his melancholy, and yet I could not have said that he looked so much unkind as reserved in the bearing by which each of us declares his habitual feeling toward others. It was as if he were not precisely offended by the existence of common men, but incommoded; they kept him not perhaps from thinking of himself, but from thinking of things infinitely more important to him than they were. I was most struck with this sort of aloofness from his species, this philosophic abstraction, when at our coming to Broadway his companion spoke of the different artists who had first colonized the place. I had never been there, but it was dear to me because my chief association with it was the memory of a many-gifted friend who might have been almost any sort of artist, but chose mainly to be a painter till the sea engulfed him with the others that went down in the Titanic. I wondered if I should perhaps see the house where that dear, sunny-eyed F. M. lived, not mattering that I should not know it if I did see it; and I fancied a curious sympathy with my mood in the gayer of the companions which was absent from the gloomier one. It was not so much that he did not care, as that he could not; his thoughts were fixed on those abstractions in which he was himself the center and the sole concrete. I thought that if I had told the first about my friendship with the bright spirit so tragically quenched he would have understood, and would have said, perhaps, the fittingest thing that could be said. But as it was I could only catch a phrase or two of the talk which I tried to eavesdrop, and heard such words as “one of among the many lovely Rosalinds,” and “beautiful young American actress,” who had come to England, but soon married off the stage, and now lived the genius of that place. It did not seem to interest the other, who remained fallen in a sort of bitter muse, till we reached the station where we changed from our pleasant, roomy motor to the crowded express. The porter ran far forward along the train before he could find places for us, and he had so much difficulty that we began to hope he would be obliged to put us into a first-class compartment with our third-class tickets, when he got seats of the right grade of our transportation, and we rode the rest of the way to Stratford in a car so near the locomotive that it was blind with the smoke and choking with the coal-gas.

It was a very long ride; but suddenly, before we expected, we had arrived, and those two companions stepped out of the car just before us. I heard the stout gentleman say, cheerily, but with a touch of friendly irony in his words, “Welcome to Stratford, my lord of St. Albans!” If I had then any lingering doubt who the pair were I must have known beyond any misgiving that they were William Shakespeare and Francis Bacon, but why they should have come there together on terms of such incredible reconciliation I shall, perhaps, never be able to make clear to the impartial reader; as for their respective partizans I despair of them absolutely. I wished to seize the friendlier phantasm of the two, and force him to some explanation, and I suppose I must have made a clutch at the incorporai air where I had last seen him; but a vigilant young porter mistook my gesture as an appeal for his help.

He seized our hand baggage, and with the demand, “Any luggage in the van, sir?” hurried us away through the Bank-Holiday makers, already arrived in swarms that Saturday afternoon, and staring about in the distraction which lasted with them for the next sixty hours at least. They thronged the roadways as well as the footways of the old town (which I shall try to keep throughout this narrative from calling quaint), and they would have had my cheap commiseration in their air of vague bewilderment and apprehension of something worse than they were already suffering if I had not been anxious in my doubt whether we should find The Spotted Pard all that we had hoped a small hotel might be when we wired for rooms from Cheltenham. The holiday makers stood about in helpless groups, or streamed, men and maids, and mothers and fathers with footsore children at their heels and toes, and mutely made way for the motor we had found at the station offering itself for the same fare as a fly, and now carrying us and our piled-up trunks to The Spotted Pard for the one-and-six which at home would have translated themselves into two-and-sixty of our little-buying dollars and cents. It was such a quiet, kind-looking, patient crowd, so Englishly single-minded and good-tempered, that I was glad to have our chauffeur consider it humanely in his course; and I did not feel it so very molestful as I might in my vision of the streets and houses, which, from once seeing them years before, I now found so familiar. They did somewhat clutter these charming perspectives which so many streets in Stratford open from the sort of central quadrangle before the Town Hall; and an early stroll before dinner showed them filling the river with their skiffs, and punts and canoes, and droning and whining out the tunes of their blatant gramophones. But people whose holidays are few do not know how to fit themselves becomingly into the general scene, or to take their joy without the vulgarity which it comes so easy for us betters of theirs to avoid. The great thing is for them to have their holiday, and it is no little thing for us finer folk to recognize the vast difference between ourselves and them. The town received them with the hospitality which was none the less sincere because it was commercial; but even for money it could not house them all, and it remains a wonder to me how the most of them got roofs over their heads for the night. Well toward midnight a policeman was seen going about with a party of Americans, richly able and eager to pay for lodgings, and knocking at every promising and unpromising door to demand shelter for them. I am sorry to leave that party of compatriots still walking the streets; they were probably only a little less undeserving than ourselves, who had thought to wire for rooms at The Spotted Pard.

But even then I did not think ourselves treated in the measure of our merit as the night wore away after we had gone to sleep in them. They were pretty rooms, very fresh of paper and paint, in an ell or extension; but with the falling damp outside a strong musty smell as of old hay began to rise from the floor within. It was so strong that it roused the sleepers from their first sleep and kept them from their second till well toward morning. Then I was haunted in my dream by the noise of a ghostly thumping, such as horses and even cows make in the vigils which they seem able to keep, and not suffer the anguish of insomnia. Without waking or at all ceasing from my indignation at having been given rooms in what might once have been a hay-loft, I was aware that the noise I heard was no stamping of horses or cattle, but the muffled blows which Shakespeare was dealing on the doors of inns and lodgings with a demand for shelter, so that his valued and honored friend Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam and Viscount of St. Albans, should not be obliged to spend the night in the street.

CHAPTER III

“You see,” Shakespeare explained, a few days later, “I had asked him down for the week-end, and I fancied he would be my guest at New Place.”

“New Place?” I ventured to interrupt.

“Yes, of course; the little property I bought from my friend Underhill when I came to Stratford in 1597, a few years before I returned from London for good. It’s at the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane. You must have seen it—”

“Oh yes, yes!” I assented, from the strong purpose I had of seeing it.

“The house was in pretty bad shape when it came into my hands, not much better than a ruin, with two tumbledown old barns, and a weedy, wild-grown, old garden. But I had an architect look the house over and see what could be done with it, and he made something very pretty and comfortable out of it; those fellows have a lot of taste; and there’s where I finally settled when I gave London up in 1609, and there’s where I died seven years later.”

It was rather creepy hearing him speak of his death in that casual way, but if he did not mind it I did not see why I should, and so I smiled, and nodded, and said, “I remember,” and he went on.

“I had the garden dug out of the weeds, and the ground leveled, and sown to grass, and I planted a mulberry-tree — I was always planting mulberry-trees—”

“There I am with you!” I broke in. “I’ve planted no end of them. It’s the most delicious fruit in the world!”

“Isn’t it?” he joyously returned, though I could feel that he did not quite like having his autobiography interrupted.

“When I died I left it to my daughter Susanna, who married Doctor Hall — Or would you say Doc?”

“No, no; some Americans do, in the friendly domesticity of Western country towns; but in New York we don’t say Doc — often.”

“Hall was a good fellow, a gentleman born, and he had a large practice and was well-to-do; so that I expected the place would remain in the family, but it didn’t fall out so. Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth married a man of the name of Nash, and Susanna settled the place on them. It turned out that this couldn’t stand in law, but they arranged that Elizabeth should keep the property when she became Lady Barnard in her second marriage. After her death it was sold to Sir John Walker, and he gave it to his daughter who married Sir Hugh Clopton, if you follow me. Oddly enough, it was Sir John Clopton who built the house I pulled down, and now he pulled my house down, and put up something very fine in its place.”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, putting my hand over my mouth.

“Yes,” Shakespeare said, absently; and then he sighed, and said, “Poor Anne!”

“Anne?” I echoed.

“Yes. My widow — my wife. She died in New Place a good many years after me. I have never felt quite happy about the way people talk of Anne. I suppose it began with my leaving her my second-best bed in my will, but that was because she always slept in it at New Place, and wanted it especially devised to her. I made no provision for her because she was in the affectionate keeping of her children, and it would have reflected upon them if I had done so. Young man!” he broke off from his pensive strain of reminiscence.

“Not unless you call seventy-six young,” I suggested. “I do,” he answered. “I’m three hundred and fifty, counting both worlds, and I feel as young as ever I did. But what I was going to say was that I don’t want you to carry away the notion that Anne was unworthy of me, or socially unequal. She was seven years older than I, when we were married; I was as ripe as she in experience, and I was a very forward boy; I don’t brag of those days of mine. The world somehow likes to think meanly of the wives of what it calls geniuses; but if the wives had their say, they could say something on their own side that would stop that talk. Xantippe herself might give a few cold facts about Socrates that would make the world sit up; and if Anne told all she knew about me, my biographers would have plenty of the material that they think they’re so lacking in now. She was a good girl, and her people were well-to-do. For the time and place their house was handsome, as you will see when you go to Shottery. Been to Shottery yet?”

“Not this time; but I’m going,” I said.

“Do so. And when you’re there think kindly and reverently of my poor Anne. I only wish I had been as good husband to her as she was wife to me.”

His voice broke a little, and in the pause he let follow, I ventured: “I’m glad to hear you say all this. If I must be quite honest, the worst grudge I ever had against you was because of that second-best bed.”

“Well, I’m glad to explain it, and I should be obliged if you would make the case known to your American friends. It was a rush bed like those you will see at Shottery, and such as my poor, dear Anne slept in when she was a girl. She clung to it all her life; the children used to laugh at her about it. We had a good deal of joking in our family, at New Place. Anne liked the children laughing at her — especially Susanna.”

I ought to ask the reader’s patience with what happened just here. The moving-picture show is not yet established in the general respect which it must enjoy, and I hesitate to say that there now ensued as from a succession of rapidly operated films, like those thrown up at the movies, the apparitions of a young girl and a young man, she mature-looking at first, but growing younger and he older, till they fairly matched in contemporaneity. In the last they stood together, she with her hand through his arm, and he looking fondly down into her lifted face. Under this picture ran the legend:

So wear they level with each other’s hearts which seemed the adaptation of a familiar verse claiming a like effect in marriage from a disparity of ages.

Without saying anything my companion looked at these apparitions; when the last flashed out he glanced at me.

“Then it isn’t true — I am glad it isn’t true — as some people have fancied, that you didn’t live happily with her?” I said.

“Man!” he cried, sternly, “Anne was with me seven years at New Place, after I came home to her at Stratford. She was with me when I died; and do you think — can you think—”

“No, no, I don’t think it, and I’m ashamed of hinting at what I’ve heard others hint at thinking.” He seemed unable to go forward from this painful point, and at last I made bold to prompt him: “But who was that Rev. Francis Gastrell who cut down your mulberry-tree when he bought New Place?”

“That churlish priest? Oh, I don’t know. He seemed to have a spite against the whole place. He hated people coming so much to see the tree, and he pulled the house pretty well to pieces for no better reason. To be sure, the Cloptons had largely made it over by that time. You’ll see some of the old foundations — I don’t say the original. They’ve made a pleasant garden of it now, and planted it with trees and flowers. They’ve got a sort of typical mulberry on a rise of ground in the lawn; I believe it was a slip — you can’t kill a mulberry — brought from my old home-place — they call it the Birthplace — which, of course, you’ve seen. You must go and sit in the New Place garden; it’s very nice.”

He lapsed into a dreamy silence, and seemed to have forgotten so entirely what we had begun talking about, that after waiting rather a long time without saying anything, I hemmed, and asked, “And Bacon?”

“And Bacon?” he echoed. “Oh, yes! About our adventure that first night? I’ll own it had slipped my mind. But you know I brought him quite confidently here,” and as Shakespeare said this, I perceived we were sitting in the New Place garden on a bench just opposite the typical mulberry-tree; I noted that the berries were pale red, and I remembered leaving my own mulberries black-ripe at home a month before. “And really, till I came quite to the corner here, I didn’t see that the place was as bare as the Rev. Gastrell had made it; while we came along I had been looking at the moon over the tower of the lovely old Guild Chapel, there, which it silvered along the edges. You might have knocked me down with a feather; I’d been counting so on an eager welcome from Susanna and my poor, dear old Anne; and suddenly it went through me how dead and gone we all were, as well as our pleasant home. I made his lordship what excuse I could, and said I must ask him to put up with humbler quarters in my Birthplace (as they call it) off in Henley Street. I could see he didn’t like it; but he was very tired, and he said he should be content with any sort of shakedown; he added something inculpatory about his supposing I had not thought of Bank Holiday when I asked him here. I can scarcely expect you to believe me when I tell you what happened at the Birthplace; if it hadn’t happened to me I don’t think I should believe it myself. We found the premises in the keeping of a fellow who had been got in to assist the regular custodians, worn out by the rush of Bank Holiday; and he pretended not to know me at first, but I soon made him understand that wouldn’t do; even then he demurred at my having brought a stranger; he said that none of the chambers had beds in them, now, and he could hardly make so bold as to offer us the settle where he had been napping on some rugs. But I said this would do very well for my friend, and I would make shift with any sort of large chair. I said my friend was Lord St. Albans, and he must get a night’s rest, and the man said, ‘Not Sir Francis Bacon?’ and I said yes, and then he answered that he could not think of letting Bacon remain under my roof for a single hour, much less a whole night. He hinted that the fact of my bringing him with me there threw a doubt on my own identity; didn’t I know that the authorship of my own plays had been impudently claimed for this man; and how could I be going about with him on these friendly terms, and trying to extort a reluctant hospitality for him from my native place? I told him that I would be answerable to Stratford for anything in the case that affected her honor or pleasure; that neither Bacon nor I cared the least for that silly superstition, and were, as we always had been, perfectly good friends. While we were wrangling Bacon drowsed in the chair he had sunk into and slept heavily; it was the only sleep he got that night, poor ghost! Actually the man turned us out at last, threatening to call the watch if we didn’t go! Of course we went, poor old Bacon stumbling along, heavy with sleep, on his sore feet; and I suppose we must have knocked at every other door in Stratford.”

“Yes, I heard you,” I said, and I wanted to tell him how I thought at first it was the stamping of hoofs under my room, but of course he could not interrupt himself for that.

“It was the same story everywhere: full-up! At some places they were kind and truly sorry; at others they were furious at being called to the door, and banged it in our faces. But we came at last to a house where they said they had a room with two beds in it; and I pushed in at once, before Bacon could object to a double-bedded room; I wasn’t sure that he would have objected, but he’s rather crotchety, you know. The man of the house was such a kindly soul, and took his having been knocked up at one o’clock in the morning so sweetly that I thought I would please him by letting him know what a distinguished guest he had, and I whispered that my friend — he was drowsing again — was the Viscount of St. Albans. He started back, and his face darkened; it turned fairly black with a frown. ‘Do you mean Bacon — the Bacon?’

‘Well, yes,’ I said, ‘Sir Francis you know; our late Lord Chancellor.’

‘Then,’ says he, ‘I’ll thank you both to walk straight out of my house. I would rather burn it down than let it shelter that cruel wretch for a single night — a single hour — a single minute! Go!’

‘But my dear man,’ I said, ‘you surely won’t. I’m your fellow-townsman, and I entreat you not to bring shame upon the place by this barbarity. I’ve lived here, man and boy, body and soul, for three hundred years, and I never knew the like. When I tell you who 7 am I think you’ll be willing to let us stay. Why, I’m—’

“‘I don’t care who you are,’ he roared. ‘Out you go, and go you should if you were Shakespeare himself.’” He laughed in an apparently lasting enjoyment of the joke, and then, noticing that I did not seem to share his amusement, he checked himself for such explanation as I might have to offer.

“Why, but — why, but,” I began, “I don’t quite understand how, being disembodied spirits as you were, you required lodgings at all. I should have thought that the ‘viewless wind’ would have been shelter enough—”

I stopped, and he said with a smile of interest in the psychical fact: “There is something rather curious in all that. We don’t — we’re not allowed to — return to your world without certain conditions. If we materialize, as you call it — the term is inexact — we must put on some of the penalties as well as privileges of mortality, of matter. We get hungry; we feel heat and cold; we want roofs and walls about us. You see?”

“Yes, I see,” I said, but in fact I did not see, or at least see why. “Then I should think that after being liberated from those conditions you wouldn’t care to resume them — often.”

“We don’t. And that accounts for it.”

“Accounts?”

“For our coming back so seldom. The incalculable majority of us never even wish to come back. There isn’t really much meaning in our return. Some of you here think it would be a good thing if we appeared as a testimony to our continued existence, but we don’t like being doubted and denounced as impostors when we do that, as occasionally happens; and it’s generally felt that you who are here now can wait, as we waited before you.”

“Yes, there is sense in that,” I said. “And what, if I may ask, has induced you to materialize at this time?”

“Well, I rather like being here in August, for what they call my festivals. I always had a tenderness for the place, you know.”

“I don’t wonder.”

“And I like to realize that I’m remembered here. But they’re painful, too — some of the experiences of coming back. We don’t return without resuming the griefs, the sorrows of our mortal state. As long as we remain in eternity we are quit of our bereavements; if we come back to time our losses are as keen as in our mortal lives. I cannot revisit New Place without losing my dear boy, my Hamnet again, who died when he was eleven; I had so counted on his coming to live with me there, and I had my eyes on it all the more fondly because I thought to have him my heir to it.”

His voice shook, and I said, lamely enough, “But it’s all right now?”

“Oh yes, it’s all right. As he never married, he continues with his mother and me; his sisters continue with their husbands.”

“Why, I should think you would all continue together.”

“No, husbands and wives continue together. Marriage is the only human relation that endures forever. It destroys the old home to create a new one, and this in turn is destroyed that a still newer one may be created.”

“It seems a little hard,” I mused.

“No, no! It’s all right. It’s reason; it’s logic; it’s love. How could it be otherwise, if you will think? We blood-kindred can all be together instantly, by merely willing it; but Anne and I are together, and we have our Hamnet with us always — our little one, our dear boy!”

CHAPTER IV

AT the time Shakespeare repeated the speech of the householder who turned him, because of Bacon, from his door, I did not realize its full import. I had to live almost a whole August in Stratford before I could feel the force of it, or know just how much it meant, not to Shakespeare himself, for he always was and always will be a very modest man, but how much it meant to the man who uttered it. He had, in a manner, to take his life in his hand, and to launch himself in the tremendous risk of something like perdition, for it was little short of blasphemy to say such a thing in Stratford. The place may not have sufficiently prized her inestimable citizen in his earthly lifetime, but she has abundantly made up for any oversight of the kind since those days. She cherishes his memory with a sort of intensive recollection, which leaves no moment of his absence or his presence unremembered. I say absence and presence, but if forever absent he is forever present in these fond records; and one cannot witness them, though a wayfaring man, and err in a sense of their wonderful comprehensiveness.

It is not the names of streets or houses that speak of him; I do not know that there is any street named after him, and the sole objective monuments, architecturally and sculpturally, are so poor and few that one might wish there were none. A sprightlier fancy than Stratford’s might have called every house after some person of his plays; and this had been done in the pleasant hotel which received us when all the good will of The Spotted Pard could not avail against that ancient and barn-like smell which filled our pretty rooms and choked us from our dreams. The rooms in the pleasant hotel I mean are each named for some hero or heroine, mistress or lover, whom the poet left to outlive him here through the whole bounds of human fancy; so that if the lady in Desdemona had decided to stay on another day, the gentleman in Sir Toby Belch might have been going unexpectedly; or the party who had engaged Troilus and Cressida might have decided to take Romeo and Juliet instead. If Prospero had been assigned to some one vaguely wiring from London, the wirer could be put in Macbeth or Othello without knowing the difference, when he came, and the maiden ladies whom the manageress had meant to give the Weird Sisters, could just as well have Hermia and Helena, if the married pair personally applying did not like Katherine and Petruchio. Outside of the pleasant hotel, however, the memory of Shakespeare is wholly subjective, but it is none the less pervasive and exclusive for that. More and more one stands amazed at its absolute possession of the place. In that England of kings and nobles, of priests and prelates, of heroes and martyrs, there is no care for them in Stratford, though I suppose that they must all have more or less masqueraded there in their time.

That loyalty of the English, which we Americans can never understand, had indeed dug up for dramatic use in the Bank Holiday Pageant following our arrival, the fact of Queen Henrietta Maria’s entry into Stratford before the coming of the hapless Charles; and not far away at Edgehill a great victory of the Commonwealth was won; but all such memories sink and fade before that which began to fill the world from this little town, till now the world itself can hardly hold it, and I do not doubt it will be found common fame in Mars when Mars is proven inhabited beyond peradventure, and in Venus if ever she is seen giving her cold cheek to the kisses of the sun. In Stratford, I do not suppose there is any man, woman, or least articulate child who does not know something of Shakespeare, and I have no question that under their feet the passers from the remotest corners of the earth could hear the very stones prate of his whereabouts if they stopped to listen. That was not quite my experience, but I was not surprised, when I issued from the New Place garden with the poet, to hear a gray cat mew intelligent recognition on the sidewalk before the gate. By this time it was entirely natural that the night should be past, and the sun should be warming the English world which it seldom overheats, instead of the moon, which had seemed to be silvering the edges of the old Chapel tower while we talked.

Shakespeare stooped over and scratched the grateful forehead of the cat which pressed plaintively mewing against his ankle and lifted one paw to him as if for pity. “Why it’s lame, poor little chap,” he said. “I hope it’s some honorable wound received in battle, and not a pinch from a passing motor-car. At first,” he added, while he still kept acceptably scratching its head, “I thought it was one of our New Place cats; Susanna was very fond of cats; but then I saw it couldn’t possibly be living now even with its nine mortal lives put end to end; they would be mortal lives of course.”

He laughed softly with a kindly pity in his laugh, which won my heart more than anything he had yet said.

I began to understand, and I understood more and more why his contemporaries called him gentle and sweet.

He stooped again, and again scratched the head of the cat, which now rubbed harder against his ankle, and to my unspeakable astonishment and its own, passed through the limb, and came out on the inner side of it. The creature looked up, and then parading round him with arched back and lifted tail, tried the other leg and came through it as with the first. At this result it looked up as before, and catching a mocking glance from the poet’s eyes, it mewed loudly and limped off as swiftly as its three legs could carry it. He followed it with his laughter, but now boyishly wild and joyous, as at some successful trick. “Poor old Tom!” he called after it. “You didn’t realize that I was shadow, did you? Well, when I come again you may be shadow, too, and then you can rub against my legs without rubbing through them!”

He laughed and laughed, with that soft, kindly laugh of his, which made me understand so many things in his philosophy that I had not understood, and which was so simple-hearted and sincere as well as wise, that it made me ashamed not to own that I had shared the cat’s bewilderment. I said, “Oh yes, matter would pass through spirit, just as spirit would pass through matter.” And then I pretended a recurrent interest in his overnight adventure with Bacon, and I said: “Apropos of life, mortal and immortal, I didn’t exactly understand just where Lord St. Albans did pass the night, after all.”

He smiled. “No, I didn’t tell you. But I will, sometime. I think it will interest you. That’s one of our privileges in the future life — as you call it — and it’s a great privilege.”

“And — and couldn’t you tell me now? I should so greatly like to know. Where is he this morning, for instance?”

“Well, I don’t know that I could just say.”

“But — but,” I persisted, for I felt that somehow he was slipping from me, and I could not bear to lose him yet, “you didn’t mean to imply that this last man turned you out because of that Baconian hypothesis?”

I scarcely remember how I was going to get him to answer me; but before I could bring my purpose to bear, I was alone with the crippled eat which was mewing its pathetic entreaties to me, and the Bank Holiday sun was climbing the sky to shine unbrokenly on the Pageant slated for that Monday. Then I was sensible of there having been a Sunday between this Monday and the Saturday of our arrival, and of our having driven out through its afternoon heat and dust to see an aviator go up in his biplane from a clover-field, and buzz first loud and then low while he mounted into the “pits of air,” as Emerson called them in a subtle forecast of the atmospheric pockets which the airmen have found in the welkin. We crossed the fine old bridge over the Avon, which we left to the aimless joyance of the holiday makers, marshaled by the trumps of gramophones braying from their punts above the prone shapes of young men stretched out, as the wont in England is, in the hollows of the boats, while girls paddled or poled the dull craft along. Beyond the river stretched the dusty road, with pairs wedded and unwedded, and families of fathers and mothers and children on foot or in perambulators, thickly trooping toward the clover-field, and patient of the carriages and motors that pushed through them as patient as themselves. They seemed not to know how hot it was, and they took their pleasure without expense when they reached the clover-field, where it was as easy to see the flying outside the hedges as inside them. None of them seemed to feel the Sabbatarian scruple which had forbidden the Race Track authorities to let the airmen fly on Sunday from the course where so much money must be gambled away on week-days. Every nation has its peculiar virtues, and the English, who are not without their vices, expect to have their Sabbath-keeping imputed to them for righteousness when they are playing the horses. I who know nothing of horse-racing but as a spectacle, am not sure that man-flying is more beautiful, and it is now scarcely more novel. The machine harshly and then softly buzzed about the sky, and descended and ascended, and all who strained their necks to see it were equally content whether they had paid or not paid.

What left me with no sort of question was the Pageant next day, for whatever the Pageant is it is joy, void of all alloy of misgiving. Event for event, I think I liked best the pleasure of the actors, who were to help the sight so much, assembling for their floats behind the Theater, in those masquerade properties they had so easily come by. The ladies were preoccupied in woman’s great business of looking beautiful, as if they took seriously the burlesque of the Elizabethan courtier who capered about painting their cheeks for them. A friendly old gentleman in the crowd, who made our acquaintance and kept it at every point throughout the morning, here tried to remember what part he had once taken in a Pageant long ago, and was not satisfied with his son’s suggestion that it was Falstaff. When the procession was formed the floats toiled slowly and shakily through the well-contented town; floats of fairies great and little, historic floats and dramatic, and of the chiefest rustic and mechanic and domestic arts, all led by Queen Henrietta Maria making her prolonged and repeated entry into Stratford. A vast Swan built up of white cotton batting satisfied the heart jealous for the primacy of the Swan of Avon in a supreme hour of his native town, and if it came last in the show, it certainly did not come least. The fairies danced and sang their way through the streets, and the large children seemed as single-heartedly glad as the little, and when they happened to be young girls, as lovely. But I gave my heart most to the old chair-mender, who in his linen smock frock and his aged top-hat repaired a chair-bottom throughout the morning with unflagging zeal.

The long forenoon ended with a longer afternoon in the meadows beyond Avon, where all the local sports had their turn on foot and on horseback, with old and young in the acts. A hundred little girls skipping with their skipping-ropes like one, and acrobatic boys in divers circus feats, represented the schools; fencing, single-stick, wrestling, running, and leaping by amateurs varied the generously contributed events of the cavalrymen, who, from some neighboring station, slashed each other’s paper plumes as rival knights, and wrestled from their horses’ backs. When the spectacle became unbearable without tea, there was of course a tea-tent where you might have it at the counter or at tables on the grass; if you ordered it at a table it was our experience that the tea-maiden who took the order had it, after a hesitation, on her conscience to warn you beforehand that it would be a shilling each, and not sixpence, as at the counter. I thought at home we might have been left to the greater outlay without the forewarning; but perhaps not.

CHAPTER V

THE Pageant which began the August festival at Stratford was only the beginning. It ended at noon; the other things went on the whole month; and I am not sure that the pageant had quite got its paint off before the song, the dance, the masque, the play, and the lecture were in full tide of joyance. They went on concurrently, like those streams which meet from different sources and swim together in one channel to the sea; and as you were borne with them you became yourself of their effect if not their origin. You became a part of the general transport, and felt, though you might not altogether look it, the happiness of the town in her greatest son, the greatest of the sons of men. As the days passed in a golden sequence scarcely dimmed by a few cloudy hours, it seemed as if there could never be such another August if ever there had been its like before, and the Genius of the festival, whoever he was, must have rejoiced more and more that he had appointed it for the season which Shakespeare might have chosen himself for his natal month rather than the raw April that chillily welcomed him into the world. Of course the right Shakespeare festivals are and have been held on and about his accepted birthday, but if the gradual rise of the August celebrations has been from a sense of his own imaginable preference, I should feel it a very graceful compliance. I should not think their coincidence with the greatest Bank Holiday of the year would be offensive to his memory; he would not probably have objected to sharing them with the middle, and lower middle, and unqualifiedly lower, classes who then flood the whole English land and who seem to wash through his native town in tides that rise yearly higher. If he seems in his plays to show little specific sympathy with the groundlings, that is no doubt because he was himself a groundling, or very near it, and knew, as they know, that as groundlings they were no better than their betters. But this is a point which he was to touch upon later, when I brought it home to him in one of those tacit colloquies we were often holding in Stratford.

As for his actual, or putative birthday, I have ventured a conjecture of the English April’s chilliness in the sixteenth century because I have found April so cold in the twentieth, but, for all I can really say, that famous twenty-third of it may have been one of those rich, soft days, full of dull sunshine when the flowers make haste to open themselves to the bees, and the birds do their best to flatter the trees that they have made no mistake in budding or even blossoming. In fact, if, as many contend, we know very little about Shakespeare, we know least of all what sort of weather it was the day he was born. This is one of the strongest proofs of the Baconian authorship of his plays; for if Bacon had been born on that 23d of April, we should have known just how the thermometer stood, and whether the day was wet, or the spring early or late; he would have noted the facts himself. But I do not mean to fling this apple of discord among my readers; it was never gathered in Stratford, for no such fruit grows there. They have scarcely heard of Bacon in that devoted town, though indeed I found at one of the shops a small bronze door-knocker figuring the Lord Chancellor in the court where he took bribes if he did not actually sell justice; the point has been made in his favor. On the other hand, in a shop-window not far off, the proprietor had sacrificed his very patronymic to the poet’s fame in the sign of “Bacon’s Shakespeare Restaurant.” I was thinking, “How Shakespeare would enjoy seeing this!” when in one of those cinematographic apparitions which he was apt to make in my consciousness, flashing in and out of it as the figures do in the films changing at the moving-picture show, he joined me and consented to share my amusement in it. But I observed that more and more he refused to smile at the cost of a man who had not himself been very tender of his friends while he lived among them here.

As we turned from the window and he led on down the street, he said, kindly, “We must always remember that he is one of the greatest benefactors of the race, and that he suffered greatly.”

“And, his atonement, as far as his plea of guilty went, was magnificent. It was one of those supreme things.”

“Magnificent, supreme! Yes, but what a tragedy!”

“You could have written it; he couldn’t.”

“Well, perhaps that one he could.”

The incident by no means followed close upon our meeting in New Place gardens, but he had offered no facts yet as to where or how he had disposed of a guest who made even the poet unwelcome in his mother-town. I ventured to fancy, however, that he might have taken for their common shelter one of those pleasant houses which their owners are willing to let furnished in Stratford, together with their servants and the general good will of the place, while they are themselves off on their holidays, at the seaside, or in Brittany or Switzerland. In our own vain search for quarters, we viewed several such houses, as alternatives of the lodgings which were always full-up; and I have finally decided that Shakespeare took a certain pretty cottage which was proposed to us with a garden sloping to the Avon and a punt belonging to it lying at the foot of the lawn. I am rather sorry now that we did not take it ourselves, not only because it had a populous wasps’ nest in the center of a flower bed, and a temporary gardener with a carbuncle on his neck and three more coming, but because I should like having lived in a cottage haunted by the greatest poet and the greatest philosopher of all time. We should not have known they were there by day, and by night we should have been so tired with each day’s pleasuring, and so drowsy from being up every night at the theater for the Shakespeare plays, that we should not have objected to the ghostly presences that exchanged criticisms of each other’s lives and works in our dreams.

It would not be easy to give a true notion of the fullness of each day’s pleasuring without seeming to give a false one, and I shall not try to do more than touch here and there on a fact of it. I should not be able to say indeed just how or why we found our favored way, one of the first mornings, to the Parish Parlor where we somehow knew that there was to be folk-singing and folk-dancing, and a lecture about both. Two years earlier we had formed the taste for these joys at a whole day of them in the Memorial Theater, and had vowed ourselves never to miss a chance at them. The songs then were sung and the dances danced by young people and children from the neighboring factories and farms, but now the intending teachers of those gay sciences were being taught by one deeply learned in them and of an impassioned devotion to them. One of the ballads was so modern as to be in celebration of the Shannon’s victory over the Chesapeake in the War of 1812, when the American ship went out from Boston to fight the British, and somehow got beaten. It had a derisive refrain of “Yankee Doodle Dandy O,” and whether or not the lecturer divined our presence, and imagined our pain from this gibe, it is certain that the next time he gave the ballad to be sung, he adventurously excused it on the ground that it possibly celebrated the only British victory of the war. Nothing could have been handsomer than that, and it was in the true Shakespearean spirit of Stratford where fourteen thousand Americans come every year to claim our half of Shakespeare’s glory.

Three days of the week the lecturer taught the teachers by precept and example; he talked a little, very simply and unaffectedly, from full knowledge of his theme, and then he called upon the students to sing and dance. He was not above giving them the pitch from his pipe, and then playing the tune on the piano with the accompaniment of a girl violinist; and we could not choose whether we liked the singing or the dancing better. They sang old country ballads and they danced old country ballets, telling stories, and reverting to the primitive earth-worship in the lilting and the stamping and the bell-clashing of the morris dances. The pictures which the learners made in illustration of the lecturer’s theme were our unfailing joy, but the first morning we had our soul’s content absolute beyond any other fortune when the whole glad school issued from the place, and formed in the middle of the street, where, men and maids together, they took the light of the open day with the witchery of their art, as they wove its patterns with their intercircling shapes and their flying feet and their kerchiefs tossing in the air above their heads. This wild joyance was called a Processional, and it was likewise called Tideswell, after the village where it was first imagined. One morning the lecturer joined in it, and became a part of its warp and woof.

It was a vision of Merry England which the heart could give itself to more trustingly than to any dream of the olden time when, with whatever will, England had far less reason to be merry than now. At last the sense of human brotherhood seems to have penetrated with conscience the legislature long so cold to the double duty law owes the common life. The English lawgiver has perceived that to keep people fairly good it must make them decently happy. Better wages, evener taxes, wholesomer housing, fitter clothing, are very well, but before these comes the right to a fairer part of the general cheer. It was told us that the young people who came to learn these glad tidings at Stratford were all teachers in the national schools, and that they were paid by the government for their pleasure in learning them. Perhaps I have not got it quite right, but it ought to be as I have got it, and at any rate I will leave it so. It is certain that these young men and maids were working as conscientiously at their gay sciences as if they were gloomy ones; the young men in tennis flannels and the maids in the gymnasium wear which left them free to foot it illustratively in the morris and the country dances. Most of the young ladies were housed for the month in a girls’ school, with its dormitories and its lawns and groves; others dwelt in tents along the levels of the Avon, where through its willows you could see them from your punt making their afternoon tea, or kindling their fires for the evening meal, all sweetly sylvan, and taking the heart with joy in their workday so like a holiday. They went about the streets of the town in the waterproofs which cloaked the informality of their ballet dress; sometimes the dress was so little ballet that it needed no cloaking, and such a dress we once saw worn late in the afternoon when the wearer had to fly up the street toward the Parish Parlor so as not to be late for the song-and-dance lecture. The dress was blue, and it fluttered about the young ankles as the wearer ran along the wall under some overhanging bushes which claimed her part of their bird-life and flower-life, and thrilled the heart of the beholders with a sense of beauty escaped from some

Attic shape, fair attitude, with brede

Of marble men and maidens overwrought.

Then one of those who saw the lovely vision thought, “What a pity Shakespeare could not see that!” and instantly to his inner hearing came the response, “I never miss seeing such things as that,” and there at my shoulder the friendly phantom was, or was not, it mattered so little whether or no.

CHAPTER VI

AT Stratford I felt as I had not before that one of the most charming things in Shakespeare, a man so variously charming that his contemporaries each might love him for a different thing, was his fondness for his native town. Every one knows how affectionately he came back to Stratford from his brilliant success as player and playwright in London, and apparently could ask nothing better than to end his earthly days where he began them. During our wonderful August of uninterrupted golden weather he seemed to like dropping round to my hotel in the afternoon, when I had got my nap, and taking me a walk about the town, where he appeared to be as much at home with the modern aspects as with the older phases. He had the good citizen’s pride in its growth, and noted how pleasantly it had pushed out beyond his birthplace to the northward uplands in streets of nice little, new-brick villas, each with its grassy dooryard and flowery garden. He liked all the newer streets, even those where the close-set, story-and-a-half rows of small brick cottages were like the monotonously ordered play-blocks of children. He professed a pleasure in their bright red, which he said expressed simple cheerfulness and cleanly comfort, and he could not understand at first how they should interest me so little, I being from a new world full of new dwellings. But when I explained that this was the very reason, he laughed and said it was quite imaginable, and he amiably consented to rambles through the fields beyond, where Nature was neither new nor old, but was what she always had been and always would be. Or from the northward uplands he would turn back across the Avon canal, and come down William or Tyler Street to the gardens beyond the Birthplace and veer off through the irregular square at the head of Bridge Street, into Chapel. We never failed to join in tender enjoyment of the sentiment of the Police Station, with its lace-curtained bow-windows, and its beds of flowers beneath them. He seemed particularly fond also of that rather blank square where High Street began, with the slope of Bridge Street to the river and the little afternoon show of hucksters’ booths at the top, and the huge omnibus motors for Leamington and Warwick standing midway of its incline before the Red Horse and the Golden Lion inns. He made me confess that the effect of the bridge across the river was very pleasant if not too picturesque, and now and then he walked me down to the holiday life of the stream, and the sheds of the cattle-market beyond.

I had not the ordinary traveler’s zeal for the timbered houses so characteristic of Stratford, and so rather abundant in High Street and Chapel Street; but one day I fancied going with him into the Harvard House, which I confessed was very charming and perhaps the best example of the style. Apparently the American flag flying at the peak of the gable without the rivalry of the British colors anywhere in the town amused him, for he smiled in looking up at it, and said in his time we were all English, or if I liked, all Americans. I said he would probably find some Americans to prefer that formulation among the many thousand that visited his Birthplace every year; but as for me I should be content with saying that we were all Shakespeareans then. At this he laughed outright, and taking me by the shoulder pushed me toward the door. He put his hand on the carved panel and we passed through its substance without attracting the notice of the kind woman who shows people about the place. There were a number of Americans following her and listening to her comment on the house which, girl and woman, she had known while it was still business offices, brutally modernized with plaster and paper that hid the rich, old black timbers and the wattle-and-dab of the homely walls. She was saying that she still lived in it, and kept house in the top story, while Shakespeare, who was making me invisible and inaudible with himself, laughed and said: “Before we took that cottage of ours on the river, I brought our friend Bacon here with me in the hope that this good soul, or perhaps even Mistress Harvard, might find us quarters after we had been turned from every other door in Stratford. You may imagine what a piece of luck I thought it when instead we were received by the Rev. John Harvard himself, who had come down to Stratford for the Bank Holiday, and had kept staying on with his mother for pure pleasure in the town. John is a good fellow, and I counted so confidently on his welcome that I made my friend known to him at once. ‘You’ll be glad to meet Lord St. Albans,’ I said, ‘because a law professor of yours over there in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was one of the most strenuous and zealous upholders of the theory that he wrote my plays. It’s something that neither his lordship nor I believe in ourselves, but we respect the earnest convictions of others, and he has always rather liked having the theory dignified by a law professor’s acceptance; he has a fellow-feeling for a jurist, you know.’ I saw Harvard was a little bemazed by my palaver, and evidently groping for my friend’s identity. ‘St. Albans — St. Albans,’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes; Sir Francis Bacon, you know,’ and then he said, ‘Oh! Oh yes!’ and shook hands, but not very cordially, I thought, and he asked, ‘What can I do for you, gentlemen?’ which I always feel equivalent to ‘How little can I do?’ I told him he could save our souls alive by giving us the shelter of his roof for the night, and I related our misadventures. He laughed rather meagerly, and said he should be only too glad, but ‘It’s my mother’s house, you know; I’m only here as a sort of guest myself. I’d ask her; but she’s rather a stiff old Puritan, and I don’t know just what she would say to having a stage-player under her roof.’   ‘Oh, that’s all right!’ I reassured him. ‘I don’t mind walking the night, myself, but his lordship is rather worn out, and I don’t think he’ll much mind my leaving him.’ In fact, I saw by his anxious face that he wouldn’t mind it at all; he was always ready to throw a friend over; Essex, you know. I added, to humor the joke, that though he might have written my plays, it was certainly I who played them, and Mistress Harvard’s objection ought to rest on me alone. The Reverend John’s eye glimmered cold; he hemmed and hawed, but said nothing about Bacon’s staying the night under his mother’s roof without me, and Bacon pulled himself up out of the chair he had dropped into, and we went out again under the stars, more hospitable than John Harvard’s eyes.”

I was rather blankly silent. Then I managed to ask: “And is this your notion of something amusing? Or merry, as you would call it?”

“Why, if it doesn’t appear so to you! But at the time I thought that after my being turned out of one house on Bacon’s account he was having his revenge in being turned out of another on my account.”

“Oh, I see. That was rather merry,” I said, but I hastened to leave the point. “By the way, this strikes me as being one of the nicest of your old timbered houses; it’s a style of architecture that can’t very well be commended for beauty; but I suppose it has charm, and it’s endearingly simple-hearted. I like their opening a bit of the wall here to show the wattle-and-dab construction, the interwoven wooden slats filled in with mortar; we’re mostly wattle-and-dab ourselves, morally, if not physically; and the old house has its stateliness. Looking from the back toward the street this main room is of noble size and proportions, and that nicely carpentered frieze is delicate and very pretty. Who were the Harvards, anyway?”

“Not Harvards, even, when this house was built. It was built by your John’s grandfather and grandmother, and very probably his mother, who was their daughter Katherine, was married from it to John’s father; he belonged in Southwark, where I had one of my theaters, and his father was a butcher. My own father was a butcher, you know, after he failed in the wool business, and I handled the meat myself.”

“Yes, yes,” I hastened to interrupt; he was running to autobiography too much. “I hope you didn’t obtrude the horrid carnage on the public as your English butchers do nowadays. I suppose,” I ventured, “that it was considered rather a drop from the butchering business when you took up play-acting.”

“You mean by my townfolk here? Well, they didn’t regard my London life with pride exactly, as you may have inferred from the Harvards’ reluctance about me.”

“And over there,” I pursued, helpless against the curiosity I had, “over there — where you are now, I mean — do they look upon it quite as the good people of that day did?”

“The dramatic vocation? Why, we are rather useful occasionally. Eternity gets a bit long, now and then, and a vivid representation of some sort helps make it go again. And in the case of a reluctant conscience, a sluggish and unwilling memory as to deeds done in the body, if we can dramatize the facts to the doer — Yes, we are rather useful, and nothing is respected so much as usefulness, there.”

He stopped, and I took the word. “I see; and I suppose you were away in London at the time this house was built in 1596?”

“I was back and forth a good deal, for I always meant to retire to Stratford and I was buying real estate here—”

“And Tithes, and supposititious Gentility, so as to qualify you to set up a coat of arms?”

“I gave way to that folly, yes. It is a part of the English illusion. You are fortunate in having had your eyes opened in America, where you care nothing for such things.”

“Well, well,” I parleyed. “I don’t know.”

“Really?” he returned, ironically. He was silent, and when he spoke again he said, pathetically: “I remember the year this house was built chiefly because 1596 was the year my poor boy Hamnet died. It would have broken my heart if his mother hadn’t given me hers to keep it whole. That was when we were first truly married. I thought I was parting with him forever, but Anne knew better; we’ve often talked it over together, she and I, and the girls. It was then that I fixed the time when I should come to Stratford. We were in the old Henley Street house still, but I had my eye on New Place.”

As he spoke I found myself in the street with him, and began taking account of the many timbered houses which I had already noticed in the different streets. We had the Tudor House directly at hand (rather overdone, after the quiet Harvard House), and as I glanced along Chapel Street at the stretches of the same sort of buildings, I said: “Why, if you took them all out of Henley Street, and Wood and Ely and Sheep and Chapel Streets, and put them together they would reach nearly half a mile, but with their white masonry and black timbers, don’t you think they would look a little too striking? Rather too like half a mile of zebras?”

“Why, you might say zebras; but they are not all so too striking as this Tudor House, which you’re mostly carrying in your mind, and which is not strictly Tudor, though it is decidedly timbered. And do you think that any middle-class or lower middle-class dwelling in any country was then so good, or was in such good taste? I believe I’ve read in one of your own books that we English never had known so much comfort before or since as in the period of these houses.”

“Yes, yes; certainly. And if I said it I must have been right, and come to think of it, I was right as to the inside of these houses. It’s the outside that rather troubles me when I imagine an indefinite stretch of it; then it turns into that half-mile of zebras. You don’t mind my saying it?”

“Oh, not at all. I believe the great mosque at Cordova reminded you of a colored circus tent—”

“Why, you do keep round after me! I didn’t suppose you followed us moderns so closely. I’m sure it’s very gratifying. But I suppose you have a great deal of time on your hands?”

“We have a great deal of eternity; excess leisure is one of our little penalties; if we’ve wasted our time on earth we have a sense of too much eternity. Of course it isn’t rubbed in, or not indefinitely, though naturally there are extreme cases when it is rather rubbed in, or seems to be. Then a spirit is glad to turn to almost anything for relief, and in that way all your popular literature, all your best-selling fiction, for instance, gets read among us. I can’t say that it’s read by our best public, but perhaps the public’s as good as the fiction.”

I gave an unwilling laugh. “I hope your acquaintance with my travels was not punitive. I don’t understand that you wasted a great deal of time when you had the time.”

“I gave myself vacant spaces. But your Spanish travels were not one of my penalties.”

“Oh, thank you!”

“I’m not saying, though, that I agreed with you about the mosque at Cordova. I don’t agree with you altogether about the outside of Stratford. In my time when it was all timbered houses it was a very dignified old town;’ it’s only in my eternity that it seems to have gone off, now when many of the buildings along High Street and Chapel here are said to be timbered fronts stuccoed or bricked over. But as it is—”

“As it is, it’s charming! Isn’t this perspective delightful?” We looked along the friendly street, which, whether it called itself High, or Chapel, or Church, was always the same kind street, to where we saw it closed by a comely brick mansion, ample, many-windowed, and offering a rest to the eyes from the timbered quaintness which I dared no longer blame.

“Yes,” he said, “all our perspectives are fair.” And by an art he had, a sort of control over place, he gave me the cinematographic range of several other avenues, up and down, and then reverted with me to Chapel Street, where we had been standing. “But I think this is best; and don’t you like the courageous fancy expressed in that façade yonder which seems to have burst into blossom ‘from roof-tree to foundation-stone’?”

“Yes, I do like that; and I like your cabmen pointing the house out with their whips to their American fares, and telling them the name of the famous woman who lives in the house and owns it.”

“You Americans are under a peculiar debt to that lady.

You know it was she who heard that the Harvard House was for sale and told a rich Chicagoan of it, and bought it for him, and so for the American nation and the American university which he gave it to. It was a handsome thing all around, but not handsomer for the millionaire than for the novelist; except for her he might not have known of the house, and so might have missed his great chance. It was she who imagined finding the present sixteenth-century house inside of the commonplace nineteenth interior and exterior which it wore when she found it for sale, and afterward realized it as we see it now. By the way, your Americans—”

“Oh, why alienate us by a geographical term? We were all one blood when you lived here in Stratford, and we have never ceased to claim our part in you; why not claim your part in us?”

“What would your Baconians say?”

“Let them say what they like. You are always ours, and so is Stratford. I am proud of our nation, but our name seems to part us!”

“Well, suppose we say Yankees, then?”

“No, no! That’s what our illiterate Indians called us in your time, and your literary Indians call us now.”

“Well, well, call yourselves what you like. Here certainly we are fellow-subjects—”

“Oh no!” I made haste. “Fellow-citizens!”

My companion laughed. “You are difficult. I was going to say merely that here in Stratford we owe a great deal to your countrymen, whatever we call them, especially your countrywomen. You know that two of them have lately bought my son-in-law’s old house, and put it through the same process of restoration, or rather revelation, as the Harvard House?”

“Oh yes, I know that.” And by one of these mystical effects which my companion could operate in virtue of his character of disembodied spirit, we were instantly in the charming grounds of Hall’s Croft. “This is delightful,” I said. “To think of a place and to be there in the same emotion — it transcends all our earthly dreams of rapid transit. Swedenborg mentions it, and I always thought it such a poetical idea, but I never imagined it practicable.”

CHAPTER VII

“CROFT; croft,” I soliloquized, looking about me on the acre or more that spread from its inner boundary to a continuous thicket and wall next the street, with tall trees overhanging them: a space of level greensward with brown walks through it and a blaze of geraniums here and there. In the midst stood a mulberry of Shakespearean lineage, which had dropped its half-ripened fruit on the grass and gravel, as seems the habit of the English mulberry, and under this we stayed for the moment together. “Croft, croft,” I murmured, and I went on with the lines from Tennyson’s Two Voices:

“Through crofts and pastures wet with dew

A living flash of light he flew.

Of course, I always knew what crofts were, but you have to see one — and such a one as this — before you can realize that when a croft isn’t a small Westmoreland farm, it is far more delightfully a turfy Midland garden hedged from the world of such a tranquil town as Stratford, and inviting to easy-chairs and afternoon tea and friendly talk, day in and day out, through interminable summers.”

“Yes,” my companion said, “Stratford is rather full of crofts; two or three more along this street, and such a vast one as The Firs where the folk-singers and folk-dancers are sojourning, and that behind the house of the author who found the Harvard House for you, and others opening in lesser limit from many a simple dwelling with a street-front that keeps its croft a secret from the passer.”

“How English!” I said. “If we had a croft at home we would pull down the wall and pull up the hedge, and pretend to welcome the world to it, and then stay indoors and glare at people who ventured to pass over it. I think of all our fake simplicities and informalities the worst is throwing down our domestic bounds, and pretending we have no barriers because we have no fences. Why, if you found yourself, invisible and impalpable as you are, in our fenceless suburbs you would feel as strictly kept on the outside as an unbidden guest at a dinner. Of course the notion was, when the fences were first disused, that everybody would enjoy the beauty that somebody owned; but I doubt if it ever happened; the sight of it merely mocked the outsider, and until we really own the beauty of nature in common, we had better not pretend that we do. For my part, I believe in crofts, and I’m going to have one as soon as I get home.”

“They take time,” my companion suggested. “I don’t suppose my son-in-law lived to see this croft in anything like its present state. He was at it as long as I lived, and I lived nine years after he married our Susanna. We thought it rather a fine match; he was a physician, and had a large practice throughout Warwickshire, with a social standing far above that of the daughter of an actor-manager and a writer of plays. He was an author himself, and kept a record of his Cures in Latin; and among his grateful patients were ‘Persons Noble, Rich, and Learned.’ There were thousands of such cases, and you remember Dr. Furvivall in his life of me says that if he had cured me in 1616 instead of letting me die we should have had an interesting account of his success.” Shakespeare chuckled his enjoyment of the humor. “But I wasn’t destined to the celebrity his learned pen might have given me; I have had to put up with the name that I ignorantly blundered into making with my plays. John was something of a prig, I’m afraid; and whenever Ben Jonson, with some of the London fellows, came down, they had it hot and heavy in learned disputes that my ‘small Latin and less Greek’ left me out of. But he was a good husband to Susanna, though she never would allow that he was more of a man than her father.” He laughed again for pleasure in his daughter’s loyalty, and said she was her mother all over in that. “Yes, John was a good fellow, and if he fancied coming off here and building himself a house where he could have scholarly quiet about him, I’m sure no one could object. For my part I was used to the rush of London, and I liked better being in the thick of things at New Place.”

Considering how a half-dozen people reading the tablet in the iron fence, and a few others peering through it at the foundations of the demolished mansion, with the passing of a cab or a motor or two, formed the actual turmoil about New Place (except when people were coming from the theater), I was tempted to ask my companion if that was his notion of the thick of things, but I also wanted to put a question of more pressing interest. “And do you suppose you could get me a glimpse of this interior here?”

“You mean of the house?”

“Well, yes.”

“Would you be going to write about it?”

“Well,” I hesitated, “things that I see are liable to get written about, you know. It was the case with yourself, wasn’t it?”

“I think I’ll let you come some day without me,” he said, gently, but firmly. “Sometimes people are sensitive—”

“But anything related to you, no matter how remotely, is of such interest to the public.”

I was trying for some more convincing demur, when I found myself in the street outside the croft, and walking toward the dear and beautiful old church where my friend’s immortal part lies under that entreating and threatening tablet. The thought of it gave me rather a shiver. “Oh, oh!” I began. “Had you thought of going in?” With a concourse of Cook tourists in motor omnibuses and on foot preceding us, I pretended a preference for some quieter occasion, but Shakespeare regarded them sociably enough, though he said:

“No, only into the churchyard.” And we walked under the avenue of sheltering trees to the church door. The place is so kindly and as it were so homelike that one night I came there in the company of another and we got half up the avenue, moon-dappled through the leaves overhead, before we realized that we were in a churchyard, pacing over outworn tombstones, and so thickly peopled everywhere with the dead of earliest and latest date that we could not have stepped aside without treading on a grave. We turned and fled, but now with my deathless companion, I turned and kept to the riverside, where we sat down on some memorial stone, and looked at the stream with its punts and skiffs and canoes, and the meadows beyond with cows and boys in them, and those evident English lovers strolling together beside the water. Pretty well everywhere in Stratford, if you will listen, you will catch the low, hoarse jawing and jowing of the rooks, and this now fell to us from the tree-tops which were stirred by the breeze drawing cool along the river. The trees were well-girthed elms, all leaning a little from the shore, as if they had been lured by the river when they were tender saplings, and had not been able to draw back. From the farther and nearer expanses came the soft clucking of oars in the rowlocks, with the sound of voices, and a stray note of laughter; from some remotest distance the wiry whine of a gramophone reached us. Suddenly, without warning, the bells in the church tower burst from their silence, and expanded in the air overhead as with a canopy of clangorous and deafening uproar. “Oh, I can’t stand this!” I cried, startled to my feet by the explosion.

“Yes?” my companion said. “I suppose I’m so used to it; but it is rather dreadful.”

“In New York,” I said, proudly, “we don’t allow it; we class it with the detonations of the insane and unsafe Fourth, which are now forbidden.” I did not say that bell-ringing was almost the only unnecessary noise which we forbade at other times.

But probably Shakespeare knew; he said: “Yes, I suppose it belongs, with the noise of drums and trumpets, and cymbals and pianofortes, to the boyhood of the race; and sometime the church-bells will be silenced along with the guns and cannon-crackers and steam-calliopes as an expression of feeling. Perhaps,” he added, “they can be so tempered as to have the effect of bells at a distance, the squillo lontano that melts the heart of the mariner when he hears it in the dying day.”

“Beautiful!” I breathed. “Do you read Dante much?”

“Well, you know I picked up some Italian from my friends in London, when,” he laughed amiably, “I was supposed to be idling away my time in writing plays and playing them. Italian was very much the fashion at court.”

“Yes, I know; and, of course, you were always picking up the beautiful wherever you found it. You must feel it a great comfort,” I suggested, “having a cultivated contemporary with you, now you’re settled in your riverside cottage.”

“You mean his lordship? Well, I don’t know. He’s not always in spirits; he has his ups and downs; especially his downs.”

“Really? He isn’t still worrying over those old things?”

“Not all of them.”

“Because I can assure you that since he’s come up as the author of your plays a great people have quite ceased to think of him as a false friend and a venal judge.”

“Oh yes; I understand that; but it isn’t always a consolation to him. By the way, why don’t you come and talk to him? You haven’t looked in on us yet. Come!”

In a moment we found ourselves in a passing punt, invisibly and unpalpably seated at the stern behind the head of the white-flanneled youth who lay stretched in the bottom of the boat dreamily admiring the awkward grace of the girl who was paddling her way among the different river craft. Besides the skiffs and canoes and the other punts there were steam and naphtha launches plying back and forth; but she got through them all, thanks less to her skill than the build of the punt, which is framed on the lines of the puddle-duck so far as upsetting is concerned. When we came abreast of the cottage we lightly quitted our unconscious hosts who kept along the willowy shore, while we mounted to the level of the rose-walled lawn, where we found Bacon walking excitedly to and fro with a large volume open between his hands. He wore the dignified and handsome Elizabethan gentleman’s dress, and I admired that he seemed to be smoking a long-stemmed pipe, as if he had been one of the first Englishmen to form the tobacco habit. He blew fitful clouds from it as he walked, and he was so absorbed in his book that he did not look up at our approach. Yet he seemed to know of our being there, for he said: “Of all the follies alleged in proof of my authorship of your plays, there is none quite so maddening as the notion that you couldn’t have written them because if you had there would be more facts about you. The contention is, and it’s accepted even by most of your friendly biographers, that there is little or nothing known of your life. I maintain that there is far more known of your life than there is of most authors’ lives.”

“There’s more known, in some particulars,” Shakespeare answered, merrily, as his day would have phrased it, “than I would have allowed if I could have helped it.”

“You mean about the poaching, and the deer-stealing and the cudgeling by Sir Thomas Lucy’s people, and your lighting out to London to escape jail?” I suggested.

“I was a wild enough boy,” Shakespeare began.

Bacon took the word from him: “But I can tell you, my friend,” he said, lifting his eyes and bending them severely on me, “that those things are the inventions of vulgar romance. Will, here, probably played his wild pranks, as he would own, but the man who ended as he did never went far in that way.”

“Well,” I ventured, “I didn’t invent them and nobody could like better to believe them lies. I wish his biographers wouldn’t mention them even to refute them, but perhaps it’s because of the paucity of biographical material—”

“Paucity of biographical material!” The ex-lord chancellor violently struck the open page of the book in his hand. “Let me tell you that there is comparatively a superabundance of material, as Andrew Lang shows in his excellent book on Shakespeare, Bacon, and the Great Unknown. Far more is known of his life than of the lives of most other famous poets.” Shakespeare smiled at me with a shrug of helpless protest, as if he would say, “He will do it,” and Bacon went on: “Take, for instance, the case of Virgil, which I have just happened to look at in the encyclopedia here.”

“The India paper copy?” I asked, seeing how lightly he held it.

“No; it’s an old edition; but I’ve imponderabled it for my convenience just as Shakespeare makes you invisible when it suits him to have you pass with him unseen.” He handed the massive volume to me; it almost floated on my hand; and he continued, in taking it back, “Here is the most famous poet of antiquity, after Homer—”

“Then you don’t believe that Homer was a syndicate?” I put in.

“No more than I believe that I wrote Shakespeare. And what does our encyclopedist know of Virgil, who lived when Rome was at the zenith of her glory, and was one of the central figures defined by the fierce light that beat upon the throne of the great Augustus? Why, he knows that Virgil was born in the country on his father’s farm near Mantua; that he was of the yeoman class, and glad of it, as he suggests by his praise of rustic life in his Eclogues and Georgics. His father, though ‘probably’ a plain man, discovered his son’s talent and put him to school at Cremona, and, ‘it may be inferred,’ went with him there. At sixteen the boy assumed the toga virilis, and ‘shortly after’ went to Milan, where he kept at his studies till he went to Rome two years later. ‘A powerful stimulus must have been given to his genius’ when he found himself there in the dawn of the Augustan age, ‘as may be inferred’ from certain lines in the first Eclogue. He studied under a rhetorician who was ‘probably’ the teacher of the future emperor, and became personally devoted to the Epicurean philosophy under Siron; but, if we may believe his verse, preferred poetry. The Eclogues allude to his circumstances and feelings nine years later, but ‘of what happened to him in the interval during which the first civil war took place and Julius Cæsar was assassinated, we have no indication from ancient history or his own writings’; but, ‘we may conjecture’ that he ‘was cultivating the woodland muse’ in his native region north of the Po. In his first poem there is full record, however, of what he felt at being expelled from his ancestral farm, which was confiscated to provide land for the soldiers of the Triumvirs. Augustus officially reinstated him, but when Virgil offered to resume possession the soldier whom the place had been allotted to, chased the poet across the river, and Virgil thought it best to take his father with him to the villa of his old teacher Siron. Then he went to live at Rome, where he was welcomed in the highest literary circles, and his Eclogues were published in 37 b c. He left Rome, however, and after longer or shorter sojourn near Naples and in Sicily, ‘it seems not unlikely’ that he made a voyage to Athens. He spent the years from 37 to 30 b c in writing the Georgies, which he read to Augustus; and he spent the rest of his life in polishing the Æneid, which he did not survive to give the finishing touches, though he read three books of the epic as it stood to the emperor and his family. In Athens he met Augustus, who persuaded him to go back to Italy with him, and on the way he was seized with sickness from the excessive heat, and died at Brindisi. He was buried at Naples, where his tomb was long regarded with religious veneration and visited as a temple. ‘That veneration... was greater than what we find attaching to the actual memory of any ancient poet, though the mystery connected with the personality of Homer excited a greater-curiosity.’ This is all,” Bacon ended, closing and dropping the volume, which instantly resumed its ponderability and fell to the ground with a heavy thud, “this is all the careful encyclopedist has to tell of the life of the most famous and beloved poet of antiquity, except the fact that he was so much dissatisfied with the Æneid, which he had to leave uncorrected, that he instructed his literary executors to suppress it, and it would have been lost to the world if Augustus had not interfered and commanded its preservation. In fact, Virgil’s wish for the destruction of his immortal epic may be compared to the indifference of our friend here to the fate of his dramas, which he left to the ignorance of the printer and the ravage of any editor who chose to collect and publish them.”

“The things had served their turn in the theater which they were made for; in those days when we literally made our plays, and we scarcely supposed people would care to read them.” As he said this, Shakespeare sat down on one of the garden seats, and watched with a scarcely conscious smile the antics of the much-carbuncled gardener who had been pouring hot water down the wasps’ nest in his flower bed and was stiffly capering about with the kettle in his hand to avoid the pursuit of the exasperated insects. As he finally disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, Shakespeare burst into a shout of laughter inaudible except to us who were sharing his invisibility.

“May I ask,” Bacon demanded, severely, “what is so very diverting in the suggestion I have made? We will not pursue it if you prefer not.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” Shakespeare choked out, “it’s the ga-ga-gardener and the wa-wa-wasps!”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Bacon returned, with dry offence. “You must excuse my inadvertance,” and he moved toward the house.

“Oh, come, come!” Shakespeare called to him. “Don’t go! What you have been telling us is something I hadn’t the least notion of. I beg your pardon. Do go on!”

“There is no more,” Bacon hesitated, “at least about Virgil, but I had thought of making a parallel of your own case with his—”

“Well, if it won’t tire our American cousin — or nephew — or brother — or uncle — or fellow-subject — or fellow-citizen, here?”

“Not at all. I shall be delighted. I think it’s extremely interesting,” I made haste to offer in placation of our friend, who was still loath to forego his offense.

“It’s this recurrent, this almost essential light-mindedness of yours which spoils so much of your noblest tragedy! You let your motley come clowning in at the highest moments, and to get a laugh from the pit you turn your Macbeth, your Hamlet, your Romeo and Juliet into farce. If you had taken my advice, or would take it now — but you wouldn’t, you won’t!” Shakespeare waited patiently, and Bacon, after he had fretted his grudge away, resumed. “What struck me was the poverty of the known events in Virgil’s life. Of these there are scarce a baker’s dozen of the most elementary; the rest is supposition and inference. There is nothing to show the character or nature of the man in the events; nothing that might not have happened to any other poet. It was a good deal so with Ben Jonson himself, who was one of the most self-advertised poets of our time. We know that he was a quick-tempered, violent-natured, warmhearted, censorious, generous, pedantic, humorous, wrongheaded, delightful old fellow—”

“He was, he was!” Shakespeare assented, with enjoyment. “And he is much the same still. Of course, he has learnt rather more self-control, but he’s ‘rare Ben’ yet, and will be to all eternity, I hope.”

“Yes,” Bacon continued, “but what do we know of the intimate facts of his life, the facts that shape and nature a man, the personal facts? We know that he was a posthumous child, and that his mother, who married a second time, is supposed to have loved him in a passionate way of her own, insomuch that when he was sentenced to have his nose and ears slit for ‘insulting the Scotch’ in a play, she prepared a poison which she meant to drink with him before the sentence could be carried out. His stepfather is ‘said’ to have forced him to lay a few bricks after Ben left school, to remind him of their trade of bricklayer; and Ben is ‘supposed’ to have lived unhappily with his wife, whom he mentions coldly, and parted from after five years, though he remembers her tenderly in the verses commemorating the two children they lost. It is certain that he was sent to Westminster school, but ‘it is stated’ only on ‘unsatisfactory evidence’ that he went afterward to Cambridge. He killed a fellow-actor in a duel and barely escaped hanging; in prison he was visited by a Roman Catholic priest and was converted to his faith, which twelve years later he renounced because of the Papist complicity with the Gunpowder Plot. He went soldiering in the Netherlands, and came back to the bricklaying of his youth; later he traveled governor to Sir Walter Raleigh’s son in France. For the rest, he lived and wrote and drank in London; but the encyclopedist doubts whether in the last of his visits to Stratford he was the cause of our friend here overdrinking himself and taking the fever he died of. These are all the intimate facts which his biographer can lay his hands on, and a fair half of them he doubts, or supposes. Merely in number — not to speak of significance — they do not compare with the well-known and generally accepted facts of the life of our friend here, who is imagined to have left little or no material for the biographer—”

“I wish,” Shakespeare said, starting restively to his feet, “that my biographers would agree to forget some of the most intimate facts of my life. I have willingly done so, and I remember them only when I find them recurring in print. Then I feel like denying them.”

CHAPTER VIII

THE philosopher glared at the poet from under brows which met in a frown such as he used perhaps to bend upon suitors in court while his pockets bulged with their offerings to justice. His pipe had now gone out, and he went about lighting it with the effect of having quite finished what he had to say.

“Well!” the poet prompted.

“There is nothing more,” the philosopher answered, in cold resentment, and began pulling at his pipe.

“But that parallel?”

“I thought you preferred your trifling.”

“My joke is dear to me, but not so precious as your interest in my biography.”

“And I, if I may venture to entreat your lordship,” I put in, “should think myself greatly the loser if I failed of your parallel. I don’t think anything like it has been offered, yet, in proof of our friend’s authorship of his plays.”

His lordship continued silent for a little longer; then he severely resumed. “I had thought of enforcing the parallel with other examples, but it is not necessary, and I will only suggest in refutation of the argument that Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare because he has left no handwriting of his behind except two or three autographs differently spelled from each other, that we have no signature of Chaucer’s, though he was an eminent diplomat and went upon many embassies to the continent, requiring signatures. It is not certainly known who his father was, or precisely his wife. None of his poems survive in his own manuscript, and it isn’t known which were irrefutably his; just as some of our friend’s plays here are of doubted origin, and none were printed from his own handwriting. Your two poets are alike, moreover, in certain alleged violations of the law: Shakespeare is said to have stolen deer, and Chaucer to have taken part in the abduction of a young girl; probably neither did either; but the interesting fact is that uncertainties cloud the history of the courtier as well as the life of the player. Seven years of Chaucer’s time left no record, just as nine of Shakespeare’s left none. But when you come to speak of the paucity of biographical material in the case of our friend here, I would have you contrast its abundance with the want of facts concerning most of his eminent contemporaries and predecessors. It is perfectly known who his father and mother were and their origin. The year and almost the day of his birth are known, but not so clearly the place; though it was certainly Stratford and certainly not the Birthplace. The day of his baptism is ascertained, and when and where he went to school — almost. There is no doubt whom he married, and if not where, then when, and reasonably why. At fixed dates his three children are baptized. In a certain year and month he goes to London, where he becomes not so much personally a holder of gentlemen’s horses at the theater, as a sort of horseholding syndicate or Trust, and an employer of skilled labor in the boys trained by himself for the purpose. From this business eminence he sinks to be a poet, a playwright, and even a player by distinctly dated gradations, and is enviously attacked for his success in the drama by a brother dramatist. The dates of his successive plays are fairly approximated in their production at the theater and their reproduction from the press, and the time of his buying New Place is fixed. His unbroken relation to Stratford during his London years can be traced by the dates of his various purchases and lawsuits and participation in local affairs. His devotion to his family expressed itself in all filial, paternal and fraternal sorts; he marries his daughters to his liking; he stands godfather to his friends’ children; when his mother dies he yields to the homesickness always in his heart, and comes back to end his days in Stratford. He wishes to be a principal citizen and a man of social standing; he buys tithes and joins in fencing the people’s commons; he rejoices in a coat-of-arms, and likes to be known as William Shakespeare, Esquire, trusting that his low-class career as actor-manager in London will not be remembered against him. But he likes to be remembered by his old dramatic friends, and he welcomes Michael Drayton and Ben Jonson to New Place, where he lives till his death in peace, if not affection, with his wife. He even engages to excess in their jolly riot, for, as a Vicar of Stratford recalls some fifty years later, ‘Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Drayton had a merie meeting, and it seems drank too hard, and Shakespeare died of a fevour there contracted.’ Others, however, hold that his fever was a filth disease contracted from the pigsties that then ran the length of New Place in Chapel Lane. But it is enough,” his lordship ended, with a dignified gesture of his pipe-stem, “that he died full of glory and honor.” Shakespeare, who had been listening more and more restively, wincing from time to time at facts which I thought his guest might better have spared him, rose and stretched himself, saying: “I didn’t realize before that I was such an unquestionable celebrity.” Then, as I rose too and thanked his lordship for his convincing statement, but said I must really be going, Shakespeare, as if he would escape some merited reproach, said he would go a little way with me, if I didn’t mind, and we hurried off together. We had not got as far as the bridge when he answered the tacit question in my mind, as the custom is among disembodied spirits.

“Yes, he is often very tiresome company, especially when he gets to harping on my record and its sufficiency for all the practical purposes of the biographer. But I haven’t the heart to stop him, for I know it forms his escape from grievous thoughts about himself which otherwise he could not bear.”

“You mean his conviction of bribery, and his dishonor before the world; that heavy fine, which was the least of his burdens, and his deposition from the high office which he had held with such pride and splendor?”

“No, no; not chiefly that. He settled with that when he owned it, saying, ‘I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defense.’”

“But why not supremely that immeasurable fall?” I insisted. “Above all other great men — for he was one of the very greatest — he ‘loved the world and the world’s law’ of luxury and state and flattery. He crawled and truckled to those who could forward him, and he took their snubs and insults almost with thanks, as for so much condescension. He knew himself the sublimest intellect in the realm; why should he show himself the basest lickspittle in it to that old harridan Elizabeth and that slobbering pedant James, and his own ungracious kinsmen, their ministers?”

“Ah, it’s a strange anomaly,” my companion answered. “He is a riddle that I don’t often attempt to read. But what I say is that he has long ago ceased to feel shame for his dishonor, but when he returns to earth the ingratitude and treachery he used toward those who trusted him are again an unquenched fire in his memory. He still writhes in pity of the poor man Aubrey, whose bribe he took and then pronounced ‘a killing decree’ against him. And his friend Essex, who enriched him with gifts and never tired of showing him good will and doing him good deeds, and whom he repaid by hunting him to his death and stopping every chance of mercy which the law might have left him — in the remembrance of Essex he suffers as if Essex would be living yet but for his pitiless pursuit. I don’t know how he bears it; and since he finds some little respite from his remembrance of the wrong he did by righting the little wrong which he thinks has been done me, I can’t deny it him.”

“No, of course not,” I agreed, “but I could have wished that his argument had been a little less in the nature of special pleading.”

“You mean in regard to that famous old saying of Hallam’s that ‘no letter of Shakespeare’s writing, no record of his conversation has been preserved?’ Why, I thought he met that fairly. People used not to keep their correspondents’ letters, and I was never a great correspondent. But the encyclopedist, whom he mainly followed in his argument, cites as to my conversation the interview my kinsman Thomas Greene had with me in London concerning the inclosure of the common lands, at Stratford and Welcombe; and there were other meetings with the friends of the scheme, when I told them distinctly that I ‘was not able to favor the inclosing of Welcombe.’ This is not only proof that I could and did talk with people and that they remembered it; but it ought to be remembered by those who imagine I cared nothing for the poor, that in these meetings I defended their interests and not mine, in opposing the fencing of the common lands.”

There was more warmth of feeling in Shakespeare’s voice than he usually allowed to be felt in it; for the most part it was expressive of a kindly, if ironical humor, as though the matter in hand were not worth very serious consideration, though he liked playing with it. I was about to say that I was glad to have him express himself so decidedly, in this connection, when I was aware of being alone, and I pursued my way across the bridge and kept on in one of those rambles through the town which were mostly as aimless as they were eventless.

CHAPTER IX

IT was more than a week after we were placed in our pleasant hotel in Stratford before we began to look about us in the lovely country round. The town was enough, with its openness, its brightness, its smiling kindness; for the time we could not wish for anything more, and we never found anything better, though we found abundant beauty in the farms and villages of the Midland slopes and levels. Everything in Stratford was homelike, and nothing more so than the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where we took our luncheon, with their blaze of a small flower garden behind and the little arbor at the kitchen door where you might have a table if you liked. The coffee was very good there, for a wonder in England, and the buttered brown-bread toast was an example to the scorched and refrigerated slices of cottage-loaf prevailing elsewhere on the island; and after ordering these it was pleasant to keep along Church Street past the low-roofed and timbered almshouses to the shop where first green gages and, after their season was past, large red Victoria plums were to be had. Such a crooked little shop, with half its stock in two unrelated windows, and the rest in baskets behind and under the counter that began elbowing you our of doors as soon as you got in, and ceased treading on breathless small boys with pennies in their hands, could have been rightly served only by two such scrupulous sisters, or at the worst sisters-in-law, who would not defraud us of a single plum in the half-pound. The fruit was grown, they said, in their own orchards just out of town, but which way we never understood, and it was in no wise related to the fruit of their next-door neighbor, as he, equally with themselves, assured us. We always hurried back to the Cochin-China with it lest the toast or the coffee should be cold; but it never was, for at noonday the little tables were all full, and the service, though reliable and smiling, was not eager. We had a table in the back room looking out on the kitchen arbor, and though we were but three we kept it against all comers till one overcrowded day a young German priest came in with three nuns, and looked so hopelessly at a three-chair table that we could not do less than offer him ours, which was for four chairs. They took it with such bows and thanks as ought to have made us ashamed, but only made us proud of our simple civility, and anxious to found a claim to acquaintance on it. We did not push, though I tried hard to believe that it was my duty to tell them I knew a little of the German they were speaking, and I only eavesdropped as hard as I could till a decent chance of warning them offered. I suppose that there are sometimes gayer parties of young people, but I have seldom heard more joyous and innocent laughter than that of those gentle sisters in their angelic flirtation with that handsome young priest. He could speak English, it seemed, from his constantly saying, “All right, all right,” and presently it seemed that the sisters could. All three of them were lovely and two were beautiful, and all three again were as glad as children; and none of the fashionable ladies we had left in London seemed so perfectly ladies as these dear sisters in their starched white coifs under their black veils and in their broadcloth robes falling round them in sculpturesque folds. When some offered courtesy broke what ice was left between us, the young priest was proud to tell us that the sisters were from a Catholic college in England, and he went further and said that the least young of the three was “a very learned sister.” This brought us somehow to the question, always rife at Stratford, of the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and the sister was of such a decided mind upon it that she was not surprised so much as grieved to learn that the poor lady who first mooted it had died in a lunatic asylum.

I could have wished that Shakespeare, and even Bacon, had been there to enjoy the learned sister’s rejection of the theory, but I saw neither of them for some time after that day at their riverside villa. In the mean time we saw a great many fellow-Americans, not indeed at the Cochin-China Tea Rooms, where they came very sparingly, but at our hotel, where they abounded, mostly in motors with the dust of hurried travel upon them. I suppose that the motor-face, of whatever nationality, is not engaging; but when its composite expression was added to the effect of something intense and almost fierce that seems to characterize our native physiognomy abroad, one could wish that it was not always so self-evidently American in those who wore it. If the automobile conditions are everywhere such as to rob the motorist’s presence of charm, to these compatriots’ hardness of face was added that peculiar stoniness of voice which is so often noticeable in us, and which made them as wounding to the ear as to the eye. They overwhelmingly outnumbered the English, who lurked apart in the hotel parlor while the Americans prevailed in the hallway. It must have been difficult for the English to bear this, and I heard two of them revenging themselves one day: “It seems to me I have heard that voice before.”

“Yes; that’s one of the educated ones.” This voice was the cat-bird twang of so many of our women, and it sometimes made itself heard in the dining-room, where the dress of the speaker was not always of that superior taste which we used to pride ourselves upon in our women. It was difficult to choose one day between the plumage of a lady who wore a single tall ostrich feather, full and blue, curling far aloof from her hat, and the feather of another lady exactly the same in outline, but as to the final curl black and skeletonized. There was in most of these motoring women an effect of not being sure that they had got all they had come for, or of not quite knowing what they had come for, and in their men a savage, suspensive air, as if, having given Europe a fair trial, as a relief from business, or as a pleasure to their wives and daughters, they were going to see about it when they got home. Perhaps all this is unfair; and perhaps it would not be just to judge our national nature from the expression of the average automobile people at home.

They had been motoring through England and Wales, as they would report when they got back, and were suffering a mental and moral dyspepsia from bolting the beautiful scenery untasted as they could seize it with distorted eyes, much as people seize the events of a three-ring circus. We ourselves became of their class for several runs into the country about, but besides not being able to afford the folly, we really preferred the neat victorias which they have cheap at Stratford, but not so cheap as good. In one of these, apt for our little party of three, we could find ourselves domesticated in the landscape round about. The country was of the same bright openness as the town, and one could as easily love it. I had supposed it leveler than it proved, though it was level enough, and where it waved, it waved with harvests of wheat and rye, golden and glossy green, rippling as the surfaces of the long ground swells at sea do. In the distance, the uplands were of a tender blue, and in the dim air the trees mounted like smoke from the hedges. The Avon and other vague streams idled about, and there were bridges and farm-houses and villages that one passed without much worrying over their identity, though no doubt they each had an identity. They had their bowering orchards of gnarled apples and of wonderful plums, green and blue and red, which were as much an example to American plums as the wheat-fields to our wheat-fields. We praised one of the thickest harvests to a conversible farmwife, but she said, “Oh no, that was not good wheat; you could see between the stems.” The region is not only a good farming country, however, but a good hunting country, and after the pleasures of the Shakespeare month end in Stratford the savage joys of the chase begin for the boyish men and women who ride to hounds through the sweet, insulted scene.

In England many things change, suddenly, thoroughly, but other things remain unchanged, usages projected from the dead past like the light from planets extinct long before it has reached the earth. They still have kings and queens in that romantic island, and lords and ladies who have no more relation to its real life than gnomes and fairies, but must be indulged with the shows and games invented for them in the days when people believed in them, and not merely made-believe. Now and then a grim smile of derision which is also self-derision breaks over the good-natured visage of the make-believers and is accepted by the universal tolerance as of right and reason. Hard by a fine old stone bridge, where the Avon found us in the country half an hour after we had parted from it in town, stood a pleasant inn, with lawns and potential tea-gardens round it, which called itself The Four Alls, and illustrated its name by a sign-board bearing the effigy of the king who Rules All, of a clergyman who Prays All, of a soldier who Fights All, and of an average man who Pays All. These Four Alls appear to prevail in every civilized country, but they might not everywhere be painted in such smiling irony as here.

I believe it was on our way home from visiting the home of Shakespeare’s mother at Wilmecote, that we stopped to converse with the amiable landlord of the Four Alls Inn. She was that Mary Arden who was as gently as his father was fiercely named, and whom one is willing to think as gently natured as her name. The Welsh are beginning to boast her of their race, as if, not content with the honor of the greatest living Briton, they must needs claim through her the greatest Briton dead; but if Welsh, she was doubtless of one of the many princely Welsh lines, of no apparent grandeur in its exile. The Arden cottage, at any rate, is a little wayside thing, belted in with a bright-flowered narrow garden, and it leans its timbered wall somewhat wearily, as from its weight of four hundred years, toward the earth. All the world knows, which knows so much too little of her world-famous son, that Mary Arden brought her husband this cottage and its sixty acres, under her father’s will, with other lands and tenements inherited from her two sisters; and if not of princely state, she was of a comfortable yeoman lineage. When she went to live at Stratford it is pleasant to believe that she left her father and mother living at Wilmecote, and keeping up the ancestral farm there in better state than one sees it now. The cottage and the decrepit barns and stables, with their sagging walls and slanting roofs, inclose a sufficient farmyard, with a gate giving into a venerable orchard, which tempted but did not prevail with us to penetrate its grass-grown aisles. One likes to leave such places to their solitude; and besides, the tenant of the cottage, who promptly demanded sixpence each for letting us see it, was not sure that her summer lease included a sight of the orchard. She led us up and down over the homelike cottage, which opened in an unexpected number of comfortable little rooms; these, opening casually from one to another, had been modernized, but not too modernized, with sparing English grates, where once the freer fires must have been of wood. Several staircases led to the upper rooms; the thick walls showed their oaken beams; the narrow sash were leaded; the floors were stone. It was very homelike, very suitable for a grandfather and grandmother, and I was thinking that if Shakespeare used to come out from Stratford to see the old people there he must have had glorious times, when the inaudible voice at my ear from the invisible presence at my shoulder, which I had now come to expect at any thought of it, said: “Yes, far more glorious times than any I ever had in London at the height of what I thought my prosperity. My mother used to bring me here when I was too little to know how homesick she was for it, and then sometimes my father brought me, and by and by I came alone. I dogged my grandfather’s heels all over the farm till I came to know every inch of it, but I seem never to have lost any moment of my grandmother’s cooking. When I went away I was in paunch and pocket full of the gingerbread which she made better than any one else in the world; I missed none of the wild berries in their season or the earlier and later apples in the orchard, or the plums that overhung the house-wall. I knew the dogs and horses and cows; I was not too proud to be friends with the pigs. I robbed the wild birds’ nests, and I didn’t neglect the partridges and pheasants even when I came to understand that they were sacred to the gentry; it was the beginning of my poaching, I dare say. I swam in a famous pool which there was beyond the orchard in summer, and in winter I risked a ducking on its thin ice. I loved Stratford, and my mother, and even my father, but a boy is king in his grandmother’s house, and I bore sovereign rule here. Yes, those were glorious times indeed.”

As we drove home to Stratford, the afternoon grew lovelier and lovelier, with a mild sun and a few large white clouds lounging in a high, blue sky. In the hedges the hips of the sweetbriers were reddening and the hawthorn berries were already scarlet. The blackberries were ripe where the canes were broken down by the pickers. The wheat was mostly cut, and in the farmyards where it had been threshed the ricks of bright new straw were neatly thatched. We came from Wilmecote to the Alcester road by a lane that was almost wild, and out through a deep, peaceful valley; when we reached the highway two little girls in pinafores were standing beside it, one with her pretty arm up to shield her eyes from the westering sun; and in all our course we met only two motors, and —

“Yes, yes! It is peaceful, peaceful, utterly charming!” I said to the presence which had mounted with us for the homeward drive, of course not incommoding us in the least; but suddenly it had become an absence, in the fashion of such presences as soon as you take your mind off them; they are so delicately fearful of seeming intrusive.

CHAPTER X

NEARLY every evening of every week of August we strolled out after dinner from our hotel to the corner of New Place, where Shakespeare died, down Chapel Lane to the theater where he still lived in those plays of his which were given every second night and every third afternoon. They were the most vital experiences of the commemorative month, and the Memorial Theater found in their succession a devotion to its office beyond the explicit intention of its giver. That is what I say now, trying to do justice to the esthetic and civic fact, but to be honest nothing of the kind was in my mind at the time. I only thought how charming it was to be going to a Shakespeare play on terms so quite unlike going to any other play in any other place. The days were shortening in August, but the twilights were still long, and they were scarcely half-way spent when they saw us to the theater with all the Stratford world, gentle and simple. The way across the street at the foot of the lane was guarded by a single policeman who sufficed to save us from the four or five motors glaring with their premature lamps, and panting after their run from Warwick or Leamington. Without his help one could have safely passed between the family carriages bringing the nearer neighbors to rites which the whole region frequented rather more than if they were of religious claim. But by far the greatest number of us came on foot, and when the play was done, we went home by the same means under the moonlight, in the informality of morning dress unless we had bought places in the first row of the balcony. The orchestra implied no such claim, but partook of the informality of the pit behind it, which there as in most English theaters continues the tradition now lost to our theaters. The seats were not reserved there, nor in the upper galleries, which, however sparse the attendance elsewhere might be, were always packed by the undying love of the people for the universal poet.

Sometimes when I fancied the poet there, in escape from a heavy evening with Bacon in their riverside cottage, I liked to suppose a generous regret in him for not having anticipatively requited this affection by tenderer treatment of the lower classes in his plays. But then I reflected that the English lower classes have always preferred to have the smooth things given to the upper classes, especially on the stage, and that they probably found their account there in imagining themselves such or such a lord or lady in the scene, and fitting their friends and neighbors to the humbler parts. Once I reminded him of Tolstoy’s censure of his want of kindness toward them, and he said he had been too nearly of them, in his own life; he satirized his own faults in them; and what literature was to do was to join political economy in making men so equal in fortune that there could be no deformity, no vulgarity in them which sprang from the pressure of need or the struggle of hiding or escaping its effects. The vanity of poverty was as ridiculous as the vanity of riches, and might be as fairly laughed at. His defense did not quite satisfy me, and I said I would hand him over to Mr. Shaw. But at the Memorial Theater I could not imagine any dramatist but himself, or hardly any moralist. In the wonderfully even performance of the plays throughout, the art of the actors did not slight the nature of the characters studied from low life; it was rendered with a reality that convinced of the dramatist’s truth, if that ever needed argument. No part was slighted, whether high or low, but one could have more pleasure of the upper classes because their reality was less tedious than that of the churls and clowns who, if anything, superabound in the Shakespeare plays; he might contend that they superabound in life. This evenness was, of course, the effect of unsparing vigilance in the admirable over-artist whose conscience was felt in every moment and every detail. His whole professional career had been directed to the Shakespeare drama which he imagined giving with an unselfishness unknown save among its most impassioned devotees. The range of the plays was suggestive if not fully illustrative of the poet’s largest range. There were “The Merchant of Venice,” “As You Like It,” “Hamlet,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Twelfth Night,” “Richard the Second,” “The Taming of the Shrew,” “King John,” “Romeo, and Juliet,” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor”; and of these I saw such I had seen seldomest, but now I am sorry I did not see them all. They were all well done, and in censure you could say no worse than that some were done better than others. If I do not name the over-artist it is because I am naming nobody in a record which is keeping itself in a high fantastic air, and as much aloof from every-day matter-of-fact as if it were one of those romantic fictions I have always endeavored to bring into contempt. He took such peculiarly difficult parts as Richard the Second, or King John, with an address that made them live so in the imagination as to win your pity where your sympathy was impossible; he was specially trained, if not natured, for tragedy, but he could for instance abandon himself unselfishly to the comedy of such a part as Doctor Caius in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” His reward was to make it wildly delightful, and delightful a play which I had always imagined a heavy piece of voluntary drolling, but must always think of hereafter as charming, full of the human nature of its day and of all time. I should have liked to make my apologies to Shakespeare if I had found him in the audience as often as I found him on the stage. I should have had to confess that mostly I found his comedies, in the reading, poor stuff, as compared with his tragedies and histories. But he usually came with Bacon, whom I should have to join in blaming those lighter plays. When it was a question of the authorship Bacon was stanchly Shakespearean, but that once granted he was somewhat less Shakespearean than such an ardent fellow-townsman of the poet as I had now become, could desire. There was a supreme moment of King John when I most longed for the author to enjoy it with me. The playing was of that beautiful evenness which left no part, and no part of any part unstudied, and which makes us rather sorry, in its steady glow, for the meteoric splendors of our American acting. After all, Shakespeare was an Englishman, and I suppose he spoke with an English voice in his plays, so that if I were an Englishman, too, I might be emboldened to claim that until you had heard the voices of the English actors in the several parts you had not heard his characters speak as Shakespeare heard them. To be sure, Shakespeare himself spoke with a Warwickshire accent, and though he had probably worn it off in his long London sojourn he must have returned to it after he came back to Stratford, as Bacon had noted in our first night with them in Cheltenham. Still, I should say that broad Warwickshire was truer to the accents which his inner ear perceived than those of our Middle West, or Philadelphia, or Broadway, or even Boston accent, or of them all synthetized in the strange blend which passes on our stage for the English voice.

In that supreme moment scene, costume, action, expression, were all so proper, so exquisitely harmonized that though it was by no means the most important scene, or one of the most important scenes, I thought that if the poet could have witnessed it his heart must have swelled almost to bursting for joy in the perfection of it. I tried to compel his presence by that longing which I had several times found effective with him, but he would not respond, and I was thrown back upon the question how much or little a great dramatist of the past might really care for the modern perfection of the upholstering which so stays and comforts the imagination of the average theater-goer, say the tired business man or the over-intellectualized club woman. Shakespeare, if he had come at my call, might have said that the action and expression were richly enough for him, and these were what so chiefly satisfied him in the highest moments; that the costuming and the setting were for others and not for him; that for him these were like the dress of a gentleman which if fit was the last thing you noticed in his presence. Then I might have come back at him with the argument that if he had been imagining a theater nowadays he would not have been content with less than the perfection of that entourage. At this he must have allowed that as a dramatist he owed more than his answer implied to the arts which the Shakespeare scholarship of such a manager as this had summoned to his help. As himself an actor-manager, and used to dealing with the work of others and adapting it to the needs of his theater, he would have approved of this actor-manager’s cutting of his plays, which I liked so much that when I recurred to the printed text I found little cause to desire it in its entirety, though I do not make so bold as to say that the cuts were unerringly those which Shakespeare would have made himself. I only say something like this; and that in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” for instance, there was no line which I would have had restored for the stage. It was the personal companionableness of Shakespeare, his modest, his humorous capacity of self-forgetfulness which made him so delightful. I am sure that in his visits to the Memorial Theater (which perhaps he did not visit oftener because of a natural diffidence) he would have liked as much as I did its quality of home, the charming sense of hospitality and domesticity, in which people met each other, and nodded and smiled from orchestra and balcony, and went about between the acts shaking hands, like neighbors akin in their common love of the Supreme Poet whom we so felt there the brother of us all. It was not my happy fortune to be there the last night of the happy season, but I have heard that the genial audience then for farewell took hands all round the theater and sang “Auld Lang Syne” together.

That must have been beautiful, but what event, what moment of the joyous season was not beautiful? When we came out of the theater at the modest hours which the theater keeps in Stratford we continued, as it were, a part of the cast in whatever play we had been seeing, and under the stars of the dim English heaven, or its mild moon, we took our way up the footpath of Chapel Lane, or confided ourselves fearlessly to the roadway, where a few large-eyed motors purred harmlessly among us. I may not claim that they paused to let us look about for the lame cat of New Place gardens, or deny that they sometimes urged us on with those porcine gutturals peculiar to motors. But we heard in them only the ghostly echoes from the styes which fenced New Place along Chapel Street and Chapel Lane in Shakespeare’s time. There was no ghostliest taint from these in our twentieth-century air, but the honeyed odor of the sweet alyssum from the beds beside the gates of New Place gardens stole through the grating and haunted us to our dreams.

CHAPTER XI

TWICE a week, in the gardens of the theater, there were Morris Dances and Country Dances by the pupil-teachers, whom we could see every morning at the lectures in the Parish Parlor. These joyous events were called by the severe and self-reproachful name of Demonstrations, but by any name they would have been enchanting, as in fact their subtitles were. What could be more quaintly dear than Beaux of London City, by the young men, or Brighton Camp by the girls, or The Rose, or Confess by both youths and maidens? There was a sword dance, and there were Morris Dances, when the dancers beat the sward with their feet to make the bells on their legs help rouse the mother earth to their adoration. For a contrast to the lusty blonde English girls, there were two lithe Greek maidens come from their far shores to fly like Mænads on a Grecian urn in the wild figures of those northern dances; but best of all there was a veteran Morris Dancer now getting in years, who had been famous in his day, and who gave the dance with a sort of dying vigor and a stiff grace of gesture very pathetic and appealing.

The sun blazed down on the place, but there was life in the air, and by the Avon’s banks the feathery reeds swayed and tilted in the light wind and waved us to the stream. The water was alive with the punts and skiffs and canoes which are coming and going on it the whole summer; my muse must not be too fastidious to sing also the steam and motor barges which all too swiftly but very cheaply bear the poorer pleasurer to the head of navigation a few miles up. But we were not so poor as that, and we took a boat, ample but not beyond the strength of a half-grown boy who at times let his head hang heavily on his breast as if overwearied with rowing. Perhaps it was only a mute entreaty for our larger largesse in the end, and if so I must allow that it was successful; but it was not practised so much going as coming, and we mingled even gaily with the other boats and punts. In England when a youth and maiden go on a water excursion it is, as I have already noted, the convention for the youth to lie flat in the bottom of the punt and for the maiden to stand or sit at his head and push the craft along. If it is two girls who man the boat, then the weaker does the work, and the stronger does the rest; or if they are both very strong, then they both lie idling over books, and there is no telling how they get to a given point. We easily passed these brave or dear crews, and contrived not to be run down by the populous launches that passed us.

At first as you ascend the Avon after you have cleared the two bridges arching the stream, there are pretty villas on the right, and on the left there are pleasant meadows where on the afternoon of our voyage we saw some of the folk-dancers, who were encamped there, going about their light housekeeping among the tents, in the short skirts and the long stockings of their folk-dancing costume. On the other shore the villa gardens came down to the water, and when we were past the gardens both shores were overhung with willows which twisted their roots together and kept the banks firm against the freshets seasonably overflowing them. Under the braided roots the water-rats had their holes, but kept acceptably within them, for water-rats when visible are a very loathsome sight, and I should be sorry to associate them with the river which Shakespeare was the Swan of. Other swans are not conspicuous in my remembrance, though there must have been swans, unless they had all merged their dying notes in the exultant strains of the surviving gramophones. Of the gramophones there is no manner of doubt; but we were chiefly bent in ascending the river on arriving at a certain tea-garden which we had heard was to be found midway of our course. We found it, but found it shut, and then there was nothing for us but to row, or make our boy row, a mile further to Teddington, where he was sure of a tea-house which was open.

While he remained with his boat at the landing there we took the path which led past picturesque thatched cottages and beside green meadows, ushered onward by signboards to the inn where we were to find tea, as we hoped in the moment of its “first sprightly running.” But when we got to the inn it appeared that the gas-fixtures had suffered some disaster, and were undergoing repairs, with the tea-room in the possession of several plumberlike men whose presence boded no refection in it. Instead we were offered a small dining-room, so dismal in dark-red paper and so haunted with the memories of bad dinners, that we implored the kind, incapable-looking host to let us have our tea in the garden. We then found ourselves under a tree in the yard behind the house at a table which had known so much rustic jollity that it bore traces of the riot ineffaceable by the wet cloth smeared over it by the slattern maid. She tried to hide them with the table-cloth, but the table-cloth was in league with them, and showed worse stains, which in turn would not be hidden by the plates and cups dispersed among them. There we sat and waited, realizing more and more that the garden was an innyard and the innyard was a farmyard with evidence of every variety of poultry in it. Feathers, with straw and chips, such as chickens delight in, seemed to grow up out of the gravel under our feet. There had been a dog which went and a eat which came and went, and then there began to be more and more cocks and hens which remained from the beginning. While we waited and waited long, the chickens were reinforced in closing upon us by troops of ducks and geese from some reserve of poultry beyond the stables. A man opened a gate from the adjacent field, and entered with a flock of sheep; in the pasture beyond we heard the lowing of cows and the neighing of horses, which put their heads over the bars as if to urge a passage to our table; we heard the note of remoter swine in unseen pens; and we began to ask each other when we were, if ever, going to have tea. Secretly we had each begun to hope we were never going to have it, and inquiry at the kitchen developed the fact that the range had sympathized with the gas-fixtures, and the fire was in doubt whether it would burn or not. We decided we could not wait the result of its misgiving, and began some polite pour parlers with the landlord, we insisting that we would pay for our tea and go without waiting for it, and he insisting that we should not pay for it without having it. In the end we paid and escaped triumphing without our tea, but feeling rather sorry that we had got the better of that poor man; though now, upon reflection, I am not sure that we had got the better of him.

It was an afternoon of anomalies, which in that neat, well-ordered England, where custom and tradition prevail as with the authority of holy writ, were startling past all former experience. When once your mind is set on tea in England, you are, though an alien, as inflexible as any born to the manner; and when we had got back to our boat we made our boy make all haste down the Avon to the pretty tea-garden we had noted lurking with its tables among leaves and flowers. But as we came in full sight of that pretty tea-garden we suffered a moment’s dismay at the sight of a punt lolling full-length at the landing, and apparently not proposing to move away for us. A youth of the usual years and an unusually elderly maiden, or say matron, occupied themselves with tea and cake in it; and when it reluctantly got from the landing, and we mounted to the garden, we were almost held from ordering tea for ourselves by the unprecedented spectacle of an elderly gentleman standing by a tea-laden table, and serving from it the youth and the maiden, or matron, in the punt with tea and bread-and-butter and ultimately cake, quite as if he had himself been in the punt and they serving him. Whether to attribute the strange fact to the all-pervading balefulness of Mr. Lloyd George or not we did not know. Perhaps with his equal taxes and old-age pensions he was really bringing the landed gentry to things like this; for this gentleman looked landed gentry and county family, if ever a gentleman did. I must not push the matter too far; I must not say he looked a title, even so low as baronet; but under that he might have been anything but a knight recognized for some service to civilization He was perfectly dressed in the well-studied propriety of an English gentleman out for an afternoon’s pleasure, down to his gaiters; he stood at his quiet ease beside that table, pouring the tea and cutting the cake, with a rather dreamy air, unconscious of the curiosity to know how he happened, which tormented, and has never ceased to torment us since, concerning him. From time to time he carried a cup or a plate to the people in the punt, which had come back to its moorings, and leaned over to bestow it on one or other of them, who took it with equal calm, and let him go on serving them. But it was no servile service which he offered and they accepted; it was rather the courtesy of host and guests of the tacit, unflourishing fashion of English society where to make the thing done seem not to have been done is the fine ideal. No word passed between them; the youth did not look an invalid, the matron not quite the mother of so old a youth. But in any ease why was not she serving the two men? Why was that elder serving her, if for any reason he was serving the youth?

The tea-maiden ran across the street and fetched our refection from the inn there, and spread our table beside the barrier opposite this strange gentleman’s, equally overhung with plum-trees and dividing him as ours divided us from borders of gay marigolds and phlox and patches of cabbage and cauliflower in the gardens beyond. The yellow-jackets, which the English call wasps, came instinctively at the call of our jam, and we saw them hovering about his fearless head as he stooped over his table or moved from it to feed or slake the famine of the people in the punt; and when we had escaped unstung from our own refreshment, we left him with his gentle riddle unread, and let our droop-headed boy pull us back to the boat-house where we had taken him. The tea at Teddington had been disappointing if it could be said to have been at all; and that last tea, which had certainly been, had left us with a thirst which I do not know how we shall ever quench. Yet that excursion up and down the Avon had been so surpassing an ideal of an excursion on the Avon, that we said, “Now we should certainly do it every day.” The surprising part is that we never did it again.

CHAPTER XII

THE days at Stratford were so full of breakfasting, lunching, and dining, with lectures on folk dancing and folk singing, and debates on ethical and esthetical matters between, and drives into the country, and afternoon teas and calls, that it was with difficulty I could squeeze in or out an hour for so favorite diversion of mine as the Moving Picture Show. But at last the hour lent itself to the desire, and I went to that Picture Theater which does not feel itself too presumptuous in almost fronting the Shakespeare Monument. Perhaps it is kept in countenance by the badness of the monument in one art and its own excellence in another, but if I ventured into the Picture Theater without knowing its grounds for selfconfidence my own trust in it was rewarded by the prevalence, so flattering to my patriotism, the almost exclusive prevalence, of American films in its events. The events were of that romantic character so easily attributable to the life of our Far West, and especially that life as it was touched, by the only a little more distinctively romantic life of our aborigines, still supposed to linger in a tribal condition before merging in our body politic as landholders in severalty and prospective citizens. In this condition they were provisionally making war on the white men, galloping round on their ponies along the brows and summits of hills which threw them into strong relief, and permitted them a splendor of action equally glorious in advance and retreat. Their forays were connected with the love-interest embodied in the reciprocal passion of a young lieutenant and the daughter of the commanding general, who conspired with an elderly colonel to frustrate their affection by throwing the lieutenant into the power of the savages, and securing his betrothed for his ranking officer. The betrayal and the rescue were effected with the incessant discharge of firearms, sensible to the eye only, between Indians and cowboys and cavalrymen, which eventuated in the triumph of the American forces with much waving of star-spangled banners.

The audience was composed almost wholly of schoolchildren; I was the only spectator distinctly in the decline of life; and among the children there was one of years so few and sensibilities so tender, that in spite of his sympathy with the American forces, he damped the general joy by bursting into a cry of alarm at the moment of their triumph, and having to be led howling up the aisle into the safety of the outer air. His grief touched me so that I could not take the pride I might have wished in the fact that of the six dramas presented that afternoon four were shown from American films, and two from French ones, with not a single English film among them, not even of those municipal receptions of royalty which the English fondness commonly wreaks itself in reproducing on the cinematographic screen, with little variety of costume for the king and an inflexible devotion to one walking - dress and one austere, reproving hat in the queen.

I could not remain after this tragic incident, and I followed the emotional sufferer out, hoping to supply the reassurance which seemed to fail from his more immediate friends. But before I reached the door I was aware of one of these mystical presences at my shoulder which I was now grown used to, and which I supposed of course was Shakespeare. On the contrary, as I looked round, I saw that it was Bacon, and I said with surprise: “Oh! You here?”

“Yes,” he said, with some resentment of my tone, “I am here a good deal, first and last.”

“Yes?” I queried, to gain time, without committing myself further.

“Why don’t these stupid people say something to comfort that little boy?” he demanded, without noting my query, and I perceived that his shadowy shape was in a quiver of compassion for the sensitive youngster. This ought not to have surprised me, and upon reflection I perceived that it was the logic of a man who had often been so pitiless in this life that he should be all pity in another life; that would be not only his eager atonement, his expiation; it would be his privilege, his highest happiness. To go through eternity compassionating every form of suffering here would be a refuge from vain regrets, and such solace as comes to us whenever we disown some misdeed by doing the opposite. I wished to speak with him on this point, but I saw he was not concerned with me; he was somehow addressing himself to the terrified child, who suddenly stopped his roaring and looked round smiling as if he expected to see a kind face at his shoulder. I knew he would see none, and Bacon instantly ceased to occupy himself with him.

“Yes,” he resumed with me, “I think there is a great deal to be hoped from this sort of show, and I am interested in every advance made in its art. If I were in authority here I would not permit these spectacles of battle, or any terrifying circumstance. There is an infinite range of subjects which could be shown for the instruction as well as the delight of those little ones; all ‘the fairy tales of science,’ all the works of nature, all the beautiful and cheering events of history.”

“I’m afraid the Shakespeareans would say,” I answered, “that you don’t show the author-actor’s instinct in that notion, and that such a notion alone was enough to disprove your friends’ claim to your authorship of the plays. You know how bloody his scene is — and advisedly so. We like a noble terror — all but our young friend here.” He did not reply, but said: “I believe that in the United States you now have the characters in the films speaking: talking-movies, I think you call them. You are very graphic, you Americans!”

“Oh, thank you! They’re not quite satisfactory, yet. There is speech, but it doesn’t seem somehow to come from the speakers, though their lips move.”

“You must trust your Mr. Edison to bring the affair to perfection. A most ingenious man; a sort of up-to-date version of your great Franklin. I don’t wonder your people value him and have voted him one of your supreme benefactors.”

“Your lordship must excuse me,” I said, “if I’m still a little surprised that a philosopher like yourself, who changed the whole course, if not the nature, of philosophy, should be so much interested in people who are after all merely inventors, however beneficent.”

“Have you read your Macaulay to so little purpose,” he rejoined, “as not to have seen how he distinguishes between the new and the old philosophies in his essay on me by pointing out that my philosophy dedicated itself to use, while that of the Greeks disdained the practical as something beneath the notice of the idealist?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, “I certainly remember that; and here I hesitated from an embarrassing recollection of the severity of Macaulay’s essay on the facts of Bacon’s career.

“I know he was terribly hard upon me in the first half of his essay,” Bacon returned, as if I had spoken. “But he let me have the last word, as it were. The whole second half of his essay is devoted to the recognition of my claim upon the forgiveness — I won’t say gratitude — of mankind because of my wish to serve them in any humblest fashion, of my will always to hitch a star to my wagon, if I may transpose the saying of your Emerson: a very different sort of idealist, by the way, from Plato.”

“I know,” I answered. “I thought that fine in Macaulay. It was only fair, though, to let you have the last word.”

“In my office of judge, in which I confessed and must always confess that I brought the judgment seat to shame, though I only did what the other judges did in my time, it often occurred to me that it was a gross injustice in our procedure to let the prosecution, the state, have the closing appeal to the jury. That should be the sacred right of the defense—”

“Ah, if you could only have expressed that in some axiom, embodied it in some decision!” I exclaimed. “That injustice is always a grief to me whenever I read the report of a criminal trial. That the last word should be for the rigor instead of the mercy of the law, that seems barbarous, atrocious.”

“But as we were saying of the cinema — the movies, as you call it in your wonderful slang — I believe there is indefinite development for that form of the drama in the direction of education. But why am I saying this to you? You who first suggested the notion to me in one of your papers.”

I was inexpressibly flattered. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that so great a man as you, in your exalted sphere, keeps up with our periodical literature? How have you the time for it?”

“We have the eternity for it,” he said, with a sad smile for the word play. “Besides you exaggerate my importance in the world of immortality. I assure you that there the lowliest of our race who has only a record of humble goodness counts before me.”

I stood rebuked. “Oh, excuse me; I didn’t reflect. But now as to the movies: you see a great dramatic future in them?”

“Ah, that you must have out with Shakespeare. You’ll find him in the gardens of the Birthplace; I’ve no doubt he’ll try to persuade you that the Elizabethan drama was the last word in that way.”

“Well, Shakespeare is always Shakespeare, you know!” I said.

“I’m glad he isn’t always Bacon,” the philosopher replied. “I shouldn’t mind having written the sonnets; but the ‘Venus and Adonis,’ the ‘Lucrece,’ and some of the plays — excuse me! Honestly, would you like to have written ‘Pericles, Prince of Tyre’ or ‘A Comedy of Errors’?”

Before I could protest my companion had left me to continue my way to the Birthplace alone. It was only a little walk from the Picture Theater, but I was not surprised to find next morning had come when I reached the house endeared to the world by the universally cherished fiction that Shakespeare was born in it. Thirteen thousand Americans are said to visit it every year, and I had already joined them twice in their tacit atonement there for the Baconian heresy which our nation invented. I had been there in fact only a few days before, and now I passed through the house into the garden without staying to visit the thronged rooms above or below. As I expected I found the shade of Shakespeare in the shelter of a far descendant of his contemporary mulberry-tree, and he courteously dematerialized me for the forbidden passage over the grass to a seat with him at its root.

“Well,” he said, smiling, “so you have shirked even the birth-room in the Birthplace where I was not born?”

“Yes — since you have divined it. I have no grudge against that superstition except that it has thronged the place so with the devout that one can’t breathe there very well. Besides, I have done it twice already.”

“And the Museum and Library, with the Original Legal Documents of the family possessions, and the signatures of my family (they seem to have abounded in autographs so much more than I), and the early editions of my plays, and my signet-ring, and my sixteenth-century school-desk, and all the rest of it? And the Timber-roofed Room overhead, with the portraits and poor old Quiney’s begging letter to me? And the Kitchen and the Living-room, where we used to feed and foregather?”

“Yes; and revered everything with unquestioning faith.”

“Well, why shouldn’t you, if you believe in me? Of course I wasn’t born in my Birthplace, but I lived most of my boyhood in this house — or till I escaped to London, some say from the law, and some from the hopeless dullness of Stratford, though then there was no great outlook for me here with my wife and three children. Do my biographers say I brought Anne home here to live with me in this house? It would have been like my father to let me; he was a kind man and muddled away his money like many another kind man. He once said of me, ‘Will was a good, honest fellow, and he darest have cracked a jest with him at any time,’ which has been a great comfort to the biographers as material and as inferential evidence that I wrote my plays. And my mother, my dear mother, would have been a loving mother-in-law to Anne, as mothers-in-law go. Or do the biographers prefer to conjecture that I went home with Anne to Shottery? Been to Shottery yet?”

“Not this time; but I’m going.”

“Let me go with you. I think I can make some things clearer to you there. So you found his lordship at the Picture Theater?”

“Yes. I was rather surprised of his interest in the movies.”

“But why? He would have told you in his Latin that he counted nothing human alien to him because he was human himself, and he especially likes all manner of new inventions. He would rather have invented your talking-movies, I believe, than written some of my plays, say” — and here Shakespeare smiled knowingly at me—”’Pericles of Tyre’ or ‘A Comedy of Errors.’”

I laughed with guilty consciousness, but I said, hardily, “He couldn’t have written them.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he returned, and then he laughed out. “I didn’t, you know — or not entirely. In my day we took our own whenever the other fellows left it; and those are not the only plays of mine which I didn’t write entirely. Well, it was an understood thing; there was the raw material, and each of us worked it up after his own fancy.”

“But I rather wonder,” I said, “at Bacon’s interest in those mechanical inventions, which are a good deal in the nature of mechanical toys. Now the discovery of a general principle, or the application of it to some useful end—”

“I suppose he thinks harmless amusement and painless instruction are useful ends to be reached by the movies. And as he never could write plays he may hope to supplant the written and acted drama with them. You know that in Italy they’ve already supplanted the Marionette drama.”

“No!” I cried, and I felt a pang of the keenest regret. “Not the wriggling plays of the time-honored masks, operated by strings overhead and vocalized by many voices in one, squeaked and growled from behind — not Arleechino, and Pantalone, and Brighella, and Facanapa and Il Dottore, and Policinella, and the rest—”

“Swept by the board, all gone, before the devastating film. I was down in Venice, last night, at the little theater where you used to see them, and they were doing a Wild West movie piece just such as you saw to-day; and it’s the same everywhere in Italy.”

I was dumb with grief, and he hastened to turn the subject a little. “But it’s not only your application of mechanics to the drama which interests our friend. He’s much more interested in your Pure Food movement. He doesn’t at all sympathize, though, with the Anti-Cold Storage Crusade, which seems rather to have fallen through, by the by. He believes he discovered the principles of cold storage. You know he brought on his mortal sickness by leaving his coach on a very cold day and stopping at a farm-house to get a dressed hen which he stuffed with snow.”

I said I thought I remembered.

“The experiment was perfectly successful. The hen was preserved till the snow thawed; but Bacon took cold from the exposure and died. He maintains that his experiment was the first embryonic stirring of your gigantic system of Cold Storage.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE great poet began to walk up and down and round about over the grass with the impunity of disembodied spirits, and being dematerialized and devisibilized for our more convenient association in the place, I joined him without attracting the notice of the gardener, who was busy watching that predatory visitors did not pillage the beds of their late summer flowers, as they passed down the walk from the house, and round and out by the garden gate. There was a constant stream of visitors, and I said to my companion: “How does all this affect you, this influx and efflux of people, who after three hundred years have read you, or heard of you, or would like to have read you, or to whom you’re at least such an object of interest that no traveler ought to miss seeing your Birthplace?”

“How do you mean?”

“Does their devotion bless you or ban you? Is it a joy or a bore? To me it looks like a perpetual afternoon tea where people are asked ‘To have the honor of meeting the memory of William Shakespeare,’ and expect somehow to feel that they’re with you.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he answered, thoughtfully. “It isn’t so bad as to have to stand tangibly in the middle of the Museum and shake hands with them all. They don’t know that I’m personally present, and in fact I’m not here, for the most part.”

“Yes, I understand that. But I suppose what I am trying to get at is whether the sense of their admiration is still as sweet as ever? Do you care for it as much as one does for a favorable notice of his new book with suggestive extracts? Something like that.”

“No, I shouldn’t say I did; though not because it’s rather an old story now. The fact is that their admiration rather searches out the seamy side of my work, where I’ve put it together and patched it out with that material of the older playwrights which we Elizabethans used to draw from. It isn’t pleasant to have people thinking it’s all mine, you know.”

“I understand. But I don’t understand how they ever mistake the work you helped yourself to for your own work. It seems to me that I can tell the borrowed from the created down to the last syllable. I make out that you helped yourself most in the comedies; at least I have to skip the most in them. You don’t mind my skipping?”

“Oh, I skip a good deal myself; and yes, I used the paste and scissors most in the comedies; scarcely at all in the tragedies, even those dramatized from the old Italian stories. But at the time I was doing my things, I didn’t distinguish much in the result. When I had got it on the stage all right, it seemed entirely mine, you know. It was when it came to printing the things that I began to feel the force of Polonius’s injunction: ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender he.’ I saw then that I had borrowed more than I should ever lend. But I didn’t worry much. You know I was rather lazy about the printed plays; I never read the proofs; and of course I never ‘blotted a line’ in the printed text any more than the written. After I came back to Stratford I left the whole affair to the compositors and the actors. I was pretty thoroughly tired.”

“I can imagine that. And this ever-gathering volume, this constantly increasing reverberation of men’s praise, how does that affect you?”

“Well, you know, not so unpleasantly as you might think. I suppose I’m rather simple about it. My London success didn’t make me very conscious, I believe. At the time I didn’t always feel it was me they were praising. One loses identity in those experiences. I didn’t always feel as if I had done the things, and they have gone on ever since becoming more and more impersonal to me. I don’t know whether I make myself quite clear. But that’s the way I manage to stand it.”

“Yes, I see,” I said.

“What I had done well seemed to become part of the great mass of good work done that belonged to nobody in particular.”

“I don’t know that I should altogether like that,” I demurred.

Shakespeare laughed genially. “Well, you would if you had done much good work. Now you want to keep your little own all your own.”

I was wondering what to say when a dreadful inaudible voice struck upon my inner ear in no-tones of inexpressible tragedy, “And the evil done, the sin, the wrong?”

It was Bacon who had joined us, speaking to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare, nothing surprised at his presence, unanswered: “Why, even more the evil than the good. Haven’t you said, somewhere” — he turned to me in asking, and I perceived a delicate intention of soothing the hurt to my self-love which his snub had given— “haven’t you said, somewhere, that when we own a sin, whether to others or to our consciences, we disown it, and it becomes a part of the general evil in the world?”

“Why, it seems to me that I did say that,” I answered, gratified to my inmost soul. “But how did you know—”

“Never mind, never mind,” he said, laying his hand caressingly on my shoulder. “Haven’t I told you that we read everything? We have no end of leisure.”

The somber shade of Bacon remained silently ignoring this exchange of civilities. At last he said to me, “And from what experience of yours did you learn that truth?”

“Oh, come!” Shakespeare answered, lightly. “Isn’t this asking?”

I stood recalling my many sins and hesitating which I should credit with the suggestion of my dark wisdom. “Well, I don’t know,” I parleyed; but I saw that Bacon really cared nothing for my sins, and was only thinking of his own.

“If I could believe that!” he passionately declared. “No sinner ever made opener or ampler avowal of his guilt than I did.”

“You couldn’t help it, my dear friend,” Shakespeare put in, with a smile which if mocking was tenderly mocking. “You had been tried and convicted by your peers before you owned up. Your sin had found you out, and I fancy that our brave moralist here means that we must own the sins which haven’t found us out if we wish to disown them. I have come to much the same effect by not denying mine, till now I haven’t any wish to deny them. But why should you continue to bother about yours? You were guilty of bribery and corruption, but, as you said, all the other judges were. It was a vice of our epoch, like my vices, which I was not ashamed of then, I’m now ashamed to say. My comedies abound in the filth of them, though not so much as some other people’s comedies; and I dare say there were judges more venal than you. But perhaps it’s the sin which you didn’t own; perhaps it was the case of—”

“Essex?” the unhappy ghost demanded. “Haven’t I owned it to him a thousand times? Haven’t I pursued him through all the timeless and spaceless reaches of eternity with my unavailing remorse? Hasn’t he forgiven me, entreated me to forgive myself, with that goodness of his which abounded to me in my unfriended need with every generous office of praise and purse, and which I repaid by hunting him to his death? Don’t tell me that in a few years he must have died even if I had not slain him! Don’t tell me that so open a rebel as he must have suffered death, even if I had not shut the gates of mercy on him. I, who owed him far dearer and truer allegiance than I owed that wretched old woman whom I called my sovereign, and whom I thought to serve to my own glory and profit by persecuting my friend!”

Shakespeare looked at him with a curious kind of pity. “What a tragedy you could have written! How you could have out-Hamleted and out-Macbethed me!”

“Why not do it yet?” I appealed to them both. “I am sure that any of our editors would be glad to print it, and it would be only a step from the magazine to the stage. With our improved psychical facilities it would be easy to find some adequate medium—”

The abject spirit’s mood changed, and he demanded, scornfully: “And prove that I wrote ‘Hamlet’ and ‘Macbeth,’ too? No, thanks. I couldn’t do anything to re-open that chapter. And if I must say it, I don’t envy the author of those plays the gross and palpable renown which he enjoys from them. I can bear what I must bear till somehow I am released from my burden; people don’t know how bad I am; many never heard of me as a recreant friend or a corrupt magistrate; they only know me as the author of the inductive method, which they don’t understand, or as the putative author of Shakespeare’s plays, which they haven’t read, not even the fatuous thirteen thousand Americans who annually visit his Birthplace — the Birthplace where he first came to live after he was a well-grown boy! Of all the hollow unrealities, of all the juiceless husks which human vanity feeds on, literary glory seems to me the emptiest and dryest. If among those thirteen thousand Americans, or the hundred thousand other pilgrims who troop annually to this supposititous shrine, there were one utterly sincere and modest soul; if in this whole town of Stratford there were one simple lower-class person who loved Shakespeare for himself, or cared for him, or even knew of him, I would grant him some joy of his swollen celebrity, his Falstaffian bulk of fame stuffed out with straw.”

“I have thought of that,” I put in, while Shakespeare remained placidly smiling. “It’s a point that I’ve wanted to test. We all knew how the comfortable and cultivated people feel about our great and good friend, but I’ve been curious, ever since I came to Stratford, to know how people who are not particularly comfortable and not at all cultivated feel about him. I believe I have in mind just the person to apply to,” and at my volition there came a sort of tremor such as when the pictures change at the movies, and we were standing in the little cluttered shop of the kind woman who sold me the plums for my lunches.

While she was doing up the pound, half of green gages and half of victorias, which I ordered, I said: “Oh, by the way, my friends and I here” — she stared, and I explained— “here in Stratford, have been wondering how much the townspeople, the tradespeople, the workpeople really know or care about Shakespeare. What do you think?”

“What do I — no, it’s only sevenpence, sir; a penny less than for all green gages — what do I think?”

“Yes. Do you honestly care anything about Shakespeare?”

She looked up a little bewildered. Then she said, “Why, how could we live without him, sir?”

The ghostly presence of the poet laughed inaudibly out. “There you have it! I am my townsmen’s stock in trade, their livelihood, their job! They couldn’t live without me! Well, I’m not sorry if that’s what I come to with them.”

“At any rate, in that you come to something real,” the philosopher assented.

CHAPTER XIV

UPON the whole I was glad not to have the company of the great poet on the way to Shottery, whither we drove that afternoon. The difficulty of conversing with a disembodied spirit while driving with people still of our earthly minority is considerable; the lightning changes from mortal to immortal is what ladies call nerve-racking; and the anxiety not to lose anything that such a spirit as Shakespeare might say must result in an inattention to the others which would seem impolite to say the least.

It is an easy walk from Stratford to Shottery, but the drive is still easier, and by a road pleasanter, I think, than the foot-path across the fields which Shakespeare probably took when he went wooing Anne Hathaway. We ought now to have thought of that courtship, but if the truth must be told we were amusing ourselves unworthily enough in counting up the number of perambulators which so abound in Stratford, and which seemed all to be taking their way that afternoon to Shottery, as if they too were going to Anne Hathaway’s cottage. I forget how many there were by the time we reached the curving streets of the hamlet, but before we got out of Stratford there were twenty-one, sometimes with twins in them, all preparing in one way or other to make their living off the memory of their mighty townsman; for I do not suppose there was a baby among them so ungrateful as to believe in the Baconian authorship.

Shottery streets are curving, and of a rustic prettiness, with sincere Kate Greenway cottages set practicable behind little gardens, after you get away from the suburban trimness of the houses nearest Stratford. Sincere and practicable as the rest, with the largest and brightest of the little gardens, the Anne Hathaway cottage was instantly recognizable by the throngs of sight-seers within and about its gates. The sight-seers were instantly recognizable, in the vast majority as American girls, waiting their turn in faintly sarcastic patience to be admitted to the cottage, and joking or at least smiling together, at other American girls who packed its doorways. Their sarcastic patience was the national mood in which we Americans face most problems of life, and it commended them, somehow, more than the varying expression of the other visitors arriving in huge motor-omnibus loads, and by carriage and automobile and on foot from every part of the world. In a way the spectacle was preposterous; but the afternoon was beautiful, and the cottage stood unconscious amidst its flowery creepers, looking gently from its latticed windows at the multitude and drawing its thatch over its eaves in a sort of tolerant surprise. In its simple memories of the courtship which had so amazingly consecrated it, one could imagine also a dismay at the outcome, such as poor Anne Hathaway herself must have felt if she had been there. It was her home and her people’s home, and they too might well have been bewildered at such a far effect from her marriage with the rather wild young Shakespeare lad whose family was certainly no better than hers, and who had not behaved too well, though as things went in that day and place no worse than many others. One could fancy an irreconcilable feeling in the place, as the dense crowd pushed from room to room, and up-stairs and down, and elbowed and gasped and perspired and tried for some personal significance to each in their presence there. None could have denied that the custodians who led from room to room and delivered the crowd over from one to another did their intelligent best to realize this for them. For myself I felt an appeal in it which I could not well express. The decency of the whole place, with the propriety of the furnishings, mostly typical, of course, rather than original, but to me somehow recalling the simplicities of the new American country where I had seen like things in old pioneer dwellings, was touching. It was much to be shown an illustrative rushlight, and how, when it was crossed, one might burn the candle at both ends, as the proverb says; and it was much to see a rush bed, with the mattress resting on the rope webbing, familiar to me from the many movings of my childhood, when the cords had to be trodden and tightened into a reluctant elasticity by the paternal foot.

I was expecting throughout the presence which it seemed to me ought to make itself sensible, there, and when we came to that room where there is a rude settle built into the chimney-place, and our cicerone said, “This is where the young people used to do most of their courting,” I felt in the words, few and simple, the thrill of a pathos imperishable as the soul itself, the richness of the race’s experience of youth and love, not alienable by circumstance or effaceable by death itself.

“Now, surely,” I thought, “he will act upon the hint,” but then instantly I felt the vulgarity of my expectation. It was not of Anne Hathaway, his sweetheart, that Shakespeare would have spoken there as he had once spoken of Anne his aging wife; or make this the occasion of defending her fame against his own. Doubtless this was his tacit way of fulfilling his half promise to be with me at Shottery; he was making me divine the case for myself. I joined the mass of humanity descending the stairs in bulk, and separating its crumpled particles in a recovered severalty where those American girls sat smiling ironically but resolutely waiting to appropriate our experience.

In Shottery there is a tea-garden prettily called after Portia, and to this we went thirsting for her promptest brew, which was served us in one of her pleached bowers of plum-trees weighed down by their purple burden of victorias. We found ourselves very hungry as well as thirsty, and ordered jam with the bread and butter which comes by nature with tea in England; but the jam was a mistake. Almost as soon as it came a swarm of yellow-jackets came and proposed sharing it with us. This is what the English yellow-jackets always do; but it seemed as if the Portia kept swarms of them, to let loose upon ignorant strangers and frighten them into surrendering the jam which they have ordered and must pay for. The plan, if it was a plan, succeeded perfectly in our case. The yellow-jackets swooped upon us, and we instantly called to have the jam taken away, but even with the removal of the jam the yellow-jackets did not go; they remained humming and buzzing, and demanding explanations which we were not able to give. Then they possessed themselves of our bread and butter, and even threatened our tea, which we had to gulp hastily and as it were by stealth. We feared they might follow us to our fly, but our rout seemed to bewilder them; and we left them darkly murmuring in the air above our table after we paid and fled.

“A little more of this,” I said, as we drove out of Shottery, while the over-laden motorbusses passed earthquakingly by us, “a little more, and I shall begin to believe in the Bacon authorship.”

CHAPTER XV

THERE was a delicate touch of autumn in the air that revived my drooping faith; and the color of the haws and reddening leaves in the untrimmed hedges consoled; so that after a night’s sleep we were ready for the evidence of the school where Shakespeare got his “small Latin and less Greek.” The row of old timbered buildings, low, red-tiled, with the second-story overhang, stretches away from the Guild Chapel with not much distinction between the Grammar School and the endearing almshouses in which one could well desire to be a pauper such as often stood at the doorways and looked so willing to have us come in. We rashly put off doing that till another time, and so never did it, but we felt that the place where it is so vigorously imagined by his biographers that Shakespeare laid the foundations of his versatility could not wait, and we lost no time at last in visiting the school-room opening out of the Guild Hall on the upper floor. In the Guild Hall the heart of faith affirms that the boy sometime came with his father to see the passing shows, which made Stratford a one-night stand in those days, and that he studied or idled in the school-room under a certain window at a desk now devoutly removed to the Birthplace; but there was not much to do with the conviction after we were possessed of it. Dr. Furnivall, in whom it is very strong, ekes it out in his life of Shakespeare with the picturesque portrayal of such a school-boy as Shakespeare would have been if he had been one; and this may be taken as one of the strongest proofs of the Shakespearean authorship.

Our visit was tardily paid on one of our very last days in Stratford, and then we said we must go again to Holy Trinity Church, which we had not yet satisfyingly seen because of the crowds of mere sight-seers infesting the place. With such people I felt that we had nothing in common, and it seemed as if Providence recognized our difference in timing our arrival at the churchyard gate just as one large company should be coming out and no other yet going in. It was a little bewildering to find this departing company Germans, and personally conducted by an English-speaking Japanese.

“Oh, stranger things than that happen here,” the gracious Shade, who greeted me at the church-door, said, when I noted the quaint fact to him; he was always so delightfully modern in his acceptance of circumstance. He lingered outside a moment in the sweet, bright air as if his genial spirit could sense the morning’s loveliness like one still in the body. “I’m particularly glad to meet you to-day because I’m thinking of leaving Stratford for a while.”

“Leaving Stratford!” I marveled.

“Yes; August is almost gone, and it will be a little dull here after the theater is closed, and the folk-dancing and singing is over, and the lectures are all finished. Bacon is gone already.”

“Bacon gone!” I stupidly repeated.

“Yes; he couldn’t stand it; he felt that I was becoming spoiled by the sickening adulation, as he called it.”

“But you’re not!” I protested.

“No; and I don’t suppose he really believed it. The fact is he can’t be away from London for a great while when once we return to Time. He finds a greater concourse of spirits there, the new arrivals as well as the old, and of course more variety. We can’t wonder at his preferring it.”

“No,” I faltered.

“Besides, it’s one of the conditions, you know, that he must visit Tower Hill where he brought Essex to his death, and Westminster Hall, where he used to sit and judge the suitors from whom he had taken bribes.”

“Why, but I thought that old notion of eternal punishment — Then, after all, there is a—”

“Do you call three hundred years eternal? Well, yes, there is a sort of hell. But there is no punishment; there is only consequence, and there is the relief of doing penance.”

“And does it last forever — the consequence?”

“How do I know, with my little three centuries’ experience? I only know that when I meet Bacon after one of these seasons of expiation he is a great deal lighter and cheerfuler, better company; he isn’t so censorious, so critical; not that I ever minded criticism much, or do now; especially as it’s quite impossible to revise my work at this late day.”

“Your editors are always doing it,” I said, thoughtfully.

“They’re not nearly drastic enough for Bacon. He would out-Ben Ben Jonson in blotting. Sometimes I could wish he had written the plays,” and the amiable Shade laughed out his enjoyment of the notion. “But come! I’m keeping you; you want to see the church.”

“There’s no hurry,” I began, but suddenly the Shade became a part of the bright air, and I turned to my companions. “Well, let us go in,” I said.

“No; we’ve seen it once already. We’ll go and walk in the meadows along the Avon till you come out.”

I was glad they had not apparently noticed anything out of the common; and I considered that perhaps the incident just closed had not had more than a dream’s space in its occurrence.

Within, the light of the church, strained through its colored windows, was of a brightness softer than that of the light outside, but still of a very unwonted brightness in an English church. There was a sort of cheer in it such as ought always to lift the heart in a church, above other places; it was like the almost gaiety of an Italian church. A few people were going about with their guidebooks in their hands, and staring round to identify the monuments. But I went directly up to the chancel where the Shakespeare tombs are, and where there was now a kind-looking verger dusting and brushing. I tried to satisfy the desire I had for a better acquaintance with the painted bust above the poet’s tablet, which overlooks the famous stone with its conditional malediction in the floor; but after craning my neck this side and that in vain, I ventured to ask the verger if they ever let people inside the chancel rail. Why, he argued, if they let many inside, the inscriptions on the stones would be quite worn away; but, he relented, they sometimes made exceptions of those especially interested. Was I especially interested? I tried to look archaeological; and he lifted the barrier, and I stood among the monuments of the Shakespeare family, which fill the whole space of the chancel pavement in front of the altar, with the bust of the poet looking over them from its Jacobean setting in the northern wall. In their presence one does not escape the sense of a family party, and of a middle-class satisfied desire of respectability in their reunion. I realized there as never before that the Shakespeares were strictly bourgeois in the whole keeping of their lives, and in their death there seems the sort of triumph I have intimated. If there wanted anything to this it was supplied by the presence of the good Doctor John Hall, whom they doubtless prized above the poet, once a stroller and at best only a successful actor-manager. He came back indeed to Stratford and set up gentleman among his town folks, who could value him at least for his thrift and state. He sued and was sued, he pleaded and was impleaded in lawsuits for the collection of their debts to him; as nearly as such a world-wide spirit could, he led their narrow village life, with an occasional burst from it in the revels which celebrated the visits of his fellow-players and fellow-playwrights when they came down from London in their love of him; it was no light proof of their affection to make the two or three days’ journey over such roads as they had then, with footpads and cut-purses along the way. He was then no doubt a scandal to the townsfolk, though they too loved him as every one who ever knew him did, but they must have prized him most for his connection with that honored physician. No doubt when the doctor was laid away with the Shakespeares in that venerable place, the neighbors felt that the family had now risen to be a lasting credit to the town.

“If you will step this way,” the verger said, leading me to a spot beyond the poet’s bust, “you will see that the nose is aquiline,” and so it was, and the whole face was redeemed from commonness by that arch. In fact I do not understand why people should be so severe on this bust; I have just called it common, but it would have been impossible for Shakespeare to look Shakespeare if Michelangelo himself had modeled him, and it seems to me that this painted death-mask serves as well as anything could to represent him.

It looks over, not down on, the silly slab which entreats and threatens the spectator concerning the dust below, and across the somewhat complacent epitaph of Mistress Hall, lying beside her husband, and the meeker monument of the poet’s youngest daughter Judith, and last of all the tomb of Anne Hathaway, his wife. There, after a moment of indignation, I was aware of the immortal Shade rising as from its knees at the foot of this farthest stone. “Oh no, oh no,” it read my mind, as always, with that gentleness which seems never to have failed the poet on earth. “Susanna was a bright girl, and a woman tender to all, and the doctor was very well, and Judith was dear to me, too; but they should have put Anne nearest me, though I put her so far away in life so many years. It doesn’t matter to us now, of course, where we have each other forever, but here our parting seems to cast blame on her. They should change my bust and epitaph to this southern wall.”

“I’m glad you feel so,” I expressed, “and I like your implying here, above all places, that you had not the feeling which they read into your words about the wife older than her husband in ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘The Tempest,’ and—”

“Drama, abstract truth!” he interrupted.

“And about the jealous wife in the ‘Comedy of Errors’—”

“Ah, I gave her cause, I gave her cause!” What would have been a sigh from the shadowy lips if they had had breath was wafted from them. “But come, come!” he encouraged himself. “We mustn’t part so; I disowned my evil by owning it to her, and she forgave it before I died, and lived in love of me as long as I lived. How strange it all seems — like things of childhood!”

He appeared to be following beside me from the church. “I should like to say good-by in the open air, in the sun,” he said; and out there it was as if his wise, kind face shone in it. “We sha’n’t meet again, I’m afraid.”

“Why, are you—”

“Yes, I’m going up to London, too. I don’t like to leave Bacon alone there a great while. He gets so very abjectly miserable; I can always help him pick himself up; seeing me restores him to his critical mood, to some sense of his superiority, and I want to take him back with me.”

“Back?” I echoed.

“Yes. To Eternity, you know.”

“Oh!” I murmured. Then I hastened to say: “There is one thing I would like a little more light on. You so id a while ago that there is still consequence — suffering — expiation.”

“When we revisit to Time, that is. But in Eternity not. It is something very difficult to explain. As I said, there is consequence — consequence of every sort, and, if you can understand, there is Correction, though there is no Punishment. Eternity is like a long, impersonal dream, painless because selfless. But after an immeasurable lapse in it we sometimes drift nearer and nearer to consciousness, or the wish to reindividualize. It is then, in these awakenings, that we can return to the borders of Mortality, of Time. We begin to know ourselves apart from the Pardon, from the vast forgiven Unity of souls in which we have been lost. How can I explain? We return to ourselves through such pain and shame — No! I can’t make you understand. But as has been said, we are then ‘let into our evils’ — the evils of our separate wills and desires, which birth gave us and death purged us of. When one of us spiritual molecules, if I may so express it, comes to the painful desire for separation, for return to something like mortal consciousness, it is not suffered to leave the common Ecstasy alone; some other molecule must go with it, but this going is by choice, not by appointment.”

“And you chose to leave that Bliss and return to our sorrowful earth with that poor soul!”

“Eternity is merciful; it forgives; it helps us forget; it forgets for us; but Time cannot; it is conditioned in remembrance; it must be cruel to be kind.”

“Ah, now you are speaking as I have always hoped you would — Shakespeareanly.”

“Would you have liked me to quote myself?”

“No, not quote yourself exactly, but express yourself rather more in the diction of the supreme poet. Instead of that you have preferred the commonest sort of everyday prose. The other sort, if I could have reported our conversations in it, would have been more convincing. It would have proved—”

“That I wrote Shakespeare? No! It would have proved that you did.”

He laughed with that gentle gaiety of his, but began now to be a little sad.

I was going to say something more in protest, but in that instant the generous Shade became part of the dim, religious light of the place, and I went out of the churchyard by the side gate, and down past the old mill, musing and murmuring beside its dam, and so into the sunny meadows along the Avon.

THE END

LITERATURE AND LIFE: SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS

CONTENTS

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK

SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN

WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT

A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS

A SHE HAMLET

THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON

THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY

SAWDUST IN THE ARENA

AT A DIME MUSEUM

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

THE HORSE SHOW

THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER

AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO

FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND

THE ART OF THE ADSMITH

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM

PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION

THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART

POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

STORAGE

FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O

STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER

THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY

SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK

The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River, I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful consideration.

I.

The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there was really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of resentment when they met around the corners. Although I was passing through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by the sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from the sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no peddlers’ carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or four shawl-hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchases in their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the beer saloons. The butchers’ windows were painted with patterns of frost, through which I could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideous stalactites from the roof. When I came to the river, I ached in sympathy with the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showers of powdered quartz.

But it was before I reached this final point that I received into my consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This would have been more effective, but it would not have been true, and the truth obliges me to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on. The pail-which was half her height and twice her bulk-was filled to overflowing with small pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not been for this I might have taken her for a child of the better classes, she was so comfortably clad. But in that case she would have had to be fifteen or sixteen years old, in order to be doing so efficiently and responsibly the work which, as the child of the worse classes, she was actually doing at five or six. We must, indeed, allow that the early self-helpfulness of such children is very remarkable, and all the more so because they grow up into men and women so stupid that, according to the theories of all polite economists, they have to have their discontent with their conditions put into their heads by malevolent agitators.

From time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest; it was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made nothing of it. From time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits of coke that tumbled from her heaping pail. She could not consent to lose one of them, and at last, when she found she could not make all of them stay on the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of her jacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older, who planted himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his hands in his pockets. I do not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in his furtive eye that she was a sore temptation to him. The chance to have fun with her by upsetting her bucket, and scattering her coke about till she cried with vexation, was one which might not often present itself, and I do not know what made him forego it, but I know that he did, and that he finally passed her, as I have seen a young dog pass a little cat, after having stopped it, and thoughtfully considered worrying it.

I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I faced about towards the river again I received the second instalment of my present perplexity. A cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard which I now perceived I had come to, and after this cart followed two brisk old women, snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the cold like the child, who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of coke that were jolted from the load, and filling their aprons with them; such old women, so hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the withered apples red in their cheeks, I have not often seen. They may have been about sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life when most women are grandmothers and are relegated on their merits to the cushioned seats of their children’s homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear visions of lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted by their grandchildren. The fancy can hardly put such sweet ladies in the place of those nimble beldams, who hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking up their day’s supply of firing from the involuntary bounty of the cart. Even the attempt is unseemly, and whether mine is at best but a feeble fancy, not bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring them before me in that figure. I cannot imagine ladies doing that kind of thing; I can only imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard all their lives doing it; who had begun to fight with want from their cradles, like that little one with the pail, and must fight without ceasing to their graves. But I am not unreasonable; I understand and I understood what I saw to be one of the things that must be, for the perfectly good and sufficient reason that they always have been; and at the moment I got what pleasure I could out of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, who never looked about him at the scene which interested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air behind him.

II.

It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is what to do with the fact. The question began with me almost at once, or at least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the wind at my back. I was then so much more comfortable that the aesthetic instinct thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what use I could make of what I had seen in the way of my trade. Should I have something very pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pick up coke for her sick daughter’s freezing orphans till she fell sick herself? What should I do with the family in that case? They could not be left at that point, and I promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl of about eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in her humble neighborhood, who should take her grandmother’s place. I decided that I should have her Italian, because I knew something of Italians, and could manage that nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena; either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more Venetian, and I saw that I must make her Venetian. Here I was on safe ground, and at once the love-interest appeared to help me out. By virtue of the law of contrasts; it appeared to me in the person of a Scandinavian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom I at once felt I could do, from my acquaintance with Scandinavian lovers in Norwegian novels. His name was Janssen, a good, distinctive Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and I thought he might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner from that of a Swedish waitress we once had.

Janssen — Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina’s grandmother used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as they were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep indifference. At first he noticed Marina — or Nina, as I soon saw I must call her — with the same unconcern; for in her grandmother’s hood and jacket and check apron, with her head held shamefacedly downward, she looked exactly like the old woman. I thought I would have Nina make her self-sacrifice rebelliously, as a girl like her would be apt to do, and follow the cokecart with tears. This would catch Janssen’s notice, and he would wonder, perhaps with a little pang, what the old woman was crying about, and then he would see that it was not the old woman. He would see that it was Nina, and he would be in love with her at once, for she would not only be very pretty, but he would know that she was good, if she were willing to help her family in that way.

He would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, Northern way. He would do nothing to betray himself. But little by little he would begin to befriend her. He would carelessly overload his cart before he left the yard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; and not only this, but if he saw a stone or a piece of coal in the street he would drive over it, so that more coke would be jolted from his load.

Nina would get to watching for him. She must not notice him much at first, except as the driver of the overladen, carelessly driven cart. But after several mornings she must see that he is very strong and handsome. Then, after several mornings more, their eyes must meet, her vivid black eyes, with the tears of rage and shame in them, and his cold blue eyes. This must be the climax; and just at this point I gave my fancy a rest, while I went into a drugstore at the corner of Avenue B to get my hands warm.

They were abominably cold, even in my pockets, and I had suffered past several places trying to think of an excuse to go in. I now asked the druggist if he had something which I felt pretty sure he had not, and this put him in the wrong, so that when we fell into talk he was very polite. We agreed admirably about the hard times, and he gave way respectfully when I doubted his opinion that the winters were getting milder. I made him reflect that there was no reason for this, and that it was probably an illusion from that deeper impression which all experiences made on us in the past, when we were younger; I ought to say that he was an elderly man, too. I said I fancied such a morning as this was not very mild for people that had no fires, and this brought me back again to Janssen and Marina, by way of the coke-cart. The thought of them rapt me so far from the druggist that I listened to his answer with a glazing eye, and did not know what he said. My hands had now got warm, and I bade him good-morning with a parting regret, which he civilly shared, that he had not the thing I had not wanted, and I pushed out again into the cold, which I found not so bad as before.

My hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and I saw that to be truly modern, to be at once realistic and mystical, to have both delicacy and strength, I must not let them get further acquainted with each other. The affair must simply go on from day to day, till one morning Jan must note that it was again the grandmother and no longer the girl who was following his cart. She must be very weak from a long sickness — I was not sure whether to have it the grippe or not, but I decided upon that provisionally and she must totter after Janssen, so that he must get down after a while to speak to her under pretence of arranging the tail-board of his cart, or something of that kind; I did not care for the detail. They should get into talk in the broken English which was the only language they could have in common, and she should burst into tears, and tell him that now Nina was sick; I imagined making this very simple, but very touching, and I really made it so touching that it brought the lump into my own throat, and I knew it would be effective with the reader. Then I had Jan get back upon his cart, and drive stolidly on again, and the old woman limp feebly after.

There should not be any more, I decided, except that one very cold morning, like that; Jan should be driving through that street, and should be passing the door of the tenement house where Nina had lived, just as a little procession should be issuing from it. The fact must be told in brief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality. The last touch must be Jan’s cart turning the street corner with Jan’s figure sharply silhouetted against the clear, cold morning light. Nothing more.

But it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing from the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader will have rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at the head of it, quite well again, and going to be married to the little brown youth with ear-rings who had long had her heart.

With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong this might be made, at the fond reader’s expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic, in such a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be. I should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame, and that the whole affair had been so tacit on Jan’s part that Nina might very well have known nothing of his feeling for her. Perhaps at the very end I might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had no such feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine.

III.

The question as to which ending I ought to have given my romance is what has ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has prevented my ever writing it. Here is material of the best sort lying useless on my hands, which, if I could only make up my mind, might be wrought into a short story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in fiction; and I think I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the broken English of Jan and Nina’s grandmother, and certainly something novel. All that I can do now, however, is to put the case before the reader, and let him decide for himself how it should end.

The mere humanist, I suppose, might say, that I am rightly served for having regarded the fact I had witnessed as material for fiction at all; that I had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I ought to have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and tried to learn something of their lives from them, that I might offer my knowledge again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us. I own there is something in this, but then, on the other hand, I have heard it urged by nice people that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, that it is offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and that we ought to be writing about good society, and especially creating grandes dames for their amusement. This sort of people could say to the humanist that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to fall off from for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment; for if one is to be interested in such things at all, it must be aesthetically, though even this is deplorable in the presence of fiction already overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours.

SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN

It may be all an illusion of the map, where the Summer Islands glimmer a small and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote from continental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly upon them, to show how sharp and swift the ship’s course is, but they seem so far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid down a steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebulous somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from the rush of the meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts and incidents contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New York in the raw March morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking and cocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing; but when the ship came in sight of the islands, and they began to lift their cedared slopes from the turquoise waters, and to explain their drifted snows as the white walls and white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became the dreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility of that drop through air became the sole reality.

I.

Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whatever offers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact. Those low hills, that climb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the summer sky, might have drifted down across the Gulf Stream from the coast of Maine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with palms and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely wonder that you had never noticed these growths in Maine before, where you were so familiar with the cedars. The hotel itself, which has brought the Green Mountains with it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the same American groups looking out over them, and rocking and smoking, though, alas! not so many smoking as rocking.

But where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or blue jackets of the British army and navy which lend their lustre and color here to the veranda groups? Where should one get the house walls of whitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the sun, and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies? These things must come from some other association, and in the case of him who here confesses, the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from waters as far away in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of Venetian Junes haunts the coral shore. (They are beginning to say the shore is not coral; but no matter.) To be sure, the white roofs are not accounted for in this visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to the snowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutely tropical, together with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries. They at least suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one remembers seeing it through Titbottom’s spectacles; and yet, if one supplies roofs of brown-red tiles, it is all Venetian enough, with the lagoon-like expanses that lend themselves to the fond effect. It is so Venetian, indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy gondoliers, in place of the dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, to complete the coming and going illusion; and there is no good reason why the rough little isles that fill the bay should not call themselves respectively San Giorgio and San Clemente, and Sant’ Elena and San Lazzaro: they probably have no other names!

II.

These summer isles of Eden have this advantage over the scriptural Eden, that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were expelled, when once she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed: women now abound in the Summer Islands, and there is not a snake anywhere to be found. There are some tortoises and a great many frogs in their season, but no other reptiles. The frogs are fabled of a note so deep and hoarse that its vibration almost springs the environing mines of dynamite, though it has never yet done so; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patriarchal age, and are fond of Boston brown bread and baked beans, if their preferences may be judged from those of a colossal specimen in the care of an American family living on the islands. The observer who contributes this fact to science is able to report the case of a parrot-fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a large brown and purple cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a sense of something like cruelty in its exile from its native waters. The angel-fish he thinks not so much like angels; they are of a transparent purity of substance, and a cherubic innocence of expression, but they terminate in two tails, which somehow will not lend themselves to the resemblance.

Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable growths about it. All things here are of a weird convertibility to the alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts of nature lavish themselves in humble association with the commonest and most familiar. You drive through long stretches of wayside willows, and realize only now and then that these willows are thick clumps of oleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies’ lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, unless because they are not nearly enough to characterize the landscape, which in spite of their presence remains so northern in aspect. They were much whipped and torn by a late hurricane, which afflicted all the vegetation of the islands, and some of the royal palms were blown down. Where these are yet standing, as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now quite one-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that of any king who could pass by them: no sovereign except Philip of Macedon in his least judicial moments could pass between them.

The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. It often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take away the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and enterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it merits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. One such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a house which this very writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore from the steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior one of the many multiples of himself which are now pretty well dispersed among the pleasant places of the earth. It fills the night with a heavy heliotropean sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence of the waxing moon, the multiple which has spiritually expropriated the legal owners stretches itself in an interminable reverie, and hears Youth come laughing back to it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where other white houses (which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy underpinning. In this dream the multiple drives home from the balls of either hotel with the young girls in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn; and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the shapes of flirtation which shall night-long gild the visions of their sleep with the flash of military and naval uniforms. Of course the multiple has been at the dance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances of forty years ago), and knows enough not to confuse the uniforms.

III.

In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land? Some think, on the stronger wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that men brought them. Men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which swarm about their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelier birds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the islands. Still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder places the catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, and holds its own against them. The little ground-doves mimic in miniature the form and markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps not their melancholy cooing. Nature has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green upon their translucent bodies as they trail their meteoric splendor against the midday sky. Full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot beyond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorter than they, and they attack fiercely anything they suspect of too intimate a curiosity concerning their nests.

They are probably the only short-tempered things in the Summer Islands, where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily find it again. Sweetness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing human quality, and a good share of it belongs to such of the natives as are in no wise light. Our poor brethren of a different pigment are in the large majority, and they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the full enjoyment of all their civil rights, without lifting themselves from their old inferiority. They do the hard work, in their own easy way, and possibly do not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whom here, as in our own country, they load up with the conundrum which their existence involves for him. They are not very gay, and do not rise to a joke with that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home. If you have them against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery canes, nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of the air and sky; nor are they out of place on the box of the little victorias, where visitors of the more inquisitive sex put them to constant question. Such visitors spare no islander of any color. Once, in the pretty Public Garden which the multiple had claimed for its private property, three unmerciful American women suddenly descended from the heavens and began to question the multiple’s gardener, who was peacefully digging at the rate of a spadeful every five minutes. Presently he sat down on his wheelbarrow, and then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it to the other. Then he rose and braced himself desperately against the tool-house, where, when his tormentors drifted away, he seemed to the soft eye of pity pinned to the wall by their cruel interrogations, whose barbed points were buried in the stucco behind him, and whose feathered shafts stuck out half a yard before his breast.

Whether he was black or not, pity could not see, but probably he was. At least the garrison of the islands is all black, being a Jamaican regiment of that color; and when one of the warriors comes down the white street, with his swagger-stick in his hand, and flaming in scarlet and gold upon the ground of his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriole were coming towards you, or a mighty tulip. These gorgeous creatures seem so much readier than the natives to laugh, that you wish to test them with a joke. But it might fail. The Summer Islands are a British colony, and the joke does not flourish so luxuriantly, here as some other things.

To be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of joke when you hear it first named, and when you are offered a ‘loquat’, if you are of a frivolous mind you search your mind for the connection with ‘loquor’ which it seems to intimate. Failing in this, you taste the fruit, and then, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as far from loquaciousness as if you had bitten a green persimmon. But if it is ripe, it is delicious, and may be consumed indefinitely. It is the only native fruit which one can wish to eat at all, with an unpractised palate, though it is claimed that with experience a relish may come for the pawpaws. These break out in clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick pole, which may have some leaves or may not, and ripen as they fancy in the indefinite summer. They are of the color and flavor of a very insipid little muskmelon which has grown too near a patch of squashes.

One may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one must study hard. It is best when plucked by a young islander of Italian blood whose father orders him up the bare pole in the sunny Sunday morning air to oblige the signori, and then with a pawpaw in either hand stands talking with them about the two bad years there have been in Bermuda, and the probability of his doing better in Nuova York. He has not imagined our winter, however, and he shrinks from its boldly pictured rigors, and lets the signori go with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses.

The roses are here, budding and blooming in the quiet bewilderment which attends the flowers and plants from the temperate zone in this latitude, and which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream and cake at another public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruit and white blossoms on the same stem. They are a pleasure to the nose and eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of the tropics, if indeed the Summer Islands are tropical, which some plausibly deny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant in mid-March, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet?

IV.

What remains? The events of the Summer Islands are few, and none out of the order of athletics between teams of the army and navy, and what may be called societetics, have happened in the past enchanted fortnight. But far better things than events have happened: sunshine and rain of such like quality that one could not grumble at either, and gales, now from the south and now from the north, with the languor of the one and the vigor of the other in them. There were drives upon drives that were always to somewhere, but would have been delightful the same if they had been mere goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late August; and why not, after all its interminable, innumerable summers? Everywhere in the gentle hollows which the coral hills (if they are coral) sink into are the patches of potatoes and lilies and onions drawing their geometrical lines across the brown-red, weedless soil; and in very sheltered spots are banana-orchards which are never so snugly sheltered there but their broad leaves are whipped to shreds. The white road winds between gray walls crumbling in an amiable disintegration, but held together against ruin by a network of maidenhair ferns and creepers of unknown name, and overhung by trees where the cactus climbs and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces them with speary stems as tall and straight as the stalks of the neighboring bamboo. The loquat-trees cluster — like quinces in the garden closes, and show their pale golden, plum-shaped fruit.

For the most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs of the negro children paddling in the tints of the prostrate rainbow.

All this seems probable and natural enough at the writing; but how will it be when one has turned one’s back upon it? Will it not lapse into the gross fable of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who swap them cannot themselves believe? What will be said to you when you tell that in the Summer Islands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard and take out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it up and go to living in it? What, when you relate that among the northern and southern evergreens there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is no fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping them on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when you pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the ooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after them the holes they emerged from?

These every-day facts seem not only incredible to the liar himself, even in their presence, but when you begin the ascent of that steep slant back to New York you foresee that they will become impossible. As impossible as the summit of the slant now appears to the sense which shudderingly figures it a Bermuda pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruiting icicles and snowballs in the March air!

WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT

Looking through Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey’s charming book on the Flowers of Field, Hill, and Swamp, the other day, I was very forcibly reminded of the number of these pretty, wilding growths which I had been finding all the season long among the streets of asphalt and the sidewalks of artificial stone in this city; and I am quite sure that any one who has been kept in New York, as I have been this year, beyond the natural time of going into the country, can have as real a pleasure in this sylvan invasion as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it.

I.

Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the early spring flowers, but I can recall the exquisite effect of the tender blue hepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down Broadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where the cable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant must find itself at home there. The water-pimpernel may now be seen, by any sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of the passing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars. The reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs. Creevey’s book. He knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my delight, I am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in August. It is a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be sought along the shady stretches of Third Avenue, where the Elevated Road overhead forms a shelter as of interlacing boughs. The arrow-head likes such swampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at Dead Man’s Curve and the corners of Twenty third Street. This is in flower now, and will be till September; and St.-John’s-wort, which some call the false goldenrod, is already here. You may find it in any moist, low ground, but the gutters of Wall Street, or even the banks of the Stock Exchange, are not too dry for it. The real golden-rod is not much in evidence with us, for it comes only when summer is on the wane. The other night, however, on the promenade of the Madison Square Roof Garden, I was delighted to see it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in response to the cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile there at the base of a potted ever green. This lonely insect had no sooner sounded its winter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically to wave and droop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-side pastures! But this may have been only a transitory response to the cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he will find golden-rod there every night. I believe there is always Golden Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of “deep, cool, moist woods,” where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing, along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman’s breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop’s — cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder’s-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from some fairy of genius. I should say it was a female fairy of genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when she invented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives. The author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one would know how they looked from their names; and when you call them over they at once transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between our sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations whence other sky-scrapers are to rise.

II.

That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket’s cry flowered the dome with golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra sloped all one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dollar gale that always blows over the city at that height. But as one turns the leaves of Mrs. Creevey’s magic book-perhaps one ought to say turns its petals — the forests and the fields come and make themselves at home in the city everywhere. By virtue of it I have been more in the country in a half-hour than if I had lived all June there. When I lift my eyes from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against the air after dwelling on his brightness. The rose-mallow flaunts along Fifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the house fronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times that it was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing illusion.

Yet Mrs. Creevey’s book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit by any of the ordinary arts. It is rather matter of fact in form and manner, and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its subject. One feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such titles of chapters as “Wet Meadows and Low Grounds”; “Dry Fields — Waste Places — Waysides”; “Hills and Rocky Woods, Open Woods”; and “Deep, Cool, Moist Woods”; each a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing opulence of suggestion. The spring and, summer months pass in stately processional through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with the names of her characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the blooms themselves.

They are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, or their own wayward wills led them astray. A singularly fascinating chapter is that called “Escaped from Gardens,” in which some of these pretty runagates are catalogued. I supposed in my liberal ignorance that the Bouncing Bet was the only one of these, but I have learned that the Pansy and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Caraway, the Snapdragon, the Prince’s Feather, the Summer Savory, the Star of Bethlehem, the Day-Lily, and the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish Stone Crop are of the vagrant, fragrant company. One is not surprised to meet the Tiger-Lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart; but that the Baby’s Breath should be found wandering by the road-sides from Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, gives one a tender pang as for a lost child. Perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and feed at back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the Baby’s Breath, and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant.

III.

As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely they were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the flowers. Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience, but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very well know; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name of the flowers she loves to write of. I am not saying that the Day-Lily would not smell as sweet by her title of ‘Hemerocallis Fulva’, or that the homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her scholar’s cap and gown of ‘Saponaria Officinalis’; but merely that their college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or even melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays. So I like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them, and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makes them grow here in the city streets. I have a fancy that they would all vanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms. As long as I talk of cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff spears; but if I called them ‘Typha Latifolia’, or even ‘Typha Angustifolia’, there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. The street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the ‘Viola Pedata’; and the commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwood maligned as the ‘Rhus Venenata’. The very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple American Cowslip as the ‘Dodecatheon Meadia’.

IV

Yet I do not deny that such scientific nomenclature has its uses; and I should be far from undervaluing this side of Mrs. Creevey’s book. In fact, I secretly respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if ever I get into the woods or fields again I mean to go up to some of the humblest flowers, such as I can feel myself on easy terms with, and tell them what they are in Latin. I think it will surprise them, and I dare say they will some of them like it, and will want their initials inscribed on their leaves, like those signatures which the medicinal plants bear, or are supposed to bear. But as long as I am engaged in their culture amid this stone and iron and asphalt, I find it best to invite their presence by their familiar names, and I hope they will not think them too familiar. I should like to get them all naturalized here, so that the thousands of poor city children, who never saw them growing in their native places, might have some notion of how bountifully the world is equipped with beauty, and how it is governed by many laws which are not enforced by policemen. I think that would interest them very much, and I shall not mind their plucking my Barmecide blossoms, and carrying them home by the armfuls. When good-will costs nothing we ought to practise it even with the tramps, and these are very welcome, in their wanderings over the city pave, to rest their weary limbs in any of my pleached bowers they come to.

A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS

We dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are well-to-do, have more than our fill of pleasures of all kinds; and for now many years past we have been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly as great misery as famine in that kind could be. For our sins, or some of our friends’ sins, perhaps, we have now gone so long to circuses of three rings and two raised-platforms that we scarcely realize that in the country there are still circuses of one ring and no platform at all. We are accustomed, in the gross and foolish-superfluity of these city circuses, to see no feat quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes at the most important instant in the hope of greater wonders in another ring. We have four or five clowns, in as many varieties of grotesque costume, as well as a lady clown in befitting dress; but we hear none of them speak, not even the lady clown, while in the country circus the old clown of our childhood, one and indivisible, makes the same style of jokes, if not the very same jokes, that we used to hear there. It is not easy to believe all this, and I do not know that I should quite believe it myself if I had not lately been witness of it in the suburban village where I was passing the summer.

I.

The circus announced itself in the good old way weeks beforehand by the vast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fell upon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere with their festive pink. They prophesied it in a name borne by the first circus I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must all have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie attached to it. I did not know this when I heard the band braying through the streets of the village on the morning of the performance, and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the procession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in their graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to himself in the darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had done lunch. My heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so very little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two-platform circuses); the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat women and lean men; the horses tethered in the background and stamping under the fly-bites; the old, weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked like the ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag me captive in its triumph; and the canvas shelters where the cooks were already at work over their kettles on the evening meal of the circus folk.

I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd, but there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of a crowd. I bought my admittances without a moment’s delay, and the man who sold me my reserve seats had even leisure to call me back and ask to look at the change he had given me, mostly nickels. “I thought I didn’t give you enough,” he said, and he added one more, and sent me on to the doorkeeper with my faith in human nature confirmed and refreshed. It was cool enough outside, but within it was very warm, as it should be, to give the men with palm-leaf fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance. They were already making their rounds, and crying their wares with voices from the tombs of the dead past; and the child of the young mother who took my seat-ticket from me was going to sleep at full length on the lowermost tread of the benches, so that I had to step across its prostrate form. These reserved seats were carpeted; but I had forgotten how little one rank was raised above another, and how very trying they were upon the back and legs. But for the carpeting, I could not see how I was advantaged above the commoner folk in the unreserved seats, and I reflected how often in this world we paid for an inappreciable splendor. I could not see but they were as well off as I; they were much more gayly dressed, and some of them were even smoking cigars, while they were nearly all younger by ten, twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even more. They did not look like the country people whom I rather hoped and expected to see, but were apparently my fellow-villagers, in different stages of excitement. They manifested by the usual signs their impatience to have the performance begin, and I confess that I shared this, though I did not take part in the demonstration.

II.

I have no intention of following the events seriatim. Front time to time during their progress I renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with the circus-men. They were quite the same people, I believe, but strangely softened and ameliorated, as I hope I am, and looking not a day older, which I cannot say of myself, exactly. The supernumeraries were patently farmer boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit of adventure, and who wore their partial liveries, a braided coat here and a pair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and were very glad when they were not. The man who went round with a dog to keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. The man came up and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferred that the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to all the great, kind-hearted, simple circus family. He was good to the poor supes, and instructed them, not at all sneeringly, how best to manage the guy ropes for the nets when the trapeze events began.

There was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity diffused over the whole circus. This was, perhaps, partly an effect from our extreme proximity to its performances; I had never been on quite such intimate terms with equitation and aerostation of all kinds; but I think it was also largely from the good hearts of the whole company. A circus must become, during the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, especially sisterhood, and its members must forget finally that they are not united by ties of blood. I dare say they often become so, as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, if not as brothers.

The domestic effect was heightened almost poignantly when a young lady in a Turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern. She really looked like a young goddess in a Turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses must have worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often imagined in the bath, or just out of it. But when this goddess threw off her bath-gown, and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore on her slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than most goddesses. What I am trying to say, however, is that, while she stood there by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she were their collective sister. They were all in their shirt-sleeves for the sake of the coolness, and they banged and trumpeted and fluted away as indifferent to her as so many born brothers.

Indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought her to our side of the ring, she was visibly not so youthful and not so divine as she might have been; but the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them wonderfully, left nothing to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see why we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other people. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contemplation of her perils. One could follow every motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which she forbade herself any shrinking or reluctance.

III.

How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions! Why should such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure? Perhaps it does not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one of the many delusions we are in with regard to each other in this bewildering world. They are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and I suppose that in the last analysis it was not pleasure I got from the clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so merrily. I remember that I liked hearing his old jokes, not because they were jokes, but because they were old and endeared by long association. He sang one song which I must have heard him sing at my first circus (I am sure it was he), about “Things that I don’t like to see,” and I heartily agreed with him that his book of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully worth the half-dime asked for it, though I did not buy it.

Perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, as a brother man, I will not allow that I did not feel for him and suffer with him because of the thick, white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, with the sweat drops upon it, made me think of a newly painted wall in the rain. He was infinitely older than his personality, than his oldest joke (though you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, representatively, I dare say he outdated the pyramids. They must have made clowns whiten their faces in the dawn of time, and no doubt there were drolls among the antediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by that means. All the same, I pitied this clown for it, and I fancied in his wildest waggery the note of a real irascibility. Shall I say that he seemed the only member of that little circus who was not of an amiable temper? But I do not blame him, and I think it much to have seen a clown once more who jested audibly with the ringmaster and always got the better of him in repartee. It was long since I had known that pleasure.

IV.

Throughout the performance at this circus I was troubled by a curious question, whether it were really of the same moral and material grandeur as the circuses it brought to memory, or whether these were thin and slight, too. We all know how the places of our childhood, the heights, the distances, shrink and dwindle when we go back to them, and was it possible that I had been deceived in the splendor of my early circuses? The doubt was painful, but I was forced to own that there might be more truth in it than in a blind fealty to their remembered magnificence. Very likely circuses have grown not only in size, but in the richness and variety of their entertainments, and I was spoiled for the simple joys of this. But I could see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on the young faces around me, and I must confess that there was at least so much of the circus that I left when it was half over. I meant to go into the side-shows and see the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take the giant by the hand and the armless man by his friendly foot, if I might be so honored. But I did none of these things, and I am willing to believe the fault was in me, if I was disappointed in the circus. It was I who had shrunk and dwindled, and not it. To real boys it was still the size of the firmament, and was a world of wonders and delights. At least I can recognize this fact now, and can rejoice in the peaceful progress all over the country of the simple circuses which the towns never see, but which help to render the summer fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyes and hearts they appeal to. I hope it will be long before they cease to find profit in the pleasure they give.

A SHE HAMLET

The other night as I sat before the curtain of the Garden Theatre and waited for it to rise upon the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of the rich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtain upon any Hamlet passed through my eager frame. There is, indeed, no scene of drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror) than that which opens the great tragedy. The sentry pacing up and down upon the platform at Elsinore under the winter night; the greeting between him and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints of the bitter cold; the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus to these before they can part; the mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in the act of protesting it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the ghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing all into a pulseless awe: what could be more simply and sublimely real, more naturally supernatural? What promise of high mystical things to come there is in the mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how it enlarges us from ourselves, for that time at least, to a disembodied unity with the troubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents! As the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in my time passed in long procession through my memory, I seemed to myself so much of their world, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actual one, that I should hardly have been surprised to find myself one of the less considered persons of the drama who were seen but not heard in its course.

I.

The trouble in judging anything is that if you have the materials for an intelligent criticism, the case is already prejudiced in your hands. You do not bring a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free your mind are a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, but not really effective for the purpose. The best way is to own yourself unfair at the start, and then you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, if not your subject. In other words, if you went to see the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt frankly expecting to be disappointed, you were less likely in the end to be disappointed in your expectations, and you could not blame her if you were. To be ideally fair to that representation, it would be better not to have known any other Hamlet, and, above all, the Hamlet of Shakespeare.

From the first it was evident that she had three things overwhelmingly against her — her sex, her race, and her speech. You never ceased to feel for a moment that it was a woman who was doing that melancholy Dane, and that the woman was a Jewess, and the Jewess a French Jewess. These three removes put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and the impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable Northern nature which is in nothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so little French as in those obscure emotions which the English poetry expressed with more than Gallic clearness, but which the French words always failed to convey. The battle was lost from the first, and all you could feel about it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it was not war.

While the battle went on I was the more anxious to be fair, because I had, as it were, pre-espoused the winning side; and I welcomed, in the interest of critical impartiality, another Hamlet which came to mind, through readily traceable associations. This was a Hamlet also of French extraction in the skill and school of the actor, but as much more deeply derived than the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt as the large imagination of Charles Fechter transcended in its virile range the effect of her subtlest womanish intuition. His was the first blond Hamlet known to our stage, and hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may stand for a complexion; and it was of the quality of his Hamlet in masterly technique.

II.

The Hamlet of Fechter, which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt was figuring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in being a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre. It was romantic as Shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense of the word, and not romanticistic as Dumas was romanticistic. It was, therefore, the most realistic Hamlet ever yet seen, because the most naturally poetic. Mme. Bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of her school; for Fechter’s poetic naturalness differed from the conventionality of the accepted Hamlets in nothing so much as the superiority of its self-instruction. In Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet, as in his, nothing was trusted to chance, or “inspiration.” Good or bad, what one saw was what was meant to be seen. When Fechter played Edmond Dantes or Claude Melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and in Hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; it might be held to be nearer the Elizabethan accent than ours; and after all, you said Hamlet was a foreigner, and in your high content with what he gave you did not mind its being in a broken vessel. When he challenged the ghost with “I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane,” you Would hardly have had the erring utterance bettered. It sufficed as it was; and when he said to Rosencrantz, “Will you pleh upon this pyip?” it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you made no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness afterwards. For the most part you were not aware of these betrayals of his speech; and in certain high things it was soul interpreted to soul through the poetry of Shakespeare so finely, so directly, that there was scarcely a sense of the histrionic means.

He put such divine despair into the words, “Except my life, except my life, except my life!” following the mockery with which he had assured Polonius there was nothing he would more willingly part withal than his leave, that the heart-break of them had lingered with me for thirty years, and I had been alert for them with every Hamlet since. But before I knew, Mme. Bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever. Her Hamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we have learned to think the points of Hamlet, and it so transformed others by its interpretation of the translator’s interpretation of Shakespeare that they passed unrecognized. Soliloquies are the weak invention of the enemy, for the most part, but as such things go that soliloquy of Hamlet’s, “To be or not to be,” is at least very noble poetry; and yet Mme. Bernhardt was so unimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed the act of its delivery. Perhaps this happened because the sumptuous and sombre melancholy of Shakespeare’s thought was transmitted in phrases that refused it its proper mystery. But there was always a hardness, not always from the translation, upon this feminine Hamlet. It was like a thick shell with no crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet could show, except for the one moment at Ophelia’s grave, where he reproaches Laertes with those pathetic words —

     ”What is the reason that you use me thus?
        I loved you ever; but it is no matter.”

Here Mme. Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and not a man. At the close of the Gonzago play, when Hamlet triumphs in a mad whirl, her Hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous crow, a mischievous she-crow.

There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there were moments of leaden lapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in her elocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit. Her voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strong emotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman. At times her movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drolly womanish, especially those of the whole person. Her quickened pace was a woman’s nervous little run, and not a man’s swift stride; and to give herself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman’s high heels to her shoes, and she could not help tilting on them.

In the scene with the queen after the play, most English and American Hamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of two brothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but Mme. Bernhardt’s preferred full-length, life-size family portraits. The dead king’s effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the scene-painter’s art, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to it in the wall at the right moment. She achieved a novelty by this treatment of the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone she took with the wretched queen. Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but though it could be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the part of a good daughter to give it her?

One should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had become impossible to think at all of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet as a man, if it ever had been possible. She had traversed the bounds which tradition as well as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which an actress may personate a man. This condition is that there shall be always a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know all the time that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herself such before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a man only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it. Shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in men’s roles, which, as women’s roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be more naturally managed then than now. But when it came to the eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have been confused if not weakened. If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity of doing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in men’s roles. These characters are, of course, “lighter motions bounded in a shallower brain” than the creation she aimed at; but she could at least have made much of them, and she does not make much of Hamlet.

III.

The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet is that it does violence to an ideal. Literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine types that we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeing Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from the fancy that the Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with crises of mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady. Hamlet is in nothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himself unequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them. If we could suppose him a woman as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved his perplexities with the delightful precipitation of his putative sex. As the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that case would have had to be a wicked aunt, wedded to Hamlet’s father hard upon the murder of her mother, she would have made short work of her vengeance. No fine scruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment’s question whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out with her bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it through her aunt’s breast.

To be sure, there would then have been no play of “Hamlet,” as we have it; but a Hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine Hamlet, Mme. Bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully. It is in attempting a masculine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates an ideal. It is not thinkable. After you have seen it done, you say, as Mr. Clemens is said to have said of bicycling: “Yes, I have seen it, but it’s impossible. It doesn’t stand to reason.”

Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonable in the work of an artist is inartistic. By the time I had reached these bold conclusions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, and to declare that in a true civilization such a thing as that Hamlet would be forbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to something precious and sacred.

In the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals in the arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves to judgment when they violate them. After Mme. Bernhardt was perversely willing to attempt the part of Hamlet, the question whether she did it well or not was of slight consequence. She had already made her failure in wishing to play the part. Her wish impugned her greatness as an artist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as the assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor. There is an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader. I can note merely that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginary actions to figure as men than for men to figure as women. In the theatre we have conjectured how and why this may be, but the privilege, for less obvious reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction. A woman may tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a man cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of a woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome. One feels this true even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a case in point. Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking effect than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not play Hamlet at all. That sublime ideal is the property of the human imagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossible. No harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched. Hamlet, after all the horse-play, would be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by a woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine for a fresh effect, is Hamlet disabled, for a long time, at least, in its vital essence. I felt that it would take many returns to the Hamlet of Shakespeare to efface the impression of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet; and as I prepared to escape from my row of stalls in the darkening theatre, I experienced a noble shame for having seen the Dane so disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell’s word. I had not been obliged to come; I had voluntarily shared in the wrong done; by my presence I had made myself an accomplice in the wrong. It was high ground, but not too high for me, and I recovered a measure of self-respect in assuming it.

THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON

He had often heard of it. Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print under the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought to see it. He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find it in his experience so largely subjective. If there was any drama at all it was wholly in his own consciousness. But the thing was certainly impressive in its way.

I.

He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by chance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised to recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the pleasure of seeing.

Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to see his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight to the next midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, and the sight of it, from the very first instant. He was proud of knowing just what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing an earthquake, though one has never felt one before. He saw the double file of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other from the corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with his perspicacity.

It was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup, warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome Christmas-week weather, and was wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night as a duty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarming them for his health. He now practised another piece of self-denial: he let the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carry him to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the Christmas party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the child from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. He got the child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: “When you get up there near that bakery again, drive slowly. I want to have a look at those men.”

“All right, sir,” said the driver intelligently, and he found his why skilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonable Christmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till they could get round to it with their carts.

When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it was a few minutes before. Except for their own coup, the cable-cars, with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs at the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves. A tall, lumbering United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central Station. He listened with half an ear to the child’s account of the fun she had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves.

He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the place where he had left them. But the driver remembered, and checked his horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater number than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along the side street. They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door where the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before they were all gone.

II.

My friend’s heart beat with glad anticipation. He was really to see this important, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage. He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnight loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way: the next day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those who needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise. She understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have liked very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic. Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having fancied it.

He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would get out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving the bread. Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask them about themselves. At the time it did not strike him that it would be indecent.

A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture. It was not probable that they were any of them there for their health, as the saying is. They were all there because they were hungry, or else they were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry. But it was always possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if any test was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving. If one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did not so much matter.

It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they would tell him lies. A fantastic association of their double files and those of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind. He smiled, and then he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts — slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty. All at once he fancied them actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted to buy. He thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it would ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been. Would the world ever outlive it? Would some New-Year’s day come when some President would proclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more? That would be fine.

III.

He noticed how still the most of them were. A few of them stepped a little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together. They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no more need of defence from the cold than the dead have.

He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among them. He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff, wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their deceit.

He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions, his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the fact.

To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue-black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal, after vain prayer.

Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind. How early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole of bread? As early as ten, as nine o’clock? If so, did the fact argue habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? Did the slaves in the coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though they were closely neighbored night after night by their misery? Perhaps they joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes. Which of them were old-comers, and which novices? Did they ever quarrel over questions of precedence? Had they some comity, some etiquette, which a man forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back? Could one say to his next-hand man, “Will you please keep my place?” and would this man say to an interloper, “Excuse me, this place is engaged”? How was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the door where the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rear that the supply was exhausted? This must sometimes happen, and what did they do then?

IV.

My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, reproachful thoughts for all the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind. If he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? But what was the use? There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not go round.

The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. He was not only walking by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by. His action caught the notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a superior. They were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but their eyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through.

My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never, never hope to know. He was Society: Society that was to be preserved because it embodies Civilization. He wondered if they hated him in his capacity of Better Classes. He no longer thought of getting out and watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee. He would have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it; that he was their friend, and wished them well — as well as might be without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which he could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. He put his hand on that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least with intelligence.

“You mustn’t mind. What we are and what we do is all right. It’s what they are and what they suffer that’s all wrong.”

V.

“Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?” I asked, when he had told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently not coloring it at all.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “It seems to be the only way out.”

“Well, it’s an easy way,” I admitted, “and it’s an idea that ought to gratify the midnight platoon.”

THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY

I confess that I cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn as beyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet I have to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon of late July, four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches near New York, I was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not within reach of them. I know very well that the excursionists must go somewhere, and as a man and a brother I am willing they should go anywhere, but as a friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry to have them come much where I am. It is not because I would deny them a share of any pleasure I enjoy, but because they are so many and I am so few that I think they would get all the pleasure and I none. I hope the reader will see how this attitude distinguishes me from the selfish people who inhumanly exult in their remoteness from excursionists.

I.

It was at Rockaway Beach that I saw these fellow-beings whose mere multitude was too much for me. They were otherwise wholly without offence towards me, and so far as I noted, towards each other; they were, in fact, the most entirely peaceable multitude I ever saw in any country, and the very quietest.

There were thousands, mounting well up towards tens of thousands, of them, in every variety of age and sex; yet I heard no voice lifted above the conversational level, except that of some infant ignorant of its privileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman crying the attractions of the spectacle in his charge. I used to think the American crowds rather boisterous and unruly, and many years ago, when I lived in Italy, I celebrated the greater amiability and self-control of the Italian crowds. But we have certainly changed all that within a generation, and if what I saw the other day was a typical New York crowd, then the popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it once was to the peaceful observer. The tough was not visibly present, nor the toughness, either of the pure native East Side stock or of the Celtic extraction; yet there were large numbers of Americans with rather fewer recognizable Irish among the masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, and the Jews of these several nationalities.

There was eating and drinking without limit, on every hand and in every kind, at the booths abounding in fried seafood, and at the tables under all the wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants; yet I saw not one drunken man, and of course not any drunken women. No one that I saw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude or unseemly behavior. The crowd was, in short, a monument to the democratic ideal of life in that very important expression of life, personal conduct, I have not any notion who or what the people were, or how virtuous or vicious they privately might be; but I am sure that no society assemblage could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly outside is all that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd.

I fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, or at least all the Americans in it, were Long-Islanders from the inland farms and villages within easy distance of the beach. They had probably the hereditary habit of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort in the time of their fathers and grandfathers, who had

     — “many an hour whiled away
          Listening to the breakers’ roar
          That washed the beach at Rockaway.”

But the clothing store and the paper pattern have equalized the cheaper dress of the people so that you can no longer know citizen and countryman apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; and I can only conjecture that the foreign-looking folk I saw were from New York and Brooklyn. They came by boat, and came and went by the continually arriving and departing trains, and last but not least by bicycles, both sexes. A few came in the public carriages and omnibuses of the neighborhood, but by far the vaster number whom neither the boats nor the trains had brought had their own vehicles, the all-pervading bicycles, which no one seemed so poor as not to be able to keep. The bicyclers stormed into the frantic village of the beach the whole afternoon, in the proportion of one woman to five men, and most of these must have ridden down on their wheels from the great cities. Boys ran about in the roadway with bunches of brasses, to check the wheels, and put them for safekeeping in what had once been the stable-yards of the hotels; the restaurants had racks for them, where you could see them in solid masses, side by side, for a hundred feet, and no shop was without its door-side rack, which the wheelman might slide his wheel into when he stopped for a soda, a cigar, or a sandwich. All along the road the gay bicycler and bicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of the inns, munching, lunching, while their wheels formed a fantastic decoration for the underpinning of the house and a novel balustering for the steps.

II.

The amusements provided for these throngs of people were not different from those provided for throngs of people everywhere, who must be of much the same mind and taste the world over. I had fine moments when I moved in an illusion of the Midway Plaisance; again I was at the Fete de Neuilly, with all of Paris but the accent about me; yet again the county agricultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys before me. At none of these places, however, was there a sounding sea or a mountainous chute, and I made haste to experience the variety these afforded, beginning with the chute, since the sea was always there, and the chute might be closed for the day if I waited to view it last. I meant only to enjoy the pleasure of others in it, and I confined my own participation to the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges down the watery steep into the oblong pool below. When I bought my ticket for the car that carried passengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal, certifying for me, “You have shot the chute,” and I resolved to keep this and show it to doubting friends as a proof of my daring; but it is a curious evidence of my unfitness for such deceptions that I afterwards could not find the medal. So I will frankly own that for me it was quite enough to see others shoot the chute, and that I came tamely down myself in the car. There is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my main object was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute. There was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat that flew down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, who clutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; but sometimes it was a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her, who was probably meditating, all the way, the inculpation of their father for any harm that came of it. Apparently no harm came of it in any case.

The boat struck the water with the impetus gained from a half- perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high into the air, struck again and again, and so flounced awkwardly across the pond to the farther shore, where the passengers debarked and went away to commune with their viscera, and to get their breath as they could. I did not ask any of them what their emotions or sensations were, but, so far as I could conjecture, the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the rare transport of a fall from a ten-story building and the delight of a tempestuous passage of the Atlantic, powerfully condensed.

The mere sight was so athletic that it took away any appetite I might have had to witness the feats of strength performed by Madame La Noire at the nearest booth on my coming out, though madame herself was at the door-to testify, in her own living picture, how much muscular force may be masked in vast masses of adipose. She had a weary, bored look, and was not without her pathos, poor soul, as few of those are who amuse the public; but I could not find her quite justifiable as a Sunday entertainment. One forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time I did not pretend to be so much better than my neighbors that I would not compromise upon a visit to, an animal show a little farther on. It was a pretty fair collection of beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, and in the cage of the lions there was a slight, sad-looking, long-haired young man, exciting them to madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots whom I was extremely glad to have get away without being torn in pieces, or at least bitten in two. A little later I saw him at the door of the tent, very breathless, dishevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessness one could wish. But perhaps spotlessness is not compatible with the intimacy of lions and lionesses. He had had his little triumph; one spectator of his feat had declared that you would not see anything like that at Coney Island; and soiled and dusty as he was in his cotton tights, he was preferable to the living picture of a young lady whom he replaced as an attraction of the show. It was professedly a moral show; the manager exhorted us as we came out to say whether it was good or not; and in the box-office sat a kind and motherly faced matron who would have apparently abhorred to look upon a living picture at any distance, much less have it at her elbow.

Upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mistake in it all; the people to whom the showmen made their appeal were all so much better, evidently, than the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves appeared harmless enough, and one could not say that there was personally any harm in the living picture; rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the face respectable enough.

I would not give the impression that most of the amusements were not in every respect decorous. As a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, both horizontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, prevailed, and was none the worse for being called by the French name of carrousel, for our people aniglicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of Gallic wickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal. At every other step there were machines for weighing you and ascertaining your height; there were photographers’ booths, and X-ray apparatus for showing you the inside of your watch; and in one open tent I saw a gentleman (with his back to the public) having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by an Egyptian seeress. Of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the softer drinks abounded.

III.

I think you could only get a hard drink by ordering something to eat and sitting down to your wine or beer at a table. Again I say that I saw no effects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants built out over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to the braying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures by the fumes of the bar. In fact it was a very rigid sobriety that reigned here, governing the common behavior by means of the placards which hung from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly announced that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carry umbrellas or canes while dancing, while all were entreated not to spit on the floor.

The dancers looked happy and harmless, if not very wise or splendid; they seemed people of the same simple neighborhoods, village lovers, young wives and husbands, and parties of friends who had come together for the day’s pleasure. A slight mother, much weighed down by a heavy baby, passed, rapt in an innocent envy of them, and I think she and the child’s father meant to join them as soon as they could find a place where to lay it. Almost any place would do; at another great restaurant I saw two chairs faced together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid the coming and going of lagers and frankfurters as if in its cradle at home.

Lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence everywhere, especially frankfurters, which seemed to have whole booths devoted to broiling them. They disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sections of eels, piled attractively on large platters, or sizzling to an impassioned brown in deep skillets of fat. The old acrid smell of frying brought back many holidays of Italy to me, and I was again at times on the Riva at Venice, and in the Mercato Vecchio at Florence. But the Continental Sunday cannot be felt to have quite replaced the old American Sabbath yet; the Puritan leaven works still, and though so many of our own people consent willingly to the transformation, I fancy they always enjoy themselves on Sunday with a certain consciousness of wrong-doing.

IV.

I have already said that the spectator quite lost sense of what day it was. Nothing could be more secular than all the sights and sounds. It was the Fourth of July, less the fire-crackers and the drunkenness, and it was the high day of the week. But if it was very wicked, and I must recognize that the scene would be shocking to most of my readers, I feel bound to say that the people themselves did not look wicked. They looked harmless; they even looked good, the most of them. I am sorry to say they were not very good-looking. The women were pretty enough, and the men were handsome enough; perhaps the average was higher in respect of beauty than the average is anywhere else; I was lately from New England, where the people were distinctly more hard-favored; but among all those thousands at Rockaway I found no striking types. It may be that as we grow older and our satisfaction with our own looks wanes, we become more fastidious as to the looks of others. At any rate, there seems to be much less beauty in the world than there was thirty or forty years ago.

On the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely prettier, as they should be in compensation. When we were all so handsome we could well afford to wear hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and the poor things must eke out their personal ungainliness with all the devices of the modiste and the tailor. I do not mean that there was any distinction in the dress of the crowd, but I saw nothing positively ugly or grotesquely out of taste. The costumes were as good as the customs, and I have already celebrated the manners of this crowd. I believe I must except the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy in effect when dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable for tottering about, in their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrow little, sharp-pointed, silly high-heeled shoes. How severe I am! But those high heels seemed to take all honesty from their daring in the wholesome exercise of the wheel, and to keep them in the tradition of cheap coquetry still, and imbecilly dependent.

V.

I have almost forgotten in the interest of the human spectacle that there is a sea somewhere about at Rockaway Beach, and it is this that the people have come for. I might well forget that modest sea, it is so built out of sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and switch-backs and shops that border it, and by the hotels and saloons and shows flaring along the road that divides the village, and the planked streets that intersect this. But if you walk southward on any of the streets, you presently find the planks foundering in sand, which drifts far up over them, and then you find yourself in full sight of the ocean and the ocean bathing. Swarms and heaps of people in all lolling and lying and wallowing shapes strew the beach, and the water is full of slopping and shouting and shrieking human creatures, clinging with bare white arms to the life-lines that run from the shore to the buoys; beyond these the lifeguard stays himself in his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the incoming surf.

All that you can say of it is that it is queer. It is not picturesque, or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer. An enfilading glance gives this impression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the added effect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs’ legs inverted in a downward plunge.

On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a philosopher of humble condition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand. This made us beg each other’s pardon; he said that he did not know I was there, and I said it did not matter. Then we both looked at the bathing, and he said:

“I don’t like that.”

“Why,” I asked, “do you see any harm in it?”

“No. But I don’t like the looks of it. It ain’t nice. It’s queer.”

It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a very public appearance. This promiscuous bathing was not much in excess of the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct. Here and there a gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand. But otherwise all was a damp and dreary decorum. I challenged my philosopher in vain for a specific cause of his dislike of the scene.

Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the sea-bathing. A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over them. There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who seemed getting the most of the good that was going.

VI.

But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating the good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, I have since thought of it as rather melancholy. It was in fact no wiser or livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it afforded. The best thing about it was that it left the guests very much to their own devices. The established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-looking; but one could eschew them. The more of them one eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day’s rest is more than most people can bear. They endure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after a twenty-mile run on the wheel. The road, by-the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driver professed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of his profession.

SAWDUST IN THE ARENA

It was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona that the circus events I wish to speak of took place; in fact, I had the honor and profit of seeing two circuses there. Or, strictly speaking, it was one entire circus that I saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying glory of a circus on its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb in adversity.

I.

The entire circus was altogether Italian, with the exception of the clowns, who, to the credit of our nation, are always Americans, or advertised as such, in Italy. Its chief and almost absorbing event was a reproduction of the tournament which had then lately been held at Rome in celebration of Prince Tommaso’s coming of age, and for a copy of a copy it was really fine. It had fitness in the arena, which must have witnessed many such mediaeval shows in their time, and I am sensible still of the pleasure its effects of color gave me. There was one beautiful woman, a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might have ridden, as she was, out of a canvas of Titian’s, if he had ever painted equestrian pictures, and who at any rate was an excellent Carpaccio. Then, the ‘Clowns Americani’ were very amusing, from a platform devoted solely to them, and it was a source of pride if not of joy with me to think that we were almost the only people present who understood their jokes. In the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring looked very little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady’s hat in front of you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we were all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have been needed to distinguish the features of the actors. I could not make out, therefore, whether the ‘Clowns Americani’ had the national expression or not, but one of them, I am sorry to say, spoke the United States language with a cockney accent. I suspect that he was an Englishman who had passed himself off upon the Italian management as a true Yankee, and who had formed himself upon our school of clowning, just as some of the recent English humorists have patterned after certain famous wits of ours. I do not know that I would have exposed this impostor, even if occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our own primacy in clowning, and the Veronese were none the worse for his erring aspirates.

The audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audience always is in Italy, and I indulged my fancy in some cheap excursions concerning the place and people. I reflected that it was the same race essentially as that which used to watch the gladiatorial shows in that arena when it was new, and that very possibly there were among these spectators persons of the same blood as those Veronese patricians who had left their names carved on the front of the gradines in places, to claim this or that seat for their own. In fact, there was so little difference, probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that I felt the process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and if Nature had been present, I might very well have asked her why, when she had once arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go on repeating it indefinitely? How were all those similar souls to know themselves apart in their common eternity? Merely to have been differently circumstanced in time did not seem enough; and I think Nature would have been puzzled to answer me. But perhaps not; she may have had her reasons, as that you cannot have too much of a good thing, and that when the type was so fine in most respects as the Italian you could not do better than go on repeating impressions from it.

Certainly I myself could have wished no variation from it in the young officer of ‘bersaglieri’, who had come down from antiquity to the topmost gradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined against the clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his side, while his thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind. I have since wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, if he did not, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the young officer of ‘bersaglieri’.

II.

I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circus I have mentioned. This event was one that I have often witnessed elsewhere, but never in such noble and worthy keeping. The top of the outer arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in the centre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet. At its base an immense net was stretched, and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derby hat was figuring about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixing the guy-ropes, and testing every particular of the preparation with his own hands. While this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and, after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole, where she presently stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes even from the loveliness of the officer of ‘bersaglieri’. There the man in the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net and looked up at her.

She called down, in English that sounded like some delocalized, denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, “Is it all right?”

He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, “Yes; keep to the left,” and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till, just before she reached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic mesh.

It was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot how wickedly dangerous it was; but I think that the brief English colloquy was the great wonder of the event for me, and I doubt if I could ever have been perfectly happy again, if chance had not amiably suffered me to satisfy my curiosity concerning the speakers. A few evenings after that, I was at that copy of a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines below me, I saw the man of the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat. I had already made up my mind that he was an American, for I supposed that an Englishman would rather perish than wear such a coat with such a hat, and as I had wished all my life to speak to a circus-man, I went down and boldly accosted him. “Are you a brother Yankee?” I asked, and he laughed, and confessed that he was an Englishman, but he said he was glad to meet any one who spoke English, and he made a place for me by his side. He was very willing to tell how he happened to be there, and he explained that he was the manager of a circus, which had been playing to very good business all winter in Spain. In an evil hour he decided to come to Italy, but he found the prices so ruinously low that he was forced to disband his company. This diving girl was all that remained to him of its many attractions, and he was trying to make a living for both in a country where the admission to a circus was six of our cents, with fifty for a reserved seat. But he was about to give it up and come to America, where he said Barnum had offered him an engagement. I hope he found it profitable, and is long since an American citizen, with as good right as any of us to wear a Prince Albert coat with a derby hat.

III.

There used to be very good circuses in Venice, where many Venetians had the only opportunity of their lives to see a horse. The horses were the great attraction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their habitual destitution in this respect, the riding was providentially very good. It was so good that it did not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does, especially that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high boots, on his back-bared horse, and ends by waving an American flag in triumph at having been so tiresome.

I am at a loss to know why they make such an ado about the lady who jumps through paper hoops, which have first had holes poked in them to render her transit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in her to hop over a succession of banners which are swept under her feet in a manner to minify her exertion almost to nothing, but I observe it is so at all circuses. At my first Venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse of the Riva degli Schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to the ground and back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus the other day; and apparently there are more circuses in the world than circus events. It must be as hard to think up anything new in that kind as in romanticistic fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largely resembles.

At a circus which played all one winter in Florence I saw for the first time-outside of polite society — the clown in evening dress, who now seems essential to all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom I missed so gladly at my village circus. He is nearly as futile as the lady clown, who is one of the saddest and strangest developments of New Womanhood.

Of the clowns who do not speak, I believe I like most the clown who catches a succession of peak-crowned soft hats on his head, when thrown across the ring by an accomplice. This is a very pretty sight always, and at the Hippodrome in Paris I once saw a gifted creature take his stand high up on the benches among the audience and catch these hats on his head from a flight of a hundred feet through the air. This made me proud of human nature, which is often so humiliating; and altogether I do not think that after a real country circus there are many better things in life than the Hippodrome. It had a state, a dignity, a smoothness, a polish, which I should not know where to match, and when the superb coach drove into the ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of their events, there was a majesty in the effect which I doubt if courts have the power to rival. Still, it should be remembered that I have never been at court, and speak from a knowledge of the Hippodrome only.

AT A DIME MUSEUM

“I see,” said my friend, “that you have been writing a good deal about the theatre during the past winter. You have been attacking its high hats and its high prices, and its low morals; and I suppose that you think you have done good, as people call it.”

I.

This seemed like a challenge of some sort, and I prepared myself to take it up warily. I said I should be very sorry to do good, as people called it; because such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual pride for the doer and general demoralization for the doee. Still, I said, a law had lately been passed in Ohio giving a man who found himself behind a high hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the manager; and if the passage of this law could be traced ever so faintly and indirectly to my teachings, I should not altogether grieve for the good I had done. I added that if all the States should pass such a law, and other laws fixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or obliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as the law does in Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays —

“I see what you mean,” said my friend, a little impatiently. “You mean sumptuary legislation. But I have not come to talk to you upon that subject, for then you would probably want to do all the talking yourself. I want to ask you if you have visited any of the cheaper amusements of this metropolis, or know anything of the really clever and charming things one may see there for a very little money.”

“Ten cents, for instance?”

“Yes.”

I answered that I would never own to having come as low down as that; and I expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the amusement that could be had for that money. I questioned if anything intellectual could be had for it.

“What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?” my friend retorted. “And do you pretend that the two-dollar drama is intellectual?”

I had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of my grief with it.

Then he said: “I don’t contend that it is intellectual, but I say that it is often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it is less often clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines. I think the average of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar theatres; and it is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you come to that. The other day,” said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably in his chair and finding room for his elbow on the corner of my table he knocked off some books for review, “I went to a dime museum for an hour that I had between two appointments, and I must say that I never passed an hour’s time more agreeably. In the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it — they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars’ caps and gowns — there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. On a platform at the end of the hall was an Australian family a good deal gloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our latitude, staring down the room with varying expressions all verging upon melancholy madness, and who gave me such a pang of compassion as I have seldom got from the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres. They allowed me to come quite close up to them, and to feed my pity upon their wild dejection in exile without stint. I couldn’t enter into conversation with them, and express my regret at finding them so far from their native boomerangs and kangaroos and pinetree grubs, but I know they felt my sympathy, it was so evident. I didn’t see their performance, and I don’t know that they had any. They may simply have been there ethnologically, but this was a good object, and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth the price of admission.

“After the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue to a close, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles lectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated a small model of it. None of the events were so exciting that we could regret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of the entertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in the theatre was about to begin. He invited us to buy tickets at an additional charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle, or orchestra.

“I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for once. We were three in the orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the little boy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a dozen at least in the orchestra circle. An attendant shouted, ‘Hats off!’ and the other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage and began to play the piano in front of it. The curtain rose, and the entertainment began at once. It was a passage apparently from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady. There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal of conscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it with unflagging energy. The young woman was equipped for the dance she brought into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustain in the drama. It was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if she was tired of it, but was not going to falter. She delivered her lines with a hard, Southwestern accent, and I liked fancying her having come up in a simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by a strong local belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady Macbeth, or Peg Woffington at the least; but very likely she had not.

“Her performance was followed by an event involving a single character. The actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to his dress he was all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he had temperament. I suspect that he thought I had, too, for he began to address his entire drama to me. This was not surprising, for it would not have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and the other man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth, whom he would hardly have given the preference over me. I felt the compliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate, and it gave me a publicity I would willingly have foregone. I did what I could to reject it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I even frowned a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated his ambition. He was really a merry creature, and when he had got off a number of very good things which were received in perfect silence, and looked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect of delicate apology, ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you any,’ I broke down and laughed, and that delivered me into his hand. He immediately said to me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty large family, eight of them living, and one in Philadelphia; and then for no reason he seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing me a song written expressly for him — by an expressman; and he went on from one wild gayety to another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzy of enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off.

“I was rather glad to be rid of him, and I was glad that the next performers, who were a lady and a gentleman contortionist of Spanish- American extraction, behaved more impartially. They were really remarkable artists in their way, and though it’s a painful way, I couldn’t help admiring their gift in bowknots and other difficult poses. The gentleman got abundant applause, but the lady at first got none. I think perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling that prevailed among us, we could not see a lady contort herself with so much approval as a gentleman, and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety in witnessing her skill. But I could see that the poor girl was hurt in her artist pride by our severity, and at the next thing she did I led off the applause with my umbrella. She instantly lighted up with a joyful smile, and the young mother in the orchestra leaned forward to nod her sympathy to me while she clapped. We were fast becoming a domestic circle, and it was very pleasant, but I thought that upon the whole I had better go.”

“And do you think you had a profitable hour at that show?” I asked, with a smile that was meant to be sceptical.

“Profitable?” said my friend. “I said agreeable. I don’t know about the profit. But it was very good variety, and it was very cheap. I understand that this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar theatre to come down to, or up to.”

“Not exactly, or not quite,” I returned, thoughtfully, “though I must say I think your time was as well spent as it would have been at most of the plays I have seen this winter.”

My friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy air: “It was all very pathetic, in a way. Three out of those five people were really clever, and certainly artists. That colored brother was almost a genius, a very common variety of genius, but still a genius, with a gift for his calling that couldn’t be disputed. He was a genuine humorist, and I sorrowed over him — after I got safely away from his intimacy — as I should over some author who was struggling along without winning his public. Why not? One is as much in the show business as the other. There is a difference of quality rather than of kind. Perhaps by-and-by my colored humorist will make a strike with his branch of the public, as you are always hoping to do with yours.”

“You don’t think you’re making yourself rather offensive?” I suggested.

“Not intentionally. Aren’t the arts one? How can you say that any art is higher than the others? Why is it nobler to contort the mind than to contort the body?”

“I am always saying that it is not at all noble to contort the mind,” I returned, “and I feel that to aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers is to bring yourself most distinctly to the level of the show business.”

“Yes, I know that is your pose,” said my friend. “And I dare say you really think that you make a distinction in facts when you make a distinction in terms. If you don’t amuse your readers, you don’t keep them; practically, you cease to exist. You may call it interesting them, if you like; but, really, what is the difference? You do your little act, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy you are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler places, with perhaps cruder means—”

“I don’t know whether I like your saws less than your instances, or your instances less than your saws,” I broke in. “Have you been at the circus yet?”

II.

“Yet?” demanded my friend. “I went the first night, and I have been a good deal interested in the examination of my emotions ever since. I can’t find out just why I have so much pleasure in the trapeze. Half the time I want to shut my eyes, and a good part of the time I do look away; but I wouldn’t spare any actor the most dangerous feat. One of the poor girls, that night, dropped awkwardly into the net after her performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with a sprained ankle. It made me rather sad to think that now she must perhaps give up her perilous work for a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, but it didn’t take away my interest in the other trapezists flying through the air above another net.

“If I had honestly complained of anything it would have been of the superfluity which glutted rather than fed me. How can you watch three sets of trapezists at once? You really see neither well. It’s the same with the three rings. There should be one ring, and each act should have a fair chance with the spectator, if it took six hours; I would willingly give the time. Fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays going on at once!”

“No, don’t fancy that!” I entreated. “One play is bad enough.”

“Or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, and listening at the same time to a lecture and a sermon, which could represent the two platforms between the rings,” my friend calmly persisted. “The three rings are an abuse and an outrage, but I don’t know but I object still more to the silencing of the clowns. They have a great many clowns now, but they are all dumb, and you only get half the good you used to get out of the single clown of the old one-ring circus. Why, it’s as if the literary humorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and then put asterisks where the humor ought to come in.”

“Don’t you think you are going from bad to worse?” I asked.

My friend went on: “I’m afraid the circus is spoiled for me. It has become too much of a good thing; for it is a good thing; almost the best thing in the way of an entertainment that there is. I’m still very fond of it, but I come away defeated and defrauded because I have been embarrassed with riches, and have been given more than I was able to grasp. My greed has been overfed. I think I must keep to those entertainments where you can come at ten in the morning and stay till ten at night, with a perpetual change of bill, only one stage, and no fall of the curtain. I suppose you would object to them because they’re getting rather dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar for the first seats.”

I said that I did not think this too much for twelve hours, if the intellectual character of the entertainment was correspondingly high.

“It’s as high as that of some magazines,” said my friend, “though I could sometimes wish it were higher. It’s like the matter in the Sunday papers — about that average. Some of it’s good, and most of it isn’t. Some of it could hardly be worse. But there is a great deal of it, and you get it consecutively and not simultaneously. That constitutes its advantage over the circus.”

My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked:

“Then, do I understand that you would advise me to recommend the dime museums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place of the theatres?”

“You have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn’t seem to have met with much favor, though you urged their comparative cheapness. Now, why not suggest something that is really level with the popular taste?”

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable primacy of the United States among countries where the struggle for material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature. He said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in attributing to a public man the thoughts that may be really due to an imaginative frame in the reporter), that among us, “the old race of writers of distinction, such as Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, and Washington Irving, have (sic) died out, and the Americans who are most prominent in cultivated European opinion in art or literature, like Sargent, Henry James, or Marion Crawford, live habitually out of America, and draw their inspiration from England, France, and Italy.”

I.

If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent to what many Americans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sort of self-love which calls itself patriotism. If it would at all help to put an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuated with us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, I should be glad to believe that it was driving our literary men out of the country. This would be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to the millionaires and the tramps. But I am afraid it would not have this effect, for neither our very rich nor our very poor care at all for the state of polite learning among us; though for the matter of that, I believe that economic conditions have little to do with it; and that if a general mediocrity of fortune prevailed and there were no haste to be rich and to get poor, the state of polite learning would not be considerably affected. As matters stand, I think we may reasonably ask whether the Americans “most prominent in cultivated European opinion,” the Americans who “live habitually out of America,” are not less exiles than advance agents of the expansion now advertising itself to the world. They may be the vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined to overrun the earth from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries to our advantage. They probably themselves do not know it, but in the act of “drawing their inspiration” from alien scenes, or taking their own where they find it, are not they simply transporting to Europe “the struggle for material prosperity,” which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatal to them here?

There is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is the question whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarm our patriotism. Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold Frederic, as well as in Mark Twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is very great; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair measure of home-keeping authorship. Our destitution is not nearly so great now in the absence of Mr. James and Mr. Crawford as it was in the times before the “struggle for material prosperity” when Washington Irving went and lived in England and on the European continent well-nigh half his life.

Sir Lepel Griffin — or Sir Lepel Griffin’s reporter — seems to forget the fact of Irving’s long absenteeism when he classes him with “the old race” of eminent American authors who stayed at home. But really none of those he names were so constant to our air as he seems — or his reporter seems — to think. Longfellow sojourned three or four years in Germany, Spain, and Italy; Holmes spent as great time in Paris; Bryant was a frequent traveller, and each of them “drew his inspiration” now and then from alien sources. Lowell was many years in Italy, Spain, and England; Motley spent more than half his life abroad; Hawthorne was away from us nearly a decade.

II.

If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do not feel that I am proving too much in another. My facts go to show that the literary spirit is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere. If any good American were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, I should first advise him that American literature was not derived from the folklore of the red Indians, but was, as I have said once before, a condition of English literature, and was independent even of our independence. Then I should entreat him to consider the case of foreign authors who had found it more comfortable or more profitable to live out of their respective countries than in them. I should allege for his consolation the case of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more latterly that of the Brownings and Walter Savage Landor, who preferred an Italian to an English sojourn; and yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who voluntarily lived several years in Vermont, and has “drawn his inspiration” in notable instances from the life of these States. It will serve him also to consider that the two greatest Norwegian authors, Bjornsen and Ibsen, have both lived long in France and Italy. Heinrich Heine loved to live in Paris much better than in Dusseldorf, or even in Hamburg; and Tourguenief himself, who said that any man’s country could get on without him, but no man could get on without his country, managed to dispense with his own in the French capital, and died there after he was quite free to go back to St. Petersburg. In the last century Rousseau lived in France rather than Switzerland; Voltaire at least tried to live in Prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; Goldoni left fame and friends in Venice for the favor of princes in Paris.

Literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not peculiarly an American vice or an American virtue. It is an expression and a proof of the modern sense which enlarges one’s country to the bounds of civilization. I cannot think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the world, and if any American feels it a grievance, I suggest that he do what he can to have embodied in the platform of his party a plank affirming the right of American authors to a public provision that will enable them to live as agreeably at home as they can abroad on the same money. In the mean time, their absenteeism is not a consequence of “the struggle for material prosperity,” not a high disdain of the strife which goes on not less in Europe than in America, and must, of course, go on everywhere as long as competitive conditions endure, but is the result of chances and preferences which mean nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable.

THE HORSE SHOW

“As good as the circus — not so good as the circus — better than the circus.” These were my varying impressions, as I sat looking down upon the tanbark, the other day, at the Horse Show in Madison Square Garden; and I came away with their blend for my final opinion.

I.

I might think that the Horse Show (which is so largely a Man Show and a Woman Show) was better or worse than the circus, or about as good; but I could not get away from the circus, in my impression of it. Perhaps the circus is the norm of all splendors where the horse and his master are joined for an effect upon the imagination of the spectator. I am sure that I have never been able quite to dissociate from it the picturesqueness of chivalry, and that it will hereafter always suggest to me the last correctness of fashion. It is through the horse that these far extremes meet; in all times the horse has been the supreme expression of aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream of the elder world prophesied the ultimate type of the future, when the Swell shall have evolved into the Centaur.

Some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about you and the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier.

In this first affair of the new-comer, the horses are not so much on show as the swells; you get only glimpses of shining coats and tossing manes, with a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the lines of people coming and going, and the ranks of people, three or four feet deep, against the rails of the ellipse; but the swells are there in perfect relief, and it is they who finally embody the Horse Show to you. The fact is that they are there to see, of course, but the effect is that they are there to be seen.

The whole spectacle had an historical quality, which I tasted with pleasure. It was the thing that had eventuated in every civilization, and the American might feel a characteristic pride that what came to Rome in five hundred years had come to America in a single century. There was something fine in the absolutely fatal nature of the result, and I perceived that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be reclusive in its exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work in it so dramatically apparent. “Yes,” I found myself thinking, “this is what it all comes to: the ‘subiti guadagni’ of the new rich, made in large masses and seeking a swift and eager exploitation, and the slowly accumulated fortunes, put together from sparing and scrimping, from slaving and enslaving, in former times, and now in the stainless white hands of the second or third generation, they both meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation, and create a Horse Show.”

I cannot say that its creators looked much as if they liked it, now they had got it; and, so far as I have been able to observe them, people of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy, and have the air of being bored in the midst of their amusements. This reserve of rapture may be their delicacy, their unwillingness to awaken envy in the less prospered; and I should not have objected to the swells at the Horse Show looking dreary if they had looked more like swells; except for a certain hardness of the countenance (which I found my own sympathetically taking on) I should not have thought them very patrician, and this hardness may have been merely the consequence of being so much stared at. Perhaps, indeed, they were not swells whom I saw in the boxes, but only companies of ordinary people who had clubbed together and hired their boxes; I understand that this can be done, and the student of civilization so far misled. But certainly if they were swells they did not look quite up to themselves; though, for that matter, neither do the nobilities of foreign countries, and on one or two occasions when I have seen them, kings and emperors have failed me in like manner. They have all wanted that indescribable something which I have found so satisfying in aristocracies and royalties on the stage; and here at the Horse Show, while I made my tour, I constantly met handsome, actor-like folk on foot who could much better have taken the role of the people in the boxes. The promenaders may not have been actors at all; they may have been the real thing for which I was in vain scanning the boxes, but they looked like actors, who indeed set an example to us all in personal beauty and in correctness of dress.

I mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors. We have not distinction, as a people; Matthew Arnold noted that; and it is not our business to have it: When it is our business our swells will have it, just as our actors now have it, especially our actors of English birth. I had not this reflection about me at the time to console me for my disappointment, and it only now occurs to me that what I took for an absence of distinction may have been such a universal prevalence of it that the result was necessarily a species of indistinction. But in the complexion of any social assembly we Americans are at a disadvantage with Europeans from the want of uniforms. A few military scattered about in those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have been heaping upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty in personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the Horse Show that I am complaining. If the men had borne their part as well, there would not have been these tears: and yet, what am I saying? There was here and there a clean-shaven face (which I will not believe was always an actor’s), and here and there a figure superbly set up, and so faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, coat, tie, hat, and gloves as to have a salience from the mass of good looks and good clothes which I will not at last call less than distinction.

II.

At any rate, I missed these marked presences when I left the lines of the promenaders around the ellipse, and climbed to a seat some tiers above the boxes. I am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was not one of those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but was with the virtuous poor who could afford to pay a dollar and a half for their tickets. I bought it of a speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, so that I conceived it the last in the house; but I found the chairs by no means all filled, though it was as good an audience as I have sometimes seen in the same place at other circuses. The people about me were such as I had noted at the other circuses, hotel-sojourners, kindly-looking comers from provincial towns and cities, whom I instantly felt myself at home with, and free to put off that gloomy severity of aspect which had grown upon me during my association with the swells below. My neighbors were sufficiently well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than their betters, or their richers, they had not the burden of the occasion upon them, and seemed really glad of what was going on in the ring.

There again I was sensible of the vast advantage of costume. The bugler who stood up at one end of the central platform and blew a fine fanfare (I hope it was a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to enter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape that filled my romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the management I thought very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters. At any rate, their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from the fashions in the boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumes are always more sincere, if not more effective, than fashions. As I have hinted, I do not know just what costumes they were, but they took the light well from the girandole far aloof and from the thousands of little electric bulbs that beaded the roof in long lines, and dispersed the sullenness of the dull, rainy afternoon. When the knights entered the lists on the seats of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and their shining tandems before them, they took the light well, too, and the spectacle was so brilliant that I trust my imagery may be forgiven a novelist pining for the pageantries of the past. I do not know to this moment whether these knights were bona fide gentlemen, or only their deputies, driving their tandems for them, and I am equally at a loss to account for the variety, of their hats. Some wore tall, shining silk hats; some flat-topped, brown derbys; some simple black pot-hats; — and is there, then, no rigor as to the head-gear of people driving tandems? I felt that there ought to be, and that there ought to be some rule as to where the number of each tandem should be displayed. As it was, this was sometimes carelessly stuck into the seat of the cart; sometimes it was worn at the back of the groom’s waist, and sometimes full upon his stomach. In the last position it gave a touch of burlesque which wounded me; for these are vital matters, and I found myself very exacting in them.

With the horses themselves I could find no fault upon the grounds of my censure of the show in some other ways. They had distinction; they were patrician; they were swell. They felt it, they showed it, they rejoiced in it; and the most reluctant observer could not deny them the glory of blood, of birth, which the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all lands and ages. Their lordly port was a thing that no one could dispute, and for an aristocracy I suppose that they had a high average of intelligence, though there might be two minds about this. They made me think of mettled youths and haughty dames; they abashed the humble spirit of the beholder with the pride of their high-stepping, their curvetting and caracoling, as they jingled in their shining harness around the long ring. Their noble uselessness took the fancy, for I suppose that there is nothing so superbly superfluous as a tandem, outside or inside of the best society. It is something which only the ambition of wealth and unbroken leisure can mount to; and I was glad that the display of tandems was the first event of the Horse Show which I witnessed, for it seemed to me that it must beyond all others typify the power which created the Horse Show. I wished that the human side of it could have been more unquestionably adequate, but the equine side of the event was perfect. Still, I felt a certain relief, as in something innocent and simple and childlike, in the next event.

III.

This was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops of pretty Shetland ponies of all ages, sizes, and colors. A cry of delight went up from a group of little people near me, and the spell of the Horse Show was broken. It was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet and kindly pleasure which every one could share, or every one who had ever had, or ever wished to have, a Shetland pony; the touch of nature made the whole show kin. I could not see that the freakish, kittenish creatures did anything to claim our admiration, but they won our affection by every trait of ponyish caprice and obstinacy. The small colts broke away from the small mares, and gambolled over the tanbark in wanton groups, with gay or plaintive whinnyings, which might well have touched a responsive chord in the bosom of fashion itself: I dare say it is not so hard as it looks. The scene remanded us to a moment of childhood; and I found myself so fond of all the ponies that I felt it invidious of the judges to choose among them for the prizes; they ought every one to have had the prize.

I suppose a Shetland pony is not a very useful animal in our conditions; no doubt a good, tough, stubbed donkey would be worth all their tribe when it came down to hard work; but we cannot all be hard-working donkeys, and some of us may be toys and playthings without too great reproach. I gazed after the broken, refluent wave of these amiable creatures, with the vague toleration here formulated, but I was not quite at peace in it, or fully consoled in my habitual ethicism till the next event brought the hunters with their high-jumping into the ring. These noble animals unite use and beauty in such measure that the censor must be of Catonian severity who can refuse them his praise. When I reflected that by them and their devoted riders our civilization had been assimilated to that of the mother-country in its finest expression, and another tie added to those that bind us to her through the language of Shakespeare and Milton; that they had tamed the haughty spirit of the American farmer in several parts of the country so that he submitted for a consideration to have his crops ridden over, and that they had all but exterminated the ferocious anise-seed bag, once so common and destructive among us, I was in a fit mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which were now set up at four or five places for the purposes of the high-jumping. As to the beauty of the hunting-horse, though, I think I must hedge a little, while I stand firmly to my admiration of his use. To be honest, the tandem horse is more to my taste. He is better shaped, and he bears himself more proudly. The hunter is apt to behave, whatever his reserve of intelligence, like an excited hen; he is apt to be ewe-necked and bred away to nothing where the ideal horse abounds; he has the behavior of a turkey-hen when not behaving like the common or garden hen. But there can be no question of his jumping, which seems to be his chief business in a world where we are all appointed our several duties, and I at once began to take a vivid pleasure in his proficiency. I have always felt a blind and insensate joy in running races, which has no relation to any particular horse, and I now experienced an impartial rapture in the performances of these hunters. They looked very much alike, and if it had not been for the changing numbers on the sign-board in the centre of the ring announcing that 650, 675, or 602 was now jumping, I might have thought it was 650 all the time.

A high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race when the horses have got half a mile away and look like a covey of swift birds, but it is still a fine sight. I became very fastidious as to which moment of it was the finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or when his aerial hoof touched the ground (with the effect of half jerking his rider’s head half off), or when he showed a flying heel in perspective; and I do not know to this hour which I prefer. But I suppose I was becoming gradually spoiled by my pleasure, for as time went on I noticed that I was not satisfied with the monotonous excellence of the horses’ execution. Will it be credited that I became willing something should happen, anything, to vary it? I asked myself why, if some of the more exciting incidents of the hunting-field which I had read of must befall; I should not see them. Several of the horses had balked at the barriers, and almost thrown their riders across them over their necks, but not quite done it; several had carried away the green-tufted top rail with their heels; when suddenly there came a loud clatter from the farther side of the ellipse, where a whole panel of fence had gone down. I looked eagerly for the prostrate horse and rider under the bars, but they were cantering safely away.

IV.

It was enough, however. I perceived that I was becoming demoralized, and that if I were to write of the Horse Show with at all the superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great, I had better come away. But I came away critical, even in my downfall, and feeling that, circus for circus, the Greatest Show on Earth which I had often seen in that place had certain distinct advantages of the Horse Show. It had three rings and two platforms; and, for another thing, the drivers and riders in the races, when they won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands, instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at their horses’ ears. The events were more frequent and rapid; the costumes infinitely more varied and picturesque. As for the people in the boxes, I do not know that they were less distinguished than these at the Horse Show, but if they were not of the same high level in which distinction was impossible, they did not show it in their looks.

The Horse Show, in fine, struck me as a circus of not all the first qualities; and I had moments of suspecting that it was no more than the evolution of the county cattle show. But in any case I had to own that its great success was quite legitimate; for the horse, upon the whole, appeals to a wider range of humanity, vertically as well as horizontally, than any other interest, not excepting politics or religion. I cannot, indeed, regard him as a civilizing influence; but then we cannot be always civilizing.

THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER

It has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer was simplest with those who were obliged to spend it as they spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in the proportion of one’s ability to spend it wherever and however one chose. Few are absolutely released to this choice, however, and those few are greatly to be pitied. I know that they are often envied and hated for it by those who have no such choice, but that is a pathetic mistake. If we could look into their hearts, indeed, we should witness there so much misery that we should wish rather to weep over them than to reproach them with their better fortune, or what appeared so.

I.

For most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse that the summer brings upon great numbers who would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted. They are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hard necessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placed somewhere else; but although I say they are in great numbers, they are an infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population. Their bane is not, in its highest form, that of the average American who has no choice of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem, one must begin at once to distinguish. It is the problem of the East rather than of the West (where people are much more in the habit of staying at home the year round), and it is the problem of the city and not of the country. I am not sure that there is one practical farmer in the whole United States who is obliged to witness in his household those sad dissensions which almost separate the families of professional men as to where and how they shall pass the summer. People of this class, which is a class with some measure of money, ease, and taste, are commonly of varying and decided minds, and I once knew a family of the sort whose combined ideal for their summer outing was summed up in the simple desire for society and solitude, mountain-air and sea-bathing. They spent the whole months of April, May, and June in a futile inquiry for a resort uniting these attractions, and on the first of July they drove to the station with no definite point in view. But they found that they could get return tickets for a certain place on an inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first train for it. There they decided next morning to push on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to the station, but before it was checked they changed their minds, and remained two weeks where they were. Then they took train for a place on the coast, but in the cars a friend told them they ought to go to another place; they decided to go there, but before arriving at the junction they decided again to keep on. They arrived at their original destination, and the following day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down the coast. The answer came that there were no rooms, and being by this time ready to start, they started, and in due time reported themselves at the hotel. The landlord saw that something must be done, and he got them rooms, at a smaller house, and ‘mealed’ them (as it used to be called at Mt. Desert) in his own. But upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house they liked it so well that they resolved to live there altogether, and they spent a summer of the greatest comfort there, so that they would hardly come away when the house closed in the fall.

This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not always turn out so happily; but I think that people might oftener trust themselves to Providence in these matters than they do. There is really an infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one could quite safely leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one should go, and check one’s baggage accordingly. I think the chances of an agreeable summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and- fast choice of a certain place and sticking to it. My own experience is that in these things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does in most non-moral things.

II.

A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is yet quite out of the kindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people who left their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stifle in the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels. Yet such people were in the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient persistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severe discouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts, and reformed them altogether. I believe the city boarding-house remains very much what it used to be; but I am bound to say that the country boarding-house has vastly improved since I began to know it. As for the summer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained of except the prices. I take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of- town summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that the chief sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which I have already spoken of.

I have rather favored chance than choice, because, whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it, with a bitter sense of responsibility added, which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you. I observe that people who own summer cottages are often apt to wish they did not, and were foot-loose to roam where they listed, and I have been told that even a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though so eminently detachable. To great numbers Europe looks from this shore like a safe refuge from the American summer problem; and yet I am not sure that it is altogether so; for it is not enough merely to go to Europe; one has to choose where to go when one has got there. A European city is certainly always more tolerable than an American city, but one cannot very well pass the summer in Paris, or even in London. The heart there, as here, will yearn for some blessed seat

     ”Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
        Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
        Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns
        And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,”

and still, after your keel touches the strand of that alluring old world, you must buy your ticket and register your trunk for somewhere in particular.

III.

It is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, and, as I say, my heart aches much more for those who have to solve it and suffer the consequences of their choice than for those who have no choice, but must stay the summer through where their work is, and be humbly glad that they have any work to keep them there. I am not meaning now, of course, business men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread — or, more correctly, the cake — of their families in the country, or even their clerks and bookkeepers, and porters and messengers, but such people as I sometimes catch sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctant midsummer flights through the city), sweltering in upper rooms over sewing-machines or lap-boards, or stewing in the breathless tenement streets, or driving clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bending over wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the no-air without. These all get on somehow, and at the end of the summer they have not to accuse themselves of folly in going to one place rather than another. Their fate is decided for them, and they submit to it; whereas those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it. They it is whom I am truly sorry for, and whom I write of with tears in my ink. Their case is hard, and it will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish they will look and how flat they will feel at the judgment-day, when they are asked about their summer outings. I do not really suppose we shall be held to a very strict account for our pleasures because everybody else has not enjoyed them, too; that would be a pity of our lives; and yet there is an old-fashioned compunction which will sometimes visit the heart if we take our pleasures ungraciously, when so many have no pleasures to take. I would suggest, then, to those on whom the curse of choice between pleasures rests, that they should keep in mind those who have chiefly pains to their portion in life.

I am not, I hope, urging my readers to any active benevolence, or counselling them to share their pleasures with others; it has been accurately ascertained that there are not pleasures enough to go round, as things now are; but I would seriously entreat them to consider whether they could not somewhat alleviate the hardships of their own lot at the sea-side or among the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of others in the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life. I know very well that it is no longer considered very good sense or very good morality to take comfort in one’s advantages from the disadvantages of others, and this is not quite what I mean to teach. Perhaps I mean nothing more than an overhauling of the whole subject of advantages and disadvantages, which would be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of the summer outer. It might be very interesting, and possibly it might be amusing, for one stretched upon the beach or swaying in the hammock to inquire into the reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is not beyond the bounds of expectation that a consensus of summer opinion on this subject would go far to enlighten the world upon a question that has vexed the world ever since mankind was divided into those who work too much and those who rest too much.

AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO

A study of New York civilization in 1849 has lately come into my hands, with a mortifying effect, which I should like to share with the reader, to my pride of modernity. I had somehow believed that after half a century of material prosperity, such as the world has never seen before, New York in 1902 must be very different from New York in 1849, but if I am to trust either the impressions of the earlier student or my own, New York is essentially the same now that it was then. The spirit of the place has not changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly commercial. Even the body of it has undergone little or no alteration; it was as shapeless, as incongruous; as ugly when the author of ‘New York in Slices’ wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, or overgrown, on the moral and material lines which seem to have been structural in it from the beginning. He felt in his time the same vulgarity, the same violence, in its architectural anarchy that I have felt in my time, and he noted how all dignity and beauty perished, amid the warring forms, with a prescience of my own affliction, which deprives me of the satisfaction of a discoverer and leaves me merely the sense of being rather old-fashioned in my painful emotions.

I.

I wish I could pretend that my author philosophized the facts of his New York with something less than the raw haste of the young journalist; but I am afraid I must own that ‘New York in Slices’ affects one as having first been printed in an evening paper, and that the writer brings to the study of the metropolis something like the eager horror of a country visitor. This probably enabled him to heighten the effect he wished to make with readers of a kindred tradition, and for me it adds a certain innocent charm to his work. I may make myself better understood if I say that his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller New York is much the same as that of Mr. Stead towards the wickedness of a much larger Chicago. He seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts of the prisons, the slums, the gambling-houses, the mock auctions, the toughs (who then called themselves b’hoys and g’hals), the quacks, the theatres, and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their iniquities with a ready virtue which the wickedest reader can enjoy with him.

But if he treated of these things alone, I should not perhaps have brought his curious little book to the polite notice of my readers. He treats also of the press, the drama, the art, and, above all, “the literary soirees” of that remote New York of his in a manner to make us latest New-Yorkers feel our close proximity to it. Fifty-odd years ago journalism had already become “the absorbing, remorseless, clamorous thing” we now know, and very different from the thing it was when “expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs were uncrystallized from the lightning’s blue and fiery film.” Reporterism was beginning to assume its present importance, but it had not yet become the paramount intellectual interest, and did not yet “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the counting-room in authority. Great editors, then as now, ranked great authors in the public esteem, or achieved a double primacy by uniting journalism and literature in the same personality. They were often the owners as well as the writers of their respective papers, and they indulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if not the chief use, of our contemporaneous journals. Apparently, however, notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made the delight of their readers, and the press had not become the detective agency that it now is, nor the organizer and distributer of charities.

But as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its relations to the theatre as still eclipses the popular faith in dramatic criticism. “How can you expect,” our author asks, “a frank and unbiassed criticism upon the performance of George Frederick Cooke Snooks . . . when the editor or reporter who is to write it has just been supping on beefsteak and stewed potatoes at Windust’s, and regaling himself on brandy-and-water cold, without, at the expense of the aforesaid George Frederick Cooke Snooks?” The severest censor of the press, however, would hardly declare now that “as to such a thing as impartial and independent criticism upon theatres in the present state of the relations between editors, reporters, managers, actors — and actresses — the thing is palpably out of the question,” and if matters were really at the pass hinted, the press has certainly improved in fifty years, if one may judge from its present frank condemnations of plays and players. The theatre apparently has not, for we read that at that period “a very great majority of the standard plays and farces on the stage depend mostly for their piquancy and their power of interesting an audience upon intrigues with married women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and fraud of every description . . . . Stage costume, too, wherever there is half a chance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible; and a freedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece which would be kicked out of private society the instant it would have the audacity to make its appearance there.”

II.

I hope private society in New York would still be found as correct if not quite so violent; and I wish I could believe that the fine arts were presently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849. That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in which the artists clubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works among themselves by something so very like raffling that the Art Unions were finally suppressed under the law against lotteries. While they lasted, however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, and intellect (to name them in the order they hold the New York mind), as our private views now are, or ought to be; and the author “devotes an entire number” of his series “to a single institution” — fearless of being accused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences of the fine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind.

He devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besides treating of various literary celebrities at the “literary soirees,” he imagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants. At Delmonico’s, where if you had “French and money” you could get in that day “a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture by Huntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers,” he meets such a musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an intellectual epicurean as N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno Hoffman. But it would be a warm day for Delmonico’s when the observer in this epoch could chance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among us has no longer the French or the money. Indeed, the author of ‘New York in Slices’ seems finally to think that he has gone too far, even for his own period, and brings himself up with the qualifying reservation that if Willis and Hoffman never did dine together at Delmonico’s, they ought to have done so. He has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musical critic, and he has no scruple in assembling for us at his “literary soiree” a dozen distinguished-looking men and “twice as many women…. listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held by a couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, reading a basketful of gilt-edged notes. It is . . . the annual Valentine Party, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the purpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which, for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise which a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb- spinners.”

It must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a ‘salon’ as this. It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently intending immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? Shall we, too, appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as “John Inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and magazines,” or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, supposed for picturesque purposes to be “stalking about with an immense quarto volume under his arm . . . an early copy of his forthcoming ‘Female Poets of America’”; or as Lewis Gaylord Clark, the “sunnyfaced, smiling” editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, “who don’t look as if the Ink-Fiend had ever heard of him,” as he stands up to dance a polka with “a demure lady who has evidently spilled the inkstand over her dress”; or as “the stately Mrs. Seba Smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight”; or as “the spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby,” where she sits “nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from its cage”; or as Margaret Fuller, “her large, gray eyes Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness”?

I hope not; I earnestly hope not. Whatever I said at the outset, affirming the persistent equality of New York characteristics and circumstances, I wish to take back at this point; and I wish to warn malign foreign observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see us as we see ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped in the taste of 1849. Possibly it was not so much the taste of 1849 as the author of ‘New York in Slices’ would have us believe; and perhaps any one who trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived by a parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of our modern “society journalism.”

FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND

There is, of course, almost a world’s difference between England and the Continent anywhere; but I do not recall just now any transition between Continental countries which involves a more distinct change in the superficial aspect of things than the passage from the Middle States into New England. It is all American, but American of diverse ideals; and you are hardly over the border before you are sensible of diverse effects, which are the more apparent to you the more American you are. If you want the contrast at its sharpest you had better leave New York on a Sound boat; for then you sleep out of the Middle State civilization and wake into the civilization of New England, which seems to give its stamp to nature herself. As to man, he takes it whether native or alien; and if he is foreign-born it marks him another Irishman, Italian, Canadian, Jew, or negro from his brother in any other part of the United States.

I.

When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out, and I, who am rather fond of my faith in New England’s influence of this sort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I could wish. A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, as black as a man can well be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along shore in search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded young chicken in the road. The natural expectation is that any chicken in these circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it with a loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat (it was a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over the hay-cocks and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which passed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and then fall still. The poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me, but I bore it well, compared with my driver. He could hardly stop lamenting it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up. “You goin’ past Jim Marden’s?” “Yes.” “Well, I wish you’d tell him I just run over a chicken of his, and I killed it, I guess. I guess it was a pretty big one.” “Oh no,” I put in, “it was only a broiler. What do you think it was worth?” I took out some money, and the farmer noted the largest coin in my hand; “About half a dollar, I guess.” On this I put it all back in my pocket, and then he said, “Well, if a chicken don’t know enough to get out of the road, I guess you ain’t to blame.” I expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on. When we parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to let the owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckled his pleasure in the joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and I have no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless he has paid for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening him, while I was off in my train without a pang for the owner and with only an agreeable pathos for the pullet.

II.

The instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, it has carried me in a psychological direction away from the simpler differences which I meant to note in New England. They were evident as soon as our train began to run from the steamboat landing into the country, and they have intensified, if they have not multiplied, themselves as I have penetrated deeper and deeper into the beautiful region. The land is poorer than the land to the southward — one sees that at once; the soil is thin, and often so thickly burdened with granite bowlders that it could never have borne any other crop since the first Puritans, or Pilgrims, cut away the primeval woods and betrayed its hopeless sterility to the light. But wherever you come to a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one of the village groups that New England farm-houses have always liked to gather themselves into, it is of a neatness that brings despair, and of a repair that ought to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey — sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut hay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem to smoke in the sun.

We have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid mood of continental weather which we have telegraphed us ahead to heighten our suffering by anticipation. But the farmsteads and village houses are safe in the shade of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the grass that grows so tall about them that the June roses have to strain upward to get themselves free of it. Behind each dwelling is a billowy mass of orchard, and before it the Gothic archway of the elms stretches above the quiet street. There is no tree in the world so full of sentiment as the American elm, and it is nowhere so graceful as in these New England villages, which are themselves, I think, the prettiest and wholesomest of mortal sojourns. By a happy instinct, their wooden houses are all painted white, to a marble effect that suits our meridional sky, and the contrast of their dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing. There was an evil hour, the terrible moment of the aesthetic revival now happily past, when white walls and green blinds were thought in bad taste, and the village houses were often tinged a dreary ground color, or a doleful olive, or a gloomy red, but now they have returned to their earlier love. Not the first love; that was a pale buff with white trim; but I doubt if it were good for all kinds of village houses; the eye rather demands the white. The pale buff does very well for large colonial mansions, like Lowell’s or Longfellow’s in Cambridge; but when you come, say, to see the great square houses built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; early in this century, and painted white, you find that white, after all, is the thing for our climate, even in the towns.

In such a village as my colored brother drove me through on the way to the beach it was of an absolute fitness; and I wish I could convey a due sense of the exquisite keeping of the place. Each white house was more or less closely belted in with a white fence, of panels or pickets; the grassy door-yards glowed with flowers, and often a climbing rose embowered the door-way with its bloom. Away backward or sidewise stretched the woodshed from the dwelling to the barn, and shut the whole under one cover; the turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, over which the elms rose and drooped; and from one end of the village to the other you could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. I know Holland; I have seen the wives of Scheveningen scrubbing up for Sunday to the very middle of their brick streets, but I doubt if Dutch cleanliness goes so far without, or comes from so deep a scruple within, as the cleanliness of New England. I felt so keenly the feminine quality of its motive as I passed through that village, that I think if I had dropped so much as a piece of paper in the street I must have knocked at the first door and begged the lady of the house (who would have opened it in person after wiping her hands from her work, taking off her apron, and giving a glance at herself in the mirror and at me through the window blind) to report me to the selectmen in the interest of good morals.

III.

I did not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the New England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and I am still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under the relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there. At best I was never more than a naturalized Bostonian; but it used to give me great pleasure — so penetratingly does the place qualify even the sojourning Westerner — to think of the defect of New York in the virtue that is next to godliness; and now I had to hang my head for shame at the mortifying contrast of the Boston streets to the well-swept asphalt which I had left frying in the New York sun the afternoon before. Later, however, when I began to meet the sort of Boston faces I remembered so well — good, just, pure, but set and severe, with their look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof — they not only ignored the disgraceful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of a state of transition which would leave the place swept and garnished behind it; and comforted me against the litter of the winding thoroughfares and narrow lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick walls, and seemed permanently to have smutched and discolored them.

In New York you see the American face as Europe characterizes it; in Boston you see it as it characterizes Europe; and it is in Boston that you can best imagine the strenuous grapple of the native forces which all alien things must yield to till they take the American cast. It is almost dismaying, that physiognomy, before it familiarizes itself anew; and in the brief first moment while it is yet objective, you ransack your conscience for any sins you may have committed in your absence from it and make ready to do penance for them. I felt almost as if I had brought the dirty streets with me, and were guilty of having left them lying about, so impossible were they with reference to the Boston face.

It is a face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety, and it looked into the window of our carriage with the serious eyes of our elderly hackman to make perfectly sure of our destination before we drove away from the station. It was a little rigorous with us, as requiring us to have a clear mind; but it was not unfriendly, not unkind, and it was patient from long experience. In New York there are no elderly hackmen; but in Boston they abound, and I cannot believe they would be capable of bad faith with travellers. In fact, I doubt if this class is anywhere as predatory as it is painted; but in Boston it appears to have the public honor in its keeping. I do not mean that it was less mature, less self-respectful in Portsmouth, where we were next to arrive; more so it could not be; an equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in both places, and all through New England it is of native birth, while in New York it is composed of men of many nations, with a weight in numbers towards the Celtic strain. The prevalence of the native in New England helps you sensibly to realize from the first moment that here you are in America as the first Americans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in New England is the original tradition more purely kept than in the beautiful old seaport of New Hampshire. In fact, without being quite prepared to defend a thesis to this effect, I believe that Portsmouth is preeminently American, and in this it differs from Newburyport and from Salem, which have suffered from different causes an equal commercial decline, and, though among the earliest of the great Puritan towns after Boston, are now largely made up of aliens in race and religion; these are actually the majority, I believe, in Newburyport.

IV.

The adversity of Portsmouth began early in the century, but before that time she had prospered so greatly that her merchant princes were able to build themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green shutters, of a grandeur and beauty unmatched elsewhere in the country. I do not know what architect had his way with them, though his name is richly worth remembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such graceful proportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines of pious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to house our well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs. The decoration is oftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement; or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicate iron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity and a faultless propriety of form in the stately mansions which stand under the arching elms, with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy terraces behind them to the river, or to the borders of other pleasances. They are all of wood, except for the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stout edifices rarely sway out of the true line given them, and they look as if they might keep it yet another century.

Between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the quiet streets, whose gravelled stretch is probably never cleaned because it never needs cleaning. Even the business streets, and the quaint square which gives the most American of towns an air so foreign and Old Worldly, look as if the wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and the narrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowd each other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water — side, are doubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a New England conscience against getting them untidy.

When you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high- shouldered warehouses which recall Holland, especially in a few with their gables broken in steps, after the Dutch fashion. These, with their mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and the whole place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of the past, from the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water’s edge till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchants and opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsome space of gardened ground.

My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty, and I seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm of the town. Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a rich field when he comes; and I hope he will come of the right sex, for it needs some minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, to express a fit sense of its life in the past. Of its life in the present I know nothing. I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, and sigh my longing soul into their dim interiors. When now and then a young shape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy would have been unable to deal with what went on in them. Some girl of those flitting through the warm, odorous twilight must become the creative historian of the place; I can at least imagine a Jane Austen now growing up in Portsmouth.

V.

If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than she has yet shown herself in fiction, I might say the Jane Austen of Portsmouth was already with us, and had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material. One day when we crossed the Piscataqua from New Hampshire into Maine, and took the trolley-line for a run along through the lovely coast country, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own people, who are a little different sort of New-Englanders from those of Miss Wilkins. They began to flock into the car, young maidens and old, mothers and grandmothers, and nice boys and girls, with a very, very few farmer youth of marriageable age, and more rustic and seafaring elders long past it, all in the Sunday best which they had worn to the graduation exercises at the High School, where we took them mostly up. The womenkind were in a nervous twitter of talk and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyond their wont, “passing the time of day” with one another, and helping the more tumultuous sex to get settled in the overcrowded open car. They courteously made room for one another, and let the children stand between their knees, or took them in their laps, with that unfailing American kindness which I am prouder of than the American valor in battle, observing in all that American decorum which is no bad thing either. We had chanced upon the high and mighty occasion of the neighborhood year, when people might well have been a little off their balance, but there was not a boisterous note in the subdued affair. As we passed the school-house door, three dear, pretty maids in white gowns and white slippers stood on the steps and gently smiled upon our company. One could see that they were inwardly glowing and thrilling with the excitement of their graduation, but were controlling their emotions to a calm worthy of the august event, so that no one might ever have it to say that they had appeared silly.

The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors or gates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of private ownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters people along its obliging lines. One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins’s story where the bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me think more of Miss Jewett’s people. The shore folk and the Down-Easters are specifically hers; and these were just such as might have belonged in ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’, or ‘Sister Wisby’s Courtship’, or ‘Dulham Ladies’, or ‘An Autumn Ramble’, or twenty other entrancing tales. Sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself.

The trolley-line had been opened only since the last September, but in an effect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and it climbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of the country road which it followed. It is a land of low hills, broken by frequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to see how frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. It scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round a sharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loud caterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles. Its course does not lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger; but as yet there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as one would think. The landscape has already accepted it, and is making the best of it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience. It passes everybody’s front door or back door, and the farmers can get themselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into Portsmouth in an hour, twice an hour, all day long. In summer the cars are open, with transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall of wind or rain. In winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity. The young motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a siding to let a car from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught out in a blizzard last Winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift. “But the cah was so wa’m, I neva suff’ed a mite.”

“Well,” I summarized, “it must be a great advantage to all the people along the line.”

“Well, you wouldn’t ‘a’ thought so, from the kick they made.”

“I suppose the cottagers” — the summer colony— “didn’t like the noise.”

“Oh yes; that’s what I mean. The’s whe’ the kick was. The natives like it. I guess the summa folks ‘ll like it, too.”

He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we both understood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bow to the will of the majority.

THE ART OF THE ADSMITH

The other day, a friend of mine, who professes all the intimacy of a bad conscience with many of my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulky book under his arm, and said, “I see by a guilty look in your eye that you are meaning to write about spring.”

“I am not,” I retorted, “and if I were, it would be because none of the new things have been said yet about spring, and because spring is never an old story, any more than youth or love.”

“I have heard something like that before,” said my friend, “and I understand. The simple truth of the matter is that this is the fag-end of the season, and you have run low in your subjects. Now take my advice and don’t write about spring; it will make everybody hate you, and will do no good. Write about advertising.” He tapped the book under his arm significantly. “Here is a theme for you.”

I.

He had no sooner pronounced these words than I began to feel a weird and potent fascination in his suggestion. I took the book from him and looked it eagerly through. It was called Good Advertising, and it was written by one of the experts in the business who have advanced it almost to the grade of an art, or a humanity.

“But I see nothing here,” I said, musingly, “which would enable a self-respecting author to come to the help of his publisher in giving due hold upon the public interest those charming characteristics of his book which no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate so persuasively.”

“I expected some such objection from you,” said my friend. “You will admit that there is everything else here?”

“Everything but that most essential thing. You know how we all feel about it: the bitter disappointment, the heart-sickening sense of insufficiency that the advertised praises of our books give us poor authors. The effect is far worse than that of the reviews, for the reviewer is not your ally and copartner, while your publisher—”

“I see what you mean,” said my friend. “But you must have patience. If the author of this book can write so luminously of advertising in other respects, I am sure he will yet be able to cast a satisfactory light upon your problem. The question is, I believe, how to translate into irresistible terms all that fond and exultant regard which a writer feels for his book, all his pervasive appreciation of its singular beauty, unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print, without infringing upon the delicate and shrinking modesty which is the distinguishing ornament of the literary spirit?”

“Something like that. But you understand.”

“Perhaps a Roentgen ray might be got to do it,” said my friend, thoughtfully, “or perhaps this author may bring his mind to bear upon it yet. He seems to have considered every kind of advertising except book-advertising.”

“The most important of all!” I cried, impatiently.

“You think so because you are in that line. If you were in the line of varnish, or bicycles, or soap, or typewriters, or extract of beef, or of malt—”

“Still I should be interested in book — advertising, because it is the most vital of human interests.”

“Tell me,” said my friend, “do you read the advertisements of the books of rival authors?”

“Brother authors,” I corrected him.

“Well, brother authors.”

I said, No, candidly, I did not; and I forbore to add that I thought them little better than a waste of the publishers’ money.

II.

My friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal disadvantage, but seemed to prefer a more general philosophy of the matter.

“I have often wondered,” he said, “at the enormous expansion of advertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted. But my author, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which I was unwittingly groping for. When you take up a Sunday paper” — I shuddered, and my friend smiled intelligence— “you are simply appalled at the miles of announcements of all sorts. Who can possibly read them? Who cares even to look at them? But if you want something in particular — to furnish a house, or buy a suburban place, or take a steamer for Europe, or go, to the theatre — then you find out at once who reads the advertisements, and cares to look at them. They respond to the multifarious wants of the whole community. You have before you the living operation of that law of demand and supply which it has always been such a bore to hear about. As often happens, the supply seems to come before the demand; but that’s only an appearance. You wanted something, and you found an offer to meet your want.”

“Then you don’t believe that the offer to meet your want suggested it?”

“I see that my author believes something of the kind. We may be full of all sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying influence of an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but I have a feeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to potential wants is largely thrown away. You must want a thing, or think you want it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of impertinence.”

“There are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that I read without the slightest interest in the subject matter. Simply the beauty of the style attracts me.”

“I know. But does it ever move you to get what you don’t want?”

“Never; and I should be glad to know what your author thinks of that sort of advertising: the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint.”

“He doesn’t contemn it, quite. But I think he feels that it may have had its day. Do you still read such advertisements with your early zest?”

“No; the zest for nearly everything goes. I don’t care so much for Tourguenief as I used. Still, if I come upon the jaunty and laconic suggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning the season’s wear, I read them with a measure of satisfaction. The advertising expert—”

“This author calls him the adsmith.”

“Delightful! Ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it. It’s as legitimate as lunch. But as I was saying, the adsmith seems to have caught the American business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelists have caught the American social tone.”

“Yes,” said my friend, “and he seems to have prospered as richly by it. You know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by adsmithing. They have put their art quite on a level with fiction pecuniarily.”

“Perhaps it is a branch of fiction.”

“No; they claim that it is pure fact. My author discourages the slightest admixture of fable. The truth, clearly and simply expressed, is the best in an ad.

“It is best in a wof, too. I am always saying that.”

“Wof?”

“Well, work of fiction. It’s another new word, like lunch or ad.”

“But in a wof,” said my friend, instantly adopting it, “my author insinuates that the fashion of payment tempts you to verbosity, while in an ad the conditions oblige you to the greatest possible succinctness. In one case you are paid by the word; in the other you pay by the word. That is where the adsmith stands upon higher moral ground than the wofsmith.”

“I should think your author might have written a recent article in
‘The ——  —— , reproaching fiction with its unhallowed gains.”

“If you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced. He would have been incapable of it. My author is no more the friend of honesty in adsmithing than he is of propriety, He deprecates jocosity in apothecaries and undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad business; and he is as severe as any one could be upon ads that seize the attention by disgusting or shocking the reader.

“He is to be praised for that, and for the other thing; and I shouldn’t have minded his criticising the ready wofsmith. I hope he attacks the use of display type, which makes our newspapers look like the poster- plastered fences around vacant lots. In New York there is only one paper whose advertisements are not typographically a shock to the nerves.”

“Well,” said my friend, “he attacks foolish and ineffective display.”

“It is all foolish and ineffective. It is like a crowd of people trying to make themselves heard by shouting each at the top of his voice. A paper full of display advertisements is an image of our whole congested and delirious state of competition; but even in competitive conditions it is unnecessary, and it is futile. Compare any New York paper but one with the London papers, and you will see what I mean. Of course I refer to the ad pages; the rest of our exception is as offensive with pictures and scare heads as all the rest. I wish your author could revise his opinions and condemn all display in ads.”

“I dare say he will when he knows what you think,” said my friend, with imaginable sarcasm.

III.

“I wish,” I went on, “that he would give us some philosophy of the prodigious increase of advertising within the last twenty-five years, and some conjecture as to the end of it all. Evidently, it can’t keep on increasing at the present rate. If it does, there will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.”

“Before that time, perhaps,” my friend suggested, “adsmithing will have become so fine and potent an art that advertising will be reduced in bulk, while keeping all its energy and even increasing its effectiveness.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “some silent electrical process will be contrived, so that the attractions of a new line of dress-goods or the fascination of a spring or fall opening may be imparted to a lady’s consciousness without even the agency of words. All other facts of commercial and industrial interest could be dealt with in the same way. A fine thrill could be made to go from the last new book through the whole community, so that people would not willingly rest till they had it. Yes, one can see an indefinite future for advertising in that way. The adsmith may be the supreme artist of the twentieth century. He may assemble in his grasp, and employ at will, all the arts and sciences.”

“Yes,” said my friend, with a sort of fall in his voice, “that is very well. But what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at every pore with a sense of the world’s demand and supply?”

“Oh, that is another affair. I was merely imagining the possible resources of invention in providing for the increase of advertising while guarding the integrity of the planet. I think, very likely, if the thing keeps on, we shall all go mad; but then we shall none of us be able to criticise the others. Or possibly the thing may work its own cure. You know the ingenuity of the political economists in justifying the egotism to which conditions appeal. They do not deny that these foster greed and rapacity in merciless degree, but they contend that when the wealth- winner drops off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and good comes of it all. I never could see how; but if it is true, why shouldn’t a sort of ultimate immunity come back to us from the very excess and invasion of the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made to us still more by the adsmith? Come, isn’t there hope in that?”

“I see a great opportunity for the wofsmith in some such dream,” said my friend. “Why don’t you turn it to account?”

“You know that isn’t my line; I must leave that sort of wofsmithing to the romantic novelist. Besides, I have my well-known panacea for all the ills our state is heir to, in a civilization which shall legislate foolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate things out of the possibility of existence. Most of the adsmithing is now employed in persuading people that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure. But in any civilization they shall not even be suffered to be made, much less foisted upon the community by adsmiths.”

“I see what you mean,” said my friend; and he sighed gently. “I had much better let you write about spring.”

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM

A late incident in the history of a very widespread English novelist, triumphantly closed by the statement of his friend that the novelist had casually failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the real author, has brought freshly to my mind a curious question in ethics. The friend who vindicated the novelist, or, rather, who contemptuously dismissed the matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, but declared that it was one of many which could be found in the novelist’s works. The novelist, he said, was quite in the habit of so using material in the rough, which he implied was like using any fact or idea from life, and he declared that the novelist could not bother to answer critics who regarded these exploitations as a sort of depredation. In a manner he brushed the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the general public that the novelist always meant, at his leisure, and in his own way, duly to ticket the flies preserved in his amber.

I.

When I read this haughty vindication, I thought at first that if the case were mine I would rather have several deadly enemies than such a friend as that; but since, I have not been so sure. I have asked myself upon a careful review of the matter whether plagiarism may not be frankly avowed, as in nowise dishonest, and I wish some abler casuist would take the affair into consideration and make it clear for me. If we are to suppose that offences against society disgrace the offender, and that public dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparently plagiarism is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases it does not disgrace. The dictionary, indeed, defines it as “the crime of literary theft”; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame, it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the offence, if it is an offence (one has to call it something, and I hope the word is not harsh), is some such harmless infraction of the moral law as white-lying.

The much-perverted saying of Moliere, that he took his own where he found it, is perhaps in the consciousness of those who appropriate the things other people have rushed in with before them. But really they seem to need neither excuse nor defence with the impartial public if they are caught in the act of reclaiming their property or despoiling the rash intruder upon their premises. The novelist in question is by no means the only recent example, and is by no means a flagrant example. While the ratification of the treaty with Spain was pending before the Senate of the United States, a member of that body opposed it in a speech almost word for word the same as a sermon delivered in New York City only a few days earlier and published broadcast. He was promptly exposed by the parallel-column system; but I have never heard that his standing was affected or his usefulness impaired by the offence proven against him. A few years ago an eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his own the sermon of a brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detected and promptly exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whatever happened from the exposure. Every one must recall like instances, more or less remote. I remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of a journalist who used as his own all the denunciatory passages of Macaulay’s article on Barrere, and applied them with changes of name to the character and conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his duty to devote to infamy. He was caught in the fact, and by means of the parallel column pilloried before the community. But the community did not mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either. He prospered on amid those who all knew what he had done, and when he removed to another city it was to a larger one, and to a position of more commanding influence, from which he was long conspicuous in helping shape the destinies of the nation.

So far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were as harmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from time to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to its foundations. They really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings, rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and I do not believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latest victim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts or heads of his readers.

II.

I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. I am always glad to have sinners get off, for I like to get off from my own sins; and I have a bad moment from my sense of them whenever another’s have found him out. But as yet I have not convinced myself that the sort of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for it seems to deprave no more than it dishonors; or that it is what the dictionary (with very unnecessary brutality) calls a “crime” and a “theft.” If it is either, it is differently conditioned, if not differently natured, from all other crimes and thefts. These may be more or less artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it. If you take a man’s hat or coat out of his hall, you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take his horse out of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it; if you take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in the crowd, and easily prove your innocence. But if you take his sermon, or his essay, or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery. The world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only too glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing their alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the court of parallel columns. You have no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the more indecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and wishes to display his erudition. A man may escape for centuries and yet be found out. In the notorious case of William Shakespeare the offender seemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in a lunatic asylum, was able to detect him at last, and to restore the goods to their rightful owner, Sir Francis Bacon.

In spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty of exposure, plagiarism goes on as it has always gone on; and there is no probability that it will cease as long as there are novelists, senators, divines, and journalists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to have in mind at the time, and which they see going to waste elsewhere. Now and then it takes a more violent form and becomes a real mania, as when the plagiarist openly claims and urges his right to a well-known piece of literary property. When Mr. William Allen Butler’s famous poem of “Nothing to Wear” achieved its extraordinary popularity, a young girl declared and apparently quite believed that she had written it and lost the MS. in an omnibus. All her friends apparently believed so, too; and the friends of the different gentlemen and ladies who claimed the authorship of “Beautiful Snow” and “Rock Me to Sleep” were ready to support them by affidavit against the real authors of those pretty worthless pieces.

From all these facts it must appear to the philosophic reader that plagiarism is not the simple “crime” or “theft” that the lexicographers would have us believe. It argues a strange and peculiar courage on the part of those who commit it or indulge it, since they are sure of having it brought home to them, for they seem to dread the exposure, though it involves no punishment outside of themselves. Why do they do it, or, having done it, why do they mind it, since the public does not? Their temerity and their timidity are things almost irreconcilable, and the whole position leaves one quite puzzled as to what one would do if one’s own plagiarisms were found out. But this is a mere question of conduct, and of infinitely less interest than that of the nature or essence of the thing itself.

PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION

The question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression of reality does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one of those inquiries to which there is no very final answer. The most baffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident; and if you go about to prove them you are in some danger of shaking the convictions of those whom they have persuaded. It will not do to affirm anything wholesale concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrary present themselves if you know the ground, and you are left in doubt of the verity which you cannot gainsay. The most that you can do is to appeal to your own consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else. Perhaps the best test in this difficult matter is the quality of the art which created the picture. Is it clear, simple, unaffected? Is it true to human experience generally? If it is so, then it cannot well be false to the special human experience it deals with.

I.

Not long ago I heard of something which amusingly, which pathetically, illustrated the sense of reality imparted by the work of one of our writers, whose art is of the kind I mean. A lady was driving with a young girl of the lighter-minded civilization of New York through one of those little towns of the North Shore in Massachusetts, where the small; wooden houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the schooners slip, in and out on the hidden channels of the salt meadows as if they were blown about through the tall grass. She tried to make her feel the shy charm of the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those to the manner born are so keenly aware of in old-fashioned New England villages; but she found that the girl was not only not looking at the sad-colored cottages, with their weather-worn shingle walls, their grassy door-yards lit by patches of summer bloom, and their shutterless windows with their close-drawn shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from them, and staring straightforward until she should be out of sight of them altogether. She said that they were terrible, and she knew that in each of them was one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, or unhappy wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read of in Miss Wilkins’s stories.

She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of these stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous, conscientious, deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and no doubt this cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows. Without being so very young, I, too, have found the humor hardly enough at times, and if one has not the habit of experiencing support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote New England village, at nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and in quite the mood that Miss Wilkins’s bleaker studies leave one in. At midday, or in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible to fling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the fiction; and I have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying this or, that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins house and in placing one of her muted dramas in it. One cannot know the people of such places without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot know New England without owning the fidelity of her stories to New England character, though, as I have already suggested, quite another sort of stories could be written which should as faithfully represent other phases of New England village life.

To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no means confident that their truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature is seldom on show anywhere. I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoy and Tourguenief to Russian life, yet I should not be surprised if I went through Russia and met none of their people. I should be rather more surprised if I went through Italy and met none of Verga’s or Fogazzaro’s, but that would be because I already knew Italy a little. In fact, I suspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes only to the connoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the artist himself. One must not be too severe in challenging the truth of an author to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of patience to the scrutiny. Types are very backward and shrinking things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if you seize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that is distinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author’s reputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of his truth.

II.

The difficulty with characters in fiction is that the reader there finds them dramatized; not only their actions, but also their emotions are dramatized; and the very same sort of persons when one meets them in real life are recreantly undramatic. One might go through a New England village and see Mary Wilkins houses and Mary Wilkins people, and yet not witness a scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales. It is only too probable that the inhabitants one met would say nothing quaint or humorous, or betray at all the nature that she reveals in them; and yet I should not question her revelation on that account. The life of New England, such as Miss Wilkins deals with, and Miss Sarah O. Jewett, and Miss Alice Brown, is not on the surface, or not visibly so, except to the accustomed eye. It is Puritanism scarcely animated at all by the Puritanic theology. One must not be very positive in such things, and I may be too bold in venturing to say that while the belief of some New Englanders approaches this theology the belief of most is now far from it; and yet its penetrating individualism so deeply influenced the New England character that Puritanism survives in the moral and mental make of the people almost in its early strength. Conduct and manner conform to a dead religious ideal; the wish to be sincere, the wish to be just, the wish to be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful, humble. A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations without acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long after they cease to believe themselves chosen. They are often stiffened in the neck and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the point of making them angular and cold; but they are of an inveterate responsibility to a power higher than themselves, and they are strengthened for any fate. They are what we see in the stories which, perhaps, hold the first place in American fiction.

As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now so Puritanical as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet the inherited Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences it from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. There was, however, always a revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest and securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. There is also a sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for it), which awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence from the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New England manners. It is often a last state of Unitarianism, which prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Calvinistic theology ceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism so common in New England, and, in fact, everywhere in America. Then, there is a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villages which has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and which forms with us an author’s closest appreciation, if not his best. But as yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exalted beauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one can always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period. Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losing itself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large. The good causes, the generous causes, are first befriended there, and in a wholesome sort the New England culture, as well as the New England conscience, has imparted itself to the American people.

Even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves to have in such excellent degree, has spread from New England. That is, indeed, the home of the American short story, and it has there been brought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of Miss Brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs. Rose Terry Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture of New England village life in some of its more obvious phases. I say obvious because I must, but I have already said that this is a life which is very little obvious; and I should not blame any one who brought the portrait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, and unnatural, though I should be perfectly sure that such a critic was wrong.

THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART

One of the things always enforcing itself upon the consciousness of the artist in any sort is the fact that those whom artists work for rarely care for their work artistically. They care for it morally, personally, partially. I suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddled preference for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by a philistine question of the material when it should, aesthetically speaking, be concerned solely with the form.

I.

The other night at the theatre I was witness of a curious and amusing illustration of my point. They were playing a most soul-filling melodrama, of the sort which gives you assurance from the very first that there will be no trouble in the end, but everything will come out just as it should, no matter what obstacles oppose themselves in the course of the action. An over-ruling Providence, long accustomed to the exigencies of the stage, could not fail to intervene at the critical moment in behalf of innocence and virtue, and the spectator never had the least occasion for anxiety. Not unnaturally there was a black-hearted villain in the piece; so very black-hearted that he seemed not to have a single good impulse from first to last. Yet he was, in the keeping of the stage Providence, as harmless as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadly aims. He accomplished no more mischief, in fact, than if all his intents had been of the best; except for the satisfaction afforded by the edifying spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not have been in the play at all; and one might almost have felt sorry for him, he was so continually baffled. But this was not enough for the audience, or for that part of it which filled the gallery to the roof. Perhaps he was such an uncommonly black-hearted villain, so very, very cold-blooded in his wickedness that the justice unsparingly dealt out to him by the dramatist could not suffice. At any rate, the gallery took such a vivid interest in his punishment that it had out the actor who impersonated the wretch between all the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberate passage across the stage before the curtain. The hisses were not at all for the actor, but altogether for the character. The performance was fairly good, quite as good as the performance of any virtuous part in the piece, and easily up to the level of other villanous performances (I never find much nature in them, perhaps because there is not much nature in villany itself; that is, villany pure and simple); but the mere conception of the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too much for an audience of the average popular goodness. It was only after he had taken poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the spectators forbore to visit him with a lively proof of their abhorrence; apparently they did not care to “give him a realizing sense that there was a punishment after death,” as the man in Lincoln’s story did with the dead dog.

II.

The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since put me upon thinking (I like to be put upon thinking; the eighteenth-century essayists were) that the attitude of the audience towards this deplorable reprobate is really the attitude of most readers of books, lookers at pictures and statues, listeners to music, and so on through the whole list of the arts. It is absolutely different from the artist’s attitude, from the connoisseur’s attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with their attitude, and yet I wonder if in the end it is not what the artist works for. Art is not produced for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it is produced for the general, who can never view it otherwise than morally, personally, partially, from their associations and preconceptions.

Whether the effect with the general is what the artist works for or not, he, does not succeed without it. Their brute liking or misliking is the final test; it is universal suffrage that elects, after all. Only, in some cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o’clock on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but remain open forever, and the voting goes on. Still, even the first day’s canvass is important, or at least significant. It will not do for the artist to electioneer, but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of his defeat, and question how he has failed to touch the chord of universal interest. He is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to his fellowmen, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of both, but whose judgment he must nevertheless not despise. If he can make something that they will cheer, or something that they will hiss, he may not have done any great thing, but if he has made something that they will neither cheer nor hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matter how well, how finely, how truly he has done the thing.

This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one’s artist-pride such as one gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one. Not long ago I was talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to my thinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling I have from reading poetry; and I was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps putting on a little more modesty than I felt. I said that I could enjoy pictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soul to those excellences of handling and execution which seem chiefly to interest painters. He replied that it was a confession of weakness in a painter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the spectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and that if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of painting, he was denying his office, which was to say something clear and appreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even insisted that a picture ought to tell a story.

The difficulty in humbling one’s self to this view of art is in the ease with which one may please the general by art which is no art. Neither the play nor the playing that I saw at the theatre when the actor was hissed for the wickedness of the villain he was personating, was at all fine; and yet I perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved a supreme effect. If I may be so confidential, I will say that I should be very sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be very proud if, on the level I chose and with the quality I cared for, I could invent a villain that the populace would have out and hiss for his surpassing wickedness. In other words, I think it a thousand pities whenever an artist gets so far away from the general, so far within himself or a little circle of amateurs, that his highest and best work awakens no response in the multitude. I am afraid this is rather the danger of the arts among us, and how to escape it is not so very plain. It makes one sick and sorry often to see how cheaply the applause of the common people is won. It is not an infallible test of merit, but if it is wanting to any performance, we may be pretty sure it is not the greatest performance.

III.

The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human affairs, to confound us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in that. We talk, for instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this is different from talking of cookery for cooks. Poetry is not made for poets; they have enough poetry of their own, but it is made for people who are not poets. If it does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it is poetry which has failed of its truest office. It is none the less its truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to do it.

The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve this truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should study how and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest are wanting in universal interest, in human appeal. Leaving the drama out of the question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only the favor of the dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a race more open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than ours. The artist who feels their divine charm, and longs to impart it, has now and here a chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had in the world before. Of course, the means of reaching the widest range of humanity are the simple and the elementary, but there is no telling when the complex and the recondite may not universally please. 288

The art is to make them plain to every one, for every one has them in him. Lowell used to say that Shakespeare was subtle, but in letters a foot high.

The painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the polite only has a success to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be ashamed of that it goes no further. He need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgar because bad art pleases them. It is part of his reason for being that he should please them, too; and if he does not it is a proof that he is wanting in force, however much he abounds in fineness. Who would not wish his picture to draw a crowd about it? Who would not wish his novel to sell five hundred thousand copies, for reasons besides the sordid love of gain which I am told governs novelists? One should not really wish it any the less because chromos and historical romances are popular.

Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will draw nearer together in a mutual understanding, though perhaps not in our present conditions. I put that understanding off till the good time when life shall be more than living, more even than the question of getting a living; but in the mean time I think that the artist might very well study the springs of feeling in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should quite humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, and inquire how his wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, so personal. Not being a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatest contempt of that play and its public.

POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

No thornier theme could well be suggested than I was once invited to consider by an Englishman who wished to know how far American politicians were scholars, and how far American authors took part in politics. In my mind I first revolted from the inquiry, and then I cast about, in the fascination it began to have for me, to see how I might handle it and prick myself least. In a sort, which it would take too long to set forth, politics are very intimate matters with us, and if one were to deal quite frankly with the politics of a contemporary author, one might accuse one’s self of an unwarrantable personality. So, in what I shall have to say in answer to the question asked me, I shall seek above all things not to be quite frank.

I.

My uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in speaking of authors no longer living. Not to go too far back among these, it is perfectly safe to say that when the slavery question began to divide all kinds of men among us, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Curtis, Emerson, and Bryant more or less promptly and openly took sides against slavery. Holmes was very much later in doing so, but he made up for his long delay by his final strenuousness; as for Hawthorne, he was, perhaps, too essentially a spectator of life to be classed with either party, though his associations, if not his sympathies, were with the Northern men who had Southern principles until the civil war came. After the war, when our political questions ceased to be moral and emotional and became economic and sociological, literary men found their standing with greater difficulty. They remained mostly Republicans, because the Republicans were the anti-slavery party, and were still waging war against slavery in their nerves.

I should say that they also continued very largely the emotional tradition in politics, and it is doubtful if in the nature of things the politics of literary men can ever be otherwise than emotional. In fact, though the questions may no longer be so, the politics of vastly the greater number of Americans are so. Nothing else would account for the fact that during the last ten or fifteen years men have remained Republicans and remained Democrats upon no tangible issues except of office, which could practically concern only a few hundreds or thousands out of every million voters. Party fealty is praised as a virtue, and disloyalty to party is treated as a species of incivism next in wickedness to treason. If any one were to ask me why then American authors were not active in American politics, as they once were, I should feel a certain diffidence in replying that the question of other people’s accession to office was, however emotional, unimportant to them as compared with literary questions. I should have the more diffidence because it might be retorted that literary men were too unpractical for politics when they did not deal with moral issues.

Such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as things go, and might even be regarded as complimentary. It is not our custom to be tender with any one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be bettered, especially in public affairs. We are apt to call such a one out of his name and to punish him for opinions he has never held. This may be a better reason than either given why authors do not take part in politics with us. They are a thin-skinned race, fastidious often, and always averse to hard knocks; they are rather modest, too, and distrust their fitness to lead, when they have quite a firm faith in their convictions. They hesitate to urge these in the face of practical politicians, who have a confidence in their ability to settle all affairs of State not surpassed even by that of business men in dealing with economic questions.

I think it is a pity that our authors do not go into politics at least for the sake of the material it would yield them; but really they do not. Our politics are often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, so far, our fiction has shunned them even more decidedly than it has shunned our good society — which is not picturesque or apparently anything but a tiresome adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad under the same name. In nearly the degree that our authors have dealt with our politics as material, they have given the practical politicians only too much reason to doubt their insight and their capacity to understand the mere machinery, the simplest motives, of political life.

II.

There are exceptions, of course, and if my promise of reticence did not withhold me I might name some striking ones. Privately and unprofessionally, I think our authors take as vivid an interest in public affairs as any other class of our citizens, and I should be sorry to think that they took a less intelligent interest. Now and then, but only very rarely, one of them speaks out, and usually on the unpopular side. In this event he is spared none of the penalties with which we like to visit difference of opinion; rather they are accumulated on him.

Such things are not serious, and they are such as no serious man need shrink from, but they have a bearing upon what I am trying to explain, and in a certain measure they account for a certain attitude in our literary men. No one likes to have stones, not to say mud, thrown at him, though they are not meant to hurt him badly and may be partly thrown in joke. But it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takes them seriously, he will have more or less mud, not to say stones, thrown at him. He might burlesque or caricature them, or misrepresent them, with safety; but if he spoke of public questions with heart and conscience, he could not do it with impunity, unless he were authorized to do so by some practical relation to them. I do not mean that then he would escape; but in this country, where there were once supposed to be no classes, people are more strictly classified than in any other. Business to the business man, law to the lawyer, medicine to the physician, politics to the politician, and letters to the literary man; that is the rule. One is not expected to transcend his function, and commonly one does not. We keep each to his last, as if there were not human interests, civic interests, which had a higher claim than the last upon our thinking and feeling. The tendency has grown upon us severally and collectively through the long persistence of our prosperity; if public affairs were going ill, private affairs were going so well that we did not mind the others; and we Americans are, I think, meridional in our improvidence. We are so essentially of to-day that we behave as if to-morrow no more concerned us than yesterday. We have taught ourselves to believe that it will all come out right in the end so long that we have come to act upon our belief; we are optimistic fatalists.

III.

The turn which our politics have taken towards economics, if I may so phrase the rise of the questions of labor and capital, has not largely attracted literary men. It is doubtful whether Edward Bellamy himself, whose fancy of better conditions has become the abiding faith of vast numbers of Americans, supposed that he was entering the field of practical politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of economic equality. But he virtually founded the Populist party, which, as the vital principle of the Democratic party, came so near electing its candidate for the Presidency some years ago; and he is to be named first among our authors who have dealt with politics on their more human side since the days of the old antislavery agitation. Without too great disregard of the reticence concerning the living which I promised myself, I may mention Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson as prominent authors who encouraged the Nationalist movement eventuating in Populism, though they were never Populists. It may be interesting to note that Dr. Hale and Colonel Higginson, who later came together in their sociological sympathies, were divided by the schism of 1884, when the first remained with the Republicans and the last went off to the Democrats. More remotely, Colonel Higginson was anti slavery almost to the point of Abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in the war. Dr. Hale was of those who were less radically opposed to slavery before the war, but hardly so after it came. Since the war a sort of refluence of the old anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings in Southern tradition Mr. George W. Cable, who, against the white sentiment of his section, sided with the former slaves, and would, if the indignant renunciation of his fellow-Southerners could avail, have consequently ceased to be the first of Southern authors, though he would still have continued the author of at least one of the greatest American novels.

If I must burn my ships behind me in alleging these modern instances, as I seem really to be doing, I may mention Mr. R. W. Gilder, the poet, as an author who has taken part in the politics of municipal reform, Mr. Hamlin Garland has been known from the first as a zealous George man, or single-taxer. Mr. John Hay, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge are Republican politicians, as well as recognized literary men. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, when not writing Uncle Remus, writes political articles in a leading Southern journal. Mark Twain is a leading anti-imperialist.

IV.

I am not sure whether I have made out a case for our authors or against them; perhaps I have not done so badly; but I have certainly not tried to be exhaustive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the subject to the reader, and I wish to leave him in a condition to judge for himself whether American literary men take part in American politics or not. I think they bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we hope (it may be too fondly) is the American way. They are none of them politicians in the Latin sort. Few, if any, of our statesmen have come forward with small volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do in Spain; none of our poets or historians have been chosen Presidents of the republic as has happened to their French confreres; no great novelist of ours has been exiled as Victor Hugo was, or atrociously mishandled as Zola has been, though I have no doubt that if, for instance, one had once said the Spanish war wrong he would be pretty generally ‘conspue’. They have none of them reached the heights of political power, as several English authors have done; but they have often been ambassadors, ministers, and consuls, though they may not often have been appointed for political reasons. I fancy they discharge their duties in voting rather faithfully, though they do not often take part in caucuses or conventions.

As for the other half of the question — how far American politicians are scholars — one’s first impulse would be to say that they never were so. But I have always had an heretical belief that there were snakes in Ireland; and it may be some such disposition to question authority that keeps me from yielding to this impulse. The law of demand and supply alone ought to have settled the question in favor of the presence of the scholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for him among us for almost a generation past. Perhaps the response has not been very direct, but I imagine that our politicians have never been quite so destitute of scholarship as they would sometimes make appear. I do not think so many of them now write a good style, or speak a good style, as the politicians of forty, or fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be merely part of the impression of the general worsening of things, familiar after middle life to every one’s experience, from the beginning of recorded time. If something not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a study of finance, of economics, of international affairs is in question, it seems to go on rather more to their own satisfaction than that of their critics. But without being always very proud of the result, and without professing to know the facts very profoundly, one may still suspect that under an outside by no means academic there is a process of thinking in our statesmen which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not even so unscholarly as it might be supposed. It is not the effect of specific training, and yet it is the effect of training. I do not find that the matters dealt with are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and in this sense scholarship has not been called to the aid of our legislation or administration; but still I should not like to say that none of our politicians were scholars. That would be offensive, and it might not be true. In fact, I can think of several whom I should be tempted to call scholars if I were not just here recalled to a sense of my purpose not to deal quite frankly with this inquiry.

STORAGE

It has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers that if the one half of mankind knew how the other half lived, the two halves might be brought together in a family affection not now so observable in human relations. Probably if this knowledge were perfect, there would still be things, to bar the perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself is so interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imagined, that one can hardly refuse to impart it if one has it, and can reasonably hope, in the advantage of the ignorant, to find one’s excuse with the better informed.

I.

City and country are still so widely apart in every civilization that one can safely count upon a reciprocal strangeness in many every-day things. For instance, in the country, when people break up house-keeping, they sell their household goods and gods, as they did in cities fifty or a hundred years ago; but now in cities they simply store them; and vast warehouses in all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage. The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, and ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and carefully planned for the purpose. They are more or less fire-proof, slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have devastated. But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Such a warehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with the private tenements on either hand duly numbered, and accessible only to the tenants or their order. The aisles are concreted, the doors are iron, and the roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated by steam and lighted by electricity. Behind the iron doors, which in the New York warehouses must number hundreds of thousands, and throughout all our other cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad households is stored — the effects of people who have gone to Europe, or broken up house-keeping provisionally or definitively, or have died, or been divorced. They are the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or their yet living bodies held in hypnotic trances; destined again in some future time to animate some house or flat anew. In certain cases the spell lasts for many years, in others for a few, and in others yet it prolongs itself indefinitely.

I may mention the case of one owner whom I saw visiting the warehouse to take out the household stuff that had lain there a long fifteen years. He had been all that while in Europe, expecting any day to come home and begin life again, in his own land. That dream had passed, and now he was taking his stuff out of storage and shipping it to Italy. I did not envy him his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose round him in formless resurrection. It was not that they were all broken or defaced. On the contrary, they were in a state of preservation far more heartbreaking than any decay. In well-managed storage warehouses the things are handled with scrupulous care, and they are so packed into the appointed rooms that if not disturbed they could suffer little harm in fifteen or fifty years. The places are wonderfully well kept, and if you will visit them, say in midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture has all been hidden away behind the iron doors of the several cells, you shall find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted, and shall walk up and down their concrete length with some such sense of secure finality as you would experience in pacing the aisle of your family vault.

That is what it comes to. One may feign that these storage warehouses are cities, but they are really cemeteries: sad columbaria on whose shelves are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners’ lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one’s dead self that one revisits them. If one takes the fragments out to fit them to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable and incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which they are steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock it upon them forever. One feels then that the old way was far better, and that if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, as chance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough to pay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to the cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best recourse. Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted the reconstruction of their homes with these

“Portions and parcels of the dreadful past”

have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve their belongings in an indiscriminate ruin.

II.

In fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you, if comfort is to attend the enterprise. It is not only sorrowful but it is futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the old happiness in taking them out and using them again. It is not that they will not go into place, after a fashion, and perform their old office, but that the pang they will inflict through the suggestion of the other places where they served their purpose in other years will be only the keener for the perfection with which they do it now. If they cannot be sold, and if no fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then they had better be stored with no thought of ever taking them out again.

That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sort of storage they are put into. The inexperienced in such matters may be surprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that the fire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal the rent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a family’s living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it can be sheltered. Yet the space required is not very great; three fair-sized rooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfaction in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely about, and seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away. To be sure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their sides or backs, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or dining tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, with cushions, pillows, pictures, cunningly adjusted to the environment; and mattresses pad the walls, or interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture that would otherwise rend each other. Carpets sewn in cotton against moths, and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a whole brood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and supporting on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof ceiling of the cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from their companioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all the what-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the repletion.

There is a science observed in the arrangement of the various effects; against the rear wall and packed along the floor, and then in front of and on top of these, is built a superstructure of the things that may be first wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted in some exigency of the homeless life of the owners, pending removal. The lightest and slightest articles float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in a kind of fabric just within, and curtaining the ponderous mass behind. The effect is not so artistic as the mortuary mosaics which the Roman Capuchins design with the bones of their dead brethren in the crypt of their church, but the warehousemen no doubt have their just pride in it, and feel an artistic pang in its provisional or final disturbance.

It had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed only in some futile dream of returning to the past; and we never can return to the past on the old terms. It is well in all things to accept life implicitly, and when an end has come to treat it as the end, and not vainly mock it as a suspense of function. When the poor break up their homes, with no immediate hope of founding others, they must sell their belongings because they cannot afford to pay storage on them. The rich or richer store their household effects, and cheat themselves with the illusion that they are going some time to rehabilitate with them just such a home as they have dismantled. But the illusion probably deceives nobody so little as those who cherish the vain hope. As long as they cherish it, however — and they must cherish it till their furniture or themselves fall to dust — they cannot begin life anew, as the poor do who have kept nothing of the sort to link them to the past. This is one of the disabilities of the prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of it till some means of storing the owner as well as the’ furniture is invented. In the immense range of modern ingenuity, this is perhaps not impossible. Why not, while we are still in life, some sweet oblivious antidote which shall drug us against memory, and after time shall elapse for the reconstruction of a new home in place of the old, shall repossess us of ourselves as unchanged as the things with which we shall again array it? Here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmy fabric of a romance, and I handsomely make a present of it to the first comer. If the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how to make the reader feel that with the universal longing to return to former conditions or circumstances it must always be a mistake to do so, and he will subtly insinuate the disappointment and discomfort of the stored personality in resuming its old relations. With that just mixture of the comic and pathetic which we desire in romance, he will teach convincingly that a stored personality is to be desired only if it is permanently stored, with the implication of a like finality in the storage of its belongings.

Save in some signal exception, a thing taken out of storage cannot be established in its former function without a sense of its comparative inadequacy. It stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yet a new thing would be better; it would even in some subtle wise be more appropriate, if I may indulge so audacious a paradox; for the time is new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old things which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of years? Such a meeting is conventionally imagined to be full of tender joy, a rapture that vents itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainly in womanly tears. But really is it any such emotion? Honestly is not it a cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide? The old friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but are they genuinely glad? Is not each wishing the other at that end of the earth from which he came? Have they any use for each other such as people of unbroken associations have?

I have lately been privy to the reunion of two old comrades who are bound together more closely than most men in a community of interests, occupations, and ideals. During a long separation they had kept account of each other’s opinions as well as experiences; they had exchanged letters, from time to time, in which they opened their minds fully to each other, and found themselves constantly in accord. When they met they made a great shouting, and each pretended that he found the other just what he used to be. They talked a long, long time, fighting the invisible enemy which they felt between them. The enemy was habit, the habit of other minds and hearts, the daily use of persons and things which in their separation they had not had in common. When the old friends parted they promised to meet every day, and now, since their lines had been cast in the same places again, to repair the ravage of the envious years, and become again to each other all that they had ever been. But though they live in the same town, and often dine at the same table, and belong to the same club, yet they have not grown together again. They have grown more and more apart, and are uneasy in each other’s presence, tacitly self-reproachful for the same effect which neither of them could avert or repair. They had been respectively in storage, and each, in taking the other out, has experienced in him the unfitness which grows upon the things put away for a time and reinstated in a former function.

III.

I have not touched upon these facts of life, without the purpose of finding some way out of the coil. There seems none better than the counsel of keeping one’s face set well forward, and one’s eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future. This is the hint we will get from nature if we will heed her, and note how she never recurs, never stores or takes out of storage. Fancy rehabilitating one’s first love: how nature would mock at that! We cannot go back and be the men and women we were, any more than we can go back and be children. As we grow older, each year’s change in us is more chasmal and complete. There is no elixir whose magic will recover us to ourselves as we were last year; but perhaps we shall return to ourselves more and more in the times, or the eternity, to come. Some instinct or inspiration implies the promise of this, but only on condition that we shall not cling to the life that has been ours, and hoard its mummified image in our hearts. We must not seek to store ourselves, but must part with what we were for the use and behoof of others, as the poor part with their worldly gear when they move from one place to another. It is a curious and significant property of our outworn characteristics that, like our old furniture, they will serve admirably in the life of some other, and that this other can profitably make them his when we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope to resume them. They not only go down to successive generations, but they spread beyond our lineages, and serve the turn of those whom we never knew to be within the circle of our influence.

Civilization imparts itself by some such means, and the lower classes are clothed in the cast conduct of the upper, which if it had been stored would have left the inferiors rude and barbarous. We have only to think how socially naked most of us would be if we had not had the beautiful manners of our exclusive society to put on at each change of fashion when it dropped them.

All earthly and material things should be worn out with use, and not preserved against decay by any unnatural artifice. Even when broken and disabled from overuse they have a kind of respectability which must commend itself to the observer, and which partakes of the pensive grace of ruin. An old table with one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay in the woodshed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same table, with all its legs intact, stored with the rest of the furniture from a broken home. Spinning-wheels gathering dust in the garret of a house that is itself falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when they are dragged from their refuge, and furbished up with ribbons and a tuft of fresh tow, and made to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as they were a few years ago. A pitcher broken at the fountain, or a battered kettle on a rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery and copper-ware stored in the possibility of future need. However carefully handed down from one generation to another, the old objects have a forlorn incongruity in their successive surroundings which appeals to the compassion rather than the veneration of the witness.

It was from a truth deeply mystical that Hawthorne declared against any sort of permanence in the dwellings of men, and held that each generation should newly house itself. He preferred the perishability of the wooden American house to the durability of the piles of brick or stone which in Europe affected him as with some moral miasm from the succession of sires and sons and grandsons that had died out of them. But even of such structures as these it is impressive how little the earth makes with the passage of time. Where once a great city of them stood, you shall find a few tottering walls, scarcely more mindful of the past than “the cellar and the well” which Holmes marked as the ultimate monuments, the last witnesses, to the existence of our more transitory habitations. It is the law of the patient sun that everything under it shall decay, and if by reason of some swift calamity, some fiery cataclysm, the perishable shall be overtaken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it cannot be felt that the law has been set aside in the interest of men’s happiness or cheerfulness. Neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites the gayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, and the ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world. As far as his comfort is concerned, it had been far better that those cities had not been stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all their contemporaries.

IV

No, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, but most likely madam: if you are about to break up your household for any indefinite period, and are not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned against putting them in storage, unless of the most briskly combustible type. Better, far better, give them away, and disperse them by that means to a continuous use that shall end in using them up; or if no one will take them, then hire a vacant lot, somewhere, and devote them to the flames. By that means you shall bear witness against a custom that insults the order of nature, and crowds the cities with the cemeteries of dead homes, where there is scarcely space for the living homes. Do not vainly fancy that you shall take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted to the ends that it served before it was put in. You will not be the same, or have the same needs or desire, when you take it out, and the new place which you shall hope to equip with it will receive it with cold reluctance, or openly refuse it, insisting upon forms and dimensions that render it ridiculous or impossible. The law is that nothing taken out of storage is the same as it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in those rude ‘graffiti’ apparently inscribed by accident in the process of removal, has only such exceptions as prove the rule.

The world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes all the difference. Yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moods and fashions change. The ideals remain, and these alone you can go back to, secure of finding them the same, to-day and to-morrow, that they were yesterday. This perhaps is because they have never been in storage, but in constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods and fashions reappear.

FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O

There was not much promise of pleasure in the sodden afternoon of a mid-March day at Pittsburg, where the smoke of a thousand foundry chimneys gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft air, and fell with the constant rain which it dyed its own black. But early memories stirred joyfully in the two travellers in whose consciousness I was making my tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steamboat lying beside the wharf boat at the foot of the dilapidated levee, and doing its best to represent the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there in the old days. It had the help of three others in its generous effort, and the levee itself made a gallant pretence of being crowded with freight, and succeeded in displaying several saturated piles of barrels and agricultural implements on the irregular pavement whose wheel-worn stones, in long stretches, were sunken out of sight in their parent mud. The boats and the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made upon them by the light-hearted youngsters of sixty-five and seventy, who were setting out on their journey in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and for whom much less freight and much fewer boats would have rehabilitated the past.

I.

When they mounted the broad stairway, tidily strewn with straw to save it from the mud of careless boots, and entered the long saloon of the steamboat, the promise of their fancy was more than made good for them. From the clerk’s office, where they eagerly paid their fare, the saloon stretched two hundred feet by thirty away to the stern, a cavernous splendor of white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, and fenced at the stern with wide windows of painted glass. Midway between the great stove in the bow where the men were herded, and the great stove at the stern where the women kept themselves in the seclusion which the tradition of Western river travel still guards, after well-nigh a hundred years, they were given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so exactly duplicated those they remembered from far-off days that they could have believed themselves awakened from a dream of insubstantial time, with the events in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of experience. When they sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort of belated steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty faces and snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those of other days that they decided all repasts since were mere Barmecide feasts, and made up for the long fraud practised upon them with the appetites of the year 1850.

II.

A rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might own that the table of the good steamboat ‘Avonek’ left something to be desired, if tested by more sophisticated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread it was of an inapproachable preeminence. This bread was made of the white corn which North knows not, nor the hapless East; and the buckwheat cakes at breakfast were without blame, and there was a simple variety in the abundance which ought to have satisfied if it did not flatter the choice. The only thing that seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in a land flowing with ham and bacon was that the ‘Avonek’ had not imagined providing either for the guests, no one of whom could have had a religious scruple against them.

The thing, indeed, which was first and last conspicuous in the passengers, was their perfectly American race and character. At the start, when with an acceptable observance of Western steamboat tradition the ‘Avonek’ left her wharf eight hours behind her appointed time, there were very few passengers; but they began to come aboard at the little towns of both shores as she swam southward and westward, till all the tables were so full that, in observance of another Western steamboat tradition; one did well to stand guard over his chair lest some other who liked it should seize it earlier. The passengers were of every age and condition, except perhaps the highest condition, and they seemed none the worse for being more like Americans of the middle of the last century than of the beginning of this. Their fashions were of an approximation to those of the present, but did not scrupulously study detail; their manners were those of simpler if not sincerer days.

The women kept to themselves at their end of the saloon, aloof from the study of any but their husbands or kindred, but the men were everywhere else about, and open to observation. They were not so open to conversation, for your mid-Westerner is not a facile, though not an unwilling, talker. They sat by their tall, cast-iron stove (of the oval pattern unvaried since the earliest stove of the region), and silently ruminated their tobacco and spat into the clustering, cuspidors at their feet. They would always answer civilly if questioned, and oftenest intelligently, but they asked nothing in return, and they seemed to have none of that curiosity once known or imagined in them by Dickens and other averse aliens. They had mostly faces of resolute power, and such a looking of knowing exactly what they wanted as would not have promised well for any collectively or individually opposing them. If ever the sense of human equality has expressed itself in the human countenance it speaks unmistakably from American faces like theirs.

They were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but for a few striking exceptions, they had been impartially treated by nature; and where they were notably plain their look of force made up for their lack of beauty. They were notably handsomest in a tall young fellow of a lean face, absolute Greek in profile, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, and slender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from much sitting down and leaning up, grew like the bark on a tree, and who moved slowly and gently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice. In his young comeliness he was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewing and a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm.

He was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid-Western human-beings about him. One heard no joking either of the dapper or cockney sort of cities, or the quaint graphic phrasing of Eastern country folk; and it may have been not far enough West for the true Western humor. At any rate, when they were not silent these men still were serious.

The women were apparently serious, too, and where they were associated with the men were, if they were not really subject, strictly abeyant, in the spectator’s eye. The average of them was certainly not above the American woman’s average in good looks, though one young mother of six children, well grown save for the baby in her arms, was of the type some masters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low arched brows. She had the placid dignity and the air of motherly goodness which goes fitly with such beauty, and the sight of her was such as to disperse many of the misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh upon the woman when she is New. As she seemed, so any man might wish to remember his mother seeming.

All these river folk, who came from the farms and villages along the stream, and never from the great towns or cities, were well mannered, if quiet manners are good; and though the men nearly all chewed tobacco and spat between meals, at the table they were of an exemplary behavior. The use of the fork appeared strange to them, and they handled it strenuously rather than agilely, yet they never used their knives shovel-wise, however they planted their forks like daggers in the steak: the steak deserved no gentler usage, indeed. They were usually young, and they were constantly changing, bent upon short journeys between the shore villages; they were mostly farm youth, apparently, though some were said to be going to find work at the great potteries up the river for wages fabulous to home-keeping experience.

One personality which greatly took the liking of one of our tourists was a Kentucky mountaineer who, after three years’ exile in a West Virginia oil town, was gladly returning to the home for which he and all his brood-of large and little comely, red-haired boys and girls-had never ceased to pine. His eagerness to get back was more than touching; it was awing; for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism that could own no excellence beyond the borders of the natal region. He had prospered at high wages in his trade at that oil town, and his wife and children had managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the family expenses from it, but he was gladly leaving opportunity behind, that he might return to a land where, if you were passing a house at meal-time, they came out and made you come in and eat. “When you eat where I’ve been living you pay fifty cents,” he explained. “And are you taking all your household stuff with you?” “Only the cook-stove. Well, I’ll tell you: we made the other things ourselves; made them out of plank, and they were not worth-moving.” Here was the backwoods surviving into the day of Trusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly far from the old ideals!

III.

The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil-wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful suns. But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltless means of millionairing? There must be iron and coal as well as wheat and corn in the world, and without their combination we cannot have bread. If the combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid its giant clutch upon all those warring industries beside the Ohio and swept them into one great monopoly, why, it has still to show that it is worse than competition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind stirrings of the universal cooperation of which the dreamers of ideal commonwealths have always had the vision.

The derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, seem to have all the land to themselves; but this was an appearance only, terrifying in its strenuousness, but not, after all, the prevalent aspect. That was rather of farm, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the rich levels of the stream, and climbing as far up its beautiful hills as the plough could drive. In the spring and in the Mall, when it is suddenly swollen by the earlier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and swims over those levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leaves the cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since the forests were first cut from the land. Other fertilizing the fields have never had any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptied into their laps. They feel themselves so rich that they part with great lengths and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good for the river, and is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whose ease learns slowly, are beginning more and more to fence their borders with the young willows which form a hedge in the shallow wash such a great part of the way up and down the Ohio. Elms and maples wade in among the willows, and in time the river will be denied the indigestion which it confesses in shoals and bars at low water, and in a difficulty of channel at all stages.

Meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise largesse to the stream, whose shores the comfortable farmsteads keep so constantly that they are never out of sight. Most commonly they are of brick, but sometimes of painted wood, and they are set on little eminences high enough to save them from the freshets, but always so near the river that they cannot fail of its passing life. Usually a group of planted evergreens half hides the house from the boat, but its inmates will not lose any detail of the show, and come down to the gate of the paling fence to watch the ‘Avonek’ float by: motionless men and women, who lean upon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who hold by their skirts and hands. There is not the eager New England neatness about these homes; now and then they have rather a sloven air, which does not discord with their air of comfort; and very, very rarely they stagger drunkenly in a ruinous neglect. Except where a log cabin has hardily survived the pioneer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; their facades front the river, and low chimneys point either gable, where a half-story forms the attic of the two stories below. Gardens of pot-herbs flank them, and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and stables stretch into the fields that stretch out to the hills, now scantily wooded, but ever lovely in the lines that change with the steamer’s course.

Except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is no such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the land is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The only distinctions that are marked are between the homes of honest industry above the banks and the homes below them of the leisure, which it is hoped is not dishonest. But, honest or dishonest, it is there apparently to stay in the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, and repeat on Occidental terms in our new land the river-life of old and far Cathay.

They formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists found absolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past every other feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladly naturalized to their memories of it. The houses had in common the form of a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter or longer, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of stovepipe softly smoking from its roof. The windows might be curtained or they might be bare, but apparently there was no other distinction among the houseboat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among the willows, or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made fast to a stake on shore. There were cases in which they had not followed the fall of the river promptly enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up to a more habitable level on its slope; in a sole, sad instance, the house had gone down with the boat and lay wallowing in the wash of the flood. But they all gave evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which the soul of the beholder envied within him, whether it manifested itself in the lord of the house-boat fishing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleanse some household utensil at its stern. Infrequently a group of the house- boat dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, and in one high event they exhibited a good-sized fish of their capture, but nothing so strenuous characterized their attitude on any other occasion. The accepted theory of them was that they did by day as nearly nothing as men could do and live, and that by night their forays on the bordering farms supplied the simple needs of people who desired neither to toil nor to spin, but only to emulate Solomon in his glory with the least possible exertion. The joyful witness of their ease would willingly have sacrificed to them any amount of the facile industrial or agricultural prosperity about them and left them slumberously afloat, unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax- gatherer. Their existence for the fleeting time seemed the true interpretation of the sage’s philosophy, the fulfilment of the poet’s aspiration.

“Why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of things.”

How did they pass their illimitable leisure, when they rested from the fishing-net by day and the chicken-coop by night? Did they read the new historical fictions aloud to one another? Did some of them even meditate the thankless muse and not mind her ingratitude? Perhaps the ladies of the house-boats, when they found themselves — as they often did — in companies of four or five, had each other in to “evenings,” at which one of them read a paper on some artistic or literary topic.

IV.

The trader’s boat, of an elder and more authentic tradition, sometimes shouldered the house-boats away from a village landing, but it, too, was a peaceful home, where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand with commerce. When the trader has supplied all the wants and wishes of a neighborhood, he unmoors his craft and drops down the river’s tide to where it meets the ocean’s tide in the farthermost Mississippi, and there either sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches his home to some returning steamboat, and climbs slowly, with many pauses, back to the upper Ohio. But his home is not so interesting as that of the houseboatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, whose floor of logs rocks flexibly under his shanty, but securely rides the current. As the pilots said, a steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which is adapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it always gives a wide berth to the lantern tilting above the raft from a swaying pole. By day the raft forms one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with its convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which have broken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or stamps. Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelving beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames of corn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets have brought down and left stranded. The tops of the little willows are tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one place a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water- maple, where it would form building material for countless generations of birds. The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere were proofs of the river’s power to devastate as well as enrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power against it, in its moments of insensate rage, and the land no protection from its encroachments except in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if planted, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of themselves and kept the torrent from the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwise crumbling helplessly into it.

The rafts were very well, and the house-boats and the traders’ boats, but the most majestic feature of the riverlife was the tow of coal-barges which, going or coming, the ‘Avonek’ met every few miles. Whether going or coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the powerful steamer which gathered them in tens and twenties before her, and rode the mid-current with them, when they were full, or kept the slower water near shore when they were empty. They claimed the river where they passed, and the ‘Avonek’ bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way, from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, with the chimneys of their steamer towering above them and her gay contours gradually making themselves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades. It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts or the swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it.

V.

So at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliest scenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared. They perused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck, and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selecting shelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offered themselves to their choice up and down the shores. The weather commonly favored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower river when the weather was divinely flattering. The soft, dull air lulled their nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and found itself again in their hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water- elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also spread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those opulent fields.

When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited or uninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot of the two who were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the lore of the river on which all their days had been passed. They knew from indelible association every ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky. They talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly debating. Were not the canals water-ways, too, like the river, and if the State unnaturally abandoned them would not it be for the behoof of those railroads which the rivermen had always fought, and which would have made a solitude of the river if they could?

But they could not, and there was nothing more surprising and delightful in this blissful voyage than the evident fact that the old river traffic had strongly survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving. Perhaps it was not; perhaps the fondness of those Ohio-river-born passengers was abused by an illusion (as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of a vivid variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream. But again, perhaps not. They were seldom out of sight of the substantial proofs of both in the through or way packets they encountered, or the nondescript steam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the contributory rivers, and climbed their shallowing courses into the recesses of their remotest hills, to the last lurking-places of their oil and coal.

VI.

The Avonek was always stopping to put off or take on merchandise or men. She would stop for a single passenger, plaited in the mud with his telescope valise or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or to gather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales that a farmer wished to ship. She lay long hours by the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchanging one cargo for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying which we call commerce, and which we drolly suppose to be governed by laws. But wherever she paused or parted, she tested the pilot’s marvellous skill; for no landing, no matter how often she landed in the same place, could be twice the same. At each return the varying stream and shore must be studied, and every caprice of either divined. It was always a triumph, a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant wonder how under the pilot’s inspired touch she glided softly to her moorings, and without a jar slipped from them again and went on her course.

But the landings by night were of course the finest. Then the wide fan of the search-light was unfurled upon the point to be attained and the heavy staging lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing the willow hedges in it’s fall, and scarcely touching the land before a black, ragged deck-hand had run out through the splendor and made a line fast to the trunk of the nearest tree. Then the work of lading or unlading rapidly began in the witching play of the light that set into radiant relief the black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of the deck-hands struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mocked or cursed at in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled back to the deck down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his broken sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among the heaps of freight.

No dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; and ah! and ah! why should their sable shadows intrude in a picture that was meant to be all so gay and glad? But ah! and ah! where, in what business of this hard world, is not prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, who still endeavor their poor best, and writhe and writhe under the burden of their brothers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of their mother earth?

STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER

Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against the southeasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in the northwest. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened the open sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef of Whaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorages within.

Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been dropping in with a casual air; the coal schooners and barges had rocked and nodded knowingly to one another, with their taper and truncated masts, on the breast of the invisible swell; and the flock of little yachts and pleasure-boats which always fleck the bay huddled together in the safe waters. The craft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seiners from Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape and one size; they came with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on their flying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seines piled in black heaps between the thwarts. As soon as they came inside their jibs weakened and fell, and the anchor-chains rattled from their bows. Before the dark hid them we could have counted sixty or seventy ships in the harbor, and as the night fell they improvised a little Venice under the hill with their lights, which twinkled rhythmically, like the lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between the Maine and New Hampshire coasts.

There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm had begun; but that ended it, as so many times this summer a dash of rain has ended a storm. The morning came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at anchor through the day; but the next night the weather cleared. We woke to the clucking of tackle, and saw the whole fleet standing dreamily out to sea. When they were fairly gone, the summer, which had held aloof in dismay of the sudden cold, seemed to return and possess the land again; and the succession of silver days and crystal nights resumed the tranquil round which we thought had ceased.

I.

One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, “There never was such a summer”; but if the summer is one of those which slip from the feeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be reckoned with the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad conviction of the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience of never seeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know. Each new summer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the last: its Junes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, in compliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so small a compass that fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the old size like shrivelled peas in a pod.

To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas put to soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we first spent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hours long. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where there is nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and muse beside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery Point that they hardly know themselves apart. The days, whatever their length, are divided, not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without regard to the sun, at eight o’clock, when the first mail comes with a few letters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before. At half-past eleven the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o’clock there is another indifferent and scattering post, much like that at eight in the morning; and at seven the last mail arrives with the Boston evening papers and the New York morning papers, to make you forget any letters you were looking for. The opening of the mid-day mail is that which most throngs with summer folks the little postoffice under the elms, opposite the weather-beaten mansion of Sir William Pepperrell; but the evening mail attracts a large and mainly disinterested circle of natives. The day’s work on land and sea is then over, and the village leisure, perched upon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I am not willing to slight on our own ground.

II.

The type is mostly of a seafaring brown, a complexion which seems to be inherited rather than personally acquired; for the commerce of Kittery Point perished long ago, and the fishing fleets that used to fit out from her wharves have almost as long ago passed to Gloucester. All that is left of the fishing interest is the weir outside which supplies, fitfully and uncertainly, the fish shipped fresh to the nearest markets. But in spite of this the tint taken from the suns and winds of the sea lingers on the local complexion; and the local manner is that freer and easier manner of people who have known other coasts, and are in some sort citizens of the world. It is very different from the inland New England manner; as different as the gentle, slow speech of the shore from the clipped nasals of the hill-country. The lounging native walk is not the heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of the deck in it.

Nothing could be better suited to progress through the long village, which rises and sinks beside the shore like a landscape with its sea-legs on; and nothing could be more charming and friendly than this village. It is quite untainted as yet by the summer cottages which have covered so much of the coast, and made it look as if the aesthetic suburbs of New York and Boston had gone ashore upon it. There are two or three old-fashioned summer hotels; but the summer life distinctly fails to characterize the place. The people live where their forefathers have lived for two hundred and fifty years; and for the century since the baronial domain of Sir William was broken up and his possessions confiscated by the young Republic, they have dwelt in small red or white houses on their small holdings along the slopes and levels of the low hills beside the water, where a man may pass with the least inconvenience and delay from his threshold to his gunwale. Not all the houses are small; some are spacious and ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns; but most are simple and homelike. Their gardens, following the example of Sir William’s vanished pleasaunce, drop southward to the shore, where the lobster-traps and the hen-coops meet in unembarrassed promiscuity. But the fish-flakes which once gave these inclines the effect of terraced vineyards have passed as utterly as the proud parterres of the old baronet; and Kittery Point no longer “makes” a cod or a haddock for the market.

Three groceries, a butcher shop, and a small variety store study the few native wants; and with a little money one may live in as great real comfort here as for much in a larger place. The street takes care of itself; the seafaring housekeeping of New England is not of the insatiable Dutch type which will not spare the stones of the highway; but within the houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness. The other day I found myself in a kitchen where the stove shone like oxidized silver; the pump and sink were clad in oilcloth as with blue tiles; the walls were papered; the stainless floor was strewn with home-made hooked and braided rugs; and I felt the place so altogether too good for me that I pleaded to stay there for the transaction of my business, lest a sharper sense of my unfitness should await me in the parlor.

The village, with scarcely an interval of farm-lands, stretches four miles along the water-side to Portsmouth; but it seems to me that just at the point where our lines have fallen there is the greatest concentration of its character. This has apparently not been weakened, it has been accented, by the trolley-line which passes through its whole length, with gayly freighted cars coming and going every half-hour. I suppose they are not longer than other trolley-cars, but they each affect me like a procession. They are cheerful presences by day, and by night they light up the dim, winding street with the flare of their electric bulbs, and bring to the country a vision of city splendor upon terms that do not humiliate or disquiet. During July and August they are mostly filled with summer folks from a great summer resort beyond us, and their lights reveal the pretty fashions of hats and gowns in all the charm of the latest lines and tints. But there is an increasing democracy in these splendors, and one might easily mistake a passing excursionist from some neighboring inland town, or even a local native with the instinct of clothes, for a social leader from York Harbor.

With the falling leaf, the barge-like open cars close up into well-warmed saloons, and falter to hourly intervals in their course. But we are still far from the falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing or fading leaf. Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn; the ancient Pepperrell elms fling down showers of the baronet’s fairy gold in the September gusts; the sumacs and the blackberry vines are ablaze along the tumbling black stone walls; but it is still summer, it is still summer: I cannot allow otherwise!

III.

The other day I visited for the first time (in the opulent indifference of one who could see it any time) the stately tomb of the first Pepperrell, who came from Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finally at Kittery Point. He laid there the foundations of the greatest fortune in colonial New England, which revolutionary New England seized and dispersed, as I cannot but feel, a little ruthlessly. In my personal quality I am of course averse to all great fortunes; and in my civic capacity I am a patriot. But still I feel a sort of grace in wealth a century old, and if I could now have my way, I would not have had their possessions reft from those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly help being loyal to the fountain of their baronial honors. Sir William, indeed; had helped, more than any other man, to bring the people who despoiled him to a national consciousness. If he did not imagine, he mainly managed the plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg at Cape Breton a half century before the War of Independence; and his splendid success in rending that stronghold from the French taught the colonists that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer than they liked. His soldiers were of the stamp of all succeeding American armies, and his leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sort natural to an amiable man who knew most of them personally. He was already the richest man in America, and his grateful king made him a baronet; but he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his old life in a region where he had the comfortable consideration of an unrivalled magnate. He built himself the dignified mansion which still stands across the way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within an easy stone’s cast of the far older house, where his father wedded Margery Bray, when he came, a thrifty young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles of Shoals, and established his family on Kittery. The Bray house had been the finest in the region a hundred years before the Pepperrell mansion was built; it still remembers its consequence in the panelling and wainscoting of the large, square parlor where the young people were married and in the elaborate staircase cramped into the little, square hall; and the Bray fortune helped materially to swell the wealth of the Pepperrells.

I do not know that I should care now to have a man able to ride thirty miles on his own land; but I do not mind Sir William’s having done it here a hundred and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had left his family, say, about a mile of it. They could now, indeed, enjoy it only in the collateral branches, for all Sir William’s line is extinct. The splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, and the fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his death belongs to the remotest of kinsmen. A group of these, the descendants of a prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point as the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove of drooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of Sir William’s father, cherishes the family memories with due American “proceedings.”

IV.

The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by no means the chief excitement of our summer. In fact, I do not know that it was an excitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence of our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and kraken shapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain in the fight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under my window.

I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they were here I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whited locomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recent accident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. The poetry of the man-of-war still clings to the “three-decker out of the foam” of the past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo about the modern battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the Texas and the Brooklyn and the rest, and thought, “Ah, but for you, and our need of proving your dire efficiency, perhaps we could have got on with the wickedness of Spanish rule in Cuba, and there had been no war!” Under my reluctant eyes the great, dreadful spectacle of the Santiago fight displayed itself in peaceful Kittery Harbor. I saw the Spanish ships drive upon the reef where a man from Dover, New Hampshire, was camping in a little wooden shanty unconscious; and I heard the dying screams of the Spanish sailors, seethed and scalded within the steel walls of their own wicked war-kettles.

As for the guns, battle or no battle, our ships, like “kind Lieutenant Belay of the ‘Hot Cross-Bun’,” seemed to be “banging away the whole day long.” They set a bad example to the dreamy old fort on the Newcastle shore, which, till they came, only recollected itself to salute the sunrise and sunset with a single gun; but which, under provocation of the squadron, formed a habit of firing twenty or thirty times at noon.

Other martial shows and noises were not so bad. I rather liked seeing the morning drill of the marines and the bluejackets on the iron decks, with the lively music that went with it. The bugle calls and the bells were charming; the week’s wash hung out to dry had its picturesqueness by day, and by night the spectral play of the search-lights along the waves and shores, and against the startled skies, was even more impressive. There was a band which gave us every evening the airs of the latest coon-songs, and the national anthems which we have borrowed from various nations; and yes, I remember the white squadron kindly, though I was so glad to have it go, and let us lapse back into our summer silence and calm. It was (I do not mind saying now) a majestic sight to see those grotesque monsters gather themselves together, and go wallowing, one after another, out of the harbor, and drop behind the ledge of Whaleback Light, as if they had sunk into the sea.

V.

A deep peace fell upon us when they went, and it must have been at this most receptive moment, when all our sympathies were adjusted in a mood of hospitable expectation, that Jim appeared.

Jim was, and still is, and I hope will long be, a cat; but unless one has lived at Kittery Point, and realized, from observation and experience, what a leading part cats may play in society, one cannot feel the full import of this fact. Not only has every house in Kittery its cat, but every house seems to have its half-dozen cats, large, little, old, and young; of divers colors, tending mostly to a dark tortoise-shell. With a whole ocean inviting to the tragic rite, I do not believe there is ever a kitten drowned in Kittery; the illimitable sea rather employs itself in supplying the fish to which “no cat’s averse,” but which the cats of Kittery demand to have cooked. They do not like raw fish; they say it plainly, and they prefer to have the bones taken out for them, though they do not insist upon that point.

At least, Jim never did so from the time when he first scented the odor of delicate young mackerel in the evening air about our kitchen, and dropped in upon the maids there with a fine casual effect of being merely out for a walk, and feeling it a neighborly thing to call. He had on a silver collar, engraved with his name and surname, which offered itself for introduction like a visiting-card. He was too polite to ask himself to the table at once, but after he had been welcomed to the family circle, he formed the habit of finding himself with us at breakfast and supper, when he sauntered in like one who should say, “Did I smell fish?” but would not go further in the way of hinting.

He had no need to do so. He was made at home, and freely invited to our best not only in fish, but in chicken, for which he showed a nice taste, and in sweetcorn, for which he revealed a most surprising fondness when it was cut from the cob for him. After he had breakfasted or supped he gracefully suggested that he was thirsty by climbing to the table where the water-pitcher stood and stretching his fine feline head towards it. When he had lapped up his saucer of water; he marched into the parlor, and riveted the chains upon our fondness by taking the best chair and going to sleep in it in attitudes of Egyptian, of Assyrian majesty. His arts were few or none; he rather disdained to practise any; he completed our conquest by maintaining himself simply a fascinating presence; and perhaps we spoiled Jim. It is certain that he came under my window at two o’clock one night, and tried the kitchen door. It resisted his efforts to get in, and then Jim began to use language which I had never heard from the lips of a cat before, and seldom from the lips of a man. I will not repeat it; enough that it carried to the listener the conviction that Jim was not sober. Where he could have got his liquor in the totally abstinent State of Maine I could not positively say, but probably of some sailor who had brought it from the neighboring New Hampshire coast. There could be no doubt, however, that Jim was drunk; and a dash from the water-pitcher seemed the only thing for him. The water did not touch him, but he started back in surprise and grief, and vanished into the night without a word.

His feelings must have been deeply wounded, for it was almost a week before he came near us again; and then I think that nothing but young lobster would have brought him. He forgave us finally, and made us of his party in the quarrel he began gradually to have with the large yellow cat of a next-door neighbor. This culminated one afternoon, after a long exchange of mediaeval defiance and insult, in a battle upon a bed of ragweed, with wild shrieks of rage, and prodigious feats of ground and lofty tumbling. It seemed to our anxious eyes that Jim was getting the worst of it; but when we afterwards visited the battle-field and picked up several tufts of blond fur, we were in a doubt which was afterwards heightened by Jim’s invasion of the yellow cat’s territory, where he stretched himself defiantly upon the grass and seemed to be challenging the yellow cat to come out and try to put him off the premises.

THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY

My friend came in the other day, before we had left town, and looked round at the appointments of the room in their summer shrouds, and said, with a faint sigh, “I see you have had the eternal-womanly with you, too.”

I.

“Isn’t the eternal-womanly everywhere? What has happened to you?” I asked.

“I wish you would come to my house and see. Every rug has been up for a month, and we have been living on bare floors. Everything that could be tied up has been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has been sewed up. Everything that could be moth-balled and put away in chests has been moth-balled and put away. Everything that could be taken down has been taken down. Bags with draw-strings at their necks have been pulled over the chandeliers and tied. The pictures have been hidden in cheese-cloth, and the mirrors veiled in gauze so that I cannot see my own miserable face anywhere.”

“Come! That’s something.”

“Yes, it’s something. But I have been thinking this matter over very seriously, and I believe it is going from bad to worse. I have heard praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but the housekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand times more intense.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked. “And if you do, what of it?”

“Simply this, that if we don’t put a stop to it, at the gait it’s going, it will put a stop to the eternal-womanly.”

“I suppose we should hate that.”

“Yes, it would be bad. It would be very bad; and I have been turning the matter over in my mind, and studying out a remedy.”

“The highest type of philosopher turns a thing over in his mind and lets some one else study out a remedy.”

“Yes, I know. I feel that I may be wrong in my processes, but I am sure that I am right in my results. The reason why our grandmothers could be such good housekeepers without danger of putting a stop to the eternal- womanly was that they had so few things to look after in their houses. Life was indefinitely simpler with them. But the modern improvements, as we call them, have multiplied the cares of housekeeping without subtracting its burdens, as they were expected to do. Every novel convenience and comfort, every article of beauty and luxury, every means of refinement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so much added to the burdens of housekeeping, and the granddaughters have inherited from the grandmothers an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, which will not suffer them to forget the least duty they owe to the naughtiest of their superfluities.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” I said. This is what one usually says when one does not quite know what another is driving at; but in this case I really did know, or thought I did. “That survival of the conscience is a very curious thing, especially in our eternal-womanly. I suppose that the North American conscience was evolved from the rudimental European conscience during the first centuries of struggle here, and was more or less religious and economical in its origin. But with the advance of wealth and the decay of faith among us, the conscience seems to be simply conscientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social. The eternal-womanly continues along the old lines of housekeeping from an atavistic impulse, and no one woman can stop because all the other women are going on. It is something in the air, or something in the blood. Perhaps it is something in both.”

“Yes,” said my friend, quite as I had said already, “I see what you mean. But I think it is in the air more than in the blood. I was in Paris, about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag with drawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests. At any rate, I was there. One day I left my wife in New York carefully tagging three worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, and tagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at the house of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her house when she went into the country for the summer. ‘Leave them just as they are,’ she said. ‘But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust and the tarnish?’ She said, ‘Why, the things would have to be all gone over when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself double trouble?’ I asked her if she didn’t even roll anything up and put it away in closets, and she said: ‘Oh, you mean that old American horror of getting ready to go away. I used to go through all that at home, too, but I shouldn’t dream of it here. In the first place, there are no closets in the house, and I couldn’t put anything away if I wanted to. And really nothing happens. I scatter some Persian powder along the edges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and I pull down the shades. When I come back in the fall I have the powder swept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again. Suppose a little dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and there? The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of putting everything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of discomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit. No, thank goodness — I left American housekeeping in America.’ I asked her: ‘But if you went back?’ and she gave a sigh, and said:

“‘I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest. Everybody does it there.’ So you see,” my friend concluded, “it’s in the air, rather than the blood.”

“Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and live in Paris?”

“Oh, dear, not” said my friend. “Nothing so drastic as all that. Merely the extinction of household property.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “But — what do you mean?”

“Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all be furnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them, and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel. There must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his own linen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by the expropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean. It must be in the lease, with severe penalties against the tenant in case of violation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect order when the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order when the tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to clean it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests. All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlord that it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts to close the house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usual way that houses are now closed and opened. Otherwise my scheme would be measurably vitiated.”

“I see what you mean,” I murmured. “Well?”

“Some years ago,” my friend went on, “when we came home from Europe, we left our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather drifted about, and did not settle anywhere in particular. During that interval my wife opened and closed five furnished houses in two years.”

“And she has lived to tell the tale?”

“She has lived to tell it a great many times. She can hardly be kept from telling it yet. But it is my belief that, although she brought to the work all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influence of the American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less in her encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, and opens it for the winter. But if there had been a clause in the lease, as there should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order when she left them, life would have been simply a rapture. Why, in Europe custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and you come and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind taking them for a month, or a few weeks. We are very far behind in this matter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extended scale we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, more perfectly than any other people in the world. You see what I mean?”

“I am not sure that I do. But go on.”

“I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would tax personal property of the household kind so heavily that it would necessarily pass out of private hands; I would make its tenure so costly that it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also the very wicked, and ought to suffer.”

“Oh, come, now!”

“I refer you to your Testament. In the end, all household property would pass into the hands of the state.”

“Aren’t you getting worse and worse?”

“Oh, I’m not supposing there won’t be a long interval when household property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like you and me, along with the houses we hire of them. I have no doubt that there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend its relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole world into its grasp. It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probably groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personal ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of the mothball. We shall suffer, but—”

“I see what you mean,” I hastened to interrupt at this point, “but these suggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond — Do you think you could defer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?”

“Well, for not more than a week,” said my friend, with an air of discomfort in his arrest.

II.

— “We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system,” said my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week. By this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the veranda of a sea-side hotel. “As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her salvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her household effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she began housekeeping.”

“That may all very well be,” I assented, though I did not believe it, and I found something almost too fantastical in my friend’s scheme. “But when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to become of our tender and sacred associations with them?”

“What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of ancestors? Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living, so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be used by their spirits as well as their bodies. A man could not sell the bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and by, when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service of the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that the tombs of one’s forefathers could be sold without violence to their spectres. I dare say it wouldn’t be different in the case of our tender and sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a little further. In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point that troubles you. Most people in modern towns and cities have changed their domiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not paid the slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations connected with them. I don’t suppose you would say that a man has no such associations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has them with the stuff that has furnished it?”

“No, I shouldn’t say that.”

“If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet at each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards, portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils, and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to part with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulated stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. Why, I am doing that very thing now! Aren’t you?”

“I am — in a certain degree,” I assented.

“We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves. Once my wife and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and slavery of the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and sent three or four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer. Some of the pieces we had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of rejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! We hadn’t had such light hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our lives forever. Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one had been a pang. All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again.”

“I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage. But the things that we have in daily use?”

“It is exactly the same with them. Why should they be more to us than the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no particular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the anxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if she could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet not form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we have tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with a thing we have hired?”

“I confess, I don’t know. And do you really think we could liberate ourselves from our belongings if they didn’t belong to us? Wouldn’t the eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them out for winter?”

“At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the Standard Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical, whatever we say about the dressmaker’s bills; and the very futilities of putting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with, are founded in the instinct of saving.”

“But,” I asked, “wouldn’t our household belongings lose a good deal of character if they didn’t belong to us? Wouldn’t our domestic interiors become dreadfully impersonal?”

“How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let the different dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard Household-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that either would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In most interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where they are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean by character and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that let itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has since gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the eternal-womanly was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp herself upon our interiors. One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf; another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the scarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a chair; another knotted it around the leg. In a day, an hour, a moment, the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius. The walls became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a hysterical chaos, full of character. Some people had their doors painted black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with morning-glories. I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day, thinking I might hire it. The sight of that black door and its morning- glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt Whitman says. No, the less we try to get personality and character into our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be. As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it. The company’s agents will begin by convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in the region of pure aesthetics. I once asked an Italian painter if he did not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said ‘SI. Ma troppa roba.’ There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas, pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers. ‘Troppa roba’ is the vice of all our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly if it is not stopped. But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South, and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with. What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?”

“That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains are concerned,” I said, “but surely you wouldn’t apply it to pictures and objects of art?”

“I would apply it to them first of all and above all,” rejoined my friend, hardily. “Among all the people who buy and own such things there is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and degrade them further. The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real sense of art, and a knowledge of it. When the house-letting and house- furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for the purpose.”

“And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the other pictures?” I sneered.

“Ancestral portraits, of course,” said my friend, with unruffled temper. “So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the company or the state. The agents of the one, or the officers of the other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits now have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme,” my friend concluded, “and no difficulty that can’t be easily overcome. We must alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and exclusively the property of some impersonal agency — company or community, I don’t care which — that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism punishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and nothing short of it, will be the salvation of the eternal-womanly.”

“And the perdition of something even more precious than that!”

“What can be more precious?”

“Individuality.”

“My dear friend,” demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was gradually edging to the door, “do you mean to say there is any individuality in such things now? What have we been saying about character?”

“Ah, I see what you mean,” I said.

SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR

CERTAIN summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanish prisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They were partly soldiers of the land forces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by far the greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera’s ill-fated fleet. I have not much stomach for war, but the poetry of the fact I have stated made a very potent appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not hold out against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away with Cervera to Annapolis, when only her less dignified captives remained with those of the Harvard to feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of the spectator. Then I went over from our summer colony to Kittery Point, and got a boat, and sailed out to have a look at these subordinate enemies in the first hours of their imprisonment.

I.

It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of the American summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered in the sun with a really incomparable brilliancy. But nothing could light up the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which our White Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullen in the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities of the coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing her decks, seemed quite unrelated. A long gun forward and a long gun aft threatened the fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered about her, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed as if asleep. She had, in fact, finished her mission. The captives whom death had released had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who survived to a further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty island a mile farther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and forth through the Narrows like a torrent. Its defiant rapidity has won it there the graphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only hope to reach the island by a series of skilful tacks, which should humor both the wind and the tide, both dead against us. Our boatman, one of those shore New Englanders who are born with a knowledge of sailing, was easily master of the art of this, but it took time, and gave me more than the leisure I wanted for trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the captives who had just looked upon it. It was beautiful, I had to own, even in my quality of exile and prisoner. The meadows and the orchards came down to the water, or, where the wandering line of the land was broken and lifted in black fronts of rock, they crept to the edge of the cliff and peered over it. A summer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level; everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farm-houses and summer cottages — like weather-beaten birds’ nests, and like freshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness which made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village, shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water, and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic alertness. The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern sky, from which my blinding southern sun was blazing, was as hard as sapphire. I tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Catalonian or Asturian fisherman, and to wonder with his darkened mind why it should all or any of it have been, and why I should have escaped from the iron hell in which I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into the hands of strangers, and to be haled over seas to these alien shores for a captivity of unknown term. But I need not have been at so much pains; the intelligence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author would have sufficed; for if there is anything more grotesque than another in war it is its monstrous inconsequence. If we had a grief with the Spanish government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, we might have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with the improved means of assassination which modern science has put at our command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen-mother and the little king. This would have been consequent, logical, and in a sort reasonable; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched Spanish peasants and fishermen, hapless conscripts to whom personally and nationally we were as so many men in the moon, was that melancholy and humiliating necessity of war which makes it homicide in which there is not even the saving grace of hate, or the excuse of hot blood.

I was able to console myself perhaps a little better for the captivity of the Spaniards than if I had really been one of them, as we drew nearer and nearer their prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and little ravines, overrun with sweet-fern, blueberry-bushes, bay, and low blackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed with a high stockade of yellow pine boards. Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by side across the general slope, with the captive officers’ quarters, sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them. About their doors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and on the grass, where some of them lounged smoking. One operatic figure in a long blanket stalked athwart an open space; but there was such poverty of drama in the spectacle at the distance we were keeping that we were glad of so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor driving out of the stockade in his buggy. On the heights overlooking the enclosure Gatling guns were posted at three or four points, and every thirty or forty feet sentries met and parted, so indifferent to us, apparently, that we wondered if we might get nearer. We ventured, but at a certain moment a sentry called to us, “Fifty yards off, please!” Our young skipper answered, “All right,” and as the sentry had a gun on his shoulder which we had every reason to believe was loaded, it was easily our pleasure to retreat to the specified limit. In fact, we came away altogether, after that, so little promise was there of our being able to satisfy our curiosity further. We came away carefully nursing such impression as we had got of a spectacle whose historical quality we did our poor best to feel. It related us, after solicitation, to the wars against the Moors, against the Mexicans and Peruvians, against the Dutch; to the Italian campaigns of the Gran Capitan, to the Siege of Florence, to the Sack of Rome, to the wars of the Spanish Succession, and what others. I do not deny that there was a certain aesthetic joy in having the Spanish prisoners there for this effect; we came away duly grateful for what we had seen of them; and we had long duly resigned ourselves to seeing no more, when word was sent to us that our young skipper had got a permit to visit the island, and wished us to go with him.

II.

It was just such another afternoon when we went again, but this time we took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far as the navy-yard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among the vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships. The grass grew in the Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than they would have been if resonant with saw and hammer. At several points, an unarmed marine left his leisure somewhere, and lunged across our path with a mute appeal for our permit; but we were nowhere delayed till we came to the office where it had to be countersigned, and after that we had presently crossed a bridge, by shady, rustic ways, and were on the prison island. Here, if possible, the sense of something pastoral deepened; a man driving a file of cows passed before us under kindly trees, and the bell which the foremost of these milky mothers wore about her silken throat sent forth its clear, tender note as if from the depth of some grassy bosk, and instantly witched me away to the woods-pastures which my boyhood knew in southern Ohio. Even when we got to what seemed fortifications they turned out to be the walls of an old reservoir, and bore on their gate a paternal warning that children unaccompanied by adults were not allowed within.

We mounted some stone steps over this portal and were met by a young marine, who left his Gatling gun for a moment to ask for our permit, and then went back satisfied. Then we found ourselves in the presence of a sentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather more exacting. Still, he only wished to be convinced, and when he had pointed out the headquarters where we were next to go, he let us over his beat. At the headquarters there was another sentry, equally serious, but equally civil, and with the intervention of an orderly our leader saw the officer of the day. He came out of the quarters looking rather blank, for he had learned that his pass admitted our party to the lines, but not to the stockade, which we might approach, at a certain point of vantage and look over into, but not penetrate. We resigned ourselves, as we must, and made what we could of the nearest prison barrack, whose door overflowed and whose windows swarmed with swarthy captives. Here they were, at such close quarters that their black, eager eyes easily pierced the pockets full of cigarettes which we had brought for them. They looked mostly very young, and there was one smiling rogue at the first window who was obviously prepared to catch anything thrown to him. He caught, in fact, the first box of cigarettes shied over the stockade; the next box flew open, and spilled its precious contents outside the dead-line under the window, where I hope some compassionate guard gathered them up and gave them to the captives.

Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their wards short of letting them go. They were a most friendly company, with an effect of picnicking there among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they had pitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance to the shrubbery as possible. They were very polite to us, and when, after that misadventure with the cigarettes (I had put our young leader up to throwing the box, merely supplying the corpus delicti myself), I wandered vaguely towards a Gatling gun planted on an earthen platform where the laurel and the dogroses had been cut away for it, the man in charge explained with a smile of apology that I must not pass a certain path I had already crossed.

One always accepts the apologies of a man with a Gatling gun to back them, and I retreated. That seemed the end; and we were going crestfallenly away when the officer of the day came out and allowed us to make his acquaintance. He permitted us, with laughing reluctance, to learn that he had been in the fight at Santiago, and had come with the prisoners, and he was most obligingly sorry that our permit did not let us into the stockade. I said I had some cigarettes for the prisoners, and I supposed I might send them in, but he said he could not allow this, for they had money to buy tobacco; and he answered another of our party, who had not a soul above buttons, and who asked if she could get one from the Spaniards, that so far from promoting her wish, he would have been obliged to take away any buttons she might have got from them.

“The fact is,” he explained, “you’ve come to the wrong end for transactions in buttons and tobacco.”

But perhaps innocence so great as ours had wrought upon him. When we said we were going, and thanked him for his unavailing good-will, he looked at his watch and said they were just going to feed the prisoners; and after some parley he suddenly called out, “Music of the guard!” Instead of a regimental band, which I had supposed summoned, a single corporal ran out the barracks, touching his cap.

“Take this party round to the gate,” the officer said, and he promised us that he would see us there, and hoped we would not mind a rough walk. We could have answered that to see his prisoners fed we would wade through fathoms of red-tape; but in fact we were arrested at the last point by nothing worse than the barbed wire which fortified the outer gate. Here two marines were willing to tell us how well the prisoners lived, while we stared into the stockade through an inner gate of plank which was run back for us. They said the Spaniards had a breakfast of coffee, and hash or stew and potatoes, and a dinner of soup and roast; and now at five o’clock they were to have bread and coffee, which indeed we saw the white-capped, white-jacketed cooks bringing out in huge tin wash-boilers. Our marines were of opinion, and no doubt rightly, that these poor Spaniards had never known in their lives before what it was to have full stomachs. But the marines said they never acknowledged it, and the one who had a German accent intimated that gratitude was not a virtue of any Roman (I suppose he meant Latin) people. But I do not know that if I were a prisoner, for no fault of my own, I should be very explicitly thankful for being unusually well fed. I thought (or I think now) that a fig or a bunch of grapes would have been more acceptable to me under my own vine and fig-tree than the stew and roast of captors who were indeed showing themselves less my enemies than my own government, but were still not quite my hosts.

III.

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us? The clock strikes twelve as it strikes two, and with no more premonition. As we stood there expecting nothing better of it than three at the most, it suddenly struck twelve. Our officer appeared at the inner gate and bade our marines slide away the gate of barbed wire and let us into the enclosure, where he welcomed us to seats on the grass against the stockade, with many polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside it were not chairs.

The prisoners were already filing out of their quarters, at a rapid trot towards the benches where those great wash-boilers of coffee were set. Each man had a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in his turn received quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a big ladleful of steaming coffee, which he made off with to his place at one of the long tables under a shed at the side of the stockade. One young fellow tried to get a place not his own in the shade, and our officer when he came back explained that he was a guerrillero, and rather unruly. We heard that eight of the prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own officers, for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were docile and obedient enough, and seemed only too glad to get peacefully at their bread and coffee.

First among them came the men of the Cristobal Colon, and these were the best looking of all the captives. From their pretty fair average the others varied to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to be ex-convicts, brought up the rear. They were nearly all little fellows, and very dark, though here and there a six-footer towered up, or a blond showed among them. They were joking and laughing together, harmlessly enough, but I must own that they looked a crew of rather sorry jail-birds; though whether any run of humanity clad in misfits of our navy blue and white, and other chance garments, with close-shaven heads, and sometimes bare feet, would have looked much less like jail-birds I am not sure. Still, they were not prepossessing, and though some of them were pathetically young, they had none of the charm of boyhood. No doubt they did not do themselves justice, and to be herded there like cattle did not improve their chances of making a favorable impression on the observer. They were kindly used by our officer and his subordinates, who mixed among them, and straightened out the confusion they got into at times, and perhaps sometimes wilfully. Their guards employed a few handy words of Spanish with them; where these did not avail, they took them by the arm and directed them; but I did not hear a harsh tone, and I saw no violence, or even so much indignity offered them as the ordinary trolley-car passenger is subjected to in Broadway. At a certain bugle-call they dispersed, when they had finished their bread and coffee, and scattered about over the grass, or returned to their barracks. We were told that these children of the sun dreaded its heat, and kept out of it whenever they could, even in its decline; but they seemed not so much to withdraw and hide themselves from that, as to vanish into the history of “old, unhappy, far-off” times, where prisoners of war, properly belong. I roused myself with a start as if I had lost them in the past.

Our officer came towards us and said gayly, “Well, you have seen the animals fed,” and let us take our grateful leave. I think we were rather a loss, in our going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance to talk. I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard at the inner gate, who walked his beat with reluctance when it took him from us, and eagerly when it brought him back. Then he delayed for a rapid and comprehensive exchange of opinions and ideas, successfully blending military subordination with American equality in his manner.

The whole thing was very American in the perfect decorum and the utter absence of ceremony. Those good fellows were in the clothes they wore through the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put on much splendor if they had wished, but apparently they did not wish. They were simple, straightforward, and adequate. There was some dry joking about the superiority of the prisoners’ rations and lodgings, and our officer ironically professed his intention of messing with the Spanish officers. But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or of that stupid and atrocious hate towards the public enemy which abominable newspapers and politicians had tried to breed in the popular mind. There was nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live up to that military ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil ideal of self-interest. Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are united for the operation of the industries as they now are for the hostilities.

IV.

Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike, imparted itself from what I had seen? Or was this more properly an effect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundred and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers? I cannot say that a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a more positive humanity which was at work. Most of the sufferers were stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, which received them, four days after the orders for their reception had come, with every equipment for their comfort. At five o’clock, when we passed down the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay, nonchalant effect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but it was really the thermometers with which the nurses were taking their temperature. It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked if they were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke, anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of cigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon. I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the sick captives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to the least. They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one said, smiling sadly, “Muchas gracias,” but the others merely smiled sadly; and I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in the faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity. Italians would have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of another tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though we sometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation. Perhaps there are even personal distinctions among their several nationalities, and there are some Spaniards who are as true and kind as some Americans. When we remember Cortez let us not forget Las Casas.

They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark faces their sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as they turned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not “support the government” so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere. But the truth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men, who, in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much like somebody’s brothers, and even somebody’s children. I may have been infected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, which prevailed in the place. There it was as wholly business to be kind and to cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be cruel and to kill. How droll these things are! The surgeons had their favorites among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted; inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of their hapless foes, whom they spoke of as “a sort of pets.” One of these was very useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was liked apparently because he was so likable. At a certain cot the chief surgeon stopped and said, “We did not expect this boy to live through the night.” He took the boy’s wrist between his thumb and finger, and asked tenderly as he leaned over him, “Poco mejor?” The boy could not speak to say that he was a little better; he tried to smile — such things do move the witness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek has been half chopped away by a machete tend to restore one’s composure.

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE AND OTHER THINGS IN PROSE AND VERSE

CONTENTS

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE

A PRESENTIMENT

CAPTAIN DUNLEVY’S LAST TRIP

THE RETURN TO FAVOR

SOMEBODY’S MOTHER

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

AN EXPERIENCE

THE BOARDERS

BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL

THE MOTHER-BIRD

THE AMIGO

BLACK CROSS FARM

THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE

A FEAST OF REASON

CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL

TABLE TALK

THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER

SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE

I

They were getting some of their things out to send into the country, and Forsyth had left his work to help his wife look them over and decide which to take and which to leave. The things were mostly trunks that they had stored the fall before; there were some tables and Colonial bureaus inherited from his mother, and some mirrors and decorative odds and ends, which they would not want in the furnished house they had taken for the summer. There were some canvases which Forsyth said he would paint out and use for other subjects, but which, when he came to look at again, he found really not so bad. The rest, literally, was nothing but trunks; there were, of course, two or three boxes of books. When they had been packed closely into the five-dollar room,  with the tables and bureaus and mirrors and canvases and decorative odds and ends put carefully on top, the Forsyths thought the effect very neat, and laughed at themselves for being proud of it.

They spent the winter in Paris planning for the summer in America, and now it had come May, a month which in New York is at its best, and in the Constitutional Storage Safe-Deposit Warehouse is by no means at its worst. The Constitutional Storage is no longer new, but when the Forsyths were among the first to store there it was up to the latest moment in the modern perfections of a safe-deposit warehouse. It was strictly fire-proof; and its long, white, brick-walled, iron-doored corridors, with their clean concrete floors, branching from a central avenue to the tall windows north and south, offered perspectives sculpturesquely bare, or picturesquely heaped with arriving or departing household stuff.

When the Forsyths went to look at it a nice young fellow from the office had gone with them; running ahead and switching on rows of electrics down the corridors, and then, with a wire-basketed electric lamp, which he twirled about and held aloft and alow, showing the dustless, sweet-smelling spaciousness of a perfect five-dollar room. He said it would more than hold their things; and it really held them.

Now, when the same young fellow unlocked the iron door and set it wide, he said he would get them a man, and he got Mrs. Forsyth a gilt armchair from some furniture going into an adjoining twenty-dollar room. She sat down in it, and “Of course,” she said, “the pieces I want will be at the very back and the very bottom. Why don’t you get yourself a chair, too, Ambrose? What are you looking at?”

With his eyes on the neighboring furniture he answered, “Seems to be the wreck of a millionaire’s happy home; parlor and kitchen utensils and office furniture all in white and gold.”

“Horrors, yes!” Mrs. Forsyth said, without turning her head from studying her trunks, as if she might divine their contents from their outside.

“Tata and I,” her husband said, “are more interested in the millionaire’s things.” Tata, it appeared, was not a dog, but a child; the name was not the diminutive of her own name, which was Charlotte, but a generic name for a doll, which Tata had learned from her Italian nurse to apply to all little girls and had got applied to herself by her father. She was now at a distance down the corridor, playing a drama with the pieces of millionaire furniture; as they stretched away in variety and splendor they naturally suggested  personages of princely quality, and being touched with her little forefinger tip were capable of entering warmly into Tata’s plans for them.

Her mother looked over her shoulder toward the child. “Come here, Tata,” she called, and when Tata, having enjoined some tall mirrors to secrecy with a frown and a shake of the head, ran to her, Mrs. Forsyth had forgotten why she had called her. “Oh!” she said, recollecting, “do you know which your trunk is, Tata? Can you show mamma? Can you put your hand on it?”

The child promptly put her hand on the end of a small box just within her tiptoe reach, and her mother said, “I do believe she knows everything that’s in it, Ambrose! That trunk has got to be opened the very first one!”

The man that the young fellow said he would send showed at the far end of the corridor, smaller than human, but enlarging himself to the average Irish bulk as he drew near. He was given instructions and obeyed with caressing irony Mrs. Forsyth’s order to pull out Tata’s trunk first, and she found the key in a large tangle of keys, and opened it, and had the joy of seeing everything recognized by the owner: doll by doll, cook-stove, tin dishes, small brooms, wooden animals on feet and wheels, birds of various plumage, a toy piano, a dust-pan, alphabet blocks, dog’s-eared linen  Mother Goose books, and the rest. Tata had been allowed to put the things away herself, and she took them out with no apparent sense of the time passed since she saw them last. In the changing life of her parents all times and places were alike to her. She began to play with the things in the storage corridor as if it were yesterday when she saw them last in the flat. Her mother and father left her to them in the distraction of their own trunks. Mrs. Forsyth had these spread over the space toward the window and their lids lifted and tried to decide about them. In the end she had changed the things in them back and forth till she candidly owned that she no longer knew where anything at all was.

As she raised herself for a moment’s respite from the problem she saw at the far end of the corridor a lady with two men, who increased in size like her own man as they approached. The lady herself seemed to decrease, though she remained of a magnificence to match the furniture, and looked like it as to her dress of white picked out in gold when she arrived at the twenty-dollar room next the Forsyths’. In her advance she had been vividly played round by a little boy, who ran forward and back and easily doubled the length of the corridor before he came to a stand and remained with his brown eyes fixed on Tata.  Tata herself had blue eyes, which now hovered dreamily above the things in her trunk.

The two mothers began politely to ignore each other. She of the twenty-dollar room directed the men who had come with her, and in a voice of authority and appeal at once commanded and consulted them in the disposition of her belongings. At the sound of the mixed tones Mrs. Forsyth signaled to her husband, and, when he came within whispering, murmured: “Pittsburg, or Chicago. Did you ever hear such a Mid-Western accent!” She pretended to be asking him about repacking the trunk before her, but the other woman was not deceived. She was at least aware of criticism in the air of her neighbors, and she put on greater severity with the workmen. The boy came up and caught her skirt. “What?” she said, bending over. “No, certainly not. I haven’t time to attend to you. Go off and play. Don’t I tell you no? Well, there, then! Will you get that trunk out where I can open it? That small one there,” she said to one of the men, while the other rested for both. She stooped to unlock the trunk and flung up the lid. “Now if you bother me any more I will surely—” But she lost herself short of the threat and began again to seek counsel and issue orders.

The boy fell upon the things in the trunk, which  were the things of a boy, as those in Tata’s trunk were the things of a girl, and to run with them, one after another, to Tata and to pile them in gift on the floor beside her trunk. He did not stop running back and forth as fast as his short, fat legs could carry him till he had reached the bottom of his box, chattering constantly and taking no note of the effect with Tata. Then, as she made no response whatever to his munificence, he began to be abashed and to look pathetically from her to her father.

“Oh, really, young man,” Forsyth said, “we can’t let you impoverish yourself at this rate. What have you said to your benefactor, Tata? What are you going to give him?”

The children did not understand his large words, but they knew he was affectionately mocking them.

“Ambrose,” Mrs. Forsyth said, “you mustn’t let him.”

“I’m trying to think how to hinder him, but it’s rather late,” Forsyth answered, and then the boy’s mother joined in.

“Indeed, indeed, if you can, it’s more than I can. You’re just worrying the little girl,” she said to the boy.

“Oh no, he isn’t, dear little soul,” Mrs. Forsyth said, leaving her chair and going up to the two  children. She took the boy’s hand in hers. “What a kind boy! But you know my little girl mustn’t take all your playthings. If you’ll give her one she’ll give you one, and that will be enough. You can both play with them all for the present.” She referred her suggestion to the boy’s mother, and the two ladies met at the invisible line dividing the five-dollar room from the twenty-dollar room.

“Oh yes, indeed,” the Mid-Westerner said, willing to meet the New-Yorker half-way. “You’re taking things out, I see. I hardly know which is the worst: taking out or putting in.”

“Well, we are just completing the experience,” Mrs. Forsyth said. “I shall be able to say better how I feel in half an hour.”

“You don’t mean this is the first time you’ve stored? I suppose we’ve been in and out of storage twenty times. Not in this warehouse exactly; we’ve never been here before.”

“It seems very nice,” Mrs. Forsyth suggested.

“They all do at the beginning. I suppose if we ever came to the end they would seem nicer still. Mr. Bream’s business is always taking him away” (it appeared almost instantly that he was the international inspector of a great insurance company’s agencies in Europe and South America), “and when I don’t go with him it seems easier  to break up and go into a hotel than to go on housekeeping. I don’t know that it is, though,” she questioned. “It’s so hard to know what to do with the child in a hotel.”

“Yes, but he seems the sort that you could manage with anywhere,” Mrs. Forsyth agreed and disagreed.

His mother looked at him where he stood beaming upon Tata and again joyfully awaiting some effect with her. But the child sat back upon her small heels with her eyes fixed on the things in her trunk and made no sign of having seen the heaps of his gifts.

The Forsyths had said to each other before this that their little girl was a queer child, and now they were not so much ashamed of her apparent selfishness or rude indifference as they thought they were. They made a joke of it with the boy’s mother, who said she did not believe Tata was anything but shy. She said she often told Mr. Bream that she did wish Peter — yes, that was his name; she didn’t like it much, but it was his grandfather’s; was Tata a Christian name? Oh, just a pet name! Well, it was pretty — could be broken of his ridiculous habit; most children — little boys, that was — held onto their things so.

Forsyth would have taken something from Tata and given it to Peter; but his wife would  not let him; and he had to content himself with giving Peter a pencil of his own that drew red at one end and blue at the other, and that at once drew a blue boy, that looked like Peter, on the pavement. He told Peter not to draw a boy now, but wait till he got home, and then be careful not to draw a blue boy with the red end. He helped him put his things back into his trunk, and Peter seemed to enjoy that, too.

Tata, without rising from her seat on her heels, watched the restitution with her dreamy eyes; she paid no attention to the blue boy on the pavement; pictures from her father were nothing new to her. The mothers parted with expressions of mutual esteem in spite of their difference of accent and fortune. Mrs. Forsyth asked if she might not kiss Peter, and did so; he ran to his mother and whispered to her; then he ran back and gave Tata so great a hug that she fell over from it.

Tata did not cry, but continued as if lost in thought which she could not break from, and that night, after she had said her prayers with her mother, her mother thought it was time to ask her: “Tata, dear, why did you act so to that boy to-day? Why didn’t you give him something of yours when he brought you all his things? Why did you act so oddly?”

Tata said something in a voice so low that her mother could not make it out.

“What did you say?”

“I couldn’t tell which,” the child still whispered; but now her mother’s ear was at her lips.

“How, which?”

“To give him. The more I looked,” and the whisper became a quivering breath, “the more I couldn’t tell which. And I wanted to give them all to him, but I couldn’t tell whether it would be right, because you and papa gave them to me for birthday and Christmas,” and the quivering breath broke into a sobbing grief, so that the mother had to catch the child up to her heart.

“Dear little tender conscience!” she said, still wiping her eyes when she told the child’s father, and they fell into a sweet, serious talk about her before they slept. “And I was ashamed of her before that woman! I know she misjudged her; but we ought to have remembered how fine and precious she is, and known how she must have suffered, trying to decide.”

“Yes, conscience,” the father said. “And temperament, the temperament to which decision is martyrdom.”

“And she will always have to be deciding! She’ll have to decide for you, some day, as I  do now; you are very undecided, Ambrose — she gets it from you.”

II

The Forsyths were afraid that Tata might want to offer Peter some gift in reparation the next morning, and her father was quite ready, if she said so, to put off their leaving town, and go with her to the Constitutional Storage, which was the only address of Mrs. Bream that he knew. But the child had either forgotten or she was contented with her mother’s comforting, and no longer felt remorse.

One does not store the least of one’s personal or household gear without giving a hostage to storage, a pledge of allegiance impossible to break. No matter how few things one puts in, one never takes everything out; one puts more things in. Mrs. Forsyth went to the warehouse with Tata in the fall before they sailed for another winter in Paris, and added some old bits she had picked up at farm-houses in their country drives, and they filled the room quite to the top. She told her husband how Tata had entered into the spirit of putting back her trunk of playthings with the hope of seeing it again in the spring; and she added that she had now had to take a seven-fifty  room without consulting him, or else throw away the things they had brought home.

During the ten or twelve years that followed, the Forsyths sometimes spent a whole winter in a hotel; sometimes they had a flat; sometimes they had a separate dwelling. If their housing was ample, they took almost everything out of storage; once they got down to a two-dollar bin, and it seemed as if they really were leaving the storage altogether. Then, if they went into a flat that was nearly all studio, their furniture went back in a cataclysmal wave to the warehouse, where a ten-dollar room, a twelve-dollar room, would not dam the overflow.

Tata, who had now outgrown her pet name, and was called Charlotte because her mother felt she ought to be, always went with her to the storage to help look the things over, to see the rooms emptied down to a few boxes, or replenished to bursting. In the first years she played about, close to her mother; as she grew older she ventured further, and began to make friends with other little girls who had come with their mothers. It was quite safe socially to be in the Constitutional Storage; it gave standing; and Mrs. Forsyth fearlessly chanced acquaintance with these mothers, who would sometimes be there whole long mornings or afternoons, taking trunks out or  putting them in. With the trunks set into the corridors and opened for them, they would spend the hours looking the contents over, talking to their neighbors, or rapt in long silences when they hesitated with things held off or up, and, after gazing absently at them, putting them back again. Sometimes they varied the process by laying things aside for sending home, and receipting for them at the office as “goods selected.”

They were mostly hotel people or apartment people, as Mrs. Forsyth oftenest was herself, but sometimes they were separate-house people. Among these there was one family, not of great rank or wealth, but distinguished, as lifelong New-Yorkers, in a world of comers and goers of every origin. Mrs. Forsyth especially liked them for a certain quality, but what this quality was she could not very well say. They were a mother with two daughters, not quite old maids, but on the way to it, and there was very intermittently the apparently bachelor brother of the girls; at the office Mrs. Forsyth verified her conjecture that he was some sort of minister. One could see they were all gentlefolks, though the girls were not of the last cry of fashion. They were very nice to their mother, and you could tell that they must have been coming with her for years.

At this point in her study of them for her  husband’s amusement she realized that Charlotte had been coming to the storage with her nearly all her life, and that more and more the child had taken charge of the uneventual inspection of the things. She was shocked to think that she had let this happen, and now she commanded her husband to say whether Charlotte would grow into a storage old maid like those good girls.

Forsyth said, Probably not before her time; but he allowed it was a point to be considered.

Very well, then, Mrs. Forsyth said, the child should never go again; that was all. She had strongly confirmed herself in this resolution when one day she not only let the child go again, but she let her go alone. The child was now between seventeen and eighteen, rather tall, grave, pretty, with the dull brown hair that goes so well with dreaming blue eyes, and of a stiff grace. She had not come out yet, because she had always been out, handing cakes at her father’s studio teas long before she could remember not doing it, and later pouring for her mother with rather a quelling air as she got toward fifteen. During these years the family had been going and coming between Europe and America; they did not know perfectly why, except that it was easier than not.

More and more there was a peculiarity in the  goods selected by Charlotte for sending home, which her mother one day noted. “How is it, Charlotte, that you always send exactly the things I want, and when you get your own things here you don’t know whether they are what you wanted or not?”

“Because I don’t know when I send them. I don’t choose them; I can’t.”

“But you choose the right things for me?”

“No, I don’t, mother. I just take what comes first, and you always like it.”

“Now, that is nonsense, Charlotte. I can’t have you telling me such a thing as that. It’s an insult to my intelligence. Do you think I don’t know my own mind?”

“I don’t know my mind,” the girl said, so persistently, obstinately, stubbornly, that her mother did not pursue the subject for fear of worse.

She referred it to her husband, who said: “Perhaps it’s like poets never being able to remember their own poetry. I’ve heard it’s because they have several versions in their minds when they write and can’t remember which they’ve written. Charlotte has several choices in her mind, and can’t choose between her choices.”

“Well, we ought to have broken her of her indecision. Some day it will make her very unhappy.”

“Pretty hard to break a person of her temperament,” Forsyth suggested.

“I know it!” his wife admitted, with a certain pleasure in realizing the fact. “I don’t know what we shall do.”

III

Storage society was almost wholly feminine; in rare instances there was a man who must have been sent in dearth of women or in an hour of their disability. Then the man came hastily, with a porter, and either pulled all the things out of the rooms so that he could honestly say he had seen them, and that the thing wanted was not there; or else merely had the doors opened, and after a glance inside resolved to wait till his wife, or mother, or daughter could come. He agreed in guilty eagerness with the workmen that this was the only way.

The exception to the general rule was a young man who came one bright spring morning when all nature suggested getting one’s stuff out and going into the country, and had the room next the Forsyths’ original five-dollar room opened. As it happened, Charlotte was at the moment visiting this room upon her mother’s charge to see whether certain old scrim sash-curtains, which  they had not needed for ages but at last simply must have, were not lurking there in a chest of general curtainings. The Forsyths now had rooms on other floors, but their main room was at the end of the corridor branching northward from that where the five-dollar room was. Near this main room that nice New York family had their rooms, and Charlotte had begun the morning in their friendly neighborhood, going through some chests that might perhaps have the general curtainings in them and the scrim curtains among the rest. It had not, and she had gone to what the Forsyths called their old ancestral five-dollar room, where that New York family continued to project a sort of wireless chaperonage over her. But the young man had come with a porter, and, with her own porter, Charlotte could not feel that even a wireless chaperonage was needed, though the young man approached with the most beaming face she thought she had ever seen, and said he hoped he should not be in her way. She answered with a sort of helpless reverberation of his glow, Not at all; she should only be a moment. She wanted to say she hoped she would not be in his way, but she saved herself in time, while, with her own eyes intent upon the façade of her room and her mind trying to lose itself in the question which curtain-trunk  the scrims might be in, she kept the sense of his sweet eyes, the merriest eyes she had ever seen, effulgent with good-will and apology and reverent admiration. She blushed to think it admiration, though she liked to think it so, and she did not snub him when the young man jumped about, neglecting his own storage, and divining the right moments for his offers of help. She saw that he was a little shorter than herself, that he was very light and quick on his feet, and had a round, brown face, clean-shaven, and a round, brown head, close shorn, from which in the zeal of his attentions to her he had shed his straw hat onto the window-sill. He formed a strong contrast to the contents of his store-room, which was full, mainly, of massive white furniture picked out in gold, and very blond. He said casually that it had been there, off and on, since long before he could remember, and at these words an impression, vague, inexplicable, deepened in Charlotte’s mind.

“Mother,” she said, for she had now disused the earlier “mamma” in deference to modern usage, “how old was I when we first took that five-dollar room?”

She asked this question after she had shown the scrim curtains she had found and brought home with her.

“Why? I don’t know. Two or three; three or four. I should have to count up. What makes you ask?”

“Can a person recollect what happened when they were three or four?”

“I should say not, decidedly.”

“Or recollect a face?”

“Certainly not.”

“Then of course it wasn’t. Mother, do you remember ever telling me what the little boy was like who gave me all his playthings and I couldn’t decide what to give him back?”

“What a question! Of course not! He was very brown and funny, with the beamingest little face in the world. Rather short for his age, I should say, though I haven’t the least idea what his age was.”

“Then it was the very same little boy!” Charlotte said.

“Who was the very same little boy?” her mother demanded.

“The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean,” Charlotte explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness which her mother’s imagination supplied.

“Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon? Did you inquire who he was or where?”

“What an idea, mother!” Charlotte said, grouping the several impossibilities under one head in her answer.

“You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one.”

“But I didn’t think he was the one, and I don’t know that he is now; and if he was, what could I do about it?”

“That is true,” Mrs. Forsyth owned. “But it’s very disappointing. I’ve always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not ungenerousness.”

Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, “Really, mother!”

Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. “Well, these are not the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you. The sooner we have it over the better,” she added, and she left the undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or the young man’s identity.

It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure to do so was the more important because the young man had come back and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The  palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the room.

When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their way; and when Mrs. Forsyth said he was not at all in their way, he got white-and-gold arm-chairs for her and Charlotte and put them so conveniently near the old ancestral room that Mrs. Forsyth scarcely needed to move hand or foot in letting Charlotte restore the wrong curtains and search the chests for the right ones. His politeness made way for conversation and for the almost instant exchange of confidences between himself and Mrs. Forsyth, so that Charlotte was free to enjoy the silence to which they left her in her labors.

“Before I say a word,” Mrs. Forsyth said, after saying some hundreds in their mutual inculpation and exculpation, “I want to ask something, and I hope you will excuse it to an old woman’s curiosity and not think it rude.”

At the words “old woman’s” the young man  gave a protesting “Oh!” and at the word “rude” he said, “Not at all.”

“It is simply this: how long have your things been here? I ask because we’ve had this room thirteen or fourteen years, and I’ve never seen your room opened in that whole time.”

The young man laughed joyously. “Because it hasn’t been opened in that whole time. I was a little chap of three or four bothering round here when my mother put the things in; I believe it was a great frolic for me, but I’m afraid it wasn’t for her. I’ve been told that my activities contributed to the confusion of the things and the things in them that she’s been in ever since, and I’m here now to make what reparation I can by listing them.”

“She’ll find it a great blessing,” Mrs. Forsyth said. “I wish we had ours listed. I suppose you remember it all very vividly. It must have been a great occasion for you seeing the things stored at that age.”

The young man beamed upon her. “Not so great as now, I’m afraid. The fact is, I don’t remember anything about it. But I’ve been told that I embarrassed with my personal riches a little girl who was looking over her doll’s things.”

“Oh, indeed!” Mrs. Forsyth said, stiffly, and she turned rather snubbingly from him and said,  coldly, to Charlotte: “I think they are in that green trunk. Have you the key?” and, stooping as her daughter stooped, she whispered, “Really!” in condemnation and contempt.

Charlotte showed no signs of sharing either, and Mrs. Forsyth could not very well manage them alone. So when Charlotte said, “No, I haven’t the key, mother,” and the young man burst in with, “Oh, do let me try my master-key; it will unlock anything that isn’t a Yale,” Mrs. Forsyth sank back enthroned and the trunk was thrown open.

She then forgot what she had wanted it opened for. Charlotte said, “They’re not here, mother,” and her mother said, “No, I didn’t suppose they were,” and began to ask the young man about his mother. It appeared that his father had died twelve years before, and since then his mother and he had been nearly everywhere except at home, though mostly in England; now they had come home to see where they should go next or whether they should stay.

“That would never suit my daughter,” Mrs. Forsyth lugged in, partly because the talk had gone on away from her family as long as she could endure, and partly because Charlotte’s indecision always amused her. “She can’t bear to choose.”

“Really?” the young man said. “I don’t know whether I like it or not, but I have had to do a lot of it. You mustn’t think, though, that I chose this magnificent furniture. My father bought an Italian palace once, and as we couldn’t live in it or move it we brought the furniture here.”

“It is magnificent,” Mrs. Forsyth said, looking down the long stretches of it and eying and fingering her specific throne. “I wish my husband could see it — I don’t believe he remembers it from fourteen years ago. It looks — excuse me! — very studio.”

“Is he a painter? Not Mr. Forsyth the painter?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Forsyth eagerly admitted, but wondering how he should know her name, without reflecting that a score of trunk-tags proclaimed it and that she had acquired his by like means.

“I like his things so much,” he said. “I thought his three portraits were the best things in the Salon last year.”

“Oh, you saw them?” Mrs. Forsyth laughed with pleasure and pride. “Then,” as if it necessarily followed, “you must come to us some Sunday afternoon. You’ll find a number of his new portraits and some of the subjects; they like to see themselves framed.” She tried for a card in her hand-bag, but she had none, and she  said, “Have you one of my cards, my dear?” Charlotte had, and rendered it up with a severity lost upon her for the moment. She held it toward him. “It’s Mr. Peter Bream?” she smiled upon him, and he beamed back.

“Did you remember it from our first meeting?”

In their cab Mrs. Forsyth said, “I don’t know whether he’s what you call rather fresh or not, Charlotte, and I’m not sure that I’ve been very wise. But he is so nice, and he looked so glad to be asked.”

Charlotte did not reply at once, and her silent severity came to the surface of her mother’s consciousness so painfully that it was rather a relief to have her explode, “Mother, I will thank you not to discuss my temperament with people.”

She gave Mrs. Forsyth her chance, and her mother was so happy in being able to say, “I won’t — your temper, my dear,” that she could add with sincere apology: “I’m sorry I vexed you, and I won’t do it again.”

IV

The next day was Sunday; Peter Bream took it for some Sunday, and came to the tea on Mrs. Forsyth’s generalized invitation. She pulled her mouth down and her eyebrows up when his card  was brought in, but as he followed hard she made a lightning change to a smile and gave him a hand of cordial welcome. Charlotte had no choice but to welcome him, too, and so the matter was simple for her. She was pouring, as usual, for her mother, who liked to eliminate herself from set duties and walk round among the actual portraits in fact and in frame and talk about them to the potential portraits. Peter, qualified by long sojourn in England, at once pressed himself into the service of handing about the curate’s assistant; Mrs. Forsyth electrically explained that it was one of the first brought to New York, and that she had got it at the Stores in London fifteen years before, and it had often been in the old ancestral room, and was there on top of the trunks that first day. She did not recur to the famous instance of Charlotte’s infant indecision, and Peter was safe from a snub when he sat down by the girl’s side and began to make her laugh. At the end, when her mother asked Charlotte what they had been laughing about, she could not tell; she said she did not know they were laughing.

The next morning Mrs. Forsyth was paying for her Sunday tea with a Monday headache, and more things must be got out for the country. Charlotte had again no choice but to go alone to the storage, and yet again no choice but to be  pleasant to Peter when she found him next door listing the contents of his mother’s trunks and tagging them as before. He dropped his work and wanted to help her. Suddenly they seemed strangely well acquainted, and he pretended to be asked which pieces she should put aside as goods selected, and chose them for her. She hinted that he was shirking his own work; he said it was an all-summer’s job, but he knew her mother was in a hurry. He found the little old trunk of her playthings, and got it down and opened it and took out some toys as goods selected. She made him put them back, but first he catalogued everything in it and synopsized the list on a tag and tagged the trunk. He begged for a broken doll which he had not listed, and Charlotte had so much of her original childish difficulty in parting with that instead of something else that she refused it.

It came lunch-time, and he invited her to go out to lunch with him; and when she declined with dignity he argued that if they went to the Woman’s Exchange she would be properly chaperoned by the genius of the place; besides, it was the only place in town where you got real strawberry shortcake. She was ashamed of liking it all; he besought her to let him carry her hand-bag for her, and, as he already had it, she could not prevent him; she did not know, really, how  far she might successfully forbid him in anything. At the street door of the apartment-house they found her mother getting out of a cab, and she asked Peter in to lunch; so that Charlotte might as well have lunched with him at the Woman’s Exchange.

At all storage warehouses there is a season in autumn when the corridors are heaped with the incoming furniture of people who have decided that they cannot pass another winter in New York and are breaking up housekeeping to go abroad indefinitely. But in the spring, when the Constitutional Safe-Deposit offered ample space for thoughtful research, the meetings of Charlotte and Peter could recur without more consciousness of the advance they were making toward the fated issue than in so many encounters at tea or luncheon or dinner. Mrs. Forsyth was insisting on rather a drastic overhauling of her storage that year. Some of the things, by her command, were shifted to and fro between the more modern rooms and the old ancestral room, and Charlotte had to verify the removals. In deciding upon goods selected for the country she had the help of Peter, and she helped him by interposing some useful hesitations in the case of things he had put aside from his mother’s possessions to be sold for her by the warehouse people.

One day he came late and told Charlotte that his mother had suddenly taken her passage for England, and they were sailing the next morning. He said, as if it logically followed, that he had been in love with her from that earliest time when she would not give him the least of her possessions, and now he asked her if she would not promise him the greatest. She did not like what she felt “rehearsed” in his proposal; it was not her idea of a proposal, which ought to be spontaneous and unpremeditated in terms; at the same time, she resented his precipitation, which she could not deny was inevitable.

She perceived that they were sitting side by side on two of those white-and-gold thrones, and she summoned an indignation with the absurdity in refusing him. She rose and said that she must go; that she must be going; that it was quite time for her to go; and she would not let him follow her to the elevator, as he made some offer of doing, but left him standing among his palatial furniture like a prince in exile.

By the time she reached home she had been able to decide that she must tell her mother at once. Her mother received the fact of Peter’s proposal with such transport that she did not realize the fact of Charlotte’s refusal. When this was connoted to her she could scarcely keep her  temper within the bounds of maternal tenderness. She said she would have nothing more to do with such a girl; that there was but one such pearl as Peter in the universe, and for Charlotte to throw him away like that! Was it because she could not decide? Well, it appeared that she could decide wrong quickly enough when it came to the point. Would she leave it now to her mother?

That Charlotte would not do, but what she did do was to write a letter to Peter taking him back as much as rested with her; but delaying so long in posting it, when it was written, that it reached him among the letters sent on board and supplementarily delivered by his room steward after all the others when the ship had sailed. The best Peter could do in response was a jubilant Marconigram of unequaled cost and comprehensiveness.

His mother had meant to return in the fall, after her custom, to find out whether she wished to spend the winter in New York or not. Before the date for her sailing she fell sick, and Peter came sadly home alone in the spring. Mrs. Bream’s death brought Mrs. Forsyth a vain regret; she was sorry now that she had seen so little of Mrs. Bream; Peter’s affection for her was beautiful and spoke worlds for both of them; and they, the Forsyths, must do what they could to comfort him.

Charlotte felt the pathos of his case peculiarly when she went to make provision for goods selected for the summer from the old ancestral room, and found him forlorn among his white-and-gold furniture next door. He complained that he had no association with it except the touching fact of his mother’s helplessness with it, which he had now inherited. The contents of the trunks were even less intimately of his experience; he had performed a filial duty in listing their contents, which long antedated him, and consisted mostly of palatial bric-à-brac and the varied spoils of travel.

He cheered up, however, in proposing to her that they should buy a Castle in Spain and put them into it. The fancy pleased her, but visibly she shrank from a step which it involved, so that he was, as it were, forced to say, half jokingly, half ruefully, “I can imagine your not caring for this rubbish or what became of it, Charlotte, but what about the owner?”

“The owner?” she asked, as it were somnambulantly.

“Yes. Marrying him, say, sometime soon.”

“Oh, Peter, I couldn’t.”

“Couldn’t? You know that’s not playing the game exactly.”

“Yes; but not — not right away?”

“Well, I don’t know much about it in my own case, but isn’t it usual to fix some approximate date? When should you think?”

“Oh, Peter, I can’t think.”

“Will you let me fix it? I must go West and sell out and pull up, you know, preparatory to never going again. We can fix the day now or we can fix it when I come back.”

“Oh, when you come back,” she entreated so eagerly that Peter said:

“Charlotte, let me ask you one thing. Were you ever sorry you wrote me that taking-back letter?”

“Why, Peter, you know how I am. When I have decided something I have undecided it. That’s all.”

From gay he turned to grave. “I ought to have thought. I haven’t been fair; I haven’t played the game. I ought to have given you another chance; and I haven’t, have I?”

“Why, I suppose a girl can always change,” Charlotte said, suggestively.

“Yes, but you won’t always be a girl. I’ve never asked you if you wanted to change. I ask you now. Do you?”

“How can I tell? Hadn’t we better let it go as it is? Only not hurry about — about — marrying?”

“Certainly not hurry about marrying. I’ve wondered that a girl could make up her mind to marry any given man. Haven’t you ever wished that you had not made up your mind about me?”

“Hundreds of times. But I don’t know that I meant anything by it.”

He took her hand from where it lay in her lap as again she sat on one of the white-and-gold thrones beside him and gently pressed it. “Well, then, let’s play we have never been engaged. I’m going West to-night to settle things up for good, and I won’t be back for three or four months, and when I come back we’ll start new. I’ll ask you, and you shall say yes or no just as if you had never said either before.”

“Peter, when you talk like that!” She saw his brown, round face dimly through her wet eyes, and she wanted to hug him for pity of him and pride in him, but she could not decide to do it. They went out to lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, and the only regret Peter had was that it was so long past the season of strawberry shortcake, and that Charlotte seemed neither to talk nor to listen; she ought to have done one or the other.

They had left the Vaneckens busy with their summer trunks at the far end of the northward corridor, where their wireless station had been re-established for Charlotte’s advantage, though  she had not thought of it the whole short morning long. When she came back from lunch the Vaneckens were just brushing away the crumbs of theirs, which the son and brother seemed to have brought in for them in a paper box; at any rate, he was now there, making believe to help them.

Mrs. Forsyth had promised to come, but she came so late in the afternoon that she owned she had been grudgingly admitted at the office, and she was rather indignant about it. By this time, without having been West for three months, Peter had asked a question which had apparently never been asked before, and Charlotte had as newly answered it. “And now, mother,” she said, while Mrs. Forsyth passed from indignant to exultant, “I want to be married right away, before Peter changes his mind about taking me West with him. Let us go home at once. You always said I should have a home wedding.”

“What a ridiculous idea!” Mrs. Forsyth said, more to gain time than anything else. She added, “Everything is at sixes and sevens in the flat. There wouldn’t be standing-room.” A sudden thought flashed upon her, which, because it was sudden and in keeping with her character, she put into tentative words. “You’re more at home here than anywhere else. You were almost born  here. You’ve played about here ever since you were a child. You first met Peter here. He proposed to you here, and you rejected him here. He’s proposed here again, and you’ve accepted him, you say—”

“Mother!” Charlotte broke in terribly upon her. “Are you suggesting that I should be married in a storage warehouse? Well, I haven’t fallen quite so low as that yet. If I can’t have a home wedding, I will have a church wedding, and I will wait till doomsday for it if necessary.”

“I don’t know about doomsday,” Mrs. Forsyth said, “but as far as to-day is concerned, it’s too late for a church wedding. Peter, isn’t there something about canonical hours? And isn’t it past them?”

“That’s in the Episcopal Church,” Peter said, and then he asked, very politely, “Will you excuse me for a moment?” and walked away as if he had an idea. It was apparently to join the Vaneckens, who stood in a group at the end of their corridor, watching the restoration of the trunks which they had been working over the whole day. He came back with Mr. Vanecken and Mr. Vanecken’s mother. He was smiling radiantly, and they amusedly.

“It’s all right,” he explained. “Mr. Vanecken is a Presbyterian minister, and he will marry us now.”

“But not here!” Charlotte cried, feeling herself weaken.

“No, certainly not,” the dominie reassured her. “I know a church in the next block that I can borrow for the occasion. But what about the license?”

It was in the day before the parties must both make application in person, and Peter took a paper from his breast pocket. “I thought it might be needed, sometime, and I got it on the way up, this morning.”

“Oh, how thoughtful of you, Peter!” Mrs. Forsyth moaned in admiration otherwise inexpressible, and the rest laughed, even Charlotte, who laughed hysterically. At the end of the corridor they met the Misses Vanecken waiting for them, unobtrusively expectant, and they all went down in the elevator together. Just as they were leaving the building, which had the air of hurrying them out, Mrs. Forsyth had an inspiration. “Good heavens!” she exclaimed, and then, in deference to Mr. Vanecken, said, “Good gracious, I mean. My husband! Peter, go right into the office and telephone Mr. Forsyth.”

“Perhaps,” Mr. Vanecken said, “I had better go and see about having my friend’s church opened, in the meanwhile, and—”

“By all means!” Mrs. Forsyth said from her mood of universal approbation.

But Mr. Vanecken came back looking rather queer and crestfallen. “I find my friend has gone into the country for a few days; and I don’t quite like to get the sexton to open the church without his authority, and — But New York is full of churches, and we can easily find another, with a little delay, if—”

He looked at Peter, who looked at Charlotte, who burst out with unprecedented determination. “No, we can’t wait. I shall never marry Peter if we do. Mother, you are right. But must it be in the old ancestral five-dollar room?”

They all laughed except Charlotte, who was more like crying.

“Certainly not,” Mr. Vanecken said. “I’ve no doubt the manager—”

He never seemed to end his sentences, and he now left this one broken off while he penetrated the railing which fenced in the manager alone among a group of vacated desks, frowning impatient. At some murmured words from the dominie, he shouted, “What!” and then came out radiantly smiling, and saying, “Why, certainly.” He knew all the group as old storers in the Constitutional, and called them each by name as he shook them each by the hand. “Everything else has happened here, and I don’t see why this shouldn’t. Come right into the reception-room.”

With some paintings of biblical subjects, unclaimed from the storage, on the walls, the place had a religious effect, and the manager significantly looked out of it a lingering stenographer, who was standing before a glass with two hatpins crossed in her mouth preparatory to thrusting them through the straw. She withdrew, visibly curious and reluctant, and then the manager offered to withdraw himself.

“No,” Charlotte said, surprisingly initiative in these junctures, “I don’t know how it is in Mr. Vanecken’s church, but, if father doesn’t come, perhaps you’ll have to give me away. At any rate, you’re an old friend of the family, and I should be hurt if you didn’t stay.”

She laid her hand on the manager’s arm, and just as he had protestingly and politely consented, her father arrived in a taxicab, rather grumbling from having been obliged to cut short a sitting. When it was all over, and the Vaneckens were eliminated, when, in fact, the Breams had joined the Forsyths at a wedding dinner which the bride’s father had given them at Delmonico’s and had precipitated themselves into a train for Niagara (“So banal,” Mrs. Forsyth said, “but I suppose they had to go somewhere, and we went to Niagara, come to think of it, and it’s on their way West”), the bride’s mother remained up late talking it  all over. She took credit to herself for the whole affair, and gave herself a great deal of just praise. But when she said, “I do believe, if it hadn’t been for me, at the last, Charlotte would never have made up her mind,” Forsyth demurred.

“I should say Peter had a good deal to do with making up her mind for her.”

“Yes, you might say that.”

“And for once in her life Charlotte seems to have had her mind ready for making up.”

“Yes, you might say that, too. I believe she is going to turn out a decided character, after all. I never saw anybody so determined not to be married in a storage warehouse.”

A PRESENTIMENT

Over our coffee in the Turkish room Minver was usually a censor of our several foibles rather than a sharer in our philosophic speculations and metaphysical conjectures. He liked to disable me as one professionally vowed to the fabulous, and he had unfailing fun with the romantic sentimentality of Rulledge, which was in fact so little in keeping with the gross super-abundance of his person, his habitual gluttony, and his ridiculous indolence. Minver knew very well that Rulledge was a good fellow withal, and would willingly do any kind action that did not seriously interfere with his comfort, or make too heavy a draft upon his pocket. His self-indulgence, which was quite blameless, unless surfeit is a fault, was the basis of an interest in occult themes, which was the means of even higher diversion to Minver. He liked to have Rulledge approach Wanhope from this side, in the invincible  persuasion that the psychologist would be interested in these themes by the law of his science, though he had been assured again and again that in spite of its misleading name psychology did not deal with the soul as Rulledge supposed the soul; and Minver’s eyes lighted up with a prescience of uncommon pleasure when, late one night, after we had vainly tried to hit it off in talk, now of this, now of that, Rulledge asked Wanhope, abruptly as if it followed from something before:

“Wasn’t there a great deal more said about presentiments forty or fifty years ago than there is now?”

Wanhope had been lapsing deeper and deeper into the hollow of his chair; but he now pulled himself up, and turned quickly toward Rulledge. “What made you think of that?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because I was thinking of it myself.” He glanced at me, and I shook my head.

“Well,” Minver said, “if it will leave Acton out in the cold, I’ll own that I was thinking of it, too. I was going back in my mind, for no reason that I know of, to my childhood, when I first heard of such a thing as a presentiment, and when I was afraid of having one. I had the notion that presentiments ran in the family.”

“Why had you that notion?” Rulledge demanded.

“I don’t know that I proposed telling,” the painter said, giving himself to his pipe.

“Perhaps you didn’t have it,” Rulledge retaliated.

“Perhaps,” Minver assented.

Wanhope turned from the personal aspect of the matter. “It’s rather curious that we should all three have had the same thing in mind just now; or, rather, it is not very curious. Such coincidences are really very common. Something must have been said at dinner which suggested it to all of us.”

“All but Acton,” Minver demurred.

“I mightn’t have heard what was said,” I explained. “I suppose the passing of all that sort of sub-beliefs must date from the general lapse of faith in personal immortality.”

“Yes, no doubt,” Wanhope assented. “It is very striking how sudden the lapse was. Everyone who experienced it in himself could date it to a year, if not to a day. The agnosticism of scientific men was of course all the time undermining the fabric of faith, and then it fell in abruptly, reaching one believer after another as fast as the ground was taken wholly or partly from under his feet. I can remember how people  once disputed whether there were such beings as guardian spirits or not. That minor question was disposed of when it was decided that there were no spirits at all.”

“Naturally,” Minver said. “And the decay of the presentiment must have been hastened by the failure of so many presentiments to make good.”

“The great majority of them have failed to make good, from the beginning of time,” Wanhope replied.

“There are two kinds of presentiments,” Rulledge suggested, with a philosophic air. “The true and the untrue.”

“Like mushrooms,” Minver said. “Only, the true presentiment kills, and the true mushroom nourishes. Talking of mushrooms, they have a way in Switzerland of preserving them in walnut oil, and they fill you with the darkest forebodings, after you’ve filled yourself with the mushrooms. There’s some occult relation between the two. Think it out, Rulledge!”

Rulledge ignored him in turning to Wanhope. “The trouble is how to distinguish the true from the untrue presentiment.”

“It would be interesting,” Wanhope began, but Minver broke in upon him maliciously.

“To know how much the dyspepsia of our predecessors had to with the prevalence of  presentimentalism? I agree with you, that a better diet has a good deal to do with the decline of the dark foreboding among us. What I can’t understand is, how a gross and reckless feeder, like Rulledge here, doesn’t go about like ancestral voices prophesying all sorts of dreadful things.”

“That’s rather cheap talk, even for you, Minver,” Rulledge said. “Why did you think presentiments ran in your family?”

“Well, there you have me, Rulledge. That’s where my theory fails. I can remember,” Minver continued soberly, “the talk there used to be about them among my people. They were serious people in an unreligious way, or rather an unecclesiastical way. They were never spiritualists, but I don’t think there was one of them who doubted that he should live hereafter; he might doubt that he was living here, but there was no question of the other thing. I must say it gave a dignity to their conversation which, when they met, as they were apt to do at one another’s houses on Sunday nights, was not of common things. One of my uncles was a merchant, another a doctor; my father was a portrait-painter by profession, and a sign-painter by practice. I suppose that’s where I got my knack, such as it is. The merchant was an invalid, rather, though he kept about his business, and our people merely  recognized him as being out of health. He was what we could call, for that day and region — the Middle West of the early fifties — a man of unusual refinement. I suppose this was temperamental with him largely; but he had cultivated tastes, too. I remember him as a peculiarly gentle person, with a pensive cast of face, and the melancholy accomplishment of playing the flute.”

“I wonder why nobody plays the flute nowadays,” I mused aloud.

“Yes, it’s quite obsolete,” Minver said. “They only play the flute in the orchestras now. I always look at the man who plays it and think of my uncle. He used to be very nice to me as a child; and he was very fond of my father, in a sort of filial way; my father was so much older. I can remember my young aunt; and how pretty she was as she sat at the piano, and sang and played to his fluting. When she looked forward at the music, her curls fell into her neck; they wore curls then, grown-up women; and though I don’t think curls are beautiful, my aunt’s beauty would have been less without them; in fact, I can’t think of her without them.

“She was delicate, too; they were really a pair of invalids; but she had none of his melancholy. They had had several children, who died, one after another, and there was only one left at the  time I am speaking of. I rather wonder, now, that the thought of those poor little ghost-cousins didn’t make me uncomfortable. I was a very superstitious boy, but I seem not to have thought of them. I played with the little girl who was left, and I liked going to my uncle’s better than anywhere else. I preferred going in the daytime and in the summer-time. Then my cousin and I sat in a nook of the garden and fought violets, as we called it; hooked the wry necks of the flowers together and twitched to see which blossom would come off first. She was a sunny little thing, like her mother, and she had curls, like her. I can’t express the feeling I had for my aunt; she seemed the embodiment of a world that was at once very proud and very good. I suppose she dressed fashionably, as things went then and there; and her style as well as her beauty fascinated me. I would have done anything to please her, far more than to please my cousin. With her I used to squabble, and sometimes sent her crying to her mother. Then I always ran off home, but when I sneaked back, or was sent for to come and play with my cousin, I was not scolded for my wickedness.

“My uncle was more prosperous than his brothers; he lived in a much better house than ours, and I used to be quite awe-struck by its  magnificence. He went East, as we said, twice a year to buy goods, and he had things sent back for his house such as we never saw elsewhere; those cask-shaped seats of blue china for the verandas, and bamboo chairs. There were cane-bottom chairs in the sitting-room, such as we had in our best room; in the parlor the large pieces were of mahogany veneer, upholstered in black hair-cloth; they held me in awe. The piano filled half the place; the windows came down to the ground, and had Venetian blinds and lace curtains.

“We all went in there after the Sunday night supper, and then the fathers and mothers were apt to begin talking of those occult things that gave me the creeps. It was after the Rochester Knockings, as they were called, had been exposed, and so had spread like an infection everywhere. It was as if people were waiting to have the fraud shown up in order to believe in it.”

“That sort of thing happens,” Wanhope agreed. “It’s as if the seeds of the ventilated imposture were carried atmospherically into the human mind broadcast and a universal crop of self-delusion sprang up.”

“At any rate,” Minver resumed, “instead of the gift being confined to a few persons — a small sisterhood with detonating knee-joints — there were  rappings in every well-regulated household; all the tables tipped; people went to sleep to the soft patter of raps on the headboards of their beds; and girls who could not spell were occupied in delivering messages from Socrates, Ben Franklin and Shakespeare. Besides the physical demonstrations, there were all sorts of psychical intimations from the world which we’ve now abolished.”

“Not permanently, perhaps,” I suggested.

“Well, that remains to be seen,” Minver said. “It was this sort of thing which my people valued above the other. Perhaps they were exclusive in their tastes, and did not care for an occultism which the crowd could share with them; though this is a conjecture too long after the fact to have much value. As far as I can now remember, they used to talk of the double presence of living persons, like their being where they greatly wished to be as well as where they really were; of clairvoyance; of what we call mind-transference, now; of weird coincidences of all kinds; of strange experiences of their own and of others; of the participation of animals in these experiences, like the testimony of cats and dogs to the presence of invisible spirits; of dreams that came true, or came near coming true; and, above everything, of forebodings and presentiments.

“I dare say they didn’t always talk of such things, and I’m giving possibly a general impression from a single instance; everything remembered of childhood is as if from large and repeated occurrence. But it must have happened more than once, for I recall that when it came to presentiments my aunt broke it up, perhaps once only. My cousin used to get very sleepy on the rug before the fire, and her mother would carry her off to bed, very cross and impatient of being kissed good night, while I was left to the brunt of the occult alone. I could not go with my aunt and cousin, and I folded myself in my mother’s skirt, where I sat at her feet, and listened in an anguish of drowsy terror. The talk would pass into my dreams, and the dreams would return into the talk; and I would suffer a sort of double nightmare, waking and sleeping.”

“Poor little devil!” Rulledge broke out. “It’s astonishing how people will go on before children, and never think of the misery they’re making for them.”

“I believe my mother thought of it,” Minver returned, “but when that sort of talk began, the witchery of it was probably too strong for her. ‘It held her like a two years’ child’; I was eight that winter. I don’t know how long my suffering had gone on, when my aunt came back and  seemed to break up the talk. It had got to presentiments, and, whether they knew that this was forbidden ground with her, or whether she now actually said something about it, they turned to talk of other things. I’m not telling you all this from my own memory, which deals with only a point or two. My father and mother used to recur to it when I was older, and I am piecing out my story from their memories.

“My uncle, with all his temperamental pensiveness, was my aunt’s stay and cheer in the fits of depression which she paid with for her usual gaiety. But these fits always began with some uncommon depression of his — some effect of the forebodings he was subject to. Her opposition to that kind of thing was purely unselfish, but certainly she dreaded it for him as well as herself. I suppose there was a sort of conscious silence in the others which betrayed them to her. ‘Well,’ she said, laughing, ‘have you been at it again? That poor child looks frightened out of his wits.’

“They all laughed then, and my father said, hypocritically, ‘I was just going to ask Felix whether he expected to start East this week or next.’

“My uncle tried to make light of what was always a heavy matter with him. ‘Well, yesterday,’ he answered, ‘I should have said next week;  but it’s this week, now. I’m going on Wednesday.’

“‘By stage or packet?’ my father asked.

“‘Oh, I shall take the canal to the lake, and get the boat for Buffalo there,’ my uncle said.

“They went on to speak of the trip to New York, and how much easier it was then than it used to be when you had to go by stage over the mountains to Philadelphia and on by stage again. Now, it seemed, you got the Erie Canal packet at Buffalo and the Hudson River steamboat at Albany, and reached New York in four or five days, in great comfort without the least fatigue. They had all risen and my aunt had gone out with her sisters-in-law to help them get their wraps. When they returned, it seemed that they had been talking of the journey, too, for she said to my mother, laughing again, ‘Well, Richard may think it’s easy; but somehow Felix never expects to get home alive.’

“I don’t think I ever heard my uncle laugh, but I can remember how he smiled at my aunt’s laughing, as he put his hand on her shoulder; I thought it was somehow a very sad smile. On Wednesday I was allowed to go with my aunt and cousin to see him off on the packet, which came up from Cincinnati early in the morning; I had lain awake most of the night, and then nearly  overslept myself, and then was at the canal in time. We made a gay parting for him, but when the boat started, and I was gloating on the three horses making up the tow-path at a spanking trot, under the snaky spirals of the driver’s smacking whip-lash, I caught sight of my uncle standing on the deck and smiling that sad smile of his. My aunt was waving her handkerchief, but when she turned away she put it to her eyes.

“The rest of the story, such as it is, I know, almost to the very end, from what I heard my father and mother say from my uncle’s report afterward. He told them that, when the boat started, the stress to stay was so strong upon him that if he had not been ashamed he would have jumped ashore and followed us home. He said that he could not analyze his feelings; it was not yet any definite foreboding, but simply a depression that seemed to crush him so that all his movements were leaden, when he turned at last, and went down to breakfast in the cabin below. The stress did not lighten with the little changes and chances of the voyage to the lake. He was never much given to making acquaintance with people, but now he found himself so absent-minded that he was aware of being sometimes spoken to by friendly strangers without replying until it was too late even to apologize. He was not only  steeped in this gloom, but he had the constant distress of the effort he involuntarily made to trace it back to some cause or follow it forward to some consequence. He kept trying at this, with a mind so tensely bent to the mere horror that he could not for a moment strain away from it. He would very willingly have occupied himself with other things, but the anguish which the double action of his mind gave him was such that he could not bear the effort; all he could do was to abandon himself to his obsession. This would ease him only for a while, though, and then he would suffer the misery of trying in vain to escape from it.

“He thought he must be going mad, but insanity implied some definite delusion or hallucination, and, so far as he could make out, he had none. He was simply crushed by a nameless foreboding. Something dreadful was to happen, but this was all he felt; knowledge had no part in his condition. He could not say whether he slept during the two nights that passed before he reached Toledo, where he was to take the lake steamer for Buffalo. He wished to turn back again, but the relentless pressure which had kept him from turning back at the start was as strong as ever with him. He tried to give his presentiment direction by talking with the other passengers about a recent accident to a lake steamer, in which several hundred lives  were lost; there had been a collision in rough weather, and one of the boats had gone down in a few minutes. There was a sort of relief in that, but the double action of the mind brought the same intolerable anguish again, and he settled back for refuge under the shadow of his impenetrable doom. This did not lift till he was well on his way from Albany to New York by the Hudson River. The canal-boat voyage from Buffalo to Albany had been as eventless as that to Toledo, and his lake steamer had reached Buffalo in safety, for which it had seemed as if those lost in the recent disaster had paid.

“He tried to pierce his heavy cloud by argument from the security in which he had traveled so far, but the very security had its hopelessness. If something had happened — some slight accident — to interrupt it, his reason, or his unreason, might have taken it for a sign that the obscure doom, whatever it was, had been averted.

“Up to this time he had not been able to connect his foreboding with anything definite, and he was not afraid for himself. He was simply without the formless hope that helps us on at every step, through good and bad, and it was a mortal peril, which he came through safely while scores of others were lost, that gave his presentiment direction. He had taken the day boat from  Albany, and about the middle of the afternoon the boat, making way under a head-wind, took fire. The pilot immediately ran her ashore, and her passengers, those that had the courage for it, ran aft, and began jumping from the stern, but a great many women and children were burned. My uncle was one of the first of those who jumped, and he stood in the water, trying to save those who came after from drowning; it was not very deep. Some of the women lost courage for the leap, and some turned back into the flames, remembering children they had left behind. One poor creature stood hesitating wildly, and he called up to her to jump. At last she did so, almost into his arms, and then she clung about him as he helped her ashore. ‘Oh,’ she cried out between her sobs, ‘if you have a wife and children at home, God will take you safe back to them; you have saved my life for my husband and little ones.’ ‘No,’ he was conscious of saying, ‘I shall never see my wife again,’ and now his foreboding had the direction that it had wanted before.

“From that on he simply knew that he should not get home alive, and he waited resignedly for the time and form of his disaster. He had a sort of peace in that. He went about his business intelligently, and from habit carefully, but it was with a mechanical action of the mind, something,  he imagined, like the mechanical action of his body in those organs which do their part without bidding from the will. He was only a few days in New York, but in the course of them he got several letters from his wife telling him that all was going well with her and their daughter. It was before the times when you can ask and answer questions by telegraph, and he started back, necessarily without having heard the latest news from home.

“He made the return trip in a sort of daze, talking, reading, eating, and sleeping in the calm certainty of doom, and only wondering how it would be fulfilled, and what hour of the night or day. But it is no use my eking this out; I heard it, as I say, when I was a child, and I am afraid that if I should try to give it with the full detail I should take to inventing particulars.” Minver paused a moment, and then he said: “But there was one thing that impressed itself indelibly on my memory. My uncle got back perfectly safe and well.”

“Oh!” Rulledge snorted in rude dissatisfaction.

“What was it impressed itself on your memory?” Wanhope asked, with scientific detachment from the story as a story.

Minver continued to address Wanhope, without regarding Rulledge. “My uncle told my father  that some sort of psychical change, which he could not describe, but which he was as conscious of as if it were physical, took place within him as he came in sight of his house—”

“Yes,” Wanhope prompted.

“He had driven down from the canal-packet in the old omnibus which used to meet passengers and distribute them at their destinations in town. All the way to his house he was still under the doom as regarded himself, but bewildered that he should be getting home safe and well, and he was refusing his escape, as it were, and then suddenly, at the sight of the familiar house, the change within him happened. He looked out of the omnibus window and saw a group of neighbors at his gate. As he got out of the omnibus, my father took him by the hand, as if to hold him back a moment. Then he said to my father, very quietly, ‘You needn’t tell me: my wife is dead.’”

There was an appreciable pause, in which we were all silent, and then Rulledge demanded, greedily, “And was she?”

“Really, Rulledge!” I could not help protesting.

Minver asked him, almost compassionately and with unwonted gentleness, as from the mood in which his reminiscence had left him: “You suspected a hoax? She had died suddenly the night before while she and my cousin were getting  things ready to welcome my uncle home in the morning. I’m sorry you’re disappointed,” he added, getting back to his irony.

“Whatever,” Rulledge pursued, “became of the little girl?”

“She died rather young; a great many years ago; and my uncle soon after her.”

Rulledge went away without saying anything, but presently returned with the sandwich which he had apparently gone for, while Wanhope was remarking: “That want of definition in the presentiment at first, and then its determination in the new direction by, as it were, propinquity — it is all very curious. Possibly we shall some day discover a law in such matters.”

Rulledge said: “How was it your boyhood was passed in the Middle West, Minver? I always thought you were a Bostonian.”

“I was an adoptive Bostonian for a good while, until I decided to become a native New-Yorker, so that I could always be near to you, Rulledge. You can never know what a delicate satisfaction you are.”

Minver laughed, and we were severally restored to the wonted relations which his story had interrupted.

CAPTAIN DUNLEVY’S LAST TRIP

It was against the law, in such case made and provided,
Of the United States, but by the good will of the pilots
That we would some of us climb to the pilot-house after our breakfast
For a morning smoke, and find ourselves seats on the benching
Under the windows, or in the worn-smooth arm-chairs. The pilot,
Which one it was did not matter, would tilt his head round and say, “All right!”
When he had seen who we were, and begin, or go on as from stopping
In the midst of talk that was leading up to a story,
Just before we came in, and the story, begun or beginning,
Always began or ended with some one, or something or other,
 Having to do with the river. If one left the wheel to the other,
Going off watch, he would say to his partner standing behind him
With his hands stretched out for the spokes that were not given up yet,
“Captain, you can tell them the thing I was going to tell them
Better than I could, I reckon,” and then the other would answer,
“Well, I don’t know as I feel so sure of that, captain,” and having
Recognized each other so by that courtesy title of captain
Never officially failed of without offense among pilots,
One would subside into Jim and into Jerry the other.

It was on these terms, at least, Captain Dunn relieved Captain Davis
When we had settled ourselves one day to listen in comfort,
After some psychological subtleties we had indulged in at breakfast
Touching that weird experience every one knows when the senses
Juggle the points of the compass out of true orientation,
 Changing the North to the South, and the East to the West. “Why, Jerry, what was it
You was going to tell them?” “Oh, never you mind what it was, Jim.
You tell them something else,” and so Captain Davis submitted,
While Captain Dunn, with a laugh, got away beyond reach of his protest.
Then Captain Davis, with fitting, deprecatory preamble,
Launched himself on a story that promised to be all a story
Could be expected to be, when one of those women — you know them —
Who interrupt on any occasion or none, interrupted,
Pointed her hand, and asked, “Oh, what is that island there, captain?”
“That one, ma’am?” He gave her the name, and then the woman persisted,
“Don’t say you know them all by sight!” “Yes, by sight or by feeling.”
“What do you mean by feeling?” “Why, just that by daylight we see them,
And in the dark it’s like as if somehow we felt them, I reckon.
Every foot of the channel and change in it, wash-out and cave-in,
 Every bend and turn of it, every sand-bar and landmark,
Every island, of course, we have got to see them, or feel them.”
“But if you don’t?” “But we’ve got to.” “But aren’t you ever mistaken?”
“Never the second time.” “Now, what do you mean, Captain Davis?
Never the second time.” “Well, let me tell you a story.
It’s not the one I begun, but that island you asked about yonder
Puts me in mind of it, happens to be the place where it happened,
Three years ago. I suppose no man ever knew the Ohio
Better than Captain Dunlevy, if any one else knew it like him.
Man and boy he had been pretty much his whole life on the river:
Cabin-boy first on a keelboat before the day of the steamboats,
Back in the pioneer times; and watchman then on a steamboat;
Then second mate, and then mate, and then pilot and captain and owner —
But he was proudest, I reckon, of being about the best pilot
 On the Ohio. He knew it as well as he knew his own Bible,
And I don’t hardly believe that ever Captain Dunlevy
Let a single day go by without reading a chapter.”

While the pilot went on with his talk, and in regular, rhythmical motion
Swayed from one side to the other before his wheel, and we listened,
Certain typical facts of the picturesque life of the river
Won their way to our consciousness as without help of our senses.
It was along about the beginning of March, but already
In the sleepy sunshine the budding maples and willows,
Where they waded out in the shallow wash of the freshet,
Showed the dull red and the yellow green of their blossoms and catkins,
And in their tops the foremost flocks of blackbirds debated
As to which they should colonize first. The indolent house-boats
Loafing along the shore, sent up in silvery spirals
 Out of their kitchen pipes the smoke of their casual breakfasts.
Once a wide tow of coal-barges, loaded clear down to the gunwales,
Gave us the slack of the current, with proper formalities shouted
By the hoarse-throated stern-wheeler that pushed the black barges before her,
And as she passed us poured a foamy cascade from her paddles.
Then, as a raft of logs, which the spread of the barges had hidden,
River-wide, weltered in sight, with a sudden jump forward the pilot
Dropped his whole weight on the spokes of the wheel just in time to escape it.

“Always give those fellows,” he joked, “all the leeway they ask for;
Worst kind of thing on the river you want your boat to run into.
Where had I got about Captain Dunlevy? Oh yes, I remember.
Well, when the railroads began to run away from the steamboats,
Taking the carrying trade in the very edge of the water,
 It was all up with the old flush times, and Captain Dunlevy
Had to climb down with the rest of us pilots till he was only
Captain the same as any and every pilot is captain,
Glad enough, too, to be getting his hundred and twenty-five dollars
Through the months of the spring and fall while navigation was open.
Never lowered himself, though, a bit from captain and owner,
Knew his rights and yours, and never would thought of allowing
Any such thing as a liberty from you or taking one with you.
I had been his cub, and all that I knew of the river
Captain Dunlevy had learnt me; and if you know what the feeling
Is of a cub for the pilot that learns him the river, you’ll trust me
When I tell you I felt it the highest kind of an honor
Having him for my partner; and when I came up to relieve him,
One day, here at the wheel, and actu’lly thought that I found him
 Taking that island there on the left, I thought I was crazy.
No, I couldn’t believe my senses, and yet I couldn’t endure it.
Seeing him climb the spokes of the wheel to warp the Kanawha,
With the biggest trip of passengers ever she carried,
Round on the bar at the left that fairly stuck out of the water.
Well, as I said, he learnt me all that I knew of the river,
And was I to learn him now which side to take of an island
When I knew he knew it like his right hand from his left hand?
My, but I hated to speak! It certainly seemed like my tongue clove,
Like the Bible says, to the roof of my mouth! But I had to.
‘Captain,’ I says, and it seemed like another person was talking,
‘Do you usu’lly take that island there on the eastward?’
‘Yes,’ he says, and he laughed, ‘and I thought I had learnt you to do it,
When you was going up.’ ‘But not going down, did you, captain?’
 ‘Down?’ And he whirled at me, and, without ever stopping his laughing,
Turned as white as a sheet, and his eyes fairly bulged from their sockets.
Then he whirled back again, and looked up and down on the river,
Like he was hunting out the shape of the shore and the landmarks.
Well, I suppose the thing has happened to every one sometime,
When you find the points of the compass have swapped with each other,
And at the instant you’re looking, the North and the South have changed places.
I knew what was in his mind as well as Dunlevy himself did.
Neither one of us spoke a word for nearly a minute.
Then in a kind of whisper he says, ‘Take the wheel, Captain Davis!’
Let the spokes fly, and while I made a jump forwards to catch them,
Staggered into that chair — well, the very one you are in, ma’am.
Set there breathing quick, and, when he could speak, all he said was,
‘This is the end of it for me on the river, Jim Davis,’
 Reached up over his head for his coat where it hung by that window,
Trembled onto his feet, and stopped in the door there a second,
Stared in hard like as if for good-by to the things he was used to,
Shut the door behind him, and never come back again through it.”
While we were silent, not liking to prompt the pilot with questions,
“Well,” he said, at last, “it was no use to argue. We tried it,
In the half-hearted way that people do that don’t mean it.
Every one was his friend here on the Kanawha, and we knew
It was the first time he ever had lost his bearings, but he knew,
In such a thing as that, that the first and the last are the same time.
When we had got through trying our worst to persuade him, he only
Shook his head and says, ‘I am done for, boys, and you know it,’
Left the boat at Wheeling, and left his life on the river —
Left his life on the earth, you may say, for I don’t call it living,
 Setting there homesick at home for the wheel he can never go back to.
Reads the river-news regular; knows just the stage of the water
Up and down the whole way from Cincinnati to Pittsburg;
Follows every boat from the time she starts out in the spring-time
Till she lays up in the summer, and then again in the winter;
Wants to talk all about her and who is her captain and pilot;
Then wants to slide away to that everlastingly puzzling
Thing that happened to him that morning on the Kanawha
When he lost his bearings and North and South had changed places —
No, I don’t call that living, whatever the rest of you call it.”
We were silent again till that woman spoke up, “And what was it,
Captain, that kept him from going back and being a pilot?”
“Well, ma’am,” after a moment the pilot patiently answered,
“I don’t hardly believe that I could explain it exactly.”

THE RETURN TO FAVOR

He never, by any chance, quite kept his word, though there was a moment in every case when he seemed to imagine doing what he said, and he took with mute patience the rakings which the ladies gave him when he disappointed them.

Disappointed is not just the word, for the ladies did not really expect him to do what he said. They pretended to believe him when he promised, but at the bottom of their hearts they never did or could. He was gentle-mannered and soft-spoken, and when he set his head on one side, and said that a coat would be ready on Wednesday, or a dress on Saturday, and repeated his promise upon the same lady’s expressed doubt, she would catch her breath and say that now she absolutely must have it on the day named, for otherwise she would not have a thing to put on. Then he would become very grave, and his soft tenor would deepen to a bass of unimpeachable  veracity, and he would say, “Sure, lady, you have it.”

The lady would depart still doubting and slightly sighing, and he would turn to the customer who was waiting to have a button sewed on, or something like that, and ask him softly what it was he could do for him. If the customer offered him his appreciation of the case in hand, he would let his head droop lower, and in a yet deeper bass deplore the doubt of the ladies as an idiosyncrasy of their sex. He would make the customer feel that he was a favorite customer whose rights to a perfect fidelity of word and deed must by no means be tampered with, and he would have the button sewed on or the rip sewed up at once, and refuse to charge anything, while the customer waited in his shirt-sleeves in the small, stuffy shop opening directly from the street. When he tolerantly discussed the peculiarities of ladies as a sex, he would endure to be laughed at, “for sufferance was the badge of all his tribe,” and possibly he rather liked it.

The favorite customer enjoyed being there when some lady came back on the appointed Wednesday or Saturday, and the tailor came soothingly forward and showed her into the curtained alcove where she was to try on the garments, and then called into the inner shop for them. The  shirt-sleeved journeyman, with his unbuttoned waistcoat-front all pins and threaded needles, would appear in his slippers with the things barely basted together, and the tailor would take them, with an airy courage, as if they were perfectly finished, and go in behind the curtain where the lady was waiting in a dishabille which the favorite customer, out of reverence for the sex, forbore to picture to himself. Then sounds of volcanic fury would issue from the alcove. “Now, Mr. Morrison, you have lied to me again, deliberately lied. Didn’t I tell you I must have the things perfectly ready to-day? You see yourself that it will be another week before I can have my things.”

“A week? Oh, madam! But I assure you—”

“Don’t talk to me any more! It’s the last time I shall ever come to you, but I suppose I can’t take the work away from you as it is. When shall I have it?”

“To-morrow. Yes, to-morrow noon. Sure!”

“Now you know you are always out at noon. I should think you would be ashamed.”

“If it hadn’t been for sickness in the family I would have finished your dress with my own hands. Sure I would. If you come here to-morrow noon you find your dress all ready for you.”

“I know I won’t, but I will come, and you’d better have it ready.”

“Oh, sure.”

The lady then added some generalities of opprobrium with some particular criticisms of the garments. Her voice sank into dispassionate murmurs in these, but it rose again in her renewed sense of the wrong done her, and when she came from the alcove she went out of the street door purple. She reopened it to say, “Now, remember!” before she definitely disappeared.

“Rather a stormy session, Mr. Morrison,” the customer said.

“Something fierce,” Mr. Morrison sighed. But he did not seem much troubled, and he had one way with all his victims, no matter what mood they came or went in.

One day the customer was by when a kind creature timidly upbraided him. “This is the third time you’ve disappointed me, Mr. Morrison. I really wish you wouldn’t promise me unless you mean to do it. I don’t think it’s right for you.”

“Oh, but sure, madam! The things will be done, sure. We had a strike on us.”

“Well, I will trust you once more,” the kind creature said.

“You can depend on me, madam, sure.”

When she was gone the customer said: “I  wonder you do that sort of thing, Mr. Morrison. You can’t be surprised at their behaving rustily with you if you never keep your word.”

“Why, I assure you there are times when I don’t know where to look, the way they go on. It is something awful. You ought to hear them once. And now they want the wote.” He rearranged some pieces of tumbled goods at the table where the customer sat, and put together the disheveled leaves of the fashion-papers which looked as if the ladies had scattered them in their rage.

One day the customer heard two ladies waiting for their disappointments in the outer room while the tailor in the alcove was trying to persuade a third lady that positively her things would be sent home the next day before dark. The customer had now formed the habit of having his own clothes made by the tailor, and his system in avoiding disappointment was very simple. In the early fall he ordered a spring suit, and in the late spring it was ready. He never had any difficulty, but he was curious to learn how the ladies managed, and he listened with all his might while these two talked.

“I always wonder we keep coming,” one of them said.

“I’ll tell you why,” the other said. “Because  he’s cheap, and we get things from a fourth to a third less than we can get them anywhere else. The quality is first rate, and he’s absolutely honest. And, besides, he’s a genius. The wretch has touch. The things have a style, a look, a hang! Really it’s something wonderful. Sure it iss,” she ended in the tailor’s accent, and then they both laughed and joined in a common sigh.

“Well, I don’t believe he means to deceive any one.”

“Oh, neither do I. I believe he expects to do everything he says. And one can’t help liking him even when he doesn’t.”

“He’s a good while getting through with her,” the first lady said, meaning the unseen lady in the alcove.

“She’ll be a good while longer getting through with him, if he hasn’t them ready the next time,” the second lady said.

But the lady in the alcove issued from it with an impredicable smile, and the tailor came up to the others, and deferred to their wishes with a sort of voiceless respect.

He gave the customer a glance of good-fellowship, and said to him, radiantly: “Your things all ready for you, this morning. As soon as I—”

“Oh, no hurry,” the customer responded.

“I won’t be a minute,” the tailor said, pulling  the curtain of the alcove aside, and then there began those sounds of objurgation and expostulation, although the ladies had seemed so amiable before.

The customer wondered if they did not all enjoy it; the ladies in their patience under long trial, and the tailor in the pleasure of practising upon it. But perhaps he did believe in the things he promised. He might be so much a genius as to have no grasp of facts; he might have thought that he could actually do what he said.

The customer’s question on these points found answer when one day the tailor remarked, as it were out of a clear sky, that he had sold his business; sold it to the slippered journeyman who used to come in his shirt-sleeves, with his vest-front full of pins and needles, bringing the basted garments to be tried on the ladies who had been promised them perfectly finished.

“He will do your clothes all right,” he explained to the customer. “He is a first-rate cutter and fitter; he knows the whole business.”

“But why — why—” the customer began.

“I couldn’t stand it. The way them ladies would talk to a person, when you done your best to please them; it’s something fierce.”

“Yes, I know. But I thought you liked it,  from the way you always promised them and never kept your word.”

“And if I hadn’t promised them?” the tailor returned with some show of feeling. “They wanted me to promise them — they made me — they wouldn’t have gone away without it. Sure. Every one wanted her things before every one. You had got to think of that.”

“But you had to think of what they would say.”

“Say? Sometimes I thought they would hit me. One lady said she had a notion to slap me once. It’s no way to talk.”

“But you didn’t seem to mind it.”

“I didn’t mind it for a good while. Then I couldn’t stand it. So I sold.”

He shook his head sadly; but the customer had no comfort to offer him. He asked when his clothes would be done, and the tailor told him when, and then they were not. The new proprietor tried them on, but he would not say just when they would be finished.

“We have a good deal of work already for some ladies that been disappointed. Now we try a new way. We tell people exactly what we do.”

“Well, that’s right,” the customer said, but in his heart he was not sure he liked the new way.

The day before his clothes were promised he dropped in. From the curtained alcove he heard low murmurs, the voice of the new proprietor and the voice of some lady trying on, and being severely bidden not to expect her things at a time she suggested. “No, madam. We got too much work on hand already. These things, they will not be done before next week.”

“I told you to-morrow,” the same voice said to another lady, and the new proprietor came out with an unfinished coat in his hand.

“I know you did, but I thought you would be better than your word, and so I came to-day. Well, then, to-morrow.”

“Yes, to-morrow,” the new proprietor said, but he did not seem to have liked the lady’s joke. He did not look happy.

A few weeks after that the customer came for some little alterations in his new suit.

In the curtained alcove he heard the murmurs of trying on, much cheerfuller murmurs than before; the voice of a lady lifted in gladness, in gaiety, and an incredible voice replying, “Oh, sure, madam.”

Then the old proprietor came out in his shirt-sleeves and slippers, with his waistcoat-front full of pins and needles, just like the new proprietor in former days.

“Why!” the customer exclaimed. “Have you bought back?”

“No. I’m just here like a journeyman already. The new man he want me to come. He don’t get along very well with his way. He’s all right; he’s a good man and a first-class tailor. But,” and the former proprietor looked down at the basted garment hanging over his arm, and picked off an irrelevant thread from it, “he thinks I get along better with the ladies.”

SOMEBODY’S MOTHER

The figure of a woman sat crouched forward on one of the lowermost steps of the brownstone dwelling which was keeping a domestic tradition in a street mostly gone to shops and small restaurants and local express-offices. The house was black behind its closed shutters, and the woman remained sitting there because no one could have come out of its door for a year past to hunt her away. The neighborhood policeman faltered in going by, and then he kept on. The three people who came out of the large, old-fashioned hotel, half a block off, on their way for dinner to a French table d’hôte which they had heard of, stopped and looked at the woman. They were a father and his son and daughter, and it was something like a family instinct that controlled them, in their pause before the woman crouching on the steps.

It was the early dusk of a December day, and the day was very chilly. “She seems to be sick or  something,” the father vaguely surmised. “Or asleep.”

The three looked at the woman, but they did nothing for a moment. They would rather have gone on, but they waited to see if anything would happen to release them from the spell that they seemed to have laid upon themselves. They were conditional New-Yorkers of long sojourn, and it was from no apparent motive that the son wore evening dress, which his unbuttoned overcoat discovered, and an opera-hat. He would not have dressed so for that problematical French table d’hôte; probably he was going on later to some society affair. He now put in effect the father’s impulse to go closer and look at the woman.

“She seems to be asleep,” he reported.

“Shouldn’t you think she would take cold? She will get her death there. Oughtn’t we to do something?” the daughter asked, but she left it to the father, and he said:

“Probably somebody will come by.”

“That we could leave her to?” the daughter pursued.

“We could do that without waiting,” the son commented.

“Well, yes,” the father assented; but they did not go on. They waited, helplessly, and then somebody came by. It was a young girl, not very  definite in the dusk, except that she was unmistakably of the working class; she was simply dressed, though with the New York instinct for clothes. Their having stopped there seemed to stay her involuntarily, and after a glance in the direction of their gaze she asked the daughter:

“Is she sick, do you think?”

“We don’t know what’s the matter. But she oughtn’t to stay there.”

Something velvety in the girl’s voice had made its racial quality sensible to the ear; as she went up to the crouching woman and bent forward over her and then turned to them, a street lamp threw its light on her face, and they saw that she was a light shade of colored girl.

“She seems to be sleeping.”

“Perhaps,” the son began, “she’s not quite—” But he did not go on.

The girl looked round at the others and suggested, “She must be somebody’s mother!”

The others all felt abashed in their several sorts and degrees, but in their several sorts and degrees they all decided that there was something romantic, sentimental, theatrical in the girl’s words, like something out of some cheap story-paper story.

The father wondered if that kind of thing was current among that kind of people. He had a  sort of esthetic pleasure in the character and condition expressed by the words.

“Well, yes,” he said, “if she has children, or has had.” The girl looked at him uncertainly, and then he added, “But, of course—”

The son went up to the woman again, and asked: “Aren’t you well? Can we do anything for you? It won’t do to stay here, you know.” The woman only made a low murmur, and he said to his sister, “Suppose we get her up.”

His sister did not come forward promptly, and the colored girl said, “I’ll help you.”

She took one arm of the woman and the son took the other, and they lifted her, without her connivance, to her feet and kept her on them. Then they walked her down the steps. On the level below she showed taller than either of them; she was bundled up in different incoherent wraps; her head was muffled, and she wore a battered bonnet at an involuntary slant.

“I don’t know exactly what we shall do with her,” the son said.

“We ought to get her home somehow,” the daughter said.

The father proposed nothing, but the colored girl said, “If we keep walking her along, we’ll come to a policeman and we can—”

A hoarse rumble of protest came from the  muffled head of the woman, and the girl put her ear closer. “Want to go home? Well, the policeman will take you. We don’t know where you live, and we haven’t the time.”

The woman seemed to have nothing to say further, and they began walking her westward; the colored girl supported her on one hand, and the son, in his evening dress and opera-hat, on the other.

The daughter followed in a vague anxiety, but the father went along, enjoying the anomaly, and happy in his relish of that phrase, “She must be somebody’s mother.” It now sounded to him like a catch from one of those New York songs, popular in the order of life where the mother represents what is best and holiest. He recalled a vaudeville ballad with the refrain of “A Boy’s Best Friend is his Mother,” which, when he heard it in a vaudeville theater, threatened the gallery floor under the applauding feet of the frenzied audience. Probably this colored girl belonged to that order of life; he wished he could know her social circumstance and what her outlook on the greater world might be. She seemed a kind creature, poor thing, and he respected her. “Somebody’s mother” — he liked that.

They all walked westward, aimlessly, except that the table d’hôte where they had meant to dine  was in that direction; they had heard of it as an amusingly harmless French place, and they were fond of such mild adventures.

The old woman contributed nothing to the definition of their progress. She stumbled and mumbled along, but between Seventh Avenue and Eighth she stubbornly arrested her guardians. “She says” — the colored girl translated some obscure avowal across her back— “she says she wants to go home, and she lives up in Harlem.”

“Oh, well, that’s good,” the father said, with an optimistic amiability. “We’d better help walk her across to Ninth Avenue and put her on a car, and tell the conductor where to let her off.”

He was not helping walk her himself, but he enjoyed his son’s doing it in evening dress and opera-hat, with that kind colored girl on the other side of the mother; the composition was agreeably droll. The daughter did not like it, and she cherished the ideal of a passing policeman to take the old woman in charge.

No policeman passed, though great numbers of other people met them without apparently finding anything noticeable in the spectacle which their group presented. Among the crowds going and coming on the avenues which they crossed scarcely any turned to look at them, or was moved by the sense of anything odd in them.

The old woman herself did nothing to attract public notice till they were midway between Seventh and Eighth avenues. She mumbled something from time to time which the colored girl interpreted to the rest as her continued wish to go home. She was now clearer about her street and number. The girl, as if after question of her own generous spirit, said she did not see how she could go with her; she was expected at home herself.

“Oh, you won’t have to go with her; we’ll just put her aboard the Ninth Avenue car,” the father encouraged her. He would have encouraged any one; he was enjoying the whole affair.

At a certain moment, for no apparent reason, the mother decided to sit down on a door-step. It proved to be the door-step of a house where from time to time colored people — sometimes of one sex, sometimes of another — went in or came out. The door seemed to open directly into a large room where dancing and dining were going on concurrently. At a long table colored people sat eating, and behind their chairs on both sides of the room and at the ends of the table colored couples were waltzing.

The effect was the more curious because, except for some almost inaudible music, the scene passed in silence. Those who were eating were not  visibly incommoded by those revolving at their backs; the waltzers turned softly around and around, untempted by the table now before them, now behind them. When some of the diners or dancers came out, they stumbled over the old woman on the door-step without minding or stopping to inquire. Those outside, when they went in, fell over her with like equanimity and joined the strange company within.

The father murmured to himself the lines,

“‘Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody—’”

with a remote trouble of mind because the words were at once so graphic and yet so imperfectly applicable. The son and daughter exchanged a silent wonder as long as they could bear it; then the daughter asked the colored girl:

“What is it?”

“It’s a boarding-house,” the girl answered, simply.

“Oh,” the daughter said.

Sounds of more decided character than before now came from the figure on the door-step.

“She seems to be saying something,” the daughter suggested in general terms. “What is she saying?” she asked the colored girl.

The girl stooped over and listened. Then she answered, “She’s swearing.”

“Swearing? What about? Whom is she swearing at?”

“At me, I reckon. She says, why don’t I take her home.”

“Well, why doesn’t she get up, then?”

“She says she won’t.”

“We can’t carry her to the car,” the daughter noted.

“Oh, why not?” the father merrily demanded.

The daughter turned to her brother. They were both very respectful to their father, but the son agreed with his sister when she said: “Papa would joke about anything. But this has passed a joke. We must get this old thing up and start her off.”

Upon experiment they could not get the old thing up, even with the help of the kind colored girl. They had to let her be, and the colored girl reported, after stooping over her again, “She says she can’t walk.”

“She walked here well enough,” the daughter said.

“Not very well,” the father amended.

His daughter did not notice him. She said to her brother: “Well, now you must go and find a policeman. It’s strange none has gone by.”

It was also strange that still their group remained without attracting the notice of the passers. Nobody stopped to speak or even stare; perhaps the phenomena of that boarding-house  had ceased to have surprises for the public of the neighborhood, and they in their momentary relation to it would naturally be without interest.

The brother went away, leaving his sister with their father and that kind colored creature in charge of the old woman, now more and more quiescent on the door-step; she had ceased to swear, or even to speak. The brother came back after a time that seemed long, and said that he could not find a policeman anywhere, and at the same moment, as if the officer had been following at his heels, a policeman crossed the street from just behind him.

The daughter ran after him, and asked if he would not come and look at the old woman who had so steadfastly remained in their charge, and she rapidly explained.

“Sure, lady,” the policeman said, and he turned from crossing the street and went up to the old woman. He laid his hand on her shoulder, and his touch seemed magical. “What’s the matter? Can’t you stand up?” She stood up as if at something familiar in the voice of authority. “Where do you live?” She gave an address altogether different from that she had given before — a place on the next avenue, within a block or two. “You’d better go home. You can walk, can’t you?”

“I can walk well enough,” she answered in a tone of vexation, and she made her word good by walking quite actively away in the direction she had given.

The kind colored girl became a part of the prevalent dark after refusing the thanks of the others. The daughter then fervently offered them to the policeman.

“That’s all right, lady,” he said, and the incident had closed except for her emotion at seeing him enter a police-station precisely across the street, where they could have got a dozen policemen in a moment.

“Well,” the father said, “we might as well go to our French table d’hôte now.”

“Oh,” the son said, as if that reminded him, “the place seems to be shut.”

“Well, then, we might as well go back to the hotel,” the father decided. “I dare say we shall do quite as well there.”

On the way the young people laughed over the affair and their escape from it, especially at the strange appearance and disappearance of the kind colored girl, with her tag of sentiment, and at the instant compliance of the old woman with the suggestion of the policeman.

The father followed, turning the matter over in his mind. Did mere motherhood hallow that  old thing to the colored girl and her sort and condition? Was there a superstition of motherhood among such people which would endear this disreputable old thing to their affection and reverence? Did such people hold mothers in tenderer regard than people of larger means? Would a mother in distress or merely embarrassment instantly appeal to their better nature as a case of want or sickness in the neighborhood always appealed to their compassion? Would her family now welcome the old thing home from her aberration more fondly than the friends of one who had arrived in a carriage among them in a good street? But, after all, how little one knew of other people! How little one knew of one self, for that matter! How next to nothing one knew of Somebody’s Mother! It did not necessarily follow from anything they knew of her that she was a mother at all. Her motherhood might be the mere figment of that kind colored girl’s emotional fancy. She might be Nobody’s Mother.

When it came to this the father laughed, too. Why, anyhow, were mothers more sacred than fathers? If they had found an old man in that old woman’s condition on those steps, would that kind colored girl have appealed to them in his behalf as Somebody’s Father?

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

He had gone down at Christmas, where our host
Had opened up his house on the Maine coast,
For the week’s holidays, and we were all,
On Christmas night, sitting in the great hall,
About the corner fireplace, while we told
Stories like those that people, young and old,
Have told at Christmas firesides from the first,
Till one who crouched upon the hearth, and nursed
His knees in his claspt arms, threw back his head,
And fixed our host with laughing eyes, and said,
“This is so good, here — with your hickory logs
Blazing like natural-gas ones on the dogs,
And sending out their flicker on the wall
And rafters of your mock-baronial hall,
All in fumed-oak, and on your polished floor,
And the steel-studded panels of your door —
I think you owe the general make-believe
Some sort of story that will somehow give
 A more ideal completeness to our case,
And make each several listener in his place —
Or hers — sit up, with a real goose-flesh creeping
All over him — or her — in proper keeping
With the locality and hour and mood.
Come!” And amid the cries of “Yes!” and “Good!”
Our host laughed back; then, with a serious air,
Looked around him on our hemicycle, where
He sat midway of it. “Why,” he began,
But interrupted by the other man,
He paused for him to say: “Nothing remote,
But something with the actual Yankee note
Of here and now in it!” “I’ll do my best,”
Our host replied, “to satisfy a guest.
What do you say to Barberry Cove? And would
Five years be too long past?” “No, both are good.
Go on!” “You noticed that big house to-day
Close to the water, and the sloop that lay,
Stripped for the winter, there, beside the pier?
Well, there she has lain just so, year after year;
And she will never leave her pier again;
But once, each spring she sailed in sun or rain,
For Bay Chaleur — or Bay Shaloor, as they
Like better to pronounce it down this way.”

“I like Shaloor myself rather the best.
But go ahead,” said the exacting guest.
 And with a glance around at us that said,
“Don’t let me bore you!” our host went ahead.

“Captain Gilroy built the big house, and he
Still lives there with his aging family.
He built the sloop, and when he used to come
Back from the Banks he made her more his home,
With his two boys, than the big house. The two
Counted with him a good half of her crew,
Until it happened, on the Banks, one day
The oldest boy got in a steamer’s way,
And went down in his dory. In the fall
The others came without him. That was all
That showed in either one of them except
That now the father and the brother slept
Ashore, and not on board. When the spring came
They sailed for the old fishing-ground the same
As ever. Yet, not quite the same. The brother,
If you believed what folks say, kissed his mother
Good-by in going; and by general rumor,
The father, so far yielding as to humor
His daughters’ weakness, rubbed his stubbly cheek
Against their lips. Neither of them would speak,
But the dumb passion of their love and grief
In so much show at parting found relief.

“The weeks passed and the months. Sometimes they heard
At home, by letter, from the sloop, or word
Of hearsay from the fleet. But by and by
Along about the middle of July,
A time in which they had no news began,
And holding unbrokenly through August, ran
Into September. Then, one afternoon,
While the world hung between the sun and moon,
And while the mother and her girls were sitting
Together with their sewing and their knitting, —
Before the early-coming evening’s gloom
Had gathered round them in the living-room,
Helplessly wondering to each other when
They should hear something from their absent men, —
They saw, all three, against the window-pane,
A face that came and went, and came again,
Three times, as though for each of them, about
As high up from the porch’s floor without
As a man’s head would be that stooped to stare
Into the room on their own level there.
Its eyes dwelt on them wistfully as if
Longing to speak with the dumb lips some grief
They could not speak. The women did not start
Or scream, though each one of them, in her heart,
 Knew she was looking on no living face,
But stared, as dumb as it did, in her place.”

Here our host paused, and one sigh broke from all
Our circle whom his tale had held in thrall.
But he who had required it of him spoke
In what we others felt an ill-timed joke:
“Well, this is something like!” A girl said, “Don’t!”
As if it hurt, and he said, “Well, I won’t.
Go on!” And in a sort of muse our host
Said: “I suppose we all expect a ghost
Will sometimes come to us. But I doubt if we
Are moved by its coming as we thought to be.
At any rate, the women were not scared,
But, as I said, they simply sat and stared
Till the face vanished. Then the mother said,
‘It was your father, girls, and he is dead.’
But both had known him; and now all went on
Much as before till three weeks more were gone,
When, one night sitting as they sat before,
Together with their mother, at the door
They heard a fumbling hand, and on the walk
Up from the pier, the tramp and muffled talk
Of different wind-blown voices that they knew
For the hoarse voices of their father’s crew.
 Then the door opened, and their father stood
Before them, palpably in flesh and blood.
The mother spoke for all, her own misgiving:
‘Father, is this your ghost? Or are you living?’
‘I am alive!’ ‘But in this very place
We saw your face look, like a spirit’s face,
There through that window, just three weeks ago,
And now you are alive!’ ‘I did not know
That I had come; all I know is that then
I wanted to tell you folks here that our Ben
Was dying of typhoid fever. He raved of you
So that I could not think what else to do.
He’s there in Bay Shaloor!’

“Well, that’s the end.”
And rising up to mend the fire our friend
Seemed trying to shun comment; but in vain:
The exacting guest came at him once again;
“You must be going to fall down, I thought,
There at the climax, when your story brought
The skipper home alive and well. But no,
You saved yourself with honor.” The girl said, “Oh,”
Who spoke before, “it’s wonderful! But you,
How could you think of anything so true,
So delicate, as the father’s wistful face
Coming there at the window in the place
 Of the dead son’s! And then, that quaintest touch,
Of half-apology — that he felt so much,
He had to come! How perfectly New England! Well,
I hope nobody will undertake to tell
A common or garden ghost-story to-night.”

Our host had turned again, and at her light
And playful sympathy he said, “My dear,
I hope that no one will imagine here
I have been inventing in the tale that’s done.
My little story’s charm if it has one
Is from no skill of mine. One does not change
The course of fable from its wonted range
To such effect as I have seemed to do:
Only the fact could make my story true.”

AN EXPERIENCE

For a long time after the event my mind dealt with the poor man in helpless conjecture, and it has now begun to do so again for no reason that I can assign. All that I ever heard about him was that he was some kind of insurance man. Whether life, fire, or marine insurance I never found out, and I am not sure that I tried to find out.

There was something in the event which discharged him of all obligation to define himself of this or that relation to life. He must have had some relation to it such as we all bear, and since the question of him has come up with me again I have tried him in several of those relations — father, son, brother, husband — without identifying him very satisfyingly in either.

As I say, he seemed by what happened to be liberated from the debt we owe in that kind to one another’s curiosity, sympathy, or whatever. I cannot say what errand it was that brought  him to the place, a strange, large, indeterminate open room, where several of us sat occupied with different sorts of business, but, as it seems to me now, by only a provisional right to the place. Certainly the corner allotted to my own editorial business was of temporary assignment; I was there until we could find a more permanent office. The man had nothing to do with me or with the publishers; he had no manuscript, or plan for an article which he wished to propose and to talk himself into writing, so that he might bring it with a claim to acceptance, as though he had been asked to write it. In fact, he did not even look of the writing sort; and his affair with some other occupant of that anomalous place could have been in no wise literary. Probably it was some kind of insurance business, and I have been left with the impression of fussiness in his conduct of it; he had to my involuntary attention an effect of conscious unwelcome with it.

After subjectively dealing with this impression, I ceased to notice him, without being able to give myself to my own work. The day was choking hot, of a damp that clung about one, and forbade one so much effort as was needed to relieve one of one’s discomfort; to pull at one’s wilted collar and loosen the linen about one’s reeking neck meant exertion which one willingly forbore; it  was less suffering to suffer passively than to suffer actively. The day was of the sort which begins with a brisk heat, and then, with a falling breeze, decays into mere swelter. To come indoors out of the sun was no escape from the heat; my window opened upon a shaded alley where the air was damper without being cooler than the air within.

At last I lost myself in my work with a kind of humid interest in the psychological inquiry of a contributor who was dealing with a matter rather beyond his power. I did not think that he was fortunate in having cast his inquiry in the form of a story; I did not think that his contrast of love and death as the supreme facts of life was what a subtler or stronger hand could have made it, or that the situation gained in effectiveness from having the hero die in the very moment of his acceptance. In his supposition that the reader would care more for his hero simply because he had undergone that tremendous catastrophe, the writer had omitted to make him interesting otherwise; perhaps he could not.

My mind began to wander from the story and not very relevantly to employ itself with the question of how far our experiences really affect our characters. I remembered having once classed certain temperaments as the stuff of tragedy, and  others as the stuff of comedy, and of having found a greater cruelty in the sorrows which light natures undergo, as unfit and disproportionate for them. Disaster, I tacitly decided, was the fit lot of serious natures; when it befell the frivolous it was more than they ought to have been made to bear; it was not of their quality. Then by the mental zigzagging which all thinking is I thought of myself and whether I was of this make or that. If it was more creditable to be of serious stuff than frivolous, though I had no agency in choosing, I asked myself how I should be affected by the sight of certain things, like the common calamities reported every day in the papers which I had hitherto escaped seeing. By another zigzag I thought that I had never known a day so close and stifling and humid. I then reflected upon the comparative poverty of the French language, which I was told had only that one word for the condition we could call by half a dozen different names, as humid, moist, damp, sticky, reeking, sweltering, and so on. I supposed that a book of synonyms would give even more English adjectives; I thought of looking, but my book of synonyms was at the back of my table, and I would have to rise for it. Then I questioned whether the French language was so destitute of adjectives, after all; I preferred to doubt it rather than rise.

With no more logic than those other vagaries had, I realized that the person who had started me in them was no longer in the room. He must have gone outdoors, and I visualized him in the street pushing about, crowded hither and thither, and striking against other people as he went and came. I was glad I was not in his place; I believed I should have fallen in a faint from the heat, as I had once almost done in New York on a day like that. From this my mind jumped to the thought of sudden death in general. Was it such a happy thing as people pretended? For the person himself, yes, perhaps; but not for those whom he had left at home, say, in the morning, and who were expecting him at home in the evening. I granted that it was generally accepted as the happiest death, but no one that had tried it had said so. To be sure, one was spared a long sickness, with suffering from pain and from the fear of death. But one had no time for making one’s peace with God, as it used to be said, and after all there might be something in death-bed repentance, although cultivated people no longer believed in it. Then I reverted to the family unprepared for the sudden death: the mother, the wife, the children. I struggled to get away from the question, but the vagaries which had lightly dispersed themselves before clung persistently to  the theme now. I felt that it was like a bad dream. That was a promising diversion. Had one any sort of volition in the quick changes of dreams? One was aware of finding a certain nightmare insupportable, and of breaking from it as by main force, and then falling into a deep, sweet sleep. Was death something like waking from a dream such as that, which this life largely was, and then sinking into a long, restful slumber, and possibly never waking again?

Suddenly I perceived that the man had come back. He might have been there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking into the room blankly.

As he stood there he lifted his hand and rubbed it across his forehead as if in a sort of daze from the heat. I recognized the gesture as one very characteristic of myself; I had often rubbed my hand across my forehead on a close, hot day like that. Then the man suddenly vanished as if he had sunk through the floor.

People who had not noticed that he was there noticed now that he was not there. Some made a crooked rush toward the place where he had been, and one of those helpful fellow-men who are first in all needs lifted his head and mainly  carried him into the wide space which the street stairs mounted to, and laid him on the floor. It was darker, if not cooler there, and we stood back to give him the air which he drew in with long, deep sighs. One of us ran down the stairs to the street for a doctor, wherever he might be found, and ran against a doctor at the last step.

The doctor came and knelt over the prostrate figure and felt its pulse, and put his ear down to its heart. It, which has already in my telling ceased to be he, drew its breath in those long suspirations which seemed to search each more profoundly than the last the lurking life, drawing it from the vital recesses and expelling it in those vast sighs.

They went on and on, and established in our consciousness the expectation of indefinite continuance. We knew that the figure there was without such consciousness as ours, unless it was something so remotely withdrawn that it could not manifest itself in any signal to our senses. There was nothing tragical in the affair, but it had a surpassing dignity. It was as if the figure was saying something to the life in each of us which none of us would have words to interpret, speaking some last message from the hither side of that bourne from which there is no returning.

There was a clutch upon my heart which tightened  with the slower and slower succession of those awful breaths. Then one was drawn and expelled and then another was not drawn. I waited for the breathing to begin again, and it did not begin. The doctor rose from kneeling over the figure that had been a man, and uttered, with a kind of soundlessness, “Gone,” and mechanically dusted his fingers with the thumbs of each hand from their contact with what had now become all dust forever.

That helpfulest one among us laid a cloth over the face, and the rest of us went away. It was finished. The man was done with the sorrow which, in our sad human order, must now begin for those he loved and who loved him. I tried vaguely to imagine their grief for not having been uselessly with him at the last, and I could not. The incident remained with me like an experience, something I had known rather than seen. I could not alienate it by my pity and make it another’s. They whom it must bereave seemed for the time immeasurably removed from the fact.

THE BOARDERS

The boarder who had eloped was a student at the theological seminary, and he had really gone to visit his family, so that he had a fairly good conscience in giving this color to the fact that he was leaving the place permanently because he could not bear it any longer. It was a shade of deceit to connive with his room-mate for the custody of his carpet-bag and the few socks and collars and the one shirt and summer coat which did not visibly affect its lankness when gathered into it from his share of the bureau-drawers; but he did not know what else to do, and he trusted to a final forgiveness when all the facts were considered by a merciful providence. His board was fully paid, and he had suffered long. He argued with his room-mate that he could do no good by remaining, and that he would have stayed if he could have believed there was any use. Besides, the food was undermining his health, and the room with that broken window  had given him a cold already. He had a right to go, and it was his duty to himself and the friends who were helping him through the seminary not to get sick.

He did not feel that he had convinced his room-mate, who took charge of his carpet-bag and now sat with it between his feet waiting the signal of the fugitive’s surreptitious return for it. He was a vague-looking young man, presently in charge of the “Local and Literary” column of the one daily paper of the place, and he had just explained to the two other boarders who were watching with him for the event that he was not certain whether it was the supper, or the anxiety of the situation, or just what it was that was now affecting his digestion.

The fellow-boarders, who sat on the edge of the bed, in default of the one unbroken chair which their host kept for himself, as easier than a mattress to get up from suddenly, did not take sides for or against him in his theories of his discomfort. One of them glanced at the broken window.

“How do you glaze that in the daytime? You can’t use the bolster then?”

“I’m not in, much, in the daytime.”

It was a medical student who had spoken, but he was now silent, and the other said, after they  had listened to the twitter of a piano in the parlor under the room, “That girl’s playing will be the death of me.”

“Not if her mother’s cooking isn’t,” the medical student, whose name was Wallace, observed with a professional effect.

“Why don’t you prescribe something for it?” the law student suggested.

“Which?” Wallace returned.

“I don’t believe anything could cure the playing. I must have meant the cooking.”

“You’re a promising young jurist, Blakeley. What makes you think I could cure the cooking?”

“Oh, I just wondered. The sick one gets paler every day. I wonder what ails her.”

“She’s not my patient.”

“Oh! Hippocratic oath. Rather fine of you, Wallace. But if she’s not your patient—”

“Listen!” their host interrupted, sharply. After a joint silence he added: “No. It must have been the sleet.”

“Well, Briggs,” the law student said, “if it must have been the sleet, what mustn’t it have been?”

“Oh!” Briggs explained, “I thought it was Phillips. He was to throw a handful of gravel at the window.”

“And then you were to run down with his bag  and help him to make his escape from a friendless widow. Well, I don’t know that I blame him. If I didn’t owe two weeks’ board, I’d leave myself — though I hope I shouldn’t sneak away. And if Mrs. Betterson didn’t owe Wallace, here, two weeks’ board, we’d walk off together arm-in-arm at high noon. I can’t understand how he ever came to advance her the money.”

Wallace rose from the bed, and kicked each leg out to dislodge the tight trousers of the middle eighteen-fifties which had caught on the tops of his high boots. “You’re a tonguey fellow, Blakeley. But you’ll find, as you live long, that there are several things you can’t explain.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Blakeley said. “We’ll get Mrs. Betterson to take your loan for my debt, and we’ll go at once.”

“You can propose something like that before the justice of the peace in your first pettifogging case.”

“I believe Wallace likes to stay. And yet he must know from his anatomical studies, better than the animals themselves, what cuts of meat the old lady gives us. I shouldn’t be so fastidious about the cuts, if she didn’t treat them all with pork gravy. Well, I mustn’t be too hard on a lone widow that I owe board to. I don’t suppose his diet had anything to do with the deep damnation  of the late Betterson’s taking off. Does that stove of yours smoke, Briggs?”

“Not when there isn’t a fire in it.”

“I just asked. Wallace’s stove smokes, fire or no fire. It takes advantage of the old lady’s indebtedness to him. There seem,” he added, philosophically, “to be just two occupations open to widows who have to support themselves: millinery business for young ones, boarding-housing for old ones. It is rather restricted. What do you suppose she puts into the mince-pies? Mince-pies are rather a mystery at the best.”

Wallace was walking up and down the room still in some difficulty with his trousers-legs, and kicking out from time to time to dislodge them. “How long should you say Blakeley had been going on?” he asked Briggs.

“You never can tell,” Briggs responded. “I think he doesn’t know himself.”

“Well said, youthful scribe! With such listeners as you two, I could go on forever. Consider yourselves clapped jovially on the back, my gentle Briggs; I can’t get up to do it from the hollow of your bed here. As you were saying, the wonder about these elderly widows who keep boarding-houses is the domestic dilapidation they fall into. If they’ve ever known how to cook a meal or  sweep a room or make a bed, these arts desert them in the presence of their boarders. Their only aim in life seems to be preventing the escape of their victims, and they either let them get into debt for their board or borrow money from them. But why do they always have daughters, and just two of them: one beautiful, fashionable, and devoted to the piano; the other willing to work, but pale, pathetic, and incapable of the smallest achievement with the gridiron or the wash-board? It’s a thing to make a person want to pay up and leave, even if he’s reading law. If Wallace, here, had the spirit of a man, he would collect the money owing him, and—”

“Oh, stop it, Blakeley!” Wallace stormed. “I should think you’d get tired of your talk yourself.”

“Well, as you insist—”

Blakeley began again, but Briggs jumped to his feet and caught up Phillips’s carpet-bag, and looked wildly around. “It’s gravel, this time.”

“Well, take your hat, Briggs. It may be a prolonged struggle. But remember that Phillips’s cause is just. He’s paid his board, and he has a perfect right to leave. She has no right to prevent him. Think of that when the fray is at its worst. But try to get him off quietly, if you can. Deal gently with the erring, while you stand firm for boarders’ rights. Remember that Phillips is  sneaking off in order to spare her feelings and has come pretty near prevarication in the effort. Have you got your shoes off? No; it’s your rubbers on. That’s better.”

Briggs faltered with the carpet-bag in his hand. “Boys, I don’t like this. It feels — clandestine.”

“It looks that way, too,” Blakeley admitted. “It has an air of conspiracy.”

“I’ve got half a mind to let Phillips come in and get his bag himself.”

“It would serve him right, though I don’t know why, exactly. He has a right to spare his own feelings if he’s sparing hers at the same time. Of course he’s afraid she’ll plead with him to stay, and he’ll have to be inexorable with her; and if I understand the yielding nature of Phillips he doesn’t like to be inexorable.”

There came another sharp rattle of small pebbles at the window.

“Oh, confound him!” Briggs cried under his breath, and he shuffled out of the room and crept noiselessly down the stairs to the front door. The door creaked a little in opening, and he left it ajar. The current of cold air that swept up to the companions he had left behind at his room door brought them the noise of his rush down the gravel walk to the gate and a noise there as of fugitive steps on the pavement outside.

A weak female tread made itself heard in the hallway, followed by a sharp voice from a door in the rear. “Was it the cat, Jenny?”

“No; the door just seems to have blown open. The catch is broken.”

Swift, strong steps advanced with an effect of angry suspicion. “I don’t believe it blew open. More likely the cat clawed it open.”

The steps which the voice preceded seemed to halt at the open door, as if falling back from it, and Wallace and Blakeley, looking down, saw by the dim flare of the hall lamp the face of Briggs confronting the face of Mrs. Betterson from the outer darkness. They saw the sick girl, whose pallor they could not see, supporting herself by the stairs-post with one hand and pressing the other to her side.

“Oh! It’s you, Mr. Briggs,” the landlady said, with a note of inculpation. “What made you leave the door open?”

The spectators could not see the swift change in Briggs’s face from terror to savage desperation, but they noted it in his voice. “Yes — yes! It’s me. I just — I was just — No I won’t, either! You’d better know the truth. I was taking Phillips’s bag out to him. He was afraid to come in for it, because he didn’t want to see you, the confounded coward! He’s left.”

“Left? And he said he would stay till spring! Didn’t he, Jenny?”

“I don’t remember—” the girl weakly gasped, but her mother did not heed her in her mounting wrath.

“A great preacher he’ll make. What’d he say he left for?”

“He didn’t say. Will you let me up-stairs?”

“No, I won’t, till you tell me. You know well enough, between you.”

“Yes, I do know,” Briggs answered, savagely. “He left because he was tired of eating sole-leather for steak, and fire-salt pork, and tar for molasses, and butter strong enough to make your nose curl, and drinking burnt-rye slops for coffee and tea-grounds for tea. And so am I, and so are all of us, and — and — Will you let me go up-stairs now, Mrs. Betterson?”

His voice had risen, not so high but that another voice from the parlor could prevail over it: a false, silly, girl voice, with the twitter of piano-keys as from hands swept over the whole board to help drown the noise of the quarrel in the hall. “Oh yes, I’ll sing it again, Mr. Saunders, if you sa-a-a-y.”

Then this voice lifted itself in a silly song, and a silence followed the voices in the hall, except for the landlady’s saying, brokenly: “Well, all right,  Mr. Briggs. You can go up to your room for all me. I’ve tried to be a mother to you boys, but if this is what I get for it!”

The two at the threshold of Briggs’s room retreated within, as he bounded furiously upon them and slammed the door after him. It started open again, from the chronic defect of the catch, but he did not care.

“Well, Briggs, I hope you feel better now,” Blakeley began. “You certainly told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But I wonder you had the heart to do it before that sick girl.”

“I didn’t have the heart,” Briggs shouted. “But I had the courage, and if you say one word more, Blakeley, I’ll throw you out of the room. I’m going to leave! My board’s paid if yours isn’t.”

He went wildly about, catching things down here and there from nails and out of drawers. The tears stood in his eyes. But suddenly he stopped and listened to the sounds from below — the sound of the silly singing in the parlor, and the sound of sobbing in the dining-room, and the sound of vain entreating between the sobs.

“Oh, I don’t suppose I’m fit to keep a boarding-house. I never was a good manager; and everybody imposes on me, and everything is so dear,  and I don’t know what’s good from what’s bad. Your poor father used to look after all that.”

“Well, don’t you cry, now, mother! It’ll all come right, you’ll see. I’m getting so I can go and do the marketing now; and if Minervy would only help a little—”

“No, no!” the mother’s voice came anxiously up. “We can get along without her; we always have. I know he likes her, and I want to give her every chance. We can get along. If she was on’y married, once, we could all live—” A note of self-comforting gradually stole into the mother’s voice, and the sound of a nose violently blown seemed to note a period in her suffering.

“Oh, mother, I wish I was well!” The girl’s voice came with a burst of wild lamenting.

“‘Sh, ‘sh, deary!” her mother entreated. “He’ll hear you, and then—”

“‘Hazel Dell’?” the silly voice came from the parlor, with a sound of fright in it. “I can sing it without the music.” The piano keys twittered the prelude and the voice sang:

“In the Hazel Dell my Nelly’s sleeping,
Nelly loved so long!”

Wallace went forward and shut the door. “It’s a shame to overhear them! What are you going to do, you fellows?”

“I’m going to stay,” Briggs said, “if it kills me. At least I will till Minervy’s married. I don’t care what the grub’s like. I can always get a bite at the restaurant.”

“If anybody will pay up my back board, I’ll stay, too,” Blakeley followed. “I should like to make a virtue of it, and, as things stand, I can’t.”

“All right,” Wallace said, and he went out and down the stairs. Then from the dining-room below his heavy voice offering encouragement came up, in terms which the others could not make out.

“I’ll bet he’s making her another advance,” Blakeley whispered, as if he might be overheard by Wallace.

“I wish I could have made to do it,” Briggs whispered back. “I feel as mean as pursley. Would you like to kick me?”

“I don’t see how that would do any good. I may want to borrow money of you, and you can’t ask a loan from a man you’ve kicked. Besides, I think what you said may do her good.”

BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL

I

Breakfast is my best meal, and I reckon it’s always been
Ever since I was old enough to know what breakfast could mean.
I mind when we lived in the cabin out on the Illinoy,
Where father had took up a quarter-section when I was a boy,
I used to go for the cows as soon as it was light;
And when I started back home, before I come in sight,
I come in smell of the cabin, where mother was frying the ham,
And boiling the coffee, that reached through the air like a mile o’ ba’m,
 ‘N’ I bet you I didn’t wait to see what it was that the dog
Thought he’d got under the stump or inside o’ the hollow log!
But I made the old cows canter till their hoof-joints cracked — you know
That dry, funny kind of a noise that the cows make when they go —
And I never stopped to wash when I got to the cabin door;
I pulled up my chair and e’t like I never had e’t before.
And mother she set there and watched me eat, and eat, and eat,
Like as if she couldn’t give her old eyes enough of the treat;
And she split the shortened biscuit, and spread the butter between,
And let it lay there and melt, and soak and soak itself in;
And she piled up my plate with potato and ham and eggs,
Till I couldn’t hold any more, or hardly stand on my legs;
And she filled me up with coffee that would float an iron wedge,
And never give way a mite, or spill a drop at the edge.

II

What? Well, yes, this is good coffee, too. If they don’t know much,
They do know how to make coffee, I will say that for these Dutch.
But my — oh, my! It ain’t the kind of coffee my mother made,
And the coffee my wife used to make would throw it clear in the shade;
And the brand of sugar-cured, canvased ham that she always used —
Well, this Westphalia stuff would simply have made her amused!
That so, heigh? I saw that you was United States as soon
As ever I heard you talk; I reckon I know the tune!
Pick it out anywhere; and you understand how I feel
About these here foreign breakfasts: breakfast is my best meal.

III

My! but my wife was a cook; and the breakfasts she used to get
The first years we was married, I can smell ’em and taste ’em yet:
 Corn cake light as a feather, and buckwheat thin as lace
And crisp as cracklin’; and steak that you couldn’t have the face
To compare any steak over here to; and chicken fried
Maryland style — I couldn’t get through the bill if I tried.
And then, her waffles! My! She’d kind of slip in a few
Between the ham and the chicken — you know how women’ll do —
For a sort of little surprise, and, if I was running light,
To take my fancy and give an edge to my appetite.
Done it all herself as long as we was poor, and I tell you
She liked to see me eat as well as mother used to do;
I reckon she went ahead of mother some, if the truth was known,
And everything she touched she give a taste of her own.

IV

She was a cook, I can tell you! And after we got ahead,
And she could ‘a’ had a girl to do the cookin’ instead,
 I had the greatest time to get Momma to leave the work;
She said it made her feel like a mis’able sneak and shirk.
She didn’t want daughter, though, when we did begin to keep girls,
To come in the kitchen and cook, and smell up her clo’es and curls;
But you couldn’t have stopped the child, whatever you tried to do —
I reckon the gift of the cookin’ was born in Girly, too.
Cook she would from the first, and we just had to let her alone;
And after she got married, and had a house of her own,
She tried to make me feel, when I come to live with her,
Like it was my house, too; and I tell you she done it, sir!
She remembered that breakfast was my best meal, and she tried
To have all I used to have, and a good deal more beside;
Grape-fruit to begin with, or melons or peaches, at least —
Husband’s business took him there, and they had went to live East —
 Then a Spanish macker’l, or a soft-shell crab on toast,
Or a broiled live lobster! Well, sir, I don’t want to seem to boast,
But I don’t believe you could have got in the whole of New York
Any such an oyster fry or sausage of country pork.

V

Well, I don’t know what-all it means; I always lived just so —
Never drinked or smoked, and yet, here about two years ago,
I begun to run down; I ain’t as young as I used to be;
And the doctors all said Carlsbad, and I reckon this is me.
But it’s more like some one I’ve dreamt of, with all three of ’em gone!
Believe in ghosts? Well, I do. I know there are ghosts. I’m one.
Maybe I mayn’t look it — I was always inclined to fat;
The doctors say that’s the trouble, and very likely it’s that.
This is my little grandson, and this is the oldest one
Of Girly’s girls; and for all that the whole of us said and done,
 She must come with grandpa when the doctors sent me off here,
To see that they didn’t starve him. Ain’t that about so, my dear?
She can cook, I tell you; and when we get home again
We’re goin’ to have something to eat; I’m just a-livin’ till then.
But when I set here of a morning, and think of them that’s gone —
Mother and Momma and Girly — well, I wouldn’t like to let on
Before the children, but I can almost seem to see
All of ’em lookin’ down, like as if they pitied me,
After the breakfasts they give me, to have me have to put up
With nothing but bread and butter, and a little mis’able cup
Of this here weak-kneed coffee! I can’t tell how you feel,
But it fairly makes me sick! Breakfast is my best meal.

THE MOTHER-BIRD

She wore around the turned-up brim of her bolero-like toque a band of violets not so much in keeping with the gray of the austere November day as with the blue of her faded autumnal eyes. Her eyes were autumnal, but it was not from this, or from the lines of maturity graven on the passing prettiness of her little face, that the notion and the name of Mother-Bird suggested itself. She became known as the Mother-Bird to the tender ironic fancy of the earliest, if not the latest, of her friends, because she was slight and small, and like a bird in her eager movements, and because she spoke so instantly and so constantly of her children in Dresden: before you knew anything else of her you knew that she was going out to them.

She was quite alone, and she gave the sense of claiming their protection, and sheltering herself in the fact of them. When she mentioned her  daughters she had the effect of feeling herself chaperoned by them. You could not go behind them and find her wanting in the social guarantees which women on steamers, if not men, exact of lonely birds of passage who are not mother-birds. One must respect the convention by which she safeguarded herself and tried to make good her standing; yet it did not lastingly avail her with other birds of passage, so far as they were themselves mother-birds, or sometimes only maiden-birds. The day had not ended before they began to hold her off by slight liftings of their wings and rufflings of their feathers, by quick, evasive flutterings, by subtle ignorances of her approach, which convinced no one but themselves that they had not seen her. She sailed with the sort of acquaintance-in-common which every one shares on a ship leaving port, when people are confused by the kindness of friends coming to see them off after sending baskets of fruit and sheaves of flowers, and scarcely know what they are doing or saying. But when the ship was abreast of Fire Island, and the pilot had gone over the side, these provisional intimacies of the parting hour began to restrict themselves. Then the Mother-Bird did not know half the women she had known at the pier, or quite all the men.

It was not that she did anything obvious to  forfeit this knowledge. Her behavior was if anything too exemplary; it might be thought to form a reproach to others. Perhaps it was the unseasonable band of violets around her hat-brim; perhaps it was the vernal gaiety of her dress; perhaps it was the uncertainty of her anxious eyes, which presumed while they implored. A mother-bird must not hover too confidently, too appealingly, near coveys whose preoccupations she does not share. It might have been her looking and dressing younger than nature justified; at forty one must not look thirty; in November one must not, even involuntarily, wear the things of May if one would have others believe in one’s devotion to one’s children in Dresden; one alleges in vain one’s impatience to join them as grounds for joining groups or detached persons who have begun to write home to their children in New York or Boston.

The very readiness of the Mother-Bird to give security by the mention of well-known names, to offer proof of her social solvency by the eager correctness of her behavior, created reluctance around her. Some would not have her at all from the first; others, who had partially or conditionally accepted her, returned her upon her hands and withdrew from the negotiation. More and more she found herself outside that hard  woman-world, and trying less and less to beat her way into it.

The women may have known her better even than she knew herself, and it may have been through ignorance greater than her own that the men were more acquiescent. But the men too were not so acquiescent, or not at all, as time passed.

It would be hard to fix the day, the hour, far harder the moment, when the Mother-Bird began to disappear from the drawing-room and to appear in the smoking-room, or say whether she passed from the one to the other in a voluntary exile or by the rigor of the women’s unwritten law. Still, from time to time she was seen in their part of the ship, after she was also seen where the band of violets showed strange and sad through veils of smoke that were not dense enough to hide her poor, pretty little face, with its faded blue eyes and wistful mouth. There she passed by quick transition from the conversation of the graver elderly smokers to the loud laughter of two birds of prey who became her comrades, or such friends as birds like them can be to birds like her.

From anything she had said or done there was no reason for her lapse from the women and the better men to such men; for her transition from  the better sort of women there was no reason except that it happened. Whether she attached herself to the birds of prey, or they to her, by that instinct which enables birds of all kinds to know themselves of a feather remained a touching question.

There remained to the end the question whether she was of a feather with them, or whether it was by some mischance, or by some such stress of the elements as drives birds of any feather to flock with birds of any other. To the end there remained a distracted and forsaken innocence in her looks. It was imaginable that she had made overtures to the birds of prey because she had made overtures to every one else; she was always seeking rather than sought, and her acceptance with them was as deplorable as her refusal by better birds. Often they were seen without her, when they had that look of having escaped, which others wore; but she was not often seen without them.

There is not much walking-weather on a November passage, and she was seen less with them in the early dark outdoors than in the late light within, by which she wavered a small form through the haze of their cigars in the smoking-room, or in the grill-room, where she showed in faint eclipse through the fumes of the broiling and frying, or  through the vapors of the hot whiskies. The birds of prey were then heard laughing, but whether at her or with her it must have been equally sorrowful to learn.

Perhaps they were laughing at the maternal fondness which she had used for introduction to the general acquaintance lost almost in the moment of winning it. She seemed not to resent their laughter, though she seemed not to join in it. The worst of her was the company she kept; but since no better would allow her to keep it, you could not confidently say she would not have liked the best company on board. At the same time you could not have said she would; you could not have been sure it would not have bored her. Doubtless these results are not solely the sport of chance; they must be somewhat the event of choice if not of desert.

For anything you could have sworn, the Mother-Bird would have liked to be as good as the best. But since it was not possible for her to be good in the society of the best, she could only be good in that of the worst. It was to be hoped that the birds of prey were not cruel to her; that their mockery was never unkind if ever it was mockery. The cruelty which must come came when they began to be seen less and less with her, even at the late suppers, through the haze of their cigars  and the smoke of the broiling and frying, and the vapors of the hot whiskies. Then it was the sharpest pang of all to meet her wandering up and down the ship’s promenades, or leaning on the rail and looking dimly out over the foam-whitened black sea. It is the necessity of birds of prey to get rid of other birds when they are tired of them, and it had doubtless come to that.

One night, the night before getting into port, when the curiosity which always followed her with grief failed of her in the heightened hilarity of the smoking-room, where the last bets on the ship’s run were making, it found her alone beside a little iron table, of those set in certain nooks outside the grill-room. There she sat with no one near, where the light from within fell palely upon her. The boon birds of prey, with whom she had been supping, had abandoned her, and she was supporting her cheek on the small hand of the arm that rested on the table. She leaned forward, and swayed with the swaying ship; the violets in her bolero-toque quivered with the vibrations of the machinery. She was asleep, poor Mother-Bird, and it would have been impossible not to wish her dreams were kind.

THE AMIGO

His name was really Perez Armando Aldeano, but in the end everybody called him the amigo, because that was the endearing term by which he saluted all the world. There was a time when the children called him “Span-yard” in their games, for he spoke no tongue but Spanish, and though he came from Ecuador, and was no more a Spaniard than they were English, he answered to the call of “Span-yard!” whenever he heard it. He came eagerly in the hope of fun, and all the more eagerly if there was a hope of mischief in the fun. Still, to discerning spirits, he was always the amigo, for, when he hailed you so, you could not help hailing him so again, and whatever mock he put upon you afterward, you were his secret and inalienable friend.

The moment of my own acceptance in this quality came in the first hours of expansion following our getting to sea after long detention in  the dock by fog. A small figure came flying down the dock with outspread arms, and a joyful cry of “Ah, amigo!” as if we were now meeting unexpectedly after a former intimacy in Bogotá; and the amigo clasped me round the middle to his bosom, or more strictly speaking, his brow, which he plunged into my waistcoat. He was clad in a long black overcoat, and a boy’s knee-pants, and under the peak of his cap twinkled the merriest black eyes that ever lighted up a smiling face of olive hue. Thereafter, he was more and more, with the thinness of his small black legs, and his habit of hopping up and down, and dancing threateningly about, with mischief latent in every motion, like a crow which in being tamed has acquired one of the worst traits of civilization. He began babbling and gurgling in Spanish, and took my hand for a stroll about the ship, and from that time we were, with certain crises of disaffection, firm allies.

There were others whom he hailed and adopted his friends, whose legs he clung about and impeded in their walks, or whom he required to toss him into the air as they passed, but I flattered myself that he had a peculiar, because a primary, esteem for myself. I have thought it might be that, Bogotá being said to be a very literary capital, as those things go in South America, he  was mystically aware of a common ground between us, wider and deeper than that of his other friendships. But it may have been somewhat owing to my inviting him to my cabin to choose such portion as he would of a lady-cake sent us on shipboard at the last hour. He prattled and chuckled over it in the soft gutturals of his parrot-like Spanish, and rushed up on deck to eat the frosting off in the presence of his small companions, and to exult before them in the exploitation of a novel pleasure. Yet it could not have been the lady-cake which lastingly endeared me to him, for by the next day he had learned prudence and refused it without withdrawing his amity.

This, indeed, was always tempered by what seemed a constitutional irony, and he did not impart it to any one without some time making his friend feel the edge of his practical humor. It was not long before the children whom he gathered to his heart had each and all suffered some fall or bump or bruise which, if not of his intention, was of his infliction, and which was regretted with such winning archness that the very mothers of them could not resist him, and his victims dried their tears to follow him with glad cries of “Span-yard, Span-yard!” Injury at his hands was a favor; neglect was the only real grievance. He  went about rolling his small black head, and darting roguish lightnings from under his thick-fringed eyes, and making more trouble with a more enticing gaiety than all the other people on the ship put together.

The truth must be owned that the time came, long before the end of the voyage, when it was felt that in the interest of the common welfare, something must be done about the amigo. At the conversational end of the doctor’s table, where he was discussed whenever the racks were not on, and the talk might have languished without their inspiration, his badness was debated at every meal. Some declared him the worst boy in the world, and held against his half-hearted defenders that something ought to be done about him; and one was left to imagine all the darker fate for him because there was nothing specific in these convictions. He could not be thrown overboard, and if he had been put in irons probably his worst enemies at the conversational end of the table would have been the first to intercede for him. It is not certain, however, that their prayers would have been effective with the captain, if that officer, framed for comfort as well as command, could have known how accurately the amigo had dramatized his personal presence by throwing himself back, and clasping his hands a  foot in front of his small stomach, and making a few tilting paces forward.

The amigo had a mimic gift which he liked to exercise when he could find no intelligible language for the expression of his ironic spirit. Being forbidden visits in and out of season to certain staterooms whose inmates feigned a wish to sleep, he represented in what grotesque attitudes of sonorous slumber they passed their day, and he spared neither age nor sex in these graphic shows. When age refused one day to go up on deck with him and pleaded in such Spanish as it could pluck up from its past studies that it was too old, he laughed it to scorn. “You are not old,” he said. “Why?” the flattered dotard inquired. “Because you smile,” and that seemed reason enough for one’s continued youth. It was then that the amigo gave his own age, carefully telling the Spanish numerals over, and explaining further by holding up both hands with one finger shut in. But he had the subtlety of centuries in his nine years, and he penetrated the ship everywhere with his arch spirit of mischief. It was mischief always in the interest of the good-fellowship which he offered impartially to old and young; and if it were mere frolic, with no ulterior object, he did not care at all how old or young his playmate was. This endeared him naturally to every age; and  the little blond German-American boy dried his tears from the last accident inflicted on him by the amigo to recall him by tender entreaties of “Span-yard, Span-yard!” while the eldest of his friends could not hold out against him more than two days in the strained relations following upon the amigo’s sweeping him down the back with a toy broom employed by the German-American boy to scrub the scuppers. This was not so much an injury as an indignity, but it was resented as an indignity, in spite of many demure glances of propitiation from the amigo’s ironical eyes and murmurs of inarticulate apology as he passed.

He was, up to a certain point, the kindest and truest of amigos; then his weird seizure came, and the baby was spilled out of the carriage he had been so benevolently pushing up and down; or the second officer’s legs, as he walked past with the prettiest girl on board, were hit with the stick that the amigo had been innocently playing shuffle-board with; or some passenger was taken unawares in his vanity or infirmity and made to contribute to the amigo’s passion for active amusement.

At this point I ought to explain that the amigo was not traveling alone from Ecuador to Paris, where it was said he was to rejoin his father. At meal-times, and at other rare intervals, he was  seen to be in the charge of a very dark and very silent little man, with intensely black eyes and mustache, clad in raven hues from his head to the delicate feet on which he wore patent-leather shoes. With him the amigo walked gravely up and down the deck, and behaved decorously at table; and we could not reconcile the apparent affection between the two with a theory we had that the amigo had been found impossible in his own country, and had been sent out of Ecuador by a decree of the government, or perhaps a vote of the whole people. The little, dark, silent man, in his patent-leather boots, had not the air of conveying a state prisoner into exile, and we wondered in vain what the tie between him and the amigo was. He might have been his tutor, or his uncle. He exercised a quite mystical control over the amigo, who was exactly obedient to him in everything, and would not look aside at you when in his keeping. We reflected with awe and pathos that, as they roomed together, it was his privilege to see the amigo asleep, when that little, very kissable black head rested innocently on the pillow, and the busy brain within it was at peace with the world which formed its pleasure and its prey in waking.

It would be idle to represent that the amigo played his pranks upon that shipload of long-suffering  people with final impunity. The time came when they not only said something must be done, but actually did something. It was by the hand of one of the amigo’s sweetest and kindest friends, namely, that elderly captain, off duty, who was going out to be assigned his ship in Hamburg. From the first he had shown the affectionate tenderness for the amigo which was felt by all except some obdurate hearts at the conversational end of the table; and it must have been with a loving interest in the amigo’s ultimate well-being that, taking him in an ecstasy of mischief, he drew the amigo face downward across his knees, and bestowed the chastisement which was morally a caress. He dismissed him with a smile in which the amigo read the good understanding that existed unimpaired between them, and accepted his correction with the same affection as that which had given it. He shook himself and ran off with an enjoyment of the joke as great as that of any of the spectators and far more generous.

In fact there was nothing mean in the amigo. Impish he was, or might be, but only in the sort of the crow or the parrot; there was no malevolence in his fine malice. One fancied him in his adolescence taking part in one of the frequent revolutions of his continent, but humorously, not  homicidally. He would like to alarm the other faction, and perhaps drive it from power, or overset it from its official place, but if he had the say there would be no bringing the vanquished out into the plaza to be shot. He may now have been on his way to France ultimately to study medicine, which seems to be preliminary to a high political career in South America; but in the mean time we feared for him in that republic of severely regulated subordinations.

We thought with pathos of our early parting with him, as we approached Plymouth and tried to be kodaked with him, considering it an honor and pleasure. He so far shared our feeling as to consent, but he insisted on wearing a pair of glasses which had large eyes painted on them, and on being taken in the act of inflating a toy balloon. Probably, therefore, the likeness would not be recognized in Bogotá, but it will always be endeared to us by the memory of the many mockeries suffered from him. There were other friends whom we left on the ship, notably those of the conversational end of the table, who thought him simply a bad boy; but there were none of such peculiar appeal as he, when he stood by the guard, opening and shutting his hand in ironical adieu, and looking smaller and smaller as our tender drifted away and the vast liner loomed  immense before us. He may have contributed to its effect of immensity by the smallness of his presence, or it may have dwarfed him. No matter; he filled no slight space in our lives while he lasted. Now that he is no longer there, was he really a bad little boy, merely and simply? Heaven knows, which alone knows good boys from bad.

BLACK CROSS FARM

(To F. S.)

After full many a mutual delay
My friend and I at last fixed on a day
For seeing Black Cross Farm, which he had long
Boasted the fittest theme for tale or song
In all that charming region round about:
Something that must not really be left out
Of the account of things to do for me.
It was a teasing bit of mystery,
He said, which he and his had tried in vain,
Ever since they had found it, to explain.
The right way was to happen, as they did,
Upon it in the hills where it was hid;
But chance could not be always trusted, quite,
You might not happen on it, though you might;
Encores were usually objected to
By chance. The next best thing that we could do
Was in his carryall, to start together,
And trust that somehow favoring wind and weather,
 With the eccentric progress of his horse,
Would so far drift us from our settled course
That we at least could lose ourselves, if not
Find the mysterious object that we sought.
So one blithe morning of the ripe July
We fared, by easy stages, toward the sky
That rested one rim of its turquoise cup
Low on the distant sea, and, tilted up,
The other on the irregular hilltops. Sweet
The sun and wind that joined to cool and heat
The air to one delicious temperature;
And over the smooth-cropt mowing-pieces pure
The pine-breath, borrowing their spicy scent
In barter for the balsam that it lent!
And when my friend handed the reins to me,
And drew a fuming match along his knee,
And, lighting his cigar, began to talk,
I let the old horse lapse into a walk
From his perfunctory trot, content to listen,
Amid that leafy rustle and that glisten
Of field, and wood, and ocean, rapt afar,
From every trouble of our anxious star.
From time to time, between effect and cause
In this or that, making a questioning pause,
My friend peered round him while he feigned a gay
Hope that we might have taken the wrong way
At the last turn, and then let me push on,
Or the old horse rather, slanting hither and yon,
 And never in the middle of the track,
Except when slanting off or slanting back.
He talked, I listened, while we wandered by
The scanty fields of wheat and oats and rye,
With patches of potatoes and of corn,
And now and then a garden spot forlorn,
Run wild where once a house had stood, or where
An empty house yet stood, and seemed to stare
Upon us blindly from the twisted glass
Of windows that once let no wayfarer pass
Unseen of children dancing at the pane,
And vanishing to reappear again,
Pulling their mother with them to the sight.
Still we kept on, with turnings left and right,
Past farmsteads grouped in cheerful neighborhoods,
Or solitary; then through shadowy woods
Of pine or birch, until the road, grass-grown,
Had given back to Nature all her own
Save a faint wheel-trace, that along the slope,
Rain-gullied, seemed to stop and doubt and grope,
And then quite ceased, as if ‘t had turned and fled
Out of the forest into which it led,
And left us at the gate whose every bar
Was nailed against us. But, “Oh, here we are!”
My friend cried joyously. “At last, at last!”
And making our horse superfluously fast,
 He led the way onward by what had been
A lane, now hid by weeds and briers between
Meadows scarce worth the mowing, to a space
Shaped as by Nature for the dwelling-place
Of kindly human life: a small plateau
Open to the heaven that seemed bending low
In liking for it. There beneath a roof
Still against winter and summer weather-proof,
With walls and doors and windows perfect yet,
Between its garden and its graveyard set,
Stood the old homestead, out of which had perished
The home whose memory it dumbly cherished,
And which, when at our push the door swung wide,
We might have well imagined to have died
And had its funeral the day before:
So clean and cold it was from floor to floor,
So lifelike and so deathlike, with the thrill
Of hours when life and death encountered still
Passionate in it. They that lay below
The tangled grasses or the drifted snow,
Husband and wife, mother and little one,
From that sad house less utterly were gone
Than they that living had abandoned it.
In moonless nights their Absences might flit,
Homesick, from room to room, or dimly sit
Around its fireless hearths, or haunt the rose
And lily in the neglected garden close;
 But they whose feet had borne them from the door
Would pass the footworn threshold nevermore.
We read the moss-grown names upon the tombs,
With lighter melancholy than the glooms
Of the dead house shadowed us with, and thence
Turning, my heart was pierced with more intense
Suggestion of a mystical dismay,
As in the brilliance of the summer day
We faced the vast gray barn. The house was old,
Though so well kept, as age by years is told
In our young land; but the barn, gray and vast,
Stood new and straight and strong — all battened fast
At every opening; and where once the mow
Had yawned wide-windowed, on the sheathing now
A Cross was nailed, the bigness of a man,
Aslant from left to right, athwart the span,
And painted black as paint could make it. Hushed,
I stood, while manifold conjecture rushed
To this point and to that point, and then burst
In the impotent questionings rejected first.
What did it mean? Ah, that no one could tell.
Who put it there? That was unknown as well.
Was there no legend? My friend knew of none.
No neighborhood story? He had sought for one
 In vain. Did he imagine it accident,
With nothing really implied or meant
By the boards set in that way? It might be,
But I could answer that as well as he.
Then (desperately) what did he guess it was:
Something of purpose, or without a cause
Other than chance? He slowly shook his head,
And with his gaze fixed on the symbol said:
“We have quite ceased from guessing or surmising,
For all our several and joint devising
Has left us finally where I must leave you.
But now I think it is your part to do
Yourself some guessing. I hoped you might bring
A fresh mind to the riddle’s unraveling.
Come!”

And thus challenged I could not deny
The sort of right he had to have me try;
And yielding, I began — instinctively
Proceeding by exclusion: “We agree
It was not put there as a pious charm
To keep the abandoned property from harm?
The owner could have been no Catholic;
And yet it was no sacrilegious trick
To make folks wonder; and it was not chance
Assuredly that set those boards askance
In that shape, or before or after, so
Painted them to that coloring of woe.
 Do you suppose, then, that it could have been
Some secret sorrow or some secret sin,
That tried to utter or to expiate
Itself in that way: some unhappy hate
Turned to remorse, or some life-rending grief
That could not find in years or tears relief?
Who lived here last?”

“Ah,” my friend made reply,
“You know as much concerning that as I.
All I could tell is what those gravestones tell,
And they have told it all to you as well.
The names, the dates, the curious epitaphs
At whose quaint phrase one either sighs or laughs,
Just as one’s heart or head happens to be
Hollow or not, are there for each to see.
But I believe they have nothing to reveal:
No wrong to publish, no shame to conceal.”

“And yet that Cross!” I turned at his reply,
Fixing the silent symbol with my eye,
Insistently. “And you consent,” I said,
“To leave the enigma uninterpreted?”

“Why, no,” he faltered, then went on: “Suppose
That some one that had known the average woes
Of human nature, finding that the load
Was overheavy for him on life’s road,
Had wished to leave some token in this Cross,
Of what had been his gain and been his loss,
 Of what had been his suffering and of what
Had also been the solace of his lot?
Whoever that unknown brother-man might be,
I think he must have been like you and me,
Who bear our Cross, and when we fail at length,
Bow down and pray to it for greater strength.”

I mused, and as I mused, I seemed to find
The fancy more and still more to my mind.

“Well, let it go at that! I think, for me,
I like that better than some tragedy
Of clearer physiognomy, which were
In being more definite the vulgarer.
For us, what, after all, would be the gain
Of making the elusive meaning plain?
I really think, if I were you and yours,
I would not lift the veil that now obscures
The appealing fact, lest I should spoil the charm
Deeding me for my own the Black Cross Farm.”

“A good suggestion! I am glad,” said he,
“We have always practised your philosophy.”

He smiled, we laughed; we sighed and turned away,
And left the mystery to the summer day
That made as if it understood, and could
Have read the riddle to us if it would:
The wide, wise sky, the clouds that on the grass
Let their vague shadows dreamlike trail and pass;
 The conscious woods, the stony meadows growing
Up to birch pastures, where we heard the lowing
Of one disconsolate cow. All the warm afternoon,
Lulled in a reverie by the myriad tune
Of insects, and the chirp of songless birds,
Forgetful of the spring-time’s lyric words,
Drowsed round us while we tried to find the lane
That to our coming feet had been so plain,
And lost ourselves among the sweetfern’s growth,
And thickets of young pine-trees, nothing loath,
Amidst the wilding loveliness to stray,
And spend, if need were, looking for the way,
Whole hours; but blundered into the right course
Suddenly, and came out upon our horse,
Where we had left him — to our great surprise,
Stamping and switching at the pestering flies,
But not apparently anxious to depart,
When nearly overturning at the start,
We followed down that evanescent trace
Which, followed up, had brought us to the place.

Then, all the wayside scenes reversing, we
Dropped to the glimpses of the distant sea,
Content as if we brought, returning thus,
The secret of the Black Cross back with us.

THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE

It had long been the notion of Frederick Erlcort, who held it playfully, held it seriously, according to the company he was in, that there might be a censorship of taste and conscience in literary matters strictly affiliated with the retail commerce in books. When he first began to propose it, playfully, seriously, as his listener chose, he said that he had noticed how in the great department stores where nearly everything to supply human need was sold, the shopmen and shopwomen seemed instructed by the ownership or the management to deal in absolute good faith with the customers, and not to misrepresent the quality, the make, or the material of any article in the slightest degree. A thing was not to be called silk or wool when it was partly cotton; it was not to be said that it would wash when it would not wash, or that the color would not come off when it would come off, or that the stuff was English or French when it was American.

When Erlcort once noted his interest in the fact to a floor-walker whom he happened to find at leisure, the floor-walker said, Yes, that was so; and the house did it because it was business, good business, the only good business. He was instantly enthusiastic, and he said that just in the same way, as an extension of its good faith with the public, the house had established the rule of taking back any article which a customer did not like, or did not find what she had supposed when she got it home, and refunding the money. This was the best sort of business; it held custom; the woman became a customer for life. The floor-walker laughed, and after he had told an anxious applicant, “Second aisle to the left, lady; three counters back,” he concluded to Erlcort, “I say she because a man never brings a thing back when he’s made a mistake; but a woman can always blame it on the house. That so?”

Erlcort laughed with him, and in going out he stopped at the book-counter. Rather it was a bookstore, and no small one, with ranks of new books covering the large tables and mounting to their level from the floor, neatly piled, and with shelves of complete editions and soberer-looking volumes stretching along the wall as high as the ceiling. “Do you happen to have a good book — a book that would read good, I mean — in your  stock here?” he asked the neat blonde behind the literary barricade.

“Well, here’s a book that a good many are reading,” she answered, with prompt interest and a smile that told in the book’s favor; it was a protectingly filial and guardedly ladylike smile.

“Yes, but is it a book worth reading — worth the money?”

“Well, I don’t know as I’m a judge,” the kind little blonde replied. She added, daringly, “All I can say is, I set up till two last night to finish it.”

“And you advise me to buy it?”

“Well, we’re not allowed to do that, exactly. I can only tell you what I know.”

“But if I take it, and it isn’t what I expected, I can return it and get my money back?”

“That’s something I never was asked before. Mr. Jeffers! Mr. Jeffers!” she called to a floor-walker passing near; and when he stopped and came up to the counter, she put the case to him.

He took the book from Erlcort’s hand and examined the outside of it curiously if not critically. Then he looked from it to Erlcort, and said, “Oh, how do you do again! Well, no, sir; I don’t know as we could do that. You see, you would have to read it to find out that you didn’t want it, and that would be like using or wearing an article,  wouldn’t it? We couldn’t take back a thing that had been used or worn — heigh?”

“But you might have some means of knowing whether a book is good or not?”

“Well, yes, we might. That’s a point we have never had raised before. Miss Prittiman, haven’t we any means of knowing whether a book’s something we can guarantee or not?”

“Well, Mr. Jeffers, there’s the publisher’s advertisement.”

“Why, yes, so there is! And a respectable publisher wouldn’t indorse a book that wasn’t the genuine article, would he now, sir?”

“He mightn’t,” Erlcort said, as if he felt the force of the argument.

“And there are the notices in the newspapers. They ought to tell,” Miss Prittiman added, more convincingly. “I don’t know,” she said, as from a sensitive conscience, “whether there have been any about this book yet, but I should think there would be.”

“And in the mean time, as you won’t guarantee the book so that I can bring it back and get my money if I find it worthless, I must accept the publisher’s word?” Erlcort pressed further.

“I should think you could do that,” the floor-walker suggested, with the appearance of being tired.

“Well, I think I will, for once,” Erlcort relented. “But wait! What does the publisher say?”

“It’s all printed on this slip inside,” the blonde said, and she showed it as she took the book from him. “Shall I send it? Or will you—”

“No, no, thank you, I’ll take it with me. Let me—”

He kept the printed slip and began to read it. The blonde wrapped the book up and laid it with a half-dollar in change on the counter before Erlcort. The floor-walker went away; Erlcort heard him saying, “No, madam; toys on the fifth floor, at the extreme rear, left,” while he lost himself in the glowing promises of the publisher. It appeared that the book he had just bought was by a perfectly new author, an old lady of seventy who had never written a novel before, and might therefore be trusted for an entire freshness of thought and feeling. The plot was of a gripping intensity; the characters were painted with large, bold strokes, and were of an unexampled virility; the story was packed with passion from cover to cover; and the reader would be held breathless by the author’s skill in working from the tragic conditions to an all-round happy conclusion.

From time to time Erlcort heard the gentle blonde saying such things as, “Oh yes; it’s the best-seller, all right,” and, “All I can say is I set  up till two o’clock in the morning to finish it,” and, “Yes, ma’am; it’s by a new writer; a very old lady of seventy who is just beginning to write; well, that’s what I heard.”

On his way up-town in the Subway he clung to the wonted strap, unsupported by anything in the romance which he had bought; and yet he could not take the book back and get his money, or even exchange it for some article of neckwear or footwear. In his extremity he thought he would try giving it to the trainman just before he reached his stop.

“You want to give it to me? Well, that’s something that never happened to me on this line before. I guess my wife will like it. I — 1009th Street! Change for East Brooklyn and the Bronx!” the guard shouted, and he let Erlcort out of the car, the very first of the tide that spilled itself forth at the station. He called after him, “Do as much for you some time.”

The incident first amused Erlcort, and then it began to trouble him; but he appeased his remorse by toying with his old notion of a critical bookstore. His mind was still at play with it when he stopped at the bell-pull of an elderly girl of his acquaintance who had a studio ten stories above, and the habit of giving him afternoon tea in it if he called there about five o’clock. She  had her ugly painting-apron still on, and her thumb through the hole in her palette, when she opened her door to him.

“Too soon?” he asked.

She answered as well as she could with the brush held horizontally in her mouth while she glared inhospitably at him. “Well, not much,” and then she let him in, and went and lighted her spirit-lamp.

He began at once to tell her of his strange experience, and went on till she said: “Well, there’s your tea. I don’t know what you’ve been driving at, but I suppose you do. Is it the old thing?”

“It’s my critical bookstore, if that’s what you call the old thing.”

“Oh! That! I thought it had failed ‘way back in the dark ages.”

“The dark ages are not back, please; they’re all ‘round, and you know very well that my critical bookstore has never been tried yet. But tell me one thing: should you wish to live with a picture, even for a few hours, which had been painted by an old lady of seventy who had never tried to paint before?”

“If I intended to go crazy, yes. What has all that got to do with it?”

“That’s the joint commendation of the publisher and the kind little blonde who united to sell me  the book I just gave to that poor Subway trainman. Do you ever buy a new book?”

“No; I always borrow an old one.”

“But if you had to buy a new one, wouldn’t you like to know of a place where you could be sure of getting a good one?”

“I shouldn’t mind. Or, yes, I should, rather. Where’s it to be?”

“Oh, I know. I’ve had my eye on the place for a good while. It’s a funny old place in Sixth Avenue—”

“Sixth Avenue!”

“Don’t interrupt — where the dearest old codger in the world is just going out of the house-furnishing business in a small way. It’s kept getting smaller and smaller — I’ve watched it shrink — till now it can’t stand up against the big shops, and the old codger told me the other day that it was no use.”

“Poor fellow!”

“No. He’s not badly off, and he’s going back up-state where he came from about forty years ago, and he can live — or die — very well on what he’s put by. I’ve known him rather a good while, and we’ve been friends ever since we’ve been acquainted.”

“Go on,” the elderly girl said.

Erlcort was not stopping, but she spoke so as  to close her mouth, which she was apt to let hang open in a way that she did not like; she had her intimates pledged to tell her when she was doing it, but she could not make a man promise, and she had to look after her mouth herself with Erlcort. It was not a bad mouth; her eyes were large, and it was merely large to match them.

“When shall you begin — open shop?” she asked.

“My old codger’s lease expires in the fall,” he answered, “but he would be glad to have me take it off his hands this spring. I could give the summer to changing and decorating, and begin my campaign in the fall — the first of October, say. Wouldn’t you like to come some day and see the old place?”

“I should love it. But you’re not supposing I shall be of the least use, I hope? I’m not decorational, you know. Easel pictures, and small ones at that.”

“Of course. But you are a woman, and have ideas of the cozy. I mean that the place shall be made attractive.”

“Do you think the situation will be — on Sixth Avenue?”

“It will be quaint. It’s in a retarded region of low buildings, with a carpenter’s shop two doors off. The L roars overhead and the surface cars  squeal before, but that is New York, you know, and it’s very central. Besides, at the back of the shop, with the front door shut, it is very quiet.”

The next day the friends lunched together at an Italian restaurant very near the place, and rather hurried themselves away to the old codger’s store.

“He is a dear,” Margaret whispered to Erlcort in following him about to see the advantages of the place.

“Oh, mine’s setting-hen’s time,” he justified his hospitality in finally asking them to take seats on a nail-keg apiece. “You mustn’t think you’re interruptin’. Look ‘round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.”

“That would be a good motto for your bookstore,” she screamed to Erlcort, when they got out into the roar of the avenue. “‘Look ‘round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.’ Wasn’t he sweet? And I don’t wonder you’re taken with the place: it has such capabilities. You might as well begin imagining how you will arrange it.”

They were walking involuntarily up the avenue, and when they came to the Park they went into it, and in the excitement of their planning they went as far as the Ramble, where they sat down on a bench and disappointed some squirrels who supposed they had brought peanuts with them.

They decided that the front of the shop should be elaborately simple; perhaps the door should be painted black, with a small-paned sash and a heavy brass latch. On each side should be a small-paned show-window, with books laid inside on an inclined shelving; on the door should be a modest bronze plate, reading, “The Critical Bookstore.” They rejected shop as an affectation, and they hooted the notion of “Ye Critical Bookstore” as altogether loathsome. The door and window would be in a rather belated taste, but the beautiful is never out of date, and black paint and small panes might be found rococo in their old-fashionedness now. There should be a fireplace, or perhaps a Franklin stove, at the rear of the room, with a high-shouldered, small-paned sash on each side letting in the light from the yard of the carpenter-shop. On the chimneypiece should be lettered, “Look ‘round all ye want to, or set down and rest ye.”

The genius of the place should be a refined hospitality, such as the gentle old codger had practised with them, and to facilitate this there should be a pair of high-backed settles, one under each window. The book-counter should stretch the whole length of the store, and at intervals beside it, against the book-shelving, should be set old-fashioned chairs, but not too old-fashioned.  Against the lower book-shelves on a deeper shelf might be stood against the books a few sketches in water-color, or even oil.

This was Margaret Green’s idea.

“And would you guarantee the quality?” Erlcort asked.

“Perhaps they wouldn’t be for sale, though if any one insisted—”

“I see. Well, pass the sketches. What else?”

“Well, a few little figures in plaster, or even marble or bronze, very Greek, or very American; things in low relief.”

“Pass the little figures and low reliefs. But don’t forget it’s a bookstore.”

“Oh, I won’t. The sketches of all kinds would be strictly subordinated to the books. If I had a tea-room handy here, with a table and the backs of some menus to draw on, I could show you just how it would look.”

“What’s the matter with the Casino?”

“Nothing; only it’s rather early for tea yet.”

“It isn’t for soda-lemonade.”

She set him the example of instantly rising, and led the way back along the lake to the Casino, resting at that afternoon hour among its spring flowers and blossoms innocent of its lurid after-dark frequentation. He got some paper from the waiter who came to take their order. She began  to draw rapidly, and by the time the waiter came again she was giving Erlcort the last scrap of paper.

“Well,” he said, “I had no idea that I had imagined anything so charming! If this critical bookstore doesn’t succeed, it’ll be because there are no critics. But what — what are these little things hung against the partitions of the shelves?”

“Oh — mirrors. Little round ones.”

“But why mirrors of any shape?”

“Nothing; only people like to see themselves in a glass of any shape. And when,” Margaret added, in a burst of candor, “a woman looks up and sees herself with a book in her hand, she will feel so intellectual she will never put it down. She will buy it.”

“Margaret Green, this is immoral. Strike out those mirrors, or I will smash them every one!”

“Oh, very well!” she said, and she rubbed them out with the top of her pencil. “If you want your place a howling wilderness.”

He looked at the ruin her rubber had wrought. “They were rather nice. Could — could you rub them in again?”

“Not if I tried a hundred years. Besides, they were rather impudent. What time is it?”

“No time at all. It’s half-past three.”

“Dear me! I must be going. And if you’re  really going to start that precious critical bookstore in the fall, you must begin work on it right away.”

“Work?”

“Reading up for it. If you’re going to guarantee the books, you must know what’s in them, mustn’t you?”

He realized that he must do what she said; he must know from his own knowledge what was in the books he offered for sale, and he began reading, or reading at, the new books immediately. He was a good deal occupied by day with the arrangement of his store, though he left it mainly with the lively young decorator who undertook for a lump sum to realize Margaret Green’s ideas. It was at night that he did most of his reading in the spring books which the publishers were willing to send him gratis, when they understood he was going to open a bookstore, and only wanted sample copies. As long as she remained in town Margaret Green helped him read, and they talked the books over, and mostly rejected them. By the time she went to Europe in August with another elderly girl they had not chosen more than eight or ten books; but they hoped for better things in the fall.

Word of what he was doing had gone out from Margaret, and a great many women of their rather  esthetic circle began writing to him about the books they were reading, and commending them to him or warning him against them. The circle of his volunteer associates enlarged itself in the nature of an endless chain, and before society quite broke up for the summer a Sympathetic Tea was offered to Erlcort by a Leading Society Woman at the Intellectual Club, where he was invited to address the Intellectuals in explanation of his project. This was before Margaret sailed, and he hurried to her in horror.

“Why, of course you must accept. You’re not going to hide your Critical Bookstore under a bushel; you can’t have too much publicity.”

The Leading Society Woman flowed in fulsome gratitude at his acceptance, and promised no one but the club should be there; he had hinted his reluctance. She kept her promise, but among the Intellectuals there was a girl who was a just beginning journalist, and who pumped Erlcort’s whole scheme out of him, unsuspicious of what she was doing, till he saw it all, with his picture, in the Sunday Supplement. She rightly judged that the intimacy of an interview would be more popular with her readers than the cold and distant report of his formal address, which she must give, though she received it so ardently with all the other Intellectuals. They flocked flatteringly,  almost suffocatingly, around him at the end. His scheme was just what every one had vaguely thought of: something must be done to stem the tide of worthless fiction, which was so often shocking as well as silly, and they would only be too glad to help read for him. They were nearly all just going to sail, but they would each take a spring book on the ship, and write him about it from the other side; they would each get a fall book coming home, and report as soon as they got back.

His scheme was discussed seriously and satirically by the press; it became a joke with many papers, and a byword quickly worn out, so that people thought that it had been dropped. But Erlcort gave his days and nights to preparation for his autumnal campaign. He studied in careful comparison the reviews of the different literary authorities, and was a little surprised to find, when he came to read the books they reviewed, how honest and adequate they often were. He was obliged to own to himself that if people were guided by them, few worthless books would be sold, and he decided that the immense majority of the book-buyers were not guided by the critics. The publishers themselves seemed not so much to blame when he went to see them and explained his wish to deal with them on the basis of a critical  bookseller. They said they wished all the booksellers were like him, for they would ask nothing better than to publish only good books. The trouble, they said, lay with the authors; they wrote such worthless books. Or if now and then one of them did write a good book and they were over-tempted to publish it, the public united in refusing to buy it. So he saw? But if the booksellers persisted in selling none but good books, perhaps something might be done. At any rate they would like to see the experiment tried.

Erlcort felt obliged to read the books suggested to him by the endless chain of readers who volunteered to read for him, on both sides of the ocean, or going and coming on the ocean. Mostly the books they praised were abject rubbish, but it took time to find this out, and he formed the habit of reading far into the night, and if he was very much vexed at discovering that the book recommended to him was trash, he could not sleep unless he took veronal, and then he had a ghastly next day.

He did not go out of town except for a few brief sojourns at places where he knew cultivated people were staying, and could give him their opinions of the books he was reading. When the publishers began, as they had agreed, to send him their advance sheets, the stitched but unbound  volumes roused so much interest by the novelty of their form that his readers could not give an undivided attention to their contents. He foresaw that in the end he should have to rely upon the taste of mercenaries in his warfare against rubbish, and more and more he found it necessary to expend himself in it, to read at second hand as well as at first. His greatest relief was in returning to town and watching the magical changes which the decorator was working in his store. This was consolation, this was inspiration, but he longed for the return of Margaret Green, that she might help him enjoy the realization of her ideas in the equipment of the place; and he held the decorator to the most slavish obedience through the carpenters and painters who created at his bidding a miraculous interior, all white, or just off-white, such as had never been imagined of a bookstore in New York before. It was actually ready by the end of August, though smelling a little of turpentine still, and Erlcort, letting himself in at the small-paned black door, and ranging up and down the long, beautiful room, and round and round the central book-table, and in and out between the side tables, under the soft, bright shelving of the walls, could hardly wait the arrival of the Minnedingdong in which the elderly girl had taken her passage back. One day, ten days  ahead of time, she blew in at the front door in a paroxysm of explanation; she had swapped passages home with another girl who wanted to come back later, while she herself wanted to come back earlier. She had no very convincing reason for this as she gave it, but Erlcort did not listen to her reason, whatever it was. He said, between the raptures with the place that she fell in and out of, that now she was just in time for the furnishing, which he never could have dared to undertake alone.

In the gay September weather they visited all the antiquity shops in Fourth Avenue, and then threw themselves frankly upon reproductions, which they bought in the native wood and ordered painted, the settles and the spindle-backed chairs in the cool gray which she decided was the thing. In the same spirit they bought new brass fire-irons and new shovel and tongs, but all very tall and antique-looking, and then they got those little immoral mirrors, which Margaret Green attached with her own hands to the partitions of the shelving. She also got soft green silk curtains for the chimney windows and for the sash of the front door; even the front windows she curtained, but very low, so that a salesman or a saleswoman could easily reach over from the interior and get a book that any customer had seen from the outside.

One day when all this was done, and Erlcort had begun ordering in a stock of such books as he had selected to start with, she said: “You’re looking rather peakéd, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve been feeling rather peakéd, until lately, keeping awake to read and read after the volunteer readers.”

“You mean you’ve lost sleep?”

“Something like that.”

“Well, you mustn’t. How many books do you start with?”

“About twenty-five.”

“Good ones? It’s a lot, isn’t it? I didn’t suppose there were so many.”

“Well, to fill our shelves I shall have to order about a thousand of each.”

“You’ll never sell them in the world! You’ll be ruined.”

“Oh no; the publishers will take them back.”

“How nice of them! But that’s only what painters have to do when the dealers can’t sell their pictures.”

A month off, the prospect was brilliant, and when the shelves and tables were filled and the sketches and bas-reliefs were stuck about and the little immoral mirrors were hung, the place was charming. The chairs and settles were all that could be asked; Margaret Green helped put them  about; and he let her light the low fire on the hearth of the Franklin stove; he said he should not always burn hickory, but he had got twenty-four sticks for two dollars from an Italian in a cellar near by, and he meant to burn that much. She upbraided him for his extravagance while touching the match to the paper under the kindling; but October opened cold, and he needed the fire.

The enterprise seemed rather to mystify the neighborhood, and some old customers of the old codger’s came in upon one fictitious errand and another to see about it, and went away without quite making it out. It was a bookstore, all right, they owned in conference, but what did he mean by “critical”?

The first bona fide buyer appeared in a little girl who could just get her chin on the counter, and who asked for an egg-beater. Erlcort had begun with only one assistant, the young lady who typed his letters and who said she guessed she could help him when she was not working. She leaned over and tried to understand the little girl, and then she called to Erlcort where he stood with his back to the fire and the morning paper open before his face.

“Mr. Erlcort, have we got a book called The Egg-beater?”

“The Egg-beater?” he echoed, letting his paper drop below his face.

“No, no!” the little girl shouted, angrily. “It ain’t a book. It’s a thing to beat eggs with. Mother said to come here and get it.”

“Well, she’s sent you to the wrong place, little girl. You want to go to a hardware-store,” the young lady argued.

“Ain’t this No. 1232?”

“Yes.”

“Well, this is the right place. Mother said to go to 1232. I guess she knows. She’s an old customer.”

“The Egg-beater! The Egg-beater!” the blithe young novelist to whom Erlcort told the story repeated. He was still happy in his original success as a best-seller, and he had come to the Critical Bookstore to spy out the stock and see whether his last novel was in it; but though it was not, he joyously extended an acquaintance with Erlcort which had begun elsewhere. “The Egg-beater? What a splendid title for a story of adventure! Keep the secret of its applicability to the last word, or perhaps never reveal it at all, and leave the reader worrying. That’s one way; makes him go and talk about the book to all the girls he knows and get them guessing. Best ad. in the world. The Egg-beater! Doesn’t it suggest  desert islands and penguins’ nests in the rocks? Fellow and girl shipwrecked, and girl wants to make an omelette after they’ve got sick of plain eggs, and can’t for want of an egg-beater. Heigh? He invents one — makes it out of some wire that floats off from the wreck. See? When they are rescued, she brings it away, and doesn’t let him know it till their Iron Wedding Day. They keep it over his study fireplace always.”

This author was the first to stretch his legs before Erlcort’s fire from his seat on one of the reproductions. He could not say enough of the beauty of the place, and he asked if he might sit there and watch for the old codger’s old customers coming to buy hardware. There might be copy in it.

But the old customers did not come so often as he hoped and Erlcort feared. Instead there came bona fide book-buyers, who asked some for a book and some for a particular book. The first were not satisfied with the books that Erlcort or his acting saleslady recommended, and went away without buying. The last were indignant at not finding what they wanted in Erlcort’s selection.

“Why don’t you stock it?” they demanded.

“Because I don’t think it’s worth reading.”

“Oh, indeed!” The sarcastic customers were  commonly ladies. “I thought you let the public judge of that!”

“There are bookstores where they do. This is a critical bookstore. I sell only the books that I think worth reading. If you had noticed my sign—”

“Oh!” the customer would say, and she, too, would go away without buying.

There were other ladies who came, links of the endless chain of volunteer readers who had tried to help Erlcort in making his selection, and he could see them slyly looking his stock over for the books they had praised to him. Mostly they went away without comment, but with heads held high in the offense which he felt even more than saw. One, indeed, did ask him why he had not stocked her chosen book, and he had to say, “Well, when I came to go through it carefully, I didn’t think it quite—”

“But here is The Green Bay Tree, and The Biggest Toad in the Puddle, and—”

“I know. For one reason and another I thought them worth stocking.”

Then another head went away high in the air, with its plumes quivering. One afternoon late a lady came flying in with all the marks, whatever they are, of transatlantic travel upon her.

“I’m just through the customs, and I’ve motored  up here the first thing, even before I went home, to stop you from selling that book I recommended. It’s dreadful; and, horrors! horrors! here it is by the hundreds! Oh, Mr. Erlcort! You mustn’t sell that dreadful book! You see, I had skipped through it in my berth going out, and posted my letter the first thing; and just now, coming home, I found it in the ship’s library and came on that frightful episode. You know! Where — How could you order it without reading it, on a mere say-so? It’s utterly immoral!”

“I don’t agree with you,” Erlcort answered, dryly. “I consider that passage one of the finest in modern fiction — one of the most ennobling and illumining—”

“Ennobling!” The lady made a gesture of horror. “Very well! If that is your idea of a critical bookstore, all I’ve got to say is—”

But she had apparently no words to say it in, and she went out banging but failing to latch the door which let through the indignant snort of her car as it whirled her away. She left Erlcort and his assistant to a common silence, but he imagined somehow a resolution in the stenographer not to let the book go unsearched till she had grasped the full iniquity of that episode and felt all its ennobling force. He was not consoled when another lady came in and, after drifting  unmolestedly about (it was the primary rule of the place not to follow people up), stopped before the side shelf where the book was ranged in dozens and scores. She took a copy from the neat ranks, and opened it; then she lifted her head by chance and caught sight of her plume in one of the little mirrors. She stealthily lifted herself on tiptoe till she could see her face, and then she turned to the assistant and said, gently, “I believe I should like this book, please,” and paid for it and went out.

It was now almost on the stroke of six, and Erlcort said to his assistant: “I’ll close the store, Miss Pearsall. You needn’t stay any longer.”

“All right, sir,” the girl said, and went into the little closet at the rear for her hat and coat. Did she contrive to get a copy of that book under her coat as she passed the shelf where it lay?

When she was gone, he turned the key in the door and went back and sat down before the fire dying on the hearth of the Franklin stove. It was not a very cheerful moment with him, but he could not have said that the day had been unprofitable, either spiritually or pecuniarily. In its experiences it had been a varied day, and he had really sold a good many books. More people than he could have expected had taken him seriously and even intelligently. It is true that he had been somewhat vexed by the sort of authority  the president of the Intellectual Club had shown in the way she swelled into the store and patronized him and it, as if she had invented them both, and blamed him in a high, sweet voice for having so many old books. “My idea was that it would be a place where one could come for the best of the new books. But here! Why, half of them I saw in June before I sailed!” She chided him merrily, and she acted as if it were quite part of the joke when he said that he did not think a good book could age much in four months. She laughed patronizingly at his conceit of getting in the fall books by Thanksgiving; but even for the humor of it she could not let him say he should not do anything in holiday books. “I had expected to get all my Christmas books of you, Mr. Erlcort,” she crowed, but for the present she bought nothing. In compensation he recalled the gratitude, almost humble gratitude, of a lady (she was a lady!) who had come that day, bringing her daughter to get a book, any book in his stock, and to thank him for his enterprise, which she had found worked perfectly in the case of the book she had got the week before; the book had been an unalloyed delight, and had left a sense of heightened self-respect with her: that book of the dreadful episode.

He wished Margaret Green had been there;  but she had been there only once since his opening; he could not think why. He heard a rattling at the door-latch, and he said before he turned to look, “What if it should be she now?” But when he went to peer through the door-curtain it was only an old fellow who had spent the better part of the afternoon in the best chair, reading a book. Erlcort went back to the fire and let him rattle, which he did rather a long time, and then went away, Erlcort hoped, in dudgeon. He was one of a number of customers who had acted on the half of his motto asking them to sit down and rest them, after acting on the other half to look round all they wanted. Most of them did not read, even; they seemed to know one another, and they talked comfortably together. Erlcort recognized a companionship of four whom he had noticed in the Park formerly; they were clean-enough-looking elderly men, but occupied nearly all the chairs and settles, so that lady customers did not like to bring books and look over them in the few places left, and Erlcort foresaw the time when he should have to ask the old fellows to look around more and rest them less. In resuming his own place before the fire he felt the fleeting ache of a desire to ask Margaret Green whether it would not be a good plan to remove the motto from the chimneypiece. He would not have liked to do it without asking  her; it had been her notion to put it there, and her other notion of the immoral mirrors had certainly worked well. The thoughtful expression they had reflected on the faces of lady customers had sold a good many books; not that Erlcort wished to sell books that way, though he argued with himself that his responsibility ought strictly to end with the provision of books which he had critically approved before offering them for sale.

His conscience was not wholly at peace as to his stock, not only the books which he had included, but also those he had excluded. Some of these tacitly pleaded against his severity; in one case an author came and personally protested. This was the case of a book by the ex-best-seller, who held that his last book was so much better than his first that it ought certainly to be found in any critical bookstore. The proceeds of his best-seller had enabled him to buy an electric runabout, and he purred up to Erlcort’s door in it to argue the matter with him. He sat down in a reproduction and proved, gaily, that Erlcort was quite wrong about it. He had the book with him, and read passages from it; then he read passages from some of the books on sale and defied Erlcort to say that his passages were not just as good, or, as he put it merrily, the same as. He held that his marked improvement entitled him  to the favor of a critical bookstore; without this, what motive had he in keeping from a reversion to the errors which had won him the vicious prosperity of his first venture? Hadn’t Erlcort a duty to perform in preventing his going back to the bad? Refuse this markedly improved fiction, and you drove him to writing nothing but best-sellers from now on. He urged Erlcort to reflect.

They had a jolly time, and the ex-best-seller went away in high spirits, prophesying that Erlcort would come to his fiction yet.

There were authors who did not leave Erlcort so cheerful when they failed to see their books on his shelves or tables. Some of them were young authors who had written their worthless books with a devout faith in their worth, and they went away more in sorrow than in anger, and yet more in bewilderment. Some were old authors who had been all their lives acceptably writing second-rate books and trying to make them unacceptably first-rate. If he knew them he kept out of their way, but the dejection of their looks was not less a pang to him if he saw them searching his stock for their books in vain.

He had his own moments of dejection. The interest of the press in his enterprise had flashed through the Sunday issues of a single week, and then flashed out in lasting darkness. He wondered  vaguely if he had counted without the counting-house in hoping for their continued favor; he could not realize that nothing is so stale as old news, and that no excess of advertising would have relumed those fitful fires.

He would have liked to talk the case over with Margaret Green. After his first revolt from the easy publicity the reporters had first given him, he was aware of having enjoyed it — perhaps vulgarly enjoyed it. But he hoped not quite that; he hoped that in his fleeting celebrity he had cared for his scheme rather than himself. He had really believed in it, and he liked having it recognized as a feature of modern civilization, an innovation which did his city and his country credit. Now and then an essayist of those who wrote thoughtful articles in the Sunday or Saturday-evening editions had dropped in, and he had opened his heart to them in a way he would not have minded their taking advantage of. Secretly he hoped they would see a topic in his enterprise and his philosophy of it. But they never did, and he was left to the shame of hopes which had held nothing to support defeat. He would have liked to confess his shame and own the justice of his punishment to Margaret Green, but she seemed the only friend who never came near. Other friends came, and many strangers, the friends to  look and the strangers to buy. He had no reason to complain of his sales; the fame of his critical bookstore might have ceased in New York, because it had gone abroad to Chicago and St. Louis and Pittsburg; people who were clearly from these commercial capitals and others came and bought copiously of his criticized stock, and they praised the notion of it in telling him that he ought to open branches in their several cities.

They were all women, and it was nearly all women who frequented the Critical Bookstore, but in their multitude Margaret Green was not. He thought it the greater pity because she would have enjoyed many of them with him, and would have divined such as hoped the culture implicated by a critical bookstore would come off on them without great effort of their own; she would have known the sincere spirits, too, and could have helped direct their choice of the best where all was so good. He smiled to find that he was invoking her help, which he had no right to.

His longing had no effect upon her till deep in January, when the weather was engaged late one afternoon in keeping the promise of a January thaw in the form of the worst snow-storm of the winter. Then she came thumping with her umbrella-handle at his door as if, he divined, she were too stiff-handed or too package-laden to press the  latch and let herself in, and she almost fell in, but saved herself by spilling on the floor some canvases and other things which she had been getting at the artist’s-materials store near by. “Don’t bother about them,” she said, “but take me to the fire as fast as you can,” and when she had turned from snow to rain and had dripped partially dry before the Franklin stove, she asked, “Where have you been all the time?”

“Waiting here for you,” he answered.

“Well, you needn’t. I wasn’t going to come — or at least not till you sent for me, or said you wanted my advice.”

“I don’t want your advice now.”

“I didn’t come to give it. I just dropped in because if I hadn’t I should have just dropped outside. How have you been getting along with your ridiculous critical bookstore?”

“Well, things are rather quiet with us just now, as the publishers say to the authors when they don’t want to publish their books.”

“Yes, I know that saying. Why didn’t you go in for the holiday books?”

“How did you know I didn’t?”

“Lots of people told me.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell you why. I would have had to read them first, and no human being could do that — not even a volunteer link in an endless chain.”

“I see. But since Christmas?”

“You know very well that after Christmas the book market drops dead.”

“Yes, so I’ve been told.” She had flung her wet veil back over her shoulders, and he thought she had never looked so adorably plain before; if she could have seen herself in a glass she would have found her whole face out of drawing. It seemed as if his thinking had put her in mind of them, and she said, “Those immoral mirrors are shameful.”

“They’ve sold more of the best books than anything else.”

“No matter. As soon as I get a little drier I shall take them down.”

“Very well. I didn’t put them up.” He laid a log of hickory on the fire. “I’m not doing it to dry you quicker.”

“Oh, I know. I’ll tell you one thing. You ought to keep the magazines, or at least the Big Four. You could keep them with a good conscience, and you could sell them without reading; they’re always good.”

“There’s an idea in that. I believe I’ll try it.”

Margaret Green was now dry enough, and she rose and removed the mirrors. In doing this she noticed that Erlcort had apparently sold a good many of his best books, and she said: “Well! I don’t see why you should be discouraged.”

“Who said I was? I’m exultant.”

“Then you were exulting with the corners of your mouth down just now. Well, I must be going. Will you get a taxi to flounder over to the Subway with me?” While Erlcort was telephoning she was talking to him. “I believe the magazines will revive public interest in your scheme. Put them in your window. Try to get advance copies for it.”

“You have a commercial genius, Margaret Green.”

“When it comes to selling literature, I have. Selling art is where I fall down.”

“That’s because you always try to sell your own art. I should fall down, too, if I tried to sell my own literature.”

They got quite back to their old friendliness; the coming of the taxi gave them plenty of time. The electric lights were turned brilliantly on, but there, at the far end of the store, before the Franklin stove, they had a cozy privacy. At the moment of parting she said:

“If I were you I should take out these settles. They simply invite loafing.”

“I’ve noticed that they seem to do that.”

“And better paint out that motto.”

“I’ve sometimes fancied I’d better. That invites loafing, too; though some nice people like it.”

“Nice people? Why haven’t some of them bought a picture?” He perceived that she had taken in the persistent presence of the sketches when removing the mirrors, and he shared the indignation she expressed: “Shabby things!”

She stood with the mirrors under her arm, and he asked what she was going to do with them, as he followed her to the door with her other things.

“Put them around the studio. But you needn’t come to see the effect.”

“No. I shall come to see you.”

But when he came in a lull of February, and he could walk part of the way up through the Park on the sunny Saturday afternoon, she said:

“I suppose you’ve come to pour out some more of your griefs. Well, pour away! Has the magazine project failed?”

“On the contrary, it has been a succès fou. But I don’t feel altogether easy in my mind about it. The fact is, they seem to print much more rubbish than I supposed.”

“Of course they do; they must; rubbish is the breath in their nostrils.”

She painted away, screwing her eyes almost shut and getting very close to her picture. He had never thought her so plain; she was letting her mouth hang open. He wondered why she was so charming; but when she stepped back rhythmically,  tilting her pretty head this way and that, he saw why: it was her unfailing grace. She suddenly remembered her mouth and shut it to say, “Well?”

“Well, some people have come back at me. They’ve said, What a rotten number this or that was! They were right; and yet there were things in all those magazines better than anything they had ever printed. What’s to be done about it? I can’t ask people to buy truck or read truck because it comes bound up with essays and stories and poems of the first quality.”

“No. You can’t. Why,” she asked, drifting up to her picture again, “don’t you tear the bad out, and sell the good?”

Erlcort gave a disdainful sound, such as cannot be spelled in English. “Do you know how defiantly the bad is bound up with the good in the magazines? They’re wired together, and you could no more tear out the bad and leave the good than you could part vice from virtue in human nature.”

“I see,” Margaret Green said, but she saw no further, and she had to let him go disconsolate. After waiting a decent time she went to find him in his critical bookstore. It was late in an afternoon of the days that were getting longer, and only one electric was lighted in the rear of the  room, where Erlcort sat before the fireless Franklin stove, so busy at something that he scarcely seemed aware of her.

“What in the world are you doing?” she demanded.

He looked up. “Who? I? Oh, it’s you! Why, I’m merely censoring the truck in the May number of this magazine.” He held up a little roller, as long as the magazine was wide, blacked with printer’s ink, which he had been applying to the open periodical. “I’ve taken a hint from the way the Russian censorship blots out seditious literature before it lets it go to the public.”

“And what a mess you’re making!”

“Of course it will have to dry before it’s put on sale.”

“I should think so. Listen to me, Frederick Erlcort: you’re going crazy.”

“I’ve sometimes thought so: crazy with conceit and vanity and arrogance. Who am I that I should set up for a critical bookstore-keeper? What is the Republic of Letters, anyway? A vast, benevolent, generous democracy, where one may have what one likes, or a cold oligarchy where he is compelled to take what is good for him? Is it a restricted citizenship, with a minority representation, or is it universal suffrage?”

“Now,” Margaret Green said, “you are talking  sense. Why didn’t you think of this in the beginning?”

“Is it a world, a whole earth,” he went on, “where the weeds mostly outflourish the flowers, or is it a wretched little florist’s conservatory where the watering-pot assumes to better the instruction of the rain which falls upon the just and the unjust? What is all the worthy family of asses to do if there are no thistles to feed them? Because the succulent fruits and nourishing cereals are better for the finer organisms, are the coarser not to have fodder? No; I have made a mistake. Literature is the whole world; it is the expression of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, and it is the pleasure of the gross, the fatuous, and the foolish, as well as the expression and the pleasure of the wise, the fine, the elect. Let the multitude have their truck, their rubbish, their rot; it may not be the truck, the rubbish, the rot that it would be to us, or may slowly and by natural selection become to certain of them. But let there be no artificial selection, no survival of the fittest by main force — the force of the spectator, who thinks he knows better than the creator of the ugly and the beautiful, the fair and foul, the evil and good.”

“Oh, now if the Intellectual Club could hear you!” Margaret Green said, with a long, deep,  admiring suspiration. “And what are you going to do with your critical bookstore?”

“I’m going to sell it. I’ve had an offer from the author of that best-seller — I’ve told you about him. I was just trying to censor that magazine while I was thinking it over. He’s got an idea. He’s going to keep it a critical bookstore, but the criticism is to be made by universal suffrage and the will of the majority. The latest books will be put to a vote; and the one getting the greatest number of votes will be the first offered for sale, and the author will receive a free passage to Europe by the southern route.”

“The southern route!” Margaret mused. “I’ve never been that way. It must be delightful.”

“Then come with me! I’m going.”

“But how can I?”

“By marrying me!”

“I never thought of that,” she said. Then, with the conscientious resolution of an elderly girl who puts her fate to the touch of any risk the truth compels, she added: “Or, yes! I have. But I never supposed you would ask me.” She stared at him, and she was aware she was letting her mouth hang open. While she was trying for some word to close it with he closed it for her.

A FEAST OF REASON

Florindo and Lindora had come to the end of another winter in town, and had packed up for another summer in the country. They were sitting together over their last breakfast until the taxi should arrive to whirl them away to the station, and were brooding in a joint gloom from the effect of the dinner they had eaten at the house of a friend the night before, and, “Well, thank goodness,” she said, “there is an end to that sort of thing for one while.”

“An end to that thing,” he partially assented, “but not that sort of thing.”

“What do you mean?” she demanded excitedly, almost resentfully.

“I mean that the lunch is of the nature of the dinner, and that in the country we shall begin lunching where we left off dining.”

“Not instantly,” she protested shrilly. “There will be nobody there for a while — not for a whole month, nearly.”

“They will be there before you can turn round, almost; and then you women will begin feeding one another there before you have well left off here.”

“We women!” she protested.

“Yes, you — you women. You give the dinners. Can you deny it?”

“It’s because we can’t get you to the lunches.”

“In the country you can; and so you will give the lunches.”

“We would give dinners if it were not for the distance, and the darkness on those bad roads.”

“I don’t see where your reasoning is carrying you.”

“No,” she despaired, “there is no reason in it. No sense. How tired of it all I am! And, as you say, it will be no time before it is all going on again.”

They computed the number of dinners they had given during the winter; that was not hard, and the sum was not great: six or seven at the most, large and small. When it came to the dinners they had received, it was another thing; but still she considered, “Were they really so few? It’s nothing to what the English do. They never dine alone at home, and they never dine alone abroad — of course not! I wonder they can stand it. I think a dinner, the happy-to-accept  kind, is always loathsome: the everlasting soup, if there aren’t oysters first, or grape-fruit, or melon, and the fish, and the entrée, and the roast and salad, and the ice-cream and the fruit nobody touches, and the coffee and cigarettes and cigars — how I hate it all!”

Lindora sank back in her chair and toyed desperately with the fragment of bacon on her plate.

“And yet,” Florindo said, “there is a charm about the first dinner of autumn, after you’ve got back.”

“Oh, yes,” she assented; “it’s like a part of our lost youth. We think all the dinners of the winter will be like that, and we come away beaming.”

“But when it keeps on and there’s more and more of our lost youth, till it comes to being the whole—”

“Florindo!” she stopped him. He pretended that he was not going to have said it, and she resumed, dreamily, “I wonder what it is makes it so detestable as the winter goes on.”

“All customs are detestable, the best of them,” he suggested, “and I should say, in spite of the first autumnal dinner, that the society dinner was an unlovely rite. You try to carry if off with china and glass, and silver and linen, and if people could fix their minds on these, or even on the  dishes of the dinner as they come successively on, it would be all very well; but the diners, the diners!”

“Yes,” she said, “the old men are hideous, certainly; and the young ones — I try not to look at them, poking things into the hollows of their faces with spoons and forks—”

“Better than when it was done with knives! Still, it’s a horror! A veteran diner-out in full action is certainly a hideous spectacle. Often he has few teeth of his own, and the dentists don’t serve him perfectly. He is in danger of dropping things out of his mouth, both liquids and solids: better not look! His eyes bulge and roll in his head in the stress of mastication and deglutition; his color rises and spreads to his gray hair or over his baldness; his person seems to swell vividly in his chair, and when he laughs—”

“Don’t, Florindo! It is awful.”

“Well, perhaps no worse than the sight of a middle-aged matron tending to overweight and bulking above her plate—”

“Yes, yes! That’s dreadful, too. But when people are young—”

“Oh, when people are young!” He said this in despair. Then he went on in an audible muse. “When people are young they are not only in their own youth; they are in the youth of the  world, the race. They dine, but they don’t think of the dinner or the unpleasantness of the diners, and the grotesqueness of feeding in common. They think—” he broke off in defect of other ideas, and concluded with a laugh, “they think of themselves. And they don’t think of how they are looking.”

“They needn’t; they are looking very well. Don’t keep harping on that! I remember when we first began going to dinners, I thought it was the most beautiful thing in the world. I don’t mean when I was a girl; a girl only goes to a dinner because it comes before a dance. I mean when we were young married people; and I pinned up my dress and we went in the horse-cars, or even walked. I enjoyed every instant of it: the finding who was going to take me in and who you were; and the going in; and the hovering round the table to find our places from the cards; and the seeing how you looked next some one else, and wondering how you thought I looked; and the beads sparkling up through the champagne and getting into one’s nose; and the laughing and joking and talking! Oh, the talking! What’s become of it? The talking, last night, it bored me to death! And what good stories people used to tell, women as well as men! You can’t deny it was beautiful.”

“I don’t; and I don’t deny that the forms of dining are still charming. It’s the dining itself that I object to.”

“That’s because your digestion is bad.”

“Isn’t yours?”

“Of course it is. What has that got to do with it?”

“It seems to me that we have arrived at what is called an impasse in French.” He looked up at the clock on the wall, and she gave a little jump in her chair. “Oh, there’s plenty of time. The taxi won’t be here for half an hour yet. Is there any heat left in that coffee?”

“There will be,” she said, and she lighted the lamp under the pot. “But I don’t like being scared out of half a year’s growth.”

“I’m sorry. I won’t look at the clock any more; I don’t care if we’re left. Where were we? Oh, I remember — the objection to dining itself. If we could have the forms without the facts, dining would be all right. Our superstition is that we can’t be gay without gorging; that society can’t be run without meat and drink. But don’t you remember when we first went to Italy there was no supper at Italian houses where we thought it such a favor to be asked?”

“I remember that the young Italian swells wouldn’t go to the American and English houses  where they weren’t sure of supper. They didn’t give supper at the Italian houses because they couldn’t afford it.”

“I know that. I believe they do, now. But —

‘Sweet are the uses of adversity,’

and the fasting made for beauty then more than the feasting does now. It was a lovelier sight to see the guests of those Italian houses conversing together without the grossness of feeding or being fed — the sort of thing one saw at our houses when people went out to supper.”

“I wonder,” Lindora said, “whether the same sort of thing goes on at evening parties still — it’s so long since I’ve been at one. It was awful standing jammed up in a corner or behind a door and eating vis-à-vis with a man who brought you a plate; and it wasn’t much better when you sat down and he stood over you gabbling and gobbling, with his plate in one hand and his fork in the other. I was always afraid of his dropping things into my lap; and the sight of his jaws champing as you looked up at them from below!”

“Yes, ridiculous. But there was an element of the grotesque in a bird’s-eye view of a lady making shots at her mouth with a spoon and trying to smile and look spirituelle between the shots.”

Lindora as she laughed bowed her forehead on  the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. “Yes,” she said, “awful, awful! Why should people want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it’s a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those who had nothing?”

“Possibly,” Florindo said, flattered into consequence by her momentary deference, or show of it. “But the people who mostly meet to feed together now are not hungry; they are already so stuffed that they loathe the sight of the things. Some of them shirk the consequences by frankly dining at home first, and then openly or covertly dodging the courses.”

“Yes, and you hear that praised as a mark of high civilization, or social wisdom. I call it wicked, and an insult to the very genius of hospitality.”

“Well, I don’t know. It must give the faster a good chance of seeing how funny the feeders all look.”

“I wonder, I do wonder, how the feeding in common came to be the custom,” she said, thoughtfully. “Of course where it’s done for convenience, like hotels or in boarding-houses — but to do it wantonly, as people do in society, it ought to be stopped.”

“We might call art to our aid — have a large tableful of people kodaked in the moments of ingulfing, chewing, or swallowing, as the act varied from guest to guest; might be reproduced as picture postals, or from films for the movies. That would give the ten and twenty cent audiences a chance to see what life in the exclusive circles was.”

She listened in dreamy inattention. “It was a step in the right direction when people began to have afternoon teas. To be sure, there was the biting and chewing sandwiches, but you needn’t take them, and most women could manage their teacups gracefully.”

“Or hide their faces in them when they couldn’t.”

“Only,” she continued, “the men wouldn’t come after the first go off. It was as bad as lunches. Now that the English way of serving tea to callers has come in, it’s better. You really get the men, and it keeps them from taking cocktails so much.”

“They’re rather glad of that. But still, still, there’s the guttling and guzzling.”

“It’s reduced to a minimum.”

“But it’s there. And the first thing you know you’ve loaded yourself up with cake or bread-and-butter and spoiled your appetite for dinner.  No, afternoon tea must go with the rest of it, if we’re going to be truly civilized. If people could come to one another’s tables with full minds instead of stomachs, there would be some excuse for hospitality. Perhaps if we reversed the practice of the professional diner-out, and read up at home as he now eats at home, and — No, I don’t see how it could be done. But we might take a leaf from the book of people who are not in society. They never ask anybody to meals if they can possibly help it; if some one happens in at meal-times they tell him to pull up a chair — if they have to, or he shows no signs first of going. But even among these people the instinct of hospitality — the feeding form of it — lurks somewhere. In our farm-boarding days—”

“Don’t speak of them!” she implored.

“We once went to an evening party,” he pursued, “where raw apples and cold water were served.”

“I thought I should die of hunger. And when we got home to our own farmer’s we ravaged the pantry for everything left from supper. It wasn’t much. There!” Lindora screamed. “There is the taxi!” And the shuddering sound of the clock making time at their expense penetrated from the street. “Come!”

“How the instinct of economy lingers in us,  too, long after the use of it is outgrown. It’s as bad as the instinct of hospitality. We could easily afford to pay extra for the comfort of sitting here over these broken victuals—”

“I tell you we shall be left,” she retorted; and in the thirty-five minutes they had at the station before their train started she outlined a scheme of social reform which she meant to put in force as soon as people began to gather in summer force at Lobster Cove.

He derided the notion; but she said, “You will see!” and in rather more time than it takes to tell it they were settled in their cottage, where, after some unavoidable changes of cook and laundress, they were soon in perfect running order.

By this time Lobster Cove was in the full tide of lunching and being lunched. The lunches were almost exclusively ladies’ lunches, and the ladies came to them with appetites sharpened by the incomparable air of those real Lobster Cove days which were all cloudless skies and west winds, and by the vigorous automobile exercise of getting to one another’s cottages. They seized every pretext for giving these feasts, marked each by some vivid touch of invention within the limits of the graceful convention which all felt bound not to transcend. It was some surprising flavor in the  salad, or some touch of color appealing to the eye only; or it was some touch in the ice-cream, or some daring substitution of a native dish for it, as strawberry or peach shortcake; or some bold transposition in the order of the courses; or some capricious arrangement of the decoration, or the use of wild flowers, or even weeds (as meadow-rue or field-lilies), for the local florist’s flowers, which set the ladies screaming at the moment and talking of it till the next lunch. This would follow perhaps the next day, or the next but one, according as a new cottager’s claims insisted or a lady had a change of guests, or three days at the latest, for no reason.

In their rapid succession people scarcely noticed that Lindora had not given a lunch, and she had so far abandoned herself to the enjoyment of the others’ lunches that she had half forgotten her high purposes of reform, when she was sharply recalled to them by a lunch which had not at all agreed with her; she had, in fact, had to have the doctor, and many people had asked one another whether they had heard how she was. Then she took her good resolution in both hands and gave an afternoon, asking people by note or ‘phone simply whether they would not come in at four sharp. People were a good deal mystified, but for this very reason everybody came. Some  of them came from somebody’s lunch, which had been so nice that they lingered over it till four, and then walked, partly to fill in the time and partly to walk off the lunch, as there would be sure to be something at Lindora’s later on.

It would be invidious to say what the nature of Lindora’s entertainment was. It was certainly to the last degree original, and those who said the worst of it could say no worse than that it was queer. It quite filled the time till six o’clock, and may be perhaps best described as a negative rather than a positive triumph, though what Lindora had aimed at she had undoubtedly achieved. Whatever it was, whether original or queer, it was certainly novel.

A good many men had come, one at least to every five ladies, but as the time passed and a certain blankness began to gather over the spirits of all, they fell into different attitudes of the despair which the ladies did their best to pass off for rapture. At each unscheduled noise they started in a vain expectation, and when the end came, it came so without accent, so without anything but the clock to mark it as the close, that they could hardly get themselves together for going away. They did what was nice and right, of course, in thanking Lindora for her fascinating afternoon, but when they were well beyond hearing  one said to another: “Well, I shall certainly have an appetite for my dinner to-night! Why, if there had only been a cup of the weakest kind of tea, or even of cold water!”

Then those who had come in autos gathered as many pedestrians into them as they would hold in leaving the house, or caught them up fainting by the way.

Lindora and Florindo watched them from their veranda.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “it’s been a wonderful afternoon; an immense stride forward in the cause of anti-eating — or—”

“Don’t speak to me!” she cried.

“But it leaves one rather hungry, doesn’t it?”

“Hungry!” she hurled back at him. “I could eat a — I don’t know what!”

CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL

A Long-distance Eclogue

1902

Morrison. Hello! Hello! Is that you, Wetherbee?

Wetherbee. Yes. Who are you? What do you want with me?

Morrison. Oh, nothing much. It’s Morrison, you know;
Morrison — down at Clamhurst Shortsands.

Wetherbee. Oh!
Why, Morrison, of course! Of course, I know!
How are you, Morrison? And, by the way,
Where are you? What! You never mean to say
You are down there yet? Well, by the Holy Poker!
What are you doing there, you ancient joker?

Morrison. Sticking it out over Thanksgiving Day.
I said I would. I tell you, it is gay
 Down here. You ought to see the Hunter’s Moon,
These silver nights, prinking in our lagoon.
You ought to see our sunsets, glassy red,
Shading to pink and violet overhead.
You ought to see our mornings, still and clear,
White silence, far as you can look and hear.
You ought to see the leaves — our oaks and ashes
Crimson and yellow, with those gorgeous splashes,
Purple and orange, against the bluish green
Of the pine woods; and scattered in between
The scarlet of the maples; and the blaze
Of blackberry-vines, along the dusty ways
And on the old stone walls; the air just balm,
And the crows cawing through the perfect calm
Of afternoons all gold and turquoise. Say,
You ought to have been with wife and me to-day,
A drive we took — it would have made you sick:
The pigeons and the partridges so thick;
And on the hill just beyond Barkin’s lane,
Before you reach the barn of Widow Payne,
Showing right up against the sky, as clear
And motionless as sculpture, stood a deer!
Say, does that jar you just a little? Say,
How have you found things up there, anyway,
Since you got back? Air like a cotton string
To breathe? The same old dust on everything,
And in your teeth, and in your eyes? The smoke
From the soft coal, got long beyond a joke?
 The trolleys rather more upon your curves,
And all the roar and clatter in your nerves?
Don’t you wish you had stayed here, too?

Wetherbee. Well, yes,
I do at certain times, I must confess.
I swear it is enough at times to make you swear
You would almost rather be anywhere
Than here. The building up and pulling down,
The getting to and fro about the town,
The turmoil underfoot and overhead,
Certainly make you wish that you were dead,
At first; and all the mean vulgarity
Of city life, the filth and misery
You see around you, make you want to put
Back to the country anywhere, hot-foot.
Yet — there are compensations.

Morrison. Such as?

Wetherbee. Why,
There is the club.

Morrison. The club I can’t deny.
Many o’ the fellows back there?

Wetherbee. Nearly all.
Over the twilight cocktails there are tall
Stories and talk. But you would hardly care;
You have the natives to talk with down there,
And always find them meaty.

Morrison. Well, so-so.
Their words outlast their ideas at times, you know,
 And they have staying powers. The theaters
All open now?

Wetherbee. Yes, all. And it occurs
To me: there’s one among the things that you
Would have enjoyed; an opera with the new —
Or at least the last — music by Sullivan,
And words, though not Gilbertian, that ran
Trippingly with it. Oh, I tell you what,
I’d rather that you had been there than not.

Morrison. Thanks ever so!

Wetherbee. Oh, there is nothing mean
About your early friend. That deer and autumn scene
Were kind of you! And, say, I think you like
Afternoon teas when good. I have chanced to strike
Some of the best of late, where people said
They had sent you cards, but thought you must be dead.
I told them I left you down there by the sea,
And then they sort of looked askance at me,
As if it were a joke, and bade me get
Myself some bouillon or some chocolate,
And turned the subject — did not even give
Me time to prove it is not life to live
In town as long as you can keep from freezing
Beside the autumn sea. A little sneezing,
At Clamhurst Shortsands, since the frosts set in?

Morrison. Well, not enough to make a true friend grin.
Slight colds, mere nothings. With our open fires
We’ve all the warmth and cheer that heart desires.
Next year we’ll have a furnace in, and stay
Not till Thanksgiving, but till Christmas Day.
It’s glorious in these roomy autumn nights
To sit between the firelight and the lights
Of our big lamps, and read aloud by turns
As long as kerosene or hickory burns.
We hate to go to bed.

Wetherbee. Of course you do!
And hate to get up in the morning, too —
To pull the coverlet from your frost-bit nose,
And touch the glary matting with your toes!
Are you beginning yet to break the ice
In your wash-pitchers? No? Well, that is nice.
I always hate to do it — seems as if
Summer was going; but when your hand is stiff
With cold, it can be done. Still, I prefer
To wash and dress beside my register,
When summer gets a little on, like this.
But some folks find the other thing pure bliss —
Lusty young chaps, like you.

Morrison. And some folks find
A sizzling radiator to their mind.
What else have you, there, you could recommend
To the attention of a country friend?

Wetherbee. Well, you know how it is in Madison Square,
Late afternoons, now, if the day’s been fair —
How all the western sidewalk ebbs and flows
With pretty women in their pretty clo’es:
I’ve never seen them prettier than this year.
Of course, I know a dear is not a deer,
But still, I think that if I had to meet
One or the other in the road, or street,
All by myself, I am not sure but that
I’d choose the dear that wears the fetching hat.

Morrison. Get out! What else?

Wetherbee. Well, it is not so bad,
If you are feeling a little down, or sad,
To walk along Fifth Avenue to the Park,
When the day thinks perhaps of getting dark,
And meet that mighty flood of vehicles
Laden with all the different kinds of swells,
Homing to dinner, in their carriages —
Victorias, landaus, chariots, coupés —
There’s nothing like it to lift up the heart
And make you realize yourself a part,
Sure, of the greatest show on earth.

Morrison. Oh, yes,
I know. I’ve felt that rapture more or less.
But I would rather put it off as long
As possible. I suppose you like the song
 Of the sweet car-gongs better than the cry
Of jays and yellowhammers when the sky
Begins to redden these October mornings,
And the loons sound their melancholy warnings;
Or honk of the wild-geese that write their A
Along the horizon in the evening’s gray.
Or when the squirrels look down on you and bark
From the nut trees —

Wetherbee. We have them in the Park
Plenty enough. But, say, you aged sinner,
Have you been out much recently at dinner?

Morrison. What do you mean? You know there’s no one here
That dines except ourselves now.

Wetherbee. Well, that’s queer!
I thought the natives — But I recollect!
It was not reasonable to expect —

Morrison. What are you driving at?

Wetherbee. Oh, nothing much.
But I was thinking how you come in touch
With life at the first dinner in the fall,
When you get back, first, as you can’t at all
Later along. But you, of course, won’t care
With your idyllic pleasures.

Morrison. Who was there?

Wetherbee. Oh — ha, ha! What d’you mean by there?

Morrison. Come off!

Wetherbee. What! you remain to pray that came to scoff!

Morrison. You know what I am after.

Wetherbee. Yes, that dinner.
Just a round dozen: Ferguson and Binner
For the fine arts; Bowyer the novelist;
Dr. Le Martin; the psychologist
Fletcher; the English actor Philipson;
The two newspaper Witkins, Bob and John;
A nice Bostonian, Bane the archæologer,
And a queer Russian amateur astrologer;
And Father Gray, the jolly ritualist priest,
And last your humble servant, but not least.
The food was not so filthy, and the wine
Was not so poison. We made out to dine
From eight till one A.M. One could endure
The dinner. But, oh say! The talk was poor!
Your natives down at Clamhurst —

Morrison. Look ye here!
What date does Thanksgiving come on this year?

Wetherbee. Why, I suppose — although I don’t remember
Certainly — the usual 28th November.

Morrison. Novem — You should have waited to get sober!
It comes on the 11th of October!
And that’s to-morrow; and if you happen down
Later, you’d better look for us in town.

TABLE TALK

They were talking after dinner in that cozy moment when the conversation has ripened, just before the coffee, into mocking guesses and laughing suggestions. The thing they were talking of was something that would have held them apart if less happily timed and placed, but then and there it drew these together in what most of them felt a charming and flattering intimacy. Not all of them took part in the talk, and of those who did, none perhaps assumed to talk with authority or finality. At first they spoke of the subject as it, forbearing to name it, as if the name of it would convey an unpleasant shock, out of temper with the general feeling.

“I don’t suppose,” the host said, “that it’s really so much commoner than it used to be. But the publicity is more invasive and explosive. That’s perhaps because it has got higher up in the world and has spread more among the first circles. The time was when you seldom heard of  it there, and now it is scarcely a scandal. I remember that when I went abroad, twenty or thirty years ago, and the English brought me to book about it, I could put them down by saying that I didn’t know a single divorced person.”

“And of course,” a bachelor guest ventured, “a person of that sort must be single.”

At first the others did not take the joke; then they laughed, but the women not so much as the men.

“And you couldn’t say that now?” the lady on the right of the host inquired.

“Why, I don’t know,” he returned, thoughtfully, after a little interval. “I don’t just call one to mind.”

“Then,” the bachelor said, “that classes you. If you moved in our best society you would certainly know some of the many smart people whose disunions alternate with the morning murders in the daily papers.”

“Yes, the fact seems to rank me rather low; but I’m rather proud of the fact.”

The hostess seemed not quite to like this arrogant humility. She said, over the length of the table (it was not very long), “I’m sure you know some very nice people who have not been.”

“Well, yes, I do. But are they really smart people? They’re of very good family, certainly.”

“You mustn’t brag,” the bachelor said.

A husband on the right of the hostess wondered if there were really more of the thing than there used to be.

“Qualitatively, yes, I should say. Quantitatively, I’m not convinced,” the host answered. “In a good many of the States it’s been made difficult.”

The husband on the right of the hostess was not convinced, he said, as to the qualitative increase. The parties to the suits were rich enough, and sometimes they were high enough placed and far enough derived. But there was nearly always a leak in them, a social leak somewhere, on one side or the other. They could not be said to be persons of quality in the highest sense.

“Why, persons of quality seldom can be,” the bachelor contended.

The girl opposite, who had been invited to balance him in the scale of celibacy by the hostess in her study of her dinner-party, first smiled, and then alleged a very distinguished instance of divorce in which the parties were both of immaculate origin and unimpeachable fashion. “Nobody,” she said, “can accuse them of a want of quality.” She was good-looking, though no longer so young as she could have wished; she flung out her answer to the bachelor defiantly, but she addressed  it to the host, and he said that was true; certainly it was a signal case; but wasn’t it exceptional? The others mentioned like cases, though none quite so perfect, and then there was a lull till the husband on the left of the hostess noted a fact which renewed the life of the discussion.

“There was a good deal of agitation, six or eight years ago, about it. I don’t know whether the agitation accomplished anything.”

The host believed it had influenced legislation.

“For or against?” the bachelor inquired.

“Oh, against.”

“But in other countries it’s been coming in more and more. It seems to be as easy in England now as it used to be in Indiana. In France it’s nothing scandalous, and in Norwegian society you meet so many disunited couples in a state of quadruplicate reunion that it is very embarrassing. It doesn’t seem to bother the parties to the new relation themselves.”

“It’s very common in Germany, too,” the husband on the right of the hostess said.

The husband on her left side said he did not know just how it was in Italy and Spain, and no one offered to disperse his ignorance.

In the silence which ensued the lady on the left of the host created a diversion in her favor by  saying that she had heard they had a very good law in Switzerland.

Being asked to tell what it was, she could not remember, but her husband, on the right of the hostess, saved the credit of his family by supplying her defect. “Oh, yes. It’s very curious. We heard of it when we were there. When people want to be put asunder, for any reason or other, they go before a magistrate and declare their wish. Then they go home, and at the end of a certain time — weeks or months — the magistrate summons them before him with a view to reconciliation. If they come, it is a good sign; if they don’t come, or come and persist in their desire, then they are summoned after another interval, and are either reconciled or put asunder, as the case may be, or as they choose. It is not expensive, and I believe it isn’t scandalous.”

“It seems very sensible,” the husband on the left of the hostess said, as if to keep the other husband in countenance. But for an interval no one else joined him, and the mature girl said to the man next her that it seemed rather cold-blooded. He was a man who had been entreated to come in, on the frank confession that he was asked as a stop-gap, the original guest having fallen by the way. Such men are apt to abuse their magnanimity, their condescension. They  think that being there out of compassion, and in compliance with a hospitality that had not at first contemplated their presence, they can say anything; they are usually asked without but through their wives, who are asked to “lend” them, and who lend them with a grudge veiled in eager acquiescence; and the men think it will afterward advantage them with their wives, when they find they are enjoying themselves, if they will go home and report that they said something vexing or verging on the offensive to their hostess. This man now addressed himself to the lady at the head of the table.

“Why do we all talk as if we thought divorce was an unquestionable evil?”

The hostess looked with a frightened air to the right and left, and then down the table to her husband. But no one came to her rescue, and she asked feebly, as if foreboding trouble (for she knew she had taken a liberty with this man’s wife), “Why, don’t we?”

“About one in seven of us doesn’t,” the stop-gap said.

“Oh!” the girl beside him cried out, in a horror-stricken voice which seemed not to interpret her emotion truly. “Is it so bad as that?”

“Perhaps not quite, even if it is bad at all,” he returned, and the hostess smiled gratefully at  the girl for drawing his fire. But it appeared she had not, for he directed his further speech at the hostess again: really the most inoffensive person there, and the least able to contend with adverse opinions.

“No, I don’t believe we do think it an unquestionable evil, unless we think marriage is so.” Everybody sat up, as the stop-gap had intended, no doubt, and he “held them with his glittering eye,” or as many as he could sweep with his glance. “I suppose that the greatest hypocrite at this table, where we are all so frankly hypocrites together, will not deny that marriage is the prime cause of divorce. In fact, divorce couldn’t exist without it.”

The women all looked bewilderedly at one another, and then appealingly at the men. None of these answered directly, but the bachelor softly intoned out of Gilbert and Sullivan — he was of that date:

“‘A paradox, a paradox;
A most ingenious paradox!’”

“Yes,” the stop-gap defiantly assented. “A paradox; and all aboriginal verities, all giant truths, are paradoxes.”

“Giant truths is good,” the bachelor noted, but the stop-gap did not mind him.

He turned to the host: “I suppose that if divorce is an evil, and we wish to extirpate it, we must strike at its root, at marriage?”

The host laughed. “I prefer not to take the floor. I’m sure we all want to hear what you have to say in support of your mammoth idea.”

“Oh yes, indeed,” the women chorused, but rather tremulously, as not knowing what might be coming.

“Which do you mean? That all truth is paradoxical, or that marriage is the mother of divorce?”

“Whichever you like.”

“The last proposition is self-evident,” the stop-gap said, supplying himself with a small bunch of the grapes which nobody ever takes at dinner; the hostess was going to have coffee for the women in the drawing-room, and to leave the men to theirs with their tobacco at the table. “And you must allow that if divorce is a good thing or a bad thing, it equally partakes of the nature of its parent. Or else there’s nothing in heredity.”

“Oh, come!” one of the husbands said.

“Very well!” the stop-gap submitted. “I yield the word to you.” But as the other went no further, he continued. “The case is so clear that it needs no argument. Up to this time, in dealing with the evil of divorce, if it is an evil, we have  simply been suppressing the symptoms; and your Swiss method—”

“Oh, it isn’t mine,” the man said who had stated it.

“ — Is only a part of the general practice. It is another attempt to make divorce difficult, when it is marriage that ought to be made difficult.”

“Some,” the daring bachelor said, “think it ought to be made impossible.” The girl across the table began to laugh hysterically, but caught herself up and tried to look as if she had not laughed at all.

“I don’t go as far as that,” the stop-gap resumed, “but as an inveterate enemy of divorce—”

An “Oh!” varying from surprise to derision chorused up; but he did not mind it; he went on as if uninterrupted.

“I should put every possible obstacle, and at every step, in the way of marriage. The attitude of society toward marriage is now simply preposterous, absolutely grotesque. Society? The whole human framework in all its manifestations, social, literary, religious, artistic, and civic, is perpetually guilty of the greatest mischief in the matter. Nothing is done to retard or prevent marriage; everything to accelerate and promote it. Marriage is universally treated as a virtue which of itself consecrates the lives of the mostly  vulgar and entirely selfish young creatures who enter into it. The blind and witless passion in which it oftenest originates, at least with us, is flattered out of all semblance to its sister emotions, and revered as if it were a celestial inspiration, a spiritual impulse. But is it? I defy any one here to say that it is.”

As if they were afraid of worse things if they spoke, the company remained silent. But this did not save them.

“You all know it isn’t. You all know that it is the caprice of chance encounter, the result of propinquity, the invention of poets and novelists, the superstition of the victims, the unscrupulous make-believe of the witnesses. As an impulse it quickly wears itself out in marriage, and makes way for divorce. In this country nine-tenths of the marriages are love-matches. The old motives which delay and prevent marriage in other countries, aristocratic countries, like questions of rank and descent, even of money, do not exist. Yet this is the land of unhappy unions beyond all other lands, the very home of divorce. The conditions of marriage are ideally favorable according to the opinions of its friends, who are all more or less active in bottling husbands and wives up in its felicity and preventing their escape through divorce.”

Still the others were silent, and again the stop-gap triumphed on. “Now, I am an enemy of divorce, too; but I would have it begin before marriage.”

“Rather paradoxical again?” the bachelor alone had the hardihood to suggest.

“Not at all. I am quite literal. I would have it begin with the engagement. I would have the betrothed — the mistress and the lover — come before the magistrate or the minister, and declare their motives in wishing to marry, and then I would have him reason with them, and represent that they were acting emotionally in obedience to a passion which must soon spend itself, or a fancy which they would quickly find illusory. If they agreed with him, well and good; if not, he should dismiss them to their homes, for say three months, to think it over. Then he should summon them again, and again reason with them, and dismiss them as before, if they continued obstinate. After three months more, he should call them before him and reason with them for the last time. If they persisted in spite of everything, he should marry them, and let them take the consequences.”

The stop-gap leaned back in his chair defiantly, and fixed the host with an eye of challenge. Upon the whole the host seemed not so much frightened.  He said: “I don’t see anything so original in all that. It’s merely a travesty of the Swiss law of divorce.”

“And you see nothing novel, nothing that makes for the higher civilization in the application of that law to marriage? You all approve of that law because you believe it prevents nine-tenths of the divorces; but if you had a law that would similarly prevent nine-tenths of the marriages, you would need no divorce law at all.”

“Oh, I don’t know that,” the hardy bachelor said. “What about the one-tenth of the marriages which it didn’t prevent? Would you have the parties hopelessly shut up to them? Would you forbid them all hope of escape? Would you have no divorce for any cause whatever?”

“Yes,” the husband on the right of the hostess asked (but his wife on the right of the host looked as if she wished he had not mixed in), “wouldn’t more unhappiness result from that one marriage than from all the marriages as we have them now?”

“Aren’t you both rather precipitate?” the stop-gap demanded. “I said, let the parties to the final marriage take the consequences. But if these consequences were too dire, I would not forbid them the hope of relief. I haven’t thought the matter out very clearly yet, but there are one or two causes for divorce which I would admit.”

“Ah?” the host inquired, with a provisional smile.

“Yes, causes going down into the very nature of things — the nature of men and of women. Incompatibility of temperament ought always to be very seriously considered as a cause.”

“Yes?”

“And, above all,” and here the stop-gap swept the board with his eye, “difference of sex.”

The sort of laugh which expresses uncertainty of perception and conditional approval went up.

The hostess rose with rather a frightened air. “Shall we leave them to their tobacco?” she said to the other women.

When he went home the stop-gap celebrated his triumph to his wife. “I don’t think she’ll ask you for the loan of me again to fill a place without you.”

“Yes,” she answered, remotely. “You don’t suppose she’ll think we live unhappily together?”

THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER

“Well, what are you doing here?” the younger of the two sages asked, with a resolute air of bonhomie, as he dragged himself over the asphalt path, and sank, gasping, into the seat beside the other in the Park. His senior lifted his head and looked him carefully over to make sure of his identity, and then he said:

“I suppose, to answer your fatuous question, I am waiting here to get my breath before I move on; and in the next place, I am watching the feet of the women who go by in their high-heeled shoes.”

“How long do you think it will take you to get your breath in the atmosphere of these motors?” the younger sage pursued. “And you don’t imagine that these women are of the first fashion, do you?”

“No, but I imagine their shoes are. I have been calculating that their average heel is from an inch and a half to two inches high, and touches  the ground in the circumference of a twenty-five-cent piece. As you seem to be fond of asking questions, perhaps you will like to answer one. Why do you think they do it?”

“Wear shoes like that?” the younger returned, cheerily, and laughed as he added, “Because the rest do.”

“Mmm!” the elder grumbled, not wholly pleased, and yet not refusing the answer. He had been having a little touch of grippe, and was somewhat broken from his wonted cynicism. He said: “It’s very strange, very sad. Just now there was such a pretty young girl, so sweet and fine, went tottering by as helpless, in any exigency, as the daughter of a thousand years of bound-feet Chinese women. While she tilted on, the nice young fellow with her swept forward with one stride to her three on the wide soles and low heels of nature-last boots, and kept himself from out-walking her by a devotion that made him grit his teeth. Probably she was wiser and better and brighter than he, but she didn’t look it; and I, who voted to give her the vote the other day, had my misgivings. I think I shall satisfy myself for the next five years by catching cold in taking my hat off to her in elevators, and getting killed by automobiles in helping her off the cars, where I’ve given her my seat.”

“But you must allow that if her shoes are too tight, her skirts are not so tight as they were. Or have you begun sighing for the good old hobble-skirts, now they’re gone?”

“The hobble-skirts were prettier than I thought they were when they were with us, but the ‘tempestuous petticoat’ has its charm, which I find I’d been missing.”

“Well, at least it’s a change,” the younger sage allowed, “and I haven’t found the other changes in our dear old New York which I look for when I come back in the fall.”

The sages were enjoying together the soft weather which lingered with us a whole month from the middle of October onward, and the afternoon of their meeting in the Park was now softly reddening to the dim sunset over the westward trees.

“Yes,” the elder assented. “I miss the new sky-scrapers which used to welcome me back up and down the Avenue. But there are more automobiles than ever, and the game of saving your life from them when you cross the street is madder and merrier than I have known it before.”

“The war seems to have stopped building because people can’t afford it,” the other suggested, “but it has only increased automobiling.”

“Well, people can’t afford that, either. Nine-tenths  of them are traveling the road to ruin, I’m told, and apparently they can’t get over the ground too fast. Just look!” and the sages joined in the amused and mournful contemplation of the different types of motors innumerably whirring up and down the drive before them, while they choked in the fumes of the gasolene.

The motors were not the costliest types, except in a few instances, and in most instances they were the cheaper types, such as those who could not afford them could at least afford best. The sages had found a bench beside the walk where the statue of Daniel Webster looks down on the confluence of two driveways, and the stream of motors, going and coming, is like a seething torrent either way.

“The mystery is,” the elder continued, “why they should want to do it in the way they do it. Are they merely going somewhere and must get there in the shortest time possible, or are they arriving on a wager? If they are taking a pleasure drive, what a droll idea of pleasure they must have! Maybe they are trying to escape Black Care, but they must know he sits beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their car. Ah!”  The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages, and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. “He’s done for, poor little wretch! They can’t get used to the change. Some day a policeman will pick me up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came to judgment.”

“He wouldn’t believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and forgotten.”

“Forgotten,” the elder sage assented. “I remember when his fame filled the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I don’t imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they wouldn’t know what he was talking about.” The sage laughed and champed his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose their countenances after an emotional outbreak.

“Well, for one thing,” the younger observed, “they wouldn’t understand what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that they seldom speak English. That’s getting to be a dead language in New York, though it’s still used in the newspapers.” He thought to hearten the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of eighty can offer a man on the thither. “Perhaps the Russian Jews would appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They’re the brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they’ve known so little of either.”

His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. “Ah, the old ideals!” he sighed. “The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle course in an open carriage on a soft drive. Now it’s a vertiginous whirl on an asphalted road, round and round and round the Park till the victims stagger with their brains spinning after they get out of their cars.”

The younger sage laughed. “You’ve been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you’d  believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs giving their lady-friends joy-rides.”

“Few?” the elder retorted. “There are lots of them. I’ve counted twenty in a single round of the Park. I was proud to be in one of them, though my horse left something to be desired in the way of youth and beauty. But I reflected that I was not very young or beautiful myself.”

As the sages sat looking out over the dizzying whirl of the motors they smoothed the tops of their sticks with their soft old hands, and were silent oftener than not. The elder seemed to drowse off from the time and place, but he was recalled by the younger saying, “It is certainly astonishing weather for this season of the year.”

The elder woke up and retorted, as if in offense: “Not at all. I’ve seen the cherries in blossom at the end of October.”

“They didn’t set their fruit, I suppose.”

“Well — no.”

“Ah! Well, I saw a butterfly up here in the sheep-pasture the other day. I could have put out my hand and caught it. It’s the soft weather that brings your victorias out like the belated butterflies. Wait till the first cold snap, and there won’t be a single victoria or butterfly left.”

“Yes,” the elder assented, “we butterflies and victorias belong to the youth of the year and the  world. And the sad thing is that we won’t have our palingenesis.”

“Why not?” the younger sage demanded. “What is to prevent your coming back in two or three thousand years?”

“Well, if we came back in a year even, we shouldn’t find room, for one reason. Haven’t you noticed how full to bursting the place seems? Every street is as packed as lower Fifth Avenue used to be when the operatives came out of the big shops for their nooning. The city’s shell hasn’t been enlarged or added to, but the life in it has multiplied past its utmost capacity. All the hotels and houses and flats are packed. The theaters, wherever the plays are bad enough, swarm with spectators. Along up and down every side-streets the motors stand in rows, and at the same time the avenues are so dense with them that you are killed at every crossing. There has been no building to speak of during the summer, but unless New York is overbuilt next year we must appeal to Chicago to come and help hold it. But I’ve an idea that the victorias are remaining to stay; if some sort of mechanical horse could be substituted for the poor old animals that remind me of my mortality, I should be sure of it. Every now and then I get an impression of permanence in the things of the Park. As long as the  peanut-men and the swan-boats are with us I sha’n’t quite despair. And the other night I was moved almost to tears by the sight of a four-in-hand tooling softly down the Fifth Avenue drive. There it was, like some vehicular phantom, but how, whence, when? It came, as if out of the early eighteen-nineties; two middle-aged grooms, with their arms folded, sat on the rumble (if it’s the rumble), but of all the young people who ought to have flowered over the top none was left but the lady beside the gentleman-driver on the box. I’ve tried every evening since for that four-in-hand, but I haven’t seen it, and I’ve decided it wasn’t a vehicular phantom, but a mere dream of the past.”

“Four-horse dream,” the younger sage commented, as if musing aloud.

The elder did not seem quite pleased. “A joke?” he challenged.

“Not necessarily. I suppose I was the helpless prey of the rhyme.”

“I didn’t know you were a poet.”

“I’m not, always. But didn’t it occur to you that danger for danger your four-in-hand was more dangerous than an automobile to the passing human creature?”

“It might have been if it had been multiplied by ten thousand. But there was only one of it, and it wasn’t going twenty miles an hour.”

“That’s true,” the younger sage assented. “But there was always a fearful hazard in horses when we had them. We supposed they were tamed, but, after all, they were only trained animals, like Hagenback’s.”

“And what is a chauffeur?”

“Ah, you have me there!” the younger said, and he laughed generously. “Or you would have if I hadn’t noticed something like amelioration in the chauffeurs. At any rate, the taxis are cheaper than they were, and I suppose something will be done about the street traffic some time. They’re talking now about subway crossings. But I should prefer overhead foot-bridges at all the corners, crossing one another diagonally. They would look like triumphal arches, and would serve the purpose of any future Dewey victory if we should happen to have another hero to win one.”

“Well, we must hope for the best. I rather like the notion of the diagonal foot-bridges. But why not Rows along the second stories as they have them in Chester? I should be pretty sure of always getting home alive if we had them. Now if I’m not telephoned for at a hospital before I’m restored to consciousness, I think myself pretty lucky. And yet it seems but yesterday, as the people used to say in the plays, since I had  a pride in counting the automobiles as I walked up the Avenue. Once I got as high as twenty before I reached Fifty-ninth Street. Now I couldn’t count as many horse vehicles.”

The elder sage mocked himself in a feeble laugh, but the younger tried to be serious. “We don’t realize the absolute change. Our streets are not streets any more; they are railroad tracks with locomotives let loose on them, and no signs up to warn people at the crossings. It’s pathetic to see the foot-passengers saving themselves, especially the poor, pretty, high-heeled women, looking this way and that in their fright, and then tottering over as fast as they can totter.”

“Well, I should have said it was outrageous, humiliating, insulting, once, but I don’t any more; it would be no use.”

“No; and so much depends upon the point of view. When I’m on foot I feel all my rights invaded, but when I’m in a taxi it amuses me to see the women escaping; and I boil with rage in being halted at every other corner by the policeman with his new-fangled semaphore, and it’s “Go” and “Stop” in red and blue, and my taxi-clock going round all the time and getting me in for a dollar when I thought I should keep within seventy cents. Then I feel that pedestrians of every age and sex ought to be killed.”

“Yes, there’s something always in the point of view; and there’s some comfort when you’re stopped in your taxi to feel that they often do get killed.”

The sages laughed together, and the younger said: “I suppose when we get aeroplanes in common use, there’ll be annoying traffic regulations, and policemen anchored out at intervals in the central blue to enforce them. After all—”

What he was going to add in amplification cannot be known, for a girlish voice, trying to sharpen itself from its native sweetness to a conscientious severity, called to them as its owner swiftly advanced upon the elder sage: “Now, see here, grandfather! This won’t do at all. You promised not to leave that bench by the Indian Hunter, and here you are away down by the Falconer, and we’ve been looking everywhere for you. It’s too bad! I shall be afraid to trust you at all after this. Why, it’s horrid of you, grandfather! You might have got killed crossing the drive.”

The grandfather looked up and verified the situation, which seemed to include a young man, tall and beautiful, but neither so handsome nor so many heads high as the young men in the advertisements of ready-to-wear clothing, who smiled down on the young girl as if he had arrived with her, and were finding an amusement in her severity  which he might not, later. She was, in fact, very pretty, and her skirt flared in the fashion of the last moment, as she stooped threateningly yet fondly over her grandfather.

The younger sage silently and somewhat guiltily escaped from the tumult of emotion which ignored him, and shuffled slowly down the path. The other finally gave an “Oh!” of recognition, and then said, for all explanation and excuse, “I didn’t know what had become of you,” and then they all laughed.

SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY

I

MISS ISOBEL RAMSEY AND MISS ESTHER GARNETT

Miss Ramsey: “And they were really understood to be engaged?” Miss Ramsey is a dark-eyed, dark-haired girl of nearly the length of two lady’s umbrellas and the bulk of one closely folded in its sheath. She stands with her elbow supported on the corner of the mantel, her temple resting on the knuckle of a thin, nervous hand, in an effect of thoughtful absent-mindedness. Miss Garnett, more or less Merovingian in a costume that lends itself somewhat reluctantly to a low, thick figure, is apparently poising for departure, as she stands before the chair from which she has risen beside Miss Ramsey’s tea-table and looks earnestly up into Miss Ramsey’s absent face. Both are very young, but aim at being much older than they are, with occasional lapses into extreme girlhood.

Miss Garnett: “Yes, distinctly. I knew you couldn’t know, and I thought you ought to.” She speaks in a deep conviction-bearing and conviction-carrying voice. “If he has been coming here so much.”

Miss Ramsey, with what seems temperamental abruptness: “Sit down. One can always think better sitting down.” She catches a chair under her with a deft movement of her heel, and Miss Garnett sinks provisionally into her seat. “And I think it needs thought, don’t you?”

Miss Garnett: “That is what I expected of you.”

Miss Ramsey: “And have some more tea. There is nothing like fresh tea for clearing the brain, and we certainly need clear brains for this.” She pushes a button in the wall beside her, and is silent till the maid appears. “More tea, Nora.” She is silent again while the maid reappears with the tea and disappears. “I don’t know that he has been coming here so very much. But he has no right to be coming at all, if he is engaged. That is, in that way.”

Miss Garnett: “No. Not unless — he wishes he wasn’t.”

Miss Ramsey: “That would give him less than no right.”

Miss Garnett: “That is true. I didn’t think of it in that light.”

Miss Ramsey: “I’m trying to decide what I ought to do if he does want to get off. She said herself that they were engaged?”

Miss Garnett: “As much as that. Conny understood her to say so. And Conny never makes a mistake in what people say. Emily didn’t say whom she was engaged to, but Conny felt that that was to come later, and she did not quite feel like asking, don’t you know.”

Miss Ramsey: “Of course. And how came she to decide that it was Mr. Ashley?”

Miss Garnett: “Simply by putting two and two together. They two were together the whole time last summer.”

Miss Ramsey: “I see. Then there is only one thing for me to do.”

Miss Garnett, admiringly: “I knew you would say that.”

Miss Ramsey, dreamily: “The question is what the thing is.”

Miss Garnett: “Yes!”

Miss Ramsey: “That is what I wish to think over. Chocolates?” She offers a box, catching it with her left hand from the mantel at her shoulder, without rising.

Miss Garnett: “Thank you; do you think they go well with tea?”

Miss Ramsey: “They go well with anything.  But we mustn’t allow our minds to be distracted. The case is simply this: If Mr. Ashley is engaged to Emily Fray, he has no right to go round calling on other girls — well, as if he wasn’t — and he has been calling here a great deal. That is perfectly evident. He must be made to feel that girls are not to be trifled with — that they are not mere toys.”

Miss Garnett: “How splendidly you do reason! And he ought to understand that Emily has a right—”

Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I don’t know that I care about her — or not primarily. Or do you say primarily?”

Miss Garnett: “I never know. I only use it in writing.”

Miss Ramsey: “It’s a clumsy word; I don’t know that I shall. But what I mean is that I must act from a general principle, and that principle is that when a man is engaged, it doesn’t matter whether the girl has thrown herself at him, or not—”

Miss Garnett: “She certainly did, from what Conny says.”

Miss Ramsey: “He must be shown that other girls won’t tolerate his behaving as if he were not engaged. It is wrong.”

Miss Garnett: “We must stand together.”

Miss Ramsey: “Yes. Though I don’t infer that he has been attentive to other girls generally.”

Miss Garnett: “No. I meant that if he has been coming here so much, you want to prevent his trifling with others.”

Miss Ramsey: “Something like that. But it ought to be more definite. He ought to realize that if another girl cared for him, it would be cruel to her, paying her attentions, when he was engaged to some one else.”

Miss Garnett: “And cruel to the girl he is engaged to.”

Miss Ramsey: “Yes.” She speaks coldly, vaguely. “But that is the personal ground, and I wish to avoid that. I wish to deal with him purely in the abstract.”

Miss Garnett: “Yes, I understand that. And at the same time you wish to punish him. He ought to be made to feel it all the more because he is so severe himself.”

Miss Ramsey: “Severe?”

Miss Garnett: “Not tolerating anything that’s the least out of the way in other people. Taking you up about your ideas and showing where you’re wrong, or even silly. Spiritually snubbing, Conny calls it.”

Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I like that in him. It’s so invigorating. It braces up all your good resolutions.  It makes you ashamed; and shame is sanative.”

Miss Garnett: “That’s just what I told Conny, or the same thing. Do you think another one would hurt me? I will risk it, anyway.” She takes another chocolate from the box. “Go on.”

Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I was just wishing that I had been out longer, and had a little more experience of men. Then I should know how to act. How do you suppose people do, generally?”

Miss Garnett: “Why, you know, if they find a man in love with them, after he’s engaged to another girl, they make him go back to her, it doesn’t matter whether they’re in love with him themselves or not.”

Miss Ramsey: “I’m not in love with Mr. Ashley, please.”

Miss Garnett: “No; I’m supposing an extreme case.”

Miss Ramsey, after a moment of silent thought: “Did you ever hear of anybody doing it?”

Miss Garnett: “Not just in our set. But I know it’s done continually.”

Miss Ramsey: “It seems to me as if I had read something of the kind.”

Miss Garnett: “Oh yes, the books are full of it. Are those mallows? They might carry off the effects of the chocolates.” Miss Ramsey passes  her the box of marshmallows which she has bent over the table to look at.

Miss Ramsey: “And of course they couldn’t get into the books if they hadn’t really happened. I wish I could think of a case in point.”

Miss Garnett: “Why, there was Peg Woffington—”

Miss Ramsey, with displeasure: “She was an actress of some sort, wasn’t she?”

Miss Garnett, with meritorious candor: “Yes, she was. But she was a very good actress.”

Miss Ramsey: “What did she do?”

Miss Garnett: “Well, it’s a long time since I read it; and it’s rather old-fashioned now. But there was a countryman of some sort, I remember, who came away from his wife, and fell in love with Peg Woffington, and then the wife follows him up to London, and begs her to give him back to her, and she does it. There’s something about a portrait of Peg — I don’t remember exactly; she puts her face through and cries when the wife talks to the picture. The wife thinks it is a real picture, and she is kind of soliloquizing, and asking Peg to give her husband back to her; and Peg does, in the end. That part is beautiful. They become the greatest friends.”

Miss Ramsey: “Rather silly, I should say.”

Miss Garnett: “Yes, it is rather silly, but I  suppose the author thought she had to do something.”

Miss Ramsey: “And disgusting. A married man, that way! I don’t see any comparison with Mr. Ashley.”

Miss Garnett: “No, there really isn’t any. Emily has never asked you to give him up. And besides, Peg Woffington really liked him a little — loved him, in fact.”

Miss Ramsey: “And I don’t like Mr. Ashley at all. Of course I respect him — and I admire his intellect; there’s no question about his being handsome; but I have never thought of him for a moment in any other way; and now I can’t even respect him.”

Miss Garnett: “Nobody could. I’m sure Emily would be welcome to him as far as I was concerned. But he has never been about with me so much as he has with you, and I don’t wonder you feel indignant.”

Miss Ramsey, coldly: “I don’t feel indignant. I wish to be just.”

Miss Garnett: “Yes, that is what I mean. And poor Emily is so uninteresting! In the play that Kentucky Summers does, she is perfectly fascinating at first, and you can see why the poor girl’s fiancé should be so taken with her. But I’m sure no one could say you had ever given Mr.  Ashley the least encouragement. It would be pure justice on your part. I think you are grand! I shall always be proud of knowing what you were going to do.”

Miss Ramsey, after some moments of snubbing intention: “I don’t know what I am going to do myself, yet. Or how. What was that play? I never heard of it.”

Miss Garnett: “I don’t remember distinctly, but it was about a young man who falls in love with her, when he’s engaged to another girl, and she determines, as soon as she finds it out, to disgust him, so that he will go back to the other girl, don’t you know.”

Miss Ramsey: “That sounds rather more practical than the Peg Woffington plan. What does she do?”

Miss Garnett: “Nothing you’d like to do.”

Miss Ramsey: “I’d like to do something in such a cause. What does she do?”

Miss Garnett: “Oh, when he is calling on her, Kentucky Summers pretends to fly into a rage with her sister, and she pulls her hair down, and slams everything round the room, and scolds, and drinks champagne, and wants him to drink with her, and I don’t know what all. The upshot is that he is only too glad to get away.”

Miss Ramsey: “It’s rather loathsome, isn’t it?”

Miss Garnett: “It is rather loathsome. But it was in a good cause, and I suppose it was what an actress would think of.”

Miss Ramsey: “An actress?”

Miss Garnett: “I forgot. The heroine is a distinguished actress, you know, and Kentucky could play that sort of part to perfection. But I don’t think a lady would like to cut up, much, in the best cause.”

Miss Ramsey: “Cut up?”

Miss Garnett: “She certainly frisks about the room a good deal. How delicious these mallows are! Have you ever tried toasting them?”

Miss Ramsey: “At school. There seems an idea in it. And the hero isn’t married. I don’t like the notion of a married man.”

Miss Garnett: “Oh, I’m quite sure he isn’t married. He’s merely engaged. That makes the whole difference from the Peg Woffington story. And there’s no portrait, I’m confident, so that you wouldn’t have to do that part.”

Miss Ramsey, haughtily: “I don’t propose to do any part, if the affair can’t be arranged without some such mountebank business!”

Miss Garnett: “You can manage it, if anybody can. You have so much dignity that you could awe him into doing his duty by a single glance. I wouldn’t be in his place!”

Miss Ramsey: “I shall not give him a glance. I shall not see him when he comes. That will be simpler still.” To Nora, at the door: “What is it, Nora?”

II

NORA, MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT

Nora: “Mr. Ashley, Miss Ramsey.”

Miss Ramsey, with a severity not meant for Nora: “Ask him to sit down in the reception-room a moment.”

Nora: “Yes, Miss Ramsey.”

III

MISS RAMSEY, MISS GARNETT

Miss Garnett, rising and seizing Miss Ramsey’s hands: “Oh, Isobel! But you will be equal to it! Oh! Oh!”

Miss Ramsey, with state: “Why are you going, Esther? Sit down.”

Miss Garnett: “If I only could stay! If I could hide under the sofa, or behind the screen! Isn’t it wonderful — providential — his coming at the very instant? Oh, Isobel!” She clasps her friend convulsively, and after a moment’s resistance Miss Ramsey yields to her emotion, and they hide their  faces in each other’s neck, and strangle their hysteric laughter. They try to regain their composure, and then abandon the effort with a shuddering delight in the perfection of the incident. “What shall you do? Shall you trust to inspiration? Shall you make him show his hand first, and then act? Or shall you tell him at once that you know all, and — Or no, of course you can’t do that. He’s not supposed to know that you know. Oh, I can imagine the freezing hauteur that you’ll receive him with, and the icy indifference you’ll let him understand that he isn’t a persona grata with! If I were only as tall as you! He isn’t as tall himself, and you can tower over him. Don’t sit down, or bend, or anything; just stand with your head up, and glance carelessly at him under your lashes as if nobody was there! Then it will gradually dawn upon him that you know everything, and he’ll simply go through the floor.” They take some ecstatic turns about the room, Miss Ramsey waltzing as gentleman. She abruptly frees herself.

Miss Ramsey: “No. It can’t be as tacit as all that. There must be something explicit. As you say, I must do something to cure him of his fancy — his perfidy — and make him glad to go back to her.”

Miss Garnett: “Yes! Do you think he deserves it?”

Miss Ramsey: “I’ve no wish to punish him.”

Miss Garnett: “How noble you are! I don’t wonder he adores you. I should. But you won’t find it so easy. You must do something drastic. It is drastic, isn’t it? or do I mean static? One of those things when you simply crush a person. But now I must go. How I should like to listen at the door! We must kiss each other very quietly, and I must slip out — Oh, you dear! How I long to know what you’ll do! But it will be perfect, whatever it is. You always did do perfect things.” They knit their fingers together in parting. “On second thoughts I won’t kiss you. It might unman you, and you need all your strength. Unman isn’t the word, exactly, but you can’t say ungirl, can you? It would be ridiculous. Though girls are as brave as men when it comes to duty. Good-by, dear!” She catches Miss Ramsey about the neck, and pressing her lips silently to her cheek, runs out. Miss Ramsey rings and the maid appears.

IV

NORA, MISS RAMSEY

Miss Ramsey, starting: “Oh! Is that you, Nora? Of course! Nora!”

Nora: “Yes, Miss Ramsey.”

Miss Ramsey: “Do you know where my brother keeps his cigarettes?”

Nora: “Why, in his room, Miss Ramsey; you told him you didn’t like the smell here.”

Miss Ramsey: “Yes, yes. I forgot. And has he got any cocktails?”

Nora: “He’s got the whole bottle full of them yet.”

Miss Ramsey: “Full yet?”

Nora: “You wouldn’t let him offer them to the gentlemen he had to lunch, last week, because you said—”

Miss Ramsey: “What did I say?”

Nora: “They were vulgar.”

Miss Ramsey: “And so they are. And so much the better! Bring the cigarettes and the bottle and some glasses here, Nora, and then ask Mr. Ashley to come.” She walks away to the window, and hurriedly hums a musical comedy waltz, not quite in tune, as from not remembering exactly, and after Nora has tinkled in with a tray of glasses she lights a cigarette and stands puffing it, gasping and coughing a little, as Walter Ashley enters. “Oh, Mr. Ashley! Sorry to make you wait.”

V

MR. ASHLEY, MISS RAMSEY

Mr. Ashley: “The time has seemed long, but I could have waited all day. I couldn’t have gone  without seeing you, and telling you—” He pauses, as if bewildered at the spectacle of Miss Ramsey’s resolute practice with the cigarette, which she now takes from her lips and waves before her face with innocent recklessness.

Miss Ramsey, chokingly: “Do sit down.” She drops into an easy-chair beside the tea-table, and stretches the tips of her feet out beyond the hem of her skirt in extremely lady-like abandon. “Have a cigarette.” She reaches the box to him.

Ashley: “Thank you. I won’t smoke, I believe.” He stands frowning, while she throws her cigarette into a teacup and lights another.

Miss Ramsey: “I thought everybody smoked. Then have a cocktail.”

Ashley: “A what?”

Miss Ramsey: “A cocktail. So many people like them with their tea, instead of rum, you know.”

Ashley: “No, I didn’t know.” He regards her with amaze, rapidly hardening into condemnation.

Miss Ramsey: “I hope you don’t object to smoking. Englishwomen all smoke.”

Ashley: “I think I’ve heard. I didn’t know that American ladies did.”

Miss Ramsey: “They don’t, all. But they will when they find how nice it is.”

Ashley: “And do Englishwomen all drink cocktails?”

Miss Ramsey: “They will when they find how nice it is. But why do you keep standing? Sit down, if it’s only for a moment. There is something I would like to talk with you about. What were you saying when you came in? I didn’t catch it quite.”

Ashley: “Nothing — now—”

Miss Ramsey: “And I can’t persuade you to have a cocktail? I believe I’ll have another myself.” She takes up the bottle, and tries several times to pour from it. “I do believe Nora’s forgotten to open it! That is a good joke on me. But I mustn’t let her know. Do you happen to have a pocket-corkscrew with you, Mr. Ashley?”

Ashley: “No—”

Miss Ramsey: “Well, never mind.” She tosses her cigarette into the grate, and lights another. “I wonder why they always have cynical persons smoke, on the stage? I don’t see that the two things necessarily go together, but it does give you a kind of thrill when they strike a match, and it lights up their faces when they put it to the cigarette. You know something good and wicked is going to happen.” She puffs violently at her cigarette, and then suddenly flings it away and starts to her feet. “Will you — would  you — open the window?” She collapses into her chair.

Ashley, springing toward her: “Miss Ramsey, are you — you are ill!”

Miss Ramsey: “No, no! The window! A little faint — it’s so close — There, it’s all right now. Or it will be — when — I’ve had — another cigarette.” She leans forward to take one; Ashley gravely watches her, but says nothing. She lights her cigarette, but, without smoking, throws it away. “Go on.”

Ashley: “I wasn’t saying anything!”

Miss Ramsey: “Oh, I forgot. And I don’t know what we were talking about myself.” She falls limply back into her chair and closes her eyes.

Ashley: “Sha’n’t I ring for the maid? I’m afraid—”

Miss Ramsey, imperiously: “Not at all. Not on any account.” Far less imperiously: “You may pour me a cup of tea if you like. That will make me well. The full strength, please.” She motions away the hot-water jug with which he has proposed qualifying the cup of tea which he offers her.

Ashley: “One lump or two?”

Miss Ramsey: “Only one, thank you.” She takes the cup.

Ashley, offering the milk: “Cream?”

Miss Ramsey: “A drop.” He stands anxiously beside her while she takes a long draught and then gives back the cup. “That was perfect.”

Ashley: “Another?”

Miss Ramsey: “No, that is just right. Now go on. Or, I forgot. You were not going on. Oh dear! How much better I feel. There must have been something poisonous in those cigarettes.”

Ashley: “Yes, there was tobacco.”

Miss Ramsey: “Oh, do you think it was the tobacco? Do throw the whole box into the fire! I shall tell Bob never to get cigarettes with tobacco in them after this. Won’t you have one of the chocolates? Or a mallow? I feel as if I should never want to eat anything again. Where was I?” She rests her cheek against the side of her chair cushion, and speaks with closed eyes, in a weak murmur. Mr. Ashley watches her at first with anxiety, then with a gradual change of countenance until a gleam of intelligence steals into his look of compassion.

Ashley: “You asked me to throw the cigarettes into the fire. But I want you to let me keep them.”

Miss Ramsey, with wide-flung eyes: “You? You said you wouldn’t smoke.”

Ashley, laughing: “May I change my mind? One talks better.” He lights a cigarette. “And, Miss Ramsey, I believe I will have a cocktail, after all.”

Miss Ramsey: “Mr. Ashley!”

Ashley, without noting her protest: “I had forgotten that I had a corkscrew in my pocket-knife. Don’t trouble yourself to ring for one.” He produces the knife and opens the bottle; then, as Miss Ramsey rises and stands aghast, he pours out a glass and offers it to her, with mock devotion. As she shakes her head and recoils: “Oh! I thought you liked cocktails. They are very good after cigarettes — very reviving. But if you won’t—” He tosses off the cocktail and sets down the glass, smacking his lips. “Tell your brother I commend his taste — in cocktails and” — puffing his cigarette— “tobacco. Poison for poison, let me offer you one of my cigarettes. They’re milder than these.” He puts his hand to his breast pocket.

Miss Ramsey, with nervous shrinking: “No—”

Ashley: “It’s just as well. I find that I hadn’t brought mine with me.” After a moment: “You are so unconventional, so fearless, that I should like your notion of the problem in a book I’ve just been reading. Why should the mere fact that a man is married to one woman prevent his  being in love with another, or half a dozen others; or vice versa?”

Miss Ramsey: “Mr. Ashley, do you wish to insult me?”

Ashley: “Dear me, no! But put the case a little differently. Suppose a couple are merely engaged. Does that fact imply that neither has a right to a change of mind, or to be fancy free to make another choice?”

Miss Ramsey, indignantly: “Yes, it does. They are as sacredly bound to each other as if they were married, and if they are false to each other the girl is a wretch, and the man is a villain! And if you think anything I have said can excuse you for breaking your engagement, or that I don’t consider you the wickedest person in the world, and the most barefaced hypocrite, and — and — I don’t know what — you are very much mistaken.”

Ashley: “What in the world are you talking about?”

Miss Ramsey: “I am talking about you and your shameless perfidy.”

Ashley: “My shameless perf — I don’t understand! I came here to tell you that I love you—”

Miss Ramsey: “How dare you! To speak to me of that, when — Or perhaps you have broken with her, and think you are free to hoodwink some other poor creature. But you will find that you  have chosen the wrong person. And it’s no excuse for you her being a little — a little — not so bright as some girls, and not so good-looking. Oh, it’s enough to make any girl loathe her own looks! You mustn’t suppose you can come here red-handed — yes, it’s the same as a murder, and any true girl would say so — and tell me you care for me. No, Walter Ashley, I haven’t fallen so low as that, though I have the disgrace of your acquaintance. And I hope — I hope — if you don’t like my smoking, and offering you cocktails, and talking the way I have, it will be a lesson to you. And yes! — I will say it! If it will add to your misery to know that I did respect you very much, and thought everything — very highly — of you, and might have answered you very differently before, when you were free to tell me that — now I have nothing but the utmost abhorrence — and — disapproval of you. And — and — Oh, I don’t see how you can be so hateful!” She hides her face in her hands and rushes from the room, overturning several chairs in her course toward the door. Ashley remains staring after her, while a succession of impetuous rings make themselves heard from the street door. There is a sound of opening it, and then a flutter of skirts and anxieties, and Miss Garnett comes running into the room.

VI

MISS GARNETT, MR. ASHLEY

Miss Garnett, to the maid hovering in the doorway: “Yes, I must have left it here, for I never missed it till I went to pay my fare in the motor-bus, and tried to think whether I had the exact dime, and if I hadn’t whether the conductor would change a five-dollar bill or not, and then it rushed into my mind that I had left my purse somewhere, and I knew I hadn’t been anywhere else.” She runs from the mantel to the writing-desk in the corner, and then to the sofa, where, peering under the tea-table, she finds her purse on the shelf. “Oh, here it is, Nora, just where I put it when we began to talk, and I must have gone out and left it. I—” She starts with a little shriek, in encountering Ashley. “Oh, Mr. Ashley! What a fright you gave me! I was just looking for my purse that I missed when I went to pay my fare in the motor-bus, and was wondering whether I had the exact dime, or the conductor could change a five-dollar bill, and—” She discovers, or affects to discover, something strange in his manner. “What — what is the matter, Mr. Ashley?”

Ashley: “I shall be glad to have you tell me — or any one.”

Miss Garnett: “I don’t understand. Has Isobel—”

Ashley: “Miss Garnett, did you know I was engaged?”

Miss Garnett: “Why, yes; I was just going to congrat—”

Ashley: “Well, don’t, unless you can tell me whom I am engaged to.”

Miss Garnett: “Why, aren’t you engaged to Emily Fray?”

Ashley: “Not the least in the world.”

Miss Garnett, in despair: “Then what have I done? Oh, what a fatal, fatal scrape!” With a ray of returning hope: “But she told me herself that she was engaged! And you were together so much, last summer!” Desperately: “Then if she isn’t engaged to you, whom is she engaged to?”

Ashley: “On general principles, I shouldn’t know, but in this particular instance I happen to know that she is engaged to Owen Brooks. They were a great deal more together last summer.”

Miss Garnett, with conviction: “So they were!” With returning doubt: “But why didn’t she say so?”

Ashley: “I can’t tell you; she may have had her reasons, or she may not. Can you possibly tell me, in return for my ignorance, why the fact  of her engagement should involve me in the strange way it seems to have done with Miss Ramsey?”

Miss Garnett, with a burst of involuntary candor: “Why, I did that. Or, no! What’s she been doing?”

Ashley: “Really, Miss Garnett—”

Miss Garnett: “How can I tell you anything, if you don’t tell me everything? You wouldn’t wish me to betray confidence?”

Ashley: “No, certainly not. What was the confidence?”

Miss Garnett: “Well — But I shall have to know first what she’s been doing. You must see that yourself, Mr. Ashley.” He is silent. “Has she — has Isobel — been behaving — well, out of character?”

Ashley: “Very much indeed.”

Miss Garnett: “I expected she would.” She fetches a thoughtful sigh, and for her greater emotional convenience she sinks into an easy-chair and leans forward. “Oh dear! It is a scrape.” Suddenly and imperatively: “Tell me exactly what she did, if you hope for any help whatever.”

Ashley: “Why, she offered me a cocktail—”

Miss Garnett: “Oh, how good! I didn’t suppose she would dare! Well?”

Ashley: “And she smoked cigarettes—”

Miss Garnett: “How perfectly divine! And what else?”

Ashley, coldly: “May I ask why you admire Miss Ramsey’s behaving out of character so much? I think the smoking made her rather faint, and—”

Miss Garnett: “She would have let it kill her! Never tell me that girls have no moral courage!”

Ashley: “But what — what was the meaning of it all?”

Miss Garnett, thoughtfully: “I suppose if I got her in for it, I ought to get her out, even if I betray confidence.”

Ashley: “It depends upon the confidence. What is it?”

Miss Garnett: “Why — But you’re sure it’s my duty?”

Ashley: “If you care what I think of her—”

Miss Garnett: “Oh, Mr. Ashley, you mustn’t think it strange of Isobel, on my bended knees you mustn’t! Why, don’t you see? She was just doing it to disgust you!”

Ashley: “Disgust me?”

Miss Garnett: “Yes, and drive you back to Emily Fray.”

Ashley: “Drive me ba—”

Miss Garnett: “If she thought you were engaged to Emily, when you were coming here all  the time, and she wasn’t quite sure that she hated to have you, don’t you see it would be her duty to sacrifice herself, and — Oh, I suppose she’s heard everything up there, and—” She catches herself up and runs out of the room, leaving Ashley to await the retarded descent of skirts which he hears on the stairs after the crash of the street door has announced Miss Garnett’s escape. He stands with his back to the mantel, and faces Miss Ramsey as she enters the room.

VII

MISS RAMSEY, ASHLEY

Miss Ramsey, with the effect of cold surprise: “Mr. Ashley? I thought I heard — Wasn’t Miss Garnett—”

Ashley: “She was. Did you think it was the street door closing on me?”

Miss Ramsey: “How should I know?” Then, courageously: “No, I didn’t think it was. Why do you ask?” She moves uneasily about the room, with an air of studied inattention.

Ashley: “Because if you did, I can put you in the right, though I can’t restore Miss Garnett’s presence by my absence.”

Miss Ramsey: “You’re rather — enigmatical.” A ring is heard; the maid pauses at the doorway.  “I’m not at home, Nora.” To Mr. Ashley: “It seems to be very close—”

Ashley: “It’s my having been smoking.”

Miss Ramsey: “Your having?” She goes to the window and tries to lift it.

Ashley: “Let me.” He follows her to the window, where he stands beside her.

Miss Ramsey: “Now, she’s seen me! And you here with me. Of course—”

Ashley: “I shouldn’t mind. But I’m so sorry if — and I will go.”

Miss Ramsey: “You can’t go now — till she’s round the corner. She’ll keep looking back, and she’ll think I made you.”

Ashley: “But haven’t you? Aren’t you sending me back to Miss Fray to tell her that I must keep my engagement, though I care nothing for her, and care all the world for you? Isn’t that what you want me to do?”

Miss Ramsey: “But you’re not engaged to her! You just—”

Ashley: “Just what?”

Miss Ramsey, desperately: “You wish me to disgrace myself forever in your eyes. Well, I will; what does it matter now? I heard you telling Esther you were not engaged. I overheard you.”

Ashley: “I fancied you must.”

Miss Ramsey: “I tried to overhear! I eavesdropped! I wish you to know that.”

Ashley: “And what do you wish me to do about it?”

Miss Ramsey: “I should think any self-respecting person would know. I’m not a self-respecting person.” Her wandering gaze seems to fall for the first time upon the tray with the cocktails and glasses and cigarettes; she flies at the bell-button and presses it impetuously. As the maid appears: “Take these things away, Nora, please!” To Ashley when the maid has left the room: “Don’t be afraid to say what you think of me!”

Ashley: “I think all the world of you. But I should merely like to ask—”

Miss Ramsey: “Oh, you can ask anything of me now!”

Ashley, with palpable insincerity: “I should like to ask why you don’t respect yourself?”

Miss Ramsey: “Was that what you were going to ask? I know it wasn’t. But I will tell you. Because I have been a fool.”

Ashley: “Thank you. Now I will tell you what I was really going to ask. Why did you wish to drive me back to Miss Fray when you knew that I would be false to her a thousand times if I could only once be true to you?”

Miss Ramsey: “Now you are insulting me!  And that is just the point. You may be a very clever lawyer, Mr. Ashley, and everybody says you are — very able, and talented, and all that, but you can’t get round that point. You may torture any meaning you please out of my words, but I shall always say you brought it on yourself.”

Ashley: “Brought what on?”

Miss Ramsey: “Mr. Ashley! I won’t be cross-questioned.”

Ashley: “Was that why you smoked, and poured cocktails out of an unopened bottle? Was it because you wished me to hate you, and remember my duty, and go back to Miss Fray? Well, it was a dead failure. It made me love you more than ever. I am a fool too, as you call it.”

Miss Ramsey: “Say anything you please. I have given you the right. I shall not resent it. Go on.”

Ashley: “I should only repeat myself. You must have known how much I care for you, Isobel. Do you mind my calling you Isobel?”

Miss Ramsey: “Not in the least if you wish to humiliate me by it. I should like you to trample on me in every way you can.”

Ashley: “Trample on you? I would rather be run over by a steam-roller than tread on the least of your outlying feelings, dearest. Do you mind my saying dearest?”

Miss Ramsey: “I have told you that you can say anything you like. I deserve it. But oh, if you have a spark of pity—”

Ashley: “I’m a perfect conflagration of compassion, darling. Do you object to darling?”

Miss Ramsey, with starting tears: “It doesn’t matter now.” She has let her lovely length trail into the corner of the sofa, where she desperately reclines, supporting her elbow on the arm of it, and resting her drooping head on her hand. He draws a hassock up in front of her, and sits on it.

Ashley: “This represents kneeling at your feet. One doesn’t do it literally any more, you know.”

Miss Ramsey, in a hollow voice: “I should despise you if you did, and” — deeply murmurous— “I don’t wish to despise you.”

Ashley: “No, I understand that. You merely wish me to despise you. But why?”

Miss Ramsey, nervously: “You know.”

Ashley: “But I don’t know — Isobel, dearest, darling, if you will allow me to express myself so fully. How should I know?”

Miss Ramsey: “I’ve told you.”

Ashley: “May I take your hand? For good-by!” He possesses himself of it. “It seems to go along with those expressions.”

Miss Ramsey, self-contemptuously: “Oh yes.”

Ashley: “Thank you. Where were we?”

Miss Ramsey, sitting up and recovering her hand: “You were saying good-by—”

Ashley: “Was I? But not before I had told you that I knew you were doing all that for my best good, and I wish — I wish you could have seen how exemplary you looked when you were trying to pour a cocktail out of a corked bottle, between your remarks on passionate fiction and puffs of the insidious cigarette! When the venomous tobacco began to get in its deadly work, and you turned pale and reeled a little, and called for air, it made me mentally vow to go back to Miss Fray instantly, whether I was engaged to her or not, and cut out poor old Brooks—”

Miss Ramsey: “Was it Mr. Brooks? I didn’t hear the name exactly.”

Ashley: “When I was telling Miss Garnett? I ought to have spoken louder, but I wasn’t sure at the time you were listening. Though as you were saying, what does it matter now?”

Miss Ramsey: “Did I say that?”

Ashley: “Words to that effect. And they have made me feel how unworthy of you I am. I’m not heroic — by nature. But I could be, if you made me — by art—”

Miss Ramsey, springing to her feet indignantly: “Now, you are ridiculing me — you are making fun of me.”

Ashley, gathering himself up from his hassock with difficulty, and confronting her: “Do I look like a man who would dare to make fun of you? I am half a head shorter than you, and in moral grandeur you overtop me so that I would always have to wear a high hat when I was with you.”

Miss Ramsey, thoughtfully: “Plenty of girls are that way, now. But if you are ashamed of my being tall—” Flashingly, and with starting tears.

Ashley: “Ashamed! I can always look up to you, you can always stoop to me!” He stretches his arms toward her.

Miss Ramsey, recoiling bewildered: “Wait! We haven’t got to that yet.”

Ashley: “Oh, Isobel — dearest — darling! We’ve got past it! We’re on the home stretch, now.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

A MORALITY

I

MR. AND MRS. CLARENCE FOUNTAIN

Mrs. Clarence Fountain, backing into the room, and closing the door noiselessly before looking round: “Oh, you poor thing! I can see that you are dead, at the first glance. I’m dead myself, for that matter.” She is speaking to her husband, who clings with one hand to the chimney-piece, and supports his back with the other; from this hand a little girl’s long stocking lumpily dangles; Mrs. Fountain, turning round, observes it. “Not finished yet? But I don’t wonder! I wonder you’ve even begun. Well, now, I will take hold with you.” In token of the aid she is going to give, Mrs. Fountain sinks into a chair and rolls a distracted eye over the littered and tumbled room. “It’s worse than I thought it  would be. You ought to have smoothed the papers out and laid them in a pile as fast as you unwrapped the things; that is the way I always do; and wound the strings up and put them one side. Then you wouldn’t have had to wade round in them. I suppose I oughtn’t to have left it to you, but if I had let you put the children to bed you know you’d have told them stories and kept them all night over their prayers. And as it was each of them wanted to put in a special Christmas clause; I know what kind of Christmas clause I should have put in if I’d been frank! I’m not sure it’s right to keep up the deception. One comfort, the oldest ones don’t believe in it any more than we do. Dear! I did think at one time this afternoon I should have to be brought home in an ambulance; it would have been a convenience, with all the packages. I simply marvel at their delivery wagons getting them here.”

Fountain, coming to the table, where she sits, and taking up one of the toys with which it is strewn: “They haven’t all of them.”

Mrs. Fountain: “What do you mean by all of them?”

Fountain: “I mean half.” He takes up a mechanical locomotive and stuffs it into the stocking he holds.

Mrs. Fountain, staying his hand: “What are you doing? Putting Jimmy’s engine into Susy’s stocking! She’ll be perfectly insulted when she finds it, for she’ll know you weren’t paying the least attention, and you can’t blame Santa Claus for it with her. If that’s what you’ve been doing with the other stockings — But there aren’t any others. Don’t tell me you’ve just begun! Well, I could simply cry.”

Fountain, dropping into the chair on the other side of the table, under the shelter of a tall Christmas tree standing on it: “Do you call unwrapping a whole car-load of truck and getting it sorted, just beginning? I’ve been slaving here from the dawn of time, and I had to have some leisure for the ghosts of my own Christmases when I was little. I didn’t have to wade round in the wrappings of my presents in those days. But it isn’t the sad memories that take it out of you; it’s the happy ones. I’ve never had a ghastlier half-hour than I’ve just spent in the humiliating multiplicity of these gifts. All the old birthdays and wedding-days and Fourth of Julys and home-comings and children’s christenings I’ve ever had came trooping back. There oughtn’t to be any gay anniversaries; they should be forbidden by law. If I could only have recalled a few dangerous fevers and funerals!”

Mrs. Fountain: “Clarence! Don’t say such a thing; you’ll be punished for it. I know how you suffer from those gloomy feelings, and I pity you. You ought to bear up against them. If I gave way! You must think about something cheerful in the future when the happiness of the past afflicts you, and set one against the other; life isn’t all a vale of tears. You must keep your mind fixed on the work before you. I don’t believe it’s the number of the packages here that’s broken you down. It’s the shopping that’s worn you out; I’m sure I’m a mere thread. And I had been at it from immediately after breakfast; and I lunched in one of the stores with ten thousand suburbans who had come pouring in with the first of their unnatural trains: I did hope I should have some of the places to myself; but they were every one jammed. And you came up from your office about four, perfectly fresh.”

Fountain: “Fresh! Yes, quite dewy from a day’s fight with the beasts at Ephesus on the eve of Christmas week.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, don’t be cynical, Clarence, on this, of all nights of the year. You know how sorry I always am for what you have to go through down there, and I suppose it’s worse, as you say, at this season than any other time of year. It’s the terrible concentration of everything  just before Christmas that makes it so killing. I really don’t know which of the places was the worst; the big department stores or the separate places for jewelry and toys and books and stationery and antiques; they were all alike, and all maddening. And the rain outside, and everybody coming in reeking; though I don’t believe that sunshine would have been any better; there’d have been more of them. I declare, it made my heart ache for those poor creatures behind the counters, and I don’t know whether I suffered most for them when they kept up a ghastly cheerfulness in their attention or were simply insulting in their indifference. I know they must be all dead by this time. ‘Going up?’ ‘Going down?’ ‘Ca-ish!’ ‘Here, boy!’ I believe it will ring in my ears as long as I live. And the whiz of those overhead wire things, and having to wait ages for your change, and then drag your tatters out of the stores into the streets! If I hadn’t had you with me at the last I should certainly have dropped.”

Fountain: “Yes, and what had become of your good resolutions about doing all your Christmas shopping in July?”

Mrs. Fountain: “My good resolutions? Really, Clarence, sometimes if it were not cruelty to animals I should like to hit you. My good — You  know that you suggested that plan, and it wasn’t even original with you. The papers have been talking about it for years; but when you brought it up as such a new idea, I fell in with it to please you—”

Fountain: “Now, look out, Lucy!”

Mrs. Fountain: “Yes, to please you, and to help you forget the Christmas worry, just as I’ve been doing to-night. You never spare me.”

Fountain: “Stick to the record. Why didn’t you do your Christmas shopping in July?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Why didn’t I? Did you expect me to do my Christmas shopping down at Sculpin Beach, where I spent the whole time from the middle of June till the middle of September? Why didn’t you do the Christmas shopping in July? You had the stores under your nose here from the beginning till the end of summer, with nothing in the world to hinder you, and not a chick or a child to look after.”

Fountain: “Oh, I like that. You think I was leading a life of complete leisure here, with the thermometer among the nineties nine-tenths of the time?”

Mrs. Fountain: “I only know you were bragging in all your letters about your bath and your club, and the folly of any one going away from the cool, comfortable town in the summer. I suppose  you’ll say that was to keep me from feeling badly at leaving you. When it was only for the children’s sake! I will let you take them the next time.”

Fountain: “While you look after my office? And you think the stores are full of Christmas things in July, I suppose.”

Mrs. Fountain: “I never thought so; and now I hope you see the folly of that idea. No, Clarence. We must be logical in everything. You can’t get rid of Christmas shopping at Christmas-time.”

Fountain, shouting wrathfully: “Then I say get rid of Christmas!”

II

MR. FRANK WATKINS, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Watkins, opening the door for himself and struggling into the room with an armful of parcels: “I’m with you there, Clarence. Christmas is at the root of Christmas shopping, and Christmas giving, and all the rest of it. Oh, you needn’t be afraid, Lucy. I didn’t hear any epithets; just caught the drift of your argument through the keyhole. I’ve been kicking at the door ever since you began. Where shall I dump these things?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Oh, you poor boy! Here — anywhere — on the floor — on the sofa — on the table.” She clears several spaces and helps Watkins unload. “Clarence! I’m surprised at you. What are you thinking of?”

Fountain: “I’m thinking that if this goes on, I’ll let somebody else arrange the presents.”

Watkins: “If I saw a man coming into my house with a load like this to-night, I’d throw him into the street. But living in a ninth-story flat like you, it might hurt him.”

Mrs. Fountain, reading the inscriptions on the packages: “‘For Benny from his uncle Frank.’ Oh, how sweet of you, Frank! And here’s a kiss for his uncle Frank.” She embraces him with as little interruption as possible. “‘From Uncle Frank to Jim.’ Oh, I know what that is!” She feels the package over. “And this is for ‘Susy from her aunt Sue.’ Oh, I knew she would remember her namesake. ‘For Maggie. Merry Christmas from Mrs. Watkins.’ ‘Bridget, with Mrs. Watkins’s best wishes for a Merry Christmas.’ Both the girls! But it’s like Sue; she never forgets anybody. And what’s this for Clarence? I must know! Not a bath-gown?” Undoing it: “I simply must see it. Blue! His very color!” Holding it up: “From you, Frank?” He nods. “Clarence!”

Watkins: “If Fountain tries to kiss me, I’ll—”

Fountain: “I wouldn’t kiss you for a dozen bath-gowns.” Lifting it up from the floor where Mrs. Fountain has dropped it: “It is rather nice.”

Watkins: “Don’t overwhelm me.”

Mrs. Fountain, dancing about with a long, soft roll in her hand: “Oh, oh, oh! She saw me gloating on it at Shumaker’s! I do wonder if it is.”

Fountain, reaching for it: “Why, open it—”

Mrs. Fountain: “You dare! No, it shall be opened the very last thing in the morning, now, to punish you! How is poor Sue? I saw her literally dropping by the way at Shumaker’s.”

Watkins, making for the door: “Well, she must have got up again. I left her registering a vow that if ever she lived to see another Christmas she would leave the country months before the shopping began. She called down maledictions on all the recipients of her gifts and wished them the worst harm that can befall the wicked.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Poor Sue! She simply lives to do people good, and I can understand exactly how she feels toward them. I’ll be round bright and early to-morrow to thank her. Why do you go?”

Watkins: “Well, I can’t stay here all night, and I’d better let you and Clarence finish up.” He escapes from her detaining embrace and runs out.

III

MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Mrs. Fountain, intent upon her roll: “How funny he is! I wonder if he did hear anything but our scolding voices? Where were we?”

Fountain: “I had just called you a serpent.”

Mrs. Fountain, with amusement: “No, really?” Feeling the parcel: “If it’s that Spanish lace scarf I can tell her it was machine lace. I saw it at the first glance. But poor Sue has no taste. I suppose I must stand it. But I can’t bear to think what she’s given the girls and children. She means well. Did you really say serpent, Clarence? You never called me just that before.”

Fountain: “No, but you called me a laughing hyena, and said I scoffed at everything sacred.”

Mrs. Fountain: “I can’t remember using the word hyena, exactly, though I do think the way you talk about Christmas is dreadful. But I take back the laughing hyena.”

Fountain: “And I take back the serpent. I meant dove, anyway. But it’s this Christmas-time when a man gets so tired he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, you’re good, anyway, dearest, whatever you say; and now I’m going to  help you arrange the things. I suppose there’ll be lots more to-morrow, but we must get rid of these now. Don’t you wish nobody would do anything for us? Just the children — dear little souls! I don’t believe but what we can make Jim and Susy believe in Santa Claus again; Benny is firm in the faith; he put him into his prayer. I declare, his sweetness almost broke my heart.” At a knock: “Who’s that, I wonder? Come in! Oh, it’s you, Maggie. Well?”

IV

THE FOUNTAINS, FOUNTAIN’S SISTERS

Maggie: “It’s Mr. Fountain’s sisters just telephoned up.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Have them come up at once, Maggie, of course.” As Maggie goes out: “Another interruption! If it’s going to keep on like this! Shouldn’t you have thought they might have sent their presents?”

Fountain: “I thought something like it in Frank’s case; but I didn’t say it.”

Mrs. Fountain: “And I don’t know why I say it, now. It’s because I’m so tired I don’t know what I am saying. Do forgive me! It’s this terrible Christmas spirit that gets into me. But now you’ll see how nice I can be to them.” At a tap  on the door: “Come in! Come in! Don’t mind our being in all this mess. So darling of you to come! You can help cheer Clarence up; you know his Christmas Eve dumps.” She runs to them and clasps them in her arms with several half-open packages dangling from her hands and contrasting their disarray with the neatness of their silk-ribboned and tissue-papered parcels which their embrace makes meet at her back. “Minnie! Aggie! To lug here, when you ought to be at home in bed dying of fatigue! But it’s just like you, both of you. Did you ever see anything like the stores to-day? Do sit down, or swoon on the floor, or anything. Let me have those wretched bundles which are simply killing you.” She looks at the different packages. “‘For Benny from Grandpa.’ ‘For a good girl, from Susy’s grandmother.’ ‘Jim, from Aunt Minnie and Aunt Aggie.’ ‘Lucy, with love from Aggie and Minnie.’ And Clarence! What hearts you have got! Well, I always say there never were such thoughtful girls, and you always show such taste and such originality. I long to get at the things.” She keeps fingering the large bundle marked with her husband’s name. “Not — not — a—”

Minnie: “Yes, a bath-robe. Unless you give him a cigar-case it’s about the only thing you can give a man.”

Aggie: “Minnie thought of it and I chose it. Blue, because it’s his color. Try it on, Clarence, and if it’s too long—”

Mrs. Fountain: “Yes, do, dear! Let’s see you with it on.” While the girls are fussily opening the robe, she manages to push her brother’s gift behind the door. Then, without looking round at her husband. “It isn’t a bit too long. Just the very—” Looking: “Well, it can easily be taken up at the hem. I can do it to-morrow.” She abandons him to his awkward isolation while she chatters on with his sisters. “Sit down; I insist! Don’t think of going. Did you see that frightful pack of people when the cab horse fell down in front of Shumaker’s?”

Minnie: “See it?”

Aggie: “We were in the midst of it! I wonder we ever got out alive. It’s enough to make you wish never to see another Christmas as long as you live.”

Minnie: “A great many won’t live. There will be more grippe, and more pneumonia, and more appendicitis from those jams of people in the stores!”

Aggie: “The germs must have been swarming.”

Fountain: “Lucy was black with them when we got home.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Don’t pay the slightest attention to him, girls. He’ll probably be the first to sneeze himself.”

Minnie: “I don’t know about sneezing. I shall only be too glad if I don’t have nervous prostration from it.”

Aggie: “I’m glad we got our motor-car just in time. Any one that goes in the trolleys now will take their life in their hand.” The girls rise and move toward the door. “Well, we must go on now. We’re making a regular round; you can’t trust the delivery wagons at a time like this. Good-by. Merry Christmas to the children. They’re fast asleep by this time, I suppose.”

Minnie: “I only wish I was!”

Mrs. Fountain: “I believe you, Minnie. Good-by. Good night. Good night, Aggie. Clarence, go to the elevator with them! Or no, he can’t in that ridiculous bath-gown!” Turning to Fountain as the door closes: “Now I’ve done it.”

V

MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Fountain: “It isn’t a thing you could have wished to phrase that way, exactly.”

Mrs. Fountain: “And you made me do it.  Never thanking them, or anything, and standing there like I don’t know what, and leaving the talk all to me. And now, making me lose my temper again, when I wanted to be so nice to you. Well, it is no use trying, and from this on I won’t. Clarence!” She has opened the parcel addressed to herself and now stands transfixed with joy and wonder. “See what the girls have given me! The very necklace I’ve been longing for at Planets’, and denying myself for the last fortnight! Well, never will I say your sisters are mean again.”

Fountain: “You ought to have said that to them.”

Mrs. Fountain: “It quite reconciles one to Christmas. What? Oh, that was rather nasty. You know I didn’t mean it. I was so excited I didn’t know what I was saying. I’m sure nobody ever got on better with sisters-in-law, and that shows my tact; if I do make a slip, now and then, I can always get out of it. They will understand. Do you think it was very nice of them to flaunt their new motor in my face? But of course anything your family does is perfect, and always was, though I must say this necklace is sweet of them. I wonder they had the taste.” A tap on the door is heard. “Come in, Maggie!” Sotto voce. “Take it off.” She snatches his bath-robe and tosses it behind the door.

VI

WILBUR HAZARD, THE FOUNTAINS

Hazard: “I suppose I can come in, even if I’m not Maggie. Catch, Fountain.” He tosses a large bundle to Fountain. “It’s huge, but it isn’t hefty.” He turns to go out again.

Mrs. Fountain: “Oh, oh, oh! Don’t go! Come in and help us. What have you brought Clarence! May I feel?”

Hazard: “You can look, if you like. I’m rather proud of it. There’s only one other thing you can give a man, and I said, ‘No, not a cigar-case. Fountain smokes enough already, but if a bath-robe can induce him to wash—’” He goes out.

Mrs. Fountain, screaming after him through the open door: “Oh, how good! Come back and see it on him.” She throws the bath-robe over Fountain’s shoulders.

Hazard, looking in again: “Perfect fit, just as the Jew said, and the very color for Fountain.” He vanishes, shutting the door behind him.

VII

MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Mrs. Fountain: “How coarse! Well, my dear, I don’t know where you picked up your bachelor friends. I hope this is the last of them.”

Fountain: “Hazard’s the only one who has survived your rigorous treatment. But he always had a passion for cold shoulder, poor fellow. As bath-robes go, this isn’t bad.” He gets his arms into it, and walks up and down. “Heigh?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Yes, it is pretty good. But the worst of Christmas is that it rouses up all your old friends.”

Fountain: “They feel so abnormally good, confound them. I suppose poor old Hazard half killed himself looking this thing up and building the joke to go with it.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, take it off, now, and come help me with the children’s presents. You’re quite forgetting about them, and it’ll be morning and you’ll have the little wretches swarming in before you can turn round. Dear little souls! I can sympathize with their impatience, of course. But what are you going to do with these bath-robes? You can’t wear four bath-robes.”

Fountain: “I can change them every day. But there ought to be seven. This hood is rather a new wrinkle, though, isn’t it? I suppose it’s for a voyage, and you pull it up over your head when you come through the corridor back to your stateroom. We shall have to go to Europe, Lucy.”

Mrs. Fountain: “I would go to Asia, Africa, and Oceanica, to escape another Christmas.  Now if there are any more bath-robes — Come in, Maggie.”

VIII

MAGGIE, THE FOUNTAINS

Maggie, bringing in a bundle: “Something a District Messenger brought. Will you sign for it, ma’am?”

Mrs. Fountain: “You sign, Clarence. If I know anything about the look and the feel of a bundle, this is another bath-robe, but I shall soon see.” While she is cutting the string and tearing the wrappings away, Fountain signs and Maggie goes. Mrs. Fountain shakes out the folds of the robe. “Well, upon my word, I should think there was conspiracy to insult you, Clarence. I should like to know who has had the effrontery — What’s on it?”

Fountain, reading from the card which had fallen out of the garment to the floor: “‘With Christmas greetings from Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby.’”

Mrs. Fountain, dropping the robe and seizing the card: “Mrs. Arthur J. Gibby! Well, upon my word, this is impudence. It’s not only impudence, it’s indelicacy. And I had always thought she was the very embodiment of refinement, and I’ve gone about saying so. Now I shall  have to take it back. The idea of a lady sending a bath-robe to a gentleman! What next, I wonder! What right has Mrs. Gibby to send you a bath-robe? Don’t prevaricate! Remember that the truth is the only thing that can save you. Matters must have gone pretty far, when a woman could send you anything so — intimate. What are you staring at with that paper? You needn’t hope to divert my mind by—”

Fountain, giving her the paper in which the robe came: “Seems to be for Mrs. Clarence Fountain.”

Mrs. Fountain, snatching it from him: “What! It is, it is! Oh, poor dear Lilly! How can you ever forgive me? She saw me looking at it to-day at Shumaker’s, and it must have come into her head in despair what else to get me. But it was a perfect inspiration — for it was just what I was longing for. Why” — laughing hysterically while she holds up the robe, and turns it this way and that— “I might have seen at a glance that it wasn’t a man’s, with this lace on and this silk hood, and” — she hurries into it, and pulls it forward, looking down at either side— “it’s just the right length, and if it was made for me it couldn’t fit me better. What a joke I shall have with Lilly, when I tell her about it. I sha’n’t spare myself a bit!”

Fountain: “Then I hope you’ll spare me. I  have some little delicacy of feeling, and I don’t like the notion of a lady’s giving me a bath-robe. It’s — intimate. I don’t know where you picked up your girl friends.”

Mrs. Fountain, capering about joyfully: “Oh, how funny you are, darling! But go on. I don’t mind it, now. And you may be glad you’ve got off so easily. Only now if there are any more bath-robes—” A timid rap is heard at the door. “Come in, Maggie!” The door is slowly set ajar, then flung suddenly wide open, and Jim and Susy in their night-gowns rush dancing and exulting in.

IX

JIM, SUSY, THE FOUNTAINS

Susy: “We’ve caught you, we’ve caught you.”

Jim: “I just bet it was you, and now I’ve won, haven’t I, mother?”

Susy: “And I’ve won, too, haven’t I, father?” Arrested at sight of her father in the hooded bath-gown: “He does look like Santa Claus, doesn’t he, Jimmy? But the real Santa Claus would be all over snow, and a long, white beard. You can’t fool us!”

Jim: “You can’t fool us! We know you, we know you! And mother dressed up, too! There isn’t any Mrs. Santa Claus, and that proves it!”

Mrs. Fountain, severely: “Dreadful little things! Who said you might come here? Go straight back to bed, this minute, or — Will you send them back, Clarence, and not stand staring so? What are you thinking of?”

Fountain, dreamily: “Nothing. Merely wondering what we shall do when we’ve got rid of our superstitions. Shall we be the better for it, or even the wiser?”

Mrs. Fountain: “What put that question into your head? Christmas, I suppose; and that’s another reason for wishing there was no such thing. If I had my way, there wouldn’t be.”

Jim: “Oh, mother!”

Susy: “No Christmas?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, not for disobedient children who get out of bed and come in, spoiling everything. If you don’t go straight back, it will be the last time, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus.”

Jim: “And if we go right back?”

Susy: “And promise not to come in any more?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, we’ll see how you keep your promise. If you don’t, that’s the end of Christmas in this house.”

Jim: “It’s a bargain, then! Come on, Susy!”

Susy: “And we do it for you, mother. And for you, father. We just came in for fun, anyway.”

Jim: “We just came for a surprise.”

Mrs. Fountain, kissing them both: “Well, then, if it was only for fun, we’ll excuse you this time. Run along, now, that’s good children. Clarence!”

X

MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Fountain: “Well?” He looks up at her from where he has dropped into a chair beside the table strewn with opened and unopened gifts at the foot of the Christmas tree.

Mrs. Fountain: “What are you mooning about?”

Fountain: “What if it was all a fake? Those thousands and hundreds of thousands of churches that pierce the clouds with their spires; those millions of ministers and missionaries; those billions of worshipers, sitting and standing and kneeling, and singing and praying; those nuns and monks, and brotherhoods and sisterhoods, with their ideals of self-denial, and their duties to the sick and poor; those martyrs that died for the one true faith, and those other martyrs of the other true faiths whom the one true faith tortured and killed; those masses and sermons and ceremonies, what if they were all a delusion, a mistake, a misunderstanding? What if it were all as unlike the real thing, if there is any real thing,  as this pagan Christmas of ours is as unlike a Christian Christmas?”

Mrs. Fountain, springing up: “I knew it! I knew that it was this Christmas giving that was making you morbid again. Can’t you shake it off and be cheerful — like me? I’m sure I have to bear twice as much of it as you have. I’ve been shopping the whole week, and you’ve been just this one afternoon.” She begins to catch her breath, and fails in searching for her handkerchief in the folds of her dress under the bath-robe.

Fountain, offering his handkerchief: “Take mine.”

Mrs. Fountain, catching it from him, and hiding her face in it on the table: “You ought to help me bear up, and instead of that you fling yourself on my sympathies and break me down.” Lifting her face: “And if it was all a fake, as you say, and an illusion, what would you do, what would you give people in place of it?”

Fountain: “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Fountain: “What would you have in place of Christmas itself?”

Fountain: “I don’t know.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, then, I wouldn’t set myself up to preach down everything — in a blue bath-gown. You’ve no idea how ridiculous you are.”

Fountain: “Oh, yes, I have. I can see you. You look like one of those blue nuns in Rome. But I don’t remember any lace on them.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, you don’t look like a blue monk, you needn’t flatter yourself, for there are none. You look like — What are you thinking about?”

Fountain: “Oh, nothing. What do you suppose is in all these packages here? Useful things, that we need, that we must have? You know without looking that it’s the superfluity of naughtiness in one form or other. And the givers of these gifts, they had to give them, just as we’ve had to give dozens of gifts ourselves. We ought to have put on our cards, ‘With the season’s bitterest grudges,’ ‘In hopes of a return,’ ‘With a hopeless sense of the folly,’ ‘To pay a hateful debt,’ ‘With impotent rage and despair.’”

Mrs. Fountain: “I don’t deny it, Clarence. You’re perfectly right; I almost wish we had put it. How it would have made them hop! But they’d have known it was just the way they felt themselves.”

Fountain, going on thoughtfully: “It’s the cap-sheaf of the social barbarism we live in, the hideous hypocrisy. It’s no use to put it on religion. The Jews keep Christmas, too, and we know what they think of Christianity as a belief. No, we’ve got  to go further back, to the Pagan Saturnalia — Well, I renounce the whole affair, here and now. I’m going to spend the rest of the night bundling these things up, and to-morrow I’m going to spend the day in a taxi, going round and giving them back to the fools that sent them.”

Mrs. Fountain: “And I’m going with you. I hate it as much as you do — Come in, Maggie!”

XI

MAGGIE, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Maggie: “Something the elevator-boy says he forgot. It came along with the last one.”

Mrs. Fountain, taking a bundle from her: “If this is another bath-robe, Clarence! It is, as I live. Now if it is a woman sending it—” She picks up a card which falls out of the robe as she unfolds it. “‘Love the Giver,’ indeed! Now, Clarence, I insist, I demand—”

Fountain: “Hold on, hold on, my dear. The last bath-robe that came from a woman was for you.”

Mrs. Fountain: “So it was. I don’t know what I was thinking about; and I do beg your par — But this is a man’s bath-robe!”

Fountain, taking the card which she mechanically stretches out to him: “And a man sends it — old  Fellows. Can’t you read print? Ambrose J. Fellows, and a message in writing: ‘It was a toss-up between this and a cigar-case, and the bath-robe won. Hope you haven’t got any other thoughtful friends.’”

Mrs. Fountain: “Oh, very brilliant, giving me a start like this! I shall let Mr. Fellows know — What is it, Maggie? Open the door, please.”

Maggie, opening: “It’s just a District Messenger.”

Fountain, ironically: “Oh, only a District Messenger.” He signs the messenger’s slip, while his wife receives from Maggie a bundle which she regards with suspicion.

XII

MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Mrs. Fountain: “‘From Uncle Philip for Clarence.’ Well, Uncle Philip, if you have sent Clarence — Clarence!” breaking into a whimper: “It is, it is! It’s another.”

Fountain: “Well, that only makes the seventh, and just enough for every day in the week. It’s quite my ideal. Now, if there’s nothing about a cigar-case — Hello!” He feels in the pocket of the robe and brings out a cigar-case, from which a slip of paper falls: “‘Couldn’t make up my mind  between them, so send both. Uncle Phil.’ Well, this is the last stroke of Christmas insanity.”

Mrs. Fountain: “His brain simply reeled under it, and gave way. It shows what Christmas really comes to with a man of strong intellect like Uncle Phil.”

Fountain, opening the case: “Oh, I don’t know! He’s put some cigars in here — in a lucid interval, probably. There’s hope yet.”

Mrs. Fountain, in despair: “No, Clarence, there’s no hope. Don’t flatter yourself. The only way is to bundle back all their presents and never, never, never give or receive another one. Come! Let’s begin tying them up at once; it will take us the rest of the night.” A knock at the door. “Come, Maggie.”

XIII

JIM AND SUSY, MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Jim and Susy, pushing in: “We can’t sleep, mother. May we have a pillow fight to keep us amused till we’re drowsy?”

Mrs. Fountain, desolately: “Yes, go and have your pillow fight. It doesn’t matter now. We’re sending the presents all back, anyway.” She begins frantically wrapping some of the things up.

Susy: “Oh, father, are you sending them back?”

Jim: “She’s just making believe. Isn’t she, father?”

Fountain: “Well, I’m not so sure of that. If she doesn’t do it, I will.”

Mrs. Fountain, desisting: “Will you go right back to bed?”

Jim and Susy: “Yes, we will.”

Mrs. Fountain: “And to sleep, instantly?”

Jim and Susy, in succession: “We won’t keep awake a minute longer.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Very well, then, we’ll see. Now be off with you.” As they put their heads together and go out laughing: “And remember, if you come here another single time, back go every one of the presents.”

Fountain: “As soon as ever Santa Claus can find a moment for it.”

Jim, derisively: “Oh, yes, Santa Claus!”

Susy: “I guess if you wait for Santa Claus to take them back!”

XIV

MRS. FOUNTAIN, FOUNTAIN

Mrs. Fountain: “Tiresome little wretches. Of course we can’t expect them to keep up the self-deception.”

Fountain: “They’ll grow to another. When they’re men and women they’ll pretend that  Christmas is delightful, and go round giving people the presents that they’ve worn their lives out in buying and getting together. And they’ll work themselves up into the notion that they are really enjoying it, when they know at the bottom of their souls that they loathe the whole job.”

Mrs. Fountain: “There you are with your pessimism again! And I had just begun to feel cheerful about it!”

Fountain: “Since when? Since I proposed sending this rubbish back to the givers with our curse?”

Mrs. Fountain: “No, I was thinking what fun it would be if we could get up a sort of Christmas game, and do it just among relations and intimate friends.”

Fountain: “Ah, I wish you luck of it. Then the thing would begin to have some reality, and just as in proportion as people had the worst feelings in giving the presents, their best feeling would be hurt in getting them back.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Then why did you ever think of it?”

Fountain: “To keep from going mad. Come, let’s go on with this job of sorting the presents, and putting them in the stockings and hanging them up on the tree and laying them round the trunk of it. One thing: it’s for the last time. As soon as Christmas week is over, I shall inaugurate  an educational campaign against the whole Christmas superstition. It must be extirpated root and branch, and the extirpation must begin in the minds of the children; we old fools are hopeless; we must die in it; but the children can be saved. We must organize and make a house-to-house fight; and I’ll begin in our own house. To-morrow, as soon as the children have made themselves thoroughly sick with candy and cake and midday dinner, I will appeal to their reason, and get them to agree to drop it; to sign the Anti-Christmas pledge; to—”

Mrs. Fountain: “Clarence! I have an idea.”

Fountain: “Not a bright one?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Yes, a bright one, even if you didn’t originate it. Have Christmas confined entirely to children — to the very youngest — to children that believe firmly in Santa Claus.”

Fountain: “Oh, hello! Wouldn’t that leave Jim and Susy out? I couldn’t have them left out.”

Mrs. Fountain: “That’s true. I didn’t think of that. Well, say, to children that either believe or pretend to believe in him. What’s that?” She stops at a faint, soft sound on the door. “It’s Maggie with her hands so full she’s pushing with her elbow. Come in, Maggie, come in. Come  in! Don’t you hear me? Come in, I say! Oh, it isn’t Maggie, of course! It’s those worthless, worthless little wretches, again.” She runs to the door calling out, “Naughty, naughty, naughty!” as she runs. Then, flinging the door wide, with a final cry of “Naughty, I say!” she discovers a small figure on the threshold, nightgowned to its feet, and looking up with a frightened, wistful face. “Why, Benny!” She stoops down and catches the child in her arms, and presses him tight to her neck, and bends over, covering his head with kisses. “What in the world are you doing here, you poor little lamb? Is mother’s darling walking in his sleep? What did you want, my pet? Tell mudda, do! Whisper it in mudda’s big ear! Can’t you tell mudda? What? Whisper a little louder, love! We’re not angry with you, sweetness. Now, try to speak louder. Is that Santa Claus? No, dearest, that’s just dadda. Santa Claus hasn’t come yet, but he will soon. What? Say it again. Is there any Santa Claus? Why, who else could have brought all these presents? Presents for Benny and Jim and Susy and mudda, and seven bath-gowns for dadda. Isn’t that funny? Seven! And one for mudda. What? I can’t quite hear you, pet. Are we going to send the presents back? Why, who ever heard of such a thing? Jim said so? And Susy?  Well, I will settle with them, when I come to them. You don’t want me to? Well, I won’t, then, if Benny doesn’t want mudda to. I’ll just give them a kiss apiece, pop in their big ears. What? You’ve got something for Santa Claus to give them? What? Where? In your crib? And shall we go and get it? For mudda too? And dadda? Oh, my little angel!” She begins to cry over him, and to kiss him again. “You’ll break my heart with your loveliness. He wants to kiss you too, dadda.” She puts the boy into his father’s arms; then catches him back and runs from the room with him. Fountain resumes the work of filling the long stocking he had begun with; then he takes up a very short sock. He has that in his hand when Mrs. Fountain comes back, wiping her eyes. “He’ll go to sleep now, I guess; he was half dreaming when he came in here. I should think, when you saw how Benny believed in it, you’d be ashamed of saying a word against Christmas.”

Fountain: “Who’s said anything against it? I’ve just been arguing for it, and trying to convince you that for the sake of little children like Benny it ought to be perpetuated to the end of the world. It began with the childhood of the race, in the rejuvenescence of the spirit.”

Mrs. Fountain: “Didn’t you say that Christmas  began with the pagans? How monstrously you prevaricate!”

Fountain: “That was merely a figure of speech. And besides, since you’ve been out with Benny, I’ve been thinking, and I take back everything I’ve said or thought against Christmas; I didn’t really think it. I’ve been going back in my mind to that first Christmas we had together, and it’s cheered me up wonderfully.”

Mrs. Fountain, tenderly: “Have you, dearest? I always think of it. If you could have seen Benny, how I left him, just now?”

Fountain: “I shouldn’t mind seeing him, and I shouldn’t care if I gave a glance at poor old Jim and Susy. I’d like to reassure them about not sending back the presents.” He puts his arm round her and presses her toward the door.

Mrs. Fountain: “How sweet you are! And how funny! And good!” She accentuates each sentiment with a kiss. “And don’t you suppose I felt sorry for you, making you go round with me the whole afternoon, and then leaving you to take the brunt of arranging the presents? Now I’ll tell you: next year, I will do my Christmas shopping in July. It’s the only way.”

Fountain: “No, there’s a better way. As you were saying, they don’t have the Christmas things out. The only way is to do our Christmas shopping  the day after Christmas; everything will be round still, and dog-cheap. Come, we’ll begin day after to-morrow.”

Mrs. Fountain: “We will, we will!”

Fountain: “Do you think we will?”

Mrs. Fountain: “Well, we’ll say we will.” They laugh together, and then he kisses her.

Fountain: “Even if it goes on in the same old way, as long as we have each other—”

Mrs. Fountain: “And the children.”

Fountain: “I forgot the children!”

Mrs. Fountain: “Oh, how delightful you are!”

THE END

A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS AND OTHER STORIES

CONTENTS

A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS

THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.

A DIFFICULT CASE.

THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.

A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.

A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS

I.

We first met Glendenning on the Canadian boat which carries you down the rapids of the St. Lawrence from Kingston and leaves you at Montreal. When we saw a handsome young clergyman across the promenade-deck looking up from his guide-book toward us, now and again, as if in default of knowing any one else he would be very willing to know us, we decided that I must make his acquaintance. He was instantly and cordially responsive to my question whether he had ever made the trip before, and he was amiably grateful when in my quality of old habitué of the route I pointed out some characteristic features of the scenery. I showed him just where we were on the long map of the river hanging over his knee, and I added, with no great relevancy, that my wife and I were renewing the fond emotion of our first trip down the St. Lawrence in the character of bridal pair which we had spurned when it was really ours. I explained that we had left the children with my wife’s aunt, so as to render the travesty more lifelike; and when he said, “I suppose you miss them, though,” I gave him my card. He tried to find one of his own to give me in return, but he could only find a lot of other people’s cards. He wrote his name on the back of one, and handed it to me with a smile. “It won’t do for me to put ‘reverend’ before it, in my own chirography, but that’s the way I have it engraved.”

“Oh,” I said, “the cut of your coat bewrayed you,” and we had some laughing talk. But I felt the eye of Mrs. March dwelling upon me with growing impatience, till I suggested, “I should like to make you acquainted with my wife, Mr. Glendenning.”

He said, Oh, he should be so happy; and he gathered his dangling map into the book and came over with me to where Mrs. March sat; and, like the good young American husband I was in those days, I stood aside and left the whole talk to her. She interested him so much more than I could that I presently wandered away and amused myself elsewhere. When I came back, she clutched my arm and bade me not speak a word; it was the most romantic thing in the world, and she would tell me about it when we were alone, but now I must go off again; he had just gone to get a book for her which he had been speaking of, and would be back the next instant, and it would not do to let him suppose we had been discussing him.

II.

I was sometimes disappointed in Mrs. March’s mysteries when I came up close to them; but I was always willing to take them on trust; and I submitted to the postponement of a solution in this case with more than my usual faith. She found time, before Mr. Glendenning reappeared, to ask me if I had noticed a mother and daughter on the boat, the mother evidently an invalid, and the daughter very devoted, and both decidedly ladies; and when I said, “No. Why?” she answered, “Oh, nothing,” and that she would tell me. Then she drove me away, and we did not meet till I found her in our state-room just before the terrible mid-day meal they used to give you on the Corinthian, and called dinner.

She began at once, while she did something to her hair before the morsel of mirror: “Why I wanted to know if you had noticed those people was because they are the reason of his being here.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Of course not. But I knew it, for he asked if I had seen them, or could tell him who they were.”

“It seems to me that he made pretty good time to get so far as that.”

“I don’t say he got so far himself, but you men never know how to take steps for any one else. You can’t put two and two together. But to my mind it’s as plain as the nose on his face that he’s seen that girl somewhere and is taking this trip because she’s on board. He said he hadn’t decided to come till the last moment.”

“What wild leaps of fancy!” I said. “But the nose on his face is handsome rather than plain, and I sha’n’t be satisfied till I see him with the lady.”

“Yes, he’s quite Greek,” said Mrs. March, in assent to my opinion of his nose. “Too Greek for a clergyman, almost. But he isn’t vain of it. Those beautiful people are often quite modest, and Mr. Glendenning is very modest.”

“And I’m very hungry. If you don’t hurry your prinking, Isabel, we shall not get any dinner.”

“I’m ready,” said my wife, and she continued with her eyes still on the glass: “He’s got a church out in Ohio, somewhere; but he’s a New-Englander, and he’s quite wild to get back. He thinks those people are from Boston: I could tell in a moment if I saw them. Well, now, I am ready,” and with this she really ceased to do something to her hair, and came out into the long saloon with me where the table was set. Rows of passengers stood behind the rows of chairs, with a detaining grasp on nearly all of them. We gazed up and down in despair. Suddenly Mrs. March sped forward, and I found that Mr. Glendenning had made a sign to her from a distant point, where there were two vacant chairs for us next his own. We eagerly laid hands on them, and waited for the gong to sound for dinner. In this interval an elderly lady followed by a young girl came down the saloon toward us, and I saw signs, or rather emotions, of intelligence pass between Mr. Glendenning and Mrs. March concerning them.

The older of these ladies was a tall, handsome matron, who bore her fifty years with a native severity qualified by a certain air of wonder at a world which I could well fancy had not always taken her at her own estimate of her personal and social importance. She had the effect of challenging you to do less, as she advanced slowly between the wall of state-rooms and the backs of the people gripping their chairs, and eyed them with a sort of imperious surprise that they should have left no place for her. So at least I read her glance, while I read in that of the young lady coming after, and showing her beauty first over this shoulder and then over that of her mother, chiefly a present amusement, behind which lay a character of perhaps equal pride, if not equal hardness. She was very beautiful, in the dark style which I cannot help thinking has fallen into unmerited abeyance; and as she passed us I could see that she was very graceful. She was dressed in a lady’s acceptance of the fashions of that day, which would be thought so grotesque in this. I have heard contemporaneous young girls laugh at the mere notion of hoops, but in 1870 we thought hoops extremely becoming; and this young lady knew how to hold hers a little on one side so as to give herself room in the narrow avenue, and not betray more than the discreetest hint of a white stocking. I believe the stockings are black now.

They both got by us, and I could see Mr. Glendenning following them with longing but irresolute eyes, until they turned, a long way down the saloon, as if to come toward us again. Then he hurried to meet them, and as he addressed himself first to one and then to the other, I knew him to be offering them his chair. So did my wife, and she said, “You must give up your place too, Basil,” and I said I would if she wished to see me starve on the spot. But of course I went and joined Glendenning in his entreaties that they would deprive us of our chances of dinner (I knew what the second table was on the Corinthian); and I must say that the elder lady accepted my chair in the spirit which my secret grudge deserved. She made me feel as if I ought to have offered it when they first passed us; but it was some satisfaction to learn afterwards that she gave Mrs. March, for her ready sacrifice of me, as bad a half-hour as she ever had. She sat next to my wife, and the young lady took Glendenning’s place, and as soon as we had left them she began trying to find out from Mrs. March who he was, and what his relation to us was. The girl tried to check her at first, and then seemed to give it up, and devoted herself to being rather more amiable than she otherwise might have been, my wife thought, in compensation for the severity of her mother’s scrutiny. Her mother appeared disposed to hold Mrs. March responsible for knowing little or nothing about Mr. Glendenning.

“He seems to be an Episcopal clergyman,” she said, in a haughty summing up. “From his name I should have supposed he was Scotch and a Presbyterian.” She began to patronize the trip we were making, and to abuse it; she said that she did not see what could have induced them to undertake it; but one had to get back from Niagara somehow, and they had been told at the hotel there that the boats were very comfortable. She had never been more uncomfortable in her life; as for the rapids, they made her ill, and they were obviously so dangerous that she should not even look at them again. Then, from having done all the talking and most of the eating, she fell quite silent, and gave her daughter a chance to speak to my wife. She had hitherto spoken only to her mother, but now she asked Mrs. March if she had ever been down the St. Lawrence before.

When my wife explained, and asked her whether she was enjoying it, she answered with a rapture that was quite astonishing, in reference to her mother’s expressions of disgust: “Oh, immensely! Every instant of it,” and she went on to expatiate on its peculiar charm in terms so intelligent and sympathetic that Mrs. March confessed it had been part of our wedding journey, and that this was the reason why we were now taking the trip.

The young lady did not seem to care so much for this, and when she thanked my wife in leaving the table with her mother, and begged her to thank the gentlemen who had so kindly given up their places, she made no overture to further acquaintance. In fact, we had been so simply and merely made use of that, although we were rather meek people, we decided to avoid our beneficiaries for the rest of the day; and Mr. Glendenning, who could not, as a clergyman, indulge even a just resentment, could as little refuse us his sympathy. He laughed at some hints of my wife’s experience, which she dropped before she left us to pick up a meal from the lukewarm leavings of the Corinthian’s dinner, if we could. She said she was going forward to get a good place on the bow, and would keep two camp-stools for us, which she could assure us no one would get away from her.

We were somewhat surprised then to find her seated by the rail with the younger lady of the two whom she meant to avoid if she meant anything by what she said. She was laughing and talking on quite easy terms with her apparently, and “There!” she triumphed as we came up, “I’ve kept your camp-stools for you,” and she showed them at her side, where she was holding her hand on them. “You had better put them here.”

The girl had stiffened a little at our approach, as I could see, but a young girl’s stiffness is always rather amusing than otherwise, and I did not mind it. Neither, that I could see, did Mr. Glendenning, and it soon passed. It seemed that she had left her mother lying down in her state-room, where she justly imagined that if she did not see the rapids she should suffer less alarm from them; the young lady had come frankly to the side of Mrs. March as soon as she saw her, and asked if she might sit with her. She now talked to me for a decent space of time, and then presently, without my knowing how, she was talking to Mr. Glendenning, and they were comparing notes of Niagara; he was saying that he thought he had seen her at the Cataract House, and she was owning that she and her mother had at least stopped at that hotel.

III.

I have no wish, and if I had the wish I should not have the art, to keep back the fact that these young people were evidently very much taken with each other. They showed their mutual pleasure so plainly that even I could see it. As for Mrs. March, she was as proud of it as if she had invented them and set them going in their advance toward each other, like two mechanical toys.

I confess that with reference to what my wife had told me of this young lady’s behavior when she was with her mother, her submissiveness, her entire self-effacement, up to a certain point, I did not know quite what to make of her present independence, not to say freedom. I thought she might perhaps have been kept so strictly in the background, with young men, that she was rather disposed to make the most of any chance at them which offered. If the young man in this case was at no pains to hide his pleasure in her society, one might say that she was almost eager to show her delight in his. If it was a case of love at first sight, the earliest glimpse had been to the girl, who was all eyes for Glendenning. It was very pretty, but it was a little alarming, and perhaps a little droll, even. She was actually making the advances, not consciously, but helplessly; fondly, ignorantly, for I have no belief, nor had my wife (a much more critical observer), that she knew how she was giving herself away.

I thought perhaps that she was in the habit from pride, or something like it, of holding herself in check, and that this blameless excess which I saw was the natural expansion from an inner constraint. But what I really knew was that the young people got on very rapidly, in an acquaintance that prospered up to the last moment I saw them together. This was just before the Corinthian drew up to her landing at Montreal, when Miss Bentley (we had learned her name) came to us from the point where she was standing with Glendenning and said that now she must go to her mother, and took a sweet leave of my wife. She asked where we were going to stay in Montreal and whether we were going on to Quebec; and said her mother would wish to send Mrs. March her card.

When she was gone, Glendenning explained, with rather superfluous apology, that he had offered to see the ladies to a hotel, for he was afraid that at this crowded season they might not find it easy to get rooms, and he did not wish Mrs. Bentley, who was an invalid, to have any anxieties about it. He bade us an affectionate, but not a disconsolate adieu, and when we had got into the modest conveyance (if an omnibus is modest) which was to take us to the Ottawa House, we saw him drive off to the St. Lawrence Hall (it was twenty-five years ago) in one of those vitreous and tinkling Montreal landaus, with Mrs. and Miss Bentley and Mrs. Bentley’s maid.

We were still so young as to be very much absorbed in the love affairs of other people; I believe women always remain young enough for that; and Mrs. March talked about the one we fancied we had witnessed the beginning of pretty much the whole evening. The next morning we got letters from Boston, telling us how the children were and all that they were doing and saying. We had stood it very well, as long as we did not hear anything about them, and we had lent ourselves in a sort of semi-forgetfulness of them to the associations of the past when they were not; but now to learn that they were hearty and happy, and that they sent love and kisses, was too much. With one mind we renounced the notion of going on to Quebec; we found that we could just get the ten-o’clock train that would reach Boston by eleven that night, and we made all haste and got it. We had not been really at peace, we perceived, till that moment since we had bidden the children good-bye.

IV.

Perhaps it was because we left Montreal so abruptly that Mrs. March never received Mrs. Bentley’s card. It may be at the Ottawa House to this day, for all I know. What is certain is that we saw and heard nothing more of her or her daughter. Glendenning called to see us as he passed through Boston on his way west from Quebec, but we were neither of us at home and we missed him, to my wife’s vivid regret. I rather think we expected him to find some excuse for writing after he reached his place in northern Ohio; but he did not write, and he became more and more the memory of a young clergyman in the beginning of a love-affair, till one summer, while we were still disputing where we should spend the hot weather within business reach, there came a letter from him saying that he was settled at Gormanville, and wishing that he might tempt us up some afternoon before we were off to the mountains or seaside. This revived all my wife’s waning interest in him, and it was hard to keep the answer I made him from expressing in a series of crucial inquiries the excitement she felt at his being in New England and so near Boston, and in Gormanville of all places. It was one of the places we had thought of for the summer, and we were yet so far from having relinquished it that we were recurring from time to time in hope and fear to the advertisement of an old village mansion there, with ample grounds, garden, orchard, ice-house, and stables, for a very low rental to an unexceptionable tenant. We had no doubt of our own qualifications, but we had misgivings of the village mansion; and I am afraid that I rather unduly despatched the personal part of my letter, in my haste to ask what Glendenning knew and what he thought of the Conwell place. However, the letter seemed to serve all purposes. There came a reply from Glendenning, most cordial, even affectionate, saying that the Conwell place was delightful, and I must come at once and see it. He professed that he would be glad to have Mrs. March come too, and he declared that if his joy at having us did not fill his modest rectory to bursting, he was sure it could stand the physical strain of our presence, though he confessed that his guest-chamber was tiny.

“He wants you, Basil,” my wife divined from terms which gave me no sense of any latent design of parting us in his hospitality. “But, evidently, it isn’t a chance to be missed, and you must go — instantly. Can you go to-morrow? But telegraph him you’re coming, and tell him to hold on to the Conwell place; it may be snapped up any moment if it’s so desirable.”

I did not go till the following week, when I found that no one had attempted to snap up the Conwell place. In fact, it rather snapped me up, I secured it with so little trouble. I reported it so perfect that all my wife’s fears of a latent objection to it were roused again. But when I said I thought we could relinquish it, her terrors subsided; and I thought this the right moment to deliver a stroke that I had been holding in reserve.

“You know,” I began, “the Bentleys have their summer place there — the old Bentley homestead. It’s their ancestral town, you know.”

“Bentleys? What Bentleys?” she demanded, opaquely.

“Why, those people we met on the Corinthian, summer before last — you thought he was in love with the girl—”

A simultaneous photograph could alone reproduce Mrs. March’s tumultuous and various emotions as she seized the fact conveyed in my words. She poured out a volume of mingled conjectures, assertions, suspicions, conclusions, in which there was nothing final but the decision that we must not dream of going there; that it would look like thrusting ourselves in, and would be in the worst sort of taste; they would all hate us, and we should feel that we were spies upon the young people; for of course the Bentleys had got Glendenning there to marry him, and in effect did not want any one to witness the disgraceful spectacle.

I said, “That may be the nefarious purpose of the young lady, but, as I understood Glendenning, it is no part of her mother’s design.”

“What do you mean?”

“Miss Bentley may have got him there to marry him, but Mrs. Bentley seems to have meant nothing more than an engagement at the worst.”

“What do you mean? They’re not engaged, are they?”

“They’re not married, at any rate, and I suppose they’re engaged. I did not have it from Miss Bentley, but I suppose Glendenning may be trusted in such a case.”

“Now,” said my wife, with a severity that might well have appalled me, “if you will please to explain, Basil, it will be better for you.”

“Why, it is simply this. Glendenning seems to have made himself so useful to the mother and pleasing to the daughter after we left them in Montreal that he was tolerated on a pretence that there was reason for his writing back to Mrs. Bentley after he got home, and, as Mrs. Bentley never writes letters, Miss Bentley had the hard task of answering him. This led to a correspondence.”

“And to her moving heaven and earth to get him to Gormanville. I see! Of course she did it so that no one knew what she was about!”

“Apparently. Glendenning himself was not in the secret. The Bentleys were in Europe last summer, and he did not know that they had a place at Gormanville till he came to live there. Another proof that Miss Bentley got him there is the fact that she and her mother are Unitarians, and that they would naturally be able to select the rector of the Episcopal church.”

“Go on,” said Mrs. March, not the least daunted.

“Oh, there’s nothing more. He is simply rector of St. Michael’s at Gormanville; and there is not the slightest proof that any young lady had a hand in getting him there.”

“As if I cared in the least whether she had! I suppose you will allow that she had something to do with getting engaged to him, and that is the great matter.”

“Yes, I must allow that, if we are to suppose that young ladies have anything to do with young men getting engaged to them; it doesn’t seem exactly delicate. But the novel phase of this great matter is the position of the young lady’s mother in regard to it. From what I could make out she consents to the engagement of her daughter, but she don’t and won’t consent to her marriage.” My wife glared at me with so little speculation in her eyes that I felt obliged to disclaim all responsibility for the fact I had reported. “Thou canst not say I did it. They did it, and Miss Bentley, if any one, is to blame. It seems, from what Glendenning says, that the young lady and he wrote to each other while she was abroad, and that they became engaged by letter. Then the affair was broken off because of her mother’s opposition; but since they have met at Gormanville, the engagement has been renewed. So much they’ve managed against the old lady’s will, but apparently on condition that they won’t get married till she says.”

“Nonsense! How could she stop them?”

“She couldn’t, I dare say, by any of the old romantic methods of a convent or disinheritance; but she is an invalid; she wants to keep her daughter with her, and she avails with the girl’s conscience by being simply dependent and obstructive. The young people have carried their engagement through, and now such hope as they have is fixed upon her finally yielding in the matter of their marriage, though Glendenning was obliged to confess that there was no sign of her doing so. They agree — Miss Bentley and he — that they cannot get married as they got engaged, in spite of her mother — it would be unclerical if it wouldn’t be unfilial — and they simply have to bide their time.”

My wife asked abruptly, “How many chambers are there in the Conwell place?”

I said, and then she asked, “Is there a windmill or a force-pump?” I answered proudly that in Gormanville there was town water, but that if this should give out there were both a windmill and a force-pump on the Conwell place.

“It is very complete,” she sighed, as if this had removed all hope from her, and she added, “I suppose we had better take it.”

V.

We certainly did not take it for the sake of being near the Bentleys, neither of whom had given us particular reason to desire their further acquaintance, though the young lady had agreeably modified herself when apart from her mother. In fact, we went to Gormanville because it was an exceptional chance to get a beautiful place for a very little money, where we could go early and stay late. But no sooner had we acted from this quite personal, not to say selfish, motive than we were rewarded with the sweetest overtures of neighborliness by the Bentleys. They waited, of course, till we were settled in our house before they came to call upon Mrs. March, but they had been preceded by several hospitable offerings from their garden, their dairy, and their hen-house, which were very welcome in the days of our first uncertainty as to trades-people. We analyzed this hospitality as an effect of that sort of nature in Mrs. Bentley which can equally assert its superiority by blessing or banning. Evidently, since chance had again thrown us in her way, she would not go out of it to be offensive, but would continue in it, and make the best of us.

No doubt Glendenning had talked us into the Bentleys; and this my wife said she hated most of all; for we should have to live up to the notion of us imparted by a young man from the impressions of the moment when he saw us purple in the light of his dawning love. In justice to Glendenning, however, I must say that he did nothing, by a show of his own assiduities, to urge us upon the Bentleys after we came to Gormanville. If we had not felt so sure of him, we might have thought he was keeping his regard for us a little too modestly in the background. He made us one cool little call, the evening of our arrival, in which he had the effect of anxiety to get away as soon as possible; and after that we saw him no more until he came with Miss Bentley and her mother a week later. His forbearance was all the more remarkable because his church and his rectory were just across the street from the Conwell place, at the corner of another street, where we could see their wooden gothic in the cold shadow of the maples with which the green in front of them was planted.

During all that time Glendenning’s personal elevation remained invisible to us, and we began to wonder if he were not that most lamentable of fellow-creatures, a clerical snob. I am not sure still that he might not have been so in some degree, there was such a mixture of joy that was almost abject in his genuine affection for us when Mrs. Bentley openly approved us on her first visit. I dare say he would not have quite abandoned us in any case; but he must have felt responsible for us, and it must have been such a load off him when she took that turn with us.

She called in the afternoon, and the young people dropped in again the same evening, and took the trouble to win back our simple hearts. That is, Miss Bentley showed herself again as frank and sweet as she had been on the boat when she joined my wife after dinner and left her mother in her state-room. Glendenning was again the Glendenning of our first meeting, and something more. He fearlessly led the way to intimacies of feeling with an expansion uncommon even in an accepted lover, and we made our conclusions that however subject he might be to his indefinitely future mother-in-law, he would not be at all so to his wife, if she could help it. He took the lead, but because she gave it him; and she displayed an aptness for conjugal submissiveness which almost amounted to genius. Whenever she spoke to either of us, it was with one eye on him to see if he liked what she was saying. It was so perfect that I doubted if it could last; but my wife said a girl like that could keep it up till she dropped. I have never been sure that she liked us as well as he did; I think it was part of her intense loyalty to seem to like us a great deal more.

She was deeply in love, and nothing but her ladylike breeding kept her from being openly fond. I figured her in a sort of impassioned incandescence, such as only a pure and perhaps cold nature could burn into; and I amused myself a little with the sense of Glendenning’s apparent inadequacy. Sweet he was, and admirably gentle and fine; he had an unfailing good sense, and a very ready wisdom, as I grew more and more to perceive. But he was an inch or so shorter than Miss Bentley, and in his sunny blondness, with his golden red beard and hair, and his pinkish complexion, he wanted still more the effect of an emotional equality with her. He was very handsome, with features excellently regular; his smile was celestially beautiful; innocent gay lights danced in his blue eyes, through lashes and under brows that were a lighter blond than his beard and hair.

VI.

The next morning, which was of a Saturday, when I did not go to town, he came over to us again from the shadow of his sombre maples, and fell simply and naturally into talk about his engagement. He was much fuller in my wife’s presence than he had been with me alone, and told us the hopes he had of Mrs. Bentley’s yielding within a reasonable time. He seemed to gather encouragement from the sort of perspective he got the affair into by putting it before us, and finding her dissent to her daughter’s marriage so ridiculous in our eyes after her consent to her engagement that a woman of her great good sense evidently could not persist in it.

“There is no personal objection to myself,” he said, with a modest satisfaction. “In fact, I think she really likes me, and only dislikes my engagement to Edith. But she knows that Edith is incapable of marrying against her mother’s will, or I of wishing her to do so; though there is nothing else to prevent us.”

My wife allowed herself to say, “Isn’t it rather cruel of her?”

“Why, no, not altogether; or not so much so as it might be in different circumstances. I make every allowance for her. In the first place, she is a great sufferer.”

“Yes, I know,” my wife relented.

“She suffers terribly from asthma. I don’t suppose she has lain down in bed for ten years. She sleeps in an easy-chair, and she’s never quite free from her trouble; when there’s a paroxysm of the disease, her anguish is frightful. I’ve never seen it, of course, but I have heard it; you hear it all through the house. Edith has the constant care of her. Her mother has to be perpetually moved and shifted in her chair, and Edith does this for her; she will let no one else come near her; Edith must look to the ventilation, and burn the pastilles which help her to breathe. She depends upon her every instant.” He had grown very solemn in voice and face, and he now said, “When I think of what she endures, it seems to me that it is I who am cruel even to dream of taking her daughter from her.”

“Yes,” my wife assented.

“But there is really no present question of that We are very happy as it is. We can wait, and wait willingly till Mrs. Bentley wishes us to wait no longer; or—”

He stopped, and we were both aware of something in his mind which he put from him. He became a little pale, and sat looking very grave. Then he rose. “I don’t know whether to say how welcome you would be at St. Michael’s to-morrow, for you may not be—”

“We are Unitarians, too,” said Mrs. March. “But we are coming to hear you.”

“I am glad you are coming to church,” said Glendenning, putting away the personal tribute implied with a gentle dignity that became him.

VII.

We waited a discreet time before returning the call of the Bentley ladies, but not so long as to seem conscious. In fact, we had been softened towards Mrs. Bentley by what Glendenning told us of her suffering, and we were disposed to forgive a great deal of patronage and superiority to her asthma; they were not part of the disease, but still they were somehow to be considered with reference to it in her case.

We were admitted by the maid, who came running down the hall stairway, with a preoccupied air, to the open door where we stood waiting. There were two great syringa-bushes on each hand close to the portal, which were in full flower, and which flung their sweetness through the doorway and the windows; but when we found ourselves in the dim old-fashioned parlor, we were aware of this odor meeting and mixing with another which descended from the floor above — the smell of some medicated pastille. There was a sound of anxious steps overhead, and a hurried closing of doors, with the mechanical sound of labored breathing.

“We have come at a bad time,” I suggested.

“Yes, why did they let us in?” cried my wife in an anguish of compassion and vexation. She repeated her question to Miss Bentley, who came down almost immediately, looking pale, indeed, but steady, and making a brave show of welcome.

“My mother would have wished it,” she said, “and she sent me as soon as she knew who it was. You mustn’t be distressed,” she entreated, with a pathetic smile. “It’s really a kind of relief to her; anything is that takes her mind off herself for a moment. She will be so sorry to miss you, and you must come again as soon as you can.”

“Oh, we will, we will!” cried my wife, in nothing less than a passion of meekness; and Miss Bentley went on to comfort her.

“It’s dreadful, of course, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds, and it isn’t nearly so bad as it looks. She is used to it, and there is a great deal in that. Oh, don’t go!” she begged, at a movement Mrs. March made to rise. “The doctor is with her just now, and I’m not needed. It will be kind if you’ll stay; it’s a relief to be out of the room with a good excuse!” She even laughed a little as she said this; she went on to lead the talk away from what was so intensely in our minds, and presently I heard her and my wife speaking of other things. The power to do this is from some heroic quality in women’s minds that we do not credit them with; we think it their volatility, and I dare say I thought myself much better, or at least more serious in my make, because I could not follow them, and did not lose one of those hoarse gasps of the sufferer overhead. Occasionally there came a stifling cry that made me jump, inwardly if not outwardly, but those women had their drama to play, and they played it to the end.

Miss Bentley came hospitably to the door with us, and waited there till she thought we could not see her turn and run swiftly up-stairs.

“Why did you stay, my dear?” I groaned. “I felt as if I were personally smothering Mrs. Bentley every moment we were there.”

“I had to do it. She wished it, and, as she said, it was a relief to have us there, though she was wishing us at the ends of the earth all the time. But what a ghastly life!”

“Yes; and can you wonder that the poor woman doesn’t want to give her up, to lose the help and comfort she gets from her? It’s a wicked thing for that girl to think of marrying.”

“What are you talking about, Basil? It’s a wicked thing for her not to think of it! She is wearing her life out, tearing it out, and she isn’t doing her mother a bit of good. Her mother would be just as well, and better, with a good strong nurse, who could lift her this way and that, and change her about, without feeling her heart-strings wrung at every gasp, as that poor child must. Oh, I wish Glendenning was man enough to make her run off with him, and get married, in spite of everything. But, of course, that’s impossible — for a clergyman! And her sacrifice began so long ago that it’s become part of her life, and she’ll simply have to keep on.”

VIII.

When her attack passed off, Mrs. Bentley sent and begged my wife to come again and see her. She went without me, while I was in town, but she was so circumstantial in her report of her visit, when I came home, that I never felt quite sure I had not been present. What most interested us both was the extreme independence which the mother and daughter showed beyond a certain point, and the daughter’s great frankness in expressing her difference of feeling. We had already had some hint of this, the first day we met her, and we were not surprised at it now, my wife at first hand, or I at second hand. Mrs. Bentley opened the way for her daughter by saying that the worst of sickness was that it made one such an affliction to others. She lived in an atmosphere of devotion, she said, but her suffering left her so little of life that she could not help clinging selfishly to everything that remained.

My wife perceived that this was meant for Miss Bentley, though it was spoken to herself; and Miss Bentley seemed to take the same view of the fact. She said: “We needn’t use any circumlocution with Mrs. March, mother. She knows just how the affair stands. You can say whatever you wish, though I don’t know why you should wish to say anything. You have made your own terms with us, and we are keeping them to the letter. What more can you ask? Do you want me to break with Mr. Glendenning? I will do that too, if you ask it. You have got everything but that, and you can have that at any time. But Arthur and I are perfectly satisfied as it is, and we can wait as long as you wish us to wait.”

Her mother said: “I’m not allowed to forget that for a single hour,” and Miss Bentley said, “I never remind you of it unless you make me, mother. You may be thinking of it all the time, but it isn’t because of anything I say.”

“Or that you do?” asked Mrs. Bentley; and her daughter answered, “I can’t help existing, of course.”

My wife broke off from the account she was giving me of her visit: “You can imagine how pleasant all this was for me, Basil, and how anxious I was to prolong my call!”

“Well,” I returned, “there were compensations. It was extremely interesting; it was life. You can’t deny that, my dear.”

“It was more like death. Several times I was on the point of going, but you know when there’s been a painful scene you feel so sorry for the people who’ve made it that you can’t bear to leave them to themselves. I did get up to go, once, in mere self-defence, but they both urged me to stay, and I couldn’t help staying till they could talk of other things. But now tell me what you think of it all. Which should your feeling be with the most? That is what I want to get at before I tell you mine.”

“Which side was I on when we talked about them last?”

“Oh, when did we talk about them last? We are always talking about them! I am getting no good of the summer at all. I shall go home in the fall more jaded and worn out than when I came. To think that we should have this beautiful place, where we could be so happy and comfortable, if it were not for having this abnormal situation under our nose and eyes all the time!”

“Abnormal? I don’t call it abnormal,” I began, and I was sensible of my wife’s thoughts leaving her own injuries for my point of view so swiftly that I could almost hear them whir.

“Not abnormal!” she gasped.

“No; only too natural. Isn’t it perfectly natural for an invalid like that to want to keep her daughter with her; and isn’t it perfectly natural for a daughter, with a New England sense of duty, to yield to her wish? You might say that she could get married and live at home, and then she and Glendenning could both devote themselves—”

“No, no,” my wife broke in, “that wouldn’t do. Marriage is marriage; and it puts the husband and wife with each other first; when it doesn’t, it’s a miserable mockery.”

“Even when there’s a sick mother in the case?”

“A thousand sick mothers wouldn’t alter the case. And that’s what they all three instinctively know, and they’re doing the only thing they can do.”

“Then I don’t see what we’re complaining of.”

“Complaining of? We’re complaining of its being all wrong and — romantic. Her mother has asked more than she had any right to ask, and Miss Bentley has tried to do more than she can perform, and that has made them hate each other.”

“Should you say hate, quite?”

“It must come to that, if Mrs. Bentley lives.”

“Then let us hope she—”

“My dear!” cried Mrs. March, warningly.

“Oh, come, now!” I retorted. “Do you mean to say that you haven’t thought how very much it would simplify the situation if—”

“Of course I have! And that is the wicked part of it. It’s that that is wearing me out. It’s perfectly hideous!”

“Well, fortunately we’re not actively concerned in the affair, and we needn’t take any measures in regard to it. We are mere spectators, and as I see it the situation is not only inevitable for Mrs. Bentley, but it has a sort of heroic propriety for Miss Bentley.”

“And Glendenning?”

“Oh, Glendenning isn’t provided for in my scheme.”

“Then I can tell you that your scheme, Basil, is worse than worthless.”

“I didn’t brag of it, my dear,” I said, meekly enough. “I’m sorry for him, but I can’t help him. He must provide for himself out of his religion.”

IX.

It was, indeed, a trying summer for our emotions, torn as we were between our pity for Mrs. Bentley and our compassion for her daughter. We had no repose, except when we centred our sympathies upon Glendenning, whom we could yearn over in tender regret without doing any one else wrong, or even criticising another. He was our great stay in that respect, and though a mere external witness might have thought that he had the easiest part, we who knew his gentle and affectionate nature could not but feel for him. We never concealed from ourselves certain foibles of his; I have hinted at one, and we should have liked it better if he had not been so sensible of the honor, from a worldly point, of being engaged to Miss Bentley. But this was a very innocent vanity, and he would have been willing to suffer for her mother and for herself, if she had let him. I have tried to insinuate how she would not let him, but freed him as much as possible from the stress of the situation, and assumed for him a mastery, a primacy, which he would never have assumed for himself. We thought this very pretty of her, and in fact she was capable of pretty things. What was hard and arrogant in her, and she was not without something of the kind at times, was like her mother; but even she, poor soul, had her good points, as I have attempted to suggest. We used to dwell upon them, when our talk with Glendenning grew confidential, as it was apt to do; for it seemed to console him to realize that her daughter and he were making their sacrifice to a not wholly unamiable person.

He confided equally in my wife and myself, but there were times when I think he rather preferred the counsel of a man friend. Once when we had gone a walk into the country, which around Gormanville is of the pathetic Mid-Massachusetts loveliness and poverty, we sat down in a hillside orchard to rest, and he began abruptly to talk of his affair. Sometimes, he said, he felt that it was all an error, and he could not rid himself of the fear that an error persisted in was a wrong, and therefore a species of sin.

“That is very interesting,” I said. “I wonder if there is anything in it? At first blush it looks so logical; but is it? Or are you simply getting morbid? What is the error? What is your error?”

“You know,” he said, with a gentle refusal of my willingness to make light of his trouble. “It is surely an error to allow a woman to give her word when she can promise nothing more, and to let her hold herself to it.”

I could have told him that I did not think the error in this case was altogether or mainly his, or the persistence in it; for it had seemed to me from the beginning that the love between him and Miss Bentley was fully as much her affair as his, and that quite within the bounds of maidenly modesty she showed herself as passionately true to their plighted troth. But of course this would not do, and I had to be content with the ironical suggestion that he might try offering to release Miss Bentley.

“Don’t laugh at me,” he implored, and I confess his tone would have taken from me any heart to do so.

“My dear fellow,” I said, “I see your point. But don’t you think you are quite needlessly adding to your affliction by pressing it? You two are in the position which isn’t at all uncommon with engaged people, of having to wait upon exterior circumstances before you get married. Suppose you were prevented by poverty, as often happens? It would be a hardship as it is now; but in that case would your engagement be any less an error than it is now? I don’t think it would, and I don’t believe you think so either.”

“In that case we should not be opposing our wills to the will of some one else, who has a better claim to her daughter’s allegiance than I have. It seems to me that our error was in letting her mother consent to our engagement if she would not or could not consent to our marriage. When it came to that we ought both to have had the strength to say that then there should be no engagement. It was my place to do that. I could have prevented the error which I can’t undo.”

“I don’t see how it could have been easier to prevent than to undo your error. I don’t admit it’s an error, but I call it so because you do. After all, an engagement is nothing but an open confession between two people that they are in love with each other and wish to marry. There need be no sort of pledge or promise to make the engagement binding, if there is love. It’s the love that binds.”

“Yes.”

“It bound you from your first acknowledgment of it, and unless you could deny your love now, or hereafter, it must always bind you. If you own that you still love each other, you are still engaged, no matter how much you release each other. Could you think of loving her and marrying some one else? Could she love you and marry another? There isn’t any error, unless you’ve mistaken your feeling for each other. If you have, I should decidedly say you couldn’t break your engagement too soon. In fact, there wouldn’t be any real engagement to break.”

“Of course you are right,” said Glendenning, but not so strenuously as he might.

I had a feeling that he had not put forward the main cause of his unhappiness, though he had given a true cause; that he had made some lesser sense of wrong stand for a greater, as people often do in confessing themselves; and I was not surprised when he presently added: “It is not merely the fact that she is bound in that way, and that her young life is passing in this sort of hopeless patience, but that — that — I don’t know how to put the ugly and wicked thing into words, but I assure you that sometimes when I think — when I’m aware that I know — Ah, I can’t say it!”

“I fancy I understand what you mean, my dear boy,” I said, and in the right of my ten years’ seniority I put my hand caressingly on his shoulder, “and you are no more guilty than I am in knowing that if Mrs. Bentley were not in the way there would be no obstacle to your happiness.”

“But such a cognition is of hell,” he cried, and he let his face fall into his hands and sobbed heartrendingly.

“Yes,” I said, “such a cognition is of hell; you are quite right. So are all evil concepts and knowledges; but so long as they are merely things of our intelligence, they are no part of us, and we are not guilty of them.”

“No; I trust not, I trust not,” he returned, and I let him sob his trouble out before I spoke again; and then I began with a laugh of unfeigned gayety. Something that my wife had hinted in one of our talks about the lovers freakishly presented itself to my mind, and I said, “There is a way, and a very practical way, to put an end to the anomaly you feel in an engagement which doesn’t imply a marriage.”

“And what is that?” he asked, not very hopefully; but he dried his eyes and calmed himself.

“Well, speaking after the manner of men, you might run off with Miss Bentley.”

All the blood in his body flushed into his face. “Don’t!” he gasped, and I divined that what I had said must have been in his thoughts before, and I laughed again. “It wouldn’t do,” he added, piteously. “The scandal — I am a clergyman, and my parish—”

I perceived that no moral scruple presented itself to him; when it came to the point, he was simply and naturally a lover, like any other man; and I persisted: “It would only be a seven days’ wonder. I never heard of a clergyman’s running away to be married; but they must have sometimes done it. Come, I don’t believe you’d have to plead hard with Miss Bentley, and Mrs. March and I will aid and abet you to the limit of our small ability. I’m sure that if I wrap up warm against the night air, she will let me go and help you hold the rope-ladder taut.”

X.

It was not very reverent to his cloth, or his recent tragical mood, but Glendenning was not offended; he laughed with a sheepish pleasure, and that evening he came with Miss Bentley to call upon us. The visit passed without unusual confidences until they rose to go, when she said abruptly to me: “I feel that we both owe you a great deal, Mr. March. Arthur has been telling me of your talk this afternoon, and I think that what you said was all so wise and true! I don’t mean,” she added, “your suggestion about putting an end to the anomaly!” and she and Glendenning both laughed.

My wife said, “That was very wicked, and I have scolded him for thinking of such a thing.” She had, indeed, forgotten that she had put it in my head, and made me wholly responsible for it.

“Then you must scold me too a little, Mrs. March,” said the girl, “for I’ve sometimes wondered if I couldn’t work Arthur up to the point of making me run away with him,” which was a joke that wonderfully amused us all.

I said, “I shouldn’t think it would be so difficult;” and she retorted:

“Oh, you’ve no idea how obdurate clergymen are;” and then she went on, seriously, to thank me for talking Glendenning out of his morbid mood. With the frankness sometimes characteristic of her she said that if he had released her, it would have made no difference — she should still have felt herself bound to him; and until he should tell her that he no longer cared for her, she should feel that he was bound to her. I saw no great originality in this reproduction of my own ideas. But when Miss Bentley added that she believed her mother herself would be shocked and disappointed if they were to give each other up, I was aware of being in the presence of a curious psychological fact. I so wholly lost myself in the inquiry it invited that I let the talk flow on round me unheeded while I questioned whether Mrs. Bentley did not derive a satisfaction from her own and her daughter’s mutual opposition which she could never have enjoyed from their perfect agreement. She had made a certain concession in consenting to the engagement, and this justified her to herself in refusing her consent to the marriage, while the ingratitude of the young people in not being content with what she had done formed a grievance of constant avail with a lady of her temperament. From what Miss Bentley let fall, half seriously, half jokingly, as well as what I observed, I divined a not unnatural effect of the strained relations between her and her mother. She concentrated whatever resentment she felt upon Miss Bentley, insomuch that it seemed as though she might altogether have withdrawn her opposition if it had been a question merely of Glendenning’s marriage. So far from disliking him, she was rather fond of him, and she had no apparent objection to him except as her daughter’s husband. It had not always been so; at first she had an active rancor against him; but this had gradually yielded to his invincible goodness and sweetness.

“Who could hold out against him?” his betrothed demanded, fondly, when these facts had been more or less expressed to us; and it was not the first time that her love had seemed more explicit than his. He smiled round upon her, pressing the hand she put in his arm; for she asked this when they stood on our threshold ready to go, and then he glanced at us with eyes that fell bashfully from ours.

“Oh, of course it will come right in time,” said my wife when they were gone, and I agreed that they need only have patience. We had all talked ourselves into a cheerful frame concerning the affair; we had seen it in its amusing aspects, and laughed about it; and that seemed almost in itself to dispose of Mrs. Bentley’s opposition. My wife and I decided that this could not long continue; that by-and-by she would become tired of it, and this would happen all the sooner if the lovers submitted absolutely, and did nothing to remind her of their submission.

XI.

The Conwells came home from Europe the next summer, and we did not go again to Gormanville. But from time to time we heard of the Bentleys, and we heard to our great amaze that there was no change in the situation, as concerned Miss Bentley and Glendenning. I think that later it would have surprised us if we had learned that there was a change. Their lives all seemed to have adjusted themselves to the conditions, and we who were mere spectators came at last to feel nothing abnormal in them.

Now and then we saw Glendenning, and now and then Miss Bentley came to call upon Mrs. March, when she was in town. Her mother had given up her Boston house, and they lived the whole year round at Gormanville, where the air was good for Mrs. Bentley without her apparently being the better for it; again, we heard in a roundabout way that their circumstances were not so fortunate as they had been, and that they had given up their Boston house partly from motives of economy.

There was no reason why our intimacy with the lovers’ affairs should continue, and it did not. Miss Bentley made mention of Glendenning, when my wife saw her, with what Mrs. March decided to be an abiding fealty, but without offer of confidence; and Glendenning, when we happened to meet at rare intervals, did not invite me to more than formal inquiry concerning the well-being of Mrs. Bentley and her daughter.

He was undoubtedly getting older, and he looked it. He was one of those gentle natures which put on fat, not from self-indulgence, but from want of resisting force, and the clerical waistcoat that buttoned black to his throat swayed decidedly beyond a straight line at his waist. His red-gold hair was getting thin, and though he wore it cut close all round, it showed thinner on the crown than on the temples, and his pale eyebrows were waning. He had a settled patience of look which would have been a sadness, if there had not been mixed with it an air of resolute cheerfulness. I am not sure that this kept it from being sad, either.

Miss Bentley, on her part, was no longer the young girl she was when we met on the Corinthian. She must then have been about twenty, and she was now twenty-six, but she looked thirty. Dark people show their age early, and she showed hers in cheeks that grew thinner if not paler, and in a purple shadow under her fine eyes. The parting of her black hair was wider than it once was, and she wore it smooth in apparent disdain of those arts of fluffing and fringing which give an air of vivacity, if not of youth. I should say she had always been a serious girl, and now she showed the effect of a life that could not have been gay for any one.

The lovers promised themselves, as we knew, that Mrs. Bentley would relent, and abandon what was more like a whimsical caprice than a settled wish. But as time wore on, and she gave no sign of changing, I have wondered whether some change did not come upon them, which affected them towards each other without affecting their constancy. I fancied their youthful passion taking on the sad color of patience, and contenting itself more and more with such friendly companionship as their fate afforded; it became, without marriage, that affectionate comradery which wedded love passes into with the lapse of as many years as they had been plighted. “What,” I once suggested to my wife, in a very darkling mood— “what if they should gradually grow apart, and end in rejoicing that they had never been allowed to join their lives? Wouldn’t that be rather Hawthornesque?”

“It wouldn’t be true,” said Mrs. March, “and I don’t see why you should put such a notion upon Hawthorne. If you can’t be more cheerful about it, Basil, I wish you wouldn’t talk of the affair at all.”

“Oh, I’m quite willing to be cheerful about it, my dear,” I returned; “and, if you like, we will fancy Mrs. Bentley coming round and ardently wishing their marriage, and their gayly protesting that after having given the matter a great deal of thought they had decided it would be better not to marry, but to live on separately for their own sake, just as they have been doing for hers so long. Wouldn’t that be cheerful?”

Mrs. March said that if I wished to tease it was because I had no ideas on the subject, and she would advise me to drop it. I did so, for the better part of the evening, but I could not relinquish it altogether. “Do you think,” I asked, finally, “that any sort of character will stand the test of such a prolonged engagement?”

“Why not? Very indifferent characters stand the test of marriage, and that’s indefinitely prolonged.”

“Yes, but it’s not indefinite itself. Marriage is something very distinct and permanent; but such an engagement as this has no sort of future. It is a mere motionless present, without the inspiration of a common life, and with no hope of release from durance except through a chance that it will be sorrow instead of joy. I should think they would go to pieces under the strain.”

“But as you see they don’t, perhaps the strain isn’t so great after all.”

“Ah,” I confessed, “there is that wonderful adaptation of the human soul to any circumstances. It’s the one thing that makes me respect our fallen nature. Fallen? It seems to me that we ought to call it our risen nature; it has steadily mounted with the responsibility that Adam took for it — or Eve.”

“I don’t see,” said my wife, pursuing her momentary advantage, “why they should not be getting as much pleasure or happiness out of life as most married people. Engagements are supposed to be very joyous, though I think they’re rather exciting and restless times, as a general thing. If they’ve settled down to being merely engaged, I’ve no doubt they’ve decided to make the best of being merely engaged as long as her mother lives.”

“There is that view of it,” I assented.

XII.

By the following autumn Glendenning had completed the seventh year of his engagement to Miss Bentley, and I reminded my wife that this seemed to be the scriptural length of a betrothal, as typified in the service which Jacob rendered for Rachel. “But he had a prospective father-in-law to deal with,” I added, “and Glendenning a mother-in-law. That may make a difference.”

Mrs. March did not join me in the humorous view of the affair which I took. She asked me if I had heard anything from Glendenning lately; if that were the reason why I mentioned him.

“No,” I said; “but I have some office business that will take me to Gormanville to-morrow, and I did not know but you might like to go too, and look the ground over, and see how much we have been suffering for them unnecessarily.” The fact was that we had now scarcely spoken of Glendenning or the Bentleys for six months, and our minds were far too full of our own affairs to be given more than very superficially to theirs at any time. “We could both go as well as not,” I suggested, “and you could call upon the Bentleys while I looked after the company’s business.”

“Thank you, Basil, I think I will let you go alone,” said my wife. “But try to find out how it is with them. Don’t be so terribly straightforward, and let it look as if that was what you came for. Don’t make the slightest advance towards their confidence. But do let them open up if they will.”

“My dear, you may depend upon my asking no leading questions whatever, and I shall behave with far more discretion than if you were with me. The danger is that I shall behave with too much, for I find that my interest in their affair is very much faded. There is every probability that unless Glendenning speaks of his engagement it won’t be spoken of at all.”

This was putting it rather with the indifference of the past six months than with the feeling of the present moment. Since I had known that I was going to Gormanville, the interest I denied had renewed itself pretty vividly for me, and I was intending not only to get everything out of Glendenning that I decently could, but to give him as much good advice as he would bear. I was going to urge him to move upon the obstructive Mrs. Bentley with all his persuasive force, and I had formulated some arguments for him which I thought he might use with success. I did not tell my wife that this was my purpose, but all the same I cherished it, and I gathered energy for the enforcement of my views for Glendenning’s happiness from the very dejection I was cast into by the outward effect of the Gormanville streets. They were all in a funeral blaze of their shade trees, which were mostly maples, but were here and there a stretch of elms meeting in arches almost consciously Gothic over the roadway; the maples were crimson and gold, and the elms the pale yellow that they affect in the fall. A silence hung under their sad splendors which I found deepen when I got into what the inhabitants called the residential part. About the business centre there was some stir, and here in the transaction of my affairs I was in the thick of it for a while. Everybody remembered me in a pleasant way, and I had to stop and pass the time of day, as they would have said, with a good many whom I could not remember at once. It seemed to me that the maples in front of St. Michael’s rectory were rather more depressingly gaudy than elsewhere in Gormanville; but I believe they were only thicker. I found Glendenning in his study, and he was so far from being cast down by their blazon that I thought him decidedly cheerfuller than when I saw him last. He met me with what for him was ardor; and as he had asked me most cordially about my family, I thought it fit to inquire how the ladies at the Bentley place were.

“Why, very well, very well indeed,” he answered, brightly. “It’s very odd, but Edith and I were talking about you all only last night, and wishing we could see you again. Edith is most uncommonly well. During the summer Mrs. Bentley had some rather severer attacks than usual, and the care and anxiety told upon Edith, but since the cooler weather has come she has picked up wonderfully.” He did not say that Mrs. Bentley had shared this gain, and I imagined that he had a reluctance to confess she had not. He went on, “You’re going to stay and spend the night with me, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said; “I’m obliged to be off by the four-o’clock train. But if I may be allowed to name the hospitality I could accept, I should say luncheon.”

“Good!” cried Glendenning, gayly. “Let us go and have it at the Bentleys’.”

“Far be it from me to say where you shall lunch me,” I returned. “The question isn’t where, but when and how, with me.”

He got his hat and stick, and as we started out of his door he began: “You’ll be a little surprised at the informality, perhaps, but I’m glad you take it so easily. It makes it easier for me to explain that I’m almost domesticated at the Bentley homestead; I come and go very much as if it were my own house.”

“My dear fellow,” I said, “I’m not surprised at anything in your relation to the Bentley homestead, and I won’t vex you with any glad inferences.”

“Why,” he returned, a little bashfully, “there’s no explicit change. The affair is just where it has been all along. But with the gradual decline in Mrs. Bentley — I’m afraid you’ll notice it — she seems rather to want me about, and at times I’m able to be of use to Edith, and so—”

He stopped, and I said, “Exactly.”

He went on: “Of course it’s rather anomalous, and I oughtn’t to let you get the impression that she has actually conceded anything. But she shows herself much more — er, shall I say? — affectionate, and I can’t help hoping there may be a change in her mood which will declare itself in an attitude more favorable to—”

I said again, “Exactly,” and Glendenning resumed:

“In spite of Edith’s not having been quite so well as usual — she’s wonderfully well now — it’s been a very happy summer with us, on account of this change. It seems to have come about in a very natural way with Mrs. Bentley, and out of a growing regard which I can’t specifically account for, as far as anything I’ve done is concerned.”

“I think I could account for it,” said I. “She must be a stonier-hearted old lady than I imagine if she hasn’t felt your goodness, all along, Glendenning.”

“Why, you’re very kind,” said the gentle creature. “You tempt me to repeat what she said, at the only time she expressed a wish to have me oftener with them: ‘You’ve been very patient with a contrary old woman. But I sha’n’t make you wait much longer.’”

“Well, I think that was very encouraging, my dear fellow.”

“Do you?” he asked, wistfully. “I thought so too, at first, but when I told Edith she could not take that view of it. She said that she did not believe her mother had changed her mind at all, and that she only meant she was growing older.”

“But, at any rate,” I argued, “it was pleasant to have her make an open recognition of your patience.”

“Yes, that was pleasant,” he said, cheerfully again, “And it was the beginning of the kind of relation that I have held ever since to her household. I am afraid I am there a good half of my time, and I believe I dine there oftener than I do at home. I am quite on the footing of a son, with her.”

“There are some of the unregenerate, Glendenning,” I made bold to say, “who think it is your own fault that you weren’t on the footing of a son-in-law with her long ago. If you’ll excuse my saying so, you have been, if anything, too patient. It would have been far better for all if you had taken the bit in your teeth six or seven years back—”

He drew a deep breath. “It wouldn’t have done; it wouldn’t have done! Edith herself would never have consented to it.”

“Did you ever ask her?”

“No,” he said, innocently. “How could I?”

“And of course she could never ask you,” I laughed. “My opinion is that you have lost a great deal of time unnecessarily. I haven’t the least doubt that if you had brought a little pressure to bear with Mrs. Bentley herself, it would have sufficed.”

He looked at me with a kind of dismay, as if my words had carried conviction, or had roused a conviction long dormant in his heart. “It wouldn’t have done,” he gasped.

“It isn’t too late to try, yet,” I suggested.

“Yes, it’s too late. We must wait now.” He hastened to add, “Until she yields entirely of herself.”

He gave me a guilty glance when he drew near the Bentley place and we saw a buggy standing at the gate. “The doctor!” he said, and he hurried me up the walk to the door.

The door stood open and we heard the doctor saying to some one within: “No, no, nothing organic at all, I assure you. One of the commonest functional disturbances.”

Miss Bentley appeared at the threshold with him, and she and Glendenning had time to exchange a glance of anxiety and of smiling reassurance, before she put out her hand in greeting to me, a very glad and cordial greeting, apparently. The doctor and I shook hands, and he got himself away with what I afterwards remembered as undue quickness, and left us to Miss Bentley.

Glendenning was quite right about her looking better. She looked even gay, and there was a vivid color in her checks such as I had not seen there for many years; her lips were red, her eyes brilliant. Her face was still perhaps as thin as ever, but it was indescribably younger.

I cannot say that there were the materials of a merrymaking amongst us, exactly, and yet I remember that luncheon as rather a gay one, with some laughing. I had not been till now in discovering that Miss Bentley had a certain gift of humor, so shy and proud, if I may so express it, that it would not show itself except upon long acquaintance, and I distinctly perceived now that this enabled her to make light of a burden that might otherwise have been intolerable. It qualified her to treat with cheerfulness the grimness of her mother, which had certainly not grown less since I saw her last, and to turn into something like a joke her valetudinarian austerities of sentiment and opinion. She made a pleasant mock of the amenities which passed between her mother and Glendenning, whose gingerliness in the acceptance of the old lady’s condescension would, I confess, have been notably comical without this gloss. It was perfectly evident that Mrs. Bentley’s favor was bestowed with a mental reservation, and conditioned upon his forming no expectations from it, and poor Glendenning’s eagerness to show that he took it upon these terms was amusing as well as touching. I do not know how to express that Miss Bentley contrived to eliminate herself from the affair, or to have the effect of doing that, and to abandon it to them. I can only say that she left them to be civil to each other, and that, except when she recurred to them in playful sarcasm from time to time, she devoted herself to me.

Evidently, Mrs. Bentley was very much worse than she had been; her breathing was painfully labored. But if her daughter had any anxiety about her condition, she concealed it most effectually from us. I decided that she had perhaps been asking the doctor as to certain symptoms that had alarmed her, and it was in the rebound from her anxiety that her spirits had risen to the height I saw. Glendenning seized the moment of her absence after luncheon, when she helped her mother up to her room, to impart to me that this was his conclusion too. He said that he had not seen her so cheerful for a long time, and when I praised her in every way he basked in my appreciation of her as if it had all been flattery for himself. She came back directly, and then I had a chance to see what she might have been under happier stars. She could not, at any moment, help showing herself an intellectual and cultivated woman, but her opportunities to show herself a woman of rare social gifts had been scanted by circumstances and perhaps by conscience. It seemed to me that even in devoting herself to her mother as she had always done she need not have enslaved herself, and that it was in this excess her inherited puritanism came out. She might sometimes openly rebel against her mother’s domination, as my wife and I had now and again seen her do; but inwardly she was almost passionately submissive. Here I thought that Glendenning, if he had been a different sort of man, might have been useful to her; he might have encouraged her in a little wholesome selfishness, and enabled her to withhold sacrifice where it was needless. But I am not sure; perhaps he would have made her more unhappy, if he had attempted this; perhaps he was the only sort of man whom, in her sense of his own utter unselfishness, she could have given her heart to in perfect peace. She now talked brilliantly and joyously to me, but all the time her eye sought his for his approval and sympathy; he, for his part, was content to listen in a sort of beatific pride in her which he did not, in his simple-hearted fondness, make any effort to mask.

When we came away he made himself amends for his silence by a long hymn in worship of her, and I listened with all the acquiescence possible. He asked me questions — whether I had noticed this thing or that about her, or remembered what she had said upon one point or another, and led up to compliments of her which I was glad to pay. In the long ordeal they had undergone they had at least kept all the freshness of their love.

XIII.

Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study, or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and then stirred the stiff panoply of the trees was lullingly soft. This part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country, as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as I have already mentioned, was the Conwell place; and after we had talked of the landscape awhile, Glendenning said: “By the way! Why don’t you buy the Conwell place? You liked it so much, and you were all so well in Gormanville. The Conwells want to sell it, and it would be just the thing for you, five or six months of the year.”

I explained, almost compassionately, the impossibility of a poor insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was not so much from his wish to have me live in Gormanville as from the new hope that filled him. It was by a perfectly natural, if not very logical transition that we were presently talking of this greater interest again, and Glendenning was going over all the plans that it included. I encouraged him to believe, as he desired, that a sea-voyage would be the thing for Mrs. Bentley, and that it would be his duty to take her to Europe as soon as he was in authority to do so. They should always, he said, live in Gormanville, for they were greatly attached to the place, and they should keep up the old Bentley homestead in the style that he thought they owed to the region where the Bentleys had always lived. It is a comfort to a man to tell his dreams, whether of the night or of the day, and I enjoyed Glendenning’s pleasure in rehearsing these fond reveries of his.

He interrupted himself to listen to the sound of hurried steps, and directly a man in his shirt-sleeves came running by on the sidewalk beyond the maples. In a village like Gormanville any passer is of interest to the spectator, and a man running is of thrilling moment. Glendenning started to his feet, and moved forward for a better sight of the flying passer. He called out to the man, who shouted back something I could not understand, and ran on.

“What did he say?”

“I don’t know.” Glendenning’s face as he turned to me again was quite white. “It is Mrs. Bentley’s farmer,” he added, feebly, and I could see that it was with an effort he kept himself from sinking. “Something has happened.”

“Oh, I guess not, or not anything serious,” I answered, with an effort to throw off the weight I suddenly felt at my own heart. “People have been known to run for a plumber. But if you’re anxious, let us go and see what the matter is.”

I turned and got my hat; Glendenning came in for his, but seemed unable to find it, though he stood before the table where it lay. I had to laugh, though I felt so little like it, as I put it in his hand.

“Don’t leave me,” he entreated, as we hurried out through the maples to the sidewalk. “It has come at last, and I feel, as I always knew I should, like a murderer.”

“What rubbish!” I retorted. “You don’t know that anything has happened. You don’t know what the man’s gone for.”

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Mrs. Bentley is — He’s gone for the doctor.”

As he spoke a buggy came tearing down the street behind us; the doctor was in it, and the man in shirt-sleeves beside him. We did not try to hail them, but as they whirled by the farmer turned his face, and again called something unintelligible to Glendenning.

We made what speed we could after them, but they were long out of sight in the mile that it seemed to me we were an hour in covering before we reached the Bentley place. The doctor’s buggy stood at the gate, and I perceived that I was without authority to enter the house, on which some unknown calamity had fallen, no matter with what good-will I had come; I could see that Glendenning had suffered a sudden estrangement, also, which he had to make a struggle against. But he went in, leaving me without, as if he had forgotten me.

I could not go away, and I walked down the path to the gate, and waited there, in case I should be in any wise wanted. After a very long time the doctor came bolting over the walk towards me, as if he did not see me, but he brought himself up short with an “Oh!” before he actually struck against me. I had known him during our summer at the Conwell place, where we used to have him in for our little ailments, and I would never have believed that his round, optimistic face could look so worried. I read the worst in it; Glendenning was right; but I asked the doctor, quite as if I did not know, whether there was anything serious the matter.

“Serious — yes,” he said. “Get in with me; I have to see another patient, but I’ll bring you back.” We mounted into his buggy, and he went on. “She’s in no immediate danger, now. The faint lasted so long I didn’t know whether we should bring her out of it, at one time, but the most alarming part is over for the present. There is some trouble with the heart, but I don’t think anything organic.”

“Yes, I heard you telling her daughter so, just before lunch. Isn’t it a frequent complication with asthma?”

“Asthma? Her daughter? Whom are you talking about?”

“Mrs. Bentley. Isn’t Mrs. Bentley—”

“No!” shouted the doctor, in disgust, “Mrs. Bentley is as well as ever. It’s Miss Bentley. I wish there was a thousandth part of the chance for her that there is for her mother.”

XIV.

I stayed over for the last train to Boston, and then I had to go home without the hope which Miss Bentley’s first rally had given the doctor. My wife and I talked the affair over far into the night, and in the paucity of particulars I was almost driven to their invention. But I managed to keep a good conscience, and at the same time to satisfy the demand for facts in a measure by the indulgence of conjectures which Mrs. March continually took for them. The doctor had let fall, in his talk with me, that he had no doubt Miss Bentley had aggravated the affection of the heart from which she was suffering by her exertions in lifting her mother about so much; and my wife said that it needed only that touch to make the tragedy complete.

“Unless,” I suggested, “you could add that her mother had just told her she would not oppose her marriage any longer, and it was the joy that brought on the access of the trouble that is killing her.”

“Did the doctor say that?” Mrs. March demanded, severely.

“No. And I haven’t the least notion that anything like it happened. But if it had—”

“It would have been too tawdry. I’m ashamed of you for thinking of such a thing, Basil.”

Upon reflection, I was rather ashamed myself; but I plucked up courage to venture: “It would be rather fine, wouldn’t it, when that poor girl is gone, if Mrs. Bentley had Glendenning come and live with her, and they devoted themselves to each other for her daughter’s sake?”

“Fine! It would be ghastly. What are you thinking of, my dear? How would it be fine?”

“Oh, I mean dramatically,” I apologized, and, not to make bad worse, I said no more.

The next day, which was Sunday, a telegram came for me, which I decided, without opening it, to be the announcement of the end. But it proved to be a message from Mrs. Bentley, begging in most urgent terms that Mrs. March and I would come to her at once, if possible. These terms left the widest latitude for surmise, but none for choice, in the sad circumstances, and we looked up the Sunday trains for Gormanville, and went.

We found the poor woman piteously grateful, but by no means so prostrated as we had expected. She was rather, as often happens, stayed and held upright by the burden that had been laid upon her, and it was with fortitude if not dignity that she appealed to us for our counsel, and if possible our help, in a matter about which she had already consulted the doctor. “The doctor says that the excitement cannot hurt Edith; it may even help her, to propose it. I should like to do it, but if you do not think well of it, I will not do it. I know it is too late now to make up to her for the past,” said Mrs. Bentley, and here she gave way to the grief she had restrained hitherto.

“There is no one else,” she went on, “who has been so intimately acquainted with the facts of my daughter’s engagement — no one else that I can confide in or appeal to.”

We both murmured that she was very good; but she put our politeness somewhat peremptorily aside.

“It is the only thing I can do now, and it is useless to do that now. It will be no reparation for the past, and it will be for myself and not for her, as all that I have done in the past has been; but I wish to know what you think of their getting married now.”

I am afraid that if we had said what we thought of such a tardy and futile proof of penitence we should have brought little comfort to the mother’s heart, but we looked at each other in the disgust we both felt and said there would be a sacred fitness in it.

She was apparently much consoled.

It was touching enough, and I at least was affected by her tears; I am not so sure my wife was. But she had instantly to consider how best to propose the matter to Miss Bentley, and to act upon her decision.

After all, as she reported the fact to me later, it was very simple to suggest her mother’s wish to the girl, who listened to it with a perfect intelligence in which there was no bitterness.

“They think I am going to die,” she said, quietly, “and I can understand how she feels. It seems such a mockery; but if she wishes it; and Arthur—”

It was my part to deal with Glendenning, and I did not find it so easy.

“Marriage is for life and for earth,” he said, solemnly, and I thought very truly. “In the resurrection we shall be one another’s without it. I don’t like to go through the form of such a sacrament idly; it seems like a profanation of its mystery.”

“But if Miss Bentley—”

“She will think whatever I do; I shall feel as she does,” he answered, with dignity.

“Yes, I know,” I urged. “It would not be for her; it would not certainly be for yourself. But if you could see it as the only form of reparation which her mother can now offer you both, and the only mode of expressing your own forgiveness — Recollect how you felt when you thought that it was Mrs. Bentley’s death; try to recall something of that terrible time—”

“I don’t forget that,” he relented. “It was in mercy to Edith and me that our trial is what it is: we have recognized that in the face of eternity. I can forgive anything in gratitude for that.”

I have often had to criticise life for a certain caprice with which she treats the elements of drama, and mars the finest conditions of tragedy with a touch of farce. No one who witnessed the marriage of Arthur Glendenning and Edith Bentley had any belief that she would survive it twenty-four hours; they themselves were wholly without hope in the moment which for happier lovers is all hope. To me it was like a funeral, but then most weddings are rather ghastly to look upon; and the stroke that life had in reserve perhaps finally restored the lost balance of gayety in this. At any rate, Mrs. Glendenning did live, and she is living yet, and in rather more happiness than comes to most people under brighter auspices. After long contention among many doctors, the original opinion that her heart trouble was functional, not organic, has been elected final, and upon these terms she bids fair to live as long as any of us.

I do not know whether she will live as long as her mother, who seems to have taken a fresh lease of years from her single act of self-sacrifice. I cannot say whether Mrs. Bentley feels herself deceived and defrauded by her daughter’s recovery; but I have made my wife observe that it would be just like life if she bore the young couple a sort of grudge for unwittingly outwitting her. Certainly, on the day we lately spent with them all at Gormanville, she seemed, in the slight attack of asthma from which she suffered, to come as heavily and exactingly upon both as she used to come upon her daughter alone. But I was glad to see that Glendenning eagerly bore the greater part of the common burden. He grows stouter and stouter, and will soon be the figure of a bishop.

THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.

I.

Hamilton Gaites sat breakfasting by the window of a restaurant looking out on Park Square, in Boston, at a table which he had chosen after rejecting one on the Boylston Street side of the place because it was too noisy, and another in the little open space, among evergreens in tubs, between the front and rear, because it was too chilly. The wind was east, but at his Park Square window it tempered the summer morning air without being a draught; and he poured out his coffee with a content in his circumstance and provision which he was apt to feel when he had taken all the possible pains, even though the result was not perfect. But now, he had real French bread, as good as he could have got in New York, and the coffee was clear and bright. A growth of crisp green watercress embowered a juicy steak, and in its shade, as it were, lay two long slices of bacon, not stupidly broiled to a crisp, but delicately pink, and exemplarily lean. Gaites had already had a cantaloupe, whose spicy fragrance lingered in the air and mingled with the robuster odors of the coffee, the steak, and the bacon.

He owned to being a fuss, but he contended that he was a cheerful fuss, and when things went reasonably well with him, he was so. They were going well with him now, not only in the small but in the large way. He was sitting there before that capital breakfast in less than half an hour after leaving the sleeping-car, where he had passed a very good night, and he was setting out on his vacation, after very successful work in the June term of court. He was in prime health; he had a good conscience in leaving no interests behind him that could suffer in his absence; and the smile that he bent upon the Italian waiter as he retired, after putting down the breakfast, had some elements of a benediction.

There was a good deal of Gaites’s smile, when it was all on: he had a generous mouth, full of handsome teeth, very white and even, which all showed in his smile. His whole face took part in the smile, and it was a charming face, long and rather quaintly narrow, of an amiable aquilinity, and clean-shaven. His figure, tall and thin, comported well with his style of visage, and at a given moment, when he suddenly rose and leaned from the window, eagerly following something outside with his eye, he had an alert movement that was very pleasant.

The thing outside which had caught, and which now kept, his eye as long as he could see it, was a case in the shape of an upright piano, on the end of a long, heavy-laden truck, making its way with a slow, jolting progress among the carts, carriages, and street cars, out of the square round the corner toward Boylston Street. On the sloping front of the case was inscribed an address, which seemed to gaze at Gaites with the eyes of the girl whom it named and placed, and to whom in the young man’s willing fancy it attributed a charming quality. Nothing, he felt, could be more suggestive, more expressive of something shy, something proud, something pure, something pastoral yet patrician, something unaffected and yet chic, in an unknown personality, than the legend:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,

Lower Merritt,

New Hampshire.

Via S. B. & H. C. R. R.

Like most lawyers, he had a vein of romance, and this now opened in pleasing conjectures concerning the girl. He knew just where Lower Merritt was, and so well what it was like that a vision of its white paint against the dark green curtain of the wooded heights around it filled his sense as agreeably as so much white marble. There was the cottage of some summer people well above the village level, among pines and birches, and overlooking the foamiest rush of the Saco, to which he instantly destined the piano of Phyllis Desmond. He had never known that these people’s name was Desmond, and he had certainly never supposed that they had a daughter called Phyllis; but he divined these facts in losing sight of the truck; and he imagined with as logical probability that one of the little girls whom he used to see playing on the hill-slope before the cottage had grown up into the young lady whose name the piano bore. There was quite time enough for this transformation; it was seven years since Gaites had run up into the White Mountains for a month’s rest after his last term in the Harvard Law School, and before beginning work in the office of the law firm in New York where he had got a clerkship, and where he had now a junior partnership. The little girl was then just ten years old, and now, of course, the young lady was seventeen, or would be when the piano reached Lower Merritt, for it was clearly meant to arrive on her birthday; it was a birthday-present and a surprise. He had always liked the way those nice people let their children play about barefoot; it would be in character with them to do a fond, pretty thing like that; and Gaites smiled for pleasure in it, and then rather blushed in relating the brown legs of the little girl, as he remembered seeing them in her races over her father’s lawn, to the dignified young lady she had now become.

He amused himself in mentally following the piano on its way to the Sea Board & Hill Country R. R. freight-depot, which he was quite able to do from a habit of Boston formed during his four years in the academic course and his three years in the law-school at Harvard. He knew that it would cross Boylston into Charles Street, and keep along that level to Cambridge; then it would turn into McLane Street, and again into Lynde, by this means avoiding the grades as much as possible, and arriving through Causeway Street at the long, low freight-depot of the S. B. & H. C., where it would be the first thing unloaded from the truck. It would stand indefinitely on the outer platform; and then, when the men in flat, narrow-peaked silk caps and grease-splotched overalls got round to it, with an air of as much personal indifference as if they were mere mechanical agencies, it would be pulled and pushed into the dimness of the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish. There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations, from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails, addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could come to killing the brakeman without doing it.

Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty girl’s name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had jolted forward on the beginning of its run.

That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and finished his breakfast at his leisure. He was going to spend his vacation at Kent Harbor, where he knew some agreeable people, and where he knew that a young man had many chances of a good time, even if he were not the youngest kind of young man. He had spent two of his Harvard vacations there, and he knew this at first hand. He could not and did not expect to do so much two-ing on the rocks and up the river as he used; the zest of that sort of thing was past, rather; but he had brought his golf stockings with him, and a quiverful of the utensils of the game, in obedience to a lady who had said there were golf-links at Kent, and she knew a young lady who would teach him to play.

He was going to stop off at Burymouth, to see a friend, an old Harvard man, and a mighty good fellow, who had rather surprised people by giving up New York, and settling in the gentle old town on the Piscatamac. They accounted for it as well as they could by his having married a Burymouth girl; and since he had begun, most unexpectedly, to come forward in literature, such of his friends as had seen him there said it was just the place for him. Gaites had not yet seen him there, and he had a romantic curiosity, the survival of an intensified friendship of their Senior year, to do so. He got to thinking of this good fellow rather vividly, when he had cleared his mind of Miss Desmond’s piano, and he did not see why he should not take an earlier train to Burymouth than he had intended to take; and so he had them call him a coupé from the restaurant, and he got into it as soon as he left the breakfast-table.

He gave the driver the authoritative address, “Sea Board Depot,” and left him to take his own way, after resisting a rather silly impulse to bid him go through Charles Street.

The man drove up Beacon, and down Temple through Staniford, and naturally Gaites saw nothing of Miss Desmond’s piano, which had come into his mind again in starting. He did not know the colonnaded structure, with its stately porte-cochère, where his driver proposed to leave him, instead of the formless brick box which he remembered as the Sea Board Depot, and he insisted upon that when the fellow got down to open the door.

“Ain’t no Sibbod Dippo, now,” the driver explained, contemptuously. “Guess Union Dippo’ll do, though;” and Gaites, a little overcome with its splendor, found that it would. He faltered a moment in passing the conductor and porter at the end of the Pullman car on his train, and then decided that it would be ridiculous to take a seat in it for the short run to Burymouth. In the common coach he got a very good seat on the shady side, where he put down his hand-bag. Then he looked at his watch, and as it was still fifteen minutes before train-time, he indulged a fantastic impulse. He left the car and hurried back through the station and out through the electrics, hacks, herdics, carts, and string-teams of Causeway Street, and up the sidewalk of the street opening into it, as far as the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot. On the way he bet himself five dollars that Miss Desmond’s piano would not be there, and lost; for at the moment he came up it was unloading from the end of the truck which he had seen carrying it past the window of his restaurant.

The fact amused him quite beyond the measure of anything intrinsically humorous in it, and he staid watching the exertions of the heated truckman and two silk-capped, sarcastic-faced freight-men, till the piano was well on the platform. He was so intent upon it that his interest seemed to communicate itself to a young girl coming from the other quarter, with a suburban, cloth-sided, crewel-initialed bag in her hand, as if she were going to a train. She paused in the stare she gave the piano-case, and then slowed her pace with a look over her shoulder after she got by. In this her eyes met his, and she blushed and hurried on; but not so soon that he had not time to see she had a thin face of a pathetic prettiness, gentle brown eyes with wistful brows, under ordinary brown hair. She was rather little, and was dressed with a sort of unaccented propriety, which was as far from distinction as it was from pretension.

When Gaites got back to his car, a few minutes before the train was to start, he found the seat where he had left his hand-bag and light overcoat more than half full of a bulky lady, who looked stupidly up at him, and did not move or attempt any excuse for crowding him from his place. He had to walk the whole length of the car before he came to a vacant seat. It was the last of the transverse seats, and at the moment he dropped into it, the girl who had watched the unloading of the piano with him passed him, and took the sidewise seat next the door.

She took it with a weary resignation which somehow made Gaites ashamed of the haste with which he had pushed forward to the only good place, and he felt as guilty of keeping her out of it as if he had known she was following him. He kept a remorseful eye upon her as she arranged her bag and umbrella about her, with some paper parcels which she must have had sent to her at the station. She breathed quickly, as if from final hurry, but somewhat also as if she were delicate; and tried to look as if she did not know he was watching her. She had taken off one of her gloves, and her hand, though little enough, showed an unexpected vigor with reference to her face, and had a curious air of education.

When the train pulled out of the station into the clearer light, she turned her face from him toward the forward window, and the corner of her mouth, which her half-averted profile gave him, had a kind of piteous droop which smote him to keener regret. Once it lifted in an upward curve, and a gay light came into the corner of her eye; then the mouth drooped again, and the light went out.

Gaites could bear it no longer; he rose and said, with a respectful bow: “Won’t you take my seat? That seems such a very inconvenient place for you, with the door opening and shutting.”

The girl turned her face promptly round and up, and answered, with a flush in her thin cheek, but no embarrassment in her tone, “No, I thank you. This will do quite well,” and then she turned her face away as before.

He had not meant his politeness for an overture to her acquaintance, but he felt as justly snubbed as if he had; and he sank back into his seat in some disorder. He tried to hide his confusion behind the newspaper he opened between them; but from time to time he had a glimpse of her round the side of it, and he saw that the hand which clutched her bag all the while tightened upon it and then loosened nervously.

II.

“Ah, I see what you mean,” said Gaites, with a kind of finality, as his friend Birkwall walked him homeward through the loveliest of the lovely old Burymouth streets. Something equivalent had been in his mind and on his tongue at every dramatic instant of the afternoon; and, in fact, ever since he had arrived from the station at Birkwall’s door, where Mrs. Birkwall met them and welcomed him. He had been sufficiently impressed with the aristocratic quiet of the vast square white old wooden house, standing behind a high white board fence, in two acres of gardened ground; but the fine hallway with its broad low stairway, the stately drawing-room with its carving, the library with its panelling and portraits, and the dining-room with its tall wainscoting, united to give him a sense of the pride of life in old Burymouth such as the raw splendors of the millionaire houses in New York had never imparted to him.

“They knew how to do it, they knew how to do it!” he exclaimed, meaning the people who had such houses built; and he said the same thing of the other Burymouth houses which Birkwall showed him, by grace of their owners, after the mid-day dinner, which Gaites kept calling luncheon.

“Be sure you get back in good time for tea,” said Mrs. Birkwall for a parting charge to her husband; and she bade Gaites, “Remember that it is tea, please; not dinner;” and he was tempted to kiss his hand to her with as much courtly gallantry as he could; for, standing under the transom of the slender-pillared portal to watch them away, she looked most distinctly descended from ancestors, and not merely the daughter of a father and mother, as most women do. Gaites said as much to Birkwall, and when they got home Birkwall repeated it to his wife, without injuring Gaites with her. If he saw what Birkwall had meant in marrying her, and settling down to his literary life with her in the atmosphere of such a quiet place as Burymouth, when he might have chosen money and unrest in New York, she on her side saw what her husband meant in liking the shrewd, able fellow who had such a vein of gay romance in his practicality, and such an intelligent and respectful sympathy with her tradition and environment.

She sent and asked several of her friends to meet him at tea; and if in that New England disproportion of the sexes which at Burymouth is intensified almost to a pure gynocracy these friends were nearly all women, he found them even more agreeable than if they had been nearly all men. It seemed to him that he had never heard better talk than that of these sequestered ladies, who were so well bred and so well read, so humorous and so dignified, who loved to laugh and who loved to think. It was all like something in a pleasant book, and Gaites was not altogether to blame if it went to his head, and after the talk had been of Burymouth, in which he professed so acceptable an interest, and then of novels, of which he had read about as many as they, he confided to the whole table his experience with Miss Phyllis Desmond’s piano. He managed the psychology of the little incident so well that he imparted the very quality he meant them to feel in it.

“How perfectly charming!” said one of the ladies. “I don’t wonder you fell in love with the name. It’s fit for a shepherdess of high degree.”

“If I were a man,” said the girl across the table who was not less sweetly a girl because she would never see thirty-nine again, “I should simply drop everything and follow that piano to Phyllis Desmond’s door.”

“It’s quite what I should like to do,” Gaites responded, with a well-affected air of passionate regret. “But I’m promised at Kent Harbor—”

She did not wait for him to say more, but submitted, “Oh, well, if you’re going to Kent Harbor, of course!” as if that would excuse and explain any sort of dereliction; and then the talk went on about Kent Harbor till Mrs. Birkwall asked, generally, as if it were part of the Kent Harbor inquiry, “Didn’t I hear that the Ashwoods were going to their place at Upper Merritt, this year?”

Then there arose a dispute, which divided the company into nearly equal parties; as to whether the Ashwoods had got home from Europe yet. But it all ended in bringing the talk back to Phyllis Desmond’s piano again, and in urging its pursuit upon Gaites, as something he owed to romance; at least he ought to do it for their sake, for now they should all be upon pins and needles till they knew who she was, and what she could be doing at Lower Merritt, N. H.

At one time he had it on his tongue to say that there seemed to be something like infection in his interest in that piano, and he was going to speak of the young girl who seemed to share it, simply because she saw him staring at it, and who faltered so long with him before the freight-depot that she came near getting no seat in the train for Burymouth. But just at that moment the dispute about the Ashwoods renewed itself upon some fresh evidence which one of the ladies recollected and offered; and Gaites’s chance passed. When it came again he had no longer the wish to seize it. A lingering soreness from his experience with that young girl made itself felt in his nether consciousness. He forbore the more easily because, mixed with this pain, was a certain insecurity as to her quality which he was afraid might impart itself to those patrician presences at the table. They would be nice, and they would be appreciative, — but would they feel that she was a lady, exactly, when he owned to the somewhat poverty-stricken simplicity of her dress in some details, more especially her thread gloves, which he could not consistently make kid? He was all the more bound to keep her from slight because he felt a little, a very little ashamed of her.

He woke next morning in a wide, low, square chamber to the singing of robins in the garden, from which at breakfast he had luscious strawberries, and heaped bowls of June roses. When he started for his train, he parted with Mrs. Birkwall as old friends as he was with her husband; and he completed her conquest by running back to her from the gate, and asking, with a great air of secrecy, but loud enough for Birkwall to hear, whether she thought she could find him another girl in Burymouth, with just such a house and garden, and exactly like herself in every way.

“Hundreds!” she shouted, and stood a graceful figure between the fluted pillars of the portal, waving her hand to them till they were out of sight behind the corner of the high board fence, over which the garden trees hung caressingly, and brushed Gaites’s shoulder in a shy, fond farewell.

It had all been as nice as it could be, and he said so again and again to Birkwall, who would go to the train with him, and who would not let him carry his own hand-bag. The good fellow clung hospitably to it, after Gaites had rechecked his trunk for Kent Harbor, and insisted upon carrying it as they walked up and down the platform together at the station. It seemed that the train from Boston which the Kent Harbor train was to connect with was ten minutes late, and after some turns they prolonged their promenade northward as far as the freight-depot, Birkwall in the abstraction of a plot for a novel which he was seizing these last moments to outline to his friend, and Gaites with a secret shame for the hope which was springing in his breast.

On a side track stood a freight-car, from which the customary men in silk caps were pulling the freight, and standing it about loosely on the platform. The car was detached from the parent train, which had left it not only orphaned on this siding, but apparently disabled; for Gaites heard the men talking about not having cut it out a minute too soon. One of them called, in at the broad low door, to some one inside, “All out?” and a voice from far within responded, “Case here, yet; I can’t handle it alone.”

The others went into the car, and then, with an interval for some heavy bumping and some strong language, they reappeared at the door with the case, which Gaites was by this time not surprised to find inscribed with the name and address of Miss Phyllis Desmond. He remained watching it, while the men got it on the platform, so wholly inattentive to Birkwall’s plot that the most besotted young author could not have failed to feel his want of interest. Birkwall then turned his vision outward upon the object which engrossed his friend, and started with an “Oh, hello!” and slapped him on the back.

Gaites nodded in proud assent, and Birkwall went on: “I thought you were faking the name last night; but I didn’t want to give you away. It was the real thing, wasn’t it, after all.”

“The real thing,” said Gaites, with his most toothful smile, and he laughed for pleasure in his friend’s astonishment.

“Well,” Birkwall resumed, “she seems to be following you up, old fellow. This will be great for Polly, and for Miss Seaward, who wanted you to follow her up; and for all Burymouth, for that matter. Why, Gaites, you’ll be the tea-table talk for a week; you’ll be married to that girl before you know it. What is the use of flying in the face of Providence? Come! There’s time enough to get a ticket, and have your check changed from Kent Harbor to Lower Merritt, and the Hill Country express will be along here at nine o’clock. You can’t let that poor thing start off on her travels alone again!”

Gaites flushed in a joyful confusion, and put the joke by as well as he could. But he was beginning to feel it not altogether a joke; it had acquired an element of mystery, of fatality, which flattered while it awed him; and he could not be easy till he had asked one of the freight-handlers what had happened to the car. He got an answer — flung over the man’s shoulder — which seemed willing enough, but was wholly unintelligible in the clang and clatter of a passenger-train which came pulling in from the southward.

“Here’s the Hill Country express now!” said Birkwall. “You won’t change your mind? Well, your Kent Harbor train backs down after this goes out. Don’t worry about the piano. I’ll find out what’s happened to the car it was in, and I’ll see that it’s put into a good strong one, next time.”

“Do! That’s a good fellow!” said Gaites, and in repeated promises, demanded and given, to come again, they passed the time till the Hill Country train pulled out and the Kent Harbor train backed down.

III.

Gaites was going to stay a week with a friend out on the Point; and after the first day he was so engrossed with the goings-on at Kent Harbor that he pretty well forgot about Burymouth, and the piano of Miss Phyllis Desmond lingered in his mind like the memory of a love one has outlived. He went to the golf links every morning in a red coat, and in plaid stockings which, if they did not show legs of all the desired fulness, attested a length of limb which was perhaps all the more remarkable for that reason. Then he came back to the beach and bathed; at half past one o’clock he dined at somebody’s cottage, and afterwards sat smoking seaward in its glazed or canopied veranda till it was time to go to afternoon tea at somebody else’s cottage, where he chatted about until he was carried off by his hostess to put on a black coat for seven or eight o’clock supper at the cottage of yet another lady.

There was a great deal more society than there had been in his old college-vacation days, when the Kent Harbor House reigned sole in a perhaps somewhat fabled despotism; but the society was of not less simple instincts, and the black coat which Gaites put on for supper was never of the evening-dress convention. Once when he had been out canoeing on the river very late, his hostess made him go “just as he was,” and he was consoled on meeting their bachelor host to find that he had had the inspiration to wear a flannel shirt of much more outing type than Gaites himself had on.

The thing that he had to guard against was not to praise the river sunsets too much at any cottage on the Point; and in cottages on the river, not to say a great deal of the surf on the rocks. But it was easy to respect the amiable local susceptibilities, and Gaites got on so well that he told people he was never going away.

He had arrived at this extreme before he received the note from Mrs. Birkwall, which she made his prompt bread-and-butter letter the excuse of writing him. She wrote mainly to remind him of his promise to stay another day with her husband on his way home through Burymouth; and she alleged an additional claim upon him because of what she said she had made Birkwall do for him. She had made him go down to the freight-depot every day, and see what had become of Phyllis Desmond’s piano; and she had not dared write before, because it had been most unaccountably delayed there for the three days that had now passed. Only that morning, however, she had gone down herself with Birkwall; and it showed what a woman could do when she took anything in hand. Without knowing of her approach except by telepathy, the railroad people had bestirred themselves, and she had seen them with her own eyes put the piano-case into a car, and had waited till the train had bumped and jolted off with it towards Mewers Junction. All the ladies of her supper party, she declared, had been keenly distressed at the delay of the piano in Burymouth, and she was now offering him the relief which she had shared already with them.

He laughed aloud in reading this letter at breakfast, and he could not do less than read it to his hostess, who said it was charming, and at once took a vivid interest in the affair of the piano. She accepted in its entirety his theory of its being a birthday-present for the young girl with that pretty name; and she professed to be in a quiver of anxiety at its retarded progress.

“And, by-the-way,” she added, with the logic of her sex, “I’m just going to the station to see what’s become of a trunk myself that I ordered expressed from Chicago a week ago. If you’re not doing anything this morning — the tide isn’t in till noon, and there’ll be little or no bathing to look at before that — you’d better drive down with me. Or perhaps you’re canoeing up the river with somebody?”

Gaites said he was not, and if he were he would plead a providential indisposition rather than miss driving with her to the station.

“Well, anyway,” she said, tangentially, “I can get June Alber to go too, and you can take her canoeing afterwards.”

But Miss Alber was already engaged for canoeing, and Gaites was obliged to drive off with his hostess alone. She said she did pity him, but she pitied him no longer than it took to get at the express agent. Then she began to pity herself, and much more energetically if not more sincerely, for it seemed that the agent had not been able to learn anything about her trunk, and was unwilling even to prophesy concerning it. Gaites left him to question at her hands, which struck him as combining all the searching effects of a Röntgen-ray examination and the earlier procedure with the rack; and he wandered off, in a habit which he seemed to have formed, toward the freight-house.

He amused himself thinking what he should do if he found Phyllis Desmond’s piano there, but he was wholly unprepared to do anything when he actually found it standing on the platform, as if it had just been put out of the freight-car which was still on the siding at the door. He passed instantly from the mood of gay conjecture in which he was playing with the improbable notion of its presence to a violent indignation.

“Why, look here!” he almost shouted to a man in a silk cap and greased overalls who was contemplating the inscription on the slope of its cover, “what’s that piano doing here?”

The man seemed to accept him as one having authority to make this demand, and responded mildly, “Well, that’s just what I was thinking myself.”

“That piano,” Gaites went on with unabated violence, “started from Boston at the beginning of the week; and I happen to know that it’s been lying two or three days at Burymouth, instead of going on to Lower Merritt, as it ought to have done at once. It ought to have been in Lower Merritt Wednesday afternoon at the latest, and here it is at Kent Harbor Saturday morning!”

The man in the silk cap scanned Gaites’s figure warily, as if it might be that of some official whale in disguise, and answered in a tone of dreamy suggestion: “Must have got shifted into the wrong car at Mewers Junction, somehow. Or maybe they started it wrong from Burymouth.”

Mrs. Maze was coming rapidly down the platform toward them, leaving the express agent to crawl flaccidly into his den at the end of the passenger-station, with the air of having had all his joints started.

“Just look at this, Mrs. Maze,” said Gaites when she drew near enough to read the address on the piano-case. She did look at it; then she looked at Gaites’s face, into which he had thrown a sort of stony calm; and then she looked back at the piano-case.

“No!” she exclaimed and questioned in one.

Gaites nodded confirmation.

“Then it won’t be there in time for the poor thing’s birthday?”

He nodded again.

Mrs. Maze was a woman who never measured her terms, perhaps because there was nothing large enough to measure them with, and perhaps because in their utmost expansion they were a tight fit for her emotions.

“Well, it’s an abominable outrage!” she began. She added: “It’s a burning shame! They’ll never get over it in the world; and when it comes lagging along after everything’s over, she won’t care a pin for it! How did it happen?”

Gaites mutely referred her, with a shrug, to the man in the silk cap, and he again hazarded his dreamy conjecture.

“Well, it doesn’t matter!” she said, with a bitterness that was a great comfort to Gaites. “What are you going to do about it?” she asked him.

“I don’t know what can be done about it,” he answered, referring himself to the man in the silk cap.

The man said, “No freight out, now, till Monday.”

Mrs. Maze burst forth again: “If I had the least confidence in the world in any human express company, I would send it by express and pay the expressage myself.”

“Oh, I couldn’t let you do that, Mrs. Maze,” Gaites protested. “Besides, I don’t suppose they’d allow us to take it out of the freight, here, unless we had the bill of lading.”

“Well,” cried Mrs. Maze, passionately, “I can’t bear to think of that child’s suspense. It’s perfectly heart-sickening. Why shouldn’t they telegraph? They ought to telegraph! If they let things go wandering round the earth at this rate, the least they can do is to telegraph and relieve people’s minds. We’ll go and make the station-master telegraph!”

But even when the station-master was found, and made to understand the case, and to feel its hardship, he had his scruples. “I don’t think I’ve got any right to do that,” he said.

“Of coarse I’ll pay for the telegram,” Mrs. Maze interpolated.

“It ain’t that exactly,” said the station-master. “It might look as if I was meddling myself. I rather not, Mrs. Maze.”

She took fire. “Then I’ll meddle myself!” she blazed. “There’s nothing to hinder my telegraphing, I suppose!”

“I can’t hinder you,” the station-master admitted.

“Well, then!” She pulled a bunch of yellow telegraph blanks toward her, and consumed three of them in her comprehensive despatch:

Miss Phyllis Desmond,

Lower Merritt, N. H.

Piano left Boston Monday P. M. Broke down on way to Burymouth, where delayed four days. Sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Forwarded to Lower Merritt Monday.

“There! How will that do?” she asked Gaites, submitting the telegram to him.

“That seems to cover the ground,” he said, not so wholly hiding the misgiving he began to feel but that she demanded,

“It explains everything, doesn’t it?”

“Yes—”

“Very well; sign it, then!”

“I?”

“Certainly. She doesn’t know me.”

“She doesn’t know me, either,” said Gaites. He added: “And a man’s name—”

“To be sure! Why didn’t I think of that?” and she affixed a signature in which the baptismal name gave away her romantic and impulsive generation — Elaine W. Maze “Now,” she triumphed, as Gaites helped her into her trap— “now I shall have a little peace of my life!”

IV.

Mrs. Maze had no great trouble in making Gaites stay over Sunday. The argument she used was, “No freight out till Monday, you know.” The inducement was June Alber, whom she said she had already engaged to go canoeing with Gaites Sunday afternoon.

That afternoon was exquisite. The sky was cloudless, and of one blue with the river and the girl’s eyes, as Gaites noted while she sat facing him from the bow of the canoe. But the day was of the treacherous serenity of a weather-breeder, and the next morning brought a storm of such violence that Mrs. Maze declared it would be a foolhardy risk of his life for Gaites to go; and again she enforced her logic with Miss Alber, whom she said she had asked to one-o’clock dinner, with a few other friends.

Gaites stayed, of course, but he atoned for his weakness by starting early Tuesday morning, so as to get the first Hill Country train from Boston at Burymouth. He had decided that to get in as much change of air as possible he had better go to Craybrooks for the rest of his vacation.

His course lay through Lower Merritt, and perhaps he would have time to run out from the train and ask the station-master (known to him from his former sojourn) who Miss Phyllis Desmond was. His mind was not so full of Miss June Alber but that he wished to know.

It was still raining heavily, and on the first cut beyond Porchester Junction his train was stopped by a flagman, sent back from a freight-train. There was a wash-out just ahead, and the way would be blocked for several hours yet, if not longer. The express backed down to Porchester, and there seemed no choice for Gaites, if he insisted upon going to Craybrooks, but to take the first train up the old Boston and Montreal line to Wells River and across by the Wing Road through Fabyans; and this was what he did, arriving very late, but quite in time for all he had to do at Craybrooks.

The next day the weather cleared up cold, after the storm, and the fat old ladies, who outnumber everybody but the thin young girls at summer hotels, made the landlord put the steam on in the corridors, and toasted themselves before the log fires on the spectacular hall hearth. Gaites walked all day, and at night he lounged by the lamp, trying to read, and wished himself at Kent Harbor. The blue eyes of June Alber made themselves one with the sky and the river again, and all three laughed at him for his folly in leaving the certain delight they embodied for the vague good of a whim fulfilled. Was this the change he had come to the mountains for? He could throw his hat into the clouds that hung so low in the defile where the hotel lurked, and that was something; but it was not so much to the purpose, now that he had it, as June Alber and the sky and the river, which he had no longer. As he drowsed by the fire in a break of the semicircle of old ladies before it, he suddenly ceased to think of June Alber and the Kent sky and river, and found himself as it were visually confronted with that pale, delicate girl in thread gloves; she was facing him from the bow of a canoe in the train at Boston, where he had first met her, and some one was saying, “Oh, she’s a Desmond, through and through.”

He woke to the sound of a quick snort, in which he suspected a terminal character when he glanced round the semicircle of old ladies and found them all staring at him. From the pain in his neck he knew that his head had been hanging forward on his breast, and, in the strong belief that he had been publicly disgracing himself, he left the place, and went out on the piazza till his shame should be forgotten. Of course, the sound of the name Desmond had been as much a part of his dream as the sight of that pale girl’s face; but he felt, while he paced the veranda, the pull of a strong curiosity to make sure of the fact. From time to time he looked in through the window, without courage to return. At last, when the semicircle was reduced to the bulks of the two ladies who had sat nearest him, he went in, and took a place with a newspaper at the lamp just behind them.

They stopped their talk and recognized him with an exchange of consciousness. Then, as if compelled by an irresistible importance in their topic, they began again; that is, one of them began to talk again, and the other to listen, and Gaites from almost the first word joined the listener with all his might, though he diligently held up his paper between himself and the speaker and pretended to be reading.

“Yes,” she said, “they must have had their summer home there nearly twenty years. Lower Merritt was one of the first places opened up in that part of the mountains, and I guess the Desmonds built the first cottage there.”

The date given would make the young lady whom he remembered from her childhood romps on her father’s lawn somewhat older than he imagined, but not too old for the purposes of his romance.

The speaker began to collect her needlework into the handkerchief on her lap as she went on, and he listened with an intensified abandon.

“I guess,” she continued, “that they pass most of the year there. After he lost his money, he had to give up his house in town, and I believe they have no other home now. They did use to travel some, winters, but I guess they don’t much any more; if they don’t stay there the whole winter through, I don’t believe they get much farther now than Portland, or Burymouth, at the furthest. It seems to me as if I heard that one of the girls was going to Boston last winter to take piano lessons at the Conservatory, so as to teach; but—”

She stopped with a definite air, and rolled her knitting up into her handkerchief. Gaites made a merit to himself of rising abruptly and closing his paper with a clash, as if he had been trying to read and had not been able for the talking near him. The ladies looked round conscience-stricken; when they saw who it was, they looked indignant.

V.

In the necessity, which we all feel, of making practical excuses to ourselves for a foolish action, he pretended that he had been at Craybrooks long enough, and that now, since he had derived all the benefit to be got from the west-side air, it was best to begin his homestretch on the other slope of the hills. His real reason was that he wished to stop at Lower Merritt and experience whatever fortuities might happen to him from doing so. He wished, in other words, to see Phyllis Desmond, or, failing this, to find out whether her piano had reached her.

It had now a pathos for him which had been wanting earlier in his romance. It was no longer a gay surprise for a young girl’s birthday; it was the sober means of living to a woman who must work for her living. But he found it not the less charming for that; he had even a more romantic interest in it, mingled with the sense of patronage, of protection, which is so agreeable to a successful man.

He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the piano in Lower Merritt, and he was so far from regretting his former interventions that at the first junction where his train stopped he employed the time in exploring the freight-house in the vain hope of finding it there, and urging the road to greater speed in its delivery to Miss Desmond. He was now not at all ashamed of the stand he had taken in the matter at former opportunities, and he was not abashed when a man in a silk cap demanded, across the twilight of the freight-house, in accents of the semi-sarcasm appropriate in addressing a person apparently not minding his own business, “Lost something?”

“Yes, I have,” answered Gaites with just effrontery. “I’ve lost an upright piano. I started with it from Boston ten days or a fortnight ago, and I’ve found it everywhere I’ve stopped, and sometimes where I didn’t stop. How long, in the course of nature, ought an upright piano to take in getting to this point from Boston, anyway?”

The man obviously tasted the sarcasm in Gaites’s tone, and dropped it from his own, but he was sulkier if more respectful than before in answering: “‘D ought a come right through in a couple of days. ‘D ought a been here a week ago.”

“Why isn’t it here now, then?”

“Might ‘a’ got off on some branch road, by mistake, and waited there till it was looked up. You see,” the man continued, resting an elbow on the tall casing of a chest of drawers, and dropping to a more confidential level in his manner, “an upright piano ain’t like a passenger. It don’t kick if it’s shunted off on the wrong line. As a gene’l rule, freight don’t complain of the route it travels by, and it ain’t in a hurry to arrive.”

“Oh!” said Gaites, with a sympathetic sneer.

“But it ain’t likely,” said the man, who now pushed his hat far back on his head, in the interest of self-possession, “that it’s gone wrong. With all these wash-outs and devilments, the last fo’t-night, it might a’ been travellin’ straight and not got the’a, yet. What d’you say was the address?”

“Lower Merritt,” said Gaites, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.

“Name?” persisted the man.

“Miss Phyllis Desmond,” Gaites answered, now feeling really silly, but unable to get away without answering.

“That ain’t your name?” the man suggested, with reviving sarcasm.

“No, it isn’t!” Gaites retorted, angrily, aware that he was giving himself away in fine shape.

“Oh, I see,” the man mocked. “Friend o’ the family. Well, I guess you’ll find your piano at Lower Merritt, all right, in two-three weeks.” He was now openly offensive, as with a sense of having Gaites in his power.

A locomotive-bell rang, and Gaites started toward the doorway. “Is that my train?”

The man openly laughed. “Guess it is, if you’re goin’ to Lower Merritt.” As Gaites shot through the doorway toward his train, he added, in an insolent drawl, “Miss — Des — mond!”

Gaites was so furious when he got back to the smoking-room of the parlor-car that he was sorry for several miles that he had not turned back and kicked the man, even if it lost him his train. But this was only while he was under the impression that he was furious with the man. When he discovered that he was furious with himself, for having been all imaginable kinds of an ass, he perceived that he had done the wisest thing he could in leaving the man to himself, and taking up the line of his journey again. What remained mortifying was that he had bought his ticket and checked his bag to Lower Merritt, which he wished never to hear of again, much less see.

He rang for the porter and consulted him as to what could be done toward changing the check on his bag from Lower Merritt to Middlemount Junction; and as it appeared that this was quite feasible, since his ticket would have carried him two stations beyond the Junction, he had done it. He knew the hotel at Middlemount, and he decided to pass the night there, and the next day to go back to Kent Harbor and June Alber, and let Lower Merritt and Phyllis Desmond take care of themselves from that time forward.

While the driver of the Middlemount House barge was helping the station-master-and-baggage-man (they were one) put the arriving passengers’ trunks into the wagon for the Middlemount House, Gaites paced up and down the long platform in the remnant of his excitement, and vowed himself to have nothing more to do with Miss Desmond’s piano, even if it should turn up then and there and personally appeal to him for help. In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car standing on the track, to read, “Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N. H.,” on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway. It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.

The united station-master-and-baggage-man, who appeared also to be the freight agent, came lounging down the platform toward him. He was so exactly of the rustic railroad type that he confused Gaites with a doubt as to which functionary, of the many he now knew, this was.

“Go’n’ to walk over to the hotel?” he asked.

“Yes,” Gaites faltered, and the man abruptly turned, and made the gesture for starting a locomotive to the driver of the Middlemount stage.

“All right, Jim!” he shouted, and the stage drove off.

“What time can I get a train for Lower Merritt this afternoon?” asked Gaites.

“Four o’clock,” said the man. “This freight goes out first;” and now Gaites noticed that up on a siding beyond the station an engine with a train of freight-cars was fretfully fizzing. The engineer put a silk-capped head out of the cab window and looked back at the station-master, who began to work his arms like a semaphore telegraph. Then the locomotive tooted, the bell rang, and the freight-train ran forward on the switch to the main track, and commenced backing down to where they stood. Evidently it was going to pick up the car with Phyllis Desmond’s piano in it.

“When does this freight go out?” Gaites palpitated.

“‘Bout ten minutes,” said the station-master.

“Does it stop at Lower Merritt?”

“Leaves this cah the’a,” said the man, as if surprised into the admission.

“Can I go on her?” Gaites pursued, breathlessly.

“Well, I guess you’ll have to talk to this man about that,” and the station-master indicated, with a nod of his head, the freight conductor, who was swinging himself down from the caboose, now come abreast of them on the track. A brakeman had also jumped down, and the train fastened on to the waiting car, under his manipulation, with a final cluck and jolt.

The conductor and station-master exchanged large oblong Manila-paper envelopes, and the station-master said, casually, “Here’s a man wants to go to Lower Merritt with you, Bill.”

The conductor looked amused and interested. “Eva travel in a caboose?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess you can stand it fo’ five miles, anyway.”

He turned and left Gaites, who understood this for permission, and clambered into the car, where he found himself in a rude but far from comfortless interior. There was a sort of table or desk in the middle, with a heavy chair or two before it; round the side of the car were some leather-covered benches, suitable for the hard naps which seemed to be taken on them, if he could guess from the man in overalls asleep on one.

The conductor came in, after the train started, and seemed disposed to be sociable. He had apparently gathered from the station-master so much of Gaites’s personal history as had accumulated since he left the express train at Middlemount.

“Thought you’d try a caboose for a little change from a pahla-cah,” he suggested, humorously.

“Well, yes,” Gaites partially admitted. “I did intend to stay over at Middlemount when I left the express there, but I changed my mind and decided to go on. It’s very good of you to let me come with you.”

“‘Tain’t but a little way to Lowa Merritt,” the conductor explained, defensively. “Eva been the’a?”

“Oh, yes; I passed a week or so there once, after I left college. Are you acquainted there?”

“I’m from the’a. Used to wo’k fo’ the Desmonds — got that summa place up the side of the mountain — before I took to the ro-ad.”

“Oh, yes! Have they still got it?”

“Yes. Or it’s got them. Be glad to sell it, I guess, since the old man lost his money. But Lowa Merritt’s kind o’ gone down as a summa roso’t. Tryin’ ha’d to bring it up, though. Know the Desmonds?”

“No, not personally.”

“Nice fo-aks,” said the conductor, providing himself for conversational purposes with a splinter from the floor. He put it between his teeth and continued: “I took ca’ thei’ hosses, one while, as long’s they had any, before I went on the ro-ad. Old gentleman kep’ up a show till he died; then the fam’ly found out that they hadn’t much of anything but the place left. Girls had to do something, and one of ’em got a place in a school out West — smaht, all of ‘em; the second one kind o’ runs the fahm; and the youngest, here, ‘s been fittin’ for a music-teacha. Why, I’ve got a piano for her in this cah that we picked up at Middlemount, now. Been two wintas at the Conservatory in Boston. Got talent enough, they tell me. Undastand ‘t she means to go to Pohtland in the fall and try to get pupils, the’a.”

“Not if I can help it!” thought Gaites, with a swelling heart; and then he blushed for his folly.

VI.

Gaites found some notable changes in the hotel at Lower Merritt since he had last sojourned there. It no longer called itself a Hotel, but an Inn, and it had a brand-new old-fashioned swinging sign before its door; its front had been cut up into several gables, and shingled to the ground with shingles artificially antiquated, so that it looked much grayer than it naturally ought. Within it was equipped for electric lighting; and there was a low-browed æsthetic parlor, where, when Gaites arrived and passed to a belated dinner in the dining-room, an orchestra, consisting of a lady pianist and a lady violinist, was giving the closing piece of the afternoon concert. The dining-room was painted a self-righteous olive-green; it was thoroughly netted against the flies, which used to roost in myriads on the cut-paper around the tops of the pillars, and a college-student head waiter ushered Gaites through the gloom to his place with a warning and hushing hand which made him feel as if he were being shown to a pew during prayers.

He escaped as soon as possible from the refection which, from the soup to the ice-cream, had hardly grown lukewarm, and went out to walk by a way that he knew well, and which had for him now a romantically pathetic interest. It was, of course, the way past the Desmond cottage, which, when he came in sight of it round the shoulder of upland where it stood, was curiously strange, curiously familiar. It needed painting badly, and the grounds had a sadly neglected air. The naked legs of little girls no longer twinkled over the lawn, which was grown neglectedly up to low-bush blackberries.

Gaites hurried past with a lump in his throat, and returned by another road to the Inn, where his long ramble ended just as the dining-room doors were opened behind their nettings for supper. At this cheerfuler moment he found the head waiter much more conversible than at the hour of his retarded dinner, and Gaites made talk with him, as the young follow lingered beside his chair, with one eye on the door for the behoof of other guests.

Gaites said he had found great changes in Lower Merritt since he had been there some years before, and he artfully led the talk up to the Desmonds. The head waiter was rather vague about their past; but he was distinct enough about their present, and said the young ladies happened all to be at home. “I don’t know,” he added, “whether you noticed our lady orchestra when you came in to dinner to-day?”

“Yes, I did,” said Gaites. “I was very much interested. I thought they played charmingly, and I was sorry that I got in only for the close of the last piece.”

“Well,” the head waiter consoled him, “you’ll have a chance to hear them again to-night; they’re going to play for the hop. I don’t know,” he added again, “whether you noticed the lady at the piano.”

“I noticed that she had a pretty head, which she carried gracefully, but it was against the window, and I couldn’t make out the face.”

“That,” said the head waiter, with pride either in the fact or for the effect it must produce, “was Miss Phyllis Desmond.”

Gaites started as satisfactorily as could be wished. “Indeed?”

“Yes; she’s engaged to play here the whole summer.” The head waiter fumbled with the knife and fork at the place opposite, and blushed. “But you’ll hear her to-night yourself,” he ended incoherently, and hurried away, to show another guest to his, or rather her, place.

Gaites wondered why he felt suddenly angry; why he resented the head waiter’s blush as an impertinence and a liberty. After all, the fellow was a student and probably a gentleman; and if he chose to help himself through college by taking that menial rôle during the summer, rather than come upon the charity of his friends or the hard-earned savings of a poor old father, what had any one to say against it? Gaites had nothing to say against it; and yet that blush, that embarrassment of a man who had pulled out his chair for him, in relation to such a girl as Miss Phyllis Desmond, incensed him so much that he could not enjoy his supper. He did not bow to the head waiter when he held the netting-door open for him to go out, and he felt the necessity of taking the evening air in another stroll to cool himself off.

Of course, if the poor girl was reduced to playing in the hotel orchestra for the money it would give her, she had come down to the level of the head waiter, and they must meet as equals. But the thought was no less intolerable for that, and Gaites set out with the notion of walking away from it. At the station, however, which was in friendly proximity to the Inn, his steps were stayed by the sound of girlish voices, rising like sweetly varied pipes from beyond the freight-depot. Their youth invited his own to look them up, and he followed round to the back of the depot, where he came upon a sight which had, perhaps from the waning light, a heightened charm. Against the curtain of low pines which had been gradually creeping back upon the depot ever since the woods were cut away to make room for it, four girls were posed in attitudes instinctively dramatic and vividly eager, while as many men were employed in getting what Gaites at once saw to be Miss Phyllis Desmond’s piano into the wagon backed up to the platform of the depot. Their work was nearly accomplished, but at every moment of what still remained to be done the girls emitted little shrieks, laughs, and moans of intense interest, and fluttered in their light summer dresses against the background of the dark evergreens like anxious birds.

At last the piano was got into the middle of the wagon, the inclined planks withdrawn and loaded into it, and the tail-board snapped to. Three of the men stepped aside, and one of them jumped into the front of the wagon and gathered up the reins from the horses’ backs. He called with mocking challenge to the group of girls, “Nobody goin’ to git up here and keep this piano from tippin’ out?”

A wild clamor rose from the girls, settling at last into staccato cries.

“You’ve got to do it, Phyl!”

“Yes, Phyllis, you must get in!”

“It’s your piano, Phyl. You’ve got to keep it from tipping out!”

“No, no! I won’t! I can’t! I’m not going to!” one voice answered to all, but apparently without a single reference to the event; for in the end the speaker gave her hand to the man in the wagon, and with many small laughs and squeaks was pulled up over the hub and tire of a front wheel, and then stood staying herself against the piano-case, with a final lamentation of “Oh, it’s a shame! I’ll never speak to any of you again! How perfectly mean! Oh!” The last exclamation signalized the start of the horses at a brisk mountain trot, which the driver presently sobered to a walk. The three remaining girls followed, mocking and cheering, and after them lounged the three remaining men, at a respectful distance, marking the social interval between them, which was to be bridged only in some such moment of supreme excitement as the present.

It was no question with Gaites whether he should bring up the end of the procession; he could not think of any consideration that would have stayed him. He scarcely troubled himself to keep at a fit remove from the rest; and as he followed in the deepening twilight he felt a sweet, unselfish gladness of heart that the poor girl whom he had seen so wan and sad in Boston should be the gay soul of this pretty triumph.

The wagon drove into the grounds of the Desmond cottage, and backed up to the edge of the veranda. Lights appeared, and voices came from within. One of the men, despatched to the barn for a hatchet, came flickering back with a lantern also; lamps brought out of the house were extinguished by the evening breeze (in spite of luminous hands held near the chimney to shelter them), amidst the joyful applause of all the girls and the laughter of the men. A sound of hammering rose, and then a sound of boards rending from the clutch of nails, and then a sound of pieces thrown loosely into a pile. There was a continual flutter of women’s dresses and emotions, and this did not end even when the piano, disclosed from its casing and all its wraps, was pushed indoors, and placed against the parlor wall, where a flash of lamp-light revealed it to Gaites in final position.

He lingered still, in the shelter of some barberry-bushes at the cottage gate, and not till the last cry of gratitude had been answered by the unanimous disclaimer of the men rattling away in the wagon did he feel that his pursuit of the piano had ended.

VII.

“Can you tell me, madam,” asked Gaites of an obviously approachable tabby next the chimney-corner, “which of the musicians is Miss Desmond?”

He had hurried back to the Inn, and got himself early into a dress suit that proved wholly inessential, and was down among the first at the hop. This function, it seemed, was going on in the parlor, which summed in itself the character of ball-room as well as drawing-room. The hop had now begun, and two young girl couples were doing what they could to rebuke the sparse youth of Lower Merritt Inn for their lack of eagerness in the evening’s pleasure by dancing alone. Gaites did not even notice them, he was so intent upon the ladies of the orchestra, concerning whom he was beginning to have a troubled mind, not to say a dark misgiving.

“Oh,” the approachable tabby answered, “it’s the one at the piano. The violinist is Miss Axewright, of South Newton. They were at the Conservatory together in Boston, and they are such friends! Miss Desmond would never have played here — intends to take pupils in Portland in the winter — if Miss Axewright hadn’t come,” and the pleasant old tabby purred on, with a velvety pat here, and a delicate scratch there. But Gaites heard with one ear only; the other was more devotedly given to the orchestra, which also claimed both his eyes. While he learned, as with the mind of some one else, that the Desmonds had been very much opposed to Phyllis’s playing at the Inn, but had consented partly with their poverty, because they needed everything they could rake and scrape together, and partly with their will, because Miss Axewright was such a nice girl, he was painfully adjusting his consciousness to the fact that the girl at the piano was not the girl whom he had seen at Boston and whom he had so rashly and romantically decided to be Miss Phyllis Desmond. The pianist was indeed Miss Desmond, but to no purpose, if the violinist was some one else; it availed as little that the violinist was the illusion that had lured him to Lower Merritt in pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano, if she were really Miss Axewright of South Newton.

What remained for him to do was to arrange for his departure by the first train in the morning; and he was subjectively accounting to the landlord for his abrupt change of mind after he had engaged his room for a week, while he was intent with all his upper faculties upon the graceful poses and movements of Miss Axewright. There was something so appealing in the pressure of her soft chin as it held the violin in place against her round, girlish throat that Gaites felt a lump in his own larger than his Adam’s-apple would account for to the spectator; the delicately arched wrist of the hand that held the bow, and the rhythmical curve and flow of her arm in playing, were means of the spell which wove itself about him, and left him, as it were, bound hand and foot. It was in this helpless condition that he rose at the urgence of a friendly young fellow who had chosen himself master of ceremonies, and took part in the dancing; and at the end of the first half of the programme, while the other dancers streamed out on the verandas and thronged the stairways, he was aware of dangling his chains as he lounged toward the ladies of the orchestra. The volunteer master of ceremonies had half shut himself across the piano in his eager talk with Miss Desmond, and he readily relinquished Miss Axewright to Gaites, who willingly devoted himself to her, after Miss Desmond had risen in acknowledgment of his bow. He had then perceived that she was not nearly so tall as she had seemed when seated; and a woman who sat tall and stood low was as much his aversion as if his own abnormally long legs did not render him guilty of the opposite offence.

Miss Desmond must have had other qualities and characteristics, but in his absorption with Miss Axewright’s he did not notice them. He saw again the pretty, pathetic face, the gentle brown eyes, the ordinary brown hair, the sentient hands, the slight, graceful figure, the whole undistinguished, unpretentious presence, which had taken his fancy at Boston, and which he now perceived had kept it, under whatever erring impressions, ever since.

“I think we have met before, Miss Axewright,” he said boldly, and he had the pleasure of seeing her pensive little visage light up with a responsive humor.

“I think we have,” she replied; and Miss Desmond, whose habitual state seemed to be intense inattention to whatever directly addressed itself to her, cut in with the cry:

“You have met before!”

“Yes. Two weeks ago, in Boston,” said Gaites. “Miss Axewright and I stopped at the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot to see that your piano started off all right.”

He explained himself further, and, “Well, I don’t see what you did to it,” Miss Desmond pouted. “It just got here this afternoon.”

“Probably they ‘throwed a spell’ on it, as the country people say,” suggested the master of ceremonies. “But all’s well that end’s well. The great thing is to have your piano, Miss Phyllis. I’m coming up to-morrow morning to see if it’s got here in good condition.”

“That’s some compensation,” said the girl ironically; and she added, with the kind of repellent lure with which women know how to leave men the responsibility of any reciprocal approach, “I don’t know whether it won’t need tuning first.”

“Well, I’m a piano-tunist myself,” the young fellow retorted, and their banter took a course that left Miss Axewright and Gaites to themselves. The dancers began to stray in again from the stairways and verandas.

“Dear me!” said Miss Desmond, “it’s time already;” and as she dropped upon the piano-stool she called to Miss Axewright with an authority of tone which Gaites thought augured well for her success as a teacher, “Millicent!”

VIII.

The next morning when Gaites came down to breakfast he had a question which solved itself contrary to his preference as he entered the dining-room. He was so early that the head waiter had to jump from his own unfinished meal, and run to pull out his chair; and Gaites saw that he left at his table the landlord’s family, the clerk, the housekeeper, and Miss Axewright. It appeared that she was not only staying in the hotel, but was there on terms which indeed held her above the servants, but separated her from the guests.

He hardly knew how to dissemble the feeling of humiliation mixed with indignation which flashed up in him, and which, he was afterwards afraid, must have made him seem rather curt in his response to the head waiter’s civilities. Miss Axewright left the dining-room first, and he hurried out to look her up as soon as he had despatched the coffee and steak which formed his breakfast, with a wholly unreasoned impulse to offer her some sort of reparation for the slight the conditions put upon her. He found her sitting on the veranda beside the friendly tabby of his last night’s acquaintance, and far, apparently, from feeling the need of reparation through him. She was very nice, though, and after chatting a little while she rose, and excused herself to the tabby, with a politeness that included Gaites, upon the ground of a promise to Miss Desmond that she would come up, the first thing after breakfast, and see how the piano was getting along.

When she reappeared, in her hat, at the front of the Inn, Gaites happened to be there, and he asked her if he might walk with her and make his inquiries too about the piano, in which, he urged, they were mutually interested. He had a notion to tell her all about his pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano, as something that would peculiarly interest Miss Desmond’s friend; but though she admitted the force of his reasoning as to their common concern in the fate of the piano, and had allowed him to go with her to rejoice over its installation, some subtle instinct kept him from the confidence he had intended, and they walked on in talk (very agreeable talk, Gaites found it) which left the subject of the piano altogether intact.

This was fortunate for Miss Desmond, who wished to talk of nothing else. The piano had arrived in perfect condition. “But I don’t know where the poor thing hasn’t been, on the way,” said the girl. “It left Boston fully two weeks ago, and it seems to have been wandering round to the ends of the earth ever since. The first of last week, I heard from it at Kent Harbor, of all places! I got a long despatch from there, from some unknown female, telling me it had broken down on the way to Burymouth, and been sent by mistake to Kent Harbor from Mewers Junction. Have you ever been at Kent Harbor, Mr. Gaites?”

“Oh, yes,” said Gaites. This was the moment to come out with the history of his relation to the piano; but he waited.

“And can you tell me whether they happen to have a female freight agent there?”

“Not to my knowledge,” said Gaites, with a mystical smile.

“Then do you know anybody there by the name of Elaine W. Maze?”

“Mrs. Maze? Yes, I know Mrs. Maze. She has a cottage, there.”

“And can you tell me why Mrs. Maze should be telegraphing me about my piano?”

There was a note of resentment in Miss Desmond’s voice, and it silenced the laughing explanation which Gaites had almost upon his tongue. He fell very grave in answering, “I can’t, indeed, Miss Desmond.”

“Perhaps she found out that it had been a long time on the way, and did it out of pure good-nature, to relieve your anxiety.”

This was what Miss Axewright conjectured, but it seemed to confirm Miss Desmond’s worst suspicions.

“That is what I should like to be sure of,” she said.

Gaites thought of all his own anxieties and interferences in behalf of the piano of this ungrateful girl, and in her presence he resolved that his lips should be forever sealed concerning them. She never would take them in the right way. But he experimented with one suggestion. “Perhaps she was taken with the beautiful name on the piano-case, and couldn’t help telegraphing just for the pleasure of writing it.”

“Beautiful?” cried Miss Desmond. “It was my grandmother’s name; and I wonder they didn’t call me for my great-grandmother, Daphne, and be done with it.”

The young man who had chosen himself master of ceremonies at the hop the night before now proposed from the social background where he had hitherto kept himself, “I will call you Daphne.”

“You will call me Miss Desmond, if you please, Mr. Ellett.” The owner of the name had been facing her visitors from the piano-stool with her back to the instrument. She now wheeled upon the stool, and struck some chords. “I wish you’d thought to bring your fiddle, Millicent. I should like to try this piece.” The piece lay on the music-rest before her.

“I will go and get it for her,” said the ex-master of ceremonies.

“Do,” said Miss Desmond.

“No, no,” Gaites protested. “I brought Miss Axewright, and I have the first claim to bring her fiddle.”

“I’m afraid you couldn’t either of you find it,” Miss Axewright began.

“We’ll both try,” said the ex-master of ceremonies. “Where do you think it is?”

“Well, it’s in the case on the piano.”

“That doesn’t sound very intricate,” said Gaites, and they all laughed.

As soon as the two men were out of the house, the ex-master of ceremonies confided: “That name is a very tender spot with Miss Desmond. She’s always hated it since I knew her, and I can’t remember when I didn’t know her.”

“Yes, I could see that — too late,” said Gaites. “But what I can’t understand is, Miss Axewright seemed to hate it, too.”

Mr. Ellett appeared greatly edified. “Did you notice that?”

“I think I did.”

“Well, now I’ll tell you just what I think. There aren’t any two girls in the world that like each other better than those two. But that shows just how it is. Girls are terribly jealous, the best of them. There isn’t a girl living that really likes to have another girl praised by a man, or anything about her, I don’t care who the man is. It’s a fact, whether you believe it or not, or whether you respect it. I don’t respect it myself. It’s narrow-minded. I don’t deny it: they are narrow-minded. All the same, we can’t help ourselves. At least, I can’t.”

Mr. Ellett broke into a laugh of exhaustive intelligence and clapped Gaites on the back.

IX.

Gaites, if he did not wholly accept Ellett’s philosophy of the female nature, acted in the light it cast upon the present situation. From that time till the end of his stay at Lower Merritt, which proved to be coeval with the close of the Inn for the season, and with the retirement of the orchestra from duty, he said nothing more of Miss Phyllis Desmond’s beautiful name. He went further, and altogether silenced himself concerning his pursuit of her piano; he even sought occasions of being silent concerning her piano in every way, or so it seemed to him, in his anxious avoidance of the topic. In all this matter he was governed a good deal by the advice of Mr. Ellett, to whom he had confessed his pursuit of Miss Desmond’s piano in all its particulars, and who showed a highly humorous appreciation of the facts. He was a sort of second (he preferred to say second-hand) cousin of Miss Desmond, and, so far as he could make out, had been born engaged to her; and he showed an intuition in the gingerly handling of her rather uncertain temper which augured well for his future happiness. His future happiness seemed to be otherwise taken care of, for though he was a young man of no particular prospects, and no profession whatever, he had a generous willingness to liberate his affianced to an artistic career; or, at least, there was no talk of her giving up her scheme of teaching the piano-forte because she was engaged to be married, he was exactly fitted to become the husband of a wage-earning wife, and was so far from being offensive in this quality that everybody (including Miss Desmond, rather fitfully) liked him; and he was universally known as Charley Ellett.

After he had quite converted Gaites to his theory of silence concerning his outlived romance, he liked to indulge himself, when he got Gaites alone with the young ladies, in speculations as to the wanderings of Miss Desmond’s piano. He could always get a rise out of Miss Desmond by referring to the impertinent person who had telegraphed her about it from Kent Harbor, and he could put Gaites into a quiver of anxiety by asking him whether he had heard Mrs. Maze speak of the piano when he was at Kent Harbor, or whether he had happened to see anything of it at any of the junctions on his way to Lower Merritt. To these questions Gaites felt himself obliged to respond with lies point-blank, though there were times when he was tempted to come out with the truth, Miss Axewright seemed so amiably indifferent, or so sympathetically interested, when Ellett was airing his conjectures or pushing his investigations.

Still Gaites clung to the refuge of his lies, and upon the whole it served him well, or at least enabled him to temporize in safety, while he was making the progress in Miss Axewright’s affections which, if he had not been her lover, he never would have imagined difficult. They went every day, between the afternoon and evening concerts, to walk in the Cloister, a colonnade of pines not far from the Inn, which differed from some other cloisters in being so much devoted to love-making. She was in love with him, as he was with her; but in her proud maiden soul she did not dream of bringing him to the confession she longed for. This came the afternoon of the last day they walked in the Cloister, when it seemed as if they might go on walking there forever, and never emerge from their fond, delicious, tremulous, trusting doubt of each other.

She cried upon his shoulder, with her arms round his neck, and owned that she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him in front of the S. B. & H. C. freight-depot in Boston; and Gaites tried to make his passion antedate this moment. To do so, he had to fall back upon the notion of pre-existence, but she gladly admitted his hypothesis.

The next morning brought another mood, a mood of sweet defiance, in which she was still more enrapturing. By this time the engagement was known to their two friends, and Miss Desmond came to the cars with Charley Ellett to see her off. As Gaites was going to Boston on the same train, they made it the occasion of seeing him off, too. Millicent openly declared that they two were going together, that in fact she was taking him home to show him to her family in South Newton and see whether they liked him.

Ellett put this aspect of the affair aside. “Well, then,” he said, “if you’re going to be in Boston together, I think you ought to see the S. B. & H. C. traffic-manager, and find out all about what kept Phyl’s piano so long on the road. I think they owe her an explanation, and Gaites is a lawyer, and he’s just the man to get it, with damages.”

Gaites saw in Ellett’s impudent, amusing face that he divined Millicent’s continued ignorance of his romance, and was bent on mischief. But the girl paid no heed to his talk, and Gaites could not help laughing. He liked the fellow; he even liked Miss Desmond, who was so much softened by the occasion that she had all the thorny allure of a ripened barberry in his fancy. They both hung about the seat, where he stood ready to take his place beside Millicent, till the conductor shouted, “All aboard!” Then they ran out, and waved to the lovers through the window till the car started.

When they could be seen no longer, Millicent let Gaites arrange their hand-baggage together on the seat in front of them. It was a warm day, and she said she did believe she would take her hat off; and she gave it to him, odorous of her pretty hair, to put in the rack overhead. After he had done this, and sat down definitively, she shrank unconsciously closer to him, knitting her fingers in those of his hand on the seat between them.

“Now,” she said, “tell me all about yourself.”

“About myself?”

“Yes. About Phyllis Desmond’s piano, and why you were so interested in it.”

A DIFFICULT CASE.

I.

It was in the fervor of their first married years that the Ewberts came to live in the little town of Hilbrook, shortly after Hilbrook University had been established there under the name of its founder, Josiah Hilbrook. The town itself had then just changed its name, in compliance with the conditions of his public benefactions, and in recognition of the honor he had done it in making it a seat of learning. Up to a certain day it had been called West Mallow, ever since it was set off from the original town of Mallow; but after a hundred and seventy years of this custom it began on that day to call itself Hilbrook, and thenceforward, with the curious American acquiescence in the accomplished fact, no one within or without its limits called it West Mallow again.

The memory of Josiah Hilbrook himself began to be lost in the name he had given the place; and except for the perfunctory mention of its founder in the ceremonies of Commencement Day, the university hardly remembered him as a man, but rather regarded him as a locality. He had, in fact, never been an important man in West Mallow, up to the time he had left it to seek his fortune in New York; and when he died, somewhat abruptly, and left his money, as it were, out of a clear sky, to his native place in the form of a university, a town hall, a soldiers’ monument, a drinking-fountain, and a public library, his fellow-townsmen, in making the due civic acknowledgment and acceptance of his gifts, recalled with effort the obscure family to which he belonged.

He had not tried to characterize the university by his peculiar religious faith, but he had given a church building, a parsonage, and a fund for the support of preaching among them at Hilbrook to the small body of believers to which his people adhered. This sect had a name by which it was officially known to itself; but, like the Shakers, the Quakers, the Moravians, it early received a nickname, which it passively adopted, and even among its own members the body was rarely spoken of or thought of except as the Rixonites.

Mrs. Ewbert fretted under the nickname, with an impatience perhaps the greater because she had merely married into the Rixonite church, and had accepted its doctrine because she loved her husband rather than because she had been convinced of its truth. From the first she complained that the Rixonites were cold; and if there was anything Emily Ewbert had always detested, it was coldness. No one, she once testified, need talk to her of their passive waiting for a sign, as a religious life; if there were not some strong, central belief, some rigorously formulated creed, some —

“Good old herb and root theology,” her husband interrupted.

“Yes!” she heedlessly acquiesced. “Unless there is something like that, all the waiting in the world won’t” — she cast about for some powerful image— “won’t keep the cold chills from running down my back when I think of my duty as a Christian.”

“Then don’t think of your duty as a Christian, my dear,” he pleaded, with the caressing languor which sometimes made her say, in reprobation of her own pleasure in it, that he was a Rixonite, if there ever was one. “Think of your duty as a woman, or even as a mortal.”

“I believe you’re thinking of making a sermon on that,” she retorted; and he gave a sad, consenting laugh, as if it were quite true, though in fact he never really preached a sermon on mere femininity or mere mortality. His sermons were all very good, however; and that was another thing that put her out of patience with his Rixonite parishioners — that they should sit there Sunday after Sunday, year in and year out, and listen to his beautiful sermons, which ought to melt their hearts and bring tears into their eyes, and not seem influenced by them any more than if they were so many dry chips.

“But think how long they’ve had the gospel,” he suggested, in a pensive self-derision which she would not share.

“Well, one thing, Clarence,” she summed up, “I’m not going to let you throw yourself away on them; and unless you see some of the university people in the congregation, I want you to use your old sermons from this out. They’ll never know the difference; and I’m going to make you take one of the old sermons along every Sunday, so as to be prepared.”

II.

One good trait of Mrs. Ewbert was that she never meant half she said — she could not; but in this case there was more meaning than usual in her saying. It really vexed her that the university families, who had all received them so nicely, and who appreciated her husband’s spiritual and intellectual quality as fully as even she could wish, came some of them so seldom, and some of them never, to hear him at the Rixonite church. They ought, she said, to have been just suited by his preaching, which inculcated with the peculiar grace of his gentle, poetic nature a refinement of the mystical theology of the founder. The Rev. Adoniram Rixon, who had seventy years before formulated his conception of the religious life as a patient waiting upon the divine will, with a constant reference of this world’s mysteries and problems to the world to come, had doubtless meant a more strenuous abeyance than Clarence Ewbert was now preaching to a third generation of his followers. He had doubtless meant them to be eager and alert in this patience, but the version of his gospel which his latest apostle gave taught a species of acquiescence which was foreign to the thoughts of the founder. He put as great stress as could be asked upon the importance of a realizing faith in the life to come, and an implicit trust in it for the solution of the problems and perplexities of this life; but so far from wishing his hearers to be constantly taking stock, as it were, of their spiritual condition, and interrogating Providence as to its will concerning them, he besought them to rest in confidence of the divine mindfulness, secure that while they fulfilled all their plain, simple duties toward one another, God would inspire them to act according to his purposes in the more psychological crises and emergencies, if these should ever be part of their experience.

In maintaining, on a certain Sunday evening, that his ideas were much more adapted to the spiritual nourishment of the president, the dean, and the several professors of Hilbrook University than to that of the hereditary Rixonites who nodded in a slumbrous acceptance of them, Mrs. Ewbert failed as usual to rouse her husband to a due sense of his grievance with the university people.

“Well,” he said, “you know I can’t make them come, my dear.”

“Of course not. And I would be the last to have you lift a finger. But I know that you feel about it just as I do.”

“Perhaps; but I hope not so much as you think you feel. Of course, I’m very grateful for your indignation. But I know you don’t undervalue the good I may do to my poor sheep — they’re not an intellectual flock — in trying to lead them in the ways of spiritual modesty and unconsciousness. How do we know but they profit more by my preaching than the faculty would? Perhaps our university friends are spiritually unconscious enough already, if not modest.”

“I see what you mean,” said Mrs. Ewbert, provisionally suspending her sense of the whimsical quality in his suggestion. “But you need never tell me that they wouldn’t appreciate you more.”

“More than old Ransom Hilbrook?” he asked.

“Oh, I hope he isn’t coming here to-night, again!” she implored, with a nervous leap from the point in question. “If he’s coming here every Sunday night” —

As he knew she wished, her husband represented that Hilbrook’s having come the last Sunday night was no proof that he was going to make a habit of it.

“But he stayed so late!” she insisted from the safety of her real belief that he was not coming.

“He came very early, though,” said Ewbert, with a gentle sigh, in which her sympathetic penetration detected a retrospective exhaustion.

“I shall tell him you’re not well,” she went on: “I shall tell him you are lying down. You ought to be, now. You’re perfectly worn out with that long walk you took.” She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a menacing eye upon him.

“Oh, I’m very comfortable here,” he said from the depths of his easy-chair. “Hilbrook won’t come to-night. It’s past the time.”

She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. “If he does, I’m determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him, Clarence. You’ve brought it upon yourself.”

Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long; and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.

III.

The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead, which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century before, and anchored fast by the great central chimney characteristic of the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and made it possible for Hilbrook to do his chores in rain or snow without leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near the kitchen door was a well with a high pent roof, where there had once been a long sweep.

These simple features showed to the village on the opposite slope with a distinctness that made the place seem much lonelier than if it had been much more remote. It gained no cheerfulness from its proximity, and when the windows of the house lighted up with the pale gleam of the sunset, they imparted to the village a sense of dreary solitude which its own lamps could do nothing to relieve.

Ransom Hilbrook came and went among the villagers in the same sort of inaccessible contiguity. He did not shun passing the time of day with people he met; he was in and out at the grocer’s, the meat man’s, the baker’s, upon the ordinary domestic occasions; but he never darkened any other doors, except on his visits to the bank where he cashed the checks for his quarterly allowance. There had been a proposition to use him representatively in the ceremonies celebrating the acceptance of the various gifts of Josiah Hilbrook; but he had not lent himself to this, and upon experiment the authorities found that he was right in his guess that they could get along without him.

He had not said it surlily, but sadly, and with a gentle deprecation of their insistence. While the several monuments that testified to his cousin’s wealth and munificence rose in the village beyond the brook, he continued in the old homestead without change, except that when his housekeeper died he began to do for himself the few things that the ailing and aged woman had done for him. How he did them was not known, for he invited no intimacy from his neighbors. But from the extent of his dealings with the grocer it was imagined that he lived mainly upon canned goods. The fish man paid him a weekly visit, and once a week he got from the meat man a piece of salt pork, which it was obvious to the meanest intelligence was for his Sunday baked beans. From his purchase of flour and baking powder it was reasonably inferred that he now and then made himself hot biscuit. Beyond these meagre facts everything was conjecture, in which the local curiosity played somewhat actively, but, for the most part, with a growing acquiescence in the general ignorance none felt authorized to dispel. There had been a time when some fulfilled a fancied duty to the solitary in trying to see him. But the visitors who found him out of doors were not asked within, and were obliged to dismiss themselves, after an interview across the pickets of the dooryard fence or from the trestles or inverted feed pails on which they were invited to seats in the barn or shed. Those who happened to find their host more ceremoniously at home were allowed to come in, but were received in rooms so comfortless from the drawn blinds or fireless hearths that they had not the spirits for the task of cheering him up which they had set themselves, and departed in greater depression than that they left him to.

IV.

Ewbert felt all the more impelled to his own first visit by the fame of these failures, but he was not hastened in it. He thought best to wait for some sign or leading from Hilbrook; but when none came, except the apparent attention with which Hilbrook listened to his preaching, and the sympathy which he believed he detected at times in the old eyes blinking upon him through his sermons, he felt urged to the visit which he had vainly delayed.

Hilbrook’s reception was wary and non-committal, but it was by no means so grudging as Ewbert had been led to expect. After some ceremonious moments in the cold parlor Hilbrook asked him into the warm kitchen, where apparently he passed most of his own time. There was something cooking in a pot on the stove, and a small room opened out of the kitchen, with a bed in it, which looked as if it were going to be made, as Ewbert handsomely maintained. There was an old dog stretched on the hearth behind the stove, who whimpered with rheumatic apprehension when his master went to put the lamp on the mantel above him.

In describing the incident to his wife Ewbert stopped at this point, and then passed on to say that after they got to talking Hilbrook seemed more and more gratified, and even glad, to see him.

“Everybody’s glad to see you, Clarence,” she broke out, with tender pride. “But why do you say, ‘After we got to talking’? Didn’t you go to talking at once?”

“Well, no,” he answered, with a vague smile; “we did a good deal of listening at first, both of us. I didn’t know just where to begin, after I got through my excuses for coming, and Mr. Hilbrook didn’t offer any opening. Don’t you think he’s a very handsome old man?”

“He has a pretty head, and his close-cut white hair gives it a neat effect, like a nice child’s. He has a refined face; such a straight nose and a delicate chin. Yes, he is certainly good-looking. But what” —

“Oh, nothing. Only, all at once I realized that he had a sensitive nature. I don’t know why I shouldn’t have realized it before. I had somehow taken it for granted that he was a self-conscious hermit, who lived in a squalid seclusion because he liked being wondered at. But he did not seem to be anything of the kind. I don’t know whether he’s a good cook, for he didn’t ask me to eat anything; but I don’t think he’s a bad housekeeper.”

“With his bed unmade at eight o’clock in the evening!”

“He may have got up late,” said Ewbert. “The house seemed very orderly, otherwise; and what is really the use of making up a bed till you need it!”

Mrs. Ewbert passed the point, and asked, “What did you talk about when you got started?”

“I found he was a reader, or had been. There was a case of good books in the parlor, and I began by talking with him about them.”

“Well, what did he say about them?”

“That he wasn’t interested in them. He had been once, but he was not now.”

“I can understand that,” said Mrs. Ewbert philosophically. “Books are crowded out after your life fills up with other interests.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?” Mrs. Ewbert followed him up.

“So far as I could make out, Mr. Hilbrook’s life hadn’t filled up with other interests. He did not care for the events of the day, as far as I tried him on them, and he did not care for the past. I tempted him with autobiography; but he seemed quite indifferent to his own history, though he was not reticent about it. I proposed the history of his cousin in the boyish days which he said they had spent together; but he seemed no more interested in his cousin than in himself. Then I tried his dog and his pathetic sufferings, and I said something about the pity of the poor old fellow’s last days being so miserable. That seemed to strike a gleam of interest from him, and he asked me if I thought animals might live again. And I found — I don’t know just how to put it so as to give you the right sense of his psychological attitude.”

“No matter! Put it any way, and I will take care of the right sense. Go on!” said Mrs. Ewbert.

“I found that his question led up to the question whether men lived again, and to a confession that he didn’t or couldn’t believe they did.”

“Well, upon my word!” Mrs. Ewbert exclaimed. “I don’t see what business he has coming to church, then. Doesn’t he understand that the idea of immortality is the very essence of Rixonitism! I think it was personally insulting to you, Clarence. What did you say?”

“I didn’t take a very high hand with him. You know I don’t embody the idea of immortality, and the church is no bad place even for unbelievers. The fact is, it struck me as profoundly pathetic. He wasn’t arrogant about it, as people sometimes are, — they seem proud of not believing; but he was sufficiently ignorant in his premises. He said he had seen too many dead people. You know he was in the civil war.”

“No!”

“Yes, — through it all. It came out on my asking him if he were going to the Decoration Day services. He said that the sight of the first great battlefield deprived him of the power of believing in a life hereafter. He was not very explanatory, but as I understood it the overwhelming presence of death had extinguished his faith in immortality; the dead riders were just like their dead horses” —

“Shocking!” Mrs. Ewbert broke in.

“He said something went out of him.” Ewbert waited a moment before adding: “It was very affecting, though Hilbrook himself was as apathetic about it as he was about everything else. He was not interested in not believing, even, but I could see that it had taken the heart out of life for him. If our life here does not mean life elsewhere, the interest of it must end with our activities. When it comes to old age, as it has with poor Hilbrook, it has no meaning at all, unless it has the hope of more life in it. I felt his forlornness, and I strongly wished to help him. I stayed a long time talking; I tried to interest him in the fact that he was not interested, and” —

“Well, what?”

“If I didn’t fatigue Hilbrook, I came away feeling perfectly exhausted myself. Were you uneasy at my being out so late?”

V.

It was some time after the Ewberts had given up expecting him that old Hilbrook came to return the minister’s visit. Then, as if some excuse were necessary, he brought a dozen eggs in a paper bag, which he said he hoped Mrs. Ewbert could use, because his hens were giving him more than he knew what to do with. He came to the back door with them; but Mrs. Ewbert always let her maid of all work go out Sunday evening, and she could receive him in the kitchen herself. She felt obliged to make him the more welcome on account of his humility, and she showed him into the library with perhaps exaggerated hospitality.

It was a chilly evening of April, and so early that the lamp was not lighted; but there was a pleasant glow from the fire on the hearth, and Ewbert made his guest sit down before it. As he lay back in the easy-chair, stretching his thin old hands toward the blaze, the delicacy of his profile was charming, and that senile parting of the lips with which he listened reminded Ewbert of his own father’s looks in his last years; so that it was with an affectionate eagerness he set about making Hilbrook feel his presence acceptable, when Mrs. Ewbert left them to finish up the work she had promised herself not to leave for the maid. It was much that Hilbrook had come at all, and he ought to be made to realize that Ewbert appreciated his coming. But Hilbrook seemed indifferent to his efforts, or rather, insensible to them, in the several topics that Ewbert advanced; and there began to be pauses, in which the minister racked his brain for some new thing to say, or found himself saying something he cared nothing for in a voice of hollow resolution, or falling into commonplaces which he tried to give vitality by strenuousness of expression. He heard his wife moving about in the kitchen and dining room, with a clicking of spoons and knives and a faint clash of china, as she put the supper things away, and he wished that she would come in and help him with old Hilbrook; but he could not very well call her, and she kept at her work, with no apparent purpose of leaving it.

Hilbrook was a farmer, so far as he was anything industrially, and Ewbert tried him with questions of crops, soils, and fertilizers; but he tried him in vain. The old man said he had never cared much for those things, and now it was too late for him to begin. He generally sold his grass standing, and his apples on the trees; and he had no animals about the place except his chickens, — they took care of themselves. Ewbert urged, for the sake of conversation, even of a disputative character, that poultry were liable to disease, if they were not looked after; but Hilbrook said, Not if there were not too many of them, and so made an end of that subject. Ewbert desperately suggested that he must find them company, — they seemed sociable creatures; and then, in his utter dearth, he asked how the old dog was getting on.

“Oh, he’s dead,” said Hilbrook, and the minister’s heart smote him with a pity for the survivor’s forlornness which the old man’s apathetic tone had scarcely invited. He inquired how and when the old dog had died, and said how much Hilbrook must miss him.

“Well, I don’t know,” Hilbrook returned. “He wa’n’t much comfort, and he’s out of his misery, anyway.” After a moment he added, with a gleam of interest: “I’ve been thinkin’, since he went, of what we talked about the other night, — I don’t mean animals, but men. I tried to go over what you said, in my own mind, but I couldn’t seem to make it.”

He lifted his face, sculptured so fine by age, and blinked at Ewbert, who was glad to fancy something appealing in his words and manner.

“You mean as to a life beyond this?”

“Ah!”

“Well, let us see if we can’t go over it together.”

Ewbert had forgotten the points he had made before, and he had to take up the whole subject anew, he did so at first in an involuntarily patronizing confidence that Hilbrook was ignorant of the ground; but from time to time the old man let drop a hint of knowledge that surprised the minister. Before they had done, it appeared that Hilbrook was acquainted with the literature of the doctrine of immortality from Plato to Swedenborg, and even to Mr. John Fiske. How well he was acquainted with it Ewbert could not quite make out; but he had recurrently a misgiving, as if he were in the presence of a doubter whose doubt was hopeless through his knowledge. In this bleak air it seemed to him that he at last detected the one thing in which the old man felt an interest: his sole tie with the earth was the belief that when he left it he should cease to be. This affected Ewbert as most interesting, and he set himself, with all his heart and soul, to dislodge Hilbrook from his deplorable conviction. He would not perhaps have found it easy to overcome at once that repugnance which Hilbrook’s doubt provoked in him, if it had been less gently, less simply owned. As it was, it was not possible to deal with it in any spirit of mere authority. He must meet it and overcome it in terms of affectionate persuasion.

It should not be difficult to overcome it; but Ewbert had not yet succeeded in arraying his reasons satisfactorily against it when his wife returned from her work in the kitchen, and sat down beside the library table. Her coming operated a total diversion, in which Hilbrook lapsed into his apathy, and was not to be roused from it by the overtures to conversation which she made. He presently got to his feet and said he mast be going, against all her protests that it was very early. Ewbert wished to walk home with him; but Hilbrook would not suffer this, and the minister had to come back from following him to the gate, and watching his figure lose itself in the dark, with a pang in his heart for the solitude which awaited the old man under his own roof. He ran swiftly over their argument in his mind, and questioned himself whether he had used him with unfailing tenderness, whether he had let him think that he regarded him as at all reprobate and culpable. He gave up the quest as he rejoined his wife with a long, unconscious sigh that made her lift her head.

“What is it, Clarence?”

“Nothing” —

“You look perfectly exhausted. You look worried. Was it something you were talking about?”

Then he told her, and he had trouble to keep her resentment in bounds. She held that, as a minister, he ought to have rebuked the wretched creature; that it was nothing short of offensive to him for Hilbrook to take such a position. She said his face was all flushed, and that she knew he would not sleep, and she should get him a glass of warm milk; the fire was out in the stove, but she could heat it over the lamp in a tin cup.

VI.

Hilbrook did not come again till Ewbert had been to see him; and in the meantime the minister suffered from the fear that the old man was staying away because of some hurt which he had received in their controversy. Hilbrook came to church as before, and blinked at him through the two sermons which Ewbert preached on significant texts, and the minister hoped he was listening with a sense of personal appeal in them. He had not only sought to make them convincing as to the doctrine of another life, but he had dealt in terms of loving entreaty with those who had not the precious faith of this in their hearts, and he had wished to convey to Hilbrook an assurance of peculiar sympathy.

The day following the last of his sermons, Ewbert had to officiate at the funeral of a little child whose mother had been stricken to the earth by her bereavement. The hapless creature had sent for him again and again, and had clung about his very soul, beseeching him for assurance that she should see her child hereafter, and have it hers, just as it was, forever, he had not had the heart to refuse her this consolation, and he had pushed himself, in giving it, beyond the bounds of imagination. When she confessed her own inability to see how it could be, and yet demanded of him that it should be, he answered her that our inability to realize the fact had nothing to do with its reality. In the few words he said over the little one, at the last, he recurred to this position, and urged it upon all his hearers; but in the moment of doing so a point that old Hilbrook had made in their talk suddenly presented itself. He experienced inwardly such a collapse that he could not be sure he had spoken, and he repeated his declaration in a voice of such harsh defiance that he could scarcely afterwards bring himself down to the meek level of the closing prayer.

As they walked home together, his wife asked, “Why did you repeat yourself in that passage, Clarence, and why did you lift your voice so? It sounded like contradicting some one. I hope you were not thinking of anything that wretched old man said?”

With the mystical sympathy by which the wife divines what is in her husband’s mind she had touched the truth, and he could not deny it. “Yes, yes, I was,” he owned in a sort of anguish, and she said: —

“Well, then, I wish he wouldn’t come about any more. He has perfectly obsessed you. I could see that the last two Sundays you were preaching right at him.” He had vainly hoped she had not noticed this, though he had not concealed from her that his talk with Hilbrook had suggested his theme. “What are you going to do about him?” she pursued relentlessly.

“I don’t know, — I don’t know, indeed,” said Ewbert; and perhaps because he did not know, he felt that he must do something, that he must at least not leave him to himself. He hoped that Hilbrook would come to him, and so put him under the necessity of doing something; but Hilbrook did not come, and after waiting a fortnight Ewbert went to him, as was his duty.

VII.

The spring had advanced so far that there were now days when it was pleasant to be out in the soft warmth of the afternoons. The day when Ewbert climbed to the Hilbrook homestead it was even a little hot, and he came up to the dooryard mopping his forehead with his handkerchief, and glad of the southwestern breeze which he caught at this point over the shoulder of the hill. He had expected to go round to the side door of the house, where he had parted with Hilbrook on his former visit; but he stopped on seeing the old man at his front door, where he was looking vaguely at a mass of Spanish willow fallen dishevelled beside it, as if he had some thought of lifting its tangled spray. The sun shone on his bare head, and struck silvery gleams from his close-cropped white hair; there was something uncommon in his air, though his dress was plain and old-fashioned; and Ewbert wished that his wife were there to share his impression of distinction in Hilbrook’s presence.

He turned at Ewbert’s cheerful hail, and after a moment of apparent uncertainty as to who he was, he came down the walk of broken brick and opened the gate to his visitor.

“I was just out, looking round at the old things,” he said, with an effort of apology. “This sort of weather is apt to make fools of us. It gets into our heads, and before we know we feel as if we had something to do with the season.”

“Perhaps we have,” said the minister. “The spring is in us, too.”

The old man shook his head. “It was once, when we were children; now there’s what we remember of it. We like to make believe about it, — that’s natural; and it’s natural we should make believe that there is going to be a spring for us somewhere else like what we see for the grass and bushes, here, every year; but I guess not. A tree puts out its leaves every spring; but by and by the tree dies, and then it doesn’t put out its leaves any more.”

“I see what you mean,” said Ewbert, “and I allow that there is no real analogy between our life and that of the grass and bushes; yet somehow I feel strengthened in my belief in the hereafter by each renewal of the earth’s life. It isn’t a proof, it isn’t a promise; but it’s a suggestion, an intimation.”

They were in the midst of a great question, and they sat down on the decaying doorstep to have it out; Hilbrook having gone in for his hat and come out again, with its soft wide brim shading his thin face, frosted with half a week’s beard.

“But character,” the minister urged at a certain point,— “what becomes of character? You may suppose that life can be lavished by its Origin in the immeasurable superabundance which we see in nature. But character, — that is a different thing; that cannot die.”

“The beasts that perish have character; my old dog had. Some are good and some bad; they’re kind and they’re ugly.”

“Ah, excuse me! That isn’t character; that’s temperament. Men have temperament, too; but the beasts haven’t character. Doesn’t that fact prove something, — or no, not prove, but give us some reasonable expectation of a hereafter?”

Hilbrook did not say anything for a moment. He broke a bit of fragrant spray from the flowering currant — which guarded the doorway on his side of the steps; Ewbert sat next the Spanish willow — and softly twisted the stem between his thumb and finger.

“Ever hear how I came to leave Hilbrook, — West Mallow, as it was then?” he asked at last.

Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly in Hilbrook’s interest, that he had not paid much attention to it.

“Thought there wa’n’t much in it? Well, that’s right, generally speakin’. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain’t goin’ to go over it. I don’t care any more about it now than if it had happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I didn’t. I presume they like to make out that I’ve grieved over it ever since. Sho! It’s forty years since I gave it a thought, that way.” A certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. “I’ve read of folks mournin’ all their lives through, and in their old age goin’ back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin’. But it ain’t true; I don’t suppose I care any more for losin’ her now than Josiah would for gettin’ her if he was alive. It did make a difference for a while; I ain’t goin’ to deny that. It lasted me four or five years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went to the war,” — Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,— “and we had one child. So you may say that I was well over that first thing. It wore out; and if it wa’n’t that it makes me mad to have folks believin’ that I’m sufferin’ from it yet, I presume I shouldn’t think of it from one year’s end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin’ him would kill me. It didn’t. It appeared one while as if I couldn’t live without him, and I was always contrivin’ how I should meet up with him somewhere else. I couldn’t figure it out.”

Hilbrook stopped, and swallowed dryly. Ewbert noticed how he had dropped more and more into the vernacular, in these reminiscences; in their controversies he had used the language of books and had spoken like a cultivated man, but now he was simply and touchingly rustic.

“Well,” he resumed, “that wore out, too. I went into business, and I made money and I lost it. I went through all that experience, and I got enough of it, just as I got enough of fightin’. I guess I was no worse scared than the rest of ‘em, but when it came to the end I’d ‘bout made up my mind that if there was another war I’d go to Canady; I was sick of it, and I was sick of business even before I lost money. I lost pretty much everything. Josiah — he was always a good enough friend of mine — wanted me to start in again, and he offered to back me, but I said no. I said if he wanted to do something for me, he could let me come home and live on the old place, here; it wouldn’t cost him anything like so much, and it would be a safer investment. He agreed, and here I be, to make a long story short.”

Hilbrook had stiffened more and more, as he went on, in the sort of defiance he had put on when he first began to speak of himself, and at the end of his confidence Ewbert did not venture any comment. His forbearance seemed to leave the old man freer to resume at the point where he had broken off, and he did so with something of lingering challenge.

“You asked me just now why I didn’t think character, as we call it, gave us some right to expect a life after this. Well, I’ll try to tell you. I consider that I’ve been the rounds, as you may say, and that I’ve got as much character as most men. I’ve had about everything in my life that most have, and a great deal more than some. I’ve seen that everything wears out, and that when a thing’s worn out it’s for good and all. I think it’s reasonable to suppose that when I wear out it will be for good and all, too. There isn’t anything of us, as I look at it, except the potentiality of experiences. The experiences come through the passions that you can tell on the fingers of one hand: love, hate, hope, grief, and you may say greed for the thumb. When you’ve had them, that’s the end of it; you’ve exhausted your capacity; you’re used up, and so’s your character, — that often dies before the body does.”

“No, no!” Ewbert protested. “Human capacity is infinite;” but even while he spoke this seemed to him a contradiction in terms. “I mean that the passions renew themselves with new occasions, new opportunities, and character grows continually. You have loved twice, you have grieved twice; in battle you hated more than once; in business you must have coveted many times. Under different conditions, the passions, the potentiality of experiences, will have a pristine strength. Can’t you see it in that light? Can’t you draw some hope from that?”

“Hope!” cried Ransom Hilbrook, lifting his fallen head and staring at the minister. “Why, man, you don’t suppose I want to live hereafter? Do you think I’m anxious to have it all over again, or any of it? Is that why you’ve been trying to convince me of immortality? I know there’s something in what you say, — more than what you realize. I’ve argued annihilation up to this point and that, and almost proved it to my own mind; but there’s always some point that I can’t quite get over. If I had the certainty, the absolute certainty, that this was all there was to be of it, I wouldn’t want to live an hour longer, not a minute! But it’s the uncertainty that keeps me. What I’m afraid of is, that if I get out of it here, I might wake up in my old identity, with the potentiality of new experiences in new conditions. That’s it I’m tired. I’ve had enough. I want to be let alone. I don’t want to do anything more, or have anything more done to me. I want to stop.”

Ewbert’s first impression was that he was shocked; but he was too honest to remain in this conventional assumption. He was profoundly moved, however, and intensely interested. He realized that Hilbrook was perfectly sincere, and he could put himself in the old man’s place, and imagine why he should feel as he did. Ewbert blamed himself for not having conceived of such a case before; and he saw that if he were to do anything for this lonely soul, he must begin far back of the point from which he had started with him. The old man’s position had a kind of dignity which did not admit of the sort of pity Ewbert had been feeling for him, and the minister had before him the difficult and delicate task of persuading Hilbrook, not that a man, if he died, should live again, but that he should live upon terms so kind and just that none of the fortuities of mortal life should be repeated in that immortality. He must show the immortal man to be a creature so happily conditioned that he would be in effect newly created, before Hilbrook would consent to accept the idea of living again. He might say to him that he would probably not be consulted in the matter, since he had not been consulted as to his existence here; but such an answer would brutally ignore the claim that such a man’s developed consciousness could justly urge to some share in the counsels of omnipotence. Ewbert did not know where to begin, and in his despair he began with a laugh.

“Upon my word,” he said, “you’ve presented a problem that would give any casuist pause, and it’s beyond my powers without some further thought. Your doubt, as I now understand it, is not of immortality, but of mortality; and there I can’t meet you in argument without entirely forsaking my own ground. If it will not seem harsh, I will confess that your doubt is rather consoling to me; for I have so much faith in the Love which rules the world that I am perfectly willing to accept reëxistence on any terms that Love may offer. You may say that this is because I have not yet exhausted the potentialities of experience, and am still interested in my own identity; and one half of this, at least, I can’t deny. But even if it were otherwise, I should trust to find among those Many Mansions which we are told of some chamber where I should be at rest without being annihilated; and I can even imagine my being glad to do any sort of work about the House, when I was tired of resting.”

VIII.

“I am glad you said that to him!” cried Ewbert’s wife, when he told her of his interview with old Hilbrook. “That will give him something to think about. What did he say?”

Ewbert had been less and less satisfied with his reply to Hilbrook, in which it seemed to him that he had passed from mockery to reproof, with no great credit to himself; and his wife’s applause now set the seal to his displeasure with it.

“Oh, he said simply that he could understand a younger person feeling differently, and that he did not wish to set himself up as a censor. But he could not pretend that he was glad to have been called out of nonentity into being, and that he could imagine nothing better than eternal unconsciousness.”

“Well?”

“I told him that his very words implied the refusal of his being to accept nonentity again; that they expressed, or adumbrated, the conception of an eternal consciousness of the eternal unconsciousness he imagined himself longing for. I’m not so sure they did, now.”

“Of course they did. And then what did he say?”

“He said nothing in direct reply; he sighed, and dropped his poor old head on his breast, and seemed very tired; so that I tried talking of other things for a while, and then I came away. Emily, I’m afraid I wasn’t perfectly candid, perfectly kind, with him.”

“I don’t see how you could have been more so!” she retorted, in tender indignation with him against himself. “And I think what he said was terrible. It was bad enough for him to pretend to believe that he was not going to live again, but for him to tell you that he was afraid he was!” An image sufficiently monstrous to typify Hilbrook’s wickedness failed to present itself to Mrs. Ewbert, and she went out to give the maid instructions for something unusually nourishing for Ewbert at their mid-day dinner. “You look fairly fagged out, Clarence,” she said, when she came back; “and I insist upon your not going up to that dreadful old man’s again, — at least, not till you’ve got over this shock.”

“Oh, I don’t think it has affected me seriously,” he returned lightly.

“Yes, it has! yes, it has!” she declared. “It’s just like your thinking you hadn’t taken cold, the other day when you were caught in the rain; and the next morning you got up with a sore throat, and it was Sunday morning, too.”

Ewbert could not deny this, and he had no great wish to see Hilbrook soon again. He consented to wait for Hilbrook to come to him, before trying to satisfy these scruples of conscience which he had hinted at; and he reasonably hoped that the painful points would cease to rankle with the lapse of time, if there should be a long interval before they met.

That night, before the Ewberts had finished their tea, there came a ring at the door, from which Mrs. Ewbert disconsolately foreboded a premature evening call. “And just when I was counting on a long, quiet, restful time for you, and getting you to bed early!” she lamented in undertone to her husband; to the maid who passed through the room with an inquiring glance, to the front door, she sighed, still in undertone, “Oh yes, of course we’re at home.”

They both listened for the voice at the door, to make out who was there; but the voice was so low that they were still in ignorance while the maid was showing the visitor into the library, and until she came back to them.

“It’s that old gentleman who lives all alone by himself on the hill over the brook,” she explained; and Mrs. Ewbert rose with an air of authority, waving her husband to keep his seat.

“Now, Clarence, I am simply not going to let you go in. You are sick enough as it is, and if you are going to let that awful old man spend the whole evening here, and drain the life out of you! I will see him, and tell him” —

“No, no, Emily! It won’t do. I must see him. It isn’t true that I’m sick. He’s old, and he has a right to the best we can do for him. Think of his loneliness! I shall certainly not let you send him away.” Ewbert was excitedly gulping his second cup of tea; he pushed his chair back, and flung his napkin down as he added, “You can come in, too, and see that I get off alive.”

“I shall not come near you,” she answered resentfully; but Ewbert had not closed the door behind him, and she felt it her duty to listen.

IX.

Mrs. Ewbert heard old Hilbrook begin at once in a high senile key without any form of response to her husband’s greeting: “There was one thing you said to-day that I’ve been thinkin’ over, and I’ve come down to talk with you about it.”

“Yes?” Ewbert queried submissively, though he was aware of being quite as fagged as his wife accused him of being, after he spoke.

“Yes,” Hilbrook returned. “I guess I ha’n’t been exactly up and down with myself. I guess I’ve been playing fast and loose with myself. I guess you’re right about my wantin’ to have enough consciousness to enjoy my unconsciousness,” and the old gentleman gave a laugh of rather weird enjoyment. “There are things,” he resumed seriously, “that are deeper in us than anything we call ourselves. I supposed I had gone to the bottom, but I guess I hadn’t. All the while there was something down there that I hadn’t got at; but you reached it and touched it, and now I know it’s there. I don’t know but it’s my Soul that’s been havin’ its say all the time, and me not listenin’. I guess you made your point.”

Ewbert was still not so sure of that. He had thrown out that hasty suggestion without much faith in it at the time, and his faith in it had not grown since.

“I’m glad,” he began, but Hilbrook pressed on as if he had not spoken.

“I guess we’re built like an onion,” he said, with a severity that forbade Ewbert to feel anything undignified in the homely illustration. “You can strip away layer after layer till you seem to get to nothing at all; but when you’ve got to that nothing you’ve got to the very thing that had the life in it, and that would have grown again if you had put it in the ground.”

“Exactly!” said Ewbert.

“You made a point that I can’t get round,” Hilbrook continued, and it was here that Ewbert enjoyed a little instant of triumph. “But that ain’t the point with me. I see that I can’t prove that we shan’t live again any more than you can prove that we shall. What I want you to do now is to convince me, or to give me the least reason to believe, that we shan’t live again on exactly the same terms that we live now. I don’t want to argue immortality any more; we’ll take that for granted. But how is it going to be any different from mortality with the hope of death taken away?”

Hilbrook’s apathy was gone, and his gentleness; he had suddenly an air and tone of fierce challenge. As he spoke he brought a clenched fist down on the arm of his chair; he pushed his face forward and fixed Ewbert with the vitreous glitter of his old eyes. Ewbert found him terrible, and he had a confused sense of responsibility for him, as if he had spiritually constituted him, in the charnel of unbelief, out of the spoil of death, like some new and fearfuler figment of Frankenstein’s. But if he had fortuitously reached him, through the one insincerity of his being, and bidden him live again forever, he must not forsake him or deny him.

“I don’t know how far you accept or reject the teachings of Scripture on this matter,” he began rather vaguely, but Hilbrook stopped him.

“You didn’t go to the Book for the point you made against me. But if you go to it now for the point I want you to make for me, what are you going to find? Are you going to find the promise of a life any different from the life we have here? I accept it all, — all that the Old Testament says, and all that the New Testament says; and what does it amount to on this point?”

“Nothing but the assurance that if we live rightly here we shall be happy in the keeping of the divine Love there. That assurance is everything to me.”

“It isn’t to me!” cried the old man. “We are in the keeping of the divine Love here, too, and are we happy? Are those who live rightly happy? It’s because we’re not conditioned for happiness here; and how are we going to be conditioned differently there? We are going to suffer to all eternity through our passions, our potentialities of experience, there just as we do here.”

“There may be other passions, other potentialities of experience,” Ewbert suggested, casting about in the void.

“Like what?” Hilbrook demanded. “I’ve been trying to figure it, and I can’t. I should like you to try it. You can’t imagine a new passion in the soul any more than you can imagine a new feature in the face. There they are: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, chin; love, hate, greed, hope, fear! You can’t add to them or take away from them.” The old man dropped from his defiance in an entreaty that was even more terrible to Ewbert. “I wish you could. I should like to have you try. Maybe I haven’t been over the whole ground. Maybe there’s some principle that I’ve missed.” He hitched his chair closer to Ewbert’s, and laid some tremulous fingers on the minister’s sleeve. “If I’ve got to live forever, what have I got to live for?”

“Well,” said Ewbert, meeting him fully in his humility, “let us try to make it out together. Let us try to think. Apparently, our way has brought us to a dead wall; but I believe there’s light beyond it, if we can only break through. Is it really necessary that we should discover some new principle? Do we know all that love can do from our experience of it here?”

“Have you seen a mother with her child?” Hilbrook retorted.

“Yes, I know. But even that has some alloy of selfishness. Can’t we imagine love in which there is no greed, — for greed, and not hate, is the true antithesis of love which is all giving, while greed is all getting, — a love that is absolutely pure?”

“I can’t,” said the old man. “All the love I ever felt had greed in it; I wanted to keep the thing I loved for myself.”

“Yes, because you were afraid in the midst of your love. It was fear that alloyed it, not greed. And in easily imaginable conditions in which there is no fear of want, or harm, or death, love would be pure; for it is these things that greed itself wants to save us from. You can imagine conditions in which there shall be no fear, in which love casteth out fear?”

“Well,” said Hilbrook provisionally.

Ewbert had not thought of these points himself before, and he was pleased with his discovery, though afterwards he was aware that it was something like an intellectual juggle. “You see,” he temporized, “we have got rid of two of the passions already, fear and greed, which are the potentialities of our unhappiest experience in this life. In fact, we have got rid of three, for without fear and greed men cannot hate.”

“But how can we exist without them?” Hilbrook urged. “Shall we be made up of two passions, — of love and hope alone?”

“Why not?” Ewbert returned, with what he felt a specious brightness.

“Because we should not be complete beings with these two elements alone.”

“Ah, as we know ourselves here, I grant you,” said the minister. “But why should we not be far more simply constituted somewhere else? Have you ever read Isaac Taylor’s Physical Theory of another Life? He argues that the immortal body would be a far less complex mechanism than the mortal body. Why should not the immortal soul be simple, too? In fact, it would necessarily be so, being one with the body. I think I can put my hand on that book, and if I can I must make you take it with you.”

He rose briskly from his chair, and went to the shelves, running his fingers along the books with that subtlety of touch by which the student knows a given book in the dark. He had heard Mrs. Ewbert stirring about in the rooms beyond with an activity in which he divined a menacing impatience; and he would have been glad to get rid of old Hilbrook before her impatience burst in an irruption upon them. Perhaps because of this distraction he could not find the book, but he remained on foot, talking with an implication in his tone that they were both preparing to part, and were now merely finishing off some odds and ends of discourse before they said good-night.

Old Hilbrook did not stir. He was far too sincere a nature, Ewbert saw, to conceive of such inhospitality as a hint for his departure, or he was too deeply interested to be aware of it. The minister was obliged to sit down again, and it was eleven o’clock before Hilbrook rose to go.

X.

Ewbert went out to the gate with the old man, and when he came back to his study, he found his wife there looking strangely tall and monumental in her reproach. “I supposed you were in bed long ago, my dear,” he attempted lightly.

“You don’t mean that you’ve been out in the night air without your hat on!” she returned. “Well, this is too much!” Her long-pent-up impatience broke in tears, and he strove in vain to comfort her with caresses. “Oh, what a fatal day it was when you stirred that wretched old creature up! Why couldn’t you leave him alone!”

“To his apathy? To his despair? Emily!” Ewbert dropped his arms from the embrace in which he had folded her woodenly unresponsive frame, and regarded her sadly.

“Oh yes, of course,” she answered, rubbing her handkerchief into her eyes. “But you don’t know that it was despair; and he was quite happy in his apathy; and as it is, you’ve got him on your hands; and if he’s going to come here every night and stay till morning, it will kill you. You know you’re not strong; and you get so excited when you sit up talking. Look how flushed your cheeks are, now, and your eyes — as big! You won’t sleep a wink to-night, — I know you won’t.”

“Oh yes, I shall,” he answered bravely. “I believe I’ve done some good work with poor old Hilbrook; and you mustn’t think he’s tired me. I feel fresher than I did when he came.”

“It’s because you’re excited,” she persisted. “I know you won’t sleep.”

“Yes, I shall. I shall just stay here, and read my nerves down a little. Then I’ll come.”

“Oh yes!” Mrs. Ewbert exulted disconsolately, and she left him to his book. She returned to say: “If you must take anything to make you sleepy, I’ve left some warm milk on the back of the stove. Promise me you won’t take any sulphonal! You know how you feel the next day!”

“No, no, I won’t,” said Ewbert; and he kept his word, with the effect of remaining awake all night. Toward morning he did not know but he had drowsed; he was not aware of losing consciousness, and he started from his drowse with the word “consciousness” in his mind, as he had heard Hilbrook speaking it.

XI.

Throughout the day, under his wife’s watchful eye, he failed of the naps he tried for, and he had to own himself as haggard, when night came again, as the fondest anxiety of a wife could pronounce a husband. He could not think of his talk with old Hilbrook without an anguish of brain exhaustion; and yet he could not help thinking of it. He realized what the misery of mere weakness must be, and the horror of not having the power to rest. He wished to go to bed before the hour when Hilbrook commonly appeared, but this was so early that Ewbert knew he should merely toss about and grow more and more wakeful from his premature effort to sleep. He trembled at every step outside, and at the sound of feet approaching the door on the short brick walk from the gate, he and his wife arrested themselves with their teacups poised in the air. Ewbert was aware of feebly hoping the feet might go away again; but the bell rang, and then he could not meet his wife’s eye.

“If it is that old Mr. Hilbrook,” she said to the maid in transit through the room, “tell him that Mr. Ewbert is not well, but I shall be glad to see him,” and now Ewbert did not dare to protest. His forebodings were verified when he heard Hilbrook asking for him, but though he knew the voice, he detected a difference in the tone that puzzled him.

His wife did not give Hilbrook time to get away, if he had wished, without seeing her; she rose at once and went out to him. Ewbert heard her asking him into the library, and then he heard them in parley there; and presently they came out into the hall again, and went to the front door together. Ewbert’s heart misgave him of something summary on her part, and he did not know what to make of the cheerful parting between them. “Well, I bid you good-evening, ma’am,” he heard old Hilbrook say briskly, and his wife return sweetly, “Good-night, Mr. Hilbrook. You must come soon again.”

“You may put your mind at rest, Clarence,” she said, as she reëntered the dining room and met his face of surprise. “He didn’t come to make a call; he just wanted to borrow a book, — Physical Theory of another Life.”

“How did you find it?” asked Ewbert, with relief.

“It was where it always was,” she returned indifferently. “Mr. Hilbrook seemed to be very much interested in something you said to him about it. I do believe you have done him good, Clarence; and now, if you can only get a full night’s rest, I shall forgive him. But I hope he won’t come very soon again, and will never stay so late when he does come. Promise me you won’t go near him till he’s brought the book back!”

XII.

Hilbrook came the night after he had borrowed the book, full of talk about it, to ask if he might keep it a little longer. Ewbert had slept well the intervening night, and had been suffered to see Hilbrook upon promising his wife that he would not encourage the old man to stay; but Hilbrook stayed without encouragement. An interest had come into his apathetic life which renewed it, and gave vitality to a whole dead world of things. He wished to talk, and he wished even more to listen, that he might confirm himself from Ewbert’s faith and reason in the conjectures with which his mind was filled. His eagerness as to the conditions of a future life, now that he had begun to imagine them, was insatiable, and Ewbert, who met it with glad sympathy, felt drained of his own spiritual forces by the strength which he supplied to the old man. But the case was so strange, so absorbing, so important, that he could not refuse himself to it. He could not deny Hilbrook’s claim to all that he could give him in this sort; he was as helpless to withhold the succor he supplied as he was to hide from Mrs. Ewbert’s censoriously anxious eye the nervous exhaustion to which it left him after each visit that Hilbrook paid him. But there was a drain from another source of which he would not speak to her till he could make sure that the effect was not some trick of his own imagination.

He had been aware, in twice urging some reason upon Hilbrook, of a certain perfunctory quality in his performance. It was as if the truth, so vital at first, had perished in its formulation, and in the repetition he was sensible, or he was fearful, of an insincerity, a hollowness in the arguments he had originally employed so earnestly against the old man’s doubt. He recognized with dismay a quality of question in his own mind, and he fancied that as Hilbrook waxed in belief he himself waned. The conviction of a life hereafter was not something which he was sharing with Hilbrook; he was giving it absolutely, and with such entire unreserve that he was impoverishing his own soul of its most precious possession.

So it seemed to him in those flaccid moods to which Hilbrook’s visits left him, when mind and body were both spent in the effort he had been making. In the intervals in which his strength renewed itself, he put this fear from him as a hypochondriacal fancy, and he summoned a cheerfulness which he felt less and less to meet the hopeful face of the old man. Hilbrook had renewed himself, apparently, in the measure that the minister had aged and waned. He looked, to Ewbert, younger and stronger. To the conventional question how he did, he one night answered that he never felt better in his life. “But you,” he said, casting an eye over the face and figure of the minister, who lay back in his easy-chair, with his hands stretched nerveless on the arms, “you, look rather peaked. I don’t know as I noticed it before, but come to think, I seemed to feel the same way about it when I saw you in the pulpit yesterday.”

“It was a very close day,” said Ewbert. “I don’t know why I shouldn’t be about as well as usual.”

“Well, that’s right,” said Hilbrook, in willing dismissal of the trifle which had delayed him from the great matter in his mind.

Some new thoughts had occurred to him in corroboration of the notions they had agreed upon in their last meeting. But in response Ewbert found himself beset by a strange temptation, — by the wish to take up these notions and expose their fallacy. They were indeed mere toys of their common fancy which they had constructed together in mutual supposition, but Ewbert felt a sacredness in them, while he longed so strangely to break them one by one and cast them in the old man’s face. Like all imaginative people, he was at times the prey of morbid self-suggestions, whose nature can scarcely be stated without excess. The more monstrous the thing appeared to his mind and conscience, the more fascinating it became. Once the mere horror of such a conception as catching a comely parishioner about the waist and kissing her, when she had come to him with a case of conscience, had so confused him in her presence as to make him answer her wildly, not because he was really tempted to the wickedness, but because he realized so vividly the hideousness of the impossible temptation. In some such sort he now trembled before old Hilbrook, thinking how dreadful it would be if he were suddenly to begin undoing the work of faith in him, and putting back in its place the doubts which he had uprooted before. In a swift series of dramatic representations he figured the old man’s helpless amaze at the demoniacal gayety with which he should mock his own seriousness in the past, the cynical ease with which he should show the vanity of the hopes he had been so fervent in awakening. He had throughout recognized the claim that all the counter-doubts had upon the reason, and he saw how effective he could make these if he were now to become their advocate. He pictured the despair in which he could send his proselyte tottering home to his lonely house through the dark.

He rent himself from the spell, but the last picture remained so real with him that he went to the window and looked out, saying, “Is there a moon?”

“It ain’t up yet, I guess,” said old Hilbrook, and from something in his manner, rather than from anything he recollected of their talk, Ewbert fancied him to have asked a question, and to be now waiting for some answer. He had not the least notion what the question could have been, and he began to walk up and down, trying to think of something to say, but feeling his legs weak under him and the sweat cold on his forehead. All the time he was aware of Hilbrook following him with an air of cheerful interest, and patiently waiting till he should take up the thread of their discourse again.

He controlled himself at last, and sank into his chair. “Where were we?” he asked. “I had gone off on a train of associations, and I don’t just recall our last point.”

Hilbrook stated it, and Ewbert said, “Oh, yes,” as if he recognized it, and went on from it upon the line of thought which it suggested. He was aware of talking rationally and forcibly; but in the subjective undercurrent paralleling his objective thought he was holding discourse with himself to an effect wholly different from that produced in Hilbrook.

“Well, sir,” said the old man when he rose to go at last, “I guess you’ve settled it for me. You’ve made me see that there can be an immortal life that’s worth living; and I was afraid there wa’n’t! I shouldn’t care, now, if I woke up any morning in the other world. I guess it would be all right; and that there would be new conditions every way, so that a man could go on and be himself, without feelin’ that he was in any danger of bein’ wasted. You’ve made me want to meet my boy again; and I used to dread it; I didn’t think I was fit for it. I don’t know whether you expect me to thank you; I presume you don’t; but I” — he faltered, and his voice shook in sympathy with the old hand that he put trembling into Ewbert’s— “I bless you!”

XIII.

The time had come when the minister must seek refuge and counsel with his wife. He went to her as a troubled child goes to its mother, and she heard the confession of his strange experience with the motherly sympathy which performs the comforting office of perfect intelligence. If she did not grasp its whole significance, she seized what was perhaps the main point, and she put herself in antagonism to the cause of his morbid condition, while administering an inevitable chastisement for the neglect of her own prevision.

“That terrible old man,” she said, “has simply been draining the life out of you, Clarence. I saw it from the beginning, and I warned you against it; but you wouldn’t listen to me. Now I suppose you will listen, after the doctor tells you that you’re in danger of nervous prostration, and that you’ve got to give up everything and rest. I think you’ve been in danger of losing your reason, you’ve overworked it so; and I sha’n’t be easy till I’ve got you safely away at the seaside, and out of the reach of that — that vampire.”

“Emily!” the minister protested. “I can’t allow you to use such language. At the worst, and supposing that he has really been that drain upon me which you say (though I don’t admit it), what is my life for but to give to others?”

“But my life isn’t for you to give to others, and your life is mine, and I think I have some right to say what shall be done with it, and I don’t choose to have it used up on old Hilbrook.” It passed through Ewbert’s languid thought, which it stirred to a vague amusement, that the son of an older church than the Rixonite might have found in this thoroughly terrestrial attitude of his wife a potent argument for sacerdotal celibacy; but he did not attempt to formulate it, and he listened submissively while she went on: “One thing: I am certainly not going to let you see him again till you’ve seen the doctor, and I hope he won’t come about. If he does, I shall see him.”

The menace in this declaration moved Ewbert to another protest, which he worded conciliatingly: “I shall have to let you. But I know you won’t say anything to convey a sense of responsibility to him. I couldn’t forgive myself if he were allowed to feel that he had been preying upon me. The fact is, I’ve been overdoing in every way, and nobody is to blame for my morbid fancies but myself. I should blame myself very severely if you based any sort of superstition on them, and acted from that superstition.”

“Oh, you needn’t be afraid!” said Mrs. Ewbert. “I shall take care of his feelings, but I shall have my own opinions, all the same, Clarence.”

Whether a woman with opinions so strong as Mrs. Ewbert’s, and so indistinguishable from her prejudices, could be trusted to keep them to herself, in dealing with the matter in hand, was a question which her husband felt must largely be left to her goodness of heart for its right solution.

When Hilbrook came that night, as usual, she had already had it out with him in several strenuous reveries before they met, and she was able to welcome him gently to the interview which she made very brief. His face fell in visible disappointment when she said that Mr. Ewbert would not be able to see him, and perhaps there was nothing to uplift him in the reasons she gave, though she obscurely resented his continued dejection as a kind of ingratitude. She explained that poor Mr. Ewbert was quite broken down, and that the doctor had advised his going to the seaside for the whole of August, where he promised everything from the air and the bathing. Mr. Ewbert merely needed toning up, she said; but to correct the impression she might be giving that his breakdown was a trifling matter, she added that she felt very anxious about it, and wanted to get him away as soon as possible. She said with a confidential effect, as of something in which Hilbrook could sympathize with her: “You know it isn’t merely his church work proper; it’s his giving himself spiritually to all sorts of people so indiscriminately. He can’t deny himself to any one; and sometimes he’s perfectly exhausted by it. You must come and see him as soon as he gets back, Mr. Hilbrook. He will count upon it, I know; he’s so much interested in the discussions he has been having with you.”

She gave the old man her hand for good-by, after she had artfully stood him up, in a double hope, — a hope that he would understand that there was some limit to her husband’s nervous strength, and a hope that her closing invitation would keep him from feeling anything personal in her hints.

Hilbrook took his leave in the dreamy fashion age has with so many things, as if there were a veil between him and experience which kept him from the full realization of what had happened; and as she watched his bent shoulders down the garden walk, carrying his forward-drooping head at a slant that scarcely left the crown of his hat visible, a fear came upon her which made it impossible for her to recount all the facts of her interview to her husband. It became her duty, rather, to conceal what was painful to herself in it, and she merely told him that Mr. Hilbrook had taken it all in the right way, and she had made him promise to come and see them as soon as they got back.

XIV.

Events approved the wisdom of Mrs. Ewbert’s course in so many respects that she confidently trusted them for the rest. Ewbert picked up wonderfully at the seaside, and she said to him again and again that it was not merely those interviews with old Hilbrook which had drained his vitality, but it was the whole social and religious keeping of the place. Everybody, she said, had thrown themselves upon his sympathies, and he was carrying a load that nobody could bear up under. She addressed these declarations to her lingering consciousness of Ransom Hilbrook, and confirmed herself, by their repetition, in the belief that he had not taken her generalizations personally. She now extended these so as to inculpate the faculty of the university, who ought to have felt it their duty not to let a man of Ewbert’s intellectual quality stagger on alone among them, with no sign of appreciation or recognition in the work he was doing, not so much for the Rixonite church as for the whole community. She took several ladies at the hotel into her confidence on this point, and upon study of the situation they said it was a shame. After that she felt more bitter about it, and attributed her husband’s collapse to a concealed sense of the indifference of the university people, so galling to a sensitive nature.

She suggested this theory to Ewbert, and he denied it with blithe derision, but she said that he need not tell her, and in confirming herself in it she began to relax her belief that old Ransom Hilbrook had preyed upon him. She even went so far as to say that the only intellectual companionship he had ever had in the place was that which he found in the old man’s society. When she discovered, after the fact, that Ewbert had written to him since they came away, she was not so severe with him as she might have expected herself to be in view of an act which, if not quite clandestine, was certainly without her privity. She would have considered him fitly punished by Hilbrook’s failure to reply, if she had not shared his uneasiness at the old man’s silence. But she did not allow this to affect her good spirits, which were essential to her husband’s comfort as well as her own. She redoubled her care of him in every sort, and among all the ladies who admired her devotion to him there was none who enjoyed it as much as herself. There was none who believed more implicitly that it was owing to her foresight and oversight that his health mended so rapidly, and that at the end of the bathing season she was, as she said, taking him home quite another man. In her perfect satisfaction she suffered him his small joke about not feeling it quite right to go with her if that were so; and though a woman of little humor, she even professed to find pleasure in his joke after she fully understood it.

“All that I ask,” she said, as if it followed, “is that you won’t spoil everything by letting old Hilbrook come every night and drain the life out of you again.”

“I won’t,” he retorted, “if you’ll promise to make the university people come regularly to my sermons.”

He treated the notion of Hilbrook’s visits lightly; but with his return to the familiar environment he felt a shrinking from them in an experience which was like something physical. Yet when he sat down the first night in his study, with his lamp in its wonted place, it was with an expectation of old Hilbrook in his usual seat so vivid that its defeat was more a shock than its fulfilment upon supernatural terms would have been. In fact, the absence of the old man was spectral; and though Ewbert employed himself fully the first night in answering an accumulation of letters that required immediate reply, it was with nervous starts from time to time, which he could trace to no other cause. His wife came in and out, with what he knew to be an accusing eye, as she brought up those arrears of housekeeping which always await the housewife on the return from any vacation; and he knew that he did not conceal his guilt from her.

They both ignored the stress which had fallen back upon him, and which accumulated, as the days of the week went by, until the first Sunday came.

Ewbert dreaded to look in the direction of Hilbrook’s pew, lest he should find it empty; but the old man was there, and he sat blinking at the minister, as his custom was, through the sermon, and thoughtfully passing the tip of his tongue over the inner edge of his lower lip.

Many came up to shake hands with the minister after church, and to tell him how well he was looking, but Hilbrook was not among them. Some of the university people who had made a point of being there that morning, out of a personal regard for Ewbert, were grouped about his wife, in the church vestibule, where she stood answering their questions about his health. He glimpsed between the heads and shoulders of this gratifying group the figure of Hilbrook dropping from grade to grade on the steps outside, till it ceased to be visible, and he fancied, with a pang, that the old man had lingered to speak with him, and had then given up and started home.

The cordial interest of the university people was hardly a compensation for the disappointment he shared with Hilbrook; but his wife was so happy in it that he could not say anything to damp her joy. “Now,” she declared, on their way home, “I am perfectly satisfied that they will keep coming. You never preached so well, Clarence, and if they have any appreciation at all, they simply won’t be able to keep away. I wish you could have heard all the nice things they said about you. I guess they’ve waked up to you, at last, and I do believe that the idea of losing you has had a great deal to do with it. And that is something we owe to old Ransom Hilbrook more than to anything else. I saw the poor old fellow hanging about, and I couldn’t help feeling for him. I knew he wanted to speak with you, and I’m not afraid that he will be a burden again. It will be such an inspiration, the prospect of having the university people come every Sunday, now, that you can afford to give a little of it to him, and I want you to go and see him soon; he evidently isn’t coming till you do.”

XV.

Ewbert had learned not to inquire too critically for a logical process in his wife’s changes of attitude toward any fact. In her present mood he recognized an effect of the exuberant good-will awakened by the handsome behavior of the university people, and he agreed with her that he must go to see old Hilbrook at once. In this good intention his painful feeling concerning him was soothed, and Ewbert did not get up to the Hilbrook place till well into the week. It was Thursday afternoon when he climbed through the orchard, under the yellowing leaves which dappled the green masses of the trees like intenser spots of the September sunshine. He came round by the well to the side door of the house, which stood open, and he did not hesitate to enter when he saw how freely the hens were coming and going through it. They scuttled out around him and between his legs, with guilty screeches, and left him standing alone in the middle of the wide, low kitchen. A certain discomfort of the nerves which their flight gave him was heightened by some details quite insignificant in themselves. There was no fire in the stove, and the wooden clock on the mantel behind it was stopped; the wind had carried in some red leaves from the maple near the door, and these were swept against the farther wall, where they lay palpitating in the draft.

The neglect in all was evidently too recent to suggest any supposition but that of the master’s temporary absence, and Ewbert went to the threshold to look for his coming from the sheds or the barn. But these were all fast shut, and there was no sign of Hilbrook anywhere. Ewbert turned back into the room again, and saw the door of the old man’s little bedroom standing slightly ajar. With a chill of apprehension he pushed it open, and he could not have experienced a more disagreeable effect if the dark fear in his mind had been realized than he did to see Hilbrook lying in his bed alive and awake. His face showed like a fine mask above the sheet, and his long, narrow hands rested on the covering across his breast. His eyes met those of Ewbert not only without surprise, but without any apparent emotion.

“Why, Mr. Hilbrook,” said the minister, “are you sick?”

“No, I am first-rate,” the old man answered.

It was on the point of the minister’s tongue to ask him, “Then what in the world are you doing in bed?” but he substituted the less authoritative suggestion, “I am afraid I disturbed you — that I woke you out of a nap. But I found the door open and the hens inside, and I ventured to come in” —

Hilbrook replied calmly, “I heard you; I wa’n’t asleep.”

“Oh,” said Ewbert, apologetically, and he did not know quite what to do; he had an aimless wish for his wife, as if she would have known what to do. In her absence he decided to shut the door against the hens, who were returning adventurously to the threshold, and then he asked, “Is there something I can do for you? Make a fire for you to get up by” —

“I ha’n’t got any call to get up,” said Hilbrook; and, after giving Ewbert time to make the best of this declaration, he asked abruptly, “What was that you said about my wantin’ to be alive enough to know I was dead?”

“The consciousness of unconsciousness?”

“Ah!” the old man assented, as with satisfaction in having got the notion right; and then he added, with a certain defiance: “There ain’t anything in that. I got to thinking it over, when you was gone, and the whole thing went to pieces. That idea don’t prove anything at all, and all that we worked out of it had to go with it.”

“Well,” the minister returned, with an assumption of cosiness in his tone which he did not feel, and feigning to make himself easy in the hard kitchen chair which he pulled up to the door of Hilbrook’s room, “let’s see if we can’t put that notion together again.”

“You can, if you want to,” said the old man, dryly “I got no interest in it any more; ‘twa’n’t nothing but a metaphysical toy, anyway.” He turned his head apathetically on the pillow, and no longer faced his visitor, who found it impossible in the conditions of tacit dismissal to philosophize further.

“I was sorry,” Ewbert began, “not to be able to speak with you after church, the other day. There were so many people” —

“That’s all right,” said Hilbrook unresentfully. “I hadn’t anything to say, in particular.”

“But I had,” the minister persisted. “I thought a great deal about you when I was away, and I went over our talks in my own mind a great many times. The more I thought about them, the more I believed that we had felt our way to some important truth in the matter. I don’t say final truth, for I don’t suppose that we shall ever reach that in this life.”

“Very likely,” Hilbrook returned, with his face to the wall. “I don’t see as it makes any difference; or if it does, I don’t care for it.”

Something occurred to Ewbert which seemed to him of more immediate usefulness than the psychological question. “Couldn’t I get you something to eat, Mr. Hilbrook? If you haven’t had any breakfast to-day, you must be hungry.”

“Yes, I’m hungry,” the old man assented, “but I don’t want to eat anything.”

Ewbert had risen hopefully in making his suggestion, but now his heart sank. Here, it seemed to him, a physician rather than a philosopher was needed, and at the sound of wheels on the wagon track to the door his imagination leaped to the miracle of the doctor’s providential advent. He hurried to the threshold and met the fish-man, who was about to announce himself with the handle of his whip on the clapboarding. He grasped the situation from the minister’s brief statement, and confessed that he had expected to find the old gentleman dead in his bed some day, and he volunteered to send some of the women folks from the farm up the road. When these came, concentrated in the person of the farmer’s bustling wife, who had a fire kindled in the stove and the kettle on before Ewbert could get away, he went for the doctor, and returned with him to find her in possession of everything in the house except the owner’s interest. Her usefulness had been arrested by an invisible but impassable barrier, though she had passed and re-passed the threshold of Hilbrook’s chamber with tea and milk toast. He said simply that he saw no object in eating; and he had not been sufficiently interested to turn his head and look at her in speaking to her.

With the doctor’s science he was as indifferent as with the farm-wife’s service. He submitted to have his pulse felt, and he could not help being prescribed for, but he would have no agency in taking his medicine. He said, as he had said to Mrs. Stephson about eating, that he saw no object in it.

The doctor retorted, with the temper of a man not used to having his will crossed, that he had better take it, if he had any object in living, and Hilbrook answered that he had none. In his absolute apathy he did not even ask to be let alone.

“You see,” the baffled doctor fumed in the conference that he had with Ewbert apart, “he doesn’t really need any medicine. There’s nothing the matter with him, and I only wanted to give him something to put an edge to his appetite. He’s got cranky living here alone; but there is such a thing as starving to death, and that’s the only thing Hilbrook’s in danger of. If you’re going to stay with him — he oughtn’t to be left alone” —

“I can come up, yes, certainly, after supper,” said Ewbert, and he fortified himself inwardly for the question this would raise with his wife.

“Then you must try to interest him in something. Get him to talking, and then let Mrs. Stephson come in with a good bowl of broth, and I guess we may trust Nature to do the rest.”

XVI.

When we speak of Nature, we figure her as one thing, with a fixed purpose and office in the universal economy; but she is an immense number of things, and her functions are inexpressibly varied. She includes decay as well as growth; she compasses death as well as birth. We call certain phenomena unnatural; but in a natural world how can anything be unnatural, except the supernatural? These facts gave Ewbert pause in view of the obstinate behavior of Ransom Hilbrook in dying for no obvious reason, and kept him from pronouncing it unnatural. The old man, he reflected, had really less reason to live than to die, if it came to reasons; for everything that had made the world home to him had gone out of it, and left him in exile here. The motives had ceased; the interests had perished; the strong personality that had persisted was solitary amid the familiar environment grown alien.

The wonder was that he should ever have been roused from his apathetic unfaith to inquiry concerning the world beyond this, and to a certain degree of belief in possibilities long abandoned by his imagination. Ewbert had assisted at the miracle of this resuscitation upon terms which, until he was himself much older, he could not question as to their beneficence, and in fact it never came to his being quite frank with himself concerning them. He kept his thoughts on this point in that state of solution which holds so many conjectures from precipitation in actual conviction.

But his wife had no misgivings. Her dread was that in his devotion to that miserable old man (as she called him, not always in compassion) he should again contribute to Hilbrook’s vitality at the expense, if not the danger, of his own. She of course expressed her joy that Ewbert had at last prevailed upon him to eat something, when the entreaty of his nurse and the authority of his doctor availed nothing; and of course she felt the pathos of his doing it out of affection for Ewbert, and merely to please him, as Hilbrook declared. It did not surprise her that any one should do anything for the love of Ewbert, but it is doubtful if she fully recognized the beauty of this last efflorescence of the aged life; and she perceived it her duty not to sympathize entirely with Ewbert’s morbid regret that it came too late. She was much more resigned than he to the will of Providence, and she urged a like submissiveness upon him.

“Don’t talk so!” he burst out. “It’s horrible!” It was in the first hours after Ewbert’s return from Hilbrook’s death-bed, and his spent nerves gave way in a gush of tears.

“I see what you mean,” she said, after a pause in which he controlled his sobs. “And I suppose,” she added, with a touch of bitterness, “that you blame me for taking you away from him here when he was coming every night and sapping your very life. You were very glad to have me do it at the time! And what use would there have been in your killing yourself, anyway? It wasn’t as if he were a young man with a career of usefulness before him, that might have been marred by his not believing this or that. He had been a complete failure every way, and the end of the world had come for him. What did it matter whether such a man believed that there was another world or not?”

“Emily! Emily!” the minister cried out. “What are you saying?”

Mrs. Ewbert broke down in her turn. “I don’t know what I’m saying!” she retorted from behind her handkerchief. “I’m trying to show you that it’s your duty to yourself — and to me — and to people who can know how to profit by your teaching and your example, not to give way as you’re doing, simply because a wornout old agnostic couldn’t keep his hold on the truth. I don’t know what your Rixonitism is for if it won’t let you wait upon the divine will in such a thing, too. You’re more conscientious than the worst kind of Congregationalist. And now for you to blame me” —

“Emily, I don’t blame you,” said her husband. “I blame myself.”

“And you see that that’s the same thing! You ought to thank me for saving your life; for it was just as if you were pouring your heart’s blood into him, and I could see you getting more anæmic every day. Even now you’re not half as well as when you got home! And yet I do believe that if you could bring old Hilbrook back into a world that he was sick and tired of, you’d give your own life to do it.”

XVII.

There was reason and there was justice in what she said, though they were so chaotic in form, and Ewbert could not refuse to acquiesce.

After all, he had done what he could, and he would not abandon himself to a useless remorse. He rather set himself to study the lesson of old Hilbrook’s life, and in the funeral sermon that he preached he urged upon his hearers the necessity of keeping themselves alive through some relation to the undying frame of things, which they could do only by cherishing earthly ties; and when these were snapped in the removal of their objects, by attaching the broken threads through an effort of the will to yet other objects: the world could furnish these inexhaustibly. He touched delicately upon the peculiarities, the eccentricities, of the deceased, and he did cordial justice to his gentleness, his blameless, harmless life, his heroism on the battlefields of his country. He declared that he would not be the one to deny an inner piety, and certainly not a steadfast courage, in Hilbrook’s acceptance of whatever his sincere doubts implied.

The sermon apparently made a strong impression on all who heard it. Mrs. Ewbert was afraid that it was rather abstruse in certain passages, but she felt sure that all the university people would appreciate these. The university people, to testify their respect for their founder, had come in a body to the obsequies of his kinsman; and Mrs. Ewbert augured the best things for her husband’s future usefulness from their presence.

THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.

I.

There was a full moon, and Langbourne walked about the town, unable to come into the hotel and go to bed. The deep yards of the houses gave out the scent of syringas and June roses; the light of lamps came through the fragrant bushes from the open doors and windows, with the sound of playing and singing and bursts of young laughter. Where the houses stood near the street, he could see people lounging on the thresholds, and their heads silhouetted against the luminous interiors. Other houses, both those which stood further back and those that stood nearer, were dark and still, and to these he attributed the happiness of love in fruition, safe from unrest and longing.

His own heart was tenderly oppressed, not with desire, but with the memory of desire. It was almost as if in his faded melancholy he were sorry for the disappointment of some one else.

At last he turned and walked back through the streets of dwellings to the business centre of the town, where a gush of light came from the veranda of his hotel, and the druggist’s window cast purple and yellow blurs out upon the footway. The other stores were shut, and he alone seemed to be abroad. The church clock struck ten as he mounted the steps of his hotel and dropped the remnant of his cigar over the side.

He had slept badly on the train the night before, and he had promised himself to make up his lost sleep in the good conditions that seemed to offer themselves. But when he sat down in the hotel office he was more wakeful than he had been when he started out to walk himself drowsy.

The clerk gave him the New York paper which had come by the evening train, and he thanked him, but remained musing in his chair. At times he thought he would light another cigar, but the hand that he carried to his breast pocket dropped nervelessly to his knee again, and he did not smoke. Through his memories of disappointment pierced a self-reproach which did not permit him the perfect self-complacency of regret; and yet he could not have been sure, if he had asked himself, that this pang did not heighten the luxury of his psychological experience.

He rose and asked the clerk for a lamp, but he turned back from the stairs to inquire when there would be another New York mail. The clerk said there was a train from the south due at eleven-forty, but it seldom brought any mail; the principal mail was at seven. Langbourne thanked him, and came back again to beg the clerk to be careful and not have him called in the morning, for he wished to sleep. Then he went up to his room, where he opened his window to let in the night air. He heard a dog barking; a cow lowed; from a stable somewhere the soft thumping of the horses’ feet came at intervals lullingly.

II.

Langbourne fell asleep so quickly that he was aware of no moment of waking after his head touched the fragrant pillow. He woke so much refreshed by his first sound, soft sleep that he thought it must be nearly morning. He got his watch into a ray of the moonlight and made out that it was only a little after midnight, and he perceived that it must have been the sound of low murmuring voices and broken laughter in the next room which had wakened him. But he was rather glad to have been roused to a sense of his absolute comfort, and he turned unresentfully to sleep again. All his heaviness of heart was gone; he felt curiously glad and young; he had somehow forgiven the wrong he had suffered and the wrong he had done. The subdued murmuring went on in the next room, and he kept himself awake to enjoy it for a while. Then he let himself go, and drifted away into gulfs of slumber, where, suddenly, he seemed to strike against something, and started up in bed.

A laugh came from the next room. It was not muffled, as before, but frank and clear. It was woman’s laughter, and Langbourne easily inferred girlhood as well as womanhood from it. His neighbors must have come by the late train, and they had probably begun to talk as soon as they got into their room. He imagined their having spoken low at first for fear of disturbing some one, and then, in their forgetfulness, or their belief that there was no one near, allowed themselves greater freedom. There were survivals of their earlier caution at times, when their voices sank so low as scarcely to be heard; then there was a break from it when they rose clearly distinguishable from each other. They were never so distinct that he could make out what was said; but each voice unmistakably conveyed character.

Friendship between girls is never equal; they may equally love each other, but one must worship and one must suffer worship. Langbourne read the differing temperaments necessary to this relation in the differing voices. That which bore mastery was a low, thick murmur, coming from deep in the throat, and flowing out in a steady stream of indescribable coaxing and drolling. The owner of that voice had imagination and humor which could charm with absolute control her companion’s lighter nature, as it betrayed itself in a gay tinkle of amusement and a succession of nervous whispers. Langbourne did not wonder at her subjection; with the first sounds of that rich, tender voice, he had fallen under its spell too; and he listened intensely, trying to make out some phrase, some word, some syllable. But the talk kept its sub-audible flow, and he had to content himself as he could with the sound of the voice.

As he lay eavesdropping with all his might he tried to construct an image of the two girls from their voices. The one with the crystalline laugh was little and lithe, quick in movement, of a mobile face, with gray eyes and fair hair; the other was tall and pale, with full, blue eyes and a regular face, and lips that trembled with humor; very demure and yet very honest; very shy and yet very frank; there was something almost mannish in her essential honesty; there was nothing of feminine coquetry in her, though everything of feminine charm. She was a girl who looked like her father, Langbourne perceived with a flash of divination. She dressed simply in dark blue, and her hair was of a dark mahogany color. The smaller girl wore light gray checks or stripes, and the shades of silver.

The talk began to be less continuous in the next room, from which there came the sound of sighs and yawns, and then of mingled laughter at these. Then the talk ran unbrokenly on for a while, and again dropped into laughs that recognized the drowse creeping upon the talkers. Suddenly it stopped altogether, and left Langbourne, as he felt, definitively awake for the rest of the night.

He had received an impression which he could not fully analyze. With some inner sense he kept hearing that voice, low and deep, and rich with whimsical suggestion. Its owner must have a strange, complex nature, which would perpetually provoke and satisfy. Her companionship would be as easy and reasonable as a man’s, while it had the charm of a woman’s. At the moment it seemed to him that life without this companionship would be something poorer and thinner than he had yet known, and that he could not endure to forego it. Somehow he must manage to see the girl and make her acquaintance. He did not know how it could be contrived, but it could certainly be contrived, and he began to dramatize their meeting on these various terms. It was interesting and it was delightful, and it always came, in its safe impossibility, to his telling her that he loved her, and to her consenting to be his wife. He resolved to take no chance of losing her, but to remain awake, and somehow see her before she could leave the hotel in the morning. The resolution gave him calm; he felt that the affair so far was settled.

Suddenly he started from his pillow; and again he heard that mellow laugh, warm and rich as the cooing of doves on sunlit eaves. The sun was shining through the crevices of his window-blinds; he looked at his watch; it was half-past eight. The sound of fluttering skirts and flying feet in the corridor shook his heart. A voice, the voice of the mellow laugh, called as if to some one on the stairs, “I must have put it in my bag. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

He hurried on his clothes, in the vain hope of finding his late neighbors at breakfast; but before he had finished dressing he heard wheels before the veranda below, and he saw the hotel barge drive away, as if to the station. There were two passengers in it; two women, whose faces were hidden by the fringe of the barge-roof, but whose slender figures showed themselves from their necks down. It seemed to him that one was tall and slight, and the other slight and little.

III.

He stopped in the hall, and then, tempted by his despair, he stepped within the open door of the next room and looked vaguely over it, with shame at being there. What was it that the girl had missed, and had come back to look for? Some trifle, no doubt, which she had not cared to lose, and yet had not wished to leave behind. He failed to find anything in the search, which he could not make very thorough, and he was going guiltily out when his eye fell upon an envelope, perversely fallen beside the door and almost indiscernible against the white paint, with the addressed surface inward.

This must be the object of her search, and he could understand why she was not very anxious when he found it a circular from a nursery-man, containing nothing more valuable than a list of flowering shrubs. He satisfied himself that this was all without satisfying himself that he had quite a right to do so; and he stood abashed in the presence of the superscription on the envelope somewhat as if Miss Barbara F. Simpson, Upper Ashton Falls, N. H., were there to see him tampering with her correspondence. It was indelicate, and he felt that his whole behavior had been indelicate, from the moment her laugh had wakened him in the night till now, when he had invaded her room. He had no more doubt that she was the taller of the two girls than that this was her name on the envelope. He liked Barbara; and Simpson could be changed. He seemed to hear her soft throaty laugh in response to the suggestion, and with a leap of the heart he slipped the circular into his breast pocket.

After breakfast he went to the hotel office, and stood leaning on the long counter and talking with the clerk till he could gather courage to look at the register, where he knew the names of these girls must be written. He asked where Upper Ashton Falls was, and whether it would be a pleasant place to spend a week.

The clerk said that it was about thirty miles up the road, and was one of the nicest places in the mountains; Langbourne could not go to a nicer; and there was a very good little hotel. “Why,” he said, “there were two ladies here overnight that just left for there, on the seven-forty. Odd you should ask about it.”

Langbourne owned that it was odd, and then he asked if the ladies lived at Upper Ashton Falls, or were merely summer folks.

“Well, a little of both,” said the clerk. “They’re cousins, and they’ve got an aunt living there that they stay with. They used to go away winters, — teaching, I guess, — but this last year they stayed right through. Been down to Springfield, they said, and just stopped the night because the accommodation don’t go any farther. Wake you up last night? I had to put ’em into the room next to yours, and girls usually talk.”

Langbourne answered that it would have taken a good deal of talking to wake him the night before, and then he lounged across to the time-table hanging on the wall, and began to look up the trains for Upper Ashton Falls.

“If you want to go to the Falls,” said the clerk, “there’s a through train at four, with a drawing-room on it, that will get you there by five.”

“Oh, I fancy I was looking up the New York trains,” Langbourne returned. He did not like these evasions, but in his consciousness of Miss Simpson he seemed unable to avoid them. The clerk went out on the veranda to talk with a farmer bringing supplies, and Langbourne ran to the register, and read there the names of Barbara F. Simpson and Juliet D. Bingham. It was Miss Simpson who had registered for both, since her name came first, and the entry was in a good, simple hand, which was like a man’s in its firmness and clearness. He turned from the register decided to take the four-o’clock train for Upper Ashton Falls, and met a messenger with a telegram which he knew was for himself before the boy could ask his name. His partner had fallen suddenly sick; his recall was absolute, his vacation was at an end; nothing remained for him but to take the first train back to New York. He thought how little prescient he had been in his pretence that he was looking the New York trains up; but the need of one had come already, and apparently he should never have any use for a train to Upper Ashton Falls.

IV.

All the way back to New York Langbourne was oppressed by a sense of loss such as his old disappointment in love now seemed to him never to have inflicted. He found that his whole being had set toward the unseen owner of the voice which had charmed him, and it was like a stretching and tearing of the nerves to be going from her instead of going to her. He was as much under duress as if he were bound by a hypnotic spell. The voice continually sounded, not in his ears, which were filled with the noises of the train, as usual, but in the inmost of his spirit, where it was a low, cooing, coaxing murmur. He realized now how intensely he must have listened for it in the night, how every tone of it must have pervaded him and possessed him. He was in love with it, he was as entirely fascinated by it as if it were the girl’s whole presence, her looks, her qualities. The remnant of the summer passed in the fret of business, which was doubly irksome through his feeling of injury in being kept from the girl whose personality he constructed from the sound of her voice, and set over his fancy in an absolute sovereignty. The image he had created of her remained a dim and blurred vision throughout the day, but by night it became distinct and compelling. One evening, late in the fall, he could endure the stress no longer, and he yielded to the temptation which had beset him from the first moment he renounced his purpose of returning in person the circular addressed to her as a means of her acquaintance. He wrote to her, and in terms as dignified as he could contrive, and as free from any ulterior import, he told her he had found it in the hotel hallway and had meant to send it to her at once, thinking it might be of some slight use to her. He had failed to do this, and now, having come upon it among some other papers, he sent it with an explanation which he hoped she would excuse him for troubling her with.

This was not true, but he did not see how he could begin with her by saying that he had found the circular in her room, and had kept it by him ever since, looking at it every day, and leaving it where he could see it the last thing before he slept at night and the first thing after he woke in the morning. As to her reception of his story, he had to trust to his knowledge that she was, like himself, of country birth and breeding, and to his belief that she would not take alarm at his overture. He did not go much into the world and was little acquainted with its usages, yet he knew enough to suspect that a woman of the world would either ignore his letter, or would return a cold and snubbing expression of Miss Simpson’s thanks for Mr. Stephen M. Langbourne’s kindness.

He had not only signed his name and given his address carefully in hopes of a reply, but he had enclosed the business card of his firm as a token of his responsibility. The partner in a wholesale stationery house ought to be an impressive figure in the imagination of a village girl; but it was some weeks before any answer came to Langbourne’s letter. The reply began with an apology for the delay, and Langbourne perceived that he had gained rather than lost by the writer’s hesitation; clearly she believed that she had put herself in the wrong, and that she owed him a certain reparation. For the rest, her letter was discreetly confined to an acknowledgment of the trouble he had taken.

But this spare return was richly enough for Langbourne; it would have sufficed, if there had been nothing in the letter, that the handwriting proved Miss Simpson to have been the one who had made the entry of her name and her friend’s in the hotel register. This was most important as one step in corroboration of the fact that he had rightly divined her; that the rest should come true was almost a logical necessity. Still, he was puzzled to contrive a pretext for writing again, and he remained without one for a fortnight. Then, in passing a seedsman’s store which he used to pass every day without thinking, he one day suddenly perceived his opportunity. He went in and got a number of the catalogues and other advertisements, and addressed them then and there, in a wrapper the seedsman gave him, to Miss Barbara F. Simpson, Upper Ashton Falls, N. H.

Now the response came with a promptness which at least testified of the lingering compunction of Miss Simpson. She asked if she were right in supposing the seedsman’s catalogues and folders had come to her from Langbourne, and begged to know from him whether the seedsman in question was reliable: it was so difficult to get garden seeds that one could trust.

The correspondence now established itself, and with one excuse or another it prospered throughout the winter. Langbourne was not only willing, he was most eager, to give her proof of his reliability; he spoke of stationers in Springfield and Greenfield to whom he was personally known; and he secretly hoped she would satisfy herself through friends in those places that he was an upright and trustworthy person.

Miss Simpson wrote delightful letters, with that whimsical quality which had enchanted him in her voice. The coaxing and caressing was not there, and could not be expected to impart itself, unless in those refuges of deep feeling supposed to lurk between the lines. But he hoped to provoke it from these in time, and his own letters grew the more earnest the more ironical hers became. He wrote to her about a book he was reading, and when she said she had not seen it, he sent it her; in one of her letters she casually betrayed that she sang contralto in the choir, and then he sent her some new songs, which he had heard in the theatre, and which he had informed himself from a friend were contralto. He was always tending to an expression of the feeling which swayed him; but on her part there was no sentiment. Only in the fact that she was willing to continue this exchange of letters with a man personally unknown to her did she betray that romantic tradition which underlies all our young life, and in those unused to the world tempts to things blameless in themselves, but of the sort shunned by the worldlier wise. There was no great wisdom of any kind in Miss Simpson’s letters; but Langbourne did not miss it; he was content with her mere words, as they related the little events of her simple daily life. These repeated themselves from the page in the tones of her voice and filled him with a passionate intoxication.

Towards spring he had his photograph taken, for no reason that he could have given; but since it was done he sent one to his mother in Vermont, and then he wrote his name on another, and sent it to Miss Simpson in New Hampshire. He hoped, of course, that she would return a photograph of herself; but she merely acknowledged his with some dry playfulness. Then, after disappointing him so long that he ceased to expect anything, she enclosed a picture. The face was so far averted that Langbourne could get nothing but the curve of a longish cheek, the point of a nose, the segment of a crescent eyebrow. The girl said that as they should probably never meet, it was not necessary he should know her when he saw her; she explained that she was looking away because she had been attracted by something on the other side of the photograph gallery just at the moment the artist took the cap off the tube of his camera, and she could not turn back without breaking the plate.

Langbourne replied that he was going up to Springfield on business the first week in May, and that he thought he might push on as far north as Upper Ashton Falls. To this there came no rejoinder whatever, but he did not lose courage. It was now the end of April, and he could bear to wait for a further verification of his ideal; the photograph had confirmed him in its evasive fashion at every point of his conjecture concerning her. It was the face he had imagined her having, or so he now imagined, and it was just such a long oval face as would go with the figure he attributed to her. She must have the healthy palor of skin which associates itself with masses of dark, mahogany-colored hair.

V.

It was so long since he had known a Northern spring that he had forgotten how much later the beginning of May was in New Hampshire; but as his train ran up from Springfield he realized the difference of the season from that which he had left in New York. The meadows were green only in the damp hollows; most of the trees were as bare as in midwinter; the willows in the swamplands hung out their catkins, and the white birches showed faint signs of returning life. In the woods were long drifts of snow, though he knew that in the brown leaves along their edges the pale pink flowers of the trailing arbutus were hiding their wet faces. A vernal mildness overhung the landscape. A blue haze filled the distances and veiled the hills; from the farm door-yards the smell of burning leaf-heaps and garden-stalks came through the window which he lifted to let in the dull, warm air. The sun shone down from a pale sky, in which the crows called to one another.

By the time he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls the afternoon had waned so far towards evening that the first robins were singing their vespers from the leafless choirs of the maples before the hotel. He indulged the landlord in his natural supposition that he had come up to make a timely engagement for summer board; after supper he even asked what the price of such rooms as his would be by the week in July, while he tried to lead the talk round to the fact which he wished to learn.

He did not know where Miss Simpson lived; and the courage with which he had set out on his adventure totally lapsed, leaving in its place an accusing sense of silliness. He was where he was without reason, and in defiance of the tacit unwillingness of the person he had come to see; she certainly had given him no invitation, she had given him no permission to come. For the moment, in his shame, it seemed to him that the only thing for him was to go back to New York by the first train in the morning. But what then would the girl think of him? Such an act must forever end the intercourse which had now become an essential part of his life. That voice which had haunted him so long, was he never to hear it again? Was he willing to renounce forever the hope of hearing it?

He sat at his supper so long, nervelessly turning his doubts over in his mind, that the waitress came out of the kitchen and drove him from the table with her severe, impatient stare.

He put on his hat, and with his overcoat on his arm he started out for a walk which was hopeless, but not so aimless as he feigned to himself. The air was lullingly warm still as he followed the long village street down the hill toward the river, where the lunge of rapids filled the dusk with a sort of humid uproar; then he turned and followed it back past the hotel as far as it led towards the open country. At the edge of the village he came to a large, old-fashioned house, which struck him as typical, with its outward swaying fence of the Greek border pattern, and its gate-posts topped by tilting urns of painted wood. The house itself stood rather far back from the street, and as he passed it he saw that it was approached by a pathway of brick which was bordered with box. Stalks of last year’s hollyhocks and lilacs from garden beds on either hand lifted their sharp points, here and there broken and hanging down. It was curious how these details insisted through the twilight.

He walked on until the wooden village pathway ended in the country mud, and then again he returned up upon his steps. As he reapproached the house he saw lights. A brighter radiance streamed from the hall door, which was apparently open, and a softer glow flushed the windows of one of the rooms that flanked the hall.

As Langbourne came abreast of the gate the tinkle of a gay laugh rang out to him; then ensued a murmur of girls’ voices in the room, and suddenly this stopped, and the voice that he knew, the voice that seemed never to have ceased to sound in his nerves and pulses, rose in singing words set to the Spanish air of La Paloma.

It was one of the songs he had sent to Miss Simpson, but he did not need this material proof that it was she whom he now heard. There was no question of what he should do. All doubt, all fear, had vanished; he had again but one impulse, one desire, one purpose. But he lingered at the gate till the song ended, and then he unlatched it and started up the walk towards the door. It seemed to him a long way; he almost reeled as he went; he fumbled tremulously for the bell-pull beside the door, while a confusion of voices in the adjoining room — the voices which had waked him from his sleep, and which now sounded like voices in a dream — came out to him.

The light from the lamp hanging in the hall shone full in his face, and the girl who came from that room beside it to answer his ring gave a sort of conscious jump at sight of him as he uncovered and stood bare-headed before her.

VI.

She must have recognized him from the photograph he had sent, and in stature and figure he recognized her as the ideal he had cherished, though her head was gilded with the light from the lamp, and he could not make out whether her hair was dark or fair; her face was, of course, a mere outline, without color or detail against the luminous interior.

He managed to ask, dry-tongued and with a heart that beat into his throat, “Is Miss Simpson at home?” and the girl answered, with a high, gay tinkle:

“Yes, she’s at home. Won’t you walk in?”

He obeyed, but at the sound of her silvery voice his heart dropped back into his breast. He put his hat and coat on an entry chair, and prepared to follow her into the room she had come out of. The door stood ajar, and he said, as she put out her hand to push it open, “I am Mr. Langbourne.”

“Oh, yes,” she answered in the same high, gay tinkle, which he fancied had now a note of laughter in it.

An elderly woman of a ladylike village type was sitting with some needlework beside a little table, and a young girl turned on the piano-stool and rose to receive him. “My aunt, Mrs. Simpson, Mr. Langbourne,” said the girl who introduced him to these presences, and she added, indicating the girl at the piano, “Miss Simpson.”

They all three bowed silently, and in the hush the sheet on the music frame slid from the piano with a sharp clash, and skated across the floor to Langbourne’s feet. It was the song of La Paloma which she had been singing; he picked it up, and she received it from him with a drooping head, and an effect of guilty embarrassment.

She was short and of rather a full figure, though not too full. She was not plain, but she was by no means the sort of beauty who had lived in Langbourne’s fancy for the year past. The oval of her face was squared; her nose was arched; she had a pretty, pouting mouth, and below it a deep dimple in her chin; her eyes were large and dark, and they had the questioning look of near-sighted eyes; her hair was brown. There was a humorous tremor in her lips, even with the prim stress she put upon them in saying, “Oh, thank you,” in a thick whisper of the voice he knew.

“And I,” said the other girl, “am Juliet Bingham. Won’t you sit down, Mr. Langbourne!” She pushed towards him the arm-chair before her, and he dropped into it. She took her place on the hair-cloth sofa, and Miss Simpson sank back upon the piano-stool with a painful provisionality, while her eyes sought Miss Bingham’s in a sort of admiring terror.

Miss Bingham was easily mistress of the situation; she did not try to bring Miss Simpson into the conversation, but she contrived to make Mrs. Simpson ask Langbourne when he arrived at Upper Ashton Falls; and she herself asked him when he had left New York, with many apposite suppositions concerning the difference in the season in the two latitudes. She presumed he was staying at the Falls House, and she said, always in her high, gay tinkle, that it was very pleasant there in the summer time. He did not know what he answered. He was aware that from time to time Miss Simpson said something in a frightened undertone. He did not know how long it was before Mrs. Simpson made an errand out of the room, in the abeyance which age practises before youthful society in the country; he did not know how much longer it was before Miss Bingham herself jumped actively up, and said, Now she would run over to Jenny’s, if Mr. Langbourne would excuse her, and tell her that they could not go the next day.

“It will do just as well in the morning,” Miss Simpson pitifully entreated.

“No, she’s got to know to-night,” said Miss Bingham, and she said she should find Mr. Langbourne there when she got back. He knew that in compliance with the simple village tradition he was being purposely left alone with Miss Simpson, as rightfully belonging to her. Miss Bingham betrayed no intentionality to him, but he caught a glimpse of mocking consciousness in the sidelong look she gave Miss Simpson as she went out; and if he had not known before he perceived then, in the vanishing oval of her cheek, the corner of her arched eyebrow, the point of her classic nose, the original of the photograph he had been treasuring as Miss Simpson’s.

VII.

“It was her picture I sent you,” said Miss Simpson. She was the first to break the silence to which Miss Bingham abandoned them, but she did not speak till her friend had closed the outer door behind her and was tripping down the brick walk to the gate.

“Yes,” said Langbourne, in a dryness which he could not keep himself from using.

The girl must have felt it, and her voice faltered a very little as she continued. “We — I — did it for fun. I meant to tell you. I—”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Langbourne. “I had no business to expect yours, or to send you mine.” But he believed that he had; that his faithful infatuation had somehow earned him the right to do what he had done, and to hope for what he had not got; without formulating the fact, he divined that she believed it too. Between the man-soul and the woman-soul it can never go so far as it had gone in their case without giving them claims upon each other which neither can justly deny.

She did not attempt to deny it. “I oughtn’t to have done it, and I ought to have told you at once — the next letter — but I — you said you were coming, and I thought if you did come — I didn’t really expect you to; and it was all a joke, — off-hand.”

It was very lame, but it was true, and it was piteous; yet Langbourne could not relent. His grievance was not with what she had done, but what she was; not what she really was, but what she materially was; her looks, her figure, her stature, her whole presence, so different from that which he had been carrying in his mind, and adoring for a year past.

If it was ridiculous, and if with her sense of the ridiculous she felt it so, she was unable to take it lightly, or to make him take it lightly. At some faint gleams which passed over her face he felt himself invited to regard it less seriously; but he did not try, even provisionally, and they fell into a silence that neither seemed to have the power of breaking.

It must be broken, however; something must be done; they could not sit there dumb forever. He looked at the sheet of music on the piano and said, “I see you have been trying that song. Do you like it?”

“Yes, very much,” and now for the first time she got her voice fairly above a whisper. She took the sheet down from the music-rest and looked at the picture of the lithographed title. It was of a tiled roof lifted among cypresses and laurels with pigeons strutting on it and sailing over it.

“It was that picture,” said Langbourne, since he must say something, “that I believe I got the song for; it made me think of the roof of an old Spanish house I saw in Southern California.”

“It must be nice, out there,” said Miss Simpson, absently staring at the picture. She gathered herself together to add, pointlessly, “Juliet says she’s going to Europe. Have you ever been?”

“Not to Europe, no. I always feel as if I wanted to see my own country first. Is she going soon?”

“Who? Juliet? Oh, no! She was just saying so. I don’t believe she’s engaged her passage yet.”

There was invitation to greater ease in this, and her voice began to have the tender, coaxing quality which had thrilled his heart when he heard it first. But the space of her variance from his ideal was between them, and the voice reached him faintly across it.

The situation grew more and more painful for her, he could see, as well as for him. She too was feeling the anomaly of their having been intimates without being acquaintances. They necessarily met as strangers after the exchange of letters in which they had spoken with the confidence of friends.

Langbourne cast about in his mind for some middle ground where they could come together without that effect of chance encounter which had reduced them to silence. He could not recur to any of the things they had written about; so far from wishing to do this, he had almost a terror of touching upon them by accident, and he felt that she shrank from them too, as if they involved a painful misunderstanding which could not be put straight.

He asked questions about Upper Ashton Falls, but these led up to what she had said of it in her letters; he tried to speak of the winter in New York, and he remembered that every week he had given her a full account of his life there. They must go beyond their letters or they must fall far back of them.

VIII.

In their attempts to talk he was aware that she was seconding all his endeavors with intelligence, and with a humorous subtlety to which he could not pretend. She was suffering from their anomalous position as much as he, but she had the means of enjoying it while he had not. After half an hour of these defeats Mrs. Simpson operated a diversion by coming in with two glasses of lemonade on a tray and some slices of sponge-cake. She offered this refreshment first to Langbourne and then to her niece, and they both obediently took a glass, and put a slice of cake in the saucer which supported the glass. She said to each in turn, “Won’t you take some lemonade? Won’t you have a piece of cake?” and then went out with her empty tray, and the air of having fulfilled the duties of hospitality to her niece’s company.

“I don’t know,” said Miss Simpson, “but it’s rather early in the season for cold lemonade,” and Langbourne, instead of laughing, as her tone invited him to do, said:

“It’s very good, I’m sure.” But this seemed too stiffly ungracious, and he added: “What delicious sponge-cake! You never get this out of New England.”

“We have to do something to make up for our doughnuts,” Miss Simpson suggested.

“Oh, I like doughnuts too,” said Langbourne. “But you can’t get the right kind of doughnuts, either, in New York.”

They began to talk about cooking. He told her of the tamales which he had first tasted in San Francisco, and afterward found superabundantly in New York; they both made a great deal of the topic; Miss Simpson had never heard of tamales. He became solemnly animated in their exegesis, and she showed a resolute interest in them.

They were in the midst of the forced discussion, when they heard a quick foot on the brick walk, but they had both fallen silent when Miss Bingham flounced elastically in upon them. She seemed to take in with a keen glance which swept them from her lively eyes that they had not been getting on, and she had the air of taking them at once in hand.

“Well, it’s all right about Jenny,” she said to Miss Simpson. “She’d a good deal rather go day after to-morrow, anyway. What have you been talking about? I don’t want to make you go over the same ground. Have you got through with the weather? The moon’s out, and it feels more like the beginning of June than the last of April. I shut the front door against dor-bugs; I couldn’t help it, though they won’t be here for six weeks yet. Do you have dor-bugs in New York, Mr. Langbourne?”

“I don’t know. There may be some in the Park,” he answered.

“We think a great deal of our dor-bugs in Upper Ashton,” said Miss Simpson demurely, looking down. “We don’t know what we should do without them.”

“Lemonade!” exclaimed Miss Bingham, catching sight of the glasses and saucers on the corner of the piano, where Miss Simpson had allowed Langbourne to put them. “Has Aunt Elmira been giving you lemonade while I was gone? I will just see about that!” She whipped out of the room, and was back in a minute with a glass in one hand and a bit of sponge-cake between the fingers of the other. “She had kept some for me! Have you sung Paloma for Mr. Langbourne, Barbara?”

“No,” said Barbara, “we hadn’t got round to it, quite.”

“Oh, do!” Langbourne entreated, and he wondered that he had not asked her before; it would have saved them from each ether.

“Wait a moment,” cried Juliet Bingham, and she gulped the last draught of her lemonade upon a final morsel of sponge-cake, and was down at the piano while still dusting the crumbs from her fingers. She struck the refractory sheet of music flat upon the rack with her palm, and then tilted her head over her shoulder towards Langbourne, who had risen with some vague notion of turning the sheets of the song. “Do you sing?”

“Oh, no. But I like—”

“Are you ready, Bab?” she asked, ignoring him; and she dashed into the accompaniment.

He sat down in his chair behind the two girls, where they could not see his face.

Barbara began rather weakly, but her voice gathered strength, and then poured full volume to the end, where it weakened again. He knew that she was taking refuge from him in the song, and in the magic of her voice he escaped from the disappointment he had been suffering. He let his head drop and his eyelids fall, and in the rapture of her singing he got back what he had lost; or rather, he lost himself again to the illusion which had grown so precious to him.

Juliet Bingham sounded the last note almost as she rose from the piano; Barbara passed her handkerchief over her forehead, as if to wipe the heat from it, but he believed that this was a ruse to dry her eyes in it: they shone with a moist brightness in the glimpse he caught of them. He had risen, and they all stood talking; or they all stood, and Juliet talked. She did not offer to sit down again, and after stiffly thanking them both, he said he must be going, and took leave of them. Juliet gave his hand a nervous grip; Barbara’s touch was lax and cold; the parting with her was painful; he believed that she felt it so as much as he.

The girls’ voices followed him down the walk, — Juliet’s treble, and Barbara’s contralto, — and he believed that they were making talk purposely against a pressure of silence, and did not know what they were saying. It occurred to him that they had not asked how long he was staying, or invited him to come again: he had not thought to ask if he might; and in the intolerable inconclusiveness of this ending he faltered at the gate till the lights in the windows of the parlor disappeared, as if carried into the hall, and then they twinkled into darkness. From an upper entry window, which reddened with a momentary flush and was then darkened, a burst of mingled laughter came. The girls must have thought him beyond hearing, and he fancied the laugh a burst of hysterical feeling in them both.

IX.

Langbourne went to bed as soon as he reached his hotel because he found himself spent with the experience of the evening; but as he rested from his fatigue he grew wakeful, and he tried to get its whole measure and meaning before him. He had a methodical nature, with a necessity for order in his motions, and he now balanced one fact against another none the less passionately because the process was a series of careful recognitions. He perceived that the dream in which he had lived for the year past was not wholly an illusion. One of the girls whom he had heard but not seen was what he had divined her to be: a dominant influence, a control to which the other was passively obedient. He had not erred greatly as to the face or figure of the superior, but he had given all the advantages to the wrong person. The voice, indeed, the spell which had bound him, belonged with the one to whom he had attributed it, and the qualities with which it was inextricably blended in his fancy were hers; she was more like his ideal than the other, though he owned that the other was a charming girl too, and that in the thin treble of her voice lurked a potential fascination which might have made itself ascendently felt if he had happened to feel it first.

There was a dangerous instant in which he had a perverse question of changing his allegiance. This passed into another moment, almost as perilous, of confusion through a primal instinct of the man’s by which he yields a double or a divided allegiance and simultaneously worships at two shrines; in still another breath he was aware that this was madness.

If he had been younger, he would have had no doubt as to his right in the circumstances. He had simply corresponded all winter with Miss Simpson; but though he had opened his heart freely and had invited her to the same confidence with him, he had not committed himself, and he had a right to drop the whole affair. She would have no right to complain; she had not committed herself either: they could both come off unscathed. But he was now thirty-five, and life had taught him something concerning the rights of others which he could not ignore. By seeking her confidence and by offering her his, he had given her a claim which was none the less binding because it was wholly tacit. There had been a time when he might have justified himself in dropping the affair; that was when she had failed to answer his letter; but he had come to see her in defiance of her silence, and now he could not withdraw, simply because he was disappointed, without cruelty, without atrocity.

This was what the girl’s wistful eyes said to him; this was the reproach of her trembling lips; this was the accusation of her dejected figure, as she drooped in vision before him on the piano-stool and passed her hand soundlessly over the key-board. He tried to own to her that he was disappointed, but he could not get the words out of his throat; and now in her presence, as it were, he was not sure that he was disappointed.

X.

He woke late, with a longing to put his two senses of her to the proof of day; and as early in the forenoon as he could hope to see her, he walked out towards her aunt’s house. It was a mild, dull morning, with a misted sunshine; in the little crimson tassels of the budded maples overhead the bees were droning.

The street was straight, and while he was yet a good way off he saw the gate open before the house, and a girl whom he recognized as Miss Bingham close it behind her. She then came down under the maples towards him, at first swiftly, and then more and more slowly, until finally she faltered to a stop. He quickened his own pace and came up to her with a “Good-morning” called to her and a lift of his hat. She returned neither salutation, and said, “I was coming to see you, Mr. Langbourne.” Her voice was still a silver bell, but it was not gay, and her face was severely unsmiling.

“To see me?” he returned. “Has anything—”

“No, there’s nothing the matter. But — I should like to talk with you.” She held a little packet, tied with blue ribbon, in her intertwined hands, and she looked urgently at him.

“I shall be very glad,” Langbourne began, but she interrupted, —

“Should you mind walking down to the Falls?”

He understood that for some reason she did not wish him to pass the house, and he bowed. “Wherever you like. I hope Mrs. Simpson is well? And Miss Simpson?”

“Oh, perfectly,” said Miss Bingham, and they fenced with some questions and answers of no interest till they had walked back through the village to the Falls at the other end of it, where the saw in a mill was whirring through a long pine log, and the water, streaked with sawdust, was spreading over the rocks below and flowing away with a smooth swiftness. The ground near the mill was piled with fresh-sawed, fragrant lumber and strewn with logs.

Miss Bingham found a comfortable place on one of the logs, and began abruptly:

“You may think it’s pretty strange, Mr. Langbourne, but I want to talk with you about Miss Simpson.” She seemed to satisfy a duty to convention by saying Miss Simpson at the outset, and after that she called her friend Barbara. “I’ve brought you your letters to her,” and she handed him the packet she had been holding. “Have you got hers with you?”

“They are at the hotel,” answered Langbourne.

“Well, that’s right, then. I thought perhaps you had brought them. You see,” Miss Bingham continued, much more cold-bloodedly than Langbourne thought she need, “we talked it over last night, and it’s too silly. That’s the way Barbara feels herself. The fact is,” she went on confidingly, and with the air of saying something that he would appreciate, “I always thought it was some young man, and so did Barbara; or I don’t believe she would ever have answered your first letter.”

Langbourne knew that he was not a young man in a young girl’s sense; but no man likes to have it said that he is old. Besides, Miss Bingham herself was not apparently in her first quarter of a century, and probably Miss Simpson would not see the earliest twenties again. He thought none the worse of her for that; but he felt that he was not so unequally matched in time with her that she need take the attitude with regard to him which Miss Bingham indicated. He was not the least gray nor the least bald, and his tall figure had kept its youthful lines.

Perhaps his face manifested something of his suppressed resentment. At any rate, Miss Bingham said apologetically, “I mean that if we had known it was a serious person we should have acted differently. I oughtn’t to have let her thank you for those seedsman’s catalogues; but I thought it couldn’t do any harm. And then, after your letters began to come, we didn’t know just when to stop them. To tell you the truth, Mr. Langbourne, we got so interested we couldn’t bear to stop them. You wrote so much about your life in New York, that it was like a visit there every week; and it’s pretty quiet at Upper Ashton in the winter time.”

She seemed to refer this fact to Langbourne for sympathetic appreciation; he said mechanically, “Yes.”

She resumed: “But when your picture came, I said it had got to stop; and so we just sent back my picture, — or I don’t know but what Barbara did it without asking me, — and we did suppose that would be the last of it; when you wrote back you were coming here, we didn’t believe you really would unless we said so. That’s all there is about it; and if there is anybody to blame, I am the one. Barbara would never have done it in the world if I hadn’t put her up to it.”

In those words the implication that Miss Bingham had operated the whole affair finally unfolded itself. But distasteful as the fact was to Langbourne, and wounding as was the realization that he had been led on by this witness of his infatuation for the sake of the entertainment which his letters gave two girls in the dull winter of a mountain village, there was still greater pain, with an additional embarrassment, in the regret which the words conveyed. It appeared that it was not he who had done the wrong; he had suffered it, and so far from having to offer reparation to a young girl for having unwarrantably wrought her up expect of him a step from which he afterwards recoiled, he had the duty of forgiving her a trespass on his own invaded sensibilities. It was humiliating to his vanity; it inflicted a hurt to something better than his vanity. He began very uncomfortably: “It’s all right, as far as I’m concerned. I had no business to address Miss Simpson in the first place—”

“Well,” Miss Bingham interrupted, “that’s what I told Barbara; but she got to feeling badly about it; she thought if you had taken the trouble to send back the circular that she dropped in the hotel, she couldn’t do less than acknowledge it, and she kept on so about it that I had to let her. That was the first false step.”

These words, while they showed Miss Simpson in a more amiable light, did not enable Langbourne to see Miss Bingham’s merit so clearly. In the methodical and consecutive working of his emotions, he was aware that it was no longer a question of divided allegiance, and that there could never be any such question again. He perceived that Miss Bingham had not such a good figure as he had fancied the night before, and that her eyes were set rather too near together. While he dropped his own eyes, and stood trying to think what he should say in answer to her last speech, her high, sweet voice tinkled out in gay challenge, “How do, John?”

He looked up and saw a square-set, brown-faced young man advancing towards them in his shirt-sleeves; he came deliberately, finding his way in and out among the logs, till he stood smiling down, through a heavy mustache and thick black lashes, into the face of the girl, as if she were some sort of joke. The sun struck into her face as she looked up at him, and made her frown with a knot between her brows that pulled her eyes still closer together, and she asked, with no direct reference to his shirt-sleeves,— “A’n’t you forcing the season?”

“Don’t want to let the summer get the start of you,” the young man generalized, and Miss Bingham said, —

“Mr. Langbourne, Mr. Dickery.” The young man silently shook hands with Langbourne, whom he took into the joke of Miss Bingham with another smile; and she went on: “Say, John, I wish you’d tell Jenny I don’t see why we shouldn’t go this afternoon, after all.”

“All right,” said the young man.

“I suppose you’re coming too?” she suggested.

“Hadn’t heard of it,” he returned.

“Well, you have now. You’ve got to be ready at two o’clock.”

“That so?” the young fellow inquired. Then he walked away among the logs, as casually as he had arrived, and Miss Bingham rose and shook some bits of bark from her skirt.

“Mr. Dickery is owner of the mills,” she explained, and she explored Langbourne’s face for an intelligence which she did not seem to find there. He thought, indifferently enough, that this young man had heard the two girls speak of him, and had satisfied a natural curiosity in coming to look him over; it did not occur to him that he had any especial relation to Miss Bingham.

She walked up into the village with Langbourne, and he did not know whether he was to accompany her home or not. But she gave him no sign of dismissal till she put her hand upon her gate to pull it open without asking him to come in. Then he said, “I will send Miss Simpson’s letters to her at once.”

“Oh, any time will do, Mr. Langbourne,” she returned sweetly. Then, as if it had just occurred to her, she added, “We’re going after May-flowers this afternoon. Wouldn’t you like to come too?”

“I don’t know,” he began, “whether I shall have the time—”

“Why, you’re not going away to-day!”

“I expected — I — But if you don’t think I shall be intruding—”

“Why, I should be delighted to have you. Mr. Dickery’s going, and Jenny Dickery, and Barbara. I don’t believe it will rain.”

“Then, if I may,” said Langbourne.

“Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne!” she cried, and he started away. But he had gone only a few rods when he wheeled about and hurried back. The girl was going up the walk to the house, looking over her shoulder after him; at his hurried return she stopped and came down to the gate again.

“Miss Bingham, I think — I think I had better not go.”

“Why, just as you feel about it, Mr. Langbourne,” she assented.

“I will bring the letters this evening, if you will let me — if Miss Simpson — if you will be at home.”

“We shall be very happy to see you, Mr. Langbourne,” said the girl formally, and then he went back to his hotel.

XI.

Langbourne could not have told just why he had withdrawn his acceptance of Miss Bingham’s invitation. If at the moment it was the effect of a quite reasonless panic, he decided later that it was because he wished to think. It could not be said, however, that he did think, unless thinking consists of a series of dramatic representations which the mind makes to itself from a given impulse, and which it is quite powerless to end. All the afternoon, which Langbourne spent in his room, his mind was the theatre of scenes with Miss Simpson, in which he perpetually evolved the motives governing him from the beginning, and triumphed out of his difficulties and embarrassments. Her voice, as it acquiesced in all, no longer related itself to that imaginary personality which had inhabited his fancy. That was gone irrevocably; and the voice belonged to the likeness of Barbara, and no other; from her similitude, little, quaint, with her hair of cloudy red and her large, dim-sighted eyes, it played upon the spiritual sense within him with the coaxing, drolling, mocking charm which he had felt from the first. It blessed him with intelligent and joyous forgiveness. But as he stood at her gate that evening this unmerited felicity fell from him. He now really heard her voice, through the open doorway, but perhaps because it was mixed with other voices — the treble of Miss Bingham, and the bass of a man who must be the Mr. Dickery he had seen at the saw mills — he turned and hurried back to his hotel, where he wrote a short letter saying that he had decided to take the express for New York that night. With an instinctive recognition of her authority in the affair, or with a cowardly shrinking from direct dealing with Barbara, he wrote to Juliet Bingham, and he addressed to her the packet of letters which he sent for Barbara. Superficially, he had done what he had no choice but to do. He had been asked to return her letters, and he had returned them, and brought the affair to an end.

In his long ride to the city he assured himself in vain that he was doing right if he was not sure of his feelings towards the girl. It was quite because he was not sure of his feeling that he could not be sure he was not acting falsely and cruelly.

The fear grew upon him through the summer, which he spent in the heat and stress of the town. In his work he could forget a little the despair in which he lived; but in a double consciousness like that of the hypochondriac, the girl whom it seemed to him he had deserted was visibly and audibly present with him. Her voice was always in his inner ear, and it visualized her looks and movements to his inner eye.

Now he saw and understood at last that what his heart had more than once misgiven him might be the truth, and that though she had sent back his letters, and asked her own in return, it was not necessarily her wish that he should obey her request. It might very well have been an experiment of his feeling towards her, a mute quest of the impression she had made upon him, a test of his will and purpose, an overture to a clearer and truer understanding between them. This misgiving became a conviction from which he could not escape.

He believed too late that he had made a mistake, that he had thrown away the supreme chance of his life. But was it too late? When he could bear it no longer, he began to deny that it was too late. He denied it even to the pathetic presence which haunted him, and in which the magic of her voice itself was merged at last, so that he saw her more than he heard her. He overbore her weak will with his stronger will, and set himself strenuously to protest to her real presence what he now always said to her phantom. When his partner came back from his vacation, Langbourne told him that he was going to take a day or two off.

XII.

He arrived at Upper Ashton Falls long enough before the early autumnal dusk to note that the crimson buds of the maples were now their crimson leaves, but he kept as close to the past as he could by not going to find Barbara before the hour of the evening when he had turned from her gate without daring to see her. It was a soft October evening now, as it was a soft May evening then; and there was a mystical hint of unity in the like feel of the dull, mild air. Again voices were coming out of the open doors and windows of the house, and they were the same voices that he had last heard there.

He knocked, and after a moment of startled hush within Juliet Bingham came to the door. “Why, Mr. Langbourne!” she screamed.

“I — I should like to come in, if you will let me,” he gasped out.

“Why, certainly, Mr. Langbourne,” she returned.

He had not dwelt so long and so intently on the meeting at hand without considering how he should account for his coming, and he had formulated a confession of his motives. But he had never meant to make it to Juliet Bingham, and he now found himself unable to allege a word in explanation of his presence. He followed her into the parlor. Barbara silently gave him her hand and then remained passive in the background, where Dickery held aloof, smiling in what seemed his perpetual enjoyment of the Juliet Bingham joke. She at once put herself in authority over the situation; she made Langbourne let her have his hat; she seated him when and where she chose; she removed and put back the lampshades; she pulled up and pulled down the window-blinds; she shut the outer door because of the night air, and opened it because of the unseasonable warmth within. She excused Mrs. Simpson’s absence on account of a headache, and asked him if he would not have a fan; when he refused it she made him take it, and while he sat helplessly dangling it from his hand, she asked him about the summer he had had, and whether he had passed it in New York. She was very intelligent about the heat in New York, and tactful in keeping the one-sided talk from falling. Barbara said nothing after a few faint attempts to take part in it, and Langbourne made briefer and briefer answers. His reticence seemed only to heighten Juliet Bingham’s satisfaction, and she said, with a final supremacy, that she had been intending to go out with Mr. Dickery to a business meeting of the book-club, but they would be back before Langbourne could get away; she made him promise to wait for them. He did not know if Barbara looked any protest, — at least she spoke none, — and Juliet went out with Dickery. She turned at the door to bid Barbara say, if any one called, that she was at the book-club meeting. Then she disappeared, but reappeared and called, “See here, a minute, Bab!” and at the outer threshold she detained Barbara in vivid whisper, ending aloud, “Now you be sure to do both, Bab! Aunt Elmira will tell you where the things are.” Again she vanished, and was gone long enough to have reached the gate and come back from it. She was renewing all her whispered and out-spoken charges when Dickery showed himself at her side, put his hand under her elbow, and wheeled her about, and while she called gayly over her shoulder to the others, “Did you ever?” walked her definitively out of the house.

Langbourne did not suffer the silence which followed her going to possess him. What he had to do he must do quickly, and he said, “Miss Simpson, may I ask you one question?”

“Why, if you won’t expect me to answer it,” she suggested quaintly.

“You must do as you please about that. It has to come before I try to excuse myself for being here; it’s the only excuse I can offer. It’s this: Did you send Miss Bingham to get back your letters from me last spring?”

“Why, of course!”

“I mean, was it your idea?”

“We thought it would be better.”

The evasion satisfied Langbourne, but he asked, “Had I given you some cause to distrust me at that time?”

“Oh, no,” she protested. “We got to talking it over, and — and we thought we had better.”

“Because I had come here without being asked?”

“No, no; it wasn’t that,” the girl protested.

“I know I oughtn’t to have come. I know I oughtn’t to have written to you in the beginning, but you had let me write, and I thought you would let me come. I tried always to be sincere with you; to make you feel that you could trust me. I believe that I am an honest man; I thought I was a better man for having known you through your letters. I couldn’t tell you how much they had been to me. You seemed to think, because I lived in a large place, that I had a great many friends; but I have very few; I might say I hadn’t any — such as I thought I had when I was writing to you. Most of the men I know belong to some sort of clubs; but I don’t. I went to New York when I was feeling alone in the world, — it was from something that had happened to me partly through my own fault, — and I’ve never got over being alone there. I’ve never gone into society; I don’t know what society is, and I suppose that’s why I am acting differently from a society man now. The only change I ever had from business was reading at night: I’ve got a pretty good library. After I began to get your letters, I went out more — to the theatre, and lectures, and concerts, and all sorts of things — so that I could have something interesting to write about; I thought you’d get tired of always hearing about me. And your letters filled up my life, so that I didn’t seem alone any more. I read them all hundreds of times; I should have said that I knew them by heart, if they had not been as fresh at last as they were at first. I seemed to hear you talking in them.” He stopped as if withholding himself from what he had nearly said without intending, and resumed: “It’s some comfort to know that you didn’t want them back because you doubted me, or my good faith.”

“Oh, no, indeed, Mr. Langbourne,” said Barbara compassionately.

“Then why did you?”

“I don’t know. We—”

“No; not ‘we.’ You!”

She did not answer for so long that he believed she resented his speaking so peremptorily and was not going to answer him at all. At last she said, “I thought you would rather give them back.” She turned and looked at him, with the eyes which he knew saw his face dimly, but saw his thought clearly.

“What made you think that?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Didn’t you want to?”

He knew that the fact which their words veiled was now the first thing in their mutual consciousness. He spoke the truth in saying, “No, I never wanted to,” but this was only a mechanical truth, and he knew it. He had an impulse to put the burden of the situation on her, and press her to say why she thought he wished to do so; but his next emotion was shame for this impulse. A thousand times, in these reveries in which he had imagined meeting her, he had told her first of all how he had overheard her talking in the room next his own in the hotel, and of the power her voice had instantly and lastingly had upon him. But now, with a sense spiritualized by her presence, he perceived that this, if it was not unworthy, was secondary, and that the right to say it was not yet established. There was something that must come before this, — something that could alone justify him in any further step. If she could answer him first as he wished, then he might open his whole heart to her, at whatever cost; he was not greatly to blame, if he did not realize that the cost could not be wholly his, as he asked, remotely enough from her question, “After I wrote that I was coming up here, and you did not answer me, did you think I was coming?”

She did not answer, and he felt that he had been seeking a mean advantage. He went on: “If you didn’t expect it, if you never thought that I was coming, there’s no need for me to tell you anything else.”

Her face turned towards him a very little, but not so much as even to get a sidelong glimpse of him; it was as if it were drawn by a magnetic attraction; and she said, “I didn’t know but you would come.”

“Then I will tell you why I came — the only thing that gave me the right to come against your will, if it was against it. I came to ask you to marry me. Will you?”

She now turned and looked fully at him, though he was aware of being a mere blur in her near-sighted vision.

“Do you mean to ask it now?”

“Yes.”

“And have you wished to ask it ever since you first saw me?”

He tried to say that he had, but he could not; he could only say, “I wish to ask it now more than ever.”

She shook her head slowly. “I’m not sure how you want me to answer you.”

“Not sure?”

“No. I’m afraid I might disappoint you again.”

He could not make out whether she was laughing at him. He sat, not knowing what to say, and he blurted out, “Do you mean that you won’t?”

“I shouldn’t want you to make another mistake.”

“I don’t know what you” — he was going to say “mean,” but he substituted— “wish. If you wish for more time, I can wait as long as you choose.”

“No, I might wish for time, if there was anything more. But if there’s nothing else you have to tell me — then, no, I cannot marry you.”

Langbourne rose, feeling justly punished, somehow, but bewildered as much as humbled, and stood stupidly unable to go. “I don’t know what you could expect me to say after you’ve refused me—”

“Oh, I don’t expect anything.”

“But there is something I should like to tell you. I know that I behaved that night as if — as if I hadn’t come to ask you — what I have; I don’t blame you for not trusting me now. But it is no use to tell you what I intended if it is all over.”

He looked down into his hat, and she said in a low voice, “I think I ought to know. Won’t you — sit down?”

He sat down again. “Then I will tell you at the risk of — But there’s nothing left to lose! You know how it is, when we think about a person or a place before we’ve seen them: we make some sort of picture of them, and expect them to be like it. I don’t know how to say it; you do look more like what I thought than you did at first. I suppose I must seem a fool to say it; but I thought you were tall, and that you were — well! — rather masterful—”

“Like Juliet Bingham?” she suggested, with a gleam in the eye next him.

“Yes, like Juliet Bingham. It was your voice made me think — it was your voice that first made me want to see you, that made me write to you, in the beginning. I heard you talking that night in the hotel, where you left that circular; you were in the room next to mine; and I wanted to come right up here then; but I had to go back to New York, and so I wrote to you. When your letters came, I always seemed to hear you speaking in them.”

“And when you saw me you were disappointed. I knew it.”

“No; not disappointed—”

“Why not? My voice didn’t go with my looks; it belonged to a tall, strong-willed girl.”

“No,” he protested. “As soon as I got away it was just as it always had been. I mean that your voice and your looks went together again.”

“As soon as you got away?” the girl questioned.

“I mean — What do you care for it, anyway!” he cried, in self-scornful exasperation.

“I know,” she said thoughtfully, “that my voice isn’t like me; I’m not good enough for it. It ought to be Juliet Bingham’s—”

“No, no!” he interrupted, with a sort of disgust that seemed not to displease her, “I can’t imagine it!”

“But we can’t any of us have everything, and she’s got enough as it is. She’s a head higher than I am, and she wants to have her way ten times as bad.”

“I didn’t mean that,” Langbourne began. “I — but you must think me enough of a simpleton already.”

“Oh, no, not near,” she declared. “I’m a good deal of a simpleton myself at times.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said desperately; “I love you.”

“Ah, that belongs to the time when you thought I looked differently.”

“I don’t want you to look differently. I—”

“You can’t expect me to believe that now. It will take time for me to do that.”

“I will give you time,” he said, so simply that she smiled.

“If it was my voice you cared for I should have to live up to it, somehow, before you cared for me. I’m not certain that I ever could. And if I couldn’t? You see, don’t you?”

“I see that I was a fool to tell you what I have,” he so far asserted himself. “But I thought I ought to be honest.”

“Oh, you’ve been honest!” she said.

“You have a right to think that I am a flighty, romantic person,” he resumed, “and I don’t blame you. But if I could explain, it has been a very real experience to me. It was your nature that I cared for in your voice. I can’t tell you just how it was; it seemed to me that unless I could hear it again, and always, my life would not be worth much. This was something deeper and better than I could make you understand. It wasn’t merely a fancy; I do not want you to believe that.”

“I don’t know whether fancies are such very bad things. I’ve had some of my own,” Barbara suggested.

He sat still with his hat between his hands, as if he could not find a chance of dismissing himself, and she remained looking down at her skirt where it tented itself over the toe of her shoe. The tall clock in the hall ticked second after second. It counted thirty of them at least before he spoke, after a preliminary noise in his throat.

“There is one thing I should like to ask: If you had cared for me, would you have been offended at my having thought you looked differently?”

She took time to consider this. “I might have been vexed, or hurt, I suppose, but I don’t see how I could really have been offended.”

“Then I understand,” he began, in one of his inductive emotions; but she rose nervously, as if she could not sit still, and went to the piano. The Spanish song he had given her was lying open upon it, and she struck some of the chords absently, and then let her fingers rest on the keys.

“Miss Simpson,” he said, coming stiffly forward, “I should like to hear you sing that song once more before I — Won’t you sing it?”

“Why, yes,” she said, and she slipped laterally into the piano-seat.

At the end of the first stanza he gave a long sigh, and then he was silent to the close.

As she sounded the last notes of the accompaniment Juliet Bingham burst into the room with somehow the effect to Langbourne of having lain in wait outside for that moment.

“Oh, I just knew it!” she shouted, running upon them. “I bet John anything! Oh, I’m so happy it’s come out all right; and now I’m going to have the first—”

She lifted her arms as if to put them round his neck; he stood dazed, and Barbara rose from the piano-stool and confronted her with nothing less than horror in her face.

Juliet Bingham was beginning again, “Why, haven’t you—”

“No!” cried Barbara. “I forgot all about what you said! I just happened to sing it because he asked me,” and she ran from the room.

“Well, if I ever!” said Juliet Bingham, following her with astonished eyes. Then she turned to Langbourne. “It’s perfectly ridiculous, and I don’t see how I can ever explain it. I don’t think Barbara has shown a great deal of tact,” and Juliet Bingham was evidently prepared to make up the defect by a diplomacy which she enjoyed. “I don’t know where to begin exactly; but you must certainly excuse my — manner, when I came in.”

“Oh, certainly,” said Langbourne in polite mystification.

“It was all through a misunderstanding that I don’t think I was to blame for, to say the least; but I can’t explain it without making Barbara appear perfectly — Mr. Langbourne, will you tell whether you are engaged?”

“No! Miss Simpson has declined my offer,” he answered.

“Oh, then it’s all right,” said Juliet Bingham, but Langbourne looked as if he did not see why she should say that. “Then I can understand; I see the whole thing now; and I didn’t want to make another mistake. Ah — won’t you — sit down?”

“Thank you. I believe I will go.”

“But you have a right to know—”

“Would my knowing alter the main facts?” he asked dryly.

“Well, no, I can’t say it would,” Juliet Bingham replied with an air of candor. “And, as you say, perhaps it’s just as well,” she added with an air of relief.

Langbourne had not said it, but he acquiesced with a faint sigh, and absently took the hand of farewell which Juliet Bingham gave him. “I know Barbara will be very sorry not to see you; but I guess it’s better.”

In spite of the supremacy which the turn of affairs had given her, Juliet Bingham looked far from satisfied, and she let Langbourne go with a sense of inconclusiveness which showed in the parting inclination towards him; she kept the effect of this after he turned from her.

He crept light-headedly down the brick walk with a feeling that the darkness was not half thick enough, though it was so thick that it hid from him a figure that leaned upon the gate and held it shut, as if forcibly to interrupt his going.

“Mr. Langbourne,” said the voice of this figure, which, though so unnaturally strained, he knew for Barbara’s voice, “you have got to know! I’m ashamed to tell you, but I should be more ashamed not to, after what’s happened. Juliet made me promise when she went out to the book-club meeting that if I — if you — if it turned out as you wanted, I would sing that song as a sign — It was just a joke — like my sending her picture. It was my mistake and I am sorry, and I beg your pardon — I—”

She stopped with a quick catch in her breath, and the darkness round them seemed to become luminous with the light of hope that broke upon him within.

“But if there really was no mistake,” he began. He could not get further.

She did not answer, and for the first time her silence was sweeter than her voice. He lifted her tip-toe in his embrace, but he did not wish her taller; her yielding spirit lost itself in his own, and he did not regret the absence of the strong will which he had once imagined hers.

A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.

I.

The sunset struck its hard red light through the fringe of leafless trees to the westward, and gave their outlines that black definition which a French school of landscape saw a few years ago, and now seems to see no longer. In the whole scene there was the pathetic repose which we feel in some dying day of the dying year, and a sort of impersonal melancholy weighed me down as I dragged myself through the woods toward that dreary November sunset.

Presently I came in sight of the place I was seeking, and partly because of the insensate pleasure of having found it, and partly because of the cheerful opening in the boscage made by the pool, which cleared its space to the sky, my heart lifted. I perceived that it was not so late as I had thought, and that there was much more of the day left than I had supposed from the crimson glare in the west. I threw myself down on one of the grassy gradines of the amphitheatre, and comforted myself with the antiquity of the work, which was so great as to involve its origin in a somewhat impassioned question among the local authorities. Whether it was a Norse work, a temple for the celebration of the earliest Christian, or the latest heathen, rites among the first discoverers of New England, or whether it was a cockpit where the English officers who were billeted in the old tavern near by fought their mains at the time of our Revolution, it had the charm of a ruin, and appealed to the fancy with whatever potency belongs to the mouldering monuments of the past. The hands that shaped it were all dust, and there was no record of the minds that willed it to prove that it was a hundred, or that it was a thousand, years old. There were young oaks and pines growing up to the border of the amphitheatre on all sides; blackberry vines and sumach bushes overran the gradines almost to the margin of the pool which filled the centre; at the edge of the water some clumps of willow and white birch leaned outward as if to mirror their tracery in its steely surface. But of the life that the thing inarticulately recorded, there was not the slightest impulse left.

I began to think how everything ends at last. Love ends, sorrow ends, and to our mortal sense everything that is mortal ends, whether that which is spiritual has a perpetual effect beyond these eyes or not. The very name of things passes with the things themselves, and

“Glory is like a circle in the water, Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself, Till by broad spreading, it disperse to naught.”

But if fame ended, did not infamy end, too? If glory, why not shame? What was it, I mused, that made an evil deed so much more memorable than a good one? Why should a crime have so much longer lodgment in our minds, and be of consequences so much more lasting than the sort of action which is the opposite of a crime, but has no precise name with us? Was it because the want of positive quality which left it nameless, characterized its effects with a kind of essential debility? Was evil then a greater force than good in the moral world? I tried to recall personalities, virtuous and vicious, and I found a fatal want of distinctness in the return of those I classed as virtuous, and a lurid vividness in those I classed as vicious. Images, knowledges, concepts, zigzagged through my brain, as they do when we are thinking, or believe we are thinking; perhaps there is no such thing as we call thinking, except when we are talking. I did not hold myself responsible in this will-less revery for the question which asked itself, Whether, then, evil and not good was the lasting principle, and whether that which should remain recognizable to all eternity was not the good effect but the evil effect?

Something broke the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses were concerned, actually ceased to be. The want of visible agency in it made me feel it all the more a providential illustration; and because the thing itself was so pretty, and because it was so apt as a case in point, I pleased myself a great deal with it. Suddenly it repeated itself; but this time I grew a little impatient of it, before the circle died out in the wider circle of the pool. I said whimsically to myself that this was rubbing it in; that I was convinced already, and needed no further proof; and at the same moment the thing happened a third time. Then I saw that there was a man standing at the top of the amphitheatre just across from me, who was throwing stones into the water. He cast a fourth pebble into the centre of the pool, and then a fifth and a sixth; I began to wonder what he was throwing at; I thought it too childish for him to be amusing himself with the circle that dispersed itself to naught, after it had done so several times already. I was sure that he saw something in the pool, and was trying to hit it, or frighten it. His figure showed black against the sunset light, and I could not make it out very well, but it held itself something like that of a workman, and yet with a difference, with an effect as of some sort of discipline; and I thought of an ex-recruit, returning to civil life, after serving his five years in the army; though I do not know why I should have gone so far afield for this notion; I certainly had never seen an ex-recruit, and I did not really know how one would look. I rose up, and we both stood still, as if he were abashed in his sport by my presence. The man made a little cast forward with his hand, and I heard the rattle as of pebbles dropped among the dead leaves.

Then he called over to me, “Is that you, Mr. March?”

“Yes,” I called back, “what is wanted?”

“Oh, nothing. I was just looking for you.” He did not move, and after a moment I began to walk round the top of the amphitheatre toward him. When I came near him I saw that he had a clean-shaven face, and he wore a soft hat that seemed large for his close-cropped head; he had on a sack coat buttoned to the throat, and of one dark color with his loose trousers. I knew him now, but I did not know what terms to put my recognition in, and I faltered. “What do you want with me?” I asked, as if I did not know him.

“I was at your house,” he answered, “and they told me that you had walked out this way.” He hesitated a moment, and then he added, rather huskily, “You don’t know me!”

“Yes,” I said. “It is Tedham,” and I held out my hand, with no definite intention, I believe, but merely because I did know him, and this was the usual form of greeting between acquaintances after a long separation, or even a short one, for that matter. But he seemed to find a special significance in my civility, and he took my hand and held it silently, while he was trying to speak. Evidently, he could not, and I said aimlessly, “What were you throwing at?”

“Nothing. I saw you lying down, over there, and I wanted to attract your attention.” He let my hand go, and looked at me apologetically.

“Oh! was that all?” I said. “I thought you saw something in the water.”

“No,” he answered, as if he felt the censure which I had not been able to keep out of my voice.

II.

I do not know why I should have chosen to take this simple fact as proof of an abiding want of straight-forwardness in Tedham’s nature. I do not know why I should have expected him to change, or why I should have felt authorized at that moment to renew his punishment for it. I certainly had said and thought very often that he had been punished enough, and more than enough. In fact, his punishment, like all the other punishments that I have witnessed in life, seemed to me wholly out of proportion to the offence; it seemed monstrous, atrocious, and when I got to talking of it I used to become so warm that my wife would warn me people would think I wanted to do something like Tedham myself if I went on in that way about him. Yet here I was, at my very first encounter with the man, after his long expiation had ended, willing to add at least a little self-reproach to his suffering. I suppose, as nearly as I can analyse my mood, I must have been expecting, in spite of all reason and experience, that his anguish would have wrung that foible out of him, and left him strong where it had found him weak. Tragedy befalls the light and foolish as well as the wise and weighty natures, but it does not render them wise and weighty; I had often made this sage reflection, but I failed to apply it to the case before me now.

After waiting a little for the displeasure to clear away from my face, Tedham smiled as if in humorous appreciation, and I perceived, as nothing else could have shown me so well, that he was still the old Tedham. There was an offer of propitiation in this smile, too, and I did not like that, either; but I was touched when I saw a certain hope die out of his eye at the failure of his appeal to me.

“Who told you I was here?” I asked, more kindly. “Did you see Mrs. March?”

“No, I think it must have been your children. I found them in front of your house, and I asked them for you, without going to the door.”

“Oh,” I said, and I hid the disappointment I felt that he had not seen my wife; for I should have liked such a leading as her behavior toward him would have given me for my own. I was sure she would have known him at once, and would not have told him where to find me, if she had not wished me to be friendly with him.

“I am glad to see you,” I said, in the absence of this leading; and then I did not know what else to say. Tedham seemed to me to be looking very well, but I could not notify this fact to him, in the circumstances; he even looked very handsome; he had aged becomingly, and a clean-shaven face suited him as well as the full beard he used to wear; but I could speak of these things as little as of his apparent health. I did not feel that I ought even to ask him what I could do for him. I did not want to have anything to do with him, and, besides, I have always regarded this formula as tantamount to saying that you cannot, or will not, do anything for the man you employ it upon.

The silence which ensued was awkward, but it was better than anything I could think of to say, and Tedham himself seemed to feel it so. He said, presently, “Thank you. I was sure you would not take my coming to you the wrong way. In fact I had no one else to come to — after I — —” Tedham stopped, and then, “I don’t know,” he went on, “whether you’ve kept run of me; I don’t suppose you have; I got out to-day at noon.”

I could not say anything to that, either; there were very few openings for me, it appeared, in the conversation, which remained one-sided as before.

“I went to the cemetery,” he continued. “I wanted to realize that those who had died were dead, it was all one thing as long as I was in there; everybody was dead; and then I came on to your house.”

The house he meant was a place I had taken for the summer a little out of town, so that I could run in to business every day, and yet have my mornings and evenings in the country; the fall had been so mild that we were still eking out the summer there.

“How did you know where I was staying?” I asked, with a willingness to make any occasion serve for saying something.

Tedham hesitated. “Well, I stopped at the office in Boston on my way out, and inquired. I was sure nobody would know me there.” He said this apologetically, as if he had been taking a liberty, and explained: “I wanted to see you very much, and I was afraid that if I let the day go by I should miss you somehow.”

“Oh, all right,” I said.

We had remained standing at the point where I had gone round to meet him, and it seemed, in the awkward silence that now followed, as if I were rooted there. I would very willingly have said something leading, for my own sake, if not for his, but I had nothing in mind but that I had better keep there, and so I waited for him to speak. I believed he was beating about the bush in his own thoughts, to find some indirect or sinuous way of getting at what he wanted to know, and that it was only because he failed that he asked bluntly, “March, do you know where my daughter is?”

“No, Tedham, I don’t,” I said, and I was glad that I could say it both with honesty and with compassion. I was truly sorry for the man; in a way, I did pity him; at the same time I did not wish to be mixed up in his affairs; in washing my hands of them, I preferred that there should be no stain of falsehood left on them.

“Where is my sister-in-law?” he asked next, and now at least I could not censure him for indirection.

“I haven’t met her for several years,” I answered. “I couldn’t say from my own knowledge where she was.”

“But you haven’t heard of her leaving Somerville?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Do you ever meet her husband?”

“Yes, sometimes, on the street; but I think not lately; we don’t often meet.”

“The last time you saw her, did she speak of me?”

“I don’t know — I believe — yes. It was a good many years ago.”

“Was she changed toward me at all?”

This was a hard question to answer, but I thought I had better answer it with the exact truth. “No, she seemed to feel just the same as ever about it.”

I do not believe Tedham cared for this, after all, though he made a show of having to collect himself before he went on. “Then you think my daughter is with her?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know anything about it.”

“March,” he urged, “don’t you think I have a right to see my daughter?”

“That’s something I can’t enter into, Tedham.”

“Good God!” said the man. “If you were in my place, wouldn’t you want to see her? You know how fond I used to be of her; and she is all that I have got left in the world.”

I did indeed remember Tedham’s affection for his daughter, whom I remembered as in short frocks when I last saw them together. It was before my own door in town. Tedham had driven up in a smart buggy behind a slim sorrel, and I came out, at a sign he made me through the bow-window with his whip, and saw the little maid on the seat there beside him. They were both very well dressed, though still in mourning for the child’s mother, and the whole turnout was handsomely set up. Tedham was then about thirty-five, and the child looked about nine. The color of her hair was the color of his fine brown beard, which had as yet no trace of gray in it; but the light in her eyes was another light, and her smile, which was of the same shape as his, was of another quality, as she leaned across him and gave me her pretty little gloved hand with a gay laugh. “I should think you would be afraid of such a fiery sorrel dragon as that,” I said, in recognition of the colt’s lifting and twitching with impatience as we talked.

“Oh, I’m not afraid with papa!” she said, and she laughed again as he took her hand in one of his and covered it out of sight.

I recalled, now, looking at him there in the twilight of the woods, how happy they had both seemed that sunny afternoon in the city square, as they flashed away from my door and glanced back at me and smiled together. I went into the house and said to my wife with a formulation of the case which pleased me, “If there is anything in the world that Tedham likes better than to ride after a good horse, it is to ride after a good horse with that little girl of his.” “Yes,” said my wife, “but a good horse means a good deal of money; even when a little girl goes with it.” “That is so,” I assented, “but Tedham has made a lot lately in real estate, they say, and I don’t know what better he could do with his money; or, I don’t believe he does.” We said no more, but we both felt, with the ardor of young parents, that it was a great virtue, a saving virtue, in Tedham to love his little girl so much; I was afterward not always sure that it was. Still, when Tedham appealed to me now in the name of his love for her, he moved my heart, if not my reason, in his favor; those old superstitions persist.

“Why, of course, you want to see her. But I couldn’t tell you where she is.”

“You could find out for me.”

“I don’t see how,” I said; but I did see how, and I knew as well as he what his next approach would be. I felt strong against it, however, and I did not perceive the necessity of being short with him in a matter not involving my own security or comfort.

“I could find out where Hasketh is,” he said, naming the husband of his sister-in-law; “but it would be of no use for me to go there. They wouldn’t see me.” He put this like a question, but I chose to let it be its own answer, and he went on. “There is no one that I can ask to act for me in the matter but you, and I ask you, March, to go to my sister-in-law for me.”

I shook my head. “That I can’t do, Tedham.”

“Ah!” he urged, “what harm could it do you?”

“Look here, Tedham!” I said. “I don’t know why you feel authorized to come to me at all. It is useless your saying that there is no one else. You know very well that the authorities, some of them — the chaplain — would go and see Mrs. Hasketh for you. He could have a great deal more influence with her than any one else could, if he felt like saying a good word for you. As far as I am concerned, you have expiated your offence fully; but I should think you yourself would see that you ought not to come to me with this request; or you ought to come to me last of all men.”

“It is just because of that part of my offence which concerned you that I come to you. I knew how generous you were, and after you told me that you had no resentment — I acknowledge that it is indelicate, if you choose to look at it in that light, but a man like me can’t afford to let delicacy stand in his way. I don’t want to flatter you, or get you to do this thing for me on false pretences. But I thought that if you went to Mrs. Hasketh for me, she would remember that you had overlooked something, and she would be more disposed to — to — be considerate.”

“I can’t do it, Tedham,” I returned. “It would be of no use. Besides, I don’t like the errand. I’m not sure that I have any business to interfere. I am not sure that you have any right to disturb the shape that their lives have settled into. I’m sorry for you, I pity you with all my heart. But there are others to be considered as well as you. And — simply, I can’t.”

“How do you know,” he entreated, “that my daughter wouldn’t be as glad to see me as I to see her?”

“I don’t know it. I don’t know anything about it. That’s the reason I can’t have anything to do with it. I can’t justify myself in meddling with what doesn’t concern me, and in what I’m not sure but I should do more harm than good. I must say good-night. It’s getting late, and they will be anxious about me at home.” My heart smote me as I spoke the last word, which seemed a cruel recognition of Tedham’s homelessness. But I held out my hand to him for parting, and braced myself against my inward weakness.

He might well have failed to see my hand. At any rate he did not take it. He turned and started to walk out of the woods by my side. We came presently to some open fields. Beyond them was the road, and after we had climbed the first wall, and found ourselves in a somewhat lighter place, he began to speak again.

“I thought,” he said, “that if you had forgiven me, I could take it as a sign that I had suffered enough to satisfy everybody.”

“We needn’t dwell upon my share in the matter, Tedham,” I answered, as kindly as I could. “That was entirely my own affair.”

“You can’t think,” he pursued, “how much your letter was to me. It came when I was in perfect despair — in those awful first days when it seemed as if I could not bear it, and yet death itself would be no relief. Oh, they don’t know how much we suffer! If they did, they would forgive us anything, everything! Your letter was the first gleam of hope I had. I don’t know how you came to write it!”

“Why, of course, Tedham, I felt sorry for you—”

“Oh, did you, did you?” He began to cry, and as we hurried along over the fields, he sobbed with the wrenching, rending sobs of a man. “I knew you did, and I believe it was God himself that put it into your heart to write me that letter and take off that much of the blame from me. I said to myself that if I ever lived through it, I would try to tell you how much you had done for me. I don’t blame you for refusing to do what I’ve asked you now. I can see how you may think it isn’t best, and I thank you all the same for that letter. I’ve got it here.” He took a letter out of his breast-pocket, and showed it to me. “It isn’t the first time I’ve cried over it.”

I did not say anything, for my heart was in my throat, and we stumbled along in silence till we climbed the last wall, and stood on the sidewalk that skirted the suburban highway. There, under the street-lamp, we stopped a moment, and it was he who now offered me his hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, “Well, good-by,” and moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back, and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. “Tedham!” I called after him.

“Well?” he answered, and he halted instantly; he had evidently known what I would do as well as I had.

We reapproached each other, and when we were again under the lamp I asked, a little awkwardly, “Are you in need of money, Tedham?”

“I’ve got my ten years’ wages with me,” he said, with a lightness that must have come from his reviving hope in me. He drew his hand out of his pocket, and showed me the few dollars with which the State inhumanly turns society’s outcasts back into the world again.

“Oh, that won’t do.” I said. “You must let me lend you something.”

“Thank you,” he said, with perfect simplicity. “But you know I can’t tell when I shall be able to pay you.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” I gave him a ten-dollar note which I had loose in my pocket; it was one that my wife had told me to get changed at the grocery near the station, and I had walked off to the old temple, or the old cockpit, and forgotten about it.

Tedham took the note, but he said, holding it in his hand, “I would a million times rather you would let me go home with you and see Mrs. March a moment.”

“I can’t do that, Tedham,” I answered, not unkindly, I hope. “I know what you mean, and I assure you that it wouldn’t be the least use. It’s because I feel so sure that my wife wouldn’t like my going to see Mrs. Hasketh, that I—”

“Yes, I know that,” said Tedham. “That is the reason why I should like to see Mrs. March. I believe that if I could see her, I could convince her.”

“She wouldn’t see you, my dear fellow,” said I, strangely finding myself on these caressing terms with him. “She entirely approved of what I did, the letter I wrote you, but I don’t believe she will ever feel just as I do about it. Women are different, you know.”

“Yes,” he said, drawing a long, quivering breath.

We stood there, helpless to part. He did not offer to leave me, and I could not find it in my heart to abandon him. After a most painful time, he drew another long breath, and asked, “Would you be willing to let me take the chances?”

“Why, Tedham,” I began, weakly; and upon that he began walking with me again.

III.

I went to my wife’s room, after I reached the house, and faced her with considerable trepidation. I had to begin rather far off, but I certainly began in a way to lead up to the fact. “Isabel,” I said, “Tedham is out at last.” I had it on my tongue to say poor Tedham, but I suppressed the qualification in actual speech as likely to prove unavailing, or worse.

“Is that what kept you!” she demanded, instantly. “Have you seen him?”

“Yes,” I admitted. I added, “Though I am afraid I was rather late, anyway.”

“I knew it was he, the moment you spoke,” she said, rising on the lounge where she had been lying, and sitting up on it; with the book she had been reading shut on her thumb, she faced me across the table where her lamp stood. “I had a presentiment when the children said there was some strange-looking man here, asking for you, and that they had told him where to find you. I couldn’t help feeling a little uneasy about it. What did he want with you, Basil?”

“Well, he wanted to know where his daughter was.”

“You didn’t tell him!”

“I didn’t know. Then he wanted me to go to Mrs. Hasketh and find out.”

“You didn’t say you would?”

“I said most decidedly I wouldn’t,” I returned, and I recalled my severity to Tedham in refusing his prayer with more satisfaction than it had given me at the time. “I told him that I had no business to interfere, and that I was not sure it would be right even for me to meddle with the course things had taken.” I was aware of weakening my case as I went on; I had better left her with a dramatic conception of a downright and relentless refusal.

“I don’t see why you felt called upon to make excuses to him, Basil. His impudence in coming to you, of all men, is perfectly intolerable. I suppose it was that sentimental letter you wrote him.”

“You didn’t think it sentimental at the time, my dear. You approved of it.”

“I didn’t approve of it, Basil; but if you felt so strongly that you ought to do it, I felt that I ought to let you. I have never interfered with your sense of duty, and I never will. But I am glad that you didn’t feel it your duty to that wretch to go and make more trouble on his account. He has made quite enough already; and it wasn’t his fault that you were not tried and convicted in his place.”

“There wasn’t the slightest danger of that—”

“He tried to put the suspicion on you, and to bring the disgrace on your wife and children.”

“Well, my dear, we agreed to forget all that long ago. And I don’t think — I never thought — that Tedham would have let the suspicion rest on me. He merely wanted to give it that turn, when the investigation began, so as to gain time to get out to Canada.”

My wife looked at me with a glance in which I saw tender affection dangerously near contempt. “You are a very forgiving man, Basil,” she said, and I looked down sheepishly. “Well, at any rate, you have had the sense not to mix yourself up in his business. Did he pretend that he came straight to you, as soon as he got out? I suppose he wanted you to believe that he appealed to you before he tried anybody else.”

“Yes, he stopped at the Reciprocity office to ask for my address, and after he had visited the cemetery he came on out here. And, if you must know, I think Tedham is still the old Tedham. Put him behind a good horse, with a pocketful of some one else’s money, in a handsome suit of clothes, and a game-and-fish dinner at Tafft’s in immediate prospect, and you couldn’t see any difference between the Tedham of to-day and the Tedham of ten years ago, except that the actual Tedham is clean-shaved and wears his hair cut rather close.”

“Basil!”

“Why do you object to the fact? Did you imagine he had changed inwardly?”

“He must have suffered.”

“But does suffering change people? I doubt it. Certain material accessories of Tedham’s have changed. But why should that change Tedham? Of course, he has suffered, and he suffers still. He threw out some hints of what he had been through that would have broken my heart if I hadn’t hardened it against him. And he loves his daughter still, and he wants to see her, poor wretch.”

“I suppose he does!” sighed my wife.

“He would hardly take no for an answer from me, when I said I wouldn’t go to the Haskeths for him; and when I fairly shook him off, he wanted me to ask you to go.”

“And what did you say?” she asked, not at all with the resentment I had counted upon equally with the possible pathos; you never can tell in the least how any woman will take anything, which is perhaps the reason why men do not trust women more.

“I told him that it would not be the smallest use to ask you; that you had forgiven that old affair as well as I had, but that women were different, and that I knew you wouldn’t even see him.”

“Well, Basil, I don’t know what right you had to put me in that odious light,” said my wife.

“Why, good heavens! Would you have seen him?”

“I don’t know whether I would or not. That’s neither here nor there. I don’t think it was very nice of you to shift the whole responsibility on me.”

“How did I do that? It seems to me that I kept the whole responsibility myself.”

“Yes, altogether too much. What became of him, then?”

“We walked along a little farther, and then—”

“Then, what? Where is the man?”

“He’s down in the parlor,” I answered hardily, in the voice of some one else.

My wife stood up from the lounge, and I rose, too, for whatever penalty she chose to inflict.

“Well, Basil, that is what I call a very cowardly thing.”

“Yes, my dear, it is; I ought to have protected you against his appeal. But you needn’t see him. It’s practically the same as if he had not come here. I can send him away.”

“And you call that practically the same! No, I am the one that will have to do the refusing now, and it is all off your shoulders. And you knew I was not feeling very well, either! Basil, how could you?”

“I don’t know. The abject creature drove me out of my senses. I suppose that if I had respected him more, or believed in him more, I should have had more strength to refuse him. But his limpness seemed to impart itself to me, and I — I gave way. But really you needn’t see him, Isabel. I can tell him we have talked it over, and I concluded, entirely of myself, that it was best for you not to meet him, and—”

“He would see through that in an instant. And if he is still the false creature you think he is, we owe him the truth, more than any other kind of man. You must understand that, Basil!”

“Then you are going to—”

“Don’t speak to me, Basil, please,” she said, and with an air of high offence she swept out of the room, and out to the landing of the stairs. There she hesitated a moment, and put her hand to her hair, mechanically, to feel if it were in order, and then she went on downstairs without further faltering. It was I who descended slowly, and with many misgivings.

IV.

Tedham was sitting in the chair I had shown him when I brought him in, and in the half-light of one gas-burner in the chandelier he looked, with his rough, clean clothes, and his slouch hat lying in his lap, like some sort of decent workingman; his features, refined by the mental suffering he had undergone, and the pallor of a complexion so seldom exposed to the open air, gave him the effect of a workingman just out of the hospital. His eyes were deep in their sockets, and showed fine shadows in the overhead light, and I must say he looked very interesting.

At the threshold my wife paused again; then she went forward, turning the gas up full as she passed under the chandelier, and gave him her hand, where he had risen from his chair.

“I am glad to see you, Mr. Tedham,” she said; and I should have found my astonishment overpowering, I dare say, if I had not felt that I was so completely in the hands of Providence, when she added, “Won’t you come out to dinner with us? We were just going to sit down, when Mr. March came in. I never know when he will be back, when he starts off on these Saturday afternoon tramps of his.”

The children seemed considerably mystified at the appearance of our guest, but they had that superior interest in the dinner appropriate to their years, and we got through the ordeal, in which, I believe, I suffered more than any one else, much better than I could have hoped. I could not help noting in Tedham a certain strangeness to the use of a four-pronged fork, at first, but he rapidly overcame this; and if it had not been for a terrible moment when, after one of the courses, he began, mechanically, to scrape his plate with his knife, there would not have been anything very odd in his behavior, or anything to show that it was the first dinner in polite society that he had taken for so many years.

The man’s mind had apparently stiffened more than his body. It used to be very agile, if light, but it was not agile now. It worked slowly toward the topics which we found with difficulty, in our necessity of avoiding the only topics of real interest between us, and I could perceive that his original egotism, intensified by the long years in which he had only himself for company, now stood in the way of his entering into the matters brought forward, though he tried to do so. They were mostly in the form of reminiscences of this person and that whom we had known in common, and even in this shape they had to be very carefully handled so as not to develop anything leading. The thing that did most to relieve the embarrassment of the time was the sturdy hunger Tedham showed, and his delight in the cooking; I suppose that I cannot make others feel the pathos I found in this.

After dinner we shut the children into the library, and kept Tedham with us in the parlor.

My wife began at once to say, “Mr. March has told me why you wanted to see me, Mr. Tedham.”

“Yes,” he said, as if he were afraid to say more lest he should injure his cause.

“I think that it would not be the least use for me to go to Mrs. Hasketh. In the first place I do not know her very well, and I have not seen her for years, I am not certain she would see me.”

Tedham turned the hollows of his eyes upon my wife, and asked, huskily, “Won’t you try?”

“Yes,” she answered, most unexpectedly to me, “I will try to see her. But if I do see her, and she refuses to tell me anything about your daughter, what will you do? Of course, I shall have to tell her I come from you, and for you.”

“I thought,” Tedham ventured, with a sort of timorous slyness, “that perhaps you might approach it casually, without any reference to me.”

“No, I couldn’t do that,” my wife said.

He went on as if he had not heard her: “If she did not know that the inquiries were made in my behalf, she might be willing to say whether my daughter was with her.”

There was in this suggestion a quality of Tedham’s old insinuation, but coarser, inferior, as if his insinuation had degenerated into something like mere animal cunning. I felt rather ashamed for him, but to my surprise, my wife seemed only to feel sorry, and did not repel his suggestion in the way I had thought she would.

“No,” she said, “that wouldn’t do. She has kept account of the time, you may be sure, and she would ask me at once if I was inquiring in your behalf, and I should have to tell her the truth.”

“I didn’t know,” he returned, “but you might evade the point, somehow. So much being at stake,” he added, as if explaining.

Still my wife was not severe with him. “I don’t understand, quite,” she said.

“Being the turning-point in my life, I can’t begin to do anything, to be anything, till I have seen my daughter. I don’t know where to find myself. If I could see her, and she did not cast me off, then I should know where I was. Or, if she did, I should. You understand that.”

“But, of course, there is another point of view.”

“My daughter’s?”

“Mrs. Hasketh’s.”

“I don’t care for Mrs. Hasketh. She did what she has done for the child’s sake. It was the best thing for the child at the time — the only thing; I know that. But I agreed to it because I had to.”

He continued: “I consider that I have expiated the wrong I did. There is no sense in the whole thing, if I haven’t. They might as well have let me go in the beginning. Don’t you think that ten years out of my life is enough for a thing that I never intended to go as far as it did, and a thing that I was led into, partly, for the sake of others? I have tried to reason it out, and not from my own point of view at all, and that is the way I feel about it. Is it to go on forever, and am I never to be rid of the consequences of a single act? If you and Mr. March could condone—”

“Oh, you mustn’t reason from us,” my wife broke in. “We are very silly people, and we do not look at a great many things as others do. You have got to reckon with the world at large.”

“I have reckoned with the world at large, and I have paid the reckoning. But why shouldn’t my daughter look at this thing as you do?”

Instead of answering, my wife asked, “When did you hear from her last?”

Tedham took a few thin, worn letters from his breast-pocket “There is Mr. March’s letter,” he said, laying one on his knee. He handed my wife another.

She read it, and asked, “May Mr. March see it?”

Tedham nodded, and I took the little paper in turn. The letter was written in a child’s stiff, awkward hand. It was hardly more than a piteous cry of despairing love. The address was Mrs. Hasketh’s, in Somerville, and the date was about three months after Tedham’s punishment began. “Is that the last you have heard from her?” I asked.

Tedham nodded as he took the letter from me.

“But surely you have heard something more about her in all this time?” my wife pursued.

“Once from Mrs. Hasketh, to make me promise that I would leave the child to her altogether, and not write to her, or ask to see her. When I went to the cemetery to-day, I did not know but I should find her grave, too.”

“Well, it is cruel!” cried my wife. “I will go and see Mrs. Hasketh, but — you ought to feel yourself that it’s hopeless.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “There isn’t much chance unless she should happen to think the same way you do: that I had suffered enough, and that it was time to stop punishing me.”

My wife looked compassionately at him, and she began with a sympathy that I have not always known her to show more deserving people, “If it were a question of that alone it would be very easy. But suppose your daughter were so situated that it would be — disadvantageous to her to have it known that you were her father?”

“You mean that I have no right to mend my broken-up life — what there is left of it — by spoiling hers? I have said that to myself. But then, on the other hand, I have had to ask myself whether I had any right to keep her from choosing for herself about it. I sha’n’t force myself on her. I expect to leave her free. But if the child cares for me, as she used to, hasn’t that love — not mine for her, but hers for me — got some rights too?”

His voice sank almost to a hush, and the last word was scarcely more than a breathing. “All I want is to know where she is, and to let her know that I am in the world, and where she can find me. I think she ought to have a chance to decide.”

“I am afraid Mrs. Hasketh may think it would be better, for her sake, not to have the chance,” my wife sighed, and she turned her look from Tedham upon me, as if she wished me rather than him to answer.

“The only way to find out is to ask her,” I answered, non-committally, and rather more lightly than I felt about it. In fact, the turn the affair had taken interested me greatly. It involved that awful mystery of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of interest and happiness. The parents’ duty to the children is obvious and plain, but the child’s duty to its parents is something subtler and more spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. “Why should we try to shield people from fate? Isn’t that always wrong? One is fated to be born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the consequences of his father’s misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly.”

“Well, don’t try to be that sort of blessing to your children, Basil,” said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.

After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing it.

“I didn’t know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay with us,” I said.

“I did want to,” she replied. “It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well have let him stay as not. Why shouldn’t we have offered him a bed for the night, as we would any other acquaintance?”

“Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!”

“But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why, as he said, shouldn’t we stop punishing him?”

“I suppose we can’t. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal perdition, for hell, in the human heart,” I suggested.

“Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil—”

“Oh, I don’t claim it, exclusively!”

“Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better. How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in — or out.”

“Yes, he affected me like an etching of himself from a wornout plate. Still, I’m afraid there’s likeness enough left to make trouble, yet. I hope you realize what you have gone in for, Isabel?”

She answered from the effort that I could see she was making, to brace herself already for the work before us:

“Well, we must do this because we can’t help doing it, and because, whatever happens, we had no right to refuse. You must come with me, Basil!”

“I? To Mrs. Hasketh’s?”

“Certainly. I will do the talking, but I shall depend upon your moral support. We will go over to Somerville to-morrow afternoon. We had better not lose any time.”

“To-morrow is Sunday.”

“So much the better. They will be sure to be at home, if they’re there at all, yet.”

She said they, but I knew that she did not expect poor old Hasketh really to count in the matter, any more than she expected me to do so.

V.

The Haskeths lived in a house that withdrew itself behind tall garden trees in a large lot sloping down the hillside, in one of the quieter old streets of their suburb. The trees were belted in by a board fence, painted a wornout white, as far as it was solid, which was to the height of one’s shoulder; there it opened into a panel work of sticks crossed X-wise, which wore a coat of aged green; the strip above them was set with a bristling row of rusty nails, which were supposed to keep out people who could perfectly well have gone in at the gate as we did. There was a brick walk from the gate to the door, which was not so far back as I remembered it (perhaps because the leaves were now off the trees), and there was a border of box on either side of the walk. Altogether there was an old-fashioned keeping in the place which I should have rather enjoyed if I had been coming on any other errand; but now it imparted to me a notion of people set in their ways, of something severe, something hopelessly forbidding.

I do not think there had ever been much intimacy between the Tedhams and the Haskeths, before Tedham’s calamity came upon him. But Mrs. Hasketh did not refuse her share of it. She came forward, and probably made her husband come forward, in Tedham’s behalf, and do what hopelessly could be done to defend him where there was really no defence, and the only thing to be attempted was to show circumstances that might perhaps tend to the mitigation of his sentence. I do not think they did. Tedham had confessed himself and had been proven such a thorough rogue, and the company had lately suffered so much through operations like his, that, even if it could have had mercy, as an individual may, mercy was felt to be bad morals, and the case was unrelentingly pushed. His sentence was of those sentences which an eminent jurist once characterized as rather dramatic; it was pronounced not so much in relation to his particular offence, as with the purpose of striking terror into all offenders like him, who were becoming altogether too common. He was made to suffer for many other peculators, who had been, or were about to be, and was given the full penalty. I was in court when it was pronounced with great solemnity by the judge, who read him a lecture in doing so; I could have read the judge another, for I could not help feeling that it was, more than all the sentences I had ever heard pronounced, wholly out of keeping with the offence. I met Hasketh coming out of the court-room, and I said that I thought it was terribly severe. He agreed with me, and as I knew that he and Tedham had never liked each other, I inferred a kindliness in him which made me his friend, in the way one is the friend of a man one never meets. He was a man of few words, and he now simply said, “It was unjust,” and we parted.

For several months after Tedham’s conviction, I did not think we ought to intrude upon the Haskeths; but then my wife and I both felt that we ought, in decency, to make some effort to see them. They seemed pleased, but they made us no formal invitation to come again, and we never did. That day, however, I caught a glimpse of Tedham’s little girl, as she flitted through the hall, after we were seated in the parlor; she was in black, a forlorn little shadow in the shadow; and I recalled now, as we stood once more on the threshold of the rather dreary house, a certain gentleness of bearing in the child, which I found infinitely pathetic, at that early moment of her desolation. She had something of poor Tedham’s own style and grace, too, which had served him so ill, and this heightened the pathos for me. In that figure I had thought of his daughter ever since, as often as I had thought of her at all; which was not very often, to tell the truth, after the first painful impression of Tedham’s affair began to die away in me, or to be effaced by the accumulating cares and concerns of my own life. But now that we had returned into the presence of that bitter sorrow, as it were, the little thing reappeared vividly to me in just the way I had seen her so long ago. My sense of her forlornness, of her most hapless orphanhood, was intensified by the implacable hate with which Mrs. Hasketh had then spoken of her father, in telling us that the child was henceforth to bear her husband’s name, and had resentfully scorned the merit Tedham tried to make of giving her up to them. “And if I can help it,” she had ended, with a fierceness I had never forgotten, “she shall not hear him mentioned again, or see him as long as I live.”

My wife and I now involuntarily dropped our voices, or rather they sank into our throats, as we sat waiting in the dim parlor, after the maid took our cards to Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh. We tried to make talk, but we could not, and we were funereally quiet, when Hasketh came pottering and peering in, and shook hands with both of us. He threw open half a blind at one of the windows, and employed himself in trying to put up the shade, to gain time, as I thought, before he should be obliged to tell us that his wife could not see us. Then he came to me, and asked, “Won’t you let me take your hat?” as such people do, in expression of a vague hospitality; and I let him take it, and put it mouth down on the marble centre-table, beside the large, gilt-edged, black-bound family Bible. He drew a chair near me, in a row with my wife and myself, and said, “It is quite a number of years since we met, Mrs. March,” and he looked across me at her.

“Yes, I am almost afraid to think how many,” she answered.

“Family well?”

“Yes, our children are both very well, Mr. Hasketh. You seem to be looking very well, too.”

“Thank you, I have nothing to complain of. I am not so young as I was. But that is about all.”

“I hope Mrs. Hasketh is well?”

“Yes, thank you, she is quite well, for her. She is never very strong. She will be down in a moment.”

“Oh, I shall be so glad to see her.”

The conversation, which might be said to have flagged from the beginning, stopped altogether at this point, and though I was prompted by several looks from my wife to urge it forward, I could think of nothing to do so with, and we sat without speaking till we heard the stir of skirts on the stairs in the hall outside, and then my wife said, “Ah, that is Mrs. Hasketh.”

I should have known it was Mrs. Hasketh without this sort of anticipation, I think, even if I had never seen her before, she was so like my expectation of what that sort of woman would be in the lapse of time, with her experience of life. The severity that I had seen come and go in her countenance in former days was now so seated that she had no other expression, and I may say without caricature that she gave us a frown of welcome. That is, she made us feel, in spite of a darkened countenance, that she was really willing to see us in her house, and that she took our coming as a sign of amity. I suppose that the induration of her spirit was the condition of her being able to bear at all what had been laid on her to bear, and her burden had certainly not been light.

At her appearance her husband, without really stirring at all, had the effect of withdrawing into the background, where, indeed, I tacitly joined him; and the two ladies remained in charge of the drama, while he and I conversed, as it were, in dumb show. Apart from my sympathy with her in the matter, I was very curious to see how my wife would play her part, which seemed to me far the more difficult of the two, since she must make all the positive movements.

After some civilities so obviously perfunctory that I admired the force of mind in the women who uttered them, my wife said, “Mrs. Hasketh, we have come on an errand that I know will cause you pain, and I needn’t say that we haven’t come willingly.”

“Is it about Mr. Tedham?” asked Mrs. Hasketh, and I remembered now that she had always used as much ceremony in speaking of him; it seemed rather droll now, but still it would not have been in character with her to call him simply Tedham, as we did, in speaking of him.

“Yes,” said my wife. “I don’t know whether you had kept exact account of the time. It was a surprise to us, for we hadn’t. He is out, you know.”

“Yes — at noon, yesterday. I wasn’t likely to forget the day, or the hour, or the minute.” Mrs. Hasketh said this without relaxing the severity of her face at all, and I confess my heart went down.

But my wife seemed not to have lost such courage as she had come with, at least. “He has been to see us—”

“I presumed so,” said Mrs. Hasketh, and as she said nothing more, Mrs. March took the word again.

“I shall have to tell you why he came — why we came. It was something that we did not wish to enter into, and at first my husband refused outright. But when I saw him, and thought it over, I did not see how we could refuse. After all, it is something you must have expected, and that you must have been expecting at once, if you say—”

“I presume,” Mrs. Hasketh said, “that he wished you to ask after his daughter. I can understand why he did not come to us.” She let one of those dreadful silences follow, and again my wife was forced to speak.

“It is something that we didn’t mean to press at all, Mrs. Hasketh, and I won’t say anything more. Only, if you care to send any word to him he will be at our house this evening again, and I will give him your message.” She rose, not in resentment, as I could see (and I knew that she had not come upon this errand without making herself Tedham’s partisan in some measure) but with sincere good feeling and appreciation of Mrs. Hasketh’s position. I rose with her, and Hasketh rose too.

“Oh, don’t go!” Mrs. Hasketh broke out, as if surprised. “You couldn’t help coming, and I don’t blame you at all. I don’t blame Mr. Tedham even. I didn’t suppose I should ever forgive him. But there! that’s all long ago, and the years do change us. They change us all, Mrs. March, and I don’t feel as if I had the right to judge anybody the way I used to judge him. Sometimes it surprises me. I did hate him, and I don’t presume I’ve got very much love for him now, but I don’t want to punish him any more. That’s gone out of me. I don’t know how it came to go, but it went. I wish he hadn’t ever got anything more to do with us, but I’m afraid we haven’t had all our punishment yet, whatever he has. It seems to me as if the sight of Mr. Tedham would make me sick.”

I found such an insufficiency in this statement of feeling that I wanted to laugh, but I perceived that it did not appeal to my wife’s sense of humor. She said, “I can understand how you feel about it, Mrs. Hasketh.”

Mrs. Hasketh seemed grateful for the sympathy. “I presume,” she went on, and I noted how often she used the quaint old-fashioned Yankee word, “that you feel as if you had almost as much right to hate him as I had, and that if you could overlook what he tried to do to you, I might overlook what he did do to his own family. But as I see it, the case is different. He failed when he tried to put the blame on Mr. March, and he succeeded only too well in putting the shame on his own family. You could forgive it, and it would be all the more to your credit because you forgave it, but his family might have forgiven it ten times over, and still they would be in disgrace through him. That is the way I looked at it.”

“And I assure you, Mrs. Hasketh, that is the way I looked at it, too,” said my wife.

“So, when it seems hard that I should have taken his child from him,” the woman continued, as if still arguing her case, and she probably was arguing it with herself, “and did what I could to make her forget him, I think it had better be considered whose sake I was doing it for, and whether I had any right to do different. I did not think I had at the time, or when I had to begin to act. I knew how I felt toward Mr. Tedham; I never liked him; I never wanted my sister to marry him; and when his trouble came, I told Mr. Hasketh that it was no more than I had expected all along. He was that kind of a man, and he was sure to show it, one way or other, sooner or later; and I was not disappointed when he did what he did. I had to guard against my own feeling, and to put myself out of the question, and that was what I tried to do when I got him to give up the child to us and let her take our name. It was the same as a legal adoption, and he freely consented to it, or as freely as he could, considering where he was. But he knew it was for her good as well as we did. There was nobody for her to look to but us, and he knew that; his own family had no means, and, in fact, he had no family but his father and mother, and when they died, that same first year, there was no one left to suffer from him but his child. The question was how much she ought to be allowed to suffer, and whether she should be allowed to suffer at all, if it could be helped. If it was to be prevented, it was to be by deadening her to him, by killing out her affection for him, and much as I hated Mr. Tedham, I could not bring myself to do that, though I used to think I would do it. He was very fond of her, I don’t deny that; I don’t think it was any merit in him to love such a child, but it was the best thing about him, and I was willing it should count. But then there was another thing that I couldn’t bring myself to, and that was to tell the child, up and down, all about it; and I presume that there I was weak. Well, you may say I was weak! But I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t. She was only between seven and eight when it happened—”

“I thought she was older,” I ventured to put in, remembering my impressions as to her age the last time I saw her with her father.

“No,” said Mrs. Hasketh, “she always appeared rather old for her age, and that made me all the more anxious to know just how much of the trouble she had taken in. I suppose it was all a kind of awful mystery to her, as most of our trials are to children; but when her father was taken from her, she seemed to think it was something she mustn’t ask about; there are a good many things in the world that children feel that way about — how they come into it, for one thing, and how they go out of it; and by and by she didn’t speak of it. She had some of his lightness, and I presume that helped her through; I was afraid it did sometimes. Then, at other times, I thought she had got the notion he was in for life, and that was the reason she didn’t speak of him; she had given him up. Then I used to wonder whether it wasn’t my duty to take her to see him — where he was. But when I came to find out that you had to see them through the bars, and with the kind of clothes they wear, I felt that I might as well kill the child at once; it was for her sake I didn’t take her. You may be sure I wasn’t anxious for the responsibility of not doing it either, the way I knew I felt toward Mr. Tedham.”

I did not like her protesting so much as this; but I saw that it was a condition of her being able to deal with herself in the matter, and I had no doubt she was telling the truth.

“You never can know just how much of a thing children have taken in, or how much they have understood,” she continued, repeating herself, as she did throughout, “and I had to keep this in mind when I had my talks with Fay about her father. She wanted to write to him at first, and of course I let her—”

My wife and I could not forbear exchanging a glance of intelligence, which Mrs. Hasketh intercepted.

“I presume he told you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “he showed us the letter.”

“Well, it was something that had to be done. As long as she questioned me about him, I put her off the best way I could, and after a while she seemed to give up questioning me of her own accord. Perhaps she really began to understand it, or some of the cruel little things she played with said something. I was always afraid of the other children throwing it up to her, and that was one reason we went away for three or four years and let our place here.”

“I didn’t know you were gone,” I said toward Hasketh, who cleared his throat to explain:

“I had some interests at that time in Canada. We were at Quebec.”

“It shows what a rush our life is,” I philosophized, with the implication that Hasketh and I had been old friends, and I ought to have noticed that I had not met him during the time of his absence. The fact was we had never come so near intimacy as when we exchanged confidences concerning the severity of Tedham’s sentence in coming out of the court-room together.

“I hadn’t any interest in Canada, except to get the child away,” said Mrs. Hasketh. “Sometimes it seemed strange we should be in Canada, and not Mr. Tedham! She got acquainted with some little girls who were going to a convent school there as externes — outside pupils, you know,” Mrs. Hasketh explained to my wife. “She got very fond of one of them — she is a child of very warm affections. I never denied that Mr. Tedham had warm affections — and when her little girl friend went into the convent to go on with her education there, Fay wanted to go too, and — we let her. That was when she was twelve, and Mr. Hasketh felt that he ought to come back and look after his business here; and we left her in the convent. Just as soon as she was out of the way, and out of the question, it seemed as if I got to feeling differently toward Mr. Tedham. I don’t mean to say I ever got to like him, or that I do to this day; but I saw that he had some rights, too, and for years and years I wanted to take the child and tell her when he was coming out. I used to ask myself what right I even had to keep the child from the suffering. The suffering was hers by rights, and she ought to go through it. I got almost crazy thinking it over. I got to thinking that her share of her father’s shame might be the very thing, of all things, that was to discipline her and make her a good and useful woman; and that’s much more than being a happy one, Mrs. March; we can’t any of us be truly happy, no matter what’s done for us. I tried to make believe that I was sparing her alone, but I knew I was sparing myself, too, and that made it harder to decide.” She suddenly addressed herself to us both: “What would you have done?”

My wife and I looked at each other in a dismay in which a glance from old Hasketh assured us that we had his sympathy. It would have been far simpler if Mrs. Hasketh had been up and down with us as Tedham’s emissaries, and refused to tell us anything of his daughter, and left us to report to him that he must find her for himself if he found her at all. This was what we had both expected, and we had come prepared to take back that answer to Tedham, and discharge our whole duty towards him in its delivery. This change in the woman who had hated him so fiercely, but whose passion had worn itself down to the underlying conscience with the lapse of time, certainly complicated the case. I was silent; my wife said: “I don’t know what I should have done, Mrs. Hasketh;” and Mrs. Hasketh resumed:

“If I did wrong in trying to separate her life from her father’s, I was punished for it, because when I wanted to undo my work, I didn’t know how to begin; I presume that’s the worst of a wrong thing. Well, I never did begin; but now I’ve got to. The time’s come, and I presume it’s as easy now as it ever could be; easier. He’s out and it’s over, as far as the law is concerned; and if she chooses she can see him. I’ll prepare her for it as well as I can, and he can come if she wishes it.”

“Do you mean that he can see her here?” my wife asked.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hasketh, with a sort of strong submission.

“At once? To-day?”

“No,” Mrs. Hasketh faltered. “I didn’t want him to see her just the first day, or before I saw him; and I thought he might try to. She’s visiting at some friends in Providence; but she’ll be back to-morrow. He can come to-morrow night, if she says so. He can come and find out. But if he was anything of a man he wouldn’t want to.”

“I’m afraid,” I ventured, “he isn’t anything of that kind of man.”

VI.

“Now, how unhandsome life is!” I broke out, at one point on our way home, after we had turned the affair over in every light, and then dropped it, and then taken it up again. “It’s so graceless, so tasteless! Why didn’t Tedham die before the expiration of his term and solve all this knotty problem with dignity? Why should he have lived on in this shabby way and come out and wished to see his daughter? If there had been anything dramatic, anything artistic in the man’s nature, he would have renounced the claim his mere paternity gives him on her love, and left word with me that he had gone away and would never be heard of any more. That was the least he could have done. If he had wanted to do the thing heroically — and I wouldn’t have denied him that satisfaction — he would have walked into that pool in the old cockpit and lain down among the autumn leaves on its surface, and made an end of the whole trouble with his own burdensome and worthless existence. That would truly have put an end to the evil he began.”

“I wouldn’t be — impious, Basil,” said my wife, with a moment’s hesitation for the word. Then she sighed and added, “Yes, it seems as if that would be the only thing that could end it. There doesn’t really seem to be any provision in life for ending such things. He will have to go on and make more and more trouble. Poor man! I feel almost as sorry for him as I do for her. I guess he hasn’t expiated his sin yet, as fully as he thinks he has.”

“And then,” I went on, with a strange pleasure I always get out of the poignancy of a despair not my own, “suppose that this isn’t all. Suppose that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and whom she will have to tell of this stain upon her name?”

“Basil!” cried my wife, “that is cruel of you! You knew I was keeping away from that point, and it seems as if you tried to make it as afflicting as you could — the whole affair.”

“Well, I don’t believe it’s as bad as that. Probably she hasn’t met any one in that way; at any rate, it’s pure conjecture on my part, and my conjecture doesn’t make it so.”

“It doesn’t unmake it, either, for you to say that now,” my wife lamented.

“Well, well! Don’t let’s think about it, then. The case is bad enough as it stands, Heaven knows, and we’ve got to grapple with it as soon as we get home. We shall find Tedham waiting for us, I dare say, unless something has happened to him. I wonder if anything can have been good enough to happen to Tedham, overnight.”

I got a little miserable fun out of this, but my wife would not laugh; she would not be placated in any way; she held me in a sort responsible for the dilemma I had conjectured, and inculpated me in some measure for that which had really presented itself.

When we reached home she went directly to her room and had a cup of tea sent to her there, and the children and I had rather a solemn time at the table together. A Sunday tea-table is solemn enough at the best, with its ghastly substitution of cold dishes or thin sliced things for the warm abundance of the week-day dinner; with the gloom of Mrs. March’s absence added, this was a very funereal feast indeed.

We went on quite silently for a while, for the children saw I was preoccupied; but at last I asked, “Has anybody called this afternoon?”

“I don’t know exactly whether it was a call or not,” said my daughter, with a nice feeling for the social proprieties which would have amused me at another time. “But that strange person who was here last night, was here again.”

“Oh!”

“He said he would come in the evening. I forgot to tell you. Papa, what kind of person is he?”

“I don’t know. What makes you ask?”

“Why, we think he wasn’t always a workingman. Tom says he looks as if he had been in some kind of business, and then failed.”

“What makes you think that, Tom?” I asked the boy.

“Oh, I don’t know. He speaks so well.”

“He always spoke well, poor fellow,” I said with a vague amusement. “And you’re quite right, Tom. He was in business once and he failed — badly.”

I went up to my wife’s room and told her what the children had said of Tedham’s call, and that he was coming back again.

“Well, then, I think I shall let you see him alone, Basil. I’m completely worn out, and besides there’s no reason why I should see him. I hope you’ll get through with him quickly. There isn’t really anything for you to say, except that we have seen the Haskeths, and that if he is still bent upon it he can find his daughter there to-morrow evening. I want you to promise me that you will confine yourself to that, Basil, and not say a single word more. There is no sense in our involving ourselves in the affair. We have done all we could, and more than he had any right to ask of us, and now I am determined that he shall not get anything more out of you. Will you promise?”

“You may be sure, my dear, that I don’t wish to get any more involved in this coil of sin and misery than you do,” I began.

“That isn’t promising,” she interrupted. “I want you to promise you’ll say just that and no more.”

“Oh, I’ll promise fast enough, if that’s all you want,” I said.

“I don’t trust you a bit, Basil,” she lamented. “Now, I will explain to you all about it. I’ve thought the whole thing over.”

She did explain, at much greater length than she needed, and she was still giving me some very solemn charges when the bell rang, and I knew that Tedham had come. “Now, remember what I’ve told you,” she called after me, as I went to the door, “and be sure to tell me, when you come back, just how he takes it and every word he says. Oh, dear, I know you’ll make the most dreadful mess of it!”

By this time I expected to do no less, but I was so curious to see Tedham again that I should have been willing to do much worse, rather than forego my meeting with him. I hope that there was some better feeling than curiosity in my heart, but I will, for the present, call it curiosity.

I met him in the hall at the foot of the stairs, and put a witless cheeriness into the voice I bade him good-evening with, while I gave him my hand and led the way into the parlor.

The twenty-four hours that had elapsed since I saw him there before had estranged him in a way that I find it rather hard to describe. He had shrunk from the approach to equality in which we had parted, and there was a sort of consciousness of disgrace in his look, such as might have shown itself if he had passed the time in a low debauch. But undoubtedly he had done nothing of the kind, and this effect in him was from a purely moral cause. He sat down on the edge of a chair, instead of leaning back, as he had done the night before.

“Well, Tedham,” I began, “we have seen your sister-in-law, and I may as well tell you at once that, so far as she is concerned, there will be nothing in the way of your meeting your daughter. The Haskeths are living at their old place in Somerville, and your daughter will be with them there to-morrow night — just at this moment she is away — and you can find her there, then, if you wish.”

Tedham kept those deep eye-hollows of his bent upon me, and listened with a passivity which did not end when I ceased to speak. I had said all that my wife had permitted me to say in her charge to me, and the incident ought to have been closed, as far as we were concerned. But Tedham’s not speaking threw me off my guard. I could not let the matter end so bluntly, and I added, in the same spirit one makes a scrawl at the bottom of a page, “Of course, it’s for you to decide whether you will or not.”

“What do you mean?” asked Tedham, feebly, but as if he were physically laying hold of me for help.

“Why, I mean — I mean — my dear fellow, you know what I mean! Whether you had better do it.” This was the very thing I had not intended to do, for I saw how wise my wife’s plan was, and how we really had nothing more to do with the matter, after having satisfied the utmost demands of humanity.

“You think I had better not,” said Tedham.

“No,” I said, but I felt that I was saying it too late, “I don’t think anything about it.”

“I have been thinking about it, too,” said Tedham, as if I had confessed and not denied having an opinion in the matter. “I have been thinking about it ever since I saw you last night, and I don’t believe I have slept, for thinking of it. I know how you and Mrs. March feel about it, and I have tried to see it from your point of view, and now I believe I do. I am not going to see my daughter; I am going away.”

He stood up, in token of his purpose, and at the same moment my wife entered the room. She must have been hurrying to do so from the moment I left her, for she had on a fresh dress, and her hair had the effect of being suddenly, if very effectively, massed for the interview from the dispersion in which I had lately seen it. She swept me with a glance of reproach, as she went up to Tedham, in the pretence that he had risen to meet her, and gave him her hand. I knew that she divined all that had passed between us, but she said:

“Mr. March has told you that we have seen Mrs. Hasketh, and that you can find your daughter at her house to-morrow evening?”

“Yes, and I have just been telling him that I am not going to see her.”

“That is very foolish — very wrong!” my wife began.

“I know you must say so,” Tedham replied, with more dignity and force than I could have expected, “and I know how kind you and Mr. March have been. But you must see that I am right — that she is the only one to be considered at all.”

“Right! How are you right? Have you been suggesting that, my dear?” demanded my wife, with a gentle despair of me in her voice.

It almost seemed to me that I had, but Tedham came to my rescue most unexpectedly.

“No, Mrs. March, he hasn’t said anything of the kind to me; or, if he has, I haven’t heard it. But you intimated, yourself, last night, that she might be so situated—”

“I was a wicked simpleton,” cried my wife, and I forebore to triumph, even by a glance at her; “to put my doubts between you and your daughter in any way. It was romantic, and — and — disgusting. It’s not only your right to see her, it’s your duty. At least it’s your duty to let her decide whether she will let you see her. What nonsense! Of course she will! She must bear her part in it. She ought not to escape it, even if she could. Now you must just drop all idea of going away, and you must stay, and you must go to see your daughter. There is no other way to do.”

Tedham shook his head stubbornly. “She has borne her share, already, and I won’t inflict my penalty on her innocence—”

“Innocence? It’s because she is innocent that it must be inflicted upon her! That is what innocence is in the world for!”

Tedham looked back at her in a dull bewilderment. “I can’t get back to that. It seemed so once; but now it looks selfish, and I’m afraid of it. I am not the one to take that ground. It might do for you—”

“Well, then, let it do for me!” I confess that I was astonished at this turn, or should have been, if I could be astonished at any turn a woman takes. “I will see her for you, if you wish, and I will tell her just how it is with you, and then she can decide for herself. You have certainly no right to decide for her, whether she will see you or not, have you?”

“No,” Tedham admitted.

“Well, then, sit down and listen.”

He sat down, and my wife reasoned it all out with him. She convinced me, perfectly, so that what Tedham proposed to do seemed not only sentimental and foolish, but unnatural and impious. I confess that I admired her casuistry, and gave it my full support. She was a woman who, in the small affairs of the tastes and the nerves and the prejudices could be as illogical as the best of her sex, but with a question large enough to engage the hereditary powers of her New England nature she showed herself a dialectician worthy of her Puritan ancestry.

Tedham rose when she had made an end; and when we both expected him to agree with her and obey her, he said, “Very likely you are right. I once saw it all that way myself, but I don’t see it so now, and I can’t do it. Perhaps we shouldn’t care for each other; at any rate, it’s too much to risk, and I can’t do it. Good-by.” He began sidling toward the door.

I would have detained him, but my wife made me a sign not to interfere. “But surely, Mr. Tedham,” she pleaded, “you are going to leave some word for her — or for Mrs. Hasketh to give her?”

“No,” he answered, “I don’t think I will. If I don’t appear, then she won’t see me, and that will be all there is of it.”

“Yes, but Mrs. Hasketh will probably tell her that you have asked about her, and will prepare her for your coming, and then if you don’t come—”

“What time is it, March?” Tedham asked.

I took out my watch. “It’s nine o’clock.” I was surprised to find it no later.

“I can get over to Somerville before ten, can’t I? I’ll go and tell Mrs. Hasketh I am not coming.”

We could not prevent his getting away, by force, and we had used all the arguments we could have hoped to detain him with. As he opened the door to go out into the night, “But, Tedham!” I called to him, “if anything happens, where are we to find you, hear of you?”

He hesitated. “I will let you know. Well, good-night.”

“I suppose this isn’t the end, Isabel,” I said, after we had turned from looking blankly at the closed door, and listening to Tedham’s steps, fainter and fainter on the board-walk to the gate.

“There never is an end to a thing like this!” she returned, with a passionate sigh of pity. “Oh, what a terrible thing an evil deed is! It can’t end. It has to go on and on forever. Poor wretch! He thought he had got to the end of his misdeed, when he had suffered the punishment for it, but it was only just beginning then! Now, you see, it has a perfectly new lease of life. It’s as if it had just happened, as far as the worst consequences are concerned.”

“Yes,” I assented. “By the way, that was a great idea of yours about the office of innocence in the world, Isabel!”

“Why, Basil!” she cried, “you don’t suppose I believed in such a monstrous thing as that, do you?”

“You made me believe in it.”

“Well, then, I can tell you that I merely said it so as to convince him that he ought to let his daughter decide whether she would see him or not, and it had nothing whatever to do with the matter. Do you think you could find me anything to eat, dear? I’m perfectly famishing, and it doesn’t seem as if I could stir a step till I’ve had a bite of something.”

She sank down on the sofa in the hall in proof of her statement, and I went out into the culinary regions (deserted of their dwellers after our early tea) and made her up a sandwich along with the one I had the Sunday-night habit of myself. I found some half-bottles of ale on the ice, and I brought one of them, too. Before we had emptied it we resigned ourselves to what we could not help in Tedham’s case; perhaps we even saw it in a more hopeful light.

VII.

The next day was one of those lax Mondays which come before the Tuesdays and Wednesdays when business has girded itself up for the week, and I got home from the office rather earlier than usual. My wife met me with, “Why, what has happened?”

“Nothing,” I said; “I had a sort of presentiment that something had happened here.”

“Well, nothing at all has happened, and you have had your presentiment for your pains, if that’s what you hurried home for.”

I justified myself as well as I could, and I added, “That wretched Tedham has been in my mind all day. I think he has made a ridiculous mistake. As if he could stop the harm by taking himself off! The harm goes on independently of him; it is hardly his harm any more.”

“That is the way it has seemed to me, too, all day,” said my wife. “You don’t suppose he has been out of my mind either? I wish we had never had anything to do with him.”

A husband likes to abuse his victory, when he has his wife quite at his mercy, but the case was so entirely in my favor that for once I forbore. I could see that she was suffering for having put into Tedham’s head the notion which had resulted in this error, and I considered that she was probably suffering enough. Besides, I was afraid that if I said anything it would bring out the fact that I had myself intimated the question again which his course had answered so mistakenly. I could well imagine that she was grateful for my forbearance, and I left her to this admirable state of mind while I went off to put myself a little in shape after my day’s work and my journey out of town. I kept thinking how perfectly right in the affair Tedham’s simple, selfish instinct had been, and how our several consciences had darkened counsel; that quaint Tuscan proverb came into ray mind: Lascia fare Iddio, ch’ è un buon vecchio. We had not been willing to let God alone, or to trust his leading; we had thought to improve on his management of the case, and to invent a principle for poor Tedham that should be better for him to act upon than the love of his child, which God had put into the man’s heart, and which was probably the best thing that had ever been there. Well, we had got our come-uppings, as the country people say, and however we might reason it away we had made ourselves responsible for the event.

There came a ring at the door that made my own heart jump into my mouth. I knew it was Tedham come back again, and I was still in the throes of buttoning on my collar when my wife burst into my room. I smiled round at her as gayly as I could with the collar-buttoning grimace on my face. “All right, I’ll be down in a minute. You just go and talk to him till—”

“Him?” she gasped back; and I have never been quite sure of her syntax to this day. “Them! It’s Mr. and Mrs. Hasketh, and some young lady! I saw them through the window coming up the walk.”

“Good Lord! You don’t suppose it’s Tedham’s daughter?”

“How do I know? Oh, how could you be dressing at a time like this!”

It did seem to me rather heinous, and I did not try to defend myself, even when she added, from her access of nervousness, in something like a whimper, “It seems to me you’re always dressing, Basil!”

“I’ll be right with you, my dear,” I answered, penitently; and, in fact, by the time the maid brought up the Haskeths’ cards I was ready to go down. We certainly needed each other’s support, and I do not know but we descended the stairs hand in hand, and entered the parlor leaning upon each other’s shoulders. The Haskeths, who were much more deeply concerned, were not apparently so much moved. We shook hands with them, and then Mrs. Hasketh said to us in succession, “My niece, Mrs. March; Mr. March, my niece.”

The young girl had risen, and stood veiled before us, and a sort of heart-breaking appeal expressed itself in the gentle droop of her figure, which did the whole office of her hidden face. The Haskeths were dressed, as became their years, in a composite fashion of no particular period; but I noticed at once, with the fondness I have for what is pretty in the modes, that Miss Tedham wore one of the latest costumes, and that she was not only a young girl, but a young lady, with all that belongs to the outward seeming of one of the gentlest of the kind. It struck me as the more monstrous, therefore, that she should be involved in the coil of her father’s inexpiable offence, which entangled her whether he stayed or whether he went. It was well enough that the Haskeths should still be made miserable through him; it belonged to their years and experience; they would soon end, at any rate, and it did not matter whether their remnant of life was dark or bright. But this child had a right to a long stretch of unbroken sunshine. As I stood and looked at her I felt the heart-burning, the indefinable indignation that we feel in the presence of death when it is the young and fair who have died. Here is a miscalculation, a mistake. It ought not to have been.

I thought that my wife, in the effusion of sympathy, would have perhaps taken the girl in her arms; but probably she knew that the dropped veil was a sign that there was to be no embracing. She put out her hand, and the girl took it with her gloved hand; but though the outward forms of their greeting were so cold, I fancied an instant understanding and kindness between them.

“My niece,” Mrs. Hasketh explained, when we were all seated, “came home this afternoon, instead of this morning, when we expected her.”

My wife said, “Oh, yes,” and after a moment, a very painful moment, in which I think we all tried to imagine something that would delay the real business, Mrs. Hasketh began again.

“Mrs. March,” she said, in a low voice, and with a curious, apologetic kind of embarrassment, “we have come — Fay wanted we should come and ask if you knew about her father—”

“Why, didn’t he come to you last night?” my wife began.

“Yes, he did,” said Mrs. Hasketh, in a crest-fallen sort, “But we thought — we thought — you might know where he was. And Fay — Did he tell you what he was going to do?”

“Yes,” my wife gasped back.

The young girl put aside her veil in turning to my wife, and showed a face which had all the ill-starred beauty of poor Tedham, with something more in it that she never got from that handsome reprobate — conscience, soul — whatever we choose to call a certain effluence of heaven which blesses us with rest and faith whenever we behold it in any human countenance. She was very young-looking, and her voice had a wistful innocence.

“Do you think my father will be here again to-night? Oh, I must see him!”

I perceived that my wife could not speak, and I said, to gain time, “Why, I’ve been expecting him to come in at any moment;” and this was true enough.

“I guess he’s not very far off,” said old Hasketh. “I don’t believe but what he’ll turn up.” Within the comfort these words were outwardly intended to convey to the anxious child, I felt an inner contempt of Tedham, a tacit doubt of the man’s nature, which was more to me than the explicit faith in his return. For some reason Hasketh had not trusted Tedham’s decision, and he might very well have done this without impugning anything but the weakness of his will.

My wife now joined our side, apparently because it was the only theory of the case that could be openly urged. “Oh, yes, I am sure. In fact he promised my husband to let him know later where he was. Didn’t you understand him so, my dear?”

I had not understood him precisely to this effect, but I answered, “Yes, certainly,” and we began to reassure one another more and more. We talked on and on to one another, but all the time we talked at the young girl, or for her encouragement; but I suppose the rest felt as I did, that we were talking provisionally, or without any stable ground of conviction. For my part, though I indulged that contempt of Tedham, I still had a lurking fear that the wretch had finally and forever disappeared, and I had a vision, very disagreeable and definite, of Tedham lying face downward in the pool of the old cockpit and shone on by the stars in the hushed circle of the woods. Simultaneously I heard his daughter saying, “I can’t understand why he shouldn’t have come to us, or should have put it off. He couldn’t think I didn’t wish to see him.” And now I looked at my wife aghast, for I perceived that the Haskeths must have lacked the courage to tell her that her father had decided himself not to see her again, and that they had brought her to us that we might stay her with some hopes, false or true, of meeting him soon. “I don’t know what they mean,” she went on, appealing from them to us, “by saying that it might be better if I never saw him again!”

“I don’t say that any more, child,” said Mrs. Hasketh, with affecting humility. “I’m sure there isn’t any one in the whole world that I would bless the sight of half as much.”

“I could have come before, if I’d known where he was; or, if I had only known, I might have been here Saturday!” She broke into a piteous lamentation, with tears and sobs that wrung my heart and made me feel like one of a conspiracy of monsters. “But he couldn’t — he couldn’t — have thought I didn’t want to see him!”

It was a very trying moment for us all, and I think that if we had, any of us, had our choice, we should have preferred to be in her place rather than our own. We miserably did what we could to comfort her, and we at last silenced her with I do not know what pretences. The affair was quite too much for me, and I made a feint of having heard the children calling me, and I went out into the hall. I felt that there was a sort of indecency in my witnessing that poor young thing’s emotion; women might see it, but a man ought not. Perhaps old Hasketh felt the same; he followed me out, and when we were beyond hearing, even if he had spoken aloud, he dropped his voice to a thick murmur and said, “This has all been a mistake. We have had to get out of it with the girl the best we could; and we don’t dare to let her know that Tedham isn’t coming back any more. You noticed from what she said that my wife tried to make believe it might be well if he didn’t; but she had to drop that; it set the girl wild. She hasn’t got anything but the one idea: that she and her father belong to each other, and that they must be together for the rest of their lives. A curious thing about it is,” and Hasketh sank his voice still lower to say this, “that she thinks that if he’s taken the punishment that was put upon him he has atoned for what he did; and if any one tries to make him suffer more he does worse than Tedham did, and he’s flying in the face of Providence. Perhaps it’s so. I’m afraid,” Hasketh continued, with the satisfaction men take in blaming their wives under the cover of sympathy, “that Mrs. Hasketh is going to feel it more and more, as time goes on, unless Tedham turns up. I was never in favor of trying to have the child forget him, or be separated from him in any way. That kind of thing can’t be made to work, and I don’t suppose, when you come to boil it down, that it’s essentially right. This universe, I take it, isn’t an accident in any particular, and if she’s his daughter it’s because she was meant to be, and to bear and share with him. You see it was a great mistake not to prepare the child for it sooner, and tell her just when Tedham would be out, so that if she wanted to see him she could. She thinks she ought to have been there at the prison waiting to speak to him the first one. I thought it was a mistake to have her away, and I guess that’s the way Mrs. Hasketh looks at it herself, now.”

A stir of garments made itself heard from the parlor at last, and we knew the ladies had risen. In a loud voice Hasketh began to say that they had a carriage down at the gate, and I said they had better let me show them the way down; and as my wife followed the others into the hall, I pulled open the outer door for them. On the threshold stood a man about to ring, who let his hand drop from the bell-pull. “Why, Tedham!” I shouted, joyfully.

The light from the hall-lamp struck full on his face; we all involuntarily shrank back, except the girl, who looked, not at the man before her, but first at her aunt and then at her uncle, timorously, and murmured some inaudible question. They did not answer, and now Tedham and his daughter looked at each other, with what feeling no one can ever fully say.

VIII.

It always seemed to me as if we had witnessed something like the return of one from the dead, in this meeting. We were talking it over one evening some weeks later, and “It would be all very well,” I philosophized, “if the dead came back at once, but if one came back after ten years, it would be difficult.”

“It was worse than coming back from the dead,” said my wife. “But I hope that is the end of it so far as we are concerned. I am sure I am glad to be out of it, and I don’t wish to see any of them ever again.”

“Why, I don’t know about that,” I returned, and I began to laugh. “You know Hubbell, our inspector of agencies?”

“What has he got to do with it?”

“Hubbell has had a romantic moment. He thinks that in view of the restitution Tedham made as far as he could, and his excellent record — elsewhere — it would be a fine thing for the Reciprocity to employ him again in our office, and he wanted to suggest it to the actuary.”

“Basil! You didn’t allow him to do such a cruel thing as that?”

“No, my dear, I am happy to say that I sat upon that dramatic climax.”

This measurably consoled my wife, but she did not cease to denounce the idea for some moments. When she ended, I asked her if she would allow the company to employ Tedham in a subordinate place in another city, and when she signified that this might be suffered, I said that this was what would probably be done. Then I added, seriously, that I thoroughly liked the notion of it, and that I took it for a testimony that poor old Tedham was right, and that he had at last fully expiated his offence against society.

His daughter continued to live with her aunt and uncle, but Tedham used to spend his holidays with them, and, however incongruously, they got on together very well, I believe. The girl kept the name of Hasketh, and I do not suppose that many people knew her relation to Tedham. It appeared that our little romantic supposition of a love affair, which the reunion of father and child must shatter, was for the present quite gratuitous. But if it should ever come to that, my wife and I had made up our minds to let God manage. We said that we had already had one narrow escape in proposing to better the divine way of doing, and we should not interfere again. Still I cannot truly say that we gave Providence our entire confidence as long as there remained the chance of further evil through the sort of romance we had dreaded for the girl. Till she was married there was an incompleteness, a potentiality of trouble, in the incident apparently closed that haunted us with a distrustful anxiety. We had to wait several years for the end, but it came eventually, and she was married to a young Englishman whom she had met in Canada, and whom she told all about her unhappy family history before she permitted herself to accept him.

During the one brief interview I had with him, for the purpose of further blackening her father’s character (for so I understood her insistence that I should see the young man), he seemed not only wholly unmoved by the facts, but was apparently sorry that poor Tedham had not done much worse things, and many more of them, that he might forgive him for her sake.

They went to live abroad after they were married; and by and by Tedham joined them. So far now as human vision can perceive, the trouble he made, the evil he did, is really at an end. Love, which can alone arrest the consequences of wrong, had ended it, and in certain luminous moments it seemed to us that we had glimpsed, in our witness of this experience, an infinite compassion encompassing our whole being like a sea, where every trouble of our sins and sorrows must cease at last like a circle in the water.

BOY LIFE STORIES AND READINGS SELECTED FROM THE WORKS OF WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

Stories and Readings Selected from the Works of William Dean Howells, and Arranged by Percival Chubb, Director of English in the Ethical Culture School, New York.

CONTENTS

ADVENTURES IN A BOY’S TOWN

HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS

THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN

JIM LEONARD’S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

LIFE IN A BOY’S TOWN

THE TOWN

EARLIEST MEMORIES

HOME LIFE

THE RIVER

SWIMMING

SKATING

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

GIRLS

MOTHERS

A BROTHER

A FRIEND

GAMES AND PASTIMES

MARBLES

A MEAN TRICK

TOPS

KITES

THE BUTLER GUARDS

PETS

INDIANS

GUNS

NUTTING

THE FIRE-ENGINES

GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD

THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS

PASSING SHOWS

THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN

THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS

THE LAST OF A BOY’S TOWN

INTRODUCTION

There are two conspicuous faults in the literary culture which we are trying to give to our boys and girls in our elementary and secondary schools: it is not sufficiently contemporaneous, and it is not sufficiently national and American. Hence it lacks vitality and actuality. So little of it is carried over into life because so little of it is interpretative of the life that is. It is associated too exclusively in the child’s mind with things dead and gone — with the Puritan world of Miles Standish, the Revolutionary days of Paul Revere, the Dutch epoch of Rip Van Winkle; or with not even this comparatively recent national interest, it takes the child back to the strange folk of the days of King Arthur and King Robert of Sicily, of Ivanhoe and the Ancient Mariner. Thus when the child leaves school his literary studies do not connect helpfully with those forms of literature with which — if he reads at all — he is most likely to be concerned: the short story, the sketch, and the popular essay of the magazines and newspapers; the new novel, or the plays which he may see at the theatre. He has not been interested in the writers of his own time, and has never been put in the way of the best contemporary fiction. Hence the ineffectualness and wastefulness of much of our school work: it does not lead forward into the life of to-day, nor help the young to judge intelligently of the popular books which later on will compete for their favor.

To be sure, not a little of the material used in our elementary schools is drawn from Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, from Irving and Hawthorne; but because it is often studied in a so-called thorough and, therefore, very deadly way — slowly and laboriously for drill, rather than briskly for pleasure — there is comparatively little of it read, and almost no sense gained of its being part of a national literature. In the high school, owing to the unfortunate domination of the college entrance requirements, the situation is not much better. Our students leave with a scant and hurried glimpse — if any glimpse at all — of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, or of Lowell, Lanier, and Poe; with no intimate view of Hawthorne, our great classic; none at all of Parkman and Fiske, our historians; or of writers like Howells, James, and Cable, or Wilkins, Jewett, and Deland, and a worthy company of story-tellers.

We may well be on our guard against a vaunting nationalism. It retards our culture. There should be no confusion of the second-rate values of most of our American products with the supreme values of the greatest British classics. We may work, of course, toward an ultimate appreciation of these greatest things. We fail, however, in securing such appreciation because we have failed to enlist those forms of interest which vitalize and stimulate literary studies — above all, the patriotic or national interest. Concord and Cambridge should be dearer, as they are nearer, to the young American than even Stratford and Abbotsford; Hawthorne should be as familiar as Goldsmith; and Emerson, as Addison or Burke. Ordinarily it is not so; and we suffer the consequences in the failure of our youth to grasp the spiritual ideals and the distinctively American democratic spirit which find expression in the greatest work of our literary masters, Emerson and Whitman, Lowell and Lanier. Our culture and our nationalism both suffer thereby. Our literature suffers also, because we have not an instructed and interested public to encourage excellence.

Among the living writers there is no one whose work has a more distinctively American savor than that of William Dean Howells; and it is to make his delightful writings more widely known and more easily accessible that this volume of selections from his books for the young has been prepared as a reading-book for the elementary school. These juvenile books of Mr. Howells contain some of the very best pages ever written for the enjoyment of young people. His two books for boys — A Boy’s Town and The Flight of Pony Baker — rank with such favorites as Tom Sawyer and The Story of a Bad Boy.

These should be introductory to the best of Mr. Howells’ novels and essays in the high school; for Mr. Howells, it need scarcely be said, is one of our few masters of style: his style is as individual and distinguished as it is felicitous and delicate. More important still, from the educational point of view, he is one of our most modern writers: the spiritual issues and social problems of our age, which our older high-school pupils are anxious to deal with, are alive in his books. Our young people should know his Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, as well as his social and literary criticism. As stimulating and alluring a volume of selections may be made for high-school students as this volume will be, we venture to predict, for the younger boys and girls of the elementary school.

In this little book of readings we have made, we believe, an entirely legitimate and desirable use of the books named above. A Boy’s Town is a series of detachable pictures and episodes into which the boy — or the healthy girl who loves boys’ books — may dip, as the selections here given will, we believe, tempt him to do. The same is true of The Flight of Pony Baker. The volume is for class-room enjoyment; for happy hours of profitable reading — profitable, because happy. Much of it should be read aloud rather than silently, and dramatic justice be done to the scenes and conversations which have dramatic quality.

Percival Chubb.

I

ADVENTURES IN A BOY’S TOWN

HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS

Just before the circus came, about the end of July, something happened that made Pony mean to run off more than anything that ever was. His father and mother were coming home from a walk, in the evening; it was so hot nobody could stay in the house, and just as they were coming to the front steps Pony stole up behind them and tossed a snowball which he had got out of the garden at his mother, just for fun. The flower struck her very softly on her hair, for she had no bonnet on, and she gave a jump and a hollo that made Pony laugh; and then she caught him by the arm and boxed his ears.

“Oh, my goodness! It was you, was it, you good-for-nothing boy? I thought it was a bat!” she said, and she broke out crying and ran into the house, and would not mind his father, who was calling after her, “Lucy, Lucy, my dear child!”

Pony was crying, too, for he did not intend to frighten his mother, and when she took his fun as if he had done something wicked he did not know what to think. He stole off to bed, and he lay there crying in the dark and expecting that she would come to him, as she always did, to have him say that he was sorry when he had been wicked, or to tell him that she was sorry when she thought she had not been quite fair with him. But she did not come, and after a good while his father came and said: “Are you awake, Pony? I am sorry your mother misunderstood your fun. But you mustn’t mind it, dear boy. She’s not well, and she’s very nervous.”

“I don’t care!” Pony sobbed out. “She won’t have a chance to touch me again!” For he had made up his mind to run off with the circus which was coming the next Tuesday.

He turned his face away, sobbing, and his father, after standing by his bed a moment, went away without saying anything but “Don’t forget your prayers, Pony. You’ll feel differently in the morning, I hope.”

Pony fell asleep thinking how he would come back to the Boy’s Town with the circus when he was grown up, and when he came out in the ring riding three horses bareback he would see his father and mother and sisters in one of the lower seats. They would not know him, but he would know them, and he would send for them to come to the dressing-room, and would be very good to them, all but his mother; he would be very cold and stiff with her, though he would know that she was prouder of him than all the rest put together, and she would go away almost crying.

HE BEGAN BEING COLD AND STIFF WITH HER THE VERY NEXT MORNING

He began being cold and stiff with her the very next morning, although she was better than ever to him, and gave him waffles for breakfast with unsalted butter, and tried to pet him up. That whole day she kept trying to do things for him, but he would scarcely speak to her; and at night she came to him and said, “What makes you act so strangely, Pony? Are you offended with your mother?”

“Yes, I am!” said Pony, haughtily, and he twitched away from where she was sitting on the side of his bed, leaning over him.

“On account of last night, Pony?” she asked, softly.

“I reckon you know well enough,” said Pony, and he tried to be disgusted with her for being such a hypocrite, but he had to set his teeth hard, hard, or he would have broken down crying.

“If it’s for that, you mustn’t, Pony dear. You don’t know how you frightened me. When your snowball hit me, I felt sure it was a bat, and I’m so afraid of bats, you know. I didn’t mean to hurt my poor boy’s feelings so, and you mustn’t mind it any more, Pony.”

She stooped down and kissed him on the forehead, but he did not move or say anything; only, after that he felt more forgiving toward his mother. He made up his mind to be good to her along with the rest when he came back with the circus. But still he meant to run off with the circus. He did not see how he could do anything else, for he had told all the boys that day that he was going to do it; and when they just laughed, and said, “Oh yes. Think you can fool your grandmother! It’ll be like running off with the Indians,” Pony wagged his head, and said they would see whether it would or not, and offered to bet them what they dared.

The morning of the circus day all the fellows went out to the corporation line to meet the circus procession. There were ladies and knights, the first thing, riding on spotted horses; and then a band-chariot, all made up of swans and dragons. There were about twenty baggage-wagons; but before you got to them there was the greatest thing of all. It was a chariot drawn by twelve Shetland ponies, and it was shaped like a big shell, and around in the bottom of the shell there were little circus actors, boys and girls, dressed in their circus clothes, and they all looked exactly like fairies. They scarce seemed to see the fellows, as they ran alongside of their chariot, but Hen Billard and Archy Hawkins, who were always cutting up, got close enough to throw some peanuts to the circus boys, and some of the little circus girls laughed, and the driver looked around and cracked his whip at the fellows, and they all had to get out of the way then.

Jim Leonard said that the circus boys and girls were all stolen, and nobody was allowed to come close to them for fear they would try to send word to their friends. Some of the fellows did not believe it, and wanted to know how he knew it; and he said he read it in a paper; after that nobody could deny it. But he said that if you went with the circus men of your own free will they would treat you first-rate; only they would give you burnt brandy to keep you little; nothing else but burnt brandy would do it, but that would do it, sure.

Pony was scared at first when he heard that most of the circus fellows were stolen, but he thought if he went of his own accord he would be all right. Still, he did not feel so much like running off with the circus as he did before the circus came. He asked Jim Leonard whether the circus men made all the children drink burnt brandy; and Archy Hawkins and Hen Billard heard him ask, and began to mock him. They took him up between them, one by his arms and the other by the legs, and ran along with him, and kept saying, “Does it want to be a great big circus actor? Then it shall, so it shall,” and, “We’ll tell the circus men to be very careful of you, Pony dear!” till Pony wriggled himself loose and began to stone them.

After that they had to let him alone, for when a fellow began to stone you in the Boy’s Town you had to let him alone, unless you were going to whip him, and the fellows only wanted to have a little fun with Pony. But what they did made him all the more resolved to run away with the circus, just to show them.

He helped to carry water for the circus men’s horses, along with the boys who earned their admission that way. He had no need to do it, because his father was going to take him in, anyway; but Jim Leonard said it was the only way to get acquainted with the circus men. Still, Pony was afraid to speak to them, and he would not have said a word to any of them if it had not been for one of them speaking to him first, when he saw him come lugging a great pail of water, and bending far over on the right to balance it.

“That’s right,” the circus man said to Pony. “If you ever fell into that bucket you’d drown, sure.”

He was a big fellow, with funny eyes, and he had a white bulldog at his heels; and all the fellows said he was the one who guarded the outside of the tent when the circus began, and kept the boys from hooking in under the curtain.

Even then Pony would not have had the courage to say anything, but Jim Leonard was just behind him with another bucket of water, and he spoke up for him. “He wants to go with the circus.”

They both set down their buckets, and Pony felt himself turning pale when the circus man came toward them. “Wants to go with the circus, heigh? Let’s have a look at you.” He took Pony by the shoulders and turned him slowly round, and looked at his nice clothes, and took him by the chin. “Orphan?” he asked.

Pony did not know what to say, but Jim Leonard nodded; perhaps he did not know what to say, either; but Pony felt as if they had both told a lie.

“Parents living?” The circus man looked at Pony, and Pony had to say that they were.

He gasped out, “Yes,” so that you could scarcely hear him, and the circus man said:

“Well, that’s right. When we take an orphan, we want to have his parents living, so that we can go and ask them what sort of a boy he is.”

He looked at Pony in such a friendly, smiling way that Pony took courage to ask him whether they would want him to drink burnt brandy.

“What for?”

“To keep me little.”

“Oh, I see.” The circus man took off his hat and rubbed his forehead with a silk handkerchief, which he threw into the top of his hat before he put it on again. “No, I don’t know as we will. We’re rather short of giants just now. How would you like to drink a glass of elephant milk every morning and grow into an eight-footer?”

Pony said he didn’t know whether he would like to be quite so big; and then the circus man said perhaps he would rather go for an India-rubber man; that was what they called the contortionists in those days.

“Let’s feel of you again.” The circus man took hold of Pony and felt his joints. “You’re put together pretty tight; but I reckon we could make you do if you’d let us take you apart with a screw-driver and limber up the pieces with rattlesnake oil. Wouldn’t like it, heigh? Well, let me see!” The circus man thought a moment, and then he said: “How would double-somersaults on four horses bareback do?”

Pony said that would do, and then the circus man said: “Well, then, we’ve just hit it, because our double-somersault, four-horse bareback is just going to leave us, and we want a new one right away. Now, there’s more than one way of joining a circus, but the best way is to wait on your front steps with your things all packed up, and the procession comes along at about one o’clock in the morning and picks you up. Which ‘d you rather do?”

Pony pushed his toe into the turf, as he always did when he was ashamed, but he made out to say he would rather wait out on the front steps.

“Well, then, that’s all settled,” said the circus man. “We’ll be along,” and he was going away with his dog, but Tim Leonard called after him:

“You hain’t asked him whereabouts he lives?”

The circus man kept on, and he said, without looking around, “Oh, that’s all right. We’ve got somebody that looks after that.”

“It’s the magician,” Jim Leonard whispered to Pony, and they walked away.

THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN

A crowd of the fellows had been waiting to know what the boys had been talking about to the circus man, but Jim Leonard said, “Don’t you tell, Pony Baker!” and he started to run, and that made Pony run, too, and they both ran till they got away from the fellows.

“You have got to keep it a secret; for if a lot of fellows find it out the constable’ll get to know it, and he’ll be watching out around the corner of your house, and when the procession comes along and he sees you’re really going he’ll take you up, and keep you in jail till your father comes and bails you out. Now, you mind!”

Pony said, “Oh, I won’t tell anybody,” and when Jim Leonard said that if a circus man was to feel him over, that way, and act so kind of pleasant and friendly, he would be too proud to speak to anybody, Pony confessed that he knew it was a great thing all the time.

“The way’ll be,” said Jim Leonard, “to keep in with him, and he’ll keep the others from picking on you; they’ll be afraid to, on account of his dog. You’ll see, he’ll be the one to come for you to-night; and if the constable is there the dog won’t let him touch you. I never thought of that.”

Perhaps on account of thinking of it now Jim Leonard felt free to tell the other fellows how Pony was going to run off, for when a crowd of them came along he told them. They said it was splendid, and they said that if they could make their mothers let them, or if they could get out of the house without their mothers knowing it, they were going to sit up with Pony and watch out for the procession, and bid him good-bye.

At dinner-time he found out that his father was going to take him and all his sisters to the circus, and his father and mother were so nice to him, asking him about the procession and everything, that his heart ached at the thought of running away from home and leaving them. But now he had to do it; the circus man was coming for him, and he could not back out; he did not know what would happen if he did. It seemed to him as if his mother had done everything she could to make it harder for him. She had stewed chicken for dinner, with plenty of gravy, and hot biscuits to sop in, and peach preserves afterward; and she kept helping him to more, because she said boys that followed the circus around got dreadfully hungry. The eating seemed to keep his heart down; it was trying to get into his throat all the time; and he knew that she was being good to him, but if he had not known it he would have believed his mother was just doing it to mock him.

Pony had to go to the circus with his father and sisters, and to get on his shoes and a clean collar. But a crowd of the fellows were there at the tent door to watch out whether the circus man would say anything to him when he went in; and Jim Leonard rubbed against him, when the man passed with his dog and did not even look at Pony, and said: “He’s just pretending. He don’t want your father to know. He’ll be round for you, sure. I saw him kind of smile to one of the other circus men.”

It was a splendid circus, and there were more things than Pony ever saw in a circus before. But instead of hating to have it over, it seemed to him that it would never come to an end. He kept thinking and thinking, and wondering whether he would like to be a circus actor; and when the one came out who rode four horses bareback and stood on his head on the last horse, and drove with the reins in his teeth, Pony thought that he never could learn to do it; and if he could not learn he did not know what the circus men would say to him. It seemed to him that it was very strange he had not told that circus man that he didn’t know whether he could do it or not; but he had not, and now it was too late.

A boy came around calling lemonade, and Pony’s father bought some for each of the children, but Pony could hardly taste his.

“What is the matter with you, Pony? Are you sick?” his father asked.

“No. I don’t care for any; that’s all. I’m well,” said Pony; but he felt very miserable.

After supper Jim Leonard came round and went up to Pony’s room with him to help him pack, and he was so gay about it and said he only wished he was going, that Pony cheered up a little. Jim had brought a large square of checked gingham that he said he did not believe his mother would ever want, and that he would tell her he had taken if she asked for it. He said it would be the very thing for Pony to carry his clothes in, for it was light and strong and would hold a lot. He helped Pony to choose his things out of his bureau drawers: a pair of stockings and a pair of white pantaloons and a blue roundabout, and a collar, and two handkerchiefs. That was all he said Pony would need, because he would have his circus clothes right away, and there was no use taking things that he would never wear.

Jim did these up in the square of gingham, and he tied it across cater-cornered twice, in double knots, and showed Pony how he could put his hand through and carry it just as easy. He hid it under the bed for him, and he told Pony that if he was in Pony’s place he should go to bed right away or pretty soon, so that nobody would think anything, and maybe he could get some sleep before he got up and went down to wait on the front steps for the circus to come along. He promised to be there with the other boys and keep them from fooling or making a noise, or doing anything to wake his father up, or make the constable come. “You see, Pony,” he said, “if you can run off this year, and come back with the circus next year, then a whole lot of fellows can run off. Don’t you see that?”

Pony said he saw that, but he said he wished some of the other fellows were going now, because he did not know any of the circus boys and he was afraid he might feel kind of lonesome. But Jim Leonard said he would soon get acquainted, and, anyway, a year would go before he knew it, and then if the other fellows could get off he would have plenty of company.

As soon as Jim Leonard was gone Pony undressed and got into bed. He was not sleepy, but he thought maybe it would be just as well to rest a little while before the circus procession came along for him; and, anyway, he could not bear to go down-stairs and be with the family when he was going to leave them so soon, and not come back for a whole year.

After a good while, or about the time he usually came in from playing, he heard his mother saying: “Where in the world is Pony? Has he come in yet? Have you seen him, girls? Pony! Pony!” she called.

But somehow Pony could not get his voice up out of his throat; he wanted to answer her, but he could not speak. He heard her say, “Go out to the front steps, girls, and see if you can see him,” and then he heard her coming up the stairs; and she came into his room, and when she saw him lying there in bed, she said: “Why, I believe in my heart the child’s asleep! Pony! Are you awake?”

Pony made out to say no, and his mother said: “My! what a fright you gave me! Why didn’t you answer me? Are you sick, Pony? Your father said you didn’t seem well at the circus; and you didn’t eat any supper, hardly.”

Pony said he was first-rate, but he spoke very low, and his mother came up and sat down on the side of his bed.

“What is the matter, child?” She bent over and felt his forehead. “No, you haven’t got a bit of fever,” she said, and she kissed him, and began to tumble his short black hair in the way she had, and she got one of his hands between her two, and kept rubbing it. “But you’ve had a long, tiresome day, and that’s why you’ve gone to bed, I suppose. But if you feel the least sick, Pony, I’ll send for the doctor.”

Pony said he was not sick at all; just tired; and that was true; he felt as if he never wanted to get up again.

His mother put her arm under his neck, and pressed her face close down to his, and said very low: “Pony dear, you don’t feel hard toward your mother for what she did the other night?”

He knew she meant boxing his ears, when he was not to blame, and he said: “Oh no,” and then he threw his arms round her neck and cried; and she told him not to cry, and that she would never do such a thing again; but she was really so frightened she did not know what she was doing.

When he quieted down, she said: “Now say your prayers, Pony, ‘Our Father,’” and she said, “Our Father” all through with him, and after that, “Now I lay me,” just as when he was a very little fellow. After they had finished she stooped over and kissed him again, and when he turned his face into his pillow she kept smoothing his hair with her hand for about a minute. Then she went away.

Pony could hear them stirring about for a good while down-stairs. His father came in from uptown at last, and asked: “Has Pony come in?”

And his mother said; “Yes, he’s up in bed. I wouldn’t disturb him, Henry. He’s asleep by this time.”

His father said: “I don’t know what to make of the boy. If he keeps on acting so strangely I shall have the doctor see him in the morning.”

Pony felt dreadfully to think how far away from them he should be in the morning, and he would have given anything if he could have gone down to his father and mother and told them what he was going to do. But it did not seem as if he could.

By-and-by he began to be sleepy, and then he dozed off, but he thought it was hardly a minute before he heard the circus band, and knew that the procession was coming for him. He jumped out of bed and put on his things as fast as he could; but his roundabout had only one sleeve to it, somehow, and he had to button the lower buttons of his trousers to keep it on. He got his bundle and stole down to the front door without seeming to touch his feet to anything, and when he got out on the front steps he saw the circus magician coming along. By that time the music had stopped and Pony could not see any procession. The magician had on a tall, peaked hat, like a witch. He took up the whole street, he was so wide in the black glazed gown that hung from his arms when he stretched them out, for he seemed to be groping along that way, with his wand in one hand, like a blind man.

He kept saying in a kind of deep, shaking voice, “It’s all glory; it’s all glory,” and the sound of those words froze Pony’s blood. He tried to get back into the house again, so that the magician should not find him, but when he felt for the door-knob there was no door there anywhere; nothing but a smooth wall. Then he sat down on the steps and tried to shrink up so little that the magician would miss him; but he saw his wide goggles getting nearer and nearer; and then his father and the doctor were standing by him looking down at him, and the doctor said:

“He has been walking in his sleep; he must be bled,” and he got out his lancet, when Pony heard his mother calling: “Pony, Pony! What’s the matter? Have you got the nightmare?” and he woke up, and found it was just morning.

The sun was shining in at his window, and it made him so glad to think that by this time the circus was far away and he was not with it, that he hardly knew what to do.

He was not very well for two or three days afterward, and his mother let him stay out of school to see whether he was really going to be sick or not. When he went back most of the fellows had forgotten that he had been going to run off with the circus. Some of them that happened to think of it plagued him a little and asked how he liked being a circus actor.

Hen Billard was the worst; he said he reckoned the circus magician got scared when he saw what a whaler Pony was, and told the circus men that they would have to get a new tent to hold him; and that was the reason why they didn’t take him. Archy Hawkins said: “How long did you have to wait on the front steps, Pony dear?” But after that he was pretty good to him, and said he reckoned they had better not any of them pretend that Pony had not tried to run off if they had not been up to see.

Pony himself could never be exactly sure whether he had waited on the front steps and seen the circus magician or not. Sometimes it seemed all of it like a dream, and sometimes only part of it. Jim Leonard tried to help him make it out, but they could not. He said it was a pity he had overslept himself, for if he had come to bid Pony good-bye, the way he said, then he could have told just how much of it was a dream and how much was not.

JIM LEONARD’S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

Jim Leonard’s stable used to stand on the flat near the river, and on a rise of ground above it stood Jim Leonard’s log-cabin. The boys called it Jim Leonard’s log-cabin, but it was really his mother’s, and the stable was hers, too. It was a log stable, but up where the gable began the logs stopped, and it was weather-boarded the rest of the way, and the roof was shingled.

Jim Leonard said it was all logs once, and that the roof was loose clapboards, held down by logs that ran across them, like the roofs in the early times, before there were shingles or nails, or anything, in the country. But none of the oldest boys had ever seen it like that, and you had to take Jim Leonard’s word for it if you wanted to believe it. The little fellows nearly all did; but everybody said afterward it was a good thing for Jim Leonard that it was not that kind of roof when he had his hair-breadth escape on it. He said himself that he would not have cared if it had been; but that was when it was all over, and his mother had whipped him, and everything, and he was telling the boys about it.

He said that in his Pirate Book lots of fellows on rafts got to land when they were shipwrecked, and that the old-fashioned roof would have been just like a raft, anyway, and he could have steered it right across the river to Delorac’s Island as easy! Pony Baker thought very likely he could, but Hen Billard said:

“Well, why didn’t you do it, with the kind of a roof you had?”

Some of the boys mocked Jim Leonard; but a good many of them thought he could have done it if he could have got into the eddy that there was over by the island. If he could have landed there, once, he could have camped out and lived on fish till the river fell.

It was that spring, about fifty-four years ago, when the freshet, which always came in the spring, was the worst that anybody could remember. The country above the Boy’s Town was under water for miles and miles. The river-bottoms were flooded so that the corn had to be all planted over again when the water went down. The freshet tore away pieces of orchard, and apple-trees in bloom came sailing along with logs and fence-rails and chicken-coops, and pretty soon dead cows and horses. There was a dog chained to a dog-kennel that went by, howling awfully; the boys would have given anything if they could have saved him, but the yellow river whirled him out of sight behind the middle pier of the bridge, which everybody was watching from the bank, expecting it to go any minute. The water was up within four or five feet of the bridge, and the boys believed that if a good big log had come along and hit it, the bridge would have been knocked loose from its piers and carried down the river.

Perhaps it would, and perhaps it would not. The boys all ran to watch it as soon as school was out, and stayed till they had to go to supper. After supper some of their mothers let them come back and stay till bedtime, if they would promise to keep a full yard back from the edge of the bank. They could not be sure just how much a yard was, and they nearly all sat down on the edge and let their legs hang over.

Jim Leonard was there, holloing and running up and down the bank, and showing the other boys things away out in the river that nobody else could see; he said he saw a man out there. He had not been to supper, and he had not been to school all day, which might have been the reason why he would rather stay with the men and watch the bridge than go home to supper; his mother would have been waiting for him with a sucker from the pear-tree. He told the boys that while they were gone he went out with one of the men on the bridge as far as the middle pier, and it shook like a leaf; he showed with his hand how it shook.

Jim Leonard was a fellow who believed he did all kinds of things that he would like to have done; and the big boys just laughed. That made Jim Leonard mad, and he said that as soon as the bridge began to go, he was going to run out on it and go with it; and then they would see whether he was a liar or not! They mocked him and danced round him till he cried. But Pony Baker, who had come with his father, believed that Jim Leonard would really have done it; and at any rate, he felt sorry for him when Jim cried.

He stayed later than any of the little fellows, because his father was with him, and even all the big boys had gone home except Hen Billard, when Pony left Jim Leonard on the bank and stumbled sleepily away, with his hand in his father’s.

When Pony was gone, Hen Billard said: “Well, going to stay all night, Jim?”

And Jim Leonard answered back, as cross as could be, “Yes, I am!” And he said the men who were sitting up to watch the bridge were going to give him some of their coffee, and that would keep him awake. But perhaps he thought this because he wanted some coffee so badly. He was awfully hungry, for he had not had anything since breakfast, except a piece of bread-and-butter that he got Pony Baker to bring him in his pocket when he came down from school at noontime.

Hen Billard said, “Well, I suppose I won’t see you any more, Jim; good-bye,” and went away laughing; and after a while one of the men saw Jim Leonard hanging about, and asked him what he wanted there at that time of night; and Jim could not say he wanted coffee, and so there was nothing for him to do but go. There was nowhere for him to go but home, and he sneaked off in the dark.

When he came in sight of the cabin he could not tell whether he would rather have his mother waiting for him with a whipping and some supper, or get to bed somehow with neither. He climbed softly over the back fence and crept up to the back door, but it was fast; then he crept round to the front door, and that was fast, too. There was no light in the house, and it was perfectly still.

All of a sudden it struck him that he could sleep in the stable-loft, and he thought what a fool he was not to have thought of it before. The notion brightened him up so that he got the gourd that hung beside the well-curb and took it out to the stable with him; for now he remembered that the cow would be there, unless she was in somebody’s garden-patch or cornfield.

He noticed as he walked down toward the stable that the freshet had come up over the flat, and just before the door he had to wade. But he was in his bare feet, and he did not care; if he thought anything, he thought that his mother would not come out to milk till the water went down, and he would be safe till then from the whipping he must take, sooner or later, for playing hooky.

Sure enough, the old cow was in the stable, and she gave Jim Leonard a snort of welcome and then lowed anxiously. He fumbled through the dark to her side, and began to milk her. She had been milked only a few hours before, and so he got only a gourdful from her. But it was all strippings, and rich as cream, and it was smoking warm. It seemed to Jim Leonard that it went down to his very toes when he poured it into his throat, and it made him feel so good that he did not know what to do.

There really was not anything for him to do but to climb up into the loft by the ladder in the corner of the stable, and lie down on the old last year’s fodder. The rich, warm milk made Jim Leonard awfully sleepy, and he dropped off almost as soon as his head touched the cornstalks. The last thing he remembered was the hoarse roar of the freshet outside, and that was a lulling music in his ears.

The next thing he knew, and he hardly knew that, was a soft, jolting, sinking motion, first to one side and then to the other; then he seemed to be going down, down, straight down, and then to be drifting off into space. He rubbed his eyes and found it was full daylight, although it was the daylight of early morning; and while he lay looking out of the stable-loft window and trying to make out what it all meant, he felt a wash of cold water along his back, and his bed of fodder melted away under him and around him, and some loose planks of the loft floor swam weltering out of the window. Then he knew what had happened. The flood had stolen up while he slept, and sapped the walls of the stable; the logs had given way, one after another, and had let him down, with the roof, into the water.

He got to his feet as well as he could, and floundered over the rising and falling boards to the window in the floating gable. One look outside showed him his mother’s log-cabin safe on its rise of ground, and at the corner the old cow, that must have escaped through the stable door he had left open, and passed the night among the cabbages. She seemed to catch sight of Jim Leonard when he put his head out, and she lowed to him.

Jim Leonard did not stop to make any answer. He clambered out of the window and up onto the ridge of the roof, and there, in the company of a large gray rat, he set out on the strangest voyage a boy ever made. In a few moments the current swept him out into the middle of the river, and he was sailing down between his native shore on one side and Delorac’s Island on the other.

All round him seethed and swirled the yellow flood in eddies and ripples, where drift of all sorts danced and raced. His vessel, such as it was, seemed seaworthy enough. It held securely together, fitting like a low, wide cup over the water, and perhaps finding some buoyancy from the air imprisoned in it above the window. But Jim Leonard was not satisfied, and so far from being proud of his adventure, he was frightened worse even than the rat which shared it. As soon as he could get his voice, he began to shout for help to the houses on the empty shores, which seemed to fly backward on both sides while he lay still on the gulf that swashed around him, and tried to drown his voice before it swallowed him up. At the same time the bridge, which had looked so far off when he first saw it, was rushing swiftly toward him, and getting nearer and nearer.

He wondered what had become of all the people and all the boys. He thought that if he were safe there on shore he should not be sleeping in bed while somebody was out in the river on a roof, with nothing but a rat to care whether he got drowned or not.

Where was Hen Billard, that always made fun so; or Archy Hawkins, that pretended to be so good-natured; or Pony Baker, that seemed to like a fellow so much? He began to call for them by name: “Hen Billard — O Hen! Help, help! Archy Hawkins — O Archy! I’m drowning! Pony, Pony — O Pony! Don’t you see me, Pony?”

He could see the top of Pony Baker’s house, and he thought what a good, kind man Pony’s father was. Surely he would try to save him; and Jim Leonard began to yell: “O Mr. Baker! Look here, Mr. Baker! It’s Jim Leonard, and I’m floating down the river on a roof! Save me, Mr. Baker, save me! Help, help, somebody! Fire! Fire! Fire! Murder! Fire!”

By this time he was about crazy, and did not half know what he was saying. Just in front of where Hen Billard’s grandmother lived, on the street that ran along the top of the bank, the roof got caught in the branches of a tree which had drifted down and stuck in the bottom of the river so that the branches waved up and down as the current swashed through them. Jim Leonard was glad of anything that would stop the roof, and at first he thought he would get off on the tree. That was what the rat did. Perhaps the rat thought Jim Leonard really was crazy and he had better let him have the roof to himself; but the rat saw that he had made a mistake, and he jumped back again after he had swung up and down on a limb two or three times. Jim Leonard felt awfully when the rat first got into the tree, for he remembered how it said in the Pirate Book that rats always leave a sinking ship, and now he believed that he certainly was gone. But that only made him hollo the louder, and he holloed so loud that at last he made somebody hear.

It was Hen Billard’s grandmother, and she put her head out of the window with her nightcap on, to see what the matter was. Jim Leonard caught sight of her, and he screamed: “Fire, fire, fire! I’m drownding, Mrs. Billard! Oh, do somebody come!”

Hen Billard’s grandmother just gave one yell of “Fire! The world’s a-burnin’ up, Hen Billard, and you layin’ there sleepin’ and not helpin’ a bit! Somebody’s out there in the river!” and she rushed into the room where Hen was, and shook him.

He bounced out of bed and pulled on his pantaloons, and was down-stairs in a minute. He ran bareheaded over to the bank, and when Jim Leonard saw him coming he holloed ten times as loud: “It’s me, Hen! It’s Jim Leonard! Oh, do get somebody to come out and save me! Fire!”

As soon as Hen heard that, and felt sure it was not a dream, which he did in about half a second, he began to yell, too, and to say: “How did you get there? Fire, fire, fire! What are you on? Fire! Are you in a tree, or what? Fire, fire! Are you in a flat-boat? Fire, fire, fire! If I had a skiff — fire!”

He kept racing up and down the bank, and back and forth between the bank and the houses. The river was almost up to the top of the bank, and it looked a mile wide. Down at the bridge you could hardly see any light between the water and the bridge.

Pretty soon people began to look out of their doors and windows, and Hen Billard’s grandmother kept screaming: “The world’s a-burnin’ up! The river’s on fire!” Then boys came out of their houses; and then men with no hats on; and then women and girls, with their hair half down. The fire-bells began to ring, and in less than five minutes both the fire companies were on the shore, with the men at the brakes and the foremen of the companies holloing through their trumpets.

Then Jim Leonard saw what a good thing it was that he had thought of holloing fire. He felt sure now that they would save him somehow, and he made up his mind to save the rat, too, and pet it, and maybe go around and exhibit it. He would name it Bolivar; it was just the color of the elephant Bolivar that came to the Boy’s Town every year. These things whirled through his brain while he watched two men setting out in a skiff toward him.

They started from the shore a little above him, and they meant to row slanting across to his tree, but the current, when they got fairly into it, swept them far below, and they were glad to row back to land again without ever getting anywhere near him. At the same time, the tree-top where his roof was caught was pulled southward by a sudden rush of the torrent; it opened, and the roof slipped out, with Jim Leonard and the rat on it. They both joined in one squeal of despair as the river leaped forward with them, and a dreadful “Oh!” went up from the people on the bank.

Some of the firemen had run down to the bridge when they saw that the skiff was not going to be of any use, and one of them had got out of the window of the bridge onto the middle pier, with a long pole in his hand. It had an iron hook at the end, and it was the kind of pole that the men used to catch driftwood with and drag it ashore. When the people saw Blue Bob with that pole in his hand, they understood what he was up to. He was going to wait till the water brought the roof with Jim Leonard on it down to the bridge, and then catch the hook into the shingles and pull it up to the pier. The strongest current set close in around the middle pier, and the roof would have to pass on one side or the other. That was what Blue Bob argued out in his mind when he decided that the skiff would never reach Jim Leonard, and he knew that if he could not save him that way, nothing could save him.

Blue Bob must have had a last name, but none of the little fellows knew what it was. Everybody called him Blue Bob because he had such a thick, black beard that when he was just shaved his face looked perfectly blue. He knew all about the river and its ways, and if it had been of any use to go out with a boat, he would have gone. That was what all the boys said, when they followed Blue Bob to the bridge and saw him getting out on the pier. He was the only person that the watchman had let go on the bridge for two days.

The water was up within three feet of the floor, and if Jim Leonard’s roof slipped by Blue Bob’s guard and passed under the bridge, it would scrape Jim Leonard off, and that would be the last of him.

All the time the roof was coming nearer the bridge, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, just as it got into an eddy or into the current; once it seemed almost to stop, and swayed completely round; then it just darted forward.

Blue Bob stood on the very point of the pier, where the strong stone-work divided the current, and held his hooked pole ready to make a clutch at the roof, whichever side it took. Jim Leonard saw him there, but although he had been holloing and yelling and crying all the time, now he was still. He wanted to say, “O Bob, save me!” but he could not make a sound.

It seemed to him that Bob was going to miss him when he made a lunge at the roof on the right side of the pier; it seemed to him that the roof was going down the left side; but he felt it quiver and stop, and then it gave a loud crack and went to pieces, and flung itself away upon the whirling and dancing flood. At first Jim Leonard thought he had gone with it; but it was only the rat that tried to run up Blue Bob’s pole, and slipped off into the water; and then somehow Jim was hanging onto Blue Bob’s hands and scrambling onto the bridge.

Blue Bob always said he never saw any rat, and a good many people said there never was any rat on the roof with Jim Leonard; they said that he just made the rat up.

He did not mention the rat himself for several days; he told Pony Baker that he did not think of it at first, he was so excited.

Pony asked his father what he thought, and Pony’s father said that it might have been the kind of rat that people see when they have been drinking too much, and that Blue Bob had not seen it because he had signed the temperance pledge.

But this was a good while after. At the time the people saw Jim Leonard standing safe with Blue Bob on the pier, they set up a regular election cheer, and they would have believed anything Jim Leonard said. They all agreed that Blue Bob had a right to go home with Jim and take him to his mother, for he had saved Jim’s life, and he ought to have the credit of it.

Before this, and while everybody supposed that Jim Leonard would surely be drowned, some of the people had gone up to his mother’s cabin to prepare her for the worst. She did not seem to understand exactly, and she kept round getting breakfast, with her old clay pipe in her mouth; but when she got it through her head, she made an awful face, and dropped her pipe on the door-stone and broke it; and then she threw her check apron over her head and sat down and cried.

But it took so long for her to come to this that the people had not got over comforting her and trying to make her believe that it was all for the best, when Blue Bob came up through the bars with his hand on Jim’s shoulder, and about all the boys in town tagging after them.

Jim’s mother heard the hurrahing and pulled off her apron, and saw that Jim was safe and sound there before her. She gave him a look that made him slip round behind Blue Bob, and she went in and got a table-knife, and she came out and went to the pear-tree and cut a sucker.

She said, “I’ll learn that limb to sleep in a cow-barn when he’s got a decent bed in the house!” and then she started to come toward Jim Leonard.

II

LIFE IN A BOY’S TOWN

THE TOWN

I call it a Boy’s Town because I wish it to appear to the reader as a town appears to a boy from his third to his eleventh year, when he seldom, if ever, catches a glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man, and has the most distorted and mistaken views of most things.... Some people remain in this condition as long as they live, and keep the ignorance of childhood, after they have lost its innocence; heaven has been shut, but the earth is still a prison to them. These will not know what I mean by much that I shall have to say; but I hope that the ungrown-up children will, and that the boys of to-day will like to know what a boy of forty years ago was like, even if he had no very exciting adventures or thread-bare escapes; perhaps I mean hair-breadth escapes; but it is the same thing — they have been used so often. I shall try to describe him very minutely in his daily doings and dreamings, and it may amuse them to compare these doings and dreamings with their own. For convenience, I shall call this boy, my boy; but I hope he might have been almost anybody’s boy; and I mean him sometimes for a boy in general, as well as a boy in particular.

THE FIRST LOCK

It seems to me that my Boy’s Town was a town peculiarly adapted for a boy to be a boy in. It had a river, the great Miami River, which was as blue as the sky when it was not as yellow as gold; and it had another river, called the Old River, which was the Miami’s former channel, and which held an island in its sluggish loop; the boys called it The Island; and it must have been about the size of Australia; perhaps it was not so large. Then this town had a Canal, and a Canal-Basin, and a First Lock and a Second Lock; you could walk out to the First Lock, but the Second Lock was at the edge of the known world, and, when my boy was very little, the biggest boy had never been beyond it. Then it had a Hydraulic, which brought the waters of Old River for mill-power through the heart of the town, from a Big Reservoir and a Little Reservoir; the Big Reservoir was as far off as the Second Lock, and the Hydraulic ran under mysterious culverts at every street-crossing. All these streams and courses had fish in them at all seasons, and all summer long they had boys in them, and now and then a boy in winter, when the thin ice of the mild Southern Ohio winter let him through with his skates. Then there were the Commons: a wide expanse of open fields, where the cows were pastured, and the boys flew their kites, and ran races, and practised for their circuses in the tan-bark rings of the real circuses.

EARLIEST MEMORIES

Some of my boy’s memories reach a time earlier than his third year, and relate to the little Ohio River hamlet where he was born, and where his mother’s people, who were river-faring folk, all lived. Every two or three years the river rose and flooded the village; and his grandmother’s household was taken out of the second-story window in a skiff; but no one minded a trivial inconvenience like that, any more than the Romans have minded the annual freshet of the Tiber for the last three or four thousand years. When the waters went down the family returned and scrubbed out the five or six inches of rich mud they had left. In the mean time it was a godsend to all boys of an age to enjoy it; but it was nothing out of the order of Providence. So, if my boy ever saw a freshet, it naturally made no impression upon him. What he remembered was something much more important, and that was waking up one morning and seeing a peach-tree in bloom through the window beside his bed; and he was always glad that this vision of beauty was his very earliest memory. All his life he has never seen a peach-tree in bloom without a swelling of the heart, without some fleeting sense that

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”

Over the spot where the little house once stood a railroad has drawn its erasing lines, and the house itself was long since taken down and built up brick by brick in quite another place; but the blooming peach-tree glows before his childish eyes untouched by time or change. The tender, pathetic pink of its flowers repeated itself many long years afterward in the paler tints of the almond blossoms in Italy, but always with a reminiscence of that dim past, and the little coal-smoky town on the banks of the Ohio.

Perversely blended with that vision of the blooming peach is a glimpse of a pet deer in the kitchen of the same little house, with its head up and its antlers erect, as if he meditated offence. My boy might never have seen him so; he may have had the vision at second hand; but it is certain that there was a pet deer in the family, and that he was as likely to have come into the kitchen by the window as by the door. One of the boy’s uncles had seen this deer swimming the Mississippi, far to the southward, and had sent out a yawl and captured him, and brought him home. He began a checkered career of uselessness when they were ferrying him over from Wheeling in a skiff, by trying to help wear the pantaloons of the boy who was holding him; he put one of his fore-legs in at the watch-pocket; but it was disagreeable to the boy and ruinous to the trousers. He grew very tame, and butted children over, right and left, in the village streets; and he behaved like one of the family whenever he got into a house; he ate the sugar out of the bowl on the table, and plundered the pantry of its sweet cakes. One day a dog got after him, and he jumped over the river-bank and broke his leg, and had to be shot.

HOME LIFE

The house gave even to him a sense of space unknown before, and he could recall his mother’s satisfaction in it. He has often been back there in dreams, and found it on the old scale of grandeur; but no doubt it was a very simple affair. The fortunes of a Whig editor in a place so overwhelmingly Democratic as the Boy’s Town were not such as could have warranted his living in a palace; and he must have been poor, as the world goes now. But the family always lived in abundance, and in their way they belonged to the employing class; that is, the father had men to work for him. On the other hand, he worked with them; and the boys, as they grew old enough, were taught to work with them, too. My boy grew old enough very young; and was put to use in the printing-office before he was ten years of age. This was not altogether because he was needed there, I dare say, but because it was part of his father’s Swedenborgian philosophy that every one should fulfil a use; I do not know that when the boy wanted to go swimming, or hunting, or skating, it consoled him much to reflect that the angels in the highest heaven delighted in uses; nevertheless, it was good for him to be of use, though maybe not so much use.

If his mother did her own work, with help only now and then from a hired girl, that was the custom of the time and country; and her memory was always the more reverend to him, because whenever he looked back at her in those dim years, he saw her about some of those household offices which are so beautiful to a child. She was always the best and tenderest mother, and her love had the heavenly art of making each child feel itself the most important, while she was partial to none. In spite of her busy days she followed their father in his religion and literature, and at night, when her long toil was over, she sat with the children and listened while he read aloud.

The first book my boy remembered to have heard him read was Moore’s Lalla Rookh, of which he formed but a vague notion, though while he struggled after its meaning he took all its music in, and began at once to make rhymes of his own. He had no conception of literature except the pleasure there was in making it; and he had no outlook into the world of it, which must have been pretty open to his father. The father read aloud some of Dickens’ Christmas stories, then new; and the boy had a good deal of trouble with the Haunted Man. One rarest night of all, the family sat up till two o’clock, listening to a novel that my boy long ago forgot the name of, if he ever knew its name. It was all about a will, forged or lost, and there was a great scene in court, and after that the mother declared that she could not go to bed till she heard the end. His own first reading was in history. At nine years of age he read the history of Greece, and the history of Rome, and he knew that Goldsmith wrote them. One night his father told the boys all about Don Quixote; and a little while after he gave my boy the book. He read it over and over again; but he did not suppose it was a novel. It was his elder brother who read novels, and a novel was like Handy Andy, or Harry Lorrequer, or the Bride of Lammermoor. His brother had another novel which they preferred to either; it was in Harper’s old “Library of Select Novels,” and was called Alamance; or, the Great and Final Experiment, and it was about the life of some sort of community in North Carolina. It bewitched them, and though my boy could not afterward recall a single fact or figure in it, he could bring before his mind’s eye every trait of its outward aspect.

All this went along with great and continued political excitement, and with some glimpses of the social problem. It was very simple then; nobody was very rich, and nobody was in want; but somehow, as the boy grew older, he began to discover that there were differences, even in the little world about him; some were higher and some were lower. From the first he was taught by precept and example to take the side of the lower. As the children were denied oftener than they were indulged, the margin of their own abundance must have been narrower than they ever knew then; but if they had been of the most prosperous, their bent in this matter would have been the same. Once there was a church festival, or something of that sort, and there was a good deal of the provision left over, which it was decided should be given to the poor. This was very easy, but it was not so easy to find the poor whom it should be given to. At last a hard-working widow was chosen to receive it; the ladies carried it to her front door and gave it her, and she carried it to her back door and threw it into the alley. No doubt she had enough without it, but there were circumstances of indignity or patronage attending the gift which were recognized in my boy’s home, and which helped afterward to make him doubtful of all giving, except the humblest, and restive with a world in which there need be any giving at all.

THE RIVER

It seems to me that the best way to get at the heart of any boy’s town is to take its different watercourses and follow them into it.

The house where my boy first lived was not far from the river, and he must have seen it often before he noticed it. But he was not aware of it till he found it under the bridge. Without the river there could not have been a bridge; the fact of the bridge may have made him look for the river; but the bridge is foremost in his mind. It is a long, wooden tunnel, with two roadways, and a foot-path on either side of these; there is a toll-house at each end, and from one to the other it is about as far as from the Earth to the planet Mars. On the western shore of the river is a smaller town than the Boy’s Town, and in the perspective the entrance of the bridge on that side is like a dim little doorway. The timbers are of a hugeness to strike fear into the heart of the boldest little boy; and there is something awful even about the dust in the roadways; soft and thrillingly cool to the boy’s bare feet, it lies thick in a perpetual twilight, streaked at intervals by the sun that slants in at the high, narrow windows under the roof; it has a certain potent, musty smell. The bridge has three piers, and at low water hardier adventurers than he wade out to the middle pier; some heroes even fish there, standing all day on the loose rocks about the base of the pier. He shudders to see them, and aches with wonder how they will get ashore. Once he is there when a big boy wades back from the middle pier, where he has been to rob a goose’s nest; he has some loose silver change in his wet hand, and my boy understands that it has come out of one of the goose eggs. This fact, which he never thought of questioning, gets mixed up in his mind with an idea of riches, of treasure-trove, in the cellar of an old house that has been torn down near the end of the bridge.

The river had its own climate, and this climate was of course much such a climate as the boys, for whom nature intended the river, would have chosen. I do not believe it was ever winter there, though it was sometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for the caves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through the turf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had the joy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended to live on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boy whose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn or to bake the potatoes in their caves, but there was the fire, and the draught was magnificent. The light of the red flames painted the little, happy, foolish faces, so long since wrinkled and grizzled with age, or mouldered away to dust, as the boys huddled before them under the bank, and fed them with the drift, or stood patient of the heat and cold in the afternoon light of some vast Saturday waning to nightfall.

The river-climate, with these autumnal intervals, was made up of a quick, eventful springtime, followed by the calm of a cloudless summer that seemed never to end. But the spring, short as it was, had its great attractions, and chief of these was the freshet which it brought to the river. They would hear somehow that the river was rising, and then the boys, who had never connected its rise with the rains they must have been having, would all go down to its banks and watch the swelling waters. These would be yellow and thick, and the boiling current would have smooth, oily eddies, where pieces of drift would whirl round and round, and then escape and slip down the stream. There were saw-logs and whole trees with their branching tops, lengths of fence and hen-coops and pig-pens; once there was a stable; and if the flood continued, there began to come swollen bodies of horses and cattle. This must have meant serious loss to the people living on the river-bottoms above, but the boys counted it all gain. They cheered the objects as they floated by, and they were breathless with the excitement of seeing the men who caught fence-rails and cord-wood, and even saw-logs, with iron prongs at the points of long poles, as they stood on some jutting point of shore and stretched far out over the flood. The boys exulted in the turbid spread of the stream, which filled its low western banks and stole over their tops, and washed into all the hollow places along its shores, and shone among the trunks of the sycamores on Delorac’s Island, which was almost of the geographical importance of The Island in Old River. When the water began to go down their hearts sank with it; and they gave up the hope of seeing the bridge carried away. Once the river rose to within a few feet of it, so that if the right piece of drift had been there to do its duty, the bridge might have been torn from its piers and swept down the raging tide into those unknown gulfs to the southward. Many a time they went to bed full of hope that it would at least happen in the night, and woke to learn with shame and grief in the morning that the bridge was still there, and the river was falling. It was a little comfort to know that some of the big boys had almost seen it go, watching as far into the night as nine o’clock with the men who sat up near the bridge till daylight: men of leisure and public spirit, but not perhaps the leading citizens.

SWIMMING

There must have been a tedious time between the going down of the flood and the first days when the water was warm enough for swimming; but it left no trace. The boys are standing on the shore while the freshet rushes by, and then they are in the water, splashing, diving, ducking; it is like that; so that I do not know just how to get in that period of fishing which must always have come between. There were not many fish in that part of the Miami; my boy’s experience was full of the ignominy of catching shiners and suckers, or, at the best, mudcats, as they called the yellow catfish; but there were boys, of those who cursed and swore, who caught sunfish, as they called the bream; and there were men who were reputed to catch at will, as it were, silvercats and river-bass. They fished with minnows, which they kept in battered tin buckets that they did not allow you even to touch, or hardly to look at; my boy scarcely breathed in their presence; when one of them got up to cast his line in a new place, the boys all ran, and then came slowly back. These men often carried a flask of liquid that had the property, when taken inwardly, of keeping the damp out. The boys respected them for their ability to drink whiskey, and thought it a fit and honorable thing that they should now and then fall into the river over the brinks where they had set their poles. But they disappear like persons in a dream, and their fishing-time vanishes with them, and the swimming-time is in full possession of the river, and of all the other waters of the Boy’s Town.

The swimming-holes in the river were the greatest favorites. My boy could not remember when he began to go into them, though it certainly was before he could swim. There was a time when he was afraid of getting in over his head; but he did not know just when he learned to swim, any more than he knew when he learned to read; he could not swim, and then he could swim; he could not read, and then he could read; but I dare say the reading came somewhat before the swimming. Yet the swimming must have come very early, and certainly it was kept up with continual practise; he swam quite as much as he read; perhaps more. The boys had deep swimming-holes and shallow ones; and over the deep ones there was always a spring-board, from which they threw somersaults, or dived straight down into the depths, where there were warm and cold currents mysteriously interwoven. They believed that these deep holes were infested by water-snakes, though they never saw any, and they expected to be bitten by snapping-turtles, though this never happened. Fiery dragons could not have kept them out; gallynippers, whatever they were, certainly did not; they were believed to abound at the bottom of the deep holes; but the boys never stayed long in the deep holes, and they preferred the shallow places, where the river broke into a long ripple (they called it riffle) on its gravelly bed, and where they could at once soak and bask in the musical rush of the sunlit waters. I have heard people in New England blame all the Western rivers for being yellow and turbid; but I know that after the spring floods, when the Miami had settled down to its summer business with the boys, it was as clear and as blue as if it were spilled out of the summer sky. The boys liked the riffle because they could stay in so long there, and there were little land-locked pools and shallows, where the water was even warmer, and they could stay in longer. At most places under the banks there was clay of different colors, which they used for war-paint in their Indian fights; and after they had their Indian fights they could rush screaming and clattering into the riffle. When the stream had washed them clean down to their red sunburn or their leathern tan, they could paint up again and have more Indian fights.

I wonder what sign the boys who read this have for challenging or inviting one another to go in swimming. The boys in the Boy’s Town used to make the motion of swimming with both arms; or they held up the forefinger and middle-finger in the form of a swallow-tail; they did this when it was necessary to be secret about it, as in school, and when they did not want the whole crowd of boys to come along; and often when they just pretended they did not want some one to know. They really had to be secret at times, for some of the boys were not allowed to go in at all; others were forbidden to go in more than once or twice a day; and as they all had to go in at least three or four times a day, some sort of sign had to be used that was understood among themselves alone. Since this is a true history, I had better own that they nearly all, at one time or other, must have told lies about it, either before or after the fact, some habitually, some only in great extremity. Here and there a boy, like my boy’s elder brother, would not tell lies at all, even about going in swimming; but by far the greater number bowed to their hard fate, and told them. They promised that they would not go in, and then they said that they had not been in; but Sin, for which they had made this sacrifice, was apt to betray them. Either they got their shirts on wrong side out in dressing, or else, while they were in, some enemy came upon them and tied their shirts. There are few cruelties which public opinion in the boy’s world condemns, but I am glad to remember, to their honor, that there were not many in that Boy’s Town who would tie shirts; and I fervently hope that there is no boy now living who would do it. As the crime is probably extinct, I will say that in those wicked days, if you were such a miscreant, and there was some boy you hated, you stole up and tied the hardest kind of a knot in one arm or both arms of his shirt. Then, if the Evil One put it into your heart, you soaked the knot in water, and pounded it with a stone.

I am glad to know that in the days when he was thoughtless and senseless enough, my boy never was guilty of any degree of this meanness. It was his brother, I suppose, who taught him to abhor it; and perhaps it was his own suffering from it in part; for he, too, sometimes shed bitter tears over such a knot, as I have seen hapless little wretches do, tearing at it with their nails and gnawing at it with their teeth, knowing that the time was passing when they could hope to hide the fact that they had been in swimming, and foreseeing no remedy but to cut off the sleeve above the knot, or else put on their clothes without the shirt, and trust to untying the knot when it got dry.

There must have been a lurking anxiety in all the boys’ hearts when they went in without leave, or, as my boy was apt to do, when explicitly forbidden. He was not apt at lying, I dare say, and so he took the course of open disobedience. He could not see the danger that filled the home hearts with fear for him, and he must have often broken the law and been forgiven, before Justice one day appeared for him on the river-bank and called him away from his stolen joys. It was an awful moment, and it covered him with shame before his mates, who heartlessly rejoiced, as children do, in the doom which they are escaping. That sin, at least, he fully expiated; and I will whisper to the young people here at the end of the chapter that somehow, soon or late, our sins do overtake us, and insist upon being paid for. That is not the best reason for not sinning, but it is well to know it, and to believe it in our acts as well as our thoughts. You will find people to tell you that things only happen so and so. It may be; only, I know that no good thing ever happened to happen to me when I had done wrong.

SKATING

I am afraid that the young people will think I am telling them too much about swimming. But in the Boy’s Town the boys really led a kind of amphibious life, and as long as the long summer lasted they were almost as much in the water as on the land. The Basin, however, unlike the river, had a winter as well as a summer climate, and one of the very first things that my boy could remember was being on the ice there. He learned to skate, but he did not know when, any more than he knew just the moment of learning to read or to swim. He became passionately fond of skating, and kept at it all day long when there was ice for it, which was not often in those soft winters. They made a very little ice go a long way in the Boy’s Town; and began to use it for skating as soon as there was a glazing of it on the Basin. None of them ever got drowned there; though a boy would often start from one bank and go flying to the other, trusting his speed to save him, while the thin sheet sank and swayed, but never actually broke under him. Usually the ice was not thick enough to have a fire built on it; and it must have been on ice which was just strong enough to bear that my boy skated all one bitter afternoon at Old River, without a fire to warm by. At first his feet were very cold, and then they gradually felt less cold, and at last he did not feel them at all. He thought this very nice, and he told one of the big boys. “Why, your feet are frozen!” said the big boy, and he dragged off my boy’s skates, and the little one ran all the long mile home, crazed with terror, and not knowing what moment his feet might drop off there in the road. His mother plunged them in a bowl of ice-cold water, and then rubbed them with flannel, and so thawed them out; but that could not save him from the pain of their coming to: it was intense, and there must have been a time afterward when he did not use his feet.

His skates themselves were of a sort that I am afraid boys would smile at nowadays. When you went to get a pair of skates forty or fifty years ago, you did not make your choice between a Barney & Berry and an Acme, which fastened on with the turn of a screw or the twist of a clamp. You found an assortment of big and little sizes of solid wood bodies with guttered blades turning up in front with a sharp point, or perhaps curling over above the toe. In this case they sometimes ended in an acorn; if this acorn was of brass, it transfigured the boy who wore that skate; he might have been otherwise all rags and patches, but the brass acorn made him splendid from head to foot. When you had bought your skates, you took them to a carpenter, and stood awe-strickenly about while he pierced the wood with strap-holes; or else you managed to bore them through with a hot iron yourself. Then you took them to a saddler, and got him to make straps for them; that is, if you were rich, and your father let you have a quarter to pay for the job. If not, you put strings through, and tied your skates on. They were always coming off, or getting crosswise of your foot, or feeble-mindedly slumping down on one side of the wood; but it did not matter, if you had a fire on the ice, fed with old barrels and boards and cooper’s shavings, and could sit round it with your skates on, and talk and tell stones, between your flights and races afar; and come whizzing back to it from the frozen distance, and glide, with one foot lifted, almost among the embers.

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

I sometimes wonder how much these have changed since my boy’s time. Of course they differ somewhat from generation to generation, and from East to West and North to South, but not so much, I believe, as grown people are apt to think. Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities, and it has its unwritten usages, which are handed down from old to young, and perpetuated on the same level of years, and are lived into and lived out of, but are binding, through all personal vicissitudes, upon the great body of boys between six and twelve years old. No boy can violate them without losing his standing among the other boys, and he cannot enter into their world without coming under them. He must do this, and must not do that; he obeys, but he does not know why, any more than the far-off savages from whom his customs seem mostly to have come. His world is all in and through the world of men and women, but no man or woman can get into it any more than if it were a world of invisible beings. It has its own ideals and superstitions, and these are often of a ferocity, a depravity, scarcely credible in after-life. It is a great pity that fathers and mothers cannot penetrate that world; but they cannot, and it is only by accident that they can catch some glimpse of what goes on in it. No doubt it will be civilized in time, but it will be very slowly; and in the mean while it is only in some of its milder manners and customs that the boy’s world can be studied.

The first great law was that, whatever happened to you through another boy, whatever hurt or harm he did you, you were to right yourself upon his person if you could; but if he was too big, and you could not hope to revenge yourself, then you were to bear the wrong, not only for that time, but for as many times as he chose to inflict it. To tell the teacher or your mother, or to betray your tormentor to any one outside of the boys’ world, was to prove yourself a cry-baby, without honor or self-respect, and unfit to go with the other fellows. They would have the right to mock you, to point at you, and call “E-e-e, e-e-e, e-e-e!” at you, till you fought them. After that, whether you whipped them or not, there began to be some feeling in your favor again, and they had to stop.

Every boy who came to town from somewhere else, or who moved into a new neighborhood, had to fight the old residents. There was no reason for this, except that he was a stranger, and there appeared to be no other means of making his acquaintance. If he was generally whipped he became subject to the local tribe, as the Delawares were to the Iroquois in the last century; if he whipped the other boys, then they adopted him into their tribe, and he became a leader among them. When you moved away from a neighborhood you did not lose all your rights in it; you did not have to fight when you went back to see the boys, or anything; but if one of them met you in your new precincts you might have to try conclusions with him; and perhaps, if he was a boy who had been in the habit of whipping you, you were quite ready to do so. When my boy’s family left the Smith house, one of the boys from that neighborhood came up to see him at the Falconer house, and tried to carry things with a high hand, as he always had done. Then my boy fought him, quite as if he were not a Delaware and the other boy not an Iroquois, with sovereign rights over him. My boy was beaten, but the difference was that, if he had not been on new ground, he would have been beaten without daring to fight. His mother witnessed the combat, and came out and shamed him for his behavior, and had in the other boy, and made them friends over some sugar-cakes. But after that the boys of the Smith neighborhood understood that my boy would not be whipped without fighting. The home instruction was all against fighting; my boy was taught that it was not only wicked but foolish; that if it was wrong to strike, it was just as wrong to strike back; that two wrongs never made a right, and so on. But all this was not of the least effect with a hot temper amid the trials and perplexities of life in the Boy’s Town.

Their fights were mostly informal scuffles, on and off in a flash, and conducted with none of the ceremony which I have read of concerning the fights of English boys. It was believed that some of the fellows knew how to box, and all the fellows intended to learn, but nobody ever did. The fights sprang usually out of some trouble of the moment; but at times they were arranged to settle some question of moral or physical superiority. Then one boy put a chip on his shoulder and dared the other to knock it off. It took a great while to bring the champions to blows, and I have known the mere preparatory insults of a fight of this kind to wear out the spirit of the combatants and the patience of the spectators, so that not a blow was struck, finally, and the whole affair fell through.

GIRLS

Though they were so quarrelsome among themselves, the boys that my boy went with never molested girls. They mostly ignored them; but they would have scorned to hurt a girl almost as much as they would have scorned to play with one. Of course, while they were very little, they played with girls; and after they began to be big boys, eleven or twelve years old, they began to pay girls some attention; but for the rest they simply left them out of the question, except at parties, when the games obliged them to take some notice of the girls. Even then, however, it was not good form for a boy to be greatly interested in them; and he had to conceal any little fancy he had about this girl or that unless he wanted to be considered soft by the other fellows. When they were having fun they did not want to have any girls around; but in the back-yard a boy might play teeter or seesaw, or some such thing, with his sisters and their friends, without necessarily losing caste, though such things were not encouraged. On the other hand, a boy was bound to defend them against anything that he thought slighting or insulting; and you did not have to verify the fact that anything had been said or done; you merely had to hear that it had.

MOTHERS

The boys had very little to do with the inside of one another’s houses. They would follow a boy to his door, and wait for him to come out; and they would sometimes get him to go in and ask his mother for crullers or sugar-cakes; when they came to see him they never went indoors for him, but stood on the sidewalk and called him with a peculiar cry, something like “E-oo-we, e-oo-we!” and threw stones at trees, or anything, till he came out. If he did not come after a reasonable time, they knew he was not there, or that his mother would not let him come. A fellow was kept in that way, now and then. If a fellow’s mother came to the door the boys always ran.

The mother represented the family sovereignty; the father was seldom seen, and he counted for little or nothing among the outside boys. It was the mother who could say whether a boy might go fishing or in swimming, and she was held a good mother or not according as she habitually said yes or no. There was no other standard of goodness for mothers in the boy’s world, and could be none; and a bad mother might be outwitted by any device that the other boys could suggest to her boy. Such a boy was always willing to listen to any suggestion, and no boy took it hard if the other fellows made fun when their plan got him into trouble at home. If a boy came out after some such experience with his face wet, and his eyes red, and his lips swollen, of course you had to laugh; he expected it, and you expected him to stone you for laughing.

When a boy’s mother had company, he went and hid till the guests were gone, or only came out of concealment to get some sort of shy lunch. If the other fellows’ mothers were there, he might be a little bolder, and bring out cake from the second table. But he had to be pretty careful how he conformed to any of the usages of grown-up society. A fellow who brushed his hair, and put on shoes, and came into the parlor when there was company, was not well seen among the fellows; he was regarded in some degree as a girl-boy; a boy who wished to stand well with other boys kept in the woodshed, and only went in as far as the kitchen to get things for his guests in the back-yard. Yet there were mothers who would make a boy put on a collar when they had company, and disgrace him before the world by making him stay round and help; they acted as if they had no sense and no pity; but such mothers were rare.

Most mothers yielded to public opinion and let their boys leave the house, and wear just what they always wore. I have told how little they wore in summer. Of course in winter they had to put on more things. In those days knickerbockers were unknown, and if a boy had appeared in short pants and long stockings he would have been thought dressed like a circus-actor. Boys wore long pantaloons, like men, as soon as they put off skirts, and they wore jackets or roundabouts such as the English boys still wear at Eton. When the cold weather came they had to put on shoes and stockings, or rather long-legged boots, such as are seen now only among lumbermen and teamsters in the country. Most of the fellows had stoga boots, as heavy as iron and as hard; they were splendid to skate in, they kept your ankles so stiff. Sometimes they greased them to keep the water out; but they never blacked them except on Sunday, and before Saturday they were as red as a rusty stovepipe. At night they were always so wet that you could not get them off without a boot-jack, and you could hardly do it anyway; sometimes you got your brother to help you off with them, and then he pulled you all round the room. In the morning they were dry, but just as hard as stone, and you had to soap the heel of your woollen sock (which your grandmother had knitted for you, or maybe some of your aunts) before you could get your foot in, and sometimes the ears of the boot that you pulled it on by would give way, and you would have to stamp your foot in and kick the toe against the mop-board. Then you gasped and limped round, with your feet like fire, till you could get out and limber your boots up in some water somewhere. About noon your chilblains began.

I have tried to give some notion of the general distribution of comfort, which was never riches, in the Boy’s Town; but I am afraid that I could not paint the simplicity of things there truly without being misunderstood in these days of great splendor and great squalor. Everybody had enough, but nobody had too much; the richest man in town might be worth twenty thousand dollars. There were distinctions among the grown people, and no doubt there were the social cruelties which are the modern expression of the savage spirit otherwise repressed by civilization; but these were unknown among the boys. Savages they were, but not that kind of savages. They valued a boy for his character and prowess, and it did not matter in the least that he was ragged and dirty. Their mothers might not allow him the run of their kitchens quite so freely as some other boys, but the boys went with him just the same, and they never noticed how little he was washed and dressed. The best of them had not an overcoat; and underclothing was unknown among them. When a boy had buttoned up his roundabout, and put on his mittens, and tied his comforter round his neck and over his ears, he was warmly dressed.

A BROTHER

My boy was often kept from being a fool, and worse, by that elder brother of his; and I advise every boy to have an elder brother. Have a brother about four years older than yourself, I should say; and if your temper is hot, and your disposition revengeful, and you are a vain and ridiculous dreamer at the same time that you are eager to excel in feats of strength and games of skill, and to do everything that the other fellows do, and are ashamed to be better than the worst boy in the crowd, your brother can be of the greatest use to you, with his larger experience and wisdom. My boy’s brother seemed to have an ideal of usefulness, while my boy only had an ideal of glory — to wish to help others, while my boy only wished to help himself. My boy would as soon have thought of his father’s doing a wrong thing as of his brother’s doing it; and his brother was a calm light of common-sense, of justice, of truth, while he was a fantastic flicker of gaudy purposes which he wished to make shine before men in their fulfilment. His brother was always doing for him and for the younger children; while my boy only did for himself; he had a very gray mustache before he began to have any conception of the fact that he was sent into the world to serve and to suffer, as well as to rule and enjoy. But his brother seemed to know this instinctively; he bore the yoke in his youth, patiently if not willingly; he shared the anxieties as he parted the cares of his father and mother. Yet he was a boy among boys, too; he loved to swim, to skate, to fish, to forage, and passionately, above all, he loved to hunt; but in everything he held himself in check, that he might hold the younger boys in check; and my boy often repaid his conscientious vigilance with hard words and hard names, such as embitter even the most self-forgiving memories. He kept mechanically within certain laws, and though in his rage he hurled every other name at his brother, he would not call him a fool, because then he would be in danger of hell-fire. If he had known just what Raca meant, he might have called him Raca, for he was not so much afraid of the council; but, as it was, his brother escaped that insult, and held through all a rein upon him, and governed him through his scruples as well as his fears.

His brother was full of inventions and enterprises beyond most other boys, and his undertakings came to the same end of nothingness that awaits all boyish endeavor. He intended to make fireworks and sell them; he meant to raise silkworms; he prepared to take the contract of clearing the new cemetery grounds of stumps by blasting them out with gunpowder. Besides this, he had a plan with another big boy for making money, by getting slabs from the saw-mill, and sawing them up into stove-wood, and selling them to the cooks of canal-boats. The only trouble was that the cooks would not buy the fuel, even when the boys had a half-cord of it all nicely piled up on the canal-bank; they would rather come ashore after dark and take it for nothing. He had a good many other schemes for getting rich that failed; and he wanted to go to California and dig gold; only his mother would not consent. He really did save the Canal-Basin once, when the banks began to give way after a long rain. He saw the break beginning, and ran to tell his father, who had the fire-bells rung. The fire companies came rushing to the rescue, but as they could not put the Basin out with their engines, they all got shovels and kept it in. They did not do this before it had overflowed the street, and run into the cellars of the nearest houses. The water stood two feet deep in the kitchen of my boy’s house, and the yard was flooded so that the boys made rafts and navigated it for a whole day. My boy’s brother got drenched to the skin in the rain, and lots of fellows fell off the rafts.

He belonged to a military company of big boys that had real wooden guns, such as the little boys never could get, and silk oil-cloth caps, and nankeen roundabouts, and white pantaloons with black stripes down the legs; and once they marched out to a boy’s that had a father that had a farm, and he gave them all a free dinner in an arbor before the house: bread-and-butter, and apple-butter, and molasses and pound cake, and peaches and apples; it was splendid. When the excitement about the Mexican War was the highest, the company wanted a fort; and they got a farmer to come and scale off the sod with his plough, in a grassy place there was near a piece of woods, where a good many cows were pastured. They took the pieces of sod, and built them up into the walls of a fort about fifteen feet square; they intended to build them higher than their heads, but they got so eager to have the works stormed that they could not wait, and they commenced having the battle when they had the walls only breast high. There were going to be two parties: one to attack the fort, and the other to defend it, and they were just going to throw sods; but one boy had a real shot-gun, that he was to load up with powder and fire off when the battle got to the worst, so as to have it more like a battle. He thought it would be more like yet if he put in a few shot, and he did it on his own hook. It was a splendid gun, but it would not stand cocked long, and he was resting it on the wall of the fort, ready to fire when the storming-party came on, throwing sods and yelling and holloing; and all at once his gun went off, and a cow that was grazing broadside to the fort gave a frightened bellow, and put up her tail, and started for home. When they found out that the gun, if not the boy, had shot a cow, the Mexicans and Americans both took to their heels; and it was a good thing they did so, for as soon as that cow got home, and the owner found out by the blood on her that she had been shot, though it was only a very slight wound, he was so mad that he did not know what to do, and very likely he would have half killed those boys if he had caught them. He got a plough, and he went out to their fort, and he ploughed it all down flat, so that not one sod remained upon another.

My boy’s brother went to all sorts of places that my boy was too shy to go to; and he associated with much older boys, but there was one boy who, as I have said, was the dear friend of both of them, and that was the boy who came to learn the trade in their father’s printing-office, and who began an historical romance at the time my boy began his great Moorish novel. The first day he came he was put to roll, or ink, the types, while my boy’s brother worked the press, and all day long my boy, from where he was setting type, could hear him telling the story of a book he had read. It was about a person named Monte Cristo, who was a count, and who could do anything. My boy listened with a gnawing literary jealousy of a boy who had read a book that he had never heard of. He tried to think whether it sounded as if it were as great a book as the Conquest of Granada, or Gesta Romanorum; and for a time he kept aloof from this boy because of his envy. Afterward they came together on Don Quixote, but though my boy came to have quite a passionate fondness for him, he was long in getting rid of his grudge against him for his knowledge of Monte Cristo. He was as great a laugher as my boy and his brother, and he liked the same sports, so that two by two, or all three together, they had no end of jokes and fun. He became the editor of a country newspaper, with varying fortunes but steadfast principles, and when the war broke out he went as a private soldier. He soon rose to be an officer, and fought bravely in many battles. Then he came back to a country-newspaper office where, ever after, he continued to fight the battles of right against wrong, till he died not long ago at his post of duty — a true, generous, and lofty soul. He was one of those boys who grow into the men who seem commoner in America than elsewhere, and who succeed far beyond our millionaires and statesmen in realizing the ideal of America in their nobly simple lives. If his story could be faithfully written out, word for word, deed for deed, it would be far more thrilling than that of Monte Cristo, or any hero of romance; and so would the common story of any common life. But we cannot tell these stories, somehow.

A FRIEND

My boy’s closest friend was a boy who was probably never willingly at school in his life, and who had no more relish of literature or learning in him than the open fields, or the warm air of an early spring day. I dare say it was a sense of his kinship with Nature that took my boy with him, and rested his soul from all its wild dreams and vain imaginings. He was like a piece of the genial earth, with no more hint of toiling or spinning in him; willing for anything, but passive, and without force or aim. He lived in a belated log-cabin that stood in the edge of a cornfield on the river-bank, and he seemed, one day when my boy went to find him there, to have a mother, who smoked a cob-pipe, and two or three large sisters who hulked about in the one dim, low room. But the boys had very little to do with each other’s houses, or, for that matter, with each other’s yards. His friend seldom entered my boy’s gate, and never his door; for with all the toleration his father felt for every manner of human creature, he could not see what good the boy was to get from this queer companion. It is certain that he got no harm; for his companion was too vague and void even to think evil. Socially, he was as low as the ground under foot, but morally he was as good as any boy in the Boy’s Town, and he had no bad impulses. He had no impulses at all, in fact, and of his own motion he never did anything, or seemed to think anything. When he wished to get at my boy, he simply appeared in the neighborhood, and hung about the outside of the fence till he came out. He did not whistle, or call “E-oo-we!” as the other fellows did, but waited patiently to be discovered, and to be gone off with wherever my boy listed. He never had any plans himself, and never any will but to go in swimming; he neither hunted nor foraged; he did not even fish; and I suppose that money could not have hired him to run races. He played marbles, but not very well, and he did not care much for the game. The two boys soaked themselves in the river together, and then they lay on the sandy shore, or under some tree, and talked; but my boy could not have talked to him about any of the things that were in his books, or the fume of dreams they sent up in his mind. He must rather have soothed against his soft, caressing ignorance the ache of his fantastic spirit, and reposed his intensity of purpose in that lax and easy aimlessness. Their friendship was not only more innocent than any other friendship my boy had, but it was wholly innocent; they loved each other, and that was all; and why people love one another there is never any satisfactory telling. But this friend of his must have had great natural good in him; and if I could find a man of the make of that boy I am sure I should love him.

My boy’s other friends wondered at his fondness for him, and it was often made a question with him at home, if not a reproach to him; so that in the course of time it ceased to be that comfort it had been to him. He could not give him up, but he could not help seeing that he was ignorant and idle, and in a fatal hour he resolved to reform him. I am not able to say now just how he worked his friend up to the point of coming to school, and of washing his hands and feet and face, and putting on a new check shirt to come in. But one day he came, and my boy, as he had planned, took him into his seat, and owned his friendship with him before the whole school. This was not easy, for though everybody knew how much the two were together, it was a different thing to sit with him as if he thought him just as good as any boy, and to help him get his lessons, and stay him mentally as well as socially. He struggled through one day, and maybe another; but it was a failure from the first moment, and my boy breathed freer when his friend came one half-day, and then never came again. The attempted reform had spoiled their simple and harmless intimacy. They never met again upon the old ground of perfect trust and affection. Perhaps the kindly earth-spirit had instinctively felt a wound from the shame my boy had tried to brave out, and shrank from their former friendship without quite knowing why. Perhaps it was my boy who learned to realize that there could be little in common but their common humanity between them, and could not go back to that. At any rate, their friendship declined from this point; and it seems to me, somehow, a pity.

Among the boys who were between my boy and his brother in age was one whom all the boys liked, because he was clever with everybody, with little boys as well as big boys. He was a laughing, pleasant fellow, always ready for fun, but he never did mean things, and he had an open face that made a friend of every one who saw him. He had a father that had a house with a lightning-rod, so that if you were in it when there was a thunder-storm you could not get struck by lightning, as my boy once proved by being in it when there was a thunder-storm and not getting struck. This in itself was a great merit, and there were grape-arbors and peach-trees in his yard which added to his popularity, with cling-stone peaches almost as big as oranges on them. He was a fellow who could take you home to meals whenever he wanted to, and he liked to have boys stay all night with him; his mother was as clever as he was, and even the sight of his father did not make the fellows want to go and hide. His father was so clever that he went home with my boy one night about midnight when the boy had come to pass the night with his boys, and the youngest of them had said he always had the nightmare and walked in his sleep, and as likely as not he might kill you before he knew it. My boy tried to sleep, but the more he reflected upon his chances of getting through the night alive the smaller they seemed; and so he woke up his potential murderer from the sweetest and soundest slumber, and said he was going home, but he was afraid; and the boy had to go and wake his father. Very few fathers would have dressed up and gone home with a boy at midnight, and perhaps this one did so only because the mother made him; but it shows how clever the whole family was.

It was their oldest boy whom my boy and his brother chiefly went with before that boy who knew about Monte Cristo came to learn the trade in their father’s office. One Saturday in July they three spent the whole day together. It was just the time when the apples are as big as walnuts on the trees, and a boy wants to try whether any of them are going to be sweet or not. The boys tried a great many of them, in an old orchard thrown open for building-lots behind my boy’s yard; but they could not find any that were not sour; or that they could eat till they thought of putting salt on them; if you put salt on it, you could eat any kind of green apple, whether it was going to be a sweet kind or not. They went up to the Basin bank and got lots of salt out of the holes in the barrels lying there, and then they ate all the apples they could hold, and after that they cut limber sticks off the trees, and sharpened the points, and stuck apples on them and threw them. You could send an apple almost out of sight that way, and you could scare a dog almost as far as you could see him.

On Monday my boy and his brother went to school, but the other boy was not there, and in the afternoon they heard he was sick. Then, toward the end of the week they heard that he had the flux; and on Friday, just before school let out, the teacher — it was the one that whipped so, and that the fellows all liked — rapped on his desk, and began to speak very solemnly to the scholars. He told them that their little mate, whom they had played with and studied with, was lying very sick, so very sick that it was expected he would die; and then he read them a serious lesson about life and death, and tried to make them feel how passing and uncertain all things were, and resolve to live so that they need never be afraid to die.

Some of the fellows cried, and the next day some of them went to see the dying boy, and my boy went with them. His spirit was stricken to the earth, when he saw his gay, kind playmate lying there, white as the pillow under his wasted face, in which his sunken blue eyes showed large and strange. The sick boy did not say anything that the other boys could hear, but they could see the wan smile that came to his dry lips, and the light come sadly into his eyes, when his mother asked him if he knew this one or that; and they could not bear it, and went out of the room.

In a few days they heard that he was dead, and one afternoon school did not keep, so that the boys might go to the funeral. Most of them walked in the procession; but some of them were waiting beside the open grave, that was dug near the grave of that man who believed there was a hole through the earth from pole to pole, and had a perforated stone globe on top of his monument.

III

GAMES AND PASTIMES

MARBLES

In the Boy’s Town they had regular games and plays, which came and went in a stated order. The first thing in the spring, as soon as the frost began to come out of the ground, they had marbles which they played till the weather began to be pleasant for the game, and then they left it off. There were some mean-spirited fellows who played for fun, but any boy who was anything played for keeps: that is, keeping all the marbles he won. As my boy was skilful at marbles, he was able to start out in the morning with his toy, or the marble he shot with, and a commy, or a brown marble of the lowest value, and come home at night with a pocketful of white-alleys and blood-alleys, striped plasters and bull’s-eyes, and crystals, clear and clouded. His gambling was not approved of at home, but it was allowed him because of the hardness of his heart, I suppose, and because it was not thought well to keep him up too strictly; and I suspect it would have been useless to forbid his playing for keeps, though he came to have a bad conscience about it before he gave it up. There were three kinds of games at marbles which the boys played: one with a long ring marked out on the ground, and a base some distance off, which you began to shoot from; another with a round ring, whose line formed the base; and another with holes, three or five, hollowed in the earth at equal distances from each other, which was called knucks. You could play for keeps in all these games; and in knucks, if you won, you had a shot or shots at the knuckles of the fellow who lost, and who was obliged to hold them down for you to shoot at. Fellows who were mean would twitch their knuckles away when they saw your toy coming, and run; but most of them took their punishment with the savage pluck of so many little Sioux. As the game began in the raw cold of the earliest spring, every boy had chapped hands, and nearly every one had the skin worn off the knuckle of his middle finger from resting it on the ground when he shot. You could use a knuckle-dabster of fur or cloth to rest your hand on, but is was considered effeminate, and in the excitement you were apt to forget it, anyway. Marbles were always very exciting, and were played with a clamor as incessant as that of a blackbird roost. A great many points were always coming up: whether a boy took-up, or edged, beyond the very place where his toy lay when he shot; whether he knuckled down, or kept his hand on the ground, in shooting; whether, when another boy’s toy drove one marble against another and knocked both out of the ring, he holloed “Fen doubs!” before the other fellow holloed “Doubs!” whether a marble was in or out of the ring, and whether the umpire’s decision was just or not. The gambling and the quarrelling went on till the second-bell rang for school, and began again as soon as the boys could get back to their rings when school let out. The rings were usually marked on the ground with a stick, but when there was a great hurry, or there was no stick handy, the side of a fellow’s boot would do, and the hollows for knucks were always bored by twirling round on your boot-heel. This helped a boy to wear out his boots very rapidly, but that was what his boots were made for, just as the sidewalks were made for the boys’ marble-rings, and a citizen’s character for cleverness or meanness was fixed by his walking round or over the rings. Cleverness was used in the Virginia sense for amiability; a person who was clever in the English sense was smart.

RACES

When the warm weather came on in April, and the boys got off their shoes for good, there came races, in which they seemed to fly on wings. Life has a good many innocent joys for the human animal, but surely none so ecstatic as the boy feels when his bare foot first touches the breast of our mother earth in the spring. Something thrills through him then from the heart of her inmost being that makes him feel kin with her, and cousin to all her dumb children of the grass and trees. His blood leaps as wildly as at that kiss of the waters when he plunges into their arms in June; there is something even finer and sweeter in the rapture of the earlier bliss. The day will not be long enough for his flights, his races; he aches more with regret than with fatigue when he must leave the happy paths under the stars outside, and creep into his bed. It is all like some glimpse, some foretaste of the heavenly time when the earth and her sons shall be reconciled in a deathless love, and they shall not be thankless, nor she a stepmother any more.

About the only drawback to going barefoot was stumping your toe, which you were pretty sure to do when you first took off your shoes and before you had got used to your new running weight. When you struck your toe against a rock, or anything, you caught it up in your hand, and hopped about a hundred yards before you could bear to put it to the ground. Then you sat down, and held it as tight as you could, and cried over it, till the fellows helped you to the pump to wash the blood off. Then, as soon as you could, you limped home for a rag, and kept pretty quiet about it so as to get out again without letting on to your mother.

A MEAN TRICK

There were shade-trees all along the street, that you could climb if you wanted to, or that you could lie down under when you had run yourself out of breath, or play mumble-the-peg. My boy distinctly remembered that under one of these trees his elder brother first broached to him that awful scheme of reform about fibbing, and applied to their own lives the moral of The Trippings of Tom Pepper; he remembered how a conviction of the righteousness of the scheme sank into his soul, and he could not withhold his consent. Under the same tree, and very likely at the same time, a solemn conclave of boys, all the boys there were, discussed the feasibility of tying a tin can to a dog’s tail, and seeing how he would act. They had all heard of the thing, but none of them had seen it; and it was not so much a question of whether you ought to do a thing that on the very face of it would be so much fun, and if it did not amuse the dog as highly as anybody, could certainly do him no harm, as it was a question of whose dog you should get to take the dog’s part in the sport. It was held that an old dog would probably not keep still long enough for you to tie the can on; he would have his suspicions; or else he would not run when the can was tied on, but very likely just go and lie down somewhere. The lot finally fell to a young yellow dog belonging to one of the boys, and the owner at once ran home to get him, and easily lured him back to the other boys with flatteries and caresses. The flatteries and caresses were not needed, for a dog is always glad to go with boys, upon any pretext, and so far from thinking that he does them a favor, he feels himself greatly honored. But I dare say the boy had a guilty fear that if his dog had known why he was invited to be of that party of boys, he might have pleaded a previous engagement. As it was, he came joyfully, and allowed the can to be tied to his tail without misgiving. If there had been any question with the boys as to whether he would enter fully into the spirit of the affair, it must have been instantly dissipated by the dogs behavior when he felt the loop tighten on his tail, and looked round to see what the matter was. The boys hardly had a chance to cheer him before he flashed out of sight round the corner, and they hardly had time to think before he flashed into sight again from the other direction. He whizzed along the ground, and the can hurtled in the air, but there was no other sound, and the cheers died away on the boys’ lips. The boy who owned the dog began to cry, and the other fellows began to blame him for not stopping the dog. But he might as well have tried to stop a streak of lightning; the only thing you could do was to keep out of the dog’s way. As an experiment it was successful beyond the wildest dreams of its projectors, though it would have been a sort of relief if the dog had taken some other road, for variety, or had even reversed his course. But he kept on as he began, and by a common impulse the boys made up their minds to abandon the whole affair to him. They all ran home and hid, or else walked about and tried to ignore it. But at this point the grown-up people began to be interested; the mothers came to their doors to see what was the matter. Yet even the mothers were powerless in a case like that, and the enthusiast had to be left to his fate. He was found under a barn at last, breathless, almost lifeless, and he tried to bite the man who untied the can from his tail. Eventually he got well again, and lived to be a solemn warning to the boys; he was touchingly distrustful of their advances for a time, but he finally forgot and forgave everything. They did not forget, and they never tried tying a tin can to a dog’s tail again, among all the things they tried and kept trying. Once was enough; and they never even liked to talk of it, the sight was so awful. They were really fond of the dog, and if they could have thought he would take the matter so seriously, they would not have tried to have that kind of fun with him. It cured them of ever wanting to have that kind of fun with any dog.

TOPS

As the weather softened, tops came in some weeks after marbles went out, and just after foot-races were over, and a little before swimming began. At first the boys bought their tops at the stores, but after a while the boy whose father had the turning-shop on the Hydraulic learned to turn their tops, and did it for nothing, which was cheaper than buying tops, especially as he furnished the wood, too, and you only had to get the metal peg yourself. I believe he was the same boy who wanted to be a pirate and ended by inventing a steam-governor. He was very ingenious, and he knew how to turn a top out of beech or maple that would outspin anything you could get in a store. The boys usually chose a firm, smooth piece of sidewalk, under one of the big trees in the Smith neighborhood, and spun their tops there. A fellow launched his top into the ring, and the rest waited till it began to go to sleep — that is, to settle in one place, and straighten up and spin silently, as if standing still. Then any fellow had a right to peg at it with his top, and if he hit it, he won it; and if he split it, as sometimes happened, the fellow that owned it had to give him a top. The boys came with their pockets bulged out with tops, but before long they had to go for more tops to that boy who could turn them. From this it was but another step to go to the shop with him and look on while he turned the tops; and then in process of time the boys discovered that the smooth floor of the shop was a better place to fight tops than the best piece of sidewalk. They would have given whole Saturdays to the sport there, but when they got to holloing too loudly the boy’s father would come up, and then they would all run. It was considered mean in him, but the boy himself was awfully clever, and the first thing the fellows knew they were back there again. Some few of the boys had humming-tops, but though these pleased by their noise, they were not much esteemed, and could make no head against the good old turnip-shaped tops, solid and weighty, that you could wind up with a stout cotton cord, and launch with perfect aim from the flat button held between your forefinger and middle finger. Some of the boys had a very pretty art in the twirl they gave the top, and could control its course, somewhat as a skilful pitcher can govern that of a baseball.

KITES

I do not know why a certain play went out, but suddenly the fellows who had been playing ball, or marbles, or tops, would find themselves playing something else. Kites came in just about the time of the greatest heat in summer, and lasted a good while; but could not have lasted as long as the heat, which began about the first of June, and kept on well through September; no play could last so long as that, and I suppose kite-flying must have died into swimming after the Fourth of July. The kites were of various shapes: bow kites, two-stick kites, and house kites. A bow kite could be made with half a barrel hoop carried over the top of a cross, but it was troublesome to make, and it did not fly very well, and somehow it was thought to look babyish; but it was held in greater respect than the two-stick kite, which only the smallest boys played with, and which was made by fastening two sticks in the form of a cross. Any fellow more than six years old who appeared on the Commons with a two-stick kite would have been met with jeers, as a kind of girl.

The favorite kite, the kite that balanced best, took the wind best, and flew best, and that would stand all day when you got it up, was the house kite, which was made of three sticks, and shaped nearly in the form of the gable of a gambrel-roofed house, only smaller at the base than at the point where the roof would begin. The outline of all these kites was given, and the sticks stayed in place by a string carried taut from stick to stick, which was notched at the ends to hold it; sometimes the sticks were held with a tack at the point of crossing, and sometimes they were mortised into one another; but this was apt to weaken them. The frame was laid down on a sheet of paper, and the paper was cut an inch or two larger, and then pasted and folded over the string. Most of the boys used a paste made of flour and cold water; but my boy and his brother could usually get paste from the printing-office; and when they could not they would make it by mixing flour and water cream-thick, and slowly boiling it. That was a paste that would hold till the cows came home, the boys said, and my boy was courted for his skill in making it. But after the kite was pasted, and dried in the sun, or behind the kitchen stove, if you were in very much of a hurry (and you nearly always were), it had to be hung, with belly-bands and tail-bands; that is, with strings carried from stick to stick over the face and at the bottom, to attach the cord for flying it and to fasten on the tail by. This took a good deal of art, and unless it were well done the kite would not balance, but would be always pitching and darting. Then the tail had to be of just the right weight; if it was too heavy the kite kept sinking, even after you got it up where otherwise it would stand; if too light, the kite would dart, and dash itself to pieces on the ground. A very pretty tail was made by tying twists of paper across a string a foot apart, till there were enough to balance the kite; but this sort of tail was apt to get tangled, and the best tail was made of a long streamer of cotton rags, with a gay tuft of dog-fennel at the end. Dog-fennel was added or taken away till just the right weight was got; and when this was done, after several experimental tests, the kite was laid flat on its face in the middle of the road, or on a long stretch of smooth grass; the bands were arranged, and the tail stretched carefully out behind, where it would not catch on bushes. You unwound a great length of twine, running backward, and letting the twine slip swiftly through your hands till you had run enough out; then you seized the ball, and with one look over your shoulder to see that all was right, started swiftly forward. The kite reared itself from the ground, and swaying gracefully from side to side, rose slowly into the air, with its long tail climbing after it till the fennel tuft swung free. If there was not much surface wind you might have to run a little way, but as soon as the kite caught the upper currents it straightened itself, pulled the twine taut, and steadily mounted, while you gave it more and more twine; if the breeze was strong, the cord burned as it ran through your hands; till at last the kite stood still in the sky, at such a height that the cord holding it sometimes melted out of sight in the distance.

If it was a hot July day the sky would be full of kites, and the Commons would be dotted over with boys holding them, or setting them up, or winding them in, and all talking and screaming at the tops of their voices under the roasting sun. One might think that kite-flying, at least, could be carried on quietly and peaceably; but it was not. Besides the wild debate of the rival excellences of the different kites, there were always quarrels from getting the strings crossed; for, as the boys got their kites up, they drew together for company and for an easier comparison of their merits. It was only a mean boy who would try to cross another fellow’s string; but sometimes accidents would happen; two kites would become entangled and both would have to be hauled in, while their owners cried and scolded, and the other fellows cheered and laughed. Now and then the tail of a kite would part midway, and then the kite would begin to dart violently from side to side, and then to whirl round and round in swifter and narrower circles till it dashed itself to the ground. Sometimes the kite-string would break, and the kite would waver and fall like a bird shot in the wing; and the owner of the kite, and all the fellows who had no kites, would run to get it where it came down, perhaps a mile or more away. It usually came down in a tree, and they had to climb for it; but sometimes it lodged so high that no one could reach it; and then it was slowly beaten and washed away in the winds and rains, and its long tail left streaming all winter from the naked bough where it had caught. It was so good for kites on the Commons, because there were no trees there, and not even fences, but a vast open stretch of level grass, which the cows and geese kept cropped to the earth; and for the most part the boys had no trouble with their kites there. Some of them had paper fringe pasted round the edges of their kites; this made a fine rattling as the kite rose, and when the kite stood, at the end of its string, you could hear the humming if you put your ear to the twine. But the most fun was sending up messengers. The messengers were cut out of thick paper, with a slit at one side, so as to slip over the string, which would be pulled level long enough to give the messenger a good start, and then released, when the wind would catch the little circle, and drive it up the long curving incline till it reached the kite.

It was thought a great thing in a kite to pull, and it was a favor to another boy to let him take hold of your string and feel how your kite pulled. If you wanted to play mumble-the-peg, or anything, while your kite was up, you tied it to a stake in the ground, or gave it to some other fellow to hold; there were always lots of fellows eager to hold it. But you had to be careful how you let a little fellow hold it; for, if it was a very powerful kite, it would take him up. It was not certain just how strong a kite had to be to take a small boy up, and nobody had ever seen a kite do it, but everybody expected to see it.

THE BUTLER GUARDS

The Butler Guards were the finest military company in the world. I do not believe there was a fellow in the Boy’s Town who even tried to imagine a more splendid body of troops: when they talked of them, as they did a great deal, it was simply to revel in the recognition of their perfection. I forget just what their uniform was, but there were white pantaloons in it, and a tuft of white-and-red cockerel plumes that almost covered the front of the hat, and swayed when the soldier walked, and blew in the wind. I think the coat was gray, and the skirts were buttoned back with buff, but I will not be sure of this; and somehow I cannot say how the officers differed from the privates in dress; it was impossible for them to be more magnificent. They walked backward in front of the platoons, with their swords drawn, and held in their white-gloved hands at hilt and point, and kept holloing, “Shoulder-r-r — arms! Carry — arms! Present — arms!” and then faced round, and walked a few steps forward, till they could think of something else to make the soldiers do.

THE BUTLER GUARDS

Every boy intended to belong to the Butler Guards when he grew up; and he would have given anything to be the drummer or the marker. These were both boys, and they were just as much dressed up as the Guards themselves, only they had caps instead of hats with plumes. It was strange that the other fellows somehow did not know who these boys were; but they never knew, or at least my boy never knew. They thought more of the marker than of the drummer; for the marker carried a little flag, and when the officers holloed out, “By the left flank — left! Wheel!” he set his flag against his shoulder, and stood marking time with his feet till the soldiers all got by him, and then he ran up to the front rank, with the flag fluttering behind him. The fellows used to wonder how he got to be marker, and to plan how they could get to be markers in other companies, if not in the Butler Guards. There were other companies that used to come to town on the Fourth of July and Muster Day, from smaller places round about; and some of them had richer uniforms: one company had blue coats with gold epaulets, and gold braid going down in loops on the sides of their legs; all the soldiers, of course, had braid straight down the outer seams of their pantaloons. One Muster Day a captain of one of the country companies came home with my boy’s father to dinner; he was in full uniform, and he put his plumed helmet down on the entry table just like any other hat.

There was a company of Germans, or Dutchmen, as the boys always called them; and the boys believed that they each had hay in his right shoe, and straw in his left, because a Dutchman was too dumb, as the boys said for stupid, to know his feet apart any other way; and that the Dutch officers had to call out to the men when they were marching, “Up mit de hay-foot, down mit de straw-foot — links, links, links!” (left, left, left!). But the boys honored even these imperfect intelligences so much in their quality of soldiers that they would any of them have been proud to be marker in the Dutch company; and they followed the Dutchmen round in their march as fondly as any other body of troops. Of course, school let out when there was a regular muster, and the boys gave the whole day to it; but I do not know just when the Muster Day came. They fired the cannon a good deal on the river-bank, and they must have camped somewhere near the town, though no recollection of tents remained in my boy’s mind. He believed with the rest of the boys that the right way to fire the cannon was to get it so hot you need not touch it off, but just keep your thumb on the touch-hole, and take it away when you wanted the cannon to go off. Once he saw the soldiers ram the piece full of dog-fennel on top of the usual charge, and then he expected the cannon to burst. But it only roared away as usual.

PETS

As there are no longer any Whig boys in the world, the coon can no longer be kept anywhere as a political emblem, I dare say. Even in my boy’s time the boys kept coons just for the pleasure of it, and without meaning to elect Whig governors and presidents with them. I do not know how they got them — they traded for them, perhaps, with fellows in the country that had caught them, or perhaps their fathers bought them in market; some people thought they were very good to eat, and, like poultry and other things for the table, they may have been brought alive to market. But, anyhow, when a boy had a coon, he had to have a store-box turned open side down to keep it in, behind the house; and he had to have a little door in the box to pull the coon out through when he wanted to show it to other boys, or to look at it himself, which he did forty or fifty times a day, when he first got it. He had to have a small collar for the coon, and a little chain, because the coon would gnaw through a string in a minute. The coon himself never seemed to take much interest in keeping a coon, or to see much fun or sense in it. He liked to stay inside his box, where he had a bed of hay, and whenever the boy pulled him out, he did his best to bite the boy. He had no tricks; his temper was bad; and there was nothing about him except the rings round his tail and his political principles that anybody could care for. He never did anything but bite, and try to get away, or else run back into his box, which smelled, pretty soon, like an animal-show; he would not even let a fellow see him eat.

My boy’s brother had a coon, which he kept a good while, at a time when there was no election, for the mere satisfaction of keeping a coon. During his captivity the coon bit his keeper repeatedly through the thumb, and upon the whole seemed to prefer him to any other food; I do not really know what coons eat in a wild state, but this captive coon tasted the blood of nearly that whole family of children. Besides biting and getting away, he never did the slightest thing worth remembering; as there was no election, he did not even take part in a Whig procession. He got away two or three times. The first thing his owner would know when he pulled the chain out was that there was no coon at the end of it, and then he would have to poke round the inside of the box pretty carefully with a stick, so as not to get bitten; after that he would have to see which tree the coon had gone up. It was usually the tall locust-tree in front of the house, and in about half a second all the boys in town would be there, telling the owner of the coon how to get him. Of course the only way was to climb for the coon, which would be out at the point of a high and slender limb, and would bite you awfully, even if the limb did not break under you, while the boys kept whooping and yelling and holloing out what to do, and Tip the dog just howled with excitement. I do not know how that coon was ever caught, but I know that the last time he got away he was not found during the day, but after nightfall he was discovered by moonlight in the locust-tree. His owner climbed for him, but the coon kept shifting about, and getting higher and higher, and at last he had to be left till morning. In the morning he was not there, nor anywhere.

It had been expected, perhaps, that Tip would watch him, and grab him if he came down, and Tip would have done it probably if he had kept awake. He was a dog of the greatest courage, and he was especially fond of hunting. He had been bitten oftener by that coon than anybody but the coon’s owner, but he did not care for biting. He was always getting bitten by rats, but he was the greatest dog for rats that there almost ever was. The boys hunted rats with him at night, when they came out of the stables that backed down to the Hydraulic, for water; and a dog who liked above all things to lie asleep on the back-step, by day, and would no more think of chasing a pig out of the garden than he would think of sitting up all night with a coon, would get frantic about rats, and would perfectly wear himself out hunting them on land and in the water, and keep on after the boys themselves were tired. He was so fond of hunting, anyway, that the sight of a gun would drive him about crazy; he would lick the barrel all over, and wag his tail so hard that it would lift his hind legs off the ground.

I do not know how he came into that family, but I believe he was given to it full grown by somebody. It was some time after my boy failed to buy what he called a Confoundland dog, from a colored boy who had it for sale, a pretty puppy with white and black spots which he had quite set his heart on; but Tip more than consoled him. Tip was of no particular breed, and he had no personal beauty; he was of the color of a mouse or an elephant, and his tail was without the smallest grace; it was smooth and round, but it was so strong that he could pull a boy all over the town by it, and usually did; and he had the best, and kindest, and truest ugly old face in the world. He loved the whole human race, and as a watch-dog he was a failure through his trustful nature; he would no more have bitten a person than he would have bitten a pig; but where other dogs were concerned, he was a lion. He might be lying fast asleep in the back-yard, and he usually was, but if a dog passed the front of the house under a wagon, he would be up and after that dog before you knew what you were about. He seemed to want to fight country dogs the worst, but any strange dog would do. A good half the time he would come off best; but, however he came off, he returned to the back-yard with his tongue hanging out, and wagging his tail in good-humor with all the world. Nothing could stop him, however, where strange dogs were concerned. He was a Whig dog, of course, as any one could tell by his name, which was Tippecanoe in full, and was given him because it was the nickname of General Harrison, the great Whig who won the battle of Tippecanoe. The boys’ Henry Clay Club used him to pull the little wagon that they went about in singing Whig songs, and he would pull five or six boys, guided simply by a stick which he held in his mouth, and which a boy held on either side of him. But if he caught sight of a dog that he did not know, he would drop that stick and start for that dog as far off as he could see him, spilling the Henry Clay Club out of the wagon piecemeal as he went, and never stopping till he mixed up the strange dog in a fight where it would have been hard to tell which was either champion and which was the club wagon. When the fight was over Tip would come smilingly back to the fragments of the Henry Clay Club, with pieces of the vehicle sticking about him, and profess himself, in a dog’s way, ready to go on with the concert.

Any crowd of boys could get Tip to go off with them, in swimming, or hunting, or simply running races. He was known through the whole town, and beloved for his many endearing qualities of heart. As to his mind, it was perhaps not much to brag of, and he certainly had some defects of character. He was incurably lazy, and his laziness grew upon him as he grew older, till hardly anything but the sight of a gun or a bone would move him. He lost his interest in politics, and, though there is no reason to suppose that he ever became indifferent to his principles, it is certain that he no longer showed his early ardor. He joined the Free-Soil movement in 1848, and supported Van Buren and Adams, but without the zeal he had shown for Henry Clay. Once a year, as long as the family lived in the Boy’s Town, the children were anxious about Tip when the dog-law was put in force, and the constables went round shooting all the dogs that were found running at large without muzzles. At this time, when Tip was in danger of going mad and biting people, he showed a most unseasonable activity, and could hardly be kept in bounds. A dog whose sole delight at other moments was to bask in the summer sun, or dream by the winter fire, would now rouse himself to an interest in everything that was going on in the dangerous world, and make forays into it at all unguarded points. The only thing to do was to muzzle him, and this was done by my boy’s brother with a piece of heavy twine, in such a manner as to interfere with Tip’s happiness as little as possible. It was a muzzle that need not be removed for either eating, drinking, or fighting; but it satisfied the law, and Tip always came safely through the dog-days, perhaps by favor or affection with the officers who were so inexorable with some dogs.

While Tip was still in his prime the family of children was further enriched by the possession of a goat; but this did not belong to the whole family, or it was, at least nominally, the property of that eldest brother they all looked up to. I do not know how they came by the goat, any more than I know how they came by Tip; I only know that there came a time when it was already in the family, and that before it was got rid of it was a presence there was no mistaking. Nobody who has not kept a goat can have any notion of how many different kinds of mischief a goat can get into, without seeming to try, either, but merely by following the impulses of its own goatishness. This one was a nanny-goat, and it answered to the name of Nanny with an intelligence that was otherwise wholly employed in making trouble. It went up and down stairs, from cellar to garret, and in and out of all the rooms, like anybody, with a faint, cynical indifference in the glance of its cold gray eyes that gave no hint of its purposes or performances. In the chambers it chewed the sheets and pillow-cases on the beds, and in the dining-room, if it found nothing else, it would do its best to eat the table-cloth. Washing-day was a perfect feast for it, for then it would banquet on the shirt-sleeves and stockings that dangled from the clothes-line, and simply glut itself with the family linen and cotton. In default of these dainties, Nanny would gladly eat a chip-hat; she was not proud; she would eat a split-basket, if there was nothing else at hand. Once she got up on the kitchen table, and had a perfect orgy with a lot of fresh-baked pumpkin-pies she found there; she cleaned all the pumpkin so neatly out of the pastry shells that, if there had been any more pumpkin left, they could have been filled up again, and nobody could have told the difference. The grandmother, who was visiting in the house at the time, declared to the mother that it would serve the father and the boys just right if she did fill these very shells up and give them to the father and the boys to eat. But I believe this was not done, and it was only suggested in a moment of awful exasperation, and because it was the father who was to blame for letting the boys keep the goat. The mother was always saying that the goat should not stay in the house another day, but she had not the heart to insist on its banishment, the children were so fond of it. I do not know why they were fond of it, for it never showed them the least affection, but was always taking the most unfair advantages of them, and it would butt them over whenever it got the chance. It would try to butt them into the well when they leaned down to pull up the bucket from the curb; and if it came out of the house, and saw a boy cracking nuts at the low flat stone the children had in the back-yard to crack nuts on, it would pretend that the boy was making motions to insult it, and before he knew what he was about it would fly at him and send him spinning head over heels. It was not of the least use in the world, and could not be, but the children were allowed to keep it till, one fatal day, when the mother had a number of other ladies to tea, as the fashion used to be in small towns, when they sat down to a comfortable gossip over dainty dishes of stewed chicken, hot biscuit, peach-preserves, sweet tomato-pickles, and pound-cake. That day they all laid off their bonnets on the hall table, and the goat, after demurely waiting and watching with its faded eyes, which saw everything and seemed to see nothing, discerned a golden opportunity, and began to make such a supper of bonnet-ribbons as perhaps never fell to a goat’s lot in life before. It was detected in its stolen joys just as it had chewed the ribbon of a best bonnet up to the bonnet, and was chased into the back-yard; but, as it had swallowed the ribbon without being able to swallow the bonnet, it carried that with it. The boy who specially owned the goat ran it down in a frenzy of horror and apprehension, and managed to unravel the ribbon from its throat, and get back the bonnet. Then he took the bonnet in and laid it carefully down on the table again, and decided that it would be best not to say anything about the affair. But such a thing as that could not be kept. The goat was known at once to have done the mischief; and this time it was really sent away. All the children mourned it, and the boy who owned it the most used to go to the house of the people who took it, and who had a high board fence round their yard, and try to catch sight of it through the cracks. When he called “Nanny!” it answered him instantly with a plaintive “Baa!” and then, after a vain interchange of lamentations, he had to come away, and console himself as he could with the pets that were left him.

But all were trifling joys, except maybe Tip and Nanny, compared with the pony which the boys owned in common, and which was the greatest thing that ever came into their lives. I cannot tell just how their father came to buy it for them, or where he got it; but I dare say he thought they were about old enough for a pony, and might as well have one. It was a Mexican pony, and as it appeared on the scene just after the Mexican war, some volunteer may have brought it home. One volunteer brought home a Mexican dog, that was smooth and hairless, with a skin like an elephant, and that was always shivering round with the cold; he was not otherwise a remarkable dog, and I do not know that he ever felt even the warmth of friendship among the boys; his manners were reserved and his temper seemed doubtful. But the pony never had any trouble with the climate of Southern Ohio (which is indeed hot enough to fry a salamander in summer); and though his temper was no better than other ponies’, he was perfectly approachable. I mean that he was approachable from the side, for it was not well to get where he could bite you or kick you. He was of a bright sorrel color, and he had a brand on one haunch.

My boy had an ideal of a pony, conceived from pictures in his reading-books at school, that held its head high and arched its neck, and he strove by means of checks and martingales to make this real pony conform to the illustrations. But it was of no use; the real pony held his neck straight out like a ewe, or, if reined up, like a camel, and he hung his big head at the end of it with no regard whatever for the ideal. His caparison was another mortification and failure. What the boy wanted was an English saddle, embroidered on the morocco seat in crimson silk, and furnished with shining steel stirrups. What he had was the framework of a Mexican saddle, covered with rawhide, and cushioned with a blanket; the stirrups were Mexican, too, and clumsily fashioned out of wood. The boys were always talking about getting their father to get them a pad, but they never did it, and they managed as they could with the saddle they had. For the most part they preferred to ride the pony barebacked, for then they could ride him double, and when they first got him they all wanted to ride him so much that they had to ride him double. They kept him going the whole day long; but after a while they calmed down enough to take him one at a time, and to let him have a chance for his meals.

They had no regular stable, and the father left the boys to fit part of the cow-shed up for the pony, which they did by throwing part of the hen-coop open into it. The pigeon-cots were just over his head, and he never could have complained of being lonesome. At first everybody wanted to feed him as well as ride him, and if he had been allowed time for it he might have eaten himself to death, or if he had not always tried to bite you or kick you when you came in with his corn. After a while the boys got so they forgot him, and nobody wanted to go out and feed the pony, especially after dark; but he knew how to take care of himself, and when he had eaten up everything there was in the cow-shed he would break out and eat up everything there was in the yard.

The boys got lots of good out of him. When you were once on his back you were pretty safe, for he was so lazy that he would not think of running away, and there was no danger unless he bounced you off when he trotted; he had a hard trot. The boys wanted to ride him standing up, like circus-actors, and the pony did not mind, but the boys could not stay on, though they practised a good deal, turn about, when the other fellows were riding their horses, standing up, on the Commons. He was not of much use in Indian fights, for he could seldom be lashed into a gallop, and a pony that proposed to walk through an Indian fight was ridiculous. Still, with the help of imagination, my boy employed him in some scenes of wild Arab life, and hurled the Moorish javelin from him in mid-career, when the pony was flying along at the mad pace of a canal-boat. The pony early gave the boys to understand that they could get very little out of him in the way of herding the family cow. He would let them ride him to the pasture, and he would keep up with the cow on the way home, when she walked, but if they wanted anything more than that they must get some other pony. They tried to use him in carrying papers, but the subscribers objected to having him ridden up to their front doors over the sidewalk, and they had to give it up.

When he became an old story, and there was no competition for him among the brothers, my boy sometimes took him into the woods, and rode him in the wandering bridle-paths, with a thrilling sense of adventure. He did not like to be alone there, and he oftener had the company of a boy who was learning the trade in his father’s printing-office. This boy was just between him and his elder brother in age, and he was the good comrade of both; all the family loved him, and made him one of them, and my boy was fond of him because they had some tastes in common that were not very common among the other boys. They liked the same books, and they both began to write historical romances. My boy’s romance was founded on facts of the Conquest of Granada, which he had read of again and again in Washington Irving, with a passionate pity for the Moors, and yet with pride in the grave and noble Spaniards. He would have given almost anything to be a Spaniard, and he lived in a dream of some day sallying out upon the Vega before Granada, in silk and steel, with an Arabian charger under him that champed its bit. In the mean time he did what he could with the family pony, and he had long rides in the woods with the other boy, who used to get his father’s horse when he was not using it on Sunday, and race with him through the dangling wild grape-vines and pawpaw thickets, and over the reedy levels of the river, their hearts both bounding with the same high hopes of a world that could never come true.

INDIANS

There was not a boy in the Boy’s Town who would not gladly have turned from the town and lived in the woods if his mother had let him; and in every vague plan of running off the forest had its place as a city of refuge from pursuit and recapture. The pioneer days were still so close to those times that the love of solitary adventure which took the boys’ fathers into the sylvan wastes of the great West might well have burned in the boys’ hearts; and if their ideal of life was the free life of the woods, no doubt it was because their near ancestors had lived it. At any rate, that was their ideal, and they were always talking among themselves of how they would go farther West when they grew up, and be trappers and hunters. I do not remember any boy but one who meant to be a sailor; they lived too hopelessly far from the sea; and I dare say the boy who invented the marine-engine governor, and who wished to be a pirate, would just as soon have been a bandit of the Osage. In those days Oregon had just been opened to settlers, and the boys all wanted to go and live in Oregon, where you could stand in your door and shoot deer and wild turkey, while a salmon big enough to pull you in was tugging away at the line you had set in the river that ran before the log-cabin.

If they could, the boys would rather have been Indians than anything else, but, as there was really no hope of this whatever, they were willing to be settlers, and fight the Indians. They had rather a mixed mind about them in the mean time, but perhaps they were not unlike other idolaters in both fearing and adoring their idols; perhaps they came pretty near being Indians in that, and certainly they came nearer than they knew. When they played war, and the war was between the whites and the Indians, it was almost as low a thing to be white as it was to be British when there were Americans on the other side; in either case you had to be beaten. The boys lived in the desire, if not the hope, of some time seeing an Indian, and they made the most of the Indians in the circus, whom they knew to be just white men dressed up; but none of them dreamed that what really happened one day could ever happen. This was at the arrival of several canal-boat loads of genuine Indians from the Wyandot Reservation in the northwestern part of the State, on their way to new lands beyond the Mississippi. The boys’ fathers must have known that these Indians were coming, but it just shows how stupid the most of fathers are, that they never told the boys about it. All at once there the Indians were, as if the canal-boats had dropped with them out of heaven. There they were, crowding the decks, in their blankets and moccasins, braves and squaws and pappooses, standing about or squatting in groups, not saying anything, and looking exactly like the pictures. The squaws had the pappooses on their backs, and the men and boys had bows and arrows in their hands; and as soon as the boats landed the Indians, all except the squaws and pappooses, came ashore, and went up to the courthouse yard, and began to shoot with their bows and arrows. It almost made the boys crazy.

ALL AT ONCE THERE THE INDIANS WERE

Of course they would have liked to have the Indians shoot at birds, or some game, but they were mighty glad to have them shoot at cents and bits and quarters that anybody could stick up in the ground. The Indians would all shoot at the mark till some one hit it, and the one who hit it had the money, whatever it was. The boys ran and brought back the arrows; and they were so proud to do this that I wonder they lived through it. My boy was too bashful to bring the Indians their arrows; he could only stand apart and long to approach the filthy savages, whom he revered; to have touched the border of one of their blankets would have been too much. Some of them were rather handsome, and two or three of the Indian boys were so pretty that the Boy’s Town boys said they were girls. They were of all ages, from old, withered men to children of six or seven, but they were all alike grave and unsmiling; the old men were not a whit more dignified than the children, and the children did not enter into their sport with more zeal and ardor than the wrinkled sages who shared it. In fact they were, old and young alike, savages, and the boys who looked on and envied them were savages in their ideal of a world where people spent their lives in hunting and fishing and ranging the woods, and never grew up into the toils and cares that can alone make men of boys. They wished to escape these, as many foolish persons do among civilized nations, and they thought if they could only escape them they would be happy; they did not know that they would be merely savage, and that the great difference between a savage and a civilized man is work. They would all have been willing to follow these Indians away into the Far West, where they were going, and be barbarians for the rest of their days; and the wonder is that some of the fellows did not try it.

GUNS

After the red men had flitted away like red leaves, their memory remained with the boys, and a plague of bows and arrows raged among them, and it was a good while before they calmed down to their old desire of having a gun. But they came back to that at last, for that was the normal desire of every boy in the Boy’s Town who was not a girl-boy, and there were mighty few girl-boys there. Up to a certain point a pistol would do, especially if you had bullet-moulds, and could run bullets to shoot out of it; only your mother would be sure to see you running them, and just as likely as not would be so scared that she would say you must not shoot bullets. Then you would have to use buckshot, if you could get them anywhere near the right size, or small marbles; but a pistol was always a makeshift, and you never could hit anything with it, not even a board fence; it always kicked, or burst, or something.

Very few boys ever came to have a gun, though they all expected to have one. But seven or eight boys would go hunting with one shot-gun, and take turn-about shooting; some of the little fellows never got to shoot at all, but they could run and see whether the big boys had hit anything when they fired, and that was something. This was my boy’s privilege for a long time before he had a gun of his own, and he went patiently with his elder brother, and never expected to fire the gun, except, perhaps, to shoot the load off before they got back to town; they were not allowed to bring the gun home loaded. It was a gun that was pretty safe for anything in front of it, but you never could tell what it was going to do. It began by being simply an old gun-barrel, which my boy’s brother bought of another boy who was sick of it for a fip, as the half-real piece was called, and it went on till it got a lock from one gunsmith and a stock from another, and was a complete gun. But this took time; perhaps a month; for the gunsmiths would only work at it in their leisure; they were delinquent subscribers, and they did it in part pay for their papers. When they got through with it my boy’s brother made himself a ramrod out of a straight piece of hickory, or at least as straight as the gun-barrel, which was rather sway-backed, and had a little twist to one side, so that one of the jour printers said it was a first-rate gun to shoot round a corner with. Then he made himself a powder-flask out of an ox-horn that he got and boiled till it was soft (it smelt the whole house up), and then scraped thin with a piece of glass; it hung at his side; and he carried his shot in his pantaloons pocket. He went hunting with this gun for a good many years, but he had never shot anything with it, when his uncle gave him a smooth-bore rifle, and he in turn gave his gun to my boy, who must then have been nearly ten years old.

It seemed to him that he was quite old enough to have a gun; but he was mortified the very next morning after he got it by a citizen who thought differently. He had risen at daybreak to go out and shoot kildees on the Common, and he was hurrying along with his gun on his shoulder when the citizen stopped him and asked him what he was going to do with that gun. He said to shoot kildees, and he added that it was his gun. This seemed to surprise the citizen even more than the boy could have wished. He asked him if he did not think he was a pretty small boy to have a gun; and he took the gun from him, and examined it thoughtfully, and then handed it back to the boy, who felt himself getting smaller all the time. The man went his way without saying anything more, but his behavior was somehow so sarcastic that the boy had no pleasure in his sport that morning; partly, perhaps, because he found no kildees to shoot at on the Common. He only fired off his gun once or twice at a fence, and then he sneaked home with it through alleys and by-ways, and whenever he met a person he hurried by for fear the person would find him too small to have a gun.

Afterward he came to have a bolder spirit about it, and he went hunting with it a good deal. It was a very curious kind of gun; you had to snap a good many caps on it, sometimes, before the load would go off; and sometimes it would hang fire, and then seem to recollect itself, and go off, maybe, just when you were going to take it down from your shoulder. The barrel was so crooked that it could not shoot straight, but this was not the only reason why the boy never hit anything with it. He could not shut his left eye and keep his right eye open; so he had to take aim with both eyes, or else with the left eye, which was worse yet, till one day when he was playing shinny (or hockey) at school, and got a blow over his left eye from a shinny-stick. At first he thought his eye was put out; he could not see for the blood that poured into it from the cut above it. He ran homeward wild with fear, but on the way he stopped at a pump to wash away the blood, and then he found his eye was safe. It suddenly came into his mind to try if he could not shut that eye now, and keep the right one open. He found that he could do it perfectly; by help of his handkerchief, he stanched his wound, and made himself presentable, with the glassy pool before the pump for a mirror, and went joyfully back to school. He kept trying his left eye, to make sure it had not lost its new-found art, and as soon as school was out he hurried home to share the joyful news with his family.

He went hunting the very next Saturday, and at the first shot he killed a bird. It was a suicidal sap-sucker, which had suffered him to steal upon it so close that it could not escape even the vagaries of that wandering gun-barrel, and was blown into such small pieces that the boy could bring only a few feathers of it away. In the evening, when his father came home, he showed him these trophies of the chase, and boasted of his exploit with the minutest detail. His father asked him whether he had expected to eat this sap-sucker, if he could have got enough of it together. He said no, sap-suckers were not good to eat. “Then you took its poor little life merely for the pleasure of killing it,” said the father. “Was it a great pleasure to see it die?” The boy hung his head in shame and silence; it seemed to him that he would never go hunting again. Of course he did go hunting often afterward, but his brother and he kept faithfully to the rule of never killing anything that they did not want to eat. To be sure, they gave themselves a wide range; they were willing to eat almost anything that they could shoot, even blackbirds, which were so abundant and so easy to shoot. But there were some things which they would have thought it not only wanton but wicked to kill, like turtle-doves, which they somehow believed were sacred, nor robins either, because robins were hallowed by poetry, and they kept about the house, and were almost tame, so that it seemed a shame to shoot them. They were very plentiful, and so were the turtle-doves, which used to light on the Basin bank, and pick up the grain scattered there from the boats and wagons.

There were a good many things you could do with a gun: you could fire your ramrod out of it, and see it sail through the air; you could fill the muzzle up with water, on top of a charge, and send the water in a straight column at a fence. The boys all believed that you could fire that column of water right through a man, and they always wanted to try whether it would go through a cow, but they were afraid the owner of the cow would find it out. There was a good deal of pleasure in cleaning your gun when it got so foul that your ramrod stuck in it and you could hardly get it out. You poured hot water into the muzzle and blew it through the nipple, till it began to show clear; then you wiped it dry with soft rags wound on your gun-screw, and then oiled it with greasy tow. Sometimes the tow would get loose from the screw, and stay in the barrel, and then you would have to pick enough powder in at the nipple to blow it out. Of course I am talking of the old muzzle-loading shot-gun, which I dare say the boys never use nowadays.

But the great pleasure of all, in hunting, was getting home tired and footsore in the evening, and smelling the supper almost as soon as you came in sight of the house. There was nearly always hot biscuit for supper, with steak, and with coffee such as nobody but a boy’s mother ever knew how to make; and just as likely as not there was some kind of preserves; at any rate, there was apple-butter. You could hardly take the time to wash the powder-grime off your hands and face before you rushed to the table; and if you had brought home a yellowhammer you left it with your gun on the back porch, and perhaps the cat got it and saved you the trouble of cleaning it. A cat can clean a bird a good deal quicker than a boy can, and she does not hate to do it half as badly.

Next to the pleasure of getting home from hunting late was the pleasure of starting early, as my boy and his brother sometimes did, to shoot ducks on the Little Reservoir in the fall. His brother had an alarm-clock, which he set at about four, and he was up the instant it rang, and pulling my boy out of bed, where he would rather have stayed than shot the largest mallard duck in the world. They raked the ashes off the bed of coals in the fireplace, and while the embers ticked and bristled, and flung out little showers of sparks, they hustled on their clothes, and ran down the back stairs into the yard with their guns.

Tip, the dog, was already waiting for them there, for he seemed to know they were going that morning, and he began whimpering for joy, and twisting himself sideways up against them, and nearly wagging his tail off; and licking their hands and faces, and kissing their guns all over; he was about crazy. When they started, he knew where they were going, and he rushed ahead through the silent little sleeping town, and led the way across the wide Commons, where the cows lay in dim bulks on the grass, and the geese waddled out of his way with wild, clamorous cries, till they came in sight of the Reservoir. Then Tip fell back with my boy and let the elder brother go ahead, for he always had a right to the first shot; and while he dodged down behind the bank, and crept along to the place where the ducks usually were, my boy kept a hold on Tip’s collar, and took in the beautiful mystery of the early morning. The place so familiar by day was estranged to his eyes in that pale light, and he was glad of old Tip’s company, for it seemed a time when there might very well be ghosts about. The water stretched a sheet of smooth, gray silver, with little tufts of mist on its surface, and through these at last he could see the ducks softly gliding to and fro, and he could catch some dreamy sound from them. His heart stood still and then jumped wildly in his breast, as the still air was startled with the rush of wings, and the water broke with the plunge of other flocks arriving. Then he began to make those bets with himself that a boy hopes he will lose: he bet that his brother would not hit any of them; he bet that he did not even see them; he bet that if he did see them and got a shot at them, they would not come back so that he could get a chance himself to kill any. It seemed to him that he had to wait an hour, and just when he was going to hollo, and tell his brother where the ducks were, the old smooth-bore sent out a red flash and a white puff before he heard the report; Tip tore loose from his grasp; and he heard the splashing rise of the ducks, and the hurtling rush of their wings; and he ran forward, yelling, “How many did you hit? Where are they? Where are you? Are they coming back? It’s my turn now!” and making an outcry that would have frightened away a fleet of ironclads, but much less a flock of ducks.

One shot always ended the morning’s sport, and there were always good reasons why this shot never killed anything.

NUTTING

The woods were pretty full of the kind of hickory-trees called pignuts, and the boys gathered the nuts, and even ate their small, bitter kernels; and around the Poor-House woods there were some shag-barks, but the boys did not go for them because of the bull and the crazy people. Their great and constant reliance in foraging was the abundance of black walnuts which grew everywhere, along the roads and on the river-banks, as well as in the woods and the pastures. Long before it was time to go walnutting, the boys began knocking off the nuts and trying whether they were ripe enough; and just as soon as the kernels began to fill out, the fellows began making walnut wagons. I do not know why it was thought necessary to have a wagon to gather walnuts, but I know that it was, and that a boy had to make a new wagon every year.

No boy’s walnut wagon could last till the next year; it did very well if it lasted till the next day. He had to make it nearly all with his pocket-knife. He could use a saw to block the wheels out of a pine board, and he could use a hatchet to rough off the corners of the blocks, but he had to use his knife to give them any sort of roundness, and they were not very round then; they were apt to be oval in shape, and they always wabbled. He whittled the axles out with his knife, and he made the hubs with it. He could get a tongue ready-made if he used a broom-handle or a hoop-pole, but that had in either case to be whittled so it could be fastened to the wagon; he even bored the linchpin holes with his knife if he could not get a gimlet; and if he could not get an auger, he bored the holes through the wheels with a red-hot poker, and then whittled them large enough with his knife. He had to use pine for nearly everything, because any other wood was too hard to whittle; and then the pine was always splitting. It split in the axles when he was making the linchpin holes, and the wheels had to be kept on by linchpins that were tied in; the wheels themselves split, and had to be strengthened by slats nailed across the rifts. The wagon-bed was a candle-box nailed to the axles, and that kept the front axle tight, so that it took the whole width of a street to turn a very little wagon in without upsetting.

When the wagon was all done, the boy who owned it started off with his brothers, or some other boys who had no wagon, to gather walnuts. He started early in the morning of some bright autumn day while the frost still bearded the grass in the back-yard, and bristled on the fence-tops and the roof of the woodshed, and hurried off to the woods so as to get there before the other boys had got the walnuts. The best place for them was in some woods-pasture where the trees stood free of one another, and around them, in among the tall, frosty grass, the tumbled nuts lay scattered in groups of twos and threes, or fives, some still yellowish-green in their hulls, and some black, but all sending up to the nostrils of the delighted boy the incense of their clean, keen, wild-woody smell, to be a memory forever.

NUTTING

The leaves had dropped from the trees overhead, and the branches outlined themselves against the blue sky, and dangled from their outer stems clusters of the unfallen fruit, as large as oranges, and only wanting a touch to send them plumping down into the grass where sometimes their fat hulls burst, and the nuts almost leaped into the boy’s hands. The boys ran, some of them to gather the fallen nuts, and others to get clubs and rocks to beat them from the trees; one was sure to throw off his jacket and kick off his shoes and climb the tree to shake every limb where a walnut was still clinging. When they had got them all heaped up like a pile of grape-shot at the foot of the tree, they began to hull them, with blows of a stick, or with stones, and to pick the nuts from the hulls, where the grubs were battening on their assured ripeness, and to toss them into a little heap, a very little heap indeed compared with the bulk of that they came from. The boys gloried in getting as much walnut stain on their hands as they could, for it would not wash off, and it showed for days that they had been walnutting; sometimes they got to staining one another’s faces with the juice, and pretending they were Indians.

The sun rose higher and higher, and burned the frost from the grass, and while the boys worked and yelled and chattered they got hotter and hotter, and began to take off their shoes and stockings, till every one of them was barefoot. Then, about three or four o’clock, they would start homeward, with half a bushel of walnuts in their wagon, and their shoes and stockings piled in on top of them. That is, if they had good luck. In a story, they would always have had good luck, and always gone home with half a bushel of walnuts; but this is a history, and so I have to own that they usually went home with about two quarts of walnuts rattling round under their shoes and stockings in the bottom of the wagon. They usually had no such easy time getting them as they always would in a story; they did not find them under the trees, or ready to drop off, but they had to knock them off with about six or seven clubs or rocks to every walnut, and they had to pound the hulls so hard to get the nuts out that sometimes they cracked the nuts. That was because they usually went walnutting before the walnuts were ripe. But they made just as much preparation for drying the nuts on the woodshed roof whether they got half a gallon or half a bushel; for they did not intend to stop gathering them till they had two or three barrels. They nailed a cleat across the roof to keep them from rolling off, and they spread them out thin, so that they could look more than they were, and dry better. They said they were going to keep them for Christmas, but they had to try pretty nearly every hour or so whether they were getting dry, and in about three days they were all eaten up.

THE FIRE-ENGINES

There were two fire-engines in the Boy’s Town; but there seemed to be something always the matter with them, so that they would not work, if there was a fire. When there was no fire, the companies sometimes pulled them up through the town to the Basin bank, and practised with them against the roofs and fronts of the pork-houses. It was almost as good as a muster to see the firemen in their red shirts and black trousers, dragging the engine at a run, two and two together, one on each side of the rope.

My boy would have liked to speak to a fireman, but he never dared; and the foreman of the Neptune, which was the larger and feebler of the engines, was a figure of such worshipful splendor in his eyes that he felt as if he could not be just a common human being. He was a storekeeper, to begin with, and he was tall and slim, and his black trousers fitted him like a glove; he had a patent-leather helmet, and a brass speaking-trumpet, and he gave all his orders through this. It did not make any difference how close he was to the men, he shouted everything through the trumpet; and when they manned the brakes and began to pump, he roared at them, “Down on her, down on her, boys!” so that you would have thought the Neptune could put out the world if it was burning up. Instead of that there was usually a feeble splutter from the nozzle, and sometimes none at all, even if the hose did not break; it was fun to see the hose break.

The Neptune was a favorite with the boys, though they believed that the Tremont could squirt farther, and they had a belief in its quiet efficiency which was fostered by its reticence in public. It was small and black, but the Neptune was large, and painted of a gay color lit up with gilding that sent the blood leaping through a boy’s veins. The boys knew the Neptune was out of order, but they were always expecting it would come right, and in the mean time they felt that it was an honor to the town, and they followed it as proudly back to the engine-house after one of its magnificent failures as if it had been a magnificent success. The boys were always making magnificent failures themselves, and they could feel for the Neptune.

IV

GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD

THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS

The boys made a very careful study of the circus bills, and when the circus came they held the performance to a strict account for any difference between the feats and their representation. For a fortnight beforehand they worked themselves up for the arrival of the circus into a fever of fear and hope, for it was always a question with a great many whether they could get their fathers to give them the money to go in. The full price was two bits, and the half-price was a bit, or a Spanish real, then a commoner coin than the American dime in the West; and every boy, for that time only, wished to be little enough to look young enough to go in for a bit. Editors of newspapers had a free ticket for every member of their families; and my boy was sure of going to the circus from the first rumor of its coming. But he was none the less deeply thrilled by the coming event, and he was up early on the morning of the great day, to go out and meet the circus procession beyond the corporation line.

I do not really know how boys live through the wonder and the glory of such a sight. Once there were two chariots — one held the band in red-and-blue uniforms, and was drawn by eighteen piebald horses; and the other was drawn by a troop of Shetland ponies, and carried in a vast mythical sea-shell little boys in spangled tights and little girls in the gauze skirts and wings of fairies. There was not a flaw in this splendor to the young eyes that gloated on it, and that followed it in rapture through every turn and winding of its course in the Boy’s Town; nor in the magnificence of the actors and actresses, who came riding two by two in their circus dresses after the chariots, and looking some haughty and contemptuous, and others quiet and even bored, as if it were nothing to be part of such a procession. The boys tried to make them out by the pictures and names on the bills: which was Rivers, the bareback-rider, and which was O’Dale, the champion tumbler; which was the India-rubber man, which the ring-master, which the clown.

Covered with dust, gasping with the fatigue of a three hours’ run beside the procession, but fresh at heart as in the beginning, they arrived with it on the Commons, where the tent-wagons were already drawn up, and the ring was made, and mighty men were driving the iron-headed tent-stakes, and stretching the ropes of the great skeleton of the pavilion which they were just going to clothe with canvas. The boys were not allowed to come anywhere near, except three or four who got leave to fetch water from a neighboring well, and thought themselves richly paid with half-price tickets. The other boys were proud to pass a word with them as they went by with their brimming buckets; fellows who had money to go in would have been glad to carry water just for the glory of coming close to the circus men. They stood about in twos and threes, and lay upon the grass in groups debating whether a tan-bark ring was better than a saw-dust ring; there were different opinions. They came as near the wagons as they dared, and looked at the circus horses munching hay from the tail-boards, just like common horses. The wagons were left standing outside of the tent; but when it was up, the horses were taken into the dressing-room, and then the boys, with many a backward look at the wide spread of canvas, and the flags and streamers floating over it from the centre-pole (the centre-pole was revered almost like a distinguished personage), ran home to dinner so as to get back good and early, and be among the first to go in.

All round, before the circus doors were open, the doorkeepers of the side-shows were inviting people to come in and see the giants and fat woman and boa-constrictors, and there were stands for peanuts and candy and lemonade; the vendors cried, “Ice-cold lemonade, from fifteen hundred miles under ground! Walk up, roll up, tumble up, any way you get up!” The boys thought this brilliant drolling, but they had no time to listen after the doors were open, and they had no money to spend on side-shows or dainties anyway. Inside the tent they found it dark and cool, and their hearts thumped in their throats with the wild joy of being there; they recognized one another with amaze, as if they had not met for years, and the excitement kept growing as other fellows came in. It was lots of fun, too, watching the country-jakes, as the boys called the farmer-folk, and seeing how green they looked, and now some of them tried to act smart with the circus men that came round with oranges to sell. But the great thing was to see whether fellows that said they were going to hook in really got in. The boys held it to be a high and creditable thing to hook into a show of any kind, but hooking into a circus was something that a fellow ought to be held in special honor for doing. He ran great risks, and if he escaped the vigilance of the massive circus man who patrolled the outside of the tent with a cow-hide and a bulldog, perhaps he merited the fame he was sure to win.

I do not know where boys get some of the notions of morality that govern them. These notions are like the sports and plays that a boy leaves off as he gets older to the boys that are younger. He outgrows them, and other boys grow into them, and then outgrow them as he did. Perhaps they come down to the boyhood of our time from the boyhood of the race, and the unwritten laws of conduct may have prevailed among the earliest Aryans on the plains of Asia that I now find so strange in a retrospect of the Boy’s Town.

The standard of honor there was, in a certain way, very high among the boys; they would have despised a thief as he deserved, and I cannot remember one of them who might not have been safely trusted. None of them would have taken an apple out of a market-wagon, or stolen a melon from a farmer who came to town with it; but they would all have thought it fun, if not right, to rob an orchard or hook a watermelon out of a patch. This would have been a foray into the enemy’s country, and the fruit of the adventure would have been the same as the plunder of a city, or the capture of a vessel belonging to him on the high seas. In the same way, if one of the boys had seen a circus man drop a quarter, he would have hurried to give it back to him, but he would only have been proud to hook into the circus man’s show, and the other fellows would have been proud of his exploit, too, as something that did honor to them all. As a person who enclosed bounds and forbade trespass, the circus man constituted himself the enemy of every boy who respected himself, and challenged him to practise any sort of strategy. There was not a boy in the crowd that my boy went with who would have been allowed to hook into a circus by his parents; yet hooking in was an ideal that was cherished among them, that was talked of, and that was even sometimes attempted, though not often. Once, when a fellow really hooked in, and joined the crowd that had ignobly paid, one of the fellows could not stand it. He asked him just how and where he got in, and then he went to the door, and got back his money from the doorkeeper upon the plea that he did not feel well; and in five or ten minutes he was back among the boys, a hero of such moral grandeur as would be hard to describe. Not one of the fellows saw him as he really was — a little lying, thievish scoundrel. Not even my boy saw him so, though he had on some other point of personal honesty the most fantastic scruples.

The boys liked to be at the circus early so as to make sure of the grand entry of the performers into the ring, where they caracoled round on horseback, and gave a delicious foretaste of the wonders to come. The fellows were united in this, but upon other matters feeling varied — some liked tumbling best; some the slack-rope; some bareback-riding; some the feats of tossing knives and balls and catching them. There never was more than one ring in those days; and you were not tempted to break your neck and set your eyes forever askew, by trying to watch all the things that went on at once in two or three rings.

The boys did not miss the smallest feats of any performance, and they enjoyed them every one, not equally, but fully. They had their preferences, of course, as I have hinted; and one of the most popular acts was that where a horse has been trained to misbehave, so that nobody can mount him; and after the actors have tried him, the ring-master turns to the audience, and asks if some gentleman among them wants to try it. Nobody stirs, till at last a tipsy country-jake is seen making his way down from one of the top seats toward the ring. He can hardly walk, he is so drunk, and the clown has to help him across the ring-board, and even then he trips and rolls over on the saw-dust, and has to be pulled to his feet. When they bring him up to the horse, he falls against it; and the little fellows think he will certainly get killed. But the big boys tell the little fellows to shut up and watch out. The ring-master and the clown manage to get the country-jake on to the broad platform on the horse’s back, and then the ring-master cracks his whip, and the two supes who have been holding the horse’s head let go, and the horse begins cantering round the ring. The little fellows are just sure the country-jake is going to fall off, he reels and totters so; but the big boys tell them to keep watching out; and pretty soon the country-jake begins to straighten up. He begins to unbutton his long gray overcoat, and then he takes it off and throws it into the ring, where one of the supes catches it. Then he sticks a short pipe into his mouth, and pulls on an old wool hat, and flourishes a stick that the supe throws to him, and you see that he is an Irishman just come across the sea; and then off goes another coat, and he comes out a British soldier in white duck trousers and red coat. That comes off, and he is an American sailor, with his hands on his hips, dancing a horn-pipe. Suddenly away flash wig and beard and false-face, the pantaloons are stripped off with the same movement, the actor stoops for the reins lying on the horse’s neck, and James Rivers, the greatest three-horse rider in the world, nimbly capers on the broad pad, and kisses his hand to the shouting and cheering spectators as he dashes from the ring past the braying and bellowing brass-band into the dressing-room!

The big boys have known all along that he was not a real country-jake; but when the trained mule begins, and shakes everybody off, just like the horse, and another country-jake gets up, and offers to bet that he can ride that mule, nobody can tell whether he is a real country-jake or not. This is always the last thing in the performance, and the boys have seen with heavy hearts many signs openly betokening the end which they knew was at hand. The actors have come out of the dressing-room door, some in their every-day clothes, and some with just overcoats on over their circus-dresses, and they lounge about near the bandstand watching the performance in the ring. Some of the people are already getting up to go out, and stand for this last act, and will not mind the shouts of “Down in front! Down there!” which the boys eagerly join in, to eke out their bliss a little longer by keeping away even the appearance of anything transitory in it. The country-jake comes stumbling awkwardly into the ring, but he is perfectly sober, and he boldly leaps astride the mule, which tries all its arts to shake him off, plunging, kicking, rearing. He sticks on, and everybody cheers him, and the owner of the mule begins to get mad and to make it do more things to shake the country-jake off. At last, with one convulsive spring, it flings him from its back, and dashes into the dressing-room, while the country-jake picks himself up and vanishes among the crowd.

A man mounted on a platform in the ring is imploring the ladies and gentlemen to keep their seats, and to buy tickets for the negro-minstrel entertainment which is to follow, but which is not included in the price of admission. The boys would like to stay, but they have not the money, and they go out clamoring over the performance, and trying to decide which was the best feat. As to which was the best actor, there is never any question; it is the clown, who showed by the way he turned a double somersault that he can do anything, and who chooses to be clown simply because he is too great a creature to enter into rivalry with the other actors.

There will be another performance in the evening, with real fights outside between the circus men and the country-jakes, and perhaps some of the Basin rounders, but the boys do not expect to come; that would be too much. The boy’s brother once stayed away in the afternoon, and went at night with one of the jour printers; but he was not able to report that the show was better than it was in the afternoon. He did not get home till nearly ten o’clock, though, and he saw the sides of the tent dropped before the people got out; that was a great thing; and what was greater yet, and reflected a kind of splendor on the boy at second hand, was that the jour printer and the clown turned out to be old friends. After the circus, the boy actually saw them standing near the centre-pole talking together; and the next day the jour showed the grease that had dripped on his coat from the candles. Otherwise the boy might have thought it was a dream, that some one he knew had talked on equal terms with the clown. The boys were always intending to stay up and see the circus go out of town, and they would have done so, but their mothers would not let them. This may have been one reason why none of them ever ran off with a circus.

As soon as a circus had been in town, the boys began to have circuses of their own, and to practise for them. Everywhere you could see boys upside down, walking on their hands or standing on them with their legs dangling over, or stayed against house walls. It was easy to stand on your head; one boy stood on his head so much that he had to have it shaved, in the brain-fever that he got from standing on it; but that did not stop the other fellows. Another boy fell head downward from a rail where he was skinning-the-cat, and nearly broke his neck, and made it so sore that it was stiff ever so long. Another boy, who was playing Samson, almost had his leg torn off by the fellows that were pulling at it with a hook; and he did have the leg of his pantaloons torn off. Nothing could stop the boys but time, or some other play coming in; and circuses lasted a good while. Some of the boys learned to turn hand-springs; anybody could turn cart-wheels; one fellow, across the river, could just run along and throw a somersault and light on his feet; lots of fellows could light on their backs; but if you had a spring-board, or shavings under a bank, like those by the turning-shop, you could practise for somersaults pretty safely.

All the time you were practising you were forming your circus company. The great trouble was not that any boy minded paying five or ten pins to come in, but that so many fellows wanted to belong there were hardly any left to form an audience. You could get girls, but even as spectators girls were a little too despicable; they did not know anything; they had no sense; if a fellow got hurt they cried. Then another thing was, where to have the circus. Of course it was simply hopeless to think of a tent, and a boy’s circus was very glad to get a barn. The boy whose father owned the barn had to get it for the circus without his father knowing it; and just as likely as not his mother would hear the noise and come out and break the whole thing up while you were in the very middle of it. Then there were all sorts of anxieties and perplexities about the dress. You could do something by turning your roundabout inside out, and rolling your trousers up as far as they would go; but what a fellow wanted to make him a real circus-actor was a long pair of white cotton stockings, and I never knew a fellow that got a pair; I heard of many a fellow who was said to have got a pair; but when you came down to the fact, they vanished like ghosts when you try to verify them. I believe the fellows always expected to get them out of a bureau-drawer or the clothes-line at home, but failed. In most other ways, a boy’s circus was always a failure, like most other things boys undertake. They usually broke up under the strain of rivalry; everybody wanted to be the clown or ring-master; or else the boy they got the barn of behaved badly, and went into the house crying, and all the fellows had to run.

PASSING SHOWS

There were only two kinds of show known by that name in the Boy’s Town: a nigger show, or a performance of burnt-cork minstrels; and an animal show, or a strolling menagerie; and the boys always meant a menagerie when they spoke of a show, unless they said just what sort of show. The only perfect joy on earth in the way of an entertainment, of course, was a circus, but after the circus the show came unquestionably next. It made a processional entry into the town almost as impressive as the circus’s, and the boys went out to meet it beyond the corporation line in the same way. It always had two elephants, at least, and four or five camels, and sometimes there was a giraffe. These headed the procession, the elephants in the very front, with their keepers at their heads, and then the camels led by halters dangling from their sneering lips and contemptuous noses. After these began to come the show-wagons, with pictures on their sides, very flattered portraits of the wild beasts and birds inside; lions first, then tigers (never meaner than Royal Bengal ones, which the boys understood to be a superior breed), then leopards, then pumas and panthers; then bears, then jackals and hyenas; then bears and wolves; then kangaroos, musk-oxen, deer, and such harmless cattle; and then ostriches, emus, lyre-birds, birds-of-Paradise, and all the rest.

From time to time the boys ran back from the elephants and camels to get what good they could out of the scenes in which these hidden wonders were dramatized in acts of rapine or the chase, but they always came forward to the elephants and camels again. Even with them they had to endure a degree of denial, for although you could see most of the camels’ figures, the elephants were so heavily draped that it was a kind of disappointment to look at them. The boys kept as close as they could, and came as near getting under the elephants’ feet as the keepers would allow; but, after all, they were driven off a good deal and had to keep stealing back. They gave the elephants apples and bits of cracker and cake, and some tried to put tobacco into their trunks, though they knew very well that it was nearly certain death to do so; for any elephant that was deceived that way would recognize the boy that did it, and kill him the next time he came, if it was twenty years afterward. The boys used to believe that the Miami bridge would break down under the elephants if they tried to cross it, and they would have liked to see it do it, but no one ever saw it, perhaps because the elephants always waded the river. Some boys had seen them wading it, and stopping to drink and squirt the water out of their trunks. If an elephant got a boy that had given him tobacco into the river, he would squirt water on him till he drowned him. Still, some boys always tried to give the elephants tobacco, just to see how they would act for the time being.

A show was not so much in favor as a circus, because there was so little performance in the ring. You could go round and look at the animals, mostly very sleepy in their cages, but you were not allowed to poke them through the bars, or anything; and when you took your seat there was nothing much till Herr Driesbach entered the lions’ cage, and began to make them jump over his whip. It was some pleasure to see him put his head between the jaws of the great African King of Beasts, but the lion never did anything to him, and so the act wanted a true dramatic climax. The boys would really rather have seen a bareback-rider, like James Rivers, turn a back-somersault and light on his horse’s crupper, any time, though they respected Herr Driesbach, too; they did not care much for a woman who once went into the lions’ cage and made them jump round.

The boys had their own beliefs about the different animals, and one of these concerned the inappeasable ferocity of the zebra. I do not know why the zebra should have had this repute, for he certainly never did anything to deserve it; but, for the matter of that, he was like all the other animals. Bears were not much esteemed, but they would have been if they could have been really seen hugging anybody to death. It was always hoped that some of the fiercest animals would get away and have to be hunted down, and retaken after they had killed a lot of dogs. If the elephants, some of them, had gone crazy, it would have been something, for then they would have roamed up and down the turnpike smashing buggies and wagons, and had to be shot with the six-pound cannon that was used to celebrate the Fourth of July with.

Another thing that was against the show was that the animals were fed after it was out, and you could not see the tigers tearing their prey when the great lumps of beef were thrown them. There was somehow not so much chance of hooking into a show as a circus, because the seats did not go all round, and you could be seen under the cages as soon as you got in under the canvas. I never heard of a boy that hooked into a show; perhaps nobody ever tried.

But the great reason of all was that you could not have an animal show of your own as you could a circus. You could not get the animals; and no boy living could act a camel, or a Royal Bengal tiger, or an elephant so as to look the least like one.

Of course you could have negro shows, and the boys often had them; but they were not much fun, and you were always getting the black on your shirt-sleeves.

THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN

A great new experience which now came to the boy was the theatre, which he had sometimes heard his father speak of. There had once been a theatre in the Boy’s Town, when a strolling company came up from Cincinnati, and opened for a season in an empty pork-house. But that was a long time ago, and, though he had written a tragedy, all that the boy knew of a theatre was from a picture in a Sunday-school book where a stage scene was given to show what kind of desperate amusements a person might come to in middle life if he began by breaking the Sabbath in his youth. His brother had once been taken to a theatre in Pittsburg by one of their river-going uncles, and he often told about it; but my boy formed no conception of the beautiful reality from his accounts of a burglar who jumped from a roof and was chased by a watchman with a pistol up and down a street with houses painted on a curtain.

The company which came to the Boy’s Town in his time was again from Cincinnati, and it was under the management of the father and mother of two actresses, afterward famous, who were then children, just starting upon their career. These pretty little creatures took the leading parts in Bombastes Furioso the first night my boy ever saw a play, and he instantly fell impartially in love with both of them, and tacitly remained their abject slave for a great while after. When the smaller of them came out with a large pair of stage boots in one hand and a drawn sword in the other, and said:

“Whoever dares these boots displace Shall meet Bombastes face to face,”

if the boy had not already been bereft of his senses by the melodrama preceding the burlesque, he must have been transported by her beauty, her grace, her genius. He, indeed, gave her and her sister his heart, but his mind was already gone, rapt from him by the adorable pirate who fought a losing fight with broadswords, two up and two down — click-click, click-click — and died all over the deck of the pirate ship in the opening piece. This was called the Beacon of Death, and the scene represented the forecastle of the pirate ship with a lantern dangling from the rigging, to lure unsuspecting merchantmen to their doom. Afterward the boy remembered nothing of the story, but a scrap of the dialogue meaninglessly remained with him; and when the pirate captain appeared with his bloody crew and said, hoarsely, “Let us go below and get some brandy!” the boy would have bartered all his hopes of bliss to have been that abandoned ruffian. In fact, he always liked, and longed to be, the villain, rather than any other person in the play, and he so glutted himself with crime of every sort in his tender years at the theatre that he afterward came to be very tired of it, and avoided the plays and novels that had very marked villains in them.

He was in an ecstasy as soon as the curtain rose that night, and he lived somewhere out of his body as long as the playing lasted, which was well on to midnight; for in those days the theatre did not meanly put the public off with one play, but gave it a heartful and its money’s worth with three. On his first night my boy saw The Beacon of Death, Bombastes Furioso, and Black-Eyed Susan, and he never afterward saw less than three plays each night, and he never missed a night, as long as the theatre languished in the unfriendly air of that mainly Calvinistic community, where the theatre was regarded by most good people as the eighth of the seven deadly sins. The whole day long he dwelt in a dream of it that blotted out, or rather consumed with more effulgent brightness, all the other day-dreams he had dreamed before, and his heart almost burst with longing to be a villain like those villains on the stage, to have a mustache — a black mustache — such as they wore at a time when every one off the stage was clean shaven, and somehow to end bloodily, murderously, as became a villain.

I dare say this was not quite a wholesome frame of mind for a boy of ten years; but I do not defend it; I only portray it. Being the boy he was, he was destined somehow to dwell half the time in a world of dreamery; and I have tried to express how, when he had once got enough of villany, he reformed his ideals and rather liked virtue.

THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS

Every boy is two or three boys, or twenty or thirty different kinds of boys in one; he is all the time living many lives and forming many characters; but it is a good thing if he can keep one life and one character when he gets to be a man. He may turn out to be like an onion when he is grown up, and be nothing but hulls, that you keep peeling off, one after another, till you think you have got down to the heart, at last, and then you have got down to nothing.

All the boys may have been like my boy in the Boy’s Town, in having each an inward being that was not the least like their outward being, but that somehow seemed to be their real self, whether it truly was so or not. But I am certain that this was the case with him, and that while he was joyfully sharing the wild sports and conforming to the savage usages of the boy’s world about him, he was dwelling in a wholly different world within him, whose wonders no one else knew. I could not tell now these wonders any more than he could have told them then; but it was a world of dreams, of hopes, of purposes, which he would have been more ashamed to avow for himself than I should be to avow for him. It was all vague and vast, and it came out of the books that he read, and that filled his soul with their witchery, and often held him aloof with their charm in the midst of the plays from which they could not lure him wholly away, or at all away. He did not know how or when their enchantment began, and he could hardly recall the names of some of them afterward.

First of them was Goldsmith’s History of Greece, which made him an Athenian of Pericles’ time, and Goldsmith’s History of Rome, which naturalized him in a Roman citizenship chiefly employed in slaying tyrants; from the time of Appius Claudius down to the time of Domitian, there was hardly a tyrant that he did not slay. After he had read these books, not once or twice, but twenty times over, his father thought fit to put into his hands The Travels of Captain Ashe in North America, to encourage, or perhaps to test, his taste for useful reading; but this was a failure. The captain’s travels were printed with long esses, and the boy could make nothing of them, for other reasons. The fancy nourished upon

“The glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome,”

starved amid the robust plenty of the Englishman’s criticisms of our early manners and customs. Neither could money hire the boy to read Malte-Brun’s Geography, in three large folios, of a thousand pages each, for which there was a standing offer of fifty cents from the father, who had never been able to read it himself.

But shortly after he failed so miserably with Captain Ashe, the boy came into possession of a priceless treasure. It was that little treatise on Greek and Roman Mythology which I have mentioned, and which he must literally have worn out with reading, since no fragment of it seems to have survived his boyhood. Heaven knows who wrote it or published it; his father bought it with a number of other books at an auction, and the boy, who had about that time discovered the chapter on prosody in the back part of his grammar, made poems from it for years, and appeared in many transfigurations, as this and that god and demigod and hero upon imagined occasions in the Boy’s Town, to the fancied admiration of all the other fellows. I do not know just why he wished to appear to his grandmother in a vision; now as Mercury with winged feet, now as Apollo with his drawn bow, now as Hercules leaning upon his club and resting from his Twelve Labors. Perhaps it was because he thought that his grandmother, who used to tell the children about her life in Wales, and show them the picture of a castle where she had once slept when she was a girl, would appreciate him in these apotheoses. If he believed they would make a vivid impression upon the sweet old Quaker lady, no doubt he was right.

There was another book which he read about this time, and that was The Greek Soldier. It was the story of a young Greek, a glorious Athenian, who had fought through the Greek war of independence against the Turks, and then come to America and published the narrative of his adventures. They fired my boy with a retrospective longing to have been present at the Battle of Navarino, when the allied ships of the English, French, and Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet; but it seemed to him that he could not have borne to have the allies impose a king upon the Greeks, when they really wanted a republic, and so he was able to console himself for having been absent. He did what he could in fighting the war over again, and he intended to harden himself for the long struggle by sleeping on the floor, as the Greek soldier had done. But the children often fell asleep on the floor in the warmth of the hearth-fire; and his preparation for the patriotic strife was not distinguishable in its practical effect from a reluctance to go to bed at the right hour.

Captain Riley’s narrative of his shipwreck on the coast of Africa, and his captivity among the Arabs, was a book which my boy and his brother prized with a kind of personal interest, because their father told them that he had once seen a son of Captain Riley when he went to get his appointment of collector at Columbus, and that this son was named William Willshire Riley, after the good English merchant, William Willshire, who had ransomed Captain Riley. William Willshire seemed to them almost the best man who ever lived; though my boy had secretly a greater fondness for the Arab, Sidi Hamet, who was kind to Captain Riley and kept his brother Seid from ill-treating him whenever he could. Probably the boy liked him better because the Arab was more picturesque than the Englishman. The whole narrative was very interesting; it had a vein of sincere and earnest piety in it which was not its least charm, and it was written in a style of old-fashioned stateliness which was not without its effect with the boys.

Somehow they did not think of the Arabs in this narrative as of the same race and faith with the Arabs of Bagdad and the other places in the Arabian Nights. They did not think whether these were Mohammedans or not; they naturalized them in the fairy world where all boys are citizens, and lived with them there upon the same familiar terms as they lived with Robinson Crusoe. Their father once told them that Robinson Crusoe had robbed the real narrative of Alexander Selkirk of the place it ought to have held in the remembrance of the world; and my boy had a feeling of guilt in reading it, as if he were making himself the accomplice of an impostor.

He liked the Arabian Nights, but oddly enough these wonderful tales made no such impression on his fancy as the stories in a wretchedly inferior book made. He did not know the name of this book, or who wrote it; from which I imagine that much of his reading was of the purblind sort that ignorant grown-up people do, without any sort of literary vision. He read this book perpetually, when he was not reading his Greek and Roman Mythology; and then suddenly, one day, as happens in childhood with so many things, it vanished out of his possession as if by magic. Perhaps he lost it; perhaps he lent it; at any rate it was gone, and he never got it back, and he never knew what book it was till thirty years afterward, when he picked up from a friend’s library-table a copy of Gesta Romanorum, and recognized in this collection of old monkish legends the long-missing treasure of his boyhood.

These stories, without beauty of invention, without art of construction or character, without spirituality in their crude materialization, which were read aloud in the refectories of mediæval cloisters while the monks sat at meat, laid a spell upon the soul of the boy that governed his life. He conformed his conduct to the principles and maxims which actuated the behavior of the shadowy people of these dry-as-dust tales; he went about drunk with the fumes of fables about Roman emperors that never were, in an empire that never was; and, though they tormented him by putting a mixed and impossible civilization in the place of that he knew from his Goldsmith, he was quite helpless to break from their influence. He was always expecting some wonderful thing to happen to him as things happened there in fulfilment of some saying or prophecy; and at every trivial moment he made sayings and prophecies for himself, which he wished events to fulfil. One Sunday when he was walking in an alley behind one of the stores, he found a fur cap that had probably fallen out of the store-loft window. He ran home with it, and in his simple-hearted rapture he told his mother that as soon as he picked it up there came into his mind the words, “He who picketh up this cap picketh up a fortune,” and he could hardly wait for Monday to come and let him restore the cap to its owner and receive an enduring prosperity in reward of his virtue. Heaven knows what form he expected this to take; but when he found himself in the store, he lost all courage; his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, and he could not utter a syllable of the fine phrases he had made to himself. He laid the cap on the counter without a word; the storekeeper came up and took it in his hand. “What’s this?” he said. “Why, this is ours,” and he tossed the cap into a loose pile of hats by the showcase, and the boy slunk out, cut to the heart and crushed to the dust. It was such a cruel disappointment and mortification that it was rather a relief to have his brother mock him, and come up and say from time to time, “He who picketh up this cap picketh up a fortune,” and then split into a jeering laugh. At least he could fight his brother, and, when he ran, could stone him; and he could throw quads and quoins, and pieces of riglet at the jour printers when the story spread to them, and one of them would begin, “He who picketh—”

He could not make anything either of Byron or Cowper; and he did not even try to read the little tree-calf volumes of Homer and Virgil which his father had in the versions of Pope and Dryden; the small copper-plates with which they were illustrated conveyed no suggestion to him. Afterward he read Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, and he formed a great passion for Pope’s Pastorals, which he imitated in their easy heroics; but till he came to read Longfellow, and Tennyson, and Heine, he never read any long poem without more fatigue than pleasure. His father used to say that the taste for poetry was an acquired taste, like the taste for tomatoes, and that he would come to it yet; but he never came to it, or so much of it as some people seemed to do, and he always had his sorrowful misgivings as to whether they liked it as much as they pretended. I think, too, that it should be a flavor, a spice, a sweet, a delicate relish in the high banquet of literature, and never a chief dish; and I should not know how to defend my boy for trying to make long poems of his own at the very time when he found it so hard to read other people’s long poems.

V

THE LAST OF A BOY’S TOWN

My boy was twelve years old, and was already a swift compositor, though he was still so small that he had to stand on a chair to reach the case in setting type on Taylor’s inaugural message. But what he lacked in stature he made up in gravity of demeanor; and he got the name of “The Old Man” from the printers as soon as he began to come about the office, which he did almost as soon as he could walk. His first attempt in literature, an essay on the vain and disappointing nature of human life, he set up and printed off himself in his sixth or seventh year; and the printing-office was in some sort his home, as well as his school, his university. He could no more remember learning to set type than he could remember learning to read; and in after-life he could not come within smell of the ink, the dusty types, the humid paper, of a printing-office without that tender swelling of the heart which so fondly responds to any memory-bearing perfume: his youth, his boyhood, almost his infancy came back to him in it. He now looked forward eagerly to helping on the new paper, and somewhat proudly to living in the larger place the family were going to. The moment it was decided he began to tell the boys that he was going to live in a city, and he felt that it gave him distinction. He had nothing but joy in it, and he did not dream that as the time drew near it could be sorrow. But when it came at last, and he was to leave the house, the town, the boys, he found himself deathly homesick.

The parting days were days of gloom; the parting was an anguish of bitter tears. Nothing consoled him but the fact that they were going all the way to the new place in a canal-boat, which his father chartered for the trip. My boy and his brother had once gone to Cincinnati in a canal-boat, with a friendly captain of their acquaintance, and, though they were both put to sleep in a berth so narrow that when they turned they fell out on the floor, the glory of the adventure remained with him, and he could have thought of nothing more delightful than such another voyage. The household goods were piled up in the middle of the boat, and the family had a cabin forward, which seemed immense to the children. They played in it and ran races up and down the long canal-boat roof, where their father and mother sometimes put their chairs and sat to admire the scenery.

They arrived safely at their journey’s end, without any sort of accident. They had made the whole forty miles in less than two days, and were all as well as when they started, without having suffered for a moment from seasickness. The boat drew up at the tow-path just before the stable belonging to the house which the father had already taken, and the whole family at once began helping the crew put the things ashore. The boys thought it would have been a splendid stable to keep the pony in, only they had sold the pony; but they saw in an instant that it would do for a circus as soon as they could get acquainted with enough boys to have one.

The strangeness of the house and street, and the necessity of meeting the boys of the neighborhood, and paying with his person for his standing among them, kept my boy interested for a time, and he did not realize at first how much he missed the Boy’s Town and all the familiar fellowships there, and all the manifold privileges of the place. Then he began to be very homesick, and to be torn with the torment of a divided love. His mother, whom he loved so dearly, so tenderly, was here, and wherever she was, that was home; and yet home was yonder, far off, at the end of those forty inexorable miles, where he had left his life-long mates. The first months there was a dumb heartache at the bottom of every pleasure and excitement.

After a while he was allowed to revisit the Boy’s Town. It could only have been three or four months after he had left it, but it already seemed a very long time; and he figured himself returning as stage heroes do to the scenes of their childhood, after an absence of some fifteen years. He fancied that if the boys did not find him grown, they would find him somehow changed, and that he would dazzle them with the light accumulated by his residence in a city. He was going to stay with his grandmother, and he planned to make a long stay; for he was very fond of her, and he liked the quiet and comfort of her pleasant house. He must have gone back by the canal-packet, but his memory kept no record of the fact, and afterward he knew only of having arrived, and of searching about in a ghostly fashion for his old comrades. They may have been at school; at any rate, he found very few of them; and with them he was certainly strange enough; too strange, even. They received him with a kind of surprise; and they could not begin playing together at once in the old way. He went to all the places that were so dear to him; but he felt in them the same kind of refusal, or reluctance, that he felt in the boys. His heart began to ache again, he did not quite know why; only it ached. When he went up from his grandmother’s to look at the Faulkner house, he realized that it was no longer home, and he could not bear the sight of it. There were other people living in it; strange voices sounded from the open doors, strange faces peered from the windows.

He came back to his grandmother’s, bruised and defeated, and spent the morning indoors reading. After dinner he went out again, and hunted up that queer earth-spirit who had been so long and closely his only friend. He at least was not changed; he was as unwashed and as unkempt as ever; but he seemed shy of my poor boy. He had probably never been shaken hands with in his life before; he dropped my boy’s hand; and they stood looking at each other, not knowing what to say. My boy had on his best clothes, which he wore so as to affect the Boy’s Town boys with the full splendor of a city boy. After all, he was not so very splendid, but his presence altogether was too much for the earth-spirit, and he vanished out of his consciousness like an apparition.

After school was out in the afternoon, he met more of the boys, but none of them knew just what to do with him. The place that he had once had in their lives was filled; he was an outsider, who might be suffered among them, but he was no longer of them. He did not understand this at once, nor well know what hurt him. But something was gone that could not be called back, something lost that could not be found.

At tea-time his grandfather came home and gravely made him welcome; the uncle who was staying with them was jovially kind. But a heavy homesickness weighed down the child’s heart, which now turned from the Boy’s Town as longingly as it had turned toward it before.

They all knelt down with the grandfather before they went to the table. There had been a good many deaths from cholera during the day, and the grandfather prayed for grace and help amid the pestilence that walketh in darkness and wasteth at noonday in such a way that the boy felt there would be very little of either for him unless he got home at once. All through the meal that followed he was trying to find the courage to say that he must go home. When he managed to say it, his grandmother and aunt tried to comfort and coax him, and his uncle tried to shame him, out of his homesickness, to joke it off, to make him laugh. But his grandfather’s tender heart was moved. He could not endure the child’s mute misery; he said he must go home if he wished.

In half an hour the boy was on the canal-packet speeding homeward at the highest pace of the three-horse team, and the Boy’s Town was out of sight. He could not sleep for excitement that night, and he came and spent the time talking on quite equal terms with the steersman, one of the canalers whom he had admired afar in earlier and simpler days. He found him a very amiable fellow, by no means haughty, who began to tell him funny stories, and who even let him take the helm for a while. The rudder-handle was of polished iron, very different from the clumsy wooden affair of a freight-boat; and the packet made in a single night the distance which the boy’s family had been nearly two days in travelling when they moved away from the Boy’s Town.

He arrived home for breakfast a travelled and experienced person, and wholly cured of that longing for his former home that had tormented him before he revisited its scenes. He now fully gave himself up to his new environment, and looked forward and not backward. I do not mean to say that he ceased to love the Boy’s Town; that he could not do and never did. But he became more and more aware that the past was gone from him forever, and that he could not return to it. He did not forget it, but cherished its memories the more fondly for that reason.

There was no bitterness in it, and no harm that he could not hope would easily be forgiven him. He had often been foolish, and sometimes he had been wicked; but he had never been such a little fool or such a little sinner but he had wished for more sense and more grace. There are some great fools and great sinners who try to believe in after-life that they are the manlier men because they have been silly and mischievous boys, but he has never believed that. He is glad to have had a boyhood fully rounded out with all a boy’s interests and pleasures, and he is glad that his lines were cast in the Boy’s Town; but he knows, or believes he knows, that whatever is good in him now came from what was good in him then; and he is sure that the town was delightful chiefly because his home in it was happy. The town was small, and the boys there were hemmed in by their inexperience and ignorance; but the simple home was large with vistas that stretched to the ends of the earth, and it was serenely bright with a father’s reason and warm with a mother’s love.

THE END

MISCELLANEOUS STORIES

CONTENTS

AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

BRAYBRIDGE’S OFFER

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

AT THE SIGN OF THE SAVAGE.

TONELLI’S MARRIAGE.

BUYING A HORSE

AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

AN IDYL OF SARATOGA

I

The day had been very hot under the tall trees which everywhere embower and stifle Saratoga, for they shut out the air as well as the sun; and after tea (they still have an early dinner at all the hotels in Saratoga, and tea is the last meal of the day) I strolled over to the pretty Congress Park, in the hope of getting a breath of coolness there. Mrs. March preferred to take the chances on the verandah of our pleasant little hotel, where I left her with the other ladies, forty fanning like one, as they rocked to and fro under the roof lifted to the third story by those lofty shafts peculiar to the Saratoga architecture. As far as coolness was concerned, I thought she was wise after I reached the park, for I found none of it there. I tried first a chair in the arabesque pavilion (I call it arabesque in despair; it might very well be Swiss; it is charming, at all events), and studied to deceive myself with the fresh-looking ebullition of the spring in the vast glass bowls your goblets are served from (people say it is pumped, and artificially aërated); but after a few moments this would not do, and I went out to a bench, of the rows beside the gravelled walks. It was no better there; but I fancied it would be better on the little isle in the little lake, where the fountain was flinging a sheaf of spray into the dull air. This looked even cooler than the bubbling spring in the glass vases, and it sounded vastly cooler. There would be mosquitoes there, of course, I admitted in the debate I had with myself before I decided to make experiment of the place, and the event proved me right. There were certainly some mosquitoes in the Grecian temple (if it is not a Turkish kiosk; perhaps we had better compromise, and call it a Grecian kiosk), which you reach by a foot-bridge from the mainland, and there was a damp in the air which might pass for coolness. There were three or four people standing vaguely about in the kiosk; but my idle mind fixed itself upon a young French-Canadian mother of low degree, who sat, with her small boy, on the verge of the pavement near the water. She scolded him in their parlance for having got himself so dirty, and then she smacked his poor, filthy little hands, with a frown of superior virtue, though I did not find her so very much cleaner herself. I cannot see children beaten without a heartache, and I continued to suffer for this small wretch even after he had avenged himself by eating a handful of peanut shells, which would be sure to disagree with him and make his mother more trouble. In fact, I experienced no relief till his mother, having spent her insensate passion, gathered him up with sufficient tenderness, and carried him away. Then, for the first time, I noticed a girl sitting in a chair just outside the kiosk, and showing a graceful young figure as she partly turned to look after the departing mother and her child. When she turned again and glanced in my direction, at the noise I made in placing my chair, I could see two things — that she had as much beauty as grace, and that she was disappointed in me. The latter fact did not wound me, for I felt its profound impersonality. I was not wrong in myself; I was simply wrong in being an elderly man with a grey beard instead of the handsome shape and phase of youth which her own young beauty had a right to in my place. I was not only not wounded, but I was not sorry not to be that shape and phase of youth, except as I hate to disappoint any one.

Her face was very beautiful; it was quite perfectly beautiful, and of such classic mould that she might well have been the tutelary goddess of that temple (if it was a temple, and not a kiosk), in the white duck costume which the goddesses were wearing that summer. Her features were Greek, but her looks were American; and she was none the less a goddess, I decided, because of that air of something exacting, of not quite satisfied, which made me more and more willing to be elderly and grey-bearded. I at least should not be expected to supply the worship necessary to keep such a goddess in good humour.

I do not know just how I can account for a strain of compassion which mingled with this sense of irresponsibility in me; perhaps it was my feeling of security that attuned me to pity; but certainly I did not look at this young girl long without beginning to grieve for her, and to weave about her a web of possibilities, which grew closer and firmer in texture when she was joined by a couple who had apparently not left her a great while before, and who spoke, without otherwise saluting her, as they sat down on either side of her. I instantly interpreted her friends to be the young wife and middle-aged husband of a second marriage; for they were evidently man and wife, and he must have been nearly twice as old as she. In person he tended to the weight which expresses settled prosperity, and a certain solidification of temperament and character; as to his face, it was kind, and it was rather humorous, in spite of being a little slow in the cast of mind it suggested. He wore an iron-grey beard on his cheeks and chin, but he had his strong upper lip clean shaven; some drops of perspiration stood upon it, and upon his forehead, which showed itself well up toward his crown under the damp strings of his scanty hair. He looked at the young goddess in white duck with a sort of trouble in his friendly countenance, and his wife (if it was his wife) seemed to share his concern, though she smiled, while he let the corners of his straight mouth droop. She was smaller than the young girl, and I thought almost as young; and she had the air of being somehow responsible for her, and cowed by her, though the word says rather more than I mean. She was not so well dressed; that is, not so stylishly, though doubtless her costume was more expensive. It seemed the inspiration of a village dressmaker; and her husband’s low-cut waistcoat, and his expanse of plaited shirt-front, betrayed a provincial ideal which she would never decry — which she would perhaps never find different from the most worldly. He had probably, I swiftly imagined, been wearing just that kind of clothes for twenty years, and telling his tailor to make each new suit like the last; he had been buying for the same period the same shape of Panama hat, regardless of the continually changing type of straw hats on other heads. I cannot say just why, as he tilted his chair back on its hind-legs, I felt that he was either the cashier of the village bank at home, or one of the principal business men of the place. Village people I was quite resolute to have them all; but I left them free to have come from some small manufacturing centre in western Massachusetts or southern Vermont or central New York. It was easy to see that they were not in the habit of coming away from their place, wherever it was; and I wondered whether they were finding their account in the present excursion.

I myself think Saratoga one of the most delightful spectacles in the world, and Mrs. March is of the same mind about it. We like all the waters, and drink them without regard to their different properties; but we rather prefer the Congress spring, because it is such a pleasant place to listen to the Troy military band in the afternoon, and the more or less vocal concert in the evening. All the Saratoga world comes and goes before us, as we sit there by day and by night, and we find a perpetual interest in it. We go and look at the deer (a herd of two, I think) behind their wire netting in the southward valley of the park, and we would feed the trout in their blue tank if we did not see them suffering with surfeit, and hanging in motionless misery amid the clear water under a cloud of bread crumbs. We are such devotees of the special attractions offered from time to time that we do not miss a single balloon ascension or pyrotechnic display. In fact, it happened to me one summer that I studied so earnestly and so closely the countenance of the lady who went up (in trunk-hose), in order to make out just what were the emotions of a lady who went up every afternoon in a balloon, that when we met near the end of the season in Broadway I thought I must have seen her somewhere in society, and took off my hat to her (she was not at the moment in trunk-hose). We like going about to the great hotels, and sponging on them for the music in the forenoon; we like the gaudy shops of modes kept by artists whose addresses are French and whose surnames are Irish; and the bazaars of the Armenians and Japanese, whose rugs and bric-à-brac are not such bargains as you would think. We even go to the races sometimes; we are not sure it is quite right, but as we do not bet, and are never decided as to which horse has won, it is perhaps not so wrong as it might be.

Somehow I could not predicate these simple joys of the people I have been talking of, for the very reason, that they were themselves so simple. It was our sophistication which enabled us to taste pleasures which would have been insipidities to them. Their palates would have demanded other flavours — social excitements, balls, flirtations, almost escapades. I speak of the two women; the man, doubtless, like most other Americans of his age, wanted nothing but to get back to business in the small town where he was important; and still more I speak of the young girl; for the young wife I fancied very willing to go back to her house-keeping, and to be staying on in Saratoga only on her friend’s account.

II

I had already made up my mind that they had been the closest friends before one of them married, and that the young wife still thought the young girl worthy of the most splendid fate that marriage could have in store for any of her sex. Women often make each other the idols of such worship; but I could not have justified this lady’s adoration so far as it concerned the mental and moral qualities of her friend, though I fully shared it in regard to her beauty. To me she looked a little dull and a little selfish, and I chose to think the husband modestly found her selfish, if he were too modest to find her dull.

Yet, after all, I tacitly argued with him, why should we call her selfish? It was perfectly right and fit that, as a young girl with such great personal advantages, she should wish to see the world — even to show herself to the world, — and find in it some agreeable youth who should admire her, and desire to make her his own for ever. Compare this simple and natural longing with the insatiate greed and ambition of one of our own sex, I urged him, and then talk to me, if you can, of this poor girl’s selfishness! A young man has more egoism in an hour than a young girl has in her whole life. She thinks she wishes some one to be devoted to her, but she really wishes some one to let her be devoted to him; and how passively, how negatively, she must manage to accomplish her self-sacrifice! He, on the contrary, means to go conquering and enslaving forward; to be in and out of love right and left, and to end, after many years of triumph, in the possession of the best and wisest and fairest of her sex. I know the breed, my dear sir; I have been a young man myself. We men have liberty, we have initiative; we are not chaperoned; we can go to this one and that one freely and fearlessly. But women must sit still, and be come to or shied off from. They cannot cast the bold eye of interest; they can at most bridle under it, and furtively respond from the corner of the eye of weak hope and gentle deprecation. Be patient, then, with this poor child if she darkles a little under the disappointment of not finding Saratoga so personally gay as she supposed it would be, and takes it out of you and your wife, as if you were to blame for it, in something like sulks.

He remained silent under these tacit appeals, but at the end he heaved a deep sigh, as he might if he were acknowledging their justice, and were promising to do his very best in the circumstances. His wife looked round at him, but did not speak. In fact, they none of them spoke after the first words of greeting to the girl, as I can very well testify; for I sat eavesdropping with all my might, resolved not to lose a syllable, and I am sure I lost none.

The young girl did not look round at that deep-drawn sigh of the man’s; she did not lift her head even when he cleared his throat: but I was intent upon him, for I thought that these sounds preluded an overture (I am not sure of the figure) to my acquaintance, and in fact he actually asked, “Do you know just when the concert begins?”

I was overjoyed at his question, for I was poignantly interested in the little situation I had created, and I made haste to answer: “Well, nominally at eight o’clock; but the first half-hour is usually taken up in tuning the instruments. If you get into the pavilion at a quarter to nine you won’t lose much. It isn’t so bad when it really begins.”

The man permitted himself a smile of the pleasure we Americans all feel at having a thing understated in that way. His wife asked timidly, “Do we have to engage our seats in the — pavilion?”

“Oh, no,” I laughed; “there’s no such rush as that. Haven’t you been at the concerts before?”

The man answered for her: “We haven’t been here but a few days. I should think,” he added to her, “it would be about as comfortable outside of the house.” I perceived that he maintained his independence of my superior knowledge by refusing to say “pavilion”; and in fact I do not know whether that is the right name for the building myself.

“It will be hot enough anywhere,” I assented, as if the remark had been made to me; but here I drew the line out of self-respect, and resolved that he should make the next advances.

The young girl looked up at the first sound of my voice, and verified me as the elderly man whom she had seen before; and then she looked down at the water again. I understood, and I freely forgave her. If my beard had been brown instead of grey I should have been an adventure; but to the eye of girlhood adventure can never wear a grey beard. I was truly sorry for her; I could read in the pensive droop of her averted face that I was again a disappointment.

They all three sat, without speaking again, in the mannerless silence of Americans. The man was not going to feel bound in further civility to me because I had civilly answered a question of his. I divined that he would be glad to withdraw from the overture he had made; he may have thought from my readiness to meet him half way that I might be one of those sharpers in whom Saratoga probably abounded. This did not offend me; it amused me; I fancied his confusion if he could suddenly know how helplessly and irreparably honest I was.

“I don’t know but it’s a little too damp here, Rufus,” said the wife.

“I don’t know but it is,” he answered; but none of them moved, and none of them spoke again for some minutes. Then the wife said again, but this time to the friend, “I don’t know but it’s a little too damp here, Julia,” and the friend answered, as the husband had —

“I don’t know but it is.”

I had two surprises in this slight event. I could never have imagined that the girl had so brunette a name as Julia, or anything less blond in sound than, say, Evadne, at the very darkest; and I had made up my mind — Heaven knows why — that her voice would be harsh. Perhaps I thought it unfair that she should have a sweet voice added to all that beauty and grace of hers; but she had a sweet voice, very tender and melodious, with a plangent note in it that touched me and charmed me. Beautiful and graceful as she was, she had lacked atmosphere before, and now suddenly she had atmosphere. I resolved to keep as near to these people as I could, and not to leave the place as long as they stayed; but I did not think it well to let them feel that I was æsthetically shadowing them, and I got up and strolled away toward the pavilion, keeping an eye in the back of my head upon them.

I sat down in a commanding position, and watched the people gathering for the concert; and in the drama of a group of Cubans, or of South Americans, I almost forgot for a moment the pale idyl of my compatriots at the kiosk. There was a short, stout little Spanish woman speaking in the shapely sentences which the Latin race everywhere delights in, and around her was an increasing number of serious Spanish men, listening as if to important things, and paying her that respectful attention which always amuses and puzzles me. In view of what we think their low estimate of women, I cannot make out whether it is a personal tribute to some specific woman whom they regard differently from all the rest of her sex, or whether they choose to know in her for the nouce the abstract woman who is better than woman in the concrete. I am sure I have never seen men of any other race abandon themselves to such a luxury of respect as these black and grey bearded Spaniards of leaden complexion showed this dumpy personification of womanhood, with their prominent eyes bent in homage upon her, and their hands trembling with readiness to seize their hats off in reverence. It appeared presently that the matter they were all canvassing so devoutly was the question of where she should sit. It seemed to be decided that she could not do better than sit just at that point. When she actually took a chair the stately convocation ended, and its members, with low obeisances, dispersed themselves in different directions. They had probably all been sitting with her the whole afternoon on the verandah of the Everett House, where their race chiefly resorts in Saratoga, and they were availing themselves of this occasion to appear to be meeting her, after a long interval, in society.

I said to myself that of course they believed Saratoga was still that centre of American fashion which it once was, and that they came and went every summer, probably in the belief that they saw a great deal of social gaiety there. This made me think, by a natural series of transitions, of the persons of my American idyl, and I looked about the pavilion everywhere for them without discovering, till the last, that they were just behind me.

I found the fact touching. They had not wished to be in any wise beholden to me, and had even tried to reject my friendly readiness to know them better; but they had probably sought my vicinity in a sense of their loneliness and helplessness, which they hoped I would not divine, but which I divined instantly. Still, I thought it best not to show any consciousness of them, and we sat through the first part of the concert without taking notice of one another. Then the man leaned forward and touched me on the shoulder.

“Will you let me take your programme a minute?”

“Why, certainly,” said I.

He took it, and after a vague glance at it he passed it to his wife, who gave it in turn to the young girl. She studied it very briefly, and then, after a questioning look, offered it back to me.

“Won’t you keep it?” I entreated. “I’ve quite done with it.”

“Oh, thank you,” she answered in her tender voice, and she and the wife looked hard at the man, whom they seemed to unite in pushing forward by that means.

He hemmed, and asked, “Have you been in Saratoga much?”

“Why, yes,” I said; “rather a good deal. My wife and I have been here three or four summers.”

At the confession of my married state, which this statement implicated, the women exchanged a glance, I fancied, of triumph, as if they had been talking about me, and I had now confirmed the ground they had taken concerning me. Then they joined in goading the man on again with their eyes.

“Which hotel,” he asked, “should you say had the most going on?”

The young girl and the wife transferred their gaze to me, with an intensified appeal in it. The man looked away with a certain shame — the shame of a man who feels that his wife has made him make an ass of himself. I tried to treat his question, by the quantity and quality of my answer, as one of the most natural things in the world; and I probably deceived them all by this effort, though I am sure that I was most truthful and just concerning the claims of the different hotels to be the centre of excitement. I thought I had earned the right to ask at the end, “Are you stopping at the Grand Union?”

“No,” he said; and he mentioned one of the smaller hotels, which depend upon the great houses for the entertainment of their guests. “Are you there?” he asked, meaning the Grand Union.

“Oh no,” I said; “we couldn’t do that sort of thing, even if we wanted.” And in my turn I named the modest hotel where we were, and said that I thought it by all odds the pleasantest place in Saratoga. “But I can’t say,” I added, “that there is a great deal going on there, either. If you want that sort of thing you will have to go to some of the great hotels. We have our little amusements, but they’re all rather mild.” I kept talking to the man, but really addressing myself to the women. “There’s something nearly every evening: prestidigitating, or elocutioning, or a little concert, or charades, or impromptu theatricals, or something of that sort. I can’t say there’s dancing, though really, I suppose, if any one wanted to dance there would be dancing.”

I was aware that the women listened intelligently, even if the man did not. The wife drew a long breath, and said, “It must be very pleasant.”

The girl said — rather more hungrily, I fancied— “Yes, indeed.”

I don’t know why their interest should have prompted me to go on and paint the lily a little, but I certainly did so. I did not stop till the music began again, and I had to stop. By the time the piece was finished I had begun to have my misgivings, and I profited by the brief interval of silence to say to the young girl, “I wouldn’t have you think we are a whirl of gaiety exactly.”

“Oh no,” she answered pathetically, as if she were quite past expecting that or anything like it.

We were silent again. At the end of the next piece they all rose, and the wife said timidly to me, “Well, good-evening,” as if she might be venturing too far; and her husband came to her rescue with “Well, good-evening, sir.” The young girl merely bowed.

I did not stay much longer, for I was eager to get home and tell my wife about my adventure, which seemed to me of a very rare and thrilling kind. I believed that if I could present it to her duly, it would interest her as much as it had interested me. But somehow, as I went on with it in the lamplight of her room, it seemed to lose colour and specific character.

“You are always making up these romances about young girls being off and disappointed of a good time ever since we saw that poor little Kitty Ellison with her cousins at Niagara,” said Mrs. March. “You seem to have it on the brain.”

“Because it’s the most tragical thing in the world, and the commonest in our transition state,” I retorted. I was somewhat exasperated to have my romance treated as so stale a situation, though I was conscious now that it did want perfect novelty. “It’s precisely for that reason that I like to break my heart over it. I see it every summer, and it keeps me in a passion of pity. Something ought to be done about it.”

“Well, don’t you try to do anything, Basil, unless you write to the newspapers.”

“I suppose,” I said, “that if the newspapers could be got to take hold of it, perhaps something might be done.” The notion amused me; I went on to play with it, and imagined Saratoga, by a joint effort of the leading journals, recolonised with the social life that once made it the paradise of young people.

“I have been writing to the children,” said my wife, “and telling them to stay on at York Harbour if the Herricks want them so much. They would hate it here. You say the girl looked cross. I can’t exactly imagine a cross goddess.”

“There were lots of cross goddesses,” I said rather crossly myself; for I saw that, after having trodden my romance in the dust, she was willing I should pick it up again and shake it off, and I wished to show her that I was not to be so lightly appeased.

“Perhaps I was thinking of angels,” she murmured.

“I distinctly didn’t say she was an angel,” I returned.

“Now, come, Basil; I see you’re keeping something back. What did you try to do for those people? Did you tell them where you were stopping?”

“Yes, I did. They asked me, and I told them.”

“Did you brag the place up?”

“On the contrary, I understated its merits.”

“Oh, very well, then,” she said, quite as if I had confessed my guilt; “they will come here, and you will have your romance on your hands for the rest of the month. I’m thankful we’re going away the first of August.”

III

The next afternoon, while we were sitting in the park waiting for the Troy band to begin playing, and I was wondering just when they would reach the “Washington Post March,” which I like because I can always be sure of it, my unknown friends came strolling our way. The man looked bewildered and bored, with something of desperation in his troubled eye, and his wife looked tired and disheartened. The young girl, still in white duck, wore the same air of passive injury I had noted in her the night before. Their faces all three lighted up at sight of me; but they faded again at the cold and meagre response I made to their smiles under correction of my wife’s fears of them. I own it was base of me; but I had begun to feel myself that it might be too large a contract to attempt their consolation, and, in fact, after one is fifty scarcely any romance will keep overnight.

My wife glanced from them to me, and read my cowardly mind; but she waited till they passed, as they did after an involuntary faltering in front of us, and were keeping on down the path, looking at the benches, which were filled on either hand. She said, “Weren’t those your friends?”

“They were the persons of my romance.”

“No matter. Go after them instantly and bring them back here, poor things. We can make room for them.”

I rose. “Isn’t this a little too idyllic? Aren’t you rather overdoing it?”

“Don’t speak to me, Basil! I never heard of anything so atrocious. Go on your knees to them if they refuse! They can sit here with me, and you and he can stand. Fly!”

I knew she was punishing me for her own reluctance; but I flew, in that sense of the term, and easily overhauled them in the tangle of people coming and going in the path, and the nursemaids pushing their perambulators in either direction. Hat in hand I delivered my message. I could see that it gave the women great pleasure and the man some doubt. His mouth fell open a little; their cheeks flushed and their eyes shone.

“I don’t know as we better,” the wife hesitated; “I’m afraid we’ll crowd you.” And she looked wistfully toward my wife. The young girl looked at her.

“Not at all!” I cried. “There’s an abundance of room. My wife’s keeping the places for you,” — in fact, I saw her putting her arm out along the bench, and explaining to a couple who had halted in front of her that the seats were taken— “and she’ll be disappointed.”

“Well,” the woman consented, with a little sigh of triumph that touched me, and reanimated all my interest in her and in her friend. She said, with a sort of shy, instinctive politeness, “I don’t know as you and Mr. Deering got acquainted last night.”

“My name is March,” I said, and I shook the hand of Mr. Deering. It was rather thick.

“And this — is our friend,” Mrs. Peering went on, in presentation of me to the young lady, “Miss Gage, that’s come with us.”

I was delighted that I had guessed their relative qualities so perfectly, and when we arrived at Mrs. March I glibly presented them. My wife was all that I could have wished her to be of sympathetic and intelligent. She did not overdo it by shaking hands, but she made places for the ladies, smiling cordially; and Mrs. Deering made Miss Gage take the seat between them. Her husband and I stood awhile in front of them, and then I said we would go off and find chairs somewhere.

We did not find any till we had climbed to the upland at the south-east of the park, and then only two iron ones, which it was useless to think of transporting. But there was no reason why we should not sit in them where they were: we could keep the ladies in plain sight, and I could not mistake “Washington Post” when the band came to it. Mr. Deering sank into one of the chairs with a sigh of satisfaction which seemed to complete itself when he discovered in the thick grass at his feet a twig from one of the tall, slim pines above us. He bent over for it, and then, as he took out his penknife and clicked open a blade to begin whittling, he cast up a critical glance at the trees.

“Pretty nice pines,” he said; and he put his hand on the one next to us with a sort of appreciation that interested me.

“Yes; the trees of Saratoga are the glory of the place,” I returned. “I never saw them grow anywhere else so tall and slim. It doesn’t seem the effect of crowding either. It’s as if there was some chemical force in the soil that shot them up. They’re like rockets that haven’t left the ground yet.”

“It’s the crowding,” he said seriously, as if the subject were not to be trifled with. “It’s the habit of all these trees — pines and oaks and maples, I don’t care what they are — to spread, and that’s what we tell our customers. Give the trees plenty of room; don’t plant ’em too thick if you want to get all the good out of ‘em.” As if he saw a question in my eye, he went on: “We do a forest-tree business exclusively; these shade-trees, and walnuts, hickories, chestnuts, and all kinds. It’s a big trade, getting to be, and growing all the time. Folks have begun to find out what fools they were to destroy the forests, and the children want to buy back what the fathers threw away.”

I scarcely needed to prompt him; he was only too glad to talk on about his business, and he spoke with a sort of homesick fondness. He told me that he had his nurseries at De Witt Point, up on the St. Lawrence, where he could raise stock hardy enough for any climate, and ship by land or water.

“I’ve got to be getting home right away now,” he said finally, clicking his knife-blade half shut and open with his thumb.

“It’s about time for our evergreen trade, and I don’t want the trees to stay a minute in the ground after the middle of the month.”

“Won’t the ladies find it hard to tear themselves away from the gaieties of Saratoga?” I asked with apparent vagueness.

“Well, that’s it,” said Mr. Deering; and he shut his knife and slipped it into his pocket, in order to take his knee between his clasped hands and lift his leg from the ground. I have noticed that this is a philosophical attitude with some people, and I was prepared by it for some thoughtful generalising from my companion. “Women would be willing to stay on in a place for a year to see if something wouldn’t happen; and if you take ’em away before anything happens, they’ll always think that if they’d stayed something would have happened the next day, or maybe the day they left.”

He stared upward into the pine boughs, and I said: “Yes, that’s so. I suppose we should be like them if we had the same conditions. Their whole life is an expectation of something to happen. Men have the privilege of making things happen — or trying to.”

“Oh, I don’t know as I want to criticise ‘em. As you say, I guess we should be just so.” He dropped his leg, and bent over as if to examine the grass; he ended by taking a blade of it between his teeth before he spoke again, with his head still down. “I don’t want to hurry ‘em; I want to give ’em a fair show now we’re here, and I’ll let the stock go as long as I can. But I don’t see very much gaiety around.”

I laughed. “Why, it’s all gaiety, in one way. Saratoga is a perpetual Fourth of July, we think.”

“Oh yes; there’s enough going on, and my wife and me we could enjoy it first rate.”

“If the young lady could?” I ventured, with a smile of sympathetic intelligence.

“Well, yes. You see, we don’t know anybody, and I suppose we didn’t take that into account. Well, I suppose it’s like this: they thought it would be easy to get acquainted in the hotel, and commence having a good time right away. I don’t know; my wife had the idea when they cooked it up amongst ’em that she was to come with us. But I swear I don’t know how to go about it. I can’t seem to make up my mouth to speak to folks first; and then you can’t tell whether a man ain’t a gambler, or on for the horse-races anyway. So we’ve been here a week now, and you’re the first ones we’ve spoken to besides the waiters since we came.”

I couldn’t help laughing, their experience was so exactly as I had imagined it when I first saw this disconsolate party. In my triumph at my own penetration, I would not have had their suffering in the past one pang the less; but the simple frankness of his confession fixed me in the wish that the future might be brighter for them. I thought myself warranted by my wife’s imprudence in taking a step toward their further intimacy on my own account, and I said:

“Well, perhaps I ought to tell you that I haven’t been inside the Saratoga Club or bet on the races since I’ve been here. That’s my name in full,” — and I gave him my card,— “and I’m in the literary line; that is, I’m the editor of a magazine in New York — the Every Other Week.”

“Oh yes; I know who you are,” said my companion, with my card in his hand. “Fact is, I was round at your place this morning trying to get rooms, and the clerk told me all about you from my description. I felt as mean as pu’sley goin’; seemed to be takin’ kind of an advantage of you.”

“Not at all; it’s a public house,” I interrupted; but I thought I should be stronger with Mrs. March if I did not give the fact away to her, and I resolved to keep it.

“But they couldn’t rest easy till I tried, and I was more than half glad there wasn’t any rooms.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry,” I said; and I indulged a real regret from the vantage I had. “It would have been very pleasant to have you there. Perhaps later — we shall be giving up our rooms at the end of the month.”

“No,” he said, with a long breath. “If I’ve got to leave ‘em, I guess it’ll be just as well to leave ’em where they’re acquainted with the house anyway.” His remark betrayed a point in his thinking which had not perhaps been reached in his talk with the ladies. “It’s a quiet place, and they’re used to it; and I guess they wouldn’t want to stay through the rest of the month, quite. I don’t believe my wife would, anyway.”

He did not say this very confidently, but hopefully rather, and I thought it afforded me an opening to find out something yet more definite about the ladies.

“Miss Gage is remarkably fine-looking,” I began.

“Think so?” he answered. “Well, so does my wife. I don’t know as I like her style exactly,” he said, with a kind of latent grudge.

“Her style is magnificent,” I insisted.

“Well, maybe so. I guess she’s good enough looking, if that’s what you mean. But I think it’s always a kind of a mistake for three persons to come off together, I don’t care who they are. Then there’s three opinions. She’s a nice girl, and a good girl, and she don’t put herself forward. But when you’ve got a young lady on your hands, you’ve got her, and you feel bound to keep doin’ something for her all the time; and if you don’t know what to do yourself, and your wife can’t tell—”

I added intelligently, “Yes.”

“Well, that’s just where it is. Sometimes I wish the whole dumb town would burn up.” I laughed and laughed; and my friend, having begun to unpack his heart, went on to ease it of the rest of its load. I had not waited for this before making some reflections concerning him, but I now formulated them to myself. He really had none of that reserve I had attributed to him the night before; it was merely caution and this is the case with most country people. They are cautious, but not reserved; if they think they can trust you, they keep back none of their affairs; and this is the American character, for we are nearly all country people. I understood him perfectly when he said, “I ruther break stone than go through what I have been through the last week! You understand how it is. ‘Tain’t as if she said anything; I wish she would; but you feel all the while that it ain’t what she expected it to be, and you feel as if it was you that was to blame for the failure. By George! if any man was to come along and make an offer for my contract I would sell out cheap. It’s worse because my wife asked her to come, and thought she was doin’ her all kinds of a favour to let her. They’ve always been together, and when we talked of coming to Saratoga this summer, nothing would do my wife but Julia must come with us. Her and her father usually take a trip off somewhere in the hot weather, but this time he couldn’t leave; president of our National Bank, and president of the village, too.” He threw in the fact of these dignities explanatorily, but with a willingness, I could see, that it should affect me. He went on: “They’re kind of connections of my first wife’s. Well, she’s a nice girl; too nice, I guess, to get along very fast. I see girls all the way along down gettin’ acquainted on the cars and boats — we come east on the Ogdensburg road to Rouse’s Point, and then took the boat down Lake Champlain and Lake George — but she always seemed to hold back. I don’t know’s she’s proud either; I can’t make it out. It balls my wife all up, too. I tell her she’s fretted off all the good her trip’s goin’ to do her before she got it.”

He laughed ruefully, and just then the band began to play the “Washington Post.”

“What tune’s that?” he demanded.

“‘Washington Post,’” I said, proud of knowing it.

“By George! that tune goes right to a fellow’s legs, don’t it?”

“It’s the new march,” I said.

He listened with a simple joy in it, and his pleasure strengthened the mystic bond which had formed itself between us through the confidences he had made me, so flatteringly corroborative of all my guesses concerning him and his party.

IV

I longed to have the chance of bragging to my wife; but this chance did not come till the concert was quite over, after I rejoined her with my companion, and she could take leave of them all without seeming to abandon them. Then I judged it best to let her have the word; for I knew by the way she ran her hand through my arm, and began pushing me along out of earshot, that she was full of it.

“Well, Basil, I think that is the sweetest and simplest and kindest creature in the world, and I’m perfectly in love with her.”

I did not believe somehow that she meant the girl, but I thought it best merely to suggest, “There are two.”

“You know very well which I mean, and I would do anything I could for her. She’s got a difficult problem before her, and I pity her. The girl’s very well, and she is a beauty; and I suppose she has been having a dull time, and of course you couldn’t please Mrs. Deering half so well as by doing something for her friend. I suppose you’re feeling very proud that they’re just what you divined.”

“Not at all; I’m so used to divining people. How did you know I knew it?”

“I saw you talking to him, and I knew you were pumping him.”

“Pumping? He asked nothing better than to flow. He would put to shame the provoked spontaneity of any spring in Saratoga.”

“Well, did he say that he was going to leave them here?”

“He would like to do it — yes. He was very sweet and simple and kind, too, Isabel. He complained bitterly of the goddess, and all but said she sulked.”

“Why, I don’t know,” said my wife. “I think, considering, that she is rather amiable. She brightened up more and more.”

“That was prosperity, or the hope of it, my dear. Nothing illumines us like the prospect of pleasant things. She took you for society smiling upon her, and of course she smiled back. But it’s only the first smile of prosperity that cheers. If it keeps on smiling it ends by making us dissatisfied again. When people are getting into society they are very glad; when they have got in they seem to be rather gloomy. We mustn’t let these things go too far. Now that you’ve got your friends in good humour, the right way is to drop them — to cut them dead when you meet them, to look the other way. That will send them home perfectly radiant.”

“Nonsense! I am going to do all I can for them. What do you think we can do? They haven’t the first idea how to amuse themselves here. It’s a miracle they ever got that dress the girl is wearing. They just made a bold dash because they saw it in a dressmaker’s window the first day, and she had to have something. It’s killingly becoming to her; but I don’t believe they know it, and they don’t begin to know how cheap it was: it was simply thrown away. I’m going shopping with them in the morning.”

“Oh!”

“But now the question is, what we can do to give them some little glimpse of social gaiety. That’s what they’ve come for.”

We were passing the corner of a large enclosure which seems devoted in Saratoga to the most distracting of its pleasures, and I said: “Well, we might give them a turn on the circular railway or the switchback; or we could take them to the Punch and Judy drama, or get their fortunes told in the seeress’s tent, or let them fire in the shooting-gallery, or buy some sweet-grass baskets of the Indians; and there is the pop-corn and the lemonade.”

“I will tell you what,” said Mrs. March, who had not been listening to a word I said; for if she had heard me she would not have had patience with my ironical suggestions.

“Well, what?”

“Or, no; that wouldn’t do, either.”

“I’m glad you don’t approve of the notion, on second thoughts. I didn’t like it from the beginning, and I didn’t even know what it was.”

“We could have them up to the house this evening, and introduce them to some of our friends, — only there isn’t a young man in the whole place, — and have them stay to the charades.”

“What do you think,” I said, “of their having come up this morning and tried to get rooms at our house?”

“Yes; they told me.”

“And don’t you call that rather forth-putting? It seems to me that it was taking a mean advantage of my brags.”

“It was perfectly innocent in them. But now, dearest, don’t be tiresome. I know that you like them as well as I do, and I will take all your little teasing affectations for granted. The question is, what can we do for them?”

“And the answer is, I don’t in the least know. There isn’t any society life at Saratoga that I can see; and if there is, we are not in it. How could we get any one else in? I see that’s what you’re aiming at. Those public socialities at the big hotels they could get into as well as we could; but they wouldn’t be anywhere when they got there, and they wouldn’t know what to do. You know what hollow mockeries those things are. Don’t you remember that hop we went to with the young Braceys the first summer? If those girls hadn’t waltzed with each other they wouldn’t have danced a step the whole evening.”

“I know, I know,” sighed my wife; “it was terrible. But these people are so very unworldly that don’t you think they could be deluded into the belief that they were seeing society if we took a little trouble? You used to be so inventive! You could think up something now if you tried.”

“My dear, a girl knows beyond all the arts of hoodwinking whether she’s having a good time, and your little scheme of passing off one of those hotel hops for a festivity would never work in the world.”

“Well, I think it is too bad! What has become of all the easy gaiety there used to be in the world?”

“It has been starched and ironed out of it, apparently. Saratoga is still trying to do the good old American act, with its big hotels and its heterogeneous hops, and I don’t suppose there’s ever such a thing as a society person at any of them. That wouldn’t be so bad. But the unsociety people seem to be afraid of one another. They feel that there is something in the air — something they don’t and can’t understand; something alien, that judges their old-fashioned American impulse to be sociable, and contemns it. No; we can’t do anything for our hapless friends — I can hardly call them our acquaintances. We must avoid them, and keep them merely as a pensive colour in our own vivid memories of Saratoga. If we made them have a good time, and sent them on their way rejoicing, I confess that I should feel myself distinctly a loser. As it is, they’re a strain of melancholy poetry in my life, of music in the minor key. I shall always associate their pathos with this hot summer weather, and I shall think of them whenever the thermometer registers eighty-nine. Don’t you see the advantage of that? I believe I can ultimately get some literature out of them. If I can think of a fitting fable for them Fulkerson will feature it in Every Other Week. He’ll get out a Saratoga number, and come up here and strike the hotels and springs for ad’s.”

“Well,” said Mrs. March, “I wish I had never seen them; and it’s all your fault, Basil. Of course, when you played upon my sympathies so about them, I couldn’t help feeling interested in them. We are a couple of romantic old geese, my dear.”

“Not at all, or at least I’m not. I simply used these people conjecturally to give myself an agreeable pang. I didn’t want to know anything more about them than I imagined, and I certainly didn’t dream of doing anything for them. You’ll spoil everything if you turn them from fiction into fact, and try to manipulate their destiny. Let them alone; they will work it out for themselves.”

“You know I can’t let them alone now,” she lamented. “I am not one of those who can give themselves an agreeable pang with the unhappiness of their fellow-creatures. I’m not satisfied to study them; I want to relieve them.”

She went on to praise herself to my disadvantage, as I notice wives will with their husbands, and I did not attempt to deny her this source of consolation. But when she ended by saying, “I believe I shall send you alone,” and explained that she had promised Mrs. Deering we would come to their hotel for them after tea, and go with them to hear the music at the United States and the Grand Union, I protested. I said that I always felt too sneaking when I was prowling round those hotels listening to their proprietary concerts, and I was aware of looking so sneaking that I expected every moment to be ordered off their piazzas. As for convoying a party of three strangers about alone, I should certainly not do it.

“Not if I’ve a headache?”

“Not if you’ve a headache.”

“Oh, very well, then.”

“What are you two quarrelling about?” cried a gay voice behind us, and we looked round into the laughing eyes of Miss Dale. She was the one cottager we knew in Saratoga, but when we were with her we felt that we knew everybody, so hospitable was the sense of world which her kindness exhaled.

“It was Mrs. March who was quarrelling,” I said. “I was only trying to convince her that she was wrong, and of course one has to lift one’s voice. I hope I hadn’t the effect of halloaing.”

“Well, I merely heard you above the steam harmonicon at the switchback,” said Miss Dale. “I don’t know whether you call that holloaing.”

“Oh, Miss Dale,” said my wife, “we are in such a fatal—”

“Pickle,” I suggested, and she instantly adopted the word in her extremity.

“ — pickle with some people that Providence has thrown in our way, and that we want to do something for”; and in a labyrinth of parentheses that no man could have found his way into or out of, she possessed Miss Dale of the whole romantic fact. “It was Mr. March, of course, who first discovered them,” she concluded, in plaintive accusation.

“Poor Mr. March!” cried Miss Dale. “Well, it is a pathetic case, but it isn’t the only one, if that’s any comfort. Saratoga is reeking with just such forlornities the whole summer long; but I can quite understand how you feel about it, Mrs. March.” We came to a corner, and she said abruptly: “Excuse my interrupting your quarrel! Not quite so loud, Mr. March!” and she flashed back a mocking look at me as she skurried off down the street with astonishing rapidity.

“How perfectly heartless!” cried my wife. “I certainly thought she would suggest something — offer to do something.”

“I relied upon her, too,” I said; “but now I have my doubts whether she was really going down that street till she saw that it was the best way to escape. We’re certainly in trouble, my dear, if people avoid us in this manner.”

V

“I am doing it entirely on Mrs. Deering’s I account,” said my wife that evening after tea, as we walked down the side-street that descended from our place to Broadway. “She has that girl on her hands, and I know she must be at her wits’ end.”

“And I do it entirely on Deering’s account,” I retorted. “He has both of those women on his hands.”

We emerged into the glistening thoroughfare in front of the vast hotels, and I was struck, as I never fail to be, with its futile and unmeaning splendour. I think there is nothing in our dun-coloured civilisation prettier than that habit the ladies have in Saratoga of going out on the street after dark in their bare heads. When I first saw them wandering about so in the glitter of the shop-windows and the fitful glare of the electrics everywhere, I thought they must be some of those Spanish-Americans mistaking the warm, dry air of the Northern night for that of their own latitudes; but when I came up with them I could hear, if I could not see, that they were of our own race. Those flat and shapeless tones could come through the noses of no other. The beauty and the elegance were also ours, and the fearless trust of circumstance. They sauntered up and down before the gaunt, high porticoes of the hotels, as much at home as they could have been in their own houses, and in much the same dress as if they had been receiving there. The effect is one of incomparable cheer, and is a promise of social brilliancy which Saratoga no more keeps than she does that of her other characteristic aspects; say the forenoon effect of the same thoroughfare, with the piazzas banked with the hotel guests, and the street full of the light equipages which seem peculiar to the place passing and repassing, in the joyous sunlight and out of it, on the leaf-flecked street. Even the public carriages of Saratoga have a fresh, unjaded air; and to issue from the railway station in the midst of those buoyant top-phaetons and surreys, with their light-limbed horses, is to be thrilled by some such insensate expectation of pleasure as fills the heart of a boy at his first sally into the world. I always expect to find my lost youth waiting for me around the corner of the United States Hotel, and I accuse myself of some fault if it disappoints me, as it always does. I can imagine what gaudy hopes by day and by night the bright staging of the potential drama must awaken in the breast of a young girl when she first sees it, and how blank she must feel when the curtain goes down and there has been no play. It was a real anguish to me when that young girl with the Deerings welcomed my wife and me with a hopeful smile, as if we were the dramatis personæ, and now the performance must be going to begin. I could see how much our chance acquaintance had brightened the perspective for her, and how eagerly she had repaired all her illusions; and I thought how much better it would have been if she had been left to the dull and spiritless resignation in which I had first seen her. From that there could no fall, at least, and now she had risen from it only to sink again.

But, in fact, the whole party seemed falsely cheered by the event of the afternoon; and in the few moments that we sat with them on their verandah, before going to the music at the Grand Union, I could hear the ladies laughing together, while Deering joyously unfolded to me his plan of going home the next morning and leaving his wife and Miss Gage behind him. “They will stay in this hotel — they might as well — and I guess they can get along. My wife feels more acquainted since she met Mrs. March, and I shan’t feel so much like leavin’ her among strangers here I don’t know when she’s taken such a fancy to any one as she has to your wife, or Miss Gage either. I guess she’ll want to ask her about the stores.”

I said that I believed the fancy was mutual, and that there was nothing my wife liked better than telling people about stores. I added, in generalisation, that when a woman had spent all her own money on dress, it did her quite as much good to see other women spending theirs; and Deering said he guessed that was about so. He gave me a push on the shoulder to make me understand how keenly he appreciated the joke, and I perceived that we had won his heart too.

We joined the ladies, and I thought that my sufferings for her authorised me to attach myself more especially to Miss Gage, and to find out all I could about her. We walked ahead of the others, and I was aware of her making believe that it was quite the same as if she were going to the music with a young man. Not that she seemed disposed to trifle with my grey hairs; I quickly saw that this would not be in character with her; but some sort of illusion was essential to her youth, and she could not help rejuvenating me. This was quite like the goddess she looked, I reflected, but otherwise she was not formidably divine; and, in fact, I suppose the goddesses were, after all, only nice girls at heart. This one, at any rate, I decided, was a very nice girl when she was not sulking; and she was so brightened by her little adventure, which was really no adventure, that I could not believe I had ever seen her sulking.

The hotel people did not keep us from going into the court of the hotel, as I was afraid they might, and we all easily found places. In the pauses of the music I pointed out such notables and characters as I saw about us, and tried to possess her of as much of the Saratoga world as I knew. It was largely there in that bold evidence it loves, and in that social solitude to which the Saratoga of the hotels condemns the denizens of her world. I do not mean that the Saratoga crowd is at all a fast-looking crowd. There are sporting people and gamblers; but the great mass of the frequenters are plain, honest Americans, out upon a holiday from all parts of the country, and of an innocence too inveterate to have grasped the fact that there is no fashion in Saratoga now but the fashion of the ladies’ dresses. These, I must say, are of the newest and prettiest; the dressing of the women always strikes me there. My companion was eager to recognise the splendours which she had heard of, and I pointed out an old lady by the door, who sat there displaying upon her vast person an assortment of gems and jewels which she seemed as personally indifferent to as if she were a show-window, and I was glad to have the girl shrink from the spectacle in a kind of mute alarm. I tried to make her share my pleasure in a group of Cubans — fat father, fat mother, fat daughter — who came down the walk toward us in the halo of tropical tradition; but she had not the taste for olives, and I saw that I failed to persuade her of the æsthetic value of this alien element among us. She apparently could do almost as little with some old figures of bygone beaus spectrally revisiting the hotel haunts of their youth; but she was charmed with the sylvan loveliness of that incomparable court. It is, in fact, a park of the tall, slim Saratoga trees enclosed by the quadrangle of the hotel, exquisitely kept, and with its acres of greensward now showing their colour vividly in the light of the electrics, which shone from all sides on the fountain flashing and plashing in the midst. I said that here was that union of the sylvan and the urban which was always the dream of art, and which formed the delicate charm of pastoral poetry; and although I do not think she quite grasped the notion, I saw that she had a pleasure in the visible fact, and that was much better. Besides, she listened very respectfully, and with no signs of being bored.

In the wait between the two parts of the concert I invited her to walk around the court with me, and under the approving eye of Mrs. March we made this expedition. It seemed to me that I could not do a wiser thing, both for the satisfaction of my own curiosity and for the gratification of the autobiographical passion we all feel, than to lead her on to speak of herself. But she had little or nothing to say of herself, and what she said of other things was marked by a straightforward good sense, if not a wide intelligence. I think we make a mistake when we suppose that a beautiful woman must always be vain or conscious.

I fancy that a beauty is quite as often a solid and sensible person, with no inordinate wish to be worshipped, and this young lady struck me as wholly unspoiled by flattery. I decided that she was not the type that would take the fancy of De Witt Point, and that she had grown up without local attention for that reason, or possibly because a certain coldness in her overawed the free spirit of rustic love-making. No doubt she knew that she was beautiful, and I began to think that it was not so much disappointment at finding Saratoga as indifferent as De Witt Point which gave her the effect of disgust I had first noted in her the night before. That might rather have come from the sense of feeling herself a helpless burden on her friends, and from that young longing for companionship which is as far as may be from the desire of conquest, of triumph. Finding her now so gratefully content with the poor efforts to amuse her which an old fellow like me could make, I perceived that the society of other girls would suffice to make Saratoga quite another thing for her, and I cast about in my mind to contrive this somehow.

I confess that I liked her better and better, and before the evening was out I had quite transferred my compassion from the Deerings to her. It was forlorn and dreary for her to be attached to this good couple, whose interests were primarily in each other, and who had not the first of those arts which could provide her with other company. She willingly told about their journey to Saratoga, and her story did not differ materially from the account Deering had already given me; but even the outward form of adventure had fallen from their experience since they had come to Saratoga. They had formed the habit of Congress Park by accident; but they had not been to the lake, or the races, or the House of Pansa, or Mount M’Gregor, or Hilton Park, or even the outlying springs. It was the first time they had been inside of the Grand Union. “Then you have never seen the parlour?” I asked; and after the concert I boldly led the way into the parlour, and lavished its magnificence upon them as if I had been the host, or one of the hotel guests at the very least. I enjoyed the breathlessness of the Deerings so much, as we walked up and down the vast drawing-rooms accompanied by our images in the mirrors, that I insisted upon sitting down with them all upon some of the richest pieces of furniture; and I was so flown with my success as cicerone that I made them come with me to the United States. I showed them through the parlours there, and then led them through to the inner verandah, which commanded another wooded court like that of the Grand Union. I tried to make them feel the statelier sentiment of the older hotel, and to stir their imaginations with a picture of the old times, when the Southern planters used to throng the place, and all that was gay and brilliant in fashionable society was to be seen there some time during the summer. I think that I failed in this, but apparently I succeeded in giving them an evening of dazzling splendour.

“Well, sir, this has been a great treat,” said Mr. Deering, when he bade us goodbye as well as good-night; he was going early in the morning.

The ladies murmured their gratitude, Mrs. Deering with an emotion that suited her thanks, and Miss Gage with a touch of something daughterly toward me that I thought pretty.

VI

“Well, what did you make of her, my dear?” Mrs. March demanded the instant she was beyond their hearing. “I must say, you didn’t spare yourself in the cause; you did bravely. What is she like?”

“Really, I don’t know,” I answered, after a moment’s reflection. “I should say she was almost purely potential. She’s not so much this or that kind of girl; she’s merely a radiant image of girlhood.”

“Now, your chicquing it, you’re faking it,” said Mrs. March, borrowing the verbs severally from the art editor and the publisher of Every Other Week. “You have got to tell me just how much and how little there really is of her before I go any further with them. Is she stupid?”

“No — no; I shouldn’t say stupid exactly. She is — what shall I say? — extremely plain-minded. I suppose the goddesses were plain-minded. I’m a little puzzled by her attitude toward her own beauty. She doesn’t live her beauty any more than a poet lives his poetry or a painter his painting; though I’ve no doubt she knows her gift is hers just as they do.”

“I think I understand. You mean she isn’t conscious.”

“No. Conscious isn’t quite the word,” I said fastidiously. “Isn’t there some word that says less, or more, in the same direction?”

“No, there isn’t; and I shall think you don’t mean anything at all if you keep on. Now, tell me how she really impressed you. Does she know anything? Has she read anything? Has she any ideas?”

“Really, I can’t say whether they were ideas or not. She knew what Every Other Week was; she had read the stories in it; but I’m not sure she valued it at its true worth. She is very plain-minded.”

“Don’t keep repeating that! What do you mean by plain-minded?”

“Well, honest, single, common-sense, coherent, arithmetical.”

“Horrors! Do you mean that she is mannish?”

“No, not mannish. And yet she gave me the notion that, when it came to companionship, she would be just as well satisfied with a lot of girls as young men.”

Mrs. March pulled her hand out of my arm, and stopped short under one of those tall Saratoga shade-trees to dramatise her inference. “Then she is the slyest of all possible pusses! Did she give you the notion that she would be just as well satisfied with you as with a young man!”

“She couldn’t deceive me so far as that, my dear.”

“Very well; I shall take her in hand myself to-morrow, and find out what she really is.”

Mrs. March went shopping the next forenoon with what was left of the Deering party; Deering had taken the early train north, and she seemed to have found the ladies livelier without him. She formed the impression from their more joyous behaviour that he kept his wife from spending as much money as she would naturally have done, and that, while he was not perhaps exactly selfish, he was forgetful of her youth, of the difference in years between them, and of her capacity for pleasures which he could not care for. She said that Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage now acted like two girls together, and, if anything, Miss Gage seemed the elder of the two.

“And what did you decide about her?” I inquired.

“Well, I helped her buy a hat and a jacket at one of those nice shops just below the hotel where they’re stopping, and we’ve started an evening dress for her. She can’t wear that white duck morning, noon, and night.”

“But her character — her nature?”

“Oh! Well, she is rather plain-minded, as you call it. I think she shows out her real feelings too much for a woman.”

“Why do you prefer dissimulation in your sex, my dear?”

“I don’t call it dissimulation. But of course a girl ought to hide her feelings. Don’t you think it would have been better for her not to have looked so obviously out of humour when you first saw her the other night?”

“She wouldn’t have interested me so much, then, and she probably wouldn’t have had your acquaintance now.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to say that even that kind of girl won’t get on, if she gives her mind to it; but I think I should prefer a little less plain-mindedness, as you call it, if I were a man.”

I did not know exactly what to say to this, and I let Mrs. March go on.

“It’s so in the smallest thing. If you’re choosing a thing for her, and she likes another, she lets you feel it at once. I don’t mean that she’s rude about it, but she seems to set herself so square across the way, and you come up with a kind of bump against her. I don’t think that’s very feminine. That’s what I mean by mannish. You always know where to find her.”

I don’t know why this criticism should have amused me so much, but I began to laugh quite uncontrollably, and I laughed on and on. Mrs. March kept her temper with me admirably. When I was quiet again, she said —

“Mrs. Deering is a person that wins your heart at once; she has that appealing quality. You can see that she’s cowed by her husband, though he means to be kind to her; and yet you may be sure she gets round him, and has her own way all the time. I know it was her idea to have him go home and leave them here, and of course she made him think it was his. She saw that as long as he was here, and anxious to get back to his ‘stock,’ there was no hope of giving Miss Gage the sort of chance she came for, and so she determined to manage it. At the same time, you can see that she is true as steel, and would abhor anything like deceit worse than the pest.”

“I see; and that is why you dislike Miss Gage?”

“Dislike her? No, I don’t dislike her; but she is disappointing. If she were a plain girl her plain-mindedness would be all right; it would be amusing; she would turn it to account and make it seem humorous. But it doesn’t seem to go with her beauty; it takes away from that — I don’t know how to express it exactly.”

“You mean that she has no charm.”

“No; I don’t mean that at all. She has a great deal of charm of a certain kind, but it’s a very peculiar kind. After all, the truth is the truth, Basil, isn’t it?”

“It is sometimes, my dear,” I assented.

“And the truth has its charm, even when it’s too blunt.”

“Ah, I’m not so sure of that.”

“Yes — yes, it has. You mustn’t say so, Basil, or I shall lose all my faith in you. If I couldn’t trust you, I don’t know what I should do.”

“What are you after now, Isabel?”

“I am not after anything. I want you to go round to all the hotels and see if there is not some young man you know at one of them. There surely must be.”

“Would one young man be enough?”

“If he were attentive enough, he would be. One young man is as good as a thousand if the girl is the right kind.”

“But you have just been implying that Miss Gage is cold and selfish and greedy. Shall I go round exploring hotel registers for a victim to such a divinity as that?”

“No; you needn’t go till I have had a talk with her. I am not sure she is worth it; I am not sure that I want to do a single thing for her.”

VII

The next day, after another forenoon’s shopping with her friends, Mrs. March announced: “Well, now, it has all come out, Basil, and I wonder you didn’t get the secret at once from your Mr. Deering. Have you been supposing that Miss Gage was a poor girl whom the Deerings had done the favour of bringing with them?”

“Why, what of it?” I asked provisionally.

“She is very well off. Her father is not only the president, as they call it, of the village, but he’s the president of the bank.”

“Yes; I told you that Deering told me so—”

“But he is very queer. He has kept her very close from the other young people, and Mrs. Deering is the only girl friend she’s ever had, and she’s grown up without having been anywhere without him. They had to plead with him to let her come with them — or Mrs. Deering had, — but when he once consented, he consented handsomely. He gave her a lot of money, and told them he wanted her to have the best time that money could buy; and of course you can understand how such a man would think that money would buy a good time anywhere. But the Deerings didn’t know how to go about it. She confessed as much when we were talking the girl over. I could see that she stood in awe of her somehow from the beginning, and that she felt more than the usual responsibility for her. That was the reason she was so eager to get her husband off home; as long as he was with them she would have to work everything through him, and that would be double labour, because he is so hopelessly villaginous, don’t you know, that he never could rise to the conception of anything else. He took them to a cheap, second-class hotel, and he was afraid to go with them anywhere because he never was sure that it was the right thing to do; and he was too proud to ask, and they had to keep prodding him all the time.”

“That’s delightful!”

“Oh, I dare say you think so; but if you knew how it wounded a woman’s self-respect you would feel differently; or you wouldn’t, rather. But now, thank goodness; they’ve got him off their hands, and they can begin to breathe freely. That is, Mrs. Deering could, if she hadn’t her heart in her mouth all the time, wondering what she can do for the girl, and bullying herself with the notion that she is to blame if she doesn’t have a good time. You can understand just how it was with them always. Mrs. Deering is one of those meek little things that a great, splendid, lonely creature like Miss Gage would take to in a small place, and perfectly crush under the weight of her confidence; and she would want to make her husband live up to her ideal of the girl, and would be miserable because he wouldn’t or couldn’t.”

“I believe the good Deering didn’t even think her handsome.”

“That’s it. And he thought anything that was good enough for his wife was good enough for Miss Gage, and he’d be stubborn about doing things on her account, even to please his wife.”

“Such conduct is imaginable of the good Deering. I don’t think he liked her.”

“Nor she him. Mrs. Deering helplessly hinted as much. She said he didn’t like to have her worrying so much about Miss Gage’s not having a good time, and she couldn’t make him feel as she did about it, and she was half glad for his own sake that he had to go home.”

“Did she say that?”

“Not exactly; but you could see that she meant it. Do you think it would do for them to change from their hotel, and go to the Grand Union or the States or Congress Hall?”

“Have you been putting them up to that, Isabel?”

“I knew you would suspect me, and I wouldn’t have asked for your opinion if I had cared anything for it, really. What would be the harm of their doing it?”

“None whatever, if you really want my worthless opinion. But what could they do there?”

“They could see something if they couldn’t do anything, and as soon as Miss Gage has got her new gowns I’m going to tell them you thought they could do it. It was their own idea, at any rate.”

“Miss Gage’s?”

“Mrs. Deering’s. She has the courage of a — I don’t know what. She sees that it’s a desperate case, and she wouldn’t stop at anything.”

“Now that her husband has gone home.”

“Well, which hotel shall they go to?”

“Oh, that requires reflection.”

“Very well, then, when you’ve reflected I want you to go to the hotel you’ve chosen, and introduce yourself to the clerk, and tell him your wife has two friends coming, and you want something very pleasant for them. Tell him all about yourself and Every Other Week.”

“He’ll think I want them deadheaded.”

“No matter, if your conscience is clear; and don’t be so shamefully modest as you always are, but speak up boldly. Now, will you? Promise me you will!”

“I will try, as the good little boy says. But, Isabel, we don’t know these people except from their own account.”

“And that is quite enough.”

“It will be quite enough for the hotel-keeper if they run their board. I shall have to pay it.”

“Now, Basil dear, don’t be disgusting, and go and do as you’re bid.”

It was amusing, but it was perfectly safe, and there was no reason why I should not engage rooms for the ladies at another hotel. I had not the least question of them, and I had failed to worry my wife with a pretended doubt. So I decided that I would go up at once and inquire at the Grand Union. I chose this hotel because, though it lacked the fine flower of the more ancient respectability and the legendary charm of the States, it was so spectacular that it would be in itself a perpetual excitement for those ladies, and would form an effect of society which, with some help from us, might very well deceive them. This was what I said to myself, though in my heart I knew better. Whatever Mrs. Deering might think, that girl was not going to be taken in with any such simple device, and I must count upon the daily chances in the place to afford her the good time she had come for.

As I mounted the steps to the portico of the Grand Union with my head down, and lost in a calculation of these chances, I heard my name gaily called, and I looked up to see young Kendricks, formerly of our staff on Every Other Week, and still a frequent contributor, and a great favourite of my wife’s and my own. My heart gave a great joyful bound at sight of him.

“My dear boy, when in the world did you come?”

“This morning by the steamboat train, and I am never, never going away!”

“You like it, then?”

“Like it! It’s the most delightful thing in the universe. Why, I’m simply wild about it, Mr. March. I go round saying to myself, Why have I thrown away my life? Why have I never come to Saratoga before? It’s simply supreme, and it’s American down to the ground. Yes; that’s what makes it so delightful. No other people could have invented it, and it doesn’t try to be anything but what we made it.”

“I’m so glad you look at it in that way. We like it. We discovered it three or four years ago, and we never let a summer slip, if we can help it, without coming here for a week or a month. The place,” I enlarged, “has the charm of ruin, though it’s in such obvious repair; it has a past; it’s so completely gone by in a society sense. The cottage life here hasn’t killed the hotel life, as it has at Newport and Bar Harbour; but the ideal of cottage life everywhere else has made hotel life at Saratoga ungenteel. The hotels are full, but at the same time they are society solitudes.”

“How gay it is!” said the young fellow, as he gazed with a pensive smile into the street, where all those festive vehicles were coming and going, dappled by the leaf-shadows from the tall trees overhead. “What air! what a sky!” The one was indeed sparkling, and the other without a cloud, for it had rained in the night, and it seemed as if the weather could never be hot and close again.

I forgot how I had been sweltering about, and said: “Yes; it is a Saratoga day. It’s supposed that the sparkle of the air comes from the healthful gases thrown off by the springs. Some people say the springs are doctored; that’s what makes their gases so healthful.”

“Why, anything might happen here,” Kendricks mused, unheedful of me. “What a scene! what a stage! Why has nobody done a story about Saratoga?” he asked, with a literary turn I knew his thoughts would be taking. All Gerald Kendricks’s thoughts were of literature, but sometimes they were not of immediate literary effect, though that was never for long.

“Because,” I suggested, “one probably couldn’t get his young lady characters to come here if they were at all in society. But of course there must be charming presences here accidentally. Some young girl, say, might come here from a country place, expecting to see social gaiety—”

“Ah, but that would be too heart-breaking!”

“Not at all. Not if she met some young fellow accidentally — don’t you see?”

“It would be difficult to manage; and hasn’t it been done?”

“Everything has been done, my dear fellow. Or, you might suppose a young lady who comes on here with her father, a veteran politician, delegate to the Republican or Democratic convention — all the conventions meet in Saratoga, — and some ardent young delegate falls in love with her. That would be new ground. There you would have the political novel, which they wonder every now and then some of us don’t write.” The smile faded from Kendricks’s lips, and I laughed. “Well, then, there’s nothing for it but the Social Science Congress. Have a brilliant professor win the heart of a lovely sister-in-law of another member by a paper he reads before the Congress. No? You’re difficult. Are you stopping here?”

“Yes; are you?”

“I try to give myself the air of it when I am feeling very proud. But really, we live at a most charming little hotel on a back street, out of the whirl and rush that we should prefer to be in if we could afford it.” He said it must be delightful, and he made the proper inquiries about Mrs. March. Kendricks never forgot the gentleman in the artist, and he was as true to the convenances as if they had been principles. That was what made Mrs. March like his stories so much more than the stories of some people who wrote better. He said he would drop in during the afternoon, and I went indoors on the pretext of buying a newspaper. Then, without engaging rooms for Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage, I hurried home.

VIII

“Well, did you get the rooms?” asked my wife as soon as she saw me.

She did not quite call it across the street to me as I came up from where she sat on the piazza.

“No, I didn’t,” I said boldly, if somewhat breathlessly.

“Why didn’t you? You ought to have gone to the States if they were full at the Grand Union.”

“They were not full, unless Kendricks got their last room.”

“Do you mean that he was there? Mr. Kendricks? If you are hoaxing me, Basil!”

“I am not, my dear; indeed I’m not,” said I, beginning to laugh, and this made her doubt me the more.

“Because if you are I shall simply never forgive you. And I’m in earnest this time,” she replied.

“Why should I want to hoax you about such a vital thing as that. Couldn’t Kendricks come to Saratoga as well as we? He’s here looking up the ground of a story I should think from what he said.”

“No matter what he’s here for; he’s here, and that’s enough. I never knew of anything so perfectly providential. Did you tell him, Basil? Did you dare?”

“Tell him what?”

“You know; about Miss Gage.”

“Well, I came very near it. I dangled the fact before his eyes once, but I caught it away again in time. He never saw it. I thought I’d better let you tell him.”

“Is he coming here to see us?”

“He asked if he might.”

“He’s always nice. I don’t know that I shall ask him to do anything for them, after all; I’m not sure that she’s worth it. I wish some commoner person had happened along. Kendricks is too precious. I shall have to think about it; and don’t you tease me, Basil, will you?”

“I don’t know. If I’m not allowed to have any voice in the matter, I’m afraid I shall take it out in teasing. I don’t see why Miss Gage isn’t quite as good as Kendricks. I believe she’s taller, and though he’s pretty good-looking, I prefer her style of beauty. I dare say his family is better, but I fancy she’s richer; and his family isn’t good beyond New York city, and her money will go anywhere. It’s a pretty even thing.”

“Good gracious, Basil! you talk as if it were a question of marriage.”

“And you think it is.”

“Now I see that you’re bent upon teasing, and we won’t talk any more, please. What time did he say he would call?”

“If I mayn’t talk, I can’t tell.”

“You may talk that much.”

“Well, then, he didn’t say.”

“Basil,” said my wife, after a moment, “if you could be serious, I should like very much to talk with you. I know that you’re excited by meeting Mr. Kendricks, and I know what you thought the instant you saw him. But, indeed, it won’t do, my dear. It’s more than we’ve any right to ask, and I shall not ask it, and I shall not let you. She is a stiff, awkward village person, and I don’t believe she’s amiable or intelligent; and to let a graceful, refined, superior man like Mr. Kendricks throw away his time upon her would be wicked, simply wicked. Let those people manage for themselves from this out. Of course you mustn’t get them rooms at the Grand Union now, for he’d be seeing us there with them, and feel bound to pay her attention. You must try for them at the States, since the matter’s been spoken of, or at Congress Hall. But there’s no hurry. We must have time to think whether we shall use Mr. Kendricks with them. I suppose it will do no harm to introduce him. If he stays we can’t very well avoid it; and I confess I should like to see how she impresses him! Of course we shall introduce him! But I insist I shall just do it merely as one human being to another; and don’t you come in with any of your romantic nonsense, Basil, about her social disappointment. Just how much did you give the situation away?”

I told as well as I could remember. “Well, that’s nothing. He’ll never think of it, and you mustn’t hint anything of the kind again.”

I promised devoutly, and she went on —

“It wouldn’t be nice — it wouldn’t be delicate to let him into the conspiracy. That must be entirely our affair, don’t you see? And I don’t want you to take a single step without me. I don’t want you even to discuss her with him. Will you? Because that will tempt you further.”

That afternoon Kendricks came promptly to call, like the little gentleman he was, and he was more satisfactory about Saratoga than he had been in the morning even. Mrs. March catechised him, and she didn’t leave an emotion of his unsearched by her vivid sympathy. She ended by saying —

“You must write a story about Saratoga. And I have got just the heroine for you.”

I started, but she ignored my start.

Kendricks laughed, delighted, and asked, “Is she pretty?”

“Must a heroine be pretty?”

“She had better be. Otherwise she will have to be tremendously clever and say all sorts of brilliant things, and that puts a great burden on the author. If you proclaim boldly at the start that she’s a beauty, the illustrator has got to look after her, and the author has a comparative sinecure.”

Mrs. March thought a moment, and then she said: “Well, she is a beauty. I don’t want to make it too hard for you.”

“When shall I see her?” Kendricks demanded, and he feigned an amusing anxiety.

“Well, that depends upon how you behave, Mr. Kendricks. If you are very, very good, perhaps I may let you see her this evening. We will take you to call upon her.”

“Is it possible? Do you mean business? Then she is — in society?”

“Mr. Kendricks!” cried Mrs. March, with burlesque severity. “Do you think that I would offer you a heroine who was not in society? You forget that I am from Boston!”

“Of course, of course! I understand that any heroine of your acquaintance must be in society. But I thought — I didn’t know — but for the moment — Saratoga seems to be so tremendously mixed; and Mr. March says there is no society here: But if she is from Boston—”

“I didn’t say she was from Boston, Mr. Kendricks.”

“Oh, I beg your pardon!”

“She is from De Witt Point,” said Mrs. March, and she apparently enjoyed his confusion, no less than my bewilderment at the course she was taking.

I was not going to be left behind, though, and I said: “I discovered this heroine myself, Kendricks, and if there is to be any giving away—”

“Now, Basil!”

“I am going to do it. Mrs. March would never have cared anything about her if it hadn’t been for me. I can’t let her impose on you. This heroine is no more in society than she is from Boston. That is the trouble with her. She has come here for society, and she can’t find any.”

“Oh, that was what you were hinting at this morning,” said Kendricks. “I thought it a pure figment of the imagination.”

“One doesn’t imagine such things as that, my dear fellow. One imagines a heroine coming here, and having the most magnificent kind of social career — lawn-parties, lunches, teas, dinners, picnics, hops — and going back to De Witt Point with a dozen offers of marriage. That’s the kind of work the imagination does. But this simple and appealing situation — this beautiful young girl, with her poor little illusions, her secret hopes half hidden from herself, her ignorant past, her visionary future—”

“Now, I am going to tell you all about her, Mr. Kendricks,” Mrs. March broke in upon me, with defiance in her eye; and she flung out the whole fact with a rapidity of utterance that would have left far behind any attempt of mine. But I made no attempt to compete with her; I contented myself with a sarcastic silence which I could see daunted her a little at last.

“And all that we’ve done, my dear fellow” — I took in irony the word she left to me— “is to load ourselves up with these two impossible people, to go their security to destiny, and answer for their having a good time. We’re in luck.”

“Why, I don’t know,” said Kendricks, and I could see that his fancy was beginning to play with the situation; “I don’t see why it isn’t a charming scheme.”

“Of course it is,” cried Mrs. March, taking a little heart from his courage.

“We can’t make out yet whether the girl is interesting,” I put in maliciously.

“That is what you say,” said my wife. “She is very shy, and of course she wouldn’t show out her real nature to you. I found her very interesting.”

“Now, Isabel!” I protested.

“She is fascinating,” the perverse woman persisted. “She has a fascinating dulness.”

Kendricks laughed and I jeered at this complex characterisation.

“You make me impatient to judge for myself,” he said.

“Will you go with me to call upon them this evening?” asked Mrs. March.

“I shall be delighted. And you can count upon me to aid and abet you in your generous conspiracy, Mrs. March, to the best of my ability. There’s nothing I should like better than to help you—”

“Throw ‘dust in her beautiful eyes,’” I quoted.

“Not at all,” said my wife. “But to spread a beatific haze over everything, so that as long as she stays in Saratoga she shall see life rose-colour. Of course you may say that it’s a kind of deception—”

“Not at all!” cried the young fellow in his turn. “We will make it reality. Then there will be no harm in it.”

“What a jesuitical casuist! You had better read what Cardinal Newman says in his Apologia about lying, young man.”

Neither of them minded me, for just then there was a stir of drapery round the corner of the piazza from where we were sitting, and the next moment Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage showed themselves.

“We were just talking of you,” said Mrs. March. “May I present our friend Mr. Kendricks, Mrs. Deering? And Miss Gage?”

At sight of the young man, so well dressed and good-looking, who bowed so prettily to her, and then bustled to place chairs for them, a certain cloud seemed to lift from Miss Gage’s beautiful face, and to be at least partly broken on Mrs. Deering’s visage. I began to talk to the girl, and she answered in good spirits, and with more apparent interest in my conversation than she had yet shown, while Kendricks very properly devoted himself to the other ladies. Both his eyes were on them, but I felt that he had a third somehow upon her, and that the smallest fact of her beauty and grace was not lost upon him. I knew that her rich, tender voice was doing its work, too, through the commonplaces she vouchsafed to me. There was a moment when I saw him lift a questioning eyebrow upon Mrs. March, and saw her answer with a fleeting frown of affirmation. I cannot tell just how it was that, before he left us, his chair was on the other side of Miss Gage’s, and I was eliminated from the dialogue.

He did not stay too long. There was another tableau of him on foot, taking leave of Mrs. March, with a high hand-shake, which had then lately come in, and which I saw the girl note, and then bowing to her and to Mrs. Deering.

“Don’t forget,” my wife called after him, with a ready invention not lost on his quick intelligence, “that you’re going to the concert with us after tea. Eight o’clock, remember.”

“You may be sure I shall remember that,” he returned gaily.

IX

The countenances of the ladies fell instantly when he was gone. “Mrs. March,” said Mrs. Deering, with a nervous tremor, “did Mr. March get us those rooms at the Grand Union?”

“No — no,” my wife began, and she made a little pause, as if to gather plausibility. “The Grand Union was very full, and he thought that at the States—”

“Because,” said Mrs. Deering, “I don’t know as we shall trouble him, after all. Mr. Deering isn’t very well, and I guess we have got to go home—”

“Go home!” Mrs. March echoed, and her voice was a tone-scene of a toppling hope and a widespread desolation. “Why, you mustn’t!”

“We must, I guess. It had begun to be very pleasant, and — I guess I have got to go. I can’t feel easy about him.”

“Why, of course,” Mrs. March now assented, and she waved her fan thoughtfully before her face. I knew what she was thinking of, and I looked at Miss Gage, who had involuntarily taken the pose and expression of the moment when I first saw her at the kiosk in Congress Park. “And Miss Gage?”

“Oh yes; I must go too,” said the girl wistfully, forlornly. She had tears in her voice, tears of despair and vexation, I should have said.

“That’s too bad,” said Mrs. March, and, as she did not offer any solution of the matter, I thought it rather heartless of her to go on and rub it in. “And we were just planning some things we could do together.”

“It can’t be helped now,” returned the girl.

“But we shall see you again before you go?” Mrs. March asked of both.

“Well, I don’t know,” said the girl, with a look at Mrs. Deering, who now said —

“I guess so. We’ll let you know when we’re going.” And they got away rather stiffly.

“Why in the world, my dear,” I asked, “if you weren’t going to promote their stay, need you prolong the agony of their acquaintance?”

“Did you feel that about it too? Well, I wanted to ask you first if you thought it would do.”

“What do?”

“You know; get her a room here. Because if we do we shall have her literally on our hands as long as we are here. We shall have to have the whole care and responsibility of her, and I wanted you to feel just what you were going in for. You know very well I can’t do things by halves, and that if I undertake to chaperon this girl I shall chaperon her—”

“To the bitter end. Yes; I understand the conditions of your uncompromising conscience. But I don’t believe it will be any such killing matter. There are other semi-detached girls in the house; she could go round with them.”

We talked on, and, as sometimes happens, we convinced each other so thoroughly that she came to my ground and I went to hers. Then it was easier for us to come together, and after making me go to the clerk and find out that he had a vacant room, Mrs. March agreed with me that it would not do at all to have Miss Gage stay with us; the fact that there was a vacant room seemed to settle the question.

We were still congratulating ourselves on our escape when Mrs. Deering suddenly reappeared round our corner of the verandah. She was alone, and she looked excited.

“Oh, it isn’t anything,” she said in answer to the alarm that showed itself in Mrs. March’s face at sight of her. “I hope you won’t think it’s too presuming, Mrs. March, and I want you to believe that it’s something I have thought of by myself, and that Julia wouldn’t have let me come if she had dreamed of such a thing. I do hate so to take her back with me, now that she’s begun to have a good time, and I was wondering — wondering whether it would be asking too much if I tried to get her a room here. I shouldn’t exactly like to leave her in the hotel alone, though I suppose it would be perfectly proper; but Mr. Deering found out when he was trying to get rooms before that there were some young ladies staying by themselves here, and I didn’t want to ask the clerk for a room unless you felt just right about it.”

“Why, of course, Mrs. Deering. It’s a public house, like any other, and you have as much right—”

“But I didn’t want you to think that I would do it without asking you, and if it is going to be the least bit of trouble to you.” The poor thing while she talked stood leaning anxiously over toward Mrs. March, who had risen, and pressing the points of her fingers nervously together.

“It won’t, Mrs. Deering. It will be nothing but pleasure. Why, certainly. I shall be delighted to have Miss Gage here, and anything that Mr. March and I can do — Why, we had just been talking of it, and Mr. March has this minute got back from seeing the clerk, and she can have a very nice room. We had been intending to speak to you about it as soon as we saw you.”

I do not know whether this was quite true or not, but I was glad Mrs. March said it, from the effect it had upon Mrs. Deering. Tears of relief came into her eyes, and she said: “Then I can go home in the morning. I was going to stay on a day or two longer, on Julia’s account, but I didn’t feel just right about Mr. Deering, and now I won’t have to.”

There followed a flutter of polite offers and refusals, acknowledgments and disavowals, and an understanding that I would arrange it all, and that we would come to Mrs. Deering’s hotel after supper and see Miss Gage about the when and the how of her coming to us.

“Well, Isabel,” I said, after it was all over, and Mrs. Deering had vanished in a mist of happy tears, “I suppose this is what you call perfectly providential. Do you really believe that Miss Gage didn’t send her back?”

“I know she didn’t. But I know that she had to do it just the same as if Miss Gage had driven her at the point of the bayonet.”

I laughed at this tragical image. “Can she be such a terror?”

“She is an ideal. And Mrs. Deering is as afraid as death of her. Of course she has to live up to her. It’s probably been the struggle of her life, and I can quite imagine her letting her husband die before she would take Miss Gage back, unless she went back satisfied.”

“I don’t believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can imagine her being afraid of Miss Gage’s taking it out of her somehow. Now she will take it out of us. I hope you realise that you’ve done it now, my dear. To be sure, you will have all your life to repent of your rashness.”

“I shall never repent,” Mrs. March retorted hardily. “It was the right thing, the only thing. We couldn’t have let that poor creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her husband.”

“No.”

“And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl, too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to let her go home so soon, and especially now.”

“Oh! And I suppose that by especially now, you mean Kendricks,” I said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. “How sick I am of this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to know better — we’re old enough; at least you are.”

She seemed not to feel the gibe. “Why, Basil,” she asked dreamily, “haven’t you any romance left in you?”

“Romance? Bah! It’s the most ridiculous unreality in the world. If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn’t you a little for her sick husband? But a husband is nothing — when you have got him.”

“I did sympathise with her.”

“You didn’t say so.”

“Well, she is only his second wife, and I don’t suppose it’s anything serious. Didn’t I really say anything to her?”

“Not a word. It is curious,” I went on, “how we let this idiotic love-passion absorb us to the very last. It is wholly unimportant who marries who, or whether anybody marries at all. And yet we no sooner have the making of a love-affair within reach than we revert to the folly of our own youth, and abandon ourselves to it as if it were one of the great interests of life.”

“Who is talking about love? It isn’t a question of that. It’s a question of making a girl have a pleasant time for a few days; and what is the harm of it? Girls have a dull enough time at the very best. My heart aches for them, and I shall never let a chance slip to help them, I don’t care what you say.”

“Now, Isabel,” I returned, “don’t you be a humbug. This is a perfectly plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair with your eyes open. You shall not pretend you’re not.”

“Very well, then, if I am going into it with my eyes open, I shall look out that nothing happens.”

“And you think prevision will avail! I wish,” I said, “that instead of coming home that night and telling you about this girl, I had confined my sentimentalising to that young French-Canadian mother, and her dirty little boy who ate the pea-nut shells. I’ve no doubt it was really a more tragical case. They looked dreadfully poor and squalid. Why couldn’t I have amused my idle fancy with their fortunes — the sort of husband and father they had, their shabby home, the struggle of their life? That is the appeal that a genuine person listens to. Nothing does more to stamp me a poseur than the fact that I preferred to bemoan myself for a sulky girl who seemed not to be having a good time.”

There was truth in my joking, but the truth did not save me; it lost me rather. “Yes,” said my wife; “it was your fault. I should never have seen anything in her if it had not been for you. It was your coming back and working me up about her that began the whole thing, and now if anything goes wrong you will have yourself to thank for it.”

She seized the opportunity of my having jestingly taken up this load to buckle it on me tight and fast, clasping it here, tying it there, and giving a final pull to the knots that left me scarcely the power to draw my breath, much less the breath to protest. I was forced to hear her say again that all her concern from the beginning was for Mrs. Deering, and that now, if she had offered to do something for Miss Gage, it was not because she cared anything for her, but because she cared everything for Mrs. Deering, who could never lift up her head again at De Witt Point if she went back so completely defeated in all the purposes she had in asking Miss Gage to come with her to Saratoga.

I did not observe that this wave of compassion carried Mrs. March so far as to leave her stranded with Mrs. Deering that evening when we called with Kendricks, and asked her and Miss Gage to go with us to the Congress Park concert. Mrs. Deering said that she had to pack, that she did not feel just exactly like going; and my tender heart ached with a knowledge of her distress. Miss Gage made a faint, false pretence of refusing to come with us, too; but Mrs. Deering urged her to go, and put on the new dress, which had just come home, so that Mrs. March could see it. The girl came back looking radiant, divine, and— “Will it do?” she palpitated under my wife’s critical glance.

“Do? It will outdo! I never saw anything like it!” The connoisseur patted it a little this way and a little that. “It is a dream! Did the hat come too?”

It appeared that the hat had come too. Miss Gage rematerialised with it on, after a moment’s evanescence, and looked at my wife with the expression of being something impersonal with a hat on.

“Simply, there is nothing to say!” cried Mrs. March. The girl put up her hands to it. “Good gracious! You mustn’t take it off! Your costume is perfect for the concert.”

“Is it, really?” asked the girl joyfully; and she seemed to find this the first fitting moment to say, for sole recognition of our self-sacrifice, “I’m much obliged to you, Mr. March, for getting me that room.”

I begged her not to speak of it, and turned an ironical eye upon my wife; but she was lost in admiration of the hat.

“Yes,” she sighed; “it’s much better than the one I wanted you to get at first.” And she afterward explained that the girl seemed to have a perfect instinct for what went with her style.

Kendricks kept himself discreetly in the background, and, with his unfailing right feeling, was talking to Mrs. Deering, in spite of her not paying much attention to him. I must own that I too was absorbed in the spectacle of Miss Gage.

She went off with us, and did not say another word to Mrs. Deering about helping her to pack. Perhaps this was best, though it seemed heartless; it may not have been so heartless as it seemed. I dare say it would have been more suffering to the woman if the girl had missed this chance.

X

We had undertaken rather a queer affair but it was not so queer after all, when Miss Gage was fairly settled with us. There were other young girls in that pleasant house who had only one another’s protection and the general safety of the social atmosphere. We could not conceal from ourselves, of course, that we had done a rather romantic thing, and, in the light of Europe, which we had more or less upon our actions, rather an absurd thing; but it was a comfort to find that Miss Gage thought it neither romantic nor absurd. She took the affair with an apparent ignorance of anything unusual in it — with so much ignorance, indeed, that Mrs. March had her occasional question whether she was duly impressed with what was being done for her. Whether this was so or not, it is certain that she was as docile and as biddable as need be. She did not always ask what she should do; that would not have been in the tradition of village independence; but she always did what she was told, and did not vary from her instructions a hair’s-breadth. I do not suppose she always knew why she might do this and might not do that; and I do not suppose that young girls often understand the reasons of the proprieties. They are told that they must, and that they must not, and this in an astonishing degree suffices them if they are nice girls.

Of course there was pretty constant question of Kendricks in the management of Miss Gage’s amusement, for that was really what our enterprise resolved itself into. He showed from the first the sweetest disposition to forward all our plans in regard to her, and, in fact, he even anticipated our wishes. I do not mean to give the notion that he behaved from an interested motive in going to the station the morning Mrs. Deering left, and getting her ticket for her, and checking her baggage, and posting her in the changes she would have to make. This was something I ought to have thought of myself, but I did not think of it, and I am willing that he should have all the credit.

I know that he did it out of the lovely generosity of nature which always took me in him. Miss Gage was there with her, and she remained to be consoled after Mrs. Deering departed. They came straight to us from the train, and then, when he had consigned Miss Gage to Mrs. March’s care, he offered to go and see that her things were transferred from her hotel to ours; they were all ready, she said, and the bill was paid.

He did not come back that day, and, in fact, he delicately waited for some sign from us that his help was wanted. But when he did come he had formulated Saratoga very completely, and had a better conception of doing it than I had, after my repeated sojourns.

We went very early in our explorations to the House of Pansa, which you find in very much better repair at Saratoga than you do at Pompeii, and we contrived to pass a whole afternoon there. My wife and I had been there before more than once; but it always pleasantly recalled our wander-years, when we first met in Europe, and we suffered round after those young things with a patience which I hope will not be forgotten at the day of judgment. When we came to a seat we sat down, and let them go off by themselves; but my recollection is that there is not much furniture in the House of Pansa that you can sit down on, and for the most part we all kept together.

Kendricks and I thought alike about the Pompeian house as a model of something that might be done in the way of a seaside cottage in our own country, and we talked up a little paper that might be done for Every Other Week, with pretty architectural drawings, giving an account of our imaginary realisation of the notion.

“Have somebody,” he said, “visit people who had been boring him to come down, or up, or out, and see them, and find them in a Pompeian house, with the sea in front and a blue-green grove of low pines behind. Might have a thread of story, but mostly talk about how they came to do it, and how delightfully livable they found it. You could work it up with some architect, who would help you to ‘keep off the grass’ in the way of technical blunders. With all this tendency to the classic in public architecture, I don’t see why the Pompeian villa shouldn’t be the next word for summer cottages.”

“Well, we’ll see what Fulkerson says. He may see an ad. in it. Would you like to do it?”

“Why not do it yourself? Nobody else could do it so well.”

“Thanks for the taffy; but the idea was yours.”

“I’ll do it,” said Kendricks after a moment, “if you won’t.”

“We’ll see.”

Miss Gage stared, and Mrs. March said —

“I didn’t suppose the House of Pansa would lead to shop with you two.”

“You never can tell which way copy lies,” I returned; and I asked the girl, “What should you think, Miss Gage, of a little paper with a thread of story, but mostly talk, on a supposititious Pompeian cottage?”

“I don’t believe I understand,” said she, far too remote from our literary interests, as I saw, to be ashamed of her ignorance.

“There!” I said to Kendricks. “Do you think the general public would?”

“Miss Gage isn’t the general public,” said my wife, who had followed the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser and better.

“Would you allow yourself to be drawn,” I asked, “dreamily issuing from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a Pompeian cottage?”

The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, “You needn’t pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is making a joke.”

We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the hope that it would play “Washington Post.”

My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as we went, and she asked, “What do you suppose she made of it all?”

“Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza.”

“No; she hasn’t read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It’s astonishing how much she doesn’t know. What can her home life have been like?”

“Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to literature have no conception how far from it most people are. The immense majority of ‘homes,’ as the newspapers call them, have no books in them except the Bible and a semi-religious volume or two — things you never see out of such ‘homes’ — and the State business directory. I was astonished when it came out that she knew about Every Other Week. It must have been by accident. The sordidness of her home life must be something unimaginable. The daughter of a village capitalist, who’s put together his money dollar by dollar, as they do in such places, from the necessities and follies of his neighbours, and has half the farmers of the region by the throat through his mortgages — I don’t think that she’s ‘one to be desired’ any more than ‘the daughter of a hundred earls,’ if so much.”

“She doesn’t seem sordid herself.”

“Oh, the taint doesn’t show itself at once —

‘If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that would live an hour?’

and she is a flower, beautiful, exquisite.”

“Yes, and she had a mother as well as this father of hers. Why shouldn’t she be like her mother?”

I laughed. “That is true! I wonder why we always leave the mother out of the count when we sum up the hereditary tendencies? I suppose the mother is as much a parent as the father.”

“Quite. And there is no reason why this girl shouldn’t have her mother’s nature.”

“We don’t actually know anything against her father’s nature yet,” I suggested; “but if her mother lived a starved and stunted life with him, it may account for that effect of disappointed greed which I fancied in her when I first saw her.”

“I don’t call it greed in a young girl to want to see something of the world.”

“What do you call it?”

Kendricks and the girl were stopping at the gate of the pavilion, and looking round at us. “Ah, he’s got enough for one day! He’s going to leave her to us now.”

When we came up he said, “I’m going to run off a moment; I’m going up to the book-store there,” and he pointed toward one that had spread across the sidewalk just below the Congress Hall verandah, with banks and shelves of novels, and a cry of bargains in them on signs sticking up from their rows. “I want to see if they have the Last Days of Pompeii.”

“We will find the ladies inside the park,” I said. “I will go with you—”

“Mr. March wants to see if they have the last number of Every Other Week,” my wife mocked after us. This was, indeed, commonly a foible of mine. I had newly become one of the owners of the periodical as well as the editor, and I was all the time looking out for it at the news-stands and book-stores, and judging their enterprise by its presence or absence. But this time I had another motive, though I did not allege it.

“I suppose it’s for Miss Gage?” I ventured to say, by way of prefacing what I wished to say. “Kendricks, I’m afraid we’re abusing your good nature. I know you’re up here to look about, and you’re letting us use all your time. You mustn’t do it. Women have no conscience about these things, and you can’t expect a woman who has a young lady on her hands to spare you. I give you the hint. Don’t count upon Mrs. March in this matter.”

“Oh, I think you are very good to allow me to bother round,” said the young fellow, with that indefatigable politeness of his. He added vaguely, “It’s very interesting.”

“Seeing it through such a fresh mind?” I suggested. “Well, I’ll own that I don’t think you could have found a much fresher one. Has she read the Last Days of Pompeii?”

“She thought she had at first, but it was the Fall of Granada.”

“How delightful! Don’t you wish we could read books with that utterly unliterary sense of them?”

“Don’t you think women generally do?” he asked evasively.

“I daresay they do at De Witt Point.”

He did not answer; I saw that he was not willing to talk the young lady over, and I could not help praising his taste to myself at the cost of my own. His delicacy forbade him the indulgence which my own protested against in vain. He showed his taste again in buying a cheap copy of the book, which he meant to give her, and of course he had to be all the more attentive to her because of my deprecating his self-devotion.

XI

In the intimacy that grew up between my wife and Miss Gage I found myself less and less included. It seemed to me at times that I might have gone away from Saratoga and not been seriously missed by any one, but perhaps this was not taking sufficient account of my value as a spectator, by whom Mrs. March could verify her own impressions.

The girl had never known a mother’s care, and it was affecting to see how willing she was to be mothered by the chance kindness of a stranger. She probably felt more and more her ignorance of the world as it unfolded itself to her in terms so altogether strange to the life of De Witt Point. I was not sure that she would have been so grateful for the efforts made for her enjoyment if they had failed, but as the case stood she was certainly grateful; my wife said that, and I saw it. She seemed to have written home about us to her father, for she read my wife part of a letter from him conveying his “respects,” and asking her to thank us for him. She came to me with the cheque it enclosed, and asked me to get it cashed for her; it was for a handsome amount. But she continued to go about at our cost, quite unconsciously, till one day she happened to witness a contest of civility between Kendricks and myself as to which should pay the carriage we were dismissing. That night she came to Mrs. March, and, with many blushes, asked to be allowed to pay for the past and future her full share of the expense of our joint pleasures. She said that she had never thought of it before, and she felt so much ashamed. She could not be consoled till she was promised that she should be indulged for the future, and that I should be obliged to average the outlay already made and let her pay a fourth. When she had gained her point, Mrs. March said that she seemed a little scared, and said, “I haven’t offended you, Mrs. March, have I? Because if it isn’t right for me to pay—”

“It’s quite right, my dear,” said my wife, “and it’s very nice of you to think of it.”

“You know,” the girl explained, “I’ve never been out a great deal at home even; and it’s always the custom there for the gentlemen to pay for a ride — or dance — or anything; but this is different.”

Mrs. March said “Yes,” and, in the interest of civilisation, she did a little missionary work. She told her that in Boston the young ladies paid for their tickets to the Harvard assemblies, and preferred to do it, because it left them without even a tacit obligation.

Miss Gage said she had never heard of such a thing before, but she could see how much better it was.

I do not think she got on with the Last Days of Pompeii very rapidly; its immediate interest was superseded by other things. But she always had the book about with her, and I fancied that she tried to read it in those moments of relaxation from our pleasuring when she might better have been day-dreaming, though I dare say she did enough of that too.

What amused me in the affair was the celerity with which it took itself out of our hands. In an incredibly short time we had no longer the trouble of thinking what we should do for Miss Gage; that was provided for by the forethought of Kendricks, and our concern was how each could make the other go with the young people on their excursions and expeditions. We had seen and done all the things that they were doing, and it presently bored us to chaperon them. After a good deal of talking we arrived at a rough division of duty, and I went with them walking and eating and drinking, and for anything involving late hours, and Mrs. March presided at such things as carriage exercise, concerts, and shopping.

There are not many public entertainments at Saratoga, except such as the hotels supply; but a series of Salvation Army meetings did duty as amusements, and there was one theatrical performance — a performance of East Lynne entirely by people of colour. The sentiments and incidents of the heart-breaking melodrama, as the coloured mind interpreted them, were of very curious effect. It was as if the version were dyed with the same pigment that darkened the players’ skins: it all came out negro. Yet they had tried to make it white; I could perceive how they aimed not at the imitation of our nature, but at the imitation of our convention; it was like the play of children in that. I should have said that nothing could be more false than the motives and emotions of the drama as the author imagined them, but I had to own that their rendition by these sincere souls was yet more artificial. There was nothing traditional, nothing archaic, nothing autochthonic in their poor art. If the scene could at any moment have resolved myself into a walk-round, with an interspersion of spirituals, it would have had the charm of these; it would have consoled and edified; but as it was I have seldom been so bored. I began to make some sad reflections, as that our American society, in its endeavour for the effect of European society, was of no truer ideal than these coloured comedians, and I accused myself of a final absurdity in having come there with these young people, who, according to our good native usage, could have come perfectly well without me. At the end of the first act I broke into their talk with my conclusion that we must not count the histrionic talent among the gifts of the African race just yet. We could concede them music, I supposed, and there seemed to be hope for them, from what they had some of them done, in the region of the plastic arts; but apparently the stage was not for them, and this was all the stranger because they were so imitative. Perhaps, I said, it was an excess of self-consciousness which prevented their giving themselves wholly to the art, and I began to speak of the subjective and the objective, of the real and the ideal; and whether it was that I became unintelligible as I became metaphysical, I found Kendricks obviously not following me in the incoherent replies he gave. Miss Gage had honestly made no attempt to follow me. He asked, Why, didn’t I think it was pretty well done? They had enjoyed it very much, he said. I could only stare in answer, and wonder what had become of the man’s tastes or his principles; he was either humbugging himself or he was humbugging me. After that I left them alone, and suffered through the rest of the play with what relief I could get from laughing when the pathetic emotions of the drama became too poignant. I decided that Kendricks was absorbed in the study of his companion’s mind, which must be open to his contemporaneous eye as it could never have been to my old-sighted glasses, and I envied him the knowledge he was gaining of that type of American girl. It suddenly came to me that he must be finding his account in this, and I felt a little less regret for the waste of civilities, of attentions, which sometimes seemed to me beyond her appreciation.

I, for my part, gave myself to the study of the types about me, and I dwelt long and luxuriously upon the vision of a florid and massive matron in diaphanous evening dress, whom I imagined to be revisiting the glimpses of her girlhood in the ancient watering-place, and to be getting all the gaiety she could out of it. These are the figures one mostly sees at Saratoga; there is very little youth of the present day there, but the youth of the past abounds, with the belated yellow hair and the purple moustaches, which gave a notion of greater wickedness in a former generation.

I made my observation that the dress, even in extreme cases of elderly prime, was very good — in the case of the women, I mean; the men there, as everywhere with us, were mostly slovens; and I was glad to find that the good taste and the correct fashion were without a colour-line; there were some mulatto ladies present as stylish as their white sisters, or step-sisters.

The most amiable of the human race is in great force at Saratoga, where the vast hotel service is wholly in its hands, and it had honoured the effort of the comedians that night with a full house of their own complexion. We who were not of it showed strangely enough in the dark mass, who let us lead the applause, however, as if doubtful themselves where it ought to come in, and whom I found willing even to share some misplaced laughter of mine. They formed two-thirds of the audience on the floor, and they were a cloud in the gallery, scarcely broken by a gleam of white.

I entertained myself with them a good deal, and I thought how much more delightful they were in their own kindly character than in their assumption of white character, and I tried to define my suffering from the performance as an effect from my tormented sympathies rather than from my offended tastes. When the long stress was over, and we rose and stood to let the crowd get out, I asked Miss Gage if she did not think this must be the case. I do not suppose she was really much more experienced in the theatre than the people on the stage, some of whom I doubted to have ever seen a play till they took part in East Lynne. But I thought I would ask her that in order to hear what she would say; and she said very simply that she had seen so few plays she did not know what to think of it, and I could see that she was abashed by the fact. Kendricks must have seen it too, for he began at once to save her from herself, with all his subtle generosity, and to turn her shame to praise. My heart, which remained sufficiently cold to her, warmed more than ever to him, and I should have liked to tell her that here was the finest and rarest human porcelain using itself like common clay in her behalf, and to demand whether she thought she was worth it.

I did not think she was, and I had a lurid moment when I was tempted to push on and make her show herself somehow at her worst. We had undertaken a preposterous thing in befriending her as we had done, and our course in bringing Kendricks in was wholly unjustifiable. How could I lead her on to some betrayal of her essential Philistinism, and make her so impossible in his eyes that even he, with all his sweetness and goodness, must take the first train from Saratoga in the morning?

We had of course joined the crowd in pushing forward; people always do, though they promise themselves to wait till the last one is out. I got caught in a dark eddy on the first stair-landing; but I could see them farther down, and I knew they would wait for me outside the door.

When I reached it at last they were nowhere to be seen; I looked up this street and down that, but they were not in sight.

XII

I did not afflict myself very much, nor pretend to do so. They knew the way home, and after I had blundered about in search of them through the lampshot darkness, I settled myself to walk back at my leisure, comfortably sure that I should find them on the verandah waiting for me when I reached the hotel. It was quite a thick night, and I almost ran into a couple at a corner of our quieter street when I had got to it out of Broadway. They seemed to be standing and looking about, and when the man said, “He must have thought we took the first turn,” and the woman, “Yes, that must have been the way,” I recognised my estrays.

I thought I would not discover myself to them, but follow on, and surprise them by arriving at our steps at the same moment they did, and I prepared myself to hurry after them. But they seemed in no hurry, and I had even some difficulty in accommodating my pace to the slowness of theirs.

“Won’t you take my arm, Miss Gage?” he asked as they moved on.

“It’s so very dark,” she answered, and I knew she had taken it. “I can hardly see a step, and poor Mr. March with his glasses — I don’t know what he’ll do.”

“Oh, he only uses them to read with; he can see as well as we can in the dark.”

“He’s very young in his feelings,” said the girl; “he puts me in mind of my own father.”

“He’s very young in his thoughts,” said Kendricks; “and that’s much more to the purpose for a magazine editor. There are very few men of his age who keep in touch with the times as he does.”

“Still, Mrs. March seems a good deal younger, don’t you think? I wonder how soon they begin to feel old?”

“Oh, not till along in the forties, I should say. It’s a good deal in temperament. I don’t suppose that either of them realises yet that they’re old, and they must be nearly fifty.”

“How strange it must be,” said the girl, “fifty years old! Twenty seems old enough, goodness knows.”

“How should you like to be a dotard of twenty-seven?” Kendricks asked, and she laughed at his joke.

“I don’t suppose I should mind it so much if I were a man.”

I had promised myself that if the talk became at all confidential I would drop behind out of earshot; but though it was curiously intimate for me to be put apart in the minds of these young people on account of my years as not of the same race or fate as themselves, there was nothing in what they said that I might not innocently overhear, as far as they were concerned, and I listened on.

But they had apparently given me quite enough attention. After some mutual laughter at what she said last, they were silent a moment, and then he said soberly, “There’s something fine in this isolation the dark gives you, isn’t there? You’re as remote in it from our own time and place as if you were wandering in interplanetary space.”

“I suppose we are doing that all the time — on the earth,” she suggested.

“Yes; but how hard it is to realise that we are on the earth now. Sometimes I have a sense of it, though, when the moon breaks from one flying cloud to another. Then it seems as if I were a passenger on some vast, shapeless ship sailing through the air. What,” he asked, with no relevancy that I could perceive, “was the strangest feeling you ever had?” I remembered asking girls such questions when I was young, and their not apparently thinking it at all odd.

“I don’t know,” she returned thoughtfully. “There was one time when I was little, and it had sleeted, and the sun came out just before it set, and seemed to set all the woods on fire. I thought the world was burning up.”

“It must have been very weird,” said Kendricks; and I thought, “Oh, good heavens! Has he got to talking of weird things?”

“It’s strange,” he added, “how we all have that belief when we are children that the world is going to burn up! I don’t suppose any child escapes it. Do you remember that poem of Thompson’s — the City of Dreadful Night man — where he describes the end of the world?”

“No, I never read it.”

“Well, merely, he says when the conflagration began the little flames looked like crocuses breaking through the sod. If it ever happened I fancy it would be quite as simple as that. But perhaps you don’t like gloomy poetry?”

“Yes, yes, I do. It’s the only kind that I care about.”

“Then you hate funny poetry?”

“I think it’s disgusting. Papa is always cutting it out of the papers and wanting to send it to me, and we have the greatest times!”

“I suppose,” said Kendricks, “it expresses some moods, though.”

“Oh yes; it expresses some moods; and sometimes it makes me laugh in spite of myself, and ashamed of anything serious.”

“That’s always the effect of a farce with me.”

“But then I’m ashamed of being ashamed afterward,” said the girl. “I suppose you go to the theatre a great deal in New York.”

“It’s a school of life,” said Kendricks. “I mean the audience.”

“I would like to go to the opera once. I am going to make papa take me in the winter.” She laughed with a gay sense of power, and he said —

“You seem to be great friends with your father.”

“Yes, we’re always together. I always went everywhere with him; this is the first time I’ve been away without him. But I thought I’d come with Mrs. Deering and see what Saratoga was like; I had never been here.”

“And is it like what you thought?”

“No. The first week we didn’t do anything. Then we got acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. March, and I began to really see something. But I supposed it was all balls and gaiety.”

“We must get up a few if you’re so fond of them,” Kendricks playfully suggested.

“Oh, I don’t know as I am. I never went much at home. Papa didn’t care to have me.”

“Ah, do you think it was right for him to keep you all to himself?” The girl did not answer, and they had both halted so abruptly that I almost ran into them. “I don’t quite make out where we are.” Kendricks seemed to be peering about. I plunged across the street lest he should ask me. I heard him add, “Oh yes; I know now,” and then they pressed forward.

We were quite near our hotel, but I thought it best to walk round the square and let them arrive first. On the way I amused myself thinking how different the girl had shown herself to him from what she had ever shown herself to my wife or me. She had really, this plain-minded goddess, a vein of poetic feeling, some inner beauty of soul answering to the outer beauty of body. She had a romantic attachment to her father, and this shed a sort of light on both of them, though I knew that it was not always a revelation of character.

XIII

When I reached the hotel I found Miss Gage at the door, and Kendricks coming out of the office toward her.

“Oh, here he is!” she called to him at sight of me.

“Where in the world have you been?” he demanded. “I had just found out from the clerk that you hadn’t come in yet, and I was going back for you with a searchlight.”

“Oh, I wasn’t so badly lost as all that,” I returned. “I missed you in the crowd at the door, but I knew you’d get home somehow, and so I came on without you. But my aged steps are not so quick as yours.”

The words, mechanically uttered, suggested something, and I thought that if they were in for weirdness I would give them as much weirdness as they could ask for. “When you get along toward fifty you’ll find that the foot you’ve still got out of the grave doesn’t work so lively as it used. Besides, I was interested in the night effect. It’s so gloriously dark; and I had a fine sense of isolation as I came along, as if I were altogether out of my epoch and my environment. I felt as if the earth was a sort of Flying Dutchman, and I was the only passenger. It was about the weirdest sensation I ever had. It reminded me, I don’t know how, exactly of the feeling I had when I was young, and I saw the sunset one evening through the woods after a sleet-storm.”

They stared at each other as I went on, and I could see Kendricks’s fine eyes kindle with an imaginative appreciation of the literary quality of the coincidence. But when I added, “Did you ever read a poem about the end of the world by that City of Dreadful Night man?” Miss Gage impulsively caught me by the coat lapel and shook me.

“Ah, it was you all the time! I knew there was somebody following us, and I might have known who it was!”

We all gave way in a gale of laughter, and sat down on the verandah and had our joke out in full recognition of the fact. When Kendricks rose to go at last, I said, “We won’t say anything about this little incident to Mrs. March, hey?” And then they laughed again as if it were the finest wit in the world, and Miss Gage bade me a joyful good-night at the head of the stairs as she went off to her room and I to mine.

I found Mrs. March waiting up with a book; and as soon as I shut myself in with her she said, awfully, “What were you laughing so about?”

“Laughing? Did you hear me laughing?”

“The whole house heard you, I’m afraid. You certainly ought to have known better, Basil. It was very inconsiderate of you.” And as I saw she was going on with more of that sort of thing, to divert her thoughts from my crime I told her the whole story. It had quite the effect I intended up to a certain point. She even smiled a little, as much as a woman could be expected to smile who was not originally in the joke.

“And they had got to comparing weird experiences?” she asked.

“Yes; the staleness of the thing almost made me sick. Do you remember when we first compared our weird experiences? But I suppose they will go on doing it to the end of time, and it will have as great a charm for the last man and woman as it had for Adam and Eve when they compared their weird experiences.”

“And was that what you were laughing at?”

“We were laughing at the wonderful case of telepathy I put up on them.”

Mrs. March faced her open book down on the table before her, and looked at me with profound solemnity. “Well, then, I can tell you, my dear, it is no laughing matter. If they have got to the weird it is very serious; and her talking to him about her family, and his wanting to know about her father, that’s serious too — far more serious than either of them can understand. I don’t like it, Basil; we have got a terrible affair on our hands.”

“Terrible?”

“Yes, terrible. As long as he was interested in her simply from a literary point of view, though I didn’t like that either, I could put up with it; but now that he’s got to telling her about himself, and exchanging weird experiences with her, it’s another thing altogether. Oh, I never wanted Kendricks brought into the affair at all.”

“Come now, Isabel! Stick to the facts, please.”

“No matter! It was you that discovered the girl, and then something had to be done. I was perfectly shocked when you told me that Mr. Kendricks was in town, because I saw at once that he would have to be got in for it; and now we have to think what we shall do.”

“Couldn’t we think better in the morning?”

“No; we must think at once. I shall not sleep to-night anyhow. My peace is gone. I shall have to watch them every instant.”

“Beginning at this instant. Why not wait till you can see them?”

“Oh, you can’t joke it away, my dear. If I find they are really interested in each other I shall have to speak. I am responsible.”

“The young lady,” I said, more to gain time than anything else, “seems quite capable of taking care of herself.”

“That makes it all the worse. Do you think I care for her only? It’s Kendricks too that I care for. I don’t know that I care for her at all.”

“Oh, then I think we may fairly leave Kendricks to his own devices; and I’m not alarmed for Miss Gage either, though I do care for her a great deal.”

“I don’t understand how you can be so heartless about it, Basil,” said Mrs. March, plaintively. “She is a young girl, and she has never seen anything of the world, and of course if he keeps on paying her attention in this way she can’t help thinking that he is interested in her. Men never can see such things as women do. They think that, until a man has actually asked a girl to marry him, he hasn’t done anything to warrant her in supposing that he is in love with her, or that she has any right to be in love with him.”

“That is true; we can’t imagine that she would be so indelicate.”

“I see that you’re determined to tease, my dear,” said Mrs. March, and she took up her book with an air of offence and dismissal. “If you won’t talk seriously, I hope you will think seriously, and try to realise what we’ve got in for. Such a girl couldn’t imagine that we had simply got Mr. Kendricks to go about with her from a romantic wish to make her have a good time, and that he was doing it to oblige us, and wasn’t at all interested in her.”

“It does look a little preposterous, even to the outsider,” I admitted.

“I am glad you are beginning to see it in that light, my dear, and if you can think of anything to do by morning I shall be humbly thankful. I don’t expect to.”

“Perhaps I shall dream of something,” I said more lightly than I felt. “How would it do for you to have a little talk with her — a little motherly talk — and hint round, and warn her not to let her feelings run away with her in Kendricks’s direction?” Mrs. March faced her book down in her lap, and listened as if there might be some reason in the nonsense I was talking. “You might say that he was a society man, and was in great request, and then intimate that there was a prior attachment, or that he was the kind of man who would never marry, but was really cold-hearted with all his sweetness, and merely had a passion for studying character.”

“Do you think that would do, Basil?” she asked.

“Well, I thought perhaps you might think so.”

“I’m afraid it wouldn’t,” she sighed.

“All that we can do now is to watch them, and act promptly, if we see that they are really in love, either of them.”

“I don’t believe,” I said, “that I should know that they were in love even if I saw it. I have forgotten the outward signs, if I ever knew them. Should he give her flowers? He’s done it from the start; he’s brought her boxes of Huyler candy, and lent her books; but I dare say he’s been merely complying with our wishes in doing it. I doubt if lovers sigh nowadays. I didn’t sigh myself, even in my time; and I don’t believe any passion could make Kendricks neglect his dress. He keeps his eyes on her all the time, but that may be merely an effort to divine her character. I don’t believe I should know, indeed I don’t.”

“I shall,” said Mrs. March.

XIV

We were to go the next day to the races, and I woke with more anxiety about the weather than about the lovers, or potential lovers. But after realising that the day was beautiful, on that large scale of loveliness which seems characteristic of the summer days at Saratoga, where they have them almost the size of the summer days I knew when I was a boy, I was sensible of a secondary worry in my mind, which presently related itself to Kendricks and Miss Gage. It was a haze of trouble merely, however, such as burns off, like a morning fog, when the sun gets higher, and it was chiefly on my wife’s account.

I suppose that the great difference between her conscience and one originating outside of New England (if any conscience can originate outside of New England) is that it cannot leave the moral government of the universe in the hands of divine Providence. I was willing to leave so many things which I could not control to the Deity, who probably could that she accused me of fatalism, and I was held to be little better than one of the wicked because I would not forecast the effects of what I did in the lives of others. I insisted that others were also probably in the hands of the somma sapienza e il primo amore, and that I was so little aware of the influence of other lives upon my own, even where there had been a direct and strenuous effort to affect me, that I could not readily believe others had swerved from the line of their destiny because of me. Especially I protested that I could not hold myself guilty of misfortunes I had not intended, even though my faulty conduct had caused them. As to this business of Kendricks and Miss Gage, I denied in the dispute I now began tacitly to hold with Mrs. March’s conscience that my conduct had been faulty. I said that there was no earthly harm in my having been interested by the girl’s forlornness when I first saw her; that I did not do wrong to interest Mrs. March in her; that she did not sin in going shopping with Miss Gage and Mrs. Deering; that we had not sinned, either of us, in rejoicing that Kendricks had come to Saratoga, or in letting Mrs. Deering go home to her sick husband and leave Miss Gage on our hands; that we were not wicked in permitting the young fellow to help us make her have a good time. In this colloquy I did all the reasoning, and Mrs. March’s conscience was completely silenced; but it rose triumphant in my miserable soul when I met Miss Gage at breakfast, looking radiantly happy, and disposed to fellowship me in an unusual confidence because, as I clearly perceived, of our last night’s adventure. I said to myself bitterly that happiness did not become her style, and I hoped that she would get away with her confounded rapture before Mrs. March came down. I resolved not to tell Mrs. March if it fell out so, but at the same time, as a sort of atonement, I decided to begin keeping the sharpest kind of watch upon Miss Gage for the outward signs and tokens of love.

She said, “When you began to talk that way last night, Mr. March, it almost took my breath, and if you hadn’t gone so far, and mentioned about the sunset through the sleety trees, I never should have suspected you.”

“Ah, that’s the trouble with men, Miss Gage.” And when I said “men” I fancied she flushed a little. “We never know when to stop; we always overdo it; if it were not for that we should be as perfect as women. Perhaps you’ll give me another chance, though.”

“No; we shall be on our guard after this.” She corrected herself and said, “I shall always be looking out for you now,” and she certainly showed herself conscious in the bridling glance that met my keen gaze.

“Good heavens!” I thought. “Has it really gone so far?” and more than ever I resolved not to tell Mrs. March.

I went out to engage a carriage to take us to the races, and to agree with the driver that he should wait for us at a certain corner some blocks distant from our hotel, where we were to walk and find him. We always did this, because there were a number of clergymen in our house, and Mrs. March could not make it seem right to start for the races direct from the door, though she held that it was perfectly right for us to go. For the same reason she made the driver stop short of our destination on our return, and walked home the rest of the way. Almost the first time we practised this deception I was met at the door by the sweetest and dearest of these old divines, who said, “Have you ever seen the races here? I’m told the spectacle is something very fine,” and I was obliged to own that I had once had a glimpse of them. But it was in vain that I pleaded this fact with Mrs. March; she insisted that the appearance of not going to the races was something that we owed the cloth, and no connivance on their part could dispense us from it.

As I now went looking up and down the street for the driver who was usually on the watch for me about eleven o’clock on a fair day of the races, I turned over in my mind the several accidents which are employed in novels to bring young people to a realising sense of their feelings toward each other, and wondered which of them I might most safely invoke. I was not anxious to have Kendricks and Miss Gage lovers; it would be altogether simpler for us if they were not; but if they were, the sooner they knew it and we knew it the better. I thought of a carriage accident, in which he should seize her and leap with her from the flying vehicle, while the horses plunged madly on, but I did not know what in this case would become of Mrs. March and me. Besides, I could think of nothing that would frighten our driver’s horses, and I dismissed the fleeting notion of getting any others because Mrs. March liked their being so safe, and she had, besides, interested herself particularly in the driver, who had a family and counted upon our custom. The poor fellow came in sight presently, and smilingly made the usual arrangement with me, and an hour later he delivered us all sound in wind and limb at the racecourse.

I watched in vain for signs of uncommon tenderness in the two young people. If anything they were rather stiff and distant with each other, and I asked myself whether this might not be from an access of consciousness. Kendricks was particularly devoted to Mrs. March, who, in the airy detachment with which she responded to his attentions, gave me the impression that she had absolutely dismissed her suspicions of the night before, or else had heartlessly abandoned the affair to me altogether. If she had really done this, then I saw no way out of it for me but by an accident which should reveal them to each other. Perhaps some one might insult Miss Gage — some ruffian — and Kendricks might strike the fellow; but this seemed too squalid. There might be a terrible jam, and he interpose his person between her and the danger of her being crushed to death; or the floor of the grand stand might give way, and everybody be precipitated into the space beneath, and he fight his way, with her senseless form on his arm, over the bodies of the mangled and dying. Any of these things would have availed in a novel, and something of the kind would have happened, too. But, to tell the truth, nothing whatever happened, and if it had not been for that anxiety on my mind I should have thought it much pleasanter so.

Even as it was I felt a measure of the hilarity which commonly fills me at a running race, and I began to lose in the charm of the gay scene the sense of my responsibility, and little by little to abate the vigilance apparently left all to me. The day was beautiful; the long heat had burned itself out, and there was a clear sparkle in the sunshine, which seemed blown across the wide space within the loop of the track by the delicate breeze. A vague, remote smell of horses haunted the air, with now and then a breath of the pines from the grove shutting the race-ground from the highway. We got excellent places, as one always may, the grand stand is so vast, and the young people disposed themselves on the bench in front of us, but so near that we were not tempted to talk them over. The newsboys came round with papers, and the boys who sold programmes of the races; from the bar below there appeared from time to time shining negroes in white linen jackets, with trays bearing tall glasses of lemonade, and straws tilted in the glasses. Bookmakers from the pool-rooms took the bets of the ladies, who formed by far the greater part of the spectators on the grand stand, and contributed, with their summer hats and gowns, to the gaiety of the ensemble. They were of all types, city and country both, and of the Southern dark as well as the Northern fair complexion, with so thick a sprinkling of South Americans that the Spanish gutturals made themselves almost as much heard as the Yankee nasals. Among them moved two nuns of some mendicant order, receiving charity from the fair gamblers, who gave for luck without distinction of race or religion.

I leaned forward and called Kendricks’s attention to the nuns, and to the admirable literary quality of the whole situation. He was talking to Miss Gage, and he said as impatiently as he ever suffered himself to speak, “Yes, yes; tremendously picturesque.”

“You ought to get something out of it, my dear fellow. Don’t you feel copy in it?”

“Oh, splendid, of course; but it’s your ground, Mr. March. I shouldn’t feel it right to do anything with Saratoga after you had discovered it,” and he turned eagerly again to Miss Gage.

My wife put her hand on my sleeve and frowned, and I had so far lost myself in my appreciation of the scene that I was going to ask her what the matter was, when a general sensation about me made me look at the track, where the horses for the first race had already appeared, with their jockeys in vivid silk jackets of various dyes. They began to form for the start with the usual tricks and feints, till I became very indignant with them, though I had no bets pending, and did not care in the least which horse won. What I wanted was to see the race, the flight, and all this miserable manoeuvring was retarding it. Now and then a jockey rode his horse far off on the track and came back between the false starts; now and then one kept stubbornly behind the rest and would not start with them. How their several schemes and ambitions were finally reconciled I never could tell, but at last the starter’s flag swept down and they were really off. Everybody could have seen perfectly well as they sat, but everybody rose and watched the swift swoop of the horses, bunched together in the distance, and scarcely distinguishable by the colours of their riders. The supreme moment came for me when they were exactly opposite the grand stand, full half a mile away — the moment that I remembered from year to year as one of exquisite illusion — for then the horses seemed to lift from the earth as with wings, and to skim over the track like a covey of low-flying birds. The finish was tame to this. Mrs. March and I had our wonted difference of opinion as to which horse had won, and we were rather uncommonly controversial because we had both decided upon the same horse, as we found, only she was talking of the jockey’s colours, and I was talking of the horse’s. We appealed to Kendricks, who said that another horse altogether had won the race, and this compromise pacified us.

We were all on foot, and he suggested, “We could see better, couldn’t we, if we went farther down in front?” And Mrs. March answered —

“No, we prefer to stay here; but you two can go.” And when they had promptly availed themselves of her leave, she said to me, “This is killing me dead, Basil, and if it keeps up much longer I don’t believe I can live through it. I don’t care now, and I believe I shall throw them together all I can from this out. The quicker they decide whether they’re in love or not the better. I have some rights too.”

Her whirling words expressed the feeling in my own mind. I had the same sense of being trifled with by these young people, who would not behave so conclusively toward each other as to justify our interference on the ground that they were in love, nor yet treat each other so indifferently as to relieve us of the strain of apprehension. I had lost all faith in accident by this time, and I was quite willing to leave them to their own devices; I was so desperate that I said I hoped they would get lost from us, as they had from me the night before, and never come back, but just keep on wandering round for ever. All sorts of vengeful thoughts went through my mind as I saw them leaning toward each other to say something, and then drawing apart to laugh in what seemed an indefinite comradery instead of an irrepressible passion. Did they think we were going to let this sort of thing go on? What did they suppose our nerves were made of? Had they no mercy, no consideration? It was quite like the selfishness of youth to wish to continue in that fool’s paradise, but they would find out that middle age had its rights too. I felt capable of asking them bluntly what they meant by it. But when they docilely rejoined us at the end of the races, hurrying up with some joke about not letting me get lost this time, and Miss Gage put herself at my wife’s side and Kendricks dropped into step with me, all I had been thinking seemed absurd. They were just two young people who were enjoying a holiday-time together, and we were in no wise culpable concerning them.

I suggested this to Mrs. March when we got home, and, in the need of some relief from the tension she had been in, she was fain to accept the theory provisionally, though I knew that her later rejection of it would be all the more violent for this respite.

XV

There was to be a hop at the Grand Union that night, and I had got tickets for it in virtue of my relation to Every Other Week. I must say the clerk who gave them me was very civil about it; he said they were really only for the hotel guests, but he was glad to give them to outsiders who applied with proper credentials; and he even offered me more tickets than I asked for.

Miss Gage was getting a dress for the hop, and it was to be finished that day. I think women really like the scare of thinking their dresses will not be done for a given occasion, and so arrange to have them at the last moment. Mrs. March went with the girl early in the afternoon to have it tried on for the last time, and they came home reporting that it was a poem. My wife confided to me that it was not half done — merely begun, in fact — and would never be finished in time in the world. She also assured Miss Gage that she need not be the least uneasy; that there was not an hour’s work on the dress; and that the dress-maker’s reputation was at stake, and she would not dare to fail her. I knew she was perfectly sincere in both these declarations, which were, indeed, merely the expression of two mental attitudes, and had no relation to the facts.

She added to me that she was completely worn out with anxiety and worry, and I must not think of her going to the hop. I would have to do the chaperoning for her, and she did hope that I would not forget what I was sent for, or get talking with somebody, and leave Miss Gage altogether to Kendricks. She said that quite likely there might be friends or acquaintances of his at the hop — such a large affair — whom he would want to show some attention, and I must take charge of Miss Gage myself, and try to find her other partners. She drilled me in the duties of my position until I believed that I was letter-perfect, and then she said that she supposed I would commit some terrible blunder that would ruin everything.

I thought that this was very likely, too, but I would not admit it.

The dress came home at nine o’clock, and operated a happy diversion from my imaginable shortcomings; for it appeared from Mrs. March’s asides to me that it was a perfect horror in the set, and that everybody could see that it had been simply slung together at the last moment, and she would never, as long as the world stood, go to that woman for anything again.

I must say I could not myself see anything wrong about the dress. I thought it exquisite in tint and texture; a delicate, pale-greenish film that clung and floated, and set off the girl’s beauty as the leafage of a flower heightens the loveliness of a flower. I did not dare to say this in the face of Mrs. March’s private despair, and I was silent while the girl submitted to be twirled about for my inspection like a statue on a revolving pedestal. Kendricks, however, had no such restrictions upon him, and I could see him start with delight in the splendid vision before he spoke.

“Isn’t it a poem?” demanded Mrs. March. “Isn’t it a perfect lyric?”

“Why should you have allowed her to be transported altogether into the ideal? Wasn’t she far enough from us before?” he asked; and I found myself wishing that he would be either less or more articulate. He ought to have been mute with passion, or else he ought to have been frankly voluble about the girl’s gown, and gone on about it longer. But he simply left the matter there, and though I kept him carefully under my eye, I could not see that he was concealing any further emotion. She, on her part, neither blushed nor frowned at his compliment; she did nothing by look or gesture to provoke more praise; she took it very much as the beautiful evening might, so undeniably fine, so perfect in its way.

She and the evening were equally fitted for the event to which they seemed equally dedicated. The dancing was to be out of doors on a vast planking, or platform, set up in the heart of that bosky court which the hotel incloses. Around this platform drooped the slim, tall Saratogan trees, and over it hung the Saratogan sky, of a nocturnal blue very rare in our latitude, with the stars faint in its depths, and by and by a white moon that permitted itself a modest competition with the electric lights effulgent everywhere. There was a great crowd of people in the portico, the vestibule, and the inner piazzas, and on the lawn around the platform, where “the trodden weed” sent up the sweet scent of bruised grass in the cool night air. My foolish old heart bounded with a pulse of youth at the thought of all the gay and tender possibilities of such a scene.

But the young people under my care seemed in no haste to mingle in it. We oldsters are always fancying youth impatient, but there is no time of life which has so much patience. It behaves as if it had eternity before it — an eternity of youth — instead of a few days and years, and then the frosty poll. We who are young no longer think we would do so and so if we were young, as women think they would do so and so if they were men; but if we were really young again, we should not do at all what we think. We should not hurry to experience our emotions; we should not press forward to discharge our duties or repair our mistakes; we should not seize the occasion to make a friend or reconcile an enemy; we should let weeks and months go by in the realisation of a passion, and trust all sorts of contingencies and accidents to help us out with its confession. The thoughts of youth are very long, and its conclusions are deliberate and delayed, and often withheld altogether. It is age which is tremulously eager in these matters, and cannot wait with the fine patience of nature in her growing moods.

As soon, even, as I was in the hotel I was impatient to press through to the place where the dancing was, and where I already heard the band playing. I knew very well that when we got there I should have to sit down somewhere on the edge of the platform with the other frumps and fogies, and begin taking cold in my dress-coat, and want to doze off without being able to, while my young people were waltzing together, or else promenading up and down ignoring me, or recognising me by the offer of a fan, and the question whether I was not simply melting; I have seen how the poor chaperon fares at such times. But they, secure of their fun, were by no means desirous to have it over, or even to have it begin. They dawdled through the thronged hotel office, where other irresponsible pairs were coming and going under the admiring eyes of the hotel loungers, and they wandered up and down the waste parlours, and sat on tête-à-têtes just to try them, apparently; and Miss Gage verified in the mirrors the beauty which was reflected in all eyes. They amused themselves with the extent of the richly-carpeted and upholstered desolation around them, where only a few lonely and aging women lurked about on sofas and ottomans; and they fell to playing with their compassion for the plebeian spectators at the long verandah windows trying to penetrate with their forbidden eyes to the hop going on in the court far beyond the intermediary desert of the parlours.

When they signified at last that they were ready for me to lead them on to the dance, I would so much rather have gone to bed that there are no words for the comparison. Then, when we got to the place, which I should never have been able to reach in the world if it had not been for the young energy and inspiration of Kendricks, and they had put me in a certain seat with Miss Gage’s wraps beside me where they could find me, they went off and danced for hours and hours. For hours and hours? For ages and ages! while I withered away amid mouldering mothers, and saw my charges through the dreadful half-dreams of such a state whirling in the waltz, hopping in the polka, sliding in the galop, and then endlessly walking up and down between the dances, and eating and drinking the chill refreshments that it made my teeth chatter to think of. I suppose they decently came to me from time to time, though they seemed to be always dancing, for I could afterward remember Miss Gage taking a wrap from me now and then, and quickly coming back to shed it upon my lap again. I got so chilled that if they had not been unmistakably women’s wraps I should have bundled them all about my shoulders, which I could almost hear creak with rheumatism. I must have fallen into a sort of drowse at last; for I was having a dispute with some sort of authority, which turned out to be Mrs. March, and upbraiding her with the fact that there were no women’s wraps which would also do for a man, when the young people stood arm in arm before me, and Miss Gage said that she was tired to death now, and they were going.

But it appeared that they were only going as far as the parlours for the present; for when they re-entered the hotel, they turned into them, and sat down there quite as if that had been the understanding. When I arrived with the wraps, I was reminded of something, and I said, “Have you two been dancing together the whole evening?”

They looked at each other as if for the first time they now realised the fact, and Kendricks said, “Why, of course we have! We didn’t know anybody.”

“Very well, then,” I said; “you have got me into a scrape.”

“Oh, poor Mr. March!” cried the girl. “How have we done it?”

“Why, Mrs. March said that Mr. Kendricks would be sure to know numbers of people, and I must get you other partners, for it wouldn’t do for you to dance the whole evening together.”

She threw herself back in the chair she had taken, and laughed as if this were the best joke in the world.

He said hardily, “You see it has done.”

“And if it wouldn’t do,” she gasped, “why didn’t you bring me the other partners?”

“Because I didn’t know any,” I said; and this seemed to amuse them both so much that I was afraid they would never get their breath.

She looked by and by at her dancing-card, and as soon as she could wipe the tears from her eyes she said, “No; there is no other name there”; and this seemed even a better joke than the other from the way they joined in laughing at it.

“Well, now,” I said, when they were quiet again, “this won’t do, my young friends. It’s all very well for you, and you seem to like it; but I am responsible for your having passed a proper evening under my chaperonage, and something has got to be done to prove it.” They saw the reasonableness of this, and they immediately became sober. “Kendricks,” I asked, “can’t you think of something?”

No, he said, he couldn’t; and then he began to laugh again.

I applied to her in the same terms; but she only answered, “Oh, don’t ask me,” and she went off laughing too.

“Very well, then,” I said; “I shall have to do something desperate, and I shall expect you both to bear me out in it, and I don’t want any miserable subterfuges when it comes to the point with Mrs. March. Will you let me have your dancing-card Miss Gage?” She detached it, and handed it to me. “It’s very fortunate that Mr. Kendricks wrote his name for the first dance only, and didn’t go on and fill it up.”

“Why, we didn’t think it was worth while!” she innocently explained.

“And that’s what makes it so perfectly providential, as Mrs. March says. Now then,” I went on, as I wrote in the name of a rising young politician, who happened just then to have been announced as arriving in Saratoga to join some other leaders in arranging the slate of his party for the convention to meet a month later, “we will begin with a good American.”

I handed the card to Kendricks. “Do you happen to remember the name of the young French nobleman who danced the third dance with Miss Gage?”

“No,” he said; “but I think I could invent it.” And he dashed down an extremely probable marquis, while Miss Gage clapped her hands for joy.

“Oh, how glorious! how splendid!”

I asked, “Will you ever give me away the longest day you live?”

“Never,” she promised; and I added the name of a South American doctor, one of those doctors who seem to be always becoming the presidents of their republics, and ordering all their patients of opposite politics to be shot in the plaza.

Kendricks entered a younger son of an English duke, and I contributed the hyphenated surname of a New York swell, and between us we soon had all the dances on Miss Gage’s card taken by the most distinguished people. We really studied probability in the forgery, and we were proud of the air of reality it wore in the carefully differenced handwritings, with national traits nicely accented in each.

XVI

The fun of it all was that Mrs. March was not deceived for an instant. “Oh, nonsense!” she said, when she glanced at our pretty deception, which we presented with perhaps too perfect seriousness. “Then you danced only the first dance?”

“No, no!” Miss Gage protested. “I danced every dance as long as I stayed.” She laughed with her handkerchief to her mouth and her eyes shining above.

“Yes; I can testify to that, Mrs. March,” said Kendricks, and he laughed wildly, too. I must say their laughter throughout was far beyond the mirthfulness of the facts. They both protested that they had had the best time in the world, and the gayest time; that I had been a mirror of chaperons, and followed them round with my eyes wherever they went like a family portrait; and that they were the most exemplary young couple at the hop in their behaviour. Mrs. March asked them all about it, and she joined in their fun with a hilarity which I knew from long experience boded me no good.

When Kendricks had gone away, and Miss Gage had left us for the night with an embrace, whose fondness I wondered at, from Mrs. March, an awful silence fell upon us in the deserted parlour where she had waited up.

I knew that when she broke the silence she would begin with, “Well, my dear!” and this was what she did. She added, “I hope you’re convinced now!”

I did not even pretend not to understand. “You mean that they are in love? I suppose that their we-ing and us-ing so much would indicate something of the kind.”

“It isn’t that alone; everything indicates it. She would hardly let go of him with her eyes. I wish,” sighed Mrs. March, and she let her head droop upon her hand a moment, “I could be as sure of him as I am of her.”

“Wouldn’t that double the difficulty?” I ventured to suggest, though till she spoke I had not doubted that it was the case.

“I should make you speak to him if I were sure of him; but as it is I shall speak to her, and the sooner the better.”

“To-night?” I quaked.

“No; I shall let the poor thing have her sleep to-night. But the first thing in the morning I shall speak, and I want you to send her up to me as soon as she’s had her breakfast. Tell her I’m not well, and shall not be down; I shall not close my eyes the whole night. And now,” she added, “I want you to tell me everything that happened this evening. Don’t omit a word, or a look, or a motion. I wish to proceed intelligently.”

I hope I was accurate in the history of the hop which I gave Mrs. March; I am sure I was full. I think my account may be justly described as having a creative truthfulness, if no other merit. I had really no wish to conceal anything except the fact that I had not, in my utter helplessness, even tried to get Miss Gage any other partners. But in the larger interest of the present situation, Mrs. March seemed to have lost the sense of my dereliction in this respect. She merely asked, “And it was after you went back to the parlour, just before you came home, that you wrote those names on her card?”

“Kendricks wrote half of them,” I said.

“I dare say. Well, it was very amusing, and if the circumstances were different, I could have entered into the spirit of it too. But you see yourself, Basil, that we can’t let this affair go any further without dealing frankly with her. You can’t speak to her, and I must. Don’t you see?”

I said that I saw, but I had suddenly a wild wish that it were practicable for me to speak to Miss Gage. I should have liked to have a peep into a girl’s heart at just such a moment, when it must be quivering with the unconfessed sense of love, and the confident hope of being loved, but while as yet nothing was assured, nothing was ascertained. If it would not have been shocking, if it would not have been sacrilegious, it would have been infinitely interesting, and from an æsthetic point of view infinitely important. I thought that I should have been willing to undergo all the embarrassment of such an inquiry for the sake of its precious results, if it had been at all possible; but I acquiesced that it would not be possible. I felt that I was getting off pretty lightly not to have it brought home to me again that I was the cause of all this trouble, and that if it had not been for me there would have been, as far as Mrs. March was concerned, no Miss Gage, and no love-affair of hers to deal with. I debated in my mind a moment whether I had better urge her to let me speak to Kendricks after all; but I forbore, and in the morning I waited about in much perturbation, after I had sent Miss Gage to her, until I could know the result of their interview. When I saw the girl come away from her room, which she did rather trippingly, I went to her, and found her by no means the wreck I had expected the ordeal to leave her.

“Did you meet Miss Gage?” she asked.

“Yes,” I returned, with tremulous expectation.

“Well, don’t you think she looks perfectly divine in that gown? It’s one of Mme. Cody’s, and we got it for thirty dollars. It would have been fifty in New York, and it was, here, earlier in the season. I shall always come here for some of my things; as soon as the season’s a little past they simply fling them away. Well, my dear!”

“Well, what?”

“I didn’t speak to her after all.”

“You didn’t! Don’t you think she’s in love with him, then?”

“Dead.”

“Well?”

“Well, I couldn’t somehow seem to approach the subject as I had expected to. She was so happy, and so good, and so perfectly obedient, that I couldn’t get anything to take hold of. You see, I didn’t know but she might be a little rebellious, or resentful of my interference; but in the little gingerly attempts I did make she was so submissive, don’t you understand? And she was very modest about Mr. Kendricks’ attentions, and so self-depreciatory that, well—”

“Look here, Isabel,” I broke in, “this is pretty shameless of you. You pretend to be in the greatest kind of fidge about this girl; and you make me lie awake all night thinking what you’re going to say to her; and now you as much as tell me you were so fascinated with the modest way she was in love that you couldn’t say anything to her against being in love on our hands in any sort of way. Do you call this business?”

“Well, I don’t care if I did encourage her—”

“Oh, you even encouraged her!”

“I didn’t encourage her. I merely praised Mr. Kendricks, and said how much you thought of him as a writer.”

“Oh! then you gave the subject a literary cast. I see! Do you think Miss Gage was able to follow you?”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“And what do you propose to do now?”

“I propose to do nothing. I think that I have done all my duty requires, and that now I can leave the whole affair to you. It was your affair in the beginning. I don’t see why I should worry myself about it.”

“It seems to me that this is a very strange position for a lady to take who was not going to close an eye last night in view of a situation which has not changed in the least, except for the worse. Don’t you think you are rather culpably light-hearted all of a sudden?”

“I am light-hearted, but if there is any culpability it is yours, Basil.”

I reflected, but I failed to find any novelty in the fact. “Very well, then; what do you propose that I should do?”

“I leave that entirely to your own conscience.”

“And if my conscience has no suggestion to make?”

“That’s your affair.”

I reflected again, and then I said, more than anything to make her uncomfortable, I’m afraid: “I feel perfectly easy in my conscience, personally, but I have a social duty in the matter, and I hope I shall perform it with more fidelity and courage than you have shown. I shall speak to Kendricks.”

She said: “That is just what you ought to do. I’m quite surprised.” After this touch of irony she added earnestly, “And I do hope, my dear, you will use judgment in speaking to him, and tact. You mustn’t go at it bluntly. Remember that Mr. Kendricks is not at all to blame. He began to show her attention to oblige us, and if she has fallen in love with him it is our fault.”

“I shall handle him without gloves,” I said. “I shall tell him he had better go away.”

I was joking, but she said seriously, “Yes; he must go away. And I don’t envy you having to tell him. I suppose you will bungle it, of course.”

“Well, then, you must advise me,” I said; and we really began to consider the question. We could hardly exaggerate the difficulty and delicacy of the duty before me. We recognised that before I made any explicit demand of him I must first ascertain the nature of the whole ground and then be governed by the facts. It would be simple enough if I had merely to say that we thought the girl’s affections were becoming engaged, and then appeal to his eager generosity, his delicate magnanimity; but there were possible complications on his side which must be regarded. I was to ascertain, we concluded, the exact nature of the situation before I ventured to say anything openly. I was to make my approaches by a series of ambushes before I unmasked my purpose, and perhaps I must not unmask it at all. As I set off on my mission, which must begin with finding Kendricks at his hotel, Mrs. March said she pitied me. She called me back to ask whether I thought I had really better do anything. Then, as I showed signs of weakening, she drove me from her with, “Yes, yes! You must! You must!”

XVII

It was still so early that I had my doubts whether I should find Kendricks up after the last night’s revelry, but he met me half-way between our hotel and his. He said he was coming to see how Mrs. March was bearing Miss Gage’s immense success at the ball; but perhaps this was not his sole motive. He asked frankly how the young lady was, and whether I thought Mrs. March would consider a lunch at a restaurant by the lake a good notion. When I said I had very little doubt she would, and proposed taking a turn in the park before I went back with him, he looked at his watch and laughed, and said he supposed it was rather early yet, and came very willingly with me.

We had the pretty place almost to ourselves at that hour. There were a half-dozen or so nursemaids, pushing their perambulators about, or standing the vehicles across the walk in front of the benches where they sat, in the simple belief of all people who have to do with babies that the rest of the world may be fitly discommoded in their behalf. But they did not actively molest us, and they scarcely circumscribed our choice of seats. We were by no means driven to the little kiosk in the lake for them, and I should rather say that we were fatefully led there, so apt were the associations of the place to my purpose. Nothing could have been more natural than that I should say, as we sat down there, “This was where I first saw Miss Gage with her friends”; and it was by a perfectly natural transition that I should go on to speak, in a semi-humorous strain, of the responsibility which Mrs. March and myself had incurred by letting our sympathy for her run away with us. I said I supposed that if we had not been willing from the first to try to realise for her some of the expectations we imagined she had in coming to Saratoga, she never would have fallen to our charge; that people really brought a great many more things upon themselves than they were willing to own; and that fate was perhaps more the fulfilment of our tacit ambitions than our overt acts. This bit of philosophy, which I confess I thought fine, did not seem to impress Kendricks. He merely said that it must be great fun to have the chance of baffling the malice of circumstance in a case like that, and I perceived that he felt nothing complex in the situation. In fact, I doubt whether youth perceives anything complex in life. To the young, life is a very plain case. To be sure, they are much more alarmed than their elders at getting tangled up in its web at times, but that is because they have not had our experience in getting untangled, and think they are never going to get out alive. When they do, they think that it is the only tangle they are ever going to be in, and do not know that they are simply going on from one to another as long as there is enough of them left to be caught in a mesh. To Kendricks we Marches were simply two amiable people, who had fancied doing a pleasant thing for a beautiful girl that accident had thrown it in our power to befriend, and were by no means the trembling arbiters of her destiny we felt ourselves to be. The difference between his objective sense and my subjective sense was the difference between his twenty-seven years and my fifty-two, and while this remained I saw that it would be useless to try to get on common ground with him, or to give him our point of view. If I were to speak to him at all, it must be with authority, with the right of one who stood in the place of the girl’s parents, and had her happiness at heart. That is, it was something like that; but my words say it too bluntly. I found myself beginning, “I have rather had a notion that her father might come on, and take the enterprise off our hands,” though, to tell the truth, I had never imagined such a thing, which came into my head at that moment through an association with the thought of parents.

“Have you any idea what sort of man he is?” asked Kendricks.

“Oh, some little local magnate, president of the village and president of the village bank; I fancy the chief figure in the place, but probably as ignorant of our world as a Cherokee.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the young fellow. “Do you think that follows because he doesn’t live in it?” I could see that he did not quite like what I had said. “I suppose ours is rather a small world.”

“The smallest of all worlds,” I answered. “And in the eyes of Papa Gage, if they could once be focused upon it, our world would shrivel to an atom.”

“Do you think,” he asked, with a manifest anxiety, “that it would in hers?”

“No; she is not the American people, and her father is, as I fancy him. I make out from the vague hints that Brother Deering (as Fulkerson would call him) dropped when he talked about him that Papa Gage is a shrewd, practical, home-keeping business man, with an eye single to the main chance, lavish, but not generous, Philistine to the backbone, blindly devoted to his daughter, and contemptuous of all the myriad mysteries of civilisation that he doesn’t understand. I don’t know why I should be authorised to imagine him personally long and lank, with possibly a tobacco habit of some sort. His natural history, upon no better authority, is that of a hard-headed farmer, who found out that farming could never be more than a livelihood, and came into the village, and began to lend money, and get gain, till he was in a position to help found the De Witt Point National Bank, and then, by weight of his moneyed solidity, imposed himself upon the free and independent voters of the village — a majority of them under mortgage to him — and became its president. It isn’t a pleasant type, but it’s ideally American.”

“Yes,” said Kendricks ruefully.

“But his daughter,” I continued, “is probably altogether different. There is something fine about her — really fine. Our world wouldn’t shrivel in her eye; it would probably swell up and fill the universe,” I added by an impulse that came from nowhere irresistibly upon me: “that is, if she could see you in it.”

“What do you mean?” he asked with a start.

“Oh, now I must tell you what I mean,” I said desperately. “It’s you that have complicated this case so dreadfully for us. Can’t you think why?”

“No, I can’t,” he said; but he had to say that.

His fine, sensitive face flamed at once so fire-red that it could only turn pale for a change when I plunged on: “I’m afraid we’ve trifled with her happiness”; and this formulation of the case disgusted me so much that I laughed wildly, and added, “unless we’ve trifled with yours, too.”

“I don’t know why you call it trifling with happiness,” he returned with dignity, but without offence. “If you will leave her out of the question, I will say that you have given me the greatest happiness of my life in introducing me to Miss Gage.”

“Now,” I demanded, “may I ask what you mean? You know I wouldn’t if I didn’t feel bound for her sake, and if you hadn’t said just what you have said. You needn’t answer me unless you like! It’s pleasant to know that you’ve not been bored, and Mrs. March and I are infinitely obliged to you for helping us out.”

Kendricks made as if he were going to say something, and then he did not. He hung his head lower and lower in the silence which I had to break for him— “I hope I haven’t been intrusive, my dear fellow. This is something I felt bound to speak of. You know we couldn’t let it go on. Mrs. March and I have blamed ourselves a good deal, and we couldn’t let it go on. But I’m afraid I haven’t been as delicate with you—”

“Oh! delicate!” He lifted his head and flashed a face of generous self-reproach upon me. “It’s I that haven’t been delicate with you. I’ve been monstrously indelicate. But I never meant to be, and — and — I was coming to see you just now when we met — to see you — Miss Gage — and ask her — tell her that we — I — must tell you and Mrs. March — Mr. March! At the hop last night I asked her to be my wife, and as soon as she can hear from her father — But the first thing when I woke this morning, I saw that I must tell Mrs. March and you. And you — you must forgive us — or me, rather; for it was my fault — for not telling you last night — at once — oh, thank you! thank you!”

I had seized his hand, and was wringing it vehemently in expression of my pleasure in what he had told me. In that first moment I felt nothing but pure joy and an immeasurable relief. I drew my breath, a very deep and full one, in a sudden, absolute freedom from anxieties which had been none the less real and constant because so often burlesqued. Afterward considerations presented themselves to alloy my rapture, but for that moment, as I say, it was nothing but rapture. There was no question in it of the lovers’ fitness for each other, of their acceptability to their respective families, of their general conduct, or of their especial behaviour toward us. All that I could realise was that it was a great escape for both of us, and a great triumph for me. I had been afraid that I should not have the courage to speak to Kendricks of the matter at all, much less ask him to go away; and here I had actually spoken to him, with the splendid result that I need only congratulate him on his engagement to the lady whose unrequited affections I had been wishing him to spare. I don’t remember just the terms I used in doing this, but they seemed satisfactory to Kendricks; probably a repetition of the letters of the alphabet would have been equally acceptable. At last I said, “Well, now I must go and tell the great news to Mrs. March,” and I shook hands with him again; we had been shaking hands at half-minutely intervals ever since the first time.

XVIII

I saw Mrs. March waiting for me on the hotel verandah. She wore her bonnet, and she warned me not to approach, and then ran down to meet me.

“Well, my dear,” she said, as she pushed her hand through my arm and began to propel me away from the sight and hearing of people on the piazza, “I hope you didn’t make a fool of yourself with Kendricks. They’re engaged!”

She apparently expected me to be prostrated by this stroke. “Yes,” I said very coolly; “I was just coming to tell you.”

“How did you know it? Who told you? Did Kendricks? I don’t believe it!” she cried in an excitement not unmixed with resentment.

“No one told me,” I said. “I simply divined it.”

She didn’t mind that for a moment. “Well, I’m glad he had the grace to do so, and I hope he did it before you asked him any leading questions.” Without waiting to hear whether this was so or not, she went on, with an emphasis on the next word that almost blotted it out of the language, “She came back to me almost the instant you were gone, and told me everything. She said she wanted to tell me last night, but she hadn’t the courage, and this morning, when she saw that I was beginning to hint up to Mr. Kendricks a little, she hadn’t the courage at all. I sent her straight off to telegraph for her father. She is behaving splendidly. And now, what are we going to do?”

“What the rest of the world is — nothing. It seems to me that we are out of the story, my dear. At any rate, I shan’t attempt to compete with Miss Gage in splendid behaviour, and I hope you won’t. It would be so easy for us. I wonder what Papa Gage is going to be like.”

I felt my thrill of apprehension impart itself to her. “Yes!” she gasped; “what if he shouldn’t like it?”

“Well, then, that’s his affair.” But I did not feel so lightly about it as I spoke, and from time to time during the day I was overtaken with a cold dismay at the thought of the unknown quantity in the problem.

When we returned to the hotel after a tour of the block, we saw Kendricks in our corner of the verandah with Miss Gage. They were both laughing convulsively, and they ran down to meet us in yet wilder throes of merriment.

“We’ve just been comparing notes,” he said, “and at the very moment when I was telling you, Mr. March, Julia was telling Mrs. March.”

“Wonderful case of telepathy,” I mocked.

“Give it to the Psychical Research.”

They both seemed a little daunted, and Miss Gage said, “I know Mr. March doesn’t like the way we’ve done.”

“Like it!” cried Mrs. March, contriving to shake me a little with the hand she still had in my arm. “Of course he likes it. He was just saying you had behaved splendidly. He said he wouldn’t attempt to compete with you. But you mustn’t regard him in the least.”

I admired the skill with which Isabel saved her conscience in this statement too much to dispute it; and I suppose that whatever she had said, Miss Gage would have been reassured. I cannot particularly praise the wisdom of her behaviour during that day, or, for the matter of that, the behaviour of Kendricks either. The ideal thing would have been for him to keep away now till her father came, but it seemed to me that he was about under our feet all the while, and that she, so far from making him remain at his own hotel, encouraged him to pass the time at ours. Without consulting me, Mrs. March asked him to stay to dinner after he had stayed all the forenoon, and he made this a pretext for spending the afternoon in our corner of the verandah. She made me give it up to him and Miss Gage, so that they could be alone together, though I must say they did not seem to mind us a great deal when we were present; he was always leaning on the back of her chair, or sitting next her with his hand dangling over it in a manner that made me sick. I wondered if I was ever such an ass as that, and I quite lost the respect for Kendricks’s good sense and good taste which had been the ground of my liking for him.

I felt myself withdrawn from the affair farther and farther in sympathy, since it had now passed beyond my control; and I resented the strain of the responsibility which I had thrown off, I found, only for a moment, and must continue to suffer until the girl’s father appeared and finally relieved me. The worst was that I had to bear it alone. It was impossible to detach Mrs. March’s interest from Miss Gage, as a girl who had been made love to, long enough to enable her to realise her as a daughter with filial ties and duties. She did try in a perfunctory way to do it, but I could see that she never gave her mind to it. I could not even make her share my sense of my own culpability, a thing she was only too willing to do in most matters. She admitted that it was absurd for me to have let my fancy play about the girl when I first saw her until we felt that I must do something for her; but I could not get her to own that we had both acted preposterously in letting Mrs. Deering leave Miss Gage in our charge. In the first place, she denied that she had been left in our charge. She had simply been left in the hotel where we were staying, and we should have been perfectly free to do nothing for her. But when Kendricks turned up so unexpectedly, it was quite natural we should ask him to be polite to her. Mrs. March saw nothing strange in all that. What was I worrying about? What she had been afraid of was that he had not been in love with the girl when she was so clearly in love with him. But now!

“And suppose her father doesn’t like it!”

“Not like Mr. Kendricks!” She stared at me, and I could see how infatuated she was.

I was myself always charmed with the young fellow. He was not only good and generous and handsome, and clever — I never thought him a first-class talent — but he was beautifully well bred, and he was very well born, as those things go with us. That is, he came of people who had not done much of anything for a generation, and had acquired merit with themselves for it. They were not very rich, but they had a right to think that he might have done nothing, or done something better than literature; and I wish I could set forth exactly the terms, tacit and explicit, in which his mother and sisters condoned his dereliction to me at a reception where he presented me to them. In virtue of his wish to do something, he had become a human being, and they could not quite follow him; but they were very polite in tolerating me, and trying to make me feel that I was not at all odd, though he was so queer in being proud of writing for my paper, as they called it. He was so unlike them all that I liked him more than ever after meeting them. Still, I could imagine a fond father, as I imagined Miss Gage’s father to be, objecting to him, on some grounds at least, till he knew him, and Mrs. March apparently could not imagine even this.

I do not know why I should have prefigured Miss Gage’s father as tall and lank. She was not herself so very tall, though she was rather tall than short, and though she was rather of the Diana or girlish type of goddess, she was by no means lank. Yet it was in this shape that I had always thought of him, perhaps through an obscure association with his fellow-villager, Deering. I had fancied him saturnine of spirit, slovenly of dress, and lounging of habit, upon no authority that I could allege, and I was wholly unprepared for the neat, small figure of a man, very precise of manner and scrupulous of aspect, who said, “How do you do, sir? I hope I see you well, sir,” when his daughter presented us to each other, the morning after the eventful day described, and he shook my hand with his very small, dry hand.

I could not make out from their manner with each other whether they had been speaking of the great matter in hand or not. I am rather at a loss about people of that Philistine make as to what their procedure will be in circumstances where I know just what people of my own sort of sophistication would do. These would come straight at the trouble, but I fancy that with the other sort the convention is a preliminary reserve. I found Mr. Gage disposed to prolong, with me at least, a discussion of the weather, and the aspects of Saratoga, the events of his journey from De Witt Point, and the hardship of having to ride all the way to Mooer’s Junction in a stage-coach. I felt more and more, while we bandied these futilities, as if Mr. Gage had an overdue note of mine, and was waiting for me, since I could not pay it, to make some proposition toward its renewal; and he did really tire me out at last, so that I said, “Well, Mr. Gage, I suppose Miss Gage has told you something of the tremendous situation that has developed itself here?”

I thought I had better give the affair such smiling character as a jocose treatment might impart, and the dry little man twinkled up responsively so far as manner was concerned. “Well, yes, yes. There has been some talk of it between us,” and again he left the word to me.

“Mrs. March urged your daughter to send for you at once because that was the right and fit thing to do, and because we felt that the affair had now quite transcended our powers, such as they were, and nobody could really cope with it but yourself. I hope you were not unduly alarmed by the summons?”

“Not at all. She said in the despatch that she was not sick. I had been anticipating a short visit to Saratoga for some days, and my business was in a shape so that I could leave.”

“Oh!” I said vaguely, “I am very glad. Mrs. March felt, as I did, that circumstances had given us a certain obligation in regard to Miss Gage, and we were anxious to discharge it faithfully and to the utmost. We should have written to you, summoned you, before, if we could have supposed — or been sure; but you know these things go on so obscurely, and we acted at the very first possible moment. I wish you to understand that. We talked it over a great deal, and I hope you will believe that we studied throughout — that we were most solicitous from beginning to end for Miss Gage’s happiness, and that if we could have foreseen or imagined — if we could have taken any steps — I trust you will believe—” I was furious at myself for being so confoundedly apologetic, for I was thinking all the time of the bother and affliction we had had with the girl; and there sat that little wooden image accepting my self-inculpations, and apparently demanding more of me; but I could not help going on in the same strain: “We felt especially bound in the matter, from the fact that Mr. Kendricks was a personal friend of ours, whom we are very fond of, and we both are very anxious that you should not suppose that we promoted, or that we were not most vigilant — that we were for a moment forgetful of your rights in such an affair—”

I stopped, and Mr. Gage passed his hand across his little meagre, smiling mouth.

“Then he is not a connection of yours, Mr. March?”

“Bless me, no!” I said in great relief; “we are not so swell as that.” And I tried to give him some notion of Kendricks’s local quality, repeating a list of agglutinated New York surnames to which his was more or less affiliated. They always amuse me, those names, which more than any in the world give the notion of social straining; but I doubt if they affected the imagination of Mr. Gage, either in this way or in the way I meanly meant them to affect him.

“And what did you say his business was?” he asked, with that implication of a previous statement on your part which some people think it so clever to make when they question you.

I always hate it, and I avenged myself by answering simply, “Bless my soul, he has no business!” and letting him take up the word now or not, as he liked.

“Then he is a man of independent means?”

I could not resist answering, “Independent means? Kendricks has no means whatever.” But having dealt this blow, I could add, “I believe his mother has some money. They are people who live comfortably.”

“Then he has no profession?” asked Mr. Gage, with a little more stringency in his smile.

“I don’t know whether you will call it a profession. He is a writer.”

“Ah!” Mr. Gage softly breathed. “Does he write for your — paper?”

I noted that as to the literary technicalities he seemed not to be much more ignorant than Kendricks’s own family, and I said, tolerantly, “Yes; he writes for our magazine.”

“Magazine — yes; I beg your pardon,” he interrupted.

“And for any others where he can place his material.”

This apparently did not convey any very luminous idea to Mr. Gage’s mind, and he asked after a moment, “What kind of things does he write?”

“Oh, stories, sketches, poems, reviews, essays — almost anything, in fact.”

The light left his face, and I perceived that I had carried my revenge too far, at least for Kendricks’s advantage, and I determined to take a new departure at the first chance. The chance did not come immediately.

“And can a man support a wife by that kind of writing?” asked Mr. Gage.

I laughed uneasily. “Some people do. It depends upon how much of it he can sell. It depends upon how handsomely a wife wishes to be supported. The result isn’t usually beyond the dreams of avarice,” I said, with a desperate levity.

“Excuse me,” returned the little man. “Do you live in that way? By your writings?”

“No,” I said with some state, which I tried to subdue; “I am the editor of Every Other Week, and part owner. Mr. Kendricks is merely a contributor.”

“Ah,” he breathed again. “And if he were successful in selling his writings, how much would he probably make in a year?”

“In a year?” I repeated, to gain time. “Mr. Kendricks is comparatively a beginner. Say fifteen hundred — two thousand — twenty-five hundred.”

“And that would not go very far in New York.”

“No; that would not go far in New York.” I was beginning to find a certain pleasure in dealing so frankly with this hard little man. I liked to see him suffer, and I could see that he did suffer; he suffered as a father must who learns that from a pecuniary point of view his daughter is imprudently in love. Why should we always regard such a sufferer as a comic figure? He is, if we think of it rightly, a most serious, even tragical figure, and at all events a most respectable figure. He loves her, and his heart is torn between the wish to indulge her and the wish to do what will be finally best for her. Why should our sympathies, in such a case, be all for the foolish young lovers? They ought in great measure to be for the father, too. Something like a sense of this smote me, and I was ashamed in my pleasure.

“Then I should say, Mr. March, that this seems a most undesirable engagement for my daughter. What should you say? I ask you to make the case your own.”

“Excuse me,” I answered; “I would much rather not make the case my own, Mr. Gage, and I must decline to have you consult me. I think that in this matter I have done all that I was called upon to do. I have told you what I know of Mr. Kendricks’s circumstances and connections. As to his character, I can truly say that he is one of the best men I ever knew. I believe in his absolute purity of heart, and he is the most unselfish, the most generous—”

Mr. Gage waved the facts aside with his hand. “I don’t undervalue those things. If I could be master, no one should have my girl without them. But they do not constitute a livelihood. From what you tell me of Mr. Kendricks’s prospects, I am not prepared to say that I think the outlook is brilliant. If he has counted upon my supplying a deficiency—”

“Oh, excuse me, Mr. Gage! Your insinuation—”

“Excuse me!” he retorted. “I am making no insinuation. I merely wish to say that, while my means are such as to enable me to live in comfort at De Witt Point, I am well aware that much more would be needed in New York to enable my daughter to live in the same comfort. I’m not willing she should live in less. I think it is my duty to say that I am not at all a rich man, and if there has been any supposition that I am so, it is a mistake that cannot be corrected too soon.”

This time I could not resent his insinuation, for since he had begun to speak I had become guiltily aware of having felt a sort of ease in regard to Kendricks’s modesty of competence from a belief, given me, I suspect, by the talk of Deering, that Mr. Gage had plenty of money, and could come to the rescue in any amount needed. I could only say, “Mr. Gage, all this is so far beyond my control that I ought not to allow you to say it to me. It is something that you must say to Mr. Kendricks.”

As I spoke I saw the young fellow come round the corner of the street, and mount the hotel steps. He did not see me, for he did not look toward the little corner of lawn where Mr. Gage and I had put our chairs for the sake of the morning shade, and for the seclusion that the spot afforded us. It was at the angle of the house farthest from our peculiar corner of the piazza, whither I had the belief that the girl had withdrawn when she left me to her father. I was sure that Kendricks would seek her there, far enough beyond eyeshot or earshot of us, and I had no doubt that she was expecting him.

“You are Mr. Kendricks’s friend—”

“I have tried much more to be Miss Gage’s friend; and Mrs. March—” It came into my mind that she was most selfishly and shamelessly keeping out of the way, and I could not go on and celebrate her magnanimous impartiality, her eager and sleepless vigilance.

“I have no doubt of that,” said the little man, “and I am very much obliged to you for all the trouble you have taken on my daughter’s account. But you are his friend, and I can speak to you much more fully and frankly than I could to him.”

I did not know just what to say to this, and he went on: “In point of fact, I don’t think that I shall speak to him at all.”

“That is quite your affair, my dear sir,” I said dryly. “It isn’t to be supposed that you would seek an interview with him.”

“And if he seeks an interview with me, I shall decline it.” He looked at me defiantly and yet interrogatively. I could see that he was very angry, and yet uncertain.

“I must say, then, Mr. Gage, that I don’t think you would be right.”

“How, not right?”

“I should say that in equity he had a full and perfect right to meet you, and to talk this matter over with you. He has done you no wrong whatever in admiring your daughter, and wishing to marry her. It’s for you and her to decide whether you will let him. But as far as his wish goes, and his expression of it to her, he is quite within his rights. You must see that yourself.”

“I consider,” he answered, “that he has done me a wrong in that very thing. A man without means, or any stated occupation, he had no business to speak to my daughter without speaking to me. He took advantage of the circumstances. What does he think? Does he suppose I am made of money? Does he suppose I want to support a son-in-law? I can tell you that if I were possessed of unlimited means, I should not do it.” I began to suspect that Deering was nearer right, after all, in his representations of the man’s financial ability; I fancied something of the anxiety, the tremor of avarice, in his resentment of poor Kendricks’s possible, or rather impossible, designs upon his pocket. “If he had any profession, or any kind of business, I should feel differently, and I should be willing to assist him to a reasonable degree; or if he had a business training, I might take him in with me; but as it is, I should have a helpless burden on my hands, and I can tell you I am not going in for that sort of thing. I shall make short work of it. I shall decline to meet Mr. Hendricks, or Kendricks, and I shall ask you to say as much to him from me.”

“And I shall decline to be the bearer of any such message from you, Mr. Gage,” I answered, and I saw, not without pleasure, the bewilderment that began to mix with his arrogance.

“Very well, then, sir,” he answered, after a moment; “I shall simply take my daughter away with me, and that will end it.”

The prim little, grim little man looked at me with his hard eyes, and set his lips so close that the beard on the lower one stuck out at me with a sort of additional menace I felt that he was too capable of doing what he said, and I lost myself in a sense of his sordidness, a sense which was almost without a trace of compassion.

It seemed as if I were a long time under the spell of this, and the sight of his repugnant face; but it could really have been merely a moment, when I heard a stir of drapery on the grass near us, and the soft, rich voice of Miss Gage saying, “Papa!”

We both started to our feet. I do not know whether she had heard what he said or not. We had spoken low, and in the utmost vehemence of his speech he did not lift his voice. In any case, she did not heed what he said.

“Papa,” she repeated, “I want you to come up and see Mrs. March on the piazza. And — Mr. Kendricks is there.”

I had a wild desire to laugh at what followed, and yet it was not without its pathos. “I — I — hm! hm! I — cannot see Mr. Kendricks just at present. I — the fact is, I do not want to see him. It is better — not. I think you had better get ready to go home with me at once, daughter. I — hm! — cannot approve of any engagement to Mr. Kendricks, and I — prefer not to meet him.” He stopped.

Miss Gage said nothing, and I cannot say that she looked anything. She simply clouded up, if I may so express the effect that came and remained upon her countenance, which was now the countenance she had shown me the first evening I saw her, when I saw the Deerings cowering in its shadow. I had no need to look at the adamantine little man before her to know that he was softening into wax, and, in fact, I felt a sort of indecency in beholding his inteneration, for I knew that it came from his heart, and had its consecration through his love for her.

That is why I turned away, and do not know to this moment just how the change she desired in him was brought about. I will not say that I did not look back from a discreet distance, and continue looking until I saw them start away together and move in the direction of that corner of the piazza where Kendricks was waiting with Mrs. March.

It appeared, from her account, that Mr. Gage, with no uncommon show of ill-will, but with merely a natural dryness, suffered Kendricks to be presented to him, and entered upon some preliminary banalities with him, such as he had used in opening a conversation with me. Before these came to a close Mrs. March had thought it well to leave the three together.

Afterward, when we knew the only result that the affair could have, she said, “The girl has a powerful will. I wonder what the mother was like.”

“Yes; evidently she didn’t get that will from her father. I have still a sense of exhaustion from it in our own case. What do you think it portends for poor Kendricks!”

“Poor Kendricks!” she repeated thoughtfully. “Yes; in that sense I suppose you might call him poor. It isn’t an equal thing as far as nature, as character, goes. But isn’t it always dreadful to see two people who have made up their minds to get married?”

“It’s very common,” I suggested.

“That doesn’t change the fact, or lessen the risk. She is very beautiful, and now he is in love with her beautiful girlhood. But after a while the girlhood will go.”

“And the girl will remain,” I said.

FINIS.

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

First published in ‘Their Wedding Journey’, 1871

LIFE HAD NOT used them ill in this time, and the fairish treatment they had received was not wholly unmerited. The twelve years past had made them older, as the years must in passing. Basil was now forty-two, and his moustache was well sprinkled with gray. Isabel was thirty-nine, and the parting of her hair had thinned and retreated; but she managed to give it an effect of youthful abundance by combing it low down upon her forehead, and roughing it there with a wet brush. By gaslight she was still very pretty; she believed that she looked more interesting, and she thought Basil’s gray moustache distinguished. He had grown stouter; he filled his double-breasted frock coat compactly, and from time to time he had the buttons set forward; his hands were rounded up on the backs, and he no longer wore his old number of gloves by two sizes; no amount of powder or manipulation from the young lady in the shop would induce them to go on. But this did not matter much now, for he seldom wore gloves at all. He was glad that the fashion suffered him to spare in that direction, for he was obliged to look somewhat carefully after the outgoes. The insurance business was not what it had been, and though Basil had comfortably established himself in it, he had not made money. He sometimes thought that he might have done quite as well if he had gone into literature; but it was now too late. They had not a very large family: they had a boy of eleven, who “took after” his father, and a girl of nine, who took after the boy; but with the American feeling that their children must have the best of everything, they made it an expensive family, and they spent nearly all Basil earned.

The narrowness of their means, as well as their household cares, had kept them from taking many long journeys. They passed their winters in Boston, and their summers on the South Shore,- cheaper than the North Shore, and near enough for Basil to go up and down every day for business; but they promised themselves that some day they would revisit certain points on their wedding journey, and perhaps somewhere find their lost second-youth on the track. It was not that they cared to be young, but they wished the children to see them as they used to be when they thought themselves very old; and one lovely afternoon in June they started for Niagara.

It had been very hot for several days, but that morning the east wind came in, and crisped the air till it seemed to rustle like tinsel, and the sky was as sincerely and solidly blue as if it had been chromoed. They felt that they were really looking up into the roof of the world, when they glanced at it; but when an old gentleman hastily kissed a young woman, and commended her to the conductor as being one who was going all the way to San Francisco alone, and then risked his life by stepping off the moving train, the vastness of the great American fact began to affect Isabel disagreeably. “Isn’t it too big, Basil?” she pleaded, peering timidly out of the little municipal consciousness in which she had been so long housed. In that seclusion she had suffered certain original tendencies to increase upon her: her nerves were more sensitive and electrical; her apprehensions had multiplied quite beyond the ratio of the dangers that beset her; and Basil had counted upon a tonic effect of the change the journey would make in their daily lives. She looked ruefully out of the window at the familiar suburbs whisking out of sight, and the continental immensity that advanced devouringly upon her. But they had the best section in the very centre of the sleeping-car, — she drew what consolation she could from the fact, — and the children’s premature demand for lunch helped her to forget her anxieties; they began to be hungry as soon as the train started. She found that she had not put up sandwiches enough; and when she told Basil that he would have to get out somewhere and buy some cold chicken, he asked her what in the world had become of that whole ham she had had boiled. It seemed to him, he said, that there was enough of it to subsist them to Niagara and back; and he went on as some men do, while Somerville vanished, and even Tufts College, which assails the Bostonian vision from every point of the compass, was shut out by the curve at the foot of the Belmont hills.

They had chosen the Hoosac Tunnel route to Niagara, because, as Basil said, their experience of travel had never yet included a very long tunnel, and it would be a signal fact by which the children would always remember the journey, if nothing else remarkable happened to impress it upon them. Indeed, they were so much concerned in it that they began to ask when they should come to this tunnel, even before they began to ask for lunch; and the long time before they reached it was not perceptibly shortened by Tom’s quarter-hourly consultations of his father’s watch.

It scarcely seemed to Basil and Isabel that their fellow-passengers were so interesting as their fellow-passengers used to be in their former days of travel. They were soberly dressed, and were all of a middle-aged sobriety of deportment, from which nothing salient offered itself for conjecture or speculation; and there was little within the car to take their minds from the brilliant young world that flashed and sang by them outside. The belated spring had ripened, with its frequent rains, into the perfection of early summer; the grass was thicker and the foliage denser than they had ever seen it before; and when they had run out into the hills beyond Fitchburg, they saw the laurel in bloom. It was everywhere in the woods, lurking like drifts among the underbrush, and overflowing the tops, and stealing down the hollows, of the railroad embankments; a snow of blossom flushed with a mist of pink. Its shy, wild beauty ceased whenever the train stopped, but the orioles made up for its absence with their singing in the village trees about the stations; and though Fitchburg and Ayer’s Junction and Athol are not names that invoke historical or romantic associations, the hearts of Basil and Isabel began to stir with the joy of travel before they had passed these points. At the first Basil got out to buy the cold chicken which had been commanded, and he recognized in the keeper of the railroad restaurant their former conductor, who had been warned by the spirits never to travel without a flower of some sort carried between his lips, and who had preserved his own life and the lives of his passengers for many years by this simple device. His presence lent the sponge cake and rhubarb pie and baked beans a supernatural interest, and reconciled Basil to the toughness of the athletic bird which the mystical ex-partner of fate had sold him; he justly reflected that if he had heard the story of the restaurateur’s superstition in a foreign land, or another time, he would have found in it a certain poetry. It was this willingness to find poetry in things around them that kept his life and Isabel’s fresh, and they taught their children the secret of their elixir. To be sure, it was only a genre poetry, but it was such as has always inspired English art and song; and now the whole family enjoyed, as if it had been a passage from Goldsmith or Wordsworth, the flying sentiment of the railroad side. There was a simple interior at one place, a small shanty, showing through the open door a cook stove surmounted by the evening coffee-pot, with a lazy cat outstretched upon the floor in the middle distance, and an old woman standing just outside the threshold to see the train go by, — which had an unrivaled value till they came to a superannuated car on a siding in the woods, in which the railroad workmen boarded: some were lounging on the platform and at the open windows, while others were “washing up” for supper, and the whole scene was full of holiday ease and sylvan comradery that went to the hearts of the sympathetic spectators. Basil had lately been reading aloud the delightful history of Rudder Grange, and the children, who had made their secret vows never to live in anything but an old canal-boat when they grew up, owned that there were fascinating possibilities in a worn-out railroad car.

The lovely Deerfield Valley began to open on either hand, with smooth stretches of the quiet river, and breadths of grassy intervale and table-land; the elms grouped themselves like the trees of a park; here and there the nearer hills broke away, and revealed long, deep, chasmed hollows, full of golden light and delicious shadow. There were people rowing on the water; and every pretty town had some touch of picturesqueness or pastoral charm to offer: at Greenfield, there were children playing in the new-mown hay along the railroad embankment; at Shelburne Falls, there was a game of cricket going on (among the English operatives of the cutlery works, as Basil boldly asserted). They looked down from their car-window on a young lady swinging in a hammock, in her door-yard, and on an old gentleman hoeing his potatoes; a group of girls waved their handkerchiefs to the passing train, and a boy paused in weeding a garden bed, — and probably denied that he had paused, later. In the mean time the golden haze along the mountain side changed to a clear, pearly lustre, and the quiet evening possessed the quiet landscape. They confessed to each other that it was all as sweet and beautiful as it used to be; and in fact they had seen palaces, in other days, which did not give them the pleasure they found in a woodcutter’s shanty, losing itself among the shadows in a solitude of the hills. The tunnel, after this, was a gross and material sensation; but they joined the children in trying to hold and keep it, and Basil let the boy time it by his watch. “Now,” said Tom, when five minutes were gone, “we are under the very centre of the mountain.” But the tunnel was like all accomplished facts, all hopes fulfilled, valueless to the soul, and scarcely appreciable to the sense; and the children emerged at North Adams with but a mean opinion of that great feat of engineering. Basil drew a pretty moral from their experience. “If you rode upon a comet you would be disappointed. Take my advice, and never ride upon a comet. I shouldn’t object to your riding on a little meteor, — you wouldn’t expect much of that; but I warn you against comets; they are as bad as tunnels.”

The children thought this moral was a joke at their expense, and as they were a little sleepy they permitted themselves the luxury of feeling trifled with. But they woke, refreshed and encouraged, from slumbers that had evidently been unbroken, though they both protested that they had not slept a wink the whole night, and gave themselves up to wonder at the interminable levels of Western New York over which the train was running. The longing to come to an edge, somewhere, that the New England traveller experiences on this plain was inarticulate with the children; but it breathed in the sigh with which Isabel welcomed even the architectural inequalities of a city into which they drew in the early morning. This city showed to their weary eyes a noble stretch of river, from the waters of which lofty piles of buildings rose abruptly; and Isabel, being left to guess where they were, could think of no other place so picturesque as Rochester.

“Yes,” said her husband; “it is our own Enchanted City. I wonder if that unstinted hospitality is still dispensed by the good head waiter at the hotel where we stopped, to bridal parties who have passed the ordeal of the haughty hotel clerk. I wonder what has become of that hotel clerk.

Has he fallen, through pride, to some lower level, or has he bowed his arrogant spirit to the demands of advancing civilization, and realized that he is the servant, and not the master, of the public? I think I’ve noticed, since his time, a growing kindness in hotel clerks; or perhaps I have become of a more impressive presence; they certainly unbend to me a little more. I should like to go up to our hotel, and try myself on our old enemy, if he is still there. I can fancy how his shirt front has expanded in these twelve years past; he has grown a little bald, after the fashion of middle-aged hotel clerks, but he parts his hair very much on one side, and brushes it squarely across his forehead to hide his loss; the forefinger that he touches that little snap-bell with, when he doesn’t look at you, must be very pudgy now. Come, let us get out and breakfast at Rochester; they will give us broiled white-fish; and we can show the children where Sam Patch jumped over Genesee Falls, and”

“No, no, Basil,” cried his wife. “It would be sacrilege! All that is sacred to those dear young days of ours; and I wouldn’t think of trying to repeat it. Our own ghosts would rise up in that dining-room to reproach us for our intrusion! Oh, perhaps we have done a wicked thing in coming this journey! We ought to have left the past alone; we shall only mar our memories of all these beautiful places. Do you suppose Buffalo can be as poetical as it was then? Buffalo! The name doesn’t invite the Muse very much. Perhaps it never was very poetical! Oh, Basil, dear, I’m afraid we have only come to find out that we were mistaken about everything! Let’s leave Rochester alone, at any rate!”

“I’m not troubled! We won’t disturb our dream of Rochester; but I don’t despair of Buffalo. I’m sure that Buffalo will be all that our fancy ever painted it. I believe in Buffalo.”

“Well, well,” murmured Isabel, “I hope you’re right;” and she put some things together for leaving their car at Buffalo, while they were still two hours away.

When they reached a place where the land mated its level with the level of the lake, they ran into a wilderness of railroad cars, in a world where life seemed to be operated solely by locomotives and their helpless minions. The bellowing and bleating trains were arriving in every direction, not only along the ground floor of the plain, but stately stretches of trestle-work, which curved and extended across the plain, carried them to and fro overhead. The travellers owned that this railroad suburb had its own impressiveness, and they said that the trestle-work was as noble in effect as the lines of aqueduct that stalk across the Roman Campagna. Perhaps this was because they had not seen the Campagna or its aqueducts for a great while; but they were so glad to find themselves in the spirit of their former journey again that they were amiable to everything. When the children first caught sight of the lake’s delicious blue, and cried out that it was lovelier than the sea, they felt quite a local pride in their preference. It was what Isabel had said twelve years before, on first beholding the lake.

But they did not really see the lake till they had taken the train for Niagara Falls, after breakfasting in the depot, where the children, used to the severe native or the patronizing Irish ministrations of Boston restaurants and hotels, reveled for the first time in the affectionate devotion of a black waiter. There was already a ridiculous abundance and variety on the table; but this waiter brought them strawberries and again strawberries, and repeated plates of griddle cakes with maple syrup; and he hung over the back of first one chair and then another with an unselfish joy in the appetites of the breakfasters which gave Basil renewed hopes of his race. “Such rapture in serving argues a largeness of nature which will be recognized hereafter,” he said, feeling about in his waistcoat pocket for a quarter. It seemed a pity to render the waiter’s zeal retroactively interested, but in view of the fact that he possibly expected the quarter, there was nothing else to do; and by a mysterious stroke of gratitude the waiter delivered them into the hands of a friend, who took another quarter from them for carrying their bags and wraps to the train. This second retainer approved their admiration of the aesthetic forms and colors of the depot colonnade; and being asked if that were the depot whose roof had fallen in some years before, proudly replied that it was.

“There were a great many killed, weren’t there?” asked Basil, with sympathetic satisfaction in the disaster. The porter seemed humiliated; he confessed the mortifying truth that the loss of life was small, but he recovered ajust self-respect in adding, “If the roof had fallen in five minutes sooner, it would have killed about three hundred people.”

Basil had promised the children a sight of the Rapids before they reached the Falls, and they held him rigidly accountable from the moment they entered the train, and began to run out of the city between the river and the canal. He attempted a diversion with the canal boats, and tried to bring forward the subject of Rudder Grange in that connection. They said that the canal boats were splendid, but they were looking for the Rapids now and they declined to be interested in a window in one ofthe boats, which Basil said was just like the window that the Rudder Granger and the boarder had popped Pomona out of when they took her for a burglar.

“You spoil those children, Basil,” said his wife, as they clambered over him, and clamored for the Rapids.

“At present I’m giving them an object-lesson in patience and self-denial; they are experiencing the fact that they can’t have the Rapids till they get to them, and probably they’ll be disappointed in them when they arrive.”

In fact, they valued the Rapids very little more than the Hoosac Tunnel, when they came in sight of them, at last; and Basil had some question in his own mind whether the Rapids had not dwindled since his former visit. He did not breathe this doubt to Isabel, however, and she arrived at the Falls with unabated expectations. They were going to spend only half a day there; and they turned into the station, away from the phalanx of omnibuses, when they dismounted from their train. They seemed, as before, to be the only passengers who had arrived, and they found an abundant choice of carriages waiting in the street, outside the station. The Niagara hackman may once have been a predatory and very rampant animal, but public opinion, long expressed through the public prints, has reduced him to silence and meekness. Apparently, he may not so much as beckon with his whip to the arriving wayfarer; it is certain that he cannot cross the pavement to the station door; and Basil, inviting one of them to negotiation, was himself required by the attendant policeman to step out to the curbstone, and complete his transaction there. It was an impressive illustration of the power of a free press, but upon the whole Basil found the effect melancholy; it had the saddening quality which inheres in every sort of perfection. The hackman, reduced to entire order, appealed to his compassion, and he had not the heart to beat him down from his moderate first demand, as perhaps he ought to have done.

They drove directly to the cataract, and found themselves in the pretty grove beside the American Fall, and in the air whose dampness was as familiar as if they had breathed it all their childhood. It was full now of the fragrance of some sort of wild blossom; and again they had that old, entrancing sense of the mingled awfulness and loveliness of the great spectacle. This sylvan perfume, the gayety of the sunshine, the mildness of the breeze that stirred the leaves overhead, and the bird-singing that made itself heard amid the roar of the Rapids and the solemn incessant plunge of the cataract, moved their hearts, and made them children with the boy and girl, who stood rapt for a moment and then broke into joyful wonder. They could sympathize with the ardor with which Tom longed to tempt fate at the brink of the river, and over the tops of the parapets which have been built along the edge of the precipice, and they equally entered into the terror with which Bella screamed at his suicidal zeal. They joined her in restraining him; they reduced him to a beggarly account of half a dozen stones, flung into the Rapids at not less than ten paces from the brink; and they would not let him toss the smallest pebble over the parapet, though he laughed to scorn the notion that anybody should be hurt by them below.

It seemed to them that the triviality of man in the surroundings of the Falls had increased with the lapse of time. There were more booths and bazars, and more colored feather fans with whole birds spitted in the centres; and there was an offensive array of blue and green and yellow glasses on the shore, through which you were expected to look at the Falls gratis. They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indian maids, who used to squat about on the grass, with their laps full of moccasins and pin-cushions. But, as of old, the photographer came out of his saloon, and invited them to pose for a family group; representing that the light and the spray were singularly propitious, and that everything in nature invited them to be taken. Basil put him off gently, for the sake of the time when he had refused to be photographed in a bridal group, and took refuge from him in the long low building from which you descend to the foot of the cataract.

The grove beside the American Fall has been inclosed, and named Prospect Park, by a company which exacts half a dollar for admittance, and then makes you free of all its wonders and conveniences, for which you once had to pay severally. This is well enough; but formerly you could refuse to go down the inclined tramway, and now you cannot, without feeling that you have failed to get your money’s worth. It was in this illogical spirit of economy that Basil invited his family to the descent; but Isabel shook her head. “No, you go with the children,” she said, “and I will stay here, till you get back;” her agonized countenance added, “and pray for you;” and Basil took his children on either side of him, and rumbled down the terrible descent with much of the excitement that attends travel in an open horse-car. When he stepped out of the car he felt that increase of courage which comes to every man after safely passing through danger. He resolved to brave the mists and slippery stones at the foot of the Fall; and he would have plunged at once into this fresh peril, if he had not been prevented by the Prospect Park Company. This ingenious association has built a large tunnel-like shed quite to the water’s edge, so that you cannot view the cataract as you once could, at a reasonable remoteness, but must emerge from the building into a storm of spray. The roof of the tunnel is painted with a lively effect in party-colored stripes, and is lettered “The Shadow of the Rock,” so that you take it at first to be an appeal to your aesthetic sense; but the real object of the company is not apparent till you put your head out into the tempest, when you agree with the nearest guide — and one is always very near — that you had better have an oil-skin dress, as Basil did. He told the guide that he did not wish to go under the Fall, and the guide confidentially admitted that there was no fun in that, anyway; and in the mean time he equipped him and his children for their foray into the mist. When they issued forth, under their friend’s leadership, Basil felt that, with his children clinging to each hand, he looked like some sort of animal with its young, and, though not unsocial by nature, he was glad to be among strangers for the time. They climbed hither and thither over the rocks, and lifted their streaming faces for the views which the guide pointed out; and in a rift of the spray they really caught one glorious glimpse of the whole sweep of the Fall. The next instant the spray swirled back, and they were glad to turn for a sight of the rainbow, lying in a circle on the rocks as quietly and naturally as if that had been the habit of rainbows ever since the flood. This was all there was to be done, and they streamed back into the tunnel, where they disrobed in the face of a menacing placard, which announced that the hire of a guide and a dress for going under the Fall was one dollar.

“Will they make you pay a dollar for each of us, papa?” asked Tom, fearfully.

“Oh, pooh, no!” returned Basil; “we haven’t been under the Fall.” But he sought out the proprietor with a trembling heart. The proprietor was a man of severely logical mind: he said that the charge would be three dollars, for they had had the use of the dresses and the guide just the same as if they had gone under the Fall; and he refused to recognize anything misleading in the dressing-room placard. In fine, he left Basil without a leg to stand upon. It was not so much the three dollars as the sense of having been swindled that vexed him; and he instantly resolved not to share his annoyance with Isabel. Why, indeed, should he put that burden upon her? If she were none the wiser, she would be none the poorer; and he ought to be willing to deny himself her sympathy for the sake of sparing her needless pain.

He met her at the top of the inclined tramway with a face of exemplary unconsciousness, and he listened with her to the tale their coachman told, as they sat in a pretty arbor looking out on the Rapids, of a Frenchman and his wife. This Frenchman had returned, one morning, from a stroll on Goat Island, and reported with much apparent concern that his wife had fallen into the water, and been carried over the Fall. It was so natural for a man to grieve for the loss of his wife, under the peculiar circumstances, that every one condoled with the widower; but when, a few days later, her body was found, and the distracted husband refused to come back from New York to her funeral, there was a general regret that he had not been arrested. A flash of conviction illumed the whole fact to Basil’s guilty consciousness: this unhappy Frenchman had paid a dollar for the use of an oil-skin suit at the foot of the Fall, and had been ashamed to confess the swindle to his wife, till, in a moment of remorse and madness, he shouted the fact into her ear, and then-Basil looked at the mother of his children, and registered a vow that if he got away from Niagara without being forced to a similar excess he would confess his guilt to Isabel at the very first act of spendthrift profusion she committed. The guide pointed out the rock in the Rapids to which Avery had clung for twenty-four hours before he was carried over the Falls, and to the morbid fancy of the deceitful husband Isabel’s bonnet ribbons seemed to flutter from the pointed reef. He could endure the pretty arbor no longer. “Come, children!” he cried, with a wild, unnatural gayety; “let us go to Goat Island, and see the Bridge to the Three Sisters, that your mother was afraid to walk back on after she had crossed it.”

“For shame, Basil!” retorted Isabel. “You know it was you who were afraid of that bridge.”

The children, who knew the story by heart, laughed with their father at the monstrous pretension; and his simulated hilarity only increased upon paying a toll of two dollars at the Goat Island bridge.

“What extortion!” cried Isabel, with an indignation that secretly unnerved him. He trembled upon the verge of confession; but he had finally the moral force to resist. He suffered her to compute the cost of their stay at Niagara without allowing those three dollars to enter into her calculation; he even began to think what justificative extravagance he could tempt her to. He suggested the purchase of local bricabrac; he asked her if she would not like to dine at the International, for old times’ sake. But she answered, with disheartening virtue, that they must not think of such a thing, after what they had spent already. Nothing, perhaps, marked the confirmed husband in Basil more than these hidden fears and reluctances.

In the mean time Isabel ignorantly abandoned herself to the charm of the place, which she found unimpaired, in spite of the reported ravages of improvement about Niagara. Goat Island was still the sylvan solitude of twelve years ago, haunted by even fewer nymphs and dryads than of old. The air was full of the perfume that scented it at Prospect Park; the leaves showered them with shade and sun, as they drove along. “If it were not for the children here,” she said, “I should think that our first drive on Goat Island had never ended.”

She sighed a little, and Basil leaned forward and took her hand in his. “It never has ended; it’s the same drive; only we are younger now, and enjoy it more.” It always touched him when Isabel was sentimental about the past, for the years had tended to make her rather more seriously maternal towards him than towards the other children; and he recognized that these fond reminiscences were the expression of the girlhood still lurking deep within her heart.

She shook her head. “No, but I’m willing the children should be young in our place. It’s only fair they should have their turn.”

She remained in the carriage, while Basil visited the various points of view on Luna Island with the boy and girl. A boy is probably of considerable interest to himself, and a man looks back at his own boyhood with some pathos. But in his actuality a boy has very little to commend him to the toleration of other human beings. Tom was very well, as boys go; but now his contribution to the common enjoyment was to venture as near as possible to all perilous edges; to throw stones into the water, and to make as if to throw them over precipices on the people below; to pepper his father with questions, and to collect cumbrous mementos of the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. He kept the carriage waiting a good five minutes, while he could cut his initials on a hand-rail. “You can come back and see em on your bridal tower,” said the driver. Isabel gave a little start, as if she had almost thought of something she was trying to think of.

They occasionally met ladies driving, and sometimes they encountered a couple making a tour of the island on foot. But none of these people were young, and Basil reported that the Three Sisters were inhabited only by persons of like maturity; even a group of people who were eating lunch to the music of the shouting Rapids, on the outer edge of the last Sister, were no younger, apparently.

Isabel did not get out of the carriage to verify his report; she preferred to refute his story of her former panic on those islands by remaining serenely seated while he visited them. She thus lost a superb novelty which nature has lately added to the wonders of this Fall, in that place at the edge of the great Horse Shoe where the rock has fallen and left a peculiarly shaped chasm: through this the spray leaps up from below, and flashes a hundred feet into the air, in rocket-like jets and points, and then breaks and dissolves away in the pyrotechnic curves of a perpetual Fourth of July. Basil said something like this in celebrating the display, with the purpose of rendering her loss more poignant; but she replied, with tranquil piety, that she would rather keep her Niagara unchanged; and she declared that, as she understood him, there must be something rather cheap and conscious in the new feature. She approved, however, of the change that had removed that foolish little Terrapin Tower from the brink on which it stood, and she confessed that she could have enjoyed a little variety in the stories the driver told them of the Indian burial-ground on the island: they were exactly the stories she and Basil had heard twelve years before, and the ill-starred goats, from which the island took its name, perished once more in his narrative.

Under the influence of his romances our travellers began to find the whole scene hackneyed; and they were glad to part from him a little sooner than they had bargained to do. They strolled about the anomalous village on foot, and once more marveled at the paucity of travel and the enormity of the local preparation. Surely the hotels are nowhere else in the world so large! Could there ever have been visitors enough at Niagara to fill them? They were built so big for some good reason, no doubt; but it is no more apparent than why all these magnificent equipages are waiting about the empty streets for the people who never come to hire them.

“It seems to me that I don’t see so many strangers here as I used,” Basil had suggested to their driver.

“Oh, they haven’t commenced coming yet,” he replied, with hardy cheerfulness, and pretended that they were plenty enough in July and August.

They went to dine at the modest restaurant of a colored man, who advertised a table d’hote dinner on a board at his door; and they put their misgivings to him, which seemed to grieve him, and he contended that Niagara was as prosperous and as much resorted to as ever. In fact, they observed that their regret for the supposed decline of the Falls as a summer resort was nowhere popular in the village, and they desisted in their offers of sympathy, after their rebuff from the restaurateur.

Basil got his family away to the station after dinner, and left them there, while he walked down the village street, for a closer inspection of the hotels. At the door of the largest a pair of children sported in the solitude, as fearlessly as the birds on Selkirk’s island; looking into the hotel, he saw a few porters and call-boys seated in statuesque repose against the wall, while the clerk pined in dreamless inactivity behind the register; some deserted ladies flitted through the door of the parlor at the side. He recalled the evening of his former visit, when he and Isabel had met the Ellisons in that parlor, and it seemed, in the retrospect, a scene of the wildest gayety. He turned for consolation into the barber’s shop, where he found himself the only customer, and no busy sound of “Next” greeted his ear. But the barber, like all the rest, said that Niagara was not unusually empty; and he came out feeling bewildered and defrauded. Surely the agent of the boats which descend the Rapids of the St. Lawrence must be frank, if Basil went to him and pretended that he was going to buy a ticket. But a glance at the agent’s sign showed Basil that the agent, with his brave jollity of manner and his impressive “Good-morning,” had passed away from the deceits of travel, and that he was now inherited by his widow, who in turn was absent, and temporarily represented by their son. The boy, in supplying Basil with an advertisement of the line, made a specious show of haste, as if there were a long queue of tourists waiting behind him to be served with tickets. Perhaps there was, indeed, a spectral line there, but Basil was the only tourist present in the flesh, and he shivered in his isolation, and fled with the advertisement in his hand. Isabel met him at the door of the station with a frightened face.

“Basil,” she cried, “I have found out what the trouble is! Where are the brides?”

He took her outstretched hands in his, and passing one of them through his arm walked with her apart from the children, who were examining at the news-man’s booth the moccasins and the birch-bark bricabrac of the Irish aborigines, and the cups and vases of Niagara spar imported from Devonshire.

“My dear,” he said, “there are no brides; everybody was married twelve years ago, and the brides are middle-aged mothers of families now, and don’t come to Niagara if they are wise.

“Yes,” she desolately asserted, “that is so! Something has been hanging over me ever since we came, and suddenly I realized that it was the absence of the brides. But — but — Down at the hotels — Didn’t you see anything bridal there? When the omnibuses arrived, was there no burst of minstrelsy? Was there” — She could not go on, but sank nervelessly into the nearest seat. “Perhaps,” said Basil, dreamily regarding the contest of Tom and Bella for a newly-purchased paper of sour cherries, and helplessly forecasting in his remoter mind the probable consequences, “there were both brides and minstrelsy at the hotel, if I had only had the eyes to see and the ears to hear. In this world, my dear, we are always of our own time, and we live amid contemporary things. I dare say there were middle-aged people at Niagara when we were here before, but we did not meet them, nor they us. I dare say that the place is now swarming with bridal couples, and it is because they are invisible and inaudible to us that it seems such a howling wilderness. But the hotel clerks and the restaurateurs and the hackmen know them, and that is the reason why they receive with surprise and even offense our sympathy for their loneliness. Do you suppose, Isabel, that if you were to lay your head on my shoulder, in a bridal manner, it would do anything to bring us en rapport with that lost bridal world again?”

Isabel caught away her hand. “Basil,” she cried, “it would be disgusting! I wouldn’t do it for the world — not even for that world. I saw one middle-aged couple on Goat Island, while you were down at the Cave of the Winds, or somewhere, with the children. They were sitting on some steps, he a step below her, and he seemed to want to put his head on her knee; but I gazed at him sternly, and he didn’t dare. We should look like them, if we yielded to any outburst of affection. Don’t you think we should look like them?”

“I don’t know,” said Basil. “You are certainly a little wrinkled, my dear.”

“And you are very fat, Basil.”

They glanced at each other with a flash of resentment, and then they both laughed. “We couldn’t look young if we quarreled a week,” he said. “We had better content ourselves with feeling young, as I hope we shall do if we live to be ninety. It will be the loss of others if they don’t see our bloom upon us. Shall I get you a paper of cherries, Isabel? The children seem to be enjoying them.”

Isabel sprang upon her offspring with a cry of despair. “Oh, what shall I do? Now we shall not have a wink of sleep with them to-night. Where is that nux?” She hunted for the medicine in her bag, and the children submitted; for they had eaten all the cherries, and they took their medicine without a murmur. “I wonder at your letting them eat the sour things, Basil,” said their mother, when the children had run off to the news-stand again.

“I wonder that you left me to see what they were doing,” promptly retorted their father.

“It was your nonsense about the brides,” said Isabel; “and I think this has been a lesson to us. Don’t let them get anything else to eat, dearest.”

“They are safe; they have no more money. They are frugally confining themselves to the admiration of the Japanese bows and arrows yonder. Why have our Indians taken to making Japanese bows and arrows?”

Isabel despised the small pleasantry. “Then you saw nobody at the hotel?” she asked.

“Not even the Ellisons,” said Basil.

“Ah, yes,” said Isabel; “that was where we met them. How long ago it seems! And poor little Kitty! I wonder what has become of them? But I’m glad they’re not here. That’s what makes you realize your age: meeting the same people in the same place a great while after, and seeing how old they’ve grown. I don’t think I could bear to see Kitty Ellison again. I’m glad she didn’t come to visit us in Boston, though, after what happened, she couldn’t, poor thing! I wonder if she’s ever regretted her breaking with him in the way she did. It’s a very painful thing to think of, — such an inconclusive conclusion; it always seemed as if they ought to meet again, somewhere.”

“I don’t believe she ever wished it.”

“A man can’t tell what a woman wishes.”

“Well, neither can a woman,” returned Basil, lightly.

His wife remained serious. “It was a very fine point, — a very little thing to reject a man for. I felt that when I first read her letter about it.”

Basil yawned. “I don’t believe I ever knew just what the point was.”

“Oh yes, you did; but you forget everything. You know that they met two Boston ladies just after they were engaged, and she believed that he didn’t introduce her because he was ashamed of her countrified appearance before them.”

“It was a pretty fine point,” said Basil, and he laughed provokingly.

“He might not have meant to ignore her,” answered Isabel thoughtfully; “he might have chosen not to introduce her because he felt too proud of her to subject her to any possible misappreciation from them. You might have looked at it in that way.”

“Why didn’t you look at it in that way? You advised her against giving him another chance. Why did you?”

“Why?” repeated Isabel, absently. “Oh, a woman doesn’t judge a man by what he does, but by what he is! I knew that if she dismissed him it was because she never really had trusted or could trust his love; and I thought she had better not make another trial.”

“Well, very possibly you were right. At any rate, you have the consolation of knowing that it’s too late to help it now.”

“Yes, it’s too late,” said Isabel; and her thoughts went back to her meeting with the young girl whom she had liked so much, and whose after history had interested her so painfully. It seemed to her a hard world that could come to nothing better than that for the girl whom she had seen in her first glimpse of it that night. Where was she now? What had become of her? If she had married that man, would she have been any happier? Marriage was not the poetic dream of perfect union that a girl imagines it; she herself had found that out. It was a state of trial, of probation; it was an ordeal, not an ecstasy. If she and Basil had broken each other’s hearts and parted, would not the fragments of their lives have been on a much finer, much higher plane? Had not the commonplace, every-day experiences of marriage vulgarized them both? To be sure, there were the children; but if they had never had the children, she would never have missed them; and if Basil had, for example, died just before they were married — She started from this wicked reverie, and ran towards her husband, whose broad, honest back, with no visible neck or shirt-collar, was turned towards her, as he stood, with his head thrown up, studying a time-table on the wall; she passed her arm convulsively through his, and pulled him away

“It’s time to be getting our bags out to the train, Basil! Come, Bella! Tom, we’re going!”

The children reluctantly turned from the news-man’s trumpery; and they all went out to the track, and took seats on the benches under the colonnade. While they waited, the train for Buffalo drew in, and they remained watching it till it started. In the last car that passed them, when it was fairly under way, a face looked full at Isabel from one of the windows. In that moment of astonishment she forgot to observe whether it was sad or glad; she only saw, or believed she saw, the light ofrecognition dawn into its eyes, and then it was gone.

“Basil!” she cried, “stop the train! That was Kitty Ellison!”

“Oh no, it wasn’t,” said Basil, easily. “It looked like her; but it looked at least ten years older.”

“Why, of course it was! We’re all ten years older,” returned his wife in such indignation at his stupidity that she neglected to insist upon his stopping the train, which was rapidly diminishing in the perspective.

He declared it was only a fancied resemblance; she contended that this was in the neighborhood of Eriecreek, and it must be Kitty; and thus one of their most inveterate disagreements began.

Their own train drew into the depot, and they disputed upon the fact in question till they entered on the passage of the Suspension Bridge. Then Basil rose and called the children to his side. On the left hand, far up the river, the great Fall shows, with its mists at its foot and its rainbow on its brow, as silent and still as if it were vastly painted there; and below the bridge, on the right, leap the Rapids in the narrow gorge, like seas on a rocky shore. “Look on both sides, now,” he said to the children. “Isabel, you must see this!”

Isabel had been preparing for the passage of this bridge ever since she left Boston. “Never!” she exclaimed. She instantly closed her eyes, and hid her face in her handkerchief. Thanks to this precaution of hers, the train crossed the bridge in perfect safety.

BRAYBRIDGE’S OFFER

We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. With its mixture of Oriental appointments in curtains, cushions, and little tables of teak-wood the Turkish room expressed rather an adventurous conception of the Ottoman taste; but it was always a cozy place whether you found yourself in it with cigars and coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other spot in the club.

Our rather limited little down-town dining club was almost a celibate community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare what we liked. Some dozed away the intervening time; some read the evening papers, or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now seeing the three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher range of thinking.

“I shouldn’t have supposed, somehow,” he said with a knot of deprecation between his fine eyes, “that he would have had the pluck.”

“Perhaps he hadn’t,” Minver suggested.

Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. “You mean that she—”

“I don’t see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.

“I didn’t say it,” Minver contradicted.

“You implied it; and I don’t think it’s fair. It’s easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the case.”

“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn’t think you would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for material already. You ought to be more careful where Acton is, Rulledge.”

“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.

Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.

“Yes,” Minver said, facing about toward me. “How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you’re always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?”

“No, I can’t,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why.”

“No, you couldn’t, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It’s part of your swindler to assume that you do know why. You ought to find out.”

Wanhope interposed abstractly, or as abstractly as he could: “The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”

“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don’t you do it, Acton?”

I returned, as seriously as could have been expected: “Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don’t like to talk of such things.”

“They’re ashamed,” Minver declared. “The lovers don’t either of them, in a given ease, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little the man.”

Minver’s point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the same time. We begged each other’s pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I should go on.

“Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don’t think they’re so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say?”

“Very much what you said. It’s astonishing how people forget the vital things, and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generation knows nothing of it.”

“That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But how do you know what you were saying, Wanhope?”

“I’ve ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn’t inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed.” Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them.”

“Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood—” Rulledge began, but Minver’s laugh arrested him.

“Nothing so concrete, I’m afraid,” Wanhope gently returned. “I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. There’s something pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at.”

“They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game of love,” Minver said. “Especially when they’re not in earnest about it.”

“Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope admitted. “But I don’t mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with her.”

“Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge asked.

“You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, “that if she didn’t know it, he never would.” Then Wanhope answered for himself:

“I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any appeal.”

“And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I suggested.

“Yes,” Wanhope admitted after a thoughtful reluctance.

“Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”

“If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the case in point; we won’t mention any names. She is sailing through time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can’t be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence.”

“Oh, I’m not sure about that, professor,” Minver put in. “Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you.”

“It’s all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life,” Wanhope resumed. “I don’t believe I could make out the case, as I feel it to be.”

“Braybridge’s part of the case is rather plain, isn’t it?” I invited him.

“I’m not sure of that. No man’s part of any case is plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the psychologist added with one of his deep breaths, “is so complex as a simple nature.”

“Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if his case isn’t.”

“Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.

“My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”

“I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel the attraction of such a man — the fascination of his being grizzled, and slovenly, and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop. He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and I don’t vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess’s end of the party, and was watching for a chance to—”

Wanhope cast about for the word, and Winver supplied it: “Pull out.”

“Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him.”

“I don’t understand,” Rulledge said.

“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late, the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it’s rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?”

We others looked at each other. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a jam of people; but this girl — I’ve understood it was she — looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”

“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. “Good selling name.”

“Don’t reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name.”

“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don’t see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women.”

“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.

“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.

“No; the response must be in kind, to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn’t be afraid.”

“Oh! That’s the way you get out of it!”

“Well?” Rulledge urged.

“I’m afraid,” Wanhope modestly confessed, “that from this point I shall have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn’t able to be very definite, except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he had said he mustn’t think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped she had refused to hear of Braybridge’s going. She said she hadn’t heard of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn’t give Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin thought it was odd that Braybridge didn’t insist; and he made a long story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each other’s charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs. Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and — Well, their engagement has come out, and—” Wanhope paused with an air that was at first indefinite, and then definitive.

“You don’t mean,” Rulledge burst out in a note of deep wrong, “that that’s all you know about it?”

“Yes, that’s all I know,” Wanhope confessed, as if somewhat surprised himself at the fact.

“Well!”

Wanhope tried to offer the only reparation in his power. “I can conjecture — we can all conjecture—”

He hesitated; then, “Well, go on with your conjecture,” Rulledge said forgivingly.

“Why—” Wanhope began again; but at that moment a man who had been elected the year before, and then gone off on a long absence, put his head in between the dull-red hangings of the doorway. It was Halson, whom I did not know very well, but liked better than I knew. His eyes were dancing with what seemed the inextinguishable gayety of his temperament, rather than any present occasion, and his smile carried his little mustache well away from his handsome teeth. “Private?”

“Come in, come in!” Minver called to him. “Thought you were in Japan?”

“My dear fellow,” Halson answered, “you must brush up your contemporary history. It’s more than a fortnight since I was in Japan.” He shook hands with me, and I introduced him to Rulledge and Wanhope. He said at once: “Well, what is it? Question of Braybridge’s engagement? It’s humiliating to a man to come back from the antipodes, and find the nation absorbed in a parochial problem like that. Everybody I’ve met here to-night has asked me, the first thing, if I’d heard of it, and if I knew how it could have happened.”

“And do you?” Rulledge asked.

“I can give a pretty good guess,” Halson said, running his merry eyes over our faces.

“Anybody can give a good guess,” Rulledge said. “Wanhope is doing it now.”

“Don’t let me interrupt.” Halson turned to him politely.

“Not at all. I’d rather hear your guess. If you know Braybridge better than I,” Wanhope said.

“Well,” Halson compromised, “perhaps I’ve known him longer.” He asked, with an effect of coming to business, “Where were you?”

“Tell him, Rulledge,” Minver ordered, and Rulledge apparently asked nothing better. He told him in detail, all we knew from any source, down to the moment of Wanhope’s arrested conjecture.

“He did leave you at an anxious point, didn’t he?” Halson smiled to the rest of us at Rulledge’s expense, and then said: “Well, I think I can help you out a little. Any of you know the lady?”

“By sight, Minver does,” Rulledge answered for us. “Wants to paint her.” “Of course,” Halson said, with intelligence. “But I doubt if he’d find her as paintable as she looks, at first. She’s beautiful, but her charm is spiritual.”

“Sometimes we try for that,” the painter interposed.

“And sometimes you get it. But you’ll allow it’s difficult. That’s all I meant. I’ve known her — let me see — for twelve years, at least; ever since I first went West. She was about eleven then, and her father was bringing her up on the ranche. Her aunt came along, by and by, and took her to Europe; mother dead before Hazelwood went out there. But the girl was always homesick for the ranche; she pined for it; and after they had kept her in Germany three or four years they let her come back, and run wild again; wild as a flower does, or a vine — not a domesticated animal.”

“Go slow, Halson. This is getting too much for the romantic Rulledge.”

“Rulledge can bear up against the facts, I guess, Minver,” Halson said, almost austerely. “Her father died two years ago, and then she had to come East, for her aunt simply wouldn’t live on the ranche. She brought her on, here, and brought her out; I was at the coming-out tea; but the girl didn’t take to the New York thing at all; I could see it from the start; she wanted to get away from it with me, and talk about the ranche.”

“She felt that she was with the only genuine person among those conventional people.”

Halson laughed at Minver’s thrust, and went on amiably: “I don’t suppose that till she met Braybridge she was ever quite at her ease with any man or woman, for that matter. I imagine, as you’ve done, that it was his fear of her that gave her courage. She met him on equal terms. Isn’t that it?”

Wanhope assented to the question referred to him with a nod.

“And when they got lost from the rest of the party at that picnic—”

“Lost?” Rulledge demanded.

“Why, yes. Didn’t you know? But I ought to go back. They said there never was anything prettier than the way she unconsciously went for Braybridge, the whole day. She wanted him, and she was a child who wanted things frankly, when she did want them. Then his being ten or fifteen years older than she was, and so large and simple, made it natural for a shy girl like her to assort herself with him when all the rest were assorting themselves, as people do at such things. The consensus of testimony is that she did it with the most transparent unconsciousness, and—”

“Who are your authorities?” Minver asked; Rulledge threw himself back on the divan, and beat the cushions with impatience.

“Is it essential to give them?”

“Oh, no. I merely wondered. Go on.”

“The authorities are all right. She had disappeared with him before the others noticed. It was a thing that happened; there was no design in it; that would have been out of character. They had got to the end of the wood-road, and into the thick of the trees where there wasn’t even a trail, and they walked round looking for a way out, till they were turned completely. They decided that the only way was to keep walking, and by and by they heard the sound of chopping. It was some Canucks clearing a piece of the woods, and when she spoke to them in French, they gave them full directions, and Braybridge soon found the path again.”

Halson paused, and I said, “But that isn’t all?”

“Oh, no.” He continued thoughtfully silent for a little while before he resumed. “The amazing thing is that they got lost again, and that when they tried going back to the Canucks, they couldn’t find the way.”

“Why didn’t they follow the sound of the chopping?” I asked.

“The Canucks had stopped, for the time being. Besides, Braybridge was rather ashamed, and he thought if they went straight on they would be sure to come out somewhere. But that was where he made a mistake. They couldn’t go on straight; they went round and round, and came on their own footsteps — or hers, which he recognized from the narrow tread and the dint of the little heels in the damp places.”

Wanhope roused himself with a kindling eye. “That is very interesting, the movement in a circle of people who have lost their way. It has often been observed, but I don’t know that it has ever been explained. Sometimes the circle is smaller, sometimes it is larger; but I believe it is always a circle.”

“Isn’t it,” I queried, “like any other error in life? We go round and round; and commit the old sins over again.”

“That is very interesting,” Wanhope allowed.

“But do lost people really always walk in a vicious circle?” Minver asked.

Rulledge would not let Wanhope answer. “Go on, Halson,” he said.

Halson roused himself from the reverie in which he was sitting with glazed eyes. “Well, what made it a little more anxious was that he had heard of bears on that mountain, and the green afternoon light among the trees was perceptibly paling. He suggested shouting, but she wouldn’t let him; she said it would be ridiculous, if the others heard them, and useless if they didn’t. So they tramped on till — till the accident happened.”

“The accident!” Rulledge exclaimed in the voice of our joint emotion.

“He stepped on a loose stone and turned his foot,” Halson explained. “It wasn’t a sprain, luckily, but it hurt enough. He turned so white that she noticed it, and asked him what was the matter. Of course that shut his mouth the closer, but it morally doubled his motive, and he kept himself from crying out till the sudden pain of the wrench was over. He said merely that he thought he had heard something, and he had — an awful ringing in his ears; but he didn’t mean that, and he started on again. The worst was trying to walk without limping, and to talk cheerfully and encouragingly, with that agony tearing at him. But he managed somehow, and he was congratulating himself on his success, when he tumbled down in a dead faint.”

“Oh, come, now!” Minver protested.

“It is like an old-fashioned story, where things are operated by accident instead of motive, isn’t it?” Halson smiled with radiant recognition.

“Fact will always imitate fiction, if you give her time enough,” I said.

“Had they got back to the other picnickers?” Rulledge asked with a tense voice.

“In sound, but not in sight of them. She wasn’t going to bring him into camp in that state; besides she couldn’t. She got some water out of the trout-brook they’d been fishing — more water than trout in it — and sprinkled his face, and he came to, and got on his legs, just in time to pull on to the others, who were organizing a search-party to go after them. From that point on, she dropped Braybridge like a hot coal, and as there was nothing of the flirt in her, she simply kept with the women, the older girls, and the tabbies, and left Braybridge to worry along with the secret of his turned ankle. He doesn’t know how he ever got home alive; but he did somehow manage to reach the wagons that had brought them to the edge of the woods, and then he was all right till they got to the house. But still she said nothing about his accident, and he couldn’t; and he pleaded an early start for town the next morning, and got off to bed, as soon as he could.”

“I shouldn’t have thought he could have stirred in the morning,” Rulledge employed Halson’s pause to say.

“Well, this beaver had to,” Halson said. “He was not the only early riser. He found Miss Hazelwood at the station before him.”

“What!” Rulledge shouted. I confess the fact rather roused me, too; and Wanhope’s eyes kindled with a scientific pleasure.

“She came right towards him. ‘Mr. Braybridge,’ says she, ‘I couldn’t let you go without explaining my very strange behavior. I didn’t choose to have these people laughing at the notion of my having played the part of your preserver. It was bad enough being lost with you; I couldn’t bring you into ridicule with them by the disproportion they’d have felt in my efforts for you after you turned your foot. So I simply had to ignore the incident. Don’t you see?’ Braybridge glanced at her, and he had never felt so big and bulky before, or seen her so slender and little. He said, ‘It would have seemed rather absurd,’ and he broke out and laughed, while she broke down and cried, and asked him to forgive her, and whether it had hurt him very much; and said she knew he could bear to keep it from the others by the way he had kept it from her till he fainted. She implied that he was morally as well as physically gigantic, and it was as much as he could do to keep from taking her in his arms on the spot.”

“It would have been edifying to the groom that had driven her to the station,” Minver cynically suggested.

“Groom nothing!” Halson returned with spirit. “She paddled herself across the lake, and walked from the boat-landing to the station.”

“Jove!” Rulledge exploded in uncontrollable enthusiasm.

“She turned round as soon as she had got through with her hymn of praise — it made Braybridge feel awfully flat — and ran back through the bushes to the boat-landing, and — that was the last he saw of her till he met her in town this fall.”

“And when — and when — did he offer himself?” Rulledge entreated breathlessly. “How—”

“Yes, that’s the point, Halson,” Minver interposed. “Your story is all very well, as far as it goes; but Rulledge here has been insinuating that it was Miss Hazelwood who made the offer, and he wants you to bear him out.”

Rulledge winced at the outrage, but he would not stay Halson’s answer even for the sake of righting himself.

“I have heard,” Minver went on, “that Braybridge insisted on paddling the canoe back to the other shore for her, and that it was on the way that he offered himself.” We others stared at Minver in astonishment. Halson glanced covertly toward him with his gay eyes. “Then that wasn’t true?”

“How did you hear it?” Halson asked.

“Oh, never mind. Is it true?”

“Well, I know there’s that version,” Halson said evasively. “The engagement is only just out, as you know. As to the offer — the when and the how — I don’t know that I’m exactly at liberty to say.”

“I don’t see why,” Minver urged. “You might stretch a point for Rulledge’s sake.”

Halson looked down, and then he glanced at Minver after a furtive passage of his eye over Rulledge’s intense face. “There was something rather nice happened after — But really, now!”

“Oh, go on!” Minver called out in contempt of his scruple.

“I haven’t the right — Well, I suppose I’m on safe ground here? It won’t go any farther, of course; and it was so pretty! After she had pushed off in her canoe, you know, Braybridge — he’d followed her down to the shore of the lake — found her handkerchief in a bush where it had caught, and he held it up, and called out to her. She looked round and saw it, and called back: ‘Never mind. I can’t return for it, now.’ Then Braybridge plucked up his courage, and asked if he might keep it, and she said ‘Yes,’ over her shoulder, and then she stopped paddling, and said ‘No, no, you mustn’t, you mustn’t! You can send it to me.’ He asked where, and she said, ‘In New York — in the fall — at the Walholland.’ Braybridge never knew how he dared, but he shouted after her — she was paddling on again— ‘May I bring it?’ and she called over her shoulder again, without fully facing him, but her profile was enough, ‘If you can’t get any one to bring it for you.’ The words barely reached him, but he’d have caught them if they’d been whispered; and he watched her across the lake, and into the bushes, and then broke for his train. He was just in time.”

Halson beamed for pleasure upon us, and even Minver said, “Yes, that’s rather nice.” After a moment he added, “Rulledge thinks she put it there.”

“You’re too bad, Minver,” Halson protested. “The charm of the whole thing was her perfect innocence. She isn’t capable of the slightest finesse. I’ve known her from a child, and I know what I say.”

“That innocence of girlhood,” Wanhope said, “is very interesting. It’s astonishing how much experience it survives. Some women carry it into old age with them. It’s never been scientifically studied—”

“Yes,” Minver allowed. “There would be a fortune for the novelist who could work a type of innocence for all it was worth. Here’s Acton always dealing with the most rancid flirtatiousness, and missing the sweetness and beauty of a girlhood which does the cheekiest things without knowing what it’s about, and fetches down its game whenever it shuts its eyes and fires at nothing. But I don’t see how all this touches the point that Rulledge makes, or decides which finally made the offer.”

“Well, hadn’t the offer already been made?”

“But how?”

“Oh, in the usual way.”

“What is the usual way?”

“I thought everybody knew that. Of course, it was from Braybridge finally, but I suppose it’s always six of one and half a dozen of the other in these cases, isn’t it? I dare say he couldn’t get any one to take her the handkerchief. My dinner?” Halson looked up at the silent waiter who had stolen upon us and was bowing toward him.

“Look here, Halson,” Minver detained him, “how is it none of the rest of us have heard all those details?”

“I don’t know where you’ve been, Minver. Everybody knows the main facts,” Halson said, escaping.

Wanhope observed musingly: “I suppose he’s quite right about the reciprocality of the offer, as we call it. There’s probably, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a perfect understanding before there’s an explanation. In many cases the offer and the acceptance must really be tacit.”

“Yes,” I ventured, “and I don’t know why we’re so severe with women when they seem to take the initiative. It’s merely, after all, the call of the maiden bird, and there’s nothing lovelier or more endearing in nature than that.”

“Maiden bird is good, Acton,” Minver approved. “Why don’t you institute a class of fiction, where the love-making is all done by the maiden birds, as you call them — or the widow birds? It would be tremendously popular with both sexes. It would lift a tremendous responsibility off the birds who’ve been expected to shoulder it heretofore if it could be introduced into real life.”

Rulledge fetched a long, simple-hearted sigh. “Well, it’s a charming story. How well he told it!”

The waiter came again, and this time signalled to Minver.

“Yes,” he said, as he rose. “What a pity you can’t believe a word Halson says.”

“Do you mean—” we began simultaneously.

“That he built the whole thing from the ground up, with the start that we had given him. Why, you poor things! Who could have told him how it all happened? Braybridge? Or the girl? As Wanhope began by saying, people don’t speak of their love-making, even when they distinctly remember it.”

“Yes, but see here, Minver!” Rulledge said with a dazed look. “If it’s all a fake of his, how came you to have heard of Braybridge paddling the canoe back for her?”

“That was the fake that tested the fake. When he adopted it, I knew he was lying, because I was lying myself. And then the cheapness of the whole thing! I wonder that didn’t strike you. It’s the stuff that a thousand summer-girl stories have been spun out of. Acton might have thought he was writing it!”

He went away, leaving us to a blank silence, till Wanhope managed to say: “That inventive habit of mind is very curious. It would be interesting to know just how far it imposes on the inventor himself — how much he believes of his own fiction.”

“I don’t see,” Rulledge said gloomily, “why they’re so long with my dinner.” Then he burst out, “I believe every word Halson said. If there’s any fake in the thing, it’s the fake that Minver owned to.”

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

First published in Impressions and Experiences (New York: Harpers & Brothers, 1896)

The New Yorkers, following the custom of Europe, often fence themselves about with a great deal of ceremony in social matters, even such small social matters as making calls.

Some ladies have days when they receive calls; others have no specified day, and then you take your chance of being turned from the door without seeing them, of if you find them, of finding them reluctant and preoccupied. A friend of mine says he has often felt as if he had been admitted through the error of the man or the maid who opened the door to him at such houses, and who returned, after carrying up his name, to say, with a frightened air, that the lady would be down in a moment.

But when there are days there is never any misgiving about letting you in. The door is whisked open before you have had time to ring, sometimes by a servant who has the effect of not belonging to the house, but hired for the afternoon. Then you leave your card on a platter of some sort in the hall to attest the fact of your visit, and at the simpler houses find your way into the drawing-room unannounced, though the English custom of shouting your name before you is very common and is always observed where there is any pretense to fashion. Certain ladies receive once a week throughout the season; others receive on some day each week of December or January or February, as the case may be. When there is this limit to a month, the reception insensibly takes on the character of an afternoon tea, and, in fact, it varies from that only in being a little less crowded. There is tea or chocolate or mild punch and a table spread with pastries and sweets, which hardly any one touches. A young lady dedicates herself to the service of each urn and offers you the beverage that flows from it. There is a great air of gayety, a very excited chatter of female voices, a constant flutter of greeting and leave-taking and a general sense of amiable emptiness and bewildered kindness when you come away. The genius of these little affairs is supposed to be informality, but at some houses where you enjoy such informalities you find two men in livery on the steps outside, a third opens the door for you, a fourth takes your hat and stick, a fifth receives your overcoat and a sixth catches at your name and miscalls it into the drawing room.

I.

But I must not give too exclusive an impression of ceremony in the New-Yorkers. I made some calls about Christmas-time last year in a quarter of the city where the informalities are real and where the hospitalities, such as they were, I thought as sincere as in the houses where the informalities are more apparent. The sort of calls I made were rather fashionable some years ago, but are so no longer. It was a fad to make them, and the fad, like all really nice fads, came from England, and perhaps it has now died out here because it has died out there. At any rate, it seems certain that there is now less interest, less curiosity, concerning the home life of the poor than there was then among the comfortable people. I do not say there is less sympathy — there must be still a good deal of sympathy — but I should say there was less hope with the well-to-do of bettering the condition of the ill-to-do; some philosophers even warn us against indulging a feeling of commiseration, lest it should encourage the poor to attempt themselves to better their condition.

Yet there are no signs of rebellion on the part of the poor, whom I found as tame and peaceful, apparently, when I went the rounds of their unceremonious at-homes as the most anxious philosopher could desire. My calls were by no means of the nature of a perquisition, but they left very little unknown to me, I fancy, of the way the poor live, so frank and simple is their life. They included some tenements of the American quarter, near the point of the island, on the West Side, and a rather greater number on the East Side, in the heart of the district abandoned chiefly to the Russian Jews, though there are no doubt other nationalities to be found there. It is said to be more densely populated than any other area in the world, or at least in Christendom, for within a square mile there are more than three hundred and fifty thousand men, women and children. One can imagine from this fact alone how they are housed and what their chances of the comforts and decencies of life may be. But I must not hurry to the region of these homes before I have first tried to show the interiors of that quarter called American, where I found the Americans represented, as they are so often, by Irish people. The friend who went with me on my calls led me across the usual surface tracks, under the usual elevated tracks, and suddenly dodged before me into an alleyway about two feet wide. This crept under houses fronting on the squalid street we had left and gave into a sort of court some ten or twelve feet wide by thirty or forty feet long. The buildings surrounding it were low and very old. One of them was a stable, which contributed its stench to the odors that rose from the reeking pavement and from the closets filling an end of the court, with a corner left beside them for the hydrant that supplied the water of the whole inclosure. It is from this court that the inmates of the tenements have their sole chance of sun and air. What the place must be in summer I had not the heart to think, and on the wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the skies which my guide said would have been evident to me if I had seen it in August. I could better fancy this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one of the houses and found myself in a typical New York tenement. Then I almost choked at the thought of what a hot day, what a hot night, must be in such a place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled by the passage through the living-room, to the black hole in the rear, where the whole family lay on the heap of rags that passed for a bed.

We had our choice which door to knock at on the narrow landing, a yard wide at most, which opened into such tenements to the right and left, as many stories up as the stairs mounted. We stood at once in the presence of the hostess; there was no ceremony of sending in our cards here, or having our names called to her. In one case we found her over the washtub, with her three weeks’ babe bundled in a chair beside it. A table, with a half-eaten loaf, that formed her breakfast, on it, helped, with the cooking-stove, to crowd the place past any possibility of sitting down, if there had been chairs to sit in; so we stood, as people do at an afternoon tea. At sight of us the woman began to cry and complain that her man had been drunk and idle for a month and did nothing for her; though in these times he might have been sober and idle and done as little. Some good soul was paying the rent for her, which was half as great as would have hired a decent flat in a good part of the town; but how her food came or the coal for her stove remained a mystery which we did not try to solve. She wiped her tears at the exhibition of a small coin, which she had perhaps dimly foreseen through them from the moment they began to flow. It was wrong, perhaps, to give her money, but it was not very wrong, perhaps, for the money was not very much, and if it pauperized her it could not have been said that she was wholly unpauperized before she took it. These are very difficult cases, but all life is a hopeless tangle, and the right is something that does not show itself at once, especially in economical affairs.

In another tenement we found a family as gay and hopeful as this was dismal and desperate. An Irish lady with a stylish fringe of red hair decorating her forehead, welcomed us with excuses for the state of the apartment, which in the next breath she proved herself very proud of, for she said that if people were not comfortable in their houses it was because they were slovenly and untidy. I could not see that she was neater than her neighbor on the landing below. She had a florid taste in pictures, and half a dozen large colored prints went far to hide the walls, which she said, the landlord had lately had whitewashed, though to eyes less fond than hers they showed a livid blue. The whitewashing was the sole repairs which had been put upon her tenement since she came into it, but she seemed to think it quite enough; and her man, who sat at leisure near the stove, in the three days’ beard which seems inseparable from idle poverty, was quite boastful of its advantages. He said that he had lived in the court for thirty years and there was no such air anywhere else in this world. I could readily believe him, being there to smell it and coming away with the taste of it in my mouth. Like other necessaries of life, it must have been rather scanty in that happy home, especially at night, when the dark fell outside and a double dark thickened in the small bin which stood open to our gaze at the end of the room. The whitewash seemed not to have penetrated to this lair, where a frowzy mattress showed itself on a rickety bedstead. The beds in these sleeping-holes were never made up; they were rounded into a heap and seemed commonly of a coarse brown sacking. They had always a horrible fascination for me. I fancied them astir with a certain life which, if there had been a consensus of it to that effect, might have walked off with them.

All the tenements here were of this size and shape — a room with windows opening upon the court and at the rear the small black bin or pen for the bed. The room was perhaps twelve feet square and the bin was six, and for such a dwelling the tenant pays six dollars a month. If he fails to pay it he is evicted, and some thirty thousand evictions have taken place in the past year. But an eviction is by no means the dreadful hardship the reader would perhaps imagine it. To be sure, it means putting the tenant on the sidewalk with his poor household gear in any weather and at any hour; but if it is very cold or very wet weather, the evicted family is seldom suffered to pass the night there. The wretched neighbors gather about and take them in, and their life begins again on the old terms; or the charities come to their aid, and they are dispersed into the different refuges until the father or mother can find another hole for them to crawl into. Still, natural as it all is, I should think it must surprise an Irishman, who supposed he had left eviction behind him in his native land, to find it so rife in the country of his adoption.

II

My friend asked me if I would like to go into any other tenements, but I thought that if what I had seen was typical, I had seen enough in that quarter. The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to going in upon people in that way, though they seemed accustomed to being gone in upon without any ceremony but the robust “Good-morning!” my companion gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and I wanted a little interval to prepare myself for further forays. The people seemed quite ready to be questioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They may have taken us for detectives, or agents of benevolent societies, or journalists in search of copy. In any case, they had nothing to lose and they might have something to gain; so they received us kindly and made us much at home among them as they knew how. It may have been that in some instances they supposed that we were members of the Board of Health and were their natural allies against their landlords.

I had not realized before how much this noble institution can befriend the poor, so potently sustained as it is in the discharge of its duties by the popular sentiment in a land where popular sentiment is so often so weak. It has full power, in the public interest, to order repairs and betterments necessary for the general health in any domicile, rich or poor, in the city, and no man’s pleasure of profit may hinder it. In cases of contagion or infection, it may isolate the neighborhood or vacate the premises, or, in certain desperate conditions, destroy them. As there are always pestilences of some sort preying upon the poor (as if their poverty were not enough), my companion could point out a typhus quarter, which the Board had shut up and which we must not approach. Such minor plagues as small pox, scarlet-fever, and diphtheria are quickly discovered and made known, and the places that they have infested are closed till they can be thoroughly purified. Any tenant believing his premises to be in an unwholesome or dangerous state may call in the Board, and from its decision the landlord has no appeal. He must make the changes the Board ordains, and he must make them at his own cost, though no doubt, when the tenant can pay, he contrives somehow to make him pay in the end. The landlord, especially if he battens on the poorer sort of tenants, is always in fear of the Board, and the tenant is in love with it, for he knows that, in a community otherwise delivered over to the pursuit of self or pleasure, it stands his ready friend, whose mandate private interest obeys as it obeys no other. It seems to have more honor than any other institution among us, and, amid the most frightful corruption of every kind, to remain incorruptible. Very likely the landlord may sometimes think that it abuses its power, but the tenant never thinks so, and the public seems always to agree with the tenant. The press, which is so keen to scent out paternalism in municipal or national affairs, has not yet perceived any odor of it in the Board of Health, and stands its constant friend, though it embodies in the most distinctive form the principle that, in a civilized community, the collective interest is supreme. Even if such an extension of its powers were not in the order of evolution, it would not be so illogical for the Board of Health to command the abatement of poverty when the diseases that flow from poverty cannot be otherwise abated. I should not like to prophesy that it will ever do so, but stranger things have happened through the necessity that knows no law, not even the law of demand and supply — the demand of Moloch and the supply of Misery.

III

I do not know whether the Hebrew quarter, whenI began to make my calls there, seemed any worse than the American quarter or not. But I noticed presently a curious subjective effect in myself, which I offer for the reader’s speculation.

There is something in a very little experience of such places that blunts the perception, so that they do not seem so dreadful as they are; and I should feel as if I were exaggerating if I recorded my first impression of their loathsomeness. I soon came to look upon the conditions as normal, not for me, indeed, or for the kind of people I mostly consort with, but for the inmates of the dens and lairs about me. Perhaps this was partly their fault; they were uncomplaining, if not patient, in circumstances where I believe a single week’s sojourn, with no more hope of a better lot than they could have, would make anarchists of the best people in the city. Perhaps the poor people themselves are not so thoroughly persuaded that there is anything very unjust in their fate, as the compassionate think. They at least do not know the better fortune of others, and they have the habit of passively enduring their own. I found them usually cheerful in the Hebrew quarter, and they had so much courage as enabled them to keep themselves noticeably clean in an environment where I am afraid their betters would scarcely have had heart to wash their faces and comb their hair. There was even a decent tidiness in their dress, which I did not find very ragged, though it often seemed unseasonable and insufficient. But here again, as in many other phases of life, I was struck by men’s heroic superiority to their fate, if their fate is hard; and I felt anew that if prosperous and comfortable people were as good in proportion to their fortune as these people were they would be as the angels of light, which, I am afraid they now but faintly resemble.

One of the places we visited was a court somewhat like that we had already seen in the American quarter, but rather smaller and with more the effect of a pit, since the walls around it were so much higher. There was the same row of closets at one side and the hydrant next to them, but there the hydrant was bound up in rags to keep it from freezing, apparently, and the wretched place was by no means so foul under foot. To be sure there was no stable to contribute its filth, but we learned that a suitable stench was not wanting from a bakery in one of the basements, which a man in good clothes and a large watch-chain told us rose from it in suffocating fumes at a certain hour, when the baker was doing some unimaginable thing to the bread. This man seemed to be the employer of labor in one of the rooms above, and he said that when the smell began they could hardly breathe. He caught promptly at the notion of the Board of Health, and I dare say that the baker will be duly abated. None of the other people complained, but that was perhaps because they had only their Yiddish to complain in, and knew that it would be wasted on us. They seemed neither curious nor suspicious concerning us; they let us go everywhere, as if they had no thought of hindering us. One of the tenements we entered had just been vacated; but there was a little girl of ten there, with some much smaller children, amusing them in the empty space. Through a public-spirited boy, who had taken charge of us form the beginning and had a justly humorous sense of the situation, we learned that this little maid was not the sister but the servant of the others, for even in these low levels society makes its distinctions. I dare say that the servant was not suffered to eat with the others when they had anything to eat, and that when they had nothing her inferiority was somehow brought home to her. She may have been made to wait and famish after the others had hungered some time. She was a cheerful and friendly creature and her small brood were kept tidy like herself.

The basement under this vacant tenement we found inhabited, and though it was a most preposterous place for people to live, it was not as dirty as one would think. To be sure, it was not very light and all the dirt may not have been visible. One of the smiling women who were there made their excuses, “Poor people; cannot keep very nice,” and laughed as if she had said a good thing. There was nothing in the room but a table and a few chairs and a stove, without fire, but they were all contentedly there together in the dark, which hardly let them see one another’s faces. My companion struck a match and held it to the cavernous mouth of an inner cellar half as large as the room we were in, where it winked and paled so soon that I had only a glimpse of the bed, with the rounded heap of bedding on it; but out of this hole, as if she had been a rat, scared from it by the light, a young girl came, rubbing her eyes and vaguely smiling, and vanished up-stairs somewhere.

IV

I found no shape or size of tenement but this. There was always the one room, where the inmates lived by day, and the one den, where they slept by night, apparently all in the same bed, though probably the children were strewn about the floor. If the tenement were high up the living-room had more light and air than if it were low down; but the sleeping hole never had any light or air of its own. My calls were made on one of the mild days which fell before last Christmas, and so I suppose I saw these places at their best; but what they must be when the summer is seven times heated without, as it often is in New York, or when the arctic cold has pierced these hapless abodes and the inmates huddle together for their animal heat, the reader must imagine for himself. The Irish-Americans had flaming stoves, even on that soft day, but in the Hebrew tenements I found no fire. They were doubtless the better for this, and it is one of the comical anomalies of the whole affair that they are singularly healthy. The death rate among them is one of the lowest in the city, though whether for their final advantage it might not better be the highest, is one of the things one must not ask one’s self. In their presence I should not dare to ask it, even in my deepest thought. They are then so like other human beings and really so little different from the best, except in their environment, that I had to get away from this before I could regard them as wild beasts.

I suppose there are and have been worse conditions of life, but if I stopped short of savage life I found it hard to imagine them. I did not exaggerate to myself the squalor that I saw, and I do not exaggerate it to the reader. As I have said, I was so far from sentimentalizing it that I almost immediately reconciled myself to it, as far as its victims were concerned. Still, it was squalor of a kind which, it seemed to me, it could not be possible to outrival anywhere in the life one commonly calls civilized. It is true that the Indians who formerly inhabited this island were no more comfortably lodged in their wigwams of bark and skins than these poor New-Yorkers in their tenements. But the wild men pay no rent, and if they are crowded together upon terms that equally forbid decency and comfort in their shelter, they have the freedom of the forest and the prairie about them; they have the illimitable sky and the whole light of day and the four winds to breathe when they issue into the open air. The New York tenement dwellers, even when they leave their lairs, are still pent in their high-walled streets and inhale a thousand stenches of their own and others’ making. The street, except in snow and rain, is always better than their horrible houses, and it is doubtless because they pass so much of their time in the street that the death rate is so low among them. Perhaps their domiciles can be best likened for darkness and discomfort to the dugouts or sod huts of the settlers on the great plains. But these are only temporary shelters, while the tenement dwellers have no hope of better housing; they have neither the prospect of a happier fortune through their own energy as the settlers have, nor any chance from the humane efforts and teachings of missionaries, like the savages. With the tenement dwellers it is from generation to generation, if not for the individual, then for the class, since no one expects that there will not always be tenement dwellers in New York as long as our present economical conditions endure.

V.

When I first set out on my calls I provided myself with some small silver, which I thought I might fitly give, at least to the children, and in some of the first places I did this. But presently I began to fancy an unseemliness in it, as if it were an indignity added to the hardship of their lot, and to feel that unless I gave all my worldly wealth to them I was in a manner mocking their misery. I could not give everything for then I should have had to come upon charity myself, and so I mostly kept my little coins in my pocket; but when we mounted into the court again from that cellar apartment and found an old, old woman there, wrinkled and yellow, with twinkling eyes and a toothless smile, waiting to see us, as if she were as curious in her way as we were in ours, I was tempted. She said in her Yiddish, which the humorous boy interpreted, that she was eighty years old, and she looked a hundred, while she babbled unintelligibly but very cheerfully on. I gave her a piece of twenty-five cents and she burst into a blessing, that I should not have thought could be bought for money. We did not stay to hear it out, but the boy did, and he followed to report it to me, with a gleeful interest in its beneficent exaggerations. If it is fulfilled I shall live to be a man of many and prosperous years, and I shall die possessed of wealth that will endow a great many colleges and found a score of libraries. I do not know whether the boy envied me or not, but I wish I could have left that benediction to him, for I took a great liking to him, his shrewd smile, his gay eyes, his promise of a Hebrew nose, and his whole wise little visage. He said that he went to school and studied reading, writing, geography and everything. All the children we spoke to said that they went to school, and they were quick and intelligent. They could mostly speak English, while most of their elders knew only Yiddish.

The sound of this was around us on the street we issued into, and which seemed from end to end a vast bazaar, where there was a great deal of selling, whether there was much buying or not. The place is humorously called the pig-market by the Christians, because everything in the world but pork is to be found there. To me its activity was a sorrowfully amusing satire upon the business ideal of our plutocratic civilization. These people were desperately poor, yet they preyed upon one another in their commerce, as if they could be enriched by selling dear or buying cheap. So far as I could see they would only impoverish each other more and more, but they trafficked as eagerly as if there were wealth in every bargain. The sidewalks and the roadways were thronged with peddlers and purchasers, and everywhere I saw splendid types of that old Hebrew world which had the sense if not the knowledge of God when all the rest of us lay sunk in heathen darkness. There were women with oval faces and olive tints, and clear, dark eyes, relucent as evening pools, and men with long beards of jetty black or silvery white, and the noble profiles of their race. I said to myself that it was among such throngs that Christ walked, it was from such people that he chose his Disciples and his friends; but I looked in vain for him in Hester street. Probably he was at that moment in Fifth Avenue.

VI.

After all, I was loath to come away. I should have liked to stay and live awhile with such as they, if the terms of their life had been possible, for there were phases of it that were very attractive. That constant meeting and that neighborly intimacy were superficially at least of a very pleasant effect, and though the whole place seemed abandoned to mere trade, it may have been a necessity of the case, for I am told that many of these Hebrews have another ideal, and think and vote in the hope that the land of their refuge shall yet some day keep its word to the world, so that men shall be equally free in it to the pursuit of happiness. I suppose they are mostly fugitives from the Russian persecution, and that from the cradle their days must have been full of fear and care, and from the time they could toil that they must have toiled at whatever their hands found to do. Yet they had not the look of a degraded people; they were quiet and orderly, and I saw none of the drunkenness or the truculence of an Irish or low American neighborhood among them. There were no policemen in sight, and the quiet behavior that struck me so much seemed not to have been enforced. Very likely they may have moods different from that I saw, but I only tell of what I saw, and I am by no means ready yet to preach poverty as a saving grace. Though they seemed so patient and even cheerful in some cases, I do not think it is well for human beings to live whole families together in one room with a kennel out of it, where modesty may survive, but decency is impossible. Neither do I think they can be the better men and women for being insufficiently clothed and fed, though so many of us appear none the better for being housed in palaces and clad in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day.

I have tried to report simply and honestly what I saw of the life of our poorest people that day. One might say it was not so bad as it is painted, but I think it is quite as bad as it appeared; and I could not see that in itself or in its conditions it held the promise or the hope of anything better. If it is tolerable, it must endure; if it is intolerable, still it must endure. Here and there one will release himself from it, and doubtless numbers are always doing this, as in the days of slavery there were always fugitives; but for the great mass the captivity remains. Upon the present terms of leaving the poor to be housed by private landlords, whose interest it is to get the greatest return of money for the money invested, the very poorest must always be housed as they are now. Nothing but public control in some form or other can secure them a shelter fit for human beings.

AT THE SIGN OF THE SAVAGE.

As they bowled along in the deliberate German express train through the Black Forest, Colonel Kenton said he had only two things against the region: it was not black, and it was not a forest. He had all his life heard of the Black Forest, and he hoped he knew what it was. The inhabitants burned charcoal, high up the mountains, and carved toys in the winter when shut in by the heavy snows; they had Easter eggs all the year round, with overshot mill-wheels in the valleys, and cherry-trees all about, always full of blossoms or ripe fruit, just as you liked to think. They were very poor people, but very devout, and lived in little villages on a friendly intimacy with their cattle. The young women of these hamlets had each a long braid of yellow hair down her back, blue eyes, and a white bodice with a cat’s-cradle lacing behind; the men had bell-crowned hats and spindle-legs: they buttoned the breath out of their bodies with round pewter buttons on tight, short crimson waistcoats.

“Now, here,” said the colonel, breathing on the window of the car and rubbing a little space clear of the frost, “I see nothing of the sort. Either I have been imposed upon by what I have heard of the Black Forest, or this is not the Black Forest. I’m inclined to believe that there is no Black Forest, and never was. There isn’t,” he added, looking again, so as not to speak hastily, “a charcoal-burner, or an Easter egg, or a cherry blossom, or a yellow braid, or a red waistcoat, to enliven the whole desolate landscape. What are we to think of it, Bessie?”

Mrs. Kenton, who sat opposite, huddled in speechless comfort under her wraps and rugs, and was just trying to decide in her own mind whether it was more delicious to let her feet, now that they were thoroughly warm, rest upon the carpet-covered cylinder of hot water, or hover just a hair’s breadth above it without touching it, answered a little impatiently that she did not know. In ordinary circumstances she would not have been so short with the colonel’s nonsense. She thought that was the way all men talked when they got well acquainted with you; and, as coming from a sex incapable of seriousness, she could have excused it if it had not interrupted her in her solution of so nice a problem. Colonel Kenton, however, did not mind. He at once possessed himself of much more than his share of the cylinder, extorting a cry of indignation from his wife, who now saw herself reduced from a fastidious choice of luxuries to a mere vulgar strife for the necessaries of life, — a thing any woman abhors.

“Well, well,” said the colonel, “keep your old hot-water bottle. If there was any other way of warming my feet, I wouldn’t touch it. It makes me sick to use it; I feel as if the doctor was going to order me some boneset tea. Give me a good red-hot patent car-heater, that smells enough of burning iron to make your head ache in a minute, and sets your car on fire as soon as it rolls over the embankment. That’s what I call comfort. A hot-water bottle shoved under your feet — I should suppose I was a woman, and a feeble one at that. I’ll tell you what I think about this Black Forest business, Bessie: I think it’s part of a system of deception that runs through the whole German character. I have heard the Germans praised for their sincerity and honesty, but I tell you they have got to work hard to convince me of it, from this out. I am on my guard. I am not going to be taken in any more.”

It became the colonel’s pleasure to develop and exemplify this idea at all points of their progress through Germany. They were going to Italy, and as Mrs. Kenton had had enough of the sea in coming to Europe, they were going to Italy by the only all-rail route then existing, — from Paris to Vienna, and so down through the Simmering to Trieste and Venice. Wherever they stopped, whatever they did before reaching Vienna, Colonel Kenton chose to preserve his guarded attitude. “Ah, they pretend this is Stuttgart, do they?” he said on arriving at the Suabian capital. “A likely story! They pretended that was the Black Forest, you know, Bessie.” At Munich, “And this is Munich!” he sneered, whenever the conversation flagged during their sojourn. “It’s outrageous, the way they let these swindling little towns palm themselves off upon the traveller for cities he’s heard of. This place will be calling itself Berlin, next.” When his wife, guide-book in hand, was struggling to heat her admiration at some cold history of Kaulbach, and in her failure clinging fondly to the fact that Kaulbach had painted it, “Kaulbach!” the colonel would exclaim, and half close his eyes and slowly nod his head and smile. “What guide-book is that you’ve got, Bessie?” looking curiously at the volume he knew so well. “Oh! — Baedeker! And are you going to let a Black Forest Dutchman like Baedeker persuade you that this daub is by Kaulbach? Come! That’s a little too much!” He rejected the birthplaces of famous persons one and all; they could not drive through a street or into a park, whose claims to be this or that street or park he did not boldly dispute; and he visited a pitiless incredulity upon the dishes of the table d’hôte, concerning which he always answered his wife’s questions: “Oh, he says it’s beef,” or veal, or fowl, as the case might be; and though he never failed to relish his own dinner, strange fears began to affect the appetite of Mrs. Kenton. It happened that he never did come out with these sneers before other travellers, but his wife was always expecting him to do so, and afterwards portrayed herself as ready to scream, the whole time. She was not a nervous person, and regarding the colonel’s jokes as part of the matrimonial contract, she usually bore them, as I have hinted, with severe composure; accepting them all, good, bad, and indifferent, as something in the nature of man which she should understand better after they had been married longer. The present journey was made just after the close of the war; they had seen very little of each other while he was in the army, and it had something of the fresh interest of a bridal tour. But they sojourned only a day or two in the places between Strasburg and Vienna; it was very cold and very unpleasant getting about, and they instinctively felt what every wise traveller knows, that it is folly to be lingering in Germany when you can get into Italy; and so they hurried on.

It was nine o’clock one night when they reached Salzburg; and when their baggage had been visited and their passports examined, they had still half an hour to wait before the train went on. They profited by the delay to consider what hotel they should stop at in Vienna, and they advised with their Bradshaw on the point. This railway guide gave in its laconic fashion several hotels, and specified the Kaiserin Elisabeth as one at which there was a table d’hôte, briefly explaining that at most hotels in Vienna there was none.

“That settles it,” said Mrs. Kenton. “We will go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, of course. I’m sure I never want the bother of ordering dinner in English, let alone German, which never was meant for human beings to speak.”

“It’s a language you can’t tell the truth in,” said the colonel thoughtfully. “You can’t call an open country an open country; you have to call it a Black Forest.” Mrs. Kenton sighed patiently. “But I don’t know about this Kaiserin Elisabeth business. How do we know that’s the real name of the hotel? How can we be sure that it isn’t an alias, an assumed name, trumped up for the occasion? I tell you, Bessie, we can’t be too cautious as long as we’re in this fatherland of lies. What guide-book is this? Baedeker? Oh! Bradshaw. Well, that’s some comfort. Bradshaw’s an Englishman, at least. If it had been Baedeker” —

“Oh, Edward, Edward!” Mrs. Kenton burst out. “Will you never give that up? Here you’ve been harping on it for the last four days, and worrying my life out with it. I think it’s unkind. It’s perfectly bewildering me. I don’t know where or what I am, any more.” Some tears of vexation started to her eyes, at which Colonel Kenton put the shaggy arm of his overcoat round her, and gave her an honest hug.

“Well,” he said, “I give it up, from this out. Though I shall always say that it was a joke that wore well. And I can tell you, Bessie, that it’s no small sacrifice to give up a joke that you’ve just got into prime working order, so that you can use it on almost anything that comes up. But that’s a thing that you can never understand. Let it all pass. We’ll go to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and submit to any sort of imposition they’ve a mind to practise upon us. I shall not breathe freely, I suppose, till we get into Italy, where people mean what they say. Haw, haw, haw!” laughed the colonel, “honest Iago’s the man I’m after.”

The doors of the waiting-room were thrown open, and cries of “Erste Klasse! Zweite Klasse! Dritte Klasse!” summoned the variously assorted passengers to carriages of their several degrees. The colonel lifted his little wife into a non-smoking first-class carriage, and established her against the cushioned barrier dividing the two seats, so that her feet could just reach the hot-water bottle, as he called it, and tucked her in and built her up so with wraps that she was a prodigy of comfort; and then folding about him the long fur-lined coat which she had bought him at Munich (in spite of his many protests that the fur was artificial), he sat down on the seat opposite, and proudly enjoyed the perfect content that beamed from Mrs. Kenton’s face, looking so small from her heap of luxurious coverings.

“Well, Bessie, this would be very pleasant — if you could believe in it,” he said, as the train smoothly rolled out of the station. “But of course it can’t be genuine. There must be some dodge about it. I’ve no doubt you’ll begin to feel perfectly horrid, the first thing you know.”

Mrs. Kenton let him go on, as he did at some length, and began to drowse, while he amused himself with a gross parody of things she had said during the past four days. In those years while their wedded bliss was yet practically new, Colonel Kenton found his wife an inexhaustible source of mental refreshment. He prized beyond measure the feminine inadequacy and excess of her sayings; he had stored away such a variety of these that he was able to talk her personal parlance for an hour together; indeed, he had learned the trick of inventing phrases so much in her manner that Mrs. Kenton never felt quite safe in disowning any monstrous thing attributed to her. Her drowse now became a little nap, and presently a delicious doze, in which she drifted far away from actual circumstance into a realm where she seemed to exist as a mere airy thought of her physical self; suddenly she lost this thought, and slept through all stops at stations and all changes of the hot-water cylinder, to renew which the guard, faithful to Colonel Kenton’s bribe, alone opened the door.

“Wake up, Bessie!” she heard her husband saying. “We’re at Vienna.”

It seemed very improbable, but she did not dispute it. “What time is it?” she asked, as she suffered herself to be lifted from the carriage into the keen air of the winter night.

“Three o’clock,” said the colonel, hurrying her into the waiting-room, where she sat, still somewhat remote from herself but getting nearer and nearer, while he went off about the baggage. “Now, then!” he cried cheerfully when he returned; and he led his wife out and put her into a fiacre. The driver bent from his perch and arrested the colonel, as he was getting in after Mrs. Kenton, with words in themselves unintelligible, but so probably in demand for neglected instructions that the colonel said, “Oh! Kaiserin Elisabeth!” and again bowed his head towards the fiacre door, when the driver addressed further speech to him, so diffuse and so presumably unnecessary that Colonel Kenton merely repeated, with rising impatience, “Kaiserin Elisabeth, — Kaiserin Elisabeth, I tell you!” and getting in shut the fiacre door after him.

The driver remained a moment in mumbled soliloquy; then he smacked his whip and drove rapidly away. They were aware of nothing outside but the starlit winter morning in unknown streets, till they plunged at last under an archway and drew up at a sort of lodge door, from which issued an example of the universal gold-cap-banded continental hotel portier, so like all others in Europe that it seemed idle for him to be leading an individual existence. He took the colonel’s passport and summoned a waiter, who went bowing before them up a staircase more or less grandiose, and led them to a pleasant chamber, whither he sent directly a woman servant. She bade them a hearty good morning in her tongue, and, kneeling down before the tall porcelain stove, kindled from her apronful of blocks and sticks a fire that soon penetrated the travellers with a rich comfort. It was of course too early yet to think of breakfast, but it was fortunately not too late to think of sleep. They were both very tired, and it was almost noon when they woke. The colonel had the fire rekindled, and he ordered breakfast to be served them in their room. “Beefsteak and coffee — here!” he said, pointing to the table; and as he made Mrs. Kenton snug near the stove he expatiated in her own terms upon the perfect loveliness of the whole affair, and the touch of nature that made coffee and beefsteak the same in every language. It seemed that the Kaiserin Elisabeth knew how to serve such a breakfast in faultless taste; and they sat long over it, in that sense of sovereign satisfaction which beefsteak and coffee in your own room can best give. At last the colonel rose briskly and announced the order of the day. They were to go here, they were to stop there; they were to see this, they were to do that.

“Nothing of the kind,” said Mrs. Kenton. “I am not going out at all to-day. It’s too cold; and if we are to push on to Trieste to-morrow, I shall need the whole day to get a little rested. Besides, I have some jobs of mending to do that can’t be put off any longer.”

The colonel listened with an air of joyous admiration. “Bessie,” said he, “this is inspiration. I don’t want to see their old town; and I shall ask nothing better than to spend the day with you here at our own fireside. You can sew, and I — I’ll read to you, Bessie!” This was a little too gross; even Mrs. Kenton laughed at this, the act of reading being so abhorrent to Colonel Kenton’s active temperament that he was notorious for his avoidance of all literature except newspapers. In about ten minutes, passed in an agreeable idealization of his purpose, which came in that time to include the perusal of all the books on Italy he had picked up on their journey, the colonel said he would go down and ask the portier if they had the New York papers.

When he returned, somewhat disconsolate, to say they had not, and had apparently never heard of the Herald or Tribune, his wife smiled subtly: “Then I suppose you’ll have to go to the consul’s for them.”

“Why, Bessie, it isn’t a thing I should have suggested; I can’t bear the thoughts of leaving you here alone; but as you say! No, I’ll tell you: I’ll not go for the New York papers, but I will just step round and call upon the representative of the country — pay my respects to him, you know — if you wish it. But I’d far rather spend the time here with you, Bessie, in our cosy little boudoir; I would, indeed.”

Mrs. Kenton now laughed outright, and — it was a tremendous sarcasm for her — asked him if he were not afraid the example of the Black Forest was becoming infectious.

“Oh, come now, Bessie; no joking,” pleaded the colonel, in mock distress. “I’ll tell you what, my dear, the head waiter here speaks English like a — an Ollendorff; and if you get to feeling a little lonesome while I’m out, you can just ring and order something from him, you know. It will cheer you up to hear the sound of your native tongue in a foreign land. But, pshaw! I sha’nt be gone a minute!”

By this time the colonel had got on his overcoat and gloves, and had his hat in one hand, and was leaning over his wife, resting the other hand on the back of the chair in which she sat warming the toes of her slippers at the draft of the stove. She popped him a cheery little kiss on his mustache, and gave him a small push: “Stay as long as you like, Ned. I shall not be in the least lonesome. I shall do my mending, and then I shall take a nap, and by that time it will be dinner. You needn’t come back before dinner. What hour is the table d’hôte?”

“Oh!” cried the colonel guiltily. “The fact is, I wasn’t going to tell you, I thought it would vex you so much: there is no table d’hôte here and never was. Bradshaw has been depraved by the moral atmosphere of Germany. I’d as soon trust Baedeker after this.”

“Well, never mind,” said Mrs. Kenton. “We can tell them to bring us what they like for dinner, and we can have it whenever we like.”

“Bessie!” exclaimed the colonel, “I have not done justice to you, and I supposed I had. I knew how bright and beautiful you were, but I didn’t think you were so amiable. I didn’t, indeed. This is a real surprise,” he said, getting out at the door. He opened it to add that he would be back in an hour, and then he went his way, with the light heart of a husband who has a day to himself with his wife’s full approval.

At the consulate a still greater surprise awaited Colonel Kenton. This was the consul himself, who proved to be an old companion-in-arms, and into whose awful presence the colonel was ushered by a Hausmeister in a cocked hat and a gold-braided uniform finer than that of all the American major-generals put together. The friends both shouted “Hollo!” and “You don’t say so!” and threw back their heads and laughed.

“Why, didn’t you know I was here?” demanded the consul when the hard work of greeting was over. “I thought everybody knew that.”

“Oh, I knew you were rusting out in some of these Dutch towns, but I never supposed it was Vienna. But that doesn’t make any difference, so long as you are here.” At this they smacked each other on the knees, and laughed again. That carried them by a very rough point in their astonishment, and they now composed themselves to the pleasure of telling each other how they happened to be then and there, with glances at their personal history when they were making it together in the field.

“Well, now, what are you going to do the rest of the day?” asked the consul at last, with a look at his watch. “As I understand it, you ‘re going to spend it with me, somehow. The question is, how would you like to spend it?”

“This is a handsome offer, Davis; but I don’t see how I’m to manage exactly,” replied the colonel, for the first time distinctly recalling the memory of Mrs. Kenton. “My wife wouldn’t know what had become of me, you know.”

“Oh, yes, she would,” retorted the consul, with a bachelor’s ignorant ease of mind on a point of that kind. “We’ll go round and take her with us.”

The colonel gravely shook his head. “She wouldn’t go, old fellow. She’s in for a day’s rest and odd jobs. I’ll tell you what, I’ll just drop round and let her know I’ve found you, and then come back again. You’ll dine with us, won’t you?” Colonel Kenton had not always found old comradeship a bond between Mrs. Kenton and his friends, but he believed he could safely chance it with Davis, whom she had always rather liked, — with such small regard as a lady’s devotion to her husband leaves her for his friends.

“Oh, I’ll dine with you fast enough,” said his friend. “But why don’t you send a note to Mrs. Kenton to say that we’ll be round together, and save yourself the bother? Did you come here alone?”

“Bless your heart, no! I forgot him. The poor devil’s out there, cooling his heels on your stairs all this time. I came with a complete guide to Vienna. Can’t you let him in out of the weather a minute?”

“We’ll have him in, so that he can take your note back; but he doesn’t expect to be decently treated: they don’t, here. You just sit down and write it,” said the consul, pushing the colonel into his own chair before his desk; and when the colonel had superscribed his note, he called in the Lohndiener, — patient, hat in hand, — and, “Where are you stopping?” he asked the colonel.

“Oh, I forgot that. At the Kaiserin Elisabeth. I’ll just write it” —

“Never mind; we’ll tell him where to take it. See here,” added the consul in a serviceable Viennese German of his own construction. “Take this to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, quick;” and as the man looked up in a dull surprise, “Do you hear? The Kaiserin Elisabeth!”

“I don’t know what it is about that hotel,” said the colonel, when the man had meekly bowed himself away, with a hat that swept the ground in honor of a handsome drink-money; “but the mention of it always seems to awaken some sort of reluctance in the minds of the lower classes. Our driver wanted to enter into conversation with me about it this morning at three o’clock, and I had to be pretty short with him. If you don’t know the language, it isn’t so difficult to be short in German as I’ve heard. And another curious thing is that Bradshaw says the Kaiserin Elisabeth has a table d’hôte, and the head-waiter says she hasn’t, and never did have.”

“Oh, you can’t trust anybody in Europe,” said the consul sententiously. “I’d leave Bradshaw and the waiter to fight it out among themselves. We’ll get back in time to order a dinner; it’s always better, and then we can dine alone, and have a good time.”

“They couldn’t keep us from having a good time at a table d’hôte, even. But I don’t mind.”

By this time they had got on their hats and coats and sallied forth. They first went to a café and had some of that famous Viennese coffee; and then they went to the imperial and municipal arsenals, and viewed those collections of historical bricabrac, including the head of the unhappy Turkish general who was strangled by his sovereign because he failed to take Vienna in 1683. This from familiarity had no longer any effect upon the consul, but it gave Colonel Kenton prolonged pause. “I should have preferred a subordinate position in the sultan’s army, I believe,” he said. “Why, Davis, what a museum we could have had out of the Army of the Potomac alone, if Lincoln had been as particular as that sultan!”

From the arsenals they went to visit the parade-ground of the garrison, and came in time to see a manœuvre of the troops, at which they looked with the frank respect and reserved superiority with which our veterans seem to regard the military of Europe. Then they walked about and noted the principal monuments of the city, and strolled along the promenades and looked at the handsome officers and the beautiful women. Colonel Kenton admired the life and the gay movement everywhere; since leaving Paris he had seen nothing so much like New York. But he did not like their shovelling up the snow into carts everywhere and dumping all that fine sleighing into the Danube. “By the way,” said his friend, “let’s go over into Leopoldstadt, and see if we can’t scare up a sleigh for a little turn in the suburbs.”

“It’s getting late, isn’t it?” asked the colonel.

“Not so late as it looks. You know we haven’t the high American sun, here.”

Colonel Kenton was having such a good time that he felt no trouble about his wife, sitting over her mending in the Kaiserin Elisabeth; and he yielded joyfully, thinking how much she would like to hear about the suburbs of Vienna: a husband will go through almost any pleasure in order to give his wife an entertaining account of it afterwards; besides, a bachelor companionship is confusing: it makes many things appear right and feasible which are perhaps not so. It was not till their driver, who had turned out of the beaten track into a wayside drift to make room for another vehicle, attempted to regain the road by too abrupt a movement, and the shafts of their sledge responded with a loud crick-crack, that Colonel Kenton perceived the error into which he had suffered himself to be led. At three miles’ distance from the city, and with the winter twilight beginning to fall, he felt the pang of a sudden remorse. It grew sorer with every homeward step and with each successive failure to secure a conveyance for their return. In fine, they trudged back to Leopoldstadt, where an absurd series of discomfitures awaited them in their attempts to get a fiacre over into the main city. They visited all the stands known to the consul, and then they were obliged to walk. But they were not tired, and they made their distance so quickly that Colonel Kenton’s spirits rose again. He was able for the first time to smile at their misadventure, and some misgivings as to how Mrs. Kenton might stand affected towards a guest under the circumstances yielded to the thought of how he should make her laugh at them both. “Good old Davis!” mused the colonel, and affectionately linked his arm through that of his friend; and they stamped through the brilliantly lighted streets gay with uniforms and the picturesque costumes with which the Levant at Vienna encounters the London and Paris fashions. Suddenly the consul arrested their movement. “Didn’t you say you were stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth?”

“Why, yes; certainly.”

“Well, it’s just around the corner, here.” The consul turned him about, and in another minute they walked under an archway into a court-yard, and were met by the portier at the door of his room with an inquiring obeisance.

Colonel Kenton started. The cap and the cap-band were the same, and it was to all intents and purposes the same portier who had bowed him away in the morning; but the face was different. On noting this fact Colonel Kenton observed so general a change in the appointments and even architecture of the place that, “Old fellow,” he said to the consul, “you’ve made a little mistake; this isn’t the Kaiserin Elisabeth.”

The consul referred the matter to the portier. Perfectly; that was the Kaiserin Elisabeth. “Well, then,” said the colonel, “tell him to have us shown to my room.” The portier discovered a certain embarrassment when the colonel’s pleasure was made known to him, and ventured something in reply which made the consul smile.

“Look here, Kenton,” he said, “you’ve made a little mistake, this time. You’re not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth!”

“Oh, pshaw! Come now! Don’t bring the consular dignity so low as to enter into a practical joke with a hotel porter. It won’t do. We got into Vienna this morning at three, and drove straight to the Kaiserin Elisabeth. We had a room and fire, and breakfast about noon. Tell him who I am, and what I say.”

The consul did so, the portier slowly and respectfully shaking his head at every point. When it came to the name, he turned to his books, and shook his head yet more impressively. Then he took down a letter, spelled its address, and handed it to the colonel; it was his own note to Mrs. Kenton. That quite crushed him. He looked at it in a dull, mechanical way, and nodded his head with compressed lips. Then he scanned the portier, and glanced round once more at the bedevilled architecture. “Well,” said he, at last, “there’s a mistake somewhere. Unless there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths — . Davis, ask him if there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths.”

The consul compassionately put the question, received with something like grief by the portier. Impossible!

“Then I’m not stopping at either of them,” continued the colonel. “So far, so good, — if you want to call it good. The question is now, if I’m not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth,” he demanded, with sudden heat, and raising his voice, “how the devil did I get there?”

The consul at this broke into a fit of laughter so violent that the portier retired a pace or two from these maniacs, and took up a safe position within his doorway. “You didn’t — you didn’t — get there!” shrieked the consul. “That’s what made the whole trouble. You — you meant well, but you got somewhere else.” He took out his handkerchief and wiped the tears from his eyes.

The colonel did not laugh; he had no real pleasure in the joke. On the contrary, he treated it as a serious business. “Very well,” said he, “it will be proved next that I never told that driver to take me to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, as it appears that I never got there and am not stopping there. Will you be good enough to tell me,” he asked, with polished sarcasm, “where I am stopping, and why, and how?’

“I wish with all my heart I could,” gasped his friend, catching his breath, “but I can’t, and the only way is to go round to the principal hotels till we hit the right one. It won’t take long. Come!” He passed his arm through that of the colonel, and made an explanation to the portier, as if accounting for the vagaries of some harmless eccentric he had in charge. Then he pulled his friend gently away, who yielded after a survey of the portier and the court-yard with a frown in which an indignant sense of injury quite eclipsed his former bewilderment. He had still this defiant air when they came to the next hotel, and used the portier with so much severity on finding that he was not stopping there, either, that the consul was obliged to protest: “If you behave in that way, Kenton, I won’t go with you. The man’s perfectly innocent of your stopping at the wrong place; and some of these hotel people know me, and I won’t stand your bullying them. And I tell you what: you’ve got to let me have my laugh out, too. You know the thing’s perfectly ridiculous, and there’s no use putting any other face on it.” The consul did not wait for leave to have his laugh out, but had it out in a series of furious gusts. At last the colonel himself joined him ruefully.

“Of course,” said he, “I know I’m an ass, and I wouldn’t mind it on my own account. I would as soon roam round after that hotel the rest of the night as not, but I can’t help feeling anxious about my wife. I’m afraid she’ll be getting very uneasy at my being gone so long. She’s all alone, there, wherever it is, and—”

“Well, but she’s got your note. She’ll understand—”

“What a fool you are, Davis! There’s my note!” cried the colonel, opening his fist and showing a very small wad of paper in his palm. “She’d have got my note if she’d been at the Kaiserin Elisabeth; but she’s no more there than I am.”

“Oh!” said his friend, sobered at this. “To be sure! Well?”

“Well, it’s no use trying to tell a man like you; but I suppose that she’s simply distracted by this time. You don’t know what a woman is, and how she can suffer about a little matter when she gives her mind to it.”

“Oh!” said the consul again, very contritely. “I’m very sorry I laughed; but” — here he looked into the colonel’s gloomy face with a countenance contorted with agony— “this only makes it the more ridiculous, you know;” and he reeled away, drunk with the mirth which filled him from head to foot. But he repented again, and with a superhuman effort so far subdued his transports as merely to quake internally, and tremble all over, as he led the way to the next hotel, arm in arm with the bewildered and embittered colonel. He encouraged the latter with much genuine sympathy, and observed a proper decorum in his interviews with one portier after another, formulating the colonel’s story very neatly, and explaining at the close that this American Herr, who had arrived at Vienna before daylight and directed his driver to take him to the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and had left his hotel at one o’clock in the belief that it was the Kaiserin Elisabeth, felt now an added eagerness to know what his hotel really was from the circumstance that his wife was there quite alone and in probable distress at his long absence. At first Colonel Kenton took a lively interest in this statement of his case, and prompted the consul with various remarks and sub-statements; he was grateful for the compassion generally shown him by the portiers, and he strove with himself to give some account of the exterior and locality of his mysterious hotel. But the fact was that he had not so much as looked behind him when he quitted it, and knew nothing about its appearance; and gradually the reiteration of the points of his misadventure to one portier after another began to be as “a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” His personation of an American Herr in great trouble of mind was an entire failure, except as illustrating the national apathy of countenance when under the influence of strong emotion. He ceased to take part in the consul’s efforts in his behalf; the whole abominable affair seemed as far beyond his forecast or endeavor as some result of malign enchantment, and there was no such thing as carrying off the tragedy with self-respect. Distressing as it was, there could be no question but it was entirely ridiculous; he hung his head with shame before the portiers at being a party to it; he no longer felt like resenting Davis’s amusement; he only wondered that he could keep his face in relating the idiotic mischance. Each successive failure to discover his lodging confirmed him in his humiliation and despair. Very likely there was a way out of the difficulty, but he did not know it. He became at last almost an indifferent spectator of the consul’s perseverance. He began to look back with incredulity at the period of his life passed before entering the fatal fiacre that morning. He received the final portier’s rejection with something like a personal derision.

“That’s the last place I can think of,” said the consul, wiping his brow as they emerged from the court-yard, for he had grown very warm with walking so much.

“Oh, all right,” said the colonel languidly.

“But we won’t give it up. Let’s go in here and get some coffee, and think it over a bit.” They were near one of the principal cafés, which was full of people smoking, and drinking the Viennese mélange out of tumblers.

“By all means,” assented Colonel Kenton with inconsequent courtliness, “think it over. It’s all that’s left us.”

Matters did not look so dark, quite, after a tumbler of coffee with milk, but they did not continue to brighten so much as they ought with the cigars. “Now let us go through the facts of the case,” said the consul, and the colonel wearily reproduced his original narrative with every possible circumstance. “But you know all about it,” he concluded. “I don’t see any end of it. I don’t see but I’m to spend the rest of my life in hunting up a hotel that professes to be the Kaiserin Elisabeth, and isn’t. I never knew anything like it.”

“It certainly has the charm of novelty,” gloomily assented the consul: it must be owned that his gloom was a respectful feint. “I have heard of men running away from their hotels, but I never did hear of a hotel running away from a man before now. Yes — hold on! I have, too. Aladdin’s palace — and with Mrs. Aladdin in it, at that! It’s a parallel case.” Here he abandoned himself as usual, while Colonel Kenton viewed his mirth with a dreary grin. When he at last caught his breath, “I beg your pardon, I do, indeed,” the consul implored. “I know just how you feel, but of course it’s coming out right. We’ve been to all the hotels I know of, but there must be others. We’ll get some more names and start at once; and if the genie has dropped your hotel anywhere this side of Africa we shall find it. If the worst comes to the worst, you can stay at my house to-night and start new to-m — Oh, I forgot! — Mrs. Kenton! Really, the whole thing is such an amusing muddle that I can’t seem to get over it.” He looked at Kenton with tears in his eyes, but contained himself and decorously summoned a waiter, who brought him whatever corresponds to a city directory in Vienna. “There!” he said, when he had copied into his note-book a number of addresses, “I don’t think your hotel will escape us this time;” and discharging his account he led the way to the door, Colonel Kenton listlessly following.

The wretched husband was now suffering all the anguish of a just remorse, and the heartlessness of his behavior in going off upon his own pleasure the whole afternoon and leaving his wife alone in a strange hotel to pass the time as she might was no less a poignant reproach, because it seemed so inconceivable in connection with what he had always taken to be the kindness and unselfishness of his character. We all know the sensation; and I know none, on the whole, so disagreeable, so little flattering, so persistent when once it has established itself in the ill-doer’s consciousness. To find out that you are not so good or generous or magnanimous as you thought is, next to having other people find it out, probably the unfriendliest discovery that can be made. But I suppose it has its uses. Colonel Kenton now saw the unhandsomeness of his leaving his wife at all, and he beheld in its true light his shabbiness in not going back to tell her he had found his old friend and was to bring him to dinner. The Lohndiener would of course have taken him straight to his hotel, and he would have been spared this shameful exposure, which, he knew well enough, Davis would never forget, but would tell all his life with an ever-increasing garniture of fiction. He cursed his weakness in allowing himself to dawdle about those arsenals and that parade-ground, and to be so far misguided by a hardened bachelor as to admire certain yellow-haired German and black-haired Hungarian women on the promenade; when he came to think of going out in that sledge, it was with anathema maranatha. He groaned in spirit, but he owned that he was rightly punished, though it seemed hard that his wife should be punished too. And then he went on miserably to figure first her slight surprise at his being gone so long; then her vague uneasiness and her conjectures; then her dawning apprehensions and her helplessness; her probable sending to the consulate to find out what had become of him; her dismay at learning nothing of him there; her waiting and waiting in wild dismay as the moments and hours went by; her frenzied running to the door at every step and her despair when it proved not his. He had seen her suffering from less causes. And where was she? In what low, shabby tavern had he left her? He choked with rage and grief, and could hardly speak to the gentleman, a naturalized fellow-citizen of Vienna, to whom he found the consul introducing him.

“I wonder if you can’t help us,” said the consul. “My friend here is the victim of a curious annoyance;” and he stated the case in language so sympathetic and decorous as to restore some small shreds of the colonel’s self-respect.

“Ah,” said their new acquaintance, who was mercifully not a man of humor, or too polite to seem so, “that’s another trick of those scamps of fiacre-drivers. He took you purposely to the wrong hotel, and was probably feed by the landlord for bringing you. But why should you make yourselves so much trouble? You know Colonel Kenton’s landlord had to send his name to the police as soon as he came, and you can get his address there at once.”

“Good-by!” said the consul very hastily, with a crestfallen air. “Come along, Kenton.”

“What did he send my name to the police for?” demanded the colonel, in the open air.

“Oh, it’s a form. They do it with all travellers. It’s merely to secure the imperial government against your machinations.”

“And do you mean to say you ought to have known,” cried the colonel, halting him, “that you could have found out where I was from the police at once, before we had walked all over this moral vineyard, and wasted half a precious lifetime?”

“Kenton,” contritely admitted the other, “I never happened to think of it.”

“Well, Davis, you’re a pretty consul!” That was all the colonel said, and though his friend was voluble in self-exculpation and condemnation, he did not answer him a word till they arrived at the police office. A few brief questions and replies between the commissary and the consul solved the long mystery, and Colonel Kenton had once more a hotel over his head. The commissary certified to the respectability of the place, but invited the colonel to prosecute the driver of the fiacre in behalf of the general public, — which seemed so right a thing that the colonel entered into it with zeal, and then suddenly relinquished it, remembering that he had not the rogue’s number, that he had not so much as looked at him, and that he knew no more what manner of man he was than his own image in a glass. Under the circumstances, the commissary admitted that it was impossible, and as to bringing the landlord to justice, nothing could be proved against him.

“Will you ask him,” said the colonel, “the outside price of a first-class assault and battery in Vienna?”

The consul put as much of this idea into German as the language would contain, which was enough to make the commissary laugh and shake his head warningly.

“It wouldn’t do, he says, Kenton; it isn’t the custom of the country.”

“Very well, then, I don’t see why we should occupy his time.” He gave his hand to the commissary, whom he would have liked to embrace, and then hurried forth again with the consul. “There is one little thing that worries me still,” he said. “I suppose Mrs. Kenton is simply crazy by this time.”

“Is she of a very — nervous — disposition?” faltered the consul.

“Nervous? Well, if you could witness the expression of her emotions in regard to mice, you wouldn’t ask that question, Davis.”

At this desolating reply the consul was mute for a moment. Then he ventured: “I’ve heard — or read, I don’t know which — that women have more real fortitude than men, and that they find a kind of moral support in an actual emergency that they wouldn’t find in — mice.”

“Pshaw!” answered the colonel. “You wait till you see Mrs. Kenton.”

“Look here, Kenton,” said the consul seriously, and stopping short. “I’ve been thinking that perhaps — I — I had better dine with you some other day. The fact is, the situation now seems so purely domestic that a third person, you know—”

“Come along!” cried the colonel. “I want you to help me out of this scrape. I’m going to leave that hotel as soon as I can put my things together, and you’ve got to browbeat the landlord for me while I go up and reassure my wife long enough to get her out of that den of thieves. What did you say the scoundrelly name was?”

“The Gasthof zum Wilden Manne.”

“And what does Wildun Manny mean?”

“The Sign of the Savage, we should make it, I suppose, — the Wild Man.”

“Well, I don’t know whether it was named after me or not; but if I’d found that sign anywhere for the last four or five hours, I should have known it for home. There hasn’t been any wilder man in Vienna since the town was laid out, I reckon; and I don’t believe there ever was a wilder woman anywhere than Mrs. Kenton is at this instant.”

Arrived at the Sign of the Savage, Colonel Kenton left his friend below with the portier, and mounting the stairs three steps at a time flew to his room. Flinging open the door, he beheld his wife dressed in one of her best silks, before the mirror, bestowing some last prinks, touching her back hair with her hand and twitching the bow at her throat into perfect place. She smiled at him in the glass, and said, “Where’s Captain Davis?”

“Captain Davis?” gasped the colonel, dry-tongued with anxiety and fatigue. “Oh! He’s down there. He’ll be up directly.”

She turned and came forward to him: “How do you like it?” Then she advanced near enough to encounter the moustache: “Why, how heated and tired you look!”

“Yes, yes, — we’ve been walking. I — I’m rather late, ain’t I, Bessie?”

“About an hour. I ordered dinner at six, and it’s nearly seven now.” The colonel started; he had not dared to look at his watch, and he had supposed it must be about ten o’clock; it seemed years since his search for the hotel had begun. But he said nothing; he felt that in some mysterious and unmerited manner Heaven was having mercy upon him, and he accepted the grace in the sneaking way we all accept mercy. “I knew you’d stay longer than you expected, when you found it was Davis.”

“How did you know it was Davis?” asked the colonel, blindly feeling his way.

Mrs. Kenton picked up her Almanach de Gotha. “It has all the consular and diplomatic corps in it.”

“I won’t laugh at it any more,” said the colonel, humbly. “Weren’t you — uneasy, Bessie?”

“No. I mended away, here, and fussed round the whole afternoon, putting the trunks to rights; and I got out this dress and ran a bit of lace into the collar; and then I ordered dinner, for I knew you’d bring the captain; and I took a nap, and by that it was nearly dinner-time.”

“Oh!” said the colonel.

“Yes; and the head-waiter was as polite as peas; they’ve all been very attentive. I shall certainly recommend everybody to the Kaiserin Elisabeth.”

“Yes,” assented the wretched man. “I reckon it’s about the best hotel in Vienna.”

“Well, now, go and get Captain Davis. You can bring him right in here; we’re only travellers. Why, what makes you act so queerly? Has anything happened?” Mrs. Kenton was surprised to find herself gathered into her husband’s arms and embraced with a rapture for which she could see no particular reason.

“Bessie,” said her husband, “I told you this morning that you were amiable as well as bright and beautiful; I now wish to add that you are sensible. I’m awfully ashamed of being gone so long. But the fact is we had a little accident. Our sleigh broke down out in the country, and we had to walk back.”

“Oh, you poor old fellow! No wonder you look tired.”

He accepted the balm of her compassion like a candid and innocent man: “Yes, it was pretty rough. But I didn’t mind it, except on your account. I thought the delay would make you uneasy.” With that he went out to the head of the stairs and called, “Davis!”

“Yes!” responded the consul; and he ascended the stairs in such trepidation that he tripped and fell part of the way up.

“Have you been saying anything to that man about my going away?”

“No, I’ve simply been blowing him up on the fiacre driver’s account. He swears they are innocent of collusion. But of course they’re not.”

“Well, all right. Mrs. Kenton is waiting for us to go to dinner. And look here,” whispered the colonel, “don’t you open your mouth, except to put something into it, till I give you the cue.”

The dinner was charming, and had suffered little or nothing from the delay. Mrs. Kenton was in raptures with it, and after a thimbleful of the good Hungarian wine had attuned her tongue, she began to sing the praises of the Kaiserin Elisabeth.

“The K — —” began the consul, who had hitherto guarded himself very well. But the colonel arrested him at that letter with a terrible look. He returned the look with a glance of intelligence, and resumed: “The Kaiserin Elisabeth has the best cook in Vienna.”

“And everybody about has such nice, honest faces,” said Mrs. Kenton. “I’m sure I couldn’t have felt anxious if you hadn’t come till midnight: I knew I was perfectly secure here.”

“Quite right, quite right,” said the consul. “All classes of the Viennese are so faithful. Now, I dare say you could have trusted that driver of yours, who brought you here before daylight this morning, with untold gold. No stranger need fear any of the tricks ordinarily practised upon travellers in Vienna. They are a truthful, honest, virtuous population, — like all the Germans in fact.”

“There, Ned! What do you say to that, with your Black Forest nonsense?” triumphed Mrs. Kenton.

Colonel Kenton laughed sheepishly: “Well, I take it all back, Bessie. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the appearance of the Black Forest country when I came to it,” he explained to the consul, “and Mrs. Kenton and I had our little joke about the fraudulent nature of the Germans.”

“Our little joke!” retorted his wife. “I wish we were going to stay longer in Vienna. They say you have to make bargains for everything in Italy, and here I suppose I could shop just as at home.”

“Precisely,” said the consul; the Viennese shopkeepers being the most notorious Jews in Europe.

“Oh, we can’t stop longer than till the morning,” remarked the colonel. “I shall be sorry to leave Vienna and the Kaiserin Elizabeth, but we must go.”

“Better hang on awhile; you won’t find many hotels like it, Kenton,” observed his friend.

“No, I suppose not,” sighed the colonel; “but I’ll get the address of their correspondent in Venice and stop there.”

Thus these craven spirits combined to delude and deceive the helpless woman of whom half an hour before they had stood in such abject terror. If they had found her in hysterics they would have pitied and respected her; but her good sense, her amiability, and noble self-control subjected her to their shameless mockery.

Colonel Kenton followed the consul downstairs when he went away, and pretended to justify himself. “I’ll tell her one of these days,” he said, “but there’s no use distressing her now.”

“I didn’t understand you at first,” said the other. “But I see now it was the only way.”

“Yes; saves needless suffering. I say, Davis, this is about an even thing between us? A United States consul ought to be of some use to his fellow-citizens abroad; and if he allows them to walk their legs off hunting up a hotel which he could have found at the first police-station if he had happened to think of it, he won’t be very anxious to tell the joke, I suppose?”

“I don’t propose to write home to the papers about it.”

“All right.” So, in the court-yard of the Wild Man, they parted.

Long after that Mrs. Kenton continued to recommend people to the Kaiserin Elisabeth. Even when the truth was made known to her she did not see much to laugh at. “I’m sure I was always very glad the colonel didn’t tell me at once,” she said, “for if I had known what I had been through, I certainly should have gone distracted.”

TONELLI’S MARRIAGE.

There was no richer man in Venice than Tommaso Tonelli, who had enough on his florin a day; and none younger than he, who owned himself forty-seven years old. He led the cheerfullest life in the world, and was quite a monster of content; but when I come to sum up his pleasures, I fear that I shall appear to my readers to be celebrating a very insipid and monotonous existence. I doubt if even a summary of his duties could be made attractive to the conscientious imagination of hard-working people; for Tonelli’s labors were not killing, nor, for that matter, were those of any Venetian that I ever knew. He had a stated employment in the office of the notary Cenarotti; and he passed there so much of every working day as lies between nine and five o’clock, writing upon deeds and conveyances and petitions and other legal instruments for the notary, who sat in an adjoining room, secluded from nearly everything in this world but snuff. He called Tonelli by the sound of a little bell; and, when he turned to take a paper from his safe, he seemed to be abstracting some secret from long-lapsed centuries, which he restored again, and locked back among the dead ages when his clerk replaced the document in his hands. These hands were very soft and pale, and their owner was a colorless old man, whose silvery hair fell down a face nearly as white; but, as he has almost nothing to do with the present affair, I shall merely say that, having been compromised in the last revolution, he had been obliged to live ever since in perfect retirement, and that he seemed to have been blanched in this social darkness as a plant is blanched by growth in a cellar. His enemies said that he was naturally a timid man, but they could not deny that he had seen things to make the brave afraid, or that he had now every reason from the police to be secret and cautious in his life. He could hardly be called company for Tonelli, who must have found the day intolerably long but for the visit which the notary’s pretty granddaughter contrived to pay every morning in the cheerless mezzà. She commonly appeared on some errand from her mother, but her chief business seemed to be to share with Tonelli the modest feast of rumor and hearsay which he loved to furnish forth for her, and from which doubtless she carried back some fragments of gossip to the family apartments. Tonelli called her, with that mingled archness and tenderness of the Venetians, his Paronsina; and, as he had seen her grow up from the smallest possible of Little Mistresses, there was no shyness between them, and they were fully privileged to each other’s society by her mother. When she flitted away again, Tonelli was left to a stillness broken only by the soft breathing of the old man in the next room, and by the shrill discourse of his own loquacious pen, so that he was commonly glad enough when it came five o’clock. At this hour he put on his black coat, that shone with constant use, and his faithful silk hat, worn down to the pasteboard with assiduous brushing, and caught up a very jaunty cane in his hand. Then, saluting the notary, he took his way to the little restaurant, where it was his custom to dine, and had his tripe soup and his risotto, or dish of fried liver, in the austere silence imposed by the presence of a few poor Austrian captains and lieutenants. It was not that the Italians feared to be overheard by these enemies; but it was good dimostrazione to be silent before the oppressor, and not let him know that they even enjoyed their dinners well enough, under his government, to chat sociably over them. To tell the truth, this duty was an irksome one to Tonelli, who liked far better to dine, as he sometimes did, at a cook-shop, where he met the folk of the people (gente del popolo), as he called them; and where, though himself a person of civil condition, he discoursed freely with the other guests, and ate of their humble but relishing fare. He was known among them as Sior Tommaso; and they paid him a homage, which they enjoyed equally with him, as a person not only learned in the law, but a poet of gift enough to write wedding and funeral verses, and a veteran who had fought for the dead Republic of Forty-eight. They honored him as a most travelled gentleman, who had been in the Tyrol, and who could have spoken German, if he had not despised that tongue as the language of the ugly Croats, like one born to it. Who, for example, spoke Venetian more elegantly than Sior Tommaso? or Tuscan, when he chose? and yet he was poor, — a man of that genius! Patience! When Garibaldi came, we should see! The facchini and gondoliers, who had been wagging their tongues all day at the church corners and ferries, were never tired of talking of this gifted friend of theirs, when, having ended some impressive discourse or some dramatic story, he left them with a sudden adieu, and walked quickly away toward the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Here, whether he had dined at the cook-shop, or at his more genteel and gloomy restaurant of the Bronze Horses, it was his custom to lounge an hour or two over a cup of coffee and a Virginia cigar at one of the many caffès, and to watch all the world as it passed to and fro on the quay. Tonelli was gray, he did not disown it; but he always maintained that his heart was still young, and that there was, moreover, a great difference in persons as to age, which told in his favor. So he loved to sit there, and look at the ladies; and he amused himself by inventing a pet name for every face he saw, which he used to teach to certain friends of his, when they joined him over his coffee. These friends were all young enough to be his sons, and wise enough to be his fathers; but they were always glad to be with him, for he had so cheery a wit and so good a heart that neither his years nor his follies could make any one sad. His kind face beamed with smiles, when Pennellini, chief among the youngsters in his affections, appeared on the top of the nearest bridge, and thence descended directly towards his little table. Then it was that he drew out the straw which ran through the centre of his long Virginia, and lighted the pleasant weed, and gave himself up to the delight of making aloud those comments on the ladies which he had hitherto stifled in his breast. Sometimes he would feign himself too deeply taken with a passing beauty to remain quiet, and would make his friend follow with him in chase of her to the Public Gardens. But he was a fickle lover, and wanted presently to get back to his caffè, where, at decent intervals of days or weeks, he would indulge himself in discovering a spy in some harmless stranger, who, in going out, looked curiously at the scar Tonelli’s cheek had brought from the battle of Vicenza in 1848.

“Something of a spy, no?” he asked at these times of the waiter, who, flattered by the penetration of a frequenter of his caffè, and the implication that it was thought seditious enough to be watched by the police, assumed a pensive importance, and answered, “Something of a spy, certainly.”

Upon this Tonelli was commonly encouraged to proceed: “Did I ever tell you how I once sent one of those ugly muzzles out of a caffè? I knew him as soon as I saw him, — I am never mistaken in a spy, — and I went with my newspaper, and sat down close at his side. Then I whispered to him across the sheet, ‘We are two.’ ‘Eh?’ says he. ‘It is a very small caffè, and there is no need of more than one,’ and then I stared at him and frowned. He looks at me fixedly a moment, then gathers up his hat and gloves, and takes his pestilency off.”

The waiter, who had heard this story, man and boy, a hundred times, made a quite successful show of enjoying it, as he walked away with Tonelli’s fee of half a cent in his pocket. Tonelli then had left from his day’s salary enough to pay for the ice which he ate at ten o’clock, but which he would sometimes forego, in order to give the money in charity, though more commonly he indulged himself, and put off the beggar with, “Another time, my dear. I have no leisure now to discuss those matters with thee.”

On holidays this routine of Tonelli’s life was varied. In the forenoon he went to mass at St. Mark’s, to see the beauty and fashion of the city; and then he took a walk with his four or five young friends, or went with them to play at bowls, or even made an excursion to the main land, where they hired a carriage, and all those Venetians got into it, like so many seamen, and drove the horse with as little mercy as if he had been a sail-boat. At seven o’clock Tonelli dined with the notary, next whom he sat at table, and for whom his quaint pleasantries had a zest that inspired the Paronsina and her mother to shout them into his dull ears, that he might lose none of them. He laughed a kind of faded laugh at them, and, rubbing his pale hands together, showed by his act that he did not think his best wine too good for his kindly guest. The signora feigned to take the same delight shown by her father and daughter in Tonelli’s drolleries; but I doubt if she had a great sense of his humor, or, indeed, cared anything for it save as she perceived that it gave pleasure to those she loved. Otherwise, however, she had a sincere regard for him, for he was most useful and devoted to her in her quality of widowed mother; and if she could not feel wit, she could feel gratitude, which is perhaps the rarer gift, if not the more respectable.

The Little Mistress was dependent upon him for nearly all the pleasures and for the only excitements of her life. As a young girl she was at best a sort of caged bird, who had to be guarded against the youth of the other sex as if they, on their part, were so many marauding and ravening cats. During most days of the year the Paronsina’s parrot had almost as much freedom as she. He could leave his gilded prison when he chose, and promenade the notary’s house as far down as the marble well in the sunless court, and the Paronsina could do little more. The signora would as soon have thought of letting the parrot walk across their campo alone as her daughter, though the local dangers, either to bird or beauty, could not have been very great. The green-grocer of that sequestered campo was an old woman, the apothecary was gray, and his shop was haunted by none but superannuated physicians; the baker, the butcher, the waiters at the caffè were all professionally, and, as purveyors to her family, out of the question; the sacristan, who sometimes appeared at the perruquier’s to get a coal from under the curling-tongs to kindle his censer, had but one eye, which he kept single to the service of the Church, and his perquisite of candle-drippings; and I hazard little in saying that the Paronsina might have danced a polka around Campo San Giuseppe without jeopardy so far as concerned the handsome wood-carver, for his wife always sat in the shop beside him. Nevertheless, a custom is not idly handed down by mother to daughter from the dawn of Christianity to the middle of the nineteenth century; and I cannot deny that the local perruquier, though stricken in years, was still so far kept fresh by the immortal youth of the wax heads in his window as to have something beauish about him; or that, just at the moment the Paronsina chanced to go into the campo alone, a leone from Florian’s might not have been passing through it, when he would certainly have looked boldly at her, perhaps spoken to her, and possibly pounced at once upon her fluttering heart. So by day the Paronsina rarely went out, and she never emerged unattended from the silence and shadow of her grandfather’s house.

If I were here telling a story of the Paronsina, or indeed any story at all, I might suffer myself to enlarge somewhat upon the daily order of her secluded life, and show how the seclusion of other Venetian girls was the widest liberty as compared with hers; but I have no right to play with the reader’s patience in a performance that can promise no excitement of incident, no charm of invention. Let him figure to himself, if he will, the ancient and half-ruined palace in which the notary dwelt, with a gallery running along one side of its inner court, the slender pillars supporting upon the corroded sculpture of their capitals a clinging vine, that dappled the floor with palpitant light and shadow in the afternoon sun. The gate, whose exquisite Saracenic arch grew into a carven flame, was surmounted by the armorial bearings of a family that died of its sins against the Serenest Republic long ago; the marble cistern which stood in the middle of the court had still a ducal rose upon either of its four sides; and little lions of stone perched upon the posts at the head of the marble stairway climbing to the gallery, their fierce aspects worn smooth and amiable by the contact of hands that for many ages had mouldered in tombs. Toward the canal the palace windows had been immemorially bricked up for some reason or caprice, and no morning sunlight, save such as shone from the bright eyes of the Paronsina, ever looked into the dim halls. It was a fit abode for such a man as the notary, exiled in the heart of his native city, and it was not unfriendly in its influences to a quiet vegetation like the signora’s; but to the Paronsina it was sad as Venice itself, where, in some moods, I have wondered that any sort of youth could have the courage to exist. Nevertheless, the Paronsina had contrived to grow up here a child of the gayest and archest spirit, and to lead a life of due content, till after her return home from the comparative freedom and society of Madame Prateux’s school, where she spent three years in learning all polite accomplishments, and whence she came, with brilliant hopes and romances ready imagined, for any possible exigency of the future. She adored all the modern Italian poets, and read their verse with that stately and rhythmical fulness of voice which often made it sublime and always pleasing. She was a relentless patriot, an Italianissima of the vividest green, white, and red; and she could interpret the historical novels of her countrymen in their subtilest application to the modern enemies of Italy. But all the Paronsina’s gifts and accomplishments were to poor purpose, if they brought no young men a-wooing under her balcony; and it was to no effect that her fervid fancy peopled the palace’s empty halls with stately and gallant company out of Marco Visconti, Nicolò de’ Lapi, Margherita Pusterla, and the other romances, since she could not hope to receive any practicable offer of marriage from the heroes thus assembled. Her grandfather invited no guests of more substantial presence to his house. In fact, the police watched him too narrowly to permit him to receive society, even had he been so minded, and for kindred reasons his family paid few visits in the city. To leave Venice, except for the autumnal villeggiatura was almost out of the question; repeated applications at the Luogotenenza won the two ladies but a tardy and scanty grace; and the use of the passport allowing them to spend a few weeks in Florence was attended with so much vexation, in coming and going upon the imperial confines, and when they returned home they were subject to so great fear of perquisition from the police, that it was after all rather a mortification than a pleasure that the government had given them. The signora received her few acquaintances once a week; but the Paronsina found the old ladies tedious over their cups of coffee or tumblers of lemonade, and declared that her mamma’s reception days were a martyrdom, — actually a martyrdom, to her. She was full of life and the beautiful and tender longing of youth; she had a warm heart and a sprightly wit; but she led an existence scarce livelier than a ghost’s, and she was so poor in friends and resources that she shuddered to think what must become of her if Tonelli should die. It was not possible, thanks to God! that he should marry.

The signora herself seldom cared to go out, for the reason that it was too cold in winter and too hot in summer. In the one season she clung all day to her wadded arm-chair, with her scaldino in her lap; and in the other season she found it a sufficient diversion to sit in the great hall of the palace, and be fanned by the salt breeze that came from the Adriatic through the vine-garlanded gallery. But besides this habitual inclemency of the weather, which forbade out-door exercise nearly the whole year, it was a displeasure to walk in Venice on account of the stairways of the bridges; and the signora much preferred to wait till they went to the country in the autumn, when she always rode to take the air. The exceptions to her custom were formed by those after-dinner promenades which she sometimes made on holidays, in summer. Then she put on her richest black, and the Paronsina dressed herself in her best, and they both went to walk on the Molo, before the pillars of the lion and the saint, under the escort of Tonelli.

It often happened that, at the hour of their arrival on the Molo, the moon was coming up over the low bank of the Lido in the east, and all that prospect of ship-bordered quay, island, and lagoon, which, at its worst, is everything that heart can wish, was then at its best, and far beyond words to paint. On the right stretched the long Giudecca, with the domes and towers of its Palladian church, and the swelling foliage of its gardens, and its line of warehouses — painted pink, as if even Business, grateful to be tolerated amid such lovely scenes, had striven to adorn herself. In front lay San Giorgio, picturesque with its church and pathetic with its political prisons; and, farther away to the east again, the gloomy mass of the madhouse at San Servolo, and then the slender campanili of the Armenian convent rose over the gleaming and tremulous water. Tonelli took in the beauty of the scene with no more consciousness than a bird; but the Paronsina had learnt from her romantic poets and novelists to be complimentary to prospects, and her heart gurgled out in rapturous praises of this. The unwonted freedom exhilarated her; there was intoxication in the encounter of faces on the promenade, in the dazzle and glimmer of the lights, and even in the music of the Austrian band playing in the Piazza, as it came purified to her patriotic ear by the distance. There were none but Italians upon the Molo, and one might walk there without so much as touching an officer with the hem of one’s garment; and, a little later, when the band ceased playing, she should go with the other Italians and possess the Piazza for one blessed hour. In the mean time, the Paronsina had a sharp little tongue; and, after she had flattered the landscape, and had, from her true heart, once for all, saluted the promenaders as brothers and sisters in Italy, she did not mind making fun of their peculiarities of dress and person. She was signally sarcastic upon such ladies as Tonelli chanced to admire, and often so stung him with her jests that he was glad when Pennellini appeared, as he always did exactly at nine o’clock, and joined the ladies in their promenade, asking and answering all those questions of ceremony which form Venetian greeting. He was a youth of the most methodical exactness in his whole life, and could no more have arrived on the Molo a moment before or after nine than the bronze giants on the clock-tower could have hastened or lingered in striking the hour. Nature, which had made him thus punctual and precise, gave him also good looks, and a most amiable kindness of heart. The Paronsina cared nothing at all for him in his quality of handsome young fellow; but she prized him as an acquaintance whom she might salute, and be saluted by, in a city where her grandfather’s isolation kept her strange to nearly all the faces she saw. Sometimes her evenings on the Molo wasted away without the exchange of a word save with Tonelli, for her mother seldom talked; and then it was quite possible her teasing was greater than his patience, and that he grew taciturn under her tongue. At such times she hailed Pennellini’s appearance with a double delight; for, if he never joined in her attacks upon Tonelli’s favorites, he always enjoyed them, and politely applauded them. If his friend reproached him for this treason, he made him every amend in answering, “She is jealous, Tonelli,” — a wily compliment, which had the most intense effect in coming from lips ordinarily so sincere as his.

The signora was weary of the promenade long before the Austrian music ceased in the Piazza, and was very glad when it came time for them to leave the Molo, and go and sit down to an ice at the Caffè Florian. This was the supreme hour to the Paronsina, the one heavenly excess of her restrained and eventless life. All about her were scattered tranquil Italian idlers, listening to the music of the strolling minstrels who had succeeded the military band; on either hand sat her friends, and she had thus the image of that tender devotion without which a young girl is said not to be perfectly happy; while the very heart of adventure seemed to bound in her exchange of glances with a handsome foreigner at a neighboring table. On the other side of the Piazza a few officers still lingered at the Caffè Quadri; and at the Specchi sundry groups of citizens in their dark dress contrasted well with these white uniforms; but, for the most part, the moon and gas-jets shone upon the broad, empty space of the Piazza, whose loneliness the presence of a few belated promenaders only served to render conspicuous. As the giants hammered eleven upon the great bell, the Austrian sentinel, under the Ducal Palace, uttered a long, reverberating cry; and soon after a patrol of soldiers clanked across the Piazza, and passed with echoing feet through the arcade into the narrow and devious streets beyond. The young girl found it hard to rend herself from the dreamy pleasure of the scene, or even to turn from the fine impersonal pain which the presence of the Austrians in the spectacle inflicted. All gave an impression something like that of the theatre, with the advantage that here one’s self was part of the pantomime; and in those days, when nearly everything but the puppet-shows was forbidden to patriots, it was altogether the greatest enjoyment possible to the Paronsina. The pensive charm of the place imbued all the little company so deeply that they scarcely broke it, as they loitered slowly homeward through the deserted Merceria. When they reached the Campo San Salvatore, on many a lovely summer’s midnight, their footsteps seemed to waken a nightingale whose cage hung from a lofty balcony there; for suddenly, at their coming, the bird broke into a wild and thrilling song, that touched them all, and suffused the tender heart of the Paronsina with an inexpressible pathos.

Alas! she had so often returned thus from the Piazza, and no stealthy footstep had followed hers homeward with love’s persistence and diffidence! She was young, she knew, and she thought not quite dull or hideous; but her spirit was as sole in that melancholy city as if there were no youth but hers in the world. And a little later than this, when she had her first affair, it did not originate in the Piazza, nor at all respond to her expectations in a love-affair. In fact, it was altogether a business affair, and was managed chiefly by Tonelli, who having met a young doctor, laurelled the year before at Padua, had heard him express so pungent a curiosity to know what the Paronsina would have to her dower, that he perceived he must be madly in love with her. So with the consent of the signora he had arranged a correspondence between the young people; and all went on well at first, — the letters from both passing through his hands. But his office was anything but a sinecure, for while the Doctor was on his part of a cold temperament, and disposed to regard the affair merely as a proper way of providing for the natural affections, the Paronsina cared nothing for him personally, and only viewed him favorably as abstract matrimony, — as the means of escaping from the bondage of her girlhood and the sad seclusion of her life into the world outside her grandfather’s house. So presently the correspondence fell almost wholly upon Tonelli, who worked up to the point of betrothal with an expense of finesse and sentiment that would have made his fortune in diplomacy or poetry. What should he say now? that stupid young Doctor would cry in a desperation, when Tonelli delicately reminded him that it was time to answer the Paronsina’s last note. Say this, that, and the other, Tonelli would answer, giving him the heads of a proper letter, which the Doctor took down on square bits of paper, neatly fashioned for writing prescriptions. “And for God’s sake, caro dottore, put a little warmth into it!” The poor Doctor would try, but it must always end in Tonelli’s suggesting and almost dictating every sentence; and then the letter, being carried to the Paronsina made her laugh: “This is very pretty, my poor Tonelli, but it was never my onoratissimo dottore who thought of these tender compliments. Ah! that allusion to my mouth and eyes could only have come from the heart of a great poet. It is yours, Tonelli, don’t deny it.” And Tonelli, taken in his weak point of literature, could make but a feeble pretence of disclaiming the child of his fancy, while the Paronsina, being in this reckless humor, more than once responded to the Doctor in such fashion that in the end the inspiration of her altered and amended letter was Tonelli’s. Even after the betrothal, the lovemaking languished, and the Doctor was indecently patient of the late day fixed for the marriage by the notary. In fact, the Doctor was very busy; and, as his practice grew, the dower of the Paronsina dwindled in his fancy, till one day he treated the whole question of their marriage with such coldness and uncertainty in his talk with Tonelli, that the latter saw whither his thoughts were drifting, and went home with an indignant heart to the Paronsina, who joyfully sat down and wrote her first sincere letter to the Doctor, dismissing him.

“It is finished,” she said, “and I am glad. After all, perhaps, I don’t want to be any freer than I am; and while I have you, Tonelli, I don’t want a younger lover. Younger? Diana! You are in the flower of youth, and I believe you will never wither. Did that rogue of a Doctor, then, really give you the elixir of youth for writing him those letters? Tell me, Tonelli, as a true friend, how long have you been forty-seven? Ever since your fiftieth birthday? Listen! I have been more afraid of losing you than my sweetest Doctor. I thought you would be so much in love with lovemaking that you would go break-neck and court some one in earnest on your own account!”

Thus the Paronsina made a jest of the loss she had sustained; but it was not pleasant to her, except as it dissolved a tie which love had done nothing to form. Her life seemed colder and vaguer after it, and the hour very far away when the handsome officers of her king (all good Venetians in those days called Victor Emanuel “our king”) should come to drive out the Austrians, and marry their victims. She scarcely enjoyed the prodigious privilege, offered her at this time in consideration of her bereavement, of going to the comedy, under Tonelli’s protection and along with Pennellini and his sister, while the poor signora afterwards had real qualms of patriotism concerning the breach of public duty involved in this distraction of her daughter. She hoped that no one had recognized her at the theatre, otherwise they might have a warning from the Venetian Committee. “Thou knowest,” she said to the Paronsina, “that they have even admonished the old Conte Tradonico, who loves the comedy better than his soul, and who used to go every evening. Thy aunt told me, and that the old rogue, when people ask him why he doesn’t go to the play, answers, ‘My mistress won’t let me.’ But fie! I am saying what young girls ought not to hear.”

After the affair with the Doctor, I say, life refused to return exactly to its old expression, and I suppose that, if what presently happened was ever to happen, it could not have occurred at a more appropriate time for a disaster, or at a time when its victims were less able to bear it I do not know whether I have yet sufficiently indicated the fact, but the truth is both the Paronsina and her mother had from long use come to regard Tonelli as a kind of property of theirs, which had no right in any way to alienate itself. They would have felt an attempt of this sort to be not only very absurd, but very wicked, in view of their affection for him and dependence upon him; and while the Paronsina thanked God that he would never marry, she had a deep conviction that he ought not to marry, even if he desired. It was at the same time perfectly natural, nay, filial, that she should herself be ready to desert this old friend, whom she felt so strictly bound to be faithful to her loneliness. As matters fell out, she had herself primarily to blame for Tonelli’s loss; for, in that interval of disgust and ennui following the Doctor’s dismissal, she had suffered him to seek his own pleasure on holiday evenings; and he had thus wandered alone to the Piazza, and so, one night, had seen a lady eating an ice there, and fallen in love without more ado than another man should drink a lemonade.

This facility came of habit, for Tonelli had now been falling in love every other day for some forty years; and in that time had broken the hearts of innumerable women of all nations and classes. The prettiest water-carriers in his neighborhood were in love with him, as their mothers had been before them, and ladies of noble condition were believed to cherish passions for him. Especially, gay and beautiful foreigners, as they sat at Florian’s, were taken with hopeless love of him; and he could tell stories of very romantic adventure in which he figured as hero, though nearly always with moral effect. For example, there was the countess from the mainland, — she merited the sad distinction of being chief among those who had vainly loved him, if you could believe the poet who both inspired and sang her passion. When she took a palace in Venice, he had been summoned to her on the pretended business of a secretary; but when she presented herself with those idle accounts of her factor and tenants on the mainland, her household expenses and her correspondence with her advocate, Tonelli perceived at once that it was upon a wholly different affair that she had desired to see him. She was a rich widow of forty, of a beauty supernaturally preserved and very great. “This is no place for thee, Tonelli mine,” the secretary had said to himself, after a week had passed, and he had understood all the waywardness of that unhappy lady’s intentions. “Thou art not too old, but thou art too wise, for these follies, though no saint”; and so had gathered up his personal effects, and secretly quitted the palace. But such was the countess’s fury at his escape that she never paid him his week’s salary; nor did she manifest the least gratitude that Tonelli, out of regard for her son, a very honest young man, refused in any way to identify her, but, to all except his closest friends, pretended that he had passed those terrible eight days on a visit to the country village where he was born. It showed Pennellini’s ignorance of life that he should laugh at this history; and I prefer to treat it seriously, and to use it in explaining the precipitation with which Tonelli’s latest inamorata returned his love.

Though, indeed, why should a lady of thirty, and from an obscure country town, hesitate to be enamored of any eligible suitor who presented himself in Venice? It is not my duty to enter upon a detail or summary of Carlotta’s character or condition, or to do more than indicate that, while she did not greatly excel in youth, good looks, or worldly gear, she had yet a little property, and was of that soft prettiness which is often more effective than downright beauty. There was, indeed, something very charming about her; and, if she was a blonde, I have no reason to think she was as fickle as the Venetian proverb paints that complexion of woman; or that she had not every quality which would have excused any one but Tonelli for thinking of marrying her.

After their first mute interview in the Piazza, the two lost no time in making each other’s acquaintance; but though the affair was vigorously conducted, no one could say that it was not perfectly in order. Tonelli on the following day, which chanced to be Sunday, repaired to St. Mark’s at the hour of the fashionable mass, where he gazed steadfastly at the lady during her orisons, and whence, at a discreet distance, he followed her home to the house of the friends whom she was visiting. Somewhat to his discomfiture at first, these proved to be old acquaintances of his; and when he came at night to walk up and down under their balconies, as bound in true love to do, they made nothing of asking him indoors, and presenting him to his lady. But the pair were not to be entirely balked of their romance, and they still arranged stolen interviews at church, where one furtively whispered word had the value of whole hours of unrestricted converse under the roof of their friends. They quite refused to take advantage of their anomalously easy relations, beyond inquiry on his part as to the amount of the lady’s dower, and on hers as to the permanence of Tonelli’s employment. He in due form had Pennellini to his confidant, and Carlotta unbosomed herself to her hostess; and the affair was thus conducted with such secrecy that not more than two thirds of Tonelli’s acquaintance knew anything about it when their engagement was announced.

There were now no circumstances to prevent their early union, yet the happy conclusion was one to which Tonelli urged himself after many secret and bitter displeasures of spirit. I am persuaded that his love for Carlotta must have been most ardent and sincere, for there was everything in his history and reason against marriage. He could not disown that he had hitherto led a joyous and careless life, or that he was exactly fitted for the modest delights, the discreet variety, of his present state, — for his daily routine at the notary’s, his dinner at the Bronze Horses or the cook-shop, his hour at the caffè, his walks and excursions, for his holiday banquet with the Cenarotti, and his formal promenade with the ladies of that family upon the Molo. He had a good employment, with a salary that held him above want, and afforded him the small luxuries already named; and he had fixed habits of work and of relaxation, which made both a blessing. He had his chosen circle of intimate equals, who regarded him for his good-heartedness and wit and foibles; and his little following of humble admirers, who looked upon him as a gifted man in disgrace with fortune. His friendships were as old as they were secure and cordial; he was established in the kindliness of all who knew him; and he was flattered by the dependence of the Paronsina and her mother, even when it was troublesome to him. He had his past of sentiment and war, his present of story-telling and romance. He was quite independent: his sins, if he had any, began and ended in himself, for none was united to him so closely as to be hurt by them; and he was far too imprudent a man to be taken for an example by any one. He came and went as he listed, he did this or that without question. With no heart chosen yet from the world of woman’s love, he was still a young man, with hopes and affections as pliable as a boy’s. He had, in a word, that reputation of good-fellow which in Venice gives a man the title of buon diavolo, but on which he does not anywhere turn his back with impunity, either from his own consciousness or from public opinion. There never was such a thing in the world as both good devil and good husband; and even with his betrothal Tonelli felt that his old, careless, merry life of the hour ended, and that he had tacitly recognized a future while he was yet unable to cut the past. If one has for twenty years made a jest of women, however amiably and insincerely, one does not propose to marry a woman without making a jest of one’s self. The avenging remembrance of elderly people whose late matrimony had furnished food for Tonelli’s wit now rose up to torment him, and in his morbid fancy the merriment he had caused was echoed back in his own derision.

It shocked him to find how quickly his secret took wing, and it annoyed him that all his acquaintances were so prompt to felicitate him. He imagined a latent mockery in their speeches, and he took them with an argumentative solemnity. He reasoned separately with his friends; to all who spoke to him of his marriage he presented elaborate proofs that it was the wisest thing he could possibly do, and tried to give the affair a cold air of prudence. “You see, I am getting old; that is to say, I am tired of this bachelor life in which I have no one to take care of me, if I fall sick, and to watch that the doctors do not put me to death. My pay is very little, but, with Carlotta’s dower well invested, we shall both together live better than either of us lives alone. She is a careful woman, and will keep me neat and comfortable. She is not so young as some women I had thought to marry, — no, but so much the better; nobody will think her half so charming as I do, and at my time of life that is a great point gained. She is good, and has an admirable disposition. She is not spoiled by Venice, but as innocent as a dove. O, I shall find myself very well with her!”

This was the speech which with slight modification Tonelli made over and over again to all his friends but Pennellini. To him he unmasked, and said boldly that at last he was really in love; and being gently discouraged in what seemed his folly, and incredulously laughed at, he grew angry, and gave such proofs of his sincerity that Pennellini was convinced, and owned to himself, “This madman is actually enamored, — enamored, — like a cat! Patience! What will ever those Cenarotti say?”

In a little while poor Tonelli lost the philosophic mind with which he had at first received the congratulations of his friends, and, from reasoning with them, fell to resenting their good wishes. Very little things irritated him, and pleasantries which he had taken in excellent part, time out of mind, now raised his anger. His barber had for many years been in the habit of saying, as he applied the stick of fixature to Tonelli’s mustache, and gave it a jaunty upward curl, “Now we will bestow that little dash of youthfulness”; and it both amazed and hurt him to have Tonelli respond with a fierce “Tsit!” and say that this jest was proper in its antiquity to the times of Romulus rather than our own period, and so go out of the shop without that “Adieu, old fellow,” which he had never failed to give in twenty years. “Capperi!” said the barber, when he emerged from a profound revery into which this outbreak had plunged him, and in which he had remained holding the nose of his next customer, and tweaking it to and fro in the violence of his emotions, regardless of those mumbled maledictions which the lather would not permit the victim to articulate. “If Tonelli is so savage in his betrothal, we must wait for his marriage to tame him. I am sorry. He was always such a good devil.”

But if many things annoyed Tonelli, there were some that deeply wounded him, and chiefly the fact that his betrothal seemed to have fixed an impassable gulf of years between him and all those young men whose company he loved so well. He had really a boy’s heart, and he had consorted with them because he felt himself nearer their age than his own. Hitherto they had in no wise found his presence a restraint. They had always laughed, and told their loves, and spoken their young men’s thoughts, and made their young men’s jokes, without fear or shame, before the merry-hearted sage, who never offered good advice, if indeed he ever dreamed that there was a wiser philosophy than theirs. It had been as if he were the youngest among them; but now, in spite of all that he or they could do, he seemed suddenly and irretrievably aged. They looked at him strangely, as if for the first time they saw that his mustache was gray, that his brow was not smooth like theirs, that there were crow’s-feet at the corners of his kindly eyes. They could not phrase the vague feeling that haunted their hearts, or they would have said that Tonelli, in offering to marry, had voluntarily turned his back upon his youth; that love, which would only have brought a richer bloom to their age, had breathed away forever the autumnal blossom of his.

Something of this made itself felt in Tonelli’s own consciousness, whenever he met them, and he soon grew to avoid these comrades of his youth. It was therefore after a purely accidental encounter with one of them, and as he was passing into the Campo Sant’ Angelo, head down, and supporting himself with an inexplicable sense of infirmity upon the cane he was wont so jauntily to flourish, that he heard himself addressed with, “I say, master!” He looked up, and beheld the fat madman who patrols that campo, and who has the license of his affliction to utter insolences to whomsoever he will, leaning against the door of a tobacconist’s shop, with his arms folded, and a lazy, mischievous smile loitering down on his greasy face. As he caught Tonelli’s eye he nodded, “Eh! I have heard, master”; while the idlers of that neighborhood, who relished and repeated his incoherent pleasantries like the mots of some great diner-out, gathered near with expectant grins. Had Tonelli been altogether himself, as in other days, he would have been far too wise to answer, “What hast thou heard, poor animal?”

“That you are going to take a mate when most birds think of flying away,” said the madman. “Because it has been summer a long time with you, master, you think it will never be winter. Look out: the wolf doesn’t eat the season.”

The poor fool in these words seemed to utter a public voice of disapprobation and derision; and as the pitiless bystanders, who had many a time laughed with Tonelli, now laughed at him, joining in the applause which the madman himself led off, the miserable good devil walked away with a shiver, as if the weather had actually turned cold. It was not till he found himself in Carlotta’s presence that the long summer appeared to return to him. Indeed, in her tenderness and his real love for her he won back all his youth again; and he found it of a truer and sweeter quality than he had known even when his years were few, while the gay old-bachelor life he had long led seemed to him a period of miserable loneliness and decrepitude. Mirrored in her fond eyes, he saw himself alert and handsome; and, since for the time being they were to each other all the world, we may be sure there was nothing in the world then to vex or shame Tonelli. The promises of the future, too, seemed not improbable of fulfilment, for they were not extravagant promises. These people’s castle in the air was a house furnished from Carlotta’s modest portion, and situated in a quarter of the city not too far from the Piazza, and convenient to a decent caffè, from which they could order a lemonade or a cup of coffee for visitors. Tonelli’s stipend was to pay the housekeeping, as well as the minute wage of a servant-girl from the country; and it was believed that they could save enough from that, and a little of Carlotta’s money at interest, to go sometimes to the Malibran theatre or the Marionette, or even make an excursion to the mainland upon a holiday; but if they could not, it was certainly better Italianism to stay at home; and at least they could always walk to the Public Gardens. At one time, religious differences threatened to cloud this blissful vision of the future; but it was finally agreed that Carlotta should go to mass and confession as often as she liked, and should not tease Tonelli about his soul; while he, on his part, was not to speak ill of the pope except as a temporal prince, or of any of the priesthood except of the Jesuits when in company, in order to show that marriage had not made him a codino. For the like reason, no change was to be made in his custom of praising Garibaldi and reviling the accursed Germans upon all safe occasions.

As Tonelli had nothing in the world but his salary and his slender wardrobe, Carlotta eagerly accepted the idea of a loss of family property during the revolution. Of Tonelli’s scar she was as proud as Tonelli himself.

When she came to speak of the acquaintance of all those young men, it seemed again like a breath from the north to her betrothed; and he answered, with a sigh, that this was an affair that had already finished itself. “I have long thought them too boyish for me,” he said, “and I shall keep none of them but Pennellini, who is even older than I, — who, I believe, was never born, but created middle-aged out of the dust of the earth, like Adam. He is not a good devil, but he has every good quality.”

While he thus praised his friend, Tonelli was meditating a service, which when he asked it of Pennellini, had almost the effect to destroy their ancient amity. This was no less than the composition of those wedding-verses, without which, printed and exposed to view in all the shop-windows, no one in Venice feels himself adequately and truly married. Pennellini had never willingly made a verse in his life; and it was long before he understood Tonelli, when he urged the delicate request. Then in vain he protested, recalcitrated. It was all an offence to Tonelli’s morbid soul, already irritated by his friend’s obtuseness, and eager to turn even the reluctance of nature into insult. He took his refusal for a sign that he, too, deserted him; and must be called back, after bidding Pennellini adieu, to hear the only condition on which the accursed sonnet would be furnished, namely, that it should not be signed Pennellini, but An Affectionate Friend. Never was sonnet cost poet so great anguish as this: Pennellini went at it conscientiously as if it were a problem in mathematics; he refreshed his prosody, he turned over Carrer, he toiled a whole night, and in due time appeared as Tonelli’s affectionate friend in all the butchers’ and bakers’ windows. But it had been too much to ask of him, and for a while he felt the shock of Tonelli’s unreason and excess so much that there was a decided coolness between them.

This important particular arranged, little remained for Tonelli to do but to come to that open understanding with the Paronsina and her mother which he had long dreaded and avoided. He could not conceal from himself that his marriage was a kind of desertion of the two dear friends so dependent upon his singleness, and he considered the case of the Paronsina with a real remorse. If his meditated act sometimes appeared to him a gross inconsistency and a satire upon all his former life, he had still consoled himself with the truth of his passion, and had found love its own apology and comfort; but in its relation to these lonely women, his love itself had no fairer aspect than that of treason, and he shrank from owning it before them with a sense of guilt. Some wild dreams of reconciling his future with his past occasionally haunted him; but in his saner moments, he perceived their folly. Carlotta, he knew, was good and patient, but she was nevertheless a woman, and she would never consent that he should be to the Cenarotti all that he had been; these ladies also were very kind and reasonable, but they too were women, and incapable of accepting a less perfect devotion. Indeed, was not his proposed marriage too much like taking her only son from the signora and giving the Paronsina a stepmother? It was worse, and so the ladies of the notary’s family viewed it, cherishing a resentment that grew with Tonelli’s delay to deal frankly with them; while Carlotta, on her part, was wounded that these old friends should ignore his future wife so utterly. On both sides evil was stored up.

When Tonelli would still make a show of fidelity to the Paronsina and her mother, they accepted his awkward advances, the latter with a cold visage, the former with a sarcastic face and tongue. He had managed particularly ill with the Paronsina, who, having no romance of her own, would possibly have come to enjoy the autumnal poetry of his love if he had permitted. But when she first approached him on the subject of those rumors she had heard, and treated them with a natural derision, as involving the most absurd and preposterous ideas, he, instead of suffering her jests, and then turning her interest to his favor, resented them, and closed his heart and its secret against her. What could she do, thereafter, but feign to avoid the subject, and adroitly touch it with constant, invisible stings? Alas! it did not need that she should ever speak to Tonelli with the wicked intent she did; at this time he would have taken ill whatever most innocent thing she said. When friends are to be estranged, they do not require a cause. They have but to doubt one another, and no forced forbearance or kindness between them can do aught but confirm their alienation. This is on the whole fortunate, for in this manner neither feels to blame for the broken friendship, and each can declare with perfect truth that he did all he could to maintain it. Tonelli said to himself, “If the Paronsina had treated the affair properly at first!” and the Paronsina thought, “If he had told me frankly about it to begin with!” Both had a latent heartache over their trouble, and both a sense of loss the more bitter because it was of loss still unacknowledged.

As the day fixed for Tonelli’s wedding drew near, the rumor of it came to the Cenarotti from all their acquaintance. But when people spoke to them of it, as of something they must be fully and particularly informed of, the signora answered coldly, “It seems that we have not merited Tonelli’s confidence”; and the Paronsina received the gossip with an air of clearly affected surprise, and a “Davvero!” that at least discomfited the tale-bearers.

The consciousness of the unworthy part he was acting toward these ladies had come at last to poison the pleasure of Tonelli’s wooing, even in Carlotta’s presence; yet I suppose he would still have let his wedding-day come and go, and been married beyond hope of atonement, so loath was he to inflict upon himself and them the pain of an explanation, if one day, within a week of that time, the notary had not bade his clerk dine with him on the morrow. It was a holiday, and as Carlotta was at home, making ready for the marriage, Tonelli consented to take his place at the table from which he had been a long time absent. But it turned out such a frigid and melancholy banquet as never was known before. The old notary, to whom all things came dimly, finally missed the accustomed warmth of Tonelli’s fun, and said, with a little shiver, “Why, what ails you, Tonelli? You are as moody as a man in love.”

The notary had been told several times of Tonelli’s affair, but it was his characteristic not to remember any gossip later than that of ‘Forty-eight.

The Paronsina burst into a laugh full of the cruelty and insult of a woman’s long-smothered sense of injury. “Caro nonno,” she screamed into her grandfather’s dull ear, “he is really in despair how to support his happiness. He is shy, even of his old friends, — he has had so little experience. It is the first love of a young man. Bisogna compatire la gioventù, caro nonno.” And her tongue being finally loosed, the Paronsina broke into incoherent mockeries, that hurt more from their purpose than their point, and gave no one greater pain than herself.

Tonelli sat sad and perfectly mute under the infliction, but he said in his heart, “I have merited worse.”

At first the signora remained quite aghast; but when she collected herself, she called out peremptorily, “Madamigella, you push the affair a little beyond. Cease!”

The Paronsina, having said all she desired, ceased, panting.

The old notary, for whose slow sense all but her first words had been too quick, though all had been spoken at him, said dryly, turning to Tonelli, “I imagine that my deafness is not always a misfortune.”

It was by an inexplicable, but hardly less inevitable, violence to the inclinations of each that, after this miserable dinner, the signora, the Paronsina, and Tonelli should go forth together for their wonted promenade on the Molo. Use, which is the second, is also very often the stronger nature, and so these parted friends made a last show of union and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions, — not mere disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood over the Lido, striking far across the glittering lagoon, and everywhere winning the flattered eye to the dark masses of shadow upon the water; to the trees of the Gardens, to the trees and towers and domes of the cloistered and templed isles. Scene of pensive and incomparable loveliness! giving even to the stranger, in some faint and most unequal fashion, a sense of the awful meaning of exile to the Venetian, who in all other lands in the world is doubly an alien, from their unutterable unlikeness to his sole and beautiful city. The prospect had that pathetic unreality to the friends which natural things always assume to people playing a part, and I imagine that they saw it not more substantial than it appears to the exile in his dreams. In their promenade they met again and again the unknown, wonted faces; they even encountered some acquaintances, whom they greeted, and with whom they chatted for a while; and when at nine the bronze giants beat the hour upon their bell, — with as remote effect as if they were giants of the times before the flood, — they were aware of Pennellini, promptly appearing like an exact and methodical spectre.

But to-night the Paronsina, who had made the scene no compliments, did not insist as usual upon the ice at Florian’s; and Pennellini took his formal leave of the friends under the arch of the Clock Tower, and they walked silently homeward through the echoing Merceria.

At the notary’s gate Tonelli would have said good-night, but the signora made him enter with them, and then abruptly left him standing with the Paronsina in the gallery, while she was heard hurrying away to her own apartment. She reappeared, extending toward Tonelli both hands, upon which glittered and glittered manifold skeins of the delicate chain of Venice.

She had a very stately and impressive bearing, as she stood there in the moonlight, and addressed him with a collected voice. “Tonelli,” she said, “I think you have treated your oldest and best friends very cruelly. Was it not enough that you should take yourself from us, but you must also forbid our hearts to follow you even in sympathy and good wishes? I had almost thought to say adieu forever to-night; but,” she continued, with a breaking utterance, and passing tenderly to the familiar form of address, “I cannot part so with thee. Thou hast been too like a son to me, too like a brother to my poor Clarice. Maybe thou no longer lovest us, yet I think thou wilt not disdain this gift for thy wife. Take it, Tonelli, if not for our sake, perhaps then for the sake of sorrows that in times past we have shared together in this unhappy Venice.”

Here the signora ended perforce the speech, which had been long for her, and the Paronsina burst into a passion of weeping, — not more at her mamma’s words than out of self-pity and from the national sensibility.

Tonelli took the chain, and reverently kissed it and the hands that gave it. He had a helpless sense of the injustice the signora’s words and the Paronsina’s tears did him; he knew that they put him with feminine excess further in the wrong than even his own weakness had; but he tried to express nothing of this, — it was but part of the miserable maze in which his life was involved. With what courage he might he owned his error, but protested his faithful friendship, and poured out all his troubles, — his love for Carlotta, his regret for them, his shame and remorse for himself. They forgave him, and there was everything in their words and will to restore their old friendship, and keep it; and when the gate with a loud clang closed upon Tonelli, going from them, they all felt that it had irrevocably perished.

I do not say that there was not always a decent and affectionate bearing on the part of the Paronsina and her mother towards Tonelli and his wife; I acknowledge that it was but too careful and faultless a tenderness, ever conscious of its own fragility. Far more natural was the satisfaction they took in the delayed fruitfulness of Tonelli’s marriage, and then in the fact that his child was a girl, and not a boy. It was but human that they should doubt his happiness, and that the signora should always say, when hard pressed with questions upon the matter: “Yes, Tonelli is married; but if it were to do again, I think he would do it to-morrow rather than to-day.”

THE END

BUYING A HORSE

If one has money enough, there seems no reason why one should not go and buy such a horse as he wants. This is the commonly accepted theory, on which the whole commerce in horses is founded, and on which my friend proceeded.

He was about removing from Charlesbridge, where he had lived many happy years without a horse, farther into the country, where there were charming drives and inconvenient distances, and where a horse would be very desirable, if not quite necessary. But as a horse seemed at first an extravagant if not sinful desire, he began by talking vaguely round, and rather hinting than declaring that he thought somewhat of buying. The professor to whom he first intimated his purpose flung himself from his horse’s back to the grassy border of the sidewalk where my friend stood, and said he would give him a few points. “In the first place don’t buy a horse that shows much daylight under him, unless you buy a horse-doctor with him; get a short-legged horse; and he ought to be short and thick in the barrel,” — or words to that effect. “Don’t get a horse with a narrow forehead: there are horse-fools as well as the other kind, and you want a horse with room for brains. And look out that he’s all right forward.”

“What’s that?” asked my friend, hearing this phrase for the first time.

“That he isn’t tender in his fore-feet, — that the hoof isn’t contracted,” said the professor, pointing out the well-planted foot of his own animal.

“What ought I to pay for a horse?” pursued my friend, struggling to fix the points given by the professor in a mind hitherto unused to points of the kind.

“Well, horses are cheap, now; and you ought to get a fair family horse — You want a family horse?”

“Yes.”

“Something you can ride and drive both? Something your children can drive?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, you ought to get such a horse as that for a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

This was the figure my friend had thought of; he drew a breath of relief. “Where did you buy your horse?”

“Oh, I always get my horses” — the plural abashed my friend— “at the Chevaliers’. If you throw yourself on their mercy, they’ll treat you well. I’ll send you a note to them.”

“Do!” cried my friend, as the professor sprang upon his horse, and galloped away.

My friend walked home encouraged; his purpose of buying a horse had not seemed so monstrous, at least to this hardened offender. He now began to announce it more boldly; he said right and left that he wished to buy a horse, but that he would not go above a hundred. This was not true, but he wished to act prudently, and to pay a hundred and twenty-five only in extremity. He carried the professor’s note to the Chevaliers’, who duly honored it, understood at once what my friend wanted, and said they would look out for him. They were sorry he had not happened in a little sooner, — they had just sold the very horse he wanted. I may as well say here that they were not able to find him a horse, but that they used him with the strictest honor, and that short of supplying his want they were perfect.

In the mean time the irregular dealers began to descend upon him, as well as amateurs to whom he had mentioned his wish for a horse, and his premises at certain hours of the morning presented the effect of a horse-fair, or say rather a museum of equine bricabrac. At first he blushed at the spectacle, but he soon became hardened to it, and liked the excitement of driving one horse after another round the block, and deciding upon him. To a horse, they had none of the qualities commended by the professor, but they had many others which the dealers praised. These persons were not discouraged when he refused to buy, but cheerfully returned the next day with others differently ruinous. They were men of a spirit more obliging than my friend has found in other walks. One of them, who paid him a prefatory visit in his library, in five minutes augmented from six to seven hundred and fifty pounds the weight of a pony-horse, which he wished to sell. (“What you want,” said the Chevaliers, “is a pony-horse,” and my friend, gratefully catching at the phrase, had gone about saying he wanted a pony-horse. After that, hulking brutes of from eleven to thirteen hundred pounds were every day brought to him as pony-horses.) The same dealer came another day with a mustang, in whom was no fault, and who had every appearance of speed, but who was only marking time as it is called in military drill, I believe, when he seemed to be getting swiftly over the ground; he showed a sociable preference for the curbstone in turning corners, and was condemned, to be replaced the next evening by a pony-horse that a child might ride or drive, and that especially would not shy. Upon experiment, he shied half across the road, and the fact was reported to the dealer. He smiled compassionately. “What did he shy at?”

“A wheelbarrow.”

“Well! I never see the hoss yet that wouldn’t shy at a wheelbarrow.”

My friend owned that a wheelbarrow was of an alarming presence, but he had his reserves respecting the self-control and intelligence of this pony-horse. The dealer amiably withdrew him, and said that he would bring next day a horse — if he could get the owner to part with a family pet — that would suit; but upon investigation it appeared that this treasure was what is called a calico-horse, and my friend, who was without the ambition to figure in the popular eye as a stray circus-rider, declined to see him.

These adventurous spirits were not squeamish. They thrust their hands into the lathery mouths of their brutes to show the state of their teeth, and wiped their fingers on their trousers or grass afterwards, without a tremor, though my friend could never forbear a shudder at the sight. If sometimes they came with a desirable animal, the price was far beyond his modest figure; but generally they seemed to think that he did not want a desirable animal. In most cases, the pony-horse pronounced sentence upon himself by some gross and ridiculous blemish; but sometimes my friend failed to hit upon any tenable excuse for refusing him. In such an event, he would say, with an air of easy and candid comradery, “Well, now, what’s the matter with him?” And then the dealer, passing his hand down one of the pony-horse’s fore-legs, would respond, with an upward glance of searching inquiry at my friend, “Well, he’s a leetle mite tender for’a’d.”

I am afraid my friend grew to have a cruel pleasure in forcing them to this exposure of the truth; but he excused himself upon the ground that they never expected him to be alarmed at this tenderness forward, and that their truth was not a tribute to virtue, but was contempt of his ignorance. Nevertheless, it was truth; and he felt that it must be his part thereafter to confute the common belief that there is no truth in horse-trades.

These people were not usually the owners of the horses they brought, but the emissaries or agents of the owners. Often they came merely to show a horse, and were not at all sure that his owner would part with him on any terms, as he was a favorite with the ladies of the family. An impenetrable mystery hung about the owner, through which he sometimes dimly loomed as a gentleman in failing health, who had to give up his daily drives, and had no use for the horse. There were cases in which the dealer came secretly, from pure zeal, to show a horse whose owner supposed him still in the stable, and who must be taken back before his absence was noticed. If my friend insisted upon knowing the owner and conferring with him, in any of these instances, it was darkly admitted that he was a gentleman in the livery business over in Somerville or down in the Lower Port. Truth, it seemed, might be absent or present in a horse-trade, but mystery was essential.

The dealers had a jargon of their own, in which my friend became an expert. They did not say that a horse weighed a thousand pounds, but ten hundred; he was not worth a hundred and twenty-five dollars, but one and a quarter; he was not going on seven years old, but was coming seven. There are curious facts, by the way, in regard to the age of horses which are not generally known. A horse is never of an even age: that is, he is not six, or eight, or ten, but five, or seven, or nine years old; he is sometimes, but not often, eleven; he is never thirteen; his favorite time of life is seven, and he rarely gets beyond it, if on sale. My friend found the number of horses brought into the world in 1871 quite beyond computation.

He also found that most hard-working horses were sick or ailing, as most hard-working men and women are; that perfectly sound horses are as rare as perfectly sound human beings, and are apt, like the latter, to be vicious.

He began to have a quick eye for the characteristics of horses, and could walk round a proffered animal and scan his points with the best. “What,” he would ask, of a given beast, “makes him let his lower lip hang down in that imbecile manner?”

“Oh, he’s got a parrot-mouth. Some folks like ‘em.” Here the dealer would pull open the creature’s flabby lips, and discover a beak like that of a polyp; and the cleansing process on the grass or trousers would take place.

Of another. “What makes him trot in that spread-out, squatty way, behind?” he demanded, after the usual tour of the block.

“He travels wide. Horse men prefer that.”

They preferred any ugliness or awkwardness in a horse to the opposite grace or charm, and all that my friend could urge, in meek withdrawal from negotiation, was that he was not of an educated taste. In the course of long talks, which frequently took the form of warnings, he became wise in the tricks practiced by all dealers except his interlocutor. One of these, a device for restoring youth to an animal nearing the dangerous limit of eleven, struck him as peculiarly ingenious. You pierce the forehead, and blow into it with a quill; this gives an agreeable fullness, and erects the drooping ears in a spirited and mettlesome manner, so that a horse coming eleven will look for a time as if he were coming five.

After a thorough course of the volunteer dealers, and after haunting the Chevaliers’ stables for several weeks, my friend found that not money alone was needed to buy a horse. The affair began to wear a sinister aspect. He had an uneasy fear that in several cases he had refused the very horse he wanted with the aplomb he had acquired in dismissing undesirable beasts. The fact was he knew less about horses than when he began to buy, while he had indefinitely enlarged his idle knowledge of men, of their fatuity and hollowness. He learned that men whom he had always envied their brilliant omniscience in regard to horses, as they drove him out behind their dashing trotters, were quite ignorant and helpless in the art of buying; they always got somebody else to buy their horses for them. “Find a man you can trust,” they said, “and then put yourself in his hands. And never trust anybody about the health of a horse. Take him to a veterinary surgeon, and have him go all over him.”

My friend grew sardonic; then he grew melancholy and haggard. There was something very strange in the fact that a person unattainted of crime, and not morally disabled in any known way, could not take his money and buy such a horse as he wanted with it. His acquaintance began to recommend men to him. “If you want a horse, Captain Jenks is your man.” “Why don’t you go to Major Snaffle? He’d take pleasure in it.” But my friend, naturally reluctant to trouble others, and sickened by long failure, as well as maddened by the absurdity that if you wanted a horse you must first get a man, neglected this really good advice. He lost his interest in the business, and dismissed with lack-lustre indifference the horses which continued to be brought to his gate. He felt that his position before the community was becoming notorious and ridiculous. He slept badly; his long endeavor for a horse ended in nightmares.

One day he said to a gentleman whose turn-out he had long admired, “I wonder if you couldn’t find me a horse!”

“Want a horse?”

“Want a horse! I thought my need was known beyond the sun. I thought my want of a horse was branded on my forehead.”

This gentleman laughed, and then he said, “I’ve just seen a mare that would suit you. I thought of buying her, but I want a match, and this mare is too small. She’ll be round here in fifteen minutes, and I’ll take you out with her. Can you wait?”

“Wait!” My friend laughed in his turn.

The mare dashed up before the fifteen minutes had passed. She was beautiful, black as a coal; and kind as a kitten, said her driver. My friend thought her head was rather big. “Why, yes, she’s a pony-horse; that’s what I like about her.”

She trotted off wonderfully, and my friend felt that the thing was now done.

The gentleman, who was driving, laid his head on one side, and listened. “Clicks, don’t she?”

“She does click,” said my friend obligingly.

“Hear it?” asked the gentleman.

“Well, if you ask me,” said my friend, “I don’t hear it. What is clicking?”

“Oh, striking the heel of her fore-foot with the toe of her hind-foot. Sometimes it comes from bad shoeing. Some people like it. I don’t myself.” After a while he added, “If you can get this mare for a hundred and twenty-five, you’d better buy her.”

“Well, I will,” said my friend. He would have bought her, in fact, if she had clicked like a noiseless sewing-machine. But the owner, remote as Medford, and invisibly dealing, as usual, through a third person, would not sell her for one and a quarter; he wanted one and a half. Besides, another Party was trying to get her; and now ensued a negotiation which for intricacy and mystery surpassed all the others. It was conducted in my friend’s interest by one who had the difficult task of keeping the owner’s imagination in check and his demands within bounds, for it soon appeared that he wanted even more than one and a half for her. Unseen and inaccessible, he grew every day more unmanageable. He entered into relations with the other Party, and it all ended in his sending her out one day after my friend had gone into the country, and requiring him to say at once that he would give one and a half. He was not at home, and he never saw the little mare again. This confirmed him in the belief that she was the very horse he ought to have had.

People had now begun to say to him, “Why don’t you advertise? Advertise for a gentleman’s pony-horse and phaeton and harness complete. You’ll have a perfect procession of them before night.” This proved true. His advertisement, mystically worded after the fashion of those things, found abundant response. But the establishments which he would have taken he could not get at the figure he had set, and those which his money would buy he would not have. They came at all hours of the day; and he never returned home after an an absence without meeting the reproach that now the very horse he wanted had just been driven away, and would not be brought back, as his owner lived in Billerica, and only happened to be down. A few equipages really appeared desirable, but in regard to these his jaded faculties refused to work: he could decide nothing; his volition was extinct; he let them come and go.

It was at this period that people who had at first been surprised that he wished to buy a horse came to believe that he had bought one, and were astonished to learn that he had not. He felt the pressure of public opinion.

He began to haunt the different sale-stables in town, and to look at horses with a view to buying at private sale. Every facility for testing them was offered him, but he could not make up his mind. In feeble wantonness he gave appointments which he knew he should not keep, and, passing his days in an agony of multitudinous indecision, he added to the lies in the world the hideous sum of his broken engagements. From time to time he forlornly appeared at the Chevaliers’, and refreshed his corrupted nature by contact with their sterling integrity. Once he ventured into their establishment just before an auction began, and remained dazzled by the splendor of a spectacle which I fancy can be paralleled only by some dream of a mediæval tournament. The horses, brilliantly harnessed, accurately shod, and standing tall on burnished hooves, their necks curved by the check rein and their black and blonde manes flowing over the proud arch, lustrous and wrinkled like satin, were ranged in a glittering hemicycle. They affected my friend like the youth and beauty of his earliest evening parties; he experienced a sense of bashfulness, of sickening personal demerit. He could not have had the audacity to bid on one of those superb creatures, if all the Chevaliers together had whispered him that here at last was the very horse.

I pass over an unprofitable interval in which he abandoned himself to despair, and really gave up the hope of being able ever to buy a horse. During this interval he removed from Charlesbridge to the country, and found himself, to his self-scorn and self-pity, actually reduced to hiring a livery horse by the day. But relief was at hand. The carpenter who had remained to finish up the new house after my friend had gone into it bethought himself of a firm in his place who brought on horses from the West, and had the practice of selling a horse on trial, and constantly replacing it with other horses till the purchaser was suited. This seemed an ideal arrangement, and the carpenter said that he thought they had the very horse my friend wanted.

The next day he drove him up, and upon the plan of successive exchanges till the perfect horse was reached, my friend bought him for one and a quarter, the figure which he had kept in mind from the first. He bought a phaeton and harness from the same people, and when the whole equipage stood at his door, he felt the long-delayed thrill of pride and satisfaction. The horse was of the Morgan breed, a bright bay, small and round and neat, with a little head tossed high, and a gentle yet alert movement. He was in the prime of youth, of the age of which every horse desires to be, and was just coming seven. My friend had already taken him to a horse-doctor, who for one dollar had gone all over him, and pronounced him sound as a fish, and complimented his new owner upon his acquisition. It all seemed too good to be true. As Billy turned his soft eye on the admiring family group, and suffered one of the children to smooth his nose while another held a lump of sugar to his dainty lips, his amiable behavior restored my friend to his peace of mind and his long-lost faith in a world of reason.

The ridiculous planet, wavering bat-like through space, on which it had been impossible for an innocent man to buy a suitable horse was a dream of the past, and he had the solid, sensible old earth under his feet once more. He mounted into the phaeton and drove off with his wife; he returned and gave each of the children a drive in succession. He told them that any of them could drive Billy as much as they liked, and he quieted a clamor for exclusive ownership on the part of each by declaring that Billy belonged to the whole family. To this day he cannot look back to those moments without tenderness. If Billy had any apparent fault, it was an amiable indolence. But this made him all the safer for the children, and it did not really amount to laziness. While on sale he had been driven in a provision cart, and had therefore the habit of standing unhitched. One had merely to fling the reins into the bottom of the phaeton and leave Billy to his own custody. His other habit of drawing up at kitchen gates was not confirmed, and the fact that he stumbled on his way to the doctor who pronounced him blameless was reasonably attributed to a loose stone at the foot of the hill; the misstep resulted in a barked shin, but a little wheel-grease, in a horse of Billy’s complexion, easily removed the evidence of this.

It was natural that after Billy was bought and paid for, several extremely desirable horses should be offered to my friend by their owners, who came in person, stripped of all the adventitious mystery of agents and middle-men. They were gentlemen, and they spoke the English habitual with persons not corrupted by horses. My friend saw them come and go with grief; for he did not like to be shaken in his belief that Billy was the only horse in the world for him, and he would have liked to purchase their animals, if only to show his appreciation of honor and frankness and sane language. Yet he was consoled by the possession of Billy, whom he found increasingly excellent and trustworthy. Any of the family drove him about; he stood unhitched; he was not afraid of cars; he was as kind as a kitten; he had not, as the neighboring coachman said, a voice, though he seemed a little loively in coming out of the stable sometimes. He went well under the saddle; he was a beauty, and if he had a voice, it was too great satisfaction in his personal appearance.

One evening after tea, the young gentleman, who was about to drive Billy out, stung by the reflection that he had not taken blackberries and cream twice, ran into the house to repair the omission, and left Billy, as usual, unhitched at the door. During his absence, Billy caught sight of his stable, and involuntarily moved towards it. Finding himself unchecked, he gently increased his pace; and when my friend, looking up from the melon-patch which he was admiring, called out, “Ho, Billy! Whoa, Billy!” and headed him off from the gap, Billy profited by the circumstance to turn into the pear orchard. The elastic turf under his unguided hoof seemed to exhilarate him; his pace became a trot, a canter, a gallop, a tornado; the reins fluttered like ribbons in the air; the phaeton flew ruining after. In a terrible cyclone the equipage swept round the neighbor’s house, vanished, reappeared, swooped down his lawn, and vanished again. It was incredible.

My friend stood transfixed among his melons. He knew that his neighbor’s children played under the porte-cochère on the other side of the house which Billy had just surrounded in his flight, and probably.... My friend’s first impulse was not to go and see, but to walk into his own house, and ignore the whole affair. But you cannot really ignore an affair of that kind. You must face it, and commonly it stares you out of countenance. Commonly, too, it knows how to choose its time so as to disgrace as well as crush its victim. His neighbor had people to tea, and long before my friend reached the house the host and his guests were all out on the lawn, having taken the precaution to bring their napkins with them.

“The children!” gasped my friend.

“Oh, they were all in bed,” said the neighbor, and he began to laugh. That was right; my friend would have mocked at the calamity if it had been his neighbor’s. “Let us go and look up your phaeton.” He put his hand on the naked flank of a fine young elm, from which the bark had just been stripped. “Billy seems to have passed this way.”

At the foot of a stone-wall four feet high lay the phaeton, with three wheels in the air, and the fourth crushed flat against the axle; the willow back was broken, the shafts were pulled out, and Billy was gone.

“Good thing there was nobody in it,” said the neighbor.

“Good thing it didn’t run down some Irish family, and get you in for damages,” said a guest.

It appeared, then, that there were two good things about this disaster. My friend had not thought there were so many, but while he rejoiced in this fact, he rebelled at the notion that a sorrow like that rendered the sufferer in any event liable for damages, and he resolved that he never would have paid them. But probably he would.

Some half-grown boys got the phaeton right-side up, and restored its shafts and cushions, and it limped away with them towards the carriage-house. Presently another half-grown boy came riding Billy up the hill. Billy showed an inflated nostril and an excited eye, but physically he was unharmed, save for a slight scratch on what was described as the off hind-leg; the reader may choose which leg this was.

“The worst of it is,” said the guest, “that you never can trust ’em after they’ve run off once.”

“Have some tea?” said the host to my friend.

“No, thank you,” said my friend, in whose heart the worst of it rankled; and he walked home embittered by his guilty consciousness that Billy ought never to have been left untied. But it was not this self-reproach; it was not the mutilated phaeton; it was not the loss of Billy, who must now be sold; it was the wreck of settled hopes, the renewed suspense of faith, the repetition of the tragical farce of buying another horse, that most grieved my friend.

Billy’s former owners made a feint of supplying other horses in his place, but the only horse supplied was an aged veteran with the scratches, who must have come seven early in our era, and who, from his habit of getting about on tiptoe, must have been tender for’a’d beyond anything of my friend’s previous experience. Probably if he could have waited they might have replaced Billy in time, but their next installment from the West produced nothing suited to his wants but a horse with the presence and carriage of a pig, and he preferred to let them sell Billy for what he would bring, and to trust his fate elsewhere. Billy had fallen nearly one half in value, and he brought very little — to his owner; though the new purchaser was afterwards reported to value him at much more than what my friend had paid for him. These things are really mysteries; you cannot fathom them; it is idle to try. My friend remained grieving over his own folly and carelessness, with a fond hankering for the poor little horse he had lost, and the belief that he should never find such another. Yet he was not without a philanthropist’s consolation. He had added to the stock of harmless pleasures in a degree of which he could not have dreamed. All his acquaintance knew that he had bought a horse, and they all seemed now to conspire in asking him how he got on with it. He was forced to confess the truth. On hearing it, his friends burst into shouts of laughter, and smote their persons, and stayed themselves against lamp-posts and house-walls. They begged his pardon, and then they began again, and shouted and roared anew. Since the gale which blew down the poet — — ‘s chimneys and put him to the expense of rebuilding them, no joke so generally satisfactory had been offered to the community. My friend had, in his time, achieved the reputation of a wit by going about and and saying, “Did you know — — ‘s chimneys had blown down?” and he had now himself the pleasure of causing the like quality of wit in others.

Having abandoned the hope of getting anything out of the people who had sold him Billy, he was for a time the prey of an inert despair, in which he had not even spirit to repine at the disorder of a universe in which he could not find a horse. No horses were now offered to him, for it had become known throughout the trade that he had bought a horse. He had therefore to set about counteracting this impression with what feeble powers were left him. Of the facts of that period he remembers with confusion and remorse the trouble to which he put the owner of the pony-horse Pansy, whom he visited repeatedly in a neighboring town, at a loss of time and money to himself, and with no result but to embarrass Pansy’s owner in his relations with people who had hired him and did not wish him sold. Something of the old baffling mystery hung over Pansy’s whereabouts; he was with difficulty produced, and when en evidence he was not the Pansy my friend had expected. He paltered with his regrets; he covered his disappointment with what pretenses he could; and he waited till he could telegraph back his adverse decision. His conclusion was that, next to proposing marriage, there was no transaction of life that involved so many delicate and complex relations as buying a horse, and that the rupture of a horse-trade was little less embarrassing and distressing to all concerned than a broken engagement. There was a terrible intimacy in the affair; it was alarmingly personal. He went about sorrowing for the pain and disappointment he had inflicted on many amiable people of all degrees who had tried to supply him with a horse.

“Look here,” said his neighbor, finding him in this low state, “why don’t you get a horse of the gentleman who furnishes mine?” This had been suggested before, and my friend explained that he had disliked to make trouble. His scruples were lightly set aside, and he suffered himself to be entreated. The fact was he was so discouraged with his attempt to buy a horse that if any one had now given him such a horse as he wanted he would have taken it.

One sunny, breezy morning his neighbor drove my friend over to the beautiful farm of the good genius on whose kindly offices he had now fixed his languid hopes. I need not say what the landscape was in mid-August, or how, as they drew near the farm, the air was enriched with the breath of vast orchards of early apples, — apples that no forced fingers rude shatter from their stems, but that ripen and mellow untouched, till they drop into the straw with which the orchard aisles are bedded; it is the poetry of horticulture; it is Art practicing the wise and gracious patience of Nature, and offering to the Market a Summer Sweeting of the Hesperides.

The possessor of this luscious realm at once took my friend’s case into consideration; he listened, the owner of a hundred horses, with gentle indulgence to the shapeless desires of a man whose wildest dream was one horse. At the end he said, “I see you want a horse that can take care of himself.”

“No,” replied my friend, with the inspiration of despair. “I want a horse that can take care of me.”

The good genius laughed, and turned the conversation. Neither he nor my friend’s neighbor was a man of many words, and like taciturn people they talked in low tones. The three moved about the room and looked at the Hispano-Roman pictures; they had a glass of sherry; from time to time something was casually murmured about Frank. My friend felt that he was in good hands, and left the affair to them. It ended in a visit to the stable, where it appeared that this gentleman had no horse to sell among his hundred which exactly met my friend’s want, but that he proposed to lend him Frank while a certain other animal was put in training for the difficult office he required of a horse. One of the men was sent for Frank, and in the mean time my friend was shown some gaunt and graceful thoroughbreds, and taught to see the difference between them and the plebeian horse. But Frank, though no thoroughbred, eclipsed these patricians when he came. He had a little head, and a neck gallantly arched; he was black and plump and smooth, and though he carried himself with a petted air, and was a dandy to the tips of his hooves, his knowing eye was kindly. He turned it upon my friend with the effect of understanding his case at a glance.

It was in this way that for the rest of the long, lovely summer peace was re-established in his heart. There was no question of buying or selling Frank; there were associations that endeared him beyond money to his owner; but my friend could take him without price. The situation had its humiliation for a man who had been arrogantly trying to buy a horse, but he submitted with grateful meekness, and with what grace Heaven granted him; and Frank gayly entered upon the peculiar duties of his position. His first duty was to upset all preconceived notions of the advantage of youth in a horse. Frank was not merely not coming seven or nine, but his age was an even number, — he was sixteen; and it was his owner’s theory, which Frank supported, that if a horse was well used he was a good horse till twenty-five.

The truth is that Frank looked like a young horse; he was a dandy without any of the ghastliness which attends the preservation of youth in old beaux of another species. When my friend drove him in the rehabilitated phaeton he felt that the turn-out was stylish, and he learned to consult certain eccentricities of Frank’s in the satisfaction of his pride. One of these was a high reluctance to be passed on the road. Frank was as lazy a horse — but lazy in a self-respectful, æsthetic way — as ever was; yet if he heard a vehicle at no matter how great distance behind him (and he always heard it before his driver), he brightened with resolution and defiance, and struck out with speed that made competition difficult. If my friend found that the horse behind was likely to pass Frank, he made a merit of holding him in. If they met a team, he lay back in his phaeton, and affected not to care to be going faster than a walk, any way.

One of the things for which he chiefly prized Frank was his skill in backing and turning. He is one of those men who become greatly perturbed when required to back and turn a vehicle; he cannot tell (till too late) whether he ought to pull the right rein in order to back to the left, or vice versa; he knows, indeed, the principle, but he becomes paralyzed in its application. Frank never was embarrassed, never confused. My friend had but to say, “Back, Frank!” and Frank knew from the nature of the ground how far to back and which way to turn. He has thus extricated my friend from positions in which it appeared to him that no earthly power could relieve him.

In going up hill Frank knew just when to give himself a rest, and at what moment to join the party in looking about and enjoying the prospect. He was also an adept in scratching off flies, and had a precision in reaching an insect anywhere in his van with one of his rear hooves which few of us attain in slapping mosquitoes. This action sometimes disquieted persons in the phaeton, but Frank knew perfectly well what he was about, and if harm had happened to the people under his charge my friend was sure that Frank could have done anything short of applying arnica and telegraphing to their friends. His varied knowledge of life and his long experience had satisfied him that there were very few things to be afraid of in this world. Such womanish weaknesses as shying and starting were far from him, and he regarded the boisterous behavior of locomotives with indifference. He had not, indeed, the virtue of one horse offered to my friend’s purchase, of standing, unmoved, with his nose against a passing express train; but he was certainly not afraid of the cars.

Frank was by no means what Mr. Emerson calls a mush of concession; he was not merely amiable; he had his moments of self-assertion, his touches of asperity. It was not safe to pat his nose, like the erring Billy’s; he was apt to bring his handsome teeth together in proximity to the caressing hand with a sharp click and a sarcastic grin. Not that he ever did, or ever would really bite. So, too, when left to stand long under fly-haunted cover, he would start off afterwards with alarming vehemence; and he objected to the saddle. On the only occasion when any of my friend’s family mounted him, he trotted gayly over the grass towards the house, with the young gentleman on his back; then, without warning, he stopped short, a slight tremor appeared to pass over him, and his rider continued the excursion some ten feet farther, alighting lump-wise on a bunch of soft turf which Frank had selected for his reception.

The summer passed, and in the comfort of Frank’s possession my friend had almost abandoned the idea of ever returning him to his owner. He had thoughts of making the loan permanent, as something on the whole preferable to a purchase. The drives continued quite into December, over roads as smooth and hard as any in June, and the air was delicious. The first snow brought the suggestion of sleighing; but that cold weather about Christmas dispersed these gay thoughts, and restored my friend to virtue. Word came from the stable that Frank’s legs were swelling from standing so long without going out, and my friend resolved to part with an animal for which he had no use. I do not praise him for this; it was no more than his duty; but I record his action in order to account for the fact that he is again without a horse, and now, with the opening of the fine weather, is beginning once more to think of buying one.

But he is in no mood of arrogant confidence. He has satisfied himself that neither love nor money is alone adequate to the acquisition: the fates also must favor it. The horse which Frank’s owner has had in training may or may not be just the horse he wants. He does not know; he humbly waits; and he trembles at the alternative of horses, mystically summoned from space, and multitudinously advancing upon him, parrot-mouthed, pony-gaited, tender for’a’d, and traveling wide behind.

The Short Stories

Howells’ home in Cambridge Massachusetts, where he and his family lived from 1873-1878; the house was designed by Howells’s wife

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

MRS. JOHNSON

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

A DAY’S PLEASURE

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

SCENE

JUBILEE DAYS

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS.

FLITTING

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY.

TURKEYS TURNING THE TABLES.

THE PONY ENGINE AND THE PACIFIC EXPRESS.

THE PUMPKIN-GLORY

BUTTERFLYFLUTTERBY AND FLUTTERBYBUTTERFLY.

EDITHA

SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE

A PRESENTIMENT

CAPTAIN DUNLEVY’S LAST TRIP

THE RETURN TO FAVOR

SOMEBODY’S MOTHER

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

AN EXPERIENCE

THE BOARDERS

BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL

THE MOTHER-BIRD

THE AMIGO

BLACK CROSS FARM

THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE

A FEAST OF REASON

CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL

TABLE TALK

THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER

SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS

THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.

A DIFFICULT CASE.

THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.

A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.

ADVENTURES IN A BOY’S TOWN

HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS

THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN

JIM LEONARD’S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

LIFE IN A BOY’S TOWN

THE TOWN

EARLIEST MEMORIES

HOME LIFE

THE RIVER

SWIMMING

SKATING

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

GIRLS

MOTHERS

A BROTHER

A FRIEND

GAMES AND PASTIMES

MARBLES

A MEAN TRICK

TOPS

KITES

THE BUTLER GUARDS

PETS

INDIANS

GUNS

NUTTING

THE FIRE-ENGINES

GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD

THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS

PASSING SHOWS

THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN

THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS

THE LAST OF A BOY’S TOWN

AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

BRAYBRIDGE’S OFFER

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

AT THE SIGN OF THE SAVAGE.

TONELLI’S MARRIAGE.

BUYING A HORSE

LIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

A BROTHER

A CIRCLE IN THE WATER.

A DAY’S PLEASURE

A DIFFICULT CASE.

A FEAST OF REASON

A FRIEND

A MEAN TRICK

A PAIR OF PATIENT LOVERS

A PEDESTRIAN TOUR.

A PRESENTIMENT

A ROMANCE OF REAL LIFE

ADVENTURES IN A BOY’S TOWN

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

AN EXPERIENCE

AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

AN OPEN-EYED CONSPIRACY

AT THE SIGN OF THE SAVAGE.

BLACK CROSS FARM

BRAYBRIDGE’S OFFER

BREAKFAST IS MY BEST MEAL

BUTTERFLYFLUTTERBY AND FLUTTERBYBUTTERFLY.

BUYING A HORSE

BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON

CAPTAIN DUNLEVY’S LAST TRIP

CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY.

CITY AND COUNTRY IN THE FALL

DOORSTEP ACQUAINTANCE

EARLIEST MEMORIES

EDITHA

FLITTING

GAMES AND PASTIMES

GIRLS

GLIMPSES OF THE LARGER WORLD

GUNS

HOME LIFE

HOW PONY BAKER CAME PRETTY NEAR RUNNING OFF WITH A CIRCUS

INDIANS

JIM LEONARD’S HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPE

JUBILEE DAYS

KITES

LIFE IN A BOY’S TOWN

MANNERS AND CUSTOMS

MARBLES

MOTHERS

MRS. JOHNSON

NIAGARA REVISITED, TWELVE YEARS AFTER THEIR WEDDING JOURNEY

NUTTING

PASSING SHOWS

PETS

SCENE

SEEN AND UNSEEN AT STRATFORD-UPON-AVON

SELF-SACRIFICE: A FARCE-TRAGEDY

SKATING

SOME LESSONS FROM THE SCHOOL OF MORALS.

SOMEBODY’S MOTHER

SWIMMING

TABLE TALK

THE AMIGO

THE BOARDERS

THE BUTLER GUARDS

THE CIRCUS MAGICIAN

THE CRITICAL BOOKSTORE

THE DAUGHTER OF THE STORAGE

THE ESCAPADE OF A GRANDFATHER

THE FACE AT THE WINDOW

THE FIRE-ENGINES

THE LAST OF A BOY’S TOWN

THE MAGIC OF A VOICE.

THE MOTHER-BIRD

THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

THE PONY ENGINE AND THE PACIFIC EXPRESS.

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

THE PUMPKIN-GLORY

THE PURSUIT OF THE PIANO.

THE RETURN TO FAVOR

THE RIVER

THE THEATRE COMES TO TOWN

THE TOWN

THE TRAVELLING CIRCUS

THE WORLD OPENED BY BOOKS

TONELLI’S MARRIAGE.

TOPS

TURKEYS TURNING THE TABLES.

The Farces

Redtop, Belmont, Massachusetts — Howells’ home from 1878 to 1881

THE PARLOR CAR

A Farce.

Scene: A Parlor-Car on the New York Central Railroad. It is late afternoon in the early autumn, with a cloudy sunset threatening rain. The car is unoccupied save by a gentleman, who sits fronting one of the windows, with his feet in another chair; a newspaper lies across his lap; his hat is drawn down over his eyes, and he is apparently asleep. The rear door of the car opens, and the conductor enters with a young lady, heavily veiled, the porter coming after with her wraps and travelling-bags. The lady’s air is of mingled anxiety and desperation, with a certain fierceness of movement. She casts a careless glance over the empty chairs.

Conductor: “Here’s your ticket, madam. You can have any of the places you like here, or,” — glancing at the unconscious gentleman, and then at the young lady,— “if you prefer, you can go and take that seat in the forward car.”

Miss Lucy Galbraith: “Oh, I can’t ride backwards. I’ll stay here, please. Thank you.” The porter places her things in a chair by a window, across the car from the sleeping gentleman, and she throws herself wearily into the next seat, wheels round in it, and lifting her veil gazes absently out at the landscape. Her face, which is very pretty, with a low forehead shadowed by thick blond hair, shows the traces of tears. She makes search in her pocket for her handkerchief, which she presses to her eyes. The conductor, lingering a moment, goes out.

Porter: “I’ll be right here, at de end of de cah, if you should happen to want anything, miss,” — making a feint of arranging the shawls and satchels. “Should you like some dese things hung up? Well, dey’ll be jus’ as well in de chair. We’s pretty late dis afternoon; more’n four hours behin’ time. Ought to been into Albany ‘fore dis. Freight train off de track jus’ dis side o’ Rochester, an’ had to wait. Was you going to stop at Schenectady, miss?”

Miss Galbraith, absently: “At Schenectady?” After a pause, “Yes.”

Porter: “Well, that’s de next station, and den de cahs don’t stop ag’in till dey git to Albany. Anything else I can do for you now, miss?”

Miss Galbraith: “No, no, thank you, nothing.” The Porter hesitates, takes off his cap, and scratches his head with a murmur of embarrassment. Miss Galbraith looks up at him inquiringly and then suddenly takes out her porte-monnaie, and fees him.

Porter: “Thank you, miss, thank you. If you want anything at all, miss, I’m right dere at de end of de cah.” He goes out by the narrow passage-way beside the smaller enclosed parlor. Miss Galbraith looks askance at the sleeping gentleman, and then, rising, goes to the large mirror, to pin her veil, which has become loosened from her hat. She gives a little start at sight of the gentleman in the mirror, but arranges her head-gear, and returning to her place looks out of the window again. After a little while she moves about uneasily in her chair, then leans forward, and tries to raise her window; she lifts it partly up, when the catch slips from her fingers, and the window falls shut again with a crash.

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, dear, how provoking! I suppose I must call the porter.” She rises from her seat, but on attempting to move away she finds that the skirt of her polonaise has been caught in the falling window. She pulls at it, and then tries to lift the window again, but the cloth has wedged it in, and she cannot stir it. “Well, I certainly think this is beyond endurance! Porter! Ah, — Porter! Oh, he’ll never hear me in the racket that these wheels are making! I wish they’d stop, — I” — The gentleman stirs in his chair, lifts his head, listens, takes his feet down from the other seat, rises abruptly, and comes to Miss Galbraith’s side.

Mr. Allen Richards: “Will you allow me to open the window for you?” Starting back, “Miss Galbraith!”

Miss Galbraith: “Al — Mr. Richards!” There is a silence for some moments, in which they remain looking at each other; then, —

Mr. Richards: “Lucy” —

Miss Galbraith: “I forbid you to address me in that way, Mr. Richards.”

Mr. Richards: “Why, you were just going to call me Allen!”

Miss Galbraith: “That was an accident, you know very well, — an impulse” —

Mr. Richards: “Well, so is this.”

Miss Galbraith: “Of which you ought to be ashamed to take advantage. I wonder at your presumption in speaking to me at all. It’s quite idle, I can assure you. Everything is at an end between us. It seems that I bore with you too long; but I’m thankful that I had the spirit to not at last, and to act in time. And now that chance has thrown us together, I trust that you will not force your conversation upon me. No gentleman would, and I have always given you credit for thinking yourself a gentleman. I request that you will not speak to me.”

Mr. Richards: “You’ve spoken ten words to me for every one of mine to you. But I won’t annoy you. I can’t believe it, Lucy; I can not believe it. It seems like some rascally dream, and if I had had any sleep since it happened, I should think I—”

Miss Galbraith: “Oh! You were sleeping soundly enough when I got into the car!”

Mr. Richards: “I own it; I was perfectly used up, and I had dropped off.”

Miss Galbraith, scornfully: “Then perhaps you have dreamed it.”

Mr. Richards: “I’ll think so till you tell me again that our engagement is broken; that the faithful love of years is to go for nothing; that you dismiss me with cruel insult, without one word of explanation, without a word of intelligible accusation, even. It’s too much! I’ve been thinking it all over and over, and I can’t make head or tail of it. I meant to see you again as soon as we got to town, and implore you to hear me. Come, it’s a mighty serious matter, Lucy. I’m not a man to put on heroics and that; but I believe it’ll play the very deuce with me, Lucy, — that is to say, Miss Galbraith, — I do indeed. It’ll give me a low opinion of woman.”

Miss Galbraith, averting her face: “Oh, a very high opinion of woman you have had!”

Mr. Richards, with sentiment: “Well, there was one woman whom I thought a perfect angel.”

Miss Galbraith: “Indeed! May I ask her name?”

Mr. Richards, with a forlorn smile. “I shall be obliged to describe her somewhat formally as — Miss Galbraith.”

Miss Galbraith: “Mr. Richards!”

Mr. Richards: “Why, you’ve just forbidden me to say Lucy! You must tell me, dearest, what I have done to offend you. The worst criminals are not condemned unheard, and I’ve always thought you were merciful if not just. And now I only ask you to be just.”

Miss Galbraith, looking out of the window: “You know very well what you’ve done. You can’t expect me to humiliate myself by putting your offence into words.”

Mr. Richards: “Upon my soul, I don’t know what you mean! I don’t know what I’ve done. When you came at me, last night, with my ring and presents and other little traps, you might have knocked me down with the lightest of the lot. I was perfectly dazed; I couldn’t say anything before you were off, and all I could do was to hope that you’d be more like yourself in the morning. And in the morning, when I came round to Mrs. Philips’s, I found you were gone, and I came after you by the next train.”

Miss Galbraith: “Mr. Richards, your personal history for the last twenty-four hours is a matter of perfect indifference to me, as it shall be for the next twenty-four hundred years. I see that you are resolved to annoy me, and since you will not leave the car, I must do so.” She rises haughtily from her seat, but the imprisoned skirt of her polonaise twitches her abruptly back into her chair. She bursts into tears. “Oh, what shall I do?”

Mr. Richards, dryly: “You shall do whatever you like, Miss Galbraith, when I’ve set you free; for I see your dress is caught in the window. When it’s once out, I’ll shut the window, and you can call the porter to raise it.” He leans forward over her chair, and while she shrinks back the length of her tether, he tugs at the window-fastening. “I can’t get at it. Would you be so good as to stand up, — all you can?” Miss Galbraith stands up, droopingly, and Mr. Richards makes a movement towards her, and then falls back. “No, that won’t do. Please sit down again.” He goes round her chair and tries to get at the window from that side. “I can’t get any purchase on it. Why don’t you cut out that piece?” Miss Galbraith stares at him in dumb amazement. “Well, I don’t see what we’re to do: I’ll go and get the porter.” He goes to the end of the car, and returns. “I can’t find the porter, — he must be in one of the other cars. But” — brightening with the fortunate conception— “I’ve just thought of something. Will it unbutton?”

Miss Galbraith: “Unbutton?”

Mr. Richards: “Yes; this garment of yours.”

Miss Galbraith: “My polonaise?” Inquiringly, “Yes.”

Mr. Richards: “Well, then, it’s a very simple matter. If you will just take it off I can easily” —

Miss Galbraith, faintly: “I can’t. A polonaise isn’t like an overcoat” —

Mr. Richards, with dismay: “Oh! Well, then” — He remains thinking a moment in hopeless perplexity.

Miss Galbraith, with polite ceremony: “The porter will be back soon. Don’t trouble yourself any further about it, please. I shall do very well.”

Mr. Richards, without heeding her: “If you could kneel on that foot-cushion, and face the window” —

Miss Galbraith, kneeling promptly: “So?”

Mr. Richards: “Yes, and now” — kneeling beside her— “if you’ll allow me to — to get at the window-catch,” — he stretches both arms forward; she shrinks from his right into his left, and then back again,— “and pull while I raise the window” —

Miss Galbraith: “Yes, yes; but do hurry, please. If any one saw us, I don’t know what they would think. It’s perfectly ridiculous!” — pulling. “It’s caught in the corner of the window, between the frame and the sash, and it won’t come! Is my hair troubling you? Is it in your eyes?”

Mr. Richards: “It’s in my eyes, but it isn’t troubling me. Am I inconveniencing you?”

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, not at all.”

Mr. Richards: “Well, now then, pull hard!” He lifts the window with a great effort; the polonaise comes free with a start, and she strikes violently against him. In supporting the shock he cannot forbear catching her for an instant to his heart. She frees herself, and starts indignantly to her feet.

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, what a cowardly — subterfuge!”

Mr. Richards: “Cowardly? You’ve no idea how much courage it took.” Miss Galbraith puts her handkerchief to her face, and sobs. “Oh, don’t cry! Bless my heart, — I’m sorry I did it! But you know how dearly I love you, Lucy, though I do think you’ve been cruelly unjust. I told you I never should love any one else, and I never shall. I couldn’t help it; upon my soul, I couldn’t. Nobody could. Don’t let it vex you, my” — He approaches her.

Miss Galbraith: “Please not touch me, sir! You have no longer any right whatever to do so.”

Mr. Richards: “You misinterpret a very inoffensive gesture. I have no idea of touching you, but I hope I may be allowed, as a special favor, to — pick up my hat, which you are in the act of stepping on.” Miss Galbraith hastily turns, and strikes the hat with her whirling skirts; it rolls to the other side of the parlor, and Mr. Richards, who goes after it, utters an ironical “Thanks!” He brushes it, and puts it on, looking at her where she has again seated herself at the window with her back to him, and continues, “As for any further molestation from me” —

Miss Galbraith: “If you will talk to me” —

Mr. Richards: “Excuse me, I am not talking to you.”

Miss Galbraith: “What were you doing?”

Mr. Richards: “I was beginning to think aloud. I — I was soliloquizing. I suppose I may be allowed to soliloquize?”

Miss Galbraith, very coldly: “You can do what you like.”

Mr. Richards: “Unfortunately that’s just what I can’t do. If I could do as I liked, I should ask you a single question.”

Miss Galbraith, after a moment: “Well, sir, you may ask your question.” She remains as before, with her chin in her hand, looking tearfully out of the window; her face is turned from Mr. Richards, who hesitates a moment before he speaks.

Mr. Richards: “I wish to ask you just this, Miss Galbraith: if you couldn’t ride backwards in the other car, why do you ride backwards in this?”

Miss Galbraith, burying her face in her handkerchief, and sobbing: “Oh, oh, oh! This is too bad!”

Mr. Richards: “Oh, come now, Lucy. It breaks my heart to hear you going on so, and all for nothing. Be a little merciful to both of us, and listen to me. I’ve no doubt I can explain everything if I once understand it, but it’s pretty hard explaining a thing if you don’t understand it yourself. Do turn round. I know it makes you sick to ride in that way, and if you don’t want to face me — there!” — wheeling in his chair so as to turn his back upon her— “you needn’t. Though it’s rather trying to a fellow’s politeness, not to mention his other feelings. Now, what in the name” —

Porter, who at this moment enters with his step-ladder, and begins to light the lamps: “Going pretty slow ag’in, sah.”

Mr. Richards: “Yes; what’s the trouble?”

Porter: “Well, I don’t know exactly, sah. Something de matter with de locomotive. We sha’n’t be into Albany much ‘fore eight o’clock.”

Mr. Richards: “What’s the next station?”

Porter: “Schenectady.”

Mr. Richards: “Is the whole train as empty as this car?”

Porter, laughing: “Well, no, sah. Fact is, dis cah don’t belong on dis train. It’s a Pullman that we hitched on when you got in, and we’s taking it along for one of de Eastern roads. We let you in ‘cause de Drawing-rooms was all full. Same with de lady,” — looking sympathetically at her, as he takes his steps to go out. “Can I do anything for you now, miss?”

Miss Galbraith, plaintively: “No, thank you; nothing whatever.” She has turned while Mr. Richards and The Porter have been speaking, and now faces the back of the former, but her veil is drawn closely. The Porter goes out.

Mr. Richards, wheeling round so as to confront her: “I wish you would speak to me half as kindly as you do to that darky, Lucy.”

Miss Galbraith: “He is a gentleman!”

Mr. Richards: “He is an urbane and well-informed nobleman. At any rate, he’s a man and a brother. But so am I.” Miss Galbraith does not reply, and after a pause Mr. Richards resumes. “Talking of gentlemen, I recollect, once, coming up on the day-boat to Poughkeepsie, there was a poor devil of a tipsy man kept following a young fellow about, and annoying him to death — trying to fight him, as a tipsy man will, and insisting that the young fellow had insulted him. By and by he lost his balance and went overboard, and the other jumped after him and fished him out.” Sensation on the part of Miss Galbraith, who stirs uneasily in her chair, looks out of the window, then looks at Mr. Richards, and drops her head. “There was a young lady on board, who had seen the whole thing — a very charming young lady indeed, with pale blond hair growing very thick over her forehead, and dark eyelashes to the sweetest blue eyes in the world. Well, this young lady’s papa was amongst those who came up to say civil things to the young fellow when he got aboard again, and to ask the honor — he said the honor — of his acquaintance. And when he came out of his stateroom in dry clothes, this infatuated old gentleman was waiting for him, and took him and introduced him to his wife and daughter; and the daughter said, with tears in her eyes, and a perfectly intoxicating impulsiveness, that it was the grandest and the most heroic and the noblest thing that she had ever seen, and she should always be a better girl for having seen it. Excuse me, Miss Galbraith, for troubling you with these facts of a personal history, which, as you say, is a matter of perfect indifference to you. The young fellow didn’t think at the time he had done anything extraordinary; but I don’t suppose he did expect to live to have the same girl tell him he was no gentleman.”

Miss Galbraith, wildly: “O Allen, Allen! You know I think you are a gentleman, and I always did!”

Mr. Richards, languidly: “Oh, I merely had your word for it, just now, that you didn’t.” Tenderly, “Will you hear me, Lucy?”

Miss Galbraith, faintly: “Yes.”

Mr. Richards: “Well, what is it I’ve done? Will you tell me if I guess right?”

Miss Galbraith, with dignity: “I am in no humor for jesting, Allen. And I can assure you that though I consent to hear what you have to say, or ask, nothing will change my determination. All is over between us.”

Mr. Richards: “Yes, I understand that, perfectly. I am now asking merely for general information. I do not expect you to relent, and, in fact, I should consider it rather frivolous if you did. No. What I have always admired in your character, Lucy, is a firm, logical consistency; a clearness of mental vision that leaves no side of a subject unsearched; and an unwavering constancy of purpose. You may say that these traits are characteristic of all women; but they are pre-eminently characteristic of you, Lucy.” Miss Galbraith looks askance at him, to make out whether he is in earnest or not; he continues, with a perfectly serious air. “And I know now that if you’re offended with me, it’s for no trivial cause.” She stirs uncomfortably in her chair.  “What I have done I can’t imagine, but it must be something monstrous, since it has made life with me appear so impossible that you are ready to fling away your own happiness — for I know you did love me, Lucy — and destroy mine. I will begin with the worst thing I can think of. Was it because I danced so much with Fanny Watervliet?”

Miss Galbraith, indignantly: “How can you insult me by supposing that I could be jealous of such a perfect little goose as that? No, Allen! Whatever I think of you, I still respect you too much for that.”

Mr. Richards: “I’m glad to hear that there are yet depths to which you think me incapable of descending, and that Miss Watervliet is one of them. I will now take a little higher ground. Perhaps you think I flirted with Mrs. Dawes. I thought, myself, that the thing might begin to have that appearance, but I give you my word of honor that as soon as the idea occurred to me, I dropped her — rather rudely, too. The trouble was, don’t you know, that I felt so perfectly safe with a married friend of yours. I couldn’t be hanging about you all the time, and I was afraid I might vex you if I went with the other girls; and I didn’t know what to do.”

Miss Galbraith: “I think you behaved rather silly, giggling so much with her. But” —

Mr. Richards: “I own it, I know it was silly. But” —

Miss Galbraith: “It wasn’t that; it wasn’t that!”

Mr. Richards: “Was it my forgetting to bring you those things from your mother?”

Miss Galbraith: “No!”

Mr. Richards: “Was it because I hadn’t given up smoking yet?”

Miss Galbraith: “You know I never asked you to give up smoking. It was entirely your own proposition.”

Mr. Richards: “That’s true. That’s what made me so easy about it. I knew I could leave it off any time. Well, I will not disturb you any longer, Miss Galbraith.” He throws his overcoat across his arm, and takes up his travelling-bag. “I have failed to guess your fatal — conundrum; and I have no longer any excuse for remaining. I am going into the smoking-car. Shall I send the porter to you for anything?”

Miss Galbraith: “No, thanks.” She puts up her handkerchief to her face.

Mr. Richards: “Lucy, do you send me away?”

Miss Galbraith, behind her handkerchief: “You were going, yourself.”

Mr. Richards, over his shoulder: “Shall I come back?”

Miss Galbraith: “I have no right to drive you from the car.”

Mr. Richards, coming back, and sitting down in the chair nearest her: “Lucy, dearest, tell me what’s the matter.”

Miss Galbraith: “O Allen! your not knowing makes it all the more hopeless and killing. It shows me that we must part; that you would go on, breaking my heart, and grinding me into the dust as long as we lived.” She sobs. “It shows me that you never understood me, and you never will. I know you’re good and kind and all that, but that only makes your not understanding me so much the worse. I do it quite as much for your sake as my own, Allen.”

Mr. Richards: “I’d much rather you wouldn’t put yourself out on my account.”

Miss Galbraith, without regarding him: “If you could mortify me before a whole roomful of people, as you did last night, what could I expect after marriage but continual insult?”

Mr. Richards, in amazement: “How did I mortify you? I thought that I treated you with all the tenderness and affection that a decent regard for the feelings of others would allow. I was ashamed to find I couldn’t keep away from you.”

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, you were attentive enough, Allen; nobody denies that. Attentive enough in non-essentials. Oh, yes!”

Mr. Richards: “Well, what vital matters did I fail in? I’m sure I can’t remember.”

Miss Galbraith: “I dare say! I dare say they won’t appear vital to you, Allen. Nothing does. And if I had told you, I should have been met with ridicule, I suppose. But I knew better than to tell; I respected myself too much.”

Mr. Richards: “But now you mustn’t respect yourself quite so much, dearest. And I promise you I won’t laugh at the most serious thing. I’m in no humor for it. If it were a matter of life and death, even, I can assure you that it wouldn’t bring a smile to my countenance. No, indeed! If you expect me to laugh, now, you must say something particularly funny.”

Miss Galbraith: “I was not going to say anything funny, as you call it, and I will say nothing at all, if you talk in that way.”

Mr. Richards: “Well, I won’t, then. But do you know what I suspect, Lucy? I wouldn’t mention it to everybody, but I will to you — in strict confidence: I suspect that you’re rather ashamed of your grievance, if you have any. I suspect it’s nothing at all.”

Miss Galbraith, very sternly at first, with a rising hysterical inflection: “Nothing, Allen! Do you call it nothing, to have Mrs. Dawes come out with all that about your accident on your way up the river, and ask me if it didn’t frighten me terribly to hear of it, even after it was all over; and I had to say you hadn’t told me a word of it? ‘Why, Lucy!’” — angrily mimicking Mrs. Dawes,—”’you must teach him better than that. I make Mr. Dawes tell me everything.’ Little simpleton! And then to have them all laugh — Oh, dear, it’s too much!”

Mr. Richards: “Why, my dear Lucy” —

Miss Galbraith, interrupting him: “I saw just how it was going to be, and I’m thankful, thankful that it happened. I saw that you didn’t care enough for me to take me into your whole life; that you despised and distrusted me, and that it would get worse and worse to the end of our days; that we should grow farther and farther apart, and I should be left moping at home, while you ran about making confidantes of other women whom you considered worthy of your confidence. It all flashed upon me in an instant; and I resolved to break with you, then and there; and I did, just as soon as ever I could go to my room for your things, and I’m glad, — yes, — Oh, hu, hu, hu, hu, hu! — so glad I did it!”

Mr. Richards, grimly: “Your joy is obvious. May I ask” —

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, it wasn’t the first proof you had given me how little you really cared for me, but I was determined it should be the last. I dare say you’ve forgotten them! I dare say you don’t remember telling Mamie Morris that you didn’t like embroidered cigar-cases, when you’d just told me that you did, and let me be such a fool as to commence one for you; but I’m thankful to say that went into the fire, — oh, yes, instantly! And I dare say you’ve forgotten that you didn’t tell me your brother’s engagement was to be kept, and let me come out with it that night at the Rudges’, and then looked perfectly aghast, so that everybody thought I had been blabbing! Time and again, Allen, you have made me suffer agonies, yes, agonies; but your power to do so is at an end. I am free and happy at last.” She weeps bitterly.

Mr. Richards, quietly: “Yes, I had forgotten those crimes, and I suppose many similar atrocities. I own it, I am forgetful and careless. I was wrong about those things. I ought to have told you why I said that to Miss Morris: I was afraid she was going to work me one. As to that accident I told Mrs. Dawes of, it wasn’t worth mentioning. Our boat simply walked over a sloop in the night, and nobody was hurt. I shouldn’t have thought twice about it, if she hadn’t happened to brag of their passing close to an iceberg on their way home from Europe; then I trotted out my pretty-near disaster as a match for hers, — confound her! I wish the iceberg had sunk them! Only it wouldn’t have sunk her, — she’s so light; she’d have gone bobbing about all over the Atlantic Ocean, like a cork; she’s got a perfect life-preserver in that mind of hers.” Miss Galbraith gives a little laugh, and then a little moan. “But since you are happy, I will not repine, Miss Galbraith. I don’t pretend to be very happy myself, but then, I don’t deserve it. Since you are ready to let an absolutely unconscious offence on my part cancel all the past; since you let my devoted love weigh as nothing against the momentary pique that a malicious little rattle-pate — she was vexed at my leaving her — could make you feel, and choose to gratify a wicked resentment at the cost of any suffering to me, why, I can be glad and happy too.” With rising anger, “Yes, Miss Galbraith. All is over between us. You can go! I renounce you!”

Miss Galbraith, springing fiercely to her feet: “Go, indeed! Renounce me! Be so good as to remember that you haven’t got me to renounce!”

Mr. Richards: “Well, it’s all the same thing. I’d renounce you if I had. Good-evening, Miss Galbraith. I will send back your presents as soon as I get to town; it won’t be necessary to acknowledge them. I hope we may never meet again.” He goes out of the door towards the front of the ear, but returns directly, and glances uneasily at Miss Galbraith, who remains with her handkerchief pressed to her eyes. “Ah — a — that is — I shall be obliged to intrude upon you again. The fact is” —

Miss Galbraith, anxiously: “Why, the cars have stopped! Are we at Schenectady?”

Mr. Richards: “Well, no; not exactly; not stopped exactly at Schenectady” —

Miss Galbraith: “Then what station is this? Have they carried me by?” Observing his embarrassment, “Allen, what is the matter? What has happened? Tell me instantly! Are we off the track? Have we run into another train? Have we broken through a bridge? Shall we be burnt alive? Tell me, Allen, tell me, — I can bear it! — are we telescoped?” She wrings her hands in terror.

Mr. Richards, unsympathetically: “Nothing of the kind has happened. This car has simply come uncoupled, and the rest of the train has gone on ahead, and left us standing on the track, nowhere in particular.” He leans back in his chair, and wheels it round from her.

Miss Galbraith, mortified, yet anxious: “Well?”

Mr. Richards: “Well, until they miss us, and run back to pick us up, I shall be obliged to ask your indulgence. I will try not to disturb you; I would go out and stand on the platform, but it’s raining.”

Miss Galbraith, listening to the rain-fall on the roof: “Why, so it is!” Timidly, “Did you notice when the car stopped?”

Mr. Richards: “No.” He rises and goes out at the rear door, comes back, and sits down again.

Miss Galbraith, rises, and goes to the large mirror to wipe away her tears. She glances at Mr. Richards, who does not move. She sits down in a seat nearer him than the chair she has left. After some faint murmurs and hesitations, she asks, “Will you please tell me why you went out just now?”

Mr. Richards, with indifference: “Yes. I went to see if the rear signal was out.”

Miss Galbraith, after another hesitation: “Why?”

Mr. Richards: “Because, if it wasn’t out, some train might run into us from that direction.”

Miss Galbraith, tremulously: “Oh! And was it?”

Mr. Richards, dryly: “Yes.”

Miss Galbraith returns to her former place, with a wounded air, and for a moment neither speaks. Finally she asks very meekly, “And there’s no danger from the front?”

Mr. Richards, coldly: “No.”

Miss Galbraith, after some little noises and movements meant to catch Mr. Richards’s attention: “Of course, I never meant to imply that you were intentionally careless or forgetful.”

Mr. Richards, still very coldly: “Thank you.”

Miss Galbraith: “I always did justice to your good-heartedness, Allen; you’re perfectly lovely that way; and I know that you would be sorry if you knew you had wounded my feelings, however accidentally.” She droops her head so as to catch a sidelong glimpse of his face, and sighs, while she nervously pinches the top of her parasol, resting the point on the floor. Mr. Richards makes no answer. “That about the cigar-case might have been a mistake; I saw that myself, and, as you explain it, why, it was certainly very kind and very creditable to — to your thoughtfulness. It was thoughtful!”

Mr. Richards: “I am grateful for your good opinion.”

Miss Galbraith: “But do you think it was exactly — it was quite — nice, not to tell me that your brother’s engagement was to be kept, when you know, Allen, I can’t bear to blunder in such things?” Tenderly, “Do you? You can’t say it was?”

Mr. Richards: “I never said it was.”

Miss Galbraith, plaintively: “No, Allen. That’s what I always admired in your character. You always owned up. Don’t you think it’s easier for men to own up than it is for women?”

Mr. Richards: “I don’t know. I never knew any woman to do it.”

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, yes, Allen! You know I often own up.”

Mr. Richards: “No, I don’t.”

Miss Galbraith: “Oh, how can you bear to say so? When I’m rash, or anything of that kind, you know I acknowledge it.”

Mr. Richards: “Do you acknowledge it now?”

Miss Galbraith: “Why, how can I, when I haven’t been rash? What have I been rash” —

Mr. Richards: “About the cigar-case, for example.”

Miss Galbraith: “Oh! that! That was a great while ago! I thought you meant something quite recent.” A sound as of the approaching tram is heard in the distance. She gives a start, and then leaves her chair again for one a little nearer his. “I thought perhaps you meant about — last night.”

Mr. Richards: “Well.”

Miss Galbraith, very judicially: “I don’t think it was rash, exactly. No, not rash. It might not have been very kind not to — to — trust you more, when I knew that you didn’t mean anything; but — No, I took the only course I could. Nobody could have done differently under the circumstances. But if I caused you any pain, I’m very sorry; oh, yes, very sorry indeed. But I was not precipitate, and I know I did right. At least I tried to act for the best. Don’t you believe I did?”

Mr. Richards: “Why, if you have no doubt upon the subject, my opinion is of no consequence.”

Miss Galbraith: “Yes. But what do you think? If you think differently, and can make me see it differently, oughtn’t you to do so?”

Mr. Richards: “I don’t see why. As you say, all is over between us.”

Miss Galbraith: “Yes.” After a pause, “I should suppose you would care enough for yourself to wish me to look at the matter from the right point of view.”

Mr. Richards: “I don’t.”

Miss Galbraith, becoming more and more uneasy as the noise of the approaching train grows louder: “I think you have been very quick with me at times, quite as quick as I could have been with you last night.” The noise is more distinctly heard. “I’m sure that if I could once see it as you do, no one would be more willing to do anything in their power to atone for their rashness. Of course I know that everything is over.”

Mr. Richards: “As to that, I have your word; and, in view of the fact, perhaps this analysis of motive, of character, however interesting on general grounds, is a little” —

Miss Galbraith, with sudden violence: “Say it, and take your revenge! I have put myself at your feet, and you do right to trample on me! Oh, this is what women may expect when they trust to men’s generosity! Well, it is over now, and I’m thankful, thankful! Cruel, suspicious, vindictive, you’re all alike, and I’m glad that I’m no longer subject to your heartless caprices. And I don’t care what happens after this, I shall always — Oh! You’re sure it’s from the front, Allen? Are you sure the rear signal is out?”

Mr. Richards, relenting: “Yes, but if it will ease your mind, I’ll go and look again.” He rises, and starts towards the rear door.

Miss Galbraith, quickly: “Oh, no! Don’t go! I can’t bear to be left alone!” The sound of the approaching train continually increases in volume. “Oh, isn’t it coming very, very, very fast?”

Mr. Richards: “No, no! Don’t be frightened.”

Miss Galbraith, running towards the rear door. “Oh, I must get out! It will kill me, I know it will. Come with me! Do, do!” He runs after her, and her voice is heard at the rear of the car. “Oh, the outside door is locked, and we are trapped, trapped, trapped! Oh, quick! Let’s try the door at the other end.” They re-enter the parlor, and the roar of the train announces that it is upon them. “No, no! It’s too late, it’s too late! I’m a wicked, wicked girl, and this is all to punish me! Oh, it’s coming, it’s coming at full speed!” He remains bewildered, confronting her. She utters a wild cry, and as the train strikes the car with a violent concussion, she flings herself into his arms. “There, there! Forgive me, Allen! Let us die together, my own, own love!” She hangs fainting on his breast. Voices are heard without, and after a little delay The Porter comes in with a lantern.

Porter: “Rather more of a jah than we meant to give you, sah! We had to run down pretty quick after we missed you, and the rain made the track a little slippery. Lady much frightened?”

Miss Galbraith, disengaging herself: “Oh, not at all! Not in the least. We thought it was a train coming from behind, and going to run into us, and so — we — I” —

Porter: “Not quite so bad as that. We’ll be into Schenectady in a few minutes, miss. I’ll come for your things.” He goes out at the other door.

Miss Galbraith, in a fearful whisper: “Allen! What will he ever think of us? I’m sure he saw us!”

Mr. Richards: “I don’t know what he’ll think now. He did think you were frightened; but you told him you were not. However, it isn’t important what he thinks. Probably he thinks I’m your long-lost brother. It had a kind of family look.”

Miss Galbraith: “Ridiculous!”

Mr. Richards: “Why, he’d never suppose that I was a jilted lover of yours!”

Miss Galbraith, ruefully: “No.”

Mr. Richards: “Come, Lucy,” — taking her hand,— “you wished to die with me, a moment ago. Don’t you think you can make one more effort to live with me? I won’t take advantage of words spoken in mortal peril, but I suppose you were in earnest when you called me your own — own” — Her head droops; he folds her in his arms a moment, then she starts away from him, as if something had suddenly occurred to her.

Miss Galbraith: “Allen, where are you going?”

Mr. Richards: “Going? Upon my soul, I haven’t the least idea.”

Miss Galbraith: “Where were you going?”

Mr. Richards: “Oh, I was going to Albany.”

Miss Galbraith: “Well, don’t! Aunt Mary is expecting me here at Schenectady, — I telegraphed her, — and I want you to stop here, too, and we’ll refer the whole matter to her. She’s such a wise old head. I’m not sure” —

Mr. Richards: “What?”

Miss Galbraith, demurely: “That I’m good enough for you.”

Mr. Richards, starting, in burlesque of her movement, as if a thought had struck him: “Lucy! how came you on this train when you left Syracuse on the morning express?”

Miss Galbraith, faintly: “I waited over a train at Utica.” She sinks into a chair, and averts her face.

Mr. Richards: “May I ask why?”

Miss Galbraith, more faintly still: “I don’t like to tell. I” —

Mr. Richards, coming and standing in front of her, with his hands in his pockets: “Look me in the eye, Lucy!” She drops her veil over her face, and looks up at him. “Did you — did you expect to find me on this train?”

Miss Galbraith: “I was afraid it never would get along, — it was so late!”

Mr. Richards: “Don’t — tergiversate.”

Miss Galbraith: “Don’t what?”

Mr. Richards: “Fib.”

Miss Galbraith: “Not for worlds!”

Mr. Richards: “How did you know I was in this car?”

Miss Galbraith: “Must I? I thought I saw you through the window; and then I made sure it was you when I went to pin my veil on, — I saw you in the mirror.”

Mr. Richards, after a little silence: “Miss Galbraith, do you want to know what you are?”

Miss Galbraith, softly: “Yes, Allen.”

Mr. Richards: “You’re a humbug!”

Miss Galbraith, springing from her seat, and confronting him. “So are you! You pretended to be asleep!”

Mr. Richards: “I — I — I was taken by surprise. I had to take time to think.”

Miss Galbraith: “So did I.”

Mr. Richards: “And you thought it would be a good plan to get your polonaise caught in the window?”

Miss Galbraith, hiding her face on his shoulder: “No, no, Allen! That I never will admit. No woman would!”

Mr. Richards: “Oh, I dare say!” After a pause: “Well, I am a poor, weak, helpless man, with no one to advise me or counsel me, and I have been cruelly deceived. How could you, Lucy, how could you? I can never get over this.” He drops his head upon her shoulder.

Miss Galbraith, starting away again, and looking about the car: “Allen, I have an idea! Do you suppose Mr. Pullman could be induced to sell this car?”

Mr. Richards: “Why?”

Miss Galbraith: “Why, because I think it’s perfectly lovely, and I should like to live in it always. It could be fitted up for a sort of summer-house, don’t you know, and we could have it in the garden, and you could smoke in it.”

Mr. Richards: “Admirable! It would look just like a travelling photographic saloon. No, Lucy, we won’t buy it; we will simply keep it as a precious souvenir, a sacred memory, a beautiful dream, — and let it go on fulfilling its destiny all the same.”

Porter, entering, and gathering up Miss Galbraith’s things: “Be at Schenectady in half a minute, miss. Won’t have much time.”

Miss Galbraith, rising, and adjusting her dress, and then looking about the car, while she passes her hand through her lover’s arm: “Oh, I do hate to leave it. Farewell, you dear, kind, good, lovely car! May you never have another accident!” She kisses her hand to the car, upon which they both look back as they slowly leave it.

Mr. Richards, kissing his hand in the like manner: “Good-by, sweet chariot! May you never carry any but bridal couples!”

Miss Galbraith: “Or engaged ones!”

Mr. Richards: “Or husbands going home to their wives!”

Miss Galbraith: “Or wives hastening to their husbands.”

Mr. Richards: “Or young ladies who have waited one train over, so as to be with the young men they hate.”

Miss Galbraith: “Or young men who are so indifferent that they pretend to be asleep when the young ladies come in!” They pause at the door and look back again. “‘And must I leave thee, Paradise?’” They both kiss their hands to the car again, and, their faces being very close together, they impulsively kiss each other. Then Miss Galbraith throws back her head, and solemnly confronts him. “Only think, Allen! If this car hadn’t broken its engagement, we might never have mended ours.”

OUT OF THE QUESTION

CONTENTS

I. IN THE PARLOR OF THE PONKWASSET HOTEL.

I. MISS MAGGIE WALLACE AND MISS LILLY ROBERTS.

II. MISS LESLIE BELLINGHAM, MAGGIE, AND LILLY.

III. MRS. BELLINGHAM, MRS. MURRAY, AND THE YOUNG GIRLS.

IV. MRS. BELLINGHAM AND LESLIE; AFTERWARDS MRS. MURRAY AND MAGGIE.

V. LESLIE AND BLAKE.

VI. MRS. BELLINGHAM AND LESLIE; THEN MRS. MURRAY.

II. “IN FAYRE FOREST.”

I. TWO TRAMPS.

II. BLAKE AND THE TRAMPS.

III. LESLIE, MAGGIE, AND LILLY; THEN LESLIE ALONE.

IV. THE YOUNG GIRLS AND THE TRAMPS.

V. BLAKE AND THE YOUNG GIRLS.

III. A SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING.

I. MRS. MURRAY AND MRS. BELLINGHAM.

II. LESLIE AND BLAKE; MRS. MURRAY AND MRS. BELLINGHAM APART.

III. LESLIE AND BLAKE; FINALLY, MRS. BELLINGHAM.

IV. MRS. MURRAY’S TRIUMPH.

I. MRS. BELLINGHAM AND LESLIE.

II. MRS. MURRAY, MRS. BELLINGHAM, AND LESLIE.

V. BLAKE’S SAVING DOUBT.

I. LESLIE AND MAGGIE.

II. LESLIE And BLAKE.

VI. MR. CHARLES BELLINGHAM’S DIPLOMACY.

I. MRS. BELLINGHAM, MRS. MURRAY, AND MR. CHARLES BELLINGHAM.

II. BELLINGHAM AND MRS. BELLINGHAM; LESLIE AND BLAKE, WITHOUT.

III. BLAKE AND BELLINGHAM.

IV. LESLIE, BLAKE, AND BELLINGHAM.

V. MRS. BELLINGHAM, AND LESLIE, BLAKE, AND BELLINGHAM; AFTERWARDS MRS. MURRAY.

I. IN THE PARLOR OF THE PONKWASSET HOTEL.

I. MISS MAGGIE WALLACE AND MISS LILLY ROBERTS.

THE Ponkwasset Hotel stands on the slope of a hill and fronts the irregular mass of Ponkwasset Mountain, on which the galleries and northern windows of the parlor look out. The parlor is furnished with two hair-cloth sofas, two hair-cloth easy-chairs, and cane-seated chairs of divers patterns; against one side of the room stands a piano, near either end of which a door opens into the corridor; in the center of the parlor a marble-topped table supports a state-lamp of kerosene, — a perfume by day, a flame by night, — and near this table sit two young ladies with what they call work in their hands and laps.

Miss Maggie Wallace, with her left wrist curved in the act of rolling up a part of her work, at which she looks down with a very thoughtful air and a careworn little sigh: “I don’t think I shall cut it bias, after all, Lilly.”

Miss Lilly Roberts, letting her work fall into her lap, in amazement: “Why, Maggie!”

Maggie: “No. Or at least I shan’t decide to do so till I’ve had Leslie’s opinion on it. She has perfect taste, and she could tell at a glance whether it would do.”

Lilly: “I wonder she isn’t here, now. The stage must be very late.”

Maggie: “I suppose the postmaster at South Herodias waited to finish his supper before he ‘changed the mail,’ as they call it. I was so in hopes she would come while they were at tea! It will so disgust her to see them all strung along the piazza and staring their eyes out at the arrivals, when the stage drives up,” — a horrible picture which Miss Wallace dreamily contemplates for a moment in mental vision.

Lilly: “Why don’t you go down, too, Maggie? Perhaps she’d find a familiar face a relief.”

Maggie, recalled to herself by the wild suggestion: “Thank you, Lilly. I’d rather not be thought so vulgar as that, by Leslie Bellingham, if it’s quite the same to other friends. Imagine her catching sight of me in that crowd! I should simply wither away.”

Lilly, rebelliously: “Well, I don’t see why she should feel authorized to overawe people in that manner. What does she do to show her immense superiority?”

Maggie: “Everything! In the first place she’s so refined and cultivated, you can’t live; and then she takes your breath away, she’s so perfectly lovely; and then she kills you dead with her style, and all that. She isn’t the least stiff. She’s the kindest to other people you ever saw, and the carefullest of their feelings; and she has the grandest principles, and she’s divinely impulsive! But somehow you feel that if you do anything that’s a little vulgar in her presence, you’d better die at once. It was always so at school, and it always will be. Why you would no more dare to do or say anything just a little common, don’t you know, with Leslie Bellingham” — A young lady, tall, slender, and with an air of delicate distinction, has appeared at the door of the parlor. She is of that type of beauty which approaches the English, without losing the American fineness and grace; she is fair, and her eyes are rather gray than blue; her nose is slightly aquiline; her expression is serious, but becomes amused as she listens to Miss Wallace. She wears one of those blonde traveling-costumes, whose general fashionableness she somehow subdues into character with herself; over her arm she carries a shawl. She drifts lightly into the room. At the rustling of her dress Miss Wallace looks up, and with a cry of surprise and ecstasy springs from her chair, scattering the contents of her work-box in every direction over the floor, and flings herself into Miss Leslie Bellingham’s embrace. Then she starts away from her and gazes rapturously into her face, while they prettily clasp hands and hold each other at arm’s length: “Leslie! You heard every word!”

II. MISS LESLIE BELLINGHAM, MAGGIE, AND LILLY.

Leslie: “Every syllable, my child. And when you came to my grand principles, I simply said to myself, ‘Then listening at keyholes is heroic,’ and kept on eavesdropping without a murmur. Had you quite finished?”

Maggie: “O Leslie! You know I never can finish when I get on that subject! It inspires me to greater and greater flights every minute. Where is your mother? Where is Mrs. Murray? Where is the stage? Why, excuse me! This is Miss Roberts. Lilly, it’s Leslie Bellingham! Oh, how glad I am to see you together at last! Didn’t the stage” —

Leslie, having graciously bowed to Miss Roberts: “No, Maggie. The stage didn’t bring me here. I walked.”

Maggie: “Why, Leslie! How perfectly ghastly!”

Leslie: “The stage has done nothing but disgrace itself ever since we left the station. In the first place it pretended to carry ten or twelve people and their baggage, with two horses. Four horses oughtn’t to drag such a load up these precipices; and wherever the driver would stop for me, I insisted upon getting out to walk.”

Maggie: “How like you, Leslie!”

Leslie: “Yes; I wish the resemblance were not so striking. I’m here in character, Maggie, if you like, but almost nothing else. I’ve nothing but a hand-bag to bless me with for the next twenty-four hours. Shall you be very much ashamed of me?” Maggie: “Why, you don’t mean to say you’ve lost your trunks? Horrors!”

Leslie: “No. I mean that I wasn’t going to let the driver add them to the cruel load he had already, and I made him leave them at the station till to-morrow night.”

Maggie, embracing her: “Oh, you dear, good, grand, generous Leslie! How — Why, but Leslie! He’ll have just as many people to-morrow night, and your trunks besides theirs!”

Leslie, with decision: “Very well! Then I shall not be there to see the outrage. I will not have suffering or injustice of any kind inflicted in my presence, if I can help it. That is all.” Nevertheless, Miss Bellingham sinks into one of the armchairs with an air of some dismay, and vainly taps the toe of her boot with the point of her umbrella in a difficult interval of silence.

Maggie, finally: “But where is your hand-bag?” Leslie, with mystery, “Oh, he’s bringing it.” Maggie: “He?”

Leslie, with reviving spirits: “A young man, the good genius of the drive. He’s bringing it from the foot of the hill; the stage had its final disaster there; and I left him in charge of mamma and aunt Kate, and came on to explore and surprise, and he made me leave the bag with him, too. But that isn’t the worst. I shall know what to do with the hand-bag when it gets here, but I shan’t know what to do with the young man.” Maggie: “With the young man? Why, Leslie, a young man is worth a thousand hand-bags in a place like this! You don’t know what you ‘re talking about; Leslie. A young man” —

Leslie, rising and going toward the window: “My dear, he’s out of the question. You may as well make up your mind to that, for you’ll see at once that he’ll never do. He’s going to stop here, and as he’s been very kind to us it makes his never doing all the harder to manage. He’s a hero, if you like, but if you can imagine it he isn’t quite — well, what you’ve been used to. Don’t you see how a person could be everything that was unselfish and obliging, and yet not — not” —

Maggie, eagerly: “Oh yes!”

Leslie: “Well, he’s that. It seems to me that he’s been doing something for mamma, or aunt Kate, or me, ever since we left the station. To begin with, he gave up his place inside to one of us, and when he went to get on top, he found all the places taken there; and so he had to sit on the trunks behind — whenever he rode; for he walked most of the way, and helped me over the bad places in the road when I insisted on getting out.

You know how aunt Kate is, Maggie, and how many wants she has. Well, there wasn’t one of them that this young man didn’t gratify: he handed her bag up to the driver on top because it crowded her, and handed it down because she couldn’t do without it; he got her out and put her back so that she could face the front, and then restored her to her place because an old gentleman who had been traveling a long way kept falling asleep on her shoulder; he buttoned her curtain down because she was sure it was going to rain, and rolled it up because it made the air too close; he fetched water for her; he looked every now and then to see if her trunks were all right, and made her more and more ungrateful every minute. Whenever the stage broke down — as it did twice before the present smash-up — he befriended everybody, encouraged old ladies, quieted children, and shamed the other men into trying to be of some use; and if it hadn’t been for him, I don’t see how the stage would ever have got out of its troubles; he always knew just what was the matter, and just how to mend it Is that the window that commands a magnificent prospect of Ponkwasset Mountain — in the advertisement?”

Maggie: “The very window!”

Leslie: “Does it condescend to overlook so common a thing as the road up to the house?” Maggie: “Of coarse; but why?”

Leslie, going to the open window, and stepping through it upon the gallery, whither the other young ladies follow her, and where her voice is heard: “Yes, there they come! But I can’t see my young man. Is it possible that he’s riding? No, there he is! He was on the other side of the stage. Don’t you see him? Why he needn’t carry my hand-bag! He certainly might have let that ride. I do wonder what he means by it! Or is it only absent-mindedness? Don’t let him see us looking! It would be altogether too silly. Do let’s go in!”

Maggie, on their return to the parlor: “What a great pity it is that he won’t do! Is he handsome, Leslie? Why won’t he do?”

Leslie: “You can tell in a moment, when you’ve seen him, Maggie. He’s perfectly respectful and nice, of course, but he’s no more social perspective than — the man in the moon. He’s never obtrusive, but he’s as free and equal as the Declaration of Independence; and when you did get up some little perspective with him, and tried to let him know, don’t you know, that there was such a thing as a vanishing point somewhere, he was sure to do or say something so unconscious that away went your perspective — one simple crush.”

Maggie: “How ridiculous!”

Leslie: “Yes. It was funny. But not just in that way. He isn’t in the least common or uncouth. Nobody could say that. But he’s going to be here two or three weeks, and it’s impossible not to be civil; and it’s very embarrassing, don’t you see?”

Lilly: “Let me comfort you, Miss Bellingham. It will be the simplest thing in the world. We ‘re all on the same level in the Ponkwasset Hotel. The landlord will bring him up during the evening and introduce him. Our table girls teach school in the winter and are as good as anybody. Mine calls me ‘Lilly,’ and I’m so small I can’t help it.

They dress up in the afternoon, and play the piano. The cook’s as affable, when you meet her in society, as can be.”

Maggie: “Lilly!”

Leslie, listening to Miss Roberts with whimsical trepidation: “Well, this certainly complicates matters. But I think we shall be able to manage.” At a sound of voices in the hall without, Miss Bellingham starts from her chair and runs to the corridor, where she is heard: “Thanks ever so much. So very good of you to take all this trouble. Come into the parlor, mamma — there’s nobody there but Maggie Wallace and Miss Roberts — and we’ll leave our things there till after tea.” She reenters the parlor with her mother and her aunt Kate, Mrs. Murray; after whom comes Stephen Blake with Leslie’s bag in his hand, and the wraps of the other ladies over his arm. His dress, which is evidently a prosperous fortuity of the clothing-store, takes character from his tall, sinewy frame; a smile of somewhat humorous patience lights his black eyes and shapes his handsome moustache, as he waits in quiet self-possession the pleasure of the ladies.

III. MRS. BELLINGHAM, MRS. MURRAY, AND THE YOUNG GIRLS.

Mrs. Bellingham, a matronly, middle-aged lady of comfortable, not cumbrous bulk, taking Miss Wallace by the hand and kissing her: “My dear child, how pleasant it is to see you so strong again! You ‘re a living testimony to the excellence of the air! How well you look!”

Leslie: “Mamma, — Miss Roberts.” Mrs. Bellingham murmurously shakes hands with Miss Roberts, and after some kindly nods and smiles, and other shows of friendliness, provisionally and expectantly quiesces into a corner of the sofa, while her sister-in-law comes aggressively forward to assume the burden of conversation.

Mrs. Murray: “Well, a more fatiguing drive I certainly never knew! How do you do, Maggie?” She kisses Miss Wallace in a casual, uninterested way, and takes Lilly’s hand. “Isn’t this Miss Roberts? I am Mrs. Murray. I used to know your family — your uncle George, before that dreadful business of his. I believe it all came out right; he wasn’t to blame; but it was a shocking experience.” Mrs. Murray turns from Lilly, and refers herself to the company in general: “It seems as if I should expire on the spot. I feel as if I had been packed away in my own hat-box for a week, and here, just as we arrive, the landlord informs us that he didn’t expect us till tomorrow night, and he hasn’t an empty room in the house!”

Maggie: “No room! To-morrow night! What nonsense! Why it’s perfectly frantic! How could he have misunderstood? Why, it seems to me that I’ve done nothing for a week past but tell him you were coming to-night!” —

Mrs. Murray, sharply: “I have no doubt of it. But it doesn’t alter the state of the case. You may tell us to leave our things till after tea, Leslie. If they can’t make up beds on the sofas and the piano, I don’t know where we ‘re going to pass the night.” In the moment of distressful sensation which follows Miss Wallace whispers something eagerly to her friend, Miss Roberts.

Maggie, with a laughing glance at Leslie and her mother, and then going on with her whispering: “Excuse the little confidence!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Conspiracy, I’m afraid. What are you plotting, Maggie?”

Maggie, finishing her confidence: “Oh, we needn’t make a mystery of such a little thing. We ‘re going to offer you one of our rooms.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “My dear, you are going to do nothing of the kind. We will never allow it.” Maggie: “Now, Mrs. Bellingham, you break my heart! It’s nothing, it’s less than nothing. I believe we can make room for all three of you.” Mrs. Murray, promptly: “Let me go with you, young ladies. I’m an old housekeeper, and I can help you plan.”

Maggie: “Oh do, Mrs. Murray. You can tell which room you’d better take, Lilly’s or mine. Lilly’s is” —

Mrs. Murray: “Oh! I had forgotten that we were detaining you!” Mrs. Murray is about to leave the room with the two young girls, when her eye falls upon Blake, who is still present, with his burden of hand-bags and shawls. “Leave the things on the table, please. We are obliged to you.” Mrs. Murray speaks with a certain finality of manner and tone which there is no mistaking; Blake stares at her a moment, and then, without replying, lays down the things and turns to quit the room; at the same instant Leslie rises with a grand air from her mother’s side, on the sofa, and sweeps towards him. —

Leslie, very graciously: “Don’t let our private afflictions drive you from a public room, Mr.—” Blake: “Blake.”

Leslie: “Mr. Blake. This is my mother, Mr. Blake, who wishes to thank you for all your kindness to us.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Yes, indeed, Mr. Blake, we are truly grateful to you.”

Leslie, with increasing significance: “And my aunt, Mrs. Murray; and my friend, Miss Wallace; and Miss Roberts.” Blake bows to each of the ladies as they are named, but persists in his movement to quit the room; Leslie impressively offers him her hand. “Must you go? Thank you, ever, ever so much!” She follows him to the door in his withdrawal, and then turns and confronts her aunt with an embattled front of defiance.

Maggie, with an effort breaking the embarrassing silence:— “Come, Lilly. Let us go and take a look at our resources. We’ll be back in a moment, Mrs. Bellingham.”

IV. MRS. BELLINGHAM AND LESLIE; AFTERWARDS MRS. MURRAY AND MAGGIE.

Leslie, coming abruptly forward as her aunt goes out with the two young girls, and drooping meekly in front of her mother, who remains seated on the sofa: “Well, mamma!”

Mrs. Bellingham, tranquilly contemplating her for a moment: “Well, Leslie!” She pauses, and again silently regards her daughter. “Perhaps you may be said to have overdone it.”

Leslie, passionately: “I can’t help it, mother! I couldn’t see him sent away in that insolent manner, I don’t care who or what he is. Aunt Kate’s tone was outrageous, atrocious, hideous! And after accepting, yes, demanding every service he could possibly render, the whole afternoon! It made me blush for her, and I wasn’t going to stand it.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “If you mean by all that that your poor aunt is a very ungracious and exacting woman, I shall not dispute you. But she’s your father’s sister; and she’s very much older than you. You seem to have forgotten, too, that your mother was present to do any justice that was needed. It’s very unfortunate that he should have been able to do us so many favors, but that can’t be helped now. It’s one of the risks of coming to these out-of-the-way places, that you ‘re so apt to be thrown in with nondescript people that you don’t know how to get rid of afterwards. And now that he’s been so cordially introduced to us all! Well, I hope you won’t have to be crueller in the end, my dear, than your aunt meant to be in the beginning. So far, of course, he has behaved with perfect delicacy; but you must see yourself, Leslie, that even as a mere acquaintance he’s quite out of the question; that however kind and thoughtful he’s been, and no one could have been more so, he isn’t a gentleman.”

Leslie, impatiently: “Well, then, mother, I am! And so are you. And I think we are bound to behave like gentlemen at any cost. I didn’t mean to ignore you. I didn’t consider. I acted as I thought Charley would have done.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Oh, my dear, my dear!

Don’t you see there’s a very important difference? Your brother is a man, and he can act without reference to consequences. But you are a young lady, and you can’t be as gentlemanly as you like without being liable to misinterpretation. I shall expect you to behave very discreetly indeed from this time forth. We must consider now how our new friend can be kindly, yet firmly and promptly, dropped.”

Leslie: “Oh, it’s another of those embarrassments that aunt Kate’s always getting me into! I was discreet about it till she acted so horridly. You can ask Maggie if I didn’t talk in the wisest way about it; like a perfect — owl. I saw it just as you do, mamma, and I was going to drop him, and so I will, yet; but I couldn’t see him so ungratefully trampled on. It’s all her doing! Who wanted to come here to this out-of-the-way place? Why, aunt Kate, — when I was eager to go to Conway! I declare it’s too bad!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “That will do, Leslie.”

Leslie: “And now she’s gone off with those poor girls to crowd them out of house and home, I suppose. It’s a shame! Why did you let her, mamma?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “For the same reason that I let you talk on, my dear, when I’ve bidden you stop.”

Leslie: “Oh, you dear, kind old mamma, you! You ‘re a gentleman, and you always were! I only wish I could be half like you!” She throws her arms round her mother’s neck and kisses her. “I know you ‘re right about this matter, but you mustn’t expect me to acknowledge that aunt Kate is. If you both said exactly the same thing, you would be right and she would be wrong, you’d say it so differently!”

Mrs. Murray, who returns alone with signs of discontent and perplexity, and flings herself into a chair: “Their rooms are mere coops, and I don’t see how even two of us are to squeeze into one of them. It’s little better than impertinence to offer it to us. I’ve been down to see the landlord again, and you’ll be pleased to know, Marion, that the only vacant room in the house had been engaged by the person to whom we’ve all just had the honor of an introduction.” Leslie makes an impetuous movement, as if she were about to speak, but at a gesture from her mother she restrains herself, and Mrs. Murray continues: “Of course, if he had been a gentleman, in the lowest sense of the word, he would have offered his room to ladies who had none, at once. As long as he could make social capital out of his obtrusive services to us he was very profuse with them, but as soon as it came to a question of real self-sacrifice — to giving up his own ease and comfort for a single night” — A bell rings, and at the sound Mrs. Bellingham rises.

Mrs. Bellingham: “I suppose that’s for supper. I think a cup of tea will put a cheerfuller face on our affairs. I don’t at all agree with you about Mr. Blake’s obligation to give up his room, nor about his services to us this afternoon; I’m sure common justice requires us to acknowledge that he was everything that was kind and thoughtful. Oh, you good child!” — as Miss Wallace appears at the door,—” have you come to show us the way to supper? Are you quite sure you’ve not gone without tea on our account as well as given up your room?” She puts her arm fondly round the young girl’s waist, and presses her cheek against her own breast.

Maggie, with enthusiasm: Oh, Mrs. Bellingham, you know I wouldn’t ask anything better than to starve on your account. I wish I hadn’t been to tea! I’m afraid that you’ll think the room is a very slight offering when you come to see it — it is such a little room; why, when I took Mrs. Murray into it, it seemed all at once as if I saw it through the wrong end of an opera-glass — it did dwindle so!”

Leslie: “Never mind, Maggie; you ‘re only too good, as it is. If your room was an inch bigger, we couldn’t bear it. I hope you may be without a roof over your head yourself, some day! Can I say anything handsomer than that? Don’t wait for me, mamma; I’ll find the dining-room myself. I’m rather too crumpled even for a houseless wanderer.” She opens her bag where it stands on the table. “I am going to make a flying toilet at one of these glasses. Do you think any one will come in, Maggie?”

Maggie: “There isn’t the least danger. This is the parlor of the “transients,” as they call them, — the occasional guests, — and Lilly and I have it mostly to ourselves when there are no transients. The regular boarders stay in the lower parlor. Shan’t I help you, Leslie?”

Leslie, rummaging through her bag: “No, indeed! It’s only a question of brush and hair-pins. Do go with mamma!” As Maggie obeys, Leslie finds her brush, and going to one of the mirrors touches the blonde masses of her hair, and then remains a moment, lightly turning her head from side to side to get the effect. She suddenly claps her hand to one ear. “Oh, horrors! That ear-drop’s gone again!” She runs to the table, reopens her bag, and searches it in every part, talking rapidly to herself. “Well, really, it seems as if sorrows would never end! To think of that working out a third time! To think of my coming away without getting the clasp fixed! And to think of my not leaving them in my trunk at the station! Oh dear me, I shall certainly go wild! What shall I do? It isn’t in the bag at all. It must be on the floor.” Keeping her hand in helpless incredulity upon the ear from which the jewel is missing, she scrutinizes the matting far and near, with a countenance of acute anguish. Footsteps are heard approaching the door, where they hesitatingly arrest themselves. “Have you come back for me? Oh, I’ve met with such a calamity! I’ve lost one of my ear-rings. I could cry. Do come and help me mouse for it.” There is no response to this invitation, and Leslie, lifting her eyes, in a little dismay confronts the silent intruder. “Mr. Blake!”

V. LESLIE AND BLAKE.

Blake: “Excuse me. I expected to find your mother here. I didn’t mean to disturb” —

Leslie, haughtily: “There’s no disturbance. It’s a public room: I had forgotten that. Mamma has gone to tea. I thought it was my friend Miss Wallace. I” — With a flash of indignation: “When you knew it wasn’t, why did you let me speak to you in that way?”

Blake, with a smile: “I couldn’t know whom you took me for, and I hadn’t time to prevent your speaking.”

Leslie: “You remained.”

Blake, with a touch of resentment tempering his amusement: “I couldn’t go away after I had come without speaking to you. It was Mrs. Bellingham I was looking for. I’m sorry not to find her, and I’ll go, now.”

Leslie, hastily: “Oh no! I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean” —

Blake, advancing toward her, and stooping to pick up something from the floor, near the table: “Is this what you lost? — if I’ve a right to know that you lost anything.”

Leslie: “Oh, my ear-ring! Oh, thanks! How did you see it? I thought I had looked and felt everywhere.” A quick color flies over her face as she takes the jewel from the palm of his hand. She turns to the mirror, and, seizing the tip of her delicate ear between the thumb and forefinger of one hand, hooks the pendant into place with the other, and then gives her head a little shake; the young man lightly sighs. She turns toward him, with the warmth still lingering in her cheeks. “I’m ever so much obliged to you, Mr. Blake. I wish I had your gift of doing all sorts of services — favors — to people. I wish I could find something for you.”

Blake: “I wish you could — if it were the key to my room, which I came back in hopes of finding. I’ve mislaid it somewhere, and I thought I might have put it down with your shawls here on the table.” Leslie promptly lifts one of the shawls, and the key drops from it. “That’s it. Miss Bellingham, I have a favor to ask: will you give this key to your mother?”

Leslie: “This key?”

Blake: “I have found a place to sleep at a farm-house just down the road, and I want your mother to take my room; I haven’t looked into it yet, and I don’t know that it’s worth taking. But I suppose it’s better than no room at all; and I know you have none.”

Leslie, with cold hauteur, after looking absently at him for a moment: “Thanks. It’s quite impossible. My mother would never consent.”

Blake: “The room will stand empty, then. I meant to give it up from the first, — as soon as I found that you were not provided for, — but I hated to make a display of it before all the people down there in the office. I’ll go now and leave the key with the landlord, as I ought to have done, without troubling you. But — I had hardly the chance of doing so after we came here.”

Leslie, with enthusiasm: “Oh, Mr. Blake, do you really mean to give us your room after you’ve been so odiously — Oh, it’s too bad; it’s too bad! You mustn’t; no, you shall not.”

Blake: “I will leave the key on the table here Good night. Or — I shall not see you in the morning: perhaps I had better say good-by.”

Leslie: “Good-by? In the morning?”

Blake: “I’ve changed my plans, and I’m going away to-morrow. Good-by.”

Leslie: “Going — Mamma will be very sorry to — Oh, Mr. Blake, I hope you are not going because — But indeed — I want you to believe” —

Blake, devoutly: “I believe it. Good-by!” He turns away to go, and Leslie, standing bewildered and irresolute, lets him leave the room; then she hastens to the door after him, and encounters her mother.

VI. MRS. BELLINGHAM AND LESLIE; THEN MRS. MURRAY.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Well, Leslie. Are you quite ready? We went to look at Maggie’s room before going down to tea. It’s small, but we shall manage somehow. Come, dear. She’s waiting for us at the head of the stairs. Why, Leslie!”

Leslie, touching her handkerchief to her eyes: “I was a little overwrought, mamma. I’m tired.” After a moment: “Mamma, Mr. Blake” —

Mrs. Bellingham, with a look at her daughter: “I met him in the hall.”

Leslie: “Yes, he has been here; and I thought I had lost one of my ear-rings; and of course he found it on the floor the instant he came in; and” ——

Mrs. Murray, surging into the room, and going up to the table: “Well, Marion, the tea — What key is this? What in the world is Leslie crying about?”

Leslie, with supreme disregard of her aunt, and adamantine self-control: “Mr. Blake had come” — she hands the key to Mrs. Bellingham—” to offer you the key of his room. He asked me to give it.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “The key of his room?” Leslie: “He offers you his room; he had always meant to offer it.”

Mrs. Bellingham, gravely: “Mr. Blake had no right to know that we had no room. It is too great a kindness. We can’t accept it, Leslie. I hope you told him so, my dear.”

Leslie: “Yes, mamma. But he said he was going to lodge at one of the farm-houses in the neighborhood, and the room would be vacant if you didn’t take it. I couldn’t prevent his leaving the key.” Mrs. Bellingham: “That is all very well. But it doesn’t alter the case, as far as we are concerned. It is very good of Mr. Blake, but after what has occurred, it’s simply impossible. We can’t take it.” Mrs. Murray: “Occurred? Not take it? Of course we will take it, Marion! I certainly am astonished. The man will get a much better bed at the farmer’s than he’s accustomed to. You talk as if it were some act of self-sacrifice. I’ve no doubt he’s made the most of it. I’ve no doubt he’s given it an effect of heroism — or tried to. But that you should fall in with his vulgar conception of the affair, Marion, and Leslie should be affected to tears by his magnanimity, is a little too comical. One would think, really, that he had imperiled life and limb on our account. All this sentiment about a room on the third floor! Give the key to me, Marion.” She possesses herself of it from Mrs. Bellingham’s passive hand. “Leslie will wish to stay with you, so as to be near her young friends. I will occupy this vacant room.”

II. “IN FAYRE FOREST.”

I. TWO TRAMPS.

UNDER the shelter of some pines near a lonely by-road, in the neighborhood of the Ponkwasset Hotel, lie two tramps asleep. One of them, having made his bed of the pine-boughs, has pillowed his head upon the bundle he carries by day; the other is stretched, face downward, on the thick brown carpet of pine-needles. The sun, which strikes through the thin screen of the trees upon the bodies of the two men, is high in the heavens. The rattle of wheels is heard from time to time on the remoter highway; the harsh clatter of a kingfisher, poising over the water, comes from the direction of the river near at hand. A squirrel descends the trunk of an oak near the pines under which the men lie, and at sight of them stops, barks harshly, and then, as one of them stirs in his sleep, whisks back into the top of the oak. It is the luxurious tramp on the pine-boughs who stirs, and who alertly opens his eyes and sits up in his bed, as if the noisy rush of the squirrel had startled him from his sleep.

First Tramp, casting a malign glance at the top of the oak: “If I had a fair shot at you with this dub, my fine fellow, I’d break you of that trick of waking people before the bell rings in the morning, and I’d give ’em broiled squirrel for breakfast when they did get up.” He takes his bundle into his lap, and, tremulously untying it, reveals a motley heap of tatters; from these he searches out a flask, which he holds against the light, shakes at his ear, and inverts upon his lips. “Not a drop; not a square smell, even! I dreamt it” He lies down with a groan, and remains with his head pillowed in his hands. Presently he reaches for his stick, and again rising to a sitting posture strikes his sleeping comrade across the shoulders. “Get up!”

Second Tramp, who speaks with a slight brogue, briskly springing to his feet, and rubbing his shoulders: “And what for, my strange bedfellow?”

First Tramp: “For breakfast. What do people generally get up for in the morning?”

Second Tramp: “Upon my soul, I’d as soon have had mine in bed; I’ve a day of leisure before me. And let me say a word to you, my friend: the next time you see a gentleman dreaming of one of the most elegant repasts in the world, and just waiting for his stew to cool, don’t you intrude upon him with that little stick of yours. I don’t care for a stroke or two in sport, but when I think of the meal I’ve lost, I could find it in my heart to break your head for you, you ugly brute. Have you got anything to eat there in your wardrobe?”

First Tramp: “Not a crumb.”

Second Tramp: “Or to drink?”

First Tramp: “Not a drop.”

Second Tramp: “Or to smoke?”

First Tramp: “No.”

Second Tramp: “Faith, you ‘re nearer a broken head than ever, me friend. Wake a man out of a dream of that sort!”

First Tramp: “I’ve had enough of this. What do you intend to do?”

Second Tramp: “I’m going to assume the character of an impostor, and pretend at the next farm-house that I haven’t had any breakfast, and haven’t any money to buy one. It’s a bare-faced deceit, I know, but” — looking down at his broken shoes and tattered clothes— “I flatter myself that I dress the part pretty well. To be sure, the women are not as ready to listen as they were once. The tramping-trade is overdone; there’s too many in it; the ladies can’t believe we ‘re all destitute; it don’t stand to reason.”

First Tramp: “I’m tired of the whole thing.” Second Tramp: “I don’t like it myself. But there’s worse things. There’s work, for example. By my soul, there’s nothing disgusts me like these places where they tell you to go out and hoe potatoes, and your breakfast will be ready in an hour. I never could work with any more pleasure on an empty stomach than a full one. And the poor devils always think they’ve done something so fine when they say that, and the joke’s so stale! I can tell them I’m not to be got rid of so easy. I’m not the lazy, dirty vagabond I look, at all; I’m the inevitable result of the conflict between labor and capital; I’m the logical consequence of the prevailing corruption. I read it on the bit of newspaper they gave me round my dinner, yesterday; it was cold beef of a quality that you don’t often find in the country.”

First Tramp, sullenly: “I’m sick of the whole thing. I’m going out of it.”

Second Tramp: “And what’ll you do? Are ye going to work?”

First Tramp: “To work? No! To steal.” Second Tramp: “Faith, I don’t call that going out of it, then. It’s quite in the line of business. You ‘re no bad dab at a hen-roost, now, as I know very well; and for any little thing that a gentleman can shove under his coat, while the lady of the house has her back turned buttering his lunch for him, I don’t know the man I’d call master.”

First Tramp: “If I could get a man to tell me the time of day by a watch I liked, I’d as lief knock him over as look at him.”

Second Tramp: “Oh, if it’s high-way robbery you mean, partner, I don’t follow you.”

First Tramp: — What’s the difference?”

Second Tramp: “Not much, if you take it one way, but a good deal if you take it another. It’s the difference between petty larceny and grand larceny; it’s the difference between three months in the House of Correction and ten years in the State’s Prison, if you ‘re caught, not to mention the risks of the profession.”

First Tramp: “I’d take the risks if I saw my chance.” He lies down with his arms crossed under his head, and stares up into the pine. His comrade glances at him, and then moves stiffly out from the shelter of the trees, and, shading his eyes with one hand, peers down the road.

Second Tramp: “I didn’t know but I might see your chance, partner. You wouldn’t like an old gentleman with a load of potatoes to begin on, would ye? There’s one just gone up the cross-road. And yonder goes an umbrella-mender. I’m afraid we shan’t take any purses to speak of, in this neighborhood. Whoosh! Wait a bit — here’s somebody coming this way.” The first tramp is sufficiently interested to sit up. “Faith, here’s your chance at last, then, if you ‘re in earnest, my friend; but it stands six feet in its stockings, and it carries a stick as well as a watch. I won’t ask a share of the plunder, partner; I’ve rags enough of my own without wanting to divide your property with the gentleman coming.” He goes back and lies down at the foot of one of the trees, while the other, who has risen from his pine-boughs, comes cautiously forward; after a glance at the approaching wayfarer he flings away his cudgel, and, taking a pipe from his pocket drops into a cringing attitude. The Irishman grins. In another moment Blake appears from under the cover of the woods and advances with long strides, striking with his stick at the stones in the road as he comes on, in an absent-minded fashion.

II. BLAKE AND THE TRAMPS.

First Tramp: “I say, mister!” Blake looks up, and his eye falls upon the squalid figure of the tramp; he stops. “Couldn’t you give a poor fellow a little tobacco for his pipe? A smoke comes good, if you don’t happen to know where you ‘re going to get your breakfast.”

Second Tramp, coming forward, with his pipe in his hand: “True for you, partner. A little tobacco in the hand is worth a deal of breakfast in the bush.” Blake looks from one to the other, and then takes a paper of tobacco from his pocket and gives it to the first tramp, who helps himself and passes it to his comrade; the latter offers to return it after filling his pipe; Blake declines it with a wave of his hand, and walks on.

Second Tramp, calling after him: “God bless you! May you never want it!”

First Tramp: “Thank you, mister. You’re a gentleman!”

Blake: “All right.” He goes out of sight under the trees down the road, and then suddenly reappears and walks up to the two tramps, who remain where he left them and are feeling in their pockets for a match. “Did one of you call me a gentleman?”

First Tramp: “Yes, I did, mister. No offense in that, I hope?”

Blake: “No, but why did you do it?”

First Tramp: “Well, you didn’t ask us why we didn’t go to work; and you didn’t say that men who hadn’t any money to buy breakfast had better not smoke; and you gave us this tobacco. I’ll call any man a gentleman that’ll do that.”

Blake: “Oh, that’s a gentleman, is it? All right.” He turns to go away, when the second tramp detains him.

Second Tramp: “Does your honor happen to have ever a match about you?” Blake takes out his match-case and strikes a light. “God bless your honor. You ‘re a real gentleman.”

Blake: “Then this makes me a gentleman past a doubt?”

Second Tramp: “Sure, it does that.”

Make: “I’m glad to have the matter settled.” He walks on absently as before, and the tramps stand staring a moment in the direction in which he has gone.

Second Tramp, who goes back to the tree where he has been sitting and stretches himself out with his head on one arm for a quiet smoke: “That’s a queer genius. By my soul, I’d like to take the road in his company. Sure, I think there isn’t the woman alive would be out of cold victuals and old clothes when he put that handsome face of his in at the kitchen window.”

First Tramp, looking down the road: “I wonder if that fellow could have a drop of spirits about him! I say, mister!” calling after Blake. “Hello, there, I say!”

Second Tramp: “It’s too late, my worthy friend. He’ll never hear you; and it’s pot likely he’d come back to fill your flask for you, if he did. A gentleman of his character’d think twice before he gave a tramp whiskey. Tobacco’s another thing.” He takes out the half-paper of tobacco, and looks at the label on it. “What an extravagant dog! It’s the real cut-cavendish; and it smells as nice as it smokes. This luxury is what’s destroying the country. ‘With the present reckless expenditure in all classes of the population, and the prodigious influx of ignorant and degraded foreigners, there must he a constant increase of tramps.’ True for you, Mr. Newspaper. ‘T would have been an act of benevolence to take his watch from him, partner, and he never could tell how fast he was going to ruin. But you can’t always befriend a man six feet high and wiry as a cat.”

He offers to put the tobacco into his pocket again, when his comrade slouches up, and makes a clutch at it.

First Tramp: “I want that.”

Second Tramp: “Why, so ye do!”

First Tramp: “It’s mine.”

Second Tramp: “I’m keeping it for ye.”

First Tramp: “I tell you the man gave it to me.”

Second Tramp: “And he would n t take it back from me. Ah, will you, ye brute?” The other seizes the wrist of the hand with which the Irishman holds the tobacco; they wrestle together, when women’s voices are heard at some distance down the road. “Whoosh! Ladies coming.” The first tramp listens, kneeling. The Irishman springs to his feet and thrusts the paper of tobacco into his pocket, and, coming quickly forward, looks down the road. “Fortune favors the brave, partner! Here comes another opportunity — three of them, faith, and pretty ones at that! Business before pleasure; I’ll put off that beating again; it’s all the better for keeping. Besides, it’s not the thing,’ quarreling before ladies.” He is about to crouch down again at the foot of the tree as before, when his comrade hastily gathers up his bundle, and seizing him by the arm drags him back into the thicket behind the pine-trees. After a moment or two, three young ladies come sauntering slowly along the road.

III. LESLIE, MAGGIE, AND LILLY; THEN LESLIE ALONE.

Lilly, delicately sniffing the air: “Fee, fi, fo, fum; I smell the pipe of an Irishman.”

Leslie: “Never! I know the flavor of refined tobacco, thanks to a smoking brother. Oh, what a lonely road!”

Lilly: “This loneliness is one of the charms of the Ponkwasset neighborhood. When you ‘re once out of sight of the hotel and the picnic-grounds you’d think you were a thousand miles away from civilization. Not an empty sardine-box or a torn paper collar anywhere! This scent of tobacco is an unheard-of intrusion.”

Maggie, archly: “Perhaps Mr. Blake went this way. Does he smoke, Leslie?”

Leslie, coldly: “How should I know, Maggie? A. gentleman would hardly smoke in ladies’ company — strange ladies.” She sinks down upon a log at the wayside, and gazes slowly about with an air of fastidious criticism that gradually changes to a rapture of admiration. “Well, I certainly think that, take it all in all, I never saw anything more fascinating. It’s wonderful! This little nook itself, with that brown carpet of needles under the pines, and that heavy fringe of ferns there, behind those trunks; and then those ghostly birches stretching up and away, yonder — thousands of them! How tall and slim and stylish they are. And how they do march into the distance! I never saw such multitudes; and their lovely paleness makes them look as if one saw them by moonlight. Oh, oh! How perfectly divine! If one could only have their phantom-like procession painted! But Corot himself couldn’t paint them. Oh, I must make some sort of memorandum — I won’t have the presumption to call it a sketch.” She takes a sketch-book from under her arm, and lays it on her knees, and then with her pencil nervously traces on the air the lines of the distant birches. “Yes; I must. I never shall see them so beautiful again! Just jot down a few lines, and wash in the background when I get to the hotel. But girls; you mustn’t stay! Go on and get the flowers, and I’ll be done by the time you ‘re back. I couldn’t bear to have you overlooking me; I’ve all the sensitiveness of a great artist. Do go! But don’t be gone long.” She begins to work at her sketch, without looking at them.

Maggie: “ I’m so glad, Leslie. I knew you’d be perfectly fascinated with this spot, and so I didn’t tell you about it. I wanted it to burst upon you.”

Leslie, with a little impatient surprise, as if she had thought they were gone: “Yes, yes; never mind. You did quite right. Don’t stay long.” She continues to sketch, looking up now and then at the scene before her; but not glancing at her companions, who walk away from her some paces, when Miss Wallace comes back.

Maggie: “ What time is it, Leslie? Leslie!”

Leslie, nervously: “ Oh! What a start you gave me.” Glancing at her watch: “ It’s nine minutes past ten — I mean ten minutes past nine.” Still without looking at her: “ Be back soon.”

Maggie: “Oh, it isn’t far. Again she turns away with Miss Roberts, but before they are quite out of sight Leslie springs to her feet and runs after them.

Leslie: “Oh, girls — girls!”

Maggie, anxiously, starting back toward her: “What? What?”

Leslie, dreamily, as she returns to her place and sits down: “Oh, nothing. I just happened to think.” She closes her eyes to a narrow line, and looks up at the birches. “There are so many horrid stories in the papers. But of course there can’t be any in this out-of-the-way place, so far from the cities.”

Maggie: “Any what, Leslie?”

Leslie, remotely: “Tramps.”

Maggie, scornfully: “There never was such a thing heard of in the whole region.”

Leslie: “I thought not.” She is again absorbed in study of the birches; and, after a moment of hesitation, the other two retreat down the road once more, lingering a little to look back in admiration of her picturesque devotion to art, and then vanishing under the flickering light and shadow. Leslie works diligently on, humming softly to herself, and pausing now and then to look at the birches, for which object she rises at times, and, gracefully bending from side to side, or stooping forward to make sure of some effect that she has too slightly glimpsed, resumes her seat and begins anew. “No, that won’t do!” — vigorously plying her india-rubber on certain lines of the sketch. “How stupid!” Then beginning to draw again, and throwing back her head for the desired distance on her sketch: “Ah, that’s more like. Still, nobody could accuse it of slavish fidelity. Well!” She sings: —

“Through starry palm-roofs on Old Nile

The full-orbed moon looked clear;

The bulbul sang to the crocodile,

‘Ah, why that bitter tear?’

“‘With thy tender breast against the thorn,

Why that society-smile?’

The bird was mute. In silent scorn

Slow winked the crocodile.” —

How perfectly ridiculous! Slow winked” —

Miss Bellingham alternately applies pencil and rubber— “slow winked the croco — I never shall get that right; it’s too bad! — dile.” While she continues to sketch, and sing da capo, the tramps creep stealthily from their covert. Apparently in accordance with some preconcerted plan, the surlier and huger ruffian goes down the road in the direction taken by Leslie’s friends, and the Irishman stations himself unobserved at her side and supports himself with both hands resting upon the top of his stick, in an attitude of deferential patience and insinuating gallantry. She ceases singing and looks up.

IV. THE YOUNG GIRLS AND THE TRAMPS.

Second Tramp: “Not to be interrupting you, miss,” — Leslie stares at his grinning face in dumb and motionless horror,—” would ye tell a poor traveler the time of day, so that he needn’t be eating his breakfast prematurely, if he happens to get any?”

First Tramp, from his station down the road, in a hoarse undertone: “Snatch it out of her belt, you fool! Snatch it! He’s coming back. Quick!” Leslie starts to her feet.

Second Tramp: “ Ye see, miss, my friend’s impatient.” Soothingly: “Just let me examine your watch. I give ye my honor I won’t hurt you; don’t lose your presence of mind, my dear; don’t be frightened.” As she shrinks back, he clutches at her watch-chain.

Leslie, in terror-stricken simplicity: “Oh, oh, no! Don’t! Don’t take my watch. My father gave it to me — and he’s dead.”

Second Tramp: “Then he’ll never miss it, my dear. Don’t oblige me to be rude to a lady. Give it here, at once, that’s a dear.”

First Tramp: “Hurry, hurry! He’s coming!” As the Irishman seizes her by the wrist, Leslie utters one wild shriek after another, to which the other young girls respond, as they reappear under the trees down the road.

Maggie: “Leslie, Leslie! What is it?”

Lilly, at sight of Leslie struggling with the tramp: “Oh, help, help, help, somebody — do!” Maggie: “Murder!”

First Tramp, rushing past them to the aid of his fellow: “Clap your hand over her mouth! Stop her noise, somehow! Choke her!” He springs forward, and while the Irishman stifles her cries with his hands, the other tears the watch-chain loose from its fastening. They suddenly release her, and as she reels gasping and swooning away, some one has the larger villain by the throat, who struggles with his assailant backward into the undergrowth, whence the crash of broken branches, with cries and curses, makes itself heard. Following this tumult comes the noise of a rush through the ferns, and then rapid footfalls, as of flight and pursuit on the hard road, that die away in the distance, while Maggie and Lilly hang over Leslie, striving to make out from her incoherent moans and laments what has happened.

Maggie: “Oh, Leslie, Leslie, Leslie, what was it? Do try to think! Do try to tell! Oh, I shall go wild if you don’t tell what’s the matter.”  Leslie: “Oh, it was — Oh, oh, I feel as if I should never be clean again! How can I endure it? — That filthy hand on my mouth! Their loathsome rags, their sickening faces! Ugh! Oh, I shall dream of it as long as I live! Why, why did I ever come to this horrid place?”

Maggie: “Leslie, — dear, good Leslie, — what was it all?”

Leslie, panting and sobbing: “Oh, two horrid, disgusting men! Don’t ask me! And they told me to give them my watch, and I begged them not to take it. And one was a hideous little Irish wretch, and he kept running all round me, and oh, dear! the other was worse than he was; yes, worse! And he told him — oh, girls! — to choke me! And he came running up, and then the other put one of his hands over my mouth, and I couldn’t breathe; and I thought I should die; but I wasn’t going to let the wretches have my watch, if I could help it; and I kept struggling; and all at once they ran away, and” — putting her hand to her belt—” Oh, it’s gone, it’s gone, it’s gone! Oh, papa, papa! The watch you gave me is gone!” She crouches down upon the log, and leaning her head upon her hands against the trunk of a tree gives way to her tears and sobs, while the others kneel beside her in helpless distress. On this scene Blake emerges from the road down which the steps were heard. His face is pale, and he advances with his right arm held behind him, while the left clasps something which he extends as he speaks.

V. BLAKE AND THE YOUNG GIRLS.

Blake, after a pause in which he stands looking at Leslie unheeded by the others: “Here is your watch, Miss Bellingham.”

Leslie, whirling swiftly round to her feet: “My watch? Oh, where did you find it?” She springs towards him and joyfully seizing it from his hand scans it eagerly, and then kisses it in a rapture.

“Safe, safe, safe! Not hurt the least! My precious gift! Oh, how glad I am! It’s even going yet! How did you get it? Where did you get it?”

Blake, who speaks with a certain painful effort while he moves slowly away backward from her:

“I found it — I got it from the thief.”

Leslie, looking confusedly at him: “How did you know they had it?”

Maggie: “Oh, it was you, Mr. Blake, who came flying past us, and drove them away! Did you have to fight them? Oh, did they hurt you?” Leslie: “It was you — Why, how pale you look! There’s blood on your face! Why, where were you? How did it all happen? It was you that drove them away? You? And I never thought of you! And I only thought about myself — my watch! I never can forgive myself.” She lets fall the watch from her heedless grasp, and he mechanically puts out the hand which he has been keeping behind him; she impetuously seizes it in her own and, suddenly shrinking, he subdues the groan that breaks from him to a sort of gasp and totters to the log where Leslie has been sitting.

Lilly: “Oh, see, Miss Bellingham; they’ve broken his wrist!”

Blake, panting: “It’s nothing; don’t — don’t—” Maggie: “Oh dear, he’s going to faint! What shall we do if he does? I didn’t know they ever fainted!” She wrings her hands in despair, while Leslie flings herself upon her knees at Blake’s side.

“Oughtn’t we to support him, somehow? Oh yes do let’s support him, all of us!”

Leslie, imperiously: “Run down to the river as fast as ever you can, and wet your handkerchiefs to sprinkle his face with.” She passes her arm round Blake’s, and tenderly gathers his broken wrist into her right hand. “One can support him.”

III. A SLIGHT MISUNDERSTANDING.

I. MRS. MURRAY AND MRS. BELLINGHAM.

THREE weeks after the events last represented Mrs. Bellingham and her sister-in-law are once more seated in the hotel parlor, both with sewing, to which the latter abandons herself with an apparently exasperated energy, while the former lets her work lie in her lap, and listens with some ladylike trepidation to what Mrs. Murray is saying.

Mrs. Murray: “From beginning to end it has been quite like a sensation play. Leslie must feel herself a heroine of melodrama. She is sojourning at a country inn, and she goes sketching in the woods, when two ruffians set upon her and try to rob her. Her screams reach the ear of the young man of humble life but noble heart, who professed to have gone away but who was still opportunely hanging about; he rushes on the scene and disperses the brigands, from whom he rends their prey. She seizes his hand to thank him for his sublime behavior, and discovers that his wrist has been broken by a blow from the bludgeon of one of the wicked ruffians. Very pretty, very charming, indeed; and so appropriate for a girl of Leslie’s training, family, and station in life. Upon my word I congratulate you, Marion. To think of being the mother of a heroine! It was fortunate that you let her snub Mr. Dudley. If she had married him probably nothing of this kind would have happened.”

Mrs. Bellingham, uneasily: “I ought to be glad the affair amuses you, but I don’t see how even you can hold the child responsible for what has happened.”

Mrs. Murray: “Responsible! I should be the last to do that, I hope. No, indeed. I consider her the victim of circumstances, and since the hero has been thrown back upon our hands, I’m sure every one must say that her devotion is most exemplary. I don’t hold her responsible for that, even.” As Mrs. Murray continues, Mrs. Bellingham’s uneasiness increases, and she drops her hands with a baffled look upon the work in her lap. “It’s quite en regie that she should be anxious about him; it would be altogether out of character, otherwise. It’s a pity that he doesn’t lend himself more gracefully to being petted. When I saw her bringing him a pillow, that first day, after the doctor set his wrist and she had got him to repose his exhausted frame on the sofa, I was almost melted to tears. Of course it can end only in one way.” Mrs. Bellingham: “Kate, I will not have any more of this. It’s intolerable, and you have no right to torment me so. You know that I’m as much vexed as you can be. It annoys me beyond endurance, but I don’t see what, as a lady, I can do about it. Mr. Blake is here again by no fault of his own, certainly, and neither Leslie nor I can treat him with indifference.”

Mrs. Murray: “I don’t object to your treating him as kindly as you like, but you had better leave as little kindness as possible to Leslie. You must sooner or later recognize one thing, Marion, and take your measures accordingly. I advise you to do it sooner.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “What do you mean?”

Mrs. Murray. “I mean what you know well enough: that Leslie is interested in this Mr. Blake. I saw that she was, from the very first moment. He’s just the kind of man to fascinate a girl like Leslie; you know that. He’s handsome, and he’s shown himself brave; and all that unconventionality which marks him of a different class gives him a charm to a girl’s fancy, even when she has recognized, herself, that he isn’t a gentleman. She soon forgets that, and sees merely that he is clever and good. She would very promptly teach a girl of his traditions her place, but a young man is different.” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “I hope Leslie would treat even a woman with consideration.”

Mrs. Murray: “Oh, consideration, consideration! You may thank yourself, Marion, and your impossible ideas, if this comes to the worst You belong to one order of things or you belong to another. If you believe that several generations of wealth, breeding, and station distinguish a girl so that a new man, however good or wise he is, can never be her equal, you must act on your belief, and in a case like this you can’t act too promptly.” Mrs. Bellingham: “What should you do?”

Mrs. Murray: “Do? I should fling away all absurd ideas of consideration, to begin with. I should deal frankly with Leslie; I should appeal to her pride and her common sense; and I should speak so distinctly to this young man that he couldn’t possibly mistake my meaning. I should tell him — I should advise him to try change of air for his wound; or whatever it is.”

Mrs. Bellingham, after a moment’s dreary reflection: “That’s quite impossible, Kate. I will speak to Leslie, but I can never offer offense to any one we owe so much.”

Mrs. Murray: “Do you wish me to speak to him?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “No, I can’t permit that, either.”

Mrs. Murray: “Very well; then you must abide by the result.” Mrs. Murray clutches her work together, stooping to recover dropping spools and scissors with an activity surprising in a lady of her massive person, and is about to leave the room, when the sound of steps and voices arrest her; a moment after Miss Bellingham and Blake, with his right arm in a sling, enter the room, so intent upon each other as not to observe the ladies in the corner.

II. LESLIE AND BLAKE; MRS. MURRAY AND MRS. BELLINGHAM APART.

Leslie: “I’m afraid you’ve let me tire you. I’m such an insatiable walker, and I never thought of your not being perfectly strong, yet.”

Make, laughing: “Why, Miss Bellingham, it isn’t one of my ankles that’s broken.”

Leslie, concessively: “No; but if you’d Only let me do something for you. I can both play and sing, and really not at all badly. Shall I play to you?” She goes up and strikes some chords on the piano, and with her hand on the keys glances with mock gravity round at Blake, who remains undecided. She turns about. “Perhaps you’d rather have me read to you?”

Blake: “Do you really wish me to choose?” Leslie: “I do. And ask something difficult and disagreeable.”

Make: “I’d rather have you talk to me than either.”

Leslie: “Is that your idea of something difficult and disagreeable?”

Make: I hope you won’t find it so.”

Leslie: “But I shan’t feel that it’s anything, then! Shall I begin to talk to you here? Or where?”

Blake: “This is a good place, but if I’m to choose again, I should say the gallery would be better.”

Leslie: “Oh, you’re choosing that because I said I wondered how people could come into the country and sit all their time in stuffy rooms!”

Make, going to the window and looking out: “There are no seats.” He returns, and putting the backs of two chairs together, lifts them with his left hand to carry them to the gallery.

Leslie, advancing tragically upon him and reproachfully possessing herself of the chairs: “Never! Do you think I have no sense of shame?” She lifts a chair in either hand and carries them out, while Blake in a charmed embarrassment follows her, and they are heard speaking without: “There! Or no! That’s in a draught. You mustn’t sit in a draught.”

Blake: “It won’t hurt me. I’m not a young lady.” —

Leslie: “That’s the very reason it will hurt you. If you were a young lady you could stand anything. Anything you liked.” There are indistinct murmurs of further feigned dispute, broken by more or less conscious laughter, to which Mrs. Bellingham listens with alarm and Mrs. Murray with the self-righteousness of those who have told you so, and who, having thus washed their hands of an affair, propose to give you a shower-bath of the water.

Mrs. Murray: “Well, Marion?”

Mrs. Bellingham, rising, with a heavy sigh: “Yes, it’s quite as bad as you could wish.”

Mrs. Murray: “As bad as I could wish? This is too much, Marion. What are you going to do?” Mrs. Bellingham is gathering up her work as if to quit the room, and Mrs. Murray’s demand is pitched in a tone of falling indignation and rising amazement.

Mrs. Bellingham: “We can’t remain to overhear their talk. I am going to my room.”

Mrs. Murray: “Why, Marion, the child is your own daughter!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “That is the very reason why I don’t wish to feel that she has cause to be ashamed of me; and I certainly should if I stayed to eavesdrop.”

Mrs. Murray: “How in the world should she ever know it?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “I should tell her. But that isn’t the point, quite.”

Mrs. Murray: “This is fantastic! Well, let her marry her — Caliban! Why don’t you go out and join them? That needn’t give her cause to blush for you. Remember, Marion; that Leslie is an ignorant, inexperienced child, and that it’s your duty to save her from her silliness.” -

Mrs. Bellingham: “My daughter is a lady, and will remember herself.”

Mrs. Murray: “But she’s a woman, Marion, and will forget herself!”

Mrs. Bellingham, who hesitates in a brief perplexity, but abruptly finishes her preparations for going out: “At any rate, I can’t dog her steps, nor play the spy upon her. I wish to know only what she will freely tell me.”

Mrs. Murray: “And are you actually going? Well, Marion, I suppose I mustn’t say what I think of you.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “It isn’t necessary that you should.”

Mrs. Murray: “If I were to speak, I should say that your logic was worthy of Bedlam, and your morality of — of — the millenium!” She whirls furiously out of the parlor, and Mrs. Bellingham, with a lingering glance at the door opening upon the balcony, follows her amply eddying skirts. A moment after their disappearance, Leslie comes to the gallery door and looks exploringly into the

III. LESLIE AND BLAKE; FINALLY, MRS. BELLINGHAM.

Leslie, speaking to Blake without: “I was sure I heard voices. But there’s nobody.” She turns, and glancing at the hills which show their irregular mass through the open window, sinks down into a chair beside the low gallery rail. “Ah, this is a better point still,” and as Blake appears with his chair and plants it vis-a-vis with her: “Why old Ponkwasset, I wonder? But people always say old of mountains: old Wachusett, old Agamenticus, old Monadnock, old Ponkwasset. Perhaps the young mountains have gone West and settled down on the prairies, with all the other young people of the neighborhood. Wouldn’t that explain it?” She looks with openly-feigned seriousness at Blake, who supports in his left hand the elbow of his hurt arm. “I’m sure it’s paining you.”

Blake: “No, no; not the least. The fact is” — he laughs lightly— “I’m afraid I wasn’t thinking about the mountains just now, when you spoke.” Leslie: “Oh, well, neither was I — very much.” They both laugh. “But why do you put your hand under your arm, if it doesn’t pain you?” Blake: “Oh! — I happened to think of the scamp who broke it for me.”

Leslie, shuddering: “Don’t speak of it! Or yes, do! Tell me about it; I’ve wanted to ask you. I ought to know about it; I hoped you would tell without asking. I can never be thankful enough that your walk happened to bring you back the same way. Why must you leave me to imagine all the rest?”

Blake: Oh, those things are better imagined than described, Miss Bellingham.”

Leslie: “But I want it described. I must hear it, no matter how terrible it is.”

Blake: “It wasn’t terrible; there was very little of it, one way or the other. The big fellow wouldn’t give up your watch; and I had to — urge him; and the little Irishman came dancing up, and made a pass at us with his stick, and my wrist caught it. That’s all.”

Leslie, with effusion: “All f You risked your life to get me back my watch, and I asked about that first, and never mentioned you.”

Blake: “I hadn’t done anything worth mentioning.”

Leslie: “Then getting my watch wasn’t worth mentioning!”

Blake: “Where is it? I haven’t seen you wear it.”

Leslie: “I broke something in it when I threw it down. It doesn’t go. Besides, I thought perhaps you wouldn’t like to see it.”

Blake: “Oh, yes, I should.”

Leslie, starting up: “I’ll go get it.”

Blake: “Not now!” They are both silent Leslie falters and then sits down again, and folds one hand over the other on the balcony rail, letting her fan dangle idly by its chain from her waist. He leans forward a little, and taking the fan, opens and shuts it, while she looks down upon him with a slight smile; he relinquishes it with a glance at her, and leans back again in his chair.

Leslie: “Well, what were you thinking about that hideous little wretch who hurt you?”

Blake: “Why, I was thinking, for one thing, that he didn’t mean to do it.”

Leslie: “Oh! Why did he do it, then?”

Blake: “I believe he meant to hit his partner, though I can’t exactly say why. It went through my mind. And I was thinking that a good deal might be said for tramps.”

Leslie: “For tramps that steal watches and break wrists? My philanthropy doesn’t rise to those giddy heights, quite. No decidedly, Mr. Blake, I draw the line at tramps. They never look clean, and why don’t they go to work?” Blake: “Well they couldn’t find work just now, if they wanted it, and generally I suppose they don’t want it. A man who’s been out of work three months is glad to get it, but if he’s idle a year he doesn’t want it. When I see one of your big cotton mills standing idle, I know that it means just so much tramping, so much starving and stealing, so much misery and murder. We ‘re all part of the tangle; we ‘re all of us to blame, we ‘re none of us to blame.” —

Leslie: “Oh, that’s very well. But if you pity such wretches, what becomes of the deserving poor?”

Blake: “I’m not sure there are any deserving poor, as you call them, any more than there are deserving rich. So I don’t draw the line at tramps. The fact is, Miss Bellingham, I had just been doing those fellows a charity before they attacked you, — . given them some tobacco. You don’t approve of that?”

Leslie: “Oh, I like smoking!”

Blake, laughing: “And I got their idea of a gentleman.”

Leslie, after a moment: “Yes? What was that?”

Blake: “A man who gives you tobacco, and doesn’t ask you why you don’t go to work. A real gentleman has matches about him to light your pipe with afterwards. Is that your notion of a gentleman?”

Leslie, consciously: “I don’t know; not exactly.”

Blake: “It made me think of the notion of a gentleman I once heard from a very nice fellow years ago: he believed that you couldn’t be a gentleman unless you began with your grandfather. I was younger then, and I remember shivering over it, for it left me quite out in the cold, though I couldn’t help liking the man; he was a gentleman in spite of what he said, — a splendid fellow, if you made allowance for him. You have to make allowances for everybody, especially for men who have had all the advantages. It’s apt to put them wrong for life; they get to thinking that the start is the race. I used to look down on that sort of men, once — in theory. But what I saw of them in the war taught me better; they only wanted an emergency, and they could show themselves as good as anybody. It isn’t safe to judge people by their circumstances; besides, I’ve known too many men who had all the disadvantage and never came to anything. Still I prefer the tramp’s idea — per-. haps because it’s more flattering — that you are a gentleman if you choose to be so. What do you think?”

Leslie: — don’t know.” After an interval long enough to vanquish and banish a disagreeable consciousness: “I think it’s a very unpleasant subject. Why don’t you talk of something else?” Blake: “Oh, I wasn’t to talk at all, as I understood. I was to be talked to.”

Leslie: “Well, what shall I talk to you about? You must choose that, too.”

Blake: “Let us talk about yourself, then.’” Leslie: “There is nothing about me. I’m just like every other girl. Get Miss Wallace to tell you about herself, some day, and then you’ll know my whole history. I’ve done everything that she’s done. We had the same dancing, singing, piano, French, German, and Italian lessons; we went to the same schools and the same lectures; we have both been abroad, and can sketch, and paint on tiles. We’re as nearly alike as the same experiences and associations could make us, and we ‘re just like all the other girls we know. Isn’t it rather monotonous?”

Blake: “I don’t know all the other girls that you know. If I can judge from Miss Wallace, I don’t believe you ‘re like them; but they may be like you.”

Leslie, laughing: “That’s too fine a distinction for me. And you haven’t answered my question.” Blake, gravely: “No, it isn’t monotonous to me; it’s all very good, I think. I’m rather old-fashioned about women; I like everything in their lives to be regular and ordered by old usage.” Leslie: “Then you don’t approve of originality?”

Blake: “I don’t like eccentricity.”

Leslie: “Oh, I do. I should like to do all sorts of odd things, if I dared.”

Blake: “Well, your not daring is a great point. If I had a sister, I should want her to be like all the other girls that are like you.”

Leslie: “You compliment! She couldn’t be like me.”

Blake: “Why?”

Leslie: “Why? Oh, I don’t know.” She hesitates, and then with a quick glance at him: “She would have dark eyes and hair, for one thing.” They both laugh.

Blake: “Was that what you meant to say?” Leslie: “Isn’t it enough to say what you mean, without being obliged to say what you meant?”

Blake: “Half a loaf is better than no bread; beggars mustn’t be choosers.”

Leslie: “Oh, if you put it so meekly as that you humiliate me. I must tell you now: I meant a question.”

Blake: “What is it?”

Leslie: “But I can’t ask it, yet. Not till I’ve got rid of some part of my obligations.”

Blake: “I suppose you mean what I — what happened.”

Leslie: “Yes.”

Blake: “I’m sorry that it happened, then; and I had been feeling rather glad of it, on the whole. I shall hate it if it’s an annoyance to you.”

Leslie: “Oh, — not annoyance, exactly.”

Blake: “What then? Should you like a receipt in full for all gratitude due me?”

Leslie: “I should like to feel that we had done something for you in return.”

Blake: “You can cancel it all by giving me leave to enjoy being just what and where I am.” Leslie, demurely, after a little pause: “Is a broken wrist such a pleasure, then?”

Blake: “I take the broken wrist for what it brings. If it were not for that I should be in New York breaking my heart over some people I’m connected with in business there, and wondering how to push a little invention of mine without their help. Instead of that” ——

Leslie, hastily: “Oh! Invention? Are you an inventor, too, Mr. Blake? Do tell me what it is.”

Blake: “It’s an improved locomotive driving-wheel. But you’d better let me alone about that, Miss Bellingham; I never stop when I get on my driving-wheel. That’s what makes my friends doubtful about it; they don’t see how any brake can check it. They say the Westinghouse airbrake would exhaust the atmosphere of the planet on it without the slightest effect. You see I am rather sanguiue about it.” He laughs nervously.

Leslie: “But what have those New York people to do with it?”

Blake: “Nothing, at present. That’s the worst of it. They were partners of mine, and they got me to come on all the way from Omaha, and then I found out that they had no means to get the thing going.”

Leslie: “Oh! How could they do it?”

Blake: “Well, I used language to that effect myself but they didn’t seem to know; and I ran up here to cool off and think the matter over for a fresh start. You see, if I succeed it will be an everlasting fortune to me; and if I fail, — well, it will be an everlasting misfortune. But I’m not going to fail. There; I’m started! If I went on a moment longer, no power on earth could stop me. I suppose your ‘re not much used to talking about driving-wheels, Miss Bellingham?”

Leslie: “We don’t often speak of them. But they must be very interesting to those that understand them.”

Blake: “I can’t honestly say they are. They ‘re like railroads; they ‘re good to get you there.” Leslie: “Where?”

Blake: “Well, in my case, away from a good deal of drudgery I don’t like, and a life I don’t altogether fancy, and a kind of world I know too well. I should go to Europe, I suppose, if the wheel succeeded. I’ve a curiosity to see what the apple is like on the other side; whether it’s riper or only rottener. And I always believed I should quiet down somewhere, and read all the books I wanted to, and make up for lost time in several ways. I don’t think I should look at any sort of machine for a year.”

Leslie, earnestly: “And would all that happen if you had the money to get the driving-wheel going?”

Blake, with a smile at her earnestness: “I’m not such a driving-wheel fanatic as that. The thing has to he fully tested, and even after it’s tested, the roads may refuse to take hold of it.”

Leslie, confidently: “They can’t — when they see that it’s better.”

Blake: “I wish I could, think so. But roads are human, Miss Bellingham. They prefer a thing that’s just as well to something that’s much better — if it costs much to change.”

Leslie: “Well, then, if you don’t believe the roads will take hold of it, why do you want to test it? Why don’t you give it up at once?” Blake: “It won’t give me up. I do believe in it, you know, and I can’t stop where I am with it. I must go on.”

Leslie: “Yes. I should do just the same. I should never, never give it up. I know you’ll be helped. Mr. Blake, if this wheel” —

Blake: “Really, Miss Bellingham, I feel ashamed for letting you bother yourself so long with that ridiculous wheel. But you wouldn’t stick to the subject: we were talking about you.” Leslie, dreamily: “About me?” Then abruptly: “Mamma will wonder what in the world has become of me.” She rises, and Blake, with an air of slight surprise, follows her example. She leads the way into the parlor, and lingeringly drawing near the piano, she strikes some chords, and as she stands over the instrument, she carelessly plays an air with one hand. Then, without looking up: “Was that the air you were trying to remember?” —

Blake, joyfully: “Oh yes, that’s it; that’s it, at last!”

Leslie, seating herself at the piano and running over the keys again: “I think I can play it for you; it’s rather old-fashioned, now.” She plays and sings, and then rests with her hands on the keys, looking up at Blake where he stands leaning one elbow on the corner of the piano.

Blake: “I’m very much obliged.”

Leslie, laughing: “And I’m very much surprised.”

Blake: “Why?”

Leslie: “I should think the inventor of a driving-wheel would want something a great deal more stirring than this German sentimentality and those languid, melancholy things from Tennyson that you liked.”

Blake: “Ah, that’s just what I don’t want. I’ve got stir enough of my own.”

Leslie: “I wish I could understand you.”

Blake: “Am I such a puzzle? I always thought myself a very simple affair.”

Leslie: “That’s the difficulty. I wish” —

Blake: “What?”

Leslie: “That I could say something wrong in just the right way!”

Blake, laughing: “How do you know it’s wrong?”

Leslie: “It isn’t, if you don’t think so.”

Blake: “I don’t, so far.”

Leslie: “Ah, don’t joke. It’s a very serious matter.”

Blake: “Why should I think it was wrong?”

Leslie: “I don’t know that you will. Mr. Blake” —

Blake: “Well?”

Leslie: “Did you know — If I begin to say something, and feel like stopping before I’ve said it, you won’t ask questions to make me go on?” Very seriously.

Blake, with a smile of joyous amusement, looking down at her as he lounges at the corner of the piano: “I won’t even ask you to begin.” Leslie passes her hand over the edges of the keys, without making them sound; then she drops it into her lap and there clasps it with the other hand, and looks up at Blake.

Leslie:— “Did you know I was rich, Mr.

Blake?”

Blake: “No, Miss Bellingham, I didn’t.” His smile changes from amusement to surprise, and he colors faintly.

Leslie, blushing violently: “Well, I am, — if being rich is having a great deal, more money to do what you please than you know what to do with.” Blake listens with a look of deepening mystification; she hurries desperately on: “I have this money in my own right; it’s what my uncle left me, and I can give it all away if I choose.” She pauses again, as if waiting for Blake to ask her to go on, but he remains loyally silent; his smile has died away, and an embarrassment increases upon both of them. She looks up at him again, and implores: “What will you think of what I’m going to say?”

Blake, breaking into a troubled laugh: “I can’t imagine what you ‘re going to say.”

Leslie: “Don’t laugh! I know you won’t —

O Mr. Blake, you said you liked girls to be just like everybody else, and old-established, and that; and I know this is as eccentric as it can be. It isn’t at all the thing, I know, for a young lady to say to a gentleman; but you ‘re not like the others, and — Oh, it doesn’t seem possible that I should have begun it! It seems perfectly monstrous!

But I know you won’t misinterpret; I must, I must go on, and the bluntest and straightforwardest way will be the best way.” She keeps wistfully scanning Blake’s face as she speaks, but apparently gathers no courage or comfort from it. “Mr. Blake!”

Blake, passively: “Well?”

Leslie, with desperate vehemence: “I want — Oh, what will you think of me! But no, you ‘re too good yourself not to see it in just the right. way. I’m sure that you won’t think it — unladylike — for me to propose such a thing, merely because — because most people wouldn’t do it; but I shall respect your reasons — I shall know you’re right — even if you refuse me; and — O Mr. Blake, I want to go into partnership with you!” Blake, recoiling a pace or two from the corner of the piano, as Leslie rises from the stool and stands confronting him; “To — to — go into” —

Leslie: “Yes, yes! But how dreadfully you take it; and you promised — Oh, I knew you wouldn’t like it! I know it seems dreadfully queer, and not at all delicate. But I thought — I thought — from what you said — You said those people had no money to push your invention, and here I have all this money doing nobody any good — and you’ve done nothing but heap one kindness after another on us — and why shouldn’t you take it, as much as you want, and use it to perfect your driving-wheel? I’m sure I believe in it; and” — She has followed him the pace or two of his withdrawal; but now, at some changing expression of his face, she hesitates, falters, and remains silent and motionless, as if fixed and stricken mute by the sight of some hideous apparition. Then with a wild incredulity: “Oh!” and indignation, “Oh!” and passionate reproach and disappointment, “Oh! How cruel, how shameless, how horrid!” She drops her face into her hands, and sinks upon the piano-stool, throwing her burdened arms upon the keys with a melodious crash.

Blake: “Don’t, don’t! For pity’s sake, don’t, my — Miss Bellingham!” He stands over her in helpless misery and abject self-reproach. “Good heavens, I didn’t — It was all” —

Leslie, springing erect: “Don’t speak to me.

Your presence, your being alive in the same world after that is an insufferable insult! For you to dare! Ah! No woman could say what you thought. No lady” —

Blake: “Wait!” He turns pale, and speaks low and steadily: “You must listen to me now; you must hear what I never dreamt I should dare to say. I loved you! If that had not bewildered me I could not have thought — what was impossible. It was a delusion dearer than life; but I was ashamed of the hope it gave me even while it lasted. Don’t mistake me, Miss Bellingham; I could have died to win your love, but if your words had said what they seemed to say, I would not have taken what they seemed to offer. But that’s past. And now that I have to answer your meaning, I must do it without thanks. You place me in the position of having told my story to hint for your help” —

Leslie, in vehement protest: “Oh, no, no, no! I never dreamt of such a thing! I couldn’t!”

Blake: “Thank you at least for that; and — Good-by!” He bows and moves away toward the door.

Leslie, wildly: “Oh, don’t go, don’t go! What have I done, what shall I do?”

Blake, pausing, and then going abruptly back to her: “You can forgive me, Miss Bellingham; and let everything be as it was.”

Leslie, after a moment of silent anguish: “No, no. That’s impossible. It can never be the same again. It must all end. I can forgive you easily enough; it was nothing; the wrong was all mine. I’ve been cruelly to blame, letting you — go on. Oh, yes, very, very much. But I didn’t know it; and I didn’t mean anything by anything. No, I couldn’t. Good-by. You are right to go. You mustn’t see me any more. I shall never forget your goodness and patience.” Eagerly: “You wouldn’t want me to forget it, would you?” Blake, brokenly: “Whatever you do will be right. God bless you, and good-by.” He takes up her right hand in his left, and raises it to his lips, she trembling, and as he stands holding it Mrs. Bellingham enters with an open letter.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Leslie” —

Leslie, who withdraws her hand, and after a momentary suspense turns unashamed to her mother: “Mr. Blake is going away, mamma” — Mrs. Bellingham faintly acknowledges his parting bow. Leslie watches him go, and then turns away with a suppressed sob.

IV. MRS. MURRAY’S TRIUMPH.

I. MRS. BELLINGHAM AND LESLIE.

Leslie: ““Well, mamma, what will you say to me now?” Without the inspiration of Blake’s presence, she stands drearily confronting her mother in Mrs. Bellingham’s own room, where the latter, seated in her easy-chair, looks up into Leslie’s face.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Nothing, Leslie. I am waiting for you to speak.”

Leslie: “Oh, I can’t speak unless you ask me.” She drops into a chair, and hiding her face in her handkerchief weeps silently. Her mother waits till her passion is spent and she has wiped her tears, and sits mutely staring toward the window.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Is he coming back again, Leslie?”

Leslie: “No.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Was it necessary that you should let him take leave of you in that way?”

Leslie, sighing: “No, it wasn’t necessary. But —— it was inevitable.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “What had made it inevitable? Remember, Leslie, that you asked me to question you.”

Leslie: “I know it, mamma.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “And you needn’t answer if you don’t like.”

Leslie: “I don’t like, but I will answer, all the same, for you have a right to know. I had been saying something silly to him.”

Mrs. Bellingham, with patient hopelessness: “Yes?”

Leslie: “It seems so, now; but I know that I spoke from a right motive, — a motive that you wouldn’t disapprove of yourself, mamma.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “I’m sure of that, my dear.”

Leslie: “Well, you see — Couldn’t you go on and ask me, mamma?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “I don’t know what to ask, Leslie.”

Leslie: “It’s so hard to tell, without!” Desperately: “Why, you see, mamma, Mr. Blake had told me about a thing he had been inventing, and how some people in New York had promised him money to get it along, — push it, he said, — and when he came on all the way from Omaha, he found that they had no money; and so — and so — I — I offered him some.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Oh, Leslie!” —

Leslie: “Yes, yes, it seems horrid, now, — perfectly hideous. But I did so long to do something for him because he had done so much for us, and I think he is so modest and noble, and I felt so sorry that he should have been so cruelly deceived. Wasn’t that a good motive, mamma?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Oh, yes, my poor headlong child! But what a thing for a young lady to propose! I can’t imagine how you could approach the matter.”

Leslie: “That’s the worst of it, — the very worst. Of course, I never could have approached such a thing with any other young man; but I thought there was such a difference between us, don’t you know, in everything, that it would be safe; and I thought it would be better — he would like it better — if there was no beating about the bush; and so I said — I said — that I wanted to go into partnership with him.”

Mrs. Bellingham, with great trouble in her voice, but steadily: “What answer did he make you, Leslie?” —

Leslie: “Oh, I was justly punished for looking down upon him. At first he blushed in a strange sort of way, and then he turned pale and looked grieved and angry, and at last repeated my words in a kind of daze, and I blundered on, and all at once — I saw what he thought I had meant; he thought — Oh dear, dear, — he thought” — she hides her face again, and sobs out the words behind her handkerchief— “that I w-w-anted to — to — to marry him! Oh, how shall I ever endure it? It was a thousand times worse than the tramps, — a thousand times.” Mrs. Bellingham remains silently regarding her daughter, who continues to bemoan herself, and then lifts her tear-stained face: “Don’t you think it was ungratefully, horridly, cruelly vulgar?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Mr. Blake can’t have the refinement of feeling that you’ve been used to in the gentlemen of your acquaintance; I’m glad that you’ve found that out for yourself, though you’ve had to reach it through such a bitter mortification. If such a man misunderstood you” —

Leslie, indignantly: “Mr. Blake is quite as good as the gentlemen of my acquaintance, mamma; he couldn’t help thinking what he did, I blundered so, and when I flew out at him, and upbraided him for his — ungenerosity, and hurt his feelings all I could, he excused himself in a perfectly satisfactory way. He said” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “ What, Leslie?”

Leslie, with a drooping head: “He said — he used words more refined and considerate than I ever dreamt of — he said he was always thinking of me in that way without knowing it, and hoping against hope, or he could never have misunderstood me in the world. And then he let me know that he wouldn’t have taken me, no matter how much he liked me, if what he thought for only an instant had been true; and he could never have taken my money, for that would have made him seem like begging, by what he had told me. And he talked splendidly, mamma, and he put me down, as I deserved, and he was going away, and I called him back, and we agreed that we must never see each other again; and — and I couldn’t help his kissing my hand.” She puts up her handkerchief and sobs, and there is an interval before her mother speaks in a tone of compassion, yet of relief.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Well, Leslie, I’m glad that you could agree upon so wise a course. This has all been a terribly perplexing and painful affair; and I have had my fears, my dear, that perhaps it had gone so far with you that” —

Leslie, vehemently: “Why, so it had! I didn’t know I liked him so, but I do; and I give him up — I gave him up — because you all hate him, yes, all; and you shut your eyes, and won’t see how kind and brave and good he is; and I can’t hold out against you. Yes, he must go; but he takes my broken heart with him.”

Mrs. Bellingham, sternly: “Leslie, this is absurd. You know yourself that he’s out of the question.”

Leslie, flinging herself down and laying her head in her mother’s lap with a desolate cry: “O mamma, mamma, don’t speak so harshly to me, or I shall die. I know he’s out of the question; yes, yes, I do. But how? How, mamma? How is he out of the question? That’s what I can’t understand!” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “Why, to begin with, we know nothing about him, Leslie.”

Leslie, eagerly: “Oh yes, I do. He’s told me all about himself. He’s an inventor. He’s a genius. Yes, he knows everything, indeed he does; and in the war he was an engineer. If you could only hear him talk as I do” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “I dare say. But even a civil engineer” —

Leslie: “A civil engineer! I should hope not. I should be ashamed of a man who had been a civilian during the war. He always had this great taste for mechanics, and he studied the business of a machinist — I don’t know what it is, exactly; but he knows all about steam, and he can build a whole engine, himself; and he happened to be a private soldier going somewhere on a Mississippi gunboat when the engineer was killed, and he took charge of the engine at once, and was in the great battles with the boat afterwards. He’s a military engineer.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “He’s a steamboat engineer, Leslie.”

Leslie: “He was an officer of the boat — an officer” ——

Mrs. Bellingham, with a groan: “Oh, he wasn’t an officer of the sort you think; he had no military rank; he had the place of a clever artisan.” Leslie: “I don’t understand.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “He looked after the machinery, and saw that the boiler didn’t burst, — I don’t know what. But you might as well marry a locomotive-driver, as far as profession goes.” Leslie, aghast: “Do you mean that when Mr. Blake was an engineer, he didn’t wear any coat, and had his sleeves rolled up, and went about with a stringy wad of oily cotton in his hand?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Yes.”

Leslie: “Oh!” She excludes the horrible vision by clasping both hands over her eyes.

Mrs. Bellingham, very gravely: “Now listen to me, Leslie. You know that I am not like your aunt Kate, — that I never talk in that vulgar way about classes and stations, don’t you?”

Leslie, still in a helpless daze: “Oh, yes, mamma. I’ve always been a great deal worse than you, myself.”

Mrs. Bellingham: ““Well, my dear, then I hope that you will acquit me of anything low or snobbish in what I have to say. There is a fitness in all things, and I speak out of respect to that. It is simply impossible that a girl of your breeding and ideas and associations should marry a man of his. Recollect that no one belongs entirely to themselves. You are part of the circle in which you have always moved, and he is part of the circumstances of his life. Do you see?”

Leslie: “Yes.” She lapses from a kneeling to a crouching posture, and resting one elbow on her mother’s knee poises her chin on her hand, and listens drearily.

Mrs. Bellingham: “We may say that it is no matter what a man has been; that we are only concerned with what Mr. Blake is now. But the trouble is that every one of us is what they have been. If Mr. Blake’s early associations have been rude and his business coarse, you may be sure they have left their mark upon him, no matter how good he may be naturally. I think he is of a very high and sweet nature; he seems so” — Leslie: “Oh, he is, he is!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “But he can’t outlive his own life. Isn’t that reasonable?”

Leslie, hopelessly: “Yes, it seems so.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “You can’t safely marry any man whose history you despise. Marriage is a terrible thing, my dear; young girls can never understand how it searches out the heart and tries and tests in every way. You mustn’t have a husband whom you can imagine with a wad of greasy cotton in his hand. There will be wicked moments in which you will taunt and torment each other.” Leslie: “O mamma, mamma!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Yes, it is so! The truest love can come to that. And in those moments it is better that all your past and present should be of the same level as his; for you wouldn’t hesitate to throw any scorn in his teeth; you would be mad, and you must not have deadly weapons within reach. I speak very plainly.”

Leslie: “Terribly!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “But that is the worst. There are a thousand lighter trials, which you must meet. Where would you live, if you married him? You have a fortune, and you might go to Europe” — Leslie: “I never would sneak away to Europe with him!”

Mrs. Bellingham: “I should hope not. But if you remained at home, how would you introduce him to your friends? Invention isn’t a profession; would you tell them that he was a machinist or a steamboat engineer by trade? And if they found it out without your telling?”

Leslie, evasively: “There are plenty of girls who marry men of genius, and it doesn’t matter what the men have done, — how humble they have been. If they ‘re geniuses” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “O Leslie, such men have won all the honors and distinctions before they marry. Girls like you, my dear, don’t marry geniuses in their poverty and obscurity. Those men spend years and years of toil and study, and struggle through a thousand difficulties and privations, and set the world talking about them, before they can even be asked to meet the ordinary people of our set in society. “Wait till Mr. Blake has shown” —

Leslie: “But he’d be an old man by that time, and then I shouldn’t want him. If I know now that he’s going to be great” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “My dear, you know nothing whatever about him, except that his past life has been shabby and common.”

Leslie, with sudden spirit: “Well, then, mamma, at least I don’t know anything horrid of him, as some girls must know of the young men they marry, — and the old men, too. Just think of Violet Emmons’s match with that count, there in Paris! And Aggy Lawson’s, with that dreadful old Mr.’ Lancaster, that everybody says has been so wicked! I’d rather marry Mr. Blake, a thousand times, if he had been a — I don’t know what!” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “You have no right to take things at their worst, Leslie. Remember all the girls you know, and the accomplished men they have married in their own set; men who are quite their equals in goodness as well as station and wealth and breeding. That’s what I want you to do.” —

Leslie: “Do you wish me to marry somebody I don’t like?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Be fair, Leslie. I merely wish you to like somebody you ought to marry, — when the proper time comes. How do you know that Mr. Blake isn’t quite as bad as the count or Mr. Lancaster?”

Leslie, with a burst of tears: “Oh, mamma, you just now said yourself that you believed he was good and sweet, and you have seen the beautiful delicacy he behaves towards women with. Well, well,” — she rises, and catches in her hand a long coil of her hair which has come loose from the mass, and stands holding it while she turns tragically toward her mother,—” let it all go. I will never marry at all, and then at least I can’t displease you. I give him up, and I hope it will make you happy, mamma.”

Mrs. Bellingham, rising: “Leslie, is this the way you reward my anxiety and patience? I have reasoned with you as a woman of sense, and the return you make is to behave as a petulant child. I will never try to control you in such a matter as this, hut you know now what I think, and you can have your own way if you like it better or believe it is wiser than mine. Oh, my poor child!” — clasping Leslie’s head between her hands and tenderly kissing the girl’s hair,— “don’t you suppose your mother’s heart aches for you? Marry him if you will, Leslie, and I shall always love you. I hope I may never have to pity you more than I do now. All that I ask of you, after all, is to make sure of yourself.”

Leslie: “I will, mamma, I will. He must go; oh, yes, he must go! I see that it wouldn’t do. It would be too unequal, — I’m so far beneath him in everything but the things I ought to despise. No, I’m not his equal, and I never can he, and so I must not think of him any more. If he were rich, and had been brought up like me, and I were some poor girl with nothing but her love for him, he would never let the world outweigh her love, as I do his. Don’t praise me, mother; don’t thank me. It isn’t for you I do it; it isn’t for anything worthy, or true, or good; it’s because I’m a coward, and afraid of the opinions of people I despise. You’ve shown me what I am. I thought I was brave and strong; but I am weak and timid, and I shall never respect myself any more. Send him away; tell him what an abject creature I am! It will kill me to have him think meanly of me, but oh, it will be a thousand times better that he should have a right to scorn me now, than that I should ever come to despise myself for having been ashamed of him, when — when — That I couldn’t bear!” She drops into a chair near the table and lets fall her face into her hands upon it, sobbing.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Leslie, Leslie! Be yourself! How strangely you act!”

Leslie, lifting her face, to let it gleam a moment upon her mother before she drops it: “Oh, yes, I feel very strangely. But now I won’t distress you any more, mother,” lifting her face again and impetuously drying her eyes with her handkerchief; “I will be firm, now, and no one shall ever hear a murmur from me, — not a murmur. I think that’s due to you, mamma; you have been so patient with me. I’ve no right to grieve you by going on in this silly way, and I won’t. I will be firm, firm, firm!” She casts herself into her mother’s arms, and as she hangs upon her neck in a passion of grief, Mrs. Murray appears in the door-way, and in spite of Mrs. Bellingham’s gesticulated entreaties to retire, advances into the room.

II. MRS. MURRAY, MRS. BELLINGHAM, AND LESLIE.

Mrs. Murray: “Why, what in the world does all this mean?”

Leslie, raising her head and turning fiercely upon her: “It means that I’m now all you wish me to be, — quite your own ideal of ingratitude and selfishness, and I wish you joy of your success!” She vanishes stormily from the room and leaves Mrs. Murray planted.

Mrs. Murray: “Has she dismissed him? Has she broken with him?”

Mrs. Bellingham, coldly: “I think she meant you to understand that.”

Mrs. Murray: “Very well, then, Charles can’t come a moment too soon. If things are at this pass, and Leslie’s in this mood, it’s the most dangerous moment of the whole affair. If she should meet him now, everything would be lost.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Don’t be troubled. She won’t meet him; he’s gone.”

Mrs. Murray: “I shall believe that when I see him going. A man like that would never leave her, in the world, because she bade him, — and I should think, him a great fool if he did.”

V. BLAKE’S SAVING DOUBT.

I. LESLIE AND MAGGIE.

Leslie: “But it’s all over, — it’s all over. I shall live it down; but it will make another girl of me, Maggie.” Along the road that winds near the nook where the encounter with the tramps took place, Leslie comes languidly pacing with her friend Maggie “Wallace, who listens, as they walk, with downcast eyes and an air of reverent devotion, to Leslie’s talk. Her voice trembles a little, and as they pause a moment Maggie draws Leslie’s head down upon her neck, from which the latter presently lifts it fiercely. “I don’t wish you to pity me, Maggie, for I don’t deserve any pity. I’m not suffering an atom more than I ought. It’s all my own fault. Mamma really left me quite free, and if I cared more for what people would say and think and look than I did for him, I’m rightfully punished, and I’m not going to whimper about it. I’ve thought it all out.”

Maggie: “O Leslie, you always did think things out so clearly!”

Leslie: “And I hope that I shall get my reward, and be an example. I hope I shall never marry at all, or else some horrid old thing I detest; it would serve me right and I should be glad of it!” Maggie: “Oh no, no! Don’t talk in that way, Leslie. Do come back with me to the house and lie down, or I’m sure you’ll be ill. You look perfectly worn out.”

Leslie, drooping upon the fallen log where she had sat to sketch the birch forest: “Yes, I’m tired. I think I shall never be rested again. It’s the same place,” — looking wistfully round,—” and yet how strange it seems. You know we used to come here, and sit on this log and talk. What long, long talks! Oh me, it will never be again! How weird those birches look! Like ghosts. I wish I was one of them. Well, well! It’s all over. Don’t wait here, Maggie, dear. Go back to the house; I will come soon; you mustn’t let me keep you from Miss Roberts. Excuse me to her, and tell her I’ll go some other time. I can’t, now. Go, Maggie!”

Maggie: “O Leslie; I hate to leave you here! After what’s happened, it seems such a dreadful place.”

Leslie: “After what’s happened, it’s a sacred place, — the dearest place in the world to me. Come, Maggie, you mustn’t break your appointment. It was very good of you to come with me at all, and now you must go. Say that you left me behind a little way; that I’ll be there directly.”

Maggie: “Leslie!”

Leslie: “Maggie!” They embrace tenderly, and Maggie, looking back more than once, goes on her way, while Leslie sits staring absently at the birches. She remains in this dreary reverie till she is startled by a footfall in the road, when she rises in a sudden panic. Blake listlessly advances toward her; at the sight of her he halts, and they both stand silently regarding each other.

II. LESLIE And BLAKE.

Leslie: “Oh! You said you were going away.” Blake: “Are you in such haste to have me gone? I had to wait for the afternoon stage; I couldn’t walk. I thought I might keep faith with you by staying away from the house till it was time to start.” —

Leslie, precipitately: “Do you call that keeping faith with me? Is leaving me all alone keeping — Oh, yes, yes, it is! You have done right. It’s I who can’t keep faith with myself. “Why did you come here? You knew I would be here! I didn’t think you could be guilty of such duplicity.” Blake: “I had no idea of finding you here, but if I had known you were here perhaps I couldn’t have kept away. The future doesn’t look very bright to me, Miss Bellingham. I had a crazy notion that perhaps I might somehow find something of the past here that I could make my own. I wanted to come and stand here, and think once more that it all really happened — that here I saw the pity in your face that made me so glad of my hurt.”

Leslie: “No; stop! It wasn’t pity! It was nothing good or generous. It was mean regret that I should be under such an obligation to you; it was a selfish and despicable fear that you would have a claim upon my acquaintance which I must recognize.” Blake makes a gesture of protest and disbelief, and seems about to speak, but she hurries on: “You mustn’t go away with one good thought of me. Since we parted, three hours ago, I have learned to know myself as I never did before, and now I see what a contemptible thing I am. I flattered myself that I had begged you to go away because I didn’t like to cross the wishes of my family, but it wasn’t that. It was — oh, listen! and try if you can imagine such vileness: I’m so much afraid of the world I’ve always lived in, that no matter how good and brave and wise and noble you were, still if any one should laugh or sneer at you because you had been — what you have been — I should be ashamed of you. There! I’m so low and feeble a creature as that; and that’s the real reason why you must go and forget me; and I must not think and you must not think it’s from any good motive I send you away.”

Blake: “I don’t believe it!”

Leslie: “What!”

Blake: “I don’t believe what you say. Nothing shall rob me of my faith in you. Do you think that I’m not man enough to give up what I’ve no right to because it’s the treasure of the world? Do you think I can’t go till you make me believe that what I’d have sold my life for isn’t worth a straw? No! I’ll give up my hope, I’ll give up my love, — poor fool I was to let it live an instant! — but my faith in you is something dearer yet, and I’ll keep that till I die. Say what you will, you are still first among women to me: the most beautiful, the noblest, the best!”

Leslie, gasping, and arresting him in a movement to turn away: “Wait, wait; don’t go! Speak; say it again! Say that you don’t believe it; that it isn’t true!”

Blake: “No, I don’t believe it. No, it isn’t true. It’s abominably false!”

Leslie, bursting into tears: “Oh yes, it is. It’s abominable, and it’s false. Yes, I will believe in myself again. I know that if I had cared for — any one, as — as you cared, as you said you cared for me, I could be as true to them as you would be through any fate. Oh, thank you, thank you!” At the tearful joy of the look she turns on him he starts toward her. “ Oh!” — she shrinks away—” you mustn’t think that I” —

Blake: “I don’t think anything that doesn’t worship you!”

Leslie: “Yes, but what I said sounds just like the other, when you misunderstood me so heartlessly.”

Blake: “I don’t misunderstand you now. You do tell me that you love me, don’t you? How should I dare hope without your leave?”

Leslie: “You said you wouldn’t have taken me as a gift if I had. You said you’d have hated me. You said” —

Blake: “I was all wrong in what I thought. I’m ashamed to think of that; but I was right in what I said.”

Leslie: “Oh, were you! If you could misunderstand me then, how do you know that you ‘re not misunderstanding me now?”

Blake: “Perhaps I am. Perhaps I’m dreaming as wildly as I was then. But you shall say. Am I?”

Leslie, demurely: “I don’t know; I” — staying his instantaneous further approach with extended arm—” No, no!” She glances fearfully round “Wait; come with me. Come back with me — that is, if you will.”

Blake, passionately: “If I will!”

Leslie, with pensive archness: “I want you to help me clear up my character.”

Make, gravely: “Leslie, may I” —

Leslie: “I can’t talk with you here.”

Blake, sadly: “I will not go back with you to make sorrow for you and trouble among your friends. It’s enough to know that you don’t forbid me to love you.”

Leslie: “Oh no, it isn’t enough — for everybody.” —

Blake: “Leslie” —

Leslie: “Miss Bellingham, please!”

Blake: “Miss Bellingham” —

Leslie: “Well?”

Blake, after a stare of rapturous perplexity: “Nothing!”

Leslie, laughing through her tears: “If you don’t make haste you will be too late for the stage, and then you can’t get away till to-morrow.”

VI. MR. CHARLES BELLINGHAM’S DIPLOMACY.

I. MRS. BELLINGHAM, MRS. MURRAY, AND MR. CHARLES BELLINGHAM.

IN the parlor with Mrs. Bellingham’ and Mrs. Murray sits a gentleman no longer young, but in the bloom of a comfortable middle life, with blonde hair tending to baldness, accurately parted in the middle, and with a handsome face, lazily shrewd, supported by a comely substructure of double chin, and traversed by a full blonde mustache. He is simply, almost carelessly, yet elegantly dressed in a thin summer stuff, and he has an effect of recent arrival. His manner has distinction, enhanced and refined by the eye-glasses which his near-sightedness obliges him to wear. He sits somewhat ponderously in the chair in which he has planted a person just losing its earlier squareness in the lines of beauty; his feet are set rather wide apart in the fashion of gentlemen approaching a certain weight; and he has an air of amiable resolution as of a man who having dined well yesterday means to dine well to-day.

Charles Bellingham, smiling amusement and indolently getting the range of his aunt through his glasses: “So I have come a day after the fair.” Mrs. Murray: “That is your mother’s opinion.” Mrs. Bellingham: “Yes, Charles, Leslie had known what to do herself, and had done it, even before I spoke to her. I’m sorry we made you drag all the way up here, for nothing.”

Bellingham: “Oh, I don’t mind it, mother. Duty called, and I obeyed. My leisure can wait for my return. The only thing is that they’ve got a new fellow at the club now, who interprets one’s ideas of planked Spanish mackerel with a sentiment that amounts to genius. I suppose you plank horn-pout, here. But as to coming for nothing, I’d much rather do that than come for something, in a case like this. You say Leslie saw herself that it wouldn’t do?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Yes, she had really behaved admirably, Charles; and when I set the whole matter before her, she fully agreed with me.”

Bellingham: “But you think she rather liked him?”

Mrs. Bellingham, sighing a little: “Yes, there is no doubt of that.”

Bellingham, musingly: “Well, it’s a pity. Behaved rather well in that tramp business, you said?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Nobly.”

Bellingham: “And hasn’t pushed himself, at all?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Not an instant.”

Bellingham: “Well, I’m sorry for him, poor fellow, but I’m glad the thing’s over. It would have been an awkward affair, under all the circumstances, to take hold of. I say, mother,” — with a significant glance at Mrs. Murray,—” there hasn’t been anything — ah — abrupt in the management of this matter? You ladies sometimes forget the limitations of action in your amiable eagerness to have things over, you know.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “I think your mother would not forget herself in such a case.”

Bellingham: “Of course, of course; excuse my asking, mother. But you ‘re about the only woman that wouldn’t.”

Mrs. Murray, bitterly: “Oh, your mother and Leslie have both used him with the greatest tenderness.”

Bellingham, dryly: “I’m glad to hear it; I never doubted it. If the man had been treated by any of my family with the faintest slight after what had happened, I should have felt bound as a gentleman to offer him any reparation in my power, — to make him any apology. People of our sort can’t do anything shabby.” Mrs. Murray does not reply, but rises from her place on the sofa and goes to the window. “Does Leslie know I’m here?”

Mrs. Bellingham, with a little start: “Really, I forgot to tell her you were coming to-day; we had been keeping it from her, and” —

Bellingham: “I don’t know that it matters. Where is she?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “I saw her going out with Maggie Wallace. I dare say she will be back soon.

Bellingham: “All right. Where is the young man? Has he gone yet?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “No, he couldn’t go till the afternoon stage leaves. He’s still here.”

Bellingham: “I must look him up, and make my acknowledgments to him.” He rises. “By the way, what’s his name?”

Mrs. Murray, standing with her face toward the window, leans forward and inclines to this side and that, as if to make perfectly sure before speaking of some fact of vivid interest which seems to have caught her notice, and at the moment Bellingham puts his question summons her sister-in-law in a voice of terrible incrimination and triumph: “Marion, did you say Leslie had gone out with Maggie Wallace?”

Mrs. Bellingham, indifferently: “Yes.”

Mrs. Murray: “Will you be kind enough to step here?” Mrs. Bellingham, with a little lady-like surprise, approaches, and Mrs. Murray indicates with a stabbing thrust of her hand, the sight which has so much interested her: “Does that look as if it were all over?”

Bellingham, carelessly, as Mrs. Bellingham with great evident distress remains looking in the direction indicated: “What’s the matter now?”

Mrs. Murray: “Nothing. I merely wished your mother to enjoy a fresh proof of Leslie’s discretion. She is returning to tell us that it’s out of the question in company with the young man himself.”

Bellingham: “Wha — ha, ha, ha! — What?” Mrs. Murray: “She is returning with the young man from whom she had just parted forever.” Bellingham, approaching: “Oh, come now, aunt.” Mrs. Murray, fiercely: “Will you look for yourself, if you don’t believe me?”

Bellingham: “Oh, I believe you, fast enough, but as for looking, you know I couldn’t tell the man in the moon at this distance, if Leslie happened to be walking home with him. But is the — ah — fat necessarily in the fire, because” — Mrs. Murray whirls away from Bellingham where he remains with his hands on his hips peering over his mother’s shoulder, and pounces upon a large opera-glass which stands on the centre-table, and returning with it thrusts it at him. “Eh? What?”

Mrs. Murray, excitedly: “It’s what we watch the loons on the lake with.”

Bellingham: “Well, but I don’t see the application. They ‘re not loons on the lake.”

Mrs. Murray: “No; but they ‘re loons on the land, and it comes to the same thing.” She vehemently presses the glass upon him.

Bellingham, gravely: “Do you mean, aunt, that you actually want me to watch my sister through an opera-glass, like a shabby Frenchman at a watering-place? Thanks. I could never look Les in the face again. It’s a little too much like eavesdropping.” He folds his arms, and regards his aunt with reproachful amazement, while he dashes back to set the glass on the table again.

Mrs. Bellingham, in great trouble: “Wait, Kate. Charles, dear, I — I think you must.”

Bellingham: “What?” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “Yes, you had better look. You will have to proceed in this matter now, and you must form some conclusions beforehand.” Bellingham: “But mother” —

Mrs. Bellingham, anxiously: “Don’t worry me, Charles. I think you must.”

Bellingham: “All right, mother.” He unfolds his arms and accepts the glass from her. “I never knew you to take an unfair advantage, and I’ll obey you on trust. But I tell you I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all,” — getting the focus, with several trials; “I’ve never stolen sheep, but I think I can realize, now, something of the self-reproach which misappropriated mutton might bring. Where did you say they were? Oh, over there! I was looking off here, at that point. They ‘re coming this way, aren’t they?” With a start:  Hollo! She’s got his arm! Oh, that won’t do. I’m surprised at Les doing that, unless” — continuing to look— “By Jove! He’s not a bad-looking fellow, at all. He — Why, confound it! No, it can’t be! Why, yes — no — yes, it is, it is — by Heaven, it is — by all that’s strange it is — BLAKE!” He lets the glass fall; and stands glaring at his aunt and mother, who confront him in speechless mystification.

Mrs. Bellingham: “Blake? Why, of course it ‘a Blake. We told you it was Mr. Blake!”

Bellingham: “No, I beg your pardon, mother, you didn’t! You never told me it was anybody — by name.”

Mrs. Bellingham: ““Well?”

Bellingham: “Why, don’t you understand, mother? It’s my Blake!”

Mrs. Bellingham:— “Your Blake? Your —

Charles, what do you mean?”

Bellingham: “Why, I mean that this is the man” — giving his glasses a fresh pinch on his nose with his thumb and forefinger—” that fished me out of the Mississippi. I flatter myself he couldn’t do it now. ‘The grossness of my nature would have weight to drag him down,’ — both of us down. But he’d try it, and he’d have the pluck to go down with me if he failed. Come, mother, you see I can’t do anything in this matter. It’s simply impossible.’ It’s out of the question.”

Mrs. Murray: “Why is it out of the question?” Bellingham: “Well, I don’t know that I can explain, aunt Kate, if it isn’t clear to you, already.” Mrs. Bellingham, recovering from the dismay in which her son’s words have plunged her:

“Charles, Charles! Do you mean that this Mr Blake is the person who saved you from” —

Bellingham: “From a watery grave? I do, mother.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “ There must be some mistake. You can’t tell at this distance, Charles.”

Bellingham: “There’s no mistake, mother. I should know Blake on the top of Ponkwasset. He was rather more than a casual acquaintance, you see. By Jove, I can’t think of the matter with any sort of repose. I can see it all now, just as if it were somebody else: I was weighted down down with my accoutrements, and I went over the side of the boat like a flash, and under that yellow deluge like a bullet. I had just leisure to think what a shame it was my life should go for nothing at a time when we needed men so much, when I felt a grip on my hair,” — rubbing his bald spot,—” it couldn’t he done now! Then I knew I was all right, and waited for developments. The only development was Blake. He fought shy of me, if you’ll believe it, after that, till I closed with him one day and had it out with him, and convinced him that he had done rather a handsome thing by me. But that was the end of it. I couldn’t get him to stand anything else in the way of gratitude. Blake had a vice: he was proud.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “And what became of him?” Bellingham: “Who? Blake? He was the engineer of the boat, I ought to explain. He was transferred to a gunboat after that, and I believe he stuck to it throughout the fighting on the Mississippi. It’s — let me see — it’s five years now since I saw him in Nebraska, when I went out there to grow up with the country, and found I couldn’t wait for it.’ After a pause: “I don’t know what it was about Blake; but he somehow made everybody feel that there was stuff in him. In the three weeks we were together we became great friends, and I must say I never liked a man better. Well, that’s why, aunt Kate.”

Mrs. Murray: “I don’t see that it has anything whatever to do with the matter. The question is whether you wish Leslie to marry a man of his station and breeding, or not. His goodness and greatness have nothing to do with it. The fact remains that he is not at all her equal — that he isn’t a gentleman” —

Bellingham: “Oh, come now, aunt Kate. You ‘re not going to tell me that a man who saved my life isn’t a gentleman?”

Mrs. Murray: “And you’re not going to tell me that a steamboat engineer is a gentleman?” Bellingham, disconcerted: “Eh?”

Mrs. Murray: “The question is, are you going to abandon that unhappy girl to her fancy for a man totally unfit to be her husband simply because he happened to save your life?”

Bellingham: “Why, you’re, aunt Kate” — Mrs. Murray: “Do you think it would be gentlemanly to do it?”

Bellingham: “Well, if you put it that way, no, I don’t. And if you want to know, I don’t see my way to behaving like a gentleman in this connection, whatever I do.” He scratches his head ruefully: “The fact is that the advantages are all on Blake’s side, and he’ll have to manage very badly if he doesn’t come out the only gentleman in the business” After a moment: “How was it you didn’t put the name and the — a — profession together, mother, and reflect that this was my Blake?”

Mrs. Bellingham, with plaintive reproach:

“Charles, you know how uncommunicative you were about all your life as a soldier. You never told me half so much about this affair before, and you never — it seems very heartless now that I didn’t insist on knowing, but at the time it was only part of the nightmare in which we were living — you never told me his name before.”

Bellingham: “Didn’t I? Well! I supposed I had, of course. Um!.. That was too bad. I say, mother, Blake has never let anything drop that made you think he had ever known me, or done me any little favor, I suppose?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “No, not the slightest hint.

If he had only” —

Bellingham: “Ah, that was like him, confound him!” Bellingham muses again with a hopeless air, and then starts suddenly from his reverie: “ Why, the fact is, you know, mother, Blake is really a magnificent fellow; and you know — well, I like him!”

Mrs. Murray: “Oh! That’s Leslie’s excuse!” Bellingham: “Eh?”

Mrs. Murray: “If you are going to take Leslie’s part, it’s fortunate you have common ground. Like him!”

Bellingham: “Mother, what is the unhallowed hour for dinner in these wilds? One o’clock? I’ve a fancy for tackling this business after dinner.” Mrs. Bellingham: “I’m afraid, my dear, that it can’t be put off. They must be here, soon.” Bellingham, sighing: ““Well! Though they didn’t seem to be hurrying.”

Mrs. Murray, bitterly: “If they could only know what a friendly disposition there was towards him here, I’m sure they’d make haste!” Bellingham: “Um!”

Mrs. Bellingham, after a pause: “You don’t know anything about his — his — family, do you, Charles?”

Bellingham: “No, mother, I don’t. My impression is that he has no family, any more than — Adam; or — protoplasm. — All I know about him is that he was from first to last one of those natural gentlemen that upset all your preconceived notions of those things. His associations must have been commoner than — well it’s impossible to compare them to anything satisfactory; but I never saw a trait in him or heard a word from him that wasn’t refined. He gave me the impression of a very able man, too, as I was just saying, but where his strength lay, I can’t say.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Leslie says he’s an inventor.”

Bellingham: “Well, very likely. I remember, now: he was a machinist by trade, I believe, and he was an enlisted man on the boat when the engineer was killed; and Blake was the man who could step right into his place. It was considered a good thing amongst those people. He was a reader in his way, and most of the time he had some particularly hard-headed book in his hand when he was off duty, — about physics or metaphysics; used to talk them up now and then, very well. I never had any doubt about his coming out all right. He’s a baffler, Blake is, — at least he is, for me. Now I suppose aunt Kate, here, doesn’t find him baffling, at all. She takes our little standards, our little weights and measures, and tests him with them, and she’s perfectly satisfied with the result. It’s a clear case of won’t do.” Mrs. Murray: “Do you say it isn’t?” Bellingham: “No; I merely doubt if it is. You don’t doubt, and there you have the advantage of me. You always were a selected oyster, aunt Kate, and you always knew that you couldn’t be improved upon. Now, I’m a selected oyster, too, apparently, but I’m not certain that I’m the best choice that could have been made. I’m a huitre de mon siecle; I am the ill-starred mollusk that doubts. Of course we can’t go counter to the theory that God once created people and no-people, and that they have nothing to do but to go on reproducing themselves and leave him at leisure for the rest of eternity. But really, aunt Kate, I have seen some things in my time — and I don’t mind saying Blake is one of them — that made me think the Creator was still — active. I admit that it sounds” — fitting his glasses on—” rather absurd for an old diner-out like myself to say it.”

Mrs. Murray, with energy: “All this is neither here nor there, Charles, and you know it. The simple question is whether you wish your sister to marry a man whose past you’ll be ashamed to be frank about. I’ll admit, if you like, that he’s quite our equal, — our superior; but what are you going to do with your ex-steamboat engineer in society?”

Bellingham, dubiously: “‘Well, it would be rather awkward.”

Mrs. Murray: “How will you introduce him, and what will you say to people about his family and his station and business? Or do you mean to banish yourself and give up the world which you find so comfortable for the boon of a brother-in-law whom you don’t really know from Adam?” Bellingham: “Well, I must allow the force of your argument. “Yes,” — after a gloomy little reverie,—” you ‘re right. It won’t do. It is out of the question. I’ll put an end to it, — if it doesn’t put an end to me. That ‘weird seizure’ as of misappropriated mutton oppresses me again. Mother, I think you’d better go away, — you and aunt Kate, — and let me meet him and Leslie here alone, when they come in. Or, I say: if you could detach Les, and let him come in here by himself, somehow? I don’t suppose it can be done. Nothing seems disposed to let itself be done.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Charles,’ I’m sorry this disagreeable business should fall to you.”

Bellingham:— “Oh, don’t mind it, mother.

What’s a brother for, if he can’t be called upon to break off his sister’s love affairs? But I don’t deny it’s a nasty business.”

Mrs. Murray, in retiring: “I sincerely hope he’ll make it so for you, and cure you of your absurdities.” —

II. BELLINGHAM AND MRS. BELLINGHAM; LESLIE AND BLAKE, WITHOUT.

Bellingham: “O Parthian shaft! Wish me well out of it, mother!”

Mrs. Bellingham, sighing: “I do, Charles; I do with all my heart. You have the most difficult duty that a gentleman ever had to perform. I don’t see how you ‘re to take hold of it; I don’t, indeed.”

Bellingham: “Well, it is embarrassing. But it’s a noble cause, and I suppose Heaven will befriend me. The trouble is, don’t you know, I haven’t got any — any point of view, any tenable point of view. It won’t do to act simply in our own interest; we can’t do that, mother; we ‘re not the sort. I must try to do it in Blake’s behalf, and that’s what I don’t see my way to, exactly. What I wish to do is to make my interference a magnanimous benefaction to Blake, — something that he’ll recognize in after years with gratitude as a — a mysterious Providence. If I’ve got to be a snob, mother, I wish to he a snob on the highest possible grounds.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Don’t use that word, Charles. It’s shocking.”

Bellingham: “Well, I won’t, mother. I say: can’t you think of some disqualifications in Leslie, that I could make a point d’appui in a conscientious effort to serve Blake?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Charles!”

Bellingham: “I mean, isn’t she rather a worldly, frivolous, fashionable spirit, devoted to pleasure, and incapable of sympathizing with — with his higher moods, don’t you know? Something like that?” Bellingham puts his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets and inclines towards his mother with a hopeful smile.

Mrs. Bellingham: “No, Charles; you know she is nothing of the kind. She’s a girl and she likes amusement, but I should like to see the man whose moods were too lofty for Leslie. She is everything that’s generous and true and high-minded.”

Bellingham, scratching his head: “That’s bad! Then she isn’t — ah — she hasn’t any habits of extravagance that would unfit her to be the wife of a poor man who — ah — had his way to make in the world?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “She never spends half her allowance on herself; and besides, Charles, (how ridiculously you talk!) she has all that money your uncle left her, and if she marries him, he won’t be poor any longer.”

Bellingham, eagerly: “And that would ruin his career! Still” — after a moment’s thought— “I don’t see how I’m to use that idea, exactly. No, I shall have to fall back on the good old ground that it’s simply — out of the question. I think that’s good; it has a thorough, logical, and final sound. I shall stick to that. Well, leave me to my fate! — Hollo! That’s Blake’s voice, now. I don’t wonder it takes Leslie. It’s the most sympathetic voice in the world. They ‘re coming up here, aren’t they? You’d better go, mother. I wish you could have got Leslie away” —

Leslie, without: “Wait for me, there. I must go to mamma’s room at once, and tell her everything.”

Blake, without: “Of course. And say that I wish to see her.”

Leslie: “Good-by.”

Blake: “Good-by.”

Leslie: “We won’t keep you long. Good-by.” Blake: “Good-by.” As he enters one of the parlor doors, flushed and radiant, Mrs. Bellingham retreats through the other.

III. BLAKE AND BELLINGHAM.

Bellingham, coming promptly forward to greet Blake, with both hands extended: “Blake!”

Blake, after a moment of stupefaction: “Bellingham!”

Bellingham: “My dear old fellow!” He wrings Blake fervently by the left hand. “This is the most astonishing thing in the world! To find you here — in New England — with my people; it’s the most wonderful thing that ever was! They’ve been — ah — been telling me all about you, my mother has; and I want to thank you — you look uncommonly well, Blake, and not a day older! Do you mean to go through life with that figure? — thank you for all you’ve done for them; and — I don’t know: what does a man say to a fellow who has behaved as you did in that business with the tramps?” — wringing Blake’s left hand again and gently touching his right arm in its sling. “By Jove, old fellow! I don’t know what to say, to you; I — Do you think it was quite the thing, though, not to intimate that you’d known me? Come, now; that wasn’t fair. It wasn’t frank. It wasn’t like you, Blake. Hey?” He affectionately presses Blake’s hand at every emphatic word.

Blake, releasing himself: “I didn’t like it: but I couldn’t help it. It would have seemed to claim something, and I should have had to allow — they would have found out” —

Bellingham: “That you happened to save my life, once. Well, upon my word, I don’t think it was a thing to be ashamed of; at least, at that time; I was in the army, then. At present — I don’t know that I should blame you for hushing the matter up.”

Blake, who has turned uneasily away, and has apparently not been paying the closest attention to Bellingham’s reproaches, but now confronts him: “I suppose you’re a gentleman, Bellingham.”

Bellingham, taking the abruptness of Blake’s question with amiable irony: “There have been moments in which I have flattered myself to that degree; even existence itself is problematical, to my mind, at other times: but — well, yes, I suppose I am a gentleman. The term’s conventional. And then?”

Blake: “I mean that you ‘re a fair-minded, honest man, and that I can talk to you without the risk of being misunderstood or having any sort of meanness attributed to me?”

Bellingham: “I should have to be a much shabbier fellow than I am, for anything of that sort, Blake.”

Blake: “I didn’t expect to find you here; I was expecting to speak with your mother. But I don’t see why I shouldn’t say to you what I have to say. In fact, I think I can say it better to you.”

Bellingham: “Thanks, Blake; you’ll always find me your — That is — well, go ahead!”

Blake: “You don’t think I’m a man to do anything sneaking, do you?”

Bellingham: “Again? My dear fellow, that goes without saying. It’s out of the question.”

Blake, walking up and down, and stopping from time to time while he speaks in a tone of passionate self-restraint: “Well, I’m glad to hear that, because I know that to some the thing might have a different look.” After a pause, in which Blake takes another turn round the room and arrives in front of Bellingham again: “If your people have been telling you about me, I suppose they’ve hinted — but I don’t care to know it — that they think I’m in love with Miss Bellingham, your sister. I am!” He looks at Bellingham, who remains impassive behind the glitter of his eye-glasses: “Do you see any reason why I shouldn’t be?”

Bellingham, reluctantly: “N-no.”

Blake: “I believe — no, I can’t believe it! — but I know that Miss Bellingham permits it; that she — I can’t say it! Is there any — any reason why I shouldn’t ask her mother’s leave to ask her to be my wife? Why, of course, there is! — a thousand, million reasons in my unworthiness; I know that. But is there” —

Bellingham, abruptly: “Blake, my dear fellow — my dear, good old boy — it won’t do; it’s out of the question! It is, it is indeed! It won’t do at all. Confound it, man! You know I like you, that I’ve always wanted to be a great deal more your friend than you would ever let me. Don’t ask me why, but take my word for it when I tell you it’s out of the question. There are a thousand reasons, as you say, though there isn’t one of them in any fault of yours, old fellow. But I can’t give them. It won’t do!” Bellingham in his turn begins to walk up and down the room with a face of acute misery and hopelessness, and at the last word he stops and stares helplessly into Blake’s eyes, who has remained in his place.

Blake, with suppressed feeling: “Do you expect me to be satisfied with that answer?”

Bellingham, at first confused and then with a burst of candor: “No; I wouldn’t, myself.” His head falls, and a groan breaks from his lips: “This is the roughest thing I ever knew of. Hang it, Blake, don’t you see what a — a — box I’m in? People pulling and hauling at me, and hammering away on all sides, till I don’t know which end I’m standing on! You wouldn’t like it yourself. Why do you ask? Why must you be — ah — satisfied? Come! Why don’t you let it all — go?”

Blake: “Upon my word, Bellingham, you talk” —

Bellingham: “Like a fool! I know it. And it’s strictly in character. At the present moment I feel like a fool. I am a fool! By Jove, if I ever supposed I should get into such a tight place as this! Why, don’t you see, Blake, what an extremely unfair advantage you have of me? Deuce take it, man, I have some rights in the matter, too, I fancy!”

Blake, bewildered: “Bights? Advantage? I don’t understand all this.”

Bellingham: “How not understand?”

Blake, gazing in mystified silence at Bellingham for a brief space, and then resuming more steadily: “There’s some objection to me, that’s clear enough. I don’t make any claim, but you would think I ought to know what the matter is, wouldn’t you?”

Bellingham: “Y-yes, Blake.”

Blake: “I know that I’m ten years older than Miss Bellingham, and that it might look as if” — Bellingham, hastily: “Oh, not in the least — not in the least!”

Blake: “Our acquaintance wasn’t regularly made, I believe. But you don’t suppose that I urged it, or that it would have been kept up if it hadn’t been for their kindness and for chances that nobody foresaw?”

Bellingham: “There isn’t a circumstance of the whole affair that isn’t perfectly honorable to you, Blake; that isn’t like you. Confound it” —

Blake: “I won’t ask you whether you think I thought of her being rich?”

Bellingham: “No, sir! That would be offensive.”

Blake: “Then what is it? Is there some personal objection to me with your family?”

Bellingham: “There isn’t at all, Blake, I assure you.”

Blake: “Then I don’t understand, and” — with rising spirit— “I want to say once for all that I 11 think your leaving me to ask these things and put myself on the defensive in this way, begging you for this reason and for that, isn’t what I’m used to. But I’m like a man on trial for his life, and I stand it. Now, go on and say what there is to say. Don’t spare my feelings, man! I have no pride where she is concerned. What do you know against me that makes it impossible?”

Bellingham: “O Lord! It isn’t against you. It’s nothing personal; personally we’ve all reason to respect and honor you; you’ve done us nothing but good in the handsomest way. ‘ But it won’t do for all that. There’s an incompatibility — a — a — I don’t know what to call it! Confound it, Blake! You know very well that there’s none of that cursed nonsense about me. I don’t care what a man is in life; I only ask what he is in himself. I accept the American plan in good faith. I know all sorts of fellows; devilish good fellows some of them are, too! Why, I had that Mitchell, who behaved so well at the Squattick Mills disaster, to dine with me; went down and looked him up, and had him to dine with me.

Some of the men didn’t think it was the thing; but I can assure you that he talked magnificently about the affair. I drew him out, and before we were done we had the whole room about us. I wouldn’t have missed it on any account. That’s my way.”

Blake, dryly: “It’s a very magnanimous way. The man must have felt honored.”

Bellingham: “What? — Oh, dence take it! I don’t mean any of that patronizing rot, you know I don’t. You know I think such a man as that ten times as good as myself. What I mean is that it’s different with women. They haven’t got the same — what shall I say? — horizons, social horizons, don’t you know. They can’t accept a man for what he is in himself. They have to take him for what he isn’t in himself. They have to have their world carried on upon the European plan, in short. I don’t know whether I make myself understood” —

Blake, with hardness: “Yes, you do. The objection is to my having been” —

Bellingham, hastily interposing: “Well — ah — no! I can’t admit that. It isn’t the occupation. We’ve all been occupied more or less remotely in — in some sort of thing; a man’s a fool who tries to blink that. But I don’t know that I can make it clear how our belonging, now, to a different order of things makes our women distrustful — I won’t say skeptical, but anxious — as to the influence of — ah — other social circumstances. They ‘re mere creatures of tradition, women are, and where you or I, Blake,” — with caressing good comradeship and the assumption of an impartial high-mindedness,—” wouldn’t care a straw for a man’s trade or profession, they are more disposed to — ah — particularize, and — don’t you know — distinguish!”

Blake, gravely: “I tried to make Miss Bellingham understand from the first just what I was and had been. I certainly never concealed anything. Do you think she would care for what disturbs the other ladies of your family?”

Bellingham: “Leslie? Well, she’s still a very young girl, and she has streaks of originality that rather disqualify her for appreciating — ah —

She’s romantic! I’m sure I’m greatly obliged to you, Blake, for taking the thing in this reasonable way. You know how to sympathize with one’s extreme reluctance — and — ah — embarrassment in putting a case of the kind.”

Blake, with a sad, musing tone: “Yes, God knows I’m sorry for you. I don’t suppose you like to do it.”

Bellingham: “Thanks, thanks, Blake. It was quite as much on your own account that I spoke. They would make it deucedly uncomfortable for you in the family, — there’s no end to the aunts and grandmothers, and things, and you’d make them uncomfortable too, with your — history.” Mopping his forehead with his handkerchief: “You have it infernally hot, up here, don’t you?”

Blake, still musingly: “Then you think that Miss Bellingham herself wouldn’t be seriously distressed?”

Bellingham: “Leslie’s a girl that will go through anything she’s made up her mind to. And if she likes you well enough to marry you” —

Blake: “She says so.”

Bellingham: “Then burning plowshares wouldn’t have the smallest effect upon her. But” —

Blake, quietly: “Then I won’t give her up.” Bellingham: “Eh?”

Blake: “I won’t give her up. It’s bad enough as it is, but if I were such a sneak as to leave the woman who loved me because my marrying her would be awkward for her friends, I should be ten thousand times unworthier than I am. I am going to hold to my one chance of showing myself worthy to win her, and if she will have me I will have her, though it smashes the whole social structure. Bellingham, you ‘re mistaken about this thing her happiness won’t depend upon the success of the aunts and cousins in accounting for me to the world; it’ll depend upon whether I’m man enough to be all the world to her. If she thinks I am, I will be!”

Bellingham: “Oh, don’t talk in that illogical way, Blake. Confound it! I know; I can account for your state of feeling, and all that; but I do assure you it’s mistaken. Let me put it to you. You don’t see this matter as I do; you can’t The best part of a woman’s life is social” —

Blake: “I don’t believe that.”

Bellingham: “Well, no matter: it’s so; and whether you came into Leslie’s world or took her out of it, you’d make no end of — of — row. She’d suffer in a thousand ways.”

Blake: “Not if she loved me, and was the kind of girl I take her to be.”

Bellingham: “Oh, yes, she would, my dear fellow; Leslie’s a devilish proud girl; she’d suffer in secret, but it would try her pride in ways you don’t know of. Why, only consider: she’s taken by surprise in this affair; she’s had no time to think” —

Blake: “She shall have my whole lifetime to make up her mind in; she shall test me in every way she will, and she may fling me away at any moment she will, and I will be her slave forever. She may give me up, but I will not give her up.” Bellingham: “Well, well! We won’t dispute about terms, but I’ll put it to you, yourself, Blake, — yourself. I want you to see that I’m acting for your good; that I’m your friend.”

Blake: “You ‘re her brother, and you ‘re my friend, whatever you say. I’ve borne to have you insinuate -that I’m your inferior. Go on!” Blake’s voice trembles.

Bellingham: “Oh, now! Don’t take that tone! It isn’t fair. It makes me feel like — like the very devil. It does, indeed. I don’t mean anything of the kind. I mean ‘simply that — that — ah — remote circumstances over which you had — ah — no control have placed you at a disadvantage, — social disadvantage. That’s all. It isn’t a question of inferiority or superiority. And I merely put it to you — as a friend, mind — whether the happiness of — ah — all concerned couldn’t be more promptly — ah — secured by your refusing to submit to tests that might — Come now my dear fellow! She’s flattered — any woman might be — by your liking her; but when she went back to her own associations” —

Blake: “If she sees any man she likes better than me, I won’t claim her. But I can’t judge her by a loyalty less than my own. She will never change.” Bellingham essays an answer, but after some preliminary ahs and urns, abruptly desists, and guards an evidently troubled silence, which Blake assails with jealous quickness: “What do you mean? Out with it, man!”

Bellingham: “Don’t take it in that way! My dear fellow” —

Blake: “If I’m her caprice and not her choice, I want to know it! I won’t be killed by inches. Speak I”

Bellingham: “Stop! — I owe you my life, but you mustn’t take that tone with me.”

Blake: “You owe me nothing, — nothing but an answer. If you mean there has been some one before me — She has told me that she never cared for any one but me; I believe her, but I want to know what you mean.”

Bellingham: “She’s my sister! What do you mean?”

IV. LESLIE, BLAKE, AND BELLINGHAM.

Leslie: “Oh, what does it mean?” She enters the room, as if she had been suddenly summoned by the sound of their angry voices from a guiltless ambush in the hall. At the sight of their flushed faces and defiant attitudes she flutters, electrically attracted, first toward one and then toward the other, but at last she instinctively takes shelter at Blake’s elbow: “Charles, what are you saying? What are you both so angry for? Oh, I hoped to find you such good friends, and here you are quarreling! Charles, what have you been doing? O Charles, I always thought you were so generous and magnanimous, and have you been joining that odious conspiracy against us? For shame! And what have you found to say, I should like to know? I should like to know what you’ve found to say — what a gentleman COULD say, under the circumstances!” She grows more vehement as their mutual embarrassment increases upon the men, and Bellingham fades into a blank dismay behind the glitter of his eyeglasses.

“Have you been saying something you ‘re ashamed of, Charles? You couldn’t say anything about him, and so you’ve been trying to set him against me. What have you said about your sister, Charles? — and always pretending to be so fond of me! Oh, oh, oh!” Miss Bellingham snatches her handkerchief from her pocket and hides her grief in it, while her brother remains in entire petrifaction at her prescience.

Bellingham, finally: “Why, Leslie — Deuce take it all, Blake, why don’t you say something?

I tell you, I haven’t said anything against you, Les. Blake will tell you himself that I was merely endeavoring to set the thing before him from different points of view. I wanted him to consider the shortness of your acquaintance” — Leslie, in her handkerchief: “It’s fully three weeks since we met, — you know it is.”

Bellingham: “And I wanted him to reflect upon how very different all your associations and — traditions — were” —

Leslie, still in her handkerchief: “Oh, that was delicate — very!”

Bellingham: “And to — ah — take into consideration the fact that returning to another — atmosphere — surroundings, you might — ah — change.”

Leslie, lifting her face: “You did! Charles, did I ever change?”

Bellingham: “Well, I don’t know. I don’t know whether you’d call it changing, exactly; but I certainly got the impression from aunt Kate that there was some hope on Dudley’s part last summer” ——

Leslie, quitting her refuge and advancing fiercely upon the dismayed but immovable Bellingham with her right hand thrust rigidly down at her side, and her left held behind her clutching her handkerchief: “Charles, have you dared to intimate that I ever cared the least thing about that — that — horrid — little — reptile? When you knew that my life was made perfectly ghastly by the way aunt Kate forced him on me, and it was as much as I could ever do to treat him decently! I never encouraged him for an instant, and you know it. Oh, Charley, Charley, how could you? It isn’t for myself I care; it’s for you, for you ‘re a gentleman, and you let yourself do that! How painfully strange that low, mean, shabby feeling must have been to you! I don’t wonder you couldn’t face me or speak to me. I don’t” —

Bellingham, desperately: “Here; hold on! Good Lord! I can’t stand this! Confound it, I’m not made of granite — or gutta-percha. I’ll allow it was sneaking, — Blake will tell you I looked it, — but it was a desperate case. It was a family job, and I had to do my best — or my worst — as the head of the family; and Blake wouldn’t hear reason, and” —

Leslie: “And so you thought you’d try fraud!” Bellingham: “Well, I shouldn’t use that word. But it’s the privilege of your sex to call a spade a pitchfork, if you don’t like the spade. I tell you I never professed to know anything personally about the Dudley business and I didn’t say anything about it; when Blake caught me up so, I was embarrassed to think how I might have mentioned it in — in the heat of argument. Come, Blake” — Leslie, turning and going devoutly up to Blake: “Yes, he will defend you. He must save your honor since he saved your life.”

Bellingham, with a start: “Eh?”

Leslie: “Oh, I know about it! Mamma told me. She thinks just as I do, now, and she has been feeling dreadfully about this shabby work she’d set you at; but I comforted her. I told her you would never do it in the world; that you would just shuffle about in your way” — Bellingham: “Oh, thanks!”

Leslie: “But that you had too good a heart, too high a spirit, to breathe a syllable that would wound the pride of a brave and generous man to whom you owed life itself: that you would rather die than do it!” To Blake: “Oh, I’ve always been a romantic girl, — you won’t mind it in me, will you? — and I’ve had my foolish dreams a thousand times about the man who risked his life to save my brother’s; and I hoped and longed, that some day we should meet. I promised myself that I should know him, and I always thought how sweet and dear a privilege it would be to thank him. I want to thank you for his life as I used to dream of doing, but I cannot yet. I cannot till you tell me that he has not said one word unworthy of you, — unworthy of a gentleman!” Blake, smiling: “He’s all right!”

Leslie, impetuously clinging to him: “Oh, thanks, thanks, thanks!”

Bellingham, accurately focusing the pair with freshly adjusted glasses. “If you’ll both give me your blessing, now, I’ll go away, feeling perfectly rehabilitated, in the afternoon stage.”

V. MRS. BELLINGHAM, AND LESLIE, BLAKE, AND BELLINGHAM; AFTERWARDS MRS. MURRAY.

Mrs. Bellingham, entering the parlor door:

“Stage? Why, Mr. Blake isn’t going away!”

Bellingham: “Oh, no, Mr. Blake has kindly consented to remain. It was I who thought of going. I can’t bear to be idle!”

Mrs. Bellingham, apart from the others:

“Charles, dear, I’m sorry I asked you to undertake that disagreeable business, and I’d have come back at once with Leslie to relieve you, — to tell you that you needn’t speak after all, — but she felt sure that you wouldn’t, and she insisted upon leaving you together and then stealing back upon you and enjoying” —

Bellingham, solemnly: “You little knew me, mother. I have the making of an iron-hearted parent in me, and I was crushing all hope out of Blake when Leslie came in.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Charles, you don’t mean that you said anything to wound the feelings of a man to whom you owed your life, — to whom we all owe so much?”

Bellingham: “I don’t know about his feelings. But I represented pretty distinctly to him the social incompatability.”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Charles, I wonder at you!” Bellingham: “Oh, yes! So do I. But if you’ll take the pains to recall the facts, that’s exactly what you left me to do. May I ask what has caused you to change your mind?”

Mrs. Bellingham, earnestly: “I found that Leslie’s happiness really depended upon it; and in fact, Charles, when I came to reflect, I found that I myself liked him.”

Bellingham: “The words have a familiar sound, — as if I had used them myself in a former existence.” Turning from his mother and looking about: “I seem to miss a — a support — moral support — in those present. Where is aunt Kate?”

Mrs. Murray, appearing at the door: “Marion! Ma” — She hesitates at sight of the peaceful grouping.

Bellingham: “Ah, this is indeed opportune! Come in, aunt Kate, come in! This is a free fight, as they say in Mr. Blake’s section. Any one can join.” Mrs. Murray advances wonderingly into the room, and Bellingham turns to his sister, where she stands at Blake’s side: “Leslie, you think I’ve behaved very unhandsomely in this matter, don’t you?”

Leslie, plaintively: “Charley, you know I hate to blame you. But I never could have believed it if any one else had told me.”

Bellingham: “All right. Mother, I understand that you would have been similarly incredulous?” Mrs. Bellingham: “I know that you acted from good motive, Charles, but you certainly went to an extreme that I could never have expected.” Bellingham: “All right, again. Blake, if the persons and relations had all been changed, could you have said to me what I said to you?”

Blake: “That isn’t a fair question, Bellingham.”

Bellingham: “All right, as before. Now, aunt Kate, I appeal to you. You know all the circumstances in which I was left here with this man who saved my life, who rescued Leslie from those tramps, who has done you all a thousand kindnesses of various sorts and sizes, who has behaved with the utmost delicacy and discretion throughout, and is in himself a thoroughly splendid fellow. Do you think I did right or wrong to set plainly before him the social disadvantages to which his marrying Leslie would put us?”

Mrs. Murray, instantly and with great energy: “Charles, I say — and every person in society, except your mother and sister, would say — that you did exactly right!”

Bellingham: “That settles it. Blake, my dear old fellow, I beg your pardon with all my heart; and I ask you to forget, if you can, every word I said. Confound society!” He offers his hand to Blake, who seizes it and wrings it in his own.

Leslie, as she flings her arms round his neck, with a fluttering cry of joy: “Oh, Charley, Charley, I’ve got my ideal back again!”

Bellingham, disengaging her arms and putting her hand into Blake’s: “Both of them.” Turning to Mrs. Murray: “And now, aunt, I beg your pardon. What do you say?”

Mrs. Murray, frozenly: “Charles, you know my principles.”

Bellingham: “They ‘re identical on all points with my own. Well?”

Mrs. Murray, grimly: “Well, then, you know that I never would abandon my family, whatever happened!”

Bellingham: “By Jove, that isn’t so bad. We must be satisfied to take your forgiveness as we get it. Perhaps Leslie might object to the formulation of” ——

Leslie, super-joyously: “Oh, no! I object to nothing in the world, now, Charles. Aunt Kate is too good! I never should have thought of asking her to remain with us.”

Bellingham: That isn’t so bad, either! You are your aunt’s own niece. Come, Blake, we can’t let this go on. Say something to allay the ill feeling you’ve created in this family.”

Blake: “I think I’d better not try. But if you’ll give me time, I’ll do my best to live down the objections to me.” Bellingham: “Oh, you’ve done that. What we want now — as I understand aunt Kate — is that you should live down the objections to us.

One thing that puzzles me” — thoughtfully scratching the sparse parting of his hair—” is that our position is so very equivocal in regard to the real principle involved. It seems to me that we are begging the whole question, which is, if Blake” —

Leslie: “There, there! I knew he would!” Bellingham, severely: “Mother, you will allow that I have been left to take the brunt of this little affair in a — well, somewhat circuitous manner?”

Mrs. Bellingham: “Charles, I am very, very sorry” —

Bellingham: “And that I am entitled to some sort of reparation?”

Leslie: “Don’t allow that, mamma! I know he’s going to say something disagreeable. He looks just as he always does when he has one of his ideas.”

Bellingham: “Thanks, Miss Bellingham. I am going to have this particular satisfaction out of you. Then I will return to my habitual state of agreeable vacancy. Mother” —

Leslie: “Mamma, don’t answer him! It’s the only way.”

Bellingham: “It is not necessary that I should be answered. I only wish to have the floor. The question is, if Blake were merely a gentleman somewhat at odds with his history, associations, and occupation, and not also our benefactor and preserver in so many ways, — whether we should be so ready to — ah” —

Mrs. Bellingham: “Charles, dear, I think it is unnecessary to enter into these painful minutiae.” Mrs. Murray: “I feel bound to say that I know we should not.”

Bellingham: “This is the point which I wished to bring out. Blake, here is your opportunity: renounce us!”

Blake: “What do you say, Leslie?”

Leslie: “I say that I don’t believe it, and I know that I like you for yourself, — not for what you’ve done for us. I did from the first moment, before you spoke or saw me. But if you doubt me, or should ever doubt me” ——

Blake, taking in his left both the little hands that she has appealingly laid upon his arms: “That’s out of the question!”

A COUNTERFEIT PRESENTMENT

CONTENTS

I. AN EXTRAORDINARY RESEMBLANCE.

II. DISTINCTIONS AND DIFFERENCES.

III. DISSOLVING VIEWS.

IV. NOT AT ALL LIKE.

I. AN EXTRAORDINARY RESEMBLANCE.

(The Scene is always in the Parlour of the Ponkwasset Hotel.)

I.

Bartlett and Cummings.

ON a lovely day in September, at that season when the most sentimental of the young maples have begun to redden along the hidden courses of the meadow streams, and the elms, with a sudden impression of despair in their languor, betray flecks of yellow on the green of their pendulous boughs, — on such a day at noon, two young men enter the parlour of the Ponkwasset Hotel, and deposit about the legs of the piano the burdens they have been carrying: a camp-stool namely, a field-easel, a closed box of colours, and a canvas to which, apparently, some portion of reluctant nature has just been transferred. These properties belong to one of the young men, whose general look and bearing readily identify him as their owner: he has a quick, somewhat furtive eye, a full brown beard, and hair that falls in a careless mass down his forehead, which, as he dries it with his handkerchief, sweeping the hair aside, shows broad and white; his figure is firm and square, without heaviness, and in his movement as well as in his face there is something of stubbornness, with a suggestion of arrogance. The other, who has evidently borne his share of the common burdens from a sense of good comradeship, has nothing of the painter in him, nor anything of this painter’s peculiar temperament: he has a very abstracted look and a dark, dreaming eye: he is pale, and does not look strong. The painter flings himself into a rocking chair and draws a long breath.

Cummings (for that is the name of the slighter man, who remains standing as he speaks).— “It’s warm, isn’t it?” His gentle face evinces a curious and kindly interest in his friend’s sturdy demonstrations of fatigue.

Bartlett.— “Yes, hot — confoundedly.” He rubs his handkerchief vigorously across his forehead, and then looks down at his dusty shoes, with apparently no mind to molest them in their dustiness. “The idea of people going back to town in this weather! However, I’m glad they’re such asses; it gives me free scope here. Every time I don’t hear some young woman banging on that piano, I fall into transports of joy.”

Cummings, smiling.— “And after to-day you won’t be bothered even with me.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, I shall rather miss you, you know. I like somebody to contradict.”

Cummings.— “You can contradict the ostler.”

Bartlett.— “No, I can’t. They’ve sent him away; and I believe you’re going to carry off the last of the table-girls with you in the stage to-morrow. The landlord and his wife are to run the concern themselves the rest of the fall. Poor old fellow! The hard times have made lean pickings for him this year. His house wasn’t full in the height of the season, and it’s been pretty empty since.”

Cummings.— “I wonder he doesn’t shut up altogether.”

Bartlett.— “Well, there are a good many transients, as they call them, at this time of year, — fellows who drive over from the little hill-towns with their girls in buggies, and take dinner and supper; then there are picnics from the larger places, ten and twelve miles off, that come to the grounds on the pond, and he always gets something out of them. And as long as he can hope for anything else, my eight dollars a week are worth hanging on to. Yes, I think I shall stay here all through October. I’ve got no orders, and it’s cheap. Besides, I’ve managed to get on confidential terms with the local scenery; I thought we should like each other last summer, and I feel now that we’re ready to swear eternal friendship. I shall do some fairish work here, yet. Phew!” He mops his forehead again, and springing out of his chair he goes up to the canvas, which he has faced to the wall, and turning it about retires some paces, and with a swift, worried glance at the windows falls to considering it critically.

Cummings.— “You’ve done some fairish work already, if I’m any judge.” He comes to his friend’s side, as if to get his effect of the picture. “I don’t believe the spirit of a graceful elm that just begins to feel the approach of autumn was ever better interpreted. There is something tremendously tragical to me in the thing. It makes me think of some lovely and charming girl, all grace and tenderness, who finds the first grey hair in her head. I should call that picture The First Grey Hair.”

Bartlett, with unheeding petulance.— “The whole thing’s too infernally brown! I beg your pardon, Cummings: what were you saying? Go on! I like your prattle about pictures; I do, indeed. I like to see how far you art-cultured fellows can miss all that was in a poor devil’s mind when he was at work. But I’d rather you’d sentimentalise my pictures than moralise them. If there’s anything that makes me quite limp, it’s to have an allegory discovered in one of my poor stupid old landscapes. But The First Grey Hair isn’t bad, really. And a good, senseless, sloppy name like that often sells a picture.”

Cummings.— “You’re brutal, Bartlett. I don’t believe your pictures would own you, if they had their way about it.”

Bartlett.— “And I wouldn’t own them if I had mine. I’ve got about forty that I wish somebody else owned — and I had the money for them; but we seem inseparable. Glad you’re going to-morrow? You are a good fellow, Cummings, and I am a brute. Come, I’ll make a great concession to friendship: it struck me, too, while I was at work on that elm, that it was something like — an old girl!” Bartlett laughs, and catching his friend by either shoulder, twists him about in his strong clutch, while he looks him merrily in the face. “I’m not a poet, old fellow; and sometimes I think I ought to have been a painter and glazier instead of a mere painter. I believe it would have paid better.”

Cummings.— “Bartlett, I hate to have you talk in that way.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, I know it’s a stale kind.”

Cummings.— “It’s worse than stale. It’s destructive. A man can soon talk himself out of heart with his better self. You can end by really being as sordid-minded and hopeless and low-purposed as you pretend to be. It’s insanity.”

Bartlett.— “Good! I’ve had my little knock on the head, you know. I don’t deny being cracked. But I’ve a method in my madness.”

Cummings.— “They all have. But it’s a very poor method; and I don’t believe you could say just what yours is. You think because a girl on whom you set your fancy — it’s nonsense to pretend it was your heart — found out she didn’t like you as well as she thought, and honestly told you so in good time, that your wisest course is to take up that rôle of misanthrope which begins with yourself and leaves people to imagine how low an opinion you have of the rest of mankind.”

Bartlett.— “My dear fellow, you know I always speak well of that young lady. I’ve invariably told you that she behaved in the handsomest manner. She even expressed the wish — I distinctly remember being struck by the novelty of the wish at the time — that we should remain friends. You misconceive” —

Cummings.— “How many poor girls have been jilted who don’t go about doing misanthropy, but mope at home and sorrow and sicken over their wrong in secret, — a wrong that attacks not merely their pride, but their life itself. Take the case I was telling you of: did you ever hear of anything more atrocious? And do you compare this little sting to your vanity with a death-blow like that?”

Bartlett.— “It’s quite impossible to compute the number of jilted girls who take the line you describe. But if it were within the scope of arithmetic, I don’t know that a billion of jilted girls would comfort me or reform me. I never could regard myself in that abstract way — a mere unit on one side or other of the balance. My little personal snub goes on rankling beyond the reach of statistical consolation. But even if there were any edification in the case of the young lady in Paris, she’s too far off to be an example for me. Take some jilted girl nearer home, Cummings, if you want me to go round sickening and sorrowing in secret. I don’t believe you can find any. Women are much tougher about the pericardium than we give them credit for, my dear fellow, — much. I don’t see why it should hurt a woman more than a man to be jilted. We shall never truly philosophise this important matter till we regard women with something of the fine penetration and impartiality with which they regard each other. Look at the stabs they give and take — they would kill men! And the graceful ferocity with which they despatch any of their number who happens to be down is quite unexampled in natural history. How much do you suppose her lady friends have left of that poor girl whose case wrings your foolish bosom all the way from Paris? I don’t believe so much as a boot-button. Why, even your correspondent — a very lively woman, by the way — can’t conceal under all her indignation her little satisfaction that so proud a girl as Miss What’s-her-name should have been jilted. Of course, she doesn’t say it.”

Cummings hotly.— “No, she doesn’t say it, and it’s not to your credit to imagine it.”

Bartlett, with a laugh.— “Oh, I don’t ask any praise for the discovery. You deserve praise for not making it. It does honour to your good heart. Well, don’t be vexed, old fellow. And in trying to improve me on this little point — a weak point, I’ll allow, with me — do me the justice to remember that I didn’t flaunt my misanthropy, as you call it, in your face; I didn’t force my confidence upon you.”

Cummings, with compunction.— “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Bartlett.”

Bartlett.— “Well, you haven’t. It’s all right.”

Cummings, with anxious concern.— “I wish I could think so.”

Bartlett, dryly.— “You have my leave — my request, in fact.” He takes a turn about the room, thrusting his fingers through the hair on his forehead, and letting it fall in a heavy tangle, and then pulling at either side of his parted beard. In facing away from one of the sofas at the end of the room, he looks back over his shoulder at it, falters, wheels about, and picks up from it a lady’s shawl and hat. “Hallo!” He lets the shawl fall again into picturesque folds on the sofa. “This is the spoil of no local beauty, Cummings. Look here; I don’t understand this. There has been an arrival.”

Cummings, joining his friend in contemplation of the hat and shawl: “Yes; it’s an arrival beyond all question. Those are a lady’s things. I should think that was a Paris hat.” They remain looking at the things some moments in silence.

Bartlett.— “How should a Paris hat get here? I know the landlord wasn’t expecting it. But it can’t be going to stay; it’s here through some caprice. It may be a transient of quality, but it’s a transient. I suppose we shall see the young woman belonging to it at dinner.” He sets the hat on his fist, and holds it at arm’s length from him. “What a curious thing it is about clothes” —

Cummings.— “Don’t, Bartlett, don’t!”

Bartlett.— “Why?”

Cummings.— “I don’t know. It makes me feel as if you were offering an indignity to the young lady herself.”

Bartlett.— “You express my idea exactly. This frippery has not only the girl’s personality but her very spirit in it. This hat looks like her; you can infer the whole woman from it, body and soul. It has a conscious air, and so has the shawl, as if they had been eavesdropping and had understood everything we were saying. They know all about my heart-break, and so will she as soon as she puts them on; she will be interested in me. The hat’s in good taste, isn’t it?”

Cummings, with sensitive reverence for the millinery which his friend handles so daringly.— “Exquisite it seems to me; but I don’t know about such things.”

Bartlett.— “Neither do I; but I feel about them. Besides, a painter and glazier sees some things that are hidden from even a progressive minister. Let us interpret the lovely being from her hat. This knot of pale-blue flowers betrays her a blonde; this lace, this mass of silky, fluffy, cob-webby what-do-you-call-it, and this delicate straw fabric show that she is slight; a stout woman would kill it, or die in the attempt. And I fancy — here pure inspiration comes to my aid — that she is tallish. I’m afraid of her! No — wait! The shawl has something to say.” He takes it up and catches it across his arm, where he scans it critically. “I don’t know that I understand the shawl, exactly. It proves her of a good height, — a short woman wouldn’t, or had better not, wear a shawl, — but this black colour: should you think it was mourning? Have we a lovely young widow among us?”

Cummings.— “I don’t see how it could go with the hat, if it were.”

Bartlett.— “True; the hat is very pensive in tone, but it isn’t mourning. This shawl’s very light, it’s very warm; I construct from it a pretty invalid.” He lets the shawl slip down his arm to his hand, and flings it back upon the sofa. “We return from the young lady’s heart to her brain — where she carries her sentiments. She has a nice taste in perfumes, Cummings: faintest violet; that goes with the blue. Of what religion is a young lady who uses violet, my reverend friend?”

Cummings.— “Bartlett, you’re outrageous. Put down that hat!”

Bartlett.— “No, seriously. What is her little æsthetic specialty? Does she sketch? Does she scribble? Tell me, thou wicked hat, does she flirt? Come; out with the vows that you have heard poured into the shelly ear under this knot of pale-blue flowers! Where be her gibes now, her gambols, her flashes of merriment? Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that. Dost thou think, Horatio Cummings, Cleopatra looked o’ this fashion? And smelt so?” — he presses the knot of artificial flowers to his moustache— “Pah!” He tosses the hat on the sofa and walks away.

Cummings.— “Bartlett, this is atrocious. I protest” —

Bartlett.— “Well, give me up, I tell you.” He returns, and takes his friend by the shoulders, as before, and laughs. “I’m not worth your refined pains. I might be good, at a pinch, but I never could be truly lady-like.”

Cummings.— “You like to speak an infinite deal of nothing, don’t you?”

Bartlett.— “It’s the only thing that makes conversation.” As he releases Cummings, and turns away from him, in the doorway he confronts an elderly gentleman, whose white hair and white moustache give distinction to his handsome florid face. There is something military in his port, as he stands immoveably erect upon the threshold, his left hand lodged in the breast of his frock-coat, and his head carried with an officer-like air of command. His visage grows momently redder and redder, and his blue eyes blaze upon Bartlett with a fascinated glare that briefly preludes the burst of fury with which he advances toward him.

II.

General Wyatt, Bartlett, and Cummings.

General Wyatt.— “You infernal scoundrel! What are you doing here?” He raises his stick at Bartlett, who remains motionlessly frowning in wrathful bewilderment, his strong hand knotting itself into a fist where it hangs at his side, while Cummings starts toward them in dismay, with his hand raised to interpose. “Didn’t I tell you if I ever set eyes on you again, you villain — didn’t I warn you that if you ever crossed my path, you” — He stops with a violent self-arrest, and lets his stick drop as he throws up both his hands in amaze. “Good Heavens! It’s a mistake! I beg your pardon, sir; I do, indeed.” He lets fall his hands, and stands staring into Bartlett’s face with his illusion apparently not fully dispelled. “A mistake, sir, a mistake. I was misled, sir, by the most prodigious resemblance” — At the sound of voices in the corridor without, he turns from Bartlett, and starts back toward the door.

A Voice, very sweet and weak, without.— “I left them in here, I think.”

Another Voice.— “You must sit down, Constance, and let me look.”

The First Voice.— “Oh, they’ll be here.”

General Wyatt., in a loud and anxious tone.— “Margaret, Margaret! Don’t bring Constance in here! Go away!” At the moment he reaches the door by which he came in, two ladies in black enter the parlour by the other door, the younger leaning weakly on the arm of the elder, and with a languidly drooping head letting her eyes rove listlessly about over the chairs and sofas. With an abrupt start at sight of Bartlett, who has mechanically turned toward them, the elder lady arrests their movement.

III.

Mrs. Wyatt, Constance, and the others.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, in mercy’s name!” The young lady wearily lifts her eyes; they fall upon Bartlett’s face, and a low cry parts her lips as she approaches a pace or two nearer, releasing her arm from her mother’s.

Constance.— “Ah!” She stops; her thin hands waver before her face, as if to clear or to obstruct her vision, and all at once she sinks forward into a little slender heap upon the floor, almost at Bartlett’s feet. He instantly drops upon his knees beside her, and stoops over her to lift her up.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Don’t touch her, you cruel wretch! Your touch is poison; the sight of you is murder!” Kneeling on the other side of her daughter, she sets both her hands against his breast and pushes him back.

General Wyatt.— “Margaret, stop! Look! Look at him again! It isn’t he!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Not he? Don’t tell me! What?” She clutches Bartlett’s arm, and scans his face with dilating eyes. “Oh! it isn’t, it isn’t! But go away, — go away, all the same! You may be an innocent man, but she would perish in your presence. Keep your hands from her, sir! If your wicked heart is not yet satisfied with your wicked work — Excuse me; I don’t know what I’m saying! But if you have any pity in your faithless soul — I — oh, speak for me, James, and send him — implore him to go away!” She bows her face over her daughter’s pale visage, and sobs.

General Wyatt.— “Sir, you must pardon us, and have the great goodness to be patient. You have a right to feel yourself aggrieved by what has happened, but no wrong is meant, — no offence. You must be so kind as to go away. I will make you all the needed apologies and explanations.” He stoops over his daughter, as Bartlett, in a sort of daze, rises from his knees and retires a few steps. “I beg your pardon, sir,” — addressing himself to Cummings,— “will you help me a moment?” Cummings, with delicate sympathy and tenderness, lifts the arms of the insensible girl to her father’s neck, and assists the General to rise with his burden. “Thanks! She’s hardly heavier, poor child, than a ghost.” The tears stand in his eyes, as he gathers her closer to him and kisses her wan cheek. “Sir,” — as he moves away he speaks to Bartlett,— “do me the favour to remain here till I can return to offer you reparation.” He makes a stately effort to bow to Bartlett in leaving the room, while his wife, who follows with the young lady’s hat and shawl, looks back at the painter with open abhorrence.

IV.

Bartlett and Cummings.

Bartlett, turning to his friend from the retreating group on which he has kept his eyes steadfastly fixed.— “Where are their keepers?” He is pale with suppressed rage.

Cummings.— “Their keepers?”

Bartlett, savagely.— “Yes! Have they escaped from them, or is it one of the new ideas to let lunatics go about the country alone? If that old fool hadn’t dropped his stick, I’d have knocked him over that table in another instant. And that other old maniac, — what did she mean by pushing me back in that way? How do you account for this thing, Cummings? What do you make of it?”

Cummings.— “I don’t know, upon my word. There seems to be some mystery, — some painful mystery. But the gentleman will be back directly, I suppose, and” —

Bartlett, crushing his hat over his eyes.— “I’ll leave you to receive him and his mystery. I’ve had enough of both.” He moves toward the door.

Cummings, detaining him.— “Bartlett, you’re surely not going away?”

Bartlett.— “Yes, I am!”

Cummings.— “But he’ll be here in a moment. He said he would come back and satisfy the claim which you certainly have to an explanation.”

Bartlett, furiously.— “Claim? I’ve a perfect Alabama Claim to an explanation. He can’t satisfy it; he shall not try. It’s a little too much to expect me to be satisfied with anything he can say after what’s passed. Get out of the way, Cummings, or I’ll put you on top of the piano.”

Cummings.— “You may throw me out of the window, if you like, but not till I’ve done my best to keep you here. It’s a shame, it’s a crime to go away. You talk about lunatics: you’re a raving madman, yourself. Have one glimmer of reason, do; and see what you’re about. It’s a mistake; it’s a misunderstanding. It’s his right, it’s your duty, to have it cleared up. Come, you’ve a conscience, Bartlett, and a clean one. Don’t give way to your abominable temper. What? You won’t stay? Bartlett, I blush for you!”

Bartlett.— “Blush unseen, then!” He thrusts Cummings aside and pushes furiously from the room. Cummings looks into the corridor after him, and then returns, panting, to the piano, and mechanically rearranges the things at his feet; he walks nervously away, and takes some turns up and down the room, looking utterly bewildered, and apparently uncertain whether to go or stay. But he has decided upon the only course really open to him by sinking down into one of the armchairs, when General Wyatt appears at the threshold of the door on the right of the piano. Cummings rises and comes forward in great embarrassment to meet him.

V.

Cummings and General Wyatt.

General Wyatt, with a look of surprise at not seeing Bartlett.— “The other gentleman” —

Cummings.— “My friend has gone out. I hope he will return soon. He has — I hardly know what to say to you, sir. He has done himself great injustice; but it was natural that under the circumstances” —

General Wyatt, with hurt pride.— “Perfectly. I should have lost my temper, too; but I think I should have waited at the request — the prayer of an older man. I don’t mind his temper; the other villain had no temper. Sir, am I right in addressing you as the Rev. Arthur Cummings?”

Cummings.— “My name is Arthur Cummings. I am a minister.”

General Wyatt.— “I thought I was not mistaken this time. I heard you preach last Sunday in Boston; and I know your cousin, Major Cummings of the 34th Artillery. I am General Wyatt.”

Cummings, with a start of painful surprise and sympathy.— “General Wyatt?”

General Wyatt, keenly.— “Your cousin has mentioned me to you?”

Cummings.— “Yes, — oh yes, certainly; certainly, very often, General Wyatt. But” — endeavouring to recover himself— “your name is known to us all, and honoured. I — I am glad to see you back; I — understood you were in Paris.”

General Wyatt, with fierce defiance.— “I was in Paris three weeks ago.” Some moments of awkward silence ensue, during which General Wyatt does not relax his angry attitude.

Cummings, finally.— “I am sorry my friend is not here to meet you. I ought to say, in justice to him, that his hasty temper does great wrong to his heart and judgment.”

General Wyatt.— “Why, yes, sir; so does mine — so does mine.”

Cummings, with a respectful smile lost upon the General.— “And I know that he will certainly be grieved in this instance to have yielded to it.”

General Wyatt, with sudden meekness.— “I hope so, sir. But I am not altogether sorry that he has done it. I have not only an explanation but a request to make, — a very great and strange favour to ask, — and I am not sure that I should be able to treat him civilly enough throughout an entire interview to ask it properly.” Cummings listens with an air of attentive respect, but makes, to this strange statement, no response other than a look of question, while the General pokes about on the carpet at his feet with the point of his stick for a moment before he brings it resolutely down upon the floor with a thump, and resumes, fiercely again: “Sir, your friend is the victim of an extraordinary resemblance, which is so much more painful to us than we could have made it to him that I have to struggle with my reason to believe that the apology should not come from his side rather than mine. He may feel that we have outraged him, but every look of his, every movement, every tone of his voice, is a mortal wound, a deadly insult to us. He should not live, sir, in the same solar system!” The General deals the floor another stab with his cane, while his eyes burn vindictively upon the mild brown orbs of Cummings, wide open with astonishment. He falters, with returning consciousness of his attitude: “I — I beg your pardon, sir; I am ridiculous.” He closes his lips pathetically, and lets fall his head. When he lifts it again, it is to address Cummings with a singular gentleness: “I know that I speak to a gentleman.”

Cummings.— “I try to be a good man.”

General Wyatt.— “I had formed that idea of you, sir, in the pulpit. Will you do me the great kindness to answer a question, personal to myself, which I must ask?”

Cummings.— “By all means.”

General Wyatt.— “You spoke of supposing me still in Paris. Are you aware of any circumstances — painful circumstances — connected with my presence there? Pardon my asking; I wouldn’t press you if I could help.”

Cummings, with reluctance.— “I had just heard something about — a letter from a friend” —

General Wyatt, bitterly.— “The news has travelled fast. Well, sir, a curious chance — a pitiless caprice of destiny — connects your friend with that miserable story.” At Cummings’s look of amaze: “Through no fault of his, sir; through no fault of his. Sir, I shall not seem to obtrude my trouble unjustifiably upon you when I tell you how; you will see that it was necessary for me to speak. I am glad you already know something of the affair, and I am sure that you will regard what I have to say with the right feeling of a gentleman, — of, as you say, a good man.”

Cummings.— “Whatever you think necessary to say to me shall be sacred. But I hope you won’t feel that it is necessary to say anything more. I am confident that when my friend has your assurance from me that what has happened is the result of a distressing association” —

General Wyatt.— “I thank you, sir. But something more is due to him; how much more you shall judge. Something more is due to us: I wish to preserve the appearance of sanity, in his eyes and your own. Nevertheless” — the General’s tone and bearing perceptibly stiffen— “if you are reluctant” —

Cummings, with reverent cordiality.— “General Wyatt, I shall feel deeply honoured by whatever confidence you repose in me. I need not say how dear your fame is to us all.” General Wyatt, visibly moved, bows to the young minister. “It was only on your account that I hesitated.”

General Wyatt.— “Thanks. I understand. I will be explicit, but I will try to be brief. Your friend bears this striking, this painful resemblance to the man who has brought this blight upon us all; yes, sir,” — at Cummings’s look of deprecation,— “to a scoundrel whom I hardly know how to characterise aright — in the presence of a clergyman. Two years ago — doubtless your correspondent has written — my wife and daughter (they were then abroad without me) met him in Paris; and he won the poor child’s affection. My wife’s judgment was also swayed in his favour, — against her first impulse of distrust; but when I saw him, I could not endure him. Yet I was helpless: my girl’s happiness was bound up in him; all that I could do was to insist upon delay. He was an American, well related, unobjectionable by all the tests which society can apply, and I might have had to wait long for the proofs that an accident gave me against him. The man’s whole soul was rotten; at the time he had wound himself into my poor girl’s innocent heart, a woman was living who had the just and perhaps the legal claim of a wife upon him; he was a felon besides, — a felon shielded through pity for his friends by the man whose name he had forged; he was of course a liar and a coward: I beat him with my stick, sir. Ah! I made him confess his infamy under his own hand, and then” — the General advances defiantly upon Cummings, who unconsciously retires a pace— “and then I compelled him to break with my daughter. Do you think I did right?”

Cummings.— “I don’t exactly understand.”

General Wyatt.— “Why, sir, it happens often enough in this shabby world that a man gains a poor girl’s love, and then jilts her. I chose what I thought the less terrible sorrow for my child. I could not tell her how filthily unworthy he was without bringing to her pure heart a sense of intolerable contamination; I could not endure to speak of it even to my wife. It seemed better that they should both suffer such wrong as a broken engagement might bring them than that they should know what I knew. He was master of the part, and played it well; he showed himself to them simply a heartless scoundrel, and he remains in my power, an outcast now and a convict whenever I will. My story, as it seems to be, is well known in Paris; but the worst is unknown. I choose still that it shall be thought my girl was the victim of a dastardly slight, and I bear with her and her mother the insolent pity with which the world visits such sorrow.” He pauses, and then brokenly resumes: “The affair has not turned out as I hoped, in the little I could hope from it. My trust that the blow, which must sink so deeply into her heart, would touch her pride, and that this would help her to react against it, was mistaken. In such things it appears a woman has no pride; I did not know it; we men are different. The blow crushed her; that was all. Sometimes I am afraid that I must yet try the effect of the whole truth upon her; that I must try if the knowledge of all his baseness cannot restore to her the self-respect which the wrong done herself seems to have robbed her of. And yet I tremble lest the sense of his fouler shame — I may be fatally temporising; but in her present state, I dread any new shock for her; it may be death — I” — He pauses again, and sets his lips firmly; all at once he breaks into a sob. “I — I beg your pardon, sir.”

Cummings.— “Don’t! You wrong yourself and me. I have seen Miss Wyatt; but I hope” —

General Wyatt.— “You have seen her ghost. You have not seen the radiant creature that was once alive. Well, sir; enough of this. There is little left to trouble you with. We landed eight days ago, and I have since been looking about for some place in which my daughter could hide herself; I can’t otherwise suggest her morbid sensitiveness, her terror of people. This region was highly commended to me for its healthfulness; but I have come upon this house by chance. I understood that it was empty, and I thought it more than probable that we might pass the autumn months here unmolested by the presence of any one belonging to our world, if not in entire seclusion. At the best, my daughter would hardly have been able to endure another change at once; so far as anything could give her pleasure, the beauty and the wild quiet of the region had pleased her, but she is now quite prostrated, sir,” —

Cummings, definitively.— “My friend will go away at once. There is nothing else for it.”

General Wyatt.— “That is too much to ask.”

Cummings.— “I won’t conceal my belief that he will think so. But there can be no question with him when” —

General Wyatt.— “When you tell him our story?” After a moment: “Yes, he has a right to know it — as the rest of the world knows it. You must tell him, sir.”

Cummings, gently.— “No, he need know nothing beyond the fact of this resemblance to some one painfully associated with your past lives. He is a man whose real tenderness of heart would revolt from knowledge that could inflict further sorrow upon you.”

General Wyatt.— “Sir, will you convey to this friend of yours an old man’s very humble apology, and sincere prayer for his forgiveness?”

Cummings.— “He will not exact anything of that sort. The evidence of misunderstanding will be clear to him at a word from me.”

General Wyatt.— “But he has a right to this explanation from my own lips, and — Sir, I am culpably weak. But now that I have missed seeing him here, I confess that I would willingly avoid meeting him. The mere sound of his voice, as I heard it before I saw him, in first coming upon you, was enough to madden me. Can you excuse my senseless dereliction to him?”

Cummings.— “I will answer for him.”

General Wyatt.— “Thanks. It seems monstrous that I should be asking and accepting these great favours. But you are doing a deed of charity to a helpless man utterly beggared in pride.” He chokes with emotion, and does not speak for a moment. “Your friend is also — he is not also — a clergyman?”

Cummings, smiling.— “No. He is a painter.”

General Wyatt.— “Is he a man of note? Successful in his profession?”

Cummings.— “Not yet. But that is certain to come.”

General Wyatt.— “He is poor?”

Cummings.— “He is a young painter.”

General Wyatt.— “Sir, excuse me. Had he planned to remain here some time yet?”

Cummings, reluctantly.— “He has been sketching here. He had expected to stay through October.”

General Wyatt.— “You make the sacrifice hard to accept — I beg your pardon! But I must accept it. I am bound hand and foot.”

Cummings.— “I am sorry to have been obliged to tell you this.”

General Wyatt.— “I obliged you, sir; I obliged you. Give me your advice, sir; you know your friend. What shall I do? I am not rich. I don’t belong to a branch of the government service in which people enrich themselves. But I have my pay; and if your friend could sell me the pictures he’s been painting here” —

Cummings.— “That’s quite impossible. There is no form in which I could propose such a thing to a man of his generous pride.”

General Wyatt.— “Well, then, sir, I must satisfy myself as I can to remain his debtor. Will you kindly undertake to tell him?”

An Elderly Serving-Woman, who appears timidly and anxiously at the right-hand door.— “General Wyatt.”

General Wyatt, with a start.— “Yes, Mary! Well?”

Mary, in vanishing.— “Mrs. Wyatt wishes to speak with you.”

General Wyatt, going up to Cummings.— “I must go, sir. I leave unsaid what I cannot even try to say.” He offers his hand.

Cummings, grasping the proffered hand.— “Everything is understood.” But as Mr. Cummings returns from following General Wyatt to the door, his face does not confirm the entire security of his words. He looks anxious and perturbed, and when he has taken up his hat and stick, he stands pondering absent-mindedly. At last he puts on his hat and starts briskly toward the door. Before he reaches it, he encounters Bartlett, who advances abruptly into the room. “Oh! I was going to look for you.”

VI.

Cummings and Bartlett.

Bartlett, sulkily.— “Were you?” He walks, without looking at Cummings, to where his painter’s paraphernalia are lying, and begins to pick them up.

Cummings.— “Yes.” In great embarrassment: “Bartlett, General Wyatt has been here.”

Bartlett, without looking round.— “Who is General Wyatt?”

Cummings.— “I mean the gentleman who — whom you wouldn’t wait to see.”

Bartlett.— “Um!” He has gathered the things into his arms, and is about to leave the room.

Cummings, in great distress.— “Bartlett, Bartlett! Don’t go! I implore you, if you have any regard for me whatever, to hear what I have to say. It’s boyish, it’s cruel, it’s cowardly to behave as you’re doing!”

Bartlett.— “Anything more, Mr. Cummings? I give you benefit of clergy.”

Cummings.— “I take it — to denounce your proceeding as something that you’ll always be sorry for and ashamed of.”

Bartlett.— “Oh! Then, if you have quite freed your mind, I think I may go.”

Cummings.— “No, no! You mustn’t go. Don’t go, my dear fellow. Forgive me! I know how insulted you feel, but upon my soul it’s all a mistake, — it is, indeed. General Wyatt” — Bartlett falters a moment and stands as if irresolute whether to stay and listen or push on out of the room— “the young lady — I don’t know how to begin!”

Bartlett, relenting a little.— “Well? I’m sorry for you, Cummings. I left a very awkward business to you, and it wasn’t yours either. As for General Wyatt, as he chooses to call himself” —

Cummings, in amaze.— “Call himself? It’s his name!”

Bartlett.— “Oh, very likely! So is King David his name, when he happens to be in a Scriptural craze. What explanation have you been commissioned to make me? What apology?”

Cummings.— “The most definite, the most satisfactory. You resemble in a most extraordinary manner a man who has inflicted an abominable wrong upon these people, a treacherous and cowardly villain” —

Bartlett, in a burst of fury.— “Stop! Is that your idea of an apology, an explanation? Isn’t it enough that I should be threatened, and vilified, and have people fainting at the sight of me, but I must be told by way of reparation that it all happens because I look like a rascal?”

Cummings.— “My dear friend! Do listen to me!”

Bartlett.— “No, sir, I won’t listen to you! I’ve listened too much! What right, I should like to know, have they to find this resemblance in me? And do they suppose that I’m going to be placated by being told that they treat me like a rogue because I look like one? It is a little too much. A man calls ‘Stop thief’ after me and expects me to be delighted when he tells me I look like a thief! The reparation is an additional insult. I don’t choose to know that they fancy this infamous resemblance in me. Their pretending it is an outrage; and your reporting it to me is an offence. Will you tell them what I say? Will you tell this General Wyatt and the rest of his Bedlam-broke-loose, that they may all go to the” —

Cummings.— “For shame, for shame! You outrage a terrible sorrow! You insult a trouble sore to death! You trample upon, an anguish that should be sacred to your tears!”

Bartlett, resting his elbow on the corner of the piano.— “What — what do you mean, Cummings?”

Cummings.— “What do I mean? What you are not worthy to know! I mean that these people, against whom you vent your stupid rage, are worthy of angelic pity. I mean that by some disastrous mischance you resemble to the life, in tone, manner, and feature, the wretch who won that poor girl’s heart, and then crushed it; who — Bartlett, look here! These are the people — this is the young lady — of whom my friend wrote me from Paris: do you understand?”

Bartlett, in a dull bewilderment.— “No, I don’t understand.”

Cummings.— “Why, you know what we were talking of just before they came in: you know what I told you of that cruel business.”

Bartlett.— “Well?”

Cummings.— “Well, this is the young lady” —

Bartlett, dauntedly.— “Oh, come now! You don’t expect me to believe that! It isn’t a stage-play.”

Cummings.— “Indeed, indeed, I tell you the miserable truth.”

Bartlett.— “Do you mean to say that this is the young girl who was jilted in that way? Who — Do you mean — Do you intend to tell me — Do you suppose — Cummings” —

Cummings.— “Yes, yes, yes!”

Bartlett.— “Why, man, she’s in Paris, according to your own showing!”

Cummings.— “She was in Paris three weeks ago. They have just brought her home, to help her hide her suffering, as if it were her shame, from all who know it. They are in this house by chance, but they are here. I mean what I say. You must believe it, shocking and wild as it is.”

Bartlett, after a prolonged silence in which he seems trying to realise the fact.— “If you were a man capable of such a ghastly joke — but that’s impossible.” He is silent again, as before. “And I — What did you say about me? That I look like a man who” — He stops and stares into Cummings’s face without speaking, as if he were trying to puzzle the mystery out; then, with fallen head, he muses in a voice of devout and reverent tenderness: “That — that — broken — lily! Oh!” With a sudden start he flings his burden upon the closed piano, whose hidden strings hum with the blow, and advances upon Cummings: “And you can tell it? Shame on you! It ought to be known to no one upon earth! And you — you show that gentle creature’s death-wound to teach something like human reason to a surly dog like me? Oh, it’s monstrous! I wasn’t worth it. Better have let me go, where I would, how I would. What did it matter what I thought or said? And I — I look like that devil, do I? I have his voice, his face, his movement? Cummings, you’ve over-avenged yourself.”

Cummings.— “Don’t take it that way, Bartlett. It is hideous. But I didn’t make it so, nor you. It’s a fatality, it’s a hateful chance. But you see now, don’t you, Bartlett, how the sight of you must affect them, and how anxious her father must be to avoid you? He most humbly asked your forgiveness, and he hardly knew how to ask that you would not let her see you again. But I told him there could be no question with you; that of course you would prevent it, and at once. I know it’s a great sacrifice to expect you to go” —

Bartlett.— “Go? What are you talking about?” He breaks again from the daze into which he had relapsed. “If there’s a hole on the face of the earth where I can hide myself from them, I want to find it. What do you think I’m made of? Go? I ought to be shot away out of a mortar; I ought to be struck away by lightning! Oh, I can’t excuse you, Cummings! The indelicacy, the brutality of telling me that! No, no, — I can’t overlook it.” He shakes his head and walks away from his friend; then he returns, and bends on him a look of curious inquiry. “Am I really such a ruffian” — he speaks very gently, almost meekly, now— “that you didn’t believe anything short of that would bring me to my senses? Who told you this of her?”

Cummings.— “Her father.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, that’s too loathsome! Had the man no soul, no mercy? Did he think me such a consummate beast that nothing less would drive me away? Yes, he did! Yes, I made him think so! Oh!” He hangs his head and walks away with a shudder.

Cummings.— “I don’t know that he did you that injustice; but I’m afraid I did. I was at my wits’ end.”

Bartlett, very humbly.— “Oh, I don’t know that you were wrong.”

Cummings.— “I suppose that his anxiety for her life made it comparatively easy for him to speak of the hurt to her pride. She can’t be long for this world.”

Bartlett.— “No, she had the dying look!” After a long pause, in which he has continued to wander aimlessly about the room: “Cummings, is it necessary that you should tell him you told me?”

Cummings.— “You know I hate concealments of any kind, Bartlett.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, well; do it then!”

Cummings.— “But I don’t know that we shall see him again; and even if we do, I don’t see how I can tell him unless he asks. It’s rather painful.”

Bartlett.— “Well, take that little sin on your conscience if you can. It seems to me too ghastly that I should know what you’ve told me; it’s indecent. Cummings,” — after another pause,— “how does a man go about such a thing? How does he contrive to tell the woman whose heart he has won that he doesn’t care for her, and break the faith that she would have staked her life on? Oh, I know, — women do such things, too; but it’s different, by a whole world’s difference. A man comes and a man goes, but a woman stays. The world is before him after that happens, and we don’t think him much of a man if he can’t get over it. But she, she has been sought out; she has been made to believe that her smile and her looks are heaven, poor, foolish, helpless idol! her fears have been laid, all her pretty maidenly traditions, her proud reserves overcome; she takes him into her inmost soul, — to find that his love is a lie, a lie! Imagine it! She can’t do anything. She can’t speak. She can’t move as long as she lives. She must stay where she has been left, and look and act as if nothing had happened. Oh, good Heaven! And I, I look like a man who could do that!” After a silence: “I feel as if there were blood on me!” He goes to the piano, and gathering up his things turns about towards Cummings again: “Come, man; I’m going. It’s sacrilege to stay an instant, — to exist.”

Cummings.— “Don’t take it in that way, Bartlett. I blame myself very much for not having spared you in what I said. I wouldn’t have told you of it, if I could have supposed that an accidental resemblance of the sort would distress you so.”

Bartlett, contritely.— “You had to tell me. I forced you to extreme measures. I’m quite worthy to look like him. Good Lord! I suppose I should be capable of his work.” He moves towards the door with his burden, but before he reaches it General Wyatt, from the corridor, meets him with an air of confused agitation. Bartlett halts awkwardly, and some of the things slip from his hold to the floor.

VII.

General Wyatt, Cummings, and Bartlett.

General Wyatt.— “Sir, I am glad to see you.” He pronounces the civility with a manner evidently affected by the effort to reconcile Bartlett’s offensive personal appearance with his own sense of duty. “I — I was sorry to miss you before; and now I wish — Your friend” — referring with an inquiring glance to Cummings— “has explained to you the cause of our very extraordinary behaviour, and I hope you” —

Bartlett.— “Mr. Cummings has told me that I have the misfortune to resemble some one with whom you have painful associations. That is quite enough, and entirely justifies you. I am going at once, and I trust you will forgive my rudeness in absenting myself a moment ago. I have a bad temper; but I never could forgive myself if I had forced my friend” — he turns and glares warningly at Cummings, who makes a faint pantomime of conscientious protest as Bartlett proceeds— “to hear anything more than the mere fact from you. No, no,” — as General Wyatt seems about to speak,— “it would be atrocious in me to seek to go behind it. I wish to know nothing more.” Cummings gives signs of extreme unrest at being made a party to this tacit deception, and General Wyatt, striking his palms hopelessly together, walks to the other end of the room. Bartlett touches the fallen camp-stool with his foot. “Cummings, will you be kind enough to put that on top of this other rubbish?” He indicates his armful, and as Cummings complies, he says in a swift fierce whisper: “Her secret is mine. If you dare to hint that you’ve told it to me, I’ll — I’ll assault you in your own pulpit.” Then to General Wyatt, who is returning toward him: “Good-morning, sir.”

General Wyatt.— “Oh! Ah! Stop! That is, don’t go! Really, sir, I don’t know what to say. I must have seemed to you like a madman a moment ago, and now I’ve come to play the fool.” Bartlett and Cummings look their surprise, and General Wyatt hurries on: “I asked your friend to beg you to go away, and now I am here to beg you to remain. It’s perfectly ridiculous, sir, I know, and I can say nothing in defence of the monstrous liberties I have taken. Sir, the matter is simply this: my daughter’s health is so frail that her life seems to hang by a thread, and I am powerless to do anything against her wish. It may be a culpable weakness, but I cannot help it. When I went back to her from seeing your friend, she immediately divined what my mission had been, and it had the contrary effect from what I had expected. Well, sir! Nothing would content her but that I should return and ask you to stay. She looks upon it as the sole reparation we can make you.”

Bartlett, gently.— “I understand that perfectly; and may I beg you to say that in going away I thanked her with all my heart, and ventured to leave her my best wishes?” He bows as if to go.

General Wyatt, detaining him.— “Excuse me — thanks — but — but I am afraid she will not be satisfied with that. She will be satisfied with nothing less than your remaining. It is the whim of a sick child — which I must ask you to indulge. In a few days, sir, I hope we may be able to continue on our way. It would be simply unbearable pain to her to know that we had driven you away, and you must stay to show that you have forgiven the wrong we have done you.”

Bartlett.— “That’s nothing, less than nothing. But I was thinking — I don’t care for myself in the matter — that Miss Wyatt is proposing a very unnecessary annoyance for you all. My friend can remain and assure her that I have no feeling whatever about the matter, and in the meantime I can remove — the embarrassment — of my presence.”

General Wyatt.— “Sir, you are very considerate, very kind. My own judgment is in favour of your course, and yet” —

Cummings.— “I think my friend is right, and that when he is gone” —

General Wyatt.— “Well, sir! well, sir! It may be the best way. I think it is the best. We will venture upon it. Sir,” — to Bartlett,— “may I have the honour of taking your hand?” Bartlett lays down his burden on the piano, and gives his hand. “Thank you, thank you! You will not regret this goodness. God bless you! May you always prosper!”

Bartlett.— “Good-bye; and say to Miss Wyatt” — At these words he pauses, arrested by an incomprehensible dismay in General Wyatt’s face, and turning about he sees Cummings transfixed at the apparition of Miss Wyatt advancing directly toward himself, while her mother coming behind her exchanges signals of helplessness and despair with the General. The young girl’s hair, thick and bronze, has been heaped in hasty but beautiful masses on her delicate head; as she stands with fallen eyes before Bartlett, the heavy lashes lie dark on her pale cheeks, and the blue of her eyes shows through their transparent lids. She has a fan with which she makes a weak pretence of playing, and which she puts to her lips as if to hide the low murmur that escapes from them as she raises her eyes to Bartlett’s face.

VIII.

Constance, Mrs. Wyatt, and the others.

Constance, with a phantom-like effort at hauteur.— “I hope you have been able to forgive the annoyance we caused you, and that you won’t let it drive you away.” She lifts her eyes with a slow effort, and starts with a little gasp as they fall upon his face, and then remains trembling before him while he speaks.

Bartlett, reverently.— “I am to do whatever you wish. I have no annoyance — but the fear that — that” —

Constance, in a husky whisper.— “Thanks!” As she turns from him to go back to her mother, she moves so frailly that he involuntarily puts out his hand.

Mrs. Wyatt, starting forward.— “No!” But Constance clutches his extended arm with one of her pale hands, and staying herself for a moment lifts her eyes again to his, looks steadily at him with her face half turned upon him, and then, making a slight, sidelong inclination of the head, releases his arm and goes to her mother, who supports her to one of the easy-chairs and kneels beside her when she sinks into it. Bartlett, after an instant of hesitation, bows silently and withdraws, Cummings having already vanished. Constance watches him going, and then hides her face on her mother’s neck.

II. DISTINCTIONS AND DIFFERENCES.

I.

Constance and Mrs. Wyatt.

Constance.— “And he is still here? He is going to stay on, mother?” She reclines in a low folding chair, and languidly rests her head against one of the pillows with which her mother has propped her; on the bright coloured shawl which has been thrown over her lie her pale hands loosely holding her shut fan. Her mother stands half across the parlour from her, and wistfully surveys her work, to see if some touch may not yet be added for the girl’s comfort.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Yes, my child. He will stay. He told your father he would stay.”

Constance.— “That’s very kind of him. He’s very good.”

Mrs. Wyatt, seating herself before her daughter.— “Do you really wish him to stay? Remember how weak you are, Constance. If you are taking anything upon yourself out of a mistaken sense of duty, of compunction, you are not kind to your poor father or to me. Not that I mean to reproach you.”

Constance.— “Oh, no. And I am not unkind to you in the way you think. I’m selfish enough in wishing him to stay. I can’t help wanting to see him again and again, — it’s so strange, so strange. All this past week, whenever I’ve caught a glimpse of him, it’s been like an apparition; and whenever he has spoken, it has been like a ghost speaking. But I haven’t been afraid since the first time. No, there’s been a dreary comfort in it; you won’t understand it; I can’t understand it myself; but I know now why people are glad to see their dead in dreams. If the ghost went, there would be nothing.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Constance, you break my heart!”

Constance.— “Yes, I know it; it’s because I’ve none.” She remains a little space without speaking, while she softly fingers the edges of the fan lying in her lap. “I suppose we shall become more acquainted, if he stays?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Why, not necessarily, dear. You need know nothing more of him than you do now. He seems very busy, and not in the least inclined to intrude upon us. Your father thinks him a little odd, but very gentlemanly.”

Constance, dreamily.— “I wonder what he would think if he knew that the man whom I would have given my life did not find my love worth having? I suppose it was worthless; but it seemed so much in the giving; it was that deceived me. He was wiser. Oh, me!” After a silence: “Mother, why was I so different from other girls?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “So different, Constance? You were only different in being lovelier and better than others.”

Constance.— “Ah, that’s the mistake! If that were true, it could never have happened. Other girls, the poorest and plainest, are kept faith with; but I was left. There must have been something about me that made him despise me. Was I silly, mother? Was I too bold, too glad to have him care for me? I was so happy that I couldn’t help showing it. May be that displeased him. I must have been dull and tiresome. And I suppose I was somehow repulsive, and at last he couldn’t bear it any longer and had to break with me. Did I dress queerly? I know I looked ridiculous at times; and people laughed at me before him.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, Constance, Constance! Can’t you understand that it was his unworthiness alone, his wicked heartlessness?”

Constance, with gentle slowness.— “No, I can’t understand that. It happened after we had learned to know each other so well. If he had been fickle, it would have happened long before that. It was something odious in me that he didn’t see at first. I have thought it out. It seems strange now that people could ever have tolerated me.” Desolately: “Well, they have their revenge.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Their revenge on you, Constance? What harm did you ever do them, my poor child? Oh, you mustn’t let these morbid fancies overcome you. Where is our Constance that used to be, — our brave, bright girl, that nothing could daunt, and nothing could sadden?”

Constance, sobbing.— “Dead, dead!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “I can’t understand! You are so young still, and with the world all before you. Why will you let one man’s baseness blacken it all, and blight your young life so? Where is your pride, Constance?”

Constance.— “Pride? What have I to do with pride? A thing like me!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, child, you’re pitiless! It seems as if you took a dreadful pleasure in torturing those who love you.”

Constance.— “You’ve said it, mother. I do. I know now that I am a vampire, and that it’s my hideous fate to prey upon those who are dearest to me. He must have known, he must have felt the vampire in me.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Constance!”

Constance.— “But at least I can be kind to those who care nothing for me. Who is this stranger? He must be an odd kind of man to forgive us. What is he, mother? — if he is anything in himself; he seems to me only a likeness, not a reality.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “He is a painter, your father says.” Mrs. Wyatt gives a quick sigh of relief, and makes haste to confirm the direction of the talk away from Constance: “He is painting some landscapes here. That friend of his who went to-day is a cousin of your father’s old friend, Major Cummings. He is a minister.”

Constance.— “What is the painter’s name? Not that it matters. But I must call him something if I meet him again.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Mr. Bartlett.”

Constance.— “Oh yes, I forgot.” She falls into a brooding silence. “I wonder if he will despise me — if he will be like in that too?” Mrs. Wyatt sighs patiently. “Why do you mind what I say, mother? I’m not worth it. I must talk on, or else go mad with the mystery of what has been. We were so happy; he was so good to me, so kind; there was nothing but papa’s not seeming to like him; and then suddenly, in an instant, he turns and strikes me down! Yes, it was like a deadly blow. If you don’t let me believe that it was because he saw all at once that I was utterly unworthy, I can’t believe in anything.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Hush, Constance; you don’t know what you’re saying.”

Constance.— “Oh, I know too well! And now this stranger, who is so like him — who has all his looks, who has his walk, who has his voice, — won’t he have his insight too? I had better show myself for what I am, at once — weak, stupid, selfish, false; it’ll save me the pain of being found out. Pain? Oh, I’m past hurting! Why do you cry, mother? I’m not worth your tears.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “You’re all the world to us, Constance; you know it, child. Your poor father” —

Constance.— “Does papa really like me?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Constance!”

Constance.— “No; but why should he? He never liked him; and sometimes I’ve wondered, if it wasn’t papa’s not liking him that first set him against me. Of course, it was best he should find me out, but still I can’t keep from thinking that if he had never begun to dislike me! I noticed from the first that after papa had been with us he was cold and constrained. Mother, I had better say it: I don’t believe I love papa as I ought. There’s something in my heart — some hardness — against him when he’s kindest to me. If he had only been kinder to him” —

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Kinder to him? Constance, you drive me wild! Kind to a wolf, kind to a snake! Kind to the thief who has robbed us of all that made our lives dear; who stole your love, and then your hope, your health, your joy, your pride, your peace! And you think your father might have been kinder to him! Constance, you were our little girl when the war began, — the last of brothers and sisters that had died. You seemed given to our later years to console and comfort us for those that had been taken; and you were so bright and gay! All through those dreadful days and months and years you were our stay and hope, — mine at home, his in the field. Our letters were full of you, — like young people’s with their first child; all that you did and said I had to tell him, and then he had to talk it over in his answers back. When he came home at last after the peace — can you remember it, Constance?”

Constance.— “I can remember a little girl that ran down the street, and met an officer on horseback. He was all tanned and weather-beaten; he sat his horse at the head of his troop like a statue of bronze. When he saw her come running, dancing down the street, he leaped from his horse and caught her in his arms, and hugged her close and kissed her, and set her all crying and laughing in his saddle, and walked on beside her; and the men burst out with a wild yell, and the ragged flags flapped over her, and the music flashed out” — She rises in her chair with the thrill of her recollection; her voice comes free and full, and her pale cheeks flush; suddenly she sinks back upon the pillows: “Was it really I, mother?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Yes, it was you, Constance. And do you remember all through your school-days, how proud and fond he was of you? what presents and feasts and pleasures he was always making you? I thought he would spoil you; he took you everywhere with him, and wanted to give you everything. When I saw you growing up with his pride and quick temper, I trembled, but I felt safe when I saw that you had his true and tender heart too. You can never know what a pang it cost him to part with you when we went abroad, but you can’t forget how he met you in Paris?”

Constance.— “Oh, no, no! Poor papa!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, child! And I could tell you something of his bitter despair when he saw the man” —

Constance, wearily.— “You needn’t tell me. I knew it as soon as they met, without looking at either of them.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “And when the worst that he feared came true, he was almost glad, I believe. He thought, and I thought, that your self-respect would come to your aid against such treachery.”

Constance.— “My self-respect? Now I know you’ve not been talking of me.”

Mrs. Wyatt, desperately.— “Oh, what shall I do?”

Mary, the serving-woman, at the door.— “If you please, Mrs. Wyatt, I can’t open Miss Constance’s hat-box.”

Mrs. Wyatt, rising.— “Oh, yes. There’s something the matter with the lock. I’ll come, Mary.” She looks at Constance.

Constance.— “Yes, go, mother. I’m perfectly well here. I like being alone well enough.” As Mrs. Wyatt, after a moment’s reluctance, goes out, the girl’s heavy eyelids fall, and she lies motionless against her pillows, while the fan, released from her careless hold, slides slowly over the shawl, and drops with a light clash upon the floor. She starts at the sound, and utters a little involuntary cry at sight of Bartlett, who stands irresolute in the doorway on her right. He makes as if to retreat, but at a glance from her he remains.

II.

Bartlett and Constance.

Bartlett, with a sort of subdued gruffness.— “I’m afraid I disturbed you.”

Constance, passively.— “No, I think it was my fan. It fell.”

Bartlett.— “I’m glad I can lay the blame on the fan.” He comes abruptly forward and picks it up for her. She makes no motion to receive it, and he lays it on her lap.

Constance, starting from the abstraction in which she has been gazing at him.— “Oh! thanks.”

Bartlett, with constraint.— “I hope you’re better this morning?”

Constance.— “Yes.” She has again fallen into a dreamy study of him, as unconscious, apparently, as if he were a picture before her, the effect of which is to reduce him to a state of immovable awkwardness. At last he tears himself loose from the spot on which he has been petrifying, and takes refuge in the business which has brought him into the room.

Bartlett.— “I came to look for one of my brushes. It must have dropped out of my traps here the other day.” He goes up to the piano and looks about the floor, while Constance’s gaze follows him in every attitude and movement. “Ah, here it is! I knew it would escape the broom under the landlady’s relaxed régime. If you happen to drop anything in this room, Miss Wyatt, you needn’t be troubled; you can always find it just where it fell.” Miss Wyatt’s fan again slips to the floor, and Bartlett again picks it up and restores it to her: “A case in point.”

Constance, blushing faintly.— “Don’t do it for me. It isn’t worth while.”

Bartlett, gravely.— “It doesn’t take a great deal of time, and the exercise does me good.” Constance faintly smiles, but does not relax her vigilance. “Isn’t that light rather strong for you?” He goes to the glass doors opening on the balcony, and offers to draw down one of their shades.

Constance.— “It doesn’t make any difference.”

Bartlett, bluffly.— “If it’s disagreeable it makes some difference. Is it disagreeable?”

Constance.— “The light’s strong” — Bartlett dashes the curtain down— “but I could see the mountain.” He pulls the curtain up.

Bartlett.— “I beg your pardon.” He again falls into statue-like discomposure under Miss Wyatt’s gaze, which does not seek the distant slopes of Ponkwasset, in spite of the lifted curtain.

Constance.— “What is the name? Do you know?”

Bartlett.— “Whose? Oh! Ponkwasset. It’s not a pretty name, but it’s aboriginal. And it doesn’t hurt the mountain.” Recovering a partial volition, he shows signs of a purpose to escape, when Miss Wyatt’s next question arrests him.

Constance.— “Are you painting it, Mr. — Bartlett?”

Bartlett, with a laugh.— “Oh no, I don’t soar so high as mountains; I only lift my eyes to a tree here and there, and a bit of pasture and a few of the lowlier and friendlier sort of rocks.” He now so far effects his purpose as to transfer his unwieldy presence to a lateral position as regards Miss Wyatt. The girl mechanically turns her head upon the pillow and again fixes her sad eyes upon him.

Constance.— “Have you ever been up it?”

Bartlett.— “Yes, half a dozen times.”

Constance.— “Is it hard to climb — like the Swiss mountains?”

Bartlett.— “You must speak for the Swiss mountains after you’ve tried Ponkwasset, Miss Wyatt. I’ve never been abroad.”

Constance, her large eyes dilating with surprise.— “Never been abroad?”

Bartlett.— “I enjoy that distinction.”

Constance.— “Oh! I thought you had been abroad.” She speaks with a slow, absent, earnest accent, regarding him, as always, with a look of wistful bewilderment.

Bartlett, struggling uneasily for his habitual lightness.— “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Miss Wyatt. I will go abroad as soon as possible. I’m going out in a boat this morning to work at a bit on the point of the island yonder, and I’ll take lessons in sea-faring.” Bartlett, managing at last to get fairly behind Miss Wyatt’s chair, indulges himself in a long, low sigh of relief, and taking out his handkerchief rubs his face with it.

Constance, with sudden, meek compunction.— “I’ve been detaining you.”

Bartlett, politely coming forward again.— “Oh no, not at all! I’m afraid I’ve tired you.”

Constance.— “No, I’m glad to have you stay.” In the unconscious movement necessary to follow Bartlett in his changes of position, the young girl has loosened one of the pillows that prop her head. It slowly disengages itself and drops to the floor. Bartlett, who has been crushing his brush against the ball of his thumb, gives a start of terror, and looks from Constance to the pillow, and back again to Constance in despair.

Constance.— “Never mind.” She tries to adjust her head to the remaining pillows, and then desists in evident discomfort.

Bartlett, in great agony of spirit.— “I — I’m afraid you miss it.”

Constance.— “Oh no.”

Bartlett.— “Shall I call your mother, Miss Wyatt?”

Constance.— “No. Oh no. She will be here presently. Thank you so much.”

Bartlett eyes the pillow in renewed desperation.

Bartlett.— “Do you think — do you suppose I could” — Recklessly: “Miss Wyatt, let me put back that pillow for you!”

Constance, promptly, with a little flush:— “Why, you’re very good! I’m ashamed to trouble you.” As she speaks, she raises her head, and lifts herself forward slightly by help of the chair-arms; two more pillows topple out, one on either side, unknown to her.

Bartlett, maddened by the fresh disaster:— “Good Lord!” He flings himself wildly upon the first pillow, and crams it into the chair behind Miss Wyatt; then without giving his courage time to flag, he seizes the others, and packs them in on top of it: “Will that do?” He stands hot and flushed, looking down upon her, as she makes a gentle attempt to adjust herself to the mass.

Constance.— “Oh, perfectly.” She puts her hand behind her and feebly endeavours to modify Bartlett’s arrangement.

Bartlett.— “What is it?”

Constance.— “Oh — nothing. Ah — would — would you draw this one a little — toward you? So! Thanks. And that one — out a little on the — other side? You’re very kind; that’s right. And this one under my neck — lift it up a little? Ah, thank you ever so much.” Bartlett, in a fine frenzy, obeying these instructions, Miss Wyatt at last reposes herself against the pillows, looks up into his embarrassed face, and deeply blushes; then she turns suddenly white, and weakly catching up her fan she passes it once or twice before her face, and lets it fall: “I’m a little — faint.” Bartlett seizes the fan, and after a moment of silent self-dedication kneels down beside her chair, and fans her.

Constance, after a moment:— “Thanks, thanks. You are very good. I’m better now. I’m ashamed to have troubled you. But I seem to live only to give trouble.”

Bartlett, with sudden deep tenderness:— “Oh, Miss Wyatt, you mustn’t say that. I’m sure I — we all — that is — shall I call your mother now, Miss Wyatt?”

Constance, after a deep breath, firmly:— “No. I’m quite well, now. She is busy. But I know I’m keeping you from your work,” — with ever so slight a wan little smile. “I mustn’t do that.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, you’re not keeping me! There’s no hurry. I can work later just as well.”

Constance.— “Then,” — with a glance at his devout posture, of which Bartlett has himself become quite unconscious,— “won’t you sit down, Mr. Bartlett?”

Bartlett, restored to consciousness and confusion:— “Thanks; I think it will be better.” He rises, and in his embarrassment draws a chair to the spot on which he has been kneeling, and sits down very close to her. He keeps the fan in his hand, as he talks: “It’s rather nice out there, Miss Wyatt, — there on the island. You must be rowed out as soon as you can stand it. The General would like it.”

Constance.— “Is it a large place, the island?”

Bartlett.— “About two acres, devoted exclusively to golden-rod and granite. The fact is, I was going to make a little study of golden-rod and granite, there. You shall visit the Fortunate Isle in my sketch, this afternoon, and see whether you’d like to go, really. People camp out there in the summer. Who knows, but if you keep on — gaining — this way, you may yet feel like camping out there yourself before you go away? You do begin to feel better, don’t you? Everybody cries up this air.”

Constance.— “It’s very pleasant; it seems fine and pure. Is the island a pretty place?”

Bartlett, glancing out at it over his shoulder:— “Well, you get the best of it from the parlour window, here. Not that it’s so bad when you’re on it; there’s a surly, frugal, hard-headed kind of beauty about it, — like the local human nature — and it has its advantages. If you were camping out there, you could almost provision yourself from the fish and wild fowl of the surrounding waters, — supposing any of your party liked to fish or shoot. Does your father like shooting?”

Constance.— “No, I don’t believe he cares for it.”

Bartlett.— “I’m glad of that. I shall be spared the painful hospitality of pointing out the best places for ducks.” At an inquiring look from Constance: “I’m glad for their sakes, not mine; I don’t want to kill them.”

Constance, with grave mistrust:— “Not like shooting?”

Bartlett.— “No, I think it’s the sneakingest sort of assassination; it’s the pleasure of murder without the guilt. If you must kill, you ought to be man enough to kill something that you’ll suffer remorse for. Do you consider those atrocious sentiments, Miss Wyatt? I assure you that they’re entirely my own.”

Constance, blankly.— “I wasn’t thinking — I was thinking — I supposed you liked shooting.”

Bartlett, laughing uneasily.— “How did you get that impression?”

Constance, evasively.— “I thought all gentlemen did.”

Bartlett.— “They do in this region. It’s the only thing that can comfort them in affliction. The other day our ostler’s brother lost his sweetheart — she died, poor girl — and the ostler and another friend had him over here to cheer him up. They took him to the stable, and whittled round among the stalls with him half the forenoon, and let him rub down some of the horses; they stood him out among the vegetables and let him gather some of the new kind of potato-bugs; they made him sit in the office with his feet on top of the stove; they played billiards with him; but he showed no signs of resignation till they borrowed three squirrel-guns and started with him to the oak woods yonder. That seemed to ‘fetch’ him. You should have seen them trudging off together with their guns all aslant, — this way, — the stricken lover in the middle!” Bartlett rises to illustrate, and then at the deepening solemnity of Constance’s face he desists in sudden dismay: “Miss Wyatt, I’ve shocked you!”

Constance.— “Oh, no — no!”

Bartlett.— “It was shocking. I wonder how I could do it! I — I thought it would amuse you.”

Constance, mournfully.— “It did, thank you, very much.” After a pause: “I didn’t know you liked — joking.”

Bartlett.— “Ah! I don’t believe I do — all kinds. Good Lord — I beg your pardon.” Bartlett turns away with an air of guilty consciousness, and goes to the window and looks out, Constance’s gaze following him: “It’s a wonderful day!” He comes back toward her: “What a pity you couldn’t be carried there in your chair!”

Constance.— “I’m not equal to that yet.” Presently: “Then you — like — nature?”

Bartlett.— “Why, that’s mere shop in a landscape painter. I get my bread and butter by her. At least I ought to have some feeling of gratitude.”

Constance, hastily.— “Of course, of course. It’s very stupid of me, asking.”

Bartlett, with the desperate intention of grappling with the situation.— “I see you have a passion for formulating, classifying people, Miss Wyatt. That’s all very well, if one’s characteristics were not so very characteristic of everybody else. But I generally find in my moments of self-consciousness, when I’ve gone round priding myself that such and such traits are my peculiar property, that the first man I meet has them all and as many more, and isn’t the least proud of them. I dare say you don’t see anything very strange in them, so far.”

Constance, musingly.— “Oh, yes; very strange indeed. They’re all — wrong!”

Bartlett.— “Well! I don’t know — I’m very sorry — Then you consider it wrong not to like shooting and to be fond of joking and nature, and” —

Constance, bewilderedly.— “Wrong? Oh no!”

Bartlett.— “Oh, I’m glad to hear it. But you just said it was.”

Constance, slowly recalling herself, with a painful blush, at last.— “I meant — I meant I didn’t expect any of those things of you.”

Bartlett, with a smile.— “Well, on reflection, I don’t know that I did, either. I think they must have come without being expected. Upon my word, I’m tempted to propose something very ridiculous.”

Constance, uneasily.— “Yes? What is that?”

Bartlett.— “That you’ll let me try to guess you out. I’ve failed so miserably in my own case, that I feel quite encouraged.”

Constance, morbidly.— “I’m not worth the trouble of guessing out.”

Bartlett.— “That means no. You always mean no by yes, because you can’t bear to say no. That is the mark of a very deep and darkling nature. I feel that I could go on and read your mind perfectly, but I’m afraid to do it. Let’s get back to myself. I can’t allow that you’ve failed to read my mind aright; I think you were careless about it. Will you give your intuitions one more chance?”

Constance, with an anxious smile.— “Oh yes.”

Bartlett.— “All those traits and tastes which we both find so unexpected in me are minor matters at the most. The great test question remains. If you answer it rightly, you prove yourself a mind-reader of wonderful power; if you miss it — The question is simply this: Do I like smoking?”

Constance, instantly, with a quick, involuntary pressure of her handkerchief to her delicate nostrils.— “Oh, yes, indeed!”

Bartlett, daunted and reddening.— “Miss Wyatt, you have been deluding me. You are really a mind-reader of great subtlety.”

Constance.— “I don’t know — I can’t say that it was mind-reading exactly.” She lifts her eyes to his, and in his embarrassment he passes his hand over his forehead and then feels first in one pocket, and then in the other for his handkerchief; suddenly he twitches it forth, and with it a pipe, half a dozen cigars, and a pouch of smoking tobacco, which fly in different directions over the floor. As he stoops in dismay and sweeps together these treasures, she cries: “Oh, it didn’t need all that to prove it!” and breaks into a wild, helpless laugh, and striving to recover herself with many little moans and sighs behind her handkerchief, laughs on and on: “Oh, don’t! I oughtn’t! Oh dear, oh dear!” When at last she lies spent with her reluctant mirth, and uncovers her face, Bartlett is gone, and it is her mother who stands over her, looking down at her with affectionate misgiving.

III.

Mrs. Wyatt and Constance.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Laughing, Constance?”

Constance, with a burst of indignant tears.— “Yes, yes! Isn’t it shocking? It’s horrible! He made me.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “He?”

Constance, beginning to laugh again.— “Mr. Bartlett; he’s been here. Oh, I wish I wouldn’t be so silly!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Made you? How could he make you laugh, poor child?”

Constance.— “Oh, it’s a long story. It was all through my bewilderment at his resemblance. It confused me. I kept thinking it was he, — as if it were some dream, — and whenever this one mentioned some trait of his that totally differed from his, don’t you know, I got more and more confused, and — mamma!” — with sudden desolation— “I know he knows all about it!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “I am sure he doesn’t. Mr. Cummings only told him that his resemblance was a painful association. He assured your father of this, and wouldn’t hear a word more. I’m certain you’re wrong. But what made you think he knows?”

Constance, solemnly.— “He behaved just as if he didn’t.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Ah, you can’t judge from that, my dear.” Impressively: “Men are very different.”

Constance, doubtfully.— “Do you think so, mamma?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “I’m certain of it.”

Constance, after a pause.— “Mamma, will you help take this shawl off my feet? I am so warm. I think I should like to walk about a little. Can you see the island from the gallery?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Do you think you’d better try to leave your chair, Constance?”

Constance.— “Yes, I’m stronger this morning. And I shall never gain, lounging about this way.” She begins to loose the wraps from her feet, and Mrs. Wyatt coming doubtfully to her aid she is presently freed. She walks briskly towards the sofa, and sits down quite erectly in the corner of it. “There! that’s pleasanter. I get so tired of being a burden.” She is silent, and then she begins softly and wearily to laugh again.

Mrs. Wyatt, smiling curiously.— “What is it, Constance? I don’t at all understand what made you laugh.”

Constance.— “Why, don’t you know? Several times after I had been surprised that he didn’t like this thing, and hadn’t that habit and the other, he noticed it, and pretended that it was an attempt at mind-reading, and then all at once he turned and said I must try once more, and he asked, ‘Do I like smoking?’ and I said instantly, ‘Oh, yes!’ Why, it was like having a whole tobacconist’s shop in the same room with you from the moment he came in; and of course he understood what I meant, and blushed, and then felt for his handkerchief, and pulled it out, and discharged a perfect volley of pipes and tobacco, that seemed to be tangled up in it, all over the floor, and then I began to laugh — so silly, so disgusting; so perfectly flat! and I thought I should die, it was so ridiculous! and — Oh, dear, I’m beginning again!” She hides her face in her handkerchief and leans her head on the back of the sofa: “Say something, do something to stop me, mother!” She stretches an imploring left hand toward the elder lady, who still remains apparently but half convinced of any reason for mirth, when General Wyatt, hastily entering, pauses in abrupt irresolution at the spectacle of Constance’s passion.

IV.

General Wyatt, Constance, and Mrs. Wyatt.

Constance.— “Oh, ha, ha, ha! Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha!”

General Wyatt.— “Margaret! Constance!” At the sound of his voice, Constance starts up with a little cry, and stiffens into an attitude of ungracious silence, without looking at her father, who turns with an expression of pain toward her mother.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Yes, James. We were laughing at something Constance had been telling me about Mr. Bartlett. Tell your father, Constance.”

Constance, coldly, while she draws through her hand the handkerchief which she has been pressing to her eyes.— “I don’t think it would amuse papa.” She passes her hand across her lap, and does not lift her heavy eye-lashes.

Mrs. Wyatt, caressingly.— “Oh, yes, it would; I’m sure it would.”

Constance.— “You can tell it then, mamma.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “No; you, my dear. You tell it so funnily; and” — in a lower tone— “it’s so long since your father heard you laugh.”

Constance.— “There was nothing funny in it. It was disgusting. I was laughing from nervousness.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Why, Constance” —

General Wyatt.— “Never mind, Margaret. Another time will do.” He chooses to ignore the coldness of his daughter’s bearing toward himself. “I came to see if Constance were not strong enough to go out on the lake this morning. The boats are very good, and the air is so fine that I think she’ll be the better for it. Mr. Bartlett is going out to the island to sketch, and” —

Constance.— “I don’t care to go.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Do go, my daughter! I know it will do you good.”

Constance.— “I am not strong enough.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “But you said you were better, just now; and you should yield to to your father’s judgment.”

Constance.— “I will do whatever papa bids me.”

General Wyatt.— “I don’t bid you. Margaret, I think I will go out with Mr. Bartlett. We will be back at dinner.” He turns and leaves the room without looking again at Constance.

V.

Constance and Mrs. Wyatt; then Bartlett.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, Constance! How can you treat your father so coldly? You will suffer some day for the pain you give him!”

Constance.— “Suffer? No, I’m past that. I’ve exhausted my power of suffering.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “You haven’t exhausted your power of making others suffer.”

Constance, crouching listlessly down upon the sofa.— “I told you that I lived only to give pain. But it’s my fate, not my will. Nothing but that can excuse me.”

Mrs. Wyatt, wringing her hands.— “Oh, oh! Well, then, give me pain if you must torment somebody. But spare your father, — spare the heart that loves you so tenderly, you unhappy girl.”

Constance, with hardness.— “Whenever I see papa, my first thought is, If he had not been so harsh and severe, it might never have happened! What can I care for his loving me when he hated him? Oh, I will do my duty, mother; I will obey; I have obeyed, and I know how. Papa can’t demand anything of me now that isn’t easy. I have forgiven everything, and if you give me time I can forget. I have forgotten. I have been laughing at something so foolish, it ought to make me cry for shame.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Constance, you try me beyond all endurance! You talk of forgiving, you talk of forgetting, you talk of that wretch! Forgive him, forget him, if you can. If he had been half a man, if he had ever cared a tithe as much for you as for himself, all the hate of all the fathers in the world could not have driven him from you. You talk of obeying” —

Mary, the serving woman, flying into the room.— “Oh, please, Mrs. Wyatt! There are four men carrying somebody up the hill. And General Wyatt just went down, and I can’t see him anywhere, and” —

Mrs. Wyatt.— “You’re crazy, Mary! He hasn’t been gone a moment; there isn’t time; it can’t be he!” Mrs. Wyatt rushes to the gallery that overlooks the road to verify her hope or fear, and then out of one of the doors into the corridor, while Constance springs frantically to her feet and runs toward the other door.

Constance.— “Oh, yes, yes! It’s papa! It’s my dear, good, kind papa! He’s dead; he’s drowned; I drove him away; I murdered him! Ah-h-h-h!” She shrinks back with a shriek at sight of Bartlett, whose excited face appears at the door.— “Go! It was you, you who made me hate my father! You made me kill him, and now I abhor you! I” —

Bartlett.— “Wait! Hold on! What is it all?”

Constance.— “Oh, forgive me! I didn’t mean — I didn’t know it was you, sir! But where is he? Oh, take me to him! Is he dead?” She seizes his arm, and clings to it trembling.

Bartlett.— “Dead? No, he isn’t dead. He was knocked over by a team coming behind him down the hill, and was slightly bruised. There’s no cause for alarm. He sent me to tell you; they’ve carried him to your rooms.”

Constance.— “Oh, thank Heaven!” She bows her head with a sob, upon his shoulder, and then lifts her tearful eyes to his: “Help me to get to him! I am weak.” She totters and Bartlett mechanically passes a supporting arm about her. “Help me, and don’t — don’t leave me!” She moves with him a few paces toward the door, her head drooping; but all at once she raises her face again, stares at him, stiffly releases herself, and with a long look of reproach walks proudly away to the other door, by which she vanishes without a word.

Bartlett, remaining planted, with a bewildered glance at his empty arm: “Well, I wonder who and what and where I am!”

III. DISSOLVING VIEWS.

I.

General Wyatt and Mrs. Wyatt.

In the parlour stands an easel with a canvas of inordinate dimensions upon it, and near this a small table, with a fresh box of colours in tubes, and a holiday outfit of new brushes, pallet, and other artist’s materials, evidently not the property of Bartlett. Across the room from this apparatus is stretched Constance’s easy-chair, towards which General Wyatt, bearing some marks of his recent accident in a bandaged wrist and a stiff leg, stumps heavily, supported by Mrs. Wyatt. Beside this chair is the centre-table of the parlour, on which are an open box of cigars, and a pile of unopened newspapers.

General Wyatt, dropping into the chair with a groan.— “Well, my dear! I feel uncommonly ashamed of myself, taking Constance’s chair in this manner. Though there’s a great consolation in thinking she doesn’t need it any longer.” Settling himself more comfortably in the chair, and laying his stick across his knees: “Margaret, I begin to be very happy about Constance. I haven’t had so light a heart for many a long day. The last month has made a wonderful change in her. She is almost like her old self again.”

Mrs. Wyatt, sighing.— “Yes, it seems almost too good to be true. I don’t know quite what to make of it. Sometimes, I almost fear for her mind. I’m sure that half the time she forgets that Mr. Bartlett isn’t that wretch, and I can see her awake with a start to the reality every little while, and then wilfully lull her consciousness to sleep again. He’s terribly like. I can hardly keep from crying out at times; and yesterday I did give way: I was so ashamed, and he looked so hurt. I see Constance restrain herself often, and I dare say there are times that we don’t know of when she doesn’t.”

General Wyatt.— “Well, all that may be. But it’s a thing that will right itself in time. We must do our best not to worry him. This painter is a fine fellow, my dear. I took a great fancy to him at the beginning. I liked him from the moment I saw him.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “James! You were going to strike him with your cane.”

General Wyatt.— “That was before I saw him. I was going to strike the other one. But that’s neither here nor there. We must be careful not to hurt his feelings; that’s all. We’ve got our Constance back again, Margaret. Impossible as it seems, we have got her back by his help. Isn’t it wonderful to see that killing weight lifted from her young life? It’s like a miracle.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “It isn’t lifted all the time, James.”

General Wyatt.— “No matter — no matter. It isn’t crushing her all the time either. I’m glad for what relief there is, and I feel that all is going well. Do you hear that step, Margaret? Listen! That’s like the old bounding tread of our little girl. Where is the leaden-footed phantom that used to drag along that hall? Is she coming this way?”

Mrs. Wyatt, listening.— “No, she is going to our rooms. Has Mr. Bartlett been here yet?”

General Wyatt.— “Not yet. He was to come when he got back from his sketching. What a good fellow, to take so much trouble for Constance’s amusement! It was uncommonly kind of Mr. Bartlett, Margaret, offering to give her these lessons.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Yes, it worries me.”

General Wyatt.— “Why in the world should it worry you, Margaret?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “You can’t offer him any compensation for his instructions.”

General Wyatt.— “Of course not. That would be offensive. Well?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Well, James, can’t you see how it complicates everything? He is conferring another obligation. He might almost think we tried to throw them together.”

General Wyatt, fiercely.— “He had better not! Why, Margaret, he’s a gentleman! He can’t think that.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “No, I suppose not. I suppose it’s our trouble that has made me suspicious of every one.” She goes sadly about the room, rearranging, with a house-keeper’s instinct, everything in it.

General Wyatt.— “You needn’t trouble yourself with the room, Margaret; Mary told me that she and the landlady had put it in order.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “That’s just why I need.” After a moment: “Are you going to be here, James?”

General Wyatt.— “Yes, I thought I should stay. It’s a cheerful place to read and smoke. It won’t disturb them, will it?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, no! It’s quite necessary some one should stay. I’m very glad you can, for I’ve got a few little things to do.”

General Wyatt.— “All right. I’ll stay and do the dragon, or whatever it is. But I wish you hadn’t put it in that light, Margaret. I was proposing to enjoy myself.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Enjoy yourself, James? With such a terribly perplexing affair before you!”

General Wyatt.— “I don’t see anything perplexing about it. It’s perfectly simple, to my mind. Mr. Bartlett kindly proposes to give Constance a few lessons in drawing, — or painting; I don’t know which it is. That’s the beginning and the end of it.”

Mrs. Wyatt, with a heavy sigh.— “Yes, that’s the beginning.”

General Wyatt, impatiently.— “Well?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Nothing. Are you quite comfortable, here? Have you got everything you wish?”

General Wyatt, with a glance at the things on the table at his elbow.— “Here are my cigars, and — yes, here are the papers. Yes, I’m all right. But what do you mean by ‘nothing’? What — Ah, here’s Mr. Bartlett!” As Bartlett comes into the room, the General, since he cannot conveniently rise, makes a demonstration of welcome with his hands. Bartlett has his colour-box under his arm, and a canvas in his hand. “You’ve been improving the shining hour, I see. What have you there?”

II.

Bartlett, General Wyatt, and Mrs. Wyatt.

Bartlett, with a smile and nod inclusive of Mrs. Wyatt.— “Nothing worth looking at.” He goes and faces it against the wall. “Have I kept Miss Wyatt waiting?”

Mrs. Wyatt, anxiously.— “It’s too bad you should waste your time upon her, Mr. Bartlett. I don’t know why we let you.”

Bartlett.— “You can’t help yourself, Mrs. Wyatt. The wrong is owing to circumstances beyond your control. If I have any virtue it is a particularly offensive form of stubbornness. Besides,” — more seriously,— “I feel myself honoured to do it — to contribute anything to Miss Wyatt’s — ah — ah — In short, if she can stand it I can.”

General Wyatt.— “It’s immensely kind of you. By the way, you won’t mind my staying here, will you, to read my papers, while you’re at work? Because if you do, I can clear out at once.” Mrs. Wyatt, with mute but lively tokens of dismay, attends the General’s further remarks: “I don’t want to stay here and be a bore and a nuisance, you know.” Mrs. Wyatt vanishes from the scene in final despair.

Bartlett, going up to the easel and dragging it into an entirely new position.— “Not in the least. Some woman been putting this room in order, hasn’t there?”

General Wyatt.— “Three.”

Bartlett.— “I thought so.” He continues to disarrange all the preparations for his work. His operations bring him in the vicinity of General Wyatt, upon whose box of cigars his eye falls. “Oh, I say, General! Smoking?”

General Wyatt.— “Certainly. Why not?”

Bartlett.— “Well, I don’t know. I thought perhaps — I supposed — I imagined somehow from something she said, or that happened — it was offensive to Miss Wyatt.”

General Wyatt.— “Why, bless your heart, man, she minds it no more than I do!”

Bartlett.— “You don’t say so! Why, I haven’t smoked any for the last two weeks, because — because — And I’m almost dead for a pipe!”

General Wyatt.— “Why, poor fellow! Why, here! Take a cigar!”

Bartlett, significantly shaking his head.— “Oh, no, no! I said a pipe.” He rushes to an old studio jacket which the landlady has hung for him on the back of a chair; he dives in one pocket and gets out a pipe, plunges into another and extracts a pouch of tobacco. He softly groans and murmurs with impatience while he makes these explorations. Upon their success: “So lucky Mrs. Ransom brought down that coat. I couldn’t have lived to get up-stairs after it!” Stuffing his pipe in a frenzy, he runs to the General for a match; that veteran has already lighted it, and extends it toward him. Bartlett stoops over the flame, pipe in mouth. As the General drops the extinct match upon the floor the painter puffs a great cloud, in which involved he is putting on his studio jacket when Constance appears at the door. He instinctively snatches his pipe from his lips and puts it in his pocket.

III.

Constance, Bartlett, and General Wyatt.

Constance, fighting her way through the smoke to the General’s chair.— “Why, papa, how you have been smoking!”

General Wyatt, with a queer look.— “Yes, I find it rests me after a bad night. I didn’t sleep well.”

Constance.— “Oh, poor papa! How do you do, Mr. Bartlett?” She gives him her hand for good-morning.

Bartlett.— “Oh, quite well, quite well now, thank you. I — I — had been a little off my — diet.”

Constance.— “Oh!”

Bartlett.— “Yes. But I’ve gone back now, and I’m all right again.” He retires to the easel, and mechanically resumes his pipe, but takes it from his mouth again, and after an impatient glance at it, throws it out of the window. “When you’re ready, Miss Wyatt, we can begin any time. There’s no hurry, though.”

Constance.— “I’m ready now. Is everything in reach, papa?”

General Wyatt.— “Yes, my dear. I’m so perfectly comfortable that one touch more would make me miserable.”

Constance.— “Can’t I do something for you?”

General Wyatt.— “Not a thing. I’m a prodigy of content.”

Constance.— “Not lift up this last fold of the chair, so your foot won’t rest so heavily on the floor?”

General Wyatt.— “Was it resting heavily? I hadn’t noticed. Yes, it was; how you see everything, my dear! Yes” — Constance stoops to put up the chair to its last extension, and Bartlett runs forward to anticipate her.

Bartlett.— “Miss Wyatt, let me do that!”

Constance.— “No, no! No one must touch papa but me. There, is that right, papa?”

General Wyatt.— “Exactly. That makes me pluperfectly comfortable. I haven’t a wish in the world, and all I ask now is to” —

Constance.— “Get at your newspapers? Let me take off the wrappers for you.”

General Wyatt.— “Not on any account.” He gently withdraws from her the newspaper she has taken up. “That is truly a kindness that kills. Open my papers for me? I’d as lief you’d put on my hat for me, my dear.”

Bartlett.— “That is the one thing that can’t be done for any man!”

Constance.— “Why not? A woman can put on another woman’s bonnet for her.”

General Wyatt.— “Ah, that’s a different thing. A man doesn’t wear his hat for looks.”

Constance.— “That’s true, papa, — some of them.” She turns gaily from her father, and looks up at Bartlett, who has smilingly listened. She gives a start, and suppresses a cry; she passes her hand quickly over her eyes, and then staying herself a moment with one hand on the back of a chair resumes with forced calm: “Shall we begin, now — ah — Mr. — Bartlett?” An awkward silence ensues, in which Bartlett remains frowning, and the General impatiently flings open a newspaper. Then Bartlett’s frown relaxes into a compassionate response to her appealing look.

Bartlett.— “Yes, I’m quite ready. But it’s you who are to begin, Miss Wyatt. I am to assume the safe and eligible position of art critic. I wish I had some of those fellows who write about my pictures before an easel; I’d stand their unpleasant company a while for the sake of taking the conceit out of them. Not but what my pictures are bad enough, — as bad as any critic says, for that matter. Well, Miss Wyatt; here is the charcoal, and yonder out-doors is the mountain.”

Constance.— “Excuse me a moment. Papa, will our talking disturb you?” To Bartlett: “I suppose we will have to talk a little?”

Bartlett.— “A little.”

General Wyatt, from behind his paper.— “It won’t disturb me if you don’t talk to me.”

Constance.— “We’ll try not.” To Bartlett: “Well?”

Bartlett, as Constance places herself before the canvas, and receiving the charcoal from his fingers, glances out at Ponkwasset.— “May I ask why you chose such a capacious canvas?”

Constance, in meek surprise.— “Why, the mountain being a large object” —

Bartlett.— “A large canvas was necessary, I see. There’s reason in that. But were you going to do it life size?”

Constance, as before.— “Why, no!”

Bartlett.— “What was your idea?”

Constance.— “I don’t know. I thought — I thought I would have the mountain in the back-ground, with some clouds over it, and a few figures in the foreground, to give it a human interest.”

Bartlett.— “Yes, that’s a good notion. Well, now begin. First get your distance — No; better strike in a horizon line first. That will keep you right. Draw the line straight across the middle of the canvas.” Constance retires a few steps from the canvas, measures its spaces with her eye, and then with a glance at the horizon outside draws. Bartlett, looking over her shoulder: “Straight, straight! The line should be straight. Don’t you see?”

Constance, falteringly.— “I meant that for a straight line.”

Bartlett.— “Oh! well! Yes! I see. However, now you’ve got it in, hadn’t you better use it for a curved line? Say for that wavering outline of the hills beyond Ponkwasset?”

Constance.— “Why, if you think so, Mr. Bartlett.”

Bartlett.— “And I’ll just strike in the horizon line here.” He draws rapidly, steps back a pace, approaches, and touches Constance’s line at different points. Then he gives her the chalk again. “Now, scratch in the outline of Ponkwasset.” Constance begins to draw. “Ah! Wait a moment, please. You’re not quite getting it. Will you let me?” Constance offers him the charcoal, which he declines with a gesture, “No, no! You must do it. I meant” —

Constance.— “What?”

Bartlett.— “That if you would allow me to — to — guide your hand” —

Constance, frankly.— “Why, of course. Do what you like with it” —

Bartlett.— “Oh!”

Constance.— “So that you teach it a little of the skill of yours.” He gently, and after some delicate hesitations, takes her hand, as it grasps the charcoal, and slowly guides it in forming the outline of the mountain. Constance, in admiration of his cleverness: “What a delicious touch you have!”

Bartlett, confusedly.— “Yes?”

Constance, regarding the outline after he has released her hand, while Bartlett, with a gesture of rapturous fondness, looks at the fingers that have guided hers, and tenderly kisses them.— “Oh, yes: I’d give anything if I had your hand!”

Bartlett.— “It’s at your service always, Miss Wyatt.”

Constance, still regarding the picture.— “Ah, but I should need your mind, too!”

Bartlett.— “Well?”

Constance.— “I couldn’t rob you of everything.” She begins to draw again, and then, in pretty, unconscious imitation of Bartlett, throws back her head.

Bartlett, breaking forth in rapture at her movement and attitude.— “Oh, divine!”

Constance, innocently beaming upon him.— “Do you think so? I didn’t suppose I could get it so at once. Is it really good?”

Bartlett, recalled to himself.— “Who? What? Yes, yes; it isn’t bad. Not at all bad. That is” —

Constance, disappointedly.— “I thought you liked it.” Gravely: “Why did you say it was divine?”

Bartlett.— “Because — I — I — thought so!”

Constance, with mystification.— “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Shall I let this outline remain for Ponkwasset, or shall I use it for something else?”

Bartlett.— “Yes, let it remain for Ponkwasset; if it needs changing that can easily be done afterwards. Now block out your middle distance. So!” He takes the charcoal from her and draws. “Now, then, sketch in your figures.”

Constance, timidly.— “How large shall I make them?”

Bartlett.— “Oh, as large as you like. How large did you think?”

Constance.— “I don’t know. About a foot high.”

Bartlett.— “Well, try them.” Constance draws, and Bartlett regards the operation with gestures and contortions of countenance expressive of mingled tenderness for Constance and extreme suffering from her performance. She turns about, and surprises him with his hands clutched in his shaggy hair.

Constance, with dignity.— “What is the matter, Mr. Bartlett?”

Bartlett, forcing an imbecile smile.— “Nothing, I was just thinking — I should — like to venture to make a remark.”

Constance.— “You know I wish you to speak to me about everything.”

Bartlett.— “Did you mean that lady to be in the middle distance?”

Constance.— “Yes.”

Bartlett.— “Well, there is a slight, a very slight, error in the perspective. She is as tall as Ponkwasset, you see, and could touch the top of it with the point of her parasol.”

Constance, dejectedly.— “I see. I can never do it.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, yes, you can, Miss Wyatt; you mustn’t lose patience with me.”

Constance.— “It’s you who won’t be able to keep your patience with my stupidity.”

Bartlett.— “That’s not the name for it. I shall think more of your failures than of anybody’s successes — that is — I mean — if you don’t let this thing be a pain instead of a pleasure to you. Remember, I hoped it would amuse you.”

Constance.— “Oh, yes. You have been only too kind, in that and everything.”

Bartlett.— “Well, now, let us begin again. This lady is very well as a lady; you understand the figure better than perspective; but she’s out of place here, a little; and a flower out of place, you know, is a weed. Suppose we” — he takes up the charcoal, and makes a few dashes at the canvas— “treat her as a clump of tall birch-trees, — that clump over there in the edge of the meadow; that will bring her into the foreground, and entitle her to be three inches high; we can’t really allow her more, even as a clump of birches. Eh?”

Constance.— “Oh, yes; that’s better, decidedly.” Smiling: “Being under instruction, this way, makes me think of my school-days.”

Bartlett, impressively.— “I hope they were happy days.”

Constance.— “Oh, the happiest of my life.”

Bartlett.— “I am so glad.” Constance stares at him in surprise, but finally says nothing. “I mean since this is like them.”

Constance, pensively.— “Yes, it’s pleasant to go back to that time.” With more animation: “Papa, I wonder if you remember Madame Le May, who used to teach me French when you came home after the war?”

General Wyatt, behind his newspaper.— “Eh? What? What’s that? Some difficulty in the drawing? You must both have patience, — patience” —

Constance.— “Why, papa! Oh, well, I won’t worry him. I suppose he’s found something about cutting down the army appropriations; that always absorbs him. What shall I try next, Mr. Bartlett?”

Bartlett.— “You can rub in your middle distance.”

Constance, laughing.— “I’ll try. But I think I should be at my best beyond the vanishing point.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, I don’t believe that! Perhaps it annoys you to have me looking over your shoulder while you work?”

Constance.— “No. Oh, no.”

Bartlett.— “I see that it does.”

Constance.— “It makes me a little nervous. I’m afraid of you, you know.”

Bartlett.— “I didn’t know I was so terrible. How far off shall I go, to be agreeable?”

Constance, laughing.— “Across the room.”

Bartlett.— “Shall you like me better at that distance?”

Constance.— “I can’t let you make a joke of our liking for you.”

Bartlett.— “You defend me, even in my presence. What kindness I must miss when I’m absent! Well, I will go and see what interests General Wyatt.”

General Wyatt.— “Madame Le May? Yes, certainly. Remember her perfectly. False hair, false teeth, false” —

Constance.— “Why, what are you talking of, papa?”

General Wyatt.— “Mayo. Capital cavalry officer — cutting down the pay of such a man” —

Constance.— “What are you reading?” The General makes no answer.

Bartlett.— “Don’t disturb him. I’ll walk off here at this end of the room.” He paces softly up and down, while Constance returns to her drawing, to which she diligently applies herself. A thought seems to strike Bartlett as his wandering eye falls upon General Wyatt, who still sits with his head buried in his newspaper. He approaches, and remarks in a low tone: “I believe I will take a cigar now, Gen—” The newspaper falls slightly, and Bartlett makes a discovery. The General has dropped off into a doze. With a gesture of amusement, Bartlett restores the paper to its place, and resumes his walk in a quiet rapture, interrupting it now and then to dwell in silent adoration on the young lady’s absorption in the fine arts.

Constance.— “Mr. Bartlett” —

Bartlett, halting.— “Recalled from exile already? Well?”

Constance.— “I’m afraid I can’t get by this point alone.”

Bartlett.— “Yes? Let’s see it.” He eagerly crosses the room, takes his stand behind her, and throws up his hands in despair. Constance indicates her difficulties.

Constance.— “The question is how to get in some idea of those slopes of the mountain. These things seem to crowd everything out.”

Bartlett, hopelessly regarding the work.— “I see. You have been composing a little, — idealising. Well, I don’t object to that. Though perhaps it had better come later. This long stretch of rocky cliff” —

Constance.— “Rocky cliff?”

Bartlett.— “Isn’t in nature, but it might have a good effect if properly utilised” —

Constance.— “But it isn’t rocky cliff, Mr. Bartlett. It’s” —

Bartlett, looking a second time, and more closely.— “Why, of course! It’s that stretch of broken woodland at the foot of the mountain. Very good; very good indeed; very boldly treated. Still, I should say” —

Constance, in desperation.— “Oh, Mr. Bartlett, it isn’t rocks, and it isn’t woods; it’s — hay-stacks!”

Bartlett.— “Hay-stacks?”

Constance, desolately.— “Yes, hay-stacks.”

Bartlett.— “But hay-stacks at the foot of the mountain, Miss Wyatt” —

Constance, inconsolably.— “They’re not at the foot of the mountain. They’re those hay-stacks, just out there in the meadow. I thought it would be nice to have them in near that clump of birches you drew.”

Bartlett.— “Oh-h-h-h!” He scratches his head in visible stupefaction. Then with reanimation: “I see. It was my error. I was looking for middle distance, and you had been working on the foreground. Very good; very — Oh, gracious powers — No, no! Don’t be discouraged, Miss Wyatt; remember it’s the first time you’ve attempted anything of the sort, and you’ve really done very well. Here!” He seizes the pencil and draws. “We will just sink these hay-stacks, — which are very good in their way, but not perhaps sufficiently subordinated, — just sink them into the lake yonder. They will serve very well for the reflections of those hills beyond, and now you can work away at some of the details of the foreground; they will interest you more.” He retires a pace. “It’s really not a bad start as it is.”

Constance, ruefully.— “But it’s all yours, Mr. Bartlett.”

Bartlett.— “Eh?”

Constance.— “You drew every line in it.”

Bartlett.— “No, you drew the line of the distant hills.”

Constance.— “But I didn’t mean it for that!”

Bartlett.— “Well, well; but the lady’s figure, that was good” —

Constance.— “You turned her into a clump of birches.”

Bartlett.— “True. A mere exigency of the perspective. The hay-stacks” —

Constance.— “You’ve just sunk them into the lake!”

Bartlett.— “Well, well. Perhaps I may have helped in the execution of the picture, a little. But my dear Miss Wyatt, the drawing is nothing; it’s the design is what makes the picture, and that’s entirely yours; the ideas were all yours. Come! Try your hand now at the shore line of the lake, just here.”

Constance.— “I’m afraid I’m a little tired. My hands are cold.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, I’m sorry!” He takes one of them and places it between either of his. “That shows you’ve been working too hard. I can’t allow that. All the art in the world isn’t worth — I mustn’t forget that you have not been well; and I want these little lessons to be a pastime and not a burden to you. The picture’s sufficiently advanced now” — he mechanically puts her hand under his left arm, and keeps his own right hand upon it, while he takes his station with her in front of the easel— “to warrant us in trying a little colour to-morrow. You’ll be very much more interested in colour. It is refreshing to get at the brushes after you’ve tired yourself out with the black and white. You’ve got a very pretty outfit, there, Miss Wyatt.” He indicates her colours on the little table.

Constance.— “I didn’t mean to refuse the offer of your paints, but I thought it would be better to have the colours perfectly fresh, you know.”

Bartlett.— “Quite right. Quite right. Now you see — Rest on me, Miss Wyatt, or I shall be afraid of fatiguing you by standing; and I’d like to point out a few things for you to begin on here to-morrow.”

Constance.— “Oh, I’m not very tired. But I will keep your arm if you will let me.”

Bartlett, making her sustain her weight more distinctly on his arm.— “By all means. Now, here, at this point, I think I’d better sketch you in that old oak down there at the foot of our hill, with its grape-vine, and you can work away at these without reference to Ponkwasset. The line of that clinging vine is one of the most graceful things that Nature — and Nature does know a thing or two, Miss Wyatt; she’s particularly good at clinging vines — ever drew.” He looks at her over his shoulder with an involuntary sigh. Then, “Suppose” — he takes up the charcoal— “I do it now. No, don’t disturb yourself.” They lean forward, and as he sketches, their faces, drawn together, almost touch. Bartlett drops the pencil, and starts away, releasing his arm: “Oh, no, no!”

Constance, simply.— “Can’t you do it?”

Bartlett, in deep emotion.— “No, no; I can’t do it — I mustn’t — it would be outrageous — I — I” — Regaining his self-possession at sight of Constance’s astonished face: “You said yourself just now that I had drawn everything in the picture. I can’t do any more. You must do the clinging vine!”

Constance, innocently.— “Very well, I’ll try. If you’ll do the oak for me. I’ll let you do that much more.” They regard each other, she with her innocent smile, he with a wild rapture of hope, doubt, and fear. Then Bartlett draws a long, despairing sigh, and turns away.

Bartlett.— “To-morrow, to-morrow!” He walks away, and returns to her. “Have you read — have you ever read The Talking Oak, Miss Wyatt?”

Constance.— “Tennyson’s? A thousand times. Isn’t it charming?”

Bartlett.— “It’s absurd, I think. Do you remember where he makes the oak say of the young lady, —

‘And in a fit of frolic, mirth She strove to span my waist:.... I wish’d myself the fair young beech That here beside me stands, That round me, clasping each in each, She might have lock’d her hands’?”

Constance.— “Why, that’s lovely, — that attribution of human feeling to the tree. Don’t you think so?”

Bartlett, absently.— “Yes, yes; beautiful. But it’s terrible, too; terrible. Supposing the oak really had human feeling; or supposing that a man had been meant in the figure of an oak” — He has drawn near Constance again; but now he retreats. “Ah, I can’t work out the idea.”

Constance.— “What idea? I can’t imagine what you mean.”

Bartlett.— “Ah! I can. My trouble is, I can’t say what I mean! This was sometime a paradox.”

Constance.— “Oh! I should think, a riddle.”

Bartlett.— “Some day I hope you’ll let me read it to you.”

Constance.— “Why not now?”

Bartlett, impetuously.— “If you only meant what you said, it would be — so much better than if I said what I meant!”

Constance.— “You are dealing in mysteries to-day.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, the greatest of them! But don’t mind. Wait! I’ll try to tell you what I mean. I won’t make you stand, while I talk. Here!” He wheels up in front of the picture one of the haircloth sofas; Constance mechanically sinks down upon it, and he takes his place at her side; she bends upon him a look of smiling amusement. “I can put my meaning best, I think, in the form of allegory. Do you like allegory, Miss Wyatt?”

Constance.— “Yes. That is, not very much.”

Bartlett.— “Oh! You don’t like allegory! Upon second thoughts, I don’t myself. We will not try allegory. We will try a supposed case. I think that’s always the best way, don’t you?”

Constance.— “No, I don’t like any sort of indirection. I believe the straightforward way is the best.”

Bartlett.— “Yes, so do I; but it’s impossible. We must try a supposed case.”

Constance, laughing.— “Well!”

Bartlett.— “Ah! I can’t say anything if you laugh. It’s a serious matter.”

Constance, with another burst of laughter.— “I should never have thought so.” With a sudden return of her old morbid mood: “I beg your pardon for laughing. What right have I to laugh? Go on, Mr. Bartlett, and I will listen as I should have done. I am ashamed.”

Bartlett.— “No, no! That won’t do! You mustn’t take me so seriously as that! Oh, Miss Wyatt, if I could only be so much your friend, your fool, — I don’t care what, — as to banish that look, that tone from you for ever!”

Constance.— “Why do you care?”

Bartlett.— “Why do I care?”

Constance.— “Yes. Why should you mind whether so weak and silly a thing as I is glad or sad? I can’t understand. Why have you had so much patience with me? Why do you take all this trouble on my account, and waste your time on me? Why” —

Bartlett, starting up.— “Why do I do it?” He walks away to the other side of the room with signs of great inward struggle; then he swiftly returns to her side where she has risen and stands near the sofa, and seizes her hand. “Well, I will tell you why. No, no! I can’t! It would be” —

General Wyatt, behind his newspaper.— “Outrageous! Gross violation of good faith! Infernal shame!” The General concludes these observations with a loud, prolonged, and very stertorous respiration.

Constance, running to him.— “Why, papa, what do you mean? Oh poor papa! He’s asleep, and in such a wretched position!” From which she hastens to move him, while Bartlett, recovering from the amaze in which the appositeness of the General’s remarks had plunged him, breaks into a harsh “Ha! ha!” Constance turns and advances upon him in threatening majesty: “Did you laugh, Mr. Bartlett?”

Bartlett, after a moment’s dismay.— “Well, I don’t know whether you call it laughing. I smiled.”

Constance, with increasing awfulness: “Why did you laugh, Mr. Bartlett?”

Bartlett.— “I — I — I can’t say.”

Constance.— “You were laughing at General Wyatt!”

Bartlett.— “Was there nothing to laugh at?”

Constance.— “For children! For vulgar, silly boys! For a gentleman, nothing!”

Bartlett, with rising wrath.— “Then I have no excuse, unless I say that I am no gentleman.”

Constance.— “I shall not dispute you in anything; and I will leave you to the enjoyment of your mirth.”

Bartlett.— “Very well. As you like. I am sorry to have offended you. I shall take care never to offend you again.” Constance sweeps towards one door, at the threshold of which she pauses to look round and see Bartlett dashing her box of colours together as if it were his own, and thrusting it under his arm, seizing with a furious hand the canvas on the easel and his coat from the chair-back, and then rushing from the room. She drops her face into her hands and vanishes, and the next moment Mrs. Wyatt enters.

IV.

Mrs. Wyatt and General Wyatt.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “What is the matter with Constance, James? Have you been” — She goes up to the General and discovers his vigilance: “Asleep!” Waking him: “James, James! Is this the way you do the dragon, as you call it?”

General Wyatt, starting awake: “Dragon? Dragon? What dragon? I dreamt I was a perfect fiery dragon, and went about breathing flame and smoke. How long have I slept, Margaret? Where is Mr. Bartlett? Where is Constance?”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, you may well ask that, James. I just met Constance at the door, in tears. Oh, I hope nothing dreadful has happened.”

General Wyatt.— “Nonsense, Margaret. Here, help me up, my dear. My nap hasn’t done me any good. I’m stiff all over.”

Mrs. Wyatt, anxiously.— “I’m afraid you have taken cold, James.”

General Wyatt, with impatience.— “Cold? No! Not in the least. I’m perfectly well. But that was a very unpleasant dream. Margaret, I’m afraid that I breathed rather — explosively, at one time.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, James, this is worse and worse. It must have mortified Constance, dreadfully.”

General Wyatt, taking his wife’s arm, and limping from the scene:— “Well, well! Never mind! I’ll make it right with Bartlett. He’s a man of sense, and will help me laugh it off with her. It will be all right, Margaret; don’t worry over a trifle like that.”

Mrs. Wyatt, as they disappear:— “Trifle? Her whole happiness may depend upon it.” At the instant of their withdrawal, Constance and Bartlett, hastily entering by opposite doors, encounter each other in the middle of the room.

V.

Bartlett and Constance

Both, at once.— “I came to” —

Bartlett.— “Restore you your box of colours and your canvas, which I carried off by mistake.”

Constance.— “To say that I am very, very sorry for my rudeness to you, and to entreat you to forget my abominable words, if you can.”

Bartlett, with a generous rush of emotion, dropping the canvas on the floor at one side and the box of colours on the other, and snatching her extended hand to his lips.— “Don’t say that. I deserved a thousand times more. You were right.”

Constance.— “No, no! I can’t let you blame yourself to save me from self-reproach. I know papa was ridiculous. But what made me angry was this thought that you were laughing at him. I couldn’t bear that. I shouldn’t have minded your laughing at me; but at papa!”

Bartlett, sadly.— “I happened to be laughing much more at myself than your father. Where is the General?”

Constance.— “He has gone with mamma. They wondered where you were, and I said you were coming back again.”

Bartlett.— “How did you know?”

Constance.— “I thought you would come, — that you would upbraid yourself for my bad behaviour, and return to excuse it to me. You see what perfect faith I — we — have in you.”

Bartlett, earnestly.— “Have you indeed perfect faith in me?”

Constance.— “Perfect!”

Bartlett, vehemently.— “But why, why do you trust me? You see that I am hasty and rude.”

Constance.— “Oh no, not rude.”

Bartlett.— “But I assure you that I am so; and you have seen that I laughed — that I am wanting in delicacy, and” —

Constance, devoutly.— “How can you say that to us, when every day, every hour, every instant of the last month has given us proof of unimaginable kindness in you!” He eagerly approaches and takes her hands, which she frankly yields him. “Your patience, your noble forbearance, which we so sorely tried, has made us all forget that you are a stranger, and — and — to me it’s as if we had always known you” — her head droops— “as if you were a — an old friend, a — brother” —

Bartlett, dropping her hands.— “Oh!” He turns away, and pacing the length of the room reapproaches her hastily.

Constance, with a little cry.— “Mr. Bartlett! Do look! Did you intend to trample my canvas and colours under foot?” She makes as if to stoop for them.

Bartlett, his manner undergoing a total change as if he had been suddenly recalled to himself at a critical moment.— “Don’t!” He hastily picks them up, and puts the canvas on the easel and the colours on the table. With a glance at the canvas: “Ponkwasset doesn’t seem to have been seriously injured by his violent usage. Shall you like to try your hand at him again to-morrow?”

Constance.— “Oh, yes. But on one condition.”

Bartlett.— “Yes.”

Constance.— “That you have a little faith in me, too.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, Miss Wyatt” —

Constance.— “I used to have a bad temper, and now that I’m getting better it seems to be getting worse. Try to believe in me enough to know that when I do or say some violent thing, I’m ashamed of it; and that when I wounded you, I really meant to hurt myself; that I — Oh, you know, Mr. Bartlett, how much you’ve borne from us, and how much we owe you; and if you did anything now to make us think less of your unselfish goodness, we never could forgive you!” Bartlett remains with bowed head. “I must go, now.” Gaily: “Perhaps to-morrow, when we resume our lessons, you’ll tell me what you meant to-day, when you couldn’t explain yourself.”

Bartlett, vehemently.— “No, I can never tell you.”

Constance.— “I can’t believe that! At any rate, we shall talk the matter over, and I may say something to help you. You know how one thing leads to another.”

Bartlett.— “But nothing you can ever say now will lead to what I wanted to say.”

Constance, laughing.— “Don’t be sure. If you rouse my curiosity, I shall be a powerful aid to expression. With a woman’s wit to help you out with your meaning, how can you help making it clear?”

Bartlett.— “Because — because it wants something more than wit in you to make it clear.”

Constance.— “Well, you shall have sympathy, if sympathy is what you need. Is it something like sympathy?”

Bartlett.— “Something like sympathy; but — not — not exactly sympathy.”

Constance, with another laugh.— “How difficult you make it! I see! You want compassion.”

Bartlett, quickly.— “Oh, no! I would sooner have contempt!”

Constance.— “But that’s the one thing you can’t have. Try to think of something else you want, and let me know to-morrow.” She nods brightly to him, and he follows her going with a gaze of hopeless longing. As she vanishes through the doorway, he lifts his hand to his lips, and reverently kisses it to her.

Bartlett, alone.— “Try to think what I want and let you know! Ah, my darling, my darling! Your faith in me kills my hope. If you only dared a little less with me, how much more I might dare with you; and if you were not so sisterly sweet, how much sweeter you might be! Brother? Forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum! You drive me farther than your worst enemy from you with that fatal word. Brother? I hate brother! If it had been cousin — And kind? Oh, I would we were

‘A little less than kin, and more than kind!’”

IV. NOT AT ALL LIKE.

I.

Bartlett and Cummings.

Bartlett.— “Six weeks since you were here? I shouldn’t have thought that.” Bartlett’s easel stands before the window, in the hotel parlour; he has laid a tint upon the canvas, and has retired a few paces for the effect, his palette and mahl-stick in hand, and his head carried at a critical angle. Cummings, who has been doing the duty of art-culture by the picture, regards it with renewed interest. Bartlett resumes his work: “Pretty good, Cummings?”

Cummings.— “Capital! The blue of that distance” —

Bartlett, with a burlesque sigh.— “Ah, I looked into my heart and painted for that! Well, you find me still here, Cummings, and apparently more at home than ever. The landlord has devoted this parlour to the cause of art, — makes the transients use the lower parlour, now, — and we have this all to ourselves: Miss Wyatt sketches, you know. Her mother brings her sewing, and the General his bruises; he hasn’t quite scrambled up, yet, from that little knock-down of his; a man doesn’t, at his time of life, I believe; and we make this our family-room; and a very queer family we are! Fine old fellow, the General; he’s behaved himself since his accident like a disabled angel, and hasn’t sworn, — well, anything worth speaking of. Yes, here I am. I suppose it’s all right, but for all I know it may be all wrong.” Bartlett sighs in unguarded sincerity. “I don’t know what I’m here for. Nature began shutting up shop a fortnight ago at a pretty lively rate, and edging loafers to the door, with every sign of impatience; and yet here I am, hanging round still. I suppose this glimpse of Indian Summer is some excuse just now; it’s a perfect blessing to the landlord, and he’s making hay — rowen crop — while the sun shines; I’ve been with him so long now, I take quite an interest in his prosperity, if eight dollars a week of it do come out of me! What is talked of in ‘art-circles’ down in Boston, brother Cummings?”

Cummings.— “Your picture.”

Bartlett, inattentively, while he comes up to his canvas, and bestows an infinitesimal portion of paint upon a destitute spot in the canvas.— “Don’t be sarcastic, Cummings.”

Cummings.— “I’m not, I assure you.”

Bartlett, turning toward him incredulously.— “Do you mean to say that The First Grey Hair is liked?”

Cummings.— “I do. There hasn’t been any picture so much talked of this season.”

Bartlett.— “Then it’s the shameless slop of the name. I should think you’d blush for your part in that swindle. But clergymen have no conscience, where they’ve a chance to do a fellow a kindness, I’ve observed.” He goes up to Cummings with his brush in his mouth, his palette on one hand, and his mahl-stick in the other, and contrives to lay hold of his shoulders with a few disengaged fingers. As Cummings shrinks a little from his embrace: “Oh, don’t be afraid; I shan’t get any paint on you. You need a whole coat of whitewash, though, you unscrupulous saint!” He returns to his easel. “So The Old Girl — that’s what I shall call the picture — is a success, is she? The admiring public ought to see the original elm-tree now; she hasn’t got a hair, grey or green, on her head; she’s perfectly bald. I say, Cummings, how would it do for me to paint a pendant, The Last Grey Hair? I might look up a leaf or two on the elm, somewhere: stick it on to the point of twig; they wouldn’t know any better.”

Cummings.— “The leafless elm would make a good picture, whatever you called it.” Bartlett throws back his shaggy head and laughs up at the ceiling. “The fact is, Bartlett, I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

Bartlett, looking at him askance.— “Somebody wanting to chromo The Old Girl? No, no; it isn’t quite so bad as that!”

Cummings, in a burst.— “They did want to chromo it. But it’s sold. They’ve got you two hundred dollars for it.” Bartlett lays down his brush, palette, and mahl-stick, dusts his fingers, puts them in his pockets, and comes and stands before Cummings, on whom, seated, he bends a curious look.

Bartlett.— “And do you mean to tell me, you hardened atheist, that you don’t believe in the doctrine of future punishments? What are they going to do with you in the next world? And that picture-dealer? And me? Two hun — It’s an outrage! It’s — the picture wasn’t worth fifty, by a stretch of the most charitable imagination! Two hundred, d — Why, Cummings, I’ll paint no end of Old Girls, First and Last Grey Hairs — I’ll flood the market! Two — Good Lord!” Bartlett goes back to his easel, and silently resumes his work. After a while: “Who’s been offered up?”

Cummings.— “What?”

Bartlett.— “Who’s the victim? My patron? The noble and discriminating and munificent purchaser of The Old Girl?”

Cummings.— “Oh! Mrs. Bellingham. She’s going to send it out to her daughter in Omaha.”

Bartlett.— “Ah! Mrs. Blake wishes to found an art museum with that curiosity out there? Sorry for the Omaha-has.” Cummings makes a gesture of impatience. “Well, well; I won’t then, old fellow! I’m truly obliged to you. I accept my good fortune with compunction, but with all the gratitude imaginable. I say, Cummings!”

Cummings.— “Well?”

Bartlett.— “What do you think of my taking to high art, — mountains twelve hundred feet above the sea, like this portrait of Ponkwasset?”

Cummings.— “I’ve always told you that you had only to give yourself scope, — attempt something worthy of your powers” —

Bartlett.— “Ah, I thought so. Then you believe that a good big canvas and a good big subject would be the making of me? Well, I’ve come round to that idea myself. I used to think that if there was any greatness in me, I could get it into a small picture, like Meissonier or Corot. But I can’t. I must have room, like the Yellowstone and Yo-Semite fellows. Don’t you think Miss Wyatt is looking wonderfully improved?”

Cummings.— “Wonderfully! And how beautiful she is! She looked lovely that first day, in spite of her ghostliness; but now” —

Bartlett.— “Yes; a phantom of delight is good enough in its way, but a well woman is the prettiest, after all. Miss Wyatt sketches, I think I told you.”

Cummings.— “Yes, you mentioned it.”

Bartlett.— “Of course. Otherwise, I couldn’t possibly have thought of her while I was at work on a great picture like this. She sketches” — Bartlett puts his nose almost on the canvas in the process of bestowing a delicate touch— “she sketches about as badly as any woman I ever saw, and that’s saying a good deal. But she looks uncommonly well while she’s at it. The fact is, Cummings,” — Bartlett retires some feet from the canvas and squints at it,— “this very picture which you approve of so highly is — Miss Wyatt’s. I couldn’t attempt anything of the size of Ponkwasset! But she allows me to paint at it a little when she’s away.” Bartlett steals a look of joy at his friend’s vexation, and then continues seriously: “I’ve been having a curious time, Cummings.” The other remains silent. “Don’t you want to ask me about it?”

Cummings.— “I don’t know that I do.”

Bartlett.— “Why, my dear old fellow, you’re hurt! It was a silly joke, and I honestly ask your pardon.” He lays down his brush and palette and leaves the easel. “Cummings, I don’t know what to do. I’m in a perfect deuce of a state. I’m hit — awfully hard; and I don’t know what to do about it. I wish I had gone at once — the first day. But I had to stay, — I had to stay.” He turns and walks away from Cummings, whose eyes follow him in pardon and sympathy.

Cummings.— “Do you really mean it, Bartlett? I didn’t dream of such a thing. I thought you were still brooding over that affair with Miss Harlan.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, child’s-play! A prehistoric illusion! A solar myth! The thing never was.” He rejects the obsolete superstition with a wave of his left hand. “I’m in love with this girl, and I feel like a sneak and a brute about it. At the very best it would be preposterous. Who am I, a poor devil of a painter, the particular pet of Poverty, to think of a young lady whose family and position could command her the best? But putting that aside, — putting that insuperable obstacle lightly aside, as a mere trifle, — the thing remains an atrocity. It’s enormously indelicate to think of loving a woman who would never have looked twice at me if I hadn’t resembled an infernal scoundrel who tried to break her heart; and I’ve nothing else to commend me. I’ve the perfect certainty that she doesn’t and can’t care anything for me in myself; and it grinds me into the dust to realise on what terms she tolerates me. I could carry it off as a joke at first; but when it became serious, I had to look it in the face; and that’s what it amounts to, and if you know of any more hopeless and humiliating tangle, I don’t.” Bartlett, who has approached his friend during this speech, walks away again; and there is an interval of silence.

Cummings, at last, musingly.— “You in love with Miss Wyatt; I can’t imagine it!”

Bartlett, fiercely.— “You can’t imagine it? What’s the reason you can’t imagine it? Don’t be offensive, Cummings!” He stops in his walk and lowers upon his friend. “Why shouldn’t I be in love with Miss Wyatt?”

Cummings.— “Oh, nothing. Only you were saying” —

Bartlett.— “I was saying! Don’t tell me what I was saying. Say something yourself.”

Cummings.— “Really, Bartlett, you can’t expect me to stand this sort of thing. You’re preposterous.”

Bartlett.— “I know it! But don’t blame me. I beg your pardon. Is it because of the circumstances that you can’t imagine my being in love with her?”

Cummings.— “Oh, no; I wasn’t thinking of the circumstances; but it seemed so out of character for you” —

Bartlett, impatiently.— “Oh, love’s always out of character, just as it’s always out of reason. I admit freely that I’m an ass. And then?”

Cummings.— “Well, then, I don’t believe you have any more reason to be in despair than you have to be in love. If she tolerates you, as you say, it can’t be because you look like the man who jilted her.”

Bartlett.— “Ah! But if she still loves him?”

Cummings.— “You don’t know that. That strikes me as a craze of jealousy. What makes you think she tolerates you for that reason or no-reason?”

Bartlett.— “What makes me think it? From the very first she interpreted me by what she knew of him. She expected me to be this and not to be that; to have one habit and not another; and I could see that every time the fact was different, it was a miserable disappointment to her, a sort of shock. Every little difference between me and that other rascal gave her a start; and whenever I looked up I found her wistful eyes on me as if they were trying to puzzle me out; they used to follow me round the room like the eyes of a family portrait. You wouldn’t have liked it yourself, Cummings. For the first three weeks I simply existed on false pretences, — involuntary false pretences, at that. I wanted to explode; I wanted to roar out. If you think I’m at all like that abandoned scoundrel of yours in anything but looks, I’m not! But I was bound by everything that was decent, to hold my tongue, and let my soul be rasped out of me in silence and apparent unconsciousness. That was your fault. If you hadn’t told me all about the thing, I could have done something outrageous and stopped it. But I was tied hand and foot by what I knew. I had to let it go on.”

Cummings.— “I’m very sorry, Bartlett, but” —

Bartlett.— “Oh, I dare say you wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t had a wild ass of the desert to deal with. Well, the old people got used to some little individuality in me, by-and-by, and beyond a suppressed whoop or two from the mother when I came suddenly into the room, they didn’t do anything to annoy me directly. But they were anxious every minute for the effect on her; and it worried me as much to have them watching her as to have her watching me. Of course I knew that she talked this confounded resemblance over with her mother every time I left them, and avoided talking it over with the father.”

Cummings.— “But you say the trouble’s over now.”

Bartlett.— “Oh — over! No, it isn’t over. When she’s with me a while she comes to see that I am not a mere doppelgänger. She respites me to that extent. But I have still some small rags of self-esteem dangling about me; and now suppose I should presume to set up for somebody on my own account; the first hint of my caring for her as I do, if she could conceive of anything so atrocious, would tear open all the old sorrows. Ah! I can’t think of it. Besides, I tell you, it isn’t all over. It’s only not so bad as it was. She’s subject to relapses, when it’s much worse than ever. Why” — Bartlett stands facing his friend, with a half-whimsical, half-desperate smile, as if about to illustrate his point, when Constance and her mother enter the parlour.

Aftermath.

II.

Constance, Mrs. Wyatt, Bartlett, and Cummings.

Constance, with a quick violent arrest.— “Ah! Oh!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Constance, Constance, darling! What’s the matter?”

Constance.— “Oh, nothing — nothing.” She laughs, nervously. “I thought there was nobody — here; and it — startled me. How do you do, Mr. Cummings?” She goes quickly up to that gentleman, and gives him her hand. “Don’t you think it wonderful to find such a day as this, up here, at this time of year?” She struggles to control the panting breath in which she speaks.

Cummings.— “Yes, I supposed I had come quite too late for anything of the sort. You must make haste with your Ponkwasset, Miss Wyatt, or you’ll have to paint him with his winter cap on.”

Constance.— “Ah, yes! My picture. Mr. Bartlett has been telling you.” Her eyes have already wandered away from Cummings, and they now dwell, with a furtive light of reparation and imploring upon Bartlett’s disheartened patience: “Good morning.” It is a delicately tentative salutation, in a low voice, still fluttered by her nervous agitation.

Bartlett, in dull despair: “Good morning.”

Constance.— “How is the light on the mountain this morning?” She drifts deprecatingly up to the picture, near which Bartlett has stolidly kept his place.

Bartlett, in apathetic inattention.— “Oh, very well, very well indeed, thank you.”

Constance, after a hesitating glance at him.— “Did you like what I had done on it yesterday?”

Bartlett, very much as before.— “Oh, yes; why not?”

Constance, with a meek subtlety.— “I was afraid I had vexed you — by it.” She bends an appealing glance upon him, to which Bartlett remains impervious, and she drops her eyes with a faint sigh. Then she lifts them again: “I was afraid I had — made the distance too blue.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, no; not at all.”

Constance.— “Do you think I had better try to finish it?”

Bartlett.— “Oh, certainly. Why not? If it amuses you!”

Constance, perplexedly.— “Of course.” Then with a sad significance: “But I know I am trying your patience too far. You have been so kind, so good, I can’t forgive myself for annoying you.”

Bartlett.— “It doesn’t annoy me. I’m very glad to be useful to you.”

Constance, demurely.— “I didn’t mean painting; I meant — screaming.” She lifts her eyes to Bartlett’s face, with a pathetic, inquiring attempt at lightness, the slightest imaginable experimental archness in her self-reproach, which dies out as Bartlett frowns and bites the corner of his moustache in unresponsive silence. “I ought to be well enough now to stop it: I’m quite well enough to be ashamed of it.” She breaks off a miserable little laugh.

Bartlett, with cold indifference.— “There’s no reason why you should stop it — if it amuses you.” She looks at him in surprise at this rudeness. “Do you wish to try your hand at Ponkwasset this morning?”

Constance, with a flash of resentment.— “No; thanks.” Then with a lapse into her morbid self-abasement: “I shall not touch it again. Mamma!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Yes, Constance.” Mrs. Wyatt and Cummings, both intent on Bartlett and Constance, have been heroically feigning a polite interest in each other, from which pretence they now eagerly release themselves.

Constance.— “Oh — nothing. I can get it of Mary. I won’t trouble you.” She goes toward the door.

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Mary isn’t up from her breakfast yet. If you want anything, let me go with you, dear.” She turns to follow Constance. “Good morning, Mr. Cummings; we shall see you at dinner. Good morning,” — with an inquiring glance at Bartlett. Constance slightly inclines towards the two gentlemen without looking at them, in going out with her mother; and Cummings moves away to the piano, and affects to examine the sheet-music scattered over it. Bartlett remains in his place near the easel.

III.

Bartlett and Cummings.

Bartlett, harshly, after a certain silence which his friend is apparently resolved not to break.— “Sail in, Cummings!”

Cummings.— “Oh, I’ve got nothing to say.”

Bartlett.— “Yes, you have. You think I’m a greater fool and a greater brute than you ever supposed in your most sanguine moments. Well, I am! What then?”

Cummings, turning about from the music at which he has been pretending to look, and facing Bartlett, with a slight shrug.— “If you choose to characterise your own behaviour in that way, I shall not dispute you at any rate.”

Bartlett.— “Go on!”

Cummings.— “Go on? You saw yourself, I suppose, how she hung upon every syllable you spoke, every look, every gesture?”

Bartlett.— “Yes, I saw it.”

Cummings.— “You saw how completely crushed she was by your tone and manner. You’re not blind. Upon my word, Bartlett, if I didn’t know what a good, kind-hearted fellow you are, I should say you were the greatest ruffian alive.”

Bartlett, with a groan.— “Go on! That’s something like.”

Cummings.— “I couldn’t hear what was going on — I’ll own I tried — but I could see; and to see the delicate amende she was trying to offer you, in such a way that it should not seem an amende, — a perfect study of a woman’s gracious, unconscious art, — and then to see your sour refusal of it all, it made me sick.”

Bartlett, with a desperate clutch at his face, like a man oppressed with some stifling vapour.— “Yes, yes! I saw it all, too! And if it had been for me, I would have given anything for such happiness. Oh, gracious powers! How dear she is! I would rather have suffered any anguish than give her pain, and yet I gave her pain! I knew how it entered her heart: I felt it in my own. But what could I do? If I am to be myself, if I am not to steal the tenderness meant for another man, the love she shows to me because I’m like somebody else, I must play the brute. But have a little mercy on me. At least, I’m a baited brute. I don’t know which way to turn, I don’t know what to do. She’s so dear to me, — so dear in every tone of her voice, every look of her eyes, every aspiration or desire of her transparent soul, that it seems to me my whole being is nothing but a thought of her. I loved her helplessness, her pallor, her sorrow; judge how I adore her return to something like life! Oh, you blame me! You simplify this infernal perplexity of mine and label it brutality, and scold me for it. Great heaven! And yet you saw, you heard how she entered this room. In that instant the old illusion was back on her, and I was nothing. All that I had been striving and longing to be to her, and hoping and despairing to seem, was swept out of existence; I was reduced to a body without a soul, to a shadow, a counterfeit! You think I resented it? Poor girl, I pitied her so; and my own heart all the time like lead in my breast, — a dull lump of ache! I swear, I wonder I don’t go mad. I suppose — why, I suppose I am insane. No man in his senses was ever bedevilled by such a maniacal hallucination. Look here, Cummings: tell me that this damnable coil isn’t simply a matter of my own fancy. It’ll be some little relief to know that it’s real.”

Cummings.— “It’s real enough, my dear fellow. And it is a trial, — more than I could have believed such a fantastic thing could be.”

Bartlett.— “Trial? Ordeal by fire! Torment! I can’t stand it any longer.”

Cummings, musingly.— “She is beautiful, isn’t she, with that faint dawn of red in her cheeks, — not a colour, but a coloured light like the light that hangs round a rose-tree’s boughs in the early spring! And what a magnificent movement, what a stately grace! The girl must have been a goddess!”

Bartlett.— “And now she’s a saint — for sweetness and patience! You think she’s had nothing to suffer before from me? You know me better! Well, I am going away.”

Cummings.— “Perhaps it will be the best. You can go back with me to-morrow.”

Bartlett.— “To-morrow? Go back with you to-morrow? What are you talking about, man?” Cummings smiles. “I can’t go to-morrow. I can’t leave her hating me.”

Cummings.— “I knew you never meant to go. Well, what will you do?”

Bartlett.— “Don’t be so cold-blooded! What would you do?”

Cummings.— “I would have it out somehow.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, you talk! How?”

Cummings.— “I am not in love with Miss Wyatt.”

Bartlett.— “Oh, don’t try to play the cynic with me! It doesn’t become you. I know I’ve used you badly at times, Cummings. I behaved abominably in leaving you to take the brunt of meeting General Wyatt that first day; I said so then, and I shall always say it. But I thought you had forgiven that.”

Cummings, with a laugh.— “You make it hard to treat you seriously, Bartlett. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to go to Miss Wyatt and explain your case to her?”

Bartlett, angrily.— “No!”

Cummings.— “Perhaps to Mrs. Wyatt?”

Bartlett, infuriate.— “No!”

Cummings.— “To the General?”

Bartlett, with sudden quiet.— “You had better go away from here, Cummings — while you can.”

Cummings.— “I see you don’t wish me to do anything, and you’re quite right. Nobody can do anything but yourself.”

Bartlett.— “And what would you advise me to do?”

Cummings.— “I’ve told you that I would have it out. You can’t make matters worse. You can’t go on in this way indefinitely. It’s just possible that you might find yourself mistaken, — that Miss Wyatt cares for you in your own proper identity.”

Bartlett.— “For shame!”

Cummings.— “Oh, if you like!”

Bartlett, after a pause.— “Would you — would you see the General?”

Cummings.— “If I wanted to marry the General. Come, Bartlett; don’t be ridiculous. You know you don’t want my advice, and I haven’t any to give. I must go to my room a moment.”

Bartlett.— “Well, go! You’re of no advantage here. You’d have it out, would you? Well, then, I wouldn’t. I’m a brute, I know, and a fool, but I’m not such a brute and fool as that!” Cummings listens with smiling patience, and then goes without reply, while Bartlett drops into the chair near the easel, and sulkily glares at the picture. Through the window at his back shows the mellow Indian summer landscape. The trees have all dropped their leaves, save the oaks which show their dark crimson banners among the deep green of the pines and hemlocks on the hills; the meadows, verdant as in June, slope away toward the fringe of birches and young maples along the borders of the pond; the low-blackberry trails like a running fire over the long grass limp from the first frosts, which have silenced all the insect voices. No sound of sylvan life is heard but the harsh challenge of a jay, answered from many trees of the nearest wood-lot. The far-off hill-tops are molten in the soft azure haze of the season; the nearer slopes and crests sleep under a greyer and thinner veil. It is to this scene that the painter turns from the easel, with the sullen unconsciousness in which he has dwelt upon the picture. Its beauty seems at last to penetrate his mood; he rises and looks upon it; then he goes out on the gallery, and, hidden by the fall of one of the curtains, stands leaning upon the rail and rapt in the common reverie of the dreaming world. While he lingers there, Cummings appears at the door, and looks in; then with an air of some surprise, as if wondering not to see Bartlett, vanishes again, to give place to General Wyatt, who after a like research retires silently and apparently disconcerted. A few moments later Mrs. Wyatt comes to the threshold, and calling gently into the room, “Constance!” waits briefly and goes away. At last, the young girl herself appears, and falters in the doorway an instant, but finally comes forward and drifts softly and indirectly up to the picture, at which she glances with a little sigh. At the same moment Bartlett’s voice, trolling a snatch of song, comes from the gallery without: —

ROMANCE.

I.

Here apart our paths, then, lie: This way you wend, that way I; Speak one word before you go: Do not, do not leave me so!

II.

What is it that I should say? Tell me quick; I cannot stay; Quick! I am not good at guessing: Night is near, and time is pressing.

III.

Nay, then, go! But were I you, I will tell you what I’d do: Rather than be baffled so, I would never, never go!

As the song ends, Bartlett reappears at the gallery door giving into the parlour, and encounters Constance turning at his tread from the picture on which she has been pensively gazing while he sang. He puts up a hand on either side of the door.

IV.

Bartlett and Constance.

Bartlett.— “I didn’t know you were here.”

Constance.— “Neither did I — know you were, till I heard you singing.”

Bartlett, smiling ironically.— “Oh, you didn’t suppose I sang!”

Constance, confusedly.— “I — I don’t know” —

Bartlett.— “Ah, you thought I did! I don’t. I was indulging in a sort of modulated howling which I flatter myself is at least one peculiarity that’s entirely my own. I was baying the landscape merely for my private amusement, and I’d not have done it, if I’d known you were in hearing. However, if it’s helped to settle the fact one way or other, concerning any little idiosyncrasy of mine, I shan’t regret it. I hope not to disappoint you in anything, by-and-by.” He drops his hands from the door-posts and steps into the room, while Constance, in shrinking abeyance, stands trembling at his harshness.

Constance, in faltering reproach.— “Mr. Bartlett!”

Bartlett.— “Constance!”

Constance, struggling to assert herself, but breaking feebly in her attempt at hauteur.— “Constance? What does this mean, Mr. Bartlett?”

Bartlett, with a sudden burst.— “What does it mean? It means that I’m sick of this nightmare masquerade. It means that I want to be something to you — all the world to you — in and for myself. It means that I can’t play another man’s part any longer and live. It means that I love you, love you, love you, Constance!” He starts involuntarily toward her with outstretched arms, from which she recoils with a convulsive cry.

Constance.— “You love me? Me? Oh, no, no! How can you be so merciless as to talk to me of love?” She drops her glowing face into her hands.

Bartlett.— “Because I’m a man. Because love is more than mercy — better, higher, wiser. Listen to me, Constance! — yes, I will call you so now if never again: you are so dear to me that I must say it at last if it killed you. If loving you is cruel, I’m pitiless! Give me some hope, tell me to breathe, my girl!”

Constance.— “Oh go, while I can still forgive you.”

Bartlett.— “I won’t go; I won’t have your forgiveness; I will have all or nothing; I want your love!”

Constance, uncovering her face and turning its desolation upon him: “My love? I have no love to give. My heart is dead.”

Bartlett.— “No, no! That’s part of the ugly trance that we’ve both been living in so long. Look! You’re better now than when you came here; you’re stronger, braver, more beautiful. My angel, you’re turned a woman again! Oh, you can love me if you will; and you will! Look at me, darling!” He takes her listless right hand in his left, and gently draws her toward him.

Constance, starting away.— “You’re wrong; you’re all wrong! You don’t understand; you don’t know — Oh, listen to me!”

Bartlett, still holding her cold hand fast.— “Yes, a thousand years. But you must tell me first that I may love you. That first!”

Constance.— “No! That never! And since you speak to me of love, listen to what it’s my right you should hear.”

Bartlett, releasing her.— “I don’t care to hear. Nothing can ever change me. But if you bid me, I will go!”

Constance.— “You shall not go now till you know what despised and hated and forsaken thing you’ve offered your love to.”

Bartlett, beseechingly.— “Constance, let me go while I can forgive myself. Nothing you can say will make me love you less; remember that; but I implore you to spare yourself. Don’t speak, my love.”

Constance.— “Spare myself? Not speak? Not speak what has been on my tongue and heart and brain, a burning fire, so long? — Oh, I was a happy girl once! The days were not long enough for my happiness; I woke at night to think of it. I was proud in my happiness and believed myself, poor fool, one to favour those I smiled on; and I had my vain and crazy dreams of being the happiness of some one who should come to ask for — what you ask now. Some one came. At first I didn’t care for him, but he knew how to make me. He knew how to make my thoughts of him part of my happiness and pride and vanity till he was all in all, and I had no wish, no hope, no life but him; and then he — left me!” She buries her face in her hands again, and breaks into a low, piteous sobbing.

Bartlett, with a groan of helpless fury and compassion.— “The fool, the sot, the slave! Constance, I knew all this, — I knew it from the first.”

Constance, recoiling in wild reproach.— “You knew it?”

Bartlett, desperately.— “Yes, I knew it — in spite of myself, through my own stubborn fury I knew it, that first day, when I had obliged my friend to tell me what your father had told him, before I would hear reason. I would have given anything not to have known it then, when it was too late, for I had at least the grace to feel the wrong, the outrage of my knowing it. You can never pardon it, I see; but you must feel what a hateful burden I had to bear, when I found that I had somehow purloined the presence, the looks, the voice of another man — a man whom I would have joyfully changed myself to any monstrous shape not to resemble, though I knew that my likeness to him, bewildering you in a continual dream of him, was all that ever made you look at me or think of me. I lived in the hope — Heaven only knows why I should have had the hope! — that I might yet be myself to you; that you might wake from your dream of him and look on me in the daylight, and see that I was at least an honest man, and pity me and may be love me at last, as I loved you at first, from the moment I saw your dear pale face, and heard your dear, sad voice.” He follows up her slow retreat and again possesses himself of her hand: “Don’t cast me off! It was monstrous, out of all decency, to know your sorrow; but I never tried to know it; I tried not to know it.” He keeps fast hold of her hand, while she remains with averted head. “I love you, Constance; I loved you; and when once you had bidden me stay, I was helpless to go away, or I would never be here now to offend you with the confession of that shameful knowledge. Do you think it was no trial to me? It gave me the conscience of an eavesdropper and a spy; yet all I knew was sacred to me.”

Constance, turning and looking steadfastly into his face.— “And you could care for so poor a creature as I — so abject, so obtuse as never to know what had made her intolerable to the man that cast her off?”

Bartlett.— “Man? He was no man! He” —

Constance, suddenly.— “Oh, wait! I — I love him yet.”

Bartlett, dropping her hand.— “You” —

Constance.— “Yes, yes! As much as I live, I love him! But when he left me, I seemed to die; and now it’s as if I were some wretched ghost clinging for all existence to the thought of my lost happiness. If that slips from me, then I cease to be.”

Bartlett.— “Why, this is still your dream. But I won’t despair. You’ll wake yet, and care for me: I know you will.”

Constance, tenderly.— “Oh, I’m not dreaming now. I know that you are not he. You are everything that is kind and good; and some day you will be very happy.”

Bartlett, desolately.— “I shall never be happy without your love.” After a pause: “It will be a barren, bitter comfort, but let me have it if you can: if I had met you first, could you have loved me?”

Constance.— “I might have loved you if — I had — lived.” She turns from him again, and moves softly toward the door; his hollow voice arrests her.

Bartlett.— “If you are dead, then I have lived too long. Your loss takes the smile out of life for me.” A moment later: “You are cruel, Constance.”

Constance, abruptly facing him.— “I cruel? To you?”

Bartlett.— “Yes, you have put me to shame before myself. You might have spared me! A treacherous villain is false in time to save you from a life of betrayal, and you say your heart is dead. But that isn’t enough. You tell me that you cannot care for me because you love that treacherous villain still. That’s my disgrace, that’s my humiliation, that’s my killing shame. I could have borne all else. You might have cast me off however you would, driven me away with any scorn, whipped me from you with the sharpest rebuke that such presumption as mine could merit; but to drag a decent man’s self-respect through such mire as that poor rascal’s memory for six long weeks, and then tell him that you prefer the mire” —

Constance.— “Oh, hush! I can’t let you reproach him! He was pitilessly false to me, but I will be true to him for ever. How do I know — I must find some reason for that, or there is no reason in anything! — how do I know that he did not break his word to me at my father’s bidding? My father never liked him.”

Bartlett, shaking his head with a melancholy smile.— “Ah, Constance, do you think I would break my word to you at your father’s bidding?”

Constance, in abject despair.— “Well, then I go back to what I always knew; I was too slight, too foolish, too tiresome for his life-long love. He saw it in time, I don’t blame him. You would see it, too.”

Bartlett.— “What devil’s vantage enabled that infernal scoundrel to blight your spirit with his treason? Constance, is this my last answer?”

Constance.— “Yes, go! I am so sorry for you, — sorrier than I ever thought I could be for anything again.”

Bartlett.— “Then if you pity me, give me a little hope that sometime, somehow” —

Constance.— “Oh, I have no hope, for you, for me, for any one. Good-bye, good, kind friend! Try, — you won’t have to try hard — to forget me. Unless some miracle should happen to show me that it was all his fault and none of mine, we are parting now for ever. It has been a strange dream, and nothing is so strange as that it should be ending so. Are you the ghost or I, I wonder! It confuses me as it did at first; but if you are he, or only you — Ah, don’t look at me so, or I must believe he has never left me, and implore you to stay!”

Bartlett, quietly.— “Thanks. I would not stay a moment longer in his disguise, if you begged me on your knees. I shall always love you, Constance, but if the world is wide enough, please Heaven, I will never see you again. There are some things dearer to me than your presence. No, I won’t take your hand; it can’t heal the hurt your words have made, and nothing can help me, now I know from your own lips that but for my likeness to him I should never have been anything to you. Good-bye!”

Constance.— “Oh!” She sinks with a long cry into the arm-chair beside the table, and drops her head into her arms upon it. At the door toward which he turns Bartlett meets General Wyatt, and a moment later Mrs. Wyatt enters by the other. Bartlett recoils under the concentrated reproach and inquiry of their gaze.

V.

General Wyatt, Mrs. Wyatt, Constance, and Bartlett.

Mrs. Wyatt, hastening to bow herself over Constance’s fallen head.— “Oh, what is it, Constance?” As Constance makes no reply, she lifts her eyes again to Bartlett’s face.

General Wyatt, peremptorily.— “Well, sir!”

Bartlett, with bitter desperation.— “Oh, you shall know!”

Constance, interposing.— “I will tell! You shall be spared that, at least.” She has risen, and with her face still hidden in her handkerchief, seeks her father with an outstretched hand. He tenderly gathers her to his arms, and she droops a moment upon his shoulder; then, with an electrical revolt against her own weakness, she lifts her head and dries her tears with a passionate energy. “He — Oh, speak for me!” Her head falls again on her father’s shoulder.

Bartlett, with grave irony and self-scorn.— “It’s a simple matter, sir; I have been telling Miss Wyatt that I love her, and offering to share with her my obscurity and poverty. I” —

General Wyatt, impatiently.— “Curse your poverty, sir! I’m poor myself. Well!”

Bartlett.— “Oh, that’s merely the beginning; I have had the indecency to do this knowing that what alone rendered me sufferable to her it was a cruel shame for me to know, and an atrocity for me to presume upon. I” —

General Wyatt.— “I authorised this knowledge on your part when I spoke to your friend, and before he went away he told me all he had said to you.”

Bartlett, in the first stages of petrifaction.— “Cummings?”

General Wyatt.— “Yes.”

Bartlett.— “Told you that I knew whom I was like?”

General Wyatt.— “Yes.”

Bartlett, very gently.— “Then I think that man will be lost for keeping his conscience too clean. Cummings has invented a new sin.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “James, James! You told me that Mr. Bartlett didn’t know.”

General Wyatt, contritely.— “I let you think so, Margaret; I didn’t know what else to do.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Oh, James!”

Constance.— “Oh, papa!” She turns with bowed head from her father’s arms, and takes refuge in her mother’s embrace. General Wyatt, released, fetches a compass round about the parlour, with a face of intense dismay. He pauses in front of his wife.

General Wyatt.— “Margaret, you must know the worst now.”

Mrs. Wyatt, in gentle reproach, while she softly caresses Constance’s hair.— “Oh, is there anything worse, James?”

General Wyatt, hopelessly.— “Yes: I’m afraid I have been to blame.”

Bartlett.— “General Wyatt, let me retire. I” —

General Wyatt.— “No, sir. This concerns you, too, now. Your destiny has entangled you with our sad fortunes, and now you must know them all.”

Constance, from her mother’s shoulder.— “Yes, stay, — whatever it is. If you care for me, nothing can hurt you any more, now.”

General Wyatt.— “Margaret, — Constance! If I have been mistaken in what I have done, you must try somehow to forgive me; it was my tenderness for you both misled me, if I erred. Sir, let me address my defence to you. You can see the whole matter with clearer eyes than we.” At an imploring gesture from Bartlett, he turns again to Mrs. Wyatt. “Perhaps you are right, sir. Margaret, when I had made up my mind that the wretch who had stolen our child’s heart was utterly unfit and unworthy” —

Constance, starting away from her mother with a cry.— “Ah, you did drive him from me then! I knew, I knew it! And after all these days and weeks and months that seem years and centuries of agony, you tell me that it was you broke my heart! No, no, I never will forgive you, father! Where is he? Tell me that! Where is my husband — the husband you robbed me of? Did you kill him, when you chose to crush my life? Is he dead? If he’s living I will find him wherever he is. No distance and no danger shall keep me from him. I’ll find him and fall down before him, and implore him to forgive you, for I never can! Was this your tenderness for me — to drive him away, and leave me to the pitiless humiliation of believing myself deserted? Oh, great tenderness!”

General Wyatt, confronting her storm with perfect quiet.— “No, I will give better proof of my tenderness than that.” He takes from his pocket-book a folded paper which he hands to his wife: “Margaret, do you know that writing?”

Mrs. Wyatt, glancing at the superscription.— “Oh, too well! This is to you, James.”

General Wyatt.— “It’s for you now. Read it.”

Mrs. Wyatt, wonderingly unfolding the paper and then reading.—”’I confess myself guilty of forging Major Cummings’s signature, and in consideration of his and your own forbearance, I promise never to see Miss Wyatt again. I shall always be grateful for your mercy; and’ — James, James! It isn’t possible!”

Constance, who has crept nearer and nearer while her mother has been reading, as if drawn by a resistless fascination.— “No, it isn’t possible! It’s false; it’s a fraud! I will see it.” She swiftly possesses herself of the paper and scans the handwriting for a moment with a fierce intentness. Then she flings it wildly away. “Yes, yes, it’s true! It’s his hand. It’s true, it’s the only true thing in this world of lies!” She totters away toward the sofa. Bartlett makes a movement to support her, but she repulses him, and throws herself upon the cushions.

General Wyatt.— “Sir, I am sorry to make you the victim of a scene. It has been your fate, and no part of my intention. Will you look at this paper? You don’t know all that is in it yet.” He touches it with his foot.

Bartlett, in dull dejection.— “No, I won’t look at it. If it were a radiant message from heaven, I don’t see how it could help me now.”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “I’m afraid you’ve made a terrible mistake, James.”

General Wyatt.— “Margaret! Don’t say that!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “Yes, it would have been better to show us this paper at once, — better than to keep us all these days in this terrible suffering.”

General Wyatt.— “I was afraid of greater suffering for you both. I chose sorrow for Constance rather than the ignominy of knowing that she had set her heart on so base a scoundrel. When he crawled in the dust there before me, and whined for pity, I revolted from telling you or her how vile he was; the thought of it seemed to dishonour you; and I had hoped something, everything, from my girl’s self-respect, her obedience, her faith in me. I never dreamed that it must come to this.”

Mrs. Wyatt, sadly shaking her head.— “I know how well you meant; but oh, it was a fatal mistake!”

Constance, abandoning her refuge among the cushions, and coming forward to her father.— “No, mother, it was no mistake! I see now how wise and kind and merciful you have been, papa. You can never love me again, I’ve behaved so badly; but if you’ll let me, I will try to live my gratitude for your mercy at a time when the whole truth would have killed me. Oh, papa! What shall I say, what shall I do to show how sorry and ashamed I am? Let me go down on my knees to thank you.” Her father catches her to his heart, and fondly kisses her again and again. “I don’t deserve it, papa! You ought to hate me, and drive me from you, and never let me see you again.” She starts away from him as if to execute upon herself this terrible doom, when her eye falls upon the letter where she had thrown it on the floor. “To think how long I have been the fool, the slave of that — felon!” She stoops upon the paper with a hawk-like fierceness; she tears it into shreds, and strews the fragments about the room. “Oh, if I could only tear out of my heart all thoughts of him, all memory, all likeness!” In her wild scorn she has whirled unheedingly away toward Bartlett, whom, suddenly confronting, she apparently addresses in this aspiration; he opens wide his folded arms.

Bartlett.— “And what would you do, then, with this extraordinary resemblance?” The closing circle of his arms involves her and clasps her to his heart, from which beneficent shelter she presently exiles herself a pace or two, and stands with either hand pressed against his breast while her eyes dwell with rapture on his face.

Constance.— “Oh, you’re not like him, and you never were!”

Bartlett, with light irony: “Ah?”

Constance.— “If I had not been blind, blind, blind, I never could have seen the slightest similarity. Like him? Never!”

Bartlett.— “Ah! Then perhaps the resemblance, which we have noticed from time to time, and which has been the cause of some annoyance and embarrassment all round, was simply a disguise which I had assumed for the time being to accomplish a purpose of my own?”

Constance.— “Oh, don’t jest it away! It’s your soul that I see now, your true and brave and generous heart; and if you pardoned me for mistaking you a single moment for one who had neither soul nor heart, I could never look you in the face again!”

Bartlett.— “You seem to be taking a good provisional glare at me beforehand, then, Miss Wyatt. I’ve never been so nearly looked out of countenance in my life. But you needn’t be afraid; I shall not pardon your crime.” Constance abruptly drops her head upon his breast, and again instantly repels herself.

Constance.— “No, you must not if you could. But you can’t — you can’t care for me after hearing what I could say to my father” —

Bartlett.— “That was in a moment of great excitement.”

Constance.— “After hearing me rave about a man so unworthy of — any one — you cared for. No, your self-respect — everything — demands that you should cast me off.”

Bartlett.— “It does. But I am inexorable, — you must have observed the trait before. In this case I will not yield even to my own colossal self-respect.” Earnestly: “Ah, Constance, do you think I could love you the less because your heart was too true to swerve even from a traitor till he was proved as false to honour as to you?” Lightly again: “Come, I like your fidelity to worthless people; I’m rather a deep and darkling villain myself.”

Constance, devoutly.— “You? Oh, you are as nobly frank and open as — as — as papa!”

Bartlett.— “No, Constance, you are wrong, for once. Hear my dreadful secret; I’m not what I seem, — the light and joyous creature I look, — I’m an emotional wreck. Three short years ago, I was frightfully jilted” — they all turn upon him in surprise— “by a young person who, I’m sorry to say, hasn’t yet consoled me by turning out a scamp.”

Constance, drifting to his side with a radiant smile.— “Oh, I’m so glad.”

Bartlett, with affected dryness.— “Are you? I didn’t know it was such a laughing matter. I was always disposed to take those things seriously.”

Constance.— “Yes, yes! But don’t you see? It places us on more of an equality.” She looks at him with a smile of rapture and logic exquisitely compact.

Bartlett.— “Does it? But you’re not half as happy as I am.”

Constance.— “Oh yes, I am! Twice.”

Bartlett.— “Then that makes us just even, for so am I.” They stand ridiculously blest, holding each other’s hand a moment, and then Constance, still clinging to one of his hands, goes and rests her other arm upon her mother’s shoulder.

Constance.— “Mamma, how wretched I have made you, all these months!”

Mrs. Wyatt.— “If your trouble’s over now, my child,” — she tenderly kisses her cheek,— “there’s no trouble for your mother in the world.”

Constance.— “But I’m not happy, mamma. I can’t be happy, thinking how wickedly unhappy I’ve been. No, no! I had better go back to the old wretched state again; it’s all I’m fit for. I’m so ashamed of myself. Send him away!” She renews her hold upon his hand.

Bartlett.— “Nothing of the kind. I was requested to remain here six weeks ago, by a young lady. Besides, this is a public house. Come, I haven’t finished the catalogue of my disagreeable qualities yet. I’m jealous. I want you to put that arm on my shoulder.” He gently effects the desired transfer, and then, chancing to look up, he discovers the Rev. Arthur Cummings on the threshold in the act of modestly retreating. He detains him with a great melodramatic start. “Hah! A clergyman! This is indeed ominous!”

THE SLEEPING CAR

I.

SCENE: One side of a sleeping-car on the Boston and Albany Road. The curtains are drawn before most of the berths; from the hooks and rods hang hats, bonnets, bags, bandboxes, umbrellas, and other travelling gear; on the floor are boots of both sexes, set out for THE PORTER to black. THE PORTER is making up the beds in the upper and lower berths adjoining the seats on which a young mother, slender and pretty, with a baby asleep on the seat beside her, and a stout old lady, sit confronting each other — MRS. AGNES ROBERTS and her aunt MARY.

MRS. ROBERTS. Do you always take down your back hair, aunty?

AUNT MARY. No, never, child; at least not since I had such a fright about it once, coming on from New York. It’s all well enough to take down your back hair if it is yours; but if it isn’t, your head’s the best place for it. Now, as I buy mine of Madame Pierrot —

MRS. ROBERTS. Don’t you wish she wouldn’t advertise it as human hair? It sounds so pokerish — like human flesh, you know.

AUNT MARY. Why, she couldn’t call it inhuman hair, my dear.

MRS. ROBERTS (thoughtfully). No — just hair.

AUNT MARY. Then people might think it was for mattresses. But, as I was saying, I took it off that night, and tucked it safely away, as I supposed, in my pocket, and I slept sweetly till about midnight, when I happened to open my eyes, and saw something long and black crawl off my bed and slip under the berth. Such a shriek as I gave, my dear! “A snake! a snake! oh, a snake!” And everybody began talking at once, and some of the gentlemen swearing, and the porter came running with the poker to kill it; and all the while it was that ridiculous switch of mine, that had worked out of my pocket. And glad enough I was to grab it up before anybody saw it, and say I must have been dreaming.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, aunty, how funny! How could you suppose a serpent could get on board a sleeping-car, of all places in the world!

AUNT MARY. That was the perfect absurdity of it.

THE PORTER. Berths ready now, ladies.

MRS. ROBERTS (to THE PORTER, who walks away to the end of the car, and sits down near the door). Oh, thank you. Aunty, do you feel nervous the least bit?

AUNT MARY. Nervous? No. Why?

MRS. ROBERTS. Well, I don’t know. I suppose I’ve been worked up a little about meeting Willis, and wondering how he’ll look, and all. We can’t know each other, of course. It doesn’t stand to reason that if he’s been out there for twelve years, ever since I was a child, though we’ve corresponded regularly — at least I have — that he could recognize me; not at the first glance, you know. He’ll have a full beard; and then I’ve got married, and here’s the baby. Oh, no! he’ll never guess who it is in the world. Photographs really amount to nothing in such a case. I wish we were at home, and it was all over. I wish he had written some particulars, instead of telegraphing from Ogden, “Be with you on the 7 A.M., Wednesday.”

AUNT MARY. Californians always telegraph, my dear; they never think of writing. It isn’t expensive enough, and it doesn’t make your blood run cold enough to get a letter, and so they send you one of those miserable yellow despatches whenever they can — those printed in a long string, if possible, so that you’ll be sure to die before you get to the end of it. I suppose your brother has fallen into all those ways, and says “reckon” and “ornary” and “which the same,” just like one of Mr. Bret Harte’s characters.

MRS. ROBERTS. But it isn’t exactly our not knowing each other, aunty, that’s worrying me; that’s something that could be got over in time. What is simply driving me distracted is Willis and Edward meeting there when I’m away from home. Oh, how could I be away! and why couldn’t Willis have given us fair warning? I would have hurried from the ends of the earth to meet him. I don’t believe poor Edward ever saw a Californian; and he’s so quiet and preoccupied, I’m sure he’d never get on with Willis. And if Willis is the least loud, he wouldn’t like Edward. Not that I suppose he is loud; but I don’t believe he knows anything about literary men. But you can see, aunty, can’t you, how very anxious I must be? Don’t you see that I ought to have been there when Willis and Edward met, so as to — to — well, to break them to each other, don’t you know?

AUNT MARY. Oh, you needn’t be troubled about that, Agnes. I dare say they’ve got on perfectly well together. Very likely they’re sitting down to the unwholesomest hot supper this instant that the ingenuity of man could invent.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, do you think they are, aunty? Oh, if I could only believe they were sitting down to a hot supper together now, I should be so happy! They’d be sure to get on if they were. There’s nothing like eating to make men friendly with each other. Don’t you know, at receptions, how they never have anything to say to each other till the escalloped oysters and the chicken salad appear; and then how sweet they are as soon as they’ve helped the ladies to ice? Oh, thank you, thank you, aunty, for thinking of the hot supper. It’s such a relief to my mind! You can understand, can’t you, aunty dear, how anxious I must have been to have my only brother and my only — my husband — get on nicely together? My life would be a wreck, simply a wreck, if they didn’t. And Willis and I not having seen each other since I was a child makes it all the worse. I do hope they’re sitting down to a hot supper.

AN ANGRY VOICE from the next berth but one. I wish people in sleeping-cars —

A VOICE from the berth beyond that. You’re mistaken in your premises, sir. This is a waking-car. Ladies, go on, and oblige an eager listener.

[Sensation, and smothered laughter from the other berths.]

MRS. ROBERTS (after a space of terrified silence, in a loud whisper to her AUNT.) What horrid things! But now we really must go to bed. It was too bad to keep talking. I’d no idea my voice was getting so loud. Which berth will you have, aunty? I’d better take the upper one, because —

AUNT MARY (whispering). No, no; I must take that, so that you can be with the baby below.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, how good you are, Aunt Mary! It’s too bad; it is really. I can’t let you.

AUNT MARY. Well, then, you must; that’s all. You know how that child tosses and kicks about in the night. You never can tell where his head’s going to be in the morning, but you’ll probably find it at the foot of the bed. I couldn’t sleep an instant, my dear, if I thought that boy was in the upper berth; for I’d be sure of his tumbling out over you. Here, let me lay him down. [She lays the baby in the lower berth.] There! Now get in, Agnes — do, and leave me to my struggle with the attraction of gravitation.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, poor aunty, how will you ever manage it? I must help you up.

AUNT MARY. No, my dear; don’t be foolish. But you may go and call the porter, if you like. I dare say he’s used to it.

[MRS. ROBERTS goes and speak timidly to THE PORTER, who fails at first to understand, then smiles broadly, accepts a quarter with a duck of his head, and comes forward to AUNT MARY’S side.]

MRS. ROBERTS. Had he better give you his hand to rest your foot in, while you spring up as if you were mounting horseback?

AUNT MARY (with disdain). Spring! My dear, I haven’t sprung for a quarter of a century. I shall require every fibre in the man’s body. His hand, indeed! You get in first, Agnes.

MRS. ROBERTS. I will, aunty dear; but —

AUNT MARY (sternly). Agnes, do as I say. [MRS. ROBERTS crouches down on the lower berth.] I don’t choose that any member of my family shall witness my contortions. Don’t you look.

MRS. ROBERTS. No, no, aunty.

AUNT MARY. Now, porter, are you strong?

PORTER. I used to be porter at a Saratoga hotel, and carried up de ladies’ trunks dere.

AUNT MARY. Then you’ll do, I think. Now, then, your knee; now your back. There! And very handsomely done. Thanks.

MRS. ROBERTS. Are you really in, Aunt Mary?

AUNT MARY (dryly). Yes. Good-night.

MRS. ROBERTS. Good-night, aunty. [After a pause of some minutes.] Aunty!

AUNT MARY. Well, what?

MRS. ROBERTS. Do you think it’s perfectly safe?

[She rises in her berth, and looks up over the edge of the upper.]

AUNT MARY. I suppose so. It’s a well-managed road. They’ve got the air-brake, I’ve heard, and the Miller platform, and all those horrid things. What makes you introduce such unpleasant subjects?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, I don’t mean accidents. But, you know, when you turn, it does creak so awfully. I shouldn’t mind myself; but the baby —

AUNT MARY. Why, child, do you think I’m going to break through? I couldn’t. I’m one of the lightest sleepers in the world.

MRS. ROBERTS. Yes, I know you’re a light sleeper; but — but it doesn’t seem quite the same thing, somehow.

AUNT MARY. But it is; it’s quite the same thing, and you can be perfectly easy in your mind, my dear. I should be quite as loth to break through as you would to have me. Good-night.

MRS. ROBERTS. Yes; good-night, Aunty!

AUNT MARY. Well?

MRS. ROBERTS. You ought to just see him, how he’s lying. He’s a perfect log. Couldn’t you just bend over, and peep down at him a moment?

AUNT MARY. Bend over! It would be the death of me. Good-night.

MRS. ROBERTS. Good-night. Did you put the glass into my bag or yours? I feel so very thirsty, and I want to go and get some water. I’m sure I don’t know why I should be thirsty. Are you, Aunt Mary? Ah! here it is. Don’t disturb yourself, aunty; I’ve found it. It was in my bag, just where I’d put it myself. But all this trouble about Willis has made me so fidgety that I don’t know where anything is. And now I don’t know how to manage about the baby while I go after the water. He’s sleeping soundly enough now; but if he should happen to get into one of his rolling moods, he might tumble out on to the floor. Never mind, aunty, I’ve thought of something. I’ll just barricade him with these bags and shawls. Now, old fellow, roll as much as you like. If you should happen to hear him stir, aunty, won’t you — aunty! Oh, dear! she’s asleep already; and what shall I do? [While MRS. ROBERTS continues talking, various notes of protest, profane and otherwise, make themselves heard from different berths.] I know. I’ll make a bold dash for the water, and be back in an instant, baby. Now, don’t you move, you little rogue. [She runs to the water-tank at the end of the car, and then back to her berth.] Now, baby, here’s mamma again. Are you all right, mamma’s own?

[A shaggy head and bearded face are thrust from the curtains of the next berth.]

THE STRANGER. Look here, ma’am. I don’t want to be disagreeable about this thing, and I hope you won’t take any offence; but the fact is, I’m half dead for want of sleep, and if you’ll only keep quiet now a little while, I’ll promise not to speak above my breath if ever I find you on a sleeping-car after you’ve come straight through from San Francisco, day and night, and not been able to get more than about a quarter of your usual allowance of rest — I will indeed.

MRS. ROBERTS. I’m very sorry that I’ve disturbed you, and I’ll try to be more quiet. I didn’t suppose I was speaking so loud; but the cars keep up such a rattling that you never can tell how loud you are speaking. Did I understand you to say that you were from California?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma’am.

MRS. ROBERTS. San Francisco?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma’am.

MRS. ROBERTS. Thanks. It’s a terribly long journey, isn’t it? I know quite how to feel for you. I’ve a brother myself coming on. In fact we expected him before this. [She scans his face as sharply as the lamp-light will allow, and continues, after a brief hesitation.] It’s always such a silly question to ask a person, and I suppose San Francisco is a large place, with a great many people always coming and going, so that it would be only one chance in a thousand if you did.

THE CALIFORNIAN (patiently). Did what, ma’am?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, I was just wondering if it was possible — but of course it isn’t, and it’s very flat to ask — that you’d ever happened to meet my brother there. His name is Willis Campbell.

THE CALIFORNIAN (with more interest). Campbell? Campbell? Yes, I know a man of that name. But I disremember his first name. Little low fellow — pretty chunky?

MRS. ROBERTS. I don’t know. Do you mean short and stout?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma’am.

MRS. ROBERTS. I’m sure I can’t tell. It’s a great many years since he went out there, and I’ve never seen him in all that time. I thought if you did happen to know him — He’s a lawyer.

THE CALIFORNIAN. It’s quite likely I know him; and in the morning, ma’am —

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, excuse me. I’m very sorry to have kept you so long awake with my silly questions.

THE MAN IN THE UPPER BERTH. Don’t apologize, madam. I’m not a Californian myself, but I’m an orphan, and away from home, and I thank you, on behalf of all our fellow-passengers, for the mental refreshment that your conversation has afforded us. I could lie here and listen to it all night; but there are invalids in some of these berths, and perhaps on their account it will be as well to defer everything till the morning, as our friend suggests. Allow me to wish you pleasant dreams, madam.

[THE CALIFORNIAN, while MRS. ROBERTS shrinks back under the curtain of her berth in dismay, and stammers some inaudible excuse, slowly emerges full length from his berth.]

THE CALIFORNIAN. Don’t you mind me, ma’am; I’ve got everything but my boots and coat on. Now, then [standing beside the berth, and looking in upon the man in the upper tier], you, do you know that this is a lady you’re talking to?

THE UPPER BERTH. By your voice and your shaggy personal appearance I shouldn’t have taken you for a lady — no, sir. But the light is very imperfect; you may be a bearded lady.

THE CALIFORNIAN. You never mind about my looks. The question is, Do you want your head rapped up against the side of this car?

THE UPPER BERTH. With all the frankness of your own Pacific slope, no.

MRS. ROBERTS (hastily reappearing). Oh, no, no, don’t hurt him. He’s not to blame. I was wrong to keep on talking. Oh, please don’t hurt him!

THE CALIFORNIAN (to THE UPPER BERTH). You hear? Well, now, don’t you speak another word to that lady tonight. Just go on, ma’am, and free your mind on any little matter you like. I don’t want any sleep. How long has your brother been in California?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, don’t let’s talk about it now; I don’t want to talk about it. I thought — I thought — Good-night. Oh, dear! I didn’t suppose I was making so much trouble. I didn’t mean to disturb anybody. I —

[MRS. ROBERTS gives way to the excess of her confusion and mortification in a little sob, and then hides her grief behind the curtains of her berth. THE CALIFORNIAN slowly emerges again from his couch, and stands beside it, looking in upon the man in the berth above.]

THE CALIFORNIAN. For half a cent I would rap your head up against that wall. Making the lady cry, and getting me so mad I can’t sleep! Now see here, you just apologize. You beg that lady’s pardon, or I’ll have you out of there before you know yourself. [Cries of “Good!” “That’s right!” and “Make him show himself!” hail MRS. ROBERTS’S champion, and heads, more or less dishevelled, are thrust from every berth. MRS. ROBERTS remains invisible and silent, and the loud and somewhat complicated respiration of her AUNT makes itself heard in the general hush of expectancy. A remark to the effect that “The old lady seems to enjoy her rest” achieves a facile applause. THE CALIFORNIAN again addresses the culprit.] Come, now, what do you say? I’ll give you just one-half a minute.

MRS. ROBERTS (from her shelter). Oh, please, please don’t make him say anything. It was very trying in me to keep him awake, and I know he didn’t mean any offence. Oh, do let him be!

THE CALIFORNIAN. You hear that? You stay quiet the rest of the time; and if that lady choses to keep us all awake the whole night, don’t you say a word, or I’ll settle with you in the morning.

[Loud and continued applause, amidst which THE CALIFORNIAN turns from the man in the berth before him, and restores order by marching along the aisle of the car in his stocking feet. The heads vanish behind the curtains. As the laughter subsides, he returns to his berth, and after a stare up and down the tranquillized car, he is about to retire.]

A VOICE. Oh, don’t just bow. Speak!

[A fresh burst of laughter greets this sally. THE CALIFORNIAN erects himself again with an air of baited wrath, and then suddenly breaks into a helpless laugh.]

THE CALIFORNIAN. Gentlemen, you’re too many for me.

[He gets into his berth, and after cries of “Good for California!” “You’re all right, William Nye!” and “You’re several ahead yet!” the occupants of the different berths gradually relapse into silence, and at last, as the car lunges onward through the darkness, nothing is heard but the rhythmical clank of the machinery, with now and then a burst of audible slumber from MRS. ROBERTS’S aunt MARY.]

II.

At Worcester, where the train has made the usual stop, THE PORTER, with his lantern on his arm, enters the car, preceding a gentleman somewhat anxiously smiling; his nervous speech contrasts painfully with the business-like impassiveness of THE PORTER, who refuses, with an air of incredulity, to enter into the confidences which the gentleman seems reluctant to bestow.

MR. EDWARD ROBERTS. This is the Governor Marcy, isn’t it?

THE PORTER. Yes, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. Came on from Albany, and not from New York?

THE PORTER. Yes, sah, it did.

MR. ROBERTS. Ah! it must be all right. I —

THE PORTER. Was your wife expecting you to come on board here?

MR. ROBERTS. Well, no, not exactly. She was expecting me to meet her at Boston. But I — [struggling to give the situation dignity, but failing, and throwing himself, with self-convicted silliness, upon THE PORTER’S mercy.] The fact is, I thought I would surprise her by joining her here.

THE PORTER (refusing to have any mercy). Oh! How did you expect to find her?

MR. ROBERTS. Well — well — I don’t know. I didn’t consider. [He looks down the aisle in despair at the close-drawn curtains of the berths, and up at the dangling hats and bags and bonnets, and down at the chaos of boots of both sexes on the floor.] I don’t know how I expected to find her.

[MR. ROBERTS’S countenance falls, and he visibly sinks so low in his own esteem and an imaginary public opinion that THE PORTER begins to have a little compassion.]

THE PORTER. Dey’s so many ladies on board I couldn’t find her.

MR. ROBERTS. Oh, no, no, of course not. I didn’t expect that.

THE PORTER. Don’t like to go routing ’em all up, you know. I wouldn’t be allowed to.

MR. ROBERTS. I don’t ask it; that would be preposterous.

THE PORTER. What sort of looking lady was she?

MR. ROBERTS. Well, I don’t know, really. Not very tall, rather slight, blue eyes. I — I don’t know what you’d call her nose. And — stop! Oh yes, she had a child with her, a little boy. Yes!

THE PORTER (thoughtfully looking down the aisle). Dey was three ladies had children. I didn’t notice whether dey was boys or girls, or what dey was. Didn’t have anybody with her?

MR. ROBERTS. No, no. Only the child.

THE PORTER. Well, I don’t know what you are going to do, sah. It won’t be a great while now till morning, you know. Here comes the conductor. Maybe he’ll know what to do.

[MR. ROBERTS makes some futile, inarticulate attempts to prevent The PORTER from laying the case before THE CONDUCTOR, and then stands guiltily smiling, overwhelmed with the hopeless absurdity of his position.]

THE CONDUCTOR (entering the car, and stopping before THE PORTER, and looking at MR. ROBERTS). Gentleman want a berth?

THE PORTER (grinning). Well, no, sah. He’s lookin’ for his wife.

THE CONDUCTOR (with suspicion). Is she aboard this car?

MR. ROBERTS (striving to propitiate THE CONDUCTOR by a dastardly amiability). Oh, yes, yes. There’s no mistake about the car — the Governor Marcy. She telegraphed the name just before you left Albany, so that I could find her at Boston in the morning. Ah!

THE CONDUCTOR. At Boston. [Sternly.] Then what are you trying to find her at Worcester in the middle of the night for?

MR. ROBERTS. Why — I — that is —

THE PORTER (taking compassion on MR. ROBERTS’S inability to continue). Says he wanted to surprise her.

MR. ROBERTS. Ha — yes, exactly. A little caprice, you know.

THE CONDUCTOR. Well, that may all be so. [MR. ROBERTS continues to smile in agonized helplessness against THE CONDUCTOR’S injurious tone, which becomes more and more offensively patronizing.] But I can’t do anything for you. Here are all these people asleep in their berths, and I can’t go round waking them up because you want to surprise your wife.

MR. ROBERTS. No, no; of course not. I never thought —

THE CONDUCTOR. My advice to you is to have a berth made up, and go to bed till we get to Boston, and surprise your wife by telling her what you tried to do.

MR. ROBERTS (unable to resent the patronage of this suggestion). Well, I don’t know but I will.

THE CONDUCTOR (going out). The porter will make up the berth for you.

MR. ROBERTS (to THE PORTER, who is about to pull down the upper berth over a vacant seat). Ah! Er — I — I don’t think I’ll trouble you to make it up; it’s so near morning now. Just bring me a pillow, and I’ll try to get a nap without lying down.

[He takes the vacant seat.]

THE PORTER. All right, sah.

[He goes to the end of the car and returns with a pillow.]

MR. ROBERTS. Ah — porter!

THE PORTER. Yes, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. Of course you didn’t notice; but you don’t think you did notice who was in that berth yonder?

[He indicates a certain berth.]

THE PORTER. Dat’s a gen’leman in dat berth, I think, sah.

MR. ROBERTS (astutely). There’s a bonnet hanging from the hook at the top. I’m not sure, but it looks like my wife’s bonnet.

THE PORTER (evidently shaken by this reasoning, but recovering his firmness). Yes, sah. But you can’t depend upon de ladies to hang deir bonnets on de right hook. Jes’ likely as not dat lady’s took de hook at de foot of her berth instead o’ de head. Sometimes dey takes both.

MR. ROBERTS. Ah! [After a pause.] Porter!

THE PORTER. Yes, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. You wouldn’t feel justified in looking?

THE PORTER. I couldn’t, sah; I couldn’t, indeed.

MR. ROBERTS (reaching his left hand toward THE PORTER’S, and pressing a half dollar into his instantly responsive palm). But there’s nothing to prevent my looking if I feel perfectly sure of the bonnet?

THE PORTER. N-no, sah.

MR. ROBERTS. All right.

[THE PORTER retires to the end of the car, and resumes the work of polishing the passengers’ boots. After an interval of quiet, MR. ROBERTS rises, and, looking about him with what he feels to be melodramatic stealth, approaches the suspected berth. He unloops the curtain with a trembling hand, and peers ineffectually in; he advances his head further and further into the darkened recess, and then suddenly dodges back again, with THE CALIFORNIAN hanging to his neckcloth with one hand.]

THE CALIFORNIAN (savagely). What do you want?

MR. ROBERTS (struggling and breathless). I — I — I want my wife.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Want your wife! Have I got your wife?

MR. ROBERTS. No — ah — that is — ah, excuse me — I thought you were my wife.

THE CALIFORNIAN (getting out of the berth, but at the same time keeping hold of MR. ROBERTS). Thought I was your wife! Do I look like your wife? You can’t play that on me, old man. Porter! conductor!

MR. ROBERTS (agonized). Oh, I beseech you, my dear sir, don’t — don’t! I can explain it — I can indeed. I know it has an ugly look; but if you will allow me two words — only two words —

MRS. ROBERTS (suddenly parting the curtain of her berth, and springing out into the aisle, with her hair wildly dishevelled). Edward!

MR. ROBERTS. Oh, Agnes, explain to this gentleman! [Imploringly.] Don’t you know me?

A VOICE. Make him show you the strawberry mark on his left arm.

MRS. ROBERTS. Edward! Edward! [THE CALIFORNIAN mechanically looses his grip, and they fly into each other’s embrace.] Where did you come from?

A VOICE. Centre door, left hand, one back.

THE CONDUCTOR (returning with his lantern). Hallo! What’s the matter here?

A VOICE. Train robbers! Throw up your hands! Tell the express-messenger to bring his safe.

[The passengers emerge from their berths in various deshabille and bewilderment.]

THE CONDUCTOR (to MR. ROBERTS). Have you been making all this row, waking up my passengers?

THE CALIFORNIAN. No, sir, he hasn’t. I’ve been making this row. This gentleman was peaceably looking for his wife, and I misunderstood him. You want to say anything to me?

THE CONDUCTOR (silently taking THE CALIFORNIAN’S measure with his eye, as he stands six fret in his stockings). If I did, I’d get the biggest brakeman I could find to do it for me. I’ve got nothing to say except that I think you’d better all go back to bed again.

[He goes out, and the passengers disappear one by one, leaving the ROBERTSES and THE CALIFORNIAN alone.]

THE CALIFORNIAN (to MR. ROBERTS). Stranger, I’m sorry I got you into this scrape.

MR. ROBERTS. Oh, don’t speak of it, my dear sir. I’m sure we owe you all sorts of apologies, which I shall be most happy to offer you at my house in Boston, with every needful explanation. [He takes out his card, and gives it to THE CALIFORNIAN, who looks at it, and then looks at MR. ROBERTS curiously.] There’s my address, and I’m sure we shall both be glad to have you call.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, yes indeed. [THE CALIFORNIAN parts the curtains of his berth to re-enter it.] Good-night, sir, and I assure you we shall do nothing more to disturb you — shall we, Edward?

MR. ROBERTS. No. And now, dear, I think you’d better go back to your berth.

MRS. ROBERTS. I couldn’t sleep, and I shall not go back. Is this your place? I will just rest my head on your shoulder; and we must both be perfectly quiet. You’ve no idea what a nuisance I have been making of myself. The whole car was perfectly furious at me one time, I kept talking so loud. I don’t know how I came to do it, but I suppose it was thinking about you and Willis meeting without knowing each other made me nervous, and I couldn’t be still. I woke everybody up with my talking, and some of them were quite outrageous in their remarks; but I didn’t blame them the least bit, for I should have been just as bad. That California gentleman was perfectly splendid, though. I can tell you he made them stop. We struck up quite a friendship. I told him I had a brother coming on from California, and he’s going to try to think whether he knows Willis. [Groans and inarticulate protests make themselves heard from different berths.] I declare, I’ve got to talking again! There, now, I shall stop, and they won’t hear another squeak from me the rest of the night. [She lifts her head from her husband’s shoulder.]  I wonder if baby will roll out. He does kick so! And I just sprang up and left him when I heard your voice, without putting anything to keep him in. I must go and have a look at him, or I never can settle down. No, no, don’t you go, Edward; you’ll be prying into all the wrong berths in the car, you poor thing! You stay here, and I’ll be back in half a second. I wonder which is my berth. Ah! that’s it; I know the one now. [She makes a sudden dash at a berth, and pulling open the curtains is confronted by the bearded visage of THE CALIFORNIAN.] Ah! Ow! ow! Edward! Ah! I — I beg your pardon, sir; excuse me; I didn’t know it was you. I came for my baby.

THE CALIFORNIAN (solemnly). I haven’t got any baby, ma’am.

MRS. ROBERTS. No — no — I thought you were my baby.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Perhaps I am, ma’am; I’ve lost so much sleep I could cry, anyway. Do I look like your baby?

MRS. ROBERTS. No, no, you don’t. [In distress that overcomes her mortification.] Oh, where is my baby? I left him all uncovered, and he’ll take his death of cold, even if he doesn’t roll out. Oh, Edward, Edward, help me to find baby!

MR. ROBERTS (bustling aimlessly about). Yes, yes; certainly, my dear. But don’t be alarmed; we shall find him.

THE CALIFORNIAN (getting out in his stocking feet). We shall find him, ma’am, if we have to search every berth in this car. Don’t you take on. That baby’s going to be found if he’s aboard the train, now, you bet! [He looks about and then tears open the curtains of a berth at random.] That your baby, ma’am?

MRS. ROBERTS (flying upon the infant thus exposed). Oh, baby, baby, baby!! I thought I had lost you. Um! um! um!

[She clasps him in her arms, and covers his face and neck with kisses.]

THE CALIFORNIAN (as he gets back into his berth, sotto voce). I wish I had been her baby.

MRS. ROBERTS (returning with her husband to his seat, and bringing the baby with her). There! Did you ever see such a sleeper, Edward? [In her ecstasy she abandons all control of her voice, and joyfully exclaims.] He has slept all through this excitement, without a wink.

A solemn Voice from one of the berths. I envy him.

[A laugh follows, in which all the passengers join.]

MRS. ROBERTS (in a hoarse whisper, breaking a little with laughter). Oh, my goodness! there I went again. But how funny! I assure you, Edward, that if their remarks had not been about me, I could have really quite enjoyed some of them. I wish there had been somebody here to take them down. And I hope I shall see some of the speakers in the morning before — Edward, I’ve got an idea!

MR. ROBERTS (endeavoring to teach his wife by example to lower her voice, which has risen again). What — what is it, my dear?

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, don’t you see? How perfectly ridiculous it was of me not to think of it before! though I did think of it once, and hadn’t the courage to insist upon it. But of course it is; and it accounts for his being so polite and kind to me through all, and it’s the only thing that can. Yes, yes, it must be.

MR. ROBERTS (mystified). What?

MRS. ROBERTS. Willis.

MR. ROBERTS. Who?

MRS. ROBERTS. This Californian.

MR. ROBERTS. Oh!

MRS. ROBERTS. No stranger could have been so patient and — and — attentive; and I know that he recognized me from the first, and he’s just kept it up for a joke, so as to surprise us and have a good laugh at us when we get to Boston. Of course it’s Willis.

MR. ROBERTS (doubtfully). Do you think so, my dear?

MRS. ROBERTS. I know it. Didn’t you notice how he looked at your card? And I want you to go at once and speak to him, and turn the tables on him.

MR. ROBERTS. I — I’d rather not, my dear.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, Edward, what can you mean?

MR. ROBERTS. He’s very violent. Suppose it shouldn’t be Willis?

MRS. ROBERTS. Nonsense! It is Willis. Come, let’s both go and just tax him with it. He can’t deny it, after all he’s done for me. [She pulls her reluctant husband toward THE CALIFORNIAN’S berth, and they each draw a curtain.] Willis!

THE CALIFORNIAN (with plaintive endurance). Well, ma’am?

MRS. ROBERTS (triumphantly). There! I knew it was you all along. How could you play such a joke on me?

THE CALIFORNIAN. I didn’t know there’d been any joke; but I suppose there must have been, if you say so. Who am I now, ma’am — your husband, or your baby, or your husband’s wife, or —

MRS. ROBERTS. How funny you are! You know you’re Willis Campbell, my only brother. Now don’t try to keep it up any longer, Willis.

[Voices from various berths. “Give us a rest, Willis!” “Joke’s too thin, Willis!” “You’re played out, Willis!” “Own up, old fellow — own up!”]

THE CALIFORNIAN (issuing from his berth, and walking up and down the aisle, as before, till quiet is restored). I haven’t got any sister, and my name ain’t Willis, and it ain’t Campbell. I’m very sorry, because I’d like to oblige you any way I could.

MRS. ROBERTS (in deep mortification). It’s I who ought to apologize, and I do most humbly. I don’t know what to say; but when I got to thinking about it, and how kind you had been to me, and how sweet you had been under all my — interruptions, I felt perfectly sure that you couldn’t be a mere stranger, and then the idea struck me that you must be my brother in disguise; and I was so certain of it that I couldn’t help just letting you know that we’d found you out, and —

MR. ROBERTS (offering a belated and feeble moral support). Yes.

MRS. ROBERTS (promptly turning upon him). And you ought to have kept me from making such a simpleton of myself, Edward.

THE CALIFORNIAN (soothingly). Well, ma’am, that ain’t always so easy. A man may mean well, and yet not be able to carry out his intentions. But it’s all right. And I reckon we’d better try to quiet down again, and get what rest we can.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, yes, certainly; and I will try — oh, I will try not to disturb you again. And if there’s anything we can do in reparation after we reach Boston, we shall be so glad to do it!

[They bow themselves away, and return to their seat, while THE CALIFORNIAN re-enters his berth.]

III.

The train stops at Framingham, and THE PORTER comes in with a passenger whom he shows to the seat opposite MR. and MRS. ROBERTS.

THE PORTER. You can sit here, sah. We’ll be in in about an hour now. Hang up your bag for you, sah?

THE PASSENGER. No, leave it on the seat here.

[THE PORTER goes out, and the ROBERTSES maintain a dejected silence. The bottom of the bag, thrown carelessly on the seat, is toward the ROBERTSES, who regard it listlessly.]

MRS. ROBERTS (suddenly clutching her husband’s arm, and hissing in his ear). See! [She points to the white lettering on the bag, where the name “Willis Campbell, San Francisco,” is distinctly legible.] But it can’t be; it must be some other Campbell. I can’t risk it.

MR. ROBERTS. But there’s the name. It would be very strange if there were two people from San Francisco of exactly the same name. I will speak.

MRS. ROBERTS (as wildly as one can in whisper). No, no, I can’t let you. We’ve made ourselves the laughing-stock of the whole car already with our mistakes, and I can’t go on. I would rather perish than ask him. You don’t suppose it could be? No, it couldn’t. There may be twenty Willis Campbells in San Francisco, and there probably are. Do you think he looks like me! He has a straight nose; but you can’t tell anything about the lower part of his face, the beard covers it so; and I can’t make out the color of his eyes by this light. But of course it’s all nonsense. Still if it should be! It would be very stupid of us to ride all the way from Framingham to Boston with that name staring one in the eyes. I wish he would turn it away. If it really turned out to be Willis, he would think we were awfully stiff and cold. But I can’t help it; I can’t go attacking every stranger I see, and accusing him of being my brother. No, no, I can’t, and I won’t, and that’s all about it. [She leans forward and addresses the stranger with sudden sweetness.] Excuse me, sir, but I am very much interested by the name on your bag. Not that I think you are even acquainted with him, and there are probably a great many of them there; but your coming from the same city and all does seem a little queer, and I hope you won’t think me intrusive in speaking to you, because if you should happen, by the thousandth of a chance, to be the right one, I should be so happy!

CAMPBELL. The right what, madam?

MRS. ROBERTS. The right Willis Campbell.

CAMPBELL. I hope I’m not the wrong one; though after a week’s pull on the railroad it’s pretty hard for a man to tell which Willis Campbell he is. May I ask if your Willis Campbell had friends in Boston?

MRS. ROBERTS (eagerly). He had a sister and a brother-in-law and a nephew.

CAMPBELL. Name of Roberts?

MRS. ROBERTS. Every one.

CAMPBELL. Then you’re —

MRS. ROBERTS (ecstatically). Agnes!

CAMPBELL. And he’s —

MRS. ROBERTS. Mr. Roberts!

CAMPBELL. And the baby’s —

MRS. ROBERTS. Asleep!

CAMPBELL. Then I am the right one.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, Willis! Willis! Willis! To think of our meeting in this way! [She kisses and embraces him, while MR. ROBERTS shakes one of his hands which he finds disengaged.] How in the world did it happen?

CAMPBELL. Ah, I found myself a little ahead of time, and I stopped off with an old friend of mine at Framingham; I didn’t want to disappoint you when you came to meet this train, or get you up last night at midnight.

MRS. ROBERTS. And I was in Albany, and I’ve been moving heaven and earth to get home before you arrived; and Edward came aboard at Worcester to surprise me, and — Oh, you’ve never seen the baby! I’ll run right and get him this instant, just as he is, and bring him. Edward, you be explaining to Willis — Oh, my goodness! [Looking wildly about.] I don’t remember the berth, and I shall be sure to wake up that poor California gentleman again. What shall I do?

CAMPBELL. What California gentleman?

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, somebody we’ve been stirring up the whole blessed night. First I took him for baby, and then Edward took him for me, and then I took him for baby again, and then we both took him for you.

CAMPBELL. Did he look like any of us?

MRS. ROBERTS. Like us? He’s eight feet tall, if he’s an inch, in his stockings — and he’s always in them — and he has a long black beard and mustaches, and he’s very lanky, and stoops over a good deal; but he’s just as lovely as he can be and live, and he’s been as kind and patient as twenty Jobs.

CAMPBELL. Speaks in a sort of soft, slow grind?

MRS. ROBERTS. Yes.

CAMPBELL. Gentle and deferential to ladies?

MRS. ROBERTS. As pie.

CAMPBELL. It’s Tom Goodall. I’ll have him out of there in half a second. I want you to take him home with you, Agnes. He’s the best fellow in the world. Which is his berth?

MRS. ROBERTS. Don’t ask me, Willis. But if you’d go for baby, you’ll be sure to find him.

MR. ROBERTS (timidly indicating a berth). I think that’s the one.

CAMPBELL (plunging at it, and pulling the curtains open). You old Tom Goodall!

THE CALIFORNIAN (appearing). I ain’t any Tom Goodall. My name’s Abram Sawyer.

CAMPBELL (falling back). Well, sir, you’re right. I’m awfully sorry to disturb you; but, from my sister’s description here, I felt certain you must be my old friend Tom Goodall.

THE CALIFORNIAN. I ain’t surprised at it. I’m only surprised I ain’t Tom Goodall. I’ve been a baby twice, and I’ve been a man’s wife once, and once I’ve been a long-lost brother.

CAMPBELL (laughing). Oh, they’ve found him. I’m the long-lost brother.

THE CALIFORNIAN (sleepily). Has she found the other one?

CAMPBELL. Yes; all right, I believe.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Has he found what he wanted?

CAMPBELL. Yes; we’re all together here. [THE CALIFORNIAN makes a movement to get into bed again.] Oh, don’t! You’d better make a night of it now. It’s almost morning anyway. We want you to go home with us, and Mrs. Roberts will give you a bed at her house, and let you sleep a week.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Well, I reckon you’re right, stranger. I seem to be in the hands of Providence tonight anyhow. [He pulls on his boots and coat, and takes his seat beside CAMPBELL.] I reckon there ain’t any use in fighting against Providence.

MRS. ROBERTS (briskly, as if she had often tried it and failed). Oh, not the least in the world. I’m sure it was all intended; and if you had turned out to be Willis at last, I should be certain of it. What surprises me is that you shouldn’t turn out to be anybody, after all.

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, it is kind of curious. But I couldn’t help it. I did my best.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, don’t speak of it. We are the ones who ought to apologize. But if you only had been somebody, it would have been such a good joke! We could always have had such a laugh over it, don’t you see?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma’am, it would have been funny. But I hope you’ve enjoyed it as it is.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, very much, thanks to you. Only I can’t seem to get reconciled to your not being anybody, after all. You must at least be some one we’ve heard about, don’t you think? It’s so strange that you and Willis never even met. Don’t you think you have some acquaintances in common?

CAMPBELL. Look here, Agnes, do you always shout at the top of your voice in this way when you converse in a sleeping-car?

MRS. ROBERTS. Was I talking loud again? Well, you can’t help it if you want to make people hear you.

CAMPBELL. But there must be a lot of them who don’t want to hear you. I wonder that the passengers who are not blood-relations don’t throw things at you — boots and hand-bags and language.

MRS. ROBERTS. Why, that’s what they’ve been doing — language, at least — and I’m only surprised they’re not doing it now.

THE CALIFORNIAN (rising). They’d better not, ma’am.

[He patrols the car from end to end, and quells some rising murmurs, halting at the rebellious berths as he passes.]

MRS. ROBERTS (enraptured by his companionship). Oh, he must be some connection. [She glances through the window.] I do believe that was Newton, or Newtonville, or West Newton, or Newton Centre. I must run and wake up baby, and get him dressed. I shan’t want to wait an instant after we get in. Why, we’re slowing up! Why, I do believe we’re there! Edward, we’re there! Only fancy being there already!

MR. ROBERTS. Yes, my dear. Only we’re not quite there yet. Hadn’t we better call your aunt Mary?

MRS. ROBERTS. I’d forgotten her.

CAMPBELL. Is Aunt Mary with you?

MRS. ROBERTS. To be sure she is. Didn’t I tell you? She came on expressly to meet you.

CAMPBELL (starting up impetuously). Which berth is she in?

MRS. ROBERTS. Right over baby.

CAMPBELL. And which berth is baby in?

MRS. ROBERTS (distractedly). Why, that’s just what I can’t tell. It was bad enough when they were all filled up, but now since the people have begun to come out of them, and some of them are made into seats I can’t tell.

THE CALIFORNIAN. I’ll look for you, ma’am. I should like to wake up all the wrong passengers on this car. I’d take a pleasure in it. If you could make sure of any berth that ain’t the one, I’ll begin on that.

MRS. ROBERTS. I can’t even be sure of the wrong one. No, no; you mustn’t — [THE CALIFORNIAN moves away, and pauses in front of one of the berths, looking back inquiringly at MRS. ROBERTS.] Oh, don’t ask me! I can’t tell. [To CAMPBELL.] Isn’t he amusing? So like all those Californians that one reads of — so chivalrous and so humorous!

AUNT MARY (thrusting her head from the curtains of the berth before which THE CALIFORNIAN is standing). Go along with you! What do you want?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Aunt Mary.

AUNT MARY. Go away. Aunt Mary, indeed!

MRS. ROBERTS (running toward her, followed by CAMPBELL and MR. ROBERTS). Why, Aunt Mary, it is you! And here’s Willis, and here’s Edward.

AUNT MARY. Nonsense! How did they get aboard?

MRS. ROBERTS. Edward came on at Worcester and Willis at Framingham, to surprise me.

AUNT MARY. And a very silly performance. Let them wait till I’m dressed, and then I’ll talk to them. Send for the porter. [She withdraws her head behind the curtain, and then thrusts it out again.] And who, pray, may this be?

[She indicates THE CALIFORNIAN.]

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh, a friend of ours from California, who’s been so kind to us all night, and who’s going home with us.

AUNT MARY. Another ridiculous surprise, I suppose. But he shall not surprise me. Young man, isn’t your name Sawyer?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Yes, ma’am.

AUNT MARY. Abram?

THE CALIFORNIAN. Abram Sawyer. You’re right there, ma’am.

MRS. ROBERTS. Oh! oh! I knew it! I knew that he must be somebody belonging to us. Oh, thank you, aunty, for thinking —

AUNT MARY. Don’t be absurd, Agnes. Then you’re my —

A VOICE from one of the berths. Lost step-son. Found! found at last!

[THE CALIFORNIAN looks vainly round in an endeavor to identify the speaker, and then turns again to AUNT MARY.]

AUNT MARY. Weren’t your parents from Bath?

THE CALIFORNIAN (eagerly). Both of ‘em, ma’am — both of ‘em.

THE VOICE. O my prophetic soul, my uncle!

AUNT MARY. Then you’re my old friend Kate Harris’s daughter?

THE CALIFORNIAN. I might be her son, ma’am; but my mother’s name was Susan Wakeman.

AUNT MARY (in sharp disgust). Call the porter, please.

[She withdraws her head and pulls her curtains together; the rest look blankly at one another.]

CAMPBELL. Another failure, and just when we thought we were sure of you. I don’t know what we shall do about you, Mr. Sawyer.

THE VOICE. Adopt him.

CAMPBELL. That’s a good idea. We will adopt you. You shall be our adoptive —

THE VOICE. Baby boy.

ANOTHER VOICE. Wife.

A THIRD VOICE. Brother.

A FOURTH VOICE. Early friend.

A FIFTH VOICE. Kate Harris’s daughter.

CAMPBELL (laying his hand on THE CALIFORNIAN’S shoulder, and breaking into a laugh). Don’t mind them. They don’t mean anything. It’s just their way. You come home with my sister, and spend Christmas, and let us devote the rest of our lives to making your declining years happy.

VOICES. “Good for you, Willis!” “We’ll all come!” “No ceremony!” “Small and early!”

CAMPBELL (looking round). We appear to have fallen in with a party of dry-goods drummers. It makes a gentleman feel like an intruder. [The train stops; he looks out of the window.] We’ve arrived. Come, Agnes; come, Roberts; come, Mr. Sawyer — let’s be going.

[They gather up their several wraps and bags, and move with great dignity toward the door.]

AUNT MARY (putting out her head). Agnes! If you must forget your aunt, at least remember your child.

MRS. ROBERTS (running back in an agony of remorse). Oh, baby, did I forget you?

CAMPBELL. Oh, aunty, did she forget you? [He runs back, and extends his arms to his aunt.] Let me help you down, Aunt Mary.

AUNT MARY. Nonsense, Willis. Send the porter.

CAMPBELL (turning round and confronting THE PORTER). He was here upon instinct. Shall he fetch a step-ladder?

AUNT MARY. He will know what to do. Go away, Willis; go away with that child, Agnes. If I should happen to fall on you — [They retreat; the curtain drops, and her voice is heard behind it addressing THE PORTER.] Give me your hand; now your back; now your knee. So! And very well done. Thanks.

THE MOUSE-TRAP AND OTHER FARCES

CONTENTS

THE GARROTERS.

PART FIRST.

I. MRS. ROBERTS; THEN MR. ROBERTS.

II. MRS. CRASHAW; MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS.

III. MR. CAMPBELL, MRS. CRASHAW, MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS.

IV. MR. BEMIS, MR. CAMPBELL, MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS.

PART SECOND.

PART THIRD.

I. MRS. ROBERTS, DR. LAWTON, MRS. CRASHAW, MR. BEMIS, YOUNG MR. AND MRS. BEMIS.

II. MR. ROBERTS, MR. CAMPBELL, AND THE OTHERS.

FIVE O’CLOCK TEA

I. MRS. SOMERS; MR. WILLIS CAMPBELL

II. MR. BEMIS; MRS. SOMERS; MR. WILLIS CAMPBELL

III. MR. and MRS. ROBERTS and the OTHERS

IV. MRS. CURWEN and the OTHERS

V DR. LAWTON, MR. and MRS. MILLER, YOUNG MR. and MRS. BEMIS, and the OTHERS

VI. MRS. CRASHAW and the OTHERS

VII. MRS. CANFIELD, MISS BAYLY, MRS. WHARTON, and the OTHERS

VIII. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL

IX. MRS. CURWEN; MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL

X. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL

XI. MR. CAMPBELL and the OTHERS

XII. MRS. SOMERS and the OTHERS

THE END

THE MOUSE -TRAP.

I. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL.

II. JANE; MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL; THEN MRS. MILLER; MRS. CURWEN; MRS. BEMIS.

III. MRS. ROBERTS AND THE OTHERS.

IV. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL.

A LIKELY STORY

I. MR. AND MRS. WILLIS CAMPBELL

II. MR. WELLING; MR. CAMPBELL

III. MRS. CAMPBELL; MR. WELLING; MR. CAMPBELL

IV. JANE; MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

V. MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

VI. JANE; MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

VII. MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

VIII. MISS RICE, MISS GREENWAY, and the OTHERS

IX. MISS GREENWAY; MR. WELLING

X. MISS RICE; then MR. and MRS. CAMPBELL, and the OTHERS

The original frontispiece

THE GARROTERS.

PART FIRST.

I. MRS. ROBERTS; THEN MR. ROBERTS.

AT the window of her apartment in Hotel Bellingham, Mrs. Roberts stands looking out into the early nightfall. A heavy snow is driving without, and from time to time the rush of the wind and the sweep of the flakes against the panes are heard. At the sound of hurried steps in the anteroom, Mrs. Roberts turns from the window, and runs to the portière, through which she puts her head.

Mrs. Roberts: “Is that you, Edward? So dark here! We ought really to keep the gas turned up all the time.”

Mr. Roberts, in a muffled voice, from without: “Yes, it’s I.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, hurry in to the fire, do! Ugh, what a storm! Do you suppose anybody will come? You must be half frozen, you poor thing! Come quick, or you’ll certainly perish!” She flies from the portière to the fire burning on the hearth, pokes it, flings on a log, jumps back, brushes from her dress with a light shriek the sparks driven out upon it, and continues talking incessantly in a voice lifted for her husband to hear in the anteroom. “If I’d dreamed it was any such storm as this, I should never have let you go out in it in the world. It wasn’t at all necessary to have the flowers. I could have got on perfectly well, and I believe now the table would look better without them. The chrysanthemums would have been quite enough; and I know you’ve taken more cold. I could tell it by your voice as soon as you spoke; and just as quick as they’re gone to-night I’m going to have you bathe your feet in mustard and hot water, and take eight of aconite, and go straight to bed. And I don’t want you to eat very much at dinner, dear, and you must be sure not to drink any coffee, or the aconite won’t be of the least use.” She turns and encounters her husband, who enters through the portière, his face pale, his eyes wild, his white necktie pulled out of knot, And his shirt front rumpled. “Why, Edward, what in the world is the matter? What has happened?”

Roberts, sinking into a chair: “Get me a glass of water, Agnes — wine — whiskey — brandy—”

Mrs. Roberts, bustling wildly about: “Yes, yes. But what — Bella! Bridget! Maggy! — Oh, I’ll go for it myself, and I won’t stop to listen! Only — only don’t die!” While Roberts remains with his eyes shut, and his head sunk on his breast in token of extreme exhaustion, she disappears and reappears through the door leading to her chamber, and then through the portière cutting off the dining-room. She finally descends upon her husband with a flagon of cologne in one hand, a small decanter of brandy in the other, and a wineglass held in the hollow of her arm against her breast. She contrives to set the glass down on the mantle and fill it from the flagon, then she turns with the decanter in her hand, and while she presses the glass to her husband’s lips, begins to pour the brandy on his head. “Here! this will revive you, and it’ll refresh you to have this cologne on your head.”

Roberts, rejecting a mouthful of the cologne with a furious sputter, and springing to his feet: “Why, you’ve given me the cologne to drink, Agnes! What are you about? Do you want to poison me? Isn’t it enough to be robbed at six o’clock on the Common, without having your head soaked in brandy, and your whole system scented up like a barber’s shop, when you get home?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Robbed?” She drops the wineglass, puts the decanter down on the hearth, and carefully bestowing the flagon of cologne in the wood-box, abandons herself to justice: “Then let them come for me at once, Edward! If I could have the heart to send you out in such a night as this for a few wretched rose-buds, I’m quite equal to poisoning you. Oh, Edward, who robbed you?”

Roberts. “That’s what I don’t know.” He continues to wipe his head with his handkerchief, and to sputter a little from time to time. “All I know is that when I got — phew! — to that dark spot by the Frog Pond, just by — phew! — that little group of — phew! — evergreens, you know — phew!—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, yes; go on! I can bear it, Edward.”

Roberts: “ — a man brushed heavily against me, and then hurried on in the other direction. I had unbuttoned my coat to look at my watch under the lamp-post, and after he struck against me I clapped my hand to my waistcoat, and — phew!—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Waistcoat! Yes!”

Roberts: “ — found my watch gone.”

Mrs. Roberts: “What! Your watch? The watch Willis gave you? Made out of the gold that he mined himself when he first went out to California? Don’t ask me to believe it, Edward! But I’m only too glad that you escaped with your life. Let them have the watch and welcome. Oh, my dear, dear husband!” She approaches him with extended arms, and then suddenly arrests herself. “But you’ve got it on!”

Roberts, with as much returning dignity as can comport with his dishevelled appearance: “Yes; I took it from him.” At his wife’s speechless astonishment: “I went after him and took it from him.” He sits down, and continues with resolute calm, while his wife remains standing before him motionless: “Agnes, I don’t know how I came to do it. I wouldn’t have believed I could do it. I’ve never thought that I had much courage — physical courage; but when I felt my watch was gone, a sort of frenzy came over me. I wasn’t hurt; and for the first time in my life I realized what an abominable outrage theft was. The thought that at six o’clock in the evening, in the very heart of a great city like Boston, an inoffensive citizen could be assaulted and robbed, made me furious. I didn’t call out. I simply buttoned my coat tight round me and turned and ran after the fellow.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Edward!”

Roberts: “Yes, I did. He hadn’t got half a dozen rods away — it all took place in a flash — and I could easily run him down. He was considerably larger than I—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh!”

Roberts: “ — and he looked young and very athletic; but these things didn’t seem to make any impression on me.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, I wonder that you live to tell the tale, Edward!”

Roberts: “Well, I wonder a little at myself. I don’t set up for a great deal of—”

Mrs. Roberts: “But I always knew you had it! Go on. Oh, when I tell Willis of this! Had the robber any accomplices? Were there many of them?”

Roberts: “I only saw one. And I saw that my only chance was to take him at a disadvantage. I sprang upon him, and pulled him over on his back. I merely said, ‘ I’ll trouble you for that watch of mine, if you please,’ jerked open his coat, snatched the watch from his pocket — I broke the chain, I see — and then left him and ran again. He didn’t make the slightest resistance, nor utter a word. Of course it wouldn’t do for him to make any noise about it, and I dare say he was glad to get off so easily.” With affected nonchalance: “I’m pretty badly rumpled, I see. He fell against me, and a scuffle like that doesn’t improve one’s appearance.”

Mrs. Roberts, very solemnly: “Edward! I don’t know what to say! Of course it makes my blood run cold to realize what you have been through, and to think what might have happened; but I think you behaved splendidly. Why, I never heard of such perfect heroism! You needn’t tell me that he made no resistance. There was a deadly struggle — your necktie and everything about you shows it. And you needn’t think there was only one of them—”

Roberts, modestly: “I don’t believe there was more.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Nonsense! There are always two! I’ve read the accounts of those garrotings. And to think you not only got out of their clutches alive, but got your property back — Willis’s watch! Oh, what will Willis say? But I know how proud of you he’ll be. Oh, I wish I could scream it from the house-tops. Why didn’t you call the police?”

Roberts: “I didn’t think — I hadn’t time to think.”

Mrs. Roberts: “No matter. I’m glad you have all the glory of it. I don’t believe you half realize what you’ve been through now. And perhaps this was the robbers’ first attempt, and it will be a lesson to them. Oh yes! I’m glad you let them escape, Edward. They may have families. If every one behaved as you’ve done, there would soon be an end of garroting. But, oh! I can’t bear to think of the danger you’ve run. And I want you to promise me never, never to undertake such a thing again!”

Roberts: “Well, I don’t know—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, yes; you must! Suppose you had got killed in that awful struggle with those reckless wretches tugging to get away from you! Think of the children! Why, you might have burst a blood-vessel! Will you promise, Edward? Promise this instant, on your bended knees, just as if you were in a court of justice!” Mrs. Roberts’s excitement mounts, and she flings herself at her husband’s feet, and pulls his face down to hers with the arm she has thrown about his neck. “Will you promise?”

II. MRS. CRASHAW; MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS.

Mrs. Crashaw, entering unobserved: “Promise you what, Agnes? The man doesn’t smoke now. What more can you ask?” She starts back from the spectacle of Roberts’s disordered dress. “Why, what’s happened to you, Edward?”

Mrs. Roberts, springing to her feet: “Oh, you may well ask that, Aunt Mary! Happened? You ought to fall down and worship him! And you will when you know what he’s been through. He’s been robbed!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Robbed? What nonsense! Who robbed him? Where was he robbed?”

Mrs. Roberts: “He was attacked by two garroters—”

Roberts: “No, no—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Don’t speak, Edward! I know there were two. On the Common. Not half an hour ago. As he was going to get me some rosebuds. In the midst of this terrible storm.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Is this true, Edward?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Don’t answer, Edward! One of the band threw his arm round Edward’s neck — so.”

She illustrates by garroting Mrs. Crashaw, who disengages herself with difficulty.

Mrs. Crashaw: “Mercy, child! What are you doing to my lace?”

Mrs. Roberts: “And the other one snatched his watch, and ran as fast as he could.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Willis’s watch? Why, he’s got it on.”

Mrs. Roberts, with proud delight: “Exactly what I said when he told me.” Then, very solemnly: “And do you know why he’s got it on?— ‘Sh, Edward! I will tell! Because he ran after them and took it back again.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Why, they might have killed him!” —

Mrs. Roberts: “Of course they might. But Edward didn’t care. The idea of being robbed at six o’clock on the Common made him so furious that he scorned to cry out for help, or call the police, or anything; but he just ran after them—”

Roberts: “Agnes! Agnes! There was only one.” Mrs. Roberts: “Nonsense, Edward! How could you tell, so excited as you were? — And caught hold of the largest of the wretches — a perfect young giant—”

Roberts: “No, no; not a giant, my dear.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, he was young, anyway! — And flung him on the ground.” She advances upon Mrs. Crashaw in her enthusiasm.

Mrs. Crashaw: “Don’t you fling me on the ground, Agnes! I won’t have it.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And tore his coat open, while all the rest were tugging at him, and snatched his watch, and then — and then just walked coolly away.”

Roberts: “No, my dear; I ran as fast as I could.” Mrs. Roberts: “Well, ran. It’s quite the same thing, and I’m just as proud of you as if you had walked. Of course you were not going to throw your life away.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I think he did a very silly thing in going after them at all.”

Roberts: “Why, of course, if I’d thought twice about it, I shouldn’t have done it.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Of course you wouldn’t, dear! And that’s what I want him to promise, Aunt Mary: never to do it again, no matter how much he’s provoked. I want him to promise it right here in your presence, Aunt Mary!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I think it’s much more important he should put on another collar and — shirt, if he’s going to see company.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes; go right off at once, Edward. How you do think of things, Aunt Mary! I really suppose I should have gone on all night and never noticed his looks. Run, Edward, and do it, dear. But — kiss me first! Oh, it don’t seem as if you could be alive and well after it all! Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

Roberts, embracing her: “No; I’m all right.” Mrs. Roberts: “And you’re not injured internally? Sometimes they’re injured internally — aren’t they, Aunt Mary? — and it doesn’t show till months afterwards. Are you sure?”

Roberts, making a cursory examination of his ribs with his hands: “Yes, I think so.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And you don’t feel any bad effects from the cologne now? Just think, Aunt Mary, I gave him cologne to drink, and poured the brandy on his head, when he came in! But I was determined to keep calm, whatever I did. And if I’ve poisoned him I’m quite willing to die for it — oh, quite! I would gladly take the blame of it before the whole world.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Well, for pity’s sake, let the man go and make himself decent. There’s your bell now.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, do go, Edward. But — kiss me—”

Mrs. Crashaw: “He did kiss you, Agnes. Don’t be a simpleton!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Did he? Well, kiss me again, then, Edward. And now do go, dear. M-m-m-m.” The inarticulate endearments represented by these signs terminate in a wild embrace, protracted halfway across the room, in the height of which Mr. Willis Campbell enters.

III. MR. CAMPBELL, MRS. CRASHAW, MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS.

Willis, pausing in contemplation: “Hello! What’s the matter? What’s she trying to get out of you, Roberts? Don’t you do it, anyway, old fellow.”

Mrs. Roberts, in an ecstasy of satisfaction: “Willis! Oh, you’ve come in time to see him just as he is. Look at him, Willis!” In the excess of her emotion she twitches her husband about, and with his arm fast in her clutch, presents him in the disadvantageous effect of having just been taken into custody. Under these circumstances Roberts’s attempt at an expression of diffident heroism fails; he looks sneaking, he looks guilty, and his eyes fall under the astonished regard of his brother-in-law.

Willis: “What’s the matter with him? What’s he been doing?”

Mrs. Roberts: “‘Sh, Edward! — What’s he been doing? What does he look as if he had been doing?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agnes—”

Willis: “He looks as if he had been signing the pledge. And he — smells like it.”

Mrs. Roberts: “For shame, Willis! I should think you’d sink through the floor. Edward, not a word! I am ashamed of him, if he is my brother.”

Willis: “Why, what in the world’s up, Agnes?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Up? He’s been robbed! — robbed on the Common, not five minutes ago! A whole gang of garroters surrounded him under the Old Elm — or just where it used to be — and took his watch away! And he ran after them, and knocked the largest of the gang down, and took it back again. He wasn’t hurt, but we’re afraid he’s been injured internally; he may be bleeding internally now — Oh, do you think he is, Willis? Don’t you think we ought to send for a physician? — That, and the cologne I gave him to drink. It’s the brandy I poured on his head makes him smell so. And he all so exhausted he couldn’t speak, and I didn’t know what I was doing, either; but he’s promised — oh yes, he’s promised! — never, never to do it again.” She again flings her arms about her husband, and then turns proudly to her brother.

Willis: “Do you know what it means, Aunt Mary?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Not in the least! But I’ve no doubt that Edward can explain, after he’s changed his linen—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh yes, do go, Edward! Not but what I should be proud and happy to have you appear just as you are before the whole world, if it was only to put Willis down with his jokes about your absent-mindedness, and his boasts about those California desperadoes of his.”

Roberts: “Come, come, Agnes! I must protest against your—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, I know it doesn’t become me to praise your courage, darling! But I should like to know what Willis would have done, with all his California experience, if a garroter had taken his watch?”

Willis: a I should have let him keep it, and pay five dollars a quarter himself for getting it cleaned and spoiled. Anybody but a literary man would. How many of them were there, Roberts?”

Roberts: “I only saw one.”

Mrs. Roberts: “But of course there were more. How could he tell, in the dark and excitement? And the one he did see was a perfect giant; so you can imagine what the rest must have been like.”

Willis: “Did you really knock him down?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Knock him down? Of course he did.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agnes, will you hold your tongue, and let the men alone?”

Mrs. Roberts, whimpering: “I can’t, Aunt Mary. And you couldn’t, if it was yours.”

Roberts: “I pulled him over backwards.”

Mrs. Roberts: “There, Willis!”

Willis: “And grabbed your watch from him?” Roberts: “I was in quite a frenzy; I really hardly knew what I was doing—”

Mrs. Roberts: “And he didn’t call for the police, or anything—” —

Willis: “Ah, that showed presence of mind! He knew it wouldn’t have been any use.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And when he had got his watch away from them, he just let them go, because they had families dependent on them.”

Willis: “I should have let them go in the first place, but you behaved handsomely in the end, Roberts; there’s no denying that. And when you came in she gave you cologne to drink, and poured brandy on your head. It must have revived you. I should think it would wake the dead.”

Mrs. Roberts: “I was all excitement, Willis—” Willis: “No, I should think from the fact that you had set the decanter here on the hearth, and put your cologne into the wood-box, you were perfectly calm, Agnes.” He takes them up and hands them to her. “Quite as calm as usual.” The doorbell rings.

Mrs. Crashaw: “Willis, will you let that ridiculous man go away and make himself presentable before people begin to come?” The bell rings violently, peal upon peal.

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, my goodness, what’s that? It’s the garroters — I know it is; and we shall all be murdered in our beds!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “What in the world can it—” Willis: “Why don’t your girl answer the bell, Agnes? Or I’ll go myself.” The bell rings violently again.

Mrs. Roberts: “No, Willis, you sha’n’t! Don’t leave me, Edward! Aunt Mary! — Oh, if we must die, let us all die together! Oh, my poor children! Ugh! What’s that?” The servant-maid opens the outer door, and uttering a shriek, rushes in through the drawing-room portière.

Bella, the Maid: “Oh, my goodness! Mrs. Roberts, it’s Mr. Bemis!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Which Mr. Bemis?”

Roberts: “What’s the matter with him?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Why doesn’t she show him in?” Willis: “Has he been garroting somebody too?”

IV. MR. BEMIS, MR. CAMPBELL, MR. AND MRS. ROBERTS.

Bemis, appearing through the portière: “I — I beg your pardon, Mrs. Roberts. I oughtn’t to present myself in this state — I — But I thought I’d better stop on my way home and report, so that my son needn’t be alarmed at my absence when he comes. I—” He stops, exhausted, and regards the others with a wild stare, while they stand taking note of his disordered coat, his torn vest, and his tumbled hat. “I’ve just been robbed—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Robbed? Why, Edward has been robbed too.”

Remis: “ — coming through the Common—” Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, Edward was coming through the Common.”

Remis: “ — of my watch—”

Mrs. Roberts, in rapturous admiration of the coincidence: “Oh, and it was Edward’s watch they took!”

Willis: “It’s a parallel case, Agnes. Pour him out a glass of cologne to drink, and rub his head with brandy. And you might let him sit down and rest while you’re enjoying the excitement.”

Mrs. Roberts, in hospitable remorse: “Oh, what am I thinking of! Here, Edward — or no, you’re too weak, you mustn’t. Willis, you help me to help him to the sofa.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I think you’d better help him off with his overcoat and his arctics.” To the maid: “Here, Bella, if you haven’t quite taken leave of your wits, undo his shoes.”

Roberts: “I’ll help him off with his coat—” Remis: “Careful! careful! I may be injured internally.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, if you only were, Mr. Bemis, perhaps I could persuade Edward that he was too: I know he is. Edward, don’t exert yourself! Aunt Mary, will you stop him, or do you all wish to see me go distracted here before your eyes?”

Willis, examining the overcoat which Roberts has removed: “Well, you won’t have much trouble buttoning and unbuttoning this coat for the present.” Remis: “They tore it open, and tore my watch from my vest pocket—”

Willis, looking at the vest: “I see. Pretty lively work. Were there many of them?”

Remis: “There must have been two, at least—” Mrs. Roberts: “There were half a dozen in the gang that attacked Edward.”

Remis: “One of them pulled me violently over on my back—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Edward’s put his arm round his neck and choked him.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agnes!”

Mrs. Roberts: “I know he did, Aunt Mary.” Bemis: “And the other tore my watch out of my pocket.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Edward’s—”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agnes, I’m thoroughly ashamed of you. Will you stop interrupting?”

Bemis: “And left me lying in the snow.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And then he ran after them, and snatched his watch away again in spite of them all; and he didn’t call for the police, or anything, because it was their first offence, and he couldn’t bear to think of their suffering families.”

Bemis, with a stare of profound astonishment: “Who?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Edward. Didn’t I say Edward, all the time?”

Bemis: “I thought you meant me. I didn’t think of pursuing them; but you may be very sure that if there had been a policeman within call — of course there wasn’t one within cannon-shot — I should have handed the scoundrels over without the slightest remorse.”

Roberts: “Oh!” He sinks into a chair with a slight groan.

Willis: “What is it?”

Roberts: “‘Sh! Don’t say anything. But — stay here. I want to speak with you, Willis.”

Bemis, with mounting wrath: “I should not have hesitated an instant to give the rascal in charge, no matter who was dependent upon him — no matter if he were my dearest friend, my own brother.”

Roberts, under his breath: “Gracious powers!” Remis: “And while I am very sorry to disagree with Mr. Roberts, I can’t help feeling that he made a great mistake in allowing the ruffians to escape.” Mrs. Crashaw, with severity: “I think you are quite right, Mr. Bemis.”

Remis: “Probably it was the same gang attacked us both. After escaping from Mr. Roberts they fell upon me.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I haven’t a doubt of it.” Roberts, sotto voce to his brother-in-law: “I think I’ll ask you to go with me to my room, Willis. Don’t alarm Agnes, please. I — I feel quite faint.” Mrs. Roberts, crestfallen: “I can’t feel that Edward was to blame. Ed — Oh, I suppose he’s gone off to make himself presentable. But Willis — Where’s Willis, Aunt Mary?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Probably gone with him to help him.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, he saw how unstrung poor Edward was! Mr. Bemis, I think you’re quite prejudiced. How could Edward help their escaping? I think it was quite enough for him, singlehanded, to get his watch back.” A ring at the door, and then a number of voices in the anteroom. “I do believe they’re all there! I’ll just run out and prepare your son. He would be dreadfully shocked if he came right in upon you.” She runs into the anteroom, and is heard without: “Oh, Dr. Lawton! Oh, Lou dear! Oh, Mr. Bemis! How can I ever tell you? Your poor father! No, no, I can’t tell you! You mustn’t ask me! It’s too hideous! And you wouldn’t believe me if I did.” Chorus of anguished voices: “What? what? what?”

Mrs. Roberts: “They’ve been robbed! Garroted on the Common! And, oh, Dr. Lawton, I’m so glad you’ve come! They’re both injured internally, but I wish you’d look at Edward first.”

Bemis: “Good heavens! Is that Mrs. Roberts’s idea of preparing my son? And his poor young wife!” He addresses his demand to Mrs. Crashaw, who lifts the hands of impotent despair.

PART SECOND.

MR. ROBERTS; MR. CAMPBELL.

IN Mr. Roberts’s dressing-room, that gentleman is discovered tragically confronting Mr. Willis Campbell, with a watch uplifted in either hand.

Willis: “Well?”

Roberts, gasping: “My — my watch!”

Willis: “Yes. How comes there to be two of it?”

Roberts: “Don’t you understand? When I went out I — didn’t take my watch — with me. I left it here on my bureau.”

Willis: “Well?”

Roberts: “Oh, merciful heavens! don’t you see? Then I couldn’t have been robbed!”

Willis: “Well, but whose watch did you take from the fellow that didn’t rob you, then?”

Roberts: “His own!” He abandons himself powerlessly upon a chair. “Yes; I left my own watch here, and when that person brushed against me in the Common, I missed it for the first time. I supposed he had robbed me, and ran after him, and—” Willis: “Robbed him!”

Roberts: “Yes.”

Willis: “Ah, ha, ha, ha! I, hi, hi, hi! O, ho, ho, ho!” He yields to a series of these gusts and paroxysms, bowing up and down, and stamping to and fro, and finally sits down exhausted, and wipes the tears from his cheeks. “Really, this thing will kill me. What are you going to do about it, Roberts?”

Roberts, with profound dejection and abysmal solemnity: “I don’t know, Willis. Don’t you see that it must have been — that I must have robbed — Mr. Bemis?”

Willis: “Bemis!” After a moment for tasting the fact. “Why, so it was! Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! And was poor old Bemis that burly ruffian? that blood-thirsty gang of giants? that — that — oh, Lord! oh, Lord!” He bows his head upon his chair-back in complete exhaustion, demanding, feebly, as he gets breath for the successive questions, “What are you going to d-o-o-o? What shall you s-a-a-a-y? How can you expla-a-ain it?”

Roberts: “I can do nothing. I can say nothing. I can never explain it. I must go to Mr. Bemis and make a clean breast of it; but think of the absurdity — the ridicule!”

Willis, after a thoughtful silence: “Oh, it isn’t that you’ve got to think of. You’ve got to think of the old gentleman’s sense of injury and outrage. Didn’t you hear what he said — that he would have handed over his dearest friend, his own brother, to the police?”

Roberts: “But that was in the supposition that his dearest friend, his own brother, had intentionally robbed him. You can’t imagine, Willis—” Willis: “Oh, I can imagine a great many things. It’s all well enough for you to say that the robbery was a mistake; but it was a genuine case of garroting, as far as the assault and taking the watch go. He’s a very pudgicky old gentleman.”

Roberts: “He is.”

Willis: “And I don’t see how you’re going to satisfy him that it was all a joke. Joke? It wasn’t a joke! It was a real assault and a bona fide robbery, and Bemis can prove it.”

Roberts: “But he would never insist—”

Willis: “Oh, I don’t know about that. He’s pretty queer, Bemis is. You can’t say what an old gentleman like that will or won’t do. If he should choose to carry it into court—”

Roberts: “Court!”

Willis: “ — it might be embarrassing. And anyway, it would have a very strange look in the papers.”

Roberts: “The papers! Good gracious!” Willis: “Ten years from now, a man that heard you mentioned would forget all about the acquittal, and say: ‘ Roberts? Oh yes! Wasn’t he the one they sent to the House of Correction for garroting an old friend of his on the Common?’ You see it wouldn’t do to go and make a clean breast of it to Bemis.”

Roberts: “I see.”

Willis: “What will you do?”

Roberts: “I must never say anything to him about it. Just let it go.” —

Willis: “And keep his watch? I don’t see how you could manage that. What would you do with the watch? You might sell it, of course—” Roberts: “Oh no, I couldn’t do that.”

Willis: “You might give it away to some deserving person; but if it got him into trouble—” Roberts: “No, no; that wouldn’t do, either.” Willis: “And you can’t have it lying around; Agnes would be sure to find it, sooner or later.” Roberts: “Yes.”

Willis: “Besides, there’s your conscience. Your conscience wouldn’t let you keep Bemis’s watch away from him. And if it would, what do you suppose Agnes’s conscience would do when she came to find it out? Agnes hasn’t got much of a head — the want of it seems to grow upon her; but she’s got a conscience as big as the side of a house.”

Roberts: “Oh, I see; I see.”

Willis, coming up and standing over him, with his hands in his pockets: “I tell you what, Roberts, you’re in a box.”

Roberts, abjectly: “I know it, Willis; I know it. What do you suggest? You must know some way out of it.”

Willis: “It isn’t a simple matter like telling them to start the elevator down when they couldn’t start her up. I’ve got to think it over.” He walks to and fro, Roberts’s eyes helplessly following his 3 movements. “How would it do to — No, that wouldn’t do, either.”

Roberts: “What wouldn’t?”

Willis: “Nothing. I was just thinking — I say, you might — Or, no, you couldn’t.”

Roberts: “Couldn’t what?”

Willis: “Nothing. But if you were to — No; up a stump that way too.”

Roberts: “Which way? For mercy’s sake, my dear fellow, don’t seem to get a clew if you haven’t it. It’s more than I can bear.” He rises, and desperately confronts Willis in his promenade. “If you see any hope at all—”

Willis, stopping: “Why, if you were a different sort of fellow, Roberts, the thing would be perfectly easy.”

Roberts: “Very well, then. What sort of fellow do you want me to be? I’ll be any sort of fellow you like.”

Willis: “Oh, but you couldn’t! With that face of yours, and that, confounded conscience of yours behind it, you would give away the whitest lie that was ever told.”

Roberts: “Do you wish me to lie? Very well, then, I will lie. What is the lie?”

Willis: “Ah, now you’re talking like a man! I can soon think up a lie, if you’re game for it. Suppose it wasn’t so very white — say a delicate blonde!”

Roberts: “I shouldn’t care if it were as black as the ace of spades.”

Willis: “Roberts, I honor you! It isn’t everybody who could steal an old gentleman’s watch, and then be so ready to lie out of it. Well, you have got courage — both kinds — moral and physical.”

Roberts: “Thank you, Willis. Of course I don’t pretend that I should be willing to lie, under ordinary circumstances; but for the sake of Agnes and the children — I don’t want any awkwardness about the matter; it would be the death of me. Well, what do you wish me to say? Be quick; I don’t believe I could hold out for a great while. I don’t suppose but what Mr. Bemis would be reasonable, even if I—”

Willis: “I’m afraid we couldn’t trust him. The only way is for you to take the bull by the horns.”

Roberts: “Yes?”

Willis: “You will not only have to lie, Roberts, but you will have to wear an air of innocent candor at the same time.”

Roberts: “I — I’m afraid I couldn’t manage that. What is your idea?”

Willis: “Oh, just come into the room with a laugh, when we go back, and say, in an off-hand way, ‘By the way, Agnes, Willis and I made a remarkable discovery in my dressing-room; we found my watch there on the bureau. Ha, ha, ha!’ Do you think you could do it?”

Roberts: “I — I don’t know.”

Willis: “Try the laugh now.”

Roberts: “I’d rather not — now.”

Willis: “Well, try it, anyway.”

Roberts: “Ha, ha, ha!”

Willis: “Once more.”

Roberts: “Ha, ha, ha!”

Willis: “Pretty ghastly; but I guess you can come it.”

Roberts: “I’ll try. And then what?”

Willis: “And then you say, ‘I hadn’t put it on when I went out, and when I got after that fellow and took it back, I was simply getting somebody else’s watch!’ Then you hold out both watches to her, and laugh again. Everybody laughs, and crowds round you to examine the watches, and you make fun and crack jokes at your own expense all the time, and pretty soon old Bemis says, ‘Why, this is my watch, now!’ and you laugh more than ever—”

Roberts: “I’m afraid I couldn’t laugh when he said that. I don’t believe I could laugh. It would make my blood run cold.”

Willis: “Oh no, it wouldn’t. You’d be in the spirit of it by that time.”

Roberts: “Do you think so? Well?”

Willis: “And then you say, ‘Well, this is the most remarkable coincidence I ever heard of. I didn’t get my own watch from the fellow, but I got yours, Mr. Bemis;’ and then you hand it over to him and say, ‘Sorry I had to break the chain in getting it from him,’ and then everybody laughs again, and — and that ends it.”

Roberts, with a profound sigh: “Do you think that would end it?” —

Willis: “Why, certainly. It’ll put old Bemis in the wrong, don’t you see? It’ll show that instead of letting the fellow escape to go and rob him, you attacked him and took Bemis’s property back from him yourself. Bemis wouldn’t have a word to say. All you’ve got to do is to keep up a light, confident manner.”

Roberts: “But what if it shouldn’t put Bemis in the wrong? What if he shouldn’t say or do anything that we’ve counted upon, but something altogether different?”

Willis: “Well, then, you must trust to inspiration, and adapt yourself to circumstances.”

Roberts: “Wouldn’t it be rather more of a joke to come out with the facts at once?”

Willis: “On you it would; and a year from now — say next Christmas — you could get the laugh on Bemis that way. But if you were to risk it now, there’s no telling how he’d take it. He’s so indignant he might insist upon leaving the house. But with this plan of mine—”

Roberts, in despair: “I couldn’t, Willis. I don’t feel light, and I don’t feel confident, and I couldn’t act it. If it were a simple lie—”

Willis: “Oh, lies are never simple; they require the exercise of all your ingenuity. If you want something simple, you must stick to the truth, and throw yourself on Bemis’s mercy.”

Roberts, walking up and down in great distress: “I can’t do it; I can’t do it. It’s very kind of you to think it all out for me, but” — struck by a sudden idea— “Willis, why shouldn’t you do it?”

Willis: “I?”

Roberts: “You are good at those things. You have so much aplomb, you know. You could carry it off, you know, first-rate.”

Willis, as if finding a certain fascination in the idea: “Well, I don’t know—”

Roberts: “And I could chime in on the laugh. I think I could do that if somebody else was doing the rest.”

Willis, after a moment of silent reflection: “I should like to do it. I should like to see how old Bemis would look when I played it on him. Roberts, I will do it. Not a word! I should like to do it. Now you go on and hurry up your toilet, old fellow; you needn’t mind me here. I’ll be rehearsing.”

Mrs. Roberts, knocking at the door, outside: “Edward, are you never coming?”

Roberts: “Yes, yes; I’ll be there in a minute, my dear.”

Willis: “Yes, he’ll be there. Run along back, and keep it going till we come. Roberts, I wouldn’t take a thousand dollars for this chance.”

Roberts: “I’m glad you like it.”

Willis: “Like it? Of course I do. Or, no! Hold on! Wait! It won’t do! No; you must take the leading part, and I’ll support you, and I’ll come in strong if you break down. That’s the way we have got to work it. You must make the start.”

Roberts: “Couldn’t you make it better, Willis? It’s your idea.”

Willis: “No; they’d be sure to suspect me, and they can’t suspect you of anything — you’re so innocent. The illusion will be complete.”

Roberts, very doubtfully: “Do you think so?” Willis: “Yes. Hurry up. Let me unbutton that collar for you.”

PART THIRD.

I. MRS. ROBERTS, DR. LAWTON, MRS. CRASHAW, MR. BEMIS, YOUNG MR. AND MRS. BEMIS.

MRS. ROBERTS, surrounded by her guests, and confronting from her sofa Mr. Bemis, who still remains sunken in his arm-chair, has apparently closed an exhaustive recital of the events which have ended in his presence there. She looks round with a mixed air of self-denial and self-satisfaction to read the admiration of her listeners in their sympathetic countenances.

Dr. Lawton, with an ironical sigh of profound impression: “Well, Mrs. Roberts, you are certainly the most lavishly hospitable of hostesses. Every one knows what delightful dinners you give; but these little dramatic episodes which you offer your guests, by way of appetizer, are certainly unique. Last year an elevator stuck in the shaft with half the company in it, and this year a highway robbery, its daring punishment and its reckless repetition — what the newspapers will call ‘ A Triple Mystery’ when it gets to them — and both victims among our commensals! Really, I don’t know what more we could ask of you, unless it were the foot-padded footpad himself as a commensal. If this sort of thing should become de rigueur in society generally, I don’t know what’s to become of people who haven’t your invention.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, it’s all very well to make fun now, Dr. Lawton; but if you had been here when they first came in—”

Young Mrs. Bemis: “Yes, indeed, I think so too, Mrs. Roberts. If Mr. Bemis — Alfred, I mean — and papa hadn’t been with me when you came out there to prepare us, I don’t know what I should have done. I should certainly have died, or gone through the floor.” She looks fondly up into the face of her husband for approval, where he stands behind her chair, and furtively gives him her hand for pressure.

Young Mr. Bemis: “Somebody ought to write to the Curwens — Mrs. Curwen, that is — about it.” Mrs. Bemis, taking away her hand: “Oh yes, papa, do write!”

Lawton: “I will, my dear. Even Mrs. Curwen, dazzling away in another sphere — hemisphere — and surrounded by cardinals and all the other celestial lights there at Rome, will be proud to exploit this new evidence of American enterprise. I can fancy the effect she will produce with it.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And the Millers — what a shame they couldn’t come! How excited they would have been! — that is, Mrs. Miller. Is their baby very bad, Doctor?”

Lawton: “Well, vaccination is always a very serious thing — with a first child. I should say, from the way Mrs. Miller feels about it, that Miller wouldn’t be able to be out for a week to come yet.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, how ridiculous you are, Doctor!”

Remis, rising feebly from his chair: “.Well, now that it’s all explained, Mrs. Roberts, I think I’d better go home; and if you’ll kindly have them telephone for a carriage—”

Mrs. Roberts: “No, indeed, Mr. Bemis! We shall not let you go. Why, the idea! You must stay and take dinner with us, just the same.”

Remis: “But in this state—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, never mind the state. You look perfectly well; and if you insist upon going I shall know that you bear a grudge against Edward for not arresting him. Wait! We can put you in perfect order in just a second.” She flies out of the room, and then comes swooping back with a needle and thread, a fresh white necktie, a handkerchief, and a hair - brush. “There! I can’t let you go to Edward’s dressing-room, because he’s there himself, and the children are in mine, and we’ve had to put the new maid in the guest-chamber — you are rather cramped in flats, that’s true; that’s the worst of them — but if you don’t mind having your toilet made in public, like the King of France—”

Bemis, entering into the spirit of it: “Not the least; but—” He laughs, and drops back into his chair. —

Mrs. Roberts, distributing the brush to young Mr. Bemis, and the tie to his wife, and dropping upon her knees before Mr. Bemis: “Now, Mrs. Lou, you just whip off that crumpled tie and whip on the fresh one, and, Mister Lou, you give his hair a touch, and I’ll have this torn button-hole mended before you can think.” She seizes it and begins to sew vigorously upon it.

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agnes, you are the most ridiculously sensible woman in the country.” lawton, standing before the group, with his arms folded and his feet well apart, in an attitude of easy admiration: “The Wounded Adonis, attended by the Loves and Graces. Familiar Pompeian fresco.”

Mrs. Roberts, looking around at him: “I don’t see a great many Loves.”

Lawton: “She ignores us, Mrs. Crashaw. And after what you’ve just said!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Then why don’t you do something?”

Lawton: “The Loves never do anything — in frescoes. They stand round and sympathize. Besides, we are waiting to administer an anaesthetic. But what I admire in this subject even more than the activity of the Graces is the serene dignity of the Adonis. I have seen my old friend in many trying positions, but I never realized till now all the simpering absurdity, the flattered silliness, the senile coquettishness, of which his benign countenance was capable.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Don’t mind him a bit, Mr. Bemis; it’s nothing but—”

Lawton: “Pure envy. I own it.”

Bemis: “All right, Lawton. Wait till—”

Mrs. Roberts, making a final stitch, snapping off the thread, and springing to her feet, all in one: “There, have you finished, Mr and Mrs. Lou? Well, then, take this lace handkerchief, and draw it down from his neck and pin it in his waistcoat, and you have—”

Lawton, as Mr. Bemis rises to his feet: “A Gentleman of the Old School. Bemis, you look like a miniature of yourself by Malbone. Rather flattered, but — recognizable.”

Bemis, with perfectly recovered gayety: “Go on, go on, Lawton. I can understand your envy. I can pity it.”

Lawton: “Could you forgive Roberts for not capturing the garroter?”

Bemis: “Yes, I could. I could give the garroter his liberty, and present him with an admission to the Provident Wood-yard, where he could earn an honest living for his family.”

Lawton, compassionately: “You are pretty far gone, Bemis. Really, I think somebody ought to go for Roberts.”

Mrs. Roberts, innocently: “Yes, indeed! Why, what in the world can be keeping him?” A nursemaid enters and beckons Mrs. Roberts to the door with a glance. She runs to her; they whisper; and then Mrs. Roberts, over her shoulder: “That ridiculous great boy of mine says he can’t go to sleep unless I come and kiss him goodnight.” —

Lawton: “Which ridiculous great boy, I wonder? — Roberts, or Campbell? But I didn’t know they had gone to bed!”

Mrs. Bemis: “You are too bad, papa! You know it’s little Neddy.”

Mrs. Roberts, vanishing: “Oh, I don’t mind his nonsense, Lou. I’ll fetch them both back with me.”

Lawton, after making a melodramatic search for concealed listeners at the doors: “Now, friends, I have a revelation to make in Mrs. Roberts’s absence. I have found out the garroter — the assassin.”

All the others: “What!”

Lawton: “He has been secured—”

Mrs. Crashaw, severely: “Well, I’m very glad of it.”

Young Remis: “By the police?”

Mrs. Bemis, incredulously: “Papa!”

Remis: “But there were several of them. Have they all been arrested?”

Lawton: “There was only one, and none of him has been arrested.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Where is he, then?”

Lawton: “In this house.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Now, Dr. Lawton, you and I are old friends — I shouldn’t like to say how old — but if you don’t instantly be serious, I — I’ll carry my rheumatism to somebody else.”

Lawton: “My dear Mrs. Crash aw, you know how much I prize that rheumatism of yours! I will be serious — I will be only too serious. The garroter is Mr. Roberts himself.”

All, horror-struck: “Oh!”

Lawton: “He went out without his watch. He thought he was robbed, but he wasn’t. He ran after the supposed thief, our poor friend Bemis here, and took Bemis’s watch away, and brought it home for his own.”

Young Bemis: “Yes, but—”

Mrs. Bemis: “But, papa—”

Bemis: “How do you know it? I can see how such a thing might happen, but — how do you know it did?”

Lawton: “I divined it.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Nonsense!”

Lawton: “Very well, then, I read of just such a case in the Advertiser a year ago. It occurs annually — in the newspapers. And I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Crashaw — Roberts found out his mistake as soon as he went to his dressing-room; and that ingenious nephew of yours, who’s closeted with him there, has been trying to put him up to something — to some game.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Willis has too much sense. He would know that Edward couldn’t carry out any sort of game.”

Lawton: “Well, then, he’s getting Roberts to let him carry out the game.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Edward couldn’t do that either.” Lawton: “Very well, then, just wait till they come back. Will you leave me to deal with Campbell?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “What are you going to do?” Young Bemis: “You mustn’t forget that he got us out of the elevator, sir.”

Mrs. Bemis: “We might have been there yet if it hadn’t been for him, papa.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I shouldn’t want Willis mortified.”

Bemis: “Nor Mr. Roberts annoyed. We’re fellow-sufferers in this business.”

Lawton: “Oh, leave it to me, leave it to me! I’ll spare their feelings. Don’t be afraid. Ah, there they come! Now don’t say anything. I’ll just step into the anteroom here.”

II. MR. ROBERTS, MR. CAMPBELL, AND THE OTHERS.

Roberts, entering the room before Campbell, and shaking hands with his guests: “Ah, Mr. Bemis; Mrs. Bemis; Aunt Mary! You’ve heard of our comical little coincidence — our — Mr. Bemis and my—” He halts, confused, and looks around for the moral support of Willis, who follows hilariously.

Willis: “Greatest joke on record! But I won’t spoil it for you, Roberts. Go on!” In a low voice to Roberts: “And don’t look so confoundedly down in the mouth. They won’t think it’s a joke at all.”

Roberts, with galvanic lightness: “Yes, yes — such a joke! Well, you see — you see—”

Mrs. Crashaw: “See what, Edward? Do get it out!”

Willis, jollily: “Ah, ha, ha!”

Roberts, lugubriously: “Ah, ha, ha!”

Mrs. Bemis: “How funny! Ha, ha, ha!” Young Mr. Bemis: “Capital! capital!”

Bemis: “Excellent!”

Willis: “Go on, Roberts, do! or I shall die! Ah, ha, ha!”

Roberts, in a low voice of consternation to Willis: “Where was I? I can’t go on unless I know where I was.”

Willis, sotto voce to Roberts: “You weren’t anywhere! For Heaven’s sake, make a start!” Roberts, to the others, convulsively: “Ha, ha, ha! I supposed all the time, you know, that I had been robbed, and — and—” —

Willis: “Go on! go on!”

Roberts, whispering: “I can’t do it!”

Willis, whispering: “You’ve got to! You’re the beaver that clomb the tree. Laugh naturally, now!”

Roberts, with a staccato groan, which he tries to make pass for a laugh: “And then I ran after the man—” He stops, and regards Mr. Bemis with a ghastly stare.

Mrs. Crashaw: “What is the matter with you, Edward? Are you sick?”

Willis: “Sick? No! Can’t you see that he can’t get over the joke of the thing? It’s killing him.” To Roberts: “Brace up, old man! You’re doing it splendidly.”

Roberts, hopelessly: “And then the other man — the man that had robbed me — the man that I had pursued — ugh!”

Willis: “Well, it is too much for him. I shall have to tell it myself, I see.”

Roberts, making a wild effort to command himself: “And so — so — this man — man — ma—”

Willis: “Oh, good Lord—” Dr. Lawton suddenly appears from the anteroom and confronts him. “Oh, the devil!”

Lawton, folding his arms, and fixing his eyes upon him: “Which means that you forgot I was coming.”

Willis: “Doctor, you read a man’s symptoms at a glance.”

Lawton: “Yes; and I can see that you are in a bad way, Mr. Campbell.”

Willis: “Why don’t you advertise, Doctor? Patients need only enclose a lock of their hair, and the color of their eyes, with one dollar to pay the cost of materials, which will be sent, with full directions for treatment, by return mail. Seventh son of a seventh son.”

Lawton: “Ah, don’t try to jest it away, my poor friend. This is one of those obscure diseases of the heart — induration of the pericardium — which, if not taken in time, result in deceitfulness above all things, and desperate wickedness.”

Willis: “Look here, Dr. Lawton, what are you up to?”

Lawton: “Look here, Mr. Campbell, what is your little game?”

Willis: “I don’t know what you’re up to.” He shrugs his shoulders and walks up the room.

Lawton, shrugging his shoulders and walking up the room abreast of Campbell: “I don’t know what your little game is.” They return together, and stop, confronting each other.

Willis: “But if you think I’m going to give myself away—”

Lawton: “If you suppose I’m going to take you at your own figure—” They walk up the room together, and return as before.

Willis: “Mrs. Bemis, what is this unnatural parent of yours after?”

Mrs. Bemis, tittering: “Oh, I’m sure I can’t tell.”

Willis: “Aunt Mary, you used to be a friend of mine. Can’t you give me some sort of clew?” Mrs. Crashaw: “I should be ashamed of you, Willis, if you accepted anybody’s help.”

Willis, sighing: “Well, this is pretty hard on an orphan. Here I come to join a company of friends at the fireside of a burgled brother-in-law, and I find myself in a nest of conspirators.” Suddenly, after a moment: “Oh, I understand. Why, I ought to have seen at once. But no matter — it’s just as well. I’m sure that we shall hear Dr. Lawton leniently, and make allowance for his well-known foible. Roberts is bound by the laws of hospitality, and Mr. Bemis is the father-in-law of his daughter.” Mrs. Bemis, in serious dismay: “Why, Mr. Campbell, what do you mean?”

Willis: “Simply that the mystery is solved — the double garroter is discovered. I’m sorry for you, Mrs. Bemis; and no one will wish to deal harshly with your father when he confesses that it was he who robbed Mr. Roberts and Mr. Bemis. All that they ask is to have their watches back. Go on, Doctor! How will that do, Aunt Mary, for a little flyer?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Willis, I declare I never saw anybody like you!” She embraces him with joyous pride.

Roberts, coming forward, anxiously: “But, my dear Willis—”

Willis, clapping his hand over his mouth, and leading him back to his place: “We can’t let you talk now. I’ve no doubt you’ll be considerate, and all that, but Dr. Lawton has the floor. Go on, Doctor! Free your mind! Don’t be afraid of telling the whole truth! It will be better for you in the end.” He rubs his hands gleefully, and then thrusting the points of them into his waistcoat-pockets, stands beaming triumphantly upon Lawton.

Lawton: “Do you think so?” With well-affected trepidation: “Well, friends, if I must confess this — this—”

Willis: “High-handed outrage. Go on.”

Lawton: “I suppose I must. I shall not expect mercy for myself; perhaps you’ll say that, as an old and hardened offender, I don’t deserve it. But I had an accomplice — a young man very respectably connected, and who, whatever his previous life may have been, had managed to keep a good reputation; a young man a little apt to be misled by overweening vanity and the ill-advised flattery of his friends; but I hope that neither of you gentlemen will be hard upon him, but will consider his youth, and perhaps his congenital moral and intellectual deficiencies, even when you find your watches — on Mr. Campbell’s person.” He leans forward, rubbing his hands, and smiling upon Campbell. “How will that do, Mr. Campbell, for a flyer?”

Willis, turning to Mrs. Crashaw: “One ahead, Aunt Mary?”

Lawton, clasping him by the hand: “Ho, generous youth — even!” They shake hands, clapping each other on the back with their lefts, and joining in the general laugh.

Bemis, coming forward, jovially: “Well, now, I gladly forgive you both — or whoever did rob me — if you’ll only give me back my watch.”

Willis: “I haven’t got your watch.”

Lawton: “Nor I.”

Roberts, rather faintly, and coming reluctantly forward: “I — I have it, Mr. Bemis.” He produces it from one waistcoat-pocket and hands it to Bemis. Then, visiting the other: “And what’s worse, I have my own. I don’t know how I can ever explain it, or atone to you for my extraordinary behavior. Willis thought you might finally see it as a joke, and I’ve done my best to pass it off lightly—” —

Willis: “And you succeeded. You had all the lightness of a sick hippopotamus.”

Roberts: “I’m afraid so. I’ll have the chain mended, of course. But when I went out this evening I left my watch on my dressing-table, and when you struck against me in the Common I missed it, and supposed I had been robbed, and I ran after you and took yours—”

Willis: “Being a man of the most violent temper and the most desperate courage—”

Roberts: “But I hope, my dear sir, that I didn’t hurt you seriously?”

Remis: “Not at all — not the least.” Shaking him cordially by both hands: “I’m all right. Mrs. Roberts has healed all my wounds with her skilful needle; I’ve got on one of your best neckties, and this lace handkerchief of your wife’s, which I’m going to keep for a souvenir of the most extraordinary adventure of my life—”

Lawton: “Oh, it’s an old newspaper story, Bemis, I tell you.”

Willis: “Well, Aunt Mary, I wish Agnes were here now to see Roberts in his character of moral hero. He ‘done’ it with his little hatchet, but he waited to make sure that Bushrod was all right before he owned up.”

Mrs. Roberts, appearing: “Who, Willis?”

Willis: “A very great and good man — George Washington.”

Mrs. Roberts: “I thought you meant Edward.”

Willis: “Well, I don’t suppose there is much difference.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “The robber has been caught, Agnes.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Caught? Nonsense! You don’t mean it! How can you trifle with such a subject? I know you are joking! Who is it?”

Young Bemis: “You never could guess—”

Mrs. Bemis: “Never in the world!”

Mrs. Roberts: “I don’t wish to. But oh, Mr. Bemis, I’ve just come from my own children, and you must be merciful to his family!”

Bemis: “For your sake, dear lady, I will.” Bella, between the portières: “Dinner is ready, Mrs. Roberts.”

Mrs. Roberts, passing her hand through Mr. Bemis’s arm: “Oh, then you must go in with me, and tell me all about it.”

FIVE O’CLOCK TEA

“‘WILL YOU ANSWER MY QUESTION, AMY?’”

I. MRS. SOMERS; MR. WILLIS CAMPBELL

MRS. Amy Somers, in a lightly floating tea-gown of singularly becoming texture and color, employs the last moments of expectance before the arrival of her guests in marching up and down in front of the mirror which fills the space between the long windows of her drawing-room, looking over either shoulder for different effects of the drifting and eddying train, and advancing upon her image with certain little bobs and bows, and retreating from it with a variety of fan practice and elaborated courtesies, finally degenerating into burlesque, and a series of grimaces and “mouths” made at the responsive reflex. In the fascination of this amusement she is first ignorant, and then aware, of the presence of Mr. Willis Campbell, who on the landing space between the drawing-room and the library stands, hat in hand, in the pleased contemplation of Mrs. Somers’s manœuvres and contortions as the mirror reports them to him. Mrs. Somers does not permit herself the slightest start on seeing him in the glass, but turns deliberately away, having taken time to prepare the air of gratification and surprise with which she greets him at half the length of the drawing-room.

Mrs. Somers, giving her hand: “Why, Mr. Campbell! How very nice of you! How long have you been prowling about there on the landing? So stupid of them not to have turned up the gas!”

Campbell: “I wasn’t much incommoded. That sort of pitch-darkness is rather becoming to my style of beauty, I find. The only objection was that I couldn’t see you.”

Mrs. Somers: “Do you often make those pretty speeches?”

Campbell: “When I can found them on fact.”

Mrs. Somers: “What can I say back? Oh! That I’m sorry I couldn’t have met you when you were looking your best.”

Campbell: “Um! Do you think you could have borne it? We might go out there.”

Mrs. Somers: “On second thoughts, no. I shall ring to have them turn up the gas.”

Campbell: “No; let me.” He prevents her ringing, and going out into the space between the library and drawing-room, stands with his hand on the key of the gas-burner. “Now how do I look?”

Mrs. Somers: “Beautiful.”

Campbell, turning up the gas: “And now?”

Mrs. Somers: “Not half so well. Decidedly pitch-darkness is becoming to you. Better turn it down again.”

Campbell, rejoining her in the drawing-room: “No; it isn’t so becoming to you; and I’m not envious, whatever I am.”

Mrs. Somers: “You are generosity itself.”

Campbell: “If you come to phrases, I prefer magnanimity.”

Mrs. Somers: “Well, say magnanimity. Won’t you sit down — while you have the opportunity?” She sinks upon the sofa, and indicates with her fan an easy-chair at one end of it.

Campbell, dropping into it: “Are there going to be so many?”

Mrs. Somers: “You never can tell about five o’clock tea. There mayn’t be more than half a dozen; there may be thirty or forty. But I wished to affect your imagination.”

Campbell: “You had better have tried it in some other kind of weather. It’s snowing like—”

Mrs. Somers, running to the window, and peeping out through the side of the curtain: “It is! like — cats and dogs!”

Campbell: “Oh no! You can’t say that! It only rains that way. I was going to say it myself, but I stopped in time.”

Mrs. Somers, standing before the window with clasped hands: “No matter! There will simply be nobody but bores. They come in any sort of weather.”

Campbell: “Thank you, Mrs. Somers. I’m glad I ventured out.”

Mrs. Somers, turning about: “What?” Then realizing the situation: “Oh, poor Mr. Campbell!”

Campbell: “Oh, don’t mind me! I can stand it if you can. I belong to a sex, thank you, that doesn’t pretend to have any tact. I would just as soon tell a man he was a bore as not. But I thought it might worry a lady, perhaps.”

Mrs. Somers: “Worry? I’m simply aghast at it. Did you ever hear of anything worse?”

Campbell: “Well, not much worse.”

Mrs. Somers: “What can I do to make you forget it?”

Campbell: “I can’t think of anything. It seems to me that I shall always remember it as the most fortunate speech a lady ever made to me — and they have said some flattering things to me in my time.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, don’t be entirely heartless. Wouldn’t a cup of tea blot it out? With a Peak & Frean?” She advances beseechingly upon him. “Come, I will give you a cup at once.”

Campbell: “No, thank you; I would rather have it with the rest of the bores. They’ll be sure to come.”

Mrs. Somers, resuming her seat on the sofa: “You are implacable. And I thought you said you were generous.”

Campbell: “No; merely magnanimous. I can’t forget your cruel frankness; but I know you can, and I ask you to do it.” He throws himself back in his chair with a sigh. “And who knows? Perhaps you were right.”

Mrs. Somers: “About what?”

Campbell: “My being a bore.”

Mrs. Somers: “I should think you would know.”

Campbell: “No; that’s the difficulty. Nobody would be a bore if he knew it.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, some would, I think.”

Campbell: “Do you mean me?”

Mrs. Somers: “Well, no, then. I don’t believe you would be a bore, if you knew it. Is that enough? or do you expect me to say something more?”

Campbell: “No, it’s quite enough, thank you.” He remains pensively silent.

Mrs. Somers, after waiting for him to speak: “Bores for bores, don’t you hate the silent ones most?”

Campbell, desperately rousing himself: “Mrs. Somers, if you only knew how disagreeable I was going to make myself just before I concluded to hold my tongue!”

Mrs. Somers: “Really? What were you going to say?”

Campbell: “Do you actually wish to know?”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh no; I only thought you wished to tell.”

Campbell: “Not at all. You complained of my being silent.”

Mrs. Somers: “Did I? I was wrong. I will never do so again.” She laughs in her fan.

Campbell: “And I complain of your delay. You can tell me now, just as well as two weeks hence, whether you love me enough to marry me or not.”

Mrs. Somers: “You promised not to recur to that subject without some hint from me. You have broken your promise.”

Campbell: “Well, you wouldn’t give me any hint.”

Mrs. Somers: “How can I believe you care for me if you are false in this?”

Campbell: “It seems to me that my falsehood is another proof of my affection.”

Mrs. Somers: “Very well, then; you can wait till I know my mind.”

Campbell: “I’d rather know your heart. But I’ll wait.” After a pause: “Why do you carry a fan on a day like this? I ask, to make general conversation.”

Mrs. Somers, spreading the fan in her lap, and looking at it curiously: “I don’t know.” After a moment: “Oh yes; for the same reason that I shall have ice-cream after dinner to-day.”

Campbell: “That’s no reason at all.” After a moment: “Are you going to have ice-cream to-day after dinner?”

Mrs. Somers: “I might. If I had company.”

Campbell: “Oh, I couldn’t stay after hinting. I’m too proud for that.” He pulls his chair nearer and joins her in examining the fan in her lap. “What is so very strange about your fan?”

Mrs. Somers: “Nothing. I was just seeing how a fan looked that was the subject of gratuitous criticism.”

Campbell: “I didn’t criticise the fan.” He regards it studiously.

Mrs. Somers: “Oh! Not the fan?”

Campbell: “No; I think it’s extremely pretty. I like big fans.”

Mrs. Somers: “So good of you! It’s Spanish. That’s why it’s so large.”

Campbell: “It’s hand-painted, too.”

Mrs. Somers, leaning back, and leaving him to the inspection of the fan: “You’re a connoisseur, Mr. Campbell.”

Campbell: “Oh, I can tell hand-painting from machine-painting when I see it. ’Tisn’t so good.”

Mrs. Somers: “Thank you.”

Campbell: “Not at all. Now, that fellow — cavalier, I suppose, in Spain — making love in that attitude, you can see at a glance that he’s hand-painted. No machine-painted cavalier would do it in that way. And look at the lady’s hand. Who ever saw a hand of that size before?”

Mrs. Somers, unclasping the hands which she had folded at her waist, and putting one of them out to take up the fan: “You said you were not criticising the fan.”

Campbell, quickly seizing the hand, with the fan in it: “Ah, I’m wrong! Here’s another one no bigger. Let me see which is the largest.”

Mrs. Somers, struggling not very violently to free her hand: “Mr. Campbell!”

Campbell: “Don’t take it away! You must listen to me now, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers, rising abruptly, and dropping her fan as she comes forward to meet an elderly gentleman arriving from the landing: “Mr. Bemis! How very heroic of you to come such a day! Isn’t it too bad?”

II. MR. BEMIS; MRS. SOMERS; MR. WILLIS CAMPBELL

Bemis: “Not if it makes me specially welcome, Mrs. Somers.” Discovering Campbell: “Oh, Mr. Campbell!”

Campbell, striving for his self-possession as they shake hands: “Yes, another hero, Mr. Bemis. Mrs. Somers is going to brevet everybody who comes to-day. She didn’t say heroes to me, but—”

Mrs. Somers: “You shall have your tea at once, Mr. Bemis.” She rings. “I was making Mr. Campbell wait for his. You don’t order up the teapot for one hero.”

Bemis: “Ha, ha, ha! No, indeed! But I’m very glad you do for two. The fact is” — rubbing his hands— “I’m half frozen.”

Mrs. Somers: “Is it so very cold?” To Campbell, who presents her fan with a bow: “Oh, thank you.” To Mr. Bemis: “Mr. Campbell has just been objecting to my fan. He doesn’t like its being hand-painted, as he calls it.”

Bemis: “That reminds me of a California gentleman whom I found looking at an Andrea del Sarto in the Pitti Palace at Florence one day — by-the-way, you’ve been a Californian too, Mr. Campbell; but you won’t mind. He seemed to be puzzled over it, and then he said to me — I was standing near him— ‘Hand-painted, I presume?’”

Mrs. Somers: “Ah! ha, ha, ha! How very good!” To the maid, who appears: “The tea, Lizzie.”

Campbell: “You don’t think he was joking?”

Bemis, with misgiving: “Why, no, it never occurred to me that he was.”

Campbell: “You can’t always tell when a Californian’s joking.”

Mrs. Somers, with insinuation: “Can’t you? Not even adoptive ones?”

Campbell: “Adoptive ones never joke.”

Mrs. Somers: “Not even about hand-painted fans? What an interesting fact!” She sits down on the sofa behind the little table on which the maid arranges the tea, and pours out a cup. Then, with her eyes on Mr. Bemis: “Cream and sugar both? Yes?” Holding a cube of sugar in the tongs: “How many?”

Bemis: “One, please.”

Mrs. Somers, handing it to him: “I’m so glad you take your tea au naturel, as I call it.”

Campbell: “What do you call it when they don’t take it with cream and sugar?”

Mrs. Somers: “Au unnaturel. There’s only one thing worse: taking it with a slice of lemon in it. You might as well draw it from a bothersome samovar at once, and be done with it.”

Campbell: “The samovar is picturesque.”

Mrs. Somers: “It is insincere. Like Californians. Natives.”

Campbell: “Well, I can think of something much worse than tea with lemon in it.”

Mrs. Somers: “What?”

Campbell: “No tea at all.”

Mrs. Somers, recollecting herself: “Oh, poor Mr. Campbell! Two lumps?”

Campbell: “One, thank you. Your pity is so sweet!”

Mrs. Somers: “You ought to have thought of the milk of human kindness, and spared my cream-jug too.”

Campbell: “You didn’t pour out your compassion soon enough.”

Bemis, who has been sipping his tea in silent admiration: “Are you often able to keep it up in that way? I was fancying myself at the theatre.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, don’t encore us! Mr. Campbell would keep saying his things over indefinitely.”

Campbell, presenting his cup: “Another lump. It’s turned bitter. Two!”

Bemis: “Ha, ha, ha! Very good — very good indeed!”

Campbell: “Thank you kindly, Mr. Bemis.”

Mrs. Somers, greeting the new arrivals, and leaning forward to shake hands with them as they come up, without rising: “Mrs. Roberts! How very good of you! And Mr. Roberts!”

III. MR. and MRS. ROBERTS and the OTHERS

Roberts: “Not at all.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Of course we were coming.”

Mrs. Somers: “Will you have some tea? You see I’m installed already. Mr. Campbell was so greedy he wouldn’t wait.”

Campbell: “Mr. Bemis and I are here in the character of heroes, and we had to have our tea at once. You’re a hero too, Roberts, though you don’t look it. Any one who comes to tea in such weather is a hero, or a—”

Mrs. Somers, interrupting him with a little shriek: “Ugh! How hot that handle’s getting!”

Campbell: “Ah, I dare say. Let me turn out my sister’s cup.” Pouring out the tea and handing it to Mrs. Roberts. “I don’t see how you could reconcile it to your No. Eleven conscience to leave your children in such a snow-storm as this, Agnes.”

Mrs. Roberts, in vague alarm: “Why, what in the world could happen to them, Willis?”

Campbell: “Oh, nothing to them. But suppose Roberts got snowed under. Have some tea, Roberts?” He offers to pour out a cup.

Mrs. Somers, dispossessing him of the teapot with dignity: “Thank you, Mr. Campbell; I will pour out the tea.”

Campbell: “Oh, very well. I thought the handle was hot.”

Mrs. Somers: “It’s cooler now.”

Campbell: “And you won’t let me help you?”

Mrs. Somers: “When there are more people you may hand the tea.”

Campbell: “I wish I knew just how much that meant.”

Mrs. Somers: “Very little. As little as an adoptive Californian in his most earnest mood.” While they talk — Campbell bending over the teapot, on which Mrs. Somers keeps her hand — the others form a little group apart.

Bemis, to Mrs. Roberts: “I hope Mr. Roberts’s distinguished friend won’t give us the slip on account of the storm.”

Roberts: “Oh no; he’ll be sure to come. He may be late. But he’s the most amiable of Englishmen, and I know he won’t disappoint Mrs. Somers.”

Bemis: “The most unamiable of Englishmen couldn’t do that.”

Roberts: “Ah, I don’t know. Did you meet Mr. Pogis?”

Bemis: “No; what did he do?”

Roberts: “Why, he came — to the Hibbens’s dinner — in a sack coat.”

Mrs. Roberts: “I thought it was a Cardigan jacket.”

Bemis: “I heard a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers.”

Mrs. Somers: “Ah, there is Mrs. Curwen!” To Campbell, aside: “And without her husband!”

Campbell: “Or any one else’s husband.”

Mrs. Somers: “For shame!”

Campbell: “You began it.”

Mrs. Somers, to Mrs. Curwen; who approaches her sofa: “You are kindness itself, Mrs. Curwen, to come on such a day.” The ladies press each other’s hands.

IV. MRS. CURWEN and the OTHERS

Mrs. Curwen: “You are goodness in person, Mrs. Somers, to say so.”

Campbell: “And I am magnanimity embodied. Let me introduce myself, Mrs. Curwen!” He bows, and Mrs. Curwen deeply courtesies.

Mrs. Curwen: “I should never have known you.”

Campbell, melodramatically, to Mrs. Somers: “Tea, ho! for Mrs. Curwen — impenetrably disguised as kindness.”

Mrs. Curwen: “What shall I say to him?”

Mrs. Somers, pouring the tea: “Anything you like, Mrs. Curwen. Aren’t we to see Mr. Curwen to-day?”

Mrs. Curwen, taking her tea: “No, I’m his insufficient apology. He’s detained at his office — business.”

Campbell: “Then you see they don’t all come, Mrs. Somers.”

Mrs. Curwen: “All what?”

Campbell: “Oh, all the — heroes.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Is that what he was going to say, Mrs. Somers?”

Mrs. Somers: “You never can tell what he’s going to say.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I should think you would be afraid of him.”

Mrs. Somers, with a little shrug: “Oh no; he’s quite harmless. It’s just a little way he has.” To Mr. and Mrs. Miller, Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Bemis, and Dr. Lawton, who all appear together: “Ah, how do you do? So glad to see you! So very kind of you! I didn’t suppose you would venture out. And you too, Doctor?” She begins to pour out tea for them, one after another, with great zeal.

V DR. LAWTON, MR. and MRS. MILLER, YOUNG MR. and MRS. BEMIS, and the OTHERS

Dr. Lawton: “Yes, I too. It sounded very much as if I were Brutus also.” He stirs his tea and stares round at the company. “It seems to me that I have met these conspirators before. That’s what makes Boston insupportable. You’re always meeting the same people!”

Campbell: “We all feel it as keenly as you do, Doctor.”

Lawton, looking sharply at him: “Oh! you here? I might have expected it. Where is your aunt?”

VI. MRS. CRASHAW and the OTHERS

Mrs. Crashaw, appearing: “If you mean me, Dr. Lawton—”

Lawton: “I do, my dear friend. What company is complete without you?”

Mrs. Somers, reaching forward to take her hand, while with her disengaged hand she begins to pour her a cup of tea: “None in my house.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Very pretty.” Taking her tea. “I hope it isn’t complete, either, without the English painter you promised us.”

Mrs. Somers: “No, indeed! And a great many other people besides. But haven’t you met him yet? I supposed Mrs. Roberts—”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Oh, I don’t go to all of Agnes’s fandangoes. I was to have seen him at Mrs. Wheeler’s — he is being asked everywhere, of course — but he didn’t come. He sent his father and mother instead. They were very nice old people, but they hadn’t painted his pictures.”

Lawton: “They might say his pictures would never have been painted without them.”

Bemis: “It was like Heine’s going to visit Rachel by appointment. She wasn’t in, but her father and mother were; and when he met her afterwards he told her that he had just come from a show where he had seen a curious monster advertised for exhibition — the offspring of a hare and a salmon. The monster was not to be seen at the moment, but the showman said here was monsieur the hare and madame the salmon.”

Mrs. Roberts: “What in the world did Rachel say?”

Lawton: “Ah, that’s what these brilliant anecdotes never tell. And I think it would be very interesting to know what the victim of a witticism has to say.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I should think you would know very often, Doctor.”

Lawton: “Ah, now I should like to know what the victim of a compliment says!”

Mrs. Curwen: “He bows his thanks.” Dr. Lawton makes a profound obeisance, to which Mrs. Curwen responds in burlesque.

Miller: “We all envy you, Doctor.”

Mrs. Miller: “Oh yes. Mrs. Curwen never makes a compliment without meaning it.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I can’t say that quite, my dear. I should be very sorry to mean all the civil things I say. But I never flatter gentlemen of a certain age.”

Mrs. Miller, tittering ineffectively: “I shall know what to say to Mr. Miller after this.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Well, if you haven’t got the man, Mrs. Somers, you have got his picture, haven’t you?”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes; it’s on my writing-desk in the library. Let me—”

Lawton: “No, no; don’t disturb yourself! We wish to tear it to pieces without your embarrassing presence. Will you take my arm, Mrs. Crashaw?”

Mrs. Bemis: “Oh, let us all go and see it!”

Roberts: “Aren’t you coming, Willis?”

Campbell, without looking round: “Thank you, I’ve seen it.”

Mrs. Somers, whom the withdrawal of her other guests has left alone with him: “How could you tell such a fib?”

Campbell: “I could tell much worse fibs than that in such a cause.”

Mrs. Somers: “What cause?”

Campbell: “A lost one, I’m afraid. Will you answer my question, Amy?”

Mrs. Somers: “Did you ask me any?”

Campbell: “You know I did — before those people came in.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, that! Yes. I should like to ask you a question first.”

Campbell: “Twenty, if you like.”

Mrs. Somers: “Why do you feel authorized to call me by my first name?”

Campbell: “Because I love you. Now will you answer me?”

Mrs. Somers, dreamily: “I didn’t say I would, did I?”

Campbell, rising, sadly: “No.”

Mrs. Somers, mechanically taking the hand he offers her: “Oh! What—”

Campbell: “I’m going; that’s all.”

Mrs. Somers: “So soon?”

Campbell: “Yes; but I’ll try to make amends by not coming back soon — or at all.”

Mrs. Somers: “You mustn’t!”

Campbell: “Mustn’t what?”

Mrs. Somers: “You mustn’t keep my hand. Here come some more people. Ah, Mrs. Canfield! Miss Bayly! So very nice of you, Mrs. Wharton! Will you have some tea?”

VII. MRS. CANFIELD, MISS BAYLY, MRS. WHARTON, and the OTHERS

Mrs. Wharton: “No, thank you. The only objection to afternoon tea is the tea.”

Mrs. Somers: “I’m so glad you don’t mind the weather.” With her hand on the teapot, glancing up at Miss Bayly: “And do you refuse too?”

Miss Bayly: “I can answer for Mrs. Canfield that she doesn’t, and I never do. We object to the weather.”

Mrs. Somers, pouring a cup of tea: “That makes it a little more difficult. I can keep from offering Mrs. Wharton some tea, but I can’t stop its snowing.”

Miss Bayly, taking her cup: “But you’re so amiable; we know you would if you could, and that’s quite enough. We’re not the first and only, are we?”

Mrs. Somers: “Dear, no! There are multitudes of flattering spirits in the library, stopping the mouth of my portrait with pretty speeches.”

Miss Bayly, vividly: “Not your Bramford portrait?”

Mrs. Somers: “My Bramford portrait.”

Miss Bayly, to the other ladies: “Oh, let us go and see it too!” They flutter out of the drawing-room, where Mrs. Somers and Campbell remain alone together as before. He continues silent, while she waits for him to speak.

VIII. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL

Mrs. Somers, finally: “Well?”

Campbell: “Well, what?”

Mrs. Somers: “Nothing. Only I thought you were — you were going to—”

“MRS. SOMERS, POURING A CUP OF TEA: ‘THAT MAKES IT A LITTLE MORE DIFFICULT’”

Campbell: “No; I’ve got nothing to say.”

Mrs. Somers: “I didn’t mean that. I thought you were going to — go.” She puts up her hand and hides a triumphant little smile with it.

Campbell: “Very well, then, I’ll go, since you wish it.” He holds out his hand.

Mrs. Somers, putting hers behind her: “You’ve shaken hands once. Besides, who said I wished you to go?”

Campbell: “Do you wish me to stay?”

Mrs. Somers: “I wish you to — hand tea to people.”

Campbell: “And you won’t say anything more?”

Mrs. Somers: “It seems to me that’s enough.”

Campbell: “It isn’t enough for me. But I suppose beggars mustn’t be choosers. I can’t stay merely to hand tea to people, however. You can say yes or no now, Amy, as well as at any other time.”

Mrs. Somers: “Well, no, then — if you wish it so much.”

Campbell: “You know I don’t wish it.”

Mrs. Somers: “You gave me my choice. I thought you were indifferent about the word.”

Campbell: “You know better than that, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers: “Amy again! Aren’t you a little previous, Mr. Campbell?”

Campbell, with a sigh: “Ah, that’s for you to say.”

Mrs. Somers: “Wouldn’t it be impolite?”

Campbell; “Oh, not for you.”

Mrs. Somers: “If you’re so sarcastic, I shall be afraid of you.”

Campbell: “Under what circumstances?”

Mrs. Somers, dropping her eyes: “I don’t know.” He makes a rush upon her. “Oh! here comes Mrs. Curwen! Shake hands, as if you were going.”

IX. MRS. CURWEN; MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL

Mrs. Curwen: “What! is Mr. Campbell going, too?”

Mrs. Somers: “Too? You’re not going, Mrs. Curwen?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Yes, I’m going. The likeness is perfect, Mrs. Somers. It’s a speaking likeness, if there ever was one.”

Campbell: “Did it do all the talking?”

Mrs. Curwen: “It would — if Mrs. Roberts and Dr. Lawton hadn’t been there. Well, I must go.”

Campbell: “So must I.”

Mrs. Somers, in surprise: “Must you?”

Campbell: “Yes; these drifts will be over my ears directly.”

Mrs. Curwen: “You poor man! You don’t mean to say you’re walking?”

Campbell: “I shall be, in about half a minute.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Indeed you shall not! You shall be driving — with me. I’ve a vacancy in the coupé, and I’ll set you down wherever you like.”

Campbell: “Won’t it crowd you?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Not at all.”

Campbell: “Or incommode you in any way?”

Mrs. Curwen: “It will oblige me in every way.”

Campbell: “Then I will go, and a thousand thanks. Good-by again, Mrs. Somers.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Good-by, Mrs. Somers. Poor Mrs. Somers! It seems too bad to leave you here alone, bowed in an elegiac attitude over your tea-urn.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, not at all! Remember me to Mr. Curwen.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I will. Well, Mr. Campbell—”

Mrs. Somers: “Mr. Campbell—”

Campbell: “Well?”

Mrs. Curwen: “To which?”

Campbell: “Both.”

Mrs. Somers: “Neither!”

Mrs. Curwen: “Ah! ha, ha, ha! Mr. Campbell, do you know much about women?”

Campbell: “I had a mother.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Oh, a mother won’t do.”

Campbell: “Well, I have an only sister who is a woman.”

Mrs. Curwen: “A sister won’t do, either — not your own. You can’t learn a woman’s meaning in that way.”

Campbell: “I will sit at your feet, Mrs. Curwen, if you’ll instruct me.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I shall be delighted. I’ll begin now. Oh, you needn’t really prostrate yourself!” She stops him in a burlesque attempt to do so. “And I’ll concentrate the wisdom of the whole first lesson in a single word.”

Campbell, with clasped hands of entreaty: “Speak, blessed ghost!”

Mrs. Curwen: “Stay! Ah! ha, ha, ha!” She flies at Mrs. Somers and kisses her. “You can’t say I’m ill-natured, my dear, whatever I am!”

Mrs. Somers, pursuing her exit with the word: “No, merely atrocious.” A pause ensues, in which Campbell stands irresolute.

X. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL

Campbell, finally: “Did you wish me to stay, Amy?”

Mrs. Somers, airily: “I? Oh no! It was Mrs. Curwen.”

Campbell: “Then I think I’ll accept her kind offer of a seat in her coupé.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh! I thought, of course, you’d stay — at her request.”

Campbell: “No; I shall only stay at yours.”

Mrs. Somers: “And I shall not ask you. In fact, I warn you not to.”

Campbell: “Why?”

Mrs. Somers: “Because, if you urge me to speak now, I shall say—”

Campbell: “I wasn’t going to urge you.”

Mrs. Somers: “No matter! I shall say it now without being urged. Yes, I’ve made up my mind. I can’t marry a flirt.”

Campbell: “I can, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers: “Sir!”

Campbell: “You know very well you sent those people into the other room to keep me here and torment me—”

Mrs. Somers: “Now you’ve insulted me, and all is over.”

Campbell: “To tantalize me with your loveliness, your beauty, your grace, Amy!”

Mrs. Somers, softening: “Oh, that’s all very well—”

Campbell: “I’m glad you like it. I could go on at much greater length. But you know I love you dearly, Amy, and why should you delight in my agonies? But only marry me, and you shall delight in them as long as you live, and—”

Mrs. Somers: “You must hold me very cheap to think I would take you from that creature.”

Campbell: “Confound her! I wasn’t hers to give. I offered myself first.”

Mrs. Somers: “She offered you last, and — no, thank you, please.”

Campbell: “Do you really mean it?”

Mrs. Somers: “I shall not say. Or, yes, I will say. If that woman, who seems to have you at her beck and call, had not intermeddled, I might have made you a very different answer. But now my eyes are opened, and I see what I should have to expect, and — no, thank you, please.”

Campbell: “And if she hadn’t offered me—”

Mrs. Somers, drawing out her handkerchief and putting it to her eyes: “I was feeling kindly towards you — I was such a little fool—”

Campbell: “Amy!”

Mrs. Somers: “And you knew how much I disliked her.”

Campbell: “Yes, I saw by the way you kissed each other.”

Mrs. Somers: “Nonsense! You knew that meant nothing. But if it had been anybody else in the world but her, I shouldn’t have minded it. And now—”

Campbell: “Now—”

Mrs. Somers: “Now all those geese are coming back from the other room, and they’ll see that I’ve been crying, and everybody will know everything. Willis—”

Campbell: “Willis?”

Mrs. Somers: “Let me go! I must bathe my eyes! You stay here and receive them! I’ll be back at once!” She escapes from the arms stretched towards her, and out of the door, just before her guests enter from the library, and Campbell remains to receive them. The ladies, in returning, call over one another’s heads and shoulders.

XI. MR. CAMPBELL and the OTHERS

Mrs. Roberts: “Amy, it’s lovely! But it doesn’t half do you justice.”

Young Mrs. Bemis: “It’s too sweet for anything, Mrs. Somers.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Why did you let the man put you into that ridiculous seventeenth-century dress? Can’t he paint a modern frock?”

Mrs. Wharton: “But what exquisite coloring, Mrs. Somers!”

Mrs. Miller: “He’s got just your lovely turn of the head.”

Miss Bayly: “And the way you hold your fan — what character he’s thrown into it!”

Mrs. Roberts: “And that fall of the skirt, Amy; that skirt is full of character!” She discovers Mr. Campbell behind the tea-urn. He has Mrs. Somers’s light wrap on his shoulders, and her fan in his hand, and he alternately hides his blushes with it, and coquettishly folds it and pats his mouth in a gross caricature of Mrs. Somers’s manner. In rising he twitches his coat forward in a similar burlesque of a lady’s management of her skirt. “Why, where is Amy, Willis?”

Campbell: “Gone a moment. Some trouble about — the hot water.”

Lawton: “Hot water that you’ve been getting into? Ah, young man, look me in the eye!”

Campbell: “Your glass one, Doctor?”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Why, my dear, has your father got a glass eye?”

Mrs. Bemis: “Of course he hasn’t! What an idea! I don’t know what Mr. Campbell means.”

Lawton: “I’ve no doubt he wishes I had a glass eye — two of them, for that matter. But that isn’t answering my question. Where is Mrs. Somers?”

Campbell: “That was my sister’s question, and I did answer it. Have some tea, ladies? I’m glad you like my portrait, and that you think he’s got my lovely turn of the head, and the way I hold my fan, and the character of my skirt; but I agree with you that it isn’t half as pretty as I am.”

The Ladies: “Oh, what shall we do to him? Prescribe for us, Doctor.”

Campbell: “No, no! I want the Doctor’s services myself. I don’t want him to give me his medicines. I want him to give me away.”

Lawton: “You’re tired of giving yourself away, then?”

Campbell: “It’s of no use. They won’t have me.”

Lawton: “Who won’t?”

Campbell: “Oh, I’ll leave Mrs. Somers to say.”

XII. MRS. SOMERS and the OTHERS

Mrs. Somers, radiantly reappearing: “Say what?” She has hidden the traces of her tears from every one but the ladies by a light application of powder, and she knows that they all know she has been crying, and this makes her a little more smiling. “Say what?” She addresses the company in general rather than Campbell.

Campbell, with caricatured tenderness: “Say yes.”

Mrs. Somers: “What does he mean, Doctor?”

Lawton: “Oh, I’m afraid he’s past all surgery. I give him over to you, Mrs. Somers.”

Campbell: “There, now. She wasn’t the last to do it!”

Mrs. Somers, with the resolution of a widow: “Well, I suppose there’s nothing else for it, then. I’ll see what can be done for your patient, Doctor.” She passes her hand through Campbell’s arm, where he continues to stand behind the tea-table.

Mrs. Roberts, falling upon her and kissing her: “Amy, you don’t mean it!”

Mrs. Bemis, embracing her in turn: “I never can believe it.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “It is ridiculous! What, Willis?”

Mrs. Miller: “It does seem too nice to be true.”

Bemis: “You astonish us!”

Roberts: “We never should have dreamed of it.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “You must give us time to realize it.”

Mrs. Wharton: “Is it possible?”

Miss Bayly: “Is it possible?” They all shake hands with Mrs. Somers in turn.

Roberts: “Isn’t this rather sudden, Willis?”

Campbell: “Well, it is — for Mrs. Somers, perhaps. But I’ve found it awfully gradual.”

Mrs. Somers: “Nonsense! It’s an old story for both of us.”

Campbell: “Well, what I like about it is, it’s true. Founded on fact!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Really? I can’t believe it!”

Campbell: “Well, I don’t know whom all this charming incredulity’s intended to flatter, but if it’s I, I say no, not really, at all! It’s merely a little coup de théâtre we’ve been arranging.”

Lawton, patting him on the shoulder: “One ahead, as usual.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, thank you, Doctor! There are two of us ahead now.”

Lawton: “I believe you, at any rate. Bravo!” He initiates an applause in which all the rest join, while Campbell catches up Mrs. Somers’s fan and unfurls it before both their faces.

THE END

THE MOUSE -TRAP.

I. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL.

IN her drawing-room, Mrs. Amy Somers, young, pretty, stylish, in the last evanescent traces of widowhood, stands confronting Mr. Willis Campbell. She has a newspaper in her hand, folded to the width of a single column, which she extends towards him with an effect of indignant menace.

Mrs. Somers: “Then you acknowledge that it is yours?”

Campbell: “I acknowledge that I made a speech before the legislative committee on behalf of the anti-suffragists. You knew I was going to do that. I don’t know how they’ve reported it.”

Mrs. Somers, with severity: “Very well, then; I will read it. ‘ Willis Campbell, Esq., was next heard on behalf of the petitioners. He touched briefly upon the fact that the suffrage was evidently not desired by the vast majority of educated women.’”

Campbell: “You’ve always said they didn’t want it.”

Mrs. Somers: “That is not the point.” Reading: “‘And many of them would feel it an onerous burden, and not a privilege.’”

Campbell: “Well, didn’t you—”

Mrs. Somers: “Don’t interrupt!” Reading: “‘Which would compel them, at the cost of serious sacrifices, to contend at the polls with the ignorant classes who would be sure to exercise the right if conferred.’”

Campbell: “That was your own argument, Amy. They’re almost your own words.”

Mrs. Somers: “That isn’t what I object to.” Reading: “‘Mr. Campbell then referred in a more humorous strain to the argument, frequently used by the suffragists, that every tax-payer should have the right to vote. He said that he objected to this, because it implied that non-tax-payers should not have the right to vote, which would deprive of the suffrage a large body of adoptive citizens, who voted at all the elections with great promptness and assiduity. He thought the exemption of women from some duties required of men by the State fairly offset the loss of the ballot in their case, and that until we were prepared to send ladies to battle we ought not to oblige them to go to the polls. Some skirmishing ensued between Mr. Campbell and Mr. Willington, on the part of the suffragists, the latter gentleman affirming that in great crises of the world’s history women had shown as much courage as men, and the former contending that this did not at all affect his position, since the courage of women was in high degree a moral courage, which was not evoked by the ordinary conditions of peace or war, but required the imminence of some extraordinary, some vital emergency.’”

Campbell: “Well, what do you object to in all that?”

Mrs. Somers, tossing the paper on the table, and confronting him with her head lifted and her hands clasped upon her left side: “Everything! It is an insult to women.”

Campbell: “Woman, you mean. I don’t think women would mind it. Who’s been talking to you, Amy?”

Mrs. Somers: “Nobody. It doesn’t matter who’s been talking to me. That is not the question.”

Campbell: “It’s the question I asked.”

Mrs. Somers: “It isn’t the question I asked. I wish simply to know what you mean by that speech.”

Campbell: “I wish you knew how pretty you look in that dress.” Mrs. Somers involuntarily glances down at the skirt of it on either side, and rearranges it a little, folding her hands again as before. “But perhaps you do.”

Mrs. Somers, with dignity: “Will you answer my question?”

Campbell: “Certainly. I meant what I said.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, you did! Very well, then!

When a woman stands by the bedside of her sick child, and risks her life from contagion, what kind of courage do you call that?”

Campbell: “Moral.”

Mrs. Somers: “And when she remains in a burning building or a sinking ship — as they often do — and perishes, while her child is saved, what kind of courage is it?”

Campbell: “Moral.”

Mrs. Somers: “When she seizes an axe and defends her little ones against a bear or a wolf that’s just bursting in the cabin door, what kind of courage does she show?”

Campbell: “Moral.”

Mrs. Somers: “Or when her babe crawls up the track, and she snatches it from the very jaws of the cow-catcher—”

Campbell: “Oh, hold on, now, Amy! Be fair! It’s the engineer who does that: he runs along the side of the locomotive, and catches the smiling infant up, and lays it in the mother’s arms as the train thunders by. His name is usually Hank Rollins. The mother is always paralyzed with terror.” Mrs. Somers: “Of course she is. But in those other cases how does her courage differ from a man’s? If hers is always moral, what kind of courage does a man show when he faces the cannon?” Campbell: “Immoral. Come, Amy, are you trying to prove that women are braver than men? Well, they are. I never was in any danger yet that I didn’t wish I was a woman, for then I should have the courage to face it, or else I could turn and run without disgrace. All that I said in that speech was that women haven’t so much nerve as men.”

Mrs. Somers: “They have more.”

Campbell: “Nerves — yes.”

Mrs. Somers: “No, nerve. Take Dr. Cissy Gay, that little, slender, delicate, sensitive thing: what do you suppose she went through when she was studying medicine, and walking the hospitals, and all those disgusting things? And Mrs. J. Plunkett Harmon: do you mean to say that she has no nerve, facing all sorts of audiences, on the platform, everywhere? Or Rev. Lily Barber, living down all that ridicule, and going quietly on in her work—”

Campbell: “Oh, they’ve been talking to you.”

Mrs. Somers: “They have not! And if they have, Dr. Gay is as much opposed to suffrage as you are.”

Campbell: “As If Aren’t you opposed to it too?”

Mrs. Somers: “Of course I am. Or I was till you made that speech.”

Campbell: “It wasn’t exactly intended to convert you.”

Mrs. Somers: “It has placed me in a false position. Everybody knows, or the same as knows, that we’re engaged—”

Campbell: “Well, I’m not ashamed of it, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers, severely: “No matter! And now it will look as if I had no ideas of my own, and was just swayed about any way by you. A woman is despicable that joins with men in ridiculing women.” Campbell: “Who’s been saying that?”

Mrs. Somers: “No one. It doesn’t matter who’s been saying it. Mrs. Mervane has been saying it.” Campbell: “Mrs. Mervane?”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes, Mrs. Mervane, that you’re always praising and admiring so for her good sense and her right ideas. Didn’t you say she wrote as logically and forcibly as a man?”

Campbell: “Yes, I did.”

Mrs. Somers: “Very well, then, she says that if anything could turn her in favor of suffrage, it is that speech of yours. She says it’s a subtle attack upon the whole sex.”

Campbell: “Well, I give it up! You are all alike. You take everything personally, in the first place, and then you say it’s an attack on all women. Couldn’t I make this right by publishing a card to acknowledge your physical courage before the whole community, Amy? Then your friends would have to say that I had recognized the pluck of universal womanhood.”

Mrs. Somers: “No, sir; you can’t make it right now. And I’m sorry, sorry, sorry I signed the antisuffrage petition. Nothing will ever teach men to appreciate women till women practically assert themselves.”

Campbell: “That sounds very much like another quotation, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers: “And they must expect to be treated as cowards till they show themselves heroes. And they must first of all have the ballot.” Campbell: “Oh!” —

Mrs. Somers: “Yes. Then, and not till then, men will acknowledge their equality in all that is admirable in both. Then there will be no more puling insolence about moral courage and vital emergencies to evoke it.”

Campbell: “I don’t see the steps to this conclusion, but the master-mind of Mrs. J. Plunkett Harmon reaches conclusions at a bound.”

Mrs. Somers: “It wasn’t Mrs. Harmon.” Campbell: “Oh, well, Rev. Lily Barber, then. You needn’t tell me you originated that stuff, Amy. But I submit for the present. Think it over, my dear, and when I come back to-morrow—”

Mrs. Somers: “Perhaps you had better not come back to-morrow.”

Campbell: “Why?”

Mrs. Somers: “Because — because I’m afraid we are not in sympathy. Because if you thought that I needed some vital emergency to make me show that I was ready to die for you any moment—” Campbell: “Die for me? I want you to live for me, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers: “ — and the emergency never came, you would despise me.”

Campbell: “Never!”

Mrs. Somers: “If you have such a low opinion of women generally—”

Campbell: “I a low opinion of women!”

Mrs. Somers: “You said they were cowards.” Campbell: “I didn’t say they were cowards. And if I seemed to say so, it was my misfortune. I honestly and truly think, Amy, that when a woman is roused, she isn’t afraid of anything in heaven or on—” He stops abruptly, and looks towards the corner of the room.

Mrs. Somers: “What is it?”

Campbell: “Oh, nothing. I thought I saw a mouse.”

Mrs. Somers: “A mouse!” She flings herself upon him, and clutches him with convulsive energy. Then suddenly freeing him, she leaps upon a chair, and stoops over to hold her train from the floor. “Oh, drive it out, drive it out! Don’t kill it. Oh — e-e-e-e! Drive it out! Oh, what shall I do? Oh, Willis, love, jump on a chair! Oh, horrid little dreadful reptile! Oh, drive it out!” In uttering these appeals Mrs. Somers alternately looses her hold upon her train in order to clasp her face in her hands, and then uncovers her face to seize her train. “Oh, is it gone f Come here, Willis, and let me hold your hand! Or no! Drive it, drive it, drive it out!”

Campbell, going about the room in deliberate examination: “I can’t find it. I guess it’s gone into its hole again.”

Mrs. Somers: “No, it hasn’t! It hasn’t got any hole here. It must have come in from somewhere else. Oh, I hope I shall have a little wisdom some time, and never, never, never have cake and wine brought into the drawing-room again, no matter how faint with walking any one is. Of course it was the smell of the fruit and crumbs attracted it; and they might just as well take the horse-cars, but they said they had walked all the way to get me to sign the suffrage petition, and when I said I’d signed the anti-suffrage, of course I had to offer them something; I couldn’t do less. Have you driven it out?”

Campbell: “I’ve done my best. But I can’t find it, and I can’t drive it out till I do find it.”

Mrs. Somers: “It’s run into the fireplace. Rattle the tongs!” Campbell goes to the fireplace and rattles the tongs against the shovel, Mrs. Somers meanwhile covering her face. “Ow — ugh — e-e-e-e! Is it gone?” She uncovers her eyes.

Campbell: “It never was there.”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes, it was, Willis. Don’t tell me it wasn’t! Where else was it if it wasn’t there? Look under that book-table!”

Campbell: “Which one?”

Mrs. Somers: “That one with the shelf coming down almost to the carpet. Poke under it with the poker!” As Campbell obeys, she again hides her face. “U-u-u-gh! Is it gone now?” Campbell: “It wasn’t there.”

Mrs. Somers: “Poke hard! Bang against the mop-board! Bang!”

Campbell, poking and banging: “There! I tell you it never was there.”

Mrs. Somers, uncovering her face: “Oh, what shall I do? It must be somewhere in the room, and I never can breathe till you’ve found it. Bang again!”

Campbell: “Nonsense! It’s gone long ago. Do you suppose a mouse of any presence of mind or self-respect would stay here after all this uproar?” He restores the tongs to their stand with a clash.

Mrs. Somers, responsive to the clash: “Ow!”

Campbell, advancing towards her and extending his hand: “Come, Amy; get down now. I must be going.”

Mrs. Somers, in horror: “Get down? Going?”

Campbell: “Certainly. I can’t stay here all day. I’ve got to follow that mouse out into the street and have him arrested. It’s a public duty.”

Mrs. Somers: “Don’t throw ridicule on it!” After a moment: “You know I can’t let you go till I’ve seen that mouse leave this room. Go all round, and stamp in the corners.” She covers her face again. “Ugh!”

Campbell: “How are you going to see him leave the room if you won’t look? He’s left long ago. I wouldn’t stay if I was a mouse. And I’ve got to go, anyway.”

Mrs. Somers, uncovering her face: “No! I beg, I command you to stay, or I shall never get out of this room alive. You know I sha’n’t.” A ring at the street door is heard. “Oh dear, what shall I do? I’ve told Jane I would see anybody that called, and now I daren’t step my foot to the floor! What shall I do?”

Campbell, with authority: “You must get down. There’s no mouse here, I tell you; and if people come and find you standing on a chair in your drawing-room, what will they think?”

Mrs. Somers: “I can kneel on it.” She drops to her knees on the chair. “There!”

Campbell: “That’s no better. It’s worse.”

Mrs. Somers, listening to the party at the door below, which the maid has opened: “‘Sh! I want to make out who it is. ‘Sh! Yes — it is!” After listening: “Yes; it’s Mrs. Miller and Lou Bemis and Mrs. Curwen! I don’t see how they happen to come together, for Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Curwen perfectly hate each other. Oh yes! I know! They’re all on the way to Mrs. Ransom’s reception; he’s showing his pictures and some of her things — horrid daubs; I don’t see how she can have the face — and they’ve met here by accident. ‘Sh! She’s showing them into the reception-room. Yes, that’s quite right.” Mrs. Somers delivers these sentences in a piercing whisper of extreme volubility. “Now, as soon as she brings up their cards, I’ll say I’m not at all well — that I’m engaged — just going out. No, that won’t do. I must be sick. Anything else would be perfectly insulting after saying that I was at home; and Jane has got to go back and tell them she forgot that I had gone to bed with a severe headache.” As Jane appears at the drawing-room door, and falters at sight of Mrs. Somers kneeling on her chair, that lady beckons her to her, frowning, shaking her head, and pressing her finger on her lip to enforce silence, and takes the cards from her, while she continues in whisper: “Yes. All right, Jane! Go straight back and tell them you forgot I had gone to bed with a perfectly blinding headache; and don’t let another soul into the house. Mr. Campbell saw a mouse, and I can’t get down till he’s caught it. Go!”

II. JANE; MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL; THEN MRS. MILLER; MRS. CURWEN; MRS. BEMIS.

Jane, after a moment of petrifaction: “A mouse! In the room, here? Oh, my goodness gracious me!” She leaps upon the chair next to Mrs. Somers, who again springs to her feet.

Mrs. Somers: “Did you see it? Oh, e-e-e-e!”

Jane: “W-o-o-o-o! I don’t know! Where was it? Oh yes, I thought—” They clutch each other convulsively, and blend their cries, at the sound of which the ladies in the reception-room below come flocking up-stairs into the drawing-room.

The ladies, at sight of Mrs. Somers and her servant: “What is it? what is it?”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, there’s a mouse in the room. Oh, jump on chairs!”

Mrs. Miller, vaulting into the middle of the sofa: “A mouse!”

Mrs. Lou Bemis, alighting upon a slight reception-chair: “Oh, not in this room, Mrs. Somers! Don’t say it!”

Mrs. Curwen, with a laugh of mingled terror and enjoyment, from the top of the table where she finds herself: “Where is it?”

Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know. I didn’t see it. But, oh! it’s here somewhere. Mr. Campbell saw it, and Jane did when she came up with your cards, and he’s been trying to drive it out, but he can’t even budge it; and—”

Campbell, desperately: “Ladies, there isn’t any mouse here! I’ve been racketing round here with the shovel and tongs all over the room, and the mouse is gone. You can depend upon that. You’re as safe here as you would be in your own rooms.” Mrs. Somers: “How can you say such a thing? No, I won’t be responsible if anything happens. The mouse is in this room. No one has seen it go out, and it’s here still.”

Mrs. Bemis, balancing herself with difficulty on her chair: “Oh dear! how tippy it is! I’m sure it’s going to break.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Get up here with me, Mrs. Bemis. We can protect each other.”

Mrs. Miller: “You would both fall off. Better come here on the sofa, Mrs. Bemis.”

Mrs. Curwen: “The mouse could run up that ottoman sofa as easily as the ground.”

Mrs. Miller, covering her face: “Oh, how can you say such a thing?”

Mrs. Bemis: “Oh, I know I’m going to fall!” Mrs. Somers: “Willis, for shame! Help her!” Campbell: “But how — how can I help—”

Mrs. Somers: “Get her another chair.” Campbell: “Oh!” He pushes a large arm-chair towards Mrs. Bemis, who leaps into it with a wild  cry, spurning the reception - chair half across the room in her flight.

Mrs. Bemis: “Oh, thank you, thank you, Mr. Campbell! Oh, I shall always bless you!”

Mrs. Curwen: “Yes, you have saved all our lives. Where there’s a man, I don’t care for a thousand mice.”

Mrs. Miller: “Oh, how very frank!”

Mrs. Curwen: “Yes, I’m nothing if not open-minded.”

Campbell, surveying her with amusement and interest: “I don’t believe you’re very much scared.”

Mrs. Bemis: “Oh yes, she is, Mr. Campbell. She keeps up that way, and then the first thing she faints.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Not on centre-tables, my dear; there isn’t room.”

Campbell, with increasing fascination: “Why don’t you get down, and set the rest an example of courage.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I prefer to set the example here: it’s safer.”

Campbell: “You look like the statue of some goddess on her altar — or saint—”

Mrs. Curwen: “Thank you. If you will say victim, I will agree with you. Say Iphigenia. But the others are too much. I draw the line at goddesses and saints.”

Campbell: “And you’re afraid of mice, too?”

Mrs. Curwen: “To be sure I am.”

Campbell: “Well, there is no mouse down here — nothing but a miserable man. Now, will you get down?”

Mrs. Somers: “Mrs. Curwen, don’t think of it! He’s just saying it. The mouse is there.” To Campbell: “You are placing us all in a very ridiculous position.”

Campbell: “I am sorry for that; I am, indeed, I give you my word of honor that I don’t believe there’s any mouse in the room.”

Mrs. Somers: “Jane just saw it.”

Campbell: “She thought she saw it, but I don’t think she did. A lion would have been scared out by this time.” A ring at the door is heard.

Mrs. Somers: “There, Jane, there’s some one ringing! You must go to the door.”

Jane, throwing her apron over her head: “Oh, please, Mrs. Somers, I can’t go! I’m so afraid of mice!”

Mrs. Somers: “Nonsense! you must go. It’s perfectly ridiculous your pretending not.”

Jane: “Oh, I couldn’t, Mrs. Somers! I was always so from a child. I can’t bear ‘em.”

Mrs. Somers: “This is disgraceful. Do you mean to say that you won’t do what I ask you? Very well, then; you can go! You needn’t stay the week out; I will pay you, and you can go at once. Do you understand?”

Jane: “Yes, I do, and I’d be glad to go this very minute, but I don’t dare to get down.”

Mrs. Somers: “But why shouldn’t you get down?

There isn’t the least danger. Is there any danger now, Mr. Campbell?”

Campbell: “Not the least in the world. Mouse gone long ago.”

Mrs. Somers: “There!”

Jane: “I can’t help it. There are so many in the dining-room—”

Mrs. Somers: “In my dining-room? Oh, my goodness! why didn’t you tell me before?”

Jane: “And one ran right over my foot.”

Mrs. Somers: “Your foot? Oh, I wonder that you live to tell it! Why haven’t you put traps? Where’s the cat?”

Jane: “The cook’s spoiled the cat, feeding it so much.”

Mrs. Miller: “Yes, that’s the worst of cooks: they always spoil cats.”

Mrs. Bemis: “They overfeed them.”

Mrs. Miller: “And then, of course, the cats are worth nothing as mousers. I had a cat—” The bell sounds again.

Mrs. Somers: “There! Some one must go.” Campbell: “Why, I’ll go to the door.”

Mrs. Somers: “And leave us here? Never! How can you propose such a thing? If you dare to go, I shall die. Don’t think of such a thing.” Jane: “The cook will go, if they keep ringing. Oh! ugh! hu, hu! When ever shall I get out of this?”

Mrs. Somers: “Stop crying, Jane! Be calm! You’re perfectly safe. You may be glad it’s no worse. ‘Sh! There’s the cook going to the door at last. Who can it be? Listen!”

Jane, clutching Mrs. Somers: “Oh! ugh! Wo-o-o-o!”

All the Ladies: “E-e-e-e!”

Mrs. Somers: “What’s the matter, Jane? Let me go! What’s the matter?”

Jane: “Oh, I thought I was falling — right down in among it!”

Mrs. Agnes Roberts, calling up from below: “What in the world is it, Amy?”

Campbell: “Oh, my prophetic soul, my sister!” Mrs. Somers, shouting: “Is that you, Agnes? Don’t come up! Don’t come up, for your life! Don’t come up, unless you wish to perish instantly. Oh, it’s dreadful, your coming now. Keep away! Go right straight out of the house, unless you wish to fling your life away.”

The other Ladies: “Don’t come! Don’t come! Keep away! It will do no good.”

III. MRS. ROBERTS AND THE OTHERS.

Mrs. Roberts, mounting the stairs, as if lured to her doom by an irresistible fascination: “Not come? Keep away? Who’s talking? What is it? Oh, Amy, what is it?” As she reaches the stair-landing space before the drawing-room and looks in, where Campbell stands in the middle of the floor with his hands in his pockets and despair in his face: “You here, Willis? What are you doing? What is it?” Her eye wanders to the ladies trembling in their several refuges, and a dawning apprehension makes itself seen in her face. “What is — Oh, it is — it isn’t — it isn’t a — mouse! Oh, Amy! Amy! Amy! Oh, how could you let me come right into the room with it? Oh, I never can forgive you! I thought it was somebody getting killed. Oh, why didn’t you tell me it was a mouse?” She alights on the piano-stool, and keeps it from rocking by staying herself with one hand on the piano-top.

Campbell: “Now look here, Agnes—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Hush! Don’t speak to me, Willis! You unnatural, cruel, heartless — Why did you let me come in? I wonder at you, Willis! If you had been half the brother you ought to be — Oh dear, dear! I know how you will go away and laugh now, and tell everybody. I suppose you think it corroborates that silly speech of yours before the legislative committee that’s wounded all your best friends so, and that I’ve been talking myself perfectly dumb defending you about.” Mrs. Roberts unconsciously gives a little push for emphasis, and the stool revolves with her. “E-e-e-e! Oh, Amy, how can you have one of these old-fashioned, horrid, whirling things, fit for nothing but boarding-house parlors!”

Mrs. Somers, with just pique: “I’m very sorry you don’t like my piano-stool, Agnes. I keep it because it was my poor mother’s; but if you’ll give me due notice another time, I’ll try to have a different—”

Mrs. Roberts, bursting into tears: “Oh, don’t say another word, Amy dear! I’m so ashamed of myself that I can hardly breathe now!”

Campbell: “And I’m ashamed of you too, Agnes! Get down off that stool, and behave yourself like a sensible woman.” He goes towards her as if to lift her down. “The mouse is gone long ago. And if it was here, it wouldn’t bite you.”

Mrs. Roberts, repelling him with one hand while she clings insecurely to the piano with the other: “Bite? Do you suppose I care for a mouse’s biting, Willis? I wouldn’t care for the bite of an elephant. It’s the idea. Can’t you understand?”

The other Ladies: “Oh yes, it’s the idea.”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes, I told him in the first place, Agnes, that it was the idea of a mouse.”

Mrs. Curwen: “It’s the innate repugnance.” Campbell: “It’s the enmity put between the mouse that tempted Eve and the woman—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Don’t be — sacrilegious, Willis! Don’t, for your own sake!”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes, it’s very easy to make fun of the Bible.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Or woman. And the wit is equally contemptible in either case.”

Mrs. Miller: “Other animals feel about mice just as we do. I was reading only the other day of an elephant — your mentioning an elephant reminded me of it, Mrs.—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh!”

The other Ladies: “E-e-e-e!”

Mrs. Somers: “What is it?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Nothing. I thought I was going to fall. Go on, Mrs. Miller.”

Mrs. Miller: “Oh, it’s merely that the elephant was asleep, and a mouse ran up its trunk—”

All the Ladies: “Horrors!”

Mrs. Miller: “And the poor creature sprang up in the greatest alarm, and bellowed till it woke the whole menagerie. It simply shows that it isn’t because women are nervously constituted that they’re afraid of mice, for the nervous organism of an elephant—”

Mrs. Somers: “The first time I went to Europe I found a mouse in one of my trunks. It was a steamer trunk, that you push under the berth, and I’ve perfectly loathed them ever since.”

Mrs. Semis: “Once in a farm-house where we were staying the summer, a mouse ran right across the table.”

All the Ladies: “Oh!”

Mrs. Curwen: “One morning I found one in the bath-tub.”

All the Ladies: “Oh> Mrs. Curwen!”

Mrs. Curwen: “We’d heard it scrambling round all night. It was stone-dead.”

All the Ladies: “Hideous!”

Campbell: “Why, bless my soul! if the mouse was dead—”

Mrs. Somers: “Then it was ten times as bad as if it was alive. Can’t you understand? It’s the idea. But, oh, don’t let’s talk of it any more, ladies! Let’s talk of something else. Agnes, are you going to Mrs. Ransom’s?”

Mrs. Roberts: “I’ve been. Nearly everybody’s coming away.”

Mrs. Miller: “Why, what time is it, Mrs. Somers?” Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know.”

Campbell, looking at his watch: “It’s ten minutes of six, and I’ve missed my appointment.”

Mrs. Curwen: “And if we don’t go now we shall miss the reception.”

Mrs. Remis: “Papa was very particular I should go, because he couldn’t.”

Mrs. Miller: “We must go at once.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, I’m so sorry! Jane, go down with the ladies.”

Jane: “Oh, please, Mrs. Somers Mrs. Miller: “But how are we to go? We are imprisoned here. We cannot get away. You must do something.”

Mrs. Curwen: “It is your house, Mrs. Somers. You are responsible.”

Mrs. Somers: “But what can I do? I can’t get down myself. And if I did, what good would it do?”

Mrs. Roberts: “For shame, Willis, to laugh!” Campbell: “I wasn’t laughing. I was merely smiling aloud.”

Mrs. Roberts: “It’s the same thing. You ought to think of something.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh yes, do, Willis. Think of something for my — for goodness’ sake, and I will always thank you. You’re so ingenious.”

Campbell: “Well, in the first place, I don’t believe there’s any mouse in the room.”

Mrs. Somers: “That is nonsense; Jane saw it. Is that all your ingenuity amounts to?”

Mrs. Roberts, electrically: “Amy, I have an idea!” —

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, Agnes! How like you!” Mrs. Roberts: “Not at all. It’s the simplest thing in the world. It’s the only way. And no thanks to Willis, either.”

All the Ladies: “Well? Well? Well?”

Mrs. Roberts: “It’s just this: all make a rush, one after another, and the rest scream. And Willis must keep beating the floor.”

Mrs. Somers: “How perfectly magnificent! Well, Agnes, you have got your wits about you! It is the very thing! Now, Mrs. Curwen, if you will jump down and make a rush—”

Mrs. Curwen: “It’s for you to make the rush first, Mrs. Somers. You are the hostess.”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes, but I’m not going, don’t you see? I’ve sent my card to Mrs. Ransom.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Then, Mrs. Miller, will you, please—”

Mrs. Miller: “Mrs. Bemis is nearest the door. I think she will wish to start first.”

Mrs. Bemis: “No; I will wait for the rest.” Mrs. Somers: “That is a good idea. They ought to all rush together, not one after another. Don’t you think so, Agnes?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, that was what I meant. And we ought to all scream just before they start, so as to scare it.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, how capital! You have got a brain, Agnes! Now I begin to believe we shall live through it. And Mr. Campbell ought to beat the floor first, oughtn’t he?”

Campbell: “I haven’t got anything to beat it with.” He looks about the room. “But I can go down and get my cane.”

All: “No!”

Mrs. Somers: “Jane will go down and get it for you.”

Jane: “Oh, I couldn’t, Mrs. Somers!”

Campbell: “Perhaps the poker — but it would spoil your carpet.” —

Mrs. Somers: “No matter for the carpet; you can beat it into — pulp.” Campbell gets the poker and beats the carpet in different places. “Harder! Beat harder!”

Mrs. Roberts: “You’re not beating at all, Willis. You’re just — temporizing.” Campbell wildly thrashes the carpet.

Mrs. Somers: “There! that is something like. Now scream, Agnes! Scream, Mrs. Curwen! Mrs. Miller, Lou, scream, please!”

All: “E-e-e-e!”

Mrs. Somers: “But nobody started!”

Mrs. Curwen: “I didn’t believe the rest would start, and so I didn’t.”

Mrs. Miller: “I was sure no one else would start.”

Mrs. Remis: “So was I.”

Mrs. Roberts: “We must have faith in each other, or else the plan’s a failure. Now all scream!” They scream.

Mrs. Somers: “E-e-e-e! Keep beating the carpet, Willis! Hard, hard, hard!” The other ladies all leap down from their perches, and rush screaming out of the drawing-room, followed by Jane, with a whoop that prolongs itself into the depths of the basement, after the retreating wails and hysterical laughter of the ladies have died out of the street door. “Oh, wasn’t it splendid? It was a perfect success.”

IV. MRS. SOMERS; MR. CAMPBELL.

Campbell, leaning on his poker, and panting with exhaustion: “They got out alive.”

Mrs. Somers: “And it was all Agnes’s idea. Why, Agnes is gone too!”

Campbell: “Yes, Agnes is gone. I think it was a ruse of hers to save her own life. She’s quite capable of it.”

Mrs. Somers, with justice: “No, I don’t think that. She was just carried away by the excitement of the moment.”

Campbell: “At any rate, she’s gone. And now, Amy, don’t you think you’d better get down?” Mrs. Somers, in astonishment: “Get down? Why, you must be crazy. How can I get down if it’s still there?”

Campbell: “What?”

Mrs. Somers: “The mouse.”

Campbell: “But it isn’t there, my dear. You saw for yourself that it wasn’t there.”

Mrs. Somers: “Did you see it run out?” Campbell: “No; but—”

Mrs. Somers: “Very well, then, it’s there still. Of course it is. I wouldn’t get down for worlds.”

Campbell: “Oh, good heavens! Do you expect to spend the rest of your life up there in that chair?”

Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know. I shall not get down till I see that mouse leave this room.”

Campbell, desperately: “Well, then, I must make a clean breast of it. There never was any mouse here.”

Mrs. Somers: “What do you mean?”

Campbell: “I mean that when we were talking — arguing — about the physical courage of women, I thought I would try a mouse. It’s succeeded only too well. I’ll never try another.”

Mrs. Somers: “And could you really be guilty of such a cruel—”

Campbell: “Yes.”

Mrs. Somers: “Shameless—”

Campbell: “I was.”

Mrs. Somers: “Despicable deception?” Campbell: “It was vile, I know, but I did it.” Mrs. Somers: “I don’t believe it. No, rather than believe that of you, Willis, I would believe there were a million mice in the room.”

Campbell: “Amy, indeed—”

Mrs. Somers: “No; if you could deceive me then, you can deceive me now. If you could say there was a mouse in the room when there wasn’t, you are quite capable of saying there isn’t when there is. You are just saying it now to get me to get down.”

Campbell: “Upon my honor, I’m not.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, don’t talk to me of honor! The honor of a man who could revel — yes, revel — in the terrors of helpless women—”

Campbell: “No, no; I’d no idea of it, Amy.” Mrs. Somers: “You will please not address me in that way, Mr. Campbell. You have forfeited all right to do so.”

Campbell: “I know it. What I did was very foolish and thoughtless.”

Mrs. Somers: “It was very low and ungentlemanly. I suppose you will go away and laugh over it with your — associates.”

Campbell: “Why not say my ruffianly accomplices at once, Amy? No, I assure you that unless you tell of the affair, nobody shall ever hear of it from me. It’s too disastrous a victory. I’m hoist by my own petard, caught in my own mousetrap. There is such a thing as succeeding too well.”

Mrs. Somers: “I should think you would be ashamed of it. Suppose you have shown that women are nervous and excitable, does that prove anything?”

Campbell: “Nothing in the world.”

Mrs. Somers: “Very likely some of us will be sick from it. I dare say you think that would be another triumphant argument.”

Campbell: “I shouldn’t exult in it.”

Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know when I shall ever get over it myself. I have had a dreadful shock.” Campbell: “I’m sorry with all my heart — I am, indeed. I had no conception that you cared so much for mice — despised them so much.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh yes, laugh, do! It’s quite in character. But if you have such a contempt for women, of course you wouldn’t want to marry one.” Campbell: “Yes, I should, my dear. But only one.”

Mrs. Somers: “Very well, then! You can find some other one. All is over between us. Yes! I will send you back the precious gifts you have lavished upon me, and I will thank you for mine. A man who can turn the sex that his mother and sister belong to into ridicule can have no real love for his wife. I am glad that I found you out in time.” Campbell: “Do you really mean it, Amy?”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes, I mean it. And I hope it will be a lesson to you. If you find any other poor, silly, trusting creature that you can impose yourself upon for a gentleman as you have upon me, I advise you to reserve your low, vulgar, boyish tricks till after she is helplessly yours, or she may tear your hateful ring from her finger and fling it—” She attempts to pull a ring from her finger, but it will not come off. “Never mind! I will get it off with a little soapsuds; and then—” Campbell: “Oh no, my dear! Come, I can allow for your excitement, but I can’t stand everything, though I admit everything. When a man has said he’s played a silly part he doesn’t like to be told so, and as for imposing myself upon you for a gentleman — you must take that back, Amy.”

Mrs. Somers: “I do. I take it back. There hasn’t been any imposture. I knew you were not a gentleman.”

Campbell: “Very good! Then I’m not fit for a lady’s company, and I don’t deny, though you’re so hard upon me, that you’re a lady, Amy. Good-by.” He bows and walks out of the room.

Mrs. Somers, sending her voice after him in a wail of despair: “Willis!”

Campbell, coming back: “Well?”

Mrs. Somers: “I can’t let you go.” He runs towards her, but she shrinks back on her chair against the wall. “No, no!”

Campbell, hesitating: “Why did you call me back, then?”

Mrs. Somers: “I — I didn’t call you back; I just said — Willis.”

Campbell: “This is unworthy — even of you.”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh!”

Campbell: “Do you admit that you have been too severe?”

Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know. What did I say?”

Campbell: “A number of pleasant things; that I was a fraud, and no gentleman.”

Mrs. Somers: “Did I say that?”

Campbell: “Yes, you did.”

Mrs. Somers: “I must have been very much incensed against you. I beg your pardon for — being so angry.”

Campbell: “That won’t do. I don’t care how angry you are if you don’t call me names. You must take them back.”

Mrs. Somers: “Do you see my handkerchief anywhere about on the carpet?”

Campbell, looking about, and then finding it: “Yes; here it is.” He hands it to her, and she bends forward and takes it from him at arm’s-length, whipping it nervously out of his hand. “What’s the matter?”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, nothing — nothing! Will you please give me my fan from the table there?” He obeys, and she catches it from him as she has caught the handkerchief. “Thank you! Keep away, please!”

Campbell, angrily: “Really this is too much. If you are afraid of touching me—”

Mrs. Somers: “No, I don’t mind touching you; that isn’t it. But if you stood so near, don’t you see, it might run up you, and jump on to me.” Campbell: “What might?”

Mrs. Somers: “You know. The mouse.” Campbell: “The mouse! There is no mouse.” Mrs. Somers: “That’s what you said before.” Campbell: “Well, it’s true. There isn’t any mouse, and there never was.” —

Mrs. Somers: “There’s the idea. And that’s all I ever cared for.”

Campbell: “Well, what are you going to do? I can’t kill the idea of a mouse, and I can’t drive it out of the room.”

Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I suppose I shall die here.” She presses her handkerchief to her eyes. “I shall never get out of the room alive. Then I hope you will he satisfied.” Campbell: “Amy, how can you say such things to me?”

Mrs. Somers: “Oh, I suppose you’re fond of me, in your contemptuous way. I never denied that. And I’m sorry, I’m sure, if I wounded your feelings by anything I said.”

Campbell: “Then you admit that I am a gentleman?”

Mrs. Somers: “I didn’t say that.”

Campbell: “And I can’t be satisfied with less. I’ll own that I’ve been stupid, but I haven’t been ungentlemanly. I can’t remain unless you do.” Mrs. Somers: “And do you think threatening me is gentlemanly?”

Campbell: “That isn’t the question. Do you think I’m a gentleman?”

Mrs. Somers: “You’re what the world calls a gentleman — yes.”

Campbell: “Do you think I’m one?”

Mrs. Somers: “How can I tell? I can’t think at all, perched up here.”

Campbell: “Why don’t you get down, then?” Mrs. Somers: “You know very well why.” Campbell: “But you’ll have to get down some time. You can’t stay there always.”

Mrs. Somers: “Why should you care?” Campbell: “You know I do care. You know that I love you dearly, and that I can’t bear to see you in distress. Shall I beat the carpet, and you scream and make a rush?”

Mrs. Somers: “No; I haven’t the strength for that. I should drop in a faint as soon as I touched the floor.”

Campbell: “Oh, good heavens! What am I going to do, then?”

Mrs. Somers: “I don’t know. You got me into the trouble. I should think you could get me out of it.”

Campbell, after walking distractedly up and down the room: “There’s only one way that I can think of, and if we’re not engaged any longer, it wouldn’t do.”

Mrs. Somers, yielding to her curiosity, after a moment’s hesitation: “What is it?”

Campbell: “Oh, unless we’re still engaged, it’s no use proposing it.”

Mrs. Somers: “Can’t you tell me without?” Campbell: “Impossible.”

Mrs. Somers, looking down at her fan: “Well, suppose we are still engaged, then?” Looking up: “Yes, say we are engaged.”

Campbell: “It’s to carry you out.”

Mrs. Somers, recoiling a little: “Oh! do you think that would be very nice?”

Campbell: “Yes, I think it would. We can both scream, you know.”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes?”

Campbell: “And then you fling yourself into my arms.”

Mrs. Somers: “Yes?”

Campbell: “And I rush out of the room with you.”

Mrs. Somers, with a deep breath: “I would never do it in the world.”

Campbell: “Well, then, you must stay where you are.”

Mrs. Somers, closing her fan: “You’re not strong enough.” She puts her handkerchief into her pocket. “You would be sure to fall.” She gathers her train in one hand. “Well, then, look the other way!” Campbell turns his face aside and waits. “No, I can’t do it.”

Campbell, retiring wrathfully to the other side of the room: “What shall we do, then?”

Mrs. Somers, after reflection: “I don’t know what we shall do. But if I were a man—”

Campbell: “Well, if you were a man—”

Mrs. Somers: “Don’t you think Mrs. Curwen is fascinating?”

Campbell: “She does.”

Mrs. Somers: “You must admit she’s clever? And awfully stylish?”

Campbell: “I don’t admit anything of the kind. She’s always posing. I think she made herself ridiculous standing there on the table.”

Mrs. Somers, fondly: “Oh, do you think so? You are very severe.”

Campbell: “Come, now, Amy, what has all this got to do with it?”

Mrs. Somers: “Nothing. But if I were a man—”

Campbell: “Well?”

Mrs. Somers: “Well, in the first place, I wouldn’t have got you wrought up so.”

Campbell: “Well, but if you had! Suppose you had done all that I’ve done, and that I was up there in your place standing on a chair, and wouldn’t let you leave the room, and wouldn’t get down and walk out, and wouldn’t allow myself to be carried, what should you do?”

Mrs. Somers, who has been regarding him attentively over the top of her fan, which she holds pressed against her face: “Why, I suppose if you wouldn’t let me help you willingly — I should use violence Campbell: “You witch!” As he makes a wild rush upon her, the curtain, which in the plays of this author has a strict regard for the convenances? abruptly descends.

A LIKELY STORY

I. MR. AND MRS. WILLIS CAMPBELL

Mrs. Campbell: “Now this, I think, is the most exciting part of the whole affair, and the pleasantest.” She is seated at breakfast in her cottage at Summering-by-the-Sea. A heap of letters of various stylish shapes, colors, and superscriptions lies beside her plate, and irregularly straggles about among the coffee-service. Vis-�-vis with her sits Mr. Campbell behind a newspaper. “How prompt they are! Why, I didn’t expect to get half so many answers yet. But that shows that where people have nothing to do but attend to their social duties they are always prompt — even the men; women, of course, reply early anyway, and you don’t really care for them; but in town the men seem to put it off till the very last moment, and then some of them call when it’s over to excuse themselves for not having come after accepting. It really makes you wish for a leisure class. It’s only the drive and hurry of American life that make our men seem wanting in the convenances; and if they had the time, with their instinctive delicacy, they would be perfect: it would come from the heart: they’re more truly polite now. Willis, just look at this!”

Campbell, behind his paper: “Look at what?”

Mrs. Campbell: “These replies. Why, I do believe that more than half the people have answered already, and the invitations only went out yesterday. That comes from putting on R.S.V.P. I knew I was right, and I shall always do it, I don’t care what you say.”

Campbell: “You didn’t put on R.S.V.P. after all I said?” He looks round the edge of his paper at her.

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes, I did. The idea of your setting up for an authority in such a thing as that!”

Campbell: “Then I’m sorry I didn’t ask you to do it. It’s a shame to make people say whether they’ll come to a garden-party from four till seven or not.”

Mrs. Campbell: “A shame? How can you provide if you don’t know how many are coming? I should like to know that. But of course I couldn’t expect you to give in gracefully.”

Campbell: “I should give in gracefully if I gave in at all, but I don’t.” He throws his paper down beside his chair. “Here, hand over the letters, and I’ll be opening them for you while you pour out the coffee.”

Mrs. Campbell, covering the letters with her hands: “Indeed you won’t!”

Campbell: “Well, pour out the coffee, then, anyway.”

Mrs. Campbell, after a moment’s reflection: “No, I shall not do it. I’m going to open them every one before you get a drop of coffee — just to punish you.”

Campbell: “To punish me? For what?” Mrs. Campbell hesitates, as if at a loss what to say. “There! you don’t know.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes, I do: for saying I oughtn’t to have put on R.S.V.P. Do you take it back?”

Campbell: “How can I till I’ve had some coffee? My mind won’t work on an empty stomach. Well—” He rises and goes round the table towards her.

Mrs. Campbell, spreading both arms over the letters: “Willis, if you dare to touch them, I’ll ring for Jane, and then she’ll see you cutting up.”

Campbell: “Touch what? I’m coming to get some coffee.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Well, I’ll give you some coffee; but don’t you touch a single one of those letters — after what you’ve said.”

Campbell: “All right!” He extends one hand for the coffee, and with the other sweeps all the letters together, and starts back to his place. As she flies upon him, “Look out, Amy; you’ll make me spill this coffee all over the table-cloth.”

Mrs. Campbell, sinking into her seat: “Oh, Willis, how can you be so base? Give me my letters. Do!”

Campbell, sorting them over: “You may have half.”

Mrs. Campbell: “No; I shall have all. I insist upon it.”

Campbell: “Well, then, you may have all the ladies’ letters. There are twice as many of them.”

Mrs. Campbell: “No; I shall have the men’s, too. Give me the men’s first.”

Campbell: “How can I tell which are the men’s without opening them?”

Mrs. Campbell: “How could you tell which were the ladies’? Come, now, Willis, don’t tease me any longer. You know I hate it.”

Campbell, studying the superscriptions, one after another: “I want to see if I can guess who wrote them. Don’t you like to guess who wrote your letters before you open them?”

Mrs. Campbell, with dignity: “I don’t like to guess who wrote other people’s letters.” She looks down at the table-cloth with a menace of tears, and Campbell instantly returns all the notes.

Campbell: “There, Amy; you may have them. I don’t care who wrote them, nor what’s in them. And I don’t want you to interrupt me with any exclamations over them, if you please.” He reaches to the floor for his newspaper, and while he sips his coffee, Mrs. Campbell loses no time in opening her letters.

Mrs. Campbell: “I shall do nothing but exclaim. The Curwens accept, of course — the very first letter. That means Mrs. Curwen; that is one, at any rate. The New York Addingses do, and the Philadelphia Addingses don’t; I hardly expected they would, so soon after their aunt’s death, but I thought I ought to ask them. Mr. and Mrs. Roberts, naturally; it was more a joke than anything, sending their invitation. Mrs. and the Misses Carver regret very much; well, I don’t. Professor and Mrs. Traine are very happy, and so am I; he doesn’t go everywhere, and he’s awfully nice. Mr. and Mrs. Lou Bemis are very happy, too, and Dr. Lawton is very happy. Mrs. Bridges Dear Mrs. Campbells me, and is very sorry in the first person; she’s always nice. Mr. Phillips, Mr. Rangeley, Mr. Small, Mr. Peters, Mr. Staples, Mr. Thornton, all accept, and they’re all charming young fellows.”

Campbell, around his paper: “Well, what of that?”

Mrs. Campbell, with an air of busy preoccupation: “Don’t eavesdrop, please; I wasn’t talking to you. The Merrills have the pleasure, and the Morgans are sorrow-stricken; the—”

Campbell: “Yes, but why should you care whether those fellows are charming or not? Who’s going to marry them?”

Mrs. Campbell: “I am. Mrs. Stevenson is bowed to the earth; Colonel Murphree is overjoyed; the Misses Ja—”

Campbell, putting his paper down: “Look here, Amy. Do you know that you have one little infinitesimal ewe-lamb of a foible? You think too much of young men.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Younger men, you mean. And you have a multitude of perfectly mammoth peccadilloes. You interrupt.” She goes on opening and reading her letters. “Well, I didn’t expect the Macklines could; but everybody seems to be coming.”

Campbell: “You pay them too much attention altogether. It spoils them; and one of these days you’ll be getting some of them in love with you, and then what will you do?”

Mrs. Campbell, with affected distraction: “What are you talking about? I’d refer them to you, and you could kill them. I suppose you killed lots of people in California. That’s what you always gave me to understand.” She goes on with her letters.

Campbell: “I never killed a single human being that I can remember; but there’s no telling what I might do if I were provoked. Now, there’s that young Welling. He’s about here under my feet all the time; and he’s got a way lately of coming in through the window from the piazza that’s very intimate. He’s a nice fellow enough, and sweet, as you say. I suppose he has talent, too, but I never heard that he had set any of the adjacent watercourses on fire; and I don’t know that he could give the Apollo Belvedere many points in beauty and beat him.”

Mrs. Campbell: “I do. Mrs. and Miss Rice accept, and her friend Miss Greenway, who’s staying with her, and — yes! here’s one from Mr. Welling! Oh, how glad I am! Willis, dearest, if I could be the means of bringing those two lovely young creatures together, I should be so happy! Don’t you think, now, he is the most delicate-minded, truly refined, exquisitely modest young fellow that ever was?” She presses the unopened note to her corsage, and leans eagerly forward entreating a sympathetic acquiescence.

Campbell: “Well, as far as I can remember my own youth, no. But what does he say?”

Mrs. Campbell, regarding the letter: “I haven’t looked yet. He writes the most characteristic hand, for a man, that I ever saw. And he has the divinest taste in perfumes! Oh, I wonder what that is? Like a memory — a regret.” She presses it repeatedly to her pretty nose, in the endeavor to ascertain.

Campbell: “Oh, hello!”

Mrs. Campbell, laughing: “Willis, you are delightful. I should like to see you really jealous once.”

Campbell: “You won’t, as long as I know my own incomparable charm. But give me that letter, Amy, if you’re not going to open it. I want to see whether Welling is going to come.”

Mrs. Campbell, fondly: “Would you really like to open it? I’ve half a mind to let you, just for a reward.”

Campbell: “Reward! What for?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, I don’t know. Being so nice.”

Campbell: “That’s something I can’t help. It’s no merit. Well, hand over the letter.”

Mrs. Campbell: “I should have thought you’d insist on my opening it, after that.”

Campbell: “Why?”

Mrs. Campbell: “To show your confidence.”

Campbell: “When I haven’t got any?”

Mrs. Campbell, tearing the note open: “Well, it’s no use trying any sentiment with you, or any generosity either. You’re always just the same; a teasing joke is your ideal. You can’t imagine a woman’s wanting to keep up a little romance all through; and a character like Mr. Welling’s, who’s all chivalry and delicacy and deference, is quite beyond you. That’s the reason you’re always sneering at him.”

Campbell: “I’m not sneering at him, my dear. I’m only afraid Miss Rice isn’t good enough for him.”

Mrs. Campbell, instantly placated: “Well, she’s the only girl who’s anywhere near it. I don’t say she’s faultless, but she has a great deal of character, and she’s very practical; just the counterpart of his dreaminess; and she is very, very good-looking, don’t you think?”

Campbell: “Her bang isn’t so nice as his.”

Mrs. Campbell: “No; and aren’t his eyes beautiful? And that high, serious look! And his nose and chin are perfectly divine. He looks like a young god!”

Campbell: “I dare say; though I never saw an old one. Well, is he coming? I’m not jealous, but I’m impatient. Read it out loud.”

Mrs. Campbell, sinking back in her chair for the more luxurious perusal of the note: “Indeed I shall not.” She opens it and runs it hastily through, with various little starts, stares, frowns, smiles of arrested development, laughs, and cries: “Why — why! What does it mean? Is he crazy? Why, there’s some mistake. No! It’s his hand — and here’s his name. I can’t make it out.” She reads it again and again. “Why, it’s perfectly bewildering! Why, there must be some mistake. He couldn’t have meant it. Could he have imagined? Could he have dared? There never has been the slightest thing that could be tortured into — But of course not. And Mr. Welling, of all men! Oh, I can’t understand it! Oh, Willis, Willis, Willis! What does it mean?” She flings the note wildly across the table, and catching her handkerchief to her face, falls back into her chair, tumultuously sobbing.

Campbell, with the calm of a man accustomed to emotional superabundance, lifting the note from the toast-rack before him: “Well, let’s see.” He reads aloud: “‘Oh, my darling! How can I live till I see you? I will be there long before the hour! To think of your asking me! You should have said, “I permit you to come,” and I would have flown from the ends of the earth. The presence of others will be nothing. It will be sweet to ignore them in my heart, and while I see you moving among them, and looking after their pleasure with that beautiful thoughtfulness of yours, to think, “She is mine, mine, mine!”

“Oh, young lord lover, what sighs are those For one that can never be thine?”

I thank you, and thank you a thousand times over, for this proof of your trust in me, and of your love — our love. You shall be the sole keeper of our secret — it is so sweet to think that no one even suspects it! — and it shall live with you, and if you will, it shall die with me. Forever yours, Arthur Welling.’” Campbell turns the note over, and picking up the envelope, examines the address. “Well, upon my word! It’s to you, Amy — on the outside, anyway. What do you suppose he means?”

Mrs. Campbell, in her handkerchief: “Oh, I don’t know; I don’t know why he should address such language to me!”

Campbell, recurring to the letter: “I never did. ‘Oh, my darling — live till I see you — ends of the earth — others will be nothing — beautiful thoughtfulness — mine, mine, mine — our love — sweet to think no one suspects it — forever yours.’ Amy, these are pretty strong expressions to use towards the wife of another, and she a married lady! I think I had better go and solve that little problem of how he can live till he sees you by relieving him of the necessity. It would be disagreeable to him, but perhaps there’s a social duty involved.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, Willis, don’t torment me! What do you suppose it means? Is it some — mistake? It’s for somebody else!”

Campbell: “I don’t see why he should have addressed it to you, then.”

Mrs. Campbell: “But don’t you see? He’s been writing to some other person at the same time, and he’s got the answers mixed — put them in the wrong envelopes. Oh dear! I wonder who she is!”

Campbell, studying her with an air of affected abstraction: “Her curiosity gets the better of her anguish. Look here, Amy! I believe you’re afraid it’s to some one else.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Willis!”

Campbell: “Yes. And before we proceed any further I must know just what you wrote to this — this Mr. Welling of yours. Did you put on R.S.V.P.?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes; and just a printed card like all the rest. I did want to write him a note in the first person, and urge him to come, because I expected Miss Rice and Miss Greenway to help me receive; but when I found Margaret had promised Mrs. Curwen for the next day, I knew she wouldn’t like to take the bloom off that by helping me first; so I didn’t.”

Campbell: “Didn’t what?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Write to him. I just sent a card.”

Campbell: “Then these passionate expressions are unprovoked, and my duty is clear. I must lose no time in destroying Mr. Welling. Do you happen to know where I laid my revolver?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, Willis, what are you going to do? You see it’s a mistake.”

Campbell: “Mr. Welling has got to prove that. I’m not going to have young men addressing my wife as Oh their darling, without knowing the reason why. It’s a liberty.”

Mrs. Campbell, inclined to laugh: “Ah, Willis, how funny you are!”

Campbell: “Funny? I’m furious.”

Mrs. Campbell: “You know you’re not. Give me the letter, dearest. I know it’s for Margaret Rice, and I shall see her, and just feel round and find out if it isn’t so, and—”

Campbell: “What an idea! You haven’t the slightest evidence that it’s for Miss Rice, or that it isn’t intended for you, and it’s my duty to find out. And nobody is authority but Mr. Welling. And I’m going to him with the corpus delicti.”

Mrs. Campbell: “But how can you? Remember how sensitive, how shrinking he is. Don’t, Willis; you mustn’t. It will kill him!”

Campbell: “Well, that may save me considerable bother. If he will simply die of himself, I can’t ask anything better.” He goes on eating his breakfast.

Mrs. Campbell, admiring him across the table: “Oh, Willis, how perfectly delightful you are!”

Campbell: “I know; but why?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Why, taking it in the nice, sensible way you do. Now, some husbands would be so stupid! Of course you couldn’t think — you couldn’t dream — that the letter was really for me; and yet you might behave very disagreeably, and make me very unhappy, if you were not just the lovely, kind-hearted, magnanimous—”

Campbell, looking up from his coffee: “Oh, hello!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes; that is what took my fancy in you, Willis: that generosity, that real gentleness, in spite of the brusque way you have. Refinement of the heart, I call it.”

Campbell: “Amy, what are you after?”

Mrs. Campbell: “We’ve been married a whole year now—”

Campbell: “Longer, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Campbell: “ — And I haven’t known you do an unkind thing, a brutal thing.”

Campbell: “Well, I understand the banging around hardly ever begins much under two years.”

Mrs. Campbell: “How sweet you are! And you’re so funny always!”

Campbell: “Come, come, Amy; get down to business. What is it you do want?”

Mrs. Campbell: “You won’t go and tease that poor boy about his letter, will you? Just hand it to him, and say you suppose here is something that has come into your possession by mistake, and that you wish to restore it to him, and then — just run off.”

Campbell: “With my parasol in one hand, and my skirts caught up in the other?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, how good! Of course I was imagining how I should do it.”

Campbell: “Well, a man can’t do it that way. He would look silly.” He rises from the table, and comes and puts his arm round her shoulders. “But you needn’t be afraid of my being rough with him. Of course it’s a mistake; but he’s a fellow who will enter into the joke too; he’ll enjoy it; he’ll—” He merges his sentence in a kiss on her upturned lips, and she clings to his hand with her right, pressing it fondly to her cheek. “I shall do it in a man’s way; but I guess you’ll approve of it quite as much.”

Mrs. Campbell: “I know I shall. That’s what I like about you, Willis: your being so helplessly a man always.”

Campbell: “Well, that’s what attracted me to you, Amy; your manliness.”

Mrs. Campbell: “And I liked your finesse. You are awfully inventive, Willis. Why, Willis, I’ve just thought of something. Oh, it would be so good if you only would!”

Campbell: “Would what?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Invent something now to get us out of the scrape.”

Campbell: “What a brilliant idea! I’m not in any scrape. And as for Mr. Welling, I don’t see how you could help him out unless you sent this letter to Miss Rice, and asked her to send yours back—”

Mrs. Campbell, springing to her feet: “Willis, you are inspired! Oh, how perfectly delightful! And it’s so delicate of you to think of that! I will just enclose his note — give it here, Willis — and he need never know that it ever went to the wrong address. Oh, I always felt that you were truly refined, anyway.” He passively yields the letter, and she whirls away to a writing-desk in the corner of the room. “Now, I’ll just keep a copy of the letter — for a joke; I think I’ve a perfect right to” — scribbling furiously away— “and then I’ll match the paper with an envelope — I can do that perfectly — and then I’ll just imitate his hand — such fun! — and send it flying over to Margaret Rice. Oh, how good! Touch the bell, Willis;” and then — as the serving-maid appears— “Yes, Jane! Run right across the lawn to Mrs. Rice’s, and give this letter for Miss Margaret, and say it was left here by mistake. Well, it was, Willis. Fly, Jane! Oh, Willis, love! Isn’t it perfect! Of course she’ll have got his formal reply to my invitation, and be all mixed up by it, and now when this note comes, she’ll see through it all in an instant, and it will be such a relief to her; and oh, she’ll think that he’s directed both the letters to her because he couldn’t think of any one else! Isn’t it lovely? Just like anything that’s nice, it’s ten times as nice as you expected it to be; and—”

Campbell: “But hold on, Amy!” He lifts a note from the desk. “You’ve sent your copy. Here’s the original now. She’ll think you’ve been playing some joke on her.”

Mrs. Campbell, clutching the letter from him, and scanning it in a daze: “What! Oh, my goodness! It is! I have! Oh, I shall die! Run! Call her back! Shriek, Willis!” They rush to the window together. “No, no! It’s too late! She’s given it to their man, and now nothing can save me! Oh, Willis! Willis! Willis! This is all your fault, with that fatal suggestion of yours. Oh, if you had only left it to me I never should have got into such a scrape! She will think now that I’ve been trying to hoax her, and she’s perfectly implacable at the least hint of a liberty, and she’ll be ready to kill me. I don’t know what she won’t do. Oh, Willis, how could you get me into this!”

Campbell, irately: “Get you into this! Now, Amy, this is a little too much. You got yourself into it. You urged me to think of something—”

Mrs. Campbell: “Well, do, Willis, do think of something, or I shall go mad! Help me, Willis! Don’t be so heartless — so unfeeling.”

Campbell: “There’s only one thing now, and that is to make a clean breast of it to Welling, and get him to help us out. A word from him can make everything right, and we can’t take a step without him; we can’t move!”

Mrs. Campbell: “I can’t let you. Oh, isn’t it horrible!”

Campbell: “Yes; a nice thing is always ten times nicer than you expected it to be!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, how can you stand there mocking me? Why don’t you go to him at once, and tell him the whole thing, and beg him, implore him, to help us?”

Campbell: “Why, you just told me I mustn’t!”

Mrs. Campbell: “You didn’t expect me to say you might, did you? Oh, how cruel!” She whirls out of the room, and Campbell stands in a daze, in which he is finally aware of Mr. Arthur Welling, seen through the open window, on the veranda without. Mr. Welling, with a terrified and furtive air, seems to be fixed to the spot where he stands.

II. MR. WELLING; MR. CAMPBELL

Campbell: “Why, Welling, what the devil are you doing there?”

Welling: “Trying to get away.”

Campbell: “To get away? But you sha’n’t, man! I won’t let you. I was just going to see you. How long have you been there?”

Welling: “I’ve just come.”

Campbell: “What have you heard?”

Welling: “Nothing — nothing. I was knocking on the window-casing to make you hear, but you seemed preoccupied.”

Campbell: “Preoccupied! convulsed! cataclysmed! Look here: we’re in a box, Welling. And you’ve got us into it.” He pulls Welling’s note out of his pocket, where he has been keeping his hand on it, and pokes it at him. “Is that yours?”

Welling, examining it with bewilderment mounting into anger: “It’s mine; yes. May I ask, Mr. Campbell, how you came to have this letter?”

Campbell: “May I ask, Mr. Welling, how you came to write such a letter to my wife?”

Welling: “To your wife? To Mrs. Campbell? I never wrote any such letter to her.”

Campbell: “Then you addressed it to her.”

Welling: “Impossible!”

Campbell: “Impossible? I think I can convince you, much as I regret to do so.” He makes search about Mrs. Campbell’s letters on the table first, and then on the writing-desk. “We have the envelope. It came amongst a lot of letters, and there’s no mistake about it.” He continues to toss the letters about, and then desists. “But no matter; I can’t find it; Amy’s probably carried it off with her. There’s no mistake about it. I was going to have some fun with you about it, but now you can have some fun with me. Whom did you send Mrs. Campbell’s letter to?”

Welling: “Mrs. Campbell’s letter?”

Campbell: “Oh, pshaw! your acceptance or refusal, or whatever it was, of her garden fandango. You got an invitation?”

Welling: “Of course.”

Campbell: “And you wrote to accept it or decline it at the same time that you wrote this letter here to some one else. And you addressed two envelopes before you put the notes in either. And then you put them into the wrong envelopes. And you sent this note to my wife, and the other note to the other person—”

Welling: “No, I didn’t do anything of the kind!” He regards Campbell with amazement, and some apparent doubt of his sanity.

Campbell: “Well, then, Mr. Welling, will you allow me to ask what the deuce you did do?”

Welling: “I never wrote to Mrs. Campbell at all. I thought I would just drop in and tell her why I couldn’t come. It seemed so formal to write.”

Campbell: “Then will you be kind enough to tell me whom you did write to?”

Welling: “No, Mr. Campbell, I can’t do that.”

Campbell: “You write such a letter as that to my wife, and then won’t tell me whom it’s to?”

Welling: “No! And you’ve no right to ask me.”

Campbell: “I’ve no right to ask you?”

Welling: “No. When I tell you that the note wasn’t meant for Mrs. Campbell, that’s enough.”

Campbell: “I’ll be judge of that, Mr. Welling. You say that you were not writing two notes at the time, and that you didn’t get the envelopes mixed. Then, if the note wasn’t meant for my wife, why did you address it to her?”

Welling: “That’s what I can’t tell; that’s what I don’t know. It’s as great a mystery to me as it is to you. I can only conjecture that when I was writing that address I was thinking of coming to explain to Mrs. Campbell that I was going away to-day, and shouldn’t be back till after her party. It was too complicated to put in a note without seeming to give my regrets too much importance. And I suppose that when I was addressing the note that I did write I put Mrs. Campbell’s name on because I had her so much in mind.”

Campbell, with irony: “Oh!”

III. MRS. CAMPBELL; MR. WELLING; MR. CAMPBELL

Mrs. Campbell, appearing through the porti�re that separates the breakfast-room from the parlor beyond: “Yes!” She goes up and gives her hand to Mr. Welling with friendly frankness. “And it was very nice of you to think of me at such a time, when you ought to have been thinking of some one else.”

Welling, with great relief and effusion: “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Campbell! I was sure you would understand. You couldn’t have imagined me capable of addressing such language to you; of presuming — of—”

Mrs. Campbell: “Of course not! And Willis has quite lost his head. I saw in an instant just how it was. I’m so sorry you can’t come to my party—”

Campbell: “Amy, have you been eavesdropping?”

Mrs. Campbell: “There was no need of eavesdropping. I could have heard you out at Loon Rock Light, you shouted so. But as soon as I recognized Mr. Welling’s voice I came to the top of the stairs and listened. I was sure you would do something foolish. But now I think we had better make a clean breast of it, and tell Mr. Welling just what we’ve done. We knew, of course, the letter wasn’t for me, and we thought we wouldn’t vex you about it, but just send it to the one it was meant for. We’ve surprised your secret, Mr. Welling, though we didn’t intend to; but if you’ll accept our congratulations — under the rose, of course — we won’t let it go any further. It does seem so perfectly ideal, and I feel like saying, Bless you, my children! You’ve been in and out here so much this summer, and I feel just like an elder sister to Margaret.”

Welling: “Margaret?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Well, Miss Rice, then—”

Welling: “Miss Rice?”

Mrs. Campbell, with dignity: “Oh, I’m sorry if we seem to presume upon our acquaintance with the matter. We couldn’t very well help knowing it under the circumstances.”

Welling: “Certainly, certainly — of course: I don’t mind that at all: I was going to tell you, anyway: that was partly the reason why I came instead of writing—”

Campbell, in an audible soliloquy: “I supposed he had written.”

Mrs. Campbell, intensely: “Don’t interrupt, Willis! Well?”

Welling: “But I don’t see what Miss Rice has to do with it.”

Mrs. Campbell: “You don’t see! Why, isn’t Margaret Rice the one—”

Welling: “What one?”

Mrs. Campbell: “The one that you’re engaged — the one that the note was really for?”

Welling: “No! What an idea! Miss Rice? Not for an instant! It’s — it’s her friend — Miss Greenway — who’s staying with her—”

Mrs. Campbell, in a very awful voice: “Willis! Get me some water — some wine! Help me! Ah! Don’t touch me! It was you, you who did it all! Oh, now what shall I do?” She drops her head upon Campbell’s shoulder, while Welling watches them in stupefaction.

Campbell: “It’s about a million times nicer than we could have expected. That’s the way with a nice thing when you get it started. Well, young man, you’re done for; and so are we, for that matter. We supposed that note which you addressed to Mrs. Campbell was intended for Miss Rice—”

Welling: “Ho, ho, ho! Ah, ha, ha! Miss Rice? Ha—”

Campbell: “I’m glad you like it. You’ll enjoy the rest of it still better. We thought it was for Miss Rice, and my wife neatly imitated your hand on an envelope and sent it over to her just before you came in. Funny, isn’t it? Laugh on! Don’t mind us!”

Welling, aghast: “Thought my note was for Miss Rice? Sent it to her? Gracious powers!” They all stand for a moment in silence, and then Welling glances at the paper in his hand. “But there’s some mistake. You haven’t sent my note to Miss Rice: here it is now!”

Campbell: “Oh, that’s the best of the joke. Mrs. Campbell took a copy” — Mrs. Campbell moans— “she meant to have some fun with you about it, and it’s ten times as much fun as I expected; and in her hurry she sent off her copy and kept the original. Perhaps that makes it better.”

Mrs. Campbell, detaching herself from him and confronting Mr. Welling: “No; worse! She’ll think we’ve been trying to hoax her, and she’ll be in a towering rage; and she’ll show the note to Miss Greenway, and you’ll be ruined. Oh poor Mr. Welling! Oh, what a fatal, fatal — mix!” She abandons herself in an attitude of extreme desperation upon a chair, while the men stare at her, till Campbell breaks the spell by starting forward and ringing the bell on the table.

Mrs. Campbell: “What are you doing, Willis?”

Campbell: “Ringing for Jane.” As Jane appears: “Did you give Miss Rice the note?”

IV. JANE; MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

Jane: “No, sir; I gave it to the man. He said he would give it to Miss Rice.”

Campbell: “Then it’s all up. If by any chance she hadn’t got it, Amy, you might have sent over for it, and said there was a mistake.”

Jane: “He said Miss Rice was out driving with Miss Greenway in her phaeton, but they expected her back every minute.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, my goodness! And you didn’t come to tell me? Oh, if we had only known! We’ve lost our only chance, Willis.”

Jane: “I did come and knock on your door, ma’am, but I couldn’t make you hear.”

Campbell: “There’s still a chance. Perhaps she hasn’t got back yet.”

Jane: “I know she ain’t, sir. I’ve been watching for her ever since. I can always see them come, from the pantry window.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Well, then, don’t stand there talking, but run at once! Oh, Willis! Never tell me again that there’s no such thing as an overruling providence. Oh, what an interposition! Oh, I can never be grateful and humble enough — Goodness me, Jane! why don’t you go?”

Jane: “Go where, ma’am? I don’t know what you want me to do. I’m willing enough to do anything if I know what it is, but it’s pretty hard to do things if you don’t.”

Campbell: “You’re perfectly right, Jane. Mrs. Campbell wants you to telegraph yourself over to Mrs. Rice’s, and say to her that the letter you left for Miss Rice is not for her, but another lady, and Mrs. Campbell sent it by mistake. Get it and bring it back here, dead or alive, even if Mrs. Rice has to pass over your mangled body in the attempt.”

Jane, tasting the joke, while Mrs. Campbell gasps in ineffective efforts to reinforce her husband’s instructions: “I will that, sir.”

V. MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

Campbell: “And now, while we’re waiting, let’s all join hands and dance round the table. You’re saved, Welling. So are you, Amy. And so am I — which is more to the point.”

Mrs. Campbell, gayly: “Dansons!” She extends her hands to the gentlemen, and as they circle round the breakfast-table she sings,

“Sur le pont d’Avignon, Tout le monde y danse en rond.”

She frees her hands and courtesies to one gentleman and the other.

“Les belles dames font comme �a; Les beaux messieurs font comme �a.”

Then she catches hands with them again, and they circle round the table as before, singing,

“Sur le pont d’Avignon, Tout le monde y danse en rond.

Oh, dear! Stop! I’m dizzy — I shall fall.” She spins into a chair, while the men continue solemnly circling by themselves.

Campbell: “It is a sacred dance:

“Sur le pont d’Avignon—”

Welling: “It’s an expiation:

“Tout le monde y danse en rond.”

Mrs. Campbell, springing from her chair and running to the window: “Stop, you crazy things! Here comes Jane! Come right in here, Jane! Did you get it? Give it to me, Jane!”

Welling: “I think it belongs to me, Mrs. Campbell.”

Campbell: “Jane, I am master of the house — nominally. Give me the letter.”

VI. JANE; MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

Jane, entering, blown and panting, through the open window: “Oh, how I did run—”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes, yes! But the letter—”

Welling: “Did you get it?”

Campbell: “Where is it?”

Jane, fanning herself with her apron: “I can’t hardly get my breath—”

Mrs. Campbell: “Had she got back?”

Jane: “No, ma’am.”

Campbell: “Did Mrs. Rice object to giving it up?”

Jane: “No, sir.”

Welling: “Then it’s all right?”

Jane: “No, sir. All wrong.”

Welling: “All wrong?”

Campbell: “How all wrong?”

Mrs. Campbell: “What’s all wrong, Jane?”

Jane: “Please, ma’am, may I have a drink of water? I’m so dry I can’t speak.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes, certainly.”

Campbell: “Of course.”

Welling: “Here.” They all pour glasses of water and press them to her lips.

Jane, pushing the glasses away, and escaping from the room: “They thought Mrs. Campbell was in a great hurry for Miss Rice to have the letter, and they sent off the man with it to meet her.”

VII. MRS. CAMPBELL; WELLING; CAMPBELL

Mrs. Campbell: “Oh, merciful goodness!”

Welling: “Gracious powers!”

Campbell: “Another overruling providence. Now you are in for it, my boy! So is Amy. And so am I — which is still more to the point.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Well, now, what shall we do?”

Campbell: “All that we can do now is to await developments: they’ll come fast enough. Miss Rice will open her letter as soon as she gets it, and she won’t understand it in the least; how could she understand a letter in your handwriting, with Welling’s name signed to it? She’ll show it to Miss Greenway—”

Welling: “Oh, don’t say that!”

Campbell: “ — Greenway; and Miss Greenway won’t know what to make of it either. But she’s the kind of girl who’ll form some lively conjectures when she reads that letter. In the first place, she’ll wonder how Mr. Welling happens to be writing to Miss Rice in that affectionate strain—”

Mrs. Campbell, in an appealing shriek: “Willis!”

Campbell: “ — And she naturally won’t believe he’s done it. But then, when Miss Rice tells her it’s your handwriting, Amy, she’ll think that you and Miss Rice have been having your jokes about Mr. Welling; and she’ll wonder what kind of person you are, anyway, to make free with a young man’s name that way.”

Welling: “Oh, I assure you that she admires Mrs. Campbell more than anybody.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Don’t try to stop him; he’s fiendish when he begins teasing.”

Campbell: “Oh, well! If she admires Mrs. Campbell and confides in you, then the whole affair is very simple. All you’ve got to do is to tell her that after you’d written her the original of that note, your mind was so full of Mrs. Campbell and her garden-party that you naturally addressed it to her. And then Mrs. Campbell can cut in and say that when she got the note she knew it wasn’t for her, but she never dreamed of your caring for Miss Greenway, and was so sure it was for Miss Rice that she sent her a copy of it. That will make it all right and perfectly agreeable to every one concerned.”

Mrs. Campbell: “And I can say that I sent it at your suggestion, and then, instead of trying to help me out of the awful, awful — box, you took a cruel pleasure in teasing me about it! But I shall not say anything, for I shall not see them. I will leave you to receive them and make the best of it. Don’t try to stop me, Willis.” She threatens him with her fan as he steps forward to intercept her escape.

Campbell: “No, no! Listen, Amy! You must stay and see those ladies. It’s all well enough to leave it to me, but what about poor Welling? He hasn’t done anything — except cause the whole trouble.”

Mrs. Campbell: “I am very sorry, but I can’t help it. I must go.” Campbell continues to prevent her flight, and she suddenly whirls about and makes a dash at the open window. “Oh, very well, then! I can get out this way.” At the same moment Miss Rice and Miss Greenway appear before the window on the piazza. “Ugh! E — e — e! How you frightened me! But — but come in. So gl — glad to see you! And you — you too, Miss Greenway. Here’s Mr. Welling. He’s been desolating us with a story about having to be away over my party, and just getting back for Mrs. Curwen’s. Isn’t it too bad? Can’t some of you young ladies — or all of you — make him stay?” As Mrs. Campbell talks on, she readjusts her spirit more and more to the exigency, and subdues her agitation to a surface of the sweetest politeness.

VIII. MISS RICE, MISS GREENWAY, and the OTHERS

Miss Rice, entering with an unopened letter in her hand, which she extends to Mrs. Campbell: “What in the world does it all mean, Mrs. Campbell, your sending your letters flying after me at this rate?”

Mrs. Campbell, with a gasp: “My letters?” She mechanically receives the extended note, and glances at the superscription: “Mrs. Willis Campbell. Ah!” She hands it quickly to her husband, who reads the address with a similar cry.

Campbell: “Well, well, Amy! This is a pretty good joke on you. You’ve sealed up one of your own notes, and sent it to Miss Rice. Capital! Ah, ha, ha!”

Mrs. Campbell, with hysterical rapture: “Oh, how delicious! What a ridiculous blunder! I don’t wonder you were puzzled, Margaret.”

Welling: “What! Sent her your own letter, addressed to yourself?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes. Isn’t it amusing?”

Welling: “The best thing I ever heard of.”

Miss Rice: “Yes. And if you only knew what agonies of curiosity Miss Greenway and I had suffered, wanting to open it and read it anyway, in spite of all the decencies, I think you would read it to us.”

Campbell: “Or at least give Miss Rice her own letter. What in the world did you do with that?”

Mrs. Campbell: “Put it in my desk, where I thought I put mine. But never mind it now. I can tell you what was in it just as well. Come in here a moment, Margaret.” She leads the way to the parlor, whither Miss Rice follows.

Miss Greenway, poutingly: “Oh, mayn’t I know, too? I think that’s hardly fair, Mrs. Campbell.”

Mrs. Campbell: “No; or — Margaret may tell you afterwards; or Mr. Welling may, now!”

Miss Greenway: “How very formidable!”

Mrs. Campbell, over her shoulder, on going out: “Willis, bring me the refusals and acceptances, won’t you? They’re up-stairs.”

Campbell: “Delighted to be of any service.” Behind Miss Greenway’s back he dramatizes over her head to Welling his sense of his own escape, and his compassion for the fellow-man whom he leaves in the toils of fate.

IX. MISS GREENWAY; MR. WELLING

Welling: “Nelly!” He approaches, and timidly takes her hand.

Miss Greenway: “Arthur! That letter was addressed in your handwriting. Will you please explain?”

Welling: “Why, it’s very simple — that is, it’s the most difficult thing in the world. Nelly, can you believe anything I say to you?”

Miss Greenway: “What nonsense! Of course I can — if you’re not too long about it.”

Welling: “Well, then, the letter in that envelope was one I wrote to Mrs. Campbell — or the copy of one.”

Miss Greenway: “The copy?”

Welling: “But let me explain. You see, when I got your note asking me to be sure and come to Mrs. Curwen’s—”

Miss Greenway: “Yes?”

Welling: “ — I had just received an invitation from Mrs. Campbell for her garden-party, and I sat down and wrote to you, and concluded I’d step over and tell her why I couldn’t come, and with that in mind I addressed your letter — the one I’d written you — to her.”

Miss Greenway: “With my name inside?”

Welling: “No; I merely called you ‘darling’; and when Mrs. Campbell opened it she saw it couldn’t be for her, and she took it into her head it must be for Miss Rice.”

Miss Greenway: “For Margaret? What an idea! But why did she put your envelope on it?”

Welling: “She made a copy, for the joke of it; and then, in her hurry, she enclosed that in my envelope, and kept the original and the envelope she’d addressed to Miss Rice, and — and that’s all.”

Miss Greenway: “What a perfectly delightful muddle! And how shall we get out of it with Margaret?”

Welling: “With Margaret? I don’t care for her. It’s you that I want to get out of it with. And you do believe me — you do forgive me, Nelly?”

Miss Greenway: “For what?”

Welling: “For — for — I don’t know what for. But I thought you’d be so vexed.”

Miss Greenway: “I shouldn’t have liked you to send a letter addressed darling to Mrs. Curwen; but Mrs. Campbell is different.”

Welling: “Oh, how archangelically sensible! How divine of you to take it in just the right way!”

MR. WELLING EXPLAINS.

Miss Greenway: “Why, of course! How stupid I should be to take such a thing in the wrong way!”

Welling: “And I’m so glad now I didn’t try to lie to you about it.”

Miss Greenway: “It wouldn’t have been of any use. You couldn’t have carried off anything of that sort. The truth is bad enough for you to carry off. Promise me that you will always leave the other thing to me.”

Welling: “I will, darling; I will, indeed.”

Miss Greenway: “And now we must tell Margaret, of course.”

X. MISS RICE; then MR. and MRS. CAMPBELL, and the OTHERS

Miss Rice, rushing in upon them, and clasping Miss Greenway in a fond embrace: “You needn’t. Mrs. Campbell has told me; and oh, Nelly, I’m so happy for you! And isn’t it all the greatest mix?”

Campbell, rushing in, and wringing Welling’s hand: “You needn’t tell me, either; I’ve been listening, and I’ve heard every word. I congratulate you, my dear boy! I’d no idea she’d let you up so easily. You’ll allow yourself it isn’t a very likely story.”

Welling: “I know it. But—”

Miss Rice: “That’s the very reason no one could have made it up.”

Miss Greenway: “He couldn’t have made up even a likely story.”

Campbell: “Congratulate you again, Welling. Do you suppose she can keep so always?”

Mrs. Campbell, rushing in with extended hands: “Don’t answer the wretch, Mr. Welling. Of course she can with you. Dansons!” She gives a hand to Miss Greenway and Welling each; the others join them, and as they circle round the table she sings,

“Sur le pont d’Avignon, Tout le monde y danse en rond.”

THE END

MISCELLANEOUS FARCES

CONTENTS

THE ALBANY DEPOT

BRIDE ROSES

THE ELEVATOR

EVENING DRESS

THE REGISTER

THE ALBANY DEPOT

I. MR. AND MRS. EDWARD ROBERTS; THE CHOREWOMAN

Mrs. Roberts, with many proofs of an afternoon’s shopping in her hands and arms, appears at the door of the ladies’ room, opening from the public hall, and studies the interior with a searching gaze, which develops a few suburban shoppers scattered over the settees, with their bags and packages, and two or three old ladies in the rocking-chairs. The Chorewoman is going about with a Saturday afternoon pail and mop, and profiting by the disoccupation of the place in the hour between the departures of two great expresses, to wipe up the floor. She passes near the door where Mrs. Roberts is standing, and Mrs. Roberts appeals to her in the anxiety which her failure to detect the object of her search has awakened: “Oh, I was just looking for my husband. He was to meet me here at ten minutes past three; but there don’t seem to be any gentlemen.”

The Chorewoman: “Mem?”

Mrs. Roberts: “I was just looking for my husband. He was to meet me here at ten minutes past three; but there don’t seem to be any gentlemen. You haven’t happened to notice—”

The Chorewoman: “There’s a gentleman over there beyant, readin’, that’s just come in. He seemed to be lukun’ for somebody.” She applies the mop to the floor close to Mrs. Roberts’s skirts.

Mrs. Roberts, bending to the right and to the left, and then, by standing on tiptoe, catching sight of a hat round a pillar: “Then it’s Mr. Roberts, of course. I’ll just go right over to him. Thank you ever so much. Don’t disturb yourself!” She picks her way round the area of damp left by the mop, and approaches the hat from behind. “It is you, Edward! What a horrid idea I had! I was just going to touch your hat from behind, for fun; but I kept myself from it in time.”

Roberts, looking up with a dazed air from the magazine in his hand: “Why, what would have happened?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, you know it mightn’t have been you.”

Roberts: “But it was I.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, I know; and I was perfectly sure of it; you’re always so prompt, and I always wonder at it, such an absent-minded creature as you are. But you came near spoiling everything by getting here behind this pillar, and burying yourself in your book that way. If it hadn’t been for my principle of always asking questions, I never should have found you in the world. But just as I was really beginning to despair, the Chorewoman came by, and I asked her if she had seen any gentleman here lately; and she said there was one now, over here, and I stretched up and saw you. I had such a fright for a moment, not seeing you; for I left my little plush bag with my purse in it at Stearns’s, and I’ve got to hurry right back; though I’m afraid they’ll be shut when I get there, Saturday afternoon, this way; but I’m going to rattle at the front door, and perhaps they’ll come — they always stay, some of them, to put the goods away; and I can tell them I don’t want to buy anything, but I left my bag with my purse in it, and I guess they’ll let me in. I want you to keep these things for me, Edward; and I’ll leave my shopping-bag; I sha’n’t want it any more. Don’t lose any of them. Better keep them all in your lap here together, and then nobody will come and sit on them.” She disburdens herself of her packages and parcels, and arranges them on her husband’s knees, while she goes on talking. “I’m almost ready to drop, I’m so tired, and I do believe I should let you go up to Stearns’s for me; but you couldn’t describe the bag so they would recognize it, let alone what was in it, and they wouldn’t give it to you, even if they would let you in to inquire: they’re much more likely to let a lady in than a gentleman. But I shall take a coupe, and tell the driver simply to fly, though there’s plenty of time to go to the ends of the earth and back before our train starts. Only I should like to be here to receive the Campbells, and keep Willis from buying tickets for Amy and himself, and us, too, for that matter; he has that vulgar passion — I don’t know where he’s picked it up — for wanting to pay everybody’s way; and you’d never think of your Hundred-Trip ticket-book till it was too late. Do take your book out and hold it in your hand, so you’ll be sure to remember it, as soon as you see Willis. You had better keep saying over to yourself, ‘Willis — Hundred-Trip Tickets — Willis — Hundred-Trip Tickets;’ that’s the way I do. Where is the book? I have to remember everything! Do keep your ticket-book in your hand, Edward, till Willis comes.”

Roberts: “But I want to read, Agnes, and I’ve got to hold my Pop. Sci. with one hand and keep your traps in my lap with the other. Did you find a cook?”

Mrs. Roberts, with rapturous admiration of him: “Well, Edward, you have got a brain! I declare, the cook had utterly gone out of my mind. Forgetting that plush bag makes me forget everything. I’ve got a splendid one — a perfect treasure. She won’t do any of the wash, and we’ll have to put that out; and she’s been used to having a kitchen-maid; but she said we were such a small family that she could shell the pease herself. She’s the most respectable-looking old thing you ever saw; and she’s been having ten dollars a week from the last family she was in; but she’ll come the summer with us for six. I was very fortunate to get her; all the good girls are snapped up for the sea-side in May, and they won’t go into the country for love or money. It was the greatest chance! She’s such a neat, quiet, lady-like person, and all the better for being Irish and a Catholic: Catholics do give so much more of a flavor; and I never could associate that Nova Scotia, sunken-cheeked leanness of Maria’s with a cook. This one’s name is — well, I forget what her name is; Bridget, or Norah, or something like that — and she’s a perfect little butter-ball. She’s coming to go out on the same train with us; and she’ll get the dinner to-night; and I sha’n’t have the mortification of sitting down to a pickup meal with Amy Campbell, the first time she has visited us; she’s conceited enough about her house-keeping as it is, I’m sure, and I wouldn’t have her patronizing and pitying me for worlds. The cook will be here at half-past three precisely; I had to pretend the train started a little earlier than it does so as to make her punctual; they are such uncertain things! and I don’t suppose I shall be back by that time, quite, Edward, and so you must receive her. Let me see!” She glances up at the clock on the wall. “It’s just quarter-past now, and our train goes at ten minutes to four — My goodness! I’ll have to hurry.”

The Colored Man who cries the trains, walking half-way into the room and then out: “Cars ready for Cottage Farms, Longwood, Chestnut Hill, Brookline, Newton Centre, Newton Highlands, Waban, Riverside, and all stations between Riverside and Boston. Circuit Line train now ready on Track No. 3.”

Mrs. Roberts, in extreme agitation: “Good gracious, Edward, that’s our train!”

Roberts, jumping to his feet and dropping all her packages: “No, no, it isn’t, my dear! That’s the Circuit Line train: didn’t you hear? Ours doesn’t go till ten to four, on the Main Line.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh yes, so it does. How ridiculous! But now I must run away and leave you, or I never shall get back in time. Be sure to speak to the cook as soon as she comes in, or she’ll get discouraged and go away again; you can’t depend on them for an instant; I told her you would be here to meet her, if I wasn’t — I thought I might be late; and you mustn’t let her slip. And if the Campbells happen to get here before I’m back, don’t you give them the least inkling of our having just engaged a cook. I’m going to smuggle her into the house without Amy’s knowing it; I wouldn’t have her know it for the world. She prides herself on keeping that impudent, spoiled thing of hers, with her two soups; and she would simply never stop crowing if she knew I’d had to change cooks in the middle of the summer.”

Roberts, picking up and dropping the multitudinous packages, and finally sitting down with them all in his lap, very red and heated: “I’ll be careful, my dear.”

Mrs. Roberts: “How flushed you are, bending over! You’re so stout now, you ought to bend sidewise; it’s perfect folly, your trying to bend straight over; you’ll get apoplexy. But now I must run, or I shall never be back in the world. Don’t forget to look out for the cook!”

Roberts, at whom she glances with misgiving as she runs out, holding the parcels on his knees with both elbows and one hand, and contriving with the help of his chin to get his magazine open again: “No, no; I won’t, my dear.” He loses himself in his reading, while people come and go restlessly. A gentleman finally drops into the seat beside him, and contemplates his absorption with friendly amusement.

II. ROBERTS AND WILLIS CAMPBELL

Campbell: “Don’t mind me, Roberts.”

Roberts, looking up: “Heigh? What! Why, Willis! Glad to see you—”

Campbell: “Now that you do see me, yes, I suppose you are. What have you got there that makes you cut all your friends?” He looks at Roberts’s open page. “Oh! Popular Science Monthly. Isn’t Agnes a little afraid of your turning out an agnostic? By-the-way, where is Agnes?”

Roberts: “She left her purse at Stearns’s, and she’s gone back after it. Where’s Amy?”

Campbell: “Wherever she said she wouldn’t be at the moment. I expected to find her here with you and Agnes. What time did you say your train started?”

Roberts. “At ten minutes to four. And, by-the-way — I’d almost forgotten it — I must keep an eye out for the cook Agnes has been engaging. She was to meet us here before half-past two, and I shall have to receive her. You mustn’t tell Amy; Agnes doesn’t want her to know she’s been changing cooks; and I’ve got to be very vigilant not to let her give us the slip, or you won’t have any dinner to-night.”

Campbell: “Is that so? Well, that interests me. Were you expecting to find her in the Pop. Sci.?”

Roberts: “Oh, I’d only been reading a minute when you came in.”

Campbell: “I don’t believe you know how long you’d been reading. Very likely your cook’s come and gone.”

Roberts, with some alarm: “She couldn’t. I’d only just opened the book.”

Campbell: “I dare say you think so. But you’d better cast your eagle eye over this assemblage now, and see if she isn’t here; though probably she’s gone. What sort of looking woman is she?”

Roberts, staring at him in consternation: “Bless my soul! I don’t know! I never saw her!”

Campbell: “Never saw her?”

Roberts: “No; Agnes engaged her at the intelligence-office, and told her we should meet her here, and she had to go back for her purse, and left me to explain.”

Campbell: “Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! How did she expect you to recognize her?”

Roberts: “I — I don’t know, I’m sure. She — she was very anxious I shouldn’t let her get away.”

Campbell, laughing: “You poor old fellow! What are you going to do?”

Roberts: “I’m sure I’ve no idea. Agnes—”

Campbell: “Agnes ought to have a keeper. You know what I’ve always thought of your presence of mind, Roberts; but Agnes — I’m really surprised at Agnes. This is too good! I must tell Amy this. She’ll never get over this. Ah, ha, ha, ha!”

Roberts: “No, no! You mustn’t, Willis. Agnes would be very much provoked with me, if you told Amy she had been engaging a cook. She expects to smuggle her into the house without Amy’s knowing.”

Campbell: “And she left you to meet her here, and keep her — a cook you’d never set eyes on! Ha, ha, ha, ha! Ah, ha, ha, ha! What’s her name?”

Roberts: “Agnes couldn’t remember her last name — one never remembers a cook’s last name. Her first name is Norah or Bridget.”

Campbell: “Maggie, perhaps; they all sound alike. Ah, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! This improves.”

Roberts: “Don’t, Willis; you’ll attract attention. What — what shall I do? If Agnes comes back, and finds I’ve let the cook get away, she’ll be terribly put out.”

Campbell: “Perfectly furious, you poor old fellow! — the rage of a disappointed pigeon! I wouldn’t be in your shoes for anything. Oh my! I wish Amy was here. Did — did — Agnes” — (he struggles with his laughter, and explodes from time to time between syllables)— “did she tell you how the woman looked?”

Roberts: “She said she was a very respectable-looking old thing — a perfect butter-ball. I suppose she was stout.”

Campbell: “That covers the ground of a great many cooks. They’re apt to look respectable when they’re off duty and they’re not in liquor, and they’re apt to be perfect butter-balls. Any other distinctive traits?”

Roberts, ruefully: “I don’t know. She’s Irish, and a Catholic.”

Campbell: “They’re apt to be Irish, and Catholics too. Well, Roberts, I don’t see what you can ask better. All you’ve got to do is to pick out a respectable butter-ball of that religion and nationality, and tell her you’re Mrs. Roberts’s husband, and you’re to keep her from slipping away till Mrs. Roberts gets here.”

Roberts: “Oh, pshaw, now, Willis! What would you do?”

Campbell: “There’s a respectable butter-ball over in the corner by the window there. You’d better go and speak to her. She’s got a gingham bundle, like a cook’s, in her lap, and she keeps looking about in a fidgety way, as if she expected somebody. I guess that’s your woman, Roberts. Better not let her give you the slip. You’ll never hear the last of it from Agnes if you do. And who’ll get our dinner to-night?”

Roberts, looking over at the woman in the corner, with growing conviction; “She does answer to the description.”

Campbell: “Yes, and she looks tired of waiting. If I know anything of that woman’s character, Roberts, she thinks she’s been trifled with, and she’s not going to stay to be made a fool of any longer.”

Roberts, getting to his feet: “Do you think so? What makes you think so? Would you go and speak to her?”

Campbell: “I don’t know. She seems to be looking this way. Perhaps she thinks she recognizes you, as she never saw you before.”

Roberts: “There can’t be any harm in asking her? She does seem to be looking this way.”

Campbell: “Pretty blackly, too. I guess she’s lost faith in you. It wouldn’t be any use to speak to her now, Roberts.”

Roberts: “I don’t know. I’m afraid I’d better. I must. How would you introduce the matter, Willis?”

Campbell: “Oh, I wouldn’t undertake to say! I must leave that entirely to you.”

Roberts: “Do you think I’d better go at it boldly, and ask her if she’s the one; or — or — approach it more gradually?”

Campbell: “With a few remarks about the weather, or the last novel, or a little society gossip? Oh, decidedly.”

Roberts: “Oh, come, now, Willis! What would you advise? You must see it’s very embarrassing.”

Campbell: “Not the least embarrassing. Simplest thing in the world!”

The Colored Man who calls the Trains, coming and going as before: “Cars for Newton, Newtonville, West Newton, Auburndale, Riverside, Wellesley Hills, Wellesley, Natick, and South Framingham. Express to Newton. Track No. 5.”

Campbell: “Ah, she’s off! She’s going to take the wrong train. She’s gathering her traps together, Roberts!”

Roberts: “I’ll go and speak to her.” He makes a sudden dash for the woman in the corner. Campbell takes up his magazine, and watches him over the top of it, as he stops before the woman, in a confidential attitude. In a moment she rises, and with a dumb show of offence gathers up her belongings and marches past Roberts to the door, with an angry glance backward at him over her shoulder. He returns crestfallen to Campbell.

Campbell, looking up from his magazine, in affected surprise: “Where’s your cook? You don’t mean to say she was the wrong woman?”

Roberts, gloomily: “She wasn’t the right one.”

Campbell: “How do you know? What did you say to her?”

Roberts: “I asked her if she had an appointment to meet a gentleman here.”

Campbell: “You did? And what did she say?”

Roberts: “She said ‘No!’ very sharply. She seemed to take it in dudgeon; she fired up.”

Campbell: “I should think so. Sounded like an improper advertisement.”

Roberts, in great distress: “Don’t, Willis, for Heaven’s sake!”

Campbell: “Why, you must see it had a very clandestine look. How did you get out of it?”

Roberts: “I didn’t. I got into it further. I told her my wife had made an appointment for me to meet a cook here that she’d engaged—”

Campbell: “You added insult to injury. Go on!”

Roberts: “And that she corresponded somewhat to the description; and — and—”

Campbell: “Well?”

Roberts: “And she told me she was no more a cook than my wife was; and she said she’d teach me to be playing my jokes on ladies; and she grabbed up her things and flew out of the room.”

Campbell; “Waddled, I should have said. But this is pretty serious, Roberts. She may be a relation of John L. Sullivan’s. I guess we better get out of here; or, no, we can’t! We’ve got to wait for Amy and Agnes.”

Roberts: “What — what would you do?”

Campbell: “I don’t know. Look here, Roberts: would you mind sitting a little way off, so as to look as if I didn’t belong with you? I don’t want to be involved in this little row of yours unnecessarily.”

Roberts: “Oh, come now, Willis! You don’t think she’ll make any trouble? I apologized. I said everything I could think of. She must think I was sincere.”

Campbell: “In taking her for a cook? I’ve no doubt she did. But I don’t see how that would help matters. I don’t suppose she’s gone for an officer; but I suspect she’s looking up the largest Irishman of her acquaintance, to come back and interview you. I should advise you to go out and get on some train; I’d willingly wait here for Amy and Agnes; but you see the real cook might come here, after you went, and I shouldn’t know her from Adam — or Eve. See?”

Roberts, desperately. “I see — Good heavens! Here comes that woman back; and a man with her. Willis, you must help me out.” Roberts gets falteringly to his feet, and stands in helpless apprehension, while Mr. and Mrs. McIlheny bear down upon him from the door. Mr. McIlheny, a small and wiry Irishman, is a little more vivid for the refreshment he has taken. He is in his best black suit, and the silk hat which he wears at a threatening slant gives dignified impressiveness to his figure and carriage. With some dumb-show of inquiry and assurance between himself and his wife, he plants himself in front of Roberts, in an attitude equally favorable for offence and defence.

III. THE McILHENYS, ROBERTS, AND CAMPBELL

McIlheny: “And are ye the mahn that’s after takun’ my wife for yer cuke?”

Mrs. McIlheny, indicating Campbell, absorbed in his magazine: “And there’s the other wan I saw jokun’ wid um, and puttun’ um up to it.”

McIlheny, after a swift glance at Campbell’s proportions and self-possession: “That’s what ye’re after thinkun’, Mary; but I haven’t got annything to do with what ye’re after thinkun’. All I wannt to know is what this mahn meant by preshumin’ to speak to a lady he didn’t know, and takun’ her for a cuke.” To Roberts: “Will ye tell me that, ye—”

Roberts, in extreme embarrassment: “Yes, yes, certainly; I shall be very glad to explain, if you’ll just step here to the corner. We’re attracting attention where we are—”

McIlheny: “Attintion! Do ye suppose I care for attintion, when it’s me wife that’s been insulted?” He follows Roberts up, with Mrs. McIlheny, as he retires to the corner where she had been sitting, out of the way of the people coming and going. Campbell, after a moment, closes his magazine, and joins them.

Roberts: “Insulted? By no manner of means! Nothing was further from my thoughts. I — I — can explain it all in a moment, my dear sir, if you will have patience; I can indeed. I have the highest respect for the lady, and I’m quite incapable of offering her an affront. The fact is — I hardly know how to begin—”

McIlheny: “Go ahn, sor; or I’ll have to do the beginnun’ meself, pretty soon.” He shifts himself from one foot to another with a saltatory briskness.

Roberts: “The fact is, my wife had engaged a cook, up-town, and she had sent her down here to meet me, and go out with me to our summer place at Weston.”

McIlheny: “An’ fwhat has all that rigamarole to do wid your speakin’ to a lady ye’d never been inthrojuced to? Fwhat had yer wife’s cuke to do with Mrs. McIlheny?”

Roberts: “Why, I didn’t know the cook by sight, you see. My wife had engaged her up-town, and appointed her to meet me here, without reflecting that I had never seen her, and wouldn’t know who she was, when I did see her; she partly expected to be here herself, and so I didn’t reflect, either.”

McIlheny, with signs of an amicable interest: “An’ she lift ye to mate a lady ye never had seen before, and expicted ye to know her by soight?”

Roberts: “Precisely.”

McIlheny, smiling: “Well, that’s loike a wooman, Mary; ye can’t say it ain’t.”

Mrs. McIlheny, grinning: “It’s loike a mahn, too, Mike, by the same token.”

McIlheny: “Sure it’s no bad joke on ye, sor.”

Campbell, interposing: “I was having my laugh at him when your good lady here noticed us. You see, I know his wife — she’s my sister — and I could understand just how she would do such a thing, and — ah, ha, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! I don’t think I shall ever get over it.”

McIlheny: “Sure it is good! Hu, hu, hu, hu! Mary, it’s what ye’d call a bull, if it was Irish, I’m thinkun’; an’ it’s no bad bull as it is, my dear.”

Mrs. McIlheny, laughing: “Ye’re right there, Mike. It’s as fine a bull as ever there was.”

Campbell: “And my friend here insisted on going over and speaking to the lady, in hopes she could help him out of the difficulty. I suppose he bungled it; he only wanted to ask her if she’d seen a cook here, who had an appointment to go out of town with a gentleman. I’d been joking him about it, and he thought he must do something; and I fancy he made a mess of it. He was a good deal worked up. Ha, ha, ha! Ah, ha, ha, ha!” Mr. and Mrs. McIlheny join in his laugh, and finally Roberts himself.

The Colored Man who calls the Trains, coming and going: “Cars for Auburndale, Riverside, Pine Grove, and Newton Lower Falls. Express to Auburndale, Track No. 7.”

Mrs. McIlheny: “There’s our train. Mike! Come!”

McIlheny: “So ’tis, Mary! Well, I’m hawpy to make yer acquaintance, gentlemen; and if ye’re ever in the City Hahl when the Council is sittun’, and ye’ll send in yer names to Mike McIlheny, I’ll be pl’ased to show ye ahl the attintion in me power. Ye must excuse me now; we’re jist runnun’ out to the Fahls to pass Sunday at a cousin’s of Mrs. McIlheny’s.” He snakes hands with Roberts and Campbell, and runs out, followed by his wife.

IV. ROBERTS AND CAMPBELL

Campbell: “Distinguished public character. Well, we’re out of that, Roberts. I had to crowd the truth a little for you, but I fetched the belligerent McIlheny. What are you going in for next?”

Roberts: “I — upon my word, I haven’t the least idea. I think I shall give up trying to identify the cook. Agnes must do it herself when she comes here.”

Campbell: “Oh no! That won’t do, old fellow. The cook may come here and give you the slip before Agnes gets back.”

Roberts: “What would you do?”

Campbell: “Well, I don’t know; I don’t like to advise, exactly; but it seems to me you’ve got to keep trying. You’ve got to keep your eye out for respectable butter-balls, and not let them slip through your fingers.”

Roberts: “You mean, go up and speak to them? I couldn’t do that again.”

Campbell: “Well, of course you didn’t make a howling success with Mrs. McIlheny; but it wasn’t a dead-failure either. But you must use a little more diplomacy — lead up to the subject gently. Don’t go and ask a woman if she’s a cook, or had an appointment to meet a gentleman here. That won’t do. I’ll tell you! You might introduce the business by asking if she had happened to see a lady coming in or going out; and then describe Agnes, and say you had expected to meet her here. And she’ll say she hadn’t seen her here, but such a lady had just engaged her as a cook. And then you’ll say you’re the lady’s husband, and you’re sure she’ll be in in a moment. And there you are! That’s the way you ought to have worked it with Mrs. McIlheny. Then it would have come out all right.”

Roberts, pessimistically: “I don’t see how it would have made her the cook.”

Campbell: “It couldn’t have done that, of course; but it would have done everything short of that. But we’re well enough out of it, anyway. It was mighty lucky I came in with my little amendment just when I did. There’s all the difference in the world between asking a lady whether she is a cook and whether she’s seen a cook. That difference just saved the self-respect of the McIlhenys, and saved your life. It gave the truth a slight twist in the right direction. You can’t be too careful about the truth, Roberts. You can’t offer it to people in the crude state; it’s got to be prepared. If you’d carried it through the way I wanted you to, the night you and old Bemis garroted each other, you’d have come out perfectly triumphant. What you want is not the real truth, but the ideal truth; not what you did, but what you ought to have done. Heigh? Now, you see, those McIlhenys have gone off with their susceptibilities in perfect repair, simply because I substituted a for for an if, and made you inquire for a cook instead of if she was a cook. Perhaps you did ask for instead of ask if?”

Roberts: “No, no. I asked her if she was a cook.”

Campbell: “Well, I’m glad the McIlhenys had too much sense to believe that. They’re happy, anyway. They’re enjoying the hobble that you and Agnes are in, with lofty compassion. They — hello! here’s that fellow coming back again!”

Roberts: “Who? Which? Where?” He starts nervously about, and confronts Mr. McIlheny bearing down upon him with a countenance of provisional severity.

McIlheny: “Just wan word more wid you, sor. Mrs. McIlheny has been thinkun’ it oover, and she says you didn’t ask her if she was after seeun a cuke, but whether she was after beun’ a cuke? Now, sor, which wahs ut? Out wfd ut! Don’t be thinkun’ ye can throw dust in our eyes because we’re Irishmen!” A threatening tone prevails in Mr. McIlheny’s address at the mounting confusion and hesitation in Roberts. “Come! are ye deef, mahn?”

Roberts, in spite of Campbell’s dumb-show inciting him to fiction: “I — I — if you will kindly step apart here, I can explain. I was very confused when I spoke to Mrs. McIlheny.”

McIlheny, following him and Willis into the corner: “Fwhat made ye take my wife for a cuke? Did she luke anny more like a cuke than yer own wife? Her family is the best in County Mayo. Her father kept six cows, and she never put her hands in wather. And ye come up to her in a public place like this, where ye’re afraid to spake aboove yer own breath, and ask her if she’s after beun’ the cuke yer wife’s engaged. Fwhat do ye mane by ut?”

Roberts: “My dear sir, I know — I can understand how it seems offensive; but I can assure you that I had no intention — no — no—” he falters, with an imploring glance at Campbell, who takes the word.

Campbell: “Look here, Mr. McIlheny, you can appreciate the feelings of a gentleman situated as my friend was here. He had to meet a lady whom he had never seen before, and didn’t know by sight; and we decided — Mrs. McIlheny was so pleasant and kindly looking — that he should go and ask her if she had seen a lady of the description he was looking for, and—”

McIlheny: “Yessor! I can appreciate ahl that. But fwhy did he ask her if she was the lady? Fwhy did he ask her if she was a cuke? That’s what I wannt to know!”

Campbell: “Well, now, I’m sure you can understand that. He was naturally a good deal embarrassed at having to address a strange lady; his mind was full of his wife’s cook, and instead of asking her if she’d seen a cook, he bungled and he blundered, and asked her — I suppose — if she was a cook. Can’t you see that? how it would happen?”

McIlheny, with conviction: “Yessor, I can. And I’ll feel it an hannor if you gintlemen will join me in a glass of wine on the carner, across the way—”

Campbell: “But your train?”

McIlheny: “Oh, domn the thrain! But I’ll just stip aboord and tell Mrs. McIlheny I’ve met a frind, an’ I’ll be out by the next thrain, an’ I’ll be back wid you in a jiffy.” He runs out, and Campbell turns to Roberts.

Roberts: “Good heavens, Willis! what are we going to do? Surely, we can’t go out and drink with this man?”

Campbell: “I’m afraid we sha’n’t have the pleasure. I’m afraid Mrs. McIlheny is of a suspicious nature; and when Mr. Mac comes back, it’ll be to offer renewed hostility instead of renewed hospitality. I don’t see anything for us but flight, Roberts. Or, you can’t fly, you poor old fellow! You’ve got to stay and look out for that cook. I’d be glad to stay for you, but, you see, I should not know her.”

Roberts: “I don’t know her either, Willis. I was just thinking whether you couldn’t manage this wretched man rather better alone. I — I’m afraid I confuse you; and he gets things out of me — admissions, you know—”

Campbell: “No, no! Your moral support is everything. That lie of mine is getting whittled away to nothing; we shall soon be down to the bare truth. If it hadn’t been for these last admissions of yours, I don’t know what I should have done. They were a perfect inspiration. I’ll tell you what, Roberts! I believe you can manage this business twice as well without me. But you must keep your eye out for the cook! You mustn’t let any respectable butter-ball leave the room without asking her if she’s the one. You’ll know how to put it more delicately now. And I won’t complicate you with McIlheny any more. I’ll just step out here—”

Roberts: “No, no, no! You mustn’t go, Willis. You mustn’t indeed! I shouldn’t know what to do with that tipsy nuisance. Ah, here he comes again!”

Campbell, cheerily, to the approaching McIlheny: “I hope you didn’t lose your train, Mr. McIlheny!”

McIlheny, darkly: “Never moind my thrain, sor! My wife says it was a put-up jahb between ye. She says ye were afther laughun’, and lukun’ and winkun’ at her before this mahn slipped up to spake to her. Now what do ye make of that?”

Campbell: “We were laughing, of course. I had been laughing at my friend’s predicament, in being left to meet a lady he’d never seen before. You laughed at it yourself.”

McIlheny: “I did, sor.”

Roberts, basely truckling to him: “It was certainly a ludicrous position.”

Campbell: “And when we explained it, it amused your good lady too. She laughed as much as yourself—”

McIlheny: “She did, sor. Ye’re right. Sure it would make a cow laugh. Well, gintlemen, ye must excuse me. Mrs. McIlheny says I mustn’t stop for the next thrain, and I’ll have to ask you to join me in that glass of wine some other toime.”

Campbell: “Oh, it’s all right, Mr. McIlheny. You’ve only got about half a minute.” He glances at the clock, and McIlheny runs out, profusely waving his hand in adieu.

Roberts, taking out his handkerchief and wiping his forehead: “Well, thank Heaven! we’re rid of him at last.”

Campbell: “I’m not so sure of that. He’ll probably miss the train. You may be sure Mrs. McIlheny is waiting for him outside of it, and then we shall have them both on our hands indefinitely. We shall have to explain and explain. Fiction has entirely failed us, and I feel that the truth is giving way under our feet. I’ll tell you what, Roberts!”

Roberts, in despair: “What?”

Campbell: “Why, if McIlheny should happen to come back alone, we mustn’t wait for him to renew his invitation to drink; we must take him out ourselves, and get him drunk; so drunk he can’t remember anything; stone drunk; dead drunk. Or, that is, you must. I haven’t got anything to do with him. I wash my hands of the whole affair.”

Roberts: “You mustn’t, Willis! You know I can’t manage without you. And you know I can’t take the man out and get him drunk. I couldn’t. I shouldn’t feel that it was right.”

Campbell: “Yes, I know. You’d have to drink with him; and you’ve got no head at all. You’d probably get drunk first, and I don’t know what I should say to Agnes.”

Roberts: “That isn’t the point, Willis. I couldn’t ask the man to drink; I should consider it immoral. Besides, what should you do if the cook came while I was away? You wouldn’t know her.”

Campbell: “Well, neither would you, if you stayed.”

Roberts: “That’s true. There doesn’t seem to be any end of it, or any way out of it. I must just stay and bear it.”

Campbell: “Of course you must stay. And when McIlheny comes back, you’d better ask him out to look upon the wine when it is red.”

Roberts: “No; that’s impossible, quite. I shouldn’t mind the association — though it isn’t very pleasant; but to offer drink to a man already — Do you suppose it would do to ask him out for a glass of soda? Plain soda would be good for him. Or I could order claret in it, if the worst came to the worst.”

Campbell: “Claret! What Mr. McIlheny requires is forty-rod whiskey in a solution of sulphuric acid. You must take that, or fourth-proof brandy straight, with him.”

Roberts, miserably: “I couldn’t; you know I couldn’t.”

Campbell: “What are you going to do, then?”

Roberts: “I don’t know; I don’t know. I — I’ll give him in charge to a policeman.”

Campbell: “And make a scandal here?”

Roberts: “Of course it can’t be done!”

Campbell: “Of course it can’t. Give a councilman in charge? The policeman will be Irish too, and then what’ll you do? You’re more likely to be carried off yourself, when the facts are explained. They’ll have an ugly look in the police report.”

Roberts: “Oh, it can’t be done! Nothing can be done! I wish Agnes would come!”

The Colored Man who calls the Trains: “Cars ready for South Framingham, Whitneys, East Holliston, Holliston, Metcalf’s, Braggville, and Milford. Express to Framingham. Milford Branch. Track No. 3.”

V. MRS. ROBERTS, MRS. CAMPBELL, ROBERTS, AND CAMPBELL; THEN THE COOK AND McILHENY

Mrs. Roberts, rushing in and looking about in a flutter, till she discovers her husband: “Good gracious, Edward! Is that our train? I ran all the way from the station door as fast as I could run, and I’m perfectly out of breath. Did you ever hear of anything like my meeting Amy on the very instant? She was getting out of her coupe just as I was getting out of mine, and I saw her the first thing as soon as I looked up. It was the most wonderful chance. And the moment we pushed our way through the door and got inside the outer hall, I heard the man calling the train — he calls so distinctly — and I told her I was sure it was our train; and then we just simply flew, both of us. I had the greatest time getting my plush bag. They were all locked up at Stearns’s as tight as a drum, but I saw somebody inside, moving about, and I rattled the door, and made signs till he came; and then I said I had left my plush bag; and he said it was against the rules, and I’d have to come Monday; and I told him I knew it was, and I didn’t expect him to transgress the rules, but I wished very much to have my plush bag, because there were some things in it that I wished to have, as well as my purse; for I’d brought away my keys in it; and I knew Willis — how d’ye do, Willis? — would want wine with his dinner, and you’d have to break the closet open if I didn’t get the key; and so he said he would see if the person who kept the picked-up things was there yet; and it turned out he was, and he asked me for a description of the bag and its contents; and I described them all, down to the very last thing; and he said I had the greatest memory he ever saw. And now I think everything is going off perfectly, and I shall be able to show Amy that there’s something inland as well as at the seaside. Why don’t you speak to her, Edward? What is the matter? What are you looking at?” She detects him in the act of craning his neck to this side and that, and peering over people’s heads and shoulders in the direction of the door. “Hasn’t Norah — Bridget, I mean — come yet?” She frowns significantly, and cautions him concerning Mrs. Campbell by pressing her finger to her lip.

Roberts: “Yes — yes, she’s here; I suppose she’s — she’s here. How do you do, Amy? So glad—” He continues his furtive inspection of the door-way, and Willis turns away with a snicker.

Mrs. Campbell: “Willis, what are you laughing at? Is there anything wrong with my bonnet? Agnes, is there? He would let me go about looking like a perfect auk. Did I bang it getting out of the coupe. Do tell me, Willis!”

Mrs. Roberts, to her husband: “You don’t mean to say you haven’t seen her yet?”

Roberts, desperately: “Seen her? How should I know whether I’ve seen her? I never saw her in my life.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Then what are you looking for, in that way?”

Roberts: “I — I’m looking for her husband.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Her husband?”

Roberts: “Yes. He keeps coming back.” Campbell bursts into a wild shriek of laughter.

Mrs. Roberts, imploringly: “Willis, what does it mean?”

Mrs. Campbell, threateningly: “Willis, if you don’t behave yourself—”

Mrs. Roberts, with the calm of despair: “Well, then, she isn’t coming! She’s given us the slip! I might have known it! Well, the cat might as well come out of the bag first as last, Amy, though I was trying to keep it in, to spare your feelings; I knew you’d be so full of sympathy.” Suddenly to her husband: “But if you saw her husband — Did he say she sent him? I didn’t dream of her being married. How do you know it’s her husband?”

Roberts: “Because — because she went out and got him! Don’t I tell you?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Went out and got him?”

Roberts: “When I spoke to her.”

Mrs. Roberts: “When you spoke to her? But you said you didn’t see her!”

Roberts: “Of course I didn’t see her. How should I see her, when I never saw her before? I went up and spoke to her, and she said she wasn’t the one. She was very angry, and she went out and got her husband. He was tipsy, and he’s been coming back ever since. I don’t know what to do about the wretched creature. He says I’ve insulted his abominable wife!”

Campbell, laughing: “O Lord! Lord! This will be the death of me!”

Mrs. Campbell: “This is one of your tricks, Willis; one of your vile practical jokes.”

Campbell: “No, no, my dear! I couldn’t invent anything equal to this. Oh my! oh my!”

Mrs. Campbell, seizing him by the arm: “Well, if you don’t tell, instantly, what it is—”

Campbell: “But I can’t tell. I promised Roberts I wouldn’t.”

Roberts, wildly: “Oh, tell, tell!”

Campbell: “About the cook, too, Agnes?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, yes; everything! Only tell!”

Campbell, struggling to recover himself: “Why, you see, Agnes engaged a cook, up-town—”

Mrs. Roberts: “I didn’t want you to know it, Amy. I thought you would be troubled if you knew you were coming to visit me just when I was trying to break in a new cook, and so I told Edward not to let Willis know. Go on, Willis.”

Mrs. Campbell: “And I understand just how you felt about it, Agnes; you knew he’d laugh. Go on, Willis.”

Campbell: “And she sent her down here, and told Roberts to keep her till she came herself.”

Both Ladies: “Well?”

Campbell: “And I found poor old Roberts here, looking out for a cook that he’d never seen before, and expecting to recognize a woman that he’d never met in his life.” He explodes in another fit of laughter. The ladies stare at him in mystification.

Mrs. Roberts: “I would have stayed myself to meet her, but I’d left my plush bag with my purse in it at Stearns’s, and I had to go back after it.”

Mrs. Campbell: “She had to leave him. What is there to laugh at?”

Mrs. Roberts: “I see nothing to laugh at, Willis.”

Campbell, sobered: “You don’t?”

Both Ladies: “No.”

Campbell: “Well, by Jove! Then perhaps you don’t see anything to laugh at in Roberts’s having to guess who the cook was; and going up to the wrong woman, and her getting mad, and going out and bringing back her little fiery-red tipsy Irishman of a husband, that wanted to fight Roberts; and my having to lie out of it for him; and their going off again, and the husband coming back four or five times between drinks, and having to be smoothed up each time—”

Both Ladies: “No!”

Mrs. Roberts: “It was simply horrid.”

Mrs. Campbell: “It wasn’t funny at all; it was simply disgusting. Poor Mr. Roberts!”

Campbell: “Well, by the holy poker! This knocks me out! The next time I’ll marry a man, and have somebody around that can appreciate a joke. The Irishman said himself it would make a cow laugh.”

Mrs. Campbell: “I congratulate you on being of the same taste, Willis. And I dare say you tried to heighten the absurdity, and add to poor Mr. Roberts’s perplexity.”

Roberts: “No, no! I assure you, Amy, if it hadn’t been for Willis, I shouldn’t have known how to manage. I was quite at my wits’ end.”

Mrs. Campbell: “You are very generous, I’m sure, Mr. Roberts; and I suppose I shall have to believe you.”

Roberts: “But I couldn’t act upon the suggestion to take the man out and treat him; Willis was convinced himself, I think, that that wouldn’t do. But I confess I was tempted.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Treat him?”

Roberts: “Yes. He was rather tipsy already; and Willis thought he would be more peaceable perhaps if we could get him quite drunk; but I really couldn’t bring my mind to it, though I was so distracted that I was on the point of yielding.”

Both Ladies: “Willis!”

Mrs. Roberts: “You wanted poor Edward to go out and drink with that wretched being, so as to get him into a still worse state?”

Mrs. Campbell: “You suggested that poor Mr. Roberts should do such a thing as that? Well, Willis!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, Willis!” She turns from him more in sorrow than in anger, and confronts a cook-like person of comfortable bulk, with a bundle in her hand, and every mark of hurry and exhaustion in her countenance. “Why, here’s Bridget now!”

The Cook: “Maggie, mem! I was afraid I was after missun’ you, after all. I couldn’t see the gentleman anywhere, and I’ve been runnun’ up and down the depot askun’ fur um; and at last, thinks I, I’ll try the ladies’ room; and sure enough here ye was yourself. It was lucky I thought of it.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh! I forgot to tell you he’d be in the ladies’ room. But it’s all right now, Maggie; and we’ve just got time to catch our train.”

Campbell, bitterly: “Well, Agnes, for a woman that’s set so many people by the ears, you let yourself up pretty easily. By Jove! here comes that fellow back again!” They all mechanically shrink aside, and leave Roberts exposed to the approach of McIlheny.

McIlheny: “Now, sor, me thrain’s gahn, and we can talk this little matter oover at our aise. What did ye mane, sor, by comin’ up to the Hannorable Mrs. Michael McIlheny and askun’ her if she was a cuke? Did she luke like a person that’d demane herself to a manial position like that? Her that never put her hands in wather, and had hilpers to milk her father’s cows? What did ye mane, sor? Did she luke like a lady, or did she luke like a cuke? Tell me that!”

The Cook, bursting upon him from behind Roberts, who eagerly gives place to her: “I’ll tell ye that meself, ye impidint felly! What’s to kape a cuke from lukun’ like a lady, or a lady from lukun’ like a cuke? Ah, Mike McIlheny, ye drunken blaggurd, is it me ye’re tellin’ that Mary Molloy never put her hands in wather, and kept hilpers to milk her father’s cows! Cows indade! It was wan pig under the bed; and more shame to them that’s ashamed to call it a pig, if ye are my cousin! I’m the lady the gentleman was lukin’ for, and if ye think I’m not as good as Mary Molloy the best day she ever stipped, I’ll thank ye to tell me who is. Be off wid ye, or I’ll say something ye’ll not like to hear!”

McIlheny: “Sure I was jokin’, Maggie! I was goun’ to tell the gintleman that if he was lukun’ for a cuke, I’d a cousin out of place that was the best professed cuke in Bahston. And I’m glad he’s got ye: and he’s a gintleman every inch, and so’s his lady, I dar’ say, though I haven’t the pleasure of her acquaintance—”

The Colored Man who calls the Trains: “Cars ready for West Newton, Auburndale, Riverside, Wellesley, Natick, and South Framingham. Train for South Framingham. Express to West Newton. Track No. 5.”

Mrs. Roberts: “That’s our train, Amy’ We get off at Auburndale. Willis, Edward, Maggie — come!” They all rush out, leaving McIlheny alone.

McIlheny, looking thoughtfully after them: “Sure, I wonder what Mary’ll be wantun’ me to ask um next!”

THE END

BRIDE ROSES

SCENE

A Lady, entering the florist’s with her muff to her face, and fluttering gayly up to the counter, where the florist stands folding a mass of loose flowers in a roll of cotton batting: “Good-morning, Mr. Eichenlaub! Ah, put plenty of cotton round the poor things, if you don’t want them frozen stiff! You have no idea what a day it is, here in your little tropic.” She takes away her muff as she speaks, but gives each of her cheeks a final pressure with it, and holds it up with one hand inside as she sinks upon the stool before the counter.

The Florist: “Dropic? With icepergs on the wintows?” He nods his head toward the frosty panes, and wraps a sheet of tissue-paper around the cotton and the flowers.

The Lady: “But you are not near the windows. Back here it is midsummer!”

The Florist: “Yes, we got a rhevricherator to keep the rhoces from sunstroke.” He crimps the paper at the top, and twists it at the bottom of the bundle in his hand. “Hier!” he calls to a young man warming his hands at the stove. “Chon, but on your hat, and dtake this to — Holt on! I forgot to but in the cart.” He undoes the paper, and puts in a card lying on the counter before him; the lady watches him vaguely. “There!” He restores the wrapping and hands the package to the young man, who goes out with it. “Well, matam?”

The Lady, laying her muff with her hand in it on the counter, and leaning forward over it: “Well, Mr. Eichenlaub. I am going to be very difficult.”

The Florist: “That is what I lige. Then I don’t feel so rhesbonsible.”

The Lady: “But to-day, I wish you to feel responsible. I want you to take the whole responsibility. Do you know why I always come to you, instead of those places on Fifth Avenue?”

The Florist: “Well, it is a good teal cheaper, for one thing” —

The Lady: “Not at all! That isn’t the reason, at all. Some of your things are dearer. It’s because you take so much more interest, and you talk over what I want, and you don’t urge me, when I haven’t made up my mind. You let me consult you, and you are not cross when I don’t take your advice.”

The Florist: “You are very goodt, matam.”

The Lady: “Not at all. I am simply just. And now I want you to provide the flowers for my first Saturday: Saturday of this week, in fact, and I want to talk the order all over with you. Are you very busy?”

The Florist: “No; I am qvite at your service. We haf just had to egsegute a larche gommission very soddenly, and we are still in a little dtisorter yet; but” —

The Lady: “Yes, I see.” She glances at the rear of the shop, where the floor is littered with the leaves and petals of flowers, and sprays of fern and evergreen. A woman, followed by a belated smell of breakfast, which gradually mingles with the odor of the plants, comes out of a door there, and begins to gather the larger fragments into her apron. The lady turns again, and looks at the jars and vases of cut flowers in the window, and on the counter. “What I can’t understand is how you know just the quantity of flowers to buy every day. You must often lose a good deal.”

The Florist: “It gomes out about rhighdt, nearly always. When I get left, sometimes, I can chenerally work dem off on funerals. Now, that bic orter hat I just fill, that wass a funeral. It usedt up all the flowers I hat ofer from yesterday.”

The Lady: “Don’t speak of it! And the flowers, are they just the same for funerals?”

The Florist: “Yes, rhoces nearly always. Whidte ones.”

The Lady: “Well, it is too dreadful. I am not going to have roses, whatever I have.” After a thoughtful pause, and a more careful look around the shop: “Mr. Eichenlaub, why wouldn’t orchids do?”

The Florist: “Well, they would be bretty dtear. You couldn’t make any show at all for less than fifteen tollars.”

The Lady, with a slight sigh: “No, orchids wouldn’t do. They are fantastic things, anyway, and they are not very effective, as you say. Pinks, anemones, marguerites, narcissus — there doesn’t seem to be any great variety, does there?”

The Florist, patiently: “There will be more, lader on.”

The Lady: “Yes, there will be more sun, later on. But now, Mr. Eichenlaub, what do you think of plants in pots, set around?”

The Florist: “Balmss?”

The Lady, vaguely: “Yes, palms.”

The Florist: “Balmss would to. But there would not be very much golor.”

The Lady: “That is true; there would be no color at all, and my rooms certainly need all the color I can get into them. Yes, I shall have to have roses, after all. But not white ones!”

The Florist: “Chacks?”

The Lady: “No; Jacks are too old-fashioned. But haven’t you got any other very dark rose? I should like something almost black, I believe.”

The Florist, setting a vase of roses on the counter before her: “There is the Matame Hoste.”

The Lady, bending over the roses, and touching one of them with the tip of her gloved finger: “Why, they are black, almost! They are nearly as black as black pansies. They are really wonderful!” She stoops over and inhales their fragrance. “Delicious! They are beautiful, but” — abruptly— “they are hideous. Their color makes me creep. It is so unnatural for a rose. A rose — a rose ought to be — rose-colored! Have you no rose-colored roses? What are those light pink ones there in the window?”

The Florist, going to the window and getting two vases of cut roses, with long stems, both pink, but one kind a little larger than the other: “That is the Matame Watterville, and this is the Matame Cousine. They are sister rhoces; both the same, but the Matame Watterville is a little bigger, and it is a little dtearer.”

The Lady: “They are both exquisite, and they are such a tender almond-bloom pink! I think the Madame Cousine is quite as nice; but of course the larger ones are more effective.” She examines them, turning her head from side to side, and then withdrawing a step, with a decisive sigh. “No; they are too pale. Have you nothing of a brighter pink? What is that over there?” She points to a vase of roses quite at the front of the window, and the florist climbs over the mass of plants and gets it for her.

The Florist: “That is the Midio.”

The Lady: “The what?”

The Florist: “The Midio.”

The Lady: “You will think I am very stupid this morning. Won’t you please write it down for me?” The florist writes on a sheet of wrapping-paper, and she leans over and reads: “Oh! Meteor! Well, it is very striking — a little too striking. I don’t like such a vivid pink, and I don’t like the name. Horrid to give such a name to a flower.” She puts both hands into her muff, and drifts a little way off, as if to get him in a better perspective. “Can’t you suggest something, Mr. Eichenlaub?”

The Florist: “Some kind off yellow rhoce? Dtea-rhoces?”

The Lady, shaking her head: “Tea-roses are ghastly. I hate yellow roses. I would rather have black, and black is simply impossible. I shall have to tell you just what I want to do. I don’t want to work up to my rooms with the flowers; I want to work up to the young lady who is going to pour tea for me. I don’t care if there isn’t a flower anywhere but on the table before her. I want a color scheme that shall not have a false note in it, from her face to the tiniest bud. I want them to all come together. Do you understand?”

The Florist, doubtfully: “Yes.” After a moment: “What kindt looking yo’ng laty iss she?”

The Lady: “The most ethereal creature in the world.”

The Florist: “Yes; but what sdyle — fair or tark?”

The Lady: “Oh, fair! Very, very fair, and very, very fragile-looking; a sort of moonlight blonde, with those remote, starry-looking eyes, don’t you know, and that pale saffron hair; not the least ashen; and just the faintest, faintest tinge of color in her face. I suppose you have nothing like the old-fashioned blush-rose? That would be the very thing.”

The Florist, shaking his head: “Oh, no; there noding like that in a chreen-house rhoce.”

The Lady: “Well, that is exactly what I want. It ought to be something very tall and ethereal; something very, very pale, and yet with a sort of suffusion of color.” She walks up and down the shop, looking at all the plants and flowers.

The Florist, waiting patiently: “Somet’ing beside rhoces, then?”

The Lady, coming back to him: “No; it must be roses, after all. I see that nothing else will do. What do you call those?” She nods at a vase of roses on a shelf behind him.

The Florist, turning and taking them down for her: “Ah, those whidte ones! That is the Pridte. You sait you woultn’t haf whidte ones.”

The Lady: “I may have to come to them. Why do they call it the Pride?”

The Florist: “I didn’t say Bridte; I said Pridte.”

The Lady: “Oh, Bride! And do they use Bride roses for” —

The Florist: “Yes; and for weddtings, too; for everything.” The lady leans back a little and surveys the flowers critically. A young man enters, and approaches the florist, but waits with respectful impatience for the lady to transact her affairs. The florist turns to him inquiringly, and upon this hint he speaks.

The Young Man: “I want you to send a few roses — white ones, or nearly white” — He looks at the lady. “Perhaps” —

The Lady: “Oh, not at all! I hadn’t decided to take them.”

The Florist: “I got plenty this kindt; all you want. I can always get them.”

The Young Man, dreamily regarding the roses: “They look rather chilly.” He goes to the stove, and drawing off his gloves, warms his hands, and then comes back. “What do you call this rose?”

The Florist: “The Pridte.”

The Young Man, uncertainly: “Oh!” The lady moves a little way up the counter toward the window, but keeps looking at the young man from time to time. She cannot help hearing all that he says. “Haven’t you any white rose with a little color in it? Just the faintest tinge, the merest touch.”

The Florist: “No, no; they are whidte, or they are yellow; dtea-rhoces; Marshal Niel” —

The Young Man: “Ah, I don’t want anything of that kind. What is the palest pink rose you have?”

The Florist, indicating the different kinds in the vases, where the lady has been looking at them: “Well, there is nothing lighder than the Matame Cousine, or the Matame Watterville, here; they are sister rhoces” —

The Young Man: “Yes, yes; very beautiful; but too dark.” He stops before the Madame Hoste: “What a strange flower! It is almost black! What is it for? Funerals?”

The Florist: “No; a good many people lige them. We don’t sell them much for funerals; they are too cloomy. They uce whidte ones for that: Marshal Niel, dtea-rhoces, this Pridte here, and other whidte ones.”

The Young Man, with an accent of repulsion: “Oh!” He goes toward the window, and looks at a mass of Easter lilies in a vase there. He speaks as if thinking aloud: “If they had a little color — But they would be dreadful with color! Why, you ought to have something!” He continues musingly, as he returns to the florist: “Haven’t you got something very delicate, and slender, about the color of pale apple blossoms? If you had them light enough, some kind of azaleas” —

The Lady, involuntarily: “Ah!”

The Florist, after a moment, in which he and the young man both glance at the lady, and she makes a sound in her throat to show that she is not thinking of them, and had not spoken in reference to what they were saying: “The only azaleas I haf are these pink ones, and those whidte ones.”

The Young Man: “And they are too pink and too white. Isn’t there anything tall, and very delicate? Something, well — something like the old-fashioned blush-rose? But with very long stems!”

The Florist: “No, there is noding lige that which gomes in a crheenhouse rhoce. We got a whidte rhoce here” — he goes to his refrigerator, and brings back a long box of roses— “that I didn’t think of before.” He gives the lady an apologetic glance. “You see there is chost the least sdain of rhet on the etch of the leafs.”

The Young Man, examining the petals of the roses: “Ah, that is very curious. It is a caprice, though.”

The Florist: “Yes, it is a kind of sbordt. That rhoce should be berfectly whidte.”

The Young Man: “On the whole, I don’t think it will do. I will take some of those pure white ones. Bride, did you call them?”

The Florist: “Yes, Pridte. How many?”

The Young Man: “Oh, a dozen — two dozen; I don’t know! I want very long, slender stems, and the flowers with loose open petals; none of those stout, tough-looking little buds. Here! This, and this, and all these; no, I don’t want any of those at all.” He selects the different stems of roses, and while the florist gets a box, and prepares it with a lining of cotton and tissue-paper, he leans over and writes on a card. He pauses and puts up his pencil; then he takes it out again and covers the card with writing. He gives it to the florist. “I wish that to go into the box where it will be found the first thing.” He turns away, and encounters the lady’s eyes as she chances to look toward him. “I beg your pardon! But” —

The Lady, smiling, and extending her hand: “I felt almost sure it was you! But I couldn’t believe my senses. All the other authorities report you in Rome.”

The Young Man: “I returned rather suddenly. I just got in this morning. Our steamer was due yesterday, but there was so much ice in the harbor that we didn’t work up till a few hours ago.”

The Lady: “You will take all your friends by surprise.”

The Young Man: “I’m a good deal taken by surprise myself. Two weeks ago I didn’t dream of being here. But I made up my mind to come, and — I came.”

The Lady, laughing: “Evidently! Well, now you must come to my Saturdays; you are just in time for the first one. Some one you know is going to pour tea for me. That ought to be some consolation to you for not having stayed away long enough to escape my hospitalities.”

The Young Man, blushing and smiling: “Oh, it’s a very charming welcome home. I shall be sure to come. She is — everybody is — well, I hope?”

The Lady: “Yes, or everybody was on Monday when I saw them. Everybody is looking very beautiful this winter, lovelier than ever, if possible. But so spiritual! Too spiritual! But that spirit of hers will carry her — I mean everybody, of course! — through everything. I feel almost wicked to have asked her to pour tea for me, when I think of how much else she is doing! Do you know, I was just ordering the flowers for my Saturday, and I had decided to take her for my key-note in the decorations. But that made it so difficult! There doesn’t seem anything delicate and pure and sweet enough for her. There ought to be some flower created just to express her! But as yet there isn’t.”

The Young Man: “No, no; there isn’t. But now I must run away. I haven’t been to my hotel yet; I was just driving up from the ship, and I saw the flowers in the window, and — stopped. Good-by!”

The Lady: “Good-by! What devotion to somebody — everybody! Don’t forget my Saturday!”

The Young Man: “No, no; I won’t. Good-by!” He hurries out of the door, and his carriage is heard driving away.

The Florist: “I wondter if he but the attress on the cart? No; there is noding!” He turns the card helplessly over. “What am I coing to do about these flowers?”

The Lady: “Why, didn’t he say where to send them?”

The Florist: “No, he rhon away and dtidn’t leaf the attress.”

The Lady: “That was my fault! I confused him, poor fellow, by talking to him. What are you going to do?”

The Florist: “That is what I lige to know! Do you know what hotel he stobs at?”

The Lady: “No; he didn’t say. I have no idea where he is going. But wait a moment! I think I know where he meant to send the flowers.”

The Florist: “Oh, well; that is all I want to know.”

The Lady: “Yes, but I am not certain.” After a moment’s thought. “I know he wants them to go at once; a great deal may depend upon it — everything.” Suddenly: “Could you let me see that card?”

The Florist, throwing it on the counter before her: “Why, soddonly; if he is a frhiendt of yours” —

The Lady, shrinking back: “Ah, it isn’t so simple! That makes it all the worse. It would be a kind of sacrilege! I have no right — or, wait! I will just glance at the first word. It may be a clew. And I want you to bear me witness, Mr. Eichenlaub, that I didn’t read a word more.” She catches up a piece of paper, and covers all the card except the first two words. “Yes! It is she! Oh, how perfectly delightful! It’s charming, charming! It’s one of the prettiest things that ever happened! And I shall be the means — no, not the means, quite, but the accident — of bringing them together! Put the card into the box, Mr. Eichenlaub, and don’t let me see it an instant longer, or I shall read every word of it, in spite of myself!” She gives him the card, and turns, swiftly, and makes some paces toward the door.

The Florist, calling after her: “But the attress, matam. You forgot.”

The Lady, returning: “Oh, yes! Give me your pencil.” She writes on a piece of the white wrapping-paper. “There! That is it.” She stands irresolute, with the pencil at her lip. “There was something else that I seem to have forgotten.”

The Florist: “Your flowers?”

The Lady: “Oh, yes, my flowers. I nearly went away without deciding. Let me see. Where are those white roses with the pink tinge on the edge of the petals?” The florist pushes the box towards her, and she looks down at the roses. “No, they won’t do. They look somehow — cruel! I don’t wonder he wouldn’t have them. They are totally out of character. I will take those white Bride roses, too. It seems a fatality, but there really isn’t anything else, and I can laugh with her about them, if it all turns out well.” She talks to herself rather than the florist, who stands patient behind the counter, and repeats, dreamily, “Laugh with her!”

The Florist: “How many shall I sendt you, matam?”

The Lady: “Oh, loads. As many as you think I ought to have. I shall not have any other flowers, and I mean to toss them on the table in loose heaps. Perhaps I shall have some smilax to go with them.”

The Florist: “Yes; or cypress wine.”

The Lady: “No; that is too crapy and creepy. Smilax, or nothing; and yet I don’t like that hard, shiny, varnishy look of smilax either. You wouldn’t possibly have anything like that wild vine, it’s scarcely more than a golden thread, that trails over the wayside bushes in New England? Dodder, they call it.”

The Florist: “I nefer heardt off it.”

The Lady: “No, but that would have been just the thing. It suggests the color of her hair; it would go with her. Well, I will have the smilax too, though I don’t like it. I don’t see why all the flowers should take to being so inexpressive. Send all the smilax you judge best. It’s quite a long table, nine or ten feet, and I want the vine going pretty much all about it.”

The Florist: “Perhaps I better sendt somebody to see?”

The Lady: “Yes, that would be the best. Good-morning.”

The Florist: “Goodt — morning, matam. I will sendt rhoundt this afternoon.”

The Lady: “Very well.” She is at the door, and she is about to open it, when it is opened from the outside, and another lady, deeply veiled, presses hurriedly in, and passes down the shop to the counter, where the florist stands sorting the long-stemmed Bride roses in the box before him. The first lady does not go out; she lingers at the door, looking after the lady who has just come in; then, with a little hesitation, she slowly returns, as if she had forgotten something, and waits by the stove until the florist shall have attended to the new-comer.

The Second Lady, throwing back her veil, and bending over to look at the box of roses: “What beautiful roses! What do you call these?”

The Florist: “That is a new rhoce: the Pridte. It is jost oudt. It is coing to be a very bopular rhoce.”

The Second Lady: “How very white it is! It seems not to have the least touch of color in it! Like snow! No; it is too cold!”

The Florist: “It iss gold-looging.”

The Second Lady: “What do they use this rose for? For — for” —

The Florist: “For everything! Weddtings, theatre barties, afternoon dteas, dtinners, funerals” —

The Second Lady: “Ah, that is shocking! I can’t have it, then. I want to send some flowers to a friend who has lost her only child — a young girl — and I wish it to be something expressive — characteristic — something that won’t wound them with other associations. Have you nothing — nothing of that kind? I want something that shall be significant; something that shall be like a young girl, and yet — Haven’t you some very tall, slender, delicate flowers? Not this deathly white, but with, a little color in it? Isn’t there some kind of lily?”

The Florist: “Easder lilies? Lily-off-the-valley? Chonquils? Azaleas? Hyacinths? Marcuerites?”

The Second Lady: “No, no; they won’t do, any of them! Haven’t you any other kind of roses, that won’t be so terribly — terribly” — She looks round over the shelves and the windows banked with flowers.

The Florist: “Yes, we haf dtea-rhoces, all kindts; Marshal Niel; Matame Watterville and Matame Cousine — these pink ones; they are sister rhoces; Matame Hoste, this plack one; the Midio, here; Chacks” —

The Second Lady: “No, no! They won’t any of them do. There ought to be a flower invented that would say something — pity, sympathy — that wouldn’t hurt more than it helped. Isn’t there anything? Some flowering vine?”

The Florist: “Here is the chasmin. That is a very peautiful wine, with that sdtar-shaped flower; and the berfume” —

The Second Lady, looking at a length of the jasmine vine which he trails on the counter before her: “Yes, that is very beautiful; and it is girlish, and like — But no, it wouldn’t do! That perfume is heartbreaking! Don’t send that!”

The Florist, patiently: “Cypress wine? Smilax?”

The Second Lady, shaking her head vaguely: “Some other flowering vine.”

The Florist: “Well, we have cot noding in, at present. I coult get you some of that other chasmin — kindt of push, that gifs its berfume after dtark” —

The Second Lady: “At night? Yes, I know. That might do. But those pale green flowers, that are not like flowers — no, they wouldn’t do! I shall have to come back to your Pride roses! Why do they call it Pride?”

The Florist: “It is Pridte, not Bridte, matam.”

The Second Lady, with mystification: “Oh! Well, let me have a great many of them. Have you plenty?”

The Florist: “As many as you lige.”

The Second Lady: “Well, I don’t want any of these hard little buds. I want very long stems, and slender, with the flowers fully open, and fragile-looking — something like her.” The first lady starts. “Yes: like this — and this — and this. Be sure you get them all like these. And send them — I will give you the address.” She writes on a piece of the paper before her. “There, that is it. Here is my card. I want it to go with them.” She turns from the florist with a sigh, and presses her handkerchief to her eyes.

The Florist: “You want them to go rhighdt away?” He takes up the card, and looks at it absently, and then puts it down, and examines the roses one after another. “I don’t know whether I cot enough of these oben ones on handt, already” —

The Second Lady: “Oh, you mustn’t send them to-day! I forgot. It isn’t to be till to-morrow. You must send them in the morning. But I am going out of town to-day, and so I came in to order them now. Be very careful not to send them to-day!”

The Florist: “All rhighdt. I loog oudt.”

The Second Lady: “I am so glad you happened to ask me. It has all been so dreadfully sudden, and I am quite bewildered. Let me think if there is anything more!” As she stands with her finger to her lip, the first lady makes a movement as if about to speak, but does not say anything. “No, there is nothing more, I believe.”

The Florist, to the First Lady: “Was there somet’ing?”

The First Lady: “No. There is no hurry.”

The Second Lady, turning towards her: “Oh, I beg your pardon! I have been keeping you” —

The First Lady: “Not at all. I merely returned to — But it isn’t of the least consequence. Don’t let me hurry you!”

The Second Lady: “Oh, I have quite finished, I believe. But I can hardly realize anything, and I was afraid of going away and forgetting something, for I am on my way to the station. My husband is very ill, and I am going South with him; and this has been so sudden, so terribly unexpected. The only daughter of a friend” —

The First Lady: “The only” —

The Second Lady: “Yes, it is too much! But perhaps you have come — I ought to have thought of it; you may have come on the same kind of sad errand yourself; you will know how to excuse” —

The First Lady, with a certain resentment: “Not at all! I was just ordering some flowers for a reception.”

The Second Lady: “Oh! Then I beg your pardon! But there seems nothing else in the world but — death. I am very sorry. I beg your pardon!” She hastens out of the shop, and the first lady remains, looking a moment at the door after she has vanished. Then she goes slowly to the counter.

The Lady, severely: “Mr. Eichenlaub, I have changed my mind about the roses and the smilax. I will not have either. I want you to send me all of that jasmine vine that you can get. I will have my whole decorations of that. I wonder I didn’t think of that before. Mr. Eichenlaub!” She hesitates. “Who was that lady?”

The Florist, looking about among the loose papers before him: “Why, I dton’t know. I cot her cart here, somewhere.”

The Lady, very nervously: “Never mind about the card! I don’t wish to know who she was. I have no right to ask. No! I won’t look at it.” She refuses the card, which he has found, and which he offers to her. “I don’t care for her name, but — Where was she sending the flowers?”

The Florist, tossing about the sheets of paper on the counter: “She dtidn’t say, but she wrhote it down here, somewhere” —

The Lady, shrinking back: “No, no! I don’t want to see it! But what right had she to ask me such a thing as that? It was very bad taste; very obtuse, — whoever she was. Have you — ah — found it?”

The Florist, offering her a paper across the counter: “Yes; here it iss.”

The Lady, catching it from him, and then, after a glance at it, starting back with a shriek: “Ah-h-h! How terrible! But it can’t be! Oh, I don’t know what to think — It is the most dreadful thing that ever — It’s impossible!” She glances at the paper again, and breaks into a hysterical laugh: “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha! Why, this is the address that I wrote out for that young gentleman’s flowers! You have made a terrible mistake, Mr. Eichenlaub — you have almost killed me. I thought — I thought that woman was sending her funeral flowers to — to” — She holds her hand over her heart, and sinks into the chair beside the counter, where she lets fall the paper. “You have almost killed me.”

The Florist: “I am very sorry. I dtidn’t subbose — But the oder attress must be here. I will fint it” — He begins tossing the papers about again.

The Lady, springing to her feet: “No, no! I wouldn’t look at it now for the world! I have had one escape. Send me all jasmine, remember.”

The Florist: “Yes, all chasmin.” The lady goes slowly and absently toward the door, where she stops, and then she turns and goes back slowly, and as if forcing herself.

The Lady: “Mr. Eichenlaub.”

The Florist: “Yes, matam.”

The Lady: “Have you — plenty — of those white — Bride roses?”

The Florist: “I get all you want of them.”

The Lady: “Open, fragile-looking ones, with long, slender stems?”

The Florist: “I get you any kindt you lige!”

The Lady: “Send me Bride roses, then. I don’t care! I will not be frightened out of them! It is too foolish.”

The Florist: “All rhighdt. How many you think you want?”

The Lady: “Send all you like! Masses of them! Heaps!”

The Florist: “All rhighdt. And the chasmin?”

The Lady: “No; I don’t want it now.”

The Florist: “You want the smilax with them, then, I subbose?”

The Lady: “No, I don’t want any smilax with them, either. Nothing but those white Bride roses!” She turns and goes to the door; she calls back, “Nothing but the roses, remember!”

The Florist: “All rhighdt. I don’t forget. No chasmin; no smilax; no kindt of wine. Only Pridte rhoces.”

The Lady: “Only roses.”

The Florist, alone, thoughtfully turning over the papers on his counter: “That is sdrainche that I mage that mistake about the attress! I can’t find the oder one anwhere; and if I lost it, what am I coing to do with the rhoces the other lady ortert?” He steps back and looks at his feet, and then stoops and picks up a paper, which he examines. “Ach! here it iss! Zlipped down behindt. Now I don’t want to get it mixed with that oder any more.” He puts it down at the left, and takes up the address for the young man’s roses on the right; he stares at the two addresses in a stupefaction. “That is very sdrainche too. Well!” He drops the papers with a shrug, and goes on arranging the flowers.

THE ELEVATOR

I.

Scene: Through the curtained doorway of Mrs. Edward Roberts’s pretty drawing-room, in Hotel Bellingham, shows the snowy and gleaming array of a table set for dinner, under the dim light of gas-burners turned low. An air of expectancy pervades the place, and the uneasiness of Mr. Roberts, in evening dress, expresses something more as he turns from a glance into the dining-room, and still holding the portière with one hand, takes out his watch with the other.

Mr. Roberts to Mrs. Roberts entering the drawing-room from regions beyond: “My dear, it’s six o’clock. What can have become of your aunt?”

Mrs. Roberts, with a little anxiety: “That was just what I was going to ask. She’s never late; and the children are quite heart-broken. They had counted upon seeing her, and talking Christmas a little before they were put to bed.”

Roberts: “Very singular her not coming! Is she going to begin standing upon ceremony with us, and not come till the hour?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Nonsense, Edward! She’s been detained. Of course she’ll be here in a moment. How impatient you are!”

Roberts: “You must profit by me as an awful example.”

Mrs. Roberts, going about the room, and bestowing little touches here and there on its ornaments: “If you’d had that new cook to battle with over this dinner, you’d have learned patience by this time without any awful example.”

Roberts, dropping nervously into the nearest chair: “I hope she isn’t behind time.”

Mrs. Roberts, drifting upon the sofa, and disposing her train effectively on the carpet around her: “She’s before time. The dinner is in the last moment of ripe perfection now, when we must still give people fifteen minutes’ grace.” She studies the convolutions of her train absent-mindedly.

Roberts, joining in its perusal: “Is that the way you’ve arranged to be sitting when people come in?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Of course not. I shall get up to receive them.”

Roberts: “That’s rather a pity. To destroy such a lovely pose.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Do you like it?”

Roberts: “It’s divine.”

Mrs. Roberts: “You might throw me a kiss.”

Roberts: “No; if it happened to strike on that train anywhere, it might spoil one of the folds. I can’t risk it.” A ring is heard at the apartment door. They spring to their feet simultaneously.

Mrs. Roberts: “There’s Aunt Mary now!” She calls into the vestibule, “Aunt Mary!”

Dr. Lawton, putting aside the vestibule portière, with affected timidity: “Very sorry. Merely a father.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh! Dr. Lawton? I am so glad to see you!” She gives him her hand: “I thought it was my aunt. We can’t understand why she hasn’t come. Why! where’s Miss Lawton?”

Lawton: “That is precisely what I was going to ask you.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Why, she isn’t here.”

Lawton: “So it seems. I left her with the carriage at the door when I started to walk here. She called after me down the stairs that she would be ready in three seconds, and begged me to hurry, so that we could come in together, and not let people know I’d saved half a dollar by walking.”

Mrs. Roberts: “She’s been detained too!”

Roberts, coming forward: “Now you know what it is to have a delinquent Aunt-Mary-in-law.”

Lawton, shaking hands with him: “O Roberts! Is that you? It’s astonishing how little one makes of the husband of a lady who gives a dinner. In my time — a long time ago — he used to carve. But nowadays, when everything is served à la Russe, he might as well be abolished. Don’t you think, on the whole, Roberts, you’d better not have come?”

Roberts: “Well, you see, I had no excuse. I hated to say an engagement when I hadn’t any.”

Lawton: “Oh, I understand. You wanted to come. We all do, when Mrs. Roberts will let us.” He goes and sits down by Mrs. Roberts, who has taken a more provisional pose on the sofa. “Mrs. Roberts, you’re the only woman in Boston who could hope to get people, with a fireside of their own — or a register — out to a Christmas dinner. You know I still wonder at your effrontery a little?”

Mrs. Roberts, laughing: “I knew I should catch you if I baited my hook with your old friend.”

Lawton: “Yes, nothing would have kept me away when I heard Bemis was coming. But he doesn’t seem so inflexible in regard to me. Where is he?”

Mrs. Roberts: “I’m sure I don’t know. I’d no idea I was giving such a formal dinner. But everybody, beginning with my own aunt, seems to think it a ceremonious occasion. There are only to be twelve. Do you know the Millers?”

Lawton: “No, thank goodness! One meets some people so often that one fancies one’s weariness of them reflected in their sympathetic countenances. Who are these acceptably novel Millers?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Do explain the Millers to the doctor, Edward.”

Roberts, standing on the hearth-rug, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets: “They board.”

Lawton: “Genus. That accounts for their willingness to flutter round your evening lamp when they ought to be singeing their wings at their own. Well, species?”

Roberts: “They’re very nice young newly married people. He’s something or other of some kind of manufactures. And Mrs. Miller is disposed to think that all the other ladies are as fond of him as she is.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh! That is not so, Edward.”

Lawton: “You defend your sex, as women always do. But you’ll admit that, as your friend, Mrs. Miller may have this foible.”

Mrs. Roberts: “I admit nothing of the kind. And we’ve invited another young couple who haven’t gone to housekeeping yet — the Curwens. And he has the same foible as Mrs. Miller.” Mrs. Roberts takes out her handkerchief, and laughs into it.

Lawton: “That is, if Mrs. Miller has it, which we both deny. Let us hope that Mrs. Miller and Mr. Curwen may not get to making eyes at each other.”

Roberts: “And Mr. Bemis and his son complete the list. Why, Agnes, there are only ten. You said there were twelve.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, never mind. I meant ten. I forgot that the Somerses declined.” A ring is heard. “Ah! that’s Aunt Mary.” She runs into the vestibule, and is heard exclaiming without: “Why, Mrs. Miller, is it you? I thought it was my aunt. Where is Mr. Miller?”

Mrs. Miller, entering the drawing-room arm in arm with her hostess: “Oh, he’ll be here directly. I had to let him run back for my fan.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, we’re very glad to have you to begin with. Let me introduce Dr. Lawton.”

Mrs. Miller, in a polite murmur: “Dr. Lawton.” In a louder tone: “O Mr. Roberts!”

Lawton: “You see, Roberts? The same aggrieved surprise at meeting you here that I felt.”

Mrs. Miller: “What in the world do you mean?”

Lawton: “Don’t you think that when a husband is present at his wife’s dinner party he repeats the mortifying superfluity of a bridegroom at a wedding?”

Mrs. Miller: “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. I should never think of giving a dinner without Mr. Miller.”

Lawton: “No?” A ring is heard. “There’s Bemis.”

Mrs. Miller: “It’s Mr. Miller.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Aunt Mary at last!” As she bustles toward the door: “Edward, there are twelve — Aunt Mary and Willis.”

Roberts: “Oh, yes. I totally forgot Willis.”

Lawton: “Who’s Willis?”

Roberts: “Willis? Oh, Willis is my wife’s brother. We always have him.”

Lawton: “Oh, yes, Campbell.”

Mrs. Roberts, without: “Mr. Bemis! So kind of you to come on Christmas.”

Mr. Bemis, without: “So kind of you to ask us houseless strangers.”

Mrs. Roberts, without: “I ran out here, thinking it was my aunt. She’s played us a trick, and hasn’t come yet.”

Bemis, entering the drawing-room with Mrs. Roberts: “I hope she won’t fail altogether. I haven’t met her for twenty years, and I counted so much upon the pleasure — Hello, Lawton!”

Lawton: “Hullo, old fellow!” They fly at each other, and shake hands. “Glad to see you again.”

Bemis, reaching his left hand to Mr. Roberts, while Mr. Lawton keeps his right: “Ah! Mr. Roberts.”

Lawton: “Oh, never mind him. He’s merely the husband of the hostess.”

Mrs. Miller, to Roberts: “What does he mean?”

Roberts: “Oh, nothing. Merely a joke he’s experimenting with.”

Lawton to Bemis: “Where’s your boy?”

Bemis: “He’ll be here directly. He preferred to walk. Where’s your girl?”

Lawton: “Oh, she’ll come by and by. She preferred to drive.”

Mrs. Roberts, introducing them: “Mr. Bemis, have you met Mrs. Miller?” She drifts away again, manifestly too uneasy to resume even a provisional pose on the sofa, and walks detachedly about the room.

Bemis: “What a lovely apartment Mrs. Roberts has.”

Mrs. Miller: “Exquisite! But then she has such perfect taste.”

Bemis, to Mrs. Roberts, who drifts near them: “We were talking about your apartment, Mrs. Roberts. It’s charming.”

Mrs. Roberts: “It is nice. It’s the ideal way of living. All on one floor. No stairs. Nothing.”

Bemis: “Yes, when once you get here! But that little matter of five pair up” —

Mrs. Roberts: “You don’t mean to say you walked up! Why in the world didn’t you take the elevator?”

Bemis: “I didn’t know you had one.”

Mrs. Roberts: “It’s the only thing that makes life worth living in a flat. All these apartment hotels have them.”

Bemis: “Bless me! Well, you see, I’ve been away from Boston so long, and am back so short a time, that I can’t realize your luxuries and conveniences. In Florence we always walk up. They have ascenseurs in a few great hotels, and they brag of it in immense signs on the sides of the building.”

Lawton: “What pastoral simplicity! We are elevated here to a degree that you can’t conceive of, gentle shepherd. Has yours got an air-cushion, Mrs. Roberts?”

Mrs. Roberts: “An air-cushion? What’s that?”

Lawton: “The only thing that makes your life worth a moment’s purchase in an elevator. You get in with a glass of water, a basket of eggs, and a file of the ‘Daily Advertiser.’ They cut the elevator loose at the top, and you drop.”

Both Ladies: “Oh!”

Lawton: “In three seconds you arrive at the ground-floor, reading your file of the ‘Daily Advertiser;’ not an egg broken nor a drop spilled. I saw it done in a New York hotel. The air is compressed under the elevator, and acts as a sort of ethereal buffer.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And why don’t we always go down in that way?”

Lawton: “Because sometimes the walls of the elevator shaft give out.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And what then?”

Lawton: “Then the elevator stops more abruptly. I had a friend who tried it when this happened.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And what did he do?”

Lawton: “Stepped out of the elevator; laughed; cried; went home; got into bed: and did not get up for six weeks. Nervous shock. He was fortunate.”

Mrs. Miller: “I shouldn’t think you’d want an air-cushion on your elevator, Mrs. Roberts.”

Mrs. Roberts: “No, indeed! Horrid!” The bell rings. “Edward, you go and see if that’s Aunt Mary.”

Mrs. Miller: “It’s Mr. Miller, I know.”

Bemis: “Or my son.”

Lawton: “My voice is for Mrs. Roberts’s brother. I’ve given up all hopes of my daughter.”

Roberts, without: “Oh, Curwen! Glad to see you! Thought you were my wife’s aunt.”

Lawton, at a suppressed sigh from Mrs. Roberts: “It’s one of his jokes, Mrs. Roberts. Of course it’s your aunt.”

Mrs. Roberts, through her set teeth, smilingly: “Oh, if it is, I’ll make him suffer for it.”

Mr. Curwen, without: “No, I hated to wait, so I walked up.”

Lawton: “It is Mr. Curwen, after all, Mrs. Roberts. Now let me see how a lady transmutes a frown of threatened vengeance into a smile of society welcome.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, look!” To Mr. Curwen, who enters, followed by her husband: “Ah, Mr. Curwen! So glad to see you. You know all our friends here — Mrs. Miller, Dr. Lawton, and Mr. Bemis?”

Curwen, smiling and bowing, and shaking hands right and left: “Very glad — very happy — pleased to know you.”

Mrs. Roberts, behind her fan to Dr. Lawton: “Didn’t I do it beautifully?”

Lawton, behind his hand: “Wonderfully! And so unconscious of the fact that he hasn’t his wife with him.”

Mrs. Roberts, in great astonishment, to Mr. Curwen: “Where in the world is Mrs. Curwen?”

Curwen: “Oh — oh — she’ll be here. I thought she was here. She started from home with two right-hand gloves, and I had to go back for a left, and I — I suppose — Good heavens!” pulling the glove out of his pocket. “I ought to have sent it to her in the ladies’ dressing-room.” He remains with the glove held up before him, in spectacular stupefaction.

Lawton: “Only imagine what Mrs. Curwen would be saying of you if she were in the dressing-room.”

Roberts: “Mr. Curwen felt so sure she was there that he wouldn’t wait to take the elevator, and walked up.” Another ring is heard. “Shall I go and meet your aunt now, my dear?”

Mrs. Roberts: “No, indeed! She may come in now with all the formality she chooses, and I will receive her excuses in state.” She waves her fan softly to and fro, concealing a murmur of trepidation under an indignant air, till the portière opens, and Mr. Willis Campbell enters. Then Mrs. Roberts breaks in nervous agitation “Why, Willis! Where’s Aunt Mary?”

Mrs. Miller: “And Mr. Miller?”

Curwen: “And Mrs. Curwen?”

Lawton: “And my daughter?”

Bemis: “And my son?”

Mr. Campbell, looking tranquilly round on the faces of his interrogators: “Is it a conundrum?”

Mrs. Roberts, mingling a real distress with an effort of mock-heroic solemnity: “It is a tragedy! O Willis dear! it’s what you see — what you hear; a niece without an aunt, a wife without a husband, a father without a son, and another father without a daughter.”

Roberts: “And a dinner getting cold, and a cook getting hot.”

Lawton: “And you are expected to account for the whole situation.”

Campbell: “Oh, I understand! I don’t know what your little game is, Agnes, but I can wait and see. I’m not hungry.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Willis, do you think I would try and play a trick on you, if I could?”

Campbell: “I think you can’t. Come, now, Agnes! It’s a failure. Own up, and bring the rest of the company out of the next room. I suppose almost anything is allowable at this festive season, but this is pretty feeble.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Indeed, indeed, they are not there.”

Campbell: “Where are they, then?”

All: “That’s what we don’t know.”

Campbell: “Oh, come, now! that’s a little too thin. You don’t know where any of all these blood-relations and connections by marriage are? Well, search me!”

Mrs. Roberts, in open distress: “Oh, I’m sure something must have happened to Aunt Mary!”

Mrs. Miller: “I can’t understand what Ellery C. Miller means.”

Lawton, with a simulated sternness: “I hope you haven’t let that son of yours run away with my daughter, Bemis?”

Bemis: “I’m afraid he’s come to a pass where he wouldn’t ask my leave.”

Curwen, re-assuring himself: “Ah, she’s all right, of course. I know that” —

Bemis: “Miss Lawton?”

Curwen: “No, no — Mrs. Curwen.”

Campbell: “Is it a true bill, Agnes?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Indeed it is, Willis. We’ve been expecting her for an hour — of course she always comes early — and I’m afraid she’s been taken ill suddenly.”

Roberts: “Oh, I don’t think it’s that, my dear.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, of course you never think anything’s wrong, Edward. My whole family might die, and” — Mrs. Roberts restrains herself, and turns to Mr. Campbell, with hysterical cheerfulness: “Who came up in the elevator with you?”

Campbell: “Me? I didn’t come in the elevator. I had my usual luck. The elevator was up somewhere, and after I’d pressed the annunciator button till my thumb ached, I watched my chance and walked up.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Where was the janitor?”

Campbell: “Where the janitor always is — nowhere.”

Lawton: “Eating his Christmas dinner, probably.”

Mrs. Roberts, partially abandoning and then recovering herself: “Yes, it’s perfectly spoiled! Well, friends, I think we’d better go to dinner — that’s the only way to bring them. I’ll go out and interview the cook.” Sotto voce to her husband: “If I don’t go somewhere and have a cry, I shall break down here before everybody. Did you ever know anything so strange? It’s perfectly — pokerish.”

Lawton: “Yes, there’s nothing like serving dinner to bring the belated guest. It’s as infallible as going without an umbrella when it won’t rain.”

Campbell: “No, no! Wait a minute, Roberts. You might sit down without one guest, but you can’t sit down without five. It’s the old joke about the part of Hamlet. I’ll just step round to Aunt Mary’s house — why, I’ll be back in three minutes.”

Mrs. Roberts, with perfervid gratitude: “Oh, how good you are, Willis! You don’t know how much you’re doing! What presence of mind you have! Why couldn’t we have thought of sending for her? O Willis, I can never be grateful enough to you! But you always think of everything.”

Roberts: “I accept my punishment meekly, Willis, since it’s in your honor.”

Lawton: “It’s a simple and beautiful solution, Mrs. Roberts, as far as your aunt’s concerned; but I don’t see how it helps the rest of us.”

Mrs. Miller to Mr. Campbell: “If you meet Mr. Miller “ —

Curwen: “Or my wife” —

Bemis: “Or my son” —

Lawton: “Or my daughter” —

Campbell: “I’ll tell them they’ve just one chance in a hundred to save their lives, and that one is open to them for just five minutes.”

Lawton: “Tell my daughter that I’ve been here half an hour, and everybody knows I drove here with her.”

Bemis: “Tell my son that the next time I’ll walk, and let him drive.”

Mrs. Miller: “Tell Mr. Miller I found I had my fan after all.”

Curwen: “And Mrs. Curwen that I’ve got her glove all right.” He holds it up.

Mrs. Roberts, at a look of mystification and demand from her brother: “Never mind explanations, Willis. They’ll understand, and we’ll explain when you get back.”

Lawton, examining the glove which Curwen holds up: “Why, so it is right!”

Curwen: “What do you mean?”

Lawton: “Were you sent back to get a left glove?”

Curwen: “Yes, yes; of course.”

Lawton: “Well, if you’ll notice, this is a right one. The one at home is left.”

Curwen, staring helplessly at it: “Gracious Powers! what shall I do?”

Lawton: “Pray that Mrs. Curwen may never come.”

Mr. Curwen, dashing through the door: “I’ll be back by the time Mr. Campbell returns.”

Mrs. Miller, with tokens of breaking down visible to Mrs. Roberts: “I wonder what could have kept Mr. Miller. It’s so very mysterious, I” —

Mrs. Roberts, suddenly seizing her by the arm, and hurrying her from the room: “Now, Mrs. Miller, you’ve just got time to see my baby.”

Mr. Roberts, winking at his remaining guests: “A little cry will do them good. I saw as soon as Willis came in instead of her aunt, that my wife couldn’t get through without it. They’ll come back as bright as” —

Lawton: “Bemis, should you mind a bereaved father falling upon your neck?”

Bemis: “Yes, Lawton, I think I should.”

Lawton: “Well, it is rather odd about all those people. You can say of one or two that they’ve been delayed, but five people can’t have been delayed. It’s too much. It amounts to a coincidence. Hello! What’s that?”

Roberts: “What’s what?”

Lawton: “I thought I heard a cry.”

Roberts: “Very likely you did. They profess to deaden these floors so that you can’t hear from one apartment to another. But I know pretty well when my neighbor overhead is trying to wheel his baby to sleep in a perambulator at three o’clock in the morning; and I guess our young lady lets the people below understand when she’s wakeful. But it’s the only way to live, after all. I wouldn’t go back to the old up-and-down-stairs, house-in-a-block system on any account. Here we all live on the ground-floor practically. The elevator equalizes everything.”

Bemis: “Yes, when it happens to be where you are. I believe I prefer the good old Florentine fashion of walking upstairs, after all.”

Lawton: “Roberts, I did hear something. Hark! It sounded like a cry for help. There!”

Roberts: “You’re nervous, doctor. It’s nothing. However, it’s easy enough to go out and see.” He goes out to the door of the apartment, and immediately returns. He beckons to Dr. Lawton and Mr. Bemis, with a mysterious whisper: “Come here both of you. Don’t alarm the ladies.”

II.

In the interior of the elevator are seated Mrs. Roberts’s Aunt Mary (Mrs. Crashaw), Mrs. Curwen, and Miss Lawton; Mr. Miller and Mr. Alfred Bemis are standing with their hats in their hands. They are in dinner costume, with their overcoats on their arms, and the ladies’ draperies and ribbons show from under their outer wraps, where they are caught up, and held with that caution which characterizes ladies in sitting attitudes which they have not been able to choose deliberately. As they talk together, the elevator rises very slowly, and they continue talking for some time before they observe that it has stopped.

Mrs. Crashaw: “It’s very fortunate that we are all here together. I ought to have been here half an hour ago, but I was kept at home by an accident to my finery, and before I could be put in repair I heard it striking the quarter past. I don’t know what my niece will say to me. I hope you good people will all stand by me if she should be violent.”

Miller: “In what a poor man may with his wife’s fan, you shall command me, Mrs. Crashaw.” He takes the fan out, and unfurls it.

Mrs. Crashaw: “Did she send you back for it?”

Miller: “I shouldn’t have had the pleasure of arriving with you if she hadn’t.”

Mrs. Crashaw, laughing, to Mrs. Curwen: “What did you send yours back for, my dear?”

Mrs. Curwen, thrusting out one hand gloved, and the other ungloved: “I didn’t want two rights.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Not even women’s rights?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Oh, so young and so depraved! Are all the young men in Florence so bad?” Surveying her extended arms, which she turns over: “I don’t know that I need have sent him for the other glove. I could have explained to Mrs. Roberts. Perhaps she would have forgiven my coming in one glove.”

Miller, looking down at the pretty arms: “If she had seen you without.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Oh, you were looking!” She rapidly involves her arms in her wrap. Then she suddenly unwraps them, and regards them thoughtfully. “What if he should bring a ten-button instead of an eight! And he’s quite capable of doing it.”

Miller: “Are there such things as ten-button gloves?”

Mrs. Curwen: “You would think there were ten-thousand button gloves if you had them to button.”

Miller: “It would depend upon whom I had to button them for.”

Mrs. Curwen: “For Mrs. Miller, for example.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “We women are too bad, always sending people back for something. It’s well the men don’t know how bad.”

Mrs. Curwen: “‘Sh! Mr. Miller is listening. And he thought we were perfect. He asks nothing better than to be sent back for his wife’s fan. And he doesn’t say anything even under his breath when she finds she’s forgotten it, and begins, ‘Oh, dearest, my fan’ — Mr. Curwen does. But he goes all the same. I hope you have your father in good training, Miss Lawton. You must commence with your father, if you expect your husband to be ‘good.’”

Miss Lawton: “Then mine will never behave, for papa is perfectly incorrigible.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I’m sorry to hear such a bad report of him. Shouldn’t you think he would be ‘good,’ Mr. Bemis?”

Young Mr. Bemis: “I should think he would try.”

Mrs. Curwen: “A diplomat, as well as a punster already! I must warn Miss Lawton.”

Mrs. Crashaw, interposing to spare the young people: “What an amusing thing elevator etiquette is! Why should the gentlemen take their hats off? Why don’t you take your hats off in a horse-car?”

Miller: “The theory is that the elevator is a room.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “We were at a hotel in London where they called it the Ascending Room.”

Miss Lawton: “Oh, how amusing!”

Miller, looking about: “This is a regular drawing-room for size and luxury. They’re usually such cribs in these hotels.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Yes, it’s very nice, though I say it that shouldn’t of my niece’s elevator. The worst about it is, it’s so slow.”

Miller: “Let’s hope it’s sure.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Some of these elevators in America go up like express trains.”

Mrs. Curwen, drawing her shawl about her shoulders, as if to be ready to step out: “Well, I never get into one without taking my life in my hand, and my heart in my mouth. I suppose every one really expects an elevator to drop with them, some day, just as everybody really expects to see a ghost some time.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Oh, my dear! what an extremely disagreeable subject of conversation.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I can’t help it, Mrs. Crashaw. When I reflect that there are two thousand elevators in Boston, and that the inspectors have just pronounced a hundred and seventy of them unsafe, I’m so desperate when I get into one that I could — flirt!”

Miller, guarding himself with the fan: “Not with me?”

Miss Lawton, to young Mr. Bemis: “How it does creep!”

Young Mr. Bemis, looking down fondly at her: “Oh, does it?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Why, it doesn’t go at all! It’s stopped. Let us get out.” They all rise.

The Elevator Boy, pulling at the rope: “We’re not there, yet.”

Mrs. Crashaw, with mingled trepidation and severity: “Not there? What are you stopping, then, for?”

The Elevator Boy: “I don’t know. It seems to be caught.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Caught?”

Miss Lawton: “Oh, dear!”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Don’t mind.”

Miller: “Caught? Nonsense!”

Mrs. Curwen: “We’re caught, I should say.” She sinks back on the seat.

The Elevator Boy: “Seemed to be going kind of funny all day!” He keeps tugging at the rope.

Miller, arresting the boy’s efforts: “Well, hold on — stop! What are you doing?”

The Elevator Boy: “Trying to make it go.”

Miller: “Well, don’t be so — violent about it. You might break something.”

The Elevator Boy: “Break a wire rope like that!”

Miller: “Well, well, be quiet now. Ladies, I think you’d better sit down — and as gently as possible. I wouldn’t move about much.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Move! We’re stone. And I wish for my part I were a feather.”

Miller, to the boy: “Er — a — er — where do you suppose we are?”

The Elevator Boy: “We’re in the shaft between the fourth and fifth floors.” He attempts a fresh demonstration on the rope, but is prevented.

Miller: “Hold on! Er — er” —

Mrs. Crashaw, as if the boy had to be communicated with through an interpreter: “Ask him if it’s ever happened before.”

Miller: “Yes. Were you ever caught before?”

The Elevator Boy: “No.”

Miller: “He says no.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Ask him if the elevator has a safety device.”

Miller: “Has it got a safety device?”

The Elevator Boy: “How should I know?”

Miller: “He says he don’t know.”

Mrs. Curwen, in a shriek of hysterical laughter: “Why, he understands English!”

Mrs. Crashaw, sternly ignoring the insinuation: “Ask him if there’s any means of calling the janitor.”

Miller: “Could you call the janitor?”

The Elevator Boy, ironically: “Well, there ain’t any telephone attachment.”

Miller, solemnly: “No, he says there isn’t.”

Mrs. Crashaw, sinking back on the seat with resignation: “Well, I don’t know what my niece will say.”

Miss Lawton: “Poor papa!”

Young Mr. Bemis, gathering one of her wandering hands into his: “Don’t be frightened. I’m sure there’s no danger.”

The Elevator Boy, indignantly: “Why, she can’t drop. The cogs in the runs won’t let her!”

All: “Oh!”

Miller, with a sigh of relief: “I knew there must be something of the kind. Well, I wish my wife had her fan.”

Mrs. Curwen: “And if I had my left glove I should be perfectly happy. Not that I know what the cogs in the runs are!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Then we’re merely caught here?”

Miller: “That’s all.”

Mrs. Curwen: “It’s quite enough for the purpose. Couldn’t you put on a life-preserver, Mr. Miller, and go ashore and get help from the natives?”

Miss Lawton, putting her handkerchief to her eyes: “Oh, dear!”

Mrs. Crashaw, putting her arm around her: “Don’t be frightened, my child. There’s no danger.”

Young Mr. Bemis, caressing the hand which he holds: “Don’t be frightened.”

Miss Lawton: “Don’t leave me.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “No, no; I won’t. Keep fast hold of my hand.”

Miss Lawton: “Oh, yes, I will! I’m ashamed to cry.”

Young Mr. Bemis, fervently: “Oh, you needn’t be! It is perfectly natural you should.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I’m too badly scared for tears. Mr. Miller, you seem to be in charge of this expedition — couldn’t you do something? Throw out ballast, or let the boy down in a parachute? Or I’ve read of a shipwreck where the survivors, in an open boat, joined in a cry, and attracted the notice of a vessel that was going to pass them. We might join in a cry.”

Miller: “Oh, it’s all very well joking, Mrs. Curwen” —

Mrs. Curwen: “You call it joking!”

Miller: “But it’s not so amusing, being cooped up here indefinitely. I don’t know how we’re to get out. We can’t join in a cry, and rouse the whole house. It would be ridiculous.”

Mrs. Curwen: “And our present attitude is so eminently dignified! Well, I suppose we shall have to cast lots pretty soon to see which of us shall be sacrificed to nourish the survivors. It’s long past dinner-time.”

Miss Lawton, breaking down: “Oh, don’t say such terrible things.”

Young Mr. Bemis, indignantly comforting her: “Don’t, don’t cry. There’s no danger. It’s perfectly safe.”

Miller to The Elevator Boy: “Couldn’t you climb up the cable, and get on to the landing, and — ah! — get somebody?”

The Elevator Boy: “I could, maybe, if there was a hole in the roof.”

Miller, glancing up: “Ah! true.”

Mrs. Crashaw, with an old lady’s serious kindness: “My boy, can’t you think of anything to do for us?”

The Elevator Boy yielding to the touch of humanity, and bursting into tears: “No, ma’am, I can’t. And everybody’s blamin’ me, as if I done it. What’s my poor mother goin’ to do?”

Mrs. Crashaw, soothingly: “But you said the runs in the cogs” —

The Elevator Boy: “How can I tell! That’s what they say. They hain’t never been tried.”

Mrs. Curwen, springing to her feet: “There! I knew I should. Oh” — She sinks fainting to the floor.

Mrs. Crashaw, abandoning Miss Lawton to the ministrations of young Mr. Bemis, while she kneels beside Mrs. Curwen and chafes her hand: “Oh, poor thing! I knew she was overwrought by the way she was keeping up. Give her air, Mr. Miller. Open a — Oh, there isn’t any window!”

Miller, dropping on his knees, and fanning Mrs. Curwen: “There! there! Wake up, Mrs. Curwen. I didn’t mean to scold you for joking. I didn’t, indeed. I — I — I don’t know what the deuce I’m up to.” He gathers Mrs. Curwen’s inanimate form in his arms, and fans her face where it lies on his shoulder. “I don’t know what my wife would say if” —

Mrs. Crashaw: “She would say that you were doing your duty.”

Miller, a little consoled: “Oh, do you think so? Well, perhaps.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Do you feel faint at all, Miss Lawton?”

Miss Lawton: “No, I think not. No, not if you say it’s safe.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Oh, I’m sure it is!”

Miss Lawton, renewing her hold upon his hand: “Well, then! Perhaps I hurt you?”

Young Mr. Bemis: “No, no! You couldn’t.”

Miss Lawton: “How kind you are!”

Mrs. Curwen, opening her eyes: “Where” —

Miller, rapidly transferring her to Mrs. Crashaw: “Still in the elevator, Mrs. Curwen.” Rising to his feet: “Something must be done. Perhaps we had better unite in a cry. It’s ridiculous, of course. But it’s the only thing we can do. Now, then! Hello!”

Miss Lawton: “Papa!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agne-e-e-s!”

Mrs. Curwen, faintly: “Walter!”

The Elevator Boy: “Say!”

Miller: “Oh, that won’t do. All join in ‘Hello!’”

All: “Hello!”

Miller: “Once more!”

All: “Hello!”

Miller: “Once more!”

All: “Hello!”

Miller: “Now wait a while.” After an interval: “No, nobody coming.” He takes out his watch. “We must repeat this cry at intervals of a half-minute. Now, then!” They all join in the cry, repeating it as Mr. Miller makes the signal with his lifted hand.

Miss Lawton: “Oh, it’s no use!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “They don’t hear.”

Mrs. Curwen: “They won’t hear.”

Miller: “Now, then, three times!”

All: “Hello! hello! hello!”

III.

Roberts appears at the outer door of his apartment on the fifth floor. It opens upon a spacious landing, to which a wide staircase ascends at one side. At the other is seen the grated door to the shaft of the elevator. He peers about on all sides, and listens for a moment before he speaks.

Roberts: “Hello yourself.”

Miller, invisibly from the shaft: “Is that you, Roberts?”

Roberts: “Yes; where in the world are you?”

Miller: “In the elevator.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “We’re all here, Edward.”

Roberts: “What! You, Aunt Mary!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Yes. Didn’t I say so?”

Roberts: “Why don’t you come up?”

Miller: “We can’t. The elevator has got stuck somehow.”

Roberts: “Got stuck? Bless my soul! How did it happen? How long have you been there?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Since the world began!”

Miller: “What’s the use asking how it happened? We don’t know, and we don’t care. What we want to do is to get out.”

Roberts: “Yes, yes! Be careful!” He rises from his frog-like posture at the grating, and walks the landing in agitation. “Just hold on a minute!”

Miller: “Oh, we sha’n’t stir.”

Roberts: “I’ll see what can be done.”

Miller: “Well, see quick, please. We have plenty of time, but we don’t want to lose any. Don’t alarm Mrs. Miller, if you can help it.”

Roberts: “No, no.”

Mrs. Curwen: “You may alarm Mr. Curwen.”

Roberts: “What! Are you there?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Here? I’ve been here all my life!”

Roberts: “Ha! ha! ha! That’s right. We’ll soon have you out. Keep up your spirits.”

Mrs. Curwen: “But I’m not keeping them up.”

Miss Lawton: “Tell papa I’m here too.”

Roberts: “What! You too, Miss Lawton?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Yes, and young Mr. Bemis. Didn’t I tell you we were all here?”

Roberts: “I couldn’t realize it. Well, wait a moment.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Oh, you can trust us to wait.”

Roberts, returning with Dr. Lawton, and Mr. Bemis, who join him in stooping around the grated door of the shaft: “They’re just under here in the well of the elevator, midway between the two stories.”

Lawton: “Ha! ha! ha! You don’t say so.”

Bemis: “Bless my heart! What are they doing there?”

Miller: “We’re not doing anything.”

Mrs. Curwen: “We’re waiting for you to do something.”

Miss Lawton: “Oh, papa!”

Lawton: “Don’t be troubled, Lou, we’ll soon have you out.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Don’t be alarmed, sir, Miss Lawton is all right.”

Miss Lawton: “Yes, I’m not frightened, papa.”

Lawton: “Well, that’s a great thing in cases of this kind. How did you happen to get there?”

Miller, indignantly: “How do you suppose? We came up in the elevator.”

Lawton: “Well, why didn’t you come the rest of the way?”

Miller: “The elevator wouldn’t.”

Lawton: “What seems to be the matter?”

Miller: “We don’t know.”

Lawton: “Have you tried to start it?”

Miller: “Well, I’ll leave that to your imagination.”

Lawton: “Well, be careful what you do. You might” —

Miller, interrupting: “Roberts, who’s that talking?”

Roberts, coming forward politely: “Oh, excuse me! I forgot that you didn’t know each other. Dr. Lawton, Mr. Miller.” Introducing them.

Lawton: “Glad to know you.”

Miller: “Very happy to make your acquaintance, and hope some day to see you. And now, if you have completed your diagnosis” —

Mrs. Curwen: “None of us have ever had it before, doctor; nor any of our families, so far as we know.”

Lawton: “Ha! ha! ha! Very good! Well, just keep quiet. We’ll have you all out of there presently.”

Bemis: “Yes, remain perfectly still.”

Roberts: “Yes, we’ll have you out. Just wait.”

Miller: “You seem to think we’re going to run away. Why shouldn’t we keep quiet? Do you suppose we’re going to be very boisterous, shut up here like rats in a trap?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Or birds in a cage, if you want a more pleasing image.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “How are you going to get us out, Edward?”

Roberts: “We don’t know yet. But keep quiet” —

Miller: “Keep quiet! Great heavens! we’re afraid to stir a finger. Now don’t say ‘keep quiet’ any more, for we can’t stand it.”

Lawton: “He’s in open rebellion. What are you going to do, Roberts?”

Roberts, rising and scratching his head: “Well, I don’t know yet. We might break a hole in the roof.”

Lawton: “Ah, I don’t think that would do. Besides you’d have to get a carpenter.”

Roberts: “That’s true. And it would make a racket, and alarm the house” — staring desperately at the grated doorway of the shaft. “If I could only find an elevator man — an elevator builder! But of course they all live in the suburbs, and they’re keeping Christmas, and it would take too long, anyway.”

Bemis: “Hadn’t you better send for the police? It seems to me it’s a case for the authorities.”

Lawton: “Ah, there speaks the Europeanized mind! They always leave the initiative to the authorities. Go out and sound the fire-alarm, Roberts. It’s a case for the Fire Department.”

Roberts: “Oh, it’s all very well to joke, Dr. Lawton. Why don’t you prescribe something?”

Lawton: “Surgical treatment seems to be indicated, and I’m merely a general practitioner.”

Roberts: “If Willis were only here, he’d find some way out of it. Well, I’ll have to go for help somewhere” —

Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Miller, bursting upon the scene: “Oh, what is it?”

Lawton: “Ah, you needn’t go for help, my dear fellow. It’s come!”

Mrs. Roberts: “What are you all doing here, Edward?”

Mrs. Miller: “Oh, have you had any bad news of Mr. Miller?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Or Aunt Mary?”

Miller, calling up: “Well, are you going to keep us here all night? Why don’t you do something?”

Mrs. Miller: “Oh, what’s that? Oh, it’s Mr. Miller! Oh, where are you, Ellery?”

Miller: “In the elevator.”

Mrs. Miller: “Oh! and where is the elevator? Why don’t you get out? Oh” —

Miller: “It’s caught, and we can’t.”

Mrs. Miller: “Caught? Oh, then you will be killed — killed — killed! And it’s all my fault, sending you back after my fan, and I had it all the time in my own pocket; and it comes from my habit of giving it to you to carry in your overcoat pocket, because it’s deep, and the fan can’t break. And of course I never thought of my own pocket, and I never should have thought of it at all if Mr. Curwen hadn’t been going back to get Mrs. Curwen’s glove, for he’d brought another right after she’d sent him for a left, and we were all having such a laugh about it, and I just happened to put my hand on my pocket, and there I felt the fan. And oh, what shall I do?” Mrs. Miller utters these explanations and self-reproaches in a lamentable voice, while crouching close to the grated door to the elevator shaft, and clinging to its meshes.

Miller: “Well, well, it’s all right. I’ve got you another fan, here. Don’t be frightened.”

Mrs. Roberts, wildly: “Where’s Aunt Mary, Edward? Has Willis got back?” At a guilty look from her husband: “Edward! don’t tell me that she’s in that elevator! Don’t do it, Edward! For your own sake don’t. Don’t tell me that your own child’s mother’s aunt is down there, suspended between heaven and earth like — like” —

Lawton: “The coffin of the Prophet.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes. Don’t tell me, Edward! Spare your child’s mother, if you won’t spare your wife!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Agnes! don’t be ridiculous. I’m here, and I never was more comfortable in my life.”

Mrs. Roberts, calling down the grating “Oh! Is it you, Aunt Mary?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Of course it is!”

Mrs. Roberts: “You recognize my voice?”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I should hope so, indeed! Why shouldn’t I?”

Mrs. Roberts: “And you know me? Agnes? Oh!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Don’t be a goose, Agnes.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, it is you, aunty. It is! Oh, I’m so glad! I’m so happy! But keep perfectly still, aunty dear, and we’ll soon have you out. Think of baby, and don’t give way.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I shall not, if the elevator doesn’t, you may depend upon that.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, what courage you do have! But keep up your spirits! Mrs. Miller and I have just come from seeing baby. She’s gone to sleep with all her little presents in her arms. The children did want to see you so much before they went to bed. But never mind that now, Aunt Mary. I’m only too thankful to have you at all!”

Mrs. Crashaw: “I wish you did have me! And if you will all stop talking and try some of you to do something, I shall be greatly obliged to you. It’s worse than it was in the sleeping car that night.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, do you remember it, Aunt Mary? Oh, how funny you are!” Turning heroically to her husband: “Now, Edward, dear, get them out. If it’s necessary, get them out over my dead body. Anything! Only hurry. I will be calm; I will be patient. But you must act instantly. Oh, here comes Mr. Curwen!” Mr. Curwen mounts the stairs to the landing with every sign of exhaustion, as if he had made a very quick run to and from his house. “Oh, he will help — I know he will! Oh, Mr. Curwen, the elevator is caught just below here with my aunt in it and Mrs. Miller’s husband” —

Lawton: “And my girl.”

Bemis: “And my boy.”

Mrs. Curwen, calling up: “And your wife!”

Curwen, horror-struck: “And my wife! Oh, heavenly powers! what are we going to do? How shall we get them out? Why don’t they come up?”

All: “They can’t.”

Curwen: “Can’t? Oh, my goodness!” He flies at the grating, and kicks and beats it.

Roberts: “Hold on! What’s the use of that?”

Lawton: “You couldn’t get at them if you beat the door down.”

Bemis: “Certainly not.” They lay hands upon him and restrain him.

Curwen, struggling: “Let me speak to my wife! Will you prevent a husband from speaking to his own wife?”

Mrs. Miller, in blind admiration of his frenzy: “Yes, that’s just what I said. If some one had beaten the door in at once” —

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, Edward, dear, let him speak to his wife.” Tearfully: “Think if I were there!”

Roberts, releasing him: “He may speak to his wife all night. But he mustn’t knock the house down.”

Curwen, rushing at the grating: “Caroline! Can you hear me? Are you safe?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Perfectly. I had a little faint when we first stuck” —

Curwen: “Faint? Oh!”

Mrs. Curwen: “But I am all right now.”

Curwen: “Well, that’s right. Don’t be frightened! There’s no occasion for excitement. Keep perfectly calm and collected. It’s the only way — What’s that ringing?” The sound of an electric bell is heard within the elevator. It increases in fury.

Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Miller: “Oh, isn’t it dreadful?”

The Elevator Boy: “It’s somebody on the ground-floor callin’ the elevator!”

Curwen: “Well, never mind him. Don’t pay the slightest attention to him. Let him go to the deuce! And, Caroline!”

Mrs. Curwen: “Yes?”

Curwen: “I — I — I’ve got your glove all right.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Left, you mean, I hope?”

Curwen: “Yes, left, dearest! I mean left.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Eight-button?”

Curwen: “Yes.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Light drab?”

Curwen, pulling a light yellow glove from his pocket: “Oh!” He staggers away from the grating and stays himself against the wall, the mistaken glove dangling limply from his hand.

Roberts, Lawton, and Bemis: “Ah! ha! ha! ha!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, for shame! to laugh at such a time!”

Mrs. Miller: “When it’s a question of life and death. There! The ringing’s stopped. What’s that?” Steps are heard mounting the stairway rapidly, several treads at a time. Mr. Campbell suddenly bursts into the group on the landing with a final bound from the stairway. “Oh!”

Campbell: “I can’t find Aunt Mary, Agnes. I can’t find anything — not even the elevator. Where’s the elevator? I rang for it down there till I was black in the face.”

Mrs. Roberts: “No wonder! It’s here.”

Mrs. Miller: “Between this floor and the floor below. With my husband in it.”

Curwen: “And my wife!”

Lawton: “And my daughter!”

Bemis: “And my son!”

Mrs. Roberts: “And aunty!”

All: “And it’s stuck fast.”

Roberts: “And the long and short of it is, Willis, that we don’t know how to get them out, and we wish you would suggest some way.”

Lawton: “There’s been a great tacit confidence among us in your executive ability and your inventive genius.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, yes, we know you can do it.”

Mrs. Miller: “If you can’t, nothing can save them.”

Campbell, going to the grating: “Miller!”

Miller: “Well?”

Campbell: “Start her up!”

Miller: “Now, look here, Campbell, we are not going to stand that; we’ve had enough of it. I speak for the whole elevator. Don’t you suppose that if it had been possible to start her up we” —

Mrs. Curwen: “We shouldn’t have been at the moon by this time.”

Campbell: “Well, then, start her down!”

Miller: “I never thought of that.” To the Elevator Boy: “Start her down.” To the people on the landing above: “Hurrah! She’s off!”

Campbell: “Well, now start her up!”

A joint cry from the elevator: “Thank you! we’ll walk up this time.”

Miller: “Here! let us out at this landing!” They are heard precipitately emerging, with sighs and groans of relief, on the floor below.

Mrs. Roberts, devoutly: “O Willis, it seems like an interposition of Providence, your coming just at this moment.”

Campbell: “Interposition of common sense! These hydraulic elevators weaken sometimes, and can’t go any farther.”

Roberts, to the shipwrecked guests, who arrive at the top of the stairs, crestfallen, spent, and clinging to one another for support: “Why didn’t you think of starting her down, some of you?”

Mrs. Roberts, welcoming them with kisses and hand-shakes: “I should have thought it would occur to you at once.”

Miller, goaded to exasperation: “Did it occur to any of you?”

Lawton, with sublime impudence: “It occurred to all of us. But we naturally supposed you had tried it.”

Mrs. Miller, taking possession of her husband: “Oh, what a fright you have given us!”

Miller: “I given you! Do you suppose I did it out of a joke, or voluntarily?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Aunty, I don’t know what to say to you. You ought to have been here long ago, before anything happened.”

Mrs. Crashaw: “Oh, I can explain everything in due season. What I wish you to do now is to let me get at Willis, and kiss him.” As Campbell submits to her embrace: “You dear, good fellow! If it hadn’t been for your presence of mind, I don’t know how we should ever have got out of that horrid pen.”

Mrs. Curwen, giving him her hand: “As it isn’t proper for me to kiss you” —

Campbell: “Well, I don’t know. I don’t wish to be too modest.”

Mrs. Curwen: “I think I shall have to vote you a service of plate.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Come and look at the pattern of mine. And, Willis, as you are the true hero of the occasion, you shall take me in to dinner. And I am not going to let anybody go before you.” She seizes his arm, and leads the way from the landing into the apartment. Roberts, Lawton, and Bemis follow stragglingly.

Mrs. Miller, getting her husband to one side: “When she fainted, she fainted at you, of course! What did you do?”

Miller: “Who? I! Oh!” After a moment’s reflection: “She came to!”

Curwen, getting his wife aside: “When you fainted, Caroline, who revived you?”

Mrs. Curwen: “Who? Me? Oh! How should I know? I was insensible.” They wheel arm in arm, and meet Mr. and Mrs. Miller in the middle. Mrs. Curwen yields precedence with an ironical courtesy: “After you, Mrs. Miller!”

Mrs. Miller, in a nervous, inimical twitter: “Oh, before the heroine of the lost elevator?”

Mrs. Curwen, dropping her husband’s arm, and taking Mrs. Miller’s: “Let us split the difference.”

Mrs. Miller: “Delightful! I shall never forget the honor.”

Mrs. Curwen: “Oh, don’t speak of honors! Mr. Miller was so kind through all those terrible scenes in the elevator.”

Mrs. Miller: “I’ve no doubt you showed yourself duly grateful.” They pass in, followed by their husbands.

Young Mr. Bemis, timidly: “Miss Lawton, in the elevator you asked me not to leave you. Did you — ah — mean — I must ask you; it may be my only chance; if you meant — never?”

Miss Lawton, dropping her head: “I — I — don’t — know.”

Young Mr. Bemis: “But if I wished never to leave you, should you send me away?”

Miss Lawton, with a shy, sly upward glance at him: “Not in the elevator!”

Young Mr. Bemis: “Oh!”

Mrs. Roberts, re-appearing at the door: “Why, you good-for-nothing young things, why don’t you come to — Oh! excuse me!” She re-enters precipitately, followed by her tardy guests, on whom she casts a backward glance of sympathy. “Oh, you needn’t hurry!”

EVENING DRESS

I

Mrs. Edward Roberts: “Now, my dear, Amy and I will get there early, so as to make up for your coming a little late, but you must be there for the last half, at least. I would excuse you altogether if I could, for I know you must be dead tired, up all night, that way, on the train, but Mrs. Miller is one of those people who never can listen to reason, and she would take deadly offence if you missed her musicale, and wouldn’t forgive us the longest day she lived. So you see?” Mrs. Roberts addresses herself to her husband in the library of their apartment in Hotel Bellingham, at Boston, as she stands before the fire pulling on a long glove and looking at him across his desk, where he has sunk into a weary heap in his swivel chair. “You are dreadfully used up, Edward, and I think it’s cruel to make you go out; but what can I do? If it was anybody but Mrs. Miller I wouldn’t think of having you go; I’m sure I never want to have her about, anyway. But that’s just the kind of people that you’re a perfect slave to! Now, dear, I’ve let the two girls go out, and you must remember that you’re in the place alone with the children; but you needn’t be troubled, because nobody will come after this hour till Willis does, and the girls will be back before that. Willis is to come and get you on his way to the Millers’, and it’s all been arranged for you, and you needn’t think of a thing till Willis comes. You’ll have to dress, of course; but you needn’t begin that at once, and you can just sit here in your chair and rest.” Mr. Roberts stretches his arms wildly abroad, and, throwing back his head, permits himself a yawn that eclipses his whole face. Mrs. Roberts lets both her arms fall at her side in token of extreme despair. “Edward! If you should go to sleep!”

Roberts, pulling himself together, with a gigantic effort: “No, no! You needn’t be afraid, my dear. But, oh! what wouldn’t I give for a chance to!”

Mrs. Roberts, who sinks into a chair and regards the unhappy man with a look of tender compassion: “You poor thing, I’ve almost a mind to let you!”

Roberts, heroically: “No, it wouldn’t do, Agnes. I must — ow, ugh, ow — go. Ugh, ow, ugh!” He abandons himself to a succession of abysmal yawns, in which the sequence of his ideas is altogether lost.

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, then, I shall have to trust you.” She gathers her train up for departure, and moves slowly towards the door. “I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything. Let me see: fan, handkerchief, both gloves; pins, because you’re never sure that they’ve put enough, and you don’t know where you’ll come apart; head scarf, yes, I’ve got that on; fur boots, I’ve got them on. I really believe I’m all here. But I shouldn’t be, Edward, if it were not for the system I put into everything; and I do wish, dear, that you’d try it once, just to please me!”

Roberts, very drowsily: “Try what, Agnes?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Why, getting what you have to do by heart, and repeating it over. If you could only bring yourself to say: Both girls out; me alone with the children; Willis at ten; mustn’t go to sleep; last half, anyway; Mrs. Miller awfully angry. There! If you could say that after me, I could go feeling so much easier! Won’t you do it, Edward? I know it has a ridiculous sound, but—”

Roberts, yawning: “How am I to dress?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Edward! Well, I always will say that you’re perfectly inspired! To think of my forgetting the most important thing, after all! Oh, I do believe there is an overruling Providence, I don’t care what the agnostics pretend. Why, it’s to be evening dress for the men, of course! Mrs. Miller would do it to be different from Mrs. Curwen, who let you come in your cutaways, even if it wasn’t the regular thing; and she’s gone around ever since saying it was the most rowdy, Bohemian thing she ever heard of, and she might as well have had beer, at once.”

Roberts: “Who?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Why, Mrs. Miller.”

Roberts: “Mrs. Miller going to have beer?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, Edward, I don’t see how you can be so — But there! I won’t blame you, dearest. I know you’re just literally expiring for want of sleep, and it seems to me I must be the cruellest thing in the world to make you go. And if you’ll say the word, I’ll smash off a note now at the eleventh hour — though it’s two hours of eleven yet! — and just tell Mrs. Miller that you’ve got home down sick, and I’ve had to stay and take care of you. Will you?”

Roberts: “Oh no, Agnes. It wouldn’t be the truth.”

Mrs. Roberts, in a rapture of admiration and affection: “Oh, who cares for the truth in such a cause, you poor heroic angel, you? Well, if you insist upon going, I suppose we must; and now the only way is for you to keep everything clearly in mind. You’d better say it over backward, now, and begin with evening dress, because that’s the most important. Now! Evening dress; Mrs. Miller awfully angry; last half, anyway; mustn’t go to sleep; Willis at ten; me alone with the children; both girls out. Now, do you think — Ow — e — e — e!” A ring at the door extorts a shriek from Mrs. Roberts, who simultaneously gathers her robes about her, in order to fall with decency in the event of burglars or fire, while her husband rises and goes to open the apartment door. “Who can it be, at this hour? Oh! Amy!”

Mrs. Willis Campbell, in the doorway: “Oh, Amy, indeed! How d’ y’ do, Edward! Glad to see you back alive, and just in time for Agnes to kill you with Mrs. Miller’s musicale. May I ask, Agnes, how long you expected me to freeze to death down in that coupé before you came?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, Amy, dear, you must forgive me! I was just staying to give Edward his charges — you know he’s so terribly forgetful — and I forgot all about you!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Then I wish, the next time, he’d give you some charges, my dear. But come, now, do! We shall be rather late, anyway, and that simpleton will be perfectly furious.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, that’s just what I was saying to Edward. She’ll never forgive you. If it was anybody else, I shouldn’t think of dragging him out to-night.”

Mrs. Campbell: “The worst of a bore like her is that she’s sure to come to all your things, and you can’t get off from one of hers. Willis declares he’s going to strike, and I couldn’t have got him out to-night if I hadn’t told him you were going to make Edward go.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, isn’t it perfectly wicked, Amy! I know he’s just going to have the grippe. See how drowsy he is! That’s one of the first symptoms.”

Mrs. Campbell: “It’s one of the symptoms of having passed the night on a sleeping-car, too.”

Mrs. Roberts: “That’s true, and thank you, Amy. I forgot all about that. But now, Edward, dear, you will remember, won’t you? If I could only stay with you — —”

Roberts, who has been drowsily drooping in his chair during the exchange of these ideas between the ladies: “Oh, I’m all right, Agnes. Or — ow, ugh, ow! — I should be if I had a cup of tea.”

Mrs. Roberts: “There! I knew it. If I had been worth anything at all as a wife I should have had you a cup of tea long ago. Oh, how heartless! And I’ve let both the girls go, and the fire’s all out in the range, anyway. But I’ll go and start it with my own hands—”

Mrs. Campbell: “In those gloves! You’re crazy, Agnes! Edward, I’ll tell you what Willis does, when he’s out of sorts a little: he takes a taste of whiskey-and-water. He says nothing freshens him up like it.”

Roberts: “That’s a good idea.”

Mrs. Roberts, bustling into the dining-room and reappearing with a tumbler and a decanter: “The very thing, Amy! And thank you so much. Trying to make Edward remember seems to put everything out of my head! I might have thought of whiskey, though! If it’s only loss of sleep, it will wake him up, and if it’s grippe, it’s the most nourishing thing in the world.”

Roberts: “I’m not going to have the grippe, Agnes.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Edward! Don’t boast! You may be stricken down in an instant. I heard of one person who was taken so suddenly she hadn’t time to get her things off, and tumbled right on the bed. You must put some water in it, of course; and hot water is very soothing. You can use some out of the pipes; it’s perfectly good.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Agnes, are you never coming?”

Roberts: “Yes, go along, Agnes, do! I shall get on quite well, now. You needn’t wait.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, if I could only stay and think for you, dearest! But I can’t, and you must do the best you can. Do keep repeating it all over! It’s the only way—”

Mrs. Campbell, from the door: “Agnes!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Amy, I’m coming instantly.”

Mrs. Campbell: “I declare I shall go without you!”

Mrs. Roberts: “And I shouldn’t blame you a bit, Amy! And if it turns out to be the grippe, Edward, don’t lose an instant. Send for the doctor as fast as the district messenger can fly; give him his car fare, and let one come for me; and jump into bed and cover up warm, and keep up the nourishment with the whiskey; there’s another bottle in the sideboard; and perhaps you’d better break a raw egg in it. I heard of one person that they gave three dozen raw eggs a day to in typhoid fever, and even then he died; so you must nourish yourself all you can. And—”

Mrs. Campbell: “Agnes! I’m going!”

Mrs. Roberts: “I’m coming! Edward!”

Roberts: “Well?”

Mrs. Roberts: “There is something else, very important. And I can’t think of it!”

Roberts: “Liebig’s extract of beef?”

Mrs. Roberts, distractedly: “No, no! And it wasn’t oysters, either, though they’re very nourishing, too. Oh, dear! What—”

Mrs. Campbell: “Going, Agnes!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Coming, Amy! Try to think of something else that I ought to remember, Edward!”

Roberts: “Some word to the girls when they come in?”

Mrs. Roberts: “No!”

Roberts: “About the children, something?”

Mrs. Roberts: “No, no!”

Roberts: “Willis, then; what Amy wants him to do?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, no, no! I shall surely die if I can’t think of it!”

Mrs. Campbell, at the door of the apartment: “Gone!”

Mrs. Roberts, flying after her, as the door closes with a bang: “Oh, Amy! how can you be so heartless? She’s driven it quite out of my head!”

II

Mr. Willis Campbell: “Hello, hello, hello! Oh, hello, hello, hello! Wake up, in there! Roberts, wake up! Sound the loud timbrel! Fire, murder, and sudden death! Wake up! Monday morning, you know; here’s Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, all gone and nothing done! Come, arouse thee, my merry Swiss boy! Take thy pail and to labor away! All aboard! Train for Newton, West Newton, Newtonville, Auburndale, Riverside, and Newton Lower Falls, on track No. 5. Express to Newton. Wake up, Roberts! Here’s McIlheny, out here, wants to know why you took his wife for a cook. Hurry up! he can’t wait. Wake up, you old seven-by-nine sleeper, you, or Mrs. Miller’s musicale will just simply expire on the spot. Come! It’s after ten o’clock now, or it will be in about five minutes. Hurry up! Hello, hello, hello!” Campbell accompanies his appeals with a tempest of knocks, thumps, and bangs on the outside of Roberts’s chamber door. Within, Roberts is discovered, at first stretched on his bed in profound repose, which becomes less and less perfect as Campbell’s blows and cries penetrate to his consciousness. He moves, groans, drops back into slumber, groans again, coughs, sits up on the bed, where he has thrown himself with all his clothes on, and listens. “I say, aren’t you going to Mrs. Miller’s? If you are, you’d better get out of bed some time before the last call for breakfast. Now ready in the dining-car!”

Roberts, leaping out of bed and flinging open the door: “Why, I’ve been to Mrs. Miller’s!”

Campbell, entering with his hat on, and his overcoat on his arm; “Oh no, you haven’t, you poor, suffering creature! That was a heavenly dream! Why, good gracious, man, you’re not dressed!” Campbell is himself in perfectly appointed evening-dress, and he stares in dismay at the travelling-suit which Roberts still wears. “You can’t go in that figure, you know. You might to Mrs. Curwen’s, but you’d give Mrs. Miller deadly offence; she’d think the Curwen had put you up to it. Didn’t Agnes tell you I’d be here at ten for you? What have you been doing with yourself? I supposed I should find you walking up and down here, fuming with impatience.”

Roberts: “I was dead tired, and after Agnes went, I just threw myself down here for a moment’s rest, and I was off before I knew it—”

Campbell: “Well, then, hustle! There’s no time to lose. We shall be late, but I guess we can get there in time to save Agnes’s life if we hump ourselves. Are you shaved?”

Roberts: “Yes, I thought I’d better shave before I lay down—”

Campbell: “Well, then, that’s half the battle, and you ought to be into your dress-suit in five minutes; but you’re an intellectual man, and your fingers are all thumbs, and so I’ll give you ten minutes. Hello! What’s this?” In speaking of shaving, Campbell has mechanically cast his eye towards the bureau, and has gradually become aware of the half-tumbler of water and the decanter of whiskey which Roberts has left standing there. He pounces upon the decanter, pulls out the stopple, and applies his nose to the mouth. “Ah, ha! This is the milk in the cocoanut, is it? No wonder you slept soundly, and had sweet dreams? Well, Roberts!”

Roberts: “No, no, Willis! I solemnly assure you I haven’t touched a drop of it!”

Campbell: “Oh yes! I know! That’s what they always say!”

Roberts: “But I tell you, Willis—”

Campbell: “Oh, all right, my boy! I don’t blame you! You have never fallen before, probably, but you’re down this time, old man. You have every appearance of being grossly intoxicated, as the reporters say, at this instant. Look how red your eyes are!”

Roberts: “It’s loss of sleep. I tell you I haven’t tasted the whiskey.”

Campbell: “But it’s half gone!” He lifts the decanter and shows. “Well, I hope Agnes may never know it, and your poor children, Roberts—”

Roberts: “Nonsense! Agnes knows all about it. She brought me the decanter herself. She and Amy thought it would freshen me up. But I distrusted it; I was afraid the effect would be soporific—”

Campbell: “And it seems you were perfectly right. Events have proved it. But come, now, don’t sit there all night, old fellow.” Roberts has sunk upon the edge of the bed. “We’ve got to be off to this scene of maddening gayety at Mrs. Miller’s. Want a wet towel round your head? Nothing like it, you know!”

Roberts, with dignity: “Thank you, I don’t need any wet towel, and I’ll be with you in a few moments, if you’ll kindly wait.” He moves towards the door of his dressing-room.

Campbell, cheerfully: “Oh, I’ll stay by, Roberts; you needn’t be afraid. There’s nothing mean about me, and you’ll want somebody to pull you together, now and then, and I know just what to do; I’ve been through this kind of thing with lots of fellows in California. I know the haughty and self-helpful stage. You’re all right, Roberts. But don’t lose time. What’s the matter now?” Roberts has come back from his dressing-room and is staring vacantly at Campbell.

Roberts: “I was trying to think where I’d put my dress-suit.”

Campbell, triumphantly: “Exactly! And now do you expect me to believe you haven’t been at that decanter? Where do you suppose you put it?”

Roberts: “Where I always do on a hook in my closet.”

Campbell: “You hang up your dress-suit? Why, it must look like a butler’s! You ought to fold your clothes and lay them in a bureau drawer. Don’t you know that? Very likely Agnes has got onto that while you’ve been away, and put them in here.” He looks towards the bureau, and Roberts tries to pull open one drawer after another.

Roberts: “This seems locked. I never lock my drawers.”

Campbell: “Then that’s proof positive that your dress-suit is in there. Agnes has put it in, and locked it up, so as to keep it nice and fresh for you. Where’s your key?”

Roberts: “I don’t know. I always leave it in the key-hole of one of the drawers. Haven’t you got a key-ring, Willis?”

Campbell: “I’ve got a key-ring, but I haven’t got it about me, as Artemus Ward said of his gift for public speaking. It’s in my other trousers pockets. Haven’t you got a collection of keys? Amy has a half-bushel, and she keeps them in a hand-bag in the bath-room closet. She says Agnes does.”

Roberts: “So she does! I’ll just look.” While he is gone, Campbell lays down his hat and overcoat, and tries the bureau drawers. Roberts returns to find him at this work. “No; she must have put them somewhere else. I know she always used to put them there.”

Campbell: “Well, then we’ve got to pick the locks. Have you got a boot-buttoner? There’s nothing like a boot-buttoner to pick locks. Or, hold on a minute! We’ve got to go about this thing systematically. Now, I don’t think you can tell in your condition whether your dress-coat’s in your closet or not, Roberts. We must bring your clothes all out here and lay them on the bed, and see. That dress-suit may turn up yet. You probably thought it was something like an ulster. I know how a man’s ideas get mixed, after a little too much freshening up.”

Roberts, unmindful of his joke: “You’re right, Willis. I may have overlooked it. I’ll bring out everything.” He disappears, and reappears with a business-suit of black diagonal, which he throws on the bed. “That isn’t it.”

Campbell, inspecting it: “No; but it isn’t so far off. Some of the young chaps have their dress-coats made of diagonal. Try again, Roberts: you’ll fetch it yet.” Roberts disappears, and reappears with a frock-coat of blue and checked trousers. “Oh, that won’t do, Roberts. Don’t give way like that. Who ever saw a man in evening-dress with check trousers on? Now, what have we next?” As Roberts goes and comes, Campbell receives his burdens and verifies them. “A velvet jacket won’t do, either, unless you’re a travelling Englishman. Three pairs of summer pantaloons are all very well in their way; but they’re out of season, and stripes are not the thing for evening wear any more. Beautiful bath gown, but more adapted for amateur dramatics than for a musicale. Two waistcoats and a Norfolk jacket mean well, but are not adapted to the purpose. Exemplary light overcoat, but still not quite the thing. Double-breasted reefer and Canada homespun trousers; admirably fitted for a sea-voyage and camping out. Armload of semi-detached waistcoats and pantaloons; very suggestive, but not instantly available. Pajamas not at all the thing. Elderly pair of doeskin trousers and low-cut waistcoat — Why, hello, Roberts! here’s part of your dress-suit now! Where’s the coat?”

Roberts, dropping into a chair and wiping his forehead, while he surveys the tangled heap of garments on the bed: “Given away. Got too small for me, three years ago. Agnes kept the waistcoat and trousers for the sake of association, because I told her I wore them at the party where we first met. They won’t go half round me now.”

Campbell, scrutinizing them critically as he holds them: “Well, look here, Roberts, we may have to come to these yet. Stand up, old fellow.” Roberts mechanically stands up, and Campbell tries the top of the trousers against his waistband. “May need a little slitting down the back, so as to let them out a third, or two thirds, or so. But I guess we’ll try an ice-pick first.” He flings the clothes on the bed, and touches the electric bell.

Roberts: “Ice-pick?”

Campbell: “Yes; nothing like it for prying open bureau drawers.” To Bella, the maid, who appears at the door in answer to his ring: “The ice-pick, please.”

Bella: “Ice-pick, sir?”

Campbell: “Yes. The — ice — pick — here — quick.”

Bella, vanishing, with a gesture of wonder at the pile of clothing on the bed: “All right, sir.”

Roberts: “But, Willis! Won’t it bruise and deface the bureau? Agnes is very careful of this bu—”

Campbell: “Not at all. You just set the pick in here over the lock, and pry. I sha’n’t leave a scratch.” They stoop down together in front of the bureau, and Campbell shows him how. “But what are you going to do? You’ve got to have your clothes if you’re going to the musicale. Ah, here we are! Thanks,” as Bella comes with the ice-pick, which he pushes in over the lock of the lowest drawer. “We’ll begin with the lowest, because that’s where Amy keeps mine, and if Agnes has got onto it through her, she’ll be sure to do exactly the same. Now, then, I just scratch the bolt down with my knife, and Open, Sesame! What do you say to bruising your old bureau now?”

Roberts, as Campbell pulls out the drawer and sets it on a chair: “Perfect! Only” — he lifts the things from the drawer, and places them on another chair— “there don’t seem to be anything here but underclothes.”

Campbell: “Well, then, we must get the next out. No time to lose. Come! Keep shoving the pick in, and I’ll scratch the bolt down with my knife. See? It’s nothing.” They pull the drawer out and set it on the floor, and Roberts ruefully contemplates it.

Roberts: “Nothing but shirts, collars, cuffs and neckties.”

Campbell: “Ah, I don’t know that. It’s a deep drawer” — he begins taking the linen out, and laying it on the floor— “and the dress-suit may be at the bottom. No! Nothing here. You’re right, Roberts. Well, now for the top drawer and the last. If we’d taken that out first, we needn’t have taken out the second; we could have seen it in place. You ought to have thought of that, Roberts.”

Roberts, with injury: “You suggested taking out the lowest first, yourself, Willis. You said Agnes would be sure to have put them there.”

Campbell: “Did I? Well, I knew I must have a reason for it. But come along now, Roberts, and push the ice-pick in.” After a season of experiment with the pick and the penknife: “The bolt won’t scratch down. What are you going to do now, Roberts?”

Roberts: “I don’t know.”

Campbell: “But you’ve got to do something, you know. We can’t just give it up. Where are those dress-trousers and waistcoat?” He begins tumbling the things on the bed, laying some on chairs, letting others drop to the floor. “Ah, here they are! Now, I’ll tell you what, Roberts, you’ve got to wear these. Go into your dressing-room there and put them on, and then we can tell how much they have to be slit up the back.”

Roberts: “But where’s the coat, even if I could get the other things on?”

Campbell: “We’ll think about that later. We haven’t got any time to lose in talk. We can pin back the skirts of your frock-coat, as the travelling Americans used to do when they went to the opera in London. Hurry up!” He gives Roberts the garments, and pushes him into the door of his dressing-room, and walks impatiently up and down amidst the chaos of clothing till Roberts reappears. “Why, that isn’t bad!”

Roberts: “Bad? I can’t breathe; I feel as if I were being cut in two!”

Campbell: “Nonsense! That’s the way every woman feels when she’s laced. It gives you a beautiful waist, Roberts! Ah, ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! O Lord! Oh, mercy! Ah, ha, ha, ha!”

Roberts: “Now, look here, Willis—”

Campbell, turning him round, and surveying him from different points: “No, no! Don’t mind me! It’s just my way, you know. I don’t mean anything by it. I think these things look first-rate on you. There’s no mistake about their giving you a youthful figure; we can just let them out a few stitches, and you’ll be perfectly comfortable. The only thing now is the coat. I’m afraid that pinning back wouldn’t do. We’d better try something else. I’ll tell you! Send down and borrow Merrick’s coat! He’s still on the floor below you, I suppose?”

Roberts: “Yes, but he’s so thin—”

Campbell: “The very thing! Those thin fellows always have their things made roomy—”

Roberts: “But he’s tall.”

Campbell: “That’s all right. If you keep these things on you’ve got to give in some direction, and you’re probably going to stretch.” He rings the bell.

Roberts: “But it’s very late. He must be in bed.”

Campbell: “I’ll fix that.” To Bella, as she appears: “Bella, I want you to go down to the gentleman under here, and ask him if he won’t lend Mr. Roberts his dress-coat. Tell him Mrs. Roberts has gone off to a party, and Mr. Roberts doesn’t know where to find his coat.”

Roberts: “Oh, do you think she’d better tell him that, Willis?”

Campbell: “Why, certainly! You must account for the request in some way. It’ll appeal to his sympathy, and put him into a good-humor if he happens to have to get out of bed to oblige you.”

Bella: “They’re all up yet, sir. I saw their cook on the back stairs when I came in. They’ve been giving a dinner—”

Campbell: “Well, run then.” To Roberts, as Bella vanishes: “Merrick can take it right off his back. But whilst she’s gone we’ll just give this lock another chance.” They work jointly at the bureau drawer. “No, it won’t scrape down. It’s probably rusted in. You must get this lock oiled, Roberts.” As Bella returns with a dress-coat in her hand: “Ah, here we are! That’s very nice of Merrick. What did he say?”

Bella: “I didn’t see him, sir. The girl brought it.”

Campbell: “Well, that’s all, Bella.” He shakes out the coat as she goes, and looks down at it. “I suppose it amused Merrick. He’s got a good deal of humor, Merrick has. I hope he won’t give it to the press.”

Roberts: “Good heavens, Willis! You don’t—”

Campbell: “Oh, he wouldn’t give real names. Merrick’s too much of a gentleman for that. Come, try it on. We’ve got to hurry, now.” Roberts backs towards him with extended arms and Campbell slips the coat-sleeves on them. “Easy, easy! It may be a little narrow for you in the back — No, sir! It fits you like a glove.” He stands off and surveys Roberts, after smoothing the coat across the shoulders. “Yes, sir, like a glove — a glove that the pretty shop-girl has put on for you, after she’s peppered it full of that white stuff to make it go on, and told you that you could easily wear a size smaller.” He begins to laugh as he lifts each of Roberts’s limp arms, with the sleeves dangling below his hands, and touches the skirt, which descends to the calf of his leg. “The most youthful figure I ever saw! Looks like a boy in his father’s coat. Merrick is a tall fellow. I’d no idea—”

Roberts, looking ruefully over his shoulder: “You see it won’t do, Willis.”

Campbell: “No, no! I don’t say that, quite. But perhaps we’d better try something else. Who’s overhead now?”

Roberts, desperately: “Baker. And he’s short and fat—”

Campbell: “Short and fat isn’t at all bad.” Touching the annunciator. “He’s probably had his coat made rather long and snug. It’ll be the very thing for you. We mustn’t leave a stone unturned, or a coat untried.” To Bella, appearing at the door, and putting her apron up to control herself at sight of Mr. Roberts’s figure: “Do you know whether Mr. Baker’s people have gone to bed?”

Bella: “No, sir. I heard their second girl saying on the stairs that Mrs. Baker was up with a bad toothache.”

Campbell: “What a piece of luck! Run right up, will you, and borrow Mr. Baker’s dress-coat.” To Roberts, on Bella’s disappearance: “Baker’s coat will be all right; but still we’d better work away at this bureau drawer again. Drive the ice-pick in a little farther, now.” They struggle with lock as before, until Bella returns, Roberts absent-mindedly keeping Merrick’s coat on, and from time to time taking a turn about the room to rest his back.

Roberts: “Let’s give it up, Willis. We can’t get it open. It’s no use!”

Campbell, desisting: “Well, we’ll leave that to the last, then. But I’ve the liveliest confidence in Baker’s coat. Ah, here it is! Saved! Saved!” He takes the garment from Bella at the threshold. “Now, then, the great thing is to get Merrick’s coat off in one piece. I thought I heard a ripping sound in the back of it when you were straining at that drawer. But I guess it was merely fancy. Easy, easy!” He helps Roberts get the coat off, and examines it.

Roberts, anxiously: “Is it all right?”

Campbell: “Yes, it’s perfectly sound. You may have started the seams a little, but it’s nothing that Merrick will ever notice. Now for Baker! There! Goes on like an old shoe!” He retires a few steps and surveys Roberts’s back, which Roberts is craning his neck round to get a view of in the glass. “There’s space! Gives you a mighty fine, portly figure, Roberts; it looks grand on you, it does indeed! I call that the back of a leading citizen in very comfortable circumstances. Something magisterial about it. Perhaps it’s a little full; but that’s a good fault; it must set awfully easy. Sleeves are a trifle short, maybe, but not too much to show your cuff-buttons; I hate a coat that don’t do that. Yes, I should call that a very nice fit.”

Roberts, tearing off the coat, and flinging it on the bed: “You know it won’t do, Willis. And now I must give the whole thing up. You’d better hurry off and explain to Agnes why I could not come.”

Campbell: “Oh no, I can’t leave you in the lurch that way, my dear fellow. Besides it would break Agnes all up. We must do something. I think either one of those coats would go perfectly well; but if you’re so particular about your personal appearance, there’s only one thing left. We must get this drawer open. Look here. We’ll shove the ice-pick in a little farther, so’s to give the bolt the slightest possible catch, and then we’ll both pull, you on one handle, and I on the other. It won’t hurt the bureau. And besides, it’s the only chance left. I suppose these coats don’t look as if they were made for you. What do you say?”

“THE SLEEVES ARE A TRIFLE SHORT, MAYBE”

Roberts, disconsolately: “Oh, I suppose we’d better try. It can’t be much worse.” He casts a hopeless glance around the confused and tumbled room.

Campbell, absently: “Yes. Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, you know. Agnes won’t be able to express her feelings anyway when she sees this room. It looks as if a small cyclone had been joking round here; but she’ll like your devotion in doing your utmost.”

Roberts: “Do you think so? I’m not so sure. But we’ll try it.” He pushes the ice-pick in with all his strength.

Campbell: “That’s it! Now then!” They each grasp a handle of the drawer and pull. “One, two, three — pull! Once more — pull! Now the third time — pull! And out she comes!” The bolt suddenly gives and the drawer drops violently to the floor, scattering its contents in every direction, while the two men totter backward and cling to each other to keep their balance. At the same moment the voices of Mrs. Roberts and Mrs. Campbell make themselves heard without in vague cries of astonishment, question, and apprehension, mounting into a wild shriek as the drawer crashes to the floor.

III

Mrs. Roberts, without: “Oh, Edward, is it a burglar?”

Mrs. Campbell, without: “Is it a mouse, Willis?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Ring for the district telegraph — call for a policeman, Edward! Press the ratchet down three times!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Don’t kill him, Willis; don’t you dare to kill him. Take him up with the tongs and fling him out of the window!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Don’t trust him, Edward: get Willis to hold him, and press the ratchet quick!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Keep him from getting back into his hole, for then you never can tell whether he’s there or not!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Why don’t you answer, Edward? Oh, dear, perhaps he’s garroted Edward. I know he has!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Willis, if this is any of your tricks — if it’s one of your miserable practical jokes—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, I wonder what they’re keeping so quiet for! Edward, are you safe? Do you need me? If you do, just speak, and I will — go for a policeman, myself!”

Mrs. Campbell: “If you don’t answer, Willis—” Whimpering: “Oh, he just wants to make me take my life in my hand! He wouldn’t like anything better.” The two men, during this rapid colloquy, remain silently aghast, staring at each other and at the scene of confusion around them.

Mrs. Roberts: “Well, then, do it, Amy! You have so much more courage than I have, and you have no children; and if you’ll only go to the door and peep in I’ll stay here, and keep screaming as loud as ever I can. I’ll begin now—”

Roberts: “No, no; don’t call out, Agnes. It’s all right. We’ve just had a little accident with one of the bureau drawers. It’s perfectly safe; but don’t come in till we—” He dashes madly about the room, trying to put it in shape. Both ladies instantly show themselves at the door.

Mrs. Roberts, in dismay at the spectacle: “Why, what in the world has happened, Edward?”

Mrs. Campbell: “It’s something Willis has put him up to. I knew it was from the way he kept so still. Where is he?”

Campbell, coming boldly forward out of Roberts’s dressing-room, where he had previously taken refuge: “I’ve saved Roberts’s life. If it hadn’t been for me he couldn’t have moved hand or foot. He was dead asleep when I came here, and I’ve been helping him look for his dress-suit.” At these words Mrs. Roberts abandons herself to despair in one of the chairs overflowing with clothes. “Hello! What’s the matter with Agnes?”

Mrs. Roberts: “I never can look any one in the face again! To think of my doing such a thing when I’ve always prided myself on being so thoughtful, and remembering things so perfectly! And here I’ve been reproaching Edward and poor Willis the whole evening for not coming to that horrid musicale, and accusing them of all kinds of things, and all the time I knew I’d forgotten something and couldn’t think what it was! Oh, dear! I shall simply never forgive myself! But it was all because I wanted him to look so nice in it, and I got it pressed while he was away, and I folded it up in the tissue-paper myself, and took the greatest care of it; and then to have it turn out the way it has!”

Campbell: “What in the world are you talking about?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Why, Edward’s dress-suit, of course!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Of course she is. But you always have to have things put in words of one syllable for you.”

Campbell: “No irrelevant insults, Mrs. Campbell, if you please! Now, Agnes, try to collect yourself. When you had folded his dress-suit in tissue-paper so nicely, what did you do with it?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Why, I wrapped it in my white Chuddah shawl, and put it away back on the top shelf in his closet, and I forgot to tell him where it was.” Visible sensation on all sides. “And if Edward were to say now that he couldn’t forgive me, I should just simply fall down and worship him.”

Campbell: “He can forgive you, probably, but he cannot forget; we must leave that to women. And here we were, searching every nook and corner of the house, and every hole and cranny, for that dress-suit, which you’d poked away in tissue-paper and Chuddah, while you were enjoying yourself at Mrs. Miller’s.”

Mrs. Campbell: “We weren’t enjoying ourselves. It was the deadliest thing that ever was, and you were very lucky to escape.”

Campbell: “That is all very well; but the credit of that belongs entirely to a merciful Providence. What I want to know is how Agnes is going to excuse herself for hiding her husband’s clothes, so that if this musicale had been the most delightful affair of the season he would have missed it just the same.”

Mrs. Roberts, regarding her husband’s strange figure in the youthful waistcoat and trousers: “Why, Edward, dear, what in the world have you got on?”

Campbell: “She doesn’t even remember the dress-suit in which poor Roberts first met her! Well, Agnes, you’re a pretty wife and mother! Look at that man!” He takes Roberts by the elbow and turns him round. “Did you ever see devotion like that? He’s buttoned in so tight that he can’t draw a full breath to save him, but he would have gone to the party, if he had expired to slow music after he got there; only he couldn’t find the coat. You’d given that away.”

Mrs. Campbell, fishing up a garment from the tempestuous sea of clothes: “Why, here’s a dress-coat, now!”

Campbell: “Yes, that’s Merrick’s. It was rather snug for Roberts.”

Mrs. Roberts: “And here’s another!”

Campbell: “Yes, that’s Baker’s. It was rather roomy for Roberts.”

Mrs. Roberts: “But how did you get them?”

Campbell, lightly: “Oh, we sent and borrowed them.”

Roberts, less lightly: “We had to do something, Agnes. I knew you would be terribly anxious if I didn’t come—”

Mrs. Roberts, with abject contrition: “Oh, don’t speak a word, you poor suffering martyr!”

Campbell: “We should have borrowed every coat in the block if you hadn’t got back.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes, and I’ve no doubt you’d have taken a perfectly fiendish enjoyment in every failure.”

Campbell, with a wild, spluttering laugh: “Well, the disappointments certainly had their compensations. Roberts, just let them see how well you look in Merrick’s coat! Or, no: try Baker’s first; I think Baker’s is a little more swell on you, if anything.”

Bella, at the door: “Supper is served, Mrs. Roberts.”

Campbell: “Supper?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, yes! Mrs. Miller never gives you anything but ice-cream; and I thought we should all need something hot when we got back, and so I had a few — But I forgot all about the supper!”

Campbell: “I’m glad Bella didn’t. Better let Bella put Roberts’s clothes away, after this.”

Mrs. Roberts, in extreme dejection: “Yes, I think I really had, Willis. I’m not fit to be Edward’s wife, if I behave that way to him.”

Campbell: “Well, well, he must have a divorce, then; but not till after supper.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Yes, never mind now, Agnes. It’s all turned out well, as it is: Edward has been spared a fearful bore, and nobody will ever be any the wiser about your putting away his evening dress—”

Campbell: “Oh, indeed! Won’t they? When Baker and Merrick meet at the club, and exchange notes about Agnes locking up Roberts’s clothes—”

Mrs. Roberts, with horror: “Edward! You didn’t send that word to them!”

Roberts: “Why — why — I’m afraid we did, something like it, my dear. We had to explain our request, somehow—”

Mrs. Roberts, relaxing into a chair: “Then I simply never can hold up my head again.” She lets it fall in typical despair.

Mrs. Campbell, pressing the annunciator, with the energy of a lioness at bay: “I don’t believe it’s as bad as that. It simply can’t be. It would be too abominable.” As Bella appears in answer to the bell: “Did you tell the gentlemen, when you went to borrow the coats for Mr. Roberts, that Mrs. Roberts had locked up his dress-suit?”

Bella: “Why, that’s what Mr. Campbell said to say, ma’am, but I didn’t believe Mrs. Roberts would quite like it, ma’am, and so I said—” She hesitates, and Mrs. Roberts springs to her feet, with arms outstretched to her.

Mrs. Roberts: “What, Bella?”

Bella: “Why, you know, ma’am, I couldn’t help thinking how things fly about a house like this.”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, yes!”

Mrs. Campbell: “Go on!”

Bella: “I didn’t believe the gentlemen would have sent word like that themselves, if they’d thought of it; and so—”

“THAT LITTLE SUPPER”

Mrs. Roberts: “And so?”

Mrs. Campbell: “So?”

Bella: “I know you like to have me always speak the truth, and so I do, to you, ma’am, and every lady I ever lived with; but I wasn’t going to have that young waitress of Mrs. Baker’s and that nasty cook of Mrs. Merrick’s laughing at us.”

Campbell: “Well, and what did you do?”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, Bella!”

Bella: “I told Mrs. Merrick’s cook that the gentlemen were getting up some charades; and I told Mr. Baker’s second girl that the tailor hadn’t sent Mr. Roberts’s coat home.”

Mrs. Campbell: “Well, you were inspired, Bella.”

Mrs. Roberts, to Bella: “Oh, you — angel!”

Campbell: “Well, that isn’t quite what they call the father of them. Who was the father of what? But we won’t dispute about terms. The great thing now is to get at that little supper. Come on, Roberts!”

Mrs. Roberts: “Yes, Edward, take out Amy—”

Roberts, putting himself in evidence: “But don’t you see, my dear, I can’t draw a full breath now; and if I were to eat anything—”

Mrs. Roberts: “Oh, well, go and change them at once. We won’t wait for you, dear, but I’ll see to keeping it hot for you.”

Campbell, as he follows the ladies out of one door, while Roberts vanishes into his dressing-room through the other; “Yes, just slip on anything that will fit you. It’s so near morning now that we won’t insist on evening dress.”

THE END

THE REGISTER

I.

Scene: In an upper chamber of a boarding-house in Melanchthon Place, Boston, a mature, plain young lady, with every appearance of establishing herself in the room for the first time, moves about, bestowing little touches of decoration here and there, and talking with another young lady, whose voice comes through the open doorway of an inner room.

Miss Ethel Reed, from within: “What in the world are you doing, Nettie?”

Miss Henrietta Spaulding: “Oh, sticking up a household god or two. What are you doing?”

Miss Reed: “Despairing.”

Miss Spaulding: “Still?”

Miss Reed, tragically: “Still! How soon did you expect me to stop? I am here on the sofa, where I flung myself two hours ago, and I don’t think I shall ever get up. There is no reason why I ever should.”

Miss Spaulding, suggestively: “Dinner.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, dinner! Dinner, to a broken heart!”

Miss Spaulding: “I don’t believe your heart is broken.”

Miss Reed: “But I tell you it is! I ought to know when my own heart is broken, I should hope. What makes you think it isn’t?”

Miss Spaulding: “Oh, it’s happened so often!”

Miss Reed: “But this is a real case. You ought to feel my forehead. It’s as hot!”

Miss Spaulding: “You ought to get up and help me put this room to rights, and then you would feel better.”

Miss Reed: “No; I should feel worse. The idea of household gods makes me sick. Sylvan deities are what I want; the great god Pan among the cat-tails and arrow-heads in the ‘ma’sh’ at Ponkwasset; the dryads of the birch woods — there are no oaks; the nymphs that haunt the heights and hollows of the dear old mountain; the” —

Miss Spaulding: “Wha-a-at? I can’t hear a word you say.”

Miss Reed: “That’s because you keep fussing about so. Why don’t you be quiet, if you want to hear?” She lifts her voice to its highest pitch, with a pause for distinctness between the words: “I’m heart-broken for — Ponkwasset. The dryads — of the — birch woods. The nymphs — and the great — god — Pan — in the reeds — by the river. And all — that — sort of — thing!”

Miss Spaulding: “You know very well you’re not.”

Miss Reed: “I’m not? What’s the reason I’m not? Then, what am I heart-broken for?”

Miss Spaulding: “You’re not heart-broken at all. You know very well that he’ll call before we’ve been here twenty-four hours.”

Miss Reed: “Who?”

Miss Spaulding: “The great god Pan.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, how cruel you are, to mock me so! Come in here, and sympathize a little! Do, Nettie.”

Miss Spaulding: “No; you come out here and utilize a little. I’m acting for your best good, as they say at Ponkwasset.”

Miss Reed: “When they want to be disagreeable!”

Miss Spaulding: “If this room isn’t in order by the time he calls, you’ll be everlastingly disgraced.”

Miss Reed: “I’m that now. I can’t be more so — there’s that comfort. What makes you think he’ll call?”

Miss Spaulding: “Because he’s a gentleman, and will want to apologize. He behaved very rudely to you.”

Miss Reed: “No, Nettie; I behaved rudely to him. Yes! Besides, if he behaved rudely, he was no gentleman. It’s a contradiction in terms, don’t you see? But I’ll tell you what I’m going to do if he comes. I’m going to show a proper spirit for once in my life. I’m going to refuse to see him. You’ve got to see him.”

Miss Spaulding: “Nonsense!”

Miss Reed: “Why nonsense? Oh, why? Expound!”

Miss Spaulding: “Because he wasn’t rude to me, and he doesn’t want to see me. Because I’m plain, and you’re pretty.”

Miss Reed: “I’m not! You know it perfectly well. I’m hideous.”

Miss Spaulding: “Because I’m poor, and you’re a person of independent property.”

Miss Reed: “Dependent property, I should call it: just enough to be useless on! But that’s insulting to him. How can you say it’s because I have a little money?”

Miss Spaulding: “Well, then, I won’t. I take it back. I’ll say it’s because you’re young, and I’m old.”

Miss Reed: “You’re not old. You’re as young as anybody, Nettie Spaulding. And you know I’m not young; I’m twenty-seven, if I’m a day. I’m just dropping into the grave. But I can’t argue with you, miles off so, any longer.” Miss Reed appears at the open door, dragging languidly after her the shawl which she had evidently drawn round her on the sofa; her fair hair is a little disordered, and she presses it into shape with one hand as she comes forward; a lovely flush vies with a heavenly pallor in her cheeks; she looks a little pensive in the arching eyebrows, and a little humorous about the dimpled mouth. “Now I can prove that you are entirely wrong. Where — were you? — This room is rather an improvement over the one we had last winter. There is more of a view” — she goes to the window— “of the houses across the Place; and I always think the swell front gives a pretty shape to a room. I’m sorry they’ve stopped building them. Your piano goes very nicely into that little alcove. Yes, we’re quite palatial. And, on the whole, I’m glad there’s no fireplace. It’s a pleasure at times; but for the most part it’s a vanity and a vexation, getting dust and ashes over everything. Yes; after all, give me the good old-fashioned, clean, convenient register! Ugh! My feet are like ice.” She pulls an easy-chair up to the register in the corner of the room, and pushes open its valves with the toe of her slipper. As she settles herself luxuriously in the chair, and poises her feet daintily over the register: “Ah, this is something like! Henrietta Spaulding, ma’am! Did I ever tell you that you were the best friend I have in the world?”

Miss Spaulding, who continues her work of arranging the room: “Often.”

Miss Reed: “Did you ever believe it?”

Miss Spaulding: “Never.”

Miss Reed: “Why?”

Miss Spaulding, thoughtfully regarding a vase which she holds in her hand, after several times shifting it from a bracket to the corner of her piano and back: “I wish I could tell where you do look best!”

Miss Reed, leaning forward wistfully, with her hands clasped and resting on her knees: “I wish you would tell me why you don’t believe you’re the best friend I have in the world.”

Miss Spaulding, finally placing the vase on the bracket: “Because you’ve said so too often.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, that’s no reason! I can prove to you that you are. Who else but you would have taken in a homeless and friendless creature like me, and let her stay bothering round in demoralizing idleness, while you were seriously teaching the young idea how to drub the piano?”

Miss Spaulding: “Anybody who wanted a room-mate as much as I did, and could have found one willing to pay more than her share of the lodging.”

Miss Reed, thoughtfully: “Do you think so, Henrietta?”

Miss Spaulding: “I know so.”

Miss Reed: “And you’re not afraid that you wrong yourself?”

Miss Spaulding: “Not the least.”

Miss Reed: “Well, be it so — as they say in novels. I will not contradict you; I will not say you are my best friend; I will merely say that you are my only friend. Come here, Henrietta. Draw up your chair, and put your little hand in mine.”

Miss Spaulding, with severe distrust: “What do you want, Ethel Reed?”

Miss Reed: “I want — I want — to talk it over with you.”

Miss Spaulding, recoiling: “I knew it! Well, now, we’ve talked it over enough; we’ve talked it over till there’s nothing left of it.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, there’s everything left! It remains in all its original enormity. Perhaps we shall get some new light upon it.” She extends a pleading hand towards Miss Spaulding. “Come, Henrietta, my only friend, shake! — as the ‘good Indians’ say. Let your Ethel pour her hackneyed sorrows into your bosom. Such an uncomfortable image, it always seems, doesn’t it, pouring sorrows into bosoms! Come!”

Miss Spaulding, decidedly: “No, I won’t! And you needn’t try wheedling any longer. I won’t sympathize with you on that basis at all.”

Miss Reed: “What shall I try, then, if you won’t let me try wheedling?”

Miss Spaulding, going to the piano and opening it: “Try courage; try self-respect.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, dear! when I haven’t a morsel of either. Are you going to practise, you cruel maid?”

Miss Spaulding: “Of course I am. It’s half-past four, and if I don’t do it now I sha’n’t be prepared to-morrow for Miss Robins: she takes this piece.”

Miss Reed: “Well, well, perhaps it’s all for the best. If music be the food of — umph-ump! — you know what! — play on.” They both laugh, and Miss Spaulding pushes back a little from the piano, and wheels toward her friend, letting one hand rest slightly on the keys.

Miss Spaulding: “Ethel Reed, you’re the most ridiculous girl in the world.”

Miss Reed: “Correct!”

Miss Spaulding: “And I don’t believe you ever were in love, or ever will be.”

Miss Reed: “Ah, there you wrong me, Henrietta! I have been, and I shall be — lots of times.”

Miss Spaulding: “Well, what do you want to say now? You must hurry, for I can’t lose any more time.”

Miss Reed: “I will free my mind with neatness and despatch. I simply wish to go over the whole affair, from Alfred to Omaha; and you’ve got to let me talk as much slang and nonsense as I want. And then I’ll skip all the details I can. Will you?”

Miss Spaulding, with impatient patience: “Oh, I suppose so!”

Miss Reed: “That’s very sweet of you, though you don’t look it. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, do you think it was forth-putting at all, to ask him if he would give me the lessons?”

Miss Spaulding: “It depends upon why you asked him.”

Miss Reed: “I asked him from — from — Let me see; I asked him because — from — Yes, I say it boldly; I asked him from an enthusiasm for art, and a sincere wish to learn the use of oil, as he called it. Yes!”

Miss Spaulding: “Are you sure?”

Miss Reed: “Sure? Well, we will say that I am, for the sake of argument. And, having secured this basis, the question is whether I wasn’t bound to offer him pay at the end, and whether he wasn’t wrong to take my doing so in dudgeon.”

Miss Spaulding: “Yes, I think he was wrong. And the terms of his refusal were very ungentlemanly. He ought to apologize most amply and humbly.” At a certain expression in Miss Reed’s face, she adds, with severity: “Unless you’re keeping back the main point. You usually do. Are you?”

Miss Reed: “No, no. I’ve told you everything — everything!”

Miss Spaulding: “Then I say, as I said from the beginning, that he behaved very badly. It was very awkward and very painful, but you’ve really nothing to blame yourself for.”

Miss Reed, ruefully: “No-o-o!”

Miss Spaulding: “What do you mean by that sort of ‘No’?”

Miss Reed: “Nothing.”

Miss Spaulding, sternly: “Yes, you do, Ethel.”

Miss Reed: “I don’t, really. What makes you’ think I do?”

Miss Spaulding: “It sounded very dishonest.”

Miss Reed: “Did it? I didn’t mean it to.” Her friend breaks down with a laugh, while Miss Reed preserves a demure countenance.

Miss Spaulding: “What are you keeping back?”

Miss Reed: “Nothing at all — less than nothing! I never thought it was worth mentioning.”

Miss Spaulding: “Are you telling me the truth?”

Miss Reed: “I’m telling you the truth and something more. You can’t ask better than that, can you?”

Miss Spaulding, turning to her music again: “Certainly not.”

Miss Reed: in a pathetic wail: “O Henrietta! do you abandon me thus? Well, I will tell you, heartless girl! I’ve only kept it back till now because it was so extremely mortifying to my pride as an artist — as a student of oil. Will you hear me?”

Miss Spaulding, beginning to play: “No.”

Miss Reed, with burlesque wildness: “You shall!” Miss Spaulding involuntarily desists. “There was a moment — a fatal moment — when he said he thought he ought to tell me that if I found oil amusing I could go on; but that he didn’t believe I should ever learn to use it, and he couldn’t let me take lessons from him with the expectation that I should. There!”

Miss Spaulding, with awful reproach: “And you call that less than nothing? I’ve almost a mind never to speak to you again, Ethel. How could you deceive me so?”

Miss Reed: “Was it really deceiving? I shouldn’t call it so. And I needed your sympathy so much, and I knew I shouldn’t get it unless you thought I was altogether in the right.”

Miss Spaulding: “You are altogether in the wrong! And it’s you that ought to apologize to him — on your bended knees. How could you offer him money after that? I wonder at you, Ethel!”

Miss Reed: “Why — don’t you see, Nettie? — I did keep on taking the lessons of him. I did find oil amusing — or the oilist — and I kept on. Of course I had to, off there in a farmhouse full of lady boarders, and he the only gentleman short of Crawford’s. Strike, but hear me, Henrietta Spaulding! What was I to do about the half-dozen lessons I had taken before he told me I should never learn to use oil? Was I to offer to pay him for these, and not for the rest; or was I to treat the whole series as gratuitous? I used to lie awake thinking about it. I’ve got little tact, but I couldn’t find any way out of the trouble. It was a box — yes, a box of the deepest dye! And the whole affair having got to be — something else, don’t you know? — made it all the worse. And if he’d only — only — But he didn’t. Not a syllable, not a breath! And there I was. I had to offer him the money. And it’s almost killed me — the way he took my offering it, and now the way you take it! And it’s all of a piece.” Miss Reed suddenly snatches her handkerchief from her pocket, and buries her face in it.— “Oh, dear — oh, dear! Oh! — hu, hu, hu!”

Miss Spaulding, relenting: “It was awkward.”

Miss Reed: “Awkward! You seem to think that because I carry things off lightly I have no feeling.”

Miss Spaulding: “You know I don’t think that, Ethel.”

Miss Reed, pursuing her advantage: “I don’t know it from you, Nettie. I’ve tried and tried to pass it off as a joke, and to treat it as something funny; but I can tell you it’s no joke at all.”

Miss Spaulding, sympathetically: “I see, dear.”

Miss Reed: “It’s not that I care for him” —

Miss Spaulding: “Why, of course.”

Miss Reed: “For I don’t in the least. He is horrid every way: blunt, and rude, and horrid. I never cared for him. But I care for myself! He has put me in the position of having done an unkind thing — an unladylike thing — when I was only doing what I had to do. Why need he have taken it the way he did? Why couldn’t he have said politely that he couldn’t accept the money because he hadn’t earned it? Even that would have been mortifying enough. But he must go and be so violent, and rush off, and — Oh, I never could have treated anybody so!”

Miss Spaulding: “Not unless you were very fond of them.”

Miss Reed: “What?”

Miss Spaulding: “Not unless you were very fond of them.”

Miss Reed, putting away her handkerchief: “Oh, nonsense, Nettie! He never cared anything for me, or he couldn’t have acted so. But no matter for that. He has fixed everything so that it can never be got straight — never in the world. It will just have to remain a hideous mass of — of — I don’t know what; and I have simply got to on withering with despair at the point where I left off. But I don’t care! That’s one comfort.”

Miss Spaulding: “I don’t believe he’ll let you wither long, Ethel.”

Miss Reed: “He’s let me wither for twenty-four hours already! But it’s nothing to me, now, how long he lets me wither. I’m perfectly satisfied to have the affair remain as it is. I am in the right, and if he comes I shall refuse to see him.”

Miss Spaulding: “Oh, no, you won’t, Ethel!”

Miss Reed: “Yes, I shall. I shall receive him very coldly. I won’t listen to any excuse from him.”

Miss Spaulding: “Oh, yes, you will, Ethel!”

Miss Reed: “No, I shall not. If he wishes me to listen he must begin by humbling himself in the dust — yes, the dust, Nettie! I won’t take anything short of it. I insist that he shall realize that I have suffered.”

Miss Spaulding: “Perhaps he has suffered too!”

Miss Reed: “Oh, he suffered!”

Miss Spaulding: “You know that he was perfectly devoted to you.”

Miss Reed: “He never said so.”

Miss Spaulding: “Perhaps he didn’t dare.”

Miss Reed: “He dared to be very insolent to me.”

Miss Spaulding: “And you know you liked him very much.”

Miss Reed: “I won’t let you say that, Nettie Spaulding. I didn’t like him. I respected and admired him; but I didn’t like him. He will come near me; but if he does he has to begin by — by — Let me see, what shall I make him begin by doing?” She casts up her eyes for inspiration while she leans forward over the register. “Yes, I will! He has got to begin by taking that money!”

Miss Spaulding: “Ethel, you wouldn’t put that affront upon a sensitive and high-spirited man!”

Miss Reed: “Wouldn’t I? You wait and see, Miss Spaulding! He shall take the money, and he shall sign a receipt for it. I’ll draw up the receipt now, so as to have it ready, and I shall ask him to sign it the very moment he enters this door — the very instant!” She takes a portfolio from the table near her, without rising, and writes: “‘Received from Miss Ethel Reed one hundred and twenty-five dollars, in full, for twenty-five lessons in oil-painting.’ There — when Mr. Oliver Ransom has signed this little document he may begin to talk; not before!” She leans back in her chair with an air of pitiless determination.

Miss Spaulding: “But, Ethel, you don’t mean to make him take money for the lessons he gave you after he told you you couldn’t learn anything?”

Miss Reed, after a moment’s pause: “Yes, I do. This is to punish him. I don’t wish for justice now; I wish for vengeance! At first I would have compromised on the six lessons, or on none at all, if he had behaved nicely; but after what’s happened I shall insist upon paying him for every lesson, so as to make him feel that the whole thing, from first to last, was a purely business transaction on my part. Yes, a purely — BUSINESS — TRANSACTION!”

Miss Spaulding, turning to her music: “Then I’ve got nothing more to say to you, Ethel Reed.”

Miss Reed: “I don’t say but what, after he’s taken the money and signed the receipt, I’ll listen to anything else he’s got to say, very willingly.” Miss Spaulding makes no answer, but begins to play with a scientific absorption, feeling her way fitfully through the new piece, while Miss Reed, seated by the register, trifles with the book she has taken from the table.

II.

The interior of the room of Miss Spaulding and Miss Reed remains in view, while the scene discloses, on the other side of the partition wall in the same house, the bachelor apartment of Mr. Samuel Grinnidge. Mr. Grinnidge in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his pipe in his mouth, has the effect of having just come in; his friend Mr. Oliver Ransom stands at the window, staring out into the November weather.

Grinnidge: “How long have you been waiting here?”

Ransom: “Ten minutes — ten years. How should I know?”

Grinnidge: “Well, I don’t know who else should. Get back to-day?”

Ransom: “Last night.”

Grinnidge: “Well, take off your coat, and pull up to the register, and warm your poor feet.” He puts his hand out over the register. “Confound it! somebody’s got the register open in the next room! You see, one pipe comes up from the furnace and branches into a V just under the floor, and professes to heat both rooms. But it don’t. There was a fellow in there last winter who used to get all my heat. Used to go out and leave his register open, and I’d come in here just before dinner and find this place as cold as a barn. We had a running fight of it all winter. The man who got his register open first in the morning got all the heat for the day, for it never turned the other way when it started in one direction. Used to almost suffocate — warm, muggy days — maintaining my rights. Some piano-pounder in there this winter, it seems. Hear? And she hasn’t lost any time in learning the trick of the register. What kept you so late in the country?”

Ransom, after an absent-minded pause: “Grinnidge, I wish you would give me some advice.”

Grinnidge: “You can have all you want of it at the market price.”

Ransom: “I don’t mean your legal advice.”

Grinnidge: “I’m sorry. What have you been doing?”

Ransom: “I’ve been making an ass of myself.”

Grinnidge: “Wasn’t that rather superfluous?”

Ransom: “If you please, yes. But now, it you’re capable of listening to me without any further display of your cross-examination wit, I should like to tell you how it happened.”

Grinnidge: “I will do my best to veil my brilliancy. Go on.”

Ransom: “I went up to Ponkwasset early in September for the foliage.”

Grinnidge: “And staid till late in October. There must have been a reason for that. What was her name? Foliage?”

Ransom, coming up to the corner of the chimney-piece, near which his friend sits, and talking to him directly over the register: “I think you’ll have to get along without the name for the present. I’ll tell you by and by.” As Mr. Ransom pronounces these words, Miss Reed, on her side of the partition, lifts her head with a startled air, and, after a moment of vague circumspection, listens keenly. “But she was beautiful. She was a blonde, and she had the loveliest eyes — eyes, you know, that could be funny or tender, just as she chose — the kind of eyes I always liked.” Miss Reed leads forward over the register. “She had one of those faces that always leave you in doubt whether they’re laughing at you, and so keep you in wholesome subjection; but you feel certain that they’re good, and that if they did hurt you by laughing at you, they’d look sorry for you afterward. When she walked you saw what an exquisite creature she was. It always made me mad to think I couldn’t paint her walk.”

Grinnidge: “I suppose you saw a good deal of her walk.”

Ransom: “Yes; we were off in the woods and fields half the time together.” He takes a turn towards the window.

Miss Reed, suddenly shutting the register on her side: “Oh!”

Miss Spaulding, looking up from her music: “What is it, Ethel?”

Miss Reed: “Nothing, nothing; I — I — thought it was getting too warm. Go on, dear; don’t let me interrupt you.” After a moment of heroic self-denial she softly presses the register open with her foot.

Ransom, coming back to the register: “It all began in that way. I had the good fortune one day to rescue her from a — cow.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, for shame!”

Miss Spaulding, desisting from her piano: “What is the matter?”

Miss Reed, clapping the register to: “This ridiculous book! But don’t — don’t mind me, Nettie.” Breathlessly: “Go — go — on!” Miss Spaulding resumes, and again Miss Reed softly presses the register open.

Ransom, after a pause: “The cow was grazing, and had no more thought of hooking Miss” —

Miss Reed: “Oh, I didn’t suppose he would! — Go on, Nettie, go on! The hero — such a goose!”

Ransom: “I drove her away with my camp-stool, and Miss — the young lady — was as grateful as if I had rescued her from a menagerie of wild animals. I walked home with her to the farm house, and the trouble began at once.” Pantomime of indignant protest and burlesque menace on the part of Miss Reed. “There wasn’t another well woman in the house, except her friend Miss Spaulding, who was rather old and rather plain.” He takes another turn to the window.

Miss Reed: “Oh!” She shuts the register, but instantly opens it again. “Louder, Nettie.”

Miss Spaulding, in astonishment: “What?”

Miss Reed: “Did I speak? I didn’t know it. I” —

Miss Spaulding, desisting from practice: “What is that strange, hollow, rumbling, mumbling kind of noise?”

Miss Reed, softly closing the register with her foot: “I don’t hear any strange, hollow, rumbling, mumbling kind of noise. Do you hear it now?”

Miss Spaulding: “No. It was the Brighton whistle, probably.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, very likely.” As Miss Spaulding turns again to her practice Miss Reed re-opens the register and listens again. A little interval of silence ensues, while Ransom lights a cigarette.

Grinnidge: “So you sought opportunities of rescuing her from other cows?”

Ransom, returning: “That wasn’t necessary. The young lady was so impressed by my behavior, that she asked if I would give her some lessons in the use of oil.”

Grinnidge: “She thought if she knew how to paint pictures like yours she wouldn’t need any one to drive the cows away.”

Ransom: “Don’t be farcical, Grinnidge. That sort of thing will do with some victim on the witness-stand who can’t help himself. Of course I said I would, and we were off half the time together, painting the loveliest and loneliest bits around Ponkwasset. It all went on very well, till one day I felt bound in conscience to tell her that I didn’t think she would ever learn to paint, and that — if she was serious about it she’d better drop it at once, for she was wasting her time.”

Grinnidge, getting up to fill his pipe: “That was a pleasant thing to do.”

Ransom: “I told her that if it amused her, to keep on; I would be only too glad to give her all — the hints I could, but that I oughtn’t to encourage her. She seemed a good deal hurt. I fancied at the time that she thought I was tired of having her with me so much.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, did you, indeed!” To Miss Spaulding, who bends an astonished glance upon her from the piano: “The man in this book is the most conceited creature, Nettie. Play chords — something very subdued — ah!”

Miss Spaulding: “What are you talking about, Ethel?”

Ransom: “That was at night; but the next day she came up smiling, and said that if I didn’t mind she would keep on — for amusement; she wasn’t a bit discouraged.”

Miss Reed: “Oh! — Go on, Nettie; don’t let my outbursts interrupt you.”

Ransom: “I used to fancy sometimes that she was a little sweet on me.”

Miss Reed: “You wretch! — Oh, scales, Nettie! Play scales!”

Miss Spaulding: “Ethel Reed, are you crazy?”

Ransom, after a thoughtful moment: “Well, so it went on for the next seven or eight weeks.  When we weren’t sketching in the meadows, or on the mountain-side, or in the old punt on the pond, we were walking up and down the farmhouse piazza together. She used to read to me when I was at work. She had a heavenly voice, Grinnidge.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, you silly, silly thing! — Really this book makes me sick, Nettie.”

Ransom: “Well, the long and the short of it was, I was hit — hard, and I lost all courage. You know how I am, Grinnidge.”

Miss Reed, softly: “Oh, poor fellow!”

Ransom: “So I let the time go by, and at the end I hadn’t said anything.”

Miss Reed: “No, sir! You hadn’t!” Miss Spaulding gradually ceases to play, and fixes her attention wholly upon Miss Reed, who bends forward over the register with an intensely excited face.

Ransom: “Then something happened that made me glad, for twenty-four hours at least, that I hadn’t spoken. She sent me the money for twenty-five lessons. Imagine how I felt, Grinnidge! What could I suppose but that she had been quietly biding her time, and storing up her resentment for my having told her she couldn’t learn to paint, till she could pay me back with interest in one supreme insult?”

Miss Reed, in a low voice: “Oh, how could you think such a cruel, vulgar thing?” Miss Spaulding leaves the piano, and softly approaches her, where she has sunk on her knees beside the register.

Ransom: “It was tantamount to telling me that she had been amusing herself with me instead of my lessons. It remanded our whole association, which I had got to thinking so romantic, to the relation of teacher and pupil. It was a snub — a heartless, killing snub; and I couldn’t see it in any other light.” Ransom walks away to the window, and looks out.

Miss Reed, flinging herself backward from the register, and hiding her face in her hands: “Oh, it wasn’t! it wasn’t! it wasn’t! How could you think so?”

Miss Spaulding, rushing forward, and catching her friend in her arms: “What is the matter with you, Ethel Reed? What are you doing here, over the register? Are you trying to suffocate yourself? Have you taken leave of your senses?”

Grinnidge: “Our fair friend on the other side of the wall seems to be on the rampage.”

Miss Spaulding, shutting the register with a violent clash: “Ugh! how hot it is here!”

Grinnidge: “Doesn’t like your conversation, apparently.”

Miss Reed, frantically pressing forward to open the register: “Oh, don’t shut it, Nettie, dear! If you do I shall die! Do-o-n’t shut the register!”

Miss Spaulding: “Don’t shut it? Why, we’ve got all the heat of the furnace in the room now. Surely you don’t want any more?”

Miss Reed: “No, no; not any more. But — but — Oh, dear! what shall I do?” She still struggles in the embrace of her friend.

Grinnidge, remaining quietly at the register, while Ransom walks away to the window: “Well, what did you do?”

Miss Reed: “There, there! They’re commencing again! Do open it, Nettie. I will have it open!” She wrenches herself free, and dashes the register open.

Grinnidge: “Ah, she’s opened it again.”

Miss Reed, in a stage-whisper: “That’s the other one!”

Ransom, from the window: “Do? I’ll tell you what I did.”

Miss Reed: “That’s Ol — Mr. Ransom. And, oh, I can’t make out what he’s saying! He must have gone away to the other side of the room — and it’s at the most important point!”

Miss Spaulding, in an awful undertone: “Was that the hollow rumbling I heard? And have you been listening at the register to what they’ve been saying? O Ethel!”

Miss Reed: “I haven’t been listening, exactly.”

Miss Spaulding: “You have! You have been eavesdropping!”

Miss Reed: “Eavesdropping is listening through a key-hole, or around a corner. This is very different. Besides, it’s Oliver, and he’s been talking about me. Hark!” She clutches her friend’s hand, where they have crouched upon the floor together, and pulls her forward to the register. “Oh, dear, how hot it is! I wish they would cut off the heat down below.”

Grinnidge, smoking peacefully through the silence which his friend has absent-mindedly let follow upon his last words: “Well, you seem disposed to take your time about it.”

Ransom: “About what? Oh, yes! Well” —

Miss Reed: “‘Sh! Listen.”

Miss Spaulding: “I won’t listen! It’s shameful: it’s wicked! I don’t see how you can do it, Ethel!” She remains, however, kneeling near the register, and she involuntarily inclines a little more toward it.

Ransom: “ — It isn’t a thing that I care to shout from the house-tops.” He returns from the window to the chimney-piece. “I wrote the rudest kind of note, and sent back her letter and her money in it. She had said that she hoped our acquaintance was not to end with the summer, but that we might sometimes meet in Boston; and I answered that our acquaintance had ended already, and that I should be sorry to meet her anywhere again.”

Grinnidge: “Well, if you wanted to make an ass of yourself, you did it pretty completely.”

Miss Reed, whispering: “How witty he is! Those men are always so humorous with each other.”

Ransom: “Yes; I didn’t do it by halves.”

Miss Reed, whispering: “Oh, that’s funny, too!”

Grinnidge: “It didn’t occur to you that she might feel bound to pay you for the first half-dozen, and was embarrassed how to offer to pay for them alone?”

Miss Reed: “How he does go to the heart of the matter!” She presses Miss Spaulding’s hand in an ecstasy of approval.

Ransom: “Yes, it did — afterward.”

Miss Reed, in a tender murmur: “Oh, poor Oliver!”

Ransom: “And it occurred to me that she was perfectly right in the whole affair.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, how generous! how noble!”

Ransom: “I had had a thousand opportunities, and I hadn’t been man enough to tell her that I was in love with her.”

Miss Reed: “How can he say it right out so bluntly? But if it’s true” —

Ransom: “I couldn’t speak. I was afraid of putting an end to the affair — of frightening her — disgusting her.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, how little they know us, Nettie!”

Ransom: “She seemed so much above me in every way — so sensitive, so refined, so gentle, so good, so angelic!”

Miss Reed: “There! Now do you call it eavesdropping? If listeners never hear any good of themselves, what do you say to that? It proves that I haven’t been listening.”

Miss Spaulding: “‘Sh! They’re saying something else.”

Ransom: “But all that’s neither here nor there. I can see now that under the circumstances she couldn’t as a lady have acted otherwise than she did. She was forced to treat our whole acquaintance as a business matter, and I had forced her to do it.”

Miss Reed: “You had, you poor thing!”

Grinnidge: “Well, what do you intend to do about it?”

Ransom: “Well” —

Miss Reed: “‘Sh!”

Miss Spaulding: “‘Sh!”

Ransom: “ — that’s what I want to submit to you, Grinnidge. I must see her.”

Grinnidge: “Yes. I’m glad I mustn’t.”

Miss Reed, stifling a laugh on Miss Spaulding’s shoulder: “They’re actually afraid of us, Nettie!”

Ransom: “See her, and go down in the dust.”

Miss Reed: “My very words!”

Ransom: “I have been trying to think what was the very humblest pie I could eat, by way of penance; and it appears to me that I had better begin by saying that I have come to ask her for the money I refused.”

Miss Reed, enraptured: “Oh! doesn’t it seem just like — like — inspiration, Nettie?”

Miss Spaulding: “‘Sh! Be quiet, do! You’ll frighten them away!”

Grinnidge: “And then what?”

Ransom: “What then? I don’t know what then. But it appears to me that, as a gentleman, I’ve got nothing to do with the result. All that I’ve got to do is to submit to my fate, whatever it is.”

Miss Reed, breathlessly: “What princely courage! What delicate magnanimity! Oh, he needn’t have the least fear! If I could only tell him that!”

Grinnidge, after an interval of meditative smoking: “Yes, I guess that’s the best thing you can do. It will strike her fancy, if she’s an imaginative girl, and she’ll think you a fine fellow.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, the horrid thing!”

Grinnidge: “If you humble yourself to a woman at all, do it thoroughly. If you go halfway down she’ll be tempted to push you the rest of the way. If you flatten out at her feet to begin with, ten to one but she will pick you up.”

Ransom: “Yes, that was my idea.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, was it, indeed! Well!”

Ransom: “But I’ve nothing to do with her picking me up or pushing me down. All that I’ve got to do is to go and surrender myself.”

Grinnidge: “Yes. Well; I guess you can’t go too soon. I like your company; but I advise you as a friend not to lose time. Where does she live?”

Ransom: “That’s the remarkable part of it: she lives in this house.”

Miss Reed and Miss Spaulding, in subdued chorus: “Oh!”

Grinnidge, taking his pipe out of his mouth in astonishment: “No!”

Ransom: “I just came in here to give my good resolutions a rest while I was screwing my courage up to ask for her.”

Miss Reed: “Don’t you think he’s very humorous? Give his good resolutions a rest! That’s the way he always talks.”

Miss Spaulding: “‘Sh!”

Grinnidge: “You said you came for my advice.”

Ransom: “So I did. But I didn’t promise to act upon it. Well!” He goes toward the door.

Grinnidge, without troubling himself to rise: “Well, good luck to you!”

Miss Reed: “How droll they are with each other! Don’t you like to hear them talk? Oh, I could listen all day.”

Grinnidge, calling after Ransom: “You haven’t told me your duck’s name.”

Miss Reed: “Is that what they call us? Duck! Do you think it’s very respectful, Nettie? I don’t believe I like it. Or, yes, why not? It’s no harm — if I am his duck!”

Ransom, coming back: “Well, I don’t propose to go shouting it round. Her name is Miss Reed — Ethel Reed.”

Miss Reed: “How can he?”

Grinnidge: “Slender, willowy party, with a lot of blond hair that looks as if it might be indigenous? Rather pensive-looking?”

Miss Reed: “Indigenous! I should hope so!”

Ransom: “Yes. But she isn’t pensive. She’s awfully deep. It makes me shudder to think how deep that girl is. And when I think of my courage in daring to be in love with her — a stupid, straightforward idiot like me — I begin to respect myself in spite of being such an ass. Well, I’m off. If I stay any longer I shall never go.” He closes the door after him, and Miss Reed instantly springs to her feet.

Miss Reed: “Now he’ll have to go down to the parlor and send up his name, and that just gives me time to do the necessary prinking. You stay here and receive him, Nettie.”

Miss Spaulding: “Never! After what’s happened I can never look him in the face again. Oh, how low, and mean, and guilty I feel!”

Miss Reed, with surprise: “Why, how droll! Now I don’t feel the least so.”

Miss Spaulding: “Oh, it’s very different with you. You’re in love with him.”

Miss Reed: “For shame, Nettie! I’m not in love with him.”

Miss Spaulding: “And you can explain and justify it. But I never can justify it to myself, much less to him. Let me go, Ethel! I shall tell Mrs. McKnight that we must change this room instantly. And just after I’d got it so nearly in order! Go down and receive him in the parlor, Ethel. I can’t see him.”

Miss Reed: “Receive him in the parlor! Why, Nettie, dear, you’re crazy! I’m going to accept him: and how can I accept him — with all the consequences — in a public parlor? No, indeed! If you won’t meet him here for a moment, just to oblige me, you can go into the other room. Or, no — you’d be listening to every word through the key-hole, you’re so demoralized!”

Miss Spaulding: “Yes, yes, I deserve your contempt, Ethel.”

Miss Reed, laughing: “You will have to go out for a walk, you poor thing; and I’m not going to have you coming back in five or ten minutes. You have got to stay out a good hour.”

Miss Spaulding, running to get her things from the next room: “Oh, I’ll stay out till midnight!”

Miss Reed, responding to a tap at the door: “Ye-e-s! Come in! — You’re caught, Nettie.”

A maid-servant, appearing with a card: “This gentleman is asking for you in the parlor, Miss Reed.”

Miss Reed: “Oh! Ask him to come up here, please. — Nettie! Nettie!” She calls to her friend in the next room. “He’s coming right up, and if you don’t run you’re trapped.”

Miss Spaulding, re-appearing, cloaked and bonneted: “I don’t blame you, Ethel, comparatively speaking. You can say that everything is fair in love. He will like it, and laugh at it in you, because he’ll like everything you’ve done. Besides, you’ve no principles, and I have.”

Miss Reed: “Oh, I’ve lots of principles, Nettie, but I’ve no practice!”

Miss Spaulding: “No matter. There’s no excuse for me. I listened simply because I was a woman, and couldn’t help it; and, oh, what will he think of me?”

Miss Reed: “I won’t give you away; if you really feel so badly” —

Miss Spaulding: “Oh, do you think you can keep from telling him, Ethel dear? Try! And I will be your slave forever!” Steps are heard on the stairs outside. “Oh, there he comes!” She dashes out of the door, and closes it after her, a moment before the maid-servant, followed by Mr. Ransom, taps at it.

III.

Scene: Miss Reed opens the door, and receives Mr. Ransom with well-affected surprise and state, suffering him to stand awkwardly on the threshold for a moment.

She, coldly: “Oh! — Mr. Ransom!”

He, abruptly: “I’ve come” —

She: “Won’t you come in?”

He, advancing a few paces into the room: “I’ve come” —

She, indicating a chair: “Will you sit down?”

He: “I must stand for the present. I’ve come to ask you for that money, Miss Reed, which I refused yesterday, in terms that I blush to think of. I was altogether and wholly in the wrong, and I’m ready to offer any imaginable apology or reparation. I’m ready to take the money and to sign a receipt, and then to be dismissed with whatever ignominy you please. I deserve anything — everything!”

She: “The money? Excuse me; I don’t know — I’m afraid that I’m not prepared to pay you the whole sum to-day.”

He, hastily: “Oh, no matter! no matter! I don’t care for the money now. I merely wish to — to assure you that I thought you were perfectly right in offering it, and to — to” —

She: “What?”

He: “Nothing. That is — ah — ah” —

She: “It’s extremely embarrassing to have people refuse their money when it’s offered them, and then come the next day for it, when perhaps it isn’t so convenient to pay it — very embarrassing.”

He, hotly: “But I tell you I don’t want the money! I never wanted it, and wouldn’t take it on any account.”

She: “Oh! I thought you said you came to get it?”

He: “I said — I didn’t say — I meant — that is — ah — I” — He stops, open-mouthed.

She, quietly: “I could give you part of the money now.”

He: “Oh, whatever you like; it’s indifferent” —

She: “Please sit down while I write a receipt.” She places herself deliberately at the table, and opens her portfolio. “I will pay you now, Mr. Ransom, for the first six lessons you gave me — the ones before you told me that I could never learn to do anything.”

He, sinking mechanically into the chair she indicates: “Oh, just as you like!” He looks up at the ceiling in hopeless bewilderment, while she writes.

She, blotting the paper: “There! And now let me offer you a little piece of advice, Mr. Ransom, which may be useful to you in taking pupils hereafter.”

He, bursting out: “I never take pupils!”

She: “Never take pupils! I don’t understand. You took me.”

He, confusedly: “I took you — yes. You seemed to wish — you seemed — the case was peculiar — peculiar circumstances.”

She, with severity: “May I ask why the circumstances were peculiar? I saw nothing peculiar about the circumstances. It seemed to me it was a very simple matter. I told you that I had always had a great curiosity to see whether I could use oil paints, and I asked you a very plain question, whether you would let me study with you. Didn’t I?”

He: “Yes.”

She: “Was there anything wrong — anything queer about my asking you?”

He: “No, no! Not at all — not in the least.”

She: “Didn’t you wish me to take the lessons of you? If you didn’t, it wasn’t kind of you to let me.”

He: “Oh, I was perfectly willing — very glad indeed, very much so — certainly!”

She: “If it wasn’t your custom to take pupils, you ought to have told me, and I wouldn’t have forced myself upon you.”

He, desperately: “It wasn’t forcing yourself upon me. The Lord knows how humbly grateful I was. It was like a hope of heaven!”

She: “Really, Mr. Ransom, this is very strange talk. What am I to understand by it? Why should you be grateful to teach me? Why should giving me lessons be like a hope of heaven?”

He: “Oh, I will tell you!”

She: “Well?”

He, after a moment of agony: “Because to be with you” —

She: “Yes?”

He: “Because I wished to be with you. Because — those days in the woods, when you read, and I” —

She: “Painted on my pictures” —

He: “Were the happiest of my life. Because — I loved you!”

She: “Mr. Ransom!”

He: “Yes, I must tell you so. I loved you; I love you still. I shall always love you, no matter what” —

She: “You forget yourself, Mr. Ransom. Has there been anything in my manner — conduct — to justify you in using such language to me?”

He: “No — no” —

She: “Did you suppose that because I first took lessons of you from — from — an enthusiasm for art, and then continued them for — for — amusement, that I wished you to make love to me?”

He: “No, I never supposed such a thing. I’m incapable of it. I beseech you to believe that no one could have more respect — reverence” — He twirls his hat between his hands, and casts an imploring glance at her.

She: “Oh, respect — reverence! I know what they mean in the mouths of men. If you respected, if you reverenced me, could you dare to tell me, after my unguarded trust of you during the past months, that you had been all the time secretly in love with me?”

He, plucking up a little courage: “I don’t see that the three things are incompatible.”

She: “Oh, then you acknowledge that you did presume upon something you thought you saw in me to tell me that you loved me, and that you were in love with me all the time?”

He, contritely: “I have no right to suppose that you encouraged me; and yet — I can’t deny it now — I was in love with you all the time.”

She: “And you never said a word to let me believe that you had any such feeling toward me!”

He: “I — I” —

She: “You would have parted from me without a syllable to suggest it — perhaps parted from me forever?” After a pause of silent humiliation for him: “Do you call that brave or generous? Do you call it manly — supposing, as you hoped, that I had any such feeling?”

He: “No; it was cowardly, it was mean, it was unmanly. I see it now, but I will spend my life in repairing the wrong, if you will only let me.” He impetuously advances some paces toward her, and then stops, arrested by her irresponsive attitude.

She, with a light sigh, and looking down at the paper, which she has continued to hold between her hands: “There was a time — a moment — when I might have answered as you wish.”

He: “Oh! then there will be again. If you have changed once, you may change once more. Let me hope that some time — any time, dearest” —

She, quenching him with a look: “Mr. Ransom, I shall never change toward you! You confess that you had your opportunity, and that you despised it.”

He: “Oh! not despised it!”

She: “Neglected it.”

He: “Not wilfully — no. I confess that I was stupidly, vilely, pusillan — pusillan — illani” —

She: “‘Monsly” —

He: “Thanks— ‘mously unworthy of it; but I didn’t despise it; I didn’t neglect it; and if you will only let me show by a lifetime of devotion how dearly and truly I have loved you from the first moment I drove that cow away” —

She: “Mr. Ransom, I have told you that I should never change toward you. That cow was nothing when weighed in the balance against your being willing to leave a poor girl, whom you supposed interested in you, and to whom you had paid the most marked attention, without a word to show her that you cared for her. What is a cow, or a whole herd of cows, as compared with obliging a young lady to offer you money that you hadn’t earned, and then savagely flinging it back in her face? A yoke of oxen would be nothing — or a mad bull.”

He: “Oh, I acknowledge it! I confess it.”

She: “And you own that I am right in refusing to listen to you now?”

He, desolately: “Yes, yes.”

She: “It seems that you gave me lessons in order to be with me, and if possible to interest me in you; and then you were going away without a word.”

He, with a groan: “It was only because I was afraid to speak.”

She: “Oh, is that any excuse?”

He: “No; none.”

She: “A man ought always to have courage.” After a pause, in which he stands before her with bowed head: “Then there’s nothing for me but to give you this money.”

He, with sudden energy: “This is too much! I” —

She, offering him the bank-notes: “No; it is the exact sum. I counted it very carefully.”

He: “I won’t take it; I can’t! I’ll never take it!”

She, standing with the money in her outstretched hand: “I have your word as a gentleman that you will take it.”

He, gasping: “Oh, well — I will take it — I will” — He clutches the money, and rushes toward the door. “Good-evening; ah — good-by” —

She, calling after him: “The receipt, Mr. Ransom! Please sign this receipt!” She waves the paper in the air.

He: “Oh, yes, certainly! Where is it — what — which” — He rushes back to her, and seizing the receipt, feels blindly about for the pen and ink. “Where shall I sign?”

She: “Read it first.”

He: “Oh, it’s all — all right” —

She: “I insist upon your reading it. It’s a business transaction. Read it aloud.”

He, desperately: “Well, well!” He reads. “‘Received from Miss Ethel Reed, in full, for twenty-five lessons in oil-painting, one hundred and twenty-five dollars, and her hand, heart, and dearest love forever.’” He looks up at her. “Ethel!”

She, smiling: “Sign it, sign it!”

He, catching her in his arms and kissing her: “Oh, yes — here!”

She, pulling a little away from him, and laughing: “Oh, oh! I only wanted one signature! Twenty autographs are too many, unless you’ll let me trade them off, as the collectors do.”

He: “No; keep them all! I couldn’t think of letting any one else have them. One more!”

She: “No; it’s quite enough!”

She frees herself, and retires beyond the table. “This unexpected affection” —

He: “Is it unexpected — seriously?”

She: “What do you mean?”

He: “Oh, nothing!”

She: “Yes, tell me!”

He: “I hoped — I thought — perhaps — that you might have been prepared for some such demonstration on my part.”

She: “And why did you think — hope — perhaps — that, Mr. Ransom, may I ask?”

He: “If I hadn’t, how should I have dared to speak?”

She: “Dared? You were obliged to speak! Well, since it’s all over, I don’t mind saying that I did have some slight apprehensions that something in the way of a declaration might be extorted from you.”

He: “Extorted? Oh!” He makes an impassioned rush toward her.

She, keeping the table between them: “No, no.”

He: “Oh, I merely wished to ask why you chose to make me suffer so, after I had come to the point.”

She: “Ask it across the table, then.” After a moment’s reflection, “I made you suffer — I made you suffer — so that you might have a realizing sense of what you had made me suffer.”

He, enraptured by this confession: “Oh, you angel!”

She, with tender magnanimity: “No; only a woman — a poor, trusting, foolish woman!” She permits him to surround the table, with imaginable results. Then, with her head on his shoulder: “You’ll never let me regret it, will you, darling? You’ll never oblige me to punish you again, dearest, will you? Oh, it hurt me far worse to see your pain than it did you to — to — feel it!” On the other side of the partition, Mr. Grinnidge’s pipe falls from his lips, parted in slumber, and shivers to atoms on the register. “Oh!” She flies at the register with a shriek of dismay, and is about to close it. “That wretch has been listening, and has heard every word!”

He, preventing her: “What wretch? Where?”

She: “Don’t you hear him, mumbling and grumbling there?”

Grinnidge: “Well, I swear! Cash value of twenty-five dollars, and untold toil in coloring it!”

Ransom, listening with an air of mystification: “Who’s that?”

She: “Gummidge, Grimmidge — whatever you called him. Oh!” She arrests herself in consternation. “Now I have done it!”

He: “Done what?”

She: “Oh — nothing!”

He: “I don’t understand. Do you mean to say that my friend Grinnidge’s room is on the other aide of the wall, and that you can hear him talk through the register?” She preserves the silence of abject terror. He stoops over the register, and calls down it. “Grinnidge! Hallo!”

Grinnidge: “Hallo, yourself!”

Ransom, to Miss Reed: “Sounds like the ghostly squeak of the phonograph.” To Grinnidge: “What’s the trouble?”

Grinnidge: “Smashed my pipe. Dozed off and let it drop on this infernal register.”

Ransom, turning from the register with impressive deliberation: “Miss Reed, may I ask how you came to know that his name was Gummidge, or Grimmidge, or whatever I called him?”

She: “Oh, dearest, I can’t tell you! Or — yes, I had better.” Impulsively: “I will judge you by myself. I could forgive you anything!”

He, doubtfully: “Oh, could you?”

She: “Everything! I had — I had better make a clean breast of it. Yes, I had. Though I don’t like to. I — I listened!”

He: “Listened?”

She: “Through the register to — to — what — you — were saying before you — came in here.” Her head droops.

He: “Then you heard everything?”

She: “Kill me, but don’t look so at me! It was accidental at first — indeed it was; and then I recognized your voice; and then I knew you were talking about me; and I had so much at stake; and I did love you so dearly! You will forgive me, darling? It wasn’t as if I were listening with any bad motive.”

He, taking her in his arms: “Forgive you? Of course I do. But you must change this room at once, Ethel; you see you hear everything on the other side, too.”

She: “Oh, not if you whisper on this. You couldn’t hear us?” At a dubious expression of his: “You didn’t hear us? If you did, I can never forgive you!”

He: “It was accidental at first — indeed it was; and then I recognized your voice; and then I knew you were talking about me; and I had so much at stake; and I did love you so dearly!”

She: “All that has nothing whatever to do with it. How much did you hear?”

He, with exemplary meekness: “Only what you were saying before Grinnidge came in. You didn’t whisper then. I had to wait there for him while” —

She: “While you were giving your good resolutions a rest?”

He: “While I was giving my good resolutions a rest.”

She: “And that accounts for your determination to humble yourself so?”

He: “It seemed perfectly providential that I should have known just what conditions you were going to exact of me.”

She: “Oh, don’t make light of it! I can tell you it’s a very serious matter.”

He: “It was very serious for me when you didn’t meet my self-abasement as you had led me to expect you would.”

She: “Don’t make fun! I’m trying to think whether I can forgive you.”

He, with insinuation: “Don’t you believe you could think better if you put your head on my shoulder?”

She: “Nonsense! Then I should forgive you without thinking.” After a season of reflection: “No, I can’t forgive you. I never could forgive eavesdropping. It’s too low.”

He, in astonishment: “Why, you did it yourself!”

She: “But you began it. Besides, it’s very different for a man. Women are weak, poor, helpless creatures. They have to use finesse. But a man should be above it.”

He: “You said you could forgive me anything.”

She: “Ah, but I didn’t know what you’d been doing!”

He, with pensive resignation, and a feint of going: “Then I suppose it’s all over between us.”

She, relenting: “If you could think of any reason why I should forgive you” —

He: “I can’t.”

She, after consideration: “Do you suppose Mr. Grumage, or Grimidge, heard too?”

He: “No; Grinnidge is a very high-principled fellow, and wouldn’t listen; besides, he wasn’t there, you know.”

She: “Well, then, I will forgive you on these grounds.” He instantly catches her to his heart. “But these alone, remember.”

He, rapturously: “Oh, on any!”

She, tenderly: “And you’ll always be devoted? And nice? And not try to provoke me? Or neglect me? Or anything?”

He: “Always! Never!”

She: “Oh, you dear, sweet, simple old thing — how I do love you!”

Grinnidge, who has been listening attentively to every word at the register at his side: “Ransom, if you don’t want me to go stark mad, shut the register!”

Ransom, about to comply: “Oh, poor old man! I forgot it was open!”

Miss Reed, preventing him: “No! If he has been vile enough to listen at a register, let him suffer. Come, sit down here, and I’ll tell you just when I began to care for you. It was long before the cow. Do you remember that first morning after you arrived” — She drags him close to the register, so that every word may tell upon the envious Grinnidge, on whose manifestations of acute despair, a rapid curtain descends.

The Poetry Collections

Howells’ home in Kittery Point, Maine, where he spent several summers between 1902 and 1908.

POEMS

CONTENTS

THE PILOT’S STORY.

FORLORN.

PLEASURE-PAIN.

IN AUGUST.

THE EMPTY HOUSE.

BUBBLES.

LOST BELIEFS.

LOUIS LEBEAU’S CONVERSION.

CAPRICE.

SWEET CLOVER.

THE ROYAL PORTRAITS.

THE FAITHFUL OF THE GONZAGA.

THE FIRST CRICKET.

THE MULBERRIES.

BEFORE THE GATE.

CLEMENT.

BY THE SEA.

SAINT CHRISTOPHER.

ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,

THANKSGIVING.

A SPRINGTIME.

IN EARLIEST SPRING.

THE BOBOLINKS ARE SINGING.

PRELUDE.

THE MOVERS.

THROUGH THE MEADOW.

GONE.

THE SARCASTIC FAIR.

RAPTURE.

DEAD.

THE DOUBT.

THE THORN.

THE MYSTERIES.

THE BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS.

FOR ONE OF THE KILLED.

THE TWO WIVES.

BEREAVED.

THE SNOW-BIRDS.

VAGARY.

FEUERBILDER.

AVERY.

BOPEEP: A PASTORAL.

WHILE SHE SANG.

A POET.

CONVENTION.

THE POET’S FRIENDS.

NO LOVE LOST.

PHILIP — To Bertha.

FANNY — To Clara.

POSTSCRIPT.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

PORDENONE.

THE LONG DAYS.

THE PILOT’S STORY.

I.

It was a story the pilot told, with his back to his hearers, —
Keeping his hand on the wheel and his eye on the globe of the jack-staff,
Holding the boat to the shore and out of the sweep of the current,
Lightly turning aside for the heavy logs of the drift-wood,
Widely shunning the snags that made us sardonic obeisance.

II.

All the soft, damp air was full of delicate perfume
From the young willows in bloom on either bank of the river, —
Faint, delicious fragrance, trancing the indolent senses
In a luxurious dream of the river and land of the lotus.
Not yet out of the west the roses of sunset were withered;
In the deep blue above light clouds of gold and of crimson
Floated in slumber serene; and the restless river beneath them
Rushed away to the sea with a vision of rest in its bosom;
Far on the eastern shore lay dimly the swamps of the cypress;
Dimly before us the islands grew from the river’s expanses, —
Beautiful, wood-grown isles, with the gleam of the swart inundation
Seen through the swaying boughs and slender trunks of their willows;
And on the shore beside us the cotton-trees rose in the evening,
Phantom-like, yearningly, wearily, with the inscrutable sadness
Of the mute races of trees. While hoarsely the steam from her ‘scape-pipes
Shouted, then whispered a moment, then shouted again to the silence,
Trembling through all her frame with the mighty pulse of her engines,
Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi,
Bank-full, sweeping on, with tangled masses of drift-wood,
Daintily breathed about with whiffs of silvery vapor,
Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted,
And the belated blackbird paused on the way to its nestlings.

III.

It was the pilot’s story:— “They both came aboard there, at Cairo,
From a New Orleans boat, and took passage with us for Saint Louis.
She was a beautiful woman, with just enough blood from her mother
Darkening her eyes and her hair to make her race known to a trader:
You would have thought she was white. The man that was with her, — you see such, —
Weakly good-natured and kind, and weakly good-natured and vicious,
Slender of body and soul, fit neither for loving nor hating.
I was a youngster then, and only learning the river, —
Not over-fond of the wheel. I used to watch them at monte,
Down in the cabin at night, and learned to know all of the gamblers.
So when I saw this weak one staking his money against them,
Betting upon the turn of the cards, I knew what was coming:
They never left their pigeons a single feather to fly with.
Next day I saw them together, — the stranger and one of the gamblers:
Picturesque rascal he was, with long black hair and moustaches,
Black slouch hat drawn down to his eyes from his villanous forehead.
On together they moved, still earnestly talking in whispers,
On toward the forecastle, where sat the woman alone by the gangway.
Roused by the fall of feet, she turned, and, beholding her master,
Greeted him with a smile that was more like a wife’s than another’s,
Rose to meet him fondly, and then, with the dread apprehension
Always haunting the slave, fell her eye on the face of the gambler, —
Dark and lustful and fierce and full of merciless cunning.
Something was spoken so low that I could not hear what the words were;
Only the woman started, and looked from one to the other,
With imploring eyes, bewildered hands, and a tremor
All through her frame: I saw her from where I was standing, she shook so.
‘Say! is it so?’ she cried. On the weak, white lips of her master
Died a sickly smile, and he said, ‘Louise, I have sold you.’
God is my judge! May I never see such a look of despairing,
Desolate anguish, as that which the woman cast on her master,
Griping her breast with her little hands, as if he had stabbed her,
Standing in silence a space, as fixed as the Indian woman
Carved out of wood, on the pilot-house of the old Pocahontas!
Then, with a gurgling moan, like the sound in the throat of the dying,
Came back her voice, that, rising, fluttered, through wild incoherence,
Into a terrible shriek that stopped my heart while she answered: —
‘Sold me? sold me? sold — And you promised to give me my freedom! —
Promised me, for the sake of our little boy in Saint Louis!
What will you say to our boy, when he cries for me there in Saint Louis?
What will you say to our God? — Ah, you have been joking! I see it! —
No? God! God! He shall hear it, — and all of the angels in heaven, —
Even the devils in hell! — and none will believe when they hear it!
Sold me!’ — Her voice died away with a wail, and in silence
Down she sank on the deck, and covered her face with her fingers.”

IV.

In his story a moment the pilot paused, while we listened
To the salute of a boat, that, rounding the point of an island,
Flamed toward us with fires that seemed to burn from the waters, —
Stately and vast and swift, and borne on the heart of the current.
Then, with the mighty voice of a giant challenged to battle,
Rose the responsive whistle, and all the echoes of island,
Swamp-land, glade, and brake replied with a myriad clamor,
Like wild birds that are suddenly startled from slumber at midnight,
Then were at peace once more; and we heard the harsh cries of the peacocks
Perched on a tree by a cabin-door, where the white-headed settler’s
White-headed children stood to look at the boat as it passed them,
Passed them so near that we heard their happy talk and their laughter.
Softly the sunset had faded, and now on the eastern horizon
Hung, like a tear in the sky, the beautiful star of the evening.

V.

Still with his back to us standing, the pilot went on with his story: —
“All of us flocked round the woman. The children cried, and their mothers
Hugged them tight to their breasts; but the gambler said to the captain, —
‘Put me off there at the town that lies round the bend of the river.
Here, you! rise at once, and be ready now to go with me.’
Roughly he seized the woman’s arm and strove to uplift her.
She — she seemed not to heed him, but rose like one that is dreaming,
Slid from his grasp, and fleetly mounted the steps of the gangway,
Up to the hurricane-deck, in silence, without lamentation.
Straight to the stern of the boat, where the wheel was, she ran, and the people
Followed her fast till she turned and stood at bay for a moment,
Looking them in the face, and in the face of the gambler.
Not one to save her, — not one of all the compassionate people!
Not one to save her, of all the pitying angels in heaven!
Not one bolt of God to strike him dead there before her!
Wildly she waved him back, we waiting in silence and horror.
Over the swarthy face of the gambler a pallor of passion
Passed, like a gleam of lightning over the west in the night-time.
White, she stood, and mute, till he put forth his hand to secure her;
Then she turned and leaped, — in mid-air fluttered a moment, —
Down then, whirling, fell, like a broken-winged bird from a tree-top,
Down on the cruel wheel, that caught her, and hurled her, and crushed her,
And in the foaming water plunged her, and hid her forever.”

VI.

Still with his back to us all the pilot stood, but we heard him
Swallowing hard, as he pulled the bell-rope for stopping. Then, turning, —
“This is the place where it happened,” brokenly whispered the pilot.
“Somehow, I never like to go by here alone in the night-time.”
Darkly the Mississippi flowed by the town that lay in the starlight,
Cheerful with lamps. Below we could hear them reversing the engines,
And the great boat glided up to the shore like a giant exhausted.
Heavily sighed her pipes. Broad over the swamps to the eastward
Shone the full moon, and turned our far-trembling wake into silver.
All was serene and calm, but the odorous breath of the willows
Smote with a mystical sense of infinite sorrow upon us.

FORLORN.

I.

Red roses, in the slender vases burning,
  Breathed all upon the air, —
The passion and the tenderness and yearning,
  The waiting and the doubting and despair.

II.

Still with the music of her voice was haunted,
  Through all its charméd rhymes,
The open book of such a one as chanted
  The things he dreamed in old, old summer-times.

III.

The silvern chords of the piano trembled
  Still with the music wrung
From them; the silence of the room dissembled
  The closes of the songs that she had sung.

IV.

The languor of the crimson shawl’s abasement, —
  Lying without a stir
Upon the floor, — the absence at the casement,
  The solitude and hush were full of her.

V.

Without, and going from the room, and never
  Departing, did depart
Her steps; and one that came too late forever
  Felt them go heavy o’er his broken heart.

VI.

And, sitting in the house’s desolation,
  He could not bear the gloom,
The vanishing encounter and evasion
  Of things that were and were not in the room.

VII.

Through midnight streets he followed fleeting visions
  Of faces and of forms;
He heard old tendernesses and derisions
  Amid the sobs and cries of midnight storms.

VIII.

By midnight lamps, and from the darkness under
  That lamps made at their feet,
He saw sweet eyes peer out in innocent wonder,
  And sadly follow after him down the street.

IX.

The noonday crowds their restlessness obtruded
  Between him and his quest;
At unseen corners jostled and eluded,
  Against his hand her silken robes were pressed.

X.

Doors closed upon her; out of garret casements
  He knew she looked at him;
In splendid mansions and in squalid basements,
  Upon the walls he saw her shadow swim.

XI.

From rapid carriages she gleamed upon him,
  Whirling away from sight;
From all the hopelessness of search she won him
  Back to the dull and lonesome house at night.

XII.

Full early into dark the twilights saddened
  Within its closéd doors;
The echoes, with the clock’s monotony maddened,
  Leaped loud in welcome from the hollow floors;

XIII.

But gusts that blew all day with solemn laughter
  From wide-mouthed chimney-places,
And the strange noises between roof and rafter,
  The wainscot clamor, and the scampering races

XIV.

Of mice that chased each other through the chambers,
  And up and down the stair,
And rioted among the ashen embers,
  And left their frolic footprints everywhere, —

XV.

Were hushed to hear his heavy tread ascending
  The broad steps, one by one,
And toward the solitary chamber tending,
  Where the dim phantom of his hope alone

XVI.

Rose up to meet him, with his growing nearer,
  Eager for his embrace,
And moved, and melted into the white mirror,
  And stared at him with his own haggard face.

XVII.

But, turning, he was ‘ware her looks beheld him
  Out of the mirror white;
And at the window yearning arms she held him,
  Out of the vague and sombre fold of night.

XVIII.

Sometimes she stood behind him, looking over
  His shoulder as he read;
Sometimes he felt her shadowy presence hover
  Above his dreamful sleep, beside his bed;

XIX.

And rising from his sleep, her shadowy presence
  Followed his light descent
Of the long stair; her shadowy evanescence
  Through all the whispering rooms before him went.

XX.

Upon the earthy draught of cellars blowing
  His shivering lamp-flame blue,
Amid the damp and chill, he felt her flowing
  Around him from the doors he entered through.

XXI.

The spiders wove their webs upon the ceiling;
  The bat clung to the wall;
The dry leaves through the open transom stealing,
  Skated and danced adown the empty hall.

XXII.

About him closed the utter desolation,
  About him closed the gloom;
The vanishing encounter and evasion
  Of things that were and were not in the room

XXIII.

Vexed him forever; and his life forever
  Immured and desolate,
Beating itself, with desperate endeavor,
  But bruised itself, against the round of fate.

XXIV.

The roses, in their slender vases burning,
  Were quenchéd long before;
A dust was on the rhymes of love and yearning;
  The shawl was like a shroud upon the floor.

XXV.

Her music from the thrilling chords had perished;
  The stillness was not moved
With memories of cadences long cherished,
  The closes of the songs that she had loved.

XXVI.

But not the less he felt her presence never
  Out of the room depart;
Over the threshold, not the less, forever
  He felt her going on his broken heart.

PLEASURE-PAIN.

“Das Vergnügen ist Nichts als ein höchst angenehmer
Schmerz.” — HEINRICH HEINE.

I.

Full of beautiful blossoms
  Stood the tree in early May:
Came a chilly gale from the sunset,
  And blew the blossoms away;

Scattered them through the garden,
  Tossed them into the mere:
The sad tree moaned and shuddered,
  “Alas! the Fall is here.”

But all through the glowing summer
  The blossomless tree throve fair,
And the fruit waxed ripe and mellow,
  With sunny rain and air;

And when the dim October
  With golden death was crowned,
Under its heavy branches
  The tree stooped to the ground.

In youth there comes a west-wind
  Blowing our bloom away, —
A chilly breath of Autumn
  Out of the lips of May.

We bear the ripe fruit after, —
  Ah, me! for the thought of pain! —
We know the sweetness and beauty
  And the heart-bloom never again.

II.

One sails away to sea,
  One stands on the shore and cries;
The ship goes down the world, and the light
  On the sullen water dies.

The whispering shell is mute,
  And after is evil cheer:
She shall stand on the shore and cry in vain,
  Many and many a year.

But the stately, wide-winged ship
  Lies wrecked on the unknown deep;
Far under, dead in his coral bed,
  The lover lies asleep.

III.

Through the silent streets of the city,
  In the night’s unbusy noon,
Up and down in the pallor
  Of the languid summer moon,

I wander, and think of the village,
  And the house in the maple-gloom,
And the porch with the honeysuckles
  And the sweet-brier all abloom.

My soul is sick with the fragrance
  Of the dewy sweet-brier’s breath:
O darling! the house is empty,
  And lonesomer than death!

If I call, no one will answer;
  If I knock, no one will come:
The feet are at rest forever,
  And the lips are cold and dumb.

The summer moon is shining
  So wan and large and still,
And the weary dead are sleeping
  In the graveyard under the hill.

IV.

We looked at the wide, white circle
  Around the Autumn moon,
And talked of the change of weather:
  It would rain, to-morrow, or soon.

And the rain came on the morrow,
  And beat the dying leaves
From the shuddering boughs of the maples
  Into the flooded eaves.

The clouds wept out their sorrow;
  But in my heart the tears
Are bitter for want of weeping,
  In all these Autumn years.

V.

The bobolink sings in the meadow,
  The wren in the cherry-tree:
Come hither, thou little maiden,
  And sit upon my knee;

And I will tell thee a story
  I read in a book of rhyme;
I will but fain that it happened
  To me, one summer-time,

When we walked through the meadow,
  And she and I were young.
The story is old and weary
  With being said and sung.

The story is old and weary:
  Ah, child! it is known to thee.
Who was it that last night kissed thee
  Under the cherry-tree?

VI.

Like a bird of evil presage,
  To the lonely house on the shore
Came the wind with a tale of shipwreck,
  And shrieked at the bolted door,

And flapped its wings in the gables,
  And shouted the well-known names,
And buffeted the windows
  Afeard in their shuddering frames.

It was night, and it is morning, —
  The summer sun is bland,
The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
  In to the summer land.

The white-cap waves come rocking, rocking,
  In the sun so soft and bright,
And toss and play with the dead man
  Drowned in the storm last night.

VII.

I remember the burning brushwood,
  Glimmering all day long
Yellow and weak in the sunlight,
  Now leaped up red and strong,

And fired the old dead chestnut,
  That all our years had stood,
Gaunt and gray and ghostly,
  Apart from the sombre wood;

And, flushed with sudden summer,
  The leafless boughs on high
Blossomed in dreadful beauty
  Against the darkened sky.

We children sat telling stories,
  And boasting what we should be,
When we were men like our fathers,
  And watched the blazing tree,

That showered its fiery blossoms,
  Like a rain of stars, we said,
Of crimson and azure and purple.
  That night, when I lay in bed,

I could not sleep for seeing,
  Whenever I closed my eyes,
The tree in its dazzling splendor
  Against the darkened skies.

I cannot sleep for seeing,
  With closéd eyes to-night,
The tree in its dazzling splendor
  Dropping its blossoms bright;

And old, old dreams of childhood
  Come thronging my weary brain,
Dear, foolish beliefs and longings:
  I doubt, are they real again?

It is nothing, and nothing, and nothing,
  That I either think or see:
The phantoms of dead illusions
  To-night are haunting me.

IN AUGUST.

All the long August afternoon,
    The little drowsy stream
Whispers a melancholy tune,
As if it dreamed of June
    And whispered in its dream.

The thistles show beyond the brook
    Dust on their down and bloom,
And out of many a weed-grown nook
The aster-flowérs look
    With eyes of tender gloom.

The silent orchard aisles are sweet
    With smell of ripening fruit.
Through the sere grass, in shy retreat,
Flutter, at coming feet,
    The robins strange and mute.

There is no wind to stir the leaves,
    The harsh leaves overhead;
Only the querulous cricket grieves,
And shrilling locust weaves
    A song of Summer dead.

THE EMPTY HOUSE.

The wet trees hang above the walks
  Purple with damps and earthish stains,
  And strewn by moody, absent rains
With rose-leaves from the wild-grown stalks.

Unmown, in heavy, tangled swaths,
  The ripe June-grass is wanton blown;
  Snails slime the untrodden threshold-stone;
Along the sills hang drowsy moths.

Down the blank visage of the wall,
  Where many a wavering trace appears,
  Like a forgotten trace of tears,
From swollen eaves the slow drops crawl.

Where everything was wide before,
  The curious wind, that comes and goes,
  Finds all the latticed windows close,
Secret and close the bolted door.

And with the shrewd and curious wind,
  That in the archéd doorway cries,
  And at the bolted portal tries,
And harks and listens at the blind, —

Forever lurks my thought about,
  And in the ghostly middle-night
  Finds all the hidden windows bright,
And sees the guests go in and out,

And lingers till the pallid dawn,
  And feels the mystery deeper there
  In silent, gust-swept chambers, bare,
With all the midnight revel gone;

But wanders through the lonesome rooms,
  Where harsh the astonished cricket calls,
  And, from the hollows of the walls
Vanishing, start unshapen glooms;

And lingers yet, and cannot come
  Out of the drear and desolate place,
  So full of ruin’s solemn grace,
And haunted with the ghost of home.

BUBBLES.

I.

I stood on the brink in childhood,
  And watched the bubbles go
From the rock-fretted, sunny ripple
  To the smoother tide below;

And over the white creek-bottom,
  Under them every one,
Went golden stars in the water,
  All luminous with the sun.

But the bubbles broke on the surface,
  And under, the stars of gold
Broke; and the hurrying water
  Flowed onward, swift and cold.

II.

I stood on the brink in manhood,
  And it came to my weary brain,
And my heart, so dull and heavy
  After the years of pain, —

That every hollowest bubble
  Which over my life had passed
Still into its deeper current
  Some heavenly gleam had cast;

That, however I mocked it gayly,
  And guessed at its hollowness,
Still shone, with each bursting bubble,
  One star in my soul the less.

LOST BELIEFS.

One after one they left us;
  The sweet birds out of our breasts
Went flying away in the morning:
  Will they come again to their nests?

Will they come again at nightfall,
  With God’s breath in their song?
Noon is fierce with the heats of summer,
  And summer days are long!

O my Life, with thy upward liftings,
  Thy downward-striking roots,
Ripening out of thy tender blossoms
  But hard and bitter fruits! —

In thy boughs there is no shelter
  For the birds to seek again.
The desolate nest is broken
  And torn with storms and rain!

LOUIS LEBEAU’S CONVERSION.

  Yesterday, while I moved with the languid crowd on the Riva,
Musing with idle eyes on the wide lagoons and the islands,
And on the dim-seen seaward glimmering sails in the distance,
Where the azure haze, like a vision of Indian-Summer,
Haunted the dreamy sky of the soft Venetian December, —
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,
Breathing air that was full of Old World sadness and beauty
Into my thought came this story of free, wild life in Ohio,
When the land was new, and yet by the Beautiful River
Dwelt the pioneers and Indian hunters and boatmen.

  Pealed from the campanili, responding from island to island,
Bells of that ancient faith whose incense and solemn devotions
Rise from a hundred shrines in the broken heart of the city;
But in my revery heard I only the passionate voices
Of the people that sang in the virgin heart of the forest.
Autumn was in the land, and the trees were golden and crimson,
And from the luminous boughs of the over-elms and the maples
Tender and beautiful fell the light in the worshippers’ faces,
Softer than lights that stream through the saints on the windows of churches,
While the balsamy breath of the hemlocks and pines by the river
Stole on the winds through the woodland aisles like the breath of a censer.
Loud the people sang old camp-meeting anthems that quaver
Quaintly yet from lips forgetful of lips that have kissed them;
Loud they sang the songs of the Sacrifice and Atonement,
And of the end of the world, and the infinite terrors of Judgment: —
Songs of ineffable sorrow, and wailing, compassionate warning
Unto the generations that hardened their hearts to their Savior;
Songs of exultant rapture for them that confessed him and followed,
Bearing his burden and yoke, enduring and entering with him
Into the rest of his saints, and the endless reward of the blessed.
Loud the people sang; but through the sound of their singing
Broke inarticulate cries and moans and sobs from the mourners,
As the glory of God, that smote the apostle of Tarsus,
Smote them and strewed them to earth like leaves in the breath of the whirlwind.

  Hushed at last was the sound of the lamentation and singing;
But from the distant hill the throbbing drum of the pheasant
Shook with its heavy pulses the depths of the listening silence,
When from his place arose a white-haired exhorter, and faltered:
“Brethren and sisters in Jesus! the Lord hath heard our petitions,
So that the hearts of his servants are awed and melted within them, —
Even the hearts of the wicked are touched by his infinite mercy.
All my days in this vale of tears the Lord hath been with me,
He hath been good to me, he hath granted me trials and patience;
But this hour hath crowned my knowledge of him and his goodness.
Truly, but that it is well this day for me to be with you,
Now might I say to the Lord,— ‘I know thee, my God, in all fulness;
Now let thy servant depart in peace to the rest thou hast promised!’”

  Faltered and ceased. And now the wild and jubilant music
Of the singing burst from the solemn profound of the silence,
Surged in triumph, and fell, and ebbed again into silence.

  Then from the group of the preachers arose the greatest among them, —
He whose days were given in youth to the praise of the Savior,
He whose lips seemed touched, like the prophet’s of old, from the altar,
So that his words were flame, and burned to the hearts of his hearers,
Quickening the dead among them, reviving the cold and the doubting.
There he charged them pray, and rest not from prayer while a sinner
In the sound of their voices denied the Friend of the sinner:
“Pray till the night shall fall, — till the stars are faint in the morning, —
Yea, till the sun himself be faint in that glory and brightness,
Faint in the light which shall dawn in mercy for penitent sinners.”
Kneeling, he led them in prayer; and the quick and sobbing responses
Spake how their souls were moved with the might and the grace of the Spirit.
Then while the converts recounted how God had chastened and saved them, —
Children, whose golden locks yet shone with the lingering effulgence
Of the touches of Him who blessed little children forever;
Old men, whose yearning eyes were dimmed with the far-streaming brightness
Seen through the opening gates in the heart of the heavenly city, —
Stealthily through the harking woods the lengthening shadows
Chased the wild things to their nests, and the twilight died into darkness.

  Now the four great pyres that were placed there to light the encampment,
High on platforms raised above the people, were kindled.
Flaming aloof, as it were the pillar by night in the Desert
Fell their crimson light on the lifted orbs of the preachers,
Fell on the withered brows of the old men, and Israel’s mothers,
Fell on the bloom of youth, and the earnest devotion of manhood,
Fell on the anguish and hope in the tearful eyes of the mourners.
Flaming aloof, it stirred the sleep of the luminous maples
With warm summer-dreams, and faint, luxurious languor.
Near the four great pyres the people closed in a circle,
In their midst the mourners, and, praying with them, the exhorters,
And on the skirts of the circle the unrepentant and scorners, —
Ever fewer and sadder, and drawn to the place of the mourners,
One after one, by the prayers and tears of the brethren and sisters,
And by the Spirit of God, that was mightily striving within them,
Till at the last alone stood Louis Lebeau, unconverted.

  Louis Lebeau, the boatman, the trapper, the hunter, the fighter,
From the unlucky French of Gallipolis he descended,
Heir to Old World want and New World love of adventure.
Vague was the life he led, and vague and grotesque were the rumors
Through which he loomed on the people, — the hero of mythical hearsay,
Quick of hand and of heart, impatient, generous, Western,
Taking the thought of the young in secret love and in envy.
Not less the elders shook their heads and held him for outcast,
Reprobate, roving, ungodly, infidel, worse than a Papist,
With his whispered fame of lawless exploits at St. Louis,
Wild affrays and loves with the half-breeds out on the Osage,
Brawls at New Orleans, and all the towns on the rivers,
All the godless towns of the many-ruffianed rivers.
Only she who loved him the best of all, in her loving
Knew him the best of all, and other than that of the rumors.
Daily she prayed for him, with conscious and tender effusion,
That the Lord would convert him. But when her father forbade him
Unto her thought, she denied him, and likewise held him for outcast,
Turned her eyes when they met, and would not speak, though her heart broke.

  Bitter and brief his logic that reasoned from wrong unto error:
“This is their praying and singing,” he said, “that makes you reject me, —
You that were kind to me once. But I think my fathers’ religion,
With a light heart in the breast and a friendly priest to absolve one,
Better than all these conversions that only bewilder and vex me,
And that have made men so hard and women fickle and cruel.
Well, then, pray for my soul, since you would not have spoken to save me, —
Yes; for I go from these saints to my brethren and sisters, the sinners.”
Spoke and went, while her faint lips fashioned unuttered entreaties, —
Went, and came again in a year at the time of the meeting,
Haggard and wan of face, and wasted with passion and sorrow.
Dead in his eyes was the careless smile of old, and its phantom
Haunted his lips in a sneer of restless, incredulous mocking.
Day by day he came to the outer skirts of the circle,
Dwelling on her, where she knelt by the white-haired exhorter, her father,
With his hollow looks, and never moved from his silence.

  Now, where he stood alone, the last of impenitent sinners,
Weeping, old friends and comrades came to him out of the circle,
And with their tears besought him to hear what the Lord had done for them.
Ever he shook them off, not roughly, nor smiled at their transports.
Then the preachers spoke and painted the terrors of Judgment,
And of the bottomless pit, and the flames of hell everlasting.
Still and dark he stood, and neither listened nor heeded;
But when the fervent voice of the white-haired exhorter was lifted,
Fell his brows in a scowl of fierce and scornful rejection.
“Lord, let this soul be saved!” cried the fervent voice of the old man;
“For that the Shepherd rejoiceth more truly for one that hath wandered,
And hath been found again, than for all the others that strayed not.”

  Out of the midst of the people, a woman old and decrepit,
Tremulous through the light, and tremulous into the shadow,
Wavered toward him with slow, uncertain paces of palsy,
Laid her quivering hand on his arm and brokenly prayed him:
“Louis Lebeau, I closed in death the eyes of your mother.
On my breast she died, in prayer for her fatherless children,
That they might know the Lord, and follow him always, and serve him.
O, I conjure you, my son, by the name of your mother in glory,
Scorn not the grace of the Lord!” As when a summer-noon’s tempest
Breaks in one swift gush of rain, then ceases and gathers
Darker and gloomier yet on the lowering front of the heavens,
So broke his mood in tears, as he soothed her, and stilled her entreaties,
And so he turned again with his clouded looks to the people.

  Vibrated then from the hush the accents of mournfullest pity, —
His who was gifted in speech, and the glow of the fires illumined
All his pallid aspect with sudden and marvellous splendor:
“Louis Lebeau,” he spake, “I have known you and loved you from childhood;
Still, when the others blamed you, I took your part, for I knew you.
Louis Lebeau, my brother, I thought to meet you in heaven,
Hand in hand with her who is gone to heaven before us,
Brothers through her dear love! I trusted to greet you and lead you
Up from the brink of the River unto the gates of the City.
Lo! my years shall be few on the earth. O my brother,
If I should die before you had known the mercy of Jesus,
Yea, I think it would sadden the hope of glory within me!”

  Neither yet had the will of the sinner yielded an answer;
But from his lips there broke a cry of unspeakable anguish,
Wild and fierce and shrill, as if some demon within him
Bent his soul with the ultimate pangs of fiendish possession;
And with the outstretched arms of bewildered imploring toward them,
Death-white unto the people he turned his face from the darkness.

  Out of the sedge by the creek a flight of clamorous killdees
Rose from their timorous sleep with piercing and iterant challenge,
Wheeled in the starlight, and fled away into distance and silence.
White in the vale lay the tents, and beyond them glided the river,
Where the broadhorn drifted slow at the will of the current,
And where the boatman listened, and knew not how, as he listened,
Something touched through the years the old lost hopes of his childhood, —
Only his sense was filled with low, monotonous murmurs,
As of a faint-heard prayer, that was chorused with deeper responses.

  Not with the rest was lifted her voice in the fervent responses,
But in her soul she prayed to Him that heareth in secret,
Asking for light and for strength to learn his will and to do it:
“O, make me clear to know if the hope that rises within me
Be not part of a love unmeet for me here, and forbidden!
So, if it be not that, make me strong for the evil entreaty
Of the days that shall bring me question of self and reproaches,
When the unrighteous shall mock, and my brethren and sisters shall doubt me!
Make me worthy to know thy will, my Savior, and do it!”
In her pain she prayed, and at last, through her mute adoration,
Rapt from all mortal presence, and in her rapture uplifted,
Glorified she rose, and stood in the midst of the people,
Looking on all with the still, unseeing eyes of devotion, —
Vague, and tender, and sweet, as the eyes of the dead, when we dream them
Living and looking on us, but they cannot speak, and we cannot, —
Knowing only the peril that threatened his soul’s unrepentance,
Knowing only the fear and error and wrong that withheld him,
Thinking, “In doubt of me, his soul had perished forever!”
Touched with no feeble shame, but trusting her power to save him,
Through the circle she passed, and straight to the side of her lover,
Took his hand in her own, and mutely implored him an instant,
Answering, giving, forgiving, confessing, beseeching him all things;
Drew him then with her, and passed once more through the circle
Unto her place, and knelt with him there by the side of her father,
Trembling as women tremble who greatly venture and triumph, —
But in her innocent breast was the saint’s sublime exultation.

  So was Louis converted; and though the lips of the scorners
Spared not in after years the subtle taunt and derision
(What time, meeker grown, his heart held his hand from its answer),
Not the less lofty and pure her love and her faith that had saved him,
Not the less now discerned was her inspiration from heaven
By the people, that rose, and embracing and weeping together,
Poured forth their jubilant songs of victory and of thanksgiving,
Till from the embers leaped the dying flame to behold them,
And the hills of the river were filled with reverberant echoes, —
Echoes that out of the years and the distance stole to me hither,
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather;
Echoes that mingled and fainted and fell with the fluttering murmurs
In the hearts of the hushing bells, as from island to island
Swooned the sound on the wide lagoons into palpitant silence.

CAPRICE.

I.

She hung the cage at the window:
  “If he goes by,” she said,
“He will hear my robin singing,
  And when he lifts his head,
I shall be sitting here to sew,
And he will bow to me, I know.”

The robin sang a love-sweet song,
  The young man raised his head;
The maiden turned away and blushed:
  “I am a fool!” she said,
And went on broidering in silk
A pink-eyed rabbit, white as milk.

II.

The young man loitered slowly
  By the house three times that day;
She took her bird from the window:
  “He need not look this way.”
She sat at her piano long,
And sighed, and played a death-sad song.

But when the day was done, she said,
  “I wish that he would come!
Remember, Mary, if he calls
  To-night — I’m not at home.”
So when he rang, she went — the elf! —
She went and let him in herself.

III.

They sang full long together
  Their songs love-sweet, death-sad;
The robin woke from his slumber,
  And rang out, clear and glad.
“Now go!” she coldly said; “’tis late;”
And followed him — to latch the gate.

He took the rosebud from her hair,
  While, “You shall not!” she said;
He closed her hand within his own,
  And, while her tongue forbade,
Her will was darkened in the eclipse
Of blinding love upon his lips.

SWEET CLOVER.

“... My letters back to me.”

I.

I know they won the faint perfume,
  That to their faded pages clings,
  From gloves, and handkerchiefs, and things
Kept in the soft and scented gloom

Of some mysterious box — poor leaves
  Of summer, now as sere and dead
  As any leaves of summer shed
From crimson boughs when autumn grieves!

The ghost of fragrance! Yet I thrill
  All through with such delicious pain
  Of soul and sense, to breathe again
The sweet that haunted memory still.

And under these December skies,
  As bland as May’s in other climes,
  I move, and muse my idle rhymes
And subtly sentimentalize.

I hear the music that was played, —
  The songs that silence knows by heart! —
  I see sweet burlesque feigning art,
The careless grace that curved and swayed

Through dances and through breezy walks;
  I feel once more the eyes that smiled,
  And that dear presence that beguiled
The pauses of the foolish talks,

When this poor phantom of perfume
  Was the Sweet Clover’s living soul,
  And breathed from her as if it stole,
Ah, heaven! from her heart in bloom!

II.

We have not many ways with pain:
  We weep weak tears, or else we laugh;
  I doubt, not less the cup we quaff,
And tears and scorn alike are vain.

But let me live my quiet life;
  I will not vex my calm with grief,
  I only know the pang was brief,
And there an end of hope and strife.

And thou? I put the letters by:
  In years the sweetness shall not pass;
  More than the perfect blossom was
I count its lingering memory.

Alas! with Time dear Love is dead,
  And not with Fate. And who can guess
  How weary of our happiness
We might have been if we were wed?

Venice.

THE ROYAL PORTRAITS.

(AT LUDWIGSHOF.)

I.

Confronting each other the pictures stare
  Into each other’s sleepless eyes;
  And the daylight into the darkness dies,
From year to year in the palace there:
  But they watch and guard that no device
Take either one of them unaware.

Their majesties the king and the queen,
  The parents of the reigning prince:
  Both put off royalty many years since,
With life and the gifts that have always been
  Given to kings from God, to evince
His sense of the mighty over the mean.

I cannot say that I like the face
  Of the king; it is something fat and red;
  And the neck that lifts the royal head
Is thick and coarse; and a scanty grace
  Dwells in the dull blue eyes that are laid
Sullenly on the queen in her place.

He must have been a king in his day
  ‘Twere well to pleasure in work and sport:
  One of the heaven-anointed sort
Who ruled his people with iron sway,
  And knew that, through good and evil report,
God meant him to rule and them to obey.

There are many other likenesses
  Of the king in his royal palace there;
  You find him depicted everywhere, —
In his robes of state, in his hunting-dress,
  In his flowing wig, in his powdered hair, —
A king in all of them, none the less;

But most himself in this on the wall
  Over against his consort, whose
  Laces, and hoops, and high-heeled shoes
Make her the finest lady of all
  The queens or courtly dames you choose,
In the ancestral portrait hall.

A glorious blonde: a luxury
  Of luring blue and wanton gold,
  Of blanchéd rose and crimson bold,
Of lines that flow voluptuously
  In tender, languorous curves to fold
Her form in perfect symmetry.

She might have been false. Of her withered dust
  There scarcely would be enough to write
  Her guilt in now; and the dead have a right
To our lenient doubt if not to our trust:
  So if the truth cannot make her white,
Let us be as merciful as we — must.

II.

The queen died first, the queen died young,
  But the king was very old when he died,
  Rotten with license, and lust, and pride;
And the usual Virtues came and hung
  Their cypress wreaths on his tomb, and wide
Throughout his kingdom his praise was sung.

How the queen died is not certainly known,
  And faithful subjects are all forbid
  To speak of the murder which some one did
One night while she slept in the dark alone:
  History keeps the story hid,
And Fear only tells it in undertone.

Up from your startled feet aloof,
  In the famous Echo-Room, with a bound
  Leaps the echo, and round and round
Beating itself against the roof, —
  A horrible, gasping, shuddering sound, —
Dies ere its terror can utter proof

Of that it knows. A door is fast,
  And none is suffered to enter there.
  His sacred majesty could not bear
To look at it toward the last,
  As he grew very old. It opened where
The queen died young so many years past.

III.

How the queen died is not certainly known;
  But in the palace’s solitude
  A harking dread and horror brood,
And a silence, as if a mortal groan
  Had been hushed the moment before, and would
Break forth again when you were gone.

The present king has never dwelt
  In the desolate palace. From year to year
  In the wide and stately garden drear
The snows and the snowy blossoms melt
  Unheeded, and a ghastly fear
Through all the shivering leaves is felt.

By night the gathering shadows creep
  Along the dusk and hollow halls,
  And the slumber-broken palace calls
With stifled moans from its nightmare sleep;
  And then the ghostly moonlight falls
Athwart the darkness brown and deep.

At early dawn the light wind sighs,
  And through the desert garden blows
  The wasted sweetness of the rose;
At noon the feverish sunshine lies
  Sick in the walks. But at evening’s close,
When the last, long rays to the windows rise,

And with many a blood-red, wrathful streak
  Pierce through the twilight glooms that blur
  His cruel vigilance and her
Regard, they light fierce looks that wreak
  A hopeless hate that cannot stir,
A voiceless hate that cannot speak

In the awful calm of the sleepless eyes;
  And as if she saw her murderer glare
  On her face, and he the white despair
Of his victim kindle in wild surmise,
  Confronted the conscious pictures stare, —
And their secret back into darkness dies.

THE FAITHFUL OF THE GONZAGA.

I.

Federigo, the son of the Marquis,
  Downcast, through the garden goes:
He is hurt with the grace of the lily,
  And the beauty of the rose.

For what is the grace of the lily
  But her own slender grace?
And what is the rose’s beauty
  But the beauty of her face? —

Who sits beside her window
  Waiting to welcome him,
That comes so lothly toward her
  With his visage sick and dim.

“Ah! lily, I come to break thee!
  Ah! rose, a bitter rain
Of tears shall beat thy light out
  That thou never burn again!”

II.

Federigo, the son of the Marquis,
  Takes the lady by the hand:
“Thou must bid me God-speed on a journey,
  For I leave my native land.

“From Mantua to-morrow
  I go, a banished man;
Make me glad for truth and love’s sake
  Of my father’s curse and ban.

“Our quarrel has left my mother
  Like death upon the floor;
And I come from a furious presence
  I never shall enter more.

“I would not wed the woman
  He had chosen for my bride,
For my heart had been before him,
  With his statecraft and his pride.

“I swore to him by my princehood
  In my love I would be free;
And I swear to thee by my manhood,
  I love no one but thee.

“Let the Duke of Bavaria marry
  His daughter to whom he will:
There where my love was given
  My word shall be faithful still.

“There are six true hearts will follow
  My truth wherever I go,
And thou equal truth wilt keep me
  In welfare and in woe.”

The maiden answered him nothing
  Of herself, but his words again
Came back through her lips like an echo
  From an abyss of pain;

And vacantly repeating
  “In welfare and in woe,”
Like a dream from the heart of fever
  From her arms she felt him go.

III.

Out of Mantua’s gate at daybreak
  Seven comrades wander forth
On a path that leads at their humor,
  East, west, or south, or north.

The prince’s laugh rings lightly,
  “What road shall we take from home?”
And they answer, “We never shall lose it
  If we take the road to Rome.”

And with many a jest and banter
  The comrades keep their way,
Journeying out of the twilight
  Forward into the day,

When they are aware beside them
  Goes a pretty minstrel lad,
With a shy and downward aspect,
  That is neither sad nor glad.

Over his slender shoulder,
  His mandolin was slung,
And around its chords the treasure
  Of his golden tresses hung.

Spoke one of the seven companions,
  “Little minstrel, whither away?” —
“With seven true-hearted comrades
  On their journey, if I may.”

Spoke one of the seven companions,
  “If our way be hard and long?” —
“I will lighten it with my music
  And shorten it with my song.”

Spoke one of the seven companions,
  “But what are the songs thou know’st?” —
“O, I know many a ditty,
  But this I sing the most:

“How once was an humble maiden
  Beloved of a great lord’s son,
That for her sake and his troth’s sake
  Was banished and undone.

“And forth of his father’s city
  He went at break of day,
And the maiden softly followed
  Behind him on the way

“In the figure of a minstrel,
  And prayed him of his love,
‘Let me go with thee and serve thee
  Wherever thou may’st rove.

“‘For if thou goest in exile
  I rest banished at home,
And where thou wanderest with thee
  My fears in anguish roam,

“‘Besetting thy path with perils,
  Making thee hungry and cold,
Filling thy heart with trouble
  And heaviness untold.

“‘But let me go beside thee,
  And banishment shall be
Honor, and riches, and country,
  And home to thee and me!’”

Down falls the minstrel-maiden
  Before the Marquis’ son,
And the six true-hearted comrades
  Bow round them every one.

Federigo, the son of the Marquis,
  From its scabbard draws his sword:
“Now swear by the honor and fealty
  Ye bear your friend and lord,

“That whenever, and wherever,
  As long as ye have life,
Ye will honor and serve this lady
  As ye would your prince’s wife!”

IV.

Over the broad expanses
  Of garlanded Lombardy,
Where the gentle vines are swinging
  In the orchards from tree to tree;

Through Padua from Verona,
  From the sculptured gothic town,
Carved from ruin upon ruin,
  And ancienter than renown;

Through Padua from Verona
  To fair Venice, where she stands
With her feet on subject waters,
  Lady of many lands;

From Venice by sea to Ancona;
  From Ancona to the west;
Climbing many a gardened hillside
  And many a castled crest;

Through valleys dim with the twilight
  Of their gray olive trees;
Over plains that swim with harvests
  Like golden noonday seas;

Whence the lofty campanili
  Like the masts of ships arise,
And like a fleet at anchor
  Under them, the village lies;

To Florence beside her Arno,
  In her many-marbled pride,
Crowned with infamy and glory
  By the sons she has denied;

To pitiless Pisa, where never
  Since the anguish of Ugolin
The moon in the Tower of Famine
  Fate so dread as his hath seen;

Out through the gates of Pisa
  To Livorno on her bay,
To Genoa and to Naples
  The comrades hold their way,

Past the Guelph in his town beleaguered,
  Past the fortressed Ghibelline,
Through lands that reek with slaughter,
  Treason, and shame, and sin;

By desert, by sea, by city,
  High hill-cope and temple-dome,
Through pestilence, hunger, and horror,
  Upon the road to Rome;

While every land behind them
  Forgets them as they go,
And in Mantua they are remembered
  As is the last year’s snow;

But the Marchioness goes to her chamber
  Day after day to weep, —
For the changeless heart of a mother
  The love of a son must keep.

The Marchioness weeps in her chamber
  Over tidings that come to her
Of the exiles she seeks, by letter
  And by lips of messenger,

Broken hints of their sojourn and absence,
  Comfortless, vague, and slight, —
Like feathers wafted backwards
  From passage birds in flight.

The tale of a drunken sailor,
  In whose ship they went to sea;
A traveller’s evening story
  At a village hostelry,

Of certain comrades sent him
  By our Lady, of her grace,
To save his life from robbers
  In a lonely desert place;

Word from the monks of a convent
  Of gentle comrades that lay
One stormy night at their convent,
  And passed with the storm at day;

The long parley of a peasant
  That sold them wine and food,
The gossip of a shepherd
  That guided them through a wood;

A boatman’s talk at the ferry
  Of a river where they crossed,
And as if they had sunk in the current
  All trace of them was lost;

And so is an end of tidings
  But never an end of tears,
Of secret and friendless sorrow
  Through blank and silent years.

V.

To the Marchioness in her chamber
  Sends word a messenger,
Newly come from the land of Naples,
  Praying for speech with her.

The messenger stands before her,
  A minstrel slender and wan:
“In a village of my country
  Lies a Mantuan gentleman,

“Sick of a smouldering fever,
  Of sorrow and poverty;
And no one in all that country
  Knows his title or degree.

“But six true Mantuan peasants,
  Or nobles, as some men say,
Watch by the sick man’s bedside,
  And toil for him, night and day,

“Hewing, digging, reaping, sowing,
  Bearing burdens, and far and nigh
Begging for him on the highway
  Of the strangers that pass by;

“And they look whenever you meet them
  Like broken-hearted men,
And I heard that the sick man would not
  If he could, be well again;

“For they say that he for love’s sake
  Was gladly banishèd,
But she for whom he was banished
  Is worse to him, now, than dead, —

“A recreant to his sorrow,
  A traitress to his woe.”
From her place the Marchioness rises,
  The minstrel turns to go.

But fast by the hand she takes him, —
  His hand in her clasp is cold, —
“If gold may be thy guerdon
  Thou shalt not lack for gold;

“And if the love of a mother
  Can bless thee for that thou hast done,
Thou shalt stay and be his brother,
  Thou shalt stay and be my son.”

“Nay, my lady,” answered the minstrel,
  And his face is deadly pale,
“Nay, this must not be, sweet lady,
  But let my words prevail.

“Let me go now from your presence,
  And I will come again,
When you stand with your son beside you,
  And be your servant then.”

VI.

At the feet of the Marquis Gonzaga
  Kneels his lady on the floor;
“Lord, grant me before I ask it
  The thing that I implore.”

“So it be not of that ingrate.” —
  “Nay, lord, it is of him.”
‘Neath the stormy brows of the Marquis
  His eyes are tender and dim.

“He lies sick of a fever in Naples,
  Near unto death, as they tell,
In his need and pain forsaken
  By the wanton he loved so well.

“Now send for him and forgive him,
  If ever thou loved’st me,
Now send for him and forgive him
  As God shall be good to thee.”

“Well so, — if he turn in repentance
  And bow himself to my will;
That the high-born lady I chose him
  May be my daughter still.”

VII.

In Mantua there is feasting
  For the Marquis’ grace to his son;
In Mantua there is rejoicing
  For the prince come back to his own.

The pomp of a wedding procession
  Pauses under the pillared porch,
With silken rustle and whisper,
  Before the door of the church.

In the midst, Federigo the bridegroom
  Stands with his high-born bride;
The six true-hearted comrades
  Are three on either side.

The bridegroom is gray as his father,
  Where they stand face to face,
And the six true-hearted comrades
  Are like old men in their place.

The Marquis takes the comrades
  And kisses them one by one:
“That ye were fast and faithful
  And better than I to my son,

“Ye shall be called forever,
  In the sign that ye were so true,
The Faithful of the Gonzaga,
  And your sons after you.”

VIII.

To the Marchioness comes a courtier:
  “I am prayed to bring you word
That the minstrel keeps his promise
  Who brought you news of my lord;

“And he waits without the circle
  To kiss your highness’ hand;
And he asks no gold for guerdon,
  But before he leaves the land

“He craves of your love once proffered
  That you suffer him for reward,
In this crowning hour of his glory,
  To look on your son, my lord.”

Through the silken press of the courtiers
  The minstrel faltered in.
His claspèd hands were bloodless,
  His face was white and thin;

And he bent his knee to the lady,
  But of her love and grace
To her heart she raised him and kissed him
  Upon his gentle face.

Turned to her son the bridegroom,
  Turned to his high-born wife,
“I give you here for your brother
  Who gave back my son to life.

“For this youth brought me news from Naples
  How thou layest sick and poor,
By true comrades kept, and forsaken
  By a false paramour.

“Wherefore I charge you love him
  For a brother that is my son.”
The comrades turned to the bridegroom
  In silence every one.

But the bridegroom looked on the minstrel
  With a visage blank and changed,
As his whom the sight of a spectre
  From his reason hath estranged;

And the smiling courtiers near them
  On a sudden were still as death;
And, subtly-stricken, the people
  Hearkened and held their breath

With an awe uncomprehended
  For an unseen agony: —
Who is this that lies a-dying,
  With her head on the prince’s knee?

A light of anguish and wonder
  Is in the prince’s eye,
“O, speak, sweet saint, and forgive me,
  Or I cannot let thee die!

“For now I see thy hardness
  Was softer than mortal ruth,
And thy heavenly guile was whiter,
  My saint, than martyr’s truth.”

She speaks not and she moves not,
  But a blessed brightness lies
On her lips in their silent rapture
  And her tender closèd eyes.

Federigo, the son of the Marquis,
  He rises from his knee:
“Aye, you have been good, my father,
  To them that were good to me.

“You have given them honors and titles,
  But here lies one unknown —
Ah, God reward her in heaven
  With the peace he gives his own!”

THE FIRST CRICKET.

Ah me! is it then true that the year has waxed unto waning,
  And that so soon must remain nothing but lapse and decay, —
Earliest cricket, that out of the midsummer midnight complaining,
  All the faint summer in me takest with subtle dismay?

Though thou bringest no dream of frost to the flowers that slumber,
  Though no tree for its leaves, doomed of thy voice, maketh moan,
Yet with th’ unconscious earth’s boded evil my soul thou dost cumber,
  And in the year’s lost youth makest me still lose my own.

Answerest thou, that when nights of December are blackest and bleakest,
  And when the fervid grate feigns me a May in my room,
And by my hearthstone gay, as now sad in my garden, thou creakest, —
  Thou wilt again give me all, — dew and fragrance and bloom?

Nay, little poet! full many a cricket I have that is willing,
  If I but take him down out of his place on my shelf,
Me blither lays to sing than the blithest known to thy shrilling,
  Full of the rapture of life, May, morn, hope, and — himself:

Leaving me only the sadder; for never one of my singers
  Lures back the bee to his feast, calls back the bird to his tree.
Hast thou no art can make me believe, while the summer yet lingers,
  Better than bloom that has been red leaf and sere that must be?

THE MULBERRIES.

I.

On the Rialto Bridge we stand;
  The street ebbs under and makes no sound;
But, with bargains shrieked on every hand,
  The noisy market rings around.

“Mulberries, fine mulberries, here!”
  A tuneful voice, — and light, light measure;
Though I hardly should count these mulberries dear,
  If I paid three times the price for my pleasure.

Brown hands splashed with mulberry blood,
  The basket wreathed with mulberry leaves
Hiding the berries beneath them; — good!
  Let us take whatever the young rogue gives.

For you know, old friend, I haven’t eaten
  A mulberry since the ignorant joy
Of anything sweet in the mouth could sweeten
  All this bitter world for a boy.

II.

O, I mind the tree in the meadow stood
  By the road near the hill: when I clomb aloof
On its branches, this side of the girdled wood,
  I could see the top of our cabin roof.

And, looking westward, could sweep the shores
  Of the river where we used to swim
Under the ghostly sycamores,
  Haunting the waters smooth and dim;

And eastward athwart the pasture-lot
  And over the milk-white buckwheat field
I could see the stately elm, where I shot
  The first black squirrel I ever killed.

And southward over the bottom-land
  I could see the mellow breadths of farm
From the river-shores to the hills expand,
  Clasped in the curving river’s arm.

In the fields we set our guileless snares
  For rabbits and pigeons and wary quails,
Content with the vaguest feathers and hairs
  From doubtful wings and vanished tails.

And in the blue summer afternoon
  We used to sit in the mulberry-tree:
The breaths of wind that remembered June
  Shook the leaves and glittering berries free;

And while we watched the wagons go
  Across the river, along the road,
To the mill above, or the mill below,
  With horses that stooped to the heavy load,

We told old stories and made new plans,
  And felt our hearts gladden within us again,
For we did not dream that this life of a man’s
  Could ever be what we know as men.

We sat so still that the woodpeckers came
  And pillaged the berries overhead;
From his log the chipmonk, waxen tame,
  Peered, and listened to what we said.

III.

One of us long ago was carried
  To his grave on the hill above the tree;
One is a farmer there, and married;
  One has wandered over the sea.

And, if you ask me, I hardly know
  Whether I’d be the dead or the clown, —
The clod above or the clay below, —
  Or this listless dust by fortune blown

To alien lands. For, however it is,
  So little we keep with us in life:
At best we win only victories,
  Not peace, not peace, O friend, in this strife.

But if I could turn from the long defeat
  Of the little successes once more, and be
A boy, with the whole wide world at my feet,
  Under the shade of the mulberry-tree, —

From the shame of the squandered chances, the sleep
  Of the will that cannot itself awaken,
From the promise the future can never keep,
  From the fitful purposes vague and shaken, —

Then, while the grasshopper sang out shrill
  In the grass beneath the blanching thistle,
And the afternoon air, with a tender thrill,
  Harked to the quail’s complaining whistle, —

Ah me! should I paint the morrows again
  In quite the colors so faint to-day,
And with the imperial mulberry’s stain
  Re-purple life’s doublet of hodden-gray?

Know again the losses of disillusion?
  For the sake of the hope, have the old deceit? —
In spite of the question’s bitter infusion,
  Don’t you find these mulberries over-sweet?

All our atoms are changed, they say;
  And the taste is so different since then;
We live, but a world has passed away
  With the years that perished to make us men.

BEFORE THE GATE.

They gave the whole long day to idle laughter,
  To fitful song and jest,
To moods of soberness as idle, after,
  And silences, as idle too as the rest.

But when at last upon their way returning,
  Taciturn, late, and loath,
Through the broad meadow in the sunset burning,
  They reached the gate, one fine spell hindered them both.

Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish
  Such as but women know
That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish,
  And what they would, would rather they would not so;

Till he said, — man-like nothing comprehending
  Of all the wondrous guile
That women won win themselves with, and bending
  Eyes of relentless asking on her the while, —

“Ah, if beyond this gate the path united
  Our steps as far as death,
And I might open it!—” His voice, affrighted
  At its own daring, faltered under his breath.

Then she — whom both his faith and fear enchanted
  Far beyond words to tell,
Feeling her woman’s finest wit had wanted
  The art he had that knew to blunder so well —

Shyly drew near, a little step, and mocking,
  “Shall we not be too late
For tea?” she said. “I’m quite worn out with walking:
  Yes, thanks, your arm. And will you — open the gate?”

CLEMENT.

I.

That time of year, you know, when the summer, beginning to sadden,
Full-mooned and silver-misted, glides from the heart of September,
Mourned by disconsolate crickets, and iterant grasshoppers, crying
All the still nights long, from the ripened abundance of gardens;
Then, ere the boughs of the maples are mantled with earliest autumn,
But the wind of autumn breathes from the orchards at nightfall,
Full of winy perfume and mystical yearning and languor;
And in the noonday woods you hear the foraging squirrels,
And the long, crashing fall of the half-eaten nut from the tree-top;
When the robins are mute, and the yellow-birds, haunting the thistles,
Cheep, and twitter, and flit through the dusty lanes and the loppings,
When the pheasant booms from your stealthy foot in the cornfield,
And the wild-pigeons feed, few and shy, in the scoke-berry bushes;
When the weary land lies hushed, like a seer in a vision,
And your life seems but the dream of a dream which you cannot remember, —
Broken, bewildering, vague, an echo that answers to nothing!
That time of year, you know. They stood by the gate in the meadow,
Fronting the sinking sun, and the level stream of its splendor
Crimsoned the meadow-slope and woodland with tenderest sunset,
Made her beautiful face like the luminous face of an angel,
Smote through the painéd gloom of his heart like a hurt to the sense, there.
Languidly clung about by the half-fallen shawl, and with folded
Hands, that held a few sad asters: “I sigh for this idyl
Lived at last to an end; and, looking on to my prose-life,”
With a smile, she said, and a subtle derision of manner,
“Better and better I seem, when I recollect all that has happened
Since I came here in June: the walks we have taken together
Through these darling meadows, and dear, old, desolate woodlands;
All our afternoon readings, and all our strolls through the moonlit
Village, — so sweetly asleep, one scarcely could credit the scandal,
Heartache, and trouble, and spite, that were hushed for the night, in its silence.
Yes, I am better. I think I could even be civil to him for his kindness,
Letting me come here without him.... But open the gate, Cousin Clement;
Seems to me it grows chill, and I think it is healthier in-doors.
 — No, then I you need not speak, for I know well enough what is coming:
Bitter taunts for the past, and discouraging views of the future?
Tragedy, Cousin Clement, or comedy, — just as you like it; —
Only not here alone, but somewhere that people can see you.
Then I’ll take part in the play, and appear the remorseful young person
Full of divine regrets at not having smothered a genius
Under the feathers and silks of a foolish, extravagant woman.
O you selfish boy! what was it, just now, about anguish?
Bills would be your talk, Cousin Clement, if you were my husband.”
  Then, with her summer-night glory of eyes low-bending upon him,
Dark’ning his thoughts as the pondered stars bewilder and darken,
Tenderly, wistfully drooping toward him, she faltered in whisper, —
All her mocking face transfigured, — with mournful effusion:
“Clement, do not think it is you alone that remember, —
Do not think it is you alone that have suffered. Ambition,
Fame, and your art, — you have all these things to console you.
I — what have I in this world? Since my child is dead — a bereavement.”
  Sad hung her eyes on his, and he felt all the anger within him
Broken, and melting in tears. But he shrank from her touch while he answered
(Awkwardly, being a man, and awkwardly, being a lover),
“Yes, you know how it is done. You have cleverly fooled me beforetime,
With a dainty scorn, and then an imploring forgiveness!
Yes, you might play it, I think, — that rôle of remorseful young person,
That, or the old man’s darling, or anything else you attempted.
Even your earnest is so much like acting I fear a betrayal,
Trusting your speech. You say that you have not forgotten. I grant you —
Not, indeed, for your word — that is light — but I wish to believe you.
Well, I say, since you have not forgotten, forget now, forever!
I — I have lived and loved, and you have lived and have married.
Only receive this bud to remember me when we have parted, —
Thorns and splendor, no sweetness, rose of the love that I cherished!”
There he tore from its stalk the imperial flower of the thistle,
Tore, and gave to her, who took it with mocking obeisance,
Twined it in her hair, and said, with her subtle derision:
“You are a wiser man than I thought you could ever be, Clement, —
Sensible, almost. So! I’ll try to forget and remember.”
Lightly she took his arm, but on through the lane to the farm-house,
Mutely together they moved through the lonesome, odorous twilight.

II.

  High on the farm-house hearth, the first autumn fire was kindled;
Scintillant hickory bark and dryest limbs of the beech-tree
Burned, where all summer long the boughs of asparagus flourished.
Wild were the children with mirth, and grouping and clinging together,
Danced with the dancing flame, and lithely swayed with its humor;
Ran to the window-panes, and peering forth into the darkness,
Saw there another room, flame-lit, and with frolicking children.
(Ah! by such phantom hearths, I think that we sit with our first-loves!)
Sometimes they tossed on the floor, and sometimes they hid in the corners,
Shouting and laughing aloud, and never resting a moment,
In the rude delight, the boisterous gladness of childhood, —
Cruel as summer sun and singing-birds to the heartsick.
  Clement sat in his chair unmoved in the midst of the hubbub,
Rapt, with unseeing eyes; and unafraid in their gambols,
By his tawny beard the children caught him, and clambered
Over his knees, and waged a mimic warfare across them,
Made him their battle-ground, and won and lost kingdoms upon him.
Airily to and fro, and out of one room to another
Passed his cousin, and busied herself with things of the household,
Nonchalant, debonair, blithe, with bewitching housewifely importance,
Laying the cloth for the supper, and bringing the meal from the kitchen;
Fairer than ever she seemed, and more than ever she mocked him,
Coming behind his chair, and clasping her fingers together
Over his eyes in a girlish caprice, and crying, “Who is it?”
Vexed his despair with a vision of wife and of home and of children,
Calling his sister’s children around her, and stilling their clamor,
Making believe they were hers. And Clement sat moody and silent,
Blank to the wistful gaze of his mother bent on his visage
With the tender pain, the pitiful, helpless devotion
Of the mother that looks on the face of her son in his trouble,
Grown beyond her consoling, and knows that she cannot befriend him.
Then his cousin laughed, and in idleness talked with the children;
Sometimes she turned to him, and then when the thistle was falling,
Caught it and twined it again in her hair, and called it her keepsake,
Smiled, and made him ashamed of his petulant gift there, before them.
  But, when the night was grown old and the two by the hearthstone together
Sat alone in the flickering red of the flame, and the cricket
Carked to the stillness, and ever, with sullen throbs of the pendule
Sighed the time-worn clock for the death of the days that were perished, —
It was her whim to be sad, and she brought him the book they were reading.
“Read it to-night,” she said, “that I may not seem to be going.”
Said, and mutely reproached him with all the pain she had wrought him.
From her hand he took the volume and read, and she listened, —
All his voice molten in secret tears, and ebbing and flowing,
Now with a faltering breath, and now with impassioned abandon, —
Read from the book of a poet the rhyme of the fatally sundered,
Fatally met too late, and their love was their guilt and their anguish,
But in the night they rose, and fled away into the darkness,
Glad of all dangers and shames, and even of death, for their love’s sake.
  Then, when his voice brake hollowly, falling and fading to silence,
Thrilled in the silence they sat, and durst not behold one another,
Feeling that wild temptation, that tender, ineffable yearning,
Drawing them heart to heart. One blind, mad moment of passion
With their fate they strove; but out of the pang of the conflict,
Through such costly triumph as wins a waste and a famine,
Victors they came, and Love retrieved the error of loving.
  So, foreknowing the years, and sharply discerning the future,
Guessing the riddle of life, and accepting the cruel solution, —
Side by side they sat, as far as the stars are asunder.
Carked the cricket no more, but while the audible silence
Shrilled in their ears, she, suddenly rising and dragging the thistle
Out of her clinging hair, laughed mockingly, casting it from her:
“Perish the thorns and splendor, — the bloom and the sweetness are perished.
Dreary, respectable calm, polite despair, and one’s Duty, —
These and the world, for dead Love! — The end of these modern romances!
Better than yonder rhyme?... Pleasant dreams and good night, Cousin Clement.”

BY THE SEA.

I walked with her I love by the sea,
  The deep came up with its chanting waves,
Making a music so great and free
  That the will and the faith, which were dead in me,
        Awoke and rose from their graves.

Chanting, and with a regal sweep
  Of their ‘broidered garments up and down
The strand, came the mighty waves of the deep,
  Dragging the wave-worn drift from its sleep
        Along the sea-sands bare and brown.

“O my soul, make the song of the sea!” I cried.
  “How it comes, with its stately tread,
And its dreadful voice, and the splendid pride
  Of its regal garments flowing wide
        Over the land!” to my soul I said.

My soul was still; the deep went down.
  “What hast thou, my soul,” I cried,
“In thy song?” “The sea-sands bare and brown,
  With broken shells and sea-weed strown,
        And stranded drift,” my soul replied.

SAINT CHRISTOPHER.

In the narrow Venetian street,
  On the wall above the garden gate
(Within, the breath of the rose is sweet,
  And the nightingale sings there, soon and late),

Stands Saint Christopher, carven in stone,
  With the little child in his huge caress,
And the arms of the baby Jesus thrown
  About his gigantic tenderness;

And over the wall a wandering growth
  Of darkest and greenest ivy clings,
And climbs around them, and holds them both
  In its netted clasp of knots and rings,

Clothing the saint from foot to beard
  In glittering leaves that whisper and dance
To the child, on his mighty arm upreared,
  With a lusty summer exuberance.

To the child on his arm the faithful saint
  Looks up with a broad and tranquil joy;
His brows and his heavy beard aslant
  Under the dimpled chin of the boy,

Who plays with the world upon his palm,
  And bends his smiling looks divine
On the face of the giant mild and calm,
  And the glittering frolic of the vine.

He smiles on either with equal grace, —
  On the simple ivy’s unconscious life,
And the soul in the giant’s lifted face,
  Strong from the peril of the strife:

For both are his own, — the innocence
  That climbs from the heart of earth to heaven,
And the virtue that gently rises thence
  Through trial sent and victory given.

Grow, ivy, up to his countenance,
  But it cannot smile on my life as on thine;
Look, Saint, with thy trustful, fearless glance,
  Where I dare not lift these eyes of mine.

Venice, 1863.

ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,

Who died, “with the first song of the birds,” Wednesday morning,
April 27, 1864.

I.

In the early morning when I wake
At the hour that is sacred for his sake,

And hear the happy birds of spring
In the garden under my window sing,

And through my window the daybreak blows
The sweetness of the lily and rose,

A dormant anguish wakes with day,
And my heart is smitten with strange dismay:

Distance wider than thine, O sea,
Darkens between my brother and me!

II.

A scrap of print, a few brief lines,
The fatal word that swims and shines

On my tears, with a meaning new and dread,
Make faltering reason know him dead,

And I would that my heart might feel it too,
And unto its own regret be true;

For this is the hardest of all to bear,
That his life was so generous and fair,

So full of love, so full of hope,
Broadening out with ample scope,

And so far from death, that his dying seems
The idle agony of dreams

To my heart, that feels him living yet, —
And I forget, and I forget.

III.

He was almost grown a man when he passed
Away, but when I kissed him last

He was still a child, and I had crept
Up to the little room where he slept,

And thought to kiss him good-by in his sleep;
But he was awake to make me weep

With terrible homesickness, before
My wayward feet had passed the door.

Round about me clung his embrace,
And he pressed against my face his face,

As if some prescience whispered him then
That it never, never should be again.

IV.

Out of far-off days of boyhood dim,
When he was a babe and I played with him,

I remember his looks and all his ways;
And how he grew through childhood’s grace,

To the hopes, and strifes, and sports, and joys,
And innocent vanity of boys;

I hear his whistle at the door,
His careless step upon the floor,

His song, his jest, his laughter yet, —
And I forget, and I forget.

V.

Somewhere in the graveyard that I know,
Where the strawberries under the chestnuts grow,

They have laid him; and his sisters set
On his grave the flowers their tears have wet;

And above his grave, while I write, the song
Of the matin robin leaps sweet and strong

From the leafy dark of the chestnut-tree;
And many a murmuring honey-bee

On the strawberry blossoms in the grass
Stoops by his grave and will not pass;

And in the little hollow beneath
The slope of the silent field of death,

The cow-bells tinkle soft and sweet,
And the cattle go by with homeward feet,

And the squirrel barks from the sheltering limb,
At the harmless noises not meant for him;

And Nature, unto her loving heart
Has taken our darling’s mortal part,

Tenderly, that he may be,
Like the song of the robin in the tree,

The blossoms, the grass, the reeds by the shore,
A part of Summer evermore.

VI.

I write, and the words with my tears are wet, —
But I forget, O, I forget!

Teach me, Thou that sendest this pain,
To know and feel my loss and gain!

Let me not falter in belief
On his death, for that is sorest grief:

O, lift me above this wearing strife,
Till I discern his deathless life,

Shining beyond this misty shore,
A part of Heaven evermore.

Venice, Wednesday Morning, at Dawn, May 16, 1864.

THANKSGIVING.

I.

Lord, for the erring thought
Not into evil wrought:
Lord, for the wicked will
Betrayed and baffled still:
For the heart from itself kept,
Our thanksgiving accept.

II.

For ignorant hopes that were
Broken to our blind prayer:
For pain, death, sorrow, sent
Unto our chastisement:
For all loss of seeming good,
Quicken our gratitude.

A SPRINGTIME.

One knows the spring is coming:
  There are birds; the fields are green;
There is balm in the sunlight and moonlight,
  And dew in the twilights between.

But over there is a silence,
  A rapture great and dumb,
That day when the doubt is ended,
  And at last the spring is come.

Behold the wonder, O silence!
  Strange as if wrought in a night, —
The waited and lingering glory,
  The world-old, fresh delight!

O blossoms that hang like winter,
  Drifted upon the trees,
O birds that sing in the blossoms,
  O blossom-haunting bees, —

O green, green leaves on the branches,
  O shadowy dark below,
O cool of the aisles of orchards,
  Woods that the wild flowers know, —

O air of gold and perfume,
  Wind, breathing sweet and sun,
O sky of perfect azure —
  Day, Heaven and Earth in one! —

Let me draw near thy secret,
  And in thy deep heart see
How fared, in doubt and dreaming,
  The spring that is come in me.

For my soul is held in silence,
  A rapture, great and dumb, —
For the mystery that lingered,
  The glory that is come!

1861.

IN EARLIEST SPRING.

Tossing his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
  Lion-like, March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and thwart all the hollows and angles
  Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.

But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow
  Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift
Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow,
  Deep in the oak’s chill core, under the gathering drift.

Nay, to earth’s life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire
  (How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes, —
Rapture of life ineffable, perfect, — as if in the brier,
  Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.

THE BOBOLINKS ARE SINGING.

Out of its fragrant heart of bloom, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
Out of its fragrant heart of bloom
The apple-tree whispers to the room,
“Why art thou but a nest of gloom,
  While the bobolinks are singing?”

The two wan ghosts of the chamber there, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
The two wan ghosts of the chamber there
Cease in the breath of the honeyed air,
Sweep from the room and leave it bare,
  While the bobolinks are singing.

Then with a breath so chill and slow, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
Then with a breath so chill and slow,
It freezes the blossoms into snow,
The haunted room makes answer low,
  While the bobolinks are singing.

“I know that in the meadow-land, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
I know that in the meadow-land
The sorrowful, slender elm-trees stand,
And the brook goes by on the other hand,
  While the bobolinks are singing.

“But ever I see, in the brawling stream, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
But ever I see in the brawling stream
A maiden drowned and floating dim,
Under the water, like a dream,
  While the bobolinks are singing.

“Buried, she lies in the meadow-land! —
  The bobolinks are singing!
Buried, she lies in the meadow-land,
Under the sorrowful elms where they stand.
Wind, blow over her soft and bland,
  While the bobolinks are singing.

“O blow, but stir not the ghastly thing, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
O blow, but stir not the ghastly thing
The farmer saw so heavily swing
From the elm, one merry morn of spring,
  While the bobolinks were singing.

“O blow, and blow away the bloom, —
  The bobolinks are singing!
O blow, and blow away the bloom
That sickens me in my heart of gloom,
That sweetly sickens the haunted room,
  While the bobolinks are singing!”

PRELUDE.

(TO AN EARLY BOOK OF VERSE.)

In March the earliest bluebird came
  And caroled from the orchard-tree
  His little tremulous songs to me,
And called upon the summer’s name,

And made old summers in my heart
  All sweet with flower and sun again;
  So that I said, “O, not in vain
Shall be thy lay of little art,

“Though never summer sun may glow,
  Nor summer flower for thee may bloom;
  Though winter turn in sudden gloom,
And drowse the stirring spring with snow”;

And learned to trust, if I should call
  Upon the sacred name of Song,
  Though chill through March I languish long,
And never feel the May at all,

Yet may I touch, in some who hear,
  The hearts, wherein old songs asleep
  Wait but the feeblest touch to leap
In music sweet as summer air!

I sing in March brief bluebird lays,
  And hope a May, and do not know:
  May be, the heaven is full of snow, —
May be, there open summer days.

THE MOVERS.

SKETCH.

Parting was over at last, and all the good-bys had been spoken.
Up the long hillside road the white-tented wagon moved slowly,
Bearing the mother and children, while onward before them the father
Trudged with his gun on his arm, and the faithful house-dog beside him,
Grave and sedate, as if knowing the sorrowful thoughts of his master.

  April was in her prime, and the day in its dewy awaking:
Like a great flower, afar on the crest of the eastern woodland,
Goldenly bloomed the sun, and over the beautiful valley,
Dim with its dew and shadow, and bright with its dream of a river,
Looked to the western hills, and shone on the humble procession,
Paining with splendor the children’s eyes, and the heart of the mother.

  Beauty, and fragrance, and song filled the air like a palpable presence.
Sweet was the smell of the dewy leaves and the flowers in the wild-wood,
Fair the long reaches of sun and shade in the aisles of the forest.
Glad of the spring, and of love, and of morning, the wild birds were singing:
Jays to each other called harshly, then mellowly fluted together;
Sang the oriole songs as golden and gay as his plumage;
Pensively piped the querulous quails their greetings unfrequent,
While, on the meadow elm, the meadow lark gushed forth in music,
Rapt, exultant, and shaken with the great joy of his singing;
Over the river, loud-chattering, aloft in the air, the kingfisher
Hung, ere he dropped, like a bolt, in the water beneath him;
Gossiping, out of the bank flew myriad twittering swallows;
And in the boughs of the sycamores quarrelled and clamored the blackbirds.

  Never for these things a moment halted the Movers, but onward,
Up the long hillside road the white-tented wagon moved slowly.
Till, on the summit, that overlooked all the beautiful valley,
Trembling and spent, the horses came to a standstill unbidden;
Then from the wagon the mother in silence got down with her children,
Came, and stood by the father, and rested her hand on his shoulder.

  Long together they gazed on the beautiful valley before them;
Looked on the well-known fields that stretched away to the woodlands,
Where, in the dark lines of green, showed the milk-white crest of the dogwood,
Snow of wild-plums in bloom, and crimson tints of the red-bud;
Looked on the pasture-fields where the cattle were lazily grazing, —
Soft, and sweet, and thin came the faint, far notes of the cow-bells, —
Looked on the oft-trodden lanes, with their elder and blackberry borders,
Looked on the orchard, a bloomy sea, with its billows of blossoms.
Fair was the scene, yet suddenly strange and all unfamiliar,
As are the faces of friends, when the word of farewell has been spoken.
Long together they gazed; then at last on the little log-cabin —
Home for so many years, now home no longer forever —
Rested their tearless eyes in the silent rapture of anguish.
Up on the morning air no column of smoke from the chimney
Wavering, silver and azure, rose, fading and brightening ever;
Shut was the door where yesterday morning the children were playing;
Lit with a gleam of the sun the window stared up at them blindly.
Cold was the hearthstone now, and the place was forsaken and empty.
Empty? Ah no! but haunted by thronging and tenderest fancies,
Sad recollections of all that had been, of sorrow or gladness.

  Still they sat there in the glow of the wide red fire in the winter,
Still they sat there by the door in the cool of the still summer evening,
Still the mother seemed to be singing her babe there to slumber,
Still the father beheld her weep o’er the child that was dying,
Still the place was haunted by all the Past’s sorrow and gladness!

  Neither of them might speak for the thoughts that came crowding their hearts so,
Till, in their ignorant trouble aloud the children lamented;
Then was the spell of silence dissolved, and the father and mother
Burst into tears and embraced, and turned their dim eyes to the Westward.

Ohio, 1859.

THROUGH THE MEADOW.

The summer sun was soft and bland,
As they went through the meadow land.

The little wind that hardly shook
The silver of the sleeping brook
Blew the gold hair about her eyes, —
A mystery of mysteries!
So he must often pause, and stoop,
And all the wanton ringlets loop
Behind her dainty ear — emprise
Of slow event and many sighs.

Across the stream was scarce a step, —
And yet she feared to try the leap;
And he, to still her sweet alarm,
Must lift her over on his arm.

She could not keep the narrow way,
For still the little feet would stray,
And ever must he bend t’ undo
The tangled grasses from her shoe, —
From dainty rosebud lips in pout,
Must kiss the perfect flowér out!

Ah! little coquette! Fair deceit!
Some things are bitter that were sweet.

GONE.

Is it the shrewd October wind
  Brings the tears into her eyes?
Does it blow so strong that she must fetch
  Her breath in sudden sighs?

The sound of his horse’s feet grows faint,
  The Rider has passed from sight;
The day dies out of the crimson west,
  And coldly falls the night.

She presses her tremulous fingers tight
  Against her closéd eyes,
And on the lonesome threshold there,
  She cowers down and cries.

THE SARCASTIC FAIR.

Her mouth is a honey-blossom,
  No doubt, as the poet sings;
But within her lips, the petals,
  Lurks a cruel bee, that stings.

RAPTURE.

In my rhyme I fable anguish,
  Feigning that my love is dead,
Playing at a game of sadness,
  Singing hope forever fled, —

Trailing the slow robes of mourning,
  Grieving with the player’s art,
With the languid palms of sorrow
  Folded on a dancing heart.

I must mix my love with death-dust,
  Lest the draught should make me mad;
I must make believe at sorrow,
  Lest I perish, over-glad.

DEAD.

I.

Something lies in the room
  Over against my own;
The windows are lit with a ghastly bloom
  Of candles, burning alone, —
Untrimmed, and all aflare
In the ghastly silence there!

II.

People go by the door,
  Tiptoe, holding their breath,
And hush the talk that they held before,
  Lest they should waken Death,
That is awake all night
There in the candlelight!

III.

The cat upon the stairs
  Watches with flamy eye
For the sleepy one who shall unawares
  Let her go stealing by.
She softly, softly purrs,
And claws at the banisters.

IV.

The bird from out its dream
  Breaks with a sudden song,
That stabs the sense like a sudden scream;
  The hound the whole night long
Howls to the moonless sky,
So far, and starry, and high.

THE DOUBT.

She sits beside the low window,
  In the pleasant evening-time,
With her face turned to the sunset,
  Reading a book of rhyme.

And the wine-light of the sunset,
  Stolen into the dainty nook,
Where she sits in her sacred beauty,
  Lies crimson on the book.

O beautiful eyes so tender,
  Brown eyes so tender and dear,
Did you leave your reading a moment
  Just now, as I passed near?

Maybe, ’tis the sunset flushes
  Her features, so lily-pale;
Maybe, ’tis the lover’s passion,
  She reads of in the tale.

O darling, and darling, and darling,
  If I dared to trust my thought;
If I dared to believe what I must not,
  Believe what no one ought, —

We would read together the poem
  Of the Love that never died,
The passionate, world-old story
  Come true, and glorified.

THE THORN.

“Every Rose, you sang, has its Thorn,
  But this has none, I know.”
She clasped my rival’s Rose
  Over her breast of snow.

I bowed to hide my pain,
  With a man’s unskilful art;
I moved my lips, and could not say
  The Thorn was in my heart!

THE MYSTERIES.

Once on my mother’s breast, a child, I crept,
  Holding my breath;
There, safe and sad, lay shuddering, and wept
  At the dark mystery of Death.

Weary and weak, and worn with all unrest,
  Spent with the strife, —
O mother, let me weep upon thy breast
  At the sad mystery of Life!

THE BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS.

“The day had been one of dense mists and rains, and much of General Hooker’s battle was fought above the clouds, on the top of Lookout Mountain.” — GENERAL MEIG’S Report of the Battle before Chattanooga.

Where the dews and the rains of heaven have their fountain,
  Like its thunder and its lightning our brave burst on the foe,
Up above the clouds on Freedom’s Lookout Mountain
  Raining life-blood like water on the valleys down below.
      O, green be the laurels that grow,
      O sweet be the wild-buds that blow,
  In the dells of the mountain where the brave are lying low.

Light of our hope and crown of our story,
  Bright as sunlight, pure as starlight shall their deeds of daring glow,
While the day and the night out of heaven shed their glory,
  On Freedom’s Lookout Mountain whence they routed Freedom’s foe.
      O, soft be the gales when they go
      Through the pines on the summit where they blow,
  Chanting solemn music for the souls that passed below.

FOR ONE OF THE KILLED.

There on the field of battle
  Lies the young warrior dead:
Who shall speak in the soldier’s honor?
  How shall his praise be said?

Cannon, there in the battle,
  Thundered the soldier’s praise,
Hark! how the volumed volleys echo
  Down through the far-off days!

Tears for the grief of a father,
  For a mother’s anguish, tears;
But for him that died in his country’s battle,
  Glory and endless years.

THE TWO WIVES.

(TO COLONEL J. G. M., IN MEMORY OF THE EVENT BEFORE ATLANTA.)

I.

The colonel rode by his picket-line
  In the pleasant morning sun,
That glanced from him far off to shine
  On the crouching rebel picket’s gun.

II.

From his command the captain strode
  Out with a grave salute,
And talked with the colonel as he rode; —
  The picket levelled his piece to shoot.

III.

The colonel rode and the captain walked, —
  The arm of the picket tired;
Their faces almost touched as they talked,
  And, swerved from his aim, the picket fired.

IV.

The captain fell at the horse’s feet,
  Wounded and hurt to death,
Calling upon a name that was sweet
  As God is good, with his dying breath.

V.

And the colonel that leaped from his horse and knelt
  To close the eyes so dim,
A high remorse for God’s mercy felt,
  Knowing the shot was meant for him.

VI.

And he whispered, prayer-like, under his breath,
  The name of his own young wife:
For Love, that had made his friend’s peace with Death,
  Alone could make his with life.

BEREAVED.

The passionate humming-birds cling
  To the honeysuckles’ hearts;
In and out at the open window
  The twittering house-wren darts,
              And the sun is bright.

June is young, and warm, and sweet;
  The morning is gay and new;
Glimmers yet the grass of the door-yard,
  Pearl-gray with fragrant dew,
              And the sun is bright.

From the mill, upon the stream,
  A busy murmur swells;
On to the pasture go the cattle,
  Lowing, with tinkling bells,
              And the sun is bright.

She gathers his playthings up,
  And dreamily puts them by;
Children are playing in the meadow,
  She hears their joyous cry,
              And the sun is bright.

She sits and clasps her brow,
  And looks with swollen eyes
On the landscape that reels and dances, —
  To herself she softly cries,
              And the sun is bright.

THE SNOW-BIRDS.

The lonesome graveyard lieth,
  A deep with silent waves
Of night-long snow, all white, and billowed
  Over the hidden graves.

The snow-birds come in the morning,
  Flocking and fluttering low,
And light on the graveyard brambles,
  And twitter there in the snow.

The Singer, old and weary,
  Looks out from his narrow room:
“Ah, me! but my thoughts are snow-birds,
  Haunting a graveyard gloom,

“Where all the Past is buried
  And dead, these many years,
Under the drifted whiteness
  Of frozen falls of tears.

“Poor birds! that know not summer,
  Nor sun, nor flowèrs fair, —
Only the graveyard brambles,
  And graves, and winter air!”

VAGARY.

Up and down the dusty street,
I hurry with my burning feet;
Against my face the wind-waves beat,
Fierce from the city-sea of heat.
    Deep in my heart the vision is,
    Of meadow grass and meadow trees
    Blown silver in the summer breeze,
    And ripe, red, hillside strawberries.

My sense the city tumult fills, —
The tumult that about me reels
Of strokes and cries, and feet and wheels.
    Deep in my dream I list, and, hark!
    From out the maple’s leafy dark,
    The fluting of the meadow lark!

About the throngéd street I go:
There is no face here that I know;
Of all that pass me to and fro
There is no face here that I know.
    Deep in my soul’s most sacred place,
    With a sweet pain I look and trace
    The features of a tender face,
    All lit with love and girlish grace.

Some spell is on me, for I seem
A memory of the past, a dream
Of happiness remembered dim,
    Unto myself that walk the street
    Scathed with the city’s noontide heat,
    With puzzled brain and burning feet.

FEUERBILDER.

The children sit by the fireside
  With their little faces in bloom;
And behind, the lily-pale mother,
  Looking out of the gloom,

Flushes in cheek and forehead
  With a light and sudden start;
But the father sits there silent,
  From the firelight apart.

“Now, what dost thou see in the embers?
  Tell it to me, my child,”
Whispers the lily-pale mother
  To her daughter sweet and mild.

“O, I see a sky and a moon
  In the coals and ashes there,
And under, two are walking
  In a garden of flowers so fair.

“A lady gay, and her lover,
  Talking with low-voiced words,
Not to waken the dreaming flowers
  And the sleepy little birds.”

Back in the gloom the mother
  Shrinks with a sudden sigh.
“Now, what dost thou see in the embers?”
  Cries the father to the boy.

“O, I see a wedding-procession
  Go in at the church’s door, —
Ladies in silk and knights in steel, —
  A hundred of them, and more.

“The bride’s face is as white as a lily,
  And the groom’s head is white as snow;
And without, with plumes and tapers,
  A funeral paces slow.”

Loudly then laughed the father,
  And shouted again for cheer,
And called to the drowsy housemaid
  To fetch him a pipe and beer.

AVERY.

[NIAGARA, 1853.]

I.

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,
Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,
Out of the hell of the rapids as ‘twere a lost soul’s cries, —
Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,
Showing, where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung?
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.

II.

Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,
Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound;
And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon,
As it had been in some blessed trance, and now it is noon.
Hurry, now with the raft! But O, build it strong and stanch,
And to the lines and treacherous rocks look well as you launch!
Over the foamy tops of the waves, and their foam-sprent sides,
Over the hidden reefs, and through the embattled tides,
Onward rushes the raft, with many a lurch and leap, —
Lord! if it strike him loose from the hold he scarce can keep!

No! through all peril unharmed, it reaches him harmless at last,
And to its proven strength he lashes his weakness fast.
Now, for the shore! But steady, steady, my men, and slow;
Taut, now, the quivering lines; now slack; and so, let her go!
Thronging the shores around stand the pitying multitude;
Wan as his own are their looks, and a nightmare seems to brood
Heavy upon them, and heavy the silence hangs on all,
Save for the rapids’ plunge, and the thunder of the fall.
But on a sudden thrills from the people still and pale,
Chorussing his unheard despair, a desperate wail:
Caught on a lurking point of rock it sways and swings,
Sport of the pitiless waters, the raft to which he clings.

III.

All the long afternoon it idly swings and sways;
And on the shore the crowd lifts up its hands and prays:
Lifts to heaven and wrings the hands so helpless to save,
Prays for the mercy of God on him whom the rock and the wave
Battle for, fettered betwixt them, and who, amidst their strife,
Struggles to help his helpers, and fights so hard for his life, —
Tugging at rope and at reef, while men weep and women swoon.
Priceless second by second, so wastes the afternoon,
And it is sunset now; and another boat and the last
Down to him from the bridge through the rapids has safely passed.

IV.

Wild through the crowd comes flying a man that nothing can stay,
Maddening against the gate that is locked athwart his way.
“No! we keep the bridge for them that can help him. You,
Tell us, who are you?” “His brother!” “God help you both! Pass through.”
Wild, with wide arms of imploring he calls aloud to him,
Unto the face of his brother, scarce seen in the distance dim;
But in the roar of the rapids his fluttering words are lost
As in a wind of autumn the leaves of autumn are tossed.
And from the bridge he sees his brother sever the rope
Holding him to the raft, and rise secure in his hope;
Sees all as in a dream the terrible pageantry, —
Populous shores, the woods, the sky, the birds flying free;
Sees, then, the form, — that, spent with effort and fasting and fear,
Flings itself feebly and fails of the boat that is lying so near, —
Caught in the long-baffled clutch of the rapids, and rolled and hurled
Headlong on to the cataract’s brink, and out of the world.

BOPEEP: A PASTORAL.

“O, to what uses shall we put
  The wildweed flower that simply blows?
And is there any moral shut
  Within the bosom of the rose?”

TENNYSON.

I.

She lies upon the soft, enamoured grass,
  I’ the wooing shelter of an apple-tree,
And at her feet the trancéd brook is glass,
  And in the blossoms over her the bee
  Hangs charméd of his sordid industry;
For love of her the light wind will not pass.

II.

Her golden hair, blown over her red lips,
  That seem two rose-leaves softly breathed apart,
Athwart her rounded throat like sunshine slips;
  Her small hand, resting on her beating heart,
  The crook that tells her peaceful shepherd-art
Scarce keeps with light and tremulous finger-tips.

III.

She is as fair as any shepherdess
  That ever was in mask or Christmas scene:
Bright silver spangles hath she on her dress,
  And of her red-heeled shoes appears the sheen;
  And she hath ribbons of such blue or green
As best suits pastoral people’s comeliness.

IV.

She sleeps, and it is in the month of May,
  And the whole land is full of the delight
Of music and sweet scents; and all the day
  The sun is gold; the moon is pearl all night,
  And like a paradise the world is bright,
And like a young girl’s hopes the world is gay.

V.

So waned the hours; and while her beauteous sleep
  Was blest with many a happy dream of Love,
Untended still, her silly, vagrant sheep
  Afar from that young shepherdess did rove,
  Along the vales and through the gossip grove,
O’er daisied meads and up the thymy steep.

VI.

Then (for it happens oft when harm is nigh,
  Our dreams grow haggard till at last we wake)
She thought that from the little runnel by
  There crept upon a sudden forth a snake,
  And stung her hand, and fled into the brake;
Whereat she sprang up with a bitter cry,

VII.

And wildly over all that place did look,
  And could not spy her ingrate, wanton flock, —
Not there among tall grasses by the brook,
  Not there behind the mossy-bearded rock;
  And pitiless Echo answered with a mock
When she did sorrow that she was forsook.

VIII.

Alas! the scattered sheep might not be found,
  And long and loud that gentle maid did weep,
Till in her blurréd sight the hills went round,
  And, circling far, field, wood, and stream did sweep;
  And on the ground the miserable Bopeep
Fell and forgot her troubles in a swound.

IX.

When she awoke, the sun long time had set,
  And all the land was sleeping in the moon,
And all the flowers with dim, sad dews were wet,
  As they had wept to see her in that swoon.
  It was about the night’s low-breathing noon;
Only the larger stars were waking yet.

X.

Bopeep, the fair and hapless shepherdess,
  Rose from her swooning in a sore dismay,
And tried to smooth her damp and rumpled dress,
  That showed in truth a grievous disarray;
  Then where the brook the wan moon’s mirror lay,
She laved her eyes, and curled each golden tress.

XI.

And looking to her ribbons, if they were
  As ribbons of a shepherdess should be,
She took the hat that she was wont to wear
  (Bedecked it was with ribbons flying free
  As ever man in opera might see),
And set it on her curls of yellow hair.

XII.

“And I will go and seek my sheep,” she said,
  “Through every distant land until I die;
But when they bring me hither, cold and dead,
  Let me beneath these apple-blossoms lie,
  With this dear, faithful, lovely runnel nigh,
Here, where my cru — cru — cruel sheep have fed.”

XIII.

Thus sorrow and despair make bold Bopeep,
  And forth she springs, and hurries on her way:
Across the lurking rivulet she can leap,
  No sombre forest shall her quest delay,
  No crooked vale her eager steps bewray:
What dreadeth she that seeketh her lost sheep?

XIV.

By many a pond, where timorous water-birds,
  With clattering cries and throbbing wings, arose,
By many a pasture, where the soft-eyed herds
  Looked shadow-huge in their unmoved repose,
  Long through the lonesome night that sad one goes
And fills the solitude with wailing words;

XV.

So that the little field-mouse dreams of harm,
  Snuggled away from harm beneath the weeds;
The violet, sleeping on the clover’s arm,
  Wakes, and is cold with thoughts of dreadful deeds;
  The pensive people of the water-reeds
Hark with a mute and dolorous alarm.

XVI.

And the fond hearts of all the turtle-doves
  Are broken in compassion of her woe,
And every tender little bird that loves
  Feels in his breast a sympathetic throe;
  And flowers are sad wherever she may go,
And hoarse with sighs the waterfalls and groves.

XVII.

The pale moon droppeth low; star after star
  Grows faint and slumbers in the gray of dawn;
And still she lingers not, but hurries far,
  Till in a dreary wilderness withdrawn
  Through tangled woods she lorn and lost moves on,
Where griffins dire and dreadful dragons are.

XVIII.

Her ribbons all are dripping with the dew,
  Her red-heeled shoes are torn, and stained with mire,
Her tender arms the angry sharpness rue
  Of many a scraggy thorn and envious brier;
  And poor Bopeep, with no sweet pity nigh her,
Wrings her small hands, and knows not what to do.

XIX.

And on that crude and rugged ground she sinks,
  And soon her seeking had been ended there,
But through the trees a fearful glimmer shrinks,
  And of a hermit’s dwelling she is ‘ware:
  At the dull pane a dull-eyed taper blinks,
Drowsed with long vigils and the morning air.

XX.

Thither she trembling moves, and at the door
  Falls down, and cannot either speak or stir:
The hermit comes, — with no white beard before,
  Nor coat of skins, nor cap of shaggy fur:
  It was a comely youth that lifted her,
And to his hearth, and to his breakfast, bore.

XXI.

Arrayed he was in princeliest attire,
  And of as goodly presence sooth was he
As any little maiden might admire,
  Or any king-beholding cat might see
  “My poor Bopeep,” he sigheth piteously,
“Rest here, and warm you at a hermit’s fire.”

XXII.

She looked so beautiful, there, mute and white,
  He kissed her on the lips and on the eyes
(The most a prince could do in such a plight);
  But chiefly gazed on her in still surprise,
  And when he saw her lily eyelids rise,
For him the whole world had no fairer sight.

XXIII.

“Rude is my fare: a bit of venison steak,
  A dish of honey and a glass of wine,
With clean white bread, is the poor feast I make.
  Be served, I pray: I think this flask is fine,”
  He said. “Hard is this hermit life of mine:
This day I will its weariness forsake.”

XXIV.

And then he told her how it chanced that he,
  King Cole’s son, in that forest held his court,
And the sole reason that there seemed to be
  Was, he was being hermit there for sport;
  But he confessed the life was not his forte,
And therewith both laughed out right jollily.

XXV.

And sly Bopeep forgot her sheep again
  In gay discourse with that engaging youth:
Love hath such sovran remedies for pain!
  But then he was a handsome prince, in truth,
  And both were young, and both were silly, sooth,
And everything to Love but love seems vain.

XXVI.

They took them down the silver-claspéd book
  That this young anchorite’s predecessor kept, —
A holy seer, — and through it they did look;
  Sometimes their idle eyes together crept,
  Sometimes their lips; but still the leaves they swept,
Until they found a shepherd’s pictured crook.

XXVII.

And underneath was writ it should befall
  On such a day, in such a month and year,
A maiden fair, a young prince brave and tall,
  By such a chance should come together here.
  They were the people, that was very clear:
“O love,” the prince said, “let us read it all!”

XXVIII.

And thus the hermit’s prophecy ran on:
  Though she her lost sheep wist not where to find,
Yet should she bid her weary care begone,
  And banish every doubt from her sweet mind:
  They, with their little snow-white tails behind,
Homeward would go, if they were left alone.

XXIX.

They closed the book, and in her happy eyes
  The prince read truth and love forevermore, —
Better than any hermit’s prophecies!
  They passed together from the cavern’s door;
  Embraced, they turned to look at it once more,
And over it beheld the glad sun rise,

XXX.

That streamed before them aisles of dusk and gold
  Under the song-swept arches of the wood,
And forth they went, tranced in each other’s hold,
  Down through that rare and luminous solitude,
  Their happy hearts enchanted in the mood
Of morning, and of May, and romance old.

XXXI.

Sometimes the saucy leaves would kiss her cheeks,
  And he must kiss their wanton kiss away;
To die beneath her feet the wood-flower seeks,
  The quivering aspen feels a fine dismay,
  And many a scented blossom on the spray
In odorous sighs its passionate longing speaks.

XXXII.

And forth they went down to that stately stream,
  Bowed over by the ghostly sycamores
(Awearily, as if some heavy dream
  Held them in languor), but whose opulent shores
  With pearléd shells and dusts of precious ores
Were tremulous brilliance in the morning beam;

XXXIII.

Where waited them, beside the lustrous sand,
  A silk-winged shallop, sleeping on the flood;
And smoothly wafted from the hither strand,
  Across the calm, broad stream they lightly rode,
  Under them still the silver fishes stood;
The eager lilies, on the other land,

XXXIV.

Beckonéd them; but where the castle shone
  With diamonded turrets and a wall
Of gold-embedded pearl and costly stone,
  Their vision to its peerless splendor thrall
  The maiden fair, the young prince brave and tall,
Thither with light, unlingering feet pressed on.

XXXV.

A gallant train to meet this loving pair,
  In silk and steel, moves from the castle door,
And up the broad and ringing castle stair
  They go with gleeful minstrelsy before,
  And “Hail our prince and princess evermore!”
From all the happy throng is greeting there.

XXXVI.

And in the hall the prince’s sire, King Cole,
  Sitting with crown and royal ermine on,
His fiddlers three behind with pipe and bowl,
  Rises and moves to lift his kneeling son,
  Greeting his bride with kisses many a one,
And tears and laughter from his jolly soul;

XXXVII.

Then both his children to a window leads
  That over daisied pasture-land looks out,
And shows Bopeep where her lost flock wide feeds,
  And every frolic lambkin leaps about.
  She hears Boy-Blue, that lazy shepherd, shout,
Slow pausing from his pipe of mellow reeds;

XXXVIII.

And, turning, peers into her prince’s eyes;
  Then, caught and clasped against her prince’s heart,
Upon her breath her answer wordless dies,
  And leaves her gratitude to sweeter art, —
  To lips from which the bloom shall never part,
To looks wherein the summer never dies!

WHILE SHE SANG.

I.

She sang, and I heard the singing,
  Far out of the wretched past,
Of meadow-larks in the meadow,
  In a breathing of the blast.

Cold through the clouds of sunset
  The thin red sunlight shone,
Staining the gloom of the woodland
  Where I walked and dreamed alone;

And glinting with chilly splendor
  The meadow under the hill,
Where the lingering larks were lurking
  In the sere grass hid and still.

Out they burst with their singing,
  Their singing so loud and gay;
They made in the heart of October
  A sudden ghastly May,

That faded and ceased with their singing.
  The thin red sunlight paled,
And through the boughs above me
  The wind of evening wailed; —

Wailed, and the light of evening
  Out of the heaven died;
And from the marsh by the river
  The lonesome killdee cried.

II.

The song is done, but a phantom
  Of music haunts the chords,
That thrill with its subtile presence,
  And grieve for the dying words.

And in the years that are perished,
  Far back in the wretched past,
I see on the May-green meadows
  The white snow falling fast; —

Falling, and falling, and falling,
  As still and cold as death,
On the bloom of the odorous orchard,
  On the small, meek flowers beneath;

On the roofs of the village-houses,
  On the long, silent street,
Where its plumes are soiled and broken
  Under the passing feet;

On the green crest of the woodland,
  On the cornfields far apart;
On the cowering birds in the gable,
  And on my desolate heart.

A POET.

From wells where Truth in secret lay
He saw the midnight stars by day.

“O marvellous gift!” the many cried,
“O cruel gift!” his voice replied.

The stars were far, and cold, and high,
That glimmered in the noonday sky;

He yearned toward the sun in vain,
That warmed the lives of other men.

CONVENTION.

He falters on the threshold,
  She lingers on the stair:
Can it be that was his footstep?
  Can it be that she is there?

Without is tender yearning,
  And tender love is within;
They can hear each other’s heart-beats,
  But a wooden door is between.

THE POET’S FRIENDS.

The robin sings in the elm;
  The cattle stand beneath,
Sedate and grave, with great brown eyes
  And fragrant meadow-breath.

They listen to the flattered bird,
  The wise-looking, stupid things;
And they never understand a word
  Of all the robin sings.

NO LOVE LOST.

A ROMANCE OF TRAVEL.

1862.

BERTHA — Writing from Venice.

I.

On your heart I feign myself fallen — ah, heavier burden,
Darling, of sorrow and pain than ever shall rest there! I take you
Into these friendless arms of mine, that you cannot escape me;
Closer and closer I fold you, and tell you all, and you listen
Just as you used at home, and you let my sobs and my silence
Speak, when the words will not come — and you understand and forgive me.
 — Ah! no, no! but I write, with the wretched bravado of distance,
What you must read unmoved by the pity too far for entreaty.

II.

  Well, I could never have loved him, but when he sought me and asked me, —
When to the men that offered their lives, the love of a woman
Seemed so little to give! — I promised the love that he asked me,
Sent him to war with my kiss on his lips, and thought him my hero.
Afterward came the doubt, and out of long question, self-knowledge, —
Came that great defeat, and the heart of the nation was withered;
Mine leaped high with the awful relief won of death. But the horror,
Then, of the crime that was wrought in that guilty moment of rapture, —
Guilty as if my will had winged the bullet that struck him, —
Clung to me day and night, and dreaming I saw him forever,
Looking through battle-smoke with sorrowful eyes of upbraiding,
Or, in the moonlight lying gray, or dimly approaching,
Holding toward me his arms, that still held nearer and nearer,
Folded about me at last ... and I would I had died in the fever! —
Better then than now, and better than ever hereafter!

III.

  Weary as some illusion of fever to me was the ocean —
Storm-swept, scourged with bitter rains, and wandering always
Onward from sky to sky with endless processions of surges,
Knowing not life nor death, but since the light was, the first day,
Only enduring unrest till the darkness possess it, the last day.
Over its desolate depths we voyaged away from all living:
All the world behind us waned into vaguest remoteness;
Names, and faces, and scenes recurred like that broken remembrance
Of the anterior, bodiless life of the spirit, — the trouble
Of a bewildered brain, or the touch of the Hand that created, —
And when the ocean ceased at last like a faded illusion,
Europe itself seemed only a vision of eld and of sadness.
Naught but the dark in my soul remained to me constant and real,
Growing and taking the thoughts bereft of happier uses,
Blotting all sense of lapse from the days that with swift iteration
Were and were not. They fable the bright days the fleetest:
These that had nothing to give, that had nothing to bring or to promise,
Went as one day alone. For me was no alternation
Save from my dull despair to wild and reckless rebellion,
When the regret for my sin was turned to ruthless self-pity —
When I hated him whose love had made me its victim,
Through his faith and my falsehood yet claiming me. Then I was smitten
With so great remorse, such grief for him, and compassion,
That, if he could have come back to me, I had welcomed and loved him
More than man ever was loved. Alas, for me that another
Holds his place in my heart evermore! Alas, that I listened
When the words, whose daring lured my spirit and lulled it,
Seemed to take my blame away with my will of resistance!

  Do not make haste to condemn me: my will was the will of a woman, —
Fain to be broken by love. Yet unto the last I endeavored
What I could to be faithful still to the past and my penance;
And as we stood that night in the old Roman garden together —
By the fountain whose passionate tears but now had implored me
In his pleading voice — and he waited my answer, I told him
All that had been before of delusion and guilt, and conjured him
Not to darken his fate with mine. The costly endeavor
Only was subtler betrayal. O me, from the pang of confession,
Sprang what strange delight, as I tore from its lurking that horror —
Brooded upon so long — with the hope that at last I might see it
Through his eyes, unblurred by the tears that disordered my vision!
Oh, with what rapturous triumph I humbled my spirit before him,
That he might lift me and soothe me, and make that dreary remembrance,
All this confused present, seem only some sickness of fancy,
Only a morbid folly, no certain and actual trouble!
If from that refuge I fled with words of too feeble denial —
Bade him hate me, with sobs that entreated his tenderest pity,
Moved mute lips and left the meaningless farewell unuttered —
She that never has loved, alone can wholly condemn me.

IV.

  How could he other than follow? My heart had bidden him follow,
Nor had my lips forbidden; and Rome yet glimmered behind me,
When my soul yearned towards his from the sudden forlornness of absence.
Everywhere his face looked from vanishing glimpses of faces,
Everywhere his voice reached my senses in fugitive cadence.
Sick, through the storied cities, with wretched hopes, and upbraidings
Of my own heart for its hopes, I went from wonder to wonder,
Blind to them all, or only beholding them wronged, and related,
Through some trick of wayward thought, to myself and my trouble.
Not surprise nor regret, but a fierce, precipitate gladness
Sent the blood to my throbbing heart when I found him in Venice.
“Waiting for you,” he whispered; “you would so.” I answered him nothing.

V.

  Father, whose humor grows more silent and ever more absent
(Changed in all but love for me since the death of my mother),
Willing to see me contented at last, and trusting us wholly,
Left us together alone in our world of love and of beauty.
So, by noon and by night, we two have wandered in Venice,
Where the beautiful lives in vivid and constant caprices,
Yet, where the charm is so perfect that nothing fantastic surprises
More than in dreams, and one’s life with the life of the city is blended
In a luxurious calm, and the tumult without and beyond it
Seems but the emptiest fable of vain aspiration and labor.

  Yes, from all that makes this Venice sole among cities,
Peerless forever, — the still lagoons that sleep in the sunlight,
Lulled by their island-bells; the night’s mysterious waters
Lit through their shadowy depths by stems of splendor, that blossom
Into the lamps that float, like flamy lotuses, over;
Narrow and secret canals, that dimly gleaming and glooming
Under palace-walls and numberless arches of bridges,
List no sound but the dip of the gondolier’s oar and his warning
Cried from corner to corner; the sad, superb Canalazzo
Mirroring marvellous grandeur and beauty, and dreaming of glory
Out of the empty homes of her lords departed; the footways
Wandering sunless between the walls of the houses, and stealing
Glimpses, through rusted cancelli, of lurking greenness of gardens,
Wild-grown flowers and broken statues and mouldering frescos;
Thoroughfares filled with traffic, and throngs ever ebbing and flowing
To and from the heart of the city, whose pride and devotion,
Lifting high the bells of St. Mark’s like prayers unto heaven,
Stretch a marble embrace of palaces toward the cathedral
Orient, gorgeous, and flushed with color and light, like the morning! —
From the lingering waste that is not yet ruin in Venice,
And her phantasmal show, through all, of being and doing —
Came a strange joy to us, untouched by regret for the idle
Days without yesterdays that died into nights without morrows.
Here, in our paradise of love we reigned, new-created,
As in the youth of the world, in the days before evil and conscience.
Ah! in our fair, lost world was neither fearing nor doubting,
Neither the sickness of old remorse nor the gloom of foreboding, —
Only the glad surrender of all individual being
Unto him whom I loved, and in whose tender possession,
Fate-free, my soul reposed from its anguish.

      — Of these things I write you
As of another’s experience; part of my own they no longer
Seem to me now, through the doom that darkens the past like the future.

VI.

  Golden the sunset gleamed, above the city behind us,
Out of a city of clouds as fairy and lovely as Venice,
While we looked at the fishing-tails of purple and yellow
Far on the rim of the sea, whose light and musical surges
Broke along the sands with a faint, reiterant sadness.
But, when the sails had darkened into black wings, through the twilight
Sweeping away into night — past the broken tombs of the Hebrews
Homeward we sauntered slowly, through dew-sweet, blossomy alleys;
So drew near the boat by errant and careless approaches,
Entered, and left with indolent pulses the Lido behind us.

  All the sunset had paled, and the campanili of Venice
Rose like the masts of a mighty fleet moored there in the water.
Lights flashed furtively to and fro through the deepening twilight.
Massed in one thick shade lay the Gardens; the numberless islands
Lay like shadows upon the lagoons. And on us as we loitered
By their enchanted coasts, a spell of ineffable sweetness
Fell and made us at one with them; and silent and blissful
Shadows we seemed, that drifted on through a being of shadow,
Vague, indistinct to ourselves, unbounded by hope or remembrance.
Yet we knew the beautiful night, as it grew from the evening:
Far beneath us and far above us the vault of the heavens
Glittered and darkened; and now the moon, that had haunted the daylight
Thin and pallid, dimmed the stars with her fulness of splendor,
And over all the lagoons fell the silvery rain of the moonbeams,
As in the song the young girls sang while their gondolas passed us, —
Sang in the joy of love, or youth’s desire of loving.

  Balmy night of the South! O perfect night of the Summer!
Night of the distant dark, of the near and tender effulgence! —
How from my despair are thy peace and loveliness frightened!
For, while our boat lay there at the will of the light undulations,
Idle as if our mood imbued and controlled it, yet ever
Seeming to bear us on athwart those shining expanses
Out to shining seas beyond pursuit or returning —
There, while we lingered, and lingered, and would not break from our rapture,
Down the mirrored night another gondola drifted
Nearer and slowly nearer our own, and moonlighted faces
Stared. And that sweet trance grew a rigid and dreadful possession,
Which, if no dream indeed, yet mocked with such semblance of dreaming,
That, as it happens in dreams, when a dear face, stooping to kiss us,
Takes, ere the lips have touched, some malign and horrible aspect,
His face faded away, and the face of the Dead — of that other —
Flashed on mine, and writhing, through every change of emotion, —
Wild amaze and scorn, accusation and pitiless mocking, —
Vanished into the swoon whose blackness encompassed and hid me.

PHILIP — To Bertha.

  I am not sure, I own, that if first I had seen my delusion
When I saw you, last night, I should be so ready to give you
Now your promises back, and hold myself nothing above you,
That it is mine to offer a freedom you never could ask for.
Yet, believe me, indeed, from no bitter heart I release you:
You are as free of me now as though I had died in the battle,
Or as I never had lived. Nay, if it is mine to forgive you,
Go without share of the blame that could hardly be all upon your side.

  Ghosts are not sensitive things; yet, after my death in the papers,
Sometimes a harrowing doubt assailed this impalpable essence:
Had I done so well to plead my cause at that moment,
When your consent must be yielded less to the lover than soldier?
“Not so well,” I was answered by that ethereal conscience
Ghosts have about them, “and not so nobly or wisely as might be.”
 — Truly, I loved you, then, as now I love you no longer.

  I was a prisoner then, and this doubt in the languor of sickness
Came; and it clung to my convalescence, and grew to the purpose,
After my days of captivity ended, to seek you and solve it,
And, if I haply had erred, to undo the wrong, and release you.

  Well, you have solved me the doubt. I dare to trust that you wept me,
Just a little, at first, when you heard of me dead in the battle?
For we were plighted, you know, and even in this saintly humor,
I would scarce like to believe that my loss had merely relieved you.
Yet, I say, it was prudent and well not to wait for my coming
Back from the dead. If it may be I sometimes had cherished a fancy
That I had won some right to the palm with the pang of the martyr, —
Fondly intended, perhaps, some splendor of self-abnegation, —
Doubtless all that was a folly which merciful chances have spared me.
No, I am far from complaining that Circumstance coolly has ordered
Matters of tragic fate in such a commonplace fashion.
How do I know, indeed, that the easiest isn’t the best way?

  Friendly adieux end this note, and our little comedy with it.

FANNY — To Clara.

I.

  Yes, I promised to write, but how shall I write to you, darling?
Venice we reached last Monday, wild for canals and for color,
Palaces, prisons, lagoons, and gondolas, bravoes, and moonlight,
All the mysterious, dreadful, beautiful things in existence.
Fred had joined us at Naples, insuff’rably knowing and travelled,
Wise in the prices of things and great at tempestuous bargains,
Rich in the costly nothing our youthful travellers buy here,
At a prodigious outlay of time and money and trouble;
Utter confusion of facts, and talking the wildest of pictures, —
Pyramids, battle-fields, bills, and examinations of luggage,
Passports, policemen, porters, and how he got through his tobacco, —
Ignorant, handsome, full-bearded, brown, and good-natured as ever:
Annie thinks him perfect, and I well enough for a brother.
Also, a friend of Fred’s came with us from Naples to Venice;
And, altogether, I think, we are rather agreeable people,
For we’ve been taking our pleasure at all times in perfect good-humor;
Which is an excellent thing that you’ll understand when you’ve travelled,
Seen Recreation dead-beat and cross, and learnt what a burden
Frescos, for instance, can be, and, in general, what an affliction
Life is apt to become among the antiques and old masters.

  Venice we’ve thoroughly done, and it’s perfectly true of the pictures —
Titians and Tintorettos, and Palmas and Paul Veroneses;
Neither are gondolas fictions, but verities, hearse-like and swan-like,
Quite as the heart could wish. And one finds, to one’s infinite comfort,
Venice just as unique as one’s fondest visions have made it:
Palaces and mosquitoes rise from the water together,
And, in the city’s streets, the salt-sea is ebbing and flowing
Several inches or more.

 — Ah! let me not wrong thee, O Venice!
Fairest, forlornest, and saddest of all the cities, and dearest!
Dear, for my heart has won here deep peace from cruel confusion;
And in this lucent air, whose night is but tenderer noon-day,
Fear is forever dead, and hope has put on the immortal!
 — There! and you need not laugh. I’m coming to something directly.
One thing: I’ve bought you a chain of the famous fabric of Venice —
Something peculiar and quaint, and of such a delicate texture
That you must wear it embroidered upon a riband of velvet,
If you would have the effect of its exquisite fineness and beauty.
“Isn’t it very frail?” I asked of the workman who made it.
“Strong enough, if you will, to bind a lover, signora,” —
With an expensive smile. ’Twas bought near the Bridge of Rialto.
(Shylock, you know.) In our shopping, Aunt May and Fred do the talking:
Fred begins always in French, with the most delicious effront’ry,
Only to end in profoundest humiliation and English.
Aunt, however, scorns to speak any tongue but Italian:
“Quanto per these ones here?” and “What did you say was the prezzo?”
“Ah! troppo caro! Too much! No, no! Don’t I tell you it’s troppo?”
All the while insists that the gondolieri shall show us
What she calls Titian’s palazzo, and pines for the house of Othello.
Annie, the dear little goose, believes in Fred and her mother
With an enchanting abandon. She doesn’t at all understand them,
But she has some twilight views of their cleverness. Father is quiet,
Now and then ventures some French when he fancies that nobody hears him,
In an aside to the valet-de-place — I never detect him —
Buys things for mother and me with a quite supernatural sweetness,
Tolerates all Fred’s airs, and is indispensably pleasant.

II.

  Prattling on of these things, which I think cannot interest deeply,
So I hold back in my heart its dear and wonderful secret
(Which I must tell you at last, however I falter to tell you),
Fain to keep it all my own for a little while longer, —
Doubting but it shall lose some part of its strangeness and sweetness,
Shared with another, and fearful that even you may not find it
Just the marvel that I do — and thus turn our friendship to hatred.

  Sometimes it seems to me that this love, which I feel is eternal,
Must have begun with my life, and that only an absence was ended
When we met and knew in our souls that we loved one another.
For from the first was no doubt. The earliest hints of the passion,
Whispered to girlhood’s tremulous dream, may be mixed with misgiving,
But, when the very love comes, it bears no vagueness of meaning;
Touched by its truth (too fine to be felt by the ignorant senses,
Knowing but looks and utterance) soul unto soul makes confession,
Silence to silence speaks. And I think that this subtile assurance,
Yet unconfirmed from without, is even sweeter and dearer
Than the perfected bliss that comes when the words have been spoken.
 — Not that I’d have them unsaid, now! But ‘t was delicious to ponder
All the miracle over, and clasp it, and keep it, and hide it, —
While I beheld him, you know, with looks of indifferent languor,
Talking of other things, and felt the divine contradiction
Trouble my heart below!

        And yet, if no doubt touched our passion,
Do not believe for that, our love has been wholly unclouded.
All best things are ours when pain and patience have won them:
Peace itself would mean nothing but for the strife that preceded;
Triumph of love is greatest, when peril of love has been sorest.
(That’s to say, I dare say. I’m only repeating what he said.)
Well, then, of all wretched things in the world, a mystery, Clara,
Lurked in this life dear to mine, and hopelessly held us asunder
When we drew nearest together, and all but his speech said, “I love you.”
Fred had known him at college, and then had found him at Naples,
After several years, — and called him a capital fellow.
Thus far his knowledge went, and beyond this began to run shallow
Over troubled ways, and to break into brilliant conjecture,
Harder by far to endure than the other’s reticent absence —
Absence wherein at times he seemed to walk like one troubled
By an uneasy dream, whose spell is not broken with waking,
But it returns all day with a vivid and sudden recurrence,
Like a remembered event. Of the past that was closest the present,
This we knew from himself: He went at the earliest summons,
When the Rebellion began, and falling, terribly wounded,
Into the enemy’s hands, after ages of sickness and prison,
Made his escape at last; and, returning, found all his virtues
Grown out of recognition and shining in posthumous splendor, —
Found all changed and estranged, and, he fancied, more wonder than welcome.
So, somewhat heavy of heart, and disabled for war, he had wandered
Hither to Europe for perfecter peace. Abruptly his silence,
Full of suggestion and sadness, made here a chasm between us;
But we spanned the chasm with conversational bridges,
Else talked all around it, and feigned an ignorance of it,
With that absurd pretence which is always so painful, or comic,
Just as you happen to make it or see it.

              In spite of our fictions,
Severed from his by that silence, my heart grew ever more anxious,
Till last night when together we sat in Piazza San Marco
(Then, when the morrow must bring us parting — forever, it might be),
Taking our ices al fresco. Some strolling minstrels were singing
Airs from the Trovatore. I noted with painful observance,
With the unwilling minuteness at such times absolute torture,
All that brilliant scene, for which I cared nothing, before me:
Dark-eyed Venetian leoni regarding the forestieri
With those compassionate looks of gentle and curious wonder
Home-keeping Italy’s nations bend on the voyaging races, —
Taciturn, indolent, sad, as their beautiful city itself is;
Groups of remotest English — not just the traditional English
(Lavish Milor is no more, and your travelling Briton is frugal) —
English, though, after all, with the Channel always between them,
Islanded in themselves, and the Continent’s sociable races;
Country-people of ours — the New World’s confident children,
Proud of America always, and even vain of the Troubles
As of disaster laid out on a scale unequalled in Europe;
Polyglot Russians that spoke all languages better than natives;
White-coated Austrian officers, anglicized Austrian dandies;
Gorgeous Levantine figures of Greek, and Turk, and Albanian —
These, and the throngs that moved through the long arcades and Piazza,
Shone on by numberless lamps that flamed round the perfect Piazza,
Jewel-like set in the splendid frame of this beautiful picture,
Full of such motley life, and so altogether Venetian.

  Then we rose and walked where the lamps were blanched by the moonlight
Flooding the Piazzetta with splendor, and throwing in shadow
All the façade of Saint Mark’s, with its pillars, and horses, and arches;
But the sculptured frondage, that blossoms over the arches
Into the forms of saints, was touched with tenderest lucence,
And the angel that stands on the crest of the vast campanile
Bathed his golden vans in the liquid light of the moonbeams.
Black rose the granite pillars that lift the Saint and the Lion;
Black sank the island campanili from distance to distance;
Over the charmèd scene there brooded a presence of music,
Subtler than sound, and felt, unheard, in the depth of the spirit.

  How can I gather and show you the airy threads of enchantment
Woven that night round my life and forever wrought into my being,
As in our boat we glided away from the glittering city?
Dull at heart I felt, and I looked at the lights in the water,
Blurring their brilliance with tears, while the tresses of eddying seaweed,
Whirled in the ebbing tide, like the tresses of sea-maidens drifting
Seaward from palace-haunts, in the moonshine glistened and darkened.

  Sad and vague were my thoughts, and full of fear was the silence;
And, when he turned to speak at last, I trembled to hear him,
Feeling he now must speak of his love, and his life and its secret, —
Now that the narrowing chances had left but that cruel conclusion,
Else the life-long ache of a love and a trouble unuttered.
Better, my feebleness pleaded, the dreariest doubt that had vexed me,
Than my life left nothing, not even a doubt to console it;
But, while I trembled and listened, his broken words crumbled to silence,
And, as though some touch of fate had thrilled him with warning,
Suddenly from me he turned. Our gondola slipped from the shadow
Under a ship lying near, and glided into the moonlight,
Where, in its brightest lustre, another gondola rested.
I saw two lovers there, and he, in the face of the woman,
Saw what has made him mine, my own belovèd, forever!
Mine! — but through what tribulation, and awful confusion of spirit!
Tears that I think of with smiles, and sighs I remember with laughter,
Agonies full of absurdity, keen, ridiculous anguish,
Ending in depths of blissful shame, and heavenly transports!

III.

  White, and estranged as a man who has looked on a spectre, he mutely
Sank to the place at my side, nor while we returned to the city
Uttered a word of explaining, or comment, or comfort, but only,
With his good-night, incoherently craved my forgiveness and patience,
Parted, and left me to spend the night in hysterical vigils,
Tending to Annie’s supreme dismay, and postponing our journey
One day longer at least; for I went to bed in the morning,
Firmly rejecting the pity of friends, and the pleasures of travel,
Fixed in a dreadful purpose never to get any better.

  Later, however, I rallied, when Fred, with a maddening prologue
Touching the cause of my sickness, including his fever at Jaffa,
Told me that some one was waiting; and could he see me a moment?
See me? Certainly not. Or, — yes. But why did he want to?
So, in the dishabille of a morning-gown and an arm-chair,
Languid, with eloquent wanness of eye and of cheek, I received him —
Willing to touch and reproach, and half-melted myself by my pathos,
Which, with a reprobate joy, I wholly forgot the next instant,
When, with electric words, few, swift, and vivid, he brought me,
Through a brief tempest of tears, to this heaven of sunshine and sweetness.

  Yes, he had looked on a ghost — the phantom of love that was perished! —
When, last night, he beheld the scene of which I have told you.
For to the woman he saw there, his troth had been solemnly plighted
Ere he went to the war. His return from the dead found her absent
In the belief of his death; and hither to Europe he followed, —
Followed to seek her, and keep, if she would, the promise between them,
Or, were a haunting doubt confirmed, to break it and free her.
Then, at Naples we met, and the love that, before he was conscious,
Turned his life toward mine, laid torturing stress to the purpose
Whither it drove him forever, and whence forever it swerved him.
How could he tell me his love, with this terrible burden upon him?
How could he linger near me, and still withhold the avowal?
And what ruin were that, if the other were doubted unjustly,
And should prove fatally true! With shame, he confessed he had faltered,
Clinging to guilty delays, and to hopes that were bitter with treason,
Up to the eve of our parting. And then the last anguish was spared him.
Her love for him was dead. But the heart that leaped in his bosom
With a great, dumb throb of joy and wonder and doubting,
Still must yield to the spell of his silencing will till that phantom
Proved an actual ghost by common-place tests of the daylight,
Such as speech with the lady’s father.

              And now, could I pardon —
Nay, did I think I could love him? I sobbingly answered, I thought so.
And we are all of us going to Lago di Como to-morrow,
With an ulterior view at the first convenient Legation.

  Patientest darling, good-by! Poor Fred, whose sense of what’s proper
Never was touched till now, is shocked at my glad self-betrayals,
And I am pointed out as an awful example to Annie,
Figuring all she must never be. But, oh, if he loves me! —

POSTSCRIPT.

  Since, he has shown me a letter in which he absolves and forgives her
(Philip, of course, not Fred; and the other, of course, and not Annie).
Don’t you think him generous, noble, unselfish, heroic?

L’ENVOY. — Clara’s Comment.

Well, I’m glad, I am sure, if Fanny supposes she’s happy.
I’ve no doubt her lover is good and noble — as men go.
But, as regards his release of a woman who’d wholly forgot him,
And whom he loved no longer, for one whom he loves, and who loves him,
I don’t exactly see where the heroism commences.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

There is a bird that comes and sings
  In the Professor’s garden-trees;
Upon the English oak he swings,
  And tilts and tosses in the breeze.

I know his name, I know his note,
  That so with rapture takes my soul;
Like flame the gold beneath his throat,
  His glossy cope is black as coal.

O oriole, it is the song
  You sang me from the cottonwood,
Too young to feel that I was young,
  Too glad to guess if life were good.

And while I hark, before my door,
  Adown the dusty Concord Road,
The blue Miami flows once more
  As by the cottonwood it flowed.

And on the bank that rises steep,
  And pours a thousand tiny rills,
From death and absence laugh and leap
  My school-mates to their flutter-mills.

The blackbirds jangle in the tops
  Of hoary-antlered sycamores;
The timorous killdee starts and stops
  Among the drift-wood on the shores.

Below, the bridge — a noonday fear
  Of dust and shadow shot with sun —
Stretches its gloom from pier to pier,
  Far unto alien coasts unknown.

And on those alien coasts, above,
  Where silver ripples break the stream’s
Long blue, from some roof-sheltering grove
  A hidden parrot scolds and screams.

Ah, nothing, nothing! Commonest things:
  A touch, a glimpse, a sound, a breath —
It is a song the oriole sings —
  And all the rest belongs to death.

But oriole, my oriole,
  Were some bright seraph sent from bliss
With songs of heaven to win my soul
  From simple memories such as this,

What could he tell to tempt my ear
  From you? What high thing could there be,
So tenderly and sweetly dear
  As my lost boyhood is to me?

PORDENONE.

I.

Hard by the Church of Saint Stephen, in sole and beautiful Venice,
Under the colonnade of the Augustinian Convent,
Every day, as I passed, I paused to look at the frescos
Painted upon the ancient walls of the court of the Convent
By a great master of old, who wore his sword and his dagger
While he wrought the figures of patriarchs, martyrs, and virgins
Into the sacred and famous scenes of Scriptural story.

II.

Long ago the monks from their snug self-devotion were driven,
Wistful and fat and slow: looking backward, I fancied them going
Out through the sculptured doorway, and down the Ponte de’Frati,
Cowled and sandalled and beaded, a plump and pensive procession;
And in my day their cells were barracks for Austrian soldiers,
Who in their turn have followed the Augustinian Friars.
As to the frescos, little remained of work once so perfect.
Summer and winter weather of some three cycles had wasted;
Plaster had fallen, and left unsightly blotches of ruin;
Wanton and stupid neglect had done its worst to the pictures:
Yet to the sympathetic and reverent eye was apparent —
Where the careless glance but found, in expanses of plaster,
Touches of incoherent color and lines interrupted —
Somewhat still of the life of surpassing splendor and glory
Filling the frescos once; and here and there was a figure,
Standing apart, and out from the common decay and confusion,
Flushed with immortal youth and ineffaceable beauty,
Such as that figure of Eve in pathetic expulsion from Eden,
Taking — the tourist remembers — the wrath of Heaven al fresco,
As is her well-known custom in thousands of acres of canvas.

III.

I could make out the much-bepainted Biblical subjects,
When I had patience enough: The Temptation, of course, and Expulsion;
Cain killing Abel, his Brother — the merest fragment of murder;
Noah’s Debauch — the trunk of the sea-faring patriarch naked,
And the garment, borne backward to cover it, fearfully tattered;
Abraham offering Isaac — no visible Isaac, and only
Abraham’s lifted knife held back by the hovering angel;
Martyrdom of Saint Stephen — a part of the figure of Stephen;
And the Conversion of Paul — the greaves on the leg of a soldier
Held across the back of a prostrate horse by the stirrup;
But when I looked at the face of that tearful and beauteous figure, —
Eve in the fresco there, and, in Venice of old, Violante,
As I must fain believe (the lovely daughter of Palma,
Who was her father’s Saint Barbara, and was the Bella of Titian), —
Such a meaning and life shone forth from its animate presence
As could restore those vague and ineffectual pictures,
With their pristine colors, and fill them with light and with movement.
Nay, sometimes it could blind me to all the present about me,
Till I beheld no more the sausage-legged Austrian soldiers,
Where they stood on guard beside one door of the Convent,
Nor the sentinel beggars that watched the approach to the other;
Neither the bigolanti, the broad-backed Friulan maidens,
Drawing the water with clatter and splashing, and laughter and gossip,
Out of the carven well in the midst of the court of the Convent —
No, not even the one with the mole on her cheek and the sidelong
Look, as she ambled forth with her buckets of bronze at her shoulder,
Swinging upon the yoke to and fro, a-drip and a-glimmer.
All in an instant was changed, and once more the cloister was peopled
By the serene monks of old, and against walls of the cloisters,
High on his scaffolding raised, Pordenone wrought at his frescos.
Armed with dagger and sword, as the legend tells, against Titian,
Who was his rival in art and in love.

IV.

                  It seemed to be summer,
In the forenoon of the day; and the master’s diligent pencil
Laid its last light touches on Eve driven forth out of Eden,
Otherwise Violante, and while his pupils about him
Wrought and chattered, in silence ran the thought of the painter:
“She, and forever she! Is it come to be my perdition?
Shall I, then, never more make the face of a beautiful woman
But it must take her divine, accursèd beauty upon it,
And, when I finish my work, stand forth her visible presence?
Ah! I could take this sword and strike it into her bosom!
Though I believe my own heart’s blood would stream from the painting,
So much I love her! Yes, that look is marvellous like you,
Wandering, tender — such as I’d give my salvation to win you
Once to bend upon me! But I knew myself better than make you,
Lest I should play the fool about you here before people,
Helpless to turn away from your violet eyes, Violante,
That have turned all my life to a vision of madness.” The painter
Here unto speech betraying the thoughts he had silently pondered,
“Visions, visions, my son?” said a gray old friar who listened,
Seated there in the sun, with his eye on the work of the painter
Fishily fixed, while the master blasphemed behind his mustaches.
“Much have I envied your Art, who vouchsafeth to those who adore her
Visions of heavenly splendor denied to fastings and vigils.
I have spent days and nights of faint and painful devotion,
Scourged myself almost to death, without one glimpse of the glory
Which your touch has revealed in the face of that heavenly maiden.
Pleasure me to repeat what it was you were saying of visions:
Fain would I know how they come to you, though I never see them,
And in my thickness of hearing I fear some words have escaped me.”
Then, while the painter glared on the lifted face of the friar,
Baleful, breathless, bewildered, fiercer than noon in the dog-days,
Round the circle of pupils there ran a tittering murmur;
From the lips to the ears of those nameless Beppis and Gigis
Buzzed the stinging whisper: “Let’s hear Pordenone’s confession.”
Well they knew the master’s luckless love, and whose portrait
He had unconsciously painted there, and guessed that his visions
Scarcely were those conceived by the friar, who constantly blundered
Round the painter at work, mistaking every subject —
Noah’s drunken Debauch for the Stoning of Stephen the Martyr,
And the Conversion of Paul for the Flight into Egypt; forever
Putting his hand to his ear and shouting, “Speak louder, I pray you!”
So they waited now, in silent, amused expectation,
Till Pordenone’s angry scorn should gather to bursting.
Long the painter gazed in furious silence, then slowly
Uttered a kind of moan, and turned again to his labor.
Tears gathered into his eyes, of mortification and pathos,
And when the dull old monk, who forgot, while he waited the answer,
Visions and painter, and all, had maundered away in his error,
Pordenone half envied the imbecile peace of his bosom;
“For in my own,” he mused, “is such a combat of devils,
That I believe torpid age or stupid youth would be better
Than this manhood of mine that has climbed aloft to discover
Heights which I never can reach, and bright on the pinnacle standing
In the unfading light, my rival crowned victor above me.
If I could hint what I feel, what forever escapes from my pencil,
All after-time should know my will was not less than my failure,
Nor should any one dare remember me merely in pity.
All should read my sorrows and do my discomfiture homage,
Saying: ‘Not meanly at any time this painter meant or endeavored;
His was the anguish of one who falls short of the highest achievement,
Conscious of doing his utmost, and knowing how vast his defeat is.
Life, if he would, might have had some second guerdon to give him,
But he would only the first; and behold! Let us honor
Grief such as his must have been; no other sorrow can match it!
There are certainly some things here that are nobly imagined:
Look! here is masterly power in this play of light, and these shadows
Boldly are massed; and what color! One can well understand Buonarotti
Saying the sight of his Curtius was worth the whole journey from Florence.
Here is a man at least never less than his work; you can feel it
As you can feel in Titian’s the painter’s inferior spirit.
He and this Pordenone, you know, were rivals; and Titian
Knew how to paint to the popular humor, and spared not
Foul means or fair (his way with rivals) to crush Pordenone,
Who with an equal chance’ —
                  “Alas, if the whole world should tell me
I was his equal in art, and the lie could save me from torment,
So must I be lost, for my soul could never believe it!
Nay, let my envy snarl as fierce as it will at his glory,
Still, when I look on his work, my soul makes obeisance within me,
Humbling itself before the touch that shall never be equalled.”

He who sleeps in continual noise is wakened by silence,
And Pordenone was roused from these thoughts anon by the sudden
Hush that had fallen upon the garrulous group of his pupils;
And ere he turned half-way with instinctive looks of inquiry,
He was already warned, with a shock at the heart, of a presence
Long attended, not feared; and he laid one hand on his sword-hilt,
Seizing the sheath with the other hand, that the pallet had dropped from.
Then he fronted Titian, who stood with his arms lightly folded,
And with a curious smile, half of sarcasm, half of compassion,
Bent on th’ embattled painter, cried: “Your slave, Messere Antonio!
What good friend has played this bitter jest with your humor?
As I beheld you just now full-armed with your pencil and palette,
I was half awed by your might; but these sorry trappings of bravo
Make me believe you less fit to be the rival of Titian,
Here in the peaceful calm of our well-ordered city of Venice,
Than to take service under some Spanish lordling at Naples,
Needy in blades for work that can not wait for the poison.”

Pordenone flushed with anger and shame to be taken
At an unguarded point; but he answered with scornful defiance:
“Oh, you are come, I see, with the favorite weapon of Titian,
And you would make a battle of words. If you care for my counsel,
Listen to me: I say you are skilfuller far in my absence,
And your tongue can inflict a keener and deadlier mischief
When it is dipped in poisonous lies, and wielded in secret.”
“Nay, then,” Titian responded, “methinks that our friend Aretino
Makes a much better effect than either of us in that tongue-play.
But since Messer Robusti has measured our wit for his portrait,
Even he has grown shyer of using his tongue than he once was.
Have you not heard the tale? Tintoretto was told Aretino
Meant to make him the subject of one of his merry effusions;
And with his naked dirk he went carefully over his person,
Promising, if the poet made free with him in his verses,
He would immortalize my satirical friend with that pencil.
Doubtless the tale is not true. Aretino says nothing about it;
Always speaks, in fact, with the highest respect of Robusti.
True or not, ’tis well found.” Then looking around on the frescos:
“Good, very good indeed! Your breadth and richness and softness
No man living surpasses; those heads are truly majestic.
Yes, Buonarotti was right, when he said that to look at your Curtius
Richly repaid him the trouble and cost of a journey from Florence.
Surely the world shall know you the first of painters in fresco!
Well? You will not strike me unarmed? This was hardly expected
By the good people that taught you to think our rivalry blood-red.
Let us be friends, Pordenone!”
                  “Be patron and patronized, rather;
Nay, if you spoke your whole mind out, be assassin and victim.
Could the life beat again in the broken heart of Giorgione,
He might tell us, I think, something pleasant of friendship with Titian.”
Suddenly over the shoulder of Titian peered an ironical visage,
Smiling, malignly intent — the leer of the scurrilous poet:
“You know — all the world knows — who dug the grave of Giorgione.
Titian and he were no friends — our Lady of Sorrows forgive ‘em!
But for all hurt that Titian did him he might have been living,
Greater than any living, and lord of renown and such glory
As would have left you both dull as yon withered moon in the sunshine.”
Loud laughed the listening group at the insolent gibe of the poet,
Stirring the gall to its depths in the bitter soul of their master,
Who with his tremulous fingers tapped the hilt of his poniard,
Answering naught as yet. Anon the glance of the ribald,
Carelessly ranging from Pordenone’s face to the picture,
Dwelt with an absent light on its marvellous beauty, and kindled
Into a slow recognition, with “Ha! Violante!” Then, erring
Wilfully as to the subject, he cackled his filthy derision:
“What have we here! More Magdalens yet of the painter’s acquaintance?
Ah — !”
      The words had scarce left his lips, when the painter
Rushed upon him, and clutching his throat, thrust him backward and held him
Over the scaffolding’s edge in air, and straightway had flung him
Crashing down on the pave of the cloister below, but for Titian,
Who around painter and poet alike wound his strong arms and stayed them
Solely, until the bewildered pupils could come to the rescue.
Then, as the foes relaxed that embrace of frenzy and murder —
White, one with rage and the other with terror, and either with hatred —
Grimly the great master smiled: “You were much nearer paradise, Piero,
Than you have been for some time. Be ruled now by me and get homeward
Fast as you may, and be thankful.” And then, as the poet,
Looking neither to right nor to left, amid the smiles of the pupils
Tottered along the platform, and trembling descended the ladder
Down to the cloister pave, and, still without upward or backward
Glance, disappeared beneath the outer door of the Convent,
Titian turned again to the painter: “Farewell, Pordenone!
Learn more fairly to know me. I envy you not; and no rival
Now, or at any time, have I held you, or ever shall hold you.
Prosper and triumph still, for all me: you shall but do me honor,
Seeing that I too serve the art that your triumphs illustrate.
I for my part find life too short for work and for pleasure;
If it should touch a century’s bound, I should think it too precious
Even to spare a moment for rage at another’s good fortune.
Do not be fooled by the purblind flatterers who would persuade you
Either of us shall have greater fame through the fall of the other.
We can thrive only in common. The tardily blossoming cycles,
Flowering at last in this glorious age of our art, had not waited,
Folded calyxes still, for Pordenone or Titian.
Think you if we had not been, our pictures had never been painted?
Others had done them, or better, the same. We are only
Pencils God paints with. And think you that He had wanted for pencils
But for our being at hand? And yet — for some virtue creative
Dwells and divinely exists in the being of every creature,
So that the thing done through him is dear as if he had done it —
If I should see your power, a tint of this great efflorescence,
Fading, methinks I should feel myself beginning to wither.
They have abused your hate who told you that Titian was jealous.
Once, in my youth that is passed, I too had my hates and my envies.
‘Sdeath! how it used to gall me — that power and depth of Giorgione!
I could have turned my knife in his heart when I looked at his portraits.
Ah! we learn somewhat still as the years go. Now, when I see you
Doing this good work here, I am glad in my soul of its beauty.
Art is not ours, O friend! but if we are not hers, we are nothing.
Look at the face you painted last year — or yesterday, even:
Far, so far, it seems from you, so utterly, finally, parted,
Nothing is stranger to you than this child of your soul; and you wonder —
‘Did I indeed then do it?’ No thrill of the rapture of doing
Stirs in your breast at the sight. Nay, then, not even the beauty
Which we had seemed to create is our own: the frame universal
Is as much ours. And shall I hate you because you are doing
That which when done you cannot feel yours more than I mine can feel it?
It shall belong hereafter to all who perceive and enjoy it,
Rather than him who made it; he, least of all, shall enjoy it.
They of the Church conjure us to look on death and be humble;
I say, look upon life and keep your pride if you can, then:
See how to-day’s achievement is only to-morrow’s confusion;
See how possession always cheapens the thing that was precious
To our endeavor; how losses and gains are equally losses;
How in ourselves we are nothing, and how we are anything only
As indifferent parts of the whole, that still, on our ceasing,
Whole remains as before, no less without us than with us.
Were it not for the delight of doing, the wonderful instant
Ere the thing done is done and dead, life scarce were worth living.
Ah, but that makes life divine! We are gods, for that instant immortal,
Mortal for evermore, with a few days’ rumor — or ages’ —
What does it matter? We, too, have our share of eating and drinking,
Love, and the liking of friends — mankind’s common portion and pleasure.
Come, Pordenone, with me; I would fain have you see my Assumption
While it is still unfinished, and stay with me for the evening:
You shall send home for your lute, and I’ll ask Sansovino to supper.
After what happened just now I scarcely could ask Aretino;
Though, for the matter of that, the dog is not one to bear malice.
Will you not come?”

V.

      I listen with Titian, and wait for the answer.
But, whatever the answer that comes to Titian, I hear none.
Nay, while I linger, all those presences fade into nothing,
In the dead air of the past; and the old Augustinian Convent
Lapses to picturesque profanation again as a barrack;
Lapses and changes once more, and this time vanishes wholly,
Leaving me at the end with the broken, shadowy legend,
Broken and shadowy still, as in the beginning. I linger,
Teased with its vague unfathomed suggestion, and wonder,
As at first I wondered, what happened about Violante,
And am but ill content with those metaphysical phrases
Touching the strictly impersonal nature of personal effort,
Wherewithal Titian had fain avoided the matter at issue.

THE LONG DAYS.

Yes! they are here again, the long, long days,
  After the days of winter, pinched and white;
  Soon, with a thousand minstrels comes the light,
Late, the sweet robin-haunted dusk delays.

But the long days that bring us back the flowers,
  The sunshine, and the quiet-dripping rain,
  And all the things we knew of spring again,
The long days bring not the long-lost long hours.

The hours that now seem to have been each one
  A summer in itself, a whole life’s bound,
  Filled full of deathless joy — where in his round,
Have these forever faded from the sun?

The fret, the fever, the unrest endures,
  But the time flies.... Oh, try, my little lad,
  Coming so hot and play-worn, to be glad
And patient of the long hours that are yours!

* * * * *

STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS

CONTENTS

NOVEMBER

MIDWAY

TIME

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

THE BEWILDERED GUEST

COMPANY

HEREDITY

TWELVE P. M.

CHANGE

IN THE DARK

TO-MORROW

LIVING

IF

SOLITUDE

RESPITE

QUESTION

HOPE

THE BURDEN

CALVARY

CONSCIENCE

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

SYMPATHY

STATISTICS

PARABLE

VISION

SOCIETY

GOOD SOCIETY

FRIENDS AND FOES

SPHINX

MATERIALS OF A STORY

THE KING DINES

LABOR AND CAPITAL

EQUALITY

JUDGMENT DAY

MORTALITY

ANOTHER DAY

SOME ONE ELSE

LIFE

WEATHER-BREEDER

PEONAGE

RACE

TEMPERAMENT

WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?

NOVEMBER

A WEFT of leafless spray
Woven fine against the gray
Of the autumnal day,
And blurred along those ghostly garden tops
Clusters of berries crimson as the drops
That my heart bleeds when I remember
How often, in how many a far November,
Of childhood and my children’s childhood I was glad,
With the wild rapture of the Fall,
Of all the beauty, and of all
The ruin, now so intolerably sad.

MIDWAY

SO blithe the birds sang in the trees,
 The trees sang in the wind,
I winged me with the morning breeze,
 And left Care far behind.
But now both birds and trees are mute
 In the hot hush of noon;
And I must up and on afoot,
 Or Care will catch me soon.

TIME

DO you wish me, then, away?
You should rather bid me stay:
Though I seem so dull and slow,
Think before you let me go!
Whether you entreat or spurn
I can nevermore return:
Times shall come, and times shall be,
But no other time like me.
Though I move with leaden feet,
Light itself is not so fleet;
And before you know me gone
Eternity and I are one.

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

I

INNOCENT spirits, bright, immaculate ghosts!
Why throng your heavenly hosts,
As eager for their birth
In this sad home of death, this sorrow-haunted earth?
Beware! Beware! Content you where you are,
And shun this evil star,
Where we who are doomed to die,
Have our brief being and pass, we know not where or why.

II

We have not to consent or to refuse;
It is not ours to choose:
We come because we must,
We know not by what law, if unjust or if just.
The doom is on us, as it is on you,
That nothing can undo;
And all in vain you warn:
As your fate is to die, our fate is to be born.

THE BEWILDERED GUEST

I WAS not asked if I should like to come.
 I have not seen my host here since I came,
 Or had a word of welcome in his name.
Some say that we shall never see him, and some
That we shall see him elsewhere, and then know
 Why we were bid. How long I am to stay
 I have not the least notion. None, they say,
Was ever told when he should come or go.
But every now and then there bursts upon
 The song and mirth a lamentable noise,
 A sound of shrieks and sobs, that strikes our joys
Dumb in our breasts; and then, some one is gone.
They say we meet him. None knows where or when.
We know we shall not meet him here again.

COMPANY

I THOUGHT, “How terrible, if I were seen
Just as in will and deed I had always been!
And if this were the fate that I must face
At the last day, and all else were God’s grace,
How must I shrink and cower before them there,
Stripped naked to the soul and beggared bare
Of every rag of seeming!” Then, “Why, no,”
I thought, “Why should I, if the rest are so?”

HEREDITY

THAT swollen paunch you are doomed to bear
Your gluttonous grandsire used to wear;
That tongue, at once so light and dull,
Wagged in your grandam’s empty skull;
That leering of the sensual eye
Your father, when he came to die,
Left yours alone; and that cheap flirt,
Your mother, gave you from the dirt
The simper which she used upon
So many men ere he was won.
Your vanity and greed and lust
And each your portion from the dust
Of those that died, and from the tomb
Made you what you must needs become.
I do not hold you aught to blame
For sin at second hand, and shame:
Evil could but from evil spring;
And yet, away, you charnel thing!

TWELVE P. M.

TO get home from some scene of gayety,
 Say a long dinner, and the laugh and joke,
 And funny story, and tobacco smoke,
  And all the not unkindly fatuousness
 Of fellow-beings not better and not worse
 Than others are, but gorged with course on course,
  And drenched with wine; and with one’s evening dress
To take off one’s perfunctory smile, and be
 Wholly and solely one’s sheer self again —
 Is like escaping from some dull, dumb pain;
 And in the luxury of that relief,
 It is, in certain sort and measure, as if
 One had put off the body, and the whole
 Illusion of life, and in one’s naked soul
Confronted the eternal Verity.

CHANGE

SOMETIMES, when after spirited debate
 Of letters or affairs, in thought I go
 Smiling unto myself, and all aglow
With some immediate purpose, and elate
As if my little, trivial scheme were great,
 And what I would so were already so:
 Suddenly I think of her that died, and know,
Whatever friendly or unfriendly fate
 Befall me in my hope or in my pride,
It is all nothing but a mockery,
And nothing can be what it used to be,
 When I could bid my happy life abide,
And build on earth for perpetuity,
 Then, in the deathless days before she died.

IN THE DARK

HOW often, when I wake from sleep at night,
 I search my consciousness to find the ill
 That has lurked formlessly within it, still
Haunting me with a shadowy affright;
And try to seize it and to know aright
 Its vague proportions, and my frantic will
 Runs this way and runs that way, with a thrill
Of horror, to all things that ban or blight!
Then, when I find all well, it is as though
 The moment were some reef where I had crept
  From the wide waste of danger and of death,
  And for a little I might draw my breath
 Before the flood came up again, and swept
Over it, and gulfed me in its deeps below.

TO-MORROW

OLD fraud, I know you in that gay disguise,
That air of hope, that promise of surprise:
Beneath your bravery, as you come this way,
I see the sordid presence of To-day;
And I shall see there, long ere you are gone,
All the dull Yesterdays that I have known.

LIVING

HOW passionately I will my life away
Which I would give all that I have to stay;
How wildly I hurry, for the change I crave,
To hurl myself into the changeless grave!

IF

YES, death is at the bottom of the cup,
And every one that lives must drink it up;
And yet between the sparkle at the top
And the black lees where lurks that bitter drop,
There swims enough good liquor, Heaven knows,
To ease our hearts of all their other woes.
The bubbles rise in sunshine at the brim;
That drop below is very far and dim;
The quick fumes spread and shape us such bright dreams
That in the glad delirium it seems
As though by some deft sleight, if so we willed,
That drop untasted might be somehow spilled.

SOLITUDE

AH, you cannot befriend me, with all your love’s tender persistence!
 In your arms’ pitying clasp sole and remote I remain,
Rapt as far from help as the last star’s measureless distance,
 Under the spell of our life’s innermost mystery, Pain.

RESPITE

DROWSING, the other afternoon, I lay
 In that sweet interlude that falls between
 Waking and sleeping, when all being is seen
Of one complexion, and the vague dreams play
Among the thoughts, and the thoughts go astray
 Among the dreams. My mother, who has been
 Dead almost half my life, appeared to lean
Above me, a boy, in a house far away,
That once was home, and all the troubled years
 That have been since were as if they were not.
The voices that are hushed were in my ears,
 The looks and motions that I had forgot
Were in my eyes; and they disowned the tears
 That now again beneath their lids are hot.

QUESTION

SHALL it be after the long misery
 Of easeless pillows, and the waste of flesh
 In sickness, till some worn and widening mesh
Frays out at last, and lets the soul go free?
Or, shall some violent accident suddenly
 Dismiss it, or some black cloud in the brain
 Lower till life maddens against the amain?
Where, in what land, or on what lonely sea?
 When, in the light of what unrisen sun?
 Under what fatal planet? There is none
Can tell, or know aught but that it shall be:
 The one thing certain which all other things
 Have taught my being in its inmost springs
To feel the sole impossibility.

HOPE

WE sailed and sailed upon the desert sea
Where for whole days we alone seemed to be.
At last we saw a dim, vague line arise
Between the empty billows and the skies,
That grew and grew until it wore the shape
Of cove and inlet, promontory and cape;
Then hills and valleys, rivers, fields, and woods,
Steeples and roofs, and village neighborhoods.
And then I thought, “Sometime I shall embark
Upon a sea more desert and more dark
Than ever this was, and between the skies
And empty billows I shall see arise
Another world out of that waste and lapse,
Like yonder land. Perhaps — perhaps — perhaps!”

THE BURDEN

I WRITHED beneath my burden,  fumed and groaned.
My burden that had felt and heard me, moaned:”
You do not know what misery is, nor what
The bitterest part is of our common lot.
The strength I load in you with my loath weight,
My weakness would so gladly own its fate.
Think, once, how much more dreadful it must be
To be the burden than bear it, and pity me!”

CALVARY

IF He could doubt on His triumphant cross,
How much more I, in the defeat and loss
Of seeing all my selfish dreams fulfilled,
Of having lived the very life I willed,
Of being all that I desired to be?
My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me?

CONSCIENCE

JUDGE me not as I judge myself, O Lord!
  Show me some mercy, or I may not live:
Let the good in me go without reward;
 Forgive the evil I must not forgive!

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

YOU are the best and the worst of everything you require.
  If you have looked on shame willingly, yours is the shame.
You are the evil you mean, and you are the good you desire;
 You shall be for yourself both the praise and the blame.

SYMPATHY

FRIEND, neighbor, stranger, as the case may be,
You who are sitting in the stall next me,
And listening also to this pitiless play
That says for me all that I would not say,
And follows me, however I wind about,
And seems to turn my whole life inside out:
I wonder, should I speak and be the first
To own just where in my soul it hurt worst,
And you revealed in yours the spot its flame

STATISTICS

SO many men, on such a date of May,
Despaired and took their hopeless lives away
In such another place, it would appear
The assassinations averaged so and so,
Through August after August, scarce below
A given range; and in another one,
March after March, it seems there were undone
So many women still about the same,
With little varying circumstance in their shame;
Burglaries, arsons, thefts, and forgeries
Had their own averages as well as these;
And from these figures science can discern
The future in the past. We but return
Upon our steps, although they seem so free.
The thing that has been is that which shall be.
Dark prophet, yes! But still somehow the round
Is spiral, and the race’s feet have found
The path rise under them which they have trod.
Your facts are facts, yet somewhere there is God.

PARABLE

THE young man who had great possessions dreamed
That once again he came to Christ and seemed
To hear Him making answer as before,
“Sell all thou hast and give unto the poor,
And come and follow me.”
And now he did
In all immediately as Jesus bid.
Then some of them to whom he gave his wealth
Mocked at him for a fool or mad, by stealth
Or openly; and others he could see
Wasting his substance with a spendthrift glee;

And others yet were tempted, and drawn in
The ways of sin that had not dreamed of sin:
Others, besides, that took were robbed and killed:
Some that had toiled their whole lives were unwilled
By riches, and began the life accurst
Of idleness, like rich men from the first.
Some hid his money in the earth, a root
From which should grow a flower of deadly fruit;
Some kept, and put it out at usury,
And made men slaves with it that had been free.
The young man’s dream was broken with his grief,
And he awoke to his immense relief,
And wept for joy, and cried, “He could not know
What dire results from His behests would flow!
I must not follow Him, but I can fulfil
The spirit, if not the letter, of His will.
Seeing the things I have been shown in sleep,
I realize how much better ‘twere to keep
The means that Providence has bestowed on me,
Doubtless for some wise purpose, and to be
The humble agency and instrument
Of good to others not intelligent
Enough to use the gifts of God aright.
“He rose up with a heart at peace, and light;
And thenceforth none of the Deserving Poor
Ever went empty-handed from his door.

VISION

WITHIN a poor man’s squalid home I stood:
  The one bare chamber, where his work-worn wife
 Above the stove and wash-tub passed her life,
Next the sty where they slept with all their brood.
But I saw not that sunless, breathless lair,
 The chamber’s sagging roof and reeking floor;
 The smeared walls, broken sash, and battered door;
The foulness and forlornness everywhere.
I saw a great house with the portals wide
 Upon a banquet room, and, from without,
  The guests descending in a brilliant line
By the stair’s statued niches, and beside
 The loveliest of the gemmed and silken rout
  The poor man’s landlord leading down to dine.

SOCIETY

I LOOKED and saw a splendid pageantry
Of beautiful women and of lordly men,
Taking their pleasure in a flowery plain,
Where poppies and the red anemone,
And many another leaf of cramoisy,
Flickered about their feet, and gave their stain
To heels of iron or satin, and the grain
Of silken garments floating far and free,
As in the dance they wove themselves, or strayed
By twos together, or lightly smiled and bowed,
Or curtseyed to each other, or else played
At games of mirth and pastime, unafraid In their delight; and all so high and proud They seemed scarce of the earth whereon they trod.

II

I looked again and saw that flowery space
Stirring, as if alive, beneath the tread
That rested now upon an old man’s head
And now upon a baby’s gasping face,
Or mother’s bosom, or the rounded grace
Of a girl’s throat; and what had seemed the red
Of flowers was blood, in gouts and gushes shed
From hearts that broke under that frolic pace.
And now and then from out the dreadful floor
An arm or brow was lifted from the rest,
As if to strike in madness, or implore
For mercy; and anon some suffering breast
Heaved from the mass and sank; and as before
The revellers above them thronged and prest.

GOOD SOCIETY

YES, I suppose it is well to make some sort of exclusion,
  Well to put up the bars, under whatever pretence;
Only be careful, be very careful, lest in the confusion
 You should shut yourself on the wrong side of the fence.

FRIENDS AND FOES

BITTER the things one’s enemies will say
Against one sometimes when one is away,
But of a bitterness far more intense
The things one’s friends will say in one’s defence.

SPHINX

WE who are nothing but self, and have no manner of being
  Save in the sense of self, still have no other delight
Like the relief that comes with the blessed oblivion freeing
 Self from self in the deep sleep of some dreamless night.
Losing alone is finding; the best of being is ceasing
Now and again to be. Then at the end of this strife,
That which comes, if we will it or not, for our releasing,
 Is it eternal death, or is it infinite life?

MATERIALS OF A STORY

I MET a friend of mine the other day
Upon the platform of a West End car;
We shook hands, and my friend began to say
Quickly, as if he were not going far,
“Last summer something rather in your way
Came to my knowledge. I was asked to see
A young man who had come to talk with me
Because I was a clergyman; and he
Told me at once that he had served his time
In the state-prison for a heinous crime,
And was just out. He had no friends, or none
To speak of; and he seemed far gone

With a bad cough. He said he had not done
The thing. They all say that. You cannot tell
He might not have been guilty of it. Well,
What he now wanted was some place to stay,
And work that he could do. I managed it
With no great trouble. And then, there began
The strangest thing I ever knew. The man,
Who showed no other signs of a weak wit,
Was hardly settled in his place a week
When he came round to see me, and to speak
About his lodging. What the matter was
He could not say, or would not tell the cause,
But he must leave that place; he could not bear
To stay. I found another room, but there
After another week he could not stay.
Again I placed him, and he came to say
At the week’s end that he must go away.
So it went on, week after week, and then
At last I made him tell me. It appears
That his imprisonment of fifteen years
Had worn so deep into the wretch’s brain
That any place he happened to remain
Longer than one day in began to seem
His prison and all over again to him;
And when the thing had got into this shape,
He was quite frantic till he could escape.
Curious, was not it? And tragical.”
“Tragical? I believe you! Was that all?
What has become of him?” “Oh, he is dead.
I told some people of him, and we made
A decent funeral for him. At the end
It came out that his mother was alive —
An outcast — and she asked our leave to attend
The ceremony, and then asked us to give
The silver coffin plate, carved with his name,
And the flowers, to her.” “That was touching. She
Had some good left in her infamy.”
“Why, I don’t know! I think she sold the things,
Together with a neck-pin and some rings
That he had left, and drank....
But as to blame....
Good-morning to you!” and my friend stepped down
At the street crossing. I went on up town.

THE KING DINES

TWO people on a bench in Boston Common,
An ordinary laboring man and woman,
Seated together,
In the November weather
Slit with a thin, keen rain;
The woman’s mouth purple with cold and pain,
And her eyes fixed as if they did not see
The passers trooping by continually,
Smearing the elm leaves underfoot that fall
Before her on the miry mall;
The man feeding out of the newspaper
Wrapped round the broken victuals brought with her,
And gnawing at a bent bone like a dog,
Following its curve hungrily with his teeth,
And his head twisted sidewise; and beneath
His reeking boots the mud, and the gray fog
Fathomless over him, and all the gloom
Of the day round him for his dining-room.

LABOR AND CAPITAL

A SPITEFUL snow spit through the bitter day
In little stinging pellets gray,
And crackling on the frozen street
About the iron feet,
Broad stamped in massy shoes
Sharpened and corked for winter use,
Of the huge Norman horses plump and round,
In burnished brass and shining leather bound,
Dragging each heavy fetlock like a mane,
And shaking as they pull the ponderous wain
With wheels that jar the ground
In a small earthquake, where they jolt and grind,
And leave a span-wide track behind:
And hunched upon the load
Above the Company’s horses like a toad,
All hugged together
Against the pitiless weather,
In an old cardigan jacket and a cap
Of mangy fur,
And a frayed comforter
Around his stiffened chin, too scant to wrap
His purple ears,
And in his blinking eyes what had been tears,
But that they seemed to have frozen there ere they ran,
The Company’s man.

EQUALITY

THE beautiful dancing-women wove their maze,
  With many a swift lascivious leer and lure
For the hot theatre, whose myriad gaze
 Burned on their shamelessness with eyes impure.
Then one that watched unseen among them — dread,
Mystical, ineffable of presence — said,”Patience!
 And leave me these poor wanton ones:
Soon they shall lie as meek and cold as nuns;
And you that hire them here to tempt your lust
Shall be as all the saints are, in the dust.”

JUDGMENT DAY

BEFORE Him weltered like a shoreless sea
 The souls of them that had not sought to be,
With all their guilt upon them, and they cried,
They that had sinned from hate and lust and pride,
“Thou that didst make us what we might become,
Judge us!” The Judge of all the earth was dumb;
But high above them, in His sovereign place,
He lifted up the pity of His face.

MORTALITY

HOW many times have I lain down at night,
And longed to fall into that gulf of sleep
Whose dreamless deep
Is haunted by no memory of
The weary world above;
And thought myself most miserable that IMust impotently lie
So long upon the brink
Without the power to sink
Into that nothingness, and neither feel nor think!
How many times, when day brought back the light
After the merciful oblivion
Of such unbroken slumber,
And once again began to cumber
My soul with her forgotten cares and sorrows,
And show in long perspective the gray morrows,
Stretching monotonously on,
Forever narrowing but never done,
Have I not loathed to live again and said,
It would have been far better to be dead,
And yet somehow, I know not why,
Remained afraid to die!

ANOTHER DAY

ANOTHER day, and with it that brute joy,
 Or that prophetic rapture of the boy
Whom every morning brings as glad a breath
As if it dawned upon the end of death!
All other days have run the common course,
And left me at their going neither worse
Nor better for them; only, a little older,
A little sadder, and a little colder.
But this, it seems as if this day might be
The day I somehow always thought to see,
And that should come to bless me past the scope
And measure of my farthest-reaching hope.
To-day, maybe, the things that were concealed
Before the first day was, shall be revealed,
The riddle of our misery shall be read,
And it be clear whether the dead are dead.
Before this sun shall sink into the west
The tired earth may have fallen on his breast,
And into heaven the world have passed away...
At any rate, it is another day!

SOME ONE ELSE

LIVE my life over? I would rather not.
 Though I could choose, perhaps, a fairer lot,
I cannot hope I should be worthier it,
Or wiser by experience any whit.
Being what I am, I should but do once more
The things that brought me grief and shame before.
But I should really fancy trying again
For some one else who had lived once in vain:
Somehow another’s erring life allures;
And were I you, I might improve on yours.

LIFE

ONCE a thronged thoroughfare that wound afar
 By shining streams, and waving fields and woods,
And festal cities and sweet solitudes,
All whither, onward to the utmost star:
Now a blind alley, lurking by the shore
Of stagnant ditches, walled with reeking crags,
Where one old heavy-hearted vagrant lags,
Footsore, at nightfall limping to Death’s door.

WEATHER-BREEDER

OH, not to know that such a happiness
 To be wished greater were to be made less;
That one drop more must make it spill in tears
Of agony that blisters and that sears;
That the supreme perfection of thy bliss
Alone could mother misery like this!

PEONAGE

HOW tired the Recording Angel must begin
 To be of setting down the same old sin,
The same old folly, year out and year in,
Since I knew how to err, against my name!
It makes me sick at heart and sore with shame
To think of that monotony of blame,
For things I fancied once that I should be
Quits with in doing; but at last I see
All that I did became a part of me,
And cannot be put from me, but must still
Remain a potent will within my will,
Holding me debtor, while I live, to ill.

RACE

I

LEAVE me here those looks of yours!
All those pretty airs and lures:Flush of cheek and flash of eye;
Your lips’ smile and their deep dye;
Gleam of the white teeth within;
Dimple of the cloven chin;
All the sunshine that you wear
In the summer of your hair;
All the morning of your face;
All your figure’s wilding grace;
The flower-pose of your head, the light
Flutter of your footsteps’ flight:I own all, and that glad heart
I must claim ere you depart.

II

Go, yet go not unconsoled!
Sometime, after you are old,
You shall come, and I will take
From your brow the sullen ache,
From your eyes the twilight gaze
Darkening upon winter days,
From your feet their palsy pace,
And the wrinkles from your face,
From your locks the snow; the droop
Of your head, your worn frame’s stoop,
And that withered smile within
The kissing of the nose and chin:
I own all, and that sad heart
I will claim ere you depart.

III

I am Race, and both are mine,
Mortal Age and Youth divine:Mine to grant, but not in fee;
Both again revert to me
From each that lives, that I may give
Unto each that yet shall live.

TEMPERAMENT

WHERE love and hate, honor and infamy,
 Change and dissolve away, and cease to be;
Where good and evil in effect are one
In the long tale of years beneath the sun;
Where like the face a man sees in a glass
And turns from, character itself shall pass —
Out of the mystery whence we came we bring
One thing that is the one immutable thing,
Through which we fashion all that we do here,
Which is the body of our hope and fear,
The form of all we feel and all we know,
The color of our weal and of our woe,
And which alone, it may be, we shall bear
Back to that mystery when we go there.

WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?

IF I lay waste and wither up with doubt
 The blessed fields of heaven where once my faith
Possessed itself serenely safe from death;
If I deny the things past finding out;
Or if I orphan my own soul of One
That seemed a Father, and make void the place
Within me where He dwelt in power and grace,
What do I gain by that I have undone?

The Poems

Atlantic Monthly office, Ticknor & Fields, 124 Tremont Street, Boston, c.1868 — after returning to America in 1865 and settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Howells wrote for various magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly. In January 1866 James Fields offered him a position as assistant editor, which Howells accepted after negotiating a higher salary. After five years, in 1871 Howells was made editor and remained in that role until 1881.

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

THE PILOT’S STORY.

FORLORN.

PLEASURE-PAIN.

IN AUGUST.

THE EMPTY HOUSE.

BUBBLES.

LOST BELIEFS.

LOUIS LEBEAU’S CONVERSION.

CAPRICE.

SWEET CLOVER.

THE ROYAL PORTRAITS.

THE FAITHFUL OF THE GONZAGA.

THE FIRST CRICKET.

THE MULBERRIES.

BEFORE THE GATE.

CLEMENT.

BY THE SEA.

SAINT CHRISTOPHER.

ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,

THANKSGIVING.

A SPRINGTIME.

IN EARLIEST SPRING.

THE BOBOLINKS ARE SINGING.

PRELUDE.

THE MOVERS.

THROUGH THE MEADOW.

GONE.

THE SARCASTIC FAIR.

RAPTURE.

DEAD.

THE DOUBT.

THE THORN.

THE MYSTERIES.

THE BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS.

FOR ONE OF THE KILLED.

THE TWO WIVES.

BEREAVED.

THE SNOW-BIRDS.

VAGARY.

FEUERBILDER.

AVERY.

BOPEEP: A PASTORAL.

WHILE SHE SANG.

A POET.

CONVENTION.

THE POET’S FRIENDS.

NO LOVE LOST.

PHILIP — To Bertha.

FANNY — To Clara.

POSTSCRIPT.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

PORDENONE.

THE LONG DAYS.

NOVEMBER

MIDWAY

TIME

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

THE BEWILDERED GUEST

COMPANY

HEREDITY

TWELVE P. M.

CHANGE

IN THE DARK

TO-MORROW

LIVING

IF

SOLITUDE

RESPITE

QUESTION

HOPE

THE BURDEN

CALVARY

CONSCIENCE

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

SYMPATHY

STATISTICS

PARABLE

VISION

SOCIETY

GOOD SOCIETY

FRIENDS AND FOES

SPHINX

MATERIALS OF A STORY

THE KING DINES

LABOR AND CAPITAL

EQUALITY

JUDGMENT DAY

MORTALITY

ANOTHER DAY

SOME ONE ELSE

LIFE

WEATHER-BREEDER

PEONAGE

RACE

TEMPERAMENT

WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

A POET.

A SPRINGTIME.

ANOTHER DAY

AVERY.

BEFORE THE GATE.

BEREAVED.

BOPEEP: A PASTORAL.

BUBBLES.

BY THE SEA.

CALVARY

CAPRICE.

CHANGE

CLEMENT.

COMPANY

CONSCIENCE

CONVENTION.

DEAD.

ELEGY ON JOHN BUTLER HOWELLS,

EQUALITY

FANNY — To Clara.

FEUERBILDER.

FOR ONE OF THE KILLED.

FORLORN.

FRIENDS AND FOES

FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION

GONE.

GOOD SOCIETY

HEREDITY

HOPE

IF

IN AUGUST.

IN EARLIEST SPRING.

IN THE DARK

JUDGMENT DAY

LABOR AND CAPITAL

LIFE

LIVING

LOST BELIEFS.

LOUIS LEBEAU’S CONVERSION.

MATERIALS OF A STORY

MIDWAY

MORTALITY

NO LOVE LOST.

NOVEMBER

PARABLE

PEONAGE

PHILIP — To Bertha.

PLEASURE-PAIN.

PORDENONE.

POSTSCRIPT.

PRELUDE.

QUESTION

RACE

RAPTURE.

RESPITE

REWARD AND PUNISHMENT

SAINT CHRISTOPHER.

SOCIETY

SOLITUDE

SOME ONE ELSE

SPHINX

STATISTICS

SWEET CLOVER.

SYMPATHY

TEMPERAMENT

THANKSGIVING.

THE BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS.

THE BEWILDERED GUEST

THE BOBOLINKS ARE SINGING.

THE BURDEN

THE DOUBT.

THE EMPTY HOUSE.

THE FAITHFUL OF THE GONZAGA.

THE FIRST CRICKET.

THE KING DINES

THE LONG DAYS.

THE MOVERS.

THE MULBERRIES.

THE MYSTERIES.

THE PILOT’S STORY.

THE POET’S FRIENDS.

THE ROYAL PORTRAITS.

THE SARCASTIC FAIR.

THE SNOW-BIRDS.

THE SONG THE ORIOLE SINGS.

THE THORN.

THE TWO WIVES.

THROUGH THE MEADOW.

TIME

TO-MORROW

TWELVE P. M.

VAGARY.

VISION

WEATHER-BREEDER

WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT?

WHILE SHE SANG.

The Travel Writing

The Bridge of Sighs, Venice, during the nineteenth century. Howells was rewarded with a job as American consulate in Venice during the Civil War. His first book was a record of his experiences in the city: Venetian Life (1866)

VENETIAN LIFE

CONTENTS

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

In correcting this book for a second edition, I have sought to complete it without altering its original plan: I have given a new chapter sketching the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the present trade and industry of Venice; I have amplified somewhat the chapter on the national holidays, and have affixed an index to the chief historical persons, incidents, and places mentioned.

Believing that such value as my book may have is in fidelity to what I actually saw and knew of Venice, I have not attempted to follow speculatively the grand and happy events of last summer in their effects upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that in the traits at which I loved most to look, the life of Venice is not so much changed as her fortunes; but at any rate I am content to remain true to what was fact one year ago.

W. D. H.

Cambridge, January 1, 1867.

CHAPTER I.

VENICE IN VENICE.

One night at the little theatre in Padua, the ticket-seller gave us the stage-box (of which he made a great merit), and so we saw the play and the byplay. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, bore a chief part in the drama (as indeed the prompter always does in the Italian theatre), and the scene-shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pursued by the villain of the piece, pause calmly in the wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, upon the stage; and we were dismayed to behold the injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of the theatre was perfectly apparent to us; we saw the grossness of the painting and the unreality of the properties. And yet I cannot say that the play lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the working of the machinery and its inevitable clumsiness disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was so much truth and beauty in the playing, that I did not care for the sham of the ropes and gilding, and presently ceased to take any note of them. The illusion which I had thought an essential in the dramatic spectacle, turned out to be a condition of small importance.

It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had given me a stage-box at another and grander spectacle, and I had been suffered to see this VENICE, which is to other cities like the pleasant improbability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place without learning to know it differently from those writers who have described it in romances, poems, and hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my point of observation the sham and cheapness with which Venice is usually brought out, if I may so speak, in literature. At the same time, it has never lost for me its claim upon constant surprise and regard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its peerless picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grandeur. It is true that the streets in Venice are canals; and yet you can walk to any part of the city, and need not take boat whenever you go out of doors, as I once fondly thought you must. But after all, though I find dry land enough in it, I do not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or less a charm. By day, the canals are still the main thoroughfares; and if these avenues are not so full of light and color as some would have us believe, they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others pretend. And by night, they are still as dark and silent as when the secret vengeance of the Republic plunged its victims into the ungossiping depths of the Canalazzo!

Did the vengeance of the Republic ever do any such thing?

Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to question that reputation for vindictive and gloomy cruelty alien historians have given to a government which endured so many centuries in the willing obedience of its subjects; but to think that the careful student of the old Republican system will condemn it for faults far different from those for which it is chiefly blamed. At all events, I find it hard to understand why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish and despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians so much regret and sorrow for its fall.

So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams — the Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his prejudices — the merciless Venice of Dar�, and of the historians who follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he sees; and will think with me that the place loses little in the illusion removed; and — to take leave of our theatrical metaphor — I promise to fatigue him with no affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may go to illustrate Life in Venice; and positively he shall suffer no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which, in Latin countries, so often get from travelers’ beds into their books.

Let us mention here at the beginning some of the sentimental errors concerning the place, with which we need not trouble ourselves hereafter, but which no doubt form a large part of every one’s associations with the name of Venice. Let us take, for example, that pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. There are few, I fancy, who will hear it mentioned without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel machinery of the Serenest Republic’s policy. When I entered it the first time I was at the pains to call about me the sad company of those who had passed its corridors from imprisonment to death; and, I doubt not, many excellent tourists have done the same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, and that the melancholy assemblage which I then conjured up was composed entirely of honest rogues, who might indeed have given as graceful and ingenious excuses for being in misfortune as the galley-slaves rescued by Don Quixote, — who might even have been very picturesque, — but who were not at all the material with which a well-regulated imagination would deal. The Bridge of Sighs was not built till the end of the sixteenth century, and no romantic episode of political imprisonment and punishment (except that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs in Venetian history later than that period. But the Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sentiment from any such episode, being, as it was, merely a means of communication between the Criminal Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the Criminal Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut-purse knaves, and murderers do not commonly impart a poetic interest to places which have known them; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron drew attention to it. The name of the bridge was given by the people from that opulence of compassion which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in difficulties. [Footnote: The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing of sentimental errors about Venice: —

“The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yesterday, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice; no great merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breathless interest; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address at one of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a hundred and fifty years after Faliero’s death.” — Stories of Venice.]

Political offenders were not confined in the “prison on each hand” of the poet, but in the famous pozzi (literally, wells) or dungeons under the Ducal Palace. And what fables concerning these cells have not been uttered and believed! For my part, I prepared my coldest chills for their exploration, and I am not sure that before I entered their gloom some foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in my mind, to be afterward written out as my Emotions on looking at them. I do not say now that they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spectator with prison-life; but they are certainly far from being as bad as I hoped. They are not joyously light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could have suffered no extreme physical discomfort; and the thick wooden casing of the interior walls evidences at least the intention of the state to inflict no wanton hardships of cold and damp.

But on whose account had I to be interested in the pozzi? It was difficult to learn, unless I took the word of sentimental hearsay. I began with Marin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to languish in these dungeons for a moment. He was imprisoned in the apartments of state, and during one night only. His fellow-conspirators were hanged nearly as fast as taken.

Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several other political prisoners of sad and famous memory with scarcely better effect. To a man, they struggled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, and escaped from the pozzi by every artifice of fact and figure.

The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the city of Venice, and their story is the most pathetic and romantic in Venetian history. But it was not the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed their cruel taking-off: they were strangled in the prison formerly existing at the top of the palace, called the Torresella. [Footnote: Galliciolli, Memorie Venete.] It is possible, however, that Jacopo Foscari may have been confined in the pozzi at different times about the middle of the fifteenth century. With his fate alone, then, can the horror of these cells be satisfactorily associated by those who relish the dark romance of Venetian annals; for it is not to be expected that the less tragic fortunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may also have been imprisoned in the pozzi, can move the true sentimentalizer. Certainly, there has been anguish enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, but we know little of it by name, and cannot confidently relate it to any great historic presence.

Touching the Giant’s Stairs in the court of the palace, the inexorable dates would not permit me to rest in the delusion that the head of Marin Falier had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the ground — at the end of Lord Byron’s tragedy. Nor could I keep unimpaired my vision of the Chief of the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he proclaimed the traitor’s death to the people from between the two red columns in the southern gallery of the palace; — that fa�ade was not built till nearly a century later.

I suppose, — always judging by my own average experience, — that besides these gloomy associations, the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of brilliant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground of the brightest picture will be the Carnival of Venice, full of antic delight, romantic adventure, and lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, and, in this way, the conventional, masquerading, pleasure-loving Venice is become as gross a fiction as if, like that other conventional Venice of which I have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no greater social dullness and sadness, on land or sea, than in contemporary Venice.

The causes of this change lie partly in the altered character of the whole world’s civilization, partly in the increasing poverty of the city, doomed four hundred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly (the Venetians would be apt to tell you wholly) in the implacable anger, the inconsolable discontent, with which the people regard their present political condition.

If there be more than one opinion among men elsewhere concerning the means by which Austria acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she holds the province, there would certainly seem to be no division on the question in Venice. To the stranger first inquiring into public feeling, there is something almost sublime in the unanimity with which the Venetians appear to believe that these means were iniquitous, and that this tenure is abominable; and though shrewder study and carefuler observation will develop some interested attachment to the present government, and some interested opposition of it; though after-knowledge will discover, in the hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the hatred is still found marvelously unanimous and bitter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exercising at Venice official functions by permission and trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard the cessation of those functions as release from obligations both to that government and my own, which render it improper for me, so long as the Austrians remain in Venice, to criticize their rule, or contribute, by comment on existing things, to embitter the feeling against them elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, speak dispassionately of facts of the abnormal social and political state of the place; and I can certainly do this, for the present situation is so disagreeable in many ways to the stranger forced to live there, — the inappeasable hatred of the Austrians by the Italians is so illiberal in application to those in any wise consorting with them, and so stupid and puerile in many respects, that I think the annoyance which it gives the foreigner might well damp any passion with which he was disposed to speak of its cause.

This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity from the defeat of patriotic hopes of union with Italy in 1859, when Napoleon found the Adriatic at Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was concluded. But it is not to be supposed that a feeling so general, and so thoroughly interwoven with Venetian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to the Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the subjection into which she fell a second time after Napoleon’s ruin, by the treaties of the Holy Alliance, defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, and loaded with heavier servitude after the fall of the short-lived Republic of 1849, — Venice has always hated her masters with an exasperation deepened by each remove from the hope of independence, and she now detests them with a rancor which no concession short of absolute relinquishment of dominion would appease.

Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety and private hospitality in Venice for which the city was once famous, the stranger finds himself planted between two hostile camps, with merely the choice of sides open to him. Neutrality is solitude and friendship with neither party; society is exclusive association with the Austrians or with the Italians. The latter do not spare one of their own number if he consorts with their masters, and though a foreigner might expect greater allowance, it is seldom shown to him. To be seen in the company of officers is enmity to Venetian freedom, and in the case of Italians it is treason to country and to race. Of course, in a city where there is a large garrison and a great many officers who have nothing else to do, there is inevitably some international love-making, although the Austrian officers are rigidly excluded from association with the citizens. But the Italian who marries an Austrian severs the dearest ties that bind her to life, and remains an exile in the heart of her country. Her friends mercilessly cast her off, as they cast off every body who associates with the dominant race. In rare cases I have known Italians to receive foreigners who had Austrian friends, but this with the explicit understanding that there was to be no sign of recognition if they met them in the company of these detested acquaintance.

There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian hatred, and after hearing certain persons pour out the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you may chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in their patriotism by yet more fiery haters. Yet it must not be supposed that the Italians hate the Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they have rather a liking for them — rather a contemptuous liking, for they think them somewhat slow and dull-witted — and individually the Austrians are amiable people, and try not to give offence. The government is also very strict in its control of the military. I have never seen the slightest affront offered by a soldier to a citizen; and there is evidently no personal ill-will engendered. The Austrians are simply hated as the means by which an alien and despotic government is imposed upon a people believing themselves born for freedom and independence. This hatred, then, is a feeling purely political, and there is political machinery by which it is kept in a state of perpetual tension.

The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians residing within the province and abroad, who have charge of the Italian interests, and who work in every way to promote union with the dominions of Victor Emanuel. They live for the most part in Venice, where they have a secret press for the publication of their addresses and proclamations, and where they remain unknown to the police, upon whose spies they maintain an espionage. On every occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make its presence felt; and from time to time persons find themselves in the possession of its printed circulars, stamped with the Committee’s seal; but no one knows how or whence they came. Constant arrests of suspected persons are made, but no member of the Committee has yet been identified; and it is said that the mysterious body has its agents in every department of the government, who keep it informed of inimical action. The functions of the Committee are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all patriotic anniversaries (such as that of the establishment of the Republic in 1848, and that of the union of the Italian States under Victor Emanuel in 1860) salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a proper number of red, white, and green lights displayed. It inscribes revolutionary sentiments on the walls; and all attempts on the part of the Austrians to revive popular festivities are frustrated by the Committee, which causes petards to be exploded in the Place of St. Mark, and on the different promenades. Even the churches are not exempt from these demonstrations: I was present at the Te Deum performed on the Emperor’s birthday, in St. Mark’s, when the moment of elevating the host was signalized by the bursting of a petard in the centre of the cathedral. All this, which seems of questionable utility, and worse than questionable taste, is approved by the fiercer of the Italianissimi, and though possibly the strictness of the patriotic discipline in which the members of the Committee keep their fellow-citizens may gall some of them, yet any public demonstration of content, such as going to the opera, or to the Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It is, of course, the Committee’s business to keep the world informed of public feeling in Venice, and of each new act of Austrian severity. Its members are inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently manifested as their patriotism.

The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in mourning, and have, as I said, disused all their former pleasures and merry-makings. Every class, except a small part of the resident titled nobility (a great part of the nobility is in either forced or voluntary exile), seems to be comprehended by this feeling of despondency and suspense. The poor of the city formerly found their respite and diversion in the numerous holidays which fell in different parts of the year, and which, though religious in their general character, were still inseparably bound up in their origin with ideas of patriotism and national glory. Such of these holidays as related to the victories and pride of the Republic naturally ended with her fall. Many others, however, survived this event in all their splendor, but there is not one celebrated now as in other days. It is true that the churches still parade their pomps in the Piazza on the day of Corpus Christi; it is true that the bridges of boats are still built across the Canalazzo to the church of Our Lady of Salvation, and across the Canal of the Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the respective festivals of these churches; but the concourse is always meagre, and the mirth is forced and ghastly. The Italianissimi have so far imbued the people with their own ideas and feelings, that the recurrence of the famous holidays now merely awakens them to lamentations over the past and vague longings for the future.

As for the carnival, which once lasted six months of the year, charming hither all the idlers of the world by its peculiar splendor and variety of pleasure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is dead, and its shabby, wretched ghost is a party of beggars, hideously dressed out with masks and horns and women’s habits, who go from shop to shop droning forth a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the shopkeepers. The crowd through which these melancholy jesters pass, regards them with a pensive scorn, and goes about its business untempted by the delights of carnival.

All other social amusements have shared in greater or less degree the fate of the carnival. At some houses conversazioni are still held, and it is impossible that balls and parties should not now and then be given. But the greater number of the nobles and the richer of the professional classes lead for the most part a life of listless seclusion, and attempts to lighten the general gloom and heaviness in any way are not looked upon with favor. By no sort of chance are Austrians, or Austriacanti ever invited to participate in the pleasures of Venetian society.

As the social life of Italy, and especially of Venice, was in great part to be once enjoyed at the theatres, at the caff�, and at the other places of public resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in those places. No lady of perfect standing among her people goes to the opera, and the men never go in the boxes, but if they frequent the theatre at all, they take places in the pit, in order that the house may wear as empty and dispirited a look as possible. Occasionally a bomb is exploded in the theatre, as a note of reminder, and as means of keeping away such of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. As it is less easy for the Austrians to participate in the diversion of comedy, it is a less offence to attend the comedy, though even this is not good Italianissimism. In regard to the caff� there is a perfectly understood system by which the Austrians go to one, and the Italians to another; and Florian’s, in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground in the city on which the hostile forces consent to meet. This is because it is thronged with foreigners of all nations, and to go there is not thought a demonstration of any kind. But the other caff� in the Piazza do not enjoy Florian’s cosmopolitan immunity, and nothing would create more wonder in Venice than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless, indeed, it were the presence of a good Italian at the Quadri.

It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of hatred and discontent chiefly takes place. Here, thrice a week, in winter and summer, the military band plays that exquisite music for which the Austrians are famous. The selections are usually from Italian operas, and the attraction is the hardest of all others for the music-loving Italian to resist. But he does resist it. There are some noble ladies who have not entered the Piazza while the band was playing there, since the fall of the Republic of 1849; and none of good standing for patriotism has attended the concerts since the treaty of Villafranca in ‘59. Until very lately, the promenaders in the Piazza were exclusively foreigners, or else the families of such government officials as were obliged to show themselves there. Last summer, however, before the Franco-Italian convention for the evacuation of Rome revived the drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had begun visibly to falter in their long endurance. But this was, after all, only a slight and transient weakness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the Piazza when the music begins, and walk upon the long quay at the sea-side of the Ducal Palace; or if they remain in the Piazza they pace up and down under the arcades on either side; for Venetian patriotism makes a delicate distinction between listening to the Austrian band in the Piazza and hearing it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first and permitting the last. As soon as the music ceases the Austrians disappear, and the Italians return to the Piazza.

But since the catalogue of demonstrations cannot be made full, it need not be made any longer. The political feeling in Venice affects her prosperity in a far greater degree than may appear to those who do not understand how large an income the city formerly derived from making merry. The poor have to lament not merely the loss of their holidays, but also of the fat employments and bountiful largess which these occasions threw into their hands. With the exile or the seclusion of the richer families, and the reluctance of foreigners to make a residence of the gloomy and dejected city, the trade of the shopkeepers has fallen off; the larger commerce of the place has also languished and dwindled year by year; while the cost of living has constantly increased, and heavier burdens of taxation have been laid upon the impoverished and despondent people. And in all this, Venice is but a type of the whole province of Venetia.

The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely worth noting. The Austrians have a casino, and they give balls and parties, and now and then make some public manifestation of gayety. But they detest Venice as a place of residence, being naturally averse to living in the midst of a people who shun them like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, and it is amusing enough to find the few English residents divided into Austriacanti and Italianissimi. [Footnote: Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics, though not of Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union with Italy at any cost.]

Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in every way bound to neutrality and indifference, are popularly reputed to be of one party or the other, and my predecessor, whose unhappy knowledge of German threw him on his arrival among people of that race, was always regarded as the enemy of Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles were of the most vivid republican tint in the United States.

The present situation has now endured five years, with only slight modifications by time, and only faint murmurs from some of the more impatient, that bisogna, una volta o l’altra, romper il chiodo, (sooner or later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are a people of indomitable perseverance, long schooled to obstinacy by oppression, I suppose they will hold out till their union with the kingdom of Italy. They can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content to wait forever in their present gloom. How deeply their attitude affects their national character I shall inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat more closely at the spirit of their demonstration.

For the present, it is certain that the discontent of the people has its peculiar effect upon the city as the stranger sees its life, casting a glamour over it all, making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my pages; but failing that, would pray the reader to remember as a fact to which I must be faithful in all my descriptions of Venice.

CHAPTER II.

ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE.

I think it does not matter just when I first came to Venice. Yesterday and to-day are the same here. I arrived one winter morning about five o’clock, and was not so full of Soul as I might have been in warmer weather. Yet I was resolved not to go to my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my valise in the station, inferred from some very polyglottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into a gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a beggar in picturesque and desultory costume. He was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, for my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I dare say every traveler recollects, — the merciless tribe who hold your gondola to shore, and affect to do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend not to be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call them gransieri, or crab-catchers; but as yet I did not know the name or the purpose of this poverino [Footnote: Poverino is the compassionate generic for all unhappy persons who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who decline to do so.] at the station, but merely saw that he had the Venetian eye for color: in the distribution and arrangement of his fragments of dress he had produced some miraculous effects of red, and he was altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of brigands would like to meet in a lonely place. He did not offer to stab me and sink my body in the Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that he ought to have done; but he implored an alms, and I hardly know now whether to exult or regret that I did not understand him, and left him empty-handed. I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which he had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal; but I heard nothing, for the wonder of the city was already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so to speak, was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway journey from Vienna, while every surface-sense was taken and tangled in the bewildering brilliancy and novelty of Venice. For I think there can be nothing else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite surprise, as that first glimpse of Venice which the traveler catches as he issues from the railway station by night, and looks upon her peerless strangeness. There is something in the blessed breath of Italy (how quickly, coming south, you know it, and how bland it is, after the harsh, transalpine air!) which prepares you for your nocturnal advent into the place; and O you! whoever you are, that journey toward this enchanted city for the first time, let me tell you how happy I count you! There lies before you for your pleasure, the spectacle of such singular beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell you, — beauty which you shall feel perfectly but once, and regret forever.

For my own part, as the gondola slipped away from the blaze and bustle of the station down the gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot that I had been freezing two days and nights; that I was at that moment very cold and a little homesick. I could at first feel nothing but that beautiful silence, broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. Then on either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray and lofty from the dark waters, holding here and there a lamp against their faces, which brought balconies, and columns, and carven arches into momentary relief, and threw long streams of crimson into the canal. I could see by that uncertain glimmer how fair was all, but not how sad and old; and so, unhaunted by any pang for the decay that afterward saddened me amid the forlorn beauty of Venice, I glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I thought them; but they passed vaguely through my mind, without at all interrupting the sensations of sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed there, and the moral and material were blent in the sentiment of utter novelty and surprise. The quick boat slid through old troubles of mine, and unlooked-for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, and safely around sharp corners of life. And all the while I knew that this was a progress through narrow and crooked canals, and past marble angles of palaces. But I did not know then that this fine confusion of sense and spirit was the first faint impression of the charm of life in Venice.

Dark, funereal barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the lines of balconied palaces had never ended; — here and there at their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out of the Grand Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from comparative light into a darkness only remotely affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But always the pallid, stately palaces; always the dark heaven with its trembling stars above, and the dark water with its trembling stars below; but now innumerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these strait and solitary passages, which was part of the strange enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gondoliers. Was not this Venice, and is not Venice forever associated with bravoes and unexpected dagger-thrusts? That valise of mine might represent fabulous wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the Situation — (as we say in the journals)? To move on was relief; to pause was regret for past transgressions mingled with good resolutions for the future. But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, when, slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gondola suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and rang again, while their passenger

   “Divided the swift mind,”

in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and austerely barred could possibly open into a hotel, with cheerful overcharges for candles and service. But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the honest swindling countenance of a hotel portier, he felt secure against every thing but imposture, and all wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at once faded from his thought, when the portier suffered the gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much.

So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the influence of that complex spell which she lays upon the stranger. I had caught the most alluring glimpses of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any fragment of her sculptured walls nods to its shadow in the canal; I had been penetrated by a deep sense of the mystery of the place, and I had been touched already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes where its presence offers, according to the humor in which it is studied, constant occasion for annoyance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness.

I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier days after my arrival need scarcely be set down even in this perishable record; but I would not wholly forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance and alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home in Venice from the first. I believe it was because I had, after my own fashion, loved the beautiful that I here found the beautiful, where it is supreme, full of society and friendship, speaking a language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I could partly understand, and at once making me citizen of that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It was not in the presence of the great and famous monuments of art alone that I felt at home — indeed, I could as yet understand their excellence and grandeur only very imperfectly — but wherever I wandered through the quaint and marvelous city, I found the good company of

   “The fair, the old;”

and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in Venice, and I learned to turn to it later from other companionship with a kind of relief.

My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm which knowledge of locality has since taken away. They began commonly with some purpose or destination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies of the narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent little streets in the world, or left me cast-away upon the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little courts lay in wait for my blundering steps, and I was incessantly surprised and brought to surrender by paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sudden brinks of canals. The wide and open squares before the innumerable churches of the city were equally victorious, and continually took me prisoner. But all places had something rare and worthy to be seen: if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, at least interesting squalor and picturesque wretchedness: and I believe I had less delight in proper Objects of Interest than in the dirty neighborhoods that reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered casements above. Every court had its carven well to show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. The remote and noisome canals were pathetic with empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters of epicene linen, and patched the lofty windows with obsolete hats.

I found the night as full of beauty as the day, when caprice led me from the brilliancy of St. Mark’s and the glittering streets of shops that branch away from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses of the courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, where the dull little oil-lamps vied with the tapers burning before the street-corner shrines of the Virgin, [Footnote: In the early times these tapers were the sole means of street illumination in Venice.] in making the way obscure, and deepening the shadows about the doorways and under the frequent arches. I remember distinctly among the beautiful nights of that time, the soft night of late winter which first showed me the scene you may behold from the Public Gardens at the end of the long concave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni. Lounging there upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I turned from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands in the east (a solitary gondola gliding across the calm of the water, and striking its moonlight silver into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all the lights from the Piazzetta to the Giudecca, making a crescent of flame in the air, and casting deep into the water under them a crimson glory that sank also down and down in my own heart, and illumined all its memories of beauty and delight. Behind these lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and palace; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens; the gondola drifted away to the northward; the islands of the lagoons seemed to rise and sink with the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on the undulating fields of banners; the stark rigging of a ship showed black against the sky, the Lido sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore had composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved sea to the music of the surge that gently beat its sands; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above me stirred themselves together, and out of one of those trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full sob burst from the heart of a bell, too deeply stricken with the glory of the scene, and suffused the languid night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness.

But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of the beautiful, and whatsoever pleases is equal to any other thing there, no matter how low its origin or humble its composition; and the magnificence of that moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I won from the fine spectacle of an old man whom I saw burning coffee one night in the little court behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as one of the most interesting people I saw in my first days at Venice. All day long the air of that neighbourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant berry, and all day long this patient old man — sage, let me call him — had turned the sheet-iron cylinder in which it was roasting over an open fire after the picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. Now that the night had fallen, and the stars shone down upon him, and the red of the flame luridly illumined him, he showed more grand and venerable than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own grandeur in Italy; and it is not hard here for the artist to find the primitive types with which genius loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had the beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, harmonized with the squalor of a beggar, superior to which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur of humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had nothing to do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect and attitude; and if he had been some dread supernatural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not have looked more sadly and weirdly impressive. When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped after it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous smoke enveloped him and glorified him — then I felt with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and hopeless magnificence.

At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I was troubled by the aesthetic perfection of a certain ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked Indian-meal to the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, and whom I often noted from the windows of the little caff� there, where you get an excellent caff� bianco (coffee with milk) for ten soldi and one to the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy dealt over shrewdly with the Austrians, for a pitiless war raged between him and one of the sergeants. His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better than olive; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, drawn down to eyes of lustrous black. For the rest, he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and pantaloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the elasticity of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet encased in wooden shoes. Habitually came a barrel-organist, and ground before the barracks, and

   “Took the soul

   Of that waste place with joy;”

and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively waltz, and threw his whole soul, as it were, into the crank of his instrument, my beloved ragamuffin failed not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of figures, in which there was something grotesquely rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric magnificence, spiritualized into a grace of movement superior to the energy of the North and the extravagant fervor of the East. It was coffee and not wine that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the difficulties of dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, something of the same genius that combated and vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea-washed sands in marble structures of airy and stately splendor, and gave to architecture new glories full of eternal surprise.

So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friendship with Venice, and being newly from a land where every thing, morally and materially, was in good repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, the pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every thing about me here. It was not yet the season to behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door life of the place; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that great part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed to have nothing to do, and that nobody seemed to be driven by any inward or outward impulse. When, however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely a spectator of this idleness, and learned that I too must assume my share of the common indolence, I found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old habits of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained fairly and finally that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished, but, after all, merely general designs of literary study, I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents where I felt the motion of the age, only to drift into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote from incentive and sensation.

For such is Venice, and the will must be strong and the faith indomitable in him who can long retain, amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a practical belief in God’s purpose of a great moving, anxious, toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have yielded, as after a while I yielded, to these influences, a gentle incredulity possesses you, and if you consent that such a thing is as earnest and useful life, you cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm of the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you; and I found it a sad condition of my perception of the beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as my own; and when I began to write the sketches which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty were mine. I do not so greatly blame, therefore, the writers who have committed so many sins of omission concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals, and palaces. One’s conscience, more or less uncomfortably vigilant elsewhere, drowses here, and it is difficult to remember that fact is more virtuous than fiction. In other years, when there was life in the city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in her canals, there might have been some incentive to keep one’s thoughts and words from lapsing into habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling the whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, some end to gain. But now, what matter?

CHAPTER III.

THE WINTER IN VENICE

It was winter, as I said, when I first came to Venice, and my experiences of the city were not all purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day roughness and discomfort in the weather, which travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of the season’s clemency in the South. But winter is apt to be very severe in mild climates. People do not acknowledge it, making a wretched pretense that it is summer only a little out of humor.

The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, but they are not in much favor with the Italians, who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, which we of the winter-lands know nothing of in our houses. They pay for their absurd prejudice with terrible chilblains; and their hands, which suffer equally with their feet, are, in the case of those most exposed to the cold, objects pitiable and revolting to behold when the itching and the effort to allay it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant sight of the affliction among people who bring you bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prevalence. I have observed that priests, and those who have much to do in the frigid churches, are the worst sufferers in this way; and I think no one can help noting in the harsh, raw winter-complexion (for in summer the tone is quite different) of the women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly starved of the warmth which health demands.

The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, where there are eight months of summer in the year, all built with a view to coolness in summer, and the rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there are two suites of apartments — the smaller and cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, for defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. But, for the most part, people must occupy the same room summer and winter, the sole change being in the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa during the latter season. In the comparatively few houses where carpets are the rule and not the exception, they are always removed during the summer — for the triple purpose of sparing them some months’ wear, banishing fleas and other domestic insects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in-wrought with figures and designs of mosaic work.

All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether of marble flags, or of that species of composition formed of dark cement, with fragments of colored marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the most glassy and even surface, and the general effect and complexion of petrified plum-pudding, all the floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled in furs and wadded gowns. When one goes out into the sun, one often finds an overcoat too heavy, but it never gives warmth enough in the house, where the Venetian sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun is recognized by Venetians as the only legitimate source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into which he shines.

It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are exposed to the utmost rigor of the winter, and people spend as much of their time as possible in the open air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm afternoon sun in its whole extent, and is then thronged with promenaders of every class, condition, age, and sex; and whenever the sun shines in the Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. At night men crowd the close little caff�, where they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat, and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and beguile the time with solemn loafing, [Footnote: I permit myself, throughout this book, the use of the expressive American words loaf and loafer, as the only terms adequate to the description of professional idling in Venice] and the perusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups of black coffee, and playing long games of chess, — an evening that seemed to me as torpid and lifeless as a Lap’s, and intolerable when I remembered the bright, social winter evenings of another and happier land and civilization.

Sometimes you find a heated stove — that is to say, one in which there has been a fire during the day — in a Venetian house; but the stove seems usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or else to be engaged only in diffusing a very acrid smoke, — as if the Venetian preferred to take warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The stove itself is a curious structure, and built commonly of bricks and plastering, — whitewashed and painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wooding I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian friends always avoided its vicinity when they came to see me, and most amusingly regarded my determination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character.

I daresay they would not trifle with winter, thus, if they knew him in his northern moods. But the only voluntary concession they make to his severity is the scaldino, and this is made chiefly by the yielding sex, who are denied the warmth of the caff�. The use of the scaldino is known to all ranks, but it is the women of the poorer orders who are most addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed earthen-ware, having an earthen bale: and with this handle passed over the arm, and the pot full of bristling charcoal, the Veneziana’s defense against cold is complete. She carries her scaldino with her in the house from room to room, and takes it with her into the street; and it has often been my fortune in the churches to divide my admiration between the painting over the altar and the poor old crone kneeling before it, who, while she sniffed and whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart with religion, baked her dirty palms in the carbonic fumes of the scaldino. In one of the public bathhouses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a poetical idea of the four seasons. There is nothing remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, and Autumn; but Winter is nationally represented by a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in her lap! When we talk of being invaded in the north, we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of defending our hearthstones. Alas! could we fight for our sacred scaldini?

Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell hot pumpkins and pears, for they can unite pleasure and profit. There are some degrees of poverty below the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars and the wretcheder poor keep themselves warm, I think, by sultry recollections of summer, as Don Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remembrances, during one of his periods of fast. One mendicant whom I know, and who always sits upon the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe, as the season advances, in heating the marble beneath him by firm and unswerving adhesion, and establishes a reciprocity of warmth with it. I have no reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a moment during the whole winter; and indeed, it would be a vicious waste of comfort to do so.

In the winter, the whole city sniffs, and if the Pipchin theory of the effect of sniffing upon the eternal interests of the soul be true, few people go to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly wondered if Desdemona, in her time, sniffed, and found little comfort in the reflection that Shylock must have had a cold in his head. There is comparative warmth in the broad squares before the churches, but the narrow streets are bitter thorough-draughts, and fell influenza lies in wait for its prey in all those picturesque, seducing little courts of which I have spoken.

It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twilight and airy height one finds so grateful in summer, that the sharpest malice of the winter is felt; and having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, I deferred the remaining seventy-five or eighty, together with the gallery of the Academy, until advancing spring should, in some degree, have mitigated the severity of their temperature. As far as my imagination affected me, I thought the Gothic churches much more tolerable than the temples of Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with their huge marbles, and their soulless splendors of theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and broken arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palladio’s architecture was especially grievous to the sense in cold weather; and I warn the traveler who goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware how he trusts himself in winter to the gusty, arctic magnificence of the church of the Redentore. But by all means the coldest church in the city is that of the Jesuits, which those who have seen it will remember for its famous marble drapery. This base, mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not art) is effected by inlaying the white marble of columns and pulpits and altars with a certain pattern of verd-antique. The workmanship is marvelously skillful, and the material costly, but it only gives the church the effect of being draped in damask linen; and even where the marble is carven in vast and heavy folds over a pulpit to simulate a curtain, or wrought in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent a carpet, it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a coldness, a harshness indescribably table-clothy. I think all this has tended to chill the soul of the sacristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his temples quite incapable of thawing. In this dreary sanctuary is one of Titian’s great paintings, The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to which (though it is so cunningly disposed as to light that no one ever yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn involuntarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably on his gridiron amid all that frigidity.

The Venetians pretend that many of the late winters have been much severer than those of former years, but I think this pretense has less support in fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to claim that such weather as the present, whatever it happens to be, was never seen before. In fine, the winter climate of north Italy is really very harsh, and though the season is not so severe in Venice as in Milan, or even Florence, it is still so sharp as to make foreigners regret the generous fires and warmly-built houses of the north. There was snow but once during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62; the second there was none at all; but the third, which was last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade. The lagoons were frozen for miles in every direction; and under our windows on the Grand Canal, great sheets of ice went up and down with the rising and the falling tide for nearly a whole month. The visible misery throughout the fireless city was great; and it was a problem I never could solve, whether people in-doors were greater sufferers from the cold than those who weathered the cruel winds sweeping the squares and the canals, and whistling through the streets of stone and brine. The boys had an unwonted season of sliding on the frozen lagoons, though a good deal persecuted by the police, who must have looked upon such a tremendous innovation as little better than revolution; and it was said that there were card-parties on the ice; but the only creatures which seemed really to enjoy the weather were the seagulls. These birds, which flock into the city in vast numbers at the first approach of cold, and, sailing up and down the canals between the palaces, bring to the dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean forlornness and desolation, now rioted on the savage winds, with harsh cries, and danced upon the waves of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had something eldritch and unearthly in it.

A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not fail to produce many memorable incidents of the cold; but the most singular adventure was that of the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to bring milk from the island of San Lazzaro to the city. One night, shortly after the coldest weather set in, he lost his oar as he was returning to the island. The wind, which is particularly furious in that part of the lagoon, blew his boat away into the night, and the good brothers at the convent naturally gave up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters drifted him eight miles from the city into the northern lagoon, and there lodged his boat in the marshes, where it froze fast in the stiffening mud. The luckless occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his boat, where he remained five days and nights, exposed to the inclemency of cold many degrees below friendship in severity. He made continual signs of distress, but no boat came near enough to discover him. At last, when the whole marsh was frozen solid, he was taken off by some fishermen, and carried to the convent, where he remains in perfectly recovered health, and where no doubt he will be preserved alive many years in an atmosphere which renders dying a San Lazzaro a matter of no small difficulty. During the whole time of his imprisonment, he sustained life against hunger and cold by smoking. I suppose no one will be surprised to learn that he was rescued by the fishermen through the miraculous interposition of the Madonna — as any one might have seen by the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a bridge of the Riva degli Schiavoni, wherein the Virgin was represented breaking through the clouds in one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing the operations of the fishermen.

It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 has been known in Venice since the famous Anno del Ghiaccio (Year of the Ice), which fell about the beginning of the last century. This year is celebrated in the local literature; the play which commemorates it always draws full houses at the people’s theatre, Malibran; and the often-copied picture, by a painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and Lustrissimi in hoops and bag-wigs on the ice, never fails to block up the street before the shop-window in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was then the guest of the Republic, and as the unprecedented cold defeated all the plans arranged for his diversion, the pleasure-loving government turned the cold itself to account, and made the ice occasion of novel brilliancy in its festivities. The duties on commerce between the city and the mainland were suspended for as long time as the lagoon should remain frozen, and the ice became a scene of the liveliest traffic, and was everywhere covered with sledges, bringing the produce of the country to the capital, and carrying away its stuffs in return. The Venetians of every class amused themselves in visiting this free mart, and the gentler and more delicate sex pressed eagerly forward to traverse with their feet a space hitherto passable only in gondolas. [Footnote: Origine delle Feste Veneziane, di Giustina Renier-Michiel] The lagoon remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted eighteen days, a period of cold unequaled till last winter. A popular song now declares that the present generation has known a winter quite as marvelous as that of the Year of the Ice, and celebrates the wonder of walking on the water: —

   Che bell’ affar!

   Che patetico affar!

   Che immenso affar!

   Sora l’acqua camminar!

But after all the disagreeable winter, which hardly commences before Christmas, and which ends about the middle of March, is but a small part of the glorious Venetian year; and even this ungracious season has a loveliness, at times, which it can have nowhere but in Venice. What summer-delight of other lands could match the beauty of the first Venetian snow-fall which I saw? It had snowed overnight, and in the morning when I woke it was still snowing. The flakes fell softly and vertically through the motionless air, and all the senses were full of languor and repose. It was rapture to lie still, and after a faint glimpse of the golden-winged angel on the bell-tower of St. Mark’s, to give indolent eye solely to the contemplation of the roof opposite, where the snow lay half an inch deep upon the brown tiles. The little scene — a few square yards of roof, a chimney-pot, and a dormer-window — was all that the most covetous spirit could demand; and I lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while the lingering mists of a dream of new-world events blent themselves with the luxurious humor of the moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made my reverie one of the perfectest things in the world. When I was lost the deepest in it, I was inexpressibly touched and gratified by the appearance of a black cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs commanding pleasant exposures seem to be chiefly devoted to the cultivation of this animal, and there are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked wonderingly upon the snow for a moment, and then ran across the roof. Nothing could have been better. Any creature less silent, or in point of movement less soothing to the eye than a cat, would have been torture of the spirit. As it was, this little piece of action contented me so well, that I left every thing else out of my reverie, and could only think how deliciously the cat harmonized with the snow-covered tiles, the chimney-pot, and the dormer-window. I began to long for her reappearance, but when she did come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased to have the slightest interest in the matter, and experienced only the disgust of satiety. I had felt ennui — nothing remained but to get up and change my relations with the world.

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no rest. It is at once shoveled into the canals by hundreds of half-naked facchini; [Footnote: The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve long seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters and day-laborers.] and now in St. Mark’s Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon my ear; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the possession of the Piazza. But the snow continued to fall, and through the twilight of the descending flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that weary kind of effort in dreams, when the most determined industry seems only to renew the task. The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark’s Church was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of novel enchantment around a structure that always seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness to be any thing but the creation of magic. The tender snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ugliness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand of the builder — or, better said, just from the brain of the architect. There was marvelous freshness in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of the fa�ade, and all that gracious harmony into which the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy exuberance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was a hundred times etherealized by the purity and whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay lightly on the golden globes that tremble like peacock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them with softest white; it robed the saints in ermine; and it danced over all its work, as if exulting in its beauty — beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could never be fairly reflected in picture or poem.

Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theodore upon one of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta did not show so grim as his wont is, and the winged lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so mild and gentle he looked by the tender light of the storm. [Footnote: St. Theodore was the first patron of Venice, but he was deposed and St. Mark adopted, when the bones of the latter were brought from Alexandria. The Venetians seem to have felt some compunctions for this desertion of an early friend, and they have given St. Theodore a place on one of the granite pillars, while the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing St. Mark. Fra Marco e Todaro, is a Venetian proverb expressing the state of perplexity which we indicate by the figure of an ass between two bundles of hay.] The towers of the island churches loomed faint and far away in the dimness; the sailors in the rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought like phantoms among the shrouds; the gondolas stole in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly and dreamily than ever; and a silence, almost palpable, lay upon the mutest city in the world.

CHAPTER IV.

COMINCIA FAR CALDO.

The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and from this beats her life in every direction through an intricate system of streets and canals that bring it back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I lost my way in the city at first, there would always have been this comfort: that the place was very small in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I must reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a crowd constantly tending to and from it, and you have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St. Mark’s — or to the Rialto Bridge, whence it is directly accessible.

Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the Church of St. Mark alone bears the name of Piazza, and the rest are called merely campi, or fields. But if the company of the noblest architecture can give honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, not in Venice only, but in the whole world; for I fancy that no other place in the world is set in such goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated by the Imperial Palace; its lateral borders are formed by lines of palace called the New Procuratie on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the left; [Footnote: In Republican days the palaces of the Procuratori di San Marco.] and the Church of St. Mark fills up almost its whole width upon the east, leaving space enough, however, for a glimpse of the Gothic perfection of the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward with the name of Piazzetta, between the eastern fa�ade of the Ducal Palace and the classic front of the Libreria Vecchia, and expands and ends at last on the mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St. Theodore; and then this mole, passing the southern fa�ade of the Doge’s Palace, stretches away to the Public Gardens at the eastern extremity of the city, over half a score of bridges, between lines of houses and shipping — stone and wooden walls — in the long, crescent-shaped quay called Riva degli Schiavoni. Looking northward up the Piazzetta from the Molo, the vision traverses the eastern breadth of the Piazza, and rests upon the Clock Tower, gleaming with blue and gold, on which the bronze Giants beat the hours; or it climbs the great mass of the Campanile San Marco, standing apart from the church at the corner of the New Procuratie, and rising four hundred feet toward the sky — the sky where the Venetian might well place his heaven, as the Moors bounded Paradise in the celestial expanse that roofed Granada.

My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, and this vicinity brought me early into familiar acquaintance with its beauty. But I never, during three years, passed through it in my daily walks, without feeling as freshly as at first the greatness of this beauty. The church, which the mighty bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-lines make to look low, is in nowise humbled by the contrast, but is like a queen enthroned amid upright reverence. The religious sentiment is deeply appealed to, I think, in the interior of St. Mark’s; but if its interior is heaven’s, its exterior, like a good man’s daily life, is earth’s; and it is this winning loveliness of earth that first attracts you to it, and when you emerge from its portals, you enter upon spaces of such sunny length and breadth, set round with such exquisite architecture, that it makes you glad to be living in this world. Before you expands the great Piazza, peopled with its various life; on your left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta, swims the blue lagoon, and overhead climb the arches, one above another, in excesses of fantastic grace.

Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to have brought hither and made part of his Piazza, that it might remain forever the city’s supreme grace; and so, though there are public gardens and several pleasant walks in the city, the great resort in summer and winter, by day and by night, is the Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Procuratie, is belted with a glittering line of shops and caff�, the most tasteful and brilliant in the world, and the arcades that pass round three of its sides are filled with loungers and shoppers, even when there is music by the Austrian bands; for, as we have seen, the purest patriot may then walk under the Procuratie, without stain to the principles which would be hopelessly blackened if he set foot in the Piazza. The absence of dust and noisy hoofs and wheels tempts social life out of doors in Venice more than in any other Italian city, though the tendency to this sort of expansion is common throughout Italy. Beginning with the warm days of early May, and continuing till the villeggiatura (the period spent at the country seat) interrupts it late in September, all Venice goes by a single impulse of dolce far niente, and sits gossiping at the doors of the innumerable caff� on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the Piazza San Marco, and in the different squares in every part of the city. But, of course, the most brilliant scene of this kind is in St. Mark’s Place, which has a night-time glory indescribable, won from the light of uncounted lamps upon its architectural groups. The superb Imperial Palace — the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Procuratie — the Byzantine magic and splendor of the church — will it all be there when you come again to-morrow night? The unfathomable heaven above seems part of the place, for I think it is never so tenderly blue over any other spot of earth. And when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the Piazza vanish with the azure? — People, I say, come to drink coffee, and eat ices here in the summer evenings, and then, what with the promenades in the arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the sound of feet, and the hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder uproar of cities where there are horses and wheels — the effect is that of a large evening party, and in this aspect the Piazza, is like a vast drawing-room.

I liked well to see that strange life, which even the stout, dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, piping in the centre of the Piazza, could not altogether substantialize, and which constantly took immateriality from the loveliness of its environment. In the winter the scene was the most purely Venetian, and in my first winter, when I had abandoned all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to steady habits of idleness and coffee, and contemplated the life of the Piazza.

By all odds, the loungers at Florian’s were the most interesting, because they were the most various. People of all shades of politics met in the dainty little saloons, though there were shades of division even there, and they did not mingle. The Italians carefully assorted themselves in a room furnished with green velvet, and the Austrians and the Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They were curious to look at, those tranquil, indolent, Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon relish for them. They seldom spoke together, and when they did speak, they burst from silence into tumultuous controversy, and then lapsed again into perfect silence. The elder among them sat with their hands carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing upon the ground, or else buried themselves in the perusal of the French journals. The younger stood a good deal about the doorways, and now and then passed a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters in black coats and white cravats, who hurried to and fro with the orders, and called them out in strident tones to the accountant at his little table; or sometimes these young idlers make a journey to the room devoted to ladies and forbidden to smokers, looked long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and then returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. By chance I found them playing chess, but very rarely. They were all well-dressed, handsome men, with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, and conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder who they were, to what order of society they belonged, and whether they, like my worthless self, had never any thing else but lounging at Florian’s to do; but I really know none of these things to this day. Some men in Venice spend their noble, useful lives in this way, and it was the proud reply of a Venetian father, when asked of what profession his son was, “� in Piazza!” That was, he bore a cane, wore light gloves, and stared from Florian’s windows at the ladies who went by.

At the Caff� Quadri, immediately across the Piazza, there was a scene of equal hopefulness. But there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and the idling was carried on with a great noise of conversation in Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all about, but I presume the talk was upon topics of mutual improvement, calculated to advance the interests of self-government and mankind. These officers were very comely, intelligent-looking people with the most good-natured faces. They came and went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their steel scabbards against the tables, or rising and straddling off with their long swords kicking against their legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the world, and one has no notion how ill they can dress when left to themselves, till one sees them in civil clothes.

Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the Imperial Palace is called), under the Procuratie Vecchie, is the Caff� Specchi, frequented only by young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those who go to Florian’s. Across from this caff� is that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to chiefly by non-commissioned officers, and civilian officials of lower grade. You know the latter, at a glance, by their beard, which in Venice is an index to every man’s politics: no Austriacante wears the imperial, no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caff� Suttil, rather Austrian, and frequented by Italian codini, or old fogies, in politics: gray old fellows, who caress their sticks with more constant zeal than even the elders at Florian’s. Quite at the other end of the Procuratie Nuove is the Caff� of the Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen represented there by two or three Albanians with an Albanian boy, who, being dressed exactly like his father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the young of some Oriental animal — say a boy-elephant or infant camel.

I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in the winter time, occasional tourists under the Procuratie, at the caff�, and in the shops, where the shop-keepers are devouring them with the keenness of an appetite unsated by the hordes of summer visitors. I hope that the reader also groups me fishermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys about the base of St. Mark’s, and at the feet of the three flag-staffs before the church; that he passes me a slatternly woman and a frowzy girl or two through the Piazza occasionally; and that he calls down the flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter half ashamed to show themselves, as being aware that they are a great humbug, and unrightfully in the guide-books.

Meantime, while I sit at Florian’s, sharing and studying the universal worthlessness about me, the brief winter passes, and the spring of the south — so unlike the ardent season of the north, where it burns full summer before the snows are dried upon the fields — descends upon the city and the sea. But except in the little gardens of the palaces, and where here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over a lofty stone wall, the spring finds no response of swelling bud and unfolding leaf, and it is human nature alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for this reason that the welcome is more visible in Venice than elsewhere, and that here, where the effect of the season is narrowed and limited to men’s hearts, the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is certain at least that the rapture is more demonstrative. The city at all times voiceful, seems to burst into song with the advent of these golden days and silver nights. Bands of young men go singing through the moonlit streets, and the Grand Canal re�choes the music of the parties of young girls as they drift along in the scarcely moving boats, and sing the glories of the lagoons and the loves of fishermen and gondoliers. In the Public Gardens they walk and sing; and wandering minstrels come forth before the caff�, and it is hard to get beyond the tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is as if the city had put off its winter humor with its winter dress; and as Venice in winter is the dreariest and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring it is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant bustle in the streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over the stones of the squares, and a constant movement of boats upon the canals.

We say, in a cheap and careless way, that the southern peoples have no homes. But this is true only in a restricted sense, for the Italian, and the Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home in pleasant weather. No one remains under a roof who can help it; and now, as I said before, the fascinating out-door life begins. All day long the people sit and drink coffee and eat ices and gossip together before the caff�, and the soft midnight sees the same diligent idlers in their places. The promenade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amusement; it has its rigidly fixed hours, and its limits are also fixed: but now, in spring, even the promenade is a little lawless, and the crowds upon the Riva sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, and throng all the wider avenues and the Piazza; while young Venice comes to take the sun at St. Mark’s in the arms of its high-breasted nurses, — mighty country-women, who, in their bright costumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses of gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza with the high, free-stepping movement of blood-horses, and look like the women of some elder race of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, had passed away from our puny, dull-clad times.

   “� la stagion che ognuno s’innamora;”

and now young girls steal to their balconies, and linger there for hours, subtly conscious of the young men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at them from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain indoors, put out their heads and gossip from window to window; while the pretty water-carriers, filling their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh at their work. Every street down which you look is likewise vocal with gossip; and if the picturesque projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys, of which the vista is full, hide the heads of the gossipers, be sure there is a face looking out of every window for all that, and the social, expansive presence of the season is felt there.

The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish the spring upon themselves unsparingly. They come forth from their dark dens in crumbling palaces and damp basements, and live in the sunlight and the welcome air. They work, they eat, they sleep out of doors. Mothers of families sit about their doors and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff while their raven-haired daughters, lounging near the threshold, chase the covert insects that haunt the tangles of the children’s locks. Within doors shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who never ceases talking for an instant.

Before the winter passed, I had changed my habitation from rooms near the Piazza, to quarters on the Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest street in Venice passes, from St. Mark’s to the Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest squares of the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my rooms early in March, when the tumult under my windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made company for me; but when the winter broke, and the windows were opened, I found that I had too much society.

Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-contained and independent. Each has its church, of which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground; and each within its limits compasses an apothecary’s shop, a mercer’s and draper’s shop, a blacksmith’s and shoemaker’s shop, a caff� more or less brilliant, a green-grocer’s and fruiterer’s, a family grocery — nay, there is also a second-hand merchant’s shop where you buy and sell every kind of worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there is a coppersmith’s and a watchmaker’s, and pretty certainly a wood-carver’s and gilder’s, while without a barber’s shop no campo could preserve its integrity or inform itself of the social and political news of the day. In addition to all these elements of bustle and disturbance, San Bartolomeo swarmed with the traffic and rang with the bargains of the Rialto market.

Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor for the absence of quantity and assortment in his wares; and it often happens that an almost imperceptible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus with real anvils. Fishermen, with baskets of fish upon their heads; peddlers, with trays of housewife wares; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and oranges back and forth by long cords; men who sold water by the glass; charlatans who advertised cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the cure of toothache; jugglers who spread their carpets and arranged their temples of magic upon the ground; organists who ground their organs; and poets of the people who brought out new songs, and sang and sold them to the crowd; — these were the children of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bartolomeo.

Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and I spent much time in the study of the vociferous life under my windows, trying to make out the meaning of the different cries, and to trace them back to their sources. There was one which puzzled me for a long time — a sharp, pealing cry that ended in a wail of angry despair, and, rising high above all other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that bird in the tropic forests which the terrified Spaniards called the alma perdida. After many days of listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded from a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about some dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung disheveled round her eyes, bloodshot with the strain of her incessant shrieks.

In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the buildings are palaces above and shops below. The ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of various kinds already mentioned; the first story above is occupied by tradesmen’s families; and on the third or fourth floor is the appartamento signorile. From the balconies of these stories hung the cages of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and savage parrots, which sang and screamed with delight in the noise that rose from the crowd. All the human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces continually appeared at the windows. By all odds the most interesting figure there was that of a stout peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, a crimson neckerchief, and a bright-colored gown, and wearing long dangling ear-rings of yellowest gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself half over the balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in the crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted with crimson yarn; and at the window of still another house, a damsel now looked out upon the square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors have the amiable custom of studying one another’s features through opera-glasses; but I could not persuade myself to use this means of learning the mirror’s response to the damsel’s constant “Fair or not?” being a believer in every woman’s right to look well a little way off. I shunned whatever trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned again to the campo beneath — to the placid dandies about the door of the caff�; to the tide of passers from the Merceria; the smooth-shaven Venetians of other days, and the bearded Venetians of these; the dark-eyed, white-faced Venetian girls, hooped in cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly clad, and moving with southern grace; the files of heavily burdened soldiers; the little policemen loitering lazily about with their swords at their sides, and in their spotless Austrian uniforms.

As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat increases, the expansive delight with which the city hails its coming passes into a tranquiler humor, as if the joy of the beautiful season had sunk too deeply into the city’s heart for utterance. I, too, felt this longing for quiet, and as San Bartolomeo continued untouched by it, and all day roared and thundered under my windows, and all night long gave itself up to sleepless youths who there melodiously bayed the moon in chorus, I was obliged to abandon San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters where I might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of the spring-time in peace.

Now, with the city’s lapse into this tranquiler humor, the promenades cease. The facchino gives all his leisure to sleeping in the sun; and in the mellow afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square on the Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its brown-cloaked peasant, basking face-downward in the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by right the berths of the beggars; the sailors and fishermen slumber in their boats; and the gondoliers, if they do not sleep, are yet placated by the season, and forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clamors at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near them under the guard of valets de place. Even the play of the children ceases, except in the Public Gardens, where the children of the poor have indolent games, and sport as noiselessly as the lizards that slide from shadow to shadow and glitter in the sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses you, — the stranger in it, — not with sadness, not with melancholy, but with a deep sense of the sweetness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all purposes and chances. If ever you cared to have your name on men’s tongues, behold! that old yearning for applause is dead. Praise would strike like pain through this delicious calm. And blame? It is a wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose takes you to her inmost heart, and you learn her secrets — arcana unintelligible to you in the new-world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy rhyme win new color and meaning. The mystical, indolent poems whose music once charmed away all will to understand them, are revealed now without your motion. Now, at last, you know why

   “It was an Abyssinian maid”

who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu? It is the land in which you were born!

The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the lagoons; the white sail faints into the white distance; the gondola slides athwart the sheeted silver of the bay; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, dozes at his post.

CHAPTER V.

OPERA AND THEATRES.

With the winter came to an end the amusement which, in spite of the existing political demonstration, I had drawn from the theatres. The Fenice, the great theatre of the city, being the property of private persons, has not been opened since the discontents of the Venetians were intensified in 1859; and it will not be opened, they say, till Victor Emanuel comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, and certainly not so magnificent as the Venetians think, the Fenice is a superb and tasteful theatre. The best opera was formerly given in it, and now that it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. The Italians seldom go to it, and as there is not a sufficient number of foreign residents to support it in good style, the opera commonly conforms to the character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it is given, and is second-rate. It is nearly always subsidized by the city to the amount of several thousand florins; but nobody need fall into the error, on this account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera-goer, as it is in the little German cities. A box does not cost a great deal; but as the theatre is carried on in Italy by two different managements, — one of which receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the other the fee of admission to the theatre, — there is always the demand of the latter to be satisfied with nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with seats, of course, but you do not sit down there without paying. So, most Italians (who if they go at all go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government officials stand; the orchestra seats are reserved for the officers of the garrison. The first row of boxes, which is on a level with the heads of people in the pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a loftier flight, and sit in the second tier.

You look about in vain, however, for that old life of the theatre which once formed so great a part of Venetian gayety, — the visits from box to box, the gossiping between the acts, and the half-occult flirtations. The people in the boxes are few, the dressing not splendid, and the beauty is the blond, unfrequent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter being the fourth season the Italians had defied the temptation of the opera, some of the Venetian ladies yielded to it, but went plainly dressed, and sat far back in boxes of the third tier, and when they issued forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. The audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly; hissing now and then for silence in the house, and clapping hands for applause, without calling bravo, — an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly habitual with foreigners: with Germans, for instance; who spell it with a p and f.

I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must seek it somewhere out of Italy, — at London, or Paris, or New York, — though possibly it might be chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in Naples. The cause of the decay of the musical art in Venice must be looked for among the events which seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing; certainly it cannot be discerned in any indifference of the people to music. The dimostrazione keeps the better class of citizens from the opera, but the passion for it still exists in every order; and God’s gift of beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race by any Situation. You hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth —

   “That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole.”

In the days of the Fenice there was a school for the ballet at that theatre, but this last and least worthy part of dramatic art is now an imported element of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on her stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, which were once so famous, have long ceased to exist. The musical theatre was very popular in Venice as early as the middle of the seventeenth century; and the care of the state for the drama existed from the first. The government, which always piously forbade the representation of Mysteries, and, as the theatre advanced, even prohibited plays containing characters of the Old or New Testament, began about the close of the century to protect and encourage the instruction of music in the different foundling hospitals and public refuges in the city. The young girls in these institutions were taught to play on instruments, and to sing, — at first for the alleviation of their own dull and solitary life, and afterward for the delight of the public. In the merry days that passed just before the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which they performed in the churches attached to the hospitals were among the most fashionable diversions in Venice. The singers were instructed by the best masters of the time; and at the close of the last century, the conservatories of the Incurables, the Foundlings, and the Mendicants were famous throughout Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those pupils who found the transition from sacred to profane opera natural and easy.

With increasing knowledge of the language, I learned to enjoy best the unmusical theatre, and went oftener to the comedy than the opera. It is hardly by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have seen excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both in the modern Italian comedy, which is very rich and good, and in the elder plays of Goldoni — compositions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, where alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and coloring can be perfectly appreciated. The best comedy is usually given to the educated classes at the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder drama is offered to the populace at Teatro Malibran, where on a Sunday night you may see the plebeian life of the city in one of its most entertaining and characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week which have not been laid out for chances in the lottery, are spent for this evening’s amusement; and in the vast pit you see, besides the families of comfortable artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude of the ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low rate of eight or ten soldi [Footnote: The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which is worth about forty-nine cents of American money.] apiece, it is hard to account for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its likes and dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great vehemence. It likes best the sanguinary local spectacular drama; it cheers and cheers again every allusion to Venice; and when the curtain rises on some well-known Venetian scene, it has out the scene-painter by name three times — which is all the police permits. The auditors wear their hats in the pit, but deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, and raise stormy and wrathful cries of cappello! till these uncover. Between acts, they indulge in excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go to the extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are hawked about the theatre, and sold for two soldi the stick, — with the tooth-pick on which they are spitted thrown into the bargain.

The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday night, but the one entertainment which never fails of drawing and delighting full houses is the theatre of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like best to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for I find in the performances of these puppets, no new condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow of verisimilitude delightful, and gives a marvelous relish to the immemorial effects and traditionary tricks of the stage.

The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner of a narrow street opening from the Calle del Ridotto, and is of the tiniest dimensions and simplest appointments. There are no boxes — the whole theatre is scarcely larger than a stage-box — and you pay ten soldi to go into the pit, where you are much more comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fifteen for places in the dress-circle above. The stage is very small, and the scenery a kind of coarse miniature painting. But it is very complete, and every thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and to produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. They are very artlessly introduced, and are maneuvered, according to the exigencies of the scene, by means of cords running from their heads, arms, and legs to the top of the stage. To the management of the cords they owe all the vehemence of their passions and the grace of their oratory, not to mention a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, altogether spectral.

The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated and ambitious tone than that of the Burattini, which exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse assassinations in little punch-shows on the Riva, and in the larger squares; but the standard characters are nearly the same with both, and are all descended from the commedia a braccio [Footnote: Comedy by the yard.] which flourished on the Italian stage before the time of Goldoni. And I am very far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great and peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art of drawing the most delighted, dirty, and picturesque audiences. Like most of the Marionette, they converse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to follow them. I only remember to have made out one of their comedies, — a play in which an ingenious lover procured his rich and successful rival to be arrested for lunacy, and married the disputed young person while the other was raging in the mad-house. This play is performed to enthusiastic audiences; but for the most part the favorite drama of the Burattini appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the chief character — a puppet ten inches high, with a fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean good-nature and wickedness — deludes other and weak-minded puppets into trusting him, and then beats them with a club upon the back of the head until they die. The murders of this infamous creature, which are always executed in a spirit of jocose sang-froid, and accompanied by humorous remarks, are received with the keenest relish by the spectators and, indeed, the action is every way worthy of applause. The dramatic spirit of the Italian race seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they perform their parts with a fidelity to theatrical unnaturalness which is wonderful. I have witnessed death agonies on these little stages which the great American tragedian himself (whoever he may happen to be) could not surpass in degree of energy. And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit because they are agitated by the legs from below the scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at the Marionette Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, are always interesting, and comprise: first, boys ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size; then weak little girls, supporting immense weight of babies; then Austrian soldiers, with long coats and short pipes; lumbering Dalmat sailors; a transient Greek or Turk; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, statuesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over their shoulders; young women, with bare heads of thick black hair; old women, all fluff and fangs; wooden-shod peasants, with hooded cloaks of coarse brown; then boys — and boys. They all enjoy the spectacle with approval, and take the drama au grand s�rieux, uttering none of the gibes which sometimes attend efforts to please in our own country. Even when the hat, or other instrument of extortion, is passed round, and they give nothing, and when the manager, in an excess of fury and disappointment, calls out, “Ah! sons of dogs! I play no more to you!” and closes the theatre, they quietly and unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, fioi de cani means no great reproach in Venetian parlance; and parents of the lower classes caressingly address their children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest insult which can be put into words.

In the commedia a braccio, before mentioned as the inheritance of the Marionette, the dramatist furnished merely the plot, and the outline of the action; the players filled in the character and dialogue. With any people less quick-witted than the Italians, this sort of comedy must have been insufferable, but it formed the delight of that people till the middle of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to Paris he furnished his Italian players with the commedia a braccio. I have heard some very passable gags at the Marionette, but the real commedia a braccio no longer exists, and its familiar and invariable characters perform written plays.

Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of dramatis personae, and he is now without doubt the popular favorite in Venice. He is always, like Pantalon, a Venetian; but whereas the latter is always a merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency of the play demands. He is a dwarf, even among puppets, and his dress invariably consists of black knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full-skirted black coat, and a three-cornered hat. His individual traits are displayed in all his characters, and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar; a glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable bonhomie that wins the heart. To tell the truth, I care little for the plays in which he has no part and I have learned to think a certain trick of his — lifting his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of emphasis, and saying, “Capisse la?” or “Sa la?” (You understand? You know?) — one of the finest things in the world.

In nearly all of Goldoni’s Venetian comedies, and in many which he wrote in Italian, appear the standard associates of Facanapa, — Arlecchino, il Dottore. Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader is at first puzzled by their constant recurrence, but never weary of Goldoni’s witty management of them. They are the chief persons of the obsolete commedia a braccio, and have their nationality and peculiarities marked by immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a Venetian merchant, rich, and commonly the indulgent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son, figuring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large fortune. The second old man is il Dottore, who is a Bolognese, and a doctor of the University. Brighella and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; the other is dull and foolish, and always masked and dressed in motley — a gibe at the poverty of the Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes of stupidity and cunning are most usually found, according to the popular notion in Italy.

The plays of the Marionette are written expressly for them, and are much shorter than the standard drama as it is known to us. They embrace, however, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama to broad farce, as you may see by looking at the advertisements in the Venetian Gazettes for any week past, where perhaps you shall find the plays performed to have been: The Ninety-nine Misfortunes of Facanapa; Arlecchino, the Sleeping King; Facanapa as Soldier in Catalonia; The Capture of Smyrna, with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in Smyrna (this play being repeated several nights); and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. If you can fancy people going night after night to this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with the keenest appetite, you will not only do something toward realizing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but you will also suppose great excellence in the theatrical management. For my own part, I find few things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable defects, their irresistible touches of verisimilitude. At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent (Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has paid the house-rent of the erring son when the prodigal was about to be cast into the street, looked on and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and the conventional delight in benefaction which we all know. I have witnessed the base terrors of Facanapa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many passages of real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when he responds to the expostulations of his friend the Knight of Malta, — a puppet of shaky and vacillating presence, but a soul of steel and rock:

“Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy dungeons? Remember, she is thy brother’s wife. Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred name of virtue.” (Wrigglingly, and with a set countenance and gesticulations toward the pit.)

To which the ferocious baron makes answer with a sneering laugh, “Honor? — I know it not! Virtue? — I detest it!” and attempting to pass the knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of rags and pasteboard, and topples against him.

Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted Poet, is tremendous. You discover him in bed, too much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading his manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of poets when they cannot find other listeners. He is alarmed by various ghostly noises in the house, and is often obliged to get up and examine the dark corners of the room, and to look under the bed. When at last the spectral head appears at the foot-board, Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under the bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it a life, a spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible.

The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of choreographic art, and is extremely funny. The prima ballerina has all the difficult grace and far-fetched arts of the prima ballerina of flesh and blood; and when the enthusiastic audience calls her back after the scene, she is humanly delighted, and acknowledges the compliment with lifelike empressement. I have no doubt the corps de ballet have their private jealousies and bickerings, when quietly laid away in boxes, and deprived of all positive power by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms and legs. The puppets are great in pirouette and pas seul; but I think the strictly dramatic part of such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of Carthage, is their strong point.

The people who witness their performances are of all ages and conditions — I remember to have once seen a Russian princess and some German countesses in the pit — but the greater number of spectators are young men of the middle classes, pretty shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and children. The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing drama going on between the acts, in which the invariable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to which watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as “Caro Antonio,” had consigned it; and from this letter I came to know certainly of at least one love affair at the Marionette. “Caro Antonio” was humbly besought, “if his heart still felt the force of love,” to meet the writer (who softly reproached him with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at six o’clock; and I would not like to believe he could resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell out so. I fished up through the lucent water this despairing little epistle, — it was full of womanly sweetness and bad spelling, — and dried away its briny tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to any particularly anxious-looking Nina at the Marionette as to the probable writer — its unaccountable loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, when I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest divided between the drolleries of Facanapa, and the sad presence of expectation somewhere among the groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such immense hoops under such greasy dresses, who part their hair at one side, and call each other “Ci�!” Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear Antonio? All unconscious, I think, — gallantly posed against the wall, thy slouch hat brought forward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms of thy velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings softly twinkling in the light.

CHAPTER VI.

VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS.

When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate appointed to young men on the Continent. I took lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the restaurants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but it is hard to conceive of the continuance of so great unhappiness elsewhere; while the restaurant life is an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not because the restaurants are very dirty — if you wipe your plate and glass carefully before using them, they need not stomach you; it is not because the rooms are cold — if you sit near the great vase of smoldering embers in the centre of each room you may suffocate in comparative comfort; it is not because the prices are great — they are really very reasonable; it is not for any very tangible fault that I object to life at the restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its hopeless homelessness without rebellion against the whole system it implies, as something unnatural and insufferable.

But before we come to look closely at this aspect of Italian civilization, it is better to look first at a very noticeable trait of Italian character, — temperance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer classes, one observes without great surprise how slenderly they fare, and how with a great habit of talking of meat and drink, the verb mangiare remains in fact for the most part inactive with them. But it is only just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be not wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with other classes which could well afford the opposite vice. Meat and drink do not form the substance of conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and the English, and in degree with ourselves; and I have often noticed on the Mondays-at-the-Gardens, and other social festivals of the people, how the crowd amused itself with any thing — music, dancing, walking, talking — any thing but the great northern pastime of gluttony. Knowing the life of the place, I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few occasions connected with repletion; and I am ashamed to confess that I have not always been able to repress a feeling of stupid scorn for the empty stomachs everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, at least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the North has a gloomy pride in gastronomic excess, which unfits her children to appreciate the cheerful prudence of the South.

Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. They breakfast on a piece of bread with coffee and milk; supper is a little cup of black coffee, or an ice, taken at a caff�. The coffee, however, is repeated frequently throughout the day, and in the summertime fruit is eaten, but eaten sparingly, like everything else. As to the nature of the dinner, it of course varies somewhat according to the nature of the diner; but in most families of the middle class a dinner at home consists of a piece of boiled beef, a minestra (a soup thickened with vegetables, tripe, and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the wine of the country. The failings of the repast among all classes lean to the side of simplicity, and the abstemious character of the Venetian finds sufficient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner: “Venga a mangiar quattro risi con me.” (Come eat four grains of rice with me.)

But invitations to dinner have never formed a prime element of hospitality in Venice. Goldoni notices this fact in his memoirs, and speaking of the city in the early half of the last century, he says that the number and excellence of the eating-houses in the city made invitations to dinner at private houses rare, and superfluous among the courtesies offered to strangers.

The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place his house at your disposition, and, having extended this splendid invitation, consider the duties of hospitality fulfilled; he does not appear to think you want to make use of his house for social purposes, preferring himself the caff�, and finding home and comfort there, rather than under his own roof. “What caff� do you frequent? Ah! so do I. We shall meet often there.” This is frequently your new acquaintance’s promise of friendship. And one may even learn to like the social footing on which people meet at the caff�, as well as that of the parlor or drawing-room. I could not help thinking one evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some pleasant Paduans in one of the magnificent saloons of the Caff� Pedrocchi, that I should like to go there for society, if I could always find it there, much better than to private houses. There is far greater ease and freedom, more elegance and luxury, and not the slightest weight of obligation laid upon you for the gratification your friend’s company has given you. One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend’s outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the like. Nowhere in Europe is the senseless and wasteful American custom of treating known; and nothing could be more especially foreign to the frugal instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a party of friends at a caff� eat or drink, each one pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily, the enjoyment of the evening is uncostly or not, according as each prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a place without calling for something; but I have frequently seen people respond to this demand of custom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the expense of two soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five soldi, secures a chair, a table, and as many journals as you like, for as long time as you like.

I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the caff�, — that of the restaurant never; though the habit of frequenting the restaurants, to which Goldoni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have grown upon the Venetians with the lapse of time. The eating-houses are almost without number, and are of every degree, from the shop of the sausage-maker, who supplies gondoliers and facchini with bowls of sguassetto, to the Caff� Florian. They all have names which are not strange to European ears, but which ape sufficiently amusing to people who come from a land where nearly every public thing is named from some inspiration of patriotism or local pride. In Venice the principal restaurants are called The Steamboat, The Savage, The Little Horse, The Black Hat, and The Pictures; and I do not know that any one of them is more uncomfortable, uncleanly, or noisy than another, or that any one of them suffers from the fact that all are bad.

You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the reason, before stated, of the breakfast’s unsubstantiality. The dining commences about three o’clock in the afternoon, and continues till nine o’clock, most people dining at five or six. As a rule the attendance is insufficient, and no guest is served until he has made a savage clapping on the tables, or clinking on his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter appears, and calls out, dramatically, “Behold me!” takes the order, shrieks it to the cook, and returning with the dinner, cries out again, more dramatically than ever, “Behold it ready!” and arrays it with a great flourish on the table. I have dined in an hotel at Niagara, to the music of a brass band; but I did not find that so utterly bewildering, so destructive of the individual savor of the dishes, and so conducive to absent-minded gluttony, as I at first found the constant rush and clamor of the waiters in the Venetian restaurants. The guests are, for the most part, patient and quiet enough, eating their minestra and boiled beef in such peace as the surrounding uproar permits them, and seldom making acquaintance with each other. It is a mistake, I think, to expect much talk from any people at dinner. The ingenious English tourists who visit the United States from time to time, find us silent over our meat, and I have noticed the like trait among people of divers races in Europe.

As I have said, the greater part of the diners at the restaurants are single, and seem to have no knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of the fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at their meals, is rather calculated to chill than warm the heart. But, in any case, a drearier set of my fellow-beings I have never seen, — no, not at evening parties, — and I conceive that their life in lodgings, at the caff� and the restaurant, remote from the society of women and all the higher privileges of fellowship for which men herd together, is at once the most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfortless life in the world. Our boarding-house life in America, dull, stupid, and flat as it often is, seems to me infinitely better than the restaurant life of young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, with all this homelessness and domestic outlawry, its young men still preserve the gentleness of civilization.

The families that share the exile of the eating-houses sometimes make together a feeble buzz of conversation, but the unfriendly spirit of the place seems soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent the restaurant for economy’s sake. Fuel is costly, and the restaurant is cheap, and its cooking better than they could perhaps otherwise afford to have. Indeed, so cheap is the restaurant that actual experience proved the cost of a dinner there to be little more than the cost of the raw material in the market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the custom, which is common, of sending home to purchasers meals from the eating-houses.

As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, the difference is not so noticeable in the prices of the same dishes, as in the substitution of cheaper varieties of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic traditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort the cooking is done entirely by native artists, deriving their inspirations from the unsophisticated tastes of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps needless to say that they grow characteristic and picturesque as they grow dirty and cheap, until at last the cook-shop perfects the descent with a triumph of raciness and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice opens upon you at almost every turn, — everywhere, in fact, but in the Piazza and the Merceria, — and looking in, you see its vast heaps of frying fish, and its huge caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell to heaven with garlic and onions. In the seducing windows smoke golden mountains of polenta (a thicker kind of mush or hasty-pudding, made of Indian meal, and universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp minnows, bowls of rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails and liver; and around the fascinating walls hang huge plates of bronzed earthenware for a lavish and a hospitable show, and for the representation of those scenes of Venetian story which are modeled upon them in bass-relief. Here I like to take my unknown friend — my scoundrel facchino or rascal gondolier — as he comes to buy his dinner, and bargains eloquently with the cook, who stands with a huge ladle in his hand capable of skimming mysterious things from vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama which ensues, and in which all the chords of the human heart are touched, from those that tremble at high tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad farce. When the diner has bought his dinner, and issues forth with his polenta in one hand, and his fried minnows or stewed snails in the other, my fancy fondly follows him to his gondola-station, where he eats it, and quarrels volubly with other gondoliers across the Grand Canal.

A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop abounds in the region of Rialto, where on market mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious business with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more limited resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, polenta, and sguassetto. The latter is a true roba veneziana, and is a loud-flavored broth, made of those desperate scraps of meat which are found impracticable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but more delicate dish, peculiar to the place, is the clotted blood of poultry, fried in slices with onions. A great number of the families of the poor breakfast at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each person.

In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. During carnival all the butter and cheese shop-windows are whitened with the snow of beaten cream — panamontata. At San Martino the bakers parade troops of gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christmas, comes mandorlato, which is a candy made of honey and enriched with almonds. In its season only can any of these devotional delicacies be had; but there is a species of cruller, fried in oil, which has all seasons for its own. On the occasion of every festa, and of every sagra (which is the holiday of one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for the cooking and sale of these crullers, between which and the religious sentiment proper to the whole year there seems to be some occult relation.

In the winter, the whole city appears to abandon herself to cooking for the public, till she threatens to hopelessly disorder the law of demand and supply. There are, to begin with, the caff� and restaurants of every class. Then there are the cook-shops, and the poulterers’, and the sausage-makers’. Then, also, every fruit-stall is misty and odorous with roast apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The chestnut-roasters infest every corner, and men women, and children cry roast pumpkin at every turn — till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and foolish vice, and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the habitual abstemiousness of every class of the population, become the most perplexing and maddening of anomalies.

CHAPTER VII.

HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE.

I hope that it is by a not unnatural progress I pass from speaking of dinners and diners to the kindred subject of the present chapter, and I trust the reader will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this book to tell what I had found most books of travel very slow to tell, — as much as possible of the everyday life of a people whose habits are so different from our own; endeavoring to develop a just notion of their character, not only from the show-traits which strangers are most likely to see, but also from experience of such things as strangers are most likely to miss.

The absolute want of society of my own nation in Venice would have thrown me upon study of the people for my amusement, even if I had cared to learn nothing of them; and the necessity of economical housekeeping would have caused me to live in the frugal Venetian fashion, even if I had been disposed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of bachelor lodgings I had sufficient experience during my first year; but as most prudent travelers who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need not describe my own particularly. You can tell the houses in which there are rooms to let, by the squares of white paper fastened to the window-shutters; and a casual glance as you pass through the streets, gives you the idea that the chief income of the place is derived from letting lodgings. Carpetless, dreary barracks the rooms usually are, with an uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, an appalling breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of wash-bowl, and an obduracy of sofa, never, never to be dissociated in their victim’s mind from the idea of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the gloomy landlady sustains her life with its immutable purposes of plunder. Flabbiness without softness is the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are dear or not according to the season and the situation. On the sunlit Riva during winter, and on the Grand Canal in summer, they are costly enough, but they are to be found on nearly all the squares at reasonable rates. On the narrow streets, where most native bachelors have them, they are absurdly cheap.

As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house in Venice means a number of rooms, including a whole story in a building, or part of it only, but always completely separated from the story above and below, or from the other rooms on the same floor. Every house has its own entrance from the street, or by a common hall and stairway from the ground-floor, where are the cellars or store-rooms, while each kitchen is usually on a level with the other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The isolation of the different families is secured (as perfectly as where a building is solely appropriated to each), either by the exclusive possession of a streetdoor, [Footnote: Where the street entrance is in common, every floor has its bell, which being sounded, summons a servant to some upper window with the demand, most formidable to strangers, “Chi xe?” (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. You reply, “Amici!” (Friends!) on which comforting reassurance, the servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running upward to her hand, and permits you to enter and wander about at your leisure till you reach her secret height. This is, supposing the master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they are not in, she answers your “Amici!” with “No ghe ne xe!” (Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a string outside the window, and fishes up your card.] or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. You bow and give good-day to the people whom you meet in the common hall and on the common stairway, but you rarely know more of them than their names, and you certainly care nothing about them. The sociability of Europe, and more especially of Southern Europe, is shown abroad; under the domestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And indeed it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and comfortless most of the houses are. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron; the wood-work is rude, even in many palaces in Venice; the rest is stone and stucco; the walls are not often papered, though they are sometimes painted: the most pleasing and inviting feature of the interior is the frescoed ceiling of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly, the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in Venice?); the doors lift slantingly from the floor, in which their lower hinges are imbedded; the stoves are of plaster, and consume fuel without just return of heat; the balconies alone are always charming, whether they hang high over the streets, or look out upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, go far to make the houses habitable.

It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly every thing else in Italy, that you pay about the same price for half the comfort that you get in America. In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on the Grand Canal; but here the rents are something absurdly high, when taken in consideration with the fact that the city is not made a place of residence by foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commercial activity to enhance the cost of living. Househunting, under these circumstances, becomes an office of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stranger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in a tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shamelessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your touch; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, and the door-frames and window-cases have long lost all recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa is at present occupying these pleasant apartments, and you only gain admission to them after an embassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baronessa receives you courteously, and you pass through her rooms, which are a little in disorder, the Baronessa being on the point of removal. Madama la Baronessa’s hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors; and at the side of the couch which her form lately pressed in slumber, you observe a French novel and a wasted candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine of the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the whole suite, and through the open window comes a curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la Baronessa’s guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that she has had their sty placed immediately under her window in the garden. It is this garden which has first taken your heart, with a glimpse caught through the great open door of the palace. It is disordered and wild, but so much the better; its firs are very thick and dark, and there are certain statues, fauns and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have made much decenter than the sculptor intended. You think that for this garden’s sake you could put up with the house, which must be very cheap. What is the price of the rooms? you ask of the smiling landlord. He answers, without winking, “If taken for several years, a thousand florins a year.” At which you suppress the whistle of disdainful surprise, and say you think it will not suit. He calls your attention to the sun, which comes in at every side, which will roast you in summer, and will not (as he would have you think) warm you in winter. “But there is another apartment,” — through which you drag languidly. It is empty now, being last inhabited by an English Ledi, — and her stove-pipes went out of the windows, and blackened the shabby stucco front of the villanous old palace.

In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance on a house, the curiously frescoed front of which tempts you within. A building which has a lady and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love from balcony to balcony, on the fa�ade, as well as Arlecchino depicted in the act of leaping from the second to the third story, promises something. Promises something, but does not fulfill the promise. The interior is fresh, clean, and new, and cold and dark as a cellar. This house — that is to say, a floor of the house — you may have for four hundred florins a year; and then farewell the world and the light of the sun! for neither will ever find you in that back court, and you will never see any body but the neighboring laundresses and their children, who cannot enough admire the front of your house.

E via in seguito! This is of house keeping, not house-hunting. There are pleasant and habitable houses in Venice — but they are not cheap, as many of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, discomfort and ruin have their price, and the tumble-down is patched up and sold at rates astonishing to innocent strangers who come from countries in good repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. If I were not ashamed of the idle and foolish old superstitions in which I once believed concerning life in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect very little for a great deal; and how a knowledge of many houses to let, made me more and more contented with the house we had taken.

It was in one corner of an old palace on the Grand Canal, and the window of the little parlor looked down upon the water, which had made friends with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, golden smiles upon it when the sun shone. The dining-room was not so much favored by the water, but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree-tops, that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Through this window, also, we could see the quaint, picturesque life of the canal; and from another room we could reach a little terrace above the water. We were not in the appartamento signorile, [Footnote: The noble floor — as the second or third story of the palace is called.] — that was above, — but we were more snugly quartered on the first story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a winter apartment in the old times. But it had been cut up, and suites of rooms had been broken according to the caprice of successive landlords, till it was not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still retained something of former grandeur, and had acquired with time more than former discomfort. We were not envious of them, for they were humbly let at a price less than we paid; though we could not quite repress a covetous yearning for their arched and carven windows, which we saw sometimes from the canal, above the tops of the garden trees.

The gondoliers used always to point out our palace (which was called Casa Falier) as the house in which Marino Faliero was born; and for a long time we clung to the hope that it might be so. But however pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up the subject a little, to relinquish our illusion, and accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli with the distinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am rather at a loss to explain how it made our lives in Casa Falier any pleasanter to think that a beheaded traitor had been born in it, but we relished the superstition amazingly as long as we could possibly believe in it. What went far to confirm us at first in our credulity was the residence, in another part of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal descendant of the unhappy doge. He was a very mild-faced old priest, with a white head, which he carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he moved but feebly. He owned the rooms in which he lived, and the apartment in the front of the palace just above our own. The rest of the house belonged to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are divided up and sold among different purchasers, floor by floor, and sometimes even room by room.

But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far more various than its proprietorship. Over our heads dwelt a Dalmatian family; below our feet a Frenchwoman; at our right, upon the same floor, an English gentleman; under him a French family; and over him the family of a marquis in exile from Modena. Except with Mr. —— , the Englishman, who was at once our friend and landlord (impossible as this may appear to those who know any thing of landlords in Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of salutation, with the many nations represented in our house. We could not help holding the French people in some sort responsible for the invasion of Mexico; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating the acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not improve it.

As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and bowed to them a great deal, and we heard them overhead in frequent athletic games, involving noise as of the maneuvering of cavalry; and as they stood a good deal on their balcony, and looked down upon us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed seeing them admirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceiling. The father of this family was a little man of a solemn and impressive demeanor, who had no other occupation but to walk up and down the city and view its monuments, for which purpose he one day informed us he had left his native place in Dalmatia, after forty years’ study of Venetian history. He further told us that this was by no means worth the time given it; that whereas the streets of Venice were sepulchres in point of narrowness and obscurity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows of which you might see for miles uninterruptedly! This little gentleman wore a black hat, in the last vivid polish of respectability, and I think fortune was not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as the hats of Italians always are; it came down to his eyes, and he carried a cane. Every evening he marched solemnly at the head of a procession of his handsome young children, who went to hear the military music in St. Mark’s Square.

The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians — we never knew their names — gave access also to a house in the story above them, which belonged to some mysterious person described on his door-plate as “Co. Prata.” I think we never saw Co. Prata himself, and only by chance some members of his family when they came back from their summer in the country to spend the winter in the city. Prata’s “Co.,” we gradually learnt, meant “Conte,” and the little counts and countesses, his children, immediately on their arrival took an active part in the exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the fall, certain of the count’s vassals came to the riva [Footnote: The gondola landing-stairs which descend to the water before palace-doors and at the ends of streets.] in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of brush and corncobs for fuel — and this is all we ever knew of our neighbors on the fourth floor. As long as he remained “Co.” we yearned to know who and what he was; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he ceased to interest us.

Such, then, was the house, and such the neighborhood in which two little people, just married, came to live in Venice.

They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, and Providence, tempering the inclemency of the domestic situation, gave them Giovanna.

The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna had been furnished with it. She was at hand to greet the new-comers, and “This is my wife, the new mistress,” said the young Paron [Footnote: Padrone in Italian. A salutation with Venetian friends, and the title by which Venetian servants always designate their employers.] with the bashful pride proper to the time and place. Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with adventurous politeness, she was very glad of it.

“Serva sua!”

The Parona, not knowing Italian, laughed in English.

So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting upon the great truth that handsome is that handsome does, began at once to make herself a thing of beauty.

As a measure of convenience and of deference to her feelings, we immediately resolved to call her G., merely, when speaking of her in English, instead of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with conjecture concerning what was said of her. And as G. thus became the centre around which our domestic life revolved, she must be somewhat particularly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. I suppose that, given certain temperaments and certain circumstances, this would have been much like keeping play-house anywhere; in Venice it had, but for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious property of unreality and impermanency. It is sufficiently bad to live in a rented house; in a house which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till your life takes root, and Home blossoms up in the alien place. For a great while we regarded our house merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were slow to form any relations which could take from our residence its temporary character. Had we but thought to get in debt to the butcher, the baker, and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish ourselves at once; but we imprudently paid our way, and consequently had no ties to bind us to our fellow-creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by housekeepers on a scale surprisingly small to one accustomed to wholesale American ways, and G., having the purse, made our little purchases in cash, never buying more than enough for one meal at a time. Every morning, the fruits and vegetables are distributed from the great market at the Rialto among a hundred greengrocers’ stalls in all parts of the city; bread (which is never made at home) is found fresh at the baker’s; there is a butcher’s stall in each campo with fresh meat. These shops are therefore resorted to for family supplies day by day; and the poor lay in provisions there in portions graduated to a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian whom I remember to have heard speculate on the superiority of a state of civilization in which you could buy two cents’ worth of beef to that in which so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find the system perfected here, where you can buy half a cent’s worth. It is a system friendly to poverty, and the small retail prices approximate very closely the real value of the stuff sold, as we sometimes proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usually no reduction would be made from the retail rate, and it was sufficiently amusing to have the dealer figure up the cost of the quantity we proposed to buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his retail rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is worth a soldo: you get no more than a hundred for a florin, though the dealer will cheerfully go under that number if he can cheat you in the count. So in most things we found it better to let G. do the marketing in her own small Venetian fashion, and “guard our strangeness.”

But there were some things which must be brought to the house by the dealers, such as water for drinking and cooking, which is drawn from public cisterns in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to all the houses. These bigolanti all come from the mountains of Friuli; they all have rosy cheeks, white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists whatever (in the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The cisterns are opened about eight o’clock in the morning, and then their day’s work begins with chatter, and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the wells; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots off under a burden of two buckets, — one appended from either end of a bow resting upon the right shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain which falls on the shelving surface of the campo, and soaks through a bed of sea-sand around the cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets into the great picturesque jars of porous earthenware which ornament Venetian kitchens; and the daily supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin a month.

Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this arrives in boats. It is cut upon the eastern shore of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small coasting vessels, each of which has a plump captain in command, whose red face is so cunningly blended with his cap of scarlet flannel that it is hard on a breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other ends. These vessels anchor off the Custom House in the Guidecca Canal in the fall, and lie there all winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a great part of the time under the charge solely of a small yellow dog of the irascible breed common to the boats of the Po. Thither the smaller dealers in firewood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up and down the canals, and penetrating the land on foot with specimen bundles of fagots in their arms. They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think — their fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their fagots are beautiful and sound and dry. But our particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted man. Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him by the superb song, or rather incantation, with which he announced his coming on the Grand Canal. The purport of this was merely that his bark was called the Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots were fine; but he so dwelt upon the hidden beauties of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and resonant roar with which he closed his triumphal hymn, that the spirit was taken with the charm, and held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this woodman’s cry was the most impressive of all the street cries of Venice. There may have been an exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of the chimney-sweep; a winning pathos in the voice of the vender of roast pumpkin; an oriental fancy and splendor in the fruiterers who cried “Melons with hearts of fire!” and “Juicy pears that bathe your beard!” — there may have been something peculiarly effective in the song of the chestnut-man who shouted “Fat chestnuts,” and added, after a lapse in which you got almost beyond hearing, “and well cooked!” — I do not deny that there was a seductive sincerity in the proclamation of one whose peaches could not be called beautiful to look upon, and were consequently advertised as “Ugly, but good!” — I say nothing to detract from the merits of harmonious chair-menders; — to my ears the shout of the melodious fisherman was delectable music, and all the birds of summer sang in the voices of the countrymen who sold finches and larks in cages, and roses and pinks in pots; — but I say, after all, none of these people combined the vocal power, the sonorous movement, the delicate grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet this man, as far as virtue went, was vox et praeterea nihil. He was a vagabond of the most abandoned; he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins had gone near to make him mad — at any rate he was of a most lunatical deportment. In other lands, the man of whom you are a regular purchaser, serves you well; in Italy he conceives that his long service gives him the right to plunder you if possible. I felt in every fibre that this woodman invariably cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he scarcely denied it on accusation. But my single experience of the more magnificent scoundrels of whom he bought the wood originally, contented me with the swindle with which I had become familiarized. On this occasion I took a boat and went to the Custom House, to get my fuel at first hand. The captain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and thereupon ensued the tragic scene of bargaining, as these things are conducted in Italy. We stood up and bargained, we sat down and bargained; the captain turned his back upon me in indignation; I parted from him and took to my boat in scorn; he called me back and displayed the wood — good, sound, dryer than bones; he pointed to the threatening heavens, and declared that it would snow that night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for twice the present price; but I laughed incredulously. Then my captain took another tack, and tried to make the contract in obsolete currencies, in Austrian pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably reduced these into familiar money, he paused desperately, and made me an offer which I accepted with mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder than I, and held arts of measurement in reserve against me. He agreed that the measurement and transportation should not cost me the value of his tooth-pick — quite an old and worthless one — which he showed me. Yet I was surprised into the payment of a youth whom this man called to assist at the measurement, and I had to give the boatman drink-money at the end. He promised that the measure should be just: yet if I lifted my eye from the work he placed the logs slantingly on the measure, and threw in knotty chunks that crowded wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight through and through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the wrong when I pointed it out: “Ga razon, lu!” (He’s right!) he said to his fellows in infamy, and throwing aside the objectionable pieces, proceeded to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this memorable load of wood housed at home, I found that it had cost just what I paid my woodman, and that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter to be cheated in quiet dignity behind my back. The woodman exulted in his restored sovereignty, and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt.

Among other provisioners who come to your house in Venice, are those ancient peasant-women, who bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed in baskets filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of their wares by the brownness of their sunburnt hands and faces, and bear in their general stoutness and burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to their own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw hats, and dangling ear-rings of yellow gold, and are the pleasantest sight of the morning streets of Venice, to the stoniness of which they bring a sense of the country’s clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn from the great cream-colored cows.

Fishermen, also, come down the little calli — with shallow baskets of fish upon their heads and under either arm, and cry their soles and mackerel to the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some door to bargain away the eels which they chop into sections as the thrilling drama proceeds, and hand over as a denouement at the purchaser’s own price. “Beautiful and all alive!” is the engaging cry with which they hawk their fish.

Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of divers arts who come to exercise their crafts at your house: not chimney-sweeps merely, but glaziers, and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair-menders, — who bear a mended chair upon their shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white wood for further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and plait the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their knives, and gossip with your serving-woman.

But in the mean time our own serving-woman Giovanna, the great central principle of our housekeeping, is waiting to be personally presented to the company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, that it is hard not to believe them created just as crooked, and foul, and full of fluff and years as you behold them, and you cannot understand how so much frowziness and so little hair, so great show of fangs and so few teeth, are growths from any ordinary human birth. G. is no longer young, but she is not after the likeness of these old women. It is of a middle age, unbeginning, interminable, of which she gives you the impression. She has brown apple-cheeks, just touched with frost; her nose is of a strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and having the slightly shrunken effect observable in tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned. A tough, pleasant, indestructible woman — for use, we thought, not ornament — the mother of a family, a good Catholic, and the flower of serving-women.

I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a class, given to pilfering; but knowing ourselves subject by nature to pillage, we cannot repress a feeling of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. She strictly accounts for all money given her at the close of each week, and to this end keeps a kind of account-book, which I cannot help regarding as in some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, confirmed by her own confession, that G. is not good for reading and writing. On settling with her I have been permitted to look into this book, which is all in capital letters, — each the evident result of serious labor, — with figures representing combinations of the pot-hook according to bold and original conceptions. The spelling is also a remarkable effort of creative genius. The only difficulty under which the author labors in regard to the book is the confusion naturally resulting from the effort to get literature right side up when it has got upside down. The writing is a kind of pugilism — the strokes being made straight out from the shoulder. The account-book is always carried about with her in a fathomless pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a housekeeper who can throw nothing away, to wit: matchboxes, now appointed to hold buttons and hooks-and-eyes; beeswax in the lump; the door-key (which in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you at first sight as ordnance); a patch-bag; a porte-monnaie; many lead-pencils in the stump; scissors, pincushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, this incapability of throwing things away is made to bear rather severely upon us in some things, such as the continual reappearance of familiar dishes at table — particularly veteran bifsteca. But we fancy that the same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage and comfort in other things, for G. makes a great show and merit of denying our charity to those bold and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not scruple to ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It is true that with G., as with every Italian, almsgiving enters into the theory and practice of Christian life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privileges. She has no hesitation, however, in bringing certain objects of compassion to our notice, and she procures small services to be done for us by many lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought my boat (I come, in time, to be willing to sell it again for half its cost to me), I require a menial to clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls me a youthful Gobbo for the work, — a festive hunchback, a bright-hearted whistler of comic opera. Whether this blithe humor is not considered decent, I do not know, but though the Gobbo serves me faithfully, I find him one day replaced by a venerable old man, whom — from his personal resemblance to Time — I should think much better occupied with an hourglass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and other mortals down, than in cleaning my boat. But all day long he sits on my riva in the sun, when it shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the day is dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to my slightest boating impulse. He salutes my going out and coming in with grave reverence, and I think he has no work to do but that which G.’s wise compassion has given him from me. Suddenly, like the Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears, and I hear vaguely — for in Venice you never know any thing with precision — that he has found a regular employment in Padua, and again that he is dead. While he lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive manner with this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining years; but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggressive misery fail to touch her. The kind of wretchedness that comes breathing woe and sciampagnin [Footnote: Little champagne, — the name which the Venetian populace gave to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy drunk during the scarcity of wine. After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor came to be jocosely known as petrolio.] under our window, and there spends a leisure hour in the rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim either upon her pity or her weakness. She is deaf to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase of a guilty tranquillity. I imagine, however, that she is afraid to deny charity to the fat Capuchin friar in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a month to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his convent, for we hear her declare from the window that the master is not at home, whenever the good brother rings; and at last, as this excuse gives out, she ceases to respond to his ring at all.

Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes down our street a certain tremulous old troubadour with an aged cithern, on which he strums feebly with bones which remain to him from former fingers, and in a thin quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of youth and love. Sadder music I have never heard, but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh of sensibility without referring sympathy to my pocket, I always hear the compassionate soldo of Giovanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement. Perhaps that slender note touches something finer than habitual charity in her middle-aged bosom, for these were songs she says that they used to sing when she was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and different from now — veramente, tutt’ altro, signor!

It is through Giovanna’s charitable disposition that we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we know to this day merely as the Creatures — creatura being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a poveretta. Our Creatures are both well stricken in years, and one of them has some incurable disorder which frequently confines her to the wretched cellar in which they live with the invalid’s husband, — a mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade, and of batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway in the summer twilight. These people have but one room, and a little nook of kitchen at the side; and not only does the sun never find his way into their habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. They pay about four florins a month for the place, and I hope their landlord is as happy as his tenants. For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly poor, they are far from being discontented. They are opulent in the possession of a small dog, which they have raised from the cradle, as it were, and adopted into the family. They are never tired of playing with their dog, — the poor old children, — and every slight display of intelligence on his part delights them. They think it fine in him to follow us as we go by, but pretend to beat him; and then they excuse him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, and hug him and kiss him. He feeds upon their slender means and the pickings that G. carefully carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on our doorstep in spite of us, while she gossips with his mistresses, who chorus our appearance at such times with “I miei rispetti, signori!” We often see them in the street, and at a distance from home, carrying mysterious bundles of clothes; and at last we learn their vocation, which is one not known out of Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to the hard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers’ shops there is one large municipal spout, which is called the Monte di Piet�, where the needy pawn their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, but there are people who to this day cannot summon courage to repair in person to the Mount of Pity, and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class of frowzy old women who transact the business for them, and receive a small percentage for their trouble. Our poor old Creatures were of this class, and as there were many persons in impoverished, decaying Venice who had need of the succor they procured, they made out to earn a living when both were well, and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill. They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they regretted our removal, when this took place, for they used to sit down under an arcade opposite our new house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the contemplation of our windows.

The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna developed at a later day was, I fear, a growth from the encouragement we gave her charitable disposition. But for several months it was merely from the fact of a boy who came and whistled at the door until Giovanna opened it and reproved him in the name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that we knew her to be a mother; and we merely had her word for the existence of a husband, who dealt in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna’s husband, I nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy exterior, wearing a canvas apron, thickly crusted with the gore of fowls, who sat at the door of his shop and plucked chickens forever, as with the tireless hand of Fate. I divined that he lived in an atmosphere of scalded pullet; that three earthen cups of clotted chickens’ blood, placed upon his window-shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and that he shadowed forth his conceptions of the beautiful in symmetrical rows of plucked chickens, presenting to the public eye rear views embellished with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird; that he must be, through the ethics of competition, the sworn foe of those illogical peasants who bring dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds, and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who furnish you a meal of victuals and a feather-bed in the same mezzo-polio arrosto. He turned out on actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, with the additional merit of having a large red nose, a sidelong, fugitive gait, and a hangdog countenance. He furnished us poultry at rates slightly advanced, I think.

As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a constant guest, and took possession of the kitchen. He came near banishment at one time for catching a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and confining them in a basket in the kitchen, which they left at the dead hour of night, to wander all over our house, — making a mysterious and alarming sound of snapping, like an army of death-watches, and eluding the cunningest efforts at capture. On another occasion, he fell into the canal before our house, and terrified us by going under twice before the arrival of the old gondolier, who called out to him “Petta! petta!” (Wait! wait!) as he placidly pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other disagreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, from which he nevertheless furtively returned on holidays.

The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroaching upon us, we came also to know her mother, — a dread and loathly old lady, whom we would willingly have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She was commonly encountered at nightfall in our street, where she lay in wait, as it were, to prey upon the fragrance of dinner drifting from the kitchen windows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here was heard the voice of cooks and of scullions, and the ecstasies of helpless voracity in which we sometimes beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. Nor did we find her more comfortable in our own kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself is weird and terrible — low ceiled, with the stone hearth built far out into the room, and the melodramatic implements of Venetian cookery dangling tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day cheerfulness of cooking-range, but grotesque andirons wading into the bristling embers, and a long crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When Giovanna’s mother, then (of the Italian hags, haggard), rises to do us reverence from the darkest corner of this kitchen, and croaks her good wishes for our long life, continued health, and endless happiness, it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest malediction.

Not more pleasing, though altogether lighter and cheerfuler, was Giovanna’s sister-in-law, whom we knew only as the Cognata. Making her appearance first upon the occasion of Giovanna’s sickness, she slowly but surely established herself as an habitual presence, and threatened at one time, as we fancied, to become our paid servant. But a happy calamity which one night carried off a carpet and the window curtains of an unoccupied room, cast an evil suspicion upon the Cognata, and she never appeared after the discovery of the theft. We suspected her of having invented some dishes of which we were very fond, and we hated her for oppressing us with a sense of many surreptitious favors. Objectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with a tendency to be always at the street-door when we opened it. She had a narrow, narrow face, with eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a demeanor of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after her addition to the household, became the banqueting-hall of Giovanna’s family, who dined there every day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the house the general savor of a low cook-shop.

As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural tendency of excellent people to place others in subjection. Our servitude at first was not hard, and consisted chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to extraordinary efforts when G. had attempted to please us with some novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account in this respect; but indeed our applause was for the most part willing enough. Her culinary execution, first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas of roast potatoes, — a delicacy foreign to the Venetian kitchen, — culminated at last in the same style of polpetti [Footnote: I confess a tenderness for this dish, which is a delicater kind of hash skillfully flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow complexion and fascinating appearance.] which furnished forth the table of our neighbor, the Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph with us.

But G.’s spirit was not wholly that of the serving-woman. We noted in her the liveliness of wit seldom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inanimate things, when there was no other chance for talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad weather, which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. The crookedness of the fuel transported her, and she upbraided the fagots as springing from races of ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian abuse is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and combine terms of opprobrium with endless facility, but all abuse begins and ends with the attribution of doggishness.) The conscription was held in the campo near us, and G. declared the place to have become unendurable— “proprio un campo di sospiri!” (Really a field of sighs.) “Staga comodo!” she said to a guest of ours who would have moved his chair to let her pass between him and the wall. “Don’t move; the way to Paradise is not wider than this.” We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did not sleep in the house, should come to us so late in the morning, but we could not deal harshly with her on that account, met, as we always were, with plentiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, to place our wishes in the balance against the welfare of the sick neighbor with whom Giovanna passed so many nights of vigil? Should we reproach her with tardiness when she had not closed the eye all night for a headache properly of the devil? If she came late in the morning, she stayed late at night; and it sometimes happened that when the Paron and Parona, supposing her gone, made a stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold chicken, they found her there at midnight in the fell company of the Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and holding a mild Italian revel with that vinegar and the stony bread of Venice.

I have said G. was the flower of serving-women; and so at first she seemed, and it was long till we doubted her perfection. We knew ourselves to be very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona had the rare gift of learning to speak less and less Italian every day, and fell inevitably into subjection. The Paron in a domestic point of view was naturally nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, beholding the great contrast we presented to herself in many respects, had forborne to abuse her advantage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and I hardly know how or when it was that we began to waver in our confidence. It is certain that with the lapse of time we came gradually to have breakfast at twelve o’clock, instead of nine, as we had originally appointed it, and that G. grew to consume the greater part of the day in making our small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners at seven o’clock. We protested, and temporary reforms ensued, only to be succeeded by more hopeless lapses; but it was not till all entreaties and threats failed that we began to think seriously it would be well to have done with Giovanna, as an unprofitable servant. I give the result, not all the nice causes from which it came. But the question was, How to get rid of a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last, somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb’s Chinaman who invented roast pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook the roaster in the flames, — we hit upon an artifice by which we could dispense with Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had long ceased to dine at home, in despair; and now we resolved to take another house, in which there were other servants. But even then, it was a sore struggle to part with the flower of serving-women, who was set over the vacated house to put it in order after our flitting, and with whom the imprudent Paron settled the last account in the familiar little dining-room, surrounded by the depressing influences of the empty chambers. The place was peopled after all, though we had left it, and I think the tenants who come after us will be haunted by our spectres, crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, and sitting down with them at table. G. stood there, the genius of the place, and wept six regretful tears, each one of which drew a florin from the purse of the Paron. She had hoped to remain with us always while we lived in Venice; but now that she could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must take care of her. The gush of grief was transient: it relieved her, and she came out sunnily a moment after. The Paron went his way more sorrowfully, taking leave at last with the fine burst of Christian philosophy: “We are none of us masters of ourselves in this world, and cannot do what we wish. Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!” Yet he was undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut adrift from old moorings, and had crossed the Grand Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the long line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast-days to levy tribute of eggs at the old house. (The postman was among these, on Christmas and New Year’s, and as he received eggs at every house, it was a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how he carried them all, and what he did with them.) Not the least among the Paron’s causes for self-gratulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of two local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he subscribed, which were delivered with unsparing regularity, and which, being never read, formed the keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle neglect of their contents.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL.

The history of Venice reads like a romance; the place seems a fantastic vision at the best, from which the world must at last awake some morning, and find that after all it has only been dreaming, and that there never was any such city. There our race seems to be in earnest in nothing. People sometimes work, but as if without any aim; they suffer, and you fancy them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. Mark, standing so solidly, with a thousand years under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in the least gray with time — no grayer than a Greek lyric.

   “All has suffered a sea-change

   Into something rich and strange,”

in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen poetry from its baptism in the sea.

And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes for a little while forget how marvelous she is, at any moment you may be startled into vivid remembrance. The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and step by step, into some old court, where a flight of marble stairs leads high up to the pillared gallery of an empty palace, with a climbing vine green and purple on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretching their heads to look into the lofty windows, — blind long ago to their leafy tenderness, — while at their feet is some sumptuously carven well, with the beauty of the sculptor’s soul wrought forever into the stone. Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her remote canals, where you glide through an avenue as secret and as still as if sea-deep under our work-day world; where the grim heads carven over the water-gates of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise, where the innumerable balconies are full of the Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames, gossiping and making love to one another, from their airy perches. Or if the city’s mood is one of bolder charm, she fascinates you in the very places where you think her power is the weakest, and as if impatient of your forgetfulness, dares a wilder beauty, and enthralls with a yet more unearthly and incredible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the Austrian band is playing, and the promenaders pace solemnly up and down to the music, and the gentle Italian loafers at Florian’s brood vacantly over their little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid; when suddenly every thing is changed, and a memorable tournament flashes up in many-glittering action upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of the church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, bright-robed, and in the midst the bonneted Doge with his guest Petrarch at his side. Or the old Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot in, comes back and throngs the place with motley company, — dominoes, harlequins, pantaloni, illustrissimi and illustrissime, and perhaps even the Doge himself, who has the right of incognito when he wears a little mask of wax at his button-hole. Or may be the grander day revisits Venice when Doria has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled the horses of Saint Mark, — and the whole Republic of rich and poor crowds the square, demanding the release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison to create victory from the dust of the crumbling commonwealth.

But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful Venice may prepare for your forgetfulness, be sure it will be complete and resistless. Nay, what potenter magic needs my Venice to revivify her past whenever she will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand Canal? Launched upon this great S have I not seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has not this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired white-haired Puritan ministers of the gospel to attempt to quote out of the guide-book “that line from Byron”? Upon my word, I have sat beside wandering editors in their gondolas, and witnessed the expulsion of the newspaper from their nature, while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they were powerless to take their own journals from their pockets, and instead of politics talked some bewildered nonsense about coming back with their families next summer. For myself, I must count as half-lost the year spent in Venice before I took a house upon the Grand Canal. There alone can existence have the perfect local flavor. But by what witchery touched one’s being suffers the common sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow with the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it would be idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear little balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very coherently on the scene upon the water under us.

And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or the fall) you will not be surprised to see, the first thing, a boat-load of those English, who go by from the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are all singularly alike, from the “Pa’ty” traveling alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to the party which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English middle age, ruddy English youth, and substantial English baggage. We have learnt to know them all very well: the father and the mother sit upon the back seat, and their comely girls at the sides and front. These girls all have the honest cabbage-roses of English health upon their cheeks; they all wear little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls of hair tumble upon their broad English backs. They are coming from Switzerland and Germany, and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, and they always pause at Venice a few days. To-morrow we shall see them in the Piazza, and at Florian’s, and St. Mark’s, and the Ducal Palace; and the young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will sentimentally feed the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark which loaf about the Piazza and defile the sculptures. But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, and are more anxious than Americans can understand about the table-d’h�te of their hotel. It is perfectly certain that if they fall into talk there with any of our nation, the respectable English father will remark that this war in America is a very sad war, and will ask to know when it will all end. The truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I believe there is no love lost on the other side. But, in many things, they are travelers to be honored, if not liked: they voyage through all countries, and without awaking fervent affection in any land through which they pass; but their sterling honesty and truth have made the English tongue a draft upon the unlimited confidence of the continental peoples, and French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect private English faith as cordially as they hate public English perfidy.

They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and October is the month of the Sunsets and the English. The former are best seen from the Public Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds them glorious behind the domes and towers of San Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on the lagoon is a fine thing; for then the sun goes down into the water with a broad trail of bloody red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he had dragged himself landward across the crimsoning expanses, and fallen and died as he reached the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of Venice grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, therefore, grow farther and farther) are commonly content to take our bit of sunset as we get it from our balcony, through the avenue opened by the narrow canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon to have been a little rainy, when we have our sunset splendid as the fury of a passionate beauty — all tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent little palace on the corner which is formed by this canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and from the palace, high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy balcony. When the sunset sky, under and over the balcony, is of that pathetic and angry red which I have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the neighborhood of that part of the “Palace of Art,” whereon

   “The light aerial gallery, golden railed,

   Burnt like a fringe of fire.”

And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any greater thing in not seeing the sunset from the Gardens, where half a dozen artists are always painting it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splendid over and under the island church of San Giorgio in Alga.

It is only the English and the other tourist strangers who go by upon the Grand Canal during the day. But in the hours just before the summer twilight the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then you may see whatever is left of Venetian gayety and looking down upon the groups in the open gondolas may witness something of the home-life of the Italians, who live out-of-doors.

The groups do not vary a great deal one from another: inevitably the pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, the over-dressed handsome young girls. We learned to look for certain gondolas, and grew to feel a fond interest in a very mild young man who took the air in company and contrast with a ferocious bull-dog — boule-dogue he called him, I suppose. He was always smoking languidly, that mild young man, and I fancied I could read in his countenance a gentle, gentle antagonism to life — the proportionate Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from sugar and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew nothing about him, and our conjecture was conjecture. Officers went by in their brilliant uniforms, and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these we enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or perhaps general, in whom the arrogance of youth had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who frowned above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the passers, like a citadel grim with battle and age. We used to fancy, with a certain luxurious sense of our own safety, that one broadside from those fortressed eyes could blow from the water the slight pleasure-boats in which the young Venetian idlers were innocently disporting. But again this was merely conjecture. The general’s glance may have had no such power. Indeed, the furniture of our apartment sustained no damage from it, even when concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means the brave officer at times perused our humble lodging from the balcony of his own over against us. He may have been no more dangerous in his way than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) were in theirs. They represented Beauty in its most implacable and persevering form, and perhaps they had one day been belles and could not forget it. They were very old indeed, but their dresses were new and their paint fresh, and as they glided by in the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to smile at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then our soldi, to the swarthy beggar, who, being short of legs, rowed up and down the canal in a boat, and overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a singular compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, between the mendicant and corsair: I fear he would not have hesitated to assume the pirate altogether in lonelier waters; and had I been a heavily laden oyster-boat returning by night through some remote and dark canal, I would have steered clear of that truculent-looking craft, of which the crew must have fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack of legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of defeat.

About nightfall came the market boats on their way to the Rialto market, bringing heaped fruits and vegetables from the main-land; and far into the night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling progress of the boats was company and gentlest lullaby. By which time, if we looked out again, we found the moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, which had so loved Venice, kissing and caressing the tide-worn marble steps where her feet seemed to rest.

At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one of those freschi, which once formed the chief splendor of festive occasions in Venice, and are peculiar to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible. The fresco is a procession of boats with music and lights. Two immense barges, illumined with hundreds of paper lanterns, carry the military bands; the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, and then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to take part in the display, — though since 1859 no Italian, unless a government official, has been seen in the procession. No gondola has less than two lanterns, and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow lights of blue, and red, and purple, over uniforms and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands breathe from their instruments music the most perfect and exquisite of its kind in the world; and as the procession takes the width of the Grand Canal in its magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon the old, weather-darkened palaces, and die tenderly away, giving to light and then to shadow the opulent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and spandrel, and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded visages of stone that peer down from doorway and window. It is a sight more gracious and fairy than ever poet dreamed; and I feel that the lights and the music have only got into my description by name, and that you would not know them when you saw and heard them, from any thing I say. In other days, people tell you, the fresco was much more impressive than now. At intervals, rockets used to be sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned during the progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers’ spectral shadows, giant-huge, on the palace-walls. But, for my part, I do not care to have the fresco other than I know it: indeed, for my own selfish pleasure, I should be sorry to have Venice in any way less fallen and forlorn than she is.

Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever seen on the Grand Canal are the great boats of the river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from Chioggia, come up to the city with the swelling sea. They are built with a pointed stern and bow rising with the sweep of a short curve from the water high above the cabin roof, which is always covered with a straw matting. Black is not the color of the gondolas alone, but of all boats in Venetia; and these of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any one of them might be sent to take King Arthur and bear him to Avilon, whither I think most of them are bound. A path runs along either gunwale, on which the men pace as they pole the boat up the canal, — her great sail folded and lying with the prostrate mast upon the deck. The rudder is a prodigious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly kind enough to wear a red cap with a blue tassel, and to smoke. The other persons on board are no less obliging and picturesque, from the dark-eyed young mother who sits with her child in her arms at the cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in play at her feet with a small yellow dog of the race already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats from Dalmatia. The father of the family, whom we take to be the commander of the vessel, occupies himself gracefully in sitting down and gazing at the babe and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed in childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, to attribute, with a kind of heart-ache, supreme earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy river craft; and as we glance down upon these people from our balcony, I choose to think them immensely contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit way, to make friends with so much bliss. But I am always repelled in these advances by the small yellow dog, who is rendered extremely irascible by my contemplation of the boat under his care, and who, ruffling his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to bark furious resentment of my longing.

Far different from the picture presented by this boat’s progress — the peacefulness of which even the bad temper of the small yellow dog could not mar — was another scene which we witnessed upon the Grand Canal, when one morning we were roused from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable outcry. Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal opposite at the same time, had struck together with a violence that shook the boatmen to their inmost souls. One barge was laden with lime, and belonged to a plasterer of the city; the other was full of fuel, and commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival captains advanced toward the bows of their boats, with murderous looks,

   “Con la test’alta e con rabbiosa fame,

   S� che parea che l’aer ne temesse,”

and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with hands of deathful challenge, while I looked on with that noble interest which the enlightened mind always feels in people about to punch each other’s heads.

But the storm burst in words.

“Figure of a pig!” shrieked the Venetian, “you have ruined my boat forever!”

“Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog!” returned the countryman, “and it was my right to enter the canal first.”

They then, after this exchange of insult, abandoned the main subject of dispute, and took up the quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally questioning the reputation of all their female relatives to the third and fourth cousins, they defied each other as the offspring of assassins and prostitutes. As the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and forth and hurled opprobrium with a foamy volubility that quite left my powers of comprehension behind. At last the townsman, executing a pas seul of uncommon violence, stooped and picked up a bit of lime, while the countryman, taking shelter at the stern of his boat, there attended the shot. To my infinite disappointment it was not fired. The Venetian seemed to have touched the climax of his passion in the mere demonstration of hostility, and gently gathering up his oar gave the countryman the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as the danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, he continued to exult in the wildest excesses of insult: “Ah-heigh! brutal executioner! Ah, hideous headsman!” Da capo. I now know that these people never intended to do more than quarrel, and no doubt they parted as well pleased as if they had actually carried broken heads from the encounter. But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by the result, for my disappointments arising out of the dramatic manner of the Italians had not yet been frequent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it.

There was some compensation for me — coming, like all compensation, a long while after the loss — in the spectacle of a funeral procession on the Grand Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity only possible to the place. It was the funeral of an Austrian general, whose coffin, mounted on a sable catafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of three that moved abreast. The barges on either side bristled with the bayonets of soldiery, but the dead man was alone in his boat, except for one strange figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and rested its glittering hand upon the black fall of the drapery. This was a man clad cap-a-pie in a perfect suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and his shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his helm. As at times he moved from side to side, and glanced upward at the old palaces, sad in the yellow morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every thing else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of some crusader come back to Venice, in wonder if this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat, were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea who had once sent her blind old Doge to beat down the pride of an empire and disdain its crown.

CHAPTER IX.

A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE.

One summer morning the mosquitoes played for me with sleep, and won. It was half-past four, and as it had often been my humor to see Venice at that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll through the city.

This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a habit of early rising in me, but I nevertheless advise people always to get up at half-past four, if they wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to take the most absorbing interest in every thing in the world. It was with a feeling absolutely novel that I looked about me that morning, and there was a breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions altogether delightful, and I fraternized so cordially with Nature that I do not think, if I had sat down immediately after to write out the experience, I should have at all patronized her, as I am afraid scribbling people have sometimes the custom to do. I know that my feeling of brotherhood in the case of two sparrows, which obliged me by hopping down from a garden wall at the end of Calle Falier and promenading on the pavement, was quite humble and sincere; and that I resented the ill-nature of a cat,

   “Whom love kept wakeful and the muse,”

and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the morn from a window grating. As I went by the gate of the Canonico’s little garden, the flowers saluted me with a breath of perfume, — I think the white honey-suckle was first to offer me this politeness, — and the dumpy little statues looked far more engaging than usual.

After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was to drink a cup of coffee at the Caff� Ponte di Ferro, where the eyebrows of the waiter expressed a mild surprise at my early presence. There was no one else in the place but an old gentleman talking thoughtfully to himself on the subject of two florins, while he poured his coffee into a glass of water, before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over my cup, I was reinforced by the appearance of a company of soldiers, marching to parade in the Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head, laughing and chatting, and one of the lieutenants smoking a long pipe, gave me a feeling of satisfaction only comparable to that which I experienced shortly afterward in beholding a stoutly built small dog on the Ponte di San Mois�. The creature was only a few inches high, and it must have been through some mist of dreams yet hanging about me that he impressed me as having something elephantine in his manner. When I stooped down and patted him on the head, I felt colossal.

On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the church of Saint Mary of the Lily, where, in company with one other sinner, I found a relish in the early sacristan’s deliberate manner of lighting the candles on the altar. Saint Mary of the Lily has a fa�ade in the taste of the declining Renaissance. The interior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous, abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was kneeling, and repeating his prayers. He now and then tapped himself absent-mindedly on the breast and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention to me as I stood at the door, hat in hand. The hour and the place invested him with so much interest, that I parted from him with emotion. My feelings were next involved by an abrupt separation from a young English East-Indian, whom I overheard asking the keeper of a caff� his way to the Campo di Marte. He was a claret-colored young fellow, tall, and wearing folds of white muslin around his hat. In another world I trust to know how he liked the parade that morning.

I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every morning swept by troops of ragged facchini, who gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over their work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and several followed my progress through the square, in the vague hope that I would relent and have my boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone amid the desert elegance of Caff� Florian, which is never shut, day or night, from year to year. At the Caff� of the Greeks, two individuals of the Greek nation were drinking coffee.

I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars of the Lion and the Saint, and walked freely back and forth, taking in the glory of that prospect of water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the lagoons, like those scenes cunningly wrought in apparent relief on old Venetian mirrors. I walked there freely, for though there were already many gondoliers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner or offered me a boat. At that hour, I was in myself so improbable, that if they saw me at all, I must have appeared to them as a dream. My sense of security was sweet, but it was false, for on going into the church of St. Mark, the keener eye of the sacristan detected me. He instantly offered to show me the Zeno Chapel; but I declined, preferring the church, where I found the space before the high altar filled with market-people come to hear the early mass. As I passed out of the church, I witnessed the partial awaking of a Venetian gentleman who had spent the night in a sitting posture, between the columns of the main entrance. He looked puffy, scornful, and uncomfortable, and at the moment of falling back to slumber, tried to smoke an unlighted cigarette, which he held between his lips. I found none of the shops open as I passed through the Merceria, and but for myself, and here and there a laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed deserted. In the mere wantonness of power, and the security of solitude, I indulged myself in snapping several door-latches, which gave me a pleasure as keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a stick along the pickets of a fence. I was in nowise abashed to be discovered in this amusement by an old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke the usual basket with bottles of milk packed in straw.

Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade already astir in that noisy place; the voice of cheap bargains, which by noonday swells into an intolerable uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having lived in Campo San Bartolomeo, I recognized several familiar faces there, and particularly noted among them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently swindled me in my small dealings with him. He now sat before his stand, and for a man of a fat and greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as if he had passed a pleasant night.

On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the market was preparing for the purchasers. Butchers were arranging their shops; fruit-stands, and stands for the sale of crockery, and — as I must say for want of a better word, if there is any — notions, were in a state of tasteful readiness. The person on the steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock of cheap clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, had so far completed his preparations as to have leisure to be talking himself hot and hoarse with the neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good humor, and was merely giving a dramatic flavor to some question of six soldi.

At the landings of the market-place squadrons of boats loaded with vegetables were arriving and unloading. Peasants were building cabbages into pyramids; collective squashes and cucumbers were taking a picturesque shape; wreaths of garlic and garlands of onions graced the scene. All the people were clamoring at the tops of their voices; and in the midst of the tumult and confusion, resting on heaps of cabbage-leaves and garbage, men lay on their bellies sweetly sleeping. Numbers of eating-houses were sending forth a savory smell, and everywhere were breakfasters with bowls of sguassetto. In one of the shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, a heated brunette was turning sections of eel on a gridiron, and hurriedly coqueting with the purchasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was the countenance of the statue called the Gobbo, as I looked at it in the centre of the market-place. The Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was patiently supporting his burden, and looking with a quiet, thoughtful frown upon the ground, as if pondering some dream of change that had come to him since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read aloud to the people from the stone tribune on his shoulders.

Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful meditation; and as I sat at the feet of the four granite kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of the ducal palace to be opened, that I might see the girls drawing the water, I studied the group of the Judgment of Solomon, on the corner of the palace, and arrived at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible story, which I have now wholly forgotten.

The gate remained closed too long for my patience, and I turned away from a scene momently losing its interest. The brilliant little shops opened like hollyhocks as I went home; the swelling tide of life filled the streets, and brought Venice back to my day-time remembrance, robbing her of that keen, delightful charm with which she greeted my early morning sense.

CHAPTER X.

THE MOUSE.

Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because I think it illustrates some amusing traits of character in a certain class of Italians, I explain at once that he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his wretched, trembling little manner, his fugitive expression, and peaked visage.

He first appeared to us on the driver’s seat of that carriage in which we posted so splendidly one spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro. But though he mounted to his place just outside the city gate, we did not regard him much, nor, indeed, observe what a mouse he was, until the driver stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the Mouse got down to stretch his forlorn little legs. Then I got down too, and bade him good-day, and told him it was a very hot day — for he was a mouse apparently so plunged in wretchedness that I doubted if he knew what kind of day it was.

When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the wary manner of the Venetians when they find themselves in the company of a foreigner who does not look like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obiza near by, which is now the country-seat of the ex-Duke of Modena; and he presently said something to imply that he thought me a German.

“But I am not a German,” said I.

“As many excuses,” said the Mouse sadly, but with evident relief; and then began to talk more freely, and of the evil times.

“Are you going all the way with us to Florence?” I asked.

“No, signor, to Bologna; from there to Ancona.”

“Have you ever been in Venice? We are just coming from there.”

“Oh, yes.”

“It is a beautiful place. Do you like it?”

“Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself very well there.”

“But I thought Venice interesting.”

“Sufficiently, signor. Ma!” said the Mouse, shrugging his shoulders, and putting on the air of being luxuriously fastidious in his choice of cities, “the water is so bad in Venice.”

The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter overcoat, and has no garment to form a compromise with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render the weather more endurable by throwing off the surtout. In spite of his momentary assumption of consequence, I suspect that his coat is in the Monte di Piet�. It comes out directly that he is a ship-carpenter who has worked in the Arsenal of Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste.

But there is no work any more. He went to Trieste lately to get a job on the three frigates which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. Ma! After all, the frigates are to be built in Marseilles instead. There is nothing. And every thing is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona.

By this time the horses are watered; the Mouse regains his seat, and we almost forget him, till he jumps from his place, just before we reach the hotel in Rovigo, and disappears — down the first hole in the side of a house, perhaps. He might have done much worse, and spent the night at the hotel, as we did.

The next morning at four o’clock, when we start, he is on the box again, nibbling bread and cheese, and glancing furtively back at us to say good morning. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like a mouse, and a sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on his chin — as like Victor Emanuel’s as a mouse’s tuft can be.

The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and he crouches into a little gelid ball on the seat beside the driver, while we wind along the Po on the smooth gray road; while the twilight lifts slowly from the distances of field and vineyard; while the black boats of the Po, with their gaunt white sails, show spectrally through the mists; while the trees and the bushes break into innumerable voice, and the birds are glad of another day in Italy; while the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen afield; while his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the door, and the children’s faces peer out from behind her skirts; while the air freshens, the east flushes, and the great miracle is wrought anew.

Once again, before we reach the ferry of the Po, the Mouse leaps down and disappears as mysteriously as at Rovigo. We see him no more till we meet in the station on the other side of the river, where we hear him bargaining long and earnestly with the ticket-seller for a third-class passage to Bologna. He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken and forlorn than ever, and walks up and down the station, startled at a word, shocked at any sudden noise.

For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for crossing the river, mentioning the fabulous sum it had cost us.

It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. “What could they do when a man was in misery? I had nothing else.”

Even while thus betraying his poverty, the Mouse did not beg, and we began to respect his poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing the manner in which he sat down on the edge of a chair, with a smile of meek desperation.

It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of work in the Old World than one can understand in the New. There the struggle for bread is so fierce and the competition so great; and, then, a man bred to one trade cannot turn his hand to another as in America. Even the rudest and least skilled labor has more to do it than are wanted. The Italians are very good to the poor, but the tradesman out of work must become a beggar before charity can help him.

We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult foolishly together concerning the Mouse. It blesses him that gives, and him that takes — this business of charity. And then, there is something irresistibly relishing and splendid in the consciousness of being the instrument of a special providence! Have I all my life admired those beneficent characters in novels and comedies who rescue innocence, succor distress, and go about pressing gold into the palm of poverty, and telling it to take it and be happy; and now shall I reject an occasion, made to my hand, for emulating them in real life?

“I think I will give the Mouse five francs,” I say.

“Yes, certainly.”

“But I will be prudent,” I continue. “I will not give him this money. I will tell him it is a loan which he may pay me back again whenever he can. In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him an incentive to economy.”

I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously toward me.

“Have you friends in Ancona?”

“No, signor.”

“How much money have you left?”

He shows me three soldi. “Enough for a coffee.”

“And then?”

“God knows.”

So I give him the five francs, and explain my little scheme of making it a loan, and not a gift; and then I give him my address.

He does not appear to understand the scheme of the loan; but he takes the money, and is quite stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me absently, and goes and shows the piece to the guards, with a smile that illumines and transfigures his whole person. At Bologna, he has come to his senses; he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep; he reverences me, he wishes me a good voyage, endless prosperity, and innumerable days; and takes the train for Ancona.

“Ah, ah!” I congratulate myself,— “is it not a fine thing to be the instrument of a special providence?”

It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that journey, and if we are never so tired, it rests us to say, “I wonder where the Mouse is by this time?” When we get home, and coldly count up our expenses, we rejoice in the five francs lent to the Mouse. “And I know he will pay it back if ever he can,” I say. “That was a Mouse of integrity.”

Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, with a young child — a child strong on its legs, a child which tries to open every thing in the room, which wants to pull the cloth off the table, to throw itself out of the open window — a child of which I have never seen the peer for restlessness and curiosity. This young woman has been directed to call on me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. “But who sent you? But, in fine, why should I pay your way to Ferrara? I have never seen you before.”

“My husband, whom you benefited on his way to Ancona, sent me. Here is his letter and the card you gave him.”

I call out to my fellow-victim,— “My dear, here is news of the Mouse!”

“Don’t tell me he’s sent you that money already!”

“Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, that I may forward them to him at Ferrara, out of my goodness, and the boundless prosperity which has followed his good wishes — I, who am a great signor in his eyes, and an insatiable giver of five-franc pieces — the instrument of a perpetual special providence. The Mouse has found work at Ferrara, and his wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, I am to send her to him, as I said.”

“You are deceived,” I say solemnly to the Mouse’s wife. “I am not a rich man. I lent your husband five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to Ferrara. If one will help you?”

“Thanks the same,” said the young woman, who was well dressed enough; and blessed me, and gathered up her child, and went her way.

But her blessing did not lighten my heart, depressed and troubled by so strange an end to my little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all, perhaps the Mouse may have been as keenly disappointed as myself. With the ineradicable idea of the Italians, that persons who speak English are wealthy by nature, and tutti originali, it was not such an absurd conception of the case to suppose that if I had lent him five francs once, I should like to do it continually. Perhaps he may yet pay back the loan with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I am far from blaming the Mouse. I merely feel that there is a misunderstanding, which I can pardon if he can.

CHAPTER XI.

CHURCHES AND PICTURES.

One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy a family party of the English, whom we had often seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were kind enough to pause before Titian’s John the Baptist. It was attention that the picture could scarcely demand in strict justice, for it hangs at the end of a suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually return from the great halls, spent with looking at much larger paintings. As these people stood gazing at the sublime figure of the Baptist, — one of the most impressive, if not the most religious, that the master has painted, — and the wild and singular beauty of the landscape made itself felt through the infinite depths of their respectability, the father of the family and the head of the group uttered approval of the painter’s conception: “Quite my idea of the party’s character,” he said; and then silently and awfully led his domestic train away.

I am so far from deriding the criticism of this honest gentleman that I would wish to have equal sincerity and boldness in saying what I thought — if I really thought any thing at all — concerning the art which I spent so great a share of my time at Venice in looking at. But I fear I should fall short of the terseness as well as the candor I applaud, and should presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms which I neither respect for their honesty, nor regard for their justice. It is the sad fortune of him who desires to arrive at full perception of the true and beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agreement except upon a few loose general principles; and that among the artists, to whom he turns in his despair, no two think alike concerning the same master, while his own little learning has made him distrust his natural likings and mislikings. Ruskin is undoubtedly the best guide you can have in your study of the Venetian painters; and after reading him, and suffering confusion and ignominy from his theories and egotisms, the exercises by which you are chastised into admission that he has taught you any thing cannot fail to end in a humility very favorable to your future as a Christian. But even in this subdued state you must distrust the methods by which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you perceive to certain civil and religious conditions: you scarcely understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly disdains (on one page) to paint well any person baser than a saint or senator, and with whom “exactly in proportion to the dignity of the character is the beauty of the painting,” — comes (on the next page) to paint a very “weak, mean, and painful” figure of Christ; and knowing a little the loose lives of the great Venetian painters, you must reject, with several other humorous postulates, the idea that good colorists are better men than bad colorists. Without any guide, I think, these painters may be studied and understood, up to a certain point, by one who lives in the atmosphere of their art at Venice, and who, insensibly breathing in its influence, acquires a feeling for it which all the critics in the world could not impart where the works themselves are not to be seen. I am sure that no one strange to the profession of artist ever received a just notion of any picture by reading the most accurate and faithful description of it: stated dimensions fail to convey ideas of size; adjectives are not adequate to the ideas of movement; and the names of the colors, however artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot tell the reader of a painter’s coloring. I should be glad to hear what Titian’s “Assumption” is like from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can any one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it? Can any cunning critic describe intelligibly the difference between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto, and of Paolo Veronese, — that difference which no one with the slightest feeling for art can fail to discern after looking thrice at their works? It results from all this that I must believe special criticisms on art to have their small use only in the presence of the works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and I could not, in any honesty, lumber my pages with descriptions or speculations which would be idle to most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art than I affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted in that way at all, I think I may better devote myself to discussion of such things in Venice as can be understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and so rest happy in the thought that I have thrown no additional darkness on any of the pictures half obscured now by the religious dimness of the Venetian churches.

Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already made me hesitate to spend the reader’s patience upon many well-known wonders of Venice; and, looking back over the preceding chapters, I find that some of the principal edifices of the city have scarcely got into my book even by name. It is possible that the reader, after all, loses nothing by this; but I should regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression of the beautiful which beguiled many dull hours for me, and kept me company in many lonesome ones. For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under obligations to edifices in every part of the city; and there is hardly a bit of sculptured stone in the Ducal Palace to which I do not owe some pleasant thought or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in my gratitude to transmute the substance of the Ducal Palace into some substance that shall be sensible to the eyes that look on this print; and I forgive myself the reluctance the more readily when I remember how, just after reading Mr. Ruskin’s description of St. Mark’s Church, I, who had seen it every day for three years, began to have dreadful doubts of its existence.

To be sure, this was only for a moment, and I do not think all the descriptive talent in the world could make me again doubt St. Mark’s, which I remember with no less love than veneration. This church indeed has a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, while it appeals profoundly to the religious sentiment. It is as if there were a sheltering friendliness in its low-hovering domes and arches, which lures and caresses while it awes; as if here, where the meekest soul feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed with the heaviest load of sin might creep nearest to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of its repentance in the temple’s dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps. Though the temple is enriched with incalculable value of stone and sculpture, I cannot remember at any time to have been struck by its mere opulence Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the highest uses, and there is such unity and justness in the solemn splendor, that wonder is scarcely appealed to. Even the priceless and rarely seen treasures of the church — such as the famous golden altarpiece, whose costly blaze of gems and gold was lighted in Constantinople six hundred years ago — failed to impress me with their pecuniary worth, though I

   “Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes,”

and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels of other churches are conspicuous and silly heaps of treasure; but St. Mark’s, where every line of space shows delicate labor in rich material, subdues the jewels to their place of subordinate adornment. So, too, the magnificence of the Romish service seems less vainly ostentatious there. In other churches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you with a sense of their grandeur, and even spirituality, but they all need the effect of twilight upon them. You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little lamps must tremble before the shrines; and in the background must rise the high altar, all ablaze with candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir pours music from behind, and the organ shakes the heart with its heavy tones. But with the daylight on its splendors even the grand function of the Te Deum fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except in St. Mark’s alone, which is given grace to spiritualize what elsewhere would be mere theatric pomp. [Footnote: The cardinal-patriarch officiates in the Basilica San Marco with some ceremonies which I believe are peculiar to the patriarchate of Venice, and which consist of an unusual number of robings and disrobings, and putting on and off of shoes. All this is performed with great gravity, and has, I suppose, some peculiar spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a priest to the foot of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the profane, out-of-door chaussure, and places the sacred shoes on the patriarch’s feet. A like ceremony replaces the patriarch’s every-day gaiters, and the pious rite ends.] The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edifice best adapted to the Romish worship; for the incense, which is a main element of the function, is gathered and held there in choking clouds under the low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves. — Yet I do not know if I would banish incense from the formula of worship even in St. Mark’s. There is certainly a poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer and its curling fumes; and I think the perfume, as it steals mitigated to your nostrils, out of the open church door, is the reverendest smell in the world.

The music in Venetian churches is not commonly very good: the best is to be heard at St. Mark’s, though the director of the choir always contrives to make so odious a slapping with his b�ton as nearly to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical event of the year is the performance (immediately after the Festa del Redentore) of the Soldini Masses. These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe Soldini of Verona, who, dying possessed of about a million francs, bequeathed a part (some six thousand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark, on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that during three successive days, every year, there shall be said for the peace of his soul a certain number of masses, — all to be done in the richest and costliest manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes to the Philharmonic Society of Milan; but the priesthood of the basilica so strictly regard the wishes of the deceased that they never say less than four masses over and above the prescribed number. [Footnote: After hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit the Casa di Ricovero, in order to look at Soldini’a will, and there I had the pleasure of recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that beneficent humanity is of all countries and religions. The Casa di Ricovero is an immense edifice dedicated to the shelter and support of the decrepit and helpless of either sex, who are collected there to the number of five hundred. The more modern quarter was erected from a bequest by Soldini; and eternal provision is also made by his will for ninety of the inmates. The Secretary of the Casa went through all the wards and infirmaries with me, and everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and such content as is possible to sickness and old age), without surprise; for I had before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something of the perfection of Venetian charities.

At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the pensioners are made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, slender, pallid young nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple pride altogether pathetic. She was a woman still, poor thing, though a nun, and she could not help loving new clothes. They called her Madre, who would never be it except in name and motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a moment before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape had hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet and beautiful vanity! An angel could have done it without harm, but she blushed repentance, and glided away with downcast eyes Poor little mother!]

As there is so little in St. Mark’s of the paltry or revolting character of modern Romanism, one would form too exalted an idea of the dignity of Catholic worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the sincerity and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown to the Romish faith of these times, are the ruling influences in that temple: the past lays its spell upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity of the early faith honors the superstition which has succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its proper grossness and deformity you must go into some of the Renaissance churches, — fit tabernacles for that droning and mumming spirit which has deprived all young and generous men in Italy of religion; which has made the priests a bitter jest and byword; which has rendered the population ignorant, vicious, and hopeless; which gives its friendship to tyranny and its hatred to freedom; which destroys the life of the Church that it may sustain the power of the Pope. The idols of this superstition are the foolish and hideous dolls which people bow to in most of the Venetian temples, and of which the most abominable is in the church of the Carmelites. It represents the Madonna with the Child, elevated breast-high to the worshipers. She is crowned with tinsel and garlanded with paper flowers; she has a blue ribbon about her tightly corseted waist; and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her painted, silly face of wood, with its staring eyes shadowed by a wig, is figured a pert smile; and people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers to her; while the column near which she sits is hung over with pictures celebrating the miracles she has performed.

These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on most altars of the Virgin, and are no less interesting as works of art than as expressions of hopeless superstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a Child similarly habited, is the Madonna most efficacious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless sickness, if we may trust the pictures which represent her interference. You behold a carriage overturned and dragged along the ground by frantic horses, and the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman in the carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, when the havoc is instantly arrested by this Madonna who breaks the clouds, leaving them with jagged and shattered edges, like broken panes of glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and gentleman from destruction. It is the fashionable lady and gentleman who have thus recorded their obligation; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the little boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall from the second-floor balcony, who has gratefully caused the miracle to be painted and hung at the Madonna’s shrine. Now and then you also find offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in acknowledgment of good crops which the Madonna has made to grow; and again you find rows of silver hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her intercession has caused to be purged. The greatest number of these, at any one shrine, is to be seen in the church of San Nicol� dei Tolentini, where I should think there were three hundred.

Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna della Salute in pestilent times, I do not take it to be very great when the health of the city is good, if I may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in the church of her name: it is true that on the annual holiday commemorative of her interposition to save Venice from the plague, there is an immense concourse of people there; but at other times I found the masses and vespers slenderly attended, and I did not observe a great number of votive offerings in the temple, — though the great silver lamp placed there by the city, in memory of the Madonna’s goodness during the visitation of the cholera in 1849, may be counted, perhaps, as representative of much collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb church, lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand Canal; and I do not know what it is saves it from being as hateful to the eye as other temples of the Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a fine effect, with its twin belltowers and single massive dome, its majestic breadth of steps rising from the water’s edge, and the many-statued sculpture of its fa�ade. Strangers go there to see the splendor of its high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, as the centre of a marble group, responds to the prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away the haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians and the grand Tintoretto in the sacristy.

The Salute is one of the great show-churches, like that of San Giovanni e Paolo, which the common poverty of imagination has decided to call the Venetian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many famous tombs and monuments. But there is only one Westminster Abbey; and I am so far a believer in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose that vergers are nowhere possible but in England. There would be nothing to say, after Mr. Ruskin, in praise or blame of the great monuments in San Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them; I only wonder that, in speaking of the bad art which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he failed to mention the successful approach to its depraved feeling, made by the single figure sitting on the case of a slender shaft, at the side of the first altar on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunken woman, whose drapery has fallen, as if in some vile debauch, to her waist, and who broods, with a horrible, heavy stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on something which she supports with her left hand upon her knee. It is a round of marble, and if you have the daring to peer under the arm of the debauchee, and look at it as she does, you find that it contains the bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing more ghastly and abominable than the whole thing can be conceived, and it seemed to me the fit type of the abandoned Venice which produced it; for one even less Ruskinian than I might have fancied that in the sculptured countenance could be seen the dismay of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the sea when, from time to time, death confronted her amid her revels.

People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to see the painting of Titian, representing The Death of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a painting of equal size by John Bellini, — the Madonna, Child, and Saints, of course, — and it is curious to study in the two pictures those points in which Titian excelled and fell short of his master. The treatment of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, but where the greater painter has gained in breadth and freedom, he has lost in that indefinable charm which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fairest flower and ripest fruit. I have looked again and again at nearly every painting of note in Venice, having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and having also a better wish to learn something of the beautiful from them; but at last I must say, that, while I wondered at the greatness of some, and tried to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paintings which gave me genuine and hearty pleasure were those of Bellini, Carpaccio, and a few others of that school and time.

Every day we used to pass through the court of the old Augustinian convent adjoining the church of San Stefano. It is a long time since the monks were driven out of their snug hold; and the convent is now the headquarters of the Austrian engineer corps, and the colonnade surrounding the court is become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of this court are remains — very shadowy remains indeed — of frescos painted by Pordenone at the period of his fiercest rivalry with Titian; and it is said that Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of scriptural story here represented, wore his sword and buckler, in readiness to repel an attack which he feared from his competitor. The story is very vague, and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to find it grow more and more intangible and uncertain. But it gave a singular relish to our daily walk through the old cloister, and I added, for my own pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am afraid, for I can nowhere localize the fable on which I built), that the rivalry between the painters was partly a love-jealousy, and that the disputed object of their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of the elder Palma, who is to be seen in so many pictures painted by her father, and by her lover, Titian. No doubt there are readers will care less for this idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard-headed German monk, Martin Luther, once said mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano, and lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The unhappy Francesco Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is buried in this church; but Venetians are chiefly interested there now by the homilies of those fervent preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons during Lent. The monks are gifted men, with a most earnest and graceful eloquence, and they attract immense audiences, like popular and eccentric ministers among ourselves. It is a fashion to hear them, and although the atmosphere of the churches in the season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfortable, the Venetians then throng the churches where they preach. After Lent the sermons and church-going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more abandoned to the possession of the priests, droning from the altars to the scattered kneelers on the floor, — the foul old women and the young girls of the poor, the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies of the better class, and that singular race of poverty-stricken old men proper to Italian churches, who, having dabbled themselves with holy water, wander forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort with the foreigners looking at the objects of interest. Lounging young fellows of low degree appear with their caps in their hands, long enough to tap themselves upon the breast and nod recognition to the high-altar; and lounging young fellows of high degree step in to glance at the faces of the pretty girls, and then vanish. The droning ends, presently, and the devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin old woman, kneeling before a shrine, with a grease-gray shawl falling from her head to the ground. The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about the great picture of the church, almost treads upon her as he brings the strangers to see it, and she gets meekly up and begs of them in a whispering whimper. The sacristan gradually expels her with the visitors, and at one o’clock locks the door and goes home.

By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at the five o’clock mass in the morning, when the worshipers are nearly all peasants who have come to market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have a bundle or basket. At this hour the sacristan is heavy with sleep; he dodges uncertainly at the tapers as he lights and extinguishes them; and his manner to the congregation, as he passes through it to the altar, is altogether rasped and nervous. I think it is best to be one’s self a little sleepy, — when the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the church of the Scalzi, say) has a habit of getting several centuries back from you, and of saying mass to the patrician ghosts from the tombs under your feet and there is nothing at all impossible in the Renaissance angels and cherubs in marble, floating and fatly tumbling about on the broken arches of the altars.

I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know why churches should keep cats, church-mice being proverbially so poor, and so little capable of sustaining a cat in good condition; yet I have repeatedly found sleek and portly cats in the churches, where they seem to be on terms of perfect understanding with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with the little boys who assist at mass. There is, for instance, a cat in the sacristy of the Frari, which I have often seen in familiar association with the ecclesiastics there, when they came into his room to robe or disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with supplication, at the great brazier in the middle of the floor. I do not think this cat has the slightest interest in the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the sacristy; but I suspect him of dreadful knowledge concerning the tombs in the church. I have no doubt he has passed through the open door of Canova’s monument, and that he sees some coherence and meaning in Titian’s; he has been all over the great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows whether the griffins descend from their perches at the midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the ragged black caryatides. This profound and awful animal I take to be a blood relation of the cat in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, who sleeps like a Christian during divine service, and loves a certain glorious bed on the top of a bench, where the sun strikes upon him through the great painted window, and dapples his tawny coat with lovely purples and crimsons.

The church cats are apparently the friends of the sacristans, with whom their amity is maintained probably by entire cession of the spoils of visitors. In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, merely opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at the sacristans as they drag the deluded strangers from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of the absurdity, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible stories rehearsed. I fancy, being Italian cats, they feel something like a national antipathy toward those troops of German tourists, who always seek the Sehensw�rdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty, — the men wearing their beards, and the women their hoops and hats, to look as much like English people as possible; while their valet marshals them forward with a stream of guttural information, unbroken by a single punctuation point. These wise cats know the real English by their “Murrays;” and I think they make a shrewd guess at the nationality of us Americans by the speed with which we pass from one thing to another, and by our national ignorance of all languages but English. They must also hear us vaunt the superiority of our own land in unpleasant comparisons, and I do not think they believe us, or like us, for our boastings. I am sure they would say to us, if they could, “Quando finir� mai quella guerra? Che sangue! che orrore!” [Footnote: “When will this war ever be ended? what blood! what horror!” I have often heard the question and the comment from many Italians who were not cats.] The French tourist they distinguish by his evident skepticism concerning his own wisdom in quitting Paris for the present purpose; and the traveling Italian, by his attention to his badly dressed, handsome wife, with whom he is now making his wedding trip.

I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most of them always are in Venice) rather interesting. Under these circumstances, the sacristan is obliged to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd corners, to show you the objects of interest; and you may often get glimpses of pictures which, if not removed from their proper places, it would be impossible to see. The carpenters and masons work most deliberately, as if in a place so set against progress that speedy workmanship would be a kind of impiety. Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests standing about, and vagabond boys clambering over the scaffolding. In San Giovanni e Paolo I remember we one day saw a small boy appear through an opening in the roof, and descend by means of some hundred feet of dangling rope. The spectacle, which made us ache with fear, delighted his companions so much that their applause was scarcely subdued by the sacred character of the place. As soon as he reached the ground in safety, a gentle, good-natured looking priest took him by the arm and cuffed his ears. It was a scene for a painter.

CHAPTER XII.

SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS.

Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these “summer isles of Eden” lying all about Venice, far and near. The water forever trembles and changes, with every change of light, from one rainbow glory to another, as with the restless hues of an opal; and even when the splendid tides recede, and go down with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have almost as wide a bound as your vision. On the east and west you can see their borders of sea-shore and main-land; but looking north and south, there seems no end to the charm of their vast, smooth, all-but melancholy expanses. Beyond their southern limit rise the blue Euganean Hills, where Petrarch died; on the north loom the Alps, white with snow. Dotting the stretches of lagoon in every direction lie the islands — now piles of airy architecture that the water seems to float under and bear upon its breast, now

   “Sunny spots of greenery,”

with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily showing above their trees; — for in the days of the Republic nearly every one of the islands had its monastery and its church. At present the greater number have been fortified by the Austrians, whose sentinel paces the once-peaceful shores, and challenges all passers with his sharp “Halt! Wer da!” and warns them not to approach too closely. Other islands have been devoted to different utilitarian purposes, and few are able to keep their distant promises of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the island of San Clemente, on which the old convent church is yet standing, empty and forlorn within, but without all draped in glossy ivy. After I had learned to row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the lagoon with my boat, and often stopped at this church. It has a curious feature in the chapel of the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the middle of the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated from the walls of the main edifice on all sides. On the back of this there is a bass-relief in bronze, representing the Nativity — a work much in the spirit of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo; and one of the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with gleaming columns of porphyry. There has been no service in the church for many years; and this altar had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like an offering. I wondered who the priest was that wore it, and why he had left it there, as if he had fled away in haste. I might have thought it looked like the signal of the abdication of a system; the gondolier who was with me took it up and reviled it as representative of birbanti matricolati, who fed upon the poor, and in whose expulsion from that island he rejoiced. But he had little reason to do so, since the last use of the place was for the imprisonment of refractory ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs of the Morosini are in San Clemente — villanous monuments, with bronze Deaths popping out of apertures, and holding marble scrolls inscribed with undying deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations of the poor old church are horrible, and there is one statue in it meant for an angel, with absolutely the most lascivious face I ever saw in marble.

The islands near Venice are all small, except the Giudecca (which is properly a part of the city), the Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca, from being anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles were confined, was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, and built up with summer-palaces. The gardens still remain to some extent; but they are now chiefly turned to practical account in raising vegetables and fruits for the Venetian market, and the palaces have been converted into warehouses and factories. This island produces a variety of beggar, the most truculent and tenacious in all Venice, and it has a convent of lazy Capuchin friars, who are likewise beggars. To them belongs the church of the Redentore, which only the Madonnas of Bellini in the sacristy make worthy to be seen, — though the island is hardly less famed for this church than for the difficult etymology of its name.

At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, with Palladio’s church of that name. There are some great Tintorettos in the church, and I like the beautiful wood-carvings in the choir. The island has a sad interest from the political prison into which part of the old convent has been perverted; and the next island eastward is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. Then comes the fair and happy seat of Armenian learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the Lido.

The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more cheerful days the Venetians used to resort in great numbers on certain holidays, called the Mondays of the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country scenery, and to lunch upon the flat tombs of the Hebrews, buried there in exile from the consecrated Christian ground. On a summer’s day there the sun glares down upon the sand and flat gravestones, and it seems the most desolate place where one’s bones might be laid. The Protestants were once also interred on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from the Catholics, however) in the cemetery of San Michele.

The island is long and narrow: it stretches between the lagoons and the sea, with a village at either end, and with bath-houses on the beach, which is everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor little trees there, and grass, — things which we were thrice a week grateful for, when we went thither to bathe. I do not know whether it will give the place further interest to say, that it was among the tombs of the Hebrews Cooper’s ingenious Bravo had the incredible good luck to hide himself from the sbirri of the Republic; or to relate that it was the habit of Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in search of that conspicuous solitude of which the sincere bard was fond.

One day of the first summer I spent in Venice (three years of Venetian life afterward removed it back into times of the remotest antiquity), a friend and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from one end of the Lido to the other, — from the port of San Nicol� (through which the Bucintoro passed when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to the port of Malamocco, at the southern extremity.

We began with that delicious bath which you may have in the Adriatic, where the light surf breaks with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all strewn with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest water I have ever seen; and it is an ineffable, lazy delight to lie and watch the fishing sails of purple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater ships dipping down its utmost rim. It was particularly good to do this after coming out of the water; but our American blood could not brook much repose, and we got up presently, and started on our walk to the little village of Malamocco, some three miles away. The double-headed eagle keeps watch and ward from a continuous line of forts along the shore, and the white-coated sentinels never cease to pace the bastions, night or day. Their vision of the sea must not be interrupted by even so much as the form of a stray passer; and as we went by the forts, we had to descend from the sea-wall, and walk under it, until we got beyond the sentry’s beat. The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy little isle, and they fringe the edges of the bastions with their bloom, as if the “blood-red blossoms of war” had there sprung from the seeds of battle sown in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts were not very engaging in appearance. A sentry-box of yellow and black, a sentry, a row of seaward frowning cannon — there was not much in all this to interest us; and so we walked idly along, and looked either to the city rising from the lagoons on one hand, or the ships going down the sea on the other. In the fields, along the road, were vines and Indian corn; but instead of those effigies of humanity, doubly fearful from their wide unlikeness to any thing human, which we contrive to scare away the birds, the devout peasant-folks had here displayed on poles the instruments of the Passion of the Lord — the hammer, the cords, the nails — which at once protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if even these would save them from the New-World pigs, and certainly the fences here would not turn pork, for they are made of a matting of reeds, woven together, and feebly secured to tremulous posts. The fields were well cultivated, and the vines and garden vegetables looked flourishing; but the corn was spindling, and had, I thought, a homesick look, as if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral bottom-lands, on the mighty streams that run through the heart of the Great West. The Italians call our corn gran turco, but I knew that it was for the West that it yearned, and not for the East.

No doubt there were once finer dwellings than the peasants’ houses which are now the only habitations on the Lido; and I suspect that a genteel villa must formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we found surmounted by broken statues of Venus and Diana. The poor goddesses were both headless, and some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering attitudes of the absurd period of art to which they belonged: they extended their mutilated arms toward the sea for pity, but it regarded them not; and we passed before them scoffing at their bad taste, for we were hungry, and it was yet some distance to Malamocco.

This dirty little village was the capital of the Venetian islands before King Pepin and his Franks burned it, and the shifting sands of empire gathered solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand years since that time, and Malamocco has long been given over to fishermen’s families and the soldiers of the forts. We found the latter lounging about the unwholesome streets; and the former seated at their thresholds, engaged in those pursuits of the chase which the use of a fine-tooth comb would undignify to mere slaughter.

There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, and we could not find the sacristan; so we went to the little restaurant, as the next best place, and demanded something to eat. What had the padrone? He answered pretty much to the same effect as the innkeeper in “Don Quixote,” who told his guests that they could have any thing that walked on the earth, or swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We would take, then, some fish, or a bit of veal, or some mutton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the shoulders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but what would we say to some liver or gizzards of chickens, fried upon the instant and ready the next breath? No, we did not want them; so we compromised on some ham fried in a batter of eggs, and reeking with its own fatness. The truth is, it was a very bad little lunch we made, and nothing redeemed it but the amiability of the smiling padrone and the bustling padrona, who served us as kings and princes. It was a clean hostelry, though, and that was a merit in Malamocco, of which the chief modern virtue is that it cannot hold you long. No doubt it was more interesting in other times. In the days when the Venetians chose it for their capital, it was a walled town, and fortified with towers. It has been more than once inundated by the sea, and it might again be washed out with advantage.

In the spring, two years after my visit to Malamocco, we people in Casa Falier made a long-intended expedition to the island of Torcello, which is perhaps the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. We had talked of it all winter, and had acquired enough property there to put up some light Spanish castles on the desolate site of the ancient city, that, so many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and died. A Count from Torcello is the title which Venetian persiflage gives to improbable noblemen; and thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello has passed into matter of scornful jest, as that of the dead Republic of Venice may likewise in its day.

When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass down the Grand Canal, cross the Basin of St. Mark, and enter one of the narrow canals that intersect the Riva degli Schiavoni, whence we wind and deviate southwestward till we emerge near the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, on the Fondamenta Nuove. On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the water from a little garden, is in full leaf, and at Murano we see the tender bloom of peaches and the drifted blossom of cherry-trees.

As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero the gondolier and Giovanna improve us with a little solemn pleasantry.

“It is a small place,” says Piero, “but there is room enough for all Venice in it.”

“It is true,” assents Giovanna, “and here we poor folks become landholders at last.”

At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old Duomo, and to enjoy its quaint mosaics within, and the fine and graceful spirit of the apsis without. It is very old, this architecture; but the eternal youth of the beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a stone fallen from it that I would replace.

The manufacture of glass at Murano, of which the origin is so remote, may be said to form the only branch of industry which still flourishes in the lagoons. Muranese beads are exported to all quarters in vast quantities, and the process of making them is one of the things that strangers feel they must see when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors are no longer made, and the glass has deteriorated in quality, as well as in the beauty of the thousand curious forms it took. The test of the old glass, which is now imitated a great deal, is its extreme lightness. I suppose the charming notion that glass was once wrought at Murano of such fineness that it burst into fragments if poison were poured into it, must be fabulous. And yet it would have been an excellent thing in the good old toxicological days of Italy; and people of noble family would have found a sensitive goblet of this sort as sovereign against the arts of venomers as an exclusive diet of boiled eggs. The city of Murano has dwindled from thirty to five thousand in population. It is intersected by a system of canals like Venice, and has a Grand Canal of its own, of as stately breadth as that of the capital. The finer houses are built on this canal; but the beautiful palaces, once occupied in villeggiatura by the noble Venetians, are now inhabited by herds of poor, or converted into glass-works. The famous Cardinal Bembo and other literati made the island their retreat, and beautified it with gardens and fountains. Casa Priuli in that day was, according to Venetian ideas, “a terrestrial Paradise,” and a proper haunt of “nymphs and demi-gods.” But the wealth, the learning, and the elegance of former times, which planted “groves of Academe” at Murano, have passed away, and the fair pleasure-gardens are now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest cabbage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary little town, with an inexplicable charm in its decay. The city arms are still displayed upon the public buildings (for Murano was ruled, independently of Venice, by its own council); and the heraldic cock, with a snake in its beak, has yet a lusty and haughty air amid the ruin of the place.

The way in which the spring made itself felt upon the lagoon was full of curious delight. It was not so early in the season that we should know the spring by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as yet no assurance of her presence in the growth — later so luxuriant — of the coarse grasses of the shallows. But somehow the spring was there, giving us new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls than usual, and those we saw sailed far overhead, debating departure. There was deeper languor in the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged and slept upon their floating custom houses in every channel of the lagoons; and the hollow voices of the boatmen, yelling to each other as their wont is, had an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. Over all, the heavens had put on their summer blue, in promise of that delicious weather which in the lagoons lasts half the year, and which makes every other climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure skies. I know we have beautiful days at home — days of which the sumptuous splendor used to take my memory with unspeakable longing and regret even in Italy; — but we do not have, week after week, month after month, that

   “Blue, unclouded weather,”

which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes you exult to be alive with the inarticulate gladness of children, or of the swallows that there all day wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a delight too intense and precipitate for song.

The island of Torcello is some five miles away from Venice, in the northern lagoon. The city was founded far back in the troubled morning of Christian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, and built with stones quarried from the ruins of old Altinum, over which Attila had passed desolating. During the first ages of its existence Torcello enjoyed the doubtful advantage of protection from the Greek emperors, but fell afterward under the domination of Venice. In the thirteenth century the debris of the river that emptied into the lagoon there began to choke up the wholesome salt canals, and to poison the air with swampy malaria; and in the seventeenth century the city had so dwindled that the Venetian podest� removed his residence from the depopulated island to Burano, — though the bishopric established immediately after the settlement of the refugees at Torcello continued there till 1814, to the satisfaction, no doubt, of the frogs and mosquitoes that had long inherited the former citizens.

I confess that I know little more of the history of Torcello than I found in my guide-book. There I read that the city had once stately civic and religious edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor Porphorygenitus called it “magnum emporium Torcellanorum.” The much-restored cathedral of the seventh century, a little church, a building supposed to have been the public palace, and other edifices so ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days is not now known, are all that remain of the magnum emporium, except some lines of moldering wall that wander along the canals, and through pastures and vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation and decay. There is a lofty bell-tower, also, from which, no doubt, the Torcellani used to descry afar off the devouring hordes of the barbarians on the main-land, and prepare for defense. As their city was never actually invaded, I am at a loss to account for the so-called Throne of Attila, which stands in the grass-grown piazza before the cathedral; and I fear that it may really have been after all only the seat which the ancient Tribunes of Torcello occupied on public occasions. It is a stone arm-chair, of a rude stateliness, and though I questioned its authenticity, I went and sat down in it a little while, to give myself the benefit of a doubt in case Attila had really pressed the same seat.

As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores at Torcello, Giovanna’s children, Beppi and Nina, whom we had brought with us to give a first experience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped from the boat and took possession of land and water. By a curious fatality the little girl, who was bred safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized her absence from their perils by presently falling into the only canal in Torcello, whence she was taken dripping, to be confined at a farm-house during the rest of our stay. The children were wild with pleasure, being absolutely new to the country, and ran over the island, plucking bouquets of weeds and flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield upon the shoulder of a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Venetian Beppi, and drew him away to study its strange and wonderful uses.

The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with gifts, or rather bargains, of flowers, to meet their discoverers, and, in a little while, exhausted our soldi. They also attended us in full force when we sat down to lunch, — the old, the young men and maidens, and the little children, all alike sallow, tattered, and dirty. Under these circumstances, a sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to our collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid manner, fragments of the feast among the poor Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness of Italians everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which the islanders clutched our gifts and devoured them, it was our doubt whether any one of them had ever experienced perfect repletion. I incline to think that a chronic famine gnawed their entrails, and that they never filled their bellies but with draughts of the east wind disdained of Job. The smaller among them even scrambled with the dog for the bones, until a little girl was bitten, when a terrific tumult arose, and the dog was driven home by the whole multitude. The children presently returned. They all had that gift of beauty which Nature seldom denies to the children of their race; but being, as I said, so dirty, their beauty shone forth chiefly from their large soft eyes. They had a very graceful, bashful archness of manner, and they insinuated beggary so winningly, that it would have been impossible for hungry people to deny them. As for us, having lunched, we gave them every thing that remained, and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art and antiquity in the cathedral.

Of course, I have not the least intention of describing it. I remember best among its wonders the bearing of certain impenitents in one of the mosaics on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had meant to represent as suffering in the flames of torment. I think, however, I have never seen complacence equal to that of these sinners, unless it was in the countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as represented in the vestibule of St. Mark’s, wear an air of the sleepiest and laziest enjoyment, while the seven lean kine, having just come up from the river, devour steaks from their bleeding haunches. There are other mosaics in the Torcello cathedral, especially those in the apsis and in one of the side chapels, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and form the widest possible contrast to the eighteenth-century high altar, with its insane and ribald angels flying off at the sides, and poising themselves in the rope-dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The choir is peculiarly built, in the form of a half-circle, with seats rising one above another, as in an amphitheatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the bishop’s seat above all, — after the manner of the earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and the capitals of the columns dividing the naves are of infinite richness. Part of the marble pulpit has a curious bass-relief, said to be representative of the worship of Mercury; and indeed the Torcellani owe much of the beauty of their Duomo to unrequited antiquity. (They came to be robbed in their turn: for the opulence of their churches was so great that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the severest penalties had to be enacted against those who stole from them. No one will be surprised to learn that the clergy themselves participated in these spoliations; but I believe no ecclesiastic was ever lashed in the piazza, or deprived of an eye or a hand for his offense.) The Duomo has the peculiar Catholic interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead saint’s mortal part in a glass case.

An arcade runs along the facade of the cathedral, and around the side and front of the adjoining church of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very old. But we found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, and so we came away and ascended the campanile. From the top of this you have a view of the lagoon, in all its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue sea. Here, looking toward the main-land, I would have been glad to experience the feelings of the Torcellani of old, as they descried the smoking advance of Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are like gifted children, and are seldom equal to occasions. I am ashamed to say that mine got no further than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard’s sister looking out for her brothers, and tearfully responding to Lady B.’s repeated and agonized entreaty, “O sister, do you see them yet?”

The old woman who had opened the door of the campanile was surprised into hospitality by the sum of money we gave her, and took us through her house (which was certainly very neat and clean) into her garden, where she explained the nature of many familiar trees and shrubs to us poor Venetians.

We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and Giovanna expressed the general feeling when she said: “Torsello xe beo — no si pol negar — la campagna xe bea; ma, benedetta la mia Venezia!”

(The country is beautiful — it can’t be denied — Torcello is beautiful; but blessed be my Venice!)

The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen in a voyage to Chioggia, or Ciozza, the quaint and historic little city that lies twenty miles away from Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The Giant Sea-wall, built there by the Republic in her decline, is a work of Roman grandeur, which impresses you more deeply than any other monument of the past with a sense of her former industrial and commercial greatness. Strips of village border the narrow Littorale all the way to Chioggia, and on the right lie the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia itself is hardly more than a village, — a Venice in miniature, like Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. But here the character of life is more amphibious than in brine-bound Venice; and though there is no horse to be seen in the central streets of Chioggia, peasants’ teams penetrate her borders by means of a long bridge from the main-land.

Of course Chioggia has passed through the customary vicissitudes of Italian towns, and has been depopulated at divers times by pestilence, famine, and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the Genoese in 1380, when it was taken by those enemies of St. Mark; and its people were so wasted by the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were obliged to invite immigration to repopulate its emptiness. I do not know how great comfort the Chiozzotti of that unhappy day took in the fact that some of the earliest experiments with cannon were made in the contest that destroyed them, but I can hardly offer them less tribute than to mention it here. At present the place is peopled almost entirely by sailors and fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their beauty than their amiability. Goldoni’s “Baruffe Chiozzotte” is an amusing and vivid picture of the daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of the city fought in the dramatist’s [Footnote: Goldoni’s family went from Venice to Chioggia when the dramatist was very young. The description of his life there form some of the most interesting chapters of his Memoirs.] time, and which are said to be of frequent occurrence at this day. The Chiozzotte are the only women of this part of Italy who still preserve a semblance of national costume; and this remnant of more picturesque times consists merely of a skirt of white, which, being open in front, is drawn from the waist over the head and gathered in the hand under the chin, giving to the flashing black eyes and swarthy features of the youthful wearer a look of very dangerous slyness and cunning. The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be that of the early Venetians, with an admixture of Greek, and it is infinitely more sweet and musical than the dialect now spoken in Venice. “Whether derived,” says the author of the “Fiore di Venezia,” alluding to the speech of these peculiar people, “from those who first settled these shores, or resulting from other physical and moral causes, it is certain that the tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful: the mouth is thrown wide open in speaking; a passion, a lament mingles with laughter itself, and there is a continual ritornello of words previously spoken. But this speech is full of energy; whoever would study brief and strong modes of expression should come here.”

Chioggia was once the residence of noble and distinguished persons, among whom was the painter Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for her crayon miniatures; and the place produced in the sixteenth century the great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, “who passes,” says Cant�, “for the restorer of modern music,” and “whose ‘Orfeo’ heralded the invention of the musical drama.” This composer claimed for his birthplace the doubtful honor of the institution of the order of the Capuchins, which he declared to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Giovanni Sambi) of Chioggia. There is not much now to see in poor little Chioggia except its common people, who, after a few minutes’ contemplation, can hardly interest any one but the artist. There are no dwellings in the town which approach palatial grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance churches to claim attention, unless it be an attributive Bellini in one of them. Yet if you have the courage to climb the bell-tower of the cathedral, you get from its summit the loveliest imaginable view of many-purpled lagoon and silver-flashing sea; and if you are sufficiently acquainted with Italy and Italians to observe a curious fact, and care to study the subject, you may note the great difference between the inhabitants of Chioggia and those of Palestrina, — an island divided from Chioggia by a half mile of lagoon, and by quite different costume, type of face, and accent.

Just between Chioggia and the sea lies the lazy town of Sottomarina, and I should say that the population of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time in lounging up and down the Sea-wall; while that of Chioggia, when not professionally engaged with the net, gave its leisure to playing mora [Footnote: Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers, one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, and calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood the game) the player mistakes the number of fingers he throws out, he loses; if he hits the number with both voice and fingers he wins. It is played with tempestuous interest, and is altogether fiendish in appearance.] in the shade, or pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. For my own part, I refused the subtlest advances of this kind which were made me in Chiozzotto, but fell a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me in some words of wonderful English, and then rowed me to the Sea-wall at about thrice the usual fare.

These primitive people are bent, in their out-of-the-world, remote way, upon fleecing the passing stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians, and they na�vely improve every occasion for plunder. As we passed up the shady side of their wide street, we came upon a plump little blond boy, lying asleep on the stones, with his head upon his arm; and as no one was near, the artist of our party stopped to sketch the sleeper. Atmospheric knowledge of the fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes we were the centre of a general assembly of the people of Chioggia, who discussed us, and the artist’s treatment of her subject, in open congress. They handed round the airy chaff as usual, but were very orderly and respectful, nevertheless, — one father of the place quelling every tendency to tumult by kicking his next neighbor, who passed on the penalty till, by this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of the trouble was infallibly reached and kicked at last. I placed a number of soldi in the boy’s hand, to the visible sensation of the crowd, and then we moved away and left him, heading, as we went, a procession of Chiozzotti, who could not make up their minds to relinquish us till we took refuge in a church. When we came out the procession had disappeared, but all round the church door, and picturesquely scattered upon the pavement in every direction, lay boys asleep, with their heads upon their arms. As we passed laughing through the midst of these slumberers, they rose and followed us with cries of “Mi tiri zu! Mi tiri zu!” (Take me down! Take me down!) They ran ahead, and fell asleep again in our path, and round every corner we came upon a sleeping boy; and, indeed, we never got out of that atmosphere of slumber till we returned to the steamer for Venice, when Chioggia shook off her drowsy stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi into the water, to be dived for by her awakened children.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE ARMENIANS.

Among the pleasantest friends we made in Venice were the monks of the Armenian Convent, whose cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon, upon the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk

   “Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers”

is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and encloses a garden-court, filled with all beautiful flowers, and with the memorable trees of the East; while another garden encompasses the monastery itself, and yields those honest fruits and vegetables which supply the wants of the well-cared-for mortal part of the good brothers. The island is called San Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by a learned and devoted Armenian priest named Mechithar, from whom the present order of monks is called Mechitharist. He was the first who formed the idea of educating a class of priests to act as missionaries among the Armenian nation in the East, and infuse into its civil and religious decay the life of European piety and learning. He founded at Sebaste, therefore, a religious order of which the seat was presently removed to Constantinople, where the friars met with so much persecution from Armenian heterodoxy that it was again transferred, and fixed at Modone in Morea. That territory falling into the hands of the Turks, the Mechitharists fled with their leader to Venice, where the Republic bestowed upon them a waste and desolate island, which had formerly been used as a place of refuge for lepers; and the monks made it the loveliest spot in all the lagoons.

The little island has such a celebrity in travel and romance, that I feel my pen catching in the tatters of a threadbare theme. And yet I love the place and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it without mention. Every tourist who spends a week in Venice goes to see the convent, and every one is charmed with it and the courteous welcome of the fathers. Its best interest is the intrinsic interest attaching to it as a seat of Armenian culture; but persons who relish the cheap sentimentalism of Byron’s life, find the convent all the more entertaining from the fact that he did the Armenian language the favor to study it there, a little. The monks show his autograph, together with those of other distinguished persons, and the Armenian Bible which he used to read. I understood from one of the friars, Padre Giacomo Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew little or nothing of Byron’s celebrity as a poet while he studied with them, and that his proficiency as an Armenian scholar was not such as to win high regard from them.

I think most readers who have visited the convent will recall the pleasant face and manners of the young father mentioned, who shows the place to English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre Giacomo was born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English lady, till he came to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San Lazzaro.

He came one morning to breakfast with us, bringing with him Padre Alessio, a teacher in the Armenian College in the city. As for the latter, it was not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopotamia mentioned as his birthplace, having somehow in childhood learned to regard that formidable name as little better than a kind of profane swearing. But I soon came to know Padre Alessio apart from his birthplace, and to find him very interesting as a scholar and an artist. He threw a little grace of poetry around our simple feast, by repeating some Armenian verses, — grace all the more ethereal from our entire ignorance of what the verses meant. Our breakfast-table talk wrought to friendship the acquaintance made some time before, and the next morning we received the photograph of Padre Giacomo, and the compliments of the Orient, in a heaped basket of ripe and luscious figs from the garden of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn, we went to visit him at the convent, we had experience of a more curious oriental hospitality. Refreshments were offered to us as to friends, and we lunched fairily upon little dishes of rose leaves, delicately preserved, with all their fragrance, in a “lucent sirup.” It seemed that this was a common conserve in the East; but we could hardly divest ourselves of the notion of sacrilege, as we thus fed upon the very most luxurious sweetness and perfume of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk accompanied the dainty repast, — Padre Giacomo recounting for us some of his adventures with the people whom he had to show about the convent, and of whom many were disappointed at not finding a gallery or museum, and went away in extreme disgust; and relating with a sly, sarcastic relish that blent curiously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how some English people once came with the notion that Lord Byron was an Armenian; how an unhappy French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern Italy, would not be parted a moment from a huge bludgeon which he carried in his hand, and (probably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be persuaded from attacking the mummy which is in one of the halls; how a sharp, bustling, go-ahead Yankee rushed in one morning, rubbing his hands, and demanding, “Show me all you can in five minutes.”

As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed throughout the Armenian world, and gathers under its roof the best scholars and poets of that nation. In the printing-office of the convent books are printed in some thirty different languages; and a number of the fathers employ themselves constantly in works of translation. The most distinguished of the Armenian literati now living at San Lazzaro is the Reverend Father Gomidas Pakraduni, who has published an Armenian version of “Paradise Lost,” and whose great labor the translation of Homer, has been recently issued from the convent press. He was born at Constantinople of an ancient and illustrious family, and took religious orders at San Lazzaro, where he was educated, and where for twenty-five years after his consecration he held the professorship of his native tongue. He devoted himself especially to the culture of the ancient Armenian, and developed it for the expression of modern ideas, he made exhaustive study of the vast collection of old manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then went to Paris in pursuance of his purpose, and acquainted himself with all the treasures of Armenian learning in the Biblioth�que Royale. He became the first scholar of the age in his national language, and acquired at the same time a profound knowledge of Latin and Greek.

Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, whose fame had preceded him, took up his residence in the family of a noble Armenian, high in the service of the Turkish government; and while assuming the care of educating his friend’s children, began those labors of translation which have since so largely employed him. He made an Armenian version of Pindar, and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which were destroyed by fire while yet in the manuscript. He labored, meanwhile, on his translation of the Iliad, — a youthful purpose which he did not see fulfilled till the year 1860, when he had already touched the Psalmist’s limit of life. In this translation he revived with admirable success an ancient species of Armenian verse, which bears, in flexibility and strength, comparison with the original Greek. Another of his great labors was the production of an Armenian Grammar, in which he reduced to rule and order the numerous forms of his native tongue, never before presented by one work in all its eastern variety.

Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am indebted for a biographic and critical notice in writing of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by that scholar a far greater work than any of his philological treatises, profound and thorough as they are. When nearly completed, this poem perished in the same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and the Rhetoric; but the poet patiently began his work anew, and after eight years gave his epic of twenty books and twenty-two thousand verses to the press. The hero of the poem is Ha�k, the first Armenian patriarch after the flood, and the founder of a kingly dynasty. Nimrod, the great hunter, drunk with his victories, declares himself a god, and ordains his own worship throughout the Orient. Ha�k refuses to obey the commands of the tyrant, takes up arms against him, and finally kills him in battle. “In the style of this poem,” writes Padre Giacomo, “it is hard to tell whether to admire most its richness, its energy, its sweetness, its melancholy, its freedom, its dignity, or its harmony, for it has all these virtues in turn. The descriptive parts are depicted with the faithfulest pencil: the battle scenes can only be matched in the Iliad.”

Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty-five years’ sojourn at Constantinople, to publish his epic at San Lazzaro, where he still lives, a tranquil, gentle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and goodness of face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Milton, with a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other works bear witness to the genuineness of his inspiration and piety, and the diligence of his study: they are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, religious essays, and grammatical treatises.

Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Lazzaro is one of close and earnest study; and life grows so fond of these quiet monks that it will hardly part with them at last. One of them is ninety-five years old, and, until 1863, there was a lay-brother among them whose years numbered a hundred and eight, and who died of old age, on the 17th of September, after passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From biographic memoranda furnished me by Padre Giacomo, I learn that the name of this patriarch was George Karabagiak, and that he was a native of Kutaieh in Asia Minor. He was for a long time the disciple of D�d� Vartabied, a renowned preacher of the Armenian faith, and he afterward taught the doctrines of his master in the Armenian schools. Failing in his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal life at Constantinople, he procured his admission as lay-brother at San Lazzaro, where all his remaining days were spent. He was but little learned; but he had great passion for poetry, and he was the author of some thirty small works on different subjects. During the course of his long and diligent life, which was chiefly spent in learning and teaching, he may be said to have hardly known a day’s sickness. And at last he died of no perceptible disorder. The years tired him to death. He had a trifling illness in August, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of the tenacious life which held him to earth. Slowly pacing up and down the corridors of the convent, he used to crave the prayers of the brothers whom he met, beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that he might be suffered to die. One day he said to the archbishop, “I fear that God has abandoned me, and I shall live.” Only a little while before his death he wrote some verses, as Padre Giacomo’s memorandum witnesses, “with a firm and steady hand,” and the manner of his death was this, — as recorded in the grave and simple words of my friend’s note:— “Finally, on the 17th of September, very early in the morning, a brother entering his chamber, asked him how he was. ‘Well,’ he replied, turning his face to the wall, and spoke no more. He had passed to a better life.”

It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this old man’s life, — which I hope has not been lost by my way of describing it, — and there is certainly a moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who discovered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renewing his existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself to death, because he had exhausted all that life had to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vicissitudes but the very last. Brother Karabagiak seems to have had no humor to take even a second ease of life. It is perhaps as well that most men die before reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred and eight years; and, doubtless, with all our human willfulness and ignorance, we would readily consent, if we could fix the time, to go sooner — say, at a hundred and seven years, friends?

Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Armenian boys from all parts of the East are educated for the priesthood, the nation has a college in the city in which boys intended for secular careers receive their schooling. The Palazzo Zenobia is devoted to the use of this college, where, besides room for study, the boys have abundant space and apparatus for gymnastics, and ample grounds for gardening. We once passed a pleasant summer evening there, strolling through the fragrant alleys of the garden, in talk with the father-professors, and looking on at the gymnastic feats of the boys; and when the annual exhibition of the school took place in the fall, we were invited to be present.

The room appointed for the exhibition was the great hall of the palace, which in other days had evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was frescoed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids and Venuses, Vices and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, dwarfs and blackamoors; and the painted faces looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever the extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might hope to see, when the boys of the college, after assisting at Te Deum in the chapel, entered the room, and took their places.

At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his dark robes, with his heavy gold chain about his neck — a figure and a countenance in all things spiritual, gracious, and reverend. There is small difference, I believe, between the creeds of the Armenians and the Roman Catholics, but a very great disparity in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is all in favor of the former. The Armenian wears his beard, and the Latin shaves — which may have a great deal to do with the holiness of appearance. Perhaps, also, the gentle and mild nature of the oriental yields more sweetly and entirely to the self-denials of the ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins a fairer grace from them. At any rate, I have not seen any thing but content and calm in the visages of the Armenian fathers, among whom the priest-face, as a type, does not exist, though it would mark the Romish ecclesiastic in whatever dress he wore. There is, moreover, a look of such entire confidence and unworldly sincerity in their eyes, that I could not help thinking, as I turned from the portly young fathers to the dark-faced, grave, old-fashioned school-boys, that an exchange of beard only was needed to effect an exchange of character between those youthful elders and their pupils. The gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender man; but nearly all the fathers take kindly to curves and circles, and glancing down a row of these amiable priests I could scarcely repress a smile at the constant recurrence of the line of beauty in their well-rounded persons.

On the right and left of the archbishop were the few invited guests, and at the other end of the saloon sat one of the fathers, the plump key-stone of an arch of comfortable young students expanding toward us. Most of the boys are from Turkey (the Armenians of Venice, though acknowledging the Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the Sultan), others are of Asiatic birth, and two are Egyptians.

As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid could hardly have impressed me more than their dark faces, that seemed to look vaguely on our modern world from the remote twilights of old, and in their very infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of their race. The mother of these boys — a black-eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and stylish — was present with their younger brother. I hardly know whether to be ashamed of having been awed by hearing of the little Egyptian that his native tongue was Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more occidental than Turkish. But, indeed, was it wholly absurd to offer a tacit homage to this favored boy, who must know the “Arabian Nights” in the original?

The exercises began with a theme in Armenian — a language which, but for its English abundance of sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was wholly outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, and French succeeded, and then came one in English. We afterward had speech with the author of this essay, who expressed the liveliest passion for English, in the philosophy and poetry of which it seemed he particularly delighted. He told us that he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in six months more he would complete his collegiate course, when he would return to his native city, and take employment in the service of the Turkish Government. Many others of the Armenian students here also find this career open to them in the East.

The literary exercises closed with another essay in Armenian; and then the archbishop delivered, very gracefully and impressively, an address to the boys. After this, the distribution of the premiums — medals of silver and bronze, and books — took place at the desk of the archbishop. Each boy, as he advanced to receive his premium, knelt and touched the hand of the priest with his lips and forehead, — a quaint and pleasing ceremony which had preceded and followed the reading of all the themes.

The social greetings and congratulations that now took place ended an entertainment throughout which every body was pleased, and the goodnatured fathers seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty than that of the boys themselves. Indeed, the ground of affection and confidence on which the lads and their teachers seemed to meet, was something very novel and attractive. We shook hands with our smiling friends among the padri, took leave of the archbishop, and then visited the studio of Padre Alessio, who had just finished a faithful and spirited portrait of monsignore. Adieux to the artist and to Padre Giacomo brought our visit to an end; and so, from that scene of oriental learning, simplicity, and kindliness, we walked into our western life once more, and resumed our citizenship and burden in the Venetian world — out of the waters of which, like a hydra or other water beast, a bathing boy instantly issued and begged of us.

A few days later our good Armenians went to pass a month on the main-land near Padua, where they have comfortable possessions. Peace followed them, and they came back as plump as they went.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE.

As I think it extremely questionable whether I could get through a chapter on this subject without some feeble pleasantry about Shylock, and whether, if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the beginning that Shylock is dead; that if he lived, Antonio would hardly spit upon his gorgeous pantaloons or his Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto; that he would far rather call out to him, “Ci� Shylock! Bon d�! Go piaser vederla;” [Footnote: “Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you.”] that if Shylock by any chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise to pay him a pound of his flesh on certain conditions, the honest commissary of police before whom they brought their affair would dismiss them both to the madhouse at San Servolo. In a word, the present social relations of Jew and Christian in this city render the “Merchant of Venice” quite impossible; and the reader, though he will find the Ghetto sufficiently noisome and dirty, will not find an oppressed people there, nor be edified by any of those insults or beatings which it was once a large share of Christian duty to inflict upon the enemies of our faith. The Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his Jewish fellow-citizen is destined to some very unpleasant experiences in the next world, but Corpo di Bacco! that is no reason why he should not be friends with him in this. He meets him daily on exchange and at the Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality of his conversazioni. If he still despises him — and I think he does, a little — he keeps his contempt to himself, for the Jew is gathering into his own hands great part of the trade of the city, and has the power that belongs to wealth. He is educated, liberal, and enlightened, and the last great name in Venetian literature is that of the Jewish historian of the Republic, Romanin. The Jew’s political sympathies are invariably patriotic, and he calls himself, not Ebreo, but Veneziano. He lives, when rich, in a palace or a fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and lets many others (I must say at rates which savor of the loan secured by the pound of flesh) in which he does not live. The famous and beautiful Ca’ Doro now belongs to a Jewish family; and an Israelite, the most distinguished physician in Venice, occupies the appartamento signorile in the palace of the famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physician, a banker, a manufacturer, a merchant; and he makes himself respected for his intelligence and his probity, — which perhaps does not infringe more than that of Italian Catholics. He dresses well, — with that indefinable difference, however, which distinguishes him in every thing from a Christian, — and his wife and daughter are fashionable and stylish, They are sometimes, also, very pretty; and I have seen one Jewish lady who might have stepped out of the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age, and been known for Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and delicate, sensitive, high-bred look and bearing — no more western and modern than a lily of Palestine.

But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by the way we went one sunny day late last fall), that I may show you something of the Jewish past, which has survived to the nineteenth century in much of the discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages.

In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient had been poured into the lap of Venice, and a spirit of reckless profusion took possession of her citizens. The money, hastily and easily amassed, went as rapidly as it came. It went chiefly for dress, in which the Venetian still indulges very often to the stint of his stomach; and the ladies of that bright-colored, showy day bore fortunes on their delicate persons in the shape of costly vestments of scarlet, black, green, white, maroon, or violet, covered with gems, glittering with silver buttons, and ringing with silver bells. The fine gentlemen of the period were not behind them in extravagance; and the priests were peculiarly luxurious in dress, wearing gay silken robes, with cowls of fur, and girdles of gold and silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly passed to repress the general license, and fortunes were wasted, and wealthy families reduced to beggary. [Footnote: Galliciolli, Memorie Venete.] At this time, when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies had need of the Uncle to whom hard-pressed nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of prosperity, there was yet no Monte di Piet�, and the demand for pawnbrokers becoming imperative, the Republic was obliged to recall the Hebrews from the exile into which they had been driven some time before, that they might set up pawnshops and succor necessity. They came back, however, only for a limited time, and were obliged to wear a badge of yellow color upon the breast, to distinguish them from the Christians, and later a yellow cap, then a red hat, and then a hat of oil-cloth. They could not acquire houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, nor exercise any noble art but medicine. They were assigned a dwelling-place in the vilest and unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was called Ghetto, from the Hebrew nghedah, a congregation. [Footnote: Mutinelli.] They were obliged to pay their landlords a third more rent than Christians paid; the Ghetto was walled in, and its gates were kept by Christian guards, who every day opened them at dawn and closed them at dark, and who were paid by the Jews. They were not allowed to issue at all from the Ghetto on holidays; and two barges, with armed men, watched over them night and day, while a special magistracy had charge of their affairs. Their synagogues were built at Mestre, on the main-land; and their dead were buried in the sand upon the seashore, whither, on the Mondays of September, the baser sort of Venetians went to make merry, and drunken men and women danced above their desecrated tombs. These unhappy people were forced also to pay tribute to the state at first every third year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth year, the privilege of residence being ingeniously renewed to them at these periods for a round sum; but, in spite of all, they flourished upon the waste and wickedness of their oppressors, waxed rich as these waxed poor, and were not again expelled from the city. [Footnote: Del Commercia del Veneziani. Mutinelli.]

There never was any attempt to disturb the Hebrews by violence, except on one occasion, about the close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult was raised against them for child-murder. This, however, was promptly quelled by the Republic before any harm was done them; and they dwelt peacefully in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison caught the sunlight of modern civilization, and crumbled beneath it. Then many of the Jews came forth and fixed their habitations in different parts of the city, but many others clung to the spot where their temples still remain, and which was hallowed by long suffering, and soaked with the blood of innumerable generations of geese. So, although you find Jews everywhere in Venice, you never find a Christian in the Ghetto, which is held to this day by a large Hebrew population.

We had not started purposely to see the Ghetto, and for this reason it had that purely incidental relish, which is the keenest possible savor of the object of interest. We were on an expedition to find Sior Antonio Rioba, who has been, from time immemorial, the means of ponderous practical jokes in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set in the corner of an ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. He has a pack on his back and a staff in his hand; his face is painted, and is habitually dishonored with dirt thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him is painted a bell-pull, with the legend, Sior Antonio Rioba. Rustics, raw apprentices, and honest Germans new to the city, are furnished with packages to be carried to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very hard to find, and not able to receive the messages when found, though there is always a crowd of loafers near to receive the unlucky simpleton who brings them. “E poi, che commedia vederli arrabiarsi! Che ridere!” That is the Venetian notion of fun, and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was curious to see Sior Antonio, because a comic journal bearing his name had been published during the time of the Republic of 1848, and from the fact that he was then a sort of Venetian Pasquino. But I question now if he was worth seeing, except as something that brought me into the neighborhood of the Ghetto, and suggested to me the idea of visiting that quarter.

As we left him and passed up the canal in our gondola, we came unawares upon the church of Santa Maria dell’ Orto, one of the most graceful Gothic churches in the city. The fa�ade is exquisite, and has two Gothic windows of that religious and heavenly beauty which pains the heart with its inexhaustible richness. One longed to fall down on the space of green turf before the church, now bathed in the soft golden October sunshine, and recant these happy, commonplace centuries of heresy, and have back again the good old believing days of bigotry, and superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to have once more the men who dreamed those windows out of their faith and piety (if they did, which I doubt), and made them with their patient, reverent hands (if their hands were reverent, which I doubt). The church is called Santa Maria dell’ Orto, from the miraculous image of Our Lady which was found in an orchard where the temple now stands. We saw this miraculous sculpture, and thought it reflected little credit upon the supernatural artist. The church is properly that of Saint Christopher, but the saint has been titularly vanquished by the Madonna, though he comes out gigantically triumphant in a fresco above the high altar, and leads to confused and puzzling reminiscences of Bluebeard and Morgante Maggiore, to both of which characters he bears a bewildering personal resemblance.

There were once many fine paintings by Tintoretto and Bellini in this church; but as the interior is now in course of restoration, the paintings have been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, which was by the former master, and had all his striking imagination in the conception, all his strength in the drawing and all his lampblack in the faded coloring. In the centre of the church, the sacristan scraped the carpenter’s rubbish away from a flat tablet in the floor, and said that it was Tintoretto’s tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan, but I pointed out that the tomb bore any name in the world rather than Robusti. “Ah!” said the sacristan, “it is just that which makes it so very curious, — that Tintoretto should wish to be buried under another name!” [Footnote: Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually buried in this church; and no sacristan of right feeling could do less than point out some tomb as that of the great painter himself.]

It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said; yet as we drew near the Ghetto, we noticed in the air many white, floating particles, like lazy, straggling flakes of snow. These we afterward found to be the down of multitudes of geese, which are forever plucked by the whole apparent force of the populace, — the fat of the devoted birds being substituted for lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, and their flesh for pork. As we approached the obscene little riva at which we landed, a blond young Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came running to know if we wished to see the church — by which name he put the synagogue to the Gentile comprehension. The street through which we passed had shops on either hand, and at the doors groups of jocular Hebrew youth sat plucking geese; while within, long files of all that was mortal of geese hung from the rafters and the walls. The ground was webbed with the feet of geese, and certain loutish boys, who paused to look at us, had each a goose dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated manner peculiar to dead poultry. The ground was stained with the blood of geese, and the smell of roasting geese came out of the windows of the grim and lofty houses.

Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive cicerone I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my idle fancy, and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency, the aimless fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys of the synagogue, and came down without them, and the manner in which he shouted to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust out of windows, and never gained the slightest information by his efforts, were imbecilities that we presently found insupportable, and we gladly cast him off for a dark-faced Hebrew boy who brought us at once to the door of the Spanish synagogue.

Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the principal was built in 1655, by the Spanish Jews who had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy Office. Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as a place of worship, and we reached the interior of the temple by means of some dark and narrow stairs. In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way were set tablets to the memory of rich and pious Israelites who had bequeathed their substance for the behoof of the sanctuary; and the sacristan informed us that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund by rich descendants of Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. These moneys are kept to furnish indigent Israelitish couples with the means of marrying, and who claim the benefit of the fund are entitled to it. The sacristan — a little wiry man, with bead-black eyes, and of a shoemakerish presence — told us with evident pride that he was himself a descendant of the Spanish Jews. Howbeit, he was now many centuries from speaking the Castilian, which, I had read, was still used in the families of the Jewish fugitives from Spain to the Levant. He spoke, instead, the abominable Venetian of Cannaregio, with that Jewish thickness which distinguishes the race’s utterance, no matter what language its children are born to. It is a curious philological fact, which I have heard repeatedly alleged by Venetians, and which is perhaps worth noting here, that Jews speaking their dialect, have not only this thickness of accent, but also a peculiarity of construction which marks them at once.

We found the contracted interior of the synagogue hardly worth looking at. Instead of having any thing oriental or peculiar in its architecture, it was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery encircled the inside, and here the women, during worship, sat apart from the men, who had seats below, running back from either side of the altar. I had no right, coming from a Protestant land of pews, to indulge in that sentimentality; but I could not help being offended to see that each of these seats might be lifted up and locked into the upright back and thus placed beyond question at the disposal of the owner: I like the freedom and equality in the Catholic churches much better. The sacristan brought a ponderous silver key, and unlocking the door behind the pulpit, showed us the Hebrew Scriptures used during the service by the Rabbi. They formed an immense parchment volume, and were rolled in silk upon a wooden staff. This was the sole object of interest in the synagogue, and its inspection concluded our visit.

We descended the narrow stairs and emerged upon the piazza which we had left. It was only partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The houses which surrounded it were on the outside old and shabby, and, even in this Venice of lofty edifices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge crossed a vile canal to another open space, where once congregated the merchants who sell antique furniture, old pictures, and objects of vertu. They are now, however, found everywhere in the city, and most of them are on the Grand Canal, where they heap together marvelous collections, and establish authenticities beyond cavil. “Is it an original?” asked a young lady who was visiting one of their shops, as she paused before an attributive Veronese, or — what know I? — perhaps a Titian. “Si, signora, originalissimo!”

I do not understand why any class of Jews should still remain in the Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, that they do remain there in great numbers. It may be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere is conducive to purity of race; but I question if the Jews buried on the sandy slope of the Lido, and blown over by the sweet sea wind — it must needs blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto — are not rather to be envied by the inhabitants of those high dirty houses and low dirty lanes. There was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, or attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the Ghetto to its visitors; and they applauded, with a common voice, the neatness which had prompted Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the floor of his gondola, and not to spread it again within the limits of that quarter.

In the good old times, when pestilence avenged the poor and oppressed upon their oppressors, what grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked by night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and passed the marble bounds of patrician palaces, and brought to the bedsides of the rich and proud the filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison! Thank God that the good old times are gone and going. One learns in these aged lands to hate and execrate the past.

CHAPTER XV.

SOME MEMORABLE PLACES.

We came away from the Ghetto, as we had arrived, in a gentle fall of goose-down, and winding crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into purer air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it was we came upon the old Servite Convent, which I had often looked for in vain, and which, associated with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of the most memorable places in Venice. We reached it, after passing by that old, old palace, which was appointed in the early ages of Venetian commerce for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, and where it is said the Moorish merchants resided till the later time of the Fondaco dei Turchi on the Grand Canal. The fa�ade of the palace is richly sculptured; and near one corner is the bass-relief of a camel and his turbaned driver, — in token, perhaps, that man and beast (as orientals would understand them) were here entertained.

We had lived long enough in Venice to know that it was by no means worth while to explore the interior of this old palace because the outside was attractive, and so we left it; and turning a corner, found ourselves in a shallow canal, with houses on one side, and a grassy bank on the other. The bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls of some edifice, on which ruin seemed to have fastened soon after the architect had begun his work. The vast walls, embracing several acres in their close, rose only some thirty or forty feet from the ground — only high enough, indeed, to join over the top of the great Gothic gates, which pierced them on two fa�ades. There must have been barracks near; for on the sward, under the walls, muskets were stacked, and Austrian soldiers were practicing the bayonet-exercise with long poles padded at the point. “Ein, zwei, drei, — vorw�rts! Ein, zwei, drei, — ruckw�rts!” snarled the drill-sergeant, and the dark-faced Hungarian soldiers — who may have soon afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the more effectively for that day’s training — stooped, writhed, and leaped obedient. I, who had already caught sight of a little tablet in the wall bearing the name of Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety of the military performance on that scene; yet I was very glad, dismounting from the gondola, to get by the soldiers without being forced back at the padded point of a pole, and offered no audible objection to their presence.

So passing to the other side, I found entrance through a disused chapel to the interior of the convent. The gates on the outside were richly sculptured, and were reverend and clean; tufts of harsh grass grew from their arches, and hung down like the “overwhelming brows” of age. Within, at first light, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of stone, and here and there a mutilated statue. I remember two pathetic caryatides, that seemed to have broken and sunk under too heavy a weight for their gentle beauty — and everywhere the unnamable filth with which ruin is always dishonored in Italy, and which makes the most picturesque and historic places inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the senses and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indignation on this incurable porcheria, of the Italian poor (who are guilty of such desecrations), when my eye fell upon an enclosed space in one corner, where some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. It was a space about six feet in depth, and twenty feet square; and the boulders, on closer inspection, turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of human bones. In any other land than Italy I think I should have turned from the grisly sight with a cowardly sickness and shuddering; but here! — Why, heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men so good-naturedly, — so many men have died and passed away with their difficult, ambitious, and troublesome little schemes, — and the great mass of mankind is taken so small account of in the course of destiny, that the idea of death does not appear so alien and repulsive as elsewhere, and the presence of such evidences of our poor mortality can scarcely offend sensibility. These were doubtless the bones of the good Servite friars who had been buried in their convent, and had been digged up to make way for certain improvements now taking place within its walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were a rest to their bodies, to say nothing of their souls. If they were at all in their lives like those who have come after them, the sun baked their bald brows in Summer, and their naked feet — poor feet! clapping round in wooden-soled sandals over the frozen stones of Venice — were swollen and gnawed with chilblains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of their number, looking all the droller in his bare feet for the spectacles on his nose, came down Calle Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread and fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristocratic precinct wished to see him.

The friars’ skulls looked contented enough, and smiled after the hearty manner of skulls; and some of the leg-bones were thrust through the enclosing fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their spirits, I suppose they must have found out by this time that these confused and shattered tabernacles which they left behind them are not nearly so corrupt and dead as the monastic system which still cumbers the earth. People are building on the site of the old convent a hospital for indigent and decrepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have care of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but I think it would be the true compensation if all the rubbish of the old cloister were cleared from the area of those walls, and a great garden planted in the space, where lovers might whisper their wise nonsense, and children might romp and frolic, till the crumbling, masonry forgot its old office of imprisonment and the memory of its prisoners. For here, one could only think of the moping and mumming herd of monks, who were certainly not worth remembering, while the fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the good which he did, refused to be localized. That good is an inheritance which has enriched the world; but the share of Venice has been comparatively small in it, and that of this old convent ground still less. I rather wondered, indeed, that I should have taken the trouble to look up the place; but it is a harmless, if even a very foolish, pastime to go seeking for the sublime secret of the glory of the palm in the earth where it struck root and flourished. So far as the lifelong presence and the death of a man of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene, this ground was holy; for here Sarpi lived, and here in his cell he died, a simple Servite friar — he who had caught the bolts of excommunication launched against the Republic from Rome, and broken them in his hand, — who had breathed upon the mighty arm of the temporal power, and withered it to the juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I could not feel that the ground was holy, and it did not make me think of Sarpi; and I believe that only those travelers who invent in cold blood their impressions of memorable places ever have remarkable impressions to record.

Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunication was pronounced against the Republic with a result as terrible as that of the later interdict was absurd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth century, of Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the high contracting parties — the Republic and an exiled claimant to the ducal crown of Ferrara — had no right to make. The father of the banished prince had displeased him by marrying late in life, when the thoughts of a good man should be turned on other things, and the son compassed the sire’s death. For this the Ferrarese drove him away, and as they would not take him back to reign over them at the suggestion of Venice, he resigned his rights in favor of the Republic, and the Republic at once annexed the city to its territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for his protection, and Clement V., supporting an ancient but long quiescent claim to Ferrara on the part of the Church, called upon the Venetians to surrender the city, and, on their refusal, excommunicated them. All Christian peoples were commanded “to arm against the Venetians, to spoil them of their goods, as separated from the union of Christians, and as enemies of the Roman Church.” They were driven out of Ferrara, but their troubles did not end with their loss of the city. Giustina Renier-Michiel says the nations, under the shelter of the pope’s permission and command, “exercised against them every species of cruelty; there was no wrong or violence of which they were not victims. All the rich merchandise which they had in France, in Flanders, and in other places, was confiscated; their merchants were arrested, maltreated, and some of them killed. Woe to us, if the Saracens had been baptized Christians! our nation would have been utterly destroyed.” Such was the ruin brought upon us by this excommunication that to this day it is a popular saying, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, “He looks as if he were bringing the excommunication of Ferrara.”

No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, commemorates the interdict of the Republic which took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at first a collision of the Venetian and Papal authorities at Ferrara, and then an interference of the pope to prevent the execution of secular justice upon certain ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in the excommunication of the Republic, and finally in the defeat of St. Peter and the triumph of St. Mark. Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders mentioned were the worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who was accused, among other things, of poisoning his own father; and the good Canonico Saraceni of Vicenza, who was repulsed in overtures made to his beautiful cousin, and who revenged himself by defaming her character, and “filthily defacing” the doors of her palace. The abbate was arrested, and the canon, on this lady’s complaint to the Ten at Venice, was thrown into prison, and the weak and furious Pope Paul V., being refused their release by the Ten, excommunicated the whole Republic.

In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane and antidote, Paul the Pope and Paul Sarpi the friar, were sent into the world. The latter grew in piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former began his quarrel with the Republic, there was none in Venice so fit and prompt as Sarpi to stand forth in her defense. He was at once taken into the service of St. Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the spiritual weapons of the Republic, and helped to shape the secular measures taken to annul the interdict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was issued, the Republic instructed her officers to stop every copy of it at the frontier, and it was never read in any church in the Venetian dominions. The Senate refused to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. All priests, monks, and other servants of the Church, as well as all secular persons, were commanded to disregard it; and refractory ecclesiastics were forced to open their churches on pain of death. The Jesuits and Capuchins were banished; and clerical intriguers, whom Rome sent in swarms to corrupt social and family relations, by declaring an end of civil government in Venice, and preaching among women disobedience to patriotic husbands and fathers, were severely punished. With internal safety thus provided for, the Republic intrusted her moral, religious, and political defense entirely to Sarpi, who devoted himself to his trust with fidelity, zeal, and power.

It might have been expected that the friend of Galileo, and the most learned and enlightened man of his country, would have taken the short and decisive method of discarding all allegiance to Rome as the most logical resistance to the unjust interdict. But the Venetians have ever been faithful Catholics, [Footnote: It is convenient here to attest the truth of certain views of religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr. Trollope, in his Paul the Pope and Paul the Friar, quotes from an “Italian author, by no means friendly to Catholicism, and very well qualified to speak of the progress of opinions and tendencies among his fellow-countrymen.”

This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern Catholicism as the heir of the old materialistic paganism, says: “The Italians have identified themselves with this mode of religion. Cultivated men find in it the truth there is in it, and the people find what is agreeable to them. But both the former and the latter approve it as conformable to the national character. And whatever may be the religious system which shall govern our descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to affirm that the exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those which prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago.” Mr. Trollope generously dissents from the “pessimism” of these views. The views are discouraging for some reasons; but, with considerable disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian character in this respect, I had arrived at precisely these conclusions. I wish here to state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and his times I have availed myself freely of Mr. Trollope’s delightful book — it is near being too much of a good thing — named above.] and Sarpi was (or, according to the papal writers, seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar, believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and revering the religion of Rome. He therefore fought Paul inside of the Church, and his writings on the interdict remain the monument of his polemical success. He was the heart and brain of the Republic’s whole resistance, — he supplied her with inexhaustible reasons and answers, — and, though tempted, accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his fidelity to her.

As he was the means of her triumph, [Footnote: The triumph was such only so far as the successful resistance to the interdict was concerned; for at the intercession of the Catholic powers the Republic gave up the ecclesiastical prisoners, and he allowed all the banished priests except the Jesuits to return. The Venetians utterly refused to perform any act of humiliation or penance. The interdict had been defied, and it remained despised.] remained the object of her love. He could never be persuaded to desert his cell in the Minorite Convent for the apartments appointed him by the State; and even when his busy days were spent in council at the Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the cloister. After the harmless interdict had been removed by Paul, and the unyielding Republic forgiven, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against the friar whose logic had been too keen for the last reason of popes. He had been tried for heresy in his youth at Milan, and acquitted; again, during the progress of St. Mark’s quarrel with Rome, his orthodoxy had been questioned; and now that all was over, and Rome could turn her attention to one particular offender, he was entreated, coaxed, commanded to come to her, and put her heart at rest concerning these old accusations. But Sarpi was very well in Venice. He had been appointed Consultor in Theology to the Republic, and had received free admission to the secret archives of the State, — a favor, till then, never bestowed on any. So he would not go to Rome, and Rome sent assassins to take his life. One evening, as he was returning from the Ducal Palace in company with a lay-brother of the convent, and an old patrician, very infirm and helpless, he was attacked by these nuncios of the papal court: one of them seized the lay-brother, and another the patrician, while a third dealt Sarpi innumerable dagger thrusts. He fell as if dead, and the ruffians made off in the confusion.

Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recovered. The action of the Republic in this affair is a comforting refutation of the saying that Republics are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice was particularly so. The most strenuous and unprecedented efforts were made to take the assassins, and the most terrific penalties were denounced against them. What was much better, new honors were showered upon Sarpi, and extraordinary and affectionate measures were taken to provide for his safety.

And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Republic, revered and beloved, till his seventieth year, when he died with zeal for her good shaping his last utterance: “I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, and I have much to do.”

Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic! Men cannot honor them enough. For though the terrors of the interdict were doubted to be harmless even at that time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, then and forever, an instrument as obsolete as the catapult.

I was so curious as to make some inquiry among the workmen on the old convent ground, whether any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, not very confidently, to gather some trace of his presence there — to have, perhaps, the spot on which he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly ignorant of Sarpi, while affecting, in the Italian manner, to be perfectly informed on the subject. I was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another, till I fell into the hands of a kind of foreman, to whom I put my questions anew. He was a man of Napoleonic beard, and such fair red-and-white complexion that he impressed me as having escaped from a show of wax-works, and I was not at all surprised to find him a wax figure in point of intelligence. He seemed to think my questions the greatest misfortunes which had ever befallen him, and to regard each suggestion of Sarpi — tempo della Repubblica — scomunica di Paolo Quinto — as an intolerable oppression. He could only tell me that on a certain spot (which he pointed out with his foot) in the demolished church, there had been found a stone with Sarpi’s name upon it. The padrone, who had the contract for building the new convent, had said,— “Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi;” but the stone had been broken, and he did not know what had become of it.

And, in fact, the only thing that remembered Sarpi, on the site of the convent where he spent his life, died, and was buried, was the little tablet on the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated Latin announced that he had been Theologue to the Republic, and that his dust was now removed to the island of San Michele. After this failure, I had no humor to make researches for the bridge on which the friar was attacked by his assassins. But, indeed, why should I look for it? Finding it, could I have kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now have, of Sarpi returning to his convent on a mild October evening, weary with his long walk from St. Mark’s, and pacing with downcast eyes, — the old patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the masked and stealthy assassins, with uplifted daggers, behind him? Nay, I fear I should have found the bridge with some scene of modern life upon it, and brought away in my remembrance an old woman with an oil-bottle, or a straggling boy with a tumbler, and a very little wine in it.

On our way home from the Servite Convent, we stopped again near the corner and bridge of Sior Antonio Rioba, — this time to go into the house of Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on the same quay. The house, indeed, might make some pretensions to be called a palace: it is large, and has a carved and balconied front, in which are set a now illegible tablet describing it as the painter’s dwelling, and a medallion portrait of Robusti. It would have been well if I had contented myself with this goodly outside; for penetrating, by a long narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the interior of the house, I found that it had nothing to offer me but the usual number of commonplace rooms in the usual blighting state of restoration. I must say that the people of the house, considering they had nothing in the world to show me, were kind and patient under the intrusion, and answered with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry if this were really Tintoretto’s house.

Their conduct was different from that of the present inmates of Titian’s house, near the Fondamenta Nuove, in a little court at the left of the church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons think it an intolerable bore that the enlightened traveling public should break in upon their privacy. They put their heads out of the upper windows, and assure the strangers that the house is as utterly restored within as they behold it without (and it is extremely restored), that it merely occupies the site of the painter’s dwelling, and that there is nothing whatever to see in it. I never myself had the heart to force an entrance after these protests; but an acquaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom I had the honor to accompany thither, once did so, and came out with a story of rafters of the original Titianic kitchen being still visible in the new one. After a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found that so far from having learned patience by frequent trial, the inmates had been apparently goaded into madness during the interval. They seemed to know of our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads out, ready for protest, before we were near enough to speak. The lazy, frowzy women, the worthless men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood, gathered round to witness the encounter; but though repeatedly commanded to ring (I was again in company with ladies), and try to force the place, I refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were strengthening their position by plastering and renewed renovation, and I doubt that by this time the original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plasterer’s boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clapping his trowel on his board, inside the house, while we debated retreat, and derisively invited us to enter: “Suoni pure, O signore! Questa e la famosa casa del gran pittore, l’immortale Tiziano, — suoni, signore!” (Ring, by all means, sir. This is the famous house of the great painter, the immortal Titian. Ring!) Da capo. We retired amid the scorn of the populace. But indeed I could not blame the inhabitants of Titian’s house; and were I condemned to live in a place so famous as to attract idle curiosity, flushed and insolent with travel, I should go to the verge of man-traps and shot-guns to protect myself.

This house, which is now hemmed in by larger buildings of later date, had in the painter’s time an incomparably “lovely and delightful situation.” Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it looked out over the lagoon, — across the quiet isle of sepulchres, San Michele, — across the smoking chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the bell-towers of her churches, — to the long line of the sea-shore on the right and to the mainland on the left; and beyond the nearer lagoon islands and the faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining in silver and purple, and resting their snowy heads against the clouds. It had a pleasant garden of flowers and trees, into which the painter descended by an open stairway, and in which he is said to have studied the famous tree in The Death of Peter Martyr. Here he entertained the great and noble of his day, and here he feasted and made merry with the gentle sculptor Sansovino, and with their common friend, the rascal-poet Aretino. The painter’s and the sculptor’s wives knew each other, and Sansovino’s Paola was often in the house of Cecilia Vecellio; [Footnote: The wife of Titian’s youth was, according to Ticozzi, named Lucia. It is in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The author of the Annali Urbani, speaking of the friendship and frequent meetings of Titian and Sansovino, says,— “Vivevano ... allora ambedue di un amore fatto sacro dalle leggi divine, essendo moglie di Tiziano una Cecilia.” I would not advise the reader to place too fond a trust in any thing concerning the house of Titian. Mutinelli refers to but one house of the painter, while Ticozzi makes him proprietor of two.] and any one who is wise enough not to visit the place, can easily think of those ladies there, talking at an open window that gives upon the pleasant garden, where their husbands walk up and down together in the purple evening light.

In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant showed me an entirely new room near the roof, in which he said the great dramatist had composed his immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that Goldoni had left the house when a child, I could scarcely believe what the cicerone said, though I was glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all of Goldoni. It is a fine old Gothic palace on a small canal near the Frari, and on the Calle del Nomboli, just across from a shop of indigestible pastry. It is known by an inscription, and by the medallion of the dramatist above the land-door; and there is no harm in looking in at the court on the ground-floor, where you may be pleased with the picturesque old stairway, wandering upward I hardly know how high, and adorned with many little heads of lions.

Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca Cappello’s birthplace, but Mutinelli awards the distinction to the palace at Sant’ Appollinare near the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vaingloriously rowed us to the water-gate of the edifice through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly canal, pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its court. At the moment of our arrival, however, Bianca happened to be hanging out clothes from a window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attributing this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were less pleased with her appearance here, than with that portrait of her which we saw on another occasion in the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This lady has since been married, and the name of Cappello is now extinct.

The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is galvanized into ghastly newness by recent repairs, and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on the Grand Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one’s interest. The custodian shows people the rooms where the poet wrote, dined, and slept, and I suppose it was from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door that one of his mistresses threw herself into the canal. Another of these interesting relicts is pointed out in the small butter-and-cheese shop which she keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant’ Angelo to San Paterinan: she is a fat sinner, long past beauty, bald, and somewhat melancholy to behold. Indeed, Byron’s memory is not a presence which I approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment in his palace when I thought of good-natured little Thomas Moore, who once visited his lordship there. Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in Venice, and I am sure no one else need like it. But he is become a cosa di Venezia, and you cannot pass his palace without having it pointed out to you by the gondoliers. Early after my arrival in the city I made the acquaintance of an old smooth-shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who said he had known Byron, and who told me that he once swam with him from the Port of San Nicol� to his palace-door. The distance is something over three miles, but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat was not so great as it seems, for the tide is as swift and strong as a mill-race. I think it would be impossible to make the distance against the tide.

CHAPTER XVI.

COMMERCE.

To make an annual report in September upon the Commercial Transactions of the port, was an official duty to which I looked forward at Venice with a vague feeling of injury during a year of almost uninterrupted tranquillity. It was not because the preparation of the report was an affair of so great labor that I shrank from it; but because the material was wanting with which to make a respectable show among my consular peers in the large and handsomely misprinted volume of Commercial Relations annually issued by the enterprising Congressional publishers. It grieved me that upstart ports like Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen, should occupy so much larger space in this important volume than my beloved Venice; and it was with a feeling of profound mortification that I used to post my meagre account of a commerce that once was greater than all the rest of the world’s together. I sometimes desperately eked out the material furnished me in the statistics of the Venetian Chamber of Commerce by an agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and its cure, or by a few wretched figures representative of a very slender mining interest in the province. But at last I determined to end these displeasures, and to make such researches into the history of her Commerce as should furnish me forth material for a report worthy of the high place Venice held in my reverence.

Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism that I had ever mentioned contemporary Venetian Commerce; and I turned with exultation from the phantom transactions of the present to that solid and magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the long-enduring foundations were laid in the earliest Christian times. For the new cities formed by the fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land, during the fifth century, had hardly settled around a common democratic government on the islands of the lagoons, when they began to develop maritime energies and resources; and long before this government was finally established at Rialto, (the ancient sea-port of Padua,) or Venice had become the capital of the young Republic, the Veneti had thriftily begun to turn the wild invaders of the main-land to account, to traffic with them, and to make treaties of commerce with their rulers. Theodoric, the king of the Goths, had fixed his capital at Ravenna, in the sixth century, and would have been glad to introduce Italian civilization among his people; but this warlike race were not prepared to practice the useful arts, and although they inhabited one of the most fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders of sea, they were neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. The Venetians supplied them (at a fine profit, no doubt,) with the salt made in the lagoons, and with wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with especial amazement their skill in the management of their river-craft, by means of which the dauntless traders ascended the shallowest streams to penetrate the main-land, “running on the grass of the meadows, and between the stalks of the harvest field,” — just as in this day our own western steamers are known to run in a heavy dew.

The Venetians continued to extend and confirm their commerce with those helpless and hungry warriors, and were ready also to open a lucrative trade with the Longobards when they descended into Italy about the year 570. They had, in fact, abetted the Longobards in their war with the Greek Emperor Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and in return the barbarians gave them the right to hold great free marts or fairs on the shores of the lagoons, whither the people resorted from every part of the Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the lagoons, grain from Istria and Dalmatia, and slaves from every country.

The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the most lucrative branches of Venetian commerce, as now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals of that commerce. The islanders, however, were not alone guilty of this infamous trade in men; other Italian states made profit of it, and it may be said to have been all but universal. But the Venetians were the most deeply involved in it, they pursued it the most unscrupulously, and they relinquished it the last. The pope forbade and execrated their commerce, and they sailed from the papal ports with cargoes of slaves for the infidels in Africa. In spite of the prohibitions of their own government, they bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, and purchased the captives of the pirates on the seas, to sell them again to the Saracens. Nay, being an ingenious people, they turned their honest penny over and over again: they sold the Christians to the Saracens, and then for certain sums ransomed them and restored them to their countries; they sold Saracens to the Christians, and plundered the infidels in similar transactions of ransom and restoration. It is not easy to fix the dates of the rise or fall of this slave-trade; but slavery continued in Venice as late as the fifteenth century, and in earlier ages was so common that every prosperous person had two or three slaves. [Footnote: Mutinelli, Del Costume Veneziano. The present sketch of the history of Venetian commerce is based upon facts chiefly drawn from Mutinelli’s delightful treatise, Del Commercio dei Veneziani.] The corruption of the citizens at this time is properly attributed in part to the existence of slavery among them; and Mutinelli goes so far as to declare that the institution impressed permanent traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indisposed to honest labor, by degrading labor and making it the office of bondmen.

While this hateful and enormous traffic in man was growing up, the Venetians enriched themselves by many other more blameless and legitimate forms of commerce, and gradually gathered into their grasp that whole trade of the East with Europe which passed through their hands for so many ages. After the dominion of the Franks was established in Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply that people, more luxurious than the Lombards, with the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry, and the perfumes of Byzantium; and held a great annual fair at the imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks the manufactures of the polished and effeminate Greeks, and whence in return they carried back to the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and excellent armor of Lombardy.

From the time when they had assisted the Longobards against the Greeks, the Venetians found it to their interest to cultivate the friendship of the latter, until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the people so long caressed, and took their capital, under Enrico Dandolo. The privileges conceded to the wily and thrifty republican traders by the Greek Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and value. Otho, the western Caesar, having succeeded the Franks in the dominion of Italy, had already absolved the Venetians from the annual tribute paid the Italian kings for the liberty of traffic, and had declared their commerce free throughout the Peninsula. In the mean time they had attacked and beaten the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now recognized their rule all over Dalmatia, thus securing to the Republic every port on the eastern shores of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided the Greeks to repel the aggressions of the Saracens and Normans, their commerce was declared free in all the ports of the empire, and they were allowed to trade without restriction in all the cities, and to build warehouses and d�p�ts throughout the dominions of the Greeks, wherever they chose. The harvest they reaped from the vast field thus opened to their enterprise, must have more than compensated them for their losses in the barbarization of the Italian continent by the incessant civil wars which followed the disruption of the Lombard League, when trade and industry languished throughout Italy. When the Crusaders had taken the Holy Land, the king of Jerusalem bestowed upon the Venetians, in return for important services against the infidel, the same privileges conceded them by the Greek Emperor; and when, finally, Constantinople fell into the hands of the Crusaders, (whom they had skillfully diverted from the reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the Greek metropolis,) nearly all the Greek islands fell to the share of Venice; and the Latin emperors, who succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave her such privileges as made her complete mistress of the commerce of the Levant.

From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise of the Republic turned, without relinquishing the old, to new gains in the farthest Orient. Against her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the barbarous prince of the Scythian Tartars, newly descended upon the shores of the Black Sea; and having secured his friendship, she proceeded, without imparting her design to her Latin allies at Constantinople, to plant a commercial colony at the mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. Through this entrep�t, thenceforward, Venetian energy, with Tartar favor, directed the entire commerce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly enriched the Republic. The vastness and importance of such a trade, even at that day, when the wants of men were far simpler and fewer than now, could hardly be over-stated; and one nation then monopolized the traffic which is now free to the whole world. The Venetians bought their wares at the great marts of Samarcand, and crossed the country of Tartary in caravans to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where they set sail and voyaged to the River Volga, which they ascended to the point of its closest proximity to the Don. Their goods were then transported overland to the Don, and were again carried by water down to their mercantile colony at its mouth. Their ships, having free access to the Black Sea, could, after receiving their cargoes, return direct to Venice. The products of every country of Asia were carried into Europe by these dauntless traffickers, who, enlightened and animated by the travels and discoveries of Matteo, Nicol�, and Marco Polo, penetrated the remotest regions, and brought away the treasures which the prevalent fears and superstitions of other nations would have deterred them from seeking, even if they had possessed the means of access to them.

The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had now reached its climax, and the class which had felt its refining effects was that best able to gratify the tastes still unknown to the great mass of the ignorant and impoverished people. It was a splendid time, and the robber counts and barons of the continent, newly tamed and Christianized into knights, spent splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving noble ladies. The Venetians, who seldom did merely heroic things, who turned the Crusades to their own account and made money out of the Holy Land, and whom one always fancies as having a half scorn of the noisy grandeur of chivalry, were very glad to supply the knights and ladies with the gorgeous stuffs, precious stones, and costly perfumes of the East; and they now also began to establish manufactories, and to practice the industrial arts at home. Their jewelers and workers in precious metals soon became famous throughout Europe; the glass-works of Murano rose into celebrity and importance which they have never since lost (for they still supply the world with beads); and they began to weave stuffs of gold tissue at Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed that no cavalier or dame of perfect fashion was content with any other. Besides this they gilded leather for lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles of ornament in wax, — a material that modern taste is apt to disdain, — while Venetian candles in chandeliers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces of the whole civilized world.

The private enterprise of citizens was in every way protected and encouraged by the State, which did not, however, fail to make due and just profit out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed to and from Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven fleets departing annually, — one for the Greek dominions, a second for Azof, a third for Trebizond, a fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for Spain, France, the Low Countries, and England, and a seventh for Africa. Each squadron of traders was accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs and other enemies, by a certain number of the state galleys, let severally to the highest bidders for the voyage, at a price never less than about five hundred dollars of our money. The galleys were all manned and armed by the State, and the crew of each amounted to three hundred persons; including a captain, four supercargoes, eight pilots, two carpenters, two calkers, a master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen, three drummers, and two hundred rowers. The State also appointed a commandant of the whole squadron, with absolute authority to hear complaints, decide controversies, and punish offences.

While the Republic was thus careful in the protection and discipline of its citizens in their commerce upon the seas, it was no less zealous for their security and its own dignity in their traffic with the continent of Europe. In that rude day, neither the life nor the property of the merchant who visited the ultramontane countries was safe; for the sorry device which he practiced, of taking with him a train of apes, buffoons, dancers, and singers, in order to divert his ferocious patrons from robbery and murder, was not always successful. The Venetians, therefore, were forbidden by the State to trade in those parts; and the Bohemians, Germans, and Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were obliged to come to the lagoons and buy them at the great marts which were held in different parts of the city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple purpose was thus served, — the Venetian merchants were protected in their lives and goods, the national honor was saved from insult, and many an honest zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others who lodged and entertained the customers of the merchants.

Five of these great fairs were held every week, the chief market being at Rialto; and the transactions in trade were carefully supervised by the servants of the State. Among the magistracies especially appointed for the orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic commerce were the so-called Mercantile Consuls (Ufficio dei Consoli dei Mercanti), whose special duty it was to see that the traffic of the nation received no hurt from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, and to punish offenses of this kind with banishment and even graver penalties. They measured every ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded the lawful amount; they guarded creditors against debtors and protected poor debtors against the rapacity of creditors, and they punished thefts sustained by the merchants. It is curious to find contemporary with this beneficent magistracy, a charge of equal dignity exercised by the College of Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or property abroad, demanded justice of the government of the country in which the offense was committed. If the demand was refused, it was repeated by the Republic; if still refused, then the Republic, although at peace with the nation from which the offense came, seized any citizen of that country whom it could find, and, through its College of Reprisals, spoiled him of sufficient property to pay the damage done to its citizen. Finally, besides several other magistracies resident in Venice, the Republic appointed Consuls in its colonies and some foreign ports, to superintend the traffic of its citizens, and to compose their controversies. The Consuls were paid out of duties levied on the merchandise; they were usually nobles, and acted with the advice and consent of twelve other Venetian nobles or merchants.

At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, the great lucrative monopoly of the Republic was the salt manufactured in the lagoons, and forced into every market, at rates that no other salt could compete with. Wherever alien enterprise attempted rivalry, it was instantly discouraged by Venice. There were troublesome salt mines, for example, in Croatia; and in 1381 the Republic caused them to be closed by paying the King of Hungary an annual pension of seven thousand crowns of gold. The exact income of the State, however, from the monopoly of salt, or from the various imposts and duties levied upon merchandise, it is now difficult to know, and it is impossible to compute accurately the value or extent of Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached the acme of its prosperity under Tommaso Mocenigo, who was Doge from 1414 to 1423. There were then three thousand and three hundred vessels of the mercantile marine, giving employment to thirty-three thousand seamen, and netting to their owners a profit of forty per cent, on the capital invested. How great has been the decline of this trade may be understood from the fact that in 1863 it amounted, according to the careful statistics of the Chamber of Commerce, to only $60,229,740, and that the number of vessels now owned in Venice is one hundred and fifty. As the total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may be inferred that they are small craft, and in fact they are nearly all coasting vessels. They no longer bring to Venice the drugs and spices and silks of Samarcand, or carry her own rare manufactures to the ports of western Europe; but they sail to and from her canals with humble freights of grain, lumber, and hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian ships now visit the old queen, who once levied a tax upon every foreign vessel in her Adriatic; and the shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy exceeds hers by ninety sail, while the tonnage of Great Britain is vastly greater. Her commerce has not only wasted to the shadow of its former magnitude, but it has also almost entirely lost its distinctive character. Glass of Murano is still exported to a value of about two millions of dollars annually; but in this industry, as in nearly all others of the lagoons, there is an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off from one to three millions of dollars yearly, and the manufacturing interests of the province have dwindled in the same proportion. So far as silk is concerned, there has been an immediate cause for the decrease in the disease which has afflicted the cocoons for several years past. Wine and oil are at present articles of import solely, — the former because of a malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent cultivation of the olive.

A considerable number of persons are still employed in the manufacture of objects of taste and ornament; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they yet make the famous Venetian gold chain, which few visitors to the city can have failed to notice hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in the shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge of Rialto. It is wrought of all degrees of fineness, and is always so flexile that it may be folded and wound in any shape. It is now no longer made in great quantity, and is chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe investment of their ready money), [Footnote: Certain foreigners living in Venice were one day astonished to find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of this chain, and thought it their business to reprove her extravagance. “Signori,” she explained paradoxically, “if I keep my money, I spend it; if I buy this chain, it is always money (� sempre soldi).”] and old-fashioned people of the city, who display the finer sort in skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I remember to have seen a babe at its christening in church literally manacled and shackled with Venetian chain; and the little girl who came to us one day, to show us the splendors in which she had appeared at a disputa (examination of children in doctrine), was loaded with it. Formerly, in the luxurious days of the Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine as sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet by the patrician dames. It had then a cruel interest from the fact that its manufacture, after a time, cost the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was the work. I could not help noticing that the workmen at the shops in the Ruga Vecchia still suffer in their eyes, even though the work is much coarser. I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying that the links are horseshoe and oval shaped, and are connected by twos, — an oval being welded crosswise into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being linked loosely into the next.

An infinitely more important art, in which Venice was distinguished a thousand years ago, has recently been revived there by Signor Salviati, an enthusiast in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the Grand Canal, not far from the Academy, and you might go by the old palace quite unsuspicious of the ancient art stirring with new life in its breast. “A. Salviati, Avvocato,” is the legend of the bell-pull, and you do not by any means take this legal style for that of the restorer of a neglected art, and a possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and “smalts,” as they term the small delicate rods of vitreous substance, with which the wonders of the art are achieved. But inside of the palace are some two hundred artisans at work, — cutting the smalts and glass into the minute fragments of which the mosaics are made, grinding and smoothing these fragments, polishing the completed works, and reproducing, with incredible patience and skill, the lights and shadows of the pictures to be copied.

You first enter the rooms of those whose talent distinguishes them as artists, and in whose work all the wonderful neatness and finish and long-suffering toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to the elder mosaicists. Each artist has at hand a great variety of the slender stems of smalts already mentioned, and breaking these into minute fragments as he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement prepared to receive his picture, and thus counterfeits in enduring mineral the perishable work of the painter.

In other rooms artisans are at work upon various tasks of marqueterie, — table-tops, album-covers, paper-weights, brooches, pins and the like, — and in others they are sawing the smalts and glass into strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet another room, where the finished mosaic-works — of course not the pictorial mosaics — are polished by machinery, we enter the store-room, where the crowded shelves display blocks of smalts and glass of endless variety of color. By far the greater number of these colors are discoveries or improvements of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has found again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, in vitreous paste, aventurine (gold stone), onyx, chalcedony, malachite, and other natural stones, and who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice for producing mosaics even more durable in tint and workmanship than those of the Byzantine artists.

In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart for the exhibition of the many beautiful and costly things which the art of the establishment produces. Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are cunningly inlaid tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases of chalcedony mounted in silver, and delicately wrought jewelry, while the floor is covered with a mosaic pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. There are here, moreover, to be seen the designs furnished by the Crown Princess of Prussia for the mosaics of the Queen’s Chapel at Windsor. These, like all other pictures and decorations in mosaic, are completed in the establishment on the Grand Canal, and are afterward put up as wholes in the places intended for them.

In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is startling to find her in her old age nourishing into fresh life an art that, after feebly preserving the memory of painting for so many centuries, had decorated her prime only with the glories of its decline; — for Kugler ascribes the completion of the mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark’s to the tenth or eleventh centuries, when the Greek Church had already laid her ascetic hand on Byzantine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed its motives, and forbidden its inspirations. I think, however, one would look about him in vain for other evidences of a returning prosperity in the lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based upon her monopoly of the most lucrative traffic in the world, as we have already seen, — upon her exclusive privileges in foreign countries, upon the enlightened zeal of her government, and upon men’s imperfect knowledge of geography, and the barbarism of the rest of Europe, as well as upon the indefatigable industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens. America was still undiscovered; the overland route to India was the only one known; the people of the continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world’s ignorance, pride, and sloth were Venetian gain; and the religious superstitions of the day, which, gross as they were, embodied perhaps its noblest and most hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable profit to the sharp-witted mistress of the Adriatic. It was the age of penances, pilgrimages, and relic-hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the devotion of others was exceedingly great. Her ships carried the pilgrims to and from the Holy Land; her adventurers ransacked Palestine and the whole Orient for the bones and memorials of the saints; and her merchants sold the precious relics throughout Europe at an immense advance upon first cost.

But the foundations of this prosperity were at last tapped by the tide of wealth which poured into Venice from every quarter of the world. Her citizens brought back the vices as well as the luxuries of the debauched Orient, and the city became that seat of splendid idleness and proud corruption which it continued till the Republic fell. It is needless here to rehearse the story of her magnificence and decay. At the time when the hardy, hungry people of other nations were opening paths to prosperity by land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with the spoils of ages, relinquished their old habits of daring enterprise, and dropped back into luxury and indolence. Their incessant wars with the Genoese began, and though they signally defeated the rival Republic in battle, Genoa finally excelled in commerce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute the sovereignty of the Latin Emperors, whom the Venetians had helped to place upon the Byzantine throne; the Genoese, seeing the favorable fortunes of the Greek, threw the influence of their arms and intrigues in his favor, and the Latins were expelled from Constantinople in 1271. The new Greek Emperor had promised to give the sole navigation of the Black Sea to his allies, together with the church and palaces possessed by the Venetians in his capital, and he bestowed also upon the Genoese the city of Smyrna. It does not seem that he fulfilled literally all his promises, for the Venetians still continued to sail to and from their colony of Tana, at the head of the Sea of Azof, though it is certain that they had no longer the sovereignty of those waters; and the Genoese now planted on the shores of the Black Sea three large and important colonies to serve as entrep�ts for the trade taken from their rivals. The oriental traffic of the latter was maintained through Tana, however, for nearly two centuries later, when, in 1410, the Mongol Tartars, under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted colony, took, sacked, burnt, and utterly destroyed it. This was the first terrible blow to the most magnificent commerce which the world had ever seen, and which had endured for ages. No wonder that, on the day of Tana’s fall, terrible portents of woe were seen at Venice, — that meteors appeared, that demons rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and blew down houses and swallowed ships! A thousand persons are said to have perished in the calamities which commemorated a stroke so mortally disastrous to the national grandeur. After that the Venetians humbly divided with their ancient foes the possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, their traffic in the Black Sea; till the Turks having taken Constantinople, and the Greeks having acquired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce unknown to them during the times of their native princes, the Venetians were finally, on the first pretext of war, expelled from those waters in which they had latterly maintained themselves only by payment of heavy tribute to the Turks.

In the mean time the industrial arts, in which Venice had heretofore excelled, began to be practiced elsewhere, and the Florentines and the English took that lead in the manufactures of the world, which the latter still retain. The league of the Hanseatic cities was established and rose daily in importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and Novogorod banks were opened under the protection and special favor of the Hanseatic League; its ships were preferred to any other, and the tide of commerce setting northward, the cities of the League persecuted the foreigners who would have traded in their ports. On the west, Barcelona began to dispute the pre�minence of Venice in the Mediterranean, and Spanish salt was brought to Italy itself and sold by the enterprising Catalonians. Their corsairs vexed Venetian commerce everywhere; and in that day, as in our own, private English enterprise was employed in piratical depredations on the traffic of a friendly power.

The Portuguese also began to extend their commerce, once so important, and catching the rage for discovery then prevalent, infested every sea in search of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing by a chart which a monk named Fra Mauro, in his convent on the island of San Michele, had put together from the stories of travelers, and his own guesses at geography, discovered the Cape of Good Hope, and the trade of India with Europe was turned in that direction, and the old over-land traffic perished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had long been gone; had its recovery been possible, it would now have been useless to the declining prosperity of the Republic.

It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of that Genoese nation which had hated the Venetians so long and so bitterly, to make the discovery of America, and thus to give the death-blow to the supremacy of Venice. While all these discoveries were taking place, the old queen of the seas had been weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her naval power had been everywhere crippled; her revenues had been reduced; her possessions, one after one, had been lopped away; and at the time Columbus was on his way to America half Europe, united in the League of Cambray, was attempting to crush the Republic of Venice.

The whole world was now changed. Commerce sought new channels; fortune smiled on other nations. How Venice dragged onward from the end of her commercial greatness, and tottered with a delusive splendor to her political death, is surely one of the saddest of stories if not the sternest of lessons.

CHAPTER XVII.

VENETIAN HOLIDAYS.

The national character of the Venetians was so largely influenced by the display and dissipation of the frequent festivals of the Republic, that it cannot be fairly estimated without taking them into consideration, nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which I have heretofore spoken) be appreciated in all its import, without particular allusion to their number and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic polity of the old commonwealth, which substituted popular indulgence for popular liberty, and gave the people costly pleasures in return for the priceless rights of which they had been robbed, set up national pride in the place of patriotism, and was as well satisfied with a drunken joy in its subjects as if they had possessed a true content.

Full notice of these holidays would be history [Footnote: “Siccome,” says the editor of Giustina Renier-Michiel’s Origine delle Feste Veneziane,— “Siccome l’illustre Autrice ha voluto applicare al suo lavoro il modesto titolo di Origins delle Feste Veneziane, e siccome questo potrebbe porgere un’ idea assai diversa dell’ opera a chi non ne ha alcuna cognizione, da quello che � sostanzialmente, si espone questo Epitome, perch� ognun regga almeno in parte, che quest’ opera sarebbe del titolo di storia condegna, giacch� essa non � che una costante descrizione degli avvenimenti pi� importanti e luminosi della Repubblica di Venezia.” The work in question is one of much research and small philosophy, like most books which Venetians have written upon Venice; but it has admirably served my purpose, and I am indebted to it for most of the information contained in this chapter.] of Venice, for each one had its origin in some great event of her existence, and they were so numerous as to commemorate nearly every notable incident in her annals. Though, as has been before observed, they had nearly all a general religious character, the Church, as usual in Venice, only seemed to direct the ceremonies in its own honor, while it really ministered to the political glory of the oligarchy, which knew how to manage its priests as well as its prince and people. Nay, it happened in one case, at least, that a religious anniversary was selected by the Republic as the day on which to put to shame before the populace certain of the highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. In 1162, Ulrich, the Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, by a treacherous stratagem, the city of Grado, then subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately besieged and took the city, with the patriarch and twelve of his canons in it, and carried them prisoners to the lagoons. The turbulent patriarchs of Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic’s dominion, and the people now determined to make an end of these displeasures. They refused, therefore, to release the patriarch, except on condition that he should bind himself to send them annually a bull and twelve fat hogs. It is not known what meaning the patriarch attached to this singular ceremony; but with the Venetians the bull was typical of himself, and the swine of his canons, and they yearly suffered death in these animals, which were slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San Marco amid a great concourse of the people, in the presence of the Doge and Signory. The locksmiths, and other workers in iron, had distinguished themselves in the recapture of Grado, and to their guild was allotted the honor of putting to death the bull and swine. Great art was shown in striking off the bull’s head at one blow, without suffering the sword to touch the ground after passing through the animal’s neck; the swine were slain with lances. Athletic games among the people succeeded, and the Doge and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with staves, several lightly built wooden castles, to symbolize the abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. As the centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, together with the slaughter of the swine, was disused; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of a corrupt disdain of simple and healthy allegory on the part of the proud doges, but in which I think most people will discern only a natural wish to discontinue in more civilized times a puerile barbarity. Mr. Ruskin himself finds no evidence of “state pride” in the abolition of the slaughter of the swine. The festival was very popular, and continued a long time, though I believe not till the fall of the Republic.

Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who paid it, was imposed upon the Paduans for an insult offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion for a national holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aquileja began atonement for his outrage. In the year 1214, the citizens of Treviso made an entertainment to which they invited the noble youth of the surrounding cities. In the chief piazza of the town a castle of wood exquisitely decorated was held against all comers by a garrison of the fairest Trevisan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, fruits, bonbons, and the bright eyes of the besieged; while the missiles of attack were much the same, with whatever added virtue might lie in tender prayers and sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Venice sent their gallantest youths, under their municipal banners, to take part in this famous enterprise; and the attack was carried on by the leagued forces with great vigor, but with no effect on the Castle of Love, as it was called, till the Venetians made a breach at a weak point. These young men were better skilled in the arts of war than their allies; they were richer, and had come to Treviso decked in the spoils of the recent sack of Constantinople, and at the moment they neared the castle it is reported that they corrupted the besieged by throwing handfuls of gold into the tower. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that the conduct of the Venetians in some manner roused the Paduans to insult, and that the hot youths came to blows. In an instant the standard of St. Mark was thrown down and trampled under the feet of the furious Paduans; blood flowed, and the indignant Trevisans drove the combatants out of their city. The spark of war spreading to the rival cities, the Paduans were soon worsted, and three hundred of their number were made prisoners. These they would willingly have ransomed at any price, but their enemies would not release them except on the payment of two white pullets for each warrior. The shameful ransom was paid in the Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight of the Venetians, who, never wanting in sharp and biting wit, abandoned themselves to sarcastic exultation. They demanded that the Paduans should, like the patriarch, repeat the tribute annually; but the prudent Doge Ziani judged the single humiliation sufficient, and refused to establish a yearly celebration of the feast.

One of the most famous occasional festivals of Venice is described by Petrarch in a Latin letter to his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in celebration of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island which in 1361 had recently been ceded to the Republic. The Candiotes rose in general rebellion, but were so promptly subdued that the news of the outbreak scarcely anticipated the announcement of its suppression in Venice. Petrarch was at this time the guest of the Republic, and from his seat at the right of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark’s Church, in front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric shows given in the Piazza below, which was then unpaved, and admirably adapted for equestrian feats of arms. It is curious to read the poet’s account of these in a city where there is now no four-footed beast larger than a dog. But in the age of chivalry even the Venetians were mounted, and rode up and down their narrow streets, and jousted in their great campos.

Speaking of twenty-four noble and handsome youths, whose feats formed a chief part of a show of which he “does not know if in the whole world there has been seen the equal,” Petrarch says: “It was a gentle sight to see so many youths decked in purple and gold, as they ruled with the rein and urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glittering harness, with iron-shod feet which scarcely seemed to touch the ground.” And it must have been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before the “golden fa�ade of the temple,” in a place so packed with spectators “that a grain of barley could not have fallen to the ground. The great piazza, the church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, the windows, all were — I will not say full, but running over, walled and paved with people.” At the right of the church was built a great platform, on which sat “four hundred honestest gentlewomen, chosen from the flower of the nobility, and distinguished in their dress and bearing, who, amid the continual homage offered them morning, noon, and night, presented the image of a celestial congress.” Some noblemen, come hither by chance, “from the part of Britain, comrades and kinsmen of their King, were present,” and attracted the notice of the poet. The feasts lasted many days, but on the third day Petrarch excused himself to the Doge, pleading, he says, his “ordinary occupations, already known to all.”

Among remoter feasts in honor of national triumphs, was one on the Day of the Annunciation, commemorative of the removal of the capital of the Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King Pepin had burnt the latter city, and when, advancing on Venice, he was met in the lagoons and beaten by the islanders and the tides: these by their recession stranding his boats in the mud, and those falling upon his helpless host with the fury of an insulted and imperiled people. The Doge annually assisted at mass in St. Mark’s in honor of the victory, but not long afterward the celebration of it ceased, as did that of a precisely similar defeat of the Hungarians, who had just descended from Asia into Europe. In 1339 there were great rejoicings in the Piazza for the peace with Mastino della Scala, who, beaten by the Republic, ceded his city of Treviso to her.

Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional festivals was that held for the Venetian share of the great Christian victory at Lepanto over the Turks. All orders of the State took part in it; but the most remarkable feature of the celebration was the roofing of the Merceria, all the way from St. Mark’s to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded with golden stars to represent the firmament, as the shopkeepers imagined it. The pictures of the famous painters of that day, Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, and the rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the end near Rialto. Later, the Venetian victories over the Turks at the Dardanelles were celebrated by a regatta, in 1658; and Morosini’s brilliant reconquest of the Morea, in 1688, was the occasion of other magnificent shows.

The whole world has now adopted, with various modifications, the picturesque and exciting pastime of the regatta, which, according to Mutinelli, [Footnote: Annali Urbani di Venezia.] originated among the lagoons at a very early period, from a peculiar feature in the military discipline of the Republic. A target for practice with the bow and cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at the Lido, and nobles and plebeians rowed thither in barges of thirty oars, vying with each other in the speed and skill with which the boats were driven. To divert the popular discontent that followed the Serrar del Consiglio and the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s conspiracy early in the fourteenth century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was turned to account, and the spectacle of the regatta was instituted. Agreeably, however, to the aristocratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy, the patricians withdrew from the lists, and the regatta became the affair exclusively of the gondoliers. In other Italian cities, where horse and donkey races were the favorite amusement, the riders were of both sexes; and now at Venice women also entered into the rivalry of the regatta. But in gallant deference to their weakness, they were permitted to begin the course at the mouth of the Grand Canal before the Doganna di Mare, while the men were obliged to start from the Public Gardens. They followed the Grand Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the present railway station, and there doubling a pole planted in the water near the Ponte della Croce, returned to the common goal before the Palazzo Foscari. Here was erected an ornate scaffolding to which the different prizes were attached. The first boat carried off a red banner; the next received a green flag; the third, a blue; and the fourth, a yellow one. With each of these was given a purse, and with the last was added, by way of gibe, a live pig, a picture of which was painted on the yellow banner. Every regatta included five courses, in which single and double oared boats, and single and double oared gondolas successively competed, — the fifth contest being that in which the women participated with two-oared boats. Four prizes like those described were awarded to the winners in each course.

The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which the superb city could assume. As soon as the government announced that it was to take place, the preparations of the champions began. “From that time the gondolier ceased to be a servant; he became almost an adoptive son;” [Footnote: Feste Veneziane.] his master giving him every possible assistance and encouragement in the daily exercises by which he trained himself for the contest, and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to bless his person, his boat, and the image of the Madonna or other saint attached to the gondola. When the great day arrived the Canalazzo swarmed with boats of every kind. “All the trades and callings,” says Giustina Renier-Michiel, [Footnote: Feste Veneziane] with that pride in the Venetian past which does not always pass from verbosity to eloquence, “had each its boats appropriately mounted and adorned; and private societies filled an hundred more. The chief families among the nobility appeared in their boats, on which they had lavished their taste and wealth.” The rowers were dressed with the most profuse and elaborate luxury, and the barges were made to represent historical and mythological conceptions. “To this end the builders employed carving and sculpture, together with all manner of costly stuffs of silk and velvet, gorgeous fringes and tassels of silver and gold, flowers, fruits, shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage of rare birds.... Young patricians, in fleet and narrow craft, propelled by swift rowers, preceded the champions and cleared the way for them, obliging the spectators to withdraw on either side.... They knelt on sumptuous cushions in the prows of their gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and launched little pellets of plaster at the directors of such obstinate boats as failed to obey their orders to retire....

“To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the nature of the place concurred. Let us imagine that superb canal, flanked on either side by a long line of edifices of every sort; with great numbers of marble palaces, — nearly all of noble and majestic structure, some admirable for an antique and Gothic taste, some for the richest Greek and Roman architecture, — their windows and balconies decked with damasks, stuffs of the Levant, tapestries, and velvets, the vivid colors of which were animated still more by borders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned beautiful women richly dressed and wearing tremulous and glittering jewels in their hair. Wherever the eye turned, it beheld a vast multitude at doorways, on the rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the spectators occupied scaffoldings erected at favorable points along the sides of the canal; and the patrician ladies did not disdain to leave their palaces, and, entering their gondolas, lose themselves among the infinite number of the boats....

“The cannons give the signal of departure. The boats dart over the water with the rapidity of lightning.... They advance and fall behind alternately. One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival suddenly leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his friends and kinsmen hail his advantage, while others already passing him, force him to redouble his efforts. Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted.... They withdraw, and the kindly Venetian populace will not aggravate their shame with jeers; the spectators glance at them compassionately, and turn again to those still in the lists. Here and there they encourage them by waving handkerchiefs, and the women toss their shawls in the air. Each patrician following close upon his gondolier’s boat, incites him with his voice, salutes him by name, and flatters his pride and spirit.... The water foams under the repeated strokes of the oars; it leaps up in spray and falls in showers on the backs of the rowers already dripping with their own sweat.... At last behold the dauntless mortal who seizes the red banner! His rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke of the oar gave him the victory.... The air reverberates with a clapping of hands so loud that at the remotest point on the canal the moment of triumph is known. The victors plant on their agile boat the conquered flag, and instead of thinking to rest their weary arms, take up the oars again and retrace their course to receive congratulations and applause.”

The regattas were by no means of frequent occurrence, for only forty-one took place during some five centuries. The first was given in 1315, and the last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Maximilian’s marriage with Princess Charlotte of Belgium. The most sumptuous and magnificent regatta of all was that given to the city in the year 1686, by Duke Ernest of Brunswick. This excellent prince having sold a great part of his subjects to the Republic for use in its wars against the Turk, generously spent their price in the costly and edifying entertainments of which Venice had already become the scene. The Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph of the Marine Goddesses had been represented at his expense on the Grand Canal, with great acceptance. And now the Triumph of Neptune formed a principal feature in the gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the whole of the salt-water mythology was employed in the ceremony. An immense wooden whale supporting a structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted by a statue of Neptune, and drawn by sea-horses, moved from the Piazzetta to the Palazzo Foscari, where numbers of Sirens sported about in every direction till the Regatta began. The whole company of the deities, very splendidly arrayed, then joined them as spectators, and behaved in the manner affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. Mutinelli [Footnote: Annali Urbani.] recounts the story with many sighs and sneers and great exactness; but it is not interesting. The miraculous recovery of the body of St. Mark, in 1094, after it had been lost for nearly two centuries, created a festive anniversary which was celebrated for a while with great religious pomp; but the rejoicings were not separately continued in after years. The festival was consolidated (if one may so speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, and the triple occasions were commemorated by a single holiday. The holidays annually distinguished by civil or ecclesiastical displays were twenty-five in number, of which only eleven were of religious origin, though all were of partly religious observance. One of the most curious and interesting of the former was of the earliest date, and was continued till the last years of the Republic. In 596 Narses, the general of the Greek Emperor, was furnished by the Venetians with means of transport by sea from Aquieja to Ravenna for the army which he was leading against the Ostrogoths; and he made a vow that if successful in his campaign, he would requite their generosity by erecting two churches in Venice. Accordingly, when he had beaten the Ostrogoths, he caused two votive churches to be built, — one to St. Theodore, on the site of the present St. Mark’s Church, and another to San Geminiano, on the opposite bank of the canal which then flowed there. In lapse of time the citizens, desiring to enlarge their Piazza, removed the church of San Geminiano back as far as the present Fabbrica Nuova, which Napoleon built on the site of the demolished temple, between the western ends of the New and Old Procuratie. The removal was effected without the pope’s leave, which had been asked, but was refused in these words,— “The Holy Father cannot sanction the commission of a sacrilege, though he can pardon it afterwards.” The pontiff, therefore, imposed on the Venetians for penance that the Doge should pay an annual visit forever to the church. On the occasion of this visit the parish priest met him at the door, and offered the holy water to him; and then the Doge, having assisted at mass, marched with his Signory and the clergy of the church to its original site, where the clergy demanded that it should be rebuilt, and the Doge replied with the promise,— “Next year.” A red stone was set in the pavement to mark the spot where the Doge renewed this never-fulfilled promise. [Footnote: As the author of the Feste Veneziane tells this story it is less dramatic and characteristic. The clergy, she says, reminded the Doge of the occasion of his visit, and his obligation to renew it the following year, which he promised to do. I cling to the version in the text, for it seems to me that the Doge’s perpetual promise to rebuild the church was a return in kind for the pope’s astute answer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So good a thing ought to be history.] The old church was destroyed by fire, and Sansovino built, in 1506, the temple thrown down by Napoleon to make room for his palace.

The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the body of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria to Venice, is still observed, though the festival has lost all the splendor which it received from civil intervention. For a thousand years the day was hallowed by a solemn mass in St. Mark’s, at which the Doge and his Signory assisted.

The chief of the State annually paid a number of festive visits, which were made the occasion of as many holidays. To the convent of San Zaccaria he went in commemoration of the visit paid to that retreat by Pope Benedict III., in 855, when the pontiff was so charmed by the piety and goodness of the fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent them great store of relics and indulgences. It thus became one of the most popular of the holidays, and the people repaired in great multitude with their Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, that they might see the relics and buy the indulgences. The nuns were of the richest and noblest families of the city, and on the Doge’s first visit, they presented him with that bonnet which became the symbol of his sovereignty. It was wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones of marvelous great beauty and value; and in order that the State might never seem forgetful of the munificence which bestowed the gift, the bonnet was annually taken from the treasury and shown by the Doge himself to the Sisters of San Zaccaria. The Doge Pietro Tradonico, to whom the bonnet was given, was killed in a popular tumult on this holiday, while going to the convent.

There was likewise a vast concourse of people and traffic in indulgences at the church of Santa Maria della Carita (now the Academy of Fine Arts), on the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander III., in 1177, flying from the Emperor Barbarossa, found refuge in that monastery. [Footnote: Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable Guida Artistica e Storica di Veneza, say that the pope merely lodged in the monastery on the day when he signed the treaty of peace with Barbarossa.] He bestowed great privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored the event to the end of their national existence.

One of the rare occasions during the year when the Doge appeared officially in public after nightfall, was on St. Stephen’s Day. He then repaired at dusk in his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of nobles and citizens, to the island church of San Giorgio Maggiore, whither, in 1009, the body of St. Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the Virgins, (the convent building now forms part of the Arsenal,) where the abbess presented him with a bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took place in commemoration of the erection and endowment of the church. The head of the State also annually assisted at mass in St. Mark’s, to celebrate the arrival in Venice of St. Isidore’s body, which the Doge Domenico Michiel brought with him from the East, at the end of twenty-six years’ war against the infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the Milanese, and deposited them in the newly finished Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was annually paid to that edifice.

Two only of the national religious festivals yet survive the Republic, — that of the church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, and that of the church of the Salute on the Grand Canal, — both votive churches, built in commemoration of the city’s deliverances from the pest in 1578 and 1630. In their general features the celebrations of the two holidays are much alike; but that of the Salute is the less important of the two, and is more entirely religious in its character. A bridge of boats is annually thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the Purification, the people throng to the Virgin’s shrine to express their gratitude for her favor. This gratitude was so strong immediately after the cessation of the pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the architects were preparing their designs for the present church, caused a wooden one to be built on its site, and consecrated with ceremonies of singular splendor. On the Festa del Redentore (the third Sunday of July) a bridge of boats crosses the great canal of the Giudecca, and vast throngs constantly pass it, day and night. But though the small tradesmen who deal in fried cakes, and in apples, peaches, pears, and other fruits, make intolerable uproar behind their booths on the long quay before the church; though the venders of mulberries (for which the gardens of the Giudecca are famous) fill the air with their sweet jargoning (for their cries are like the shrill notes of so many singing-birds); though thousands of people pace up and down, and come and go upon the bridge, yet the Festa del Redentore has now none of the old-time gayety it wore when the Venetians thronged the gardens, and feasted, sang, danced, and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in their fleets of many-lanterned boats, covering the lagoon with fairy light, to behold the sunrise on the Adriatic Sea.

Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there were five banquets annually given by the State on the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus, St. Jerome, and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all of which were attended with religious observances. Good Friday was especially hallowed by church processions in each of the campos; and St. Martha’s Day was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca Canal, when a favorite fish, being in season, was devotionally eaten.

The civil and political holidays which lasted till the fall of the Republic were eleven. One of the earliest was the anniversary of the recapture of the Venetian Brides, who were snatched from their bridegrooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, by Triestine pirates. The class of citizens most distinguished in the punishment of the abductors was the trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the parish of Santa Maria Formosa; and when the Doge in his gratitude bade them demand any reasonable grace, the trade asked that he should pay their quarter an annual visit. “But if it rains?” said the Doge. “We will give you a hat to cover you,” answered the carpenters. “And if I am hungry?” “We will give you to eat and drink.” So when the Doge made his visit on the day of the Virgin’s Purification, he was given a hat of gilded straw, a bottle of wine, and loaves of bread. On this occasion the State bestowed dowers upon twelve young girls among the fairest and best of Venice (chosen two from each of the six sections of the city), who marched in procession to the church of Santa Maria Formosa. But as time passed, the custom lost its simplicity and purity: pretty girls were said to make eyes at handsome youths in the crowd, and scandals occurred in public. Twelve wooden figures were then substituted, but the procession in which they were carried was followed by a disgusted and hooting populace, and assailed with a shower of turnips. The festivities, which used to last eight days, with incredible magnificence, fell into discredit, and were finally abolished during the war when the Genoese took Chioggia and threatened Venice, under Doria. This was the famous Festa delle Marie.

In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, and annexed all Istria, as far as Dalmatia, to the Republic. On the day of the Ascension, of the same year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the dominion of Venice over the Adriatic, though it was not till some two hundred years later that the Pope Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and confirmed the Republic in the possession of the sea forever. “What,” cries Giustina Renier-Michiel, turning to speak of the holiday thus established, and destined to be the proudest in the Venetian calendar,— “what shall I say of the greatest of all our solemnities, that of the Ascension? Alas! I myself saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full of derision and insult, combine to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn it for the gold upon it!” [Footnote: That which follows is a translation of the report given by Cesare Cant�, in his Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, of a conversation with the author of Feste Veneziane. It is not necessary to remind readers of Venetian history that Renier and Michiel were of the foremost names in the Golden Book. She who bore them both was born before the fall of the Republic which she so much loved and lamented, and no doubt felt more than the grief she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. It was destroyed, as she describes, in 1796, by the French Republicans and Venetian Democrats after the abdication of the oligarchy; but a fragment of its mast yet remains, and is to be seen in the museum of the Arsenal.].... (This was the nuptial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the sea, and the patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucintoro of her day): “It was in the form of a galley, and two hundred feet long, with two decks. The first of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty rowers, the handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat four men to each oar, and there awaited their orders; forty other sailors completed the crew. The upper deck was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with arched doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, and covered with a roof supported by caryatides — the whole surmounted by a canopy of crimson velvet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety seats, and at the stern a still richer chamber for the Doge’s throne, over which drooped the banner of St. Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides of the vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, Peace, Sea, Land, and other allegories and ornaments.

“Let me imagine those times — it is the habit of the old. At midday, having heard mass in the chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the Giant’s Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta, [Footnote: The gate of the Ducal Palace which opens upon the Piazzetta next St. Mark’s.] and passes the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected for the fair beginning that evening. He is preceded by eight standard-bearers with the flags of the Republic, — red, blue, white, and purple, — given by Alexander III. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of silver, borne by as many boys, mix their notes with the clangor of the bells of the city. Behind come the retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, and the fifty Comandadori in their flowing blue robes and red caps; then follow musicians, and the squires of the Doge in black velvet; then the guards of the Doge, two chancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, a deacon clad in purple and bearing a wax taper, six canons, three parish priests in their sacerdotal robes, and the Doge’s chaplain dressed in crimson. The grand chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. Two squires bear the Doge’s chair and the cushion of cloth of gold. And the Doge — the representative, and not the master of his country; the executor, and not the maker of the laws; citizen and prince, revered and guarded, sovereign of individuals, servant of the State — comes clad in a long mantle of ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of tocca d’oro [Footnote: A gauze of gold and silk.] with the golden bonnet on his head, under the umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the foreign ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his drawn sword is carried by a patrician recently destined for some government of land or sea, and soon to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a throng of personages, — the grand captain of the city, the judges, the three chiefs of the Forty, the Avogodori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten, the three censors, and the sixty of the Senate with the sixty of the Aggiunta, all in robes of crimson silk.

“On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned him, and the prince ascends the throne. The Admiral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in front as pilot; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and around him the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor of bells and roar of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every form and size.

“The Patriarch, who had already sent several vases of flowers to do courtesy to the company in the Bucintoro, joins them at the island of Sant’ Elena, and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they reach the port of Lido, whence they formerly issued out upon the open sea; but in my time they paused there, turning the stern of the vessel to the sea. Then the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery of the fort, took the ring blessed by the Patriarch, — who now emptied a cup of holy water into the sea, — and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne, threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the words, Desponsamus te, mare, in signum veri perpetuique dominii. Proceeding then to the church of San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and returned to Venice, where the dignitaries were entertained at a banquet, while the multitude peacefully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths erected for the fair.” [Footnote: One of the sops thrown to the populace on this occasion, as we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the train of gilded barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing the chief of the Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time immemorial the lower classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction between the two parties seems to have been purely geographical; for there is no apparent reason why a man should have belonged to the Castellani except that he lived in the eastern quarter of the city, or to the Nicolotti, except that he lived in the western quarter. The government encouraged a rivalry not dangerous to itself, and for a long time the champions of the two sections met annually and beat each other with rods. The form of contest was afterwards modified, and became a struggle for the possession of certain bridges, in which the defeated were merely thrown into the canals. I often passed the scene of the fiercest of these curious battles at San Barnaba, where the Ponte de Pugni is adorned with four feet of stone let into the pavement, and defying each other from the four corners of the bridge. Finally, even these contests were given up and the Castellani and Nicolotti spent their rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats.] This fair, which was established as early as 1180, was an industrial exhibition of the arts and trades peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, with increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, the feasts of the Republic at last grew so numerous that it became necessary, as we have seen before, to make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia after the terrible war of 1380, the Senate refused to yield them another festa, and merely ordered that St. Mark’s Day should be thereafter observed with some added ceremony: there was already one festival commemorative of a triumph over the Genoese (that of San Giovanni Decollate, on whose day, in 1358, the Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the Senate declared that this was sufficient. A curious custom, however, on the Sunday after Ascension, celebrated a remoter victory over the same enemies, to which it is hard to attach any historic probability. It is not known exactly when the Genoese in immense force penetrated to Poveglia (one of the small islands of the lagoons), nor why being there they stopped to ask the islanders the best way of getting to Venice. But tradition says that the sly Povegliesi persuaded these silly Genoese that the best method of navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts, which they constructed for them, and on which they sent them afloat. About the time the Venetians came out to meet the armada, the withes binding the members of the rafts gave way, and the Genoese who were not drowned in the tides stuck in the mud, and were cut in pieces like so many melons. No one will be surprised to learn that not a soul of them escaped, and that only the Povegliesi lived to tell the tale. Special and considerable privileges were conferred on them for their part in this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the Doge, when a deputation of the islanders called on him in his palace, and hugged and kissed the devoted prince.

People who will sentimentalize over the pigeons of St. Mark’s, may like to know that they have been settled in the city ever since 877. After the religious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the custom of the sacristans of St. Mark’s to release doves fettered with fragments of paper, and thus partly disabled from flight, for the people to scramble for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the birds as they caught, and ate them at Easter, but those pigeons which escaped took refuge in the roof of the church, where they gradually assumed a certain sacredness of character, and increased to enormous numbers. They were fed by provision of the Republic, and being neglected at the time of its fall, many of them were starved. But they now flourish on a bequest left by a pious lady for their maintenance, and on the largess of grain and polenta constantly bestowed by strangers. Besides the holidays mentioned, the 6th of December was religiously observed in honor of the taking of Constantinople, the Doge assisting at mass in the ducal chapel of St. Nicholas. He also annually visited, with his Signory in the state barges, and with great concourse of people, the church of San Vito on the 15th of June, in memory of the change of the government from a democracy to an oligarchy, and of the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s conspiracy. On St. Isidore’s Day he went with his Signory, and the religious confraternities, in torchlight procession, to hear mass at St. Mark’s in celebration of the failure of Marin Falier’s plot. On the 17th of January he visited by water the hospital erected for invalid soldiers and sailors, and thus commemorated the famous defence of Scutari against the Turks, in 1413. For the peace of 1516, concluded after the dissolution of the League of Cambray, he went in his barge to the church of Santa Marina, who had potently exerted her influence for the preservation of the Republic against allied France, Austria, Spain, and Rome. On St. Jerome’s Day, when the newly-elected members of the Council of Ten took their seats, the Doge entertained them with a banquet, and there were great popular rejoicings over an affair in which the people had no interest.

It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while not only all the Venetian holidays in anywise connected with the glory of the Republic, but also those which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, have ceased to be, a festival common to the whole Catholic world should still be observed in Venice with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus Christi there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in the Piazza.

The great splendor of the solemnization is said to date from the times when Enrico Dandolo and his fellow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose of taking Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantinople from the schismatics. Up to that period the day of Corpus Christi was honored by a procession from what was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello; but now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their hundred churches, have part in the procession, which is of such great length as to take some two hours in its progress round the Piazza.

Several days before the holiday workmen begin to build, within the Place of St. Mark, the colonnade through which the procession is to pass; they roof it with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of pasteboard representing garlands of palm. At last, on the festive morning, the dwellers on the Grand Canal are drawn to their balconies by the apparition of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes, and bearing banners, painted candles, and other movable elements of devotion, with which they pass to the Piazzetta, and thence into St. Mark’s. They re-appear presently, and, with a guard of Austrian troops to clear the way before them, begin their march under the canopy of the colonnade.

When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by night your eye has tasted its most delicate delight, but then it is the delight given by a memory only, and it touches you with sadness. You must see the Piazza to-day, — every window fluttering with rich stuffs and vivid colors; the three great flag staffs [Footnote: Once bearing the standards of Cyprus, Candia, and Venice.] hanging their heavy flags; the brilliant square alive with a holiday population, with resplendent uniforms, with Italian gesture and movement, and that long glittering procession, bearing slowly on the august paraphernalia of the Church — you must see all this before you can enter into the old heart of Venetian magnificence, and feel its life about you.

To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Castello comes first in the procession, and, with a proud humility, the Basilica San Marco last. Before each parochial division goes a banner displaying the picture or distinctive device of its titular saint, under the shadow of which chants a priest; there are the hosts of the different churches, and the gorgeous canopies under which they are elevated; then come facchini dressed in scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or the long carved and gilded candlesticks; and again facchini delicately robed in vestments of the purest white linen, with caps of azure, green, and purple, and shod with sandals or white shoes, carrying other apparatus of worship. Each banner and candlestick has a fluttering leaf of tinsel paper attached to it, and the procession makes a soft rustling as it passes. The matter-of-fact character of the external Church walks between those symbolists, the candle-bearers, — in the form of persons who gather the dropping fatness of the candles, and deposit it in a vase carried for that purpose. Citizens march in the procession with candles; and there are charity-schools which also take part, and sing in the harsh, shrill manner, of which I think only little boys who have their heads closely shorn are capable.

On all this we looked down from a window of the Old Procuratie — of course with that calm sense of superiority which people are apt to have in regarding the solemnities of a religion different from their own. But that did not altogether prevent us from enjoying what was really beautiful and charming in the scene. I thought most of the priests, very good and gentle looking, — and in all respects they were much pleasanter to the eye than the monks of the Carmelite order, who, in shaving their heads to simulate the Saviour’s crown of thorns, produce a hideous burlesque of the divine humiliation. Yet many even of these had earnest and sincere faces, and I could not think so much as I ought, perhaps, of their idle life, and the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess, indeed, I felt rather a sadness than an indignation at all that self-sacrifice to an end of which I could but dimly see the usefulness. With some things in this grand spectacle we were wholly charmed, and doubtless had most delight in the little child who personated John the Baptist, and who was quite naked, but for a fleece folded about him: he bore the cross-headed staff in one small hand, and led with the other a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here and there in the procession little girls, exquisitely dressed, and gifted by fond mothers with wings and aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I likewise greatly relished the lively holiday air of a company of airy old men, the pensioners of some charity, who, in their white linen trousers and blue coats, formed a prominent feature of the display. Far from being puffed up with their consequence, they gossiped cheerfully with the spectators in the pauses of the march, and made jests to each other in that light-hearted, careless way observable in old men taken care of, and with nothing before them to do worth speaking of but to die. I must own that the honest facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, and even freer with their jokes. But in this they formed a fine contrast to here and there a closely hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent lips, was carrying a taper for religion, and not, like them, for money. I liked the great good-natured crowd, so orderly and amiable; and I enjoyed even that old citizen in the procession who, when the Patriarch gave his blessing, found it inconvenient to kneel, and compromised by stretching one leg a great way out behind him. These things, indeed, quite took my mind off of the splendors; and I let the canopy of the Scuola di San Rocco (worth 40,000 ducats) go by with scarce a glance, and did not bestow much more attention upon the brilliant liveries of the Patriarch’s servants, — though the appearance of these ecclesiastical flunkies is far more impressive than that of any of their secular brethren. They went gorgeously before the Patriarch, who was surrounded by the richly dressed clergy of St. Mark’s, and by clouds of incense rising from the smoking censers. He walked under the canopy in his cardinal’s robes, and with his eye fixed upon the Host.

All at once the procession halted, and the Patriarch blessed the crowd, which knelt in a profound silence. Then the military band before him struck up an air from “Un Ballo in Maschera;” the procession moved on to the cathedral, and the crowd melted away.

The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the Venetians now honor by closing all shop-doors behind them and putting all thought of labor out of their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in the mild, inexplosive fashion which seems to satisfy Italian nature. It is the same on all the feast-days: then the city sinks into profounder quiet; only bells are noisy, and where their clangor is so common as in Venice, it seems at last to make friends with the general stillness, and disturbs none but people of untranquil minds. We always go to the Piazza San Marco when we seek pleasure, and now, for eight days only of all the year, we have there the great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi, performed every hour by automata within the little golden-railed gallery on the facade of the Giant’s Clock Tower. There the Virgin sits above the azure circle of the zodiac, all heavily gilded, and holding the Child, equally splendid. Through the doors on either side, usually occupied by the illuminated figures of the hours, appears the procession and disappears. The stately giant on the summit of the tower, at the hither side of the great bell, solemnly strikes the hour — as a giant should who has struck it for centuries — with a grand, whole-arm movement, and a slow, muscular pride. We look up — we tourists of the red-backed books; we peasant-girls radiant with converging darts of silver piercing the masses of our thick black hair; we Austrian soldiers in white coats and blue tights; we voiceful sellers of the cherries of Padua, and we calm loafers about the many-pillared base of the church — we look up and see the Adoration. First, the trumpeter, blowing the world news of the act; then the first king, turning softly to the Virgin, and bowing; then the second, that enthusiastic devotee, — the second who lifts his crown quite from his head; last the Ethiopian prince, gorgeous in green and gold, who, I am sorry to say, burlesques the whole solemnity. His devotion may be equally heart-felt, but it is more jerky than that of the others. He bows well and adequately, but recovers his balance with a prodigious start, altogether too suggestive of springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the pathetic in this grotesque fatality of the black king, whose suffering race has always held mankind between laughter and tears, and has seldom done a fine thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing absurdity; but if there is, the sentimental may find it, not I. When the procession has disappeared, we wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and then we disperse.

If it is six o’clock, and the sea has begun to breathe cool across the Basin of St. Mark, we find our account in strolling upon the long Riva degli Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would suppose, at first thought, that here, on this magnificent quay, with its glorious lookout over the lagoons, the patricians would have built their finest palaces; whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural shabbiness from the Ponte della Paglia at one end, to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other. But there need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The feudal wealth and nobility of other cities kept the base at a respectful distance by means of lofty stone walls, and so shut in their palaces and gardens. Here equal seclusion could only be achieved by building flush upon the water, and therefore all the finest palaces rise sheer from the canals; and caff�, shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the Riva degli Schiavoni. Nevertheless, it is the favorite promenade of the Venetians for the winter sunshine, and at such times in the summer as when the sun’s rage is tempered. There is always variety in the throng on the Riva, but the fashionable part of it is the least interesting: here and there a magnificent Greek flashes through the crowd, in dazzling white petticoats and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket; now and then a tall Dalmat or a solemn Turk; even the fishermen and the peasants, and the lower orders of the people, are picturesque; but polite Venice is hopelessly given to the pride of the eyes, and commits all the excesses of the French modes. The Venetian dandy, when dressed to his own satisfaction, is the worst-dressed man in the world. His hat curls outrageously in brim and sides; his coatsleeves are extremely full, and the garment pinches him at the waist; his pantaloons flow forth from the hips, and contract narrowly at the boot, which is square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is something not to be seen elsewhere, and is well calculated to move the beholder to desperation. [Footnote: These exaggerations of the fashions of 1862 have been succeeded by equal travesties of the present modes.] The Venetian fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. Her dress is as full of color as a Paolo Veronese; in these narrow streets, where it is hard to expand an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost; and she fatally hides her ankles in pantalets.

In the wide thoroughfare leading from the last bridge of the Riva to the gate of the gardens there is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the stones, a braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who sell fish and fruit, at once insufferable and indescribable. The street is a rio terr�, — a filled-up canal, — and, as always happens with rii terrai, is abandoned to the poorest classes who manifest themselves, as the poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of frowzy women, small girls carrying large babies, beggars, of course, and soldiers. I spoke of fruit-sellers; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin-seeds is the most popular, — the people finding these an inexpensive and pleasant excess, when taken with a glass of water flavored with anise.

The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who demolished to that end some monasteries once cumbering the ground. They are pleasant enough, and are not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted trees — sycamores, chiefly. I do not remember to have seen here any Venetians of the better class, except on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. Usually the promenaders are fishermen, Austrian corporals, loutish youth of low degree, and women too old and too poor to have any thing to do. Strangers go there, and the German visitors even drink the exceptionable beer which is sold in the wooden cottage on the little hillock at the end of the Gardens. There is also a stable — where are the only horses in Venice. They are let at a florin an hour, and I do not know why the riders are always persons of the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be drearier than the company in the Gardens, and nothing lovelier than the view they command, — from the sunset on the dome of the church of the Salute, all round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the port of San Nicol�, where you catch a glimpse of the Adriatic.

The company is commonly stupid, but one evening, as we strolled idly through the walks, we came upon an interesting group — forty or fifty sailors, soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen and contadini — sitting and lying on the grass, and listening with rapt attention to an old man reclining against a tree. I never saw a manner of sweeter or easier dignity than the speaker’s. Nature is so lavish of her grace to these people that grow near her heart — the sun! Infinite study could not have taught one northern-born the charm of oratory as this old man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was speaking Tuscan. Do you guess with what he was enchanting his simple auditors? Nothing less than “Orlando Furioso.” They listened with the hungriest delight, and when Ariosto’s interpreter raised his finger and said, “Disse l’imperatore,” or, “Orlando disse, Carlomano mio,” they hardly breathed.

On the Luned� dei Giardini, already mentioned, all orders of the people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass. The trees get back the voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles with glancing movement and graceful sport.

Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper element, the populace, — but here it brays to a peculiarly beautiful purpose. For no sooner does it sound than the young girls of the people wreathe themselves into dances, and improvise the poetry of motion. Over the grass they whirl, and up and down the broad avenues, and no one of all the gentle and peaceable crowd molests or makes them afraid. It is a scene to make you believe in Miriam dancing with Donatello there in that old garden at Rome, and reveals a simple beauty in the nature of the Italian poor, which shall one day, I hope, be counted in their favor when they are called to answer for lying and swindling.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS.

It often happens, even after the cold has announced itself in Venice, that the hesitating winter lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow Indian-summer weather has possession of the first weeks of December. There was nothing in the December weather of 1863 to remind us Northerners that Christmas was coming. The skies were as blue as those of June, the sun was warm, and the air was bland, with only now and then a trenchant breath from the Alps, coming like a delicate sarcasm from loveliness unwilling to be thought insipidly amiable. But if there was no warning in the weather, there were other signs of Christmas-time not to be mistaken: a certain foolish leaping of the heart in one’s own breast, as if the dead raptures of childhood were stirred in their graves by the return of the happy season; and in Venice, in weary, forlorn Venice, there was the half-unconscious tumult, the expectant bustle which cities feel at the approach of holidays. The little shops put on their gayest airs; there was a great clapping and hammering on the stalls and booths which were building in the campos; the street-cries were more shrill and resonant than ever, and the air was shaken with the continual clangor of the church bells. All this note of preparation is rather bewildering to strangers, and is apt to disorder the best-disciplined intentions of seeing Christmas as the Venetians keep it. The public observance of the holiday in the churches and on the streets is evident and accessible to the most transient sojourner; but it is curious proof of the difficulty of knowledge concerning the in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I had already spent two Christmases in Venice without learning any thing of their home celebration of the day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty attends like inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas contracts the family circle more exclusively than ever around the home hearth, or the domestic scaldino, as the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite ready to say that the observance of Christmas in Venice was altogether public, when I thought it a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult my barber.

In all Latin countries the barber is a source of information, which, skillfully tapped, pours forth in a stream of endless gossip and local intelligence. Every man talks with his barber; and perhaps a lingering dignity clings to this artist from his former profession of surgeon: it is certain the barber here prattles on with a freedom and importance perfectly admitted and respected by the interlocutory count under his razor. Those who care to know how things passed in an Italian barber shop three hundred years ago, may read it in Miss Evans’s “Romola;” those who are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art in Venice at this day, must go to be shaved at his shop in the Frezzaria. Here there is a continual exchange of gossip, and I have often listened with profit to the sage and piquant remarks of the head barber and chief ciarlone, on the different events of human life brought to his notice. His shop is well known as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair Venetian declare that she had cut from her list all acquaintance who go there, as persons likely to become infected with the worst habits of gossip.

To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in the most brilliant humor for listening, and my authority on Christmas observances is another and humbler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By birth, I believe, he is a Mantuan, and he prides himself on speaking Italian instead of Venetian. He has a defective eye, which obliges him to tack before bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more favorable to conversation. On the whole, he is flattered to be asked about Christmas in Venice, and he first tells me that it is one of the chief holidays of the year: —

“It is then, Signore, that the Venetians have the custom to make three sorts of peculiar presents: Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have seen the mustard in the shop windows: it is a thick conserve of fruits, flavored with mustard; and the mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and filled with almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, and a vase of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and make presents of them, one family to another, the day before Christmas. It is not too much for a rich family to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and as many pots of mustard. These are exchanged between friends in the city, and Venetians also send them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift is returned in cakes and eggs at Easter. Christmas Eve people invite each other to great dinners, and eat and drink, and make merry; but there are only fish and vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are forbidden. This dinner lasts so long that, when it is over, it is almost time to so to midnight mass, which all must attend, or else hear three masses on the morrow; and no doubt it was some delinquent who made our saying,— ‘Long as a Christmas mass.’ On Christmas Day people dine at home, keeping the day with family reunions. But the day after! Ah-heigh! That is the first of Carnival, and all the theatres are opened, and there is no end to the amusements — or was not, in the old time. Now, they never begin. A week later comes the day of the Lord’s Circumcision, and then the next holiday is Easter. The Nativity, the Circumcision, and the Resurrection — behold! these are the three mysteries of the Christian faith. Of what religion are the Americans, Signore?”

I think I was justified in answering that we were Christians. My barber was politely surprised. “But there are so many different religions,” he said, in excuse.

On the afternoon before Christmas I walked through the thronged Merceria to the Rialto Bridge, where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza San Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bargains. At this time the Merceria, or street of the shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is arranged with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the most of every thing, which are seldom applied to the abundance of our fairs at home. The shops in Venice are all very small, and the streets of lofty houses are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not exposed in the shop-windows are brought to the door to be clamored over by purchasers; so that the Merceria is roused by unusual effort to produce a more pronounced effect of traffic and noise than it always wears; but now the effort had been made and the effect produced. The street was choked with the throngs, through which all sorts of peddlers battled their way and cried their wares. In Campo San Bartolomeo, into which the Merceria expands, at the foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic had built enormous barricades of stalls, and entrenched itself behind booths, whence purchasers were assailed with challenges to buy bargains. More than half the campo was paved with crockery from Rovigo and glass-ware from Murano; clothing of every sort, and all kinds of small household wares, were offered for sale; and among the other booths, in the proportion of two to one, were stalls of the inevitable Christmas mustard and mandorlato.

But I cared rather for the crowd than what the crowd cared for. I had been long ago obliged to throw aside my preconceived notions of the Italian character, though they were not, I believe, more absurd than the impressions of others who have never studied Italian character in Italy. I hardly know what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed to them on their holidays: a people living in a mild climate under such a lovely sky, with wine cheap and abundant, might not unreasonably have been expected to put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying themselves. Venetian crowds are always perfectly gentle and kindly, but they are also as a whole usually serious; and this Christmas procession, moving up and down the Merceria, and to and fro between the markets of Rialto, was in the fullest sense a solemnity. It is true that the scene was dramatic, but the drama was not consciously comic. Whether these people bought or sold, or talked together, or walked up and down in silence, they were all equally in earnest. The crowd, in spite of its noisy bustle and passionate uproar, did not seem to me a blithe or light-hearted crowd. Its sole activity was that of traffic, for, far more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian loves a bargain, and puts his whole heart into upholding and beating down demands.

Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit market, where whole Hollands of cabbage and Spains of onions opened on the view, with every other succulent and toothsome growth; and beyond this we entered the glory of Rialto, the fish-market, which is now more lavishly supplied than at any other season. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color for the fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow hues of the lagoon. There is a certain kind of red mullet, called triglia, which is as rich and tender in its dyes as if it had never swam in water less glorious than that which crimsons under October sunsets. But a fish-market, even at Rialto, with fishermen in scarlet caps and triglie in sunset splendors, is only a fish-market after all: it is wet and slimy under foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing everywhere, set the soul asquirm, and soon-sated curiosity slides willingly away.

We had an appointment with a young Venetian lady to attend midnight mass at the church of San Mois�, and thither about half-past eleven we went to welcome in Christmas. The church of San Mois� is in the highest style of the Renaissance art, which is, I believe, the lowest style of any other. The richly sculptured fa�ade is divided into stories; the fluted columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their lines are broken by the bands which encircle them like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible point theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from falling to the ground by iron bars let into their backs, start from the niches and cling to the sculpture. The outside of the church is in every way detestable, and the inside is consistently bad. All the side-altars have broken arches, and the high altar is built of rough blocks of marble to represent Mount Sinai, on which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives the tables of the law from God the Father, with frescoed seraphim in the background. For the same reason, I suppose, that the devout prefer a hideous Bambino and a Madonna in crinoline to the most graceful artistic conception of those sacred personages, San Mois� is the most popular church for the midnight mass in Venice, and there is no mass at all in St. Mark’s, where its magnificence would be so peculiarly impressive.

On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, and the door-ways were constantly thronged with people passing in and out. I was puzzled to see so many young men present, for Young Italy is not usually in great number at church; but a friend explained the anomaly: “After the guests at our Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, they all go to mass in at least one church, and the younger offer a multiplied devotion by going to all. It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means they manage to see every pretty face in the city, which that night has specially prepared itself to be seen;” and from this slender text my friend began to discourse at large about these Christmas Eve dinners, and chiefly how jollily the priests fared, ending with the devout wish, “Would God had made me nephew of a canonico!” The great dinners of the priests are a favorite theme with Italian talkers; but I doubt it is after all only a habit of speech. The priests are too numerous to feed sumptuously in most cases.

We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in the middle of the main aisle, directly over the dust of John Law, who alighted in Venice when his great Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now sleeps peacefully under a marble tablet in the ugly church of San Mois�. The thought of that busy, ambitious life, come to this unscheming repose under our feet, — so far from the scene of its hopes, successes, and defeats, — gave its own touch of solemnity to the time and place, and helped the offended sense of propriety through the bursts of operatic music, which interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music was good and the function sufficiently impressive, — what with the gloom of the temple everywhere starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to the mountain-top. The singing of the priests also was here much better than I had found it elsewhere in Venice.

The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable thing always in Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it was unusually evident. The rags of the beggar brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side by side on the marble floor; and on the night when God was born to poverty on earth, the rich seemed to feel that they drew nearer Him in the neighborhood of the poor. In these costly temples of the eldest Christianity, the poor seem to enter upon their inheritance of the future, for it is they who frequent them most and possess them with the deepest sense of ownership. The withered old woman, who creeps into St Mark’s with her scaldino in her hand, takes visible possession of its magnificence as God’s and hers, and Catholic wealth and rank would hardly, if challenged, dispute her claim.

Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, and those of our party who could credit themselves with no gain of masses against the morrow, received the benediction at San Mois� with peculiar unction. We all issued forth, and passing through the lines of young men who draw themselves up on either side of the doors of public places in Venice, to look at the young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place of St. Mark. The Piazza was more gloriously beautiful than ever I saw it before, and the church had a saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and snowed down the mellowest light on the gray domes, which in their soft, elusive outlines, and strange effect of far-withdrawal, rhymed like faint-heard refrains to the bright and vivid arches of the fa�ade. And if the bronze horses had been minded to quit their station before the great window over the central arch, they might have paced around the night’s whole half-world, and found no fairer resting-place.

As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to very little; every thing was closed, and whatever merry-making went on was all within doors. Although the shops and the places of amusement were opened the day following, the city entered very sparingly on the pleasures of Carnival, and Christmas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be remembered that on St. Stephen’s Day — the first of Carnival — one of the five annual banquets took place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the Republic. A certain number of patricians received invitations to the dinner, and those for whom there was no room were presented with fish and poultry by the Doge. The populace were admitted to look on during the first course, and then, having sated their appetites with this savory observance, were invited to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina Renier-Michiel of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended to the people by the State, but I cannot help thinking it must have been hard to bear. The banquet, however, has passed away with the Republic which gave it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian poverty now inhales on St. Stephen’s Day, is that which arises from its own proper pot of broth.

New Year’s is the carnival of the beggars in Venice. Their business is carried on briskly throughout the year, but on this day it is pursued with an unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise worthy of all disinterested admiration. At every corner, on every bridge, under every door-way, hideous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and advance good wishes and blessings to all who pass, It is an immemorial custom, and it is one in which all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The facchini in every square take up their collections; the gondoliers have their plates prepared for contribution at every ferry; at every caff� and restaurant begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted hand in your service in any way during the past year expects a reward on New Year’s for the complaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send to wish you a bel capo d’anno, with the same practical end in view. On New Year’s Eve and morning bands of facchini and gondoliers go about howling vivas under charitable windows till they open and drop alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of beggary, and held in overpowering numbers against all comers; and to traverse it is like a progress through a lazar-house.

Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I do not know that Venice celebrates New Year’s in a peculiar manner. It is a festa, and there are masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which consist chiefly of books — printed for the season, and brilliant outside and dull within, like all annuals.

CHAPTER XIX.

LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING; BAPTISMS AND BURIALS.

The Venetians have had a practical and strictly business-like way of arranging marriages from the earliest times. The shrewdest provision has always been made for the dower and for the good of the State; private and public interest being consulted, the small matters of affections have been left to the chances of association; and it does not seem that Venetian society has ever dealt severely with husbands or wives whom incompatibilities forced to seek consolation outside of matrimony. Herodotus relates that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at auction to the highest bidder; and the fair being thus comfortably placed in life, the hard-favored were given to whomsoever would take them, with such dower as might be considered a reasonable compensation. The auction was discontinued in Christian times, but marriage contracts still partook of the form of a public and half-mercantile transaction. At a comparatively late period Venetian fathers went with their daughters to a great annual matrimonial fair at San Pietro di Castello Olivolo, and the youth of the lagoons repaired thither to choose wives from the number of the maidens. These were all dressed in white, with hair loose about the neck, and each bore her dower in a little box, slung over her shoulder by a ribbon. It is to be supposed that there was commonly a previous understanding between each damsel and some youth in the crowd: as soon as all had paired off, the bishop gave them a sermon and his benediction, and the young men gathered up their brides and boxes, and went away wedded. It was on one of these occasions, in the year 944, that the Triestine pirates stole the Brides of Venice with their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle Marie, already described, and to Rogers’s poem, which every body pretends to have read.

This going to San Pietro’s, selecting a wife and marrying her on the spot, out of hand, could only have been the contrivance of a straightforward, practical race. Among the common people betrothals were managed with even greater ease and dispatch, till a very late day in history; and in the record of a certain trial which took place in 1443 there is an account of one of these brief and unceremonious courtships. Donna Catarussa, who gives evidence, and whom I take to have been a worthless, idle gossip, was one day sitting at her door, when Piero di Trento passed, selling brooms, and said to her, “Madonna, find me some nice girl.” To which Donna Catarussa replied, “Ugly fool! do you take me for a go-between?” “No,” said Piero, “not that; I mean a girl to be my wife.” And as Donna Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she said, “In faith of God, I know one for you. Come again to-morrow.” So they both met next day, and the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being asked, “Wouldst thou like to have Piero for thy husband, as God commands and holy Church?” she answered, “Yes.” And Peter being asked the like question, answered, “Why, yes, certainly.” And they went off and had the wedding feast. A number of these betrothals takes place in the last scene of Goldoni’s “Baruffe Chiozzotte,” where the belligerent women and their lovers take hands in the public streets, and saluting each other as man and wife, are affianced, and get married as quickly as possible: —

“Checa (to Tofolo). Take my hand.

“Tofolo. Wife!

“Checa. Husband!

“Tofolo. Hurra!”

The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were celebrated with as much pomp and ceremony as could possibly distinguish them from those of the people, and there was much more polite indifference to the inclinations of the parties immediately concerned. The contract was often concluded before the betrothed had seen each other, by means of a third person, when the amount of the dower was fixed. The bridegroom elect having verbally agreed with the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, where the match was published, and where he shook hands with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed for signing the contract the bride’s father invited to his house the bridegroom and all his friends, and hither came the high officers of state to compliment the future husband. He, with the father of his betrothed, met the guests at the door of the palace, and conducted them to the grand saloon, which no woman was allowed (si figuri!) at this time to enter. When the company was seated, the bride, clad in white, was led from her rooms and presented. She wore a crown of pearls and brilliants on her head, and her hair, mixed with long threads of gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as you may see it in Carpaccio’s pictures of the Espousals of St. Ursula. Her ear-rings were pendants of three pearls set in gold; her neck and throat were bare but for a collar of lace and gems, from which slid a fine jeweled chain into her bosom. Over her breast she wore a stomacher of cloth of gold, to which were attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to the hand. The formal words of espousal being pronounced, the bride paced slowly round the hall to the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a gentle inclination to each of the guests; and then returned to her chamber, from which she issued again on the arrival of any tardy friend, and repeated the ceremony. After all this, she descended to the courtyard, where she was received by gentlewomen, her friends, and placed on a raised seat (which was covered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus, followed by a fleet of attendant gondolas, went to visit all the convents in which there were kinspeople of herself or her betrothed. The excessive publicity of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the validity of the marriage contract. At an early day after the espousals the betrothed, preceded by musicians and followed by relatives and friends, went at dawn to be married in the church, — the bridegroom wearing a toga, and the bride a dress of white silk or crimson velvet, with jewels in her hair, and pearls embroidered on her robes. Visits of congratulation followed, and on the same day a public feast was given in honor of the wedding, to which at least three hundred persons were always invited, and at which the number, quality, and cost of the dishes were carefully regulated by the Republic’s laws. On this occasion, one or more persons were chosen as governors of the feast, and after the tables were removed, a mock-heroic character appeared, and recounted with absurd exaggeration the deeds of the ancestors of the bride and groom. The next morning ristorativi of sweetmeats and confectionery were presented to the happy couple, by whom the presents were returned in kind.

A splendor so exceptional, even in the most splendid age of the most splendid city, as that which marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy Jacopo Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. He espoused Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Contarini, a noble as rich and magnificent as Jacopo’s own father, the Doge; and, on the 29th of January 1441, the noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord of the feasts, the bridegroom, the bride’s brother and eighteen other patrician youths, assembled in the Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback to conduct Lucrezia to the Ducal Palace. They were all sumptuously dressed in crimson velvet and silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers superbly caparisoned. Other noble friends attended them; musicians went before; a troop of soldiers brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, and then, returning, traversed the Piazza, and threading the devious little streets to the Campo San Samuele, there crossed the Grand Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San Barnaba opposite, where the Contarini lived. On their arrival at this place the bride, supported by two Procuratori di San Marco, and attended by sixty ladies, descended to the church and heard mass, after which an oration was delivered in Campo San Barnaba before the Doge, the ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles and people, in praise of the spouses and their families. The bride then returned to her father’s house, and jousts took place in the campos of Santa Maria Formosa and San Polo (the largest in the city), and in the Piazza San Marco. The Doge gave a great banquet, and at its close one hundred and fifty ladies proceeded to the bride’s palace in the Bucintoro, where one hundred other ladies joined them, together with Lucrezia, who, seated between Francesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic’s armies) and the Florentine ambassador, was conducted, amid the shouts of the people and the sound of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge received her at the riva of the Piazzetta, and, with Sforza and Balbi led her to the foot of the palace stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty ladies, welcomed her. A state supper ended this day’s rejoicings, and on the following day a tournament took place in the Piazza, for a prize of cloth of gold, which was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the next day there were processions of boats with music on the Grand Canal; on the fourth and last day there were other jousts for prizes offered by the jewelers and Florentine merchants; and every night there were dancing and feasting in the Ducal Palace. The Doge was himself the giver of the last tournament, and with this the festivities came to an end.

I have read an account by an old-fashioned English traveler of a Venetian marriage which he saw, sixty or seventy years ago, at the church of San Giorgio Maggiore: “After a crowd of nobles,” he says, “in their usual black robes, had been some time in attendance, the gondolas appearing, exhibited a fine show, though all of them were painted of a sable hue, in consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very necessary in this place, to prevent an expense which many who could not bear it would incur; nevertheless the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in handsome liveries; the gondolas followed one another in a line, each carrying two ladies, who were likewise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to the great altar. At length the bride, arrayed in white as the symbol of innocence, led by the bridesman, ascended the stairs of the landing-place. There she received the compliments of the bridegroom, in his black toga, who walked at her right hand to the altar, where they and all the company kneeled. I was often afraid the poor young creature would have sunk upon the ground before she arrived, for she trembled with great agitation, while she made her low courtesies from side to side: however, the ceremony was no sooner performed than she seemed to recover her spirits, and looked matrimony in the face with a determined smile. Indeed, in all appearance she had nothing to fear from her husband, whose age and aspect were not at all formidable; accordingly she tripped back to the gondola with great activity and resolution, and the procession ended as it began. Though there was something attractive in this aquatic parade, the black hue of the boats and the company presented to a stranger, like me, the idea of a funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation was raised too high by the previous description of the Italians, who are much given to hyperbole, who gave me to understand that this procession would far exceed any thing I had ever seen. When I reflect upon this rhodomontade,” disdainfully adds Mr. Drummond, “I cannot help comparing, in my memory, the paltry procession of the Venetian marriage with a very august occurrence of which I was eyewitness in Sweden,” and which being the reception of their Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am sure the reader will not ask me to quote. With change of government, changes of civilization following the revolutions, and the decay of wealth among the Venetian nobles, almost all their splendid customs have passed away, and the habit of making wedding presents of sweetmeats and confectionery is perhaps the only relic which has descended from the picturesque past to the present time. These gifts are still exchanged not only by nobles, but by all commoners according to their means, and are sometimes a source of very profuse outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in the elegant and costly paper caskets which the confectioners sell, and the sum of a thousand florins scarcely suffices to pass the courtesy round a moderately large circle of friends.

With the nobility and with the richest commoners marriage is still greatly a matter of contract, and is arranged without much reference to the principals, though it is now scarcely probable in any case that they have not seen each other. But with all other classes, except the poorest, who cannot and do not seclude the youth of either sex from each other, and with whom, consequently, romantic contrivance and subterfuge would be superfluous, love is made to-day in Venice as in the capa y espada comedies of the Spaniards, and the business is carried on with all the cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and stolen interviews.

Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and Todaro, and attend them in their solemn promenade under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the air and to look at the ladies, while the Austrians and the other foreigners listen to the military music in the Piazza. They are both young, our friends; they have both glossy silk hats; they have both light canes and an innocent swagger. Inconceivably mild are these youth, and in their talk indescribably small and commonplace.

They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels the consuming ardors of love.

Todaro (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this beautiful blonde here! Beautiful as an angel! But what loveliness!

Marco. But where?

Todaro. It is enough. Let us go. I follow her.

Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. They follow that beautiful blonde, who, marching demurely in front of the gray-moustached papa and the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is electrically conscious of pursuit. They follow her during the whole evening, and, at a distance, softly follow her home, where the burning Todaro photographs the number of the house upon the sensitized tablets of his soul.

This is the first great step in love: he has seen his adored one, and he knows that he loves her with an inextinguishable ardor. The next advance is to be decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and is to be debated over many cups of black coffee, not to name glasses of sugar-and-water and the like exciting beverages. The friends may now find out the caff� which the Biondina frequents with her parents, and to which Todaro may go every evening and feast his eyes upon her loveliness, never making his regard known by any word, till some night, when he has followed her home, he steals speech with her as he stands in the street under her balcony, — and looks sufficiently sheepish as people detect him on their late return from the theatre. [Footnote: The love-making scenes in Goldoni’s comedy of Il Bugiarda are photographically faithful to present usage in Venice.] Or, if the friends do not take this course in their courtship (for they are both engaged in the wooing), they decide that Todaro, after walking back and forth a sufficient number of times in the street where the Biondina lives, shall write her a tender letter, to demand if she be disposed to correspond his love. This billet must always be conveyed to her by her serving-maid, who must be bribed by Marco for the purpose. At every juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted with every step of progress; and no doubt the Biondina has some lively Moretta for her friend, to whom she confides her part of the love-affair in all its intricacy.

It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see the Biondina in church, whither, but for her presence, he would hardly go, and that there, though he may not have speech with her, he shall still fan the ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. It must be confessed that if the Biondina is not pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the character of an intolerable bore to her; and that to see him everywhere at her heels — to behold him leaning against the pillar near which she kneels at church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation — to be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him in promenade, or, turning round at the caff� encounter his pleading gaze — that all this must drive the Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and finger-nails. Ma, come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza! This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaintance between young people is extremely difficult; and so this blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondina’s inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained.

Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved? Then Todaro has just and proper inquiries to make concerning her dower, and if her fortune is as pleasing as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of her father, and after that to make her acquaintance.

One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a little English, came to me with a joyous air and said:

“I am in lofe.”

The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind from the same person, I listened with tempered effusion.

“It is a blonde again?”

“Yes, you have right; blonde again.”

“And pretty?”

“Oh, but beautiful. I lofe her — come si dice! — immensamente.” “And where did you see her? Where did you make her acquaintance?”

“I have not make the acquaintance. I see her pass with his fazer every night on Rialto Bridge We did not spoke yet — only with the eyes. The lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. It is not much — no. But!”

Is not this love at first sight almost idyllic? Is it not also a sublime prudence to know the lady’s fortune better than herself, before herself? These passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main chance before they leap into matrimony, and you may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, what the Biondina has to her fortune before he weds her. After that may come the marriage, and the sonnet written by the next of friendship, and printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, celebrating the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can write nobile after his Christian name, perhaps some abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and alive to grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly printed by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send it to all the bridegroom’s friends. It is not the only event which the facile Venetian Muse shall sing for him. If his child is brought happily through the measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall celebrate the fact. If he takes any public honor or scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses; and when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. Indeed, almost every occurrence — a boy’s success at school, an advocate’s triumphal passage of the perils of examination at Padua, a priest’s first mass, a nun’s novitiate, a birth, an amputation — is the subject of tuneful effusion, and no less the occasion of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring campo, who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of voices around the victim’s door, and proclaim his skill or good fortune, and break into vivas that never end till he bribes their enthusiasm into silence. The na�ve commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic methods of courtship threw about them, was a source of endless amusement, as it stole out in different ways. “You know my friend Marco?” asked an acquaintance one day. “Well, we are looking out a wife for him. He doesn’t want to marry, but his father insists; and he has begged us to find somebody. There are three of us on the look-out. But he hates women, and is very hard to suit. Ben! Ci vuol pazienza!”

It rarely happens now that the religious part of the marriage ceremony is not performed in church, though it may be performed at the house of the bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the evening, and the spouses attend five o’clock mass next morning. But if the marriage takes place at church, it must be between five and eleven in the morning, and the blessing is commonly pronounced about six o’clock. Civil marriage is still unknown among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, and which exacts from the candidates a preliminary visit to their parish priest, for examination in their catechism, and for instruction in religion when they are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no longer any civil publication of the betrothals, and the hand-shaking in the court of the Ducal Palace has long been disused. I cannot help thinking that the ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, in the Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must have fared nearly as hard as a President elect in our times at home.

There was a curious display on occasion of births among the nobility in former times. The room of the young mother was decorated with a profusion of paintings, sculpture, and jewelry; and, while yet in bed, she received the congratulations of her friends, and regaled them with sweetmeats served in vases of gold and silver.

The child of noble parents had always at least two godfathers, and sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty; but in order that the relationship of godfather (which is the same according to the canonical law as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desirable matrimony between nobles, no patrician was allowed to be godfather to another’s child. Consequently the compare was usually a client of the noble parent, and was not expected to make any present to the godchild, whose father, on the day following the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane, in acknowledgment of their relationship. No women were present at the baptism except those who had charge of the babe. After the fall of the Republic the French custom of baptism in the parents’ house was introduced, as well as the custom, on the godfather’s part, of giving a present, — usually of sugarplums and silver toys. But I think that most baptisms still take place in church, if I may judge from the numbers of tight little glass cases I have noticed, — half bed and half coffin, — containing little eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in mummy-like bandages, and borne to and from the churches by mysterious old women. The ceremony of baptism itself does not apparently differ from that in other Catholic countries, and is performed, like all religious services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or solemnity of any kind.

For many centuries funeral services in Venice have been conducted by the Scuole del Sacramento, instituted for that purpose. To one of these societies the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the expenses of the ceremony, the dignity of which is regulated by the priest of the parish in which the deceased lived. The rite is now most generally undertaken by the Scuola di San Rocco. The funeral train is of ten or twenty facchini, wearing tunics of white, with caps and capes of red, and bearing the society’s long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and then comes the bier, — with a gilt crown lying on the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners attended, and a candle, weighing a pound, was given to any one who chose to carry it in the procession.

Anciently there was great show of mourning in Venice for the dead, when, according to Mutinelli, the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having seen his body deposited in the church, “fell to weeping and howling, tore their hair and rent their clothes, and withdrew forever from that church, thenceforth become for them a place of abomination.” Decenter customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pathetic dignity in the ceremony of condolence among patricians: the mourners, on the day following the interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, one after one, and expressed their sympathy by a mute pressure of the hand.

Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible in modern Venice. The corpse is hurried from the house of mourning to the parish church, where the friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. Then it is placed in a boat and carried to the burial-ground, where it is quickly interred. I was fortunate, therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral at which I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There was a church on this island as early as the tenth century, and in the thirteenth century it fell into the possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They built a monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of learning, and gave much erudite scholarship to the world. In later times Pope Gregory XVI. carried his profound learning from San Michele to the Vatican. The present church is in the Renaissance style, but not very offensively so, and has some indifferent paintings. The arcades and the courts around which it is built contain funeral monuments as unutterably ugly and tasteless as any thing of the kind I ever saw at home; but the dead, for the most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron crosses in the narrow and roofless space walled in from the lagoon, which laps sluggishly at the foot of the masonry with the impulses of the tide. The old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there is now a convent of Reformed Benedictines on the island, who perform the last service for the dead.

On the day of which I speak, I was taking a friend to see the objects of interest at San Michele, which I had seen before, and the funeral procession touched at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The procession was of one gondola only, and the pallbearers were four pleasant ruffians in scarlet robes of cotton, hooded, and girdled at the waist. They were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly countenance, two grinning boys, and finally the corpse itself, severely habited in an under-dress of black box, but wearing an outer garment of red velvet, bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant ruffians (who all wore smoking-caps with some other name) placed this holiday corpse upon a bier, and after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which the compliments of the day were passed in the usual terms of Venetian chaff, lifted the bier on shore and set it down. The priest followed with the two boys, whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping over the Latin of a prayer, with his eyes fixed on our harmless little party as if we were a funeral, and the dead in the black box an indifferent spectator Then he popped down upon his knees, and made us a lively little supplication, while a blind beggar scuffled for a lost soldo about his feet, and the gondoliers quarreled volubly. After which, he threw off his surplice with the air of one who should say his day’s work was done, and preceded the coffin into the church.

We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in the centre of the nave, when two pale young friars appeared, throwing off their hooded cloaks of coarse brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing in their rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a lighted taper in his right hand and a book in his left; the other had also a taper, but a pot of holy water instead of the book.

They are very handsome young men, these monks, with heavy, sad eyes, and graceful, slender figures, which their monastic life will presently overload with gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go and stand beside the bier, giving a curious touch of solemnity to a scene composed of the four pleasant ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have learned as facchini waiting for jobs; of the two boys with inattentive grins, and of the priest with wandering eyes, kneeling behind them.

A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its damp loft: the monk hurries rapidly over the Latin text of the service, while

   “His breath to heaven like vapor goes”

on the chilly, humid air; and the other monk makes the responses, giving and taking the sprinkler, which his chief shakes vaguely in the direction of the coffin. They both bow their heads — shaven down to the temples, to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. The organ is still, the priest has vanished; the tapers are blown out; the pall-bearers lay hold of the bier, and raise it to their shoulders; the boys slouch into procession behind them; the monks glide softly and dispiritedly away. The soul is prepared for eternal life, and the body for the grave.

The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the open air again. They laugh, they call “Ci�!” [Footnote: Literally, That in Italian, and meaning in Venetian, You! Heigh! To talk in Ci� ciappa is to assume insolent familiarity or unbounded good fellowship with the person addressed. A Venetian says Ci� a thousand times in a day, and hails every one but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian pronoun, but rather a contraction of Veccio (vecchio), Old fellow! It is common with all classes of the people: parents use it in speaking to their children, and brothers and sisters call one mother Ci�. It is a salutation between friends, who cry out, Ci�! as they pass in the street. Acquaintances, men who meet after separation, rush together with “Ah Ci�!” Then they kiss on the right cheek “Ci�!” on the left, “Ci�!” on the lips, “Ci�! Bon di Ci�!”] continually, and banter each other as they trot to the grave.

The boys follow them, gamboling among the little iron crosses, and trying if here and there one of them may not be overthrown.

We two strangers follow the boys.

But here the pall-bearers become puzzled: on the right is an open trench, on the left is an open trench.

“Presence of the Devil! To which grave does this dead belong?” They discuss, they dispute, they quarrel.

From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the sea, appears the grave digger, with his shovel on his shoulder — slouching toward us.

“Ah heigh! Ci�, the grave-digger! Where does this dead belong?”

“Body of Bacchus, what potatoes! Here, in this trench to the right.”

They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip away the coffin’s gay upper garment; they leave but the under-dress of black box, painted to that favor with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger’s arms, where he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, rich with bones. He lets it slide swiftly to the ground — thump! Ecco fatto!

The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance merrily away with it to the riva-gate, feigning a little play after the manner of children,— “Oh, what a beautiful dead!”

The eldest of the pleasant ruffians is all the pleasanter for sciampagnin, and can hardly be persuaded to go out at the right gate.

We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with mother spectator — Venetian, this. “Who is the dead man, signore?”

“It is a woman, poor little thing! Dead in child-bed. The baby is in there with her.”

It has been a cheerful funeral, and yet we are not in great spirits as we go back to the city.

For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is a joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo fa�ade of the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with despondency and foreboding.

CHAPTER XX.

VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS.

On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, the gondoliers show you a house, by no means notable (except for the noble statue of a knight, occupying a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. It was once the palace of the patrician family Moro, a name well known in the annals of the Republic, and one which, it has been suggested, misled Shakespeare into the invention of a Moor of Venice. Whether this is possibly the fact, or whether there is any tradition of a tragic incident in the history of the Moro family similar to that upon which the play is founded, I do not know; but it is certain that the story of Othello, very nearly as Shakespeare tells it, is popularly known in Venice; and the gondoliers have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as the edifice best calculated to give satisfaction to strangers in search of the True and the Memorable. The statue is happily darkened by time, and thus serves admirably to represent Othello’s complexion, and to place beyond the shadow of a doubt the fact of his residence in the house. Indeed, what can you say to the gondolier, who, in answer to your cavils, points to the knight, with the convincing argument, “There is his statue!”

One day I was taken to see this house, in company with some friends, and when it had been victoriously pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly, “Who was Othello?”

“Othello, Signori,” answered the gondolier, “was a general of the Republic, in the old times. He was an African, and black; but nevertheless the State valued him, and he beat the Turks in many battles. Well, Signori, this general Othello had a very young and beautiful wife, and his wife’s cousin (sic!), Cassio was his major-domo, or, as some say, his lieutenant. But after a while happens along (capita) another soldier of Othello, who wants Cassio’s employment, and so accuses him to the general of corrupting his wife. Very well, Signori! Without thinking an instant, Othello, being made so, flew into a passion (si riscald� l� t�sta), and killed his wife; and then when her innocence came out, he killed himself and that liar; and the State confiscated his goods, he being a very rich man. There has been a tragedy written about all this, you know.”

“But how is it called? Who wrote it?”

“Oh! in regard to that, then, I don’t know. Some Englishman.”

“Shakespeare?”

“I don’t know, Signori. But if you doubt what I tell you, go to any bookseller, and say, ‘Favor me with the tragedy of “Othello.”’ He will give it you, and there you will find it all written out just as I tell it.”

This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his story, by showing us the house of Cassio near the Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would also have pointed out that of Iago if we had wished it.

But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers is not rich nor very great. They are a loquacious and a gossiping race, but they love better to have a quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly at the ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand Canal, than to tell stories. In all history that relates to localities they are sufficiently versed to find the notable places for strangers, but beyond this they trouble themselves as little with the past as with the future. Three tragic legends, however, they know, and will tell with the most amusing effect, namely: Biasio, luganegher; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and Veneranda Porta.

The first of these legends is that of a sausage-maker who flourished in Venice some centuries ago, and who improved the quality of the broth which the luganegheri make of their scraps and sell to the gondoliers, by cutting up into it now and then a child of some neighbor. He was finally detected by a gondolier who discovered a little finger in his broth, and being brought to justice, was dragged through the city at the heels of a wild horse. This most uncomfortable character appears to be the first hero in the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly deserves to rank with that long line of imaginary personages who have made childhood so wretched and tractable. The second is the Innocent Baker-Boy already named, who was put to death on suspicion of having murdered a noble, because in the dead man’s heart was found a dagger fitting a sheath which the baker had picked up in the street, on the morning of the murder, and kept in his possession. Many years afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua confessed the murder, and thereupon two lamps were lighted before a shrine in the southern fa�ade of St. Mark’s Church, — one for the murdered nobleman’s soul, and the other for that of the innocent boy. Such is the gondoliers’ story, and the lamps still burn every night before the shrine from dark till dawn, in witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and its guiltless expiation is an incident of Venetian history, and it is said that the Council of the Ten never pronounced a sentence of death thereafter, till they had been solemnly warned by one of their number with “Ricordatevi del povero Fornaretto!” (Remember the poor Baker-Boy!) The poet Dall ‘Ongaro has woven the story into a beautiful and touching tragedy; but I believe the poet is still to be born who shall take from the gondoliers their Veneranda Porta, and place her historic figure in dramatic literature. Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the Republic, between whom and her husband existed an incompatibility. This was increased by the course of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at last led to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. The head of the murdered man was found in one of the canals, and being exposed, as the old custom was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St. Mark’s Church, it was recognized by his brother who found among the papers on which the long hair was curled fragments of a letter he had written to the deceased. The crime was traced to the paramours, and being brought before the Ten, they were both condemned to be hanged between the columns of the Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when the sentence was pronounced, Veneranda said to the Chief of the Ten, “But as for me this sentence will never be carried out. You cannot hang a woman. Consider the impropriety!” The Venetian rulers were wise men in their generation, and far from being balked by this question of delicacy, the Chief replied, solving it, “My dear, you shall be hanged in my breeches.”

It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these stories; another is remembered because it concerns one of the people; and another for its abomination and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which take the fancy and touch the sensibility of the world seem hardly known to the gondoliers, the most intelligent and quick-witted of the populace, and themselves the very stuff that some romantic dreams of Venice are made of. However sad the fact, it is undeniable that the stories of the sausage-maker whose broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy who suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the expense of the murderess, interest these people more than the high-well-born sorrows of the Foscari, the tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of Falier, — which last they know partly, however, because of the scandal about Falier’s wife. Yet after all, though the gondoliers are not the gondoliers of imaginative literature, they have qualities which recommended them to my liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance with two or three of them in a very friendly spirit. Compared with the truculent hackmen, who prey upon the traveling public in all other cities of the civilized world, they are eminently intelligent and amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small dishonesties are the breath in the nostrils of common carriers by land or water, everywhere; but the trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured and simple that it can hardly offend. A very ordinary jocular sagacity defeats their profoundest purposes of swindling, and no one enjoys their exposure half so much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future employment purifies them of every trait of dishonesty. I had only one troublesome experience with them, and that was in the case of the old gondolier who taught me to row. He, when I had no longer need of his services, plunged into drunkenness, and came and dismissed me one day with every mark of ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, and saluted me kindly when we met.

The immediate goal of every gondolier’s ambition is to serve, no matter for how short a time, an Inglese, by which generic title nearly all foreigners except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, whether he be English or American, is apt to make the tour of the whole city in a gondola, and to give handsome drink money at the end, whereas your Tedesco frugally walks to every place accessible by land, or when, in a party of six or eight, he takes a gondola, plants himself upon the letter of the tariff, and will give no more than the rate fixed by law. The gondolier is therefore flowingly polite to the Inglese, and he is even civil to the Tedesco; but he is not at all bound in courtesy to that provincial Italian who comes from the country to Venice, bargains furiously for his boat, and commonly pays under the tariff. The Venetian who does not himself keep a gondola seldom hires one, and even on this rare occasion makes no lavish demand such as “How much do you want for taking me to the rail-way station?” Lest the fervid imagination of the gondolier rise to zwanzigers and florins, and a tedious dispute ensue, he asks: “How many centissimi do you want?” and the contract is made, for a number of soldi.

The number of private gondolas owned in Venice is not very great. The custom is rather to hire a gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of the gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his services as a domestic when off his special duty. He waits at table, goes marketing, takes the children to school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the gondola about a franc daily for the boat. In former times, when Venice was rich and prosperous, many noble families kept six or seven gondolas; and what with this service, and the numerous gala-days of the Republic, when the whole city took boat for the Lido, or the Giudecca, or Murano, and the gondoliers were allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a numerous and prosperous class. But these times have passed from Venice forever, and though the gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of the Giudecca and Lido, some thousands in number, there are comparatively few young men among them, and their gains are meagre.

In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken at Canareggio or Castello is a different tongue from that heard under the Procuratie of St. Mark’s Place, the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of course vary greatly in character and appearance; and the gondolier who lounges at the base of the columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites the Inglesi to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different type from the weather-beaten barcaiuolo, who croaks “Barca!” at the promenaders on the Zattere. But all, as I say, are simple and harmless enough, and however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they never pass from the defamation of their female relatives to blows. As for the game of knives, as it is said to be played at Naples, and as About describes it at Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the populace of Venice. Only the doctors let blood there — though from their lancets it flows pretty freely and constantly.

It is true that the gondolier loves best of everything a clamorous quarrel, carried on with the canal between him and his antagonist; but next to this, he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking of eating and of money, and he does not differ from many of his fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I have seldom caught a casual expression from passers in the streets of Venice which did not relate in some way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, or else to wine and polenta. I note this trait in the Venetians, which Goldoni observed in the Milanese a hundred years ago, and which I incline to believe is common to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great deal in figure and hyperbole, and their jocose chaff is quite inscrutable even to some classes of Venetians. With foreigners, to whom the silence and easy progress of the gondola gives them the opportunity to talk, they are fond of using a word or two of French. They are quick at repartee, and have a clever answer ready for most occasions. I was one day bargaining for a boat to the Lido, whither I refused to be taken in a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher than seventy-five soldi for the trip. At last the patience of the gondoliers was exhausted, and one of them called out, “Somebody fetch the Bucintoro, and take this gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi!” (The Bucintoro being the magnificent barge in which the Doge went to wed the Adriatic.)

The skill with which the gondoliers manage their graceful craft is always admired by strangers, and is certainly remarkable. The gondola is very long and slender, and rises high from the water at either end. Both bow and stern are sharp, the former being ornamented with that deeply serrated blade of steel, which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep bright is silver, and the poop having a small platform, not far behind the cabin, on which he stands when he rows. The danger of collision has always obliged Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke with the oar (for the gondolier uses only a single oar) is made by pushing, and not by pulling. No small degree of art (as I learnt from experience) is thus required to keep the gondola’s head straight, — all the strokes being made on one side, — and the sculling return of the oar-blade, preparatory for each new stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under the hands of the gondolier, however, the gondola seems a living thing, full of grace and winning movement. The wood-work of the little cabin is elaborately carved, and it is usually furnished with mirrors and seats luxuriously cushioned. The sensation of the gondola’s progress, felt by the occupant of the cabin, as he falls back upon these cushions, may be described, to the female apprehension at least, as “too divine.” The cabin is removable at pleasure, and is generally taken off and replaced by awnings in summer. But in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out in their gondolas to take the air, even this awning is dispensed with, and the long slender boat glides darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing its dazzling freight of white tulle, pale-faced, black-eyed beauty, and flashing jewels, in full view.

As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the only class of Venetians who have not good voices, and I am scarcely inclined to regret the silence which long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with the peculiar note of warning which they utter as they approach the corner of a canal, and which meaning simply, “To the Right,” or “To the Left,” is the most pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. If, putting aside my own comfort, I have sometimes wished for the sake of a dear, sentimental old friend at home, who loves such idle illusions with an ardor unbecoming his years, that I might hear the voice

   “of Adria’s gondolier,

   By distance mellowed, o’er the waters sweep,”

I must still confess that I never did hear it under similar circumstances, except in conversation across half a mile of lagoon, when, as usual, the burden of the lay was polenta or soldi.

A recent Venetian writer, describing the character of the lower classes of Venice, says: “No one can deny that our populace is loquacious and quickwitted; but, on the other hand, no one can deny that it is regardless of improvement. Venice, a city exceptional in its construction, its customs, and its habits, has also an exceptional populace. It still feels, although sixty-eight years have passed, the influence of the system of the fallen Republic, of that oligarchic government, which, affording almost every day some amusement to the people, left them no time to think of their offended rights.... Since 1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of the living, — squalor and beggary gaining ground with each day, and commerce, with few exceptions, converted into monopoly; yet the populace remains attached to its old habits, and will have its pleasure. If the earnings are little, what then? Must one die of ennui? The caff� is depopulated: not so the drinking-house. The last day before the drawing of the lottery, the offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of families, who stint their children of bread to buy dearly a few hours of golden illusion.... At the worst, there is the Monte di Piet�, as a last resort.”

It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure-loving populace still looks back fondly to the old Republican times of feasting and holidays; but there is certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any part of Italy is a place where people may be “idle with impunity,” or make amusement the serious business of life. I can remember that the book from which I received my first impressions of geography was illuminated with a picture professing to represent Italian customs. The spirit of inquiry had long before caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this representation; but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture was utterly delusive. It has been no part of my experience in Venice to see an Italian sitting upon the ground, and strumming the guitar, while two gayly dressed peasants danced to the music. Indeed, the indolence of Venetians is listless and silent, not playful or joyous; and as I learned to know their life more intimately, I came to understand that in many cases they are idle from despair of finding work, and that indolence is as much their fate as their fault. Any diligence of theirs is surprising to us of northern and free lands, because their climate subdues and enervates us, and because we can see before them no career open to intelligent industry. With the poorest, work is necessarily a hand-to-hand struggle against hunger; with those who would not absolutely starve without it, work is an inexplicable passion.

Partly because the ways of these people are so childlike and simple in many things, and partly from one’s own swindling tendency to take one’s self in (a tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples as have felt the baleful effects of the world’s sentimental, impotent sympathy), there is something pathetic in the patient content with which Italians work. They have naturally so large a capacity for enjoyment, that the degree of selfdenial involved in labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these children, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are harshly dealt with by their stepmother Circumstance. No doubt there ought to be truth in the silly old picture, if there is none, and I would willingly make-believe to credit it, if I could. I am glad that they at least work in old-world, awkward, picturesque ways, and not in commonplace, handy, modern fashion. Neither the habits nor the implements of labor are changed since the progress of the Republic ceased, and her heart began to die within her. All sorts of mechanics’ tools are clumsy and inconvenient: the turner’s lathe moves by broken impulses; door-hinges are made to order, and lift the door from the ground as it opens upon them; all nails and tacks we hand-made; window-sashes are contrived to be glazed without putty, and the panes are put in from the top, so that to repair a broken glass the whole sash is taken apart; cooking-stoves are unknown to the native cooks, who work at an open fire, with crane and dangling pot-hooks; furniture is put together with wooden pegs instead of screws; you do not buy a door-lock at a hardware store, — you get a fabbro to make it, and he comes with a leathern satchel full of tools to fit and finish it on the door. The wheelbarrow of this civilization is peculiarly wonderful in construction, with a prodigious wooden wheel, and a ponderous, incapable body. The canals are dredged with scoops mounted on long poles, and manned each by three or four Chiozzotti. There never was a pile-driving machine known in Venice; nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons, through which the largest craft are towed to and from the ports by row-boats. In the model of the sea-going vessels there has apparently been little change from the first. Yet in spite of all this backwardness in invention, the city is full of beautiful workmanship in every branch of artificing, and the Venetians are still the best sailors in the Adriatic.

I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statistics, but it seems to me that the most active branch of industry in Venice is plucking fowls. In summer the people all work on their thresholds, and in their windows, and as nearly out of doors as the narrowness of the streets will let them, — and it is hard to pass through any part of the city without coming to a poulterer’s shop, in the door of which inevitably sits a boy, tugging at the plumage of some wretched bird. He is seldom to be seen except in that crisis of plucking when he seems to have all but finished; yet he seems never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Perhaps it is part of his hard fate that the feathers shall grow again under his hand as fast as he plucks them away: at the restaurants, I know, the quantity of plumage one devours in consuming roast chicken is surprising — at first. The birds are always very lean, too, and have but a languid and weary look, in spite of the ardent manner in which the boy clasps them while at work. It may be that the Venetians do not like fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, are of that emaciation which is attributed among ourselves only to the turkey of Job; and as for the geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists. It is as if the long ages of incursion and oppression which have impoverished and devastated Italy had at last taken effect upon the poultry, and made it as poor as the population.

I do not want to give too exclusive an impression of Venetian industry, however, for now I remember the Venetian lasagnoni, whom I never saw doing any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable numbers.

The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a loafer, without the admixture of ruffianism, which blemishes most loafers of northern race. He may be quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot be a rowdy, — that pleasing blossom on the nose of our fast, high-fed, thick-blooded civilization. In Venice he must not be confounded with other loiterers at the caff�; not with the natty people who talk politics interminably over little cups of black coffee; not with those old habitu�s, who sit forever under the Procuratie, their hands folded upon the tops of their sticks, and staring at the ladies who pass with a curious steadfastness and knowing skepticism of gaze, not pleasing in the dim eyes of age; certainly, the last persons who bear any likeness to the lasagnone are the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces comically anglicized by leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, the lasagnone does not flourish in the best caff�; he comes to perfection in cheaper resorts, for he is commonly not rich. It often happens that a glass of water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over which he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter intimately, and does not call him “Shop!” (Bottega,) as less familiar people do, but Gigi, or Beppi, as the waiter is pretty sure to be named. “Behold!” he says, when the servant places his modest drink before him, “who is that loveliest blonde there?” Or to his fellow-lasagnone: “She regards me! I have broken her the heart!” This is his sole business and mission, the cruel lasagnone — to break ladies the heart. He spares no condition, — neither rank nor wealth is any defense against him. I often wonder what is in that note he continually shows to his friend. The confession of some broken heart, I think. When he has folded it, and put it away, he chuckles “Ah, cara!” and sucks at his long, slender Virginia cigar. It is unlighted, for fire consumes cigars. I never see him read the papers, — neither the Italian papers nor the Parisian journals, though if he can get “Galignani” he is glad, and he likes to pretend to a knowledge of English, uttering upon occasion, with great relish, such distinctively English words as “Yes” and “Not,” and to the waiter, “A-little-fire-if-you-please.” He sits very late in the caff�, and he touches his hat — his curly French hat — to the company as he goes out with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left hand, his coat cut snugly to show his hips, and genteelly swaying with the motion of his body. He is a dandy, of course, — all Italians are dandies, — but his vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not bad. He would go half an hour out of his way to put you in the direction of the Piazza. A little thing can make him happy, — to stand in the pit at the opera, and gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes — to attend the Marionette, or the Malibran Theatre, and imperil the peace of pretty seamstresses and contadinas — to stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodging in some mysterious height, and break hearts if thou wilt. They are quickly mended.

Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, I think I must select a certain ruffian who deals in dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of what a vagabond should be in all respects. He stands habitually under the Old Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies in that snuffling and quivering state which appears to be the favorite condition of very young dogs, and occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent dealer in grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastidiously engages in trimming the hair upon the closely shaven bodies of the dogs; for in Venice it is the ambition of every dog to look as much like the Lion of St. Mark as the nature of the case will permit. My vagabond at times makes expeditions to the groups of travelers always seated in summer before the Caff� Florian, appearing at such times with a very small puppy, — neatly poised upon the palm of his hand, and winking pensively, — which he advertises to the company as a “Beautiful Beast,” or a “Lovely Babe,” according to the inspiration of his light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term is used generally as a means of ingratiation with the ladies, to whom my vagabond always shows a demeanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him sell any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by his failure to do so. His air is grave, but not severe; there is even, at times, a certain playfulness in his manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin. His curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket and pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard is cut in the French-imperial mode. His personal presence is unwholesome, and it is chiefly his moral perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating. One is so confident, however, of his fitness for his position and business, and of his entire contentment with it, that it is impossible not to exult in him.

He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would be hard to find any Venetian of any vocation, however base, who forgets that he too is a man and a brother. There is enough servility in the language, — it is the fashion of the Italian tongue, with its Tu for inferiors, Voi for intimates and friendly equals, and Lei for superiors, — but in the manner there is none, and there is a sense of equality in the ordinary intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to foreigners.

All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression seems not to exist among them, and the very boys and dogs in Venice are so well-behaved, that I have never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. Of course, it is of the street-boy — the biricchino, the boy in his natural, unreclaimed state — that I speak. This state is here, in winter, marked by a clouded countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled shoes open at the heels; in summer by a preternatural purity of person, by abandon to the amphibious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the canals, and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried minnows, and water-melons.

When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a great many of them do, out of a spirit of adventure and wish to pass the time, he carries out the enterprise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to approach Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, and, with the other extended, implore a soldo to buy cheese to eat with the polenta. The street-boys also often perform the duties of the gransieri, who draw your gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. To this order of beggar I usually gave; but one day at the railway station I had no soldi, and as I did not wish to render my friend discontented with future alms by giving silver, I deliberately apologized, praying him to excuse me, and promising him for another time. I cannot forget the lofty courtesy with which he returned,— “S’accomodi pur, Signor!” They have sometimes a sense of humor, these poor swindlers, and can enjoy the exposure of their own enormities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to land one evening when we went too late to see the church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The sacristan made us free of a perfectly dark church, and we rewarded him as if it had been noonday. On our return to the gondola, the same beggar whom we had just feed held out his hat for another alms. “But we have just paid you,” we cried in an agony of grief and desperation. “S�, signori!” he admitted with an air of argument, “� vero. Ma, la chiesa!” (Yes, gentlemen, it is true. But the church!) he added with confidential insinuation, and a patronizing wave of the hand toward the edifice, as if he had been San Giorgio himself, and held the church as a source of revenue. This was too much, and we laughed him to scorn; at which, beholding the amusing abomination of his conduct, he himself joined in our laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts.

Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and it therefore comes that no mendicant is without a proper degree of the self-respect common to all classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money is so general and shameless that the street beggars must be diffident souls indeed if they hesitated to ask for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered man will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, and not consider himself in the least abased. The detestable custom of largess, instead of wages, still obtains in so great degree in Venice that a physician, when asked for his account, replies: “What you please to give.” Knowing these customs, I hope I have never acted discourteously to the street beggars of Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I know that only one of them ever so far forgot himself as to curse me for not giving. Him, however, I think to have been out of his right mind at the time.

There were two mad beggars in the parish of San Stefano, whom I should be sorry to leave unmentioned here. One, who presided chiefly over the Campo San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I never saw him employed, except in addressing select circles of idlers whom a brawling noise always draws together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats passing through the campo, and gave them the word of command, to the great amusement of those swarthy barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when in this state was proud to go before any ladies who might be passing, and clear away the boys and idlers, to make room for them. When not occupied in any of these ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of the old convent.

But the mad beggar of Campo Sant’ Angelo seemed to have a finer sense of what became him as a madman and a beggar, and never made himself obnoxious by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, and in the summer lay asleep, for the most part, at a certain street corner which belonged to him. When awake he was a man of extremely complaisant presence, and suffered no lady to go by without a compliment to her complexion, her blond hair, or her beautiful eyes, whichever it might be. He got money for these attentions, and people paid him for any sort of witticism. One day he said to the richest young dandy of the city,— “Pah! you stomach me with your perfumes and fine airs;” for which he received half a florin. His remarks to gentlemen had usually this sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to say that so excellent a madman was often drunk and unable to fulfill his duties to society.

There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in Venice, and they are, of course, never enforced. Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in Campo San Stefano, who picked up a livelihood from the foreigners passing to and from the Academy of Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of Count, and no doubt gained something by this sort of heraldry, though there are counts in Venice almost as poor as themselves, and titles are not distinctions. The Venetian seldom gives to beggars; he says deliberately, “No go” (I have nothing), or “Quando ritorner�” (when I return), and never comes back that way. I noticed that professional hunger and cold took this sort of denial very patiently, as they did every other; but I confess I had never the heart to practice it. In my walks to the Public Gardens there was a venerable old man, with the beard and bearing of a patriarch, whom I encountered on the last bridge of the Riva, and who there asked alms of me. When I gave him a soldo, he returned me a blessing which I would be ashamed to take in the United States for half a dollar; and when the soldo was in some inaccessible pocket, and I begged him to await my coming back, he said sweetly,— “Very well, Signor, I will be here.” And I must say, to his credit, that he never broke his promise, nor suffered me, for shame’s sake, to break mine. He was quite a treasure to me in this respect, and assisted me to form habits of punctuality.

That exuberance of manner which one notes, the first thing, in his intercourse with Venetians, characterizes all classes, but is most excessive and relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of ceremony with every order, and one hardly knows what to do with the numbers of compliments it is necessary to respond to. A Venetian does not come to see you, he comes to revere you; he not only asks if you be well when he meets you, but he bids you remain well at parting, and desires you to salute for him all common friends; he reverences you at leave-taking; he will sometimes consent to incommode you with a visit; he will relieve you of the disturbance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of the complimentary phrase, are formally expressed by him, — good appetite to you, when you go to dinner much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre; a pleasant walk, if you meet in promenade. He is your servant at meeting and parting; he begs to be commanded when he has misunderstood you. But courtesy takes its highest flights, as I hinted, from the poorest company. Acquaintances of this sort, when not on the Ci� ciappa footing, or that of the familiar thee and thou, always address each other in Lei (lordship), or Elo, as the Venetians have it; and their compliment-making at encounter and separation is endless: I salute you! Remain well! Master! Mistress! (Paron! parona!) being repeated as long as the polite persons are within hearing.

One day, as we passed through the crowded Merceria, an old Venetian friend of mine, who trod upon the dress of a young person before us, called out, “Scusate, bella giovane!” (Pardon, beautiful girl!) She was not so fair nor so young as I have seen women; but she half turned her face with a forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident that had won her the amiable apology. The waiter of the caff� frequented by the people, says to the ladies for whom he places seats,— “Take this place, beautiful blonde;” or, “Sit here, lovely brunette,” as it happens.

A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of public resort touches his hat to the company, and one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had been dining there, said “Complimenti!” on going out, with a grace that went near to make the beefsteak tender. It is this uncostly gentleness of bearing which gives a winning impression of the whole people, whatever selfishness or real discourtesy lie beneath it. At home it sometimes seems that we are in such haste to live and be done with it, we have no time to be polite. Or is popular politeness merely a vice of servile peoples? And is it altogether better to be rude? I wish it were not. If you are lost in his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost there, continually), a Venetian will go with you wherever you wish. And he will do this amiable little service out of what one may say old civilization has established in place of goodness of heart, but which is perhaps not so different from it.

You hear people in the streets bless each other in the most dramatic fashion. I once caught these parting words between an old man and a young girl;

Giovanetta. Revered sir! (Patron riverito!)

Vecchio. (With that peculiar backward wave and beneficent wag of the hand, only possible to Italians.) Blessed child! (Benedetta!)

It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at the utterance of terms which Anglo-Saxons would scarcely use in their most emotional moments. The old gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the Old Procuratie always gave me his benediction when I took a box.

There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have heard many fine maledictions on the Venetian streets, but I recollect none more elaborate than that of a gondolier who, after listening peacefully to a quarrel between two other boatmen, suddenly took part against one of them, and saluted him with,— “Ah! baptized son of a dog! And if I had been present at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out against the baptismal font!”

All the theatrical forms of passion were visible in a scene I witnessed in a little street near San Samuele, where I found the neighborhood assembled at doors and windows in honor of a wordy battle between two poor women. One of these had been forced in-doors by her prudent husband, and the other upbraided her across the marital barrier. The assailant was washing, and twenty times she left her tub to revile the besieged, who thrust her long arms out over those of her husband, and turned each reproach back upon her who uttered it, thus: —

Assailant. Beast!

Besieged. Thou!

A. Fool!

B. Thou!

A. Liar!

B. Thou!

E via in seguito! At last the assailant, beating her breast with both hands, and tempestuously swaying her person back and forth, wreaked her scorn in one wild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyxiation, “O, non discorre pi� con gente.”

I returned half an hour later, and she was laughing and playing sweetly with her babe.

It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have incredible ado about buying and selling, and a day’s shopping is a sort of campaign, from which the shopper returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with the spoil of vanquished shopmen.

The embattled commercial transaction is conducted in this wise:

The shopper enters, and prices a given article. The shopman names a sum of which only the fervid imagination of the South could conceive as corresponding to the value of the goods.

The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail of horror and indignation, and the shopman throws himself forward over the counter with a protest that, far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap at the price stated, though they may nevertheless agree for something less.

What, then, is the very most ultimate price?

Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. (Say, the smallest trifle under the price first asked.)

The purchaser moves toward the door. He comes back, and offers one third of the very most ultimate price.

The shopman, with a gentle desperation, declares that the thing cost him as much. He cannot really take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot. That the gentleman would say something more! So much — for example. That he regard the stuff, its quality, fashion, beauty.

The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh! and, coming forward, he picks up the article and reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly of its kind. The shopman defends his wares. There is no such quantity and quality elsewhere in Venice. But if the gentleman will give even so much (still something preposterous), he may have it, though truly its sale for that money is utter ruin.

The shopper walks straight to the door. The shopman calls him back from the threshold, or sends his boy to call him back from the street.

Let him accommodate himself — which is to say, take the thing at his own price.

He takes it.

The shopman says cheerfully, “Servo suo!”

The purchaser responds, “Bon d�! Patron!” (Good day! my Master!)

Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and every purchase a triumph or a defeat. The whole thing is understood; the opposing forces know perfectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and retire after the contest, like the captured knights in “Morgante Maggiore” “calm as oil,” — however furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared to strangers.

Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no bloodshed in such encounters, and enter into them with a zeal as great as that of natives, though with less skill. I knew one American who prided himself on such matters, and who haughtily closed a certain bargain without words, as he called it. The shopman offered several articles, for which he demanded prices amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary customer rapidly computed the total and replied “Without words, now, I’ll give you a hundred francs for the lot.” With a pensive elevation of the eyebrows, and a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the shopman suffered him to take them.

Your Venetian is simpatico, if he is any thing. He is always ready to feel and to express the deepest concern, and I rather think he likes to have his sensibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful exercise for them. His sympathy begins at home, and he generously pities himself as the victim of a combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen of a country without liberty, without commerce, without money, without hope. He next pities his fellow-citizens, who are as desperately situated as himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, and despair into which the city has fallen. And I think his compassion is the most hopeless thing in his character. That alone is touched; that alone is moved; and when its impulse ceases he and every thing about him remain just as before.

With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mischievous. They never speak of one of their own class without adding some such ejaculation as “Poor fellow!” or, “Poor little creature!” They pity all wretchedness, no matter from what cause, and the greatest rogue has their compassion when under a cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in Venice, where they are very bold and numerous for the police are too much occupied with political surveillance to give due attention to mere cutpurses and housebreakers, and even when they make an arrest, people can hardly be got to bear witness against their unhappy prisoner. Povareto anca lu! There is no work and no money; people must do something; so they steal. Ci vuol pazienza! Bear witness against an ill-fated fellow-sufferer? God forbid! Stop a thief? I think a burglar might run from Rialto to San Marco, and not one compassionate soul in the Merceria would do aught to arrest him — povareto! Thieves came to the house of a friend of mine at noonday, when his servant was out. They tied their boat to his landing, entered his house, filled their boat with plunder from it, and rowed out into the canal. The neighbors on the floor above saw them, and cried “Thieves! thieves!” It was in the most frequented part of the Grand Canal, where scores of boats passed and repassed; but no one molested the thieves, and these povareti escaped with their booty. [Footnote: The rogues, it must be confessed, are often very polite. This same friend of mine one day found a man in the act of getting down into a boat with his favorite singing bird in its cage. “What are you doing with that bird?” he thought himself authorized to inquire. The thief looked about him a moment, and perceiving himself detected, handed back the cage with a cool “La scusi!” (“Beg pardon!”) as if its removal had been a trifling inadvertance.]

One night, in a little street through which we passed to our ferry, there came a wild rush before us, of a woman screaming for help, and pursued by her husband with a knife in his hand; their children, shrieking piteously, came after them. The street was crowded with people and soldiers, but no one put out his hand; and the man presently overtook his wife and stabbed her in the back. We only knew of the rush, but what it all meant we could not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding from the stab, which, happily, was slight. Inquiry of the bystanders developed the facts, but, singularly enough, scarcely a word of pity. It was entirely a family affair, it seemed; the man, poor little fellow, had a mistress, and his wife had maddened him with reproaches. Come si fa? He had to stab her. The woman’s case was not one that appealed to popular compassion, and the only words of pity for her which I heard were expressed by the wife of a fruiterer, whom her husband angrily silenced.

CHAPTER XXI.

SOCIETY.

It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay upon the borders of the Greek Empire, and whose greatest commerce was with the Orient, should be influenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mutinelli records that in the twelfth century they had many religious offices and observances in common with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon, which formed a very prominent part of the service of worship. At this time, also, when the rupture of the Lombard League had left other Italian cities to fall back into incessant local wars, and barbarized their customs, the people of Venice dressed richly and delicately, after the Greek fashion. They combed and dressed their hair, and wore the long, pointed Greek beard; [Footnote: A. Foscarini, in 1687, was the last patrician who wore the beard.] and though these Byzantine modes fell, for the most part, into disuse, in after-time, there is still a peculiarity of dress among the women of the Venetian poor which is said to have been inherited from the oriental costumes of Constantinople; namely, that high-heeled, sharp-toed slipper, or sandal, which covers the front of the foot, and drops from the heel at every step, requiring no slight art in the wearer to keep it on at all.

The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling particulars to important generalities, may perhaps see another relic of Byzantine civilization among the Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they put upon all the social movements of young girls, and the great liberty which they allow to married women. It is true that their damsels are now no longer imprisoned under the parental roof, as they were in times when they never left its shelter but to go, closely veiled, to communion in the church, on Christmas and Easter; but it is still quite impossible that any young lady should go out alone. Indeed, she would scarcely be secure from insult in broad day if she did so. She goes out with her governess, and, even with this protection, she cannot be too guarded and circumspect in her bearing; for in Venice a woman has to encounter upon the public street a rude license of glance, from men of all ages and conditions, which falls little short of outrage. They stare at her as she approaches; and I have seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they passed them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely sidelong gait. Something of this insolence might be forgiven to thoughtless, hot-blooded youth; but the gross and knowing leer that the elders of the Piazza and the caff� put on at the approach of a pretty girl is an ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly inured to it as the Venetians, would care to encounter. However, as I never heard the trial complained of by any but foreigners, I suppose it is not regarded by Italians as intolerable; and it is certain that an audible compliment, upon the street, to a pretty girl of the poor, is by no means an affront.

The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by nature to the gentler sex; and if in Italy they add to them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much they are to blame, never being in anywise trusted? They do not differ from persons of any age or sex in that country, if the world has been as justly, as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the people of Italy are effete in point of good faith. I have seen much to justify this opinion, and something also to confute it; and as long as Garibaldi lives, I shall not let myself believe that a race which could produce a man so signally truthful and single-hearted is a race of liars and cheats. I think the student of their character should also be slow to upbraid Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, in palliation of the fault, facts of long ages of alien and domestic oppression, in politics and religion, which must account for a vast deal of every kind of evil in Italy. Yet after exception and palliation has been duly made, it must be confessed that in Italy it does not seem to be thought shameful to tell lies, and that there the standard of sincerity, compared with that of the English or American, is low, as the Italian standard of morality in ether respects is also comparatively low. With the women, bred in idleness and ignorance, the imputed national untruthfulness takes the form naturally to be expected, and contributes to a state of things which must be examined with the greatest caution and reservation by every one but the Italians themselves. Goethe says that there is no society so corrupt that a man may not live virtuously in it; and I think the immorality of any people will not be directly and wholly seen by the stranger who does not seek it. Certainly, the experience and acquaintance of a foreigner in Italy must have been most unfortunate, if they confirm all the stories of corruption told by Italians themselves. A little generous distrust is best in matters of this kind; but while I strengthen my incredulity concerning the utter depravation of Venetian society in one respect, I am not disposed to deal so leniently with it in others. The state of things is bad in Venice, not because all women in society are impure, but because the Italian theory of morals does not admit the existence of opportunity without sin. It is by rare chance that a young girl makes acquaintance with young men in society; she seldom talks with them at the parties to which she is sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call upon her at her home; while for her to walk alone with a young man would be vastly more scandalous than much worse things, and is, consequently, unheard of. The Italians say freely they cannot trust their women as northern women are trusted; and some Italian women frankly confess that their sex would be worse if it were trusted more. But the truth does not appear in this shallow suspicion and this shallow self-conviction; and one who cares to have a just estimate of this matter must by no means believe all the evil he hears. There may be much corruption in society, but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all sense of shame and pity out of the heart of Venice. There is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting littleness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small country village in America or England has its meddlesomeness, but not its worldly, wicked sharpness. Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, added to the bitter shrewdness and witty penetration of a gifted rou�, and you have some idea of Venetian scandal. In that city, where all the nobler organs of expression are closed by political conditions, the viler channels run continual filth and poison, and the people, shut out from public and free discussion of religious and political themes, occupy themselves with private slander, and rend each other in their abject desperation. As it is part of the existing political demonstration to avoid the opera and theatre, the Venetians are deprived of these harmless distractions; balls and evening parties, at which people, in other countries, do nothing worse than bore each other, are almost unknown, for the same reason; and when persons meet in society, it is too often to retail personalities, or Italian politics made as unintelligible and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which is small and noxious in private circles is the same thing at the caff�, when the dread of spies does not reduce the talkers to a dreary silence. Not permitted to feel the currents of literature and the great world’s thought in religion freshly and directly, they seldom speak of these things, except in that tone of obsolete superiority which Italians are still prone to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to Art, the Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant of it, here in the very atmosphere of Art, to a degree absolutely amusing. I would as soon think of asking a fish’s opinion of water as of asking a Venetian’s notion of architecture or painting, unless he were himself a professed artist or critic.

Admitting, however, that a great part of the corruption of society is imputed, there still remains, no doubt, a great deal of real immorality to be accounted for. This, I think, is often to be attributed to the bad system of female education, and the habits of idleness in which women are bred. Indeed, to Americans, the whole system of Italian education seems calculated to reduce women to a state of imbecile captivity before marriage; and I have no fault to find with the Italians that they are jealous in guarding those whom they have unfitted to protect themselves, but have rather to blame them that, after marriage, their women are thrown at once upon society, when worse than helpless against its temptations. Except with those people who attempt to maintain a certain appearance in public upon insufficient means (and there are too many of these in Venice as everywhere else), and who spare in every other way that they may spend on dress, it does not often happen that Venetian ladies are housekeepers. Servants are cheap and numerous, as they are uncleanly and untrustworthy, and the Venetians prefer to keep them [Footnote: A clerk or employ� with a salary of fifty cents a day keeps a maid-servant, that his wife may fulfill to society the important duty of doing nothing.] rather than take part in housewifely duties; and, since they must lavish upon dress and show, to suffer from cold and hunger in their fireless houses and at their meagre boards. In this way the young girls, kept imprisoned from the world, instead of learning cookery and other domestic arts, have the grievous burden of idleness added to that of their solitary confinement, not only among the rich and noble, but among that large class which is neither and wishes to appear both. [Footnote: The poet Gray, genteelly making the grand tour in 1740, wrote to his father from Florence: “The only thing the Italians shine in is their reception of strangers. At such times every thing is magnificence: the more remarkable as in their ordinary course of life they are parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I saw in one of the vastest palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio), the apartment which he himself inhabited, a bed that most servants in England would disdain to lie in, and furniture much like that of a soph at Cambridge. This man is worth 30,000l. a year.” Italian nature has changed so little in a century, that all this would hold admirably true of Italian life at this time. The goodly outside in religion, in morals, in every thing is too much the ambition of Italy; this achieved, she is content to endure any pang of self-denial, and sell what little comfort she knows — it is mostly imported, like the word, from England — to strangers at fabulous prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and the conveniences unknown or excessively dear.] Their idle thoughts, not drilled by study nor occupied with work, run upon the freedom which marriage shall bring them, and form a distorted image of the world, of which they know as little as of their own undisciplined selves. Denied the just and wholesome amusements of society during their girlhood, it is scarcely a matter of surprise that they should throw themselves into the giddiest whirl of its excitement when marriage sets them free to do so.

I have said I do not think Venetians who give each other bad names are always to be credited, and I have no doubt that many a reputation in Venice is stained while the victim remains without guilt. A questioned reputation is, however, no great social calamity. It forms no bar to society, and few people are so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss it. And it is here that the harshness of American and English society toward the erring woman (harshness which is not injustice, but half-justice only) contrasts visibly to our advantage over the bad na�vet� and lenity of the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is accustomed to hear of things and speak of things which, with us, parents strive in every way to keep from their daughters’ knowledge; and while her sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is thus used to know good and evil, she hears her father and mother comment on the sinful errors of a friend or neighbor, who visits them and meets them every day in society. How can the impunity of the guilt which she believes to exist around her but sometimes have its effect, and ripen, with opportunity, into wrong? Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at all, how can she think the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is so very bad? If, however, she escape all these early influences of depravation; if her idleness, and solitude and precocious knowledge leave her unvitiated, if, when she goes into society, it is by marriage with a man who is neither a dotard nor a fortune-seeker, and who remains constant and does not tempt her, by neglect, to forbode offense and to inflict anticipative reprisals — yet her purity goes uncredited, as her guilt would go unpunished; scandal makes haste to blacken her name to the prevailing hue; and whether she has sin or not, those with sin will cast, not the stone that breaks and kills, but the filth that sticks and stinks. The wife must continue the long social exile of her girlhood if she would not be the prey of scandal. The cavaliere servente no longer exists, but gossip now attributes often more than one lover in his place, and society has the cruel clemency to wink at the license. Nothing is in worse taste than jealousy, and, consequently, though intrigue sometimes causes stabbing, and the like, among low people, it is rarely noticed by persons of good breeding. It seems to me that in Venetian society the reform must begin, not with dissolute life, but with the social toleration of the impure, and with the wanton habits of scandal, which make all other life incredible, and deny to virtue the triumph of fair fame.

I confess that what I saw of the innocent amusements of this society was not enough to convince me of their brilliancy and attractiveness; but I doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of these things, and perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien hand, in the best faith, might have an air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own impression of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more lively and brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled anywhere, except at the theatre or the caff�, have a certain stiffness, all the more surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect exactly the reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality of this people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I have certainly never seen society in any small town in America so ill at ease as I have seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed restraints. At a musical soir�e, attended by the class of people who at home would have been chatty and sociable, given to making acquaintance and to keeping up acquaintance, — the young men harmlessly talking and walking with the young ladies, and the old people listening together, while constant movement and intercourse kept life in the assembly, and there was some real pleasure felt amidst a good deal of unavoidable suffering, — I say, I found such a soir�e in Venice to be a spectacle of ladies planted in formal rows of low-necks and white dresses around the four sides of one room, and of gentlemen restively imprisoned in dress-coats and white gloves in another. During the music all these devoted people listened attentively, and at the end, the ladies lapsed back into their chairs and fanned themselves, while the gentlemen walked up and down the floor of their cell, and stopped, two by two, at the door of the ladies’ room, glanced mournfully athwart the moral barrier which divided them, and sadly and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at this singular species of social enjoyment, I inquired afterward, of a Venetian lady, if evening parties in Venice were usually such ordeals, and was discouraged to learn that what I had seen was scarcely an exaggeration of prevailing torments. Commonly people do not know each other, and it is difficult for the younger to procure introductions; and when there is previous acquaintance, the presence of some commanding spirit is necessary to break the ice of propriety, and substitute enjoyment for correctness of behavior. Even at dancing parties, where it would seem that the poetry of motion might do something to soften the rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, the poor young people separate after each dance, and take each sex its appointed prison, till the next quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For my own part, I cannot wonder that young men fly these virtuous scenes, and throng the rooms of those pleasant women of the demi-monde, who only exact from them that they shall be natural and agreeable; I cannot wonder that their fair partners in wretchedness seize the first opportunity to revenge themselves upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. It is said that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite as unexceptionable in character, are far more sociable and lively than those of the Christians. The young Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and witty, with a savoir faire which their Christian brethren lack. But, indeed, the young Venetian is, at that age when all men are owlish, ignorant, and vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in the world. He talks, not milk-and-water, but warm water alone, a little sweetened; and, until he has grown wicked, has very little good in him.

Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain day of each week, when it is made a matter of pride to receive as many calls as possible. The number sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits down, and few exchange more than a word with the hostess. In winter, the stove is heated on these reception days, and little cups of black coffee are passed round to the company; in summer lemonade is substituted for the coffee; but in all seasons a thin, waferish slice of toasted rusk (the Venetian baicolo) is offered to each guest with the drink. At receptions where the sparsity of the company permits the lady of the house to be seen, she is commonly visible on a sofa, surrounded by visitors in a half-circle. Nobody stays more than ten or fifteen minutes, and I have sometimes found even this brief time of much greater apparent length, and apt to produce a low state of nerves, from which one seldom recovers before dinner. Gentlemen, however, do not much frequent these receptions; and I assert again the diffidence I should feel in offering this glance at Venetian social enjoyment as conveying a just and full idea of it. There is no doubt that the Venetians find delight in their assemblies, where a stranger seeks it in vain. I dare say they would not think our own reunions brilliant, and that, looking obliquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible faces at one of our evening parties, they might mistake the look of pathetic dejection, visible in them, as the expression of people rather bored by their pleasure than otherwise.

The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the conversazioni of the rigid proprietarians, where people sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a soldo the point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the demi-monde where they say any thing. There are persons in Venice, as well as everywhere else, of new-fashioned modes of thinking, and these strive to give a greater life and ease to their assemblies, by attracting as many young men as possible; and in their families, gentlemen are welcome to visit, and to talk with the young ladies in the presence of their mothers. But though such people are no more accused of impropriety than the straitest of the old-fashioned, they are not regarded with the greatest esteem, and their daughters do not so readily find husbands. The Italians are fickle, the women say; they get soon tired of their wives after marriage, and when they see much of ladies before marriage, they get tired of them then, and never make them their wives. So it is much better to see nothing of a possible husband till you actually have him. I do not think conversazioni of any kind are popular with young men, however; they like better to go to the caff�, and the people you meet at private houses are none the less interesting for being old, or middle-aged. A great many of the best families, at present, receive no company at all, and see their friends only in the most private manner; though there are still cultivated circles to which proper introduction gives the stranger (who has no Austrian acquaintance) access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of Italian politics localized to apply to Venice, an interest in the affairs, fortunes, and misfortunes of his neighbors, and an acquaintance with the Venetian dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself in the places so cautiously opened to him. Even in the most cultivated society, the dialect is habitually spoken; and if Italian is used, it is only in compliment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, topics of general interest are sometimes chosen.

The best society is now composed of the families of professional men, such as the advocates, the physicians, and the richer sort of merchants. The shopkeepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry and thrift distinguish from the populace, seem not to have any social life, in the American sense. They are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from choice, and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. It is their class which has to fight hardest for life in Europe, and they give no quarter to those above or below them. The shop is their sole thought and interest, and they never, never sink it. But, since they have habits of diligence, and, as far as they are permitted, of enterprise, they seem to be in great part the stuff from which a prosperous State is to be rebuilt in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. They have sometimes a certain independence of character, which a better condition of things, and further education, would perhaps lift into honesty; though as yet they seem not to scruple to take any unfair advantage, and not to know that commercial success can never rest permanently on a system of bad faith. Below this class is the populace, between which and the patrician order a relation something like Roman clientage existed, contributing greatly to the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic power in the State. The greatest conspiracy (that of Marin Falier) which the commons ever moved against the oligarchy was revealed to one of the nobility by his plebeian creature, or client; and the government rewarded by every species of indulgence a class in which it had extinguished even the desire of popular liberty. The heirs of the servile baseness which such a system as this must create are not yet extinct. There is still a helplessness in many of the servant class, and a disposition to look for largess as well as wages, which are the traits naturally resulting from a state of voluntary submission to others. The nobles, as the government, enervated and debauched the character of the poor by public shows and countless holidays; as individuals, they taught them to depend upon patrician favor, and not upon their own plebeian industry, for support. The lesson was an evil one, hard to be unlearned, and it is yet to be forgotten in Venice. Certain traits of soft and familiar dependence give great charm to the populace; but their existence makes the student doubtful of a future to which the plebeians themselves look forward with perfect hope and confidence. It may be that they are right, and will really rise to the dignity of men, when free government shall have taught them that the laborer is worthy of his hire — after he has earned it. This has been the result, to some degree, in the kingdom of Italy, where the people have found that freedom, like happiness, means work.

Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of Venice are the advocates, an order of consequence even in the times of the Republic, though then shut out from participation in public affairs by a native government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance with several members of this profession impressed me with a sense of its liberality of thought and feeling, where all liberal thinking and feeling must be done by stealth, and where the common intelligence of the world sheds its light through multiplied barriers. Daniele Manin, the President of the Republic of 1848, was of this class, which, by virtue of its learning, enlightenment, and talent, occupies a place in the esteem and regard of the Venetian people far above that held by the effete aristocracy. The better part of the nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional class, and some of the most historic names are now preceded by the learned titles of Doctor and Advocate, rather than the cheap dignity of Count, offered by the Austrian government to all the patricians who chose to ask for it, when Austrian rule was extended over their country.

The physicians rank next to the advocates, and are usually men learned in their profession, however erroneous and old-fashioned some of their theories of practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often men of letters: they write for the journals, and publish little pamphlets on those topics of local history which it is so much the fashion to treat in Venice. No one makes a profession of authorship. The returns of an author’s work would be too uncertain, and its restrictions and penalties would be too vexatious and serious; and so literary topics are only occasionally treated by those whose main energies are bent in another direction.

The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable number of them are Hebrews, who, even in the old jealous times, exercised the noble art of medicine, and who now rank very highly among their professional brethren. These physicians haunt the neat and tasteful apothecary shops, where they sit upon the benching that passes round the interior, read the newspapers, and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, with all the zest that you may observe to characterize their discussions in Goldoni’s plays. There they spend their evenings, and many hours of every day, and thither the sick send to call them, — each physician resorting to a particular apothecary’s, and keeping his name inscribed on a brass plate against the wall, above the head of the druggist, who presides over the reunions of the doctors, while his apprentice pestles away at their prescriptions.

In 1786 there were, what with priests, monks, and nuns, a multitude of persons of ecclesiastical profession in Venice; and though many convents and monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests are still very numerous, and some monastic establishments have been revived under Austrian rule. The high officers of the Church are, of course, well paid, but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. They receive from the government a daily stipend of about thirty-five soldi, and they celebrate mass when they can get something to do in that way, for forty soldi. Unless, then, they have private income from their own family, or have pay for the education of some rich man’s son or daughter, they must fare slenderly.

There is much said, in and out of Venice, about their influence in society; but this is greatly modified, and I think is chiefly exercised upon the women of the old-fashioned families. [Footnote: It is no longer usual for girls to be educated in convents, and most young ladies of the better classes, up to the age of thirteen or fourteen years, receive their schooling in secular establishments, whither they go every day for study, or where they sometimes live as in our boarding-schools, and where they are taught the usual accomplishments, greater attention being paid to French and music than to other things.] I need hardly repeat the wellknown fact that all the moral power of the Roman Church over the younger men is gone; these seldom attend mass, and almost never go to confession, and the priests are their scorn and by-word. Their example, in some degree, must be much followed also by women; and though women must everywhere make more public professions of religion than men, in order to retain social standing, I doubt if the priests have a very firm hold upon the fears or reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal Venetians.

If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep down the people, they are themselves enslaved to their superiors and to each other. No priest can leave the city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. He is cut off as much as possible from his own kinspeople, and subjected to the constant surveillance of his class. Obliged to maintain a respectable appearance on twenty cents a day, — hampered and hindered from all personal liberty and private friendship, and hated by the great mass of the people, — I hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied in his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I was not able to cherish toward the priests those feelings of scornful severity which swell many Protestant bosoms; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I found them kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at least, I may describe as one of the most agreeable and cultivated gentlemen I ever met.

Those who fare best among the priests are the Jesuits, who returned from repeated banishment with the Austrians in this century. Their influence is very extended, and the confessional is their forte. Venetians say that with the old and the old-fashioned these crafty priests suggest remorse and impose penances; that with the young men and the latter-day thinkers they are men of the world, and pass off pleasant sins as trifles. All the students of the government schools are obliged by law to confess twice a month, and are given printed certificates of confession, in blank, which the confessor fills up and stamps with the seal of the Church. Most of them go to confess at the church of the Jesuits, who are glad to hear the cock-and-bull story invented by the student, and to cultivate his friendship by an easy penance and a liberal tone. This ingenuous young man of course despises the confessional. He goes to confess because the law obliges him to do so; but the law cannot dictate what he must confess. Therefore, he ventures as near downright burlesque as he dares, and (if the account he gives of the matter be true) puts off his confessor with some well-known fact, as that he has blasphemed. Of course he has blasphemed, blasphemy being as common as the forms of salutation in Venice. So the priest, who wishes him to come again, and to found some sort of influence over him, says,— “Oh dear, dear! This is very bad. Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you must swear, swear by the heathen gods: say Body of Diana, instead of Body of God; Presence of the Devil, instead of Blood of Mary. Then there is no harm done.” The students laugh over the pleasant absurdity together, and usually agree upon the matter of their semimonthly confessions beforehand.

As I have hinted, the young men do not love the government or the Church, and though I account for the loss of much high hope and generous sympathy in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot see how, when they have replaced their fathers, the present religious and political discontent is to be modified. Nay, I believe it must become worse. The middle-aged men of Venice grew up in times of comparative quiet, when she did not so much care who ruled over her, and negatively, at least, they honored the Church. They may now hate the foreign rule, but there are many considerations of timidity, and many effects of education, to temper their hate. They may dislike the priests, but they revere the Church. The young men of to-day are bred in a different school, and all their thoughts are of opposition to the government and of war upon the Church, which they detest and ridicule. The fact that their education is still in the hands of the priests in some measure, does not render them more tractable. They have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical professors, who seldom have sought to act upon their nobler qualities. The influence of the priesthood is again limited by the fact that the teachers in the free schools of the city, to which the poor send their children, are generally not priests; and ecclesiastics are no longer so commonly the private tutors of the children of the rich, as they once were when they lived with the family, and exercised a direct and important influence on it. Express permission from the pope is now necessary to the maintenance of a family chaplain, and the office is nearly disused. [Footnote: In early days every noble Venetian family had its chaplain, who, on the occasion of great dinners and suppers, remained in the kitchen, and received as one of his perquisites the fragments that came back from the table.]

The Republic was extremely jealous of the political power of the priests, who could not hold secular office in its time. A curious punishment was inflicted upon the priest who proved false to his own vows of chastity, and there is a most amusing old ballad — by no means cleanly in its language — purporting to be the lament of a priest suspended in the iron cage, appointed for the purpose, from the belfry of the Campanile San Marco, and enduring the jeers and insults of the mob below. We may suppose that with advancing corruption (if corruption has indeed advanced from remote to later times) this punishment was disused for want of room to hang out the delinquents. In the last century, especially, the nuns and monks led a pleasant life. You may see in the old pictures of Pietro Longhi and his school, how at the aristocratic and fashionable convent of San Zaccaria, the lady nuns received their friends and acquaintances of this world in the anteroom, where the dames and their cavaliers flirted and drank coffee, and the gentlemen coquetted with the brides of heaven through their grated windows.

Among other privileges of the Church, abolished in Venice long ago, was that ancient right of the monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which their herds of swine were made free of the whole city. These animals, enveloped in an odor of sanctity, wandered here and there, and were piously fed by devout people, until the year 1409, when, being found dangerous to children and inconvenient to every body, they were made the subject of a special decree, which deprived them of their freedom of movement. The Republic was always limiting the privileges of the Church! It is known how when the holy inquisition was established in its dominions in 1249, the State stipulated that great part of the process against heresy should be conducted by secular functionaries, and that the sentence should rest with the Doge and his councillors, — a kind of inquisition with claws clipped and teeth filed, as one may say, and the only sort ever permitted in Venice. At present there is no absolute disfavor shown to the clergy; but, as we have seen, many a pleasant island, which the monks of old reclaimed from the salty marshes, and planted with gardens and vineyards, now bears only the ruins of their convents, or else, converted into a fortress or government d�p�t, is all thistly with bayonets. Anciently, moreover, there were many little groves in different parts of the city, where the pleasant clergy, of what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the pure and religious days of Venice, met and made merry so riotously together by night that the higher officers of the Church were forced to prohibit their little soir�es.

An old custom of rejoicing over the installation of a new parish priest is still to be seen in almost primitive quaintness. The people of each parish — nobles, citizens, and plebeians alike — formerly elected their own priest, and, till the year 1576, they used to perambulate the city to the sound of drums, with banners flying, after an election, and proclaim the name of their favorite. On the day of the parroco’s induction his portrait was placed over the church door and after the celebration of the morning mass, a breakfast was given, which grew to be so splendid in time, that in the fifteenth century a statute limited its profusion. In the afternoon the new parroco, preceded by a band of military music, visited all the streets and courts of his parish, and then, as now, all the windows of the parish were decorated with brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored cloths and pictures. In those times as in these, there was an illumination at night, throngs of people in the campo of the church, and booths for traffic in cakes of flour and raisins, — fried in lard upon the spot, and sold smoking hot, with immense uproar on the part of the merchant; and for three days afterward the parish bells were sounded in concert.

The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with certainty in Venice attends in a degree peculiarly great the effort to learn exactly the present influence and standing of the nobility as a class. One is tempted, on observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of all ranks of people toward each other, to say that no sense of difference exists, — and I do not think there is ever shown, among Italians, either the aggressive pride or the abject meanness which marks the intercourse of people and nobles elsewhere in Europe, and I have not seen the distinction of rich and poor made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in our own soi-disant democratic society at home. There is, indeed, that equality in Italian fibre which I believe fits the nation for democratic institutions better than any other, and which is perhaps partly the result of their ancient civilization. At any rate, it fascinates a stranger to see people so mutually gentle and deferential; and must often be a matter of surprise to the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race, reclaimed from barbarism more recently, the native wild-beast is still so strong as to sometimes inform the manner. The uneducated Anglo-Saxon is a savage; the Italian, though born to utter ignorance, poverty, and depravity, is a civilized man. I do not say that his civilization is of a high order, or that the civilization of the most cultivated Italian is at all comparable to that of a gentleman among ourselves. The Italian’s education, however profound, has left his passions undisciplined, while it has carefully polished his manner; he yields lightly to temptation, he loses his self-control, he blasphemes habitually; his gentleness is conventional, his civilization not individual. With us the education of a gentleman (I do not mean a person born to wealth or station, but any man who has trained himself in morals or religion, in letters, and in the world) disciplines the impulses, and leaves the good manner to grow naturally out of habits of self-command and consequent habitual self-respect.

The natural equality of the Italians is visible in their community of good looks as well as good manners. They have never, perhaps, that high beauty of sensitive expression which is found among Englishmen and Americans (preferably among the latter), but it very rarely happens that they are brutally ugly; and the man of low rank and mean vocation has often a beauty of as fine sort as the man of education and refinement. If they changed clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to wash himself, they might successfully masquerade, one for another. The plebeian Italian, inspired by the national vanity, bears himself as proudly as the noble, without at all aggressing in his manner. His beauty, like that of the women of his class, is world-old, — the beauty of the pictures and the statues: the ideal types of loveliness are realized in Italy; the saints and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, come true to the stranger at every encounter with living faces. In Venice, particularly, the carriage of the women, of whatever rank, is very free and noble, and the servant is sometimes to be distinguished from the mistress only by her dress and by her labor-coarsened hands; certainly not always by her dirty finger-nails and foul teeth, for though the clean shirt is now generally in Italy, some lesser virtues are still unknown: the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of but infrequent use; the four-pronged fork is still imperfectly understood, and as a nation the Italians may be said to eat with their knives.

The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference between himself and others, whatever his rank may be, has, as I said, little temptation to arrogance or servility. The effects of the old relationship of patron and client are amusingly noticeable in the superior as well as the inferior; a rich man’s dependents are perfectly free with advice and comment, and it sometimes happens that he likes to hear their lively talk, and at home secretly consorts with his servants. The former social differences between commoners and patricians (which, I think, judging from the natural temper of the race, must have been greatly modified at all times by concession and exception) may be said to have quite disappeared in point of fact; the nobility is now almost as effete socially as it is politically. There is still a number of historic families, which are in a certain degree exclusive; but rich parvenus have admission to their friendship, and commoners in good circumstances are permitted their acquaintance; the ladies of this patrician society visit ladies of less rank, and receive them at their great parties, though not at more sacred assemblies, where they see only each other.

The Venetians have a habit of saying their best families are in exile, but this is not meant to be taken literally. Many of the best families are yet in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often merged in the middle class, and become men of professions, and active, useful lives. Of these nobles (they usually belong to the families which did not care to ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore untitled) [Footnote: The only title conferred on any patrician of Venice during the Republic was Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legislative act in reward of distinguished service. The names of the nobility were written in the Golden Book of the Republic, and they were addressed as Illustrissimo or Eccellenza. They also signed themselves nobile, between the Christian name and surname, as it is still the habit of the untitled nobility to do.] the citizens are affectionately proud, while I have heard from them nothing but contempt and ridicule of the patricians who, upon a wretched pension or meagre government office, attempt to maintain patrician distinction. Such nobles are usually Austriacanti in their politics, and behind the age in every thing; while there are other descendants of patrician families mingled at last with the very populace, sharing their ignorance and degradation, and feeling with them. These sometimes exercise the most menial employments: I knew one noble lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another who was a street-sweeper. Conte che non conta, non conta niente, [Footnote: A count who doesn’t count (money) counts for nothing.] says the sneering Italian proverb; and it would be little less than miraculous if a nobility like that of modern Venice maintained superior state and regard in the eyes of the quick-witted, intelligent, sarcastic commonalty.

The few opulent patricians are by no means the most violent of Italianissimi. They own lands and houses, and as property is unsafe when revolutionary feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The wealth amassed in early times by the vast and enterprising commerce of the country was, when not dissipated in riotous splendor, invested in real estate upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, and the income of the nobles is now from the rents of these lands. They reside upon their estates during the season of the villeggiatura, which includes the months of September and October, when every one who can possibly leave the city goes into the country. Then the patricians betake themselves to their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Treviso, and people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco hermitages, where the mutilated statues, swaggering above the gates, forlornly commemorate days when it was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is now. I say the villas look dreary and lonesome as places can be made to look in Italy, what with their high garden walls, their long, low piles of stabling, and the pass�e indecency of their nymphs and fauns, foolishly strutting in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past; and it must be but a dull life that the noble proprietors lead there.

It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, where there are still so many villas as to form a street of these seats of luxury, almost the whole length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am not certain that they have a right to the place which they hold in literature and sentiment, and yet there is something very charming about them, with their gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks. We went to see them one day early in October, and found them every one, when habitable, inhabited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their proximity to Venice incredible. As we returned home after dark, we saw the ladies from the villas walking unattended along the road, and giving the scene an air of homelike peace and trustfulness which I had not found before in Italy; while the windows of the houses were brilliantly lighted, as if people lived in them; whereas, you seldom see a light in Venetian palaces. I am not sure that I did not like better, however, the villas that were empty and ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild, and the statues that had lost legs and arms. Some of the ingenious proprietors had enterprisingly whitewashed their statues, and there was a horrible primness about certain of the well-kept gardens which offended me. Most of the houses were not large, but there was here and there a palace as grand as any in the city. Such was the great villa of the Contarini of the Lions, which was in every way superb, with two great lions of stone guarding its portals, and a gravel walk, over-arched with stately trees, stretching a quarter of a mile before it. At the moment I was walking down this aisle I met a cleanshaven old canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with a book under his arm, and a meditative look, whom I here thank for being so venerably picturesque. The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had known, when I saw it, that it had a ghostly underground passage from its cellar to the chapel, — wherein, when you get half way, your light goes out, and you consequently never reach the chapel.

This is at Mira; but the greatest of all the villas is the magnificent country-seat of the family Pisani at Stra, which now, with scarcely any addition to its splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vastness of this edifice and its gardens as impresses you with the material greatness which found expression in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly passed away. You wander around through the aisles of trim-cut lime-trees, bullied and overborne by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn to come upon intriguing spectres in bag-wigs, immense hoops and patches. How can you feel sympathy for those dull and wicked ghosts of eighteenth-century corruption? There is rottenness enough in the world without digging up old putridity and sentimentalizing on it; and I doubt if you will care to know much of the way in which the noble owner of such a villa ascended the Brenta at the season of the villeggiatura in his great gilded barge, all carven outside with the dumpling loves and loose nymphs of the period, with fruits, and flowers, and what not; and within, luxuriously cushioned and furnished, and stocked with good things for pleasure making in the gross old fashion. [Footnote: Mutinelli, Gli Ultimi Cinquant’ Anni della Repubblica di Veneza.] King Cole was not a merrier old soul than Illustrissimo of that day; he outspent princes; and his agent, while he harried the tenants to supply his master’s demands, plundered Illustrissimo frightfully. Illustrissimo never looked at accounts. He said to his steward, “Caro veccio, f� vu. Mi remeto a quel che f� vu.” (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall be satisfied with what you do.) So the poor agent had no other course but to swindle him, which he did; and Illustrissimo, when he died, died poor, and left his lordly debts and vices to his sons.

In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his ancestral palace, dimly occupying the halls where his forefathers flourished in so much splendor. I can conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering to human pride than that which surrounded the patrician of the old aristocratic Republic. The house in which he dwelt was the palace of a king, in luxury of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of servants that ministered to his state peopled its vast extent; and the gondolas that carried his grandeur abroad were moored in little fleets to the piles that rose before his palace, painted with the family arms and colors. The palace itself stood usually on the Grand Canal, and rose sheer from the water, giving the noble that haughty inaccessibility which the lord of the main-land achieved only by building lofty walls and multiplying gates. The architecture was as costly in its ornament as wild Gothic fancy, or Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it; and when the palace front was not of sculptured marble, the painter’s pencil filled it with the delight of color. The main-land noble’s house was half a fortress, and formed his stronghold in times of popular tumult or family fray; but at Venice the strong arm of St. Mark suppressed all turbulence in a city secure from foreign war; and the peaceful arts rejoiced in undisturbed possession of the palaces, which rose in the most delicate and fantastic beauty, and mirrored in the brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and richness. You see much of the beauty yet, but the pride and opulence which called it into being are gone forever.

Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic period, have the same internal arrangement of halls and chambers, and are commonly built of two lofty and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water level, is a hall running back from the gate to a bit of garden at the other side of the palace; and on either side of this hall, which in old times was hung with the family trophies of the chase and war, are the porter’s lodge and gondoliers’ rooms. On the first and second stories are the family apartments, opening on either side from great halls, of the same extent as that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters gilded or painted. The fourth floor is of the same arrangement, but has a lower roof, and was devoted to the better class of servants. Of the two stories used by the family, the third is the loftier and airier, and was occupied in summer; the second was the winter apartment. On either hand the rooms open in suites.

We have seen something of the ceremonies, public and private, which gave peculiar gayety and brilliance to the life of the Venetians of former days; but in his political character the noble had yet greater consequence. He was part of the proudest, strongest, and securest system of his time. He was a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with the equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, and of its nominal head. During the earlier times it was his office to go daily to Rialto and instruct the people in their political rights and duties for four hours; and even when the duties became every thing and the rights nothing (after the Serrar del Consiglio), the friendly habit of daily intercourse between patricians and citizens was still kept up at the same place. Once each week, and on every holiday, the noble took his seat in the Grand Council (the most august assembly in the world, without doubt), or the Ten, or the Three, according to his office in the State, — holding his place in the Council by right of birth, and in the other bodies by election of his peers.

Although the patricians were kept as one family apart from the people, and jealously guarded in their aristocratic purity by the State, they were only equals of the poorest before the laws of their own creation, and their condescension to the people was frequent and great. Indeed, the Venetians of all classes are social creatures, loving talk and gossip, and these constant habits of intercourse must have done much to produce that equality of manner now observable in them. Their amusements were for a long time the same, the nobles taking part in the public holidays, and in the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. In the earlier times, hunting in the lagoons was a favorite diversion; but as the decay of the Republic advanced, and the patrician blossomed into the fine gentleman of the last century, these hearty sports were relinquished, and every thing was voted vulgar but masking in carnival, dancing and gaming at Ridotto, and intriguing everywhere.

The accounts which Venetian writers give of Republican society in the eighteenth century form a chronique scandaleuse which need not be minutely copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian manners of this time from the comedies of Goldoni; and the faithlessness of society may be argued from the fact that in these plays, which contain nothing salacious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any rank who scruples to tell lies; and the truth is not to be found in works intended to school the public to virtue. The ingenious old playwright’s memoirs are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, which is now no more; and the worthy autobiographer, Casanova, also gives much information about things that had best not be known.

As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there was little left in its dominant class worth saving, if we may believe the testimony of Venetians which Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his “Annali Urbani,” and his “History of the Last Fifty Years of the Republic.” Long prosperity and prodigious opulence had done their worst, and the patricians, and the lowest orders of the people, their creatures and dependants, were thoroughly corrupt; while the men of professions began to assume that station which they now hold. The days of a fashionable patrician of those times began at a little before sunset, and ended with the following dawn. Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty linen, and placed himself in the hands of the hairdresser to be combed, oiled, perfumed, and powdered; and then sallied forth for a stroll through the Merceria, where this excellent husband and father made tasteful purchases to be carried to the lady he served. At dinner, which he took about seven or eight, his board was covered with the most tempting viands, and surrounded by needy parasites, who detailed the spicy scandals of the day in payment of their dinner, while the children of the host were confided to the care of the corrupt and negligent servants. After dinner, the father went to the theatre, or to the casino, and spent the night over cards and wine, in the society of dissolute women; and renewed on the morrow the routine of his useful existence. The education of the children of the man of fashion was confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and called himself an abbate, after the mode of the abb�s of French society; he had winning manners with the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils, and dressed his elegant person in silks of Lyons and English broadcloths. In the pleasant old days he flitted from palace to villa, dining and supping, and flattering the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled snuffbox in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet of a patrician family (when not the ambitious son of a low family), with a polite taste for idleness and intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found in the State, and who obliged the Church by accepting orders. Whether in the palace on the Grand Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle and engaging priest was surely the most agreeable person to be met, and the most dangerous to ladies’ hearts, — with his rich suit of black, and his smug, clean-shaven face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet, seducing manners. Alas! the world is changed! The priests whom you see playing tre-sette now at the conversazioni are altogether different men, and the delightful abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag-wig or the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, and often showed himself there at the side of his noble patron’s wife. Nay, in that time the theatre was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher thought it becoming to declare from his pulpit that to compose well his hearers should study the comedies of Goldoni, — and his hearers were the posterity of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook a journey without first receiving the holy sacrament; which had built the churches and endowed them from private wealth!

Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those elegant days, and it is related that a charming lady of good society once addressed a foreign savant at her conversazione, and begged him to favor the company with a little music, because, having heard that he was virtuous, she had no other association with the word than its technical use in Italy to indicate a professional singer as a virtuoso. A father of a family who kept no abbate for the education of his children ingeniously taught them himself. “Father,” asked one of his children, “what are the stars?” “The stars are stars, and little things that shine as thou seest.” “Then they are candles, perhaps?” “Make thy account that they are candles exactly.” “Of wax or tallow?” pursues the boy. “What! tallow-candles in heaven? No, certainly — wax, wax!”

These, and many other scandalous stories, the Venetian writers recount of the last days of their Republic, and the picture they produce is one of the most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, the most unblushing baseness. I have no doubt that the picture is full of national exaggeration. Indeed, the method of Mutinelli (who I believe intends to tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether too credulous and incautious. It is well enough to study contemporary comedy for light upon past society, but satirical ballads and lampoons, and scurrilous letters, cannot be accepted as historical authority. Still there is no question but Venice was very corrupt. As you read of her people in the last century, one by one the ideas of family faith and domestic purity fade away; one by one the beliefs in public virtue are dissipated; until at last you are glad to fly the study, close the filthy pages, and take refuge in doubt of the writers, who declare that they must needs disgrace Venice with facts since her children have dishonored her in their lives. “Such as we see them,” they say, “were the patricians, such the people of Venice, after the middle of the eighteenth century. The Venetians might be considered as extinguished; the marvelous city, the pomp only of the Venetians, existed.”

Shall we believe this? Let each choose for himself. At that very time the taste and wealth of a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova and then, when their captains starved the ragged soldiers of the Republic to feed their own idleness and vice, — when the soldiers dismantled her forts to sell the guns to the Turk, — when her sailors rioted on shore and her ships rotted in her ports, she had still military virtue enough to produce that Emo, who beat back the Algerine corsairs from the commerce of Christendom, and attacked them in their stronghold, as of old her galleys beat back the Turks. Alas! there was not the virtue in her statesmen to respond to this greatness in the hero. One of their last public acts was to break his heart with insult, and to crave peace of the pirates whom he had cowed. It remained for the helpless Doge and the abject patricians, terrified at a threat of war, to declare the Republic at an end, and San Marco was no more.

I love Republics too well to lament the fall of Venice. And yet, Pax tibi, Marce! If I have been slow to praise, I shall not hasten to condemn, a whole nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify with contrary sense what I have written concerning Venice, that I wonder if, after all, I have not been treating throughout less of the rule than of the exception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon every fair and temperate man who attempts to describe another people’s life and character; and I confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end of my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader to believe much more good and much less evil of the Venetians than I have said. I am glad that it remains for me to express a faith and hope in them for the future, founded upon their present political feeling, which, however tainted with self-interest in the case of many, is no doubt with the great majority a high and true feeling of patriotism. And it is impossible to believe that a people which can maintain the stern and unyielding attitude now maintained by the Venetians toward an alien government disposed to make them any concession short of freedom, in order to win them into voluntary submission, can be wanting in the great qualities which distinguish living peoples from those passed hopelessly into history and sentiment. In truth, glancing back over the whole career of the nation, I can discern in it nothing so admirable, so dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its present sacrifice of all that makes life easy and joyous, to the attainment of a good which shall make life noble.

The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, Liberty, knowing that in slavery men can learn no virtues; and I think them fit, with all their errors and defects, to be free now, because men are never fit to be slaves.

CHAPTER XXII.

OUR LAST YEAR IN VENICE.

(As it seems Seven Years after.)

The last of four years which it was our fortune to live in the city of Venice was passed under the roof of one of her most beautiful and memorable palaces, namely, the Palazzo Giustiniani, whither we went, as has been told in an earlier chapter of this book, to escape the encroaching nepotism of Giovanna, the flower of serving-women. The experience now, in Cambridge, Mass., refuses to consort with ordinary remembrances, and has such a fantastic preference for the company of rather vivid and circumstantial dreams, that it is with no very strong hope of making it seem real that I shall venture to speak of it.

The Giustiniani were a family of patricians very famous during the times of a Republic that gave so many splendid names to history, and the race was preserved to the honor and service of Saint Mark by one of the most romantic facts of his annals. During a war with the Greek Emperor in the twelfth century every known Giustiniani was slain, and the heroic strain seemed lost forever. But the state that mourned them bethought itself of a half forgotten monk of their house, who was wasting his life in the Convent of San Nicol�; he was drawn forth from this seclusion, and, the permission of Rome being won, he was married to the daughter of the reigning doge. From them descended the Giustiniani of aftertimes, who still exist; in deed, in the year 1865 there came one day a gentleman of the family, and tried to buy from our landlord that part of the palace which we so humbly and insufficiently inhabited. It is said that as the unfrocked friar and his wife declined in life they separated, and, as if in doubt of what had been done for the state through them, retired each into a convent, Giustiniani going back to San Nicol�, and dying at last to the murmur of the Adriatic waves along the Lido’s sands.

Next after this Giustiniani I like best to think of that latest hero of the family, who had the sad fortune to live when the ancient Republic fell at a threat of Napoleon, and who alone among her nobles had the courage to meet with a manly spirit the insolent menaces of the conqueror. The Giustiniani governed Treviso for the Senate; he refused, when Napoleon ordered him from his presence, to quit Treviso without the command of the Senate; he flung back the taunts of bad faith cast upon the Venetians; and when Napoleon changed his tone from that of disdain to one of compliment, and promised that in the general disaster he was preparing for Venice, Giustiniani should be spared, the latter generously replied that he had been a friend of the French only because the Senate was so; as to the immunity offered, all was lost to him in the loss of his country, and he should blush for his wealth if it remained intact amidst the ruin of his countrymen.

The family grew in riches and renown from age to age, and, some four centuries after the marriage of the monk, they reared the three beautiful Gothic palaces, in the noblest site on the Grand Canal, whence on one hand you can look down to the Rialto Bridge, and on the other far up towards the church of the Salute, and the Basin of Saint Mark. The architects were those Buoni, father and son, who did some of the most beautiful work on the Ducal Palace, and who wrought in an equal inspiration upon these homes of the Giustiniani, building the delicate Gothic arches of the windows, with their slender columns and their graceful balconies, and crowning all with the airy battlements.

The largest of the three palaces became later the property of the Foscari family, and here dwelt with his father that unhappy Jacopo Foscari, who after thrice suffering torture by the state for a murder he never did, at last died in exile; hither came the old Doge Foscari, who had consented to this cruel error of the state, and who after a life spent in its service was deposed and disgraced before his death; and whither when he lay dead, came remorseful Venice, and claimed for sumptuous obsequies the dust which his widow yielded with bitter reproaches. Here the family faded away generation by generation, till, (according to the tale told us) early in this century, when the ultimate male survivor of the line had died, under a false name, in London, where he had been some sort of obscure actor, there were but two old maiden sisters left, who, lapsing into imbecility, were shown to strangers by the rascal servants as the last of the Foscari; and here in our time was quartered a regiment of Austrian troops, whose neatly pipe-clayed belts decorated the balconies on which the princely ladies of the house had rested their jewelled arms in other days.

The Foscari added a story to the palace to distinguish it from the two other palaces Giustiniani, but these remain to the present day as they were originally planned. That in which we lived was called Palazzo Giustiniani of the Bishops, because one of the family was the first patriarch of Venice. After his death he was made a saint by the Pope; and it is related that he was not only a very pious, but a very good man. In his last hours he admitted his beloved people to his chamber, where he meekly lay upon a pallet of straw, and at the moment he expired, two monks in the solitude of their cloister, heard an angelical harmony in the air: the clergy performed his obsequies not in black, funereal robes, but in white garments, and crowned with laurel, and bearing gilded torches, and although the patriarch had died of a malignant fever, his body was miraculously preserved incorrupt during the sixty-five days that the obsequies lasted. The other branch of the family was called the Giustiniani of the Jewels, from the splendor of their dress; but neither palace now shelters any of their magnificent race. The edifice on our right was exclusively occupied by a noble Viennese lady, who as we heard, — vaguely, in the right Venetian fashion, — had been a ballet-dancer in her youth, and who now in her matronly days dwelt apart from her husband, the Russian count, and had gondoliers in blue silk, and the finest gondola on the Grand Canal, but was a plump, florid lady, looking long past beauty, even as we saw her from our balcony.

Our own palace — as we absurdly grew to call it — was owned and inhabited in a manner much more proper to modern Venice, the proprietorship being about equally divided between our own landlord and a very well known Venetian painter, son of a painter still more famous. This artist was a very courteous old gentleman, who went with Italian and clock-like regularity every evening in summer to a certain caff�, where he seemed to make it a point of conscience to sip one sherbet, and to read the “Journal des D�bats.” In his coming and going we met him so often that we became friends, and he asked us many times to visit him, and see his father’s pictures, and some famous frescos with which his part of the palace was adorned. It was a characteristic trait of our life, that though we constantly meant to avail ourselves of this kindness, we never did so. But we continued in the enjoyment of the beautiful garden, which this gentleman owned at the rear of the palace and on which our chamber windows looked. It was full of oleanders and roses, and other bright and odorous blooms, which we could enjoy perfectly well without knowing their names; and I could hardly say whether the garden was more charming when it was in its summer glory, or when, on some rare winter day, a breath from the mountains had clothed its tender boughs and sprays with a light and evanescent flowering of snow. At any season the lofty palace walls rose over it, and shut it in a pensive seclusion which was loved by the old mother of the painter and by his elderly maiden sister. These often walked on its moss-grown paths, silent as the roses and oleanders to which one could have fancied the blossom of their youth had flown; and sometimes there came to them there, grave, black-gowned priests, — for the painter’s was a devout family, — and talked with them in tones almost as tranquil as the silence was, save when one of the ecclesiastics placidly took snuff, — it is a dogma of the Church for priests to take snuff in Italy, — and thereafter, upon a prolonged search for his handkerchief, blew a resounding nose. So far as we knew, the garden walls circumscribed the whole life of these ladies; and I am afraid that such topics of this world as they touched upon with their priests must have been deplorably small.

Their kinsman owned part of the story under us, and both of the stories above us; he had the advantage of the garden over our landlord; but he had not so grand a gondola-gate as we, and in some other respects I incline to think that our part of the edifice was the finer. It is certain that no mention is made of any such beautiful hall in the property of the painter as is noted in that of our landlord, by the historian of a “Hundred Palaces of Venice,” — a work for which I subscribed, and then for my merit was honored by a visit from the author, who read aloud to me in a deep and sonorous voice the annals of our temporary home. This hall occupied half the space of the whole floor; but it was altogether surrounded by rooms of various shapes and sizes, except upon one side of its length, where it gave through Gothic windows of vari-colored glass, upon a small court below, — a green-mouldy little court, further dampened by a cistern, which had the usual curb of a single carven block of marble. The roof of this stately sala was traversed by a long series of painted rafters, which in the halls of nearly all Venetian palaces are left exposed, and painted or carved and gilded. A suite of stately rooms closed the hall from the Grand Canal, and one of these formed our parlor; on the side opposite the Gothic windows was a vast aristocratic kitchen, which, with its rows of shining coppers, its great chimney-place well advanced toward the middle of the floor, and its tall gloomy windows, still affects my imagination as one of the most patrician rooms which I ever saw; at the back of the hall were those chambers of ours overlooking the garden of which I have already spoken, and another kitchen, less noble than the first, but still sufficiently grandiose to make most New World kitchens seem very meekly minute and unimpressive. Between the two kitchens was another court, with another cistern, from which the painter’s family drew water with a bucket on a long rope, which, when let down from the fourth story, appeared to be dropped from the clouds, and descended with a noise little less alarming than thunder.

Altogether the most surprising object in the great sala was a sewing-machine, and we should have been inconsolably outraged by its presence there, amid so much that was merely venerable and beautiful, but for the fact that it was in a state of harmonious and hopeless disrepair, and, from its general contrivance, gave us the idea that it had never been of any use. It was, in fact, kept as a sort of curiosity by the landlord, who exhibited it to the admiration of his Venetian friends.

The reader will doubtless have imagined, from what I have been saying, that the Palazzo Giustiniani had not all that machinery which we know in our houses here as modern improvements. It had nothing of the kind, and life there was, as in most houses in Italy, a kind of permanent camping out. When I remember the small amount of carpeting, of furniture, and of upholstery we enjoyed, it appears to me pathetic; and yet, I am not sure that it was not the wisest way to live. I know that we had compensation in things not purchasable here for money. If the furniture of the principal bedroom was somewhat scanty, its dimensions were unstinted the ceiling was fifteen feet high, and was divided into rich and heavy panels, adorned each with a mighty rosette of carved and gilded wood, two feet across. The parlor had not its original decorations in our time, but it had once had so noble a carved ceiling that it was found worth while to take it down and sell it into England; and it still had two grand Venetian mirrors, a vast and very good painting of a miracle of St. Anthony, and imitation-antique tables and arm-chairs. The last were frolicked all over with carven nymphs and cupids; but they were of such frail construction that they were not meant to be sat in, much less to be removed from the wall against which they stood; and more than one of our American visitors was dismayed at having these proud articles of furniture go to pieces upon his attempt to use them like mere arm-chairs of ordinary life. Scarcely less impressive or useless than these was a monumental plaster-stove, surmounted by a bust of Aesculapius; when this was broken by accident, we cheaply repaired the loss with a bust of Homer (the dealer in the next campo being out of Aesculapiuses) which no one could have told from the bust it replaced; and this and the other artistic glories of the room made us quite forget all possible blemishes and defects. And will the reader mention any house with modern improvements in America which has also windows, with pointed arches of marble, opening upon balconies that overhang the Grand Canal?

For our new apartment, which consisted of six rooms, furnished with every article necessary for Venetian housekeeping, we paid one dollar a day which, in the innocence of our hearts we thought rather dear, though we were somewhat consoled by reflecting that this extravagant outlay secured us the finest position on the Grand Canal. We did not mean to keep house as we had in Casa Falier, and perhaps a sketch of our easier ménage may not be out of place. Breakfast was prepared in the house, for in that blessed climate all you care for in the morning is a cup of coffee, with a little bread and butter, a musk-melon, and some clusters of white grapes, more or less. Then we had our dinners sent in warm from a cook’s who had learned his noble art in France; he furnished a dinner of five courses for three persons at a cost of about eighty cents; and they were dinners so happily conceived and so justly executed, that I cannot accuse myself of an excess of sentiment when I confess that I sigh for them to this day. Then as for our immaterial tea, we always took that at the Caffé Florian in the Piazza of Saint Mark, where we drank a cup of black coffee and ate an ice, while all the world promenaded by, and the Austrian bands made heavenly music.

Those bands no longer play in Venice, and I believe that they are not the only charm which she has lost in exchanging Austrian servitude for Italian freedom; though I should be sorry to think that freedom was not worth all other charms. The poor Venetians used to be very rigorous (as I have elsewhere related), about the music of their oppressors, and would not come into the Piazza until it had ceased and the Austrian promenaders had disappeared, when they sat down at Florian’s, and listened to such bands of strolling singers and minstrels as chose to give them a concord of sweet sounds, without foreign admixture. We, in our neutrality, were wont to sit out both entertainments, and then go home well toward midnight, through the sleepy little streets, and over the bridges that spanned the narrow canals, dreaming in the shadows of the palaces.

We moved with half-conscious steps till we came to the silver expanse of the Grand Canal, where, at the ferry, darkled a little brood of black gondolas, into one of which we got, and were rowed noiselessly to the thither side, where we took our way toward the land-gate of our palace through the narrow streets of the parish of San Barnab�, and the campo before the ugly fa�ade of the church; or else we were rowed directly to the water-gate, where we got out on the steps worn by the feet of the Giustiniani of old, and wandered upward through the darkness of the stairway, which gave them a far different welcome of servants and lights when they returned from an evening’s pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive, and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep this important fact sufficiently in mind; and as the Palazzo Giustiniani is still let in furnished lodgings, and it is quite possible that some of my readers may be going to spend next summer in it, I venture to remind them that if they have to draw somewhat upon their fancy for patrician accommodations there, it will cost them far less in money than it did the original proprietors, who contributed to our selfish pleasure by the very thought of their romantic absence and picturesque decay. In fact, the Past is everywhere like the cake of proverb: you cannot enjoy it and have it.

And here I am reminded of another pleasure of modern dwellers in Venetian palaces, which could hardly have been indulged by the patricians of old, and which is hardly imaginable by people of this day, whose front doors open upon dry land: I mean to say the privilege of sea-bathing from one’s own threshold. From the beginning of June till far into September all the canals of Venice are populated by the amphibious boys, who clamor about in the brine, or poise themselves for a leap from the tops of bridges, or show their fine, statuesque figures, bronzed by the ardent sun, against the facades of empty palaces, where they hover among the marble sculptures, and meditate a headlong plunge. It is only the Venetian ladies, in fact, who do not share this healthful amusement. Fathers of families, like so many plump, domestic drakes, lead forth their aquatic broods, teaching the little ones to swim by the aid of various floats, and delighting in the gambols of the larger ducklings. When the tide comes in fresh and strong from the sea the water in the Grand Canal is pure and refreshing; and at these times it is a singular pleasure to leap from one’s door-step into the swift current, and spend a half-hour, very informally, among one’s neighbors there. The Venetian bathing-dress is a mere sketch of the pantaloons of ordinary life; and when I used to stand upon our balcony, and see some bearded head ducking me a polite salutation from a pair of broad, brown shoulders that showed above the water, I was not always able to recognize my acquaintance, deprived of his factitious identity of clothes. But I always knew a certain stately consul-general by a vast expanse of baldness upon the top of his head; and it must be owned, I think, that this form of social assembly was, with all its disadvantages, a novel and vivacious spectacle. The Venetian ladies, when they bathed, went to the Lido, or else to the bath-houses in front of the Ducal Palace, where they saturated themselves a good part of the day, and drank coffee, and, possibly, gossiped.

I think that our balconies at Palazzo Giustiniani were even better places to see the life of the Grand Canal from than the balcony of Casa Falier, which we had just left. Here at least we had a greater stretch of the Canal, looking, as we could, up either side of its angle. Here, too, we had more gondola stations in sight, and as we were nearer the Rialto, there was more picturesque passing of the market-boats. But if we saw more of this life, we did not see it in greater variety, for I think we had already exhausted this. There was a movement all night long. If I woke at three or four o’clock, and offered myself the novel spectacle of the Canal at that hour, I saw the heavy-laden barges go by to the Rialto, with now and then also a good-sized coasting schooner making lazily for the lagoons, with its ruddy fire already kindled for cooking the morning’s meal, and looking very enviably cosey. After our own breakfast we began to watch for the gondolas of the tourists of different nations, whom we came to distinguish at a glance. Then the boats of the various artisans went by, the carpenter’s, the mason’s, the plasterer’s, with those that sold fuel, and vegetables, and fruit, and fish, to any household that arrested them. From noon till three or four o’clock the Canal was comparatively deserted; but before twilight it was thronged again by people riding out in their open gondolas to take the air after the day’s fervor. After nightfall they ceased, till only at long intervals a solitary lamp, stealing over the dark surface, gave token of the movement of some gondola bent upon an errand that could not fail to seem mysterious or fail to be matter of fact. We never wearied of this oft-repeated variety, nor of our balcony in any way; and when the moon shone in through the lovely arched window and sketched its exquisite outline on the floor, we were as happy as moonshine could make us.

Were we otherwise content? As concerns Venice, it is very hard to say, and I do not know that I shall ever be able to say with certainty. For all the entertainment it afforded us, it was a very lonely life, and we felt the sadness of the city in many fine and not instantly recognizable ways. Englishmen who lived there bade us beware of spending the whole year in Venice, which they declared apt to result in a morbid depression of the spirits. I believe they attributed this to the air of the place, but I think it was more than half owing to her mood, to her old, ghostly, aimless life. She was, indeed, a phantom of the past, haunting our modern world, — serene, inexpressibly beautiful, yet inscrutably and unspeakably sad. Remembering the charm that was in her, we often sigh for the renewal of our own vague life there, — a shadow within the shadow; but remembering also her deep melancholy, an involuntary shiver creeps over us, and we are glad not to be there. Perhaps some of you who have spent a summer day or a summer week in Venice do not recognize this feeling; but if you will remain there, not four years as we did, but a year or six months even, it will ever afterwards be only too plain. All changes, all events, were affected by the inevitable local melancholy; the day was as pensive amidst that populous silence as the night; the winter not more pathetic than the long, tranquil, lovely summer. We rarely sentimentalized consciously, and still more seldom openly, about the present state of Venice as contrasted with her past glory.

I am glad to say that we despised the conventional poetastery about her; but I believe that we had so far lived into sympathy with her, that, whether we realized it or not, we took the tone of her dispiritedness, and assumed a part of the common experience of loss and of hopelessness. History, if you live where it was created, is a far subtler influence than you suspect; and I would not say how much Venetian history, amidst the monuments of her glory and the witnesses of her fall, had to do in secret and tacit ways with the prevailing sentiment of existence, which I now distinctly recognize to have been a melancholy one. No doubt this sentiment was deepened by every freshly added association with memorable places; and each fact, each great name and career, each strange tradition as it rose out of the past for us and shed its pale lustre upon the present, touched us with a pathos which we could neither trace nor analyze.

I do not know how much the modern Venetians had to do with this impression, but something I have no question. They were then under Austrian rule; and in spite of much that was puerile and theatrical in it, there was something very affecting in their attitude of what may best be described as passive defiance. This alone made them heroic, but it also made them tedious. They rarely talked of anything but politics; and as I have elsewhere said, they were very jealous to have every one declare himself of their opinion. Hemmed in by this jealousy on one side, and by a heavy and rebellious sense of the wrongful presence of the Austrian troops and the Austrian spies on the other, we forever felt dimly constrained by something, we could not say precisely what, and we only knew what, when we went sometimes on a journey into free Italy, and threw off the irksome caution we had maintained both as to patriotic and alien tyrants. This political misery circumscribed our acquaintance very much, and reduced the circle of our friendship to three or four families, who were content to know our sympathies without exacting constant expression of them. So we learned to depend mainly upon passing Americans for our society; we hailed with rapture the arrival of a gondola distinguished by the easy hats of our countrymen and the pretty faces and pretty dresses of our countrywomen. It was in the days of our war; and talking together over its events, we felt a brotherhood with every other American.

Of course, in these circumstances, we made thorough acquaintance with the people about us in the palace. The landlord had come somehow into a profitable knowledge of Anglo-Saxon foibles and susceptibilities; but his lodgings were charming, and I recognize the principle that it is not for literature to make its prey of any possibly conscious object. For this reason, I am likewise mostly silent concerning a certain attach� of the palace, the right-hand man and intimate associate of the landlord. He was the descendant of one of the most ancient and noble families of Italy, — a family of popes and cardinals, of princes and ministers, which in him was diminished and tarnished in an almost inexplicable degree. He was not at all worldly-wise, but he was a man of great learning, and of a capacity for acquiring knowledge that I have never seen surpassed. He possessed, I think, not many shirts on earth; but he spoke three or four languages, and wrote very pretty sonnets in Italian and German. He was one of the friendliest and willingest souls living, and as generous as utter destitution can make a man; yet he had a proper spirit, and valued himself upon his name. Sometimes he brought his great-grandfather to the palace; a brisk old gentleman in his nineties, who had seen the fall of the Republic and three other revolutions in Venice, but had contrived to keep a government pension through all, and now smiled with unabated cheerfulness upon a world which he seemed likely never to leave.

The palace-servants were two, the gondolier and a sort of housekeeper, — a handsome, swarthy woman, with beautiful white teeth and liquid black eyes. She was the mother of a pretty little boy, who was going to bring himself up for a priest, and whose chief amusement was saying mimic masses to an imaginary congregation. She was perfectly statuesque and obliging, and we had no right, as lovers of the beautiful or as lodgers, to complain of her, whatever her faults might have been. As to the gondolier, who was a very important personage in our palatial household, he was a handsome bashful, well-mannered fellow, with a good-natured blue eye and a neatly waxed mustache. He had been ten years a soldier in the Austrian army, and was, from his own account and from all I saw of him, one of the least courageous men in the world; but then no part of the Austrian system tends to make men brave, and I could easily imagine that before it had done with one it might give him reasons enough to be timid all the rest of his life. Piero had not very much to do, and he spent the greater part of his leisure in a sort of lazy flirtation with the women about the kitchen-fire, or in the gondola, in which he sometimes gave them the air. We always liked him; I should have trusted him in any sort of way, except one that involved danger. It once happened that burglars attempted to enter our rooms, and Piero declared to us that he knew the men; but before the police, he swore that he knew nothing about them. Afterwards he returned privately to his first assertion, and accounted for his conduct by saying that if he had borne witness against the burglars, he was afraid that their friends would jump on his back (saltarmi adosso), as he phrased it, in the dark; for by this sort of terrorism the poor and the wicked have long been bound together in Italy. Piero was a humorist in his dry way, and made a jest of his own caution; but his favorite joke was, when he dressed himself with particular care, to tell the women that he was going to pay a visit to the Princess Clary, then the star of Austrian society. This mild pleasantry was repeated indefinitely with never-failing effect.

More interesting to us than all the rest was our own servant, Bettina, who came to us from a village on the mainland. She was very dark, so dark and so Southern in appearance as almost to verge upon the negro type; yet she bore the English-sounding name of Scarbro, and how she ever came by it remains a puzzle to this day, for she was one of the most pure and entire of Italians. I mean this was her maiden name; she was married to a trumpeter in the Austrian service, whose Bohemian name she was unable to pronounce, and consequently never gave us. She was a woman of very few ideas indeed, but perfectly honest and good-hearted. She was pious, in her peasant fashion, and in her walks about the city did not fail to bless the baby before every picture of the Madonna. She provided it with an engraved portrait of that Holy Nail which was venerated in the neighboring church of San Pantaleon; and she apparently aimed to supply it with playthings of a religious and saving character like that piece of ivory, which resembled a small torso, and which Bettina described as “A bit of the Lord, Signor,” — and it was, in fact, a fragment of an ivory crucifix, which she had somewhere picked up. To Bettina’s mind, mankind broadly divided themselves into two races, Italians and Germans, to which latter she held that we Americans in some sort belonged. She believed that America lay a little to the south of Vienna and in her heart I think she was persuaded that the real national complexion was black, and that the innumerable white Americans she saw at our house were merely a multitude of exceptions. But with all her ignorance, she had no superstitions of a gloomy kind: the only ghost she seemed ever to have heard of was the spectre of an American ship captain which a friend of Piero’s had seen at the Lido. She was perfectly kind and obedient, and was deeply attached in an inarticulate way to the baby, which was indeed the pet of the whole palace. This young lady ruled arbitrarily over them all, and was forever being kissed and adored. When Piero went out to the wine-shop for a little temperate dissipation, he took her with him on his shoulder, and exhibited her to the admiring gondoliers of his acquaintance; there was no puppetshow, no church festival, in that region to which she was not carried; and when Bettina, and Giulia, and all the idle women of the neighborhood assembled on a Saturday afternoon in the narrow alley behind the palace (where they dressed one another’s thick black hair in fine braids soaked in milk, and built it up to last the whole of the next week), the baby was the cynosure of all hearts and eyes. But her supremacy was yet more distinguished when, late at night, the household gave itself a feast of snails stewed in oil and garlic, in the vast kitchen. There her anxious parents have found her seated in the middle of the table with the bowl of snails before her, and armed with a great spoon, while her vassals sat round, and grinned their fondness and delight in her small tyrannies; and the immense room, dimly lit, with the mystical implements of cookery glimmering from the wall, showed like some witch’s cavern, where a particularly small sorceress was presiding over the concoction of an evil potion or the weaving of a powerful spell.

From time to time we had fellow-lodgers, who were always more or less interesting and mysterious. Among the rest there was once a French lady, who languished, during her stay, under the disfavor of the police, and for whose sake there was a sentinel with a fixed bayonet stationed day and night at the palace gate. At last, one night, this French lady escaped by a rope-ladder from her chamber window, and thus no doubt satisfied alike the female instinct for intrigue and elopement and the political agitator’s love of a mysterious disappearance. It was understood dimly that she was an author, and had written a book displeasing to the police.

Then there was the German baroness and her son and daughter, the last very beautiful and much courted by handsome Austrian officers; the son rather weak-minded, and a great care to his sister and mother, from his propensity to fall in love and marry below his station; the mother very red-faced and fat, a good-natured old creature who gambled the summer months away at Hombourg and Baden and in the winter resorted to Venice to make a match for her pretty daughter. Then, moreover, there was that English family, between whom and ourselves there was the reluctance and antipathy, personal and national, which exists between all right-minded Englishmen and Americans. No Italian can understand this just and natural condition, and it was the constant aim of our landlord to make us acquainted. So one day when he found a member of each of these unfriendly families on the neutral ground of the grand sala, he introduced them. They had, happily, the piano-forte between them, and I flatter myself that the insulting coldness and indifference with which they received each other’s names carried to our landlord’s bosom a dismay never before felt by a good-natured and well-meaning man.

The piano-forte which I have mentioned belonged to the landlord, who was fond of music and of all fine and beautiful things; and now and then he gave a musical soir�e, which was attended, more or less surreptitiously, by the young people of his acquaintance. I do not think he was always quite candid in giving his invitations, for on one occasion a certain count, who had taken refuge from the glare of the sala in our parlor for the purpose of concealing the very loud-plaided pantaloons he wore, explained pathetically that he had no idea it was a party, and that he had been so long out of society, for patriotic reasons, that he had no longer a dress suit. But to us they were very delightful entertainments, no less from the great variety of character they afforded than from the really charming and excellent music which the different amateurs made; for we had airs from all the famous operas, and the instrumentation was by a gifted young composer. Besides, the gayety seemed to recall in some degree the old, brilliant life of the palace, and at least showed us how well it was adapted to social magnificence and display.

We enjoyed our whole year in Palazzo Giustiniani, though some of the days were too long and some too short, as everywhere. From heat we hardly suffered at all, so perfectly did the vast and lofty rooms answer to the purpose of their builders in this respect. A current of sea air drew through to the painter’s garden by day; and by night there was scarcely a mosquito of the myriads that infested some parts of Venice. In winter it was not so well. Then we shuffled about in wadded gowns and boots lined with sheep-skin, — the woolly side in, as in the song. The passage of the sala, was something to be dreaded, and we shivered as fleetly through it as we could, and were all the colder for the deceitful warmth of the colors which the sun cast upon the stone floor from the window opening on the court.

I do not remember any one event of our life more exciting than that attempted burglary of which I have spoken. In a city where the police gave their best attention to political offenders, there were naturally a great many rogues, and the Venetian rogues, if not distinguished for the more heroic crimes, were very skillful in what I may call the genre branch of robbing rooms through open windows, and committing all kinds of safe domestic depredations. It was judged best to acquaint Justice (as they call law in Latin countries) with the attempt upon our property, and I found her officers housed in a small room of the Doge’s Palace, clerkly men in velvet skull-caps, driving loath quills over the rough official paper of those regions. After an exchange of diplomatic courtesies, the commissary took my statement of the affair down in writing, pertinent to which were my father’s name, place, and business, with a full and satisfactory personal history of myself down to the period of the attempted burglary. This, I said, occurred one morning about daylight, when I saw the head of the burglar peering above the window-sill, and the hand of the burglar extended to prey upon my wardrobe.

“Excuse me, Signor Console,” interrupted the commissary, “how could you see him?”

“Why, there was nothing in the world to prevent me. The window was open.”

“The window was open!” gasped the commissary. “Do you mean that you sleep with your windows open?”

“Most certainly!”

“Pardon!” said the commissary, suspiciously. “Do all Americans sleep with their windows open?”

“I may venture to say that they all do, in summer,” I answered; “at least, it’s the general custom.”

Such a thing as this indulgence in fresh air seemed altogether foreign to the commissary’s experience; and but for my official dignity, I am sure that I should have been effectually browbeaten by him. As it was, he threw himself back in his armchair and stared at me fixedly for some moments. Then he recovered himself with another “Per-doni!” and, turning to his clerk, said, “Write down that, according to the American custom, they were sleeping with their windows open.” But I know that the commissary, for all his politeness, considered this habit a relic of the times when we Americans all abode in wigwams; and I suppose it paralyzed his energies in the effort to bring the burglars to justice, for I have never heard anything of them from that day to this.

The truth is, it was a very uneventful year; and I am the better satisfied with it as an average Venetian year on that account. We sometimes varied the pensive monotony by a short visit to the cities of the mainland; but we always came back to it willingly, and I think we unconsciously abhorred any interruption of it. The days, as they followed each other, were wonderfully alike, in every respect. For eight months of summer they were alike in their clear-skied, sweet-breathed loveliness; in the autumn, there where the melancholy of the falling leaf could not spread its contagion to the sculptured foliage of Gothic art, the days were alike in their sentiment of tranquil oblivion and resignation which was as autumnal as any aspect of woods or fields could have been; in the winter they were alike in their dreariness and discomfort. As I remember, we spent by far the greater part of our time in going to the Piazza, and we were devoted Florianisti, as the Italians call those that lounge habitually at the Caff� Florian. We went every evening to the Piazza as a matter of course; if the morning was long, we went to the Piazza; if we did not know what to do with the afternoon, we went to the Piazza; if we had friends with us, we went to the Piazza; if we were alone, we went to the Piazza; and there was no mood or circumstances in which it did not seem a natural and fitting thing to go to the Piazza. There were all the prettiest shops; there were all the finest caff�s; there was the incomparable Church of St. Mark; there was the whole world of Venice.

Of course, we had other devices besides going to the Piazza; and sometimes we spent entire weeks in visiting the churches, one after another, and studying their artistic treasures, down to the smallest scrap of an old master in their darkest chapel; their history, their storied tombs, their fictitious associations. Very few churches escaped, I believe, except such as had been turned into barracks, and were guarded by an incorruptible Austrian sentinel. For such churches as did escape, we have a kind of envious longing to this day, and should find it hard to like anybody who had succeeded better in visiting them. There is, for example, the church of San Giobbe, the doors of which we haunted with more patience than that of the titulary saint: now the sacristan was out; now the church was shut up for repairs; now it was Holy Week and the pictures were veiled; we had to leave Venice at last without a sight of San Giobbe’s three Saints by Bordone, and Madonna by Bellini, which, unseen, outvalue all the other Saints and Madonnas that we looked at; and I am sure that life can never become so aimless, but we shall still have the desire of some day going to see the church of San Giobbe. If we read some famous episode of Venetian history, we made it the immediate care of our lives to visit the scene of its occurrence; if Ruskin told us of some recondite beauty of sculpture hid away in some unthought-of palace court, we invaded that palace at once; if in entirely purposeless strolls through the city, we came upon anything that touched the fancy or piqued curiosity, there was no gate or bar proof against our bribes. What strange old nests of ruin, what marvellous homes of solitude and dilapidation, did we not wander into! What boarded-up windows peer through, what gloomy recesses penetrate! I have lumber enough in my memory stored from such rambles to load the nightmares of a generation, and stuff for the dreams of a whole people. Does any gentleman or lady wish to write a romance? Sir or madam, I know just the mouldy and sunless alley for your villain to stalk his victim in, the canal in which to plunge his body, the staircase and the hall for the subsequent wanderings of his ghost; and all these scenes and localities I will sell at half the cost price; as also, balconies for flirtation, gondolas for intrigue and elopement, confessionals for the betrayal of guilty secrets. I have an assortment of bad and beautiful faces and picturesque attitudes and effective tones of voice; and a large stock of sympathetic sculptures and furniture and dresses, with other articles too numerous to mention, all warranted Venetian, and suitable to every style of romance. Who bids? Nay, I cannot sell, nor you buy. Each memory, as I hold it up for inspection, loses its subtle beauty and value, and turns common and poor in my hawker’s fingers.

Yet I must needs try to fix here the remembrance of two or three palaces, of which our fancy took the fondest hold, and to which it yet most fondly clings. It cannot locate them all, and least of all can it place that vast old palace, somewhere near Cannaregio, which faced upon a campo, with lofty windows blinded by rough boards, and empty from top to bottom. It was of the later Renaissance in style, and we imagined it built in the Republic’s declining years by some ruinous noble, whose extravagance forbade his posterity to live in it, for it had that peculiarly forlorn air which belongs to a thing decayed without being worn out. We entered its coolness and dampness, and wandered up the wide marble staircase, past the vacant niches of departed statuary, and came on the third floor to a grand portal which was closed against us by a barrier of lumber. But this could not hinder us from looking within, and we were aware that we stood upon the threshold of our ruinous noble’s great banqueting-hall, where he used to give his magnificent feste da ballo. Lustrissimo was long gone with all his guests; but there in the roof were the amazing frescos of Tiepolo’s school, which had smiled down on them, as now they smiled on us, great piles of architecture, airy tops of palaces, swimming in summer sky, and wantoned over by a joyous populace of divinities of the lovelier sex that had nothing but their loveliness to clothe them and keep them afloat; the whole grandiose and superb beyond the effect of words, and luminous with delicious color. How it all rioted there with its inextinguishable beauty in the solitude and silence, from day to day, from year to year, while men died, and systems passed, and nothing remained unchanged but the instincts of youth and love that inspired it! It was music and wine and wit; it was so warm and glowing that it made the sunlight cold; and it seemed ever after a secret of gladness and beauty that the sad old palace was keeping in its heart against the time to which Venice looks forward when her splendor and opulence shall be indestructibly renewed.

There is a ball-room in the Palazzo Pisani, which some of my readers may have passed through on their way to the studio of the charming old Prussian painter, Nerl�; the frescos of this are dim and faded and dusty, and impress you with a sense of irreparable decay, but the noble proportions and the princely air of the place are inalienable, while the palace stands. Here might have danced that Contarini who, when his wife’s necklace of pearls fell upon the floor in the way of her partner, the King of Denmark, advanced and ground it into powder with his foot that the king might not be troubled to avoid treading on it; and here, doubtless, many a gorgeous masquerade had been in the long Venetian carnival; and what passion and intrigue and jealousy, who knows? Now the palace was let in apartments, and was otherwise a barrack, and in the great court, steadfast as any of the marble statues, stood the Austrian sentinel. One of the statues was a figure veiled from head to foot, at the base of which it was hard not to imagine lovers, masked and hooded, and forever hurriedly whispering their secrets in the shadow cast in perpetual moonlight.

Yet another ball-room in yet another palace opens to memory, but this is all bright and fresh with recent decoration. In the blue vaulted roof shine stars of gold; the walls are gay with dainty frescos; a gallery encircles the whole, and from this drops a light stairway, slim-railed, and guarded at the foot by torch-bearing statues of swarthy Eastern girls; through the glass doors at the other side glimmers the green and red of a garden. It was a place to be young in, to dance in, dream in, make love in; but it was no more a surprise than the whole palace to which it belonged, and which there in that tattered and poverty-stricken old Venice was a vision of untarnished splendor and prosperous fortune. It was richly furnished throughout all its vast extent, adorned with every caprice and delight of art, and appointed with every modern comfort The foot was hushed by costly carpets, the eye was flattered by a thousand beauties and prettinesses. In the grates the fires were laid and ready to be lighted; the candles stood upon the mantles; the toilet-linen was arranged for instant use in the luxurious chambers; but from basement to roof the palace was a solitude; no guest came there, no one dwelt there save the custodian; the eccentric lady of whose possessions it formed a part abode in a little house behind the palace, and on her door-plate had written her vanitas vanitatum in the sarcastic inscription, “John Humdrum, Esquire.”

Of course she was Inglese; and that other lady, who was selling off the furniture of her palace, and was so amiable a guide to its wonders in her curious broken English, was Hungarian. Her great pride and joy, amidst the objects of vertu and the works of art, was a set of “Punch,” which she made us admire, and which she prized the more because she had always been allowed to receive it when the government prohibited it to everybody else. But we were Americans, she said; and had we ever seen this book? She held up the “The Potiphar Papers,” a volume which must have been inexpressibly amused and bewildered to find itself there, in that curious little old lady’s hand.

Shall I go on and tell of the palace in which our strange friend Padre L ——  — dwelt, and the rooms of which he had filled up with the fruits of his passion for the arts and sciences; the anteroom he had frescoed to represent a grape-arbor with a multitude of clusters overhead; the parlor with his oil-paintings on the walls, and the piano and melodeon arranged so that Padre L ——  — could play upon them both at once; the oratory turned forge, and harboring the most alchemic-looking apparatus of all kinds; the other rooms in which he had stored his inventions in portable furniture, steam-propulsion, rifled cannon, and perpetual motion; the attic with the camera by which one could photograh one’s self, — shall I tell of this, and yet other palaces? I think there is enough already; and I have begun to doubt somewhat the truth of my reminiscences, as I advise the reader to do.

Besides, I feel that the words fail to give all the truth that is in them; and if I cannot make them serve my purpose as to the palaces, how should I hope to impart through them my sense of the glory and loveliness of Venetian art? I could not give the imagination and the power of Tintoretto as we felt it, nor the serene beauty, the gracious luxury of Titian, nor the opulence, the worldly magnificence of Paolo Veronese. There hang their mighty works forever, high above the reach of any palaverer; they smile their stately welcome from the altars and palace-walls, upon whoever approaches them in the sincerity and love of beauty that produced them; and thither you must thus go if you would know them. Like fragments of dreams, like the fleeting

    “Images of glimmering dawn,”

I am from time to time aware, amid the work-day world, of some happiness from them, some face or form, some drift of a princely robe or ethereal drapery, some august shape of painted architecture, some un-namable delight of color; but to describe them more strictly and explicitly, how should I undertake?

There was the exhaustion following every form of intense pleasure, in their contemplation, such a wear of vision and thought, that I could not call the life we led in looking at them an idle one, even if it had no result in after times; so I will not say that it was to severer occupation our minds turned more and more in our growing desire to return home. For my own part personally I felt keenly the fictitious and transitory character of official life. I knew that if I had become fit to serve the government by four years’ residence in Venice, that was a good reason why the government, according to our admirable system, should dismiss me, and send some perfectly unqualified person to take my place; and in my heart also I knew that there was almost nothing for me to do where I was, and I dreaded the easily formed habit of receiving, a salary for no service performed. I reminded myself that, soon or late, I must go back to the old fashion of earning money, and that it had better be sooner than later. Therefore, though for some reasons it was the saddest and strangest thing in the world to do, I was on the whole rejoiced when a leave of absence came, and we prepared to quit Venice.

Never had the city seemed so dream-like and unreal as in this light of farewell, — this tearful glimmer which our love and regret cast upon it. As in a maze, we haunted once more and for the last time the scenes we had known so long, and spent our final, phantasmal evening in the Piazza; looked, through the moonlight, our mute adieu to islands and lagoons, to church and tower; and then returned to our own palace, and stood long upon the balconies that overhung the Grand Canal. There the future became as incredible and improbable as the past; and if we had often felt the incongruity of our coming to live in such a place, now, with tenfold force, we felt the cruel absurdity of proposing to live anywhere else. We had become part of Venice; and how could such atoms of her fantastic personality ever mingle with the alien and unsympathetic world?

The next morning the whole palace household bestirred itself to accompany us to the station: the landlord in his best hat and coat, our noble friend in phenomenal linen, Giulia and her little boy, Bettina shedding bitter tears over the baby, and Piero, sad but firm, bending over the oar and driving us swiftly forward. The first turn of the Canal shut the Palazzo Giustiniani from our lingering gaze, a few more curves and windings brought us to the station. The tickets were bought, the baggage was registered; the little oddly assorted company drew itself up in a line, and received with tears our husky adieux. I feared there might be a remote purpose in the hearts of the landlord and his retainer to embrace and kiss me, after the Italian manner, but if there was, by a final inspiration they spared me the ordeal. Piero turned away to his gondola; the two other men moved aside; Bettina gave one long, hungering, devouring hug to the baby; and as we hurried into the waiting-room, we saw her, as upon a stage, standing without the barrier, supported and sobbing in the arms of Giulia.

It was well to be gone, but I cannot say we were glad to be going.

ITALIAN JOURNEYS

CONTENTS

THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.

I.

LEAVING VENICE.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

AT PADUA

A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH’S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ.

MINOR TRAVELS.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.

THE ROAD TO ROME FROM VENICE.

I.

LEAVING VENICE.

We did not know, when we started from home in Venice, on the 8th of November, 1864, that we had taken the longest road to Rome. We thought that of all the proverbial paths to the Eternal City that leading to Padua, and thence through Ferrara and Bologna to Florence, and so down the sea-shore from Leghorn to Civita Vecchia, was the best, the briefest, and the cheapest. Who could have dreamed that this path, so wisely and carefully chosen, would lead us to Genoa, conduct us on shipboard, toss us four dizzy days and nights, and set us down, void, battered, and bewildered, in Naples? Luckily,

“The moving accident is not my trade,”

for there are events of this journey (now happily at an end) which, if I recounted them with unsparing sincerity, would forever deter the reader from taking any road to Rome.

Though, indeed, what is Rome, after all, when you come to it?

II.

FROM PADUA TO FERRARA.

As far as to Ferrara there was no sign of deviation from the direct line in our road, and the company was well enough. We had a Swiss family in the car with us to Padua, and they told us how they were going home to their mountains from Russia, where they had spent nineteen years of their lives. They were mother and father and only daughter and the last, without ever having seen her ancestral country, was so Swiss in her yet childish beauty, that she filled the morning twilight with vague images of glacial height, blue lake, snug chalet, and whatever else of picturesque there is in paint and print about Switzerland. Of course, as the light grew brighter these images melted away, and left only a little frost upon the window-pane.

The mother was restively anxious at nearing her country, and told us every thing of its loveliness and happiness. Nineteen years of absence had not robbed it of the poorest charm, and I hope that seeing it again took nothing from it. We said how glad we should be if we were as near America as she was to Switzerland. “America!” she screamed; “you come from America! Dear God, the world is wide — the world is wide!” The thought was so paralyzing that it silenced the fat little lady for a moment, and gave her husband time to express his sympathy with us in our war, which he understood perfectly well. He trusted that the revolution to perpetuate slavery must fail, and he hoped that the war would soon end, for it made cotton very dear.

Europe is material: I doubt if, after Victor Hugo and Garibaldi, there were many upon that continent whose enthusiasm for American unity (which is European freedom) was not somewhat chilled by the expensiveness of cotton. The fabrics were all doubled in price, and every man in Europe paid tribute in hard money to the devotion with which we prosecuted the war, and, incidentally, interrupted the cultivation of cotton.

We shook hands with our friends, and dismounted at Padua, where we were to take the diligence for the Po. In the diligence their loss was more than made good by the company of the only honest man in Italy. Of course this honest man had been a great sufferer from his own countrymen, and I wish that all English and American tourists, who think themselves the sole victims of publican rapacity and deceit in Italy, could have heard our honest man’s talk. The truth is, these ingenious people prey upon their own kind with an avidity quite as keen as that with which they devour strangers; and I am half-persuaded that a ready-witted foreigner fares better among them than a traveller of their own nation. Italians will always pretend, on any occasion, that you have been plundered much worse than they but the reverse often happens. They give little in fees; but their landlord, their porter, their driver, and their boatman pillage them with the same impunity that they rob an Inglese. As for this honest man in the diligence, he had suffered such enormities at the hands of the Paduans, from which we had just escaped, and at the hands of the Ferrarese, into which we were rushing (at the rate of five miles scant an hour), that I was almost minded to stop between the nests of those brigands and pass the rest of my days at Rovigo, where the honest man lived. His talk was amusingly instructive, and went to illustrate the strong municipal spirit which still dominates all Italy, and which is more inimical to an effectual unity among Italians than Pope or Kaiser has ever been. Our honest man of Rovigo was a foreigner at Padua, twenty-five miles north, and a foreigner at Ferrara, twenty-five miles south; and throughout Italy the native of one city is an alien in another, and is as lawful prey as a Russian or an American with people who consider every stranger as sent them by the bounty of Providence to be eaten alive. Heaven knows what our honest man had paid at his hotel in Padua, but in Ferrara the other week he had been made to give five francs apiece for two small roast chickens, besides a fee to the waiter; and he pathetically warned us to beware how we dealt with Italians. Indeed, I never met a man so thoroughly persuaded of the rascality of his nation and of his own exceptional virtue. He took snuff with his whole person; and he volunteered, at sight of a flock of geese, a recipe which I give the reader: Stuff a goose with sausage; let it hang in the weather during the winter; and in the spring cut it up and stew it, and you have an excellent and delicate soup.

But after all our friend’s talk, though constant, became dispiriting, and we were willing when he left us. His integrity had, indeed, been so oppressive that I was glad to be swindled in the charge for our dinner at the Iron Crown, in Rovigo, and rode more cheerfully on to Ferrara.

III.

THE PICTURESQUE, THE IMPROBABLE, AND THE PATHETIC IN FERRARA.

I.

It was one of the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The portier at the Stella d’Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose works I had not read.

The famous hospital of St. Anna, where Tasso was confined for seven years, is still an asylum for the infirm and sick, but it is no longer used as a mad-house. It stands on one of the lone, silent Ferrarese streets, not far from the Ducal Castle, and it is said that from the window of his cell the unhappy poet could behold Leonora in her tower. It may be so; certainly those who can believe in the genuineness of the cell will have no trouble in believing that the vision of Tasso could pierce through several brick walls and a Doric portico, and at last comprehend the lady at her casement in the castle. We entered a modern gateway, and passed into a hall of the elder edifice, where a slim young soldier sat reading a romance of Dumas. This was the keeper of Tasso’s prison; and knowing me, by the instinct which teaches an Italian custodian to distinguish his prey, for a seeker after the True and Beautiful, he relinquished his romance, lighted a waxen taper, unbolted a heavy door with a dramatic clang, and preceded me to the cell of Tasso. We descended a little stairway, and found ourselves in a sufficiently spacious court, which was still ampler in the poet’s time, and was then a garden planted with trees and flowers. On a low doorway to the right was inscribed the legend “PRIGIONE DI TASSO,” and passing through this doorway into a kind of reception-cell, we entered the poet’s dungeon. It is an oblong room, with a low wagon-roof ceiling, under which it is barely possible to stand upright. A single narrow window admits the light, and the stone casing of this window has a hollow in a certain place, which might well have been worn there by the friction of the hand that for seven years passed the prisoner his food through the small opening. The young custodian pointed to this memento of suffering, without effusion, and he drew my attention to other remarkable things in the cell, without troubling himself to palliate their improbability in the least. They were his stock in trade; you paid your money, and took your choice of believing in them or not. On the other hand, my portier, an ex-valet de place, pumped a softly murmuring stream of enthusiasm; and expressed the freshest delight in the inspection of each object of interest.

One still faintly discerns among the vast number of names with which the walls of the ante-cell are bewritten, that of Lamartine. The name of Byron, which was once deeply graven in the stucco, had been scooped away by the Grand Duke of Tuscany (so the custodian said), and there is only part of a capital B now visible. But the cell itself is still fragrant of associations with the noble bard, who, according to the story related to Valery, caused himself to be locked up in it, and there, with his head fallen upon his breast, and frequently smiting his brow, spent two hours in pacing the floor with great strides. It is a touching picture; but its pathos becomes somewhat embarrassing when you enter the cell, and see the impossibility of taking more than three generous paces without turning. When Byron issued forth, after this exercise, he said (still according to Valery) to the custodian: “I thank thee, good man! The thoughts of Tasso are now all in my mind and heart.” “A short time after his departure from Ferrara,” adds the Frenchman, maliciously, “he composed his ‘Lament of Tasso,’ a mediocre result from such inspiration.” No doubt all this is colored, for the same author adds another tint to heighten the absurdity of the spectacle: he declares that Byron spent part of his time in the cell in writing upon the ceiling Lamartine’s verses on Tasso, which he misspelled. The present visitor has no means of judging of the truth concerning this, for the lines of the poet have been so smoked by the candles of successive pilgrims in their efforts to get light on them, that they are now utterly illegible. But if it is uncertain what were Byron’s emotions on visiting the prison of Tasso, there is no doubt about Lady Morgan’s: she “experienced a suffocating emotion; her heart failed her on entering that cell; and she satisfied a melancholy curiosity at the cost of a most painful sensation.”

I find this amusing fact stated in a translation of her ladyship’s own language, in a clever guide-book called Il Servitore di Piazza, which I bought at Ferrara, and from which, I confess, I have learnt all I know to confirm me in my doubt of Tasso’s prison. The Count Avventi, who writes this book, prefaces it by saying that he is a valet de place who knows how to read and write, and he employs these unusual gifts with singular candor and clearness. No one, he says, before the nineteenth century, ever dreamed of calling the cellar in question Tasso’s prison, and it was never before that time made the shrine of sentimental pilgrimage, though it has since been visited by every traveller who has passed through Ferrara. It was used during the poet’s time to hold charcoal and lime; and not long ago died an old servant of the hospital, who remembered its use for that purpose. It is damp, close, and dark, and Count Avventi thinks it hardly possible that a delicate courtier could have lived seven years in a place unwholesome enough to kill a stout laborer in two months; while it seems to him not probable that Tasso should have received there the visits of princes and other distinguished persons whom Duke Alfonso allowed to see him, or that a prisoner who was often permitted to ride about the city in a carriage should have been thrust back into such a cavern on his return to the hospital. “After this,” says our valet de place who knows how to read and write, “visit the prison of Tasso, certain that in the hospital of St. Anna that great man was confined for many years;” and, with this chilly warning, leaves his reader to his emotions.

I am afraid that if as frank caution were uttered in regard to other memorable places, the objects of interest in Italy would dwindle sadly in number, and the valets de place, whether they know how to read and write or not, would be starved to death. Even the learning of Italy is poetic; and an Italian would rather enjoy a fiction than know a fact — in which preference I am not ready to pronounce him unwise. But this characteristic of his embroiders the stranger’s progress throughout the whole land with fanciful improbabilities; so that if one use his eyes half as much as his wonder, he must see how much better it would have been to visit, in fancy, scenes that have an interest so largely imaginary. The utmost he can make out of the most famous place is, that it is possibly what it is said to be, and is more probably as near that as any thing local enterprise could furnish. He visits the very cell in which Tasso was confined, and has the satisfaction of knowing that it was the charcoal-cellar of the hospital in which the poet dwelt. And the genius loci — where is that? Away in the American woods, very likely, whispering some dreamy, credulous youth, — telling him charming fables of its locus, and proposing to itself to abandon him as soon as he sets foot upon its native ground. You see, though I cared little about Tasso, and nothing about his prison, I was heavily disappointed in not being able to believe in it, and felt somehow that I had been awakened from a cherished dream.

II.

But I have no right to cast the unbroken shadow of my skepticism upon the reader, and so I tell him a story about Ferrara which I actually believe. He must know that in Ferrara the streets are marvelous long and straight. On the corners formed by the crossing of two of the longest and straightest of these streets stand four palaces, in only one of which we have a present interest. This palace my guide took me to see, after our visit to Tasso’s prison, and, standing in its shadow, he related to me the occurrence which has given it a sad celebrity. It was, in the time of the gifted toxicologist, the residence of Lucrezia Borgia, who used to make poisonous little suppers there, and ask the best families of Italy to partake of them. It happened on one occasion that Lucrezia Borgia was thrust out of a ball-room at Venice as a disreputable character, and treated with peculiar indignity. She determined to make the Venetians repent their unwonted accession of virtue, and she therefore allowed the occurrence to be forgotten till the proper moment of her revenge arrived, when she gave a supper, and invited to her board eighteen young and handsome Venetian nobles. Upon the preparation of this repast she bestowed all the resources of her skillful and exquisite knowledge; and the result was, the Venetians were so felicitously poisoned that they had just time to listen to a speech from the charming and ingenious lady of the house before expiring. In this address she reminded her guests of the occurrence in the Venetian ball-room, and perhaps exulted a little tediously in her present vengeance. She was surprised and pained when one of the guests interrupted her, and, justifying the treatment she had received at Venice, declared himself her natural son. The lady instantly recognized him, and in the sudden revulsion of maternal feeling, begged him to take an antidote. This he not only refused to do, but continued his dying reproaches, till his mother, losing her self-command, drew her poniard and plunged it into his heart.

The blood of her son fell upon the table-cloth, and this being hung out of the window to dry, the wall received a stain, which neither the sun nor rain of centuries sufficed to efface, and which was only removed with the masonry, when it became necessary to restore the wall under that window, a few months before the time of my visit to Ferrara. Accordingly, the blood-stain has now disappeared; but the conscientious artist who painted the new wall has faithfully restored the tragic spot, by bestowing upon the stucco a bloody dash of Venetian red.

III.

It would be pleasant and merciful, I think, if old towns, after having served a certain number of centuries for the use and pride of men, could be released to a gentle, unmolested decay. I, for my part, would like to have the ducal cities of North Italy, such as Mantua, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara, locked up quietly within their walls, and left to crumble and totter and fall, without any harder presence to vex them in their decrepitude than that of some gray custodian, who should come to the gate with clanking keys, and admit the wandering stranger, if he gave signs of a reverent sympathy, to look for a little while upon the reserved and dignified desolation. It is a shame to tempt these sad old cities into unnatural activity, when they long ago made their peace with the world, and would fain be mixing their weary brick and mortar with the earth’s unbuilded dust; and it is hard for the emotional traveller to restrain his sense of outrage at finding them inhabited, and their rest broken by sounds of toil, traffic, and idleness; at seeing places that would gladly have had done with history still doomed to be parts of political systems, to read the newspapers, and to expose railway guides and caricatures of the Pope and of Napoleon in their shop windows.

Of course, Ferrara was not incorporated into a living nation against her will, and I therefore marveled the more that she had become a portion of the present kingdom of Italy. The poor little State had its day long before ours; it had been a republic, and then subject to lords; and then, its lords becoming dukes, it had led a life of gayety and glory till its fall, and given the world such names and memories as had fairly won it the right to rest forever from making history. Its individual existence ended with that of Alfonso II., in 1597, when the Pope declared it reverted to the Holy See; and I always fancied that it must have received with a spectral, yet courtly kind of surprise, those rights of man which bloody-handed France distributed to the Italian cities in 1796; that it must have experienced a ghostly bewilderment in its rapid transformation, thereafter, under Napoleon, into part of the Cispadan Republic, the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic, and the Kingdom of Italy, and that it must have sunk back again under the rule of the Popes with gratitude and relief at last — as phantoms are reputed to be glad when released from haunting the world where they once dwelt. I speak of all this, not so much from actual knowledge of facts as from personal feeling; for it seems to me that if I were a city of the past, and must be inhabited at all, I should choose just such priestly domination, assured that though it consumed my substance, yet it would be well for my fame and final repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle, snuff-taking abbés writing up episodes in the history of my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate my archives. Being myself done with war, I should be glad to have my people exempt, as they are under the Pope, from military service; and I should hope that if the Legates taxed them, the taxes paid would be as so many masses said to get my soul out of the purgatory of perished capitals. Finally, I should trust that in the sanctified keeping of the Legates my mortal part would rest as sweetly as bones laid in hallowed earth brought from Jerusalem; and that under their serene protection I should be forever secure from being in any way exhumed and utilized by the ruthless hand of Progress.

However, as I said, this is a mere personal preference, and other old cities might feel differently. Indeed, though disposed to condole with Ferrara upon the fact of her having become part of modern Italy, I could not deny, on better acquaintance with her, that she was still almost entirely of the past. She has certainly missed that ideal perfection of non-existence under the Popes which I have just depicted, but she is practically almost as profoundly at rest under the King of Italy. One may walk long through the longitude and rectitude of many of her streets without the encounter of a single face: the place, as a whole, is by no means as lively as Pompeii, where there are always strangers; perhaps the only cities in the world worthy to compete with Ferrara in point of agreeable solitude are Mantua and Herculaneum. It is the newer part of the town — the modern quarter built before Boston was settled or Ohio was known — which is loneliest; and whatever motion and cheerfulness are still felt in Ferrara linger fondly about the ancient holds of life — about the street before the castle of the Dukes, and in the elder and narrower streets branching away from the piazza of the Duomo, where, on market days, there is a kind of dreamy tumult. In the Ghetto we were almost crowded, and people wanted to sell us things, with an enterprise that contrasted strangely with shopkeeping apathy elsewhere. Indeed, surprise at the presence of strangers spending two days in Ferrara when they could have got away sooner, was the only emotion which the whole population agreed in expressing with any degree of energy, but into this they seemed to throw their whole vitality. The Italians are everywhere an artless race, so far as concerns the gratification of their curiosity, from which no consideration of decency deters them. Here in Ferrara they turned about and followed us with their eyes, came to windows to see us, lay in wait for us at street-corners, and openly and audibly debated whether we were English or German. We might have thought this interest a tribute to something peculiar in our dress or manner, had it not visibly attended other strangers who arrived with us. It rose almost into a frenzy of craving to know more of us all, when on the third day the whole city assembled before our hotel, and witnessed, with a sort of desperate cry, the departure of the heavy-laden omnibus which bore us and our luggage from their midst.

IV.

I doubt if, after St. Mark’s in Venice, the Duomo at Parma, and the Four Fabrics at Pisa, there is a church more worthy to be seen for its quaint, rich architecture, than the Cathedral at Ferrara. It is of that beloved Gothic of which eye or soul cannot weary, and we continually wandered back to it from other more properly interesting objects. It is horribly restored in-doors, and its Renaissance splendors soon drove us forth, after we had looked at the Last Judgment by Bastianino. The style of this painting is muscular and Michelangelic, and the artist’s notion of putting his friends in heaven and his foes in hell is by no means novel; but he has achieved fame for his picture by the original thought of making it his revenge for a disappointment in love. The unhappy lady who refused his love is represented in the depths, in the attitude of supplicating the pity and interest of another maiden in Paradise who accepted Bastianino, and who consequently has no mercy on her that snubbed him. But I counted of far more value than this fresco the sincere old sculptures on the façade of the cathedral, in which the same subject is treated, beginning from the moment the archangel’s trump has sounded. The people getting suddenly out of their graves at the summons are all admirable; but the best among them is the excellent man with one leg over the side of his coffin, and tugging with both hands to pull himself up, while the coffin-lid tumbles off behind. One sees instantly that the conscience of this early riser is clean, for he makes no miserable attempt to turn over for a nap of a few thousand years more, with the pretense that it was not the trump of doom, but some other and unimportant noise he had heard. The final reward of the blessed is expressed by the repose of one small figure in the lap of a colossal effigy, which I understood to mean rest in Abraham’s bosom; but the artist has bestowed far more interest and feeling upon the fate of the damned, who are all boiling in rows of immense pots. It is doubtful (considering the droll aspect of heavenly bliss as figured in the one small saint and the large patriarch) whether the artist intended the condition of his sinners to be so horribly comic as it is; but the effect is just as great, for all that, and the slowest conscience might well take alarm from the spectacle of fate so grotesque and ludicrous; for, wittingly or unwittingly, the artist here punishes, as Dante knew best how to do, the folly of sinners as well as their wickedness. Boiling is bad enough; but to be boiled in an undeniable dinner-pot, like a leg of mutton, is to suffer shame us well as agony.

We turned from these horrors, and walked down by the side of the Duomo toward the Ghetto, which is not so foul as one could wish a Ghetto to be. The Jews were admitted to Ferrara in 1275, and, throughout the government of the Dukes, were free to live where they chose in the city; but the Pope’s Legate assigned them afterward a separate quarter, which was closed with gates. Large numbers of Spanish Jews fled hither during the persecutions, and there are four synagogues for the four languages, — Spanish, German, French, and Italian. Avventi mentions, among other interesting facts concerning the Ferrarese Jews, that one of their Rabbins, Isaaco degli Abranelli, a man of excellent learning in the Scriptures, claimed to be descended from David. His children still abide in Ferrara; and it may have been one of his kingly line that kept the tempting antiquarian’s shop on the corner from which you turn up toward the Library. I should think such a man would find a sort of melancholy solace in such a place: filled with broken and fragmentary glories of every kind, it would serve him for that chamber of desolation, set apart in the houses of the Oriental Hebrews as a place to bewail themselves in; and, indeed, this idea may go far to explain the universal Israelitish fondness for dealing in relics and ruins.

V.

The Ghetto was in itself indifferent to us; it was merely our way to the Library, whither the great memory of Ariosto invited us to see his famous relics treasured there.

We found that the dead literati of Ferrara had the place wholly to themselves; not a living soul disputed the solitude of the halls with the custodians, and the bust of Ariosto looked down from his monument upon rows of empty tables, idle chairs, and dusty inkstands.

The poet, who was painted by Titian, has a tomb of abandoned ugliness, and sleeps under three epitaphs; while cherubs frescoed on the wall behind affect to disclose the mausoleum, by lifting a frescoed curtain, but deceive no one who cares to consider how impossible it would be for them to perform this service, and caper so ignobly as they do at the same time. In fact this tomb of Ariosto shocks with its hideousness and levity. It stood formerly in the Church of San Benedetto, where it was erected shortly after the poet’s death, and it was brought to the Library by the French, when they turned the church into a barracks for their troops. The poet’s dust, therefore, rests here, where the worm, working silently through the vellum volumes on the shelves, feeds upon the immortality of many other poets. In the adjoining hall are the famed and precious manuscripts of Ariosto and of Tasso. A special application must be made to the librarian, in order to see the fragment of the Furioso in Ariosto’s hand, and the manuscript copy of the Gerusalemma, with the corrections by Tasso. There are some pages of Ariosto’s Satires, framed and glazed for the satisfaction of the less curious; as well as a letter of Tasso’s, written from the Hospital of St. Anna, which the poet sends to a friend, with twelve shirts, and in which he begs that his friend will have the shirts mended, and cautions him “not to let them be mixed with others.” But when the slow custodian had at last unlocked that more costly fragment of the Furioso, and placed it in my hands, the other manuscripts had no value for me. It seems to me that the one privilege which travel has reserved to itself, is that of making each traveller, in presence of its treasures, forget whatever other travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much of Ariosto’s industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open space near the margin, the poet’s final triumph in a clearly written stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto’s painful work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them: “Vittorio Alfieri beheld and venerated;” and I think, counting over the many memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be remembered.

When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the poet’s fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic.

As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way, we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch’s house at Arquà, where the grandeur of the past is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than the poet’s visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto’s house could not be left to him. Parva sed apta mihi, he has contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second story — there are but two floors — and cross to the rear of the building, where Ariosto’s chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet spent much of his time — chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months in the same place, — such was the poet’s rage for revision. It was probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house: “It was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his poem cost him no money.”] In this chamber they say the poet died. It is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were of the poet’s time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions; for the poet’s burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his “Furioso,” subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors.

The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted, after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly French-windowed.

Our portier said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul, who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said: “Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of the noble families of Ferrara.”

VI.

The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic strength. The daylight took nothing of this charm from it; for the castle stands isolated in the midst of the city, as its founder meant that it should [The castle of Ferrara was begun in 1385 by Niccolò d’Este to defend himself against the repetition of scenes of tumult, in which his princely rights were invaded. One of his tax-gatherers, Tommaso da Tortona, had, a short time before, made himself so obnoxious to the people by his insolence and severity, that they rose against him and demanded his life. He took refuge in the palace of his master, which was immediately assailed. The prince’s own life was threatened, and he was forced to surrender the fugitive to the people, who tore Tortona limb from limb, and then, after parading the city with the mutilated remains, quietly returned to their allegiance. Niccolò, therefore, caused this castle to be built, which he strengthened with massive walls and towers commanding the whole city, and rendered inaccessible by surrounding it with a deep and wide canal from the river Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the old edifice; it is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the clerks their coffee in very dirty little pots. Dreary-looking suitors, slowly grinding through the mills of law, or passing in the routine of the offices, are the guests encountered in the corridors; and all that bright-colored throng of the old days, ladies and lords, is passed from the scene. The melodrama is over, friends, and now we have a play of real life, founded on fact and inculcating a moral.

Of course the custodians were slow to admit any change of this kind. If you could have believed them, — and the poor people told as many lies as they could to make you, — you would believe that nothing had ever happened of a commonplace nature in this castle. The taking-off of Hugo and Parisina they think the great merit of the castle; and one of them, seeing us, made haste to light his taper and conduct us down to the dungeons where those unhappy lovers were imprisoned. It is the misfortune of memorable dungeons to acquire, when put upon show, just the reverse of those properties which should raise horror and distress in the mind of the beholder. It was impossible to deny that the cells of Parisina and of Hugo were both singularly warm, dry, and comfortable; and we, who had never been imprisoned in them, found it hard to command, for our sensation, the terror and agony of the miserable ones who suffered there. We, happy and secure in these dungeons, could not think of the guilty and wretched pair bowing themselves to the headsman’s stroke in the gloomy chamber under the Hall of Aurora; nor of the Marquis, in his night-long walk, breaking at last into frantic remorse and tears to know that his will had been accomplished. Nay, there upon its very scene, the whole tragedy faded from us; and, seeing our wonder so cold, the custodian tried to kindle it by saying that in the time of the event these cells were much dreadfuller than now, which was no doubt true. The floors of the dungeons are both below the level of the moat, and the narrow windows, or rather crevices to admit the light, were cut in the prodigiously thick wall just above the water, and were defended with four successive iron gratings. The dungeons are some distance apart: that of Hugo was separated from the outer wall of the castle by a narrow passage-way, while Parisina’s window opened directly upon the moat.

When we ascended again to the court of the castle, the custodian, abetted by his wife, would have interested us in two memorable wells there, between which, he said, Hugo was beheaded; and unabashed by the small success of this fable, he pointed out two windows in converging angles overhead, from one of which the Marquis, looking into the other, discovered the guilt of the lovers. The windows are now walled up, but are neatly represented to the credulous eye by a fresco of lattices.

Valery mentions another claim upon the interest of the tourist which this castle may make, in the fact that it once sheltered John Calvin, who was protected by the Marchioness Renée, wife of Hercules II.; and my Servitore di Piazza (the one who knows how to read and write) gives the following account of the matter, in speaking of the domestic chapel which Renée had built in the castle: “This lady was learned in belles-lettres and in the schismatic doctrines which at that time were insinuating themselves throughout France and Germany, and with which Calvin, Luther, and other proselytes, agitated the people, and threatened war to the Catholic religion. Nationally fond of innovation, and averse to the court of Rome on account of the dissensions between her father and Pope Julius II., Renée began to receive the teachings of Calvin, with whom she maintained correspondence. Indeed, Calvin himself, under the name of Huppeville, visited her in Ferrara, in 1536, and ended by corrupting her mind and seducing her into his own errors, which produced discord between her and her religious husband, and resulted in his placing her in temporary seclusion, in order to attempt her conversion. Hence, the chapel is faced with marble, paneled in relief, and studied to avoid giving place to saints or images, which were disapproved by the almost Anabaptist doctrines of Calvin, then fatally imbibed by the princess.”

We would willingly, as Protestants, have visited this wicked chapel; but we were prevented from seeing it, as well as the famous frescoes of Dosso Dossi in the Hall of Aurora, by the fact that the prefect was giving a little dinner (pranzetto) in that part of the castle. We were not so greatly disappointed in reality as we made believe; but our servitore di piazza (the unlettered one) was almost moved to lesa maestà with vexation. He had been full of scorching patriotism the whole morning; but now electing the unhappy and apologetic custodian representative of Piedmontese tyranny, he bitterly assailed the government of the king. In the times of His Holiness the Legates had made it their pleasure and duty to show the whole castle to strangers. But now strangers must be sent away without seeing its chief beauties, because, forsooth, the prefect was giving a little dinner. Presence of the Devil!

VII.

In our visits to the different churches in Ferrara we noticed devotion in classes of people who are devout nowhere else in Italy. Not only came solid-looking business men to say their prayers, but gay young dandies, who knelt and repeated their orisons and then rose and went seriously out. In Venice they would have posted themselves against a pillar, sucked the heads of their sticks, and made eyes at the young ladies kneeling near them. This degree of religion was all the more remarkable in Ferrara, because that city had been so many years under the Pope, and His Holiness contrives commonly to prevent the appearance of religion in young men throughout his dominions.

Valery speaks of the delightful society which he met in the gray old town; and it is said that Ferrara has an unusual share of culture in her wealthy class, which is large. With such memories of learning and literary splendor as belong to her, it would be strange if she did not in some form keep alive the sacred flame. But, though there may be refinement and erudition in Ferrara, she has given no great name to modern Italian literature. Her men of letters seem to be of that race of grubs singularly abundant in Italy, — men who dig out of archives and libraries some topic of special and momentary interest and print it, unstudied and unphilosophized. Their books are material, not literature, and it is marvelous how many of them are published. A writer on any given subject can heap together from them a mass of fact and anecdote invaluable in its way; but it is a mass without life or light, and must be vivified by him who uses it before it can serve the world, which does not care for its dead local value. It remains to be seen whether the free speech and free press of Italy can reawaken the intellectual activity of the cities which once gave the land so many literary capitals.

What numbers of people used to write verses in Ferrara! By operation of the principle which causes things concerning whatever subject you happen to be interested in to turn up in every direction, I found a volume of these dead-and-gone immortals at a book-stall, one day, in Venice. It is a curiously yellow and uncomfortable volume of the year 1703, printed all in italics. I suppose there are two hundred odd rhymers selected from in that book, — and how droll the most of them are, with their unmistakable traces of descent from Ariosto, Tasso, and Guarini! What acres of enameled meadow there are in those pages! Brooks enough to turn all the mills in the world go purling through them. I should say some thousands of nymphs are constantly engaged in weaving garlands there, and the swains keep such a piping on those familiar notes, — Amore, dolore, crudele, and miele. Poor little poets! they knew no other tunes. Do not now weak voices twitter from a hundred books, in unconscious imitation of the hour’s great singers?

I think some of the pleasantest people in Italy are the army gentlemen. There is the race’s gentleness in their ways, in spite of their ferocious trade, and an American freedom of style. They brag in a manner that makes one feel at home immediately; and met in travel, they are ready to render any little kindness.

The other year at Reggio (which is not far from Modena) we stopped to dine at a restaurant where the whole garrison had its coat off and was playing billiards, with the exception of one or two officers, who were dining. These rose and bowed as we entered their room, and when the waiter pretended that such and such dishes were out (in Italy the waiter, for some mysterious reason, always pretends that the best dishes are out), they bullied him for the honor of Italy, and made him bring them to us. Indeed, I am afraid his life was sadly harassed by those brave men. We were in deep despair at finding no French bread, and the waiter swore with the utmost pathos that there was none; but as soon as his back was turned, a tightly laced little captain rose and began to forage for the bread. He opened every drawer and cupboard in the room, and finding none, invaded another room, captured several loaves from the plates laid there, and brought them back in triumph, presenting them to us amid the applause of his comrades. The dismay of the waiter, on his return, was ineffable.

Three officers, who dined with us at the table d’hôte of the Stella d’Oro in Ferrara (and excellent dinners were those we ate there), were visibly anxious to address us, and began not uncivilly, but still in order that we should hear, to speculate on our nationality among themselves. It appeared that we were Germans; for one of these officers, who had formerly been in the Austrian service at Vienna, recognized the word bitter in our remarks on the beccafichi. As I did not care to put these fine fellows to the trouble of hating us for others’ faults, I made bold to say that we were not Germans, and to add that bitter was also an English word. Ah! yes, to be sure, one of them admitted; when he was with the Sardinian army in the Crimea, he had frequently heard the word used by the English soldiers. He nodded confirmation of what he said to his comrades, and then was good enough to display what English he knew. It was barely sufficient to impress his comrades; but it led the way to a good deal of talk in Italian.

“I suppose you gentlemen are all Piedmontese?” I said.

“Not at all,” said our Crimean. “I am from Como; this gentleman, il signor Conte, (il signor Conte bowed,) is of Piacenza; and our friend across the table is Genoese. The army is doing a great deal to unify Italy. We are all Italians now, and you see we speak Italian, and not our dialects, together.”

My cheap remark that it was a fine thing to see them all united under one flag, after so many ages of mutual hate and bloodshed, turned the talk upon the origin of the Italian flag; and that led our Crimean to ask what was the origin of the English colors.

“I scarcely know,” I said. “We are Americans.”

Our friends at once grew more cordial. “Oh, Americani!” They had great pleasure of it. Did we think Signor Leencolen would be reëlected?

I supposed that he had been elected that day, I said.

Ah! this was the election day, then. Cospetto!

At this the Genoese frowned superior intelligence, and the Crimean gazing admiringly upon him, said he had been nine months at Nuova York, and that he had a brother living there. The poor Crimean boastfully added that he himself had a cousin in America, and that the Americans generally spoke Spanish. The count from Piacenza wore an air of pathetic discomfiture, and tried to invent a transatlantic relative, as I think, but failed.

I am persuaded that none of these warriors really had kinsmen in America, but that they all pretended to have them, out of politeness to us, and that they believed each other. It was very kind of them, and we were so grateful that we put no embarrassing questions. Indeed, the conversation presently took another course, and grew to include the whole table.

There was an extremely pretty Italian present with her newly wedded husband, who turned out to be a retired officer. He fraternized at once with our soldiers, and when we left the table they all rose and made military obeisances. Having asked leave to light their cigars, they were smoking — the sweet young bride blowing a fairy cloud from her rosy lips with the rest. “Indeed,” I heard an Italian lady once remark, “why should men pretend to deny us the privilege of smoking? It is so pleasant and innocent.” It is but just to the Italians to say that they do not always deny it; and there is, without doubt, a certain grace and charm in a pretty fumatrice. I suppose it is a habit not so pleasing in an ugly or middle-aged woman.

IV.

THROUGH BOLOGNA TO GENOA.

I.

We had intended to stay only one day at Ferrara, but just at that time the storms predicted on the Adriatic and Mediterranean coasts, by Mathieu de la Drome, had been raging all over Italy, and the railway communications were broken in every direction. The magnificent work through and under the Apennines, between Bologna and Florence, had been washed away by the mountain torrents in a dozen places, and the roads over the plains of the Romagna had been sapped by the flood, and rendered useless, where not actually laid under water.

On the day of our intended departure we left the hotel, with other travellers, gayly incredulous of the landlord’s fear that no train would start for Bologna. At the station we found a crowd of people waiting and hoping, but there was a sickly cast of doubt in some faces, and the labeled employés of the railway wore looks of ominous importance. Of course the crowd did not lose its temper. It sought information of the officials running to and fro with telegrams, in a spirit of national sweetness, and consoled itself with saying, as Italy has said under all circumstances of difficulty for centuries: Ci vuol pazienza! At last a blank silence fell upon it, as the Capo-Stazione advanced toward a well-dressed man in the crowd, and spoke to him quietly. The well-dressed man lifted his forefinger and waved it back and forth before his face: —

The Well-dressed Man. — Dunque, non si parte più? (No departures, then?)

The Capo-Stazione (waving his forefinger in like manner.) — Non si parte più. (Like a mournful echo.)

We knew quite as well from this pantomime of negation as from the dialogue our sad fate, and submitted to it. Some adventurous spirit demanded whether any trains would go on the morrow. The Capo-Stazione, with an air of one who would not presume to fathom the designs of Providence, responded: “Who knows? To-day, certainly not. To-morrow, perhaps. But” — and vanished.

It may give an idea of the Italian way of doing things to say that, as we understood, this break in the line was only a few miles in extent, that trains could have approached both to and from Bologna, and that a little enterprise on the part of the company could have passed travellers from one side to the other with very small trouble or delay. But the railway company was as much daunted by the inundation as a peasant going to market, and for two months after the accident no trains carried passengers from one city to the other. No doubt, however, the line was under process of very solid repair meanwhile.

For the present the only means of getting to Bologna was by carriage on the old highway, and accordingly we took passage thither in the omnibus of the Stella d’Oro.

There was little to interest us in the country over which we rode. It is perfectly flat, and I suppose the reader knows what quantities of hemp and flax are raised there. The land seems poorer than in Lombardy, and the farm-houses and peasants’ cottages are small and mean, though the peasants themselves, when we met them, looked well fed, and were certainly well clad. The landscape lay soaking in a dreary drizzle the whole way, and the town of Cento when we reached it, seemed miserably conscious of being too wet and dirty to go in-doors, and was loitering about in the rain. Our arrival gave the poor little place a sensation, for I think such a thing as an omnibus had not been seen there since the railway of Bologna and Ferrara was built. We went into the principal caffè to lunch, — a caffè much too large for Cento, with immense red-leather cushioned sofas, and a cold, forlorn air of half-starved gentility, a clean, high-roofed caffè and a breezy, — and thither the youthful nobility and gentry of the place followed us, and ordered a cup of coffee, that they might sit down and give us the pleasure of their distinguished company. They put on their very finest manners, and took their most captivating attitudes for the ladies’ sake; and the gentlemen of our party fancied that it was for them these young men began to discuss the Roman question. How loud they were, and how earnest! And how often they consulted the newspapers of the caffè! (Older newspapers I never saw off a canal-boat.) I may tire some time of the artless vanity of the young Italians, so innocent, so amiable, so transparent, but I think I never shall.

The great painter Guercino was born at Cento, and they have a noble and beautiful statue of him in the piazza, which the town caused to be erected from contributions by all the citizens. Formerly his house was kept for a show to the public; it was full of the pictures of the painter and many mementos of him; but recently the paintings have been taken to the gallery, and the house is now closed. The gallery is, consequently, one of the richest second-rate galleries in Italy, and one may spend much longer time in it than we gave, with great profit. There are some most interesting heads of Christ, painted, as Guercino always painted the Saviour, with a great degree of humanity in the face. It is an excellent countenance, and full of sweet dignity, but quite different from the conventional face of Christ.

II.

At night we were again in Bologna, of which we had not seen the gloomy arcades for two years. It must be a dreary town at all times: in a rain it is horrible; and I think the whole race of arcaded cities, Treviso, Padua, and Bologna, are dull, blind, and comfortless. The effect of the buildings vaulted above the sidewalks is that of a continuous cellarway; your view of the street is constantly interrupted by the heavy brick pillars that support the arches; the arcades are not even picturesque. Liking always to leave Bologna as quickly as possible, and, on this occasion, learning that there was no hope of crossing the Apennines to Florence, we made haste to take the first train for Genoa, meaning to proceed thence directly to Naples by steamer.

It was a motley company that sat down in Hotel Brun the morning after our arrival in Bologna to a breakfast of murky coffee and furry beefsteaks, associated with sleek, greasy, lukewarm fried potatoes. I am sure that if each of our weather-bound pilgrims had told his story, we had been as well entertained as those at Canterbury. However, no one thought fit to give his narrative but a garrulous old Hebrew from London, who told us how he had been made to pay fifteen guineas for a carriage to cross the Apennines, and had been obliged to walk part of the way at that price. He was evidently proud, now the money was gone, of having been cheated of so much; and in him we saw that there was at least one human being more odious than a purse-proud Englishman — namely, a purse-proud English Jew. He gave his noble name after a while, as something too precious to be kept from the company, when recommending one of the travellers to go to the Hotel d’Angleterre in Rome: “The best ‘otel out of England. You may mention my name, if you like — Mr. Jonas.” The recipient of this favor noted down the talismanic words in his pocket-book, and Mr. Jonas, conscious of having conferred a benefit on his race, became more odious to it than ever. An Englishman is of a composition so uncomfortably original that no one can copy him, though many may caricature. I saw an American in London once who thought himself an Englishman because he wore leg-of-mutton whiskers, declaimed against universal suffrage and republics, and had an appetite for high game. He was a hateful animal, surely, but he was not the British lion; and this poor Hebrew at Bologna was not a whit more successful in his imitation of the illustrious brute, though he talked, like him, of nothing but hotels, and routes of travel, and hackmen and porters, and seemed to have nothing to do in Italy but get through it as quickly and abusively as possible.

We were very glad, I say, to part from all this at Bologna and take the noon train for Genoa. In our car there were none but Italians, and the exchange of “La Perseveranza” of Milan for “Il Popolo” of Turin with one of them quickly opened the way for conversation and acquaintance. (En passant: I know of no journal in the United States whose articles are better than those of the “Perseveranza,” and it was gratifying to an American to read in this ablest journal of Italy nothing but applause and encouragement of the national side in our late war.) My new-made friend turned out to be a Milanese. He was a physician, and had served as a surgeon in the late war of Italian independence; but was now placed in a hospital in Milan. There was a gentle little blonde with him, and at Piacenza, where we stopped for lunch, “You see,” said he, indicating the lady, “we are newly married,” — which was, indeed, plain enough to any one who looked at their joyous faces, and observed how great disposition that little blonde had to nestle on the young man’s broad shoulder. “I have a week’s leave from my place,” he went on, “and this is our wedding journey. We were to have gone to Florence, but it seems we are fated not to see that famous city.”

He spoke of it as immensely far off, and herein greatly amused us
Americans, who had outgrown distances.

“So we are going to Genoa instead, for two or three days.” “Oh, have you ever been at Genoa?” broke in the bride. “What magnificent palaces! And then the bay, and the villas in the environs! There is the Villa Pallavicini, with beautiful gardens, where an artificial shower breaks out from the bushes, and sprinkles the people who pass. Such fun!” and she continued to describe vividly a city of which she had only heard from her husband; and it was easy to see that she walked in paradise wherever he led her.

They say that Italian husbands and wives do not long remain fond of each other, but it was impossible in the presence of these happy people not to believe in the eternity of their love, and it was hard to keep from “dropping into poetry” on account of them. Their bliss infected every body in the car, and in spite of the weariness of our journey, and the vexation of the misadventures which had succeeded one another unsparingly ever since we left home, we found ourselves far on the way to Genoa before we thought to grumble at the distance. There was with us, besides the bridal party, a lady travelling from Bologna to Turin, who had learned English in London, and spoke it much better than most Londoners. It is surprising how thoroughly Italians master a language so alien to their own as ours, and how frequently you find them acquainted with English. From Russia the mania for this tongue has spread all over the Continent, and in Italy English seems to be prized first among the virtues.

As we drew near Genoa, the moon came out on purpose to show us the superb city, and we strove eagerly for a first glimpse of the proud capital where Columbus was born. To tell the truth, the glimpse was but slight and false, for railways always enter cities by some mean level, from which any picturesque view is impossible.

Near the station in Genoa, however, is the weak and ugly monument which the municipality has lately raised to Columbus. The moon made the best of this, which stands in a wide open space, and contrived, with an Italian skill in the arrangement of light, to produce an effect of undeniable splendor. On the morrow, we found out by the careless candor of the daylight what a uselessly big head Columbus had, and how the sculptor had not very happily thought proper to represent him with his sea-legs on.

V.

UP AND DOWN GENOA.

I had my note-book with me on this journey, and pledged myself to make notes in it. And, indeed, I did really do something of the kind, though the result of my labors is by no means so voluminous as I would like it to be, now when the work of wishing there were more notes is so easy. We spent but one day in Genoa, and I find such a marvelous succinct record of this in my book that I am tempted to give it here, after the fashion of that Historical Heavyweight who writes the Life of “Frederick the Great.”

“Genoa, November 13. — Breakfast à la fourchette excellently and cheaply. I buy a hat. We go to seek the Consul, and, after finding every thing else for two hours, find him. Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw; and the new monument to Columbus about the weakest possible monument. Walk through the city with Consul; Doge’s palace; cathedral; girl turning somersaults in the street; blind madman on the cathedral steps. We leave for Naples at twelve midnight.”

As for the breakfast, it was eaten at one of the many good caffè in Genoa, and perhaps some statistician will like to know that for a beefsteak and potatoes, with a half-bottle of Ligurian wine, we paid a franc. For this money we had also the society of an unoccupied waiter, who leaned against a marble column and looked on, with that gentle, half-compassionate interest in our appetites, which seems native to the tribe of waiters. A slight dash of surprise is in this professional manner; and there is a faint smile on the solemn, professional countenance, which is perhaps prompted by too intimate knowledge of the mysteries of the kitchen and the habits of the cook. The man who passes his life among beefsteaks cannot be expected to love them, or to regard without wonder the avidity with which others devour them. I imagine that service in restaurants must beget simple and natural tastes in eating, and that the jaded men who minister there to our pampered appetites demand only for themselves —

 ”A scrip with herbs and fruits supplied,
  And water from the spring.”

Turning from this thought to the purchase of my hat, I do not believe that literary art can interest the reader in that purely personal transaction, though I have no doubt that a great deal might be said about buying hats as a principle. I prefer, therefore, to pass to our search for the Consul.

A former Consul at —— , whom I know, has told me a good many stories about the pieces of popular mind which he received at different times from the travelling public, in reproof of his difficulty of discovery; and I think it must be one of the most jealously guarded rights of American citizens in foreign lands to declare the national representative hard to find, if there is no other complaint to lodge against him. It seems to be, in peculiar degree, a quality of consulship at —— , to be found remote and inaccessible. My friend says that even at New York, before setting out for his post, when inquiring into the history of his predecessors, he heard that they were one and all hard to find; and he relates that on the steamer, going over, there was a low fellow who set the table in a roar by a vulgar anecdote to this effect: —

“There was once a consul at —— , who indicated his office-hours by the legend on his door, ‘In from ten to one.’ An old ship-captain, who kept coming for about a week without finding the Consul, at last furiously wrote, in the terms of wager, under this legend, ‘Ten to one you’re out!’”

My friend also states that one day a visitor of his remarked: “I’m rather surprised to find you in. As a general rule, I never do find consuls in.” Habitually, his fellow-countrymen entertained him with accounts of their misadventures in reaching him. It was useless to represent to them that his house was in the most convenient locality in —— , where, indeed, no stranger can walk twenty rods from his hotel without losing himself; that their guide was an ass, or their courier a rogue. They listened to him politely, but they never pardoned him in the least; and neither will I forgive the Consul at Genoa. I had no earthly consular business with him, but a private favor to ask. It was Sunday, and I could not reasonably expect to find him at his office, or any body to tell me where he lived; but I have seldom had so keen a sense of personal wrong and national neglect as in my search for that Consul’s house.

In Italy there is no species of fact with which any human being you meet will not pretend to have perfect acquaintance, and, of course, the driver whose fiacre we took professed himself a complete guide to the Consul’s whereabouts, and took us successively to the residences of the consuls of all the South American republics. It occurred to me that it might be well to inquire of these officials where their colleague was to be found; but it is true that not one consul of them was at home! Their doors were opened by vacant old women, in whom a vague intelligence feebly guttered, like the wick of an expiring candle, and who, after feigning to throw floods of light on the object of my search, successively flickered out, and left me in total darkness.

Till that day, I never knew of what lofty flights stairs were capable. As out-of-doors, in Genoa, it is either all up or down hill, so in-doors it is either all up or down stairs. Ascending and descending, in one palace after another, those infinite marble steps, it became a question not solved to this hour, whether it was worse to ascend or descend, — each ordeal in its turn seemed so much more terrible than the other.

At last I resolved to come to an understanding with the driver, and I spent what little breath I had left — it was dry and hot as the simoom — in blowing up that infamous man. “You are a great driver,” I said, “not to know your own city. What are you good for if you can’t take a foreigner to his consul’s?” “Signore,” answered the driver patiently, “you would have to get a book in two volumes by heart, in order to be able to find everybody in Genoa. This city is a labyrinth.”

Truly, it had so proved, and I could scarcely believe in my good luck when I actually found my friend, and set out with him on a ramble through its toils.

A very great number of the streets in Genoa are footways merely, and these are as narrow, as dark, as full of jutting chimney-places, balconies, and opened window-shutters, and as picturesque as the little alleys in Venice. They wander at will around the bases of the gloomy old stone palaces, and seem to have a vagabond fondness for creeping down to the port, and losing themselves there in a certain cavernous arcade which curves round the water with the flection of the shore, and makes itself a twilight at noonday. Under it are clangorous shops of iron-smiths, and sizzling shops of marine cooks, and, looking down its dim perspective, one beholds chiefly sea-legs coming and going, more or less affected by strong waters; and as the faces to which these sea-legs belong draw near, one discerns sailors from all parts of the world, — tawny men from Sicily and Norway, as diverse in their tawniness as olive and train-oil; sharp faces from Nantucket and from the Piraeus, likewise mightily different in their sharpness; blonde Germans and blonde Englishmen; and now and then a colored brother also in the seafaring line, with sea-legs, also, more or less affected by strong waters like the rest.

What curious people are these seafarers! They coast the whole world, and know nothing of it, being more ignorant and helpless than children on shore. I spoke with the Yankee mate of a ship one day at Venice, and asked him how he liked the city.

Well, he had not been ashore yet.

He was told he had better go ashore; that the Piazza San Marco was worth seeing.

Well, he knew it; he had seen pictures of it; but he guessed he wouldn’t go ashore.

Why not, now he was here?

Well, he laid out to go ashore the next time he came to Venice.

And so, bless his honest soul, he lay three weeks at Venice with his ship, after a voyage of two months, and he sailed away without ever setting his foot on that enchanted ground.

I should have liked to stop some of those seafarers and ask them what they thought of Genoa.

It must have been in the little streets — impassable for horses — that the people sat and talked, as Heine fabled, in their doorways, and touched knees with the people sitting and talking on the thresholds of the opposite side. But we saw no gossipers there on our Sunday in Genoa; and I think the domestic race of Heine’s day no longer lives in Genoa, for every body we saw on the streets was gayly dressed in the idea of the last fashions, and was to be met chiefly in the public promenades. The fashions were French; but here still lingers the lovely phantom of the old national costume of Genoa, and snow-white veils fluttered from many a dark head, and caressed many an olive cheek. It is the kindest and charitablest of attirements, this white veil, and, while decking beauty to the most perilous effect, befriends and modifies age and ugliness.

The pleasure with which I look at the splendor of an Italian crowd in winter is always touched with melancholy. I know that, at the time of its noonday promenade, it has nothing but a cup of coffee in its stomach; that it has emerged from a house as cold and dim as a cellar; and that it will presently go home to dine on rice and boiled beef. I know that chilblains secretly gnaw the hands inside of its kid gloves, and I see in the rawness of its faces the anguish of winter-long suffering from cold. But I also look at many in this crowd with the eye of the economist, and wonder how people practicing even so great self-denial as they can contrive to make so much display on their little means, — how those clerks of public offices, who have rarely an income of five hundred dollars a year, can dress with such peerless gorgeousness. I suppose the national instinct teaches them ways and means unknown to us. The passion for dress is universal: the men are as fond of it as the women; and, happily, clothes are comparatively cheap. It is no great harm in itself, this display: it is only a pity that there is often nothing, or worse than nothing, under the shining surface.

We walked with the brilliant Genoese crowd upon the hill where the public promenade overlooks a landscape of city and country, houses and gardens, vines and olives, which it makes the heart ache to behold, it is so faultlessly beautiful. Behind us the fountain was —

“Shaking its loosened silver in the sun;”

the birds were singing; and there were innumerable fair girls going by, about whom one might have made romances if one had not known better. Our friend pointed out to us the “pink jail” in which Dickens lived while at Genoa; and showed us on the brow of a distant upland the villa, called Il Paradiso, which Byron had occupied. I dare say this Genoese joke is already in print: That the Devil reëntered Paradise when Byron took this villa. Though, in loveliest Italy, one is half-persuaded that the Devil had never left Paradise.

After lingering a little longer on that delicious height, we turned and went down for a stroll through the city.

My note-book says that Genoa is the most magnificent city I ever saw, and I hold by my note-book, though I hardly know how to prove it. Venice is, and remains, the most beautiful city in the world; but her ancient rival impresses you with greater splendor. I suppose that the exclusively Renaissance architecture, which Ruskin declares the architecture of pride, lends itself powerfully to this effect in Genoa. It is here in its best mood, and there is little grotesque Renaissance to be seen, though the palaces are, as usual, loaded with ornament. The Via Nuova is the chief thoroughfare of the city, and the crowd pours through this avenue between long lines of palaces. Height on height rise the stately, sculptured façades, colonnaded, statued, pierced by mighty doorways and lofty windows; and the palaces seem to gain a kind of aristocratic hauteur from the fact that there are for the most part no sidewalks, and that the carriages, rolling insolently through the crowd, threaten constantly to grind the pedestrian up against their carven marbles, and immolate him to their stony pride. There is something gracious and gentle in the grandeur of Venice, and much that the heart loves to cling to; but in Genoa no sense of kindliness is touched by the magnificence of the city.

It was an unspeakable relief, after such a street, to come, on a sudden, upon the Duomo, one of the few Gothic buildings in Genoa, and rest our jaded eyes on that architecture which Heaven seems truly to have put into the thoughts of man together with the Christian faith. O beloved beauty of aspiring arches, of slender and clustered columns, of flowering capitals and window-traceries, of many-carven breadths and heights, wherein all Nature breathes and blossoms again! There is neither Greek perfection, nor winning Byzantine languor, nor insolent Renaissance opulence, which may compare with this loveliness of yours! Alas that the interior of this Gothic temple of Genoa should abound in the abomination of rococo restoration! They say that the dust of St. John the Baptist lies there within a costly shrine; and I wonder that it can sleep in peace amid all that heathenish show of bad taste. But the poor saints have to suffer a great deal in Italy.

Outside, in the piazza before the church, there was an idle, cruel crowd, amusing itself with the efforts of a blind old man to find the entrance. He had a number of books which he desperately laid down while he ran his helpless hands over the clustered columns, and which he then desperately caught up again, in fear of losing them. At other times he paused, and wildly clasped his hands upon his eyes, or wildly threw up his arms; and then began to run to and fro again uneasily, while the crowd laughed and jeered. Doubtless a taint of madness afflicted him; but not the less he seemed the type of a blind soul that gropes darkly about through life, to find the doorway of some divine truth or beauty, — touched by the heavenly harmonies from within, and miserably failing, amid the scornful cries and bitter glee of those who have no will but to mock aspiration.

The girl turning somersaults in another place had far more popular sympathy than the blind madman at the temple door, but she was hardly a more cheerful spectacle. For all her festive spangles and fairy-like brevity of skirts, she had quite a work-a-day look upon her honest, blood-red face, as if this were business though it looked like sport, and her part of the diversion were as practical as that of the famous captain of the waiters, who gave the act of peeling a sack of potatoes a playful effect by standing on his head. The poor damsel was going over and over, to the sound of most dismal drumming and braying, in front of the immense old palace of the Genoese Doges, — a classic building, stilted on a rustic base, and quite worthy of Palladio, if any body thinks that is praise.

There was little left of our day when we had dined; but having seen the outside of Genoa, and not hoping to see the inside, we found even this little heavy on our hands, and were glad as the hour drew near when we were to take the steamer for Naples.

It had been one of the noisiest days spent during several years in clamorous Italy, whose voiceful uproar strikes to the summits of her guardian Alps, and greets the coming stranger, and whose loud Addio would stun him at parting, if he had not meanwhile become habituated to the operatic pitch of her every-day tones. In Genoa, the hotels, taking counsel of the vagabond streets, stand about the cavernous arcade already mentioned, and all the noise of the shipping reaches their guests. We rose early that Sunday morning to the sound of a fleet unloading cargoes of wrought-iron, and of the hard swearing of all nations of seafaring men. The whole day long the tumult followed us, and seemed to culminate at last in the screams of a parrot, who thought it fine to cry, “Piove! piove! piove!”— “It rains! it rains! it rains!” — and had, no doubt, a secret interest in some umbrella-shop. This unprincipled bird dwelt somewhere in the neighborhood of the street where you see the awful tablet in the wall devoting to infamy the citizens of the old republic that were false to their country. The sight of that pitiless stone recalls with a thrill the picturesque, unhappy past, with all the wandering, half-benighted efforts of the people to rend their liberty from now a foreign and now a native lord. At best, they only knew how to avenge their wrongs; but now, let us hope, they have learnt, with all Italy, to prevent them. The will was never wanting of old to the Ligurian race, and in this time they have done their full share to establish Italian freedom.

I do not know why it should have been so surprising to hear the boatman who rowed us to the steamer’s anchorage speak English; but, after his harsh Genoese profanity in getting his boat into open water, it was the last thing we expected from him. It had somehow the effect of a furious beast addressing you in your native tongue, and telling you it was “Wary poordy wedder;” and it made us cling to his good-nature with the trembling solicitude of Little Red-Riding-Hood, when she begins to have the first faint suspicions of her grandmother. However, our boatman was no wild beast, but took our six cents of buonamano with the base servility of a Christian man, when he had put our luggage in the cabin of the steamer. I wonder how he should have known us for Americans? He did so know us, and said he had been at New York in better days, when he voyaged upon higher seas than those he now navigated.

On board, we watched with compassion an old gentleman in the cabin making a hearty meal of sardines and fruit-pie, and I asked him if he had ever been at sea. No, he said. I could have wept over that innocent old gentleman’s childlike confidence of appetite, and guileless trust of the deep.

We went on deck, where one of the gentle beings of our party declared that she would remain as long as Genoa was in sight; and to tell the truth, the scene was worthy of the promised devotion. There, in a half-circle before us, blazed the lights of the quay; above these twinkled the lamps of the steep streets and climbing palaces; over and behind all hung the darkness on the heights, — a sable cloud dotted with ruddy points of flame burning in the windows of invisible houses.

“Merrily did we drop”

down the bay, and presently caught the heavy swell of the open sea. The other gentle being of our party then clutched my shoulder with a dreadful shudder, and after gasping, “O Mr. Scribbler, why will the ship roll so?” was meekly hurried below by her sister, who did not return for a last glimpse of Genoa the Proud.

In a moment heaven’s sweet pity flapped away as with the sea-gull’s wings, and I too felt that there was no help for it, and that I must go and lie down in the cabin. With anguished eyes I beheld upon the shelf opposite to mine the innocent old gentleman who had lately supped so confidently on sardines and fruit-pie. He lay upon his back, groaning softly to himself.

VI.

BY SEA FROM GENOA TO NAPLES.

I.

Like the Englishman who had no prejudices, I do hate a Frenchman; and there were many Frenchmen among our passengers on the Messina, in whose company I could hardly have been happy, had I not seen them horribly sea-sick. After the imprudent old gentleman of the sardines and fruit-pie, these wretched Gauls were the first to be seized with the malady, which became epidemic, and were miserable up to the last moment on board. To the enormity of having been born Frenchmen, they added the crime of being commercial travellers, — a class of fellow-men of whom we know little at home, but who are met everywhere in European travel. They spend more than half their lives in movement from place to place, and they learn to snatch from every kind of travel its meagre comforts, with an insolent disregard of the rights and feelings of other passengers. They excuse an abominable trespass with a cool “Pardon!” take the best seat everywhere, and especially treat women with a savage rudeness, to which an American vainly endeavors to accustom his temper. I have seen commercial travellers of all nations, and I think I must award the French nation the discredit of producing the most odious commercial travellers in the world. The Englishman of this species wraps himself in his rugs, and rolls into his corner, defiantly, but not aggressively, boorish; the Italian is almost a gentleman; the German is apt to take sausage out of a newspaper and eat it with his penknife; the Frenchman aggravates human nature beyond endurance by his restless ill-breeding, and his evident intention not only to keep all his own advantages, but to steal some of yours upon the first occasion. There were three of these monsters on our steamer: one a slight, bloodless young man, with pale blue eyes and an incredulous grin; another, a gigantic full-bearded animal in spectacles; the third an infamous plump little creature, in absurdly tight pantaloons, with a cast in his eye, and a habit of sucking his teeth at table. When this wretch was not writhing in the agonies of sea-sickness, he was on deck with his comrades, lecturing them upon various things, to which the bloodless young man listened with his incredulous grin, and the bearded giant in spectacles attended with a choked look about the eyes, like a suffering ox. They were constantly staggering in and out of their state-room, which, for my sins, was also mine; and opening their abominable commodious travelling bags, or brushing their shaggy heads at the reeling mirror, and since they were born into the world, I think they had never cleaned their finger-nails. They wore their hats at dinner, but always went away, after soup, deadly pale.

II.

In contrast with these cattle, what polished and courtly gentlemen were the sailors and firemen! As for our captain, he would in any company have won notice for his gentle and high-bred way; in his place at the head of the table among these Frenchmen, he seemed to me the finest gentleman I had ever seen. He had spent his whole life at sea, and had voyaged in all parts of the world except Japan, where he meant some day, he said, to go. He had been first a cabin-boy on a little Genoese schooner, and he had gradually risen to the first place on a sailing-vessel, and now he had been selected to fill a commander’s post on this line of steamers. (It is an admirable line of boats, not belonging I believe to the Italian government, but much under its control, leaving Genoa every day for Leghorn, Naples, Palermo, and Ancona, on the Adriatic coast.) The captain had sailed a good deal in American waters, but chiefly on the Pacific coast, trading from the Spanish republican ports to those of California. He had been in that State during its effervescent days, when every thing foul floated to the top, and I am afraid he formed there but a bad opinion of our people, though he was far too courteous to say outright any thing of this sort.

He had very fine, shrewd blue eyes, a lean, weather-beaten, kindly face, and a cautious way of saying things. I hardly expected him to turn out so red-hot a Democrat as he did on better acquaintance, but being a warm friend of man myself, I was not sorry. Garibaldi was the beginning and ending of his political faith, as he is with every enthusiastic Italian. The honest soul’s conception of all concrete evil was brought forth in two words, of odd enough application. In Europe, and Italy more particularly, true men have suffered chiefly from this form of evil, and the captain evidently could conceive of no other cause of suffering anywhere. We were talking of the American war, and when the captain had asked the usual question, “Quando finirà mai questa guerra?” and I had responded as usual, “Ah, ci vuol pazienza!” the captain gave a heavy sigh, and turning his head pensively aside, plucked his grapes from the cluster a moment in silence.

Then he said: “You Americans are in the habit of attributing this war to slavery. The cause is not sufficient.”

I ventured to demur and explain. “No,” said the captain, “the cause is not sufficient. We Italians know the only cause which could produce a war like this.”

I was naturally anxious to be instructed in the Italian theory, hoping it might be profounder than the English notion that we were fighting about tariffs.

The captain frowned, looked at me carefully, and then said: —

“In this world there is but one cause of mischief — the Jesuits.”

III.

The first night out, from Genoa to Leghorn, was bad enough, but that which succeeded our departure from the latter port was by far the worst of the three we spent in our voyage to Naples. How we envied the happy people who went ashore at Leghorn! I think we even envied the bones of the Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese who met and slew each other in the long-forgotten sea-fights, and sank too deeply through the waves to be stirred by their restless tumult. Every one has heard tell of how cross and treacherous a sea the Mediterranean is in winter, and my own belief is, that he who has merely been sea-sick on the Atlantic should give the Mediterranean a trial before professing to have suffered every thing of which human nature is capable. Our steamer was clean enough and staunch enough, but she was not large — no bigger, I thought, than a gondola, that night as the waves tossed her to and fro, till unwinged things took flight all through her cabins and over her decks. My berth was placed transversely instead of lengthwise with the boat, — an ingenious arrangement to heighten sea-sick horrors, and dash the blood of the sufferer from brain to boots with exaggerated violence at each roll of the boat; and I begged the steward to let me sleep upon one of the lockers in the cabin. I found many of my agonized species already laid out there; and the misery of the three French commercial travellers was so great, that, in the excess of my own dolor, it actually afforded me a kind of happiness, and I found myself smiling at times to see the giant, with the eyes of a choked ox, rise up and faintly bellow. Indeed, there was something eldritch and unearthly in the whole business, and I think a kind of delirium must have resulted from the sea-sickness. Otherwise, I shall not know how to account for having attributed a kind of consciousness and individuality to the guide-book of a young American who had come aboard at Leghorn. He turned out afterward to be the sweetest soul in the world, and I am sorry now that I regarded with amusement his failure to smoke off his sickness. He was reading his guide-book with great diligence and unconcern, when suddenly I marked him lay it softly, softly down, with that excessive deliberation which men use at such times, and vanish with great dignity from the scene. Thus abandoned to its own devices, this guide-book began its night-long riots, setting out upon a tour of the cabin with the first lurch of the boat that threw it from the table upon the floor. I heard it careen at once wildly to the cabin door, and knock to get out; and failing in this, return more deliberately to the stern of the boat, interrogating the tables and chairs, which had got their sea-legs on, and asking them how they found themselves. Arrived again at the point of starting, it seemed to pause a moment, and then I saw it setting forth on a voyage of pleasure in the low company of a French hat, which, being itself a French book, I suppose it liked. In these travels they both ran under the feet of one of the stewards and were replaced by an immense tour de force on the table, from which the book eloped again, — this time in company with an overcoat; but it seemed the coat was too miserable to go far: it stretched itself at full length on the floor, and suffered the book to dance over it, back and forth, I know not how many times. At last, as the actions of the book were becoming unendurable, and the general sea-sickness was waxing into a frenzy, a heavy roll, that made the whole ship shriek and tremble, threw us all from our lockers; and gathering myself up, bruised and sore in every fibre, I lay down again and became sensible of a blissful, blissful lull; the machinery had stopped, and with the mute hope that we were all going to the bottom, I fell tranquilly asleep.

IV.

It appeared that the storm had really been dangerous. Instead of being only six hours from Naples, as we ought to be at this time, we were got no further than Porto Longone, in the Isle of Elba. We woke in a quiet, sheltered little bay, whence we could only behold, not feel, the storm left far out upon the open sea. From this we turned our heavy eyes gladly to the shore, where a white little town was settled, like a flight of gulls upon the beach, at the feet of green and pleasant hills, whose gentle lines rhymed softly away against the sky. At the end of either arm of the embracing land in which we lay, stood gray, placid old forts, with peaceful sentries pacing their bastions, and weary ships creeping round their feet, under guns looking out so kindly and harmlessly, that I think General —— himself would not have hesitated (except, perhaps, from a profound sentiment of regret for offering the violence) to attack them. Our port was full of frightened shipping — steamers, brigs, and schooners — of all sizes and nations; and since it was our misfortune that Napoleon spent his exile in Elba at Porto Ferrato instead of Porto Longone, we amused ourselves with looking at the vessels and the white town and the soft hills, instead of hunting up dead lion’s tracks.

Our fellow-passengers began to develop themselves: the regiment of soldiers whom we were transporting picturesquely breakfasted forward, and the second-cabin people came aft to our deck, while the English engineer (there are English engineers on all the Mediterranean steamers) planted a camp-stool in a sunny spot, and sat down to read the “Birmingham Express.”

Our friends of the second cabin were chiefly officers with their wives and families, and they talked for the most part of their sufferings during the night. They spoke such exquisite Italian that I thought them Tuscans, but they told me they were of Sicily, where their beautiful speech first had life. Let us hear what they talked of in their divine language, and with that ineffable tonic accent which no foreigner perfectly acquires, and let us for once translate the profanities Pagan and Christian, which adorn common parlance in Italy: —

“Ah, my God! how much I suffered!” says a sweet little woman with gentle brown eyes, red, red lips, and blameless Greek lines of face. “I broke two basins!”

“There were ten broken in all, by Diana!” says this lady’s sister.

“Presence of the Devil!” says her husband; and

“Body of Bacchus!” her young brother, puffing his cigar.

“And you, sir,” said the lady, turning to a handsome young fellow in civil dress, near her, “how did you pass this horrible night?”

“Oh!” says the young man, twirling his heavy blond mustache, “mighty well, mighty well!”

“Oh mercy of God! You were not sick?”

“I, signora, am never sea-sick. I am of the navy.”

At which they all cry oh, and ah, and declare they are glad of it, though why they should have been I don’t know to this day.

“I have often wished,” added the young man meditatively, and in a serious tone, as if he had indeed given the subject much thought, “that it might please God to let me be sea-sick once, if only that I might know how it feels. But no!” He turned the conversation, as if his disappointment were too sore to dwell upon; and hearing our English, he made out to let us know that he had been at New York, and could spik our language, which he proceeded to do, to the great pride of his countrymen, and our own astonishment at the remarkable forms of English speech to which he gave utterance.

V.

We set out from Porto Longone that night at eight o’clock, and next evening, driving through much-abated storm southward into calm waters and clear skies, reached Naples. At noon, Monte Circeo where Circe led her disreputable life, was a majestic rock against blue heaven and broken clouds; after nightfall, and under the risen moon, Vesuvius crept softly up from the sea, and stood a graceful steep, with wreaths of lightest cloud upon its crest, and the city lamps circling far round its bay.

VII.

CERTAIN THINGS IN NAPLES.

I.

Perhaps some reader of mine who visited Naples under the old disorder of things, when the Bourbon and the Camorra reigned, will like to hear that the pitched battle which travellers formerly fought, in landing from their steamer, is now gone out of fashion. Less truculent boatmen I never saw than those who rowed us ashore at Naples; they were so quiet and peaceful that they harmonized perfectly with that tranquil scene of drowsy-twinkling city lights, slumbrous mountains, and calm sea, and, as they dipped softly toward us in the glare of the steamer’s lamps, I could only think of Tennyson’s description: —

 ”And round about the keel with faces pale,
  Dark faces pale against the rosy flame,
  The mild-eyed melancholy lotus-eaters came.”

The mystery of this placidity had been already solved by our captain, whom I had asked what price I should bargain to pay from the steamer to the shore. “There is a tariff,” said he, “and the boatmen keep to it. The Neapolitans are good people, (buona gente,) and only needed justice to make them obedient to the laws.” I must say that I found this to be true. The fares of all public conveyances are now fixed, and the attempts which drivers occasionally make to cheat you, seem to be rather the involuntary impulses of old habit than deliberate intentions to do you wrong. You pay what is due, and as your man merely rumbles internally when you turn away, you must be a very timid signorin, indeed, if you buy his content with any thing more. I fancy that all these things are now much better managed in Italy than in America, only we grumble at them there and stand them in silence at home. Every one can recall frightful instances of plunder, in which he was the victim, at New York — in which the robbery had none of the neatness of an operation, as it often has in Italy, but was a brutal mutilation. And then as regards civility from the same kind of people in the two countries, there is no comparison that holds in favor of us. All questions are readily and politely answered in Italian travel, and the servants of companies are required to be courteous to the public whereas, one is only too glad to receive a silent snub from such people at home.

II.

The first sun that rose after our arrival in Naples was mild and warm as a May sun, though we were quite in the heart of November. We early strolled out under it into the crowded ways of the city, and drew near as we might to that restless, thronging, gossiping southern life, in contrast with which all northern existence seems only a sort of hibernation. The long Toledo, on which the magnificence of modern Naples is threaded, is the most brilliant and joyous street in the world; but I think there is less of the quaintness of Italian civilization to be seen in its vivacious crowds than anywhere else in Italy. One easily understands how, with its superb length and straightness, and its fine, respectable, commonplace-looking houses, it should be the pride of a people fond of show; but after Venice and Genoa it has no picturesque charm; nay, even busy Milan seems less modern and more picturesque. The lines of the lofty palaces on the Toledo are seldom broken by the façade of a church or other public edifice; and when this does happen, the building is sure to be coldly classic or frantically baroque.

You weary of the Toledo’s perfect repair, of its monotonous iron balconies, its monotonous lofty windows; and it would be insufferable if you could not turn out from it at intervals into one of those wondrous little streets which branch up on one hand and down on the other, rising and falling with flights of steps between the high, many-balconied walls. They ring all day with the motleyest life of fishermen, fruit-venders, chestnut-roasters, and idlers of every age and sex; and there is nothing so full of local color, unless it be the little up-and-down-hill streets in Genoa. Like those, the by-streets of Naples are only meant for foot-passengers, and a carriage never enters them; but sometimes, if you are so blest, you may see a mule climbing the long stairways, moving solemnly under a stack of straw, or tinkling gayly down-stairs, bestridden by a swarthy, handsome peasant — all glittering teeth and eyes and flaming Phrygian cap. The rider exchanges lively salutations and sarcasms with the by-standers in his way, and perhaps brushes against the bagpipers who bray constantly in those hilly defiles. They are in Neapolitan costume, these pifferari, and have their legs incomprehensibly tied up in the stockings and garters affected by the peasantry of the provinces, and wear brave red sashes about their waists. They are simple, harmless-looking people, and would no doubt rob and kill in the most amiable manner, if brigandage came into fashion in their neighborhood.

Sometimes the student of men may witness a Neapolitan quarrel in these streets, and may pick up useful ideas of invective from the remarks of the fat old women who always take part in the contests. But, though we were ten days in Naples, I only saw one quarrel, and I could have heard much finer violence of language among the gondoliers at any ferry in Venice than I heard in this altercation.

The Neapolitans are, of course, furious in traffic. They sell a great deal, and very boisterously, the fruit of the cactus, which is about as large as an egg, and which they peel to a very bloody pulp, and lay out, a sanguinary presence, on boards for purchase. It is not good to the uncultivated taste; but the stranger may stop and drink, with relish and refreshment, the orangeade and lemonade mixed with snow and sold at the little booths on the street-corners. These stands looks much like the shrines of the Madonna in other Italian cities, and a friend of ours was led, before looking carefully into their office, to argue immense Neapolitan piety from the frequency of their ecclesiastical architecture. They are, indeed, the shrines of a god much worshiped during the long Neapolitan summers; and it was the profound theory of the Bourbon kings of Naples, that, if they kept their subjects well supplied with snow to cool their drink, there was no fear of revolution. It shows how liable statesmen are to err, that, after all, the Neapolitans rose, drove out the Bourbons, and welcomed Garibaldi.

The only part of the picturesque life of the side streets which seems ever to issue from them into the Toledo is the goatherd with his flock of milch-goats, which mingle with the passers in the avenues as familiarly as with those of the alley, and thrust aside silk-hidden hoops, and brush against dandies’ legs, in their course, but keep on perfect terms with every body. The goatherd leads the eldest of the flock, and the rest follow in docile order and stop as he stops to ask at the doors if milk is wanted. When he happens to have an order, one of the goats is haled, much against her will, into the entry of a, house, and there milked, while the others wait outside alone, nibbling and smelling thoughtfully about the masonry. It is noticeable that none of the good-natured passers seem to think these goats a great nuisance in the crowded street; but all make way for them as if they were there by perfect right, and were no inconvenience.

On the Toledo people keep upon the narrow sidewalks, or strike out into the carriage-way, with an indifference to hoofs and wheels which one, after long residence in tranquil Venice, cannot acquire, in view of the furious Neapolitan driving. That old comprehensive gig of Naples, with which many pens and pencils have familiarized the reader, is nearly as hard to find there now as the lazzaroni, who have gone out altogether. You may still see it in the remoter quarters of the city, with its complement of twelve passengers to one horse, distributed, two on each thill, four on the top seats, one at each side, and two behind; but in the Toledo it has given place to much finer vehicles. Slight buggies, which take you anywhere for half a franc, are the favorite means of public conveyance, and the private turn-outs are of every description and degree. Indeed, all the Neapolitans take to carriages, and the Strand in London at six o’clock in the evening is not a greater jam of wheels than the Toledo in the afternoon. Shopping feels the expansive influence of the out-of-doors life, and ladies do most of it as they sit in their open carriages at the shop-doors, ministered to by the neat-handed shopmen. They are very languid ladies, as they recline upon their carriage cushions; they are all black-eyed, and of an olive pallor, and have gloomy rings about their fine eyes, like the dark-faced dandies who bow to them. This Neapolitan look is very curious, and I have not seen it elsewhere in Italy; it is a look of peculiar pensiveness, and comes, no doubt, from the peculiarly heavy growth of lashes which fringes the lower eyelid. Then there is the weariness in it of all peoples whose summers are fierce and long.

As the Italians usually dress beyond their means, the dandies of Naples are very gorgeous. If it is now, say, four o’clock in the afternoon, they are all coming down the Toledo with the streams of carriages bound for the long drive around the bay. But our foot-passers go to walk in the beautiful Villa Reale, between this course and the sea. The Villa is a slender strip of Paradise, a mile long; it is rapture to walk in it, and it comes, in description, to be a garden-grove, with feathery palms, Greekish temples, musical fountains, white statues of the gods, and groups of fair girls in spring silks. If I remember aright, the sun is always setting on the bay, and you cannot tell whether this sunset is cooled by the water or the water is warmed by the golden light upon it, and upon the city, and upon all the soft mountain-heights around.

III.

Walking westward through the whole length of the Villa Reale, and keeping with the crescent shore of the bay, you come, after a while, to the Grot of Posilippo, which is not a grotto but a tunnel cut for a carriage-way under the hill. It serves, however, the purpose of a grotto, if a grotto has any, and is of great length and dimness, and is all a-twinkle night and day with numberless lamps. Overlooking the street which passes into it is the tomb of Virgil, and it is this you have come to see. To reach it, you knock first at the door of a blacksmith, who calls a species of custodian, and, when this latter has opened a gate in a wall, you follow him up-stairs into a market-garden.

In one corner, and standing in a leafy and grassy shelter somewhat away from the vegetables, is the poet’s tomb, which has a kind of claim to genuineness by virtue of its improbable appearance. It looks more like a bake-oven than even the Pompeian tombs; the masonry is antique, and is at least in skillful imitation of the fine Roman work. The interior is a small chamber with vaulted or wagon-roof ceiling, under which a man may stand upright, and at the end next the street is a little stone commemorating the place as Virgil’s tomb, which was placed there by the Queen of France in 1840, and said by the custodian (a singularly dull ass) to be an exact copy of the original, whatever the original may have been. This guide could tell us nothing more about it, and was too stupidly honest to pretend to know more. The laurel planted by Petrarch at the door of the tomb, and renewed in later times by Casimir Delavigne, has been succeeded by a third laurel. The present twig was so slender, and looked so friendless and unprotected, that even enthusiasm for the memory of two poets could not be brought to rob it of one of its few leaves; and we contented ourselves with plucking some of the grass and weeds that grew abundantly on the roof of the tomb.

There was a dusty quiet within the tomb, and a grassy quiet without, that pleased exceedingly; but though the memories of the place were so high and epic, it only suggested bucolic associations, and, sunken into that nook of hill-side verdure, made me think of a spring-house on some far-away Ohio farm; a thought that, perhaps, would not have offended the poet, who loved and sang of humble country things, and, drawing wearily to his rest here, no doubt turned and remembered tenderly the rustic days before the excellent veterans of Augustus came to exile him from his father’s farm at Mantua, and banish him to mere glory. But I believe most travellers have much nobler sensations in Virgil’s tomb, and there is a great deal of testimony borne to their lofty sentiments on every scribbleable inch of its walls. Valery reminded me that Boccaccio, standing near it of old, first felt his fate decided for literature. Did he come there, I wonder, with poor Fiammetta, and enter the tomb with her tender hand in his, before ever he thought of that cruel absence she tells of? “O donne pietose!” I hope so, and that this pilgrimage, half of love and half of letters, took place, “nel tempo nel quale la rivestita terra più che tutto l’altro anno si mostra bella.”

If you ascend from the tomb and turn Naplesward from the crest of the hill, you have the loveliest view in the world of the sea and of the crescent beach, mightily jeweled at its further horn with the black Castel dell’ Ovo. Fishermen’s children are playing all along the foamy border of the sea, and boats are darting out into the surf. The present humble muse is not above saying also that the linen which the laundresses hang to dry upon lines along the beach takes the sun like a dazzling flight of white birds, and gives a breezy life to the scene which it could not spare.

IV.

There was a little church on our way back from Posilippo, into which we lounged a moment, pausing at the altar of some very successful saint near the door. Here there were great numbers of the usual offerings from the sick whom the saint had eased of their various ills, — waxen legs and arms from people who had been in peril of losing their limbs, as well as eyes, noses, fingers, and feet, and the crutches of those cured of lameness; but we were most amused with the waxen effigies of several entire babies hung up about the altar, which the poor souls who had been near losing the originals had brought there in gratitude to the saint.

Generally, however, the churches of Naples are not very interesting, and one who came away without seeing them would have little to regret. The pictures are seldom good, and though there are magnificent chapels in St. Januarius, and fine Gothic tombs at Santa Chiara, the architecture is usually rococo. I fancy that Naples has felt the damage of Spanish taste in such things as well as Spanish tyranny in others. Indeed, I saw much there which reminded me of what I had read about Spain rather than what I had seen in Italy; and all Italian writers are agreed in attributing the depravation of Naples to the long Spanish dominion. It is well known how the Spaniards rule their provinces, and their gloomy despotism was probably never more cruelly felt than in Italy, where the people were least able to bear it. I had a heart-felt exultation in walking through the quarter of the city where the tumults of Massaniello had raged, and, if only for a few days, struck mortal terror to the brutal pride of the viceroy; but I think I had a better sense of the immense retribution which has overtaken all memory of Spanish rule in Naples as we passed through the palace of Capo di Monte. This was the most splendid seat of the Spanish Bourbon, whose family, inheriting its power from the violence of other times, held it with violence in these; and in one of the chief saloons of the palace, which is now Victor Emanuel’s, were pictures representing scenes of the revolution of 1860, while the statuette of a Garibaldino, in his red shirt and all his heroic rudeness, was defiantly conspicuous on one of the tables.

V.

There was nothing else that pleased me as well in the palace, or in the grounds about it. These are all laid out in pleasant successions of grove, tangled wilderness, and pasture-land, and were thronged, the Saturday afternoon of our visit, with all ranks of people, who strolled through the beautiful walks and enjoyed themselves in the peculiarly peaceful Italian way. Valery says that the Villa Reale in the Bourbon time was closed, except for a single day in the year, to all but the nobles; and that on this occasion it was filled with pretty peasant women, who made it a condition of their marriage bargains that their husbands should bring them to the Villa Reale on St. Mary’s Day. It is now free to all on every day of the year, and the grounds of the Palace Capo di Monte are opened every Saturday. I liked the pleasant way in which sylvan Nature and Art had made friends in these beautiful grounds, in which Nature had consented to overlook even the foolish vanity of the long aisles of lime, cut and trimmed in formal and fantastic shapes, according to the taste of the silly times of bagwigs and patches. On every side wild birds fluttered through these absurd trees, and in the thickets lurked innumerable pheasants, which occasionally issued forth and stalked in stately, fearless groups over the sunset-crimsoned lawns. There was a brown gamekeeper for nearly every head of game, wearing a pheasant’s wing in his hat and carrying a short, heavy sword; and our driver told us, with an awful solemnity in his bated breath, that no one might kill this game but the king, under penalty of the galleys.

VI.

We went one evening to the opera at San Carlo. It is one of the three theatres — San Carlo of Naples, La Scala of Milan, and Fenice of Venice — on which the Italians pride themselves; and it is certainly very large and imposing. The interior has a bel colpo d’occhio, which is what many Italians chiefly value in morals, manners, and architecture; but after this comes great shabbiness of detail. The boxes, even of the first order, are paved with brick tiles, and the red velvet border of the box which the people see from the pit is not supported in style by the seats within, which are merely covered with red oil-cloth. The opera we saw was also second-rate, and was to the splendor of the scenic arrangements what the oil-cloth was to the velvet. The house was full of people, but the dress of the audience was not so fine as we had expected in Naples. The evening dress is not de rigueur at Italian theatres, and people seemed to have come to San Carlo in any pleasant carelessness of costume.

VII.

The Italians are simple and natural folks, pleased through all their show of conventionality with little things, and as easy and unconscious as children in their ways. There happened to be a new caffè opened in Naples while we were there, and we had the pleasure of seeing all ranks of people affected by its magnificence. Artless throngs blocked the sidewalk day and night before its windows, gazing upon its mirrors, fountains, and frescos, and regarding the persons over their coffee within as beings lifted by sudden magic out of the common orbit of life and set dazzling in a higher sphere. All the waiters were uniformed and brass-buttoned to blinding effect, and the head waiter was a majestic creature in a long blue coat reaching to his feet, and armed with a mighty silver-headed staff. This gorgeous apparition did nothing but walk up and down, and occasionally advance toward the door, as if to disperse the crowds. At such times, however, before executing his purpose, he would glance round on the splendors they were admiring, and, as if smitten with a sense of the enormous cruelty he had meditated in thinking to deprive them of the sight, would falter and turn away, leaving his intent unfulfilled.

VIII.

A DAY IN POMPEII.

I.

On the second morning after our arrival in Naples, we took the seven o’clock train, which leaves the Nineteenth Century for the first cycle of the Christian Era, and, skirting the waters of the Neapolitan bay almost the whole length of our journey, reached the railway station of Pompeii in an hour. As we rode along by that bluest sea, we saw the fishing-boats go out, and the foamy waves (which it would be an insolent violence to call breakers) come in; we saw the mountains slope their tawny and golden manes caressingly downward to the waters, where the islands were dozing yet; and landward, on the left, we saw Vesuvius, with his brown mantle of ashes drawn close about his throat, reclining on the plain, and smoking a bland and thoughtful morning pipe, of which the silver fumes curled lightly, lightly upward in the sunrise.

We dismounted at the station, walked a few rods eastward through a little cotton-field, and found ourselves at the door of Hotel Diomed, where we took breakfast for a number of sesterces which I am sure it would have made an ancient Pompeian stir in his urn to think of paying. But in Italy one learns the chief Italian virtue, patience, and we paid our account with the utmost good nature. There was compensation in store for us, and the guide whom we found at the gate leading up the little hill to Pompeii inclined the disturbed balance in favor of our happiness. He was a Roman, spoke Italian that Beatrice might have addressed to Dante, and was numbered Twenty-six. I suppose it is known that the present Italian Government forbids people to be pillaged in any way on its premises, and that the property of the State is no longer the traffic of custodians and their pitiless race. At Pompeii each person pays two francs for admission, and is rigorously forbidden by recurrent sign-boards to offer money to the guides. Ventisei (as we shall call him) himself pointed out one of these notices in English, and did his duty faithfully without asking or receiving fees in money. He was a soldier, like all the other guides, and was a most intelligent, obliging fellow, with a self-respect and dignity worthy of one of our own volunteer soldiers.

Ventisei took us up the winding slope, and led us out of this living world through the Sea-gate of Pompeii back into the dead past — the past which, with all its sensuous beauty and grace, and all its intellectual power, I am not sorry to have dead, and for the most part, buried. Our feet had hardly trodden the lava flagging of the narrow streets when we came in sight of the laborers who were exhuming the inanimate city. They were few in number, not perhaps a score, and they worked tediously, with baskets to carry away the earth from the excavation, boys and girls carrying the baskets, and several athletic old women plying picks, while an overseer sat in a chair near by, and smoked, and directed their exertions.

They dig down about eight or ten feet, uncovering the walls and pillars of the houses, and the mason, who is at hand, places little iron rivets in the stucco to prevent its fall where it is weak, while an artist attends to wash and clean the frescos as fast as they are exposed. The soil through which the excavation first passes is not of great depth; the ashes which fell damp with scalding rain, in the second eruption, are perhaps five feet thick; the rest is of that porous stone which descended in small fragments during the first eruption. A depth of at least two feet in this stone is always left untouched by the laborers till the day when the chief superintendent of the work comes out from Naples to see the last layers removed; and it is then that the beautiful mosaic pavements of the houses are uncovered, and the interesting and valuable objects are nearly always found.

The wonder was, seeing how slowly the work proceeded, not that two thirds of Pompeii were yet buried, but that one third had been exhumed. We left these hopeless toilers, and went down-town into the Forum, stepping aside on the way to look into one of the Pompeian Courts of Common Pleas.

II.

Now Pompeii is, in truth, so full of marvel and surprise, that it would be unreasonable to express disappointment with Pompeii in fiction. And yet I cannot help it. An exuberant carelessness of phrase in most writers and talkers who describe it had led me to expect much more than it was possible to find there. In my Pompeii I confess that the houses had no roofs — in fact, the rafters which sustained the tiles being burnt, how could the roofs help falling in? But otherwise my Pompeii was a very complete affair: the walls all rose to their full height; doorways and arches were perfect; the columns were all unbroken and upright; putting roofs on my Pompeii, you might have lived in it very comfortably. The real Pompeii is different. It is seldom that any wall is unbroken; most columns are fragmentary; and though the ground-plans are always distinct, very few rooms in the city are perfect in form, and the whole is much more ruinous than I thought.

But this ruin once granted, and the idle disappointment at its greatness overcome, there is endless material for study, instruction, and delight. It is the revelation of another life, and the utterance of the past is here more perfect than anywhere else in the world. Indeed, I think that the true friend of Pompeii should make it a matter of conscience, on entering the enchanted city, to cast out of his knowledge all the rubbish that has fallen into it from novels and travels, and to keep merely the facts of the town’s luxurious life and agonizing death, with such incidents of the eruption as he can remember from the description of Pliny. These are the spells to which the sorcery yields, and with these in your thought you can rehabilitate the city until Ventisei seems to be a valet de place of the first century, and yourselves a set of blond barbarians to whom he is showing off the splendors of one of the most brilliant towns of the empire of Titus. Those sad furrows in the pavement become vocal with the joyous rattle of chariot-wheels on a sudden, and you prudently step up on the narrow sidewalks and rub along by the little shops of wine, and grain, and oil, with which the thrifty voluptuaries of Pompeii flanked their street-doors. The counters of these shops run across their fronts, and are pierced with round holes on the top, through which you see dark depths of oil in the jars below, and not sullen lumps of ashes; those stately amphoræ behind are full of wine, and in the corners are bags of wheat.

“This house, with a shop on either side, whose is it, XXVI.?”

“It is the house of the great Sallust, my masters. Would you like his autograph? I know one of his slaves who would sell it.”

You are a good deal stared at, naturally, as you pass by, for people in Pompeii have not much to do, and, besides, a Briton is not an every-day sight there, as he will be one of these centuries. The skins of wild beasts are little worn in Pompeii; and those bold-eyed Roman women think it rather odd that we should like to powder our shaggy heads with brick-dust. However, these are matters of taste. We, for our part, cannot repress a feeling of disgust at the loungers in the street, who, XXVI. tells us, are all going to soak themselves half the day in the baths yonder; for, if there is in Pompeii one thing more offensive than another to our savage sense of propriety, it is the personal cleanliness of the inhabitants. We little know what a change for the better will be wrought in these people with the lapse of time, and that they will yet come to wash themselves but once a year, as we do.

(The reader may go on doing this sort of thing at some length for himself; and may imagine, if he pleases, a boastful conversation among the Pompeians at the baths, in which the barbarians hear how Agricola has broken the backbone of a rebellion in Britain; and in which all the speakers begin their observations with “Ho! my Lepidus!” and “Ha! my Diomed!” In the mean time we return to the present day, and step down the Street of Plenty along with Ventisei.)

III.

It is proper, after seeing the sites of some of the principal temples in Pompeii (such as those of Jupiter and Venus), to cross the fields that cover a great breadth of the buried city, and look into the amphitheatre, where, as every body knows, the lions had no stomach for Glaucus on the morning of the fatal eruption. The fields are now planted with cotton, and of course we thought those commonplaces about the wonder the Pompeians would feel could they come back to see that New-World plant growing above their buried homes. We might have told them, the day of our visit, that this cruel plant, so long watered with the tears of slaves, and fed with the blood of men, was now an exile from its native fields, where war was plowing with sword and shot the guilty land, and rooting up the subtlest fibres of the oppression in which cotton had grown king. And the ghosts of wicked old Pompeii, remembering the manifold sins that called the fires of hell to devour her, and thinking on this exiled plant, the latest witness of God’s unforgetting justice, might well have shuddered, through all their shadow, to feel how terribly He destroys the enemies of Nature and man.

But the only Pompeian presences which haunted our passage of the cotton-field were certain small

“Phantoms of delight,”

with soft black eyes and graceful ways, who ran before us and plucked the bolls of the cotton and sold them to us. Embassies bearing red and white grapes were also sent out of the cottages to our excellencies; and there was some doubt of the currency of the coin which we gave these poor children in return.

There are now but few peasants living on the land over the head of Pompeii, and the Government allows no sales of real estate to be made except to itself. The people who still dwell here can hardly be said to own their possessions, for they are merely allowed to cultivate the soil. A guard stationed night and day prevents them from making excavations, and they are severely restricted from entering the excavated quarters of the city alone.

The cotton whitens over two thirds of Pompeii yet interred: happy the generation that lives to learn the wondrous secrets of that sepulchre! For, when you have once been at Pompeii, this phantasm of the past takes deeper hold on your imagination than any living city, and becomes and is the metropolis of your dreamland forever. O marvelous city! who shall reveal the cunning of your spell? Something not death, something not life — something that is the one when you turn to determine its essence as the other! What is it comes to me at this distance of that which I saw in Pompeii? The narrow and curving, but not crooked streets, with the blazing sun of that Neapolitan November falling into them, or clouding their wheel-worn lava with the black, black shadows of the many-tinted walls; the houses, and the gay columns of white, yellow, and red; the delicate pavements of mosaic; the skeletons of dusty cisterns and dead fountains; inanimate garden spaces with pygmy statues suited to their littleness; suites of fairy bed-chambers, painted with exquisite frescos; dining-halls with joyous scenes of hunt and banquet on their walls; the ruinous sites of temples; the melancholy emptiness of booths and shops and jolly drinking-houses; the lonesome tragic theatre, with a modern Pompeian drawing water from a well there; the baths with their roofs perfect yet, and the stucco bass-reliefs all but unharmed; around the whole, the city wall crowned with slender poplars; outside the gates, the long avenue of tombs, and the Appian Way stretching on to Stabiae; and, in the distance, Vesuvius, brown and bare, with his fiery breath scarce visible against the cloudless heaven; — these are the things that float before my fancy as I turn back to look at myself walking those enchanted streets, and to wonder if I could ever have been so blest.

For there is nothing on the earth, or under it, like Pompeii.

The amphitheatre, to which we came now, after our stroll across the cotton-fields, was small, like the vastest things in Pompeii, and had nothing of the stately magnificence of the Arena at Verona, nor any thing of the Roman Coliseum’s melancholy and ruinous grandeur. But its littleness made it all the more comfortable and social, and, seated upon its benches under a cool awning, one could have almost chatted across the arena with one’s friends; could have witnessed the spectacle on the sands without losing a movement of the quick gladiators, or an agony of the victim given to the beasts — which must have been very delightful to a Pompeian of companionable habits and fine feelings. It is quite impossible, however, that the bouts described by Bulwer as taking place all at the same time on the arena should really have done so: the combatants would have rolled and tumbled and trampled over each other an hundred times in the narrow space.

Of all the voices with which it once rang the poor little amphitheatre has kept only an echo. But this echo is one of the most perfect ever heard: prompt clear, startling, it blew back the light chaff we threw to it with amazing vehemence, and almost made us doubt if it were not a direct human utterance. Yet how was Ventisei to know our names? And there was no one else to call them but ourselves. Our “dolce duca” gathered a nosegay from the crumbling ledges, and sat down in the cool of the once-cruel cells beneath, and put it prettily together for the ladies. When we had wearied ourselves with the echo he arose and led us back into Pompeii.

IV.

The plans of nearly all the houses in the city are alike: the entrance-room next the door; the parlor or drawing-room next that; then the impluvium, or unroofed space in the middle of the house, where the rains were caught and drained into the cistern, and where the household used to come to wash itself, primitively, as at a pump; the little garden, with its painted columns, behind the impluvium, and, at last, the dining-room. There are minute bed-chambers on either side, and, as I said, a shop at one side in front, for the sale of the master’s grain, wine, and oil. The pavements of all the houses are of mosaic, which, in the better sort, is very delicate and beautiful, and is found sometimes perfectly uninjured. An exquisite pattern, often repeated, is a ground of tiny cubes of white marble with dots of black dropped regularly into it. Of course there were many picturesque and fanciful designs, of which the best have been removed to the Museum in Naples; but several good ones are still left, and (like that of the Wild Boar) give names to the houses in which they are found.

But, after all, the great wonder, the glory, of these Pompeian houses is in their frescos. If I tried to give an idea of the luxury of color in Pompeii, the most gorgeous adjectives would be as poorly able to reproduce a vivid and glowing sense of those hues as the photography which now copies the drawing of the decorations; so I do not try.

I know it is a cheap and feeble thought, and yet, let the reader please to consider: A workman nearly two thousand years laying upon the walls those soft lines that went to make up fauns and satyrs, nymphs and naiads, heroes and gods and goddesses; and getting weary and lying down to sleep, and dreaming of an eruption of the mountain; of the city buried under a fiery hail, and slumbering in its bed of ashes seventeen centuries; then of its being slowly exhumed, and, after another lapse of years, of some one coming to gather the shadow of that dreamer’s work upon a plate of glass, that he might infinitely reproduce it and sell it to tourists at from five francs to fifty centimes a copy — I say, consider such a dream, dreamed in the hot heart of the day, after certain cups of Vesuvian wine! What a piece of Katzenjämmer (I can use no milder term) would that workman think it when he woke again! Alas! what is history and the progress of the arts and sciences but one long Katzenjämmer!

Photography cannot give, any more than I, the colors of the frescos, but it can do the drawing better, and, I suspect, the spirit also. I used the word workman, and not artist, in speaking of the decoration of the walls, for in most cases the painter was only an artisan, and did his work probably by the yard, as the artisan who paints walls and ceilings in Italy does at this day. But the old workman did his work much more skillfully and tastefully than the modern — threw on expanses of mellow color, delicately paneled off the places for the scenes, and penciled in the figures and draperies (there are usually more of the one than the other) with a deft hand. Of course, the houses of the rich were adorned by men of talent; but it is surprising to see the community of thought and feeling in all this work, whether it be from cunninger or clumsier hands. The subjects are nearly always chosen from the fables of the gods, and they are in illustration of the poets, Homer and the rest. To suit that soft, luxurious life which people led in Pompeii, the themes are commonly amorous, and sometimes not too chaste; there is much of Bacchus and Ariadne, much of Venus and Adonis, and Diana bathes a good deal with her nymphs, — not to mention frequent representations of the toilet of that beautiful monster which the lascivious art of the time loved to depict. One of the most pleasing of all the scenes is that in one of the houses, of the Judgment of Paris, in which the shepherd sits upon a bank in an attitude of ineffable and flattered importance, with one leg carelessly crossing the other, and both hands resting lightly on his shepherd’s crook, while the goddesses before him await his sentence. Naturally the painter has done his best for the victress in this rivalry, and you see

“Idalian Aphrodite beautiful,”

as she should be, but with a warm and piquant spice of girlish resentment in her attitude, that Paris should pause for an instant, which is altogether delicious.

“And I beheld great Here’s angry eyes.”

Awful eyes! How did the painter make them? The wonder of all these pagan frescos is the mystery of the eyes — still, beautiful, unhuman. You cannot believe that it is wrong for those tranquil-eyed men and women to do evil, they look so calm and so unconscious in it all; and in the presence of the celestials, as they bend upon you those eternal orbs, in whose regard you are but a part of space, you feel that here art has achieved the unearthly. I know of no words in literature which give a sense (nothing gives the idea) of the stare of these gods, except that magnificent line of Kingsley’s, describing the advance over the sea toward Andromeda of the oblivious and unsympathizing Nereids. They floated slowly up, and their eyes

“Stared on her, silent and still, like the eyes in the house of the idols.”

The colors of this fresco of the Judgment of Paris are still so fresh and bright, that it photographs very well, but there are other frescos wherein there is more visible perfection of line, but in which the colors are so dim that they can only be reproduced by drawings. One of these is the Wounded Adonis cared for by Venus and the Loves; in which the story is treated with a playful pathos wonderfully charming. The fair boy leans in the languor of his hurt toward Venus, who sits utterly disconsolate beside him, while the Cupids busy themselves with such slight surgical offices as Cupids may render: one prepares a linen bandage for the wound, another wraps it round the leg of Adonis, another supports one of his heavy arms, another finds his own emotions too much for him and pauses to weep. It is a pity that the colors of this beautiful fresco are grown so dim, and a greater pity that most of the other frescos in Pompeii must share its fate, and fade away. The hues are vivid when the walls are first uncovered, and the ashes washed from the pictures, but then the malice of the elements begins anew, and rain and sun draw the life out of tints which the volcano failed to obliterate. In nearly all cases they could be preserved by throwing a roof above the walls, and it is a wonder that the Government does not take this slight trouble to save them.

Among the frescos which told no story but their own, we were most pleased with one in a delicately painted little bed-chamber. This represented an alarmed and furtive man, whom we at once pronounced The Belated Husband, opening a door with a night-latch. Nothing could have been better than this miserable wretch’s cowardly haste and cautious noiselessness in applying his key; apprehension sat upon his brow, confusion dwelt in his guilty eye. He had been out till two o’clock in the morning, electioneering for Pansa, the friend of the people (“Pansa, and Roman gladiators,” “Pansa, and Christians to the Beasts,” was the platform), and he had left his placens uxor at home alone with the children, and now within this door that placens uxor awaited him!

V.

You have read, no doubt, of their discovering, a year or two since, in making an excavation in a Pompeian street, the molds of four human bodies, three women and a man, who fell down, blind and writhing, in the storm of fire eighteen hundred years ago; whose shape the settling and hardening ashes took; whose flesh wasted away, and whose bones lay there in the hollow of the matrix till the cunning of this time found them, and, pouring liquid plaster round the skeletons, clothed them with human form again, and drew them forth into the world once more. There are many things in Pompeii which bring back the gay life of the city, but nothing which so vividly reports the terrible manner of her death as these effigies of the creatures that actually shared it. The man in the last struggle has thrown himself upon his back and taken his doom sturdily — there is a sublime calm in his rigid figure. The women lie upon their faces, their limbs tossed and distorted, their drapery tangled and heaped about them, and in every fibre you see how hard they died. One presses her face into her handkerchief to draw one last breath unmixed with scalding steam; another’s arms are wildly thrown abroad to clutch at help; another’s hand is appealingly raised, and on her slight fingers you see the silver hoops with which her poor dead vanity adorned them.

The guide takes you aside from the street into the house where they lie, and a dreadful shadow drops upon your heart as you enter their presence. Without, the hell-storm seems to fall again, and the whole sunny plain to be darkened with its ruin, and the city to send up the tumult of her despair.

What is there left in Pompeii to speak of after this? The long street of tombs outside the walls? Those that died before the city’s burial seem to have scarcely a claim to the solemnity of death.

Shall we go see Diomed’s Villa, and walk through the freedman’s long underground vaults, where his friends thought to be safe, and were smothered in heaps? The garden-ground grows wild among its broken columns with weeds and poplar saplings; in one of the corridors they sell photographs, on which, if you please, Ventisei has his bottle, or drink-money. So we escape from the doom of the calamity, and so, at last, the severely forbidden buonamano is paid. A dog may die many deaths besides choking with butter.

We return slowly through the city, where we have spent the whole day, from nine till four o’clock. We linger on the way, imploring Ventisei if there is not something to be seen in this or that house; we make our weariness an excuse for sitting down, and cannot rend ourselves from the bliss of being in Pompeii.

At last we leave its gates, and swear each other to come again many times while in Naples, and never go again.

Perhaps it was as well. You cannot repeat great happiness.

IX.

A HALF-HOUR AT HERCULANEUM.

I.

The road from Naples to Herculaneum is, in fact, one long street; it hardly ceases to be city in Naples till it is town at Portici, and in the interval it is suburb, running between palatial lines of villas, which all have their names ambitiously painted over their doors. Great part of the distance this street is bordered by the bay, and, as far as this is the case, it is picturesque, as every thing is belonging to marine life in Italy. Sea-faring people go lounging up and down among the fishermen’s boats drawn up on the shore, and among the fishermen’s wives making nets, while the fishermen’s children play and clamber everywhere, and over all flap and flutter the clothes hung on poles to dry. In this part of the street there are, of course, oysters, and grapes, and oranges, and cactus-pulps, and cutlery, and iced drinks to sell at various booths; and Commerce is exceedingly dramatic and boisterous over the bargains she offers; and equally, of course, murderous drinking shops lurk at intervals along the pavement, and lure into their recesses mariners of foreign birth, briefly ashore from their ships. The New York Coffee House is there to attract my maritime fellow-countrymen, and I know that if I look into that place of refreshment I shall see their honest, foolish faces flushed with drink, and with the excitement of buying the least they can for the most money. Poor souls! they shall drink that pleasant morning away in the society of Antonino the best of Neapolitans, and at midnight, emptied of every soldo, shall arise, wrung with a fearful suspicion of treachery, and wander away under Antonino’s guidance to seek the protection of the Consul; or, taking the law into their own hands, shall proceed to clean out, more Americano, the New York Coffee House, when Antonino shall develop into one of the landlords, and deal them the most artistic stab in Naples: handsome, worthy Antonino; tender-eyed, subtle, pitiless!

II.

Where the road to Herculaneum leaves the bay and its seafaring life, it enters, between the walls of lofty, fly-blown houses, a world of maccaroni haunted by foul odors, beggars, poultry, and insects. There were few people to be seen on the street, but through the open doors of the lofty fly-blown houses we saw floury legions at work making maccaroni; grinding maccaroni, rolling it, cutting it, hanging it in mighty skeins to dry, and gathering it when dried, and putting it away. By the frequency of the wine-shops we judged that the legions were a thirsty host, and by the number of the barber-surgeons’ shops, that they were a plethoric and too full-blooded host. The latter shops were in the proportion of one to five of the former; and the artist who had painted their signs had indulged his fancy in wild excesses of phlebotomy. We had found that, as we came south from Venice, science grew more and more sanguinary in Italy, and more and more disposed to let blood. At Ferrara, even, the propensity began to be manifest on the barbers’ signs, which displayed the device of an arm lanced at the elbow, and jetting the blood by a neatly described curve into a tumbler. Further south the same arm was seen to bleed at the wrist also; and at Naples an exhaustive treatment of the subject appeared, the favorite study of the artist being to represent a nude figure reclining in a genteel attitude on a bank of pleasant greensward, and bleeding from the elbows, wrists, hands, ankles, and feet.

III.

In Naples everywhere one is surprised by the great number of English names which appear on business houses, but it was entirely bewildering to read a bill affixed to the gate of one of the villas on this road: “This Desirable Property for Sale.” I should scarcely have cared to buy that desirable property, though the neighborhood seemed to be a favorite summer resort, and there were villas, as I said, nearly the whole way to Portici. Those which stood with their gardens toward the bay would have been tolerable, no doubt, if they could have kept their windows shut to the vile street before their doors; but the houses opposite could have had no escape from its stench and noisomeness. It was absolutely the filthiest street I have seen anywhere outside of New York, excepting only that little street which, in Herculaneum, leads from the theatre to the House of Argo.

This pleasant avenue has a stream of turbid water in its centre, bordered by begging children, and is either fouler or cleaner for the water, but I shall never know which. It is at a depth of some fifty or sixty feet below the elevation on which the present city of Portici is built, and is part of the excavation made long ago to reach the plain on which Herculaneum stands, buried under its half-score of successive layers of lava, and ashes, and Portici. We had the aid of all the virtuous poverty and leisure of the modern town — there was a vast deal of both, we found — in our search for the staircase by which you descend to the classic plain, and it proved a discovery involving the outlay of all the copper coin about us, while the sight of the famous theatre of Herculaneum was much more expensive than it would have been had we come there in the old time to see a play of Plautus or Terence.

As for the theatre, “the large and highly ornamented theatre” of which I read, only a little while ago, in an encyclopedia, we found it, by the light of our candles, a series of gloomy hollows, of the general complexion of coal-bins and potato-cellars. It was never perfectly dug out of the lava, and, as is known, it was filled up in the last century, together with other excavations, when they endangered the foundations of worthless Portici overhead. (I am amused to find myself so hot upon the poor property-holders of Portici. I suppose I should not myself, even for the cause of antiquity and the knowledge of classic civilization, like to have my house tumbled about my ears.) But though it was impossible in the theatre of Herculaneum to gain any idea of its size or richness, I remembered there the magnificent bronzes which had been found in it, and did a hasty reverence to the place. Indeed, it is amazing, when one sees how small a part of Herculaneum has been uncovered, to consider the number of fine works of art in the Museo Borbonico which were taken thence, and which argue a much richer and more refined community than that of Pompeii. A third of the latter city has now been restored to the light of day; but though it has yielded abundance of all the things that illustrate the domestic and public life, and the luxury and depravity of those old times, and has given the once secret rooms of the museum their worst attraction, it still falls far below Herculaneum in the value of its contributions to the treasures of classic art, except only in the variety and beauty of its exquisite frescos.

The effect of this fact is to stimulate the imagination of the visitor to that degree that nothing short of the instant destruction of Portici and the excavation of all Herculaneum will satisfy him. If the opening of one theatre, and the uncovering of a basilica and two or three houses, have given such richness to us, what delight and knowledge would not the removal of these obdurate hills of ashes and lava bestow!

Emerging from the coal-bins and potato-cellars, the visitor extinguishes his candle with a pathetic sigh, profusely rewards the custodian (whom he connects in some mysterious way with the ancient population of the injured city about him), and, thoughtfully removing the tallow from his fingers, follows the course of the vile stream already sung, and soon arrives at the gate opening into the exhumed quarter of Herculaneum. And there he finds a custodian who enters perfectly into his feelings; a custodian who has once been a guide in Pompeii, but now despises that wretched town, and would not be guide there for any money since he has known the superior life of Herculaneum; who, in fine, feels toward Pompeii as a Bostonian feels toward New York. Yet the reader would be wrong to form the idea that there is bitterness in the disdain of this custodian. On the contrary, he is one of the best-natured men in the world. He is a mighty mass of pinguid bronze, with a fat lisp, and a broad, sunflower smile, and he lectures us with a vast and genial breadth of manner on the ruins, contradicting all our guesses at things with a sweet “Perdoni, signori! ma —— .” At the end, we find that he has some medallions of lava to sell: there is Victor Emanuel, or, if we are of the partito d’azione, there is Garibaldi; both warm yet from the crater of Vesuvius, and of the same material which destroyed Herculaneum. We decline to buy and the custodian makes the national shrug and grimace (signifying that we are masters of the situation, and that he washes his hands of the consequence of our folly) on the largest scale that we have ever seen: his mighty hands are rigidly thrust forth, his great lip protruded, his enormous head thrown back to bring his face on a level with his chin. The effect is tremendous, but we nevertheless feel that he loves us the same.

IV.

The afternoon on which we visited Herculaneum was in melancholy contrast to the day we spent in Pompeii. The lingering summer had at last saddened into something like autumnal gloom, and that blue, blue sky of Naples was overcast. So, this second draught of the spirit of the past had not only something of the insipidity of custom, but brought rather a depression than a lightness to our hearts. There was so little of Herculaneum: only a few hundred yards square are exhumed, and we counted the houses easily on the fingers of one hand, leaving the thumb to stand for the few rods of street that, with its flagging of lava and narrow border of foot-walks, lay between; and though the custodian, apparently moved at our dejection, said that the excavation was to be resumed the very next week, the assurance did little to restore our cheerfulness. Indeed, I fancy that these old cities must needs be seen in the sunshine by those who would feel what gay lives they once led; by dimmer light they are very sullen spectres, and their doom still seems to brood upon them. I know that even Pompeii could not have been joyous that sunless afternoon, for what there was to see of mournful Herculaneum was as brilliant with colors as any thing in the former city. Nay, I believe that the tints of the frescos and painted columns were even brighter, and that the walls of the houses were far less ruinous than those of Pompeii. But no house was wholly freed from lava, and the little street ran at the rear of the buildings which were supposed to front on some grander avenue not yet exhumed. It led down, as the custodian pretended, to a wharf, and he showed an iron ring in the wall of the House of Argo, standing at the end of the street, to which, he said, his former fellow-citizens used to fasten their boats, though it was all dry enough there now.

There is evidence in Herculaneum of much more ambitious domestic architecture than seems to have been known in Pompeii. The ground-plan of the houses in the two cities is alike; but in the former there was often a second story, as was proven by the charred ends of beams still protruding from the walls, while in the latter there is only one house which is thought to have aspired to a second floor. The House of Argo is also much larger than any in Pompeii, and its appointments were more magnificent. Indeed, we imagined that in this more purely Greek town we felt an atmosphere of better taste in every thing than prevailed in the fashionable Roman watering-place, though this, too, was a summer resort of the “best society” of the empire. The mosaic pavements were exquisite, and the little bed-chambers dainty and delicious in their decorations. The lavish delight in color found expression in the vividest hues upon the walls, and not only were the columns of the garden painted, but the foliage of the capitals was variously tinted. The garden of the House of Argo was vaster than any of the classic world which we had yet seen, and was superb with a long colonnade of unbroken columns. Between these and the walls of the houses was a pretty pathway of mosaic, and in the midst once stood marble tables, under which the workmen exhuming the city found certain crouching skeletons. At one end was the dining-room, of course, and painted on the wall was a lady with a parasol.

I thought all Herculaneum sad enough, but the profusion of flowers growing wild in this garden gave it a yet more tender and pathetic charm. Here — where so long ago the flowers had bloomed, and perished in the terrible blossoming of the mountain that sent up its fires in the awful similitude of Nature’s harmless and lovely forms, and showered its destroying petals all abroad — was it not tragic to find again the soft tints, the graceful shapes, the sweet perfumes of the earth’s immortal life? Of them that planted and tended and plucked and bore in their bosoms and twined in their hair these fragile children of the summer, what witness in the world? Only the crouching skeletons under the tables. Alas and alas!

V.

The skeletons went with us throughout Herculaneum, and descended into the cell, all green with damp, under the basilica, and lay down, fettered and manacled in the place of those found there beside the big bronze kettle in which the prisoners used to cook their dinners. How ghastly the thought of it was! If we had really seen this kettle and the skeletons there — as we did not — we could not have suffered more than we did. They took all the life out of the House of Perseus, and the beauty from his pretty little domestic temple to the Penates, and this was all there was left in Herculaneum to see.

“Is there nothing else?” we demand of the custodian.

“Signori, this is all.”

“It is mighty little.”

“Perdoni, signori! ma —— .”

“Well,” we say sourly to each other, glancing round at the walls of the pit, on the bottom of which the bit of city stands, “it is a good thing to know that Herculaneum amounts to nothing.”

X.

CAPRI AND CAPRIOTES.

I.

I have no doubt

“Calm Capri waits,”

where we left it, in the Gulf of Salerno, for any traveller who may choose to pay it a visit; but at the time we were there we felt that it was on exhibition for that day only, and would, when we departed, disappear in its sapphire sea, and be no more; just as Niagara ceases to play as soon as your back is turned, and Venice goes out like a pyrotechnic display, and all marvelously grand and lovely things make haste to prove their impermanence.

We delayed some days in Naples in hopes of fine weather, and at last chose a morning that was warm and cloudy at nine o’clock, and burst into frequent passions of rain before we reached Sorrento at noon The first half of the journey was made by rail, and brought us to Castellamare, whence we took carriage for Sorrento, and oranges, and rapture, — winding along the steep shore of the sea, and under the brows of wooded hills that rose high above us into the misty weather, and caught here and there the sunshine on their tops. In that heavenly climate no day can long be out of humor, and at Sorrento we found ours very pleasant, and rode delightedly through the devious streets, looking up to the terraced orange-groves on one hand, and down to the terraced orange-groves on the other, until at a certain turning of the way we encountered Antonino Occhio d’Argento, whom fate had appointed to be our boatman to Capri. We had never heard of Antonino before, and indeed had intended to take a boat from one of the hotels; but when this corsair offered us his services, there was that guile in his handsome face, that cunning in his dark eyes, that heart could not resist, and we halted our carriage and took him at once.

He kept his boat in one of those caverns which honey-comb the cliff under Sorrento, and afford a natural and admirable shelter for such small craft as may be dragged up out of reach of the waves, and here I bargained with him before finally agreeing to go with him to Capri. In Italy it is customary for a public carrier when engaged to give his employer as a pledge the sum agreed upon for the service, which is returned with the amount due him, at the end, if the service has been satisfactory; and I demanded of Antonino this caparra, as it is called. “What caparra?” said he, lifting the lid of his wicked eye with his forefinger, “this is the best caparra,” meaning a face as honest and trustworthy as the devil’s. The stroke confirmed my subjection to Antonino, and I took his boat without further parley, declining even to feel the muscle of his boatmen’s arms, which he exposed to my touch in evidence that they were strong enough to row us swiftly to Capri. The men were but two in number, but they tossed the boat lightly into the surf, and then lifted me aboard, and rowed to the little pier from which the ladies and T. got in.

The sun shone, the water danced and sparkled, and presently we raised our sail, and took the gale that blew for Capri — an oblong height rising ten miles beyond out of the heart of the azure gulf. On the way thither there was little interest but that of natural beauty in the bold, picturesque coast we skirted for some distance; though on one mighty rock there were the ruins of a seaward-looking Temple of Hercules, with arches of the unmistakable Roman masonry, below which the receding waves rushed and poured over a jetting ledge in a thunderous cataract.

Antonino did his best to entertain us, and lectured us unceasingly upon his virtue and his wisdom, dwelling greatly on the propriety and good policy of always speaking the truth. This spectacle of veracity became intolerable after a while, and I was goaded to say: “Oh then, if you never tell lies, you expect to go to Paradise.” “Not at all,” answered Antonino compassionately, “for I have sinned much. But the lie doesn’t go ahead” (non va avanti), added this Machiavelli of boatmen; yet I think he was mistaken, for he deceived us with perfect ease and admirable success. All along, he had pretended that we could see Capri, visit the Blue Grotto, and return that day; but as we drew near the island, painful doubts began to trouble him, and he feared the sea would be too rough for the Grotto part of the affair. “But there will be an old man,” he said, with a subtile air of prophecy, “waiting for us on the beach. This old man is one of the Government guides to the Grotto, and he will say whether it is to be seen to-day.”

And certainly there was the old man on the beach — a short patriarch, with his baldness covered by a kind of bloated woolen sock — a blear-eyed sage, and a bare-legged. He waded through the surf toward the boat, and when we asked him whether the Grotto was to be seen, he paused knee-deep in the water, (at a secret signal from Antonino, as I shall always believe,) put on a face of tender solemnity, threw back his head a little, brought his hand to his cheek, expanded it, and said, “No; to-day, no! To-morrow, yes!” Antonino leaped joyously ashore, and delivered us over to the old man, to be guided to the Hotel di Londra, while he drew his boat upon the land. He had reason to be contented, for this artifice of the patriarch of Capri relieved him from the necessity of verifying to me the existence of an officer of extraordinary powers in the nature of a consul, who, he said, would not permit boats to leave Capri for the main-land after five o’clock in the evening.

When it was decided that we should remain on the island till the morrow, we found so much time on our hands, after bargaining for our lodging at the Hotel di Londra, that we resolved to ascend the mountain to the ruins of the palaces of Tiberius, and to this end we contracted for the services of certain of the muletresses that had gathered about the inn-gate, clamorously offering their beasts. The muletresses chosen were a matron of mature years and of a portly habit of body; her daughter, a mere child; and her niece, a very pretty girl of eighteen, with a voice soft and sweet as a bird’s. They placed the ladies, one on each mule, and then, while the mother and daughter devoted themselves to the hind-quarters of the foremost animal, the lovely niece brought up the rear of the second beast, and the patriarch went before, and T. and I trudged behind. So the cavalcade ascended; first, from the terrace of the hotel overlooking the bit of shipping village on the beach, and next from the town of Capri, clinging to the hill-sides, midway between sea and sky, until at last it reached the heights on which the ruins stand. Our way was through narrow lanes, bordered by garden walls; then through narrow streets bordered by dirty houses; and then again by gardens, but now of a better sort than the first, and belonging to handsome villas.

On the road our pretty muletress gossiped cheerfully, and our patriarch gloomily, and between the two we accumulated a store of information concerning the present inhabitants of Capri, which, I am sorry to say, has now for the most part failed me. I remember that they said most of the land-owners at Capri were Neapolitans, and that these villas were their country-houses; though they pointed out one of the stateliest of the edifices as belonging to a certain English physician who had come to visit Capri for a few days, and had now been living on the island twenty years, having married (said the muletress) the prettiest and poorest girl in the town, from this romance — something like which the muletress seemed to think might well happen concerning herself — we passed lightly to speak of kindred things, the muletress responding gayly between the blows she bestowed upon her beast. The accent of these Capriotes has something of German harshness and heaviness: they say non bosso instead of non posso, and monto instead of mondo, and interchange the t and d a good deal; and they use for father the Latin pater, instead of padre. But this girl’s voice, as I said, was very musical, and the island’s accent was sweet upon her tongue.

I. — What is your name?

She. — Caterina, little sir (signorin).

I. — And how old are you, Caterina?

She. — Eighteen, little sir.

I. — And you are betrothed?

She feigns not to understand; but the patriarch, who has dropped behind to listen to our discourse, explains,— “He asks if you are in love.”

She. — Ah, no! little sir, not yet.

I. — No? A little late, it seems to me. I think there must be some good-looking youngster who pleases you — no?

She. — Ah, no! one must work, one cannot think of marrying. We are four sisters, and we have only the buonamano from hiring these mules, and we must spin and cook.

The Patriarch. — Don’t believe her; she has two lovers.

She. — Ah, no! It isn’t true. He tells a fib — he!

But, nevertheless, she seemed to love to be accused of lovers, — such is the guile of the female heart in Capri, — and laughed over the patriarch’s wickedness. She confided that she ate maccaroni once a day, and she talked constantly of eating it just as the Northern Italians always talk of polenta. She was a true daughter of the isle, and had never left it but once in her life, when she went to Naples. “Naples was beautiful, yes; but one always loves one’s own country the best.” She was very attentive and good, but at the end was rapacious of more and more buonamano. “Have patience with her, sir,” said the blameless Antonino, who witnessed her greediness; “they do not understand certain matters here, poor little things!”

As for the patriarch, he was full of learning relative to himself and to Capri; and told me with much elaboration that the islanders lived chiefly by fishing, and gained something also by their vineyards. But they were greatly oppressed by taxes, and the strict enforcement of the conscriptions, and they had little love for the Italian Government, and wished the Bourbons back again. The Piedmontese, indeed, misgoverned them horribly. There was the Blue Grotto, for example: formerly travellers paid the guides five, six, ten francs for viewing it; but now the Piedmontese had made a tariff, and the poor guides could only exact a franc from each person. Things were in a ruinous condition.

By this we had arrived at a little inn on the top of the mountain, very near the ruins of the palaces, “Here,” said the patriarch, “it is customary for strangers to drink a bottle of the wine of Tiberius.” We obediently entered the hostelry, and the landlord — a white-toothed, brown-faced, good-humored peasant — gallantly ran forward and presented the ladies with bouquets of roses. We thought it a pretty and graceful act, but found later that it was to be paid for, like all pretty and graceful things in Italy; for when we came to settle for the wine, and the landlord wanted more than justice, he urged that he had presented the ladies with flowers, — yet he equally gave me his benediction when I refused to pay for his politeness.

“Now here,” again said the patriarch in a solemn whisper, “you can see the Tarantella danced for two francs; whereas down at your inn, if you hire the dancers through your landlord, it will cost you five or six francs.” The difference was tempting, and decided us in favor of an immediate Tarantella. The muletresses left their beasts to browse about the door of the inn and came into the little public room, where were already the wife and sister of the landlord, and took their places vis-à-vis, while the landlord seized his tambourine and beat from it a wild and lively measure. The women were barefooted and hoopless, and they gave us the Tarantella with all the beauty of natural movement and free floating drapery, and with all that splendid grace of pose which animates the antique statues and pictures of dancers. They swayed themselves in time with the music; then, filled with its passionate impulse, advanced and retreated and whirled away; — snapping their fingers above their heads, and looking over their shoulders with a gay and a laughing challenge to each other, they drifted through the ever-repeated figures of flight and wooing, and wove for us pictures of delight that remained upon the brain like the effect of long-pondered vivid colors, and still return to illumine and complete any representation of that indescribable dance. Heaven knows what peril there might have been in the beauty and grace of the pretty muletress but for the spectacle of her fat aunt, who, I must confess, could only burlesque some of her niece’s airiest movements, and whose hard-bought buoyancy was at once pathetic and laughable. She earned her share of the spoils certainly, and she seemed glad when the dance was over, and went contentedly back to her mule.

The patriarch had early retired from the scene as from a vanity with which he was too familiar for enjoyment, and I found him, when the Tarantella was done, leaning on the curb of the precipitous rock immediately behind the inn, over which the Capriotes say Tiberius used to cast the victims of his pleasures after he was sated with them. These have taken their place in the insular imagination as Christian martyrs, though it is probable that the poor souls were any thing but Nazarenes. It took a stone thrown from the brink of the rock twenty seconds to send back a response from the water below, and the depth was too dizzying to look into. So we looked instead toward Amalfi, across the Gulf of Salerno, and toward Naples, across her bay. On every hand the sea was flushed with sunset, and an unspeakable calm dwelt upon it, while the heights rising from it softened and softened in the distance, and withdrew themselves into dreams of ghostly solitude and phantom city. His late majesty the Emperor Tiberius is well known to have been a man of sentiment, and he may often have sought this spot to enjoy the evening hour. It was convenient to his palace, and he could here give a fillip to his jaded sensibilities by popping a boon companion over the cliff, and thus enjoy the fine poetic contrast which his perturbed and horrible spirit afforded to that scene of innocence and peace. Later he may have come hither also, when lust failed, when all the lewd plays and devices of his fancy palled upon his senses, when sin had grown insipid and even murder ceased to amuse, and his majesty uttered his despair to the Senate in that terrible letter: “What to write to you, or how to write, I know not; and what not to write at this time, may all the gods and goddesses torment me wore than I daily feel that I suffer if I do know.”

The poor patriarch was also a rascal in his small way, and he presently turned to me with a countenance full of cowardly trouble and base remorse, “I pray you, little sir, not to tell the landlord below there that you have seen the Tarantella danced here; for he has daughters and friends to dance it for strangers, and gets a deal of money by it. So, if he asks you to see it, do me the pleasure to say, lest he should take on (pigliarsi) with me about it: ‘Thanks, but we saw the Tarantella at Pompeii!’” It was the last place in Italy where we were likely to have seen the Tarantella; but these simple people are improvident in lying, as in every thing else.

The patriarch had a curious spice of malice in him, which prompted him to speak evil of all, and to as many as he dared. After we had inspected the ruins of the emperor’s villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing to be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations, came forth out of a cleft in the rock and received tribute of us — why, I do not know. The patriarch abetted the extortion, but Parthianly remarked, as we turned away, “Her husband ought to be here; but this is a festa, and he is drinking and gaming in the village,” while the woman protested that he was sick at home. There was also a hermit living in great publicity among the ruins, and the patriarch did not spare him a sneering comment. [This hermit I have heard was not brought up to the profession of anchorite, but was formerly a shoemaker, and according to his own confession abandoned his trade because he could better indulge a lethargic habit in the character of religious recluse.] He had even a bad word for Tiberius, and reproached the emperor for throwing people over the cliff, though I think it a sport in which he would himself have liked to join. The only human creatures with whom he seemed to be in sympathy were the brigands of the main-land, of whom he spoke poetically as exiles and fugitives.

As for the palace of Tiberius, which we had come go far and so toilsomely to see, it must be confessed there was very little left of it. When that well-meaning but mistaken prince died, the Senate demolished his pleasure-houses at Capri, and left only those fragments of the beautiful brick masonry which yet remain, clinging indestructible to the rocks, and strewing the ground with rubbish. The recent excavations have discovered nothing besides the uninteresting foundations of the building, except a subterranean avenue leading from one part of the palace to another: this is walled with delicate brickwork, and exquisitely paved with white marble mosaic; and this was all that witnessed of the splendor of the wicked emperor. Nature, the all-forgetting, all-forgiving, that takes the red battle-field into her arms and hides it with blossom and harvest, could not remember his iniquity, greater than the multitudinous murder of war. The sea, which the despot’s lust and fear had made so lonely, slept with the white sails of boats secure upon its breast; the little bays and inlets, the rocky clefts and woody dells, had forgotten their desecration; and the gathering twilight, the sweetness of the garden-bordered pathway, and the serenity of the lonely landscape, helped us to doubt history.

We slowly returned to the inn by the road we had ascended, noting again the mansion of the surprising Englishman who had come to Capri for three months and had remained thirty years; passed through the darkness of the village, — dropped here and there with the vivid red of a lamp, — and so reached the inn at last, where we found the landlord ready to have the Tarantella danced for us. We framed a discreeter fiction than that prepared for us by the patriarch, and went in to dinner, where there were two Danish gentlemen in dispute with as many rogues of boatmen, who, having contracted to take them back that night to Naples, were now trying to fly their bargain and remain at Capri till the morrow. The Danes beat them, however, and then sat down to dinner, and to long stories of the imposture and villany of the Italians. One of them chiefly bewailed himself that the day before, having unwisely eaten a dozen oysters without agreeing first with the oyster-man upon the price, he had been obliged to pay this scamp’s extortionate demand to the full, since he was unable to restore him his property. We thought that something like this might have happened to an imprudent man in any country, but we did not the less join him in abusing the Italians — the purpose for which foreigners chiefly visit Italy.

II.

Standing on the height among the ruins of Tiberius’s palace, the patriarch had looked out over the waters, and predicted for the morrow the finest weather that had ever been known in that region; but in spite of this prophecy the day dawned stormily, and at breakfast time we looked out doubtfully on waves lashed by driving rain. The entrance to the Blue Grotto, to visit which we had come to Capri, is by a semicircular opening, some three feet in width and two feet in height, and just large enough to admit a small boat. One lies flat in the bottom of this, waits for the impulse of a beneficent wave, and is carried through the mouth of the cavern, and rescued from it in like manner by some receding billow. When the wind is in the wrong quarter, it is impossible to enter the grot at all; and we waited till nine o’clock for the storm to abate before we ventured forth. In the mean time one of the Danish gentlemen, who — after assisting his companion to compel the boatmen to justice the night before — had stayed at Capri, and had risen early to see the grotto, returned from it, and we besieged him with a hundred questions concerning it. But he preserved the wise silence of the boy who goes in to see the six-legged calf, and comes out impervious to the curiosity of all the boys who are doubtful whether the monster is worth their money. Our Dane would merely say that it was now possible to visit the Blue Grotto; that he had seen it; that he was glad he had seen it. As to its blueness, Messieurs — yes, it is blue. C’est i dire….

The ladies had been amusing themselves with a perusal of the hotel register, and the notes of admiration or disgust with which the different sojourners at the inn had filled it. As a rule, the English people found fault with the poor little hostelry and the French people praised it. Commander Joshing and Lieutenant Prattent, R.N., of the former nation, “were cheated by the donkey women, and thought themselves extremely fortunate to have escaped with their lives from the effects of Capri vintage. The landlord was an old Cossack.” On the other hand, we read, “J. Cruttard, homme de lettres, a passè quinze jours ici, et n’a eu que des félicités du patron de cêt hôtel et de sa famille.” Cheerful man of letters! His good-natured record will keep green a name little known to literature. Who are G. Bradshaw, Duke of New York, and Signori Jones and Andrews, Hereditary Princes of the United States? Their patrician names followed the titles of several English nobles in the register. But that which most interested the ladies in this record was the warning of a terrified British matron against any visit to the Blue Grotto except in the very calmest weather. The British matron penned her caution after an all but fatal experience. The ladies read it aloud to us, and announced that for themselves they would be contented with pictures of the Blue Grotto and our account of its marvels.

On the beach below the hotel lay the small boats of the guides to the Blue Grotto, and we descended to take one of them. The fixed rate is a franc for each person. The boatmen wanted five francs for each of us. We explained that although not indigenous to Capri, or even Italy, we were not of the succulent growth of travellers, and would not be eaten. We retired to our vantage ground on the heights. The guides called us to the beach again. They would take us for three francs apiece, or say six francs for both of us. We withdrew furious to the heights again, where we found honest Antonino, who did us the pleasure to yell to his fellow-scoundrels on the beach, “You had better take these signori for a just price. They are going to the syndic to complain of you.” At which there arose a lamentable outcry among the boatmen, and they called with one voice for us to come down and go for a franc apiece. This fable teaches that common-carriers are rogues everywhere; but that whereas we are helpless in their hands at home, we may bully them into rectitude in Italy, where they are afraid of the law.

We had scarcely left the landing of the hotel in the boat of the patriarch — for I need hardly say he was first and most rapacious of the plundering crew — when we found ourselves in very turbulent waters, in the face of mighty bluffs, rising inaccessible from the sea. Here and there, where their swarthy fronts were softened with a little verdure, goat-paths wound up and down among the rocks; and midway between the hotel and the grotto, in a sort of sheltered nook, we saw the Roman masonry of certain antique baths — baths of Augustus, says Valery; baths of Tiberius, say the Capriotes, zealous for the honor of their infamous hero. Howbeit, this was all we saw on the way to the Blue Grotto. Every moment the waves rose higher, emulous of the bluffs, which would not have afforded a foothold, or any thing to cling to, had we been upset and washed against them — and we began to talk of the immortality of the soul. As we neared the grotto, the patriarch entertained us with stories of the perilous adventures of people who insisted upon entering it in stormy weather, — especially of a French painter who had been imprisoned in it four days, and kept alive only on rum, which the patriarch supplied him, swimming into the grotto with a bottle-full at a time. “And behold us arrived, gentlemen!” said he, as he brought the boat skillfully around in front of the small semicircular opening at the base of the lofty bluff. We lie flat on the bottom of the boat, and complete the immersion of that part of our clothing which the driving torrents of rain had spared. The wave of destiny rises with us upon its breast — sinks, and we are inside of the Blue Grotto. Not so much blue as gray, however, and the water about the mouth of it green rather than azure. They say that on a sunny day both the water and the roof of the cavern are of the vividest cerulean tint — and I saw the grotto so represented in the windows of the paint-shops at Naples. But to my own experience it did not differ from other caves in color or form: there was the customary clamminess in the air; the sound of dropping water; the sense of dull and stupid solitude, — a little relieved in this case by the mighty music of the waves breaking against the rocks outside. The grot is not great in extent, and the roof in the rear shelves gradually down to the water. Valery says that some remains of a gallery have caused the supposition that the grotto was once the scene of Tiberius’s pleasures; and the Prussian painter who discovered the cave was led to seek it by something he had read of a staircase by which Barbarossa used to descend into a subterranean retreat from the town of Anacapri on the mountain top. The slight fragment of ruin which we saw in one corner of the cave might be taken in confirmation of both theories; but the patriarch attributed the work to Barbarossa, being probably tired at last of hearing Tiberius so much talked about.

We returned, soaked and disappointed, to the hotel, where we found Antonino very doubtful about the possibility of getting back that day to Sorrento, and disposed, when pooh-poohed out of the notion of bad weather, to revive the fiction of a prohibitory consul. He was staying in Capri at our expense, and the honest fellow would willingly have spent a fortnight there.

We summoned the landlord to settlement, and he came with all his household to present the account, — each one full of visible longing, yet restrained from asking buonamano by a strong sense of previous contract. It was a deadly struggle with them, but they conquered themselves, and blessed us as we departed. The pretty muletress took leave of us on the beach, and we set sail for Sorrento, the ladies crouching in the bottom of the boat, and taking their sea-sickness in silence. As we drew near the beautiful town, we saw how it lay on a plateau, at the foot of the mountains, but high above the sea. Antonino pointed out to us the house of Tasso, — in which the novelist Cooper also resided when in Sorrento, — a white house not handsomer nor uglier than the rest, with a terrace looking out over the water. The bluffs are pierced by numerous arched caverns, as I have said, giving shelter to the fishermen’s boats, and here and there a devious stairway mounts to their crests. Up one of these we walked, noting how in the house above us the people, with that puerility usually mixed with the Italian love of beauty, had placed painted busts of terra-cotta in the windows to simulate persons looking out. There was nothing to blame in the breakfast we found ready at the Hotel Rispoli; and as for the grove of slender, graceful orange-trees in the midst of which the hotel stood, and which had lavished the fruit in every direction on the ground, why, I would willingly give for it all the currant-bushes, with their promises of jelly and jam, on which I gaze at this moment.

Antonino attended us to our carriage when we went away. He had kept us all night at Capri, it is true, and he had brought us in at the end for a prodigious buonamano; yet I cannot escape the conviction that he parted from us with an unfulfilled purpose of greater plunder, and I have a compassion, which I here declare, for the strangers who fell next into his hands. He was good enough at the last moment to say that his name, Silver-Eye, was a nickname given him according to a custom of the Sorrentines; and he made us a farewell bow that could not be bought in America for money.

At the station of Castellamare sat a curious cripple on the stones, — a man with little, short, withered legs, and a pleasant face. He showed us the ticket-office, and wanted nothing for the politeness. After we had been in the waiting-room a brief time, he came swinging himself in upon his hands, followed by another person, who, when the cripple had planted himself finally and squarely on the ground, whipped out a tape from his pocket and took his measure for a suit of clothes, the cripple twirling and twisting himself about in every way for the tailor’s convenience. Nobody was surprised or amused at the sight, and when his measure was thus publicly taken, the cripple gravely swung himself out as he had swung himself in.

XI.

THE PROTESTANT RAGGED SCHOOLS AT NAPLES.

I had the pleasure one day of visiting nearly all the free schools which the wise philanthropy of the Protestant residents of Naples has established in that city. The schools had a peculiar interest for me, because I had noticed (in an uncareful fashion enough, no doubt) the great changes which had taken place in Italy under its new national government, and was desirous to see for myself the sort of progress the Italians of the south were making in avenues so long closed to them. I believe I have no mania for missionaries; I have heard of the converted Jew-and-a-half, and I have thought it a good joke; but I cannot help offering a very cordial homage to the truth that the missionaries are doing a vast deal of good in Naples, where they are not only spreading the gospel, but the spelling-book, the arithmetic, and the geography.

It is not to be understood from the word missionaries, that this work is done by men especially sent from England or America to perform it. The free Protestant schools in Naples are conducted under the auspices of the Evangelical Aid Committee, — composed of members of the English Church, the Swiss Church, and the Presbyterian Church; the President of this committee is Dr. Strange, an Englishman, and the Treasurer is Mr. Rogers, the American banker. The missionaries in Naples, therefore, are men who have themselves found out their work and appointed themselves to do it. The gentleman by whose kindness I was permitted to visit the schools was one of these men, — the Rev. Mr. Buscarlet, the pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Naples, a Swiss by birth, who had received his education chiefly in Scotland.

He accompanied me to the different schools, and as we walked up the long Toledo, and threaded our way through the sprightly Neapolitan crowd, he told me of the origin of the schools, and of the peculiar difficulties encountered in their foundation and maintenance. They are no older than the union of Naples with the Kingdom of Italy, when toleration of Protestantism was decreed by law; and from the first, their managers proceeded upon a principle of perfect openness and candor with the parents who wished to send their children to them. They announced that the children would be taught certain branches of learning, and that the whole Bible would be placed in their hands, to be studied and understood. In spite of this declaration of the Protestant character of the schools, the parents of the children were so anxious to secure them the benefits of education, that they willingly ran the risk of their becoming heretics. They were principally people of the lower classes, — laborers, hackmen, fishermen, domestics, and very small shopkeepers, but occasionally among them were parents able to send their children to other schools, yet preferring the thorough and conscientious system practiced in these. So the children came, and thanks to the peaceful, uncombative nature of Italian boys, who get on with much less waylaying and thumping and bullying than boys of northern blood, they have not been molested by their companions who still live the wild life of the streets, and they have only once suffered through interference of the priests. On complaint to the authorities the wrong was promptly redressed, and was not again inflicted. Of course these poor little people, picked up out of the vileness and ignorance of a city that had suffered for ages the most degrading oppression, are by no means regenerate yet, but there seems to be great hope for them. Now at least they are taught a reasonable and logical morality — and who can tell what wonders the novel instruction may not work? They learn for the first time that it is a foolish shame to lie and cheat, and it would scarcely be surprising if some of them were finally persuaded that Honesty is the best Policy — a maxim that few Italians believe. And here lies the trouble, — in the unfathomable, disheartening duplicity of the race. The children are not quarrelsome, nor cruel, nor brutal; but the servile defect of falsehood fixed by long generations of slavery in the Italians, is almost ineradicable. The fault is worse in Naples than elsewhere in Italy; but how bad it is everywhere, not merely travellers, but all residents in Italy, must bear witness.

The first school which we visited was a girls’ school, in which some forty-four little women of all ages, from four to fifteen years, were assembled under the charge of a young Corfute girl, an Italian Protestant, who had delegated her authority to different children under her. The small maidens gathered around their chiefs in groups, and read from the book in which they were studying when we appeared. Some allowance must be made for difference of the languages, Italian being logically spelled and easily pronounced; but I certainly never heard American children of their age read nearly so well. They seemed also to have a lively understanding of what they read, and to be greatly interested in the scriptural stories of which their books were made up. They repeated verses from the Bible, and stanzas of poetry, all very eagerly and prettily. As bashfulness is scarcely known to their race, they had no hesitation in showing off their accomplishments before a stranger, and seemed quite delighted with his applause. They were not particularly quiet; perhaps with young Neapolitans that would be impossible. I saw their copy-books, in which the writing was very good, (I am sure the printer would like mine to be as legible,) and the books were kept neat and clean, as were the hands and faces of the children. Taking the children as one goes in the streets of Naples, it would require a day perhaps to find as many clean ones as I saw in these schools, where cleanliness is resolutely insisted upon. Many of the children were ragged; here and there was one hideous with ophthalmia; but there was not a clouded countenance, nor a dirty hand among them. We should have great hopes for a nation of which the children can be taught to wash themselves.

There were fourteen pupils in the boys’ superior school, where geography, mathematics, linear drawing, French, Italian history, and ancient history were taught. A brief examination showed the boys to be well up in their studies; — indeed they furnished some recondite information about Baffin’s Bay for which I should not myself have liked to be called on suddenly. Their drawing-books were prodigies of neatness, and betrayed that aptness for form and facility of execution which are natural to the Italians. Some of these boys had been in the schools nearly three years; they were nearly all of the class which must otherwise have grown up to hopeless vagabondage; but here they were receiving gratis an education that would fit them for employments wherein trained intellectual capacity is required. If their education went no higher than this, what an advance it would be upon their original condition!

In the room devoted to boys of lower grade, I entangled myself in difficulties with a bright-eyed young gentleman, whom I asked if he liked Italian history better than ancient history. He said he liked the latter, especially that of the Romans, much better. “Why, that is strange. I should think an Italian boy would like Italian history best.” “But were not the Romans also Italians, Signore?” I blush to say that I basely sneaked out of this trouble by answering that they were not like the Italians of the present day, — whatever that meant. But indeed all these young persons were startlingly quick with their information, and knowing that I knew very little on any subject with certainty, I think I was wise to refuse all offers to examine them in their studies.

We left this school and returned to the Toledo by one of those wonderful little side streets already mentioned, which are forever tumultuous with the oddest Neapolitan life — with men quarreling themselves purple over small quantities of fish — with asses braying loud and clear above their discord — with women roasting pine-cones at charcoal fires — with children in the agonies of having their hair combed — with degraded poultry and homeless dogs — with fruit-stands and green groceries, and the little edifices of ecclesiastical architecture for the sale of lemonade — with wandering bag-pipers, and herds of nonchalant goats — with horses, and grooms currying them — and over all, from vast heights of balcony, with people lazily hanging upon rails and looking down on the riot. Reëntering the stream of the Toledo, it carried us almost to the Museo Borbonico before we again struck aside into one of the smaller streets, whence we climbed quite to the top of one of those incredibly high Neapolitan houses. Here, crossing an open terrace on the roof, we visited three small rooms, in which there were altogether some hundred boys in the first stages of reclamation. They were under the immediate superintendence of Mr. Buscarlet and he seemed to feel the fondest interest in them. Indeed, there was sufficient reason for this: up to a certain point, the Neapolitan children learn so rapidly and willingly that it can hardly be other than a pleasure to teach them. After this, their zeal flags; they know enough; and their parents and friends, far more ignorant than they, are perfectly satisfied with their progress. Then the difficulties of their teachers begin; but here, in these lowest grade schools, they had not yet begun. The boys were still eager to learn, and were ardently following the lead of their teachers. They were little fellows, nearly all, and none of them had been in school more than a year and a half, while some had been there only three or four months. They rose up with “Buon giorno, signori,” as we entered, and could hardly be persuaded to lapse back to the duties of life during our stay. They had very good faces, indeed, for the most part, and even the vicious had intellectual brightness. Just and consistent usage has the best influence on them; and one boy was pointed out as quite docile and manageable, whose parents had given him up as incorrigible before he entered the school. As it was, there was something almost pathetic in his good behavior, as being possible to him, but utterly alien to his instincts. The boys of these schools seldom play truant, and they are never severely beaten in school; when quite intractable, notice is given to their parents, and they usually return in a more docile state. It sometimes happens that the boys are taken away by their parents, from one motive or another; but they find their way back again, and are received as if nothing had happened.

The teacher in the first room here is a handsome young Calabrian, with the gentlest face and manner, — one of the most efficient teachers under Mr. Buscarlet. The boys had out their Bibles when we entered, and one after another read passages to us. There were children of seven, eight, and nine years, who had been in the school only three months, and who read any part of their Bibles with facility and correctness; of course, before coming to school they had not known one letter from another. The most accomplished scholar was a youngster, named Saggiomo, who had received eighteen months’ schooling. He was consequently very quick indeed, and wanted to answer all the hard questions put to the other boys. In fact, all of them were ready enough, and there was a great deal of writhing and snapping of fingers among those who longed to answer some hesitator’s question — just as you see in schools at home. They were examined in geography, and then in Bible history — particularly Joseph’s story. They responded in chorus to all demands on this part of study, and could hardly be quieted sufficiently to give Saggiomo’s little brother, aged five, a chance to tell why Joseph’s brethren sold him. As soon as he could be heard he piped out: “Perchè Giuseppe aveva dei sogni!” (Because Joseph had dreams.) It was not exactly the right answer, but nobody laughed at the little fellow, though they all roared out in correction when permitted.

In the next room, boys somewhat older were examined in Italian history, and responded correctly and promptly. They were given a sum which they performed in a miraculously short time; and their copy-books, when shown, were equally creditable to them. Their teacher was a Bolognese, — a naturalized Swiss, — who had been a soldier, and who maintained strict discipline among his irregulars, without, however, any perceptible terrorism.

The amount of work these teachers accomplish in a day is incredible: the boys’ school opens at eight in the morning and closes at four, with intermission of an hour at noon. Then in the evening the same men teach a school for adults, and on Sunday have their classes in the Sunday-schools. And this the whole year round. Their pay is not great, being about twenty dollars a month, and they are evidently not wholly self-interested from this fact. The amount of good they accomplish under the direction of their superiors is in proportion to the work done. To appreciate it, the reader must consider that they take the children of the most ignorant and degraded of all the Italians; that they cause them to be washed corporeally, first of all, and then set about cleansing them morally; and having cleared away as much of the inherited corruption of ages as possible, they begin to educate them in the various branches of learning. There is no direct proselyting in the schools, but the Bible is the first study, and the children are constantly examined in it; and the result is at least not superstition. The advance upon the old condition of things is incalculably great; for till the revolution under Garibaldi in 1860, the schools of Naples were all in the hands of the priests or their creatures, and the little learning there imparted was as dangerous as it could well be made. Now these schools are free, the children are honestly and thoroughly taught, and if they are not directly instructed in Protestantism, are at least instructed to associate religion with morality, probably for the first time in their lives. Too much credit cannot be given to the Italian government which has acted in such good faith with the men engaged in this work, protecting them from all interruption and persecution; but after all, the great praise is due to their own wise, unflagging zeal. They have worked unostentatiously, making no idle attacks on time-honored prejudices, but still having a purpose of enlightenment which they frankly avowed. The people whom they seek to benefit judge them by their works, and the result is that they have quite as much before them as they can do. Their discouragements are great. The day’s teaching is often undone at home; the boys forget as aptly as they learn; and from the fact that only the baser feelings of fear and interest have ever been appealed to before in the Neapolitans, they have often to build in treacherous places without foundation of good faith or gratitude. Embarrassments for want of adequate funds are sometimes felt also. But no one can study their operations without feeling that success must attend their efforts, with honor to them, and with inestimable benefits to the generation which shall one day help to govern free Italy.

XII.

BETWEEN ROME AND NAPLES.

One day it became plain even to our reluctance that we could not stay in Naples forever, and the next morning we took the train for Rome. The Villa Reale put on its most alluring charm to him that ran down before breakfast to thrid once more its pathways bordered with palms and fountains and statues; the bay beside it purpled and twinkled in the light that made silver of the fishermen’s sails; far away rose Vesuvius with his nightcap of mist still hanging about his shoulders; all around rang and rattled Naples. The city was never so fair before, nor could ever have been so hard to leave; and at the last moment the landlord of the Hotel Washington must needs add a supreme pang by developing into a poet, and presenting me with a copy of a comedy he had written. The reader who has received at parting from the gentlemanly proprietor of one of our palatial hotels his “Ode on the Steam Elevator,” will conceive of the shame and regret with which I thought of having upbraided our landlord about our rooms, of having stickled at small preliminaries concerning our contract for board, and for having altogether treated him as one of the uninspired. Let me do him the tardy justice to say that he keeps, after the Stella d’Oro at Ferrara, the best hotel in Italy, and that his comedy was really very sprightly. It is no small thing to know how to keep a hotel, as we know, and a poet who does it ought to have a double acclaim.

Nobody who cares to travel with decency and comfort can take the second-class cars on the road between Naples and Rome, though these are perfectly good everywhere else in Italy. The Papal city makes her influence felt for shabbiness and uncleanliness wherever she can, and her management seems to prevail on this railway. A glance into the second-class cars reconciled us to the first-class, — which in themselves were bad, — and we took our places almost contentedly.

The road passed through the wildest country we had seen in Italy; and presently a rain began to fall and made it drearier than ever. The land was much grown up with thickets of hazel, and was here and there sparsely wooded with oaks. Under these, hogs were feeding upon the acorns, and the wet swine-herds were steaming over fires built at their roots. In some places the forest was quite dense; in other places it fell entirely away, and left the rocky hill-sides bare, and solitary but for the sheep that nibbled at the scanty grass, and the shepherds that leaned upon their crooks and motionlessly stared at us as we rushed by. As we drew near Rome, the scenery grew lonelier yet; the land rose into desolate, sterile, stony heights, without a patch of verdure on their nakedness, and at last abruptly dropped into the gloomy expanse of the Campagna.

The towns along the route had little to interest us in their looks, though at San Germano we caught a glimpse of the famous old convent of Monte-Cassino, perched aloft on its cliff and looking like a part of the rock on which it was built. Fancy now loves to climb that steep acclivity, and wander through the many-volumed library of the ancient Benedictine retreat, and on the whole finds it less fatiguing and certainly less expensive than actual ascent and acquaintance with the monastery would have been. Two Croatian priests, who shared our compartment of the railway carriage, first drew our notice to the place, and were enthusiastic about it for many miles after it was out of sight. What gentle and pleasant men they were, and how hard it seemed that they should be priests and Croats! They told us all about the city of Spalato, where they lived, and gave us such a glowing account of Dalmatian poets and poetry that we began to doubt at last if the seat of literature were not somewhere on the east coast of the Adriatic; and I hope we left them the impression that the literary centre of the world was not a thousand miles from the horse-car office in Harvard Square.

Here and there repairs were going forward on the railroad, and most of the laborers were women. They were straight and handsome girls, and moved with a stately grace under the baskets of earth balanced on their heads. Brave black eyes they had, such as love to look and to be looked at; they were not in the least hurried by their work, but desisted from it to gaze at the passengers whenever the train stopped. They all wore their beautiful peasant costume, — the square white linen head-dress falling to the shoulders, the crimson bodice, and the red scant skirt; and how they contrived to keep themselves so clean at their work, and to look so spectacular in it all, remains one of the many Italian mysteries.

Another of these mysteries we beheld in the little beggar-boy at Isoletta. He stood at the corner of the station quite mute and motionless during our pause, and made no sign of supplication or entreaty. He let his looks beg for him. He was perfectly beautiful and exceedingly picturesque. Where his body was not quite naked, his jacket and trousers hung in shreds and points; his long hair grew through the top of his hat, and fell over like a plume. Nobody could resist him; people ran out of the cars, at the risk of being left behind, to put coppers into the little dirty hand held languidly out to receive them. The boy thanked none, smiled on none, but looked curiously and cautiously at all, with the quick perception and the illogical conclusions of his class and race. As we started he did not move, but remained in his attitude of listless tranquillity. As we glanced back, the mystery of him seemed to be solved for a moment: he would stand there till he grew up into a graceful, prayerful, pitiless brigand, and then he would rend from travel the tribute now go freely given him. But after all, though his future seemed clear, and he appeared the type of a strange and hardly reclaimable people, he was not quite a solution of the Neapolitan puzzle.

XIII.

ROMAN PEARLS.

I.

The first view of the ruins in the Forum brought a keen sense of disappointment. I knew that they could only be mere fragments and rubbish, but I was not prepared to find them so. I learned that I had all along secretly hoped for some dignity of neighborhood, some affectionate solicitude on the part of Nature to redeem these works of Art from the destruction that had befallen them. But in hollows below the level of the dirty cowfield, wandered over by evil-eyed buffaloes, and obscenely defiled by wild beasts of men, there stood here an arch, there a pillar, yonder a cluster of columns crowned by a bit of frieze; and yonder again, a fragment of temple, half-gorged by the façade of a hideous Renaissance church; then a height of vaulted brick-work, and, leading on to the Coliseum, another arch, and then incoherent columns overthrown and mixed with dilapidated walls — mere phonographic consonants, dumbly representing the past, out of which all vocal glory had departed. The Coliseum itself does not much better express a certain phase of Roman life than does the Arena at Verona; it is larger only to the foot-rule, and it seemed not grander otherwise, while it is vastly more ruinous. Even the Pantheon failed to impress me at first sight, though I found myself disposed to return to it again and again, and to be more and more affected by it.

Modern Rome appeared, first and last, hideous. It is the least interesting town in Italy, and the architecture is hopelessly ugly — especially the architecture of the churches. The Papal city contrives at the beginning to hide the Imperial city from your thought, as it hides it in such a great degree from your eye, and old Rome only occurs to you in a sort of stupid wonder over the depth at which it is buried. I confess that I was glad to get altogether away from it after a first look at the ruins in the Forum, and to take refuge in the Conservatorio delle Mendicanti, where we were charged to see the little Virginia G. The Conservatorio, though a charitable institution, is not so entirely meant for mendicants as its name would imply, but none of the many young girls there were the children of rich men. They were often enough of parentage actually hungry and ragged, but they were often also the daughters of honest poor folk, who paid a certain sum toward their maintenance and education in the Conservatorio. Such was the case with little Virginia, whose father was at Florence, doubly impeded from seeing her by the fact that he had fought against the Pope for the Republic of 1848, and by the other fact that he had since wrought the Pope a yet deadlier injury by turning Protestant.

Ringing a garrulous bell that continued to jingle some time after we were admitted, we found ourselves in a sort of reception-room, of the general quality of a cellar, and in the presence of a portress who was perceptibly preserved from mold only by the great pot of coals that stood in the centre of the place. Some young girls, rather pretty than not, attended the ancient woman, and kindly acted as the ear-trumpet through which our wishes were conveyed to her mind. The Conservatorio was not, so far, as conventual as we had imagined it; but as the gentleman of the party was strongly guarded by female friends, and asked at once to see the Superior, he concluded that there was, perhaps, something so unusually reassuring to the recluses in his appearance and manner that they had not thought it necessary to behave very rigidly. It later occurred to this gentleman that the promptness with which the pretty mendicants procured him an interview with the Superior had a flavor of self-interest in; and that he who came to the Conservatorio in the place of a father might have been for a moment ignorantly viewed as a yet dearer and tenderer possibility. From whatever danger there was in this error the Superior soon appeared to rescue him, and we were invited into a more ceremonious apartment on the first floor, and the little Virginia was sent for. The visit of the strangers caused a tumult and interest in the quiet old Conservatorio of which it is hard to conceive now, and the excitement grew tremendous when it appeared that, the signori were Americani and Protestanti. We imparted a savor of novelty and importance to Virginia herself, and when she appeared, the Superior and her assistant looked at her with no small curiosity and awe, of which the little maiden instantly became conscious, and began to take advantage. Accompanying us over the building and through the grounds, she cut her small friends wherever she met them, and was not more than respectful to the assistant.

It was from an instinct of hospitality that we were shown the Conservatorio, and instructed in regard to all its purposes. We saw the neat dormitories with their battalions of little white beds; the kitchen with its gigantic coppers for boiling broth, and the refectory with the smell of the frugal dinners of generations of mendicants in it. The assistant was very proud of the neatness of every thing, and was glad to talk of that, or, indeed, any thing else. It appeared that the girls were taught reading, writing, and plain sewing when they were young, and that the Conservatorio was chiefly sustained by pious contributions and bequests. Any lingering notion of the conventual character of the place was dispelled by the assistant’s hurrying to say, “And when we can get the poor things well married, we are glad to do so.”

“But how does any one ever see them?”

“Eh! well, that is easily managed. Once a month we dress the marriageable girls in their best, and take them for a walk in the street. If an honest young man falls in love with one of them going by, he comes to the Superior, and describes her as well as he can, and demands to see her. She is called, and if both are pleased, the marriage is arranged. You see it is a very simple affair.”

And there was, to the assistant’s mind, nothing odd in the whole business, insomuch that I felt almost ashamed of marveling at it.

Issuing from the backdoor of the convent, we ascended by stairs and gateways into garden spaces, chiefly planted with turnips and the like poor but respectable vegetables, and curiously adorned with fragments of antique statuary, and here and there a fountain in a corner, trickling from moss-grown rocks, and falling into a trough of travertine, about the feet of some poor old goddess or Virtue who had forgotten what her name was.

Once, the assistant said, speaking as if the thing had been within her recollection, though it must have been centuries before, the antiquities of the Conservatorio were much more numerous and striking; but they were now removed to the different museums. Nevertheless they had still a beautiful prospect left, which we were welcome to enjoy if we would follow her; and presently, to our surprise, we stepped from the garden upon the roof of the Temple of Peace. The assistant had not boasted without reason: away before us stretched the Campagna, a level waste, and empty, but for the umbrella-palms that here and there waved like black plumes upon it, and for the arched lengths of the acqueducts that seemed to stalk down from the ages across the melancholy expanse like files of giants, with now and then a ruinous gap in the line, as if one had fallen out weary by the way. The city all around us glittered asleep in the dim December sunshine, and far below us, — on the length of the Forum over which the Appian Way stretched from the Capitoline Hill under the Arch of Septimius Severus and the Arch of Titus to the Arch of Constantine, leaving the Coliseum on the left, and losing itself in the foliage of the suburbs, — the Past seemed struggling to emerge from the ruins, and to reshape and animate itself anew. The effort was more successful than that which we had helped the Past to make when standing on the level of the Forum; but Antiquity must have been painfully conscious of the incongruity of the red-legged Zouaves wandering over the grass, and of the bewildered tourists trying to make her out with their Murrays.

In a day or two after this we returned again to our Conservatorio, where we found that the excitement created by our first visit had been kept fully alive by the events attending the photographing of Virginia for her father. Not only Virginia was there to receive us, but her grandmother also — an old, old woman, dumb through some infirmity of age, who could only weep and smile in token of her content. I think she had but a dim idea, after all, of what went on beyond the visible fact of Virginia’s photograph, and that she did not quite understand how we could cause it to be taken for her son. She was deeply compassionated by the Superior, who rendered her pity with a great deal of gesticulation, casting up her eyes, shrugging her shoulders, and sighing grievously. But the assistant’s cheerfulness could not be abated even by the spectacle of extreme age; and she made the most of the whole occasion, recounting with great minuteness all the incidents of the visit to the photographer’s, and running to get the dress Virginia sat in, that we might see how exactly it was given in the picture. Then she gave us much discourse concerning the Conservatorio and its usages, and seemed not to wish us to think that life there was altogether eventless. “Here we have a little amusement also,” she said. “The girls have their relatives to visit them sometimes, and then in the evening they dance. Oh, they enjoy themselves! I am half old (mezzo-vecchia). I am done with these things. But for youth, always kept down, something lively is wanted.”

When we took leave of these simple folks, we took leave of almost the only natural and unprepared aspect of Italian life which we were to see in Rome; but we did not know this at the time.

II.

Indeed, it seems to me that all moisture of romance and adventure has been wellnigh sucked out of travel in Italy, and that compared with the old time, when the happy wayfarer journeyed by vettura through the innumerable little states of the Peninsula, — halted every other mile to show his passport, and robbed by customs officers in every color of shabby uniform and every variety of cocked hat, — the present railroad period is one of but stale and insipid flavor. Much of local life and color remains, of course; but the hurried traveller sees little of it, and, passed from one grand hotel to another, without material change in the cooking or the methods of extortion, he might nearly as well remain at Paris. The Italians, who live to so great extent by the travel through their country, learn our abominable languages and minister to our detestable comfort and propriety, till we have slight chance to know them as we once could, — musical, picturesque, and full of sweet, natural knaveries, graceful falsehood, and all uncleanness. Rome really belongs to the Anglo-Saxon nations, and the Pope and the past seem to be carried on entirely for our diversion. Every thing is systematized as thoroughly as in a museum where the objects are all ticketed; and our prejudices are consulted even down to alms-giving, Honest Beppo is gone from the steps in the Piazza di Spagna, and now the beggars are labeled like policemen, with an immense plate bearing the image of St. Peter, so that you may know you give to a worthy person when you bestow charity on one of them, and not, alas! to some abandoned impostor, as in former days. One of these highly recommended mendicants gave the last finish to the system, and begged of us in English! No custodian will answer you, if he can help it, in the Italian which he speaks so exquisitely, preferring to speak bad French instead, and in all the shops on the Corso the English tongue is de rigueur.

After our dear friends at the Conservatorio, I think we found one of the most simple and interesting of Romans in the monk who showed us the Catacombs of St. Sebastian. These catacombs, he assured us, were not restored like those of St. Calixtus, but were just as the martyrs left them; and, as I do not remember to have read anywhere that they are formed merely of long, low, narrow, wandering underground passages, lined on either side with tombs in tiers like berths on a steamer, and expanding here and there into small square chambers, bearing the traces of ancient frescos, and evidently used as chapels, — I venture to offer the information here. The reader is to keep in his mind a darkness broken by the light of wax tapers, a close smell, and crookedness and narrowness, or he cannot realize the catacombs as they are in fact. Our monkish guide, before entering the passage leading from the floor of the church to the tombs, in which there was still some “fine small dust” of the martyrs, warned us that to touch it was to incur the penalty of excommunication, and then gently craved pardon for having mentioned the fact. But, indeed, it was only to persons who showed a certain degree of reverence that these places were now exhibited; for some Protestants who had been permitted there had stolen handfuls of the precious ashes, merely to throw away. I assured him that I thought them beasts to do it; and I was afterwards puzzled to know what should attract their wantonness in the remnants of mortality, hardly to be distinguished from the common earth out of which the catacombs were dug.

III.

Returning to the church above we found, kneeling before one of the altars, two pilgrims, — a man and a woman. The latter was habited in a nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim’s coat of coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim’s staff in his hand, and showed under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised to be told that he was a species of spiritual valet de place, whose occupation it was to attend pilgrims on their tour to the Seven Churches at which these devotees pray in Rome, and there to direct their orisons and join in them.

It was not to the pilgrims, but to the heretics that the monk now uncovered the precious marble slab on which Christ stood when he met Peter flying from Rome and turned him back. You are shown the prints of the divine feet, which the conscious stone received and keeps forever; and near at hand is one of the arrows with which St. Sebastian was shot. We looked at these things critically, having to pay for the spectacle; but the pilgrims and their guide were all faith and wonder.

I remember seeing nothing else so finely superstitious at Rome. In a chapel near the Church of St. John Lateran are, as is well known, the marble steps which once belonged to Pilate’s house, and which the Saviour is said to have ascended when he went to trial before Pilate. The steps are protected against the wear and tear of devotion by a stout casing of wood, and they are constantly covered with penitents, who ascend and descend them upon their knees. Most of the pious people whom I saw in this act were children, and the boys enjoyed it with a good deal of giggling, as a very amusing feat. Some old and haggard women gave the scene all the dignity which it possessed; but certain well-dressed ladies and gentlemen were undeniably awkward and absurd, and I was led to doubt if there were not an incompatibility between the abandon of simple faith and the respectability of good clothes.

IV.

In all other parts of Italy one hears constant talk among travellers of the malaria at Rome, and having seen a case of Roman fever, I know it is a thing not to be trifled with. But in Rome itself the malaria is laughed at by the foreign residents, — who, nevertheless, go out of the city in midsummer. The Romans, to the number of a hundred thousand or so, remain there the whole year round, and I am bound to say I never saw a healthier, robuster-looking population. The cheeks of the French soldiers, too, whom we met at every turn, were red as their trousers, and they seemed to flourish on the imputed unwholesomeness of the atmosphere. All at Rome are united in declaring that the fever exists at Naples, and that sometimes those who have taken it there come and die in Rome, in order to give the city a bad name; and I think this very likely.

Rome is certainly dirty, however, though there is a fountain in every square, and you are never out of the sound of falling water. The Corso and some of the principal streets do not so much impress you with their filth as with their dullness; but that part of the city where some of the most memorable relics of antiquity are to be found is unimaginably vile. The least said of the state of the archways of the Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by a fossé of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people turn round to stare at the stranger as he passes them; they are all dirty, and his decency must be no less a surprise to them than the neatness of the French soldiers amid all the filth is a puzzle to him. We wandered about a long time in such places one day, looking for the Tarpeian Rock, less for Tarpeia’s sake than for the sake of Miriam and Donatello and the Model. There are two Tarpeian rocks, between which the stranger takes his choice; and we must have chosen the wrong one, for it seemed but a shallow gulf compared to that in our fancy. We were somewhat disappointed; but then Niagara disappoints one; and as for Mont Blanc….

V.

It is worth while for every one who goes to Rome to visit the Church of St. Peter’s; but it is scarcely worth while for me to describe it, or for every one to go up into the bronze globe on the top of the cupola. In fact, this is a great labor, and there is nothing to be seen from the crevices in the ball which cannot be far more comfortably seen from the roof of the church below.

The companions of our ascent to the latter point were an English lady and gentleman, brother and sister, and both Catholics, as they at once told us. The lady and myself spoke for some time in the Tuscan tongue before we discovered that neither of us was Italian, after which we paid each other some handsome compliments upon fluency and perfection of accent. The gentleman was a pleasant purple porpoise from the waters of Chili, whither he had wandered from the English coasts in early youth. He had two leading ideas: one concerned the Pope, to whom he had just been presented, and whom he viewed as the best and blandest of beings; the other related to his boy, then in England, whom he called Jack Spratt, and considered the grandest and greatest of boys. With the view from the roof of the church this gentleman did not much trouble himself. He believed Jack Spratt could ride up to the roof where we stood on his donkey. As to the great bronze globe which we were hurrying to enter he seemed to regard it merely as a rival in rotundity, and made not the slightest motion to follow us.

I should be loth to vex the reader with any description of the scene before us and beneath us, even if I could faithfully portray it. But I recollect, with a pleasure not to be left unrecorded, the sweetness of the great fountain playing in the square before the church, and the harmony in which the city grew in every direction from it, like an emanation from its music, till the last house sank away into the pathetic solitude of the Campagna, with nothing beyond but the snow-capped mountains lighting up the remotest distance. At the same moment I experienced a rapture in reflecting that I had underpaid three hackmen during my stay in Rome, and thus contributed to avenge my race for ages of oppression.

The vastness of St. Peter’s itself is best felt in looking down upon the interior from the gallery that surrounds the inside of the dome, and in comparing one’s own littleness with the greatness of all the neighboring mosaics. But as to the beauty of the temple, I could not find it without or within.

VI.

In Rome one’s fellow-tourists are a constant source of gratification and surprise. I thought that American travellers were by no means the most absurd among those we saw, nor even the loudest in their approval of the Eternal City. A certain order of German greenness affords, perhaps, the pleasantest pasturage for the ruminating mind. For example, at the Villa Ludovisi there was, beside numerous Englishry in detached bodies, a troop of Germans, chiefly young men, frugally pursuing the Sehenswürdigkeiten in the social manner of their nation. They took their enjoyment very noisily, and wrangled together with furious amiability as they looked at Guercino’s “Aurora.” Then two of them parted from the rest, and went to a little summer-house in the gardens, while the others followed us to the top of the Casino. There they caught sight of their friends in the arbor, and the spectacle appeared to overwhelm them. They bowed, they took off their hats, they waved their handkerchiefs. It was not enough: one young fellow mounted on the balustrade of the roof at his neck’s risk, lifted his hat on his cane and flourished it in greeting to the heart’s-friends in the arbor, from whom he had parted two minutes before.

In strange contrast to the producer of this enthusiasm, so pumped and so unmistakably mixed with beer, a fat and pallid Englishwoman sat in a chair upon the roof and coldly, coldly sketched the lovely landscape. And she and the blonde young English girl beside her pronounced a little dialogue together, which I give, because I saw that they meant it for the public:

The Young Girl. — I wonder, you knoa, you don’t draw-ow St. Petuh’s!

The Artist. — O ah, you knoa, I can draw-ow St. Petuh’s from so mennee powints.

I am afraid that the worst form of American greenness appears abroad in a desire to be perfectly up in critical appreciation of the arts, and to approach the great works in the spirit of the connoisseur. The ambition is not altogether a bad one. Still I could not help laughing at a fellow-countryman when he told me that he had not yet seen Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” because he wished to prepare his mind for understanding the original by first looking at all the copies he could find.

VII.

The Basilica San Paolo fuori le Mura surpasses every thing in splendor of marble and costly stone — porphyry, malachite, alabaster — and luxury of gilding that is to be seen at Rome. But I chiefly remember it because on the road that leads to it, through scenes as quiet and peaceful as if history had never known them, lies the Protestant graveyard in which Keats is buried. Quite by chance the driver mentioned it, pointing in the direction of the cemetery with his whip. We eagerly dismounted and repaired to the gate, where we were met by the son of the sexton, who spoke English through the beauteous line of a curved Hebrew nose. Perhaps a Christian could not be found in Rome to take charge of these heretic graves, though Christians can be got to do almost any thing there for money. However, I do not think a Catholic would have kept the place in better order, or more intelligently understood our reverent curiosity. It was the new burial-ground which we had entered, and which is a little to the right of the elder cemetery. It was very beautiful and tasteful in every way; the names upon the stones were chiefly English and Scotch, with here and there an American’s. But affection drew us only to the prostrate tablet inscribed with the words, “Percy Bysshe Shelley, Cor Cordium,” and then we were ready to go to the grave of him for whom we all feel so deep a tenderness. The grave of John Keats is one of few in the old burying-ground, and lies almost in the shadow of the pyramid of Caius Cestius; and I could not help thinking of the wonder the Roman would have felt could he have known into what unnamable richness and beauty his Greek faith had ripened in the heart of the poor poet, where it was mixed with so much sorrow. Doubtless, in his time, a prominent citizen like Caius Cestius was a leading member of the temple in his neighborhood, and regularly attended sacrifice: it would have been but decent; and yet I fancied that a man immersed like him in affairs might have learned with surprise the inner and more fragrant meaning of the symbols with the outside of which his life was satisfied; and I was glad to reflect that in our day such a thing is impossible.

The grave of our beloved poet is sunken to the level of the common earth, and is only marked by the quaintly lettered, simple stone bearing the famous epitaph. While at Rome I heard talk of another and grander monument which some members of the Keats family were to place over the dust of their great kinsman. But, for one, I hope this may never be done, even though the original stone should also be left there, as was intended. Let the world still keep unchanged this shrine, to which it can repair with at once pity and tenderness and respect.

A rose-tree and some sweet-smelling bushes grew upon the grave, and the roses were in bloom. We asked leave to take one of them; but at last could only bring ourselves to gather some of the fallen petals. Our Hebrew guide was willing enough, and unconsciously set us a little example of wantonness; for while he listened to our explanation of the mystery which had puzzled him ever since he had learned English, namely, why the stone should say “writ on water,” and not written, he kept plucking mechanically at one of the fragrant shrubs, pinching away the leaves, and rending the tender twig, till I, remembering the once-sensitive dust from which it grew, waited for the tortured tree to cry out to him with a voice of words and blood, “Perchè mi schianti?”

VIII.

It seems to me that a candid person will wish to pause a little before condemning Gibson’s colored statues. They have been grossly misrepresented. They do not impress one at all as wax-work, and there is great wrong in saying that their tinted nakedness suggests impurity any more than the white nakedness of other statues. The coloring is quite conventional; the flesh is merely warmed with the hue representing life; the hair is always a very delicate yellow, the eyes a tender violet, and there is no other particularization of color; a fillet binding the hair may be gilded, — the hem of a robe traced in blue. I, who had just come from seeing the fragments of antique statuary in Naples Museum, tinted in the same way, could not feel that there was any thing preposterous in Gibson’s works, and I am not ashamed to say that they gave me pleasure.

As we passed, in his studio, from one room to another, the workman who showed the marbles surprised and delighted us by asking if we would like to see the sculptor, and took us up into the little room where Gibson worked. He was engaged upon a bass-relief, — a visit of Psyche to the Zephyrs, or something equally aërial and mythological, — and received us very simply and naturally, and at once began with some quaint talk about the subject in hand. When we mentioned our pleasure in his colored marbles we touched the right spring, and he went on to speak of his favorite theory with visible delight, making occasional pauses to bestow a touch on the bass-relief, and coming back to his theme with that self-corroborative “Yes!” of his, which Hawthorne has immortalized. He was dressed with extraordinary slovenliness and indifference to clothes, had no collar, I think, and evidently did not know what he had on. Every thing about him bespoke the utmost unconsciousness and democratic plainness of life, so that I could readily believe a story I heard of him. Having dined the greater part of his life in Roman restaurants where it is but wholesome to go over your plate, glass, spoon, and knife and fork with your napkin before using them, the great sculptor had acquired such habits of neatness that at table in the most aristocratic house in England he absent-mindedly went through all that ceremony of cleansing and wiping. It is a story they tell in Rome, where every body is anecdoted, and not always so good-naturedly.

IX.

One Sunday afternoon we went with some artistic friends to visit the studio of the great German painter, Overbeck; and since I first read Uhland I have known no pleasure so illogical as I felt in looking at this painter’s drawings. In the sensuous heart of objective Italy he treats the themes of mediæval Catholicism with the most subjective feeling, and I thought I perceived in his work the enthusiasm which led many Protestant German painters and poets of the romantic school back into the twilight of the Romish faith, in the hope that they might thus realize to themselves something of the earnestness which animated the elder Christian artists. Overbeck’s work is beautiful, but it is unreal, and expresses the sentiment of no time; as the work of the romantic German poets seems without relation to any world men ever lived in.

Walking from the painter’s house, two of us parted with the rest on the steps of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore, and pursued our stroll through the gate of San Lorenzo out upon the Campagna, which tempts and tempts the sojourner at Rome, until at last he must go and see — if it will give him the fever. And, alas! there I caught the Roman fever — the longing that burns one who has once been in Rome to go again — that will not be cured by all the cool contemptuous things he may think or say of the Eternal City; that fills him with fond memories of its fascination, and makes it forever desired.

We walked far down the dusty road beyond the city walls, and then struck out from the highway across the wild meadows of the Campagna. They were weedy and desolate, seamed by shaggy grass-grown ditches, and deeply pitted with holes made in search for catacombs. There was here and there a farm-house amid the wide lonesomeness, but oftener a round, hollow, roofless tomb, from which the dust and memory of the dead had long been blown away, and through the top of which — fringed and overhung with grasses, and opening like a great eye — the evening sky looked marvelously sad. One of the fields was full of grim, wide-horned cattle, and in another there were four or five buffaloes lying down and chewing their cuds, — holding their heads horizontally in the air, and with an air of gloomy wickedness which nothing could exceed in their cruel black eyes, glancing about in visible pursuit of some object to toss and gore. There were also many canebrakes, in which the wind made a mournful rustling after the sun had set in golden glitter on the roofs of the Roman churches and the transparent night had fallen upon the scene.

In all our ramble we met not a soul, and I scarcely know what it is makes this walk upon the Campagna one of my vividest recollections of Rome, unless it be the opportunity it gave me to weary myself upon that many-memoried ground as freely as if it had been a woods-pasture in Ohio. Nature, where history was so august, was perfectly simple and motherly, and did so much to make me at home, that, as the night thickened and we plunged here and there into ditches and climbed fences, and struggled, heavy-footed, back through the suburbs to the city gate, I felt as if half my boyhood had been passed upon the Campagna.

X.

Pasquino, like most other great people, is not very interesting upon close approach. There is no trace now in his aspect to show that he has ever been satirical; but the humanity that the sculptor gave him is imperishable, though he has lost all character as a public censor. The torso is at first glance nothing but a shapeless mass of stone, but the life can never die out of that which has been shaped by art to the likeness of a man, and a second look restores the lump to full possession of form and expression. For this reason I lament that statues should ever be restored except by sympathy and imagination.

XI.

Regarding the face of Pompey’s statue in the Spada Palace, I was more struck than ever with a resemblance to American politicians which I had noted in all the Roman statues. It is a type of face not now to be found in Rome, but frequent enough here, and rather in the South than in the North. Pompey was like the pictures of so many Southern Congressmen that I wondered whether race had not less to do with producing types than had similarity of circumstances; whether a republicanism based upon slavery could not so far assimilate character as to produce a common aspect in people widely separated by time and creeds, but having the same unquestioned habits of command, and the same boundless and unscrupulous ambition.

XII.

When the Tiber, according to its frequent habit, rises and inundates the city, the Pantheon is one of the first places to be flooded — the sacristan told us. The water climbs above the altar-tops, sapping, in its recession, the cement of the fine marbles which incrust the columns, so that about their bases the pieces have to be continually renewed. Nothing vexes you so much in the Pantheon as your consciousness of these and other repairs. Bad as ruin is, I think I would rather have the old temple ruinous in every part than restored as you find it. The sacristan felt the wrongs of the place keenly, and said, referring to the removal of the bronze roof, which took place some centuries ago, “They have robbed us of every thing” (Ci hanno levato tutto); as if he and the Pantheon were of one blood, and he had suffered personal hurt in its spoliation.

What a sense of the wildness everywhere lurking about Rome we had given us by that group of peasants who had built a fire of brushwood almost within the portico of the Pantheon, and were cooking their supper at it, the light of the flames luridly painting their swarthy faces!

XIII.

Poor little Numero Cinque Via del Gambero has seldom, I imagine, known so violent a sensation as that it experienced when, on the day of the Immaculate Conception, the Armenian Archbishop rolled up to the door in his red coach. The master of the house had always seemed to like us; now he appeared with profound respect suffusing, as it were, his whole being, and announced, “Signore, it is Monsignore come to take you to the Sistine Chapel in his carriage,” and drew himself up in a line, as much like a series of serving-men as possible, to let us pass out. There was a private carriage for the ladies near that of Monsignore, for he had already advertised us that the sex were not permitted to ride in the red coach. As they appeared, however, he renewed his expressions of desolation at being deprived of their company, and assured them of his good-will with a multiplicity of smiles and nods, intermixed with shrugs of recurrence to his poignant regret. But! In fine, it was forbidden!

Monsignore was in full costume, with his best ecclesiastical clothes on, and with his great gold chain about his neck. The dress was richer than that of the western archbishops; and the long white beard of Monsignore made him look much more like a Scriptural monsignore than these. He lacked, perhaps, the fine spiritual grace of his brother, the Archbishop at Venice, to whose letter of introduction we owed his acquaintance and untiring civilities; but if a man cannot be plump and spiritual, he can be plump and pleasant, as Monsignore was to the last degree. He enlivened our ride with discourse about the Armenians at Venice, equally beloved of us; and, arrived at the Sistine Chapel, he marshaled the ladies before him, and won them early entrance through the crowd of English people crushing one another at the door. Then he laid hold upon the captain of the Swiss Guard, who was swift to provide them with the best places; and in nowise did he seem one of the uninfluential and insignificant priests that About describes the archbishops at Rome to be. According to this lively author, a Swiss guard was striking back the crowd on some occasion with the butt of his halberd, and smote a cardinal on the breast. He instantly dropped upon his knees, with “Pardon, Eminenza! I thought it was a monsignore!” Even the chief of these handsome fellows had nothing but respect and obedience for our Archbishop.

The gentlemen present were separated from the ladies, and in a very narrow space outside of the chapel men of every nation were penned up together. All talked — several priests as loudly as the rest. But the rudest among them were certain Germans, who not only talked but stood upon a seat to see better, and were ordered down by one of the Swiss with a fierce “Giù, signore, giù!” Otherwise the guard kept good order in the chapel, and were no doubt as useful and genuine as any thing about the poor old Pope. What gorgeous fellows they were, and, as soldiers, how absurd! The weapons they bore were as obsolete as the excommunication. It was amusing to pass one of these play-soldiers on guard at the door of the Vatican — tall, straight, beautiful, superb, with his halberd on his shoulder — and then come to a real warrior outside, a little, ugly, red-legged French sentinel, with his Minié on his arm.

Except for the singing of the Pope’s choir — which was angelically sweet, and heavenly far above all praise — the religious ceremonies affected me, like all others of that faith, as tedious and empty. Each of the cardinals, as he entered the chapel, blew a sonorous nose; and was received standing by his brother prelates — a grotesque company of old-womanish old men in gaudy gowns. One of the last to come was Antonelli, who has the very wickedest face in the world. He sat with his eyes fastened upon his book, but obviously open at every pore to all that went on about him. As he passed out he cast gleaming, terrible, sidelong looks upon the people, full of hate and guile.

From where I stood I saw the Pope’s face only in profile: it was gentle and benign enough, but not great in expression, and the smile on it almost degenerated into a simper. His Holiness had a cold; and his recitative, though full, was not smooth. He was all priest when, in the midst of the service, he hawked, held his handkerchief up before his face, a little way off, and ruthlessly spat in it!

FORZA MAGGIORE.

I imagine that Grossetto is not a town much known to travel, for it is absent from all the guide-books I have looked at. However, it is chief in the Maremma, where sweet Pia de’ Tolommei languished and perished of the poisonous air and her love’s cruelty, and where, so many mute centuries since, the Etrurian cities flourished and fell. Further, one may say that Grossetto is on the diligence road from Civita Vecchia to Leghorn, and that in the very heart of the place there is a lovely palm-tree, rare, if not sole, in that latitude. This palm stands in a well-sheltered, dull little court, out of every thing’s way, and turns tenderly toward the wall that shields it on the north. It has no other company but a beautiful young girl, who leans out of a window high over its head, and I have no doubt talks with it. At the moment we discovered the friends, the maiden was looking pathetically to the northward, while the palm softly stirred and opened its plumes, as a bird does when his song is finished; and there is very little question but it had just been singing to her that song of which the palms are so fond, —

 ”Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam
  Im Norden auf kahler Höh’.”

Grossetto does her utmost to hide the secret of this tree’s existence, as if a hard, matter-of-fact place ought to be ashamed of a sentimentality of the kind. It pretended to be a very worldly town, and tried to keep us in the neighborhood of its cathedral, where the caffè and shops are, and where, in the evening, four or five officers of the garrison clinked their sabres on the stones, and promenaded up and down, and as many ladies shopped for gloves; and as many citizens sat at the principal caffè and drank black coffee. This was lively enough; and we knew that the citizens were talking of the last week’s news and the Roman question; that the ladies were really looking for loves, not gloves; that such of the officers as had no local intrigue to keep their hearts at rest were terribly bored, and longed for Florence or Milan or Turin.

Besides the social charms of her piazza, Grossetto put forth others of an artistic nature. The cathedral was very old and very beautiful, — built of alternate lines of red and white marble, and lately restored in the best spirit of fidelity and reverence. But it was not open, and we were obliged to turn from it to the group of statuary in the middle of the piazza, representative of the Maremma and Family returning thanks to the Grand Duke Leopold III. of Tuscany for his goodness in causing her swamps to be drained. The Maremma and her children are arrayed in the scant draperies of Allegory, but the Grand Duke is fully dressed, and is shown looking down with some surprise at their figures, and with a visible doubt of the propriety of their public appearance in that state.

There was also a Museum at Grossetto, and I wonder what was in it?

The wall of the town was perfect yet, though the moat at its feet had been so long dry that it was only to be known from the adjacent fields by the richness of its soil. The top of the wall had been leveled, and planted with shade, and turned into a peaceful promenade, like most of such mediæval defenses in Italy; though I am not sure that a little military life did not still linger about a bastion here and there. From somewhere, when we strolled out early in the morning, to walk upon the wall, there came to us a throb of drums; but I believe that the only armed men we saw, beside the officers in the piazza, were the numerous sportsmen resorting at that season to Grossetto for the excellent shooting in the marshes. All the way to Florence we continued to meet them and their dogs; and our inn at Grossetto overflowed with abundance of game. On the kitchen floor and in the court were heaps of larks, pheasants, quails, and beccafichi, at which a troop of scullion-boys constantly plucked, and from which the great, noble, beautiful, white-aproned cook forever fried, stewed, broiled, and roasted. We lived chiefly upon these generous birds during our sojourn, and found, when we attempted to vary our bill of fare, that the very genteel waiter attending us had few distinct ideas beyond them. He was part of the repairs and improvements which that hostelry had recently undergone, and had evidently come in with the four-pronged forks, the chromo-lithographs of Victor Emanuel, Garibaldi, Solferino, and Magenta in the large dining-room, and the iron stove in the small one. He had nothing, evidently, in common with the brick floors of the bed-chambers, and the ancient rooms with great fire-places. He strove to give a Florentine blandishment to the rusticity of life in the Maremma; and we felt sure that he must know what beefsteak was. When we ordered it, he assumed to be perfectly conversant with it, started to bring it, paused, turned, and, with a great sacrifice of personal dignity, demanded, “Bifsteca di manzo, o bifsteca di motone?”— “Beefsteak of beef, or beefsteak of mutton?”

Of Grossetto proper, this is all I remember, if I except a boy whom I heard singing after dark in the streets, —

“Camicia rossa, O Garibaldi!”

The cause of our sojourn there was an instance of forza maggiore, as the agent of the diligence company defiantly expressed it, in refusing us damages for our overturn into the river. It was in the early part of the winter when we started from Rome for Venice, and we were travelling northward by diligence because the railways were still more or less interrupted by the storms and floods predicted of Matthieu de la Drôme, — the only reliable prophet France has produced since Voltaire; — and if our accident was caused by an overruling Providence, the company, according to the very law of its existence, was not responsible. To be sure, we did not see how an overruling Providence was to blame for loading upon our diligence the baggage of two diligences, or for the clumsiness of our driver; but on the other hand, it is certain that the company did not make it rain or cause the inundation. And, in fine, although we could not have travelled by railway, we were masters to have taken the steamer instead of the diligence at Civita Vecchia.

The choice of either of these means of travel had presented itself in vivid hues of disadvantage all the way from Rome to the Papal port, where the French steamer for Leghorn lay dancing a hornpipe upon the short, chopping waves, while we approached by railway. We had leisure enough to make the decision, if that was all we wanted. Our engine-driver had derived his ideas of progress from an Encyclical Letter, and the train gave every promise of arriving at Civita Vecchia five hundred years behind time. But such was the desolating and depressing influence of the weather and the landscape, that we reached Civita Vecchia as undecided as we had left Rome. On the one hand, there had been the land, soaked and sodden, — wild, shagged with scrubby growths of timber and brooded over by sullen clouds, and visibly inhabited only by shepherds, leaning upon their staves at an angle of forty-five degrees, and looking, in their immovable dejection, with their legs wrapped in long-haired goat-skins, like satyrs that had been converted, and were trying to do right; turning dim faces to us, they warned us with every mute appeal against the land, as a waste of mud from one end of Italy to the other. On the other hand, there was the sea-wind raving about our train and threatening to blow it over, and whenever we drew near the coast, heaping the waves upon the beach in thundering menace.

We weakly and fearfully remembered our former journeys by diligence over broken railway routes; we recalled our cruel voyage from Genoa to Naples by sea; and in a state of pitiable dismay we ate five francs’ worth at the restaurant of the Civita Vecchia station before we knew it, and long before we had made up our minds. Still we might have lingered and hesitated, and perhaps returned to Rome at last, but for the dramatic resolution of the old man who solicited passengers for the diligence, and carried their passports for a final Papal visa at the police-office. By the account he gave of himself, he was one of the best men in the world, and unique in those parts for honesty and truthfulness; and he besought us, out of that affectionate interest with which our very aspect had inspired him, not to go by steamer, but to go by diligence, which in nineteen hours would land us safe, and absolutely refreshed by the journey, at the railway station in Follonica. And now, once, would we go by diligence? twice, would we go? three times, would we go?

“Signore,” said our benefactor, angrily, “I lose my time with you;” and ran away, to be called back in the course of destiny, as he knew well enough, and besought to take us as a special favor.

From the passports he learned that there was official dignity among us, and addressed the unworthy bearer of public honors as Eccellenza, and, at parting bequeathed his advantage to the conductor, commending us all in set terms to his courtesy. He hovered caressingly about us as long as we remained, straining politeness to do us some last little service; and when the diligence rolled away, he did all that one man could to give us a round of applause.

We laughed together at this silly old man, when out of sight; but we confessed that, if travel in our own country ever came, with advancing corruption, to be treated with the small deceits practiced upon it in Italy, it was not likely to be treated with the small civilities also there attendant on it, — and so tried to console ourselves.

At the moment of departure, we were surprised to have enter the diligence a fellow-countryman, whom we had first seen on the road from Naples to Rome. He had since crossed our path with that iteration of travel which brings you again and again in view of the same trunks and the same tourists in the round of Europe, and finally at Civita Vecchia he had turned up, a silent spectator of our scene with the agent of the diligence, and had gone off apparently a confirmed passenger by steamer. Perhaps a nearer view of the sailor’s hornpipe, as danced by that vessel in the harbor, shook his resolution. At any rate, here he was again, and with his ticket for Follonica, — a bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked man, and we will say a citizen of Portland, though he was not. For the first time in our long acquaintance with one another’s faces, we entered into conversation, and wondered whether we should find brigands or any thing to eat on the road, without expectation of finding either. In respect of robbers, we were not disappointed; but shortly after nightfall we stopped at a lonely post-house to change horses, and found that the landlord had so far counted on our appearance as to have, just roasted and fragrantly fuming, a leg of lamb, with certain small fried fish, and a sufficiency of bread. It was a very lonely place as I say; the sky was gloomy overhead; and the wildness of the landscape all about us gave our provision quite a gamy flavor; and brigands could have added nothing to our sense of solitude.

The road creeps along the coast for some distance from Civita Vecchia, within hearing of the sea, and nowhere widely forsakes it, I believe, all the way to Follonica. The country is hilly, and we stopped every two hours to change horses; at which times we looked out, and, seeing that it was a gray and windy night, though not rainy, exulted that we had not taken the steamer. With very little change, the wisdom of our decision in favor of the diligence formed the burden of our talk during the whole night; and to think of eluded sea-sickness requited us in the agony of our break-neck efforts to catch a little sleep, as, mounted upon our nightmares, we rode steeple-chases up and down the highways and by-ways of horror. Any thing that absolutely awakened us was accounted a blessing; and I remember few things in life with so keen a pleasure as the summons that came to us to descend from our places and cross a river in one boat, while the two diligences of our train followed in another. Here we had time to see our fellow-passengers, as the pulsating light of their cigars illumined their faces, and to discover among them that Italian, common to all large companies, who speaks English, and is very eager to practice it with you, — who is such a benefactor if you do not know his own language, and such a bore if you do. After this, being landed, it was rapture to stroll up and down the good road, and feel it hard and real under our feet, and not an abysmal impalpability, while all the grim shapes of our dreams fled to the spectral line of small boats sustaining the ferry-barge, and swaying slowly from it as the drowned men at their keels tugged them against the tide.

“S’ accommodino, Signori!” cries the cheerful voice of the conductor, and we ascend to our places in the diligence. The nightmares are brought out again; we mount, and renew the steeple-chase as before.

Suddenly, it all comes to an end, and we sit wide awake in the diligence, amid a silence only broken by the hiss of rain against the windows, and the sweep of gusts upon the roof. The diligence stands still; there is no rattle of harness, nor other sound to prove that we have arrived at the spot by other means than dropping from the clouds. The idea that we are passengers in the last diligence destroyed before the Deluge, and are now waiting our fate on the highest ground accessible to wheels, fades away as the day dimly breaks, and we find ourselves planted, as the Italians say, on the banks of another river. There is no longer any visible conductor, the horses have been spirited away, the driver has vanished.

The rain beats and beats upon the roof, and begins to drop through upon us in great, wrathful tears, while the river before us rushes away with a momently swelling flood. Enter now from the depths of the storm a number of rainy peasants, with our conductor and driver perfectly waterlogged, and group themselves on the low, muddy shore, near a flat ferry-barge, evidently wanting but a hint of forza maggiore to go down with any thing put into it. A moment they dispute in pantomime, sending now and then a windy tone of protest and expostulation to our ears, and then they drop into a motionless silence, and stand there in the tempest, not braving it, but enduring it with the pathetic resignation of their race, as if it were some form of hopeless political oppression. At last comes the conductor to us and says, It is impossible for our diligences to cross in the boat, and he has sent for others to meet us on the opposite shore. He expected them long before this, but we see! They are not come. Patience and malediction!

Remaining planted in these unfriendly circumstances from four o’clock till ten, we have still the effrontery to be glad that we did not take the steamer. What a storm that must be at sea! When at last our connecting diligences appear on the other shore, we are almost light-hearted, and make a jest of the Ombrone, as we perilously pass it in the ferry-boat too weak for our diligences. Between the landing and the vehicles there is a space of heavy mud to cross, and when we reach them we find the coupé appointed us occupied by three young Englishmen, who insist that they shall be driven to the boat. With that graceful superiority which endears their nation to the world, and makes the travelling Englishman a universal favorite, they keep the seats to which they have no longer any right, while the tempest drenches the ladies to whom the places belong; and it is only by the forza maggiore of our conductor that they can be dislodged. In the mean time the Portland man exchanges with them the assurances of personal and national esteem, which that mighty bond of friendship, the language of Shakespeare and Milton, enables us to offer so idiomatically to our transatlantic cousins.

What Grossetto was like, as we first rode through it, we scarcely looked to see. In four or five hours we should strike the railroad at Follonica; and we merely asked of intermediate places that they should not detain us. We dined in Grossetto at an inn of the Larthian period, — a cold inn and a damp, which seemed never to have been swept since the broom dropped from the grasp of the last Etrurian chambermaid, — and we ate with the two-pronged iron forks of an extinct civilization. All the while we dined, a boy tried to kindle a fire to warm us, and beguiled his incessant failures with stories of inundation on the road ahead of us. But we believed him so little, that when he said a certain stream near Grossetto was impassable, our company all but hissed him.

When we left the town and hurried into the open country, we perceived that he had only too great reason to be an alarmist. Every little rill was risen, and boiling over with the pride of harm, and the broad fields lay hid under the yellow waters that here and there washed over the road. Yet the freshet only presented itself to us as a pleasant excitement; and even when we came to a place where the road itself was covered for a quarter of a mile, we scarcely looked outside the diligence to see how deep the water was. We were surprised when our horses were brought to a stand on a rising ground, and the conductor, cap in hand, appeared at the door. He was a fat, well-natured man, full of a smiling goodwill; and he stood before us in a radiant desperation.

Would Eccellenza descend, look at the water in front, and decide whether to go on? The conductor desired to content; it displeased him to delay, — ma, in somma! — the rest was confided to the conductor’s eloquent shoulders and eyebrows.

Eccellenza, descending, beheld but a disheartening prospect. On every hand the country was under water. The two diligences stood on a stone bridge spanning the stream, that, now swollen to an angry torrent, brawled over a hundred yards of the road before us. Beyond, the ground rose, and on its slope stood a farm-house up to its second story in water. Without the slightest hope in his purpose and merely as an experiment, Eccellenza suggested that a man should be sent in on horseback; which being done, man and horse in a moment floundered into swimming depths.

The conductor, vigilantly regarding Eccellenza, gave a great shrug of desolation.

Eccellenza replied with a foreigner’s broken shrug, — a shrug of sufficiently correct construction, but wanting the tonic accent, as one may say, though expressing, however imperfectly, an equal desolation.

It appeared to be the part of wisdom not to go ahead, but to go back if we could; and we reëntered the water we had just crossed. It had risen a little meanwhile, and the road could now be traced only by the telegraph-poles. The diligence before us went safely through; but our driver, trusting rather to inspiration than precedent, did not follow it carefully, and directly drove us over the side of a small viaduct. All the baggage of the train having been lodged upon the roof of our diligence, the unwieldy vehicle now lurched heavily, hesitated, as if preparing, like Cæsar, to fall decently, and went over on its side with a stately deliberation that gave us ample time to arrange our plans for getting out.

The torrent was only some three feet deep, but it was swift and muddy, and it was with a fine sense of shipwreck that Eccellenza felt his boots filling with water, while a conviction that it would have been better, after all, to have taken the steamer, struck coldly home to him. We opened the window in the top side of the diligence, and lifted the ladies through it and the conductor, in the character of life-boat, bore them ashore; while the driver cursed his horses in a sullen whisper, and could with difficulty be diverted from that employment to cut the lines and save one of them from drowning.

Here our compatriot, whose conversation with the Englishman at the Ombrone we had lately admired, showed traits of strict and severe method which afterward came into even bolder relief. The ladies being rescued, he applied himself to the rescue of their hats, cloaks, rubbers, muffs, books, and bags, and handed them up through the window with tireless perseverance, making an effort to wring or dry each article in turn. The other gentleman on top received them all rather grimly, and had not perhaps been amused by the situation but for the exploit of his hat. It was of the sort called in Italian as in English slang a stove-pipe (canna), and having been made in Italy, it was of course too large for its wearer. It had never been any thing but a horror and reproach to him, and he was now inexpressibly delighted to see it steal out of the diligence in company with one of the red-leather cushions, and glide darkly down the flood. It nodded and nodded to the cushion with a superhuman tenderness and elegance, and had a preposterous air of whispering, as it drifted out of sight, —

 ”It may be we shall reach the Happy Isles, —
  It may be that the gulfs shall wash us down.”

The romantic interest of this episode had hardly died away, when our adventure acquired an idyllic flavor from the appearance on the scene of four peasants in an ox-cart. These the conductor tried to engage to bring out the baggage and right the fallen diligence; and they, after making him a little speech upon the value of their health, which might be injured, asked him, tentatively, two hundred francs for the service. The simple incident enforced the fact already known to us, — that, if Italians sometimes take advantage of strangers, they are equally willing to prey upon each other; but I doubt if any thing could have taught a foreigner the sweetness with which our conductor bore the enormity, and turned quietly from those brigands to carry the Portland man from the wreck, on which he lingered, to the shore.

Here in the gathering twilight the passengers of both diligences grouped themselves, and made merry over the common disaster. As the conductor and the drivers brought off the luggage our spirits rose with the arrival of each trunk, and we were pleased or not as we found it soaked or dry. We applauded and admired the greater sufferers among us: a lady who opened a dripping box was felt to have perpetrated a pleasantry; and a Brazilian gentleman, whose luggage dropped to pieces and was scattered in the flood about the diligence, was looked upon as a very subtile humorist. Our own contribution to these witty passages was the epigrammatic display of a reeking trunk full of the pretty rubbish people bring away from Rome and Naples, — copies of Pompeian frescos more ruinous than the originals; photographs floating loose from their cards; little earthen busts reduced to the lumpishness of common clay; Roman scarfs stained and blotted out of all memory of their recent hues; Roman pearls clinging together in clammy masses.

We were a band of brothers and sisters, as we all crowded into one diligence and returned to Grossetto. Arrived there, our party, knowing that a public conveyance in Italy — and everywhere else — always stops at the worst inn in a place, made bold to seek another, and found it without ado, though the person who undertook to show it spoke of it mysteriously and as of difficult access, and tried to make the simple affair as like a scene of grand opera as he could.

We took one of the ancient rooms in which there was a vast fire-place, as already mentioned, and we there kindled such a fire as could not have been known in that fuel-sparing land for ages. The drying of the clothes was an affair that drew out all the energy and method of our compatriot, and at a late hour we left him moving about among the garments that dangled and dripped from pegs and hooks and lines, dealing with them as a physician with his sick, and tenderly nursing his dress-coat, which he wrung and shook and smoothed and pulled this way and that with a never-satisfied anxiety. At midnight, he hired a watcher to keep up the fire and turn the steaming raiment, and, returning at four o’clock, found his watcher dead asleep before the empty fire-place. But I rather applaud than blame the watcher for this. He must have been a man of iron nerve to fall asleep amid all that phantasmal show of masks and disguises. What if those reeking silks had forsaken their nails, and, decking themselves with the blotted Roman scarfs and the slimy Roman pearls, had invited the dress-coats to look over the dripping photographs? Or if all those drowned garments had assumed the characters of the people whom they had grown to resemble, and had sat down to hear the shade of Pia de’ Tolommei rehearse the story of her sad fate in the Maremma? I say, if a watcher could sleep in such company, he was right to do so.

* * * * *

On the third day after our return to Grossetto, we gathered together our damaged effects, and packed them into refractory trunks. Then we held the customary discussion with the landlord concerning the effrontery of his account, and drove off once more toward Follonica. We could scarcely recognize the route for the one we had recently passed over; and it was not until we came to the scene of our wreck, and found the diligence stranded high and dry upon the roadside, that we could believe the whole landscape about us had been flooded three days before. The offending stream had shrunk back to its channel, and now seemed to feign an unconsciousness of its late excess, and had a virtuous air of not knowing how in the world to account for that upturned diligence. The waters, we learned, had begun to subside the night after our disaster; and the vehicle might have been righted and drawn off — for it was not in the least injured — forty-eight hours previously; but I suppose it was not en règle to touch it without orders from Rome. I picture it to myself still lying there, in the heart of the marshes, and thrilling sympathetic travel with the spectacle of its ultimate ruin:

“Disfecemi Maremma.”

We reached Follonica at last, and then the cars hurried us to Leghorn. We were thoroughly humbled in spirit, and had no longer any doubt that we did ill to take the diligence at Civita Vecchia instead of the steamer; for we had been, not nineteen hours, but four days on the road, and we had suffered as aforementioned.

But we were destined to be partially restored to our self-esteem, if not entirely comforted for our losses, when we sat down to dinner in the Hotel Washington, and the urbane head-waiter, catching the drift of our English discourse, asked us, —

“Have the signori heard that the French steamer, which left Civita Vecchia the same day with their diligence, had to put back and lie in port more than two days on account of the storm? She is but now come into Leghorn, after a very dangerous passage.”

AT PADUA

I.

Those of my readers who have frequented the garden of Doctor Rappaccini no doubt recall with perfect distinctness the quaint old city of Padua. They remember its miles and miles of dim arcade over-roofing the sidewalks everywhere, affording excellent opportunity for the flirtation of lovers by day and the vengeance of rivals by night. They have seen the now-vacant streets thronged with maskers, and the Venetian Podestà going in gorgeous state to and from the vast Palazzo della Ragione. They have witnessed ringing tournaments in those sad empty squares, and races in the Prato della Valle, and many other wonders of different epochs, and their pleasure makes me half-sorry that I should have lived for several years within an hour by rail from Padua, and should know little or nothing of these great sights from actual observation. I take shame to myself for having visited Padua so often and so familiarly as I used to do, — for having been bored and hungry there, — for having had toothache there, upon one occasion, — for having rejoiced more in a cup of coffee at Pedrocchi’s than in the whole history of Padua, — for having slept repeatedly in the bad-bedded hotels of Padua and never once dreamt of Portia, — for having been more taken by the salti mortali[Salti mortali are those prodigious efforts of mental arithmetic by which Italian waiters, in verbally presenting your account, arrive at six as the product of two and two.] of a waiter who summed up my account at a Paduan restaurant, than by all the strategies with which the city has been many times captured and recaptured. Had I viewed Padua only over the wall of Doctor Rappaccini’s garden, how different my impressions of the city would now be! This is one of the drawbacks of actual knowledge. “Ah! how can you write about Spain when once you have been there?” asked Heine of Théophile Gautier setting out on a journey thither.

Nevertheless it seems to me that I remember something about Padua with a sort of romantic pleasure. There was a certain charm which I can dimly recall, in sauntering along the top of the old wall of the city, and looking down upon the plumy crests of the Indian corn that flourished up so mightily from the dry bed of the moat. At such times I could not help figuring to myself the many sieges that the wall had known, with the fierce assault by day, the secret attack by night, the swarming foe upon the plains below, the bristling arms of the besieged upon the wall, the boom of the great mortars made of ropes and leather and throwing mighty balls of stone, the stormy flight of arrows, the ladders planted against the defenses and staggering headlong into the moat, enriched for future agriculture not only by its sluggish waters, but by the blood of many men. I suppose that most of these visions were old stage spectacles furbished up anew, and that my armies were chiefly equipped with their obsolete implements of warfare from museums of armor and from cabinets of antiquities; but they were very vivid for all that.

I was never able, in passing a certain one of the city gates, to divest myself of an historic interest in the great loads of hay waiting admission on the outside. For an instant they masked again the Venetian troops that, in the War of the League of Cambray, entered the city in the hay-carts, shot down the landsknechts at the gates, and, uniting with the citizens, cut the German garrison to pieces. But it was a thing long past. The German garrison was here again; and the heirs of the landsknechts went clanking through the gate to the parade-ground, with that fierce clamor of their kettle-drums which is so much fiercer because unmingled with the noise of fifes. Once more now the Germans are gone, and, let us trust, forever; but when I saw them, there seemed little hope of their going. They had a great Biergarten on the top of the wall, and they had set up the altars of their heavy Bacchus in many parts of the city.

I please myself with thinking that, if I walked on such a spring day as this in the arcaded Paduan streets, I should catch glimpses, through the gate-ways of the palaces, of gardens full of vivid bloom, and of fountains that tinkle there forever. If it were autumn, and I were in the great market-place before the Palazzo della Ragione, I should hear the baskets of amber-hued and honeyed grapes humming with the murmur of multitudinous bees, and making a music as if the wine itself were already singing in their gentle hearts. It is a great field of succulent verdure, that wide old market-place; and fancy loves to browse about among its gay stores of fruits and vegetables, brought thither by the world-old peasant-women who have been bringing fruits and vegetables to the Paduan market for so many centuries. They sit upon the ground before their great panniers, and knit and doze, and wake up with a drowsy “Comandala?” as you linger to look at their grapes. They have each a pair of scales, — the emblem of Injustice, — and will weigh you out a scant measure of the fruit if you like. Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line. Doubtless these old parchment visages are palimpsests, and would tell the whole history of Padua if you could get at each successive inscription. Among their primal records there must be some account of the Roman city, as each little contadinella remembered it on market-days; and one might read of the terror of Attila’s sack, a little later, with the peasant-maid’s personal recollections of the bold Hunnish trooper who ate up the grapes in her basket, and kissed her hard, round red cheeks, — for in that time she was a blooming girl, — and paid nothing for either privilege. What wild and confused reminiscences on the wrinkled visage we should find thereafter of the fierce republican times, of Ecelino, of the Carraras, of the Venetian rule! And is it not sad to think of systems and peoples all passing away, and these ancient women lasting still, and still selling grapes in front of the Palazzo della Ragione? What a long mortality!

The youngest of their number is a thousand years older than the palace, which was begun in the twelfth century, and which is much the same now as it was when first completed. I know that, if I entered it, I should be sure of finding the great hall of the palace — the vastest hall in the world — dim and dull and dusty and delightful, with nothing in it except at one end Donatello’s colossal marble-headed wooden horse of Troy, stared at from the other end by the two dog-faced Egyptian women in basalt placed there by Belzoni.

Late in the drowsy summer afternoons I should have the Court of the University all to myself, and might study unmolested the blazons of the noble youth who have attended the school in different centuries ever since 1200, and have left their escutcheons on the walls to commemorate them. At the foot of the stairway ascending to the schools from the court is the statue of the learned lady who was once a professor in the University, and who, if her likeness belie not her looks, must have given a great charm to student life in other times. At present there are no lady professors at Padua any more than at Harvard; and during late years the schools have suffered greatly from the interference of the Austrian government, which frequently closed them for months, on account of political demonstrations among the students. But now there is an end of this and many other stupid oppressions; and the time-honored University will doubtless regain its ancient importance. Even in 1864 it had nearly fifteen hundred students, and one met them everywhere under the arcades, and could not well mistake them, with that blended air of pirate and dandy which these studious young men loved to assume. They were to be seen a good deal on the promenades outside the walls, where the Paduan ladies are driven in their carriages in the afternoon, and where one sees the blood-horses and fine equipages for which Padua is famous. There used once to be races in the Prato della Valle, after the Italian notion of horse-races; but these are now discontinued, and there is nothing to be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden, — the oldest botanical garden in the world, — the garden which first received in Europe the strange and splendid growths of our hemisphere, — the garden where Doctor Rappaccini doubtless found the germ of his mortal plant?

On the whole, I believe I would rather go this moment to Padua than to Lowell or Lawrence, or even to Worcester; and as to the disadvantage of having seen Padua, I begin to think the whole place has now assumed so fantastic a character in my mind that I am almost as well qualified to write of it as if I had merely dreamed it.

The day that we first visited the city was very rainy, and we spent most of the time in viewing the churches. These, even after the churches of Venice, one finds rich in art and historic interest, and they in no instance fall into the maniacal excesses of the Renaissance to which some of the temples of the latter city abandon themselves. Their architecture forms a sort of border-land between the Byzantine of Venice and the Lombardic of Verona. The superb domes of St. Anthony’s emulate those of St. Mark’s; and the porticos of other Paduan churches rest upon the backs of bird-headed lions and leopards that fascinate with their mystery and beauty.

It was the wish to see the attributive Giottos in the Chapter which drew us first to St. Anthony’s, and we saw them with the satisfaction naturally attending the contemplation of frescos discovered only since 1858, after having been hidden under plaster and whitewash for many centuries; but we could not believe that Giotto’s fame was destined to gain much by their rescue from oblivion. They are in nowise to be compared with this master’s frescos in the Chapel of the Annunziata, — which, indeed, is in every way a place of wonder and delight. You reach it by passing through a garden lane bordered with roses, and a taciturn gardener comes out with clinking keys, and lets you into the chapel, where there is nobody but Giotto and Dante, nor seems to have been for ages. Cool it is, and of a pulverous smell, as a sacred place should be; a blessed benching goes round the walls, and you sit down and take unlimited comfort in the frescos. The gardener leaves you alone to the solitude and the silence, in which the talk of the painter and the exile is plain enough. Their contemporaries and yours are cordial in their gay companionship: through the half-open door falls, in a pause of the rain, the same sunshine that they saw lie there; the deathless birds that they heard sing out in the garden trees; it is the fresh sweetness of the grass mown so many hundred years ago that breathes through all the lovely garden grounds.

But in the midst of this pleasant communion with the past, you have a lurking pain; for you have hired your brougham by the hour; and you presently quit the Chapel of Giotto on this account.

We had chosen our driver from among many other drivers of broughams in the vicinity of Pedrocchi’s, because he had such an honest look, and was not likely, we thought, to deal unfairly with us.

“But first,” said the signor who had selected him, “how much is your brougham an hour?”

So and so.

“Show me the tariff of fares.”

“There is no tariff.”

“There is. Show it to me.”

“It is lost, signor.”

“I think not. It is here in this pocket. Get it out.”

The tariff appears, and with it the fact that he had demanded just what the boatman of the ballad received in gift, — thrice his fee.

The driver mounted his seat, and served us so faithfully that day in Padua that we took him the next day for Arquà. At the end, when he had received his due, and a handsome mancia besides, he was still unsatisfied, and referred to the tariff in proof that he had been under-paid. On that confronted and defeated, he thanked us very cordially, gave us the number of his brougham, and begged us to ask for him when we came next to Padua and needed a carriage.

From the Chapel of the Annunziata he drove us to the Church of Santa Giustina, where is a very famous and noble picture by Romanino. But as this writing has nothing in the world to do with art, I here dismiss that subject, and with a gross and idle delight follow the sacristan down under the church to the prison of Santa Giustina.

Of all the faculties of the mind there is none so little fatiguing to exercise as mere wonder; and, for my own sake, I try always to wonder at things without the least critical reservation. I therefore, in the sense of deglutition, bolted this prison at once, though subsequent experiences led me to look with grave indigestion upon the whole idea of prisons, their authenticity, and even their existence.

As far as mere dimensions are concerned, the prison of Santa Giustina was not a hard one to swallow, being only three feet wide by about ten feet in length. In this limited space, Santa Giustina passed five years of the paternal reign of Nero (a virtuous and a long-suffering prince, whom, singularly enough, no historic artist has yet arisen to whitewash), and was then brought out into the larger cell adjoining, to suffer a blessed martyrdom. I am not sure now whether the sacristan said she was dashed to death on the stones, or cut to pieces with knives; but whatever the form of martyrdom, an iron ring in the ceiling was employed in it, as I know from seeing the ring, — a curiously well-preserved piece of iron-mongery. Within the narrow prison of the saint, and just under the grating, through which the sacristan thrust his candle to illuminate it, was a mountain of candle-drippings, — a monument to the fact that faith still largely exists in this doubting world. My own credulity, not only with regard to this prison, but also touching the coffin of St. Luke, which I saw in the church, had so wrought upon the esteem of the sacristan, that he now took me to a well, into which, he said, had been cast the bones of three thousand Christian martyrs. He lowered a lantern into the well, and assured me that, if I looked through a certain screenwork there, I could see the bones. On experiment I could not see the bones, but this circumstance did not cause me to doubt their presence, particularly as I did see upon the screen a great number of coins offered for the repose of the martyrs’ souls. I threw down some soldi, and thus enthralled the sacristan.

If the signor cared to see prisons, he said, the driver must take him to those of Ecelino, at present the property of a private gentleman near by. As I had just bought a history of Ecelino, at a great bargain, from a second-hand book-stall, and had a lively interest in all the enormities of that nobleman, I sped the driver instantly to the villa of the Signor P —— .

It depends here altogether upon the freshness or mustiness of the reader’s historical reading whether he cares to be reminded more particularly who Ecelino was. He flourished balefully in the early half of the thirteenth century as lord of Vicenza, Verona, Padua, and Brescia, and was defeated and hurt to death in an attempt to possess himself of Milan. He was in every respect a remarkable man for that time, — fearless, abstemious, continent, avaricious, hardy, and unspeakably ambitious and cruel. He survived and suppressed innumerable conspiracies, escaping even the thrust of the assassin whom the fame of his enormous wickedness had caused the Old Man of the Mountain to send against him. As lord of Padua he was more incredibly severe and bloody in his rule than as lord of the other cities, for the Paduans had been latest free, and conspired the most frequently against him. He extirpated whole families on suspicion that a single member had been concerned in a meditated revolt. Little children and helpless women suffered hideous mutilation and shame at his hands. Six prisons in Padua were constantly filled by his arrests. The whole country was traversed by witnesses of his cruelties, — men and women deprived of an arm or leg, and begging from door to door. He had long been excommunicated; at last the Church proclaimed a crusade against him, and his lieutenant and nephew — more demoniacal, if possible, than himself — was driven out of Padua while he was operating against Mantua. Ecelino retired to Verona, and maintained a struggle against the crusade for nearly two years longer, with a courage which never failed him. Wounded and taken prisoner, the soldiers of the victorious army gathered about him, and heaped insult and reproach upon him; and one furious peasant, whose brother’s feet had been cut off by Ecelino’s command, dealt the helpless monster four blows upon the head with a scythe. By some, Ecelino is said to have died of these wounds alone; but by others it is related that his death was a kind of suicide, inasmuch as he himself put the case past surgery by tearing off the bandages from his hurts, and refusing all medicines.

II.

Entering at the enchanted portal of the Villa P —— , we found ourselves in a realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ages concerning life and death; we began with Confucius, and we ended with Benjamino Franklino. But as if these ideas of mortality were not sufficiently depressing, the funereal Signor P —— had collected into earthen amphoræ the ashes of the most famous men of ancient and modern times, and arranged them so that a sense of their number and variety should at once strike his visitor. Each jar was conspicuously labeled with the name its illustrious dust had borne in life; and if one escaped with comparative cheerfulness from the thought that Seneca had died, there were in the very next pot the cinders of Napoleon to bully him back to a sense of his mortality.

We were glad to have the gloomy fascination of these objects broken by the custodian, who approached to ask if we wished to see the prisons of Ecelino, and we willingly followed him into the rain out of our sepulchral shelter.

Between the vestibule and the towers of the tyrant lay that garden already mentioned, and our guide led us through ranks of weeping statuary, and rainy bowers, and showery lanes of shrubbery, until we reached the door of his cottage. While he entered to fetch the key to the prisons, we noted that the towers were freshly painted and in perfect repair; and indeed the custodian said frankly enough, on reappearing, that they were merely built over the prisons on the site of the original towers. The storied stream of the Bacchiglione sweeps through the grounds, and now, swollen by the rainfall, it roared, a yellow torrent, under a corner of the prisons. The towers rise from masses of foliage, and form no unpleasing feature of what must be, in spite of Signor P —— , a delightful Italian garden in sunny weather. The ground is not so flat as elsewhere in Padua, and this inequality gives an additional picturesqueness to the place. But as we were come in search of horrors, we scorned these merely lovely things, and hastened to immure ourselves in the dungeons below. The custodian, lighting a candle, (which ought, we felt, to have been a torch,) went before.

We found the cells, though narrow and dark, not uncomfortable, and the guide conceded that they had undergone some repairs since Ecelino’s time. But all the horrors for which we had come were there in perfect grisliness, and labeled by the ingenious Signor P —— with Latin inscriptions.

In the first cell was a shrine of the Virgin, set in the wall. Beneath this, while the wretched prisoner knelt in prayer, a trap-door opened and precipitated him upon the points of knives, from which his body fell into the Bacchiglione below. In the next cell, held by some rusty iron rings to the wall, was a skeleton, hanging by the wrists.

“This,” said the guide, “was another punishment of which Ecelino was very fond.”

A dreadful doubt seized my mind. “Was this skeleton found here?” I demanded.

Without faltering an instant, without so much as winking an eye, the custodian replied, “Appunto.”

It was a great relief, and restored me to confidence in the establishment. I am at a loss to explain how my faith should have been confirmed afterwards by coming upon a guillotine — an awful instrument in the likeness of a straw-cutter, with a decapitated wooden figure under its blade — which the custodian confessed to be a modern improvement placed there by Signor P —— . Yet my credulity was so strengthened by his candor, that I accepted without hesitation the torture of the water-drop when we came to it. The water-jar was as well preserved as if placed there but yesterday, and the skeleton beneath it — found as we saw it — was entire and perfect.

In the adjoining cell sat a skeleton — found as we saw it — with its neck in the clutch of the garrote, which was one of Ecelino’s more merciful punishments; while in still another cell the ferocity of the tyrant appeared in the penalty inflicted upon the wretch whose skeleton had been hanging for ages — as we saw it — head downwards from the ceiling.

Beyond these, in a yet darker and drearier dungeon, stood a heavy oblong wooden box, with two apertures near the top, peering through which we found that we were looking into the eyeless sockets of a skull. Within this box Ecelino had immured the victim we beheld there, and left him to perish in view of the platters of food and goblets of drink placed just beyond the reach of his hands. The food we saw was of course not the original food.

At last we came to the crowning horror of Villa P —— , the supreme excess of Ecelino’s cruelty. The guide entered the cell before us, and, as we gained the threshold, threw the light of his taper vividly upon a block that stood in the middle of the floor. Fixed to the block by an immense spike driven through from the back was the little slender hand of a woman, which lay there just as it had been struck from the living arm, and which, after the lapse of so many centuries, was still as perfectly preserved as if it had been embalmed. The sight had a most cruel fascination; and while one of the horror-seekers stood helplessly conjuring to his vision that scene of unknown dread, — the shrinking, shrieking woman dragged to the block, the wild, shrill, horrible screech following the blow that drove in the spike, the merciful swoon after the mutilation, — his companion, with a sudden pallor, demanded to be taken instantly away.

In their swift withdrawal, they only glanced at a few detached instruments of torture, — all original Ecelinos, but intended for the infliction of minor and comparatively unimportant torments, — and then they passed from that place of fear.

III.

In the evening we sat talking at the Caffè Pedrocchi with an abbate, an acquaintance of ours, who was a Professor in the University of Padua. Pedrocchi’s is the great caffè of Padua, a granite edifice of Egyptian architecture, which is the mausoleum of the proprietor’s fortune. The pecuniary skeleton at the feast, however, does not much trouble the guests. They begin early in the evening to gather into the elegant saloons of the caffè, — somewhat too large for so small a city as Padua, — and they sit there late in the night over their cheerful cups and their ices, with their newspapers and their talk. Not so many ladies are to be seen as at the caffè in Venice, for it is only in the greater cities that they go much to these public places. There are few students at Pedrocchi’s, for they frequent the cheaper caffè; but you may nearly always find there some Professor of the University, and on the evening of which I speak there were two present besides our abbate. Our friend’s great passion was the English language, which he understood too well to venture to speak a great deal. He had been translating from that tongue into Italian certain American poems, and our talk was of these at first. Then we began to talk of distinguished American writers, of whom intelligent Italians always know at least four, in this succession, — Cooper, Mrs. Stowe, Longfellow, and Irving. Mrs. Stowe’s Capanna di Zio Tom is, of course universally read; and my friend had also read Il Fiore di Maggio,— “The May-flower.” Of Longfellow, the “Evangeline” is familiar to Italians, through a translation of the poem; but our abbate knew all the poet’s works, and one of the other professors present that evening had made such faithful study of them as to have produced some translations rendering the original with remarkable fidelity and spirit. I have before me here his brochure, printed last year at Padua, and containing versions of “Enceladus,” “Excelsior,” “A Psalm of Life,” “The Old Clock on the Stairs,” “Sand of the Desert in an Hour-Glass,” “Twilight,” “Daybreak,” “The Quadroon Girl,” and “Torquemada,” — pieces which give the Italians a fair notion of our poet’s lyrical range, and which bear witness to Professor Messadaglia’s sympathetic and familiar knowledge of his works. A young and gifted lady of Parma, now unhappily no more, lately published a translation of “The Golden Legend;” and Professor Messadaglia, in his Preface, mentions a version of another of our poet’s longer works on which the translator of the “Evangeline” is now engaged.

At last, turning from literature, we spoke with the gentle abbate of our day’s adventures, and eagerly related that of the Ecelino prisons. To have seen them was the most terrific pleasure of our lives.

“Eh!” said our friend, “I believe you.”

“We mean those under the Villa P —— .”

“Exactly.”

There was a tone of politely suppressed amusement in the abbate’s voice; and after a moment’s pause, in which we felt our awful experience slipping and sliding away from us, we ventured to say, “You don’t mean that those are not the veritable Ecelino prisons?”

“Certainly they are nothing of the kind. The Ecelino prisons were destroyed when the Crusaders took Padua, with the exception of the tower, which the Venetian Republic converted into an observatory.”

“But at least these prisons are on the site of Ecelino’s castle?”

“Nothing of the sort. His castle in that case would have been outside of the old city walls.”

“And those tortures and the prisons are all” —

“Things got up for show. No doubt, Ecelino used such things, and many worse, of which even the ingenuity of Signor P —— cannot conceive. But he is an eccentric man, loving the horrors of history, and what he can do to realize them he has done in his prisons.”

“But the custodian — how could he lie so?”

Our friend shrugged his shoulders. “Eh! easily. And perhaps he even believed what he said.”

The world began to assume an aspect of bewildering ungenuineness, and there seemed to be a treacherous quality of fiction in the ground under our feet. Even the play at the pretty little Teatro Sociale where we went to pass the rest of the evening appeared hollow and improbable. We thought the hero something of a bore, with his patience and goodness; and as for the heroine, pursued by the attentions of the rich profligate, we doubted if she were any better than she should be.

A PILGRIMAGE TO PETRARCH’S HOUSE AT ARQUÀ.

I.

We said, during summer days at Venice, when every campo was a furnace seven times heated, and every canal was filled with boiling bathers, “As soon as it rains we will go to Arquà.” Remembering the ardors of an April sun on the long, level roads of plain, we could not think of them in August without a sense of dust clogging every pore, and eyes that shrank from the vision of their blinding whiteness. So we stayed in Venice, waiting for rain, until the summer had almost lapsed into autumn; and as the weather cooled before any rain reached us, we took the moisture on the main-land for granted, and set out under a cloudy and windy sky.

We had to go to Padua by railway, and take carriage thence to Arquà upon the road to Ferrara. I believe no rule of human experience was violated when it began to rain directly after we reached Padua, and continued to rain violently the whole day. We gave up this day entirely to the rain, and did not leave Padua until the following morning when we count that our pilgrimage to Petrarch’s house actually began.

The rain had cooled and freshened the air, but it was already too late in the season for the summer to recover herself with the elastic brilliancy that follows the rain of July or early August; and there was I know not what vague sentiment of autumn in the weather. There was not yet enough of it to stir the

“Tears from the depth of some divine despair;”

but in here and there a faded leaf (for in Europe death is not glorified to the foliage as in our own land), in the purple of the ripening grapes, and in the tawny grass of the pastures, there was autumn enough to touch our spirits, and while it hardly affected the tone of the landscape, to lay upon us the gentle and pensive spell of its presence. Of all the days in the year I would have chosen this to go pilgrim to the house of Petrarch.

The Euganean Hills, on one of which the poet’s house is built, are those mellow heights which you see when you look southwest across the lagoon at Venice. In misty weather they are blue, and in clear weather silver, and the October sunset loves them. They rise in tender azure before you as you issue from the southern gate of Padua, and grow in loveliness as you draw nearer to them from the rich plain that washes their feet with endless harvests of oil and wine.

Oh beauty that will not let itself be told! Could I not take warning from another, and refrain from this fruitless effort of description? A friend in Padua had lent me Disraeli’s “Venetia,” because a passage of the story occurs in Petrarch’s house at Arquà, and we carried the volumes with us on our pilgrimage. I would here quote the description of the village, the house, and the hills from this work, as faultlessly true, and as affording no just idea of either; but nothing of it has remained in my mind except the geological fact that the hills are a volcanic range. To tell the truth, the landscape, as we rode along, continually took my mind off the book, and I could not give that attention either to the elegant language of its descriptions, or the adventures of its well-born characters, which they deserved. I was even more interested in the disreputable-looking person who mounted the box beside our driver directly we got out of the city gate, and who invariably commits this infringement upon your rights in Italy, no matter how strictly and cunningly you frame your contract that no one else is to occupy any part of the carriage but yourself. He does not seem to be the acquaintance of the driver, for they never exchange a word, and he does not seem to pay any thing for the ride. He got down, in this instance, just before we reached the little town at which our driver stopped, and asked us if we wished to drink a glass of the wine of the country. We did not, but his own thirst seemed to answer equally well, and he slaked it cheerfully at our cost.

The fields did not present the busy appearance which had delighted us on the same road in the spring, but they had that autumnal charm already mentioned. Many of the vine-leaves were sear; the red grapes were already purple, and the white grapes pearly ripe, and they formed a gorgeous necklace for the trees, around which they clung in opulent festoons. Then, dearer to our American hearts than this southern splendor, were the russet fields of Indian corn, and, scattered among the shrunken stalks, great nuggets of the “harmless gold” of pumpkins.

At Battaglia (the village just beyond which you turn off to go to Arquà) there was a fair, on the blessed occasion of some saint’s day, and there were many booths full of fruits, agricultural implements, toys, clothes, wooden ware, and the like. There was a great crowd and a noise, but, according to the mysterious Italian custom, nobody seemed to be buying or selling. I am in the belief that a small purchase of grapes we made here on our return was the great transaction of the day, unless, indeed, the neat operation in alms achieved at our expense by a mendicant villager may be classed commercially.

When we turned off from the Rovigo road at Battaglia we were only three miles from Arquà.

II.

Now, all the way from this turning to the foot of the hill on which the village was stretched asleep in the tender sunshine, there was on either side of the road a stream of living water. There was no other barrier than this between the road and the fields (unless the vines swinging from tree to tree formed a barrier), and, as if in graceful excuse for the interposition of even these slender streams, Nature had lavished such growth of wild flowers and wild berries on the banks that it was like a garden avenue, through the fragrance and beauty of which we rolled, delighted to silence, almost to sadness.

When we began to climb the hill to Arquà, and the driver stopped to breathe his horse, I got out and finished the easy ascent on foot. The great marvel to me is that the prospect of the vast plain below, on which, turning back, I feasted my vision, should be there yet, and always. It had the rare and saddening beauty of evanescence, and awoke in me the memory of all beautiful scenery, so that I embroidered the landscape with the silver threads of western streams, and bordered it with Ohio hills. Ohio hills? When I looked again it was the storied Euganean group. But what trans-oceanic bird, voyaging hither, dropped from its mouth the blackberry which took root and grew and blossomed and ripened, that I might taste Home in it on these classic hills?

I wonder did Petrarch walk often down this road from his house just above? I figured him coming to meet me with his book in his hand, in his reverend poetic robes, and with his laurel on, over that curious kind of bandaging which he seems to have been fond of — looking, in a word, for all the world like the neuralgic Petrarch in the pictures.

Drawing nearer, I discerned the apparition to be a robeless, laureless lout, who belonged at the village inn. Yet this lout, though not Petrarch, had merits. His face and hands, and his legs, as seen from his knees down, had the tone of the richest bronze; he wore a mountain cap with a long tasseled fall to the back of it; his face was comely and his eye beautiful; and he was so nobly ignorant of every thing that a colt or young bullock could not have been better company. He merely offered to guide us to Petrarch’s house, and was silent, except when spoken to, from that instant.

I am here tempted to say: Arquà is in the figure of a man stretched upon the hill slope. The head, which is Petrarch’s house, rests upon the summit. The carelessly tossed arms lie abroad from this in one direction, and the legs in the opposite quarter. It is a very lank and shambling figure, without elegance or much proportion, and the attitude is the last wantonness of loafing. We followed our lout up the right leg, which is a gentle and easy ascent in the general likeness of a street. World-old stone cottages crouch on either side; here and there is a more ambitious house in decay; trees wave over the street, and down its distance comes an occasional donkey-cart very musically and leisurely. By all odds, Arquà and its kind of villages are to be preferred to those hamlets of the plain which in Italy cling to the white-hot highway without a tree to shelter them, and bake and burn there in the merciless sun. Their houses of stuccoed stone are crowded as thickly together as city houses, and these wretched little villages do their worst to unite the discomforts of town and country with a success dreadful to think of. In all countries villages are hateful to the heart of civilized man. In the Lombard plains I wonder that one stone of them rests upon another.

We reached Petrarch’s house before the custodian had arrived to admit us, and stood before the high stone wall which shuts in the front of the house, and quite hides it from those without. This wall bears the inscription, Casa Petrarca, and a marble tablet lettered to the following effect: —

SE TI AGITA SACRO AMORE DI PATRIA, T’INCHINA A QUESTE MURA OVE SPIRÒ LA GRAND’ ANIMA, IL CANTOR DEI SCIPIONI E DI LAURA.

Which may be translated: “If thou art stirred by love of country, bow to these walls, whence passed the great soul, the singer of the Scipios and of Laura.”

Meanwhile we became the centre of a group of the youths of Arquà, who had kindly attended our progress in gradually increasing numbers from the moment we had entered the village. They were dear little girls and boys, and mountain babies, all with sunburnt faces and the gentle and the winning ways native to this race, which Nature loves better than us of the North. The blonde pilgrim seemed to please them, and they evidently took us for Tedeschi. You learn to submit to this fate in Northern Italy, however ungracefully, for it is the one that constantly befalls you outside of the greatest cities. The people know about two varieties of foreigners — the Englishman and the German. If, therefore, you have not rosbif expressed in every lineament of your countenance; if the soles of your boots are less than an inch thick, and your clothes are not reduced in color to the invariable and maddening tone of the English tweed, — you must resign yourself to be a German. All this is grievous to the soul which loves to spread its eagle in every land and to be known as American, with star-spangled conspicuousness all over the world: but it cannot be helped. I vainly tried to explain the geographical, political, and natural difference between Tedeschi and Americani to the custodian of Petrarch’s house. She listened with amiability, shrugged her shoulders hopelessly, and said, in her rude Venetian, “Mi no so miga” (I don’t know at all).

Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died, — on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, —

“When did Petrarch live here?”

“Ah! I don’t remember him.”

“Who was he?”

“A poet, signor.”

Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet had penetrated — and he a lout in the village where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not know when Petrarch had lived there, — a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries, — but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch’s door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arquà. Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth of Arquà picked and forced upon us for remembrance.

A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony. From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch’s garden, which, presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it. Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden? For me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven to heaven below.

The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations. In all these Laura prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled botany and toothache. There is occasionally a startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses. I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes. I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the poet’s residence, but the portrait over the door of the bedroom inside of the chamber, was of his own time, and taken from him — the custodian said. As it seemed to look like all the Petrarchian portraits, I did not remark it closely, but rather turned my attention to the walls of the chamber, which were thickly over-scribbled with names. They were nearly all Italian, and none English so far as I saw. This passion for allying one’s self to the great, by inscribing one’s name on places hallowed by them, is certainly very odd; and (I reflected as I added our names to the rest) it is, without doubt, the most impertinent and idiotic custom in the world. People have thus written themselves down, to the contempt of sensible futurity, all over Petrarch’s house.

The custodian insisted that the bedroom was just as in the poet’s time; some rooms beyond it had been restored; the kitchen at its side was also repaired. Crossing the passage-way, we now entered the dining-room, which was comparatively large and lofty, with a mighty and generous fire-place at one end, occupying the whole space left by a balcony-window. The floor was paved with tiles, and the window-panes were round and small, and set in lead — like the floors and window-panes of all the other rooms. A gaudy fresco, representing some indelicate female deity, adorned the front of the fire-place, which sloped expanding from the ceiling and terminated at the mouth without a mantel-piece. The chimney was deep, and told of the cold winters in the hills, of which, afterward, the landlady of the village inn prattled less eloquently.

From this dining-room opens, to the right, the door of the room which they call Petrarch’s library; and above the door, set in a marble frame, with a glass before it, is all that is mortal of Petrarch’s cat, except the hair. Whether or not the fur was found incompatible with the process of embalming, and therefore removed, or whether it has slowly dropped away with the lapse of centuries, I do not know; but it is certain the cat is now quite hairless, and has the effect of a wash-leather invention in the likeness of a young lamb. On the marble slab below there is a Latin inscription, said to be by the great poet himself, declaring this cat to have been “second only to Laura.” We may, therefore, believe its virtues to have been rare enough; and cannot well figure to ourselves Petrarch sitting before that wide-mouthed fire-place, without beholding also the gifted cat that purrs softly at his feet and nestles on his knees, or, with thickened tail and lifted back, parades, loftily round his chair in the haughty and disdainful manner of cats.

In the library, protected against the predatory enthusiasm of visitors by a heavy wire netting, are the desk and chair of Petrarch, which I know of no form of words to describe perfectly. The front of the desk is of a kind of mosaic in cubes of wood, most of which have been carried away. The chair is wide-armed and carved, but the bottom is gone, and it has been rudely repaired. The custodian said Petrarch died in this chair while he sat writing at his desk in the little nook lighted by a single window opening on the left from his library. He loved to sit there. As I entered I found he had stepped out for a moment, but I know he returned directly after I withdrew.

On one wall of the library (which is a simple oblong room, in nowise remarkable) was a copy of verses in a frame, by Cesarotti, and on the wall opposite a tribute from Alfieri, both manu propriâ. Over and above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of the poet’s little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of “Pétrarque” when young.

Alfieri’s verses are written in ink on the wall, while those of Cesarotti are on paper, and framed, I do not remember any reference to his visit to Petrarch’s house in Alfieri’s autobiography, though the visit must have taken place in 1783, when he sojourned at Padua, and “made the acquaintance of the celebrated Cesarotti, with whose lively and courteous manners he was no less satisfied than he had always been in reading his (Cesarotti’s) most masterly version of ‘Ossian.’” It is probable that the friends visited the house together. At any rate, I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat “composing” his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri’s impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.

Do you care, gentle reader, to be reminded that just before this visit
Alfieri had heard in Venice of the “peace between England and the
United Colonies,” and that he then and there “wrote the fifth ode of
the ‘America Libera,’” and thus finished that poem?

After copying these verses we returned to the dining-room, and while one pilgrim strayed idly through the names in the visitor’s book, the other sketched Petrarch’s cat, before mentioned, and Petrarch’s inkstand of bronze — a graceful little thing, having a cover surmounted by a roguish cupid, while the lower part is supported on three lion’s claws, and just above the feet, at either of the three corners, is an exquisite little female bust and head. Thus sketching and idling, we held spell-bound our friends the youth of Arquà, as well as our driver, who, having brought innumerable people to see the house of Petrarch, now for the first time, with great astonishment, beheld the inside of it himself.

As to the authenticity of the house I think there can be no doubt, and as to the genuineness of the relics there, nothing in the world could shake my faith in them, though Muratori certainly characterizes them as “superstitions.” The great poet was sixty-five years old when he came to rest at Arquà, and when, in his own pathetic words, “there remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good end.” He says further, at the close of his autobiography: “In one of the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements, without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins; wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as these of the psalm: ‘Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne memineris.’ And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to Him — only true, certain, immutable Good.”

I venerate the house at Arquà because these sweet and solemn words were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final look from the balcony down upon “the slopes clothed with vines and olives”) and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch— “an ark of red stone, upon four columns likewise of marble.” The epitaph is this: —

 ”Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
  Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
  Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce.”

A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arquà, in proof of which she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little “Life of Petrarch,” by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that this curious attempt of the Florentines to do doubtful honor to the great citizen whose hereditary civic rights they restored too late (about the time he was drawing nigh his “good end” at Arquà), was made for them by a certain monk of Portagruaro named Tommaso Martinelli. He had a general instruction from his employers to bring away from Arquà “any important thing of Petrarch’s” that he could; and it occurred to this ill-advised friar to “move his bones.” He succeeded on a night of the year 1630 in stealing the dead poet’s arm. The theft being at once discovered, the Venetian Republic rested not till the thief was also discovered; but what became of the arm or of the sacrilegious monk neither the Signor Leoni nor the old women of Arquà give any account. The Republic removed the rest of Petrarch’s body, which is now said to be in the Royal Museum of Madrid.

I was willing to know more of this quaint village of Arquà, and I rang at the parish priest’s door to beg of him some account of the place, if any were printed. But already at one o’clock he had gone to bed for a nap, and must on no account be roused till four. It is but a quiet life men lead in Arquà, and their souls are in drowsy hands. The amount of sleep which this good man gives himself (if he goes to bed at 9 P.M. and rises at 9 A.M., with a nap of three hours during the day) speaks of a quiet conscience, a good digestion, and uneventful days. As I turned this notion over in my mind, my longing to behold his reverence increased, that I might read life at Arquà in the smooth curves of his well-padded countenance. I thought it must be that his “bowels of compassion were well-rounded,” and, making sure of absolution, I was half-minded, if I got speech with him, to improve the occasion by confessing one or two of my blackest sins.

Ought I to say here that, on the occasion of a second visit to Arquà, I succeeded in finding this excellent ecclesiastic wide awake at two o’clock in the afternoon, and that he granted me an interview at that hour? Justice to him, I think, demands this admission of me. He was not at all a fat priest, as I had prefigured him, but rather of a spare person, and of a brisk and lively manner. At the village inn, after listening half an hour to a discourse on nothing but white wine from a young priest, who had stopped to drink a glass of it, I was put in the way of seeing the priest of Arquà by the former’s courtesy. Happily enough, his reverence chanced to have the very thing I wanted to see — no other than Leoni’s “Life of Petrarch,” to which I have already referred. Courtesy is the blood in an Italian’s veins, and I need not say that the ecclesiastic of Arquà, seeing my interest in the place, was very polite and obliging. But he continued to sleep throughout our first stay in Arquà, and I did not see him then.

I strolled up and down the lazy, rambling streets, and chiefly devoted myself to watching the young women who were washing clothes at the stream running from the “Fountain of Petrarch.” Their arms and legs were bronzed and bare, and they chattered and laughed gayly at their work. Their wash-tubs were formed by a long marble conduit from the fountain; their wash-boards, by the inward-sloping conduit-sides; and they thrashed and beat the garments clean upon the smooth stone. To a girl, their waists were broad and their ankles thick. Above their foreheads the hair was cut short, and their “back hair” was gathered into a mass, and held together by converging circle of silver pins.

The Piazza della Fontana, in Arquà, is a place some fifty feet in length and breadth, and seems to be a favorite place of public resort. In the evening, doubtless, it is alive with gossipers, as now with workers. It may be that then his reverence, risen from his nap, saunters by, and pauses long enough to chuck a pretty girl under the chin or pinch an urchin’s cheek.

Our dinner was ready by the time I got back to the inn, and we sat down to a chicken stewed in oil and a stoup of the white wine of Arquà. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arquà had retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the bill was as follows: —

         Soldi.
  Chicken 70
  Bread 8
  Wine 20
          —
  Total 98

It surely was not a costly dinner, yet I could have bought the same chicken in Venice for half the money; which is but another proof that the demand of the producer is often much larger than the supply of the consumer, and that to buy poultry cheaply you must not purchase it where raised, —

 …”On misty mountain ground,
  Its own vast shadow glory crowned,” —

but rather in a large city after it has been transported forty miles or more. Not that we begrudged the thrifty inn-keeper his fee. We paid it cheerfully, as well for his own sake as for that of his pleasant and neat little wife, who kept the whole inn so sweet and clean; and we bade them a most cordial farewell as we drove away from their door.

III.

Returning, we stopped at the great castle of the Obizzi (now the property of the Duke of Modena), through which we were conducted by a surly and humorous custode, whose pride in life was that castle and its treasures, so that he resented as a personal affront the slightest interest in any thing else. He stopped us abruptly in the midst of the museum, and, regarding the precious antiques and curiosities around him, demanded:

“Does this castle please you?” Then, with a scornful glance at us, “Your driver tells me you have been at Arquà? And what did you see at Arquà? A shabby little house and a cat without any hair on. I would not,” said this disdainful custode, “go to Arquà if you gave me a lemonade.”

A VISIT TO THE CIMBRI.

I had often heard in Venice of that ancient people, settled in the Alpine hills about the pretty town of Bassano, on the Brenta, whom common fame declares to be a remnant of the Cimbrian invaders of Rome, broken up in battle, and dispersed along the borders of North Italy, by Marius, many centuries ago. So when the soft September weather came, last year, we sallied out of Venice, in three, to make conquest of whatever was curious in the life and traditions of these mountaineers, who dwell in seven villages, and are therefore called the people of the Sette Communi among their Italian neighbors. We went fully armed with note-book and sketch-book, and prepared to take literary possession of our conquest.

From Venice to the city of Vicenza by railroad, it is two hours; and thence one must take a carriage to Bassano (which is an opulent and busy little grain mart, of some twelve thousand souls, about thirty miles north of Venice). We were very glad of the ride across the country. By the time we reached the town it was nine o’clock, and moonlight, and as we glanced out of our windows we saw the quaint up-and-down-hill streets peopled with promenaders, and every body in Bassano seemed to be making love. Young girls strolled about the picturesque ways with their lovers, and tender couples were cooing at the doorways and windows, and the scene had all that surface of romance with which the Italians contrive to varnish the real commonplaceness of their life. Our ride through the twilight landscape had prepared us for the sentiment of Bassano; we had pleased ourselves with the spectacle of the peasants returning from their labor in the fields, led in troops of eight or ten by stalwart, white-teethed, bare-legged maids; and we had reveled in the momentary lordship of an old walled town we passed, which at dusk seemed more Gothic and Middle-Age than any thing after Verona, with a fine church, and turrets and battlements in great plenty. What town it was, or what it had been doing there so many ages, I have never sought to know, and I should be sorry to learn any thing about it.

The next morning we began those researches for preliminary information concerning the Cimbri which turned out so vain. Indeed, as we drew near the lurking-places of that ancient people, all knowledge relating to them diffused itself into shadowy conjecture. The barber and the bookseller differed as to the best means of getting to the Sette Communi, and the caffetiere at whose place we took breakfast knew nothing at all of the road, except that it was up the mountains, and commanded views of scenery which verily, it would not grieve us to see. As to the Cimbri, he only knew that they had their own language, which was yet harder than the German. The German was hard enough, but the Cimbrian! Corpo!

At last, hearing of a famous cave there is at Oliero, a town some miles further up the Brenta, we determined to go there, and it was a fortunate thought, for there we found a nobleman in charge of the cave who told us exactly how to reach the Sette Communi. You pass a bridge to get out of Bassano — a bridge which spans the crystal swiftness of the Brenta, rushing down to the Adriatic from the feet of the Alps on the north, and full of voluble mills at Bassano. All along the road to Oliero was the finest mountain scenery, Brenta-washed, and picturesque with ever-changing lines. Maize grows in the bottom-lands, and tobacco, which is guarded in the fields by soldiers for the monopolist government. Farm-houses dot the valley, and now and then we passed villages, abounding in blonde girls, so rare elsewhere in Italy, but here so numerous as to give Titian that type from which he painted.

At Oliero we learned not only which was the road to the Sette Communi, but that we were in it, and it was settled that we should come the next day and continue in it, with the custodian of the cave, who for his breakfast and dinner, and what else we pleased, offered to accompany us. We were early at Oliero on the following morning, and found our friend in waiting; he mounted beside our driver, and we rode up the Brenta to the town of Valstagna where our journey by wheels ended, and where we were to take mules for the mountain ascent. Our guide, Count Giovanni Bonato (for I may as well give him his title, though at this stage of our progress we did not know into what patrician care we had fallen), had already told us what the charge for mules would be, but it was necessary to go through the ceremony of bargain with the muleteer before taking the beasts. Their owner was a Cimbrian, with a broad sheepish face, and a heavy, awkward accent of Italian which at once more marked his northern race, and made us feel comparatively secure from plunder in his hands. He had come down from the mountain top the night before, bringing three mules laden with charcoal, and he had waited for us till the morning. His beasts were furnished with comfortable pads, covered with linen, to ride upon, and with halters instead of bridles, and we were prayed to let them have their heads in the ascent, and not to try to guide them.

The elegant leisure of Valstagna (and in an Italian town nearly the whole population is elegantly at leisure) turned out to witness the departure of our expedition; the pretty little blonde wife of our inn-keeper, who was to get dinner ready against our return, held up her baby to wish us boun viaggio, and waved us adieu with the infant as with a handkerchief; the chickens and children scattered to right and left before our advance; and with Count Giovanni going splendidly ahead on foot, and the Cimbrian bringing up the rear, we struck on the broad rocky valley between the heights, and presently began the ascent. It was a lovely morning; the sun was on the heads of the hills, and the shadows clothed them like robes to their feet; and I should be glad to feel here and now the sweetness, freshness, and purity of the mountain air, that seemed to bathe our souls in a childlike delight of life. A noisy brook gurgled through the valley; the birds sang from the trees; the Alps rose, crest on crest, around us; and soft before us, among the bald peaks showed the wooded height where the Cimbrian village of Fozza stood, with a white chapel gleaming from the heart of the lofty grove. Along the mountain sides the smoke curled from the lonely huts of shepherds, and now and then we came upon one of those melancholy refuges which are built in the hills for such travellers as are belated in their ways, or are overtaken there by storms.

The road for the most part winds by the brink of precipices, — walled in with masonry of small stones, where Nature has not shored it up with vast monoliths, — and is paved with limestone. It is, of course, merely a mule-path, and it was curious to see, and thrilling to experience, how the mules, vain of the safety of their foothold, kept as near the border of the precipices as possible. For my own part, I abandoned to my beast the entire responsibility involved by this line of conduct; let the halter hang loose upon his neck, and gave him no aid except such slight service as was occasionally to be rendered by shutting my eyes and holding my breath. The mule of the fairer traveller behind me was not only ambitious of peril like my own, but was envious of my beast’s captaincy, and continually tried to pass him on the outside of the path, to the great dismay of the gentle rider; while half-suppressed wails of terror from the second lady in the train gave evidence of equal vanity and daring in her mule. Count Giovanni strode stolidly before, the Cimbrian came behind, and we had little coherent conversation until we stopped under a spreading haw-tree, half-way up the mountain, to breathe our adventurous beasts.

Here two of us dismounted, and while one of the ladies sketched the other in her novel attitude of cavalier, I listened to the talk of Count Giovanni and the Cimbrian. This Cimbrian’s name in Italian was Lazzaretti, and in his own tongue Brück, which, pronouncing less regularly, we made Brick, in compliment to his qualities of good fellowship. His broad, honest visage was bordered by a hedge of red beard, and a light of dry humor shone upon it: he looked, we thought, like a Cornishman, and the contrast between him and the viso sciolto, pensieri stretti expression of Count Giovanni was curious enough.

Concerning his people, he knew little; but the Capo-gente of Fozza could tell me everything. Various traditions of their origin were believed among them; Brick himself held to one that they had first come from Denmark. As we sat there under the spreading haw-tree, Count Giovanni and I made him give us the Cimbrian equivalent of some Italian phrases, which the curious may care to see in correspondence with English and German. Of course, German pronunciation must be given to the words: —

English. Cimbrian. German.

 I go, I gehe, Ich gehe.
  Thou goest, Du gehst, Du gehst.
  He goes, Ar geht, Er geht.
  We go, Hamish gehen, Wir gehen.
  You go, Hamish setender gehnt, Ihr geht.
  They go, Dandern gehnt, Sie gehen.
  I went, I bin gegehnt, Ich bin gegangen.
  Thou wentest, Du bist gegehnt, Du bist gegangen.
  He went, Der iganget, Er ist gegangen
  Good day, Uter tag, Guten Tag.
  Good night, Uter nast, Gute Nacht.
  How do you do? Bie estater? Wie steht’s?
  How goes it? Bie gehts? Wie geht’s?
  I, I, Ich.
  Thou, Du, Du.
  He, she, Di, Er, sie.
  We, Borandern, Wir.
  You, Ihrt, Ihr.
  They, Dandern, Sie.
  The head, Da kof, Der Kopf.
  Breast, Petten, Brust (Italian petto)
  Face, Denne, Gesicht.
  Arm, Arm, Arm.
  Foot, Vuss, Fuss.
  Finger, Vinger, Finger.
  Hand, Hant, Hand.
  Tree, Pom, Baum.
  Hat, Hoit, Hut.
  God, Got, Gott.
  Heaven, Debelt, Himmel.
  Earth, Erda, Erde.
  Mountain, Perk, Berg.
  Valley, Tal, Thal.
  Man, Mann, Mann.
  Woman, Beip, Weib.
  Lady, Vrau, Frau.
  Child, Hint, Kind.
  Brother, Pruder, Bruder.
  Father, Vada, Vater.
  Mother, Muter, Mutter.
  Sister, Schwester, Schwester,
  Stone, Stone, Stein.

A general resemblance to German and English will have been observed in these fragments of Cimbrian, while other words will have been noticed as quite foreign to either.

There was a poor little house of refreshment beside our spreading haw, and a withered old woman came out of it and refreshed us with clear spring water, and our guides and friends with some bitter berries of the mountain, which they admitted were unpleasant to the taste, but declared were very good for the blood. When they had sufficiently improved their blood, we mounted our mules again, and set out with the journey of an hour and a quarter still between us and Fozza.

As we drew near the summit of the mountain our road grew more level, and instead of creeping along by the brinks of precipices, we began to wind through bits of meadow and pleasant valley walled in by lofty heights of rock.

Though September was bland as June at the foot of the mountain, we found its breath harsh and cold on these heights; and we remarked that though there were here and there breadths of wheat, the land was for the most part in sheep pasturage, and the grass looked poor and stinted of summer warmth. We met, at times, the shepherds, who seemed to be of Italian race, and were of the conventional type of shepherds, with regular faces, and two elaborate curls trained upon their cheeks, as shepherds are always represented in stone over the gates of villas. They bore staves, and their flocks went before them. Encountering us, they saluted us courteously, and when we had returned their greeting, they cried with one voice,— “Ah, lords! is not this a miserable country? The people are poor and the air is cold. It is an unhappy land!” And so passed on, profoundly sad; but we could not help smiling at the vehement popular desire to have the region abused. We answered cheerfully that it was a lovely country. If the air was cold, it was also pure.

We now drew in sight of Fozza, and, at the last moment, just before parting with Brick, we learned that he had passed a whole year in Venice, where he had brought milk from the main-land and sold it in the city. He declared frankly that he counted that year worth all the other years of his life, and that he would never have come back to his native heights but that his father had died, and left his mother and young brothers helpless. He was an honest soul, and I gave him two florins, which I had tacitly appointed him over and above the bargain, with something for the small Brick-bats at home, whom he presently brought to kiss our hands at the house of the Capo-gente.

The village of Fozza is built on a grassy, oblong plain on the crest of the mountain, which declines from it on three sides, and on the north rises high above it into the mists in bleaker and ruggeder acclivities. There are not more than thirty houses in the village, and I do not think it numbers more than a hundred and fifty souls, if it numbers so many. Indeed, it is one of the smallest of the Sette Communi, of which the capital, Asiago, contains some thousands of people, and lies not far from Vicenza. The poor Fozzatti had a church, however, in their village, in spite of its littleness, and they had just completed a fine new bell tower, which the Capo-gente deplored, and was proud of when I praised it. The church, like all the other edifices, was built of stone; and the village at a little distance might look like broken crags of rock, so well it consorted with the harsh, crude nature about it. Meagre meadowlands, pathetic with tufts of a certain pale-blue, tearful flower, stretched about the village and southward as far as to that wooded point which had all day been our landmark in the ascent.

Our train drew up at the humble door of the Capo-gente (in Fozza all doors are alike humble), and, leaving our mules, we entered by his wife’s invitation, and seated ourselves near the welcome fire of the kitchen — welcome, though we knew that all the sunny Lombard plain below was purple with grapes and black with figs. Again came from the women here the wail of the shepherds: “Ah, lords! is it not a miserable land?” and I began to doubt whether the love which I had heard mountaineers bore to their inclement heights was not altogether fabulous. They made haste to boil us some eggs, and set them before us with some unhappy wine, and while we were eating, the Capo-gente came in.

He was a very well-mannered person, but had, of course, the bashfulness naturally resulting from lonely life at that altitude, where contact with the world must be infrequent. His fellow-citizens seemed to regard him with a kind of affectionate deference, and some of them came in to hear him talk with the strangers. He stood till we prayed him to sit down, and he presently consented to take some wine with us.

After all, however, he could not tell us much of his people which we had not heard before. A tradition existed among them, he said, that their ancestors had fled to these Alps from Marius, and that they had dwelt for a long time in the hollows and caves of the mountains, living and burying their dead in the same secret places. At what time they had been converted to Christianity he could not tell; they had, up to the beginning of the present century, had little or no intercourse with the Italian population by which they were surrounded on all sides. Formerly, they did not intermarry with that race, and it was seldom that any Cimbrian knew its language. But now intermarriage is very frequent; both Italian and Cimbrian are spoken in nearly all the families, and the Cimbrian is gradually falling into disuse. They still, however, have books of religious instruction in their ancient dialect, and until very lately the services of their church were performed in Cimbrian.

I begged the Capo to show us some of their books and he brought us two, — one a catechism for children, entitled “Dar Kloane Catechism vor z’ Beloseland vortraghet in z’ gaprecht von siben Komünen, un vier Halghe Gasang. 1842. Padova.” The other book it grieved me to see, for it proved that I was not the only one tempted in recent times to visit these ancient people, ambitious to bear to them the relation of discoverer, as it were. A High-Dutch Columbus, from Vienna, had been before me, and I could only come in for Amerigo Vespucci’s tempered glory. This German savant had dwelt a week in these lonely places, patiently compiling a dictionary of their tongue, which, when it was printed, he had sent to the Capo. I am magnanimous enough to give the name of his book, that the curious may buy it if they like. It is called “Johann Andreas Schweller’s Cimbrisches Wörterbuch. Joseph Bergman. Vienna, 1855.”

Concerning the present Cimbri, the Capo said that in his community they were chiefly hunters, wood-cutters, and charcoal-burners, and that they practiced their primitive crafts in those gloomier and wilder heights we saw to the northward, and descended to the towns of the plain to make sale of their fagots, charcoal, and wild-beast skins. In Asiago and the larger communities they were farmers and tradesmen like the Italians; and the Capo believed that the Cimbri, in all their villages, numbered near ten thousand. He could tell me of no particular customs or usages, and believed they did not differ from the Italians now except in race and language. [The English traveller Rose, who (to my further discomfiture, I find) visited Asiago in 1817, mentions that the Cimbri have the Celtic custom of waking the dead. “If a traveller dies by the way, they plant a cross upon the spot, and all who pass by cast a stone upon his cairn. Some go in certain seasons in the year to high places and woods, where it is supposed they worshiped their divinities, but the origin of the custom is forgot amongst themselves.” If a man dies by violence, they lay him out with his hat and shoes on, as if to give him the appearance of a wayfarer, and “symbolize one surprised in the great journey of life.” A woman dying in childbed is dressed for the grave in her bridal ornaments. Mr. Rose is very scornful of the notion that these people are Cimbri, and holds that it is “more consonant to all the evidence of history to say, that the flux and reflux of Teutonic invaders at different periods deposited this backwater of barbarians” in the district they now inhabit. “The whole space, which in addition to the seven burghs contains twenty-four villages, is bounded by rivers, alps, and hills. Its most precise limits are the Brenta to the east, and the Astico to the west.”] They are, of course, subject to the Austrian Government, but not so strictly as the Italians are; and though they are taxed and made to do military service, they are otherwise left to regulate their affairs pretty much at their pleasure.

The Capo ended his discourse with much polite regret that he had nothing more worthy to tell us; and, as if to make us amends for having come so far to learn so little, he said there was a hermit living near, whom we might like to see, and sent his son to conduct us to the hermitage. It turned out to be the white object which we had seen gleaming in the wood on the mountain from so great distance below, and the wood turned out to be a pleasant beechen grove, in which we found the hermit cutting fagots. He was warmly dressed in clothes without rent, and wore the clerical knee-breeches. He saluted us with a cricket-like chirpiness of manner, and was greatly amazed to hear that we had come all the way from America to visit him. His hermitage was built upon the side of a white-washed chapel to St. Francis, and contained three or four little rooms or cupboards, in which the hermit dwelt and meditated. They opened into the chapel, of which the hermit had the care, and which he kept neat and clean like himself. He told us proudly that once a year, on the day of the titular saint, a priest came and said mass in that chapel, and it was easy to see that this was the great occasion of the old man’s life. For forty years, he said, he had been devout; and for twenty-five he had dwelt in this place, where the goodness of God and the charity of the poor people around had kept him from want. Altogether, he was a pleasant enough hermit, not in the least spiritual, but gentle, simple, and evidently sincere. We gave some small coins of silver to aid him to continue his life of devotion, and Count Giovanni bestowed some coppers with the stately blessing, “Iddio vi benedica, padre mio.”

So we left the hermitage, left Fozza, and started down the mountain on foot, for no one may ride down those steeps. Long before we reached the bottom, we had learned to loathe mountains and to long for dead levels during the rest of life. Yet the descent was picturesque, and in some things even more interesting than the ascent had been. We met more people: now melancholy shepherds with their flocks; now swine-herds and swine-herdesses with herds of wild black pigs of the Italian breed; now men driving asses that brayed and woke long, loud, and most musical echoes in the hills; now whole peasant families driving cows, horses, and mules to the plains below. On the way down, fragments of autobiography began, with the opportunities of conversation, to come from the Count Giovanni, and we learned that he was a private soldier at home on that permesso which the Austrian Government frequently gives its less able-bodied men in times of peace. He had been at home some years, and did not expect to be again called into the service. He liked much better to be in charge of the cave at Oliero than to carry the musket, though he confessed that he liked to see the world, and that soldiering brought one acquainted with many places. He had not many ideas, and the philosophy of his life chiefly regarded deportment toward strangers who visited the cave. He held it an error in most custodians to show discontent when travellers gave them little; and he said that if he received never so much, he believed it wise not to betray exultation. “Always be contented, and nothing more,” said Count Giovanni.

“It is what you people always promise beforehand,” I said, “when you bargain with strangers, to do them a certain service for what they please; but afterward they must pay what you please or have trouble. I know you will not be content with what I give you.”

“If I am not content,” cried Count Giovanni, “call me the greatest ass in the world!”

And I am bound to say that, for all I could see through the mask of his face, he was satisfied with what I gave him, though it was not much.

He had told us casually that he was nephew of a nobleman of a certain rich and ancient family in Venice, who sent him money while in the army, but this made no great impression on me; and though I knew there was enough noble poverty in Italy to have given rise to the proverb, Un conte che non conta, non conta niente, yet I confess that it was with a shock of surprise I heard our guide and servant saluted by a lounger in Valstagna with “Sior conte, servitor suo!” I looked narrowly at him, but there was no ray of feeling or pride visible in his pale, languid visage as he responded, “Buona sera, caro.”

Still, after that revelation we simple plebeians, who had been all day heaping shawls and guide-books upon Count Giovanni, demanding menial offices from him, and treating him with good-natured slight, felt uncomfortable in his presence, and welcomed the appearance of our carriage with our driver, who, having started drunk from Bassano in the morning, had kept drunk all day at Valstagna, and who now drove us back wildly over the road, and almost made us sigh for the security of mules ambitious of the brinks of precipices.

MINOR TRAVELS.

I.

PISA.

I am afraid that the talk of the modern railway traveller, if he is honest, must be a great deal of the custodians, the vetturini, and the facchini, whose agreeable acquaintance constitutes his chief knowledge of the population among which he journeys. We do not nowadays carry letters recommending us to citizens of the different places. If we did, consider the calamity we should be to the be-travelled Italian communities we now bless! No, we buy our through-tickets, and we put up at the hotels praised in the hand-book, and are very glad of a little conversation with any native, however adulterated he be by contact with the world to which we belong. I do not blush to own that I love the whole rascal race which ministers to our curiosity and preys upon us, and I am not ashamed to have spoken so often in this book of the lowly and rapacious but interesting porters who opened to me the different gates of that great realm of wonders, Italy. I doubt if they can be much known to the dwellers in the land, though they are the intimates of all sojourners and passengers; and if I have any regret in the matter, it is that I did not more diligently study them when I could. The opportunity once lost, seldom recurs; they are all but as transitory as the Object of Interest itself, I remember that years ago when I first visited Cambridge, there was an old man appeared to me in the character of Genius of the College Grounds, who showed me all the notable things in our city, — its treasures of art, its monuments, — and ended by taking me into his wood-house, and sawing me off from a wind-fallen branch of the Washington Elm a bit of the sacred wood for a remembrancer. Where now is that old man? He no longer exists for me, neither he nor his wood-house nor his dwelling-house. Let me look for a month about the College Grounds, and I shall not see him. But somewhere in the regions of traveller’s faëry he still lives, and he appears instantly to the new-comer; he has an understanding with the dryads, who keep him supplied with boughs from the Washington Elm, and his wood-house is full of them.

Among memorable custodians in Italy was one whom we saw at Pisa, where we stopped on our way from Leghorn after our accident in the Maremma, and spent an hour in viewing the Quattro Fabbriche. The beautiful old town, which every one knows from the report of travellers, one yet finds possessed of the incommunicable charm which keeps it forever novel to the visitor. Lying upon either side of the broad Arno, it mirrors in the flood architecture almost as fair and noble as that glassed in the Canalazzo, and its other streets seemed as tranquil as the canals of Venice. Those over which we drove, on the day of our visit, were paved with broad flag-stones, and gave out scarcely a sound under our wheels. It was Sunday, and no one was to be seen. Yet the empty and silent city inspired us with no sense of desolation. The palaces were in perfect repair; the pavements were clean; behind those windows we felt that there must be a good deal of easy, comfortable life. It is said that Pisa is one of the few places in Europe where the sweet, but timid spirit of Inexpensiveness — everywhere pursued by Railways — still lingers, and that you find cheap apartments in those well-preserved old palaces. No doubt it would be worth more to live in Pisa than it would cost, for the history of the place would alone be to any reasonable sojourner a perpetual recompense, and a princely income far exceeding his expenditure. To be sure, the Tower of Famine, with which we chiefly associate the name of Pisa, has been long razed to the ground, and built piecemeal into the neighboring palaces, but you may still visit the dead wall which hides from view the place where it stood; and you may thence drive on, as we did, to the great Piazza where stands the unrivaledest group of architecture in the world, after that of St. Mark’s Place in Venice. There is the wonderful Leaning Tower, there is the old and beautiful Duomo, there is the noble Baptistery, there is the lovely Campo-Santo, and there — somewhere lurking in portal or behind pillar, and keeping out an eagle-eye for the marveling stranger — is the much-experienced cicerone who shows you through the edifices. Yours is the fourteen-thousandth American family to which he has had the honor of acting as guide, and he makes you feel an illogical satisfaction in thus becoming a contribution to statistics.

We entered the Duomo, in our new friend’s custody, and we saw the things which it was well to see. There was mass, or some other ceremony, transacting; but as usual it was made as little obtrusive as possible, and there was not much to weaken the sense of proprietorship with which travellers view objects of interest. Then we ascended the Leaning Tower, skillfully preserving its equilibrium as we went by an inclination of our persons in a direction opposed to the tower’s inclination, but perhaps not receiving a full justification of the Campanile’s appearance in pictures, till we stood at its base, and saw its vast bulk and height as it seemed to sway and threaten in the blue sky above our heads. There the sensation was too terrible for endurance, — even the architectural beauty of the tower could not save it from being monstrous to us, — and we were glad to hurry away from it to the serenity and solemn loveliness of the Campo Santo.

Here are the frescos painted five hundred years ago to be ruinous and ready against the time of your arrival in 1864, and you feel that you are the first to enjoy the joke of the Vergognosa, that cunning jade who peers through her fingers at the shameful condition of deboshed father Noah, and seems to wink one eye of wicked amusement at you. Turning afterward to any book written about Italy during the time specified, you find your impression of exclusive possession of the frescos erroneous, and your muse naturally despairs, where so many muses have labored in vain, to give a just idea of the Campo Santo. Yet it is most worthy celebration. Those exquisitely arched and traceried colonnades seem to grow like the slim cypresses out of the sainted earth of Jerusalem; and those old paintings, made when Art was — if ever — a Soul, and not as now a mere Intelligence, enforce more effectively than their authors conceived the lessons of life and death; for they are themselves becoming part of the triumphant decay they represent. If it was awful once to look upon that strange scene where the gay lords and ladies of the chase come suddenly upon three dead men in their coffins, while the devoted hermits enjoy the peace of a dismal righteousness on a hill in the background, it is yet more tragic to behold it now when the dead men are hardly discernible in their coffins, and the hermits are but the vaguest shadows of gloomy bliss. Alas! Death mocks even the homage done him by our poor fears and hopes: with dust he wipes out dust, and with decay he blots the image of decay.

I assure the reader that I made none of these apt reflections in the Campo Santo at Pisa, but have written them out this morning in Cambridge because there happens to be an east wind blowing. No one could have been sad in the company of our cheerful and patient cicerone, who, although visibly anxious to get his fourteen-thousandth American family away, still would not go till he had shown us that monument to a dead enmity which hangs in the Campo Santo. This is the mighty chain which the Pisans, in their old wars with the Genoese, once stretched across the mouth of their harbor to prevent the entrance of the hostile galleys. The Genoese with no great trouble carried the chain away, and kept it ever afterward till 1860, when Pisa was united to the kingdom of Italy. Then the trophy was restored to the Pisans, and with public rejoicings placed in the Campo Santo, an emblem of reconciliation and perpetual amity between ancient foes. [I read in Mr. Norton’s Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, that he saw in the Campo Santo, as long ago as 1856, “the chains that marked the servitude of Pisa, now restored by Florence,” and it is of course possible that our cicerone may have employed one of those chains for the different historical purpose I have mentioned. It would be a thousand pities, I think, if a monument of that sort should be limited to the commemoration of one fact only.] It is not a very good world, — e pur si muove.

The Baptistery stands but a step away from the Campo Santo, and our guide ushered us into it with the air of one who had till now held in reserve his great stroke and was ready to deliver it. Yet I think he waited till we had looked at some comparatively trifling sculptures by Nicolò Pisano before he raised his voice, and uttered a melodious species of howl. While we stood in some amazement at this, the conscious structure of the dome caught the sound and prolonged it with a variety and sweetness of which I could not have dreamed. The man poured out in quick succession his musical wails, and then ceased, and a choir of heavenly echoes burst forth in response. There was a supernatural beauty in these harmonies of which I despair of giving any true idea: they were of such tender and exalted rapture that we might well have thought them the voices of young-eyed cherubim, singing as they passed through Paradise over that spot of earth where we stood. They seemed a celestial compassion that stooped and soothed, and rose again in lofty and solemn acclaim, leaving us poor and penitent and humbled.

We were long silent, and then broke forth with cries of admiration of which the marvelous echo made eloquence.

“Did you ever,” said the cicerone after we had left the building, “hear such music as that?”

“The papal choir does not equal it,” we answered with one voice.

The cicerone was not to be silenced even with such a tribute, and he went on:

“Perhaps, as you are Americans, you know Moshu Feelmore, the President? No? Ah, what a fine man! You saw that he had his heart actually in his hand! Well, one day he said to me here, when I told him of the Baptistery echo, ‘We have the finest echo in the world in the Hall of Congress.’ I said nothing, but for answer I merely howled a little, — thus! Moshu Feelmore was convinced. Said he, ‘There is no other echo in the world besides this. You are right.’ I am unique,” pursued the cicerone, “for making this echo. But,” he added with a sigh, “it has been my ruin. The English have put me in all the guide-books, and sometimes I have to howl twenty times a day. When our Victor Emanuel came here I showed him the church, the tower, and the Campo Santo. Says the king, ‘Pfui!’” — here the cicerone gave that sweeping outward motion with both hands by which Italians dismiss a trifling subject—”’make me the echo!’ I was forced,” concluded the cicerone with a strong sense of injury in his tone, “to howl half an hour without ceasing.”

II.

THE FERRARA ROAD.

The delight of one of our first journeys over the road between Padua and Ferrara was a Roman cameriere out of place, who got into the diligence at Ponte Lagoscuro. We were six in all: The Englishman who thought it particularly Italian to say “Sì” three times for every assent; the Veneto (as the citizen of the province calls himself, the native of the city being Veneziano) going home to his farm near Padua; the German lady of a sour and dreadful countenance; our two selves, and the Roman cameriere. The last was worth all the rest — being a man of vast general information acquired in the course of service with families of all nations, and agreeably communicative. A brisk and lively little man, with dancing eyes, beard cut to the mode of the Emperor Napoleon, and the impressive habit of tapping himself on the teeth with his railroad-guide, and lifting his eyebrows when he says any thing specially worthy of remark. He, also, long after the conclusion of an observation, comes back to himself approvingly, with “Sì!” “Vabene!” “Ecco!” He speaks beautiful Italian and constantly, and in a little while we know that he was born at Ferrara, bred at Venice, and is now a citizen of Rome. “St. Peter’s, Signori, — have you ever seen it? — is the first church of the world. At Ferrara lived Tasso and Ariosto. Venice is a lovely city. Ah! what beauty! But unique. My second country. Sì, Signori, la mia seconda patria.” After a pause, “Va bene.”

We hint to him that he is extremely fortunate in having so many countries, and that it will be difficult to exile so universal a citizen, which he takes as a tribute to his worth, smiles and says, “Ecco!”

Then he turns to the Veneto, and describes to him the English manner of living. “Wonderfully well they eat — the English. Four times a day. With rosbif at the dinner. Always, always, always! And tea in the evening, with rosbif cold. Mangiano sempre. Ma bene, dico.” After a pause, “Sì!” “And the Venetians, they eat well, too. Whence the proverb: ‘Sulla Riva degli Schiavoni, si mangiano bei bocconi.’ (‘On the Riva degli Schiavoni, you eat fine mouthfuls.’) Signori, I am going to Venice,” concludes the cameriere.

He is the politest man in the world, and the most attentive to ladies. The German lady has not spoken a word, possibly not knowing the language. Our good cameriere cannot bear this, and commiserates her weariness with noble elegance and originality. “La Signora si trova un poco sagrificata?” (“The lady feels slightly sacrificed!”) We all smile, and the little man very gladly with us.

“An elegant way of expressing it,” we venture to suggest. The Veneto roars and roars again, and we all shriek, none louder than the Roman himself. We never can get over that idea of being slightly sacrificed, and it lasts us the whole way to Padua; and when the Veneto gets down at his farm-gate, he first “reverences” us, and then says, “I am very sorry for you others who must be still more slightly sacrificed.”

At Venice, a week or two later, I meet our cameriere. He is not so gay, quite, as he was, and I fancy that he has not found so many bei bocconi on the Riva degli Schiavoni, as the proverb and a sanguine temperament led him to expect. Do I happen to know, he asks, any American family going to Rome and desiring a cameriere?

* * * * *

As I write, the Spring is coming in Cambridge, and I cannot help thinking, with a little heartache, of how the Spring came to meet us once as we rode southward from Venice toward Florence on that road from Padua to Ferrara. It had been May for some time in Tuscany, and all through the wide plains of Venetia this was the railroad landscape: fields tilled and tended as jealously as gardens, and waving in wheat, oats, and grass, with here and there the hay cut already, and here and there acres of Indian corn. The green of the fields was all dashed with the bloody red of poppies; the fig-trees hung full of half-grown fruit; the orchards were garlanded with vines, which they do not bind to stakes in Italy, but train from tree to tree, leaving them to droop in festoons and sway in the wind, with the slender native grace of vines. Huge stone farm-houses shelter under the same roof the family and all the live stock of the farm; thatched cottages thickly dotting the fields, send forth to their cultivation the most picturesque peasants, — men and women, pretty young girls in broad hats, and wonderful old brown and crooked crones, who seem never to have been younger nor fairer. Country roads, level, straight, and white, stretch away on either hand, and the constant files of poplars escort them wherever they go. All about, the birds sing, and the butterflies dance. The milk-white oxen dragging the heavy carts turn up their patient heads, with wide-spreading horns and mellow eyes, at the passing train; the sunburnt lout behind them suspends the application of the goad; unwonted acquiescence stirs in the bosom of the firm-minded donkey, and even the matter-of-fact locomotive seems to linger as lovingly as a locomotive may along these plains of Spring.

At Padua we take a carriage for Ponte Lagoscuro, and having fought the customary battle with the vetturino before arriving at the terms of contract; having submitted to the successive pillage of the man who had held our horses a moment, of the man who tied on the trunk, and of the man who hovered obligingly about the carriage, and desired to drink our health — with prodigious smacking of whip, and banging of wheels, we rattle out of the Stella d’Oro, and set forth from the gate of the old city.

I confess that I like posting. There is a freedom and a fine sense of proprietorship in that mode of travel, combined with sufficient speed, which you do not feel on the railroad. For twenty francs and buonamano, I had bought my carriage and horses and driver for the journey of forty miles, and I began to look round on the landscape with a cumulative feeling of ownership in everything I saw. For me, old women spinning in old-world fashion, with distaff and spindle, flax as white as their own hair, came to roadside doors, or moved back and forth under orchard trees. For me, the peasants toiled in the fields together, wearing for my sake wide straw hats, or gay ribbons, or red caps. The white oxen were willing to mass themselves in effective groups, as the ploughman turned the end of his furrow; young girls specially appointed themselves to lead horses to springs as we passed; children had larger eyes and finer faces and played more about the cottage doors, on account of our posting. As for the vine-garlanded trees in the orchards, and the opulence of the endless fertile plain; the white distance of the road before us with its guardian poplars, — I doubt if people in a diligence could have got so much of these things as we. Certainly they could not have had all to themselves the lordly splendor with which we dashed through gaping villages, taking the street from everybody, and fading magnificently away upon the road.

III.

TRIESTE.

If you take the midnight steamer at Venice you reach Trieste by six o’clock in the morning, and the hills rise to meet you as you enter the broad bay dotted with the sail of fishing-craft. The hills are bald and bare, and you find, as you draw near, that the city lies at their feet under a veil of mist, or climbs earlier into view along their sides. The prospect is singularly devoid of gentle and pleasing features, and looking at those rugged acclivities, with their aspect of continual bleakness, you readily believe all the stories you have heard of that fierce wind called the Bora which sweeps from them through Trieste at certain seasons. While it blows, ladies walking near the quays are sometimes caught up and set afloat, involuntary Galateas, in the bay, and people keep in-doors as much as possible. But the Bora, though so sudden and so savage, does give warning of its rise, and the peasants avail themselves of this characteristic. They station a man on one of the mountain tops, and when he feels the first breath of the Bora, he sounds a horn, which is a signal for all within hearing to lay hold of something that cannot be blown away, and cling to it till the wind falls. This may happen in three days or in nine, according to the popular proverbs. “The spectacle of the sea,” says Dall’ Ongaro, in a note to one of his ballads, “while the Bora blows, is sublime, and when it ceases the prospect of the surrounding hills is delightful. The air, purified by the rapid current, clothes them with a rosy veil, and the temperature is instantly softened, even in the heart of winter.”

The city itself, as you penetrate it, makes good with its stateliness and picturesqueness your loss through the grimness of its environs. It is in great part new, very clean, and full of the life and movement of a prosperous port; but, better than this, so far as the mere sight-seer is concerned, it wins a novel charm from the many public staircases by which you ascend and descend its hillier quarters, and which are made of stone, and lightly railed and balustraded with iron.

Something of all this I noticed in my ride from the landing of the steamer to the house of friends in the suburbs, and there I grew better disposed toward the hills, which, as I strolled over them, I found dotted with lovely villas, and everywhere traversed by perfectly-kept carriage-roads, and easy and pleasant foot-paths. It was in the spring-time, and the peach-trees and almond-trees hung full of blossoms and bees, the lizards lay in the walks absorbing the vernal sunshine, the violets and cowslips sweetened all the grassy borders. The scene did not want a human interest, for the peasant girls were going to market at that hour, and I met them everywhere, bearing heavy burdens on their own heads, or hurrying forward with their wares on the backs of donkeys. They were as handsome as heart could wish, and they wore that Italian costume which is not to be seen anywhere in Italy except at Trieste and in the Roman and Neapolitan provinces, — a bright bodice and gown, with the head-dress of dazzling white linen, square upon the crown, and dropping lightly to the shoulders. Later I saw these comely maidens crouching on the ground in the market-place, and selling their wares, with much glitter of eyes, teeth, and earrings, and a continual babble of bargaining.

It seemed to me that the average of good looks was greater among the women of Trieste than among those of Venice, but that the instances of striking and exquisite beauty were rarer. At Trieste, too, the Italian type, so pure at Venice, is lost or continually modified by the mixed character of the population, which perhaps is most noticeable at the Merchants’ Exchange. This is a vast edifice roofed with glass, where are the offices of the great steam navigation company, the Austrian Lloyds, — which, far more than the favor of the Imperial government, has contributed to the prosperity of Trieste, — and where the traffickers of all races meet daily to gossip over the news and the prices. Here a Greek or Dalmat talks with an eager Italian or a slow, sure Englishman; here the hated Austrian button-holes the Venetian or the Magyar; here the Jew meets the Gentile on common ground; here Christianity encounters the hoary superstitions of the East, and makes a good thing out of them in cotton or grain. All costumes are seen here, and all tongues are heard, the native Triestines contributing almost as much to the variety of the latter as the foreigners. “In regard to language,” says Cantù, “though the country is peopled by Slavonians, yet the Italian tongue is spreading into the remotest villages where a few years since it was not understood. In the city it is the common and familiar language; the Slavonians of the North use the German for the language of ceremony; those of the South, as well as the Israelites, the Italian; while the Protestants use the German, the Greeks the Hellenic and Illyric, the employés of the civil courts the Italian or the German, the schools now German and now Italian, the bar and the pulpit Italian. Most of the inhabitants, indeed, are bi-lingual, and very many tri-lingual, without counting French, which is understood and spoken from infancy. Italian, German, and Greek are written, but the Slavonic little, this having remained in the condition of a vulgar tongue. But it would be idle to distinguish the population according to language, for the son adopts a language different from the father’s, and now prefers one language and now another; the women incline to the Italian; but those of the upper class prefer now German, now French, now English, as, from one decade to another, affairs, fashions, and fancies change. This in the salons; in the squares and streets, the Venetian dialect is heard.”

And with the introduction of the Venetian dialect, Venetian discontent seems also to have crept in, and I once heard a Triestine declaim against the Imperial government quite in the manner of Venice. It struck me that this desire for union with Italy, which he declared prevalent in Trieste, must be of very recent growth, since even so late as 1848, Trieste had refused to join Venice in the expulsion of the Austrians. Indeed, the Triestines have fought the Venetians from the first; they stole the Brides of Venice in one of their piratical cruises in the lagoons; gave aid and comfort to those enemies of Venice, the Visconti, the Carraras, and the Genoese; revolted from St. Mark whenever subjected to his banner, and finally, rather than remain under his sway, gave themselves five centuries ago to Austria.

The objects of interest in Trieste are not many. There are remains of an attributive temple of Jupiter under the Duomo, and there is near at hand the Museum of Classical Antiquities founded in honor of Winckelmann, murdered at Trieste by that ill-advised Pistojese, Ancangeli, who had seen the medals bestowed on the antiquary by Maria Theresa and believed him rich. There is also a scientific museum founded by the Archduke Maximilian, and, above all, there is the beautiful residence of that ill-starred prince, — the Miramare, where the half-crazed Empress of the Mexicans vainly waits her husband’s return from the experiment of paternal government in the New World. It would be hard to tell how Art has charmed rock and wave at Miramare, until the spur of those rugged Triestine hills, jutting into the sea, has been made the seat of ease and luxury, but the visitor is aware of the magic as soon as he passes the gate of the palace grounds. These are in great part perpendicular, and are over clambered with airy stairways climbing to pensile arbors. Where horizontal, they are diversified with mimic seas for swans to sail upon, and summer-houses for people to lounge in and look at the swans from. On the point of land furthest from the acclivity stands the Castle of Miramare, half at sea, and half adrift in the clouds above: —

 ”And fain it would stoop downward
  To the mirrored wave below;
  And fain it would soar upward
  In the evening’s crimson glow.”

I remember that a little yacht lay beside the pier at the castle’s foot, and lazily flapped its sail, while the sea beat inward with as languid a pulse. That was some years ago, before Mexico was dreamed of at Miramare: now, perchance, she who is one of the most unhappy among women looks down distraught from those high windows, and finds in the helpless sail and impassive wave the images of her baffled hope, and that immeasurable sea which gives back its mariners neither to love nor sorrow. I think though she be the wife and daughter of princes, we may pity this poor Empress at least as much as we pity the Mexicans to whom her dreams have brought so many woes.

It was the midnight following my visit to Miramare when the fiacre in which I had quitted my friend’s house was drawn up by its greatly bewildered driver on the quay near the place where the steamer for Venice should be lying. There was no steamer for Venice to be seen. The driver swore a little in the polyglot profanities of his native city, and descending from his box, went and questioned different lights — blue lights, yellow lights, green lights — to be seen at different points. To a light, they were ignorant, though eloquent, and to pass the time, we drove up and down the quay, and stopped at the landings of all the steamers that touch at Trieste. It was a snug fiacre enough, but I did not care to spend the night in it, and I urged the driver to further inquiry. A wanderer whom we met, declared that it was not the night for the Venice steamer; another admitted that it might be; a third conversed with the driver in low tones, and then leaped upon the box. We drove rapidly away, and before I had, in view of this mysterious proceeding, composed a fitting paragraph for the Fatti Diversi of the Osservatore Triestino, descriptive of the state in which the Guardie di Polizia should find me floating in the bay, exanimate and evidently the prey of a triste evvenimento — the driver pulled up once more, and now beside a steamer. It was the steamer for Venice, he said, in precisely the tone which he would have used had he driven me directly to it without blundering. It was breathing heavily, and was just about to depart, but even in the hurry of getting on board, I could not help noticing that it seemed to have grown a great deal since I had last voyaged in it. There was not a soul to be seen except the mute steward who took my satchel, and guiding me below into an elegant saloon, instantly left me alone. Here again the steamer was vastly enlarged. These were not the narrow quarters of the Venice steamer, nor was this lamp, shedding a soft light on cushioned seats and paneled doors and wainscotings the sort of illumination usual in that humble craft. I rang the small silver bell on the long table, and the mute steward appeared.

Was this the steamer for Venice?

Sicuro!

All that I could do in comment was to sit down; and in the mean time the steamer trembled, groaned, choked, cleared its throat, and we were under way.

“The other passengers have all gone to bed, I suppose,” I argued acutely, seeing none of them. Nevertheless, I thought it odd, and it seemed a shrewd means of relief to ring the bell, and pretending drowsiness, to ask the steward which was my state-room.

He replied with a curious smile that I could have any of them. Amazed, I yet selected a state-room, and while the steward was gone for the sheets and pillow-cases, I occupied my time by opening the doors of all the other state-rooms. They were empty.

“Am I the only passenger?” I asked, when he returned, with some anxiety.

“Precisely,” he answered.

I could not proceed and ask if he composed the entire crew — it seemed too fearfully probable that he did.

I now suspected that I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner — I was a Manuscript Found in a Bottle!

Coming to the surface about six o’clock A.M., I found a daylight as cheerful as need be upon the appointments of the elegant cabin, and upon the good-natured face of the steward when he brought me the caffè latte, and the buttered toast for my breakfast. He said “Servitor suo!” in a loud and comfortable voice, and I perceived the absurdity of having thought that he was in any way related to the Nightmare-Death-in-life-that-thicks-man’s-blood-with-cold.

“This is not the regular Venice steamer, I suppose,” I remarked to the steward as he laid my breakfast in state upon the long table.

No. Properly, no boat should have left for Venice last night, which was not one of the times of the tri-weekly departure. This was one of the steamers of the line between Trieste and Alexandria, and it was going at present to take on an extraordinary freight at Venice for Egypt. I had been permitted to come on board because my driver said I had a return ticket, and would go.

Ascending to the deck I found nothing whatever mysterious in the management of the steamer. The captain met me with a bow in the gangway; seamen were coiling wet ropes at different points, as they always are; the mate was promenading the bridge, and taking the rainy weather as it came, with his oil-cloth coat and hat on. The wheel of the steamer was as usual chewing the sea, and finding it unpalatable, and making vain efforts at expectoration.

We were in sight of the breakwater outside Malamocco, and a pilot-boat was making us from the land. Even at this point the innumerable fortifications of the Austrians began, and they multiplied as we drew near Venice, till we entered the lagoon, and found it a nest of fortresses one with another.

Unhappily the day being rainy, Venice did not spring resplendent from the sea, as I had always read she would. She rose slowly and languidly from the water, — not like a queen, but like the gray, slovenly, bedrabbled, heart-broken old slave she really was.

IV.

BASSANO.

I have already told, in recounting the story of our visit to the Cimbri, how full of courtship we found the little city of Bassano on the evening of our arrival there. Bassano is the birthplace of the painter Jacopo da Ponte, who was one of the first Italian painters to treat scriptural story as accessory to mere landscape, and who had a peculiar fondness for painting Entrances into the Ark, for in these he could indulge without stint the taste for pairing-off early acquired from observation of local customs in his native town. This was the theory offered by one who had imbibed the spirit of subtile speculation from Ruskin, and I think it reasonable. At least it does not conflict with the fact that there is at Bassano a most excellent gallery of paintings entirely devoted to the works of Jacopo da Ponte, and his four sons, who are here to be seen to better advantage than anywhere else. As few strangers visit Bassano, the gallery is little frequented. It is in charge of a very strict old man, who will not allow people to look at the pictures till he has shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your indifference to these scientific seccature; he is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, “Have the Protestants the same God as the Catholics?” we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the fact for himself.

Underneath the gallery was a school of boys, whom as we entered we heard humming over the bitter honey which childhood is obliged to gather from the opening flowers of orthography. When we passed out, the master gave these poor busy bees an atom of holiday, and they all swarmed forth together to look at the strangers. The teacher was a long, lank man, in a black threadbare coat, and a skull-cap — exactly like the schoolmaster in “The Deserted Village.” We made a pretense of asking him our way to somewhere, and went wrong, and came by accident upon a wide flat space, bare as a brick-yard, beside which was lettered on a fragment of the old city wall, “Giuoco di Palla.” It was evidently the playground of the whole city, and it gave us a pleasanter idea of life in Bassano than we had yet conceived, to think of its entire population playing ball there in the spring afternoons. We respected Bassano as much for this as for her diligent remembrance of her illustrious dead, of whom she has very great numbers. It appeared to us that nearly every other house bore a tablet announcing that “Here was born,” or “Here died,” some great or good man of whom no one out of Bassano ever heard. There is enough celebrity in Bassano to supply the world; but as laurel is a thing that grows anywhere, I covet rather from Bassano the magnificent ivy that covers the portions of her ancient wall yet standing. The wall, where visible, is seen to be of a pebbly rough-cast, but it is clad almost from the ground in glossy ivy, that glitters upon it like chain-mail upon the vast shoulders of some giant warrior. The moat beneath is turned into a lovely promenade bordered by quiet villas, with rococo shepherds and shepherdesses in marble on their gates; where the wall is built to the verge of the high ground on which the city stands, there is a swift descent to the wide valley of the Brenta waving in corn and vines and tobacco.

We went up the Brenta one day as far as Oliero, to visit the famous cavern already mentioned, out of which, from the secret heart of the hill, gushes one of the foamy affluents of the river. It is reached by passing through a paper-mill, fed by the stream, and then through a sort of ante-grot, whence stepping-stones are laid in the brawling current through a succession of natural compartments with dome-like roofs. From the hill overhead hang stalactites of all grotesque and fairy shapes, and the rock underfoot is embroidered with fantastic designs wrought by the water in the silence and darkness of the endless night. At a considerable distance from the mouth of the cavern is a wide lake, with a boat upon it, and voyaging to the centre of the pool your attention is drawn to the dome above you, which contracts into a shaft rising upward to a height as yet unmeasured and even unpierced by light. From somewhere in its mysterious ascent, an auroral boy, with a tallow candle, produces a so-called effect of sunrise, and sheds a sad, disheartening radiance on the lake and the cavern sides, which is to sunlight about as the blind creatures of subterranean waters are to those of waves that laugh and dance above ground. But all caverns are much alike in their depressing and gloomy influences, and since there is so great opportunity to be wretched on the surface of the earth, why do people visit them? I do not know that this is more dispiriting or its stream more Stygian than another.

The wicked memory of the Ecelini survives everywhere in this part of Italy, and near the entrance of the Oliero grotto is a hollow in the hill something like the apsis of a church, which is popularly believed to have been the hiding-place of Cecilia da Baone, one of the many unhappy wives of one of the many miserable members of the Ecelino family. It is not quite clear when Cecilia should have employed this as a place of refuge, and it is certain that she was not the wife of Ecelino da Romano, as the neighbors believe at Oliero, but of Ecelino il Monaco, his father; yet since her name is associated with the grot, let us have her story, which is curiously illustrative of the life of the best society in Italy during the thirteenth century. She was the only daughter of the rich and potent lord, Manfredo, Count of Baone and Abano, who died leaving his heiress to the guardianship of Spinabello da Xendrico. When his ward reached womanhood, Spinabello cast about him to find a suitable husband for her, and it appeared to him that a match with the son of Tiso du Camposampiero promised the greatest advantages. Tiso, to whom he proposed the affair, was delighted, but desiring first to take counsel with his friends upon so important a matter, he confided it for advice to his brother-in-law and closest intimate, Ecelino Balbo. It had just happened that Balbo’s son, Ecelino il Monaco, was at that moment disengaged, having been recently divorced from his first wife, the lovely but light Speronella; and Balbo falsely went to the greedy guardian of Cecilia, and offering him better terms than he could hope for from Tiso, secured Cecilia for his son. At this treachery the Camposampieri were furious; but they dissembled their anger till the moment of revenge arrived, when Cecilia’s rejected suitor encountering her upon a journey beyond the protection of her husband, violently dishonored his successful rival. The unhappy lady returning to Ecelino at Bassano, recounted her wrong, and was with a horrible injustice repudiated and sent home, while her husband arranged schemes of vengeance in due time consummated. Cecilia next married a Venetian noble, and being in due time divorced, married yet again, and died the mother of a large family of children.

This is a very old scandal, yet I think there was an habitué of the caffè in Bassano who could have given some of its particulars from personal recollection. He was an old and smoothly shaven gentleman, in a scrupulously white waistcoat, whom we saw every evening in a corner of the caffè playing solitaire. He talked with no one, saluted no one. He drank his glasses of water with anisette, and silently played solitaire. There is no good reason to doubt that he had been doing the same thing every evening for six hundred years.

V.

POSSAGNO, CANOVA’S BIRTHPLACE.

It did not take a long time to exhaust the interest of Bassano, but we were sorry to leave the place because of the excellence of the inn at which we tarried. It was called “Il Mondo,” and it had everything in it that heart could wish. Our rooms were miracles of neatness and comfort; they had the freshness, not the rawness, of recent repair, and they opened into the dining-hall, where we were served with indescribable salads and risotti. During our sojourn we simply enjoyed the house; when we were come away we wondered that so much perfection of hotel could exist in so small a town as Bassano. It is one of the pleasures of by-way travel in Italy, that you are everywhere introduced in character, that you become fictitious and play a part as in a novel. To this inn of The World, our driver had brought us with a clamor and rattle proportioned to the fee received from us, and when, in response to his haughty summons, the cameriere, who had been gossiping with the cook, threw open the kitchen door, and stood out to welcome us in a broad square of forth-streaming ruddy light, amid the lovely odors of broiling and roasting, our driver saluted him with, “Receive these gentle folks, and treat them to your very best. They are worthy of anything.” This at once put us back several centuries, and we never ceased to be lords and ladies of the period of Don Quixote as long as we rested in that inn.

It was a bright and breezy Sunday when we left “Il Mondo,” and gayly journeyed toward Treviso, intending to visit Possagno, the birthplace of Canova, on our way. The road to the latter place passes through a beautiful country, that gently undulates on either hand till in the distance it rises into pleasant hills and green mountain heights. Possagno itself lies upon the brink of a declivity, down the side of which drops terrace after terrace, all planted with vines and figs and peaches, to a watercourse below. The ground on which the village is built, with its quaint and antiquated stone cottages, slopes gently northward, and on a little rise upon the left hand of us coming from Bassano, we saw that stately edifice with which Canova has honored his humble birthplace. It is a copy of the Pantheon, and it cannot help being beautiful and imposing, but it would be utterly out of place in any other than an Italian village. Here, however, it consorted well enough with the lingering qualities of the old pagan civilization still perceptible in Italy. A sense of that past was so strong with us as we ascended the broad stairway leading up the slope from the village to the level on which the temple stands at the foot of a mountain, that we might well have believed we approached an altar devoted to the elder worship: through the open doorway and between the columns of the portico we could see the priests moving to and fro, and the voice of their chanting came out to us like the sound of hymns to some of the deities long disowned; and I remembered how Padre L —— had said to me in Venice, “Our blessed saints are only the old gods baptized and christened anew.” Within as without, the temple resembled the Pantheon, but it had little to show us. The niches designed by Canova for statues of the saints are empty yet; but there are busts by his own hand of himself and his brother, the Bishop Canova. Among the people was the sculptor’s niece, whom our guide pointed out to us, and who was evidently used to being looked at. She seemed not to dislike it, and stared back at us amiably enough, being a good-natured, plump, comely dark-faced lady of perhaps fifty years.

Possagno is nothing if not Canova, and our guide, a boy, knew all about him, — how, more especially, he had first manifested his wonderful genius by modeling a group of sheep out of the dust of the highway, and how an Inglese happening along in his carriage, saw the boy’s work and gave him a plateful of gold napoleons. I dare say this is as near the truth as most facts. And is it not better for the historic Canova to have begun in this way than to have poorly picked up the rudiments of his art in the workshop of his father, a maker of altar-pieces and the like for country churches? The Canova family was intermarried with the Venetian nobility, and will not credit those stories of Canova’s beginnings which his townsmen so fondly cherish. I believe they would even distrust the butter-lion with which the boy-sculptor is said to have adorned the table of the noble Falier, and first won his notice.

Besides the temple at Possagno, there is a very pretty gallery containing casts of all Canova’s works. It is an interesting place, where Psyches and Cupids flutter, where Venuses present themselves in every variety of attitude, where Sorrows sit upon hard, straight-backed classic chairs, and mourn in the society of faithful Storks; where the Bereft of this century surround death-beds in Greek costume appropriate to the scene; where Muses and Graces sweetly pose themselves and insipidly smile, and where the Dancers and Passions, though nakeder, are no wickeder than the Saints and Virtues. In all, there are a hundred and ninety-five pieces in the gallery, and among the rest the statue named George Washington, which was sent to America in 1820, and afterwards destroyed by fire in the Capitol. The figure is in a sitting posture; naturally, it is in the dress of a Roman general; and if it does not look much like George Washington, it does resemble Julius Cæsar.

The custodian of the gallery had been Canova’a body-servant, and he loved to talk of his master. He had so far imbibed the family spirit that he did not like to allow that Canova had ever been other than rich and grand, and he begged us not to believe the idle stories of his first essays in art. He was delighted with our interest in the imperial Washington, and our pleasure in the whole gallery, which we viewed with the homage due to the man who had rescued the world from Swaggering in sculpture. When we were satisfied, he invited us, with his mistress’s permission, into the house of the Canovas adjoining the gallery; and there we saw many paintings by the sculptor, — pausing longest in a lovely little room decorated after the Pompeian manner with scherzi in miniature panels representing the jocose classic usualities: Cupids escaping from cages, and being sold from them, and playing many pranks and games with Nymphs and Graces.

Then Canova was done, and Possagno was finished; and we resumed our way to Treviso, a town nearly as much porticoed as Padua, and having a memory and hardly any other consciousness. The Duomo, which is perhaps the ugliest duomo in the world, contains an “Annunciation,” by Titian, one of his best paintings; and in the Monte di Pietà is the grand and beautiful “Entombment,” by which Giorgione is perhaps most worthily remembered. The church of San Nicolò is interesting from its quaint and pleasing frescos by the school of Giotto. At the railway station an admirable old man sells the most delicious white and purple grapes.

VI.

COMO.

My visit to Lake Como has become to me a dream of summer, — a vision that remains faded the whole year round, till the blazing heats of July bring out the sympathetic tints in which it was vividly painted. Then I behold myself again in burning Milan, amidst noises and fervors and bustle that seem intolerable after my first six months in tranquil, cool, mute Venice. Looking at the great white Cathedral, with its infinite pinnacles piercing the cloudless blue, and gathering the fierce sun upon it, I half expect to see the whole mass calcined by the heat, and crumbling, statue by statue, finial by finial, arch by arch, into a vast heap of lime on the Piazza, with a few charred English tourists blackening here and there upon the ruin, and contributing a smell of burnt leather and Scotch tweed to the horror of the scene. All round Milan smokes the great Lombard plain, and to the north rises Monte Rosa, her dark head coifed with tantalizing snows as with a peasant’s white linen kerchief. And I am walking out upon that fuming plain as far as to the Arco della Pace, on which the bronze horses may melt any minute; or I am sweltering through the city’s noonday streets, in search of Sant’ Ambrogio, or the Cenacolo of Da Vinci, or what know I? Coming back to our hotel, “Alla Bella Venezia,” and greeted on entering by the immense fresco which covers one whole side of the court, it appeared to my friend and me no wonder that Garibaldi should look so longingly from the prow of a gondola toward the airy towers and balloon-like domes that swim above the unattainable lagoons of Venice, where the Austrian then lorded it in coolness and quietness, while hot, red-shirted Italy was shut out upon the dusty plains and stony hills. Our desire for water became insufferable; we paid our modest bills, and at six o’clock we took the train for Como, where we arrived about the hour when Don Abbondio, walking down the lonely path with his book of devotions in his hand, gave himself to the Devil on meeting the bravos of Don Rodrigo. I counsel the reader to turn to I Promessi Sposi, if he would know how all the lovely Como country looks at that hour. For me, the ride through the evening landscape, and the faint sentiment of pensiveness provoked by the smell of the ripening maize, which exhales the same sweetness on the way to Como that it does on any Ohio bottom-land, have given me an appetite, and I am to dine before wooing the descriptive Muse.

After dinner, we find at the door of the hotel an English architect whom we know, and we take a boat together for a moonlight row upon the lake, and voyage far up the placid water through air that bathes our heated senses like dew. How far we have left Milan behind! On the lake lies the moon, but the hills are held by mysterious shadows, which for the time are as substantial to us as the hills themselves. Hints of habitation appear in the twinkling lights along the water’s edge, and we suspect an alabaster lamp in every casement, and in every invisible house a villa such as Claude Melnotte described to Pauline, — and some one mouths that well-worn fustian. The rags of sentimentality flutter from every crag and olive-tree and orange-tree in all Italy — like the wilted paper collars which vulgar tourists leave by our own mountains and streams, to commemorate their enjoyment of the landscape.

The town of Como lies, a swarm of lights, behind us; the hills and shadows gloom around; the lake is a sheet of tremulous silver. There is no telling how we get back to our hotel, or with what satisfied hearts we fall asleep in our room there. The steamer starts for the head of the lake at eight o’clock in the morning, and we go on board at that hour.

There is some pretense of shelter in the awning stretched over the after part of the boat; but we do not feel the need of it in the fresh morning air, and we get as near the bow as possible, that we may be the very first to enjoy the famous beauty of the scenes opening before us. A few sails dot the water, and everywhere there are small, canopied row-boats, such as we went pleasuring in last night. We reach a bend in the lake, and all the roofs and towers of the city of Como pass from view, as if they had been so much architecture painted on a scene and shifted out of sight at a theatre. But other roofs and towers constantly succeed them, not less lovely and picturesque than they, with every curve of the many-curving lake. We advance over charming expanses of water lying between lofty hills; and as the lake is narrow, the voyage is like that of a winding river, — like that of the Ohio, but for the primeval wildness of the acclivities that guard our Western stream, and the tawniness of its current. Wherever the hills do not descend sheer into Como, a pretty town nestles on the brink, or, if not a town, then a villa, or else a cottage, if there is room for nothing more. Many little towns climb the heights half-way, and where the hills are green and cultivated in vines or olives, peasants’ houses scale them to the crest. They grow loftier and loftier as we leave our starting-place farther behind, and as we draw near Colico they wear light wreaths of cloud and snow. So cool a breeze has drawn down between them all the way that we fancy it to have come from them till we stop at Colico, and find that, but for the efforts of our honest engine, sweating and toiling in the dark below, we should have had no current of air. A burning calm is in the atmosphere, and on the broad, flat valley, — out of which a marshy stream oozes into the lake, — and on the snow-crowned hills upon the left, and on the dirty village of Colico upon the right, and on the indolent beggars waiting to welcome us, and sunning their goitres at the landing.

The name Colico, indeed, might be literally taken in English as descriptive of the local insalubrity. The place was once large, but it has fallen away much from sickness, and we found a bill posted in its public places inviting emigrants to America on the part of a German steamship company. It was the only advertisement of the kind I ever saw in Italy, and I judged that the people must be notoriously discontented there to make it worth the while of a steamship company to tempt from home any of the home-keeping Italian race. And yet Colico, though undeniably hot, and openly dirty, and tacitly unhealthy, had merits, though the dinner we got there was not among its virtues. It had an accessible country about it; that is, its woods and fields were not impenetrably walled in from the vagabond foot; and after we had dined we went and lay down under some greenly waving trees beside a field of corn, and heard the plumed and panoplied maize talking to itself of its kindred in America. It always has a welcome for tourists of our nation wherever it finds us in Italy; and sometimes its sympathy, expressed in a rustling and clashing of its long green blades, or in its strong sweet perfume, has, as already hinted, made me homesick, though I have been uniformly unaffected by potato-patches and tobacco-fields. If only the maize could impart to the Italian cooks the beautiful mystery of roasting-ears! Ah! then indeed it might claim a full and perfect fraternization from its compatriots abroad.

From where we lay beside the corn-field, we could see, through the twinkling leaves and the twinkling atmosphere, the great hills across the lake, taking their afternoon naps, with their clouds drawn like handkerchiefs over their heads. It was very hot, and the red and purple ooze of the unwholesome river below “burnt like a witch’s oils.” It was indeed but a fevered joy we snatched from Nature there; and I am afraid that we got nothing more comfortable from sentiment, when, rising, we wandered off through the unguarded fields toward a ruined tower on a hill. It must have been a relic of feudal times, and I could easily believe it had been the hold of one of those wicked lords who used to rule in the terror of the people beside peaceful and happy Como. But the life, good or bad, was utterly gone out of it now, and what was left of the tower was a burden to the sense. A few scrawny blackberries and other brambles grew out of its fallen stones; harsh, dust-dry mosses painted its weather-worn walls with their blanched gray and yellow. From its foot, looking out over the valley, we saw the road to the Splügen Pass lying white-hot in the valley; and while we looked, the diligence appeared, and dashed through the dust that rose like a flame before. After that it was a relief to stroll in dirty by-ways, past cottages of saffron peasants, and poor stony fields that begrudged them a scanty vegetation, back to the steamer blistering in the sun.

Now indeed we were glad of the awning, under which a silent crowd of people with sunburnt faces waited for the departure of the boat. The breeze rose again as the engine resumed its unappreciated labors, and, with our head toward Como, we pushed out into the lake. The company on board was such as might be expected. There was a German landscape-painter, with three heart’s-friends beside him; there were some German ladies; there were the unfailing Americans and the unfailing Englishman; there were some French people; there were Italians from the meridional provinces, dark, thin, and enthusiastic, with fat silent wives, and a rhythmical speech; there were Milanese with their families, out for a holiday, — round-bodied men, with blunt square features, and hair and vowels clipped surprisingly short, there was a young girl whose face was of the exact type affected in rococo sculpture, and at whom one gazed without being able to decide whether she was a nymph descended from a villa gate, or a saint come from under a broken arch in a Renaissance church. At one of the little towns two young Englishmen in knickerbockers came on board, who were devoured by the eyes of their fellow-passengers, and between whom and our kindly architect there was instantly ratified the tacit treaty of non-intercourse which travelling Englishmen observe.

Nothing further interested us on the way to Como, except the gathering coolness of the evening air; the shadows creeping higher and higher on the hills; the songs of the girls winding yellow silk on the reels that hummed through the open windows of the factories on the shore; and the appearance of a flag that floated from a shallop before the landing of a stately villa. The Italians did not know this banner, and the Germans loudly debated its nationality. The Englishmen grinned, and the Americans blushed in silence. Of all my memories of that hot day on Lake Como, this is burnt the deepest; for the flag was that insolent banner which in 1862 proclaimed us a broken people, and persuaded willing Europe of our ruin. It has gone down long ago from ship and fort and regiment, as well as from the shallop on the fair Italian lake. Still, I say, it made Como too hot for us that afternoon, and even breathless Milan was afterwards a pleasant contrast.

STOPPING AT VICENZA, VERONA, AND PARMA.

I.

It was after sunset when we arrived in the birthplace of Palladio, which we found a fair city in the lap of caressing hills. There are pretty villas upon these slopes, and an abundance of shaded walks and drives about the houses which were pointed out to us, by the boy who carried our light luggage from the railway station, as the property of rich citizens “but little less than lords” in quality. A lovely grove lay between the station and the city, and our guide not only took us voluntarily by the longest route through this, but, after reaching the streets, led us by labyrinthine ways to the hotel, in order, he afterwards confessed, to show us the city. He was a poet, though in that lowly walk of life, and he had done well. No other moment of our stay would have served us so well for a first general impression of Vicenza as that twilight hour. In its uncertain glimmer we seemed to get quite back to the dawn of feudal civilization, when Theodoric founded the great Basilica of the city; and as we stood before the famous Clock Tower, which rises light and straight as a mast eighty-two metres into the air from a base of seven metres, the wavering obscurity enhanced the effect by half concealing the tower’s crest, and letting it soar endlessly upward in the fancy. The Basilica is greatly restored by Palladio, and the cold hand of that friend of virtuous poverty in architecture lies heavy upon his native city in many places. Yet there is still a great deal of Lombardic architecture in Vicenza; and we walked through one street of palaces in which Venetian Gothic prevailed, so that it seemed as if the Grand Canal had but just shrunk away from their bases. When we threw open our window at the hotel, we found that it overlooked one of the city gates, from which rose a Ghibelline tower with a great bulging cornice, full of the beauty and memory of times long before Palladio.

They were rather troublous times, and not to be recalled here in all their circumstance; but I think it due to Vicenza, which is now little spoken of, even in Italy, and is scarcely known in America, where her straw-braid is bought for that of Leghorn, to remind the reader that the city was for a long time a republic of very independent and warlike stomach. Before she arrived at that state, however, she had undergone a great variety of fortunes. The Gauls founded the city (as I learn from “The Chronicles of Vicenza,” by Battista Pagliarino, published at Vicenza in 1563) when Gideon was Judge in Israel, and were driven out by the Romans some centuries later. As a matter of course, Vicenza was sacked by Attila and conquered by Alboin; after which she was ruled by some lords of her own, until she was made an imperial city by Henry I. Then she had a government more or less republican in form till Frederick Barbarossa burnt her, and “wrapped her in ashes,” and gave her to his vicar Ecelino da Romano, who “held her in cruel tyranny” from 1236 to 1259. The Paduans next ruled her forty years, and the Veronese seventy-seven, and the Milanese seventeen years; then she reposed in the arms of the Venetian Republic till these fell weak and helpless from all the Venetian possessions at the threat of Napoleon. Vicenza belonged again to Venice during the brief Republic of 1848, but the most memorable battle of that heroic but unhappy epoch gave her back to Austria. Now at last, and for the first time, she is Italian. Vicenza is

 ”Of kindred that have greatly expiated
  And greatly wept,”

and but that I so long fought against Ecelino da Romano, and the imperial interest in Italy, I could readily forgive her all her past errors. To us of the Lombard League, it was grievous that she should remain so doggishly faithful to her tyrant; though it is to be granted that perhaps fear had as much to do with her devotion as favor. The defense of 1848 was greatly to her honor, and she took an active part in that demonstration against the Austrians which endured from 1859 till 1866.

Of the demonstration we travellers saw an amusing phase at the opera which we attended the evening of our arrival in Vicenza. “Nabucodonosor” was the piece to be given in the new open-air theatre outside the city walls, whither we walked under the starlight. It was a pretty structure of fresh white stucco, oval in form, with some graceful architectural pretensions without, and within very charmingly galleried; while overhead it was roofed with a blue dome set with such starry mosaic as never covered temple or theatre since they used to leave their houses of play and worship open to the Attic skies. The old Hebrew story had, on this stage brought so near to Nature, effects seldom known to opera, and the scene evoked from far-off days the awful interest of the Bible histories, — the vague, unfigured oriental splendor — the desert — the captive people by the waters of the river of Babylon — the shadow and mystery of the prophecies. When the Hebrews, chained and toiling on the banks of the Euphrates, lifted their voices in lamentation, the sublime music so transfigured the commonplaceness of the words, that they meant all deep and unutterable affliction, and for a while swept away whatever was false and tawdry in the show, and thrilled our hearts with a rapture rarely felt. Yet, as but a moment before we had laughed to see Nebuchadnezzar’s crown shot off his head by a squib visibly directed from the side scenes, — at the point when, according to the libretto, “the thunder roars, and a bolt descends upon the head of the king,” — so but a moment after some new absurdity marred the illusion, and we began to look about the theatre at the audience. We then beheld that act of dimostrazioni which I have mentioned. In one of the few boxes sat a young and very beautiful woman in a dress of white, with a fan which she kept in constant movement. It was red on one side, and green on the other, and gave, with the white dress, the forbidden Italian colors, while, looked at alone, it was innocent of offense. I do not think a soul in the theatre was ignorant of the demonstration. A satisfied consciousness was reflected from the faces of the Italians, and I saw two Austrian officers exchange looks of good-natured intelligence, after a glance at the fair patriot. I wonder what those poor people do, now they are free, and deprived of the sweet, perilous luxury of defying their tyrants by constant acts of subtle disdain? Life in Venetia must be very dull: no more explosion of pasteboard petards; no more treason in bouquets; no more stealthy inscriptions on the walls — it must be insufferably dull. Ebbene, pazienza! Perhaps Victor Emanuel may betray them yet.

A spirit of lawless effrontery, indeed, seemed to pervade the whole audience in the theatre that night at Vicenza, and to extend to the ministers of the law themselves. There were large placards everywhere posted, notifying the people that it was forbidden to smoke in the theatre, and that smokers were liable to expulsion; but except for ourselves, and the fair patriot in the box, I think every body there was smoking and the policemen set the example of anarchy by smoking the longest and worst cigars of all. I am sure that the captive Hebrews all held lighted cigarettes behind their backs, and that Nebuchadnezzar, condemned to the grass of the field, conscientiously gave himself up to the Virginia weed behind the scenes.

Before I fell asleep that night, the moon rose over the top of the feudal tower, in front of our hotel, and produced some very pretty effects with the battlements. Early in the morning a regiment of Croats marched through the gate below the tower, their band playing “The Young Recruit.” These advantages of situation were not charged in our bill; but, even if they had been, I should still advise my reader to go, when in Vicenza, if he loves a pleasant landlord and a good dinner, to the Hotel de la Ville, which he will find almost at his sole disposition for however long time he may stay. His meals will be served him in a vast dining-hall, as bare as a barn or a palace, but for the pleasant, absurd old paintings on the wall, representing, as I suppose, Cleopatra applying the Asp, Susannah and the Elders, the Roman Lucrezia, and other moral and appetizing histories. I take it there is a quaint side-table or two lost midway of the wall, and that an old woodcut picture of the Most Noble City of Venice hangs over each. I know that there is a screen at one end of the apartment behind which the landlord invisibly assumes the head waiter; and I suspect that at the moment of sitting down at meat, you hear two Englishmen talking — as they pass along the neighboring corridor — of wine, in dissatisfied chest-tones. This hotel is of course built round a court, in which there is a stable and — exposed to the weather — a diligence, and two or three carriages and a driver, and an ostler chewing straw, and a pump and a grape-vine. Why the hotel, therefore, does not smell like a stable, from garret to cellar, I am utterly at a loss to know. I state the fact that it does not, and that every other hotel in Italy does smell of stable as if cattle had been immemorially pastured in its halls, and horses housed in its bed-chambers, — or as if its only guests were centaurs on their travels.

From the Museo Civico, whither we repaired first in the morning, and where there are some beautiful Montagnas, and an assortment of good and bad works by other masters, we went to the Campo Santo, which is worthy to be seen, if only because of the beautiful Laschi monument by Vela, one of the greatest modern sculptors. It is nothing more than a very simple tomb, at the door of which stands a figure in flowing drapery, with folded hands and uplifted eyes in an attitude exquisitely expressive of grief. The figure is said to be the portrait statue of the widow of him within the tomb, and the face is very beautiful. We asked if the widow was still young, and the custodian answered us in terms that ought to endear him to all women, if not to our whole mortal race,— “Oh quite young, yet. She is perhaps fifty years old.”

After the Campo Santo one ought to go to that theatre which Palladio built for the representation of classic tragedy, and which is perhaps the perfectest reproduction of the Greek theatre in the world. Alfieri is the only poet of modern times, whose works have been judged worthy of this stage, and no drama has been given on it since 1857, when the “Oedipus Tyrannus” of Sophocles was played. We found it very silent and dusty, and were much sadder as we walked through its gayly frescoed, desolate anterooms than we had been in the Campo Santo. Here used to sit, at coffee and bassett, the merry people who owned the now empty seats of the theatre, — lord, and lady, and abbé — who affected to be entertained by the scenes upon the stage. Upon my word, I should like to know what has become, in the other world, of those poor pleasurers of the past whose memory makes one so sad upon the scenes of their enjoyment here! I suppose they have something quite as unreal, yonder, to satisfy them as they had on earth, and that they still play at happiness in the old rococo way, though it is hard to conceive of any fiction outside of Italy so perfect and so entirely suited to their unreality as this classic theatre. It is a Greek theatre, for Greek tragedies; but it could never have been for popular amusement, and it was not open to the air, though it had a sky skillfully painted in the centre of the roof. The proscenium is a Greek façade, in three stories, such as never was seen in Greece; and the architecture of the three streets running back from the proscenium, and forming the one unchangeable scene of all the dramas, is — like the statues in the niches and on the gallery inclosing the auditorium — Greek in the most fashionable Vicentine taste. It must have been but an operatic chorus that sang in the semicircular space just below the stage and in front of the audience. Admit and forget these small blemishes and aberrations, however, and what a marvelous thing Palladio’s theatre is! The sky above the stage is a wonderful trick, and those three streets — one in the centre and serving as entrance for the royal persons of the drama, one at the right for the nobles, and one at the left for the citizens — present unsurpassed effects of illusion. They are not painted, but modeled in stucco. In perspective they seem each half a mile long, but entering them you find that they run back from the proscenium only some fifteen feet, the fronts of the houses and the statues upon them decreasing in recession with a well-ordered abruptness. The semicircular gallery above the auditorium is of stone, and forty statues of marble crown its colonnade, or occupy niches between the columns.

II.

It was curious to pass, with the impression left by this costly and ingenious toy upon our minds, at once to the amphitheatre in Verona, which, next to the Coliseum, has, of all the works bequeathed us by the ancient Roman world, the greatest claim upon the wonder and imagination. Indeed, it makes even a stronger appeal to the fancy. We know who built the Coliseum, but in its unstoried origin, the Veronese arena has the mystery of the Pyramids. Was its founder Augustus, or Vitellus, or Antoninus, or Maximian, or the Republic of Verona? Nothing is certain but that it was conceived and reared by some mighty prince or people, and that it yet remains in such perfection that the great shows of two thousand years ago might take place in it to-day. It is so suggestive of the fierce and splendid spectacles of Roman times that the ring left by a modern circus on the arena, and absurdly dwarfed by the vast space of the oval, had an impertinence which we hotly resented, looking down on it from the highest grade of the interior. It then lay fifty feet below us, in the middle of an ellipse five hundred feet in length and four hundred in breadth, and capable of holding fifty thousand spectators. The seats that the multitudes pressed of old are perfect, yet; scarce a stone has been removed from the interior; the aedile and the prefect might take their places again in the balustraded tribunes above the great entrance at either end of the arena, and scarcely see that they were changed. Nay, the victims and the gladiators might return to the cells below the seats of the people, and not know they had left them for a day; the wild beasts might leap into the arena from dens as secure and strong as when first built. The ruin within seems only to begin with the aqueduct, which was used to flood the arena for the naval shows, but which is now choked with the dust of ages. Without, however, is plain enough the doom which is written against all the work of human hands, and which, unknown of the builders, is among the memorable things placed in the corner-stone of every edifice. Of the outer wall that rose high over the highest seats of the amphitheatre, and encircled it with stately corridors, giving it vaster amplitude and grace, the earthquake of six centuries ago spared only a fragment that now threatens above one of the narrow Veronese streets. Blacksmiths, wagon-makers, and workers in clangorous metals have made shops of the lower corridors of the old arena, and it is friends and neighbors with the modern life about it, as such things usually are in Italy. Fortunately for the stranger, the Piazza Bra flanks it on one hand, and across this it has a magnificent approach. It is not less happy in being little known to sentiment, and the traveller who visits it by moonlight, has a full sense of grandeur and pathos, without any of the sheepishness attending homage to that battered old coquette, the Coliseum, which so many emotional people have sighed over, kissing and afterwards telling.

But he who would know the innocent charm of a ruin as yet almost wholly uncourted by travel, must go to the Roman theatre in Verona. It is not a favorite of the hand-books; and we were decided to see it chiefly by a visit to the Museum, where, besides an admirable gallery of paintings, there is a most interesting collection of antiques in bronze and marble found in excavating the theatre. The ancient edifice had been completely buried, and a quarter of the town was built over it, as Portici is built over Herculaneum, and on the very top stood a Jesuit convent. One day, some children, playing in the garden of one of the shabby houses, suddenly vanished from sight. Their mother ran like one mad (I am telling the story in the words of the peasant who related it to me) to the spot where they had last been seen, and fell herself into an opening of the earth there. The outcry raised by these unfortunates brought a number of men to their aid, and in digging to get them out, an old marble stairway was discovered. This was about twenty-five years ago. A certain gentleman named Monga owned the land, and he immediately began to make excavations. He was a rich man, but considered rather whimsical (if my peasant represented the opinion of his neighbors), and as the excavation ate a great deal of money (mangiava molti soldi), his sons discontinued the work after his death, and nothing has been done for some time, now. The peasant in charge was not a person of imaginative mind, though he said the theatre (supposed to have been built in the time of Augustus) was completed two thousand years before Christ. He had a purely conventional admiration of the work, which he expressed at regular intervals, by stopping short in his course, waving both hands over the ruins, and crying in a sepulchral voice, “Qual’ opera!” However, as he took us faithfully into every part of it, there is no reason to complain of him.

We crossed three or four streets, and entered at several different gates, in order to see the uncovered parts of the work, which could have been but a small proportion of the whole. The excavation has been carried down thirty and forty feet below the foundations of the modern houses, revealing the stone seats of the auditorium, the corridors beneath them, and the canals and other apparatus for naval shows, as in the great Amphitheatre. These works are even more stupendous than those of the Amphitheatre, for in many cases they are not constructed, but hewn out of the living rock, so that in this light the theatre is a gigantic sculpture. Below all are cut channels to collect and carry off the water of the springs in which the rock abounds. The depth of one of these channels near the Jesuit convent must be fifty feet below the present surface. Only in one place does the ancient edifice rise near the top of the ground, and there is uncovered the arched front of what was once a family-box at the theatre, with the owner’s name graven upon the arch. Many poor little houses have of course been demolished to carry on the excavations, and to the walls that joined them cling memorials of the simple life that once inhabited them. To one of the buildings hung a melancholy fire-place left blackened with smoke, and battered with use, but witnessing that it had once been the heart of a home. It was far more touching than any thing in the elder ruin; and I think nothing could have so vividly expressed the difference which, in spite of all the resemblances noticeable in Italy, exists between the ancient and modern civilization, as that family-box at the theatre and this simple fireside.

I do not now remember what fortunate chance it was that discovered to us the house of the Capulets, and I incline to believe that we gravitated toward it by operation of well-known natural principles which bring travellers acquainted with improbabilities wherever they go. We found it a very old and time-worn edifice, built round an ample court, and we knew it, as we had been told we should, by the cap carven in stone above the interior of the grand portal. The family, anciently one of the principal of Verona, has fallen from much of its former greatness. On the occasion of our visit, Juliet, very dowdily dressed, looked down from the top of a long, dirty staircase which descended into the court, and seemed interested to see us; while her mother caressed with one hand a large yellow mastiff, and distracted it from its first impulse to fly upon us poor children of sentiment. There was a great deal of stable litter, and many empty carts standing about in the court; and if I might hazard the opinion formed upon these and other appearances, I should say that old Capulet has now gone to keeping a hotel, united with the retail liquor business, both in a small way.

Nothing could be more natural, after seeing the house of the Capulets, than a wish to see Juliet’s Tomb, which is visited by all strangers, and is the common property of the hand-books. It formerly stood in a garden, where, up to the beginning of this century, it served, says my “Viaggio in Italia,” “for the basest uses,” — just as the sacred prison of Tasso was used for a charcoal bin. We found the sarcophagus under a shed in one corner of the garden of the Orfanotrofio delle Franceschine, and had to confess to each other that it looked like a horse-trough roughly hewn out of stone. The garden, said the boy in charge of the moving monument, had been the burial-place of the Capulets, and this tomb being found in the middle of the garden, was easily recognized as that of Juliet. Its genuineness, as well as its employment in the ruse of the lovers, was proven beyond cavil by a slight hollow cut for the head to rest in, and a hole at the foot “to breathe through,” as the boy said. Does not the fact that this relic has to be protected from the depredations of travellers, who could otherwise carry it away piecemeal, speak eloquently of a large amount of vulgar and rapacious innocence drifting about the world?

It is well to see even such idle and foolish curiosities, however, in a city like Verona, for the mere going to and fro in search of them through her streets is full of instruction and delight. To my mind, no city has a fairer place than she that sits beside the eager Adige, and breathes the keen air of mountains white with snows in winter, green and purple with vineyards in summer, and forever rich with marble. Around Verona stretch those gardened plains of Lombardy, on which Nature, who dotes on Italy, and seems but a step-mother to all transalpine lands, has lavished every gift of beauty and fertility. Within the city’s walls, what store of art and history! Her market-places have been the scenes of a thousand tragic or ridiculous dramas; her quaint and narrow streets are ballads and legends full of love-making and murder; the empty, grass-grown piazzas before her churches are tales that are told of municipal and ecclesiastical splendor. Her nobles sleep in marble tombs so beautiful that the dust in them ought to be envied by living men in Verona; her lords lie in perpetual state in the heart of the city, in magnificent sepulchres of such grace and opulence, that, unless a language be invented full of lance-headed characters, and Gothic vagaries of arch and finial, flower and fruit, bird and beast, they can never be described. Sacred be their rest from pen of mine, Verona! Nay, while I would fain bring the whole city before my reader’s fancy, I am loath and afraid to touch any thing in it with my poor art: either the tawny river, spanned with many beautiful bridges, and murmurous with mills afloat and turned by the rapid current; or the thoroughfares with their passengers and bright shops and caffès; or the grim old feudal towers; or the age-embrowned palaces, eloquent in their haughty strength of the times when they were family fortresses; or the churches with the red pillars of their porticos resting upon the backs of eagle-headed lions; or even the white-coated garrison (now there no more), with its heavy-footed rank and file, its handsome and resplendent officers, its bristling fortifications, its horses and artillery, crowding the piazzas of churches turned into barracks. All these things haunt my memory, but I could only at best thinly sketch them in meagre black and white. Verona is an almost purely Gothic city in her architecture, and her churches are more worthy to be seen than any others in North Italy, outside of Venice. San Zenone, with the quaint bronzes on its doors representing in the rudeness of the first period of art the incidents of the Old Testament and the miracles of the saints — with the allegorical sculptures surrounding the interior and exterior of the portico, and illustrating, among other things, the creation of Eve with absolute literalness — with its beautiful and solemn crypt in which the dust of the titular saint lies entombed — with its minute windows, and its vast columns sustaining the roof upon capitals of every bizarre and fantastic device — is doubtless most abundant in that Gothic spirit, now grotesque and now earnest, which somewhere appears in all the churches of Verona; which has carven upon the façade of the Duomo the statues of Orlando and Olliviero, heroes of romance, and near them has placed the scandalous figure of a pig in a monk’s robe and cowl, with a breviary in his paw; which has reared the exquisite monument of Guglielmo da Castelbarco before the church of St. Anastasia, and has produced the tombs of the Scaligeri before the chapel of Santa Maria Antica.

I have already pledged myself not to attempt any description of these tombs, and shall not fall now. But I bought in the. English tongue, as written at Verona, some “Notices,” kept for sale by the sacristan, “of the Ancient Churg of Our Lady, and of the Tombs of the most illustrious Family Della-Scala,” and from these I think it no dereliction to quote verbatim. First is the tomb of San Francesco, who was “surnamed the Great by reason of his valor.” “With him the Great Alighieri and other exiles took refuge. We see his figure extended upon a bed, and above his statue on horsebac with the vizor down, and his crest falling behind his shoulders, his horse covered with mail. The columns and capitals are wonderful.” “Within the Cemetery to the right leaning against the walls of the church is the tomb of John Scaliger.” “In the side of this tomb near the wall of Sacristy, you see the urn that encloses the ashes of Martin I.,” “who was traitorously killed on the 17th of October 1277 by Scaramello of the Scaramelli, who wished to revenge the honor of a young lady of his family.” “The Mausoleum that is in the side facing the Place encloses the Martin II.’s ashes…. This building is sumptuous and wonderful because it stands on four columns, each of which has an architrave of nine feet. On the beams stands a very large square of marble that forms the floor, on which stands the urn of the Defunct. Four other columns support the vault that covers the urn; and the rest is adorned by facts of Old Testament. Upon the Summit is the equestrian statue as large as life.” Of “Can Signorius,” whose tomb is the most splendid of all, the “Notices” say: “He spent two thousand florins of gold, in order to prepare his own sepulchre while he was yet alive, and to surpass the magnificence of his predecessors. The monument is as magnificent as the contracted space allows. Six columns support the floor of marble on which it stands covered with figures. Six other columns support the top, on that is the Scaliger’s statues…. The monument is surrounded by an enclosure of red marble, with six pillars, on which are square capitols with armed Saints. The rails of iron with the Arms of the Scala, are worked with a beauty wonderful for that age,” or, I may add, for any age. These “rails” are an exquisite net-work of iron wrought by hand, with an art emulous of that of Nicolò Caparra at Florence. The chief device employed is a ladder (scala) constantly repeated in the centres of quatre-foils; and the whole fabric is still so flexible and perfect, after the lapse of centuries, that the net may be shaken throughout by a touch. Four other tombs of the Scaligeri are here, among which the “Notices” particularly mention that of Alboin della Scala: “He was one of the Ghibelline party, as the arms on his urn schew, that is a staircase risen by an eagle — wherefore Dante said, In sulla Scala porta il santo Uccello.”

I should have been glad to meet the author of these delightful histories, but in his absence we fared well enough with the sacristan. When, a few hours before we left Verona, we came for a last look it the beautiful sepulchres, he recognized us, and seeing a sketch-book in the party, he invited us within the inclosure again, and then ran and fetched chairs for us to sit upon — nay, even placed chairs for us to rest our feet on. Winning and exuberant courtesy of the Italian race! If I had never acknowledged it before, I must do homage to it now, remembering the sweetness of the sacristans and custodians of Verona. They were all men of the most sympathetic natures. He at San Zenone seemed never to have met with real friends till we expressed pleasure in the magnificent Mantegna, which is the pride of his church. “What coloring!” he cried, and then triumphantly took us into the crypt: “What a magnificent crypt! What works they executed in those days, there!” At San Giorgio Maggiore, where there are a Tintoretto and a Veronese, and four horrible swindling big pictures by Romanino, I discovered to my great dismay that I had in my pocket but five soldi, which I offered with much abasement and many apologies to the sacristan; but he received them as if they had been so many napoleons, prayed me not to speak of embarrassment, and declared that his labors in our behalf had been nothing but pleasure. At Santa Maria in Organo, where are the wonderful intagli of Fra Giovanni da Verona, the sacristan fully shared our sorrow that the best pictures could not be unveiled as it was Holy Week. He was also moved with us at the gradual decay of the intagli, and led us to believe that, to a man of so much sensibility, the general ruinous state of the church was an inexpressible affliction; and we rejoiced for his sake that it should possess at least one piece of art in perfect repair. This was a modern work, that day exposed for the first time, and it represented in a group of wooden figures The Death of St. Joseph. The Virgin and Christ supported the dying saint on either hand; and as the whole was vividly colored, and rays of glory in pink and yellow gauze descended upon Joseph’s head, nothing could have been more impressive.

III.

Parma is laid out with a regularity which may be called characteristic of the great ducal cities of Italy, and which it fully shares with Mantua, Ferrara, and Bologna. The signorial cities, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Treviso, are far more picturesque, and Parma excels only in the number and beauty of her fountains. It is a city of gloomy aspect, says Valery, who possibly entered it in a pensive frame of mind, for its sadness did not impress us. We had just come from Modena, where the badness of our hotel enveloped the city in an atmosphere of profound melancholy. In fact, it will not do to trust to travellers in any thing. I, for example, have just now spoken of the many beautiful fountains in Parma because I think it right to uphold the statement of M. Richard’s hand-book; but I only remember seeing one fountain, passably handsome, there. My Lord Corke, who was at Parma in 1754, says nothing of fountains, and Richard Lasells, Gent., who was there a century earlier, merely speaks of the fountains in the Duke’s gardens, which, together with his Grace’s “wild beasts” and “exquisite coaches,” and “admirable Theater to exhibit Operas in,” “the Domo, whose Cupola was painted by the rare hand of Corregio,” and the church of the Capuchins, where Alexander Farnese is buried, were “the Chief thing to be seen in Parma” at that day.

The wild beasts have long ago run away with the exquisite coaches, but the other wonders named by Master Lasells are still extant in Parma, together with some things he does not name. Our minds, in going thither, were mainly bent upon Correggio and his works, and while our dinner was cooking at the admirable Albergo della Posta, we went off to feast upon the perennial Hash of Frogs in the dome of the Cathedral. This is one of the finest Gothic churches in Italy, and vividly recalls Verona, while it has a quite unique and most beautiful feature in the three light-columned galleries, that traverse the façade one above another. Close at hand stands the ancient Baptistery, hardly less peculiar and beautiful; but, after all, it is the work of the great painter which gives the temple its chief right to wonder and reverence. We found the fresco, of course, much wasted, and at first glance, before the innumerable arms and legs had time to order and attribute themselves to their respective bodies, we felt the justice of the undying spite which called this divinest of frescos a guazzetto di rane. But in another moment it appeared to us the most sublime conception of the Assumption ever painted, and we did not find Caracci’s praise too warm where he says: “And I still remain stupefied with the sight of so grand a work — every thing so well conceived — so well seen from below — with so much severity, yet with so much judgment and so much grace; with a coloring which is of very flesh.” The height of the fresco above the floor of the church is so vast that it might well appear like a heavenly scene to the reeling sense of the spectator. Brain, nerve, and muscle were strained to utter exhaustion in a very few minutes, and we came away with our admiration only half-satisfied, and resolved to ascend the cupola next day, and see the fresco on something like equal terms. In one sort we did thus approach it, and as we looked at the gracious floating figures of the heavenly company through the apertures of the dome, they did seem to adopt us and make us part of the painting. But the tremendous depth, over which they drifted so lightly, it dizzied us to look into; and I am not certain that I should counsel travellers to repeat our experience. Where still perfect, the fresco can only gain from close inspection, — it is painted with such exquisite and jealous perfection, — yet the whole effect is now better from below, for the decay is less apparent; and besides, life is short, and the stairway by which one ascends to the dome is in every way too exigent. It is with the most astounding sense of contrast that you pass from the Assumption to the contemplation of that other famous roof frescoed by Correggio, in the Monastero di San Paolo. You might almost touch the ceiling with your hand, it hovers so low with its counterfeit of vine-clambered trellis-work, and its pretty boys looking roguishly through the embowering leaves. It is altogether the loveliest room in the world; and if the Diana in her car on the chimney is truly a portrait of the abbess for whom the chamber was decorated, she was altogether worthy of it, and one is glad to think of her enjoying life in the fashion amiably permitted to nuns in the fifteenth century. What curious scenes the gayety of this little chamber conjures up, and what a vivid comment it is upon the age and people that produced it! This is one of the things that makes a single hour of travel worth whole years of historic study, and which casts its light upon all future reading. Here, no doubt, the sweet little abbess, with the noblest and prettiest of her nuns about her, received the polite world, and made a cheerful thing of devotion, while all over transalpine Europe the sour-hearted Reformers were destroying pleasant monasteries like this. The light-hearted lady-nuns and their gentlemen friends looked on heresy as a deadly sin, and they had little reason to regard it with favor. It certainly made life harder for them in time, for it made reform within the Church as well as without, so that at last the lovely Chamber of St. Paul was closed against the public for more than two centuries.

All Parma is full of Correggio, as Venice is of Titian and Tintoretto, as Naples of Spagnoletto, as Mantua of Giulio Romano, as Vicenza of Palladio, as Bassano of Da Ponte, as Bologna of Guido Reni. I have elsewhere noticed how ineffaceably and exclusively the manner of the masters seems to have stamped itself upon the art of the cities where they severally wrought, — how at Parma Correggio yet lives in all the sketchy mouths of all the pictures painted there since his time. One might almost believe, hearing the Parmesans talk, that his manner had infected their dialect, and that they fashioned their lazy, incomplete utterance with the careless lips of his nymphs and angels. They almost entirely suppress the last syllable of every word, and not with a quick precision, as people do in Venice or Milan, but with an ineffable languor, as if language were not worth the effort of enunciation; while they rise and lapse several times in each sentence, and sink so sweetly and sadly away upon the closing vocable that the listener can scarcely repress his tears. In this melancholy rhythm, one of the citizens recounted to me the whole story of the assassination of the last Duke of Parma in 1850; and left me as softly moved as if I had been listening to a tale of hapless love. Yet it was an ugly story, and after the enchantment of the recital passed away, I perceived that when the Duke was killed justice was done on one of the maddest and wickedest tyrants that ever harassed an unhappy city.

The Parmesans remember Maria Louisa, Napoleon’s wife, with pleasant enough feelings, and she seems to have been good to them after the manner of sovereigns, enriching their city with art, and beautifying it in many ways, besides doing works of private charity and beneficence. Her daughter by a second marriage, the Countess Sanvitali, still lives in Parma; and in one of the halls of the Academy of Fine Arts the Duchess herself survives in the marble of Canova. It was she who caused the two great pictures of Correggio, the St. Jerome and the Madonna della Scodella, to be placed alone in separate apartments hung with silk, in which the painter’s initial A is endlessly interwoven. “The Night,” to which the St. Jerome is “The Day,” is in the gallery at Dresden, but Parma could have kept nothing more representative of her great painter’s power than this “Day.” It is “the bridal of the earth and sky,” and all sweetness, brightness, and tender shadow are in it. Many other excellent works of Correggio, Caracci, Parmigianino, and masters of different schools are in this gallery, but it is the good fortune of travellers, who have to see so much, that the memory of the very best alone distinctly remains. Nay, in the presence of prime beauty nothing else exists, and we found that the church of the Steccata, where Parmigianino’s sublime “Moses breaking the Tables of the Law” is visible in the midst of a multitude of other figures on the vault, really contained nothing at last but that august and awful presence.

Undoubtedly the best gallery of classical antiquities in North Italy is that of Parma, which has derived all its precious relics from the little city of Valleja alone. It is a fine foretaste of Pompeii and the wonders of the Museo Borbonico at Naples, with its antique frescos, and marble, and bronzes. I think nothing better has come out of Herculaneum than the comic statuette of “Hercules Drunk.” He is in bronze, and the drunkest man who has descended to us from the elder world; he reels backward, and leers knowingly upon you, while one hand hangs stiffly at his side, and the other faintly clasps a wine-cup — a burly, worthless, disgraceful demigod.

The great Farnese Theatre was, as we have seen, admired by Lasells; but Lord Corke found it a “useless structure” though immense. “The same spirit that raised the Colossus at Rhodes,” he says, “raised the theatre at Parma; that insatiable spirit and lust of Fame which would brave the Almighty by fixing eternity to the name of a perishable being.” If it was indeed this spirit, I am bound to say that it did not build so wisely at Parma as at Rhodes. The play-house that Ranuzio I. constructed in 1628, to do honor to Cosmo II. de’ Medici (pausing at Parma on his way to visit the tomb of San Carlo Borromeo), and that for a century afterward was the scene of the most brilliant spectacles in the world, is now one of the dismalest and dustiest of ruins. This Theatrum orbis miraculum was built and ornamented with the most perishable materials, and even its size has shrunken as the imaginations of men have contracted under the strong light of later days. When it was first opened, it was believed to hold fourteen thousand spectators; at a later fête it held only ten thousand; the last published description fixes its capacity at five thousand; and it is certain that for many and many a year it has held only the stray tourists who have looked in upon its desolation. The gay paintings hang in shreds and tatters from the roof; dust is thick upon the seats and in the boxes, and on the leads that line the space once flooded for naval games. The poor plaster statues stand naked and forlorn amid the ruin of which they are part; and the great stage, from which the curtain has rotted away, yawns dark and empty before the empty auditorium.

DUCAL MANTUA.

In that desperate depth of Hell where Dante beholds the Diviners doomed to pace with backward-twisted faces, and turn forever on the past the rainy eyes once bent too daringly on the future, the sweet guide of the Tuscan poet points out among the damned the daughter of a Theban king, and discourses to his charge: —

 Manto was she: through many lands she went
    Seeking, and paused where I was born, at last.
    Therefore I choose thou be on me intent
  A little. When from life her father passed,
    And they of Bacchus’ city became slaves,
    Long time about the world the daughter cast.
  Up in fair Italy is a lake that laves
    The feet of Alps that lock in Germany:
    Benaco called….
  And Peschiera in strong harness sits
    To front the Brescians and the Bergamasques,
    Where one down-curving shore the other meets.
  There all the gathered waters outward flow
    That may not in Benaco’s bosom rest,
    And down through, pastures green a river go.

* * * * *

   As far as to Governo, where, its quest
  Ended at last, it falls into me Po.
    But far it has not sought before a plain
    It finds and floods, out-creeping wide and slow
  To be the steaming summer’s offense and bane.
    Here passing by, the fierce, unfriendly maid
    Saw land in the middle of the sullen main,
  Wild and unpeopled, and here, unafraid
    Of human neighborhood, she made her lair,
    Rested, and with her menials wrought her trade,
  And lived, and left her empty body there.
    Then the sparse people that were scattered near
    Gathered upon that island, everywhere
  Compassed about with swamps and kept from fear.
    They built their city above the witch’s grave,
    And for her sake that first made dwelling there
  The name of Mantua to their city gave.

To this account of the first settlement of Mantua Virgil adds a warning to his charge to distrust all other histories of the city’s foundation; and Dante is so thoroughly persuaded of its truth, that he declares all other histories shall be to him as so many lifeless embers. Nevertheless, divers chroniclers of Mantua reject the tradition here given as fabulous; and the carefullest and most ruthless of these traces the city’s origin, not to the unfriendly maid, but to the Etruscan King Ocno, fixing the precise date of its foundation at thirty years before the Trojan war, one thousand five hundred and thirty-nine years after the creation of the world, three hundred years before Rome, and nine hundred and fifteen years after the flood, while Abimelech was judge in Israel. “And whoever,” says the compiler of the “Flower of the Mantuan Chroniclers” (it is a very dry and musty flower, indeed), citing doughty authorities for all his facts and figures,— “whoever wishes to understand this more curiously, let him read the said authors, and he will be satisfied.”

But I am as little disposed to unsettle the reader’s faith in the Virgilian tradition, as to part with my own; and I therefore uncandidly hold back the names of the authorities cited. This tradition was in fact the only thing concerning Mantuan history present to my thoughts as I rode toward the city, one afternoon of a pleasant Lombard spring; and when I came in sight of the ancient hold of sorcery, with the languid waters of its lagoons lying sick at its feet, I recognized at least the topographical truth of Virgil’s description. But old and mighty walls now surround the spot which Manto found sterile and lonely in the heart of the swamp formed by the Mincio, no longer Benaco; and the dust of the witch is multitudinously hidden under the edifices of a city whose mighty domes, towers, and spires make its approach one of the stateliest in the world. It is a prospect on which you may dwell long as you draw toward the city, for the road from the railway station winds through some two miles of flat meadow-land before it reaches the gate of the stronghold which the Italians call the first hope of the winner of the land, and the last hope of the loser of Italy. Indeed, there is no haste in any of the means of access to Mantua. It lies scarce forty miles south of Verona, and you are three hours in journeying this distance in the placid railway train, — a distance which Romeo, returning to Verona from his exile in Mantua, no doubt travelled in less time. There is abundant leisure to study the scenery on the way; but it scarcely repays the perusal, for it lacks the beauty of the usual Lombard landscape. The soil is red, stony, and sterile; the orchard-trees are scant and slender, and not wedded with the caressing vines which elsewhere in North Italy garland happier trees and stretch gracefully from trunk to trunk. Especially the landscape looks sad and shabby about the little village of Villafranca, where, in 1864, the dejected prospect seemed incapable of a smile even in spring; as if it had lost all hope and cheerfulness since the peace was made which confirmed Venetia to the alien. It said as plainly as real estate could express the national sentiment, “Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza!” and crept sullenly out of sight, as our pensive train resumed its meditative progress. No doubt this poor landscape was imbued, in its dull, earthy way, with a feeling that the coming of Garibaldi would irrigate and fertilize it into a paradise; as at Venice the gondoliers believed that his army would bring in its train cheap wine and hordes of rich and helpless Englishmen bent on perpetual tours of the Grand Canal without understanding as to price.

But within and without Mantua was a strong argument against possibility of change in the political condition of this part of Italy. Compassed about by the corruption of the swamps and the sluggish breadth of the river, the city is no less mighty in her artificial defenses than in this natural strength of her position; and the Croats of her garrison were as frequent in her sad, handsome streets, as the priests in Rome. Three lakes secure her from approach upon the east, north, and south; on the west is a vast intrenched camp, which can be flooded at pleasure from one of the lakes; while the water runs three fathoms deep at the feet of the solid brick walls all round the city. There are five gates giving access by drawbridges from the town to the fortressed posts on every side, and commanding with their guns the roads that lead to them. The outlying forts, with the citadel, are four in number, and are each capable of holding from two to three thousand men. The intrenched camp, for cavalry and artillery, and the barracks of the city itself, can receive a garrison of from thirty to forty thousand men; and the measureless depths of the air are full of the fever that fights in defense of Mantua, and serves with equal zeal whoever is master of the place, let him be French, Italian, or Austrian, so only that he have an unacclimated enemy before him.

I confess that little of this formidable military knowledge burdened me on the occasion of my visit to Mantua, and I have already confessed that I was but very imperfectly informed of the history of the city. But indeed, if the reader dealt candidly with himself, how much could he profess to know of Mantuan history? The ladies all have some erudite associations with the place as giving the term of mantua-making to the art of dress, and most persons have heard that Mantua’s law was once death to any he that uttered mortal drugs there, and that the place was till a few years since an Austrian fortress on the Mincio. Of Giulio Romano, and his works to Mantua, a good many have heard; and there is something known to the reader of the punctuated edition of Browning about Sordello. But of the Gonzagas of Mantua, and their duchy, what do you know, gentle reader?

For myself, when in Mantua, I tried to make a virtue of my want of information, and fancied that a sort of general ignorance was more favorable to my enjoyment of what I saw there than thorough acquaintance with the city’s history would have been. It certainly enabled me to accept all the poetic fiction of the custodians, and to embroider with their pleasing improbabilities the business-like succinctness of the guide-books; to make out of the twilight which involved all impressions a misty and heroic picture of the Mantuan past, wherein her great men appeared with a stately and gigantic uncertainty of outline, and mixed with dim scenes of battle, intrigue, and riot, and were gone before Fact could lay her finger on any shape, and swear that it was called so, and did so and so. But even if there had been neither pleasure nor profit in this ignorance, the means of dispelling it are so scant in modern literature that it might well have been excused in a far more earnest traveller. The difficulty, indeed, which I afterwards experienced in trying to learn something of Mantua, is my best excuse for writing of its history here.

I fancy that the few recent books on the subject are not in the hands of most readers, and I have a comforting belief that scarcely a reader of mine has been a reader of the “Grande Illustrazione de Lombardo-Veneto.”[Mantova e Sua Provincia, per ‘Avvocato Bartolomeo Arrighi: Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, ossia Storia delle Città, des Borghi, Communi, Castelli, etc., fino ai Tempi moderni. Per Cura di Cesare Cantù, e a’ altri Literati. Milano, 1859.] Yet I suppose that he forms some notion of this work from its title, and figures to himself a physical bulk of six volumes, — large, abounding in ill-printed wood-cuts, and having the appalling features which repel our race from pictorial history-books generally.

The “Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto” includes notice of all those dear and famous cities of North Italy which we know, — of Verona, Vicenza, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Modena, Brescia, Bergamo, and the rest; but here we have only to do with the part which concerns Mantua. This is written by the advocate Bartolomeo Arrighi, whose ingenious avoidance of all that might make his theme attractive could not be sufficiently celebrated here, and may therefore be left to the reader’s fancy. There is little in his paper to leaven statistical heaviness; and in recounting one of the most picturesque histories, he contrives to give merely a list of the events and a diagram of the scenes. Whatever illustrated character in princes or people he carefully excludes, and the raciness of anecdote and the flavor of manner and epoch distil not into his compilation from the elder historiographers. I have therefore to go back, in my present purpose, to the authors whose substance he has desiccated; and with their help, and that of one or two antiquated authors of this century, I shall try to rehabilitate the ducal state of Mantua,

“Which was an image of the mighty world,”

and present some shadow of its microcosmal life. The story has the completeness of a tragedy; but it runs over many centuries, and it ends like a farce, though it ends with a death. One feels, indeed, almost as great satisfaction in the catastrophe as the Mantuans themselves, who terminated their national existence and parted from their last Duke with something like exultation.

As I recall my own impressions of the city, I doubt if any good or bad fortune could rouse her to such positive emotion now. She seemed sunken, that dull April evening of our visit, into an abiding lethargy; as if perfect repose, and oblivion from the many-troubled past, — from the renown of all former famine, fire, intrigue, slaughter, and sack, — were to be preferred by the ghost of a once populous and haughty capital to the most splendid memories of national life. Certainly, the phantom of bygone Mantuan greatness did not haunt the idle tourists who strolled through her wide streets, enjoying their quiet beauty and regularity, and finding them, despite their empty, melancholy air, full of something that reminded of home. Coming from a land where there is a vast deal of length, breadth, and rectitude in streets, as well as human nature, they could not, of course, feel that wonder in the Mantuan avenues which inspired a Venetian ambassador, two centuries since, to write the Serenest Senate in praise of their marvelous extent and straightness; but they were still conscious of a certain expansive difference from Gothic Verona and narrow Venice. The windows of the ground-floors were grated to the prison-like effect common throughout Italy; but people evidently lived upon the ground-floors, and at many of the iron-barred windows fair young prisoners sat and looked out upon the streets, or laughed and chatted together. About the open doorways, moreover, people lounged gossiping; and the interiors of the entry-halls, as they appeared to the passing glance, were clean, and had not that forbidding, inhospitable air characteristic of most house-entrances in North Italy. But sculptured Venice and Verona had unfitted the travellers for pleasure in the stucco of Mantua; and they had an immense scorn for the large and beautiful palaces of which the before-quoted ambassador speaks, because they found them faced with cunningly-moulded plaster instead of carven stone. Nevertheless, they could not help a kind of half-tender respect for the old town. It shares the domestic character of its scenes with the other ducal cities, Modena, Parma, and Ferrara; and this character is, perhaps, proper to all long and intensely municipalized communities. But Mantua has a ghostly calm wholly its own; and this was not in the least broken that evening by chatters at thresholds, and pretty laughers at grated windows. It was very, very quiet. Perhaps half a score of carriages rumbled by us in our long walk, and we met some scattered promenaders. But for the most part the streets were quite empty; and even in the chief piazza, where there was still some belated show of buying and selling, and about the doors of the caffès, where there was a good deal of languid loafing, there was no indecency of noise or bustle There were visibly few people in the place, and it was in decay; but it was not squalid in its lapse. The streets were scrupulously neat and clean, and the stuccoed houses were all painted of that pale saffron hue which gives such unquestionable respectability to New England towns. Before we returned to our lodgings, Mantua had turned into twilight; and we walked homeward through a placid and dignified gloom, nowhere broken by the flare of gas, and only remotely affected, here and there, by the light of lamps of oil, faintly twinkling in a disheartened Mantuan fashion.

If you turn this pensive light upon the yellow pages of those old chronicles of which I spoke, it reveals pictures fit to raise both pity and wonder for the past of this city, — pictures full of the glory of struggles for freedom, of the splendor of wise princes, of the comfort of a prosperous and contented people, of the grateful fruits of protected arts and civilization; but likewise stained with images of unspeakable filth and wickedness, baseness and cruelty, incredible shame, suffering, and sin.

Long before the birth of Christ, the Gauls drive out the Etruscans from Mantua, and aggrandize and beautify the city, to be in their turn expelled by the Romans, under whom Mantua again waxes strong and fair. In this time, the wife of a farmer not far from the city dreams a marvelous dream of bringing forth a laurel-bough, and in due time bears into the world the chiefest of all Mantuans, with a smile upon his face. This is a poet, and they call his name Virgil. He goes from his native city to Rome, when ripe for glory, and has there the good fortune to win back his father’s farm, which the greedy veterans of Augustus, then settled in the Cremonese, had annexed to the spoils bestowed upon them by the Emperor. Later in this Roman time, and only three years after the death of Him whom the poet all but prophesied, another grand event marks an epoch in Mantuan history. According to the pious legend, the soldier Longinus, who pierced the side of Christ as he hung upon the cross, has been converted by a miracle; wiping away that costly blood from his spear-head, and then drawing his hand across his eyes, he is suddenly healed of his near-sightedness, and stricken with the full wonder of conviction. He gathers anxiously the precious drops of blood from his weapon into the phial from which the vinegar mixed with gall was poured, and, forsaking his life of soldier, he wanders with his new-won faith and his priceless treasure to Mantua, where it is destined to work famous miracles, and to be the most valued possession of the city to all after-time. The saint himself, preaching the Gospel of Christ, suffers martyrdom under Tiberius; his tongue is cut out, and his body is burnt; and his ashes are buried at Mantua, forgotten, and found again in after ages with due signs and miraculous portents. The Romans give a civil tranquillity to Mantua; but it is not till three centuries after Christ that the persecutions of the Christians cease. Then the temples of the gods are thrown down, and churches are built; and the city goes forward to share the destinies of the Christianized empire, and be spoiled by the barbarians. In 407 the Goths take it, and the Vandals in their turn sack and waste it, and scatter its people, who return again after the storm, and rebuild their city. Attila, marching to destroy it, is met at Governo (as you see in Raphael’s fresco in the Vatican) by Pope Leo I., who conjures him to spare the city, and threatens him with Divine vengeance if he refuse; above the pontiff’s head two wrathful angels, bearing drawn swords, menace the Hun with death if he advance; and, thus miraculously admonished, he turns aside from Mantua and spares it. The citizens successfully resist an attack of Alboin; but the Longobards afterwards, unrestrained by the visions of Attila, beat the Mantuans and take the city. From the Lombards the Greeks, sent thither by the Exarch of Ravenna, captured Mantua about the end of the sixth century; and then, the Lombards turning immediately to besiege it again, the Greeks defend their prize long and valiantly, but in the end are overpowered. They are allowed to retire with their men and arms to Ravenna, and the Lombards dismantle the city.

Concerning our poor Mantua under Lombard rule there is but little known, except that she went to war with the Cremonese; and it may be fairly supposed that she was, like her neighbors, completely involved in foreign and domestic discords of every kind. That war with the Cremonese was about the possession of the river Ollio; and the Mantuans came off victors in it, slaying immense numbers of the enemy, and taking some thousands of them prisoners, whom their countrymen ransomed on condition of building one of the gates of Mantua with materials from the Cremonese territory, and mortar mixed with water from the disputed Ollio. The reader easily conceives how bitter a pill this must have been for the high-toned Cremonese gentlemen of that day.

When Charlemagne made himself master of Italy, the Mantuan lands and Mantuan men were divided up among the brave soldiers who had helped to enslave the country. These warriors of Charlemagne became counts; and the contadini, or inhabitants of each contado (county), became absolutely dependent on their will and pleasure. It is recorded (to the confusion of those who think primitive barbarism is virtue) that the corruption of those rude and brutal old times was great, that all classes were sunk in vice, and that the clergy were especially venal and abominable. After the death of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, wars broke out all over Italy between the factions supporting different aspirants to his power; and we may be sure that Mantua had some share in the common quarrel. As I have found no explicit record of this period, I distribute to the city, as her portion of the calamities, at least two sieges, one capture and sack, and a decimation by famine and pestilence. We certainly read that, fifty years later, the Emperor Rudolph attacked it with his Hungarians, took it, pillaged it, and put great part of its people to the sword. During the siege, some pious Mantuans had buried (to save them from the religious foe) the blood of Christ, and part of the sponge which had held the gall and vinegar, together with the body of St. Longinus. Most unluckily, however, these excellent men were put to the sword, and all knowledge of the place of sepulture perished with them.

At the end of these wars Mantua received a lord, by appointment of the Emperor, and the first lord’s son married the daughter of the Duke of Lorraine, from which union was born the great Countess Matilda. Boniface was the happy bridegroom’s name, and the wedding had a wild splendor and profuse barbaric jollity about it, which it is pleasant enough to read of after so much cutting and slashing. The viands were passed round on horseback to the guests, and the horses were shod with silver shoes loosely nailed on, that they might drop off and be scrambled for by the people. Oxen were roasted whole, as at a Kentucky barbecue; and wine was drawn from wells with buckets hung on silver chains. It was the first great display of that magnificence of which after princes of Mantua were so fond; and the wretched hinds out of whose sweat it came no doubt thought it very fine.

Of course Lord Boniface had his wars. There was a plot to depose him discovered in Mantua, and the plotters fled to Verona. Boniface demanded them; but the Veronese answered stoutly that theirs was a free city, and no man should be taken from it against his will. Boniface marched to attack them; and the Veronese were such fools as to call the Duke of Austria to their aid, promising submission to his government in return for his help. It was then that Austria first put her finger into the Italian pasticcio, where she kept it so many centuries. But the Austrian governor whom the Duke set over the Veronese made himself intolerable, — the Austrian governor always does, — and they drove him out of the city. On this the Duke turns about, unites with Boniface, takes Verona and sacks it.

An altogether pleasanter incident of Boniface’s domination was the miraculous discovery of the sacred relics, buried and lost during the sack of Mantua by the Hungarians. The place of sepulture was revealed thrice to a blind pauper in a dream. People dug where he bade them and found the relics. Immediately on its exhumation the Blood wrought innumerable miracles; and the fame of it grew so great, that the Pope came to see it, attended by such concourse of the people that they were obliged to sleep in the streets. It was an age that drew the mantle of exterior devotion and laborious penances and pilgrimages over the most hideous crimes and unnatural sins. But perhaps the poor believers who slept in the streets of Mantua on that occasion were none the worse for their faith when the Pope pronounced the Blood genuine and blessed it. I am sure that for some days of enthusiasm they abstained from the violence of war, and paused a little in that career of vice and wickedness of which one reads in Italian history, with the full conviction that Sodom and Gomorrah also were facts, and not merely allegory. I have no doubt that the blind beggar believed that Heaven had revealed to him the place where the Blood was buried, that the Pope believed in the verity of the relic, and that the devout multitudes were helped and uplifted in their gross faith by this visible witness to the truth that Christ had died for them upon the bloody tree. Poor souls! they had much to contend with in the way to any good. The leaven of the old pleasure-making pagan civilization was in them yet (it is in the Italians to this day); and centuries of Northern invasion had made them fierce and cruel, without teaching them Northern virtues. Nay, I question much if their invaders had so many rugged virtues to teach as some people would have us think. They seem to have liked well the sweet corruptions of the land, and the studied debaucheries of ages of sin, and to have enjoyed them as furiously and clumsily as bears do the hoarded honey of civilized bees.

After the death of Boniface the lordship of Mantua fell to his famous daughter, Matilda, of whom most have heard. She was a woman of strong will and strong mind; she held her own, and rent from others with a mighty hand, till she had united nearly all Lombardy under her rule. She was not much given to the domestic affections; she had two husbands (successively), and, if the truth must be told, divorced them both: one because he wished to share her sovereignty, perhaps usurp it; and the other because he was not warm enough friend of religion. She had no children, and, indeed, in her last marriage contract it was expressly provided that the spouses were to live in chastity together, and as much asunder as possible, Matilda having scruples. She was a great friend to learning, — founded libraries, established the law schools at Bologna, caused the codification of the canon law, corresponded with distant nations, and spoke all the different languages of her soldiers. More than literature, however, she loved the Church; and fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII in his wars with the Emperor Henry IV. Henry therefore took Mantua from her in 1091, and up to the year 1111 the city enjoyed a kind of republican government under his protection. In that year Henry made peace with Matilda, and appointed her his vice-regent in Italy; but the Mantuans, after twenty years of freedom, were in no humor to feel the weight of the mailed hand of this strong-minded lady. She was then, moreover, nigh to her death; and, hearing that her physicians had given her up, the Mantuans refused submission. The great Countess rose irefully from her deathbed, and, gathering her army, led it in person, as she always did, laid siege to Mantua by land and water, entered the city in 1114, and did not die till a year after. Such is female resolution.

The Mantuans now founded a republican government, having unlimited immunities and privileges from the Emperor, whose power over them extended merely to the investure of their consuls. Their republic was democratic, the legislative council of nine rectors and three curators being elective by the whole people. This government, or something like it, endured for more than a century, during which period the Mantuans seem to have done nothing but war with their neighbors in every direction, — with the Veronese chiefly, with the Cremonese a good deal, with the Paduans, with the Ferrarese, with the Modenese and the Bolognese: indeed, we count up twelve of these wars. Like the English of their time, the Mantuans were famous bowmen, and their shafts took flight all over Lombardy. At the same time they did not omit to fight each other at home; and it must have been a dullish kind of day in Mantua when there was no street-battle between families of the factious nobility. Dante has peopled his Hell from the Italy of this time, and he might have gone farther and fared worse for a type of the infernal state. The spectacle of these countless little Italian powers, racked, and torn, and blazing with pride, aggression, and disorder, within and without, — full of intrigue, anguish, and shame, — each with its petty thief or victorious faction making war upon the other, and bubbling over with local ambitions, personal rivalries, and lusts, — is a spectacle which the traveller of to-day, passing over the countless forgotten battle-fields, and hurried from one famous city to another by railroad, can scarcely conjure up. Parma, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, Mantua Vicenza, Verona, Bassano, — all are now at peace with each other, and firmly united in the national sentiment that travellers were meant to be eaten alive by Italians. Poor old cities! it is hard to conceive of their bygone animosities; still harder to believe that all the villages squatting on the long white roads, and waking up to beg of you as your diligence passes, were once embroiled in deadly and incessant wars. Municipal pride is a good thing, and discentralization is well; and we have to thank these intensely local little states for genius triply crowned with the glories of literature, art, and science, which Italy might not have produced if she had been united, and if the little states had loved themselves less and Italy more. Though, after all, there is the doubt whether it is not better to bless one’s obscure and happy children with peace and safety, than to give to the world a score of great names at the cost to millions of incalculable misery.

Besides their local wars and domestic feuds the Mantuans had troubles on a much larger scale, — troubles, indeed, which the Emperor Barbarossa laid out for all Italy. In Carlyle’s History of Frederick the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor’s business at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard set before his tent, inviting all men to come and have justice done them, that the Emperor was actually at Roncaglia for the purpose of conspiring with his Diet to take away every vestige of liberty and independence from miserable Italy. Among other cities Mantua lost her freedom at this Diet, and was ruled by an imperial governor and by consuls of Frederick’s nomination till 1167, when she joined the famous Lombard League against him. The leagued cities beat the Emperor at Legnano, and received back their liberties by the treaty of Costanza in 1183; after which, Frederick having withdrawn to Germany, they fell to fighting among themselves again with redoubled zeal, and rent their league into as many pieces as there had been parties to it. In 1236 the Germans again invaded Lombardy, under Frederick II.; and aided by the troops of the Ghibelline cities, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, and Treviso, besieged Mantua, which surrendered to this formidable union of forces, thus becoming once more an imperial city, and irreparably fracturing the Lombard League. It does not appear, however, that her ancient liberties were withdrawn by Frederick II.; and we read that the local wars went on after this with as little interruption as before. The wars went on as usual, and on the old terms with Verona and Cremona; and there is little in their history to interest us. But in 1256 the famous tyrant of Padua, Eccelino da Romano, who aspired to the dominion of Lombardy, gathered his forces, and went and sat down before Mantua. The Mantuans refused to surrender at his summons; and Eccelino, who had very little notion of what the Paduans were doing in his absence, swore that he would cut down the vines in those pleasant Mantuan vineyards, plant new ones, and drink the wine of their grapes before ever he raised the siege. But meantime that conspiracy which ended in Eccelino’s ruin had declared itself in Padua, and the tyrant was forced to abandon the siege and look to his dominion of other cities.

After which there was something like peace in Mantua for twenty years, and the city waxed prosperous. Indeed, neither industry nor learning had wholly perished during the wars of the republic, and the people built grist-mills on the Mincio, and cultivated belles-lettres to some degree. Men of heavier science likewise nourished, and we read of jurists and astronomers born in those troublous days, as well as of a distinguished physician, who wrote a ponderous dictionary of simples, and dedicated it to King Robert of Naples. But by far the greatest Mantuan of this time was he of whom readers have heard something from a modern poet. He is the haughty Lombard soul, “in the movement of the eyes honest and slow,” whom Dante, ascending the inexplicable heights of Purgatory, beheld; and who, summoning all himself, leaped to the heart of Virgil when he named Mantua: “O Mantuan! I am Sordello, of thine own land!”

Of Virgil the superstition of the Middle Ages had made a kind of wizard, and of Sordello the old writers fable all manner of wonders; he is both knight and poet, and has adventures scarcely less surprising than those of Amadis of Gaul. It is pretty nearly certain that he was born in 1189 of the Visconti di Goito, in the Mantuan country, and that he married Beatrice, a sister of Eccelino, and had amours with the youngest sister of this tyrant, the pretty Cunizza, whom Dante places in his “Paradiso.” This final disposition of Cunizza, whom we should hardly think now of assigning a place among the blest, surprised some people even in that day, it seems; for an old commentator defends it, saying: “Cunizza was always, it is true, tender and amorous, and properly called a daughter of Venus; but she was also compassionate, benign, and merciful toward those unhappy ones whom her brother cruelly tormented. Therefore the poet is right in feigning to find her in the sphere of Venus. For if the gentle Cyprians deified their Venus, and the Romans their Flora, how much more honestly may a Christian poet save Cunizza.” The lady, whose salvation is on these grounds inexpugnably accomplished, was married to Count Sanbonifazio of Padua, in her twenty-fourth year; and Sordello was early called to this nobleman’s court, having already given proofs of his poetic genius. He fell in love with Cunizza, whom her lord, becoming the enemy of the Eccelini, began to ill-treat. A curious glimpse of the manners and morals of that day is afforded by the fact, that the brothers of Cunizza conspired to effect her escape with Sordella from her husband’s court, and that, under the protection of Eccelino da Romano, the lovers were left unmolested to their amours. Eccelino, indeed, loved this weak sister with extraordinary tenderness, and we read of a marvelous complaisance to her amorous intrigues by a man who cared nothing himself for women. Cunizza lived in one of her brother’s palaces at Verona, and used to receive there the visits of Sordello after Eccelino had determined to separate them. The poet entered the palace by a back door, to reach which he must pass through a very filthy alley; and a servant was stationed there to carry Sordello to and fro upon his back. One night Eccelino took the servant’s place, bore the poet to the palace door, and on his return carried him back to the mouth of the alley, where he revealed himself, to the natural surprise and pain of Sordello, who could have reasonably expected anything but the mild reproof and warning given him by his truculent brother-in-law: “Ora ti basti, Sordello. Non venir più per questa vile strada ad opere ancor più vili.”— “Let this suffice thee, Sordello. Come no more by this vile path to yet viler deeds.”

It was probably after this amour ended that Sordello sat out upon his travels, visiting most courts, and dwelling long in Provence, where he learned to poetize in the Provençal tongue, in which he thereafter chiefly wrote, and composed many songs. He did not, however, neglect his Lombard language, but composed in it a treatise on the art of defending towns. The Mantuan historian, Volta, says that some of Sordello’s Provençal poems exist in manuscript in the Vatican and Chigi libraries at Rome, in the Laurentian at Florence, and the Estense at Modena. He was versed in arms as well as letters, and he caused Mantua to be surrounded with fosses five miles beyond her walls; and the republic having lodged sovereign powers in his hands when Eccelino besieged the city, Sordello conducted the defense with great courage and ability, and did not at all betray the place to his obliging brother-in-law, as the latter expected. Verci, from whose “History of the Eccelini” we have drawn the account of Sordello’s intrigue with Cunizza, says: “The writers represent this Sordello as the most polite, the most gentle, the most generous man of his time, of middle stature, of beautiful aspect and fine person, of lofty bearing, agile and dexterous, instructed in letters, and a good poet, as his Provençal poems manifest. To these qualities he united military valor in such degree that no knight of his time could stand before him.” He was properly the first Lord of Mantua, and the republic seems to have died with him in 1284.

The madness which comes upon a people about to be enslaved commonly makes them the agents of their own undoing. The time had now come for the destruction of the last vestiges of liberty in Mantua, and the Mantuans, in their assembly of the Four Hundred and Ninety, voted full power into the hands of the destroyer. That Pinamonte Bonacolsi whom Dante mentions in the twentieth canto of the “Inferno,” had been elected captain of the republic, and, feigning to fear aggression from the Marquis of Ferrara, he demanded of the people the right to banish all enemies of the state. This reasonable demand was granted, and the captain banished, as is well known, all enemies of Pinamonte Bonacolsi. After that, having things his own way, he began to favor public tranquillity, abolished family feuds and the ancient amusement of street-battles, and led his enslaved country in the paths of material prosperity; for which he was no doubt lauded in his day by those who thought the Mantuans were not prepared for freedom. He resolved to make the captaincy of the republic hereditary in the Bonacolsi family; and when he died, in 1293, his power descended to his son Bordellone. This Bordellone seems to have been a generous and merciful captain enough, but he loved ease and pleasure; and a rough nephew of his, Guido Botticella, conspired against him to that degree that Bordellone thought best, for peace and quietness’ sake, to abdicate in his favor. Guido had the customary war with the Marquis of Ferrara, and then died, and was succeeded by his brother Passerino, a very bad person, whose son at last brought his whole family to grief. The Emperor made him vicar of Modena; and he used the Modenese very cruelly, and shut up Francesco Pico and his sons in a tower, where he starved them, as the Pisans did Ugolino. In those days, also, the Pope was living at Avignon, and people used to send him money and other comforts there out of Italy. An officer of Passerino’s, being of Ghibelline politics, attacked one of these richly laden emissaries, and took his spoils, dividing them with Passerino. For this the Pope naturally excommunicated the captain of Mantua, and thereupon his neighbors made a great deal of pious war upon him. But he beat the Bolognese, the most pious of his foes, near Montevoglio, and with his Modenese took from them that famous bucket, about which Tassoni made his great Bernesque epic, “The Rape of the Bucket” (La Secchia Rapita), and which still hangs in the tower of the Duomo at Modena. Meantime, while Passerino had done everything to settle himself comfortably and permanently in the tyranny of Mantua, his worthless son Francesco fell in love with the wife of Filippino Gonzaga.

According to the old Mantuan chronicles the Gonzagas were of a royal German line, and had fixed themselves in the Mantuan territory in 770 where they built a castle beyond Po, and began at once to take part in public affairs. They had now grown to be a family of such consequence that they could not be offended with impunity, and it was a great misfortune to the Bonacolsi that Francesco happened to covet Filippino Gonzaga’s wife. As to the poor lady herself, it is of infinite consequence to her eternal health whether she was guilty or no, but to us still on earth, it seems scarcely worth while to inquire, after so great lapse of time. History, however, rather favors the notion of her innocence; and it is said that Francesco, unable to overcome her virtue, took away her good fame by evil reports. At the same time he was greatly wroth — it is scarcely possible to write seriously of these ridiculous, wicked old shadows — that this lady’s husband should have fallen in love with a pretty concubine of his, Bonacolsi’s; and, after publicly defaming Filippino’s wife, he threatened to kill him for this passion. The insult and the menace sank deep into the bitter hearts of the Gonzagas; and the head of that proud race, Filippino’s uncle, Luigi Gonzaga, resolved to avenge the family dishonor. He was a secret and taciturn man, and a pious adulator of his line has praised him for the success with which he dissembled his hatred of the Bonacolsi, while conspiring to sweep them and their dominion away. He won over adherents among the Mantuans, and then made a league with Can Grande of Verona to divide the spoils of the Bonacolsi; and so, one morning, having bribed the guards to open the city gates, he entered Mantua at the head of the banded forces. The population was roused with patriotic cries of “Long live the Mantuan people!” and, as usual, believed, poor souls, that some good was meant them by those who came to overthrow their tyrants. The Bonacolsi were dreaming that pleasant morning of anything but ruin, and they offered no resistance to the insurrection till it burst out in the great square before the Castello di Corte. They then made a feeble sally from the castle, but were swiftly driven back, and Passerino, wounded to death under the great Gothic archway of the palace, as he retreated, dropped from his languid hands the bridle-rein of his charger and the reins of that government with which he had so long galled Mantua. The unhappy Francesco fled to the cathedral for protection; but the Gonzagas slew him at the foot of the altar, with tortures so hideous and incredible, that I am glad to have our friend, the advocate Arrighi, deny the fact altogether. Passerino’s brother, a bishop, was flung into a tower to starve, that the Picos might be avenged; and the city of Mantua was liberated.

In that day, when you freed a city from a tyrant, you gave it up to be pillaged by the army of liberation; and Mantua was now sacked by her deliverers. Can Grande’s share of the booty alone amounted to a hundred thousand gold florins (about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars). The Mantuans, far from imitating the ungrateful Paduans, who, when the Crusaders liberated them from Eccelino, grudged these brave fellows three days’ pillage of their city, and even wished back their old tyrant, — the Mantuans, we say, seemed not in the least to mind being devoured, but gratefully elected the Gonzaga their captain-general, and purchased him absolution from the Pope for his crimes committed in the sack. They got this absolution for twenty thousand gold florins; and the Pope probably sold it cheap, remembering his old grudge against the Bonacolsi, whom the Gonzaga had overthrown. All this was in the year of grace 1328.

I confess that I am never weary of reading of these good, heroic, virtuous old times in Italy, and that I am here tempted to digress into declamation about them. There is no study more curious and interesting, and I am fond of tracing the two elements of character visible in Italian society, and every individual Italian, as they flow down from the remotest times to these: the one element, that capacity for intellectual culture of the highest degree; the other element, that utter untamableness of passion and feeling. The presence of these contradictory elements seems to influence every relation of Italian life; — to make it capable of splendor, but barren of comfort; to endear beauty, but not goodness, to the Italian; to lead him to recognize and celebrate virtues, but not to practice them; to produce a civilization of the mind, and not of the soul.

When Luigi Gonzaga was made lord of Mantua, he left his castle beyond Po, to dwell in the city. In this castle he had dwelt, like other lords of his time, in the likeness of a king, spending regally and keeping state and open house in an edifice strongly built about with walls, encircled with ditches passable by a single drawbridge, and guarded day and night, from castle moat to castle crest, by armed vassals. Hundreds ate daily at his board, which was heaped with a rude and rich profusion, and furnished with carven goblets and plate of gold and silver. In fair weather the banquet-hall stood open to all the winds that blew; in foul, the guests were sheltered from the storm by curtains of oiled linen, and the place was lighted with torches borne by splendidly attired pages. The great saloons of the castle were decked with tapestries of Flanders and Damascus, and the floor was strewn with straw or rushes. The bed in which the lord and lady slept was the couch of a monarch; the household herded together in the empty chambers, and lay upon the floor like swine. The garden-fields about the castle smiled with generous harvests; the peasant lay down after his toil, at night, in deadly fear of invasion from some neighboring state, which should rob him of everything, dishonor his wife and daughters, and slay him upon the smoking ruins of his home.

In the city to which this lord repaired, the houses were built here and there at caprice, without numbers or regularity, and only distinguished by the figure of a saint, or some pious motto painted above the door. Cattle wandered at will through the crooked, narrow, and filthy streets, which rang with the clamor of frequent feud, and reeked with the blood of the embattled citizens; over all the squalor and wickedness rose the loveliest temples that ever blossomed from man’s love of the beautiful, to the honor and glory of God.

In this time Crusaders went to take the Lord’s sepulchre from the infidel, while their brothers left at home rose against one another, each petty state against its neighbor, in unsparing wars of rapine and devastation, — wars that slew, or, less mercifully, mutilated prisoners, — that snatched the babe from the embrace of its violated mother, and dashed out its brains upon the desolated hearth. A hopeless, hellish time of sack, plunder, murder, famine, plague, and unnatural crime; a glorious age, in which flourished the gentlest and sweetest poet that ever sang, and the grimmest and grandest that ever upbraided a godless generation for its sins, — in which Petrarch was crowned with laurel at Rome, and Dante wandered in despair from court to court, learning in the bitterness of his exile’s heart,

 ”come sa di sale
  Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
  Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.”

It was a time ignorant of the simplest comfort, but debauched with the vices of luxury; in which cities repressed the license of their people by laws regulating the length of women’s gowns and the outlays at weddings and funerals. Every wild misdeed and filthy crime was committed, and punished by terrible penalties, or atoned for by fines. A fierce democracy reigned, banishing nobles, razing their palaces, and ploughing up the salt-sown sites; till at last, in the uttermost paroxysm of madness, it delivered itself up to lords to be defended from itself, and was crushed into the abjectest depths of slavery. Literature and architecture flourished, and the sister arts were born amid the struggles of human nature convulsed with every abominable passion.

For nearly four hundred years the Gonzagas continued to rule the city, which the first prince of their line, having well-nigh destroyed, now rebuilt and restored to greater splendor than ever; and it is the Mantua of the Gonzagas which travellers of this day look upon when they visit the famous old city. Their pride and their wealth adorned it; their wisdom and prudence made it rich and prosperous; their valor glorified it; their crimes stain its annals with infamy; their wickedness and weakness ruined it and brought it low. They were a race full of hereditary traits of magnificence, but one reads their history, and learns to love, of all their long succession, only one or two in their pride, learns to pity only one or two in their fall. They were patriotic, but the patriotism of despotic princes is self-love. They were liberal — in spending the revenues of the state for the glory of their family. They were brave, and led many nameless Mantuans to die in forgotten battles for alien quarrels which they never understood.

The succession of the Gonzagas was of four captains, ending in 1407; four marquises, ending in 1484; and ten dukes, ending in 1708.

The first of the captains was Luigi, as we know. In his time the great Gothic fabric of the Castello di Corte was built; and having rebuilt the portions of the city wasted by the sack, he devoted himself, as far as might be in that age, to the arts of peace; and it is remembered of him that he tried to cure the Mantuan air of its feverish unwholesomeness by draining the swampy environs. During his time, Petrarch, making a sentimental journey to the birthplace of Virgil, was splendidly entertained and greatly honored by him. For the rest, Can Grande of Verona was by no means content with his hundred thousand golden florins of spoil from the sack of the city, but aspired to its seigniory, declaring that he had understood Gonzaga to have promised him it as the condition of alliance against the Bonacolsi. Gonzaga construed the contract differently, and had so little idea of parting with his opinion, that he fought the Scaligero on this point of difference till he died, which befell thirty years after his election to the captaincy.

Him his son Guido succeeded, — a prince already old at the time of his father’s death, and of feeble spirit. He shared his dominion with his son Ugolino, excluding the younger brothers from the dominion. These, indignant at the partiality, one night slew their brother Ugolino at a supper he was giving; and being thereupon admitted to a share in their father’s government, had no trouble in obtaining the pardon of the Pope and Emperor. One of the murderers died before the father; the other, named Ludovico, was, on the death of Guido, in 1370, elected to the captaincy, and ruled long, wisely, and well. He loved a peaceful life; and though the Emperor confirmed him in the honors conferred on him by the Mantuans, and made him Vicar imperial, Ludovico declined to take part with Ghibellines against Guelphs, remained quietly at home, and spent himself much in good works, as if he would thus expiate his bloody crime. He gathered artists, poets, and learned men about him, and did much to foster all arts. In his time, Mantua had rest from war, and grew to have twenty-eight thousand inhabitants; but it was not in the nature of a city of the Middle Ages to be long without a calamity of some sort, and it is a kind of relief to know that Mantua, under this peaceful prince, was well-nigh depopulated by a pestilence.

In 1381 he died, and with his son Francesco the blood-letting began again. Indeed, this captain spent nearly his whole life in war with those pleasant people, the Visconti of Milan. He had married the daughter of Barnabo Visconti, but discovering her to be unfaithful to him, or believing her so, he caused her to be put to death, refusing all her family’s intercessions for mercy. After that, a heavy sadness fell upon him, and he wandered aimlessly about in many Italian cities, and at last married a second time, taking to wife Margherita Malatesta. He was a prince of high and generous soul and of manly greatness rare in his time. There came once a creature of the Visconti to him, with a plot for secretly taking off his masters; but the Gonzaga (he must have been thought an eccentric man by his neighbors) dismissed the wretch with scornful horror. I am sure the reader will be glad to know that he finally beat the Visconti in fair fight, and (the pest still raging in Mantua) lived to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. When he returned, he compiled the city’s statutes, divided the town into four districts, and named its streets. So he died.

And after this prince had made his end, there came another Francesco, or Gianfrancesco, who was created Marquis of Mantua by the Emperor Sigismund. He was a friend of war, and having been the ward of the Venetian Republic (Venice was fond of this kind of trust, and sometimes adopted princely persons as her children, among whom the reader will of course remember the Queen of Cyprus, and the charming Bianca Capello, whose personal attractions and singularly skillful knowledge of the use of poisons made her Grand Duchess of Tuscany some years after she eloped from Venice), he became the leader of her armies on the death of Carmagnola, who survived the triumphal reception given him by the Serenest Senate only a very short time. [It seems scarcely worth while to state the fact that Carmagnola, suspected of treasonable correspondence with the Visconti, was recalled to Venice to receive distinguished honors from the republic. The Senate was sitting in the hall of the Grand Council when he appeared, and they detained him there with various compliments till night fell. Then instead of lights, the Sbirri appeared, and seized Carmagnola. “I am a dead man,” he exclaimed, on beholding them. And so indeed he was; for, three days after, he was led out of prison, and beheaded between the pillars of the Piazzetta.] The Gonzaga took Verona and Padua for the republic, and met the Milanese in many battles. Venice was then fat and insolently profuse with the spoils of the Orient, and it is probable that the Marquis of Mantua acquired there that taste for splendor which he introduced into his hitherto frugal little state. We read of his being in Venice in 1414, when the Jewelers and Goldsmiths’ Guild gave a tournament in the Piazza San Marco, offering as prizes to the victorious lances a collar enriched with pearls and diamonds, the work of the jewelers, and two helmets excellently wrought by the goldsmiths. On this occasion the Gonzaga, with two hundred and sixty Mantuan gentlemen, mounted on superb horses, contested the prizes with the Marquis of Ferrara, at the head of two hundred Ferrarese, equally mounted, and attended by their squires and pages, magnificently dressed. There were sixty thousand spectators of the encounter. “Both the Marquises,” says Mutinelli in his “Annali Urbani,” “being each assisted by fourteen well-armed cavaliers, combated valorously at the barrier, and were both judged worthy of the first prize: a Mantuan cavalier took the second.”

The Marquis Gonzaga was the first of his line who began that royal luxury of palaces with which Mantua was adorned. He commenced the Ducal Palace; but before he went far with the work, he fell a prey to the science then much affected by Italian princes, but still awaiting its last refinement from the gifted Lucrezia Borgia. The poor Marquis was poisoned by his wife’s paramour, and died in the year 1444. Against this prince, our advocate Arrighi records the vandalism of causing to be thrown down and broken in pieces the antique statue of Virgil, which stood in one of the public places of Mantua, and of which the head is still shown in the Museum of the city. In all times, the Mantuans had honored, in diverse ways, their great poet, and at certain epochs had coined money bearing his face. With the common people he had a kind of worship (more likely as wizard than as poet), and they celebrated annually some now-forgotten event by assembling with songs and dances about the statue of Virgil, which was destroyed by the uncle of the Marquis, Malatesta, rather than by the Marquis’s own order. This ill-conditioned person is supposed to have been “vexed because our Mantuan people thought it their highest glory to be fellow-citizens of the prince of poets.” We can better sympathize with the advocate’s indignation at this barbarity, than with his blame of Francesco for having consented, by his acceptance of the marquisate, to become a prince of the Roman Empire. Mantua was thus subjected to the Emperors, but liberty had long been extinguished; and the voluntary election of the Council, which bestowed the captaincy on each succeeding generation of the Gonzagas, was a mere matter of form, and of course.

The next prince, Lodovico Gonzaga, was an austere man, and had been bred in a hard school, if I may believe some of our old chroniclers, whom, indeed, I sometimes suspect of being not altogether faithful. It is said that his father loved his younger brother better than him, and that Lodovico ran away in his boyhood, and took refuge with his father’s hereditary enemies, the Visconti. To make dates agree, it must have been the last of these, for the line failed during Lodovico’s time, and he had wars with the succeeding Sforza. In the day of his escapade, Milan was at war with Mantua and with Venice, and the Marquis Gonzaga was at the head of the united armies, as we have already seen. So the father and son met in several battles; though the Visconti, out of love for the boy, and from a sentiment of piety somewhat amazing in them, contrived that he should never actually encounter his parent face to face. Lodovico came home after the wars, wearing a long beard; and his mother called her son “the Turk,” a nickname that he never lost.

Il Turco was a lover of the arts and of letters, and he did many works to enrich and beautify the city. He established the first printing-office in Mantua, where the first book printed was the “Decamerone” of Boccaccio. He founded a college of advocates, and he dug canals for irrigation; and the prosperity of Mantuan manufacturers in his time may be inferred from the fact that, when the King of Denmark paid him a visit, in 1474, the merchants decked their shops with five thousand pieces of fine Mantuan cloth.

The Marquis made his brilliant little court the resort of the arts and letters; and hither from Florence came once the elegant Politian, who composed his tragedy of “Orfeo” in Mantua, and caused it to be first represented before Lodovico. But it must be confessed that this was a soil in which art flourished better than literature, and that even born Mantuan poets went off, after a while, and blossomed in other air. The painter Mantegna, whom the Marquis invited from Padua, passed his whole life here, painting for the Marquis in the palaces and churches. The prince loved him, and gave him a house, and bestowed other honors upon him; and Mantegna executed for Lodovico his famous pictures representing the Triumph of Julius Cæsar. [Now at Hamilton Court, in England.] It was divided into nine compartments, and, as a frieze, went round the upper part of Lodovico’s newly erected palace of San Sebastian. Mantegna also painted a hall in the Castello di Corte, called the Stanza di Mantegna, and there, among other subjects of fable and of war, made the portraits of Lodovico and his wife. It was partly the wish to see such works of Mantegna as still remained in Mantua that took us thither; and it was chiefly this wish that carried us, the morning after our arrival, to the Castello di Corte, or the Ducal Palace. Our thirst for Mantegnas was destined to be in no degree satisfied in this pile, but it was full of things to tempt us to forget Mantegna, and to make us more and more interested in the Gonzagas and their Mantua.

It is taken for granted that no human being ever yet gained an idea of any building from the most artful description of it; but if the reader cares to fancy a wide piazza, or open square, with a church upon the left hand, immense, uninteresting edifices on the right, and an ugly bishop’s palace of Renaissance taste behind him, he may figure before him as vastly and magnificently as he pleases the superb Gothic front of the Castello di Corte. This façade is the only one in Italy that reminds you of the most beautiful building in the world, the Ducal Palace at Venice; and it does this merely by right of its short pillars and deep Gothic arches in the ground story, and the great breadth of wall that rises above them, unbroken by the second line of columns which relieves and lightens this wall in the Venetian palace. It stands at an extremity of the city, upon the edge of the broad fresh-water lagoon, and is of such extent as to include within its walls a whole court-city of theatre, church, stables, playground, course for riding, and several streets. There is a far older edifice adjoining the Castello di Corte, which Guido Bonacolsi began, and which witnessed the bloody end of his line, when Louis Gonzaga surprised and slew his last successor. But the palace itself is all the work of the Gonzagas, and it remains the monument of their kingly state and splendid pride.

It was the misfortune of the present writer to be recognized by the employé (formerly of Venice) who gives the permissions to travellers to visit the palace, and to be addressed in the presence of the Custode by the dignified title to which his presence did so little honor. This circumstance threw upon the Custode, a naturally tedious and oppressive old man, the responsibility of being doubly prolix and garrulous. He reveled in his office of showing the palace, and did homage to the visitor’s charge and nation by an infinite expansion upon all possible points of interest, lest he should go away imperfectly informed of anything. By dint of frequent encounter with strangers, this Custode had picked up many shreds and fragments of many languages, and did not permit the travellers to consider themselves as having at all understood him until he had repeated everything in Italian, English, French, and German. He led the way with his polyglot babble through an endless number of those magnificent and uninteresting chambers which palaces seem specially built to contain, that men may be content to dwell in the humbler dullness of their own houses; and though the travellers often prayed him to show them the apartments containing the works of Mantegna, they really got to see nothing of this painter’s in the Ducal Palace, except, here and there, some evanescent frescoes, which the Custode would not go beyond a si crede in attributing to him. Indeed, it is known that the works of Mantegna suffered grievously in the wars of the last century, and his memory has faded so dim in this palace where he wrought, that the guide could not understand the curiosity of the foreigners concerning the old painter; and certainly Giulio Romano has stamped himself more ineffaceably than Mantegna upon Mantua.

In the Ducal Palace are seen vividly contrasted the fineness and strength, the delicacy and courage of the fancy, which, rather than the higher gift of imagination, characterize Giulio’s work. There is such an airy refinement and subtile grace in the pretty grotesques with which he decorates a chamber; there is such daring luxury of color and design in the pictures for which his grand halls are merely the frames. No doubt I could make fine speeches about these paintings; but who, not seeing them, would be the wiser, after the best description and the choicest critical disquisition? In fact, our travellers themselves found it pleasanter, after a while, to yield to the guidance of the Custode, and to enjoy the stupider marvels of the place, than to do the set and difficult admiration of the works of art. So, passing the apartments in good preservation (the Austrian Emperors had taken good care of some parts of the palace of one of their first Italian possessions), they did justice to the splendor of the satin beds and the other upholstery work; they admired rich carpentering and costly toys; they dwelt on marvelous tapestries (among which the tapestry copies of Raphael’s cartoons, woven at Mantua in the fifteenth century, are certainly worthy of wonder); and they expressed the proper amazement at the miracles of art which caused figures frescoed in the ceilings to turn with them, and follow and face them from whatever part of the room they chose to look. Nay, they even enjoyed the Hall of the Rivers, on the sides of which the usual river-gods were painted, in the company of the usual pottery, from which they pour their founts, and at the end of which there was an abominable little grotto of what people call, in modern landscape-gardening, rock-work, out of the despair with which its unmeaning ugliness fills them. There were busts of several Mantuan duchesses in the gallery, which were interesting, and the pictures were so bad as to molest no one. There was, besides all this, a hanging garden in this small Babylon, on which the travellers looked with a doleful regret that they were no longer of the age when a hanging garden would have brought supreme comfort to the soul. It occupied a spacious oblong, had a fountain and statues, trees and flowers, and would certainly have been taken for the surface of the earth, had not the Custode proudly pointed out that it was on a level with the second floor, on which they stood.

After that they wandered through a series of unused, dismantled apartments and halls, melancholy with faded fresco, dropping stucco, and mutilated statues of plaster, and came at last upon a balcony overlooking the Cavallerizza, which one of the early dukes built after a design by the inevitable Giulio Romano. It is a large square, and was meant for the diversion of riding on horseback. Balconies go all found it between those thick columns, finely twisted, as we see them in that cartoon of Raphael, “The Healing of the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple”; and here once stood the jolly dukes and the jolly ladies of their light-hearted court, and there below rode the gay, insolent, intriguing courtiers, and outside groaned the city under the heavy extortions of the tax-gatherers. It is all in weather-worn stucco, and the handsome square is planted with trees. The turf was now cut and carved by the heavy wheels of the Austrian baggage-wagons constantly passing through the court to carry munitions to the fortress outside, whose black guns grimly overlook the dead lagoon. A sense of desolation had crept over the sight-seers, with that strange sickness of heart which one feels in the presence of ruin not to be lamented, and which deepened into actual pain as the Custode clapped his hands and the echo buffeted itself against the forlorn stucco, and up from the trees rose a score of sullen, slumberous owls, and flapped heavily across the lonesome air with melancholy cries. It only needed, to crush these poor strangers, that final touch which the Custode gave, as they passed from the palace through the hall in which are painted the Gonzagas, and in which he pointed out the last Duke of Mantua, saying he was deposed by the Emperor for felony, and somehow conveying the idea of horse-stealing and counterfeiting on the part of his Grace.

A very different man from this rogue was our old friend Lodovico, who also, however, had his troubles. He was an enemy of the Ghibellines, and fought them a great deal. Of course he had the habitual wars with Milan, and he was obliged to do battle with his own brother Carlo to some extent. This Gonzaga had been taken prisoner by Sforza; and Lodovico, having paid for him a ransom of sixty thousand florins of gold (which Carlo was scarcely worth), seized the fraternal lands, and held them in pledge of repayment. Carlo could not pay, and tried to get back his possessions by war. Vexed with these and other contentions, Lodovico was also unhappy in his son, whose romance I may best tell in the words of the history [Volta: Storia di Mantova.], from which I take it:

“Lodovico Gonzaga, having agreed with the Duke of Bavaria to take his daughter Margherita as wife for his (Lodovico’s) first-born, Federico, and the young man having refused her, Lodovico was so much enraged that he sought to imprison him; but the Marchioness Barbara, mother of Federico, caused him to fly from the city till his father’s anger should be abated. Federico departed with six attendants [The Fioretto delle Cronache says “persons of gentle condition.”]; but this flight caused still greater displeasure to his father, who now declared him banished, and threatened with heavy penalties any one who should give him help or favor. Federico, therefore, wandered about with these six attendants in diverse places, and finally arrived in Naples; but having already spent all his substance, and not daring to make himself known for fear of his father, he fell into great want, and so into severe sickness. His companions having nothing wherewith to live, and not knowing any trade by which to gain their bread, did menial services fit for day-laborers, and sustained their lord with their earnings, he remaining hidden in a poor woman’s house where they all dwelt.

“The Marchioness had sent many messengers in divers provinces with money to find her son, but they never heard any news of him; so that they thought him dead, not hearing anything, either, of his attendants. Now it happened that one of those who sought Federico came to Naples, and presented himself to the king with a letter from the said lady, praying that he should make search in his territory for a company of seven men, giving the name and description of each. The king caused this search to be made by the heads of the district; and one of these heads told how in his district there were six Lombard men (not knowing of Federico, who lay ill), but that they were laborers and of base condition. The king determined to see them; and they being come before him, he demanded who they were, and how many; as they were not willing to discover their lord, on being asked their names they gave others, so that the king, not being able to learn anything, would have dismissed them. But the messenger sent by the Marchioness knew them, and said to the king, ‘Sire, these are the attendants of him whom I seek; but they have changed their names.’ The king caused them to be separated one from another, and then asked them of their Lord; and they, finding themselves separated, minutely narrated everything; and the king immediately sent for Federico, whom his officers found miserably ill on a heap of straw. He was brought to the palace, where the king ordered him to be cared for, sending the messenger back to his mother to advise her how the men had been found and in what great misery. The Marchioness went to her husband, and, having cast herself at his feet, besought him of a grace. The Marquis answered that he would grant everything, so it did not treat of Federico. Then the lady opened him the letter of the king of Naples, which had such effect that it softened the soul of the Marquis, showing him in how great misery his son had been; and so, giving the letter to the Marchioness, he said, ‘Do that which pleases you.’ The Marchioness straightway sent the prince money, and clothes to clothe him, in order that he should return to Mantua; and having come, the son cast himself at his father’s feet, imploring pardon for himself and for his attendants; and he pardoned them, and gave those attendants enough to live honorably and like noblemen, and they were called The Faithful of the House of Gonzaga, and from them come the Fedeli of Mantua.

“The Marquis then, not to break faith, caused Federico to take Margherita, daughter of the Duke of Bavaria, for his wife, and celebrated the nuptials splendidly; so that there remained the greatest love between father and son.”

The son succeeded to the father’s dominion in 1478; and it is recorded of him in the “Flower of the Chronicles,” that he was a hater of idleness, and a just man, greatly beloved by his people. They chiefly objected to him that he placed a Jew, Eusebio Malatesta, at the head of civil affairs; and this Jew was indeed the cause of great mischief: for Ridolfo Gonzaga coming to reside with his wife for a time at the court of his brother, the Marquis, Malatesta fell in love with her. She repelled him, and the bitter Jew thereupon so poisoned her husband’s mind with accusations against her chastity, that he took her home to his town of Lazzaro, and there put the unhappy and innocent lady to death by the headsman’s hand in the great square of the city.

Federico was Marquis only six years, and died in 1484, leaving his marquisate to his son Francesco, the most ambitious, warlike, restless, splendid prince of his magnificent race. This Gonzaga wore a beard, and brought the custom into fashion in Italy again. He founded the famous breed of Mantuan horses, and gave them about free-handedly to other sovereigns of his acquaintance. To the English king he presented a steed which, if we may trust history, could have been sold for almost its weight in gold. He was so fond of hunting that he kept two hundred dogs of the chase, and one hundred and fifty birds of prey.

Of course this Gonzaga was a soldier, and indeed he loved war better even than hunting, and delighted so much in personal feats of arms that, concealing his name and quality, in order that the combat should be in all things equal, he was wont to challenge renowned champions wherever he heard of them, and to meet them in the lists. Great part of his life was spent in the field; and he fought in turn on nearly all sides of the political questions then agitating Italy. In 1495 he was at the head of the Venetian and other Italian troops when they beat the French under Charles VIII. at Taro, and made so little use of their victory as to let their vanquished invaders escape from them after all. Nevertheless, if the Gonzaga did not here show himself a great general, he did great feats of personal valor, penetrating to the midst of the French forces, wounding the king, and with his own hand taking prisoner the great Bastard of Bourbon. Venice paid him ten thousand ducats for gaining the victory, such as it was, and when peace was made he went to visit the French king at Vercelli; and there Charles gave his guest a present of two magnificent horses, which the Gonzaga returned yet more splendidly in kind. About five years later he was again at war with the French, and helped the Aragonese drive them out of Naples. In 1506, Pope Julius II. made him leader of the armies of the Church (for he had now quitted the Venetian service), and he reduced the city of Bologna to obedience to the Holy See. In 1509 he joined the League of Cambray against Venice, and, being made Imperial Captain-General, was taken prisoner by the Venetians. They liberated him, however, the following year; and in 1513 we find him at the head of the league against the French.

A curious anecdote of this Gonzaga’s hospitality is also illustrative of the anomalous life of those times, when good faith had as little to do with the intercourse of nations as at present; but good fortune, when she appeared in the world, liked to put on a romantic and melodramatic guise. An ambassador from the Grand Turk on his way to Rome was taken by an enemy of the Pope, despoiled of all his money, and left planted, as the Italians expressively say, at Ancona. This ambassador was come to concert with Alexander VI. the death of Bajazet’s brother, prisoner in the Pope’s hands, and he bore the Pope a present of 50,000 gold ducats. It was Gian Della Rovere who seized and spoiled him, and sent the papers (letters of the Pope and Sultan) to Charles VIII. of France, to whom Alexander had been obliged to give the Grand Turk’s brother. The magnificent Gonzaga hears of the Turk’s embarrassing mischance, sends and fetches him to Mantua, clothes him, puts abundant money in his purse, and dispatches him on his way. The Sultan, in reward of this courtesy to his servant, gave a number of fine horses to the Marquis, who, possibly being tired of presenting his own horses, returned the Porte a ship-load of excellent Mantuan cheeses. This interchange of compliments seems to have led to a kind of romantic friendship between the Gonzaga and the Grand Turk, who did occasionally interest himself in the affairs of the Christian dogs; and who, when Francesco lay prisoner at Venice, actually wrote to the Serenest Senate, and asked his release as a personal grace to him, the Grand Turk. And Francesco was, thereupon, let go; the canny republic being willing to do the Sultan any sort of cheap favor.

This Gonzaga, being so much engaged in war, seems to have had little time for the adornment of his capital. The Church of Our Lady of Victory is the only edifice which he added to it; and this was merely in glorification of his own triumph over the French at Taro. Mantegna painted an altar-piece for it, representing the Marquis and his wife on their knees before the Virgin, in act of rendering her thanks for the victory. The French nation avenged itself for whatever wrong was done its pride in this picture by stealing it away from Mantua in Napoleon’s time; and it now hangs in the gallery of the Louvre.

Francesco died in 1519; and after him his son, Federico II., the first Duke of Mantua, reigned some twenty-one years, and died in 1540. The marquisate in his time was made a duchy by the Emperor Charles V., to whom the Gonzaga had given efficient aid in his wars against the French. This was in the year 1530; and three years later, when the Duke of Monferrato died, and the inheritance of his opulent little state was disputed by the Duke of Savoy, by the Marquis of Saluzzo, and by the Gonzaga, who had married the late Duke’s daughter, Charles’s influence secured it to the Mantuan. The dominions of the Gonzagas had now reached their utmost extent, and these dominions were not curtailed till the deposition of Fernando Carlo in 1708, when Monferrato was adjudged to the Duke of Savoy, and afterwards confirmed to him by treaty. It was separated from the capital of the Gonzagas by a wide extent of alien territory, but they held it with a strong hand, embellished the city, and founded there the strongest citadel in Italy.

Federico, after his wars for the Emperor, appears to have reposed in peace for the rest of his days, and to have devoted himself to the adornment of Mantua and the aggrandizing of his family. His court was the home of many artists; and Titian painted for him the Twelve Cæsars, which the Germans stole when they sacked the city in 1630. But his great agent and best beloved genius was Giulio Pippi, called Romano, who was conducted to Mantua by pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione.

Pleasant Count Baldassare Castiglione! whose incomparable book of the “Cortigiano” succeeded in teaching his countrymen every gentlemanly grace but virtue. He was born at Casatico in the Mantovano, in the year 1476, and went in his boyhood to be schooled at Milan, where he learnt the profession of arms. From Milan he went to Rome, where he exercised his profession of arms till the year 1504, when he was called to gentler uses at the court of the elegant Dukes of Urbino. He lived there as courtier and court-poet, and he returned to Rome as the ambassador from Urbino. Meantime his liege, Francesco Gonzaga, was but poorly pleased that so brilliant a Mantuan should spend his life in the service and ornament of other princes, and Castiglione came back to his native country about the year 1516. He married in Mantua, and there finished his famous book of “The Courtier,” and succeeded in winning back the favor of his prince. Federico, the Duke, made him ambassador to Rome in 1528; and Baldassare did his master two signal services there, — he procured him to be named head of all the Papal forces, and he found him Giulio Romano. So the Duke suffered him to go as the Pope’s Nuncio to Spain, and Baldassare finished his courtly days at Toledo in 1529.

The poet made a detour to Mantua on his way to Spain, taking with him the painter, whom the Duke received with many caresses, as Vasari says, presented him a house honorably furnished, ordered provision for him and his pupils, gave them certain brave suits of velvet and satin, and, seeing that Giulio had no horse, called for his own favorite Luggieri, and bestowed it on him. Ah! they knew how to receive painters, those fine princes, who had merely to put their hands into their people’s pocket, and take out what florins they liked. So the Duke presently set the artist to work, riding out with him through the gate of San Bastiano to some stables about a bow-shot from the walls, in the midst of a flat meadow, where he told Giulio that he would be glad (if it could be done without destroying the old walls) to have such buildings added to the stables as would serve him for a kind of lodge, to come out and merrily sup in when he liked. Whereupon Giulio began to think out the famous Palazzo del T.

This painter is an unlucky kind of man, to whom all criticism seems to have agreed to attribute great power and deny great praise. Castiglione had found him at Rome, after the death of his master Raphael, when his genius, for good or for ill, began for the first time to find original expression. At Mantua, where he spent all the rest of his busy life, it is impossible not to feel in some degree the force of this genius. As in Venice all the Madonnas in the street-corner shrines have some touch of color to confess the painter’s subjection to Titian or Tintoretto; as in Vicenza the edifices are all in Greekish taste, and stilted upon pedestals in honor and homage to Palladio; as in Parma Correggio has never died, but lives to this day in the mouths and chiaroscuro effects of all the figures in all the pictures painted there; — so in Mantua Giulio Romano is to be found in the lines of every painting and every palace. It is wonderful to see, in these little Italian cities which have been the homes of great men, how no succeeding generation has dared to wrong the memory of them by departing in the least from their precepts upon art. One fancies, for instance, the immense scorn with which the Vicentines would greet the audacity of any young architect who dared to think Gothic instead of Palladian Greek, and how they would put him to shame by asking him if he knew more than Palladio about architecture! It seems that original art cannot arise in the presence of the great virtues and the great errors of the past; and Italian art of this day seems incapable of even the feeble, mortal life of other modern art, in the midst of so much immortality.

Giulio Romano did a little of everything for the Dukes of Mantua, — from painting the most delicate and improper little fresco for a bed-chamber to restraining the Po and the Mincio with immense dikes, restoring ancient edifices and building new ones, draining swamps and demolishing and reconstructing whole streets, painting palaces and churches, and designing the city slaughter-house. He grew old and very rich in the service of the Gonzagas; but though Mrs. Jameson says he commanded respect by a sense of his own dignity as an artist, the Bishop of Casale, who wrote the “Annali di Mantova,” says that the want of nobility and purity in his style, and his “gallant inventions, were conformable to his own sensual life, and that he did not disdain to prostitute himself to the infamies of Aretino.”

His great architectural work in Mantua is the Palazzo del T, or Tè, as it is now written. It was first called Palazzo del T, from the convergence of roads there in the form of that letter; and the modern Mantuans call it Del Tè, from the superstition, transmitted to us by the Custode of the Ducal Palace, that the Gonzagas merely used it on pleasant afternoons to take tea in! so curiously has latter-day guidemanship interpreted the jolly purpose expressed by the Duke to Giulio. I say nothing to control the reader’s choice between T and Tè, and merely adhere to the elder style out of reverence for the past. It is certain that the air of the plain on which the palace stands is most unwholesome; and it may have been true that the dukes never passed the night there. Federico did not intend to build more than a lodge in this place; but fascinated with the design offered him by Giulio, he caused the artist to go on, and contrive him a palace instead. It stands, as Vasari says, about a good bow-shot from one of the city’s gates; and going out to see the palace on our second day in Mantua, we crossed a drawbridge guarded by Austrian soldiers. Below languished a bed of sullen ooze, tangled and thickly grown with long, villainous grasses, and sending up a damp and deathly stench, which made all the faces we saw look feverish and sallow. Already at that early season the air was foul and heavy, and the sun, faintly making himself seen through the dun sky of the dull spring day, seemed sick to look upon the place, where indeed the only happy and lively things were the clouds of gnats that danced before us, and welcomed us to the Palazzo del T. Damp ditches surround the palace, in which these gnats seemed to have peculiar pleasure; and they took possession of the portico of the stately entrance of the edifice as we went in, and held it faithfully till we returned.

In one of the first large rooms are the life-size portraits of the six finest horses of the Gonzaga stud, painted by the pupils of Giulio Romano, after the master’s designs. The paintings attest the beauty of the Mantuan horses, and the pride and fondness of their ducal owners; and trustworthy critics have praised their eminent truth. But it is only the artist or the hippanthrop who can delight in them long; and we presently left them for the other chambers, in which the invention of Giulio had been used to please himself rather than his master. I scarcely mean to name the wonders of the palace, having, indeed, general associations with them, rather than particular recollections of them.

One of the most famous rooms is the Chamber of Psyche (the apartments are not of great size), of which the ceiling is by Giulio and the walls are by his pupils. The whole illustrates, with every variety of fantastic invention, the story of Psyche, as told by Apuleius, and deserves to be curiously studied as a part of the fair outside of a superb and corrupt age, the inside of which was full of rottenness. The civilization of Italy, as a growth from the earliest Pagan times, and only modified by Christianity and the admixture of Northern blood and thought, is yet to be carefully analyzed; and until this analysis is made, discussion of certain features must necessarily be incomplete and unsatisfactory. No one, however, can stand in this Chamber of Psyche, and not feel how great reality the old mythology must still have had, not only for the artists who painted the room, but for the people who inhabited it and enjoyed it. I do not say that they believed it as they believed in the vital articles of Christian faith, but that they accepted it with the same spirit as they accepted the martyrology of the Church; and that to the fine gentlemen and ladies of the court, those jolly satyrs and careless nymphs, those Cupids and Psyches, and Dianas and Venuses, were of the same verity as the Fathers of the Desert, the Devil, and the great body of the saints. If they did not pray to them, they swore by them, and their names were much oftener on their lips; and the art of the time was so thoroughly Pagan, that it forgot all Christian holiness, and clung only to heathen beauty. When it had not actually a mythologic subject to deal with, it paganized Christian themes. St. Sebastian was made to look like Apollo, and Mary Magdalene was merely a tearful, triste Venus. There is scarcely a ray of feeling in Italian art since Raphael’s time which suggests Christianity in the artist, or teaches it to the beholder. In confessedly Pagan subjects it was happiest, as in the life of Psyche, in this room; and here it inculcated a gay and spirited license, and an elegant absence of delicacy, which is still observable in Italian life. It would be instructive to know in what spirit the common Mantuans of his day looked upon the inventions of the painter, and how far the courtly circle which frequented this room went in discussion and comment on its subjects; they were not nice people, and probably had no nasty ideas about the unspeakable indecency of some of the scenes. [The ruin in the famous room frescoed with the Fall of the Giants commences on the very door-jambs, which are painted in broken and tumbling brick-work; and throughout there is a prodigiousness which does not surprise, and a bigness which does not impress; and the treatment of the subject can only be expressed by the Westernism powerfully weak. In Kugler’s Hand-book of Italian Painting are two illustrations, representing parts of the fresco, which give a fair idea of the whole.]

Returning to the city we visited the house of Giulio Romano, which stands in one of the fine, lonesome streets, and at the outside of which we looked. The artist designed it himself; and it is very pretty, with delicacy of feeling in the fine stucco ornamentation, but is not otherwise interesting.

We passed it, continuing our way toward the Arsenal, near which we had seen the women at work washing the linen coats of the garrison in the twilight of the evening before; and we now saw them again from the bridge, on which we paused to look at a picturesque bit of modern life in Mantua. The washing-machine (when the successful instrument is invented) may do its work as well, but not so charmingly, as these Mantuan girls did. They washed the linen in a clear, swift-running stream, diverted from the dam of the Mincio to furnish mill-power within the city wall; and we could look down the watercourse past old arcades of masonry half submerged in it, past pleasant angles of houses and a lazy mill-wheel turning slowly, slowly, till our view ended in the gallery of a time-worn palace, through the columns of which was seen the blue sky. Under the bridge the stream ran very strong and lucid, over long, green, undulating water-grasses, which it loved to dimple over and play with. On the right were the laundresses under the eaves of a wooden shed, each kneeling, as their custom is, in a three-sided box, and leaning forward over the washboard that sloped down into the water. As they washed they held the linen in one hand, and rubbed it with the other; then heaped it into a mass upon the board and beat it with great two-handed blows of a stick. They sang, meanwhile, one of those plaintive airs of which the Italian peasants are fond, and which rose in indescribable pathos, pulsing with their blows, and rhythmic with the graceful movement of their forms. Many of the women were young, — though they were of all ages, — and the prettiest among them was third from where we stood upon the bridge. She caught sight of the sketch-book which one of the travellers carried, and pointed it out to the rest, who could hardly settle to their work to be sketched. Presently an idle baker, whose shop adjoined the bridge, came out and leaned upon the parapet, and bantered the girls. “They are drawing the prettiest,” he said, at which they all bridled a little; and she who knew herself to be prettiest hung her head and rubbed furiously at the linen. Long before the artist had finished the sketch, the lazy, good-humored crowd which the public practice of the fine arts always attract in Italy, had surrounded the strangers, and were applauding, commenting, comparing, and absorbing every stroke as it was made. When the book was closed and they walked away, a number of boys straggled after them some spaces, inspired by a curious longing and regret, like that which leads boys to the eager inspection of fireworks when they have gone out. We lost them at the first turning of the street, whither the melancholy chorus of the women’s song had also followed us, and where it died pathetically away.

In the evening we walked to the Piazza Virgiliana, the beautiful space laid out and planted with trees by the French, at the beginning of this century in honor of the great Mantuan poet. One of its bounds is the shore of the lake which surrounds the city, and from which now rose ghostly vapors on the still twilight air. Down the slow, dull current moved one of the picturesque black boats of the Po; and beyond, the level landscape had a pleasant desolation that recalled the scenery of the Middle Mississippi. It might have been here in this very water that the first-born of our first Duke of Mantua fell from his boat while hunting water-fowl in 1550, and took a fever of which he died only a short time after his accession to the sovereignty of the duchy. At any rate, the fact of the accident brings me back from lounging up and down Mantua to my grave duty of chronicler. Francesco’s father had left him in childhood to the care of his uncle, the Cardinal Hercules, who ruled Mantua with a firm and able hand, increasing the income of the state, spending less upon the ducal stud, and cutting down the number of mouths at the ducal table from eight hundred to three hundred and fifty-one. His justice tended to severity rather than mercy; but reformers of our own time will argue well of his heart, that he founded in that time a place of refuge and retirement for abandoned women. Good Catholics will also be pleased to know that he was very efficient in suppressing the black heresy of Calvin, which had crept into Mantua in his day, — probably from Ferrara, where the black heretic himself was then, or about then, in hiding under the protection of the ill-advised Marchioness Renée. The good Cardinal received the Pope’s applause for his energy in this matter, and I doubt not his hand fell heavily on the Calvinists. Of the Duke who died so young, the Venetian ambassador thought it worth while to write what I think it worth while to quote, as illustrating the desire of the Senate to have careful knowledge of its neighbors: “He is a boy of melancholy complexion. His eyes are full of spirit, but he does not delight in childish things, and seems secretly proud of being lord. He has an excellent memory, and shows much inclination for letters.”

His brother Guglielmo, who succeeded him in 1550, seems to have had the same affection for learning; but he was willful, harsh, and cruelly ambitious, and cared, an old writer says, for nothing so much as perpetuating the race of the Gonzagas in Mantua. He was a hunchback, and some of his family (who could not have understood his character) tried to persuade him not to assume the ducal dignity; but his haughty temper soon righted him in their esteem, and it is said that all the courtiers put on humps in honor of the Duke. He was not a great warrior, and there are few picturesque incidents in his reign. Indeed, nearly the last of these in Mantuan history was the coronation at Mantua of the excellent poet Lodovico Ariosto, by Charles V., in 1532, Federico II. reigning. But the Mantuans of Guglielmo’s day were not without their sensations, for three Japanese ambassadors passed through their city on the way to Rome. They were also awakened to religious zeal by the reappearance of Protestantism among them. The heresy was happily suppressed by the Inquisition, acting under Pius V., though with small thanks to Duke William, who seems to have taken no fervent part in the persecutions. “The proceedings,” says Cantù, writing before slavery had been abolished, “were marked by those punishments which free America inflicts upon the negroes to-day, and which a high conception of the mission of the Church moves us to deplore.” The Duke must have made haste after this to reconcile himself with the Church; for we read that two years later he was permitted to take a particle of the blood of Christ from the church of St. Andrea to that of Sta. Barbara, where he deposited it in a box of crystal and gold, and caused his statue to be placed before the shrine in the act of adoring the relic.

Duke William managed his finances so well as to leave his spendthrift son Vincenzo a large sum of money to make away with after his death. Part of this, indeed, he had earned by obedience to his father’s wishes in the article of matrimony. The prince was in love with the niece of the Duke of Bavaria, very lovely and certainly high-born enough, but having unhappily only sixty thousand crowns to her portion. So she was not to be thought of, and Vincenzo married the sister of the Duke of Parma, of whom he grew so fond, that, though two years of marriage brought them no children, he could scarce be persuaded to suffer her divorce on account of sterility. This happened, however, and the prince’s affections were next engaged by the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. The lady had a portion of three hundred thousand crowns, which entirely charmed the frugal-minded Duke William, and Vincenzo married her, after certain diplomatic preliminaries demanded by the circumstances, which scarcely bear statement in English, and which the present history would blush to give even in Italian.

Indeed, he was a great beast, this splendid Vincenzo, both by his own fault and that of others; but it ought to be remembered of him, that at his solicitation the most clement lord of Ferrara liberated from durance in the hospital of St. Anna his poet Tasso, whom he had kept shut in that mad-house seven years. On his delivery, Tasso addressed his “Discorso” to Vincenzo’s kinsman, the learned Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga; and to this prelate he submitted for correction the “Gerusalemme,” as did Guarini his “Pastor Fido.”

When Vincenzo came to power he found a fat treasury, which he enjoyed after the fashion of the time, and which, having a princely passion for every costly pleasure, he soon emptied. He was crowned in 1587; and on his coronation day rode through the streets throwing gold to the people, after the manner of the Mantuan Dukes. He kept up an army of six thousand men, among a population of eighty thousand all told; and maintained as his guard “fifty archers on horseback, who also served with the arquebuse, and fifty light-horsemen for the guard of his own person, who were all excellently mounted, the Duke possessing such a noble stud of horses that he always had five hundred at his service, and kept in stable one hundred and fifty of marvelous beauty.” He lent the Spanish king two hundred thousand pounds out of his father’s sparings; and when the Archduchess of Austria, Margherita, passed through Mantua on her way to wed Philip II. of Spain, he gave her a diamond ring worth twelve thousand crowns. Next after women, he was madly fond of the theatre, and spent immense sums for actors. He would not, indeed, cede in splendor to the greatest monarchs, and in his reign of fifteen years he squandered fifty million crowns! No one will be surprised to learn from a contemporary writer in Mantua, that this excellent prince was adorned with all the Christian virtues; nor to be told by a later historian, that in Vincenzo’s time Mantua was the most corrupt city in Europe. A satire of the year 1601, which this writer (Maffei) reduces to prose, says of that period: “Everywhere in Mantua are seen feasts, jousts, masks, banquets, plays, music, balls, delights, dancing. To these, the young girls,” an enormity in Italy, “as well as the matrons, go in magnificent dresses; and even the churches are scenes of love-making. Good mothers, instead of teaching their daughters the use of the needle, teach them the arts of rouging, dressing, singing, and dancing. Naples and Milan scarcely produce silk enough, or India and Peru gold and gems enough, to deck out female impudence and pride. Courtiers and warriors perfume themselves as delicately as ladies; and even the food is scented, that the mouth may exhale fragrance. The galleries and halls of the houses are painted full of the loves of Mars and Venus, Leda and the Swan, Jove and Danae, while the devout solace themselves with such sacred subjects as Susannah and the Elders. The flower of chastity seems withered in Mantua. No longer in Lydia nor in Cyprus, but in Mantua, is fixed the realm of pleasure.” The Mantuans were a different people in the old republican times, when a fine was imposed for blasphemy, and the blasphemer put into a basket and drowned in the lake, if he did not pay within fifteen days; which must have made profanity a luxury even to the rich. But in that day a man had to pay twenty soldi (seventy-five cents) if he spoke to a woman in church; and women were not allowed even the moderate diversion of going to funerals, and could not wear silk lace about the neck, nor have dresses that dragged more than a yard, nor crowns of pearls or gems, nor belts worth more than ten livres (twenty-five dollars), nor purses worth more than fifteen soldi (fifty cents.)

Possibly as an antidote for the corruption brought into the world with Vincenzo, there was another Gonzaga born about the same period, who became in due time Saint Louis Gonzaga, and remains to this day one of the most powerful friends of virtue to whom a good Catholic can pray. He is particularly recommended by his biographer, the Jesuit Father Cesari, in cases of carnal temptation, and improving stories are told Italian youth of the miracles he works under such circumstances. He vowed chastity for his own part at an age when most children do not know good from evil, and he carried the fulfillment of this vow to such extreme, that, being one day at play of forfeits with other boys and girls, and being required to kiss — not one of the little maidens — but her shadow on the wall, he would not, preferring to lose his pawn. Everybody, I think, will agree with Father Cesari that it would be hard to draw chastity finer than this.

San Luigi Gonzaga descended from that Ridolfo who put his wife to death, and his father was Marquis of Castiglione delle Stivere. He was born in 1568, and, being the first son, was heir to the marquisate; but from his earliest years he had a call to the Church. His family did everything possible to dissuade him — his father with harshness, and his uncle, Duke William of Mantua, with tenderness — from his vocation. The latter even sent a “bishop of rare eloquence” to labor with the boy at Castiglione; but everything was done in vain. In due time Luigi joined the Company of Jesus, renounced this world, and died at Rome in the odor of sanctity, after doing such good works as surprised every one. His brother Ridolfo succeeded to the marquisate, and fell into a quarrel with Duke William about lands, which dispute Luigi composed before his death. About all which the reverend Jesuit Father Tolomei has shown how far heaviness can go in the dramatic form, and has written a pitiless play, wherein everybody goes into a convent with the fall of the curtain. Till the reader has read this play, he has never (properly speaking) been bored. For the happiness of mankind, it has not been translated out of the original Italian.

From the time of the first Vincenzo’s death, there are only two tragic events which lift the character of Mantuan history above the quality of chronique scandaleuse, namely, the Duke Ferdinand’s repudiation of Camilla Faa di Casale, and the sack of Mantua in 1630. The first of these events followed close upon the demise of the splendid Vincenzo; for his son Francesco reigned but a short time, and died, leaving a little daughter of three years to the guardianship of her uncle, the Cardinal Ferdinand. The law of the Mantuan succession excluded females; and Ferdinand, dispensed from his ecclesiastical functions by the Pope, ascended the ducal throne. In 1615, not long after his accession, as the chronicles relate, in passing through a chamber of the palace he saw a young girl playing upon a cithern, and being himself young, and of the ardent temper of the Gonzagas, he fell in love with the fair minstrel. She was the daughter of a noble servant of the Duke, who had once been his ambassador to the court of the Duke of Savoy, and was called Count Ardizzo Faa Monferrino di Casale; but his Grace did not on that account hesitate to attempt corrupting her; indeed, a courtly father of that day might well be supposed to have few scruples that would interfere with a gracious sovereign’s designs upon his daughter. Singularly enough, the chastity of Camilla was so well guarded that the ex-cardinal was at last forced to propose marriage. It seems that the poor girl loved her ducal wooer; and besides, the ducal crown was a glittering temptation, and she consented to a marriage which, for state and family reasons, was made secret. When the fact was bruited, it raised the wrath and ridicule of Ferdinand’s family, and the Duke’s sister Margaret, Duchess of Ferrara, had so lofty a disdain of his mésalliance with an inferior, that she drove him to desperation with her sarcasms. About this time Camilla’s father died, with strong evidences of poisoning; and the wife being left helpless and friendless, her noble husband resorted to the artifice of feigning that there had never been any marriage, and thus sought to appease his family. Unhappily, however, he had given her a certificate of matrimony, which she refused to surrender when he put her away, so that the Duke, desiring afterwards to espouse the daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, was obliged to present a counterfeit certificate to his bride, who believed it the real marriage contract, and destroyed it. When the Duchess discovered the imposition, she would not rest till she had wrung the real document from Camilla, under the threat of putting her son to death. The miserable mother then retired to a convent, and died of a broken heart, while Ferdinand bastardized his only legitimate son, a noble boy, whom his mother had prettily called Jacinth. After this, a kind of retribution, amid all his political successes, seems to have pursued the guilty Duke. His second wife was too fat to bear children, but not to bear malice; and she never ceased to distrust and reproach the Duke, whom she could not believe in anything since the affair of the counterfeit marriage contract. She was very religious, and embittered Ferdinand’s days with continued sermons and reproofs, and made him order, in the merry Mantuan court, all the devotions commanded by her confessor.

So Ferdinand died childless, and, it is said, in sore remorse, and was succeeded in 1626 by his brother Vincenzo, another hope of the faith and light of the Church. His brief reign lasted but one year, and was ignoble as it was brief, and fitly ended the direct line of the Gonzagas. Vincenzo, though an ecclesiastic, never studied anything, and was disgracefully ignorant. Lacking the hereditary love of letters, he had not the warlike boldness of his race; and resembled his ancestors only in the love he bore to horses, hunting, and women. He was enamored of the widow of one of his kinsmen, a woman no longer young, but of still agreeable person, strong will, and quick wit, and of a fascinating presence, which Vincenzo could not resist. The excellent prince was wooing her, with a view to seduction, when he received the nomination of cardinal from Pope Paul V. He pressed his suit, but the lady would consent to nothing but marriage, and Vincenzo bundled up the cardinal’s purple and sent it back, with a very careless and ill-mannered letter to the ireful Pope, who swore never to make another Gonzaga cardinal. He then married the widow, but soon wearied of her, and spent the rest of his days in vain attempts to secure a divorce, in order to be restored to his ecclesiastical benefices. And one Christmas morning he died childless; and three years later the famous sack of Mantua took place. The events leading to this crime are part of one of the most complicated episodes of Italian history.

Ferdinand, as guardian of his brother’s daughter Maria, claimed the Duchy of Monferrato as part of his dominion; but his claim was disputed by Maria’s grandfather, the Duke of Savoy, who contended that it reverted to him, on the death of his daughter, as a fief which had been added to Mantua merely by the intermarriage of the Gonzagas with his family. He was supported in this claim by the Spaniards, then at Milan. The Venetians and the German Emperor supported Ferdinand, and the French advanced the claim of a third, a descendant of Lodovico Gonzaga, who had left Mantua a century before, and entered upon the inheritance of the Duchy of Nevers-Rethel. The Duke of Savoy was one of the boldest of his warlike race; and the Italians had great hopes of him as one great enough to drive the barbarians out of Italy. But nearly three centuries more were wanted to raise his family to the magnitude of a national purpose; and Carlo Emanuel spent his greatness in disputes with the petty princes about him. In this dispute for Monferrato he was worsted; for at the treaty of Pavia, Monferrato was assured to Duke Ferdinand of Mantua.

Ferdinand afterwards died without issue, and Vincenzo likewise died childless; and Charles Gonzaga of Nevers-Rethel, who had married Maria, Ferdinand’s ward, became heir to the Duchy of Mantua, but his right was disputed by Ferrante Gonzaga of Guastalla. Charles hurriedly and half secretly introduced himself into Mantua without consultation with Venetian, Spaniard, or German. While Duke Olivares of Spain was meditating his recognition, his officer at Milan tried to seize Mantua and failed; but the German Emperor had been even more deeply offended, and claimed the remission of Charles’s rights as a feudatory of the Roman Empire, until he should have regularly invested him. Charles prepared for defense. Meanwhile Spain and Savoy seized Monferrato, but they were afterwards defeated by the French, and the Spanish Milanese was overrun by the Venetians and Mantuans. The German Emperor then sent down his Landsknechts, and in 1630 besieged Mantua, while the French promised help and gave none, and the Pope exhorted Charles to submit. The Venetians, occupied with the Uskok pirates, could do little in his defense. To the horrors of this unequal and desperate war were added those of famine; and the Jews, passing between the camp and the city, brought a pest from the army into Mantua, which raged with extraordinary violence among the hungry and miserable people. In vain they formed processions, and carried the blood of Christ about the city. So many died that there were not boats enough to bear them away to their sepulture in the lakes, and the bodies rotted in the streets. There was not wanting at this time the presence of a traitor in the devoted city; and that this wretch was a Swiss will be a matter of no surprise. The despicable valor of these republicans has everywhere formed the best defense of tyrants, and their fidelity has always been at the service of the highest bidder. The recreant was a lieutenant in the Swiss Guard of the Duke; and when he had led the Germans into Mantua, and received the reward of his infamy, two German soldiers, placed over him for his protection, killed him and plundered him of his spoil.

The sack now began, and lasted three days, with unspeakable horrors. The Germans (then the most slavish and merciless of soldiers) violated Mantuan women, and buried their victims alive. The harlots of their camp cast off their rags, and robing themselves in the richest spoils they could find, rioted with brutal insult through the streets, and added the shame of drunken orgies to the dreadful scene of blood and tears. The Jews were driven forth almost naked from the Ghetto. The precious monuments of ages were destroyed; or such as the fury of the soldiers spared, the avarice of their generals consumed; and pictures, statues, and other works of art were stolen and carried away. The churches were plundered, the sacred houses of religion were sacked, and the nuns who did not meet a worse fate went begging through the streets.

The imperial general, Aldringher, had, immediately upon entering the city, appropriated the Ducal Palace to himself as his share of the booty. He placed a strong guard around it, and spoiled it at leisure and systematically, and gained fabulous sums from the robbery. After the sack was ended, he levied upon the population (from whom his soldiers had forced everything that terror and torture could wring from them) four contributions, amounting to a hundred thousand doubloons. This population had, during the siege and sack, been reduced from thirty to twelve thousand; and Aldringher had so thoroughly accomplished his part of the spoliation, that the Duke Charles, returning after the withdrawal of the Germans, could not find in the Ducal Palace so much as a bench to sit upon. He and his family had fled half naked from their beds on the entry of the Germans, and, after a pause in the citadel, had withdrawn to Ariano, whence the Duke sent ambassadors to Vienna to expose his miserable fate to the Emperor. The conduct of Aldringher was severely rebuked at the capital; and the Empress sent Carlo’s wife ten thousand zecchini, with which they returned at length to Mantua. It is melancholy to read how his neighbors had to compassionate his destitution: how the Grand Duke of Tuscany sent him upholstery for two state chambers; how the Duke of Parma supplied his table-service; how Alfonso of Modena gave him a hundred pairs of oxen, and as many peasants to till his desolated lands. His people always looked upon him with evil eyes, as the cause of their woes; and after a reign of ten years he died of a broken heart, or, as some thought, of poison.

Carlo had appointed as his successor his nephew and namesake, who succeeded to the throne ten years after his uncle’s death, the princess Maria Gonzaga being regent during his minority. Carlo II. early manifested the amorous disposition of his blood, but his reign was not distinguished by remarkable events. He was of imperial politics during those interminable French-Austrian wars, and the French desolated his dominions more or less. In the time of this Carlo II., we read of the Jews being condemned to pay the wages of the Duke’s archers for the extremely improbable crime of killing some Hebrews who had been converted; and there is account of the Duchess going on foot to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Grace, to render thanks for her son’s recovery from a fever, and her daughter’s recovery from the bite of a monkey. Mantua must also have regained something of its former gayety; for in 1652 the Austrian Archdukes and the Medici spent Carnival there. Carlo II. died, like his father, with suspicions of poisoning, and undoubted evidences of debauchery. He was a generous and amiable prince; and, though a shameless profligate, was beloved by his subjects, with whom, no doubt, his profligacy was not a reproach.

Ferdinand Carlo, whose ignoble reign lasted from 1665 to 1708, was the last and basest of his race. The histories of his country do not attribute a single virtue to this unhappy prince, who seems to have united in himself all the vices of all the Gonzagas. He was licentious and depraved as the first Vincenzo, and he had not Vincenzo’s courage; he was luxurious as the second Francesco, but had none of his generosity; he taxed his people heavily that he might meanly enjoy their substance without making them even the poor return of national glory; he was grasping as Guglielmo, but saved nothing to the state; he was as timid as the second Vincenzo, and yet made a feint of making war, and went to Hungary at one time to fight against the Turk. But he loved far better to go to Venice in his gilded barge, and to spend his Carnivals amid the infinite variety of that city’s dissoluteness. He was so ignorant as scarcely to be able to write his name; but he knew all vicious things from his cradle, as if, indeed, he had been gifted to know them by instinct through the profligacy of his parents. It is said that even the degraded Mantuans blushed to be ruled by so dull and ignorant a wretch; but in his time, nevertheless, Mantua was all rejoicings, promenades, pleasure-voyages, and merry-makings. “The Duke recruited women from every country to stock his palace,” says an Italian author, “where they played, sang, and made merry at his will and theirs.” “In Venice,” says Volta, “he surrendered himself to such diversions without shame, or stint of expense. He not only took part in all public entertainments and pleasures of that capital, but he held a most luxurious and gallant court of his own; and all night long his palace was the scene of theatrical representations by dissolute women, with music and banqueting, so that he had a worse name than Sardanapalus of old.” He sneaked away to these gross delights in 1700, while the Emperor was at war with the Spaniards, and left his Duchess (a brave and noble woman, the daughter of Ferrante Gonzaga, Duke of Guastalla) to take care of the duchy, then in great part occupied by Spanish and French forces. This was the War of the Spanish Succession; and it used up poor Ferdinand, who had not a shadow of interest in it. He had sold the fortress of Casale to the French in 1681, feigning that they had taken it from him by fraud: and now he declared that he was forced to admit eight thousand French and Spanish troops into Mantua. Perhaps indeed he was, but the Emperor never would believe it; and he pronounced Ferdinand guilty of felony against the Empire, and deposed him from his duchy. The Duke appealed against this sentence to the Diet of Ratisbon, and, pending the Diet’s decision, made a journey of pleasure to France, where the Grand Monarch named him generalissimo of the French forces in Italy, though he never commanded them. He came back to Mantua after a little, and built himself a splendid theatre, — the cheerful Duke.

But his end was near. The French and Austrians made peace in 1707; and next year, Monferrato having fallen to Savoy, the Austrians entered Mantua, whence the Duke promptly fled. The Austrians marched into Mantua on the 29th of February, that being leap-year, and Ferdinand came back no more. Indeed, trusting in false hopes of restoration held out to him by Venice and France, he died on the 5th of the July following, at Padua, — it was said by poison, but more probably of sin and sorrow. So ended Ducal Mantua.

The Austrians held the city till 1797. The French Revolution took it and kept it till 1799, and then left it to the Austrians for two years. Then the Cisalpine Republic possessed it till 1802; and then it was made part of the Kingdom of Italy, and so continued twelve years; after which it fell again to Austria. In 1848, there was a revolution, and the Austrian soldiers stole the precious silver case that held the phial of the true blood. Now at last it belongs to the Kingdom of Italy, with the other forts of the Quadrilateral — thanks to the Prussian needle-gun.

THREE VILLAGES

CONTENTS

LEXINGTON.

SHIRLEY.

GNADENHÜTTEN.

LEXINGTON.

THE Bostonian spring being more than usually embittered against mankind the year 1882, we left our quarters in town very early, and went to pass the month of May in the pretty and historic village of Lexington. It lies ten or twelve miles inland; it is not only a little beyond the worst of the east wind, but is just a little too far from Boston to be strictly suburban in aspect; and thanks chiefly to an absence of water-power (a clear brown brook, that you may anywhere jump across, idles through the pastures unmolested by a mill-wheel), Lexington has not yet been overtaken by the unpicturesque prosperity which has befallen so many New England villages. It has no manufactures of any sort, neither shoes nor cotton, nor boxes, nor barrels, nor watches, nor furniture; it is still a farming-town, such as you find in the Massachusetts or New Hampshire hills, and is not yet a market-gardening town like those which lie nearer the city. The ancestral meadows are still mown by the great-great-grandchildren of those who cleared them of the primeval forest, and who, having begun to build into fences and bury in the earth the granite bowlders plentifully bestrewing its surface, invented rather than discovered their reluctant fertility. In many parts of New England the Western jokes about sharpening the sheep’s noses for their greater convenience in getting at the herbage between the rocks, and about firing the seed-corn into the ground with a shot-gun, do not seem so grotesquely imaginative. More than once at nightfall, as I drove along country roads, the flocks and herds, lying under the orchard trees, have turned on nearer inspection to companies of bowlders; in the hill towns I have seen stone walls six feet wide, titanic barriers thrown up in the farmer’s despair of otherwise getting rid of the stones scattered over his fields; and these gifts of the glacial period are often interred by the cord in pits dug for the purpose. It is said that the soil thus twice conquered from the wilderness is very rich and strong, and Lexington was by no means so barren originally as some other towns; but its fertility must once have been greater than it now is, or else people must once have been satisfied with less fertility to the acre than contents them at present, for I could not see any agricultural reason why Lexington should first have been known as Cambridge Farms. Doubtless the name did not imply that it was the fittest part of the township for farming; Beverly Farms and Salem Farms and Cambridge Farms must have all been so called because they were hamlets remote from the principal village. At any rate Lexington once formed part of our university town, but was set off long before the revolutionary days in which it achieved a separate celebrity.

In New England the “town” is the township, and there are some “towns” in which there is no village at all; but at Lexington there was early a little grouping of houses; and for two hundred and fifty years the local feeling has been growing more and more intense, until it can be said at last to be now somewhat larger than the place. This is not an uncommon result; as Dr. Holmes has remarked, American cities and villages all like to think of themselves as the “good old” this and that; but at Lexington more than anywhere else out of Italy I felt that the village was to its people the patria. With us the great Republic is repeated and multiplied in several smaller and diminishing republican governments, each subordinate to the larger, all over the land; and ever since its separation from Cambridge, Lexington has, like other New England towns, had its little autonomy. Twice a year the citizens convene and legislate in town meetings; and three Selectmen annually chosen see that the popular will is carried out and transact the whole business of the town government. This microcosm of democracy is the more interesting in Lexington because it is in many things an image of what the New England town was a hundred years ago, — a sufficiently remote antiquity with us. The Irish have their foothold there as everywhere; but they have not acquired much land; and though they remain faithful Catholics, they have Americanized in such degree that it is hard to know some of them from ourselves in their slouching and nasal speech. As for the Canadian French, who abound in the valley of the Connecticut, and in all the factory towns, I saw none of them in Lexington, and there are no Germans.

It is because of the typically New England character of Lexington village, as well as its historical note, that I ask English readers to be interested in it; and as we Americans are some times grieved by our cousins’ imperfect recollection of family troubles, I make haste to remind them that at Lexington the first blood was shed in the war of American Independence. It has a powerful hold upon the American imagination for this reason; it has therefore overloaded the gazetteer with namesakes in every part of the Union, and its celebrity is chief part of the first historical knowledge imparted to American school-boys. But the village has such a charm for me from its actual loveliness and quaintness, that I should be sorry to bring that bloody spectre of the past into the foreground of any picture, and I shall blink it as long as I can.

It was a shrewish afternoon late in April when we arrived from Boston at the odd but very pleasant hotel where we spent our month of May. The season was very dry, and the bare landscape showed scarce a sign of spring. At that time there is usually a half-scared, experimental-looking verdure on our winter-beaten fields; but except where a forlorn hope of grass cowered in some damp hollow, the meadows were now as brown and haggard in aspect as they are when the great snows leave them in mid-March, and they lie gaunt and wasted under a high, vast blue sky, full of an ironical glitter of sunshine. The wind was sharp, and for many weary weeks yet there would be no buds on the elms that creaked overhead along the village street.

Further north, in Maine and Canada, the spring comes with a bound after the thaw; but the region of Boston seems to me the battle-ground of all the seasons when the spring is nominally in possession. On the 18th of May this year we had a soft, sunny morning, which clouded under an east wind; a cold rain set in before noon, with hail; it snowed the greater part of the after noon, and we had an Italian sunset to the singing of the robins. This was excessive; but usually after the first relenting days the winter returns, and whips the fields with sleet and snow, storm after storm; and this martyrdom follows upon a succession of frosts and thaws, which began before Thanksgiving in November. Finally the east wind comes in, fretting the nerves and chilling the marrow, throughout April and May; even when it does not blow it remains in the air, a sentiment of icebergs and freezing sea. It is worst, of course, on the shore, and delicate people who cannot live in it there are sent to Lexington, and thrive. The air is very dry and pure, and that is perhaps the reason why even the east wind is tolerable. Lexington Common, they say, is as high as the top of Bunker Hill Monument in Boston; and the locomotive pants with difficulty up the heavy grade of the road near the village. Perhaps there is something in the grouping of the low hills — in the embrace of which the village lies on an ample plain — that gives it peculiar shelter; it is certain that beyond the eastern range there is practically another climate. This is not saying that the winter is not long and dreary there; the snows lie deep in the hollows of those hills for months, and clog the long street on which the village houses are chiefly set.

Streets branch off from this thoroughfare to the right and left; but it is the newer houses which are built on these, and the more characteristic dwellings, as well as the old-fashioned shops, face the westward road along which Major Pitcairne’s red-coats marched in the early April morning a hundred years ago to destroy the Provincial stores at Concord. Here and there before you reach the village is a large old mansion rambling with successive outhouses a hundred feet back from the road or beside it, all the buildings under one roof, and having a comfortable unity and snugness; but the dwellings in the village are small and very simple, generally of but two stories, and placed each in its separate little plot of ground. Where they pretend to the dignity of mansions, they stand

“Somewhat back from the village street,”

like the old-fashioned country-seat in Longfellow’s poem, and have stately elms and burly maples about them; but they are mostly set close upon the road, as seems to have been everywhere the early custom in New England. They are all of wood, — there are but two brick buildings in Lexington, — and here and there one is still painted saffron, with Paris-green shutters and white window casings, — the color of Longfellow’s house and the other colonial houses in Cambridge. When the paint is not too freshly renewed, they have a suggestion of antiquity which is pleasing and satisfactory in so new a world as ours. There is no attempt at ornamentation in these unassuming houses at Lexington; that is left to the later carpentry which has produced on the intersecting streets various examples, in one story and a half, of the mansard architecture so popular in our wood-built suburbs. There is also at one point of the principal street a wooden “block,” in emulation of the conventional American city block of brick or stone; but otherwise Lexington has escaped the ravages alike of “tasliness” and of enterprise, and is as plain and sober a little town as it was fifty years ago. There are old-fashioned shops in rows, quite different from the “block,” with wooden awnings to shelter their doorways, and with well-gnawed rails and horse-posts before them there is an old tavern dating from the days when all the transportation was by stage and wagon along the good hard roads; there are several churches of a decent and wholesome ugliness; and there are everywhere trees and grass and vines and flowers. The village is conscientiously clean; but except in midsummer the English reader must imagine a bareness impossible in an English hamlet. We have no evergreen vines; the spruces and firs which we plant about our houses only emphasize the nakedness of all the other trees in winter; in the clear, cold air the landscape is as blank and open as a good conscience. The village, when the leaves fall, will be honestly of whatever color it is painted, and its outlines will be as destitute of “atmosphere” as if they were in the moon. There is no soft discoloration of decay in roof or wall; at the best you will have a weather-beaten gray.

Lexington has a High-School house of wood upon the model of a Grecian temple; but the principal public building is the Town Hall, a shapely structure of brick, which has been put up within the last five or six years, and which unites under one roof a hall for town meetings, elections, and all sorts of civic, social, and artistic entertainments, the town offices, and the free town library. The number of books is uncommonly large and exceedingly well chosen, and the collection is the gift of a lady of the place. The library is named after her, but it is piously dedicated in an inscription over the door to the men of Lexington who fell in the first battle with the British in 1775, and in the many fields of our late civil war. Statues of John Hancock and Sam Adams, the patriots who had fled from arrest in Boston, and were in hiding at Lexington the night before the affair of 1775, occupy niches in the rotunda from which the library opens, and confront figures of a provincial Minute-Man and of a national volunteer beside the door. Three days in the week the library is open from one till nine o’clock, and then there is a continual coining and going of the villagers on foot, and the neighboring farmer-folks in buggies and carryalls. I noticed that these frequenters of the library, who thronged the reading-room, and kept the young lady at the desk incessantly busy recording the books they borrowed and returned, were mostly young people and mostly women. The women, in fact, are the miscellaneous readers in our country; they make or leave unmade most literary reputations; and I believe that it is usually by their advice when their work-worn fathers and husbands turn from their newspapers to the doubtful pleasure of a book. This is the case alike in city and country as regards lighter literature; and in small towns these devourers of novels and travels and magazines read so close to the bone, that sometimes being brought personally to book for my intentions in this or that passage, I have preferred to adopt their own interpretations; and when this copy of “Longman’s Magazine” is laid upon the table of the town library at Lexington, I am aware that I shall not be safe from my readers in any tortuous subtlety of phrase, but that they will search me out to the finest meaning of my commas, and the last insinuation of my semicolons. But I have a good conscience and I am not afraid.

Some friends, who compassionated the extremity of an author with an unfinished novel on his hands in the penetrating disquiet of a country hotel, lent me the keys to the Town Hall, and I had the library to myself on the days when it was not open to the public, and wrote there every morning amid the books, and the memorials of Lexington’s great day, and every sort of colonial bric-a-brac. On one side of the door was the gun carried by a Provincial (whose name I read whenever I lifted my eyes from my work, and now marvel that I should have forgotten) during the fight, and which being “brought back from Concord busted,” was thriftily sawed off just short of the fracture and afterwards used by his descendants; on the other side was a musket taken from the body of a British soldier who fell in the retreat; the sign of the old Monroe Tavern, where Earl Percy made his headquarters when he came out to support Major Pitcairne’s men, swung from the ceiling near these trophies; in glass cases on my right were collections of smaller relics, including shot from Percy’s cannon, the tongue of the bell that called the villagers from their slumbers the night before the attack; the pistols, richly chased and mounted, from which Pitcairne fired the first bullet in the war that made us two peoples; the hanger worn by the sexton when he went to light the signal lantern for Paul Revere in the belfry of the Old North Church in Boston, and sent him galloping out on his midnight ride through the sleeping land with the news that the King’s troops had begun their march on Concord; the broadside issued in the British interest, giving an account of the day’s fight with divers shoe-buckles, rings, knives, platters, and profiles cut out of black paper, belonging to the colonial period. No motive of patriotism shall induce me to represent these collections as very rich, or in themselves very interesting, and I am aware that I cannot give them great adventitious importance by grouping them with the rude writing-desk of one of the old Puritan ministers of Lexington, or the foot-stove which one of his congregation probably carried to meeting and warmed his poor feet with while he thawed his imagination at the penal fires painted as the last end of sinners in the sermon; the sincere home-made lantern of a later date, and the spinning-wheel of an uncertain epoch do not commend themselves to me as much more hopeful material for an effective picture. But all the more pathetic from their paucity did I find these few and simple records of the hard, laborious past of the little town, which flowered after a century’s toil and privation into an hour of supreme heroism. For whatever may be the several minds of my readers and myself concerning their right, there can be no question between us that it was sublime for forty unwarlike farmers to stand up and take the fire of six hundred disciplined troops in defence of what they believed their right: it was English to do that, it was American, and these plain martyr-folk were both. I own that I sympathized with the piety that has treasured every relic connected, however remotely, with that time; and that I took an increasing pleasure in showing off the trophies to such comers as tried the library door when nobody had any right there but myself. I was quite master to let them in or not, but I always opened, and waited for them to overcome their polite reluctance to disturb me at my writing. Their questions succeeded upon a proper interval of fidgeting and whispering, and then I confirmed orally all the written statements of the placards on the objects, and found my account in listening to the laudable endeavors of my visitors to connect their family history somehow with them. They were people of all ages and conditions; but they all had these facts by heart, and were proud of them, though with a pride unqualified by any foolish rancor. Most of all they were interested in the portrait of a young and handsome British officer in the uniform of the last century, whose sensitive face looks down from the library wall upon the records of the fight; and when I said that this was a portrait of Earl Percy, who commanded the British artillery, and explained (as I am afraid I have not the right to explain fully here) how it came to be given to a gentleman of Lexington by the present Duke of Northumberland, I elicited nothing but praises of the Earl’s good looks or expressions of satisfaction that his portrait should be there. No one apparently regarded him as out of sympathy with themselves, and I believe indeed that this generous foe acted only as a soldier on that day, and thought the measures used against the Provincials neither wise nor just. One small boy dwelt upon the portrait with delays that passed even the patriotic patience of the cicerone, and left it at last with a sigh of gratified wonder. “And he was a Britisher !” I give his language because, contrary to the experience of English observers among us, I never heard any other American say Britisher; and this small boy was unmistakably of Irish parentage.

The hotel in which we stayed had a characteristically American history, though it could not relate itself in any way to the revolutionary fame of Lexington, as I fancied most buildings in Lexington would have liked to do. It was the house put up by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for the use of its officers and agents at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, in Philadelphia. When the exhibition ended, the house was sold to a citizen of Lexington, who took it down piecemeal, and brought it round by ship to Boston, whence it was forwarded by rail to Lexington, and reconstructed there. This was a simpler and easier process than first appears, for the edifice was what we call a shell; it was not plastered, and the several portions being marked and numbered were easily put together again. I believe that as a speculation the removal and rebuilding did not pay; but when the house was rendered winter-proof, and heated with steam, it became at once the most picturesque and delightful country hotel. Outwardly it abounded in porches, in broken roofs and gables, and inwardly it was huge and rambling, with unexpected staircases and passages, and chambers of all manner of shapes and sizes, lit with transoms of colored glass; but its most charming feature was the vast hall, running the whole length of the building and occupying the greater part of the ground floor. You entered this from the street, and wandered about in it at will till some one in authority accidentally discovered you there, and having directed you to the hotel register lying open on the piano, assigned you a room; so vague and slight in everything was the conformity to ordinary hotel usage in that pleasant house. It was like arriving at some enchanted castle; or, if it were not, so much the worse for the enchanted castle. Enchanted castles, or even those of another sort, had not a railroad, as our hotel had, at their postern gate, — a railroad that was on domestic and almost affectionate terms with us all. When the trains came scuffling and wheezing up the incline from Boston, the sound was as if the friendly locomotive were mounting the back stairs, and might be expected to walk in without ceremony, and sit down at the fire like any other boarder. We could see the trains backing and filling at the station as we sat at breakfast, and such of us as were going to town could time ourselves to the last half-minute, and count upon some sympathetic delay when we were late. Saturday evening, the trains all drew in with the air of having done an honest week’s work, and the engines having run their empty cars up the siding, found their way to the locomotive house at their leisure, as if they were going to wash up there for Sunday, while a Sabbath peace settled with the nightfall upon the village.

I dare say I shall not be able, in this much-served England, to make it plain that our Lexington hotel was charming almost in proportion to the wide freedom granted every comer of taking care of himself; yet it was largely on account of this rather slipshod ease that it was so pleasant In the end one was very comfortable: the beds were good, the rooms were clean, the table was plentiful; you had what you wanted if you would take the trouble to get it, and much more than half the time it was got for you. Moreover, you were brevetted partner in the enterprise with a hearty good-will that could not have been bought for money, and with so much amiability, and so much real regard for your welfare, that you must have been a very extraordinary American indeed if you did not willingly accept the situation as you found it. A fire was burning all the month of May in the prodigious fireplace midway of the hall at our hotel; and if neither host nor servitor came after a reasonable time to receive the stranger, some hospitable boarder rose from the circle about the hearth, and welcomed him to one of the great Shaker rocking-chairs before the fire, while he went in search of the housekeeper or hostler. The fireplace would take in a back-log big enough to smoulder and inwardly burn for days, and it had a stomach for the largest stumps from the neighboring fields, which it devoured together with all blocks and fragments too tough for the axe and wedge. Sometimes, as the landlord remarked, there was more wood than fire; but ordinarily a roaring blaze was not wanting, and with this, and the elk’s head and antlers on the chimney-piece, the armor (brought home by one of the boarders from some joust with a bric-a-brac dealer abroad) on the opposite wall, and all the rude gothic of the architecture, which showed the beams and rafters as in a Venetian palace, we had very little difficulty in feeling baronial. It was probably a mistaken emotion; and I am not prepared to defend its genuineness against all comers. The ladies used to bring out their sewing or knitting, and chat round the fire; the men had their newspapers and cigars; as the evening wore on there was whist or euchre at the tables; sometimes people from the outside world dropped in; and if you went down late (as hours go with us in the country), you were likely to find the landlord and his brother smoking before the fire and telling stories of Lexington as they remembered it when boys. They were born on that spot, their family had owned the land for two hundred years, and they loved their native place with a tenderness very uncommon among Americans. I remember from those drowsy hours many stories, as of the frenzy of a family cat amidst the pyrotechnic rejoicings of a Fourth of July, and the unseemly behavior of a Lexington man’s horse, who brought his owner to shame before a Boston audience by backing down stairs into a huckster’s cellar in Dock Square; but I am withheld from repeating them here by that English scrupulosity regarding the facts of private life which I am naturally anxious to emulate in writing for an English magazine. I do not know whether I am bound by the same extreme of civilization not to speak of the old lantern which the landlord sometimes showed to guests of a very exacting patriotism as the very lantern which Paul Revere carried on his midnight ride from Boston to Concord. They found nothing odd in the suggestion that he should have carried a lantern, and no hesitation in receiving the relic as historical.

The hall was the boarders’ drawing-room when they were alone; and it was only when a sleighing party drove out from Boston in the winter, or a bicycling party arrived in the spring, that they reluctantly abandoned it to the dancing, and to the anguish of the piano which must ensue with or without the dancing. Here by day as well as by night there was easy loitering and talking amongst us, as if we were all guests in the house, — as in fact we practically were; and here on one of those white, white Sunday mornings, when the humid warmth bursts from the suddenly open portals of the South, and under a sky all sun, every bud breaks into blossom with a bee in its heart, and the whole air quavers and tinkles with the notes of bluebirds and orioles, our languor was thrilled with the horror of the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish and Mr. Burke in Dublin. The crime was then but a few hours old, and it seemed to stain that exquisite Sabbath purity with blood. I think that throughout America we all felt it personally as we did Garfield’s death, and that whether we hoped or whether we doubted for Ireland, we were alike dismayed at the cruel stupidity of the deed. The feeling of the hour comes back to me again in vivid association with the sensuous memory of that peculiarly American weather, of which I should perhaps try in vain to give a definite impression. It comes after long days of chilly drought, when the dust flies in the bitter east; overnight the wind changes, a warm rain falls, which dries in the first hours of the sun climbing a lofty sky, absolutely with out cloud, of more than Italian blueness, and of such continental vastness as roofed the first home of our race on Asiatic plains. In such a day there is compensation for all that has gone before; the grass is thickly and brightly green; the cherry-trees and pear-trees whiten the world; the air is sweet with delicate scents, it palpitates with song. To-morrow may be like yesterday, but to-day is heavenly perfect.

We were still the same company in our hotel, when one day our evening paper brought us, fully reprinted, Mr. Matthew Arnold’s recent “Word about America.” It was a not wholly flattering word, but I do not think it could have been more amiably received if it had been so. The good-will of the writer was so evident that we all said it would not do to be vexed that he seemed not very well informed; the Americans are in fact so used to having their ribs walked over by foreigners in the heaviest boots of travel, that this slippered and rhythmic pace was like a sort of Hawaiian lomi-lomi to our toughened sensibilities; it tickled, it lulled us, it was almost a caress. The editor of our paper had warned us not to reject what truth there was in Mr. Arnold’s “Word,” and we set ourselves dutifully to seek it. We could not quite maintain with our compatriot, whose declaration seemed to have evoked the Word, that there was in every little American town a circle of cultivated people; at the most we could assert that there was a circle of people who wished they were cultivated, and cordially and modestly and intelligently appreciated cultivation; but at the bottom of our hearts we were aware of not being Murdstones, or even in an ill sense Methodists. This conception of us appeared to us lamentably mistaken; we could not so readily have proved that we were not in a low condition from the national tendency to irreverent humor; we have certainly a bad habit of laughing at serious things, even our critics; but at the same time we could not see how we could be so generally wanting in sweetness and light, and yet be so often Mr. Arnold’s readers and admirers. Given English middle-class Puritanism, we ought logically to have been what he imagines us; the camel could not complain that it had not been scientifically evolved from the philosopher’s consciousness; and yet it felt itself, in its dumb helplessness, to be quite a different sort of beast. I suppose this must be always somewhat the case; and heaven knows how the ancient Greeks and Hebrews like Mr. Arnold’s notions of them. I have myself attempted to say things of the English which have not been found just by the few English people who read them, and in fact I suppose it would be better to let the writers of each nation aggrieve their own. I shall not, therefore, presume to say that Mr. Arnold is right about the English middle class; but if we are like what he conceives of them, I should say yes, we are perhaps the English middle class, but with the lid off. This appears to me an advantage.

At any rate this was the sum of the talk over Mr. Arnold’s paper among the boarders of the Massachusetts House in Lexington. It was a purely fortuitous assemblage of people, such as one is apt to encounter at summer hotels in New England. They were of various complexions as regarded creeds and callings; but neither their creeds nor callings appeared to characterize them; they kept their individualities free and apart from the accidents of business and belief, in a way that I own I should be somewhat at a loss to explain. There were Unitarians, Episcopalians, Swedenborgians, Orthodox Congregationalists, and, for all I know, Baptists among them, but I think no Methodists; and of that numerous and respectable sect there happens to be no congregation in Lexington. There is a Unitarian church, which was formerly the prevailing faith; the Orthodox church is earnest and growing; there is a large Irish Catholic church; but the greatest advance has been made by the Baptists, under the ministrations of a lay preacher, formerly a colonel in the Union army, who has lately reconstituted that body out of very perishing fragments, and made it strong and flourishing. I heard it said that he had done this by rendering the church “attractive to young people.” There is very little religious excitement of any sort in New England, now; the church in small places becomes more and more a social affair; and perhaps it was chiefly in the social way that the Baptist body was rehabilitated in Lexington.

It was our good fortune to be there on Decoration Day, the anniversary when all over the country the Americans of both sections decorate with flags and flowers the graves of those who fell in the Civil War, and the soldiers who have since died. In the cities the day is celebrated with civic pomp, with parades of militia and steam fire-engines; but in the villages its observance is an act of religion, of domestic piety; and it is touching, after the day is past, to see the garlands withering in the lonely country graveyards, and the little flags feebly fluttering about the graves till the weather quite wears them away. Every year the graves increase in number and the soldiers are fewer and fewer who come to lay the flowers on them; and it is in the country that this waste of life is most sorrow fully noticeable. At Lexington, two new graves had been added to those of the year before, and of the young men who went to the war from the town only a score of middle-aging veterans remained. These facts were touched upon in the address with which the ceremonies of the day were closed in the Town Hall at night, and the sad and glorious associations of the past were invoked by a speaker who had himself been part of those great events. He was now the Unitarian minister of the village, and he had been preceded in prayer by the Orthodox Congregational minister; the gentleman, by the way, through whom the Duke of Northumberland presented Lord Percy’s portrait to the town. There was excellent singing by a choir of men’s voices; and for the rest there was very earnest attention on the part of the people who filled the hall to overflowing. The audience was not of unmixed Yankee race; the Irish quarter of Lexington was duly represented, but all were one in a sense of the gravity of the occasion, and the whole assembly was subdued, old and young alike, to a Puritanic seriousness of demeanor. It is sometimes a little amusing to find how aptly the Irish settled in the rural communities of New England take on the prevailing type of manners; they are perhaps, with the Celtic conception of democracy, that “one man is as good as another and a dale better too,” a little more American in some things than the natives themselves; but it appears to be their ambition to conform as closely as possible to our social ideal. The imitation is by no means superficial; they are industrious and thrifty, and except that they unfailingly vote for whatever is illiberal and retrograde in politics, they are not bad citizens in such communities, whatever they are in the larger towns. I was not near enough to the veterans occupying the front benches to see how many were of Irish birth; but it is known how well they served in the army; and I dare say no one present took greater satisfaction in the expressions relating the second war for freedom to the part Lexington had borne in the struggle against England. The Revolution was remembered in the special decoration of the statues of Adams and Hancock and the Minute-Man with wreaths of hemlock and pine, which, in a season that denied the usual profusion of flowers, did duty for them throughout the day.

One night we had a concert in the Town Hall, which was so curiously American as regards the artists that I wish I could give a thoroughly intelligible idea of the affair. They were all of one family, — father, mother, and nine children between nineteen and five years old, — two children younger still being left at home out of regard to their tender age. They were from utmost Oregon, and they had gone about the whole country, singing and playing, apparently ever since any of the children could walk. They had visited the White House in Washington, and had been very acceptable everywhere to Sunday schools and scrupulous pleasure-seekers because of the edifying character of their entertainments, which were certainly exemplary from the moral side. I cannot say much as to the artistic quality of their programme; it commended itself by dealing with those themes of domestic and obituary interest in which our balladry delights; it was varied with a very little very modest dancing, and sketches of infantine drama; but they were nevertheless gifted people, and while they conformed to the popular taste in their performances, they were all working hard at the science of their profession under a German master. They stopped at our hotel, and we had the advantage of seeing them in private as well as in public, and of witnessing the triumph of the family among them over the temptations of their difficult and hazardous experiment; the young people were quiet and well-mannered; the little ones far less spoiled than might have been expected of babes encored several times every night; and there was a spirit of mutual affection and of discipline manifest in them which I should like to claim as characteristic of the American family under less arduous conditions. The father talked freely of his theories for maintaining a home-life in his nomadic tribe; and the author sojourning in the hotel did not think the less of his methods when he said he had read the author’s books, and introduced his children as versed in them. This author had long had his ideas of what those novels, those travels, those unsalable poems, those intheatricable dramas, rightly understood, might do for mankind, and here. . . .

I was very glad that the Lexington people gave the singing and playing family a good house, and I fancy that they do not refuse any fit occasions for amusing themselves. The young men seem not to go away from home so generally as they do from most country towns in New England; it is perhaps because their pleasant village is so near the city; at any rate they remain at home even after being graduated at Harvard. They have sleigh-rides, and dances at the Town Hall during the winter; I was told that the Lexington “germans” are not despised by the undergraduates of Cambridge; and “Oh, I tell you,” I heard it said by one of themselves, “the Lexington girls have a good time!” In the summer there are of course picnics, and of late horseback-riding has come greatly into vogue in the country all about Boston. The rigors of our winters and summers are against that pleasure, and hitherto it was almost unknown; but now, thanks largely to the importation of Texan riding-horses, it is especially prevalent at Lexington. These horses, which are small, are very strong and tough, and they look like little thoroughbreds. Like all Southern horses, they are broken to walk very rapidly, and they have in perfection that gait which in the Southwest is called a lope. When they are first brought North they sell for prices ranging from $40 to $100. Their popularity has revived the sport, almost obsolete in the North, of horse-racing at Lexington, where I once saw a race between gentlemen riders, which had apparently called out the greater part of the population. We drove through miles of the small pine forest, which, growing up all over New England on the exhausted lands, gives such an impression of wildness; and came at last to a space in the woods where a track had been newly laid out in the white birch scrub, or newly recovered from it, and where we found everything prepared for the sport in due form. The riders gave us all the gayety of jockey dress, as well as the race, for our money; the ground was thronged with carriages and buggies; there was a tally-ho coach which had been driven out from Boston; and I went about bewildered at this transformation of my poor New England, and fearfully hoping there was nothing wicked in so much apparent enjoyment with no apparent useful purpose, till I heard myself indicated in a whisper as “one of the horsemen.” Then I desperately abandoned myself to the common dissipation, for it was idle to be better than one seemed.

These Texan horses, which are not quite the mustangs of the prairies, are ridden with high-pommelled, wooden-stirruped Mexican saddles; and when a party of young people dashed by the hotel in the twilight, it was with a picturesqueness which the pig-skin of Anglo-Saxon civilization fails to impart to a man. But let me not give the impression of mere pleasure-taking on the part of these cavaliers; they were students at law or medicine, or they were young men of business recreating themselves after the close application of a day in town; by and by, when they were married, they would content themselves with their cigars and their newspapers, and leave others to ride with pretty girls in the dusk of the eyening, or chase the flying tennis-ball on the whitewashed lawn. Except perhaps at Newport, or the New York clubs, one sees few men of leisure with us, and the example of these few is not one to make the Republic pine for that leisure class which the Old World finds indispensable to its government and refinement. Women of leisure we certainly have; they distinguish and adorn us everywhere, advancing (as we understand) the standard of dress abroad, and absorbing and diffusing ideas of taste and culture at home. Wherever the pianoforte penetrates, lovely woman lifts her fingers from the needle, the broom-handle, and the washboard, and places them on its keys, never again to be restored to those odious implements; she finds that she has a mind, and she makes her husband or her father pay for it; she begins to have aims, to draw, to model, to decorate, to lecture, and to render herself self-supporting by every expensive device. This alone is enough to keep the men of her family busy, and to prevent the commonwealth from lapsing into decay; the civic virtues fall naturally to the care of the trained patriots who are “inside politics” . . .

I perceive too late that by an infrangible chain of reasoning I have been proving that we too are governed and refined by a leisure class, and that there is only the trifling difference of sex between the American and the European aristocracies. At the same time I have got rather far away from Lexington, where life seemed to be still very unambitious and old-fashioned. I wish I could say that it was cheap; but this is not the case in the suburbs of any of our Atlantic cities. House rent is certainly less, but the railroad fares and the expressman’s charges go far to equalize that with the city rate; about Boston the suburban taxes are sometimes greater than the city taxes; provisions and service are a little costlier, and unless one conforms quite strictly to the local standard of simplicity, one is apt to live quite as expensively as in town. It would cost as much to live with the same ease in Lexington as in Boston; that is to say, a third more than in London. But one is not obliged to live with “ease” there, and he may live in comfort for a reasonable sum. It struck me that the place had studied convenience scientifically, and that in a modest way it was entirely sufficient to itself, with its good schools, its admirable library, its well-kept streets and roads; its sociable little line of railroad connecting it with the city by ten or twelve trains a day; its well-stocked provision stores, and its variety of other shops. There cannot be many more than a thousand people in the village, including the Irish hamlet by the railroad side; but it is lighted with gas, and they are talking of water-works. I dare say they will soon have drainage and malaria.

The village of Lexington, however, is not one of those examples of rapid growth with which we like to astonish the world. I doubt if it can be more than twice as populous as when a hundred years ago it became the scene of the brief conflict which has made it memorable. Our hotel fronted the road along which the King’s troops had marched in the twilight of the morning of April 19, 1775, and on which they retreated in the afternoon. The common where the encounter with the Provincials took place was but a minute’s walk away, and with the relics of the library close at hand, we dwelt, as it were, in the midst of heroic memories. One pleasant forenoon, when the May had remitted its worst rigors, and nature was making the most, with birds and sunshine, of a respite from the east wind, we strolled up to the pretty green, and leaning upon the rail that encloses it, listened to the story of the fight from one who had all but been present in his careful and enthusiastic studies of its details.

The green is an irregular triangle fronted by the village churches and dwellings, and the historic fact is commemorated by a rude monument erected at the close of the last century, with an inscription by the minister of the village: a good man who seemed to have learned his rhetoric from the French Republic, then distributing equality and fraternity to the reluctant peoples of Europe at the point of the bayonet. The stone is “sacred to liberty, independence, and the rights of man;” it rehearses in swelling terms the wrongs endured from British tyranny by the colonists, and their resort to arms. “The contest was long, bloody, and affecting: righteous Heaven approved the solemn appeal,” and the sovereignty of the States was the final conse quence. The great-grandchildren of those who fell there look from their windows upon the consecrated spot; not far up a street to the northward the house yet stands in which Adams and Hancock were hiding, with a price set on their heads by the British commandant in Boston, while Major Pitcairne’s troops were marching up the Concord road; and three of the houses that witnessed the bloodshed on the green seem to be still strong and sound, and good for another hundred years. They are all interesting as specimens of the early village architecture of New England, and one is especially quaint and picturesque, with a pretty, old-fashioned garden beside it, where the flowers defied the May in a sort of embattled bloom. This was the Buckner Tavern at the time of the fight, and it was even then an old house, — of the seventeenth century, as the beams in the parlor ceiling still show. It afforded a rendezvous for the Provincials when the alarm of the British approach was first sounded by Paul Revere, and there most of the men lingered and waited subject to their captain’s orders, after he had begun to doubt the truth of the rumor. The interval must have been trying to those unwarlike men, but they all answered the drum when a messenger galloped up with the news that the King’s troops were right upon them. Some of them had gone to bed again in their homes beside the green, and they left their wives and children sleeping almost within sound of a whisper from the spot where they loosely formed on the grass before their doors. They were very simple and quiet folks, with no long perspective of national glory to embolden and sustain them in the resistance they were about to offer their King: a name at which we do not trouble ourselves to laugh now, but which was then to be feared next to God’s. Independence was scarcely dreamt of; all that the villagers were clear of was their right as Englishmen, and they stood there upon that, with everything else around them in a dark far thicker than the morning gloom out of which the red-coats flashed at the other corner of the green. Major Pitcairne called a halt at some thirty rods, and riding forward swore at the damned rebels, and bade them disperse. They stood firm, and he ordered his men to fire; the soldiers hesitated; but when he drew his pistols and emptied them at the Provincials, they discharged a volley, and eight of our people fell. They were not a tithe of the enemy in number, and it is doubtful if they returned the fire; their captain called a retreat, and those who were unhurt made their escape, to join later in the long running fight through which the Provincials all day harassed the flight of the British from Concord back to Boston. Major Pitcairne had dispersed a riot, and had shed the first blood in a seven years’ war. The dead men lay on the grass where their children had played a few hours before; one, shot through the breast, dragged himself a little space to his own threshold and died there in the arms of his wife.

Many stories are told of the peaceful inexperience of these people who had defied a mighty empire. A few of them had been in what we call the Old French War, and had served under Wolfe at the taking of Quebec; but it was so little understood generally that war meant fighting, that some boys came to the common that morning as to a sort of muster, and only retired when the bullets whistled over their heads. After the encounter at Concord, where an hour or two later —

“The embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world,”

the popular education in the art of war proceeded rapidly; though even then one of our men who was unsuspiciously firing from behind a stone wall at the British column in the road, had the surprise and mortification to be himself shot in the back by a flanking party. Before noon the retreat from Concord had become a rout, that was not arrested till Earl Percy arrived at Lexington with twelve hundred men and two pieces of cannon. The whole country side was up; the Minute-Men from Acton, Concord, Menotomy, Lexington, and Cambridge were joined by those of Woburn, Billerica, and even some of the seaboard towns, in pursuing the King’s troops. The season was so unusually advanced that the cherry-trees were in bloom; the day was one of that sudden and sickening heat that sometimes occurs in our spring; and when the troops met Percy’s supporting column at the Monroe Tavern, many of them fell down in the dust, “with their tongues lolling out like dogs’.” They had fought a running fight for ten miles, and they had marched in all nearly thirty since they left Boston the night before. Percy’s cannon scared away the riflemen who hung upon their rear, and his men, scattering over the country, fired the farmhouses that might be supposed to afford shelter to the Minute-Men. Some of the houses were beyond gunshot, and the sick and old who were here and there bayoneted in them would perhaps now have been spared. The word had gone about that the Americans were scalping the English dead, and something had to be done in retaliation. No soldiers were found scalped, but a good many farmhouses were burned; for when Percy began to retire, the shooting from the walls and the woods along the road began again, and continued throughout the retreat. At different points on the route stones have been set up to commemorate the acts of reprisal committed by the soldiers: here stood a house burned by the British; in another house three Americans were massacred; in another twelve; and so forth. One of these monuments, in Arlington (then Menotomy), celebrates the valor and final per severance of one of the patriots in terms that used to amuse me in spite of the gravity of the facts. “On this spot, Samuel Whittemore, aged 81, killed three British soldiers. He was shot, beaten, bayoneted, and left for dead, but recovered, and lived to be 98 years old.” My readers may differ with me as to the political principles of this hoary man, but there can be but one opinion concerning his resolution and physical toughness.

We have counted it all joy in our annals that we were able to embitter defeat to the British in the pursuit from Concord to Boston, and have of course made the most of their reprisals. But perhaps these did not appear to them such enormities. To be fired on from every covert by the roadside, and helplessly slaughtered by a people they despised, was a thing that must have had its exasperations; and they responded in the way that might have been expected. “War is cruel, madam,” General Sherman explained to the lady who came out from Atlanta to reproach him for bombarding a town where so many non-combatants must suffer; and our race, whether English or American, has never “made war with water of roses.” The British had succeeded in the object of their expedition; they had destroyed the Provincial stores at Concord; but they lost that day more men than it cost them to capture Quebec. The day is only a chapter of history now. We are tender and proud of it, because it is our own, and because it vindicated us, and proved us after the fashion of war in the right. But if there have been griefs between the two countries that no dilution of “the language of Shakespeare and Milton” can wash out the memory of, there is scarcely a pang in them any more. Meanwhile we are still very far apart, and after all that cables and steamships can do, there are three thousand miles of sea, and immeasurable gulfs of democracy between us. With a few exceptions on either side, we heartily dislike and distrust each other’s civic and social ideas. England Americanizes in some respects, in some respects America Anglicizes; but the most of that amounts to very little, I suspect; and for our part, whatever outcry we make over our own follies and sins and errors, we do not believe that it is less democracy, but more, that is to help us. Mere contiguity might do something to reconcile the ideals of the two countries, but it could not do everything. The four millions of Canada are not affected by the proximity of our fifty millions; they cling all the more closely to the English ideal, or what they imagine it to be, and shudder at the spectre of annexation, which exists only in their own nervous abhorrence.

At the same time, there is apt to be so much kindness between us personally when we meet on any common ground, that it is difficult to realize the national alienation, and impossible to account for it. We seem so very much alike, — I necessarily speak only for the American half of the impression, — that we feel like asserting an indisputable brotherhood. Upon reflection we have our reserves, our doubts, our fears; but for the time the illusion is delightfully perfect. It occurs with Americans, sometimes not only upon acquaintance or speech with Englishmen, but at the mere sight of their faces, which have a kindred look, whatever their calling or degree; and I think we are never less wrapped in the national flag than when we encounter English soldiers. The other day I was walking through one of the Parks when I came upon some sort of little barrack, where two or three privates, being temporarily debarred from flirtation with the nursery maids by the duty they were on, presented themselves purely and simply as my traditional enemies. But so far from wishing to offer them battle, I could only think of that whimsical and remorseful passage of Hawthorne’s “Septimius Felton,” in which he describes Pitcairne’s men as they marched into Concord after the affair at Lexington, dusty, wearied, and footsore, but “needing only a half-hour’s rest, a good breakfast, and a pot of beer apiece, to make them ready to face the world. Nor did their faces look in any way rancorous, but at the most only heavy, cloddish, good-natured, and humane. ‘Oh, heavens, Mr. Felton!’ whispered Rose; ‘why should we shoot these men, or they us? They look kind, if homely.’ ‘It is the strangest thing in the world that we should think of killing them,’ said Septimius.”

Indeed it was monstrous. I realized then as never before the tremendous moral disadvantage a democracy is at in any war with a royal or oligarchic power; for whereas a portion of the Republican idea is slain in every American who perishes on the field, the poor fellows who fall on the other side personally express nothing, while the real enemy remains safe at home. It was no longer a question of shooting at the King and his ministers from behind stone walls, as it had been hitherto, but of picking off such amiable and friendly-looking folk as those I saw. Something in my heart — no doubt the brother plebeian — stirred in their presence with a novel pain; and if I could have hoped to make these honest men in anywise cognizant of April 19, 1775, I might have wished to excuse it to them.

SHIRLEY.

IT was our fortune to spend six weeks of the summer of 1875 in the neighborhood of a community of the people called Shakers, who are chiefly known to the world-outside by their apple-sauce, by their garden seeds so punctual in coming up when planted, by their brooms so well made that they sweep clean long after the ordinary new broom of proverb has retired upon its reputation, by the quaintness of their dress, and by the fame of their religious dances. It is well to have one’s name such a synonyme for honesty that anything called by it may be bought and sold with perfect confidence, and it is surely no harm to be noted for dressing out of the present fashion, or for dancing before the Lord. But when our summer had come to an end, and we had learned to know the Shakers for so many other qualities, we grew almost to resent their superficial renown among men. We saw in them a sect simple, sincere, and fervently persuaded of the truth of their doctrine, striving for the realization of a heavenly ideal upon earth; and amidst the hard and often sordid common place of our ordinary country life, their practice of the austerities to which men and women have devoted themselves in storied times and picturesque lands clothed these Yankee Shakers in something of the pathetic interest which always clings to our thoughts of monks and nuns.

Their doctrine has been so often explained that I need not dwell upon it here, but the more curious reader may turn to the volumes of “The Atlantic Monthly” of 1867 for an authoritative statement of all its points in the autobiography of Elder Evans of Mt. Lebanon. Mainly, their faith is their life; a life of charity, of labor, of celibacy, which they call the angelic life. Theologically, it can be most succinctly presented in their formula, Christ Jesus and Christ Ann, their belief being that the order of special prophecy was completed by the inspiration of Mother Ann Lee, the wife of the English blacksmith, Stanley. She is their second Christ; their divine mother, whom some of their hymns invoke; and for whom they cherish a filial love. The families of Shirley and Harvard, Massachusetts, were formed in her time, near the close of the last century; at the latter place they show the room in which she lived, and whence she was once dragged by the foolish mob which helps to found every new religion.

In regard to other points their minds vary. Generally they do not believe in the miraculous birth or divinity of Christ; he was a divinely good and perfect man, and any of us may be come divine by being godlike. Generally, also, I should say that they reject the Puritanic ideas of future rewards and punishments, and accept something like the Swedenborgian notion of the life hereafter. They are all spiritualists, recognizing a succession of inspirations from the earliest times down to our own, when they claim to have been the first spiritual mediums. Five or six years before the spirits who have since animated so many table-legs, planchettes, phantom shapes, and what not began to knock at Rochester, the Shaker families in New York, Massachusetts, Ohio, and elsewhere were in full communion with the other world, and they were warned of the impending invasion of the world’s parlor and dining-room sets. They feel by no means honored, however, by all the results. But they believe that the intercourse between the worlds can be rescued from the evil influences which have perverted it, and they have signs, they say, of an early renewal of the manifestations among themselves. In some ways these have in fact never ceased. Many of the Shaker hymns, words and music, are directly inspirational, coming to this brother or that sister without regard to his or her special genius; they are sung and written down, and are then brought into general use. The poetry is like that which the other world usually furnishes through its agents in this, — hardly up to our literary standard; but the music has always something strangely wild, sweet, and naïve in it.

The Shakers claim to be the purest and most Christian church, proceeding in a straight succession from the church which Christ’s life of charity and celibacy established on earth; whereas, all the other churches are sprung from the first Gentile churches, to whose weakness and wilfulness certain regrettable things, as slavery, war, private property, and marriage, were permitted. Acknowledging a measure of inspiration in all religions, they also recognize a kindred attraction to the angelic life in the celibate orders of every faith: the Roman vestals, the Peruvian virgins of the sun, and the Buddhist bonzes, as well as the monks and nuns of the Catholic Church. They complain that they have not been understood by such alien writers as have treated of them, and have represented them as chiefly useful in furnishing homes for helpless and destitute people of all ages and sexes. In the words of Elder Fraser, of Shirley, the Shakers claim that their system is “based on the fact that each man has in himself a higher and a lower life,” and that Shakerism “is a manifestation of the higher to the exclusion of the lower life. Its object is to gather into one fold all who have risen above their natural propensities,” and they think with Paul that though those who marry do well, yet those who do not marry do better. Their preaching and teaching is largely to this effect; and yet I do not find it quite strange that friends from the world-outside regard rather the spectacle of the Shakers’ peaceful life, and think mostly of their quiet homes as refuges for those disabled against fate, the poor, the bruised, the hopeless; after all, Christ himself is but this. As I recall their plain, quaint village at Shirley, a sense of its exceeding peace fills me; I see its long, straight street, with the severely simple edifices on either hand; the gardens up-hill on one side and down-hill on the other; its fragrant orchards and its levels of clovery meadow-land stretching away to buck wheat fields, at the borders of whose milky bloom the bee paused, puzzled which sweet to choose; and it seems to me that one whom the world could flatter no more, one broken in hope, or health, or fortune, could not do better than come hither and meekly ask to be taken into that quiet fold, and kept forever from his sorrows and himself. But — such is the hardness of the natural heart — I cannot think of one’s being a Shaker on any other terms, except, of course, a sincere conviction.

The first time that we saw the Shaker worship was on the occasion of Sister Julia’s funeral, to which we were asked the day after her death. It was a hot afternoon at the end of July, and when we drove out of the woods, we were glad of the ash and maple trees that shade the village street in nearly its whole length. There were once three families at Shirley, but the South Family, so-called, has been absorbed by the Church Family, and its dwellings, barns, and shops are occupied by tenants and work people of the community. The village is built on each side of the road, under the flank of a long ridge, and the land still falls, from the buildings on the eastern side, into a broad, beautiful valley (where between its sycamores the Nashua runs unseen), with gardens, orchards, patches of corn and potatoes, green meadows, and soft clumps of pine woods; beyond rise the fertile hills in a fold of which the village of the Harvard Shakers lies hid from their brethren at Shirley.

Between the South Family and the Church Family were two wayside monuments that always won my admiration and homage. One was a vast apple-tree, whose trunk was some three feet through, and whose towering top was heavy, even in an off-year for apples, with a mass of young fruit; apparently this veteran, after supplying cider and “sass” for at least a century, was resolute to continue its benefactions for another hundred years to come. The other reverend monument on this road was the horse-trough: not one of the perishable horse-troughs that our civilization, conscious of its own evanescence, scoops from a log, and leaves to soak and rot year by year, but a great, generous bowl, four feet across, and nearly as many deep, which some forgotten Shaker brother had patiently hollowed out of a mass of granite. A spring, led in pipes from the hill-side, fills it to the brim, with a continual soft bubble in the centre and silent drip of the moisture over the edges to keep fresh the cool, sober green with which in many passing years it has painted the gray stone. Our horse was hired from the Shakers, and was, if one may say it without disrespect, so bigoted a brother himself that he could scarcely be got to drink any water at our farm, but kept his thirst for this fount, which, even when he was not thirsty, he would fondly stop to kiss and loll his great head over. The brother to whom he belonged by courtesy (for of course he was owned in common, like everything else Shaker) had let him form the habit of snatching birch leaves and bushy tops of all sorts along the woodland roads, and we learned to indulge and even cherish this eccentricity. He was called Skip; apparently because he never skipped.

We stopped at the office of the Church Family, which is a large brick house, scrupulously plain, like all the rest, and appointed for the transaction of business and the entertainment of visitors. Here three sisters and one brother are in charge, and here are chambers for visitors staying overnight. The Shakers do not keep a public-house, and are far from inviting custom, but their theory of Christianity forbids them to turn any one unhoused or unfed from their doors; the rich pay a moderate charge, and the poor nothing — as that large and flourishing order of fellow-citizens, the tramps, very well know. These overripe fruits of our labor system lurk about in the woods and by-ways, and turn up at the Shakers’ doors after dark, where they are secure of being fed and sheltered in the little dormitory set apart for them. “And some of them,” said Elder Fraser, “really look as if the Pit had vomited them up.”

In the parlor of the office we found our friends the office-sisters, and a number of Shakers and Shakeresses from Harvard, including two of the Harvard elders, who had come to the funeral, and who presently repaired to the plain, white-painted, hip-roofed church-building. Besides ourselves there were but few of the world-outside there, and these few were nearly all tenants from the South Family farm, so that the whole ceremony was unrestricted by reference to spectators, though I am bound to add that no Shaker ceremony that I have seen was embarrassed by the world’s observation, however great the attendance of lookers-on. We were separated, the men from the women, as were the brethren and sisters, who sat facing each other on rows of long settees opposite the spectators. The sisters came in wearing their stiff gauze caps; the brothers with their broad straw-hats, which they took off and hung up on the wooden pegs set round the whole room.

There was silence for a little while, in which the Shakers took from their pockets and laid across their knees white handkerchiefs as great and thick as napkins, and then placed their hands palm down on the handkerchiefs, and waited till some one began to sing, when they all joined in the hymn. There was none of their characteristic dancing — or marching, rather — that day, but as they sang they all softly beat time with their hands upon their knees, and they sang with a fervent rapture that the self-possessed worship of our world’s congregations no longer knows. Their hymns were now wild and sad, and now jubilant, but the music was always strong and sweet, as it came from lips on which it had been breathed by angelic inspiration. There seemed to be no leader, but after each silence some brother or sister began to sing, and the rest followed, except in one case, when it was announced that the hymn was Sister Julia’s favorite and would be sung in compliance with her request. There was no prayer, or any set discourse, but the elders and eldresses and many others spoke in commemoration of Sister Julia’s duteous and faithful life, and in expression of their love for her. Their voices trembled, and the younger sisters, who had been most about her at the last, freely gave way to their tears. Each one who spoke had some special tribute to pay to her faithfulness, or some tender little testimony to bear to her goodness of heart; several read verses which they had written in memory of her, and amongst these was the elder of the Church Family, who conducted the ceremonies. What was most observable in it all was the familiar character; it was as if these were brothers and sisters by the ties of nature, who spoke of the dead. The faces of nearly all but our old friend Elder Fraser were strange to us, but they were none the less interesting, from the many-wrinkled front of the nonagenarian who has spent half his century in Shirley, to the dimpled visage of the small boy or girl last adopted into the family. They were peaceful faces, the older ones with the stamp of a strong discipline which sustained while it subdued. The women were in far the greater number, as they are in the world’s assemblies in this quarter, and a good half were children or young girls who had not come to close question with themselves, and of whom it could not yet be finally affirmed that they were Shakeresses. The history which was not written could not be read, but it was not easy to believe of those who had passed their prime that they had devoted themselves to their ideal without regrets, or misgivings, nor was it true of any. “We are women,” one of them afterwards said, “and we have had our thoughts of homes and children of our own.”

During our six weeks’ stay near them we saw our Shaker friends nearly every day. Some of their fruit was now coming into season, and we were asked down to the village to see the first harvest of their new Wachusett blackberry, a recent discovery by Brother Leander, who noticed a vine one day by the wayside on which the berries hung ripe, while those on neighboring bushes were yet two weeks from their maturity. He observed also that the cane was almost free from thorns; he marked the vine, and when the leaves fell, transplanted it. In the garden we found a dozen brothers and sisters busy on either side of the rows of bushes which bowed beneath their weight of ripe berries in those first days of August.

In the afternoon we found the office-sisters in the basement of their dwelling, putting up the berries in boxes, which they did with Shaker scrupulosity as to ripeness and justness of measure. The Shakers are very diligent people, and yet seem always to have any desired leisure, as one may notice in large, old-fashioned families where people do their own work. The industries at Shirley are broom-making (at which the minister, Elder John Whiteley, and several of the brothers work), raising blackberries, drying sweet corn, and making apple-sauce and jellies. In former times, before the wickedness of fermented drinks was clearly established, one brother made wine from the bacchanal grape as well as the self-righteous elderberry, and some bottles of his vintage yet linger in the office-cellar. But no wine has been made for many years, now; for the Shakers are very strictly abstemious. Yet if a brother’s natural man insist upon a draught now and then, they consider all the circumstances, and do not forbid, while they deplore. A similar tolerance they use toward tobacco, and I have seen a snuffing as well as a chewing brother. They generally avoid also tea and coffee, shortened biscuit, doughnuts, and the whole unwholesome line of country cookery, while they accept and practise the new gospel of oatmeal porridge and brown-bread gems in its fulness. Many of the younger people are averse from meat, following the example and precept of our good Elder Fraser, who for the last thirty-five years has kept his tough Scotch bloom fresh upon a diet that involves harm to no living creature, and at seventy looks as ruddy as few Americans at any time of life.

But after this testimony to their healthful regimen, shall I confess that the Shakers did not seem to me especially healthful-looking? They do not look so fresh nor so strong as the same number of well-to-do city people; and they are not, as a community, exempt in notable degree from the ills we are all heir to. Is it possibly true that our climate is healthful only in proportion as it is shut out by brick walls and plate-glass, and battened down under cobble and flag stones; that the less fresh air we have the better, and that Nature here is at best only a step-mother to our race? But perhaps it is too much to expect a single generation, gathered from the common stock of an unwisely-feeding ancestry, to show the good effects of a more reasonable regimen. The Shakers labor under the disadvantage of not being able to transmit a cumulative force of good example in their descendants; they must always be dealing, even in their own body, with the sons of pie and the daughters of doughnut; and Elder Fraser, who one Sunday spoke outright against these abominations, addressing the strangers present, will have to preach long and often the better culinary faith, which the Shakers received from the spirits (as they claim), before he can reach the stomachs, at once poor and proud, of the dyspeptical world-outside.

We went regularly to the Shaker meeting, which in summer is held every Sunday in the church-building I have mentioned; in winter the meetings are privately held in the large room kept for that purpose in every Shaker dwelling, and used throughout the year for family gatherings, social and devotional. The seats for spectators in the church were filled, and sometimes to overflowing, by people from the country and the villages round about, as well as by summer boarders from the neighboring town of Lancaster, whose modish silks and millinery distinguished them from the rural congregation; but all were respectful and attentive to the worship which they had come to look at, and which, in its most fantastic phase, I should think could move only a silly person to laughter. The meetings opened with singing, and then Elder Wetherbee, of the Church Family, briefly addressed the brethren and sisters in terms which were commonly a grateful recognition of the beauty of their “gospel relation” to each other, and of their safety from sin in a world of evil. The words were not always ready, but the sincere affection and conviction which breathed from them were characteristic of all the addresses which followed. After the elder sat down, they sang again, and then the minister, John Whiteley, read a chapter of the Bible, and made a few remarks; then, with alternate singing and speaking (the speaking was mostly from the men, though now and then a sister rose and bore her testimony to her heartfelt happiness in Shakerism, or declared her intention to take up a cross against such or such a tendency of her nature), the services proceeded till the time for the marching came. Till this time the brothers and sisters had sat confronting each other on settees, which they now lifted and set out of the way against the wall. A group formed in an ellipse in the middle, with two lines of marchers out side of them, headed by Elder Wetherbee. Some one struck into one of their stirring march tunes, and those in the ellipse began to rock back and forth on their feet, and to sway their bodies to the music, while the marchers with a sort of rising motion began their round, all beat ing time with a quick outward gesture of the arms and an upward gesture of the open palms. It was always a thrilling sight, fantastic, as I said, but not ludicrous, and it never failed to tempt the nerves to so much Shakerism at least as lay in the march. To the worshippers this part of their rite was evidently that sort of joy which if physical, is next to spiritual transport. Their faces were enraptured, they rose and rose in their march with a glad exultation; suddenly the singing ceased, the march instantly ended, and the arms of each sank slowly down to the side. Some brother now spoke again, and when he closed, another song was raised, and the march resumed, till in the course of the singing and speaking those forming the central ellipse had been relieved and enabled to join the march. When it ended, the settees were drawn up again, and the brethren and sisters sat down as before. Generally, one or two of the younger sisters would at this point read some article or poem from “The Shaker and Shakeress,” — the organ of the sect published at Mt. Lebanon, New York, and made up of contributions by members of the different families throughout the country. If the extract was particularly to the minds of the listeners, one of them pronounced it “good,” and there was a general testimony to this effect. When these were finished, Elder Fraser, of the North Family, came forward between the rows of Shakers, and addressed the world in the principal discourse of the day. I always liked his speaking, for, if I did not accept his Shakerism, I felt bound to accept his good sense; and besides, it is pleasant, after the generalizing of the pulpits, to have the sins of one’s fellow-men frankly named and fully rebuked; in this sort of satisfaction I sometimes almost felt myself without reproach. I suppose that what Elder Fraser and Elder Wetherbee and Elder John Whiteley preached is what is called morality by those who make a distinction between that and religion; but there was constant reference to Christ in their praise of the virtues they wished us to practise. Elder Fraser’s discourses took a wide range at times, and he enforced his faith in language which, while it was always simple, was seldom wanting in strength, clearness, and literary excellence. He and Minister Whiteley are readers of most of the late books of religious and scientific controversy, from the most hopeless of which they come back confirmed and refreshed in their Shaker belief.

It was very pleasant to hear Elder Fraser, not only in the church, but also among his raspberries and grape-vines, to the culture of which he brought a spirit by no means bowed to the clod. He was fond of drawing illustrations from nature in his most daring theories of the universe, and the sucker that his hoe lopped away, or the vine bud that his thumb and forefinger sacrificed to the prosperity of the clusters, furnished him argument as he worked and talked. He is lately from Mt. Lebanon, where his years and services had justly retired him from all labors but those he chose to add to his literary pursuits; yet he came back to active life in Shirley at the intimation that his presence there would be to the advantage of the North Family, and he bears his little cross (as the Shakers call any trouble they would make light of) with the cheerfulest content. The boys, the sweet corn, the tomatoes, the grapes, the pears, flourish equally in his care at the North Family, and I do not know where else one should find such clumps of cockscomb and prince’s feather and beds of balsam as grow under his kindly smile and diligent hand.

I am not sure whether the different faces in the march had a greater or less fascination to us after we came to know their different owners personally. Each showed his or her transport in a different way, and each had some peculiarity of step or movement that took our idle minds and made us curious about their history and character. Among them, none was more striking than the nonagenarian, whose bent frame kept its place in the round, but whose nerveless hands beat time after a very fugitive and erratic fashion. Father Abraham is very deaf, and in the singing some final bit of belated melody always stuck in his throat, and came scratching and scrambling up after the others had ceased in a manner that was rather hard to bear. But it was wonderful that he should know what tunes they sang when they sang without book. He is the author of a system of musical notation which the Shakers used exclusively until very lately, and which many of them still prefer. At his great age he still works every day at basket-making, in which he is very skilful and conscientious. But it is superfluous to say this; Shaker work is always the best of its kind. He is rarely sick, and he takes part in all the details of the worship, as he did when he came, sixty years ago. He was then a young man, and it is said that he visited the community from idle curiosity, with his betrothed. Its life and faith made an instant impression upon him, and he proposed to the young girl that they should both become Shakers; but after due thought she refused. She said that she would not be a hindrance to his wish in the matter; if he was called to this belief, she gave him back his promise. To the Shakers it seems right that he should have accepted her sacrifice; to some of the world-outside it will seem tragic. Who knows? He has never regretted his course; she took another mate, saw her children about her knee, and died long ago, after a life that was no doubt as happy as most. But perhaps in an affair like that, a girl’s heart had supreme claims. Perhaps there are some things that one ought not to do even with the hope of winning heaven.

After this old man, some of the little ones, left by death or their parents’ poverty or worthlessness to the care of the Shakers, were the most interesting figures in the march, through which they moved with such a pretty pleasure. The meeting must have been a delight to them, though their faces kept a soberness which was an edifying proof of their discipline. This is the effect of vigilance and moral suasion; I believe the Shakers never strike their little wards, or employ any harsh measures with them.

One has somehow the impression that the young people of the Shakers are held in compulsory allegiance; but of course this is not at all the fact. As soon as they are old enough to take care of themselves they are entirely free to go or to stay. Undoubtedly they are constantly taught the advantages of the community over the world, and the superior merit of the virgin life over the married state, which they may be inclined to think of as they grow to be men and women. Marriage is not held to be sinful or dishonorable. “Few things,” said one of the elders, “are more pleasing to us than the sight of a happy young couple, living rightly in their order,” but marriage is earthly and human, and celibacy is divine; as the thoughts are turned to higher things, they forsake husband or wife. Nevertheless, if their young women will marry, the Shakers claim the satisfaction of thinking that they have received in the community the best possible training for wives and mothers, — that they have been taught diligence, economy and all branches of domestic knowledge. More than once there have been secessions of young people, which are nearly always stealthy, not because there could be any constraint, but because they dreaded to face the disappointed hopes of their elders. In after years, these delinquents from the angelic condition sometimes return to thank their benefactors, and to declare that they owe most of their worldly prosperity to their unworldly precepts. The proportion of those reared in Shakerism whom the Shakers expect to keep is small; they count quite as much for their increase upon accessions of mature men and women from outside, whom the Shaker life and doctrine persuade. These they invite now, as always, very cordially to join them, and they look forward to a time when their dwindling communities shall be restored to more than their old numbers.

One bad effect of the present decrease, which all thoughtful Shakers deplore, is the employment of hired labor. This, as communists, they feel to be wrong; but they are loath either to alienate their land or to let it lie idle. A strange and sad state of things results: the most profitable crop that they can now raise is timber, which they harvest once in thirty years, and which it costs nothing to cultivate, whereas it costs more to plant and reap the ordinary farm-crops, at the present rate of farm labor, than the crops will sell for. This is the melancholy experience of shrewd managers and economical agriculturists. The farmer who can till his own fields and take care of his own stock can live by farming, but no other can. One might not regret this, for it tends to encourage the subdivision of land, but the farm which one man’s labor can till is too small to support a family; and the farmer cannot count upon the help of his children, for these, as soon as they grow up, leave the homestead, the girls to be teachers, factory operatives, table-girls, shop-girls; the boys for the cities and the West.

“

Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay;”

and perhaps one ought to take heart from the fact that these rural districts are as poor as ever, though they have not half the population they had fifty years ago. Yet it was not easy to be cheerful when in our drives about the country we came from time to time upon some grass-grown cellar where a farm-house once stood, or counted, within the circuit of a mile about the corners where we sojourned, a score of these monuments of adversity. It is not that the soil is so poor, but that it lacks the tilth of an owner’s hands. How shall it be restored to prosperity? It is within thirty-five miles of Boston, where we all know to our sorrow that provisions are dearer than anywhere in the country, — not to specify the whole planet, — and where consequently the best market is; yet the land grows up to woods. Who shall inherit this legacy of the Puritans, won at such bitter cost from the wilderness? Other races and another religion, it appears; here and there the Irish have found foothold; a good part of the population is Canadian; the farm laborers are all either Irish or French.

The decay of numbers, then, which the Shakers confess with so great regret, is but their share of the common blight, and how to arrest it is their share of the common perplexity. We often touched upon this subject, which they face bravely and not unhopefully, and yet with a care concerning it that was not less than touching. What could it matter to those childless men and women whether any like them should inherit them in this world, to which, while living, they had turned so cold a shoulder? Very little indeed, one would have said, and yet they were clearly anxious that Shakerism should flourish after them. Their anxiety was not so unnatural; none of us can bear to think of leaving the fruits of our long endeavor to chance and the stranger. But I may attribute the largest share of the Shaker reluctance to perish from the earth to zeal for the perpetuation of the true faith, — faith which was founded, like all others, in persecution, built up amidst ridicule and obloquy, and now, when its practical expression is received with respect by all the neighboring world, is in some danger of ceasing among men, not through the indifference of believers, but through their inevitable mortal decay. There are several reasons for the present decrease, besides that decrease of the whole rural population which I have mentioned. The impulse of the age is towards a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life. Men no longer remain on the lonely farms, or in the little towns where they were born, brooding upon the ways of God to man; if they think of God, it is too often to despair of knowing him; while the age calls upon them to learn this, that, and the other, to get gain and live at ease, to buy pianos and pictures, and take books out of the circulating library. The new condition is always vulgar, and amidst the modern ferment we may look back upon the old stagnation and call it repose. Whatever it was, it was a time when men’s minds turned fervidly from the hard work-days of this world to the Sabbaths of another; from the winter, the wilderness, the privation of New England, to the eternal summer and glory and fruition of the New Jerusalem. How to get there was their care; it was for this that wives and husbands rent themselves asunder, and shared their children with strangers; it was for this that the lover left his love, and the young girl forbade her heart’s yearning; we may be sure that it was zeal for heaven, for the imagined service of God, that built up the Shaker communities.

Their peculiar dress remembers the now quaint days of their origin; it is not a costume invented or assumed by them; it is the American dress of a hundred years ago, as our rustic great-grandparents wore it, with such changes as convenience, not fashion, has suggested to the Shakers since. With all its quaintness it has a charm which equally appears whether it is worn by old or by young. To the old, the modest soberness of the colors, the white kerchief crossed upon the breast, the clean stiff cap, were singularly becoming; and the young had in their simple white Sunday dresses a look of maidenly purity which is after all the finest ornament. The colors we noticed at meeting were for the young mostly white, for the middle-aged and elderly the subdued tints of drab, bronze, and lead-color, which also prevailed with the men of all ages. Both sexes wear collars that cover the whole neck, and both eschew the vanity of neckties; some of the brothers suffered themselves the gayety of showing at the ends of their trousers-legs the brighter selvage of the cloth; if indeed this was a gayety, and not, as one clothed in the world’s taste might have accounted it, an added mortification of the spirit.

The Shakers used to spin and weave all the stuff they wore, but to do this now would be a waste of time; they buy the alpaca and linen which both sexes wear in summer, and their substantial woollens for the winter. Some relics of their former skill and taste remain in the handsome counterpanes in their guest-chambers at the office, which were dyed, spun, and woven in the family, and the sisters are still skilled in braiding palm-leaf hats and in the old-fashioned art of hooking rugs. But I would not persuade the reader that any Shaker family is otherwise a school of art; one painting I did indeed see, a vigorous sketch in oil of a Durham bull, but this was nailed to the side of a stall far up in the vast gray barn. It was the work of a boy who was in the family years ago; but he never became a Shaker. It would be interesting to know what he did become.

In a community it must be that the individual genius is largely sacrificed to the common purpose and tendency, and yet I believe that among the Shakers the sacrifice is compelled only by the private conscience. So it is with regard to everything. On joining the community the new member gives up nothing, and is cautioned against a too early surrender of his property. He wears, so long as he likes, the fashions of the world, but these make him look as odd in the family as the Shaker dress would outside of it, and he is commonly anxious to assume the garb of simplicity before his mundane clothing is worn out. After due time he may give his property to the family; if he ever leaves it, he receives back the principal of his contribution without interest; for his labor he has already received his support. There are no formalities observed when a new brother or sister comes among the Shakers. It is understood that they are to go as freely as they have come; and this provision is recalled, as a rule that works both ways, to the mind of any brother whose room is finally found to be better than his company. But this very rarely happens: in twenty-five years Minister Whiteley had been obliged to dismiss only one undesirable brother.

The whole polity of the family is very simple. Its affairs are conducted by trustees, who hold the property and handle the funds, and to whom any member goes for money to purchase things not provided for the common use. Reasonable requests of this sort are readily allowed; but it is easy to understand how the indulgence of even very simple private tastes adds to the cost of the common living, already enhanced by the decrease of members, and the necessity of keeping in repair the buildings left only partially occupied. There are no longer carpenters, blacksmiths, and shoemakers among the Shakers at Shirley, because their work can be more cheaply performed by the world-outside, and the shops once devoted to these trades now stand empty. The community still has the advantage of buying all provisions and materials at wholesale prices, but I doubt whether the cost of living within it is much less than it is among its uncommunized neighbors. This, however, is an impression for which I have not the figures.

At the head of each family there is an elder and an eldress, to whom all complaints are first addressed, and by whom difficulties are settled. I believe there is also a species of confessional, in which those who desire can confide their repentance and good intentions to the elders. Disputes in which the decision of the elders is not satisfactory are appealed to the ministers, whose mind is final in such matters. Of these ministers there are three, two being sisters; they reside alternate months in Shirley and Harvard, and have completely appointed dwelling-houses in both communities. I could not see that they took a more prominent part in public worship than the elders, and I do not know in what their religious eminence consists, but they are held in peculiar regard by the community.

Of course, nothing like ceremony must be inferred concerning the expression of this regard. They, and all the other brothers and sisters, are addressed by their first names, and it is liked that strangers in addressing the Shakers should be simple and direct, eschewing the forms and titles which could not be accorded in return. The speech of the Shakers is Yea, yea, and Nay, nay (they pronounce the former words yee, yee, for reasons of their own), but it does not otherwise vary from the surrounding Yankee. They are plain and homely in their phrase, but they are very courteous, and it is impossible to know them and not perceive how little politeness consists in the tedious palaver that commonly passes by that name. Their sincerity gives them dignity and repose; it appears that you have but to renounce the world, and you cannot be afraid of it.

I should be sorry to give the notion of a gloomy asceticism in the Shaker life. I saw nothing of this, though I saw self-restraint, discipline, quiet, and heard sober, considered, conscientious speech. They had their jesting, also; and those brothers and sisters who were of a humorous mind seemed all the better liked for their gift of laughing and making laugh. The sum of Shaker asceticism is this: they neither marry nor give in marriage; but this is a good deal. Certain things they would think indecorous rather than wicked, and I do not suppose a Shaker would go twice to the opera bouffe; but such an entertainment as a lecture by our right-hearted humorist, Mark Twain, had been attended by one of the brethren not only without self-reproach, but with great enjoyment. They had also some of them read Mr. Bret Harte’s books without apparent fear of consequences. They are rather strict in the observance of the Sabbath, but not so much, I thought, from conscience as from custom.

Our Shaker friends are sometimes embarrassed by visitors who ask to be shown all over their buildings, forgetting that their houses are private houses; and I cannot promise the curious reader visiting Shirley a repetition of the favors done us, whom the Shakers were good enough to show all of their communal life that one could see. In each village is an edifice known as the Dwelling-House, which is separate from the office and the other buildings. In this are the rooms of the brothers and sisters, the kitchen and dining-room, and a large room for family meetings. The first impression of all is cleanliness, with a suggestion of bareness which is not inconsistent, however, with comfort, and which comes chiefly from the aspect of the unpapered walls, the scrubbed floors hidden only by rugs and strips of carpeting, and the plain, flat finish of the wood-work. Each chamber accommodates two brothers or two sisters, and is appointed with two beds, two rocking-chairs, two wash-stands, and a wood-stove, with abundance of rugs. The rooms of the younger people are above, so that (as was explained to us) if the young sisters, especially, wish to talk after they go to bed, they need not disturb their elders. There were few tokens of personal taste in the arrangement of the rooms; the most decided expression of character was that of the nonagenarian, who required his bed to be made up with a hollow in the middle from top to bottom, which he called his trough, and which he strictly forbade any one to meddle with; that was all he asked of earth after ninety-six years, not to disturb his trough. It seemed right that the simple demand should be indulged.

The dining-room was provided with two large tables, at one of which the brothers sat, and at the other the sisters. The monastic rule of silence at meals is observed, because, as we were told, the confusion would be too great if all talked together. In the kitchen was an immense cook-stove, with every housekeeping convenience; and everywhere opened pantry and store-room doors, with capacious cellars underneath all scoured and scrubbed to the last degree of neatness.

The family ménage is completed by a wash-house and a dairy-house; there is an infirmary, and a shop for women’s work, and under the same roof with the latter, at Shirley, a large school-room, in which the children of the community are taught the usual English branches by Sister Rose. The Shaker village forms a school-district, and their school is under the control of the town committee.

One day, toward the end of our sojourn, the office-sisters asked us to spend an afternoon and take tea with them. After tea we sat down in the office-parlor, and the best singers of the family came in with their music books, and sang those tunes which we had severally liked most. It was all done with the friendliest simplicity, and we could not but be charmed. Most of the singers were young girls, who looked their best in fresh white dresses and fresh gauze caps; and Elder William, Brother Lorenzo, and Brother Thomas were there in Sabbath trim. One song followed another till long after dark, and then there was a little commotion: the married sister of one of the young Shakeresses arrived with her baby to spend the night. She was young and pretty, and was duly tied back, overskirted, and furbelowed, and her little one was arrayed in its finest, when by and by she came into the room where we sat. By some juggle the baby found himself on the knees of one of the brothers, and sat looking up into his weather-beaten face with a kindly embarrassment which the good brother plainly shared, while the white dresses and white caps of the sisters flocked round in worship of that deplorable heir of the Adamic order of life; his mother stood outside of the group with complacently folded hands. Some how the sight was pathetic. If she were right and they wrong, how much of heaven they had lost in renouncing the supreme good of earth!

GNADENHÜTTEN.

I  HOPE that it is something better than an idle love of picturesque and ancient days that prompts me to cast a glimmer of their light on this page, and trace the origin of a poor little Indian village that flourished and fell, beyond the Ohio, ninety years ago, to that remote century, when the Paulician fathers, Chyrillus and Methodius, went out of Constantinople and established Christianity among the heathen of Moravia. The fate of Gnadenhütten is so dolorous in itself that I have no need to borrow pathos of the past; yet I own that its obscure troubles have a peculiar interest to me in their relation to those of a people whose seat was in the world’s most famous places, and whose heroes’ and martyrs’ names are quick in all men’s minds.

The annals of the Moravian Church link in the same chain of sorrows and calamities the burning of Huss at Constance and the murder of the hapless Christian Indians on the Muskingum; and if they cannot make them equal sharers with him in the glory of martyrdom, they declare their death equally magnanimous and saintly, their faith as great, and their spirit the same. It was this spirit, at once zealous and patient, which made the Moravian Church first among the missionary churches, and which early in its history awakened persecution against it. Indeed, the Moravians were scarcely converted to Christianity in 860, when Rome assailed them with all the reasons of popes and kings, and the fagot and sword were constantly employed against people whose bodies at least would have remained much more comfortable if they had continued heathen instead of becoming heretics. Their chances of heaven may have been impaired, in the opinion of their persecutors, if that were possible, when, after two hundred years of suffering, they united with the Waldenses, in Bohemia; but the chances of being burned alive were unquestionably diminished by this union, and there was no more persecution of either sect till Rome began to feel the first movements of the Reformation within herself. The Moravian Church then became especially obnoxious to her, and she determined to uproot that heresy. So it came to the martyrdom of Huss and of Jerome, and of many more unremembered, and at last to the armed resistance of the Moravians under Zisca. When Zisca died, the persecuted people quarrelled among themselves, and divided into the Taborites, who held for a pure Scriptural church, and the Calixtines, who were received into the Roman Church with the promise of certain privileges afterward only partially or never fulfilled; but a part of the Taborites and a body of the Calixtines came together again, and called their new band Unitas Fratrum, and so eagerly devoted themselves to the work of conversion, that the Romish Calixtines stirred up a new persecution. The temporal power refused the United Brethren its protection; their civil rights were forfeited, the prisons were filled with them; they were driven from their homes in midwinter, and reduced to scattered remnants that dwelt in the forests and the uninhabited places, kindling fires only by night, lest the element that saved them from one death should betray them to another yet more cruel. These fugitives finally met together in the wilderness, to the number of seventy, and reaffirmed their fealty to their ancient church, and their preference for the episcopal over the presbyterian constitution. Through the Paulician fathers, first sent to them, and again through their union with the Waldenses, they traced an episcopal succession, hitherto unbroken, up to the apostles themselves; and now, casting lots for such of their number as should receive the succession, they sent these secretly to the Waldensen bishop, Stephen in Austria, who consecrated them.

After Stephen was burnt, many Waldenses united with the Moravians, and, in the midst of persecutions, they re-entered upon their career as a missionary church. They published the Bohemian Bible in 1470, and they multiplied copies of the Scriptures at two printing-offices in Bohemia and one in Moravia.

Luther, after a preliminary quarrel with them about discipline, received a copy of their confession of faith, and acknowledged them worthy of all Christian love, a little before Charles V., declaring them worthy of all Christian hate, because he believed they influenced the Bohemians in their refusal to fight against the Protestant Elector of Saxony, confiscated their property, outlawed their nobles, and racked their bishops. Their sufferings continued throughout the Thirty Years’ War, and at its close the Protestant powers abandoned them to the fury of Austria, who disposed so effectively of their pestilent Bibles and other books, of their churches and their schools, that she might well believe herself to have extirpated them. Their Bishop Comenius, however, escaped to England, where he was received with all affection and respect by the Anglican clergy, and whence he went later to Holland, where he wrote the history of his church. Before he died he caused the ordination of two bishops, and thus transmitted the apostolic succession to the church in our times, through the few Brethren whom that devout man, Count Zinzendorf, found at Fulneck in Bohemia, and invited to a safer and quieter abode on his vast estates at Bertholsdorf. There, in 1722, they founded their famous hamlet of Herrnhut, and established their church once more in the ardor of its zeal and hope.

They were for the most part simple peasant folk and artisans, but they were afterward joined by scholars and people of condition from all parts of Germany. It appears they did not in all cases bear their peace and security with so great dignity as they had borne their sorrows and wrongs. They sometimes fell into silly ecstasies of devotion, and permitted themselves a latitude of metaphor and expression that scandalized the whole Protestant world, — the excellent Protestant world, that had given them up to their mortal enemies, and had endured their calamities with such exemplary fortitude. Zinzendorf was himself an enthusiast, and unwittingly provoked the weaker Brethren to this verbal and sentimental excess, though he was afterwards first and severest in rebuking it, when the clamor rose against it. The offending zealots owned their indecorousness, and sent their apology to the other Protestant churches. Their folly had never passed beyond words; and in the mean time the works of the Moravian community were of a character to win it our profoundest respect, if they did not attract so much contemporary attention.

During the first ten years after their colonization on Count Zinzendorf’s estates, and while not yet numbered but six hundred, the Moravians sent missionaries to all parts of the heathen world, to Greenland, to the West Indies, to Tartary, to Lapland, to Guinea, to the Cape of Good Hope, to Ceylon, and to North America. Their missionaries first landed upon our continent at Savannah in 1735, and attempted the conversion of the neighboring Creeks, but withdrew to Pennsylvania a few years later, and founded their town of Bethlehem, and entered upon their mission to the Delawares. They had afterwards their greatest success with this tribe; but the first Indian community seems to have been formed among the Mohicans at Shekomeko in New York and Pachgatgoch in Connecticut. There the efforts of the Brethren for the conversion and civilization of the Indians affected the whiskey traffic with the savages in a short time to such a degree that nothing but their interruption saved the border from ruin. It was certainly a cruel burlesque of their real character, and of their past, that these poor Moravians should have been accused as Papists; but in this quality they were dragged to and fro for several days about Connecticut, until at last they were brought into the presence of the governor, who promptly liberated them. Yet they could never hope to be free from molestation there: the traders instigated the savages to attempt their lives, and the local religious feeling was averse to their missionary enterprise; while in the Province of New York the intelligent conception that they were French spies gave them as great trouble as their reputed Papistry in Connecticut. The Moravians were non-resistants, and they had conscientious scruples about taking oaths; and the Provincial Assembly passed an act banishing from New York all who refused the oath of allegiance, and forbidding the missionaries to instruct the Indians. They were thus forced to abandon their missions in New York and Connecticut, and retire to Bethlehem, which had already begun to assume that character of spiritual capital still belonging to it among the Moravians. The whites near Shekomeko at once seized upon the lands of the Indian converts; and it is consoling to know that a pious struggle for their souls ensued between the local Christians and the local savages, the former striving to attach the converts to their churches, and the latter to drag them back into heathenism. The savages, however, got nothing at all; and the Christians, nothing but the land; for, after a great deal of suffering and molestation, the converts thought best to follow their teachers to Bethlehem.

The Moravians were now confined in their enterprise to the Province of Pennsylvania, where the precedent of the Friends had already so far depraved public sentiment, that it was possible for them not only to refuse oaths and military service, but to pursue their benevolent efforts among the Indians without incurring so much resentment as in Connecticut and New York.

This, however, was but for a time. Many Scriptural-minded colonists of that day held that the Indians were Canaanities; and many others, who knew enough of God to swear by, interpreted the Divine will to the extinction, not the conversion, of the heathen. The French War broke out, and it appeared certain to all these that people who treated the Indians with love and kindness, whereas God had imposed no duty toward them but the simple and elementary obligation of destruction, must in reason be French spies; while the heathen, on the other hand, took it into their wrong, thick heads that the Moravians must be the foes of their race, and secretly leagued with the English, being of such an inimical color as they were. The savages, therefore, fell upon a Moravian station on the river Mahony, and killed all the Brethren, with their wives and children, whom they found there. This unsettled the colonial mind somewhat concerning their complicity with the French, but did nothing to disabuse it of other prejudices. Some murders committed on the border exasperated the feeling against the converts to such degree that it was judged best by their teachers to abandon their exposed and isolated villages, and place themselves under the protection of the troops at Philadelphia. But when they repaired to the barracks, with the governor’s order for their admission, the soldiers would not let them enter, and they remained a whole night before the gate, exposed to the insults and outrages of the mob that gathered about them, and that threatened to revenge on these helpless folk the crimes and injuries of the savages. They were then sent to Province Island, where they were lodged for some months in comparative safety and comfort; but about the beginning of the year 1764 orders came from the government for their removal to New York, and, very scantily clad, and burdened with their old and sick, they set out on a journey which was attended with exposure not only to the seventy of the winter, but to the contumely of the mobs that followed them in all the stupid and wicked little towns, and assembled to revile them as they passed along their route.

They had not reached the New York frontier, however, when they were met by a messenger from the governor of that Province, forbidding them to cross it; and so they returned upon their weary steps to Philadelphia, where the authorities now succeeded in lodging them in the barracks. For no other reason than that they were Indians, and with scarcely the pretence of any other reason, a mob assembled to destroy them, and nothing but the most prompt and energetic measures on the part of the military and the better citizens saved them. The danger was so great, and the intended outrage so abominable, that even some of the younger Quakers took up arms in defence of a people whose use and creed would not permit them to defend themselves; and indeed the Quakers, throughout the unmerited sufferings of these harmless Indians, were their true and steadfast friends, insomuch that one of them said, Even the sight of a Quaker made him happy. In this, as in other things, the Friends bore witness to the superior civilization of their sect, and to the faithful and generous spirit of their relations with the Indians, at which it has in these days grown easy and cheap to sneer. Next to the drab-coats it was the red-coats that treated the Christian Indians with the greatest tenderness and respect, and in effect protected them against the popular fury, until the end of the war, which came in December, 1764, after they had been under arrest a whole year. They were then set at liberty, the danger from partisans of either side being past; and with greatly enfeebled numbers (fifty-six had died of small pox during the summer) they repaired to a point on the Susquehanna, in what is now Bradford County, and there founded their first considerable town. The Indian name of the place was Wyalusing; but the Moravians, out of their thankful and hopeful hearts, called it Friedenshütten, or Tents of Peace. It is needless to relate at length how their hopes were turned to despair, as the whites encroached upon them, and the traders attempted to make their village a rendezvous whence they might debauch and plunder the neighboring savages. The great blow to their tranquillity and confidence was the sale of the whole region round about them, which was ceded to the English by the Iroquois, in violation of the solemn promises of that truculent and faithless tribe confirming the Christians in the possession of the lands on which they had settled. The Moravians had already extended their operations westward as far as the Ohio, and had a prosperous station on Beaver Creek, and there now came to them, for the third time, messages from the chiefs of the Delawares, inviting them to establish a mission in their country. The Lennilenape, as they called themselves, were then a numerous and powerful people, in alliance with many important tribes, who, having abandoned Pennsylvania, where they were subject to the Iroquois, now inhabited a vast and fertile country about midway between the Ohio River and Lake Erie, and had their principal towns on the Walhonding and Tuscarawas, whose confluence forms the Muskingum. It was from these capitals that the invitation came to the Christians at Friedenshütten, offering them lands and the protection of the Delaware nation, with full and free opportunity to the missionaries of preaching the gospel and introducing the arts of peace. The messages added that the land should never be alienated from them, as it had been at Friedenshütten by the Iroquois; and both teachers and people saw that in this invitation, from one of the mildest and most intelligent of the Indian nations, a great and smiling field of usefulness opened to them, remote alike from the evil influences of the border and the bad faith and secret enmity of the Iroquois. It was true, the governor of Pennsylvania had assured them that they should never be molested in the tenure of their lands, and had forbidden the survey of any territory within five miles of their villages on the Susquehanna; but their experience of the colonists had taught them to distrust, not the good will, but the strength of their authorities. Still less were the Moravians disposed to listen to the remonstrances and repentant prayers of the Iroquois, who now besought them not to abandon their country. They heard the Delaware embassy with favor, and sent out to Ohio David Zeisberger, their leading missionary, and five Indian families to look at the land offered them; and these arriving on the Tuscarawas made choice of a tract which, when they described it to the Delaware chiefs, proved to be the very land destined to them by the nation.

The pioneers found the soil of their allotted domain excellent, and the game abundant in the forest, and with well-contented hearts they built themselves cabins, and laid out their peaceful city on the site of an old Indian town, long since deserted and falling to decay. Ramparts and other traces of ancient fortification were still visible beside the small lake where the gentle Moravian and his followers planned their home, and from the heart of the ruin burst forth that beautiful spring for which he named their city, Schönbrunn. All round them stood the primeval, many-centuried woods; the river, never vexed by keel, flowed beside them from solitude to solitude; even the lodges of their savage hosts and benefactors were a day’s journey out of sight.

It was in April, 1772, and in the summer of the same year the whole community of Friedenshütten abandoned their houses and farms, and departed on their long pilgrimage through the wilderness, to seek the country given them beside the Muskingum; and though their historians set down

“The short and simple annals of the poor”

in terms something of the driest, yet an irrepressible pathos communicates itself to the reader as these writers tell how they all left their beloved village on the Wyalusing to the malice of men and elements, and trusted themselves to the promise of the desert. At Friedenshütten they had dwelt seven happy, prosperous years, which they had employed so well that their town wore a substantial and smiling aspect, with its great street eighty feet wide, and its lines of pretty cottages,— “built of squared pine logs,” and flanked by gardens, — radiating from the spacious chapel in the midst; while around it on every hand rippled their yellow wheat, and the broad acres of bladed corn spread their serried ranks. The green fruit mantled to ripeness in their generous orchards, and all the flattery of harvest was in the landscape from which this poor little people turned their heavy eyes.

They must, of course, leave the greater part of their substance, but such things as were most necessary or most portable they carried with them, and departed a heavily laden train, bearing each one his burden, and all driving their well-freighted horses and their flocks and herds before them. Hundreds of miles of unbroken wilderness stretched between Friedenshütten and the land of promise; and their path was beset, not only by the sylvan beasts, but by the wild brethren of the new Christians. The converts had all the toils and fatigues of the pilgrimage to bear, and they must have often found a potent fascination in the desert, where the wildness without allured the wildness within them, and pleaded eloquently for their return to the allegiance of the woods. But they none of them faltered in obedience to the pious and humble teachers who led them, neither for love of the desert if it beguiled, nor for fear of the drunken savages, who sometimes molested their march.

The pilgrims were far from suffering from hunger, for they killed a hundred deer upon their journey; but their course was through tangled depths of woodland and morass, across floods, and over mountains, and their steps were always in peril of rattlesnakes, which infested the wilderness in great numbers. Those who journeyed by land fared not more painfully and slowly than others of the brethren who descended the rivers towards the Ohio in heavily laden canoes, and over the long portages or beside the shrinking streams carried craft and freight alike upon their shoulders.

Heckewelder, who tells us this much, tells little of all that it would now be so interesting to know of this strange pilgrimage, nor do other Moravian writers, except in a dry and general way, touch upon its events, at best vaguely sketching a picture which the reader’s fancy must fill up. Their thoughts are doubtless upon the things of which these wanderings were but the shadow and symbol; yet here and there a touch illumines the whole with a vivid and purely human interest. Such a one shows us a certain poor mother, who took her crippled son upon her shoulder, and so set out from Friedenshütten with the rest, and bore him many and many days’ journey through the desert. Sickness appeared among the pilgrims, and some of the little ones drooped and died; and that which shall one day ease us all of our burdens, whether they console or whether they oppress us, drew softly near the crippled boy. Day after day the poor mother found the load upon her shoulder grow lighter, and that within her breast heavier and heavier, as if the burden were shifted, till at last those walking at her side saw by his white lips and shrinking visage that the hand of death had touched the child. The cripple, between signs and sounds, made them understand that he desired baptism before he died, and, tenderly lifting him from his mother’s shoulder, they consecrated him by the ancient rites of that church of the poor and martyrs. So he died; and the mother mixed again with the rest, and we know her thenceforth only as part of the sorrow of her people.

In fact, the history of Gnadenhütten follows with certainty few individual fortunes; but its chroniclers, who touch upon no others in that march, tell us how every night, when the foot sore and failing train halted after their long day’s journey, they built a great fire in the midst of their camp, and, as around an altar, raised their voices in hymns of praise and thanksgiving. It may be that, at these times, when the echoes of the songs died away in distant solitudes, the teacher who led them sought to give his wild flock such ideas as they might grasp of their church’s past, and recounted her history to those who were keeping unbroken here, in another race and remote deserts, the long succession of her martyrs. Fancy may have her will as to what strange images of imperial Levantine and lordly German cities, of Byzantium, of Vienna, of Prague, and of the embattled life of those far-off lands, arose before the wondering eyes of these children of the forest, as the story ran; for not one of their kindred survives in any generation to refute her, but all have entered upon their inheritance.

On the 23d of August, 1772, the pilgrimage came to an end, and beside the Muskingum the wanderers kindled their great camp-fire, and for the last time gathered about it to utter the common gratitude in songs and prayers. On the morrow they arose and began their guiltless warfare with the wilderness.

The good Moravians who had led them hither had no grand or novel ideas of a state, and perhaps their success in civilizing the Indians was largely due to the fact that they formed for them no high civic ideal, but seem to have made them as like German peasant-folk as they could where neither Kaisers devoured them in wars nor lords in peace, and where the intermittent persecutions of their white and red brethren could have but poorly represented the continual oppressions of Fatherland. They taught their communities to sow and reap, they instructed them in humble and useful trades; they inculcated the simple policy of thrift, the humble virtues of meekness and obedience. But if the political ideal of the Moravians was lowly, their religious ideal and their discipline was lofty and severe, — so severe, indeed, that it had in time of great peril and necessity barred their union even with the early Lutherans. They had sought these lately savage men, not with the awful prophets of doom, and the sword of the Lord sharpened against them, nor had they come among them as the equally zealous and devoted Jesuits did, to take their imaginations with the picturesque splendors of ritual. The ardent faith of the Hussites and the meek goodness of Herrnhut were the arms with which they surprised these wild, wily hearts, and conquered them for heaven, making their converts lay down the savage, not in creed only, but in life also, and put on the Christian with all the hard conditions of forgiveness to enemies, of peace, and of continual labor. Never since Eliot preached to the Indians in New England had efforts so sincere and so fortunate been made for their conversion, and never had civilization been so strictly united with conversion. For once the unhappy race, whom romance has caressed, and sentiment has weakly compassionated, but from whom our prudent justice has always averted its face, was here taken by the strong hand of love and lifted to the white man’s level, and saved for earth as well as for heaven. It appears that the converts yielded an implicit submission to the advice and laws of the Moravians, who assumed no superiority over them, who married among them, and who shared equally with them in their toils and privations.

Chief among these teachers was the brave, steadfast, and pious David Zeisberger, a learned and diligent man, and an apostle of zeal and love not less than Eliot’s. He was born in Moravia, but his early life was passed at Herrnhut, whither his parents repaired at Zinzendorf’s invitation; and he was eighty-seven years old when he died, in 1808. Of these years he had spent sixty-two in unceasing labors among the Indians, without reward save such as came to him through the sense of good work well done; for he always refused to “become a hireling,” and never took pay for his missionary services. He was the author of a German and of an English grammar of the Onondaga language, and a dictionary in that tongue containing near two thousand pages, as well as a Delaware grammar and spelling-book; he was translator of innumerable hymns and sermons for the use of the Indian congregations; and he was well versed in different native dialects. He was a man of simple and abstemious life, of a most benevolent heart, and a courageous and undaunted temper. We need not refuse to know that “he was of small stature, with a cheerful countenance,” that “his words were few, and never known to be wasted at random or in an unprofitable manner.”

The Rev. John Heckewelder, who imparts these facts, was himself only second to Zeisberger in the length and ardor of his labors among the Indians. He was born of Moravian parents in England, but came to this country when a young man, and spent nearly his whole life in the companionship of Zeisberger, and in the work which engaged him. He left a daughter, born in one of the Indian villages on the Tuscarawas, who survived until last September at Bethlehem; and he bequeathed to our literature a work on the history, character, and customs of some tribes of the North American Indians, which was received with great favor and great disgust by differing North American Reviewers of other days. I have here availed myself freely of his Narrative, the statements of which there is no reason to doubt, whatever may be thought of his philosophy of Indian life. He and Zeisberger arrived among the first in the Muskingum country in 1772, and continued there throughout ten years of its occupation by the Christians, being later joined by Brothers Edwards, Sensemann, and Jungmann, and others.

The Christian Indians who appeared on the banks of the Tuscarawas in 1772, and who built Schönbrunn, were two hundred and forty-one in number; a little later came a congregation of Mohicans, and on the same river, some miles to the southward, founded the village which gives my history its great tragic interest, and which they named Tents of Grace, or Gnadenhütten. In 1776 Zeisberger and Heckewelder, at the prayer of the Delaware chiefs, laid out a third village, which they called Lichtenau, near the heathen town of Goschocking, and stationed a Missionary there, that the wives and children of these chiefs might hear the preaching of the Christian faith. All these communities now prospered and grew in the likeness of civilization exceeding that of any of the border settlements. It was yet ten years before the first white man had fixed his place west of the Ohio; a few hunters held Kentucky against the Indians north of the river, and sustained with that region the primitive relations of horse-stealing and scalping; in Virginia, the frail and lonely settlements creeping westward made friends with the desert and produced a population nearly as wild as its elder children and quite as fierce and truculent. In the mean time the old-world peasant-thrift and industry, moving the quick and willing hands of the new Christians, made those shores of the Muskingum glad with fields and gardens. The villages were all regularly laid out and solidly built upon nearly the same plan. The chapel stood in the midst, and the streets, branching away from it to the four quarters, were wide and kept scrupulously clean, and cattle were forbidden to run at large in the public ways. The houses of the people were the log-cabins common to all pioneers in the West; but they were built upon foundations of stone, and neatly constructed within and without, and their grounds were prettily fenced with palings. The chapels, for their greater honor and distinction, were built, not of the ordinary trunks of trees, but of logs squared and smooth-hewn, and they had shingle roofs, and were surmounted with belfries, from which the voice of evening and of Sabbath bells floated out over the happy homes, and took the heathenish heart of the wilderness beyond.

The people were for the most part farmers, but some exercised mechanical trades. There was neither poverty nor wealth in the state, but all lived in abundance upon the crops that the generous acres yielded them, and the increase of their flocks and herds; and at a time when none but the rudest fare was known to their Virginian neighbors, any of them could set before the guest who asked their hospitality a meal’s victuals (as Heckewelder quaintly phrases it) of good bread, meat, butter, cheese, milk, tea and coffee, and chocolate, with such fruits and vegetables as the season afforded. They dressed decorously, and not after that heathen fashion which took the fancy of the younger of the white settlers; the men wore their hair like Christians, not shaving it as the savages did, nor decorating their heads and faces with feathers and paint in their vain manner; and the women doubtless wore the demure caps and linen fillets, which it is said the good Count Zinzendorf once passed a sleepless night in contriving for the Moravian sisterhood.

The government of the villages was akin in form and spirit to that of all other Moravian communities. By an ancient usage of the church in Bohemia and Moravia, each minister received under his roof and into his family two or three acolytes or assistants, whom he educated in certain offices of piety and religion, such as visiting the sick, catechizing the young, and caring generally for the moral welfare of the people. When the church was revived at Herrnhut, the minister ceased to receive the acolytes into his family; but they still continued a part of the social and religious government, and in all the missions of the Brethren, being chosen from among the converts, they were particularly useful and active. They were of either sex, the men being charged to oversee the Brethren, and the women, who must always, according to the Discipline, be “respectable, prudent, and grave matrons,” having particular care for the helplessness of widows, and the innocence of young maidens. They were never ordained, but they gave their right hands to the Elders as a pledge that they would be faithful in duty. In the Muskingum towns, the authority rested in a council composed of these acolytes and of the missionaries, subject to the mission-board at Bethlehem, and this council enacted the laws under which the people lived. Heckewelder gives the substance of their laws, which were eminently practical in most things, and were remarkable, as will be seen, for embodying some principles of legislation supposed to be entirely the fruit of modern reform. These enactments, which were accepted by the whole congregation at Schönbrunn, and applied afterwards to all the other towns, declared that God only should be worshipped among them, that the Sabbath should be hallowed, and that parents should be honored, and supported in helplessness and age. It was made unlawful for any convert to be received without the consent of the teachers; and neither adulterers, drunkards, thieves, nor those that took part in the feasts, dances, or sacrifices of the heathen, were suffered to remain in the Christian towns. The people renounced “all juggles, lies, and deceits of Satan,” affirmed their will to obey the teachers and acolytes, and to live peaceably together, and not to be idle or untruthful in anything. None should strike another; but if any were injured in person or property, the wrong-doer should make just atonement. “A man,” the statutes continue, “shall have but one wife, love her, and provide for her and the children,” and she shall be obedient to him, take care of the children, “and be cleanly in all things.” The young were forbidden to marry without their parents’ permission; and no one might go on a long hunt or journey without first informing the teachers or assistants. All persons were enjoined not to contract debts with traders, and none could receive goods to sell for them without leave of the council; all should contribute cheerfully of labor and substance to the public work of building school-houses and churches, and other enterprises of the community. There was a law, also, forbidding the converts to use witchcraft or sorcery in hunting, as the heathen did, the Moravians esteeming it perhaps wicked, or perhaps only a foolish and unbecoming thing for Christians; and among these Indians the first prohibitory liquor law was rigorously enforced. They allowed no intoxicating drink to be brought within their borders; and if strangers or traders chanced to have such drink with them, the acolytes took it in charge, and delivered it to them only on their departure. Some time after the adoption of these rules, when the Revolutionary War broke out, and a war-party sprang up among the Delawares, the native assistants, of their own motion, enacted that “no one inclining to go to war, which is the shedding of blood,” or that gave encouragement to theft and murder by purchasing stolen goods of warriors, could remain among them.

Offenders against any of the laws were first admonished, and, upon repeated offence, sent out of the towns.

The reader must have noted how little these stern and simple enactments flattered any savage instinct. Under them, a people fiercely free became meek and obedient, changed their wild unchastity and loose marital relations for Christian purity and wedlock; left their indolence for continual toil; learned to forego revenge, and to withhold the angry word and hand; eschewed the delights and deliriums of drunkenness; and, above all, in a time and country where all men, red and white alike, seemed born to massacre and rapine, set their faces steadfastly against war, and did no murder. The success of the good men who effected this change seems like a poet’s dream, in view of what we know of Indian life; and it must indeed have been a potent bond of love which so united their converts to them that the order of the villages was only once disturbed from within, and was then restored by the penitent return to the church of those who had been seduced by the heathen. Doubtless the hold of the Moravians upon the Indians was strengthened by those ties of marriage and adoption which they formed with them; but, after all, their marvellous triumph was due to the fact that their efforts were addressed to the reason of the savages, and to humanity’s inherent sense of goodness and justice. I confess that this alone interests me in the history of Gnadenhütten, and lifts its event out of the order of calamities into a tragedy of the saddest significance. Not as Indians, but as men responding faithfully and sincerely to the appeals of civilization and Christianity, and reflecting in their lives a far truer image of either than their destroyers, its people have a claim to sympathy and compassionate remembrance which none can deny.

In spite of many vexatious disturbances from the incessant border frays, the prosperity and happiness of the Christian towns were so great that their fame spread throughout the whole Indian country, and the heathen came from far and near to look with their own eyes upon the marvel. They lost their savage calm when they beheld these flourishing villages peopled by men of their kindred and color, each dwelling in his own house with his wife and little ones in peace and security, and in such abundance as the wilderness never gave her children. They saw with amazement the spreading fields, and all the evidences of thrift and comfort afforded by flocks and herds, and the free hospitality which welcomed them as guests, and feasted them as long as they cared to linger; and though they doubtless regarded with grave misgiving those points of the Moravian system which required men who would naturally have been naked and idle braves to clothe themselves like white men, and go unpainted and industriously about women’s work of tilling the earth, and which, teaching them how to use the axe and saw and hammer, left them unskilled in the nobler arts of tomahawking and scalping, yet they could not deny that the whole result was exceedingly comfortable and pleasant. They shook their heads, and murmured gloomily over the contrast their own state presented to that of the Christians; and they loudly blamed their chiefs for not listening to the preachers. It was not strange that the Moravians should conceive hopes of converting the whole Delaware nation, both from the effect of their people’s visible prosperity upon the imagination of the savages and from more substantial facts. Converts were made in such numbers that it became necessary to build new and larger chapels at Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten; while, in a council of the whole Delaware nation, it was determined that the Christian Indians and their teachers should enjoy throughout their country equal rights and liberties with other Indians, and that, while all should be free to listen to the doctrine of the missionaries, no heathen Indians should be permitted to settle in the neighborhood of the Christian towns or in any wise disturb them. The Moravians had exacted a pledge of neutrality from the Delawares in the wars between the whites and Indians; in 1776, when the war of our Revolution began, they stood firm upon the maintenance of this pledge; and in the national council it was determined to keep faith with them. Schools for the children were maintained in the villages, and instruction was given from elementary books prepared by Zeisberger; and the religious activity of the ministers never ceased.

In the midst, however, of these happy and successful labors, the storm which was gathering to the eastward burst upon the whole country, and at last involved the Christian communities in ruin.

There had never been peace between the white settlers and the other Indian tribes, and now, at the outbreak of hostilities between the Colonies and England, the Delaware borders burned with warfare, the rumor of which beset the timid Moravian flocks with terror. In spite of the protection of the Delawares, they trembled at the threats of the tribes that accused them of secret alliance with the Americans; and they were especially afraid of the Monseys, — once a truculent and bloodthirsty people, but now extinct as the Spartans, — and, alarmed at the advance of a Monsey war party upon Schönbrunn, they abandoned that village and fled to Gnadenhütten, first taking care to destroy their beloved chapel, lest it should be desecrated by heathen powwows and dances. But the Monseys passed harmless by Schönbrunn, and in three days the Christians came back; though they finally abandoned the place, and drew nearer the Delaware capital of Goschocking, in Lichtenau. Here, with the fugitives from Gnadenhütten, which had been in like manner abandoned, they enlarged the chapel, and pushed forward their work of conversion and civilization. In time they returned to the deserted villages, and rebuilt Schönbrunn, which had been destroyed; but as new dangers threatened, and the Delawares seemed about to swerve from their neutrality, even Lichtenau was vacated, and the united congregations founded a new town, which they called Salem. Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten were still inhabited; and the converts continued obedient to their teachers; laboring as their wont was, and enjoying seasons of prosperity and happiness with longer and longer intervals of disturbance. The war parties of the Wyandots had free passage to and from Virginia through the Delaware country, and the pioneers made their avenging forays over the same ground; the Christian villages were thus overrun by warlike guests, to whom they dared not deny their hospitality, and they came to be regarded with an evil eye by either side. The pioneers especially complained that they fed and comforted the murderous bands that preyed upon the borders, and desolated them with warfare as pitiless and indiscriminate as that waged by themselves, and forgot that the Moravians, claiming from the Indians a right earned by their hospitality, saved from blows and death the unhappy captives who were carried through their country, and when it was possible ransomed them, and sent them back to their friends. Indeed, according to the American and Moravian annalists alike, the Missionaries frequently forewarned the settlements of Indian forays, — not as spies in our interest, but as good men abhorring the cruelties of savage warfare, and anxious to avert its atrocities from helpless women and children. The authorities on either side recognized the vast advantage gained to the American cause by the neutrality in which they held the Delawares and the allies of that nation. At the most disastrous period of our Revolution, this neutrality was observed by a body of ten thousand warriors, whom the British vainly endeavored to incite against us, and it was not broken till the great contest had been virtually decided in our favor. President Reed of Philadelphia, in a letter to Zeisberger, thanked “him in the name of the whole country for his services among the Indians, particularly for his Christian humanity in turning back so many war parties on their way to rapine and massacres;” and there is no doubt of the merciful and beneficent attitude held toward us by a people afterwards requited with such murderous wrong.

It had been the custom of some of the settlers to steal the horses of the Brethren, and the entire population of the border seems to have inherited that stupid hatred which everywhere attended the enterprises of the Moravians. Sometimes large bodies of pioneers, bent upon errands of theft and murder among the hostile Indians, would pass through the Christian country. Such a body once halted at Salem and asked provision; and then, while the greater part remained with their commandant, who was conversing with Heckewelder and assuring him of his respect for the Brethren, and his confidence in their neutrality, certain of the men stole away to destroy the other villages, and could scarcely be restrained from that purpose by their leader, to whom knowledge of it was happily brought in time.

On the other hand, the war parties of the Wyandots grew more and more insolent and exacting. They appeared in larger numbers and with greater appetites, and the hospitality offered them came to be a very oppressive tribute, which they occasionally acknowledged by threatening the lives of the teachers, whom they had often plotted to carry off to the English commandant at Detroit.

During the long summer months the Christian territory was infested by these unwelcome guests. It was a grateful relief, therefore, that the winter brought the teachers and elders, when the last party of warriors, in their paint and savage panoply, marched down the peaceful streets, chanting their melancholy farewell song, and doubtless taking some hearts among their civilized kindred; for here and there a young girl must have melted to look on their splendor, here and there a boy’s heart leaped with delight in those free wild men; and even in some of the Brethren tempting memories of other days, when they, too, had trodden the war-path, may have been stirred by these sylvan notes. But the wives and mothers all rejoiced with the Moravians, when the distance hid the nodding plumes, and the last echo let the farewell song die. A profound peace fell upon the solitudes with the falling snow; for even if the woods had not now become impassable to the warriors, the drifts would have betrayed their steps beyond hope of concealment, and pursuit and vengeance would have too surely attended any raid upon the white settlements. And now, life in the Muskingum villages lapsed into a tranquillity broken only by the advent from the forest of some poor heathen, on whom the words of the ministers had wrought, and who came at last, with prayers and tears, entreating to be received into the brotherhood of the Christians. It was the season of social enjoyment, and the people, released from the labor of their farms, paid friendly visits between village and village, and from house to house, or all met in their chapels to celebrate those Love-Feasts, by which their church remembered the earliest Christians, — eating and drinking together, and joining in worship. It was also the time of in-doors industry; the loom clattered at the window, and the wheel murmured beside the hearth much the same music that the children made over Father Zeisberger’s spelling-books in the well-ordered schools. No sound but that of the chapel bell broke upon these homely harmonies, save when some peaceful soul departed to its inheritance, and the people, according to the Moravian fashion, hailed its release from earthly tribulations with the jubilant sound of horns and clarionets, continuing their solemn exultation while the bearers of the dead carried their burden through the street to the house where it was prepared for burial. The winter was the great harvest of the missionaries, and they wrought zealously in their pious work, animating those who had grown cold, and call ing the unconverted to repentance. The churches grew in numbers and activity; and it must have been with something like a pang that the Moravians and their assistants saw the buds beginning to swell upon the naked boughs, and found the first violet in the woods.

All was changed with the return of spring, and with the renewal of every year the dangers of their people increased.

Most of the allies of the Delawares had at last joined in the war against the Americans, and there had grown up among the Delawares themselves a hostile faction, which constantly increased. The leaders of this party perceived that nothing but the presence of the Christian Indians hindered them from dragging the whole nation into the war, and all their efforts were bent to their removal. The commandant of the Americans at Pittsburg was also perfectly sensible of this fact. He seems to have been one of those humane, enlightened, and faithful soldiers who have been only too rarely intrusted with the control of our Indian relations, and the Delawares held him in the greatest love and honor. When they applied to him for advice, he counselled them to treat the wards of their nation with favor and kindness; and we may well believe, from the report of the missionaries, and from concurrent facts, that something better than mere policy prompted this advice. But his friendship in the end furnished the war Delawares with an accusation against the Moravians, and determined the English commandant before whom it was made to remove the Christians from the Muskingum. The letters from Pittsburg to the nation were craftily carried to the missionaries to be read and answered. They could not refuse this service, but they rendered it sorely against their will, for they feared that it would bring upon them the charge of alliance with the Americans and unfaithfulness to their neutrality, as indeed finally happened. When the missionaries confronted their chief accuser before the English commandant, the savage with deep grief and shame owned his fraud and declared them wholly innocent; but in the mean time the ruin of the villages had been compassed.

All the events leading to the final disaster are pathetic enough in themselves, and fantastic enough in their travesty of the fatalities by which greater states have fallen. A little wicked diplomacy, a great deal of ineffectual persuasion, appeals to the common sense of danger answered by a few weak souls, and a coup de main at last accomplished the purposes of the Indians against the Brethren. The war faction amongst the Delawares had already fruitlessly urged the Moravians to remove to the Miami country, when, on the 10th of August, 1781, a chieftain of the Hurons called the Half-King appeared in Salem at the head of a hundred and forty armed men, flying the Cross of St. George, and accompanied by Captain Elliott and a trader named McCormick. It does not appear certain that these Englishmen were regularly in the king’s service, but on this occasion they gave his authority to the whole transaction, and the Half-King and his warriors acted under the direction of Elliott, who was deputed to this service by the governor of Detroit. They marched down the startled village street, and, after a halt on the borders of the place, passed on to Gnadenhütten, where their number was increased to three hundred by the arrival of Monseys and war Delawares. A week of riot and debauchery in the heathen camp celebrated these preliminary steps, but no acts of violence were committed against the Brethren; and, as soon as his followers had recovered from their drunken stupor, the Half-King, in full council, urged the converts to abandon a place where they were in continual peril from the Virginians, and to place themselves under the protection of the British at Sandusky. Being answered by the assistants that they were at peace with all men, and had no fear of the Virginians, and that, moreover, they were too heavy with substance to think of leaving their present homes, and must in any case delay giving a final answer till spring, the Half-King and his men declared themselves satisfied, and, as a clear expression of their minds, fired upon the British colors. Loskiel and Heckewelder dwell with sad unction upon the events which we need only allude to, telling us with much circumstance how Elliott now turned to evil account the departure of two of the Brethren to Pittsburg, whither they went to inform the commandant of their affairs, and to beg that he would not interfere, lest he should thereby confirm the Indians in their suspicions; how the warriors, incensed by Elliott’s report that the Virginians were marching to the rescue of the Brethren, shot down their cattle and threatened their teachers; how the savage politicians tampered with the weaker converts, alluring them with pleasant pictures of the Sandusky country, and terrifying them with the fate that awaited them if they remained on the Muskingum; and how about one tenth of the Christians were brought to favor removal, and some were unhappy enough to give the hint upon which the savages afterwards acted, saying, “We look to our teachers; what they do, we likewise will do!”

By this time all the villages were in the utmost confusion; and at Gnadenhütten the women and children were in terror of their lives; many of the houses were sacked, and the cattle which had been shot down in the streets and fields sent up an intolerable stench. Well might Zeisberger write to Heckewelder: “It has the appearance as if Satan is again about to make himself merry by troubling and persecuting us. No wonder he grows angry when he sees how many of his subjects he loses by our preaching the gospel. His roaring, however, must not frighten us; we have a heavenly Father, without whose will he dare not touch us. Let us rely on Him who so often has delivered us from his machinations.” In the midst of these sorrows and troubles this good man meekly gathered his flock about him at Gnadenhütten, and preached to them for the last time in the beloved chapel, while enemies compassed them about; giving “a most emphatic discourse,” says Heckewelder, “on the great love of God to man,” and charging them in no event to place themselves “on a level with the heathen by making use of weapons” for their defence.

Soon after, the heathen, having received a repetition of the answer originally made them by the Christians, when they urged the removal of the latter, resolved to seize upon the missionaries, and compel their followers to abandon the Muskingum country. Their capture was easily effected, for they made no effort to escape, and the fears of the savages that the Brethren would attempt their rescue were idle. They patiently submitted to the outrage and insult offered them by the Monseys into whose hands they fell, and who, having stripped them of nearly all their clothing, carried them prisoners before Captain Elliott. The Englishman, who seems to have undertaken the expedition chiefly through a desire to profit by the distress and necessities of the Brethren, and who was particularly bent upon buying their cattle for a trifling sum to sell again at a great price in Detroit, had the grace to express some shame when these harmless men were brought maltreated and almost naked into his presence; but he did nothing to relieve them; indeed, he speculated in the clothing of which the savages had plundered their houses, and they were kept from bodily suffering only by the compassion of some of the heathen, who gave back part of their stolen gear, and the Brethren who brought them blankets. Their calamity was not the less real because it took at this and other times the face of comedy. Heckewelder’s coat, restored to him without the skirts, and worn in that amusing state of mutilation, covered an aching heart, and the fortune that similarly made a jest of his associates, not the less afflicted them with anguish for the wreck of their just and good hopes, for the unhappiness of their people, and for the cruel state of their families: for their wives and children had likewise been seized by the heathen, and Sister Sensemann was driven from one village to another, with her babe four days old in her arms. As to their treatment by the warriors, in whose camp they were confined, “What incommoded us most,” says Heckewelder, with a quaint pathos, “was their custom of repeating the scalp yell so often for each of their prisoners during the night, as well as in the daytime; but this is a general custom with them, and is continued until the prisoner is liberated or killed. Another very incommoding custom they have is that of performing their war dances and songs during the night near their prisoners, — all which we had to endure, exclusive of being thereby prevented from enjoying sleep. Otherwise the addresses paid us by a jovial and probably harmless Ottawa Indian, who, having obtained of the Wyandot warriors sufficient of our clothes to dress himself as a white man, and placing a white nightcap on his head, being mounted on a horse, would ride through the camps, nodding to us each time he passed, caused much amusement through the camp, and in some measure to us also.” The men to whom this moderate diversion was offered had already been entertained by threats against their lives, and were at the moment of the Ottawa’s pleasantries perhaps sufficiently amused in guessing what fate was reserved for them. They were very glad to be released at last on their promise (exacted by Elliott’s command) that they would no longer resist the will of their captors, but would prepare at once to go with them to Sandusky. It was hard to persuade the Brethren that they were indeed to abandon their homes; and the missionaries had to call them, not only from the labors of the field, but from their efforts to repair the damages done by the warriors to their gardens and houses; and of one it is related that he was summoned to the general meeting at Salem, away from the new cottage on which he had just put the last touches of loving industry. But they all obeyed the appeals of their teachers, and on the 9th of September assembled from Gnadenhütten and Schönbrunn at Salem, where for the last time the three congregations met together in worship. “A most extraordinary sensation of the presence of the Lord comforted their hearts,” says Heckewelder; the gospel was preached, the holy sacrament was administered to the communicants, and, even in this hour of earthly extremity, a convert was baptized.

The Christians were in the mean time guarded by a body of the hostile Delawares. Many of these attended the service, which was in their tongue, and all treated the congregations with perfect decorum and respect; but on the next day the Half-King and his followers arrived, and renewed at Salem the scenes of rapine and devastation already enacted at Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten. Then the teachers besought their captors to delay no longer, and on the third day, which was the 11th of September, the Brethren turned their faces from the valley of the Muskingum.

“Never,” says Heckewelder, “did the Christian Indians leave a country with more regret;” and he and his brother annalists, Holmes and Loskiel, briefly relate the losses the Brethren underwent, most of all lamenting the destruction of the writings and records of the little state, of the books of instruction and worship prepared with so much pains and labor for the converts and children, and now heaped into the streets and burned by the Wyandots, as a century before the Bibles of the Moravians were burnt by the Austrians. The total loss of the Christians is computed at twelve thousand dollars, — a great sum for that rude time and country and that humble people. The Wyandots had destroyed six hundred head of swine and cattle, and hundreds of young cattle had wandered into the woods. The crops of the last year were left in the garners; and three hundred acres of corn, ripe for harvest, nodded in the September sunshine, as the captives looked their last upon their beloved villages.

At Sandusky the Brethren halted and prepared to pass the winter; while their teachers were carried on to Detroit, where they confronted their accusers before the English governor, and were honorably acquitted. The season was very cold, and the miserable people, assembled on the bleak Sandusky shores without proper food and shelter, suffered greatly, and many little children died of cold and famine; but our story follows the fate only of those who from time to time stole back to the Muskingum, and gathered the corn yet standing in the fields for the rescue of the starving Brethren.

In March, 1782, a larger party than usual arrived at the deserted villages and began their belated harvest. Great number of these were women and children, and the men bore only such arms as served them in hunting. Even if their bloodless creed had permitted them to guard against the attacks of enemies, they would not have prepared to defend themselves in a region now abandoned by hostile Indians, and lying near the settlements of the whites whom they had so often befriended; for it was the firm belief of these ill-starred people that they had only to fear savages of their own race, and that they were all the safer for their proximity to the Americans. They worked eagerly and diligently, gathering the corn, and securing it in sacks for removal to Sandusky, and it would scarcely have alarmed them to know that Virginian spies had noted their presence and reported it in the settlements.

But on the border deadly influences were operating against them. In February, a party of Indians from Sandusky had fallen upon a lonely cabin, and had murdered all its inmates, with facts of peculiar atrocity. Earlier in the winter, a number of the Christians had been taken, while gathering corn on the Muskingum, and sent to Fort Pitt, where they were promptly liberated by the commandant. It was the public sentiment of the border, that these captives ought to have been killed, religiously as Canaanites and politically as Indians; and there was a very bitter feeling against their liberator, ex tending to Colonel Williamson, who had taken the prisoners and might have butchered them on the spot, instead of sending them to Fort Pitt. Williamson had been the most popular man in the backwoods, and he was deeply hurt by the reproach his clemency had brought upon him. He was, according to the testimony of the annalist who most severely condemns the Gnadenhütten massacre, “a brave man, but not cruel. He would meet an enemy in battle, and fight like a soldier, but not murder a prisoner.” Out of these evil elements — bigotry, lust of vengeance, and a generous but weak man’s shame — was shaped the calamity of the Christian Indians. As soon as it was noised through the settlements of Western Virginia and Pennsylvania that a large body of the converts had returned to the Muskingum, a band of a hundred and sixty pioneers hastily assembled, and, under the lead of Colonel Williamson, who burned to wipe out the stain of his former pity, advanced upon the deserted villages with the avowed purpose of putting the Indians to death. We must record, upon the unquestionable authority given below, that these murderers were not vagabonds or miscreants, but in many cases people of the first social rank in the settlements; and perhaps we ought to respect them as vigorous and original thinkers, whose ideas of an Indian policy still largely inspire us.

They hastily organized, and then pushed forward with an eagerness in their purpose which defied all attempts at order and discipline, if any were made. Their advance was not that of a military expedition, but consciously and evidently that of a band of robbers and cut-throats, descending upon victims from whom they expected no resistance. And throughout the whole transaction, as if their deed were to have the lustre of no virtue, they behaved with infamous cowardice as well as treachery.

It is pitiful to think of the blind trust and security in which their victims awaited them. The commandant at Fort Pitt, hearing of the expedition and its object, sent a messenger to warn the Christians of their peril, but he unhappily arrived too late. Yet they were not wholly taken unawares. Information of the approach of Williamson’s men had reached them through another channel; but they quietly continued their labors, unable to believe that any harm was meant them; and the murderers found them in the fields at work.

In fact, they had almost completed their harvest, and they were preparing for an early departure when the whites appeared in their midst at Gnadenhütten. The first innocent life had been taken, and the hands extended in friendship to the Brethren were already stained with the blood of one of their number. About a mile from the village the whites found a half-breed boy, the son of the missionary Schebosch and his Indian wife, and, giving him a peaceful greeting, they approached and killed him with their tomahawks, he crying out between their blows that his father was a white man, and imploring them to spare him. To the main body of the Christians whom they found in the cornfields they now declared that they had come to remove them to Fort Pitt, where they would be safe from dangers that menaced them as the friends of the Americans, at the same time taking care to secure their rifles, lest in their extremity these helpless people should be tempted to make some effort at self-defence. The Brethren thanked them for their kindness, and mingled freely with their captors, who walked about among them, “engaging them in friendly conversation,” asking them concerning their civil and religious customs, and praising them for their practical Christianity. They persuaded them to send messengers with a detachment ordered to Salem, and urge the Brethren in the fields there to repair to Gnadenhütten. In the mean time, the whites remaining suddenly fell upon their bewildered prisoners and bound them; and the expedition, acting upon preconcerted measures, re-entered Gnadenhütten with the Salem converts disarmed and manacled.

Although the purpose of the campaign had been perfectly understood from the beginning, the officers were now loath to execute it upon their own responsibility: and it is Doddridge’s belief, from his personal knowledge of Williamson’s character, that if he had been an officer with due authority, and not merely the leader of a band of marauders, he would not have suffered any of his prisoners to be slain. But he was powerless, and could only refer their fate to a vote of his men. When, therefore, it was demanded, Should the Christian Indians be put to death, or should they be sent to Fort Pitt? only eighteen voted to spare their lives. It still remained a question whether they should be burned alive, or tomahawked and scalped; and the majority having voted for the latter form of murder, one of the assassins was deputed to inform the Indians, that, inasmuch as they were Christians, they would be given one night to prepare for death in a Christian manner.

It is related that the merciful eighteen reiterated their protests to the last against the atrocity, but neither their protests nor the appeals of the Indians availed. One of the women who had been educated at Bethlehem, and who spoke good English, fell upon her knees at Williamson’s feet, and besought his protection; but the greater number of the victims seem to have submitted silently, with something of the old stoical fortitude of the savage, and some thing of the martyr’s serene resignation. They embraced with tears and kisses, and asked forgiveness one of another, and thus meekly prepared themselves for their doom. They were Christians whose lives had witnessed to the sincerity of their conversion; and, now brought face to face with death, their faith remained unshaken. Among them were five of the national assistants, one of whom was well educated in English, and all of whom were men of exemplary thought and deed. These led the rest in the fervent prayers and hymns with which they wore away the night.

At dawn the assassins grew impatient of the delay they had granted, and sent to the Brethren, demanding whether they were not yet ready to die; and, being answered that they had commended their souls to God and received the assurance of His peace, the whites parted them, the men from the women and children, and placed them in two houses, to which, from some impulse of grotesque and ferocious drollery, they gave the name of the Slaughter-Houses.

Few even among those who had voted for the murder of the Brethren took part in the actual butchery. The great body of the whites turned aside from the ineffable atrocity, while those who with their own hands did the murder now entered the cabins.

The house in which the men were confined had been that of a cooper, and his mallet, abandoned in the removal of the preceding autumn, lay upon the floor. One of the whites picked it up, and saying “How exactly this will answer for the business!” made his way among the kneeling figures toward Brother Abraham, a convert, who, from being somewhat lukewarm in the faith, had in this extremity become the most fervent in exhortation. Then, while the clear and awful music of the victims’ prayers and songs arose, this nameless murderer lifted his weapon and struck Abraham down with a single blow. Thirteen others fell by his hand before he passed the mallet to a fellow-assassin, with the words “My arm fails me. Go on in the same way. I think I have done pretty well.” In the house where the women and children awaited their doom the massacre began with Judith, a very old and pious widow; and in a little space, the voices of singing and of supplication failing one by one, the silence that fell upon the place attested the accomplishment of a crime which, for all its circumstances and conditions, must be deemed one of the blackest in history. The murderers scalped their victims as they fell, and, when the work was done, they gathered their trophies together and rejoined their comrades. But before nightfall they came again to the Slaughter-Houses for some reason; and as they entered that of the men, one of the Brethren who had been stunned and scalped, but not killed, lifted himself upon his hands, and turned his blood-stained visage towards them with a ghastly stare. They fell upon the horrible apparition, and it sank beneath their tomahawks to rise no more; and then, with that wild craving for excitement which seems the first effect of crime in the guilty, they set fire to the cabins, and, withdrawing to a little distance, spent the night in drunken revelry by the light of the burning shambles.

The sole witnesses of their riot were two Indian boys, who had almost miraculously escaped the general butchery, and who afterwards met in the woods outside of the village. One of them had been knocked down and scalped with the rest, and, reviving like the Brother who was killed on the return of the murderers to the Slaughter-Houses, had taken warning by his fate, and, feigning death, had fled as soon as they were gone. The other, having concealed himself beneath the house of the women and children, remained there, the blood dripping down upon him through the floor, until nightfall. A companion who had taken refuge with him, and attempted to escape with him through the cabin window, stuck fast and was burned to death.

“Thus,” says Bishop Loskiel,— “thus ninety-six persons magnified the name of the Lord by patiently meeting a cruel death;” and he adds in another place, with a meek self-denial of one who had fain claimed the greater glory for his people, that inasmuch as, from the admissions of the murderers, the Moravians were destroyed not as Christians, but as Indians, “I will not therefore compare them with the martyrs of the ancient Church, who were sometimes sacrificed in great numbers to the rage of their persecutors, on account of their faith in Christ. But this much I can confidently assert, that these Christian Indians approved themselves to the end as steadfast confessors of the truth, . . . and delivered themselves without resistance to the cruel hands of their bloodthirsty murderers, and thus bore witness to the truth and efficacy of the Gospel of Jesus.” Brother John Holmes, writing like Bishop Loskiel at a distance, accepts this strict construction of the position of the Indians in the Church; but Heckewelder, whose life for many years had been passed in the closest and tenderest association with these hapless victims, — who had doubtless been the means of conversion to many, who had joined them in marriage, and had baptized their little ones, who had shared their lowly joys and sorrows, sat at their boards and by the beds of their dying, — has no heart for these ecclesiastical niceties, but breaks into lamentation none the less touching because the words awkwardly express the anguish of his spirit: “Here they were now murdered, together with the little children! — the loving children who so harmoniously raised their voices in the chapel, at their singing-schools, and in their parents’ houses, in singing praises to the Lord! — those whose tender years, innocent countenances, and tears made no impression on these pretended white Christians, were all butchered with the rest!”

What recoil of their crime, if any, there was upon the Gnadenhütten murderers themselves, is not certainly known. A dim tradition, one of the few in the West which have not yet hardened into print, relates that their leader in after years lost the popular favor that he consented to buy at so dear a cost. Old friends looked on him coldly, and the humanity of a younger generation regarded him with horror. He could never be brought to speak of the atrocious deed, and his men shunned all talk of it. But since, in the year following the massacre, the same leader and men organized a force to complete their work of murder by taking off the remaining converts in this refuge at Sandusky, it may be doubted whether the defeat that attended this effort, and the burning of such of their number as were captured by the Indians, in avowed revenge for the murder of the Christians, were not the only regrettable circumstances connected in their minds with the Gnadenhütten massacre, until a better and more civilized public sentiment illumined them. Their act at the time did not lack defenders in Eastern gazettes, and many years afterwards Heckewelder tells that he met and rebuked a ruffian who justified them, and regretted that they had not killed all the Christian Indians. It is true that the Gnadenhütten murderers but fulfilled a long-cherished purpose of the backwoodsmen, which had been formed and attempted twenty years earlier in Pennsylvania; and it can be said, in their defence, that they had provocation as well to cruelty as to mercy. The race and color of their victims represented to them the pitiless savages who had so often desolated their homes, sparing neither age nor sex, and holding them in continual wrath and terror; and though many white prisoners owed their welfare or their ransom to the humane offices of the Moravians, the compulsory hospitality of the Muskingum villages to the war parties of marauding Indians was, as has been said, a constant offence to the pioneers. Yet this offence, at the time of the massacre, had entirely ceased, through the removal of the Christians to Sandusky, and the murder was utterly wanton. Doubtless the slaughter of a few Indians, more or less, was not quite a crime to their tough consciences; in the ethics of the border, according to Heckewelder, it was no more harm to kill an Indian than a buffalo, — a sentiment which with contemporary moralists of our Western plains finds expression in the maxim, “Good Indians dead Indians.” We can perhaps hardly arraign these murderers before any tribunal of civilized thought; but their deed was nevertheless hideous, and it was most lamentable in its consequences, for it weakened, if it did not break, the hope of a whole race. It was so horrible, that in the face of it the Moravians never regained full courage, nor the Indians full trust; and though the Moravian mission to the Delawares continued for some forty years thereafter, the early vigor of the enterprise was never restored.

The crime, indeed, had the far-reaching consequences of every evil action; it embittered the warfare between the whites and Indians in ten-fold degree, and filled their infrequent truces with hazard and doubt. Nay, it seems to have broken up all foundation of faith as well as mercy between the two races; many of the converts themselves relapsed into heathenism, and were lost among the multitude of warriors; and when the Moravians sent to seek these out and reclaim them, they sometimes found their bewildered minds filled with a dreadful and unimagined suspicion. “I cannot,” said such a one to the Indian brother who discovered him among the warlike savages, painted and armed like the rest,— “I cannot but have bad thoughts of our teachers. I think it was their fault that so many of our countrymen were murdered at Gnadenhütten. They betrayed us and informed the white people of our being there, by which they were enabled to surprise us with ease. Tell me now, is this the truth or not?” This poor soul had lost all his children and most of his kindred in the massacre, and even when brought to see the injustice of his suspicions, he was impotent to repair the wrong or to return to his old life. “I have now a wicked and malicious heart,” he said, mournfully, “and therefore my thoughts are evil. As I look outwardly,” he continued, pointing to his crimson paint and warrior’s plumes, “so is my heart within. What would it avail if I were outwardly to appear as a believer, and my heart were full of evil?”

There yet stands beside the Muskingum, near the site of the hapless Indian village, a little hamlet bearing the pious name of Gnadenhütten, and its chapel bells still call the Moravian Brethren to the worship of their ancient church. But no Christian of Indian blood shares in the celebration of its rites; the stone foundations of the cabins, some aged apple-trees planted by their hands, and a few pathetic traces of the fire that consumed the victims of the massacre, alone remain to attest the success and the disastrous close of the Moravians’ loving and devoted labors at Gnadenhütten. The survivors of the great murder and of the cold and famine of that winter at Sandusky attempted a settlement in Canada under British protection, and later built a village in Northern Ohio; but they always longed to return to the Muskingum, to their old fields, and to the scenes endeared to them by so many years of happiness and consecrated by the sufferings of so many of their kindred. Before the close of the century this wish was gratified through the Congressional grant to the Christian Indians of all the lands assigned them by the Delawares; and they came back and founded near the ruins of Schönbrunn a new town called Goshen. Their teachers came with them, and Heckewelder, assisted by a Moravian Brother, gathered together the charred bones of the Indian martyrs, and gave them Christian burial. But the life of the experiment was gone, as if their hopes had been buried in that grave. Defeat met the renewed efforts at conversion; the influences of the border infected the broken and disheartened people; Zeisberger died; the rigid laws of the community were trampled upon by the borderers, among whom the war of 1812 revived all the old bitterness against the Indians; drink was brought into the village; and, before the removal of the community to Canada in 1823, the spectacle of drunken converts in the streets bore witness, if not to the inherent viciousness of the Indian, at least to the white man’s success in tempting and depraving him.

TUSCAN CITIES

CONTENTS

PREFACE.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

XXVI.

XXVII

XXVIII

XXIX

XXX

XXXI

XXXII

XXXIII

XXXIV

XXXV

XXXVI

XXXVII

XXXVIII

XXXIX

XL

PAN FORTE DI SIENA

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

PITILESS PISA

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII.

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA

I

II

III

PISTOJA, PRATO, and FIESOLE

I

II

III

PREFACE.

THE wish to see this book in the same size and shape as Venetian Life and Italian Journeys was the motive on the author’s part which prompted the publishers to the present edition. A score of years had elapsed between the writing of those books and the writing of this, and yet he felt a kind of unity in all three which he hoped might be appreciable to the reader in the uniformity aimed at.

Perhaps it is not indiscreet here to confess another hope of his: that it might be more apparent in the unpictured text, than in the illustrated pages of the former editions, that each of these studies offered to the reader an historical view, however cursory, of those famous Tuscan Cities, which it would not be so easy otherwise for him to find. It was part of the author’s pleasure, in visiting them, to arrange a hasty perspective of this sort, which seemed to him essential to a right sense of their modern qualities and conditions; and he trusts that he does not value it too much because of the difficulty he had in contriving it. The reader at least will be spared his difficulty.

A FLORENTINE MOSAIC

I

FROM Turin to Bologna there was snow all the way down; not, of course, the sort of snow we had left on the other side of the Alps, or the snow we remembered in America, but a snow picturesque, spectacular, and no colder or bleaker to the eye from the car-window than the cotton-woolly counterfeit which clothes a landscape of the theatre. It covered the whole Lombard plain to the depth of several inches, and formed a very pretty decoration for the naked vines and the trees they festooned. A sky which remained thick and dun throughout the day contributed to the effect of winter, for which, indeed, the Genoese merchant in our carriage said it was now the season.

But the snow grew thinner as the train drew southward, and about Bologna the ground showed through it in patches. Then the night came on, and when we reached Florence at nine o’clock we emerged into an atmosphere which, in comparison with the severity of the transalpine air, could only be called mildly reproachful. For a few days we rejoiced in its concessive softness with some such sense of escape as must come to one who has left moral obligation behind; and then our penalty began. If we walked half a mile away from our hotel, we despaired of getting back, and commonly had ourselves brought home by one of the kindly cab-drivers who had observed our exhaustion. It came finally to our not going away from our hotel to such distances at all. We observed with a mild passivity the vigour of the other guests, who went and came from morning till night, and brought to the table d’hote minds full of the spoil of their day’s sight-seeing. We confessed that we had not, perhaps, been out that day, and we accounted for ourselves by saying that we had seen Florence before, a good many years ago, and that we were in no haste, for we were going to stay all winter. We tried to pass it off as well as we could, and a fortnight had gone by before we had darkened the doors of a church or a gallery.

I suppose that all this lassitude was the effect of our sudden transition from the tonic air of the Swiss mountains; and I should be surprised if our experience of the rigours of a Florentine December were not considered libellous by many whose experience was different Nevertheless, I report it; for the reader may like to trace to it the languid lack of absolute opinion concerning Florence and her phenomena, and the total absence of final wisdom on any point, which I hope he will be able to detect throughout these pages.

II

IT was quite three weeks before I began to keep any record of impressions, and I cannot therefore fix the date at which I pushed my search for them beyond the limits of the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where we were lodged. It is better to own up at once to any sin which one is likely to be found out in, for then one gains at least the credit of candour and courage; and I will confess here that I had come to Florence with the intention of writing about it. But I rather wonder now why I should have thought of writing of the whole city, when one piazza in it was interesting enough to make a book about. It was in itself not one of the most interesting piazzas of Florence in the ordinary way. I do not know that anything very historical ever happened there; but that is by no means saying that there did not There used, under the early Medici and the late grand dukes, to be chariot-races in it, the goals of which are the two obelisks by John of Bologna, set upon the backs of the bronze turtles which the sympathetic observer will fancy gasping under their weight at either end of the irregular space; and its wide floor is still unpaved, so that it is a sop of mud in rainy weather, and a whirl of dust in dry. At the end opposite the church is the terminus of the steam tramway running to Prato, and the small engine that drew the trains of two or three horse-cars linked together was perpetually fretting and snuffing about the base of the obelisk there, as if that were a stump and the engine were a boy’s dog with intolerable conviction of a woodchuck under it. From time to time the conductor blew a small horn of a feeble, reedy note, like that of the horns which children find in their stockings on Christmas morning; and then the poor little engine hitched itself to the train, and with an air of hopeless affliction snuffled away toward Prato, and left the woodchuck under the obelisk to escape. The impression of a woodchuck was confirmed by the digging round the obelisk which a gang of workmen kept up all winter; they laid down water-pipes, and then dug them up again. But when the engine was gone we could give our minds to other sights in the piazza.

III

ONE of these was the passage of troops, infantry or cavalry, who were always going to or from the great railway station behind the church, and who entered it with a gay blare of bugles, extinguished midway of the square, letting the measured tramp of feet or the irregular clank of hoofs make itself heard. This was always thrilling, and we could not get enough of the brave spectacle. We rejoiced in the parade of Italian military force with even more than native ardour, for we were not taxed to pay for it, and personally the men were beautiful; not large or strong, but regular and refined of face, rank and file alike, in that democracy of good looks which one sees in no other land. They marched with a lounging, swinging step, under a heavy burden of equipment, and with the sort of quiet patience to which the whole nation has been schooled in its advance out of slavish subjection to the van of civilization.

They were not less charming when they came through off duty, the officers in their statuesque cloaks, with the gleam of their swords beneath the folds, striding across the piazza in twos or threes, the common soldiers straggling loosely over its space with the air of peasants let loose amid the wonders of a city, and smoking their long, straw-stemmed Italian cigars, with their eyes all abroad. I do not think they kept up so active a courtship with the nursemaids as the soldiers in the London squares and parks, but there was a friendliness in their relations with the population everywhere that spoke them still citizens of a common country, and not alien to its life in any way. They had leisure just before Epiphany to take a great interest in the preparations the boys were making for the celebration of that feast, with a noise of long, slender trumpets of glass; and I remember the fine behaviour of a corporal in a fatigue-cap, who happened along one day when an orange-vendor and a group of urchins were trying a trumpet, and extorting from it only a few stertorous crumbs of sound. The corporal put it lightly to his lips, and blew a blast upon it that almost shivered our window-panes, and then walked off with the effect of one who would escape gratitude; the boys looked after him till he was quite out of sight with mute wonder, such as pursues the doer of a noble action.

One evening an officer’s funeral passed through the piazza, with a pomp of military mourning; but that was no more effective than the merely civil funeral which we once saw just at twilight. The bearers were in white cowls and robes, and one went at the head of the bier with a large cross. The others carried torches, which sometimes they inverted, swinging forward with a slow processional movement, and chanting monotonously, with the clear dark of the evening light keen and beautiful around them.

At other times we heard the jangle of a small bell, and looking out we saw a priest of Santa Maria, with the Host in his hand and his taper-bearing retinue around him, going to administer the extreme unction to some passing soul in our neighbourhood. Some of the spectators uncovered, but for the most part they seemed not to notice it, and the solemnity had an effect of business which I should be at some loss to make the reader feel. But that is the effect which church ceremonial in Italy has always had to me. I do not say that the Italians are more indifferent to their religion than other people, but that, having kept up its shows, always much the same in the celebration of different faiths, — Etruscan, Hellenic, Hebraic, — so long, they were more tired of them, and were willing to let it transact itself without their personal connivance when they could.

IV

ALL the life of the piazza was alike novel to the young eyes which now saw it for the first time from our windows, and lovely in ours, to which youth seemed to come back in its revision. I should not know how to give a just sense of the value of a man who used to traverse the square with a wide wicker tray on his head, piled up with Chianti wine-flasks that looked like a heap of great bubbles. I must trust him to the reader’s sympathy, together with the pensive donkeys abounding there, who acquired no sort of spiritual pride from the sense of splendid array, though their fringed and tasselled harness blazed with burnished brass. They appeared to be stationed in our piazza while their peasant-owners went about the city on their errands, and it may have been in an access of homesickness too acute for repression that, with a preliminary quivering of the tail and final rise of that member, they lifted their woe-begone countenances and broke into a long disconsolate bray, expressive of a despair which has not yet found its way into poetry, and is only vaguely suggested by some music of the minor key.

These donkeys, which usually stood under our hotel, were balanced in the picture by the line of cabs at the base of the tall buildings on the other side, whence their drivers watched our windows with hopes not unnaturally excited by our interest in them, which they might well have mistaken for a remote intention of choosing a cab. From time to time one of them left the rank, and took a turn in the square from pure effervescence of expectation, flashing his equipage upon our eyes, and snapping his whip in explosions that we heard even through the closed windows. They were of all degrees of splendour and squalor, both cabs and drivers, from the young fellow with false, floating blue eyes and fur-trimmed coat, who drove a shining cab fresh from the builder’s hands, to the little man whose high hat was worn down almost to its structural pasteboard, and whose vehicle limped over the stones with querulous complaints from its rheumatic joints. When we began to drive out, we resolved to have always the worldlier turnout; but we got it only two or three times, falling finally and permanently — as no doubt we deserved, in punishment of our heartless vanity — to the wreck at the other extreme of the scale. There is no describing the zeal and vigilance by which this driver obtained and secured us to himself. For a while we practised devices for avoiding him, and did not scruple to wound his feelings; but we might as well have been kind, for it came to the same thing in the end. Once we had almost escaped. Our little man’s horse had been feeding, and he had not fastened his bridle on when the portiere called a carriage for us. He made a snatch at his horse’s bridle; it came off in his hand and hung dangling. Another driver saw the situation, and began to whip his horse across the square; our little man seized his horse by the forelock, and dragging him along at the top of his speed, arrived at the hotel door a little the first What could we do but laugh? Everybody in the piazza applauded, and I think it must have been this fact which confirmed our subjection. After that we pretended once that our little man had cheated us; but with respectful courage he contested the fact, and convinced us that we were wrong; he restored a gold pencil which he had found in his cab; and, though he never got it, he voluntarily promised to get a new coat, to do us the more honour when he drove us out to pay visits.

V

HE was, like all of his calling with whom he had to do in Florence, amiable and faithful, and he showed that personal interest in us from the beginning which is instant with most of them, and which found pretty expression when I was sending home a child to the hotel from a distance at nightfall. I was persistent in getting the driver’s number, and he divined the cause of my anxiety.

“Oh, rest easy!” he said, leaning down toward me from his perch. “I, too, am a father!”

Possibly a Bostno hackman might have gone so far as to tell me that he had young ones of his own, but he would have snubbed in reassuring me; and it is this union of grace with sympathy which, I think, forms the true expression of Italian civilization. It is not yet valued aright in the world; but the time must come when it will not be shouldered aside by physical and intellectual brutality. I hope it may come so soon that the Italians will not have learned bad manners from the rest of us. As yet, they seem uncontaminated, and the orange-vendor who crushes a plump grandmother up against the wall in some narrow street is as gayly polite in his apologies, and she as graciously forgiving, as they could have been under any older régime.

But probably the Italians could not change if they would. They may fancy changes in themselves and in one another, but the barbarian who returns to them after a long absence cannot see that they are personally different from all their political transformations. Life, which has become to us like a book which we silently peruse in the closet, or at most read aloud with a few friends, is still a drama with them, to be more or less openly played. This is what strikes you at first, and strikes you at last. It is the most recognizable thing in Italy, and I was constantly pausing in my languid strolls, confronted by some dramatic episode so bewilderingly familiar that it seemed to me I must have already attempted to write about it. One day, on the narrow sidewalk beside the escutcheoned cloister-wall of the church, two young and handsome people stopped me while they put upon that public stage the pretty melodrama of their feelings. The bareheaded girl wore a dress of the red and black plaid of the Florentine laundresses, and the young fellow standing beside her had a cloak falling from his left shoulder. She was looking down and away from him, impatiently pulling with one hand at the fingers of another, and he was vividly gesticulating, while he explained or expostulated, with his eyes not upon her, but looking straight forward; and they both stood as if, in a moment of opera, they were confronting an audience over the footlights. But they were both quite unconscious, and were merely obeying the histrionic instinct of their race. So was the schoolboy in clerical robes, when, goaded by some taunt, pointless to the foreign bystander, he flung himself into an attitude of deadly scorn, and defied the tormenting gamins; so were the vendor of chestnut-paste and his customer, as they debated over the smoking viand the exact quantity and quality which a soldo ought to purchase, in view of the state of the chestnut market and the price demanded elsewhere; so was the little woman who deplored, in impassioned accents, the non-arrival of the fresh radishes we liked with our coffee, when I went a little too early for them to her stall; so was the fruiterer who called me back with an effect of heroic magnanimity to give me the change I had forgotten, after beating him down from a franc to seventy centimes on a dozen of mandarin oranges. The sweetness of his air, tempering the severity of his self-righteousness in doing this, lingers with me yet, and makes me ashamed of having got the oranges at a just price. I wish he had cheated me.

We, too, can be honest if we try, but the effort seems to sour most of us. We hurl our integrity in the teeth of the person whom we deal fairly with; but when the Italian makes up his mind to be just, it is in no ungracious spirit. It was their lovely ways, far more than their monuments of history and art, that made return to the Florentines delightful. I would rather have had a perpetuity of the cameriere’s smile when he came up with our coffee in the morning than Donatello’s San Giorgio, if either were purchasable; and the face of the old chamber-maid, Maria, full of motherly affection, was better than the façade of Santa Maria Novella.

VI

IT is true that the church bore its age somewhat better; for though Maria must have been beautiful, too, in her youth, her complexion had not that luminous flush in which three hundred years have been painting the marble front of the church. It is this light, or this colour, — I hardly know which to call it, — that remains in my mind as the most characteristic quality of Santa Maria Novella; and I would like to have it go as far as possible with the reader, for I know that the edifice would not otherwise present itself in my pages, however flatteringly entreated or severely censured. I remember the bold mixture of the styles in its architecture, the lovely sculptures of its grand portals, the curious sundials high in its front; I remember the brand-new restoration of the screen of monuments on the right, with the arms of the noble patrons of the church carved below them, and the grass of the space enclosed showing green through the cloister-arches all winter long; I remember also the unemployed labourers crouching along its sunny base for the heat publicly dispensed in Italy on bright days — when it is not needed; and they all gave me the same pleasure, equal in degree, if not in kind. While the languor of these first days was still heavy upon me, I crept into the church for a look at the Ghirlandajo frescos behind the high altar, the Virgin of Cimabue, and the other objects which one is advised to see there, and had such modest satisfaction in them as may come to one who long ago, once for all, owned to himself that emotions to which others testified in the presence of such things were beyond him. The old masters and their humble acquaintance met shyly, after so many years; these were the only terms on which I, at least, could preserve my self-respect; and it was not till we had given ourselves time to overcome our mutual diffidence that the spirit in which their work was imagined stole into my heart and made me thoroughly glad of it again. Perhaps the most that ever came to me was a sense of tender reverence, of gracious quaintness in them; but this was enough. In the meanwhile I did my duty in Santa Maria Novella. I looked conscientiously at all the pictures, in spite of a great deal of trouble I had in putting on my glasses to read my “Walks in Florence” and taking them off to see the paintings; and I was careful to identify the portraits of Poliziano and the other Florentine gentlemen and ladies in the frescos. I cannot say that I was immediately sensible of advantage in this achievement; but I experienced a present delight in the Spanish chapel at finding not only Petrarch and Laura, but Boccaccio and Fiammetta, in the groups enjoying the triumphs of the church militant It will always remain a confusion in our thick Northern heads, this attribution of merit through mere belief to people whose lives cast so little lustre on their creeds; but the confusion is an agreeable one, and I enjoyed it as much as when it first overcame me in Italy.

VII

THE cicerone who helped me about these figures was a white-robed young monk, one of twelve who are still left at Santa Maria Novella to share the old cloisters now mainly occupied by the pupils of a military college and a children’s school. It was noon, and the corridors and the court were full of boys at their noisy games, on whom the young father smiled patiently, lifting his gentle voice above their clamour to speak of the suppression of the convents. This was my first personal knowledge of the effect of that measure, and I now perceived the hardship which it must have involved, as I did not when I read of it, with my Protestant satisfaction, in the newspapers. The uncomfortable thing about any institution which has survived its usefulness is that it still embodies so much harmless life that must suffer in its destruction. The monks and nuns had been a heavy burden no doubt, for many ages, and at the best they cumbered the ground; but when it came to a question of sweeping them away, it meant sorrow and exile and dismay to thousands of gentle and blameless spirits like the brother here, who recounted one of many such histories so meekly, so unresentfully. He and his few fellows were kept there by the piety of certain faithful who, throughout Italy, still maintain a dwindling number of monks and nuns in their old cloisters wherever the convent happened to be the private property of the order. I cannot say that they thus quite console the sentimentalist who would not have the convents re-established, even while suffering a poignant regret for their suppression; but I know from myself that this sort of sentimentalist is very difficult, and perhaps he ought not to be too seriously regarded.

VIII

THE sentimentalist is very abundant in Italy, and most commonly he is of our race and religion, though he is rather English than American. The Englishman, so chary of his sensibilities at home, abandons himself to them abroad. At Rome he already regrets the good old days of the temporal power, when the streets were unsafe after nightfall and unclean the whole twenty-four hours, and there was no new quarter. At Venice he is bowed down under the restorations of the Ducal Palace and the church of St Mark; and he has no language in which to speak of the little steamers on the Grand Canal, which the Venetians find so convenient. In Florence, from time to time, he has a panic prescience that they are going to tear down the Ponte Vecchio. I do not know how he gets this, but he has it, and all the rest of us sentimentalists eagerly share it with him when he comes in to the table d’hôte luncheon, puts his Baedeker down by his plate, and before he has had a bite of anything calls out: “Well, they are going to tear down the Ponte Vecchio!”

The first time that this happened in our hotel, I was still under the influence of the climate; but I resolved to visit the Ponte Vecchio with no more delay, lest they should be going to tear it down that afternoon. It was not that I cared a great deal for the bridge itself, but my accumulating impressions of Florentine history had centred about it as the point where that history really began to be historic. I had formed the idea of a little dramatic opening for my sketches there, with Buondelmonte riding in from his villa to meet his bride, and all that spectral train of Ghibelline and Guelphic tragedies behind them on the bridge; and it appeared to me that this could not be managed if the bridge were going to be torn down. I trembled for my calvalcade, ignominiously halted on the other side of the Arno, or obliged to go round and come in on some other bridge without regard to the fact; and at some personal inconvenience I hurried off to the Ponte Vecchio. I could not see that the preparations for its destruction had begun, and I believe they are still threatened only in the imagination of sentimental Anglo-Saxons. The omnibuses were following each other over the bridge in the peaceful succession of so many horse-cars to Cambridge, and the ugly little jewellers’ booths glittered in their wonted security on either hand all the way across. The carriages, the carts, the foot-passengers were swarming up and down from the thick turmoil of Por San Maria; and the bridge did not respond with the slightest tremor to the heel clandestinely stamped upon it for a final test of its stability.

But the alarm I had suffered was no doubt useful, for it was after this that I really began to be serious with my material, as I found it everywhere in the streets and the books, and located it from one to the other. Even if one has no literary designs upon the facts, that is incomparably the best way of dealing with the past. At home, in the closet, one may read history, but one can realize it, as if it were something personally experienced, only on the spot where it was lived. This seems to me the prime use of travel; and to create the reader a partner in the enterprise and a sharer in its realization seems the sole excuse for books of travel, now when modern facilities have abolished hardship and danger and adventure, and nothing is more likely to happen to one in Florence than in Fitchburg.

In this pursuit of the past, the inquirer will often surprise himself in the possession of a genuine emotion; at moments the illustrious or pathetic figures of other days will seem to walk before him unmocked by the grotesque and burlesquing shadows we all cast while in the flesh. I will not swear it, but it would take little to persuade me that I had vanishing glimpses of many of these figures in Florence. One of the advantages of this method is that you have your historical personages in a sort of picturesque contemporaneity with one another and with yourself, and you imbue them all with the sensibilities of our own time. Perhaps this is not an advantage, but it shows what may be done by the imaginative faculty; and if we do not judge men by ourselves, how are we to judge them at all?

IX

I TOOK some pains with my Florentines, first and last, I will confess it. I went quite back with them to the lilies that tilted all over the plain where they founded their city in the dawn of history, and that gave her that flowery name of hers. I came down with them from Fiesole to the first marts they held by the Arno for the convenience of the merchants who did not want to climb that long hill to the Etruscan citadel; and I built my wooden hut with the rest hard by the Ponte Vecchio, which was an old bridge a thousand years before Gaddi’s structure. I was with them all through that dim turmoil of wars, martyrdoms, pestilences, heroisms, and treasons for a thousand years, feeling their increasing purpose of municipal freedom and hatred of the one-man power (il governo d’un solo) alike under Romans, Huns, Longobards, Franks, and Germans, till in the eleventh century they marched up against their mother city, and destroyed Fiesole, leaving nothing standing but the fortress, the cathedral, and the Caffé Aurora, where the visitor lunches at this day, and has an incomparable view of Florence in the distance. When, in due time, the proud citizens began to go out from their gates and tumble their castles about the ears of the Germanic counts and barons in the surrounding country, they had my sympathy almost to the point of active co-operation; though I doubt now if we did well to let those hornets come into the town and build other nests within the walls, where they continued nearly as pestilent as ever. Still, so long as no one of them came to the top permanently, there was no danger of the one-man power we dreaded, and we could adjust our arts, our industries, our finances to the state of street warfare, even if it lasted, as at one time, for forty years. I was as much opposed as Dante himself to the extension of the national limits, though I am not sure now that our troubles came from acquiring territory three miles away, beyond the Ema, and I could not trace the bitterness of partisan feeling even to the annexation of Prato, whither it took me a whole hour to go by the stream-tram. But when the factions were divided under the names of Guelph and Ghibelline, and subdivided again into Bianchi and Neri, I was always of the Guelph and the Bianchi party, for it seemed to me that these wished the best to the commonwealth, and preserved most actively the traditional fear and hate of the one-man power. I believed heartily in the wars against Pisa and Siena, though afterward, when I visited those cities, I took their part against the Florentines, perhaps because they were finally reduced by the Medici, — a family I opposed from the very first, uniting with any faction or house that contested its rise. They never deceived me when they seemed to take the popular side, nor again when they voluptuously favoured the letters and arts, inviting the city full of Greeks to teach them. I mourned all through the reign of Lorenzo the Magnificent over the subjection of the people, never before brought under the one-man power, and flattered to their undoing by the splendours of the city and the state he created for him. When our dissolute youth went singing his obscene songs through the moonlit streets, I shuddered with a good Piagnone’s abhorrence; and I heard one morning with a stem and solemn joy that the great Frate had refused absolution to the dying despot who had refused freedom to Florence. Those were great days for one of my thinking, when Savonarola realized the old Florentine ideal of a free commonwealth, with the Medici banished, the Pope defied, and Christ king; days incredibly dark and terrible, when the Frate paid for his goodwill to us with his life, and suffered by the Republic which he had restored. Then the famous siege came, the siege of fifteen months, when Papist and Lutheran united under one banner against us, and treason did what all the forces of the Empire had failed to effect Yet Florence, the genius of the great democracy, never showed more glorious than in that supreme hour, just before she vanished for ever, and the Medici bastard entered the city out of which Florence had died, to be its liege lord where no master had ever been openly confessed before. I could follow the Florentines intelligently through all till that; but then, what suddenly became of that burning desire of equality, that deadly jealousy of a tyrant’s domination, that love of country surpassing the love of life? It is hard to reconcile ourselves to the belief that the right can be beaten, that the spirit of a generous and valiant people can be broken; but this is what seems again and again to happen in history, though never so signally, so spectacularly, as in Florence when the Medici were restored. After that there were conspiracies and attempts of individuals to throw off the yoke; but in the great people, the prostrate body of the old democracy, not a throe of revolt. Had they outlived the passion of their youth for liberty, or were they sunk in despair before the odds arrayed against them? I did not know what to do with the Florentines from this point; they mystified me, silently suffering under the Medici for two hundred years, and then sleeping under the Lorrainese for another century, to awake in our own time the most polite, the most agreeable of the Italians perhaps, but the most languid. They say of themselves, “We lack initiative;” and the foreigner most disposed to confess his ignorance cannot help having heard it said of them by other Italians that while the Turinese, Genoese, and Milanese, and even the Venetians, excel them in industrial enterprise, they are less even than the Neapolitans in intellectual activity; and that when the capital was removed to Rome they accepted adversity almost with indifference, and resigned themselves to a second place in everything. I do not know whether this is true; there are some things against it, as that the Florentine schools are confessedly the best in Italy, and that it would be hard anywhere in that country or another to match the group of scholars and writers who form the University of Florence. These are not all Florentines, but they live in Florence, where almost any one would choose to live if he did not live in London, or Boston, or New York, or Helena, Montana T. There is no more comfortable city in the world, I fancy. But you cannot paint comfort so as to interest the reader of a book of travel. Even the lack of initiative in a people who conceal their adversity under very good clothes, and have abolished beggary, cannot be made the subject of a graphic sketch; one must go to their past for that.

X

Yet if the reader had time, I would like to linger a little on our way down to the Via Borgo Santi Apostoli, where it branches off into the Middle Ages out of Via Tornabuoni, not far from Vieusseux’s Circulating Library. For Via Tornabuoni is charming, and merits to be observed for the ensemble it offers of the contemporary Florentine expression, with its alluring shops, its confectioners and cafés, its florists and milliners, its dandies and tourists, and, ruggedly massing up out of their midst, the mighty bulk of its old Strozzi Palace, mediaeval, sombre, superb, tremendously impressive of the days when really a man’s house was his castle. Everywhere in Florence the same sort of contrast presents itself in some degree; but nowhere quite so dramatically as here, where it seems expressly contrived for the sensation of the traveller when he arrives at the American banker’s with his letter of credit the first morning, or comes to the British pharmacy for his box of quinine pills. It is eminently the street of the tourists, who are always haunting it on some errand. The best shops are here, and the most English is spoken; you hear our tongue spoken almost as commonly as Italian, and much more loudly, both from the chest and through the nose, whether the one is advanced with British firmness to divide the groups of civil and military loiterers on the narrow pavement before the confectioner Giacosa’s, or the other is flattened with American curiosity against the panes of the jewellers’ windows. There is not here the glitter of mosaics which fatigues the eye on the Lungarno or in Via Borgognissanti, nor the white glare of new statuary — or statuettary, rather — which renders other streets impassable; but there is a sobered richness in the display, and a local character in the prices which will sober the purchaser.

Florence is not well provided with spaces for the outdoor lounging which Italian leisure loves, and you must go to the Cascine for much Florentine fashion if you want it; but something of it is always rolling down through Via Tornabuoni in its carriage at the proper hour of the day, and something more is always standing before Giacosa’s English-tailored, Italian-mannered, to bow, and smile, and comment. I was glad that the sort of swell whom I used to love in the Piazzi at Venice abounded in the narrower limits of Via Tornabuoni. I was afraid he was dead; but he graced the curbstone there with the same lily-like disoccupation and the same sweetness of aspect which made the Procuratie Nuove like a garden. He was not without his small dog or his cane held to his mouth; he was very, very patient and kind with the aged crone who plays the part of Florentine flower-girl in Via Tornabuoni, and whom I after saw aiming with uncertain eye a boutonniere of violets at his coat-lapel; there was the same sort of calm, heavy-eyed beauty looking out at him from her ice or coffee through the vast pane of the confectioner’s window, that stared sphinx-like in her mystery from a cushioned corner of Florian’s; and the officers went by with tinkling spurs and sabres, and clicking boot-heels, differing in nothing but their Italian uniforms and complexions from the blonde Austrian military of those far-off days. I often wondered who or what those beautiful swells might be, and now I rather wonder that I did not ask some one who could tell me. But perhaps it was not important; perhaps it might even have impaired their value in the picture of a conscientious artist who can now leave them, without a qualm, to be imagined as rich and noble as the reader likes. Not all the frequenters of Doney’s famous café were both, if one could trust hearsay. Besides those who could afford to drink the first sprightly runnings of his coffee-pot, it was said that there was a genteel class, who, for the sake of being seen to read their newspapers there, paid for the second décantation from its grounds, which comprised what was left in the cups from the former. This might be true of a race which loves a goodly outside perhaps a little better than we do; but Doney’s is not the Doney’s of old days, nor its coffee so very good at first hand. Yet if that sort of self-sacrifice goes on in there, I do not object; it continues the old Latin tradition of splendour and hunger which runs through so many pleasant books, and is as good in its way as a beggar at the gate of a palace. It is a contrast; it flatters the reader who would be incapable of it; and let us have it. It is one of the many contrasts in Florence which I spoke of, and not all of which there is time to point out. But if you would have the full effect of the grimness and rudeness of the Strozzi Palace (drolly parodied, by the way, in a structure of the same street which is like a Strozzi Palace on the stage), look at that bank of flowers at one corner of its base, — roses, carnations, jonquils, great Florentine anemones, — laying their delicate cheeks against the savage blocks of stone, rent and burst from their quarry, and set here with their native rudeness untamed by hammer or chisel.

XI

THE human passions were wrought almost as primitive into the civic structure of Florence, down in the thirteenth century, which you will find with me at the bottom of the Borgo Santi Apostoli, if you like to come. There and thereabouts dwell the Buondelmonti, the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and other noble families, in fastnesses of stone and iron as formidable as the castles from which their ancestors were dislodged when the citizens went out into the country around Florence, and destroyed their strongholds and obliged them to come into the city; and thence from their casements and towers they carried on their private wars as conveniently as ever, descending into the streets, and battling about among the peaceful industries of the vicinity for generations. It must have been inconvenient for the industries, but so far as one can understand, they suffered it just as a Kentucky community now suffers the fighting out of a family feud in its streets, and philosophically gets under shelter when the shooting begins. It does not seem to have been objected to some of these palaces that they had vaulted passageways under their first stories, provided with trap doors to let the besieged pour hot water down on the passers below; these avenues were probably strictly private, and the citizens did not use them at times when family feeling ran high. In fact, there could have been but little coming and going about these houses for any who did not belong in them. A whole quarter, covering the space of several American city blocks, would be given up to the palaces of one family and its adherents, in a manner which one can hardly understand without seeing it. The Peruzzi, for example, enclosed a Roman amphitheatre with their palaces, which still follow in structure the circle of the ancient edifice; and the Peruzzi were rather peaceable people, with less occasion for fighting-room than many other Florentine families, — far less than the Buondelmonti, Uberti, Amidei, Lamberti, Gherardini, and others, whose domestic fortifications seem to have occupied all that region lying near the end of the Ponte Vecchio. They used to fight from their towers on three corners of Por San Maria above the heads of the people passing to and from the bridge, and must have occasioned a great deal of annoyance to the tourists of that day. Nevertheless, they seem to have dwelt in very tolerable enmity together till one day when a Florentine gentleman invited all the noble youth of the city to a banquet at his villa, where, for their greater entertainment, there was a buffoon playing his antics. This poor soul seems not to have been a person of better taste than some other humorists, and he thought it droll to snatch away the plate of Uberto degl’ Infangati, who had come with Buondelmonte, at which Buondelmonte became furious, and resented the insult to his friend, probably in terms that disabled the politeness of those who laughed, for it is recorded that Oddo di Arrigo dei Fifanti, “a proud and resolute man,” became so incensed as to throw a plate and its contents into Uberto’s face. The tables were overturned, and Buondelmonte stabbed Oddo with a knife; at which point the party seems to have broken up, and Oddo returned to Florence from Campi, where the banquet was given, and called a family council to plot vengeance. But a temperate spirit prevailed in this senate, and it was decided that Buondelmonte, instead of dying, should marry Oddo’s niece, Reparata degli Amidei, differently described by history as a plain girl, and as one of the most beautiful and accomplished damsels of the city, of a noble and consular family. Buondelmonte, a handsome and gallant cavalier, but a weak will, as appears from all that happened, agreed to this, and everything was happily arranged, till one day when he was riding by the house of Forese Donati. Monna Gualdrada Donati was looking out of the window, and possibly expecting the young man. She called to him, and when he had alighted and come into the house she began to mock him.

“Cheer up, young lover! Your wedding day is coming, and you will soon be happy with your bride.”

“You know very well,” said Buondelmonte, “that this marriage was a thing I could not get out of.”

“Oh, indeed!” cried Monna Gualdrada. “As if you did not care for a pretty wife i” And then it was, we may suppose, that she hinted those things she is said to have insinuated against Reparata’s looks and her fitness otherwise for a gentleman like Buondelmonte. “If I had known you were in such haste to marry — but God’s will be done! We cannot have things as we like in this world!” And Machiavelli says that the thing Monna Gualdrada had set her heart on was Buondelmonte’s marriage with her daughter, but either through carelessness, or because she thought it would do any time, she had not mentioned it to any one.” She added, probably with an affected carelessness, that the Donati were of rather better lineage than the Amidei, though she did not know whether he would have thought her Beatrice as pretty as Reparata. Then suddenly she brought him face to face with the girl, radiantly beautiful, the most beautiful in Florence. “This is the wife I was keeping for you,” said Monna Gualdrada; and she must have known her ground well, for she let the poor young man understand that her daughter had long been secretly in love with him. Malespini tells us that Buondelmonte was tempted by a diabolical spirit to break faith at this sight; the devil accounted for a great many things then to which we should not now, perhaps, assign so black an origin. “And I would very willingly marry her,” he faltered, “if I were not bound by that solemn promise to the Amidei;” and Monna Gualdrada now plied the weak soul with such arguments and reasons, in such wise as women can use them, that he yielded, and giving his hand to Beatrice, he did not rest till they were married. Then the Amidei, the Uberti, the Lamberti, and the Fifanti, and others who were outraged in their cousinship or friendship by this treachery and insult to Reparata, assembled in the church of Santa Maria sopra Porta to take counsel again for vengeance. Some were of opinion that Buondelmonte should be cudgelled, and thus publicly put to shame; others that he should be wounded and disfigured in the face; but Mosca Lamberti rose and said: “There is no need of all these words. If you strike him or disfigure him, get your graves ready to hide in. Cosa fatta capo ha!” With which saying he advised them to make an end of Buondelmonte altogether. His words had the acceptance that they would now have in a Kentucky family council, and they agreed to kill Buondelmonte when he should come to fetch home his bride. On Easter morning, in the year 1215, they were waiting for him in the house of the Amidei, at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio; and when they saw him come riding, richly dressed in white, on a white palfrey, over the bridge, and “fancying,” says Machiavelli, “that such a wrong as breaking an engagement could be so easily forgotten,” they sallied out to the statue of Mars which used to be there. As Buondelmonte reached the group, — it must have been, for all his courage, with a face as white as his mantle, — Schiatta degli Uberti struck him on the head with a stick, so that he dropped stunned from his palfrey. Then Oddo di Arrigo, whom he had stabbed, and Mosca Lamberti, who had pronounced his sentence, and Lambertaccio Amidei, “and one of the Gangolandi,” ran and cut his throat There arose a terrible tumult in the city, and the girl whose fatal beauty had wrought this horror, governing herself against her woman’s weakness with supernatural strength, mounted the funeral car beside her lover’s body, and taking his head into her lap, with his blood soaking her bridal robes, was drawn through the city everywhere, crying for vengeance.

From that hour, they tell us, the factions that had long tormented Florence took new names, and those who had sided with the Buondelmonti and the Donati for the Pope against the Emperor became Guelphs, while the partisans of the Amidei and the Empire became Ghibellines, and began that succession of reciprocal banishments which kept a good fourth of the citizens in exile for three hundred years.

XII

WHAT impresses one in this and the other old Florentine stories is the circumstantial minuteness with which they are told, and their report has an air of simple truth very different from the literary factitiousness which one is tempted to in following them. After six centuries the passions are as living, the characters as distinct, as if the thing happened yesterday. Each of the persons stands out a very man or woman, in that clear, strong light of the early day which they move through. From the first the Florentines were able to hit each other off with an accuracy which comes of the southern habit of living much together in public, and one cannot question these lineaments. Buondelmonte, Mosca Lamberti, Monna Gualdrada, and even that “one of the Gangolandi,” how they possess the imagination! Their palaces still rise there in the grim, narrow streets, and seem no older in that fine Florentine air than houses of fifty years ago elsewhere. They were long since set apart, of course, to other uses. The chief palace of the Buondelmonti is occupied by an insurance company; there is a little shop for the sale of fruit and vegetables niched into the grand Gothic portal of the tower, and one is pushed in among the pears and endives by the carts which take up the whole street from wall to wall in passing. The Lamberti palace was confiscated by the Guelph party, and was long used by the Art of Silk for its guild meetings. Now it is a fire-engine house, where a polite young lieutenant left his architectural drawings to show us some frescos of Giotto lately uncovered there over an old doorway.

Over a portal outside the arms of the guild were beautifully carved by Donatello, as you may still see; and in a lofty angle of the palace the exquisite loggia of the family shows its columns and balustrade against the blue sky.

I say blue sky for the sake of the colour, and because that is expected of one in mentioning the Florentine sky, but, as a matter of fact, I do not believe it was blue half a dozen days during the winter of 1882-83. The prevailing weather was gray, and down in the passages about the bases of these mediaeval structures the sun never struck, and the point of the mediæval nose must always have been very cold from the end of November till the beginning of April.

The tradition of an older life continues into the present everywhere; only in Italy it is a little more evident, and one realizes in the discomfort of the poor, who have succeeded to these dark and humid streets, the discomfort of the rich who once inhabited them, and whose cast-off manners have been left there. Monna Gualdrada would not now call out to Buondelmonte riding under her window, and make him come in and see her beautiful daughter; but a woman of the class which now peoples the old Donati houses might do it.

I walked through the Borgo Santi Apostoli for the last time late in March, and wandered round in the winter, still lingering in that wonderful old nest of palaces, before I came out into the cheerful bustle of Por San Maria, the street which projects the glitter of its jewellers’ shops quite across the Ponte Vecchio. One of these, on the left corner, just before you reach the bridge, is said to occupy the site of the loggia of the Amidei; and if you are young and strong, you may still see them waiting there for Buondelmonte. But my eyes are not very good any more, and I saw only the amiable modern Florentine crowd, swollen by a vast number of English and American tourists, who at this season begin to come up from Rome. There are a good many antiquarian and bric-a-brac shops in Por San Maria; but the towers which the vanished families used to fight from have been torn down, so that there is comparatively little danger from a chance bolt there.

XIII

ONE of the furious Ghibelline houses of this quarter were the Gherardini, who are said to have become the Fitzgeralds of Ireland, whither they went in their exile, and where they enjoyed their fighting privileges long after those of their friends and acquaintances remaining in Florence had been cut off. The city annals would no doubt tell us what end the Amidei and the Lamberti made; from the Uberti came the great Farinati, who, in exile with the other Ghibellines, refused with magnificent disdain to join them in the destruction of Florence. But the history of the Buondelmonti has become part of the history of the world. One branch of the family migrated from Tuscany to Corsica, where they changed their name to Buonaparte, and from them came the great Napoleon. As to that “one of the Gangolandi,” he teases me into vain conjecture, lurking in the covert of his family name, an elusive personality which I wish some poet would divine for us. The Donati afterward made a marriage which brought them into as lasting remembrance as the Buondelmonti; and one visits their palaces for the sake of Dante rather than Napoleon. They enclose, with the Alighieri house in which the poet was born, ‘the little Piazza Donati, which you reach by going up the Corso to the Borgo degli Albizzi, and over against them on that street the house of the Portinari stood, where Beatrice lived, and where it must have been that she first appeared to the rapt boy who was to be the world’s Dante, “clothed in a most noble colour, a modest and becoming crimson, garlanded and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age.” The palace of the Salviati — in which Cosimo I. was born, and in which his father, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, taught the child courage by flinging him from an upper window into the arms of a servitor below — has long occupied the site of the older edifice; and the Piazza Donati, whatever dignity it may once have had, is now nothing better than a shabby court. The back windows of the tall houses surrounding it look into it when not looking into one another, and see there a butcher’s shop, a smithy, a wagon-maker’s, and an inn for peasants with stabling. On a day when I was there, a wash stretched fluttering across the rear of Dante’s house, and the banner of a green vine trailed from a loftier balcony. From one of the Donati casements an old woman in a purple knit jacket was watching a man repainting an omnibus in front of the wagon-shop; a great number of canaries sang in cages all round the piazza; a wrinkled peasant with a faded green cotton umbrella under his arm gave the place an effect of rustic sojourn; and a diligence that two playful stable-boys were long in hitching up drove jingling out, with its horses in brass-studded head-stalls, past where I stood under the fine old arches of the gateway. I had nothing to object to all this, nor do I suppose that this last state of his old neighbourhood much vexes the poet now. It was eminently picturesque, with a sort of simple cheerfulness of aspect, the walls of the houses in the little piazza being of different shades of buff, with window-shutters in light green opening back upon them from those casements where the shrieking canaries hung. The place had that tone which characterizes so many city perspectives in Italy, and especially Florence — which makes the long stretch of Via Borgognissanti so smiling, and bathes the sweep of Lungarno in a sunny glow wholly independent of the state of the weather. As you stroll along one of these light-yellow avenues you say to yourself, “Ah, this is Florence!” And then suddenly you plunge into the gray-brown gloom of such a street as the Borgo degli Albizzi, with lofty palaces climbing in vain toward the sun, and frowning upon the street below with fronts of stone, rude or sculptured, but always stern and cold; and then that, too, seems the only Florence. They are in fact equally Florentine; but I suppose one expresses the stormy yet poetic life of the old commonwealth, and the other the serene, sunny commonplace of the Lorrainese régime.

I was not sorry to find this the tone of Piazza Donati, into which I had eddied from the austerity of Borgo degli Albizzi. It really belongs to a much remoter period than the older-looking street — to the Florence that lingers architecturally yet in certain narrow avenues to the Mercato Vecchio, where the vista is broken by innumerable pent-roofs, balconies, and cornices; and a throng of operatic figures in slouch hats and short cloaks are so very improbably bent on any realistic business, that they seem to be masquerading there in the mysterious fumes of the cook-shops. Yet I should be loath, for no very tangible reason, to have Piazza Donati like one of these avenues or in any wise different from what it is; certainly I should not like to have the back of Dante’s house smartened up like the front, which looks into the Piazza San Martino. I do not complain that the restoration is bad; it is even very good, for all that I know; but the unrestored back is better, and I have a general feeling that the past ought to be allowed to tumble down in peace, though I have no doubt that whenever this happened I should be one of the first to cry out against the barbarous indifference that suffered it. I dare say that in a few hundred years, when the fact of the restoration is forgotten, the nineteenth-century mediævalism of Dante’s house will be acceptable to the most fastidious tourist. I tried to get into the house, which is open to the public at certain hours on certain days, but I always came at ten on Saturday, when I ought to have come at two on Monday, or the like; and so at last I had to content myself with the interior of the little church of San Martino, where Dante was married, half a stone’s-cast from where he was born. The church was closed, and I asked a cobbler, who had brought his work to the threshold of his shop hard by, for the sake of the light, where the sacristan lived. He answered me unintelligibly, without leaving off for a moment his furious hammering at the shoe in his lap. He must have been asked that question a great many times, and I do not know that I should have taken any more trouble in his place; but a woman in a fruit-stall next door had pity on me, knowing doubtless that I was interested in San Martino on account of the wedding, and sent me to No 1. But No 1 was a house so improbably genteel that I had not the courage to ring; and I asked the grocer alongside for a better direction. He did not know how to give it, but he sent me to the local apothecary, who in turn sent me to another number. Here another shoemaker, friendlier or idler than the first, left off gossiping with some friends of his, and showed me the right door at last in the rear of the church. My pull at the bell shot the sacristan’s head out of the fourth-story window in the old way that always delighted me, and f perceived even at that distance that he was a man perpetually fired with zeal for his church by the curiosity of strangers. I could certainly see the church, yes; he would come down instantly and open it from the inside if I would do him the grace to close his own door from the outside, I complied willingly, and in another moment I stood within the little temple, where, upon the whole, for the sake of the emotion that divine genius, majestic sorrow, and immortal fame can accumulate within one’s average commonplaceness, it is as well to stand as any other spot on earth. It is a very little place, with one-third of the space divided from the rest by an iron-tipped wooden screen. Behind this is the simple altar, and here Dante Alighieri and Gemma Donati were married. In whatever state the walls were then, they are now plainly whitewashed. though in one of the lunettes forming a sort of frieze half round the top was a fresco said to represent the espousals of the poet. The church was continually visited, the sacristan told me, by all sorts of foreigners, English, French, Germans, Spaniards, even Americans, but especially Russians, the most impassioned of all for it. One of this nation, one Russian eminent even among his impassioned race, spent several hours in looking at that picture, taking his stand at the foot of the stairs by which the sacristan descended from his lodging into the church. He showed me the very spot; I do not know why, unless he took me for another Russian, and thought my pride in a compatriot so impassioned might have some effect upon the fee I was to give him. He was a credulous sacristan, and I cannot find any evidence in Miss Horner’s faithful and trusty “Walks in Florence” that there is a fresco in that church representing the espousals of Dante. The paintings in the lunettes are by a pupil of Masaccio’s, and deal with the good works of the twelve good men of San Martino, who, ever since 1441, have had charge of a fund for the relief of such shamefaced poor as were unwilling to ask alms. Prince Strozzi and other patricians of Florence are at present among these Good Men, so the sacristan said; and there is an iron contribution-box at the church door, with an inscription promising any giver indulgence, successively guaranteed by four popes, of twenty-four hundred years; which seemed really to make it worth one’s while.

XIV

IN visiting these scenes, one cannot but wonder at the small compass in which the chief facts of Dante’s young life, suitably to the home-keeping character of the time and race, occurred. There he was born, there he was bred, and there he was married to Gemma Donati after Beatrice Portinari died. Beatrice’s father lived just across the way from the Donati houses, and the Donati houses adjoined the house where Dante grew up with his widowed mother. He saw Beatrice in her father’s house, and he must often have been in the house of Manetto de’ Donati as a child. As a youth he no doubt made love to Gemma at her casement; and here they must have dwelt after they were married, and she began to lead him a restless and unhappy life, being a fretful and foolish woman, by the accounts.

One realizes all this there with a distinctness which the clearness of the Italian atmosphere permits. In that air events do not seem to age any more than edifices; a life, like a structure, of six hundred years ago seems of yesterday, and one feels toward the Donati as if that troublesome family were one’s own contemporaries. The evil they brought on Dante was not domestic only, but they and their party were the cause of his exile and his barbarous sentence in the process of the evil times which brought the Bianchi and Neri to Florence.

There is in history hardly anything so fantastically malicious, so tortuous, so perverse, as the series of chances that ended in his banishment. Nothing could apparently have been more remote from him, to all human perception, than that quarrel of a Pistoja family, in which the children of Messer Cancelliere’s first wife, Bianca, called themselves Bianchi, and the children of the second called themselves Neri, simply for contrary-mindedness’ sake. But let us follow it, and see how it reaches the poet and finally delivers him over to a life of exile and misery. One of these Cancellieri of Pistoja falls into a quarrel with another and wounds him with his sword. They are both boys, or hardly more, and the father of the one who struck the blow bids him go to his kinsmen and beg their forgiveness. But when he comes to them the father of the wounded youth takes him out to the stable, and striking off the offending hand on a block there, flings it into his face. “Go back to your father and tell him that hurts are healed with iron, not with words.” The news of this cruel deed throws all Pistoja into an incomprehensible mediaeval frenzy. The citizens arm and divide themselves into Bianchi and Neri; the streets become battlefields. Finally some cooler heads ask Florence to interfere. Florence is always glad to get a finger into the affairs of her neighbours, and to quiet Pistoja she calls the worst of the Bianchi and Neri to her. Her own factions take promptly to the new names; the Guelphs have long ruled the city; the Ghibellines have been a whole generation in exile. But the Nen take up the old Ghibelline role of invoking foreign intervention, with Corso Donati at their head, — a brave man, but hot, proud, and lawless. Dante is of the Bianchi party, which is that of the liberals and patriots, and in this quality he goes to Rome to plead with the Pope to use his good offices for the peace and freedom of Florence. In his absence he is banished for two years and heavily fined; then he is banished for life, and will be burned if he comes back. His party comes into power, but the sentence is never repealed, and in the despair of exile Dante, too, invokes the stranger’s help. He becomes Nero; he dies Ghibelline.

I walked up from the other Donati houses through the Via Borgo degli Albizzi to the Piazza San Pier Maggiore to look at the truncated tower of Corso Donati, in which he made his last stand against the people when summoned by their Podestà to answer for all his treasons and seditions. He fortified the adjoining houses, and embattled the whole neighbourhood, galling his besiegers in the streets below with showers of stones and arrows. They set fire to his fortress, and then he escaped through the city wall into the open country, but was hunted down and taken by his enemies. On the way back to Florence he flung himself from his horse, that they might not have the pleasure of triumphing with him through the streets, and the soldier in charge of him was surprised into running him through with his lance, as Corso intended. This is the story that some tell; but others say that his horse ran away, dragging him over the road by his foot, which caught in his stirrup, and the guard killed him, seeing him already hurt to death. Dante favours the latter version of his end, and sees him in hell, torn along at the heels of a beast, whose ceaseless flight is toward “the valley where never mercy is.”

The poet had once been the friend as well as brother-in-law of Corso, but had turned against him when Corso’s lust of power threatened the liberties of Florence. You must see this little space of the city to understand how intensely narrow and local the great poet was in his hates and loves, and how considerably he has populated hell and purgatory with his old neighbours and acquaintance. Among those whom he puts in Paradise was that sister of Corso’s, the poor Picarda, whose story is one of the most pathetic and pious legends of that terrible old Florence. The vain and worldly life which she saw around her had turned her thoughts toward heaven, and she took the veil in the convent of Santa Chiara. Her brother was then at Bologna, but he repaired straightway to Florence with certain of his followers, forced the convent, and dragging his sister forth amid the cries and prayers of the nuns, gave her to wife to Rosellino della Tosa, a gentleman to whom he had promised her. She, in the bridal garments with which he had replaced her nun’s robes, fell on her knees and implored the succour of her Heavenly Spouse, and suddenly her beautiful body was covered with a loathsome leprosy, and in a few days she died inviolate. Some will have it that she merely fell into a slow infirmity, and so pined away. Corso Donati was the brother of Dante’s wife, and without ascribing to Gemma more of his quality than Picarda’s, one may readily perceive that the poet had not married into a comfortable family.

In the stump of the old tower which I had come to see, I found a poulterer’s shop, bloody and evil-smelling, and two frowzy girls picking chickens. In the wall there is a tablet signed by the Messer Capitani of the Guelph Party, forbidding any huckster to sell his wares in that square under pain of a certain fine. The place now naturally abounds in them.

The Messer Capitani are all dead, with their party, and the hucksters are no longer afraid.

XV

FOR my part, I find it hard to be serious about the tragedy of a people who seem, as one looks back at them in their history, to have lived in such perpetual broil as the Florentines. They cease to be even pathetic; they become absurd, and tempt the observer to a certain mood of triviality, by their indefatigable antics in cutting and thrusting, chopping off heads, mutilating, burning, and banishing. But I have often thought that we must get a false impression of the past by the laws governing perspective, in which the remoter objects are inevitably pressed together in their succession, and the spaces between are ignored. In looking at a painting, these spaces are imagined; but in history, the objects, the events are what alone make their appeal, and there seems nothing else. It must always remain for the reader to revise his impressions, and rearrange them, so as to give some value to conditions as well as to occurrences. It looks very much, at first glance, as if the Florentines had no peace from the domination of the Romans to the domination of the Medici. But in all that time they had been growing in wealth, power, the arts and letters, and were constantly striving to realise in their state the ideal which is still our only political aim—” a government of the people by the people for the people.” Whoever opposed himself, his interests or his pride, to that ideal, was destroyed sooner or later; and it appears that if there had been no foreign interference, the one-man power would never have been fastened on Florence. We must account, therefore, not only for seasons of repose not obvious in history, but for a measure of success in the realization of her political ideal. The feudal nobles, forced into the city from their petty sovereignties beyond its gates; the rich merchants and bankers, creators and creatures of its prosperity; the industrious and powerful guilds of artisans; the populace of unskilled labourers — authority visited each in turn; but no class could long keep it from the others, and no man from all the rest. The fluctuations were violent enough, but they only seem incessant through the necessities of perspective; and somehow, in the most turbulent period, there was peace enough for the industries to fruit and the arts to flower. Now and then a whole generation passed in which there was no upheaval, though it must be owned that these generations seem few. A life of the ordinary compass witnessed so many atrocious scenes, that Dante, who peopled his Inferno with his neighbours and fellow-citizens, had but to study their manners and customs to give life to his picture. Forty years after his exile, when the Florentines rose to drive out Walter of Brienne, the Duke of Athens, whom they had made their ruler, and who had tried to make himself their master by a series of cruel oppressions, they stormed the. Palazzo Vecchio, where he had taken refuge, and demanded certain of his bloody minions; and when his soldiers thrust one of these out among them, they cut him into small pieces, and some tore the quivering fragments with their teeth.

XVI

THE savage lurks so near the surface in every man that a constant watch must be kept upon the passions and impulses, or he leaps out in his war-paint, and the poor integument of civilization that held him is flung aside like a useless garment The Florentines were a race of impulse and passion, and the mob was merely the frenzy of that popular assemblage by which the popular will made itself known, the suffrage being a thing as yet imperfectly understood and only secondarily exercised. Yet the peacefulest and Apparently the wholesomest time known to the historians was that which followed the expulsion of the Duke of Athens, when the popular mob, having defeated the aristocratic leaders of the revolt, came into power, with such unquestionable authority that the nobles were debarred from office, and punished not only in their own persons, but in kith and kin, for offences against the life of a plebeian. Five hundred noble families were exiled, and of those left, the greater part sued to be admitted among the people. This grace was granted them, but upon the condition that they must not aspire to office for five years, and that if any of them killed or grievously wounded a plebeian, he should be immediately and hopelessly re-ennobled; which sounds like some fantastic invention of Mr Frank R. Stockton’s, and only too vividly recalls Lord Tolloller’s appeal in “Iolanthe.”

“Spurn not the nobly born

         With love affected,

Nor treat with virtuous scorn

         The well-connected.

High rank involves no shame —

We boast an equal claim

With him of humble name

         To be respected.”

The world has been ruled so long by the most idle and worthless people in it, that it always seems droll to see those who earn the money spending it, and those from whom the power comes using it. But we who are now trying to offer this ridiculous spectacle to the world ought not to laugh at it in the Florentine government of 1343-46. It seems to have lasted no long time, for at the end of three or four years the divine wrath smote Florence with the pest. This was to chastise her for her sins, as the chroniclers tell us; but as a means of reform it failed apparently. A hundred thousand of the people died, and the rest, demoralized by the terror and enforced idleness in which they had lived, abandoned themselves to all manner of dissolute pleasures, and were much worse than if they had never had any pest This pest, of which the reader will find a lively account in Boccaccio’s introduction to the “Decamerone” — he was able to write of it because, like De Foe, who described the plague of London, he had not seen it — seems rather to have been a blow at popular government, if we may judge from the disorders which it threw the democratic city into, and the long train of wars and miseries that presently followed. But few of us are ever sufficiently in the divine confidence to be able to say just why this or that thing happens, and we are constantly growing more modest about assuming to know. What is certain is that the one-man power, forboded and resisted from the first in Florence, was at last to possess itself of the fierce and jealous city. It showed itself, of course, in a patriotic and beneficent aspect at the beginning, but within a generation the first memorable Medici had befriended the popular cause and had made the weight of his name felt in Florence. From Salvestro de Medici, who succeeded in breaking the power of the Guelph nobles in 1382, and, however unwillingly, promoted the Tumult of the Ciompi and the rule of the lowest classes, it is a long step to Averardo de’ Medici, another popular leader in 1421; and it is again another long step from him to Cosimo de’ Medici, who got himself called the Father of his Country, and died in 1469, leaving her with her throat fast in the clutch of his nephew, Lorenzo the Magnificent. But it was the stride of destiny, and nothing apparently could stay it.

XVII

THE name of Lorenzo de’ Medici is the next name of unrivalled greatness to which one comes in Florence after Dante’s. The Medici, however one may be principled against them, do possess the imagination there, and I could not have helped going for their sake to the Piazza of the Mercato Vecchio, even if I had not wished to see again and again one of the most picturesque and characteristic places in the city. As I think of it, the pale, delicate sky of a fair winter’s day in Florence spreads over me, and I seem to stand in the midst of the old square, with its mouldering colonnade on one side, and on the other its low, irregular roofs, their brown tiles thinly tinted with a growth of spindling grass and weeds, green the whole year round. In front of me a vast, white old palace springs seven stories into the sunshine, disreputably shabby from basement to attic, but beautiful, with the rags of a plebeian wash-day caught across it from balcony to balcony, as if it had fancied trying to hide its forlornness in them. Around me are peasants and donkey-carts and Florentines of all sizes and ages; my ears are filled with the sharp din of an Italian crowd, and my nose with the smell of immemorial, innumerable market-days, and the rank, cutting savour of frying fish and cakes from a score of neighbouring cook-shops; but I am happy — happier than I should probably be if I were actually there. Through an archway in the street behind me, not far from an admirably tumble-down shop full of bric-a-brac of low degree, all huddled — old bureaus and bedsteads, crockery, classic lamps, assorted saints, shovels, flat-irons, and big-eyed madonnas — under a sagging pent-roof, I enter a large court, like Piazza Donati. Here the Medici, among other great citizens, had their first houses; and in the narrow street opening out of this court stands the little church which was then the family chapel of the Medici, after the fashion of that time, where all their marriages, christenings, and funerals took place. In time this highly respectable quarter suffered the sort of social decay which so frequently and so capriciously affects highly respectable quarters in all cities; and it had at last fallen so low in the reign of Cosimo I., that when that grim tyrant wished cheaply to please the Florentines by making it a little harder for the Jews than for the Christians under him, he shut them up in the old court. They had been let into Florence to counteract the extortion of the Christian usurers, and upon the condition that they would not ask more than twenty per cent, interest How much more had been taken by the Christians one can hardly imagine; but if this was a low rate to Florentines, one easily understands how the bankers of the city grew rich by lending to the necessitous world outside. Now and then they did not get back their principal, and Edward III. of England has still an outstanding debt to the house of Peruzzi, which he bankrupted in the fourteenth century. The best of the Jews left the city rather than enter the Ghetto, and only the baser sort remained to its captivity. Whether any of them still continue there, I do not know; but the place has grown more and more disreputable, till now it is the home of the forlornest rabble I saw in Florence, and if they were not the worst, their looks are unjust to them. They were mainly women and children, as the worst classes seem to be everywhere — I do not know why — and the air was full of the clatter of their feet and tongues, intolerably reverberated from the high, many-windowed walls of scorbutic brick and stucco. These walls were, of course, garlanded with garments hung to dry from their casements. It is perpetually washing-day in Italy, and the observer, seeing so much linen washed and so little clean, is everywhere invited to the solution of one of the strangest problems of the Latin civilization.

The ancient home of the Medici has none of the feudal dignity, the baronial pride, of the quarter of the Lamberti and the Buondelmonti; and, disliking them as I did, I was glad to see it in the possession of that squalor so different from the cheerful and industrious thrift of Piazza Donati and the neighbourhood of Dante’s house. No touch of sympathetic poetry relieves the history of that race of demagogues and tyrants, who, in their rise, had no thought but to aggrandize themselves, and whose only greatness was an apotheosis of egotism. It is hard to understand through what law of development from lower to higher, the Providence which rules the affairs of men permitted them supremacy; and it is easy to understand how the better men whom they supplanted and dominated should abhor them. They were especially a bitter dose to the proud-stomached aristocracy of citizens which had succeeded the extinct Ghibelline nobility in Florence; but, indeed, the three pills which they adopted from the arms of their guild of physicians, together with the only appellation by which history knows their lineage, were agreeable to none who wished their country well. From the first Medici to the last, they were nearly all hypocrites or ruffians, bigots or imbeciles; and Lorenzo, who was a scholar and a poet, and the friend of scholars and poets, had the genius and science of tyranny in supreme degree, though he wore no princely title and assumed to be only the chosen head of the commonwealth.

“Under his rule,” says Villari, in his “Life of Savonarola,” that almost incomparable biography, “all wore a prosperous and contented aspect; the parties that had so long disquieted the city were at peace; imprisoned, or banished, or dead, those who would not submit to the Medicean domination; tranquillity and calm were everywhere. Feasting, dancing, public shows, and games amused the Florentine people who, once so jealous of their rights, seemed to have forgotten even the name of liberty. Lorenzo, who took part in all these pleasures, invented new ones every day. But among all his inventions, the most famous was that of the carnival songs (canti camasctaleschi), of which he composed the first, and which were meant to be sung in the masquerades of carnival, when the youthful nobility, disguised to represent the Triumph of Death, or a crew of demons, or some other caprice of fancy, wandered through the city, filling it with their riot. The reading of these songs will paint the corruption of the town far better than any other description. To-day, not only the youthful nobility, but the basest of the populace, would hold them in loathing, and to go singing them through the city would be an offence to public decency which could not fail to be punished. These things were the favourite recreation of a prince lauded by all the world and held up as a model to every sovereign, a prodigy of wisdom, a political and literary genius. And such as they called him then many would judge him still,” says our author, who explicitly warns his readers against Roscoe’s “Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici,” as the least trustworthy of all in its characterization. “They would forgive him the blood spilt to maintain a dominion unjustly acquired by him and his: the disorder wrought in the commonwealth; the theft of the public treasure to supply his profligate waste; the shameless vices to which in spite of his feeble health he abandoned himself; and even that rapid and infernal corruption of the people, which he perpetually studied with all the force and capacity of his soul. And all because he was the protector of letters and the fine arts!

“In the social condition of Florence at that time there was indeed a strange contrast. Culture was universally diffused; everybody knew Latin and Greek, everybody admired the classics; many ladies were noted for the elegance of their Greek and Latin verses. The arts, which had languished since the time of Giotta, revived, and on all sides rose exquisite palaces and churches. But artists, scholars, politicians, nobles, and plebeians were rotten at heart, lacking in every public and private virtue, every moral sentiment. Religion was the tool of the government or vile hypocrisy; they had neither civil, nor religious, nor moral, nor philosophic faith; even doubt feebly asserted itself in their souls. A cold indifference to every principle prevailed, and those visages full of guile and subtlety wore a smile of chilly superiority and compassion at any sign of enthusiasm for noble and generous ideas. They did not oppose these or question them, as a philosophical sceptic would have done; they simply pitied them.... But Lorenzo had an exquisite taste for poetry and the arts....

Having set himself up to protect artists and scholars, his house became the resort of the most illustrious wits of his time,... and whether in the meetings under his own roof, or in those of the famous Platonic Academy, his own genius shown brilliantly in that elect circle.... A strange life indeed was Lorenzo’s. After giving his whole mind and soul to the destruction, by some new law, of some last remnant of liberty, after pronouncing some fresh sentence of ruin or death, he entered the Platonic Academy, and ardently discussed virtue and the immortality of the soul; then sallying forth to mingle with the dissolute youth of the city, he sang his carnival songs, and abandoned himself to debauchery; returning home with Pulci and Politian, he recited verses and talked of poetry; and to each of these occupations he gave himself up as wholly as if it were the sole occupation of his life. But the strangest thing of all is that in all that variety of life they cannot cite a solitary act of real generosity toward his people, his friends, or his kinsmen; for surely if there had been such an act, his indefatigable flatterers would not have forgotten it.... He had inherited from Cosimo all that subtlety by which, without being a great statesman, he was prompt in cunning subterfuges, full of prudence and acuteness, skilful in dealing with ambassadors, most skilful in extinguishing his enemies, bold and cruel when he believed the occasion permitted.... His face revealed his character; there was something sinister and hateful in it; the complexion was greenish, the mouth very large, the nose flat, and the voice nasal; but his eye was quick and keen, his forehead was high, and his manner had all of gentleness that can be imagined of an age so refined and elegant as that; his conversation was full of vivacity, of wit and learning; those who were admitted to his familiarity were always fascinated by him. He seconded his age in all its tendencies; corrupt as it was, he left it corrupter still in every way; he gave himself up to pleasure, and he taught his people to give themselves up to it, to its intoxication and its delirium.”

XVIII

THIS is the sort of being whom human nature in self-defence ought always to recognize as a devil, and whom no glamour of circumstance or quality should be suffered to disguise. It is success like his which, as Victor Hugo says of Louis Napoleon’s similar success, “ confounds the human conscience,” and kindles the lurid light in which assassination seems a holy duty. Lorenzo’s tyranny in Florence was not only the extinction of public liberty, but the control of private life in all its relations. He made this marriage and he forbade that among the principal families, as it suited his pleasure; he decided employments and careers; he regulated the most intimate affairs of households in the interest of his power, with a final impunity which is inconceivable of that proud and fiery Florence. The smouldering resentment of his tyranny, which flamed out in the conspiracy of the Pazzi, adds the consecration of a desperate love of liberty to the cathedral, hallowed by religion and history, in which the tragedy was enacted. It was always dramatizing itself there when I entered the Duomo, whether in the hush and twilight of some vacant hour, or in the flare of tapers and voices while some high ceremonial filled the vast nave with its glittering procession. But I think the ghosts preferred the latter setting. To tell the truth, the Duomo at Florence is a temple to damp the spirit, dead or alive, by the immense impression of stony bareness, of drab vacuity, which one receives from its interior, unless it is filled with people. Outside it is magnificently imposing, in spite of the insufficiency and irregularity of its piazza. In spite of having no such approach as St. Mark’s at Venice, or St Peter’s at Rome, or even the cathedral at Milan, in spite of being almost crowded upon by the surrounding shops and cafés, it is noble, and more and more astonishing; and there is the baptistery, with its heavenly gates, and the tower of Giotto, with its immortal beauty, as novel for each new-comer as if freshly set out there overnight for his advantage. Nor do I object at all to the cab-stands there, and the little shops all round, and the people thronging through the piazza, in and out of the half-score of crooked streets opening upon it You do not get all the grandeur of the cathedral outside, but you get enough, while you come away from the interior in a sort of destitution. One needs some such function as I saw there one evening at dusk in order to realize all the spectacular capabilities of the place. This function consisted mainly of a visible array of the Church’s forces “against blasphemy,” as the printed notices informed me; but with the high altar blazing, a constellation of candles in the distant gloom, and the long train of priests, choristers, acolytes, and white-cowled penitents, each with his taper, and the archbishop, bearing the pyx, at their head, under a silken canopy, it formed a setting of incomparable vividness for the scene on the last Sunday before Ascension, 1478.

There is, to my thinking, no such mirror of the spirit of that time as the story of this conspiracy. A pope was at the head of it, and an archbishop was there in Florence to share actively in it. Having failed to find Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici together at Lorenzo’s villa, the conspirators transfer the scene to the cathedral; the moment chosen for striking the blow is that supremely sacred moment when the very body of Christ is elevated for the adoration of the kneeling worshippers. What a contempt they all have for the place and the office! In this you read one effect of that study of antiquity which was among the means Lorenzo used to corrupt the souls of men; the Florentines are half repaganized. Yet at the bottom of the heart of one conspirator lingers a mediaeval compunction, and though not unwilling to kill a man, this soldier does not know about killing one in a church. Very well, then, give up your dagger, you simple soldier; give it to this priest; he knows what a church is, and how little sacred!

The cathedral is packed with people, and Lorenzo is there, but Giuliano is not come yet. Are we to be fooled a second time? Malediction! Send some one to fetch that Medicean beast, who is so slow coming to the slaughter! I am of the conspiracy, for I hate the Medici; but these muttered blasphemies, hissed and ground through the teeth, this frenzy for murder — it is getting to be little better than that — make me sick. Two of us go for Giuliano to his house, and being acquaintances of his, we laugh and joke familiarly with him; we put our arms caressingly about him, and feel if he has a shirt of mail on, as we walk him between us through the crowd at the corner of the cafe there, invisibly, past all the cabmen ranked near the cathedral and the baptistery, not one of whom shall snatch his horse’s oat-bag from his nose to invite us phantoms to a turn in the city. We have our friend safe in the cathedral at last — hapless, kindly youth, whom we have nothing against except that he is of that cursed race of the Medici — and now at last the priest elevates the host and it is time to strike; the little bell tinkles, the multitude hold its breath and falls upon its knees; Lorenzo and Giuliano kneel with the rest A moment, and Bernardo Bandini plunges his short dagger through the boy, who drops dead upon his face, and Francesco Pazzi flings himself upon the body, and blindly striking to make sure of his death, gives himself a wound in the leg that disables him for the rest of the work. And now we see the folly of intrusting Lorenzo to the unpractised hand of a priest, who would have been neat enough, no doubt, at mixing a dose of poison. The bungler has only cut his man a little in the neck! Lorenzo’s sword is out and making desperate play for his life; his friends close about him, and while the sacred vessels are tumbled from the altar and trampled under foot in the mellay, and the cathedral rings with yells and shrieks and curses and the clash of weapons, they have hurried him into the sacristy and barred the doors, against which we shall beat ourselves in vain. Fury! Infamy! Malediction! Pick yourself up, Francesco Pazzi, and get home as you may! There is no mounting to horse and crying liberty through the streets for you! All is over! The wretched populace, the servile signory, side with the Medici; in a few hours the Archbishop of Pisa is swinging by the neck from a window of the Palazzo Vecchio; and while he is yet alive you are dragged, bleeding and naked, from your bed through the streets and hung beside him, so close that in his dying agony he sets his teeth in your breast with a convulsive frenzy that leaves you fast in the death-clutch of his jaws till they cut the ropes and you run hideously down to the pavement below.

XIX

ONE must face these grisly details from time to time if he would feel what Florence was. All the world was like Florence at that time in its bloody cruelty; the wonder is that Florence, being what she otherwise was, should be like all the world in that One should take the trouble also to keep constantly in mind the smallness of the theatre in which these scenes were enacted. Compared with modern cities, Florence was but a large town, and these Pazzi were neighbours and kinsmen of the Medici, and they and their fathers had seen the time when the Medici were no more in the state than other families which had perhaps scorned to rise by their arts. It would be insufferable to any of us if some acquaintance whom we knew so well, root and branch, should come to reign over us; but this is what happened through the Medici in Florence.

I walked out one pleasant Sunday afternoon to the Villa Careggi, where Lorenzo made a dramatic end twenty years after the tragedy in the cathedral. It is some two miles from the city; I could not say in just what direction; but it does not matter, since if you do not come to Villa Careggi when you go to look for it, you come to something else equally memorable, by ways as beautiful and through landscapes as picturesque. I remember that there was hanging from a crevice of one of the stone walls which we sauntered between, one of those great purple anemones of Florence, tilting and swaying in the sunny air of February, and that there was a tender presentiment of spring in the atmosphere, and people were out languidly enjoying the warmth about their doors, as if the winter had been some malady of theirs, and they were now slowly convalescent The mountains were white with snow beyond Fiesole, but that was perhaps to set off to better advantage the nearer hillsides, studded with villas gleaming white through black plumes of cypress, and blurred with long gray stretches of olive orchard; it is impossible to escape some such crazy impression of intention in the spectacular prospect of Italy, though that is probably less the fault of the prospect than of the people who have painted and printed so much about it There were vineyards, of course, as well as olive orchards on all those broken and irregular slopes, over which wandered a tangle of the high walls which everywhere shut you out from intimate approach to the fields about Florence; you may look up at them, afar off, or you may look down at them, but you cannot look into them on the same level.

We entered the Villa Careggi, when we got to it, through a high grated gateway, and then we found ourselves in a delicious garden, the exquisite thrill of whose loveliness lingers yet in my utterly satisfied senses. I remember it as chiefly a plantation of rare trees, with an enchanting glimmer of the inexhaustibly various landscape through every break in their foliage; but near the house was a formal parterre for flowers, silent, serene, aristocratic, touched not with decay, but a sort of pensive regret. On a terrace yet nearer were some putti, some frolic boys cut in marble, with a growth of brown moss on their soft backs, and looking as if, in their lapse from the civilisation for which they were designed, they had begun to clothe themselves in skins.

As to the interior of the villa, every one may go there and observe its facts; its vast, cold, dim saloons, its floors of polished cement, like ice to the foot, and its walls covered with painted histories and anecdotes and portraits of the Medici. The outside warmth had not got into the house, and I shivered in the sepulchral gloom, and could get no sense of the gay, voluptuous, living past there, not even in the prettily painted loggia where Lorenzo used to sit with his friends overlooking Val d’Arno, and glimpsing the tower of Giotto and the dome of Brunelleschi. But there is one room, next to the last of the long suite fronting on the lovely garden, where the event which makes the place memorable has an incomparable actuality. It is the room where Lorenzo died, and his dying eyes could look from its windows out over the lovely garden, and across the vast stretches of villa and village, olive and cypress, to the tops of Florence swimming against the horizon. He was a long time dying, of the gout of his ancestors and his own debauchery, and he drew near his end cheerfully enough, and very much as he had always lived, now reasoning high of philosophy and poetry with Pico della Mirandola and Politian, and now laughing at the pranks of the jesters and buffoons whom they brought in to amuse him, till the very last, when he sickened of all those delights, fine or gross, and turned his thoughts to the mercy despised so long. But, as he kept saying, none had ever dared give him a resolute No, save one: and dreading in his final hours the mockery of flattering priests, he sent for this one fearless soul: and Savonarola, who had never yielded to his threats or caresses, came at the prayer of the dying man, and took his place beside the bed we still see there — high, broad, richly carved in dark wood, with a picture of Perugino’s on the wall at the left beside it. Piero, Lorenzo’s son, from whom he has just parted, must be in the next room yet, and the gentle Pico della Mirandola, whom Lorenzo was so glad to see that he smiled and jested with him in the old way, has closed the door on the preacher and the sinner. Lorenzo confesses that he has heavy on his soul three crimes: the cruel sack of Volterra, the theft of the public dower of young girls, by which many were driven to a wicked life, and the blood shed after the conspiracy of the Pazzi. “He was greatly agitated, and Savonarola to quiet him kept repeating, ‘God is good; God is merciful. But,’ he added, when Lorenzo had ceased to speak, ‘there is need of three things.’

‘And what are they, father?’   ‘First, you must have a great and living faith in the mercy of God.’   ‘This I have — the greatest.’   ‘Second, you must restore that which you have wrongfully taken, or require your children to restore it for you.’ Lorenzo looked surprised and troubled; but he forced himself to compliance, and nodded his head in sign of assent. Then Savonarola rose to his feet, and stood over the dying prince. ‘Last, you must give back their liberty to the people of Florence.’ Lorenzo, summoning all his remaining strength, disdainfully turned his back; and, without uttering a word, Savonarola departed without giving him absolution.”

It was as if I saw and heard it all, as I stood there in the room where the scene had been enacted; it still remains to me the vividest event in Florentine history, and Villari has no need, for me at least, to summon all the witnesses he calls to establish the verity of the story. There are some disputed things that establish themselves in our credence through the nature of the men and the times of which they are told, and this is one of them. Lorenzo and Savonarola were equally matched in courage, and the Italian soul of the one was as subtle for good as the Italian soul of the other was subtle for evil. In that encounter, the preacher knew that it was not the sack of a city or the blood of conspirators for which the sinner really desired absolution, however artfully and naturally they were advanced in his appeal; and Lorenzo knew when he sent for him that the monk would touch the sore spot in his guilty heart unerringly. It was a profound drama, searching the depths of character on either side, and on either side it was played with matchless magnanimity.

XX

AFTER I had been at Careggi, I had to go again and look at San Marco, at the cell to which Savonarola returned from that death-bed, sorrowing. Yet, at this distance of time and place, one must needs wonder a little why one is so pitiless to Lorenzo, so devoted to Savonarola. I have a suspicion, which I own with shame and reluctance, that I should have liked Lorenzo’s company much better, and that I, too, should have felt to its last sweetness the charm of his manner. I confess that I think I should have been bored — it is well to be honest with one’s self in all things — by the menaces and mystery of Savonarola’s prophesying, and that I should have thought his crusade against the pomps and vanities of Florence a vulgar and ridiculous business. He and his monks would have been terribly dull companions for one of my make within their convent; and when they came out and danced in a ring with his male and female devotees in the square before the church, I should have liked them no better than so many soldiers of the Army of Salvation. That is not my idea of the way in which the souls of men are to be purified and elevated, or their thoughts turned to God. Puerility and vulgarity of a sort to set one’s teeth on edge marked the excesses which Savonarola permitted in his followers; and if he could have realized his puritanic republic, it would have been one of the heaviest yokes about the neck of poor human nature that have ever burdened it. For the reality would have been totally different from the ideal. So far as we can understand, the popular conception of Savonarola’s doctrine was something as gross as Army-of-Salvationism, as wild and sensuous as backwoods Wesleyism as fantastic, as spiritually arrogant as primitive Quakerism, as bleak and grim as militant Puritanism. We must face these facts, and the fact that Savonarola, though a Puritan, was no Protestant at all, but the most devout of Catholics, even while he defied the Pope. He was a sublime and eloquent preacher, a genius inspired to ecstasy with the beauty of holiness; but perhaps — perhaps! — Lorenzo knew the Florentines better than he when he turned his face away and died unshriven rather than give them back their freedom. Then why, now that they have both been dust for four hundred years — and in all things the change is such that if not a new heaven there is a new earth since their day — why do we cling tenderly, devoutly, to the strange, frenzied apostle of the Impossible, and turn, abhorring, from that gay, accomplished, charming, wise, and erudite statesman who knew what men were so much better? There is nothing of Savonarola now but the memory of his purpose, nothing of Lorenzo but the memory of his; and now we see, far more clearly than if the frate had founded his free state upon the ruins of the magnifiers tyranny, that the one willed only good to others, and the other willed it only to himself. All history, like each little individual experience, enforces nothing but this lesson of altruism; and it is because the memory which consecrates the church of San Marco teaches it in supreme degree that one stands before it with a swelling heart.

In itself the church is nowise interesting or imposing, with that ugly and senseless classicism of its façade, which associates itself with Spain rather than Italy, and the stretch of its plain, low convent walls. It looks South American, it looks Mexican, with its plaza-like piazza; and the alien effect is heightened by the stiff tropical plants set round the recent military statue in the centre. But when you are within the convent gate, all is Italian, all is Florentine again; for there is nothing more Florentine in Florence than those old convent courts into which your sight-seeing takes you so often. The middle space is enclosed by the sheltering cloisters, and here the grass lies green in the sun the whole winter through, with daisies in it, and other simple little sympathetic weeds or flowers; the still air is warm, and the place has a climate of its own. Of course, the Dominican friars are long gone from San Marco; the place is a museum now, admirably kept up by the Government I paid a franc to go in, and found the old cloister so little conventual that there was a pretty girl copying a fresco in one of the lunettes, who presently left her scaldino on her scaffolding, and got down to start the blood in her feet by a swift little promenade under the arches where the monks used to walk, and over the dead whose gravestones pave the way. You cannot help those things; and she was really very pretty — much prettier than a monk. In one of the cells upstairs there was another young lady; she was copying a Fra Angelico, who might have been less shocked at her presence than some would think. He put a great number of women, as beautiful as he could paint them, in the frescos with which he has illuminated the long line of cells. In one place he has left his own portrait in a saintly company, looking on at an Annunciation; a very handsome youth, with an air expressive of an artistic rather than a spiritual interest in the fact represented, which indeed has the effect merely of a polite interview. One looks at the frescoes glimmering through the dusk of the little rooms in hardly discernible detail, with more or less care, according to one’s real or attempted delight in them, and then suddenly comes to the cell of Savonarola; and all the life goes out of those remote histories and allegories, and pulses in an agony of baffled good in this martyrdom. Here is the desk at which he read and wrote; here are laid some leaves of his manuscript, as if they had just trembled from those wasted hands of his; here is the hair shirt he wore, to mortify and torment that suffering flesh the more; here is a bit of charred wood gathered from the fire in which he expiated his love for the Florentines by a hideous death at their hands. It rends the heart to look at them! Still, after four hundred years, the event is as fresh as yesterday, — as fresh as Calvary; and never can the race which still gropes blindly here conceive of its divine source better than in the sacrifice of some poor fellow-creature who perishes by those to whom he meant nothing but good.

As one stands in the presence of these pathetic witnesses, the whole lamentable tragedy rehearses itself again, with a power that makes one an actor in it. Here, I am of that Florence which has sprung erect after shaking the foot of the tyrant from its neck, too fiercely free to endure the yoke of the reformer; and I perceive the waning strength of Savonarola’s friends, the growing number of his foes. I stand with the rest before the Palazzo Vecchio waiting for the result of that ordeal by fire to which they have challenged his monks in’ test of his claims, and I hear with foreboding the murmurs of the crowd when they are balked of their spectacle by that question between the Dominicans and the Franciscans about carrying the host through the flames; I return with him heavy and sorrowful to his convent, prescient of broken power over the souls which his voice has swayed so long; I am there in San Marco when he rises to preach, and the gathering storm of insult and outrage bursts upon him, with hisses and yells, till the battle begins between his Piagnoni and the Arrabbiati, and rages through the consecrated edifice, and that fiery Peter among his friars beats in the skulls of his assailants with the bronze crucifix caught up from the altar; I am in the piazza before the church when the mob attacks the convent, and the monks, shaking off his meek control, reply with musket-shots from their cells; I am with him when the signory sends to lead him a prisoner to the Bargello; I am there when they stretch upon the rack that frail and delicate body, which fastings and vigils and the cloistered life have wrought up to a nervous sensibility as keen as a woman’s; I hear his confused and uncertain replies under the torture when they ask him whether he claims now to have prophesied from God; I climb with him, for that month’s respite they allow him before they put him to he question again, to the narrow cell high up in the tower of the Old Palace, where, with the roofs and towers of the cruel city he had so loved far below him, and the purple hills misty against the snow-clad mountains all round the horizon, he recovers something of his peace of mind, and keeps his serenity of soul; I follow him down to the chapel beautiful with Ghirlandajo’s frescoes where he spends his last hours, before they lead him between the two monks who are to suffer with him; and once more I stand among the pitiless multitude in the piazza. They make him taste the agony of death twice in the death of his monks; then he submits his neck to the halter, and the hangman thrusts him from the scaffold, where the others hang dangling in their chains above the pyre that is to consume their bodies. “Prophet!” cries an echo of the mocking voice on Calvary, “now is the time for a miracle!” The hangman thinks to please the crowd by playing the buffoon with the quivering form; a yell of abhorrence breaks from them, and he makes haste to descend and kindle the fire that it may reach Savonarola while he is still alive. A wind rises and blows the flame away. The crowd shrinks back terrified: “A miracle! a miracle!” But the wind falls again, and the bodies slowly burn, dropping a rain of blood into the hissing embers. The heat moving the right hand of Savonarola, he seems to lift it and bless the multitude. The Piagnoni fall sobbing and groaning to their knees; the Arrabbiati set on a crew of ribald boys, who, dancing and yelling round the fire, pelt the dead martyrs with a shower of stones.

Once more I was in San Marco, but it was now in the nineteenth century, on a Sunday of January, 1883. There, in the place of Savonarola, who, though surely no Protestant, was one of the precursors of the Reformation, stood a Northern priest, chief perhaps of those who would lead us back to Rome, appealing to us in the harsh sibilants of our English, where the Dominican had rolled the organ harmonies of his impassioned Italian upon his hearers’ souls. I have certainly nothing to say against Monsignor Capel, and I have never seen a more picturesque figure than his as he stood in his episcopal purple against the curtain of pale green behind him, his square priest’s cap on his fine head, and the embroidered sleeves of some ecclesiastical under-vestment showing at every tasteful gesture. His face was strong, and beautiful with its deep-sunk, dreamy eyes, and he preached with singular vigour and point to a congregation of all the fashionable and cultivated English-speaking people in Florence, and to larger numbers of Italians whom I suspected of coming partly to improve themselves in our tongue. They could not have done better; his English was exquisite in diction and accent, and his matter was very good. He was warning us against Agnosticism and the limitations of merely scientific wisdom; but I thought that there was little need to persuade us of God in a church where Savonarola had lived and aspired; and that even the dead, who had known him and heard him, and who now sent up their chill through the pavement from the tombs below, and made my feet so very cold, were more eloquent of immortality in that place.

XXI

ONE morning, early in February, I walked out through the picturesqueness of Oltrarno, and up the long ascent of the street to Porta San Giorgio, for the purpose of revering what is left of the fortifications designed by Michael Angelo for the defence of the city in the great siege of 1535. There are many things to distract even the most resolute pilgrim on the way to that gate, and I was but too willing to loiter. There are bric-a-brac shops on the Ponte Vecchio, and in the Via Guicciardini and the Piazza Pitti, with old canvases, and carvings, and bronzes in their windows; and though a little past the time of life when one piously looks up the scenes of fiction, I had to make an excursion up the Via de’ Bardi for the sake of Romola, whose history begins in that street. It is a book which you must read again in Florence, for it gives a true and powerful impression of Savonarola’s time, even if the author does burden her drama and dialogue with too much history. The Via de’ Bardi, moreover, is worthy a visit for its own Gothic-palaced, mediaeval sake, and for the sake of that long stretch of the Boboli garden wall backing upon it with ivy flung over its shoulder, and a murmur of bees in some sort of invisible blossoms beyond. In that neighbourhood I had to stop a moment before the house — simple, but keeping its countenance in the presence of a long line of Guicciardini palaces — where Machiavelli lived; a barber has his shop on the ground floor now, and not far off, again, are the houses of the Canigiani, the maternal ancestors of Petrarch. And yet a little way, up a steep, winding street, is the house of Galileo. It bears on its front a tablet recording the great fact that Ferdinand II. de’ Medici visited his valued astronomer there, and a portrait of the astronomer is painted on the stucco; there is a fruiterer underneath, and there are a great many children playing about, and their mothers screaming at them. The vast sky is blue without a speck overhead, and I look down on the tops of garden trees, and the brown-tiled roofs of houses sinking in ever richer and softer picturesqueness from level to level below. But to get the prospect in all its wonderful beauty, one must push on up the street a little farther, and pass out between two indolent sentries lounging under the Grotto-esquely frescoed arch of Porta San Giorgio, into the open road. By this time I fancy the landscape will have got the better of history in the interest of any amateur, and he will give but a casual glance at Michael Angelo’s bastions or towers, and will abandon himself altogether to the rapture of that scene.

For my part, I cannot tell whether I am more blest in the varieties of effect which every step of the descent outside the wall reveals in the city and its river and valley, or in the near olive orchards, gray in the sun, and the cypresses, intensely black against the sky. The road next the wall is bordered by a tangle of blackberry vines, which the amiable Florentine winter has not had the harshness to rob of their leaves; they hang green from the canes, on which one might almost hope to find some berries. The lizards, basking in the warm dust, rustle away among them at my approach, and up the path comes a gentleman in the company of two small terrier dogs, whose little bells finely tinkle as they advance. It would be hard to say just how these gave the final touch to my satisfaction with a prospect in which everything glistened and sparkled as far as the snows of Vallombrosa, lustrous along the horizon; but the reader ought to understand.

XXII

I WAS instructed by the friend in whose tutelage I was pursuing with so much passion my search for historical localities that I had better not give myself quite away to either the associations or the landscapes at Porta San Giorgio, but wait till I visited San Miniato. Afterward I was glad that I did so, for that is certainly the point from which best to enjoy both. The day of our visit was gray and overcast, but the air was clear, and nothing was lost to the eye among the objects distinct in line and colour, almost as far as it could reach. We went out of the famous Porta Romana, by which so much history enters and issues that if the customs officers there were not the most circumspect of men, they never could get round among the peasants’ carts to tax their wine and oil without trampling a multitude of august and pathetic presences under foot. One shudders at the rate at which one’s cocchiere dashes through the Past thronging the lofty archway, and scatters its phantoms right and left with loud explosions of his whip. Outside it is somewhat better, among the curves and slopes of the beautiful suburban avenues, with which Florence was adorned to be the capital of Italy twenty years ago. But here, too, history thickens upon you, even if you know it but a little; it springs from the soil that looks so red and poor, and seems to fill the air. In no other space, it seems to me do the great events stand so dense as in that city and the circuit of its hills; so that, for mere pleasure in its beauty, the sense of its surpassing loveliness, perhaps one had better not know the history of Florence at all. As little as I knew it, I was terribly incommoded by it; and that morning, when I drove up to San Miniato to “realize” the siege of Florence, keeping a sharp eye out for Montici, where Sciarra Colonna had his quarters, and the range of hills whence the imperial forces joined in the chorus of his cannon battering the tower of the church, I would far rather have been an unpremeditating listener to the poem of Browning which the friend in the carriage with me was repeating. The din of the guns drowned his voice from time to time, and while he was trying to catch a faded phrase, and going back and correcting himself, and saying, “No — yes — no! That’s it — no! Hold on — I have it!” as people do in repeating poetry, my embattled fancy was flying about over all the historic scene, sallying, repulsing, defeating, succumbing; joining in the famous camisada when the Florentines put their shirts on over their armour and attacked the enemy’s sleeping camp by night, and at the same time playing ball down in the piazza of Santa Croce with the Florentine youth in sheer contempt of the besiegers. It was prodigiously fatiguing, and I fetched a long sigh of exhaustion as I dismounted at the steps of San Miniato, which was the outpost of the Florentines, and walked tremulously round it for a better view of the tower in whose top they had planted their great gun. It was all battered there by the enemy’s shot aimed to dislodge the piece, and in the crumbling brickwork nodded tufts of grass and dry weeds in the wind, like so many conceits of a frivolous tourist springing from the tragic history it recorded. The apse of the church below this tower is of the most satisfying golden brown in colour, and within, the church is what all the guide-books know, but what I own I have forgotten. It is a very famous temple, and every one goes to see it, for its frescoes and mosaics and its peculiar beauty of architecture; and I dedicated a moment of reverent silence to the memory of the poet Giusti, whose monument was there. After four hundred years of slavery, his pen was one of the keenest and bravest of those which resumed the old Italian fight for freedom, and he might have had a more adequate monument. I believe there is an insufficient statue, or perhaps it is only a bust, or may be a tablet with his face in bas-relief; but the modern Italians are not happy in their commemorations of the dead. The little Campo Santo at San Miniato is a place to make one laugh and cry with the hideous vulgarity of its realistic busts and its photographs set in the tombstones; and yet it is one of the least offensive in Italy. When I could escape from the fascination of its ugliness, I went and leaned with my friend on the parapet that encloses the Piazza Michelangelo, and took my fill of delight in the landscape. The city seemed to cover the whole plain beneath us with the swarm of its edifices, and the steely stretch of the Arno thrust through its whole length and spanned by its half-dozen bridges. The Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio swelled up from the mass with a vastness which the distance seemed only to accent and reveal. To the northward showed the snowy tops of the Apennines, while on the nearer slopes of the soft brown hills flanking the wonderful valley the towns and villas hung densely drifted everywhere, and whitened the plain to its remotest purple.

I spare the reader the successive events which my unhappy acquaintance with the past obliged me to wait and see sweep over this mighty theatre. The winter was still in the wind that whistled round our lofty perch, and that must make the Piazza Michelangelo so delicious in the summer twilight; the bronze copy of the David in the centre of the square looked half frozen. The terrace is part of the system of embellishment and improvement of Florence for her brief supremacy as capital; and it is fitly called after Michael Angelo because it covers the site of so much work of his for her defence in the great siege. We looked about till we could endure the cold no longer, and then returned to our carriage. By this time the siege was over, and after a resistance of fifteen months we were betrayed by our leader, Malatesta Baglioni, who could not resist the Pope’s bribe. With the disgraceful facility of pleasure-seeking foreigners, we instantly changed sides, and returned through the Porta Romana, which his treason opened, and, because it was so convenient, entered the city with a horde of other Spanish and German bigots and mercenaries that the empire had hurled against the stronghold of Italian liberty.

XXIII

YET, once within the beloved walls — I must still call them walls, though they axe now razed to the ground and laid out in fine avenues, with a perpetual succession of horse-cars tinkling down their midst — I was all Florentine again, and furious against the Medici, whom after a whole generation the holy league of the Emperor and the Pope had brought back in the person of the bastard Alessandro. They brought him back, of course, in prompt and explicit violation of their sacred word; and it seemed to me that I could not wait for his cousin Lorenzino to kill him, — such is the ferocity of the mildest tourist in the presence of occasions sufficiently remote. But surely if ever a man merited murder it was that brutal despot, whose tyrannies and excesses had something almost deliriously insolent in them, and who, crime for crime, seems to have preferred that which was most revolting. But I had to postpone this exemplary assassination till I could find the moment for visiting the Riccardi Palace, in the name of which the fact of the elder Medicean residence is clouded. It has long been a public building, and now some branch of the municipal government has its meetings and offices there; but what the stranger commonly goes to see is the chapel or oratory frescoed by Benozzo Gozzoli, which is perhaps the most simply and satisfyingly lovely little space that ever four walls enclosed. The sacred histories cover every inch of it with form and colour; and if it all remains in my memory a sensation of delight, rather than anything more definite, that is perhaps a witness to the efficacy with which the painter wrought. Serried ranks of seraphs, peacock-plumed, and kneeling in prayer; garlands of roses everywhere; contemporary Florentines on horseback, riding in the train of the Three Magi Kings under the low boughs of trees; and birds fluttering through the dim, mellow atmosphere, the whole set dense and close in an opulent yet delicate fancifulness of design, — that is what I recall, with a conviction of the idleness and absurdity of recalling anything. It was like going out of doors to leave the dusky splendour of this chapel, which was intended at first to be seen only by the light of silver lamps, and come into the great hall frescoed by Luca Giordano, where his classicistic fables swim overhead in immeasurable light They still have the air, those boldly foreshortened and dramatically postured figures, of being newly dashed on — the work of yesterday begun the day before; and they fill one with an ineffable gaiety: War, Pestilence, and Famine, no less than Peace, Plenty, and Hygienic Plumbing — if that was one of the antithetical personages. Upon the whole, I think the seventeenth century was more comfortable than the fifteenth, and that when men had fairly got their passions and miseries impersonalized into allegory, they were in a state to enjoy themselves much better than before. One can very well imagine the old Cosimo who built this palace having himself carried through its desolate magnificence, and crying that, now his son was dead, it was too big for his family; but grief must have been a much politer and seemlier thing in Florence when Luca Giordano painted the ceiling of the great hall.

In the Duke Alessandro’s time they had only got half-way, and their hearts ached and burned in primitive fashion. The revival of learning had brought them the consolation of much classic example, both virtuous and vicious, but they had not yet fully philosophized slavery into elegant passivity. Even a reprobate like Lorenzino de’ Medici—” the morrow of a debauch,” as De Musset calls him — had his head full of the high Roman fashion of finishing tyrants, and behaved as much like a Greek as he could.

The Palazzo Riccardi now includes in its mass the site of the house in which Lorenzino lived, as well as the narrow street which formerly ran between his house and the palace of the Medici; so that if you have ever so great a desire to visit the very spot where Alessandro died that only too insufficient death, you must wreak your frenzy upon a small passage opening out of the present court. You enter this from the modern liveliness of the Via Cavour — in every Italian city since the unification there is a Via Cavour, a Via Garibaldi, and a Corso Vittorio Emmanuele — and you ordinarily linger for a moment among the Etruscan and Roman marbles before paying your half franc and going upstairs. There is a little confusion in this, but I think upon the whole it heightens the effect; and the question whether the custodian can change a piece of twenty francs, debating itself all the time in the mind of the amateur of tyrannicide, sharpens his impatience, while he turns aside into the street which no longer exists, and mounts the phantom stairs to the vanished chamber of the demolished house, where the Duke is waiting for the Lady Ginori, as he believes, but really for his death. No one, I think, claims that he was a demon less infernal than Lorenzino makes him out in that strange Apology of his, in which he justifies himself to posterity by appeals to antiquity. “Alessandro,” he says, “went far beyond Phalaris in cruelty, because, whereas Phalaris justly punished Perillus for his cruel invention for miserably tormenting and destroying men in his brazen Bull, Alessandro would have rewarded him if he had lived in his time, for he was himself always thinking out new sorts of tortures and deaths, like building men up alive in places so narrow that they could not turn or move, but might be said to be built in as a part of the wall of brick and stone, and in that state feeding them and prolonging their misery as much as possible, the monster not satisfying himself with the mere death of his people; so that the seven years of his reign, for debauchery, for avarice and cruelty, may be compared with seven others of Nero, of Caligula, or of Phalaris, choosing the most abominable of their whole lives, in proportion, of course, of the city to the empire; for in that time so many citizens will be found to have been driven from their country, and persecuted, and murdered in exile, and so many beheaded without trial and without cause, and only for empty suspicion, and for words of no importance, and others poisoned or slain by his own hand, or his satellites, merely that they might not put him to shame before certain persons, for the condition in which he was born and reared; and so many extortions and robberies will be found to have been committed, so many adulteries, so many violences, not only in things profane but in sacred also, that it will be difficult to decide whether the tyrant was more atrocious and impious, or the Florentine people more patient and vile.... And if Timoleon was forced to kill his own brother to liberate his country, and was so much praised and celebrated for it, and still is so, what authority have the malevolent to blame me? But in regard to killing one who trusted me (which I do not allow I have done), I say that if I had done it in this case, and if I could not have accomplished it otherwise, I should have done it.... That he was not of the house of Medici and my kinsman is manifest, for he was born of a woman of base condition, from Castelvecchi in the Romagna, who lived in the house of the Duke Lorenzo [of Urbino], and was employed in the most menial services, and married to a coachman.... He [Alessandro] left her to work in the fields, so that those citizens of ours who had fled from the tyrant’s avarice and cruelty in the city determined to conduct her to the Emperor at Naples, to show his Majesty whence came the man he thought fit to rule Florence. Then Alessandro, forgetting his duty in his shame, and the love for his mother, which indeed he never had, and through an inborn cruelty and ferocity, caused his mother to be killed before she came to the Emperor’s presence.”

On the way up to the chamber to which the dwarfish, sickly little tyrannicide has lured his prey, the most dramatic moment occurs. He stops the bold ruffian whom he has got to do him the pleasure of a certain unspecified homicide, in requital of the good turn by which he once saved his life, and whispers to him, “It is the Duke!” Scoronconcolo, who had merely counted on an every-day murder, falters in dismay. But he recovers himself: “Here we are; go ahead, if it were the devil himself!” And after that he has no more compunction in the affair than if it were the butchery of a simple citizen. The Duke is lying there on the bed in the dark, and Lorenzino bends over him with “Are you asleep, sir?” and drives his sword, shortened to half length, through him; but the Duke springs up, and crying out, “I did not expect this of thee!” makes a fight for his life that tasks the full strength of the assassins, and covers the chamber with blood. When the work is done, Lorenzino draws the curtains round the bed again, and pins a Latin verse to them explaining that he did it for the love of country and the thirst for glory.

XXIV

Is it perhaps all a good deal too much like a stage-play? Or is it that stage-plays are too much like facts of this sort? If it were at the theatre, one could go away, deploring the bloodshed, of course, but comforted by the justice done on an execrable wretch, the murderer of his own mother, and the pollution of every life that he touched. But if it is history we have been reading, we must turn the next page and see the city filled with troops by the Medici and their friends, and another of the race established in power before the people know that the Duke is dead. Clearly, poetical justice is not the justice of God. If it were, the Florentines would have had the republic again at once. Lorenzino, instead of being assassinated in Venice, on his way to see a lady, by the emissaries of the Medici, would have satisfied public decorum by going through the form of a trial, and would then have accepted some official employment and made a good end. Yet the seven Medicean dukes who followed Alessandro were so variously bad for the most part that it seems impious to regard them as part of the design of Providence. How, then, did they come to be? Is it possible that sometimes evil prevails by its superior force in the universe? We must suppose that it took seven Medicean despots and as many more of the house of Lorraine and Austria to iron the Florentines out to the flat and polished peacefulness of their modern effect. Of course, the commonwealth could not go on in the old way; but was it worse at its worst than the tyranny that destroyed it? I am afraid we must allow that it was more impossible. People are not put into the world merely to love their country; they must have peace. True freedom is only a means to peace; and if such freedom as they have will not give them peace, then they must accept it from slavery. It is always to be remembered that the great body of men are not affected by oppressions that involve the happiness of the magnanimous few; the affair of most men is mainly to be sheltered and victualled and allowed to prosper and bring up their families. Yet when one thinks of the sacrifices made to perpetuate popular rule in Florence, one’s heart is wrung in indignant sympathy with the hearts that broke for it. Of course, one must, in order to experience this emotion, put out of his mind certain facts, as that there never was freedom for more than one party at a time under the old commonwealth; that as soon as one party came into power the other was driven out of the city; and that even within the triumphant party every soul seemed corroded by envy and distrust of every other. There is, to be sure, the consoling reflection that the popular party was always the most generous and liberal, and that the oppression of all parties under the despotism was not exactly an improvement on the oppression of one. With this thought kept before you vividly, and with those facts blinked, you may go, for example, into the Medici Chapel of San Lorenzo and make pretty sure of your pang in the presence of those solemn figures of Michael Angelo’s, where his Night seems to have his words of grief for the loss of liberty upon her lips: —

“Tis sweet to sleep, sweeter of stone to be,

    And while endure the infamy and woe,

For me ’tis happiness not to feel or see.

    Do not awake me therefore. Ah, speak low!”

XXV

THOSE words of Michael Angelo’s answer to Strozzi’s civil verses on his Day and Night are nobly simple, and of a colloquial and natural pitch to which their author seldom condescended in sculpture. Even the Day is too muscularly awaking and the Night too anatomically sleeping for the spectator’s perfect loss of himself in the sculptor’s thought; but the figures are so famous that it is hard to reconcile one’s self to the fact that they do not celebrate the memory of the greatest Medici. That Giuliano whom we see in the chapel there is little known to history; of that Lorenzo, history chiefly remembers that he was the father of Alessandro, whom we have seen slain, and of Catharine de’ Medici. Some people may think this enough; but we ought to read the lives of the other Medici before deciding. Another thing to guard against in that chapel is the cold; and, in fact, one ought to go well wrapped up in visiting any of the in-door monuments of Florence. Santa Croce, for example, is a temple whose rigours I should not like to encounter again in January, especially if the day be fine without. Then the sun streams in with a deceitful warmth through the mellow blazon of the windows, and the crone, with her scaldino at the door, has the air almost of sitting by a register. But it is all an illusion. By the time you have gone the round of the strutting and mincing allegories, and the pompous effigies with which art here, as everywhere, renders death ridiculous, you have scarcely the courage to penetrate to those remote chapels where the Giotto frescoes are. Or if you do, you shiver round among them with no more pleasure in them than if they were so many boreal lights. Vague they are, indeed, and spectral enough, those faded histories of John the Baptist, and John the Evangelist, and St. Francis of Assisi, and as far from us, morally, as anything at the pole; so that the honest sufferer, who feels himself taking cold in his bare head, would blush for his absurdity in pretending to get any comfort or joy from them, if all the available blood in his body were not then concentrated in the tip of his nose. For my part, I marvelled at myself for being led even temporarily, into temptation of that sort; and it soon came to my putting my book under my arm and my hands in my pockets, and, with a priest’s silken skull-cap on my head, sauntering among those works of art with no more sense of obligation to them than if I were their contemporary. It is well, if possible, to have some one with you to look at the book, and see what the works are and the authors. But nothing of it is comparable to getting out into the open piazza again, where the sun is so warm, — though not so warm as it looks.

It suffices for the Italians, however, who are greedy in nothing, and do not require to be warmed through, any more than to be fed full. The wonder of their temperance comes back with perpetual surprise to the gluttonous Northern nature. Their shyness of your fire, their gentle deprecation of your out-of-hours hospitality, amuse as freshly as at first; and the reader who has not known the fact must imagine the well-dressed throng in the Florentine street more meagrely breakfasted and lunched than anything but destitution with us, and protected against the cold in-doors by nothing but the clothes which are much more efficient without.

XXVI.

WHAT strikes one first in the Florentine crowd is that it is so well dressed. I do not mean that the average of fashion is so great as with us, but that the average of raggedness is less. Venice, when I saw it again, seemed in tatters, but, so far as I can remember, Florence was not even patched; and this, in spite of the talk one constantly hears of the poverty which has befallen the city since the removal of the capital to Rome. All classes are said to feel this adversity more or less, but none of them show it on the street; beggary itself is silenced to the invisible speech which one sees moving the lips of the old women who steal an open palm towards you at the church doors. Florence is not only better dressed on the average than Boston, but, with little over half the population, there are, I should think, nearly twice as many private carriages in the former city. I am not going beyond the most non-committal si dice in any study of the Florentine civilisation, and I know no more than that it is said (as it has been said ever since the first northern tourist discovered them) that they will starve themselves at home to make a show abroad. But if they do not invite the observer to share their domestic self-denial, — and it is said that they do not, even when he has long ceased to be a passing stranger, — I do not see why he should complain. For my part, their abstemiousness cost me no sacrifice, and I found a great deal of pleasure in looking at the turnouts in the Cascine, and at the fur-lined coats in the streets and piazzas. They are always great wearers of fur in the south, but I think it is less fashionable than it used to be in Italy. The younger swells did not wear it in Florence, but now and then I met an elderly gentleman, slim, tall, with an iron-gray moustache, who, in folding his long fur-lined overcoat loosely about him as he walked, had a gratifying effect of being an ancestral portrait of himself; and with all persons and classes content to come short of recent fashion, fur is the most popular wear for winter. Each has it in such measure as he may; and one day in the Piazza della Signoria, when there was for some reason an assemblage of market-folk there, every man had hanging operatically from his shoulder an overcoat with cheap fur collar and cuffs. They were all babbling and gesticulating with an impassioned amiability, and their voices filled the place with a leafy rustling which it must have known so often in the old times, when the Florentines came together there to govern Florence. One ought not, I suppose, to imagine them always too grimly bent on public business in those times. They must have got a great deal of fun out of it, in the long run, as well as trouble, and must have enjoyed sharpening their wits upon one another vastly.

The presence now of all those busy-tongued people — bargaining or gossiping, whichever they were — gave its own touch to the peculiarly noble effect of the piazza, as it rose before me from the gentle slope of the Via Borgo dei Greci. I was coming back from that visit to Santa Croce, of which I have tried to give the sentiment, and I was resentfully tingling still with the cold, and the displeasure of a backward glance at the brand-new ugliness of the façade, and of the big clumsy Dante on his pedestal before it, when all my burden suddenly lifted from me, as if nothing could resist the spring of that buoyant air. It was too much for even the dull, vague rage I felt at having voluntarily gone through that dreary old farce of old-master doing again, in which the man only averagely instructed in the history of art is at his last extreme of insincerity, weariness, and degradation, — the ridiculous and miserable slave of the guide-book asterisks marking this or that thing as worth seeing. All seemed to rise and float away with the thin clouds, chasing one another across the generous space of afternoon sky which the piazza opened to the vision; and my spirit rose as light as the lion of the Republic, which capers so nimbly up the staff on top of the palace tower.

There is something fine in the old piazza being still true to the popular and even plebeian use. In narrow and crowded Florence, one might have supposed that fashion would have tried to possess itself of the place, after the public palace became the residence of the Medici; but it seems not to have changed its ancient character. It is now the starting-point of a line of omnibuses; a rank of cabs surrounds the base of Cosimo’s equestrian statue; the lottery is drawn on the platform in front of the palace; second-rate shops of all sorts face it from two sides, and the restaurants and cafés of the neighbourhood are inferior. But this unambitious environment leaves the observer all the freer to his impressions of the local art, the groups of the Loggia dei Lanzi, the symmetrical stretch of the Portico degli Uffizzi, and, best of all, the great, bold, irregular mass of the old palace itself, beautiful as some rugged natural object is beautiful, and with the kindliness of nature in it. Plenty of men have been hung from its windows, plenty dashed from its turrets, slain at its base, torn in pieces, cruelly martyred before it; the wild passions of the human heart have beaten against it like billows; it has faced every violent crime and outbreak. And yet it is sacred, and the scene is sacred, to all who hope for their kind; for there, in some sort, century after century, the purpose of popular sovereignty — the rule of all by the most — struggled to fulfil itself, purblindly, bloodily, ruthlessly, but never ignobly, and inspired by an instinct only less strong than the love of life. There is nothing superfine, nothing of the salon about the place, nothing of the beauty of Piazza San Marco at Venice, which expresses the elegance of an oligarchy and suggests the dapper perfection of an aristocracy in decay; it is loud with wheels and hoofs, and busy with commerce, and it has a certain ineffaceable rudeness and unfinish like the structure of a democratic state.

XXVII

WHEN Cosimo I., who succeeded Alessandro, moved his residence from the family seat of the Medici to the Palazzo Vecchio, it was as if he were planting his foot on the very neck of Florentine liberty. He ground his iron heel in deeply; the prostrate city hardly stirred afterwards. One sees what a potent and valiant man he was from the terrible face of the bronze bust by Benvenuto Cellini, now in the Bargello Museum; but the world, going about its business these many generations, remembers him chiefly by a horrid crime — the murder of his son in the presence of the boy’s mother. Yet he was not only a great warrior and wild beast; he befriended letters, endowed universities, founded academies, encouraged printing; he adorned his capital with statues and public edifices; he enlarged and enriched the Palazzo Vecchio; he bought Luca Pitti’s palace, and built the Uffizzi, thus securing the eternal gratitude of the tourists who visit these galleries, and have something to talk about at the table d’hôte. It was he who patronised Benvenuto Cellini, and got him to make his Perseus in the Loggia de’ Lanzi; he built the fishermen’s arcade in the Mercato Vecchio and the fine loggia of the Mercato Nuovo; he established the General Archives, and reformed the laws and the public employments; he created Leghorn, and throughout Tuscany, which his arms had united under his rule, he promoted the material welfare of his people, after the manner of tyrants when they do not happen to be also fools.

His care of them in other respects may be judged from the fact that he established two official spies in each of the fifty wards of the city, whose business it was to keep him informed of the smallest events, and all that went on in the houses and streets, together with their conjectures and suspicions. He did not neglect his people in any way; and he not only built all those fine public edifices in Florence, — having merely to put his hand in his people’s pocket and do it, and then take the credit of them, — but he seems to have loved to adorn it with that terrible face of his on many busts and statues. Its ferocity, as Benvenuto Cellini has frankly recorded it, and as it betrays itself in all the effigies, is something to appal us still; and whether the story is true or not, you see in it a man capable of striking his son dead in his mother’s arms. To be sure, Garzia was not Cosimo’s favourite, and, like a Medici, he had killed his brother; but he was a boy, and when his father came to Pisa to find him, where he had taken refuge with his mother, he threw himself at Cosimo’s feet and implored forgiveness. “I want no Cains in my family!” said the father, and struck him with the dagger which he had kept hidden in his breast “Mother! Mother!” gasped the boy, and fell dead in the arms of the hapless woman, who had urged him to trust in his father’s mercy. She threw herself on the bed where they laid her dead son, and never looked on the light again. Some say she died of grief, some that she starved herself; in a week she died, and was carried with her two children to Florence, where it was presently made known that all three had fallen victims to the bad air of the Maremma. She was the daughter of a Spanish king, and eight years after her death her husband married the vulgar and ignoble woman who had long been his mistress. This woman was young, handsome, full of life, and she queened it absolutely over the last days of the bloody tyrant. His excesses had broken Cosimo with premature decrepitude; he was helpless in the hands of this creature, from whom his son tried to separate him in vain; and he was two years in dying, after the palsy had deprived him of speech and motion, but left him able to think and to remember!

The son was that Francesco I. who is chiefly known to fame as the lover and then the husband of Bianca Cappello, — to so little may a sovereign prince come in the crowded and busy mind of after-time. This grand duke had his courts and his camps, his tribunals and audiences, his shows of authority and government; but what we see of him at this distance is the luxurious and lawless youth, sated with every indulgence, riding listlessly by under the window of the Venetian girl who eloped with the Florentine banker’s clerk from her father’s palace in the lagoons, and is now the household drudge of her husband’s family in Florence. She is looking out of the window that looks on Savonarola’s convent, in the tallest of the stupid, commonplace houses that confront it across the square; and we see the prince and her as their eyes meet, and the work is done in the gunpowdery way of southern passion. We see her again at the house of those Spaniards in the Via de’ Banchi, which leads out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella, from whence the Palazzo Mandragone is actually in sight; and the marchioness is showing Bianca her jewels and — Wait a moment! There is something else the marchioness wishes to show her; she will go get it; and when the door reopens Francesco enters, protesting his love, to Bianca’s confusion, and no doubt to her surprise; for how could she suppose he would be there? We see her then at the head of the grand-ducal court, the poor, plain Austrian wife thrust aside to die in neglect; and then when Bianca’s husband, whom his honours and good fortune have rendered intolerably insolent, is slain by some of the duke’s gentlemen, — in the narrow street at Santo Spirito, hard by the handsome house in Via Maggio which the duke has given her, — we see them married, and receiving ih state the congratulations of Bianca’s father and brother, who have come on a special embassy from Venice to proclaim the distinguished lady Daughter of the Republic, — and, of course, to withdraw the price hitherto set upon her head. We see them then in the sort of life which must always follow from such love, — the grand duke had spent three hundred thousand ducats in the celebration of his nuptials, — overeating, overdrinking, and seeking their gross pleasures amid the ruin of the State. We see them trying to palm off a supposititious child upon the Cardinal Ferdinand, who was the true heir to his brother, and would have none of his spurious nephew; and we see these three sitting down in the villa at Poggio a Caiano to the famous tart which Bianca, remembering the skill of her first married days, has made with her own hands, and which she courteously presses the Cardinal to be the first to partake of. He politely refuses, being provided with a ring of admirable convenience at that time in Italy, set with a stone that turned pale in the presence of poison. “Some one has to begin,” cries Francesco, impatiently; and in spite of his wife’s signs — she was probably treading on his foot under the table, and frowning at him — he ate of the mortal viand; and then in despair Bianca ate too, and they both died. Is this tart perhaps too much for the reader’s digestion? There is another story, then, to the effect that the grand duke died of the same malarial fever that carried off his brothers Garzia and Giovanni, and Bianca perished of terror and apprehension; and there is still another story that the Cardinal poisoned them both. Let the reader take his choice of them; in any case it is an end of Francesco, whom, as I said, the world remembers so little else of.

It almost forgets that he was privy to the murder of his sister Isabella by her husband Paolo Orsini, and of his sister-in-law Eleonora by her husband Pietro de’ Medici. The grand duke, who was then in the midst of his intrigue with Bianca, was naturally jealous of the purity of his family; and as it has never been denied that both of those unhappy ladies had wronged their husbands, I suppose he can be justified by the moralists who contend that what is a venial lapse in a man is worthy death, or something like it, in a woman. About the taking-off of Eleonora, however, there was something gross, Medicean, butcherly, which all must deprecate. She knew she was to be killed, poor woman, as soon as her intrigue was discovered to the grand duke; and one is not exactly able to sympathize with either the curiosity or the trepidation of that “celebrated Roman singer” who first tampered with the letter from her lover, intrusted to him, and then, terrified at its nature, gave it to Francesco. When her husband sent for her to come to him at his villa, she took leave of her child as for the last time, and Pietro met her in the dark of their chamber and plunged his dagger into her breast.

The affair of Isabella Orsini was managed with much greater taste, with a sort of homicidal grace, a sentiment, if one may so speak, worthy a Roman prince and a lady so accomplished. She was Cosimo’s favourite, and she was beautiful, gifted, and learned, knowing music, knowing languages, and all the gentler arts; but one of her lovers had just killed her page, whom he was jealous of, and the scandal was very great, so that her brother, the grand duke, felt that he ought, for decency’s sake, to send to Rome for her husband, and arrange her death with him. She, too, like Eleonora, had her forebodings, when Paolo Orsini asked her to their villa (it seems to have been the custom to devote the peaceful seclusion of the country to these domestic rites); but he did what he could to allay her fears by his affectionate gaiety at supper, and his gift of either of those stag-hounds which he had brought in for her to choose from against the hunt planned for the morrow, as well as by the tender politeness with which he invited her to follow him to their room. At the door we may still see her pause, after so many years, and turn wistfully to her lady in waiting:—” Madonna Lucrezia, shall I go or shall I not go to my husband? What do you say?”

And Madonna Lucrezia Frescobaldi answers, with the irresponsible shrug which we can imagine: “Do what you like. Still, he is your husband!”

She enters, and Paolo Orsini, a prince and a gentleman, knows how to be as sweet as before, and without once passing from caresses to violence, has that silken cord about her neck —

Terrible stories, which I must try to excuse myself for telling the thousandth time. At least, I did not invent them. They are all part of the intimate life of the same family, and the reader must group them in his mind to get an idea of what Florence must have been under the first and second grand dukes. Cosimo is believed to have killed his son Garzia, who had stabbed his brother Giovanni. His son Pietro kills his wife, and his daughter Isabella is strangled by her husband, both murders being done with the knowledge and approval of the reigning prince. Francesco and Bianca his wife die of poison intended for Ferdinand, or of poison given them by him. On these facts throw the light of St Bartholomew’s day in Paris, whither Catharine de’ Medici, the cousin of these homicides, had carried the methods and morals of her family, and you begin to realize the Medici.

By what series of influences and accidents did any race accumulate the enormous sum of evil which is but partly represented in these crimes? By what process was that evil worked out of the blood? Had it wreaked its terrible force in violence, and did it then no longer exist, like some explosive which has been fired? These would be interesting questions for the casuist; and doubtless such questions will yet come to be studied with the same scientific minuteness which is brought to the solution of contemporary social problems. The Medici, a family of princes and criminals, may come to be studied like the Jukes, a family of paupers and criminals. What we know at present is, that the evil in them did seem to die out in process of time; though, to be sure, the Medici died with it That Ferdinand who succeeded Francesco, whichever poisoned the other, did prove a wise and beneficent ruler, filling Tuscany with good works, moral and material, and, by his marriage with Catharine of Lorraine, bringing that good race to Florence, where it afterwards reigned so long in the affections of the people. His son Cosimo II. was like him, but feebler, as a copy always is, with a dominant desire to get the sepulchre of our Lord away from the Turks to Florence, and long waging futile war to that end. In the time of Ferdinand II., Tuscany, with the rest of Italy, was wasted by the wars of the French, Spaniards, and Germans, who found it convenient to fight them out there, and by famine and pestilence. But the grand duke was a well-meaning man enough; he protected the arts and sciences as he got the opportunity, and he did his best to protect Galileo against the Pope and the inquisitors. Cosimo III., who followed him, was obliged to harass his subjects with taxes to repair the ruin of the wars in his father’s reign; he was much given to works of piety, and he had a wife who hated him, and finally forsook him and went back to France, her own country. He reigned fifty years, and after him came his son Gian Gastone, the last of his line. He was a person, by all accounts, who wished men well enough, but, knowing himself destined to leave no heir to the throne, was disposed rather to enjoy what was left of his life than trouble himself about the affairs of state. Germany, France, England, and Holland, had already provided him with a successor, by the treaty of London, in 1718; and when Gian Gastone died, in 1737, Francis II. of Lorraine became Grand Duke of Tuscany.

XXVIII

UNDER the later Mcdici the Florentines were drawing towards the long quiet which they enjoyed under their Lorrainese dukes — the first of whom, as is well known, left being their duke to go and be husband of Maria Theresa and emperor consort Their son, Pietro Leopoldo, succeeded him in Tuscany, and became the author of reforms in the civil, criminal, and ecclesiastical law, which then astonished all Europe, and which tardy civilization still lags behind in some things. For example, Leopold found that the abolition of the death penalty resulted not in more, but in fewer crimes of violence; yet the law continues to kill murderers, even in Massachusetts.

He lived to see the outbreak of the French revolution, and his son, Ferdinand III., was driven out by the forces of the Republic in 1796, after which Tuscany rapidly underwent the Napoleonic metamorphoses, and was republican under the Directory, regal under Ludovico I., Bonaparte’s king of Etruria, and grand ducal under Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Bacciocchi. Then, in 1816, Ferdinand III. came back, and he and his descendants reigned till 1848, when Leopold II. was driven out, to return the next year with the Austrians. Ten years later he again retired, and in i860 Tuscany united herself by popular vote to the kingdom of Italy, of which Florence became the capital, and so remained till the French evacuated Rome in 1871.

The time from the restoration of Ferdinand III. till the first expulsion of Leopold II. must always be attractive to the student of Italian civilization as the period in which the milder Lorrainese traditions permitted the germs of Italian literature to live in Florence, while everywhere else the native and fc eign despotisms sought diligently to destroy them, instinctively knowing them to be the germs of Italian liberty and nationality; but I confess that the time of the first Leopold’s reign has a greater charm for my fancy. It is like a long stretch of sunshine in that lurid, war-clouded landscape of history, full of repose and genial, beneficent growth. For twenty-five years, apparently, the good prince got up at six o’clock in the morning, and dried the tears of his people. To be more specific, he “formed the generous project,” according to Signor Bacciotti, by whose “Firenze Illustrata” I would not thanklessly profit, “of restoring Tuscany to her original happy state,” — which, I think, must have been prehistoric. “His first occupation was to reform the laws, simplifying the civil and mitigating the criminal; and the volumes are ten that contain his wise statutes, edicts, and decrees. In his time, ten years passed in which no drop of blood was shed on the scaffold. Prisoners suffered no corporeal penalty but the loss of liberty. The amelioration of the laws improved the public morals; grave crimes, after the abolition of the cruel punishments, became rare, and for three months at one period the prisons of Tuscany remained empty. The hospitals that Leopold founded, and the order and propriety in which he kept them, justly entitled him to the name of Father of the Poor. The education he gave his children aimed to render them compassionate and beneficent to their fellow-beings, and to make them men rather than princes. An illustrious Englishman, then living in Florence, and consequently an eye-witness, wrote of him: ‘Leopold loves his people. He has abolished all the imposts which were not necessary; he has dismissed nearly all his soldiers; he has destroyed the fortifications of Pisa, whose maintenance was extremely expensive, overthrowing the stones that devoured men. He observed that his court concealed him from his people; he no longer has a court. He has established manufactures, and opened superb roads at his own cost, and founded hospitals. These might be called, in Tuscany, the palaces of the grand duke. I visited them, and found throughout cleanliness, order, and delicate and attentive treatment; I saw sick old men, who were cared for as if by their own sons; helpless children watched over with a mother’s care; and that luxury of pity and humanity brought happy tears to my eyes. The prince often repairs to these abodes of sorrow and pain, and never quits them without leaving joy behind him, and coming away loaded with blessings: you might fancy you heard the expression of a happy people’s gratitude, but that hymn rises from a hospital. The palace of Leopold, like the churches, is open to all without distinction; three days of the week are devoted to one class of persons; it is not that of the great, the rich, the artists, the foreigners; it is that of the unfortunate! In many countries, commerce and industry have become the patrimony of the few: in Tuscany, all that know how may do; there is but one exclusive privilege — ability. Leopold has enriched the year with a great number of work-days, which he took from idleness and gave back to agriculture, to the arts, to good morals.... The grand duke always rises before the sun, arid when that beneficent star rejoices nature with its rays, the good prince has already dried many tears.... Leopold is happy, because his people are happy; he believes in God; and what must be his satisfaction when, before closing his eyes at night, before permitting himself to sleep, he renders an account to the Supreme Being of the happiness of a million of subjects during the course of the day!”’

English which has once been Italian acquires an emotionality which it does not perhaps wholly lose in returning to itself; and I am not sure that the language of the illustrious stranger, whom I quote at second hand, has not kept some terms which are native to Signor Bacciotti rather than himself. But it must be remembered that he was an eighteenth-century Englishman, and perhaps expressed himself much in this way. The picture he draws, if a little too idyllic, too pastoral, too operatic, for our realization, must still have been founded on fact, and I hope it is at least as true as those which commemorate the atrocities of the Medici. At any rate it is delightful, and one may as probably derive the softness of the modern Florentine morals and manners from the benevolence of Leopold as from the ferocity of Cosimo. Considering what princes mostly were in the days when they could take themselves seriously, and still are now when I should think they would give themselves the wink on seeing their faces in the glass, I am willing to allow that kindly despot of a Leopold all the glory that any history may claim for him. He had the genius of humanity, and that is about the only kind of genius which is entitled to reverence in this world. If he perhaps conceived of men as his children rather than his brothers, still he wished them well, and did them all the good he knew how. After a hundred years it must be allowed that we have made a considerable advance beyond him — in theory.

XXIX

WHAT society in Florence may now be like underneath its superficial effect of gentleness and placidity, the stranger, who reflects how little any one really knows of his native civilisation, will carefully guard himself from saying upon his own authority. From the report of others, of people who had lived long in Florence and were qualified in that degree to speak, one might say a great deal — a great deal that would be more and less than true. A brilliant and accomplished writer, a stranger naturalized by many years’ sojourn, and of an imaginable intimacy with his subject, sometimes spoke to me of a decay of manners which he had noticed in his time: the peasants no longer saluted persons of civil condition in meeting them; the young nobles, if asked to a ball, ascertained that there was going to be supper before accepting. I could not find these instances very shocking, upon reflection; and I was not astonished to hear that the sort of rich American girls who form the chase of young Florentine noblemen show themselves indifferent to untitled persons. There was something more of instruction in the fact that these fortune-hunters care absolutely nothing for youth or beauty, wit or character, in their prey, and ask nothing but money. This implies certain other facts — certain compensations and consolations, which the American girl with her heart set upon an historical name would be the last to consider. What interested me more was the witness which this gentleman bore, with others, to the excellent stuff of the peasants, whom he declared good and honest, and full of simple, kindly force and uprightness. The citizen class, on the other hand, was unenlightened and narrow-minded, and very selfish towards those beneath them; he believed that a peasant, for example, who cast his lot in the city, would encounter great unfriendliness in them if he showed the desire and the ability to rise above his original station. Both from this observer, and from other foreigners resident in Florence, I heard that the Italian nobility are quite apart from the national life; they have no political influence, and are scarcely a social power; there are, indeed, but three of the old noble families founded by the German emperors remaining — the Ricasoli, the Gherardeschi, and the Stufe; and a title counts absolutely for nothing with the Italians. At the same time, a Corsini was syndic of Florence; all the dead wall invited me to “vote for Peruzzi” in the approaching election for deputy, and at the last election a Ginori had been chosen. It is very hard to know about these things, and I am not saying my informants were wrong; but it is right to oppose to theirs the declaration of the intelligent and sympathetic scholar with whom I took my walks about Florence, and who said that there was great goodwill between the people and the historical families, who were in thorough accord with the national aspirations and endeavours. Again, I say, it is difficult to know the truth; but happily the truth in this case is not important.

One of the few acquaintances I made with Italians outside of the English-speaking circles was that of a tradesman who, in the intervals of business, was reading Shakspeare in English, and — if I may say it— “Venetian Life.” I think some Americans had lent him the latter classic. I did not learn from him that many other Florentine tradesmen gave their leisure to the same literature; in fact, I inferred that, generally speaking, there was not much interest in any sort of literature among the Florentines; and I only mention him in the hope of throwing some light upon the problem with which we are playing. He took me one night to the Literary Club, of which he was a member, and of which the Marchese Ricci is president; and I could not see that any presentation could have availed me more than his with that nobleman or the other nobleman who was secretary. The president shook my hand in a friendly despair, perfectly evident, of getting upon any common ground with me; and the secretary, after asking me if I knew Doctor Holmes, had an amiable effect of being cast away upon the sea of American literature. These gentlemen, as I understood, came every week to the club, and assisted at its entertainments, which were sometimes concerts, sometimes lectures and recitations, and sometimes conversation merely, for which I found the empty chairs, on my entrance, arranged in groups of threes and fives about the floor, with an air perhaps of too great social premeditation. Presently there was playing on the piano, and at the end the president shook hands with the performer. If there was anything of the snobbishness which poisons such intercourse for our race, I could not see it. May be snobbishness, like gentlemanliness, is not appreciable from one race to another.

XXX

MY acquaintance, whom I should grieve to make in any sort a victim by my personalities, did me the pleasure to take me over the little ancestral farm which he holds just beyond one of the gates; and thus I got at one of the homely aspects of life which the stranger is commonly kept aloof from. A narrow lane, in which some boys were pitching stones for quoits in the soft Sunday afternoon sunshine, led up from the street to the farmhouse, where one wandering roof covered house, stables, and offices with its mellow expanse of brown tiles, A door opening flush upon the lane admitted us to the picturesque interior, which was divided into the quarters of the farmer and his family, and the apartment which the owner occupied during the summer heats. This contained half a dozen pleasant rooms, chief of which was the library, overflowing with books representing all the rich past of Italian literature in poetry, history, and philosophy — the collections of my host’s father and grandfather. On the table he opened a bottle of the wine made on his farm; and then he took me up to the terrace at the house-top for the beautiful view of the city, and the mountains beyond it, streaked with snow. The floor of the terrace, which, like all the floors of the house, was of brick, was heaped with olives from the orchard on the hillside which bounded the little farm; but I could see from this point how it was otherwise almost wholly devoted to market-gardening. The grass keeps green all winter long at Florence, not growing, but never withering; and there were several sorts of vegetables in view, in the same sort of dreamy arrest Between the rows of cabbages I noticed the trenches for irrigation; and I lost my heart to the wide, deep well under the shed-roof below, with a wheel, picturesque as a mill-wheel, for pumping water into these trenches. The farm implements and heavier household utensils were kept in order here; and among the latter was a large wash-tub of fine earthenware, which had been in use there for a hundred and fifty years. My friend led the way up the slopes of his olive-orchard, where some olives still lingered among the willow-like leaves, and rewarded my curious palate with the insipidity of the olive which has not been salted. Then we returned to the house, and explored the cow-stables, where the well-kept Italian kine between their stone walls were much warmer than most Italian Christians in Florence. In a large room next the stable and behind the kitchen the farm-people were assembled, men, women, and children, in their Sunday best, who all stood up when we came in — all but two very old men, who sat in the chimney and held out their hands over the fire that sent its smoke up between them. Their eyes were bleared with age, and I doubt if they made out what it was all about; but they croaked back a pleasant answer to my host’s salutation, and then let their mouths fall open again and kept their hands stretched over the fire. It would be very hard to say just why these old men were such a pleasure to me.

XXXI

ONE January afternoon I idled into the Baptistery, to take my chance of seeing some little one made a Christian, where so many babes, afterwards memorable for good and evil, had been baptized; and, to be sure, there was the conventional Italian infant of civil condition tied up tight in the swathing of its civilisation, perfectly quiescent, except for its feebly wiggling arms, and undergoing the rite with national patience. It lay in the arms of a half-grown boy, probably its brother, and there were the father and the nurse; the mother of so young a child could not come, of course. The officiating priest, with spectacles dropped quite to the point of his nose, mumbled the rite from his book, and the assistant, with one hand in his pocket, held a negligently tilted taper in the other. Then the priest lifted the lid of the font in which many a renowned poet’s, artist’s, tyrant’s, philanthropist’s twisted little features were similarly reflected, and poured on the water, rapidly drying the poor little skull with a single wipe of a napkin; then the servant in attendance powdered the baby’s head, and the group, grotesquely inattentive throughout to the sacred rite, dispersed, and left me and a German family who had looked on with murmurs of sympathy for the child to overmaster as we might any interest we had felt in a matter that had apparently not concerned them.

One is always coming upon this sort of thing in the Italian churches, this droll nonchalance in the midst of religious solemnities, which I suppose is promoted somewhat by the invasions of sight-seeing everywhere. In the Church of the Badia at Florence, one day, the indifference of the tourists and the worshippers to one another’s presence was carried to such a point that the boy who was showing the strangers about, and was consequently in their interest, drew the curtain of a picture, and then, with his back to a group of kneeling devotees, balanced himself on the chapel-rail and sat swinging his legs there, as if it had been a store-box on a curbstone.

Perhaps we do not sufficiently account for the domestication of the people of Latin countries in their everyday-open church. They are quite at their ease there, whereas we are as unhappy in ours as if we were at an evening party; we wear all our good clothes, and they come into the houses of their Father in any rag they chance to have on, and are at home there. I have never seen a more careless and familiar group than that of which I was glad to form one, in the Church of Ognissanti, one day. I had gone, in my quality of American, to revere the tablet to Amerigo Vespucci which is there, and I found the great nave of the church occupied by workmen who were putting together the foundations of a catafalque, hammering away, and chatting cheerfully, with their mouths full of tacks and pins, and the funereal frippery of gold, black, and silver braid all about them. The church-beggars had left their posts to come and gossip with them, and the grandchildren of these old women were playing back and forth over the structure, unmolested by the workmen, and unawed either by the function going on in a distant chapel or by the theatrical magnificence of the sculptures around them and the fresco overhead, where a painted colonnade lifted another roof high above the real vault.

I liked all this, and I could not pass a church door without the wish to go in, not only for the pictures or statues one might see, but for the delightfully natural human beings one could always be sure of. Italy is above all lands the home of human nature — simple, unabashed even in the presence of its Maker, who is probably not so much ashamed of His work as some would Kke to have us think. In the churches, the beggary which the civil government has disheartened almost out of existence in the streets is still fostered, and an aged crone with a scaldino in her lap, a tattered shawl over her head, and an outstretched, skinny palm, guards the portal of every sanctuary. She has her chair, and the church is literally her home; she does all but eat and sleep there. For the rest, these interiors had not so much novelty as the charm of old association for me. Either I had not enlarged my interests in the twenty years since I had known them, or else they had remained unchanged; there was the same old smell of incense, the same chill, the same warmth, the same mixture of glare and shadow. A function in progress at a remote altar, the tapers starring the distant dusk; the straggling tourists; the sacristan, eager, but not too persistent with his tale of some special attraction at one’s elbow; the worshippers, all women or old men; a priest hurrying to or from the sacristy; the pictures, famous or unknown, above the side altars; the monuments, serious Gothic or strutting rococo — all was there again, just as it used to be.

But the thing that was really novel to me, who found the churches of 1883 in Florence so like the churches of 1863 in Venice, was the loveliness of the deserted cloisters belonging to so many of the former. These enclose nearly always a grass-grown space, where daisies and dandelions began to abound with the earliest consent of spring. Most public places and edifices in Italy have been so much photographed that few have any surprise left in them: one is sure that one has seen them oefore; but the cloisters are not yet the prey of this sort of pre-acquaintance. Whether the vaults and walls of the colonnades are beautifully frescoed, like those of Sta. Maria Novella or Sta. Annunziata or San Marco, or the place has no attraction but its grass and sculptured stone, it is charming; and these cloisters linger in my mind as something not less Florentine in character than the Ponte Vecchio or the Palazzo Publico. I remember particularly an evening effect in the cloister of Santa Annunziata, when the belfry in the corner, lifted aloft on its tower, showed with its pendulous bells like a great, graceful flower against the dome of the church behind it. The quiet in the place was almost sensible; the pale light, suffused with rose, had a delicate clearness; there was a little agreeable thrill of cold in the air; there could not have been a more refined moment’s pleasure offered to a sympathetic tourist loitering slowly homeward to his hotel and its table d’hôte; and why we cannot have old cloisters in America, where we are getting everything that money can buy, is a question that must remain to vex us. A suppressed convent at the corner of, say, Clarendon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, where the Brattle Street church is, would be a great pleasure on one’s way home in the afternoon; but still I should lack the final satisfaction of dropping into the chapel of the Brothers of the Misericordia, a little farther on towards Santa Maria Novella.

The sentimentalist may despair as he pleases, and have his fill of panic about the threatened destruction of the Ponte Vecchio, but I say that while these brothers, “black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream,” continue to light the way to dusty death with their flaring torches through the streets of Florence, the mediaeval tradition remains unbroken; Italy is still Italy. They knew better how to treat Death in the Middle Ages than we do now, with our vain profanation of flowers to his service, our loathsome dapperness of “burial caskets,” and dress-coat and white tie for the dead. Those simple old Florentines, with their street wars, their pestilences, their manifold destructive violences, felt instinctively that he, the inexorable, was not to be hidden or palliated, not to be softened or prettified, or anywise made the best of, but was to be confessed in all his terrible gloom; and in this they found, not comfort, not alleviation, which time alone can give, but the anæsthesis of a freezing horror. Those masked and trailing sable figures, sweeping through the wide and narrow ways by night to the wild, long rhythm of their chant, in the red light of their streaming torches, and bearing the heavily draped bier in their midst, supremely awe the spectator, whose heart falters within him in the presence of that which alone is certain to be. I cannot say they are so effective by daylight, when they are carrying some sick or wounded person to the hospital; they have not their torches then, and the sun seems to take a cynical satisfaction in showing their robes to be merely of black glazed cotton. An anteroom of their chapel was fitted with locked and numbered drawers, where the brothers kept their robes; half-a-dozen coffin-shaped biers and litters stood about, and the floor was strewn with laurel leaves — I suppose because it was the festa of St. Sebastian.

XXXII

I DO not know that the festas are noticeably fewer than they used to be in Italy. There are still enough of them to account for the delay in doing almost anything that has beén promised to be done. The carnival came on scatteringly and reluctantly. A large sum of money which had been raised for its celebration was properly” diverted to the relief of the sufferers by the inundations in Lombardy and Venetia, and the Florentines patiently set about being merry each on his own personal account. Not many were visibly merry, except in the way of business. The gentlemen of the operatic choruses clad themselves in stage-armour, and went about under the hotel windows, playing and singing, and levying contributions on the inmates; here and there a white clown or a red devil figured through the streets; two or three carriages feebly attempted a corso, and there was an exciting rumour that confetti had been thrown from one of them: I did not see the confetti. There was for a long time doubt whether there was to be any veglione or ball on the last night of the carnival; but finally there were two of them: one of low degree at the Teatro Umberto, and one of more pretension at the Pergola Theatre. The latter presented an agreeable image of the carnival ball which has taken place in so many romances: the boxes filled with brilliantly dressed spectators, drinking champagne; the floor covered with maskers, gibbering in falsetto, dancing, capering, coquetting till daylight. This, more than any other aspect of the carnival, seemed to give one the worth of his money in tradition and association. Not but that towards the end the masks increased in the streets, and the shops where they sold costumes were very gay; but the thing is dying out, as at least one Italian, in whose veins the new wine of Progress had wrought, rejoiced to tell me. I do not know whether I rejoiced so much to hear it; but I will own that I did not regret it a great deal. Italy is now so much the sojourn of barbarians that any such gaiety must be brutalized by them, till the Italians turn from it in disgust. Then it must be remembered that the carnival was fostered by their tyrants to corrupt and enervate them; and I cannot wonder that their love of Italy is wounded by it. They are trying to be men, and the carnival is childish. I fancy that is the way my friend felt about it.

XXXIII

AFTER the churches, the Italians are most at home in their theatres, and I went as often as I could to see them there, preferably where they were giving the Stenterello plays. Stenterello is the Florentine mask or type who survives the older Italian comedy which Goldoni destroyed; and during carnival he appeared in a great variety of characters at three different theatres. He is always painted with wide purplish circles round his eyes, with an effect of goggles, and a hare-lip; and his hair, caught into a queue behind, curls up into a pigtail on his neck. With this face and this wig he assumes any character the farce requires, and becomes delicious in proportion to his grotesque unfitness for it. The best Stenterello was an old man, since dead, who was very famous in the part. He was of such a sympathetic and lovely humour that your heart warmed to him the moment he came upon the stage, and when he opened his mouth, it scarcely mattered what he said: those Tuscan gutturals and abounding vowels as he uttered them were enough; but certainly to see him in “Stenterello and his own Corpse,” or “Stenterello Umbrella-mender,” or “Stenterello Quack Doctor,” was one of the great and simple pleasures. He was an actor who united the quaintness of Jefferson to the sweetness of Warren; in his wildest burlesque he was so true to nature in every touch and accent, that I wanted to sit there and spend my life in the innocent folly of enjoying him. Apparently, the rest of the audience desired the same. Nowhere, even in Italy, was the sense of rest from all the hurrying, great weary world outside so full as in certain moments of this Stenterello’s absurdity at the Teatro Rossini, which was not otherwise a comfortable place. It was more like a section of a tunnel than like a theatre, being a rounded oblong, with the usual tiers of boxes, and the pit where there were seats in front, and two-thirds of the space left free for standing behind. Every day there was a new bill, and I remember “Stenterello White Slave in America” and “Stenterello as Hamlet” among the attractions offered. In fact, he runs through an indefinite number of dramas, as Brighella, Arlecchino, Pantalone, Florindo, Rosaura, and the rest, appear and reappear in the comedies of Goldoni while he is temporizing with the old commedia d’arte, where he is at his best.

At what I may call the non-Stenterello theatres in Florence, they were apt to give versions of the more heart-breaking, vow-broken, French melodramas, though occasionally there was a piece of Italian origin, generally Giacosa’s. But it seemed to me that there were now fewer Italian plays given than there were twenty years ago; and the opera season was almost as short and inclement as in Boston.

XXXIV

I VISITED many places of amusements more popular than the theatre, but I do not know that I can fitly offer them all to the more polite and formal acquaintance of my readers, whom I like always to figure as extremely well-behaved and well-dressed persons. Which of these refined and fastidious ladies and gentlemen shall I ask, for example, to go with me to see a dying Zouave in wax in a booth at the Mercato Vecchio, where there were other pathetic and monstrous figures! At the door was a peasant-like personage who extolled himself from time to time as the inventor of a musical instrument within, which he said he had exemplarily spent his time in perfecting, instead of playing cards and mora. I followed him inside with the crowd, chiefly soldiers, who were in such overwhelming force that I was a little puzzled to make out which corps and regiment I belonged to; but I shared the common edification of the performance, when our musical genius mounted a platform before a most intricate instrument, which combined in itself, as he boasted, the qualities of all other kinds of instruments. He shuffled off his shoes and played its pedals with his bare feet, while he sounded its pipes with his mouth, pounding a drum-attachment with one hand and scraping a violin-attachment with the other. I do not think the instrument will ever come into general use, and I have my doubts whether the inventor might not have better spared a moment or two of his time to mora. I enjoyed more a little vocal and acrobatic entertainment, where again I found myself in the midst of my brothers in arms. Civilians paid three cents to come in, but we military only two; and we had the best seats and smoked throughout the performance. This consisted of the feats of two nice, innocent-looking boys, who came out and tumbled, and of two sisters who sang a very long duet together, screeching the dialogue with which it was interspersed in the ear-piercingest voices; it represented a lover’s quarrel, and sounded very like some which I have heard on the roof and the back fences. But what I admired about this and other popular shows was the perfect propriety. At the circus in the Via Nazionale they had even a clown in a dress coat.

Of course, the two iron tanks full of young crocodiles which I saw in a booth in our piazza classed themselves with great moral shows, because of their instructiveness. The water in which they lay soaking was warmed for them, and the chill was taken off the air by a sheet-iron stove, so that, upon the whole, these saurians had the most comfortable quarters in the whole shivering city. Although they had up a sign, “Animal pericolosi — non si toccano,” nothing Was apparently further from their thoughts than biting; they lay blinking in supreme content, and allowed a captain of horse to poke them with his finger throughout my stay, and were no more to be feared than that younger brother of theirs whom the showman went about with in his hand, lecturing on him; he was half-hatched from his native egg, and had been arrested and neatly varnished in the act for the astonishment of mankind.

XXXV

WE had the luck to be in Florence on the 25th of March, when one of the few surviving ecclesiastical shows peculiar to the city takes place. On that day a great multitude, chiefly of peasants from the surrounding country, assemble in front of the Duomo to see the explosion of the Car of the Pazzi. This car somehow celebrates the exploit of a crusading Pazzi, who broke off a piece of the Holy Sepulchre and brought it back to Florence with him; I could not learn just how or why, from the very scoffing and ironical little pamphlet which was sold in the crowd; but it is certain the car is covered with large fire-crackers, and if these explode successfully, the harvest for that year will be something remarkable. The car is stationed midway between the Duomo and the Baptistery, and the fire to set off the crackers is brought from the high altar by a pyrotechnic dove, which flies along a wire stretched for that purpose. If a mother with a sick child passes under the dove in its flight, the child is as good as cured.

The crowd was vast, packing the piazza outside around the car and the cathedral to its walls with all sorts and conditions of people, and every age and sex. An alley between the living walls was kept open under the wire, to let the archbishop, heading a procession of priests, go out to bless the car. When this was done, and he had returned within, we heard a faint pop at the high altar, and then a loud fizzing as the fiery dove came flying along the wire, showering sparks on every side; it rushed out to the car, and then fled back to the altar, amidst a most satisfactory banging of the fire-crackers. “It was not a very awful spectacle, and I suspect that my sarcastic pamphleteer’s description was in the mood of most of the Florentines looking on, whatever the peasant thought. “‘Now, Nina,’ says the priest to the dove, ‘we ‘re almost ready, and look out how you come back, as well as go out. That’s a dear! It’s for the good of all, and don’t play me a trick — you understand? Ready! Are you ready? Well, then, — Gloria in excelsis Deo, — go, go, dear, and look out for your feathers! Shhhhh! pum, pum! Hurrah, little one! Now for the return! Here you come! Shhhhh! pum, pum, pum! And I don’t care a fig for the rest!’ And he goes on with his mass, while the crowd outside console themselves with the cracking and popping. Then those inside the church join those without, and follow the car up to the corner of the Pazzi palace, where the unexploded remnants are fired in honour of the family.

XXXVI

THE civil rite now constitutes the only legal marriage in Italy, the blessing of the church going for nothing without it before the law; and I had had a curiosity to see the ceremony which one may see any day in the office of the syndic. The names of those intending matrimony are posted for a certain time on the base of the Public Palace, which gives everybody the opportunity of dedicating sonnets to them. The pay of a sonnet is one franc, so that the poorest couple can afford one; and I suppose the happy pair whom I saw waiting in the syndic’s anteroom had provided themselves with one of these simple luxuries. They were sufficiently commonish, kindly faced young people, and they and their friends wore, with their best clothes, an air of natural excitement. A bell sounded, and we followed the group into a large handsome saloon hung with red silk and old tapestries, where the bride and groom sat down in chairs placed for them at the rail before the syndic’s desk, with their two witnesses at their left A clerk recorded the names and residences of all four; and then the usher summoned the syndic, who entered, a large, stout old gentleman, with a tricolor sash accenting his fat middle — waist he had none. Everybody rose, and he asked the bride and groom severally if they would help each other through life and be kind and faithful; then in a long, mechanical formula, which I could not hear, he dismissed them. They signed a register, and the affair was all over for us, and just begun for them, poor things. The bride seemed a little moved when we returned to the anteroom; she borrowed her husband’s handkerchief, lightly blew her nose with it, and tucked it back in his breast-pocket.

XXXVII

In pursuance of an intention of studying Florence more seriously than anything here represents, I assisted one morning at a session of the police court, which I was willing to compare with the like tribunal at home. I found myself in much the same sort of crowd as frequents the police court here; but upon the whole the Florentine audience, though shabby, was not so truculent-looking nor so dirty as the Boston one; and my respectability was consoled when I found myself shoulder to shoulder with an abbate in it. The thing that chiefly struck me in the court itself was the abundance of form and “presence,” as compared with ours. Instead of our clerk standing up in his sack-coat, the court was opened by a crier in a black gown with a white shoulder-knot, and order was kept by others as ceremoniously apparelled, instead of two fat, cravatless officers in blue flannel jackets and Japanese fans. The judges, who were three, sat on a dais under a bust of King Umberto, before desks equipped with inkstands and sand-boxes exactly like those in the theatre. Like the ushers, they wore black gowns and white shoulder-knots, and had on visorless caps bound with silver braid; the lawyers also were in gowns. The business with which the court opened seemed to be some civil question, and I waited for no other. The judges examined the witnesses, and were very keen and quick with them, but not severe; and what I admired in all was the good manner — self-respectful, unabashed; nobody seemed browbeaten or afraid. One of the witnesses was one whom people near me called a gobbino (hunchbackling), and whose deformity was so grotesque that I am afraid a crowd of our people would have laughed at him, but no one smiled there. He bore himself with dignity, answering to the beautiful Florentine name of Vanuccio Vanucci; the judges first addressed him as voi (you), but slipped insensibly into the more respectful lei (lordship) before they were done with him. I was too far off from them to make out what it was all about.

XXXVIII

I BELIEVE there are not many crimes of violence in Florence; the people are not brutal, except to the dumb brutes, and there is probably more cutting and stabbing in Boston; as for shooting, it is almost unheard of. A society for the prevention of cruelty to animals has been established by some humane English ladies, which directs its efforts wisely to awakening sympathy for them in the children. They are taught kindness to cats and dogs, and it is hoped that when they grow up they will even be kind to horses. These poor creatures, which have been shut out of the pale of human sympathy in Italy by their failure to embrace the Christian doctrine (“Non sono Cristiani!”), are very harshly treated by the Florentines, I was told; though I am bound to say that I never saw an Italian beating a horse. The horses look wretchedly underfed and overworked, and doubtless they suffer from the hard, smooth pavements of the city, which are so delightful to drive on; but as for the savage scourgings, the kicking with heavy boots, the striking over the head with the butts of whips, I take leave to doubt if it is at all worse with the Italians than with us, though it is so bad with us that the sooner the Italians can be reformed the better.

If they are not very good to animals, I saw how kind they could be to the helpless and hapless of our own species, in a visit which I paid one morning to the Pia Casa di Ricovero in Florence. This refuge for pauperism was established by the first Napoleon, and is formed of two old convents, which he suppressed and joined together for the purpose. It has now nearly eight hundred inmates, men, women, and children; and any one found begging in the streets is sent there. The whole is under police government, and an officer was detailed to show me about the airy wards and sunny courts, and the clean, wholesome dormitories. The cleanliness of the place, in fact, is its most striking characteristic, and is promoted in the persons of the inmates by baths, perfunctory or voluntary, every week. The kitchen, with its shining coppers, was deliciously fragrant with the lunch preparing, as I passed through it: a mush of Indian meal boiled in a substantial meat-broth. This was served with an abundance of bread and half a gill of wine in pleasant refectories; some very old incapables and incurables were eating it in bed. The aged leisure gregariously gossiping in the wards, or blinking vacantly in the sunshine of the courts, was an enviable spectacle; and I should have liked to know what these old fellows had to complain of; for, of course, they were discontented.

The younger inmates were all at work; there was an admirably appointed shop where they were artistically instructed in wood-carving and fine cabinet-work; and there were whole rooms full of little girls knitting, and of big girls weaving: all the clothes worn there are woven there. I do not know why the sight of a very old tailor in spectacles, cutting out a dozen suits of clothes at a time, from as many thicknesses of cloth, should have been so fascinating. Perhaps in his presence I was hovering upon the secret of the conjectured grief of that aged leisure: its clothes were all cut of one size and pattern!

XXXIX

I HAVE spoken already of the excellent public schools of Florence, which I heard extolled again and again as the best in Italy; and I was very glad of the kindness of certain friends, which enabled me to visit them nearly all. The first which I saw was in that famous old Via de’ Bardi where Romola lived, and which was inspired by a charity as large-minded as her own. It is for the education of young girls in book-keeping and those departments of commerce in which they can be useful to themselves and others, and has a subsidy from the state of two-fifths of its expenses; the girls pay each ten francs a year for their tuition, and the rest comes from private sources. The person who had done most to establish it was the lady in whose charge I found it, and who was giving her time to it for nothing; she was the wife of a professor in the School of Superior Studies (as the University of Florence modestly calls itself), and I hope I may be forgiven, for the sake of the completer idea of the fact which I wish to present, if I trench so far as to add that she found her devotion to it consistent with all her domestic duties and social pleasures: she had thoroughly philosophized it, and enjoyed it practically as well as aesthetically. The school occupies three rooms on the ground floor of an old palace, whose rear windows look upon the Arno; and in these rooms are taught successively writing and mathematics, the principles of book-keeping, and practical book-keeping, with English and French throughout the three years’ course. The teacher of penmanship was a professor in the Academy of Fine Arts, and taught it in its principles; in this case, as in most others, the instruction is without text-books, and seemed to me more direct and sympathetic than ours: the pupil felt the personal quality of the teacher. There are fifty girls in the school, mostly from shopkeeping families, and of all ages from twelve to seventeen, and although it had been established only a short time, several of them had already found places. They were prettily and tidily dressed, and looked interested and happy. They rose when we entered a room, and remained standing till we left it; and it was easy to see that their mental training was based upon a habit of selfrespectful subordination, which would be quite as useful hereafter. Some little infractions of discipline — I have forgotten what — were promptly rebuked by Signora G — , and her rebuke was received in the best spirit.

She said she had no trouble with her girls, and she was experiencing now, at the end of the first year, the satisfaction of success in her experiment: hers I call it, because, though there is a similar school in Naples, she was the foundress of this in Florence.

There is now in Italy much inquiry as to what the Italians can best do to resume their place in the business of the world; and in giving me a letter to the director of the Popular Schools in Florence, Signora G — told me something of what certain good heads and hearts there had been thinking and doing. It appeared to these that Italy, with her lack of natural resources, could never compete with the great industrial nations in manufacturing, but they believed that she might still excel in the mechanical arts which are nearest allied to the fine arts, if an intelligent interest in them could be reawakened in her people, and they could be enlightened and educated to the appreciation of skill and beauty in these. To this end a number of Florentine gentlemen united to establish the Popular Schools, where instruction is given free every Sunday to any man or boy of any age who chooses to wash his hands and face and come. Each of these gentlemen pledges himself to teach personally in the schools, or to pay for a teacher in his place; there is no aid from the state; all is the work of private beneficence, and no one receives pay for service in the schools except the porter.

I found them in a vast old palace in the Via Parione, and the director kindly showed me through every department. Instruction is given in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and the other simpler branches; but the final purpose of the schools is to train the faculties for the practice of the decorative arts, and any art in which disciplined and nimble wits are useful. When a pupil enters, his name is registered, and his history in the school is carefully recorded up to the time he leaves it. It was most interesting to pass from one room to another, and witness the operation of the admirable ideas which animated the whole. Of course, the younger pupils were the quicker; but the director called them up without regard to age or standing, and let me hear them answer their teachers’ questions, merely saying, “This one has been with us six weeks; this one, two; this one, three years,” etc. They were mostly poor fellows out of the streets, but often they were peasants who walked five or six miles to and fro to profit by the chance offered them for a little life and light Sometimes they were not too clean, and the smell in the rooms must have been trying to the teachers; but they were decently clad, attentive, and well behaved. One of the teachers had come up through the schools, with no other training, and was very efficient. There was a gymnasium, and the pupils were taught the principles of hygiene; there was abundant scientific apparatus, and a free circulating library. There is no religious instruction, but in one of the rooms a professor from the Studii Superiori was lecturing on the Duties of a Citizen; I heard him talk to the boys about theft; he was very explicit with them, but just and kindly; from time to time he put a question to test their intelligence and attention. An admirable spirit of democracy — that is to say, of humanity and good sense — seemed to prevail throughout. The director made one little fellow read to me. Then, “What is your business?” he asked. “Cleaning out eave-troughs.” Some of the rest tittered. “Why laugh?” demanded the director sternly. “It is an occupation, like another.”

There are no punishments; for gross misbehaviour the offender is expelled. On the other hand, the pupils are given premiums for excellence, and are encouraged to put them into the savings-bank. The whole course is for four years; but in the last year’s room few remained. Of these was a certain rosso (red-head), whom the director called up. Afterwards he told me that this rosso had a wild romantic passion for America, whither he supremely desired to go, and that it would be an inexpressible pleasure for him to have seen me. I came away regretting that he could form so little idea from my looks of what America was really like.

In an old Medici palace, which was also once a convent, at the Oltrarno end of the Trinità bridge, is the National Female Normal School, one of two in the kingdom, the other being at Naples. On the day of my visit, the older girls had just returned from the funeral of one of their professors — a priest of the neighbouring parish of S. Spirito. It was at noon, and, in the natural reaction, they were chatting gaily; and as they ranged up and down stairs and through the long sunny corridors, pairing off, and whispering and laughing over their luncheon, they were very much like school-girls at home. The porter sent me upstairs through their formidable ranks to the room of the professor to whom I was accredited, and he kindly showed me through his department. It was scientific, and to my ignorance, at least, was thoroughly equipped for its work with the usual apparatus; but at that moment the light, clean, airy rooms were empty of students; and he presently gave me in charge of the directress, Signora Billi, who kindly led the way through the whole establishment. Some Boston lady, whom she had met in our educational exhibit at the Exposition in Paris, had made interest with her for all future Americans by giving her a complete set of our public-school text-books, and she showed me with great satisfaction, in one of the rooms, a set of American school furniture, desks, and seats. But there the Americanism of the Normal School ended. The instruction was oral, the text-books few or none; but every student had her note-book in which she set down the facts and principles imparted. I do not know what the comparative advantages of the different systems are; but it seemed to me that there must be more life and sympathy in the Italian.

The pupils, who are of all ages from six years to twenty, are five hundred in number, and are nearly all from the middle class, though some are from the classes above and below that. They come there to be fitted for teaching, and are glad to get the places which the state, which educates them for nothing, pays scantily enough — two hundred and fifty dollars a year at most They were all neatly dressed, and well-mannered, of course, from the oldest to the youngest; the discipline is perfect, and the relation of teachers and pupils, I understand, most affectionate. Perhaps after saying this I ought to add that the teachers are all ladies, and young ladies. One of these was vexed that I should see her girls with their hats and sacks on: but they were little ones and just going home; the little ones were allowed to go home at one o’clock, while the others remained from nine till two. In the room of the youngest were two small Scotchwomen who had quite forgotten their parents’ dialect; but in their blue eyes and auburn hair, in everything but their speech, they were utterly alien to the dusky bloom and gleaming black of the Italians about them. The girls were nearly all of the dark type, though there was here and there one of those opaque Southern blondes one finds in Italy. Fair or dark, however, they all had looks of bright intelligence, though I should say that in beauty they were below the American average. All their surroundings here were wholesome and good, and the place was thoroughly comfortable, as the Italians understand comfort. They have no fire in the coldest weather, though at Signora G— ‘s commercial school they’had stoves, to be used in extreme cases; but on the other hand they had plenty of light and sunny air, and all the brick floors and whitewashed walls were exquisitely clean. I should not have been much the wiser for seeing them at their lessons, and I shall always be glad of that impression of hopeful, cheerful young life which the sight of their leisure gave me, as they wandered happy and free through the corridors where the nuns used to pace with downcast eyes and folded palms; and I came away very well satisfied with my century.

My content was in nowise impaired by the visit which I made to the girls’ public school in Via Montebello. It corresponded, I suppose, to one of our primary schools; and here, as elsewhere, the teaching was by dictation; the children had readers, but no other textbooks; these were in the hands of the teachers alone.

Again everything was very clean, very orderly, very humane and kindly. The little ones in the various rooms, called up at random, were wonderfully proficient in reading, mathematics, grammar, and geography; one small person showed an intimacy with the map of Europe which was nothing less than dismaying.

I did not succeed in getting to the boys’ schools, but I was told that they were practically the same as this; and it seemed to me that if I must miss either, it was better to see the future mothers of Italy at their books. Here alone was there any hint of the church in the school: it was a Friday, and the priest was coming to teach the future mothers their catechism.

XL

FEW of my readers, I hope, have failed to feel the likeness of these broken and ineffectual sketches to the pictures in stone which glare at you from the windows of the mosaicists on the Lungarno and in the Via Borgognissanti; the wonder of them is greater than the pleasure. I have myself had the fancy, in my work, of a number of small views and figures of mosaic, set in a slab of black marble for a table-top, or — if the reader does not like me to be so ambitious — a paper-weight; and now I am tempted to form a border to this capo d’ opera, bizarre and irregular, such as I have sometimes seen composed of the bits of pietra viva left over from a larger work. They are mere fragments of colour, scraps and shreds of Florence, which I find still gleaming more or less dimly in my note-books, and I have no notion of making any ordered arrangement of them But I am sure that if I shall but speak of how the sunshine lies in the Piazza of the Annunziata at noonday, falling on the feebly dribbling grotesques of the fountain there, and on John of Bologna’s equestrian grand duke, and on that dear and ever lovely band of babes by Luca della Robbia in the façade of the Hospital of the Innocents, I shall do enough to bring it all back to him who has once seen it, and to justify myself at least in his eyes.

The beautiful pulpit of Donatello in San Lorenzo I find associated in sensation with the effect, from the old cloistered court of that church, of Brunelleschi’s dome and Giotti’s tower showing in the pale evening air above all the picturesque roofs between San Lorenzo and the cathedral; and not remote from these is my pleasure in the rich vulgarity and affluent bad taste of the modem decoration of the Caffé del Parlamento, in which one takes one’s ice under the chins of all these pretty girls, popping their little sculptured heads oiit of the lunettes below the frieze, with the hats and bonnets of fifteen years ago on them.

Do you remember, beloved brethren and sisters of Florentine sojourn, the little windows beside the grand portals of the palaces, the cantine, where you could buy a graceful wicker-covered flask of the prince’s or marquis’s wine? “Open from ten till four — till one on holidays,” they were lettered; and in the Borgo degli Albizzi I saw the Cantina Filicaja, though it had no longer the old sigh for Italy upon its lips: —

“Deh, fossi tu men bella o almen piu forte!”

I am far from disdaining the memory of my horse-car tour of the city, on the track which followed so nearly the line of the old city wall that it showed me most of the gates still left standing, and the last grand duke’s arch of triumph, very brave in the sunset light. The tramways make all the long distances in the Florentine outskirts and suburbs, and the cars never come when you want them, just as with us, and are always as crowded.

I had a great deal of comfort in two old fellows, unoccupied custodians, in the convent of San Marco, who, while we were all fidgeting about, doing our Fra Angelico or our Savonarola, sat motionless in a patch of sunshine and tranquilly gossipped together in senile falsetto. On the other hand, I never saw truer grief, or more of it, in a custodian than the polite soul displayed in the Bargello on whom we came so near the hour of closing one day that he could show us almost nothing. I could see that it wrung his heart that we should have paid our francs to come in then, when the Dante in the peaceful Giotto fresco was only a pensive blur to the eye, and the hideous realisations of the great Pest in wax were mere indistinguishable nightmares. We tried to console him by assuring him of our delight in Della Robbia’s singing boys in another room, and of the compensation we had in getting away from the Twelve (Useless) Labours of Hercules by Rossi, and two or three particularly unpleasant muscular Abstractions of Michael Angelo. It was, in fact, too dark to see much of the museum, and we had to come again for that; but no hour could have been better than that of the falling dusk for the old court, with its beautiful staircase, where so many hearts had broken in the anguish of death, and so many bloody heads rolled upon the insensible stones since the first Podestà of Florence had made the Bargello his home, till the last Medici made it his prison.

Of statues and pictures I have spoken very little, because it seems to me that others have spoken more than enough. Yet I have hinted that I did my share both of suffering and enjoying in galleries and churches, and I have here and there still lurking in my consciousness a colour, a look, a light, a line from some masterpiece of Botticelli, of Donatello, of Mino da Fiesole, which I would fain hope will be a consolation for ever, but which I will not vainly attempt to impart to others. I will rather beg the reader when he goes to Florence, to go for my sake, as well as his own, to the Academy and look at the Spring of Botticelli as long and often as he can keep away from the tender and dignified and exquisitely refined Mino da Fiesole sculptures in the Badia, or wherever else he may find them. These works he may enjoy without technique, and simply upon condition of his being a tolerably genuine human creature. There is something also very sweet and winningly simple in the archaic reliefs in the base of Giotto’s tower; and the lessee of the Teatro Umberto in showing me behind the scenes of his theatre had a politeness that was delicious, and comparable to nothing less than the finest works of art.

In quality of courtesy the Italians are still easily first of all men, as they are in most other things when they will, though I am not sure that the old gentleman who is known in Florence as The American, par excellence, is not perhaps pre-eminent in the art of driving a circus-chariot. This compatriot has been one of the most striking and characteristic features of the place for a quarter of a century, with his team of sixteen or twenty horses guided through the Florentine streets by the reins gathered into his hands. From time to time his horses have run away and smashed his carriage, or at least pulled him from his seat, so that now he has himself strapped to the box, and four grooms sit with folded arms on the seats behind him, ready to jump down and fly at the horses’ heads. As the strange figure, drawn at a slow trot, passes along, with stiffly waxed moustache and impassive face, it looks rather like a mechanical contrivance in the human form; and you are yielding to this fancy, when, approaching a comer, it breaks into a long cry, astonishingly harsh and fierce, to warn people in the next street of its approach. It is a curions sight, and seems to belong to the time when rich and privileged people used their pleasure to be eccentric, and the “madness” of Englishmen especially was the amazement and delight of the Continent. It is in character with this that the poor old gentleman should bear one of our own briefly historical names, and that he should illustrate in the indulgence of his caprice the fact that no great length of time is required to arrive at all that centuries can do for a noble family. I have been sorry to observe a growing impatience with him on the part of the Florentine journalists. Upon the occasion of his last accident they asked if it was not time his progresses should be forbidden. Next to tearing down the Ponte Vecchio, I can imagine nothing worse.

Journalism is very active in Florence, and newspapers are sold and read everywhere; they are conspicuous in the hands of people who are not supposed to read; and more than once the cab-driver whom I called at a street corner had to fold up his cheap paper and put it away before he could respond. They are of a varying quality. The “Nazione,” which is serious and political, is as solidly, if not so heavily, written as an English journal; the “Fanfulla della Domenica,” which is literary, contains careful and brilliant reviews of new books. The cheap papers are apt to be inflammatory in politics; if humorous, they are local and somewhat unintelligible. The more pretentious satirical papers are upon the model of the French — a little more political, but abounding mostly in jokes at the expense of the seventh commandment, which the Latins find so droll. There are in all thirty periodicals, monthly, weekly, and daily, published in Florence, which you are continually assured is no longer the literary centre of Italy. It is true none of the leaders of the new realistic movement in fiction are Florentines by birth or residence; the chief Italian poet, Carducci, lives in Bologna, the famous traveller De Amicis lives in Turin, and most new books are published at Milan or Naples. But I recur again to the group of accomplished scholars who form the intellectual body of the Studii Superiori, or University of Florence; and thinking of such an able and delightful historian as Villari, and such a thorough and indefatigable littérateur as Gubernatis, whom the congenial intellectual atmosphere of Florence has attracted from Naples and Piedmont, I should not, if I were a Florentine, yield the palm without a struggle.

One does not turn one’s face from Florence without having paid due honours in many a regretful, grateful look to the noble and famous river that runs through her heart You are always coming upon the Arno, and always seeing it in some new phase or mood. Belted with its many bridges, and margined with towers and palaces, it is the most beautiful and stately thing in the beautiful and stately city, whether it is in a dramatic passion from the recent rains, or dreamily raving of summer drouth over its dam, and stretching a bar of silver from shore to shore. The tawny splendour of its flood; the rush of its rapids; the glassy expanses in which the skies mirror themselves by day, and the lamps by night; the sweeping curve of the pale buff line of houses that follows its course — give a fascination which is not lost even when the anxiety of a threatened inundation mingles with it. The storms of a single night, sending down their torrents from the hills, set it foaming; it rises momently, and nothing but the presence of all the fire-engine companies in the city allays public apprehension. What they are to do to the Arno in case it overflows its banks, or whether they are similarly called out in summer when it shrinks to a rill in its bed, and sends up clouds of mosquitoes, I do not know; nor am I quite comfortable in thinking the city is drained into it. From the vile old rancid stenches which steam up from the crevices in the pavement everywhere, one would think the city was not drained at all; but this would be as great a mistake as to think New York is not cleaned, merely because it looks filthy.

Before we left Florence we saw the winter drowse broken in the drives and alleys of the Cascine; we saw the grass, green from November till April, snowed with daisies, and the floors of the dusky little dingles empurpled with violets. The nightingales sang from the poplar tops in the dull rich warmth; the carriages blossomed with lovely hats and parasols; handsome cavaliers and slim-waisted ladies dashed by on blooded horses (I will say blooded for the effect), and a fat flower-girl urged her wares upon every one she could overtake. It was enough to suggest what the Cascine could be to Florence in the summer, and enough to make one regret the winter, when one could have it nearly all to one’s self.

You can never see the Boboli Garden with the same sense of ownership, for it distinctly belongs to the king’s palace, and the public has the range of it only on Sundays, when the people throng it. But, unless one is very greedy, it is none the less a pleasure for that, with its charming, silly grottos, its masses of ivy-coloured wall, its curtains of laurel-hedge, its black spires of cypress and domes of pine, its weather-beaten marbles, its sad, unkempt lawns, its grotesque, overgrown fountain, with those sea-horses so much too big for its lake, its wandering alleys and mdss-grown seats abounding in talking age and whispering lovers. It has a tangled vastness in which an American might almost lose his self-consciousness; and the view of Florence from one of its heights is incomparably enchanting — like every other view of Florence.

Like that, for instance, which one has from the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, looking down on the picturesque surfaces of the city tiles, the silver breadth and stretch of the Arno, the olive and vine clad hills, the vast champaign widening in the distance till the misty tops of the mountains softly close it in at last. Here, as from San Miniato, the domed and galleried bulk of the cathedral showed prodigiously first of all things; then the eye rested again and again upon the lowered crests of the mediaeval towers, monumentally abounding among the modern roofs that swelled above their broken pride. The Florence that I saw was indeed no longer the Florence of the sentimentalist’s feeble desire, or the romancer’s dream, but something vastly better: contemporary, real, busy in its fashion, and wholesomely and every-daily beautiful. And my heart still warms to the famous town, not because of that past which, however heroic and aspiring, was so wrong-headed and bloody and pitiless, but because of the present, safe, free, kindly, full of possibilities of prosperity and fraternity, like that of Boston or Denver.

The weather had grown suddenly warm overnight. I looked again at the distant mountains, where they smouldered along the horizon: they were purple to their tips, and no ghost of snow glimmered under any fold of their mist. Our winter in Florence had come to an end.

PAN FORTE DI SIENA

I

MONTH out of our winter at Florence we gave to Siena, whither we went early in February. At that time there were no more signs of spring in the landscape than there were in December, except for here and there an almond-tree, which in the pale pink of its thronging blossoms showed delicately as a lady’s complexion in the unfriendly air. The fields were in their green arrest, but the trees were bare, and the yellow river that wandered along beside the railroad looked sullen and cold under the dun sky.

After we left the Florentine plain, we ran between lines of reddish hills, sometimes thickly wooded, sometimes showing on their crests only the stems and tops of scattering pines and poplars, such as the Tuscan painters were fond of putting into their Judean backgrounds. There were few tokens of life in the picture; we saw some old women tending sheep and spinning with their distaffs in the pastures; and in the distance there were villages cropping out of the hill-tops and straggling a little way down the slopes. At times we whirled by the ruins of a castle, and nearer Siena we caught sight of two or three walled towers which had come down from the Middle Ages apparently with every turret in repair. Our course was south-westward, but we were continually mounting into the cold, thin air of the volcanic hill-country, at the summit of which the old Ghibelline city still sits capital, proud of her past, beautiful and noble even among Italian towns, and wearing in her mural crown the cathedral second in splendour and surprise only to the jewel-church in the belt of Venice.

It is not my habit to write such fine rhetoric as this, the reader will bear me witness; and I suspect that it is a prophetic tint from an historical sketch of Siena, to which, after ascertaining the monotony of the landscape, I — could dedicate the leisure of our journey with a good conscience. It forms part of “La Nuova Guida di Siena,” and it grieves me that the title-page of my copy should have been lost, so that I cannot give the name of an author whose eloquence I delight in. He says: “Siena is lifted upon hills that rise alluring and delicious in the centre of Tuscany.... Its climate is soft, temperate, and wholesome. The summer sojourn is very grateful there on account of the elevated position and the sea breezes that, with an agreeable constancy, prevail in that season.... The panorama of the city is something enchanting.... Every step reveals startling changes of perspective, now lovely, now stern, but always stamped with a physiognomy of their own, a characteristic originality. From all points is seen the slim, proud tower of the Mangia, that lifts among the clouds its battlemented crest, its arrowy and exquisite shaft. Viewed from the top of this tower, Siena presents the figure of a star — a figure formed by the diverse rays or lines of its streets traced upon the shoulder of the hills. The loveliest blue of the most lovely Italian sky irradiates our city with the purest light, in which horizons magnificent and vast open upon the eye.... The hills and the plain are everywhere clothed with rich olive groves, festive orchards, luxuriant vineyards, and delightful bosks of oak, of chestnut, and of walnut, which form the umbrageous breathing-places of the enchanting landscape, and render the air pure and oxygenated.” The native inhabitants of this paradise are entirely worthy of it. “No people in Italy, except, perhaps, the Neapolitans, has the wide-awake-mindedness, the liveliness of character, the quickness of spirit, the keen-witted joyousness of the Sienese.... The women dress modestly, but with taste. They are gracious, amiable, inclined to amusement, and affectionate in their families. In general their honesty gives no ground for jealousy to their husbands; they are extremely refined in manner, and renowned for their grace and beauty. The comeliness of their figures, the regularity of their lineaments, as well as their vivid colouring, which reveals in them an enviable freshness of fibre and good blood purified by the mountain air, justly awaken the admiration of strangers.... In the women and the men alike exist the sweetness of pronunciation, the elegance of phrase, and the soft clearness of the true Tuscan accent....

Hospitality and the cordial reception of strangers aie the hereditary, the proverbial virtues of the Sienese.... The pride of the Sienese character is equal to its hospitality; and this does not spring from roughness of manners and customs, but is a noble pride, magnanimous, worthy of an enlightened people with a self-derived dignity, and intensely attached to its own liberty and independence. The Sienese, whom one historian has called the French of Italy, are ardent spirits, enthusiastic, resolute, energetic, courageous, and prompt beyond any other people to brandish their arms in defence of their country. They have a martial nature, a fervid fancy, a lively imagination; they are born artists; laborious, affable, affectionate, expansive; they are frank and loyal friends, but impressionable, impetuous, fiery to exaltation. Quick to anger, they are ready to forgive, which shows their excellence of heart. They are polite, but unaffected. Another trait of their gay and sympathetic character is their love of song, of the dance, and of all gymnastic exercises.... Dante called the Sienese genie vana (a vain people). But we must reflect that the altissimo poeta was a Florentine, and though a sublime genius, he was not able to emancipate himself from that party hate and municipal rivalry, the great curse of his time.”

But for that final touch about Dante, I might have thought I was reading a description of the Americans, and more especially the Bostonians, so exactly did my author’s eulogy of the Sienese embody the facts of our own character. But that touch disillusioned me: even Dante would not have called the Bostonians gente vana unless he had proposed to spend the rest of his life in London. As it was, I was impatient to breathe that wondrous air, to bask in that light, to behold that incomparable loveliness, to experience that proverbial hospitality, and that frank and loyal friendship; to mingle in the song and dance and the gymnastic exercises; and nothing but the sober-minded deliberation of the omnibus-train, which was four hours in going to Siena, prevented me from throwing myself into the welcoming embrace of the cordial city at once.

II

I HAD time not only to reflect that perhaps Siena distinguished between strangers arriving at her gates, and did not bestow an indiscriminate hospitality, but to wander back with the “New Guide” quite to the dawn of her history, when Senio, the son of Remus, flying from the wrath of his uncle Romulus, stopped where Siena now stands and built himself a castle. Whether the city got her name from Senio or not, it is certain that she adopted the family arms; and to this day the she-wolf suckling the twins is as much blazoned about Siena as about Rome, if not more. She was called Urbs Lupata even by the Romans, from the wolf-bearing seal of her chief magistrate; and a noble Roman family sent one of its sons as early as 303 to perish at Siena for the conversion of the city to Christianity. When the empire fell, Siena suffered less than the other Tuscan cities from the barbarian incursions; but she came under the rule of the Longobard kings, and then was one of the “free cities” of Charlemagne, from whose counts and barons, enriched by his gifts of Sienese lands and castles, the Sienese nobility trace their descent. These foreign robbers, whose nests the Florentines went out of their gates to destroy, in their neighbourhood, voluntarily left their castles in the Sienese territory, and came into the city, which they united with the bishops in embellishing with beautiful palaces and ruling with an iron hand, till the commons rose and made good their claim to a share in their own government. Immunities and privileges were granted by Cæsar and Peter, and at the close of the twelfth century a republican government, with an elective magistracy, was fully developed, and the democratized city entered upon a career of great material prosperity. “But in the midst of this potent activity of political and commercial life, Siena more than any other Italian city was afflicted with municipal rivalries and intestine discords. To-day the nobles triumphed and hurled the commons from power; tomorrow the people took a bloody revenge and banished every patrician from the city. Every change of administration was accompanied by ostracism, by violence, by public tumults, by continual upheavals;” and these feuds of families, of parties, and of classes, were fostered and perpetuated by the warring ambitions of the popes and emperors. From the first, Siena was Ghibelline and for the emperors, and it is odd that one of her proudest victories should have been won against Henry the son of Barbarossa. When that emperor threatened the free cities with ruin, Siena was the only one in Tuscany that shut her gates against him; and when Henry laid siege to her, her people sallied out of Fontebranda and San Marco, and fell upon his Germans and put them to flight.

The Florentines, as we have seen, were of the pope’s politics; or, rather, they were for their own freedom, which they thought his politics favoured, and the Sienese were for theirs, which they believed the imperial success would establish. They never could meet upon the common ground of their common love of liberty, but kept battling on through four centuries of miserable wars till both were enslaved. Siena had her shameful triumph when she helped in the great siege that restored the Medici to Florence in 1530, and Florence had her cruel revenge when her tyrant, Cosimo I., entered Siena at the head of the imperial forces fifteen years later. The Florentines met their first great defeat at the hands of the Sienese and of their own Ghibelline exiles at Montaperto (twelve miles from Siena) in 1260, when the slaughter was so great, as Dante says, “ che fece l’Arbia colorata in rosso;” and in 1269 the Sienese were routed by their own Guelph exiles and the Florentines at Colle di Val d’Elsa.

A story is told of an official of Siena to whom the Florentines sent in 1860 to invite his fellow-citizens to join them in celebrating the union of Tuscany with the kingdom of Italy. He said, Yes, they would be glad to send a deputation of Sienese to Florence, but would the Florentines really like to have them come? “Surely! Why not?”

“Oh, that affair of Montaperto, you know” — as if it were of the year before, and must still, after six hundred years, have been rankling in the Florentine mind. But perhaps in that time it had become confused there with other injuries, or perhaps the Florentines of 1860 felt that they had sufficiently avenged themselves by their victory of 1269. This resulted in the triumph of the Guelphs in Siena, and finally in the substitution of the magistracy of the Nine for that of the Thirty. These Nine, or the Noveschi, ruled the city for two hundred and fifty years with such unscrupulous tyranny and infamous corruption, that they “succeeded in destroying every generous sentiment, in sapping the noble pride of character in the Sienese population, and if not in extinguishing, at least in cooling, their ardent love of liberty,” and preparing them for the rule of the ever-dreaded one-man power, which appeared in the person of Pandolfo Petrucci in 1487. He misruled Siena for twenty-five years, playing there, with less astuteness and greater ferocity, the part which Lorenzo de’ Medici had played a century earlier in earlier rotten Florence. Petrucci, too, like Lorenzo, was called the Magnificent, and he, too, passed his life in sensual debauchery, in political intrigues ending in bloody revenges and reprisals, and in the protection of the arts, letters, and religion. Of course he beautified the city, and built palaces, churches, and convents with the money he stole from the people whom he gave peace to prosper in. He, too, died tranquilly of his sins and excesses, his soul reeking with treasons and murders like the fascinating Lorenzo’s; and his sons tried to succeed him like Lorenzo’s, but were deposed like Pietro de’ Medici and banished. One of his pleasing family was that Achille Petrucci who, in the massacre of St Bartholomew at Paris, cut the throat of the great Protestant admiral, Coligny.

After them, the Sienese enjoyed a stormy and intermittent liberty within and varying fortunes of war without, till the Emperor Charles V., having subdued Florence, sent a Spanish garrison to Siena with orders to build him a fort in that city. The Spaniards were under the command of Don Hurtado de Mendoza, who was not only, as my “New Guide” describes him, “ex-monk, astute, subtle, fascinating in address, profound dissimulator,” but also the author of the “History of the War of Granada,” and of one of the most delightful books in the world, namely, “The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes,” Spanish rogue and beggar, for whose sake I freely forgive him on my part all his sins against the Sienese; especially as they presently drove him and his Spaniards out of the city and demolished his fort.

The Sienese had regained their freedom, but they could hope to keep it only by the help of the French and their allies the Florentine exiles, who were plotting under the Strozzi against the Medici. The French friendship came to little or nothing but promises, the exiles were few and feeble, and in 1554 the troops of the Emperor and of Duke Cosimo — him of the terrible face and the bloodstained soul, murderer of his son, and father of a family of adulteresses and assassins — came and laid siege to the doomed city. The siege lasted eighteen months, and until the Sienese were wasted by famine and pestilence, and the women fought beside the men for the city which was their country and the last hope of liberty in Italy. When the famine began they drove out the useless mouths (bocche inutilt ), the old men and women and the orphan children, hoping that the enemy would have pity on these hapless creatures; the Spaniards massacred most of them before their eyes. Fifteen hundred peasants, who tried to bring food into the city, were hung before the walls on the trees, which a Spanish writer says “seemed to bear dead men.” The country round about was laid waste; a hundred thousand of its inhabitants perished, and the fields they had tilled lapsed into pestilential marshes breathing fever and death. The inhabitants of the city were reduced from forty to six thousand; seven hundred families preferred exile to slavery.

Charles V. gave Siena as a fief to his son, Philip II., who ceded it to Cosimo I., and he built there the fort which the Spaniards had attempted. It remained under the good Lorrainese dukes till Napoleon made it capital of his Department of the Ombrone, and it returned to them at his fall. In 1860 it was the first Tuscan city to«f vote for the union of Italy under Victor Emmanuel — the only honest king known to history, says my “New - Guide.”

III

IT is a “New Guide” full of the new wine of our epoch, and it brags not only of the warriors, the saints, the popes, the artists, the authors, who have illustrated the Sienese name, but of the two great thinkers in religion and politics who have given her truer glory. The bold pontiff Alexander III., who put his foot on the neck of the Emperor at Venice, was a Sienese; the meek, courageous St Catherine, daughter of a dyer, and the envoy of popes and princes, was a Sienese; Sallustio Bandini the inventor of the principle of Free Trade in commerce, was a Sienese; and Socinus, the inventor of Free Thought in religion, was a Sienese. There is a statue to Bandini in one of the chief places of Siena, but when my “New Guide” was written there was as yet no memorial of Socinus. “The fame of this glorious apostle,” he cries bitterly, “who has been called the father of modem rationalism, is cherished in England, in France, in Italy, in Switzerland, in Holland, in Poland, in America. Only Siena, who should remember with noble pride her most illustrious son, has no street named for him, no bust, no stone. Rightly do the strangers who visit our city marvel at neglect which denies him even a commemorative tablet in the house where he was born — the Casa Sozzini, now Palazzo Malavolta, 21 Via Ricasoli.” The justness of this censure is not impugned by the fact that the tablet has since been placed there; perhaps it was the scorn of my “New Guide” which lashed the Sienese to the act of tardy recognition. This has now found stately utterance in the monumental Italian which is the admirar tion and despair of other languages: —

“In the first Half of the 16th Century

Were born in this House

Lelio and Fausto Sozzini,

Scholars, Philosophers, Philanthropists.

Strenuous Champions of the Liberty of Thought,

Defenders of Human Reason against the Supernatural,

They founded the celebrated Socinian School,

Forecasting by three Centuries

The doctrine of Modern Rationalism.

The Sienese Liberals, Admiring, Reverent,

Placed this Memorial.

1877.”

I wandered into the court of the old palace, now involuntarily pea-green with mould and damp, and looked out from the bow-shaped terrace bulging over the garden behind, and across the olive orchards — But I forgot that I was not yet in Siena.

IV

BEFORE our arrival I had time to read all the “New Guide” had to say about the present condition of this city. What it was socially, morally, and personally, I knew already, and what it was industrially and commercially I learned with regret. The prosperity of Siena had reached its height in the thirteenth century, just before the great pest appeared. Her people then numbered a hundred thousand, from which they were reduced by the plague to twenty thousand. Whole districts were depopulated within the walls; the houses fell down, the streets vanished, and the plough passed over the ruins; wide gardens, olive orchards, and vineyards still flourish where traffic was busy and life was abundant. The “New Guide” does not say so, but it is true that Siena never fully recovered from this terrible stroke. At the time of the great siege, two hundred years after the time of the great pest, she counted only forty thousand souls within her gates, and her silk and woollen industries, which still exist, were vastly shrunken from their old proportions. The most evident industry in Siena now is that of the tanners, which hangs its banners of leather from all the roofs in the famous region of Fontebranda, and envelops the birthplace of St Catherine in an odour of tan bark. There is also a prosperous fabric of iron furniture, principally bedsteads, which is noted throughout Italy; this, with some cotton-factories and carpet-looms on a small scale, and some agricultural implement works, is nearly all that the “New Guide” can boast, till he comes to speak of the ancient marchpane of Siena, now called Panforte, whose honoured name I have ventured to bestow upon these haphazard sketches of its native city, rather because of their chance and random associations of material and decorative character than because of any rivalry in quality to which they can pretend. I often saw the panforte in shop-windows at Florence, and had the best intention in the world to test its excellence, but to this day I know only of its merits from my “New Guide.”

“This specialty, wholly Sienese, enjoys, in the article of sweetmeats, the primacy in Italy and beyond, and forms one of the principal branches of our industry. The panforte of Siena fears no competition or comparison, either for the exquisiteness of its flavour or for the beauty of its artistic confection: its brown paste, gemmed with broken almonds, is covered in the panfortes de luxe with a frosting of sugar, adorned with broideries, with laces, with flowers, with leaves, with elegant figures in lively colours, and with artistic designs, representing usually some monument of the city.”

V

IT was about dark when we reached Siena, looking down over her wall upon the station in the valley; but there was still light enough to give us proof, in the splendid quarrel of two railway porters over our baggage, of that quickness to anger and readiness to forgive which demonstrates the excellence of heart in the Sienese. These admirable types of the local character jumped furiously up and down in front of each other, and then, without striking a blow, instantly exchanged forgiveness and joined in a fraternal conspiracy to get too much money out of me for handling my trunks. I willingly became a party to their plot myself in gratitude for the impassioned spectacle they had afforded me; and I drove up through the steeply winding streets of the town with a sense of nearness to the Middle Ages not excelled even in my first visit to Quebec. Of Quebec I still think when I think of Siena; and there are many superficial points of likeness in the two cities. Each, as Dante said of one, “torregia e siede” (“sits and towers” is no bad phrase) on a mighty front of rock, round whose precipitous slopes she belts her girdling wall. The streets within wander hither and thither at will; in both they are narrow and hemmed in with the gray façades of the stone houses; without spreads a mighty valley — watered at Quebec with the confluent St Lawrence and St Charles, and walled at the horizon with primevally wooded hills; dry at Siena with almost volcanic drought, and shut in at the same far range by arid and sterile tops bare as the skies above them, yet having still the same grandeur and nobility of form. After that there is all the difference you will — the difference of the North and South, the difference of the Old World and the New.

I have always been a friend of the picturesqueness of the Cathedral Place at Quebec, and faithful to it in much scribbling hitherto, but nothing — not even the love of pushing a parallel — shall make me pretend that it is in any manner or degree comparable to the old and deeply memoried Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele at Siena. This was anciently Piazza del Campo, but now they call it Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, because, since the Unification, they want some piazza of that dear name in every Italian city, as I have already noted; and I walked to it through the Via Cavour which they must also have, and how it was I failed to traverse a Via Garibaldi I do not understand. It was in the clearness that follows the twilight when, after the sudden descent of a vaulted passage, I stood in the piazza and saw the Tower of the Mangia leap like a rocket into the starlit air. After all, that does not say it: you must suppose a perfect silence, through which this exquisite shaft for ever soars. When once you have seen the Mangia, all other towers, obelisks, and columns are tame and vulgar and earth-rooted; that seems to quit the ground, to be not a monument but a flight. The crescent of the young moon, at half its height, looked sparely over the battlements of the Palazzo Communale, from which the tower sprang, upon the fronts of the beautiful old palaces whose semi-circle encloses the grand space before it, and touched with its silver the waters of the loveliest fountain in the world, whose statues and bas-reliefs darkled above and around a silent pool. There were shops in the basements of some of the palaces, and there were lamps around the piazza, but there seemed no one in it but ourselves, and no figure broke the gentle slope in which the ground shelves from three sides towards the Palazzo Communale, where I left the old republic in full possession when I went home through the thronged and cheerful streets to bed.

I observed in the morning that the present Italian Government had taken occasion overnight to displace the ancient Sienese signory, and had posted a sentry at the palace door. There had also sprung up a picturesque cluster of wooden-roofed market-booths where peasant women sat before heaps of fruit and vegetables, and there was a not very impressive show of butter, eggs, and poultry. Now I saw that the brick-paved slope of the piazza was moss-grown in disuse, and that the noble Gothic and Renaissance palaces seemed half of them uninhabited. But there was nothing dilapidated, nothing ruinous in the place; it had simply a forsaken look, which the feeble stir of buying and selling at the market-booths scarcely affected. The old Palace of the Commonwealth stood serene in the morning light, and its Gothic windows gazed tranquilly upon the shallow cup before it, as empty now of the furious passions, the mediaeval hates and rivalries and ambitions, as of the other volcanic fires which are said once to have burned there. These, indeed, still smoulder beneath Siena, and every August a tremor of earthquake runs through her aged frame; but the heart of her fierce, free youth is at peace for evermore.

VI

WE waited at the hotel forty-eight hours for the proverbially cordial reception of strangers which the “New Guide” had boasted in his Sienese. Then, as no deputation of citizens came to offer us the hospitality of the city, we set about finding a lodging for ourselves. At this distance of time I am a little at a loss to know how our search, before it ended, had involved the complicity of a valet de place; a short, fat, amiable man of no definite occupation; a barber; a dealer in bric-a-brac; a hunchbackling; a mysterious facchino; and a were-wolf. I only know that all these were actually the agents of our domiciliation, and that without their intervention I do not see how we could ever have been settled in Siena. The valet had come to show us the city, and no caricature of him could give a sufficient impression of his forlorn and anxious little face, his livid silk hat, his threadbare coat, his meagre body, and his evanescent legs. He was a terribly pathetic figure, and I count it no merit to have employed him at once. The first day I gave him three francs to keep away, and went myself in search of a carriage to drive us about in search of rooms. There were no carriages at the stand, but an old man who kept a bookstore let the lady of the party have his chair and his scaldino while I went to the stable for one. There my purpose somehow became known, and when the driver mounted the box, and I stepped inside, the were-wolf mounted with him, and all that morning he directed our movements with lupine persistence and ferocity, but with a wolfishly characteristic lack of intelligence. He had an awful face, poor fellow, but I suspect that his ravenous eyes, his gaunt cheeks, his shaggy hair, and his lurking, illusive looks, were the worst of him; and heaven knows what dire need of devouring strangers he may have had. He did us no harm beyond wasting our time upon unfurnished lodgings in spite of our repeated groans and cries for furnished ones. From time to time I stopped the carriage and drove him down from the box; then he ran beside us on the pavement, and when we came to a walk on some uphill street he mounted again beside the driver, whom he at last persuaded to take us to a low tavern darkling in a sunless alley. There we finally threw off his malign spell, and driving back to our hotel, I found the little valet de place on the outlook. He hopefully laid hold of me, and walked me off to one impossible apartment after another — brick-floored, scantily rugged, stoveless, husk-matressed, mountain-bedsteaded, where we should have to find our own service, and subsist mainly upon the view from the windows. This was always fine; the valet had a cultivated eye for a prospect, and there was one of these lodgings which I should have liked to take for the sake of the boys playing mora in the old palace court, and the old lady with a single tooth rising like an obelisk from her lower jaw, who wished to let it.

A boarding-house, or pension, whose windows commanded an enchanting panorama of the Sienese hills, was provided with rather too much of the landscape in-doors; and at another, which was cleanly and attractive, two obdurate young Englishmen were occupying the sunny rooms we wanted, and would not vacate them for several days. The landlord conveyed a vivid impression of the violent character of these young men by whispering to me behind his hand, while he gently tried the door to see whether they were in or not, before he ventured to show me their apartment We could not wait, and then he tried to get rooms for us on the floor above, in an apartment belonging to a priest, so that we might at least eat at his table; but he failed in this, and we resumed our search for shelter. It must have been about this time that the short fat man appeared on the scene, and lured us off to see an apartment so exquisitely unsuitable that he saw the despair and reproach in our eyes, and, without giving us time to speak, promised us a perfect apartment for the morrow, and vanished round the first corner when we got into the street In the very next barber’s window, however, was a notice of rooms to let, and the barber left a lathered customer in his chair while he ran across the way to get the keys from a shoemaker. The shoemaker was at dinner, and his shop was shut; and the barber having, with however great regret, to go back to the customer left steeping in his lather, we fell into the hands of the most sympathetic of all bric-a-brac dealers, who sent us to the apartment of a French lady — an apartment with a northern exposure as sunless as fireless, from which we retreated with the vague praises and promises of people swearing in their hearts never to be caught in that place again. The day went on in this vain quest, but as I returned to the hotel at dusk I was stopped on the stairs by a mysterious facchino in a blouse; he had been waiting there for me, and he whispered that the priest, whose rooms the keeper of the pension had tried to get, now had an apartment for me. It proved that he had not quite this, when I went to visit him after dinner, but he had certain rooms, and a lady occupying an apartment on the same floor had certain others; and with these and one more room which we got in the pension below, we really sheltered ourselves at last. It was not quite a realization of the hereditary Sienese hospitality, but we paid almost nothing for very comfortable quarters; and I do not see how a party of five could be better housed and fed for twenty-five francs a day in the world.

We must have been almost the first lodgers whom our good ecclesiastic and his niece had ever had, their enterprise being so new; the rooms were pretty and fresh, and there was a comfortable stove in our little parlour — a franklinetto which, three days out of four, did not smoke — and a large kerosene lamp for our table included in the price of two francs a day which we paid for our two rooms. We grieved a good deal that we could not get all our rooms of Don A., and he sorrowed with us, showing us a jewel (giojello) of a room which he would have been so glad to give us if it were not already occupied by a young man of fashion and his dog. As we stood looking at it, with its stove in the corner, its carpet, its chest of drawers, and its other splendours, the good Don A. holding his three-beaked classic lamp up for us to see better, and his niece behind him lost in a passion of sympathy, which continually escaped in tender Ohs and Ahs, we sighed again, “Yes, if we could only have this, too!”

Don A. nodded his head and compressed his lips. “It would be a big thing!” (“Sarebbe un’ affarone!”) And then we all cast our eyes to heaven, and were about to break into a common sigh, when we heard the key of the young man of fashion in the outer door; upon which, like a party of guilty conspirators, we shrank breathlessly together for a moment, and then fled precipitately into our own rooms. We parted for that night with many whispered vows of esteem, and we returned in the morning to take possession. It was in character with the whole affair that on the way we should be met by the hunchbackling (whom I find described also in my notes as a wry-necked lamb, probably from some forcible contrast which he presented to the were-wolf) with a perfectly superb apartment, full of sun, in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuele, looking squarely upon the Palazzo Communale and the Tower of the Mangia. I was forced to confess that I had engaged my rooms.

“A pity for you cried the hunchbackling, passionately.

“I have promised,” I faltered. “One must keep one’s promises, no?”

“Oh, you are right, you are right,” said the hunchbackling, and vanished, and I never saw him more. Had he really the apartment to which he pretended?

VII

No more, probably, than I had the virtue which I affected about keeping my promises. But I have never been sorry that I remained true to the word I had given Don A., and I do not see what harm there can be in saying that he was an ex-monk of the suppressed convent of Monte Olivetto, who was eking out the small stipend he received for his priestly offices in the next parish church by letting these lodgings. All the monks of Monte Olivetto had to be of noble family, and in one of our rooms the blessed candle and crucifix which hung on one side of the bed were balanced by the blazon of our host’s arms in a frame on the other. Yet he was not above doing any sort of homely office for our comfort and convenience; I saw him with his priest’s gown off, in his shirt-sleeves and knee-breeches, putting up a bedstead; sometimes I met him on the stairs with a load of fire-wood in his arms, which I suspect he must have been sawing in the cellar. He bowed to me over it with unabashed courtesy, and he and Maddalena were so simply proud and happy at having filled all their rooms for a month, that one could not help sharing their cheerfulness. Don A. was of a mechanical turn, and I heard that he also earned something by repairing the watches of peasants who could not or would not pay for finer surgery. Greater gentleness, sweeter kindliness never surrounded the inmates of hired lodgings than enveloped us in the manners of this good priest and his niece. They did together all the work of the apartment, serving us without shame and without reluctance, yet keeping a soft dignity withal that was extremely pretty. May no word of mine offend them, for every word of theirs was meant to make us feel at home with them; and I believe that they will not mind this public recognition of the grace with which they adorned their gentle poverty. They never intruded, but they were always there, saluting our outgoing and incoming, and watchful of our slightest wish. Often before we could get our key into the outer door Maddalena had run to open it, holding her lucerna above her head to light us, and hailing us with a “Buona sera Loro!” (Good evening to them — our lordships, namely) to which only music could do justice.

But the landlord of the pension below, where we took our meals, was no less zealous for the comfort of his guests, and at that table of his, good at any price, and wonderful for the little they gave, he presided with a hospitality which pressed them to eat of this and that, and kept the unstinted wine a-flowing, and communicated itself to Luigi, who, having cooked the dinner, hurled on a dress coat of impenetrable antiquity and rushed in to help serve it; and to Angiolina, the housekeeper, who affected a sort of Yankee old maid’s grumpiness, but was as sweet of soul as Maddalena herself. More than once has that sympathetic spirit, in passing me a dish, advised me with a fine movement of her clasping thumb which morsel to choose.

We took our rooms in the belief that we were on the sunny side of the house; and so we were; the sun obliquely bathed that whole front of the edifice, and I never can understand why it should not have got indoors. It did not; but it was delightful in the garden, which stretched from the rear of our palace across to the city wall. Just under our windows — but far under, for we were in the fourth story — was a wide stone terrace, old, moss-grown, balustraded with marble, from which you descended by two curving flights of marble steps into the garden. There, in the early March weather, which succeeded a wind storm of three days, the sun fell like a shining silence, amidst which the bent figure of an old gardener stirred, noiselessly turning up the earth.

In the utmost distance the snow-covered Apennines glistened against a milky white sky growing pale blue above; the nearer hills were purplish; nearer yet were green fields, gray olive orchards, red plowed land, and black cypress clumps about the villas with which the whole prospect was thickly sown. Then the city houses outside the wall began, and then came the beautiful red brick city wall, wandering wide over the levels and heights and hollows, and within it that sunny silence of a garden. While I once stood at the open window looking, brimful of content, tingling with it, a bugler came up the road without the wall, and gaily, bravely sounded a gallant fanfare, purely, as it seemed, for love of it and pleasure in it.

I call our garden a garden, but it was mostly a succession of fields, planted with vegetables for the market, and closed round next the city wall with ranks of olive-trees. Still, next the palace there were flowers, or must have been in summer; and on another morning, another heavenly morning, a young lady, doubtless of the ancient family to which the palace belonged, came out upon the terrace from the first floor with an elderly companion, and, loitering listlessly there a moment, descended the steps into the garden to a stone basin where some serving-women were washing. Her hair was ashen blonde; she was slimly cased in black silk, and as she slowly walked, she pulled forward the skirt a little with one hand, while she drew together with the other a light shawl, falling from the top of her head, round her throat; her companion followed at a little distance; on the terrace lingered a large white Persian cat, looking after them.

VIII

THESE gardens, or fields, of Siena occupy half the space her walls enclose, and the olives everywhere softly embower the borders of the shrivelled and shrunken old city, which once must have plumply filled their circuit with life. But it is five hundred years since the great pest reduced her hundred thousand souls to fifteen thousand; generation after generation the plough has gone over the dead streets, and the spade has been busy obliterating the decay, so that now there is no sign of them where the artichokes stretch their sharp lines, and the tops of the olives run tangling in the wind. Except where the streets carry the lines of buildings to the ten gates, the city is completely surrounded by these gardens within its walls; they drop on all sides from the lofty ledge of rocks to which the edifices cling, with the cathedral pre-eminent, and cover the slopes with their herbage and foliage; at one point near the Lizza, flanking the fort which Cosimo built where the Spaniards failed, a gaunt ravine — deep, lonely, shadowy — pushes itself up into the heart of the town. Once, arid once only, so old is the decay of Siena, I saw the crumbling foundations of a house on a garden slope; but again and again the houses break away, and the street which you have been following ceases in acreages of vegetation. Sometimes the varied and ever-picturesquely irregular ground has the effect of having fallen away from the palaces; the rear of a line of these, at one point, rested on massive arches, with buttresses sprung fifty or seventy-five feet from the lower level; and on the lofty shoulders of the palaces, here and there, was caught a bit of garden, and lifted with its overhanging hedge high into the sun. There are abundant evidences of that lost beauty and magnificence of Siena — she has kept enough of both — not only in the great thirteenth and fourteenth century structures in the Via Cavour, the Via del Capitano, and the neighbourhood of the Palazzo Communale, but in many little wandering, darkling streets, where you come upon exquisite Gothic arches walled up in the fronts of now ordinary houses, which before some time of great calamity must have been the portals and windows of noble palaces. These gave their pathos to walks which were bewilderingly opulent in picturesqueness; walks that took us down sharp declivities dropping under successive arches between the house-walls, and flashing out upon sunny prospects of gardens; up steep thoroughfares climbing and crooking from the gates below, and stopping as if for rest in successive piazzas, till they reach the great avenue which stretches along the high spine of the city from Porta Camollia to Porta Romana. Sharp turns everywhere bring your nose against some incomparable piece of architecture, or your eye upon some view astonishingly vast, and smiling or austere, but always enchanting.

The first night we found the Via Cavour full of people walking and talking together; and there was always the effect of out-door liveliness in the ancient town, which is partly to be accounted for by the pungent strength of the good air. This stirs and sustains one like the Swiss air, and when not in too rapid motion it is delicious. In March I will own that its motion was often too rapid. It swept cold from the Apennines, and one night it sifted the gray depths of the streets full of snow. The next morning the sun blazed out with that ironical smile which we know here as well as in Italy, and Via Cavour was full of people lured forth by his sarcastic glitter, though the wind blew pitilessly. “Marzo Matto!” (Crazy March!) said the shopman, with a sympathetic smile and impressive shrug, to whom I complained of it; and I had to confess that March was no better in America. The peasants, who took the whole breadth of Via Cavour with their carts laden with wine and drawn by widehorned dun oxen, had their faces tied up against the blast, which must have been terrible on their hills; and it roared and blustered against our lofty eyry in Palazzo Bandini-Piccolomini with a force that penetrated it with icy cold. It was quite impossible to keep warm; with his back planted well into the fireplace blazing with the little logs of the country, and fenced about on the windward side with mattresses and sofa-pillows, a suffering novelist was able to complete his then current fiction only at the risk of freezing.

But before this, and after it, we had weather in which the streets were as much a pleasure to us as to the Sienese; and, in fact, I do not know where I would rather be at this moment than in Via Cavour, unless it were on the Grand Canal at Venice — or the Lungarno at Florence — or the Pincio at Rome — or Piazza Brà at Verona. Any of these places would do, and yet they would all lack the strictly mediaeval charm which belongs to Siena, and which perhaps you feel most when you stand before the Tolomei Palace, with its gray Gothic façade, on the richly sculptured porch of the Casino dei Nobili. At more than one point the gaunt Roman wolf suckles her adoptive twins on the top of a pillar; and the olden charm of prehistoric fable mingles with the interest of the city’s proper life, when her people fought each other for their freedom in her streets, and never trusted one another except in some fiery foray against the enemy beyond her gates.

Let the reader not figure to himself any broad, straight level when I speak of Via Cavour as the principal street; it is only not so narrow and steep and curving as the rest, and a little more light gets into it; but there is one level, and one alone, in all Siena, and that is the Lizza, the public promenade, which looks very much like an artificial level. It is planted with pleasant little bosks and trim hedges, beyond which lurk certain cafés and beer-houses, and it has walks and a drive. On a Sunday afternoon of February, when the military band played there, and I was told that the fine world of Siena resorted to the Lizza, we hurried thither to see it; but we must have come too late. The band were blowing the drops of distilled music out of their instruments and shutting them up, and on the drive there was but one equipage worthy of the name. Within this carriage sat a little refined-looking boy — delicate, pale, the expression of an effete aristocracy; and beside him sat a very stout, gray-moustached, side-whiskered, eagle-nosed, elderly gentleman, who took snuff out of a gold box, and looked like Old Descent in person. I felt, at sight of them, that I had met the Sienese nobility, whom otherwise I did not see; and yet I do not say that they may not have been a prosperous fabricant of panforte and his son. A few young bucks, with fierce trotting-ponies in two-seated sulkies, hammered round the drive; the crowd on foot was mostly a cloaked and slouched-hatted crowd, which in Italy is always a plebeian crowd. There were no ladies, but many women of less degree, pretty enough, well-dressed enough, and radiantly smiling. In the centre of the place shone a resplendent group of officers, who kept quite to themselves. We could not feel that we had mingled greatly in the social gaieties of Siena, and we wandered off to climb the bastions of the old Medicean fort — very bold with its shield and palle over the gateway — and listened to the bees humming in the oleander hedge beneath.

This was toward the end of February; a few days later I find it recorded that in walking half-way round the city outside the wall I felt the sun very hot, and heard the birds singing over the fields, where the peasants were breaking the clods with their hoes. The almond-trees kept blossoming with delicate courage all through February, like girls who brave the lingering cold with their spring finery; and though the grass was green, with here and there daring dandelions in it, the landscape generally had a pathetic look of winter weariness, when we drove out into the country beyond the wall.

It is this wall with the colour of its red brick which everywhere warms up the cold gray tone of Siena. It is like no other city wall that I know, except that of Pisa, and is not supported with glacis on the inside, but rises sheer from the earth there as on the outside. With its towers and noble gates it is beautiful always; and near the railway station it obligingly abounds in repaired spots which look as if they had been holes knocked in it at the great siege. I hope they were.

It is anywhere a study for a painter — preferably a water-colourist, I should say — and I do not see how an architect could better use his eyes in Italy than in perusing the excellent brick-work of certain of the smaller houses, as well as certain palaces and churches, both in the city and the suburbs of Siena. Some of the carved brick there is delightful, and the material is treated with peculiar character and feeling.

IX

THE ancient palace of the Republic, the Palazzo Communale, is of brick, which allegorizes well enough the multitude of plebeian wills and forces that went to the constitution of the democratic state. No friend of popular rule, I suppose, can boast that these little mediaeval commonwealths of Italy were the homes of individual liberty. They were popular tyrannies; but tyrannies as they were, they were always better than the single-handed despotisms, the governo d’un solo, which supplanted them, except in the one fact only that they did not give continuous civil peace. The crater of the extinct volcano before the Palazzo Communale in Siena was always boiling with human passions, and for four hundred years it vomited up and ingulfed innumerable governments and forms of government, now aristocratic and now plebeian. From those beautiful Gothic windows many a traitor has dangled head downwards or feet downwards, as the humour took the mob; many a temporiser or usurper has hurtled from that high balcony ruining down to the stones below.

Carlo Folletti-Fossati, a Sienese citizen of our own time, has made a luminous and interesting study of the “Costumi Senese” of the Middle Ages, which no reader of Italian should fail to get when he goes to Siena, for the sake of the light which it throws upon that tumultuous and struggling past of one of the bravest and doughtiest little peoples that ever lived. In his chapters on the “Daily Life” of the Sienese of those times, he speaks first of the world-wide difference between the American democracy and the mediaeval democracies. He has read his De Tocqueville, and he understands, as Mr Matthew Arnold is beginning to understand, that the secret of our political success is in the easy and natural fit of our political government, the looseness of our social organisation; and he shows with attractive clearness how, in the Italian republics, there was no conception of the popular initiative, except in the matter of revolution, which was extra-constitutional. The government once established, no matter how democratic, how plebeian its origin, it began at once to interfere with the personal affairs of the people. It regulated their household expenses; said what dishes and how many they might have at dinner; clipped women’s gowns, and forbade the braid and laces on their sleeves and stomachers; prescribed the fashion of men’s hats and cloaks; determined the length of coats, the size of bricks, and the dimensions of letter-paper; costumed the different classes; established the hours of pleasure and business; limited the number of those who should be in this or that trade or profession; bothered in every way. In Siena, at a characteristic period, the signory were chosen every two months, and no man might decline the honour and burden of office except under heavy fine. The government must have been as great a bore to its officers as to its subjects, for, once elected, the signory were obliged to remain night and day in the public palace. They could not leave it except for some grave reason of state, or sickness, or marriage, or the death of near kindred, and then they could only go out two at a time, with a third for a spy upon them. Once a week they could converse with the citizens, but solely on public business. Then, on Thursdays, the signory — the Nine, or the Twelve, or the Priors, whichever they chanced to be — descended from their magnificent confinement in the apartments of state to the great hall of the ground floor, and heard the petitions of all comers. Otherwise, their official life was no joke; in the months of March and April, 1364, they consumed in their public labours eleven reams of paper, twenty-one quires of parchment, twelve pounds of red and green sealing-wax, five hundred goose-quills, and twenty bottles of ink.

Besides this confinement at hard labour, they were obliged to suffer from the shrieks of the culprits, who were mutilated or put to death in the rear of the palace; for in those days prison expenses were saved by burning a witch or heretic, tearing out the tongue of a blasphemer, striking off the right hand of a perjurer or bigamist, and the right foot of a highwayman. The Sienese in course of time became so refined that they expelled the mutilated wretches from the city, that they might not offend the eye, after the infliction of their penalties; but in the meanwhile the signory could not bear the noise of their agony, especially while they sat at dinner; and the execution-grounds were finally changed to a remote quarter.

It is well enough for the tourist to give a thought to these facts and conditions of the times that produced the beautiful architecture of the Palazzo Communale and the wonderful frescos which illumine its dim-vaulted halls and chambers. The masters who wrought either might have mixed the mortar for their bricks, and the colours for their saints and angels, and allegories and warriors, with human blood, it flowed so freely and abundantly in Siena. Poor, splendid, stupid, glorious past! I stood at the windows of the people’s palace and looked out on the space in the rear where those culprits used to disturb the signory at their meals, and thanked Heaven that I was of the nineteenth century. The place is flanked now by an immense modem prison, whose ample casements were crowded with captives pressing to them for the sun; and in the distance there is a beautiful view of an insane asylum, the largest and most populous in Italy.

I suppose the reader will not apprehend a great deal of comment from më upon the frescos, inexpressibly quaint and rich, from which certain faces and certain looks remain with me yet. The pictures figure the great scenes of Sienese history and fable. There are the battles in which the republic triumphed, to the disadvantage chiefly of the Florentines; there are the victorious encounters of her son Pope Alexander III. with Barbarossa; there are allegorie s in which her chief citizens appear. In one of these — I think it is that representing “Good and Bad Government,” painted by Lorenzetti in 1337 — there is a procession of Sienese figures and faces of the most curious realistic interest, and above their heads some divine and august ideal shapes — a Wisdom, from whose strange eyes all mystery looks, and a Peace and a Fortitude which, for an unearthly dignity and beauty, I cannot remember the like of. There is also somewhere in those dusky halls, a most noble St Victor by Sodoma; and I would not have my readers miss that sly rogue of a saint (“We are famous for our saints in Siena,” said the sardonic custodian, with a shrug) who is represented in a time of interdict stealing a blessing from the Pope for his city by having concealed under his cloak a model of it when he appears before the pontiff! For the rest, there is an impression of cavernous gloom left from many of the rooms of the palace which characterizes the whole to my memory; and as I look back into it, beautiful, mystical, living eyes glance out of it; noble presences, solemn attitudes, forms of grandeur faintly appear; and then all is again a hovering twilight, out of which I am glad to emerge into the laughing sunshine of the piazza.

X

A MONUMENT of the old magnanimity of Siena is that Capella di Piazza in front of the palace, at the foot of the tower, which the tourist goes to see for the sake of Sodoma’s fresco in it, but which deserves to be also revered as the memorial of the great pest of 1348; it was built in 1352, and thrice demolished and thrice rebuilt before it met with public approval. This and the beautiful Fonte Gaja — as beautiful in its way as the tower — make the piazza a place to linger in and come back to at every chance. The fountain was designed by Giacomo della Quercia, who was known thereafter as Giacomo della Fonte, and it was called the Gay Fountain in memory of the festivities with which the people celebrated the introduction of good water into their city in 1419. Seven years the artist wrought upon it, and three thousand florins of gold the republic paid for the work, which after four hundred years has been restored in all its first loveliness by Tito Sarocchi, an admirable Sienese sculptor of our day.

There are six fountains in all, in different quarters of the city; and of these, the finest are the two oldest — Fonte Branda of the twelfth century, and Fonte Nuova of the fourteenth. Fonte Branda I will allow to be the more famous, but never so beautiful as Fonte Nuova. They are both as practicable now as when they were built, and Fonte Nuova has a small house atop of its arches, where people seem to live. The arches are Gothic, and the delicate carved brick-work of Siena decorates their sharp spring. Below, in the bottom of the four-sided structure, is the clear pool from whose affluent pipes the neighbourhood come to draw its water (in buckets hammered from solid copper into antique form), and in which women seem to be always rinsing linen, or beating it with wooden paddles in the Latin fashion.

Fonte Branda derives a world-wide celebrity from being mentioned by Dante and then having its honours disputed by a small stream of its name elsewhere. It, too, is a lovely Gothic shape, and whenever I saw it wash-day was in possession of it. The large pool which the laundresses had whitened with their suds is used as a swimming-vat in summer; and the old fountain may therefore be considered in very active use still, so many years after Dante dedicated the new fountain to disputed immortality with a single word. It was one of those extremely well-ventilated days of March when I last visited Fonte Branda; and not only was the linen of all Siena blowing about from balconies and house tops, but, from a multitude of galleries and casements, hides of leather were lustily flapping and giving out the pungent aroma of the tan. It is a region of tanneries, and some of them are of almost as august a presence as the Fonte Branda itself. We had not come to see either, but to pay our second visit to the little house of St Catherine of Siena, who was born and lived a child in this neighbourhood, the good Contrada dell’ Oca, or Goose Ward, which took this simple name while other wards of Siena called themselves after the Dragon, the Lion, the Eagle, and other noble beasts and birds. The region has therefore the odour of sanctity as well as of leather, and is consecrated by the memory of one of the best and bravest and meekest woman’s lives ever lived. Her house here is much visited by the curious and devout, and across a chasmed and gardened space from the fountain rises high on the bluff the high-shouldered bulk of the church of San Domenico, in which Catherine was first rapt in her beatific visions of our Lord, conversing with Him, and giving Him her heart for His in mystical espousals.

XI

FEW strangers in Siena fail to visit the house where that great woman and saint, Caterina Benincasa, was born in 1347. She was one of a family of thirteen or fourteen children, that blessed the union of Giacomo and Lapa, who were indeed well-in-the-house as their name is, being interpreted; for with the father’s industry as a dyer, and the mother’s thrift, they lived not merely in decent poverty, but in sufficient ease; and it was not from a need of her work nor from any want of piety in themselves that her parents at first opposed her religious inclination, but because (as I learn from the life of her written by that holy man, G. B. Francesia), hearing on every side the praises of her beauty and character, they hoped to make a splendid marriage for her. When she persisted in her prayers and devotions, they scolded and beat her, as good parents used to do, and made her the household drudge. But one day while the child was at prayer the father saw a white dove hovering over her head, and though she said she knew nothing of it, he was struck with awe and ceased to persecute her. She was now fourteen, and at this time she began her penances, sleeping little on the hard floor where she lay, scourging herself continually, wearing a hair shirt, and lacerating her flesh with chains. She fell sick, and was restored to health only by being allowed to join a sisterhood, under the rule of St Dominic, who were then doing many good works in Siena. After that our Lord began to appear to her in the Dominican church; she was likewise tempted of the devil; but Christ ended by making her His spouse. While her ecstasies continued she not only visited the sick and poor, but she already took an interest in public affairs, appealing first to the rival factions in Siena to mitigate their furies, and then trying to make peace between the Ghibellines of that city and the Guelphs of Florence. She pacified many family feuds; multitudes thronged to see her and hear her; and the Pope authorised her to preach throughout the territory of Siena. While she was thus dedicated to the salvation of souls, war broke out afresh between the Sienese and Florentines, and in the midst of it the terrible pest appeared. Then the saint gave herself up to the care of the sick, and performed miracles of cure, at the same time suffering persecution from the suspicions of the Sienese, among whom question of her patriotism arose.

She now began also to preach a new crusade against the Saracens, and for this purpose appeared in Pisa.

She went later to Avignon to beseech the Pope to remove an interdict laid upon the Florentines, and then she prevailed with him to remove his court to the ancient seat of St Peter.

The rest of her days were spent in special miracles; in rescuing cities from the plague; in making peace between the different Italian states and between all of them and the Pope; in difficult journeys; in preaching and writing. “And two years before she died,” says her biographer, “the truth manifested itself so clearly in her, that she prayed certain scriveners to put in writing what she should say during her ecstasies. In this manner there was soon composed the treatise on Obedience and Prayer, and on Divine Providence, which contains a dialogue between a Soul and God. She dictated as rapidly as if reading, in a clear voice, with her eyes closed and her arms crossed on her breast and her hands opened; her limbs became so rigid that, having ceased to speak, she remained a long hour silent; then, holy water being sprinkled on her face, she revived.” She died in Rome in 1380; but even after her death she continued to work miracles; and her head was brought amidst great public rejoicings to her native city. A procession went out to receive it, led by the Senate, the Bishop of Siena, and all the bishops of the state, with all the secular and religious orders. “That which was wonderful and memorable on this occasion,” says the Diario Senese, “was that Madonna Lapa, mother of our Seraphic Compatriot — who had many years before restored her to life, and liberated her from the pains of hell — was led to the solemn encounter.”

It seems by all accounts to have been one of the best and strongest heads that ever rested on a woman’s shoulders — or a man’s, for the matter of that; apt not only for private beneficence, but for high humane thoughts and works of great material and universal moment; and I was willing to see the silken purse, or sack, in which it was brought from Rome, and which is now to be viewed in the little chamber where she used to pillow the poor head so hard. I do not know that I wished to come any nearer the saint’s mortal part, but our Roman Catholic brethren have another taste in such matters, and the body of St Catherine has been pretty well dispersed about the world to supply them with objects of veneration. One of her fingers, as I learn from the Diario Senese of Girolamo Gigli (the most confusing, not to say stupefying, form of history Î ever read, being the collection under the three hundred and sixty-five several days of the year of all the events happening on each in Siena since the time of Remus’s son), is in the Certosa at Pontignano, where it has been seen by many, to their great advantage, with the wedding-ring of Jesus Christ upon it. Her right thumb is in the church of the Dominicans at Camporeggi; one of her ribs is in the cathedral at Siena; another in the church of the Company of St Catherine, from which a morsel has been sent to the same society in the city of Lima, in Peru; her cervical vertebra and one of her slippers are treasured by the Nuns of Paradise; in the monastery of Saints Dominic and Sixtus at Rome is her right hand; her shoulder is in the convent of St Catherine at Magnanopoli; and her right foot is in the church of San Giovanni e Paolo at Venice. In St Catherine at Naples are a shoulder-bone and a finger; in other churches there are a piece of an arm and a rib; in San Bartolomeo at Salerno there is a finger; the Predicatori at Colonia have a rib; the Canons of Eau-Court in Artois have a good-sized bone (osso di giusta grandezza); and the good Gigli does not know exactly what bone it is they revere in the Chapel Royal at Madrid. But perhaps this is enough, as it is.

XII

THE arched and pillared front of St Catherine’s house is turned toward a street on the level of Fonte Branda, but we reached it from the level above, whence we clambered down to it by a declivity that no carriage could descend. It has been converted, up stairs and down, into a number of chapels, and I suppose that the ornate façade dates from the ecclesiastic rather than the domestic occupation. Of a human home there are indeed few signs, or none, in the house; even the shop in which the old dyer, her father, worked at his trade has been turned into a chapel and enriched, like the rest, with gold and silver, gems and precious marbles.

From the house we went to the church of San Domenico, hard by, and followed St Catherine’s history there through the period of her first ecstasies, in which she received the stigmata and gave her heart to her heavenly Spouse in exchange for his own. I do not know how it is with  other Protestants, but for myself I will confess that in the place where so many good souls for so many ages have stood in the devout faith that the miracles recorded really happened there, I could not feel otherwise than reverent. Illusion, hallucination as it all was, it was the error of one of the purest souls that ever lived, and of one of the noblest minds. “Here,” says the printed tablet appended to the wall of the chapel, “here she was invested with the habit of St Dominic; and she was the first woman who up to that time had worn it. Here she remained withdrawn from the world, listening to the divine services of the church, and here continually in divine colloquy she conversed familiarly with Jesus Christ, her Spouse. Here, leaning against this pilaster, she was rapt in frequent ecstasies; wherefore this pilaster has ever since been potent against the infernal furies, delivering many possessed of devils.” Here Jesus Christ appeared before her in the figure of a beggar, and she gave Him alms, and He promised to own her before all the world at the Judgment Day. She gave Him her robe, and He gave her an invisible garment which for ever after kept her from the cold. Here once He gave her the Host Himself, and her confessor, missing it, was in great terror till she told him. Here the Lord took His own heart from His breast and put it into hers.

You may also see in this chapel, framed and covered with a grating in the floor, a piece of the original pavement on which Christ stood and walked. The whole church is full of memories of her; and there is another chapel in it, painted in fresco by Sodoma with her deeds and miracles, which in its kind is almost incomparably rich and beautiful. It is the painter’s most admirable and admired work, in which his genius ranges from the wretch decapitated in the bottom of the picture to the soul borne instantly aloft by two angels in response to St Catherine’s prayers. They had as much nerve as faith in those days, and the painter has studied the horror with the same conscience as the glory. It would be interesting to know how much he believed of what he was painting, — just as it would be now to know how much I believe of what I am writing: probably neither of us could say.

What impresses St Catherine so vividly upon the fancy that has once begun to concern itself with her is the double character of her greatness. She was not merely an ecstatic nun: she was a woman of extraordinary political sagacity, and so great a power among statesmen and princes that she alone could put an end to the long exile of the popes at Avignon, and bring them back to Rome. She failed to pacify her country because, as the Sienese historian Buonsignore confesses, “the germs of the evil were planted so deeply that it was beyond human power to uproot them.” But, nevertheless, “she rendered herself for ever famous by her civic virtues,” her active beneficence, her perpetual striving for the good of others, all and singly; and even so furious a freethinker as the author of my “New Guide to Siena” thinks that, setting aside the marvels of legend, she has a right to the reverence of posterity, the veneration of her fellow-citizens. “St Catherine, an honour to humanity, is also a literary celebrity: the golden purity of her diction, the sympathetic and affectionate simplicity of expression in her letters, still arouse the admiration of the most illustrious writers. With the potency of her prodigious genius, the virgin stainlessness of her life, and her great heart warm with love of country and magnanimous desires, inspired by a sublime ideal even in her mysticism, she, born of the people, meek child of Giacomo the dyer, lifted herself to the summit of religious and political grandeur.... With an overflowing eloquence and generous indignation she stigmatized the crimes, the vices, the ambition of the popes, their temporal power, and the scandalous schism of the Roman Church.”

In the Communal Library at Siena, I had the pleasure of seeing many of St Catherine’s letters in the MS. in which they were dictated: she was not a scholar like the great Socinus, whose letters I also saw, and she could not even write.

XIII

A HUNDRED years after St Catherine’s death there was born in the same “noble Ward of the Goose” one of the most famous and eloquent of Italian reformers, the Bernardino Ochino, whose name commemorates that of his native Contrada dell’ Oca. He became a Franciscan, and through the austerity of his life, the beauty of his character, and the wonder of his eloquence, he became the General of his Order in Italy, and then he became a Protestant. “His words could move stones to tears,” said Charles V.; and when he preached in Siena, no space was large enough for his audience except the great piazza before the Public Palace, which was thronged even to the house-tops. Ochino escaped by flight the death that overtook his sometime fellow-denizen of Siena, Aonio Paleario, whose book, “II Beneficio di Cristo,” was very famous in its time and potent for reform throughout Italy. In that doughty little Siena, in fact, there has been almost as much hard thinking as hard fighting, and what with Ochino and Paleario, with Socinus and Bandini, the Reformation, Rationalism, and Free Trade may be said almost to have been invented in the city which gave one of the loveliest and sublimest saints to the Church. Let us not forget, either, that brave archbishop of Siena, Ascanio Piccolomini, one of the ancient family which gave two popes to Rome, and which, in this archbishop, had the heart to defy the Inquisition and welcome Galileo to the protection of an inviolable roof.

XIV

It is so little way off from Fonte Branda and St Catherine’s house, that I do not know but the great cathedral of Siena may also be in the “Ward of the Goose but I confess that I did not think of this when I stood before that wondrous work.

There are a few things in this world about whose grandeur one may keep silent with dignity and advantage, as St Mark’s, for instance, and Nôtre Dame, and Giotto’s Tower, and the curve of the Arno at Pisa, and Niagara, and the cathedral at Siena. I am not sure that one has not here more authority for holding his peace than before any of the others. Let the architecture go, then: the inexhaustible treasure of the sculptured marbles, the ecstasy of Gothic invention, the splendour of the mosaics, the quaintness, the grotesqueness, the magnificence of the design and the detail. The photographs do well enough in suggestion for such as have not seen the church, but these will never have the full sense of it which only long looking and coming again and again can impart. One or two facts, however, may be imagined, and the reader may fancy the cathedral set on the crest of the noble height to which Siena clings, and from which the streets and houses drop all round from the narrow level expressed in the magnificent stretch of that straight line with which the cathedral-roof delights the eye from every distance. It has a pre-eminence which seems to me unapproached, and this structure, which only partially realises the vast design of its founders, impresses one with the courage even more than the piety of the little republic, now so utterly extinct. What a force was in men’s hearts in those days! What a love of beauty must have exalted the whole community!

The Sienese were at the height of their work on the great cathedral when the great pestilence smote them, and broke them for ever, leaving them a feeble phantom of their past glory and prosperity. “The infection,” says Buonsignore, “spread not only from the sick, but from everything they touched, and the terror was such that selfish frenzy mounted to the wildest excess; not only did neighbour abandon neighbour, friend forsake friend, but the wife her husband, parents their children. In the general fear, all noble and endearing feelings were hushed.... Such was the helplessness into which the inhabitants lapsed that the stench exhaling from the wretched huts of the poor was the sole signal of death within. The dead were buried by a few generous persons whom an angelic pity moved to the duty: their appeal was, ‘Help to carry this body to the grave, that when we die others may bear us thither! ‘ The proportion of the dead to the sick was frightful; out of every five seized by the plague scarcely one survived. Angelo di Tura tells us that at Siena, in the months of May, June, July, and August of the year 1348, the pest carried off eighty thousand persons...

A hundred noble families were extinguished.” Through out Italy, “three-fourths of the population perished The cities, lately flourishing, busy, industrious, full of life, had become squalid, deserted, bereft of the activity which promotes grandeur. In Siena the region of Fonte ‘ Branda was largely saved from the infection by the odour of its tanneries. Other quarters, empty and forsaken, were set on fire after the plague ceased, and the waste areas where they stood became the fields and gardens we now see within the walls.... The work on the cathedral, which had gone forward for ten years, was suspended.... and when resumed, it was upon a scale adjusted to the diminished wealth of the city, and the plan was restricted to the dimensions which we now behold.... And if the fancy contemplates the grandeur of the original project, divining it from the vestiges of the walls and the columns remaining imperfect, but still preserved in good condition, it must be owned that the republic disposed of resources of which we can form no conception; and we must rest astounded that a little state, embroiled in perpetual wars with its neighbours, and in the midst of incessant party strife, should undertake the completion of a work worthy of the greatest and most powerful nations.”

“When a man,” says Mr Addison, writing from Siena in the spirit of the genteel age which he was an ornament of, “sees the prodigious pains and expense that our forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic cathedrals as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have been raised either before or since that time.” And describing this wonderful cathedral of Siena in detail, he says that “nothing in the world can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity.”

The time will no doubt come again when we shall prefer “noble and majestic simplicity,” as Mr Addison did; and I for one shall not make myself the mock of it by confessing how much better I now like “false beauties and affected ornaments.” In fact, I am willing to make a little interest with it by admitting that the Tuscan fashion of alternate courses of black and white marble in architecture robs the interior of the cathedral of all repose, and that nowhere else does the godless joke which nicknamed a New York temple “the Church of the Holy Zebra” insist upon itself so much. But if my business were iconoclasm, I should much rather smash the rococo apostolic statues which Mr Addison doubtless admired, perching on their brackets at the base of the variegated pillars; and I suspect they are greatly to blame for the distraction which the visitor feels before he loses himself in the inexhaustibly beautiful and delightful detail. Shall I attempt to describe this? Not I! Get photographs, get prints, dear reader, or go see for yourself! Otherwise, trust me that if we had a tithe of that lavish loveliness in one structure in America, the richness of that one would impoverish the effect of all the other buildings on the continent. I say this, not with the hope of imparting an idea of the beauty, which words cannot, but to give some notion of the wealth poured out upon this mere fragment of what was meant to be the cathedral of Siena, and to help the reader conceive not only of the piety of the age, but of the love of art then universally, spread among the Italians.

The day was abominably cold, of course, — it had been showing that morning, — when we first visited the church, and I was lurking about with my skull-cap on, my teeth chattering, and my hands benumbing in my pockets, when the little valet de place who had helped us not find a lodging espied us and leaped joyously upon us, and ran us hither and thither so proudly and loudly that one of the priests had to come and snub him back to quiet and decorum. I do not know whether this was really in the interest of decency, or of the succession of sacristans who, when the valet had been retired to the front door, took possession of us, and lifted the planking which preserves the famous engraved pavement, and showed us the wonderful pulpit and the rich chapels, and finally the library all frescoed by Pinturicchio with scenes from the lives of the two Sienese Piccolomini who were Popes Pius II. and III.

This multiplicity of sacristans suffered us to omit nothing, and one of them hastened to point out the two flag-poles fastened to the two pillars nearest the high altar, which are said to be those of the great War Car of the Florentines, captured by the Sienese at Montaperto in 1260. “ How,” says my “New Guide,”

“how on earth, the stranger will ask, do we find here in the house of God, who shed His blood for all mankind, here in the temple consecrated to Mary, mother of every sweet affection, these two records of a terrible carnage between brothers, sons of the same country? Does it not seem as if these relics from the field of battle stand here to render Divinity accomplice of the rage and hate and vengeance of men? We know not how to answer this question; we must even add that the crucifix not far from the poles, in the chapel on the left of the transept, was borne by the Sienese, trusting for victory in the favour of God, upon the field of Montaperto.”

I make haste to say that I was not a stranger disposed to perplex my “New Guide” with any such question, and that nothing I saw in the cathedral gave me so much satisfaction as these flag-poles. Ghibelline and Sienese as I had become as soon as I turned my back on Guelphic Florence, I exulted in these trophies of Montaperto with a joy which nothing matched except the pleasure I had in viewing the fur-lined canopy of the War Car, which is preserved in the Opera del Duomo, and from which the custodian bestowed upon my devotion certain small tufts of the fur. I have no question but this canopy and the flag-poles are equally genuine, and I counsel the reader by all means to see them.

There are many other objects to be seen in the curious museum of antique and mediaeval art called the Opera del Duomo, especially the original sculptures of the Fonte Gaia; but the place is chiefly interesting as the outline, the colossal sketch in sculptured marble, of the cathedral as it was projected. The present structure rises amid the halting fragments of the mediaeval edifice, which it has included in itself, without exceeding their extent; and from the roof there is an ineffable prospect of the city and the country, from which one turns again in still greater wonder to the church itself.

I had an even deeper sense of its vastness, — the least marvellous of its facts, — and a renewed sense of the domestication of the Italian churches, when I went one morning to hear a Florentine monk, famed for his eloquence, preach in the cathedral. An oblong canopy of coarse gray canvas had been stretched overhead in part of the great nave, to keep his voice from losing itself in the space around and above. The monk, from a pulpit built against one of the pillars, faced a dais, across the nave, where the archbishop sat in his chair to listen, and the planked floor between them was thronged with people sitting and standing, who came and went, as if at home, with a continued clapping of feet and banging of doors. All the time service was going on at several side-altars, where squads of worshippers were kneeling, indifferent alike to one another and to the sermon of the monk. Some of his listeners, however, wore a look of intense interest, and I myself was not without concern in his discourse, for I perceived that it was all in honour and compassion of the captive of the Vatican, and full of innuendo for the national government. It gave me some notion of the difficulties with which that government has to contend, and impressed me anew with its admirable patience and forbearance. Italy is unified, but many interests, prejudices, and ambitions are still at war within her unity.

XV

ONE night we of the Pension T. made a sentimental pilgrimage to the cathedral, to see it by moonlight. The moon was not so prompt as we, and at first we only had it on the baptistery and the campanile — a campanile to make one almost forget the Tower of Giotto. But before we came away one corner of the façade had caught the light, and hung richly bathed, tenderly etherealized in it. What was gold, what was marble before, seemed transmuted to the luminous substance of the moonlight itself, and rested there like some translucent cloud that “stooped from heaven and took the shape” of clustered arch and finial.

On the way home we passed the open portal of a palace, and made ourselves the guests of its noble court, now poured full of the moon, and dimly lighted by an exquisite lantern of beaten iron, which hung near a massive pillar at the foot of the staircase. The pillar divided the staircase, and lost its branchy top in the vault overhead; and there was something so consciously noble and dignified in the whole architectural presence that I should have been surprised to find that we had not stumbled upon an historic edifice. It proved to be the ancient palace of the Captain of the People — and I will thank the reader to imagine me a finer name than Capitano del Popolo for the head of such a democracy as Siena, whose earliest government, according to Alessandro Sozzino, was popular, after the Swiss fashion. Now the palace is the residence and property of the Grattanelli family, who have restored it and preserved it in the mediaeval spirit, so that I suppose it is, upon the whole, the best realization of a phase of the past which one can see. The present Count Grattanelli — who may be rather a marquis or a prince, but who is certainly a gentleman of enlightened taste, and of a due sense of his Siena — keeps an apartment of the palace open to the public, with certain of the rooms in the original state, and store of armour and weapons in which the consequence of the old Captains of the People fitly masquerades. One must notice the beautiful doors of inlaid wood in this apartment, which are of the count’s or marquis’s or prince’s own design; and not fail of two or three ceilings frescoed in dark colours, in dense, close designs and small panels, after what seems a fashion peculiar to Siena.

Now that I am in Boston, where there are so few private palaces open to the public, I wonder that I did not visit more of them in Siena; but I find no record of any such visits but this one in my note-books. It was not for want of inscriptional provocation to penetrate interiors that I failed to do so. They are tableted in Siena beyond almost anything I have seen. The villa outside the gate where the poet Manzoni once visited his daughter records the fact for the passing stranger; on the way to the station a house boasts that within it the dramatist Pietro Cossa, being there “the guest of his adored mother,” wrote his Cecilia and the second act of his Sylla; in a palace near that of Socinus you are notified that Alfieri wrote several of his tragedies; and another proclaims that he frequented it “holding dear the friendship” of the lady of the house! In spite of all this, I can remember only having got so far as the vestibule and staircase — lovely and grand they were, too — of one of those noble Gothic palaces in Via Cavour: I was deterred from going farther by learning it was not the day when uninvited guests were received. I always kept in mind, moreover, the Palazzo Tolomei for the sake of that dear and fair lady who besought the traveller through purgatory —

“Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia;

Siena mi fè, disfecemi Maremma,” —

 and who was of the ancient name still surviving in Siena. Some say that her husband carried her to die of malaria in the marshes of the Maremma; some, that he killed her with his dagger; others, that he made his servants throw her from the window of his castle; and none are certain whether or no he had reason to murder her — they used to think there could be a reason for murdering wives in his day; even the good Gigli, of the Diario Senese, speaks of that “giusto motivo” Messer Nello may possibly have had. What is certain is that Pia was the most beautiful woman in Italy; and what is still more certain is that she was not a Tolomei at all, but only the widow of a Tolomei. Perhaps it was prescience of this fact that kept me from visiting the Tolomei palace for her sake. At any rate, I did not visit it, though I often stopped in the street before it, and dedicated a mistaken sigh to the poor lady who was only a Tolomie by marriage.

There were several other ladies of Siena, in past ages, who interested me. Such an one was the exemplary Onorata de’ Principi Orsini, one of the four hundred Sienese noblewomen who went out to meet the Emperor Frederick III. in 1341, when he came to Siena to espouse Leonora, Infanta of Portugal; a column near Porta Camollia still commemorates the exact spot where the Infanta stood to receive him. On this occasion the fair Onorata was, to the thinking of some of the other ladies, too simply dressed; but she defended herself against their censure, affirming that the “Sienese gentlewomen should make a pomp of nothing but their modesty, since in other displays and feminine adornments the matrons of other and richer cities could easily surpass them.” And at a ball that night, being asked who was the handsomest gentleman present, she answered that she saw no one but her husband there. Is the estimable Onorata a trifle too sage for the reader’s sympathy? Let him turn then to the Lady Battista Berti, wife of Achille Petrucci, who, at another ball in honour of the Emperor, spoke Latin with him so elegantly and with such spirit that he embraced her, and created her countess, and begged her to ask some grace of him; upon which this learned creature, instead of requesting the Emperor to found a free public library, besought him to have her exempted from the existing law which prohibited the wearing of jewels and brocade dresses in Siena. The careful Gigli would have us think that by this reply Lady Battista lost all the credit which her Latinity had won her; but it appears to me that both of these ladies knew very well what they were about, and each in her way perceived that the Emperor could appreciate a delicate stroke of humour as well as another. If there were time, and not so many questions of our own day pressing, I should like to inquire into all the imaginable facts of these cases; and I commend them to the reader, whose fancy cannot be so hard worked as mine.

The great siege of Siena by the Florentines and Imperialists in 1554-55 called forth high civic virtues in the Sienese women, who not only shared all the hardships and privations of the men, but often their labours, their dangers, and their battles. “Never, Sienese ladies,” gallantly exclaimed the brave Blaise de Montluc, Marshal of France, who commanded the forces of the Most Christian King in defence of the city, and who treats of the siege in his Commentaries, “never shall I fail to immortalise your name so long as the book of Montluc shall live; for in truth you are worthy of immortal praise, if ever women were so. As soon as the people took the noble resolution of defending their liberty, the ladies of the city of Siena divided themselves into three companies: the first was led by Lady Forteguerra, who was dressed in violet, and all those who followed her likewise, having her accoutrement in the fashion of a nymph, short, and showing the buskin; the second by Lady Piccolomini, dressed in rose-coloured satin, and her troops in the same livery; the third by Lady Livia Fausta, dressed in white, as was also her following, and bearing a white ensign. On their flags they had some pretty devices. I would give a good deal if I could remember them. These three squadrons were composed of three thousand ladies — gentlewomen or citizenesses. Their arms were pickaxes, shovels, baskets, and fascines; and thus equipped, they mustered and set to work on the fortifications. Monsieur de Termes, who has frequently told me about it (for I had not then arrived), has assured me that he never saw in his life anything so pretty as that. I saw the flags afterwards. They had made a song in honour of France, and they sang it in going to the fortifications. I would give the best horse I have if I could have been there. And since I am upon the honour of these ladies, I wish those who come after us to admire the courage of a young Sienese girl, who, although she was of poor condition, still deserves to be placed in the first rank. I had issued an order when I was chosen Dictator that nobody, on pain of being punished, should fail to go on guard in his turn. This girl, seeing her brother, whose turn it was, unable to go, takes his morion, which she puts on her head, his shoes, his buffalo-gorget; and with his halberd on her shoulders, goes off with the corps de garde in this guise, passing, when the roll is called, under the name of her brother, and stands sentinel in his place, without being known till morning. She was brought home in triumph. That afternoon Signor Cornelio showed her to me.”

I am sorry that concerning the present ladies of Siena I know nothing except by the scantiest hearsay. My chief knowledge of them, indeed, centres in the story of one of the Borghesi there, who hold themselves so very much higher than the Borghesi of Rome. She stopped fanning herself a moment while some one spoke of them. “Oh, yes; I have heard that a branch of our family went to Rome. But I know nothing about them.”

What glimpse we caught of Sienese society was at the theatre — the lovely little theatre of the Academia dei Rozzi. This is one of the famous literary academies of Italy; it was founded in the time of Leo X., and was then composed entirely of working-men, who confessed their unpolished origin in their title; afterwards the Academies of the Wrapped-up, the Twisted, and the Insipid (such was the fantastic humour of the prevailing nomenclature) united with these Rude Men, and their academy finally became the most polite in Siena. Their theatre still enjoys a national fame, none but the best companies being admitted to its stage. We saw there the Rossi company of Turin — the best players by all odds, after the great Florentine Stenterello, whom I saw in Italy. Commendatore Rossi’s is an exquisite comic talent — the most delicately amusing, the most subtly refined. In a comedy of Goldoni’s (“A Curious Accident”) which he gave, he was able to set the house in an uproar by simply letting a series of feelings pass over his face, in expression of the conceited, wilful old comedy-father’s progress from facetious satisfaction in the elopement of his neighbour’s daughter to a realisation of the fact that it was his own daughter who bad run away.

Rossi, who must not be confounded with the tragedian of his name, is the first comedian who has ever been knighted in Italy, the theory being that since a comic actor might receive a blow which the exigency of the play forbade him to resent, he was unfit for knighthood. King Humbert seems somehow to have got over this prodigious obstacle.

The theatre was always filled, and between the acts there was much drama in the boxes, where the gentlemen went and came, making their compliments to the ladies, in the old Italian fashion. It looked very easy and pleasant; and I wish Count Nerli, whose box we had hired one evening when he sent the key to the ticket-office to be let, had been there to tell us something of the people in the others. I wish, in fact, that we might have known something of the count himself, whom, as it is, I know only by the title boldly lettered on his box-door. The acquaintance was slight, but very agreeable. Before the evening was out I had imagined him in a dozen figures and characters; and I still feel that I came very near knowing a Sienese count. Some English people, who became English friends, in our pension, had letters which took them into society, and they reported it very charming. Indeed, I heard at Florence, from others who knew it well, that it was pleasantly characterised by the number of cultivated people connected with the ancient university of Siena. Again, I heard that here, and elsewhere in Italy, husbands neglect their wives, and leave them dismal at home, while they go out to spend their evenings at the clubs and cafés. Who knows? I will not even pretend to do so, though the temptation is great.

A curious phase of the social life in another direction appeared in the notice which I found posted one day on the door of the church of San Christoforo, inviting the poor girls of the parish to a competitive examination for the wedding portions to be supplied to the most deserving from an ancient fund. They were advised that they must appear on some Sunday during Lent before the parish priest, with a petition certifying to these facts: —

“I. Poverty.

“II. Good morals.

“III. Regular attendance at church.

“IV. Residence of six months in the parish.

“V. Age between 18 and 30 years.

“N.B. — A girl who has won a dower in this or any other parish cannot compete.”

XVI

THE churches are very rich in paintings of the Sienese school, and the gallery of the Belle Arti, though small, is extremely interesting. Upon the whole, I do not know where one could better study the progress of Italian painting, from the Byzantine period up to the great moment when Sodoma came in Siena. Oddly enough, there was a very lovely little Bellini in this collection, which, with a small Veronese, distinguished itself from the Tuscan canvases, by the mellow beauty of the Venetian colouring, at once. It is worse than useless to be specific about pictures, and if I have kept any general impression of the Sienese work, it concerns the superior charm of the earlier frescoes, especially in the Public Palace. In the churches the best frescoes are at San

Domenico, where one sees the exquisite chapel of St Catherine painted by Sodoma, which I have already mentioned. After these one must reckon in interest the histories with which Pinturicchio has covered the whole library of the cathedral, and which are surpassingly delightful in their quaint realism. For the rest, I have a vivid memory of a tendency in the Sienese painters to the more horiffic facts of Scripture and legend; they were terrible fellows for the Massacre of the Innocents, and treated it with a bloodier carefulness of detail than I remember to have noticed in any other school; the most sanguinary of these slaughters is in the Church of the Servi. But there is something wholesome and human even in the most butcherly of their simple-minded carnages; it is where the allegorists get hold of horror that it becomes loathsome, as in that choir of a church, which I have forgotten the name of, where the stalls are decorated with winged death’s heads, the pinions shown dropping with rottenness and decay around the skulls. Yet this too had its effectiveness: it said what some people of that time were thinking; and I suppose that the bust of a lady in a fashionable ruff, with a book in her hand, simpering at the bust of her husband in an opposite niche in San Vigilio, was once not so amusing as it now looks. I am rather proud of discovering her, for I found her after I had been distinctly discouraged from exploring the church by the old woman in charge. She was civil, but went back eagerly to her gossip with another crone there, after saying: “The pictures in the roof are of no merit. They are beautiful, however.” I liked this church, which was near our pension, because it seemed such a purely little neighbourhood affair; and I must have been about the only tourist who ever looked into it.

One afternoon we drove out to the famous convent of the Osservanza, which was suppressed with the other convents, but in which the piety of charitable people still maintains fifty of the monks. We passed a company of them, young and old, on our way, bareheaded and barefooted, as their use is, and looking very fit in the landscape; they saluted us politely, and overtaking us in the porch of the church, rang up the sacristan for us, and then, dropping for a moment on one knee before the door, disappeared into the convent. The chapel is not very much to see, though there is a most beautiful Della Robbia there — a Madonna and St Thomas — which I would give much to see now. When we had gone the round of the different objects, our sacristan, who was very old and infirm, and visibly foul in the brown robes which are charitable to so much dirt, rose from the last altar before which he had knelt with a rheumatic’s groans, and turning to the ladies with a malicious grin, told them that they could not be admitted to the cloisters, though the gentlemen could come. We followed him through the long, dreary galleries, yawning with hundreds of empty cells, and a sense of the obsoleteness of the whole affair oppressed me. I do not know why this feeling should have been heightened by the smallness of the gardened court enclosed by the cloisters, or by the tinkle of a faint old piano coming from some room where one of the brothers was practising. The whole place was very bare, and stared with fresh whitewash; but from the pervading smell I feared that this venerable relic of the past was not well drained — though I do not know that in the religious ages they valued plumbing greatly, anywhere.

XVII

IN this and other drives about Siena the peculiar character of the volcanic landscape made itself continually felt. There is a desolation in the treeless hills, and a wildness and strangeness in their forms, which I can perhaps best suggest by repeating that they have been constantly reproduced by the Tuscan painters in their backgrounds, and that most Judean landscapes in their pictures are faithful studies of such naked and lonely hills as billow round Siena. The soil is red, and but for the wine and oil with which it flows, however reluctantly, I should say that it must be poor. Some of the hills look mere heaps of clay, such as mighty geysers might have cast up until at last they hid themselves under the accumulation; and this seems to be the nature of the group amidst which the battle of Montaperto was fought I speak from a very remote inspection; for though we started to drive there, we considered, after a mile or two, that we had no real interest in it now, either as Florentines or Sienese, and contented ourselves with a look at the Arbia, which the battle “coloured red,” but which had long since got back its natural complexion. This stream — or some other which the driver passed off on us for it — flowed down through the uplands over which we drove with a small volume that seemed quite inadequate slake the wide drought of the landscape, in which, except for the cypresses about the villas, no tree lifted its head. There were not even olives; even the vineyards had vanished. The fields were green with well-started wheat, but of other husbandry there was scarcely a sign. Yet the peasants whom we met were well dressed (to be sure it was Sunday), and there was that air of comfort about the farmsteads which is seldom absent in Tuscany. All along the road were people going to vespers; and these people were often girls, young and pretty, who, with their arms about one another’s waists, walked three and four abreast, the wide brims of their straw hats lifting round their faces like the discs of sunflowers. A great many of them were blonde; at least one in ten had blue eyes and red hair, and they must have been the far-descended children of those seigneurs and soldiers among whom Charlemagne portioned his Italian lands, marking to this day, a clear distinction of race between the citizens and the contadini. By and by we came to a little country church, before which in the grassy piazza two men had a humble show of figs and cakes for sale in their wagon-beds, and another was selling wine by the glass from a heap of flasks on his stand. Here again I was reminded of Quebec, for the interior of this church was, in its bareness and poverty, quite like the poor little Huron village church at the Falls of Lorette.

Our drive was out from the Porta Pispini southward, and back to the city through the Porta Romana; but pleasure lies in any course you take, and perhaps greater pleasure in any other than this. The beauty of the scenery is wilder and ruggeder than at Florence. In the country round Siena all is free and open, with none of those high garden walls that baffle approach in the Florentine neighbourhood. But it seems to have been as greatly loved and as much frequented, and there are villas and palaces everywhere, with signs of that personal eccentricity in the architecture and inscriptions for which the Italians ought to be as famous as the English. Out of the Porta Camollia, in the Palazzo del Diavolo, which was the scene of stirring facts during the great siege, when the Sienese once beat Duke Cosimo’s Florentines out of it, the caprice of the owner has run riot in the decoration of the brick front, where heads of Turks and Saracens are everywhere thrusting out of the frieze and cornice. At Poggio Pini, an inscription on the porter’s lodge declares: “Count Casti de’ Vecchi, jealous conservator of the ornaments of the above situated villa Poggio Pini, his glory, his care, placed me guardian of this approach.” The pines thus tenderly and proudly watched would not strike the American as worthy of so much anxiety; but perhaps they are so in a country which has wasted its whole patrimony of trees, as we are now so wickedly wasting ours. The variety of timber which one sees in Tuscany is very small: pines, poplars, oaks, walnuts, chestnuts — that is the whole story of the forest growth. Its brevity impressed us particularly in our long ride to Belcaro, which I visited for its interest as the quarters of the Marquis of Marignano, the Imperialist general during the siege. Two cannon-balls imbedded in its walls recall the fight, with an appropriate inscription; but whether they were fired by Marignano while it was occupied by the Sienese, or by the Sienese after he took it, I cannot now remember. I hope the reader will not mind this a great deal, especially as I am able to offer him the local etymology of the name Belcaro: bel because it is so beautiful, and caro because it cost so much. It is now owned by two brothers, rich merchants of Siena, one of whom lives in it, and it is approached through a landscape wild, and sometimes almost savage, like that all around Siena, but of more fertile aspect than that to the southward. The reader must always think of the wildness in Italy as different from our primeval wildness; it is the wildness of decay, of relapse. At one point a group of cypresses huddling about the armless statue of some poor god thrilled us with a note, like the sigh of a satyr’s reed, from the antique world; at another, a certain wood-grown turn of the road, there was a brick stairway, which had once led to some pavilion of the hoop and bag-wig age, and now, grown thick with moss and long grasses, had a desolation more exquisite than I can express.

Belcaro itself, however, when we came to it, was in perfectly good repair, and afforded a satisfying image of a mediaeval castle, walled and fossed about, and lifting its mighty curtains of masonry just above the smooth level of the ilex-tops that hedged it loftily in. There was not very much to see within it, except the dining-hall, painted by Peruzzi with the Judgment of Paris. After we had admired this we were shown across the garden to the little lodge which the same painter has deliciously frescoed with indecenter fables than any outside of the Palazzo del Tè at Mantua. Beside it is the chapel in which he has indifferently turned his hand, with the same brilliant facility, to the illustration of holy writ and legend. It was a curious civilization. Both lodge and chapel were extraordinarily bright and cheerful.

From these works of art we turned and climbed to the superb promenade which crowns the wide wall of the castle. In the garden below, a chilly bed of anemones blew in the March wind, and the top where we stood was swept by a frosty blast, while the waning sunshine cast a sad splendour over the city on her hill seven miles away. A delicate rose-light began to bathe it, in which the divine cathedral looked like some perfect shape of cloud-land; while the clustering towers, palaces and gates, and the wandering sweep of the city wall seemed the details of a vision too lovely for waking eyes.

PITILESS PISA

I

As Pisa made no comment on the little changes she may have observed in me since we had last met, nineteen years before, I feel bound in politeness to say that I found her in April 1883 looking not a day older than she did in December 1864. In fact, she looked younger, if anything, though it may have been the season that made this difference in her. She was in her spring attire, freshly, almost at the moment, put on; and that counts for much more in Pisa than one who knew her merely in the region of her palaces and churches and bridges would believe. She has not, indeed, quite that breadth of orchards and gardens within her walls which Siena has, but she has space enough for nature to flourish at ease there; and she has many deserted squares and places where the grass was sprouting vigorously in the crevices of the pavement. All this made her perceptibly younger, even with her memories running so far back of Roman times, into twilights whither perhaps a less careful modern historian than myself would not follow them. But when I am in a town that has real claims to antiquity, I like to allow them to the uttermost; and with me it is not merely a duty, it is a pleasure, to remind the reader that Pisa was founded by Pelops, the grandson of Jove, and the son of Tantalus, king of Phrygia. He was the same who was slain by his father, and served in a banquet to the gods, to try if he knew everything, or could be tricked into eating of the hideous repast; and it was after this curious experience — Ceres came in from the field, very tired and hungry, and popped down and tasted a bit of his shoulder before they could stop her — that, being restored to life by his grandfather, he visited Italy, and, liking the situation at the mouth of the Arno, built his city there. This is the opinion of Pliny and Solinus, and that generally adopted by the Pisan chroniclers; but the sceptical Strabo would have us think that Pisa was not founded till much later, when Nestor, sailing homeward after the fall of Troy, was cast away on the Etruscan shore at this point. There are some historians who reconcile the accounts by delaring that Nestor merely joined the Phrygians at Pisa, and could never have pretended to found the city. I myself incline to this notion; but even if Pisa was not built till after the fall of Troy, the reader easily perceives that a sense of her antiquity might affect an Ohio man, even after a residence in Boston. A city founded by Pelops or Nestor could not be converted to Christianity by a less person than St Peter, who, on his way to Rome, was expressly wrecked on the Pisan coasts for that purpose. Her faith, like her origin, is as ancient as possible, and Pisa was one of the first Italian communities to emerge from the ruin of the Roman Empire into a vigorous and splendid life of her own. Early in the Middle Ages she had, with the arrogance of long-established consequence, superciliously explained the Florentines, to an Eastern potentate who had just heard of them, as something like the desert Arabs — a lawless, marauding, barbarous race, the annoyance of all respectable and settled communities. In those days Pisa had not only commerce with the East, but wars; and in 1005 she famously beat back the Saracens from their conquests in the northern Mediterranean, and after a struggle of eighteen years, ended by carrying the war into Africa and capturing Carthage with the Emir of the Saracens in it. In the beginning of this war her neighbour Lucca, fifteen miles away, profited by her preoccupation to attack her, and this is said to have been one of the first quarrels, if not the first, in which the Italian cities asserted their separate nationality and their independence of the empire. It is supposed on that account to have been rather a useful event, though it is scarcely to be praised otherwise. Of course, the Pisans took it out of the Lucchese afterwards in the intervals of their more important wars with the Genoese by sea and the Florentines by land. There must have been fighting pretty well all the time, back and forth across the vineyards and olive orchards that stretch between the two cities; I have counted up eight distinct wars, bloody and tedious, in which they ravaged each other’s territory, and I — dare say I have missed some. Once the Pisans captured Lucca and sacked it, and once the Lucchese took Pisa and sacked it; the Pisans were Ghibelline, and the Lucchese were Guelph, and these things had to be. In the meantime, Pisa was waging, with varying fortune, seven wars with Genoa, seven other with Florence, three with Venice, and one with Milan, and was in a spirited state of continual party strife within herself; though she found leisure to take part in several of the crusades, to break the naval supremacy of the Saracens, and to beat the Greeks in sea-fights under the walls of Constantinople. The warlike passions of men were tightly wound up in those days, and Pisa was set to fight for five hundred years. Then she fell at last, in 1509, under the power of those upstart Florentines, whom she had despised so long.

Almost from the beginning of their rivalry, some three or four hundred years before, the triumph of Florence was a foregone conclusion. The serious historians are rather ashamed of the incident that kindled the first hostilities between the two cities, but the chroniclers, who are still more serious, treat it with perfect gravity; and I, who am always with the chroniclers, cannot offer it less respect. The fact is, that one day, at the time of the coronation of the Emperor Frederick II. of Rome, the Florentine ambassador, who was dining with a certain cardinal, either politely or sincerely admired the cardinal’s lapdog so much that the cardinal could not help making him a present of the dog, out of hand. The Florentine thought this extremely handsome of the cardinal, and the cardinal forgot all about it; so that when the Pisan ambassador came to dine with him the next day, and professed also to be charmed with this engaging lapdog, the cardinal promptly bestowed it upon him in his turn; nothing could equal the openhandedness of that cardinal in the matter of lapdogs. He seems to have forgotten his gift to the Pisan as readily as he had forgotten his present to the Florentine; or possibly he thought that neither of them would have the ill manners to take him in earnest; very likely it was the custom to say to a guest who admired your dog, “He is yours,” and then think no more about it. However, the Florentine sent for the dog and got it, and then the Pisan sent, and got the poor cardinal’s best excuses; one imagines the desolated smiles and deprecating shrugs with which he must have made them. The affair might have ended there, if it had not happened that a party of Florentines and a party of Pisans met shortly afterwards in Rome, and exchanging some natural jeers and taunts concerning the good cardinal’s gift, came to blows about it. The Pisans were the first to begin this quarrel, and all the Florentines in Rome were furious. Oddo di Arrigo Fifanti, whom the diligent reader of these pages will remember as one of the Florentine gentlemen who helped cut the throat of Buondelmonte on his wedding day, chanced to be in Rome, and put himself at the head of the Florentines. He was not the kind of man to let any sort of quarrel suffer in his hands, and he led the Florentines on to attack the Pisan legation in the street.

When the news of this outrage came to Pisa, it set the hot little state in a flame. She was glad of a chance to break with Florence, for the Pisans had long been jealous of the growing power of the upstart city, and they hastened to make reprisal by seizing all the Florentine merchandise within their borders. Florence still remained in such awe of the old-established respectability of Pisa, and of her supremacy by land and sea, lately illustrated in her victorious wars with the Genoese and Saracens, that she was willing to offer any reasonable reparation; and her consuls even sent -to pay secretly the price of the confiscated goods, if only they could have them back, and so make an appearance of honourable reconciliation before their people. The Pisan authorities refused these humble overtures, and the Florentines desperately prepared for war. The campaign ended in a single battle at Castel del Bosco, where the Florentines, supported by the Lucchese, defeated the Pisans with great slaughter, and conquered a peace that left them masters of the future. After that Pisa was in league with Florence, as she had been in league with her before that, against the encroachments of the emperors upon the liberties of the Tuscan cities, and she was often at war with her, siding with the Sienese in one of their famous defeats at the hands of the Florentines, and generally doing what she could to disable and destroy her rival. She seems to have grown more and more incapable of governing herself; she gave herself to this master and that; and at last, in 1406, after a siege of eight months, she was reduced by the Florentines. Her women had fought together with her men in her defence; the people were starving, and the victors wept at the misery they saw within the fallen city.

The Florentines had hoped to inherit the maritime greatness of Pisa, but this perished with her; thereafter the ships that left her famous arsenal were small and few. The Florentines treated their captive as well as a mediaeval people knew how, and addressed themselves to the restoration of her prosperity; but she languished in their hold for nearly a hundred years, when Pietro de’ Medici, hoping to make interest for himself with Charles VIII. of France (who seems to have invaded Italy rather for the verification of one of Savonarola’s prophecies than for any other specific purpose), handed over Pisa with the other Florentine fortresses to the French troops. When their commandant evacuated the place, he restored it not to the Florentines but to the Pisans. The Florentines set instantly and actively about the reconquest, and after a siege and a blockade that lasted for years, they accomplished it. In this siege, as in the other great defence, the Pisan women fought side by side with the men; it is told of two sisters working upon the fortifications, that when one was killed by a cannon-shot the other threw her body into a gabion, covered it with earth, and went on with her work above it. Before Pisa fell people had begun to drop dead of famine in her streets, and the Florentines, afraid that they would destroy the city in their despair, offered them terms far beyond their hopes, after a war of fifteen years.

II

WHAT is odd in the history of Pisa is that it has given but one name to common remembrance. Her prosperity was early and great, and her people employed it in the cultivation of all the arts; yet Andrea and Nicolo Pisano are almost the only artists whose fame is associated with that of their native city. She was perpetually at war by sea and by land, yet her admirals and generals are unknown to the world. Her university is one of the oldest and most learned in Italy, yet she produced no eminent scholars or poets, and one hardly realizes that the great Galileo, who came a century after the fall of his country, was not a Florentine but a Pisan by birth; he was actually of a Florentine family settled in Pisa. When one thinks of Florence, one thinks of Dante, of Giotto, of Cimabue, of Brunelleschi, of Michelangelo, of Savonarola, and of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Leo X., of Boccaccio and Pulci and Politian, of Machiavelli, of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and Gino Capponi, of Guido Cavalcanti, of Amerigo Vespucci, of Benvenuto Cellini, and Masaccio and Botticelli, and all the rest. When one thinks of Siena, one thinks of St Catharine, and Ochino, and Socinus, and the Piccolomini, and Bandini, and Sodoma; but when one thinks of Pisa, Ugolino is the sole name that comes into one’s mind. I am not at all sure, however, that one ought to despise Pisa for her lack of celebrities; I am rather of a contrary opinion. It is certain that such a force and splendour as she was for five hundred years could have been created only by a consensus of mighty wills, and it seems to me that a very pretty case might be made out in behalf of the democracy whose level was so high that no one head could be seen above it. Perhaps this is what we are coming to in our own civilization, and I am disposed to take heart from the heroless history of Pisa when I look round over the vast plain of our equality, where every one is as great as every other.

I wish, if this is the case, we might come finally to anything as clean and restful and lovely as I found Pisa on the day of my arrival; but of course that would be much more difficult for a continent than for a city, and probably our last state will not be so pleasant. On our way down from Florence, through much the same landscape as that through which we had started to Siena, the peach-trees were having their turn in the unhurried Italian spring’s succession of blossoms, and the fields were lit with their pathetic pink, where earlier the paler bloom of the almond had prevailed. As I said, Pisa herself was in her spring dress, and it may be that the season had touched her with the languor which it makes the whole world feel, as she sat dreaming beside her Arno, in the midst of the gardens that compassed her about within her walls. I do not know what Pisa had to say to other tourists who arrived that day, but we were old friends, and she regarded me with a frank, sad wonder when she read in my eyes a determination to take notes of her.

“Is it possible?” she expressed, with that mute, melancholy air of hers. “You, who have lived in Italy, and ought to know better? You, who have been here, before? Sit down with me beside the Arno!” and she indicated two or three empty bridges, which I was welcome to, or if I preferred half a mile or so of that quay, which has the noblest sweep in the world, there it was, vacant for me. I shrugged my excuses, as well as I could, and indicated the artist at my side, who with his etching-plate under his arm, and his hat in his hand, was making his manners to Pisa, and I tried to explain that we were both there under contract to produce certain illustrated papers for THE CENTURY.

“What papers? What Century?” she murmured, and tears came into the eyes of the beautiful ghost; and she added with an inexpressible pathos and bitterness, “I remember no century, since the fifteenth, when — I — died.”

She would not say, when she fell under the power of her enemy, but we knew she was thinking of Florence; and as she bowed her face in her hands, we turned away with our hearts in our throat.

We thought it well not to go about viewing the monuments of her fallen grandeur at once, — they are all kept in wonderful repair, — and we left the Amo, whose mighty curve is followed on either side by lines of magnificent palaces, and got our driver to carry us out to the streets that dwindled into lanes beside the gardens fenced in by red brick city walls. At one point a long stretch of the wall seemed trellised for yellow roses which covered acres of it with their golden multitude; but when we got down and walked nearer, with the permission of the peasant whose field we passed through, we found they were lemons. He said they grew very well in that shelter and exposure, and his kind old weather-beaten, friendly face was almost the colour of one. He bade us go anywhere we liked in his garden, and he invited us to drink of the water of his well, which he said never went dry in the hottest weather. Then he returned to his fat old wife, who had kept on weeding, and bent down beside her and did not follow us for drink-money, but returned a self-respectful adieu from a distance, when we called a good-by before getting into our carriage. We generalised from his behaviour a manly independence of character in the Pisan people, and I am sure we were not mistaken in the beauty of the Pisan women, who, as we met them in the street, were all extremely pretty, and young, many of them, even after five hundred years. One gets over expecting good looks in Tuscany; and perhaps this was the reason why we prized the loveliness of the Pisans. It may have been comparative, only, though I am inclined to think it was positive. At any rate, there can be no doubt about the landscape outside the walls, which we drove into a little way out of one of the gates, to return by another. It was a plain country, and at this point a line of aqueduct stretched across the smiling fields to the feet of the arid, purple hills, that propped the blue horizon. There was something richly simple in the elements of the picture, which was of as few tones as a landscape of Titian or Raphael, and as strictly subordinated in its natural features to the human interest, which we did our best to represent. I daresay our best was but poor. Every acre of that plain had been the theatre of a great tragedy; every rood of ground had borne its hero. Now, in the advancing spring, the grass and wheat were long enough to flow in the wind, and they flowed like the ripples of a wide green sea to the feet of those purple hills, away from our feet where we stood beside our carriage on its hither shore. The warmth of the season had liberated the fine haze that dances above the summer fields, and this quivered before us like the confluent phantoms of multitudes, indistinguishably vast, who had fallen there in immemorial strife. But we could not stand musing long upon this fact; we had taken that carriage by the hour. Yet we could not help loitering along by the clear stream that followed the road, till it brought us to a flour-whitened mill, near the city wall, slowly and thoughtfully turning its huge undershot wheel; and I could not resist entering and speaking to the miller, where, leaning upon a sack of wheat, he dimly loomed through the powdered air, in the exact attitude of a miller I used to know in a mill on the little Miami, in Ohio, when I was a boy.

III

I TRY to give the reader a true impression of the sweet confusion of travel in those old lands. In the phrases that come out of the point of the pen, rather than out of the head or the heart, we talk about losing ourselves in the associations of the past; but we never do it. A prime condition of our sympathy with it, is that we always and every instant and vividly find our dreary, tiresome, unstoried, unstoriable selves in it; and if I had been less modem, less recent, less raw, I should have been by just so much indifferent to the antique charm of the place. In the midst of my reverie of the Pisan past, I dreamily asked the miller about the milling business in the Pisan present. I forget what he said.

The artist outside had begun an etching, — if you let that artist out of your sight half a second he began an etching, — and we got back by a common effort into the town again, where we renewed our impression of a quiet that was only equalled by its cleanliness, of a cleanliness that was only surpassed by its quiet. I think of certain dim arcaded streets; of certain genial, lonely, irregular squares, more or less planted with pollarded sycamores, just then woolily tufted with their leaf-buds; and I will ask the reader to think of such white light over all as comes in our own first real spring days; for in some atmospheric qualities and effects the spring is nowhere so much alike as in America and Italy. In one of these squares the boys were playing ball, striking it with a small tambourine instead of a bat; in another, some young girls sat under a sycamore with their sewing; and in a narrow street running out of this was the house where Galileo was born. He is known to have said that the world moves; but I do not believe it has moved much in that neighbourhood since his time. His natal roof is overlooked by a lofty gallery leading into Prince Corsini’s garden; and I wish I could have got inside of that garden; it must have been pleasanter than the street in which Galileo was born, and which more nearly approached squalor in its condition than any other street that I remember in Pisa. It had fallen from no better state, and must always have witnessed to the poverty of the decayed Florentine family from which Galileo sprang.

I left the artist there — beginning an etching as usual — and wandered back to our hotel; for it was then in the drowsy heart of the late afternoon, and I believed that Pisa had done all that she could for me in one day. But she had reserved a little surprise, quaint and unimaginable enough, in a small chapel of the Chiesa Evangelica Metodista Italiana, which she suddenly showed me in a retired street I wandered through. This Italian Evangelical Methodist Church was but a tiny structure, and it stood back from the street in a yard, with some hollies and myrtles before it — simple and plain, like a little Methodist church at home. It had not a frequented look, and I was told afterwards that the Methodists of Pisa were in that state of arrest which the whole Protestant movement in Italy has fallen into, after its first vigorous impulse. It has not lost ground, but it has not gained, which is also a kind of loss. Apparently the Protestant church which prospers best in Italy is the ancient Italian church of the Waldenses. This presents the Italians a Protestantism of their own invention, while perhaps the hundred religions which we offer them are too distracting, if unaccompanied by our one gravy. It is said that our missionaries have unexpected difficulties to encounter in preaching to the Italians, who are not amused, as we should be, by a foreigner’s blunder, in our language, but annoyed and revolted by incorrect Italian from the pulpit. They have, moreover, their intellectual pride in the matter: they believe that if Protestantism had been the wiser and better thing we think it, the Italians would have found it out long ago for themselves. As it is, such proselytes as we make are among the poor and ignorant; though that is the way all religions begin.

After the Methodist Church it was not at all astonishing to come upon an agricultural implement warehouse — alongside of a shop glaring with alabaster statuary — where the polite attendant offered me an American pump as the very best thing of its kind that I could use on my podere. When I explained that I and his pump were fellow-countrymen, I could see that we both rose in his respect A French pump, he said, was not worth anything in comparison, and I made my own inferences as to the relative inferiority of a Frenchman.

IV

WHEN I got to the hotel I asked for the key to my room, which opened by an inner door into the artist’s room, and was told that the artist had it. He had come out by that door, it appeared, and carried off the key in his pocket.

“Very well,” I said, “then let us get in with the porter’s key.”

They answered that the porter had no key, and they confessed that there was no other key than that which my friend had in his pocket. They maintained that for one door one key was enough, and they would not hear to the superiority of the American hotel system of several keys, which I, flown with pride by the lately acknowledged pre-eminence of American pumps, boasted for their mortification. I leave the sympathetic reader of forty-six to conceive the feelings of a man whose whole being had set nap-wards in a lethal tide, and who now found himself arrested and as it were dammed up in inevitable vigils. In the reading-room there were plenty of old newspapers that one could sleep over; but there was not a lounge, not an arm-chair. I pulled up one of the pitiless, straight-backed seats to the table, and meditated upon the lost condition of an artist who, without even meaning it, could be so wicked; and then I opened the hotel register, in which the different guests had inscribed their names, their residences, their feelings, their opinions of Pisa and the Hotel Minerva.

“This,” I said to my bitter heart, “will help a man to sleep, standing upright.”

But to my surprise I presently found myself interested in these predecessors of mine. They were, in most unexpected number, South Americans, and there were far more Spanish than English names from our hemisphere, though I do not know why the South Americans should not travel as well as we of the Northern continent. There were, of course, Europeans of all races and languages, conspicuous among whom for their effusion and expansiveness were the French. I should rather have thought the Germans would be foremost in this sort, but these French bridal couples — they all seemed to be on their wedding journeys — let their joy bubble frankly out in the public record. One Baron — declared that he saw Pisa for the second time, and “How much more beautiful it is,” he cries, “now when I see it on my bridal tour!” and his wife writes fondly above this — one fancies her with her left arm thrown round his neck while they bend over the book together—” Life is a journey which we should always make in pairs.” On another page, “Cecie and Louis — , on their wedding journey, are very content with this hotel, and still more with being together.”

Who could they have been, I wonder; and are they still better satisfied with each other’s company than with the hotels they stop at?

The Minerva was a good hotel; not perhaps all that these Gallic doves boasted it, but very fair indeed, and the landlord took off a charge for two pigeons when we represented that he had only given us one for dinner. The artist came in, after a while, with the appetite of a good conscience, and that dinner almost starved us. We tried to eke out the pigeon with vegetables, but the cook’s fire had gone down, and we could get nothing but salad. There is nothing I hate more, under such circumstances, than a giardinetto for dessert, and a gardenette was all we had; a little garden that grew us only two wizened pears, some dried prunes, and two slices of Gruyère cheese, fitter for a Parisian bridal pair than for us. If my memory serves me right, we had to go out to a café for our after dinner coffee.

At any rate we went out, and walked up to look at the Arno under the pale moon. We found the river roughed by the chill wind that flared the line of lamps defining the curve of the quay before the shadowy palaces, and swept through the quiet streets, and while we lounged upon the parapet, a poor mountebank — of those that tumble for centesimi before the cafés — came by, shivering and shrinking in his shabby tights. His spangled breech-cloth emitted some forlorn gleams; he was smoking a cigarette, and trying to keep on by a succession of shrugs the jacket that hung from one of his shoulders. I give him to the reader for whatever he can do with him in an impression of Pisa.

V

ONE of our first cares in Pisa was, of course, to visit the Four Fabrics, as the Italians call, par excellence, the Duomo, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo. I say cares, for to me it was not a great pleasure. I perceive, by reference to my note-book, that I found that group far less impressive than at first, and that the Campo Santo especially appeared conscious and finicking. I had seen those Orgagna frescoes before, and I had said to myself twenty years ago, in obedience to whatever art-critic I had in my pocket, that here was the highest evidence of the perfect sincerity in which the early masters wrought — that no one could have painted those horrors of death and torments of hell who had not thoroughly believed in them. But this time I had my doubts, and I questioned if the painters of the Campo Santo might not have worked with almost as little faith and reverence as so many American humorists. Why should we suppose that the men who painted the Vergognosa peeping through her fingers at the debauch of Noah should not be capable of making ferocious fun of the scenes which they seemed to depict seriously? There is, as we all know, a modem quality in the great minds, the quickest wits, of all ages, and I do not feel sure these old painters are always to be taken at their word. Were they not sometimes making a mock of the devout clerics and laics who employed them? It is bitter fun, I allow. The Death and the Hell of Orgagna are atrocious — nothing less. A hideous fancy, if not a grotesque, insolent humour, riots through those scenes, where the damned are shown with their entrails dangling out (my pen cannot be half so plain as his brush), with their arms chopped off, and their tongues torn out by fiends, with their women’s breasts eaten by snakes. I for one will not pretend to have revered those works of art, or to have felt anything but loathing in their presence. If I am told that I ought at least to respect the faith with which the painter wrought, I say that faith was not respectable; and I can honour him more if I believe he was portraying those evil dreams in contempt of them — doing what he could to make faith in them impossible by realising them in all the details of their filthy cruelty. It was misery to look upon them, and it was bliss to turn my back and give my gaze to the innocent wilding flowers and weeds — the daisies that powdered the sacred earth brought from the Holy Land in the Pisan galleys of old, for the sweeter repose of those laid away here to wait the Judgment Day. How long they had been sleeping already? But they do not dream; that was one comfort I revisited the Baptistery for the sake of the famous echo which I had heard before, and which had sweetly lingered in my sense all these twenty years. But I was now a little disappointed in it, — perhaps because the custodian who had howled so skilfully to evoke it was no longer there, but a mere tyro intent upon his half franc, with no real feeling for ululation as an art. Guides and custodians of an unexampled rapacity swarmed in and all about the Four Fabrics, and beggars, whom we had almost forgotten in Florence, were there in such number that if the Leaning Tower were to fall, as it still looks capable of doing at any moment, it would half depopulate Pisa. I grieve to say that I encouraged mendicancy in the person of an old woman whom I gave a franc by mistake for a soldo. She had hot the public spirit to refuse it; without giving me time to correct the error, her hand closed upon it like a talon of a vulture, and I had to get what consolation I could out of pretending to have meant to give her a franc, and to take lightly the blessings under which I really staggered.

It may have been this misadventure that cast a malign light upon the cathedral, which I found, after that of Siena, not at all estimable. I dare say it had its merits; but I could get no pleasure even out of the swinging lamp of Galileo; it was a franc, large as the full moon, and reproachfully pale, that waved to and fro before my eyes. This cathedral, however, is only the new Duomo of Pisa, being less than eight hundred years of age, and there is an old Duomo, in another part of the city, which went much more to my heart. I do not pretend that I entered it; but it had a lovely façade of Pisan gothic, mellowed through all its marble by the suns of a thousand summers, and weed-grown in every neglected niche and nook where dust and seeds could be lodged; so that I now wonder I did not sit down before it and spend the rest of my life there.

VI

THE reader, who has been requested to imagine the irregular form and the perpetually varying heights and depths of Siena, is now set the easier task of supposing Pisa shut within walls almost quadrangular, and reposing on a level which expands to the borders of the hills beyond Lucca, and drops softly with the Arno towards the sea. The river divides the southward third of the city from the rest, to which stately bridges bind it again. The group of the Four Fabrics, to which we have paid a devoir tempered by modern misgiving, rises in aristocratic seclusion in the north-western corner of the quadrangle, and the outer wall of the Campo Santo is the wall of the city. Nothing statelier than the position of these edifices could be conceived; and yet their isolation, so favourable to their reproduction in small alabaster copies, costs them something of the sympathy of the sensitive spectator. He cannot withhold his admiration of that grandeur, but his soul turns to the Duomo in the busy heart of Florence, or to the cathedral, pre-eminent but not solitary in the crest of Siena. The Pisans have put their famous group apart from their streets and shops, and have consecrated to it a region which no business can take them to. In this they have gained distinction and effect for it, but they have lost for it that character of friendly domesticity which belongs to all other religious edifices that I know in Italy. Here, as in some other things not so easily definable, the people so mute in all the arts but architecture — of which they were the origin and school in Italy — seem to have expressed themselves mistakenly. The Four Fabrics are where they are to be seen, to be visited, to be wondered at; but they are remote from human society, and they fail of the last and finest effect of architecture — the perfect adaptation of houses to the use of men. Perhaps also one feels a want of unity in the group; perhaps they are too much like dishes set upon the table: the Duomo a vast and beautiful pudding; the Baptistery a gigantic charlotte russe; the Campo Santo an exquisite structure in sugar; the Leaning Tower, a column of ice-cream which has been weakened at the base by too zealous an application of hot water to the outside of the mould. But I do not insist upon this comparison; I only say that I like the ancient church of St Paul by the Arno. Some question whether it was really the first cathedral of Pisa, maintaining that it was merely used as such while the Duomo was in repair after the fire from which it suffered shortly after its completion.

One must nowadays seem to have some preference in all aesthetic matters, but the time was when polite tourists took things more easily. In the seventeenth century, “Richard Lassels, Gent, who Travelled through Italy five times as Tutor to several of the English Nobility and Gentry,” says of the Pisan Duomo that it “is a neat Church for structure, and for its three Brazen Doors historied with a fine Basso rilievo. It’s built after La maniera Tedescha, a fashion of Building much used in Italy four or five hundred years ago, and brought in by Germans or Tedeschi, saith Vasari. Near to the Domo stands (if leaning may be called standing) the bending Tower, so artificially made, that it seems to be falling, and yet it stands firm.... On the other side of the Domo, is the Campo Santo, a great square cloistered about with a low cloister curiously painted.”

Here is no trouble of mind about the old masters, either architects or painters, but a beautiful succinctness, a tranquil brevity, which no concern for the motives, or meanings, or aspirations of either penetrates. We have taken upon ourselves in these days a heavy burden of inquiry as to what the mediaeval masters thought and felt; but the tourist of the seventeenth century could say of the Pisan Duomo that it was “a neat church for structure,” and of the Campo Santo that it was “curiously painted,” and there an end. Perhaps there was a relief for the reader also in this method. Master Lassels vexed himself to spell his Italian correctly no more than he did his English.

He visited, apparently with more interest, the Church of the Knights of St Stephen, which indeed I myself found full of unique attraction. Of these knights he says: “They wear a Red Cross of Satin upon their Cloaks, and profess to fight against the Turks. For this purpose they have here a good House and Maintenance. Their Church is beautified without with a handsome Faciata of White Marble, and within with Turkish Ensigns and divers Lanterns of Capitanesse Gallies. In this House the Knights live in common, and they are well maintained. In their Treasury they show a great Buckler of Diamonds, won in a Battle against the Turks.... They have their Cancellaria, a Catalogue of those Knights who have done notable service against the Turks, which serves for a powerful exhortation to their Successors, to do, and die bravely. In fine, these Knights may marry if they will, and live in their own particular houses, but many of them choose celibate, as more convenient for brave Soldiers; Wives and Children being the true impedimenta exercitus The knights were long gone from their House and Maintenance in 1883, and I suspect it is years since any of them even professed to fight the Turks. But their church is still there, with their trophies, which I went and admired; and I do not know that there is anything in Pisa which gives you a more vivid notion of her glory in the past than those flags taken from the infidels and those carvings that once enriched her galleys. These and the ship-yards by the Arno, from which her galleys were launched, do really recall the majesty and dominion of the sea which once was hers — and then Genoa’s, and then Venice’s, and then the Hanseatic Cities’, and then Holland’s, and then England’s; and shall be ours when the Moral Force of the American Navy is appreciated At present Pisa and the United States are equally formidable as maritime powers, unless indeed this conveys too strong an impression of the decay of Pisa.

VII

ISSUING from the Church of the Cavaliers I found myself in the most famous spot in the whole city: the wide dusty square where the Tower of Famine once stood, and where you may still see a palace with iron baskets swung from the corners of the façade, in which it is said the wicked Archbishop Ruggieri used to put the heads of traitors. It may not be his palace, and the baskets may not have been used for this purpose; but there is no doubt that this was the site of the tower, which was not demolished till 1655, and that here it was that Ugolino and his children and grandchildren cruelly perished.

The writer of an excellent little local guide to Pisa, which I bought on my first visit, says that Dante has told the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, and that “after Dante, God alone can repeat it.” Yet I fancy the tragedy will always have a fascination to the scribbler who visits Pisa, irresistibly tempting him to recall it to his reader. I for my part shall not do less than remind him that Ugolino was Captain of the People and Podestà of Pisa at the time of her great defeat by Genoa in 1284, when so many of her best and bravest were carried off prisoners that a saying arose, “If you want to see Pisa, go to Genoa.” In those days they had a short and easy way of accounting for disaster, which has been much practised since down even to the date of our own civil war; they attributed it to treason, and in this case they were pretty clear that Count Ugolino was the traitor. He sailed away with his squadron before his critics thought the day lost; and after the battle, in his negotiations with Florence and Genoa they declared that he behaved as only a man would who wished to ruin his country in order to rule her. He had already betrayed his purpose of founding an hereditary lordship in Pisa, as the Visconti had done in Milan and the Scaligeri in Verona, and to this end had turned Guelph from being ancestrally Ghibelline; for his name is one of the three still surviving in Tuscany of the old German nobility founded there by the emperors. He was a man of furious and ruthless temper; he had caused one of his nephews to be poisoned, he stabbed another, and when the young man’s friend, a nephew of the Archbishop, would have defended him, Ugolino killed him with his own hand. The Archbishop, as a Ghibelline, was already no friend of Ugolino’s, and here now was bloodshed between them. “And what happened to Count Ugolino a little after,” says the Florentine chronicler, Villani, “ was prophesied by a wise and worthy man of the court, Marco Lombardo; for when the count was chosen by all to be Lord of Pisa, and when he was in his highest estate and felicity, he made himself a splendid birthday feast, where he had his children and grandchildren and all his lineage, kinsmen and kinswomen, with great pomp of apparel, and ornament, and preparation for a rich banquet The count took this Marco, and went about showing him his possessions and splendour, and the preparation for the feast, and that done, he said, ‘What do you think of it, Marco? ‘ The sage answered at once, and said, ‘ You are fitter for evil chance than any baron of Italy.’ And the count, afraid of Marco’s meaning, asked, ‘Why?’ And Marco answered, ‘Because you lack nothing but the wrath of God.’ And surely the wrath of God quickly fell upon him, as it pleased God, for his sins and treasons; for as it had been intended by the Archbishop of Pisa and his party to drive out of Pisa Nino and his followers, and betray and entrammel Ugolino, and weaken the Guelphs, the Archbishop ordered Count Ugolino to be undone, and immediately set the people on in their fury to attack and take his palace, giving the people to understand that he had betrayed Pisa, and surrendered their castles to the Florentines and Lucchese; and finding the people upon him, without hope of escape, Ugolino gave himself up, and in this assault his bastard son and one of his grandchildren were killed; and Ugolino being taken, and two of his sons and two of his son’s sons, they threw them in prison, and drove his family and his followers out of Pisa.... The Pisans, who had thrown in prison Ugolino and his two sons, and two sons of his son Count Guelfo, as we have before mentioned, in a tower on the Piazza degli Anziani, caused the door of the tower to be locked and the keys to be thrown into the Arno, and forbidding these captives all food, in a few days they perished of hunger. But first, the count imploring a confessor, they would not allow him a friar or priest that he might confess. And all five being taken out of the tower together, they were vilely buried; and from that time the prison was called the Tower of Famine, and will be so always. For this cruelty the Pisans were strongly blamed by the whole world, wherever it was known, not so much for the count, who for his crimes and treasons was perhaps worthy of such a death, but for his sons and grandsons, who were young, boys, and innocent; and this sin, committed by the Pisans, did not remain unpunished, as may be seen in after time.”

A monograph on Ugolino by an English writer states that the victims were rolled in the matting of their prison floor and interred, with the irons still on their limbs, in the cloister of the church of San Francesco. The grave was opened in the fourteenth century, and the irons taken out; again, in 1822, the remains were found and carelessly thrown together in a spot marked by a stone bearing the name of Vannuchi. Of the prison where they suffered, no more remains now than of the municipal eagles which the Republic put to moult there, and from which it was called the Moulting Tower before it was called the Tower of Famine.

VIII.

THE memory of that curious literary conjunction which once took place at Pisa, when Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt met there to establish an English review on Italian ground, imparts to the old city an odour, faint now and very vague, of the time when Romance was new enough to seem Immortal; but I could do little with this association, as an element of my impression. They will point you out, if you wish, the palace in which Byron lived on the Lung’ Arno, but as I would not have gone to look at a palace with Byron alive in it, I easily excused myself for not hunting up this one of the residences with which he left Italy swarming. The Shelleys lived first in a villa, four miles off under the hills, but were washed out of it in one of the sudden inundations of the country, and spent the rest of their sojourn in the city, where Shelley alarmed his Italian friends by launching on the Amo in a boat he had contrived of pitched canvas and lath. His companion in this perilous navigation was that Mr Williams with whom he was afterwards drowned in Spezzia Bay. “Once,” writes Mrs Shelley, “I went down with him to the mouth of the Arno, where the stream, then high and swift, met the tideless sea and disturbed its sluggish waters. It was a waste and dreary scene; the desert sand stretched into a point surrounded by waves that broke idly but perpetually around.”

At Pisa there is nothing of this wildness or strife in the Arno, not so much as at Florence, where it rushes and brawls down its channel and over its dams and ripples. Its waters are turbid, almost black, but smooth, and they slip oilily away with many a wreathing eddy, round the curve of the magnificent quay, to which my mind recurs still as the noblest thing in Pisa; as the noblest thing, indeed, that any city has done with its river. But what quick and sensitive allies of Nature the Italians have always shown themselves! No suggestion of hers has been thrown away on them; they have made the most of her lavish kindness, and transmuted it into the glory and the charm of art. Our last moments of sight-seeing in Pisa were spent in strolling beside the river, in hanging on the parapet and delighting in the lines of that curve.

At one end of the city, before this begins, near a spick-and-span new iron bridge, is the mediaeval tower of the galley prison, which we found exquisitely picturesque in the light of our last morning; and then stretching up towards the heart of the town from this tower, were the ship-yards, with the sheds in which the old republic built the galleys she launched on every sea then known. They are used now for military stables; they are not unlike the ordinary horse-car stables of our civilization; and the grooms, swabbing the legs of the horses and combing their manes, were naturalized to our homesick sympathies by the homely community of their functions with those I had so often stopped to admire in my own land. There is no doubt but the toilet of a horse is something that interests every human being.

INDUSTRIOUS LUCCA

I

WITH rather less than the ordinary stupidity of tourists, wretched slaves of routine as they are, we had imagined the possibility of going to Lucca overland; that is, of driving fifteen miles across the country instead of taking the train. It would be as three hours against twenty minutes, and as fifteen francs against two; but my friend was young and I was imprudent, and we boldly ventured upon the expedition. I have never regretted it, which is what can be said of, alas, how few pleasures! On the contrary, it is rapture to think of it still.

Already, at eight o’clock of the April morning, the sun had filled the city with a sickening heat, which intimated pretty clearly what it might do for Pisa in August; but when we had mounted superbly to our carriage seats, after pensioning all the bystanders, and had driven out of the city into the green plain beyond the walls, we found it a delicious spring day, warm, indeed, but full of a fervent life.

We had issued from the gate nearest the Four Fabrics, and I advise the reader to get that view of them if he can. To the backward glance of the journeyer toward Lucca, they have the unity, the ensemble, the want of which weakens their effect to proximity. Beside us swept the great level to the blue-misted hills on our right; before us it stretched indefinitely. From the grass, the larks were quivering up to the perfect heaven, and the sympathy of Man with the tender and lovely mood of Nature was expressed in the presence of the hunters with their dogs, who were exploring the herbage in quest of something to kill.

Perhaps I do man injustice. Perhaps the rapture of the blameless litterateur and artist, who drove along crying out over the exquisite beauty of the scene, was more justly representative of our poor race. I am vexed now, when I think how brief this rapture was, and how much it might have been prolonged if we had bargained with our driver to go slow. We had bargained for everything else; but who could have imagined that one Italian could ever have been fast enough for two Americans? He was even too fast. He had a just pride in his beast, — as tough as the iron it was the colour of, — and when implored, in the interest of natural beauty, not to urge it on, he misunderstood; he boasted that it could keep up that pace all day, and he incited it in the good Tuscan of Pisa to go faster yet. Ah me! What enchanting villas he whirled us by! What gray chateaux! What old wayside towers, hoary out of all remembrance! What delightfully stupid-looking little stony picturesque villages, in every one of which that poor artist and I would have been glad to spend the whole day! But the driver could not snatch the broad and constant features of the landscape from us so quickly; these we had time to peruse and imprint for ever on our memories: the green expanses, the peach trees pink in their bloom; the plums and cherries putting on their bridal white; the gray road, followed its whole length by the vines trained from trees to tall stakes across a space which they thus embowered continuously from field to field. Everywhere the peasants were working the soil; spading, not ploughing their acres, and dressing it to the smoothness of a garden. It looked rich and fertile, and the whole land wore an air of smiling prosperity which I cannot think it put on expressly for us.

Pisa seemed hardly to have died out of the horizon before her ancient enemy began to rise from the other verge, beyond the little space in which they used to play bloodily at national hostilities. The plain narrowed as we approached, and hills hemmed us in on three sides, with snow-capped heights in the background, from which the air blew cooler and cooler. It was only eleven o’clock, and we would gladly have been all day on the road. But we pretended to be pleased with the mistaken zeal that had hurried us; it was so amiable, we could not help it; and we entered Lucca with the smiling resolution to make the most of it

II

LUCCA lies as fiat as Pisa, but in shape it is as regularly oblong as that is square, and instead of the brick wall, which we had grown fond of there and in Siena, it has a girdle of gray stone, deeply moated with out, and broadly levelled on top, where a lovely driveway winds round the ancient town. The wall juts in a score of angles, and the projecting spaces thus formed are planted with groups of forest trees, lofty and old, and giving a charm to the promenade exquisitely wild and rare.

To our approach, the clustering city towers and roofs promised a picturesqueness which she kept in her own fashion when we drove in through her gates, and were set down, after a dramatic rattling and banging through her streets, at the door of the Universo, or the Croce di Malta, — I do not really remember which hotel it was. But I remember very well the whole domestic force of the inn seemed to be concentrated in the distracted servant who gave us our rooms, and was landlord, porter, accountant, waiter, and chambermaid all in one. It was an inn apparently very little tainted by tourist custom, and Lucca is certainly one of the less discovered of the Tuscan cities. At the table d’hôte in the evening our commensals were all Italians except an ancient English couple, who had lived so long in that region that they had rubbed off everything English but their speech. I wondered a good deal who they could be; they spoke conservatively — the foreigners are always conservative in Italy — of the good old ducal days of Lucca, when she had her own mild little despot, and they were now going to the Baths of Lucca to place themselves for the summer. They were types of a class which is numerous all over the Continent, and which seems thoroughly content with expatriation. The Europeanised American is always apologetic; he says that America is best, and he pretends that he is going back there; but the continentalised Englishman has apparently no intention of repatriating himself. He has said to me frankly in one instance that England was beastly. But I own I should not like to have said it to him.

In their talk of the ducal past of Lucca these English people struck again the note which my first impression of Lucca had sounded. Lucca was a sort of republic for nearly a thousand years» with less interruption from lords, bishops, and foreign dominions than most of her sister commonwealths, and she kept her ancient liberties down to the time of the French Revolution — four hundred years longer than Pisa, and two hundred and fifty years longer than Florence and Siena; as long, in fact, as Venice, which she resembled in an arbitrary change effected from a democratic to an aristocratic constitution at the moment when the change was necessary to her existence as an independent state. The duchy of Lucca created by the Congress of Vienna, 1817, and assigned to the Bourbons of Parma, lasted only thirty years, when it was merged by previous agreement in the grand duchy of Tuscany, the Bourbons going back to Parma, in which Napoleon’s Austrian widow had meantime enjoyed a life interest. In this brief period, however, the old republican city assumed so completely the character of a little principality, that in spite of the usual Via Garibaldi and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I could not banish the image of the ducal state from my mind. Yet I should be at a loss how to impart this feeling to every one, or to say why a vast dusty square, planted with pollarded sycamores, and a huge, Ugly palace with but a fairish gallery of pictures, fronting upon the dust and sycamores, should have been so expressive of a ducal residence. There was a statue of Maria Louisa, the first ruler of the temporary duchy, in the midst of these sycamores, and I had a persistent whimsey of her reviewing her little ducal army there, as I sat and looked out from the open door of the restaurant where my friend and I were making the acquaintance of a number of strange dishes and trying our best to be friends with the Lucchese conception of a beefsteak.

It was not because I had no other periods to choose from; in Lucca you can be overwhelmed with them. Her chronicles do not indeed go back into the mists of fable for her origin, but they boast an Etruscan, a Roman antiquity which is hardly less formidable. Here in Α.U. 515 there was fixed a colony of two thousand citizens; here in 698 the great Cæsar met with Pompey and Crassus, and settled who should rule in Rome. After the Romans, she knew the Goths, the Lombards, and the Franks; then she had her own tyrants, and in the twelfth century she began to have her own consuls, the magistrates of her people’s choice, and to have her wars within and without, to be torn with faction and menaced with conquest in the right Italian fashion. Once she was sacked by the Pisans under the terrible Uguccione della Fagginola, in 1314; and more than once she was sold. She was sold for thirty-five thousand florins to two ambitious and enterprising, gentlemen, the Rossi brothers, of Parma, who, however, were obliged to relinquish her to the Scaligeri of Verona. This was the sorrow and shame that fell upon her after a brief fever of conquest and glory, brought her by the greatest of her captains, the famous Castruccio Castracani, the condottiere, whose fierce, death-white face, bordered by its pale yellow hair, looks more vividly out of the history of his time than any other. For Castruccio had been in prison, appointed to die, and when the rising of the Lucchese delivered him, and made him Lord of Lucca, Uguccione’s fetters were still upon him. He was of the ancient Ghibelline family of the Antelminelli, who had prospered to great wealth in England, where they spent a long exile and where Castruccio learned the art of war. After his death one of his sons sold his dominion to another for twenty-two thousand florins, from whom his German garrison took it and sold it for sixty thousand to Gherardo Spinola; he, in turn, disposed of it to the Rossi, at a clear loss of thirty-eight thousand florins. The Lucchese suffered six years under the Scaligeri, who sold them again — the market price this time is not quoted — to the Florentines, whom the Pisans drove out. These held her in a servitude so cruel that the Lucchese called it their Babylonian captivity, and when it was ended after twenty years, through the intervention of the Emperor Charles IV., in 1369, they were obliged to pay the German a hundred thousand florins for their liberty, which had been sold so many times for far less money.

An ancient Lucchese family, the Guanigi, whose Gothic palaces are still the most beautiful in the city, now rose to power, and held it till 1430; and then the city finally established the republican government, which in its democratic and oligarchic form continued till 1799.

The noblest event of this long period was the magnanimous attempt of the gonfaloniere, Francesco Burlamacchi, who in 1546 dreamed of driving the Medici from power and re-establishing the republic throughout Tuscany. Burlamacchi was of an old patrician family, but the love of freedom had been instilled in him by his uncle, Filippo Burlamacchi, that Fra Pacifico who wrote the first life of Savonarola and was one of his most fervent disciples. The gonfaloniere’s plot was discovered; and he was arrested by the timid Lucchese Senate, which hastened to assure the ferocious Cosimo I. that they were guiltless of complicity. The imperial commissioner came from Milan to preside at his trial, and he was sentenced to suffer death for treason to the empire. He was taken to Milan and beheaded; but now he is the greatest name in Lucca, and his statue in the piazza, fronting her ancient communal palace, appeals to all who love freedom with the memory of his high intent. He died in the same cause which Savonarola laid down his life for, and not less generously.

Poor little Lucca had not even the courage to attempt to save him; but doubtless she would have tried if she had dared. She was under the special protection of the emperors, having paid Maximilian and then Charles V. good round sums for the confirmation of her early liberties; and she was so anxious to be well with the latter, that when she was accused to him of favouring the new Lutheran heresy she hastened to persecute the Protestants with the same cowardice that she had shown in abandoning Burlamacchi.

It cost, indeed, no great effort to suppress the Protestant congregation at Lucca. Peter Martyr, its founder, had fled before, and was now a professor at Strasburg, whence he wrote a letter of severe upbraiding to the timorous flock who suffered themselves to be frightened back to Rome. Some of them would not renounce their faith, preferring exile, and of these, who emigrated by families, were the Burlamacchi, from whom the hero came. He had counted somewhat upon the spirit of the Reformation to help him in his design against the Medici, knowing it to be the spirit of freedom, but there is no one evidence that he was himself more a Protestant than Savonarola was.

Eight years after his death the constitution of Lucca was changed, and she fell under the rule of an aristocracy nicknamed the Lords of the Little Ring, from the narrow circle in which her senators succeeded one another. She had always been called Lucca the Industrious; in her safe subordination, she now worked and throve for two hundred and fifty years, till the French republicans came and toppled her oligarchy over at a touch. James Howell, writing one of his delightful letters from Florence in 1621, gives us some notion of Luccha as she appeared to the polite traveller of that day.

“There is a notable active litttle Republic towards the midst of Tuscany,” he says, “called Lucca, which, in regard she is under the Emperour’s protection, he dares not meddle with, though she lie as a Partridg under a Faulcon’s wings, in relation to the grand Duke; besides there is another reason of the State why he meddles not with her, because she is more beneficial unto him now that she is free, and more industrious to support this freedom, than if she were become his vassal; for then it is probable she would grow more careless and idle, and so would not vent his comodities so soon, which she buys for ready mony, wherein most of her wealth consists. There is no State that winds the peny more nimbly and makes a quicker return.”

Lasells, who visited Lucca a little earlier, tells us that it “ hath thirty thousand Muskets or half Muskets in its Arsenal, eight thousand Pikes, two thousand Brest Pieces of Musket proof, and store of great Artillery. The whole State, for a need, can arm eighteen thousand men of service;” but Lucca appears to have become the joke and by-word of her neighbours more and more as time went on. At Florence they told of a prima-donna who, when she gesticulated in opera at Lucca, flung her arms beyond the borders of the republic. An ignominious peace, timid, selfish, prudent, was her condition from the time the aristocratic change took place. For two centuries she was preparing for that Bourbon despotism which characterized her even physically to my fancy. “An absolute government,” says my Lucchese guide-book, “but of mild temper, which might have been more beneficent if it had been inspired by views less narrow. Yet it was a notable period of our history for municipal activity and for public works, which in proportion to the smallness of the country may also be called great; the city secured by vast and well-planned defences against the inundations of the Serchio; the country traversed in every direction by carriage-roads; abundance of the best water for use and beauty brought to the city by a monumental work of art; an ample highway across the Apennines, to communicate with Modena and Lombardy; bridges, ornamental and convenient, of stone and iron.”

III

OF mediaeval Lucca I have kept freshest the sense of her Gothic church architecture, with its delicate difference from that of Pisa, which it resembles and excels. It is touched with the Lombardic and Byzantine character, while keeping its own; here are the pillars resting on the backs of lions and leopards; here are the quaint mosaics in the façades. You see the former in the cathedral, which is not signally remarkable, like that of Florence, or Siena, or Pisa, and the latter in the beautiful old church of San Frediano, an Irish saint who for some reason figured in Lucca; he was bishop there in the fifth century, and the foundation of his church dates only a century or two later. San Michele is an admirable example of Lucchese gothic, and is more importantly placed than any other church, in the very heart of the town opposite the Palazzo Pretorio. This structure was dedicated to the occupation of the Podestà of Lucca, in pursuance of the republic’s high-languaged decree, recognising the fact that “among the ornaments with which cities embellish themselves, the greatest expenditure should always be devoted to those where the deities are worshipped, the magistracy administers justice, and the people convenes.” The Palazzo Pretorio is now the repository of a public archaeological collection, and the memory of its original use has so utterly perished that the combined intellects of two policemen, whom we appealed to for information, could not assign to it any other function than that of lottery office, appointed by the late grand duke. The popular intellect at Lucca is not very vivid, so far as we tested it, and though willing, it is not quick. The caffetiera in whose restaurant we took breakfast, under the shadow of the Pretorian Palace walls, was as ignorant of its history as the policemen; but she was very amiable, and she had three pretty daughters in the bon-bon department, who looked the friendliest disposition to know about it if they could.

I speak of them at once, because I did not think the Lucchese generally such handsome people as the Pisans, and I wish to be generous before I am just. Why, indeed, should I be severe with the poor Lucchese in any way, even for their ignorance, when the infallible Baedeker himself speaks of the statue in the Piazza S. Michele as that of “S. Burlamacchi”? The hero thus canonised stood frowning down upon a grain and seed market when we went to offer him our homage, and the peasants thought we had come to buy, and could not understand why we should have only a minor curiosity about their wares. They took the wheat up in their brown hands to show us, and boasted of its superior quality. We said we were strangers, and explained that we had no intention of putting in a crop of that sort; but they only laughed blankly. In spite of this prevailing ignorance, penetrating even to the Baedeker in our hands, Lucca was much tableted to the memory of her celebrities, especially her literary celebrities, who need tablets as greatly as any literary celebrities I know. There was one literary lady whose tablet I saw in a church, and whom the local Scientific and Literary Academy proclaimed “the marvel of her age” for her learning and her gifts in improvisation. The reader will readily identify her from this; or if he cannot, the greater shame to him; he might as well be a Lucchese.

“All there are barrators, except Bontura;

No into yes for money there is changed,”

 says Dante of this Lucca in which I found an aspect of busy commonplace, an air of thrift and traffic, and in which I only feign to have discovered an indifference to finer things. I dare say Lucca is full of intelligence and polite learning; but she does not imbue her policemen and caffetieras with it, as Boston does. Yet I would willingly be at this moment in a town where I could step out and see an old Roman amphitheatre, built bodily up into the modern city, and showing its mighty ribs through the houses surrounding the market-place — a market-place quaint beyond any other, with its tile-roofed stands and booths. There is much more silk in Lucca than in Boston, if we have the greater culture; and the oil of Lucca is sublime; and — yes, I will own it! — Lucca has the finer city wall. The town showed shabby and poor from the driveway along the top of this, for we saw the backyards and rears of the houses; but now and then we looked down into a stiff, formal, delicious palace garden, full of weather-beaten statues, old, bad, ridiculous, divinely dear and beautiful!

I cannot say that I have been hardly used, when I remember that I have seen such gardens as those; and I humbly confess it a privilege to have walked in the shadow of the Guanigi palaces at Lucca, in which the gothic seems to have done its best for a stately and lovely effect. I even climbed to the top of one of their towers, which I had wondered at ever since my first sight of Lucca because of the little grove it bore upon its crest I asked the custodian of the palace what it was, and he said it was a little garden, which I suspected already. But I had a consuming desire to know what it looked like, and what Lucca looked like from it; and I asked him how high the tower was. He answered that it was four hundred feet high, which I doubted at first, but came to believe when I had made the ascent. I hated very much to go up that tower; but when the custodian said that an English lady eighty years old had gone up the week before, I said to myself that I would not be outdone by any old lady of eighty, and I went up. The trees were really rooted in little beds of earth up there, and had been growing for ten years; the people of the house sometimes took tea under them in the summer evenings.

This tower was one of three hundred and seventy in which Lucca abounded before the Guanigi levelled them. They were for the convenience of private warfare; the custodian showed me a little chamber near the top, where he pretended the garrison used to stay. I enjoyed his statement as much as if it were a fact, and I enjoyed still more the magnificent prospect of the city and country from the towers; the fertile plain with the hills all round, and distant mountains snow-crowned except to the south where the valley widened toward Florence; the multitudinous roofs and bell-towers of the city, which filled its walls full of human habitations, with no breadths of orchard and field as at Fisa and Siena.

The present Count Guanigi, so the custodian pretended, lives in another palace, and lets this in apartments; you may have the finest for seventy-five dollars a year, with privilege of sky-garden. I did not think it dear, and I said so, though I did not visit any of the interiors and do not know what state the finest of them may be in.

We did, however, see one Lucchese palace throughout; the Palazzo Mansi, in which there is an admirable gallery of Dutch pictures inherited by the late marquis through a Dutch marriage made by one of his ancestors. The portrait of this lady, a gay, exuberant, eighteenth-century blonde, ornaments the wall of one of the gilded and tapestried rooms which form two sides of the palace court. From a third, standing in an arcaded passage, you look across this court, gray with the stone of which the edifice is built, to a rich brown mass of tiled roofs, and receive a perfect impression of the pride and state in which life was lived in the old days in Lucca. It is a palace in the classic taste; it is excellent in its way, and it expresses as no other sort of edifice can the splendours of an aristocracy, after it has ceased to be feudal and barbaric, and become elegant and municipal. What laced coats and bag-wigs, what hoops and feathers had not alighted from gilt coaches and sedan-chairs in that silent and empty court! I am glad to be plebeian and American, a citizen of this enormous democracy, but if I were strictly cross-examined, would I not like also to be a Lord of the Little Ring in Lucca, a marquis, and a Mansi?

PISTOJA, PRATO, and FIESOLE

I

IT was on the last day of March, after our return from Siena, that I ran out to Pistoja with my friend the artist There were now many signs of spring in the landscape, and the gray olives were a less prevalent tone, amid the tints of the peach and pear blossoms. Dandelions thickly strewed the railroad sides; the grass was powdered with the little daisies, white with crimson-tipped petals; the garden borders were full of yellow flowering seed-turnips. The peasants were spading their fields; as we ran along, it came noon, and they began to troop over the white roads to dinner, past villas frescoed with false balconies and casements, and comfortable brownish-gray farmsteads. On our right the waves of distant purple hills swept all the way to Pistoja.

I made it part of my business there to look up a young married couple, Americans, journeying from Venice to Florence, who stopped at Pistoja twenty years before, and saw the gray town in the gray light of a spring morning between four and six o’clock. I remembered how strange and beautiful they thought it, and from time to time I started with recognition of different objects — as if I had been one of that pair; so young, so simple-heartedly, greedily glad of all that eld and story which Italy constantly lavished upon them. I could not find them, but I found phantom traces of their youth in the ancient town, and that endeared it to me, and made it lovely through every hour of the long rainy day I spent there. To other eyes it might have seemed merely a stony old town, dull and cold under the lowering sky, with a locked-up cathedral, a bare baptistery, and a mediaeval public palace, and a history early merged in that of Florence; but to me it must always have the tender interest of the pleasure, pathetically intense, which that young couple took in it. They were very hungry, and they could get no breakfast in the drowsy town, not even a cup of coffee, but they did not mind that; they wandered about, famished but blest, and by one of the happy accidents that usually befriended them, they found their way up to the Piazza del Duomo and saw the Communal Palace so thoroughly, in all its gothic fulness and mediæval richness of detail, that I seemed never to have risen from the stone benching around the interior of the court on which they sat to study the escutcheons carven and painted on the walls. I could swear that the bear on the arms of Pistoja was the same that they saw and noted with the amusement which a bear in a checkered tabard must inspire in ignorant minds; though I am now able to inform the reader that it was put there because Pistoja was anciently infested with bears, and this was the last bear left when they were exterminated.

We need not otherwise go deeply into the history of Pistoja. We know already how one of her family feuds introduced the factions of the Bianchi and Neri in Florence, and finally caused the exile of Dante; and we may inoffensively remember that Cataline met his defeat and death on her hills A.U. 691. She was ruled more or less tumultuously by princes, popes, and people till the time of her great siege by the Lucchese and Florentines and her own Guelph exiles in 1305. Famine began to madden the besieged, and men and women stole out of the city through the enemy’s camp and scoured the country for food. When the Florentines found this out they lay in wait for them, and such as they caught they mutilated, cutting off their noses, or arms, or legs, and then exposing them to the sight of those they had gone out to save from starvation. After the city fell the Florentine and Lucchese leaders commanded such of the wounded Pistojese as they found on the field to be gathered in heaps upon the demolished walls, that their fathers, brothers, and children might see them slowly die, and forbade any one, under pain of a like fate, to succour one of these miserable creatures.

Pistoja could not endure the yoke fastened upon her. A few years later her whole people rose literally in a frenzy of rebellion against the Lucchese governor, and men, women, children, priests, and monks joined in driving him out. After the heroic struggle they re-established their own republic, which presently fell a prey to the feud of two of her families, in whose private warfare she suffered almost as much as from her foreign enemies. Between them the Cancellieri and the Panciatichi burned a thousand houses within her walls, not counting those without, and the latter had plotted to deliver over their country to the Visconti of Milan, when the Florentines intervened and took final possession of Pistoja.

We had, therefore, not even to say that we were of the Cancellieri party in order to enter Pistoja, but drove up to the Hotel di Londra without challenge, and had dinner there, after which we repaired to the Piazza del Duomo; and while the artist got out a plate and began to etch in the rain, the author bestirred himself to find the sacristan and get into the cathedral. It was easy enough to find the sacristan, but when he had been made to put his head out of the fifth-story window he answered, with a want of enterprise and hospitality which I had never before met in Italy, that the cathedral was always open at three o’clock, and he would not come down to open it sooner. At that hour I revenged myself upon him by not finding it very interesting, though I think now the fault must have been in me. There is enough estimable detail of art, especially the fourteenth-century monument to the great lawyer and lover, Cino da Pistoja, who is represented lecturing to Petrarch among eight other of his pupils. The lady in the group is the Selvaggia whom he immortalised in his subtle and metaphysical verses; she was the daughter of Filippo Vergiolesi, the leader of the Ghibellines in Pistoja, and she died of hopeless love for Cino, when the calamities of their country drove him into exile at the time of the siege. He remains the most tangible if not the greatest name of Pistoja; he was the first of those who polished the Tuscan speech; he was a wonder of jurisprudence in his time, restoring the Roman law and commenting nine books of the Code; and the wayfarer, whether grammarian, attorney, litterateur, or young lady, may well look on his monument with sympathy.

But I brought away no impression of pleasure or surprise from the cathedral generally, and in fact the works of art for which one may chiefly, if not solely, desire to see Pistoja again, are the Della Robbias, which immortally beautify the Ospedale del Ceppo. They represent with the simplest reality, and in the proportions of life, the seven works of mercy of St. Andrea Franchi, bishop of Pistoja, in 1399. They form a frieze or band round the edifice, and are of the glazed terra cotta in which the Della Robbias commonly wrought. The saint is seen visiting “The Naked,”

“The Pilgrims,”

“The Sick,”

“The Imprisoned,”

“The Dead,”

“The An Hungered,”

“The Athirst;” and between the tableaux are the figures of “Faith,”

“Charity,”

“Hope,”

“Prudence,” and “Justice.” There is also an “Annunciation,”

“A Visitation,”

“An Assumption;” and in three circular reliefs, adorned with fruits and flowers after the Della Robbia manner, the arms of the hospital, the city, and the Medici; but what takes the eye and the heart are the good bishop’s works of mercy. In these colour is used as it must be in that material, and in the broad, unmingled blues, reds, yellows, and greens, primary, sincere, you have satisfying actuality of effect I believe the critics are not decided that these are the best works of the masters, but they gave me more pleasure than any others, and I remember them with a vivid joy still. It is hardly less than startling to see them first, and then for every succeeding moment it is delightful. Giovanni della Robbia and his brother, the monk Frate Ambrogio, and Andrea and his two sons, Luca and Girolomo, are all supposed to have shared in this work, which has, therefore, a peculiar interest, though it is not even mentioned by Vasari, and seems to have suffered neglect by all the earlier connoisseurs. It was skilfully restored in 1826 by a Pistojese architect, who removed the layer of dust that had hardened upon the glaze and hid the colours; and in 1839 the French Government asked leave to reproduce it in plaster for the Beaux Arts; from which copy another was made for the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. It is, by all odds, the chiefest thing in Pistoja, where the reader, when he goes too look at it, may like to recall the pretty legend of the dry tree-stump (ceppo) breaking into bud and leaf, to indicate to the two good Pistojese of six hundred years ago where to found the hospital which this lovely frieze adorns.

Apparently, however, Pistoja does not expect to be visited for this or any other reason. I have already held up to obloquy the want of public spirit in the sacristan of the cathedral, and I have now to report an equal indifference on the part of the owner of a beautiful show-villa which a cabman persuaded me drive some miles out of the town through the rain to see. When we reached its gate, we were told that the villa was closed; simply that — closed. But I was not wholly a loser, for in celebration of my supposed disappointment my driver dramatized a grief which was as fine a theatrical spectacle as I have seen.

Besides, I was able to stop on the way back at the ancient church of Sant’ Andrea, where I found myself as little expected, indeed, as elsewhere, but very prettily welcomed by the daughter of the sacristan, whose father was absent, and who made me free of the church. I thought that I wished to see the famous pulpit of Giovanna da Pisa, son of Niccolo, and the little maid had to light me a candle to look at it with. She was not of much help otherwise; she did not at all understand the subjects, neither the Nativity, nor the Adoration of the Magi (“Who were the three Magi Kings?” she asked, and was so glad when I explained), nor the Slaughter of the Innocents, nor the Crucifixion, nor the Judgment. These facts were as strange to her as the marvellous richness and delicacy of the whole work, which, for opulence of invention and perfect expression of intention, is surely one of the most wonderful things in all that wonderland of Italy. She stood by and freshly admired, while I lectured her upon it as if I had been the sacristan and she a simple maid from America, and got the hot wax of the candle all over my fingers.

She affected to refuse my fee. “Le pare!” she said, with the sweetest pretence of astonishment (which, being interpreted, is something like “the idea!”); and when I forced the coin into her unwilling hand, she asked me to come again, when her father was at home.

Would I could! There is no such pulpit in America, that I know of; and even Pistoja, in the rain and mud, nonchalant, unenterprising, is no bad place.

I  had actually business there besides that of a scribbling dilletante, and it took me, on behalf of a sculptor who had some medallions casting, to the most ancient of the several bronze foundries in Pistoja. This foundry, an irregular group of low roofs, was enclosed in a hedge of myrtle, and I descended through flowery garden-paths to the office, where the master met me with the air of a host, instead of that terrifying no-admittance-except-on-business address, which I have encountered in my rare visits to foundries in my own country. Nothing could have been more fascinating than the interior of the workshop, in which the bronze figures, groups, reliefs, stood about in every variety of dimension and all stages of finish. When I confessed my ignorance, with a candour which I shall not expect from the reader, of how the sculpturesque forms to their last fragile and delicate detail were reproduced in metal, he explained that an exact copy was first made in wax, which was painted with successive coats of liquid mud, one dried upon another, till a sufficient thickness was secured, and then the wax was melted out, and the bronze was poured in.

I said how very simple it was when one knew, and he said, yes, very simple; and I came away sighing for the day when our foundries shall be enclosed in myrtle hedges, and reached through garden-paths. I suppose I shall hardly see it, however, for it had taken almost a thousand years for that foundry in Pisa to attain its idyllic setting. Patience!

II

ON my way home from Lucca, I stopped at Prato, whither I had been tempted to go all winter by the steam-tramway trains snuffing in and out of our Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence. I found it a flat, dull, commonplace-looking town at first blush, with one wild huge, gaunt piazza, planted with straggling sycamores and banged all round by copper-smiths, whose shops seemed to alternate with the stables occupying its arcades. Multitudinous hanks of new-dyed yarn blew in the wind under the trees, and through all the windows and open doors I saw girls and women plaiting straw. This forms the chief industry of Prato, where, as a kind little priest with a fine Roman profile, in the railway carriage, assured me between the prayers he kept saying to himself, there was work for all and all were at work.

Secular report was not so flattering to Prato. I was told that business was but dull there since the death of the English gentleman, one Mr Askew, who has done so much for it, and who lies buried in the odour of sanctity in the old, Carmelite convent I saw his grave there when I went to look at the frescoes, under the tutelage of an old, sleek, fat monk, roundest of the round dozen of brothers remaining since the suppression. I cannot say now why I went to see these frescoes, but I must have been told by some local guide they were worthy to be seen, for I find no mention of them in the books. My old monk admired them without stint, and had a particular delight in the murder of St Martin, who was stabbed in the back at the altar.

He rubbed his hands gleefully and pointed out the flying acolyte: “Sempre scappa, ma è sempre là!” (Always running, but always there!) And then he burst into a childish, simple laugh that was rather grewsome, considering its inspiration and the place.

Upon the whole, it might have been as well to suppress that brother along with the convent; though I was glad to hear his praises or the Englishman who had befriended the little town so wisely; and I was not troubled to learn that this good man was a convert to the religion of his beneficiaries.

All that I ever knew of him I heard from the monk and read from his gravestone; but until he came nothing so definite had been done, probably, to mend the prosperity of Prato, broken by the sack in 1512, when the Spaniards, retiring from their defeat at Ravenna by Gaston de Foix, sat down before the town and pounded a hole in its undefended walls with their cannon. They were the soldiers of that Holy League which Pope Julius II. invented, and they were marching upon Florence to restore the Medici. They were very hungry, and as fearless as they were pitiless; and when they had made a breach in the wall, they poured into the town and began to burn and to kill, to rob and to ravish.

“Five thousand persons,” says a careful and temperate history, “without resisting, without defending themselves, without provocation, were inhumanly slaughtered in cold blood; neither age nor sex was spared, nor sanctity respected; every house, every church, every convent was pillaged, devastated, and brutally defiled. Only the cathedral, thanks to the safeguard posted there by the Cardinal Legate Giovanni de Medici, was spared, and this was filled with women, gathered there to weep, to pray, to prepare for death. For days the barbarous soldiery rioted in the sack of the hapless city, which, with its people decimated, and its territory ravaged, never fully rose again from its calamity; more than three centuries passed before its population reached the number it had attained before the siege.”

At that time Prato had long been subject to Florence, but in its day Prato had also been a free and independent republic, with its factions and its family feuds, like another. The greatest of its families were the Guazziolitri, of Guelph politics, who aspired to its sovereignty, but were driven out and all their property confiscated. They had built for their palace and fortress the beautiful old pile which now serves the town for municipal uses, and where there is an interesting little gallery, though one ought rather to visit it for its own sake, and the stately image it keeps in singular perfection of a grandeur of which we can now but dimly conceive.

I said that Prato was dull and commonplace, but that only shows how pampered and spoiled one becomes by sojourn in Italy. Let me explain now that it was only dull and commonplace in comparison with other towns I had been seeing. If we had Prato in America, we might well visit it for inspiration from its wealth of picturesqueness, and history, and of art. We have, of course, nothing to compare with it; and one ought always to remember, in reading the notes of the supercilious American tourist in Italy, that he is sneering with a mental reservation to this effect. More memory, more art, more beauty clusters about the Duomo at Prato than about — I do not wish to be extravagant — the New Old South in Boston or Grace Church in New York.

I am afraid, indeed, we should not find in the interior even of these edifices such frescoes as those of Lippo Lippi and Ghirlandajo in the cathedral at Prato; and as for the Della Robbia over the door and the pulpit of Donatello on the corner without, where they show the Virgin’s girdle on her holiday, what shall one say? We have not even a girdle of the virgin! These are the facts that must still keep us modest and make us beg not to be taken too positively, when we say Prato is not interesting. In that pulpit, with its “marble brede” of dancing children, one sees almost at his best a sculptor whose work, after that of Mino da Fiesole, goes most to the heart of the beholder.

I hung about the piazza, delighting in it, till it was time to take the steam-tramway to Florence, and then I got the local postman to carry my bag to the cars for me. He was the gentlest of postmen, and the most grateful for my franc, and he explained as we walked how he was allowed by the Government to make what sums he could in this way between his distributions of the mail. His salary was fifty francs a month, and he had a family.

I dare say he is removed by this time, for a man with an income like that must seem an Offensive Partisan to many people of opposite politics in Prato.

The steam-tramway train consisted of two or three horse-cars coupled together, and drawn by the pony-engine I was familiar with in our Piazza. This is a common means of travel between all large Italian cities and outlying small towns, and I wonder why we have not adopted it in America. We rattled pleasantly along the level of the highway at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour, and none of the horses seemed to be troubled by us. They had probably been educated up to the steam-tram, and I will never believe that American horses are less capable of intellectual development than the Italian.

III

WE postponed our visit to Fiesole, which we had been meaning to make all winter, until the last days of our Florentine sojourn, and it was quite the middle of April when we drove up to the Etruscan city.

“Go by the new road and come back by the old,” said a friend who heard we were really going at last. “Then you will get the whole thing.”

We did so; but I am not going to make the reader a partner of all of our advantages; I am not sure that he would be grateful for them; and to tell the truth, I have forgotten which road Boccaccio’s villa was on and which the villa of the Medici. Wherever they are they are charming. The villa of Boccaccio is now the Villa Palmieri; I still see it fenced with cypresses, and its broad terrace peopled with weather-beaten statues, which at a distance I could not have sworn were not the gay ladies and gentlemen who met there and told their merry tales while the plague raged in Florence. It is not only famous as the supposed scene of the Decamerone, but it takes its name from a learned gentleman who wrote a poem there, in which he maintained that at the time of Satan’s rebellion the angels who remained neutral became the souls now inhabiting our bodies. For this uncomfortable doctrine his poem, though never printed, was condemned by the Inquisition — and justly. The Villa Medici, once Villa Mozzi, and now called Villa Spence, after the English gentleman who inhabits it, was the favourite seat of Lorenzo before he placed himself at Villa Carreggi; hither he resorted with his wits, his philosophers, his concubines, buffoons, and scholars; and here it was that the Pazzi hoped to have killed him and Giuliano at the time of their ill-starred conspiracy. You come suddenly upon it, deeply dropped amidst its gardens, at a turn of the winding slopes which make the ascent to Fiesole a constantly changing delight and wonder.

Fiesole was farther than she seemed in the fine high air she breathes, and we had some long hours of sun and breeze in the exquisite spring morning before the first Etruscan emissaries met us with the straw fans and parasols whose fabrication still employs their remote antiquity. They were pretty children and young girls, and they were preferable to the mediaeval beggars who had swarmed upon us at the first town outside the Florentine limits, whither the Pia Casa di Recovero could not reach them. From every point the world-old town, fast seated on its rock, looked like a fortress, inexpugnable and picturesque; but it kept neither promise, for it yielded to us without a struggle, and then was rather tame and commonplace — commonplace and tame, of course, comparatively. It is not everywhere that you have an impressive Etruscan wall; a grass-grown Roman amphitheatre, lovely, silent; a museum stocked with classic relics and a custodian with a private store of them for sale, not to speak of a cathedral begun by the Florentines just after they destroyed Fiesole in 1000. Fiesole certainly does not, however, invite one by its modern aspect to think of the Etruscan capital which Cicero attacked in the Roman Senate for the luxury of its banquets and the lavish display of its inhabitants. It was but a plain and simple repast that the Café Aurora afforded us, and the Fiesolans seemed a plain and simple folk; perhaps in one of them who was tipsy an image of their classic corruptions survived.

The only excitement of the place we seemed to have brought with us; there had, indeed, been an election some time before, and the dead walls — it seems odd that all the walls in Fiesole should not be dead by this time — were still placarded with appeals to the enlightened voters to cast their ballots for Peruzzi, candidate for the House of Deputies and a name almost as immemorial as their town’s.

However luxurious, the Fiesolans were not proud; a throng of them followed us into the cathedral, where we went to see the beautiful monument of Bishop Salutali by Mino da Fiesole, and allowed me to pay the sacristan for them all. There may have been a sort of justice in this; they must have seen the monument so very often before!

They were sociable, but not obtrusive, not even at the point called the Belvedere, where, having seen that we were already superabundantly supplied with straw fans and parasols, they stood sweetly aside and enjoyed our pleasure in the views of Florence. This ineffable prospect —

But let me rather stand aside with the Fiesolans, and leave it to the reader!

THE END

A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN

CONTENTS

First Paper

Sign of the White Cross Inn

Entrance to Villeneuve

Post-office, Villeneuve

The Castle of Chillon

A Railroad Servant

A Bit of Villeneuve

The Prisoner of Chillon

One of the Fountains

“They helped to make the hay in the marshes”

Cattle at the Fountains

Washing Clothes in the Lake

Flirtation at the Fountains

Second Paper

The Wine-press

Castle of Aigle

The Market at Vevey

The Market, Vevay — A Bargain before the Notary

Germans at Montreux

Church Terrace, Montreux

Tour up the Lake

First Paper

Sign of the White Cross Inn

I

Out of eighty or ninety days that we passed in Switzerland there must have been at least ten that were fair, not counting the forenoons before it began to rain, and the afternoons when it cleared up. They said that it was an unusually rainy autumn, and we could well believe it; yet I suspect that it rains a good deal in that little corner of the Canton Vaud even when the autumn is only usually rainy. We arrived late in September and came away early in December, and during that time we had neither the fevers that raged in France nor the floods that raged in Italy. We Vaudois were rather proud of that, but whether we had much else to be proud of I am not so certain. Of course we had our Alpine scenery, and when the day was fair the sun came loafing up over the eastern mountains about ten o’clock in the morning, and lounged down behind the western tops about half-past three, after dinner. But then he left the eternal snows of the Dent-du-Midi all flushed with his light, and in the mean time he had glittered for five hours on the “bleu impossible” of the Lake of Geneva, and had shown in a hundred changing lights and shadows the storied and sentimentalized towers of the Castle of Chillon. Solemn groups and ranks of Swiss and Savoyard Alps hemmed the lake in as far as the eye could reach, and the lateen-sailed craft lent it their picturesqueness, while the steamboats constantly making its circuit and stopping at all the little towns on the shores imparted a pleasant modern interest to the whole effect, which the trains of the railroad running under the lee of the castle agreeably heightened.

II

The Swiss railroad was always an object of friendly amusement with the children, who could not get used to having the trains started by a small Christmas-horn. They had not entirely respected the English engine, with the shrill falsetto of its whistle, after the burly roar of our locomotives; and the boatswain’s pipe of the French conductor had considerably diminished the dignity of a sister republic in their minds; but this Christmas-horn was too droll. That a grown man, much more imposingly uniformed than an American general, should blow it to start a real train of cars was the source of patriotic sarcasm whenever its plaintive, reedy note was heard. We had come straight through from London, taking the sleeping-car at Calais, and rolling and bounding over the road towards Basle in a fashion that provoked scornful comparisons with the Pullman that had carried us so smoothly from Boston to Buffalo. It is well to be honest, even to our own adulation, and one must confess that the sleeping-car of the European continent is but the nervous and hysterical daughter of the American mother of sleeping-cars. Many express trains are run without any sleeper, and the charges for berths are ludicrously extravagant — five dollars apiece for a single night. It is not strange that the native prefers to doze away the night bolt-upright, or crouched into the corners of his repellently padded carriage, rather than toss upon the expensive pallet of the sleeping-car, which seems hung rather with a view to affording involuntary exercise than promoting dear-bought slumber. One advantage of it is that if you have to leave the car at five o’clock in the morning, you are awake and eager to do so long before that time. At the first Swiss station we quitted it to go to Berne, which was one of the three points where I was told by the London railway people that my baggage would be examined. I forget the second, but the third was Berne, and now at Delemont I looked about for the customs officers with the anxiety which the thought of them always awakens in the human heart, whether one has meant to smuggle or not. Even the good conscience may suffer from the upturning of a well-packed trunk. But nobody wanted to examine our baggage at Delemont, or at the other now-forgotten station; and at Berne, though I labored hard in several dialects with all the railway officials, I could not get them to open one of our ten trunks or five valises. I was so resolute in the matter that I had some difficulty to keep from opening them myself and levying duty upon their contents.

III

It was the first but not the last disappointment we suffered in Switzerland. A friend in London had congratulated us upon going to the Vaud in the grape season. “For thruppence,” he said, “they will let you go into the vineyards and eat all the grapes you can hold.” Arrived upon the ground, we learned that it was six francs fine to touch a grape in the vineyards; that every field had a watch set in it, who popped up between the vines from time to time, and interrogated the vicinity with an eye of sleepless vigilance; and that small boys of suspicious character, whose pleasure or business took them through a vineyard, were obliged to hold up their hands as they passed, like the victims of a Far Western road agency. As the laws and usages governing the grape culture run back to the time of the Romans, who brought the vine into the Vaud, I was obliged to refer my friend’s legend of cheapness and freedom to an earlier period, whose customs we could not profit by. In point of fact, I could buy more grapes for thruppence in London than in the Vaud; and the best grapes we had in Switzerland were some brought from Italy, and sold at a franc a pound in Montreux to the poor foreigners who had come to feast upon the wealth of the local vineyards.

It was the rain that spoiled the grapes, they said at Montreux, and wherever we complained; and indeed the vines were a dismal show of sterility and blight, even to the spectator who did not venture near enough to subject himself to a fine of six francs. The foreigners had protected themselves in large numbers by not coming, and the natives who prosper upon them suffered. The stout lady who kept a small shop of ivory carvings at Montreux continually lamented their absence to me: “Die Fremden kommen nicht, dieses regenes Wetter! Man muss Geduldt haben! Die Fremden kommen nicht!” She was from Interlaken, and the accents of her native dialect were flavored with the strong waters which she seemed always to have been drinking, and she put her face close up to that of the good, all-sympathizing Amerikaner who alone patronized her shop, and talked her sorrows loudly into him, so that he should not misunderstand.

Entrance to Villeneuve

IV

But one must not be altogether unreasonable. When we first came in sight of the lake the rain lifted, and the afternoon sun gushed out upon a world of vineyards. In other words, the vines clothe all the little levels and vast slopes of the mountain-sides as far up as the cold will let the grapes grow. There is literally almost no other cultivation, and it is a very pretty sight. On top of the mountains are the chalets with their kine, and at a certain elevation the milk and the wine meet, while below is the water of the lake, so good to mix with both. I do not know that the Swiss use it for that purpose, but there are countries where something of the sort would be done.

When the train put us down at Villeneuve, among railway people as indifferent as our own at country stations, and much crosser and more snubbing, the demand for grapes began with the party who remained with the baggage, while a party of the second part went off to find the pension where we were to pass the next three months. The grape-seekers strolled up the stony, steaming streets of the little town, asking for grapes right and left, at all the shops, in their imperfect French, and returned to the station with a paper of gingerbread which they had bought at a jeweller’s. I do not know why this artist should have had it for sale, but he must have had it a long time, for it was densely inhabited. Afterwards we found two shops in Villeneuve where they had the most delicious petits gâteaux, fresh every day, and nothing but the mania for unattainable grapes prevented the first explorers from seeing them.

In the mean time the party of the second part had found the pension — a pretty stone villa overlooking the lake, under the boughs of tall walnut-trees, on the level of a high terrace. Laurel and holly hemmed it in on one side, and southward spread a pleasant garden full of roses and imperfectly ripening fig-trees. In the rear the vineyards climbed the mountains in irregular breadths to the belt of walnuts, beyond which were only forests and pastures. I heard the roar of the torrent that foamed down the steep; the fountain plashed under the group of laurels at the kitchen door; the roses dripped all round the house; and the lake lapped its shores below. Decidedly there was a sense of wet.

The house, which had an Italian outside covered with jasmine and wistarias, confessed the North within. There was a huge hall stove, not yet heated, but on the hearth of the pleasant salon an acceptable fire of little logs was purring. Beside it sat a lady reading, and at a table her daughter was painting flowers. A little Italian, a very little English, a good deal of French, helped me to understand that mademoiselle the landlady was momentarily absent, that the season was exceptionally bad, and that these ladies were glad of the sunshine which we were apparently bringing with us. They spoke with those Suissesse voices, which are the sweetest and most softly modulated voices in the world, whether they come from the throat of peasant or of lady, and can make a transaction in eggs and butter in the market-place as musical as chanted verse. To the last these voices remained a delight, and the memory of them made most Italian women’s voices a pang when we heard them afterwards.

V

At first we were the only people in the house besides these Swiss ladies and their son and brother, but later there came two ladies from Strasburg, and with them our circle was complete at the table and around the evening lamp in the drawing-room. I am bound to say for the circle, outside of ourselves, that it was a cultivated and even intellectual company, with traits that provoked unusual sympathy and interest. But those friendly people are quite their own property, and I have no intention of compelling them to an involuntary celebrity in these pages, much as I should like to impart their quality to my narrative. In the Strasbourgeoises we encountered again that pathos of an insulted and down-trodden nationality which had cast its melancholy over our Venice of Austrian days. German by name and by origin, these ladies were intensely French in everything else. They felt themselves doomed to exile in their own country, they abhorred their Prussian masters, and they had no name for Bismarck that was bad enough. Our Swiss, indeed, hated him almost as bitterly. Their sympathies had been wholly with the French, and they could not repress a half-conscious dread of his principle of race nationality, which would be fatal to Switzerland, one neither in race nor religion, but hitherto indivisible in her ancient freedom. While he lives this fear can never die in Swiss hearts, for they know that if he will, he can, in a Europe where he is the only real power.

Mademoiselle sat at the chief place of the table, and led the talk, imparting to it a flavor of humorous good sense very characteristic. The villa had been her father’s country-house, and it abounded in a scholar’s accumulations of old books in divers languages. She herself knew literature widely in the better way that it was once read. The memories of many years spent in Florence made common Italian ground for us, and she spoke English perfectly.

As I wish to give a complete notion of our household, so far as it may be honestly set down, I will add that the domestics were three. Two of them, the cook and the housemaid, were German Swiss, of middle class, who had taken service to earn what money they could, but mainly to learn French, after the custom of their country, where the young people of a French or Italian canton would in like manner resort to a German province. The third was Louis, a native, who spoke his own patois, and found it sufficient for the expression of his ideas. He was chiefly employed about the grounds; in-doors his use was mostly to mount the peculiar clogs used for the purpose, and rub the waxed floors till they shone. These floors were very handsome, of hard woods prettily inlaid; and Louis produced an effect upon them that it seemed a pity to mar with muddy shoes.

I do not speak of Alexis, the farmer, who appeared in domestic exigencies; but my picture would be incomplete without the portrait of Poppi. Poppi was the large house-dog, who in early life had intended to call himself Puppy, but he naturally pronounced it with a French accent. He was now far from young, but he was still Poppi. I believe he was the more strictly domestic in his habits because an infirmity of temper had betrayed him into an attack upon a neighbor, or a neighbor’s dog, and it was no longer safe for him to live much out-of-doors. The confinement had softened his temper, but it had rendered him effeminate and self-indulgent. He had, in fact, been spoiled by the boarders, and he now expected to be present at meals, and to be fed with choice morsels from their plates. As the cold weather came on he developed rheumatism, and demanded our sympathy as well as our hospitality. If Elise in waiting on table brushed him with her skirts, he set up a lamentable cry, and rushed up to the nearest guest, and put his chin on the table for his greater convenience in being comforted. At a dance which we had one evening Poppi insisted upon being present, and in his efforts to keep out of the way and in the apprehensions he suffered he abandoned himself to moans and howls that sometimes drowned the piano.

Yet Poppi was an amiable invalid, and he was on terms of perfect friendship with the cats, of which there were three generations — Boulette, Boulette’s mother, and Boulette’s grandmother. They were not readily distinguishable from one another, and I really forget which it was that used to mount to the dining-room window without, and paw the glass till we let her in; but we all felt that it was a great accomplishment, and reflected credit upon us.

VI

The vineyard began immediately behind the laurels that enclosed the house, and at a little distance, where the mountain began to lift from the narrow plateau, stood the farmer’s stone cottage, with the stables and the wine-vaults under the same roof. Mademoiselle gave us grapes from her vines at dinner, and the walnut-trees seemed public property, though I think one was not allowed to knock the nuts off, but was only free of the windfalls. A little later they were all gathered, and on a certain night the girls and the young men of the village have the custom to meet and make a frolic of cracking them, as they used in husking corn with us. Then the oil is pressed out, and the commune apportions each family its share, according to the amount of nuts contributed. This nut oil imparts a sentiment to salad which the olive cannot give, and mushrooms pickled in it become the most delicious and indigestible of all imaginable morsels. I have had dreams from those pickled mushrooms which, if I could write them out, would make my fortune as a romantic novelist.

The Swiss breakfast was our old friend the Italian breakfast, with butter and Gruyère cheese added to the milk and coffee. We dined at one o’clock, and at six or seven we supped upon a meal that had left off soup and added tea, in order to differ from the dinner. For all this, with our rooms, we paid what we should have paid at a New Hampshire farm-house; that is, a dollar a day each.

But the air was such as we could not have got in New Hampshire for twice the money. It restored one completely every twenty-four hours, and it not only stimulated but supported one throughout the day. Our own air is quite as exciting, but after stirring one up, it leaves him to take the consequences, whereas that faithful Swiss air stood by and helped out the enterprise. I rose fresh from my forenoon’s writing and eager to walk; I walked all afternoon, and came in perfectly fresh to supper. One can’t speak too well of the Swiss air, whatever one says of the Swiss sun.

Post-office, Villeneuve

VII

Whenever it came out, or rather whenever the rain stopped, we pursued our explorations of the neighborhood. It had many interesting features, among which was the large Hôtel Byron, very attractive and almost empty, which we passed every day on our way to the post-office in Villeneuve, and noted two pretty American shes in eye-glasses playing croquet amid the wet shrubbery, as resolutely cheerful and as young-manless as if they had been in some mountain resort of our own. In the other direction there were simple villas dropped along the little levels and ledges, and vineyards that crept to the road’s edge everywhere. There was also a cement factory, busy and prosperous; and to make us quite at home, a saw-mill. Above all, there was the Castle of Chillon; and one of the first Sundays after our arrival we descended the stone staircased steps of our gardened terrace, dripping with ivy and myrtle, and picked our steps over the muddy road to the old prison-fortress, where, in the ancient chapel of the Dukes of Savoy, we heard an excellent sermon from the pasteur of our parish. The castle was perhaps a bow-shot from our pension: I did not test the distance, having left my trusty cross-bow and cloth-yard shafts in Boston; but that is my confirmed guess. In point of time it is much more remote, for, as the reader need not be reminded, it was there, or some castle like it, almost from the beginning, or at least from the day when men first began to fight for the possession of the land. The lake-dwellers are imagined to have had some sort of stronghold there; and it is reasonably supposed that Romans, Franks, and Burgundians had each fortified the rock. Count Wala, cousin of Charlemagne, and grandson of Charles Martel, was a prisoner in its dungeon in 830 for uttering some words too true for an age unaccustomed to the perpetual veracity of our newspapers. Count Wala, who was also an abbot, had the misfortune to speak of Judith of Bavaria as “the adulterous woman,” and when her husband, Louis le Debonair, came back to the throne after the conspiracy of his sons, the lady naturally wanted Wala killed; but Louis compromised by throwing him into the rock of Chillon. This is what Wala’s friends say: others say that he was one of the conspirators against Louis. At any rate, he was the first great captive of Chillon, which was a political prison as long as political prisoners were needed in Switzerland. That is now a good while ago.

The Castle of Chillon

Chillon fell to the princes of the house of Savoy in 1033, and Count Peter, whom they nicknamed Little Charlemagne for his prowess and his conquests, built the present castle, after which the barons of the Pays de Vaud and the Duke of Cophingen (whoever he may have been) besieged Peter in it. Perhaps they might have taken him. But the wine was so good, and the pretty girls of the country were so fond of dancing! They forgot themselves in these delights. All at once Little Charlemagne was upon them. He leaves his force at Chillon, and goes by night to spy out the enemy at Villeneuve, returning at dawn to his people. He came back very gayly; when they saw him so joyous, “What news?” they asked. “Fine and good,” he answers; “for, by God’s help, if you will behave yourselves well, the enemy is ours.” To which they cried with one voice, “Seigneur, you have but to command.” They fell upon the barons and the duke, and killed a gratifying number of their followers, carrying the rest back to Chillon, where Peter “used them not as prisoners, but feasted them honorably. Much was the spoil and great the booty.”

Afterwards Peter lost the castle, and in retaking it he launched fifty thousand shafts and arrows against it. “The castle was not then an isolated point of rock as we now see it, but formed part of a group of defences.”

VIII

Two or three centuries later — how quickly all those stupid, cruel, weary years pass under the pen! — the spirit of liberty and protestantism began to stir in the heads and hearts of the burghers of Berne and of Geneva. A Savoyard, Francis de Bonivard, prior of St. Victor, sympathized with them. He was noble, accomplished, high-placed, but he loved freedom of thought and act. Yet when a deputation of reformers came to him for advice, he said: “It is to be wished, without doubt, that the evil should be cast out of our midst, provided that the good enters. You burn to reform our Church; certainly it needs it; but how can you reform it, deformed as you are? You complain that the monks and priests are buffoons; and you are buffoons; that they are gamblers and drunkards, and you are the same. Does the hate you bear them come from difference or likeness? You intend to overthrow our clergy and replace them by evangelical ministers. That would be a very good thing in itself, but a very bad thing for you, because you have no happiness but in the pleasures the priests allow you. The ministers wish to abolish vice, but there is where you will suffer most, and after having hated the priests because they are so much like you, you will hate their successors because they are so little like you. You will not have had them two years before you will put them down. Meanwhile, if you trust me, do one of two things: if you wish to remain deformed, as you are, do not wonder that others are like you; or, if you wish to reform them, begin by showing them how.”

A Railroad Servant

This was very odd language to use to a deputation of reformers, but I confess that it endears the memory of Bonivard to me. He was a thoroughly charming person, and not at all wise in his actions. Through mere folly he fell twice into the hands of his enemies, suffered two years’ imprisonment, and lost his priory. To get it back he laid siege to it with six men and a captain. The siege was a failure. He trusted his enemy, the duke, and was thrown into Chillon, where he remained a sort of guest of the governor for two years. The duke visited the castle at the end of that time. “Then the captain threw me into a vault lower than the lake, where I remained four years. I do not know whether it was by order of the duke or from his own motion, but I do know that I then had so much leisure for walking that I wore in the rock which formed the floor of the dungeon a pathlet [vionnet], or little path, as if one had beaten it out with a hammer.” He was fastened by a chain four feet in length to one of the beautiful Gothic pillars of the vault, and you still see where this gentle scholar, this sweet humorist, this wise and lenient philosopher, paced to and fro those weary years like a restless beast — a captive wolf, or a bear in his pit. But his soul was never in prison. As he trod that vionnet out of the stone he meditated upon his reading, his travels, the state of the Church and its reform, politics, the origin of evil. “His reflections often lifted him above men and their imperfect works; often, too, they were marked by that scepticism which knowledge of the human heart inspires. ‘When one considers things well,’ he said, ‘one finds that it is easier to destroy the evil than to construct the good. This world being fashioned like an ass’s back, the fardel that you would balance in the middle will not stay there, but hangs over on the other side.’”

Bonivard was set free by the united forces of Berne and Geneva, preaching political and religious liberty by the cannon’s mouth, as has had so often to happen. That too must have seemed droll to Bonivard when he came to think it over in his humorous way. “The epoch of the Renaissance and the Reformation was that of strong individualities and undaunted characters. But let no one imagine a resemblance between the prior of St. Victor and the great rebels his contemporaries, Luther, Zwinglius, and Calvin. Like them he was one of the learned men of his time; like them he learned to read the Evangels, and saw their light disengage itself from the trembling gleams of tradition; but beyond that he has nothing in common with them. Bonivard is not a hero; he is not made to obey or to command; he is an artist, a kind of poet, who treats high matters of theology in a humorous spirit; prompt of repartee, gifted with happy dash; his irony has lively point, and he likes to season the counsels of wisdom with sauce piquante and rustic bonhomie.... He prepares the way for Calvin, while having nothing of the Calvinist; he is gay, he is jovial; he has, even when he censures, I know not what air of gentleness that wins your heart.”

A Bit of Villeneuve

IX

This and all the rest that I know of Bonivard I learn from a charming historical and topographical study of Montreux and its neighborhood, by MM. Rambert, Lebert, etc.; and I confess it at once, for fear some one else shall find me out by simply buying the book there. It leaves you little ground for classifying Bonivard with the great reformers, but it leaves you still less for identifying him historically with Byron’s great melodramatic Prisoner of Chillon. If the Majority have somewhere that personal consciousness without which they are the Nonentity, one can fancy the liberal scholar, the humorous philosopher, meeting the romantic poet, and protesting against the second earthly captivity that he has delivered him over to. Nothing could be more alien to Bonivard than the character of Byron’s prisoner; and all that equipment of six supposititious brothers, who perish one by one to intensify his sufferings, is, it must be confessed, odious and ridiculous when you think of the lonely yet cheerful sceptic pacing his vionnet, and composing essays and verses as he walked. Prisoner for prisoner, even if both were real, the un-Byronic Bonivard is much more to my mind. But the poet had to make a Byronic Bonivard, being of the romantic time he was, and we cannot blame him. The love of his sentimentality pervades the region; they have named the nearest hotel after him, and there is a Sentier Byron leading up to it. But, on the other hand, they have called one of the lake steamboats after Bonivard, which, upon the whole, I should think would be more satisfactory to him than the poem. At any rate, I should prefer it in his place.

X

The fine Gothic chapel where we heard our pasteur preach was whitewashed out of all memory of any mural decoration that its earlier religion may have given it; but the gloss of the whitewash was subdued by the dim light that stole in through the long slits of windows. We sat upon narrow wooden seats so very hard that I hope the old dukes and their court were protected by good stout armor against their obduracy, and that they had not to wait a quarter of an hour for the holy father to come walking up the railroad track, as we had for our pasteur. There were but three men in the congregation that day, and all the rest were Suissesses, with the hard, pure, plain faces their sex wear mostly in that country. The choir sat in two rows of quaintly carved seats on each side of the pulpit, and the school-master of the village led the singing, tapping his foot to keep time. The pastor, delicate and wan of face, and now no longer living, I came afterwards to know better, and to respect greatly for his goodness and good sense. His health had been broken by the hard work of a mountain parish, and he had vainly spent two winters in Nice. Now he was here as the assistant of the superannuated pastor of Villeneuve, who had a salary of $600 a year from the Government; but how little our preacher had I dare not imagine, or what the pastor of the Free Church was paid by his parishioners. M. P —— was a man of culture far above that of the average New England country minister of this day; probably he was more like a New England minister of the past, but with more of the air of the world. He wore the Genevan bands and gown, and represented in that tabernacle of the ancient faith the triumph of “the Religion” with an effectiveness that was heightened by the hectic brightness of his gentle, spiritual eyes; and he preached a beautiful sermon from the beautiful text, “Suffer little children,” teaching us that they were the types, not the models, of Christian perfection. There was first a prayer, which he read; then a hymn, and one of the Psalms; then the sermon, very simply and decorously delivered; then another hymn, and prayer. Here, and often again in Switzerland, the New England that is past or passing was recalled to me; these Swiss are like the people of our hill country in their faith, as well as their hard, laborious lives; only they sang with sweeter voices than our women.

The wood-carving of the chapel, which must have been of the fourteenth century or earlier, was delightfully grotesque, and all the queerer for its contrast with the Protestant, the Calvinistic, whitewash which one of our fellow-boarders found here in the chapel and elsewhere in the castle un peu vulgaire — as if he were a Boston man. But the whole place was very clean, and up the corner of one of the courts ran a strip of Virginia-creeper, which the Swiss call the Canada vine, blood-red with autumn. There was also a rose-tree sixty years old stretching its arms abroad, over the ancient masonry, and feeling itself still young in that sheltered place.

We saw it when we came later to do the whole castle, and to revere the dungeon where Bonivard wore his vionnet in the rock. I will not trouble the reader with much about the Hall of Justice and the Chamber of Tortures opening out of it, with the pulley for the rack formerly used in cross-questioning prisoners. These places were very interesting, and so were the bedchambers of the duke and duchess, and the great Hall of the Knights. The wells or pits, armed round with knife points, against which the prisoner struck when hurled down through them into the lake, have long had their wicked throats choked with sand; and the bed hewn out of the rock, where the condemned slept the night before execution, is no longer used for that purpose — possibly because the only prisoners now in Chillon are soldiers punished for such social offences as tipsiness. But the place was all charmingly mediæval, and the more so for a certain rudeness of decoration. The artistic merit was purely architectural, and this made itself felt perhaps most distinctly in the prison vaults, which Longfellow pronounced “the most delightful dungeon” he had ever seen. A great rose-tree overhung the entrance, and within we found them dry, wholesome, and picturesque. The beautiful Gothic pillars rose like a living growth from the rock, out of which the vault was half hewn; but the iron rings to which the prisoners were chained still hung from them. The columns were scribbled full of names, and Byron’s was among the rest. The vionnet of Bonivard was there, beside one of the pillars, plain enough, worn two inches deep and three feet long in the hard stone. Words cannot add to the pathos of it.

The Prisoner of Chillon

XI

Nothing could be more nobly picturesque than the outside of Chillon. Its base is beaten by the waves of the lake, to which it presents wide masses of irregularly curving wall, pierced by narrow windows, and surmounted by Mansard-roofs. Wild growths of vines and shrubs break the broad surfaces of the wall, and out of the shoulders of one of the towers springs a tall young fir-tree. The water at its base is intensely blue and unfathomably deep. This is what nature has done; as for men, they have hugely painted the lakeward wall of the castle with the arms of the Canton Vaud, which are nearly as ugly as the arms of Ohio; and they have wrought into the roof of the tallest tower with tiles of a paler tint the word “Chillon,” so that you cannot possibly mistake it for any other castle.

One of the Fountains

XII

First and last, we hung about Chillon a good deal, both by land and by water. For the latter purpose we had to hire a boat; and deceived by the fact that the owner spoke a Latin dialect, I attempted to beat him down from his demand of a franc an hour. “It’s too much,” I cried. “It’s the price,” he answered, laconically. Clearly I was to take it or leave it, and I took it. We did not find our fellow-republicans flatteringly polite, but we found them firm, and, for all I know, honest. At least they seemed as honest as we were, and that is saying a great deal. What struck us from the beginning was the surliness of the men and the industry of the women; and I am persuaded that the Swiss Government is really carried on by the house-keeping sex. At any rate, the postmaster of Villeneuve was a woman; her little girl brought the mail up from the railway station in a hand-cart, and her old mother helped her to understand my French. They were rather cross about it, and one day, with the assistance of a child in arms, they defeated me in an attempt I made to get a postal order. I dare say they thought it quite a triumph; but it was not so very much to be proud of. At that period my French, always spoken with the Venetian accent of the friend with whom I had studied it many years before, was taking on strange and wilful characteristics, which would have disabled me in the presence of a much less formidable force. I think the only person really able to interpret me was the amiable mistress of the Croix Blanche, to whose hostelry I went every day for my after-dinner coffee. She knew what I wanted whenever I asked for it, and I simplified my wants so as to meet her in the same spirit. The inn stood midway of the village street that for hundreds of yards followed the curve of the lake shore with its two lines of high stone houses. At one end of it stood a tower springing out of an almost fabulous past; then you came to the first of three plashing fountains, where cattle were always drinking, and bareheaded girls washing vegetables for the pot. Aloft swung the lamps that lighted the village, on ropes stretching across the street. I believe some distinction was ascribed to Villeneuve for the antiquity of this method of street-lighting. There were numbers of useful shops along the street, which wandered out into the country on the levels of the Rhone, where the mountains presently shut in so close that there was scarcely room for the railway to get through. What finally became of the highway I don’t know. One day I tried to run it down, but after a long chase I was glad to get myself brought back in a diligence from the next village.

“They helped to make the hay in the marshes”

The road became a street and ceased to be so with an abruptness that admitted nothing of suburban hesitation or compromise, and Villeneuve, as far as it went, was a solid wall of houses on either side. It was called Villeneuve because it was so very, very old; and in the level beyond it is placed the scene of the great Helvetian victory over the Romans, when the Swiss made their invaders pass under the yoke. I do not know that Villeneuve witnessed that incident, but it looks and smells old enough to have done so. It is reasonably picturesque in a semi-Italian, semi-French fashion, but it is to the nose that it makes its chief appeal. Every house has a cherished manure heap in its back yard, symmetrically shaped, with the projecting edges of the straw neatly braided: it is a source of family pride as well as profit. But it is chiefly the odor of world-old human occupation, otherwise indescribable, that pervades the air of Villeneuve, and makes the mildest of foreign sojourners long for the application of a little dynamite to its ancient houses. Our towns are perhaps the ugliest in the world, but how open to the sun and wind they are! how free, how pure, how wholesome!

On week-days a cart sometimes passed through Villeneuve with a most disproportionate banging over the cobble-stones, but usually the walls reverberated the soft tinkle of cow-bells as the kine wound through from pasture to pasture and lingered at the fountains. On Sundays the street was reasonably full of young men in the peg-top trousers which the Swiss still cling to, making eyes at the girls in the upper windows. These were the only times when I saw women of any age idle. Sometimes through the open door I caught a glimpse of a group of them busy with their work, while a little girl read to them. Once in a crowded café, where half a hundred men were smoking and drinking and chattering, the girl who served my coffee put down a volume of Victor Hugo’s poems to bring it. But mostly their literary employments did not go beyond driving the cows to pasture and washing clothes in the lake, where they beat the linen with far-echoing blows of their paddles. They helped to make the hay on the marshes beyond the village, and they greatly outnumbered the men in the labors of the vintage. They were seldom pretty either in face or figure; they seemed all to have some stage of goitre; but their manners were charming, and their voices, as I have said, angelically sweet. Our pasteur’s wife said that there was a great deal of pauperism in Villeneuve, “because of the drunkenness of the men and the disorder of the women;” but I saw only one man drunk in the streets there, and what the disorders of the women were I don’t know. Possibly their labors in the field made them poor house-keepers, though this is mere conjecture. Divorce is theoretically easy, but the couple seeking it must go before a magistrate every four months for two years and insist that they continue to desire it. This makes it rather uncommon.

Cattle at the Fountains

If the women were not good-looking, if their lives of toil stunted and coarsened them, the men, with greater apparent leisure, were no handsomer. Among the young I noticed the frequency of what may be called the republican face — thin and aquiline, whether dark or fair. The Vaudois as I saw them were at no age a merry folk. In the fields they toiled silently; in the cafés, where they were sufficiently noisy over their new wine, they talked without laughter, and without the shrugs and gestures that enliven conversation among other Latin peoples. They had a hard-favored grimness and taciturnity that with their mountain scenery reminded me of New England now and again, and gave me the bewildered sense of having dropped down in some little anterior America. But there was one thing that marked a great difference from our civilization, and that was the prevalence of uniforms, for which the Swiss have the true European fondness. This is natural in a people whose men all are or have been soldiers; and the war footing on which the little republic is obliged to keep a large force in that ridiculous army-ridden Europe must largely account for the abandonment of the peaceful industries to women. But the men are off at the mountain chalets too, and they are away in all lands, keeping hotels, and amassing from the candle-ends of the travelling public the fortune with which all Swiss hope to return home to die.

Washing Clothes in the Lake

XIII

Sometimes the country people I met greeted me, as sometimes they still do in New Hampshire, but commonly they passed in silence. I think the mountains must have had something to do with hushing the people: far and near, on every hand, they rise such bulks of silence. The chief of their stately company was always the Dent-du-Midi, which alone remains perpetually snow-covered, and which, when not hooded in the rain-bearing mists of that most rainy autumn, gave back the changing light of every hour with new splendors, though of course it was most beautiful in the early sunsets. Then its cold snows warmed and softened into something supernally rosy, while all the other peaks were brown and purple, and its vast silence was thrilled with a divine message that spoke to the eye. Across the lake and on its farther shores the mountains were dimly blue; but nearer, in the first days of our sojourn, they were green to their tops. Away up there we could see the lofty steeps and slopes of the summer pastures, and set low among them the chalets where the herdsmen dwelt. None of the mountains seemed so bare and sterile as Mount Washington, and though they were on a sensibly vaster scale than the White Mountains generally, I remembered the grandeur of Chocorua and Kearsarge in their presence. But my national — not to say my hemispheric — pride suffered a terrible blow as the season advanced. I had bragged all my life of the glories of our American autumnal foliage, which I had, in common with the rest of my countrymen, complacently denied to all the rest of the world. Yet here, before my very eyes, the same beautiful miracle was wrought. Day after day the trees on the mountain-sides changed, and kindled and softly smouldered in a thousand delicate hues, till all their mighty flanks seemed draped in the mingling dyes of Indian shawls. Shall I own that while this effect was not the fiery gorgeousness of our autumn leaves, it was something tenderer, richer, more tastefully lovely? Never!

Flirtation at the Fountains

The clouds lowering, and as it were loafing along, among the tops and crags, were a perpetual amusement, and when the first cold came it was odd to see a cloud in a sky otherwise clear stoop upon some crest, and after lingering there awhile drift off about its business, and leave the mountain all white with snow. This grew more and more frequent, and at last, after a long rain, we looked out on the mountains whitened all round us far down their sides, while it was still summer green and summer bloom in the valley. The moon rose and blackened the mountains below the crags of snow, which shone out above like one of her own dead landscapes. Slowly the winter descended, snow after snow, keeping a line beautifully straight along the mountain-sides, till it reached the valley and put out our garden roses at last. The hard-wood trees lost their leaves, and stretched dim and brown along the lower ranges; the pines straggled high up into the snows. The Jura, far across the lake; was vaguely roseate, with an effect of perpetual sunset; the Dent-du-Midi lost the distinction of its eternal drifts; and the cold not only descended upon us, but from the frozen hills all round us hemmed us in with a lateral pressure that pierced and chilled to the marrow. The mud froze, and we walked to church dry-shod. It was quite time to fire the vestibule stove, which, after fighting hard and smoking rebelliously at first, sobered down to its winter work, and afforded Poppi’s rheumatism the comfort for which he had longed pined.

Second Paper

I

The winter and the vintage come on together at Villeneuve, and when the snows had well covered the mountains around, the grapes in the valley were declared ripe by an act of the Commune. There had been so much rain and so little sun that their ripeness was hardly attested otherwise. Fully two-thirds of the crop had blackened with blight; the imperfect clusters, where they did not hang sodden and mildewed on the vines, were small and sour. It was sorrowful to see them; and when, about the middle of October, the people assembled in the vineyards to gather them, the spectacle had none of that gayety which the poets had taught me to expect of it. Those poor clusters did not

“reel to earth Purple and gushing,”

but limply waited the short hooked knife with which the peasants cut them from their stems; and the peasants, instead of advancing with jocund steps and rustic song to the sound of the lute and tabor and other convenient instruments, met in obedience to public notice duly posted about the Commune, and set to work, men, women, and children alike silent and serious. So many of the grapes are harvested and manufactured in common that it is necessary the vintage should begin on a fixed day, and no one was allowed to anticipate or postpone. Some cut the grapes, and dropped them into the flattish wooden barrels, which others, after mashing the berries with a long wooden pestle, bore off and emptied frothing and gurgling into big casks mounted on carts. These were then driven into the village, where the mess was poured into the presses, and the wine crushed out to the last bitter dregs. The vineyards were a scene of activity, but not hilarity, though a little way off they looked rather lively with the vintagers at work in them. We climbed to one of them far up the mountain-side one day, where a family were gathering the grapes on a slope almost as steep as a house roof, father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, big boy, and big girl all silently busy together. There were bees and wasps humming around the tubs of crushed grapes in the pale afternoon sun; the view of the lake and the mountains was inspiring; but there was nothing bacchanalian in the affair, unless the thick calves of the girl, as she bent over to cut the clusters, suggested a Mænad fury. These poor people were quite songless, though I am bound to say that in another vineyard I did hear some of the children singing. It had momentarily stopped raining; but it soon began again, and the vintage went sorrowfully on in the mud. All Villeneuve smelt of the harsh juice and pulp arriving from the fields in the wagons, carts, tubs, and barrels which crowded the streets and sidewalks, and in divers cavernous basements the presses were at work, and there was a slop and drip of new wine everywhere. After dark the people came in from the fields and gossiped about their doors, and the red light of flitting lanterns blotched the steady rainpour. Outside of the village rose the black mountains, white at the top with their snows.

The Wine-press

In the cafés and other public places there were placards advertising American wine-presses, but I saw none of them in use. At a farm-house near us we looked on at the use of one of the old-fashioned Swiss presses. Under it lay a mighty cake of grapes, stems, and skins, crushed into a common mass, and bulging farther beyond the press with each turn of the screw, while the juice ran in a little rivulet into a tub below. When the press was lifted, the grapes were seen only half crushed. Two peasants then mounted the cake, and trimmed it into shape with long-handled spades, piling the trimmings on top, and then bringing the press down again. They invited us with charming politeness to taste the juice, but their heavy boots bore evidence of too recent a visit to the cherished manure heap, and we thanked them with equal courtesy.

This grape cake, when it had yielded up its last drop, would be broken to pieces and scattered over the fields as a fertilizer. The juice would meanwhile have been placed to ferment in the tuns, twelve and thirteen feet deep, which lay in the adjoining cellar.

For weeks after the vintage people were drinking the new wine, which looked thick and whitish in the glasses, at all the cafés. It seemed to be thought a dainty beverage, but our scruples against it remained, and I cannot say what its effect upon the drinkers might be. Perhaps it had properties as a “sweet, oblivious antidote” which rendered necessary the placard we saw in the café of the little Hôtel Chillon:

“Die Rose blüht, Der Dorn der sticht; Wer gleich bezahlt Vergisst es nicht.”

Or, in inadequate English:

The roses bloom, The thorns they stick; No one forgets Who settles quick.

The relation of the ideas is not very apparent, but the lyric cry is distinctly audible.

II

One morning, a week before the vintage began, we were wakened by the musical clash of cow-bells, and for days afterwards the herds came streaming from the chalets on all the mountains round to feed upon the lowland pastures for a brief season before the winter should house them. There was something charming to ear and eye in this autumnal descent of the kine, and we were sorry when it ended. They thronged the village in their passage to the levels beside the Rhone, where afterwards they lent their music and their picturesqueness to the meadows. With each herd there were two or three goats, and these goats thought they were cows; but, after all, the public interest of this descent of the cows was not really comparable to that of the fall elections, now coming on with handbills and newspaper appeals very like those of our own country at like times. In the cafés, the steamboats, the railway stations, the street corners, vivid posters warned the voters against the wiles of the enemy, and the journals urged the people of the Canton Vaud to be up and doing; they declared the issue before them a vital one, and the crisis a crisis of the greatest moment.

Castle of Aigle

In the mean time the people in our pension, who were so intelligent and well informed about other things, bore witness to the real security of the State, and the tranquillity of the Swiss mind generally concerning politics, by their ignorance of the name of their existing President. They believed he was a man of the name of Schultz; but it appeared that his name was not at all Schultz, when we referred the matter to our pasteur. It was from him, indeed, that I learned nearly all I knew of Swiss politics, and it was from his teaching that I became a conservative partisan in the question, then before the voters, of a national free-school law. The radicals, who, the pasteur said, wished Switzerland to attempt the role “grande nation,” had brought forward this measure in the Federal legislature, and it was now, according to the sensible Swiss custom, to be submitted to a popular vote. It provided for the establishment of a national bureau of education, and the conservatives protested against it as the entering wedge of centralization in government affairs. They contended that in a country shared by three races and two religions education should be left as much as possible to the several cantons, which in the Swiss constitution are equivalent to our States. I am happy to say that the proposed law was overwhelmingly defeated; I am happy because I liked the pasteur so much, though when I remember the sympathetic bric-à-brac dealer at Vevay, who was a radical, but who sold me some old pewters at a very low price, I can’t help feeling a little sorry too. However, the Swiss still keep their old school law, under which each canton taxes itself for education, as our States do, though all share in the advantages of the universities, which are part of the public-school system.

The parties in Switzerland are fortunately not divided by questions of race or religion, but the pasteur owned that the Catholics were a difficult element, and had to be carefully managed. They include the whole population of the Italian cantons, and part of the French and German. In Geneva and other large towns the labor question troublesomely enters, and the radicals, like our Democrats, are sometimes the retrograde party.

The pasteur spoke with smiling slight of the Père Hyacinthe and the Döllinger movements, and he confessed that the Protestants were cut up into too many sects to make progress among the Catholic populations. The Catholics often keep their children out of the public schools, as they do with us, but these have to undergo the State examinations, to which all the children, whether taught at home or in private schools, must submit. He deplored the want of moral instruction in the public schools, but he laughed at the attempts in France to instil non-religious moral principles: when I afterwards saw this done in the Florentine ragged schools I could not feel that he was altogether right. He was a member of the communal school committee, and he told me that this body was appointed by the syndic and council of each commune, who are elected by the people. To some degree religion influences local feeling, the Protestant Church being divided into orthodox and liberal factions; there is a large Unitarian party besides, and agnosticism is a qualifying element of religious thought.

Outside of our pension I had not many sources of information concerning the political or social life at Villeneuve. I knew the village shoemaker, a German, who had fixed his dwelling there because it was so bequem, and who had some vague aspirations towards Chicago, whither a citizen of Villeneuve had lately gone. But he was discouraged by my representation, with his wax, his awl, and his hammer, successively arranged as New York, Cleveland, and Chicago, on his shoe-bench, of the extreme distance of the last from the seaboard. He liked his neighbors and their political system; and so did the portier at the Hôtel Byron, another German, with whom I sometimes talked of general topics in transacting small affairs of carriage hire and the like, and who invited me to notice how perfectly well these singular Swiss, in the midst of a Europe elsewhere overrun with royalties, got on without a king, queen, or anything of the kind. In his country, he said, those hills would be covered with fortifications, but here they seemed not to be thought necessary.

The Market at Vevey

I made friends with the instituteur of the Villeneuve public school, who led the singing at church, and kept the village book-store; and he too talked politics with me, and told me that all elections were held on Sunday, when the people were at leisure, for otherwise they would not take the time to vote. He was not so clear as to why they were always held in church, but that is the fact; and sometimes the sacred character of the place is not enough to suppress boisterous party feeling, though it certainly helps to control it.

After divine service on election Sunday I went to the Croix Blanche for my coffee, to pass the time till the voting should begin. On the church door was posted a printed summons to the electors, and on the café billiard tables I found ballots of the different parties scattered. Gendarmes had also distributed them about in the church pews; they were enclosed in envelops, which were voted sealed. On a table before the pulpit the ballot-box — a glass urn — was placed; and beside it sat the judges of election, with lists of the registered voters. But in any precinct of the canton an elector who could prove that he had not voted at home might deposit his ballot in any other. The church bell rang for the people to assemble, and the voting began and ended in perfect quiet. But I could not witness an election of this ancient republic, where Freedom was so many centuries old, without strong emotion; it had from its nature and the place the consecration of a religious rite.

III

The church itself was old — almost as old as Swiss freedom, and older than the freedom of the Vaud. The Gothic interior, which had once, no doubt, been idolatrously frescoed and furnished with statues, was now naked and coldly Protestant; one window, partly stained, let in a little colored light to mix with the wintry day that struck through the others. The pulpit was in the centre of the church, and the clerk’s desk diagonally across from it. The floor was boarded over, but a chill struck through from the stones below, and the people seemed to shiver through the service that preceded the election. When the pasteur mounted the pulpit they listened faithfully, but when the clerk led the psalm they vented their suffering in the most dreadful groaning that ever passed for singing outside of one of our country churches.

It was all very like home, and yet unlike it, for there is much more government in Switzerland than with us, and much less play of individuality. In small communes, for example, like Villeneuve, there are features of practical socialism, which have existed apparently from the earliest times. Certain things are held in common, as mountain pasturage and the forests, from which each family has a provision of fuel. These and other possessions of the commune are “confided to the public faith,” and trespass is punished with signal severity. The trees are felled under government inspection, and the woods are never cut off wholesale. When a tree is chopped down a tree is planted, and the floods that ravage Italy from the mountains denuded of their forests are unknown to the wiser Swiss. Throughout Switzerland the State insures against fire, and inflicts penalties for neglect and carelessness from which fires may result. Education is compulsory, and there is a rigid military service, and a show of public force everywhere which is quite unknown to our unneighbored, easy-going republic. I should say, upon the whole, that the likeness was more in social than in political things, strange as that may appear. There seemed to be much the same freedom among young people, and democratic institutions had produced a kindred type of manners in both countries. But I will not be very confident about all this, for I might easily be mistaken. The Swiss make their social distinctions as we do; and in Geneva and Lausanne I understood that a more than American exclusivism prevailed in families that held themselves to be peculiarly good, and believed themselves very old.

Our excursions into society at Villeneuve were confined to a single tea at the pasteur’s, where we went with mademoiselle one evening. He lived in a certain Villa Garibaldi, which had belonged to an Italian refugee, now long repatriated, and which stood at the foot of the nearest mountain. To reach the front door we passed through the vineyard to the back of the house, where a huge dog leaped the length of his chain at us, and a maid let us in. The pasteur, in a coat of unclerical cut, and his wife, in black silk, received us in the parlor, which was heated by a handsome porcelain stove, and simply furnished, much like such a room at home. Madame P —— , who was musical, played a tempestuously representative composition called “L’Orage” on the upright piano, and joined from time to time in her husband’s talk about Swiss affairs, which I have already allowed the reader to profit by. They offered us tea, wine, grapes, and cake, and we came away at eleven, lighted home through the vineyards by Louis, the farm boy, with his lantern.

The Market, Vevay — A Bargain before the Notary

Another day mademoiselle did us the pleasure to take us to her sister, married, and living at Aigle — a clean, many-hotelled, prosperous town, a few miles off, which had also the merit of a very fine old castle. We found our friends in an apartment of a former convent, behind which stretched a pretty lawn, with flowers and a fountain, and then vineyards to the foot of the mountains and far up their sides. We entered the court by a great stone-paved carriage-way, as in Italy, and we found the drawing-room furnished with Italian simplicity, and abounding in souvenirs of the hostess’s long Florentine sojourn; but it was fortified against the Swiss winter by the tall Swiss stove. The whole family received us, including the young lady daughter, the niece, the well-mannered boys and their father openly proud of them, and the pleasant young English girl who was living in the family, according to a common custom, to perfect her French. This part of Switzerland is full of English people, who come not always for the French, but often for the cheapness which they find equally there.

Mr. K —— was a business man, well-to-do, well educated, agreeable, and interesting; his house and his table, where we sat down to the mid-day dinner of the country, were witness to his prosperity. I hope it is no harm, in the interest of statistics, to say that this good Swiss dinner consisted of soup, cold ham put up like sausage, stuffed roast beef which had first been boiled, cauliflower, salad, corn-starch pudding, and apples stewed whole and stuck full of pine pips. There was abundance of the several kinds of excellent wine made upon the estate, both white and red, and it was freely given to the children. Mr. K —— seemed surprised when we refused it for ours; and probably he could have given us good reason for his custom. His boys were strong, robust, handsome fellows; he had a charming pride in showing us the prizes they had taken at school; and on the lawn they were equally proud to show the gymnastic feats they had learned there. I believe we are coming to think now that the American schools are better than the Swiss; but till we have organized something like the Swiss school excursions, and have learned to mix more open air with our instruction, I doubt if the Swiss would agree with us.

After dinner we went to the vente, or charitable fair, which the young ladies of the town were holding in one of the public buildings. It was bewilderingly like the church fair of an American country town, socially and materially. The young ladies had made all sorts of pretty knick-knacks, and were selling them at the little tables set about the room; they also presided, more or less alluringly, at fruit, coffee, and ice-cream stands; and — I will not be sure, but I think — some of them seemed to be flirting with the youth of the other sex. There was an auction going on, and the place was full of tobacco smoke, which the women appeared not to mind. A booth for the sale of wine and beer was set off, and there was a good deal of amiable drinking. This was not like our fairs quite; and I am bound to say that the people of Aigle had more polished manners, if not better, than our country-town average.

To quit this scene for the castle of Aigle was to plunge from the present into my favorite Middle Ages. We were directly in the times when the Lords of Berne held the Vaud by the strong hand, and forced Protestant convictions upon its people by the same vigorous methods. The castle was far older than their occupation, but it is chiefly memorable as the residence of their bailiffs before the independence of the Vaud was established after the French Revolution. They were hard masters, but they left political and religious freedom behind them, where perhaps neither would have existed without them. The castle, though eminently picturesque and delightfully Gothic, is very rudely finished and decorated, and could never have been a luxurious seat for the bailiffs. It is now used by the local courts of law; a solitary, pale, unshaven old prisoner, who seemed very glad of our tribute-money, inhabited its tower, and there was an old woman carding wool in the baronial kitchen. Her little grandson lighted a candle and showed us the oubliettes, which are subterranean dungeons, one above the other, and barred by mighty doors of wood and iron. The outer one bore an inscription, which I copied:

“Doubles grilles a gros cloux, Triples portes, fortes Verroux, Aux âmes vraiment méchantes Vous représentez l’Enfer; Mais aux âmes innocentes Vous n’êtes que du bois, de la pierre, & du fer!”

Germans at Montreux

But these doors, thus branded as representing the gates of hell to guilty souls, and to the innocent being merely wood, stone, and iron, sufficed equally to shut the blameless in, and I doubt if the reflection suggested was ever of any real comfort to them. For one thing, the captives could not read the inscription; it seems to have been intended rather for the edification of the public.

We visited the castle a second time, to let the children sketch it; and even I, who could not draw a line, became with them the centre of popular interest. Half a dozen little people who had been playing “snap-the-whip” left off and crowded round, and one of the boys profited by the occasion to lock into the barn, near which we sat, a peasant who had gone in to fodder his cattle. When he got out he criticised the pictures, and insisted that one of the artists should put in a certain window which he had left out of the tower. Upon the whole, we liked him better as a prisoner.

“What would you do,” I asked the children, “if I gave you a piece of twenty-five centimes?”

They reflected, and then evidently determined to pose as good children. “We would give it to our mamma.”

“Now don’t you think,” I pursued, “that it would be better to spend it for little cakes?”

This instantly corrupted them, and they cried with one voice, “Oh yes!”

Out of respect to me the oldest girl made a small boy pull up his stocking, which had got down round his ankle, and then they took the money and all ran off. Later they returned to show me that they had got it changed into copper and shared equally among them. They must have spent an evening of great excitement talking us over.

The October sun set early, chill, and disconsolate after a rain. A weary peasant with a heavy load on his back, which he looked as if he had brought from the dawn of time, approached the castle gate, and bowed to us in passing. I was not his feudal lord, but his sad, work-worn aspect gave me as keen a pang as if I had been.

IV

The Pays de Vaud is also the land of castles, and the visitor to Vevay should not fail to see Blonay Castle, the seat of the ancient family which, with intervals of dispossession, has possessed it ever since the Crusades. It is only a little way off, on the first rise of the hills, from which it looks over the vineyards on inexpressible glories of lake and distant mountains, and it is most nobly approached through steeps of vine and grove. Apparently it is kept up in as much of the sentiment of the past as possible, and one may hire its baronial splendor fully furnished; for the keeper told it had been occupied by an English family for the last three winters. The finish, like that of the castle of Aigle, is rude, but the whole place is wonderfully picturesque and impressive. The arched gateway is alone worth a good rent; the long corridors from which the chambers open are suitable to ghosts fond of walking exercise; the superb dining-room is round, and the floor is so old that it would shake under the foot of the lightest spectre. The répertoire of family traditions is almost inexhaustible, and doubtless one might have the use of them for a little additional money. One of the latest is of the seventeenth century, when the daughter of the house was “the beautiful Nicolaïde de Blonay, before whom many adorers had bent the knee in vain. Among them, a certain Tavel de Villars, vanquished the proud beauty by his constancy. But the marriage was delayed. Officer in the service of France, Tavel was detained by his military duties. In the mean time Jean-François de Blonay, of another branch of the family, the Savoyard branch, fell in love with his cousin, and twice demanded her in marriage. Twice he was refused. Then, listening only to his passion, he assembled some of his friends, and hid himself with them near the castle. They watched the comings and goings of the baron, and suddenly profiting by his absence, they entered his dwelling and carried off the fair Nicolaïde, who, transported to Savoy, rewarded the boldness of her captor by becoming his wife. This history, which resembles that of the beautiful Helen, and is not less authentic, kindled the fiercest hostilities between the Tavel and Blonay families; the French and Italian ambassadors intervened; and it all ended in a sentence pronounced at Berne against the Blonays — a sentence as useless as it was severe — for the principal offenders had built a nest for their loves in domains which they possessed in Savoy. The old baron alone felt its effects. He was severely reprimanded for having so ill fulfilled his paternal duties.”

The good burghers of Berne — the Lords as they called themselves — were in fact very hard with all their Vaudois subjects. “Equally merciless to the vanities and the vices, they confounded luxury and drunkenness in their rules, pleasures and bad manners. They were no less the enemies of innovations. Coffee at its introduction was stigmatized as a devilish invention; tea was no better; as to tobacco, whether snuffed or smoked, it was worse yet. Low-necked dresses and low-quartered shoes were rigorously forbidden. Games and all dances, ‘except three modest dances on wedding-days,’ were unlawful.... The Sabbath was strictly observed; silence reigned in the villages, even those remotest from the church, until the divine service of the afternoon was closed; no cart might pass in the street, and no child play there.... In short, all their ordinances and regulations witness a firm design on the part of their Excellencies ‘to revive among all those under their domination a life and manners truly Christian.’ The Pays de Vaud under this régime acquired its moral and religious education. A more serious spirit gradually prevailed. The Bible became the book par excellence, the book of the fireside, and on Sunday the exercises of devotion took the place of the public amusements.”

Church Terrace, Montreux

When the regicides fled from England after the Restoration they could not have sought a more congenial refuge than such a land as this. One of them, as is known, died in Vevay by the shot of an assassin sent to murder him by Charles II.; with another he is interred in the old Church of St. Martin there; and I went there to revere the tombs of Ludlow and Broughton. While I was looking about for them a familiar name on a tablet caught my eye, and I read that “William Walter Phelps, of New Jersey, and Charles A. Phelps, of Massachusetts, his descendants beyond the seas,” had set it there in memory of the brave John Phelps, who was so anxious to be known as clerk of the court which tried Charles Stuart that he set his name to every page of its record.

That tablet was the most interesting thing in the old church; but I found Vevay quaint and attractive in every way. It is, as all the world knows, the paradise of pensions and hotels and boarding-schools, and one may live well and study deeply there for a very little money. It was part of our mission to lunch at the most gorgeous of the hotels, and to look upon such of our fellow-countrymen as we might see there, after our long seclusion at Villeneuve; and we easily found all the splendor and compatriotism we wanted. The hotel we chose stood close upon the lake, with a superb view of the mountains, and its evergreens in tubs stood about the gravelled spaces in a manner that consoled us with a sense of being once more in the current of polite travel. The waiter wanted none of our humble French, but replied to our timorous advances in that tongue in a correct and finally expensive English. Under the stimulus of this experience we went to a bric-à-brac shop and bought a lot of fascinating old pewter platters and flagons, and then we went recklessly shopping about in all directions. We even visited an exhibition of Swiss paintings, which, from an ethical and political point of view, were admirable; and we strolled delightedly about through the market, where the peasant women sat and knitted before their baskets of butter, fruit, cheese, flowers, and grapes, and warbled their gossip and their bargains in their angelic Suissesse voices, while their husbands priced the cattle and examined the horses. It was all very picturesque, and prophesied of the greater picturesqueness of Italy, which we were soon to see.

V

In fact, there was a great deal to make one think of Italy in that region; but the resemblance ended mostly with the Southern architecture and vegetation. Our lake coast had its own features, one of the most striking of which was its apparent abandonment to the use and pleasure of strangers. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the water was everywhere bordered by hotels and pensions. Such large places as Vevay and Lausanne had their proper life, of course, but of smaller ones, like Montreux, the tourist seemed to be in exclusive possession. In our walks thither we met her — when the tourist was of that sex — young, gay, gathering the red leaves of the Virginia-creeper from the lakeward terraces of the highway; we met him, old, sick, pale, munching the sour grapes, and trying somehow to kill the time. Large listless groups of them met every steamboat from which we landed, and parties of them encountered us on every road. “A hash of foreigners,” the Swiss call Montreux, and they scarcely contribute a native flavor to the dish. The Englishman no longer characterizes sojourn there, I should say; the Americans, who pay and speak little or no French, and the Russians, who speak beautiful French but do not pay, are there in about equal abundance; there are some French people; but if it came to my laying my hand upon my heart, I should say there seemed more Germans than any other nationality at Montreux. They are not pretty to look at, and apparently not pleasant; and it is said that the Swiss, who digest them along with the rest of us, do not like them. In fact, the Germans seem everywhere to take their new national consequence ungraciously.

Besides the foreigners, there is not much to see at Montreux, though one must not miss the ancient church which looks out from its lofty place over the lake, and offers the visitor many seats on its terrace for the enjoyment of the same view. The day we went he had pretty well covered the gravel with grape-skins; but he had left the prospect undisturbed.

What struck me principally in Montreux was its extreme suitability to the purposes of the international novelist. It was full of sites for mild incidents, for tacit tragedies, for subdued flirtations, and arrested improprieties. I can especially recommend the Kursaal at Montreux to my brother and sister fictionists looking about for a pretty entourage. Its terrace is beaten by the billows of the restless lake, and in soft weather people sit at little tables there; otherwise they take their ices inside the café, and all the same look out on the Dent-du-Midi, and feel so bored with everybody that they are just in the humor to be interested in anybody. There is a very pretty theatre in the Kursaal, where they seldom give entertainments, but where, if you ever go, you see numbers of pretty girls, and in a box a pale, delicate-looking middle-aged Englishman in a brown velvet coat, with his two daughters. The concert will be very good, and a young man of cultivated sympathies and disdainful tastes could have a very pleasant time there. For the rest, Montreux offers to the novelist’s hand perhaps the crude American of the station who says it is the cheapest place he has struck, and he is going to stick it out there awhile; perhaps the group of chattering American school-girls; perhaps the little Jewish water-color painter who tells of his narrow escape from the mad dog, which having broken his chain at Bouveret, had bitten six persons on the way to Clarens, and been killed by the gendarmes near Vevay; perhaps two Englishwomen who talk for half an hour about their rooms at the hotel, and are presently joined by their husbands, who pursue the subject. These are the true features of modern travel, and for a bit of pensive philosophy, or to have a high-bred, refined widow with a fading sorrow encountered by a sensitive nature of the other sex, there is no better place than the sad little English church-yard at Montreux. It is full of the graves of people who have died in the search for health far from home, and it has a pathos therefore which cannot be expressed. The stones grow stained and old under the laurels and hollies, and the rain-beaten ivy creeps and drips all over the grassy mounds. Yes, that is a beautiful, lonely, heart-breaking place. Now and again I saw black-craped figures silently standing there, and paid their grief the tribute of a stranger’s pang as I passed, happy with my children by my side.

VI

I did not find Aigle and Blonay enough to satisfy my appetite for castles, and once, after several times passing a certain château meublé à louer in the levels of the Rhone Valley, I made bold to go in and ask to look at it. I loved it for the certain Louis XV. grandiosity there was about it; for the great clock in the stable wall; for the balcony frescos on the front of the garden-house, and for the arched driveway to the court. It seemed to me a wonderfully good thing of its kind, and I liked Napoleon’s having lodged in it when his troops occupied Villeneuve. It had, of course, once belonged to a rich family, but it had long passed out of their hands into those of the sort of farmer-folk who now own it, and let it when they can. It had stood several years empty, for the situation is not thought wholesome, and the last tenant had been an English clergyman, who kept a school in it for baddish boys whom no one else could manage, and who were supposed to be out of harm’s way there.

I followed a young man whom I saw going into the gateway, and asked him if I could see the house. He said “Yes,” and summoned his mother, a fierce-looking little dame, in a black Vaudois cap, who came out of a farm-house near with jingling keys, and made him throw open the whole house, while she walked me through the sad, forgotten garden, past its silent fountain, and through its grove of pine to the top of an orchard wall, where the Dent-du-Midi showed all its snow-capped mass. Within, the château was very clean and dry; the dining-room was handsomely panelled, and equipped with a huge porcelain stove; the shelves of the library were stocked with soberly bound books, and it was tastefully frescoed; the pretty chambers were in the rococo taste of the fine old rococo time, with successive scenes of the same history painted over the fireplaces throughout the suite; the drawing-room was elegant with silk hangings and carved mirrors; and the noble staircase, whose landing was honored with the bust of the French king of the château’s period, looked as if that prince had just mounted it. All these splendors, with the modern comfort of hot and cold water wherever needed, you may have, if you like, for $500 a year; and none of the castles I saw compared with this château in richness of finish or furnishing. I am rather particular to advertise it because a question, painfully debating itself in my mind throughout my visit, as to the sum I ought to offer the woman was awkwardly settled by her refusing to take anything, and I feel a lingering obligation. But, really, I do not see how the reader, if he likes solitary state, or has “daughters to educate,” or baddish boys to keep out of mischief, or is wearing out a heavy disappointment, or is suffering under one of those little stains or uneasy consciences such as people can manage so much better in Europe — I say I do not see how he could suit himself more perfectly or more cheaply than in that pensively superb old château, with its aristocratic seclusion, and possibly malarious, lovely old garden.

Tour up the Lake

VII

Early in October, before the vintage began, we seized the first fine day, which the Dent-du-Midi lifted its cap of mists the night before to promise, and made an early start for the tour of the lake. Mademoiselle and her cousins came with us, and we all stood together at the steamer’s prow to watch the morning sunshine break through the silvery haze that hung over Villeneuve, dimly pierced by the ghostly poplars wandering up the road beside the Rhone. As we started, the clouds drifted in ineffable beauty over the mountain-sides; one slowly dropped upon the lake, and when we had sailed through it we had come in sight of the first town on the French border, which the gendarmes of the two nations seemed to share equally between them. All these lake-side villages are wonderfully picturesque, but this first one had a fancy in chimney-tops which I think none of the rest equalled — some were twisted, some shaped like little chalets; and there were groups of old wood-colored roofs and gables which were luxuries of color. A half-built railroad was struggling along the shore; at times it seemed to stop hopelessly; then it began again, and then left off, to reappear beyond some point of hill which had not yet been bored through or blown quite away. I have never seen a railroad laboring under so many difficulties. The landscape was now grand and beautiful, like New England, now pretty and soft, like Old England, till we came to Evains-les-Bains, which looked like nothing but the French watering-place it was. It looked like a watering-place that would be very gay in the season; there were lots of pretty boats; there was a most official-looking gendarme in a cocked hat, and two jolly young priests joking together; and there were green, frivolous French fishes swimming about in the water, and apparently left behind when the rest of the brilliant world had flown.

Here the little English artist who had been so sociable all the way from Villeneuve was reinforced by other Englishmen, whom we found on the much more crowded boat to which we had to change. Our company began to diversify itself: there were French and German parties as well as English. We changed boats four times in the tour of the lake, and each boat brought us a fresh accession of passengers. By-and-by there came aboard a brave Italian, with birds in cages and gold-fish in vases, with a gay Southern face, a coral neck button, a brown mustache and imperial, and a black-tasselled red fez that consoled. He was the vividest bit of color in our composition, though we were not wanting in life without him. There began to be some Americans besides ourselves, and a pretty girl of our nation, who occupied a public station at the boat’s prow, seemed to know that she was pretty, but probably did not. She will recognize herself in this sketch; but who was that other pretty maiden, with brown eyes wide apart, and upper lip projecting a little, as if pulled out by the piquant-nose? I must have taken her portrait so carefully because I thought she would work somewhere into fiction; but the reader is welcome to her as she is. He may also have the spirituelle English girl who ordered tea, and added, “I want some kätzchens with my tea.” “Kätzchens! Kätzchen is a little cat.” “Yes; it’s a word of my own invention.” These are the brilliant little passages of foreign travel that make a voyage to Europe worth while. I add to this international gallery the German girl in blue calico, who had so strong a belief that she was elegantly dressed that she came up on deck with her coffee, and drank it where we might all admire her. I intersperse also the comment that it is the Germans who seem to prevail now in any given international group, and that they have the air of coming forward to take the front seats as by right; while the English, once so confident of their superiority, seem to yield the places to them. But I dare say this is all my fancy.

I am sure, however, of the ever-varying grandeur and beauty of the Alps all round us. Those of the Savoyard shore had a softer loveliness than the Swiss, as if the South had touched and mellowed them, as it had the light-colored trousers which in Geneva recalled the joyous pantaloons of Italy. These mountains moulded themselves one upon another, and deepened behind their transparent shadows with a thousand dimmer and tenderer dyes in the autumnal foliage. From time to time a village, gray-walled, brown-roofed, broke the low helving shore of the lake, where the poplars rose and the vineyards spread with a monotony that somehow pleased; and at Nyon a twelfth-century castle, as noble as Chillon, offered the delight of its changing lines as the boat approached and passed.

At Geneva we had barely time to think Rousseau, to think Calvin, to think Voltaire, to drive swiftly through the town and back again to the boat, fuming and fretting to be off. There is an old town, gravely picturesque and austerely fine in its fine old burgherly, Calvinistic, exclusive way; and outside the walls there is a new town, very clean, very cold, very quiet, with horse-cars like Boston, and a new Renaissance theatre like Paris. The impression remains that Geneva is outwardly a small moralized Bostonian Paris; and I suppose the reader knows that it has had its political rings and bosses like New York. It also has an exact reproduction of the Veronese tombs of the Scaligeri, which the eccentric Duke of Brunswick, who died in Geneva, willed it the money to build; like most fac-similes, they are easily distinguishable from the original, and you must still go to Verona to see the tombs of the Scaligeri. But they have the real Mont Blanc at Geneva, bleak to the eye with enduring snow, and the Blue Rhone, rushing smooth and swift under the overhanging balconies of quaint old houses. With its neat quays, azure lake, symmetrical hotel fronts, and white steamboats, Geneva was like an admirable illustration printed in colors, for a holiday number, to imitate a water-color sketch.

When we started we were detained a moment by conjugal affection. A lady, who had already kept the boat waiting, stopped midway up the gang-plank to kiss her husband in parting, in spite of the captain’s loud cries of “Allez! Allez!” and the angry derision of the passengers. We were in fact all furious, and it was as much as a mule team with bells, drawing a wagon loaded with bags of flower, and a tree growing out of a tower beside the lake, could do to put me in good-humor. Yet I was not really in a hurry to have the voyage end; I was enjoying every moment of it, only, when your boat starts, you do not want to stop for a woman to kiss her husband.

Again we were passing the wild Savoyard shore, where the yellow tops of the poplars jutted up like spires from the road-sides, and on the hill-sides tracts of dark evergreens blotted their space out of the vaster expanses of autumn foliage; back of all rose gray cliffs and crags. Now and then we met a boat of our line; otherwise the blue stretch of the water was broken only by the lateen-sails of the black-hulked lake craft. At that season the delicate flame of the Virginia-creeper was a prominent tint on the walls all round the lake.

Lausanne, which made us think Gibbon, of course, was a stately stretch of architecture along her terraces; Vevay showed us her quaint market square, and her old church on its heights; then came Montreux with its many-hotelled slopes and levels, and chalets peeping from the brows of the mountains that crowd it upon the lake. All these places keep multitudes of swans, whose snow reddened in the sunset that stained the water more and more darkly crimson till we landed at Villeneuve.

VIII

When December came, and the vintage and elections were over, and the winter had come down into the valley to stay, Italy called to us more and more appealingly.

Yet it was not so easy to pull up and go. I liked the row-boat on the lake, though it was getting too cold and rough for that; I liked the way the railway guards called out “Verney-Montreux!” and “Territey-Chillon!” as they ran alongside the carriages at these stations; I liked the pastel portraits of mademoiselle’s grandmothers on the gray walls of our pretty chamber that overlooked the lake, and overheard the lightest lisp of that sometimes bellowing body of water; I liked the notion of the wild-ducks among the reeds by the Rhone, though I had no wish to kill them; I liked our little corner fireplace, where I covered a log of the grand bois every night in the coals, and found it a perfect line of bristling embers in the morning; I liked Poppi and the three generations of Boulettes; and, yes, I liked mademoiselle and all her boarders; and I hated to leave these friends. Mademoiselle made a grand Thanksgiving supper in honor of the American nation, for which we did our best to figure both at the table, where smoked a turkey driven over the Alps from his Italian home for that fête (there are no Swiss turkeys), and in the dance, for which he had wellnigh disabled us. Poppi was in uncommon tune that night, and the voice of this pensive rheumatic lent a unique interest to every change of the Virginia reel.

But these pleasures had to end; it grew colder and colder; we had long since consumed all the old grape-roots which constituted our petit bois, and we were ravaging our way through an expensive pile of grand bois without much effect upon the climate. One morning the most enterprising spirit of our party kindled such a mighty blaze on our chamber hearth that she set the chimney on fire, thus threatening the Swiss republic with the loss of the insurance, and involving mademoiselle in I know not what penalties for having a chimney that could be set on fire. By the blessing of Heaven, the vigor of mademoiselle, and the activity of Louis and Alexis the farmer, the flames were subdued and the house saved. Mademoiselle forgave us, but we knew it was time to go, and the next Sunday we were in Florence.

THE END

LONDON FILMS

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

I

METEOROLOGICAL EMOTIONS

Whoever carries a mental kodak with him (as I suspect I was in the habit of doing long before I knew it) must be aware of the uncertain value of the different exposures. This can be determined only by the process of developing, which requires a dark room and other apparatus not always at hand; and so much depends upon the process that it might be well if it could always be left to some one who makes a specialty of it, as in the case of the real amateur photographer. Then one’s faulty impressions might be so treated as to yield a pictorial result of interest, or frankly thrown away if they showed hopeless to the instructed eye. Otherwise, one must do one’s own developing, and trust the result, whatever it is, to the imaginative kindness of the reader, who will surely, if he is the right sort of reader, be able to sharpen the blurred details, to soften the harsh lights, and blend the shadows in a subordination giving due relief to the best meaning of the print. This is what I fancy myself to be doing now, and if any one shall say that my little pictures are superficial, I shall not be able to gainsay him. I can only answer that most pictures represent the surfaces of things; but at the same time I can fully share the disappointment of those who would prefer some such result as the employment of the Roentgen rays would have given, if applied to certain aspects of the London world.

Of a world so vast, only small parts can be known to a life-long dweller. To the sojourner scarcely more will vouchsafe itself than to the passing stranger, and it is chiefly to home-keeping folk who have never broken their ignorance of London that one can venture to speak with confidence from the cumulative misgiving which seems to sum the impressions of many sojourns of differing lengths and dates. One could have used the authority of a profound observer after the first few days in 1861 and 1865, but the experience of weeks stretching to months in 1882 and 1883, clouded rather than cleared the air through which one earliest saw one’s London; and the successive pauses in 1894 and 1897, with the longest and latest stays in 1904, have but served to confirm one in the diffident inconclusion on all important points to which I hope the pages following will bear witness.

What appears to be a fact, fixed and absolute amid a shimmer of self-question, is that any one coming to London in the beginning of April, after devious delays in the South and West of England, is destined to have printed upon his mental films a succession of meteorological changes quite past computation. Yet if one were as willing to be honest as one is willing to be graphic, one would allow that probably the weather on the other side of the Atlantic was then behaving with quite as swift and reckless caprice. The difference is that at home, having one’s proper business, one leaves the weather to look after its own affairs in its own way; but being cast upon the necessary idleness of sojourn abroad, one becomes critical, becomes censorious. If I were to be a little honester still, I should confess that I do not know of any place where the month of April can be meaner, more poison, upon occasion, than in New York. Of course it has its moments of relenting, of showing that warm, soft, winning phase which is the reverse of its obverse shrewishness, when the heart melts to it in a grateful tenderness for the wide, high, blue sky, the flood of white light, the joy of the flocking birds, and the transport of the buds which you can all but hear bursting in an eager rapture. It is a sudden glut of delight, a great, wholesale emotion of pure joy, filling the soul to overflowing, which the more scrupulously adjusted meteorology of England is incapable of at least so instantly imparting. Our weather is of public largeness and universal application, and is perhaps rather for the greatest good of the greatest number; admirable for the seed-time and harvest, and for the growing crops in the seasons between. The English weather is of a more private quality, and apportioned to the personal preference, or the personal endurance. It is as if it were influenced by the same genius which operates the whole of English life, and allows each to identify himself as the object of specific care, irrespective of the interests of the mass. This may be a little too fanciful, and I do not insist that it is scientific or even sociological. Yet I think the reader who rejects it might do worse than agree with me that the first impression of a foreign country visited or revisited is stamped in a sense of the weather and the season.

Nothing made me so much at home in England as reading, one day, that there was a lower or a higher pressure in a part of Scotland, just as I might have read of a lower or a higher pressure in the region of the lakes. “Now,” I said to myself, “we shall have something like real weather, the weather that is worth telegraphing ahead, and is going to be decisively this or that.” But I could not see that the weather following differed from the weather we had been having. It was the same small, individual weather, offered as it were in samples of warm, cold, damp and dry, but mostly cold and damp, especially in-doors. The day often opened gray and cloudy, but by-and-by you found that the sun was unobtrusively shining; then it rained, and there was rather a bitter wind; but presently it was sunny again, and you felt secure of the spring, for the birds were singing: the birds of literature, the lark, the golden-billed blackbird, the true robin, and the various finches; and round and over all the rooks were calling like voices in a dream. Full of this certainty of spring you went in-doors, and found it winter.

If you can keep out-of-doors in England you are very well, and that is why the English, who have been philosophizing their climate for a thousand and some odd years, keep out-of-doors so much. When they go indoors they take all the outer air they can with them, instinctively realizing that they will be more comfortable with it than in the atmosphere awaiting them. If their houses could be built reversible, so as to be turned inside out in some weathers, one would be very comfortable in them. Lowell used whimsically to hold that the English rain did not wet you, and he might have argued that the English cold would not chill you if only you stayed out-of-doors in it.

Why will not travellers be honest with foreign countries? Is it because they think they may some day come back? For my part, I am going to be heroic, and say that the in-doors cold in England is constant suffering to the American born. It is not that there is no sizzling or crackling radiator, no tropic-breathing register; but that the grate in most of the houses that the traveler sees, the public-houses namely, seems to have shrunken to a most sordid meanness of size. In Exeter, for example, where there is such a beautiful cathedral, one found a bedroom grate of the capacity of a quart pot, and the heating capabilities of a glowworm. I might say the same of the Plymouth grate, but not quite the same of the grates of Bath or Southampton; if I pause before arriving at the grate of London, it is because daring must stop somewhere. I think it is probable that the American, if he stayed long enough, would heed the injunction to suffer and be strong from the cold, as the Englishman has so largely done, but I am not sure. At one point of my devious progress to the capital I met an Englishman who had spent ten years in Canada, and who constrained me to a mild deprecation by the wrath with which he denounced the in-doors cold he had found everywhere at home. He said that England was a hundred, five hundred, years behind in such matters; and I could not deny that, even when cowering over the quart pot to warm the hands and face, one was aware of a gelid mediaeval back behind one. To be warm all round in an English house is a thing impossible, at least to the traveller, who finds the natives living in what seems to him a whorl of draughts. In entering his own room he is apt to find the window has been put down, but this is not merely to let in some of the outside warmth; it is also to make a current of air to the open door. Even if the window has not been put down, it has always so much play in its frame, to allow for swelling from the damp, that in anything like dry weather the cold whistles round it, and you do not know which way to turn your mediaeval back.

In the corridors of one of the provincial hotels there were radiators, but not hot ones, and in a dining-room where they were hot the natives found them oppressive, while the foreigners were warming their fingers on the bottoms of their plates. Yet it is useless for these to pretend that the suffering they experience has not apparently resulted in the strength they see. Our contemporary ancestors are a splendid-looking race, in the higher average, and if in the lower average they often look pinched and stunted, why, we are not ourselves giants without exception. The ancestral race does often look stunted and poor; persons of small build and stature abound; and nature is

   “So careful of the single type”

of beefy Briton as to show it very rarely. But in the matter of complexion, if we count that a proof of health, we are quite out of it in comparison with the English, and beside them must look like a nation of invalids. There are few English so poor as not, in youth at least, to afford cheeks of a redness which all our money could not buy with us. I do not say the color does not look a little overdone in cases, or that the violent explosion of pinks and roses, especially in the cheeks of small children, does not make one pause in question whether paste or putty might not be more tasteful. But it is best not to be too critical. Putty and paste, apart from association, are not pretty tints, and pinks and roses are; and the English children look not only fresher but sturdier and healthier than ours. Whether they are really so I do not know; but I doubt if the English live longer than we for living less comfortably. The lower classes seem always to have colds; the middle classes, rheumatism; and the upper, gout, by what one sees or hears. Rheumatism one might almost say (or quite, if one did not mind what one said) is universal in England, and all ranks of society have the facilities for it in the in-doors cold in which they otherwise often undeniably flourish. At the end, it is a question of whether you would rather be warm and well, or cold and well; we choose the first course and they choose the last.

If we leave this question apart, I think it will be the experience of the careful observer that there is a summit of healthful looks in England, which we do not touch in America, whatever the large table-land or foot-hill average we reach; and in like manner there is an exceptional distinction of presence as one encounters it, rarely enough, in the London streets, which one never encounters with us. I am not envying the one, or at least not regretting the other. Distinction is the one thing for which I think humanity certainly pays too much; only, in America, we pay too much for too many other things to take any great comfort in our want of distinction. I own the truth without grief or shame, while I enjoy the sight of distinction in England as I enjoy other spectacles for which I cannot help letting the English pay too much. I was not appreciably the poorer myself, perhaps I was actually the richer, in seeing, one fine chill Sunday afternoon, in the aristocratic region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other on the pavement before me, and then went and came their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the tall cane that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a straight well-fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was nothing for the eye to dwell on in her various black. She looked not only authoritative; people often do that with us; she looked authorized; she had been empowered by the vested rights and interests to look so her whole life; one could not be mistaken in her, any more than in the black trees and their electric-green buds in the high-fenced square, or in the vast, high, heavy, handsome houses where, in the cellary or sepulchral cold, she would presently resume the rheumatic pangs of which the comparative warmth of the outer air had momentarily relieved her stately bulk.

But what is this? While I am noting the terrors of the English clime, they have all turned themselves into allures and delights. There have come three or four days, since I arrived in London, of so fine and mellow a warmth, of skies so tenderly blue, and so heaped with such soft masses of white clouds, that one wonders what there was ever to complain of. In the parks and in the gardened spaces which so abound, the leaves have grown perceptibly, and the grass thickened so that you can smell it, if you cannot hear it, growing. The birds insist, and in the air is that miraculous lift, as if nature, having had this banquet of the year long simmering, had suddenly taken the lid off, to let you perceive with every gladdening sense what a feast you were going to have presently in the way of summer. From the delectable vision rises a subtile haze, which veils the day just a little from its own loveliness, and lies upon the sighing and expectant city like the substance of a dream made visible. It has the magic to transmute you to this substance yourself, so that while you dawdle afoot, or whisk by in your hansom, or rumble earthquakingly aloft on your omnibus-top, you are aware of being a part, very dim, very subtile, of the passer’s blissful consciousness. It is flattering, but you feel like warning him not to go in-doors, or he will lose you and all the rest of it; for having tried it yourself you know that it is still winter within the house walls, and will not be April there till well into June.

II

CIVIC AND SOCIAL COMPARISONS, MOSTLY ODIOUS

It might be, somewhat overhardily, advanced that there is no such thing as positive fact, but only relative fact. The mind, in an instinctive perception of this hazardous truth, clings to contrast as the only basis of inference, and in now taking my tenth or twentieth look at London I have been careful to keep about me a pocket vision of New York, so as to see what London is like by making constantly sure what it is not like. A pocket vision, say, of Paris, would not serve the same purpose. That is a city of a legal loveliness, of a beauty obedient to a just municipal control, of a grandeur studied and authorized in proportion and relation to the design of a magnificent entirety; it is a capital nobly realized on lines nobly imagined. But New York and London may always be intelligibly compared because they are both the effect of an indefinite succession of anarchistic impulses, sometimes correcting and sometimes promoting, or at best sometimes annulling one another. Each has been mainly built at the pleasure of the private person, with the community now and then swooping down upon him, and turning him out of house and home to the common advantage. Nothing but our racial illogicality has saved us from the effect of our racial anarchy in the social structure as well as the material structure, but if we could see London and New York as lawless in the one way as in the other, we should perhaps see how ugly they collectively are.

The sum of such involuntary reflection with me has been the perception that London was and is and shall be, and New York is and shall be, but has hardly yet been. New York is therefore one-third less morally, as she is one-third less numerically, than London. In her future she has no past, but only a present to retrieve; though perhaps a present like hers is enough. She is also one less architecturally than London; she is two-thirds as splendid, as grand, as impressive. In fact, if I more closely examine my pocket vision, I am afraid that I must hedge from this modest claim, for we have as yet nothing to compare with at least a half of London magnificence, whatever we may have in the seventeen or eighteen hundred years that shall bring us of her actual age. As we go fast in all things, we may then surpass her; but this is not certain, for in her more deliberate way she goes fast, too. In the mean time the materials of comparison, as they lie dispersed in the pocket vision, seem few. The sky-scrapers, Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, and some vast rocketing hotels offer themselves rather shrinkingly for the contrast with those miles of imperial and municipal architecture which in London make you forget the leagues of mean little houses, and remember the palaces, the law-courts, the great private mansions, the dignified and shapely flats, the large department stores, the immense hotels, the bridges, the monuments of every kind.

One reason, I think, why London is so much more striking is in the unbroken line which the irregularly divided streets often present to the passer. Here is a chance for architecture to extend, while with us it has only a chance to tower, on the short up-town block which is the extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either hand is the loveliness of Grace Church; but in the Strand and Fleet Street you have a succession of edifices which overwhelm you with the sense of a life in which trade is only one of the incidents. If the day is such as a lover of the picturesque would choose, or may rather often have without choosing, when the scene is rolled in vaporous smoke, and a lurid gloom hovers from the hidden sky, you have an effect of majesty and grandeur that no other city can offer. As the shadow momently thickens or thins in the absence or the presence of the yellowish-green light, the massive structures are shown or hid, and the meaner houses render the rifts between more impressively chasmal. The tremendous volume of life that flows through the narrow and winding channels past the dim cliffs and pinnacles, and the lower banks which the lesser buildings form, is such that the highest tide of Broadway or Fifth Avenue seems a scanty ebb beside it. The swelling and towering omnibuses, the huge trucks and wagons and carriages, the impetuous hansoms and the more sobered four-wheelers, the pony-carts, donkey-carts, handcarts, and bicycles which fearlessly find their way amid the turmoil, with foot-passengers winding in and out, and covering the sidewalks with their multitude, give the effect of a single monstrous organism, which writhes swiftly along the channel where it had run in the figure of a flood till you were tired of that metaphor. You are now a molecule of that vast organism, as you sit under your umbrella on your omnibus-top, with the public waterproof apron across your knees, and feel in supreme degree the insensate exultation of being part of the largest thing of its kind in the world, or perhaps the universe.

It is an emotion which supports the American visitor even against the immensity he shares, and he is able to reflect that New York would not look so relatively little, so comparatively thin, if New York were a capital on the same lines as London. If New York were, like London, a political as well as a commercial capital, she would have the national edifices of Washington added to the sky-scrapers in which she is now unrivalled, and her competition would be architecturally much more formidable than it is. She would be the legislative centre of the different States of the Union, as London is of the different counties of the United Kingdom; she would have collected in her borders all their capitols and public buildings; and their variety, if not dignity, would valiantly abet her in the rivalry from which one must now recoil on her behalf. She could not, of course, except on such rare days of fog as seem to greet Englishmen in New York on purpose to vex us, have the adventitious aid which the London atmosphere renders; her air is of such a helpless sincerity that nothing in it shows larger than it is; no mist clothes the sky-scraper in gigantic vagueness, the hideous tops soar into the clear heaven distinct in their naked ugliness; and the low buildings cower unrelieved about their bases. Nothing could be done in palliation of the comparative want of antiquity in New York, for the present, at least; but it is altogether probable that in the fulfilment of her destiny she will be one day as old as London now is.

If one thinks, however, how old London now is, it is rather crazing; much more crazing than the same sort of thought in the cities of lands more exclusively associated with antiquity. In Italy you forget the present; there seems nothing above the past, or only so thin a layer of actuality that you have scarcely the sense of it. In England you remember with an effort Briton, and Roman, and Saxon, and Norman, and the long centuries of the mediaeval and modern English; the living interests, ambitions, motives, are so dense that you cannot penetrate them and consort quietly with the dead alone. Men whose names are in the directory as well as men whose names are in history, keep you company, and push the shades of heroes, martyrs, saints, poets, and princes to the wall. They do not shoulder them willingly out of the way, but helplessly; there is no place in the world where the material present is so reverently, so tenderly mindful of the material past. Perhaps, therefore, I felt safe in so largely leaving the English past to the English present, and, having in London long ago satisfied that hunger for the old which the new American brings with him to Europe, I now went about enjoying the modern in its manifold aspects and possibly fancying characteristic traits where I did not find them. I did not care how trivial some of these were, but I hesitate to confide to the more serious reader that I was at one moment much interested in what seemed the growing informality of Englishmen in dress, as I noted it in the streets and parks, or thought I noted it.

To my vision, or any illusion, they wore every sort of careless cap, slouch felt hat, and straw hat; any sort of tunic, jacket, and cutaway. The top-hat and frock-coat still appear, but their combination is evidently no longer imperative, as it formerly was at all daytime functions. I do not mean to say that you do not often see that stately garment on persons of authority, but only that it is apparently not of the supremacy expressed in the drawings of Du Maurier in the eighties and nineties of the last century. Certainly, when it comes to the artist at Truefitt’s wearing a frock-coat while cutting your hair, you cannot help asking yourself whether its hour has not struck. Yet, when one has said this, one must hedge from a conjecture so extreme. The king wears a frock-coat, a long, gray one, with a white top-hat and lavender gloves, and those who like to be like a king conform to his taste. No one, upon his life, may yet wear a frock and a derby, but many people now wear top-hats, though black ones, with sack-coats, with any sort of coats; and, above all, the Londoner affects in summer a straw hat either of a flat top and a pasteboard stiffness, or of the operatically picturesque Alpine pattern, or of a slouching Panama shapelessness. What was often the derision, the abhorrence of the English in the dress of other nations has now become their pleasure, and, with the English genius of doing what they like, it may be that they overdo their pleasure. But at the worst the effect is more interesting than our uniformity. The conventional evening dress alone remains inviolate, but how long this will remain, who can say? The simple-hearted American, arriving with his scrupulous dress suit in London, may yet find himself going out to dinner with a company of Englishmen in white linen jackets or tennis flannels.

If, however, the men’s dress in England is informal, impatient, I think one will be well within the lines of safety in saying that above everything the English women’s dress expresses sentiment, though I suppose it is no more expressive of personal sentiment than the chic of our women’s dress is expressive of personal chic; in either case the dressmaker, male or female, has impersonally much to do with it. Under correction of those countrywomen of ours who will not allow that the Englishwomen know how to dress, I will venture to say that their expression of sentiment in dress is charming, but how charming it comparatively is I shall be far from saying. I will only make so bold as to affirm that it seems more adapted to the slender fluency of youth than some realizations of the American ideal; and that after the azaleas and rhododendrons in the Park there is nothing in nature more suggestive of girlish sweetness and loveliness than the costumes in which the wearers flow by the flowery expanses in carriage or on foot. The colors worn are often as courageous as the vegetable tints; the vaporous air softens and subdues crimsons and yellows that I am told would shriek aloud in our arid atmosphere; but mostly the shades worn tend to soft pallors, lavender, and pink, and creamy white. A group of girlish shapes in these colors, seen newly lighted at a doorway from a passing carriage, gave as they pressed eagerly forward a supreme effect of that sentiment in English dress which I hope I am not recreant in liking. Occasionally, also, there was a scarf, lightly escaping, lightly caught, which, with an endearing sash, renewed for a fleeting moment a bygone age of Sensibility, as we find it recorded in many a graceful page, on many a glowing canvas.

Pictorial, rather than picturesque, might be the word for the present dress of Englishwomen. It forms in itself a lovely picture to the eye, and is not merely the material or the inspiration of a picture. It is therefore the more difficult of transference to the imagination of the reader who has not also been a spectator, and before such a scene as one may witness in a certain space of the Park on a fair Sunday after church in the morning, or before dinner in the early evening, the boldest kodak may well close its single eye in despair. As yet even the mental photograph cannot impart the tints of nature, and the reader who wishes to assist at this scene must do his best to fancy them for himself. At the right moment of the ripening London season the foliage of the trees is densely yet freshly green and flatteringly soft to the eye; the grass below has that closeness of texture which only English grass has the secret of. At fit distances the wide beds of rhododendrons and azaleas are glowing; the sky is tenderly blue, and the drifted clouds in it are washed clean of their London grime. If it is in the afternoon, these beautiful women begin to appear about the time when you may have bidden yourself abandon the hope of them for that day. Some drift from the carriages that draw up on the drive beside the sacred close where they are to sit on penny chairs, spreading far over the green; others glide on foot from elect neighborhoods, or from vehicles left afar, perhaps that they may give themselves the effect of coming informally. They arrive in twos and threes, young girls commonly with their mothers, but sometimes together, in varied raptures of millinery, and with the rainbow range in their delicately floating, delicately clinging draperies. But their hats, their gowns, always express sentiment, even when they cannot always express simplicity; and the just observer is obliged to own that their calm faces often express, if not simplicity, sentiment. Their beauty is very, very great, not a beauty of coloring alone, but a beauty of feature which is able to be patrician without being unkind; and if, as some American women say, they do not carry themselves well, it takes an American woman to see it. They move naturally and lightly — that is, the young girls do; mothers in England, as elsewhere, are apt to put on weight; but many of the mothers are as handsome in their well-wearing English way as their daughters.

Several irregular spaces are enclosed by low iron barriers, and in one of these the arriving groups of authorized people found other people of their kind, where the unauthorized people seemed by common consent to leave them. There was especially one enclosure which seemed consecrated to the highest comers; it was not necessary that they should make the others feel they were not wanted there; the others felt it of themselves, and did not attempt to enter that especial fairy ring, or fairy triangle. Those within looked as much at home as if in their own drawing-rooms, and after the usual greetings of friends sat down in their penny chairs for the talk which the present kodak would not have overheard if it could.

If any one were to ask me how I knew that these beautiful creatures were of supreme social value, I should be obliged to own that it was largely an assumption based upon hearsay. For all I can avouch personally in the matter they might have been women come to see the women who had not come. Still, if the effects of high breeding are visible, then they were the sort they looked. Not only the women, but the men, old and young, had the aristocratic air which is not aggressive, the patrician bearing which is passive and not active, and which in the English seems consistent with so much that is human and kindly. There is always the question whether this sort of game is worth the candle; but that is a moral consideration which would take me too far from the little scene I am trying to suggest; it is sufficient for the present purpose that the English think it is worth it. A main fact of the scene was the constant movement of distinguished figures within the sacred close, and up and down the paths past the rows of on-lookers on their penny chairs. The distinguished figures were apparently not the least molested by the multiplied and concentrated gazes of the on-lookers, who were, as it were, outside the window, and of the street. What struck one accustomed to the heterogeneous Sunday crowds of Central Park, where any such scene would be so inexpressibly impossible, was the almost wholly English personnel of the crowd within and without the sacred close. Here and there a Continental presence, French or German or Italian, pronounced its nationality in dress and bearing; one of the many dark subject races of Great Britain was represented in the swarthy skin and lustrous black hair and eyes of a solitary individual; there were doubtless various colonials among the spectators, and in one’s nerves one was aware of some other Americans. But these exceptions only accented the absolutely English dominance of the spectacle. The alien elements were less evident in the observed than in the observers, where, beyond the barrier, which there was nothing to prevent their passing, they sat in passive rows, in passive pairs, in passive ones, and stared and stared. The observers were mostly men, and largely men of the age when the hands folded on the top of the stick express a pause in the emotions and the energies which has its pathos. There were women among them, of course, but the women were also of the age when the keener sensibilities are taking a rest; and such aliens of their sex as qualified the purely English nature of the affair lost whatever was aggressive in their difference.

It was necessary to the transaction of the drama that from time to time the agents of the penny-chair company should go about in the close and collect money for the chairs; and it became a question, never rightly solved, how the ladies who had come unattended managed, with their pocketless dresses, to carry coins unequalled in bulk since the iron currency of Sparta; or whether they held the pennies frankly in their hands till they paid them away. In England the situation, if it is really the situation, is always accepted with implicit confidence, and if it had been the custom to bring pennies in their hands, these ladies would have no more minded doing it than they minded being looked at by people whose gaze dedicated them to an inviolate superiority.

With us the public affirmation of class, if it were imaginable, could not be imaginable except upon the terms of a mutinous protest in the spectators which would not have been less real for being silent. But again I say the thing would not have been possible with us in New York; though in Newport, where the aristocratic tradition is said to have been successfully transplanted to our plutocratic soil, something analogous might at least be dramatized. Elsewhere that tradition does not come to flower in the open American air; it is potted and grown under glass; and can be carried out-doors only under special conditions. The American must still come to England for the realization of certain social ideals towards which we may be now straining, but which do not yet enjoy general acceptance. The reader who knows New York has but to try and fancy its best, or even its better, society dispersing itself on certain grassy limits of Central Park on a Sunday noon or afternoon; or, on some week-day evening, leaving its equipages along the drives and strolling out over the herbage; or receiving in its carriages the greetings of acquaintance who make their way in and out among the wheels. Police and populace would join forces in their several sorts to spoil a spectacle which in Hyde Park appeals, in high degree, to the aesthetic sense, and which might stimulate the historic imagination to feats of agreeable invention if one had that sort of imagination.

The spectacle is a condition of that old, secure society which we have not yet lived long enough to have known, and which we very probably never shall know. Such civilization as we have will continue to be public and impersonal, like our politics, and our society in its specific events will remain within walls. It could not manifest itself outside without being questioned, challenged, denied; and upon reflection there might appear reasons why it is well so.

III

SHOWS AND SIDE-SHOWS OF STATE

We are quite as domestic as the English, but with us the family is of the personal life, while with them it is of the general life, so that when their domesticity imparts itself to their out-door pleasures no one feels it strange. One has read of something like this without the sense of it which constantly penetrates one in London. One must come to England in order to realize from countless little occasions, little experiences, how entirely English life, public as well as private, is an affair of family. We know from our reading how a comparatively few families administer, if they do not govern, but we have still to learn how the other families are apparently content to share the form in which authority resides, since they cannot share the authority. At the very top I offer the conjecture towards the solution of that mystery which constantly bewilders the republican witness, the mystery of loyalty — is, of course, the royal family; and the rash conclusion of the American is that it is revered because it is the royal family. But possibly a truer interpretation of the fact would be that it is dear and sacred to the vaster British public because it is the royal family. A bachelor king could hardly dominate the English imagination like a royal husband and father, even if his being a husband and father were not one of the implications of that tacit Constitution in whose silence English power resides. With us, family has less and less to do with society, even; but with the English it has more and more to do, since the royal family is practically without political power, and not only may, but almost must, devote itself to society. It goes and comes on visits to other principalities and powers; it opens parliaments; it lays corner-stones and presides at the dedication of edifices of varied purpose; it receives deputations and listens to addresses; it holds courts and levees; it reviews regiments and fleets, and assists at charity entertainments and at plays and shows of divers sorts; it plays races; it is in constant demand for occasions requiring exalted presences for their prosperity. These events seem public, and if they were imaginable of a democracy like ours they would be so; but in the close-linked order of English things they are social, they are domestic, they are from one family to every other family directly or indirectly; the king is for these ends not more a royalty than the rest of his family, and for the most part he acts as a family man; his purely official acts are few. Things that in a republic are entirely personal, as marriages, births, christenings, deaths, and burials, whether of high or low, in a monarchy are, if they affect royalty, of public and national concern, and it would not be easy to show how one royal act differed from another in greater or less publicity.

If you were of a very bold conjecture, or of a willingness to generalize from wholly insufficient grounds, and take the chances of hitting or missing, you might affirm a domestic simplicity of feeling in some phases of functions exalted far beyond the range of republican experiences or means of comparison. In the polite intelligence which we sometimes have cabled to our press at home, by more than usually ardent enterprise, one may have read that the king held a levee at St. James’s; and one conceived of it as something dramatic, something historic, something, on the grand scale, civic. But if one happened to be walking in Pall Mall on the morning of that levee, one saw merely a sort of irregular coming and going in almost every kind of vehicle, or, as regarded the spiritual and temporal armies, sometimes on foot. A thin fringe of rather incurious but not unfriendly bystanders lined the curbstone, and looked at the people arriving in the carriages, victorias, hansoms, and four-wheelers; behind the bystanders loitered dignitaries of the church; and military and naval officers made their way through the fringe and crossed the street among the wheels and horses. No one concerned seemed to feel anything odd in the effect, though to the unwonted American the sight of a dignitary in full canonicals or regimentals going to a royal levee in a cab or on foot is not a vision which realizes the ideal inspired by romance. At one moment a middle-aged lady in the line of vehicles put her person well out of the window of her four-wheeler, and craned her head up to instruct her driver in something. She may not have been going to the levee, but one felt that if she had been she would still have done what it abashed the alien to see.

We are, in fact, much more exacting than the English in matters of English state; we, who have no state at all require them to live up to theirs, just as quite plain, elderly observers expect every woman to be young and pretty, and take it hard when she is not. But possibly the secret of enduring so much state as the English have lies in knowing how and when to shirk it, to drop it. No doubt, the alien who counted upon this fact, if it is a fact, would find his knuckles warningly rapped when he reached too confidingly through air that seemed empty of etiquette. But the rapping would be very gentle, very kindly, for this is the genius of English rule where it is not concerned with criminal offence. You must keep off wellnigh all the grass on the island, but you are “requested” to keep off it, and not forbidden in the harsh imperatives of our brief authorities. It is again the difference between the social and the public, which is perhaps the main difference between an oligarchy and a democracy. The sensibilities are more spared in the one and the self-respect in the other, though this is saying it too loosely, and may not be saying it truly; it is only a conjecture with which I am parleying while I am getting round to add that such part of the levee as I saw in plain day, though there was vastly more of it, was much less filling to the imagination than a glimpse which I had of a court one night. I am rather proud of being able to explain that the late queen held court in the early afternoon and the present king holds court at night; but, lest any envious reader suspect me of knowing the fact at first-hand, I hasten to say that the glimpse I had of the function that night only revealed to me in my cab a royal coach driving out of a palace gate, and showing larger than human, through a thin rain, the blood-red figures of the coachmen and footmen gowned from head to foot in their ensanguined colors, with the black-gleaming body of the coach between them, and the horses trampling heraldically before out of the legendary past. The want of definition in the fact, which I beheld in softly blurred outline, enhanced its value, which was so supreme that I could not perhaps do justice to the vague splendors of inferior courtward equipages, as my cab flashed by them, moving in a slow line towards the front of Buckingham Palace.

The carriages were doubtless full of titles, any one of which would enrich my page beyond the dreams of fiction, and it is said that in the time of the one-o’clock court they used to receive a full share of the attention which I could only so scantily and fleetingly bestow. They were often halted, as that night I saw them halting, in their progress, and this favored the plebeian witnesses, who ranged along their course and invited themselves and one another to a study of the looks and dresses of the titles, and to open comment on both. The study and the comment must have had their limits; the observed knew how much to bear if the observers did not know how little to forbear; and it is not probable that the London spectators went the lengths which our outsiders go in trying to verify an English duke who is about to marry an American heiress. The London vulgar, if not better bred than our vulgar, are better fed on the sight of social grandeur, and have not a lifelong famine to satisfy, as ours have. Besides, whatever gulf birth and wealth have fixed between the English classes, it is mystically bridged by that sentiment of family which I have imagined the ruling influence in England. In a country where equality has been glorified as it has been in ours, the contrast of conditions must breed a bitterness in those of a lower condition which is not in their hearts there; or if it is, the alien does not know it.

What seems certain is the interest with which every outward manifestation of royal and social state is followed, and the leisure which the poor have for a vicarious indulgence in its luxuries and splendors. One would say that there was a large leisure class entirely devoted to these pleasures, which cost it nothing, but which may have palled on the taste of those who pay for them. Of course, something like this is the case in every great city; but in London, where society is enlarged to the bounds of the national interests, the demand of such a leisure class might very well be supposed to have created the supply. Throughout the London season, and measurably throughout the London year, there is an incessant appeal to the curiosity of the common people which is never made in vain. Somewhere a drum is throbbing or a bugle sounding from dawn till dusk; the red coat is always passing singly or in battalions, afoot or on horseback; the tall bear-skin cap weighs upon the grenadier’s brow,

   “And the hapless soldier’s sigh,”

if it does not “run in blood down palace walls,” must often exhale from lips tremulous with hushed profanity. One bright, hot morning of mid-July the suffering from that cruel folly in the men of a regiment marching from their barracks to Buckingham Palace and sweltering under those shaggy cliffs was evident in their distorted eyes, streaming cheeks, and panting mouths. But why do I select the bear-skin cap as peculiarly cruel and foolish, merely because it is archaic? All war and all the images of it are cruel and foolish.

The April morning, however, when I first carried out my sensitized surfaces for the impression which I hoped to receive from a certain historic spectacle was very different. There was even a suggestion of comfort in the archaic bear-skins; they were worn, and they had been worn, every day for nearly two hundred years, as part of the ceremonial of changing the regimental colors before Buckingham Palace. I will not be asked why this is imperative; it has always been done and probably always will be done, and to most civilian onlookers will remain as unintelligible in detail as it was to me. When the regiment was drawn up under the palace windows, a part detached itself from the main body and went off to a gate of the palace, and continued mysteriously stationary there. In the mean time the ranks left behind closed or separated amid the shouting of sergeants or corporals, and the men relieved themselves of the strain from their knapsacks, or satisfied an exacting military ideal, by hopping at will into the air and bouncing their knapsacks, dragging lower down, up to the napes of their necks, where they rested under the very fringe of their bear-skin caps. A couple of officers, with swords drawn, walked up and down behind the ranks, but, though they were tall, fine fellows, and expressed in the nonchalant fulfilment of their part a high sense of boredom, they did not give the scene any such poignant interest as it had from the men in performing a duty, or indulging a privilege, by hopping into the air and bouncing their knapsacks up to their necks. After what seemed an unreasonable delay, but was doubtless requisite for the transaction, the detachment sent for the change of colors returned with the proper standards. The historic rite was then completed, the troops formed in order, and marched back to their barracks to the exultant strains of their band.

The crowd outside the palace yard, which this daily sight attracts, dispersed reluctantly, its particles doubtless holding themselves ready to reassemble at the slightest notice. It formed a small portion only of the population of London which has volunteer charge of the goings and comings at Buckingham Palace. Certain of its members are on guard there from morning till night, and probably no detail of ceremony escapes their vigilance. If asked what they are expecting to see, they are not able to say; they only know that they are there to see what happens. They make the most of any carriage entering or issuing from the yard; they note the rare civilians who leave or approach the palace door on foot, the half-dozen plain policemen who stand at their appointed places within the barrier which none of the crowd ever dreams of passing must share its interest. Neither these policemen nor the sentries who pace their beat before the high iron fence are apparently willing to molest the representatives of the public interest. On the April morning in case, during the momentary absence of the policeman who should have restrained the crowd, the sentry found himself embarrassed by a spectator who had intruded on his beat. He faltered, blushing as well as he could through his high English color, and then said, gently, “A little back, please,” and the intruder begged pardon and retired.

In the simple incident there was nothing of the nervousness observable in either the official or the officious repositories of the nationality which one sees in Continental countries, and especially in Germany. It was plain that England, though a military power, is not militarized. The English shows of force are civil. Nowhere but in England does the European hand of iron wear the glove of velvet. There is always an English war going on somewhere, but one does not relate to it the kindly-looking young fellows whom one sees suffering under their bear-skin caps in the ranks, or loitering at liberty in the parks, and courting the flattered girls who flutter like moths about the flame of their red jackets, up and down the paths and on the public benches. The soldiers are under the law of military obedience, and are so far in slavery, as all soldiers are, but nothing of their slavery is visible, and they are the idols of an unstinted devotion, which adds to the picturesqueness and, no doubt, the pathos of the great London spectacle. It is said that they sometimes abuse their apparent supremacy, and that their uniform generally bars them from places of amusement; but one sees nothing of their insubordination or exclusion in the public ways, where one sometimes sees them pushing baby-carriages to free the nurse-maids to more unrestricted flirtation, or straying over the grass and under the trees with maids who are not burdened by any sort of present duty.

After all, as compared with the civilians, they are few even in that game of love which is always playing itself wherever youth meets youth, and which in London is only evident in proportion to the vastness of the city. Their individual life is, like that of the royalty which they decorate, public more than private, and one can scarcely dissociate them, with all their personal humility, from the exalted figures whose eminence they directly or indirectly contribute to throw into relief. I do not mean that they are seen much or little in the king’s company. The English king, though he wears many land and sea uniforms, is essentially civilian, and though vast numbers of soldiers exist for his state in London, they do not obviously attend him, except on occasions of the very highest state. I make this observation rather hazardously, for the fact, which I feel bound to share with the reader, is that I never saw in London any of the royalties who so abound there.

I did, indeed, see the king before I left England, but it was in a place far from his capital, and the king was the only one of his large family I saw anywhere. I hope this will not greatly disappoint my readers, especially such as have scruples against royalties; but it is best to be honest. I can be quite as honest in adding that I had always a vague, underlying curiosity concerning royalty, and a hope that it would somehow come my way, but it never did, to my knowledge, and somehow, with the best will towards it; I never went its way. This I now think rather stupid, for every day the morning papers predicted the movements of royalty, which seemed to be in perpetual movement, so that it must have been by chance that I never saw it arriving or departing at the stations where I was often doing the same.

Of course, no private person, not even the greatest nobleman, let alone the passing stranger, can possibly arrive and depart so much as the king and queen, and their many children, grandchildren, nephews, and nieces, and cousins of every remove. For the sovereigns themselves this incessant motion, though mitigated by every device of loyal affection and devotion on the part of their subjects, must be a great hardship, and greater as they get into years. The king’s formal office is simply to reign, but one wonders when he finds the time for reigning. He seems to be always setting out for Germany or Denmark or France, when he is not coming from Wales or Scotland or Ireland; and, when quietly at home in England, he is constantly away on visits to the houses of favored subjects, shooting pheasants or grouse or deer; or he is going from one horse-race to another or to some yacht-race or garden-party or whatever corresponds in England to a church sociable. It is impossible to enumerate the pleasures which must poison his life, as if the cares were not enough. In the case of the present king, who is so much liked and is so amiable and active, the perpetual movement affects the plebeian foreigner as something terrible. Never to be quiet; never to have a stretch of those long days and weeks of unbroken continuity dear to later life; ever to sit at strange tables and sample strange cookeries; to sleep under a different preacher every Sunday, and in a different bed every night; to wear all sorts of uniforms for all sorts of occasions, three or four times a day; to receive every manner of deputation, and try to show an interest in every manner of object — who would reign on such terms as these, if there were any choice of not reigning?

Evidently such a career cannot be managed without the help, the pretty constant help, of armed men; and the movement of troops in London from one point to another is one of the evidences of state which is so little static, so largely dynamic. It is a pretty sight, and makes one wish one were a child that one might fully enjoy it, whether it is the movement of a great mass of blood-red backs of men, or here and there a flaming squad, or a single vidette spurring on some swift errand, with his pennoned lance erect from his toe and his horse-hair crest streaming behind him. The soldiers always lend a brilliancy to the dull hue of civil life, and there is a never-failing sensation in the spectator as they pass afar or near. Of course, the supreme attraction in their sort for the newly arrived American is the pair of statuesque warriors who motionlessly sit their motionless steeds at the gates of the Horse-Guards, and express an archaic uselessness as perfectly as if they were Highlanders taking snuff before a tobacconist’s shop. When I first arrived in London in the earliest of those sad eighteen-sixties when our English brethren were equipping our Confederate brethren to sweep our commerce from the seas, I think I must have gone to see those images at the Horse-Guards even before I visited the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and they then perfectly filled my vast expectation; they might have been Gog and Magog, for their gigantic stature. In after visits, though I had a sneaking desire to see them again, I somehow could not find their place, being ashamed to ask for it, in my hope of happening on it, and I had formed the notion, which I confidently urged, that they had been taken down, like the Wellington statue from the arch. But the other day (or month, rather), when I was looking for Whitehall, suddenly there they were again, sitting their horses in the gateways as of yore, and as woodenly as if they had never stirred since 1861. They were unchanged in attitude, but how changed they were in person: so dwarfed, so shrunken, as if the intervening years had sapped the juices of their joints and let their bones fall together, like those of withered old men!

This was, of course, the unjust effect of my original exaggeration of their length and breadth. The troops that I saw marching through the streets where we first lodged were fine, large men. I myself saw no choice in the different bodies, but the little housemaid much preferred the grenadier guards to the Scotch guards; perhaps there was one grenadier guard who lent beauty and grandeur to the rest. I think Scotch caps are much gayer than those busbies which the grenadiers wear, but that, again, is a matter of taste; I certainly did not think the plaid pantaloons with which the Scotch guards hid the knees that ought to have been naked were as good as the plain trousers of their rivals. But they were all well enough, and the officers who sauntered along out of step on the sidewalk, or stoop-shoulderedly, as the English military fashion now is, followed the troops on horseback, were splendid fellows, who would go to battle as simply as to afternoon tea, and get themselves shot in some imperial cause as impersonally as their men.

There were large barracks in our neighborhood where one might have glimpses of the intimate life of the troops, such as shirt-sleeved figures smoking short pipes at the windows, or red coats hanging from the sills, or sometimes a stately bear-skin dangling from a shutter by its throat-latch. We were also near to the Chelsea Hospital, where soldiering had come to its last word in the old pensioners pottering about the garden-paths or sitting in the shade or sun. Wherever a red coat appeared it had its honorable obsequy in the popular interest, and if I might venture to sum up my impression of what I saw of soldiering in London I should say that it keeps its romance for the spectator far more than soldiering does in the Continental capitals, where it seems a slavery consciously sad and clearly discerned. It may be that a glamour clings to the English soldier because he has voluntarily enslaved himself as a recruit, and has not been torn an unwilling captive from his home and work, like the conscripts of other countries. On the same terms our own military are romantic.

IV

THE DUN YEAR’S BRILLIANT FLOWER

I had thought — rather cheaply, as I now realize — of offering, as a pendant for the scene of Fashion Meeting Itself in the Park on the Sunday noons and afternoons which I have tried to photograph, some picture of open-air life in the slums. But upon reflection I have decided that the true counterpart of that scene is to be found any week-day evening, when the weather is fair, on the grassy stretches which the Park rises into somewhat beyond the sacred close of high life. This space is also enclosed, but the iron fence which bounds it is higher and firmer, and there is nothing of such seclusion as embowering foliage gives. There are no trees on any side for many acres, and the golden-red sunset glow hovers with an Indian-summer mellowness in the low English heaven; or at least it did so at the end of one sultry day which I have in mind. From all the paths leading up out of Piccadilly there was a streaming tendency to the pleasant level, thickly and softly turfed, and already strewn with sitting and reclining shapes which a more impassioned imagination than mine might figure as the dead and wounded in some field of the incessant struggle of life. But, besides having no use for such a figure, I am withheld from it by a conscience against its unreality. Those people, mostly young people, are either sitting there in gossiping groups, or whispering pairs, or singly breathing a mute rapture of release from the day’s work. A young fellow lies stretched upon his stomach, propped by his elbows above the newspaper which the lingering light allows him to read; another has an open book under his eyes; but commonly each has the companionship of some fearless girl in the abandonment of the conventionalities which with us is a convention of summer ease on the sands beside the sea, but which is here without that extreme effect which the bathing-costume imparts on our beaches. These young people stretched side by side on the grass in Hyde Park added a pastoral charm to the scene, a suggestion of the

   “Bella et�, dell’ oro”

not to be had elsewhere in our iron civilization. One might accuse their taste, but certainly they were more interesting than the rows of young men perched on the top course of the fence, in a wide variety of straw hats, or even than the red-coated soldiers who boldly occupied the penny chairs along the walks and enjoyed each the vigorous rivalry of girls worshipping him on either hand.

They boldly occupied the penny chairs, for the danger that they would be made to pay was small. The sole collector, a man well in years and of a benevolent reluctance, passed casually among the rows of seats, and took pennies only from those who could most clearly afford it. There was a fence round a pavilion where a band was playing, and within there were spendthrifts who paid fourpence for their chairs, when the music could be perfectly well heard without charge outside. It was, in fact, heard there by a large audience of bicyclers of both sexes, who stood by their wheels in numbers unknown in New York since the fad of bicycling began to pass several years ago. The lamps shed a pleasant light upon the crowd, after the long afterglow of the sunset had passed and the first stars began to pierce the clear heavens. But there was always enough kindly obscurity to hide emotions that did not mind being seen, and to soften the details which could not be called beautiful. As the dark deepened, the prone shapes scattered by hundreds over the grass looked like peaceful flocks whose repose was not disturbed by the human voices or by the human feet that incessantly went and came on the paths. It was a touch, however illusory, of the rusticity which lingers in so many sorts at the heart of the immense city, and renders it at unexpected moments simple and homelike above all other cities.

The evening when this London pastoral offered itself was the close of a day of almost American heat. The mercury never went above eighty-three degrees, but the blood mounted ten degrees higher; though I think a good deal of the heat imparted itself through the eye from the lurid horizons paling upward into the dull, unbroken blue of the heavens, ordinarily overcast or heaped with masses of white cloud. A good deal came also from the thronged streets, in which the season had scarcely begun to waver, and the pulses of the plethoric town throbbed with a sense of choking fulness. The feverish activity of the cabs contributed to the effect of the currents and counter-currents, as they insinuated themselves into every crevice of the frequent “blocks,” where the populations of the bus-tops, deprived in their arrest of the artificial movement of air, sweltered in the sun, and the classes in private carriages of every order and degree suffered in a helpless equality with the perspiring masses.

Suddenly all London had burst into a passion of straw hats; and where one lately saw only the variance from silken cylinders to the different types of derbies and fedoras, there was now the glisten of every shape of panama, tuscan, and chip head-gear, with a prevalence of the low, flat-topped hard-brimmed things that mocked with the rigidity of sheet-iron the conception of straw as a light and yielding material. Men with as yet only one foot in the grave can easily remember when the American picked himself out in the London crowd by his summer hat, but now, in his belated conformity to an extinct ideal, his head is apt to be one of the few cylindered or derbied heads in the swarming processions of Piccadilly or the paths in the Park. No shape of straw hat is peculiar to any class, but the slouching panama is for pecuniary reasons more the wear of rank and wealth. With a brim flared up in front and scooped down behind, it justifies its greater acceptance with youth; age and middle-age wear its weave and the tuscan braid in the fedora form; and now and then one saw the venerable convention of the cockaded footman’s and coachman’s silk hat mocked in straw. No concession more extreme could be made to the heat, and these strange cylinders, together with the linen liveries which accompanied them, accented the excesses in which the English are apt to indulge their common-sense when they decide to give way to it. They have apparently decided to give way to it in the dress of both sexes on the bridle-paths of the Park, where individual caprice is the sole law that obtains amid a general anarchy.

The effect, upon the whole, is exhilarating, and suggests the daring thought that, if ever their race decides to get on without government of any sort, they will rid themselves of it with a thoroughness and swiftness past the energy of dynamite, and cast church and state, with all their dignities, to the winds as lightly as they have discarded the traditional costumes of Rotten Row. The young girls and young men in flapping panamas, in tunics and jackets of every kind and color, gave certainly an agreeable liveliness to the spectacle, which their elders emulated by expressions of taste as personal and unconventional. A lady in the old-fashioned riding-habit and a black top-hat with a floating veil recalled a former day, but she was obviously riding to lose weight, in a brief emergence from the past to which she belonged. One man similarly hatted, but frock-coated and not veiled, is scarcely worthy of note; but no doubt he was gratifying an individual preference as distinct as that of the rest. He did not contribute so much to the sense of liberation from the heat as the others who, when it reached its height, frankly confessed its power by riding in greatly diminished numbers. By twelve o’clock scarcely one left of all those joyous youths, those jolly sires and grandsires, those happy children, matched in size with their ponies, as the elders were in their different mounts, remains to distract the eye from the occupants of the two rows of penny chairs and the promenaders between them.

It was a less formidable but possibly more interesting show of what seemed society at home than the Sunday-afternoon reception in the consecrated closes on the grass. People who knew one another stopped and gossiped, and people who knew nobody passed on and tried to ignore them. But that could not have been easy. The women whom those handsome, aristocratic men bowed over, or dropped into chairs beside, or saluted as they went by, were very beautiful women, and dressed with that sentiment which has already been celebrated. Their draperies fluttered in the gay breeze which vied with the brilliant sun in dappling them with tremulous leaf-shadows, and in making them the life of a picture to be seen nowhere else. It was not necessary to know just who, or just of what quality they were, in order to realize their loveliness.

Behind the walks and under the trees the grass had still something of its early summer freshness; but in its farther stretches it was of our August brown, and in certain spaces looked burned to the roots. The trees themselves had begun to relax their earlier vigor, and the wind blew showers of yellowing leaves from their drooping boughs. Towards the close of the season, on the withered grass, quite in the vicinity of those consecrated social closes, to which I am always returning with a snobbish fondness, I saw signs of the advance of the great weary army which would possess the pleasure-grounds of the town when the pleasurers had left it. Already the dead-tired, or possibly the dead-drunk, had cast themselves, as if they had been shot down there, with their faces in the lifeless grass, and lay in greasy heaps and coils where the delicate foot of fashion had pressed the green herbage. As among the spectators I thought I noted an increasing number of my countrymen and women, so in the passing vehicles I fancied more and more of them in the hired turnouts which cannot long keep their secret from the critical eye. These were as obvious to conjecture as some other turnouts, which I fancied of a decayed ancestrality: cumbrous landaus and victorias, with rubberless tires, which grumbled and grieved in their course for the passati tempi, and expressed a rheumatic scorn for the parvenu carriages, and for all the types of motors which more and more invade the drives of the Park. They had a literary quality, and were out of Thackeray and Trollope, in the dearth of any modern society novelists great enough for them to be out of.

If such novelists had not been wanting I am sure I should not be left with the problem of an extremely pretty and charming woman whose scarf one morning so much engaged the eye of the gentleman sitting beside another extremely pretty and charming woman, that he left her and came and sat down by the new-comer, who let him play with the fringe of her scarf. Was she in a manner playing him with it? A thoroughly equipped society fiction, such as the English now lack, would have instructed me, and taught me the mystic meaning of the young girls who fluttered up and down the paths by twos and threes, exquisite complexions, exquisite shapes, exquisite profiles, exquisite costumes, in a glad momentary freedom from chaperonage. It would fix even the exact social value of that companion of a lady stopped in chat by that other lady, who was always hopping up and stopping people of her acquaintance. The companion was not of her acquaintance, nor was she now made of it; she stood statue-still and sphinx-patient in the walk, and only an eye ever avid of story could be aware of the impassioned tapping of the little foot whose mute drama faintly agitated the hem of her drapery. Was she poor and proud, or was she rich and scornful in her relation to the encounter from which she remained excluded? The lady who had left her standing rejoined her and they drifted off together into the vast of the unfathomed, but not, I like to believe, the unfathomable.

When the heat broke at last, after a fortnight, of course it did not break. That would have been a violence of which English weather would not have been capable. There was no abrupt drop of the mercury, as if a trap were sprung under it, after the fashion with us. It softly gave way in a gradual, delicious coolness, which again mellowed at the edges, as it were, and dissolved in a gentle, tentative rain. But how far the rain might finally go, we did not stay to see: we had fled from the “anguish of the solstice,” as we had felt it in London, and by the time the first shower insinuated itself we were in the heart of the Malvern Hills.

Of course, this heated term was not as the heated terms of New York are; but it excelled them in length, if not in breadth and thickness. The nights were always cool, and that was a saving grace which our nights do not know; with nights like ours so long a heat would have been unendurable, but in London one woke each morning with renewed hope and renewed strength. Very likely there were parts of London where people despaired and weakened through the night, but in these polite perspectives I am trying to exclude such places; and whenever I say “one” in this relation, I am imagining one of the many Americans who witness the London season perhaps oftener from the outside than the inside, but who still can appreciate and revere its facts.

The season was said to begin very late, and it was said to be a very “bad” season, throughout May, when the charges of those who live by it ordinarily feel an expansive rise; when rooms at hotels become difficult, become impossible; when the rents of apartments double themselves, and apartments are often not to be had at any price; when the face of the cabman clouds if you say you want him by the hour, and clears if you add that you will make it all right with him; when every form of service begins to have the courage of its dependence; and the manifold fees which ease the social machine seem to lubricate it so much less than the same fees in April; when the whole vast body of London groans with a sense of repletion such as no American city knows except in the rare congestion produced by a universal exposition or a national convention. Such a congestion is of annual occurrence in London, and is the symptomatic expression of the season; but the symptoms ordinarily recognizable in May were absent until June in the actual year. They were said to have been suppressed by the reluctance of the tardy spring, and again by the king’s visit to Ireland. As the king is the fountain of social prosperity it is probable that he had more to do with delaying the season than the weather had; but by what one hears said of him he would not have willingly delayed it. He is not only a well-meaning and well-doing prince, one hears from people of every opinion, but a promoter of peace and international concord (especially with France, where his good offices are believed to have been peculiarly effective), and he is, rather more expectedly, a cheerful sovereign, loving the gayety as well as the splendor of state, and fond of seeing the world enjoy itself.

It is no betrayal of the national confidence to repeat what every one says concerning the present outburst of fashion, that it is a glad compliance with the king’s liking; the more eager because of its long suppression during the late queen’s reign and the more anxious because of a pathetic apprehension inspired by the well-known serious temperament of the heir-apparent to the throne. No doubt the joyful rebound from the depression of the Boer war is also still felt; but for whatever reason London life is gay and glad, it is certainly making its hay while the sun shines, and it mixes as many poppies and daisies with the crop as possible against the time when only grass may be acceptable. In other terms the prevailing passion for pretty clothes in the masses as well as the classes is the inspiration of the court, while the free personal preferences expressed are probably the effect of that strong, that headstrong, instinct of being like one’s self, whether one is like others or not, which has always moulded precedence and tradition to individual convenience with the English. One would not have said that a frock-coat of lustrous black alpaca was just the wear for a tall middle-aged gentleman in a silk hat and other scrupulous appointments; but when he appeared in it one hottest Sunday afternoon in that consecrated close of Hyde Park, and was welcomed by the inmost flower-group of the gorgeous parterre, one had to own a force of logic in it. If a frock-coat was the proper thing for the occasion in general, then the lightest and coolest fabric was the thing for that occasion in particular. So the wearer had reasoned in sublime self-reliance, and so, probably, the others reasoned in intelligent acquiescence.

Just what quality he had the courage of one could not have guessed at a distance, and he must remain part of the immense question which London continues for the inquirer to the last; but it is safe to say that he looked distinguished. Out of season, the London type of man looked undistinguished, but when the season began to make London over, the pavement of Piccadilly sprouted in a race of giants who were as trees walking. They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty of complexion, of course, and as great beauty of feature. They were doubtless the result of a natural selection, to which money for buying perfect conditions had contributed as much as the time necessary for growing a type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only now and then hard or cruel; but one need not be especially averse to the English classification of our species to feel that they had cost more than they were worth. The very handsomest man I saw, with the most perfectly patrician profile (if we imagine something delicately aquiline to be particularly patrician), was a groom who sat his horse beside Rotten Row, waiting till his master should come to command the services of both. He too had the look of long descent, but if it could not be said that he had cost the nation too much time and money, it might still be conjectured that he had cost some one too much of something better.

Next after these beautiful people I think that in the multitudinously varied crowd of London I saw no men so splendidly, so brilliantly, so lustrously handsome as three of those imperial British whose lives are safer, but whose social status is scarcely better than that of our negroes. They were three tall young Hindoos, in native dress, and white-turbaned to their swarthy foreheads, who suddenly filed out of the crowd, looking more mystery from their liquid eyes than they could well have corroborated in word or thought, and bringing to the metropolis of the West the gorgeous and foolish magnificence of the sensuous East. What did they make of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or without rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferiority in the imperial scheme? If looks went for what looks rarely do, except in women, they should have been the lords of those they met; but as it was they were simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under British rule. Somehow they brought the sense of this home to the beholder, as none of the monuments or memorials of England’s imperial glory had done, and then, having fulfilled their office, lost themselves in the crowd.

V

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS

The specialization of those fatuous Orientals, transient as it was, was of far greater duration than that of most individual impressions from the London crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a powerful light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific wavelet; but these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred record with the most instantaneous apparatus. What remains of the vision of that long succession of streets called by successive names from Knightsbridge to Ludgate Hill is the rush of a human torrent, in which you are scarcely more aware of the single life than of any given ripple in a river. Men, women, children form the torrent, but each has been lost to himself in order to give it the collective immensity which abides in your mind’s eye.

To the American city-dweller the London omnibus is archaic. Except for the few slow stages that lumber up and down Fifth Avenue, we have hardly anything of the omnibus kind in the whole length and breadth of our continent, and it is with perpetual astonishment and amusement that one finds it still prevailing in London, quite as if it were not as gross an anachronism as the war-chariot or the sedan-chair. It is ugly, and bewilderingly painted over with the names of its destinations, and clad with signs of patent medicines and new plays and breakfast foods in every color but the colors of the rainbow. It is ponderous and it rumbles forward with a sound of thunder, and the motion of a steamer when they put the table-racks on. Seen from the pavement, or from the top of another omnibus, it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the single example, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses coming towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in the collective uncouthness which becomes of a tremendous grandeur. The procession bears onward whole populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and lurching with the elephantine gait of things which can no more capsize than they can keep an even pace. Of all the sights of London streets, this procession of the omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common herd of Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft seems to suffer a change into something almost as rich as strange. They are no longer ordinary or less than ordinary men and women bent on the shabby businesses that preoccupy the most of us; they are conquering princes, making a progress in a long triumph, and looking down upon a lower order of human beings from their wobbling steeps. It enhances their apparent dignity that they whom they look down upon are not merely the drivers of trucks and wagons of low degree, but often ladies of title in their family carriages, under the care of the august family coachman and footman, or gentlemen driving in their own traps or carts, or fares in the hansoms that steal their swift course through and by these ranks; the omnibuses are always the most monumental fact of the scene. They dominate it in bulk and height; they form the chief impulse of the tremendous movement, and it is they that choke from time to time the channel of the mighty torrent, and helplessly hold it in the arrest of a block.

No one can forecast the moment when, or the place where, a block may happen; but mostly it occurs in mid-afternoon, at the intersection of some street where a line of vehicles is crossing the channel of the torrent. Suddenly all is at a stand-still, and one of those wonderful English policemen, who look so slight and young after the vast blue bulks of our Irish force, shows himself in the middle of the channel, and holds back its rapids with the quiet gesture of extended hands. The currents and counter-currents gather and press from the rear and solidify, but in the narrow fissure the policeman stands motionless, with only some such slight stir of his extended hands as a cat imparts to her “conscious tail” when she waits to spring upon her prey.

The mute language of his hands, down to the lightest accent of the fingers, is intelligible to the dullest of those concerned in its interpretation, and is telepathically despatched from the nearest to the farthest driver in the block. While the policeman stands there in the open space, no wheel or hoof stirs, and it does not seem as if the particles of the mass could detach themselves for such separate movement as they have at the best. Softly, almost imperceptibly, he drops his arms, and lets fall the viewless barrier which he had raised with them; he remains where he was, but the immense bodies he had stayed liquefy and move in their opposite courses, and for that time the block is over.

If ever London has her epic poet, I think he will sing the omnibus; but the poet who sings the hansom must be of a lyrical note. I do not see how he could be too lyrical, for anything more like song does not move on wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play of fancy in that impetuous form. We have the hansom with us, but it does not perform the essential part in New York life that it does in London life. In New York you may take a hansom; in London you must. You serve yourself of it as at home you serve yourself of the electric car; but not by any means at the same rate. Nothing is more deceitful than the cheapness of the hansom, for it is of such an immediate and constant convenience that the unwary stranger’s shilling has slipped from him in a sovereign before he knows, with the swift succession of occasions when the hansom seems imperative. A ‘bus is inexpensive, but it is stolid and bewildering; a hansom is always cheerfully intelligent. It will set you down at the very place you seek; you need walk neither to it nor from it; a nod, a glance, summons it or dismisses. The ‘bus may be kind, but it is not flattering, and the hansom is flattering as well as kind; flattering to one’s pride, one’s doubt, one’s timid hope. It takes all the responsibility for your prompt and unerring arrival; and you may trust it almost implicitly. At any point in London you can bid it go to any other with a confidence that I rarely found abused. Once, indeed, my cabman carried me a long way about at midnight, and when he finally left me at my door, he was disposed to be critical of its remoteness, while he apologized for the delay. I suggested that in a difficulty like his a map of London would be a good thing; but though he was so far in drink as to be able to take the joke in good part, he denied that a map would be of the least use to a cabman. Probably he was right; my map was not of the least use to me; and his craft seemed to feel their way about through the maze of streets and squares and circles by the same instinct that serves a pilot on a river in the dark. Their knowledge is a thing of the nerves, not of the brains, if there is a difference; or if there is none, then it is an affair of the subliminal consciousness, it is inspiration, it is genius. It could not well be overpaid, and the cabmen are careful that it is not underpaid. I heard, indeed, of two American ladies who succeeded in underpaying their cabman; this was their belief resting upon his solemn declaration; but I myself failed in every attempt of the kind. My cabman always said that it was not enough; and then I compromised by giving him too much. Many stories are told of the abusiveness of the class, but a simple and effective rule is to overpay them at once and be done with it. I have sometimes had one cast a sorrowing glance at the just fare pressed into his down-stretched palm, and drive off in thankless silence; but any excess of payment was met with eager gratitude. I preferred to buy the cabman’s good-will, because I find this is a world in which I am constantly buying the good-will of people whom I do not care the least for, and I did not see why I should make an exception of cabmen. Only once did I hold out against an extortionate demand of theirs. That was with a cabman who drove me to the station, and said: “I’ll have to get another sixpence for this, sir.” “Well,” I returned, with a hardihood which astonished me, “you won’t get it of me.” But I was then leaving London, and was no longer afraid. Now, such is the perversity of the human spirit, I am sorry he did not get the other sixpence of me. One always regrets these acts of justice, especially towards any class of fellow-beings whose habits of prey are a sort of vested rights. It is even in your own interest to suffer yourself to be plundered a little; it stimulates the imagination of the plunderer to high conceptions of equity, of generosity, which eventuate in deeds of exemplary honesty. Once, one of the party left a shawl in the hansom of a cabman whom I had, after my custom and principle, overpaid, and who had left us at a restaurant upon our second thought against a gallery where we had first proposed to be put down. We duly despaired, but we went and saw the pictures, and when we came out of the gallery there was our good cabman lying in wait to identify us as the losers of the shawl which he had found in his cab. Is it credible that if he had been paid only his legal fare he would have been at such virtuous pains? It may, indeed, be surmised that if the shawl was not worth more than an imaginable reward for its restoration he was actuated by self-interest, but this is a view of our common nature which I will not take.

One hears a good deal of the greater quiet of London after New York. I think that what you notice is a difference in the quality of the noise in London. What is with us mainly a harsh, metallic shriek, a grind of trolley wheels upon trolley tracks, and a wild battering of their polygonized circles upon the rails, is in London the dull, tormented roar of the omnibuses and the incessant cloop-cloop of the cab-horses’ hoofs. Between the two sorts of noise there is little choice for one who abhors both. The real difference is that in many neighborhoods you can more or less get away from the specialized noises in London, but you never can do this in New York. You hear people saying that in these refuges the London noise is mellowed to a soft pour of sound, like the steady fall of a cataract, which effectively is silence; but that is not accurate. The noise is broken and crushed in a huge rumble without a specialized sound, except when, after midnight, the headlong clatter of a cab-horse distinguishes itself from the prevailing bulk. But the New York noise is never broken and crushed into a rumble; it bristles with specific accents, night and day, which agonizingly assort themselves one from another, and there is no nook or corner where you can be safe from them, as you can measurably be in London.

London is, if anything, rather more infested than New York with motors, as the English more simply and briefly call automobiles. The perspective is seldom free of them, and from time to time the air is tainted with their breath, which is now one of the most characteristic stenches of civilization. They share equally with other vehicles the drives in the parks, though their speed is tempered there to the prevalent pace. They add to the general noise the shuddering bursts of their swift percussions, and make the soul shrink from a forecast of what the aeroplane may be when it shall come hurtling overhead with some peculiar screech as yet unimagined. The motor plays an even more prominent part in the country than in London, especially in those remnants of time which the English call weekends, and which stretch from Friday afternoon to the next Monday morning. It is within these limits that people are ordinarily “asked down,” and as the host usually lives from five to ten miles from the nearest station, the guest is met there by a motor which hurls him over the intervening ground at the speed of the train he has just left. The motor is still the rich man’s pleasure, as the week-end is his holiday; and it will be long before the one will be the poor man’s use, or the other his leisure. For the present he must content himself, in England, at least, with his own legs, and with the bank-holiday which now comes so often as to be dreaded by his betters when it lets him loose upon their travel and sojourn in excursional multitude. This is not likely ever to come under question of affecting the London season, as one heard the week-end accused of doing. It was theorized that people went out of town so much, in order to be at home in the country for their friends, that with two afternoons and three nights lost to the festivities of London, the season was sensibly if not vitally affected. But that was in the early weeks of it. As it grew and prospered through the latter half of June and the whole of July, the week-end, as an inimical factor, was no longer mentioned. It even began to be recognized as an essential element of the season. Like the king’s visits to Denmark, to Ireland, to Germany, it really served to intensify the season.

At this point, I find it no longer possible to continue celebrating that great moment in the social life of a vast empire without accusing myself of triviality and hypocrisy. I have become aware that I really care nothing about it, and know almost as little. I fancy that with most English people who have passed the heyday of their youth, perhaps without having drunk deeply, or at all, of the delirious fountain of fashion, it is much the same. The purpose that the season clearly serves is annually gathering into the capital great numbers of the people best worth meeting from all parts of the world-wide English dominion, with many aliens of distinction, not counting Americans, who are held a kind of middle species by the natives. It is a time of perpetual breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners, receptions, concerts, and for those who can bear it, balls till the day of twenty-four hours’ pleasure begins again, with the early rites of Rotten Row. Those who have a superfluity of invitations go on at night from one house to another till they fall lifeless into bed at their own. One may fancy, if one likes, that they show the effects of their pleasure the next day, that many a soft cheek pales its English rose under the flapping panama hats among the riders in the Park, and that, lively as they still are, they tend rather to be phantoms of delight. But perhaps this is not so. What is certain is that for those who do not abuse the season it is a time of fine as well as high enjoyment, when the alien, or the middle species, if he is known, or even tolerably imagined, may taste a cup of social kindness, of hospitality, deeper if not richer than any in the world. I do not say that one of the middle species will find in it the delicate, the wild, the piquant flavors of certain remembered cups of kindness at home; and I should not say this even if it were true; but he will be an ungrateful and ungracious guest if he criticises. He will more wisely and justly accuse himself of having lost his earlier zest, if he does not come away always thinking, “What interesting people I have met!”

VI

SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION

It is perhaps more than possible that among the interesting people one meets at luncheons and teas and dinners, there will be, or have been, other Americans; and this suggests the perilous question whether the English like the Americans better than formerly. An Englishman might counter by asking whether the Americans like the English better than formerly; but that would not be answering the question, which I hope to leave very much where I found it. Yet Americans have heard and read so much of their increasing national favor with their contemporary ancestors that they may be excused if not satisfied in a curiosity as to the fact. Is the universal favor which an emotional and imaginative press like ours has portrayed them as presently enjoying in England a reality, or is it one of the dreams which our press now and then indulges, and of which the best that can be said is that they do no harm?

One not only hears of this favor at home, but when one goes to England one still hears of it. To be sure one hears of it mainly from Americans, but they have the best means of knowing the fact; they are chiefly concerned, and they are supported in their belief by the almost unvaried amenity of the English journals, which now very rarely take the tone towards Americans formerly habitual with them. Their change of tone is the most obvious change which I think Americans can count upon noting when they come to England, and I am far from reckoning it insignificant. It did not happen of the newspapers themselves; it must be the expression of a prevalent mood, if not a very deeply rooted feeling in their readers. One hears of their interest, their kindness, not from the Americans alone; the English themselves sometimes profess it, and if they overestimate us, the generous error is in the right direction. At the end it must cease to be an error, for, as we Americans all know, we need only to be better understood in order to be more highly prized. Besides, liking is much oftener the effect of willing than has been supposed.

But if the case were quite the contrary, if it were obvious to the casual experience of the American traveller or sojourner in England, that his nationality was now liked less rather than more there, I should still be sorry to disturb what is at the worst no worse than a fond illusion. The case is by no means the contrary, and yet in consenting to some reason in the iridescence which the situation wears in the American fancy I should wish to distinguish. For a beginning I should not wish to go farther than to say that the sort of Englishmen who have always liked Americans, because they have liked the American ideal and the kind of character realized from it, now probably like them better than ever. They are indeed less critical of our departure from our old ideal than some Americans, perhaps because they have not foreseen, as such Americans have foreseen, the necessary effect in American character. They can still allow themselves the pleasure which comes from being confirmed in an impression by events, and in that pleasure they may somewhat romance us; but even such Englishmen are not blindly fond of us. The other sort of Englishmen, the sort that never liked our ideal or our character, probably now like us as little as ever, except as they have noted our change of ideal, and expect a change of character. To them we may very well have seemed a sort of civic dissenters, with the implication of some such quality of offence as the notion of dissent suggests to minds like theirs. We had a political religion like their own, with a hierarchy, a ritual, an establishment all complete, and we violently broke with it. But it is safe to conjecture that this sort of Englishman is too old or too old-fashioned to live much longer; he suffers with the decay of certain English interests which the American prosperity imperilled before it began to imperil English ideals, if it has indeed done so. His dying out counts for an increase of favor for us; we enjoy through it a sort of promotion by seniority.

But a new kind of Englishman has come up of late years, and so far as he is friendly to us his friendliness should be more gratifying than that even of our older friends. He has been in America, either much or little, and has come to like us because he has seen us at home. If such an Englishman is rich and noble, he has seen our plutocracy, and has liked it because it is lively and inventive in its amusements and profusely original in its splendors; but he need not be poor and plebeian to have seen something of our better life, and divined something of our real meaning from it. He will not be to blame if he has not divined our whole meaning; for we are at present rather in the dark as to that ourselves, and certainly no American who met him in England could wish to blame him, for his cordiality forms the warmest welcome that the American can have there. If he has been in America and not liked us, or our order or ideal, he has still the English good-nature, and if you do not insist upon being taken nationally, there are many chances that he will take you personally, and if he finds you not at all like an American, he will like you, as he liked others in America whom he found not at all like Americans.

It is the foible, however, of many Americans, both at home and abroad, that they want to be taken nationally, and not personally, by foreigners. Beyond any other people we wish to be loved by other peoples, even by others whom we do not love, and we wish to be loved in the lump. We would like to believe that somehow our sheer Americanism rouses the honor and evokes the veneration of the alien, and as we have long had a grudge against the English, we would be particularly glad to forget it in a sense of English respect and affection. We would fain believe that the English have essentially changed towards us, but we might easily deceive ourselves, as we could realize if we asked ourselves the reasons for such a change.

The English are very polite, far politer than they have been represented, and they will not wittingly wound the American visitor, unless for just cause, like business, or the truth. Still, I should say that the American will fare best with them if he allows himself to be taken individually, rather than typically. One’s nationality is to others, after a first moment of surprise, a bore and a nuisance, which cannot be got out of the way too soon. I cannot keep my interest in a German or an Italian because he is such; and why should not it be the same with an Englishman in regard to Americans? If he thinks about our nationality at all, in its historical character, it is rather a pill, which he may be supposed to take unwillingly, whether he believes we were historically right or not. He may say just things about it, but he will say them more for the profit of Englishmen than for the pleasure of Americans. With our pleasure nationally an Englishman is very little concerned, and either he thinks it out of taste to show any curiosity concerning us, in the bulk, or else he feels none. He has lately read and heard a good deal of talk about us; but I doubt if it has indelibly impressed him. If we have lately done things which in their way could not be ignored, they could certainly be forgotten, and many Englishmen, in spite of them, still remain immensely incurious about us. The American who wishes to be taken nationally by them must often inspire them with a curiosity about us, before he can gratify it, and that is a species of self-indulgence which leaves a pang.

The English have, or they often express, an amiable notion of us as enormously rich, and perhaps they think we are vain of our millionaires, and would be flattered by an implication of wealth as common to us all as our varying accent. But it is as hard for some of us to live up to a full pocket as for others to live up to a full brain. It is hard even to meet the expectation that you will know, or know about, our tremendously moneyed people; but here is a curiosity which you do not have to inspire before you gratify it, for it exists already, while as to our political affairs, or even our military or naval affairs, not to speak of our scientific or literary affairs, the curiosity that you gratify you must first have inspired.

Their curiosity as to our riches does not judge the English, as might be supposed. They are very romantic, with a young, lusty appetite for the bizarre and the marvellous, as their taste in fiction evinces; and they need not be contemned as sordid admirers of money because they wish to know the lengths it can go to with the people who seem to be just now making the most money. Their interest in a phenomenon which we ourselves have not every reason to be proud of, is not without justification, as we must allow if we consider a little, for if we consider, we must own that our greatest achievement in the last twenty or thirty years has been in the heaping up of riches. Our magnificent success in that sort really eclipses our successes in every other, and the average American who comes abroad must be content to shine in the reflected glory of those Americans who have recently, more than any others, rendered our name illustrious. If we do not like the fact all that we have to do is to set about doing commensurate things in art, in science, in letters, or even in arms.

It will not quite do to say that the non-millionaire American enjoys in England the interest mixed with commiseration which is the lot of a poor relation of the great among kindly people. That would not be true, and possibly the fact is merely that the name American first awakens in the English some such associations with riches as the name South African awakened before it awakened others more poignant and more personal. Already the South African had begun to rival the American in the popular imagination; as the Boer war fades more and more into the past, the time may come when we shall be confusedly welcomed as Africanders or South Americans.

If I were to offer what I have been saying as my opinions, or my conclusions from sufficient observations I should be unfair, if not uncandid. The sum of what one sees and hears in a foreign country is as nothing to the sum of what one does not see and hear; and the immense balance may be so far against the foregoing inferences that it is the part of mere prudence to declare that they are not my opinions or conclusions, but are only impressions, vague and hurried, guesses from cursory observations, deductions from slight casual incidents. They are mere gleams from social facets, sparks struck out by chance encounter, and never glancing lights from the rarefied atmosphere in which the two nations have their formal reciprocities. For all that I have really the right to say from substantial evidence to the contrary, I might very well say that the English value us for those things of the mind and soul which we are somewhat neglectful of ourselves, and I insist the more, therefore, that it is only their love of fairy-tales which is taken with the notion of an opulence so widespread among us as to constitute us a nation of potential, if not actual, millionaires.

They would hasten to reproach me, I am afraid, for speaking of England, though merely for purposes of illustration, as a foreign country. One is promptly told that Americans are not regarded as foreigners in England, and is left to conjecture one’s self a sort of compromise between English and alien, a little less kin than Canadian and more kind than Australian. The idea has its quaintness; but the American in England has been singularly unfortunate if he has had reason to believe that the kindness done him is not felt. What has always been true of the English is true now. They do not say or do the thing which is not, out of politeness; their hypocrisies, if they have any, are for their God, and not for their fellow-man. When they talk of their American brethren, they mean it; just as when they do not talk of them so they mean something less, or nothing at all. The American who wishes to be taken nationally, may trust any expression friendly to our nation that he hears; but still I think he will have a better time if he prefers being taken personally. That is really making one’s self at home in a different, I will no longer say a foreign, country; the English are eager hosts, and wish you to make yourself at home — if they like you. Nationally we cannot make ourselves, or be made at home, except in the United States. To any other people, to people sometimes claiming to be nearer than the first degree of cousinship, our nationality, taking it in bulk, is necessarily a mystery. We are so very like them; why should we be so very unlike them? The difference puzzles them, annoys them; why seek points of it, and turn them to the light? The same mystery distresses the American when the points of their difference are turned to the light. A man’s nationality is something he is justly proud of, but not till it is put aside can the man of another nation have any joy of him humanly, spiritually. If you insist upon talking to the English about American things, you have them in an unknown world, a really unknowable world, as you yourself know it; and you bewilder and weary them, unless they are studying Americanism, and then they still do not understand you. You are speaking English, but the meaning is a strange tongue.

I say again that I do not know why any one should wish to be caressed for his nationality. I think one might more self-respectfully wish to be liked for one’s self than joined with a hundred million compatriots, and loved in the lump. If the English, however, are now trying to love us nationally we should be careful not to tax their affections too heavily, or demand too much of them. We must remember that they are more apt to be deceived by our likeness to themselves than by our unlikeness. When an Englishman and an American meet on common ground they have arrived from opposite poles. The Englishman, though he knows the road the American has come, cannot really imagine it. His whole experience of life has taught him that if you have come that road, you are not the kind of man you seem; therefore, you have not come that road, or else you are another kind of man. He revolves in a maze of hopeless conjecture; he gives up trying to guess your conundrum, and reads into you the character of some Englishman of parallel tradition. If he likes you after that, you may be sure it is for yourself and not for your nation. All the same he may not know it, and may think he likes you because you are an agreeable American.

My line of reasoning, or I had better say of fancying (that, on such dangerous ground, is safest), is forcing an inference from which I shrink a little; it seems so very bold, so very contrary to recent prepossessions. But the candor which I would be so glad not to practise, obliges me to say that I think the American who is himself interesting, would have been as welcome in England twenty-five years ago as at this day, and he would not have been expected to be rich, or to have the acquaintance of rich Americans. Already, at that remote period, certain fellow-countrymen of ours had satisfied the English taste for wildness in us. There had been Buffalo Bill, with his show, and there had been other Buffalo Bills, literary ones, who were themselves shows. There had then arisen a conjecture, a tardy surmise, of an American fineness, which might be as well in its way as the American wildness, and the American who had any imaginable touch of this found as warm a liking ready for him then as the wild American found earlier, or the rich American finds later.

In fact, interesting Americans have always been personally liked in England, if I must really go to the extreme of saying it. What the English now join in owning, if the question of greater kindness between the two countries comes up, is that their ruling class made a vast mistake in choosing, officiously though not officially, the side of the South in our Civil War. They own it frankly, eagerly. But they owned the same thing frankly, if not so eagerly, twenty-five years ago. Even during the Civil War, I doubt if an acceptable American would have suffered personally among them. He would have suffered nationally, but he has now and then to suffer so still, for they cannot have the same measure of his nationality as he, and they necessarily tread upon its subtile circumferences here and there.

From the very beginning of Americanism the case has been the same. The American in England during the Civil War was strangely unfortunate if he did not meet many and great Englishmen who thought and felt with him; and if there were now any American so stricken in years as to be able to testify from his own experience of the English attitude towards us in the War of Independence, he could tell us of the outspoken and constant sympathy of Chatham, Burke, Fox, Walpole, and their like, with the American cause — which they counted the English cause. He could tell of the deep undercurrent of favor among the English people, which the superficial course of power belied and at last ceased to control, in our earlier vital war as well as in our later.

So much for that consideration of us nationally, which I do not think England, in her quality of hostess, is bound to show her several American guests. I do not blame her that the sympathy of her greatest sons, so far as it has been shown us nationally, has been shown in her interest, which they believed the supreme interest of mankind, rather than in our interest, which it is for us to believe the supreme interest of mankind. Even when they are talking America they are thinking England; they cannot otherwise; they must; it is imperative; it is essential that they should. We talk of England on the same terms, with our own inner version.

There is another point in this inquiry which I hesitate to touch, and which if I were better advised I should not touch — that is, the English interest in the beauty and brilliancy of our women. Their charm is now magnanimously conceded and now violently confuted in their public prints; now and then an Englishman lets himself go — over his own signature even, at times — and denounces our women, their loveliness, their liveliness, their goodness, in terms which if I repeated them would make some timider spirits pause in their resolution to marry English dukes and run English society. But his hot words are hardly cold before another Englishman comes to the rescue of our countrywomen, and lifts them again to that pinnacle where their merits quite as much as the imagination of their novelists have placed them. Almost as much as our millionaires they are the object of a curiosity which one has not had to inspire. Where, in what part, in which favored city, do they most abound? What is the secret of their dazzling wit and beauty, the heart of their mystery? The most ardent of their votaries must flush in generous deprecation when those orphic inquiries flow from lips quite as divine as their own.

For the rest, if there is really that present liking for Americans in England, which we must wish to touch with all delicacy as the precious bloom of a century-plant at last coming to flower, the explanation may be sought perhaps in an effect of the English nature to which I shall not be the one to limit it. They have not substantially so much as phenomenally changed towards us. They are, like ourselves, always taking stock, examining themselves to see what they have on hand. From time to time they will, say, accuse themselves of being insular, and then, suddenly, they invite themselves to be continental, to be French, to be German, to be Italian, to be Bulgarian, or whatever; and for a while they believe that they have become so. All this time they remain immutably English. It is not that they are insensible of their defects; they tell themselves of them in clamorous tones; and of late, possibly, they have asked themselves why they are not what they think the Americans are in certain things. If the logic of their emotions in this direction were a resolution to like all the Americans with a universal affection, I should admire their spirit, but I should feel a difficulty in its operation for a reason which I hesitate to confess; I do not like all the Americans myself.

VII

IN THE GALLERY OF THE COMMONS

In speaking of any specific social experience it is always a question of how far one may pardonably err on the side of indiscretion; and if I remember here a dinner in the basement of the House of Commons — in a small room of the architectural effect of a chapel in a cathedral crypt — it is with the sufficiently meek hope of keeping well within bounds which only the nerves can ascertain.

The quaintness of the place may have contributed to an uncommon charm in the occasion; but its charm was perhaps a happy accident which would have tried in vain to repeat itself even there. It ended in a visit to the House, where the strangers were admitted on the rigid terms and in the strict limits to which non-members must submit themselves. But one might well undergo much more in order to hear John Burns speak in the place to which he has fought his right under a system of things as averse as can be imagined to a working-man’s sharing in the legislation for working-men. The matter in hand that night chanced to be one peculiarly interesting to a believer in the people’s doing as many things as possible for themselves, as the body politic, instead of leaving them to a variety of bodies corporate. The steamboat service on the Thames had grown so insufficient and so inconvenient that it was now a question of having it performed by the London County Council, which should be authorized to run lines of boats solely in the public interest, and not merely for the pleasure and profit of directors and stockholders. The monstrous proposition did not alarm those fears of socialism which anything of the kind would have roused with us; nobody seemed to expect that blowing up the Parliament buildings with dynamite would be the next step towards anarchy. There was a good deal of hear-hearing from Mr. Burns’s friends, with some friendly chaffing from his enemies as he went on, steadily and quietly, with his statement of the case; but there was no serious opposition to the measure which was afterwards carried in due course of legislation.

I was left to think two or three things about the matter which, though not strictly photographic, are yet so superficial that they will not be out of place here. Several members spoke besides Mr. Burns, but the labor leader was easily first, not only in the business quality of what he said, but in his business fashion of saying it. As much as any of them, as the oldest-familied and longest-leisured of them, his manners had

   “that repose

   Which marks the caste of Vere de Vere,”

and is supposed to distinguish them from those of the castes of Smith and Brown. But I quickly forgot this in considering how far socialism had got itself realized in London through the activities of the County Council, which are so largely in the direction of municipal control. One hears and reads as little of socialism now in London as in New York, but that is because it has so effectually passed from the debated principle to the accomplished fact. It has been embodied in so many admirable works that the presumption is rather in favor of it as something truly conservative. It is not, as with us, still under the ban of a prejudice too ignorant to know in how many things it is already effective; but this is, of course, mainly because English administration is so much honester than ours. It can be safely taken for granted that a thing ostensibly done for the greatest good of the greatest number is not really done for the profit of a few on the inside. The English can let the County Council put municipal boats on the Thames with the full assurance that the County Council will never be in case to retire on a cumulative income from them.

But apparently the English can do this only by laying the duty and responsibility upon the imperial legislature. It was droll to sit there and hear a body, ultimately if not immediately charged with the welfare of a state conscious in every continent and the islands of every sea, debating whether the municipal steamboats would not be too solely for the behoof of the London suburb of West Ham. England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, with any of their tremendous interests, must rest in abeyance while that question concerning West Ham was pending. We, in our way, would have settled it by the vote of a Board of Aldermen, subject to the veto of a mayor; but we might not have settled it so justly as the British Parliament did in concentrating the collective wisdom of a world-empire upon it.

The House of Commons took its tremendous responsibility lightly, even gayly. Except for the dramatic division into government and opposition benches, the spectacle was in no wise impressive. There was a restless going and coming of members, as if they could not stand being bored by their duties any longer, and then, after a brief absence, found strength for them. Some sat with their hats on, some with their hats off; some with their legs stretched out, some with their legs pulled in. One could easily distinguish the well-known faces of ministers, who paid no more heed, apparently, to what was going on than the least recognizable members unknown to caricature. The reporters, in their gallery, alone seemed to give any attention to the proceedings, but doubtless the speaker, under his official wig, concerned himself with them. The people apparently most interested were, like myself, in the visitors’ gallery. From time to time one of them asked the nearest usher who it was that was speaking; in his eagerness to see and hear, one of them would rise up and crane forward, and then the nearest usher would make him sit down; but the ushers were generally very lenient, and upon the whole looked quite up to the level of the average visitor in intelligence.

I am speaking of the men visitors; the intellectual light of the women visitors, whatever it was, was much dispersed and intercepted by the screen behind which they were placed. I do not know why the women should be thus obscured, for, if the minds of members were in danger of being distracted by their presence, I should think they would be still more distracted when the element of mystery was added to it by the grille. Seen across the whole length of the House from the men’s gallery the women looked as if tightly pressed against the grille, and had a curiously thin, phantasmal effect, or the effect of frescoed figures done very flat. To the imaginative spectator their state might have symbolized the relation of women to Parliamentary politics, of which we read much in English novels, and even English newspapers. Women take much more interest in political affairs in England than with us; that is well known; but it may not be so well known that they are in much greater enjoyment of the franchise, if the franchise is indeed a pleasure. I do not know whether they vote for school-committeemen, or whether there are school-committeemen for them to vote for; but they may vote for guardians of the poor, and may themselves be voted for to that office; and they may vote for members of the Urban Councils and the County Councils if they have property to be taxed by those bodies. This is the right for which our Revolution was made, though we continue, with regard to women, the Georgian heresy of taxation without representation; but it is doubtful to the barbarian whether good can come of women’s mixing in parliamentary elections at which they have no vote. Of course, with us a like interference would be taken jocosely, ironically; it would, at the bottom, be a good joke, amusing from the tendency of the feminine temperament to acts of circus in moments of high excitement; but whether the Englishmen regard it so, the English, alone know. They are much more serious than we, and perhaps they take it as a fit manifestation of the family principle which is the underlying force of the British Constitution. One heard of ladies who were stumping (or whatever is the English equivalent of stumping) the country on the preferential tariff question and the other questions which divide Conservatives and Liberals; but in spite of these examples of their proficiency the doubt remained whether those who have not the suffrage can profitably attempt to influence it. Till women can make up their minds to demand and accept its responsibilities, possibly they will do best to let it alone.

When they want it they will have it; but until they do, it may not be for nothing, or even for the control of the members’ wandering fancies, that the House of Commons interposes between them and itself the grille through which they show like beauteous wraiths or frescoes in the flat. That screen is emblematic of their real exclusion from the higher government which their social participation in parliamentary elections, and the men’s habit of talking politics with them, flatter them into a delusive sense of sharing. A woman may be the queen of England, but she may not be one of its legislators. That must be because women like being queens and do not really care for being legislators.

VIII

THE MEANS OF SOJOURN

The secular intensification of the family life makes it possible for the English to abandon their secular domesticity, when they will, without apparent detriment to the family life. Formerly the English family which came up to London for the season or a part of it went into a house of its own, or, in default of that, went into lodgings, or into a hotel of a kind happily obsolescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one of the hotels which abound in London, of a type combining more of the Continental and American features than the traits of the old English hotel, which was dark, cold, grim, and silently rapacious, heavy In appointments and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel is apt to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a home reasonably cheerful on inclusive terms not at all ruinous. It has a table-d’h�te dinner at separate tables and a fair version of the French cuisine. If it is one of the more expensive, it will not be dearer than our dearest, and if one of the cheaper, it will be better in every way than our cheaper. The supply has created a demand which apparently did not exist before, and the Englishman has become a hotel-dweller, or at least a hotel-sojourner, such as he had long reproached the American with being.

In like manner, with the supply of good restaurants in great number and variety, he has become a diner and luncher at restaurants. Whether he has been able to exact as much as he really wanted of the privacy once supposed so dear to him, a stranger, even of the middle species, cannot say, but it is evident that at his hotel or his restaurant he dines or lunches as publicly as ever the American did or does; and he has his friends to dinner or lunch without pretence of a private dining-room. One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by its facility to those excesses of hospitality which are such a drain on English incomes; but again that is something of which an outsider can hardly venture to have an opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern hotel and restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are pushing the old-fashioned lodging as well as the old-fashioned hotel out of the general favor, and have already driven them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a level where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species.

In the streets neighboring on Piccadilly there are many apartments which are effectively small hotels, where you pay a certain price for your rooms, and a certain fixed price for your meals. You must leave this neighborhood if you want the true lodging where you pay for your apartment, and order the provisions which are cooked for you, and which are apportioned to your daily needs. This is the ideal, and it is not seriously affected by the reality that your provisions are also apportioned to the needs of your landlord’s family. Even then, the ideal remains beautiful, and you have an image, somewhat blurred and battered, of home, such as money cannot elsewhere buy you. If your landlord is the butler who has married the cook, your valeting and cooking approach as nearly perfection as you can hopefully demand.

It will be well not to scan too closely the infirmities of the appointments over which an air of decent reticence is cast, and it will have been quite useless to try guarding all the points at which you might be plundered. The result is more vexatious than ruinous, and perhaps in a hotel also you would be plundered. In a lodging you are promptly and respectfully personalized; your tastes are consulted, if not gratified; your minor wants, in which your comfort lies, are interpreted, and possibly there grows up round you the semblance, which is not altogether deceitful, of your own house.

The theory is admirable, but I think the system is in decay, though to say this is something like accusing the stability of the Constitution. Very likely if some American ghost were to revisit a well-known London street a hundred years from now, he would find it still with the legend of “Apartments” in every transom; and it must not be supposed that lodgings have by any means fallen wholly to the middle, much less the lower middle, classes. In one place there was a marquis overhead; in another there was a lordship of unascertained degree, who was heard on a court night being got ready by his valet and the landlord’s whole force, and then marking his descent to his cab by the clanking of his sword upon the stairs, after which the joint service spent a good part of the night in celebrating the event at a banquet in the basement. At two lodgings in a most unpretentious street, it was the landlords’ boast that a royal princess had taken tea with their tenants, who were of the quality to be rightfully taken tea with by a royal princess; and at certain hours of the afternoon during the season it was not uncommon to see noble equipages standing at the doors of certain apartments with a full equipment of coachmen and footmen, and ladies of unmistakable fashion ascending and descending by the carriage-steps like the angels on Jacob’s ladder. It could be surmised that they were visiting poor relations, or modest merit of some sort, but it was not necessary to suppose this, and upon the whole I prefer not.

The search for lodgings, which began before the season was conscious of itself, was its own reward in the pleasures it yielded to the student of human nature and the lover of mild adventure. The belief in lodgings was a survival from an age of faith, when in the early eighteen-eighties they seemed the most commodious and desirable refuge to the outwandering American family which then first proved them. The fragmentary outwanderers who now visited London, after an absence of twenty-two years, did not take into account the fact that their apartment of long ago was the fine event of the search, prolonged for weeks, of two friends, singularly intelligent and rarely versed in London; they took it as a type, and expected to drive directly to its fellow. They drove indirectly to unnumbered lodgings unlike it and unworthy of its memory, and it was not until after three days that they were able to fix upon a lodging that appeared the least remote from their ideal. Then, in a street not too far from Mayfair, and of the quality of a self-respectful dependant of Belgravia, they set up their breathless Lares and panting Penates, and settled down with a sense of comfort that grew upon them day by day. The place undeniably had its charm, if not its merit. The drawing-room chairs were in a proper pattern of brocade, and, though abraded at their edges and corners, were of a tasteful frame; the armchairs, covered like the sofa in a cheerful cretonne, lent the parting guest the help of an outward incline; the sofa, heaped with cushions, could not conceal a broken spring, though it braved it out with the consciousness of having been sat upon by a royal princess who had once taken tea in that lodging. But the other appointments, including a pretty writing-desk and a multitude of china plates almost hiding the wall-paper, were unfractured, and the little dining-room was very cosey. After breakfast it had the habit of turning itself into a study, where one of the outwanderers used to set himself down and ask himself with pen and ink what he honestly thought and felt about this England which he had always been more or less bothering about. The inquiry took time which he might better have spent in day-dreaming before the prospect of the gray March heaven, with the combs of the roofs and the chimney-pots mezzotinted against it. He might have more profitably wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow-brick house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their clambering pipes of unknown employ, in the middle distance; or, in the foreground, the skylights of cluttered outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of grimy backyards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with the spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green points of electric light: the same sort of light that showed in the eyes of a black cat seasonably appearing under them. Inquiries into English civilization can always wait, but such passing effects stay for no man, and I put them down roughly in behalf of a futile philosopher who ought to have studied them in their inexhaustible detail.

He could not be reproached with insensibility to his domestic circumstance, from the combination of cook and butler which took him into its ideal keeping to the unknown, unheard, and unseen German baron who had the dining-room floor, and was represented through his open door by his breakfast-trays and his perfectly valeted clothes. The valeting in that house was unexceptionable, and the service at table was of a dress-coated decorum worthy of finer dinners than were ever eaten there. The service throughout was of a gravity never relaxed, except in the intimate moments of bringing the bath in the morning, when the news of the day before and the coming events of the present day were suggestively yet respectfully discussed.

The tenants of the drawing-room floor owed some of their most fortunate inspirations in sight-seeing to the suggestions of the landlord, whose apartments I would in no wise leave to depreciatory conjecture. There was, indeed, always a jagged wound in the entry wall made by some envious trunk; but there was nothing of the frowziness, the shabbiness of many of those houses in the streets neighboring Mayfair where many Americans are eager to pay twice the fee demanded in this house on the borders of Belgravia.

The Americans I am imagining had first carried on their search in those genteel regions, which could hardly have looked their best in the last moments of preparation before the season began. The house-cleaning which went on in all of them was no more hurried than the advance of the slow English spring outside, where the buds appeared after weeks of hesitation, and the leaves unfolded themselves at long leisure, and the blossoms deliberated in dreamy doubt whether they had not better stay in than come out. Day after day found the lodging-houses with their carpets up, and their furniture inverted, and their hallways and stairways reeking from slop-pails or smelling from paint-pots, and with no visible promise of readiness for lodgers. They were pretty nearly all of one type. A young German or Swiss — there for the language — came to the door in the coat he had not always got quite into, and then summoned from the depths below a landlord or landlady to be specific about times and terms, to show the rooms, and conceal the extras. The entry was oftenest dim and narrow, with a mat sunk into the floor at the threshold and worn to the quick by the cleansing of numberless feet; and an indescribable frowziness prevailed which imparted itself to the condition of widowhood dug up by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes there responded to his summons a clerical, an almost episcopal presence, which was clearly that of a former butler, unctuous in manner and person from long serving. Or sometimes there would be something much more modern, of an alert middle-age or wary youth; in every case the lodging-keeper was skilled far beyond the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and of holding in the background unsurmised charges for electric lights, for candles, for washing, for baths, for boots, and for what-know-I, after the most explicit declaration that the first demand included everything. Nothing definite could be evolved but the fact that when the season began, or after the first of May the rent would be doubled.

The treaty usually took place in the dishevelled drawing-room, after a round of the widely parted chambers, where frowzy beds, covered with frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic rugs. The drawing-room expected to be the dining-room also, and faintly breathed the staleness of the meals served in it. If the front windows often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows had no air but that of the sunless spaces which successive architectural exigencies had crowded with projecting cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement skylights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages and the stairs were never visible except after dark; even then the foot rather than the eye found the way. Yet, once settled in such a place, it developed possibilities of comfort, of quiet, of seclusion, which the hardiest hopefulness could not have forecast. The meals came up and could be eaten; the coffee, which nearly all English hotels have good and nearly all English lodgings bad, could be exchanged for tea; the service was always well-intentioned, and often more, and except that you paid twice as much as it all seemed worth, you were not so ill-used as you might have been.

It is said that the whole system, if not on its last legs, is unsteady on its feet from the competition of the great numbers of those large, new, reasonably cheap, and admirably managed hotels. Yet the lodging-houses remain by hundreds of thousands, almost by millions, throughout the land, and if the English are giving them up they are renouncing them with national deliberation. The most mysterious fact concerning them is that they are, with all their multitude, so difficult to get, and are so very bad when you have got them. Having said this, I remember with fond regret particular advantages in every lodging of my acquaintance.

IX

CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME

The painting-up which the apartments, as they always call themselves, undergo inside and out, in preparation for the season, is a rite to which all London bows during April as far as it can afford it. The lodging-house may restrict itself to picking out in fresh green its front door and window-frames, or perhaps reddening its area railing; but private houses pretending to be smart clothe themselves from eave to basement in coats of creamy white, or other blond tints susceptible of the soonest harm from the natural and artificial climates of London. While the paint is fresh, or “wet,” the word by which you are warned from its contact everywhere, it is undeniably pleasing; it gives the gray town an air of girlish innocence, and, with the boxes of brilliant flowers at every window-sill, promises a gayety which the season realizes in rather unusual measure. It is said that the flowers at the windows must be renewed every month, against the blight of the London smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot be renewed so often, it is of perhaps a little more durable beauty. For a month of preparation, while the house-fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer’s dreadful trade, the air is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, and the eye is pleased with the soft colors in which the grimy walls remember the hopes of another spring, of another London season.

If the American’s business or pleasure takes him out of town on the edge of the season and brings him back well over its border, he will have an agreeable effect from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs he left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion will have got in its work, and the streets, the pavements, the parks will have responded with a splendor, a gayety earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the passing feet will be oftener those going to luncheon and afternoon tea, and not so solely those hurrying to or lagging from the toils of the day. Even the morning trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to arrive with multitudes fresher and brighter than those which arrived before the season began. I do not know whether it was in tribute to the joyful time that a housemaid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and whitening up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore a long, black train and a bolero hat and jacket, and I do not say that this is the usual dress of the London housemaid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting on them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all the London steps wear in the morning. One might as well pretend that the may is consciously white and red on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares in honor of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so with no apparent literary association, but the American must always feel as if he were quoting the name from an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a peculiarly appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom almost as long as its namesake month endures. But that is no great wonder: when a tree has worked as hard as a tree must in England to get its blossoms out, it is naturally in no hurry to drop them; it likes to keep them on for weeks.

The leaves, by the beginning of June, were in their silken fulness; the trees stood densely, softly, darkly rounded in the dim air, and they did not begin to shed their foliage till almost two months later. But I think I had never so exquisite a sense of the loveliness of the London trees as one evening in the grounds of a country club not so far out of London as not to have London trees in its grounds. They were mostly oaks, beeches, and sycamores; they frequented the banks of a wide, slow water, which could not be called a stream, and they hung like a palpable sort of clouds in the gathering mists. The mists, in fact, seemed of much the same density as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like if I declared which the birds were singing their vespers in. There was one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I think must have been singing in the heart of the mist, and which probably mistook it for a tree of like substance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life; and really the place was enchanting, with its close-cropped, daisy-starred lawns, and the gay figures of polo-players coming home from a distant field in the pale dusk of a brilliant day of early June.

The birds are heard everywhere in London through that glowing month, and their singing would drown the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter of the cab-horses’ hoofs if anything could. The little gardens of the houses back together and form innumerable shelters and pleasaunces for them. The simple beauty of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to the American city-dweller, who never sees anything but clothes-lines in blossom from his back windows; but they exist nearly everywhere in London, and a more spacious privacy can always be secured where two houses throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens.

The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest, London house has some leafy breathing-place behind it where the birds may nest and sing, and our lodging in the street which was almost Belgravian was not without its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really warm days came (and they came at the time appointed by the poets), the feathered hostess of the birds, in a coop under the tree, laid an egg in honor of her friends building overhead. This was a high moment of triumph for the landlord’s whole family. He happened to be making some very gravelly garden-beds along the wall when the hen proclaimed her achievement, and he called his children and their mother to rejoice with him. His oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his lodgers came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am sure the royal princess would have done if she had been taking tea there that afternoon.

He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man, and though his aspirates were dislocated, his heart, however he miscalled it, was in the right place. We had many improving conversations, by which I profited more than he; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of every class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively upon the rights of his station. In England you feel that you cannot trespass upon the social demesne of the lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the premises. The social inferiors have a convention of profound respect for the social superiors, but it sometimes seemed provisional only, a mask which they expected one day to drop; yet this may have been one of those errors which foreigners easily make. What is certain is that the superior had better keep to his place, as the inferior keeps to his. Across the barrier the classes can and do exchange much more kindness than we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this is not a good time to say that the English manner to dependants is beyond criticism. The consideration for them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things if they please, and they are invariably and distinctly thanked for the smallest service. There are no doubt exceptions to the kindness which one sees, but I did not see the exceptions. The social machinery has so little play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the grind of class upon class might be intolerable. With us in America there is no love lost between rich and poor; unless the poor are directly and obviously dependent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with one another, as they never seem in England. Very possibly that perfect English manner from superiors is also a convention, like the respect of the inferiors, but it is a becoming one.

This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to say my landlord, who told me that when he first took that house a flock of starlings used to visit him in the spring. He did not tell me that his little house stood in the region of Nell Gwynne’s mulberry-gardens; his knowledge was of observation, not of reading; and he was a gossip only about impersonal things. Concerning his lodgers he was as a grave for silence, and I fancy this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by the national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak once of a young German lodger whom he had kept from going to a garden-party in full evening-dress, but the incident was of a remoteness which excused its mention. What had impressed him in it was the foreigner’s almost tearful gratitude when he came home and acknowledged that he had found everybody in the sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him to wear.

While the may was still hesitating on the hawthorns whether to come out, there were plum and peach trees in the gardens which emulated the earlier daring of the almonds. Plums do ripen in England, of course; the greengages that come there after they have ceased to come from France are as good as our own when the curculio does not get them; but the efflorescence of the peaches and almonds is purely gratuitous; they never fruit in the London air unless against some exceptionally sun-warmed wall, and even then I fancy the chances are against them. Perhaps the fruits of the fields and orchards, if not of the streets, would do better in England if the nights were warmer. The days are often quite hot, but after dusk the temperature falls so decidedly that even in that heated fortnight in July a blanket or two were never too much. In the spring a day often began mellowly enough, but by the end of the afternoon it had grown pinched and acrid.

X

SOME VOLUNTARY AND INVOLUNTARY SIGHT-SEEING

I had a very good will towards all the historic temples in London, and I hope that this, with the fact that I had seen them before, will pass for my excuse in not going promptly to revere them. I indeed had some self-reproaches with regard to St. Paul’s, of which I said to myself I ought to see it again; there might be an emotion in it. I passed and repassed it, till I could bear it no longer, and late one afternoon I entered just in time to be turned out with half a score of other tardy visitors who had come at the closing hour. After this unavailing visit, the necessity of going again established itself in me, and I went repeatedly, choosing, indeed, rainy days when I could not well go elsewhere, and vengefully rejoicing, when I went, in the inadequacy of its hugeness and the ugliness of its monuments.

Some sense of my mood I may impart, if I say that St. Paul’s always seemed a dispersed and interrupted St. Peter’s in its structure and decoration, and a very hard, unsympathetic, unappealing Westminster Abbey in its mortuary records. The monuments of the Abbey are often grotesque enough, but where they are so they are in the taste of times far enough back to have become rococo and charming. I do not mind a bronze Death starting out of a marble tomb and threatening me with his dart, if he is a Death of the seventeenth century; but I do very much mind the heavy presence of the Fames or Britannias of the earlier nineteenth century celebrating in dull allegory the national bereavement in the loss of military and naval heroes who fell when the national type was least able to inspire grief with an artistic expression. The statesmen, the ecclesiastics, the jurists, look all of a like period, and stand about in stone with no more interest for the spectator than the Fames or the Britannias.

The imagination stirs at nothing in St. Paul’s so much as at that list of London bishops, which, if you are so lucky as to come on it by chance where it is inscribed beside certain windows, thrills you with a sense of the long, long youth of that still unaging England. Bishops of the Roman and Briton times, with their scholarly Latin names; bishops of the Saxon and Danish times remembered in rough, Northern syllables; bishops of the Norman time, with appellations that again flow upon the tongue; bishops of the English time, with designations as familiar as those in the directory: what a record! It moves you more than any of those uniformed or cloaked images of warriors and statesmen, and it speaks more eloquently of the infrangible continuity, the unbroken greatness of England.

My last visit was paid after I had seen so many other English cathedrals that I had begun to say, if not to think, that England was overgothicized, and that I should be glad, or at least relieved, by something classicistic. But I found that I was mistaken. That architecture is alien to the English sky and alien to the English faith, which continues the ancient tradition in terms not ceremonially very distinct from those of Rome; and coming freshly from the minster in York to the cathedral in London, I was aware of differences which were all in favor of the elder fane. The minster now asserted its superior majesty, and its mere magnitude, the sweep of its mighty nave, the bulk of its clustered columns, the splendor of its vast and lofty windows, as they held their own in my memory, dwarfed St. Paul’s as much physically as spiritually.

A great congregation lost itself in the broken spaces of the London temple, dimmed rather than illumined by the electric blaze in the choir; a monotonous chanting filled the air as with a Rome of the worldliest period of the church, and the sense of something pagan that had arisen again in the Renaissance was, I perceived, the emotion that had long lain in wait for me. St. Paul’s, like St. Peter’s, testifies of the genius of a man, not the spirit of humanity awed before the divine. Neither grew as the Gothic churches grew; both were ordered to be built after the plans of the most skilful architects of their time and race, and both are monuments to civilizations which had outlived mystery.

I no more escaped a return to Westminster Abbey than to St. Paul’s, but I had from the first so profoundly and thoroughly naturalized myself to the place that it was like going back to a home of my youth. It was, indeed, the earliest home of my youthful love of the old; and if I might advise any reader who still has his first visit to Westminster Abbey before him, I would counsel him not to go there much past his twenty-fourth year. If possible, let him repair to the venerable fane in the year 1861, and choose a chill, fair day of the English December, so short as to be red all through with a sense of the late sunrise and a prescience of the early sunset. Then he will know better than I could otherwise tell him how I felt in that august and beautiful place, and how my heart rose in my throat when I first looked up in the Poets’ Corner and read the words, “Oh, rare Ben Jonson!” The good Ben was never so constantly rare in life as he has been in death, and that I knew well enough from having tried to read him in days when I was willing to try reading any one. But I was meaning then to be rare every moment myself, and out of the riches of my poetic potentiality I dowered him with a wealth of poetry which he had not actually enjoyed; and in this generous emotion the tears came.

I am not sensible of having been grouped with others in charge of a verger, but a verger there must have been, and at my next visit there must equally have been one; he only entered, rigid, authoritative, unsparing, into my consciousness at the third or fourth visit, widely separated by time, when he marshalled me the way that he was going with a flock of other docile tourists. I suppose it would be possible to see Westminster Abbey without a verger, but I do not know; and would it be safe? I imagine he was there at my first and second visits, but that my memory rejected him as unfit for association with fames and names made so much of in death that it seemed better than life in all dignified particulars, though I was then eagerly taking my chances of getting along for a few centuries on earth.

I hope I am not being severe upon the verger, for he is a very necessary evil, if evil at all, in a place of such manifold and recondite interest; and in my next-to-last visit I found him most intelligibly accessible to my curiosity concerning those waxen effigies of royalty which used to be carried in the funeral processions of the English kings and queens. He bade us wait till he had dismissed all his flock but ourselves, and then, for a very little gratuitous money, he took us into some upper places where, suddenly, we stood in the presence of Queen Elizabeth and of William and Mary, as they had looked and dressed in life, and very startlingly lifelike in the way they showed unconscious of us. Doubtless there were others, but those are the ones I recall, and with their identity I felt the power that glared from the fierce, vain, shrewd, masterful face of Elizabeth, and the obstinate good sense and ability that dwelt in William’s. Possibly I read their natures into them, but I do not think so; and one could well wish that art had so preserved all the great embodiments of history.

I hope it was some better motive than the sightseer’s that at least partly caused me to make myself part of the congregation listening to a sermon in the Abbey on the Sunday afternoon of my last visit. But the stir of the place’s literary associations began with the sight of Longfellow’s bust, which looks so much like him, in the grand simplicity of his looks, as he was when he lived; and then presently the effigies of all the “dear sons of memory” began to reveal themselves, medallion and bust and figure, with many a remembered allegory and inscription. We went and sat, for the choral service, under the bust of Macaulay, and, looking down, we found with a shock that we had our feet upon his grave. It might have been the wounded sense of reverence, it might have been the dread of a longer sermon than we had time for, but we left before the sermon began, and went out into the rather unkempt little public garden which lies by the Thames in the shadow of the Parliament Houses; and who has said the Houses are not fine? They are not a thousand years old, but some day they will be, and then those who cavilled at them when they were only fifty will be sorry. For my part I think them as Gothically noble and majestic as need be. They are inevitably Gothic, too, and they spring from the river-side as if they grew from the ground there far into the gray sky to which their architecture is native. It was a pale, resigned afternoon, with the languor of the long, unwonted heat in it, which a recent rain had slightly abated, and we were glad of a memoriferous property which it seemed to exhale. Suddenly in the midst of that most alien environment we confronted a pair of friends from whom we had last parted twenty years before in the woods beside Lake George, and whose apparition at once implied the sylvan scene. So improbable, so sensational is life even to the most bigoted realist! But if it is so, why go outside of it? Our friends passed, and we were in the shadow of the Parliament Houses again, and no longer in that of the forest which did not know it was Gothic.

We were going to hang upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge for the view it offers of the Houses, to which the spacious river makes itself a foreground such as few pictures or subjects of pictures enjoy in this cluttered world; but first we gave ourselves the pleasure of realizing the statue of Cromwell which has somehow found place where it belongs in those stately precincts, after long, vain endeavors to ignore his sovereign mightiness. He was not much more a friend of Parliaments than Charles whom he slew, but he was such a massive piece of English history that the void his effigy now fills under the windows of the Commons must have ached for it before.

When we had done our hanging upon the parapet of the bridge we found a somewhat reluctant cab and drove homeward through the muted Sunday streets. The roar of the city was still there, but it was subdued; the crowd was still abroad, but it was an aimless, idle, shuffling crowd. The air itself seemed more vacant than on week-days, and there was a silencing suspense everywhere. The poor were out in their poor best, and the children strayed along the streets without playing, or lagged homeward behind their parents. There were no vehicles except those of pleasure or convenience; the omnibuses sent up their thunder from afar; our cab-horse, clapping down the wooden pavement, was the noisiest thing we heard. The trees in the squares and places hung dull and tired in the coolish, dusty atmosphere, and through the heart of the summer afternoon passed a presentiment of autumn. These are subtilties of experience which, after all, one does not impart. Those who like, as I do, the innocence which companions the sophistication of London will frequent Kensington Gardens in the earlier spring before the season has set the seal of supreme interest on Hyde Park. It then seems peculiarly the playground of little children in the care of their nurses, if they are well-to-do people’s children, and in one another’s care if they are poor people’s. All over England the tenderness of the little children for the less is delightful. I remember to have seen scarcely any squabbling, and I saw abundance of caressing. Small girls, even small boys, lug babies of almost their own weight and size, and fondle them as if it were a privilege and a pleasure to lug them. This goes on in spite of a reciprocal untidiness which is indescribable; for the English poor children have the very dirtiest faces in the world, unless the Scotch have dirtier ones; but nothing, no spotting or thick plastering of filth, can obscure their inborn sweetness. I think, perhaps, they wash up a little when they come to play in Kensington Gardens, to sail their ships on its placid waters and tumble on its grass. When they enter the palace, to look at the late queen’s dolls and toys, as they do in troops, they are commonly in charge of their teachers; and their raptures of loyalty in the presence of those reminders that queens, too, must have once been little girls are beautiful to behold, and are doubtless as genuine as those of their elders in the historical and political associations. Since William III. built the palace and laid out the gardens that he might dwell within easy reach of his capital, but out of its smoke and din, the place has not lost the character which his homely wish impressed upon it, and it is especially sweet and commendable because of its relation to the good Victoria’s childhood. One does not forget “great Anna’s” drinking tea there in the Orangery so nobly designed for her by Wren, but the plain old palace is dearest because Victoria spent so many of her early days in it, and received there the awful summons literally to rise from her dreams and come and be queen of the mightiest realm under the sun. No such stroke of poetry is possible to our system; we have not yet provided even for the election of young girls to the presidency; and though we may prefer our prosaical republican conditions, we must still feel the charm of such an incident in the mother monarchy.

The Temple was another of the places that I did not think I should visit again, because I had so pleasant and perfect a memory of it, which I feared to impair. More than a score of years before I had drunk tea in the chambers of some young leader-writing barrister, and then went out and wandered about in the wet, for it was raining very diligently. I cannot say, now, just where my wanderings took me; but, of course, it was down into the gardens sloping towards the river. In a way the first images of places always remain, however blurred and broken, and the Temple gardens were a dim and fractured memory in the retrospect as I next saw them. It needed all the sunshine of my September day to unsadden them, not from the rainy gloom in which I had left them then, but from the pensive associations of the years between. Yet such sunshine as that can do much, and I found it restoring me to my wonted gayety as soon as we got out of our four-wheeler after our drive from the Thames Embankment and began to walk up towards the Temple Church. I will not ask the reader to go over the church with us; I will merely have him note a curious fact regarding those effigies of the crusaders lying cross-legged in the pavement of the circle to which one enters. According to the strong, the irresistible conviction of one of our party, these crusaders had distinctly changed their posture since she saw them first. It was not merely that they had uncrossed their legs and crossed them another way, or some such small matter; but that now they lay side by side, whereas formerly they had better accommodated themselves to the architectural design, and lain in a ring with their long-pointed toes pointing inward to the centre. Why they should have changed, we could not understand; the verger said they had not; but he was a dim, discouraged intelligence, bent chiefly in a limp sort on keeping the door locked so that people could not get away without his help, and must either fee him, or indecently deny him. The Temple Church, indeed, is by no means the best of the Temple. Cunningham says that the two edifices most worth visiting are the church and the Middle Temple Hall, which I now preferred luxuriously to leave in my remembrances of 1882, and to idle about the grounds with my party, straying through the quiet thoroughfares and into the empty courts, and envying, not very actively, the lodgers in the delightfully dull-looking old brick dwellings. I do not know just what Templars are, in this day, but I am told they are practically of both sexes, and that when married they are allowed to domesticate themselves in these buildings in apartments sublet to them by Templars of one sex. It is against the law, but conformable to usage, and the wedded pairs are subject only to a semicentennial ejection, so that I do not know where a young literary couple could more charmingly begin their married life. Perhaps children would be a scandal; but they would be very safe in the Temple paths and on the Temple lawns. At one house, a girl was vaguely arriving with a band-box and parcels, and everything in the Temple seemed of a faint, remote date; in the heart of a former century, the loud crash of our period came to us through the Strand gate softened to a mellow roar. The noise was not great enough, we noted, to interrupt the marble gentleman in court dress and full-bottomed wig, elegantly reclining on the top of his tomb in a niche of the wall near Goldsmith’s grave, and leaning forward with one hand extended as if, in the spirit of the present entente cordiale, he was calling our attention to the fact that the garlands and streamers of the Virginian-creeper dangling from the walls about him were in the mother-clime of a real American redness.

It is proof of the manifold interest of London, or else of our own inadequacy to our opportunities, that in all our sojourns we had never yet visited what is left of that famous Whitehall, so tragically memorable of the death of Charles I. The existing edifice is only the noble remnant of that ancient palace of the English kings which the fire of 1697 spared, as if such a masterpiece of Inigo Jones would be the fittest witness of its highest, saddest event. Few, if any, of the tremendous issues of history are so nearly within seeing and touching as that on which the windows of Whitehall still look, and I must count that last day of our September in London as spent in such sort as to be of unsurpassed if not unrivalled impression, because of the visit which we then so tardily paid to the place, and so casually that we had almost not paid it at all.

The Banquetting House is now a sort of military and naval museum; with the swords and saddles and uniforms and other equipments of divers English heroes in glass cases, and models of battle-ships, and of the two most famous English battles, likewise under glass. I was not so vain of my reading about battles as not to be glad of seeing how the men-of-war deployed at Trafalgar; or how the French and English troops were engaged at Waterloo (with the smoke coming out of the cannons’ mouths in puffs of cotton-wool), when Bl�cher modestly appeared at one corner of the plan in time to save the day. “But we should ‘ave ‘ad it, without ‘im?” a fellow sight-seer of local birth anxiously inquired of the custodian. “Oh, we should ‘ave ‘ad the victory, anyway,” the custodian reassured him, and they looked together at some trophies of the Boer war with a patriotic interest which we could not share. I do not know whether they shared my psychological interest in that apposition of Napoleon and of Nelson which, in this place, as in several others in England, invests the spiritual squalor of war-memories with the glamour of two so supremely poetic, yet so different personalities. Whatever other heroes may have been, these dreamers in their ideals shed such a light upon the sad business of their lives as almost to ennoble it. One feels that with a little more qualification on the creative side they could have been literary men, not of the first order, perhaps, but, say, historical novelists.

There is some question among other authorities which window of the Banquetting House the doomed king passed through upon the scaffold to the block; but the custodian had no doubts. He would not allow a choice of windows, and as to a space broken through the wall, he had never heard of it. But we were so well satisfied with his window as to shrink involuntarily from it, and from the scene without whose eternal substance showed through the shadowy illusion of passing hansoms and omnibuses, like the sole fact of the street, the king’s voice rising above the noises in tender caution to a heedless witness, “Have a care of the axe; have a care,” and then gravely to the headsman: “When I stretch out my hands so, then—” The drums were ordered beaten, so that we could not hear more; and we went out, and crossed among the cabs and ‘busses to the horse-guards sitting shrunken on their steeds, and passed between them into the park beyond where the beds of flowers spread their soft autumnal bloom in the low sun of the September day.

XI

GLIMPSES OF THE LOWLY AND THE LOWLIER

I liked walking through St. James’s and through Green Park, especially in the late afternoon when the tired poor began to droop upon the benches, and, long before the spring damp was out of the ground, to strew themselves on the grass, and sleep, face downward, among its odorous roots. There was often the music of military bands to which wide-spreading audiences of the less pretentious sort listened; in St. James’s there were seats along the borders of the ponds where, while the chill evening breeze crisped the water, a good deal of energetic courting went on. Besides, both were in the immediate neighborhood of certain barracks where there was always a chance of military, and were hard by Buckingham Palace with its chances of royalty. But the resort of the poorer sort of pleasure-seekers is eminently Battersea Park, to which we drove one hot, hot Sunday afternoon in late July, conscience-stricken that we had left it so long out of our desultory doing and seeing. It was full of the sort of people we had expected to find in it, but these people though poor were not tattered. The Londoner, of whatever class is apt to be better dressed than the New-Yorker of the same class, and the women especially make a bolder attempt than ours, if not so well advised, at gayety. They had put on the best and finest they had, in Battersea Park, and if it was not the most fitting still they wore it. The afternoon was sultry to breathlessness; yet a young mother with a heavy baby in her arms sweltered along in the splendor of a purple sack of thick plush; she was hot, yes; but she had it on. The young girls emulated as well as they could the airy muslins and silks in which the great world was flitting and flirting at the same hour in the closes of Hyde Park, and if the young fellows with these poor girls had not the distinction of the swells in the prouder parade they at least equalled them in their aberrations from formality.

There was not much shade in Battersea Park for the people to sit under, but there was almost a superabundance of flowers in glaring beds, and there were pieces of water, where the amateur boatman could have the admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely encircling the ponds. To watch them and to walk up and down the shadeless aisles of shrubbery, to sit on the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme cases to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, seemed to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea Park could do. We ourselves ordered tea, knowing the quality and quantity of the public English ice, which is so very minute that you think it will not be enough, but which when you taste it is apt to be more than you want. The spectacle of our simple refection was irresistible, and a crowd of envious small boys thronged the railing that parted us from the general public, till the spectacle of their hungry interest became intolerable. We consulted with the waiter, who entered seriously into our question as to the moral and social effect of sixpence worth of buns on those boys; he decided that it would at least not form an example ruinous to the peace of his tea-house; and he presently appeared with a paper bag that seemed to hold half a bushel of buns. Yet even half a bushel of buns will not go round the boys in Battersea Park, and we had to choose as honest a looking boy as there was in the foremost rank, and pledge him to a just division of the buns intrusted him in bulk, and hope, as he ran off down an aisle of the shrubbery with the whole troop at his heels, that he would be faithful to the trust.

So very mild are the excitements, so slight the incidents, so safe and tame the adventures of modern travel! I am almost ashamed when I think what a swashing time a romantic novelist, or a person of real imagination would have been having in London when so little was happening to me. There was, indeed, one night after dinner when for a salient moment I had hopes of something different. The maid had whistled for a hansom, and a hansom had started for the door where we stood waiting, when out of the shadows across the way two figures sprang, boarded the cab, and bade the cabman drive them away under our very eyes. Such a thing, occurring at almost eleven o’clock, promised a series of stirring experiences; and an American lady, long resident in England, encouragingly said, on hearing of the outrage, “Ah, that’s London!” as if I might look to be often mishandled by bandits of the sort; but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the security and gentleness with which life is operated in the capital of the world is one of the kind things makes you forget its immensity. Your personal comfort and safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mistake yourself for one of very few people instead of so many.

London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and deliberation, and if it hurried or worried, it would be like the precession of the equinoxes getting a move on, and would shake the earth. The street events are few. In my nine or ten weeks’ sojourn, so largely spent in the streets, I saw the body of only one accident worse than a cab-horse falling; but that was early in my stay when I expected to see many more. We were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and were walking by the hospital of the same name just as a cab drove up to its gate bearing the body of the accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face hung upon his breast and whose limp arm another young man of the same station in life held round his own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside him. A crowd was already following, and it gathered so quickly at the high iron fence that the most censorious witness could hardly see with what clumsiness the wounded man was half-dragged, half-lifted from the cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the ground till he could be duly carried into the hospital. It may have been a casualty of the many incident to alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single combat, which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediaeval atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic dignity which would have come in the way of a more heroical imagination.

It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however characteristic of the observer, that I made haste to forget it as I entered the church-yard under the Norman arch which has been for some years gradually finding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole church, indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it was one of the first effects I saw) of that rescue of the past from the present which is perpetually going on all over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and the crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an ironworker’s shop; and modern life still pressed close upon it in the houses looking on the graves of the grassless church-yard. With women at the windows that opened on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, and doing other household offices, the place was like something out of Dickens, but something that yet had been cleaned up in sympathy with the restoration of the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than good before he turned monk) who founded the Cistercian monastery there in the twelfth century would hardly have missed anything if he had returned to examine the church. He would have had the advantage, which he could not have enjoyed in his life-time, of his own effigy stretched upon his tomb, and he might have been interested to note, as we did, that the painter Hogarth had been baptized in his church six hundred years after his own time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent Norman architecture might have been less; it is possible he would have preferred the Gothic which was coming in when he went out.

The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray, dim, twilighted as with the closes of the days of a thousand years; and in the pale ray an artist sat sketching a stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a loss in not having looked to see how he was making out, but the image of the pew-opener remains compensatively with me. She was the first of her sort to confront me in England with the question whether her very intelligent comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry. She was a little morsel of a woman, in a black alpaca dress, and a world-old black bonnet, who spared us no detail of the church, and took us last into the crypt, not long rescued from the invasive iron-worker, but now used as a mortuary chapel for the poor of the parish, which is still full of the poor. The chapel was equipped with a large bier and tall candles, frankly ready for any of the dead who might drop in. The old countries do not affect to deny death a part of experience, as younger countries do.

We came out into the imperfect circle before the gateway of the church, and realized that it was Smithfield, where all those martyrs had perished by fire that the faith of the world might live free. There can be no place where the past is more august, more pathetic, more appealing, and none I suppose, where the activities of the present, in view of it, are more offensive. It is all undermined with the railways that bring the day’s meat-provision to London for distribution throughout the city, and the streets that centre upon it swarm with butchers’ wagons laden with every kind and color of carnage, prevalently the pallor of calves’ heads, which seem so to abound in England that it is wonderful any calves have them on still. The wholesale market covers I know not what acreage, and if you enter at some central point, you find yourself amid endless prospectives of sides, flitches, quarters, and whole carcasses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings, and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material, so that you come away wishing to live a vegetarian ever after.

The emotions are not at one’s bidding, and if one calls upon them, they are very apt not to come. I promised myself some very signal ones, of a certain type, from going to the Sunday market of the Jews in what was once Petticoat Lane, but now, with the general cleaning up and clearing out of the slums, has got itself called by some much finer and worthier name. But, really, I had seen much Jewisher things in Hester Street, on our own East Side. The market did not begin so early as I had been led to expect it would. The blazing forenoon of my visit was more than half gone, and yet there was no clothes’ auction, which was said to be the great thing to see. But by nine o’clock there seemed to be everything else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long booths and shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat, fish, fruit, vegetables, glassware, ironware, boots and shoes, china and crockery, women’s tawdry finery, children’s toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one another indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with an incessant jargon of bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation. A few mild, slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently unseeing, unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic crowd, in which the Oriental types were by no means so marked as in New York, though there was a greater number of red Jews than I had noted before. The most monumental features of the scene were the gorgeous scales of wrought brass, standing at intervals along the street, and arranged with seats, like swings, for the weighing of such Hebrews as wished to know their tonnage; apparently they have a passion for knowing it.

The friend who had invited me to this spectacle felt its inadequacy so keenly, in spite of my protests, that he questioned the policemen for some very squalid or depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were in the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because the region had been so very much reformed and cleaned up since the dreadful murders there, he had no recourse but to take me on top of a tram-car and show me how very thoroughly it had been reformed and cleaned up. In a ride the whole length of Whitechapel Road to where the once iniquitous region ceased from troubling and rose in a most respectable resurrection as Stepney, with old-fashioned houses which looked happy, harmless homes, I could only be bidden imagine avenues of iniquity branching off on either hand. But I actually saw nothing slumlike; indeed, with a current of cool east wind in our faces, which the motion of the tram reinforced, the ride was an experience delightful to every sense. It was significant also of the endlessness of London that as far as the tram-car took us we seemed as far as ever from the bounds of the city; whatever point we reached there was still as much or more London beyond.

Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than it used to be in the days before slumming (now itself of the past) began to exploit it. At any rate, I thought that in my present London sojourn I found less unblushing destitution than in the more hopeless or more shameless days of 1882-3. In those days I remember being taken by a friend, much concerned for my knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful purlieu where I saw and heard and smelled things quite as bad as any that I did long afterwards in the over-tenanted regions of New York. My memory is still haunted by the vision of certain hapless creatures who fled blinking from one hole in the wall to another, with little or nothing on, and of other creatures much in liquor and loudly scolding and quarrelling, with squalid bits of childhood scattered about underfoot, and vague shapes of sickness and mutilation, and all the time a buying and selling of loathsome second-hand rags.

In the midst of it there stood, like figures of a monument erected to the local genius of misery and disorder, two burly figures of half-drunken men, threatening each other with loud curses and shaken fists under the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the throat-latch of his helmet. When the men should strike, I was aware that it would be his instant duty, as the guardian of the public peace, to seize them both and hale them away to prison. But it was not till many years afterwards that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth less than an ounce of cure.

I would very willingly have seen something of this kind again, but, as I say, I happened not to see it. I think that I did not see or hear even so much simple drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I had passed more gin-palaces, flaring through their hell-litten windows into the night; but this may have been because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and did not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and coming out of such places in draggle-tailed processions in those wicked days; but now I only once saw women drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night, when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the thirst of the morrow, for all through the Sunday idleness it cannot be slaked enough. It was a hot night, and the bar-room door stood open, and within, fronted by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men-kind, those poor silly things stood drooping against the wall with their beer-pots dangling limply from their hands, and their mouths fallen open as if to catch the morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the tongues of their admired male companions. They did not look very bad; bad people never do look as bad as they are, and perhaps they are sometimes not so bad as they look. Perhaps these were kind, but not very wise, mothers of families, who were merely relieving in that moment of liquored leisure the long weariness of the week’s work. I may have passed and repassed in the street some of the families that they were the mothers of; it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose oppressiveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to share with the reader, and the street children seemed to have been roused to uncommon vigilance by it. They played about far into the night, unrebuked by their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little girls were always lugging, shared their untimely wakefulness if not their activity. There was seldom any crying among them then, though by day the voice of grief and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy. If their mothers did not call them in-doors, their fathers were still less exacting. After the marketing, which took place in the neighboring avenue, where there began to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon, father and mother alike seemed to have renounced their domestic cares and to have liberated their offspring to the unrestricted enjoyment of the street.

As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see much of it, and I heard less, though that might have been because I did not look or listen in the right places. With that, as with everything else in London, I took my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports of a lady in Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of mutual friends from assaulting another lady. She, however, though she excelled in violence, did not equal in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long, long hour threatened an invisible bicyclist under our windows in that humbler quarter already described as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had apparently been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who, in a moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned that he had not sounded the warning bell. In making this confession he had evidently apologized with his forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the future. Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted his wheel and attempted to ride off, when he was stopped and brought back to the miserable error of his confession. The whole ground was then gone over again, and again pardon with warning was given. Even a glad good-night was exchanged, the wheelman’s voice rising in a quaver of grateful affection. Then he seemed to try riding off again, and then he was stayed as before by the victim, whose sense of public duty flamed up at the prospect of his escape. I do not know how the affair ended; perhaps it never ended; but exhausted nature sank in sleep, and I at least was saved from its continuance. I suppose now that the almost injured person was, if not drunk, at that stage of tipsiness when the sensibilities are keenest and self-respect is most alert. An American could not, at least, have been so tedious in his sober senses, and I will not believe that an Englishman could.

It is to be considered, in any view of the comparative drunkenness of the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is the hope and example of the human race in so many things, that much if not most of our American drunkenness is alien, while English drunkenness is almost entirely native. If the inebriety of the spirited Celt, which in the early years of his adoption with us is sometimes conspicuous, were added to the sum of our home-born intoxication, there could be no doubt which was the greater. As it is, I am afraid that I cannot claim to have seen more drunken men in London than in New York; and when I think of the Family Entrance, indicated at the side-door of every one of our thousands of saloons, I am not sure I can plume myself on the superior sobriety of our drinking men’s wives. As for poverty — if I am still partially on that subject — as for open misery, the misery that indecently obtrudes itself upon prosperity and begs of it, I am bound to say that I have met more of it in New York than ever I met during my sojourns in London. Such misery may be more rigidly policed in the English capital, more kept out of sight, more quelled from asking mercy, but I am sure that in Fifth Avenue, and to and fro in the millionaire blocks between that avenue and the last possible avenue eastward, more deserving or undeserving poverty has made itself seen and heard to my personal knowledge than in Piccadilly, or the streets of Mayfair or Park Lane, or the squares and places which are the London analogues of our best residential quarters.

Of course, the statistics will probably be against me — I have often felt an enmity in statistics — and I offer my observations as possibly inexact. One can only be sure of one’s own experience (even if one can be sure of that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two further in behalf of my observations. After we returned to London, in September, I used to stroll much among the recumbent figures of the unemployed on the grass of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours of the autumnal day. These fellow-men looked more interesting than they probably were, either asleep or awake, and if I could really have got inside their minds I dare say I should have been no more amused than if I had penetrated the consciousness of as many people of fashion in the height of the season. But what I wish to say is that, whether sleeping or waking, they never, any of them, asked me for a penny, or in any wise intimated a wish to divide my wealth with me. If I offered it myself, it was another thing, and it was not refused to the extent of a shilling by the good fellow whose conversation I bought one afternoon when I found him, sitting up in his turfy bed, and mending his coat with needle and thread. I asked him of the times and their badness, and I hope I left him with the conviction that I believed him an artisan out of work, taking his misfortune bravely. He was certainly cheerful, and we had some agreeable moments, which I could not prolong, because I did not like waking the others, or such of them as might be sleeping.

I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery to be cheerful seemed to be rather trivial, and I was better pleased with the impassioned bearing of a pair who passed me another day as I sat on one of the benches beside the path where the trees were dropping their listless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I might judge from their having each a babe in their arms and two or three other babes at their heels. They were not actually in tatters, but anything more intensely threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined; they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to the left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly, with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble terror which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the best effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a little way before I gained courage to speak to the man, who seemed to have been sick, and looked more miserable, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then I asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed in a ghastly pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his luck. He owned that he was, and in guarantee of his good faith took the shilling I offered him. If his need had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sovereign; but one must not fly in the face of the Providence, which is probably not ill-advised in choosing certain of us to be reduced to absolute destitution. The man smiled a sick, thin-lipped smile which showed his teeth in a sort of pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife, gloomily unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk back to my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had not embodied, society to her.

I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest that came to my knowledge in London; but I do not insist that it was genuine, and if any more scientific student of civilization wishes to insinuate that my tragedy was a masquerade got up by that pair to victimize the sentimental American stranger, and do him out of one of his ill-got shillings, I will not gainsay him. I merely maintain, as I have always done, that the conditions are alike in the Old World and the New, and that the only difference is in the circumstances, which may be better now in New York, and now in London, while the conditions are always bad everywhere for the poor. That is a point on which I shall not yield to any more scientific student of civilization. But in the mean time my light mind was taken from that dolorous pair to another pair on the grass of the slope not far off in front of me.

Hard by the scene of this pathetic passage a pair of quite well-dressed young people had thrown themselves, side by side, on the September grass as if it had been the sand at any American seashore, or the embrowned herbage of Hyde Park in July. Perhaps the shelving ground was dryer than the moist levels where the professional unemployed lay in scores; but I do not think it would have mattered to that tender pair if it had been very damp; so warmly were they lapped in love’s dream, they could not have taken cold. The exile could only note the likeness of their open-air love-making to that in public places at home, and contrast it with the decorum of Latin countries where nothing of the kind is known. If anything, English lovers of this type are franker than with us, doubtless because of the greater simplicity of the English nature; and they seem to be of a better class. One day when I was sitting in a penny chair in Green Park, the agent of the company came and collected the rent of me. I thought it a hardship, for I had purposely chosen an inconspicuous situation where I should not be found, and it was long past the end of the season, when no company should have had the heart to collect rent for its chairs. But I met my fate without murmuring, and as the young man who sold me a ticket good for the whole day at a penny, was obviously not pressed with business, I tried to recoup myself by a little conversation.

“I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I don’t see many of your chairs occupied.”

“Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there’s quite a few taken at night, sir — over there in the hollow.” I looked a leading question, and he went on: “Young people come to sit there in the evening, sir. It’s a quiet place and out of the way.”

“Oh, yes. Where they’re not molested by the unemployed?” I cast a generalizing glance over the dead and wounded of the battle of life strewn about the grass of an adjacent space.

“Well, that’s just where it is, sir. Those fellows do nothing but sleep all day, and then after dark they get up and begin to prowl. They spy, some of ‘em, on the young people courting, and follow ’em ‘ome and blackmail ‘em. They’re a bad lot, sir. They wouldn’t work if they could get it.”

I perceived that my friend was a capitalist, and I suspected him of being one of the directors of the penny-chair company. But perhaps he thought me a capitalist, too, and fancied that I would like to have him decry the unemployed. Still he may have been right about the blackmailing; one must live, and the innocent courage of open-air courtship in London offers occasions of wilful misconstruction. In a great city, the sense of being probably unnoted and unknown among its myriads must eventuate in much indifference to one’s surroundings. How should a young couple on an omnibus-top imagine that a stranger in the seat opposite could not help overhearing the tender dialogue in which they renewed their love after some previous falling out?

“But I was hurt, Will, dear.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, dear.”

“I know, Will, dear.”

“But it’s all right now, dear?”

“Oh yes, Will, dear.”

Could anything be sweeter? I am ashamed to set it down; it ought to be sacred; and nothing but my zeal in these social studies could make me profane it. Who would not have been the careless brute this young man must have been, if only one might have tasted the sweetness of such forgiving? His pardon set a premium on misbehavior. He was a nice-looking young fellow, but she was nicer, and in her tender eyes there seemed more wisdom. Probably she knew just at what moment to temper justice with mercy.

Sometimes women do not know when to temper mercy with justice. I fancied this the error of the fond nursemaid whom I one day saw pushing her perambulator at almost an illegal motor-pace along the sidewalk in order to keep up with the tall grenadier who marched with his head in the air, and let her make this show of being in his company, but not once looking at her, or speaking to her. The hearts of such poor girls are always with the military, so that it is said to be comparatively easy to keep servants in the neighborhood of the barracks, or even in those streets that the troops habitually pass through, and may be conveniently gloated upon from attic-windows or basement areas. Probably much of the natural supremacy of the male of our species has been lost in all ranks of society through the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men in civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace on their coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely they could still knock women about as they used, and be all the more admired. It is a point worth considering in the final adjustment of their mutual relations.

A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory with those I eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus-top, was a silent pair I noted one day in St. Paul’s. They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had apparently lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where every monument is more forbidding than another, and had sunk down on a seat by themselves, and were trying to get back a little courage by furtively holding each other’s hands. It was a touching sight, and of a human interest larger than any London characteristic. So, in a little different sort, was the rapture of a couple behind a tree on whom a friend of mine came suddenly in St. James’s Park at the very moment when the eager he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who had not the courage of an ever-present literary mission, fled abashed from the place, and I think he was right; but surely it was no harm to overhear the affianced of a ‘bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the way from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from the seat she had taken next him. The witness was going up to a dentist in that region, and professed that in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the furies of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after all.

XII

TWICE-SEEN SIGHTS AND HALF-FANCIED FACTS

London is so manifold (as I have all along been saying) that it would be advisable, if one could, to see it in a sort of severalty, and take it in the successive strata of its unfathomable interest. Perhaps it could best be visited by a syndicate of cultivated Americans; then one could give himself to its political or civic interest, another to its religious memories and associations, another to its literary and artistic records; no one American, however cultivated, could do justice to all these claims, even with life and health of an expectation beyond that of the most uncultivated American. Besides this suggestion I should like to offer a warning, and this is, that no matter with what devoted passion the American lover of London approaches her he must not hope for an exclusive possession of her heart. If she is insurpassably the most interesting, the most fascinating of all the cities that ever were, let him be sure that he is not the first to find it out. He may not like it, but he must reconcile himself to seeing some English rival before him in devotion to any aspect of her divinity. It is not for nothing that poets, novelists, historians, antiquarians have been born in England for so many ages; and not a palm’s breadth of her sky, not a foot of her earth, not a stone or brick of her myriad wallspaces but has been fondly noted, studied, and described in prose, or celebrated in verse. English books are full of England, and she is full of Englishmen, whom the American, come he never so numerously, will find outnumbering him in the pursuit of any specific charm of hers. In my wanderings otherwhere in their islands I had occasion to observe how fond the English were of English travel and English objects of interest, and wherever I went in London there were Englishmen elbowing me from the front rank, not rudely, not unkindly, but insensibly to my rights of priority as an alien. In the old days of my Italian travels I had been used as a foreigner to carrying it with a high hand at shrines of the beautiful or memorable. I do not know how it is now, but in those days there was nothing in the presence of an Italian church, gallery, palace, piazza, or ruin that you expected less than an Italian. As for Rome, there was no such thing as doing as the Romans do in such places, because there were apparently no Romans to set you the example. But there are plenty of Londoners in London, and of a curiosity about London far greater than you can ever inspire them with for New York.

Even at such a place as the Zoological Gardens, which they must have been visiting all their lives, there were, at least, a thousand Englishmen for every cultivated American we could make sure of when we went there; and as it was a Sunday, when the gardens are closed to the general public, this overwhelming majority of natives must have come on orders from Fellows of the Society such as we had supposed would admit us much more selectly, if not solely. Still, the place was not crowded, and if it had been, still it would have been delightful on a summer afternoon, of that hovering softness, half-cloud, half-sun, which the London sky has the patent of. The hawthorn-trees, white and pink with their may, were like cloudlets dropped from that sky, as it then was and would be at sunset; and there was a density of grass underfoot and foliage overhead in which one’s own childhood found itself again, so that one felt as free for the simple pleasure of consorting with strange beasts and birds as if one were still ten or eleven years old. But I cannot hope to rejuvenate my readers in the same degree, and so had better not insist upon the animals; the herds of elephants, the troops of lions and tigers, the schools of hippopotamuses, and the mass-meetings of anthropoid apes. Above and beyond these in their strangeness were the figures of humanity representative of the globe-girdling British empire, in their drawers and turbans and their swarthy skins, who could urge a patriotic interest, impossible for me, in the place. One is, of course, used to all sorts of alien shapes in Central Park, but there they are somehow at once less surprising and less significant than these Asian and African forms; they will presently be Americans, and like the rest of us; but those dark imperialings were already British and eternally un-English. They frequented the tea-tables spread in pleasant shades and shelters, and ate buns and bread-and-butter, like their fellow-subjects, but their dark liquid eyes roamed over the blue and gold and pink of the English complexions with an effect of mystery irreconcilable forever with the matter-of-fact mind behind their bland masks. We called them Burmese, Eurasians, Hindoos, Malays, and fatigued ourselves with guessing at them so that we were faint for the tea from which they kept us at the crowded tables in the gardens or on the verandas of the tea-houses. But we were not so insatiable of them as of their fellow-subjects, the native British whom one sees at a Sunday of the Zoo to perhaps special advantage. Our Sunday was in the season, and the season had conjecturably qualified it, so that one could sometimes feel oneself in company better than one’s own. The children were well-dressed and admirably well-behaved; they justly outnumbered their elders, and it was obviously their day. But it was also the day of their elders, who had made excuse of the children’s pleasure in coming to the Zoo for their own. Some indeed were not so much their elders, and the young aunts and uncles, who were naturally cousins, lost themselves at times a little way from the children and maids, in the quieter walks or nooks, or took boat to be alone on the tranquil waters with one another. They were then more interesting than the strangest Malays and Hindoos, and I wonder what these made of them, as they contemplated their segregation with the other thronging spectators.

We had not pledged ourselves not to go to the Zoo; we were there quite voluntarily; but among the places which we promised ourselves not to visit again were the South Kensington Museum and the National Gallery; and I shall always be glad that we did not keep faith with ourselves in regard to the last. We went to it again not once, but several times, and always with an increasing sense of its transcendent representativity. It is not merely that for all the schools of painting it is almost as good as going to the continental countries where they flourished, and is much easier. It is not only that for English history, as it lives in the portraiture of kings and queens, and their courtiers and courtesans and heroes and statesmen, it is the past made personal to the beholder and forever related to himself, as if he had seen those people in the flesh. It is, above everything else, for those rooms upon rooms crowded with the pictures and statues and busts of the Englishmen who have made England England in every field of achievement that is oppressively, almost crushingly wonderful. Before that swarming population of poets, novelists, historians, essayists, dramatists; of painters, sculptors, architects; of astronomers, mathematicians, geologists, physicians; of philosophers, theologians, divines; of statesmen, politicians, inventors, actors; of philanthropists, reformers, economists, the great of our own history need not, indeed, shrink in form, but must dwindle in number till our past seems as thinly peopled as our continent. It is in these rooms that the grandeur of England, historically, resides. You may, if you are so envious, consider it in that point and this, and at some point find her less great than the greatest of her overgrown or overgrowing daughters, but from the presence of that tremendous collectivity, that populous commonwealth of famous citizens whose census can hardly be taken, you must come away and own, in the welcome obscurity to which you plunge among the millions of her capital, that in all-round greatness we have hardly even the imagination of her transcendence.

Well towards fifty years had passed between my first and last visits to London, but I think I had kept for it throughout that long interval much more of the earlier sentiment than for any other city that I have known. I do not wish to be mystical, and I hesitate to say that this sentiment was continuous through the smell of the coal-smoke, or that the smoke formed a solution in which all associations were held, and from which they were, from time to time, precipitated in specific memories. The peculiar odor had at once made me at home in London, for it had probably so saturated my first consciousness in the little black, smoky town on the Ohio River, where I was born, that I found myself in a most intimate element when I now inhaled it. But apart from this personal magic, the London smoke has always seemed to me full of charm. Of course it is mostly the smoke which gives “atmosphere,” softens outlines, tenderly blurs forms, makes near and far the same, and intenerisce il cuore, for any him whose infant sense it bathed. No doubt it thickens the constant damp, and lends mass and viscosity to the fog; but it is over-blamed and under-praised. It is chiefly objectionable, it is wholly deplorable, indeed, when it descends in those sooty particles, the blacks; but in all my London sojourns I have had but one experience of the blacks, and I will not condemn the smoke because of them. It gives a wild pathetic glamour to the late winter sunrises and the early winter sunsets, the beauty of which dwells still in my mind from my first London sojourn. In my most recent autumn, it mellowed the noons to the softest effulgence; in the summer it was a veil in the air which kept the flame of the heated term from doing its worst. It hung, diaphonous, in the dusty perspectives, but it gathered and thickened about the squares and places, and subdued all edges, so that nothing cut or hurt the vision.

I was glad of that, because I found one of my greatest pleasures in looking at the massed tree-forms in those gardened-groves, which I never penetrated. The greater parks are open to the public, but the squares are enclosed by tall iron fences, and locked against the general with keys of which the particular have the keeping in the houses about them. It gave one a fine shiver of exclusion as populace, or mob, to look through their barriers at children playing on the lawns within, while their nurses sat reading, or pushed perambulators over the trim walks. Sometimes it was even young ladies who sat reading, or, at the worst, governesses. But commonly the squares were empty, though the grass so invited the foot, and the benches in the border of the shade, or round the great beds of bloom, extended their arms and spread their welcoming laps for any of the particular who would lounge in them.

I remember only one of these neighborhood gardens which was open to the public, and that was in the poor neighborhood which we lodged on the edge of, equally with the edge of Belgravia. It was opened, by the great nobleman who owned nearly the whole of that part of London, on all but certain days of the week, with restrictions lettered on a board nearly as big as the garden itself; but I never saw it much frequented, perhaps because I usually happened upon it when it was locked against its beneficiaries. Upon the whole, these London squares, though they flattered the eye, did not console the spirit so much as the far uglier places in New York, or the pretty places in Paris, which are free to all. It can be said for the English way that when such places are free to all they are not so free to some, and that is true. In this world you have to exclude either the many or the few, and in England it is rather the many who are excluded. Being one of those shut out, I did not like the English way so well as ours, but if I had had keys to those locks, I should not now dare ask myself which principle I should have preferred. It would have been something like choosing between popular government and family government after having been created one of the governing families.

Life, I felt, would be sensibly dignified if one could spend some months of every year of it in a mansion looking down into the leafy tops of those squares. One’s mansion might not always have the company of the most historical or patrician mansions; sometimes these are to be found in very unexpected and even inconspicuous places; but commonly the associated dwellings would be ample, if not noble. They would rarely be elbowed by those structures, not yet quite so frequent in London as in New York, which lift themselves in an outer grandeur unsupported by the successive levels of the social pretence within. I should say that with the English, more than with us, the perpendicular is still socially superior to the horizontal domestication. Yet the London flats are of more comfortable and tasteful arrangement than ours. They are better lighted always, never having (as far as I know) dark rooms blindly staring into airless pits; and if they are not so well heated, that is because the English do not wish, or at least expect, to be heated at all. The elevator is not so universal as with us, but the stairways are easier and statelier. The public presence of the edifice is statelier, too; but if you come to state, the grandest of these buildings must deny its denizens the splendor of flunkeys standing before its door, on a day or night of social function, as one sees them standing by the steps or portals of some mansion that houses a single family. To which of the flat-dwellers would they be supposed to belong, if they grouped themselves at the common entrance? For anything specific in their attendance they might almost as well be at the next street-corner.

Time and again, in these pages, I have paid my duty, which has been my grateful pleasure, to the birds which haunt the squares, and sing there. You are not obliged to have a householder’s key in order to hear them; and when the hawthorns and the horse-chestnuts blossomed you required a proprietorial right as little. Somehow, my eye and ear always disappointed themselves in the absence of rooks from such places. My senses ought to have been better instructed than to expect rooks in London, but they had been so educated to the sight and sound of rooks everywhere else in England that they mechanically demanded them in town. I do not even know what birds they were that sang in the spaces; but I was aware of a fringe of sparrow-chirpings sharply edging their song next the street; and where the squares were reduced to crescents, or narrow parallelograms, or mere strips or parings of groves, I suspect that this edging was all there was of the mesh of bird-notes so densely interwoven in the squares.

I have spoken hitherto of that passion for dress to which all the womanhood of England has so bewitchingly abandoned itself, and which seemed to have reached an undue excess in the housemaid in a bolero hat and a trained skirt, putting that white on the front steps which is so universal in England that if the sun missed it after rising he might instantly go down again in the supposition that it was still night. It must always be a woman who whitens the steps; if a man-servant were to do it any such dreadful thing might happen as would follow his blacking the boots, which is alienably a female function. Under the circumstances one hears much of the general decay of excellence in woman-servants in London. They are far less amiable, patient, respectful, and faithful than when their mistresses were young. This may be from the fact that so many more employments besides domestic service seem to be open to girls. Apparently very young girls are preferred in the innumerable postal-stations, if one may judge from the children of tender years who sell you stamps, and take your telegrams and register your letters. I used at first to tremble for a defective experience, if not a defective intelligence in them, but I did not find them inadequate to their duties through either. Still their employment was so phenomenal that I could not help remarking upon it. None of my English friends seemed to have noticed it, till at last one, who had noticed it, said he believed it was because the government found them cheap, and was in that way helping repay itself for the enormous expenses of the Boer War.

In the London shops I did not think women were so generally employed as in our own, or those of the Continent. But this may have been a conclusion from careless observation. In the book-stores to which I most resorted, and which I did not think so good as ours, I remember to have seen but one saleswoman. Of course saleswomen prevail in all the large stores where women’s goods, personal and household, are sold, and which I again did not think comparable to ours. Seldom in any small shop, or even book-stall or newspaper-stand, did women seem to be in charge. But at the street-markets, especially those for the poorer customers, market-women were the rule. I should say, in fine, that woman was a far more domestic animal in London than in Paris, and never quite the beast of burden that she is in Berlin, or other German cities great or small; but I am not going to sentimentalize her lot in England. Probably it is only comparatively ideal in the highest classes. In the lower and lowest its hardship is attested by the stunted stature, and the stunted figure of the ordinary English lower-class woman. Even among the elect of the afternoon parade in the Park, I do not think there was so great an average of tall young girls as in any fashionable show with us, where they form the patriciate which our plutocracy has already flowered into. But there was a far greater average of tall young men than with us; which may mean that, with the English, nobility is a masculine distinction.

As for those great department stores with which the question of women relates itself inevitably, I have cursorily assumed our priority in them, and the more I think of them, the more I am inclined to believe myself right. But that is a matter in which women only may be decisive; the nice psychology involved cannot be convincingly studied by the other sex. I will venture, again, however, so far into this strange realm as to say that the subordinate shops did not seem so many or so good in London as in New York, though when one remembers the two Bond Streets, and Oxford, and lower Piccadilly, one might feel the absurdity of claiming superiority for Broadway, or Fourteenth and Twenty-third streets, or Union and Madison squares, or the parts of Third and Sixth avenues to which ladies’ shopping has spread. After all, perhaps there is but one London, in this as in some other things.

Among the other things are hardly the restaurants which abound with us, good, bad, and indifferent. In the affair of public feeding, of the costliest, as well as the cheapest sorts, we may, with our polyglot menus, safely challenge the competition of any metropolis in the world, not to say the universe. It is not only that we make the openest show of this feeding, and parade it at windows, whereas the English retire it to curtained depths within, but that, in reality, we transact it ubiquitously, perpetually. In both London and New York it is exotic for the most part, or, at least, on the higher levels, and the administration is in the hands of those foreigners who take our money for learning English of us. But there is no such range of Italian and French and German restaurants in London as in New York, and of what there are none are at once so cheap and so good as ours. The cheaper restaurants are apt to be English, sincere in material, but heavy and unattractive in expression; in everything culinary the island touch seems hopelessly inartistic. One Sunday morning, far from home, when the lunch came prematurely, we found all the English eating-houses devoutly shut, and our wicked hope was in a little Italian trattoria which opened its doors to the alien air with some such artificial effect as an orange-tree in a tub might expand its blossoms. There was a strictly English company within, and the lunch was to the English taste, but the touch was as Latin as it could have been by the Arno or the Tiber or on the Riva degli Schiavoni.

At the great restaurants, where one may see fashion lunching, the kitchen seemed of an equal inspiration with Sherry’s or Delmonico’s, but the entourage was less oppressively glaring, and the service had more moments of effacing itself, and allowing one to feel oneself a principal part of the drama. That is often the case with us in the simpler sort of eating-houses, where it is the neat hand of Phyllis that serves rather than that of the white-aproned or dress-coated Strephon of either color or any nationality. My profoundest and distinctest impression of Phyllidian service is from a delightful lunch which I had one golden noonday in that famous and beautiful house, Crosby Place, Bishopsgate, which remains of much the perpendicular Gothic state in which Sir John Crosby proudly built it from his grocer’s and woolman’s gains in 1466. It had afterwards added to it the glory of lodging Richard III., who, both as protector and as sovereign-prince made appointments there, in Shakespeare’s tragedy of him, for the Lady Anne, for Catesby, and for the “First Murderer,” whom he praises for his thoughtfulness in coming for the “warrant,” that he might be admitted to their victim.

   “Well thought upon; I have it here about me.

   When you have done, repair to Crosby place.”

Probably the First Murderer lunched there, four hundred years ago, “when he had done as I did now”; but, in the mean time, Henry VIII. had given Crosby Place to a rich Italian merchant, one Anthony Bonvice; later, ambassadors had been received in it; the first Earl of Northampton had enlarged it, and dwelt in it as lord mayor; in 1638 the East India Company had owned it, and later yet, in 1673, it was used for a Presbyterian meeting-house; but in 1836 it was restored to its ancient form and function. I do not know how long it has been an eating-house, but I hope it may long remain so, for the sensation and refreshment of Americans who love a simple and good refection in a mediaeval setting, at a cost so moderate that they must ever afterwards blush for it. You penetrate to its innermost perpendicularity through a passage that enclosed a “quick-lunch” counter, and climb from a most noble banquet-hall crammed with hundreds of mercantile gentlemen “feeding like one” at innumerable little tables, to a gallery where the musicians must have sat of old. There it was that Phyllis found and neat-handedly served my friend and me, gently experiencing a certain difficulty in our combined addition, but mastering the arithmetical problem presently, and taking our tip with an air of surprise which it never created in any of the English-learning Swiss, French, or Italian Strephons who elsewhere ministered to us.

The waitresses at Crosby Place were of a girlish dignity which never expected and was never visibly offered the familiar pleasantries which are the portion of that strange, sad, English creation, the barmaid. In tens of thousands of London public-houses she stands with her hand on beer-pumps, and exchanges jocose banalities with persons beyond the counter in whose dim regard she must show a mere blur of hardened loveliness against her background of bottles and decanters; but the waitress at Crosby Place is of an ideal of behavior as fine as that of any Phyllis in a White Mountain hotel; and I thought it to the honor of the lunchers that they seemed all to know it. The gentle influence of her presence had spread to a restaurant in the neighborhood where, another day, in trying for Crosby Place, I was misled by the mediaeval aspect of the entrance, and where I found waitresses again instead of waiters. But nowhere else do I remember them, always excepting the manifold tea-houses of the metropolis, and those repeated A. B. C. cold-lunch places of the Aerated Bread Company, where a chill has apparently been imparted to their bearing by the temperature of the food they serve. It is very wholesome, however, and it may be rather that a New England severity in them is the effect of the impersonal relation of served and server which no gratuity humanizes.

It would not be easy to fathom the reason for the employment of girls as ushers in the London theatres. Perhaps it is to heighten the glamour of a place whose glamour hardly needs heightening, or more probably it is to soften the asperity of the play-goer who finds himself asked sixpence for that necessary evil, the programme. But, now I come to think of it, most of the play-goers in London are Englishmen who have been always used to paying, ancestrally and personally, sixpence for their programmes and feel no asperity at being so plundered. The true explanation may be found, after all, in the discovery, akin to the government’s, that their service is cheaper than men ushers’ would be. Children of as tender years as those who manage the postal-stations, go round with tea and coffee between the acts, as with us the myriad-buttoned ice-water boy passes; but whereas this boy returns always with a tray of empty glasses, I never saw a human being drink either the tea or coffee offered by those female infants in any London theatre.

Let it be not supposed, however, that I went much to London theatres. I went perhaps half a dozen times in as many weeks. Once settled in my chair, I might well have fancied myself at home in a New York theatre, except that the playing seemed rather better, and the English intonation not quite so scrupulously English as that which our actors have produced after a conscientious study of the original. I heard that the English actors had studied the American accent for a play imported from us; but I did not see this play, and I am now very sorry. The American accent, at least, must have been worth hearing, if one might judge from the reproductions of our parlance which I heard in private life by people who had sojourned, or merely travelled, among us. These were so unfailingly delightful, that one could not have wished them more like.

The arriving and departing of theatre-goers by night adds sensibly to the brilliancy of the complexion of London. The flare of electricity in the region of the theatres made a midnight summer in the empty heart of September, and recalled the gayety of the season for the moment to the desolate metropolis. But this splendor was always so massed and so vivid that even in the height of the season it was one of the things that distinguished itself among the various immense impressions. The impressions were all, if I may so try to characterize them, transitory; they were effects of adventitious circumstances; they were not structural in their origin. The most memorable aspect of the Strand or Fleet Street would not be its moments of stately architecture, but its moments of fog or mist, when its meanest architecture would show stately. The city won its moving grandeur from the throng of people astir on its pavements, or the streams of vehicles solidifying or liquefying in its streets. The august groups of Westminster and Parliament did not seem in themselves spectacular; they needed the desertedness of night, and the pour of the moon into the comparative emptiness of the neighborhood, to fill them out to the proportions of their keeping in the memory. Is Trafalgar Square as imposing as it has the chance of being? It is rather scattered and spotty, and wants somehow the magic by which Paris moves the spirit in the Place de la Concorde, or Edinburgh stirs the soul with its suggestions of old steel-engravings of Athens. Of course St. Paul’s has a prodigious opportunity, as the multitudinous omnibuses roll their tide towards its facade, but it is not equal to its opportunity. Bit for bit, there is not quite any bit in London like that edifice of smutted Greek on which the newly arrived American looks from his breakfast-table in his Liverpool hotel, and realizes that he is in England. I am far from thinking the black of the coal-smoke a disadvantage to the London architecture. Pure white marble is all very well, and the faint rose that the stone takes from a thousand years of Italian sunsets is not bad; but the black blur on the surfaces of St. Paul’s lends wall and dome and pillar a depth of shadow which only the electric glare of tropic suns can cast. The smoke enriches the columns which rise, more or less casually as it seems, from the London streets and squares, and one almost hates to have it cleaned off or painted under on the fronts of the aristocratic mansions. It is like having an old picture restored; perhaps it has to be done, but it is a pity.

The aristocratic mansions themselves, the hundreds of large houses of the proudest nobility in the world, are by no means overwhelming. They hold their primacy among the other pieces of domestic architecture, as their owners hold their primacy in society, very quietly, if very stolidly, and one would have, I fancy, to come much harder against them than one would be allowed to do, in order to feel their quality intimately. There they are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, and the different squares and gardens and places; and certain of them may be visited at certain times on application by the tourist. But that is a barren pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now and then such a house gave evidence of high social preparation during the season in flinging out curtained galleries or pavilions towards the street, if it stood back; if it stood flush upon the sidewalk a group of fifteen or twenty flunkeys, and the continual arrest of carriages would attest its inward state; but the genius of the race is to keep its own to itself, even its own splendors and grandeurs, except on public occasions when it shines forth in incomparable magnificence.

If London, then, is not habitually grandiose, or monumental, or beautiful, what is it? I should say, with much fear of contradiction and scornful laughter, that it was pretty, that it was endearingly nooky, cornery, curvy, with the enchantment of trees and flowers everywhere mixed with its civic turmoil, and the song of birds heard through the staccato of cabs, and the muffled bellow of omnibuses. You may not like London, but you cannot help loving it. The monuments, if I may keep coming back to them, are plain things, often, with no attempt upon the beholder’s emotions. In the process of time, I suspect that the Albert Memorial will not be the most despised among them, for it expresses, even if it over-expresses, a not ignoble idea, and if it somewhat stutters and stammers, it does at last get it out; it does not stand mum, like the different shy, bashful columns stuck here and there, and not able to say what they would be at.

If one comes to the statues there are, of course, none so good as the Farragut in Madison Square, or the Logan on the Lake front at Chicago, and, on the whole, I remember those at Washington as better. There are not so many English kings standing or riding about as one would expect; the English kings have, indeed, not been much to brag of in bronze or marble, though in that I do not say they are worse than other kings. I think, but I am not sure, that there are rather more public men of inferior grade than kings, though this may be that they were more impressive. Most noticeable was the statue of Disraeli, which, on Primrose Day, I saw much garlanded and banked up with the favorite flower of that peculiarly rustic and English statesman. He had the air of looking at the simple blossoms and forbearing an ironical smile, or was this merely the fancy of the spectator? Among the royal statues is that of the Charles whom they put to death, and who was so unequal in character though not in spirit to his dread fate. It was stolen away, and somewhere long hid by his friends or foes, but it is now to be seen in the collection of Trafalgar Square, so surely the least imposing of equestrian figures that it is a pity it should ever have been found. For a strikingly handsome man, all his statues attest how little he lent himself to sculpture.

Not far away is another equestrian statue, which never failed to give me a start, when I suddenly came upon it in a cab. It looked for an instant quite like many statues of George Washington, as it swept the air with its doffed hat, but a second glance always showed it the effigy of George the Third, bowing to posterity with a gracious eighteenth-century majesty. If it were possible, one would like to think that the resemblance mentioned had grown upon it, and that it in the case of Americans was the poor king’s ultimate concession to the good-feeling which seems to be reuniting the people he divided.

XIII

AN AFTERNOON AT HAMPTON COURT

The amiable afternoon of late April which we chose for going to Hampton Court, made my return to the place after an interval of twenty odd years, a sort of triumphal progress by embowering the course of our train with plum and pear and cherry trees in a white mist of bloom. Long before we reached the country these lovely apparitions abounded in the back-yards of the little city and suburban dwellings which we ran between, and the bits of gardens were full of homely flowers; when we got to open expanses where nature could find room to spread in lawns that green English turf of hers, the grass was starry with daisies and sunny with dandelions. The poets used to call that sort of thing enamelling, and it was not distasteful, in our approach to such a kindly, artificial old place as Hampton Court, to suppose that we were passing through enamelled meads. Under the circumstances we might have expected our train to purl, in default of a stream to perform the part, and I can truly say of it that it arrived with us in a mood so pastoral that I still cannot understand why we did not ask for a fly at the station in a couplet out of Pope. We got the fly easily enough in our prose vernacular, and the driver hid his surprise at our taking it for the little distance to the palace, which it would have been so much pleasanter to walk.

Yet, I do not know but we were instinctively wise in coming to the entrance of the fine old paved courtyard with a certain suddenness: if we had left it much more time the grass between the bricks might have overgrown them, and given an air of ruin to precincts that for centuries have been held from decay, in the keeping of life at once simple and elegant. Though Hampton Court has never been the residence of the English kings since the second George gave the third George an enduring disgust for it by boxing the ears of the boy there in a fit of grandfatherly impatience, it has been and is the home of many English gentlefolk, rarely privileged, in a land of rare privileges, to live in apartments granted them by royal favor. In former times the privilege was now and then abused by tenants who sublet their rooms in lodgings; but the abuse has long been broken up, and now there cannot be, in the whole earth, a more dignified dwelling for the dowager of a distinguished or merely favored family than such as the royal pleasure freely grants at Hampton Court. Doubtless the crumpled rose-leaf is there, as it is everywhere, but unless it is there to lend a faint old-fashioned odor as of pot-pourri to life in those apartments, I do not believe that it abounds in any of them.

The things I had chiefly in mind from my former visit were the beauties of the Stuarts’ time, and of Sir Peter Lely’s pencil, in the galleries of the palace, and the secular grape-vine which I found in its familiar place in a corner of the conservatories. I will not say which I paid my devoirs to first, but if it was the vine, I can truly declare that I did not find it looking a day older since I had seen it last in 1882. It could hardly have said as much for me, but I reflected that I had not been two hundred years old to begin with, and consoled myself as I could in my consciousness that I was really not so young by twenty odd years as I once was. Yet I think it must be a dull and churlish nature which would wish to refuse the gentle contemporaneity offered by the unaging antiquity at Hampton Court. I should at this moment be glad to share the youthful spirit of the sunken garden which I passed on my way to the famous vine, and in which with certain shapes of sculpture and blossom, I admired the cockerels snipped out of arbor-vitae in the taste of a world more childlike than ours, and at the same time so much older. The Dutch taste of it all, once removed from a French taste, or twice from the Italian, and mostly naturalized to the English air by the good William and Mary (who were perhaps chiefly good in comparison with all their predecessors from Henry VIII. down to the second and worst of the Jameses), comes to its most endearing expression in that long arbor of clipped wych-elms, near the sunken garden, called Mary’s bower, which, on our April afternoon, was woolly with the first effort of its boughs to break into leaf.

We did not penetrate its perspective, for it seems one of the few things at Hampton Court barred to the public. Everywhere else the place is free to the visitor, who may walk as he pleases on its garden-paths, or over its close-woven turf, or sit out of the sun under its dense black yews, or stroll beneath the oaks by the banks of the Long Canal. If the canal is Dutch, the burly trees which lounge about at their pleasure in the park, impart the true English sentiment to the scene; but, for my part, I did not care to go far from the borders of the beds of hyacinths and tulips and daffodils. The grass sighed with secret tears under the foot, and it was better to let the fancy, which would not feel the need of goloshes, rove disembodied to the bosky depths into which the oaks thickened afar, dim amid the vapor-laden air. From the garden-plots one could look, dry-shod, down upon the Thames, along which the pretty town of Hampton stretches, and in whose lively current great numbers of house-boats tug at their moorings. The Thames beside the palace is not only swift but wide, and from the little flowery height on which we surveyed these very modernest of pleasure-craft they had a remove at which they were lost in an agreeable mystery. Even one which we were told belonged to a rich American could not alienate itself from the past when there were no United States, and very few united colonies. The poorest American, if he could not have a lodgement in the palace (and I do not see how the royal bounty could extend to one of our disinherited condition), or one of the pleasant Hampton houses overlooking the river, might be glad to pass the long, mild English summer, made fast to the willowy bank of the Thames, without mosquitoes or malaria to molest him or make him afraid in his dreamful sojourn.

By all the laws of picturesque dealing with other times the people whose portraits we had seen in the galleries ought to have been in the garden or about the lawns in hospitable response to the interest of their trans-Atlantic visitors; but in mere common honesty, I must own they were not. They may have become tired of leaving their frames at the summons of the imaginations which have so often sought to steal their color for a dull page, and to give the charm of their tragedy or comedy to a passage which otherwise would not move. I do not blame them, and I advise the reader not to expect a greater complaisance of them than we experienced. But in all that densely-storied England, where every scene has memories accumulated one upon another till the sense aches under them, I think there is none that surpasses, if any vies with this.

What makes the charm of Hampton Court is that from first to last it lies in an air clearer of fable or tradition than that which involves most other seats of power. For we do like to know what we are dealing with, in the past as in the present, and in proportion as we are ourselves real, we love reality in other people, whether they still live or whether they died long ago. If they were people of eminence, we gratify in supreme degree the inextinguishable passion for good society innate in every one by consorting with royalties and titles whom we may here know as we know our contemporary equals, through facts and traits even better ascertained. At Hampton Court we are really at home with the great parvenu who began the palace in such magnificence that none of the successive princes have excelled it in design, and who when his fear of the jealous tyrant compelled him to offer it to his king, could make such a gift as no subject ever before laid at the feet of a sovereign. The grandeur of Cardinal Wolsey, and the meanness of Henry VIII., in the sufferance and the performance of that extortion are as sensible in the local air as if they were qualities of some event in our own day, and the details of the tyrant’s life in the palace remain matters of as clear knowledge as those of some such tragedy as the recent taking off of the Servian king and queen. The annals are so explicit that no veil of uncertainty hangs between us and the lapse of Anne Boleyn from the throne to the scaffold; we see Catherine Howard as in an instantaneous photograph escaping from her prison-chamber and running through the gallery to implore the mercy of Henry at mass in the chapel, and, as if a phonograph were reporting them, we hear the wretched woman’s screams when she is pursued and seized and carried back, while the king continues devoutly in the chapel at prayer. The little life of Edward VI. relates itself as distinctly to the palace where he was born; and one is all but personally witness there to the strange episode of Elizabeth’s semi-imprisonment while Bloody Mary, now sister and now sovereign, balanced her fate as from hand to hand, and hesitated whether to make her heiress to a throne or to a crown of martyrdom. She chose wisely in the end, for Elizabeth was fitter for mortal than immortal glory, and for the earthly fame of Mary Queen of Scots Elizabeth in her turn did not choose unwisely, however unwittingly, when amid her coquetting and counselling with her statesmen and lovers at Hampton Court she drew the toils closer and closer about her victim. But here I ought to own that all this is a reflected light from after-reading, and not from my previous knowledge of the local history. In making my confession, however, I am not sure that the sort of general ignorance I brought to it was not a favorable medium through which to view Hampton Court. If you come prepared with the facts, you are hampered by them and hindered in the enjoyment of the moment’s chances. You are obliged to verify them, from point to point, but if you learn them afterwards you can arrange them in your memories of the scene, where you have wandered vaguely about in a liberal and expansive sense of unlimited historical possibilities. I am able now to realize, without having missed one charm of our spring afternoon in those entrancing bounds that the son of Mary Stuart was as fond of Hampton Court, when he came there king, as Elizabeth herself.

It was there that James I. confronted and confuted the Puritan divines whom he invited to lay their complaints before him, and there in his pedantic brow-beating so hammered their hard metal that he tempered it to the sword soon to be unsheathed against his son; it was there that Charles began the famous quarrel with his queen which ended in his deporting Henrietta Maria’s French adherents, or, as he wrote Buckingham, “dryving them away, lyke so many wylde beastes ... and soe the Devill goe with them”; it was there that more importantly when an honorable captive of Parliament, he played fast and loose, after the fashion he was born to, with Cromwell and the other generals who would have favored his escape, and even his restoration to the throne, if they could have found any truth in him to rest a treaty on. It was at Hampton that Cromwell, when the palace became his home, first put on something of royal state, always with lapses through his bonhomie into good-fellowship with his officers, and never with any help from his simple-hearted wife; that the death of his daughter, amid these fitful glories, broke his heart, and he drooped and sickened to his own end, which a change to the different air of Whitehall did not delay; that after the little time of Richard Cromwell’s protectorate, Hampton Court had another royal lord in the second Charles, who repeated history in a quarrel with his queen, for none of the good reasons which the first Charles had in the like contention. The father’s tergiversations with Cromwell may be supposed to have given a glamour of kingcraft to his sojourn later, but the bad part which the son took against his wife was without one dignifying circumstance. One reads with indignation still hot how he brought the plain little Portuguese woman there for their honeymoon, and brightened it for her by thrusting upon her the intimacy of his mistress Lady Castlemaine; how he was firm for once in his yielding life, when he compelled Clarendon to the base office of coaxing and frightening the queen who had trusted the old man as a father; how, like the godless blackguard he was, the “merry monarch,” swore “before Almighty God,” in his letter to the chancellor, that he was “resolved to go through with this matter” of forcing his paramour upon his wife, with the added threat, “and whomsoever I find my Lady Castlemaine’s enemy” in it, “I do promise upon my word to be his enemy as long as I live.” It is less wonderful that the unhappy creature whose spirit he broke should have been crushed, than that the English people, to whom the king’s bad life was an open book, should have suffered him. But perhaps, even this was less wonderful than their patience with the harsh virtue of the Puritans. It is not well to be good, or make others be good at the cost of every ease and grace of life, and though it seems strange and sad to us republicans that the mighty English commonwealth should have been supplanted by such a monarchy as that restored in Charles, it may not be so strange as it was sad. The life which attests itself in the beauties of Lely and of Kneller on the walls of Hampton Court, when it began to have its free course was doubtless none the purer for having been frozen at its source. The world is a long time being saved from itself, and it has had to go back for many fresh starts. If the beautiful women whose wickedness is recorded by the court painters in a convention of wanton looks, rather than by a severally faithful portraiture, can be regarded simply as a part of the inevitable reaction from a period when men had allowed women to be better, we shall not have so much difficulty in showing them mercy. If only after a lapse of twenty years they would not look so much like old acquaintances who had kept their youth too well, one need certainly not be shy of them. Even if all the beauties were as bad as they were painted, there are many other women not ostensibly bad whose pictures fill Hampton Court; but, knowing what galleries are, how mortally fatiguing to every fibre, I should not think of making the reader follow me through the long rooms of the palace, and I will now own that I even spared myself many details in this second visit of mine.

Historically, as I retrospectively perceived, it never ceases to be most intimately interesting down to the day of that third George who had his ears boxed there. The second James had almost as little to do with it as our last king; he was in such haste to go wrong everywhere else that he had no time for the place where other sovereigns before and after him took their pleasure. But William and Mary seemed to give it most of their leisure; to the great little Dutchman it was almost as dear as if it were a bit of Holland, and even more to his mind than Kensington. His queen planted it and kept it to his fancy while he was away fighting the Stuarts in Ireland; and when she was dead, he continued to pull down and build up at Hampton Court as long as he lived, laying the sort of ruthless hand upon its antiquity with which the unsparing present always touches the past. He sickened towards his end there, and one day his horse stepping into a mole-hill when the king was hunting (in the park where the kings from Henry VIII. down had chased the deer), fell with him and hurt him past surgery; but it was at Kensington that he shortly afterwards died. Few indeed, if any of the royal dwellers at Hampton Court breathed their last in air supposed so life-giving by Wolsey when he made it his seat. They loved it and enjoyed it, and in Queen Anne’s time, when under a dull sovereign the civility of England brightened to Augustan splendor, the deep-rooted stem of English poetry burst there into the most exquisite artificial flower which it ever bore; for it was at Hampton Court that the fact occurred, which the fancy of the poet fanned to a bloom, as lasting as if it were rouge, in the matchless numbers of The Rape of the Lock.

Such pleasure-parties as that in which the lovely Arabella Fermor lost her curl under the scissors of Lord Petre, must have had the best of the gayety, in the time of the first and second Georges, for Pope himself, writing of it in one of his visits in 1717, described the court life as one of dull and laborious etiquette. Yet what was fairest and brightest and wittiest, if not wisest in England graced it, and the names of Bellenden and Lepell and Montagu, of Harvey and Chesterfield, of Gay and Pope and Walpole, flash and fade through the air that must have been so heavy even at Hampton Court in these reigns. After all, it is the common people who get the best of it when some lordly pleasure-house for which they have paid comes back to them, as palaces are not unapt finally to do; and it is not unimaginable that collectively they bring as much brilliancy and beauty to its free enjoyment as the kings and courtiers did in their mutually hampered pleasures.

Though the Georges began to divide the palace up into the apartments for the kind of permanent guests of the state who now inhabit them, it was not until well into the time of the late queen that the galleries and gardens were thrown open, without price or restriction, to the public. Whosever the instinct or inspiration was, the graciousness of it may probably be attributed to the mother-hearted sovereign whose goodness gave English monarchy a new lease of life in the affections of her subjects, and raised loyalty to a part of their religion. I suppose that actual rags and dirt would not be admitted to Hampton Court, but I doubt if any misery short of them would be excluded. Our fellow-visitors were of all types, chiefly of the humbler English, and there were not many obvious aliens among them. With that passion and pride in their own which sends them holidaying over the island to every point of historic or legendary interest, and every scene famous for its beauty, they strayed about the grounds and garden-paths of Hampton Court and through the halls of state, and revered the couches and thrones of the dead kings and queens in their bed-chambers and council-chambers, and perused the pictures on the walls, and the frescoes in the roofs. Oftenest they did not seem persons who could bring a cultivated taste to their enjoyment, but fortunately that was not essential to it, and possibly it was even greater without that. They could not have got so much hurt from the baleful beauties of Charles’s court without their history as with it, and where they might not have been protected by their ignorance, they were saved by their preoccupation with one another, for they mostly hunted the objects of interest in courting couples.

We were going, after we had shared their sight-seeing, to enjoy the special privilege of visiting one of the private apartments into which the palace has been so comfortably divided up. But here, I am sorry to say, I must close the door in the reader’s face, and leave him to cool his heels (I regret the offensiveness of the expression, but I cannot help it) on the threshold of the apartment, at the top of the historic staircase which he will have climbed with us, until we come out again. I do not mind telling him that nothing could be more charmingly homelike, and less like the proud discomfort of a palace, than the series of rooms we saw. For a moment, also, I will allow him to come round into the little picturesque court, gay with the window-gardens of its quaint casements, where we can look down upon him from the leads of our apartment. He ought to feel like a figure in an uncommonly pretty watercolor, for he certainly looks like one, under the clustering gables and the jutting lattices. But if he prefers coming to life as a sight-seer he may join us at the door of Cardinal Wolsey’s great kitchen, now forming part of our hostess’s domain. The vast hearth is there yet, with its crane and spit, and if the cardinal could come back he might have a dinner cooked at it for Edward VII. with very little more trouble than for Henry VIII. three or four hundred years ago. “But what in the world,” the reader may ask me, putting his hand on an old sedan-chair, which is somewhere in the same basement, if not in the kitchen itself, “is this?” I answer him, quite easily: “Oh, that is the Push,” and explain that though now mounted on wheels instead of poles, the sedan-chair is still in actual use, and any lady-dweller in the apartments has the right of going to a dinner, or for what I know a “rout” in it, wherever it can be propelled within the precincts of the palace.

I suppose it is not taken out into the town, and I do not know that the ladies of the apartments ever visit there. In spite of this misgiving, Hampton remains one of the innumerable places in England where I should like to live always. Its streets follow the Thames, or come and go from the shores so pleasantly, that there is a sense of the river in it everywhere; and though I suppose people do not now resort to the place so much by water as they used, one is quite free to do so if one likes. We had not thought, however, to hire a waterman with his barge in coming, and so we poorly went back by the train. I say poorly in a comparative sense only, for there are many worse things in the world than running up to London in the cool, the very cool, of an April evening from Hampton Court. At such an hour you see the glad young suburban husbands, who have got home for the day, digging in the gardens at the backs of the pretty houses which your train passes, and the glad young wives, keeping round after them, and seeing they do not make play of their work. A neat maid in a cap pushes a garden-roller over the path, or a perambulator with a never-failing baby in it. The glimpse of domestic bliss is charming; and then it is such a comfort to get back to London, which seems to have been waiting, like a great plain, kind metropolis-mother, to welcome you home again, and ask what you would rather have for dinner.

XIV

A SUNDAY MORNING IN THE COUNTRY

The invention of Week-Ends is a feat of the English social genius dating since long after my stay of twenty-odd years ago. Like so many other English mysteries it is very simple, and consists of dedicating the waste space of time between Friday afternoon and Monday forenoon to visits out of town. It is the time when, if you have friends within reasonable, or even unreasonable reach of London, you are asked down. Science has ascertained that in this interval of fifty or sixty hours no one can do anything, and that the time had better be frankly given up to pleasure.

Yet, for the alien sojourner in London, there are no such intervals between sights, or perhaps between engagements, and we found a whole week-end beyond our grasp, though ever so temptingly entreated to spend it here or there in the country. That was why we were going down to the place of a friend one Sunday morning instead of a Friday evening and coming back the same day instead of the next. But we were glad of our piece of a week-end, and we had reason to be especially grateful for the Sunday when we had it, for it was one of the most perfect of its kind. There used to be such Sundays in America when people were young, and I suppose there are such Sundays there yet for children; but if you are no longer so very young you will be more apt to find them in England, where Sunday has been studying, ever since the Romans began to observe it, in just what proportion to blend the blue and white in its welkin, and to unite warmth and coolness in its air.

I have no doubt there were multitudes going to church that morning, but our third-class compartment was filled with people going into the country for the day; fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for an endless time in the fields and woods, which are often free in that much-owned England, while the may was yet freshly red and white on the hawthorns in the first week in June. Among our fellow-passengers that morning a young mother, not much older than her five children, sat with her youngest in her arms, while the other four perched at the edge of the seat, two on each side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one flare of red cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came to lifting them out of the car after her, the public had to help. One’s heart must go with these holiday-makers as they began to leave the train after the last suburban stations, where they could feel themselves fairly in the country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such motherly looking country, and yet young with springtime, and of a breath that came balmily in at the open car-windows; and the trees stood about in the meadows near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing it was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being much good for fuel or lumber they could stand for ages and ages, and shelter the sheep and cattle without danger of the axe.

At our own station we found our host’s motor waiting for us, and after waiting for some one else, who did not come by the next train, it whisked us much sooner than we could have wished over the nine miles of smooth road stretching to his house. The English are always telling you, if you are an American, how the Americans think nothing of distances, and they apparently derive their belief from the fact that it is a thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we do not step casually aboard a train for either of those places, or, indeed, without much moral and material preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware attaches to you from our supposed contempt of space, you could make out a very pretty case against them, in convicting them of an even greater indifference to distances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and accepting invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a run from London down to Ultima Thule for a week is thought nothing of, or much less of than a journey from New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more in the English social scheme than the other is in ours; and perhaps the distance at which a gentleman will live from his railroad-station in the country is still more impressive. The American commuter who drives night and morning two or three miles after leaving and before getting his train, thinks he is having quite drive enough; if he drives six miles the late and early guest feels himself badly used; but apparently such distances are not minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come to devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled away by a public fly, they seem not to have been regarded as evils.

For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil. Every foot, every inch of the way was delightful, and we only wished that our motor could have conceived of our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom had made it indifferent. There were some villages in the course of that swift flight where we could have willingly spent a week of such Sundays: villages with gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards and kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for millionaire money with us, and villagers in their church-going best, whom, as they lived in the precious scene, our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves are the symbol of our race’s rustic Sunday leisure everywhere; and the main difference that I could note between our own farmer-folk and these was that at home they would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, and here they were hanging over gates; you cannot very well sit on the tops of hedges.

If one part of England can be said to be more charming than another, and I suppose that there are odds in its loveliness, I think there can be no doubt but we were that day in one of the most beautiful regions within an hour’s reach of London. We were pretty constantly mounting in our motor-flight from the station; the uplands opened round us, and began to roll far away towards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were very stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency of English downs which satisfies without surfeiting, and this we had from the windows and gardened levels of our friends’ house even more than from the highroad, which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way of its own. Mountains would have been out of key with the landscape; downs were just right.

I do not know why the house was the more agreeable for being new, and for being the effect of our friends’ immediate and not their ancestral fancy, quite as it would have been with most of our friends’ country-houses at home. We certainly had not come to England for newness of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the shrubberies being new; and my content was absolute when I heard from our friends that they had at one time thought of building their house of wood: the fact seemed to restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built continent which I had so willingly forsaken only a few weeks before.

But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than that it shall render us some fleeting image of the nearest and dearest things of home? What I had reasonably or logically come to England for was nature tamed to the hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of something wild, something savage-looking, gaunt, huge, rugged, I rejoiced with an insensate pleasure in its likeness to the roughest aspect of America that association could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some others, and I will own that when our friends took us the walk over the downs which they had promised us, nothing could have gladdened me so much as to enter a secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart-track growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and finally forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths of shade. Then I said to my soul that it might have been a wood-road in the White Mountains, mouldering out of memory of the clearing where the young pines and birches had grown into good-sized trees since the giants of the primeval forest were slain and dragged out over its snows and mosses.

The masses of the red may and the white may which stood here and there in the border of the yews, might have been the blossom of the wilding apple-trees which often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Dor�, used to draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through any of the loneliest of his illustrations. He knew how to be true to such mediaeval moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame to bear what witness we can to the fact.

The yew-tree’s shade in Gray’s Elegy had not prepared me for a whole forest of yews, and I had never imagined them of the vastness I beheld. The place had its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations of the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish flavor in the lawless fact that in times when it was less protected than now, or when its wood was more employed in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London used to come out to the forest by night and lop away great limbs of the yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of timber-merchants. From time to time my host put his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry decay without that endeavor some other trees make to cover the stump with a new growth. The down, he told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his horse or his cow or his goose on its grass, and I do not know whose forest rights, if any one’s, were especially violated in these cruel midnight outrages on the yews; but some one must have had the interest to stop it.

I would not try to say how far the common extended, or how far its privileges; but the land about is mostly held in great estates, like most of the land in England, and no doubt there are signorial rights which overlie the popular privileges. I fancied a symbol of these in the game keeper — whom we met coming out of the wood, brown-clad, with a scarcely touched hat, silently sweeping through the gorse, furtive as one of the pheasants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met in England, and, as it happened, the last, but he now seems to me to have been so perfect in his way that I would not for the sake of the books where I have known so many of his sort, have him the least different from what he was.

The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is usually cool and pleasant, but you must not take liberties. By the time we got back to lunch we could have believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after the talk filling the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, which we were to take at a famous house in the neighborhood, the temperature was all right again; it was more than all right in the cold current of air which the motor created. In the course of that post-luncheon talk our host brought out a small porcelain bust of Washington, in very Continental blue, which he said was one of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the time of our Revolution to express the feeling of our English sympathizers in the struggle which gave English liberty a new lease. One reads of this sympathy, how wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not realized it. The miniature father-of-his-country smiled at our ignorance with his accustomed blandness, and I hope he will never regret being given to one of us as a testimony of the amity which had largely endured for our nation from and through the most difficult times. The gift lent our day a unique grace, and I could only hope that it might be without a surprise too painful that our English Washington would look upon the American Republic of his creation when we got home with him; I doubted if he would find it altogether his ideal.

The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down to the house where we were going, I do not know how many miles, for our afternoon tea. The house was famous, for being the most perfect Tudor house in existence; but I am not going to transfer the burden of my slight knowledge of its past to the mind of the reader. I will only say that it came into the hands of the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of its owners’ heads, a means of acquisition not so distasteful to him as to them, and after its restitution to the much decapitated family it continued in their possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind, rising upon a gentle level of fields and meadows, with nothing dramatically picturesque in the view from its straight-browed windows. The present owner, who showed me through its rooms and gardens hurriedly in consideration of our early train, has the generous passion of leaving the old place as nearly as he can in the keeping of its past; and I was glad to have him to agree with me that the Tudor period was that in which English domestic comfort had been most effectually studied. But my satisfaction in this was much heightened by my approval of what he was simultaneously saying about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not publishing serial fiction: in his own newspaper, he said, he had a story running all the time.

The old and the new kiss each other constantly in England, and I perceived that this vividly modern possessor of the most perfect Tudor house existing was, with the intense actuality of his interests and ambitions, as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom. When we came out of the house and walked towards the group we had left under a spreading oak (or it might have been an elm; the two are much of the same habit in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have fancied one’s self in any most picturesque period of the past, if it had not been for the informality of the men’s dress. Women are always of the past in the beauty of their attire, and those whom the low sun, striking across the velvet of the grass, now lighted up in their pretty gowns of our day, could easily have stepped out of an old picture, or continued in it as they sat in their wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table.

XV

FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT

An incident of the great midsummer heat, was an excursion down the Thames which took us far from the society atmosphere so relaxing to the moral fibre of the mere witness of the London season. The change was not to the cooler air which had been imagined, but it immersed us for the space of the boat’s voyage to and from Greenwich among those social inferiors who are probably the moral betters of their superiors, but whose company does not always seem the spiritual baptism it doubtless is. Our fellow-passengers were distinctly of the classes which are lower as well as middle, and the sole worldly advantage they had of us was that they were going where they wished, and we were going where we must. We had started for Richmond, but as there proved to be no boat for Richmond, we decided to take the boat which was for Greenwich, and consoled ourselves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor of many parliamentary and literary feasts which that fish has furnished. A whitebait dinner, what would not one suffer of human contiguity for it, even though it could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early hour?

It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the Greenwich boat puffed up to her landing at Westminster Bridge, and the lower middle classes streamed aboard.

She looked very lower middle class herself, poor boat, and she was of a failing line which the London County Council is about to replace by a line of municipal boats, without apparently alarming, in the English, the sensibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there is any talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets might have been training himself for a position on the municipal line, he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased reassuring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud which passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the tide towards Greenwich.

Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark and the grandeur of the Westminster shore, which is probably the noblest water-front in the world. Near and far the great imperial and municipal and palatial masses of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we passed, varied their grouping with one another, and with the leafy domes and spires which everywhere enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great succession ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it does to the mind’s eye, but to the body’s eye, the Tower is rather histrionic than historic. It is like a scenic reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage; and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the County Council should think of selling it to Chicago, to be set up somewhere between the Illinois Central and the Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her the purchase: New York could easily build a London Tower that would look worthier of its memories than the real one, without even making it a sky-scraper.

So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it is so true as it is that after passing the Tower the one shore of the Thames begins to lose its dignity and beauty, and to be of like effect with the other, which is the Southwark side, and like all the American river-sides that I remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, and frowsy wharves and docks grieve the eye, which the shipping in the stream does little to console. That is mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch liners, clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom.

Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bathing from the slimy shoals, running down to the water on planks laid over them, and splashing joyously into the filthy solution with the inextinguishable gladness of their years. They looked like boys out of the purlieus of Dickens’s poverty-world, and all London waterside apparitions are more or less from his pages. The elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated hotel to which we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as much of his invention as if he had created him from the dust of the place, and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul into him. He had a queer pseudo-respectful shuffle and a sidelong approach, with a dawning baldness at the back of his head, which seemed of one quality with these characteristics: his dress-coat was lustrous with the greasiness of long serving. Asked for whitebait, he destroyed the illusion in which we had come at a blow. He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any call for it now, and they did not keep it. Then he smiled down upon us out of an apparently humorous face in which there was no real fun, and added that we could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon mayonnaise was therefore what we had, and except that it was not whitebait, it was not very disappointing; we had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it, we were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a fly which we wished to take for a drive, in the absence of whitebait. But a fly required, in Greenwich, an interview with a stableman and a negotiation which, though we were assured it would be fairly conducted, we decided to forego, and contented ourselves with exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was called Nelson’s, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the immediate foreground — it was as much earth as water that lapped the shore — a small boy wading out to a small boat and providing himself a sorrowful evening at home with his mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves and trousers in the solution. Some young men in rowing costume were vigorously pulling in a heavy row-boat by way of filling in their outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaintance we had made in coming, was hurrying to get out of the river into the freshness of the sea, and this was all of Greenwich as a watering-place which we cared to see.

But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of balls and parties, which, though not imaginably of the first social quality, must have given his middle-aging hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in summer. He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the gallery of the old naval college on the way back to our boat, and saw us to the door, and fairly out into the blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat, and we utilized every scrap of shade as one does in Italy, running from tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every available portico and colonnade. But once inside the great hall where England honors her naval heroes and their battles, it was deliriously cool. It could not have been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid air, for they all represented the heat of battle, with fire and smoke, and the work of coming to close quarters, with

   “hot gun-lip kissing gun.”

The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals and other sea-dogs of England whose portraits relieved the intolerable spread of the battle scenes; and it was best of all in the many pictures and effigies and relics of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of his great time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon; everywhere his face showed the impassioned dreamer, the poet; and once more gave the lie to the silly notion that there is a type of this or that kind of great men. When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we perceived that the whole place we were in was a temple to Nelson, and that whatever minor marine deities had their shrines there, it was in strict subordination to him. England had done what she could for them, who had done so much for her; but they seem consecrated in rather an out-of-the-way place, now that there is no longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their worship; and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before choosing just their apotheosis.

By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, it was time to grill forth to our boat, and we escaped from shade to shade, as before, until we reached the first-class shelter of the awning at her stern. Even there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the small breeze that was crisping the surface of the solution; and fifteen or twenty babies developed themselves to testify of the English abhorrence of race-suicide among the lower middle classes. They were mostly good, poor things, and evoked no sentiment harsher than pity even when they were not good. Still it was not just the sort of day when one could have wished them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich. Perhaps they were only incidentally given it, but it must have been from a specific generosity that several children in arms were fed by their indulgent mothers with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had probably had no whitebait.

XVI

HENLEY DAY

Our invitation to the regatta at Henley, included luncheon in the tent of an Oxford college, and a view of the races from the college barge, which, with the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed down the Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry between the crews of the two great English universities. There may also have been Cambridge barges, spirited through the air in default of water for towing them to Henley, but I make sure only of a gay variety of houseboats stretching up and down the grassy margin of the stream, along the course the rowers were to take. As their contest was the least important fact of the occasion for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a clear notion which came off winner in any of the events, I will try not to trouble the reader with my impressions of them, except as they lent a vivid action and formed a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles under the sun. I have hitherto contended that class-day at Harvard was the fairest flower of civilization, but, having seen the regatta at Henley, I am no longer so sure of it.

Henley is no great way from London, and the quick pulse of its excitement could be sensibly felt at the station, where we took train for it. Our train was one of many special trains leaving at quarter-hourly intervals, and there was already an anxious crowd hurrying to it, with tickets entitling them to go by that train and no other. It was by no means the youthful crowd it would have been at home, and not even the overwhelmingly feminine crowd. The chaperon, who now politely prevails with us in almost her European numbers, was here in no greater evident force; but gray-haired fathers and uncles and elderly friends much more abounded; and they looked as if they were not altogether bent upon a vicarious day’s pleasure. The male of the English race is of much more striking presence than the American; he keeps more of the native priority of his sex in his costume, so that in this crowd, I should say, the outward shows were rather on his part than that of his demurely cloaked females, though the hats into which these flowered at top gave some hint of the summer loveliness of dress to be later revealed. They were, much more largely than most railway-station crowds, of the rank which goes first class, and in these special Henley trains it was well to have booked so, if one wished to go in comfort, or arrive uncrumpled, for the second-class and third-class carriages were packed with people.

There seemed so many of our fellow-passengers, that reaching Henley in the condition of greed and grudge of all travellers on errands of pleasure, we made haste to anticipate any rush for the carriages outside the station which were to take us to the scene of the races. Oddly enough there was no great pressure for these vehicles, or for the more public brakes and char-�-bancs and omnibuses plying to the same destination; and so far from falling victims to covert extortion in the matter of fares, we found the flys conscientiously placarded with the price of the drive. This was about double the ordinary price, and so soon does human nature adjust itself to conditions that I promptly complained to an English friend for having had to pay four shillings for a drive I should have had to pay four dollars for at home. In my resentment I tried to part foes with my driver, who mildly urged that he had but a few days in the year for doubling his fares, but I succeeded so ill that when I found him waiting for me at the end of the day, I amicably took him again for the return to the station.

Of the coming and going through the town of Henley I keep the sort of impression which small English towns give the passing stranger, of a sufficiently busy commercial life, doing business in excellent shops of the modern pattern, but often housed in dwellings of such a familiar picturesqueness that you wonder what old-fashioned annual or stage-setting or illustrated Christmas-story they are out of. I never could pass through such a town without longing to stop in it and know all about it; and I wish I could believe that Henley reciprocated my longing, on its bright holiday morning, that we could have had each other to ourselves in the interest of an intimate acquaintance. It looked most worthy to be known, and I have no doubt that it is full of history and tradition of the sort which small towns have been growing for centuries throughout England.

But we had only that one day there, and in our haste to give it to the regatta we could only make sure of driving over a beautiful picture-postal bridge on our way to the meadows by whose brink our college barge was moored, and making believe to tug at its chain. It was really doing nothing of the kind, for it was familiar with boat-racing in the Thames where the Thames is still the Isis at Oxford, and was as wholly without the motive as without the fact of impatience. Like many other barges and house-boats set broadside to the shore for a mile up and down as closely as they could be lined, it was of a comfortable cabin below and of a pleasant gallery above, with an awning to keep off the sun or rain, whichever it might be the whim of the weather to send. But that day the weather had no whims; it was its pleasure to be neither wet nor hot, but of a delicious average warmth, informed with a cool freshness which had the days of the years of youth in it. In fact, youth came back in all the holiday sights and scents to the elderly witness who ought to have known better than to be glad of such things as the white tents in the green meadows, the gypsy fires burning pale in the sunlight by the gypsy camps, the traps and carriages thronging up and down the road, or standing detached from the horses in the wayside shadow, where the trodden grass, not less nor more than the wandering cigar-whiff, exhaled the memories of far-off circus-days and Fourths of July. But such things lift the heart in spite of philosophy and experience, and bid it rejoice in the relish of novelty which a scene everywhere elementally the same offers in slight idiosyncrasies of time and place. Certain of these might well touch the American half-brother with a sense of difference, but there was none that perhaps more suggested it than the frank English proclamation by sign-board that these or those grounds in the meadows were this or that lady’s, who might be supposed waiting in proprietory state for her guests within the pavilion of her roped-off enclosure. Together with this assertion of private right, and the warning it implied, was the expression of yet elder privilege in the presence of the immemorial wanderers who had their shabby camps by the open wayside and offered the passer fortune at so low a rate that the poorest pleasurer could afford to buy a prophecy of prosperity from them; I do not know why they proposed to sell with these favorable destinies small brushes and brooms of their own make.

These swarthy aliens, whom no conditions can naturalize, are a fact of every English holiday without which it would not be so native, as the English themselves may hereafter be the more peculiarly and intensely insular through the prevalence of more and more Americans among them. Most of our fellow-guests on that Oxford barge were our fellow-countrymen, and I think now that without their difference there would have been wanting an ultimately penetrating sense of the entirely English keeping of the affair. The ardor of our fresh interest lent, I hope, a novel zest to our English hosts for the spectacle which began to offer itself so gradually to our delight, and which seemed to grow and open flower-like from the water, until it was a blossom which covered the surface with its petals.

The course for the races was marked off midway from either shore by long timbers fastened end to end and forming a complete barrier to the intrusion of any of the mere pleasure-craft. Our own shore was sacred to barges and house-boats; the thither margin, if I remember rightly, was devoted to the noisy and muscular expansion of undergraduate emotion, but, it seems to me, that farther up on the grounds which rose from it were some such tents and pavilions as whitened our own side. Still the impression of something rather more official in the arrangements of that shore persists with me.

There was a long waiting, of course, before the rowing began, but as this throughout was the least interest of the affair for any one but the undergraduates, and the nearest or fairest friends of the crews, I will keep my promise not to dwell on it. Each event was announced some minutes beforehand by the ringing of a rather unimpressive hand-bell. Then a pistol-shot was fired; and then, after the start far up the course, the shells came sweeping swiftly down towards us. I noticed that the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked from their waists up as our university crews do, or used to do, and I missed the Greek joy I have experienced at New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculpturesque in their bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for the signal to come to eager life. I think that American moment was more thrilling than any given moment at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a college barge, and more gentle seclusion for the favored spectator, I am not going to own that it equals as a view-point the observation-train, with its successive banks of shouting and glowing girls, all a flutter of handkerchiefs and parasols, which used to keep abreast of the racing crews beside the stately course of the Connecticut Thames. Otherwise I think it best to withhold comparisons, lest the impartial judge should decide in favor of Henley.

There was already a multitude of small boats within the barriers keeping the race-course open, and now and then one of these crossed from shore to shore. They were of all types: skiffs and wherries and canoes and snub-nosed punts, with a great number of short, sharply rounded craft, new to my American observance, and called cockles, very precisely adapted to contain one girl, who had to sit with her eyes firmly fixed on the young man with the oars, lest a glance to this side or that should oversee the ticklishly balanced shell. She might assist her eyes in trimming the boat with a red or yellow parasol, or a large fan, but it appeared that her gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat, must be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink, lest any turmoil of colors in it should be too much for the balance she sought to keep. The like precaution seemed to have been taken in the other boats, so that while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were afloat on the stream, there was nothing of the kaleidoscope’s vulgar variety in the respective costumes. As the numbers of the boats momentarily increased, it was more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park had taken water, and though in such a scene as that which spread its soft allure before us, it was not quite imaginable that all the loveliness one saw was of the quality of that in the consecrated paddocks near Stanhope Gate, neither was it imaginable that much of the beauty was not as well-born as it was well-dressed. Those house-boats up and down the shore must mainly have been peopled by persons of worldly worth, and of those who had come from the four quarters to Henley for the day, not every one could have been an actress with her friends, though each contributed to the effect of a spectacle not yet approached in any pantomime. There was a good deal of friendly visiting back and forth among the house-boat people; and I was told that it was even more than correct for a young man to ask a house-boat girl to go out with him in one of the small boats on the water, but how much this contributed to keep the scene elect I do not know.

If one looked steadily at the pretty sight, it lost reality as things do when too closely scrutinized, and became a visionary confluence of lines and colors, a soft stir of bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the air. This ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one’s feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one’s college barge. Out of that “giddy pleasure of the eyes” business lifted a practical front from time to time, and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a pole so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected pennies for the people in boats who had been singing or playing banjos or guitars or even upright pianos. For, it must be explained, there were many in that aquatic crowd who were there to be heard as well as seen, and this gave the affair its pathos. Not that negro minstrelsy as the English have interpreted the sole American contribution to histrionic art, is in itself pathetic, except as it is so lamentably far from the original; but that any obvious labor which adds to our gayety is sorrowful; and there were many different artists there who were working hard. Sometimes it was the man who sang and the woman who played; but it was always the woman who took up the collection: she seemed to have the greater enterprise and perseverance. Of course in the case of the blackened minstrels, some man appealed to the love of humor rather than the love of beauty for the bounty of the spectators. In the case of an old-time plantation darkey who sang the familiar melodies with the slurring vowels and wandering aspirates of East London, and then lifted a face one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective than the other could have been. A company of young men in masks with a piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their reward, and were all the more amusingly eager because they were, as our English friends believed, undergraduates on a lark.

They were no better-natured than the rest of the constantly increasing multitude. The boats thickened upon the water as if they had risen softly from the bottom to which any panic might have sent them; but the people in them took every chance with the amiability which seems to be finally the thing that holds England together. The English have got a bad name abroad which certainly they do not deserve at home; but perhaps they do not think foreigners worthy the consideration they show one another on any occasion that masses them. One lady, from her vantage in the stern of her boat, was seen to hit the gentleman in the bow a tremendous whack with her paddle; but he merely looked round and smiled, as if it had been a caress, which it probably was, in disguise. But they were all kind and patient with one another whether in the same boat or not. Some had clearly not the faintest notion how a boat should be managed; they bumped and punched one another wildly; but the occupants of the boat assailed simply pushed off the attacking party with a smiling acceptance of its apology, and passed on the incident to another boat before or beside them. From the whole multitude there came not one loud or angry note, and, for any appearance of authority on the scene it was altogether unpoliced, and kept safe solely by the universal good-humor. The women were there to show themselves in and at their prettiest, and to see one another as they lounged on the cushions or lay in the bottoms of the boats, or sat up and displayed their hats and parasols; the men were there to make the women have a good time. Neither the one nor the other seemed in the least concerned in the races, which duly followed one another with the ringing of bells and firing of pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal came to clear the course for the crews, the pleasure-craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast, softly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the water, so that you could have walked from the barrier to the shore without dipping foot in the flood. I have suggested that the situation might have had its perils. Any panic must have caused a commotion that would have overturned hundreds of the crazy craft, and plunged their freight to helpless death. But the spectacle smiled securely to the sun, which smiled back upon it from a cloud-islanded blue with a rather more than English ardor; and we left it without anxiety, to take our luncheon in the pavilion pitched beside our barge on the grassy shore.

To this honest meal we sat comfortably down at long tables, and served one another from the dishes put before us. There was not the ambitious variety of salads and sweets and fruits and ices, which I have seen at Harvard Class-Day spreads, but there were the things that stay one more wholesomely and substantially, and one was not obliged to eat standing and hold one’s plate. Everything in England that can be is adjusted to the private and personal scale; everything with us is generalized and fitted to the convenience of the greatest number. Later, we all sat down together at afternoon tea, a rite of as inviolable observance as breakfast itself in that island of fixed habits.

I believe some races were rowed while we were eating and drinking, but we did not mind. We were not there for the races, but for the people who were there for the races; or who were apparently so. In the mean time, the multitude of them seemed to have increased, and where I had fancied that not one boat more could have been pressed in, half a dozen had found room. The feat must have been accomplished by main strength and awkwardness, as the old phrase is. It was no place indeed for skill to evince itself; but people pushed about in the most incredible way when they tried to move, though mostly they did not try; they let their boats lie still, and sway with the common movement when the water rose and sank, or fluctuated unseen beneath them. There were more and more people of the sort that there can never be enough of, such as young girls beautifully dressed in airy muslins and light silks, sheltered but not hidden by gay parasols floating above their summer hats. It was the fairy multitude of Harvard Class-Day in English terms, and though Henley never came at any moment to that prodigiously picturesque expression which Class-Day used to reach when all its youthful loveliness banked itself on the pine-plank gradines enclosing the Class-Day elm, and waited the struggle for its garlands, yet you felt at Henley somehow in the presence of inexhaustible numbers, drawing themselves from a society ultimately, if not immediately, vaster. It was rather dreadful perhaps to reflect that if all that brilliant expanse of fashion and beauty had been engulfed in the hidden Thames it could have been instantly replaced by as much more, not once but a score of times.

I will not pretend that this thought finally drove me from the scene, for I am of a very hardy make when it comes to the most frightful sort of suppositions. But the afternoon was wearing away, and we must go sometime. It seemed better also to leave the gayety at its height: the river covered with soft colors, and the barges and house-boats by the brink, with their companies responsive in harmonies of muslin and gauze and lace to those afloat; the crowds on the opposite shore in constant movement, and in vivid agitation when the bell and the pistol announced a racing event. We parted with our friends on the barge, and found our way through the gypsy crones squatted on the grass, weaving the web of fate and selling brooms and brushes in the intervals of their mystical employ, or cosily gossiping together; and then we took for the station the harmless fly which we had forever renounced as predatory in the morning.

It was not yet the rush-hour for the run back to London, and we easily got an empty compartment, in which we were presently joined by a group of extremely handsome people, all of a southern type, but differing in age and sex. There were a mother and a daughter, and a father evidently soon to become a father-in-law, and the young man who was to make him so. The women were alike in their white gowns, and alike in their dark beauty, but the charms of the mother had expanded in a bulk incredible of the slender daughter. She and her father were rather silent, and the talk was mainly between the mother and the future of the girl. They first counted up the day’s expenses, and the cost of each dish they had had at luncheon. “Then there was the champagne,” the lady insisted. “It isn’t so much when you count that out; and you know we chose to have it.” They all discussed the sum, and agreed that if they had not wanted the champagne their holiday would not have cost inordinately. “And now,” the mother continued to the young man, “you must order that box for the opera as soon as ever you reach the hotel. Order it by telephone. Give the girl your boutonni�re; that will jolly her. Get a four-guinea box opposite the royal box.”

As she sat deeply sunk in the luxurious first-class seat, her little feet could not reach the floor, and the effort with which she bent forward was heroic. The very pretty girl in the corner at her elbow was almost eclipsed by her breadth and thickness; and the old gentleman in the opposite corner spoke a word now and then, but for the most part silently smelled of tobacco. The talk which the mother and future son-in-law had to themselves, though it was so intimately of their own affairs, we fancied more or less carried on at us. I do not know why they should have wished to crush us with their opulence since they would not have chosen to enrich us; but I have never had so great a sense of opulence. They were all, as I said, singularly handsome people, in the dark, liquid, lustrous fashion which I am afraid our own race can never achieve. Yet with all this evident opulence, with their resolute spirits, with their satisfaction in having spent so much on a luncheon which they could have made less expensive if they had not chosen to gratify themselves in it, with their prospect of a four-guinea box, opposite the box of royalty, at the opera, it seemed to me they were rather pathetic than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they were a radiantly enviable party returning from a brilliant day at Henley.

XVII

AMERICAN ORIGINS — MOSTLY NORTHERN

The return in mid-September to the London which we left at the end of July, implicates a dramatic effect more striking than any possible in the mere tourist’s experience. In the difference between this London and that you fully realize the moral and physical magnitude of the season. The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life, the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible, and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort of bluff to say that a city which still holds all its six millions except a few hundred thousands, is empty, but that is the look a certain part of London has in September, for the brilliant and perpetual movement of those hundred thousands was what gave it repletion.

The fashion that fluttered and glittered along Piccadilly and the streets of shops is all away at country-houses or at the sea-side or in the mountains of the island or the continent. The comely young giants who stalked along the pavement of Pall Mall or in the paths of the Park are off killing grouse; scarcely a livery shows itself; even the omnibus-tops are depopulated; long rows of idle cabs are on the ranks; the stately procession of diners-out flashing their white shirt-fronts at nightfall in interminable hansoms has vanished; the tormented regiments of soldiers are at peace in their barracks; a strange quiet has fallen on that better quarter of the town which is really, or unreally, the town. With this there is an increase of the homelike feeling which is always present, with at least the happy alien, in London; and what gayety is left is cumulative at night and centralized in the electric-blazing neighborhoods of the theatres. There, indeed, the season seems to have returned, and in the boxes of the playhouses and the stalls fashion phantasmally revisits one of the scenes of its summer joy.

One day in Piccadilly, in a pause of the thin rain, I met a solitary apparition in the diaphanous silks and the snowy plumes of hat and boa which the sylphs of the church parade wore in life through those halcyon days when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition put on a bold front of not being strange and sad, but upon the whole it failed. It may have been an impulse from this vision that carried me as far as Hyde Park, where I saw not a soul, either of the quick or the dead, in the chilly drizzle, save a keeper cleaning up the edges of the road. In the consecrated closes, where the vanished children of smartness used to stand or sit, to go and come like bright birds, or flowers walking, the inverted chairs lay massed together or scattered, with their legs in the air, on the wet grass, and the dripping leaves smote damply together overhead. Another close, in Green Park the afternoon before, however, I saw devoted to frequenters of another sort. It had showered over-night, and the ground must still have been wet where a score of the bodies of the unemployed, or at least the unoccupied, lay as if dead in the sun. They were having their holiday, but they did not make me feel as if I were still enjoying my outing so much as some other things: for instance, the colored minstrelsy, which I had heard so often at the sea-side in August, and which reported itself one night in the Mayfair street which we seemed to have wholly to ourselves, and touched our hearts with the concord of our native airs and banjos. We were sure they were American darkies, from their voices and accents, but perhaps they were not as certainly so as the poor little mother was English who came down the place at high noon with her large baby in her arms, swaying it from side to side as she sang a plaintive ballad to the skies, and scanned the windows for some relenting to her want.

The clubs and the great houses of Mayfair, which the season had used so hard, were many of them putting themselves in repair against the next time of festivity, and testifying to the absence of their world. One day I found the solitude rather more than I could bear without appeal to that vastly more multitudinous world of the six millions who never leave London except on business. I said in my heart that this was the hour to go and look up that emotion which I had suspected of lying in wait for me in St. Paul’s, and I had no sooner mounted an omnibus-top for the journey through Piccadilly, the Strand, and Fleet Street, than I found the other omnibus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied. To be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had formed the almost universal head-covering of the ‘bus-top throngs were now in a melancholy minority, but they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us when September begins. They had never so much reason to be here as with us, and they might have had almost as much reason for lingering as they had for coming. I still saw some of them among the pedestrians as well as among the omnibus-toppers, and the pedestrians abashed me by their undiminished myriads. As they streamed along the sidewalks, in a torrent of eager life, and crossed and recrossed among the hoofs and wheels as thickly as in mid-July, they put me to shame for my theory of a decimated London. It was not the tenth man who was gone, nor the hundredth, if even it was the thousandth. The tremendous metropolis mocked with its millions the notion of nobody left in town because a few pleasurers had gone to the moors or the mountains or the shores.

Yet the season being so dead as it was in the middle of September, the trivial kodak could not bear to dwell on the mortuary aspects which the fashionable quarters of London presented. It turned itself in pursuance of a plan much cherished and often renounced, to seek those springs or sources of the American nation which may be traced all over England, and which rather abound in London, trusting chances for the involuntary glimpses which are so much better than any others, when you can get them. In different terms, and leaving apart the strained figure which I cannot ask the reader to help me carry farther, I went one breezy, cool, sunny, and rainy morning to meet the friend who was to guide my steps, and philosophize my reflections in the researches before us. Our rendezvous was at the church of All Hallows Barking, conveniently founded just opposite the Mark Lane District Railway Station, some seven or eight hundred years before I arrived there, and successively destroyed and rebuilt, but left finally in such good repair that I could safely lean against it while waiting for my friend, and taking note of its very sordid neighborhood. The street before it might have been a second-rate New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, except for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted yellow brick and harsh red brick shops and public-houses. There was a continual coming and going of trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all heedless, if not unconscious, of the Tower of London close at hand, whose dead were so often brought from the scaffold to be buried in that church.

Our own mission was to revere its interior because William Penn was baptized in it, but when we had got inside we found it so full of scaffolding and the litter of masonry, and the cool fresh smell of mortar from the restorations going on that we had no room for the emotions we had come prepared with. With the compassion of a kindly man in a plasterer’s spattered suit of white, we did what we could, but it was very little. I at least was not yet armed with the facts that, among others, the headless form of Archbishop Laud had been carried from the block on Tower Hill and laid in All Hallows; and if I had known it, I must have felt that though Laud could be related to our beginnings through his persecution of the Puritans, whom he harried into exile, his interment in All Hallows was only of remote American interest. Besides, we had set out with the intention of keeping to the origins of colonies which had not been so much studied as those of New England, and we had first chosen Penn as sufficiently removed from the forbidden ground. But we had no sooner left the church where he was baptized, to follow him in the much later interest of his imprisonment in the Tower, than we found ourselves in New England territory again. For there, round the first corner, under the foliage of the trees and shrubs that I had been ignorantly watching from the church, as they stiffly stirred in the September wind, was that Calvary of so many martyr-souls, Tower Hill.

It is no longer, if it ever was, a hill, or even a perceptible rise of ground, but a pleasant gardened and planted space, not distinguishable from a hundred others in London, with public offices related to the navy closing it mostly in, but not without unofficial public and private houses on some sides. It was perhaps because of its convenience for his professional affairs that Admiral Penn had fixed such land-going residence as an admiral may have, in All Hallows Barking parish, where his great son was born. “Your late honored father,” his friend Gibson wrote the founder of Pennsylvania, “dwelt upon Great Tower Hill, on the east side, within a court adjoining to London Wall.” But the memories of honored father and more honored son must yield in that air to such tragic fames as those of Sir Thomas More, of Strafford, and above these and the many others in immediate interest for us, of Sir Harry Vane, once governor of Massachusetts, who died here among those whom the perjured second Charles played false when he came back to the throne of the perjured first Charles. In fact you can get away from New England no more in London than in America; and if in the Tower itself the long captivity of Sir Walter Raleigh somewhat dressed the balance, we were close upon other associations which outweighed the discovery of the middle south and of tobacco, a thousandfold.

Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the common level than it once was, as often happens with rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it owed its distinction of being called a hill to a slight elevation from the general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not now seem lifted from that grade, but if you come away, Tower Hill looms lofty and large, as before you approached, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre memories which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower towards it is much more dignified than the theatrical river-front, but worse than this even is the histrionic modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at the bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it, and yet before we were half-way over the bridge, we had reason to forget the turrets and arches which look as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in the stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between Tower Bridge and London Bridge, was the scene of the fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell, Hampden, and their friends, by Charles I., when they were embarking for New England, if indeed the thing really happened. Everybody used to think so, and the historians even said so, but now they begin to doubt: it is an age of doubt. This questionably memorable expanse of muddy water was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting in the iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with various craft of steam and sail in the tide which danced in the sun and wind along the shore we were leaving. It is tradition, if not history, that just in front of the present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny were forced to leave their ship and abide in the land they were to ennoble with the first great republican experiment of our race, after the commonwealth failed to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps, because of a want of imagination in both people and protector, who could not conceive of a state without an hereditary ruler. The son of Cromwell must follow his father, till another son of another father came back to urge his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a right to except the direct and still renewed choice of the citizens. It is all very droll at this distance of time and place; but we ourselves who grew up where there had never been kings to craze the popular fancy, could not conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years and more, and even then some of us thought of having one. The lesson which the English Commonwealth now had set itself, though lost upon England, was at last read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of American beginnings was made when Cromwell was forced ashore from his ship in front of the Custom-house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice now on the site of whatever building then stood there, and it marks the spot with sufficiently classical grace, whether you look down at it from the Tower Bridge, as I did, first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I did, last.

We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower Bridge that we might walk through Tooley Street, once a hot-bed of sedition and dissent, which many of its inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled away to cool themselves in different parts of the American wilderness. It was much later that the place became famous for the declaration of the three tailors of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have begun, a public appeal with the words: “We, the people of England,” and perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street is more suggestive of them than of those who went into exile for their religious and political faith. In the former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and poetic, like all of that old London which is so nearly gone, but now it is almost the most prosaic and commonplace thoroughfare of the newer London. It is wholly mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, and which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of plebeian folks who have always dwelt in Tooley Street, and who so largely form the ancestry of the American people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there is the beauty of that good-will to men which I should be glad to think characteristic of our nation in one of the Peabody tenements that the large-hearted American bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better homes than the London poor could otherwise have known.

Possibly Baptists and Independents like those whom Tooley Street sent out to enlarge the area of freedom beyond seas still people it; but I cannot say, and for the rest it is much crossed and recrossed by the viaducts of the London and South Eastern Railway, under which we walked the length of the long, dull, noisy thoroughfare. We were going to the church of St. Olave, or Olaus, a hallowed Danish king from whose name that of Tooley was most ingeniously corrupted, for the sake of knowing that we were in the parish that sweet Priscilla Mullins, and others of the Plymouth colony came from. The church is an uninteresting structure of Wrennish renaissance; but it was better with us when, for the sake of the Puritan ministers who failed to repent in the Clink prison, after their silencing by Laud, came out to air their opinions in the boundlessness of our continent. My friend strongly believed that some part of the Clink was still to be detected in the walls of certain water-side warehouses, and we plunged into their labyrinth after leaving St. Olave’s or St. Tooley’s, and wandered on through their shades, among trucks and carts in alleys that were dirty and damp, but somehow whitened with flour as if all those dull and sullen piles were grist-mills. I do not know whether we found traces of the Clink or not, but the place had a not ungrateful human interest in certain floury laborers who had cleared a space among the wheels and hoofs, and in the hour of their nooning were pitching pennies, and mildly squabbling over the events of their game. We somehow came out at Bankside, of infamous memory, and yet of glorious memory, for if it was once the home of all the vices, it was also the home of one of the greatest arts. The present filthy quay figuratively remembers the moral squalor of its past in the material dirt that litters it; but you have to help it recall the fact that here stood such theatres as the Paris Garden, the Rose, the Hope, the Swan, and, above all, the Globe.

Here, Shakespeare rose up and stood massively blocking the perspective of our patriotic researches, and blotting out all minor memories. But if this was a hardship it was one which constantly waits upon the sympathetic American in England. It is really easier to stay at home, and make your inquiries in that large air where the objects of your interest are placed at ample intervals, than to visit the actual scene where you will find them crowding and elbowing one another, and perhaps treading down and pushing back others of equal import which you had not in mind. England has so long been breeding greatness of all kinds, and her visionary children press so thick about her knees, that you cannot well single one specially out when you come close; it is only at a distance that you can train your equatorial upon any certain star, and study it at your ease. This tremendous old woman who lives in a shoe so many sizes too small more than halves with her guests her despair in the multitude of her offspring, and it is best to visit her in fancy if you wish their several acquaintance. There at Bankside was not only Shakespeare suddenly filling that place and extending his vast shadow over the region we had so troublesomely passed through, but now another embarrassment of riches attended us. We were going to visit St. Saviour’s Church, because John Harvard, the son of a butcher in that parish was baptized in it, long before he could have dreamed of Emanuel College at Cambridge, or its outwandering scholars could have dreamed of naming after him another college in another Cambridge in another world. Our way lay through the Borough Market, which is for Southwark in fruits and vegetables, and much more in refuse and offal, what Covent Garden Market is for the London beyond Thames; and then through a wide troubled street, loud with coming and going at some railway station. Here we suddenly dropped into a silent and secluded place, and found ourselves at the door of St. Saviour’s. Outside it has been pitilessly restored in a later English version of the Early English in which it was built, and it has that peculiarly offensive hardness which such feats of masonry seem to put on defiantly; but within much of the original architectural beauty lingers, especially in the choir and Lady Chapel. We were not there for that beauty, however, but for John Harvard’s sake; yet no sooner were we fairly inside the church than our thoughts were rapt from him to such clearer fames as those of Philip Massinger, the dramatist; Edmund Shakespeare, the great Shakespeare’s younger brother; John Fletcher, of the poetic firm of Beaumont and Fletcher; the poet Edward Dyer; and yet again the poet John Gower, the “moral Gower” who so insufficiently filled the long gap between Chaucer and Spencer, and who rests here with a monument and a painted effigy over him. Besides these there are so many actors buried in it that the church is full of the theatre, and it might well dispute with our own Little Church Round the Corner, the honor of mothering the outcast of other sanctuaries; though it rather more welcomes them in their funeral than their nuptial rites. Among the tablets and effigies there was none of John Harvard in St. Saviour’s, and we were almost a year too early for the painted window which now commemorates him.

One might leave Southwark rather glad to be out of it, for in spite of its patriotic and poetic associations it is a quarter where the scrupulous house-keeping of London seems for once to fail. In such streets as we passed through, and I dare say they were not the best, the broom and the brush and the dust-pan strive in vain against the dirt that seems to rise out of the ground and fall from the clouds. But many people live there, and London Bridge, by which we crossed, was full of clerks and shop-girls going home to Southwark; for it was one o’clock on a Saturday, and they were profiting by the early closing which shuts the stores of London so inexorably at that hour on that day. We made our way through them to the parapet for a final look at that stretch of the Thames where Cromwell as unwillingly as unwittingly perhaps stepped ashore to come into a kingdom.

[Footnote: While the reader is sharing our emotion in the scene of the problematical event, I think it a good time to tell him that the knowledge of which I have been and expect to be so profuse in these researches, is none of mine, except as I have cheaply possessed myself of it from the wonderful hand-book of Peter Cunningham, which Murray used to publish as his guide to London, and which unhappily no one publishes now. It is a bulky volume of near six hundred pages, crammed with facts more delightful than any fancies, and its riches were supplemented for me by the specific erudition of my friend, the genealogist, Mr. Lothrop Withington, who accompanied my wanderings, and who endorses all my statements. The reader who doubts them (as I sometimes do) may recur to him at the British Museum with the proper reproaches if they prove mistaken.]

We were going from St. Saviour’s in Southwark where Harvard was baptized to St. Catherine Cree in the city where Sir Nicholas Throgmorton’s effigy lies in the chancel, and somewhat distantly relates itself to our history through his daughter’s elopement with Sir Walter Raleigh. But now for a mere pleasure, whose wantonness I shall not know how to excuse to the duteous reader, we turned aside to the church of St. Magnus at the end of the bridge, and I shall always rejoice that we did so, for there I made the acquaintance of three of the most admirable cats in London. One curled herself round the base of a pillar of the portico, which was formerly the public thoroughfare to London Bridge; another basked in the pretty garden which now encloses the portico, and let the shifting shadows of the young sycamores flicker over her velvet flank; the third arched a majestic back and rubbed against our legs in accompanying us into the church. There was not much for us to see there, and perhaps the cat was tired of knowing that the church was built by Wren, after the great fire, and has a cupola and lantern thought to be uncommonly fine. Certainly it did not seem to share my interest in the tablet to Miles Coverdale, once rector of St. Magnus and bishop of Exeter, at which I started, not so much because he had directed the publication of the first complete version of the English Bible, as because he had borne the name of a chief character in The Blithedale Romance. I am afraid that if the cat could have supposed me to be occupied with such a trivial matter it would not have purred so civilly at parting, and I should not have known how to justify myself by explaining that the church of St. Magnus was more illustriously connected with America through that coincidence than many more historical scenes.

The early closing had already prevailed so largely in the city, that most of the churches were shut, and we were not aware of having got into St. Catherine Cree’s at the time we actually did so. We were grateful for getting into any church, but we looked about us too carelessly to identify the effigy of Sir Nicholas, who was, after all, only a sort of involuntary father-in-law of Virginia. That was what we said to console ourselves afterwards; but now, since we were, however unwittingly, there, I feel that I have some right to remind the reader that our enemy (so far as we are of Puritan descent) Archbishop Laud consecrated the church with ceremonies of such high ecclesiastical character that his part in them was alleged against him, and did something to bring him to the block. That Inigo Jones is said to have helped in designing the church, and that the great Holbein is believed to be buried in it, and would have had a monument there if the Earl of Arundel could have found his bones to put it over, are sufficiently irrelevant details.

The reader sees how honest I am trying to be with him, and I will not conceal from him that Duke Street, down a stretch of which I looked, because the wife of Elder Brewster of Plymouth Colony was born and bred there, was as dull a perspective of mean modern houses as any in London. It was distinctly a relief, after paying this duty, to pass, in Leadenhall Street, the stately bulk of India House, and think of the former occupying the site, from which Charles Lamb used to go early in compensation for coming so late to his work there. It was still better when, by an accident happier than that which befell us at St. Catherine Cree’s, we unexpectedly entered by a quaint nook from Bishopsgate Street to the church of St. Ethelburga, which has a claim to the New-Yorker’s interest from the picturesque fact that Henry Hudson and his ship’s company made their communion in it the night before he sailed away to give his name to the lordliest, if not the longest of our rivers, and to help the Dutch found the Tammany r�gime, which still flourishes at the Hudson’s mouth. The comprehensive Cunningham makes no mention of the fact, but I do not know why my genealogist should have had the misgiving which he expressed within the overhearing of the eager pew-opener attending us. She promptly set him right. “Oh, ‘e did mike it ‘ere, sir. They’ve been and searched the records,” she said, so that the reader now has it on the best authority.

I wish I could share with him, as easily as this assurance, the sentiment of the quaint place, with its traces of Early English architecture, and its look of being chopped in two; its intense quiet and remoteness in the heart of the city, with the slop-pail of its pew-opener mingling a cleansing odor with the ancient smells which pervade all old churches. But these things are of the nerves and may not be imparted, though they may be intimated. As rich in its way as the sentiment of St. Ethelburga was that of the quiescing streets of the city, that pleasant afternoon, with their shops closed or closing, and the crowds thinned or thinning in their footways and wheelways, so that we got from point to point in our desultory progress, incommoded only by other associations that rivalled those we had more specifically in mind. History, of people and of princes, finance, literature, the arts of every kind, were the phantoms that started up from the stones and the blocks of the wood-pavement and followed or fled before us at every step. As I have already tried to express, it is always the same story. London is too full of interest, and when I thought how I could have gone over as much ground in New York without anything to distract me from what I had in view, I felt the pressure of those thick London facts almost to suffocation. Nothing but my denser ignorance saved me from their density, as I hurried with my friend through air that any ignorance less dense would have found impassable with memories.

As it was I could draw a full breath unmolested only when we dropped down a narrow way from Bishopsgate Street to the sequestered place before the church of the Dutch refugees from papal persecutions in France and the Netherlands. Here was formerly the church of the Augustine Friars, whose community Henry VIII. dissolved, and whose church his son Edward VI. gave to the “Germans” as he calls the Hollanders in his boyish diary. It was to our purpose as one of the beginnings of New York, for it is said that New Amsterdam was first imagined by the exiles who worshipped in it, and who planned the expedition of Henry Hudson from it. Besides this historic or mythic claim, it had for me the more strictly human interest of the sign-board in Dutch, renewed from the earliest time, at both its doorways, notifying its expatriated congregation that all letters and parcels would be received there for them; this somehow intimated that the refugees could not have found it spiritually much farther to extend their exile half round the world. Cunningham says that “the church contains some very good decorated windows, and will repay examination,” but, like the early-closing shops all round it, the Dutch church was shut that Saturday afternoon, and we had to come away contenting ourselves as we could with the Gothic, fair if rather too freshly restored, of the outside. I can therefore impartially commend the exterior to our Knickerbocker travellers, but they will readily find the church in the rear of the Bank of England, after cashing their drafts there, and judge for themselves.

Philadelphians of Quaker descent will like better to follow my friend with me up Cheapside, past the Bowbells which ring so sweet and clear in literature, and through Holborn to Newgate which was one of the several prisons of William Penn. He did not go to it without making it so hard for the magistrates trying him and his fellow-Quakers for street-preaching that they were forced to over-ride his law and logic, and send him to jail in spite of the jury’s verdict of acquittal; such things could then be easily done. In self-justification they committed the jury along with the prisoners; that made a very perfect case for their worships, as the reader can find edifyingly and a little amusingly set forth in Maria Webb’s story of The Penns and the Penningtons. As is known, the persecution of Penn wellnigh converted his father, the stiff old admiral, who now wrote to him in Newgate: “Son William, if you and your friends keep to your plain way of preaching, and your plain way of living, you will make an end of the priests to the end of the world ... Live in love. Shun all manner of evil, and I pray God to bless you all; and He will bless you.”

Little of the old Newgate where Penn lay imprisoned is left; a spic-and-span new Newgate, still in process of building, replaces it, but there is enough left for a monument to him who was brave in such a different way from his brave father, and was great far beyond the worldly greatness which the admiral hoped his comely, courtly son would achieve. It was in Newgate, when he was cast there the second time in three months, that he wrote The Great Case of Liberty of Conscience, and three minor treatises. He addressed from the same prison a letter to Parliament explaining the principles of Quakerism, and he protested to the sheriff of London against the cruelties practised by the jailors of Newgate on prisoners too poor to buy their favor. He who was rich and well-born preferred to suffer with these humble victims; and probably his oppressors were as glad to be rid of him in the end as he of them.

One may follow Penn (though we did not always follow him to all, that Saturday afternoon), to many other places in London: to the Tower, where he was imprisoned on the droll charge of “blasphemy,” within stone’s throw of All Hallow’s Barking, where he was christened; to Grace Church Street, where he was arrested for preaching; to Lincoln’s Inn, where he had chambers in his worldlier days; to Tower Street, where he went to school; to the Fleet, where he once lived within the “rules” of the prison; to Norfolk Street, where he dwelt awhile almost in hiding from the creditors who were pressing him, probably for the public debt of Pennsylvania.

We followed him only to Newgate, whence we visited the church of St. Sepulchre hard by, and vainly attempted to enter, because Roger Williams was christened there, and so connected it with the coming of toleration into the world, as well as with the history of the minute province of Rhode Island, which his spirit so boundlessly enlarged. We failed equally of any satisfactory effect from Little St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, possibly because the Place was demolished a hundred and five years before, and because my friend could not quite make out which neighboring street it was where the mother of the Wesleys was born. But we did what we could with the shield of the United States Consulate-General in the Place, and in an adjoining court we had occasion for seriousness in the capers of a tipsy Frenchman, who had found some boys playing at soldiers, and was teaching them in his own tongue from apparently vague recollections of the manual of arms. I do not insist that we profited by the occasion; I only say that life likes a motley wear, and that he who rejects the antic aspects it so often inappropriately puts on is no true photographer.

After all, we did not find just the street, much less the house, in which Susannah Annesley had lived before she was Mrs. Wesley, and long before her sons had imagined Methodism, and the greater of them had borne its message to General Oglethorpe’s new colony of Georgia. She lies in Bunhill Fields near Finsbury Square, that place sacred to so many varying memories, but chiefly those of the Dissenters who leased it, because they would not have the service from the book of Common Prayer read over them. There her dust mingles with that of John Bunyan, of Daniel de Foe, of Isaac Watts, of William Blake, of Thomas Stothard, and a multitude of nameless or of most namable others. The English crowd one another no less under than above the ground, and their island is as historically as actually over-populated. As I have expressed before, you can scarcely venture into the past anywhere for a certain association without being importuned by a score of others as interesting or more so. I have, for instance, been hesitating to say that the ancestor of Susannah was the Reverend Samuel Annesley who was silenced for his Puritanism in his church of St. Giles Cripplegate, because I should have to confess that when I visited his church my thoughts were rapt from the Reverend Samuel and from Susannah Annesley, and John Wesley, and the Georgian Methodists to the far mightier fame of Milton, who lies interred there, with his father before him, with John Fox, author of The Book of Martyrs, with Sir Martin Frobisher, who sailed the western seas when they were yet mysteries, with Margaret Lucy, the daughter of Shakespeare’s Sir Thomas. There, too, Cromwell was married, when a youth of twenty-one, to Elizabeth Bowchier. Again, I have had to ask myself, what is the use of painfully following up the slender threads afterwards woven into the web of American nationality, when at any moment the clews may drop from your heedless hands in your wonder at some which are the woof of the history of the world? I have to own even here that the more storied dead in Bunhill Fields made me forget that there lay among them Nathaniel Mather of the kindred of Increase and Cotton.

That is a place which one must wish to visit not once, but often, and I hope that if I send any reader of mine to it he will fare better than we did, and not find it shut to the public on a Sunday morning when it ought to have been open. But the Sabbatarian observances of England are quite past the comprehension of even such semi-aliens as the Americans, and must baffle entire foreigners all but to madness. I had already seen the Sunday auctions of the poor Jews in Petticoat Lane, which are licit, if not legal, and that Sunday morning before we found Bunhill Fields fast closed, we had found a market for poor Christians wide open in Whitecross Street near by. It was one of several markets of the kind which begin early Saturday evening, and are suffered by a much-winking police to carry on their traffic through the night and till noon the next day. Then, at the hour when the Continental Sunday changes from a holy day to a holiday, the guardians of the public morals in London begin to urge the hucksters and their customers to have done with their bargaining, and get about remembering the Sabbath-day. If neither persuasions nor imperatives will prevail, it is said that the police sometimes call in the firemen and rake the marketplace with volleys from the engine-hose. This is doubtless effective, but at the hour when we passed through as much of Whitecross Street as eyes and nose could bear, it was still far from the time for such an extreme measure, and the market was flourishing as if it were there to stay indefinitely.

Everything immediately imaginable for the outside or inside of man seemed on sale: clothing of all kinds, boots and shoes, hats and caps, glassware, iron-ware; fruits and vegetables, heaps of unripe English hazelnuts, and heaps of Spanish grapes which had failed to ripen on the way; fish, salt and fresh, and equally smelling to heaven; but, above all, flesh meats of every beast of the field and every bird of the barnyard, with great girls hewing and hacking at the carnage, and strewing the ground under their stands with hoofs and hides and claws and feathers and other less namable refuse. There was a notable absence among the hucksters of that coster class which I used to see in London twenty odd years before, or at least an absence of the swarming buttons on jackets and trousers which used to distinguish the coster. But among the customers, whose number all but forbade our passage through the street, with the noise of their feet and voices, there were, far beyond counting, those short, stubbed girls and women as typically cockney still as the costers ever were. They were of a plinth-like bigness up and down, and their kind, plain, common faces were all topped with narrow-brimmed sailor-hats, mostly black. In their jargoning hardly an aspirate was in its right place, but they looked as if their hearts were, and if no word came from their lips with its true quality, but with that curious soft London slur or twist, they doubtless spoke a sound business dialect.

When we traversed the dense body of the market and entered Roscoe Street from Whitecross, we were surprisingly soon out of its hubbub in a quiet befitting the silent sectaries, who once made so great a spiritual clamor in the world. We were going to look at the grave of George Fox, because of his relation to our colonial history in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and we thought it well to look into the Friends’ Meeting-house on the way, for a more fitting frame of mind than we might have brought with us from Whitecross Street. A mute sexton welcomed us at the door, and held back for us the curtain of the homely quadrangular interior, where we found twoscore or more of such simple folk as Fox might have preached to in just such a place. The only difference was that they now wore artless versions of the world’s present fashions in dress, and not the drabs of out-dated cut which we associate with Quakerism. But this was right, for that dress is only the antiquated simplicity of the time when Quakerism began; and the people we now saw were more fitly dressed than if they had worn it. We sat with them a quarter of an hour in the stillness which no one broke, the elders on the platform, with their brows bowed on their hands, apparently more deeply lost in it than the rest. Then we had freedom (to use their gentle Quaker parlance) to depart, and I hope we did so without offence.

Cunningham says that Fox was buried in Bunhill Fields, but he owns there is no memorial of him there; and there is a stone to mark his grave in the grassy space just beyond the meeting-house in Roscoe Street. If that is really his last resting-place, he lies under the shadow of a certain lofty warehouse walls, and in the shelter of some trees which on that sunny First Day morning stirred in the breeze with the stiffness by which the English foliage confesses before the fall it drops sere and colorless to the ground. Some leaves had already fallen about the simple monumental stone, and now they moved inertly, and now again lay still.

I will own here that I had more heart in the researches which concerned the ancestral Friends of all mankind, including so much American citizenship, than in following up some other origins of ours. The reader will perhaps have noticed long before that our origins were nearly all religious, and that though some of the American plantations were at first the effect of commercial enterprise, they were afterwards by far the greater part undertaken by people who desired for themselves, if not for others, freedom for the forms of worship forbidden them at home. Our colonial beginnings were illustrated by sacrifices and martyrdoms even among the lowliest, and their leaders passed in sad vicissitude from pulpit to prison, back and forth, until exile became their refuge from oppression. No nation could have a nobler source than ours had in such heroic fidelity to ideals; but it cannot be forgotten that the religious freedom, which they all sought, some of them were not willing to impart when they had found it; and it is known how, in New England especially, they practised the lessons of persecution they had learned in Old England. Two provinces stood conspicuously for toleration, Rhode Island, for which Roger Williams imagined it the first time in history, and Pennsylvania, where, for the first time, William Penn embodied in the polity of a state the gospel of peace and good-will to men. Neither of these colonies has become the most exemplary of our commonwealths; both are perhaps, for some reasons, the least so in their sections; but, above all the rest, their earlier memories appeal to the believer in the universal right to religious liberty and in the ideal of peaceful democracy which the Quakers alone have realized. The Quakers are no longer sensibly a moral force; but the creed of honest work for daily bread, and of the equalization of every man with another which they lived, can never perish. Their testimony against bloodshed was practical, as such a testimony can still be, when men will; their principle of equality, as well as their practise of it was their legacy to our people, and it remains now all that differences us from other nations. It was not Thomas Jefferson who first imagined the first of the self-evident truths of the Declaration, but George Fox.

We went, inappropriately enough, from where George Fox lay in his grave, level with the common earth, to where, in Finsbury Pavement, the castellated armory of the Honourable Artillery Company of London recalls the origin of the like formidable body in Boston. These gallant men were archers before they were gunners, being established in that quality first when the fear of Spanish invasion was rife in 1585. They did yeoman service against their own king in the Civil War, but later fell into despite and were mocked by poets no more warlike than themselves. Fletcher’s “Knight of the Burning Pestle” was of their company, and Cowper’s “John Gilpin” was “a train-band captain.” Now, however, they are so far restored to their earlier standing that when they are called out to celebrate, say, the Fourth of July, or on any of the high military occasions demanding the presence of royalty, the King appears in their uniform.

XVIII

AMERICAN ORIGINS — MOSTLY SOUTHERN

Outside the high gate of Bunhill Fields, we could do no more than read the great names lettered on the gate-posts, and peer through the iron barriers at the thickly clustered headstones within. But over against the cemetery we had access to the chapel where John Wesley preached for thirty years, and behind which he is buried. He laid the corner-stone in 1777 amid such a multitude of spectators that he could scarcely get through to the foundation, Cunningham says. Before the chapel is an excellent statue of the great preacher, and the glance at the interior which we suffered ourselves showed a large congregation listening to the doctrine which he preached there so long, and which he carried beyond seas himself to ourselves, to found among us the great spiritual commonwealth which is still more populous than any of those dividing our country.

The scene of his labors here was related for me by an obscure association to such a doctrinally different place as Finsbury Chapel, hard by, where my old friend, Dr. Moncure D. Conway preached for twenty years. Whatever manner of metaphysician he has ended, he began Methodist, and as a Virginian he had a right to a share of my interest in that home of Wesleyism, for it was in Virginia, so much vaster then than now, that Wesleyism spread widest and deepest. If any part of Wesley’s mission tended to modify or abolish slavery, then a devotion to freedom so constant and generous as Conway’s should link their names by an irrefragable, however subtle, filament of common piety. I wished to look into Finsbury Chapel for my old friend’s sake, but it seemed to me that we had intruded on worshippers enough that morning, and I satisfied my longing by a glimpse of the interior through the pane of glass let into the inner door. It was past the time for singing the poem of Tennyson which “Tom Brown” Hughes used to say they always gave out instead of a hymn in Finsbury Chapel; and some one else was preaching in Conway’s pulpit, or at his desk. I do not know what weird influence of sermonizing seen but not heard took the sense of reality from the experience, but I came away feeling as if I had looked upon something visionary.

It was no bad preparation for coming presently to the church of All Hallows in the Wall, where a bit of the old Roman masonry shows in the foundations of the later defences, of which indeed, no much greater length remains. The church, which is so uninterestingly ugly as not to compete with the relic of Roman wall, stands at the base of a little triangle planted with young elms that made a green quiet, and murmured to the silence with their stiffening leaves. It was an effect possible only to that wonderful London which towers so massively into the present that you are dumb before the evidences of its vast antiquity. There must have been a time when there was no London, but you cannot think it any more than you can think the time when there shall be none. I make so sure of these reflections that I hope there was no mistake about those modest breadths of Roman masonry; its rubble laid in concrete, was strong enough to support the weightiest consideration.

I am the more anxious about this because my friend, the genealogist, here differed with the great Cunningham, and was leading me by that morsel of Roman London to St. Peter’s Lane, where he said Fox died, and not to White Hart Court, where my other authority declares that he made an end two days after preaching in the Friends’ Meeting-house there. The ignorant disciple of both may have his choice; perhaps in the process of time the two places may have become one and the same. At any rate we were able that morning to repair our error concerning St. Catherine Cree’s, which we had unwittingly seen before, and now consciously saw, for Sir Nicholas Throgmorton’s sake. It had the look of very high church in the service which was celebrating, and I am afraid my mind was taken less by the monument of Sir Nicholas than by the black-robed figure of the young man who knelt with bowed head at the back of the church and rapt me with the memory of the many sacerdotal shapes which I used to see doing the like in Latin sanctuaries. It is one of the few advantages of living long that all experiences become more or less contemporaneous, and that at certain moments you cannot be distinctly aware just when and where you are.

There was little of this mystical question when our mission took us to Whitechapel, for there was nothing there to suggest former times or other places. I did, indeed, recall the thick-breathed sweltering Sunday morning when I had visited the region in July; but it is all now so absolutely and sordidly modern that one has no difficulty in believing that it was altogether different when so many Southern and especially Virginian emigrations began there. How many settlers in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland also were recruited from it, I know not; but the reader may have it at second-hand from me, as I had it at firsthand from my genealogist, that some Virginian names of the first quality originated in Whitechapel, which, in the colonizing times, was a region of high respectability, and not for generations afterwards the perlieu it became, and has now again somewhat ceased to be.

The first exiles from it were not self-banished for conscience’ sake, like those at a later date when the Puritans went both to Massachusetts where they revolted further, and to Virginia where they ultimately conformed. The earlier out-goers, though they might be come-outers, were part of the commercial enterprise which began to plant colonies north and south. The Plymouth Company which had the right to the country as far northward as Nova Scotia and westward as far as the Pacific, and the London Company which had as great scope westward and southward as far as Cape Fear, had the region between them in common, and they both drew upon Whitechapel, and upon Stepney beyond, where I had formerly fancied the present Whitechapel resuming somewhat of its ancient respectability. It is then a “spacious fair street,” as one of Cunningham’s early authorities describes it, and it is still “somewhat long,” so long indeed that our tram was a half-hour in carrying us through it into Stepney. About the time of the emigrations De Foe saw it, or says he saw it (you never can be sure with De Foe) thronged “with the richer sort of people, especially the nobility and gentry from the west part of the town, ... with their families and servants,” escaping into the country from the plague.

The “offscourings” of London, which the companies carried rather more to the southward than the northward with us, were hardly scoured off in Whitechapel, which was a decent enough ancestral source for any American strain. As for Stepney, then as now the great centre of the London shipping, she has never shared the ill-repute of Whitechapel, at least in name. Cunningham declares the region once “well-inhabited,” and the sailors still believe that all children born at sea belong to Stepney Parish. By an easy extension of this superstition she is supposed to have had a motherly interest in all children born beyond seas, including, of course, the American colonies, and she is of a presence that her foster-folk’s descendants need not be ashamed of. Our tram took us now and then by an old mansion of almost manor-house dignity, set in pleasant gardens; and it followed the shore of the Thames in sight of the masts of ships whose multitude brought me to disgrace for having, on my way to Greenwich, thought poorly of London as a port, and which, because of her riparian situation, made Stepney the scene of the great strike of the London dockers, when they won their fight under the lead of John Burns.

Our lovely weather cooled slightly as the afternoon wore away, but it was bright and mild again when we came another day towards Stepney as far as the old church of St. Dunstan. It is an edifice of good perpendicular Gothic, with traces of early English and even of later Norman, standing serene in a place of quiet graves amid the surrounding turmoil of life. The churchyard was full of rustling shrubs and bright with beds of autumnal flowers, from which the old square tower rose in the mellow air. Divers of our early emigrants were baptized in St. Dunstan’s, namely, the wife of Governor Bradford of Plymouth, with many of our ship-men, notably that Master Willoughby, who established the ship-yard at Charlestown, Massachusetts. I like better to associate with it our beginnings, because here I first saw those decorations for the Thanksgiving festival which the English have lately borrowed from us, and which I found again and again at various points in my September wanderings. The pillars were wreathed with the flowers and leaves of the fall; the altar was decked with apples and grapes, and the pews trimmed with yellow heads of ripe wheat. The English Thanksgiving comes earlier than ours, but it remembers its American source in its name, and the autumn comes so much sooner than with us that although the “parting summer lingering blooms delayed” in St. Dunstan’s church-yard, the fallen leaves danced and whirled about our feet in the paths.

There is witness of the often return of the exiles to their old home in the quaint epitaph which a writer in The Spectator (it might have been Addison himself) read from one of the flat tombstones:

   “Here Thomas Taffin lyes interred, ah why?

   Born in New England, did in London die.”

“I do not wonder at this,” Dr. Johnson said of the epitaph to Boswell. “It would have been strange if born in London he had died in New England.”

The good doctor did indeed despise the American colonies with a contempt which we can almost reverence; but the thing which he found so strange happened to many Londoners before his time. One of the least worthy and less known of these was that George Downing, who came back from Boston, where he was graduated at Harvard, and took the title of baronet from Charles II., in return, apparently, for giving his name to that famous Downing Street, ever since synonymous with English administration. If he has no other claim to our interest, that is perhaps enough; and the American who is too often abashed by the humility of our London origins may well feel a rise of worldly pride in the London celebrity of this quandam fellow-citizen. His personality is indeed lost in it, but his achievement in laying out a street, and getting it called after him, was prophetic of so much economic enterprise of ours that it may be fairly claimed as a national honor.

Of those who preferred not to risk the fate Dr. Johnson held in scorn, multitudes perished at Whitechapel of the plague which it was one of the poor compensations of life in New England to escape. They would all have been dead by now, whether they went or whether they stayed, though it was hard not to attribute their present decease solely to their staying, as we turned over the leaves of the old register in St. Mary Matfelon’s, Whitechapel. The church has been more than once rebuilt out of recollection of its original self, and there were workman still doing something to the interior; but the sexton led us into the vestry, and while the sunlight played through the waving trees without and softly illumined the record, we turned page after page, where the names were entered in a fair clear hand, with the given cause of death shortened to the letters, pl., after each. They were such names as abounded in the colonies, and those who had borne them must have been of the kindred of the emigrants. But my patriotic interest in them was lost in a sense of the strong nerve of the clerk who had written their names and that “pl.” with such an unshaken hand. One of the earlier dead, in the church-yard without, was a certain ragman, Richard Brandon, of whom the register says: “This R. Brandon is supposed to have cut off the head of Charles the First.”

From the parish of St. Botolph by Aldgate, on the road from Houndsditch to Whitechapel, came many of those who settled in Salem and the neighboring towns of Massachusetts. It is now very low church, as it probably was in their day, with a plain interior, and with the crimson foliage of the Virginia-creeper staining the light like painted glass at one of its windows. The bare triangular space in front of the church was once a pit where the dead of the plague were thrown, and in the sacristy is a thing of yet grislier interest. My friend made favor with some outlying authority, and an old, dim, silent servitor of some sort came back with him and took from a sort of cupboard, where it was kept in a glass box, the embalmed head of the Duke of Suffolk, which he lost for his part in the short-lived usurpation of his daughter, Lady Jane Grey. Little was left to suggest the mighty noble in the mummy-face, but the tragedy of his death was all there. It seemed as if the thoughts of the hideous last moment might still be haunting the withered brain, and the agony of which none of the dead have yet been able to impart a sense to the living, was present in it. As he who was showing us the head, turned it obligingly round in view of the expected shilling, and tilted it forward that we might see the mark of the axe in the severed neck, one seemed to see also the things which those sunken eyes had looked on last: the swarming visages of the crowd, the inner fringe of halberdiers, the black-visored figure waiting beside the block. As the doomed man dragged himself to the scaffold, how pale that face in the glass box must have been, for any courage that kept him above his fate. It was all very vivid, and the more incredible therefore that such a devilish thing as the death-punishment should still be, and that governments should keep on surpassing in the anguish they inflict the atrocity of the cruelest murderers. If the Salem-born Hawthorne ever visited that church in remembrance of the fact that his people came from the same parish; if he saw the mortal relic which held me in such fascination that I could scarcely leave the place even when the glass box had been locked back to its cupboard, and if the spirits of the dead sometimes haunt their dust, there must have been a reciprocal intelligence between the dead and the living that left no emotion of the supreme hour unimparted.

We visited St. Sepulchre’s where the truly sainted Roger Williams was baptized, and found entrance one day after two failures to penetrate to its very unattractive interior. We were lighted by stained-glass windows of geometrical pattern and a sort of calico or gingham effect in their coloring, to the tablet to Captain John Smith, whose life Pocahontas, in Virginia, with other ladies in diverse parts of the world, saved, that we might have one of the most delightful, if not one of the most credible, of autobiographies. He was of prime colonial interest, of course, and we were not taken from the thought of him by any charm of the place; but when we had identified his time-dimmed tablet there was no more to do at St. Sepulchre’s. The church is at the western end of Old Bailey, and in the dreadful old times when every Friday brought its batch of doomed men forth from the cells, it was the duty of the bellman of St. Sepulchre’s to pass under the prison walls the night before and ring his bell, and chant the dismal lines:

   “All you that in the condemned hold do lie,

   Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die;

   Watch all, and pray, the hour is drawing near,

   That you before the Almighty must appear;

   Examine well yourselves, in time repent,

   That you may not to eternal flames be sent,

   And when St. Sepulchre’s bell to-morrow tolls,

   The Lord above have mercy on your souls.

                       Past twelve o’clock.”

When we consider what piety was in the past, we need not be so horrified by justice. Sentiment sometimes came in to heighten the effect of both, and it used to present each criminal in passing St. Sepulchre’s on the way to Tyburn with a nosegay, and a little farther on with a glass of beer. The gardened strip of what once must have been a graveyard beside the church could hardly have afforded flowers enough for the pious rite. It was frequented, the day of our visit, by some old men of a very vacant-looking leisure, who sat on the benches in the path; and the smallest girl in proportion to the baby she carried that I ever saw in that England where small girls seem always to carry such very large babies, tilted back and forth with it in her slender arms, and tried to make-believe it was going to sleep.

The reader who prefers to develop these films for himself must not fail to bring out the surroundings of the places visited, if he would have the right effect. Otherwise he might suppose the several sanctuaries which we visited standing in a dignified space and hallowed quiet, whereas, all but a few were crowded close upon crowded streets, with the busy and noisy indifference of modern life passing before them and round them. St. Giles-in-the-Fields, which we visited after leaving St. Sepulchre, was the church in which Calvert, the founder of Maryland, was baptized, of course before he turned Catholic, since it could not very well have been afterwards. At the moment, however, I did not think of this. I had enough to do with the fact that Chapman, the translator of Homer, was buried in that church, and Andrew Marvell, the poet, and that very wicked Countess of Shrewsbury, the terrible she who held the Duke of Buckingham’s horse while he was killing her husband in a duel. I should, no doubt, have seen this memorable interior if it had still existed, but it was the interior of a church which was taken down more than a hundred years before the present church was built.

We visited the church on the way to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, turning out of Holborn round the corner of the house, now a bookseller’s shop, where Garrick died. I mention this merely as an instance of how the famous dead started out of the over-populated London past and tried at every step to keep me from my proper search for our meaner American origins. I was going to look at certain mansions, in which the Lords Baltimore used to live, and the patriotic Marylander, if he have faith enough, may identify them by their arches of gray stone at the first corner on his right in coming into the place from Holborn. But if he have not faith enough for this, then he may respond with a throb of sympathy to the more universal appeal of the undoubted fact that Lord Russell was beheaded in the centre of the square, which now waves so pleasantly with its elms and poplars. The cruel second James, afterwards king, wanted him beheaded before his own house, but the cynical second Charles was not quite so cruel as that, and rejected the proposed dramatic fancy “as indecent,” Burnet says. So Lord Russell, after Tillotson had prayed with him, “laid his head on the block at a spot which the elms and poplars now hide, and it was cut off at two strokes.”

Cunningham is certainly very temperate in calling Lincoln’s Inn Fields “a noble square.” I should myself call it one of the noblest and most beautiful in London, and if the Calverts did not dwell in one of the stately mansions of Arch Row, which is “all that Inigo Jones lived to build” after his design for the whole square, then they might very well have been proud to do so. They are not among the great whom Cunningham names as having dwelt there, and I do not know what foundation the tradition of their residence rests upon. What seems more certain is that one of the Calverts, the first or the second Lord Baltimore, was buried in that church of St. Dunstan’s in the West, or St. Dunstan’s Fleet Street, which was replaced by the actual edifice in 1833.

The reader, now being got so near, may as well go on with me to Charing Cross, where in the present scene of cabs, both hansoms and four-wheelers, perpetually coming and going at the portals of the great station and hotel, and beside the torrent of omnibuses in the Strand, the Reverend Hugh Peters suffered death through the often broken faith of Charles II. In one of the most delightful of his essays, Lowell humorously portrays the character of the man who met this tragic fate: a restless and somewhat fatuous Puritan divine, who, having once got safely away from persecution to Boston, came back to London in the Civil War, and took part in the trial of Charles I. If not one of the regicides, he was very near one, and he shared the doom from which the treacherous pardon of Charles II was never intended to save them. I suppose his fatuity was not incompatible with tragedy, though somehow we think that absurd people are not the stuff of serious experience.

Leigh Hunt, in that most delightful of all books about London, The Town, tells us that No. 7 Craven Street, Strand, was once the dwelling of Benjamin Franklin, and he adds, with the manliness which is always such a curious element of his unmanliness: “What a change along the shore of the Thames in a few years (for two centuries are less than a few in the lapse of time) from the residence of a set of haughty nobles, who never dreamt that a tradesman could be anything but a tradesman, to that of a yeoman’s son, and a printer, who was one of the founders of a great state!”

Not far away in one of the houses of Essex Street, Strand, a state which led in the attempted dismemberment of that great state, and nearly wrought its ruin, had a formal beginning, for it is said that it was there John Locke wrote the constitution of South Carolina, which still, I believe, remains its organic law. One has one’s choice among the entirely commonplace yellow brick buildings, which give the street the aspect of an old-fashioned place in Boston. The street was seriously quiet the afternoon of our visit, with only a few foot-passengers sauntering through it, and certain clerklike youth entering and issuing from the doors of the buildings which had the air of being law-offices.

We used as a pretext for visiting the Temple the very attenuated colonial fact that some Mortons akin to him of Merrymount in Massachusetts, have their tombs and tablets in the triforium of the Temple Church. But when we had climbed to the triforium by the corkscrew stairs leading to it, did we find there tombs and tablets? I am not sure, but I am sure we found the tomb of that Edward Gibbon who wrote a History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and who while in Parliament strongly favored “distressing the Americans,” as the king wished, and made a speech in support of the government measure for closing the port of Boston. I did not bear him any great grudge for that, but I could not give myself to his monument with such cordial affection as I felt for that of the versatile and volatile old letter-writer James Howell, which also I found in that triforium, half-hidden behind a small organ, with an epitaph too undecipherable in the dimness for my patience. It was so satisfactory to find this, after looking in vain for any record of him at Jesus College in Oxford, where he studied the humanities that enabled him to be so many things to so many masters, that I took all his chiselled praises for granted.

I made what amends I could for my slight of the Mortons in the Temple Church, by crossing presently to Clifford’s Inn, Strand, where the very founder of Merrymount, the redoubtable Thomas Morton himself was sometime student of the law and a dweller in these precincts. It is now the hall of the Art Workers’ Guild, and anywhere but in London would be incredibly quiet and quaint in that noisy, commonplace, modern neighborhood. It in nowise remembers the disreputable and roistering antipuritan, who set up his May-pole at Wollaston, and danced about it with his debauched aboriginies, in defiance of the saints, till Miles Standish marched up from Plymouth and made an end of such ungodly doings at the muzzles of his matchlocks.

It must have been another day that we went to view the church of St. Botolph without Aldersgate, because some of the patrician families emigrating to Massachusetts were from that parish, which was the home of many patrician families of the Commonwealth. In St. Andrew’s Holborn, the Vanes, father and son, worshipped, together with the kindred of many that had gone to dwell beyond seas. It is a large impressive interior, after the manner of Wren, and at the moment of our visit was smelling of varnish; most London churches smell of mortar, when in course of their pretty constant reparation, and this was at least a change. St. Stephen’s Coleman-Street, may draw the Connecticut exile, as the spiritual home of that Reverend Mr. Davenport, who was the founder of New Haven, but it will attract the unlocalized lover of liberty because it was also the parish church of the Five Members of Parliament whom Charles I. tried to arrest when he began looking for trouble. It had a certain sentiment of low-churchness, being very plain without and within not unlike an Orthodox church in some old-fashioned New England town. One entered to it by a very neatly-paved, clean court, out of a business neighborhood, jostled by commercial figures in sack-coats and top-hats who were expressive in their way of a non-conformity in sympathy with the past if not with the present of St. Andrew’s.

St. Martins-in-the-Fields, where General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia, was baptized, was, in his time, one of the proudest parishes of the city, and the actual church is thought to be the masterpiece of the architect Gibbs, who produced in the portico what Cunningham calls “one of the finest pieces of architecture in London.” Many famous people were buried in the earlier edifice, including Nell Gwynne, Lord Mohun, who fell in a duel with the Duke of Hamilton, as the readers of Henry Esmond well know, and Farquhar the dramatist. Lord Bacon was baptized there; and the interior of the church is very noble and worthy of him and of the parish history. Whether General Oglethorpe drew upon his native parish in promoting the settlement of Georgia, I am not so sure as I am of some other things, as, for instance, that he asked the king for a grant of land, “in trust for the poor,” and that his plan was to people his colony largely from the captives in the debtors’ prisons. I love his memory for that, and I would gladly have visited the debtors’ prisons which his humanity vacated if I could have found them, or if they had still existed.

The reader who has had the patience to accompany me on these somewhat futile errands must have been aware of making them largely on the lordly omnibus-tops which I always found so much to my proud taste. Often, however, we whisked together from point to point in hansoms; often we made our way on foot, with those quick transitions from the present to the past, from the rush and roar of business thoroughfares to the deep tranquillity of religious interiors, or the noise-bound quiet of ancient church-yards, where the autumn flowers blazed under the withering autumn leaves, and the peaceful occupants of the public benches were scarcely more agitated by our coming than the tenants of the graves beside them.

The weather was for the most part divinely beautiful, so tenderly and evenly cool and warm, with a sort of lingering fondness in the sunshine, as if it were prescient of the fogs so soon to blot it. The first of these came on the last day of our research, when suddenly we dropped from the clouded surfaces of the earth to depths where the tube-line trains carry their passengers from one brilliantly lighted station to another. We took three of the different lines, experimentally, rather than necessarily, in going from St. Mary Woolnoth, in Lombard Street, hard by the Bank of England, to the far neighborhood of Stoke Newington; and at each descent by the company’s lift, we left the dark above ground, and found the light fifty feet below. While this sort of transit is novel, it is delightful; the air is good, or seems so, and there is a faint earthy smell, somewhat like that of stale incense in Italian churches, which I found agreeable from association at least; besides, I liked to think of passing so far beneath all the superincumbent death and all the superambulant life of the immense immemorial town.

We found St. Mary Woolnoth closed, being too early for the Sunday service, and had to content ourselves with the extremely ugly outside of the church which is reputed the masterpiece of Wren’s pupil Hawksmoor; while we took for granted the tablet or monument of Sir William Phipps, the governor of Massachusetts, who went back to be buried there after the failure of his premature expedition against Quebec. My friend had provided me something as remote from Massachusetts as South Carolina in colonial interest, and we were presently speeding to New River, which Sir Hugh Myddleton taught to flow through the meadows of Stoke Newington to all the streets of London, and so originated her modern water-supply. This knight, or baronet, he declared, upon the faith of a genealogist, to be of the ancestry of that family of Middletons who were of the first South Carolinians then and since. It is at least certain that he was a Welshman, and that the gift of his engineering genius to London was so ungratefully received that he was left wellnigh ruined by his enterprise. The king claimed a half-interest in the profits, but the losses remained undivided to Myddleton. The fact, such as it is, proves perhaps the weakest link in a chain of patriotic associations which, I am afraid the reader must agree with me, has no great strength anywhere. The New River itself, when you come to it, is a plain straightforward, canal-like water-course through a grassy and shady level, but it is interesting for the garden of Charles Lamb’s first house backing upon it, and for the incident of some of his friends walking into it one night when they left him after an evening that might have been rather unusually “smoky and drinky.” Apart from this I cared for it less than for the neighborhoods through which I got to it, and which were looking their best in the blur of the fog. This was softest and richest among the low trees of Highbury Fields, where, when we ascended to them from our tubular station, the lawns were of an electric green in their vividness. In fact, when it is not blindingly thick, a London fog lends itself to the most charming effects. It caresses the prevailing commonness and ugliness, and coaxes it into a semblance of beauty in spite of itself. The rows upon rows of humble brick dwellings in the streets we passed through were flattered into cottage homes where one would have liked to live in one’s quieter moods, and some rather stately eighteenth-century mansions in Stoke Newington housed one’s pride the more fittingly, because of the mystery which the fog added to their antiquity. It hung tenderly and reverently about that old, old parish church of Stoke Newington where, it is story or fable, they that bore the body of the dead King Harold from the field of Hastings made one of their stations on the way to Waltham Abbey; and it was much in the maundering mind of the kindly spectator who could not leave off pitying us because we could not get into the church, the sexton having just before gone down the street to the baker’s. It followed us more and more vaguely into the business quarter where we took our omnibus, and where we noted that business London, like business New York, was always of the same complexion and temperament in its shops and saloons, from centre to circumference. Amid the commonplaceness of Islington where we changed omnibuses, the fog abandoned us in despair, and rising aloof, dissolved into the bitterness of a small cold rain.

XIX

ASPECTS AND INTIMATIONS

The fog, through that golden month of September (September is so silvern in America), was more or less a fact of the daily weather. The morning began in a mellow mistiness, which the sun burned through by noon; or if sometimes there was positive rain, it would clear for a warm sunset, which had moments of a very pretty pensiveness in the hollows of Green Park, or by the lakes of St. James’s. There were always the bright beds of autumn flowers, and in Hyde Park something of the season’s flush came back in the driving. The town began to be visibly fuller, and I was aware of many Americans, in carriages and on foot, whom I fancied alighting after a continental summer, and poising for another flight to their respective steamers. The sentiment of London was quite different at the end of September from the sentiment of London at the beginning, and one could imagine the sort of secondary season which it revisits in the winter. There was indeed no hint of the great primary season in the sacred paddock of beauty and fashion in Hyde Park, where the inverted penny chairs lay with their foreheads in the earth; and the shrivelled leaves, loosened from their boughs in the windless air, dropped listlessly round them.

At night our little Mayfair Street was the haunt of much voluntary minstrelsy. Bands of cockney darkeys came down it, tuning their voices to our native ragtime. Or a balladist, man or woman, took the centre, and sang towards our compassionate windows. Or a musical husband and wife placed their portable melodeon on the opposite sidewalk, and trained their vocal and instrumental attack upon the same weak defences.

It was all in keeping with the simple kindliness of the great town whose homelikeness arises from its immense habitability. This always strikes the New-Yorker, whether native or adoptive, if he be a thoughtful New-Yorker, and goes about the different regions of the ampler metropolis with an abiding sense of the restricted spaces where man may peacefully dwell, or quietly lodge over-night, in his own city. In assimilating each of the smaller towns or villages which it has made itself up of London has left them so much of their original character that though merged, they are not lost; and in cases where they have been so long merged as to have experienced a severance of consciousness, or where they are only nominally different sections of the vast whole, they have each its own temperament. It would be quite impossible for one finding one’s self in Bloomsbury to suppose one’s self in Belgravia, or in any of the Kensingtons to fancy one’s self in Mayfair. Chelsea is as temperamentally different from Pimlico as the City from Southwark, and Islington, again, though it speaks the same language as Whitechapel, might well be of another tongue, so differently does it think and feel. The names, and a hundred others, call to the stranger from the sides and fronts and backs of omnibuses, until he has a weird sense that they personally knew him long before he knew them. But when once domesticated in any quarter he is so quickly at home in it that it will be the centre of London for him, coming to and going from it in a local acceptance which he cannot help feeling a reciprocal kindliness. He might do this as a mere hotel-dweller, but if he has given hostages to fortune by going into lodgings, and forming even indirect relations with the tradesmen round the corners, the little stationers and newsmen, the nearest bookseller, the intelligent female infants in the post-office (which is always within a minute’s walk), and perhaps conversed with the neighboring policeman, or has taken cabs so often from the neighboring rank as to be recognizable to the cabmen, then he is more quickly and thoroughly naturalized in the chosen region. He will be unworthy of many little friendlinesses from his fellow-citizens if he does not like them, and he will miss, in refusing the image of home which is offered him, one of the rarest consolations of exile.

At a distance from London (say as small a distance, in time if not space, as Bath), you will hear it said that everybody is well in London, but in London you will find that the hygienic critics or authorities distinguish. All England, indeed, is divided into parts that are relaxing, and parts that are bracing, and it is not so strange then that London should be likewise subdivided. Mayfair, you will hear, is very bracing, but Belgravia, and more particularly Pimlico, on which it borders, is terribly relaxing. Beyond Pimlico, Chelsea again is bracing, and as for South Kensington it stands to reason that it is bracing because it is very high, almost as high as Mayfair. If you pass from your Pimlico borderland of Belgravia to either of those regions you are certainly not sensible of any sharp accent, but there is no telling what a gradual rise of eight or ten feet may make in the quality of the air. To the stranger all London seems a vast level, with perhaps here and there the sort of ground-swell you may note from your car-window in the passage of a Western plain. Ludgate Hill is truly a rise of ground, but Tower Hill is only such a bad eminence as may gloomily lift itself in history irrespective of the actual topography. Such an elevation as our own Murray Hill would be a noticeable height in London, and there are no such noble inequalities as in our up-town streets along the Hudson. All great modern cities love the plain surfaces, and London is not different from Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Paris, or Berlin, or Vienna, or St. Petersburg, or Milan in this; New York is much more mountainous, and Boston is a Sierra Nevada in comparison.

Yet, I suppose there must be something in the superstition that one part of London is more bracing or more relaxing than another, and that there is really, however insensibly, a difference of levels. That difference of temperaments which I have mentioned, seems mostly intimated in the size and age of the houses. They are larger and older in Bloomsbury, where they express a citizen substance and comfort; they are statelier about the parks and squares of Belgravia, which is comparatively a new settlement; but there are more little houses among the grandeurs of Mayfair which is of the same social quality, though many of its streets crossing from Piccadilly have quite gone to shops and family hotels and lodgings. It is more irregular and ancient than Belgravia, and its grandeurs have a more casual air. The historic mansions crowded by the clubs towards Hyde Park Corner, and grouped about the open space into which Piccadilly falters there, or following the park in the flat curve of Park Lane, have not the effect of withdrawal and exclusion of the Belgravian mansions; beyond which again there is a world of small dwellings of fainter and fainter self-assertion till they fade into the hopeless plebeian unconsciousness of Pimlico, whose endless streets are without beauty or dignity. Yet beyond this lost realm Chelsea redeems itself in a grace of domestic architecture and an atmosphere of esthetic associations which make it a favorite abode of the tastes as well as the means. Kensington, where you arrive after what seems hopeless straggling through the roaring thoroughfare prolonging the Fleet-and-Strand-derived Piccadilly, is of almost equal artistic and literary appeal, but is older and perhaps less actual in its claims upon the cultivated sympathies. In either of these regions the polite American of definite resources might, if banished from the republic, dwell in great material and spiritual comfort; but if he chose Chelsea for his exile, I do not know that I should blame his preference. There he would have the neighborhood of many charming people whom to know for neighbors would add a certain grace to existence, although he might not otherwise know them. Besides he would have, beyond the Thames, the wooded stretch of Battersea Park, if his dwelling, as it very well might, looked out upon the river and across it; and in the distance he would have the roofs and chimneys of that far Southwark, which no one seems anxious to have nearer than, say, the seventeenth century, and yet which being a part of London must be full of perfectly delightful people.

Even if you make-believe that Southwark bears some such relation to London as Jersey City bears to New York (but the image is very imperfect) still New York, you are aware, can never domesticate the Hudson as London has domesticated the Thames. Our river is too vast, too grand, if you will, ever to be redeemed from its primitive wildness, much less made an intimate part of the city’s life. It may be laced with ferries and bound with all the meshes that commerce can weave with its swift-flying shuttles; it shall be tunnelled and bridged hereafter, again and again, but its mere size will keep it savage, just as a giant, though ever so amiable and good-natured, could not imaginably be civilized as a man of the usual five-foot-six may be. Among rivers the Thames is strictly of the five-foot-six average, and is therefore perfectly proportioned to the little continent of which it is the Amazon or the Mississippi. If it were larger it would make England ridiculous, as Denmark, for instance, is made ridiculous by the sounds and estuaries that sunder it. But the Thames is of just the right size to be held in London’s arms, and if it is not for her the graceful plaything that the Seine is for Paris, it is more suited to the practical nature of London. There are, so far as I noted, no whispering poplars planted by the brink of the Thames, but I feel sure that if there were, and there were citizens fishing their years away in their shade, they would sometimes catch a fish, which the life-long anglers in the Seine never do. That forms a great difference, expressive of a lasting difference of character in the two capitals. Along the Thames the trees are planted on the successive Embankments, in a beautiful leafy parkway following its course, broken here and there by public edifices, like the Parliament buildings, but forming a screen mostly uninterrupted, behind which a parade of grandiose hotels does not altogether hide itself from the river. Then the national quality of the English stream is expressed in the succession of bridges which span it. These are uglier than any that cross the Seine; each one, in fact, is uglier than the other, till you come to the Tower Bridge, which is the ugliest of all. They have a strange fascination, and quickly endear themselves to the stranger who lounges on their parapets and looks down upon the grimy little steamers scuttling under them, or the uncouth barges pushed and pulled over the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an admirable point for viewing the clumsy craft of all types which the falling tide leaves wallowing in the iridescent slime of the shoals, showing their huge flanks, and resting their blunt snouts on the mud-banks in a slumberous content.

It is seldom that the prospect reveals a vessel of more dignified proportions or presence, though in my drives along one of the Embankments I came upon a steamer of the modest size which we used to think large when we crossed the Atlantic in it, but which might be swung among the small boats from the davits of a latter-day liner. This vessel always had an admiring crowd about it, and I suppose it had some peculiar interest for the public which did not translate itself to me. As far as the more visible commerce of the more sight-seen parts of the Thames is concerned, it is as unimpressive as may be. It has nothing of the dramatic presence of the shipping in the Hudson or the East River, with its light operatic touches in the gayly painted Sound and North River steamboats. You must go as far at least as Stepney on the Thames before you begin to realize that London is the largest port, as well as the largest city, in the world.

There are certain characteristics, qualities, of London which I am aware of not calling aright, but which I will call sentiments for want of some better word. One of them was the feel of the night-air, especially late in the season, when there was a waste and weariness in it as if the vast human endeavor for pleasure and success had exhaled its despair upon it. Whatever there was of disappointment in one’s past, of apprehension in one’s future, came to the surface of the spirit, and asserted its unity with the collective melancholy. It was not exactly a Weltschmerz; that is as out-dated as the romantic movement; but it was a sort of scientific relinquishment, which was by no means scornful of others, or too appreciative of one’s own unrecognized worth. Through the senses it related itself to the noises of the quiescing city, to the smell of its tormented dust, to the whiff of a casual cigar, or the odor of the herbage and foliage in the park or square that one was passing, one may not be more definite about what was perhaps nothing at all. But I fancy that relinquishment of any sort would be easier in London than in cities of simpler interest or smaller population. For my own part I was content to deny many knowledges that I would have liked to believe myself possessed of, and to go about clothed in my ignorance as in a garment, or defended by it as by armor. There was a sort of luxury in passing through streets memorable for a thousand things and as dense with associations as Long Island with mosquitoes when the winds are low, and in reflecting that I need not be ashamed for neglecting in part what no man could know in whole. I really suppose that upon any other terms the life of the cultivated American would be hardly safe from his own violence in London. If one did not shut one’s self out from the complex appeal to one’s higher self one could hardly go to one’s tailor or one’s hatter or one’s shoemaker, on those missions which, it is a national superstition with us, may be more inexpensively fulfilled there than at home. The best way is to begin by giving up everything, by frankly saying to yourself that you will not be bothered, that man’s days of travel are full of trouble, and that you are going to get what little joy you can out of them as you go along. Then, perhaps, on some errand of quite ignoble purport, you will be seized with the knowledge that in the very spot where you stand one of the most significant things in history happened. It will be quite enough for you, as you inhale a breath of the London mixture of smoke, dust, and fog, that it is something like the air which Shakespeare and Milton breathed when they were meditating the works which have given so many international after-dinner orators the assurance of a bond of amity in our common language. Once, in driving through one of the dullest streets imaginable, I chanced to look out of the side-window of my hansom, and saw on a flying house-wall a tablet reading: “Here lived John Dryden,” and though Dryden is a poet to move one to tenderness as little as may be, the tears came into my eyes.

It is but one of a thousand names, great in some sort or other, which make sojourn in London impossible, if one takes them to heart as an obligation to consciousness of her constant and instant claim. They show you Johnson’s house in Bolt Court, but it only avails to vex you with the thought of the many and many houses of better and greater men which they will never show you. As for the scenes of events in fiction you have a plain duty to shun them, for in a city where the great facts of the past are written so deep upon the walls and pavement one over another, it is folly which can be forgiven only to the vacancy of youth to go looking for the places where this imaginary thing happened. Yet this claim of folly has been recognized, and if you wish to indulge it, you can do so at little trouble. Where the real localities are not available they have fictitious ones, and they show you an Old Curiosity Shop, for instance, which serves every purpose of having been the home of Little Nell. There are at least three Cock Taverns, and several Mitres, all genuine; and so on. Forty odd years ago I myself, on first arriving in London, lodged at the Golden Cross, because it was there that David Copperfield stopped; and I was insensately pleased the other day that there was still a hotel of that name at the old stand. Whether it was the old inn, I did not challenge the ghost within me to say. I doubt if you now dine there “off the joint” in the “coffee-room”; more probably you have a table d’h�te meal served you “at separate tables,” by a German lad just beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very likely dead; and for the credit of our country I hope that the recreant American whom I heard telling an Englishman there in those disheartening days, of our civic corruptions, may have also passed away. He said that he himself had bought votes, as many as he wanted, in the city of Providence; and though I could deny the general prevalence of such venality at least in my own stainless state of Ohio, I did not think to suggest that in such a case the corruption was in the buyer rather than the seller of the votes, and that if he had now come to live, as he implied, in a purer country, he had not taken the right way to be worthy of it. But at twenty-four you cannot think of everything at once, and a recreant American is so uncommon that you need hardly, at any age, provide for him.

XX

PARTING GUESTS

However the Golden Cross Inn may have inwardly or outwardly changed, the Golden Cross Hotel keeps its old place hard by the Charing Cross station, which is now so different from the station of the earlier day. I do not think it is one of the most sympathetic of the London stations. I myself prefer rather the sentiment of the good old Euston station, which continues for you the feeling of arrival in England, and keeps you in the glow of landing that you have, or had in the days when you always landed in Liverpool, and the constant Cunarders and Inmans ignored the upstart pretensions of Southampton and Plymouth to be ports of entry from the United States. But among the stations of minor autobiographical interest, Charing Cross is undoubtedly the first, and you may have your tenderness for it as the place where you took the train for the nightboat at Folkestone in first crossing to the continent. How strange it all was, and yet how not unfriendly; for there is always a great deal of human nature in England. She is very motherly, even with us children who ran away from home, and only come back now and then to make sure that we are glad of having done so. In the lamp-broken obscurity of the second-class carriage I am aware still of a youthful exile being asked his destination, and then his derivation, by a gentle old lady in the seat opposite (she might have been Mother England in person), who, hearing that he was from America where the civil war was then very unpromising, could only say, comfortingly: “And very glad to be out of it, I dare say!” He must protest, but if he failed to convince, how could he explain that part of his high mission to the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate privateers which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon our sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had eventually to do little or no sweeping of that sort; for no privateers came to interrupt the calm in which he devoted himself, unofficially, to writing a book about the chief of those ports.

It was the first of many departures from London, where you are always more or less arriving or departing as long as you remain in England. It is indeed an axiom with the natives that if you want to go from any one point to any other in the island it is easier to come to London and start afresh for it, than to reach the point across country. The trains to and from the capital are swifter and more frequent, and you are not likely to lose your way in the mazes of Bradshaw if you consult the indefinitely simplified A B C tables which instruct you how to launch yourself direct from London upon any objective, or to recoil from it. My impression is that you habitually drive to a London station as nearly in time to take your train as may be, and that there is very little use for waiting-rooms. This may be why the waiting-room seems so small and unattractive a part of the general equipment. It never bears any such proportion to the rest as the waiting-rooms in the great Boston stations, or even that of the Grand Central in New York, and is by no chance so really fine as that of the Atchison and Topeka at Omaha, or that of the Lake Shore at Pittsburg. Neither the management nor the climate is so unkind as to keep intending passengers from the platforms, where they stand talking, or walk up and down, or lean from their carriage-doors and take leave of attendant friends with repeated pathos. With us it is either too cold or too hot to do that, and at all the great stations we are now fenced off from the tracks, as on the Continent, and unless we can make favor with the gateman, must despatch our farewells before our parting dear ones press forward to have their tickets punched. But at no London station, and far less at any provincial station in England, are you subjected to these formalities; and the English seem to linger out their farewells almost abusively, especially if they are young and have much of life before them.

Charing Cross has the distinction, sole among her sister stations, of a royal entrance. There is no doubt a reason for this; but as royalty is always coming and going in every direction, it is not easy to know why the other stations do not provide themselves with like facilities. One cannot imagine just how the king and queen get in and out of the common gateway, but it has to be managed everywhere but at Charing Cross, no matter what hardship to royalty it involves. Neither has any other station a modern copy of a Queen Eleanor’s Cross, but this is doubtless because no other station was the last of these points where her coffin was set down on its way from Lincoln to its final restingplace in Westminster. You cannot altogether regret their lack after you have seen such an original cross as that of Northampton, for though the Victorian piety which replaced the monument at Charing Cross was faithful and earnest, it was not somehow the art of 1291. One feels no greater hardness in the Parliamentary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in the stony fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern work, and refuses to be softened by any effect of the mellowing London air. It looks out over the scurry of cabs, the ponderous tread of omnibuses, the rainfall patter of human feet, as inexorably latter-day as anything in the Strand. It is only an instance of the constant futility of the restoration which, in a world so violent or merely wearing as ours, must still go on, and give us dead corpses of the past instead of living images. Fortunately it cannot take from Charing Cross its preeminence among the London railway stations, which is chiefly due to its place in the busy heart of the town, and to that certain openness of aspect, which sometimes, as with the space at Hyde Park Corner, does the effect of sunniness in London. It may be nearer or farther, as related to one’s own abode, but it has not the positive remoteness from the great centres, by force of which, for instance, Waterloo seems in a peripheral whirl of non-arrival, and Vauxhall lost somewhere in a rude borderland, and King’s Cross bewildered in a roar of tormented streets beyond darkest Bloomsbury. Even Paddington, which is of a politer situation, and is the gate of the beautiful West-of-England country, has not the allure of Charing Cross; even Euston which so sweetly prolongs the old-fashioned Liverpool voyage from New York, and keeps one to the last moment in a sense of home, really stays one from London by its kind reluctance. It is at Charing Cross alone that you are immediately and unmistakably in the London of your dreams.

I think that sooner or later we had arrived at or departed from all the great stations, but I will not make so sure of St. Pancras. I am afraid that I was, more strictly speaking, only at a small church hard by, of so marked a ritualistic temperament that it had pictures in it, and gave me an illusion of Italy, though I was explicitly there because of an American origin in the baptism of Junius Brutus Booth. I am sorry I do not remember the name of that little church, but it stood among autumn flowers, in the heart of a still, sunny morning, where the reader will easily find it. Of Victoria station I am many times certain, for it was from it that we at last left London, and that at the time of an earlier sojourn we arrived in a fog of a type which stamped our sense of the world’s metropolis with a completeness which it had hitherto disappointingly wanted.

It had been a dull evening on the way up from Dover, but not uncommonly dull for an evening of the English November, and we did not notice that we had emerged from the train into an intensified obscurity. In the corridors of the station-hotel hung wreaths of what a confident spirit of our party declared to be smoke, in expression of the alarming conviction that the house was on fire. Nobody but ourselves seemed troubled by the smoke, however, and with a prompt recurrence to the reading which makes the American an intimate of the English circumstance though he has never personally known it, we realized that what seemed smoke must be a very marked phase of London fog. It did not perceptibly thicken in-doors that night, but the next day no day dawned, nor, for that matter, the day after the next. All the same the town was invisibly astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments between total and partial blindness. The usual motives and incentives were at work in the business of men, more like the mental operations of sleep than of waking. From the height of an upper window one could look down and feel the city’s efforts to break the mesh of its weird captivity, with an invisible stir in all directions, as of groping. Of course, life had to go on, upon such terms as it could, and if you descended from your window that showed nothing, and went into the street, and joined the groping, you could make out something of its objects. With a cabman who knew his way, as a pilot knows his way on a river in a black night, you could depart and even arrive. In the course of your journey you would find the thoroughfare thick with hesitating or arrested traffic. At one place you would be aware of a dull, red light, brightening into a veiled glare, and you would have come upon a group of horses, detached from several omnibuses, and standing head to head till they might hopefully be put to and driven on again. The same light, with the torches carried by boys, would reveal trucks and carts stopped, or slowly creeping forward. Cab-horses between the blotches of flame made by the cab-lamps were craning their necks forward, or twitching them from side to side. Through the press foot-passengers found their way across the street, and imaginably in the dark that swallowed up the sidewalks, they were going and coming on errands that could brook no stay. The wonder was that they could know which way they were going, or how they could expect to reach any given point.

Where the buildings were densest the fog was thinnest, and there it was a greenish-yellow, like water when you open your eyes and look at it far below the surface. Where the houses fell away, and you found yourself in a square, or with a park on one side, the vapor thickened into blackness and seemed to swell, a turbid tide, overhead and underfoot. It hurt your straining eyes, and got into your throat, and burned it like a sullen steam. If your cab stopped, miraculously enough, at the address given, you got out incredulous and fearful of abandonment. When you emerged again, and found your cab waiting, you mutely mounted to your place and resumed your strange quality of something in a dream.

So, all that day the pall hung upon the town, and all the next. The third day the travellers were to sail from Liverpool, and there was some imperative last-shopping on the eve. Two of them took a courageous cab, and started for Bond Street. In a few moments the cab was in the thick of the fog and its consequences, a tangle of stationary vehicles with horses detached, or marking time, without advancing either way. A trembling hand lifted the little trap in the cab-roof, and a trembling voice asked the cabman: “Do you think you can go on?” “I think so, sir.” The horse’s head had already vanished; now his haunches faded away. Towards the dashboard the shafts of another cab came yawing, and again the eager voice quavered: “Do you think you can get back?” “Oh yes, sir,” the answer came more cheerfully, and the shopping was done a week later in Twenty-third Street.

There is an insensate wish in the human witness to have nature when she begins misbehaving do her worst. One longs to have her go all lengths, and this perhaps is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of violent type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the secret joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must form the mystical delight of such a London fog as we had experienced. But you see the blizzard once in a generation or a century, while if you are good, or good enough to live in London, you may see a characteristic fog almost any year. It is another case in which the metropolis of the New World must yield to the metropolis of the whole world. Fog for fog, I do not say but the fog in which we left New York, on March 3, 1904, was not as perfect as our great London fog. But the New York fog was only blindingly white and the London fog blindingly black, and that is a main difference.

The tender and hesitating mist with which each day of our final September in London began, must not be confused in the reader’s mind with a true London fog. The mist grew a little heavier, day by day, perhaps; but only once the sun failed to burn through it before noon, and that was one of the first days of October, as if in September it had not yet lost the last of its summer force. Even then, though it rained all the forenoon, and well into the afternoon, the weather cleared for a mild, warm sunset, and we could take the last of our pleasant walks from Half-Moon Street into St. James’s Park.

When the last day of our London sojourn came, it was fitly tearful, and we had our misgivings of the Channel crossing. The crossing of the day before had been so bad that Pretty Polly, who had won the St. Leger, held all England in approving suspense, while her owners decided that she should not venture to the defeat that awaited her in France, till the sea was smoother. But in the morning the papers prophesied fair weather, and it was promised that Pretty Polly should cross. Her courage confirmed our own, and we took our initial departure in the London fashion which is so different from the New York fashion. Not with the struggle, personally and telephonically, in an exchange of bitter sarcasms prolonged with the haughty agents of the express monopoly, did we get our baggage expensively before us to the station and follow in a costly coup�, but with all our trunks piled upon two reasonable four-wheelers, we set out contemporaneously with them. In New York we paid six dollars for our entire transportation to the steamer; in London we paid six shillings to reach the Victoria station with our belongings. The right fare would have been five; the imagination of our cabman rose to three and six each, and feebly fluttered there, but sank to three, and did not rise again. At our admirable lodging the landlady, the butler and the chambermaid had descended with us to the outer door in a smiling convention of regret, the kindly Swiss boots allowed the street porter to help him up with our trunks, and we drove away in the tradition of personal acceptability which bathes the stranger in a gentle self-satisfaction, and which prolonged itself through all the formalities of registering our baggage for the continent at the station, of bribing the guard in the hope of an entire first-class compartment to ourselves and then sharing it with four others similarly promised its sole use, and of telegraphing to secure seats in the rapide from Calais to Paris.

Then we were off in a fine chill, small English rain through a landscape in which all the forms showed like figures in blotting-paper, as Taine said, once for all. After we had run out of the wet ranks of yellowish-black city houses, and passed the sullen suburbs,

   “All in a death-doing autumn-dripping gloom,”

we found ourselves in a world which was the dim ghost of the English country we had so loved in the summer. On some of the trees and hedgerows the leaves hung dull yellow or dull red, but on most they were a blackening green. The raw green of the cold flat meadows, the purplish green of the interminable ranks of cabbages, and the harsh green of the turnip-fields, blurred with the reeking yellow of mustard bloom, together with the gleaming brown of ploughed fields, formed a prospect from which the eye turned with the heart, in a rapturous vision of the South towards which we were now swiftly pulsing.

THE END

CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS

CONTENTS

I. THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH

II. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER

III. A FORTNIGHT IN BATH

IV. A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE

V. AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL

VI. BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON

VII. IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON

VIII. KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING CANTERBURY

IX. OXFORD

X. THE CHARM OF CHESTER

XI. MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS

XII. SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD

XIII. NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY

I. THE LANDING OF A PILGRIM AT PLYMOUTH

NO American, complexly speaking, finds himself in England for the first time, unless he is one of those many Americans who are not of English extraction. It is probable, rather, that on his arrival, if he has not yet visited the country, he has that sense of having been there before which a simpler psychology than ours used to make much of without making anything of. His English ancestors who really were once there stir within him, and his American forefathers, who were nourished on the history and literature of England, and were therefore intellectually English, join forces in creating an English consciousness in him. Together, they make it very difficult for him to continue a new-comer, and it may be that only on the fourth or fifth coming shall the illusion wear away and he find himself a stranger in a strange land. But by that time custom may have done its misleading work, and he may be as much as ever the prey of his first impressions. I am sure that some such result in me will evince itself to the reader in what I shall have to say of my brief stay with the English foster-mother of our American Plymouth; and I hope he will not think it altogether to be regretted.

My first impressions of England, after a fourth or fifth visit, began even before I landed in Plymouth, for I decided that there was something very national in the behavior of a young Englishman who, as we neared his native shores, varied from day to day, almost from hour to hour, in his doubt whether a cap or a derby hat was the right wear for a passenger about landing. He seemed also perplexed whether he should or should not speak to some of his fellow-passengers in the safety of parting, but having ventured, seemed to like it. On the tender which took us from the steamer to the dock I fancied another type in the Englishman whom I asked which was the best hotel in Plymouth. At first he would not commit himself; then his humanity began to work in him, and he expressed a preference, and abruptly left me. He returned directly to give the reasons for his preference, and to excuse them, and again he left me. A second time he came back, with his conscience fully roused, and conjured me not to think of going elsewhere.

I thought that charming, and I afterwards found the hotel excellent, as I found nearly all the hotels in England. I found everything delightful on the way to it, inclusive of the cabman’s overcharge, which brought the extortion to a full third of the just fare of a New York cabman. I do not include the weather, which was hesitating a bitter little rain, but I do include the behavior of the customs officer, who would do not more than touch, with averted eyes, the contents of the single piece of baggage which he had me open. When it came to paying the two hand - cart men three shillings for bringing up the trunks, which it would have cost me three dollars to transport from the steamer to a hotel at home, I did not see why I should not save money for the rest of my life by becoming naturalized in England, and making it my home, unless it was because it takes so long to become naturalized there that I might not live to economize much.

It was with a pleasure much more distinct than any subliminal intimation that I saw again the office-ladies in our hotel. Personally, they were young strangers, but officially they were old friends, and quite as I had seen them first forty years ago, or last a brief seven; only once they wore bangs or fringes over their bright, unintelligent eyes, and now they wore Mamie loops. But they were, as always, very neatly and prettily dressed, and they had the well - remembered difficulty of functionally differencing themselves to the traveller’s needs, so that which he should ask for a room, and which for letters, and which for a candle, and which for his bill, remains a doubt to the end. From time to time with an exchange of puzzled glances, they united in begging him to ask the head porter, please, for whatever it was he wanted to know. They seemed of equal authority, but suddenly and quite casually the real superior appeared among them. She was the manageress, and I never saw a manager at an English hotel except once, and that was in Wales. But the English theory of hotel-keeping seems to be house-keeping enlarged; a manageress is therefore more logical than a manager, and practically the excellence of English hotels attests that a manager could not be more efficient.

One of the young office-ladies, you never can know which it will be, gives you a little disk of pasteboard with the number and sometimes the price of your room on it, but the key is an after-thought of your own. You apply for it on going down to dinner, but in nearly all provincial hotels it is safe to leave your door unlocked. At any rate I did so with impunity. This was all new to me, but a greater novelty which greeted us was the table d’hote, which has nearly everywhere in England replaced the old-time dinner off the joint. You may still have that if you will, but not quite on the old imperative terms. The joint is now the roast from the table d’hôte, and you can take it with soup and vegetables and a sweet. But if you have become wonted to the superabundance of a German steamer you will not find all the courses too many for you, and you will find them very good. At least you will at first: what is it that does not pall at last? Let it be magnanimously owned at the outset then, while one has the heart, that the cooking of any English hotel is better than that of any American hotel of the same grade. At Plymouth, that first night, everything in meats and sweets, though simple, was excellent; in vegetables there were green things with no hint of the can in them, but fresh from the southerner parts of neighboring France. As yet the protean forms of the cabbage family were not so insistent as afterwards.

Though we dined in an air so cold that we vainly tried to warm our fingers on the bottoms of our plates, we saw, between intervening heads and shoulders, a fire burning blithely in a grate at the farther side of the room. It was cold there in the dining-room, but after we got into the reading-room, we thought of it as having been warm, and we hurried out for a walk under the English moon which we found diffusing a mildness over the promenade on the Hoe, in which the statue of Sir Francis Drake fairly basked on its pedestal. The old sea-dog had the air of having lifted himself from the game of bowls in which the approach of the Spanish Armada had surprised him, and he must have already arrived at that philosophy which we reached so much later. In England it is chiefly inclement in-doors, but even out-doors it is well to temper the air with as vigorous exercise as time and occasion will allow you to take. Another monument, less personally a record of the Armada, balanced that of Drake at the farther end of the Hoe, and on top of this we saw Britannia leading out her lion for a walk: lions become so dyspeptic if kept housed, and not allowed to stretch their legs in the open air. We had no lion to lead out; and there was no chance for us at bowls on the Hoe that night, but we walked swiftly to and fro on the promenade and began at once to choose among the mansions looking seawards over it such as we meant to buy and live in always. They were all very handsome, in a reserved, quiet sort; but we had no hesitation in fixing on one with a balcony glassed in, so that we could see the sea and shore in all weathers; and I hope we shall not incommode the actual occupants.

The truth is we were flown with the beauty of the scene, which we afterwards found as great by day as by night. The promenade, which may have other reasons for calling itself as it does besides being shaped like the blade of a hoe, is a promontory pushed well out into the sound, with many islands and peninsulas clustered before it, or jutting towards it and forming a safe roadstead for shipping of all types. Plymouth is not a chief naval station of Great Britain without the presence of war-ships in its harbor; and among the peaceful craft at anchor with their riding-lights showing in the deeps of the sea and air one could distinguish the huge kraken shapes of modern cruisers and destroyers, and what not. But like the embattled figures of the marine and landgoing soldiery, flirting on the benches of the promenade with females as fearless as themselves, or jauntily strolling up and down under the moon, the ships tended to an effect of subjective peacefulness, as if invented merely for the pleasure of the appreciative stranger. We were, at any rate, very glad of them, and appreciated the municipal efforts in our behalf as gratefully as the imperial fortifications of the harbor. It must be confessed at once, if I am ever to claim any American superiority in these “trivial, fond records,” which I shall never be able to help making comparative, that in what is done by the public for the public, we are hardly in the same running with England. It is only when we reflect upon our greater municipal virtue, and consider how the economies of our civic servants in the matter of beauty enable them to spend the more in good works, that we can lift up our heads and look down on what England has everywhere wrought for the people in such unspiritual things as parks and gardens, and terraces and promenades and statues. I could have wished that first evening, before I committed myself to any wrong impression or association, that I had known something more, or even anything at all, of the history of Plymouth. But I did not even know that from the Hoe, and possibly the very spot where I stood, the brave Trojan Cirenæus hurled the giant Goemagot into the sea. I was quite as far from remembering any facts of the British civilization which has always flourished so splendidly in the fancy of the native bards, and which has mingled its relics with those of the Roman, not only in the neighborhood of Plymouth, but all over England.

As for the facts that Plymouth had been harried throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by the incursions of the French; that it was the foremost English port in the time of Elizabeth; that Drake sailed from it in 1585 to bring back the remnant of Raleigh’s colony from Virginia; that one hundred and twenty-seven English ships waited in its waters to meet the Spanish Armada; that it stood alone in the West of England for the Parliament in the Civil War; that Charles II. had signified his displeasure with it for this by building to overawe it the entirely useless fortress in the harbor; and that it was the first town to declare for William of Orange when he landed to urge the flight of the last Stuart: I do not suppose there is any half-educated school-boy but has the facts more about him than I had that first night in Plymouth when I might have found them so serviceable. I could only have matched him in my certainty that this was the Plymouth from which the Mayflower sailed to find, or to found, another Plymouth in the New World; but he could easily have alleged more proofs of our common conviction than I.

At sunset, which they have in Plymouth appropriately late for the spring season and the high latitude, there had been a splotch of red about six feet square in the watery west, promising the fine weather which the morning brought. It also brought more red coats and swagger - sticks in company with the large hats and glaring costumes which had not had so good a chance the night before, whether we saw them in our walk on the Hoe, or met them in the ramble through the town into which we prolonged it. Through the still Sunday morning air there came a drumming and bugling of religious note from the neighboring fortifications, and while we listened, a general officer, or perhaps only a colonel, very tight in the gold and scarlet of his uniform, passed across the Hoe, like a pillar of flame, on his way to church. But I do not know that he was a finer bit of color, after all, than the jet-black cat with a vivid red ribbon at her neck, which had chosen to crouch on the ivied stone-wall across the way from our hotel, in just the spot where the sun fell earliest and would lie longest. There was more ivy than sun in Plymouth, that is the truth, and this cat probably knew what she was about. There was ivy, ivy everywhere, and there were subtropical growths of laurel and oleander and the like, which made a pleasant confusion of earlier Italy and later Bermuda in the brain, and yet were so characteristic of that constantly self-contradictory England.

Many things of it that I had known in flying and poising visits during fifty years of the past began to steal back into my consciousness. The nine-o’clock breakfast, of sole and eggs and bacon, and heavy bread and washy coffee, was of the same moral texture as the sabbatical silence in the pale sunny air, which now I remembered so well, with some weird question whether I was not all the while in Quebec, instead of Plymouth, and the strong conviction at the same time that this was the absurdest of obsessions. The Hoe was not Durham Terrace, but it looked down on a sort of Lower Town from a height almost as great, and the spread of the harbor, with a little help, recalled the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the St. Charles. But the rows of small houses that sent up the smoke of their chimneypots were of yellow brick, not of wood or gray stone, and their red roofs were tiled in dull weather-worn tints, and not brilliantly tinned.

Why, I wonder, do we feel such a pleasure in finding different things alike? It is rather stupid, but we are always trying to do it and fatiguing ourselves with the sterile effect. At Plymouth there was so much to remind me of so much else that it was a relief to be pretty promptly confronted on the Hoe with something so positive, so absolute as a Bath chair, which at the worst could only remind me of something in literature. A stubby old man was tugging it over the ground slowly, as if through a chapter of Dickens; and a wrathful-looking invalid lady sat within, just as if she had got into it from a book. There was little to recall anything else in the men strolling about in caps and knickerbockers, with short pipes in their mouths, or, equally with short pipes, wheeling back and forth on bicycles. There were a few people in top-hats, who had unmistakably the air of having got them out for Sunday; though why every one did not wear them every day in the week was the question when we presently saw a shop-window full of them at three and sixpence apiece.

This was when we had gone down into the town from the Hoe, and found its quiet streets of an exquisite Sunday neatness. They were quite empty, except for very washed-up-looking worshippers going to church, among whom a file of extremely little boys and girls, kept in line and kept moving by a black-gowned church-sister, gave us, with their tender pink cheeks and their tender blue eyes, our first delight in the wonderful West-of-England complexion. The trams do not begin running in any provincial town till afternoon on Sundays, and the loud-rattling milk-carts, bearing bright brass-topped cans as big as the ponies that drew them, seemed the only vehicles abroad. The only shops open were those for the sale of butter and eggs and fruit and flowers; but these necessaries and luxuries abounded in many windows and doorways, especially the flowers, which had already begun to arrive everywhere by tons from the Channel Islands, though it was then so early in March. It is not the least of the advantages which England enjoys that she has her Florida at her door; she has but to put out her hand and it is heaped with flowers and fruits from the Scilly Isles, while the spring is coming slowly up our way at home by fast-freight, through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia.

So many things were strange to me that I might have thought I had never been in Plymouth before, and so many things familiar that I might have fancied I had always been there. The long unimpressive stretches of little shops might have been in any second-class American city, which would likewise have shown the same exceptional number of large department stores. What it could not have shown were the well-kept streets, the reverently guarded heritage from the past in here and there a bit of antique architecture amid the prosperous newness; the presence of lingering state in the mansions peering over their high garden wall, or standing withdrawn from the thoroughfares in the quiet of wooded crescents or circles.

I doubt if any American city, great or small, has the same number of birds, dear to poetry, singing in early March, as Plymouth has. That morning as we walked in the town, and that afternoon as we rode on our tram-top into the country, they started from a thousand lovely lines of verse, finches and real larks, and real robins, and many a golden-billed blackbird, and piped us on our way. Overhead, in the veiled sun, circled and swam the ever-cawing rooks, as they jarred in the anxieties of the nesting then urgent with them. They were no better than our birds; I will never own such a recreant thing. If I do not quite prefer a crow to a rook, I am free to say that one oriole or redbird or hermit-thrush is worth all the English birds that ever sang. Only, the English birds sing with greater authority, and find an echo in the mysterious depths of our ancestral past where they and we were compatriots.

Viewed from the far vantage of some rising ground the three towns of Plymouth, Stonehouse, and Devonport, which have grown together to form one Plymouth, stretch away from the sea in huge long ridges thickly serried with the gables, and bristling with the chimneypots of their lines of houses. They probably look denselier built than they are through the exaggerative dimness of the air which lends bulk to the features of every distant prospect in England; but for my pleasure I would not have had the houses set any closer than they were on the winding, sloping line of the tram we had taken after luncheon. It was bearing us with a leisurely gait, inconceivable of an American trolley, but quite swiftly enough, towards any point in the country it chose; and after it had carried us through rows and rows of small, low, gray stone cottages, each with its pretty bit of garden at its feet, it bore us on where their strict contiguity ceased in detached villas, and let us have time to look into the depths of their encompassing evergreenery, their ivy, their laurel, their hedges of holly, all shining with a pleasant lustre. So we came out into the familiar provisionality of half-built house-lots, and at last into the open country quite beyond the town, with green market-gardens, and brown ploughed fields, patching the sides of the gentle knolls, laced with white winding roads, that lost their heads in the haze of the horizon, and with woodlands calling themselves “Private,” and hiding the way to stately mansions withdrawn from the commonness of our course.

When the tram stopped we got down, with the other civilian persons of our tram-top company, and with the soldiers and the girls who formed their escort, and hurried beyond hearing of the loud-cackling, hard-mouthed, red-cheeked, black-eyed young woman, whom one sees everywhere in some form, and in whose English version I saw so many an American original that I was humbled with the doubt whether she might not have come out on the Mayflower. There were many other people more inoffensive coming and going, or stretching themselves on the damp new grass in a defiance of the national rheumatism which does not save them from it. At that time, though, I did not know but it might, and I enjoyed the picturesqueness of their temerity with an untroubled mind. I noted merely the kind looks which prevail in English faces of the commoner sort, and I thought the men better and the women worse dressed than Americans of the same order. Then, after I had realized the prevalence of much the same farming tradition as our own, in the spreading fields, and holloed my fancy up and away over the narrow lines climbing between them to the sky, there was nothing left to do but to go to town by a different tram-line from that which brought us. The man I asked for help in this bold enterprise had a face above the ordinary in a sort of quickness, and he seemed to find something unusual in my speech. He answered civilly and fully, as all the English do when you ask them a civil question, without the friendly irony with which Americans often like to visit the inquiring stranger. Then he stopped short, checking the little boy he was leading by the hand, and said, abruptly, “You’re not English!”

“No,” I said, “we’re Americans,” and I added, “From New York.”

“Ah, from New York!” he said, with a visible rush of interest in the fact that it never afterwards brought to another English face, so far as I could see. “From New York! Americans!” and he stood clutching the hand of the little boy, while I felt myself in the presence of a tacit drama, which I have not yet been able to render explicit. Sometimes I have thought it not well to try. It might have been the memory of sad experiences which had left a rancor for our country in his heart, and held him in doubt whether he might not fitly wreak it upon the first chance American he met. Again I fancied it might have been the stirring of some long-deferred hope, some defeated ambition, or the rapture of some ideal of us which had never had the opportunity to disappoint itself. I only know that he looked like a man above his class: an unhappy man anywhere, and probably in England most unhappy. I stupidly hurried on, and after some movement to follow me he let me leave him behind. Whoever he was or whatever his emotion, I hope he was worthy of the sympathy which here offers itself too late. If I could I would perhaps go back to him, and tell him that if he sailed for New York he might never find the America of his vision, but only a hard workaday world like the one he was leaving, where he might be differently circumstanced, but not differently conditioned. I dare say he would not believe me; I am not sure that I should believe myself, though I might well be speaking the truth.

The next day being Monday, it was quite fit that we should go to work with the rest of the world in Plymouth, and we set diligently about the business of looking up such traces of the Pilgrim Fathers as still exist in the town which was so kind to them in their great need of kindness. I will not pretend that the pathetic story recurred to me in full circumstance during our search for the exact place from which the Mayflower last sailed, when after she had come with her sister ship, the Speedwell, from Holland to Southampton, and then started on the voyage to America, she had been forced by the unseaworthiness of the Speedwell to put back as far as Plymouth. Mr. W. E. Griffin, in his very agreeable and careful little book, The Pilgrims in their Three Homes, is able only to define the period of their stay there as “some time,” but he tells us that the disappointed voyagers “were treated very kindly by the people of the Free Church, forming what is now the Grange Street Chapel, the Mayflower meanwhile lying off the Barbican.” The weather was good while the two ships stayed, but when they sailed again the Speedwell returned to London with some twenty of the homesick or heart-sick, while all her other people stowed themselves with their belongings in the little Mayflower as best they could, and she once more put out to sea: a prison where the brutal shipmen were their jailers; a lazar where the seeds of death were planted in many that were soon to fill the graves secreted under the snow of the savage shore they were seeking.

I believe it was the visiting association of American librarians who caused, a few years ago, a flag-stone in the pavement of the quay where the Mayflower lay to be inscribed with her name and the date 1620, as well as a more explicit tablet to be let into the adjacent parapet. Perhaps our driver could have found these records for us, or we could have found them for ourselves, but I am all the same grateful for the good offices of several unoccupied spectators, especially a friendly matron who had disposed of her morning’s stock of fish, and had now the leisure for indulging an interest in our search. She constituted herself the tutelary spirit of the neighborhood, which smelt of immemorial catches of fish, both from the adjacent market and from the lumpish, quaintly rigged craft crowding one another in the docks and composing in an insurpassable picturesqueness; and she directed us wherever we wanted to go.

The barbican of the citadel from which the Mayflower sailed, before there was either citadel or barbican, is no great remove from the Hoe, which may justly enough boast itself “the finest promenade in England,” but it is quite in another world: a seventeenth-century world of narrow streets crooking up hill and down, and overhung by the little bulging houses which the pilgrims must have seen as they came and went on their affairs with the ship, scarcely bigger than the fishing-boats now nosing at the quay where she then lay. Whatever it was in the Mayflower’s time, it is not a proud neighborhood in ours, nor has it any reason to be proud; for it is apparently what is indefinitely called a purlieu. At one point where I climbed a steep thoroughfare to look at what no doubt unwarrantably professed to be a remnant of “Cromwell’s castle,” I met an elderly man, who was apparently looking up truant school-children, and who said, quite without prompting, “This used to be ‘ell upon earth,” with something in his tone implying that it might still be a little like it. We could not get into the ruin, the solitary who tenanted its one habitable room being away on a visit, as a neighbor put her head out of a window opposite to tell us.

Probably the traveller who wishes for a just impression of the Plymouth of 1620 will get it more reliably somewhat away from the immediate scene of the Mayflower’s departure. There are old houses abundantly overhanging their first stories, after the seventeenth-century fashion, in the pleasanter streets which keep aloof from the water. If he is more bent upon a sense of modern Plymouth he will do best to visit her group of public edifices, the Guild Hall, the Law Courts, the Library, and see all that I did not see of the vast shipping which constitutes her one of the greatest English ports, and the government works which magnify her importance among the naval stations of the world.

It is always best to leave something for a later comer, and I may seem almost to have left too much by any one whom I shall have inspired to linger in Plymouth long enough after landing to get his sea-legs off. But really I was continually finding the most charming things. The very business aspects of Plymouth had their charm. I saw a great prosperity around me, but there was no sense of the hustle which is supposed alone to create prosperity with us. I dare say that below the unruffled surface of life there is sordid turmoil enough, but I did not perceive it, and I prefer still to think of Plymouth as the first of the many places in England where the home-wearied American might spend his last days in the repose of a peaceful exile, with all the comforts, which only much money can buy with us, cheaply about him. He could live like a gentleman in Plymouth for about half what the same state would cost him in his own air, unless he went as far inland as the inexpensive Middle West, and then it would be dearer in as large a town. He could keep his republican self-respect in his agreeable banishment by remembering how Plymouth had held for the Commonwealth in Cromwell’s time, and the very name of the place would bring him near to the heroic Plymouth on the other shore of the Atlantic. I speak from experience, for even in my two days’ stay with the mother Plymouth I had now and then a vision of the daughter Plymouth, on the elm-shaded slopes of her landlocked bay, filially the subordinate in numbers and riches with which she began her alien life. Still of wood, as the English Plymouth is still of stone, and newer by a thousand years, she has an antiquity of her own precious to Americans, and a gentle picturesqueness which I found endearing when I first saw her in the later eighteen-sixties, and which I now recalled as worthy of her lineage. Perhaps it was because I had always thought the younger Plymouth would be a kind dwelling-place that I fancied a potential hospitality in the elder. At any rate I thought it well, while I was on the ground, to choose a good many eligible residences, not only among the proud mansions overlooking the Hoe, but in some of the streets whose gentility had decayed, but which were still keeping up appearances in their fine roomy old houses, or again in the newer and simpler surburban avenues, where I thought I could be content in one of the pretty stone cottages costing me forty pounds a year, with my holly hedge before me belting in a little garden of all but perennial bloom.

We had chanced upon weather that we might easily have mistaken for climate. There was the lustre of soft sunshine in it, and there was the song of birds in the wooded and gardened pleasaunces which opened in several directions about the Hoe, and seemed to follow the vagarious lines of ancient fortifications. Whether weather or climate, it could not have been more suitable for the excursion we planned our last afternoon across that stretch of water which separates Plymouth from the seat of the lords who have their title from the great estate. The mansion is not one of the noble houses which are open to the public in England, and even to get into the grounds you must have leave from the manor-house. This will not quite answer the raw American’s expectation of a manor-house; it looks more like a kind of office in a Plymouth street; but if you get from it as guide a veteran of the navy with an agreeable cast in his eye, and an effect of involuntary humor in his rusty voice, you have not really so much to complain of. In our own case the veteran’s intelligence seemed limited to delivering us over at gates to gardeners and the like, who gave us back to his keeping after the just recognition of their vested interests, and then left him to walk us unsparingly over the whole place, which had grown as large at least as some of our smaller States, say Connecticut or New Jersey, by the time we had compassed it. We imagined afterwards that he might have led us a long way about, not from stupidity, but from a sardonic amusement in our protests; and we were sure he knew that the bird he called a nightingale was no nightingale. It was as if he had said to himself, on our asking if there were none there, “Well, if they want a nightingale, let ’em have it,” and had chosen the first songster we heard. There were already songsters enough in the trees about to choose any sort from, for we were now in Cornwall, and the spring is very early in Cornwall. There were primroses growing at the roots of the trees in the park; in the garden closes were bamboos and palms, and rhododendrons in bloom, with cork-trees and ilexes, springing from the soaked earth which the sun damply shining from the spongy heavens could never have dried. The confusion of the tropical and temperate zones in this air, which was that of neither or both, was somewhat heightened by the first we saw of those cedars of Lebanon which so abound in England that you can hardly imagine any left on Lebanon. It was a dark, spreading tree, with a biblical seriousness and an oriental poetry of aspect, under whose low shelving branches one might think to find the scripturalized childhood of our race. The gardens, whether English or French or Italian, appealed to a more sophisticated consciousness; but it had all a dim, blurred fascination which words refuse to impart, and the rooks, wheeling in their aërial orbits overhead, seemed to deepen the spell with the monotony of their mystical incantations. There were woodland spaces which had the democratic friendliness of American woods, as if not knowing themselves part of a nobleman’s estate, and which gave the foot a home welcome with the bedding of their fallen leaves. But the rabbits which had everywhere broken the close mossy turf with their burrowing and thrown out the red soil over the grass, must have been consciously a part of the English order. As for the deer, lying in herds, or posing statuesquely against the sky on some stretch of summit, they were as absolutely a part of it as if they had been in the peerage. A flag floated over the Elizabethan mansion of gray stone (rained a fine greenish in the long succession of springs and falls), to intimate that the family was at home, and invite the public to respect its privacy by keeping away from the grounds next about it; and in the impersonal touch of exclusion which could be so impersonally accepted, the sense of certain English things was perfected. You read of them all your life, till you imagine them things of actual experience, but when you come face to face with them you perceive that till then they have been as unreal as anything else in the romances where you frequented them, and that you have not known their true quality and significance. In fiction they stood for a state as gracious as it was splendid, and welcomed the reader to an equal share in it; but in fact they imply the robust survival, in commercial and industrial times, of a feudal condition so wholly obsolete in its alien admirer’s experience that none of the imitations of it which he has seen at home suggest it more than by a picturesqueness almost as provisional as that of the theatre.

What the alien has to confess in its presence is that it is an essential part of a system which seems to work, and in the simpler terms, to work admirably; so that if he has a heart to which the ideal of human equality is dear, it must shrink with certain withering doubts as he looks on the lovely landscapes everywhere in which those who till the fields and keep the woods have no ownership, in severalty or in common. He must remember how persistently and recurrently this has been the history of mankind, how, while democracies and republics have come and gone, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, have remained, or have returned after they had passed. If he is a pilgrim reverting from the new world to which the outgoing pilgrims sailed, there to open from the primeval woods a new heaven and a new earth, his dismay will not justly be for the persistence of the old forms which they left behind, but for the question whether these forms have not somehow fixed themselves as firmly and lastingly in his native as in his ancestral country. I do not say that any such anxieties spoiled the pleasure of my afternoon. I was perhaps expecting to see much more perfect instances of the kind, and I was probably postponing the psychological effect to these. It is a fault of travel that you are always looking forward to something more typical, and you neglect immediate examples because they offer themselves at the outset, or you reject them as only approximately representative to find that they are never afterwards surpassed. That was the case with our hotel, which was quite perfect in its way: a way rather new to England, I believe, and quite new to my knowledge of England.

It is a sort of hotel where you can live for as short or as long a time as you will at an inclusive rate for the day or week, and always in greater comfort for less money than you can at home, except in the mere matter of warmth. Warm you cannot be in-doors, and why should not you go out-doors for warmth, when the subtropical growths in the well-kept garden, which never fails to enclose that kind of hotel, are flourishing in a temperature distinctly above freezing? They always had the long windows, that opened into the garden, ajar when we came into the reading-room after dinner, and the modest little fire in the grate veiled itself under a covering of cinders or coal-siftings, so that it was not certain that the first-comer who got the chair next to it was luckiest. Yet around this cold hearth the social ice was easily broken, and there bubbled up a better sort of friendly talk than always follows our diffidence in public places at home. Without knowing it, or being able to realize it at that moment, we were confronted with a social condition which is becoming more and more general in England, where in winter even more than in summer people have the habit of leaving town for a longer or a shorter time, which they spend in a hotel like ours at Plymouth. There they meet in apparent fearlessness of the consequences of being more or less agreeable to one another, and then part as informally as they meet. But as yet we did not know that there was that sort of hotel or that we were in it, and we lost the earliest occasion of realizing a typical phase of recent English civilization.

II. TWENTY-FOUR HOURS AT EXETER

THE weather, on the morning we left Plymouth, was at once cloudy and fair, and chilly and warm, as it can be only in England. It ended by cheering up, if not quite clearing up, and from time to time the sun shone so brightly into our railway carriage that we said it would have been absurd to supplement it with the hot-water foot-warmer which, in many trains, still embodies the English notion of car-heating. The sun shone even more brightly outside, and lay in patches much larger than our compartment floor on the varied surface of that lovely English country with which we rapturously acquainted and reacquainted ourselves, as the train bore us smoothly (but not quite so smoothly as some American trains would have borne us) away from the sea and up towards the heart of the land. The trees, except the semitropical growths, were leafless yet, with no sign of budding; the grass was not so green as at Plymouth; but there were primroses (or cowslips: does it matter which?) in bloom along the railroad banks, and young lambs in the meadows where their elders nosed listlessly among the chopped turnips strewn over the turf. Whether it was in mere surfeit, or in an invincible distaste for turnips, or an instinctive repulsion from their frequent association at table, that the sheep everywhere showed this apathy, I cannot make so sure as I can of such characteristic features of the landscape as the gray stone cottages with thatched roofs, and the gray stone villages with tiled roofs clustering about the knees of a venerable mother-church and then thinning off into the scattered cottages again.

As yet we were not fully sensible of the sparsity of the cottages; that is something which grows upon you in England, as the reasons for it become more a part of your knowledge. Then you realize why a far older country where the land is in a few hands must be far lonelier than ours, where each farmer owns his farm, and lives on it. Mile after mile you pass through carefully tilled fields with no sign of a human habitation, but at first your eyes and your thoughts are holden from the fact in a vision of things endeared by association from the earliest moment of your intellectual nonage. The primroses, if they are primroses and not cowslips, are a pale-yellow wash in the grass; the ivy is creeping over the banks and walls, and climbing the trees, and clothing their wintry nakedness; the hedgerows, lifted on turf-covered foundations of stone, change the pattern of the web they weave over the prospect as your train passes; the rooks are drifting high or drifting low; the little streams loiter brimful through the meadows steeped in perpetual rains; and all these material facts have a witchery from poetry and romance to transmute you to a common substance of tradition. The quick transition from the present to the past, from the industrial to the feudal, and back again as your train flies through the smoke of busy towns, and then suddenly skirts some nobleman’s park where the herds of fallow deer lie motionless on the borders of the lawn sloping up to the stately mansion, is an effect of the magic that could nowhere else bring the tenth and twentieth centuries so bewilderingly together. At times, in the open, I seemed to be traversing certain pastoral regions of southern Ohio; at other times, when the woods grew close to the railroad track, I was following the borders of Beverly Farms on the Massachusetts shore, in either case recklessly irresponsible for the illusion, which if I had been in one place or the other I could have easily reversed, and so been back in England.

The run from Plymouth to Exeter is only an hour and a half, but in that short space we stopped four or five minutes at towns where I should have been glad to have stopped as many days if I had known what I lost by hurrying on. I do not know it yet, but I know that one loses so greatly in every sort of high interest at all the towns one does not stop at in England that one departs at last a ruined, a beggared man. As it was we could only avert our faces from the pane as we drew out of each tempting station, and sigh for the certainty of Exeter’s claims upon us. There our first cathedral was waiting us, and there we knew, from the words which no guide-book fails to repeat, that we should find “a typical English city... alike of Briton, Roman, and Englishman, the one great prize of the Christian Saxon, the city where Jupiter gave way to Christ, but where Christ never gave way to Wodin.... None other can trace up a life so unbroken to so remote a past.” Whether, when we found it, we found it equal to the unique grandeur imputed to it, I prefer to escape saying by saying that the cathedral at Exeter is more than equal to any expectation you can form of it, even if it is not your first cathedral. A city of scarcely forty thousand inhabitants may well be forgiven if it cannot look an unbroken life from so remote a past as Exeter’s. Chicago herself, with all her mythical millions, might not be able to do as much in the like case; when it comes to certain details I doubt if even New York would be equal to it.

I will not pretend that I was intimately acquainted with her history before I came to Exeter. I will frankly own that I did not drive up to the Butt of Malmsey in the hotel omnibus quite aware that the castle of Exeter was built on an old British earthwork; or that many coins, vases, and burial-urns dug up from such streets as I passed through prove the chief town of Devonshire to have been built on an important Roman station. To me it did not at once show its Romano-British origin in the central crossing of its principal streets at right angles; but the better-informed reader will recall without an effort that the place was never wholly deserted during the darkest hours of the Saxon conquest. The great Alfred drove the Danes out of it in 877, and fortified and beautified it, and Athelstan, when he came to Exeter in 926, discovered Briton and Saxon living there on terms of perfect amity and equality. Together they must have manned the walls in resisting the Northmen, and they probably united in surrendering the city to William the Conqueror after a siege of eighteen days, which was long for an English town to hold out against him. He then built the castle of Rougemont, of which a substantial ruin yet remains for the pleasure of such travellers as do not find it closed for repairs; and the city held for Matilda in the wars of 1137, but it was finally taken by King Stephen. In 1469 it was for the Red Rose against the White when the houses of Lancaster and York disputed its possession, and for the Old Religion against the New in the time of Henry VIII.’s high-handed reforms, when the Devonshire and Cornish men fought for the ancient faith within its walls against his forces without. The pretender Perkin Warbeck (a beautiful name, I always think, like a bird-note, and worthy a truer prince) had vainly besieged it in 1549; and in the Civil War it was taken and retaken by King and Parliament. At some moment before these vicissitudes, Charles’s hapless daughter Henrietta, who became Madame of France, was born in Exeter; and in Exeter likewise was born that General Monk who brought the Stuarts back after Cromwell’s death.

The Butt of Malmsey had advertised itself as the only hotel in the cathedral close, and as we had stopped at Exeter for the cathedral’s sake we fell a willing prey to the fanciful statement. There is of course no hotel in the cathedral close, but the Butt of Malmsey is so close to the cathedral that it may have unintentionally confused the words. At any rate, it stood facing the side of the beautiful pile and getting its noble Norman towers against a sky, which we would not have had other than a broken gray, above the tops of trees where one nesting rook the less would have been an incalculable loss. One of the rooms which the managers could give us looked on this lovely sight, and if the other looked into a dim court, why, all the rooms in a cathedral close, or close to a cathedral, cannot command views of it.

We had of course seen the cathedral almost before we saw the city in our approach, but now we felt that the time spent before studying it would be time lost and we made haste to the great west front. To the first glance it is all a soft gray blur of age-worn carving, in which no point or angle seems to have failed of the touch which has blent all the archaic sanctities and royalties of the glorious screen in a dim sumptuous harmony of figures and faces. Whatever I had sceptically read, and yet more impatiently heard, of the beauty of English cathedrals was attested and approved far beyond cavil, and after that first glance I asked nothing but submissively to see more and more of their gracious splendor. No wise reader will expect me to say what were the sculptured facts before me or to make the hopeless endeavor to impart a sense of the whole structure in descriptions or admeasurements. Let him take any picture of it, and then imagine something of that form vastly old and dark, richly wrought over in the stone to the last effects of tender delicacy by the miracles of Gothic art. So let him suppose the edifice set among leafless elms, in which the tattered rooks-nests swing blackening, on a spread of close greensward, under a low welkin, where thin clouds break and close in a pallid blue, and he will have as much of Exeter Cathedral as he can hope to have without going there to see for himself; it can never otherwise be brought to him in words of mine.

Neither, without standing in that presence or another of its kind, can he realize what the ages of faith were. Till then the phrase will remain a bit of decorative rhetoric, but then he will live a meaning out of it which will die only with him. He will feel, as well as know, how men built such temples in an absolute trust and hope now extinct, but without which they could never have been built, and how they continued to grow, like living things, from the hearts rather than the hands of strongly believing men. So that of Exeter grew, while all through the tenth and eleventh centuries, the monks of its immemorial beginning were flying from the heathen invasions, but still returning, till the Normans gave their monastery fixity in the twelfth century, and the long English succession of bishops maintained the cathedral in ever-increasing majesty till the rude touch of the Tudor stayed the work that had prospered under the Norman and Plantagenet and Lancastrian kings. If the age of faith shall extend itself to his perception, as he listens to the afternoon service in the taper-starred twilight, far back into the times before Christ, he may hear in the chanting and intoning the voice of the first articulate religions of the world. The sound of that imploring and beseeching, that wailing and sighing, which drifts out to him through the screen of the choir will come heavy with the pathos of the human abasing itself before the divine in whatever form men may have imagined God, and seeking the pity and the mercy of which Christianity was not the first to feel the need. Then, if he has a sense of the unbroken continuity of ceremonial, the essential unity of form, from Pagan to Roman and from Roman to Anglican, perhaps he will have more patience than he otherwise might with the fierce zeal of the fanatics who would at last away with all ceremonial and all form, and would stand in their naked souls before the eternal justice and make their appeal direct, and if need be, through their noses, to Him who desireth not the death of a sinner.

Unless the visitor to Exeter Cathedral can come into something of this patience, he will hardly tolerate the thought of the Commonwealth’s-men who deemed that they were doing God’s will when they built a brick wall through it, and listened on one side to an Independent chaplain, and on the other to a Presbyterian minister. It is said that they “had great quiet and comfort” in their worship on each side of their wall, which was of course taken down directly after the Restoration. For this no one can reasonably grieve; and one may of course rejoice that Cromwell’s troopers did not stable their horses in Exeter Cathedral. They forbore to do so in few other old churches in England, but we did not know how to value fully its exemption from this profanation in our first cathedral. We took the fact with an ignorant thanklessness from our guide-book, and we acquiesced, with some surprise, in the lack of any such official as a verger to instruct us in the unharmed monuments. The printed instructions which we received from the placard overhanging a box at the gate to the choir did not go beyond the elementary precept that we were each to put sixpence in it; after that we were left free to look about for ourselves, and we made the round of the tombs and altars unattended.

The disappointment which awaits one in English churches, if one’s earlier experience of churches has been in Latin countries, is of course from the want of pictures. Color there is and enough in the stained windows which Cromwell’s men sometimes spared, but the stained windows in Exeter are said to be indifferent good. In compensation for this, there are traces of the frescoing which once covered the walls, and which Cromwell’s men neglected to whitewash. They also heedlessly left unspoiled that wonderful Minstrel’s Gallery stretching across the front of the choir, with its fourteen tuneful angels playing forever on as many sculptured instruments of stone. For the rest the monuments are of the funereal cast to which the devout fancy is pretty much confined in all sacred edifices. There is abundance of bishops lying on their tombs, with their features worn away in the exposure from which those of many crusaders have been kept by their stone visors. But what was most expressive of the past, which both bishops and crusaders reported so imperfectly, was the later portrait statuary, oftenest of Elizabethan ladies and their lords, painted in the colors of life and fashion, with their ruffs and farthingales worn as they were when they put them off, to rest in the tombs on which their effigies lie. It is not easy to render the sense of a certain consciousness which seemed to deepen in these, as the twilight of the closing day deepened round them in the windows and arches. If they were waiting to hold converse after the night had fallen, one would hardly have cared to stay for a share in their sixteenth-century gossip, and I could understand the feeling of the two dear old ladies who made anxiously up to us at one point of our common progress, and asked us if we thought there was any danger of being locked in. I did my poor best to reassure them, and they took heart, and were delightfully grateful. When we had presently missed them we found them waiting at the door, to thank us again, as if we had saved them from a dreadful fate, and to shake hands and say good-bye.

If it were for them alone, I should feel sensibly richer for my afternoon in our first cathedral. But I think my satisfaction was heightened just before we left, by meeting a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal which he was trundling through “the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault” to the great iron stoves placed on either side of the nave to warm the cathedral, and contribute in their humble way to that perfect balance of parts which is the most admired effect of its architectural symmetry. As he stopped before each stove and noisily stoked it from a clangorous shovel, the simple sincerity of this bit of necessary house-keeping in the ancient fane seemed to strike a note characteristic of the English civilization, and to suggest the plain outrightness by which it has been able to save itself sound through every age and fortune. The English have reared a civic edifice more majestic than any the world has yet seen, but in the temple of their liberty and their loyalty a man with a wheelbarrow full of coal has always been frankly invited to appear when needed. It is this mingling of the poetical ideal and the practical real which has preserved them at every emergency, and but for the man’s timely ministrations church and state would alike have fared ill in the past. He has kept both habitable, and to any one who visits cathedrals with a luminous mind the man with the wheelbarrow of coal will remain as distinctly a part of the impression as the processioning and recessioning celebrants coming and going in their white surplices, with their red and black bands; or even the singing of the angel-voiced choir-boys, who as they hurry away at the end of the service do not all look as seraphic as they have sounded. There is often indeed something in the passing regard of choir-boys less suggestive of the final state of young-eyed cherubim than of evil provisionally repressed.

I do not say that I thought all this before leaving the cathedral in Exeter, or till long afterwards. I was at the time rather bent upon seeing more of the town, in which I felt a quality different from that of Plymouth though it pleased me no better. The manageress of the Butt of Malmsey had boasted already of the numbers of nobility and gentry living in the neighborhood of the little city, where, she promised, we should see ten private carriages for every one in Plymouth. I did not keep count, but I dare say she was right. What was more to my crude pleasure was the sight of the many Tudor, and earlier than Tudor, houses in the High Street and the other streets of Exeter, with their second stories overhanging their first, to that effect of baffle in the leaded casements of their gables which we fancy in the eyes of stout gentlemen who try to catch sight of their feet over the intervening bulge of their waistcoats. They are incomparably picturesque, those Tudor houses, and as I had afterwards occasion to note from some of their interiors, they mark a beginning of domestic comfort, which, if not modern on the American terms, is quite so on the English.

To the last, I had always to make my criticisms of the provision for the inner house in England, but my conviction that the English had little to learn of us in providing for the inner man began quite as early as in my first walks about Exeter, where the most perverse American could not have helped noting the abundance and variety of the fruits and vegetables at the green-grocers’. Southern Europe had supplied these better than Florida and California supply them with us at the same season in towns the size of Exeter, or indeed in any less luxurious than our great seaboard cities. Counting in the apples and oranges from South Africa and the Pacific colonies of Great Britain, we are far out of it as to cheapness and quality. Then, no place in England is so remote from one sea or another as not always to have the best and freshest fish, which as the dealers arrange them with an artistic eye for form and color, make, it must be owned, a more appetizing show than the thronging shapes of carnage which start from the butchers’ doors and windows, and bleed upon the sidewalk, and gather microbes from every passing gust. There is something peculiarly loathsome in these displays of fresh meat carcases all over England, which does not affect the spectator from the corded and mounded ham and bacon in the grocers’ shops, though when one thinks of the myriads of eggs needed to accompany these at the forty million robust English breakfasts every morning, it is with doubt and despair for the hens. They seem equal to the demand upon them, however, like every one and everything else English, and they always lay eggs enough, as if every hen knew that England expected her to do her duty.

We sauntered through Exeter without a plan, and took it as it came in a joy which I wish I could believe was reciprocal, and which was at no moment higher than when we found at the corner of the most impressive old place in Exeter the office of a certain New York insurance company. As smiling fate would have it, this was the very company in which I was myself insured, and I paused before it with effusion, and shook hands with the actuary in the spirit. In the flesh, if he was an Englishman, he might not have known what to do with my emotion, but with Englishmen in the spirit the wandering American always finds himself cordially at home. One must not say that the longer they have been in the spirit the better; some of them who are actually still in the flesh are also in the spirit; but a certain historical remove is apt to relieve friends of that sort of stiffness which keeps them at arm’s-length when they meet as contemporaries. At the other end of Bedford Circus, where I had my glad moment with the insurance actuary, I found myself in the presence of that daughter of Charles I., the Princess Henrietta, who was born there near three hundred years ago, and whose life I had lately followed with pathos for her young exile from England, through her girlhood in France, and through her unhappy marriage with the King’s brother Monsieur, to the afternoon of her last day when she lay so long dying in the presence of the court, as some thought, of poison. I could not feel myself an intrusive witness at that strange scene, which now represented itself in Bedford Circus, with the courtiers coming and going, and the doctors joining their medical endeavors with the spiritual ministrations of the prelates, and the poor princess herself taking part in the speculations and discussions, and presently in the midst of all incontinently making her end.

I suppose it would not be good taste to boast of the intimacy I enjoyed with the clergy in the neighborhood of the cathedral, by favor of their translation into a region much remoter than the past. Without having the shadow of acquaintance with them and without removing them for an instant from their pleasant houses and gardens in the close at Exeter, I put them back a generation, and met them with familiar ease in the friendly circumstance of Trollope’s many stories of cathedral towns. I am not sure they would have liked that if they had known it, and certainly I should not have done it if they had known it; but as it was I could do it without offence. When we could rend ourselves from the delightful company of those deans, and canons, and minor canons, and prebendaries, with whom we really did not pass a word, we went a long idle walk to an old-fashioned part of the town overlooking the Exe from the crest of a hill, where certain large out-dated mansions formed themselves in a crescent. We instantly bought property there in preference to any more modern neighborhood, and there our subliminal selves remain, and stroll out into the pretty park and sit on the benches, and superintend the lading and unlading of the small craft from foreign ports in the old ship-canal below: the oldest ship-canal in the world, indeed, whose beginnings Shakespeare was born too late to see. We do not find the shipping is any the less picturesque for being much entangled in the net-work of railroad lines (for Exeter is a large junction), or feel the sticks and spars more discordant with the smoke and steam of the locomotives through which they pierce, than with the fine tracery of the trees farther away.

I was never an enemy of the confusion of the old and new in Europe when Italy was all Europe for me, and now in England it was distinctly a pleasure. It is something we must accept, whether we like it or not, and we had better like it. The pride of the old custodian of the Exeter Guildhall in the coil of hot-water pipes heating the ancient edifice was quite as acceptable as his pride in the thirteenth-century carvings of the oaken door and the oak-panelled walls, the portraits of the Princess Henrietta and General Monk, and the swords bestowed upon the faithful city by Edward IV. and Henry VII. I warmed my chilly hands at the familiar radiator while I thawed my fancy out to play about the medieval facts, and even fly to that uttermost antiquity when the Roman Prætorium stood where the Guildhall stands now. Still, I was not so warm all over but that I was glad to shun the in-doors inclemency to which we must have returned in the hotel, and to prolong our stay in the milder air outside by going a drive beyond the city into the charming country. I do not say that the country was more charming than about Plymouth, but it had its pleasant difference, which was hardly a difference in the subtropical types of trees and shrubs. There were the same evergreens hedging and shading, too deeply shading, the stone cottages of the suburbs as we had seen nearer the sea; but when we were well out of the town, we had climbed to high, rolling fields, which looked warm even when the sun did not shine upon them; there were brown bare woods cresting the hills, and the hedge-rows ran bare and brown between the ploughed fields and the verdure of the pastures and the wheat. Behind and below us lay the town, clustering about the cathedral which dwarfed its varying tops to the illusion of one level.

We had driven out by a handsome avenue called, for reasons I did not penetrate, Pennsylvania Road. Stately houses lined the way, and the wealth and consequence of the town had imaginably transferred themselves to Pennsylvania Road from the fine old crescent where we had perhaps rashly invested; though I shall never regret it. But we came back another way, winding round by the first English lane I had ever driven through. It was all, and more, than I could have asked of it in that quality, for it was so narrow between the tall hedges, which shut everything else from sight, that if we had met another vehicle, I do not know what would have happened. There was a breathless moment when I thought we were going to meet a market-cart, but luckily it turned into an open gateway before the actual encounter. There must be tacit provision for such a chance in the British Constitution, but it is not for a semi-alien like an American to say what it is.

We were apparently the first of our nation to reach Exeter that spring, for as we came in to lunch we heard an elderly cleric, who had the air of lunching every day at the Butt of Malmsey, say to his waiter, “The Americans are coming early this year.” We had reasons of our own for thinking we had come too early; probably in midsummer the old-established cold of the venerable hostelry is quite tolerable. If I had been absolutely new to the past, I could not have complained, even in March, of its reeling floors and staggering stairways and dim passages; these were as they should be, and I am not saying anything against the table. That again was better than it would have been at a hotel in an American town of the size of Exeter, and it had a personal application at breakfast and luncheon that pleased and comforted; the table d’hôte dinner was, as in other English inns, far preferable to the indiscriminate and wasteful superabundance for which we pay too much at our own. It is of the grates in the Butt of Malmsey that I complain, and I do not know that I should have cause to complain of these if I had not rashly ordered fire in mine. To give the grate time to become glowing, as grates always should be in old inns, I passed an hour or two in the reading-room talking with an elderly Irish gentleman who had come to that part of England with his wife to buy a place and settle down for the remnant of his days, after having spent the greater part of his life in South Africa. He could not praise South Africa enough. Everything flourished there and every one prospered; his family had grown up and he had left seven children settled there; it was the most wonderful country under the sun; but the two years he had now passed in England were worth the whole thirty-five years that he had passed in South Africa. I agreed with him in extolling the English country and climate, while I accepted all that he said of South Africa as true, and then I went up to my room.

With the aid of the two candles which I lighted I discovered the grate in the wall near the head of the bed, and on examining it closely I perceived that there was a fire in it. The grate would have held quite a doublehandful of coal if carefully put on; the fire which seemed to be flickering so feebly had yet had the energy to draw all the warmth of the chamber up the chimney, and I stood shivering in the temperature of a subterranean dungeon. The place instantly gave evidence of being haunted, and the testimony of my nerves on this point was corroborated by the spectral play of the firelight on the ceiling, when I blew out my candles. In the middle of the night I woke to the sense of something creeping with a rustling noise over the floor. I rejected the hypothesis of my bed-curtain falling into place, though I remembered putting it back that I might have light to read myself drowsy. I knew at once that it was a ghost walking the night there, and walking hard. Suddenly it ceased, and I knew why: it had been frozen out.

III. A FORTNIGHT IN BATH

THE American who goes to England as part of the invasion which we have lately heard so much of must constantly be vexed at finding the Romans have been pretty well everywhere before him. He might not mind the Saxons, the Danes, the Normans so much, or the transitory Phoenicians, and, of course, he could have no quarrel with the Cymri, who were there from the beginning, and formed a sort of subsoil in which conquering races successively rooted and flourished; but it is hard to have the Romans always cropping up and displacing the others. He likes well enough to meet them in southern Europe; he enjoys their ruins in Italy, in Spain, in France; but the fact of their presence in Britain forms too great a strain for his imagination. By dint of having been there such a long time ago they seem to have anticipated any novelty there is in his own coming, and by having remained four hundred years they leave him little hope of doing anything very surprising in a stay of four months. He is gnawed by a secret jealousy of the Romans, and when he lands in Liverpool, as he commonly does, and discovers them in possession of the remote antiquity of Chester, where he goes for a little comfortable mediævalism before pushing on to wreak himself on the vast modernity of London, he can hardly govern his impatience. Their vestiges are less intrusive at Plymouth and Exeter than at Chester, but still I think the sort of American I have been fancying would have been incommoded by a sense of them in the air of either place, and, if he had followed on with us to Bath, would have found no benefit from the springs which they frequented two thousand years earlier, so fevered must have been his resentment.

The very beginnings of Bath were Roman, for I suppose Prince Bladud is not to be taken as serious history, though he is poetically important as the prototype of King Lear (I believe he had also the personal advantage of being a giant), and he is interesting as one of the few persons who have ever profited by the example of the pigs. Men are constantly warned against that, in every way, but Prince Bladud, who went forth from his father’s house a leper, and who observed the swine under his charge wallowing in the local waters and coming out cured from his infection, immediately tried them himself, and recovered and lived to be the father of an unnatural family of daughters. By inspiring Shakespeare with the theme of his great tragedy, he was the first to impart the literary interest to Bath which afterwards increased there until it fairly rivalled its social and pathological interest. But the Romans have undoubtedly a claim to the honor of building a city on the site of the present town; under their rule it became the favorite resort of the gayety which always goes hand in hand with infirmity at medicinal springs, and if you dig anywhere in Bath, now, you come upon its vestiges. A little behind and below the actual Pump Room, these are so abundant that, if you cannot go to Herculaneum or Pompeii, you can still have a fair notion of Roman luxury from the vast tanks for bathing, the stone platforms, steps, and seats, the vaulted roofs and columns, the furnaces for heating the waters, and the system of pipes for conveying it from point to point. The plumbing, in its lavish use of material, attests the advance of the Romans in the most actual and expensive of the arts; and the American invader must recognize, with whatever of gall and bitterness, that his native plumbers would have little to teach those of the conquerors who possessed Britain two thousand years before him.

If he had been coming with us from Exeter the morning we arrived, he might, indeed, have triumphed over the Romans in the comfort of his approach, for, after all, there are few trains like the English trains to give you a sense of safety, snugness, and swiftness. I like getting into them from the level of the platform, instead of climbing several steps to reach them, as we do with ours, and I like being followed into my compartment by one of those amiable porters who abound in English stations, and save your arms from being pulled out of their sockets by your hand - baggage. They are the kindest and carefullest of that class whom Lord Chesterfield nobly called his unfortunate friends, and who in England are treated with a gentle consideration almost equal to their own, and as porters they are so grateful for the slightest recompense of their service. I have seen people give them twopence, for some slight office, or nothing when they were people who could not afford something; but I never saw an English porter’s face clouded by the angry resentment which instantly darkens the French porter’s brow if he thinks himself underpaid, as he always seems to do. It did not perceptibly matter to the English porter whether he followed me into a first-class or a third-class carriage, and it was from a mere love of luxury and not from the hope of gratifying any sense of superiority to the fellow-being with my hand-baggage that I ended by travelling first-class for short hauls in England. On the expresses, like those from London to Edinburgh, you can make the journey third-class in perfect comfort, and with no great risk of overcrowding, but not, I should say, in the way-trains.

We had come third-class from Plymouth to Exeter in a superstition preached us before leaving home, that everybody now went third-class in England, that to go first-class was sinfully extravagant, and that to go second-class was to chance travelling with valets and lady’s-maids. But in coming on from Exeter we thought we would risk this contamination, and, not realizing that the first-class rate was no greater than ours with the cost of a Pullman ticket added, I boldly “booked” second-class. But so far from finding ourselves in a compartment with valets and lady’s-maids, in whose company I hope we should have avouched our quality by promptly perishing, we were quite alone, except for the presence of a lady who sat by the window knitting, knitting, knitting. She did not look up, but from time to time she looked out, till our interchanges of joy in the landscape seemed to win upon her, and then she looked round. Her glance at the member of our party whose sex seemed to warrant her in the overture was apparently reassuring. She asked if we would like the window closed, and we pretended that we would not, but she closed it, and then she arranged her needles in her knitting, and folded her knitting up, and put it firmly away in her bag, and began to talk. Evidently she liked talking, but evidently she liked listening, too, and she let us do our share of both in confirming the tacit treaty of amity between our nations. She spoke A FORTNIGHT IN BATH of the Americans, not as cousins, but as brothers and sisters; and I began to be sorry for all the unkind things I had said of the English, and mutely to pray that she might never see them, however just they were. She had been in America, as well as most other parts of the world, and we tried hard for some mutual acquaintance. Our failure did not matter; we were friends for that trip and train at least, and when we came to Bristol, where our own party was to change, we were fain to run away from our tea in the restaurant to take the hand held out to us from the window of her parting train.

It was very pretty, and we said, If the English were all going to be like that! I do not say that they actually were, and I do not say they were not; but no after-experience could affect the quality of that charming incident, and all the way from Bristol to Bath we turned again and again from the landscape, that lay soaking in the rains of the year before, and celebrated our good-fortune. We were still in its glamour when our train drew into Bath; and in our wish to be pleased with everything in the world to which it rapt us, we were delighted with the fitness of the fact that the largest buildings near the station should be, as their signs proclaimed, corset-manufactories. We read afterwards that corset-making was, with the quarrying of the Bath building-stone, the chief business interest of the place, as such a polite industry should be in a city which was for so long the capital of fashion. Our pleasure in it was only less than our joy in finding that our hotel was in Pulteney Street, where the Allens of “Northanger Abbey” had their apartment, and where Catherine Morland had so often come and gone with the Tilneys and the Thorpes, and round the farthest corner of which the dear, the divine, the only Jane Austen herself had lived for two years in one of the large, demure, self-respectful mansions of the neighborhood.

Our hotel scarcely distinguished, and it did not at all detach, itself from the rank of these handsome dwellings; and everything in our happy circumstance began at once to breathe that air of gentle association which kept Bath for a fortnight the Bath of our dreams. There was a belief with one of us that he had come to drink the waters, but an early consultation with possibly the most lenient of the medical authorities of the place, who make the doctors of German springs seem such tyrannous martinets, disabused him. Since he had brought no rheumatism to Bath, his physician owned there was a chance of his taking some away; but in the mean time he might go once a day to the Pump Room, for a glass of the water lukewarm, and be a little careful of his diet. A little careful of his diet, he who had been furiously warned on his peril at Carlsbad that everything which was not allowed was forbidden! But he found that the Bath medical men said the same thing to the patients whom he saw around him, at the hotel, doubled up with rheumatism, and eating and drinking whatever their stiffened joints could carry to their mouths. All the greater was the miraculous virtue of the waters, for the sufferers seemed to make rapid recovery in spite of themselves and their doctors. There were no lepers among them, and since Prince Bladud’s day few are noted as having resorted to Bath; but there is rheumatism enough in England to make up the defect of leprosy, and the American, who had come with only a mild dyspepsia, found himself quite out of the running, or limping, with his fellow-invalids.

He had apparently not even brought an American accent with his malady, and that was a disappointment to one of the worst sufferers, who constantly assured him, in a Scotch burr so thick that he had to be begged to speak twice before he could be understood, that he was the only American without a twang whom he had ever met. The twangless dyspeptic wished at times to pretend that he was only twangless in British company, and that when his party went to their rooms they talked violently through their noses till they were out of breath, as a slight compensation for their self-denial in society. But, upon the whole, the Scotch gentleman was so kind and sweet a soul, and seemed, for all his disappointment, to value the American so much as a phenomenon that he forebore, and in the end he was not sorry.

He would have been sorry to have put himself at odds with any of the pleasant people at that hotel, who seemed to regard their being thrown together as a circumstance that justified their speaking to one another much more than the wont is in American hotels. They were more conversible even than those at the Plymouth hotel; the very women talked to other women without fear; and the Americans, if they had been nationally vainer than they were, might have fancied a specially hospitable consideration of their case. In hotels of that agreeable type there is, besides the more formal drawing-room, a place called the lounge, where there are writing-desks and stationery, and a large table covered with the day’s papers, and a comfortable fire (or, at least, the most comfortable in the house) burning in the grate; and here people drop in before breakfast and after dinner, and chat or read or write, as they please. It is all very amiably informal and uncommitting, and in our Bath hotel there were only two or three kept at a distance in which they were not molested. There was all the while a great nobleman in the house who was apparently never seen even by those superior people. He came, sojourned, and departed in as much secrecy as a great millionaire would at home, and I could not honestly say that he psychologically affected the others any more than the presence of a great millionaire would have affected the same number of Americans. Perhaps they were less excited, being more used to being avoided by great noblemen in the course of many generations. What I know is that they were very friendly and intelligent, and, if their talk began and ended with the weather, there was plenty of weather to talk about.

There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage at dinner, which here first began to get in their work on the imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable fibre, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for there was commonly nothing else but potatoes. But one night there came a dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers’, and we eagerly helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could answer that it was sea-kale we had fallen a prey to something that of the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most passionately cabbage.

Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was vitiated by an attempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the “sweets” included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a dollar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze, but had only felt its well-known relaxing effect. One drinks, of course, a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us, tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to the observer’s comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if they had been diligently tended I think they would have glowed. In the corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was completed by the elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of the staircase. It was a formidable matter to get the head porter, in full uniform, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key, but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.

When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary association; but at the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs, bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of the beautiful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her faint air; and along the top the downs were softly wooded, or else they carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one resigns one’s self with difficulty in the country where they abound) rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb their slope, and can no otherwise escape in the guise of country roads, except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament.

When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we found them in command of prospects of Bath which could alone have compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant, and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one’s self one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some high - set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system — I do not say universe — The King’s Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood, famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty, and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adornment, that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which overhangs The King’s Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he is, as a double star is one; but it was Wood the elder who, in the ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the unstinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory, without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.

In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such greatness as the Woods’ has always bowed, every person of fashion thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James’s Square or Queen’s Square, or in Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus. As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one’s self without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfortably back to dinner at one’s hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where the great Earl of Chatham had lived: he who, if he had been an American as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on his soil would never had laid down his arms — never, never, never! The eloquent words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously memorable for us Americans, where Major André had once sojourned. Was it in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there; and I was not surprised to find that Lord Clive of India and Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord Chatham and Major André. What other famous names were inscribed on those simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence, Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.

Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off into business of the quieter professional type, and I would not swear that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a lurking suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready to make oath to at least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent, where I was about buying property because of its glorious site and its high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old between fields and pastures in a landscape of unsurpassed loveliness.

But you cannot anywhere get away from the beautiful in Bath. For the temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and sloping streets, and the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediaeval abbey for her principal church which is a cathedral to all æsthetical intents and purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than some cathedrals. Mostly of that perpendicular Gothic, which I suppose more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of their fans spreads and delicately feels its way over the vaulted roof as if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached to the bishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of God and an olive-tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, “Let an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church.” Moved by this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope’s failure to bless his divorces, the monastery was with many others suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop who had not been authorized in a dream.

The failure of Oliver Cromwell’s troopers to stable their horses in it is one of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I was destined to be confronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously despoiled by Henry VIII’s Thomas Cromwell. But among the most interesting monuments of the interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general, Sir William Waller, which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guidebook, though I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.

“Sole issue of a matchless paire,

Both of their state and virtues heyre;

In graces great, in stature small,

As full of spirit as voyd of gall;

Cheerfully grave, bounteously close,

Holy without vain-glorious showes;

Happy, and yet from envy free,

Learn’d without pride, witty, yet wise,

Reader, this riddle read with mee,

Here the good Lady Waller lies.”

There is almost an exultant note in this, and in its rendering of a most appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals. These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful, and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash — namely, who ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King’s command; and “How strange,” the preacher reflected, “that men should be so prompt to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the lord of lords.” But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do it, that in the close-knit system which he himself was essentially part of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has never been anywhere else on earth, much less spiritually between the human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation through immemorial law and custom as never was between a father and his children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man’s body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it is insanity for them to disobey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or the ideals of loyalty. But I could not offer this notion to the preacher in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will welcome it with entire acceptance.

From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came upon me overwhelmingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one

“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”

I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them substantially the same for a thousand years to come. Briton and Phoenician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American consciousness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, passing so serenely from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them, talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic wilfulness, their sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the world with the pity which being under or over some one else seems always to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all, testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally accepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self-containment; but the result was not the gloom which Americans achieve when they mean to be very good society in public places; far less was it a Latin gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not essentially changed? None of the causes were sufficient for the effect; the effect was not the logic of the causes.

History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs, and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of their houses and the butchers slaughtered their cattle and left the offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it was not till well into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and enclosed. Even then they were not so covered and enclosed but that the politer public frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.

If any one would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from the Chronicle, by William Tyte, with the title of Bath in the Eighteenth Century, its Progress and Life described. It is only honest (but one is honest with so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most amusing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to Mr. Tyte’s. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler, and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he’ deals with; we have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in the English and the eighteenth century terms, that familiar phenomenon which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that “none but Abigails appeared in white aprons,” as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not forgotten his horse; he could forbid ladies coming in riding-hoods; he could abolish the wearing of swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a challenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government* of Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who at all periods have

*BATH.

Rules laid down by Richard Nash, Esq., M.C., put up by Authority in the Pump Room and observed at Bath Assemblies during his reign.

I.

“That a visit of ceremony at coming to Bath, and another going away, is all that is expected or desired by Ladies of Quality and Fashion — except Impertinents.

II.

“That Ladies coming to the Ball appoint a Time for their Footmens coming to wait on them Home, to prevent Disturbances and Inconveniences to Themselves and Others.

III.

“That Gentlemen of Fashion never appearing in a Morning before the Ladies in Gowns and Caps shew Breeding and Respect.

IV.

“That no Person take it ill that any one goes to another’s Play or breakfast and not to theirs; — except Captious by Nature.

V.

“That no Gentleman give his Tickets for the Balls to any but Gentlewomen; — N. B. Unless he has none of his Acquaintance.

VI.

“That Gentlemen crowding before the Ladies at the Ball, shew ill Manners; and that none do so for the Future; — except such as respect nobody but themselves.

VII.

“That no Gentleman or Lady take it ill that another Dances before them; — except such as have no Pretence to dance at all.

VIII.

“That the Elder Ladies and Children be contented with a Second Bench at the Ball, as being past, or not come to Perfection.

IX.

“That the younger Ladies take notice how many Eyes observe them; — This don’t extend to the Have-at-all’s.

X.

“That all whisperers of Lies and Scandal be taken for their Authors.

XI.

“That all Repeaters of such Lies and Scandal be shun’d by all Company; — except such as have been guilty of the same Crime.

“V. B. — Several Men of no Character, Old Women and Young Ones of Questioned Refutation, are great Authors of Lies in this place, being of the sect of LEVELLERS.”

Date 1707. invaded England so much less obviously than the Scotch, and have come so largely into control of the Saeseneg, while seeming to merge and lose themselves in the heavy mass. He had the hot temper of his race; but he was able to cool it to a very keen edge, and he cut his way through disorder to victory. He wished to establish an etiquette as severe as that of the French or English court, and he succeeded, in a measure. But though not an easy Boss, he was a wise one and he really moulded the rebellious material to a form of propriety if not of beauty. When he passed to his account, insolvent both morally and financially, it lapsed again under the succeeding Masters of Ceremony to its elemental condition, and social anarchy followed; a strife raged between the old and new assembly rooms for primacy, and at a ball, where the partisans of two rival candidates for the mastership met in force, a free fight followed the attempt of a clergyman’s wife to take precedence of a peer’s daughter; “the gentlemen fought and swore; the ladies, screaming, tore each other’s garments and headgear; the floor was strewn with fragments of caps, lappets, millinery, coat-tails and ruffles. The non-combatants hurried to the exits, or mounted the chairs near the walls to be out of danger or to watch the foes mauling and bruising each other.” Before the fight ended the Mayor of the city had to appear and read the Riot Act three times.

Of course matters could not go on so. Both the contestants for the Master of the Ceremonies retired and a third was chosen. The office though poorly paid, and wholly unremunerative except in hands so skilled as those of Nash (who died poor by his own fault, but who lived rich), was honored in him by a statue in the Pump Room and a monument in the Abbey. This to be sure was after his death, but the place was always of such dignity that in 1785 Mr. J. King, “who had highly distinguished himself in the British army during the American war,” by no means disdained to take it. His distinction does not form any ornament of our annals as I recall them, but that is perhaps because it was achieved to our disadvantage. He had indeed the rare honor of introducing Jane Austen’s most charming hero to her sweetest and simplest heroine; but though he could fearlessly present Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, his courage was apparently not equal to upholding his general authority with the satirical arrogance of Nash. Where Nash would have laid down the law and enforced it if need be with his own hands, King “humbly requested,” though in the matter of wearing hats “at the cotillions or concerts or dress balls,” our distinguished enemy plucked up the spirit to warn any lady who should “through inattention or any other motive infringe this regulation, that she must not take it amiss if she should be obliged to take off her hat or quit the assembly.”

From Nash’s time onward several Masters of Ceremonies were scandalized by people’s giving tickets for the entertainments to their domestics, and one of them took public notice of the evil. “Servants, hair-dressers, and the improper persons who every night occupy some of the best seats, and even presume to mix with the company, are warned to keep away, and to spare themselves the mortification of being desired to withdraw, a circumstance which will inevitably happen if they continue to intrude themselves where decency, propriety and decorum forbid their entrance.”

Apparently in spite of all the efforts of all the Masters of Ceremonies, society in Bath was not only very fast, which society never minds being, but a good deal mixed, which it professes not to like, though it was at the same time always very gay. When at last the respective nights of the New Assembly Rooms and the Old Assembly Rooms were ascertained, the fashionable week began on Monday with a Dress Ball at the New Rooms; it continued on Tuesday with Public Tea and Cards at the New Rooms; on Wednesday with a Cotillion Ball at the Old Rooms; on Thursday with a Cotillion Ball at the New Rooms, and Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; on Friday with a Dress Ball at the Old Rooms; on Saturday with Public Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; and it ended on Sunday with Tea and Walking, alternately at the New Rooms and the Old Rooms. The cost of all these pleasures either to the person or the pocket, was not so great as might be imagined from their abundance. The hours were early, and except for the gaming, and the drinking that slaked the dry passion of chance, the fun was over by eleven o’clock. Then the last note was sounded, the last step taken, the last sigh or the last look exchanged, so that those who loved balls might not only tread the stately measures of that time with far less fatigue than the more athletic figures of our period cost, but might be at home and in bed at the hour when the modem party is beginning. For their pleasure they paid in the proportion of a guinea for twenty-six dress balls, and half a guinea for thirty fancy balls. Two guineas supplied two tickets for twelve concerts, and sixpence admitted one to the Rooms for a promenade and a cup of tea.

It will be seen that with that “large acquaintance” which Mrs. Allen so handsomely but hopelessly desired for Catherine Morland at her first ball, where they had no acquaintance at all, one could have a very good time at Bath for a very little money, and every one apparently who had the money could have the good time. There were many public gardens, where all sorts of people went for concert-breakfasts, and for tea and for supper, at a charge of a shilling, or the classic one-and-six. Jane Austen writes in one of her charming letters that she liked going to the concerts of Sydney Gardens because, having no ear for music, she could best get away from it there; but there were besides the Villa Gardens, the Bagatelle, and the Grosvenor Gardens, which were most resorted to because they were so convenient to the Pump Rooms. Some of the lawns, if not the groves of these gardens still remains, and hard by the Avon babbles still, rushing under the walls and bridges of the town, with a busy air of knowing more than it has time to tell of the old-time picnics on its grassy shores, and the water-parties on its tumultuous bosom, as well as the fireworks and illuminations in its bowers. The river indeed is one of the chief beauties of Bath, winding into it through a valley of the downs, and curving through it with a careless grace which leaves nothing to be asked.

The highest moment of fashion in Bath seems to have been when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., came to drink its waters and partake its pleasures in 1728. She was rather a plain body, no longer young, very stout, and with a simple taste for gambling, fishing, riding, and beer. “Her favorite haunt,” says Mr. Tyte, “was a summer-house by the riverside in Harrison’s Walk, where she often was seen attired in a riding-habit and a black velvet postilion-cap tied under her chin.” But she also liked to wear when on horseback “a hunting-cap and a laced scarlet coat,” which must have set off her red face and portly bulk to peculiar advantage. Her particular friend was a milliner in the abbey church-yard who wrote verses in praise of the princess and of Bath, but she seems to have been friendly enough with people of every kind and she went freely to the dress balls, the fancy balls, the teas, the walks, the breakfast-concerts, the gardens, and whatever else there was of elegant or amusing in the place. One of the customs of Bath was the ringing of the abbey bells to welcome visitors of distinction, who were expected to pay the vergers in proportion to the noise made for them. This custom was afterwards abused to include any corner from whom money could reasonably or unreasonably be hoped for, as the supposed writer in the New Bath Guide records. But the custom has long been obsolete, and no American invader arriving by train need fear being honored and plundered through it.

It would be idle to catalogue the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists, and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin yet. We were first of all concerned in looking up the places which the divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of encountering some of her people, or perhaps herself, a delicate elusive phantom of ironical observance, in a place they and she so much frequented, I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the characters or the author, though it was here that Catherine Morland first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. “Every creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down.”

I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than Catherine’s for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that they no longer cared to look at the, glass cases full of Roman and Saxon coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk; and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it one might stand and thaw one’s back without infringing anybody’s privileges or preferences. Under the Pump Room were the old Roman Baths with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a guide who started up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.

I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription did not include bathing I saw nothing of the modern baths. There the sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spectator in the days of the New Bath Guide, when —

“’Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex

All wading with gentlemen up to their necks.”

The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident, many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March weather which was everything that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.

I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the truth rather than bound in a slavish fidelity to the fact. The fact is that in the succession of days that were all and more than here suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird-song and bee-murmur, with the color of bloom in one’s eyes and the odor of flowers in one’s nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought property right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always. The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I repeat that I heard people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the social reciprocity so necessary in England, and must take humbler dwellings instead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price, and in the article of butcher’s meat of a far more glaring and offensive abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in unwholesome-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way entirely with the digestion which the Bath waters were doing so little to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England complexions, the wonder what became of that bilious superfluity of pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.

But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided, and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that self-respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which concern their comfort that it is said the consensus of feminine feeling has had force with the imperial government to prevent the placing of a garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic situation.

The glimpse of the Bath world, which a happy and most unimagined chance afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be slower to attempt saying than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a centre of fashion and infirmity, of pleasure and pain, without evolving in the finest sort the supremacy of woman, who is first in either. The lingering tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which spreads a soft afterglow over the literary decline of Boston, is of the same effect in the gentle city where the mere spectacle of life became penetrated with the quality of so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of their humor, the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness of their intelligence have remained to this time, when the spectacle of life has so dwindled that the observed are less than the observers, it would not be wonderful, for the essential part of what has been anywhere seems always to haunt the scene, and to become the immortal genius of the place. In a more literal sense Bath is haunted by the past, for it is the favorite resort of numbers of interesting ghosts, whose characters are well ascertained and whose stories are recounted to you, if you have so much merit, by people who have known the spectres almost from childhood. Some of them have the habit of preferably appearing to strangers; but perhaps they drew the line at Americans.

I forget whether the almond-trees were in bloom or not when we came to Bath, but I am sure they continued so throughout our stay, and I found them steadily blossoming away elsewhere for a month afterwards. There is no reason why they should not, for they have no work to do in the way of ripening their nuts, and they lead a life as idle and unfinal as the vines and fig-trees of Great Britain, which also blossom as cheerfully and set their fruit, and carry it through the seasons in a lasting immaturity. I never thought the almond in bloom as rare a sight as the peach, whose pale elder sister it is; but in the absence of the peach, I was always glad of it, in a dooryard or over a garden wall. Where the walls were low enough to lean upon, as they sometimes were round the vegetable gardens, it was pleasant to pause and contemplate the infinite variety of cabbage held in a green arrest by the mild winter air, but destined to an ultimation beyond the powers of the almond, the grape and the fig. There seemed to be a good many of these gardened spaces in the town, as well as in the outskirts where more new houses were going up, in something of the long leisure of the vegetation. The famous Bath building-stone is in fact so much employed elsewhere that there may not be enough of it for home use, and that may account for the slow growth of the place; but if I lived there I should not wish it to grow, and if I were King of Bath, in due succession from Beau Nash, I would not suffer one Bathstone to be set upon the other within its limits. The place is large enough as it is, and I should hate to have it restored to its former greatness. There was indeed only too little decay in it, but there was at least one gratifying instance in the stately mansion at the end of our street, — falling or fallen to ruin, with its Italian style rapidly antedating the rough classic of the Roman baths, in the effect of a sorrowful superannuation, — which I could not have rescued from dilapidation without serious loss. The hollow windows and broken doors and toppled chimneys, the weather-stained walls and pillars painted green with mould, were half concealed, half betrayed, by the neglected growth of trees, and a wilding thicket had sprung up over the lawn, penetrated by wanton paths in spite of warnings against trespassing by severely worded sign-boards. Whose the house was, or why it was abandoned I never learned, and I do not know that I wished to learn; it was so satisfying as it was and for what it was. It stood on the borders of Sydney Gardens, which the authorities were slowly, too slowly for our pleasure, putting in order for some sort of phantasmal season.

We never got into them, though we longed to make out where it was that Jane Austen need not hear the music when she went to the concerts. But it was richly consoling, in these failures to come unexpectedly upon the house in which she had lived two years with her mother, and to find it fronting the ruining mansion and the tangled shrubbery that took our souls with so sorrowful a rapture. At the moment we discovered it, there was a young girl visible through the dining-room window feeding a quiet gray cat on the floor, and a gray parrot in a cage. She looked kind and good, and as if she would not turn two pilgrims away if they asked to glance in over the threshold that Jane Austen’s feet had lightly pressed, but we could not find just the words to petition her in, and we had to leave the shrine unvisited. It occurs to me now that we might have pretended to mistake the tablet in the wall for a sign of apartments, but we had not then even this cheap inspiration; and we could only note with a longing, fingering look, that the house was very simple and plain, like the other houses near.

The literary tradition of the neighborhood is supported in one of these by the presence of a famous nautical novelist, who has often shipwrecked and marooned me to my great satisfaction, on reefs and desolate islands, or water-logged me in lonely seas. He lived even nearer the corner of Pulteney Street where we were in our hotel, and where we much imagined taking one of the many lodgings to let there, but never did. We looked into some, and found them probably not very different from what they were when the Allens went into theirs with Catherine Morland. We decided that this was just across the way from our hotel, and that Mrs. Allen saw us from her window whenever we went or came. We were sure also that we met Lady Russell and Anne Elliot driving out of Persuasion through Pulteney Street, when Anne noticed Captain Wentworth coming towards them, and supposed from Lady Russell’s stare, that she was equally moved by the vision, but found she was “looking after some window curtains, which Lady Alicia and Mrs. Frankland were telling” her of as “being the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath.”

Our hotel fronted not only on Pulteney Street, but also on Laura Place, a most genteel locality indeed where we knew as soon as Sir Walter Elliot that his cousin “Lady Dalrymple had taken a house for three months and would be living in style.” I do not think we ever made out the house, and we were more engaged in observing the behavior of the wicked John Thorpe driving poor Catherine Morland through Laura Place after he had deceived her into thinking Henry Tilney, whom she had promised to walk with, had gone out of town, and whom she now saw passing with his sister. On a happier day, as the reader will remember, Catherine really went her walk with the Tilneys, and in sympathy and emulation we too climbed the steep slopes of “Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.” You now cross the railroad to reach it, and pass through neighborhoods that were probably pleasanter a hundred years ago; but the view of the town in the bottom of its bowl must be as fine as ever, though we found no hanging coppice from which to command it. Still, as our wont was, we bought several pieces of property that pleased us, and I still have a few suburban houses in that quarter which I could offer the reader at a sacrifice. The truth is that in spite of having the Tilneys and Catherine for company we did not like the Beechen Cliff as well as its rival acclivity, Sion Hill, which forms the opposite rim of Bath, and is not so arduous of approach. A lady who lived not quite at the top, but above the Bath chair line, declared it the third-best air in England, without indicating the first or second. The air was at least more active than we were in our climb, but with a driver who got down and helped his horses walk up with us, we could enjoy there one of the loveliest prospects in the world. The fineness of the air was attested probably by the growth of ivy, which was the richest I saw in England, where the ivy grows so richly in every place. It not only climbed all the trees on that down, and clothed their wintry nakedness with a foliage perpetually green, but it flung its shining mantles over the walls that shut in the mansions on the varying slopes, and densely aproned the laps of the little hollows in the lawns and woods. It had the air of feeling its life in every leaf, and of lustily reaching out for other conquests, like the true weed it is in Old England, and not the precious exotic which people make it believe it is in New England. I do not know that I ever lost the surprise of it in its real character; I only know that this surprise was greatest for me on those happy heights.

The modern hand-book which was guiding our steps about Bath advised us that if we would frequent Milsom Street about four o’clock we should find the tide of fashion flowing through it; but the torrent must have been very rapid indeed, for we always missed it, and were obliged to fill the rather empty channel with the gayety of the past. There are delightful shops everywhere in Bath, and so many places to buy old family silver that it seems as if all the old families must have poured all their old silver into them, till you visit other parts of England, and find the same superabundance of second-hand plate everywhere. But it is in Milsom Street that most of the fine shops are, and I do not deny that you will see some drops of the tide of fashion clustered about their windows. Other drops have percolated to the tea-rooms, where at five o’clock there is a scene of dissipation around the innocent cups. But there was no reason why we should practise the generous self-deceit of our hand-book regarding the actual Milsom Street, when we had its former brilliancy to draw upon. Even in the time of Jane Austen’s people it was no longer “residential,” though it was not so wholly gone to shops as now. The most eligible lodgings were in it, and here General Tilney sojourned till he insisted on carrying Catherine off to Northanger Abbey with his children. “His lodgings were taken the very day after he left them, Catherine,” said Mrs. Allen, afterwards. “But no wonder; Milsom Street, you know.” Still, the finest shops prevailed there, then, and when Isabella Thorpe wished to punish the two young men who had been so impertinently admiring her, by following them, she persuaded Catherine that she was taking her to a shop-window in Milsom Street to see “the prettiest hat you can imagine... very like yours, with coquelicot ribbons instead of green.” In Milsom Street, sweet Anne Elliot first meets Captain Wentworth after he comes to Bath, and he is much confused. But it is no wonder that so many things happen in or through Milsom Street in Bath fiction, for it leads directly, or as directly as a street in Bath can, from the New Assembly to the Old Assembly which were called, puzzingly enough for the after-comer, the Upper Rooms and the Lower Rooms, as if they were on different floors of the same building, instead of separated a quarter of a mile by a rise of ground. The street therefore led also to the Pump Room and to the divers parades and walks and gardens, and was of prime topographical importance, as well as literary interest.

We could not visit the Lower Rooms because they were burned down a great while ago, but for the sake of certain famous heroines, and many more dear girls unknown to fame, we went to the Upper Rooms, and found them most characteristically getting ready for the Easter Ball which the County Club was to give, and which promised to resume for one night at least the vanished splendors of Bath. The Ballroom was really noble, and there were sympathetic tea-rooms and cloakrooms, and the celebrated octagonal room in the centre, where workmen were hustling the pretty and gallant ghosts of former dances with their sawing and hammering, and painting and puttying, and measuring the walls for decorations. I do not know that I should have minded all that, though I hate to have the present disturbing the past so much as it must in England; but something very tragical happened to me at the Upper Rooms which branded that visit in my mind. A young fellow civilly detached himself from the other artisans and showed us through the place, and though we could have easily found the way ourselves, it seemed fit to return his civility in silver. Sixpence would have been almost too much, but in my pocket there was a sole coin that enlarged itself to my dismay to the measure of a full moon. I appealed to my companion, but when did ever a woman have money unless she had just got it from a husband or father? The thought struck me that for once I might behave as shabbily as I should always like to do; but I had not the courage. Slowly, with inward sighs, I drew forth my hand and bestowed upon that most superfluous youth, for five minutes’ disservice, a whole undivided half-crown, received his brief “Thankyesir,” rendered as if he took half-crowns every day for that sort of thing, and tottered forth so bewildered that I quite forgot the emotion proper to the place where Catherine Morland went to her first ball, and Anne Elliot first met Captain Wentworth after coming to Bath. It was there that Catherine had to sit the whole evening through without dancing or speaking with a soul, and was only saved by overhearing two gentlemen speak of her as “a pretty girl. Such words had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before, her humble vanity was contented; she... went to her chair in good humor with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.”

I should have liked immensely to look on at the County Ball which was to assemble all the quality of the neighborhood on something like the old terms, and I heard with joy the story of ten gay youths who returned from one of the last balls in Bath chairs, drawn through the gray dawn in Milsom Street by as many mettlesome chairmen. Only when one has studied the Bath chair on its own ground, and seen the sort of gloomy veteran who pulls it, commonly with a yet gloomier old lady darkling under its low buggy-top, can one realize the wild fun of such an adventure. It might not always be safe, for the chairman sometimes balks, and in case of sharp acclivities altogether refuses to go on, as I have already told.

In paying our duty to the literary memories of the town we did not fail to visit the church of St. Swithin, in the shadow of which Fanny Burney lies buried with the gentle exile who made her Madame d’Arblay, and a very happy wife, after the glory of Evelina and Cecilia began to be lost a little in the less merited success of Camilla and The Wanderer. The gate was locked and we were obliged to come away without getting into the church-yard, but we saw “about where” one of the great mothers of English fiction lay; and the pew-opener, found for us with some difficulty and delay by an interested neighbor, let us into the church, and there we revered the tablets of the kindly pair. They were on the wall of the gallery, and I thought they might have been nearer together, but hers was very fitly inscribed; and one could stand before it, and indulge a pensive mood in thought of the brilliant girl’s first novel, which set the London world wild and kept Dr. Johnson up all night, mixed with fit reflections on her father’s ambition in urging her into the service of the “sweet Queen” Charlotte, where she was summoned with a bell like a waiting-maid, and the fire of her young genius was quenched.

If one would have a merrier memory of literary Bath, let him go visit the house, if he can find it, of the Reverend Dr. Wilson, in Alfred Street, where the famous Mrs. Macaulay, the first English historian of her name, presided as a species of tenth muse, and received the homage of whatever was academic in the rheumatic culture of Bath. She was apparently the idol of the heart as well as the head (it was thought to have been partially turned) of the good man whose permanent guest she was. He put up a marble statue to her as History in his London parish church, and had a vault made near it to receive her remains when she should have done with them. But before this happened, History fell in love with Romance in the person of a young man many years her junior, and on their marriage the reverend doctor irately removed her statue from the chancel of St. Stephen’s, and sold her vault for the use of some less lively body. Her new husband was the brother of a Dr. Graham who had formerly travelled with Lord Nelson’s beautiful Lady Hamilton and exhibited her “reclining on a celestial bed” as the Goddess of Health and Beauty. On the night of Mrs. Macaulay’s birthday the physician presented her with an address in which he claimed, by virtue of his mud baths, “the supreme blessedness of removing under God, the complicated and obstinate maladies your, fair and very delicate frame was afflicted with.” The company danced, played, and talked, and went out to a supper of “syllabubs, jellies, creams, ices, wine-cakes, and a variety of dry and fresh fruits, particularly grapes and pineapples.” The literary celebrities who visited Bath, or sojourned, or lived there were not to be outnumbered except in London alone, if in fact the political capital exceeded in them. Mr. Tyte mentions among others De Foe, who stopped at Bath in collecting materials for his Tour of Great Britain; and who met Alexander Selkirk there, and probably imagined Robinson Crusoe from him on the spot. Richard Steele came and wrote about Bath in the Spectator. Gay, Pope and Congreve, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe came and went; and Sheridan dwelt there in his father’s house, and met the beautiful Miss Linley, woed, won, went off to Paris with her and wedded her, and returned A FORTNIGHT IN BATH to fight two duels in defence of her honor. Goldsmith and Johnson and Boswell resorted to the waters; Lord Chesterfield wrote some of his letters from a place where worldly politeness might be so well studied; Walpole some of his where gossip so abounded. De Quincey was a school-boy in Bath; Southey spent his childhood there, and Coleridge preached there, as he did in many other Unitarian pulpits in England; Cowper wrote his “Verses on finding the Heel of a Shoe at Bath” after coming to see his cousin, Lady Hesketh, there; Burke met his wife there, and so did Beckford, who wrote Vathek, meet his. Christopher Anstey, the author of that humorous, that scandalous, that amusing satire, the New Bath Guide, lived most of his life in the city he delighted to laugh at.

The list might be indefinitely prolonged, but the name which most attracts, after the names of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, is the name of Charles Dickens. He must have come to Bath when he was very young, and very probably on some newspaper errand; for when he wrote The Pickwick Papers he was still a reporter. His genius for boisterous drollery was not just the qualification for dealing with the pathetic absurdities of a centre of fashion which was no longer quite what it had been. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century found Bath in a social decline which all her miraculous waters could not medicine. But the members of the Pickwick Club went to a ball at the Upper Rooms where some noble ladies won a good deal of Mr. Pickwick’s money; and he had already visited the Pump Room. Dickens derides the company at both places with the full force of his high spirits and riots in the description of Mr. Pickwick’s introduction to the Master of the Ceremonies, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq.  The exaggerated caricature preserves some traits of the M.C.’s, his illustrious predecessors; and perhaps some such bold handling as Dickens’s could best render the personal effect of a beau of the period. He “was a charming young man of not more than fifty, dressed in a very bright-blue coat with resplendent buttons, black trousers, and the thinnest possible pair of highly polished boots. A gold eyeglass was suspended from his neck by a short, broad black ribbon, a gold snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left hand... and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a heavy gold top. His linen was of the very whitest, finest and stiff est; his wig of the glossiest, blackest and curliest.... His features were contracted into a perpetual smile. ‘Welcome to Ba-ath, sir. This is indeed an acquisition. Most welcome to Ba-ath.... Never been in Ba-ath, Mr. Pickwick?... Never in Ba-ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick, you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-markable!’”

This might have happened, but it does not seem as if it had happened, and one sighs amid the horse-play for “the touch of a vanished hand,” like Jane Austen’s, to give delicacy and precision to the picture. The Pickwick Club first put up at the White Hart, just opposite the Pump Room, but it was while living in “the upper portion of the Royal Crescent,” that Mr. Winkle had his amusing adventure with Mrs. Dowler, whose husband had fallen asleep after promising to sit up for her return from a ball. The elderly reader will probably remember better than the younger how Mr. Winkle went down-stairs in his bed-gown and slippers to let the lady in, and then had the door blown to behind him, and was obliged to plunge into her sedan-chair to hide himself from the mockeries of a party coming into the Hosted by Crescent; how he fled to escape her infuriated husband, and in Bristol found Mr. Dowler, who had also fled from Bath to escape Mr. Winkle and the consequences of his own violent threats. It was at the house of the Master of Ceremonies in Queen’s Square that “a select company of Bath footmen” entertained Sam Weller at a “friendly swarry consisting of a boiled leg of mutton and the usual trimmings,” but I am unable to give the number where Sam’s note of invitation instructed him to ring at the “airy bell.”

In fact, on going back to the Bath episode of the Pickwick Papers, one finds so much make-believe required of him that the remembrance of one’s earlier delight in it is a burden and a hindrance rather than a help. You could get on better with it if you were reading it for the first time, and even then it would not seem very like what one probably saw. You would be sensible of the elemental facts, but in the picture they are all jarred out of semblance to life. The effect is quite that of a Cruikshank illustration, abounding in impossible grotesqueness, yet related here and there to reality by an action, an expression, a figure. It is screaming farce, or it is shrieking melodrama; the mirror is held up to nature, but nature makes a face in it. Nevertheless, on an earlier visit to England, I had once seen a water-side character getting into a Thames steamboat who seemed to me exactly like a character of Dickens; and in Bath I used often to meet a little, queer block of a man, whose nationality I could not make out, but every inch of whose five feet was full of the suggestion of Dickens. His face, topped by a frowzy cap, was twisted in a sort of fixed grin, and his eyes looked different ways, perhaps to prevent any attempt of mine to escape him. He carried at his side a small wicker-box which he kept his hand on; and as he drew near and halted, I heard a series of plaintive squeaks coming from it. “Make you perform the guinea-pig?” he always asked, and before I could answer, he dragged a remonstrating guinea-pig from its warm shelter, and stretched it on the cage, holding it down with both hands. “Johnny die queek!” he commanded, and lifted his hands for the instant in which Johnny was motionlessly gathering his forces for resuscitation. Then he called exultantly, “Bobby’s coming!” and before the police were upon him, Johnny was hustled back into his cosy box, woefully murmuring of his hardship to its comfort; and the queer little man smiled his triumph in every direction. The sight of this brief drama always cost me a penny; perhaps I could have had it for less; but I did not think a penny was too much.

IV. A COUNTRY TOWN AND A COUNTRY HOUSE

THERE were so many pleasing places within easy reach of Bath that it was hard to choose among them, and Bath itself was so constantly pleasing that it was a serious loss to leave it for a day, for an hour. I do not know, now, why we should have gone first, when we gathered force to break the charm, to Bradford-on-Avon. If we did not go first to Wells it was perhaps because we balanced the merits of an eighth-century Saxon Chapel against those of a twelfth-century Cathedral, and felt that the chapel had a prior claim. Possibly, spoiled as we were by the accessibility of places in England, and relaxed as we were by the air of Bath, we shrank from spending five or six hours in the run to Wells when we could get to and from Bradford in little or no time. Wells is one of the exceptions to the rule that in England everything is within easy reach from everywhere, or else Bath is an exception among the places that Wells is within easy reach of. At any rate we were at Bradford almost before we knew it, or knew anything of its history, which there is really a good deal of.

The best of this history seems to be that when in the year 652 the Saxon King of Wessex overcame the Britons in a signal victory, he did not exterminate the survivors, but allowed them to become the fellow-subjects of their Saxon conquerors under his rule. Just how great a blessing this was it would not be easy to say at the actual distance of time, but it seems to have been thought a good deal of a blessing for a King of Wessex to bestow. To crown it, some fifty years later, a monastery was founded in Bradford, by St. Aldhelm, a nephew of the King. A chapel was built on the site of the uncle’s battle with the Britons, and such as it was then such we now saw it, the vicar of the parish having not long ago rescued it from its irreligious uses as a cottage dwelling and a free school, and restored it spiritually and materially to its original function. It is precious for being the only old church in England which is wholly unchanged in form, and though very small and very rude it is pathetically interesting. It seemed somehow much older than many monuments of my acquaintance which greatly antedated it; much older, say, than the Roman remains at Bath, for it is a relic of the remote beginning of an order of things, and not the remnant of a fading civilization. No doubt the Saxons who built it on the low hill slope where it stands, in a rude semblance of the Roman churches which were the only models of Christian architecture they could have seen, thought it an edifice of the dignity since imparted to it by the lapse of centuries. Without, the grass grew close to its foundations, in the narrow plot of ground about it, and the sturdy little fabric showed its Romanesque forms in the gray stone pierced by mere slits of windows, which gave so faint a light within that, after entering, one must wait a moment before attempting to move about in the cramped, dungeon-like space. With the simple altar, and the chairs set before it for worshippers, it gave an awful sense of that English continuity on which political and religious changes vainly break: the parts knit themselves together again, and transmit the original consciousness from age to age. The type of beauty in the child who sold us permits to see the chapel and followed us into it was in like manner that of the Saxon maids whose hulking fathers had beaten in battle the fierce, dark little Britons on that spot twelve hundred years before: the same blazing red cheeks, the same blue, blue eyes, the same sunny hair which has always had to make up for the want of other sunniness in that dim clime, falling round the fair neck. No doubt the snuffles with which the pretty creature suffered were also of the same date and had descended from mother to daughter in the thirty generations dwelling in just such stone-cold stone cottages as that where we found her. It was one of a row of cottages near the chapel, of a red-tiled, many-gabled, leaden-sashed, diamond-paned picturesqueness that I have never seen surpassed out of the theatre, or a Kate Greenaway picture, and was damp with the immemorial dampness that inundated us from the open door when we approached. What perpetuity of colds in the head must be the lot of youth in such abodes; how rheumatism must run riot among the joints of age in the very beds and chimney-corners! Better, it sometimes seemed, the plainest prose ever devised by a Yankee carpenter in dry and comfortable wood than the deadly poetry of such dwellings.

But there were actually some wooden houses in Bradford, or partially wooden, which the driver of our fly took us to see when we had otherwise exhausted the place. They had the timbered gables of the Tudor times, when, as I have noted, the English seemed to build with an instinct for comfort earlier unknown and later lost; otherwise Bradford was of stone, stony. It Studded the slopes of its broken uplands with warts and knots of little dwellings, and had a certain foreignness, possibly imparted by the long abode of the Flemish cloth-workers whom an enterprising manufacturer invited to the place centuries before, and whose skill established its ancient industry in a finer product and a greater prosperity. Now, one reads, the competition of the same art in Yorkshire has reduced the weavers of Bradford to a fifth of their number fifty years ago. But the presence of the Flemings was so influential in the seventeenth century that they had a quarter of their own, and altogether there were intimations in Bradford so Continental, the raw rainy day of our visit, that I thought if it could have had a little sun on it there were moments when it might have looked Italian.

Perhaps not, and I do not mean that in its own way it was not delightful. We wandered from the station into it by a bridge over the Avon that was all a bridge could be asked to be by the most exacting tourist, who could not have asked more, midway, than a guardhouse which had become a chapel, and then a lock-up, and finally an object of interest merely. When we had got well into the town, and wanted a carriage, we were taken in charge by the kindest policeman that ever befriended strangers. If not the only policeman in Bradford, he was the only one on duty, and his duty was mainly, as it seemed, to do us any pleasure he could. He told us where we could find a fly, and not content with this, he went in person with us to the stable-yard, and did not leave us till he had made a boy come out and promise us a fly immediately. Never, even when girdled by the protecting arm of a blue giant resolved to bring my gray hairs in safety to some thither side of Fifth Avenue or Broadway, have I known such sweetness in a minister of the law. We could only thank him again and again, and vainly wish that we might do something for him in return. But what can one do for a policeman except offer him a cigar? But if one does not smoke?

The stable-boy seemed a well-grown lad in that character, but when he put on a metal-buttoned coat and a top-hat, and coachman’s boots in honor of us, he shrank into the smallest-sized man. It seemed the harder, therefore, that when he proposed to bow us into the fly with fit dignity, and pulled open the door, it should come off its hinge and hang by its handle from his grasp. But we did what we could to ignore the mortifying incident, and after that we abetted him in always letting us out on the other side.

His intelligence was creditable to him as a large boy, if not as a small man, and but for him we should not have seen those timbered’ houses which were in a street dreadfully called, with the English frankness which never spares the sensibilities of strangers, The Shambles. With us shambles are only known in tragic poetry; in real life they veil their horror in delicate French and become abattoirs; but as that street in Bradford was probably the Shambles in 652, the year of the great Saxon victory over the Britons, it was still so called in the year of our visit, 1904. We did not complain; the houses were not so wooden as we could have wished for the sake of the rheumatism and snuffles within, but they must have been drier than houses entirely of stone. Besides we had just come warm from the Italian aspect of one of the most charming houses I saw in England, and we did not really much mind the discomfort of others. The house was that Kingston House, world-famous for having been reproduced in papier-maché at the last Universal Exposition in Paris, which a wealthy cloth - manufacturer had had built for himself about 1600 by Giovanni of Padua, and it was touched with Italian feeling in an English environment. Masses of cold, cold evergreen shrubs hide it from the street, but at the moment the rain was briefly intermitting, and we surprised it, as it were, in a sort of reverie of the South under an afternoon sky, hesitating from gray to blue. At this happy instant the place was embellished by a peacock, sweeping with outspread tail the farthest green of a long velvet lawn, and lending the splendor of his color to a picture richly framed by a stretch of balustrade. The house, with English shyness (which it surely might have overcome after being shown as the most beautiful house in England), faced away from the street, towards a garden which sloped downward from it, towards a dove-cote with pigeons in red and mauve cooing about its eaves and roofs, and mingling their deep-throated sighs with the murmur of a mill somewhere beyond the Avon.

There were other beautiful and famous houses not far from Bradford, but our afternoon was waning, and we consoled ourselves as we could with the old Barton Barn, which was built two hundred years after King Etheldred had given the manor to the abbess of Shaftesbury, and became locally known as the tithe-barn from its use in receiving the dues of the church in kind during the long simple centuries when they were so paid. It is a vast, stately structure, and is now used for the cow-barn of a dairy fanner, whose unkempt cattle stood about, knee-deep in the manure, with the caked and clotted hides which the West of England cattle seem to wear all winter. It did not look such a place as one would like to get milk from in America, but if we could have that old cow-barn, without the cows, at home, I think we might gainfully exchange our neatest and wholesomest dairy for it. The rich superabundance of the past in England is what always strikes one, and the piety with which the past is preserved and restored promises more and more of antiquity. I am sure the Barton Bam at Bradford is only waiting for some public-spirited magnate who will yet drive the untidy kine from its shelter, clean up, and sod and plant its yard, and with the help of some reverent architect renew it in the image of its prime, and stock it as a museum with the various kinds of tithes which in the ages of faith the neighboring churls used to pay into it for the comfort of the clergy here, and the good of their own souls hereafter.

When we got well away from the tithe-barn we felt the need of tea, and we walked back from the station where our large boy, or little man, had put us down, to the shop of a green-grocer, which is probably the most twentieth-century building in Bradford. It is altogether of wood, and behind the shop, where the vegetables vaunted themselves in all the variety of cabbage, there is a clean little room, with the walls and roof sheathed in matched and painted pine. In this cheerful place, two rustics, a man and a boy, were drinking tea at the only table, but at our coming they politely choked down all the tea that was in their cups, and in spite of our entreaties hurried out with their cheeks bulged by what was left of their bread and butter. It was too bad, we murmured, but our hostess maintained that her late guests had really done, and she welcomed us with a hospitality rendered precious by her dusting off the chairs for us with her apron: I do not know that I had ever had that done for me before, and it seemed very romantic, and very English. The tea and butter were English too, and excellent, as they almost unfailingly are in England, no matter how poor the place where they are supplied, and the bread was no worse than usual. In a morsel of garden under the window some gillyflowers were in bloom, and when we expressed our surprise, the kind woman went out and gathered some for us: they bloomed there pretty well all the winter, she said; but let not this give the fond reader too glowing an idea of the winter’s warmth in the West of England. It only proves how sturdy the English flowers are, and how much raw cold they can stand without turning a petal.

Before our train went, we had time to go a longish walk, which we took through some pleasant, rather new, streets of small houses, each with its gardened front-yard hedged about it with holly or laurel, and looking a good, dull, peaceful home. It may really have been neither, and life may have been as wild, and bad, and fascinating in those streets as in the streets of any American town of the same population as Bradford. There was everything in the charming old place to make life easy; good shops of all kinds, abundant provisions, stores, and not too many licensed victuallers, mostly women, privileged to sell wine and spirits. Yet, as the twilight began to fall, Bradford seemed very lonely, and we thought with terror, what if we should miss our train back to Bath! We got to the station, however, in time to cower half an hour over a grate in which the Company had munificently had a fire early in the day; and to correct by closer observation of an elderly pair an error which had flattered our national pride at the time of our arrival. In hurrying away to get the only fly at the station the lady had then fallen down and the gentleman had kept on, leaving her to pick herself up as she could, while he secured the fly. Perhaps he had not noticed her falling, but we chose to think the incident very characteristically middle-class English; for all we knew it might be a betrayal of the way all the English treated their wives. Now the same couple arrived to take the train with us for Bath, and we heard them censuring its retard in accents unmistakably American! We fell from our superiority to our English half-brothers instantly; and I think the little experience was useful in confirming me in the resolution throughout my English travels to practise that slowness in sentencing and executing offenders against one’s native ideals and standards which has always been the conspicuous ornament of English travellers among ourselves.

The day that we drove out from Bath to a certain charming old house which I wish I could impart my sense of, but which I will at once own the object of a fond despair, was apparently warm and bright, but was really dim and cold. That is, the warmth and brightness were superficial, while the cold and dimness were structural. The fields on either side of the road were mostly level, though here and there they dipped or rose, delicately green in their diaphanous garment of winter wheat, or more substantially clad in the grass which the winter’s cold had not been great enough to embrown. Here and there were spaces of woodland, withdrawn rather afar from our course, except where the trees of an avenue led up from the highway to some unseen mansion. To complete the impression you must always, under the tender blue sky, thickly archipelagoed with whity-brown clouds, have rooks sailing and dreamily scolding, except where they wake into a loud clamor among the leafless tops surrounding some infrequent roof. There are flights of starlings suddenly winging from the pastures, where the cows with their untidily caked and clotted hides are grazing, and the sheep are idling over the chopped turnips, and the young lambs are shivering with plaintive cries. Amid their lamentations the singing of birds makes itself heard; the singing of larks, or the singing of robins, Heaven knows which, but always angelically sweet. The bare hedges cross and recross the fields, and follow the hard, smooth road in lines unbroken save near some village of gray walls and red roofs, topped by an ancient church. In the background, over a stretch of embankment or along the side of a low hill, sweeps a swift train of little English cars, with a soft whirring sound, as unlike the giant roar of one of our expresses as it is unlike the harsh clatter of a French rapide. The white plumes of steam stretch after it in vain; break, and float thinner and thinner over the track behind.

There were, except in the villages, very few houses; and we met even fewer vehicles. There was one family carriage, with the family in it, and a sort of tranter’s wagon somewhere out of Hardy’s enchanted pages, with a friendly company of neighbors going to Bath inside it. At one exciting moment there was a lady in a Bath chair driving a donkey violently along the side of the road. A man slashing and wattling the lines of hedge, or trimming the turf beside the foot-path, left his place in literature, and came to life as the hedger and ditcher we had always read of. Beneath the hedges here and there very “rathe primroses” peered out intrepidly, like venturesome live things poising between further advance and retreat. The road was admirable, but it seemed strange that so few people used it. The order in which it was kept was certainly worthy of constant travel, and we noted that from point to point there was a walled space beside it for the storage of road-mending material. At home we should dump the broken stone in the gutter near the place that needed mending, or on the face of the highway, but in England, where everything is so static, and the unhurried dynamic activities are from everlasting to everlasting, a place is specially provided for broken stone, and the broken stone is kept there.

The drive from Bath to our destination was twelve miles, and the friend who was to be our host for the day had come as far on his wheel to ask us. It was the first of many surprises in the continued use of the bicycle which were destined to confound strangers from a land whose entire population seemed to go bicycle-mad a few years ago, and where now they are so wholly recovered that the wheel is almost as obsolete as the russet shoe. As both the wheel and the russet shoe are excellent things in their way, though no American could now wear the one or use the other without something like social suicide, the English continue to employ them with great comfort and entire self-respect. They fail so wholly to understand why either should have gone out with us that one becomes rather ashamed to explain that it was for the same reason that they came in, merely because everybody had them.

Our friend had given us explicit directions for our journey, and it was well that he did so, for we had two turnings to take on that lonely road, and there were few passers whom we could ask our way. We really made the driver ask it, and he did not like to do it, for he felt, as we did, that he ought to know it. I am afraid he was not a very active intelligence, and I doubt if he had ever before been required to say what so many birds and flowers were. I think he named most of them at random, and when it came at last to a very common white flower, he boldly said that he had forgotten what it was. As we drew near the end of our journey he grew more anxiously complicated in such knowledge of our destination as he acquired. But he triumphed finally in the successive parleys held to determine the site of a house which had been in its place seven or eight hundred years, and might, in that time have ceased to be a matter of doubt even among the farther neighbors. It was with pride on his part and pleasure on ours that suddenly and most unexpectedly, when within a few yards of it, he divined the true way, and drove into the court-yard of what had at times been the dower-house, where we were to find our host and guide to the greater mansion.

As this house is a type of many old dower-houses I will be so intimate as to say that you enter it from the level of the ground outside, such a thing as under-pinning to lift the floor from the earth and to make an airspace below being still vaguely known in England, and in former times apparently unheard of. But when once within you are aware of a charm which keeps such houses inviolate in the form of the past; and this one was warmed for us by a hospitality which refined itself down to the detail of a black cat basking before the grate: a black cat that promptly demanded milk after our luncheon, but politely waited to be asked to the saucer when it was brought. From the long room which looked so much a study that I will not call it differently, the windows opened on the shrubberies and lawns and gardens that surround such houses in fiction, and keep them so visionary to the corner who has known them nowhere else that it would be easy to transgress the bounds a guest must set himself, and speak as freely of the people he met there as if they were persons in a pleasant book. Two of them, kindred of the manor-house and of the great house near, had come from three or four miles away on their wheels. Our host himself, the youngest son of the great house, was a painter, by passion as well as by profession, and a reviewer of books on art, such as plentifully bestrewed his table and forbade us to think of the place in the ordinary terms as a drawing-room. It seemed to me characteristic of the convenient insular distances that here, far in the West, almost on the Welsh border, he should be doing this work for a great London periodical, in as direct touch with the metropolis as if he dwelt hard by the Park, and could walk in fifteen minutes to any latest exhibition of pictures.

When he took us after luncheon almost as long a walk to his studio, I fancied that I was feeling England under my feet as I had not before. We passed through a gray hamlet of ten or a dozen stone cottages, where, behind or above their dooryard hedges, they had gradually in the long ages clustered near the great house, and a little cottage girl, who was like a verse of Wordsworth, met us, and bidding us good-day, surprised us by dropping a courtesy. It surprised even our friends, who spoke of it as if it were almost the last courtesy dropped in England, and made me wish I could pick it up, and put it in my note-book, to grace some such poor page as this: so pretty was it, so shy, so dear, with such a dip of the suddenly weakening little knees.

We were then on our way to see first the small gray church which had been in its place among the ancient graves from some such hoary eld as English churches dream of in like places all over the land, and make our very faith seem so recent a thing. It was in a manner the family chapel, but it was also the spiritual home of the lowlier lives of village and farm, and was shared with them in the reciprocal kindness common in that English world of enduring ties. There for ages the parish folk had all been christened, and all married, and all buried, and there in due time they had been or would be forgotten. The edifice was kept in fit repair by the joint piety of rich and poor, with the lion’s share of the expense rightfully falling to the rich, as in such cases it always does in England; and within and without the church the affection of the central family had made itself felt and seen, since the Christian symbols were first rudely graven in the stone of the square church-tower.

The name of the family always dwelling in that stately old house whither we were next going had not always been the same, but its nature and its spirit had been the same. An enlightened race would naturally favor the humane side in all times, and the family were Parliamentarian at the time England shook off the Stuart tyranny, and revolutionist when she finally ridded herself of her faithless Jameses and Charleses. In the archives of the house there are records of the hopes vainly cherished by a son of it who was then in New York, that our own revolt against the Georgian oppression might be composed to some peaceful solution of the quarrel. It was not his fault that this hope was from the first moment too late, but it must be one of his virtues in American eyes that he saw from the beginning the hopelessness of any accommodation without a full concession of the principles for which the colonies contended. In the negotiation of the treaty at Versailles in 1783 he loyally did his utmost for his country against ours at every point of issue, and especially where the exiled American royalists were concerned. Our own commissioners feared while they respected him, and John Adams wrote of him in his diary, “He pushes and presses every point as far as it can possibly go; he has a most eager, earnest, pointed spirit.”

This was the first baronet of his line, but the real dignity and honor of the house has been that of a race of scholars and thinkers. Their public spirit has been of the rarer sort which would find itself most at home in the literary association of the place, and it has come to literary expression in a book of singular charm. In the gentle wisdom of sympathies which can be universal without transcending English conditions, the Talk at a Country House, as the book modestly calls itself, strays to topics of poetry, and politics, and economics, and religion, yet keeps its allegiance to the old house we were about to see as a central motif. It was our first English country house, but I do not think that its claim on our interest was exaggerated by its novelty, and I would willingly chance finding its charm as potent again, if I might take my way to it as before. We came from the old church now by the high-road, now through fringes of woodland, and now over shoulders of pasturage, where the lesser celandine delicately bloomed, and the primrose started from the grass, till at last we emerged from under the sheltering boughs of the tall elms that screened the house from our approach. There was a brook that fell noisily over our way, and that we crossed on a rustic bridge, and there must have been a drive to the house, but I suppose we did not follow it. Our day of March had grown gray as it had grown old, and we had not the light of a day in June, such as favored an imaginary visitor in Talk at a Country House, but we saw the place quite so much as he did that his words will be better than any of my own in picturing it.

“The air was resonant with rooks as they filled the sky with the circles in which they wheeled to and fro, CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS disappearing in the distance to appear again, and so gradually reach their roosting trees.... I might call them a coruscation of rooks.... On my left I saw... the old battlemented wall, and a succession of gables on either side... and one marked by a cross which I knew must be the chapel.... The old, battlemented wall had a flora of its own: ferns, crimson valerian, snap-dragons, and brier-roses... and an ash and a yew growing on the battlements where they had been sown no doubt by the rooks. And as I passed through an archway of the road, the whole house came in view. It was not a castle nor a palace, but it might be called a real though small record of what men had been doing there from the time of the Doomsday Book to our own.”

As we grew more acquainted with it, we realized that at the front it was a building low for its length, rising gray on terraces that dropped from its level in green, green turf. Some of the long windows opened down to the grass, with which the ground floor was even. Above rose the Elizabethan, earlier Tudor, and Plantagenet of the main building, the wings, and the tower of the keep. The rear of the house was enclosed by a wall of Edward II.’s time, and beyond this was a wood of elms, tufted with the nests of that eternal chorus of coruscating rooks. At first we noticed their multitudinous voices, but in a little while they lost all severalty of sound, like waves breaking on the shore, and I fancied one being so lulled by them that one would miss them when out of hearing, and the sense would ache for them in the less soothing silence.

The family was away from home, and there were no reserves in the house, left in the charge of the gardener, as there must have been if it were occupied. But I do not hope to reproduce my impressions of it. I can only say that a sense of intellectual refinement and of liberal thought was what qualified for me such state as characterized the place. The whole structure within as well as without was a record of successive temperaments as well as successive times. Each occupant had built up or pulled down after his fancy, but the changes had left a certain physiognomy unchanged, as the mixture of different strains in the blood still leaves a family look pure. The house, for all its stateliness, was not too proud for domesticity; its grandeur was never so vast that the home circle would be lost in it. The portraits on the walls were sometimes those of people enlarged to history in their lives, but these seemed to keep with the rest their allegiance to a common life. The great Bess of Hardwicke, the “building Bess,” whose architectural impulses effected themselves in so many parts of England, had married into the line and then married out of it (to become, as Countess of Shrewsbury, one of the last jailers of Mary Queen of Scots), and she had left her touch as well as her face on its walls, but she is not a more strenuous memory in it than a certain unstoried dowager. She, when her son died, took half the house and left half to her daughter-in-law, whom she built off from herself by a partition carried straight through the mansion to the garden wall, with a separate gate for each.

In her portrait she looks all this and more; and a whole pathetic romance lives in the looks of that lady of the first Charles’s time who wears a ring pendent from her neck, and a true-lovers’ knot embroidered on the bodice over her heart, and who died unwedded. There were other legends enough; and where the pictures asserted nothing but lineage they were still very interesting. They were of people who had a life in common with the house, wives and mothers and daughters, sons and husbands and fathers, married into it or born into it, and all receiving from it as much as they imparted to it, as if they were of one substance with it and it shared their consciousness that it was the home of their race. We have no like terms in America, and our generations, which are each separately housed, can only guess at the feeling for the place of their succession which the generations of such an English house must feel. It would be easy to overestimate the feeling, but in view of it I began to understand the somewhat defiant tenderness with which the children of such a house must cherish the system which keeps it inalienably their common home, though only the first-born son may dwell in it. If there were no law to transmit it to the eldest brother they might well in their passion for it be a law unto themselves at any sacrifice and put it in his hands to have and hold for them all.

In my own country I had known too much graceless private ownership to care to offer the consecrated tenure of such an ancestral home the violence of unfriendly opinions of primogeniture. But if I had been minded to do so, I am not sure that this house and all its dead and living would not have heard me at least tolerantly. In England, with the rigid social and civic conformity, there has always been ample play for personal character; perhaps without this the inflexible conditions would be insufferable, and all sorts of explosions would occur. With full liberty to indulge his whim a man does not so much mind being on this level or that, or on which side of the social barrier he finds himself. But it is not his whim only that he may freely indulge: he may have his way in saying the thing he thinks, and the more frankly he says it the better he is liked, even when the thing is disliked. These are the conditions, implicit in everything, by which the status, elsewhere apparently so shaky, holds itself so firmly on its legs. They reconcile to its contradictions those who suffer as well as those who enjoy, and dimly, dumbly, the dweller in the cottage is aware that his rheumatism is of one uric acid with the gout of the dweller in the great house. Every such mansion is the centre of the evenly distributed civilization which he shares, and makes each part of England as tame, and keeps it as wild, as any other. He knows that hut and hall must stand or fall together, for the present, at least; and where is it that there is any longer a future?

It seems strange to us New-Worldlings, after all the affirmation of history and fiction, to find certain facts of feudalism (mostly the kindlier facts) forming part of the status in England as they form no part of it with us. It was only upon reflection that I perceived how feudal this great house was in its relation to the lesser homes about it through many tacit ties of responsibility and allegiance. From eldest son to eldest son it had been in the family always, but it had descended with obligations which no eldest son could safely deny any more than he could refuse the privileges it conferred. To what gentlest effect the sense of both would come, the reader can best learn from the book which I have already named. This, when I had read it, had the curious retroactive power of establishing the author in a hospitable perpetuity in the place bereft of him, so that it now seems as if he had been chief of those who took leave of us that pale late afternoon of March, and warned us of the chill mists which shrouded us back to Bath. As we drove along between the meadows where the light was failing and the lambs plaintively called through the gloaming, we said how delightful it had all been, how perfectly, how satisfyingly, English. We tried again to realize the sentiment which, as well as the law, keeps such places in England in the ordered descent, and renders it part of the family faith and honor that the ancestral house should always be the home of its head. I think we failed because we conceived of the fact too objectively, and imagined conscious a thing that tradition has made part of the English nature, so that the younger brother acquiesces as subjectively in the elder brother’s primacy as the elder brother himself, for the family’s sake. We fancied that in their order one class yielded to another without grudging and without grasping, and that this, which fills England with picturesqueness and drama, was the secret of England. In the end we were not so sure. We were not sure even of our day’s experience; it was like something we had read rather than lived; and in this final unreality, I prefer to shirk the assertion of a different ideal, which all the same I devoutly hold.

V. AFTERNOONS IN WELLS AND BRISTOL

EVEN the local guide-book, which is necessarily optimistic, owns that the railroad service between Bath and Wells leaves something to be desired. The distance is twenty miles, and you can make it by the Great Western in something over two hours, but if you are pressed for time, the Somerset and Dorset line will carry you in two. As we were nationally in a hurry, though personally we had time to spare, we went and came by this line, mostly in a sort of vague rain, which favored the blossoming of the primroses along the railroad bank. Not that any part of the way needed rain; great stretches of the country lay soaking in the rainfall of the year before, which had not had sun enough to diminish its depth or breadth. In fact, on the eve of the sunniest and loveliest summer which perhaps England ever saw, the whole West looked in March as if wringing it out and hanging it up to dry in a steam-laundry could alone get the wet out of it. The water lay in wide expanses in the meadows, the plethoric streams swam chokeful; in the ditches men were at work with short scythes cutting the rank weeds out to give the flood a little course, but where it was to run was a question which did not answer itself.

We were in a third-class compartment, and we had the advantage of the simple life getting in and out of a train that seemed to stop oftener than it started. Our ever-changing fellow-passengers were mostly mothers of large little families: babies in arms, and babies slightly bigger, sisters and brothers pendent at arm’s-length from the mother-hands, all with flaring blue eyes and flaming red cheeks, and flaxen hair and mild, sweet faces. Everybody was good, and helped these helpless families to mount and dismount; the kindly porters came and went with their impracticable bundles, and the passengers handed the brothers and sisters after the baby-burdened mother, or took them from her so that she might stumble into the carriage without falling upon her detached offspring. They were beautifully polite in word and deed, so that it was a consolation to hear and see them.

Shortly after our journey began, our train was apparently run down by an old man and his granddaughter who got in blown and panting from their chase of half a mile before overtaking us. They were of the thin blond type of some English country folks, with a milder color in their cheeks than usual, and between his age and her youth they had about a third of the natural allowance of teeth. Agriculture is apparently nowhere favorable to the preservation of teeth; the rustic theory is that when a tooth offends one should pluck it out; but in England they never expect to replace it, while with us they pluck out all the others and replace them with new ones from the dentist’s, so that when you see good teeth in a country mouth you know where they come from. Their want of teeth did not prevent the old man and the little girl from beginning to eat as soon as they could get their breath. They were going on a visit to her aunt, it seemed, and she was provisioned against the chances of famine in the hour’s journey by a plentiful supply of oranges and apples and cakes in a net bag. “Us ‘ad a ‘ard chase, didn’t us?” the old man asked her, with a sociable glance round the place. The little girl nodded with her mouth full, while her fingers explored the bag for more cakes to fill it when it should be empty, and the old man leaned tenderly towards her and suggested, “Couldn’t your little ‘and find something for me, too?” She drew forth an orange and a cake and gave them to him. Then they munched on, he garrulously, she silently; with what teeth they had between them they must have managed to masticate their food, and there is every probability that they reached their journey’s end without famishing.

We had only two changes to make in our twenty miles, and as we were on the swift train that made the distance in two hours, we did not mind some delay at each change. It was just lunch-time when we reached Wells, and had ourselves driven in the hotel omnibus, a tremendously rackety vehicle, to The Swan. This bird’s plumage was much disarranged by some sort of Easter preparations, and there were workmen taking down and hanging up decorations. But there was quiet in the coffee-room, where over a cold, cold, luncheon we shivered in sympathy with the icy gloom of the basement entrance of the inn, where an office-lady darkled behind her office-window, apparently in winter-long question whether she would be warmer with it shut or open. It was an inn of the old type, now happily obsolescent, which if it cannot smell directly of a stable-yard, does what it can by smelling of the stable-boy in its doorway. We had not, however, come to Wells for the Swan, but for the cathedral, and as we could look out at its loveliness from the window where we ate lunch, we had really nothing to complain of. We had indeed something specially to be glad of, for we could there get our first glimpse of the cathedral through the Dean’s Eye, or if this is not quite honest, from over the Dean’s Eyebrow, so to call the top of the fifteenth-century gate, which commands the finest approach to the cathedral. When you have passed through the Dean’s Eye it may not be quite as if you had passed through the Needle’s Eye; but if I had been an American millionaire who had my doubts of the way I was going I might have fancied myself achieving a feat even more difficult than the camel’s, and to be entering the Kingdom as I crossed the lawn inside the gate, and moved in my rapture towards the divine edifice. All the English cathedrals are beautiful, but among those which are most beautiful the Wells cathedral is next to the cathedral of Ely, in my memory. I am not speaking of stateliness or grandeur, but of that more refined and exquisite something which makes a supreme appeal in, say, the Church of St. Mark’s at Venice. I came away from the Wells cathedral saying to myself that there was a loveliness in it for which there was no word but feminine; and if this conveys any notion to the reader’s mind, I shall be glad to leave him for the rest to any pictures of it he can find.

Of course we followed the verger through it in the usual way, but I could not make any one follow me with as much profit. It had its quaint details, and its grotesque details, from the bursting fun of the ages of faith, as well as its expressions of simple reverence, all blending to the sort of tender beauty I have tried to intimate, and it had its great wonder of an inverted arch, through which one looked at its glories as with one’s head held upside down. I do not know but the 1325 clock of Peter Lightfoot, monk of Glastonbury, is as great a wonder as the inverted arch. We were so fortunate as to be present when it struck the hour, and so we saw the four knights on horseback go riding round, and the seated man kick two small bells with his heels, as he has been doing every fifteen minutes for nigh six hundred years. For the ordinary lay-mind on its travels, I suppose, this active personage is one of the great attractions of the cathedral next after the toothache-man in one of the capitals who pulls his mouth open to show his aching tooth. He has been much photographed, of course, but he is to be seen in situ just above that bishop’s tomb which is sovereign, through the bishop’s merits, for the toothache. The verger, who told us this, left us to suppose that the tomb had been too difficult of application to the tooth of the sufferer above, and that this was why he was still appealing to the public sympathy.

We offered him a mute condolence after we had sated ourselves with the beauty of the most beautiful chapter-house in the world, ascending and descending by the wide, foot-worn, curving sweep of the unique stairway, and then walking through into the Vicar’s Close, and the two rows of Singers’ Houses, like cottages in a particularly successful stage perspective. As we passed one of these histrionic habitations, each with its lifelike dooryard and its practicable gate, three of the clerical students, who have an immemorial right to lodge with the singers, came out gayly challenging one another which way they should walk, and deciding on Tor Hill, wherever that was, and then starting off at a good round pace in the rain. The doubting day had sorrowed and soured to that effect, and when the verger had led us through the cloister aisle into the gardens of the bishop’s palace the grounds were so much like waters that there seemed no reason why the ducks should not have been sailing on the lawn as well as the moat. This, with the embattled wall, is said, and probably fabled, to have formed the defence of his house for a certain bishop whose life was threatened by the monks of Bath, who if they had waited five hundred years in the idea of suddenly descending upon him by our swift train, would have found him prepared to give them a warm reception. But the day of our visit there were no belligerent monks; the place was almost peacefully picturesque, with no protection needed but an umbrella against the rain heavily dripping from the ivy of the ruined cloister arches, and goloshes against the water of the sopping earth.

It was the idea of one of us who had found an ancient almshouse very amusingly characteristic on a former English journey, that we could not do better, after the cathedral, than go to one of the several time-honored charitable foundations in Wells. We had our choice of several, including one for six poor men, and one for twelve poor men and two poor women. But we must have selected the largest, where both poor men and poor women dwell. Such people do not end their days in the snugness of such places with anything of the disgrace which attaches to paupers with us. Their lot is rather a coveted honor, and on their level is felt to add dignity to the decline of life. Each old woman has her kitchen, and each old man his kitchen garden (always edged with simple flowers); and they have a stated income, generally six or seven shillings a week, with which they provision themselves as they please.

We did not find the matron of the place we chose without some difficulty, or some apologetic delay for her want of preparation. But she was really well enough, when she came, though it was charing-day, and the whole house was even better prepared, which was the essential thing. I cannot say that the inmates seemed especially glad to see their poor American relations, but there was no active opposition to our visit, and we did our best to win the favor of three old men shown as specimens in the large common room where they were smoking by the chimney, and, if I am any judge of human nature, criticising the management down to the motives of the original benefactor in the fourteenth century. We had some brief but not unfriendly parley, and after offering a modest contribution towards the general tobacco-fund, we said good-bye to these meritorious old men, who made a show of standing up, but did not really do so, I think. The matron would have left the door open, but I bethought me to ask if they would not rather have it shut, and they said with one voice that they would. I closed it with the conviction that they would instantly begin talking about us, and not to our advantage, but I could not blame them. Age is censorious, poverty is apt to be envious, infirmity is not amiable and we were not praiseworthy. Upon the whole I hope they gave it us good and strong; for I am afraid that the next pensioner whom we visited thought better of us than we deserved. I got the notion that she was in some sort a show pensioner, and that therefore we had not taken her unawares. Her room was both parlor and kitchen, and was decorated no less with her cooking apparatus than the china openly set about the wall on shelves. She was full of smiles and little polite bobs, and most willing to have her room admired, even to the bed that crowded her table towards her grate, and left a very snug fit for her easy-chair. One could see that the matron prized her, and expected us to do so, and we did so, especially, when she showed us a flower in a pot which her son had given her. Perhaps we exaggerated the comforts of her room in congratulating her upon it, but this was an error in the right direction, and we did what we could to repair it by the offer of a shilling. If it is permitted to the spirits of benefactors in heaven to take pleasure in their good deeds on earth, it must have been a source of satisfaction for five hundred years (as they count time here) to the founder of this charity when he thought of how many humble fellow-creatures he had helped, and was helping. Perhaps they do not care, up there; but the chance is worth the attention of people looking about for a permanent investment. I think every one ought to earn a living, and when past it ought to be pensioned by the state, and let live in comfort after his own fancy; but failing this ideal, I wish the rich with us would multiply foundations after the good old English fashion, in which the pensioners, though they dwelt much in common, could keep a semblance of family life and personal independence.

Of course Wells, as its name says, was once a watering-place, though never of so much resort as Bath; but now its healing springs bubble or ooze forth in forgottenness, with not a leper or even a rheumatic to avail of them. It was very, very anciently a mining-town, and long afterwards a shoe-town, with an interval of being a place of weavers, but it was never an industrial centre. It has never even been very historical, though Henry VII. stopped there in his campaign against the Pretender Perkin Warbeck, and after centuries the followers of another pretender — the luckless, worthless, but otherwise harmless bastard of Charles II., the Duke of Monmouth, who was making war against his uncle, James II. — occupied the city and stripped the lead from the cathedral roof for bullets; they otherwise dishonored its edifice, Cromwell’s soldiers having failed to do so. By the beginning of this century the population of the town had dwindled to less than five thousand. But these, in their flat streets of snug little houses, we thought well supplied with good shops, and the other comforts of life, and we found them of an indefatigable civility in telling and showing us our way about. We had still some time to spare when finally their kindness got us to the station of the Somerset and Dorset line, where, as a friendly old man whom we found there before us justly remarked, “Us must wait for the train; it won’t wait for we.”

There was another old man there, in a sort of farmer’s gayety of costume, with leathern gaiters reaching well to his knees, and a jaunty, low-crowned hat, who promptly made our acquaintance and told us that he was eighty years old, and that he had lately led the singing of a Methodist revival-meeting. “And every one said my voice was as strong in the last note as the first.” He then sang us a verse from a hymn in justification of the universal opinion, and in spite of his functional piety was of an organic levity which, with his withered bloom and his lively movement on his feet, recalled the type of sage eternized by Mr. Hardy in Granfer Cantle. Upon the whole we were glad to be rid of him when he quitted the train on which we started together, and left us to the sadder society of a much younger man. He too was a countryman, and he presently surprised me by owning that he had once been a fellow-countryman. He had indeed lived two years in a part of Northern Ohio where I once lived, and the world shrank in compass through our meeting in the Somerset and Dorset line. “And didn’t you like it?”

“Oh, yes; I liked it. After I came back I was the homesickest man! But my wife couldn’t get her health there.” Privately, I thought I would have preferred Glastonbury, where this kindly man got out, to Orwell, Ashtabula County, Ohio; but we all have our tastes, and I made him a due show of sympathy in his regret for my native land.

When our two hours of travel were rather more than up, we found ourselves again in Bath after a day which I felt to have been full of exciting adventure. But I ask almost as little of life as of literature in the way of incident, and perhaps the reader will not think my visit to Wells especially stirring. In that case I will throw in the fact of a calf tied at one of the stations where we changed, and lamentably bellowing in the midst of its fellow-passengers, but standing upon its rights quite as if it had booked first-class. When I add that there was a sign up at this station requiring all persons to cross the track by the bridge, and that without exception we contumaciously trooped over the line at grade, I think the cup of the wildest lover of romance must rim over.

Of our subsequent afternoon in Bristol, what remains after this lapse of time except a pleasing impression? We chose a wet day because there were no dry days to choose from. But a wet day of the English spring is commonly better than it promises, and this one made several unexpected efforts to be fine, and repeatedly succeeded. Bristol is no nearer Bath than Wells is, but there are no changes, and we arrived in half an hour and drove at once through the rather uninteresting streets to the beautiful old church of St. Mary Redcliffe. There we found the verger (or perhaps one should say the sexton) as ready to receive us, having just finished mopping the floor, as if he had been expecting us from the foundation of the church in the thirteenth century. One has not often such a welcome, even from a verger, and I make this occasion to say that few things add more to the comfort of sight-seeing travel than an appreciative verger. He imparts a quality of his church or cathedral to the sight-seer, who feels himself Early English or at least Perpendicular Gothic under his flattering ministrations, and he supplements the dry facts of the guide-book with those agreeable touches of fable which really give life to history.

St. Mary Redcliffe is so rich in charming associations, however, as scarcely to need the play of the sacristan’s imagination for the adornment of her past. She is easily, as Queen Elizabeth so often-quotedly said, “the fairest, the goodliest, and most famous parish church in England,” and is more beautiful and interesting than the cathedral of her city, if not more graceful in form and lovely in detail than any other church in Europe, One scarcely knows which of her claims on the reader’s interest to mention first, but perhaps if the reader has a feeling heart for genius and sorrow he will care most for St. Mary Redcliffe because Chatterton lies buried in her shadow. Or, if he is not buried there, but at St. Andrews, Holborn, in London, as Peter Cunningham claims, there is at least his monument at St. Mary’s Redcliffe to give validity to the verger’s favorite story. The bishop forbade the poor suicide to be buried in the church-yard, and he was interred in a space just outside; but later the vestry bought this lot and enclosed it with the rest, and so beat the bishop on his own consecrated ground. I could not give a just sense of how much the verger triumphed in this legend, but apparently he could not have been prouder of it if he had invented it. He pointed out, at no great remove, a house in or near which Chatterton was born; and he must have taken it for granted that we knew the boy had pretended to find the MS. of his poems in an old chest in the muniment-room, over the beautiful porch of the church, for he did not mention it. He was probably so absorbed in the interest which Chatterton conferred upon St. Mary Redcliffe that he did not think to remind us that both Coleridge and Southey were married in the church. Southey was born in Bristol, and they both formed part of a little transitory provincial literary centre, which flourished there before the rise of the Lake School under the fostering faith of Joseph Cottle, the publisher, himself an epic poet of no mean area.

But St. Mary Redcliffe has peculiar claims upon the reverence of Americans from its monument of Admiral Penn, father of him who founded the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. The formidable old sailor’s gauntlets, cuirass, and helmet hang upon the wall above the monument, and near by is the rib of a whale which John Cabot is said to have slain in Labrador. Less endearing associations for us, and less honorable to the city are those of the slave-trade which Bristol long carried on to her great gain and shame. Slavery was common there, not only in the Saxon and Norman days, but practically far down the centuries into the eighteenth. In the earlier times youths and maidens were roped together and offered for sale in the market; people sold their own children abroad; and in the later times, Bristol prospered so greatly in the exportation of young men and women to the colonies, that when this slavery was finally put an end to, it was found just to compensate her merchants and ship-owners in the sum of nearly a million dollars for their loss in the redemptioners whom they used to carry out and sell for their passage-money. In the strange contemporaneity of the worst and the best things Bristol grew in grace; beautiful churches rose, and then her people fought the fight out of Romanism into Protestantism; in the civil war she held for the Parliament against the King, and was taken by Rupert and retaken by Cromwell. A hundred years after, the great religious awakening to be known as Methodism, began in and about Bristol. Whitefield preached to the miners at Kingswood, and then Wesley, whose help he had invoked, came and preached to all classes, in the town and out, moving them so powerfully to seek salvation, that many who heard him fell down in swounds and fits, and “roared for the disquietness of their hearts,” while tens of thousands were less dramatically saved from their sins. Yet another hundred years and the spirit miraculously responded to the constant prayer of George Müller for means to found the Orphanages, which witness the wonder at this day to any tourist willing to visit them. Without one specific or personal appeal, alms to the amount of three million dollars flowed in upon him, and helped him do his noble work.

Riches abounded more and more in Bristol, but the city continued almost to the nineteenth century in a mediæval inconvenience, discomfort, and squalor. A horse and cart could not pass through her tortuous streets, and trucks drawn by dogs transported her merchandise; down to 1820 heavy wagons were not permitted for fear of damaging the arches of the sewers, and sledges were used. All the same, there was from the beginning a vehement and powerful spirit of enterprise, and Bristol is connected with our own history not only by the voyages of the Cabots to our savage northern shores in the fifteenth century, but by the venture of the Great Western, which, in 1838, made the first steam passage of the Atlantic Ocean. In honor of the relations established by her mariners between the old world and the new, I over-ruled our driver’s genteel reluctance from the seafaring quarter of the town, and had him take us to as much of the port of Bristol as possible. I am not sure that I found the points from which either the Matthew sailed for America in 1497, or the Great Western in 1838, but I am sure that nothing more picturesque could have rewarded my vague search. Among the craft skirting the long quays there was every type of vessel except the Atlantic liner which had originated there; but the steamers, which looked coast-wise and river-going, contributed their full share to the busy effect. This for the moment was intensified by the interest which a vast crowd of people were taking in the raising of a sunken barge. Their multitude helped to embarrass our progress through the heaps of merchandise, and piles of fish, and coils of chain and cordage, and trucks backing and filling; but I would not have had them away, and I only wish I knew, as they must later have known, whether that barge was got up in good shape.

On one shore were ranks of warehouses, and on the other, the wild variety of taverns and haunts of crude pleasure, embracing many places for the enjoyment of strong waters, such as everywhere in the world attract the foot wandering ashore at the end of a sea-leg. Their like may have allured that Anglicized Venetian, John Cabot, when he returned from finding Newfoundland, and left his ship to enjoy the ten pounds which Henry VII. had handsomely sent him for that purpose, as an acknowledgment of his gift of a continent. It is not to be supposed that there were then so many and so large shops as now intersperse the pleasure-resorts in the port of Bristol; I question whether Cabot, if he had strained his eyes over-seas by looking out for new hemispheres, could have found there a whole building lettered over with the signs of an optician, and I do not yet see just why such a semi-scientist should so abound there now. But I shall always be sorry I did not go to him to replace the eye-glasses I had broken, instead of poorly driving to the shop of an optician in one of the best city streets. It was a very handsome street full of shops, such as gave a due notion of the sufficiency of Bristol to all demands of wealth and ease, and I got an excellent pair of glasses; but if I had bought my glasses in the port, I might perhaps have seen the whole strenuous past of the famous place through them, and even “stared at the Pacific” with the earliest of her circumnavigating sons. However, we cannot do everything, and we did not even see that day the cathedral which St. Mary Redcliffe so much surpasses, for anything we know to the contrary. We could and did see the beautiful Norman gateway of the Abbey, which it is no treason to our favorite church to allow she has none to equal, and passing under its sumptuously carven arches into the cathedral we arrived at the side of the regretful verger. He bade us note that the afternoon service was going on, and how the Elder Lady Chapel with its grotesque sculptures in the mediaeval taste, which used to have fun in the decoration of sacred places with all sorts of mocking fancies, was impossible to us at the moment.

But the Bristol cathedral is not one of the famous English cathedrals, and our regret was tempered by this fact, though the verger’s was not. I tried to appease him with a promise to come again, which I should like nothing better than to keep, and then we drove off. We were visiting almost without a plan this storied and noble city, which so much merited to be carefully and intelligently seen, and it was by mere grace of chance that we now happened upon one of the most interesting houses in it. In the graveyard of St. Peter’s Church the hapless poet Richard Savage was buried at the cost of the jailer of the debtor’s prison where he died, and we must have passed the tablet to his memory in finding our unheeding way to St. Peter’s Hospital behind the church. This is one of the most splendid survivals of the statelier moods of the past in that England which is full of its records. A noted alchemist built it, whether for his dwelling or whether for the mystic uses of his art, in the thirteen-hundreds, but it is gabled and timbered now in the fashion of the sixteenth century, and serves as the official home of the Bristol Board of Guardians. Once it belonged to a company of merchant adventurers, and their ships used to float up to its postern-gate, and show their spars through the leaden sash of its windows, still kept in their primal picturesqueness. The whole place within is a wonder of carven mantels and friezes and ceilings; and so sound that it might well hold its own for yet five hundred years longer.

It was the first of those mediaeval houses which gave us a sense of English comfort hardly yet surpassed in modem English interiors; and here first we noted the devotion of the English themselves to the monuments of their past. The Americans who visit objects of interest on the continent are apt to find themselves equalling in number, if not outnumbering their fellow-Anglo-Saxons of English birth; but in England they are a most insignificant minority. The English are not merely globe-trotters, they are most incessant travellers in their own island. They are always going and coming in it, and as often for pleasure as business, apparently. At any rate the American who proposes coming into a private heritage of the past when he visits his ancestral country finds himself constantly intruded upon by the modern natives, who seem to think they have as good right to it as he. This is very trying when he does not think them half so interesting as himself, or half so intelligently appreciative. He may be the most dissident of dissenters, the most outrageously evangelical of low-churchmen, but when he is pushed by a clericallooking family of English country folk, father, mother, sister-in-law, and elderly and younger daughters, almost out of hearing of the vergeress’s traditions of St. Peter’s Hospital, he cannot help feeling himself debarred of most of the rights established by our Revolution. It is perhaps a confusion of emotions; but it will be a generous confusion if he observes, amidst his resentment, the listless inattention of the young girl, dragged at the heels of her family, and imaginably asking herself if this is their notion of the promised holiday, the splendid gayety of the long-looked-for visit to Bristol!

Before my own visit to that city my mind was much on a young Welsh girl whose feet used to be light in its streets, more than a hundred years ago, and who used in her garb of Quaker grandmother to speak of her childhood days there. She had come an orphan from Glamorganshire, to the care of an aunt and uncle at Bristol, and there she grew up, and one day she met a young Welshman from Breconshire who had come on some affair of his father’s woollen-mills to the busy town. She was walking in the fields, and when they passed, and she looked back at him, she found he was looking back at her; and perhaps if it were not for this surprising coincidence, some other hand than mine might now be writing this page. In her Bristol days she did not wear the white kerchief crossed at her neck above the gown of Quaker drab, nor the cap hiding the gray hair, but some youthful form of the demure dress in which one could better fancy her tripping across the field and looking back, in the path where she still pauses, in a dear and gentle transmutation of girlhood and grandmotherhood.

It might have been over the very field where she walked that we drove out to the suburb of Clifton, where Bristol mostly lives. It is the more beautiful Allegheny City of a less unbeautiful Pittsburg, but otherwise it bears the same relation to Bristol as the first of these American towns bears to the last. Nobody dwells in Bristol who can dwell in Clifton, and Clifton has not only the charm of pleasant houses and gardens, with public parks and promenades, and schools and colleges, and museums and galleries, as well as almost a superabundance of attractive hotels, but it is in the midst of nature as grand as that of the Niagara River below the falls. The Avon’s currents and tides flow between cliffs, spanned by Brunei’s exquisite and awful suspension-bridge, that rise thickly and wildly wooded on one side, and on the other, built over to its stupendous verge with shapes of the stately and dignified architecture, civic and domestic, which characterizes English towns. The American invader draws a panting breath of astonishment in the presence of scenery which eclipses his native landscape in savage grandeur as much as in civilized loveliness, and meekly wonders, on his way through that mighty gorge of the Avon, how he could have come to England with the notion that she was soft and tame in her most spectacular moods. He does not call upon the hills to hide his shame, lest the cliffs that beetle dizzyingly above him should only too complaisantly comply. But he promises himself, if he gets back to Bath alive, to use the first available moment for taking a reef in his national vanity where it has flapped widest. Of course it will not do in Bath to wound the local susceptibilities by dwelling upon the surviving attractions of Clifton as a watering-place, but he may safely and modestly compare them with those of Saratoga.

VI. BY WAY OF SOUTHAMPTON TO LONDON

WE left Bath on the afternoon of a day which remained behind us in doubt whether it was sunny or rainy; but probably the night solved its doubt in favor of rain. It was the next to the last day of March, and thoughtful friends had warned us to be very careful not to travel during the impending Bank holidays, which would be worse than usual (all Bank holidays being bad for polite travellers), because they would also be Easter holidays. We were very willing to heed this counsel, but for one reason or another we were travelling pretty well all through those Easter Bank holidays, and except for a little difficulty in? finding places in the train up from Southampton to London, we travelled without the slightest molestation from the holiday-makers. The truth is that the leisure classes in England are so coddled by the constitution and the by-laws that they love to lament over the slightest menace of discomfort or displeasure, and they go about with bated breath warning one another of troubles that never come.

Special trains are run on all lines at Bank holiday times, and very particularly special trains were advertised for those Easter Bank holidays in the station at Bath, but as we were taking a train for Southampton on the Saturday before the dread Monday which was to begin them, we seemed to have it pretty much to ourselves. The Midland road does not run second-class cars, and so you must go first or third, and we being as yet too proud to go third, sought a first-class nonsmoking compartment. The most eligible car we could find was distinctly lettered “Smoking,” but the porter said he could paste that out, and by this simple device he changed it to non-smoking, and we took possession.

We were soon running through that English country which is always pretty, and seems prettiest wherever you happen to be, and though we did not and never can forget Bath, we could not help tricking our beams a little, in response to the fields smiling through the sunny rain, or the rainy sun. It was mostly meadow-land, with the brown leafless hedges dividing pasture from pasture, but by-and-by there began to be ploughed fields, with more signs of habitation. Yet it was as lonely as it was lovely, like all the English country, to which the cheerfulness of our smaller holdings is wanting. What made it homelike, in spite of the solitude, was the occurrence in greater and greater number of wooden buildings. We conjectured stone villages somewhere out of sight, huddled about their hoary churches, but largely the gray masonry of the West of England had yielded to the gray weather-boarding of the more southeasterly region, where at first only the barns and out - buildings were of wood; but soon the dwellings themselves were frame-built.

Was it at otherwise immemorable Shapton we got tea, running into the cleanly, friendly station from the slopes of the shallow valleys? It must have been, for after that the sky cleared, and nature in a cooler air was gayer, as only tea can make nature. They trundled a little cart up to the side of the train, and gave us our cups and sandwiches, bidding us leave the cups in the train, as they do all over England, to be collected at some or any other station. After that we were in plain sight of the towers and spires of Salisbury, the nearest we ever came, in spite of much expectation and resolution, to the famous cathedral; and then we were in the dear, open country again, with white birches, like those of New England, growing on the railroad banks; and presently again we were in sight of houses building, and houses of pink brick already built, and then, almost without realizing it, we were in the suburbs of Southampton, and driving in a four-wheeler up through the almost American ugliness of the main business street, and out into a residence quarter to the residential hotel commended to us.

It was really very much a private house, for it was mainly formed of a stately old mansion, which with many modern additions, actual and prospective, had been turned to the uses of genteel boarding. But it had a mixed character, and was at moments everything you could ask a hotel to be; if it failed of wine or spirits, which could not be sold on the premises, these could be brought in from some neighboring bar. The transients, as our summer hotels call them, were few, and nearly all the inmates except ourselves were permanent boarders, in the scriptural and New England proportion of seven women to one man. It was a heterogeneous company of insular and colonial English, but always English, whether from the immediate neighborhood, or Canada, or South Africa, or Australia. At separate small tables in an older dining-room, cooled by the ancestral grate, or in a newer one, warmed by steam-radiators just put in, we were served abundant breakfasts of bacon and eggs and tea and toast, and table d’hote luncheons and dinners, with afternoon tea and after-dinner coffee in the drawing-room. For all this, with rooms and lights and service, we paid ten shillings a day, and I dare say the permanents paid less. Bedroom fires were of course extra, but as they gave out no perceptible heat, they ought not to be counted, though they had a certain illuminating force, say a five candle-power, and rendered the breath distinctly visible.

We had come down to Southampton in a superstition that, being to the southward, it would be milder than Bath, where the spring was from time to time so inclement, but finding it rather colder and bleaker, we experimented a little farther to the southward, a day or two after our arrival, and went to the Isle of Wight. The sail across the Solent, or whatever water it was we crossed, was beautiful, but it was not balmy, and when we reached Cowes, after that dinner aboard which you always get so much better in England than in like conditions with us, we found it looking not so tropical as we could have liked, but doubtless as tropical as it really was. The pretty town curved round its famous yacht harborage in ranks of slimmer hotel-like houses, with green lattices and a convention of out-door life in their architecture, such as befitted a mild climate; but we were keeping on to the station where you take train for Ventnor, on the southern shore of the island which has to support the reputation of being the English Riviera. We did not know then how bad the Italian Riviera could be, and doubtless we blamed the English one more than we ought. We ought, indeed, to have been warmed for it by the sort of horseback exercise we had on the roughest stretch of railway I can remember, in cars whose springs had been broken in earlier service on some mainland line of the monopoly now employing them on the Isle of Wight, and defying the public to do anything about it, as successfully as any railroad of our own republic. We had a hope and an intention of seeing flowers, which we fulfilled as we could with the unprofitable gayety of the blossomed furze by the way-sides; and more and more we fancied a forwardness in the spring which was doubtless mainly of our invention. From our steamer we had a glimpse of Osborne Castle, the favorite seat of the good queen who is gone, and we wafted our thoughts afar to Carisbrooke, where the hapless Charles I. was for a time captive, playing fast and loose, in feeble bad faith, with the victorious Parliament, when it would have been willing to treat with him. But you cannot go everywhere in England, especially in one day, though home-keeping Americans think it is so small, and we had to leave Newport and its Carisbrooke castle aside in our going and coming between Ryde and Ventnor.

It was well into the afternoon when we reached Ventnor, and took a fly for the time left us, which was largely tea-time, by the reckoning of the girl in the nice pastry-shop where we stopped for refreshment. She said that the season in Ventnor was July and August, but the bathing was good into October, and we could believe the pleasant Irishman in our return train who told us that it was terribly hot in the summer at Ventnor. The lovely little town, which is like an English water-color, for the rich, soft blur of its grays, and blues and greens, has a sea at its feet of an almost Bermudian variety of rainbow tints, and a milky horizon all its own, with the sails of fishing-boats, drowning in it, like moths that had got into the milk. The streets rise in amphitheatrical terraces from the shore, and where they cease to have the liveliness of watering-place shops, they have the domesticity of residential hotels and summer boarding-houses, and private villas set in depths of myrtle and holly and oleander and laurel; some of the better-looking houses were thatched, perhaps to satisfy a sentiment for rusticity in the summer boarder or tenant. The intelligent hunchback who drove our fly, and instructed us in things of local interest far beyond our capacity, named prices at these houses which might, if I repeated them, tempt an invasion from our own resorts, if people did not mind suffering in July and August for the sake of the fine weather in November. Doubtless there are some who would not mind being shut southward by the steep and lofty downs which prevent the movement of air as much in summer as in winter at Ventnor. The acclivities are covered with a short, wiry grass, and on the day of our visit the boys of Ventnor were coasting down them on a kind of toboggans. Besides this peculiar advantage, Ventnor has the attraction, common to so many English towns and villages, of a Norman church, and of those seats and parks of the nobility and gentry which one cannot long miss in whatever direction one goes, in a land where the nobility and gentry are so much cherished.

The day had been hesitating between rain and sun as usual, but it had decided for rain when we left Ventnor, where we had already found it very cold in-doors, over the tea and bread and butter, which they gave us so good. By the time we had got back to Ryde, the frigidity of the railway waiting-room, all the colder for the fire that had died earlier in the day, was such that it seemed better to go out and walk up and down the platform, in the drive of the rain, as hard and fast as one could, than to stay within. In these conditions the boat appeared to be longer in coming than it really was, and when it came it was almost too well laden with the Bank-holiday folk whom we had been instructed to dread. At Cowes, more young men and young girls of a like sort came on board, but beyond favoring us with their loud confidences they did us no harm, and it was quite practicable to get supper. They were of the chorus-girl level of life, apparently, and there was much that suggested the stage in their looks and behavior, but they could not all have been of the theatre, and they were better company than the two German governesses who had travelled towards Ventnor with us, and filled the compartment with the harsh clashing of their native consonants. The worst that you could say of the trippers was that they were always leaving the saloon door open, and letting in the damp wind, which had now become very bitter, but English people of every degree are always leaving the door open, and these poor trippers were only like the rest of their nation in that. One young lady lay with her feet conspicuously up on the lounge which she occupied to the exclusion of four or five other persons, but by-and-by she took her feet down, and the most critical traveller could not have affirmed that it was characteristic of Easter Bank-holiday ladies to stretch themselves out with their feet permanently up on the cushions. When we landed at Southampton, and drove away in a cab, we had an experience which was then novel, but ceased to be less and less so. It seemed that the pier was a private enterprise, and you must pay toll for its use, or else not arrive or depart on that boat.

So many of our fellow-countrymen come ashore from their Atlantic liners at Southampton, and rush up to London in two hours by their steamer trains, without any other sense of the place than as a port of entry, that I feel as if I were making an undue claim upon their credulity in proposing it as a city having a varied literary and historical interest. Yet Southampton is a city of no mean memories, with a history going back into the dark of the first invasions, and culminating early in the fable of King Canute’s failure to browbeat the Atlantic. The men who won Cressy, Poictiers and Agincourt set sail from it, and fifty ships and more made ready there for the Armada. In turn it was much harried by the French, but the Dutch, whom Alva drove into exile, settled in the town and helped prosper it with their industries, till the Great Plague brought it such adversity that the grass, which has served the turn of so much desolation, grew in its streets. With the continuous wars of England and France it rose again, and now it is what every American traveller fails to see as he hurries through it. I have not thought it needful to mention that in the ages when giants abounded in Britain, Southampton had one of the worst of that caitiff race, who was baptized against his will, but afterwards eloping with his liege lady, was finally slain.

The place was so attractive socially, a hundred-odd years ago, that Jane Austen’s family, when they came away from Bath, could think of no pleasanter sojourn. She wrote some of her most delightful letters from Southampton, and of course we went and looked up the neighborhood where she had lived. No trace of that precious occupancy is now left beside the stretch of the ancient city wall from which the Austens’ garden overlooked a beautiful expanse of the Solent, but we made out the place, and for the rest we gave ourselves to the pleasure of following the course of the old city wall, which, with its ivied arches, its towers and battlements all agreeably mouldering and ruinous, is better, as far as it goes, than the walls of either Chester or York, conscious of their entirety, and of their claim upon the interest of travel. Southampton is so very modern in the prosperity which has made it the rival of Liverpool as the chief port of entry from our country, that we ought rather to have devoted ourselves to its docks than its walls, and we did honestly try for them. But there is always something very disappointing about docks, and though I went more than once for a due impression of them at Southampton, I constantly failed of it. I tried coming upon them casually at first; at last I drove expressly to them, and when I dismounted from my cab, and cast about me for the sensation they should have imparted, and demanded of my cabman, “Where are the docks?” and he said, “Here they are, sir,” I could not make them out, and was forced to conclude that they had been taken in for the time.

I had no such difficulty with the prison into which Dr. Isaac Watts’s father was put for some of those opinions which in former times were always costing people their personal liberty. In my mind’s eye I could almost see his poor wife bringing their babe and suckling the infant hymnologist under the father’s prison window; and I was in such rich doubt of Dr. Watts’s birthplace in French Street, that with two houses to choose from, I ended by uncovering to both. I think it was not too much honor to that kind, brave soul, who got no little poetry into his piety, and was neither very severe about theology on earth, nor exigent of psalm-singing in heaven, where he imagined a pleasing conformity in the conditions to the tastes and habits of the several saints in this life. If the reader thinks that I overdid my reverence in the case of this poet, let him set against it my total failure to visit either the birthplace or the baptismal church of another Southampton poet, that Charles Dibdin, namely, whose songs were much on British tongues when Britain was making herself mistress of the seas, and which possibly breathe still from the lips of

“The sweet little cherub who sits up aloft,

Keeping watch o’er the life of poor Jack.”

Early in my English travels I found it well to leave something to the curiosity of after-seekers, and there is so much to see in every English city, town, village, country neighborhood, road, and lane that I could always leave unseen far more than I saw. I suppose it was largely accidental that I gave so much of my time to the traces of the Watts family, but perhaps it was also because both the prison and the house (in which, whichever it was, the mother kept a boarding-house while she nurtured her nine children, and the good doctor began his Greek and Latin at five years of age), were in the region of the old church of St. Michael’s which will form another compensation at Southampton for the American who misses the docks. Its architecture was amongst my earliest Norman, and was of the earliest Norman of any, for the church was built in 1100 by monks who came over from Normandy. It was duly burned by the French two centuries later in one of their pretty constant incursions; they burned only the nave of the church, but they left the baptismal font rather badly cracked, and with only the staple of the lock which used to fasten the lid to keep the water from being stolen. I do not know why the baptismal water should have been stolen, but perhaps in those ages of faith it was a specific against some popular malady, leprosy or the black death, or the like. The sacristan who showed me the font, showed me also the tomb of a bad baronet of the past, a very great miscreant, whose name he could not remember, but who had done something awful to his wives; and no doubt he could easily have told me why people stole the water. He was himself an excellent family man, or at least highly domesticated, if one might judge from his manner with his own wife, who came in demanding a certain key of him. Husband-like, he denied having it; then he remembered, and said, “Oh, I left it in the pocket of my black coat.” He was not at all vexed at being interrupted in telling me about the bad baronet, whose tomb, he made me observe, had not a leaf or blossom on it, though it was Easter Sunday, and the old church, which was beautifully rough and simple within, was decked with flowers for the festival.

Outside, the prevalence of Easter was so great that we had failed of a street cab, and had been obliged to send to the mews (so much better than a livery-stable, though probably not provided now with falcons) for a fly, and we felt by no means sure that we should be admitted to the beautiful old Tudor house, facing the church of St. Michael’s, which goes by the name of King Henry VIII.’s Palace. They are much stricter in England concerning the holy days of the church than the non-conforming American imagines. On Good Friday there were neither cabs nor trams at Southampton in the morning, and only Sunday trains were run on the Great Southwestern to London; though on the other hand the shops were open, and mechanics were working; perhaps they closed and stopped in the afternoon. But we summoned an unchurchly courage for the Tudor house, and when we rang at the postern-gate — it ought to have been a postern-gate, and at any rate I will call it so — it was opened to us by a very sprightly little old lady, with one tooth standing boldy up in the centre of her lower jaw, unafraid amid the surrounding desolation. She smiled at us so kindly that we apologized for our coming, and said that we did not suppose we could see the palace, and then she looked grave, and answered, “Yes, but you’ll have to pay a fee, sir,” I undertook that the fee should be paid, and then she smiled again, and led the way from her nook in it, through one of the most livable houses I was in anywhere in England. By this time the reader will have noted that I was constantly coming in England on houses I would have greedily liked to keep other people from living in; here was a house I would have liked to live in myself; and it was not spoiled for me by being called a palace. This palace of Henry VIII., which is rather simple for a palace, but may very well have been the sojourn of Anne Boleyn and her daughter Queen Elizabeth in their visits to Southampton, was divided above and below into large rooms, wainscotted in oak, of a noble shapeliness, and from cellar to attic was full of good air, without the draughts which the earlier and later English have found advantageous in perpetuating the racial catarrh and rheumatism. The apartments were of varying dignity from the ground floor up, and the basement was So wholesome that before the time of the present owner, who had restored it to its former state, a family with eleven children lived there in the greatest health as long as they were allowed to stay. Even in the attic, the rooms, though rough, were pleasant, and there were so many that one of them had got lost and could never be found, though the window of it still shows plainly from the outside. This and much more the friendly dame recounted to us in our passage through a mansion, which we found so attractive that we of course tacitly proposed to buy it and live in it always. Then she led us out into her kitchen-garden, running to the top of the ancient city wall, and undermined, as she told us, by submarine passages.

But we could only find a flight of stone steps descending to the street level below, where, if the reader is of a mind to follow, he will find the wall falling wholly away at times, and at times merging itself in the modern or moderner buildings, and then reappearing in arches, topped with quaint roofs and chimneys, and here and there turned to practical uses in little workshops, much as old walls are in the dear Italian towns which we Americans know rather better than the English, though the English ruins are befriended by a softer summer, prolonging itself with its mosses and its ivy never sere deep into winters almost as mild as Italy’s. In an avenue reluctantly leaving the ancient wall and winding deviously into the High Street, are the traces, in humbler masonry, of the jambs and spandrels of far older arches in the façade of an edifice presently a cow stable, but famed to have been the palace of that King Canute who was mortified to find his power inferior to the sea’s, and sharply rebuked his courtiers when they had induced him to set his chair in reach of the tides which would not ebb at his bidding. The tides have now permanently ebbed from the scene of the king’s discomfiture, and as this royal Dane was otherwise so able and shrewd a prince as to have made himself master of England if not of her seas, we may believe as little as we like of the story. For my part, I choose to believe it every word, as I always have believed it, and I think it should still be a lesson to royalty, which is altogether too credulous of its relative importance to the rest of the universe.

In the most conspicuous niche of the beautiful old Bargate, which remains sole of the seven portals of the city, and still spans with its archway the High Street hard by where Porter’s Lane creeps into it from Canute’s cow stable, is the statue of another British prince who was to take a seat even farther back than Canute’s, under an overruling providence. In this effigy George III. naturally wears the uniform of a Roman warrior, but perhaps the artificial stone of which it is composed more aptly symbolizes the extremely friable nature of human empire. One never can look at any presentment of the poor, good, mistaken man without the softness of regret for his long sufferings, or without gratitude for what he involuntarily did for us as a people in forcing us to rid ourselves of royalty for good and all; yet with our national prejudice, it is always a surprise for the American to find him taken seriously in England. On the Bargate he seems to stand between us and the remoter English antiquity to which we willingly yield an unbroken allegiance. When I looked on the mediaeval work of the Bargate, I easily felt myself, in a common romantic interest, the faithful subject of Edward III. or Richard III., but when I came down to George III. I had to draw the line; and yet he was a better and not unwiser man than either of the others. You can say of Edward III. that he was luckier in war than George III., but then he had not the Americans to fight against as the allies of the French.

We were so well advised not to fail of seeing the ruins of Netley Abbey, which is such a little way off from Southampton across the river Itchen, that I should strongly counsel, in my turn, all fellow-countrymen arriving on whatever line, to keep half a day from London, and give it to that most beautiful and pathetic place. It was our first ruin in England, but though we saw ruins afterwards of great merit, none ever surpassed it in charm, and none remains so sweet and pensive a memory. From the strenuous modern city you reach this dim, mediæval shadow by way of what they poetically call at Southampton the Floating Bridge, and which, before we came to it, we fancied some form of stately pontoon, but found simply the sort of ferry-boat common in earlier times on American rivers East and West, forced by the tide on supporting chains from one shore to the other. At our landing on the farther side we agreed with the driver of a fly, who justly refused to abate his reasonable charge, to carry us along the borders of the Itchen in a rapture which might have been greater if the wind had not been so bitter. But it was great enough, and when we dismounted at the gate of the abbey, and made our way to its venerable presence over turf that yielded perhaps too damply to the foot, we had our content so absolute, that not the sunniest day known to the English climate could have added sensibly to it. I do not believe that we could have been happier in it even if we had known all the little why and how together with the great when of its suppression by Henry VIII. Even now I cannot supplement the conjecture of the moment by anything especially dramatic from history. Netley Abbey, like the rest of the religious houses which Henry hammered down, was suppressed in the general hope of pillage, defeated by the fact that its income was rather less than a hundred and fifty pounds a year, which even in the money of the time was no great booty. The king had as little to envy those Cistercian monks in their life as their income, except perhaps their virtues, which he would not have wished to share. For, as our faithful guide-book told us, they slept hard on the plank of wooden boxes, and unless food were given them in alms they ate neither fish, flesh, fowl, eggs, butter nor cheese, but only a spare porridge — twice a day, and in Lent once. They never spoke except sometimes in their parlor, on religious topics, and on a journey they could only ask questions, which they must ask if possible by signs. They that transgressed the rules were whipped, or stretched upon the stone floor during mass. For their greater humiliation the heads of the order were entirely shaven, which if the wind blew from the sea in their day, as piercingly as it blew in ours, was not so comfortable as it was picturesque for the monks going about bareheaded in their white robes. Yet their hospitality was great and constant, and their guest-hall was so often full that Horace Walpole, in his much-quoted letter about their ruined house, could speak with insinuation of their “purpled abbots,” as if these perhaps led a life of luxury not shared by the humbler brethren. His picture of the abbey is so charming and so true that one may copy it once again, as still the best thing that could be said of it: “How shall I describe Netley to you? I can only tell you that it is the spot in the world which I and Mr. Chute wish. The ruins are vast and retain fragments of beautiful fretted roofs, pendent in the air, with all variety of Gothic patterns of windows topped round and round with ivy. Many trees have sprouted up among the walls, and only want to be increased by cypresses. A hill rises above the Abbey, enriched with wood. The fort in which we would build a tower for habitation, remains with two small platforms. This little castle is buried from the Abbey, in the very centre of a wood, on the edge of a wood hill. On each side breaks in the view of the Southampton Sea, deep, blue, glittering with silver and vessels. In short, they are not the ruins of Netley, but of Paradise. Oh, the purpled abbots! What a spot they had chosen to slumber in! The scene is so beautifully tranquil, yet so lively that they seem only to have retired into the world.”

What can one have to say of Netley after this, even to the romantic touch of the absent cypresses? We came suddenly upon the ruin, and with little parley at the porter’s lodge where they charge admittance and sell photographs, we stood within its densely ivied walls, the broken arches beetling overhead, and the tall trees repairing their defect with a leafless tracery showing fine against a gray sky hesitating blue, and the pale sun filtering a wet silver through the clouds. In places the architecture still kept its gracious lines of Gothic or Norman design; there were whole breadths of wall to testify of the beauty and majesty that had been, and where walls were marred or shattered, the ivy had bound up their wounds, or tufts of soft foliage distracted the eye from their wrongs. Underfoot the damp grass was starred with the earliest flowers of spring, violets, celandine, primrose; and among the flocks of pigeons that made their homes in the holes of the masonry left by the rotting joists, the golden-billed English blackbirds fluttered and sang. You could trace the whole shape of the edifice, and see it almost as it once stood, but the ivy which holds it up is also pulling it down. The decay seems mostly from the winds and rains, and the insidious malice of vegetation, but men have aided from time to time in the destruction, though not without the censure of their fellow-men. It is told, indeed, that a purchaser of the ruin, two hundred years ago, was so wrought upon by the blame of his friends when he wished to use its hallowed stone for other building, that he began to dream of his own death by a keystone falling from one of the arches he was destroying; his death actually happened, though it was a heavy timber, and not a stone that crushed him. Everything in the neighborhood of the ruin was in keeping with it: a baronial mansion among the woods of an adjoining hill, villas within their shrubbery, and when we came to drive back to the ferry, many pleasant farms and pretty cottages behind their hedges of holly and whitethorn. An unusual number of these were thatched, in the tradition of rustic roofs which is slowly, though very slowly, dying out. The machine-threshed straw is so broken that it does not make a good thatch, and the art of the thatcher is passing with the quality of his material. Still we saw some new thatches, with occasionally an old one so rotten that it must have been full of the vermin which such shelters collect, and which could have walked away with it. Now and then we met country people on our way, looking rather sallow and lean, but our driver, perhaps from his contact with town-bred luxury, had a face of the right purple, and here and there was a rustic visage of the rich, south-of-England color showing warm in the pale sunset light.

When we had seen Netley Abbey, all the rest of the Southampton region was left rather impoverished of the conventional touristic interest, but any friend of man could still find abundant pleasure in it by mounting a tram-top and riding far out towards the Itchen, along winding streets of low brick houses, each with its little garden at the front or side, and with its hedge of evergreen. Often these kindly looking homes were overhung by almond-trees, palely pink, in bloom, and sometimes when they were more pretentious, though they were never arrogant, they stood apart, all planted round with shrubs and trees, like the dwellings in Hartford. The tram’s course was largely through umbrageous avenues, or parklike spaces such as seem to abound at Southampton, with now and then a stretch of gleaming water, and here and there an open field with people playing cricket in it. Swarms of holidaymakers strolled up and down, and though it might be a Sunday, with no signs of a bad conscience in their harmless recreations. There was much evidence of church-going in the morning, but little or nothing in the afternoon. The aspect of the crowd was that of comfortable wage-earners or shopkeepers for the most part, such as the flourishing port maintains in ever-increasing multitude, with none of the squalor which seems so inseparable from prosperity in Liverpool. The crowd affirms the modem advance of Southampton in its rivalry with the commercial metropolis of the north, but we were well content in one of our walks to lose ourselves from it, and come upon a neighborhood of fine old houses, standing in wide grounds, now run wild with neglected groves, but speaking with the voices of their secular rooks of the social glory which has long departed. These mansions meant that once there was a local life of ease and splendor which could hold its own against London, as perhaps the life of no other place in England now does. If you took them at twilight, their weed-grown walks simply swarmed with ghosts of quality, in a setting transferred bodily from the pages of old novels.

We had not the strength, social or moral, which their faded gentility represented, to resist the pull of the capital, and in a few days, shrivelled each to less than its twenty-four hours by the chill spring air, we yielded, and started for London on the maddest, merriest afternoon of all the glad Bank holidays of that Easter time. They have apparently not so much leisure for good manners at Southampton as at Bath, or even at Plymouth; the booking-clerk at the station met inquiries about trains as snubbingly as any ticket-seller of our own could have done, and so we chanced it with one of the many expresses, on first-class tickets that at any other time would have insured us a whole compartment. As it was they got us two seats more luxurious than money could buy in an American train, and we were fain to be content. We were the more content, because, presently, we were running through a forest greater than I can remember as in these latter days bordering any American railroad. Miles and miles of country were thickly wooded on either side, with only such cart-tracks and signs of woodcraft as make the page of Thomas Hardy so wild and primitive after twenty centuries of Briton, Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman, in that often mastered but never wholly tamed England. We came now and then to a wooden farm-house with its wooden barns and outhouses, in an image of home which we would not have had more like if we could: we had not come to England to be back in America. Yet such is the perversity of human nature, that I who here am always idealizing a stone house as the fittest habitation of man, and longing to live in one, exulted in these frame cottages, and would have preferred one for my English dwelling; even the wood-built stations we whisked by had a charm because they were like the clapboarded depots, freight and passenger, at our rustic junctions. Everywhere in England one sees building of wood to an amazing extent, though the lumber for it is not cut from English woods, but comes rather from Norway and elsewhere in the densely timbered north. Of course it did not characterize the landscape even in the region of the New Forest, which but for its name we should think so old, but the gray stone of the West-of-England farmsteads and cottages had more and more given way to the warm red brick of the easterly south. This, as we drew near London, paled to the Milwaukee yellow, here and there, and when this color prevailed it was smirched and smutted with the smoke holding the metropolis hidden from us till we could, little by little, bear its immensity.

VII. IN FOLKESTONE OUT OF SEASON

HOW long the pretty town, or summer city, of Folkestone on the southeastern shore of Kent has been a favorite English watering-place, I am not ready to say; but I think probably a great while. Very likely the ancient Britons did not resort to it much; but there are the remains of Roman fortifications on the downs behind the town, known as Cæsar’s camp, and though Cæsar is now said not to have known of camping there, other Roman soldiers there must have been, who could have come down from the place to the sea for a dip as often as they got liberty. It is also imaginable that an occasional Saxon or Dane, after a hard day’s marauding along the coast, may have wished to wash up in the waters of the Channel; but they could hardly have inaugurated the sort of season which for five or six weeks of the later summer finds the Folkestone beaches thronged with visitors, and the surf full of them. We ourselves formed no part of the season, having come for the air in the later spring, when the air is said to be tonic enough without the water. It is my belief that at no time of the year can you come amiss to Folkestone; but still it is better to own at the outset that you will not find it very gay there if you come at the end of April.

We thought we were doing a very original if not a very distinguished thing in putting our hand-baggage into a fly at the station, and then driving with it from house to house for an hour and more in search of lodgings. But the very first people whom we told said they had done the same, and I dare say it is the common experience at Folkestone, where, even out of season, the houses whose addresses you have seem to be full-up, as the lodging-house phrase is, and where although every other house in the place has the sign of “Apartments” in the transoms, or the drawing-room windows, or both, you have the greatest difficulty in fixing yourself. When one address after another failed us, the driver of our fly began to take pity on us: too great pity for our faith, for we began to suspect him of carrying us to apartments in which he was interested; but we were never able to prove it, and by severely opposing him, we flattered ourselves that we did not finally go where he wanted. Perhaps we did, but if so it was the right place for us. If one landlord had not what we wished, or had nothing, he cheerfully referred us to another, and when we had seen the lodgings we decided were the best, we did not and could not make up our minds to take them until we tried yet one more, where we found the landlord full-up, but where he commended us to the house we had just left as one of singular merit, in every way, and with a repute for excellent cooking which we would find the facts justify. We drove back all the more strenuously because of a fancied reluctance in our driver, and found the landlord serenely expectant on the pleasant lawn beside his house; he accepted our repentant excuses, and in another minute we found ourselves in the spacious sitting-room which had become ours, overlooking the brick-walled gardens of the adjoining houses in the shelter, which slowly, very slowly, became the shade of a grove of tall, slim, young trees. When a trio of tall, slim, young girls intent upon some out-door sport in an interval of the rain, lounged through this grove, we felt that we could not have made a mistake; when a black cat provided itself for one of the garden walls, our reason was perfectly convinced. Fortune had approved our resolution not to go, except in the greatest extremity, to any sort of boarding-house, or any sort of hotel, private, residential, temperant or inebriant, varying to the type of sea-side caravansary which is common to the whole world, but to cling to an ideal of lodgings such as we had cherished ever since our former sojourn in England, and such as you can realize nowhere else in the world.

Our sitting-room windows did not look out upon the sea, as we had planned, but with those brick walls and their tutelary cat, with these tall, slim, young trees and girls before us, we forgot the sea. As the front of our house was not upon the Leas (so the esplanaded cliffs at Folkestone are called), you could not see the coast of France from it, as you could from the house-fronts of the Leas in certain states of the atmosphere. But that sight always means rain, and in Folkestone there is rain enough without seeing the coast of France; and so it was not altogether a disadvantage to be one corner back from the Leas on a street enfilading them from the north. After the tea and bread and butter, which instantly appeared as if the kettle had been boiling for us all the time, we ran out to the Leas, and said we would never go away from Folkestone. How, indeed, could we think of doing such a thing, with that lawny level of interasphalted green stretching eastward into the town that climbed picturesquely up to meet it, and westward to the sunset, and dropping by a swift declivity softened in its abruptness by flowery and leafy shrubs? If this were not enough inducement to an eternal stay, there was the provisionally peaceful Channel wrinkled in a friendly smile at the depth below us, and shaded from delicate green to delicate purple away from the long, brown beach on which it amused itself by gently breaking in a snowy surf. In the middle distance was every manner of smaller or larger sail, and in the offing little stubbed steamers smoking along, and here and there an ocean-liner making from an American for a German port; or if it was not an ocean-liner, we will call it so. Certainly there could be no question of the business and pleasure shipping drawn up on the beach, on the best terms with the ranks of bathing-machines patiently waiting the August bathers with the same serene faith in them as the half-fledged trees showed, that end-of-April evening, in the coming of the summer which seemed so doubtful to the human spectator. For the prevailing blandness of the atmosphere had keen little points and edges of cold in it; and vagarious gusts caught and tossed the smoke from the chimney-pots of the pretty town along the sea-level below the Leas, giving away here to the wooded walks, and gaining there upon them. Inspired by the presence of a steel pier half as long as that of Atlantic City, with the same sort of pavilion for entertainments at the end, we tried to fancy that the spring was farther advanced with us at home, but we could only make sure that it would be summer sooner and fiercer. In the mean time, as it was too late for the military band which plays every fine afternoon in a stand on the Leas, the birds were singing in the gardens that border it, very sweetly and richly, and not obliging you at any point to get up and take your hat off by striking into “God Save the King.” I am not sure what kind of birds they were; but I called them to myself robins of our sort, for upon the whole they sounded like them. Some golden-billed blackbirds I made certain of, and very likely there were larks and finches among them, and nightingales, for what I knew. They all shouted for joy of the pleasant evening, and of the garden trees in which they hid, and which were oftener pleasant, no doubt, than the evening. The gardens where the trees stood spread between handsome mansard-roofed houses of gray stucco, of the same type as those which front flush upon the Leas, and which prevail in all the newer parts of Folkestone; their style dates them of the sixties and seventies of the last century, since when not many houses seem to have been built in Folkestone.

Probably these handsome houses were not meant for the lodgings that they have now so largely if not mostly become. It is said that the polite resident population has receded before the summer-folk who have come in and more and more possessed the place, and to whom the tradesman class has survived to minister. At any rate it is the fate of Folkestone to grow morally and civically more and more like Atlantic City, which somehow persists in offering itself in its wild, wooden ugliness for a contrast as well as a parallel of the English watering-place. Nothing could be more unlike the Leas than the Board Walk; nothing more unlike their picturesque declivity than the flat sands on which the vast hotels and toy cottages of the New Jersey summer-resort are built; nothing more unlike the mild, many-steamered, many-schoonered expanse of the Channel, than the immeasurable, empty horizon, and the long, huge wash of the ocean. Yet, I say, there is a solidarity of gay intent and of like devotion to brief alien pleasures in which I find the two places inseparable in my mind.

If such a thing were possible, I should like to take the promenaders on the Leas whom I saw in April, 1904, and interchange them with the same number of those whom I saw two months before on the Board Walk fighting their way against the northeasterly gale that washed the frozen foam far in under it against the frozen sand. Yes, I should be satisfied if I could only transpose the placid, respectable Bath-chairmen of the Leas, and the joyous darkys who pushed the wheeled wicker-chairs of the Board Walk, and turned first one cheek and then another to the blast, or took it in their shining teeth, as they planted their wide, flat feet, wrapped in carpet, with a rhythmical recklessness on the plank. I should like, if this could be done, to ask the first, “Isn’t this something like Folkestone?” and the last, “Isn’t this like Atlantic City?”

Perhaps it is only the sea that is alike in both, and the centipedal steel piers that bestride it in either. The sea makes the exile at home everywhere, for it washes his native shore and the alien coast with the same tides, and only to-day the moss cast up on the shore at Dover breathed the odor that blows in the face of the stroller on Lynn Beach, or the Long Sands at York, Maine.

We were going by a corner of it to see the landing of the passengers from the Calais boat, and to gloat upon what the misery of their passage had left of them; but before we could reach the deck they had found shelter in their special train for London. It used to be one of the chief amusements of the visitors at Folkestone to witness such disheveled debarkations at their own piers, and we had promised ourselves the daily excitement of the spectacle; but the arrival of the boats had been changed so as to coincide with our lunch hour, and we pretended that it would have been indelicate to indulge ourselves with it when really it was merely inconvenient.

There are entertainments of an inoffensive vaudeville sort in the pavilion on the pier, and yet milder attractions in the hall of the Leas Pavilion, which for some abstruse reason is sunk some ten or twelve feet below the surrounding level. The tea was yet milder than the other attractions: than the fair vocalist; than the prestidigitator who made a dozen different kinds of hats out of a square piece of cloth, and personated their historical wearers in them; than the cinematograph; than the lady orchestra which so often played pieces “By Desire” that the programme was almost composed of them. A diversion in the direction of ice-cream was not lavishly fortunate: the ice-cream was a sort of sweetened and extract-flavored snow which was hardly colder than the air outside.

At Folkestone we were early warned against the air of the sea-level, which we would find extremely relaxing, whereas that of the Leas, fifty feet above was extremely bracing. We were not able always to note the difference, but at times we found the air even on the Leas extremely relaxing when the wind was in a certain quarter. Once, in a long, warm rain, I found myself so relaxed in the street back of the Leas, that but for the seasonable support of a garden wall against which I rested, I do not know how I should have found strength to get home. You constantly hear, in England, of the relaxing and bracing effects of places that are so little separated by distance, that you wonder at the variance of their hygienic qualities. But once master the notion and you will be able to detect differences so subtle and so constant that from bench to bench on the Leas at Folkestone you will be sensible of being extremely relaxed and extremely braced, though the benches are not twenty rods apart. The great thing is to forget these differences, and to remember only that the birds are singing, and the sun shining equally for all the benches.

The sun is, of course, the soft English sun, which seems nowise akin to our flaming American star, but is quite probably the centre of the same solar system. The birds are in the wilding shrubs and trees which clothe the front of the cliffs, and in the gardened spaces on the relaxing levels, spreading below to the sands of the sea; and they are in the gardens of the placid, handsome houses which stand detached behind their hedges of thorn or laurel. This is their habit through the whole town, which is superficially vast, and everywhere agreeably and often prettily built. It is overbuilt, in fact, and well towards a thousand houses lie empty, and most of those which are occupied are devoted to lodgings and boarding-houses, while hotels, large and little, abound. There are no manufactures, and except in the season and the preparatory season, there is no work. Folkestone has become very fashionable, but it is no longer the resort of the conservative or the aristocratic, or even the aesthetic. These turn to other air and other conditions, where they may step out-of-doors, or wander informally about the fields or over the sands. A great number of smaller places, more lately opened, along the everywhere beautiful English shore, supply simplicity at a far lower rate than you can buy formality in Folkestone.

But the birds say nothing of all this, especially in the first days of your arrival, when it is only a question whether you shall buy the most beautiful house on the Leas, or whether you shall buy the whole town. Afterwards, your heart is gone to Folkestone, and you do not mind whether you have made a good investment or not. By this time though the Earl of Radnor still owns the earth, you own the sky and sea, for which you pay him no ground rent. Of your sky perhaps the less said the better, but of your sea you could not brag too loudly. Sometimes the sun looks askance at it from the curtains of cloud which he likes to keep drawn, especially when it is out of season, and sometimes the rainy Hyades vex its dimness, but at all times its tender and lovely coloring seems its own, and not a hue lent it from the smiling or frowning welkin. I am speaking of its amiable moods, it has a muddiness all its own, also, when the Hyades have kept at it too long. But on a seasonably pleasant day, such as rather prevails at Folkestone, in or out of season, I do not know a much more agreeable thing than to sit on a bench under the edge of the Leas, and tacitly direct the movements of the fishermen whose sails light up the water wherever it is not darkened by the smokes of those steamers I have spoken of. About noon they begin to make inshore, towards the piers which form the harbor, and then if you will leave your bench, and walk down the long, sloping road from the Leas into the quaint, old seafaring quarter of the town, you can see the fishermen auctioning off their several catches.

Their craft, as they round the end of the breakwater, and come dropping into the wharves, are not as graceful as they looked at sea. In fact, the American eye, trained to the trimmer lines of one shipping in every kind, sees them lumpish and loggish, with bows that can scarcely know themselves from sterns, and with stumpy masts and shapeless sails. But the fishermen themselves are very fine: fair and dark men, but mostly fair, of stalwart build, with sou’westers sloping over powerful shoulders, and the red of their English complexions showing through their professional tan. With the toe of his huge thigh-boot one of them tenderly touches the edge of the wharf, as the boatload of fish swerves up to it, and then steps ashore to hold it fast, while the others empty a squirming and flapping heap on the stones. The heaps are gathered into baskets, and carried to the simple sheds of the market, where the beheading and disembowelling of fish is forever going on, and there being dumped down on the stones again, they are cried off by one of the crew that caught them. I say cried because I suppose that is the technical phrase, but it is too violent. The voice of the auctioneer is slow and low, and his manner diffident and embarrassed; he practises none of the arts of his secondary trade; he does nothing, by joke or brag, to work up the inaudible bidders to flights of speculative frenzy; after a pause, which seems no silenter than the rest of the transaction, he ceases to repeat the bids, and his fish, in the measure of a bushel or so, have gone for a matter of three shillings. A few tourists, mostly women, of course, form the uninterested audience. A few push-cart dealers were there with their vehicles the day of my visit. Some boys were trying to get into mischief and to compromise some innocent, confiding dogs as their accomplices. One vast fish-woman, in a man’s hat, with enormous hips and huge flanks, moved ponderously about, making jokes at the affair, and shaking with bulky laughter.

The affair was so far from having the interest promised, that I turned from it towards the neighboring streets of humble old-fashioned houses, and wondered in which of them it would have been that forty-three years before a very home-sick, very young American, going out to be a consul in Italy, stopped one particularly black midnight and had a rasher of bacon. It seemed to me that I was personally interested in this incident, as if I had been personally a party to it, and it was recalled for my amusement, how a little old man, in a water-side fur cap of the Dickens type, came to the front-door of that humble house, and, by the dim light of the candle he bore, recognized the two companions of the young American, who had made friends with them on the journey from London, where they dwelt, and where they had left all their aspirates except a few which they misplaced. I think they must have been commercial travellers going to Paris upon some business occasion, and used to the transit of the Channel, which was much more dependent then than it is now, in its beginnings and endings, on the state of the tide, so that it was no surprise either for them or for that old man to meet at midnight on his threshold in a negotiation for supper. He set about getting it with what always calls itself, in no very intimate relation to the fact, cheerful alacrity, and at a rather smoky fire in the parlor grate he set the tea-kettle singing, and burned the toast, and broiled the bacon, which he then put sizzling before his guests, famished, but gay and glad of heart. Even the heavy heart of the very homesick, very young American was lifted by the simple cheer; and it seemed to him that while there might have been and doubtless would be better bacon, there actually was none half so good in the world. He had no distinct recollection of the Channel crossing afterwards, and so it must have been good, and he could recall little of the journey to Paris or the sojourn there. Being as proud as he was poor, he travelled second-class incognito, but some sense of an official quality must have transpired from his mysterious reticence, for at Paris when they were taking different trains from the same station, one of those good fellows came to his car-window to shake hands. It was in that dark hour of the civil war when the feeling between England and America was not the affection of these halcyon days, but the good fellow put it in the form of a kindly gibe. “I say,” he mocked, holding the American’s hand, “don’t make it too ‘ot to ‘old Us, down there?” Then he waved his hand and disappeared, smiling out of that darkness of time and space which has swallowed up so many smiling faces.

That darkness had swallowed up the humble Folkestone house, so that it could not be specifically found, but there were plenty of other quaint, antiquated houses, of which one had one’s choice, clinging to the edge of the sea, and the foot of the steep which swells away towards Dover into misty heights of very agreeable grandeur. In the narrow street that climbs into the upper and newer town, there are curiosity shops of a fatal fascination for such as love old silver, which is indeed so abundant in the old curiosity shops of England everywhere as to leave the impression that all the silver presently in use is fire-new. There are other fascinating shops of a more practical sort in that street, which has a cart-track so narrow that scarce the boldest Bath chair could venture it. When it opens at top into the new wide streets you find yourself in the midst of a shopping region of which Folkestone is justly proud, and which is said to suggest to “the finer female sense,” both London and Paris. Perhaps it only suggests a difference from both; but at any rate it is very bright and pleasant, especially when it is not raining; and there are not only French and English modistes but Italian confectioners; one sees many Italian names, and their owners seem rather fond of Folkestone, of which they may mistake the air for that of the Riviera. I wish they would not guard so carefully from the people at the Leas Pavilion the secret of the meridional ice-cream.

This street of shops (which abounds in circulating libraries) soon ceases in a street of the self-respectful houses of the local type, and from the midst of these rises the bulk of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, to which I addicted myself with my love of the drama without even the small reciprocity which I experience from it at home. In the season, the Pleasure Gardens adjacent are given up to many sorts of gayety, but during our stay there was no merriment madder than the hilarity of a croquet tournament; this, I will own, I had not the heart to go and pay sixpence to see.

But at no season does Folkestone cease to be charming, if not in itself, then out of itself. A line of omnibusses as well as a line of public automobiles runs to the delightful old village of Hythe, which is mainly a single street of low houses, with larger ones, old mansions and new villas on the modest heights back of its sea-level, where the sea is first of all skirted by a horse-car track. The cars of this pass the ruins of certain old martello towers between the sea and the long canal dug at the beginning of the last century as part of the defences against the Napoleonic invasion, apparently in the hope that such of the French as escaped the dangers of the Channel would fall into the canal and be drowned. But the chief object of interest at Hythe, beside the human interest, is the ancient church. It is of the usual mixture of Norman and Gothic characteristic of old English churches, but it has the peculiar merit of a collection of six hundred skulls, which with some cords of the relative bones wellnigh fill the whole crypt. These sad evidences of our common mortality are not æsthetically ordered, as in the Church of the Capuchins at Rome, but are simply corded up and ranged on shelves. The surliest of vergers ventures no fable such as you would be very willing to pay for, and you are left to account for them as you can, by battle, by plague, by the slow accumulation of the dead in unremembered graves long robbed of their tenants. It is hard for you, in the presence of their peculiar detachment, to relate these smiling ground-plans of faces —

“Neither painted, glazed nor framed,” — to anything at any time like the life you know in yourself, or to suppose that there once passed in these hollow shells, even such poor thoughts as do not quite fill your own skull to bursting.

It is, nevertheless, rather a terrible little place, that crypt, and you come out gladly into the watery sunshine, and stray among the tombs, where you are not daunted by the wide bill-board conspicuously erected near the entrance with the charges of corporation, vicar and sexton for burial in that holy ground, lettered large upon the panel. That is the English outrightness, you say, that is the island honesty, and you try, rather vainly, to match it with a like publication in such a place at home which should do us equal credit. Other things were very like country graveyards at home, though not those strange, coffin shapes of stones which lie on so many graves in Kent, and keep the funeral fact so strongly before the living. But there were the grass-grown graves; the weather-beaten monuments, the wandering brambles, the ineffectual flowers. Besides, there was the ever present ivy, ever absent with us; and over the Gothic portal of the church was a grotesque, laughing mask, with open mouth, out of which a sparrow flew from her nest somewhere within the wrinkled cheeks. As if that were the signal for it the chimes began to ring in the square, gray church tower, and to fill the listening air with the sweetest, the tenderest tones. The bells of St. Leonard’s at Hythe are famous for their tenderness, their sweetness, and it was no uncommon pathos that flowed from their well-tuned throats, and melted our hearts within us. Doubtless at the same hour of every afternoon the forbidding verger returns to the crypt which he has been showing to people all day at threepence a head, and weeps for the hardness of his manner with emotional tourists. At any rate the bells have made their soft appeal to him every afternoon for the hundred and fifty-eight years since 1748, when a still older tower of the church fell down, and they were put up with the new one.

The church-yard was half surrounded by humble houses of many dates, and we came down by one of these streets to the main thoroughfare of Hythe at the moment two little girls were wildly daring fate at the hands of the local halfwit, who was tottering after them, with his rickety arms and legs flung abroad as he ran, in his laughter at their mocking. It was a scene proper to village life anywhere, but what made us localize it in the American villages we knew was coming suddenly on the low wooden cottage which stood flush upon the sidewalk, exactly in the way of wooden houses of exactly the same pattern, familiar to our summer sojourn in many New England towns. It might have stood, just as it was, except for its mouldering and mossgrown tile-roof, on any back street of Marblehead, or Newbury port, or Portsmouth, New Hampshire; yet it seemed there in Hythe by equal authority with any of the new or old brick cottages. There are in fact many wooden houses, both old and new, in Hythe and Sandgate, and other sea-shore and inland towns of the Folkestone region; the old ones follow the older American fashion in their size and shape, and the newer ones the less old; for there are summer cottages of wood in the style that has ultimately prevailed with us. Many by the sea emulate the aesthetic forms of these, but in brick, and only look like our summer cottages at a distance. The real wooden houses when not very ancient, are like those we used to build when we were emerging from the Swiss chalet and Gothic villa period, and the jig-saw still lent its graceful touch in the decoration of gable and veranda; and they are always painted white.

In all cases they either look American or make our houses of the like pattern look English in the retrospect. On the line of the South Eastern Railway in Kent are many wooden stations of exactly the sort I remember on the Fitchburg Railroad in Massachusetts. They could have been transposed without disturbing their consciousness; but what of the porter at one of the Kentish stations whom I heard calling the trains with the same nasal accent that I used to hear announcing my arrival at n’Atholl, and n’Orange, Massachusetts? Was he a belated Yankee ancestor, or was the brakeman of those prehistoric days simply his far progenitor? Is there then nothing American, nothing English, and are we really all one?

In the window of the little pastry shop at Hythe where we got some excellent tea, there were certain objects on a lavish platter whose identity we scarcely ventured to establish, but “What are these?” we finally asked.

“Doughnuts,” the reply came, and we could not gasp out the question:

“But where are the baked beans, the fish-balls?” We might well have expected them to rise like an exhalation from the floor, and greet us with the solemn declaration, “We are no more American than you are, with your English language, which you go round with here disappointing people by not speaking it through your nose. We and you are of the same immemorial Anglo-Saxon tradition; we are at home on either shore of the sea; and we shall attest the unity of the race’s civilization in all the ages to come.”

This would have been a good deal for the baked beans and the fish-bails to say, but it would not have been too much. In that very village of Hythe, where we lunched the Sunday after in a sea-side cottage of such an endearingly American interior that we could not help risking praise of it for that reason, there was a dish which I thought I knew as I voraciously ate of it. I asked its honored name, and I was told, “Salt haddock and potatoes,” but all the same I knew that it was inchoate fish-balls, and I believe they had left the baked beans in the kitchen as more than my daunted intelligence could assimilate at one meal. The baked beans! What know I? The succotash, the chowder, the clam - fritters, the hoe-cake, the flapjacks, the corned-beef hash, the stewed oyster, with whatever else the ancient Briton ate— “When wild in the woods the noble savage ran,”

 and felt his digestion affected by a weird prescience of his transatlantic posterity.

They do not serve hot tamales on the Leas of Folkestone yet, and perhaps they never will, now that our national fickleness has relegated to a hopeless back-numbership the hot-tamale-man, in his suit of shining white with his oven of shining brass, and impoverished our streets of their joint picturesqueness. It is possible that in the season they serve other sorts of public food on the Leas, but I doubt it, for the note of Folkestone is distinctly formality. I do not say the highest fashion, for I have been told that this is “the tender grace of a day that is dead” for Folkestone. The highest fashion in England, if not in America, seeks the simplest expression in certain moments; it likes to go to little seashore places where it can be informal, when it likes, in dress and amusement, where it can get close to its neglected mother nature, and lie in her lap and smoke its cigarette in her indulgent face. So at least I have heard; I vouch for nothing. Sometimes I have seen the Leas fairly well dotted with promenaders towards evening; sometimes, in a brief interval of sunshine, the lawns pretty fairly spotted with people listening in chairs to the military band. On bad days — and my experience is that out of eighteen days at Folkestone fourteen are too bad for the band to play in the Pavilion, there is a modest string-band in the Shelter. This is a sort of cavern hollowed under the edge of the Leas, where there are chairs within, and without under the veranda eaves, at tuppence each, and where the visitors all sit reading novels, and trying to shut the music from their consciousness. I think it is because they dread so much  coming to “God Save the King,” when they will have to get up and stand uncovered. It is not because they hate to uncover to the King, but because they know that then they will have to go away, and there is nothing else for them to do.

Once they could go twice a day to see the Channel boats come in, and the passengers sodden from seasickness, limply lagging ashore. But now they are deprived of this sight by the ill-behavior of the railroad in timing the boats so that they arrive in the middle of lunch and after dark. It is held to have been distinctly a blow to the prosperity of Folkestone, where people now have more leisure than they know what to do with, even when they spend all the time in the dressing and undressing which the height of the season exacts of them. Of course, there is always the bathing, when the water is warm enough. The bathing-machine is not so attractive to the spectator as our bath-house, with the bather tripping or limping down to the sea across the yellow sands; but it serves equally to pass the time and occupy the mind, and for the American onlooker it would have the charm of novelty, when the clumsy structure was driven into the water.

I have said yellow sands in obedience to Shakespeare, but I note again that the beach at Folkestone is reddish-brown. Its sands are coarse, and do not pack smoothly like those of our beaches; at Dover, where they were used in the mortar for building the castle, the warder had to blame them as the cause of the damp coming through the walls and obliging the authorities to paint the old armor to keep it from rusting. But I fancy the sea-sand does not enter into the composition of the stucco on the Folkestone houses, one of which we found so pleasantly habitable. Most of the houses on and near the Leas are larger than the wont of American houses, and the arrangement much more agreeable and sensible than that of our average houses; the hallway opens from a handsome vestibule, and the stairs ascend from the rear of the hall, and turn squarely, as they mount half-way up. But let not the intending exile suppose that their rents are low; with the rates and taxes, which the tenant always pays in England, the rents are fully up to those in towns of corresponding size with us. Provisions are even higher than in our subordinate cities, especially to the westward, and I doubt if people live as cheaply in Folkestone as, say, in Springfield, Massachusetts, or certainly Buffalo.

For the same money, though, they can live more handsomely, for domestic service in England is cheap and abundant and well-ordered. Yet on the other hand, they cannot live so comfortably, nor, so wholesomely. There are no furnaces in these very personable houses; steam-heat is undreamed of, and the grates which are in every room and are not of ignoble size, scarce suffice to keep the mercury above the early sixties of the thermometer’s degrees. If you would have warm hands and feet you must go out-of-doors and walk them warm. It is not a bad plan, and if you can happen on a little sunshine out-of-doors, it is far better than to sit cowering over the grate, which has enough to do in keeping itself warm.

One could easily exaggerate the sense of sunshine at Folkestone, and yet I do not feel that I have got quite enough of it into my picture. It was not much obscured by fog during our stay; but there were clouds that came and went — came more than they went. One night there was absolute fog, which blew in from the sea in drifts showing almost like snow in the electric lamps; and at momently intervals the siren horn at the pier lowed like some unhappy cow, crazed for her wandering calf, and far out from the blind deep, the Boulogne boat bellowed its plaintive response. But there was, at other times, sunshine quite as absolute. Our last Sunday at Folkestone was one of such sunshine, and all the morning long the sky was blue, blue, as I had fancied it could be blue only in America or in Italy. Besides this there remains the sense of much absolute sunshine from our first Sunday morning, when we walked along under the Leas, towards Sandgate, as far as to the Elizabethan castle on the shore. We found it doubly shut because it was Sunday and because it was not yet Whit-Monday, until which feast of the church it would not be opened. It is only after much trouble with the almanac that the essentially dissenting American discovers the date of these church feasts which are confidently given in public announcements in England, as clearly fixing this or that day of the month; but we were sure we should not be there after Whit-Monday, and we made what we could of the outside of the castle, and did not suffer our exclusion to embitter us. Nothing could have embittered us that Sunday morning as we strolled along that pleasant-way, with the sea on one side and the sea-side cottages on the other, and occasionally pressing between us and the beach. Their presence so close to the water spoke well for the mildness of the winter, and for the winds of all seasons. On any New England coast they would have frozen up and blown away; but here they stood safe among their laurels, with their little vegetable gardens beside them; and the birds, which sang among their budding trees, probably never left off singing the year round except in some extraordinary stress of weather, or when occupied in 26 — 395 plucking up the sprouting peas by the roots and eating the seed-peas. To prevent their ravage, and to restrict them to their business of singing, the rows of young peas were netted with a somewhat coarser mesh than that used in New Jersey to exclude the mosquitoes, but whether it was effectual or not, I do not know.

I only know that the sun shone impartially on birds and peas, and upon us as well, so that an overcoat became oppressive, and the climb back to the Leas by the steep hill-side paths impossible. If it had not been for the elders reading newspapers, and the lovers reading one another’s thoughts on all the benches, it might have been managed; but as it was we climbed down after climbing half-way up, and retraced our steps towards Sandgate, where we took a fly for the drive back to Folkestone. Our fly driver (it is not the slang it sounds) said there would be time within the hour we bargained for to go round through the camp at Shorncliff, and we providentially arrived on the parade-ground while the band was still playing to a crowd of the masses who love military music everywhere, and especially hang tranced upon it in England. If I had by me some particularly vivid pots of paint instead of the cold black and white of print, I might give some notion in color of the way the red-coated soldiery flamed out of the intense green of the plain, and how the strong purples and greens and yellows and blues of the listeners’ dresses gave the effect of some gaudy garden all round them; American women say that English women of all classes wear, and can wear, colors in their soft atmosphere that would shriek aloud in our clear, pitiless air. When the band ceased playing, and each soldier had paired off and strolled away with the maid who had been simple-heartedly waiting for him, it was as gigantic tulips and hollyhocks walking.

The camp at Shorncliff is for ten thousand soldiers, I believe of all arms, who are housed in a town of brick and wooden cottages, with streets and lanes of its own; and there many of the officers have their quarters as well as the men. Once these officers’ families lived in Folkestone, and something of its decay is laid to their removal, which was caused by its increasing expensiveness. Probably none of them dwell in the tents, which our drive brought us in sight of beyond the barrack-town, pitched in the middle of a green, green field, and lying like heaps of snow on the verdure. The old church of Cheriton, with a cloud of immemorial associations, rose gray in the background of the picture, and beyond the potential goriness of the tented field a sheep-pasture stretched, full of the bloodless innocence of the young lambs, which after imaginably bounding as to the tabor’s sound from the martial bands, were stretched beside their dams in motionless exhaustion from their play.

It was all very strange, that sunshiny Sunday morning, for the soldiers who lounged near the gate of their camp looked not less kind than the types of harmlessness beyond the hedge, and the emblems of their inherited faith could hardly have been less conscious of the monstrous grotesqueness of their trade of murder than these poor souls themselves. It is all a weary and disheartening puzzle, which the world seems as far as ever from guessing out. It may be that the best way is to give it up, but one thinks of it helplessly in the beauty of this gentle, smiling England, whose history has been written in blood from the earliest records of the heathen time to the latest Christian yesterday, when her battle-fields have merely been transferred beyond seas, but are still English battle-fields.

What strikes the American constantly in England is the homogeneousness of the people. We at home have the foreigner so much with us that we miss him when we come to England. When I take my walks in the mall in Central Park I am likely to hear any other tongue oftener than English, to hear Yiddish, or Russian, or Polish, or Norwegian, or French, or Italian, or Spanish; but when I take my walks on the Leas at Folkestone, scarcely more than an hour from the polyglot continent of Europe, I hear almost nothing but English. Twice, indeed, I heard a few French people speaking together; once I heard a German Jew telling a story of a dog, which he found so funny that he almost burst with laughter; and once again, in the lower town, there came to me from the open door of an eating-house the sound of Italian. But everywhere else was English, and the signs of on parle Français were almost as infrequent in the shops. As we very well know, if we know English history even so little as I do, it used to be very different. Many of these tongues in their earlier modifications used to be heard in and about Folkestone, if not simultaneously, then successively. The Normans came speaking their French of Stratford-atte-Bow, the Saxons their Low German, the Danes their Scandinavian, and the Italians their vernacular Latin, the supposed sister-tongue and not mother-tongue of their common parlance. It was not the Latin which Cæsar wrote, but it was the Latin which Cæsar heard in his camp on the downs back of Folkestone, if that was really his camp and not some later Roman general’s. The words, if not the accents of these foreigners are still heard in the British speech there; the only words which are almost silent in it are those of the first British, who have given their name to the empire of the English; and that seems very strange, and perhaps a little sad. But it cannot be helped; we ourselves have kept very few Algonquin vocables; we ourselves speak the language of the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman in the mixture imported from England in the seventeenth century, and adapted to our needs by the newspapers in the twentieth. We may get back to a likeness of the Latin to which the hills behind Folkestone echoed two thousand years ago, if the Italians keep coming in at the present rate, but it is not probable; and I thought it advisable, for the sake of a realizing sense of Italian authority in our civilization to pay a visit to Caesar’s camp one afternoon of the few when the sun shone. This took us up a road so long and steep that it seemed only a due humanity to get out and join our fly driver (again that apparent slang!) in sparing his panting and perspiring horse; but the walk gave us a better chance of enjoying the entrancing perspectives opening seaward from every break in the downs. Valleys green with soft grass and gray with pasturing sheep dipped in soft slopes to the Folkestone levels; and against the horizon shimmered the Channel, flecked with sail of every type, and stained with the smoke of steamers, including the Folkestone boat full of passengers not, let us hope, so sea-sick as usual.

Part of our errand was to see the Holy Well at which the Canterbury Pilgrims used to turn aside and drink, and to feel that we were going a little way with them. But we were so lost in pity for our horse and joy in the landscape, that we forgot to demand these objects and their associations from our driver till we had remounted to our places, and turned aside on the way to Cæsar’s camp. Then he could only point with his whip to a hollow we had passed unconscious, and say the Holy Well was there.

“But where, where,” we cried, “is the pilgrim road to Canterbury?”

Then he faced about and pointed in another direction to a long, white highway curving out of sight, and there it was, just as Chaucer saw it full of pilgrims seven hundred years ago, or as Blake and Stothard saw it six hundred years after Chaucer. I myself always preferred Stothard’s notion of these pious folk to Blake’s; but that is a matter of taste. Both versions of them were like, and they both now did their best to repeople the empty white highway for us. I do not say they altogether failed; these things are mostly subjective, and it is hard to tell, especially if you want others to believe your report. We were only subordinately concerned with the Canterbury pilgrims; we were mainly in a high Roman mood, and Cæsar’s camp was our goal.

The antiquity of England is always stunning, and it is with the breath pretty well knocked out of your body that you constantly come upon evidences of the Roman occupation, especially in the old, old churches which abound far beyond the fondest fancy of the home-keeping American mind. You can only stand before these walls built of Roman brick, on these bricked-up Roman arches, and gasp out below the verger’s hearing, “Four hundred years! They held Britain four hundred years! Four times as long as we have lived since we broke with her!” But observe, gentle and trusting reader, that these Roman remains are of the latest years of their domination, and very long after they had converted and enslaved the stubbornest of the Britons, while at Caesar’s camp, if it was his, we stood before the ghosts of the earliest invaders, of those legionaries who were there before Christ was in the world, and who have left no trace of their presence except this fortress-grave.

Very like a grave it was, with huge, long barrows of heavily sodded earth made in scooping out the bed of the moat, and resting upon some imaginable inner structure of stone or brick. They fronted the landward side of a down which seawardly was of too sharp an ascent to need their defence. Rising one above another they formed good resting-places for the transatlantic tourists whom the Roman engineers could hardly have had in mind, and a good playground for some children who were there with their mothers and nurses. A kindly-looking young Englishman had stretched himself out on one of them, and as we approached from below was in the act of lighting his pipe. It was all, after those two thousand years, very peaceable, and there were so many larks singing in the meadow that it seemed as if there must be one of them in every tuft of grass. It was profusely starred over with the small English daisies, which they are not obliged to take up in pots, for the winter there, and which seized the occasion to pass themselves off on me for white clover, till I found them out by their having no odor.

The effect was what forts and fields of fight always come to if you give them time enough; though few of the most famous can offer the traveller such a view of Folkestone and the sea as Caesar’s camp. We drove round into the town by a different road from that we came out by, and on the way I noted a small brickmaking industry in the suburb, which could perhaps account both for the prosperity of Folkestone and for the overbuilding. Sadly we saw the great numbers of houses that were to be let or sold, everywhere, and we arrived at our lodgings and the conclusion together that four-fifths of the houses which were not to be let whole, were to be let piecemeal in apartments. The sign of these is up on every hand, and the well-wisher of the sympathetic town must fall back for comfort as to its future on the prevalence of what has been waiting to call itself the instructural industry. Schools for youth of both sexes abound, and we everywhere saw at the proper horns discreetly guarded processions of fresh-looking young English-looking girls, carrying their complexions out into the health-giving air of the seas. As long as we could see them in their wholesome, pinkcheeked, blue-eyed innocence, we could hardly miss the fashion whose absence was a condition of one’s being in Folkestone out of season.

Another compensation for being there untimely, as regarded fashion, was a glimpse of the English political life which I had one night in a “Liberal Demonstration” at the Town Hall. This I found as intellectually bracing as my two nights at the theatre were mentally relaxing. It was all the difference between the beach and the Leas, and nothing but a severe sense of my non-citizenship saved me from partaking the enthusiasm which I perceived all round me. I perceived also the good, honest odor of salt fish, such as was proper to the seafaring constituency whom one of the gentlemen on the platform was willing to represent in Parliament as the Liberal candidate. He was ranked in by rows of his friends of both sexes, and on the floor where I sat, as well as in the galleries there were great numbers of women, whom one seldom sees in political meetings at home, and great numbers of young men whom one sees almost as seldom. One lady on the platform, in evening dress, I fancied the wife of the young gentleman in evening dress who was standing (in England candidates do not run) for a neighboring parliamentary constituency, and who presently made an excellent and telling speech. At times the speakers all aimed some remark, usually semi jocose, at the women, and there was evidence of the domestication, the homely intelligence of all ranks and sexes, in English politics, which is wholly absent from ours. The points made against the Tories were their selfish government of the nation in the interest of themselves and their families; the crushing debts and taxes heaped upon the English people by the mismanagement of the Boer war; the injustice of the proposed school law towards Dissenters; the absurdity and wickedness of the preferential tariff. It was all very personal to Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour, but impersonally personal and self-respectful. As I came in the Folkestone candidate was speaking very clearly and cogently, but not very vividly, and the real spirit of the demonstration was not roused till a Liberal member of Parliament followed him in a jovial, witty, and forcible talk rather than a speech. He won the heart of the people, and especially the women, who laughed with him, and helped cheer him; there was some give and take between him and the audience, from which he was bantered as well as applauded; but all was well within the bounds of good-humor and good-manners. He genially roughed the working-men, whom he rallied on not getting everything they wanted, now when they had the vote and could vote what they chose. It was like the talk of a man to his family or his familiar friends, and gave the sense of the closely graduated intimacy of politics possible in a homogeneous community.

He was followed by that gentleman in evening dress, who spoke as forcibly, and addressed himself to the working-man, too, whom he invited to realize their power, and to “take their share in the kingship.” The terms of his appeal made me tremble a little, but they were probably quite figurative, and embodied no danger to the monarchy. Still from a man in evening dress, and especially a white waistcoat, they were interesting; and I came away equally divided between my surprise at them, and my American misgiving for the fact that neither the gentleman proposing to represent a Folkestone constituency nor any of his friends was a resident of Folkestone. Such a thing, I reflected, was wholly alien to our law and custom, and could not happen except where some gentleman wished very much to be a Senator from a State of which he was not a citizen, and felt obliged to buy up its legislature.

VIII. KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS, INCLUDING CANTERBURY

DOVER is a place which looks its history as little as any famous town I know. It lies smutched with smoke, along the shore, and it is as commonplace as some worthy town of our own which has grown to like effect in as many decades as Dover has taken centuries. The difference in favor of Dover is that when at last you get outside of it, you are upon the same circle of downs that backs Folkestone, and on the top of one of them you are overawed by the very noble castle, which too few people, who know the place as the landing of the Calais boat, ever think of. Up and steeply up we mounted, with a mounting sense of never getting there; but at last, after passing red-coated soldiers stalking upward, and red-cheeked children stooping downward to pick the wayside flowers, hardily blowing in the keen sea-wind, we reached the ancient fortress and waited in a court-yard till we were many enough to be herded through it by a warder of a jocosity which I have not known elsewhere in England. He had a joke for the mimic men in armor which had to be constantly painted to keep the damp off; for the thickness of the walls; for the lantern that flings a faint glimmer, a third way down the unfathomable castle well; for the disparity between our multitude and the French father and daughter whom he had shown through just before us. At different points he would begin, “I always say, ‘ere,” and then pronounce some habitual pleasantry. He called our notice to a crusader effigy’s tall two-handed sword, and invited us to enjoy his custom of calling it “‘is toothpick.”

All would not do. We kept sternly or densely silent; so far from laughing, not one of us smiled. In the small chamber which served as the bedroom of Charles I. and Charles II. on their visit to the castle, he showed the narrow alcove where the couch of these kings had once lurked, and then looked around at us and sighed deeply, as for some one to say that it was rather like a coal-cellar. In England, one does not make merry even with by-gone royalty; it is as if the unwritten law which renders it bad form to speak with slight of any member of the reigning family were retroactive, and forbade trifling with the family it has displaced. I knew the warder was aching to joke at the expense of that alcove, and I ached in sympathy with him, but we both remained respectfully serious. His herd received all his humorous comment with a dulness, or a heartlessness, I do not know which, such as I have never seen equalled, in so much that, coming out last, I pressed a shy sixpence into his palm with the bated explanation, “That’s for the jokes,” and his sad face lighted up with a joy that I hope was for the appreciation and not for the sixpence.

We went once to Dover, but many times, as I have recorded, to Hythe, which was once the home of smuggling, and where there is still a little ale-house that poetically, pathetically, remembers the happy past by its sign of “Smuggler’s Retreat.” It is said that there was formerly smuggling pretty much along the whole coast, and there is a heartrending story of charred bales of silk, found in a farm-house chimney, long after they were hidden there, where the hearth-fires of many years had done their worst with them. It grieves the spirit still to think of the young hearts which those silks, timely and fitly worn, would have gladdened or captivated. But Hythe could hardly ever, even in the palmiest days of smuggling, have been a haunt of fashion, though the police-station, in the long, rambling street, had apparently once been an assembly-room, if one might trust the glimpses caught, from the top of one’s charabanc, of the interiors of rooms far statelier than suit the simple needs or tastes of modern crime.

I do not know why my thought should linger with special fondness in Hythe, for all the region far and near was alive with equal allurements. Famous and hallowed Canterbury itself was only an hour or so away, and yet we kept going day after day to Hythe for no better reason, perhaps, than that the charabanc ran accessibly by the corner of our lodgings in Folkestone, while it required a special effort of the will to call a fly and drive to the station and thence take the train for a city whose origin, in the local imagination at least, is prehistoric, and was undeniably a capital of the ancient Britons. The generous ignorance in which I finally approached was not so ample as to include association with Chaucer’s Pilgrims, or the fact that Canterbury is the seat of the primate of all England; and it distinctly faltered before extending itself to the tragic circumstances of Thomas à Becket’s murder. Otherwise it was most comprehensive, and I suppose that few travellers have perused the pages of Baedeker relating to the place with more surprise. The manual which one buys in all places is for the retrospective enjoyment and identification of their objects of interest, and my “Canterbury Official Guide to the Cathedral Church, and Hand-book of the City,” could do no more than agreeably supplement, long afterwards, the prompt information of the indefatigable German.

The day which chose us for our run up from Folkestone was a heavenly fourth of May, when the flowers had pretty well all come up to reassure the birds of spring. There were not only cowslips and primroses in their convertible yellow, but violets visible if not recognizable along the railway sides, and the cherry-trees which so abound in Kent were putting on their clouds of bridal white and standing in festive array between the expanses of the hop-fields, in a sort of shining expectation. At first you think there cannot be more of anything than of the cherry-trees in Kent, which last so long in their beauteous bloom, that for week after week you will find them full-flower, with scarcely a fallen petal. But by-and-by you perceive that there are more hop-vines than even cherry-trees in Kent; and that trained first to climb their slender poles, and then to feel their way along the wires crossing everywhere from the tops of these till the whole landscape is netted in, they are there in an insurpassable plenitude. As yet, on our fourth of May, however, the hops, in mere hint of their ultimate prevalence, were just out of the ground, and beginning to curl about their poles, while the cherry-trees were there as if drifted by a blizzard of bloom. Here and there a pear-tree trained against a sunny wall attempted a rivalry self-doomed to failure; but the yellow furze gilded the embankments and the backward-flying plain with its honied flowers, already neighbored by purple expanses of wild hyacinth. What, in the heart of all this blossoming, was the great cathedral itself, when we came in sight of it, but a vast efflorescence of the age of faith, mystically beautiful in form, and gray as some pale exhalation from the mould of the ever-cloistered, the deeply reforested past?

Canterbury Cathedral, however, though it is so distinctive, and is the chief of the sacred edifices which have in all Christian times incomparably enriched the place, might be lost from it and be less missed than from any other town of cathedral dignity. Without it Canterbury would still be worthy of all wonder, but with it, what shall one say? There is St. Martin’s, there is St. Mildred’s, there is St. Alphege’s, there is the Monastery of St. Augustine, there is St. Stephen’s, there is St. John’s Hospital, and I know not what other pious edifices to remember the Roman and Saxon and Norman and English men, who, if they did not build better than they knew, built beautifuler than we can. But of course the cathedral towers above them all in the sky and thought, and I hope no reader of mine will make our mistake of immuring himself in a general omnibus for the rather long drive to the sacred fane from the station. A fly fully open to the sun, and creeping as slowly as a fly can when hired by the hour, is the true means of arrival in the sacred vicinity. In this you may absorb every particular of the picturesque course over the winding road, across the bridge under which the Stour rushes (one marvels whither, in such haste), overhung with the wheels of busy mills and the balconies of idle dwellings, in air reeking of tanneries, and so into the city by streets narrowing and widening at their own caprice, with little regard to the convenience of the shops. These seem rather to thicken about the precincts of the cathedral, where among those just without is a tiny restaurant which thinks itself almost a part of the church, and where some very gentlewomanly young women will serve you an excellent warm lunch in a room of such mediaeval proportion and decoration that you can hardly refuse to believe yourself a pilgrim out of Chaucer. If the main dish of the lunch is lamb from the flocks which you saw trying to whiten the meadows all the way from Folkestone, and destined to greater success as the season advances, the poetic propriety of the feast will be the more perfect. After you have refreshed yourself you may sally out into the Mercery Lane whither the pilgrims used to resort for their occasions of shopping, and where the ruder sort kept up “the noise of their singing, with the sound of their piping, and the jingling of their Canterbury bells,” which they made in all the towns they passed through on their devout errand. They were in Canterbury, according to good William Thorpe, who paid for his opinions by suffering a charge of heresy in 1405, “more for the health of their bodies than their souls.... And if these men and women be a month in their pilgrimage, many of them shall be an half year after great janglers, tale-tellers, and liars. They have with them both men and women that sing well wanton songs.” But what of that, the archbishop before whom Thorpe was tried effectively demanded. “When one of them that goeth barefoot striketh his foot against a stone... and maketh him to bleed, it is well done that he or his fellow beginneth then a song... for to drive away with such mirth the hurt of his fellow. For with such solace the travel and weariness of pilgrims is lightly and merrily brought forth.”

Nevertheless, in spite of this archiepiscopal reasoning, the pilgrims seem to be largely a godless crew whom, if my reader has come in their company to Canterbury, he will do better to avoid while there, and betake himself at once to the cathedral when he has had his luncheon. It is easily of such interest, historical and architectural, that he may spend in it not only all that is left him of his fourth of May, but many and many days of other months before he has exhausted it. The interest will rather exhaust him if he forms one of that troop of twentieth-century pilgrims who are led sheeplike through the edifice under the rod of the verger. We fell to a somewhat severe verger, though the whole verger tribe is severe, for that matter, and were snubbed if we ventured out of the strict order of our instruction at the shrine where Thomas à Becket, become a saint by his passive participation in the act, was murdered. One lady who trespassed upon the bounds pointed out as worn in the stone by the knees of more pious pilgrims, in former ages, was bidden peremptorily “Step back,” and complied in a confusion that took the mind from the arrogant churchman slain by the knights acting upon their king’s passionate suspiration, “Is there no one to deliver me from this turbulent priest?”

Perhaps it was not the verger alone that at Canterbury caused the vital spirits to sink so low. There was also the sense of hopelessness with which one recalled a few shadowy details of the mighty story of the church, including, as it does, almost everything of civility and art in the successive centuries which have passed, eight of them, since it began to be the prodigious pile it is. St. Thomas, who, since he was so promptly canonized, must be allowed a saint in everything but meekness, is the prime presence that haunts the thought of the visitor, and yet it is no bad second if the French Protestant refugees, whom Elizabeth allowed to hold their services in the crypt, and who lived where they worshipped in their exile, possess it next; the Black Prince’s armor and effigy are not in it, with these. The crypt is no longer their dwelling-place, but their rites (I suppose Calvinistic) are still solemnized there; and who knows but if the savage Puritans, who imagined they were abolishing episcopacy when they were destroying beauty, had been a little less barbarous they might not now enter third among the associations of the cathedral? We cannot doubt the sincerity of their self-righteousness, and there is a fine thrill in the story of how they demolished “the great idolatrous window standing on the left hand as you go up into the choir,” if you take it in the language of the minister Richard Culmer, luridly known to neighboring men as “Blue Dick.” He himself bore a leading part in the vandalism, being moved by especial zeal to the work, not only because “in that window were seven large pictures of the Virgin Mary, in seven large glorious appearances,” but because “their prime cathedral saint, Archbishop Becket, was most rarely pictured in that window, in full proportion, with cope, rochet, crozier, and his pontificalibus.... A minister,” the godly Blue Dick tells us, modestly forbearing to name himself, “was on top of the city ladder, near sixty steps high, with a whole pike in his hand, rattling down proud Becket’s glassy bones, when others present would not venture so high.”

Of course, of course, it is all abominable enough, but it is not contemptible. The Puritans were not doing this sort of thing for fun, though undoubtedly they got fun out of it. They believed truly they were serving God in the work, and they cannot be left out of any count that sums up the facts making the English churches so potent upon the imagination. These churches were of a powerfuler hold upon my age than those that charmed my youth in Italy, because they bore witness not only to the great political changes in the life about them, but also to the succession of religious events. The order of an unbroken Catholicism is not of so rich a picturesqueness or so vital an importance as the break from the Roman Church, and then the break from the English Church, the first protestantism obeying the king’s will and the second the people’s conscience. Each was effected with ruinous violence, but ruin for ruin, that wrought by Henry VIII. is of twice the quantity and quality of that wrought by the zealots of the Commonwealth. When they tell you in these beautiful old places that Cromwell did so and so to devastate or desecrate them, you naturally, if you are a true American, and inherit in spirit the Commonwealth, take shame to yourself for brave Oliver; but you need not be in such haste. There was a Thomas Cromwell, who failed to “put away ambition,” when bidden by the dying Wolsey, and who served his king better than his God; and it was this Cromwell far more than Oliver Cromwell who spoiled the religious houses and the churches. A hundred years before the righteous Blue Dick “rattled down proud Becket’s glassy bones,” there were royal commissioners who rattled out the same martyr’s real bones, and profaned his tomb in such wise that one cannot now satisfy the piety which drew the pilgrims in such multitude to his knee-worn shrine. It is to be said for the first Cromwell and his instruments, who were not too good to stable their horses in a church here and there, like the Puritan troopers who hardly bettered their instruction, that they would forbear their conscientious violence if the churchmen would pay enough, whereas no bribe could stay the hands of such followers of the second Cromwell as Blue Dick when once they lifted their hands against “cathedral saints.”

We revered whatever was venerable in the cathedral, and then came rather wearily out and sat down to rest on a friendly bench commanding a view of as much of the edifice as the eye can take in at a glance. That was much more than the pen could tell in a chapter, and I will only generalize the effect as such rich repose for soul and body as I should not know where else to find again. We sat there in a moment of positive sunshine, which poured itself from certain blue spaces in a firmament of soft white clouds. The towers and pinnacles of the mighty bulk, which was yet too beautiful to seem’ big, soared among the tender forms, the English sky is so low and the church was so high; and in and out of the coigns and crevices of its Norman, and early English, and Gothic, the rooks doing duty as pigeons, disappeared and appeared again. Naturally, there were workmen doing something to the roofs and towers, but as if their scaffolding was also Norman, and Gothic, and early English, it did not hurt the harmony of the architecture. When we could endure no more of the loveliness, we rose, and went about peering among the noble ruins of the cathedral cloisters, the work of the first Cromwell who tried to fear God in honoring the king, not the second Cromwell, who tried to honor God without fearing the king.

These are somehow more appealing than the ruins of St. Augustine’s monastery, which is still a school for missionaries in its habitable parts. He began to build it while King Ethelbert yet mourned, in his conversion, for his Christian Queen Bertha, but it was a thousand years growing to the grandeur which Henry VIII. spared and appropriated, and in which it remained to be the sojourn of all the sovereigns visiting Canterbury from his time till that of Charles II. It is not clear how it fell into its present dignified dilapidation, through the hands to which it was granted from age to age; but it could not be a more sightly or reverently kept monument. The missionary school is like some vigorous growth clothing with new sap the flank of a mouldering trunk long since dead. It is interesting, it is most estimable; it tenderly preserves and uses such portions of the ancient monastery as it may; but the spirit turns willingly from it, and goes and hangs over some shoulder of orchard wall, and gloats upon the picturesqueness of broken, sky-spanning arches, ivied from their pillar bases to the tops of their mutilated spandrels.

It was here, I think, that we first saw that curious flintwork which so abounds in the parts of Kent: the cloven pebbles of black-rimmed white set in walls of such pitiless obduracy that the sense bruises itself against them, and comes away bleeding. The monks who wove these curtains of checkered masonry, what an adamantine patience they must have had! But the labor was the least part of their bleak life, which was well put an end to, soon after it was corrupted into something tolerable by the vices attributed to them. Vicious they could not have been in the measure that the not over-virtuous destroyers of their monasteries pretended, and I think that amid the ruins of their houses one may always rather fitly offer their memory the oblation of a pitying tear. I am not sure whether it was before or after we had visited the still older scene of St. Augustine’s missionary effort at the church of St. Martin, that I paid some such tribute to his successors at the monastery; but the main thing is to have visited St. Martin’s at any time. It is so old as to have forgotten not only its founders, who are dimly conjectured to have been some Christian soldiers of the Roman garrison in about the year 187, but also the name of its first tutelary saint, for St. Martin was not yet born when St. Martin’s was built. He died about 395, and his fame crossed over from France with the good Bertha, when she came to wed the heathen King Ethelbert, of whose heathenism, with St. Augustine’s help, she made such short and thorough work that after her death he became a Christian himself, and after his own death a saint. She dedicated the little Roman church to St. Martin, and she lies buried, in a recess of the wall beside the chancel. The verger who showed us her stone coffin in its nook said, with a seeking glance from the corner of his eye: “This is where she is supposed to be buried. They say she is buried in two other places, but I think, as there is nothing to prove it, they might as well let her rest here.”

He was probably right, and he was of a subacid saturnine humor which suited so well with the fabulous atmosphere of the place, or else with our momentary mood, that we voted him upon the whole the most sympathetic sexton we had yet known. He made, doubtless not for the first time, demurely merry with the brass of a gentleman interred beneath the chancel, who, being the father of three sons and ten daughters, was recorded to have had “many joys and some cares,” and with the monumental stone of a patriarch who had died at a hundred and of whom he conjectured grimly that if he had not so many joys as his neighbor, he had fewer cares, since he had never married. If these jokes KENTISH NEIGHBORHOODS were the standard drolleries purveyed to all travellers, we yet imputed from them a more habitual humor to the English race than Americans are willing to give it credit for. I still fancy something national in his comment on the seven doors, now all but one walled up in the side of the church: Roman and Saxon and Norman doors, which formed a pretty fair allowance of exit from a place not much more than thirty feet long, even if one of the Saxon doors was appropriated to the Evil One for his sole use in retreating when hard pressed by the sermon within. I believe, or I wish to believe, that our verger’s caustic wit spared that sad memorial of past suffering and sorrow which one comes upon again and again in the old English churches, and which was called the Lepers’ Squint in days when the word had no savor of mocking, and meant merely the chance of the outcasts to see the worship which their affliction would not suffer them to share.

It would be a pity to seem in any sort wanting in a sense of the solemnity of that pathetic temple, so old, so little, so significant of the history of the faith and race. The tasteful piety which is so universal in England, and is of such constant effect of godliness in an age not otherwise much vowed to it, keeps the revered place within and without in perfect repair; and I hope it is not too fantastic to suppose it in tacit sympathy with any stranger who lingers in the church-yard, and stays and stays for the beautiful prospect of Canterbury from its height. We drove from it through some streets of old houses stooped and shrunken with age, to that doting monument of the past which calls itself the Dane John, having forgotten just what its right name is. The immemorial mound, fifty feet high, which now forms the main feature of a pretty public garden, is fabled to be the monstrous barrow of those slain in a battle between the Danes and Saxons, but it need not be just that to “tease us out of thought” of our times; for wars are still as rife as in its own century, and dead men’s bones can still be heaped skyward on the bloody fields. Some sixty or seventy years ago a public-spirited citizen of Canterbury planned and planted the pleasaunce one may now enjoy there, if one will leave one’s carriage at the gate and stroll through it. Half of our little party preferred resting in the fly, seeing which a public-spirited citizeness came and protested against the self-denial with much entreaty. This unknown lady, hospitable and kindly soul, we afterwards fancied tardily fulfilling a duty to the giver of the garden which other ladies earlier spurned, if we may trust a local writer to whose monograph I owe more than I should like to own. “The gentry — for here in Canterbury, as elsewhere, we have our jarring spheres — consider the place unfashionable, and frequent it very little, because it is much frequented by the tradespeople, the industrious classes, and the soldiery; who, one and all, behave with exemplary propriety.”

Another day of May, not quite so elect as our Canterbury fourth, we went to the village of Eelham, nearer Folkestone, and there found ourselves in a most alluring little square with an inn at one corner and divers shops, and certain casual, wide-windowed, brick cottages enclosing it, and a windmill topping the low height above it. Windmills are so characteristic of Eelham Valley that we might not forbear visiting this, and I found the miller of as friendly and conversible a leisure as I could ask. Perhaps it was because he had a brother in Manitoba that we felt our worlds akin; perhaps because the varied experience of my own youth had confessedly included a year of milling. He said that he ground all kinds of grain, except wheat, for which the stones were too coarse, and he took toll of every third bushel, which did not seem too little. I should have liked to spend the day in his company, where I perceived I might be acceptably and comfortably silent when I would.

There must have been a church at Eelham, but there was a more noted church at Lyminge, two miles away, whither we decided to walk. The main object of interest at Eelham was an old Tudor manor-house, which we had not quite the courage, or perhaps the desire, to ask to see except from the outside. The perspective from the sidewalk through the open doorway included a lady on a step-ladder papering the entry wall, and presently another lady, her elder, going in-doors from the garden, who was not averse to saying that there was plenty of room in the house, but it was much out of repair. We inferred that we were not conversing with the manorial family; when we asked how far it was to Lyminge, this old lady made it a half-mile more than the miller; and probably the disrepair of the mansion was partly subjective.

The road to Lyminge was longer than it was broad, though its measure was in keeping with an island where the roads cannot be of our continental width. It opened to a sky smaller than ours, but from which there fell a pleasant sunshine with bird-singing in it; and there was room enough on the borders of the lane for more wild flowers than often grow by our waysides. When the envious hedges suffered us a glimpse of them we saw gentle fields on either hand, and men at work in their furrows. From time to time we met bicyclers of both sexes, and from time to time people in dog-

419’ carts. Once we met a man with a farm-cart, who seemed willing, though dull, when we asked our way. “Turn to left just inside the windmill,” he directed us; and by keeping outside of the mill, on a height beyond, we got to Lyminge.

I am sorry to report of the pastry-shop there that we had with our tea the only rancid butter offered us in England, and that in a country where the bread is always heavy and damp, it was here a little heavier and damper than elsewhere. But we were at Lyminge not for the pastry-shop, but the church, and that did not disappoint us, even to the foundation of the Roman edifice which is kept partly exposed beside it. The actual church is very Norman, and it is of that chilly charm which all Norman churches are of when the English spring afternoon begins to wane. From the tower down through the dim air dangled long bell-ropes bound with red stuff where the ringers seized them, and we heard, or seem now to have heard, that there had lately been a bell-ringing contest among them which must have stirred Lyminge to its centre. The day of our visit was market-day, and there had been cattle sales which left traces of unwonted excitement in the quiet streets, and almost thronged the bleak little station with the frequenters of the fair. One of these was of a type which I imagine is alien to the elder country life. The young man who embodied it was so full of himself, and of his day’s affairs, for which he was appropriately costumed in high boots and riding-breeches, that he overflowed in confidences to the American stranger. He told what cattle he had bought and what sold, and he estimated his gains at a figure which I hope was not too handsome. In return he invited the experience of the stranger whom he brevetted a cattle-dealer of perhaps a more old-fashioned kind, but whose errand at Lyminge on market-day was doubtless the same as his own. It was mortifying not to be able to comply, but my thoughts were still busy with the somewhat ghostly personage whom we had found deciphering an inscription on a stone in the church-yard, and whose weirdness was heightened by an impediment in his speech. He was very kind in helping us out in our mild curiosity, and I hope he has felt that brace in the change of air to Lyminge from Folkestone which he offered as a reason for his being where we met him. But he liked Lyminge, he said, and if one does hot care much for the movements of great cities there may be worse places than the church-yard of Lyminge, where we left him in the waning light, gently pushing, not scraping, the moss from — the lay Graved on a Stone beneath the aged thorn.

If the reader thinks we were too easily satisfied with the events of our excursion, he can hardly deny that the children and their mothers or aunts or governesses getting into the trains at the little country stations, with their hands full of wild flowers, and eyes bluer than their violets, were more than we had a right to. When at one of these stations a young man, with county-family writ large upon his face and person and raiment, escaped from a lady who talked him into the train, and then almost talked him out of it before it could start, we felt blessed beyond our desert. We dramatized, out of our superabundant English fiction, the familiar situation of the pushing and the pushed which is always repeating itself; and in the lady’s fawning persistence, and his solid, stolid resistance we had a moment of the CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS sort of social comedy which should provoke tears rather than smiles. But the pushed always yield to the pusher in the end. This adamantine aristocrat, if such he was, was utimately to be as putty between the fingers of the parvenue, if such she was, and since she was middle-aged enough to be the mother of a marriageable daughter we foresaw her ultimately giving him her child with tears of triumph.

Travel is obliged to make up these little romances, or else it is apt to feel that it has had no genteel experiences, since it necessarily moves on the surfaces and edges of life. I was glad of any chance of the sort, and even of the humbler sort of thing which offered itself more explicitly, such as the acquaintance of a milkman and a retired exciseman, with whom I found myself walking outside of the pretty town of Rye on a May morning of sunny rain. At the entrance of a hop-field, where there was a foot-path inviting our steps across lots, the milkman eliminated himself with his cans and left us with the fact that hop-raising was not everything to the farmer that could be wished, and that if, after all his expenses, he could clear up a pound an acre at the end of the season, he was lucky. Up to that moment our discourse had been commonplace and business-like, but now it became sociological, it became metaphysical, it became spiritual, as befitted the conversation of a Scotchman and an American. The Englishman had been civil and been kind; he was intelligent enough in the range of his experiences; but he was not so vividly all there as the Scotch body, who eagerly inquired of the state of Presbyterianism among us. He did not push the question as to my own religious persuasion, but I met nowhere any Briton so generally interested in us. In the feeling promoted by this interest of his, we united in a good opinion of his actual sovereign, whom it was fit, as a pensioner who had been “for-r-ty years in his Majesty’s sar-r-vice,” he should praise as “a good-natured gentleman.” As for the late queen he had no terms to measure his affection and reverence for her. I do not know now by what circuit we had reached these topics from the Scriptural subjects with which we started, or how it was he came to express the strong sense he had of the Saviour’s civility to the woman of Samaria, as something that should be “a lesson to our gentry” in kindly behavior to the poor.

Wherever he now is, I hope my friendly Scot is well, and I am sure he is happy. Our weather included, from the time we met till we parted after crossing the wide salt-marsh stretching between Rye and the sea, every vicissitude of sun and rain, with once a little hail; but I remember only an unclouded sky, which I think was his personal firmament. I left him at the little house of the daughter whom he said he was visiting, outside the only town-gate that remains to Rye from its mediæval fortifications. There is a small parade, or promenade, at a certain point near by, fenced with peaceful guns, from which one may overlook all that wide level stretching to the sea — with a long gash of ship-channel and boats tilted by the ebb on its muddy shores — and carrying the eye to the houses and vessels of the port. Rye itself was once much more impressively the port, but the sea left it, long and long ago, standing like the bold headland it was, and still must look like when the fog washes in about its feet. It is an endearing little town, one of hundreds (I had almost said thousands) in England, with every comfort in the compass of its cosey streets; with a church, old, old, but not too dotingly Norman, and a lane opening from it to the door of a certain house where one might almost live on the entrancing perspective of its tower and its graveyard trees. A damp blind beggar on a stone, who was never dry in his life, and was, of course, a mere mass of rheumatic aches and pains, is a feature common to so many perspectives in England that he need not be dwelt upon. What is precious about Rye is that with its great charm it does not insist upon being dramatically different from those hundreds or thousands of other lovely old towns. It keeps its history to itself, and I would no more invite the reader to intrude upon its past than I would ask him to join me in invading the private affairs of any English gentleman. A few people who know its charm come down from London for the summer months; but there is a reasonable hope that it will never be newer or other than it is. I myself would not have it changed in the least particular. I should like to go there May after May as long as the world stands, and hang upon the parapet of the small parade and look dreamfully seaward over the prairie-like level, and presently find myself joined by a weak-eyed, weak-voiced elder who draws my attention to the blossoming hawthorns beside us. One is white and one is pink, and between them is a third of pinkish-white. He wishes to know if it is so because the bees have inoculated it, and being of the mild make he is, he rather asks than asserts, “They do inockerlate ‘em, sir?”

IX. OXFORD

THE friendly gentleman in our railway carriage who was good enough to care for my interest in the landscape between London and Oxford (I began to express it as soon as we got by a very broad, bad smell waiting our train, midway, in the region of some sort of chemical works) said he was going to Oxford for the Eights. Then we knew that we were going there for the Eights, too, though as to what the Eights are I have never been able to be explicit with myself to this day, beyond the general fact that they are intercollegiate boat-races and implicate Bumps, two of which we saw with satisfaction in due time. But while the towers of Oxford were growing from the plain, a petrified efflorescence of the past, lovelier than any new May-wrought miracle of leaf and flower, we had no thought but for Oxford, and Eights and Bumps were mere vocables no more resolvable into their separate significances than the notes of the jargoning rooks flying over the fields, or the noises of the station where each of our passengers was welcomed by at least three sons or brothers, and kept from claiming somebody else’s boxes in the confiding distributions from the luggagè-vans. As our passengers were mostly mothers and sisters, their boxes easily outnumbered them, and if a nephew and cousin or next friend had lent his aid in their rescue in the worst cases, it could not have been superfluous. The ancient town is at other times a stronghold of learning, obedient to a tradition of cloistered men in whom the cloistered monk of other days still lingers, but at this happy time it was overflowed to its very citadel by a tide of feathered hats, of clinging and escaping scarfs, of fluffy skirts in all angelic colors; and I should not be true to that first impression of the meetings at the station, if I did not say that the meeters were quite lost, and well lost, in the multitude of the met. When they issued together from the place these contributed their advantageous disproportion to the effect of the streets, from which they swept the proper university life into corners and doorways, and up alleys and against walls, before their advancing flood.

Our own friend who, lief and dear as any son or brother or nephew or cousin of them all, came flying on the wings of his academic gown to greet us at the station, had in a wonderfully little while divined our baggage, and had it and us in an open carriage making a progress into the heart of the beautiful grove of towers, which nearer to, we perceived was no petrification, but a living growth from the soul of the undying youth coming age after age to perpetuate the university there. We began at once to see the body of this youth chasing singly or plurally down the streets, in tasselled mortarboards, and gowns clipped of their flow, to an effect of alpaca jackets. Youth can, or must, stand anything, and at certain hours of the morning and evening no undergraduate may show himself in Oxford streets without this abbreviated badge of learning, though the streets were that day so full of people thronging to the Eights and the Bumps that studious youth in the ordinary garb of the unstudious could hardly have awakened suspicion in the authorities. We were, in fact, driving through a largeish town, peopled beyond its comfortable wont, and noisy with the rush of feet and wheels far frequenter and swifter than those which set its characteristic pace.

Our friend knew we were not, poor things, there for a tumult which we could have easily had in New York, or even in London, and he made haste to withdraw us from it up into a higher place at the top of the Radcliffe Library, where we could look down on all Oxford, with the tumult subsiding into repose under the foliage and amid the flowers of the college gardens. It is the well-known view which every one is advised by the guidebooks to seize the first thing, and he could not have done better for us, even from his great love and lore of the place, than to point severally out each renowned roof and spire and tower which blent again for my rapture in a rich harmony with nothing jarring from the whole into any separately accentuated fact. I pretended otherwise, and I hope I satisfactorily seemed to know those tops and deeps one from another, when I ignorantly exclaimed, “Oh, Magdalen, of course! Christ Church! And is that Balliol? And Oriel, of course; and Merton, and Jesus, and Wadham. — really Wadham? And New College, of course! And is that Brasenose?”

I honestly affected to remember them from a first visit twenty years before, when in a cold September rain I wandered about among them with a soul dry-shod and warmed by an inner effulgence of joy in being there on any sort of terms. But I remembered nothing except the glory which nothing but the superior radiance of being there again in May could eclipse. What I remember now of this second sight of them will not let itself be put in words; it is the bird which sings in the bush, and alertly refuses to double its value by coming into the hand. I could not now take the most trusting reader up into that high place, and hope to abuse his innocence by any feigned knowledge of those clustering colleges. All is a blur of leafy luxuriance, probably the foliage of the garden trees which embower the colleges, but not so absolutely such that it does not seem the bourgeoning and branching edifices themselves, a sumptuous Gothic suggestion, in stem and spray, of the stone-wrought beauty of the halls and chapels where nature might well have studied her effects of Perpendicular or Early English, or that spiritual Flamboyant in which she excels art. There remains from it chiefly a sense of flowery color which I suppose is from the nearer-to insistence of trees everywhere in bloom.

It was as if Oxford were decorated for the Eights by these sympathetic hawthorns and chestnuts and fond lilacs, and the whole variety of kind, sweet shrubs which had hung out their blossoms to gladden the pretty eyes and noses of the undergraduates’ visitors. We could not drive anywhere without coming upon some proof of the floral ardor; but perhaps I am embowering Oxford more than I ought with borrowed wreaths and garlands from the drive to the Norman church of Iffley where our friend took us, ostensibly because it could just be got in before lunch, but really because we needed some relief from the facts of Oxford which, stamped thickly, one upon another, made us inexhaustible palimpsests of precious impressions. I am sure that if another could get at my memory, and wash one record clear of another, there would reveal itself such a perfect history of what I saw and did as would constitute every beholder a partner of my experiences. But this I cannot manage for myself, and must be as content as I can with revealing mere fragmentary glimpses of the fact, broken lines, shattered images, blurred colors. For instance, all I can get at, of that visit to the Norman church at Iffley, is the May morning air, with its sun and sweet, from which we passed to the gloom, richly chill, of the interior, and then from that again, into the sun and sweet, to have a swift look at the façade, with the dog-toothing of its arches, which I then for the first time received distinctly into my consciousness. A part of the precious concept, forever inseparable, is my recollection of the church warden’s printed prayer that I would not lean against the chain-fencing before the façade, and of my grief that I could not comply without failing of the view of it which I was there for: without leaning against that chain one cannot look up at the dog-toothing, and receive it into one’s consciousness.

As often I have thought of asking my reader to revisit Oxford with me, I have fancied vividly possessing them of this or that distinctive fact, without regard to the sequences, but I find myself, poor slave of all that I have seen and known! following myself, step by step through the uneventful events in the order of their occurrence; and if my reader will not keep me company, after luncheon, in my stroll across fields and through garden ways beyond my friend’s house to that affluent of the Isis whose real name is the Cherwell, and which calls itself the Char, I know not how he is to get to the point where the Isis becomes the Thames, and where we are to see the first of the Eights, and two of the Bumps together. For except by this stroll we cannot reach the pretty water, so full, so slow, so bright, so dark, where we are to take boat, and get down to the destined point on its smooth breast, with a thousand other boats of every device, but mainly, but overwhelmingly, punts. The craft were all pushed or pulled by their owners or their owners’ guests, who were as serenely and sweetly patient with the problem of getting to the Eights or the Bumps in time, as if the affair were subjective, and might be delayed by an effort of the will in the various cases.

As with other public things in England, this had such a quality of privacy that we seemed the only persons really concerned, and other people in other boats were as much figures painted in the landscape as the buttercups in the meadowy levels that stretched on either hand at our point of departure, and presently, changed into knots of boskage, overhanging the dreamy lymph. But I shall not get into my picture the sense of the lush grasses, with those little yellow lamps, or those Perpendicular boles, with their Early English arches, or their Flamboyant leafage, any more than I shall get in the sense of the shore gleamily wetting its root-wrought earthen brinks, or bringing the weedy herbage down to drink of the little river. River it was, though so little, and as much in scale with the little continent it helps to water, as any Ohio or Mississippi of ours is with our measureless peninsula. There is also something in that English air, which, in spite of the centuries of taming to man’s hand leaves Nature her moods, her whims, of showing divinely and inalienably primitive, so that I had bewildering moments, on that sung and storied water, of floating on some wildwood stream of my Western boyhood. It has, so it appeared, its moments of savage treachery, and one still eddy where it lay smoothly smiling was identified as the point where two undergraduates had not very long ago been drowned. Sometimes the early or the later rains swell it to a flood, and spread it over those low pastures, in an image of the vaster deluges which sweep our immense stretches of river valley.

There was a kind of warm chill in the afternoon air which bore all odors of wood and meadow, and transmitted the English voices with a tender distinctness. From point to point there were reaches of the water where we had quite a boat’s-length of it to ourselves, and again there were sharp turns where it narrowed to an impossible strait and the congested craft must have got by one another through the air. The people in the punts, and canoes, and boats, were proceeding at their leisure, or lying wilfully or forgetfully moored by the flat shores or under the mimic bluffs. They struck into one another where they found room enough to withdraw for the purpose, and they were constantly grinding gunwale against gunwale, with gentle murmurs of deprecation and soft-voiced forgivenesses which had almost the quality of thanks. Then, before we knew it we were gliding under Magdalen bridge past bolder shores, and so, into wider and opener waters where, with as little knowledge of ours the Char had become, or was by way of becoming the Thames which is the Isis. I believe it is still the Char where the bumps take place in the commodious expanses between the college barges tethered to the grassy shores. These barges were only a little more conspicuously aflame and aflutter with bright hats and parasols and volatile skirts than the shores; and they were all one fluent delight of color. On the shore opposite the barge where we were guests, there ran, soon after we had taken our first cups of tea, a cry of undergraduates, heralding the first of the two shells which came rowing past us. Then, almost ere I was aware of it the bow of a shell which was behind touched the stern of the shell which was before, and the first bump had been achieved. The thing had been so lightly and quickly done that the mere fact of the bump had not fully passed from the eye to the mind, when a glory wholly unexpected by me involved us: the shell which had made the bump belonged to our college, or at least the college to which our barge belonged. Shining in the reflected light, we rowed back up the Char to the point of our departure, and in the long, leisurely twilight found our first day in Oxford drawing on to night in the fragrant meadow.

Was it this night or the next that I dined in hall? There were several dinners in hall, and I may best be indefinite as to time as well as place. All civilized dinners are much alike everywhere, from soup to coffee, and it is only in certain academic formalities that a dinner in hall at Oxford differs from another banquet. One of these which one may mention as most captivating to the fancy fond of finding poetry in antique usage was the passing from meat in the large hall, portraited round the carven and panelled walls with the effigies of the college celebrities and dignities, into a smaller and cosier room, where the spirit of the gadding vine began its rambles up and down the glossy mahogany; and then into a third place where the fragrant cups and tubes fumed in the wedded odors of coffee and tobacco. If I remember, we went from the first to the last successively under the open heaven; but perhaps you do not always so, though you always make the transit, and could not imaginably smoke where you ate or drank.

Once, when the last convivial delight was exhausted, and there was a loath parting at the door in the grassy quadrangle under the mild heaven, where not even a star intruded, I had a realizing sense of what Oxford could mean to some youth who comes to it in eager inexperience from such a strange, far land as ours, and first fully imagines it. Or perhaps it was rather in one of the lambent mornings when I strayed through the gardened closes too harshly called quadrangles that I had the company of this supposititious student, and wreaked myself in his sense of measureless opportunity. Not opportunity alone, but opportunity graced with all the charm of tradition, and weighted with rich scholarly convention, the outgrowth of the patient centuries blossoming at last in a flower from whose luminous chalice he should drink the hoarded wisdom of the past. I said to myself that if I were such a youth my heart would go near to break with the happiness of finding myself in that environment and privileged to all its possibilities, with nothing but myself to hinder me from their utmost effect. Perhaps I made my imaginary youth too imaginative, when I was dowering him with my senile regrets in the form of joyful expectations. It is said the form in which the spirit of the university dwells is so overmastering for some that they are fain to escape from it, to renounce their fellowships, and go out from those hallowed shades into the glare of the profane world gladly to battle “in the midst of men and day.”

Even of the American youth who resort to it, not all add shining names to the effulgent records of the place. They are indeed not needed, though they may be patriotically missed from the roll in which the native memories shine in every sort of splendor. It fatigues you at last to read the inscriptions which meet the eye wherever it turns. The thousand years of English glory stretch across the English sky from 900 to 1900 in a luminous tract where the stars are sown in multitudes outnumbering those of all the other heavens; and in Oxford above other places one needs a telescope to distinguish them. The logic of any commemoration of the mighty dead is that they will animate the living to noble endeavor for like remembrance. But where the mighty dead are in such multitude perhaps it is not so. Perhaps in the presence of their records the desire of distinction fails, and it is the will to do great things for the things’ sake rather than the doer’s which remains. The hypothesis might account for the prevailing impersonality of Oxford, the incandescent mass from which nevertheless from time to time a name detaches itself and flames a separate star in the zenith.

What strikes one with the sharpest surprise is not the memories of distant times, however mighty, but those of yesterday, of this forenoon, in which the tradition of their glory is continued. The aged statesman whose funeral eulogy has hardly ceased to echo in the newspapers, the young hero who fell in the battle of the latest conquest, died equally for the honor of England, and both are mourned in bronze which has not yet lost its golden lustre beside the inscriptions forgetting themselves in the time-worn lettering of the tablets on the walls, or the brasses in the floors. Thick as the leaves in Vallombrosa, they strew the solemn place, but in the religious calm of those chapels and halls there is no rude blast to scatter them, or to disturb the quiet in which for a few hundred or a few thousand years they may keep themselves from the universal oblivion.

When one strays through those aisles and under those arches, one fancies them almost as conscious of their sacred eld as one is one’s self. Then suddenly one comes out into the vivid green light of a grassy quadrangle, or the flowery effulgence of a garden, where the banks of blossomed bushes are pushed back of the beds of glowing annuals by the velvety sward unrolled over spaces no more denied to your foot than the trim walks that wander beyond their barrier, under the ivied walls, and to and from the foot-worn thresholds. To the eye it is all very soft and warm, and the breadths of enclosing masonry, the arched or pillared gables, the towers starting on their skyward climb, seem to bathe themselves in sun or cool themselves in shade alike mellow and mild. There are other senses that more truly take account of the thermometer and report it in very glowing moments as not registering much above the middle fifties. But you answer in excuse of it that it is so sincere, just as you ascribe to its scrupulous truthfulness the failure of the English temperament ever to register anything like summer heat. We boil in the torridity of an adoptive climate, but our ancestral suns were no hotter than those of the English are now; and where we have kept their effect in some such cold storage as that, say, of Boston, we probably impart no greater heat to the stranger. The spiritual temperature of Oxford, indeed, is much that of Old Cambridge, that Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, when it was far older, forty years ago, than it is now. Very likely, the atmospheres of all capitals of learning are of the same degree of warmth; and of a responsive salubrity, in the absence of malarial microbes. At any rate I was at once naturalized to Oxford through my former citizenship in Old Cambridge, and in a pleasing confusion found myself in both places at once with an interval of forty years foreshortened in a joint past and present.

The note of impersonality is struck in both places, but not so prevalently in Old Cambridge as in Oxford, where the genius of the place at some moment of divine inspiration, “Smote the chord of self, that trembling, passed in music out of sight.”

As in the political frame of things the powerful English individualities pronounce themselves strongliest by their abnegation to a patriotic ideal, so in this finer and higher England, this England of the mind, what chiefly impresses the stranger is that mighty accord, that impersonal potency, which is the stun of the powerful wills, intellects, spirits severally lost in its collectivity. The master of this college, the president of that, the dean of the other, they all unite in effacing themselves, and letting the university, which is their composite personality, stand for them. As far as possible they refuse to stand for it, and the humor of the pose is carried to the very whim in the custom which bars the Chancellor of the University from ever returning to Oxford after that first visit which he makes upon his appointment. My imagination does not rise to a height like his, but of all accessible dignities there seems to me none so amiable as the headship of one of those famous colleges. I will not, since I need not, choose among them, and very likely if one had one’s choice, one might find a crumpled rose - leaf in the cushioned seat. Yet one could well bear the pain for the sake of the pleasure and the pride of feeling one’s self an agency of that ancient and venerable impersonality and of denying one’s self the active appearance. Scholarship, when it does not degenerate into authorship is the most negative of human things. It silently feeds itself full of learning, which is as free again to the famine of future scholarship; and in a world where pretty nearly all the soft warm things of privilege are so cruelly wrong, I can think of none so nearly innocent as those which lap the love of learning round in such an immortal home of study as Oxford. It is there so fitly housed, so properly served, so respectfully fed, so decorously clad, so beautifully environed, that it might almost dream itself a type of what should always and everywhere be an emanation of the literature to which it shall return after its earthly avatar, and rest, a blessed ghost, between the leaves of some fortunate book on an unvisited shelf of a vast silentious and oblivious library.

There is memory enough of lunches and dinners and teas, in halls and on lawns and in gardens, but as the reader was not asked, so cannot he in self-respect and propriety go. But there was one of the out-door affairs of which I may give him at least a picture-postal-card glimpse. No one’s abnegated personality will be infringed, not even the university need shrink from the intrusion if the garden of no college is named. The reader is to stand well out of the way at a Gothic window looking on the green where the guests come and go under an afternoon heaven which constantly threatens to shower, and never showers; where the sun indeed appears just often enough to agree with the garden trees that it will add indescribably to the effect if their lengthening shadows can be cast over the sward with those of the Gothic tops around. A little breeze crisps the air, and the birds sing among the gossiping leaves of the hawthorns and of the laburnums. One great chestnut stands elect, apart, dense with spiky blossoms from the level of its lowest spreading boughs to the topmost peak of its massive cone. Everywhere is the gracious architecture in which the mouldering Oxford stone, whether it is old or new, puts on the common antiquity.

I will not say that all the colleges seem crumbling to ruin, but the scaly and scabrous complexion of the surfaces is the impression remaining from the totality. The decay into which the stone almost instantly falls is sometimes rather dreadful to the casual glance in the plinths of those philosophers and sages about the Sheldonian Theatre, where the heads seem to be dropping away in a mortal decay. I believe they are renewed from time to time when they become too dreadful, but always in the same stone; and I do not know that I would have it otherwise in the statues or structures of Oxford. Where newness in any part would seem upstart and vulgar, every part looks old, whether it is of the last year or the first year. The smoke has blackened it, the damp has painted it a dim green; the latent disintegration of the stone has made its way to the surface, which hangs in warped scales or drops in finer particles. One would not have a different material used for building; brick or marble would affront the sensibilities, and deny the wisdom of that whole English system, in which reform finds itself authorized in usage, and innovation hesitates till it can put on the likeness of precedent.

It is interesting in Oxford to see how the town and the university grow in and out of each other. Like other towns of the Anglo-Saxon civilization it is occasional, accidental, anarchical, the crass effect of small personal ambitions and requisitions. In the course of so many centuries its commonness could not always fail of a picturesque quaintness, and perhaps it only seems without beauty or dignity because the generous collective spirit working itself out in the visible body of the university has created more of both than any other group of edifices in the world embodies. Those shapeless, shambling, casual streets, with their scattered dwellings and their clustering shops, find by necessity a common centre, without impressiveness or distinction. But in their progress or arrival, weakly widening here, or helplessly narrowing there, they often pass under the very walls of the venerable and beautiful edifices which constitute at once the real Oxford and the ideal Oxford, alike removed from the material Oxford of the town. Sometimes it is a wall that flanks a stretch of the commonplace thoroughfares; sometimes a gate or a portal under a tower giving into the college quadrangle from which you pass by inner ways beneath inner walls to an inmost garden, where the creepers cling to the windows and the porches, or a space of ivied masonry suns itself above the odorous bushes and the daisied sward. It would be hard to choose among these homes of ancient lore; but happily one is not obliged to choose. They are all there for the looking, and one owns them, an inalienable possession for life. One would not will them away, if one could; they must remain forever to enrich the pious beholder with the vision which no words can impart.

The heart of the pilgrim softens in the retrospect even towards that municipal Oxford which forms the setting of their beauty, as a mass of common rock may shapelessly enclose a cluster of precious stones, crystals which something next to conscious life has deposited through the course of the slow ages in the rude matrix. He relents in remembering pleasant suburbs, through which the unhurried trams will bear him past tasteful houses, set in embowered spaces of greensward, and on past pretty parks into the level country where there are villas among grounds that will presently broaden into the acreage of ancestral-seats, halls, manors, and, for all I know, castles. Even the immediate town has moods of lurking in lanes apart from the busier streets, and offering the consolation of low, stone dwellings faced by college walls, and dedicated to the uses of furnished lodgings. If it should be your fortune to find your sojourn in one of these, you may look down from your front window perhaps into the groves that shade Addison’s Walk; or you may step from your back door into a grassy nook where a tower or bastion of the old city wall will be hiding itself in a mesh of ivy. The lane before may be dusty with traffic and the garden behind may be damp with the rains that have never had intervals long enough to dry out of it; but the rooms with their rocking floors will be neatly kept, and if they happen to be the rooms of a reading or sporting undergraduate, sublet in some academic interval, you will find the tokens of his tastes and passions crowding the mantels and the walls. He has confided them with the careless faith of youth, to your chance reverence; he has not even withheld the photographs which attest his preference in actresses, or express a finer fealty in the faces self-evidently of mother or sister or even cousin, or some one farther and nearer yet.

It is everywhere much alike, that spirit of studious youth, at least in our common race, and I do not believe that if I had met a like number of Harvard men, going and coming in the mortar-boards and cropped gowns, in those quadrangles or gardens, I should have known them from the Oxford men I actually saw. They might have looked sharper, tenser, less fresh and less fair, not so often blue of eye and blond of hair, more mixed and differenced; but they would have had the same effect of being chosen for their golden opportunity by fortune, and the same gay ignorance of being favored above other youth. If one came to closer quarters and had to ask some chance question, the slovenlier speech of the Harvard men would have betrayed them in their answer, for even our oldest university has not yet taken thought of how her children shall distinguish themselves from our snuffling mass by the beauty of utterance which above any other beauty discriminates between us and the English. It is said that the youth of the parent stock are younger than our youth; but I know nothing as to this; and I could not say that their manners were better, except as the manners of the English are in being simpler. They are not better in being suppler: I should say that as life passed with him the American limbered and the Englishman stiffened, and that the first gained and the last lost in the power to imagine another which they both perhaps equally possessed in their shy nonage, and which chiefly, if not solely, enables men to be comfortable to their fellows. But here, as everywhere, I wish to be understood as making an inference vastly disproportioned to the facts observed. The stranger in any country must reflect that its people seem much less interested in themselves and their belongings than he is, and from the far greater abundance of their knowledge have far less to say of them. This may very well happen to a traveller from an old land among us; his zest for our novelty may fatigue us; just as possibly our zest for his antiquity may put us at odds with him. The spirit seeks in either case a common ground of actuality, achronic, ubiquitious, where it may play with its fellow soul among the human interests which are eternally and everywhere the same.

What these are I should be far from trying to say, but I think I may venture to recur to my memories of the mute music of Harvard for the dominant of the unheard melodies at Oxford. The genius of the older university seemed much the same as that of the younger under the stress of ceremonial, and to have the quality of that stern acquiescence in the inevitable on the occasions of Commemoration Day that I remembered from Commencement Days in the past. The submission did not break into the furtively imparted jest which relieves the American temperament under fire, but the feeling of obedience to usage, the law-abiding instinct of the race, was the same in both. From both a gala pride was equally remote; the confident expectation of living through it, and not even a martyr exultance in the ordeal, was doubtless what sustained the participants. We have simplified form, but the English have simplied the mood of observing form, and in the end it comes to the same thing in them and in us. But there the parallel ceases. There is a riches of incident in the observance of Commemoration Day at Oxford, for which the sum of all like events in our academic world is but an accumulated poverty. We could not if we would emulate the continuous splendors of the time, for we lack not only the tradition but the environment in which to honor the tradition. If it were possible so to abolish space that Harvard and Yale and Princeton, say, and Columbia could locally unite, and be severally the colleges of one university, and assemble their best in architecture for its embodiment, something might be imaginable of their collectivity like what involuntarily, inevitably happens at Oxford on Commemoration Day. Then the dinners in hall on the eve and in the evening, the lunches in the collège gardens immediately following the academical events of the Sheldonian Theatre, the architectural beauty and grandeur forming the avenue for the progress of the Chancellor and all his train of diverse doctors, actual and potential, might be courageously emulated, but never could be equalled or approached. Our emulation would want the color of the line which at Oxford comes out of the past in the bravery of the scarlets and crimsons and violets and purples which men used to wear, and before which the iridescent fashions of the feminine spectators paled their ineffectual hues. Again, the characteristic surrender of personality contributed to the effect. In that procession whatever were the individual advantages or disadvantages of looks or statures, all were clothed on with the glory of the ancient university which honored them; it was the university which passively or actively was embodied in them; and their very distinction would in a little while be merged in her secular splendor.

Of course we have only to live on a few centuries more and our universities can eclipse this splendor, though we shall still have the English start of a thousand years to overcome in this as in some other things. We cannot doubt of the result, but in the mean time we must recognize the actual fact, and I will own that I do not see how we could ever offer a d’œil which should surpass that of the supreme moments in the Sheldonian Theatre when the Chancellor stood up in his high place, in his deeply gold-embroidered gown of black, and accepted each of the candidates for the university’s degrees, and then, after a welcoming clasp of the hand, waved him to the benches which mystically represented her hospitality. The circle of the interior lent itself with unimagined effect to the spectacle, and swam with faces, with figures innumerable, representing a world of birth, of wealth, of deed, populous beyond reckoning from our simple republican experience. The thronged interior stirred like some vast organism with 29 — 443 the rustle of stuffs, the agitation of fans, the invisible movement of feet; but the master-note of it was the young life which is always the breath of the university. How much or little the undergraduates were there it would not do for a chance alien spectator to say. That they were there to do what they would with the occasion in the tradition of an irresponsible license might be affirmed, but it must be equally owned that they generously forebore to abuse their privilege. They cheered the Candidates, some more, some less, but there was, to my knowledge, none of the guying of which one hears much, beyond a lonely pun upon a name that offered itself with irresistible temptation. The pun itself burst like an involuntary sigh from the heart of youth, and the laugh that followed it was of like quality with it.

Then, the degrees being conferred, each with distinctive praise and formal acceptance in a latinity untouched by modern conjecture of Roman speech, there ensued a Latin oration, and then English essays and speeches from the graduates — thriftily represented, that the time should not be wasted, by extracts — and then a prize poem which did not perhaps distinguish itself so much in generals as in particulars from other prize poems of the past. If it had been as wholly as it was partially good — and there were passages that caught and kept the notice — it would have been a breach of custom out of tune and temper, as much as if the occasional latinity had been of the new Roman accent instead of that old English enunciation as it was of right, there where Latin had never quite ceased to be a spoken language. All was of usage: the actors and the spectators of the scene were bearing the parts which like actors and like spectators had ancestrally borne so often that they might have seemed to themselves the same from the first century, the first generation, without sense of actuality. This sense might imaginably have been left, in any sort of poignancy, to the accidental alien, who in proportion as he was penetrated with it would feel it a contravention of the spirit, the taste, of the event.

I try for something that is not easily said, and being said at all, seems over-said; and I shrink from the weightest impression of Oxford which one could receive, and recall those light touches of her magic, which as I feel them again make me almost wish that there had been no Eights, no Commemoration Day in my experience. Of course I shall fail to make the reader sensible of the preciousness of a walk from the Char through a sort of market flower-garden, where when I asked my way to a friend’s house a kindly consensus of gardeners helped me miss the short cut; but I hope he will not be quite without the pleasure I knew in another row on that stream. Remembering my prime joys in its navigation, I gratefully accepted an invitation to a second voyage which was delayed till we could be sure it was not going to rain. Then we started for the boat where it lay not far off under a clump of trees, and where we were delayed in their seasonable shelter by a thunder-gust; but the clouds broke away and the sun shone, so that when our boat was bailed dry, we could embark in a light shower, and keep on our way unmolested by the fine drizzle that was really representing fine weather. If I had been native to the impulsive climate I should not have noticed these swift vicissitudes, and as it was I noticed them only to enjoy them on the still, bank-full water, where I floated with a delight not really qualified by the question whether the pond-lilies which padded it in places were of the fragrant family of our own pond-lilies. I was pursued by a kindred curiosity in regard to many other leaves and blossoms till one Sunday morning, when, as I found myself interrogating a shrub by the sunny walk of a college garden, it came to me that my curiosity was out of taste. The bush was not there specifically, but as an herbaceous expression of the University, and I had no more right to pass certain bounds with it in my curiosity than I would have had to push any scholar of the place to an assertion of personality where he would have preferred to remain collective.

What riches of personality lay behind the collectivity I ought not, if I knew, to say. Again I take refuge, from the reader’s quest, which I cannot help feeling in the indefinite attempt to suggest it, by saying that the collective tone is that of Old Cambridge, or more strictly, of Harvard. I remember that once a friend, coming in high June straight to Old Cambridge after a brief ocean interval from Oxford, noted the resemblance. As we walked under a Gothic archway of our elms, past the door-yards full of syringas and azaleas, with

“Old Harvard’s scholar-factories red,”

 showing on the other hand in the college enclosures, he said it was all very like Oxford. He must have felt the moral likeness, the spiritual likeness, as I did in Oxford, for physical or meteorological likeness there is none absolutely. It is something in the ambient ether, in the temperament, in the unity of high interests, in the mystical effluence from minds moving with a certain dirigibility in the upper regions, but controlled by invisible ties, in each case, to a common centre. It is the prevalence of scholarship, which characterizes the respective municipalities and which holds the civic bodies in a not ungraceful, not ungrateful subordination.

Something of the hereditary grudge between town and gown descended to Harvard from the English centres of learning; but the prompt assertion of town government as the sole police force forbade with us the question of jurisdictions which it is said still confuses the parties with a feeling of enmity at Oxford. The war of fists following the war of swords and daggers, which in the earliest times left the dead of both sides in the streets after some mortal clash, and kept each college a stronghold, even after that war had no longer a stated or formal expression, is forever past, but still the town and the gown in their mutual dependence hold themselves aloof in mutual antipathy. So I was told, but probably on both sides the heritage of dislike resides only in the youthfuler breasts, and is of the quality of those ideals which perpetuate hazing in our colleges, or which among boys pass forms of mischief and phases of superstition along on a certain level of age. All customs and usages are presently uninteresting, as one observes them from the outside, and can be precious on the inside only as they are endeared by association. What is truly charming is some expression of the characteristic spirit such as in Oxford forbids one of the colleges to part in fee with a piece of ground on which a certain coveted tree stands, but which allows it to lease that beautiful feature of the landscape to a neighboring college. A thing like that is really charming, and has forever the freshness of a whimsical impulse, where whimsical impulses of many sorts must have abounded without making any such memorable sign.

In the reticence of the place all sorts of silent character will have been accumulating through the centuries until now the sum of it must be prodigious. But that is a kind of thing which if one has any direct knowledge of it one feels to be a kind of confidence, and which one lets one’s conjecture play about, in the absence of knowledge, very guardedly. For my part I prefer to leave quite to the reader’s imagination the charming traits of the acquaintance I would fain have made my friends. Sometimes they were of difficult conversation, but not more so than certain Old Cambridge men, whom I remembered from my youth; the studious life is nowhere favorable to the cultivation of the smaller talk; but now that so many of the Fellows are married the silence is less unbroken, and the teas, if not the dinners, recur in a music which is not the less agreeable for the prevalence of the soprano or the contralto note. It seemed to me that there were a good many teas, out-doors when it shone and in-doors when it rained, but there were never enough, and now I feel there were all too few. They had the entourage which the like social dramas cannot have for yet some centuries in our centres of learning; between the tinkle of the silver and the light clash of the china one caught the muted voices of the past speaking from the storied architecture, or the immemorial trees, or even the secular sward underfoot. But one must not suppose that the lawns which are velvet to one’s tread are quite voluntarily velvet. I was once sighing enviously to a momentary host and saying of his turf that nothing but the incessant play of the garden-hose could keep the grass in such vernal green with us, when he promptly answered that the garden-hose had also its useful part in the miracle of his own lawn. I dared not ask if the lawn-mower likewise lent its magic; that would have been going too far. Or at least I thought so; and in the midst of the surrounding reticences I always felt it was better not to push the bounds of knowledge.

There is so much passive erudition, hived from the flowers of a thousand summers in such a place of learning, that I felt the chances were that if the stranger came there conscious of some of his own little treasure of honey, he would find it a few thin drops beside the rich stores of any first apiarist to whom he opened it. In that long, long quiet, that illimitable opportunity, that generously defended leisure, the scholarship is not only deep, but it is so wide that it may well include the special learning of the comer, and he may hear that this or that different don who is known for a master in a certain kind has made it his recreation to surpass in provinces where the comer’s field shrinks to parochial measure. How many things they keep to themselves at Oxford, it must remain part of one’s general ignorance not to know, and it is more comfortable not to inquire. But out of the sense of their guarded, their hidden, lore may spring the habit of referring everything to the university, which represents them as far as they can manage not to represent it. They may have imaginably outlived our raw passion of doing, and have become serenely content with being. This is a way of saying an illanguagible thing, and, of course, oversaying it.

The finer impressions of such a place — there is no other such in the world unless it is Cambridge, England, or Old Cambridge, Massachusetts, — escape the will to impart them. The coarser ones are what I have been giving the reader, and trying to pass off upon him in their fragility for something subtile. If one could have stayed the witchery of an instant of twilight in a college quadrangle, or of morning sunshine in a college garden, or of a glimpse of the High Street with the academic walls and towers and spires richly foreshortened in its perspective, or of the beauty of some meadow widening to the level Isis, or the tender solemnity of a long-drawn aisle of trees leading to the stream under the pale English noon, and could now transfer the spell to another, something worth while might be done. But short of this endeavor is vain. There was a walk, which I should like to distinguish from others, all delightful, where we passed in a grassy field over an old battle-ground of the Parliamentarians and the Royalists, and saw traces of the old lager-beads, the earthworks in which the hostile camps pushed closer and closer to each other, and left the word “loggerheads’’ to their language. But I do not now find this very typical, and I am rather glad that the details of my sojourn are so inextricably interwoven that I need not try to unravel the threads which glow so rich a pattern in my memory.

X. THE CHARM OF CHESTER

BECAUSE Chester is the handiest piece of English antiquity for new Americans to try their infant teeth on, I had fancied myself avoiding it as unworthy my greater maturity. I had not now landed in Liverpool, and as often as I had hitherto landed there, I had promptly, proudly disobeyed the charge of more imperfectly travelled friends to be sure and break the run to London at Chester, for there was nothing like it in all England. Having indulged my haughty spirit for nearly half a century, one of the sudden caprices which undermine the firmest resolutions determined me to pass at Chester the day which must intervene before the steamer I was going to meet at Liverpool was due. Naturally I did everything I could to difference myself from the swarm of my crude countrymen whom I found there, and I was rewarded at the delightful restaurant in the Rows, where I asked for tea in my most carefully guarded chest-notes, with a pot of the odious oolong which observation has taught the English is most acceptable to the palate of our average compatriots, when they cannot get green tea or Japan tea. Perhaps it was my mortifying failure in this matter which fixed me in my wish never to be taken for an Englishman, except by other Americans whom it was easy to deceive.

The Americans abounded in Chester, not only on the present occasion but in my three successive chance visits to the place; and if they were by an immense majority nearly all of the same sex, they were none the worse for that. By pretty twos, by pretty threes, by yet larger lovely groups, and, in serious, middle-aged instances, singly, they wandered in and out of the plain old cathedral; they strayed through the Rows or arcades by which Chester distinguishes herself from other cities in having two-storied sidewalks; they clustered in the shops where the prices were adjusted to their ignorance of English values and they could pay as much for a pair of gloves as in New York or Chicago; they crowded the narrow promenade which tops the city wall; they haunted the historic houses, where they strayed whispering about with their Baedekers shut on their thumbs, attentive to the instruction of the custodians; they rode On the tops of the municipal tram-cars with apparently no apprehension from their violation of the sacred American principle of corporational enterprise in transportation; they followed on foot the wanderings of the desultory streets; at the corners and before the quainter façades the sun caught the slant of their lifted eyeglasses and flashed them into an involuntary conspicuity. In all his round I doubt if his ray could have visited countenances of a more diffused intelligence, expressive of a more generous and truly poetic interest in those new things of the old English world on which they were now feeding full the longing, and realizing rapturously the dreaming, of the years and years of vague hopes. I could read from my own past the pathos of some lives, restricted and remote, to which the present opportunity was like a glad delirium, a glory of unimagined chance, in which they trod the stones of Old Chester as if they were the golden streets of the New Jerusalem. These and such as these have forever the better of those bora to the manner; as for those assuming to be naturalized to the manner, they are not worthy to be confounded with such envoys from the present to the past. It is only the newest Americans who ever really see England, and they are apt to see it in the measure of that simplicity for which sincerity is by no means a satisfactory substitute.

It could well be in a passion of humility that a sophisticated traveller might wish to hide himself from them in the depths of that Roman bath which apparently so few visitors to Chester see. We found it with some difficulty, by the direction of a kindly shop-woman who, though she had lived all her life opposite, could only go so far as to say she believed it was under a certain small newspaper and periodical store across the way. Asking the young man we found there, he owned the fact, and leaving a yet younger man in charge, he lighted a stump of candle, and led to a sort of cavern back of his shop, where the classic relic, rude but unmistakable, was. Rough, low pillars supported the roof and the modern buildings overhead, and the bath, clumsily shaped of stone, attested the civilization once dominant in Chester. Our guide had his fact or his fable concerning the spring which supplied the bath; but whether it is in summer or in winter that this spring almost wholly disappears, I am ashamed not to remember.

The Rome that was built upon Britain underlies so much of England that if one begins to long for its excavation one must be willing to involve so much mediaeval and modern superstructure in a common ruin that one’s wisdom must be doubted. So far as the Roman remains showed themselves to a pretty ignorant observer they did not seem worth digging out in their entirety; here and there an example seems to serve; they are the unpolished monuments of life in a remote and partially settled province, not to be compared, except at Bath and York, with those of Pompeii or Herculaneum. To be sure, if one knew they underlay New York, one would gladly level all the sky-scrapers in the town, that they might be given to the light. But in Chester it is another matter. There is already an interesting if not satisfactory collection of antiquities in Chester; and if it came to question of demolishing the delightful old wall, or the Rows, with God’s Providence House, and Bishop Lloyd’s House, or even the cathedral, though it is, to my knowledge, the least sympathetic of English cathedrals, one would wish to think twice. At the wall, especially, one would like to hesitate, walking perhaps all the way round the city on it, and pausing at discreet intervals to repose and ponder. It does not convince everywhere of an equal antiquity; there are parts that are evidently restorations and parts that are reproductions, and the gates frankly own themselves modern. But there are towers that moulder and bastions that have plainly borne the brunt of time. In the circuit of the wall you may look down on the roofs of old Chester within, and that much larger and busier new Chester without, which stretches with its shops and mills and suburban cottages and villas into the pretty country, as far as you like. But our affair was never with that Chester; except where the country began under the walls, and widened away beyond the river Dee, with bridges and tramways presently lost to the eye in the shadow of pleasant groves, we cared for nothing beyond the walls. There were places where these dropped sheer to the waters of the Dee, which obliged us at one point of its flow with a vivid rapid, or (I will not be sure) the swift slope of a dam, where a man stood midway casting his line into the ripple. He could by some stretch of the imagination have been a Jolly Miller who lived on the river Dee, though I remember no mills in sight; and by an equal stroke of fancy, he could have been casting his line for the salmon with which the sands of Dee are also associated in song. I do not insist that the reader shall hazard either conjecture with me; but what I say is that all England is so closely netted over and embroidered with literary reminiscence, with race - memories, from the earliest hours of personal consciousness, that wherever the American goes his mind catches in some rhyme, some phrase, some story of fact or fable that makes the place more home to him than the house where he was born. That is the sweetness, the kindness of travel in England, and that is the enchanting strangeness. To other lands we relate ourselves by an effort, but there the charm lies waiting for us, to seize us and hold us fast with ties running to the inmost and furthermost of our earthly being.

At one point in our first ramble on the wall at Chester we came to a house built close upon it, of such quaintness and demureness that it needed no second glance, in the long June twilight, to convince us that one of Thomas Hardy’s heroines lived there; or if it did, no possible doubt of the fact could be left when we encountered at the descent to the next city gate the smartest of red-coated sergeants mounting the wall to go and pay court to her. Afterwards we found many houses level with the top of the wall, with little gardened door-yards or leafy spaces beside them. I do not say they all had Hardy heroines in them; there were not sergeants enough for that; but the dwellings were all of an insurpassable quaintness and demurencss, or only less quaint and less demure than the first. One of the most winning traits of the past wherever you find it is its apparent willingness to be friends with the present, to make room for it when it can, and to respond as far as possible to its commonplace and even sordid occasions. Like old walls that I had known in Italy, the old wall at Chester lent itself not only to the domestic but the commercial demands of to-day, and if the shops which it allowed to front upon its promenade were preferably those of dealers in bric-à-brac and second-hand books, still the principle is the same. In one of these shops was an old (it looked old) sundial which tempted and tempted the poor American, who knew very well he could not get it home without intolerable inconvenience and expense; and who tore himself from it at last with the hope of returning another day and carrying it all the way to New York, if need be, in his arms. As is the custom of sundials it professed to number only the sunny hours; but he had (or is this his subsequent invention?) the belief that somewhere on its round was indelibly if invisibly marked that gloomy moment of the September afternoon when King Charles looked from the Phoenix Tower hard by the shop where the dial lurked, and saw his army routed by the Parliamentarians on Rowton Moor. To be sure the moment was bright for the Parliamentarians; there is the consolation in every defeat that it is the victory of at least one side, and in this instance it was the right side which won.

You are advised that if you would see Chester Cathedral aright you had best look at it across the grassy space which lies between it and the wall near Phoenix Tower. It is indeed finest there, for it is a fane that asks distance, and if you go visit it by the pale twilight at nine o’clock of the long June day, the brown stone it is built of will remind you less than it might at noonday of the brown-stone fronts of the old New York streets. But who am I that I should criticise even the material body of any English cathedral? If we had this one of Chester in the finest American city, in Boston itself, we should throng to it with our guide-books if not our prayer-books, and would not allow that any ecclesiastical structure in the country compared with it. All that I say to my compatriots of either sex, who come to its Perpendicular Gothic fresh from the Oblique Doric of their Cunarders or White Stars at Liverpool, is: “Wait! Do not lavish your precipitate raptures all upon this good but plain edifice. Keep some of them rather for the gentler and lovelier dreams of architecture at Wells, at Ely, at Exeter, and supremely the minster at York, to which you should not come impoverished of the emotions you have been storing up from the beginning of your æsthetic consciousness. Yet, stay! Forbear to turn slightingly from your first cathedral because some one tells you it is not the best. It will have more to say to that precious newness of yours (you cannot yet realize how precious your newness is) than fairer temples shall to your more shop-worn sensibility.” It is always well in travel to cherish the first moments of it, for these are richer in potentialities of joy than any that can follow; and it is doubtless in the wise order of Providence that such a city as Chester should lie so near the great port of entry for three hundred thousand Americans that they may have something worthy of their emotions while they have still their sea-legs on, and may reel under the stroke without causing suspicion.

I have said how constantly one met them, how inevitably; and if they were wondering, willingly or unwillingly, what Chester could be bought for and sent home, in bulk or piecemeal, and set up again, say an hour from New York, just beyond Harlem River, I do not know that I should blame them. Naturally, there would be the question of the customs; the place could not be brought in duty free; but some nobler-minded millionaire might expand to the magnitude of the generous enterprise and offer to pay the duties if an equal sum toward the purchase could be raised. We should of course want only the Chester within the walls, but the walls and gates must be included.

Why should such a thing be impossible? Such a thing on a smaller scale, different in quantity but not in quality, had been dreamt of by a boldly imaginative Chicagoan, if we could believe the good woman in charge of the Derby House, up the little court out of Nicholas Street, where all that is left of the old town mansion of the noble Stanleys remains. This magnanimous dreamer had the vision of the Stanleys’ town-house transplanted to the shores of Lake Michigan, and erected as a prime feature of the great Columbian Fair. He offered to buy it in fulfilment of his vision, so ran the tale, of whoever then could sell it; but when the head of the family to which it once belonged heard of the offer, he bought it himself in a quiver of indignation conceivably lasting yet, and dedicated it to the public curiosity forever, on the spot where its timbered and carven gables have looked into a dingy little court ever since the earliest days of Tudor architecture. If we could trust the witness of the cards which strewed the good woman’s table, it was American curiosity which mainly wreaked itself on the beautiful but rather uninhabitable old house our Chicagoan failed to buy. By hungry hundreds they throng to the place, and begin to satisfy their life-long famine for historic scenes in the mansion where Charles the First sojourned while in Chester, and whence the head of the house was taken out to die by the axe for his part in the royalist rising of 1657. So, in my rashness, I should have believed, but for the correction of Mr. Havell Crickmore, who says, in his pleasantly written and pleasantly pictured book about “Old Chester,” that the Earl was “beheaded during the great Rebellion,” which would shorten his life by some ten years, and make his death date 1647, not 1657. It does not greatly matter now; he would still be dead, at either date, and at either a touch of heroic humor would survive him in the story Mr. Crickmore repeats. Colonel Duckenfield of the Cromwellian forces asked him if he had no friend who would do the last office for him. “Do you mean, to cut my head off? Nay, if those men who would have my head off cannot find one to cut it off, let it stand where it is.”

I have always liked to believe everything I read in guide-books, or hear from sacristans or custodians. In Chester you can believe not only the blunt Baedeker, with its stern adherence to fact, but anything that anybody tells you; and in my turn I ask the unquestioning faith of the reader when I assure him that he will find nothing so mediæval-looking out of Nuremberg as that street — I think it is called Eastgate Street — with its Rows, or two-story sidewalks, and its timber-gabled shops with their double chance of putting up the rates on the fresh American. Let him pay the price, and gladly, for there is no perspective worthier his money. I am not in the pay of a certain pastry-cook of the Rows, who makes the wedding-cakes for all the royal marriage feasts; but I say he will serve you a toasted tea-cake with the afternoon oolong he will try to put off on an American, such as you cannot buy elsewhere in England; only, you must be sure to eat the bottom half of the tea-cake, because most of the rich, sweet Cheshire butter will have melted tenderly into that. Go then, if you will, to the cathedral which I have been vainly seeking to decry, and study its histories, beginning with the remnants of the original Norman church of the Conqueror’s lieutenant and nephew Hugh Lupus, and ending with a distinctly modern restoration of the mediaeval carvings in the eastern transept, wherein Disraeli and Gladstone are made grotesquely to figure, the one in building up the Indian Empire and the other in disestablishing the Irish Church. Somewhere in the historical middle distance are certain faded flags taken from the Americans at the battle of Bunker Hill, which we should always have won if our powder had not given out, and let the enemy capture these banners. The beauty of the Chapter House will subdue you, if you rebel against the sight of them, and I can certify to the solemnity of the Cloister, which I visited with due impression; but with what success a young girl was sketching a perspective of the cathedral I did not look over her shoulder to see.

How perverse is memory! I cannot recall distinctly the prospect across the Dee from the Watergate to which the Dee use to float its ships and from which it now shrinks far beyond the green flats. But I remember that in returning through a humble street from the Watergate, the children on the door-steps were eating the largest and thickest slices of bread and butter I saw in all England, where the children in humble streets are always eating large, thick slices of bread and butter. For the pleasure of riding on the municipal trams, and of realizing how much softer and slower they run than our monopolistic trolleys, we made, whenever we had nothing else to do, an excursion “across the sands of Dee” by the bridge which spans its valley, with always fragments of Kingsley’s tender old song singing themselves in the brain, and with the visionary Mary going to call the cattle home, and the cruel, crawling foam from which never home came she.

Oh, is it fish, or weed, or floating hair, in the tide that no longer laps the green floor that once was sand? Ask the young girls of fifty years ago, who could make people cry with the words! It was enough for me that I was actually in the scene of the tragedy, and more than all the British, Roman, Saxon, or Norseman antiquity of Chester. At the suburban extremity of the tram-line, or somewhere a little short of it, we were offered by sign-board a bargain in house-lots so phrased that it added thirty generations to the age of a region already old enough in all conscience. We were not invited to buy the land brutally in fee-simple, outright; but it was intimated that the noble or gentle family to which it belonged would part with it temporarily on a lease of nine hundred and ninety-nine years. I hope we fully felt the delicacy, the pathos in that reservation of the thousandth year, which was the more appealing because it was tacit.

These lots were no part of the vast estate of the great noble whose seat lies farther yet out of Chester in much the same direction. It was one of the many aristocratic houses which I meant to visit in England, but as I really visited no other, I am glad that I gave way in the matter of a shilling to the driver of the fly who held that the drive to the place was worth that much more than I did. I tried hard for the odd shilling, as an affair of conscience and of public spirit; but the morning was of a cool-edged warmth, and of a sky that neither rained nor shone, and the driver of the fly was an elderly man who looked as if he would not lie about the regular price, though I pretended so strenuously it should be six and not seven shillings for the drive, and I yielded. After all (I excused my weakness to myself), it would have been seven dollars at home; and presently we were in the leafy damp, the leafy dark of the parkway within the gates of the great nobleman’s estate beyond the Dee. Eight thousand acres large it stretches all about, and is visibly bounded only by the beautiful Welsh hills to the westward, and four miles we drove through the woodsy quiet of the park, which was so much like the woodsy quiet of forest-ways not so accessible at home. Birds were singing in the trees, and on the hawthorns a little may hung yet, though it was well into June. Rabbits — or if they were hares I mean no offence to the hares — limped leisurely away from the road-side. Coops of young pheasants, carefully bringing up to be shot in the season for the pleasure of noble or even royal guns, were scattered about in the borders of the shade; and grown cock and hen pheasants showed their elect forms through the undergrowth in the conscious pride of a species dedicated to such splendid self-sacrifice. In the open spaces the brown deer by scores lay lazily feeding, their antlers shining, or their ears pricking through the thin tall stems of the grass. Otherwhere in paddock or pasture, were two-year-olds or three-year-olds, of the blooded hunters or racers to whose breeding that great nobleman is said to be mostly affectioned, though for all I personally know he may be more impassioned of the fine arts, or have his whole heart in the study of realistic fiction. What I do personally know is that at a certain point of our drive a groom came riding one of his cultivated colts, so highly strung that it took fright at our harmless fly, and escaped by us in a flash of splendid terror that left my own responsive nerves vibrating.

From time to time notices to the public “earnestly requested” the visitor not to trespass or deface, instead of sternly forbidding him with a threat of penalties. They know how to do these things in England, and when our monopolists, corporate or individual, have come more generally to fence themselves away from their fellow-citizens they will learn how gracefully to entreat the traveller not to abuse the privileges of a visit to their grounds. Whether they will ever posit themselves in a landscape with the perfect pride of circumstance proper to a great English nobleman’s place, no one can say; and if I mention that there was a whole outlying village of picturesque and tasteful houses appropriated to the immediate dependants of this nobleman, it is less with the purpose of instructing some future oil-king or beef-baron in the niceties of state, than of simply letting the reader know that we drove back to Chester by a different way from that we came by.

As for the palace of the nobleman, which did not call itself a palace, it was disappointing, just as Niagara is disappointing if you come to it with vague preconceptions of another sort of majesty. I myself was disappointed in the Castle of Chester, which one would naturally expect to be Norman, “or at least Early English,” but which one finds a low two-story edifice of Georgian architecture enclosing a parade-ground, with a main gate in the form of a Greek portico and a side entrance disguised as a small classic temple. But the castle is in the definite taste of a self-justified epoch, and consoles you with the belated Georgian — the Fourth Georgian — surviving into our own century not so very long after its universal acceptance. One could not build a castle in any other than classic terms in 1829, and I dare say that forty years later it would have been impossible to build an ancestral seat in any other style than the Victorian Gothic-Tudor-Mansard which now glasses its gables, roofs, and finials with so much satisfaction in the silvery sheet of water at its feet. The finest thing about it is that the nobleman who imagined or commanded it was of the same name and surname as the Norman baron whom William the Conqueror appointed to hold Chester for him, when he had reduced it after a tedious siege, and to curb the wild Welsh of the dim hills we saw afar.

I am not good at descriptions of landscape-gardening, but I like all the formalities of cropt lawns and dipt trees, and I would fain have the reader, if I could, stand with me at the window within the house which gives the best sight of these glories. That exterior part of the interior which is shown to the public in great houses seems wastefully rather than tastefully splendid. The life of the place could hardly be inferred from it; but there was a touch of gentle intimacy in the photograph, lying on one of the curiously costly tables, of the fair and sweet young girl who had lately become the lady of all that magnificence. She looked like so many another pretty creature in any land or clime that it was difficult to realize her state even with the help of the awed flunky who was showing the stranger through. He was of an imagination which admitted nothing ignoble in its belongings, so that in passing a certain bust with the familiar broken nose of the master he respectfully murmured, “Sir Michael Hangelo.”

“Who?” the stranger joyfully demanded, wishing to make very sure of the precious fact; and the good soul repeated, “Sir Michael Hangelo, sir.”

Of course it was Sir Michelangelo, Bart.; nothing so low as the effigy of a knight could be admitted to that august gallery.

Am I being a little too scornful in all this? I hope not, though I own that in the mansions of the great it is difficult not to try despising them. The easy theory about a man whom you find magnificently housed in the heart of eight thousand acres, themselves a very minor portion of his incalculable possessions, is that he is personally to blame for it. In your generous indignation you wish to have him out, and his pleasure-grounds divided up into small farms. But this is a kind of equity which may be as justly applied to any one who owns more of the earth than he knows how to use. Who are they that fence large parts of Long Island, and much of the Hudson River scenery, which they have studded with villas never open to the public like that great house near Chester? I know a man who has two acres and a half on the Maine shore of the Piscataqua, and tills not a tenth of it; but I should be sorry to have him expropriated from the rest. We all, who have the least bit more than we need, are in the same boat, and we cannot begin throwing one another overboard, with a good conscience. What the people already struggling for their lives in the water have a right to do is another matter. They are the immense majority and they may vote anything they choose, even a cruel injustice.

The American, newly arrived in Chester after his new arrival in Liverpool, will be confronted with a stronghold of the past which he will not be able to overthrow perhaps during his whole stay in England, though he should spend the summer. Immemorial custom is intrenched there not only in the picturesqueness, the beauty, the charm, but the silent inexpugnable possession which time from the beginning has been fortifying. The outside has been made as goodly as possible, but within is the relentless greed of ages, fed strong with the prey of poverty and toil. Yet let him not rashly fling himself against its impregnable defences. It is not primarily his affair. Let him go quietly about with his Baedeker, and see and enjoy all he can of that ancient novelty, so dear to us new folk, and then when he is worn out with his pleasure, and sits down to his toasted tea-cake in that restaurant of the Rows where they will serve him a cup of our national oolong, let him ask himself how far the beloved land he has left has been true to its proclamations in favor of a fresh and finally just — Theilung der Erde.

Having answered this question to his satisfaction, let him by no means hurry away from Chester that night or the next morning in the vain belief that greater historic riches await him in cities, farther away from his port of entry, in the heart of the land. Scarcely any shall surpass it, for if not a Roman capital like York or London, it was long a Roman camp, and a temple of Apollo replaced a Druid temple on the site of the present cathedral. The Britons were never pushed farther off than the violet hills where they still dwell, strong in their unintelligible tongue, with a taste for music and mysticism which seems never to have failed them. From those adjacent heights they harried in frequent foray their Roman and Saxon and Norman invaders, and only left off attacking Chester when the Early English had become the Later!

Chester was not only one of the stubbornest of the English cities in its resistance of William the Conqueror, but it held out still longer against Oliver the Conqueror in the war of the King and the Parliament. What part, if any, it had in the Wars of the Roses, I excuse myself for not knowing. The strong Henry Fourth led the weak Richard Second a captive through it, and there is record that the weaker Henry Sixth tried in vain to recruit his forces in it for his futile struggle with fate. The lucky Henry Seventh who had newly married royalty, and was no more king by right than the pretender who afterwards threatened his throne, sent a Stanley to the block for having spoken tolerantly of Perkyn Warbeck. But if there was any party in Chester for that pretender, there was none for the Stuart calling himself Charles III., for when he sent from Scotland an entreaty to the citizens for help, they took it as a warning to fortify their town against him. After that they had peace, and now the place is the great market for Cheshire cheese which is made in the fertile country round about, and vies with the New Jersey imitation in the favor of our own country.

The American who means to stop in Chester for the day, which may so profitably and pleasantly extend itself to a week, cannot do better than instruct himself more particularly in the history which I still find myself so ignorant, for all my show of learning. I would have him distrust this at every point, and correct it from better authorities. Especially I would have him mistrust a story told in Chester of the American who discovered a national origin in the guide-book’s mention of one of the Mercian kings who extended his rule so far from the midland counties. The traveller read the word American, and pronounced if as the English believe we all do. “My dear,” he said to his wife, “this town was settled by the’Murricans.”

XI. MALVERN AMONG HER HILLS

FROM the loth to the 20th of July the heat was as great in London as the nerves ever register in New York. It was much more continuous, for our heat seldom lasts a week, and there it lasted nearly a fortnight, with a peculiar closeness from the damp and thickness from the smoke. That was why we left London, and went to Great Malvern, for a little respite.

Our run was through a country which frankly confessed a long drouth, such as parches the fields at home in exceptional summers. Rain had not fallen during the heat from which we were escaping, and the grain had been cut and stacked in unwonted safety from mould. There is vastly more wheat grown in England than the simple American, who expects to find it a large market-garden, imagines, and the yield was now so heavy that the stacked sheaves served to cover half the space from which they had been reaped. The meadow-lands were burned by the sun almost as yellow as the stubble; the dry grass along the railroad banks had caught fire from the sparks of the locomotive, and the flames had run through the hedges, into the pasturage and stubble, and at one place they had kindled the stacks of wheat, which farm-hands were pulling apart and beating out. The air was full of the pleasant smell of their burning, and except that the larks were spiring up into the dull-blue sky, and singing in the torrid air, it was all very like home.

I ventured to say as much to the young man whom I found sleeping in the full blaze of the sun in his corner of our carriage, and to whom I apologized for the liberty I had taken in drawing his curtain so as to shade his comely fresh face. He pardoned me so gratefully that I felt warranted in thinking he might possibly care to know of the resemblance I had noted. He said, “Ah!” in the most amiable manner imaginable, “which part of America?” But just as I was going to tell him, the train drew into the station at Oxford, and he escaped out of the carriage.

Before this he had remarked that we should find the drouth much worse as we went on, for we were now in the Valley of the Thames, which kept the land comparatively moist. But I could not see that the levels of harvest beyond this favored region were different. Still the generous yield of grain half covered the ground; the fires along the embankments continued in places; in places the hay was just mown, and women were tossing it into windrows; at a country station where we stopped there were fat, heavy-fleeced sheep panting wofully in the cattle-pens; but the heat was no worse than it had been. The landscape grew more varied as we approached Worcester, where we meant to pass the night; low hills rose from the plain, softly wooded; and I find from my note-book that the weather was much mitigated by the amenity of all the inhabitants we encountered. I really suppose that the underlined record, “politeness,” related mainly to the railway company’s servants, but there must have been some instances of kindness from others, perhaps fellow-travellers, which I grieve now to have forgotten. I have not forgotten the patience with which the people at the old inn-like hotel in Worcester bore our impatience with the rooms which they showed us, and which we found impossibly stuffy, and smelling of the stables below. The inn was a survival of the coaching days, when the stables formed an integral part of the public-house, but did not perfume the fiction which has endeared its ideal to readers. The dining-room was sultry, and abounded with the flies which love stables of the olden times, or indeed of any date. We sat by our baggage in an outer room till a carriage could be called, and then we drove back to the station, through the long, hot, dusty street by which we had come, with a poorish, stunted type of work-people crowding it on the way home to supper.

Somewhere in the offing we were aware of cathedral roofs and towers, and we were destined later to a pleasanter impression of Worcester than that from which we now gladly fled by the first train for Great Malvern. Our refuge was only an hour away, and it duly received us in a vast, modern hotel, odorous only of a surrounding garden into which a soft rain was already beginning to fall. A slow, safe elevator, manned by the very oldest and heaviest official in full uniform whom I have ever seen in the like charge, mounted with us to upper chambers, where we knew no more till we awoke in the morning to find the face of nature washed clean by that gentle rain, and her breath fresh and sweet, coming from the grateful lips of the myriad flowers which embloom most English towns.

I may as well note at once that it was not a bracing air which we inhaled from them, and I do not suppose that the air is any more an adjunct of the healing waters at Great Malvern than the air at Carlsbad, for instance, where it is notoriously relaxing. The companionable office-lady at our hotel, who was also a sort of lady-butler, and carved the cold meats, candidly owned that the air at Great Malvern was lifeless, and she boldly regretted the two years she had passed in New England, as matron of a boys’ reformatory. She said, quite in the teeth of an English couple paying their bill at the same time, that she was only living to get back there. They took her impatriotism with a large imperial allowance; and I shall always be sorry I did not ask them what kind of bird it was they had with them in a cage; I think they would have told me willingly, and even gladly, before they drove away.

We were ourselves driving away in search of lodgings, which, whether you like them or not after you find them, it is always so interesting to look up in England. It was our fate commonly to visit places in their season when lodgings were scarce and dear; and it was one of the surprises that Great Malvern had in store for us that it was in the very height of its season. We should never have thought it, but for the assurance of the lodging-house landladies, who united in saying so, and in asking twice their fee as an earnest of good faith. The charming streets, which were not only laterally but vertically irregular, and curved and rose and fell in every direction, were so far from thronged that we were often the only people in them besides the unoccupied drivers of other flies than ours, and the boys who had pony chairs for hire, and demanded height-of-the-season prices for them. Perhaps the fellow-visitors whom we missed from the street were thronging in-doors: the hotels were full up; the boarding-houses could offer only a choice of inferior rooms; the lodgings had nearly all been taken at the rates which astonished if they did not dismay us. But we found the pleasantest apartment left at last, and were immediately as much domesticated in it as if we had lived there ever since it was built. In front it faced, across the street, a wooded and gardened steep; in the rear, from the window of our stately sitting-room, we looked out over a vast plain, of tilth and grass and groves, cheered everywhere with farm villages or farm cottages, and the grander edifices of the local nobility and gentry, and the spires of churches. Farther off where the Cotswold Hills began to be blue, glimmered Cheltenham, where we could, with a glass strong enough, have seen the retired military and civil employés of the India service who largely inhabit the place, basking in a summer heat of familiar tropical fervor, and a cheapness suited to their pensions. In the same quarter there was also sometimes visible a blur of dim towers and roofs which the guide-book knew as Tewkesbury; in the opposite direction, Worcester with its cathedral more boldly defined itself. The landscape seemed so altogether, so surpassingly English, that one day when I had nothing better to do — as was mostly the case with me in Malvern — I set down its amiable features, which I wish I could assemble here in a portrait. First, there were orchard and garden trees of our own house (one of a dozen houses on the same curving terrace), with apples, pears, and plums belted in by the larches and firs that deepened towards the foot of the hill. Pretty, well-kept dwellings of more or less state, showed their chimneys and slated or tiled roofs everywhere through the trees and shrubs at the beginning of what looked the level from our elevation. From these the plain stretched on, with hotels and churches salient from rows of red brick and gray stone cottages. Fields, now greening under the rains, but still keeping the warmer colors which the long drouth had given them, were parted into every angular form by rigid hedge-rows. They were fields of oats and grass, and sometimes wheat; but there were no recognizable orchards; and the trees that dotted the fields, singly and in clumps, massed themselves in forest effects in the increasing distance. They covered quite a third of the plain, which stretched twenty miles away on every hand, and were an accent of dark, harsh green amid the yellower tone of the meadows. The Cotswolds rising to the height of the Malvern Hills against the dull horizon (often rainy, now, but dull always), ended the immense level, where, coming or going, the little English railway trains, under their long white plumes of smoke, glided in every direction; and somewhere through the scene the unseen Severn ran.

Not to affront the reader’s intelligence, but to note my own ignorance, until an unusually excellent local guide-book partially dispersed it, will I remind him that all this region was once a royal chase. Half a dozen forests, of which Malvern Forest was chief, spread “a boundless contiguity of shade” over the hills and plains in which the cruel kings, from Canute down to Charles I., hunted the deer consecrated to their bows and spears, and took the lives or put out the eyes of any other man that slew them without leave. But in virtue of the unwritten law by which the people’s own reverts to them through the very pride of their expropriators, the dwellers in and about Malvern Chase had insensibly grown to have such rights and privileges in the wilderness that when Charles proposed to sell the woods they made a tumultuous protest; they rose in riot against the king’s will, and he had to give them two-thirds of the Chase for commons, before he could turn the remaining third into the money he needed so much.

In the very earliest times Malvern seems to have been a British stronghold against the Romans, and perhaps, again, the Saxons; but otherwise its peaceful history is resumed in that of its beautiful Priory church, an edifice which is fabled to have begun its religious life as a Druid temple. On one of the three Beacons, as the chief of the Malvern Hills are called, after the three comities of Worcester, Gloucester, and Hereford in which they rise,

“Twelve fair counties saw the blaze.”

 which signaled the approach of the Spanish Armada. But the local history is not of that dense succession of events, against whose serried points the visitor so often dashes himself in vain elsewhere in England. He can let his fancy roam up and down the vague past, with nothing, except the possible surrender of Caractacus to the Romans, very definitely important to hinder it, from the dawn of time to the year 1842, when the Priessnitz system of water-cure chose Malvern the capital of English hydropathy. The Wells of Malvern had always been famous for their healing properties, and now modern faith added itself to ancient superstition, and from the centre of belief thus established, a hydropathic religion spread throughout England. Its monuments still confront one everywhere in the minor hotels or major boarding-houses which briefly call themselves Hydros, but probably do not attempt working the old miracles. There is still a commodious shrine for the performance of these in the heart of Malvern; but the place was plainly no longer the Mecca of the pilgrims of thirty or fifty years ago. The air of its hills indeed invites the ailing, who so abound in England, but the waters have found the level which even medicinal waters seek, and flow away in the obscurity attending the decline of so many once thronged and honored Spas.

I do not know that I particularly like ruinous ruins, but a decay that is still in tolerable repair is greatly to my mind. The better the repair, the greater my pleasure in it, and when we were once posited in our lodgings, I began to take comfort in the perfect neatness, the unfailing taste, the pious care with which the spirit of that dead Malvern guarded its sepulchre. There was all the apparatus of a social gayety beneficial to invalids, but not, so far as I could note, an invalid to profit by it, if it had been running. In a certain public garden, indeed, in the centre of the town, there was a sound of revelry emitted by a hidden band, in the afternoon and evening, but I had never the heart to penetrate its secret; within, the garden might not have looked so gay as it sounded. There were excellent large and little shops, including a book and periodical store, where you could get almost anything you wanted, or did not want, at watering-place prices. There was an Assembly building, always locked fast, and a very good public library where I resorted for books of reference, and for a word of intellectual converse with the kind assistant librarian who formed my social circle in Malvern. From somewhere in the dim valley at night there came bursts of fragmentary minstrelsy, which we were told by the maid was the professional rejoicing of Pierrots, a gleeful tribe summer England has borrowed from the French tradition almost as lavishly as the crude creations of our own burnt-cork opera. Wherever you go, among her thronged and thronging watering-places, these strongly contrasted figures meet and cheer you; even in Malvern there were strains of rag-time, mingling with the music of the Pierrots, which gave assurance of these duskier presences somewhere in the dark.

One afternoon we went to a politer entertainment in a lower room of the Assembly building, given by a company which had so vividly plastered the dead walls (if this is specific) of Malvern with the announcements of their coming, that we hastened to be among the earliest at the box-office lest we should not get seats. To make sure of seeing and hearing we took two-shilling seats, which were at the front, and it was well we did so, for before the curtain rose, a multitude of fourteen people thronged to the one-shilling benches behind us. This number I knew from deliberate count, for the curtain, as if in a sad prescience of adversity, was long in rising. I do not think that company of artists would have been very cheerful under the best conditions; as it was they afforded us the very sorrowfulest amusement I have ever enjoyed. In that pathetic retrospect it seems to me that one man and woman of them sang at different times comic duets with tears in their voices. There were also from time to time joyless glees, and there was an interlude of dancing, so very, very blameless that it was all but actively virtuous in its modesty. A sense of something perpetually provincial, something irretrievably amateurish in the performers, penetrated the American spectators; and it is from a heart still full of pity that I recall how plain they were, poor girls, how floor - walkerish they were, poor fellows. They were as one family in their mutual disability and forbearance; if perhaps they each knew how badly the others were doing, they did nothing to show it; and in their joint weakness they were unable to spare us a single act of their programme. I have seldom left a hall of mirth in so haggard a frame, but perhaps if I had been more inured to Malvern I could have borne my pleasure better.

If this was not, strictly speaking, a concert, that was certainly a concert which I attended one evening at a Baptist chapel, where a company of Welsh miners sang like a company of Welsh angels. I was in hopes they would have sung in Welsh, which, as is well known, was the language of Paradise, but they sang in English as good as English ever can be in comparison; and instead of Bardic measures, it was all terribly classic, or when not classic, religious. As I say, though, the voices were divine, and I asked myself if such heavenly sounds could issue, at this remove, from the bowels of the Welsh mountains, what must be the cherubinic choiring from their tops! It was a very simple-hearted affair, that concert, and well encouraged by a large and cordial audience, thanks mostly, perhaps, to the vigilance of the lady pickets stationed down the lane leading to the chapel, and quite into the street, with tickets for sale, who let no hesitating passers escape. I myself pleaded a sovereign in defence, but one of the fair pickets changed it with instant rapture, and I was left without excuse for the indecision in which I had gone out to see whether I would really go to the concert.

For the matter of that we were without excuse for staying on in Malvern, save that it was so very, very pleasant though so very, very dull. It was there, I think, that I formed the Spanish melon habit, which I indulged thereafter throughout that summer, till the fogs of London reformed me at end of September, when no more melons came from Spain. The average of Spanish melons in England is so much better than that of our cantaloupes at home that I advise all lovers of the generous fruit to miss no chance of buying them. The fruiterer who sold me my first in Malvern, said that in the palmy days of the place many Americans used to come, and he mentioned a New York millionaire of his acquaintance so confidently that I almost thought he was mine, and felt much more at home than before. I had more talk with this kind fruiterer than with any one else in Malvern, though I will not depreciate an interview with a jobbing mechanic from far Norfolk, who spent an afternoon washing our windows, and was conversible when once you started his torpid flow. He did not grasp extra-Norfolk ideas readily, and he altogether lacked the brilliant fancy of the gay, rusty, frowsy ragged tramp who came one afternoon with a bunch of cat-tail rushes for sale, and who had vividly conceived of himself as a steel-polisher out of work. He might not have been mistaken; but if he was it could not spoil my pleasure in him, or in the weather which had now begun to be very beautiful, with blue skies almost cloudless, and quite agreeably hot. It being the 12th of August, a bank holiday fell on that day, and the town filled up with trippers (mysteriously much objected to in England), who seemed mostly lovers, and who arm in arm passed through our street. One indeed there was who passed without companionship, playing the accordeon, his eyes fixed in a rapture with his own music.

On several other days the town seemed the less reasoned resort of crowds of harmless young people, who perhaps thought they were seeing the world there, since it was the height of the Malvern season. They were at one time more definitely attracted by the Flower Show at the neighboring seat of a great nobleman, which was opened by his lady with due ceremonies, and which enjoyed a greater popular favor. I myself followed with the trippers there, partly because I had long read of that kind of English thing without seeing it, and because in the spacious leisure of Malvern it was difficult to invent occupations that would fill the time between luncheon and dinner, even with an hour out for an afternoon nap.

It was just a pleasant drive to the nobleman’s place, and my progress was attended by a sentiment of circus-day in the goers and comers on foot and in fly, and the loungers strewn on the grass of the road-sides and the open lots. At the gate of the nobleman’s grounds, we paid a modest entrance, and there were still modester fees for several of the exhibits. One of these was a tent where under a strong magnifying-glass a community of ants were offering their peculiar domestic and social economy to the study of the curious. But, if I rightly remember, the pavilion which sheltered the flower-show was free to all who could walk through its sultry air without stifling; it was really not so much a show of flowers as of fruits and vegetables, which indeed bore the heat better. Another free performance was the rivalry, apparently of amateurs, in simple feats of carpentry and joiner-work as applied to fence-building; but this was of a didactic effect from which it was a relief to turn to the idle and useless adventures of the people who lost themselves in a maze, or labyrinthine hedge and shared the innocent hilarity of the spectators watching their bewilderment from a high ground hard by. All the time there was a band playing, which when it played a certain familiar rag-time measure was loudly applauded and forced to play it again and again. It was a proud moment for the exile from a country whose black step-children had contributed these novel motives to the world’s music, in the intervals of being lynched. The scene was ail very familiar and very strange, with qualities of a subdued county fair at home, but more ordered and directed than such things are with us. As I say, I had long known its like in literature, and I was now glad to find it so realistic. My pleasure in it overflowed when the nobleman who had lent his premises for the show, came walking out among the people, bareheaded, in a suit of summer gray, with his lady beside him, and paused to speak, amid the general emotion, with a neat old woman of humble class, whose hand his lady had shaken. That, I said to myself, was quite as it should be in its allegiance to immemorial tradition and its fidelity to fiction; it could have formed the initial moment of a hundred thousand English novels. If it could not have formed a like moment in American romance, it is because our millionaires, in their shyness of subpoenas or of interviews, do not yet open their private grounds for flower-shows. It needs many centuries to mellow the conditions for the effect I had witnessed, and we must not be impatient.

The lord and his lady had come out of a mansion that did not look very mediaeval, though it had a moat round it, with ducks in the moat, and in the way to its portal a force of footmen to confirm any corner in his misgiving that the house was closed to the public, and to direct him to the pleasaunce beyond. This was a lawned and gardened place, enclosed with a green wall of hedge, and guarded on one side with succession of pedestals bearing classic busts. It was charming in the afternoon sun, with groups of people seriously, if somewhat awe-strickenly, enjoying themselves. The inferiors in England never take that ironical attitude towards their superiors which must long delay a real classification of society with us. When there one accepts the situation, and becomes at least gentry if one can, with all the assumptions and responsibilities which station implies. I had a curious illustration of this in my own case when once I came to pay the driver of my fly at the end of an excursion. It had always been my theory that if only the people who exact tips would say what tip they expected, it would greatly simplify and clarify the affair. But now when this good-fellow said the fly would be twelve shillings for the two hours, which I mutely thought too much, and then added, “And two shillings for me,” I did not like it as well as my theory should have supported me in doing. Had I possibly been meaning to offer him one shilling? Heaven knows; but I found myself on the point of lecturing him for his greed, when I reflected that it would be of no use, at least in Malvern, for in Malvern when I went to a stable to engage a fly for other excursions, they always said it would be so much, and so much more for the driver. His tip, a good third of the whole cost, seemed an unwritten part of the tariff, but it was an inflexible law.

It is strong proof of the pleasantness of the drives that this novel feature could not spoil them for us, and we were always going them. There were pretty villages lurking all about in the shades of that lovely plain, which if you passed through them on a Sunday afternoon, for example, had their people out in their best, with comely girls seen through the open doors of the above cottages, apparently waiting for company, or, in its defect, sitting on benches in their flowery door-yards and making believe to read.

The way was sometimes between tall ranks of trees, sometimes through lines of hedge, opening at the hamlets and closing beyond them. Once it ran by a vast enclosure, which looked like a neglected nursery, losing itself in a forest beyond. But we had really chanced upon one of the most characteristic features of English civilization. This neglected nursery was in fact a plantation of all woodland growths, for a game-preserve where later the gentleman who owned it would have the pleasure of killing the wild things resorting to it. We came to it fresh from our satisfaction with another characteristic feature: a village of low houses fronting on a green common, where geese and sheep were grazing, and poultry were set about in coops in the grass. Children were playing over it; men were smoking at the doors, and women doubtless were working within. The evening fire sent up its fumes from the chimneys, and a savory smell of cooking was in the air. It all looked very sociable, and if a little squalid, not the less friendly for that reason. It is from our literary associations with such scenes that we derive our heartaches when we first leave our humble homes in America, where we have really no such villages, but only solitary farms, or bustling communities on the way to be business centres. A village like that could easily become a “Deserted Village,” and an image of it, reflected in Goldsmith’s dear and lovely poem, recurred to me from my far youth,

“On Eric’s banks, where tigers steal along,

And the dread Indian chants his warlike song,”

 and mixed with the reality as I drove through it.

The three great summits which are chief of the Malvern Hills are the Beacons of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire; and nearest the town they are everywhere traversed by the paths which the founders of the water-cure taught to stray over their undulations in the fashion of the German spas, and on which the patients walked themselves into a wholesome glow after their douches, sprays, and drenches. They are very noble tops indeed, from which one may everywhere command a lordly prospect, but the most interesting, and the loftiest, is the Worcestershire Beacon, a brow of which the Britons fortified against the Romans. You can drive the greater part of the way to their earthwork, and if you make the climb to it you will not envy either enemy its possession. The views from it are enchanting, and the fortifications, with companies of sheep grazing sidelong on their glacis and escarpments, can still be easily traced by the eye of military science; but perhaps their chief attraction to the civilian is that they seem impregnable to the swarming flies which infest the road almost throughout its rise, and at the point where you leave your carriage are a quite indescribable pest. One could imagine the Romans hurrying up the steep to be rid of them, and beating the Britons out of their stronghold in order to secure themselves from the insect enemy on the breezy height. They must have bitten the bare legs of the legionaries fearfully and really rendered retreat impossible, while the Britons had no choice but to submit; for if it was at this point that the brave Caractacus surrendered with his following, rather than be forced down among those flies, he yielded to a military necessity, and I should be the last to blame him for it. I wondered how my driver was getting on among them, till I found that he had taken refuge in the opportune inn from which he issued, wiping his mouth, on my descent from the embattled height; but the inn could not have been there in the Roman times.

The best of the excursion was coming home by the Wyche, a tremendous cut through beetling walls of rock, which are truly, in the old eighteenth-century literary sense, horrid. Here, as several times before and after, I had to admire at that ignorance of mine in which I had supposed the British continent to be made up of a mild loveliness alone. It has often a bold and rugged beauty which may challenge comparison with our much less accessible grandeurs. It takes days for us to go to the Grand Canon, or the Yellowstone, or the Yosemite, but one can reach the farthest natural wonder in England by a morning train from London. This handiness of the picturesque and the marvellous is in keeping with the scheme of English life, which is so conveniently arranged that you have scarcely to make an effort for comfort in it. One excepts, of course, the matter of in-door warmth; but out-doors you can always be happy, if you have an umbrella.

I could not praise too much the meteorological delightfulness of that fortnight in Great Malvern, when we had the place so much to ourselves, except for the incursionary trippers, who were, after all, so transient. What contributed greatly to our pleasure was the perfect repair in which the whole place was kept. Apparently the source of its prosperity and certainly its repute, was at the lowest ebb; but the vigilant municipality did not suffer the smallest blight of neglect to rest upon it; the streets were kept with the scruple which is universal in England and which in the retrospect makes our slattern towns and ruffian cities look so shameful; and all was maintained in a preparedness in which no sudden onset of invalids could surprise a weak point. The private premises were penetrated by the same spirit of neatness, and the succession of villas and cottages everywhere showed behind their laurel and holly hedges paths so trim and cleanly that if Adversity haunted their doors she could approach their spotless thresholds without wetting her feet or staining her skirts. It is gratuitous, of course, to suppose the inhabitants all dependent upon hydropathy for their prosperity, but it was certainly upon hydropathy that Malvern increased to her fifteen thousand; and the agreeable anomaly remains.

If ever the tide of sickness sets back there — and somehow I wish it might — the cultivated sufferer will find an environment so beautiful that it will console him even for not getting well. Nothing can surpass the picturesqueness of those up and down hill streets of Malvern, or the easy variety of the walks and drives about it, up the hills, and down the valleys, and over the plains. If the sufferer is too delicate for much exercise, there is the prettiest public garden in which to smoke or sew, with a peaceful pond in it, and land and water growths which I did interrogate too closely for their botanical names, but which looked friendly if not familiar. Above all, if the sufferer is cultivated and of a taste for antique beauty, there is the Priory Church, which to a cultivated sufferer from our Priory Churchless land will have an endless charm.

At least, I found myself, who am not a great sufferer, nor so very cultivated, and with a passion for antiquity much sated by various travel in many lands, going again and again to the Priory Church in Malvern, and spending hours of pensive pleasure among the forgetting graves without, and the vaguely remembering monuments within. But not among these alone, for some of the most modern of the sculptures are the most beautiful and touching. In a church which dates easily from Early Norman times and not difficultly from Saxon days, a tomb of the Elizabethan century may be called modern, and I specially commend to the visitor that of the Knotesford family to which the Priory passed after the dissolution of the monasteries. The good “Esquire, servant to King Henry the Eight,” lies beside his wife, and at their sides kneel four of their daughters, with the fifth, who raised the monument to them, at her father’s head. Nothing can mark the simple piety and filial sweetness of the whole group, which is of portraits in the realistic spirit of the time; but there is a softer, a sublimer exaltation in that ideal woman’s figure, on a monument of our day, rising from her couch to hail her Saviour with “Even so, come, Lord Jesus.” This work, in the spirit of Chantry, is in the spirit of all ages; and yet has my reader heard of Robert Hollins of Birmingham? If he has not, it will have for him the pathos which attaches to so much art bearing to the beholder no claim of the mind that conceived or the hand that wrought; and the Priory Church of Malvern is rich in such work of every older date. If the reader has a great deal of leisure, he will wish to study the fifteenth-century tiles which record so many sacred and profane histories, and the quaintly carven stalls with the grotesques of their underseats, and doubtless to do what he can with the stained-windows which survive, in almost unrivalled beauty, the devastation through malice and conscience, of so many others in England. A hundred, or for all I know, a thousand reverend and imperative details will keep him and recall him, day after day, and doubtless he will begin to feel a veneration for the zeal and piety which has restored at immense cost this and so many other temples in every part of the country. You cannot have beauty and the cleanliness next to holiness, you cannot even have antiquity, without paying for it, and the English have been willing to pay. That is why Malvern is still so fair and neat, and why if her Hydropathy should fail at last to attract a single sufferer, her Priory Church may continue to entreat the foot of the Pilgrim in good health. If the monastery, of which the Priory Gateway is a sole relic, was, as seems probable, really once the home of Langland, the author of “Piers Ploughman’s Vision,” he could visit no shrine more worthy the reverence of any lover of his kind, any friend of the poor.

XII. SHREWSBURY BY WAY OF WORCESTER AND HEREFORD

WE made Worcester what amends we could for refusing to stop the night in her picturesque old inn, so powerfully smelling of stable, by going an afternoon from Malvern to see her fabric of the Royal Worcester ware which some people may think she is named for. Really, however, she was called Wygraster, Wyrcester Wearcester, Wureter, and Hooster, long before porcelain was heard of. In times quite prehistoric the Cornuvlf dwelt there in dug-outs, or huts, of “wottle-and-dab,” the dab being probably the clay now used in the Royal Worcester ware. In a more advanced period, she was plundered and burned by the Danes, and had a mint of her own nearly a thousand years before we paid her our second visit. But this detail, of which, with many others, we were ignorant, could not keep us from going to the works, and spending a long, exhausting, and edifying afternoon amidst the potteries, ateliers and ovens. The worst of such things is you are so genuinely interested that you think you ought to be much more so, and you put on such an intensity of curiosity and express such a transport of gratitude for each new fact that you come away gasping. I for my part, was prostrated at the very outset by something that I dare say everybody else knows — namely, that to have a small teacup of china you must put into the oven a hulking bowl of day, which will shrink in baking to the proper dimensions, and that the reduction through the loss of moisture must be calculated with mathematical precision. With difficulty I then followed our intelligent guide through every part of the Wonderful establishment: from the places where the clays were being mixed and kneaded; where the forms were being turned and moulded; where the dried pieces were being painted and decorated in the colors which were to come to life in the furnaces wholly different colors from those laid on by the artists; from the delicate smoothing and polishing, to the final display by sample, in the pretty show-room where one might satisfy the most economical thankfulness by the purchase of a souvenir. The museum of the works, where the history of the local keramics is told in the gradual perfectioning of the product through more than a hundred and fifty years, and where copies of its chefs-d’œuvre are assembled in dazzling variety, is most worthy to be seen; but I would counsel greater leisure than ours to make it the occasion of a second visit. By the time you reach it after going through the other departments, you feel like the huge earthen shape which has come out, after the different processes, a tiny demi-tasse. You are very finished, but you are desiccated to the last attenuation, and a touch would shiver you to atoms.

It could not have been after we visited the Royal Porcelain Works that we saw the noble Cathedral of Worcester; it must have been before, for otherwise there would not have been enough left of us for the joy in it of which my mind bears record still. The riches of the place can scarcely be intimated, much less catalogued, and perhaps it was fortunate for us that the Norman crypt, with all its dim associations, was much abandoned to the steam-boilers which furnish the inspiration, or at least, the power, of the great organ. Though the verger, a man of up-to-date intelligence, was proud of those boilers and their bulk, we complained of them to each other, with the eager grudge of travellers; and I suppose we would rather have had their room given to monuments of Bishop Gauden, who wrote Charles I.’s Eikon Basilike, or of Mrs. Digby by the ever-divine Chantrey, or masterpieces of Roubiliac, or effigies of King John and Prince Arthur, or tablets to the wife of Isaac Walton, with epitaphs by the angler himself, such as Baedeker and the other guide-bookers say the cathedral overhead abounds in. We learned too late for emotion that Henry II. and his queen were crowned in the cathedral, and that the poor, bad John was buried there at his own request. “The organ is decorated, in arabesque and has five manuals and sixty-two stops,” yet we thought it might have got on with fewer boilers in the crypt. Not that we had time or thought for full pleasure in the rest of the cathedral. I remember indeed the beautiful roof of one long unbroken level; but what remains to me of the exquisite “Perp. Cloisters, entered from the S. aisle of the nave”? I will own to my shame that we failed even to see the marriage contract of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, in the diocesan registrar’s office, just within the cathedral gateway. Did we so much know that it existed there? Who can say? We saw quite as little that portion of the skin of the Dane who was flayed alive for looting the cathedral, and is now represented by a remnant of his cuticle in the chapter-house.

My prevalent impression of the Worcester Cathedral is not so much one of beauty as one of interest, full, various, and important interest. Of course in our one poor afternoon we could not give the wonderful place more than an hour. We had for one thing to go and do some shopping, and the shops in Worcester are very fairly good. Then we tried for tea, but there seemed to be men drinking beer in the place; and though the proprietor hospitably drove them out, in honor of the lady of our party, yet we thought we would not have tea there, or indeed anywhere. We went rather for a rainy moment to a pretty public garden beside the Severn, where from a waterproof spread upon a stone seat we watched the flow of the river. It seemed a very damp river, but it must be remembered the weather was wet. For the rest, Worcester proved a city of trams, passing through rather narrow streets of tall modern houses, intersected by lanes of lesser and older houses, much more attractive. It was also a centre of torrential downpours, with refuges in doorways where one of us could wait while the other umbrellaed a wild way about in search of a personable public-house, and an eventual chop. Found, the public-house turned out brand-new, like a hotel in an American railroad centre, where in an upper chamber, dryer and warmer than the English wont, travelling-men sat eating, and the strangers were asked by a kind, plain girl if they would have tea with their chop. Did English people, then, of the lower middle non-conformist class, have tea with their meat? It seemed probable, and in compliance we reverted to the American custom of fifty years ago. If the truth must be told it was not very good, personal tea, but was of the quick-lunch general brew which one drinks scalding hot from steaming nickel-plated cylinders in our country-stations, with the conductor calling “All aboard!” at the door.

It is a shame to be noting these silly exceptions to the grand and beautiful life which must abound in Worcester, if one only had the key to it. There looked charming houses here and there in the quiet streets and places, but the present must keep itself locked against the average touristry to which the past is open. Afterwards we visited the famous city again and again in history, where the reader will find our welcome awaiting him, from Peter de Montford, who pillaged the town in 1263, and Owen Glendower in 1401; from Henry VII. who beheaded there after the battle of Bosworth Field many citizens holding for hunchback Richard; from Queen Elizabeth who came in 1574 and was received at the White Ladies; from Prince Rupert who captured it and Essex who recaptured and plundered it and spoiled the cathedral; and from the two wicked Kings Charles, father and son, who each deserved to lose the battle each lost at Worcester. If the reader comes and goes by Sidbury Gate, he may easily make his entrance and exit by that approach, where the first Charles’s friends upset the wagon-load of hay which kept his pursuers from overtaking and taking him in his flight from the battle-field above the city. The storied, or the fabled, hay is always there, if you do not know the place.

The August day we left Malvern, and stayed for a drive through Hereford on our way to Shrewsbury, was bright and hot, and Hereford was responsively sultry and dusty. Except for its beautiful cathedral, Hereford is not apparently interesting, though it may really be interesting. It certainly is historically interesting; and if one likes to find one’s self in a place which was considerable in 584, and sent a bishop to the synod of St. Augustine seventeen years later, there is Hereford for the choosing. Otherwise it looks a dull, slovenly large market-town which has not been swept since the last market-day. It has, indeed, the merit of a fine old Tudor house between three intersecting streets and now devoted to a banking business, and I will not pretend that I did not enjoy, quite as much as I enjoyed the cathedral, the old almshouse which we visited somewhere on the length of a mighty long street. A longer, dustier, flatter and hotter street I have not known outside of Ferrara, where all the streets are like that. It must have been in default of other attractions that we were so strenuous about seeing the Coningsby Hospital for old soldiers and servants, but at any rate I am now glad we went. For one thing we should not have known what else to do till our train left for Shrewsbury, and for another it was really very nice to learn what old soldiership or old butlership could come to late in life in that England of snug retreats for so many sorts of superannuation. The kindly inmate who showed me about the place was hurrying himself into a red coat when we stopped at the outer door, and as he proved an old servant and not an old soldier, I thought he might have worn something of a cooler color, say Kendall-green, on such a day. But there was no other fault in him, and if I had been the nobleman who appointed him to that disoccupation after a life-long menial employment, I might well have thought twice before choosing some other domestic of my train. He led me about the thirsty garden, where the vegetables panted among their droughty flower-borders, and had me view not only the Norman archway of the old commandery of the Knights Templars, now spanning a space of pot herbs, but the ruins of the Black Friars’ priory drooping in the heat. Something incongruous in it all tormented the spirit, but how to have it otherwise probably the spirit could not have said. It was better in the cloistered approaches to the pensioners’ quarters, cool and dim under the low ceiling, and I shall always be sorry that I pretended a hurry, and did not view the rooms of my guide. I thought I could do that, any time, in the insensate superstition of the postponing traveller, and now, how far I am from Hereford, recording these vain regrets in the top of a towering New York hotel, overlooking the Hudson!

Or is it rather the Wye? The Wye runs, or slowly, slowly creeps through Hereford, under a most beautiful bridge, which I do not know but you cross in going to the station. I had, or I ought to have had, long thoughts in that dreamy old town, where I would now so willingly pass all the rest of my worst enemy’s life; for it was the market-town of my ancestors, and thither, I dare say, my Welsh-flannel manufacturing great-grandfather sent his goods, as to a bustling metropolis where they would bring the largest price. But at this distance of time, who knows? I hope at least they went by the river Wye in barges laden at his little Breconshire town, and floated either up or down the stream; I do not know which way the Wye runs from The Hay, and in this sort of purely literary reverie it does not matter. What really matters is to get these Welsh flannels into the hands of some mercer in Hereford, and then leave them and go again to the cathedral, which is so beautiful, and so full of bishops, now no longer living. Your foot knocks against their monuments at every step; but the great glory of the cathedral is in its mighty tower, massing itself to heaven from the midst, and looking best, I fancy, from the outside of the church. Only, there, when you have left your fly in the shade of the great chestnuts (I hope they are chestnuts), you will have to run across the blazing pavement if you wish to reach the cathedral alive in that fierce Hereford sun. Before I leave it for another flight to our fly, I wish to bear testimony to the exceptional intelligence of the verger showing us about, in whom I vainly sought a likeness to the verger who twenty years earlier had guided my steps among the tombs of those multitudinous bishops. At that time I had lately read in an Ecclesiastical Directory of the United Kingdom that a newer canon of the cathedral was of my own name; and I asked the verger if he could show me his seat in the choir. He did so at once, and incidentally noted, “Many’s the ‘alf-crown I’ve ‘ad from ‘im, sir,” when, such is the honor one bears one’s name, I too gave him a half-crown at parting. Had I perhaps been meaning to give him sixpence?

We were sheltered from the sun at last when we started for Shrewsbury, in a train which began almost at once to run between wooded hills under a sky that constantly cleared, constantly clouded, through a country that had been expelled from Eden along with Adam and Eve. It was still very hot, on the outskirts of the afternoon, when we rearched Shrewsbury, and drove to the Raven, which we called a bird of prey because it wanted certain shillings for two large, cool rooms, though we should be glad now to pay twice their sum. How haught the spirit grows when once it has tasted the comparative cheapness of English inns! We alleged Chester, we alleged Plymouth, we alleged Liverpool, in expostulation, but the Raven would only offer us two smaller and warmer rooms for fewer shillings, and so we drove to another hotel. We got two fair chambers there with loaded casements, for much less money, and we looked from our pretty windows down upon the green at the foot of St. Mary’s Church, and as far up its heaven-climbing tower as we could crane our necks to see. I can give no idea of our content in that proximity; it was as if we had the lovely and venerable edifice all to ourselves, and as we listened to the music in which it struck the hour and the next quarter of it, our hearts sang in unison with a holy and tasteful joy.

But it seemed as if, though a sultry afternoon at Hereford,

“The day increased from heat to heat,”

 in its decline at Shrewsbury. We made a long evening of it before we tried to sleep, and then our joy in the chimed quarters of St. Mary’s clock was still tasteful, but not so holy as it had been at first. The bells had miraculously transferred themselves to the interior of our rooms, which were transformed into deeply murmuring belfries; and we discovered that there were not four but twenty-four quarters in every hour. These were computed by one stroke for the first quarter, two for the next, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on until about a thousand strokes told the final quarter in the twenty-four. In the mean time the heat broke in a passion of rain. A thunder-storm came on, and having the whole night before it, and being quite at leisure, it bellowed and flashed till daylight, when it retired from the scene and left it as hot as ever, and a great deal closer.

If the entire truth must be told, in that old border - town which, after an inarticulate Roman antiquity, had held back the Welsh from England for nearly a thousand years, and finally witnessed the triumph of the Red Rose over the White in the fight where Hotspur Harry fell, we had been allured by the delicious incongruity of seeing “The Belle of New York” in the most alien of all possible environments. We had never seen the piece in its native city; money could not there have overcome our instinct of its abominable vulgarity, but here in a strange land (if our English friends will let us call it so for the sake of the antithesis) we made it an act of patriotism to go. We bought two proud front seats, and found our way to them before a risen curtain, to realize too late that until its fall there was no retreat for us. The theatre at Shrewsbury is not large, under the best of circumstances, and that night it was smaller than ever. Such was the favor of “The Belle of New York” with that generous population, that every seat in the orchestra was taken, and the walls of the edifice pressed suffocatingly inwards. On the stage the heat was so concentrated that in the glare of the foot-lights the faces of the performers steamed with perspiration through the greasepaint of their faces, as they swayed and sang, and leaped and bounded in obedience to the dramatist and composer, and delivered our New York slang in a cockney convention of our local accent which seemed entirely to satisfy the preconceptions of Shrewsbury. Altogether, the piece enjoyed an acceptance with the audience which, in the welding heat, was so little less than stifling that the adventurous strangers, at the close of an act that lasted as long as a Greek trilogy, escaped into the street with what was left of their lives. I know that it is making an exorbitant demand upon the credulity of the reader to relate that upon their return to Shrewsbury a week later these strangers again went to see an American play in the same theatre, which seemed to have been greatly enlarged in the interval, and so deliciously lowered in temperature that in their balcony seats they all but shivered through a melodrama of New York life professing to have been written by Joseph Jefferson. There was an escape of the hero from prison in one scene, and in another a still narrower escape from drowning in the East River at the hands of perhaps the worst reprobate who ever came to a bad end on the stage; and there was a set (I think it is called) of the Brooklyn Bridge, which though attenuated and almost spectralized, recalled the reality as measurably as the English Bobby in blue recalled the massive Irish-American guardians of our public security. The “Shadows of a Great City” did not convince us of our dear and now-lamented Jefferson’s authorship; but it was not so unbearable as “The Belle of New York,” for meteorological reasons, if not for others, and upon the whole it interested, it flattered the mind to the fond conjecture that here in this ancient, this beautiful town, the American drama, if finally neglected in its own land, might be welcomed to a prosperous and honored exile.

St. Mary’s Church was so near at hand that it could hardly fail of repeated visits, and it merited a veneration which might have been more instructed but could not have been more sincere than ours. In every author who treats of it the riches of its stained glass is celebrated, and I will not dwell upon its beauties or even its quaint simplicities. The church is as old as Norman architecture can make it, and it invites with a hundred interesting facts, so that I hardly know how to justify the specific attraction which one piece of modern sculpture there had from me above all other things. The tomb of General Curston by Westonscott has not even the claim of being within the church, where so many memorable and immemorable dead are remembered. It is in the square basement of the tower, and the soldier’s figure is on your right as you enter. He was perhaps not much known to history, being only an adjutant - general, who fell in battle with the Sikhs at Runneggar in 1848, but no one who looks upon his countenance in the living stone can forget it. His left hand rests at his side; his right lies on his heart holding his sword; his soldier’s cloak opens, showing his medals. In the realistically treated face, with its long drooping mustache and whiskers, is a look of dreamy melancholy which, whatever the other qualities of the work, is a masterpiece of expression. Of a period when the commonplace asserted itself with a positive force almost universal in the arts, this simple monument is of classic beauty.

As quaint as any of the earliest inscriptions on the monuments of the church is the tablet in the outer wall of the tower to the bold eighteenth-century aëronaut who came to his death in an endeavored flight from its top to the farther bank of the Severn. It appears that in this as in some other matters —

“Not only we, the latest seed of time,

That in the flying of a wheel cry down

The past—”

 have excelled or even failed. Nor is it probable that the bold youth who perished in 1759 was the first to try imperfect wings in the region where none have yet triumphed; and the faith of his epitapher is not less touching than that of the many who survive to our own day in the belief of antemortem aërostation.

“Let this small monument record the name

Of Cadmus, and to future time proclaim

How by an attempt to fly from this high spire

Across the Sabrine stream he did acquire

His fatal end. ’Twas not for want of skill,

Or courage to perform the task, he fell.

No, no, a faulty cord being drawn too tight,

Hurried his soul on high to take her flight.”

The imagination which does not rest its hopes on faulty cords, but follows carefully, on the sure and firm-set earth, in the steps of fact and then flies forward in most inspired conjecture, has its abiding in the memory of the great Darwin, son of Shrewsbury town, and scholar of her famous school. If we cannot count him

“The first of these who know.”

 among such savans and philosophers as Jenner, Paley, Kennedy, and Butler, his name will carry to further times than any other the glory of that “faire free schoole,” founded by Edward VI., of which even in the seventeenth century it could be written, “Itt hath fowr maisters, and their are sometimes six hundred schollers, and a hansome library thirunto belonging.” The stainless Sir Philip Sidney, and the blood-stained Judge Jeffreys were both of its alumni, but it is the statue of Darwin to which the devotees of evolution will bend their steps in Shrewsbury. It was my fortune to find myself by chance in the house where he lived with his first teacher, the Unitarian minister at Shrewsbury, and to stand in the room where he began, very obliquely and remotely, the studies which changed the thoughts of the world. But the old man he became sits in bronze at a far remove from this in front of the museum of Roman antiquities.

As a museum it is not so amusing as you might expect of a collection containing the remains of Latin civilization from the Roman city of Uriconium, long hidden from fame under the name of Wroxeter, which lies, as my laconic Baedeker tells, “about 5 in to the S. E.” of Shrewsbury. But probably it is your want of archæology which disables your interest in the province of these remains, while you readily grapple with the fact that the museum itself is part of the old Edward VI. foundation, and that Darwin, whose mild, wise face welcomes you up the way to the building, often went it “unwillingly to school” in that very place.

Another dear son of memory who may be associated with Shrewsbury was the poet Coleridge, vaguely and vagariously great, who in his literary nonage preached in the Unitarian chapel of the town. This chapel (“now used,” my guide says, “by a Theistic congregation,”) was afterwards partially destroyed by a mob which had the divinity of Christ so much at heart that it could not suffer a Socinian place of worship; but it was restored by the King’s command at the public cost, as we ought to remember of that poor George III. whose name we cannot otherwise revere. It was restored in the good architectural taste of the time, and as you stand within it you might readily fancy yourself in some elderly fane of our own once Unitarian Boston.

Darwin’s mother was of that cult, which has enjoyed rather a lion’s share of the social discountenance falling to all dissent in England, but the tale of his fellow-scholars in aftertimes and aforetimes at the school of Edward Vlth, shines with so many Established bishops and divines, as to relieve Shrewsbury from any blight falling upon it for that cause. With these, and such statesmen as Halifax, such dramatists as Wycherley, such poets as Ambrose Phillips, such savans as Dr. Jonathan Scott, the orientalist, Dr. Edward Waring, the mathematician, Rev. C. H. Hartsborne, the antiquarian, the venerable foundation is surely safe in the regard of the most liturgical.

But Shrewsbury swarms with all sorts of high associations. Here David, the last of the old British Princes of Wales, was put to death by order of the English King, and here in the last battle between the Roses, the Welsh hope was finally broken in the defeat of the White Rose. Here Falstaff fought with Harry Hotspur “a long hour by the Shrewsbury clock” — probably the very clock in St. Mary’s tower which kept me awake much longer; and here was born the second son of Henry IV., one of the princes whom their wicked uncle Richard slew in the Tower. Here, in one of his flights before his subjects, Charles I. stayed with the brief splendor of his court about him, and minted the plate of the loyal Shropshire gentry, till treachery overtook him (in the local guide-book), and the town fell to the Parliament; and here James II. paused a day when time was getting to be more than money to him. Twice the good Queen Victoria visited the town, and once, long before, the Prince of Darkness himself came, in storm and night, and spoiled the clock of St. Alkmund, leaving a scratch from his claw on the fourth bell. The precise occasion of his visit is not recorded, nor is it told just why the effigy of Richard of York, the father of Edward IV., should be standing, “clad in complete steel,” in front of the beautiful old Market Hall, and stooped in an attitude of such apparent discomfortableness that he is known to some of a light-minded generation as the “Stomach-ache Man.”

The city is the home of those Shrewsbury cakes, famed in The Ingoldshy Legends, and once offered to distinguished visitors, who thought them “delicious,” but if they were then no better than now, we can imagine how poor the living of the proudest was in olden times. Rather than the bakery which professes to be the original Pallin’s, or even the Norman castle from which Henry IV. went out to beat Henry Percy and his Yorkish followers, the gentle reader will wish to see the quaint streets and places in which the timbered houses called Tudor abound beyond the like anywhere else in England. There are whole lengths and breadths of these, some stately and tall, and some so humble and low that you can put your hand on their eaves as you pass, but all so charming and so picturesque that you could wish every house in the town to be like them. Failing this, you must console yourself as best you can by visiting the most beautiful old Abbey Church in the world: how old it is I will not say, and how beautiful I cannot, but it fills the heart with reverence and delight. I will not pretend that the inside is as lovely as the outside: that could not be, and any one outlive the joy of it; but it is within and without adorable. You do not require a late afternoon light on the rich façade, but if you have it you are all the happier in its century-mellowed masonry and’ the old-lace softness of the Gothic window which opens over half its space. From the church you will fancy, inadequately enough, what the whole abbey must have been before it fell into ruin under the hand of Reform. But a relic of the monastic life remains which will repay the enthusiast for going across the way and putting his nose and eyes between the palings of the railroad freight-yard in which it stands, and lingering long upon the sight of it among the grime and dust of the place. It is the pulpit of the refectory where some young brother used to stand to read to the other monks, while they sat at meat, and listened to his prayer and praise, if anything, and not to one another’s talk. That youthful ghost now reads to a spectral brotherhood, not more dead now than then, to all the loveliness of life; and the porters come and go through their shadowy company, pushing their heavy trucks to and from the goods-vans, and from time to time the engines lift their strident voices above the monotonous silence of the reader’s words; and all is very weird and sad; What should have possessed us to drive beyond the Abbey Church to view “the quaint Dun Cow Inn,” heaven knows; but that was what we did, and now I can testify that there is really an image of the Dun Cow standing over its door, and challenging the spectator for any associations he has with it. We had none, but I do not say it is not rich in associations for the better-informed. Even we can suppose Coleridge stopping there, and perhaps not being able to pay for the milk it yielded, and so staying on till the youthful Hazlitt came and ordered the meal — in the essay where he has so divinely rendered the consciousness of “the gentleman in the parlor” waiting for his supper. We must have it that he paid the poet’s bill; otherwise we should have seen him still pent and peering sadly from the window, with the image of the Dun Cow watching relentlessly overhead.

There are two bridges crossing the Severn at Shrewsbury: the English Bridge and the Welsh Bridge, by which the Briton and the Sassenach respectively went and came during the ages of border warfare before that last battle of the Roses. Now the bridges are used by travellers who wish to drink so deep of the Severn’s beauty (in which the softly wooded shores are glassed as tenderly as a lover in his mistress’ eyes), that they can never go away from Shrewsbury, but must remain glad captives to the witchery of her wandering up-and-down-hill streets, her Tudor houses, her beautiful churches, her enchanting remains of a past rich in insurpassable events and men. I say insurpassable to round my period; but there is no place in England that is not equally insurpassable in these things.

XIII. NORTHAMPTON AND THE WASHINGTON COUNTRY

GREAT BRINGTON is the name of the village neighborhood clustering about the church where, under the floor of the nave, the great-great-grandfather of George Washington lies buried. Little Brington is the village neighborhood, hardly separated from the other, where the Washington family dwelt in a house granted them by their cousin, Earl Spencer, when the events of the Civil War drove them from their ancestral place at Sulgrave. To reach the Bringtons from London you must first go to Northampton, where in his time the first Lawrence Washington was twice mayor. The necessity is not a hardship, for to see Northampton, ever so passingly, is a delight such as only English travel can offer. To drive the six miles from Northampton to the Bringtons is another necessity which is another delight, still richer if not greater. Be chosen by a 28th of September, veiled in a fog with sunny rifts in its veil, for your railroad rim through a level pastoral scene where stemless blotches of trees shelter white blurs of sheep, and vague canal-boats rest cloudily on the unseen waterways, and you have conditions in which, if you are worthy, the hour of your journey will shrink to a few golden minutes. You will be meanwhile kept by the protecting mists from the manifold facts which in England are apt to pierce you with a thousand appeals and reproaches. The many much-storied places will be faded to wraiths of towers and gates and walls, and you will escape to your destination without that torment of regret for not having constantly stopped on the way from which nothing could otherwise deliver you.

If at Northampton the fog lifts, and the autumnal sun has all the rest of the day to itself, you arrive with unimpaired strength for what you have come to see. Yet with all your energy conserved on the way, you will not be fully equal to the demand upon you. Northampton did not fail to begin with the Britons, and though it was not a permanent Roman station, and lay dormant during the Saxon hierarchy, it revived sufficiently under Saxon rule in the eleventh century to be twice taken and once burnt by the Danish invaders. It suffered under the Normans, but was walled and fortified in the Conqueror’s reign, and began a new life with the inspiration of his oppressions. A picturesque incident of its civil history, which was early a record of resistance to the royal will, was Thomas à Becket’s defiance of Henry II., when the King tried to reduce the proud churchman to the common obedience before the laws. The archbishop, followed by great crowds of the people, appeared as summoned, but when the Earl of Leicester bade him, in the old Norman form, hear the judgment rendered against him, he interrupted with the words, “Son and Earl, hear me first! I forbid you to judge me! I decline your tribunal, and refer my quarrel to the decision of the Pope.” Then he retired, and shortly escaped to Flanders, but coming back to Canterbury, was murdered, as all men know, by four of the King’s knights, at the altar in the cathedral.

Perhaps the feeling of the people was less for the prelate than against the prince, for the first Protestant heresies spread rapidly in Northampton, and the doctrines of Wickliffe had such acceptance that the mayor himself was accused of holding them, and of favoring the spread of Lollardy. In the two great Civil Wars, Northampton stood for the White Rose and then for the Parliament, against the two kings. In 1460, a great battle was fought under the city’s walls; ten thousand of Henry’s “tall Englishmen” were killed or drowned in the river Nene, and Henry himself was brought prisoner into the town. In 1642, the guns of the Puritan garrison “plaid for about two hours” on “the cavaleers and shot about twenty of them” when they attempted to assault the place, which became a rendezvous for the parliamentarians, and sent them frequent aid from its fifteen thousand in their attacks on the neighboring places holding for the King. In 1645, both parties met in force, a little northwest of the town, and Cromwell, who had joined Fairfax, won the battle of Naseby after Fairfax had lost it, and with an overwhelming victory ended the war against Charles.

If any Washingtons were in the fight, as some of so numerous a line might very well have been, it was on the King’s side. They put their faith in princes while they remained in England; it wanted yet a hundred and thirty years, at the remoteness of Virginia, to school them to the final diffidence which they were not the first of the Americans to feel. The slow evolution of the race out of devoted subjects into devoted citizens was accomplished in stuff other than that of the Puritan chief who soon after could “say this of Naseby, — that when I saw the enemy draw up and march in gallant order towards us, and we a company of poor ignorant men... I could not, riding alone about my business, but smile out to God in praises, in assurance of victory, because God would by things that are not, bring to naught things that are. Of which I had great assurance, and God did it.” Yet the faith in poor common men, once kindled in Washington, if not so mixed with piety as Cromwell’s, outlasted that through parliamentary trials as severe as ever it was put to by poor uncommon men.

Non-conformity, civil as well as religious, which the Washingtons were no part of, was the note of Northampton from the first, and to the last it has been represented in Parliament by such bold dissentients as Bradlaugh and Mr. Labouchere. It is the great shoe-town of England, and apparently there is nothing like leather to inspire a manly resistance to the pretensions of authority. But the Washingtons of Northampton were never any part of the revolt against kingly assumptions. The Lawrence Washington who was twice Mayor of Northampton profited by Henry VIII.’s suppression of the monasteries to possess himself of Sulgrave Manor, where his descendants dwelt for a hundred years and more, until 1658, when their discomforts under the Commonwealth, and their failing fortunes, made them glad of the protection of their noble kindred the Spencers at Brington.

It is not clear how the house at Little Brington, which is known as the Washington house, was granted them, or how much it was loan or gift of the Spencers; but it does not greatly matter now. The Washingtons, who had shared the politics of their cousins, were rather passive royalists, but they suffered the adversities of the cause they had chosen, and they did not apparently enjoy the prosperity which the Restoration brought to such of their side as could extort recognition from the second Charles, as thankless as the first Charles was faithless; and neither the Washingtons who staid in England, nor those who went to Virginia, had ever any profit from their fidelity to the Stuarts. They were gentlemen, who were successful in business when they turned to trade, but in the household records of their noble cousins at their seat of Althorp there is said to be proof of the frequent goodness of the Spencers to the needy Washingtons of Little Brington. If the Washingtons paid for the favor they enjoyed in the ways that poor relations do, it is not to the discredit of either line that a lady of their family should have been at one time housekeeper at Althorp. One fancies, quite gratuitously, that Lucy Washington was a woman of spirit who wished to earn the favor which her people had, whether less or more, from their kinsfolk. Two of the Washingtons elsewhere, who made for times, were knighted, but the direct ancestor of our Washington was a clergyman who suffered more than the common misfortunes of the Washingtons at Brington. He was falsely accused of drunkenness at a time when any charge was willingly heard against a royalist clergyman, and was ejected from his rich benefice as a scandalous minister. His character was afterwards cleared, but he had thenceforth only a small living to the end, and probably was, like his kindred at Brington, befriended by the Spencers.

The Lawrence Washington who was Mayor of Northampton and the grantee of Sulgrave, was chosen first in 1532 and last in 1546. The place was then, as it continued to be for a hundred and thirty odd years, the mediæval town of which the visitor now sees only a few relics in here and there an ancient house. Happily most of the old churches escaped the fire that swept away the old dwellings in 1675, and left the modern Northampton to grow up from their ashes the somewhat American-looking town we now find it. The side streets are set with neat brick houses, prevailingly commonplace. One might fancy one’s self, coming towards the Church of All Saints, in the business centre of some minor New England city, but with rather less of glare and noise, and held in a certain abeyance by the presence of the church. All Saints is not one of the churches which escaped the flames; and of the original structure only the Gothic tower is left; the rest, a somewhat vague little history of the city says, “is wholly modem.” But modernity, like some other things, is relative, and a New England town might find a very satisfying antiquity in an edifice which at its latest dates back to Queen Anne, and at its earliest to Charles II. The King gave a thousand tons of timber from his forest of Whittlebury towards the rebuilding of the church, and for this munificence he has been immortalized by sculpture over the centre of a most beautiful and noble Ionic, or Christopher-Wrennish, portico, where he stands in the figure of a Roman centurion, with, naturally, a full-bottomed wig on. Few heroic statues are more amusing, and the spirit of the royal reprobate so travestied might be very probably supposed to share the spectator’s enjoyment. Behind one end of the portico, which extends for eighty feet across the whole front of the church, were once the rooms in which many non-conformists of Northampton were tried for the offence of thinking for themselves in matters of religion, which were then so apt to become matters of politics.

The members of the Corporation were formerly the patrons of the living, and the mayor still has his seat in the church under the arms of the town, and doubtless that official had it in the older building before the fire, when the mayor was Lawrence Washington. In the wall is a tablet to the memory of a man who was born in the century when. Lawrence was twice chosen chief magistrate of Northampton, and who died in the century when George Washington was twice chosen Chief Magistrate of the United States. John Bailes was a button-maker by trade, and if he links the memories of those far-parted Washingtons together, by force of longevity, it is with no merit of his, though it is recorded of him that “he had his hearing, Sight & Memory to ye last.” I leave more mystical inquirers to trace a relationship between the actual civilizations of Northampton and the United States in the presence, beside the church, of a house of refection, liquid rather than solid, calling itself the Geisha Café. If ever the ghost of the Merry Monarch comes to haunt his Roman effigy in the full-bottomed wig, it may humorously linger a moment at the door of the genial resort.

It is mainly through her churches that Northampton has her hold on the American patriot who is also a person of taste, as one must try to be in going from one church to another. The reader who could give as many days to them as I could give minutes, would have a proportional reward, whether from St. Peter’s, unsurpassed for the effect of its rich Norman; or from St. Sepulchre, with the rotunda which marks it one of the four churches remaining in England out of all those built during the Crusades in memory of the Holy Sepulchre. There are other old churches, but perhaps not dating back with these to the ten and eleven hundreds. One, which I cannot now identify, bears tragical witness to the rigor of the times in the scars on the masonry about the height of a man, where certain royalists were stood beside the portal to be shot. The wonder is that the grief ever goes out of such things, but it does, and they who died, and they who did them to death, have long been friends in their children’s children.

It is curious how everything becomes matter of æsthetic interest, if you give it time. We stood looking at the Queen’s Cross, near Northampton, which rises not so very far from the field of Naseby, and with our eyes on the wasted beauty of the shrine, we two Americans begun by a common impulse to say verses from Macaulay’s stalwart ballad of the battle. Our English companion, who was a cleric of high ritualistic type, listened unmoved by any conscience he might have had against the purport of the lines as we rolled them forth, and, for all we could see, he had the same quality of pleasure as ourselves in the adjuration to the Puritans to “bear up another minute” for the coming of “brave Oliver,” and in the supposed narrator’s abhorrence of “the man of blood,” whom brave Oliver presently put to rout.

But see, he turns, he flies! Shame on those cruel eyes That bore to look on torture and that dare not look on war.

If he had a feeling as to our feeling, it was amusement that after two centuries and a half there should be any feeling about either party in the strife, and doubtless he did not take us too seriously.

He sent us later on our way to Great Brington with the assurance that the rector of the church would be waiting us in it to show us the tomb of the Washington buried there. His courtesy was the merit of my friend the genealogist with whom I had exhausted the American origins in London, and who had now come with me into the country for the most important of them all. When we were well started on our drive, that divine September afternoon, we would gladly have had it twelve rather than six miles from Northampton to Great Brington. The road was uncommonly open, or else it was lifted above the wonted level of English roads, and we could see over the tops of the hedges into the fields, instead of making the blindfold progress to which the wayfarer is usually condemned. It was not too late in the year or the day for a song-bird or so, and the wayside roses and hawthorns were so red with hips and haws that we gave them the praise of an American coloring for their foliage till we looked closer and found that the gayety was not of their leaves. Where the leaves felt the fall, they showed it in a sort of rheumatic stiffness, and a paling of their green to a sad gray, or a darkening of it to a yet sadder brown. But we did not notice this till we had turned from the highway, and were driving through Althorp Park. There was a model farm village before our turning, where some nobleman had experimented in making his tenants more comfortable than they could afford, in cottages too uniformly Tudoresque; but at differing distances, in various hollows and on various tops, there were more indigenous hamlets, huddling about the towers of their churches, and showing a red blur of tiles or a dun blur of walls, as we saw them alow or aloft. When we got well into the park there was only the undulation of the wooded surfaces, where wide oaks stood liberally about with an air of happy accident in their informal relation. I should like, for the sake of my romantic page, to put does under them; they were a very fit shelter for does; and I have read that does may sometimes be seen lightly flying from the visitors’ approach through the glades of the park. It was my characteristically commonplace luck to see none, but I hope that in their absence the reader will make no objection to the black and white sheep which I did abundantly see feeding everywhere. It will be remembered, or not unwillingly learned, that sheep were once the ambition, the enthusiasm of the Spencers, who made them early an interest of the region, so that it was the most perverse of fates which kept their greatest flock down to 19,999, when they aimed at 20,000.. Still, if they were black-nosed sheep, the lower figure might represent a value greater than 20,000 of the common white-nosed sort. A black nose gives a sheep the touch of character which the species too often lacks: a hardy air of almost goatlike effrontery, yet without the cold-eyed irony of the goat, which forbids the lover of wickedness the sympathy which the black-nosed sheep inspires. A black-nosed lamb affects one more like a bad little boy whose face has not been washed that morning, or for several mornings, than anything else in nature; and it would not be easy to say which was more suggestive of racial innocence mixed with personal depravity. I am not able to say whether a black nose in a sheep adds to the merit of its mutton or its fleece, but I am sure that it adds a piquant charm to its appearance, and I do not know why we have not that variety of sheep in America. I dare say we have.

When presently we drove past Althorp house, standing at a dignified remove from our course, which was effectively the highway, I felt in its aspects the modernity which has always been characteristic of the family. It is of that agreeable period when the English architects were beginning to study for country houses the form of domestic classic which the Italian taught those willing to learn of them simplicity and grace at harmony with due state, and which is still the highest type of a noble mansion. The lady of the house more than two centuries back had been the Saccharissa of Suckling’s verse, and her charm remained to my vague associations with the place, where she figured in the revels of happier times, and then in her beneficences to the distressed clergy after the Civil War, when the darker days came to those of the Spencer praying and fighting. There is no reason why she should not be related in these to the Washingtons, who needed if they did not experience her kindness, and if the reader wishes to strain a point and make her more the friend than mistress of that Lucy Washington who was sometime housekeeper at Althorp, I will not be the one to gainsay him. For all me, he may figure these ladies in the priceless library of Althorp: priceless then, but sold in our times to Mrs. Rylands at Manchester, for a million and a half, and there made a monument to her husband’s memory. Many bolder things have been feigned than these ladies sitting together among the books, which would be the native air of the rhyme-worn Saccharissa, and discoursing with Mistress Lucy’s kinsman, Lawrence Washington, lately Fellow of Brasenose College, and lecturer and proctor at Oxford, and now rector of Purleigh, whence he was to be wrongfully removed for drunkenness: all with the simultaneity so common in the romance of historical type. How they would thee and thou one another as cousins of the seventeenth-century sort I leave the archaeological novelist to inquire, gladly making over to him all my right and title in the affair. If he wishes to lug in the arrest of King Charles by Comet Joyce of the Parliament forces, he can do it with no great violence, for it really happened hard by at Holmby House, whence the King was fond of coming to enjoy the gardens of Althorp. He can have Saccharissa and Mistress Lucy Washington, and his reverence Mr. Washington, looking down at the incident; from a window of the library, and if he is the romanticist I take him for, he will easily have young Lawrence rapt in a vision of his great-great-grandson arresting the kingly power in America. The vision will have all the more fitness, in the reflections it suggests to the ancestor, from the fact, of which he will also be prescient, that both the Washingtons and Spencers, devoted and perhaps unreasoning royalists in their days, were destined to become more and more freed from their superstition, and to stand for greater freedom under different forms, as time went on. In his prophetic rapture, the Reverend Lawrence may have been puzzled to choose among his great-great-grandsons who was to fulfil it, for he was the father of a populous family counting seventeen in the first descent, and he could not have been blamed if he could not know George Washington by name, or identify him in his historical character.

It is this Lawrence Washington whose tablet one goes to revere in the church at Great Brington, where he lies entombed with the mother of his eight sons and nine daughters; and if one arrives at the sort of headland where the church stands on such a September afternoon as ours, and looks out from it over the lovely country undulating about its feet, one must try hard in one’s memory or imagination to match it with a scene of equal beauty. Of like beauty there is none except in some other English scenes like the home of Washington’s ancestors, and it is English in every feature and expression. The fields with their dividing hedges, the farmsteads snuggling in the hollows, the grouped or solitary trees, all softened in a sunny haze, and tented over with the milky-blue sky, form a landscape of which the immediate village, at the left of the headland, is a foreground, with the human interest without which no picture lives.

I suppose that if I had been given my choice whether to have one of these village houses unroofed, and its simple drama revealed to me, I should have poorly chosen that rather than had the wooden cover lifted from the church floor where it protects the mortuary tablet of Lawrence Washington and his wife from the passing tread. But the rector of the church at Great Brington could not have gratified me in my preference, whereas he could and did lift the lid from the tablet in the nave, and let us read the inscription, and see the armorial bearings, in which the stars and stripes of our flag slept, undreaming of future glory, in the chrysalis arrest of the centuries since they had been the arms of a race of Northamptonshire gentlemen. The rector was in fact waiting for us at the church door, hospitably mindful of the commendation of our Northampton clerical friend, and we saw the edifice to all the advantage that his thoughtful patience could lend us. He had at once some other guests, in the young man and young woman who followed us in with their dog. They recalled themselves to the rector, who received them somewhat austerely, with his eyes hard upon their companion. “Did you mean to bring that animal with you?” he asked, and they pretended that the dog was an interloper, and the young man put him out in as much disgrace as he could bring himself to inflict. Probably there was an understanding between him and the dog; but the whole party took the rector’s reproof with a smiling humility and an unabated interest in the claims of the Washington tablet, and in fact the whole church, upon their attention. They somewhat distracted my own, which is at best an idle sort, easily wandering from Early English architecture to Later English character, and from perpendicular windows to people of any inclination. Yet, the church at Great Brington is most worthy to be studied in detail, for it is “notable even among the famous churches of Northamptonshire,” and it is the fitting last home of Washington’s ancestors.

I bring myself with some difficulty to own that the specific knowledge I have on this point, and several others in this vague narration, I owe to an agreeable sketch of “The Homes of the Washingtons” by Mr. John Leyland. But if I did not own it, some one would find me out, and it is best to confess my obligation together with my gratitude. I wish I had had the sketch with me at the time of my visit to Great Brington church, but I had not, and I lingered about in the church-yard, after we came out and the rector must leave us, under the spell of a quiet and in the keeping of associations unalloyed by information. For this reason I am unable to attribute its true significance to the old cross which stands apart from the church, and guides and guards the way to the place of graves beside it. I must own that at first glance it has somewhat the effect of an old-fashioned sign-post at an inn yard, and perhaps that were no bad symbol of the welcome the peaceful place holds for the life-weary wayfarers who lie down to their rest in it. Great Brington remains to me an impression of cottage streets, — doubtless provided with some shops. But when we had taken leave of the rector, and looked our last at the elegy-breathing church-yard, with its turf heaving in many a mouldering heap as if in decasyllabic quatrains, we drove away to see the Washington house in Little Brington.

When you come to it, or do not come to it, you find Little Brington nothing but a dwindling Great Brington, or a wider and more shopless dispersion of its cottages on one long street, which is really the highroad back to Northampton. Some bad little boys hung on to the rear of our carriage, and other little boys, quite as bad, I dare say, ran beside us, and invited our driver to “Cut be’oind, cut be’oind!” probably in the very accents, mellow and rounded, of our ancestral Washingtons. They all dropped away before we stopped at the gate of the very simple house where these Washingtons dwelt. It is a thatched stone house, of a Tudor touch in architecture, with rooms on each side of the front door and a tablet over that, lettered with the text, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away: blessed be the name of the Lord.” Perhaps in other times it was of the dignity of a manor-house, but now it was inhabited by decent farmfolk, and very neatly kept. The farmwife who let us go up-stairs and down and all through it was a friendly soul, but apparently puzzled by our interest in it, and I fancied not many pilgrims worshipped at that shrine. It was rather ruder and humbler within than without; the flooring was rough, and the whitewashed walls of the little chambers were roughly plastered; neither these nor the living-rooms below had the beauty or interest of many colonial houses in New England. There was a little vegetable-gardened space behind the house, and a low stable, or some sort of shed, and on the comb of the roof an English true robin redbreast perched, darkly outlined against the clear September sky, and swelled his little red throat, and sang and sang. It was very pretty, and he sang much better than the big awkward thrush which we call a robin at home.

Our lovely day which had begun so dim, was waning in a sweet translucency, and we drove back to Northampton over gentle uplands through afternoon influences of a rich peacefulness. The road-side hedgerows now kept us from seeing much beyond them, but they were red, like those we passed in coming, with haws and wild rose-pips, which we again took for a flush of American autumn in their leaves; but the trees were really of a sober yellow, with here and there, on a house wall, a flame of Japanese ivy or Virginia creeper. The way was dotted with shoe-hands, men and girls, going home early from the unprosperous shops which our driver said were running only half-time. But even on half-pay they earned so much more than they could on the land that the farmers, desperate for help, could pay only a nominal rent. Much of the land was sign-boarded for sale, and this and the unusual number of wooden cottages gave us a very home feeling. In our illusion, we easily took for crows the rooks sailing over the fields.

ROMAN HOLIDAYS AND OTHERS

CONTENTS

I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.

II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN

III. ASHORE AT GENOA

IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE

V. POMPEII REVISITED

VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS

I. HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS

II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME

III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM

IV. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS

V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY

VI. PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST

VII. CHANCES IN CHURCHES

VIII. A FEW VILLAS

IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS

X. SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US

XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN

XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES

XIII. CASUAL IMPRESSIONS

XIV. TIVOLI AND FRASCATI

XV. A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS

VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

VIII. OVER AT PISA

IX. BACK AT GENOA

X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL

I. UP AND DOWN MADEIRA.

No drop-curtain, at any theatre I have seen, was ever so richly imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and frowning cliffs and gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape of Madeira, when we drew nearer and nearer to it, at the close of a tearful afternoon of mid-January. The scenery of drop-curtains is often very boldly beautiful, but here Nature, if she had taken a hint from art, had certainly bettered her instruction. During the waits between acts at the theatre, while studying the magnificent painting beyond the trouble of the orchestra, I have been most impressed by the splendid variety which the artist had got into his picture, where the spacious frame lent itself to his passion for saying everything; but I remembered his thronging fancies as meagre and scanty in the presence of the stupendous reality before me. I have, for instance, not even mentioned the sea, which swept smoother and smoother in toward the feet of those precipices and grew more and more trans-lucently purple and yellow and green, while half a score of cascades shot straight down their fronts in shafts of snowy foam, and over their pachydermatous shoulders streamed and hung long reaches of gray vines or mosses. To the view from the sea the island is all, with its changing capes and promontories and bays and inlets, one immeasurable mountain; and on the afternoon of our approach it was bestridden by a steadfast rainbow, of which we could only see one leg indeed, but that very stout and athletic.

There were breadths of dark woodland aloft on this mountain, and terraced vineyards lower down; and on the shelving plateaus yet farther from the heights that lost themselves in the clouds there were scattered white cottages; on little levels close to the sea there were set white villas. These, as the ship coquetted with the vagaries of the shore, thickened more and more, until after rounding a prodigious headland we found ourselves in face of the charming little city of Funchal: long horizontal lines of red roofs, ivory and pink and salmon walls, evenly fenestrated, with an ancient fortress giving the modern look of things a proper mediaeval touch. Large hotels, with the air of palaces, crowned the upland vantages; there were bell-towers of churches, and in one place there was a wide splotch of vivid color from the red of the densely flowering creeper on the side of some favored house. There was an acceptable expanse of warm brown near the quay from the withered but unfailing leaves of a sycamore-shaded promenade, and in the fine roadstead where we anchored there lay other steamers and a lead-colored Portuguese war-ship. I am not a painter, but I think that here are the materials of a water-color which almost any one else could paint. In the hands of a scene-painter they would yield a really unrivalled drop-curtain. I stick to the notion of this because when the beautiful goes too far, as it certainly does at Madeira, it leaves you not only sated but vindictive; you wish to mock it.

The afternoon saddened more and more, and one could not take an interest in the islanders who came out in little cockles and proposed to dive for shillings and sixpences, though quarters and dimes would do. The company’s tender also came out, and numbers of passengers went ashore in the mere wantonness of paying for their dinner and a night’s lodging in the annexes of the hotels, which they were told beforehand were full. The lights began to twinkle from the windows of the town, and the dark fell upon the insupportable picturesqueness of the prospect, leaving one to a gayety of trooping and climbing lamps which defined the course of the streets.

The morning broke in sunshine, and after early breakfast the launches began to ply again between the ship and the shore and continued till nearly all the first and second cabin people had been carried off. The people of the steerage satisfied what longing they had for strange sights and scenes by thronging to the sides of the steamer until they gave her a strong list landward, as they easily might, for there were twenty-five hundred of them. At Madeira there is a local Thomas Cook & Son of quite another name, but we were not finally sure that the alert youth on the pier who sold us transportation and provision was really their agent. However, his tickets served perfectly well at all points, and he was of such an engaging civility and personal comeliness that I should not have much minded their failing us here and there. He gave the first charming-touch of the Latin south whose renewed contact is such a pleasure to any one knowing it from the past. All Portuguese as Funchal was, it looked so like a hundred little Italian towns that it seemed to me as if I must always have driven about them in calico-tented bullock-carts set on runners, as later I drove about Eunchal.

It was warm enough on the ship, but here in the town we found ourselves in weather that one could easily have taken for summer, if the inhabitants had not repeatedly assured us that it was the season of winter, and that there were no flowers and no fruits. They could not, if they had wished, have denied the flies; these, in a hotel interior to which we penetrated, simply swarmed. If it was winter in Funchal it was no wintrier than early autumn would have been in one of those Italian towns of other days; it had the same temperament, the same little tree-planted spaces, the same devious, cobble-paved streets, the same pleasant stucco houses; the churches had bells of like tone, and if their facades confessed a Spanish touch they were not more Spanish than half the churches in Naples. The public ways were of a scrupulous cleanliness, as if, with so many English signs glaring down at them, they durst not untidy out-of-doors, though in-doors it was said to be different with them. There are three thousand English living at Funchal and everybody speaks English, however slightly. The fresh faces of English girls met us in the streets and no doubt English invalids abound.

We shipmates were all going to the station of the funicular railway, but our tickets did not call for bullock-sleds and so we took a clattering little horse-car, which climbed with us through up-hill streets and got us to the station too soon. Within the closed grille there the handsomest of swarthy, black-eyed, black-mustached station-masters (if such was his quality) told us that we could not have a train at once, though we had been advised that any ten of us could any time have a train, because the cars had all gone up the mountain and none would be down for twenty minutes. He spoke English and he mitigated by a most amiable personality sufferings which were perhaps not so great as we would have liked to think. Some of us wandered off down a pink-and-cream colored avenue near by and admired so much the curtains of red-and-yellow flowers — a cross between honeysuckles and trumpet blossoms — overhanging a garden-wall that two friendly boys began to share our interest in them. One of them mounted the other and tore down handfuls of the flowers, which they bestowed upon us with so little apparent expectation of reward that we promptly gave them of the international copper coinage current in Madeira, and went back to the station doubtless feeling guiltier than they. Had we not been accessory after the fact to something like theft and, as it was Sunday, to Sabbath-breaking besides? Afterward flowers proved so abundant in Madeira in spite of its being winter, that we could not feel the larceny a serious one, and the Sunday was a Latin Sabbath well used to being broken. The pony engine which was to push our slanting car over the cogged track up the mountain arrived with due ceremony of bell and whistle, and we were let through the grille by the station-master as politely as if we had been each his considered guest. Then the climb began through the fields of sugar-cane, terraced vineyards, orchards of fruit trees, and gardens of vegetables planted under the arbors over which the grapes were trained. One of us told the others that the vegetables were sheltered to save them from being scorched by the summer sun, and that much of the work among them was done by moonlight to save the laborers from the same fate. I do not know how he had amassed this knowledge, and I am not sure that I have the right to impart it without his leave. I myself saw some melons lolling on one of the tiled roofs of the cottages where they had perhaps been pushed by the energetic forces of the earth and sky. The grape-vines were quiescent, partly because it was winter, as everybody said, and partly because the wine culture is no longer so profitable in the island. It has been found for the moment that Madeira is bad for the gout, and this discovery of the doctors is bad for the peasants (already cruelly overtaxed by Portugal), who are leaving their homes in great numbers and seeking their fortunes in both of the Americas, as well as the islands of all the seas. It must be a heartbreak for them to forsake such homes as we saw in the clean white cottages, with the balconies and terraces.

But there were no signs of depopulation either of old or young. Smiling mothers and fathers of all ages, in their Sunday leisure and their Sunday best, watched our ascent as if they had never seen the like before, and our course was never so swift but we could be easily overtaken by the children; they embarrassed us with the riches of the camellias which they flung in upon us, and they were accompanied by small dogs which barked excitedly. Our train almost grazed the walls of the door-yards as we passed through the succession of the one- and two-story cottages, which dotted the mountain-side in every direction. When the eye could leave them it was lured from height to height, and at each rise of the track to some wider and lovelier expanse of the sea. We could see merely our own steamer in the roadstead, with the Portuguese war-ship, and the few other vessels at anchor, but we could never exhaust the variety of those varied mountain slopes and tops. Their picturesqueness of form and their delight of color would beggar any thesaurus of its descriptive reserves, and yet leave their beauty almost unhinted. A drop-curtain were here a vain simile; the chromatic glories of colored postal-cards might suggest the scene, but then again they might overdo it. Nature is modest in her most magnificent moods, and I do not see how she could have a more magnificent mood than Madeira. It can never be represented by my art, but it may be measurably stated: low lying sea; the town scattering and fraying everywhere into outlying hamlets, villas and cottages; steep rising upon steep, till they reach uninhabitable climaxes where the woods darken upward into the everlasting snows, in one whole of grandeur resuming in its unity every varying detail.

I dwell rather helplessly upon the scenery, because it was what we professedly went up or half up, or one-tenth or-hundredth up, the mountain for. Un-professedly we went up in order to come down by the toboggan of the country, though we vowed one another not to attempt anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch, we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were at prayer within; irregular files of them attended our progress to give us the opportunity of doing charity. The beggars were of every sort, sex, and age, and some, from the hands they held out, with fingers reduced to their last joints, looked as if they might be lepers, but I do not say they were. What I am sure of is that the faces of the worshippers — men, women, and children — when they came out of the church were of a gentleness which, if it was not innocence and goodness, might well have passed for those virtues. They had kind eyes, which seemed as often blue as black, and if they had no great beauty they were seldom quite ugly. I wish I could think we strangers, as they gazed curiously, timorously at us, struck them as favorably.

An involuntary ferocity from the famine which we began to feel may have glared from our visages, for we had eaten nothing for three hours, which was long for saloon passengers. At the first restaurant which we found, and in which we all but sat down at table, our coupons were not good, but this was not wholly loss, for we recouped ourselves in the beauties of the walk on which we wandered along the mountain-side to the right of the restaurant. At the point where we were no longer confident of our way an opportune native appeared and Jed us over paths paved with fine pebbles, sometimes wrought into geometric patterns, and always through pleasing sun and shade, till we reached a pretty hotel set, with its gardens before it, on a shelf of level land and commanding a view of our steamer and the surrounding sea. Tropic growths, which I will venture to call myrtle, oleander, laurel, and eucalyptus, environed the hotel, not too closely nor densely, and our increasing party was presently discovered from the head of its steps by a hospitable matron, who with a cry of comprehensive welcome ran within and was replaced by a head-waiter of as friendly aspect and much more English. He said our coupons were good there and that our luncheon would be ready in two minutes; for proof of the despatch with which we should be served he held up the first and second fingers of his right hand. Restored by his assurance, we did not really mind waiting twice the tale of all his ten fingers, and we spent our time variously in wandering about the plateau, among the wonted iron tables and chairs in front of the hotel, in being photographed in a fairy grotto behind it, and in examining the visitors’ book in the parlor. The names of visitors from South Africa largely prevailed, for the Cape Town steamers, oftener than any others, touch at Madeira, but there was one traveller of Portuguese race who had written his name in bold characters above the cry, “Long live the Portuguese Republic.” Soon after the Portuguese monarchy ceased to live for a time in the person of the murdered king and his heir, but it is doubtful if the health of the potential republic was as great as before.

That bright Sunday morning no shadow of the black event was forecast, and we gave our unstinted sympathy to our unknown co-republican. The luncheon, when we were called to it, had merits of novelty and quality which I will celebrate only as regards the delicate fish fresh from the sea, and the pease fresh from the garden, with poached eggs fresh from the coop dropped upon them. The conception of chops which followed was not so faultless, though the fruit with which we ended did much to repair any error of kid which may have mistaken itself for lamb. Perhaps our enthusiasm was heightened by the fine air which had sharpened our appetites. At any rate, it all ended in an habitual transaction in real estate by which I became the owner of the place, without expropriating the actual possessor, and established there those castles in Spain belonging to me in so many parts of the world.

There remained now nothing for us to do but to toboggan down the mountain, and we overcame our resolution not to do so far enough to go and look at the toboggans under the guidance of our head-waiter. When once we had looked we were lost. The toboggans were flat baskets set on iron-shod runners, and well cushioned and padded; they held one, two, or three passengers; the track on which they descended was paved, in gentle undulations, with thin pebbles set on edge and greased wherever the descent found a level. A smiling native, with a strong rope attached to the toboggan, stood on each side of it, and held it back or pulled it forward, according to the exigencies of the case. It is long since I slid down hill on a sled of my own, and I do not pretend to recall the sensation; but I can remember nothing so luxurious in transportation as the swift flight of the Madeira toboggan, which you temper at will through its guides and guards, but do not wish to temper at all when your first alarm, mainly theoretical, passes into the gayety ending in exultant rejoicing at the bottom of the course.

Our two toboggan men were possibly vigilant and reassuring beyond the common, but one was quite silently so; the other, who spoke a little English, encouraged us from time to time to believe that they were “strong mans,” afterward correcting himself in conformity to the rules of Portuguese grammar, which make the adjective agree in number with the noun, and declaring that they were “strongs mans.” We met many toboggan men who needed to be “strongs mans” in their ascent of our track, with their heavy toboggans on their heads; but some of them did not look strong, and our own arrived spent and panting at the bottom. Something like that is what always spoils pleasure in this world. Even when you have paid for it with your money, some one else has paid with his person twice as much, and you have not equalled his outlay when you have tipped him your handsomest.

A shilling apiece seemed handsome for those “strongs mans,” but afterward there were watches of the nights when the spirit grieved that the shilling had not been made two apiece or even half a crown, and I wish now that the first reader of mine who toboggans down Madeira would make up the difference for me in his tip to those poor fellows. I do not mind if he adds a few pennies for the children who ran before our toboggan and tossed camellias into it, and then followed in the hopes of a reward, which we tried not to disappoint.

The future traveller need not add to the fee of the authorized and numbered guide who took possession of us as soon as we got out of our basket and led us unresisting to a waiting bullock sled. He invited himself into it, and gave himself the best of characters in the autobiography into which he wove his scanty instruction concerning the objects we passed. A bullock sled is not of such blithe progress as a toboggan, but it is very comfortable, and it is of an Oriental and litter-like dignity, with its calico cushions and curtains. One could not well use it in New York, but it serves every purpose of a cab in Funchal, where we noted a peculiar feature of local commerce which I hesitate to specify, since it cast apparent discredit upon woman. It was, as I have noted, Sunday; but every shop where things pleasing or even useful to women were sold was wide open, and somewhat flaringly invited the custom of our fellow-passengers of that sex; but there was not a shop where such things as men’s collars were for sale, or anything pleasing or useful to man, but was closed and locked fast. I must except from this sweeping statement the cafes, but these should not count, for women as well as men frequented them, as we ascertained by going to a very bowery one on the quay and ordering a bottle of the best and dryest Madeira. We wished perhaps to prove that it was really not bad for gout, or perhaps that it was no better than the Madeira you get in New York for the same price. Even with the help of friends, of the sex which could have been freely buying native laces, hats, fans, photographs, parasols, and tailor-made dresses, we could not finish that bottle. Glass after glass we bestowed on our smiling guide, with no final effect upon the bottle and none upon him, except to make him follow us to the tender and take an after-fee for showing us a way which we could not have missed blindfold. It was rather strange, but not stranger than the behavior of the captain of the tender, who, when he had collected our tickets, invited a free-will offering for collecting them, and mostly got it.

When we were safely and gladly on board our steamer again, we had nothing to do, until the deck-steward came round with tea, but watch the islanders swarming around us in their cockles and diving for sixpences and shillings, which they caught impartially with their fingers and toes. With so many all shouting and gesticulating, one could not venture one’s silver indiscriminately; one must employ some particular diver, and I selected for my investments a poor young fellow who had lost an arm. With his one hand and his two feet he never failed of the coin I risked, and I wish they had been many enough to enable him to retire from the trade, which even in that mild air kept him visibly shivering when out of the water. I do not know his name, but I commend him to future travellers by the token of his pathetic mutilation.

By-and-by we felt the gentle stir of the steamer under us; the last tender went ashore, and the divers retired in their cockles from our side. Funchal began to rearrange the lines of her streets, while keeping those of her roofs and house-walls and terraced gardens. We passed out of the roadstead, we rounded the mighty headland by which we had entered, and were once more in face of that magnificent drop-curtain, which had now fallen upon one of the most vivid and novel passages of our lives.

II. TWO UP-TOWN BLOCKS INTO SPAIN

There is nothing strikes the traveller in his approach to the rock of Gibraltar so much as its resemblance to the trade-mark of the Prudential Insurance Company. He cannot help feeling that the famous stronghold is pictorially a plagiarism from the advertisements of that institution. As the lines change with the ship’s course, the resemblance is less remarkable; but it is always remarkable, and I suppose it detracts somewhat from the majesty of the fortress, which we could wish to be more entirely original. This was my feeling when I first saw Gibraltar four years ago, and it remains my feeling after having last seen it four weeks ago. The eye seeks the bold, familiar legend, and one suffers a certain disappointment in its absence. Otherwise Gibraltar does not and cannot disappoint the most exacting tourist.

The morning which found us in face of it was in brisk contrast to the bland afternoon on which we had parted from Madeira. No flocking coracles surrounded our steamer, with crews eager to plunge into the hissing brine for shillings or equivalent quarters. The whitecaps looked snow cold as they tossed under the sharp north wind, and the tender which put us ashore had all it could do to embark and disembark us upright, or even aslant. But, once in the lee of the rocky Africa breathed a genial warmth across the strait beyond which its summits faintly shimmered; or was it the welcome of Cook’s carriages which warmed us so? We were promised separate vehicles for parties of three or four, with English-speaking drivers, and the promise was fairly well kept. The carriages bore a strong family likeness to the pictures of Spanish state coaches of the seventeenth century, and were curtained and cushioned in reddish calico. Rubber tires are yet unknown in southern Europe, and these mediaeval arks bounded over the stones with a violence which must once have been characteristic of those in the illustrations. But the English of our English-speaking driver was all that we could have asked for the shillings we paid Cook for him, or, if it was not, it was all we got. He was an energetic young fellow and satisfyingly Spanish in coloring, but in his eagerness to please he was less grave than I could now wish; I now wish everything in Spain to have been in keeping.

What was most perfectly, most fittingly in keeping was the sight of the Moors whom we began at once to see on the wharves and in the streets. They probably looked very much like the Moors who followed their caliph, if he was a caliph, into Spain when he drove Don Roderick out of his kingdom and established his own race and religion in the Peninsula. Moslem costumes can have changed very little in the last eleven or twelve hundred years, and these handsome fellows, who had come over with fresh eggs and vegetables and chickens and turkeys from Tangier, could not have been handsomer when they bore scimitars and javelins instead of coops and baskets. They had baggy drawers on, and brown cloaks, with bare, red legs and yellow slippers; one, when he took his fez off, had a head shaved perfectly bald, like the one-eyed Calender or the Barber’s brother out of the Arabian Nights; the sparse mustache and short-forked beard heightened the verisimilitude. Whether they squatted on the wharf, or passed gravely through the street, or waited for custom in their little market among the hen-coops and the herds of rather lean, dispirited turkeys (which had not the satisfaction of their American kindred in being fattened for the sacrifice, for in Europe all turkeys are served lean), these Moors had an allure impossible to any Occidental race. It was greater even than that of their Semitic brethren, who had a market farther up in the town, and showed that a Jewish market could be much filthier than a’ Moorish market without being more picturesque. Into the web of Oriental life were wrought the dapper figures of the red-coated, red-cheeked English soldiers, with blue, blue eyes and incredible red and yellow hair, lounging or hurrying orderlies with swagger-sticks, and apparently aimless privates no doubt bent ‘upon quite definite business or pleasure. Now and then an English groom led an English horse through the long street from which the other streets in Gibraltar branch up and down hill, for there is no other level; and now and then an English man or woman rode trimly by.

The whole place is an incongruous mixture of Latin and Saxon. The strictly South-European effect of the houses and churches is a mute protest against the alien presence which keeps the streets so clean and maintains order by means of policemen showing under the helmets of the London bobby the faces of the native alguazil. In the shops the saleswomen speak English and look Spanish. Our driver, indeed, looked more Spanish than he spoke English.

His knowledge of our rude tongue extended hardly beyond the mention of certain conventional objects of interest, and did not suffice to explain why we could not see the old disused galleries of the fortifications. I do not know why we wished to see these; I doubt if we really did so, but we embittered life for that well-meaning boy by our insistence upon them, and we brought him under unjust suspicion of deceit by forcing him to a sort of time-limit in respect to them. We appealed from him to the blandest of black-mus-tached, olive-skinned bobby-alguazils, who directed us to a certain government office for a permit. There our application caused something like dismay, and we were directed to another office, but were saved from the shame of failure by incidentally learning that the galleries could not be seen till after three o’clock. As our ship sailed at that hour, we were probably saved a life-long disappointment.

Everywhere the rock of the Prudential beetles and towers over the town; but the fortifications are so far up in the sky that you can really distinguish nothing but the Marconi telegraphic apparatus at the top. Along the sea-level, which the town mostly keeps, the war-like harness of the stronghold shows through the civil dress of the town in barracks and specific forts and gray battle-ships lying at anchor in the docks. But all is simple and reserved, in the right English fashion. The strength of the place is not to be put forth till it is needed, which will be never, since it is hard to imagine how it can ever be even attempted by a hostile force. This is not saying, I hope, that an American fleet could not batter it down, nor leave one letter of the insurance advertisement after another on the face of the precipice.

There is a pretty public garden at Gibraltar in that part of the town which is farthest from the steamer’s landing, and this proved the end of our excursion in our state coach. We found other state coaches there, and joined their passengers in strolling over the pleasant paths and trying to make out what bird it was singing somewhere in the trees. We made out an almond-tree in bloom, after some dispute; and, in fact, the climate there was much softer than at the landing, so insidiously soft that it required great force of character to keep from buying the flowers which some tasteful boys gathered from the public beds. There is a mild monument or two in this garden, to what memories I promptly failed to remember afterward; but as there are more military memories in the world than is good for it, and as these were undoubtedly military memories, I cannot much blame myself in the matter. After viewing them, there was nothing left to do but to get lunch, which we got extremely good at the hotel where a friend led us. There was at this hotel a head-waiter, in a silver-braided silk dress-coat of a mauve color, who imagined our wants so perfectly that I shall always regret not taking more of the omelette; the table-waiter urged it upon us twice with true friendliness. The eggs must have been laid for it in Africa that morning at daybreak, and brought over by a Moorish marketman, but we turned from the poetic experience of this omelette in the greedy hope of better things. Better things there could not be, but the fish was as good as the fish at Madeira, and the belief of the chops that they were lamb and not kid seemed better founded.

There had been an excellent bottle of Rioja Blanca, such as you may have as good at some Spanish restaurant in New York for as little money; and the lunch, when reckoned up in English shillings and Spanish undertones, was not cheap. Yet it was not dear, either, and there was no specific charge for that silver-braided dress-coat of a mauve color. An English dean in full clericals, and some English ladies talking in the waiting-room, added an agreeable confusion to our doubt of where and what we were, and we came away from the hotel as well content as if we had lunched in Plymouth or Bath. The table-waiter took an extra fee for confiding that he was a Milanese, and was almost the only Italian in Gibraltar; whether he was right or not I do not know, but it was certainly not his fault that we did not take twice of the omelette.

It is said that living is dear in Gibraltar, especially in the matter of house rent. The houses in the town are like all the houses of Latin Europe in their gray or yellowish walls of stone or stucco and their dark-green shutters. There is an English residential quarter at the east end of the town, where the houses may be different, for all I know; the English of our driver or the hire of our state coach did not enable us to visit that suburb, where the reader may imagine villas standing in grounds with lawns and gardens about them. The English have prevailed nothing against the local civilization in most things, while they have infected it with the costliness of the whole Anglo-Saxon life. We should not think seven hundred dollars in New York dear for even a quite small house, but it has come to that in Gibraltar, and there they think it dear, with other things proportionately so. Of course, it is an artificial place; the fortress makes the town, and the town in turn lives upon the fortress.

The English plant themselves nowhere without gathering English conveniences or conventions about them; Americans would not always think them comforts. There is at Gibraltar a club or clubs; there is a hunt, there is a lending library, there is tennis, there is golf, there is bridge, there is a cathedral, and I dare say there is gossip, but I do not know it. It was difficult to get land for the golf links, we heard, because of the Spanish jealousy of the English occupation, which they will not have extended any farther over Spanish soil, even in golf links. Gibraltar is fondly or whimsically known to the invaders as Gib, and I believe it is rather a favorite sojourn, though in summer it is frightfully hot, held out on the knees and insteps of the rock to the burning African sun, which comes up every morning over the sea after setting Sahara on fire.

All this foreign life must be exterior to the aboriginal Spanish life which has so long outlasted the Moorish, and is not without hope of outlasting the English. I do not know what the occupations and amusements of that life are, but I will suppose them unworthy enough. There must be a certain space of neutral life uniting or dividing the two, which would form a curious inquiry, but would probably not lend itself to literary study. Besides this middle ground there is another neutral territory at Gibraltar which we traversed after luncheon, in order to say that we had been in Spain. That was the country of many more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, it is in this. We used then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his Tales of the Alhambra, and his history of The Conquest of Granada, and we read Prescott’s histories of Spanish kings and adventures in the old world and the new. We read Don Quixote, which very few read now, and we read Gil Blas, which fewer still now read; and all these constituted Spain a realm of faery, where every sort of delightful things did or could happen. I for my part had always expected to go to Spain and live among the people I had known in those charming books, yet I had been often in Europe, and had spent whole years there without ever going near Spain. But now, I saw, was my chance, and when the friend who had been lunching with us asked if we would not like to drive across that neutral territory and go into Spain a bit, it seemed as if the dream of my youth had suddenly renewed itself with the purpose of coming immediately true. It was a charmingly characteristic foretaste of Spanish travel that the driver of the state coach which we first engaged should, when we presently came back, have replaced himself by another for no other reason than, perhaps, that he could so provide us with a worse horse. I am not sure of this theory, and I do not insist upon it, but it seems plausible.

As soon as we rounded the rock of Gibraltar and struck across a flatter country than I supposed could be found within fifty miles of Gibraltar, we were swept by a blast which must have come from the Pyrenees, it was so savagely rough and cold. It may be always blowing there as a Spanish protest against the English treatment of the neutral territory; in fact, it does not seem quite the thing to build over that space as the English have done, though the structures are entirely peaceable, and it is not strange that the Spaniards have refused to meet them half-way with a good road over it, or to let them make one the whole way. They stand gravely opposed to any further incursion. Officially in all the Spanish documents the place is styled “Gibraltar, temporarily occupied by Great Britain,” and there is a little town which you see sparkling in the sun no great way off in Spain called San Roque, of which the mayor is also mayor of Gibraltar; he visits his province once a year, and many people living for generations over the Spanish line keep the keys of the houses that they personally or ancestrally own in Gibraltar. The case has its pathos, but as a selfish witness I wish they had let the English make that road through the neutral territory. The present road is so bad that our state coach, in bounding over its inequalities, sometimes almost flung us into the arms of the Spanish beggars always extended toward us. They were probably most of them serious, but some of the younger ones recognized the bouffe quality of their calling. One pleasant starveling of ten or twelve entreated us for bread with a cigarette in his mouth, and, being rewarded for his impudence, entered into the spirit of the affair and asked for more, just as if we had given nothing.

A squalid little town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached, and we left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form of examining our hand-bags, as they would have done at an American frontier; and they did not pierce our carriage cushions with the long javelins with which they are armed for the detection of smuggling among the natives who have been shopping in Gibraltar. As the gates of that town are closed every day at nightfall by a patrol with drum and fife, and everybody is shut either in or out, it may easily happen with shoppers in haste to get through that they bring dutiable goods into Spain; but the official javelins rectify the error.

We left our belongings in our state coach and started for that stroll in Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I think a pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it was not. It was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise unkempt, with the usual yellowish or grayish buildings, rather low and rather new, as if prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They were both shops and dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking cafe restaurant, and one dwelling all faced with bright-green tiles. An alguazil — I am certain he was an alguazil, though he looked like an Italian carabiniere and wore a cocked hat — loitered into a police station; but I remember no one else during our brief stay in that street except those bouffe boy beggars. Of course, they wished to sell us postal-cards, but they were willing to accept charity on any terms. Otherwise our Spanish tour was, so far as we then knew, absolutely without incident; but when we got too far away to return we found that we had been among brigands as well as beggars, and all the Spanish picaresque fiction seemed to come true in the theft of a black chudda shawl, which had indeed been so often lost in duplicate that it was time it was entirely lost. Whether it was secretly confiscated by the customs, or was accepted as a just tribute by the populace from a poetic admirer, I do not know, but I hope it is now in the keeping of some dark-eyed Spanish girl, who will wear it while murmuring through her lattice to her novio on the pavement outside. It was rather heavy to be worn as a veil, but I am sure she could manage it after dark, and could hold it under her chin, as she leaned forward to the grille, with one little olive hand, so that the novio would think it was a black silk mantilla. Or if it was a gift from him, it would be all right, anyway.

Our visit to Spain did not wholly realize my early dreams of that romantic land, and yet it had not been finally destitute of incident. Besides, we had not gone very far into the country; a third block might have teemed with adventure, but we had to be back on the steamer before three o’clock, and we dared not go beyond the second. Even within this limit a love of reality underlying all my love of romance was satisfied in the impression left by that dusty, empty, silent street. It seemed somehow like the street of a new, dreary, Western American town, so that I afterward could hardly believe that the shops and restaurants had not eked out their height with dashboard fronts. It was not a place that I would have chosen for a summer sojourn; the sense of a fly-blown past must have become a vivid part of future experience, and yet I could imagine that if one were born to it, and were young and hopeful, and had some one to share one’s youth and hope, that Spanish street, which was all there was of that Spanish town, might have had its charm. I do not say that even for age there was not a railway station by which one might have got away, though there was no sign of any trains arriving or departing — perhaps because it was not one o’clock in the morning, which is the favorite hour of departure for Spanish trains.

When we turned to drive back over the neutral territory the rock of Gibraltar suddenly bulked up before us, in a sheer ascent that left the familiar Prudential view in utterly inconspicuous unimpressive-ness. Till one has seen it from this point one has not truly seen it. The vast stone shows like a half from which the other half has been sharply cleft and removed, that the sense of its precipitous magnitude may unrelievedly strike the eye; and it seems to have in that moment the whole world to tower up in from the level at its feet. No dictionary, however unabridged, has language adequate to convey the notion of it.

III. ASHORE AT GENOA

The pride of Americans in their native scenery is brought down almost to the level of the South Shore of Long Island in arriving home from the Mediterranean voyage to Europe. The last thing one sees in Europe is the rock of Gibraltar, but before that there have been the snow-topped Maritime Alps of Italy and the gray-brown, softly rounded, velvety heights of Spain; and one has to think very hard of the Palisades above the point where they have been blasted away for road-making material if one wishes to keep up one’s spirits. The last time I came home the Mediterranean way I had a struggle with myself against excusing our sandy landscape, when we came in sight of it, with its summer cottages for the sole altitudes, to some Italian fellow-passengers who were not spellbound by its grandeur. I had to remember the Rocky Mountains, which I had never seen, and all the moral magnificence of our life before I could withhold the words of apology pressing to my lips. I was glad that I succeeded; but now, going back by the same route, I abandoned myself to transports in the beauty of the Mediterranean coast which I hope were not untrue to my country. Perhaps there is no country which can show anything like that beauty, and America is no worse off than the rest of the world; but I am not sure that I have a right to this consolation. Again there were those

 “Silent pinnacles of aged snow,”

flushed with the Southern sun; in those sombre slopes of pine; again the olives climbing to their gloom; again the terraced vineyards and the white farmsteads, with villages nestling in the vast clefts of the hills, and all along the sea-level the blond towns and cities which broidei the hem of the land from Marseilles to Genoa. One is willing to brag; one must be a good American; but, honestly, have we anything like that to show the arriving foreigner? For some reason our ship was abating the speed with which she had crossed the Atlantic, and now she was swimming along the Mediterranean coasts so slowly and so closely that it seemed as if we could almost have cast an apple ashore, though probably we could not. We were at least far enough off to mistake Nice for Monte Carlo and then for San Remo, but that was partly because our course was so leisurely, and we thought we must have passed Nice long before we did. It did not matter; all those places were alike beautiful under the palms of their promenades, with their scattered villas and hotels stretching along their upper levels, and the ranks of shops and dwellings solidly forming the streets which left the shipping of their ports to climb to the gardens and farms beyond the villas. Cannes, Mentone, Ventimiglia, Ospedeletti, Bordighera, Taggia, Alassio: was that their fair succession, or did they follow in another order? Once more it did not matter; what is certain is that the golden sun of the soft January afternoon turned to crimson and left the last of them suffused in dim rose before we drifted into Genoa and came to anchor at dusk beside a steamer which had left New York on the same day as ours. By her vast size we could measure our own and have an objective perception of our grandeur. We had crossed in one of the largest ships afloat, but you cannot be both spectacle and spectator; and you must match your magnificence with some rival magnificence before you can have a due sense of it. That was what we now got at Genoa, and we could not help pitying the people on that other ship, who must have suffered shame from our overwhelming magnitude; the fact that she was of nearly the same tonnage as our own ship had nothing to do with the case.

After the creamy and rosy tints of those daughters of climate along the Riviera, it was pleasant to find a many-centuried mother of commerce like Genoa of the dignified gray which she wears to the eye, whether it looks down on her from the heights above her port or up at her from the thickly masted and thickly funnelled waters of the harbor. Most European towns have red tiled roofs, which one gets rather tired of putting into one’s word paintings, but the roofs of Genoa are gray tiled, and gray are her serried house walls, and gray her many churches and bell-towers. The sober tone gratifies your eye immensely, and the fact that your eye has noted it and not attributed the conventional coloring of southern Europe to the city is a flattery to your pride which you will not refuse. It is not a setting for opera like Naples; there is something businesslike in it which agrees with your American mood if you are true to America, and recalls you to duty if you are not.

I had not been in Genoa since 1864 except for a few days in 1905, and I saw changes which I will mostly not specify. Already at the earlier date the railway had cut through the beautiful and reverend Doria garden and left the old palace some scanty grounds on the sea-level, where commerce noisily encompassed it with trains and tracks and lines of freight-cars. But there had remained up to my last visit that grot on the gardened hill-slope whence a colossal marble Hercules helplessly overlooked the offence offered by the railroad; and now suddenly here was the lofty wall of some new edifice stretching across in front of the Hercules and wholly shutting him from view; for all I know it may have made him part of its structure.

Let this stand for a type of the change which had passed upon Genoa and has passed or is passing upon all Italy. The trouble is that Italy is full of very living Italians, the quickest-witted people in the world, who are alert to seize every chance for bettering themselves financially as they have bettered themselves politically. For my part, I always wonder they do not still rule the world when I see how intellectually fit they are to do it, how beyond any other race they seem still equipped for their ancient primacy. Possibly it is their ancient primacy which hangs about their necks and loads them down. It is better to have too little past, as we have, than too much, as they have. But if antiquity hampers them, they are tenderer of its vast mass than we are of our little fragments of it; tenderer than any other people, except perhaps the English, have shown themselves; but when the time comes that the past stands distinctly in the way of the future, down goes the past, even in Italy. I am not saying that I do not see why that railroad could not have tunnelled under the Doria garden rather than cut through it; and I am waiting for that new building to justify its behavior toward that poor old Hercules; but in the mean time I hold that Italy is for the Italians who now live in it, and have to get that better living out of it which we others all want our countries to yield us; and that it is not merely a playground for tourists who wish to sentimentalize it, or study it, or sketch it, or make copy of it, as I am doing now.

All the same I will not deny that I enjoyed more than any of the improvements which I noted in Genoa that bit of the old Doria palace-grounds which progress has left it. The gray edifice looks out on the neighboring traffic across the leanness of a lovely old garden, with statues and stone seats, and in the midst a softly soliloquizing fountain, painted green with moss and mould. When you enter the palace, as you do in response to a custodian who soon comes with a key and asks if you would like to see it, you find yourself, one flight up, in a long glazed gallery, fronting on the garden, which is so warm with the sun that you wish to spend the rest of your stay in Genoa there. It is frescoed round with classically imagined portraits of the different Dorias, and above all the portrait of that great hero of the republic. I do not know that this portrait particularly impresses you; if you have been here before you will be reserving yourself for the portrait which the custodian will lead you to see in the ultimate chamber of the rather rude old palace, where it is like a living presence.

It is the picture of a very old man in a flat cap, sitting sunken forward in his deep chair, with his thin, long hands folded one on the other, and looking wearily at you out of his faded eyes, in which dwell the memories of action in every sort and counsel in every kind. Victor in battles by land and sea, statesman and leader and sage, he looks it all in that wonderful effigy, which shuns no effect of his more than ninety years, but confesses his great age as a part of his greatness with a pathetic reality. The white beard, with “each particular hair” defined, falling almost to the pale, lean hands, is an essential part of the presentment, which is full of such scrupulous detail as the eye would unconsciously take note of in confronting the man himself and afterward supply in the remembrance of the whole. As if it were a part of his personality, on a table facing him, covered with maps and papers, sits the mighty admiral’s cat, which, with true feline im-passiveness, ignores the spectator and gives its sole regard to the admiral. There are possibly better portraits in the world than this, which was once by Sebastiano del Piombo and is now by Titian; but I remember none which has moved me more.

We tried in vain for a photograph of it, and then after a brief glance at the riches of the Church of the Annunziata, where we were followed around the interior by a sacristan who desired us to note that the pillars were “All inlady, all inlady” with different marbles, and, after a chilly moment in San Lorenzo, which the worshippers and the masons were sharing between them in the prayers and repairs always going on in cathedrals, we drove for luncheon to the hotel where we had sojourned in great comfort three years before. Genoa has rather a bad name for its hotels, but we had found this one charming, perhaps because when we had objected to going five flights up the landlord had led us yet a floor higher, that we might walk into the garden. It is so in much of Genoa, where the precipitous nature of the site makes this vivid contrast between the levels of the front door and the back gate. Many of the streets have been widened since Heine saw the gossiping neighbors touching knees across them, but nothing less than an earthquake could change the temperamental topography of the place. It has its advantages; when there is a ring at the door the housemaid, instead of panting up from the kitchen to answer it, has merely to fall down five pairs of stairs. It cannot be denied, either, that the steep incline gives a charm to the streets which overcome it with sidewalks and driveways and trolley-tracks. Such a street as the Via Garibaldi (there is a Via Garibaldi in every Italian city, town, and village, and ought to be a dozen), compactly built, but giving here and there over the houses’ shoulders glimpses of the gardens lurking behind them, is of a dignity full of the energy which a flat thoroughfare never displays or imparts. Without the inspiration lent us by the street, I am sure we should never have got to the top of it with our cab when we went to the Campo Santo; and, as it was, we had to help our horses upward by involuntarily straining forward from our places. But the Campo Santo was richly worth the effort, for to visit that famous cemetery is to enjoy an experience of which it is the unique opportunity.

I wish to celebrate it because it seems to me one of the frankest expressions of national taste and nature, and I do like simplicity — in others. The modern Italians are the most literal of the realists in all the arts, and, as I had striven for reality in my own poor way, I was perhaps the more curious to see its effects in sculpture which I had heard of so much. I will own that they went far beyond my expectation and possibly my wishes; but it is not to be supposed that it is only inferior artists who have abandoned themselves to the excesses of fidelity so abundant in the Campo Santo. There are, of course, enough poor falterings of allegory and tradition in the marble walls and floors of this vast residence of the dead (as it gives you the cheerful impression of being), but the characteristic note of the place is a realism braving it out in every extreme of actuality. Possibly the fact is most striking in that death-bed scene where the family, life-size and unsparingly portraitured, and, as it were, photographed in marble, are gathered in the room of the dying mother. She lies on a bedstead which bears every mark of being one of a standard chamber-set in the early eighteen-seventies, and about her stand her husband and her sons and daughters and their wives and husbands, in the fashions of that day. I recall a brother, in a cutaway coat, and a daughter, in a tie-back, embraced in their grief and turning their faces away from their mother toward the spectator; and doubtless there were others whom to describe in their dress would render as grotesque. It is enough to say that the artist, of a name well known in Italy and of uncommon gift, has been as true to the moment in their costume as to the eternal humanity in their faces. He has done what the sculptor or painter of the great periods of art used to do with their historical and scriptural people — he has put them in the dress of his own time and place; and it is impossible to deny him a convincing logic. No sophistry or convention of drapery in the scene could have conveyed its pathos half so well, or indeed at all. It does make you shudder, I allow; it sets your teeth on edge; but then, if you are a real man or woman, it brings the lump into your throat; the smile fails from your lip; you pay the tribute of genuine pity and awe. I will not pretend that I was so much moved by the meeting in heaven of a son and father: the spirit of the son in a cutaway, with a derby hat in his hand, gazing with rapture into the face of the father’s spirit in a long sack-coat holding his marble bowler elegantly away from his side, if I remember rightly. But here the fact wanted the basis of simplicity so strong in the other scene; in the mixture of the real and the ideal the group was romanticistic.

There are innumerable other portrait figures and busts in which the civic and social hour is expressed. The women’s hair is dressed in this fashionable way or that; the men’s beards are cut in conformity to the fashion or the personal preference in side whiskers or mustache or imperial or goatee; and their bronze or marble faces convey the contemporary character of aristocrat or bourgeois or politician or professional. I do not know just what the reader would expect me to say in defence of the full-length figure of a lady in decollete and trained evening dress, who enters from the tomb toward the spectator as if she were coming into a drawing-room after dinner. She is very beautiful, but she is no longer very young, and the bare arms, which hang gracefully at her side, respond to an intimation of embonpoint in the figure, with a slightly flabby over-largeness where they lose themselves in the ample shoulders. Whether this figure is the fancy of the sorrowing husband or the caprice of the defunct herself, who wished to be shown to after-time as she hoped she looked in the past, I do not know; but I had the same difficulty with it as I had with that father and son; it was romanticistic. Wholly realistic and rightly actual was that figure of an old woman who is said to have put by all her savings from the grocery business that she might appear properly in the Campo Santo, and who is shown there short and stout and common, in her ill-fitting best dress, but motherly and kind and of an undeniable and touching dignity.

If I am giving the reader the impression that I went to the Campo Santo in my last stop at Genoa, I am deceiving him; I record here the memories of four years ago. I did not revisit the place, but I should like to see it again, if only to revive my recollections of its unique interest. I did really revisit the Pal-lavicini-Durazzo palace, and there revived the pleasure I had known before in its wonderful Van Dycks. Most wonderful was and will always be the “Boy in White,” the little serene princeling, whoever he was, in whom the painter has fixed forever a bewitching mood and moment of childhood. “The Mother with two Children” is very well and self-evidently true to personality and period and position; but, after all, she is nothing beside that “Boy in White,” though she and her children are otherwise so wonderful. Now that I speak of her, however, she rather grows upon my recollection as a woman greater than her great world and proudly weary of it.

She was a lady of that very patrician house whose palace, in its cold grandeur and splendor, renews at once all one’s faded or fading sense of the commercial past of Italy, when her greatest merchants were her greatest nobles and dwelt in magnificence unparalleled yet since Rome began to be old. Genoa, Venice, Pisa, Florence, what state their business men housed themselves in and environed themselves with! Their palaces by the hundreds were such as only the public edifices of our less simple State capitols could equal in size and not surpass in cost. Their folie des grandeurs realized illusions in architecture, in sculpture, and in painting which the assembled and concentrated feats of those arts all the way up and down Fifth Avenue, and in the millionaire blocks eastward could not produce the likeness of. We have the same madness in our brains; we have even a Roman megalomania, but the effect of it in Chicago or Pittsburg or Philadelphia or New York has not yet got beyond a ducal or a princely son-in-law. The splendors of such alliances have still to take substantial form in a single instance worthy to compare with a thousand instances in the commercial republics of Italy. This does not mean that our rich people have not so much money as the Italians of the Renaissance, but that perhaps in their folie des grandeurs they are a different kind of madmen; it means also that land and labor are dearer positively and comparatively with us, and that our pork-packing or stock-broking princes prefer to spend on comfort rather than size in their houses, and do not like the cold feet which the merchant princes of Italy must have had from generation to generation. I shall always be sorry I did not wear arctics when I went to the Pallavicini-Durazzo palace, and I strongly urge the reader to do so when he goes.

He will not so much need them out-of-doors in a Genoese January, unless a tramontana is blowing, and there was none on our half-day. But in any case we did not walk. We selected the best-looking cab-horse we could find, and he turned out better than his driver, who asked a fabulous price by the hour. We obliged him to show his tariff, when his wickedness was apparent from the printed rates. He explained that the part we were looking at was obsolete, and he showed us another part, which was really for drives outside the city; but we agreed to pay it, and set out hoping for good behavior from him that would make up the difference. Again we were deceived; at the end he demanded a franc beyond even his unnatural fare. I urged that one should be reasonable; but he seemed to think not, and to avoid controversy I paid the extortionate franc. I remembered that just a month before, in New York, I had paid an extortionate dollar in like circumstances.

Nevertheless, that franc above and beyond the stipulated extortion impoverished me, and when we came to take a rowboat back to our steamer I beat the boatman down cruelly, mercilessly. He was a poor, lean little man, with rather a superannuated boat, and he labored harder at the oar than I could bear to see without noting his exertion to him. This was fatal; instantly he owned that I was right, and he confessed, moreover, that he was the father of a family, and that some of his children were then suffering from sickness as well as want. What could one do but make the fare up to the first demand of three francs after having got the price down to one and a half? At the time it seemed to me that I was somehow by this means getting the better of the cabman who had obliged me to pay a franc more than his stipulated extortion, but I do not now hope to make it appear so to the reader.

IV. NAPLES AND HER JOYFUL NOISE

We heard the joyful noise of Naples as soon as our steamer came to anchor within the moles whose rigid lines perhaps disfigure her famous bay, while they render her harbor so secure. The noise first rose to us, hanging over the guard, and trying to get phrases for the glory of her sea and sky and mountains and monuments, from a boat which seemed to have been keeping abreast of us ever since we had slowed up. It was not a largo boat, but it managed to contain two men with mandolins, a mother of a family with a guitar, and a young girl with an alternate tambourine and umbrella. The last instrument was inverted to catch the coins, such as they were, which the passengers flung down to the minstrels for their repetitions of “Santa Lucia,” “Funicoli-Funicola,” “II Cacciatore,” and other popular Neapolitan airs, such as “John Brown’s Body” and “In the Bowery.” To the songs that had a waltz movement the mother of a family performed a restricted dance, at some risk of falling overboard, while she smiled radiantly up at us, as, in fact, they all did, except the young girl, who had to play simultaneously on her tambourine and her inverted umbrella, and seemed careworn. Her anxiety visibly deepened to despair when she missed a shilling, which must have looked as large to her as a full moon as it sank slowly down into the sea.

But her despair did not last long; nothing lasts long in Naples except the joyful noise, which is incessant and perpetual, and which seems the expression of the universal temperament in both man and beast. Our good-fortune placed us in a hotel fronting the famous Castel dell’ Ovo, across a little space of land and water, and we could hear, late and early, the cackling and crowing of the chickens which have replaced the hapless prisoners of other days in that fortress. At times the voices of the hens were lifted in a choral of self-praise, as if they had among them just laid the mighty structure which takes its name from its resemblance to the egg they ordinarily produce. In other lands the peculiar note of the donkey is not thought very melodious, but in Naples before it can fade away it is caught up in the general orchestration and ceases in music. The cabmen at our corner, lying in wait by scores for the strangers whom it is their convention to suppose ignorant of their want of a carriage, quarrelled rhythmically with one another; the mendicants, lying everywhere in wait for charity, murmured a modulated appeal; if you heard shouts or yells afar off they died upon your ear in a strain of melody at the moment when they were lifted highest. I am aware of seeming to burlesque the operatic fact which every one must have noticed in Naples; and I will not say that the neglected or affronted babe, or the trodden dog, is as tuneful as the midnight cat there, but only that they approach it in the prevailing tendency of all the local discords to soften and lose themselves in the general unison. This embraces the clatter of the cabs, which are seldom less than fifty years old, and of a looseness in all their joints responsive to their effect of dusty decrepitude. Their clatter penetrates the volumed tread of the myriad feet in a city where, if you did not see all sorts of people driving, you would say the whole population walked. Above the manifold noises gayly springing to the sky spreads and swims the clangor of the church-bells and holds the terrestrial uproar in immeasurable solution. It would be rash to say that the whole population of Naples is always in the street, for if you look into the shops or cafes, or, I dare say, the houses, you will find them quite full; but the general statement verifies itself almost tiresomely in its agreement with what everybody has always said of Naples. It is so quite what you expect that if you could you would turn away in satiety, especially from the swarming life of the poor, which seems to have no concealments from the public, but frankly works at all the trades and arts that can be carried on out-of-doors; cooks, eats, laughs, cries, sleeps, wakes, makes love, quarrels, scolds, does everything but wash itself — clothes enough it washes for other people’s life. There is a reason for this in the fact that in bad weather at Naples it is cold and dark and damp in-doors, and in fine so bright and warm and charming without that there is really no choice. Then there is the expansive temperament, which if it were shut up would probably be much more explosive than it is now. As it is, it vents itself in volleyed detonations and scattered shots which language can give no sense of.

For the true sense of it you must go to Naples, and then you will never lose the sense of it. I had not been there since 1864, but when I woke up the morning after my arrival, and heard the chickens cackling in the Castel dell’ Ovo, and the donkeys braying, and the cab-drivers quarrelling, and the cries of the street vendors, and the dogs barking, and the children wailing, and their mothers scolding, and the clatter of wheels and hoops and feet, and all that mighty harmony of the joyful Neapolitan noises, it seemed to me that it was the first morning after my first arrival, and I was still only twenty-seven years old. As soon as possible, when the short but sweet Vincenzo had brought up my breakfast of tea and bread-and-butter and honey (to which my appetite turned from the gross superabundance of the steamer’s breakfasts with instant acquiescence), and announced with a smile as liberal as the sunshine that it was a fine day, I went out for those impressions which I had better make over to the reader in their original disorder. Vesuvius, which was silver veiled the day before, was now of a soft, smoky white, and the sea, of a milky blue, swam round the shore and out to every dim island and low cape and cliffy promontory. The street was full of people on foot and in trolleys and cabs and donkey pleasure-carts, and the familiar teasing of cabmen and peddlers and beggars began with my first steps toward what I remembered as the Toledo, but what now called itself, with the moderner Italian patriotism, the Via Roma. The sole poetic novelty of my experience was in my being offered loaves of bread which, when I bought them, would be given to the poor, in honor of what saint’s day I did not learn. But it was all charming; even the inattention of the young woman over the book-counter was charming, since it was a condition of her flirtation with the far younger man beside me who wanted something far more interesting from her than any brief sketch of the history of Naples, in either English or Italian or French or, at the worst, German. She was very pretty, though rather powdered, and when the young man went away she was sympathetically regretful to me that there was no such sketch, in place of which she offered me several large histories in more or less volumes. But why should I have wanted a history of Naples when I had Naples itself? It was like wanting a photograph when you have the original. Had I not just come through the splendid Piazza San Ferdinando, with the nobly arcaded church on one hand and the many-statued royal palace on the other, and between them a lake of mellow sunshine, as warm as ours in June?

What I found Naples and the Neapolitans in 1908 I had found them in 1864, and Mr. Gray (as he of the “Elegy” used to be called on his title-pages) found them in 1740. “The streets,” he wrote home to his mother, “are one continued market, and thronged with populace so much that a coach can hardly pass. The common sort are a jolly, lively kind of animals, more industrious than Italians usually are; they work till evening; then they take their lute or guitar (for they all play) and walk about the city or upon the seashore with it, to enjoy the fresco.” There was, in fact, a bold gayety in the aspect of the city, without the refinement which you do not begin to feel till you get into North Italy. When I came upon church after church, with its facade of Spanish baroque, I lamented the want of Gothic delicacy and beauty, but I was consoled abundantly later in the churches antedating the Spanish domination. I had no reason, such as travellers give for hating places, to be dissatisfied with Naples in any way. I had been warned that the customs officers were terrible there, and that I might be kept hours with my baggage. But the inspector, after the politest demand for a declaration of tobacco, ordered only a small valise, the Benjamin of its tribe, opened and then closed untouched; and his courteous forbearance, acknowledged later through the hotel porter, cost me but a dollar. The hotel itself was inexpressibly better in lighting, heating, service, and table than any New York hotel at twice the money — in fact, no money could buy the like with us at any hotel I know of; but this is a theme which I hope to treat more fully hereafter. It is true that the streets of Naples are very long and rather narrow and pretty crooked, and full of a damp cold that no sunlight seems ever to hunt out of them; but then they are seldom ironed down with trolley-tracks; the cabs feel their way among the swarming crowds with warning voices and smacking whips; even the prepotent automobile shows some tenderness for human life and limb, and proceeds still more cautiously than the cabs and carts — in fact, I thought I saw recurrent proofs of that respect for the average man which seems the characteristic note of Italian liberty; and this belief of mine, bred of my first observations in Naples, did not, after twelve weeks in Italy, prove an illusion. If it is not the equality we fancy ourselves having, it is rather more fraternity in effect.

The failure of other researches for that sketch of Neapolitan history left me in the final ignorance which I must share with the reader; but my inquiries brought me prompt knowledge of one of those charming features in which the Italian cities excel, if they are not unique. I remember too vaguely the Galleria, as they call the beautiful glazed arcade of Milan, to be sure that it is finer than the Galleria at Naples, but I am sure this is finer than that at Genoa, with which, however, I know nothing in other cities to compare. The Neapolitan gallery, wider than any avenue of the place, branching in the form of a Greek cross to four principal streets, is lighted by its roof of glass, and a hundred brilliant shops and cafes spread their business and leisure over its marble floor. Nothing could be architecturally more cheerful, and, if it were not too hot in summer, there could be no doubt of its adaptation to our year, for it could be easily closed against the winter by great portals, and at other seasons would give that out-door expansion which in Latin countries hospitably offers the spectacle of pleasant eating and drinking to people who have nothing to eat and drink. These spectators could be kept at a distance with us by porters at the entrances, while they would not be altogether deprived of the gratifying glimpses.

I do not know whether poverty avails itself of its privileges by visiting the Neapolitan gallery; but probably, like poverty elsewhere, it is too much interested by the drama of life in its own quarter ever willingly to leave it. Poverty is very conservative, for reasons more than one; its quarter in Naples is the oldest, and was the most responsive to our recollections of the Naples of 1864. Overhead the houses tower and beetle with their balconies and bulging casements, shutting the sun, except at noon, from the squalor below, where the varied dwellers bargain and battle and ply their different trades, bringing their work from the dusk of cavernous shops to their doorways for the advantage of the prevailing twilight. Carpentry and tailoring and painting and plumbing, locksmithing and copper-smithing go on there, touching elbows with frying and feeding, and the vending of all the strange and hideous forms of flesh, fish, and fowl. If you wish to know how much the tentacle of a small polyp is worth you may chance to see a cent pass for it from the crone who buys to the boy who sells it smoking from the kettle; but the price of cooked cabbage or pumpkin must remain a mystery, along with that of many raw vegetables and the more revolting viscera of the less-recognizable animals.

The poor people worming in and out around your cab are very patient of your progress over the terrible floor of their crooked thoroughfare, perhaps because they reciprocate your curiosity, and perhaps because they are very amiable and not very sensitive. They are not always crowded into these dismal chasms; their quarter expands here and there into market-plates, like the fish-market where the uprising of the fisherman Masaniello against the Spaniards fitly took place; and the Jewish market-place, where the poor young Corra-dino, last of the imperial Hohenstaufen line, was less appropriately beheaded by the Angevines. The open spaces are not less loathsome than the reeking alleys, but if you have the intelligent guide we had you approach them through the triumphal arch by which Charles V. entered Naples, and that is something. Yet we will now talk less of the emperor than of the guide, who appealed more to my sympathy.

He had been six years in America, which he adored, because, he said, he had got work and earned his living there the very day he landed. That was in Boston, where he turned his hand first to one thing and then another, and came away at last through some call home, honoring and loving the Americans as the kindest, the noblest, the friendliest people in the world. I tried, politely, to persuade him that we were not all of us all he thought us, but he would not yield, and at one place he generously claimed a pre-eminence in wickedness for his fellow-Neapolitans. That was when we came to a vast, sorrowful prison, from which an iron cage projected into the street. Around this cage wretched women and children and old men clustered till the prisoners dear to them were let into it from the jail and allowed to speak with them. The scene was as public as all of life and death is in Naples, and the publicity seemed to give it peculiar sadness, which I noted to our guide. He owned its pathos; “but,” he said, “you know we have a terrible class of people here in Naples.” I protested that there were terrible classes of people everywhere, even in America. He would not consent entirely, but in partly convincing each other we became better friends. He had a large black mustache and gentle black eyes, and he spoke very fair English, which, when he wished to be most impressive, he dropped and used a very literary Italian instead. He showed us where he lived, on a hill-top back of our gardened quay, and said that he paid twelve dollars a month for a tenement of five rooms there. Schooling is compulsory in Naples, but he sends his boy willingly, and has him especially study English as the best provision he can make for him — as heir of his own calling of cicerone, perhaps. He has a little farm at Bavello, which he tills when it is past the season for cultivating foreigners in Naples; he expects to spend his old age there; and I thought it not a bad lookout. He was perfectly well-mannered, and at a hotel where we stopped for tea he took his coffee at our table unbidden, like any American fellow-man. He and the landlord had their joke together, the landlord warning me against him in English as “very bad man,” and clapping him affectionately on the shoulder to emphasize the irony. We did not demand too much social information of him; all the more we valued the gratuitous fact that the Neapolitan nobles were now rather poor, because they preferred a life of pleasure to a life of business. I could have told him that the American nobles were increasingly like them in their love of pleasure, but I would not have known how to explain that they were not poor also. He was himself a moderate in politics, but he told us, what seems to be the fact everywhere in Italy, that singly the largest party in Naples is the Socialist party.

He went with me first one day to the beautiful old Church of Santa Chiara, to show me the Angevine tombs there, in which I satisfied a secret, lingering love for the Gothic; and then to the cathedral, where the sacristan showed us everything but the blood of St. Jannarius, perhaps because it was not then in the act of liquefying; but I am thankful to say I saw one of his finger-bones. My guide had made me observe how several of the churches on the way to this were built on the sites and of the remnants of pagan temples, and he summoned the world-old sacristan of St. Januarius to show us evidences of a rival antiquity in the crypt; for it had begun as a temple of Neptune. The sacristan practically lived in those depths and the chill sanctuary above them, and-he was so full of rheumatism that you could almost hear it creak as he walked; yet he was a cheerful sage, and satisfied with the fee which my guide gave him and which he made small, as he explained, that the sacristan might not be discontented with future largesse. I need not say that each church we visited had its tutelary beggar, and that my happy youth came back to me in the blindness of one, or the mutilation of another, or the haggish wrinkles of a third. At Santa Chiara I could not at first make out what it was which caused my heart to rejoice so; but then I found that it was because the church was closed, and we had to go and dig a torpid monk out of his crevice in a cold, many-storied cliff near by, and get him to come and open it, just as I used, with the help of neighbors, to do in the past.

Our day ended at sunset — a sunset of watermelon red — with a visit to the Castel Nuovo, where my guide found himself at home with the garrison, because, as he explained, he had served his term as a soldier. He was the born friend of the custodian of the castle church, which was the most comfortable church for warmth we had visited, and to which we entered by the bronze gates of the triumphal arch raised in honor of the Aragonese victory over the Angevines in 1442, when this New Castle was newer than it is now. The bronze gates record in bas-relief the battles between the French and Spanish powers in their quarrel over the people one or other must make its prey; but whether it was to the greater advantage of the Neapolitans to be battened on by the house of Aragon and then that of Bourbon for the next six hundred years after the Angevines had retired from the banquet is problematical. History is a very baffling study, and one may be well content to know little or nothing about it. I knew so little or had forgotten so much that I scarcely deserved to be taken down into the crypt of this church and shown the skeletons of four conspirators for Anjou whom Aragon had put to death — two laymen and an archbishop by beheading, and a woman by dividing crosswise into thirds. The skeletons lay in their tattered and dusty shrouds, and I suppose were authentic enough; but I had met them, poor things, too late in my life to wish for their further acquaintance. Once I could have exulted to search out their story and make much of it; but now I must leave it to the reader’s imagination, along with most other facts of my observation in Naples.

I was at some pains to look up the traces of my lost youth there, and if I could have found more of them no doubt I should have been more interested in these skeletons. For forty-odd years I had remembered the prodigious picturesqueness of certain streets branching from a busy avenue and ascending to uplands above by stately successions of steps. When I demanded these of my guide, he promptly satisfied me, and in a few moments, there in the Chiaja, we stood at the foot of such a public staircase. I had no wish to climb it, but I found it more charming even than I remembered. All the way to the top it was banked on either side with glowing masses of flowers and fruits and the spectacular vegetables of the South, and between these there were series of people, whom I tacitly delegated to make the ascent for me, passing the groups bargaining at the stalls. Nothing could have been better; nothing that I think of is half so well in New York, where the markets are on that dead level which in the social structure those above it abhor; though there are places on the East River where we might easily have inclined markets.

Other associations of that far past awoke with my identification of the hotel where we had stayed at the end of the Villa Nazionale. In those days the hotel was called, in appeal to our patriotism, more flattered then than now in Europe, Hotel Washington; but it is to-day a mere pension, though it looks over the same length of palm-shaded, statue-peopled garden. The palms were larger than I remembered them, and the statues had grown up and seemed to have had large families since my day; but the lovely sea was the same, with all the mural decorations of the skyey horizons beyond, dim precipices and dreamy island tops, and the dozing Vesuvius mistakable for any of them. At one place there was a file of fishermen, including a fisherwoman, drawing their net by means of a rope carried across the carriage-way from the seawall, with a splendid show of their black eyes and white teeth and swarthy, bare legs, and always there were beggars, both of those who frankly begged and those who importuned with postal-cards. This terrible traffic pervades all southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting traveller with undesired bargains. In its presence it is almost impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase; and yet one must own that it has its rights. What would those boys do if they did not sell, or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor problem, so many-faced in our time. Would it be better that they should take to open mendicancy, or try to win the soft American heart with such acquired slang as “Skiddoo to twenty-three”? One who had no postal-cards had English enough to say he would go away for a penny; it was his price, and I did not see how he could take less; when he was reproached by a citizen of uncommon austerity for his shameless annoyance of strangers, I could not see that he looked abashed — in fact, he went away singing. He did not take with him the divine beauty of the afternoon light on the sea and mountains; and, if he was satisfied, we were content with our bargain.

In fact, it would be impossible to exaggerate in the praise of that incomparable environment. At every hour of the day, and, for all I know, the night, it had a varying beauty and a constant loveliness. Six days out of the week of our stay the sunshine was glorious, and five days of at least a May or September warmth; and though one day was shrill and stiff with the tramontana, it was of as glorious sunshine as the rest. The gale had blown my window open and chilled my room, but with that sun blazing outside I could not believe in the hurricane which seemed to blow our car up the funicular railway when we mounted to the height where the famous old Convent of San Martino stands, and then blew us all about the dust-clouded streets of that upland in our search for the right way to the monastery. It was worth more than we suffered in finding it; for the museum is a record of the most significant events of Neapolitan history from the time of the Spanish domination down to that of the Garibaldian invasion; and the church and corridors through which the wind hustled us abound in paintings and frescos such as one would be willing to give a whole week of quiet weather to. I do not know but I should like to walk always in the convent garden, or merely look into it from my window in the cloister wall, and gossip with my fellow-friars at their windows. We should all be ghosts, of course, but the more easily could the sun warm us through in spite of the tramontana.

I do not know that Naples is very beautiful in certain phases in which Venice and Genoa are excellent. Those cities were adorned by their sons with palaces of an outlook worthy of their splendor. But in the other Italian cities the homes of her patricians were crowded into the narrow streets where their architecture fails of its due effect. It is so with them in Naples, and even along the Villa Nazionale, where many palatial villas are set, they seclude themselves in gardens where one fancies rather than sees them. These are, in fact, sometimes the houses of the richest bourgeoisie — bankers and financiers — and the houses which have names conspicuous in the mainly inglorious turmoil of Neapolitan history help unnoted to darken the narrow and winding ways of the old city. A glimpse of a deep court or of a towering facade is what you get in passing, but it is to be said of the sunless streets over which they gloom that they are kept in a modern neatness beside which the dirt of New York is mediaeval. It is so with most other streets in Naples, except those poorest ones where the out-door life insists upon the most intimate domestic expression. Even such streets are no worse than our worst streets, and the good streets are all better kept than our best.

I am not sure that there are even more beggars in Naples than in New York, though I will own that I kept no count. In both cities beggary is common enough, and I am not noting it with disfavor in either, for it is one of my heresies that comfort should be constantly reminded of misery by the sight of it — comfort is so forgetful. Besides, in Italy charity costs so little; a cent of our money pays a man for the loss of a leg or an arm; two cents is the compensation for total blindness; a sick mother with a brood of starving children is richly rewarded for her pains with a nickel worth four cents. Organized charity is not absent in the midst of such volunteers of poverty; one day, when we thought we had passed the last outpost of want in our drive, two Sisters of Charity suddenly appeared with out-stretched tin cups. Our driver did not imagine our inexhaustible benovelence; he drove on, and before we could bring him to a halt the Sisters of Charity ran us down, their black robes flying abroad and their sweet faces flushed with the pursuit. Upon the whole it was very humiliating; we could have wished to offer our excuses and regrets; but our silver seemed enough, and the gentle sisters fell back when we had given it.

That was while we were driving toward Posilipo for the beauty of the prospect along the sea and shore, and for a sense of which any colored postal-card will suffice better than the most hectic word-painting. The worst of Italy is the superabundance of the riches it offers ear and eye and nose — offers every sense — ending in a glut of pleasure. At the point where we descended from our carriage to look from the upland out over the vast hollow of land and sea toward Pozzuoli, which is so interesting as the scene of Jove’s memorable struggle with the Titans, and just when we were really beginning to feel equal to it, a company of minstrels suddenly burst upon us with guitars and mandolins and comic songs much dramatized, while the immediate natives offered us violets and other distracting flowers. In the effect, art and nature combined to neutralize each other, as they do with us, for instance, in those restaurants where they have music during dinner, and where you do not know whether you are eating the chef-d’oeuvre of a cook or a composer.

It was at the new hotel which is evolving itself through the repair of the never-finished and long-ruined Palace of Donn’ Anna, wife of a Spanish viceroy in the seventeenth century, that our guide stopped with us for that cup of tea already mentioned. We had to climb four nights of stairs for it to the magnificent salon overlooking the finest postal-card prospect in all Naples. We lingered long upon it, in the balcony from which we could have dropped into the sunset sea any coin which we could have brought ourselves to part with; but we had none of the bad money which had been so easily passed off upon us. This sort rather abounds in Naples, and the traveller should watch not only for false francs, but for francs of an obsolete coinage which you can know by the king’s head having a longer neck than in the current pieces. At the bookseller’s they would not take a perfectly good five-franc piece because it was so old as 1815; and what becomes of all the bad money one innocently takes for good? One fraudulent franc I made a virtue of throwing away; but I do not know what I did with a copper refused by a trolley conductor as counterfeit. I could not take the affair seriously, and perhaps I gave that copper in charity.

As we drove hotelward through the pink twilight we met many carriages of people who looked rich and noble, but whether they were so I do not know. I only know that old ladies who regard the world severely from their coaches behind the backs of their perfectly appointed coachmen and footmen ought to be both, and that old gentlemen who frown over their white mustaches have no right to their looks if they are neither. It was, at any rate, the hour of the fashionable drive, which included a pause midway of the Villa Nazionale for the music of the military band.

The band plays near the Aquarium, which I hope the reader will visit at the earlier hours of the day. Then, if he has a passion for polyps, and wishes to imagine how they could ingulf good-sized ships in the ages of fable, he can see one of the hideous things float from its torpor in the bottom of its tank, and seize Avith its hungry tentacles the food lowered to it by a string. Still awfuller is it to see it rise and reach with those prehensile members, as with the tails of a multi-caudate ape, some rocky projection of its walls and lurk fearsomely into the hollow, and vanish there in a loathly quiescence. The carnivorous spray and bloom of the deep-sea flowers amid which drowned men’s “bones are coral made” seem of one temperament with the polyps as they slowly, slowly wave their tendrils and petals; but there is amusement if not pleasure in store for the traveller who turns from them to the company of shad softly and continuously circling in their tank, and regarding the spectators with a surly dignity becoming to people in better society than others. One large shad, imaginably of very old family and independent property, sails at the head of several smaller shad, his flatterers and toadies, who try to look like him. Mostly his expression is very severe; but in milder moments he offers a perverse resemblance to some portraits of Washington.

All our days in Naples died like dolphins to the music which I have tried to impart the sense of. The joyful noises which it was made up of culminated for us on that evening when a company of the street and boat musicians came into the hotel and danced and sang and played the tarantella. They were of all ages, sexes, and bulks, and of divers operatic costumes, but they were of one temperament only, which was glad and childlike. They went through their repertory, which included a great deal more than the tarantella, and which we applauded with an enthusiasm attested by our contributions when the tambourine went round. Then they repeated their selections, and at the second collection we guests of the hotel repeated our contributions, but in a more guarded spirit. After the second repetition the prettiest girl came round with her photographs and sold them at prices out of all reason. Then we became very melancholy, and began to steal out one by one. I myself did not stay for the fourth collection, and I cannot report how the different points of view, the Southern and the Northern, were reconciled in the event which I am not sure was final. But I am sure that unless you can make allowance for a world-wide difference in the Neapolitans from yourself you can never understand them. Perhaps you cannot, even then.

V. POMPEII REVISITED

Because I felt very happy in going back to Pompeii after a generation, and being alive to do so in the body, I resolved to behave handsomely by the cabman who drove me from my hotel to the station. I said to myself that I would do something that would surprise him, and I gave him his fee and nearly a franc over; but it was I who was surprised, for he ran after me into the station, as I supposed, to extort more. He was holding out a franc toward me, and I asked the guide who was bothering me to take him to Pompeii (where there are swarms of guides always on the grounds) what the matter was. “It is false,” he explained, and this proved true, though whether the franc was the one I had given the driver or whether it was one which he had thoughtfully substituted for it to make good an earlier loss I shall now never know. I put it into my pocket, wondering what I should do with it; the question what you shall do with counterfeit money in Italy is one which is apt to recur as I have hinted, and in despair of solving it at the moment I threw the false franc out of the car-window; it was the false franc I have already boasted of throwing away.

This was, of course, after I got into the car, and after I had suffered another wrong, and was resolved at least to be good myself. I had taken first-class tickets, but, when we had followed several conductors up and down the train, the last of them said there were no first-class places left, though I shall always doubt this. I asked what we should do, and he shrugged. I had heard that if you will stand upon your rights in such a matter the company will have to put on another car for you. But I was now dealing with the Italian government, which has nationalized the railroads, but has apparently not yet repleted the rolling stock; and when the conductor found us places in a second-class carriage, rather than quarrel with a government which had troubles enough already I got aboard. I suppose really that I have not much public spirit, and that the little I have I commonly leave at home; in travelling it is burdensome. Besides, the second-class carriage would have been comfortable enough if it had not been so dirty; it looked as if it had not been washed since it was flooded with liquid ashes at the destruction of Pompeii, though they seemed to be cigar ashes.

The country through which we made the hour’s run was sympathetically squalid. We had, to be sure, the sea on one side, and that was clean enough; but the day was gray, and the sea was responsively gray; while the earth on the other side was torn and ragged, with people digging manure into the patches of broccoli, and gardening away as if it had been April instead of January. There were shabby villas, with stone-pines and cypresses herding about the houses, and tatters of life-plant overhanging their shabby walls; there were stucco shanties which the men and women working in the fields would lurk in at nightfall. At places there was some cheerful boat building, and at one place there was a large macaroni manufactory, with far stretches of the product dangling in hanks and skeins from rows of trellises. We passed through towns where women and children swarmed, working at doorways and playing in the dim, cold streets; from the balconies everywhere winter melons hung in nets, dozens and scores of them, such as you can buy at the Italian fruiterers’ in New York, and will keep buying when once you know how good they are. In Naples they sell them by the slice in the street, the fruiterer carrying a board on his head with the slices arranged in an upright coronal like the rich, barbaric head-dress of some savage prince.

Our train was slow and our car was foul, but nothing could keep us from arriving at Pompeii in very good spirits. The entrance to the dead city is gardened about with a cemeterial prettiness of evergreens; but, after you have bought your ticket and been assigned your guide, you pass through this decorative zone and find yourself in the first of streets where the past makes no such terms with the present. If some of the houses of an ampler plan had little spaces beyond the atrium planted with such flowers as probably grew there two thousand years ago, and stuck round with tiny figurines, it was to the advantage of the people’s fancy; but it did not appeal so much to the imagination as the mould and moss, and the small, weedy network that covered the ground in the roofless chambers and temples and basilicas, where the broken columns and walls started from the floors which this unmeditated verdure painted in the favorite hue of ruin.

Most of the places I re-entered through my recollection of them, but to this subjective experience there was added that of seeing much newer and vaster things than I remembered. That sad population of the victims of the disaster, restored to the semhlance of life, or perhaps rather of death, in plaster casts taken from the moulds their decay had left in the hardening ashes, had much increased in the melancholy museum where one visits them the first thing within the city gates. But their effect was not cumulative; there were more writhing women and more contorted men; but they did not make their tragedy more evident than it had been when I saw them, fewer but not less affecting, all those years ago. It was the same with the city itself; Pompeii had grown, like the rest of the world in the interval, and, although it had been dug tip instead of built up, a good third had been added to the count of its streets and houses. There were not, so far as I could see, more ruts from chariot-wheels in the lava blocks of the thoroughfares, but some convincingly two-storied dwellings had been exhumed, and others with ceilings in better condition than those of the earlier excavations; there were more all-but-unbroken walls and columns; some mosaic floors were almost as perfect as when their dwellers fled over them out of the stifling city. But upon the whole the result was a greater monotony; the revelation of house after house, nearly the same in design, did not gain impressiveness from their repetition; just as the case would be if the dwellings of an old-fashioned cross-town street in New York were dug out two thousand years after their submergence by an eruption of Orange Mountain. The identity of each of the public edifices is easily attested to the archaeologist, but the generally intelligent, as the generally unintelligent, visitor must take the archaeologist’s word for the fact. One temple is much like another in its stumps of columns and vague foundations and broken altars. Among the later discoveries certain of the public baths are in the best repair, both structurally and decoratively, and in these one could replace the antique life with the least wear and tear of the imagination.

I could not tell which the several private houses were; but the guide-books can, and there I leave the specific knowledge of them; their names would say nothing to the reader if they said nothing to me. In Pompeii, where all the houses were rather small, some of the new ones were rather large, though not larger than a few of the older ones. Not more recognizably than these, they had been devoted to the varied uses known to advanced civilization in all ages: there were dwellings, and taverns and drinking-houses and eating-houses, and there were those houses where the feet of them that abide therein and of those that frequent them alike take hold on hell. In these the guide stays the men of his party to prove the character of the places to them from the frescos and statues; but it may be questioned if the visitors so indulged had not better taken the guide’s word for the fact. There can be no doubt that at the heart of paganism the same plague festered which poisons Christian life, and which, while the social conditions remain the same from age to age, will poison life forever.

The pictures on the walls of the newly excavated houses are not strikingly better than those I had not forgotten; but of late it has been the purpose to leave as many of the ornaments and utensils in position as possible. The best are, as they ought to be, gathered into the National Museum at Naples, but those which remain impart a more living sense of the past than such wisely ordered accumulations; for it is the Pompeian paradox that in the image of death it can best recall life. It is a grave which has been laid bare, and it were best to leave its ghastly memories unhindered by other companionship. One feels that one ought to be there alone in order to see it aright. One should not perhaps

 “Go visit it by the pale moonlight,”

but if one could have it all to one’s self by day, such a gray day as we had for it, there is no telling what might happen. One thing only would certainly happen: one would get lost. It never was a town of large area; and, like all spaces that have been ruined over, it looked smaller than it would have looked if all its walls were standing with all their roofs upon them. Still, it was a mesh of streets, out of which you would in vain have sought your way if you had been caught in it alone; though it is mostly so level that if you had mounted a truncated column almost anywhere you could have looked over the labyrinth to its verge.

It was not much crowded by visitors; though there were strings of them at the heels of the respective guides, with, I thought, a prevalence of the Germans, who are now overrunning Italy; I am sorry to say they are not able to keep it cheap, at least for other nationalities. Among these I noted two little smiling, shining, twinkling Japs, who carried kodaks for the capture of that classical antiquity which could never really belong to them. Their want of a pagan past in common with us may be what keeps us alien even more than the want of a common Christian tradition.

 “The glory that was Greece

 And the grandeur that was Rome”

could never mean to our brown companions what they meant to us; but they put on a polite air of being interested in the Graeco-Roman ruin, and were so gentle and friendly that one could almost feel they were fellow-men. Very likely they were; at any rate, until we are at war with them I shall believe so.

Our guide, whom we had really bought the whole use of at the gate, thriftily took on another party, with our leave, and it was pleasant to find that the American type from Utah was the same as from Ohio or Massachusetts; with all our differences we are the most homogeneous people under the sun, and likest a large family. We all frankly got tired at about the same time at the same place, and agreed that we had, without the amphitheatre, had enough when we ended at the Street of Tombs, where the tombs are in so much better repair than the houses. For myself, I remembered the amphitheatre so perfectly from 1864 that I did not see how I could add a single emotion there in 1908 to those I had already turned into literature; and though Pompeii is but small, the amphitheatre is practically as far from the Street of Tombs, after you have walked about the place for two hours, as the Battery is from High Bridge. There is no Elevated or Subway at Pompeii, and even the lines of public chariots, if such they were, which left those ruts in the lava pavements seem to have been permanently suspended after the final destruction in the year 79.

We were not only very tired, but very hungry, and we asked our guide to take us back the shortest way. I suggested a cross-cut at one point, and he caught at the word eagerly, and wrote it in his note-book for future use. He also acted upon it instantly, and we cut across the back yards and over the kitchen areas of several absent citizens on our way back. Our guide was as good and true as it is in the nature of guides to be, but absolute goodness and truth are rather the attributes of American travellers; and you will not escape the small graft which the guides are so rigorously forbidden to practise. Pompeii is no longer in the keeping of the Italian army; with the Italian instinct of decentralization the place has claimed the right of self-government, and now the guides are civilians, and not soldiers, as they were in my far day. They do not accept fees, but still they take them; and our guide said that he had a brother-in-law who had the best restaurant outside the gate, where we could get luncheon for two francs. As soon as we were in the hands of the runner for that restaurant the price augmented itself to two francs and a half; when we mounted to the threshold, lured on by the fascinating mystery of this increase, it became three francs, without wine. But as the waiter justly noted, in hovering about us with the cutlery and napery while he laid the table, a two-fifty luncheon was unworthy such lords as we. When he began to bring on the delicious omelette, the admirable fish, the excellent cutlets, he made us observe that if we paid three francs we ought to eat a great deal; and there seemed reason in this; at any rate, we did so. The truth is, that luncheon was worth the money, and more; as for the Vesuvian wine, it had the rich red blood of the volcano in it, and it could not be bought in New York for half a franc the bottle, if at all; at thrice that sum in Naples it was not a third as good.

If there had been anything to do after lunch except go to the train, we could not have done it, we were so spent with our two hours’ walk through Pompeii, though the gray day had been rather invigorating. Certainly it was not so exhausting as that white-hot day forty-three years before when I had broiled over the same ground under the blazing sun of a Pompeian November. Yet the difference in the muscles and emotions of twenty-seven as against those of seventy told in favor of the white-hot day; and, besides that, in the time that had elapsed a much greater burden of antiquity had been added to the city than had accumulated in its history between the year 79 and the year 1864. During most of those centuries Pompeii had been dreamlessly sleeping under its ashes, but in the ensuing less than half a century it had wakefully, however unwillingly, witnessed such events as the failure of secession and the abolition of slavery, the unification of Italy and Germany, the fall of the Second Empire, the liberation of Cuba, and the acquisition of the Philippines, the exile of Richard Croker, the destruction of the Boer Republic, the rise and spread of the trusts, the purification of municipal politics, the invention of wireless telegraphy, and the general adoption of automobiling. These things, and others like them, had perhaps not aged Pompeii so much as they had aged me, but their subjective effect was the same, and upon the whole I was not altogether sorry to have added scarcely a new impression of the place to those I had been carrying for more than a generation. Quantitatively there were plenty of new impressions to be had; impressions of more roofs, gardens, columns, houses, temples, walls, frescos; but qualitatively the Greater Pompeii was now not different from the lesser which I remembered so well.

This, at least, was what I said to myself on the ground and afterward in the National Museum at Naples, where most of the precious Pompeian things, new and old, are heaped up. They still make but a poor show there beside the treasures of Herculaneum, where the excavation of a few streets and houses has yielded costlier and lovelier things than all the lengths and breadths of Pompeii. But not for this would I turn against Pompeii at the last moment, as it were, though my second visit had not aesthetically enriched me beyond my first. I keep the vision of it under that gray January sky, with Vesuvius smokeless in the background, and the plan of the dead city, opener to the eye than ever it could have been in life, inscribed upon the broadly opened area of the gentle slopes within its gates. Whether one had not better known it dead than alive, one might not wish perhaps to say; but the place itself is curiously without pathos; Newport in ruins might not be touching; possibly all skeletons or even mummies are without pathos; and Pompeii is a skeleton, or at the most a mummy, of the past.

Seeing what antiquity so largely was, however, one might be not only resigned but cheerful in the ef-facement of any particular piece of it; and for a help to this at Pompeii I may advise the reader to take with him a certain little guide-book, written in English by a very courageous Italian, which I chanced to find in Naples. Though it treats of the tragical facts with seriousness, it is not with equal gravity that one reads that sixteen years before the Vesuvian eruption “the region had been shaken by strong sismic movements, which induced Pompei inhabitants to forsake precipitately their habitations. But being the amazement up, they got one’s home again as soon as the earth was quiet and all fear and sadness went off by memory.” Signs of the final disaster to follow were not wanting; the wells failed, the water-courses were crossed by currents of carbonic acid; “the domestic animals were also very sensible of the approaching of the scourge; they lost the habitual vivacity, and having the food in disgust, had from time to time to complain with mournful wailings, without justified reasons.... The sky became of a thick darkness,... interrupted only by flashes of light which the lava reverberated, by the bloody gliding of the thunderbolts, by the incandescence of enormous projectiles, thrown to an incommensurable highness.... Death surprised the charming town; houses and streets became the tombs of the unhappies hit by an atrocious torture.”

The author’s study of the life of Pompeii is notable for diction which, if there were logic in language, would be admirable English, for while yet in his mind it must have been “very choice Italian.” He tells us that “Pompei’s dwellings are surprising by their specific littleness,” and explains that “Pompei inhabitants, for the habitudes of the climate could allow, lived almost always to the open sky,” just as the Naples inhabitants do now. “They got home only to rest a little, to fulfill life wants, to be protected by bad weather. They spent much time during the day in forum, temples, thermes, tennis-court, or intervened to public sports, religious functions and meetings.... Few houses only had windows. The sunlight and ventilation to the ancients was given through empty spaces in the roofs.... Hoofs knocked under the weight of materials thrown out by Vesuvius; it is undoubted, however, that roofs were provided with covers or supported terraces. In the middle of the roofs was cut an overture through which air and light brought their benefits to the underlaid ambients.... Proprietor disposed the locals according to his own delight.... So that, there were bed, bath, dining, talking and game rooms.” In the peristyle “the ground was gardened, the area shared in flower beds, had narrow paths; herbs, flowers, shrubs were put with art well in order on flower beds, delighted from time to time by statues of various subjects,” as may be noted in the actual restorations of some of the Pompeian houses.

As for their spiritual life, “Pompeian’s religion, like by Roman people, was the Paganism. Deities were worshipped in the temples with prayers, sacrifices, vows, and festivities.... Banquets to the Deity were joined to prayers. In fact, dining tables were dressed near the altars, and all around them on dining beds, tricli-nari, placed Divinities statues as these were assembled to own account to the joyous banquet.” Auspices or auguries “gave interpretation to thunders, lightnings, winds, rain crashes, comets, or to bird songs and flights.... Horuspices inquired the divine will on the animal bowels, sacrificed to the altar; they took out further indications by fleshes and bowels flames when burnt on the altar.”

An important feature of Pompeian social life was the bath, which “was one of the hospitality duty, and very often required in several religious functions.... Large and colossal edifices were quite furnished with all the necessary for care and sport. Besides localities for all kind of bath — cold, warm, steam bath — didn’t want parks, alleys, and porticos in order to walk; lists rings for gymnastic exercises, conversation and reading rooms, localities for theatrical representations, swimming stations, localities for scientific disquisitions, moral and religious teachings. The most splendid art works adorned the ambient.”

When we pass to the popular amusements we are presented with the materials of pictures vividly realized in The Last Days of Pompeii, but somewhat faded since. “In the beginning gladiators’ rank was made by condemned to death slaves and war prisoners. Later also thoughtless young men, who had never learned an advantageous trade, became gladiators.” In the arena they engaged in sham fights till the spectators demanded blood. Then, “sometimes one provided one’s self nets for wrapping up the adversary, who, hit by a trident much, frequently die. When the gladiator was deadly wounded, forsaking the arm, struck down and stretching the index, asked the people grace of life. The spectators decided up his destiny, turning the thumb to the breast, or toward the ground. The thumb turned toward the ground was the unlucky’s death doom, and he had without fail the throat cut off.”

Such, dimly but unmistakably seen through our Italian author’s well-reasoned English, were the ancient Pompeians; and, upon the whole, the visitor to their city could not wish them back in it. I preferred even those modern Pompeians who followed us so molestively to the train with bargains in postal-cards and coral. They are very alert, the modern Pompeians, to catch the note of national character, and I saw one of them pursuing an elderly American with a spread of hat-pins, primarily two francs each, and with the appeal, evidently studied from some fair American girl: “Buy it, Poppa! Six for one franc. Oh, Poppa, buy it!”

I had again lavished my substance upon first-class tickets, and so had my Utah friend, who expounded his philosophy of travel as we managed to secure a first-class carriage. “When I can’t go first-class in Italy, I’ll go home.” I promptly and proudly agreed with him, but I concealed my morning’s experience of the fact that in Italy you may sometimes go second class when you have paid first. I agreed with him, however, in not minding the plunder of Italian travel, since, with all the extortions, it would come to a third less than you expected to spend. His was the true American spirit.

VI. ROMAN HOLIDAYS

I. HOTELS, PENSIONS, AND APARTMENTS

“Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?” the traveller asks rather anxiously than defiantly when he finds himself a stranger in a strange place, and he is apt to add, if he has not written or wired ahead to some specific hotel, “Which of mine inns shall I take mine ease in?” He is the more puzzled to choose the more inns there are to choose from, and his difficulty is enhanced if he has not considered that some of his inns may be full or may be too dear, and yet others undesirable.

The run from Naples in four hours and a half had been so flattering fair an experience to people who had last made it in eight that they arrived in Rome on a sunny afternoon of January preoccupied with expectations of an instant ease in their inn which seemed the measure of their merit. They indeed found their inn, and it was with a painful surprise that they did not find the rooms in it which they wanted. There were neither rooms full south, nor over the garden, nor off the tram, and in these circumstances there was nothing for it but to drive to some one else’s inn and try for better quarters there. They, in fact, drove to half a dozen such, their demands rising for more rooms and sunnier and quieter and cheaper, the fewer and darker and noisier and dearer were those they found.

The trouble was that they found in the very first alien hotel where they applied an apartment so exactly what they wanted, with its four rooms and bath, all more or less full south, though mostly veering west and north, that they carried the fatal norm in their consciousness and tested all other apartments by it, the earlier notion of single rooms being promptly rejected after the sight of it. The reader will therefore not be so much, astonished as these travellers were to learn that there was nothing else in Rome (where there must be about five hundred hotels, hotels garnis, and pensions) that one could comparatively stay even overnight in, and that they settled in that alluring apartment provisionally, the next day being Sunday, and the crystalline Saturday of their arrival being well worn away toward its topaz and ruby sunset. Of course, they continued their search for several days afterward, zealously but hopelessly, yet not fruitlessly, for it resulted in an acquaintance with Roman hotels which they might otherwise never have made, and for one of them in literary material of interest to every one hoping to come to Rome or despairing of it. The psychology of the matter was very curious, and involved the sort of pleasing self-illusion by which people so often get themselves over questionable passes in life and come out with a good conscience, or a dead one, which is practically the same thing. These particular people had come to Rome with reminiscences of in-expensiveness and had intended to recoup themselves for the cost of several previous winters in New York hotels by the saving they would make in their Roman sojourn. When it appeared, after all the negotiation and consequent abatement, that their Roman hotel apartment would cost them hardly a fifth less than they had last paid in New York, they took a guilty refuge in the fact that they were getting for less money something which no money could buy in New York. Gradually all sense of guilt wore off, and they boldly, or even impudently, said to themselves that they ought to have what they could pay for, and that there were reasons, which they were not obliged to render in their frankest soliloquies, why they should do just what they chose in the matter.

The truth is that the modern Roman hotel is far better in every way than the hotel of far higher class, or of the highest class, in New York. In the first place, the managers are in the precious secret, which our managers have lost, of making you believe that they want you; and, having you, they know how to look after your pleasure and welfare. The table is always of more real variety, though vastly less stupid profusion than ours. The materials are wholesomer and fresher and are without the proofs, always present in our hotel viands, of a probationary period in cold storage. As for the cooking, there is no comparison, whether the things are simply or complexly treated; and the service is of that neatness and promptness which ours is so ignorant of.

Your agreement is usually for meals as well as rooms; the European plan is preferably ignored in Europe; and the table d’hote luncheon and dinner are served at small, separate tables; your breakfast is brought to your room. Being old-fashioned, myself, I am rather sorry for the small, separate tables. I liked the one large, long table, where you made talk with your neighbors; but it is gone, and much facile friendliness with it, on either hand and across the board. The rooms are tastefully furnished, and the beds are unquestionable; the carpets warmly cover the floor if stone, or amply rug it if of wood. The steam-heating is generous and performs its office of “roasting you out of the house” without the sizzling and crackling which accompany its efforts at home. The electricity really illuminates, and there is always an electric lamp at your bed-head for those long hours when your remorse or your digestion will not let you sleep, and you must substitute some other’s waking dreams for those of your own slumbers. Above all, there is a lift, or elevator, not enthusiastically active or convulsively swift, but entirely practicable and efficient. It will hold from four to eight persons, and will take up at least six without reluctance.

It must be clearly understood that the ideal of American comfort is fully and faithfully realized, and if the English have reformed the Italian hotels in respect of cleanliness, it is we who have brought them quite to our domestic level in regard to heat and light. But if we want these things in Rome, we must pay for them as we do at home, though still we do not pay so much as we pay at home. The tips are about half our average, but whether they are given currently or ultimately I do not know. Who, indeed, knows about others’ tips anywhere in the world? I asked an experienced fellow-citizen what the custom was, and he said that he believed the English gave in going away, but he thought the spirits of the helpers drooped under the strain of hope deferred, and he preferred to give every week. The donations, I understood, were pooled by the dining-room waiters and then equally divided; but gifts bestowed above stairs were for the sole behoof of him or her who took them. Germans are said to give less than Anglo-Saxons, and it is said that Italians in some cases do not give at all. But, again, who knows? The Italians are said never to give drink money to the cabmen, but to pay only the letter of the tariff. If I had done that in driving about to look up worse hotels than the one I chose first and last, I should now be a richer man, but I doubt if a happier. Two cents seems to satisfy a Roman cabman; five cents has for him the witchery of money found in the road; but I must not leave the subject of hotels for that of cabs, however alluringly it beckons.

The reader who knows Italy only from the past should clear his mind of his old impressions of the hotels. There is no longer that rivalry between the coming guest and the manager to see how few or many candles can be lighted in his room and charged in the bill; there are no longer candles, but only electricity. There is no longer an extortion for hearth-fires which send all the heat up the chimney; there are steam radiators in every room. There is no longer a tedious bargaining for rooms; the price is fixed and cannot be abated except for a sojourn of weeks or months. But the price is much greater than it used to be — twice as great almost; for the taxes are heavy and provisions are dear, and coal and electricity are costly, and you must share the expense with the landlord. He is not there for his health, and, if for your comfort, you are not his invited guest. As I have intimated, an apartment of four rooms with a bath will cost almost as much, with board, as the same quarters in New York, but you will get far more for your money in Rome. If you take a single room, even to the south, in many first-class Roman hotels it will cost you for room and board only two dollars or two and a half a day, which is what you pay for a far meaner and smaller room alone in New York; and the Roman board is such, as you can get at none but our most expensive houses for twice the money. Generally you cannot get a single room and bath, but at present a very exclusive hotel is going up in a good quarter which promises, with huge English signs, a bath with every room and every room full south. One does not see just how the universal sunny exposure is to be managed, but there can be no question of the baths; and, with the steam radiators everywhere, the northernmost room might well imagine itself full south.

Nearly all the hotels have a pleasant tea-room, which is called a winter garden, because of a pair of palm-trees set under the centre of its glass roof and the painted bamboo chairs and tables set about. This sort of garden is found even in the hotels which are almost of the grade of pensions and of their prices; but generally the pensions proper are without it. Their rates are much lower, but quite as good people frequent them, and they are often found in good streets and sometimes open into or overlook charming gardens; the English especially seem to like the pensions, which are managed like hotels. They are commonly without steam-heat, which might account for their being less frequented by Americans.

There are two supreme hotels in Rome — one in the Ludovisi quarter, as it is called, and the other near the Baths of Diocletian, which Americans frequent to their cost, for the rates approach a New York or London magnificence. The first is rather the more spectacular of the two and is the resort of all the finer sort of afternoon tea-drinkers, who find themselves the observed of observers of all nationalities; there is music and dress, and there are titles of every degree, with as much informality as people choose, if they go to look, or as much state if they go to be looked at; these things are much less cumbrously contrived than with us. The other hotel, I have the somewhat unauthorized fancy, is rather more addicted to very elect dinner-parties and suppers. Below these two are an endless variety of first-rate and second-rate houses, both in the newer quarter of the city, where the villa paths have been turned into streets, and in the old town on all the pleasant squares and avenues. There is a tradition of unhealth concerning the old town which the modern death-rate of Rome shows to be unjust; at the worst these places have more dark and damp, and the hotels are not steam-heated.

It has seemed to me that there are not so many hotels garnis in Rome as there used to be in Italian cities, but they, too, abound in pleasant streets, and the stranger who has a fancy for lodgings with breakfast in his rooms, and likes to browse about for his luncheon and dinner, will easily suit himself. If it comes to taking a furnished apartment for the season, there is much range in price and much choice in place. The agents who have them to let will begin, rather dismayingly, “Oh, apartments in Rome are very dear.” But you learn on inquiry that a furnished flat in the Ludovisi region, in a house with a lift and full sun, may be had for two hundred dollars a month. From this height the rents of palatial apartments soar to such lonely peaks as eight hundred and sink to such levels as a hundred and twenty or a hundred; and for this you have linen and silver and all the movables and utensils you want, as well as several vast rooms opening wastefully from one to another till you reach the salon. The rents of the like flats, if vacant, would be a quarter or a third less, though again the agents begin by telling you that there is very little difference between the rents of furnished and unfurnished flats. The flats are in every part of the old town and the new; and some are in noble sixteenth and seventeenth century palaces, such as we are accustomed to at home only in the theatre. My own experience is that everybody, especially in houses where there are no lifts, lives on the top floor. You pass many other floors in going up, but you are left to believe that nobody lives on them. When you reach the inhabited levels, you find them charming inside for their state and beauty, and outside for their magnificent view, which may be pretty confidently relied upon to command the dome of St. Peter’s. That magnificent stone bubble seems to blow all round the horizon.

When you have taken your furnished flat, the same agency will provide you a cook at ten or twelve dollars a month, a maid at seven dollars, a lady’s maid at eight or nine dollars, and so on; the cook will prefer to sleep out of the house. Then will come the question of provisions, and these seem really to be dear in Rome. Meats and vegetables both are dear, and game and poultry. Beef will be forty cents a pound, and veal and mutton in proportion; a chicken which has been banting for the table from its birth will be forty cents; eggs which have not yet taken active shape are twenty-five and thirty cents throughout winters so bland that a hen of any heart can hardly keep from laying every day. I am afraid I am no authority on butter and milk, and groceries I do not know the prices of; but coffee ought to be cheap, for nobody drinks anything but substitutes more or less unabashed.

For the passing stranger, or even the protracted so-journer, whose time and money are not too much at odds, a hotel is best, and a hotel in the new quarter is pleasanter than one in the old quarters. Ours, at any rate, was in a wide, sunny, and (if I must own it) dusty street, laid out in a line of beauty on the borders of the former Villa Ludovisi, where the aging or middle-aging reader used to come to see Guercino’s “Aurora” in the roof of the casino. Now all trace of the garden is hidden under vast and vaster hotels and great blond apartment-houses, and ironed down with trolley-rails; but the Guercino has been spared, though it is no longer so accessible to the public. Still, there is a garden left, and our hotel, with others, looks across the sun and dust of its street into the useful vegetation of the famous old Capuchin convent, with the church, to which I came so eagerly so long ago to revere Guido’s “St. Michael and the Dragon” and the decorative bones of the good brothers braided on the walls and roofs of the crypt in the indissoluble community of floral and geometric designs.

All through the months of February and March I woke to the bell that woke the brothers to their prayers before daybreak and burst the beauty-sleep of the hotel-dwellers, who have so far outnumbered the monks since the obliteration of the once neighboring villa. This was, of course, a hardship, and one thought things of that bell which the monks were too good to say; but being awake, and while one was reading one’s self to sleep again, one could hear the beginning of the bird singing in the modern garden in the rear which followed upon the bell-ringing. I do not know what make or manner of bird it was that mostly sang among the palms and laurels and statues, but it had a note of liquid gold, which it poured till a certain flageo-lettist, whom I never saw, came to the corner under the villa wall and blew his soul into one end of his instrument and out of the other in the despondent breathings of most melancholy music. Then, having attuned the spirits of his involuntary listeners to a pensive sympathy, he closed with that international hymn which does not rightly know whether it is “My Country, ’tis of Thee,” or “God Save the King,” but serves equally for the patriotism of any English or Americans in hearing. I do not know why this harmless hymn, which the flageolettist gave extremely well, should always have seemed to provoke the derision of the donkey which apparently dwelt in harmony with the birds in that garden, but the flageolettist had no sooner ended than the donkey burst into a bray, loud, long, and full of mockery, with a close of ironical whistling and most insolent hissing; you would think that some arch-enemy of the Anglo-Saxon race was laughing the new-felt unity of the English and Americans to scorn. Later, but still before daylight, came the wild cry of a boy, somewhere out of perdition, following the deep bass invitation of his father’s lost spirit to buy his wares, whatever they were. We never knew, but we liked that boy’s despairing wail, and would not have missed it for ever so much extra slumber. When all hope of more sleep was past there was no question of the desirability of the boy who visibly arranged his store of oranges on the curbstone under the villa wall, and seemed to think that they had a peculiar attraction from being offered for sale in pairs. His cry filled the rest of the forenoon.

The Italian spring comes on slowly everywhere, with successive snubs in its early ardor from the snows on the mountains, which regulate the climate from north to south. We could not see that it made more speed behind the sheltering walls of the Capuchin convent garden than in other places. The old gardener whom we saw pottering about in it seemed to potter no more actively at the end of March than at the beginning of February; on the first days of April a heap of old leaves and stalks was sending up the ruddy flame and pleasant smell that the like burning heaps do with us at the like hour of spring — in fact, vegetation had much more reason to be cheerful throughout February than at any time in March. Those February days were really incomparable. They had not the melting heat of the warm spells that sometimes come in our Februaries; but their suns were golden, and their skies unutterably blue, and their airs mild, yet fresh. You always wanted a heavy coat for driving or for the shade in walking; otherwise the temperature was that of a New England April which was resolved to begin as it could carry out. But March came with cold rains of whole days, and with suns that might overheat but could not be trusted to warm you. The last Sunday of January I found ice in the Colosseum; but that was the only time I saw ice anywhere in Rome. In March, however, in a moment of great exasperation from the mountains, it almost snowed. Yet that month would in our climate have been remembered for its beauty and for a prevailing kindness of temperature. The worst you could say of it was that it left the spring in the Capuchin garden where it found it. But possibly, since the temporal power was overthrown, the seasons are neglected and indifferent. Certainly man seems so in the case of the Capuchin convent. Great stretches of the poor old plain edifice look vacant, and the high wall which encloses it is plastered and painted with huge advertisements of clothiers and hotels and druggists, and announcements of races and other events out of keeping with its character and tradition.

The sentimentalists who overrun Rome from all the Northern lands will tell you that this is of a piece with all the Newer Rome which has sprung into existence since the Italian occupation. Their griefs with the thing that is are loud and they are long; but I, who am a sentimentalist too, though of another make, do not share them. No doubt the Newer Rome has made mistakes, but, without defending her indiscriminately, I am a Newer-Roman to the core, perhaps because I knew the Older Rome and what it was like; and not all my brother and sister sentimentalists can say as much.

II. A PRAISE OF NEW ROME

Rome and I had both grown older since I had seen her last, but she seemed not to show so much as I the forty-three years that had passed. Naturally a city that was already twenty-seven centuries of age (and no one knows how much more) would not betray the lapse of time since 1864 as a man must who was then only twenty-seven years of age. In fact, I should say that Rome looked, if anything, younger at our second meeting, in 1908, or, at any rate, newer; and I am so warm a friend of youth (in others) that I was not sorry to find Rome young, or merely new, in so many good things. At the same time I must own that I heard no other foreigner praising her for her newness except a fellow-septuagenarian, who had seen Rome earlier even than I, and who thought it well that the Ghetto should have been cleared away, though some visitors, who had perhaps never lived in a Ghetto, thought it a pity if not a shame, and an incalculable loss to the picturesque. These also thought the Tiber Embankments a wicked sacrifice to the commonplace, though the mud-banks of other days invited the torrent to an easy overflow of whole quarters of the town, which were left reeking with the filth of the flood that overlay the filth of the streets, and combined with it to an effect of disease and of discomfort not always personally unknown to the lover of the picturesque. There used to be a particular type of typhoid known as Roman fever, but now quite unknown, thanks to the Tiber Embankments and to the light and air let into the purlieus of that mediaeval Rome for which the injudicious grieve so loudly. The perfect municipal housekeeping of our time leaves no darkest and narrowest lane or alley unswept; every morning the shovel and broom go over the surfaces formerly almost impassable to the foot and quite impossible to the nose.

I am speaking literally as well as frankly, and though I can understand why some envious New-Yorker, remembering our blackguard streets and avenues, should look askance at the decency of the newer Rome and feign it an offence against beauty and poetry, I do not see why a Londoner, who himself lives in a well-kept town, should join with any of my fellow-barbarians in hypocritically deploring the modern spirit which has so happily invaded the Eternal City. The Londoner should rather entreat us not to be humbugs and should invite us to join him in rejoicing that the death-rate of Rome, once the highest in the civilized world, is now almost the lowest. But the language of Shakespeare and Milton is too often internationally employed in deploring the modernity which has housed us aliens there in such perfect comfort and safety. One must confine one’s self to instances, and one may take that of the Ludovisi Quarter, as it is called, where I dwelt in so much peace and pleasure except when I was reminded that it was formed by plotting the lovely Villa Ludovisi in house lots and building it up in attractive hotels and apartment-houses. Even then I did not suffer so keenly as some younger people, who had never seen the villa, seemed to do, though there are still villas to burn in and about Rome, and they could not really miss the Ludovisi. It was a pretty place, but not beyond praise, and the quarter also is pretty, though also not beyond praise. The villa was for the pleasure and pride of one family, but it signified, even in its beauty, nothing but patrician splendor, which is a poor thing at best; and the quarter is now for the pleasure and pride of great numbers of tourists, mostly of that plutocracy from which a final democracy is inevitably to evolve itself. I could see no cause to beat the breast in this; and in humbler instances, even to very humble, I could not find that things were nearly as bad in Rome as they have been painted.

There is no doubt but at one time, directly after the coming of the capital, Rome was badly overbuilt. There is no doubt, also, that Rome has grown up to these rash provisions for her growth, and that she now “stuffs out her vacant garments with her form” pretty fully. One must not say that all the flats in all the houses are occupied, but most of them are; and if now the property of the speculators is the property of the banks, the banks are no bad landlords, and the law does not spare them the least of their duties to their tenants; or so, at least, it is said.

Another typical wrong to the old Rome, or rather to the not-yet Rome, was the building-up, beyond the Tiber, of the Quarter of the Fields, so called, where Zola in his novel of Rome has placed most of the squalor which he so lavishly employs in its contrasts. In these he shows himself the romanticist that he always frankly owned he was in spite of himself; but after I had read his book I made it my affair to visit the scenes of poverty and misery in the Quartiere dei Prati. When I did so I found that I had already passed through the quarter without noting anything especially poor or specifically miserable, and I went a third time to make sure that I had not overlooked something impressively lamentable. But I did not see above three tenement-houses with the wash hung from the windows, and with the broken shutters of poverty and misery, in a space where on the East Side or the North Side in New York I could have counted such houses by the score, almost the hundred. In this quarter the streets were swept every morning as they are everywhere in Rome, and though toward noon they were beginning to look as slovenly as our streets look when they have just been “cleaned,” I knew that the next morning these worst avenues of Rome would be swept as our best never have been since the days of Waring.

Beyond the tenements the generous breadth of the new streets has been bordered by pleasant stucco houses of the pretty Italian type, fleetingly touched but not spoiled by the taste of the art nouveau, standing in their own grounds, and not so high-fenced but one could look over their garden-walls into the shrubs and flowers about them. Like suburban effects are characteristic of the new wide residential streets on the hither side of the Tiber, and on both shores the streets expand from time to time into squares, with more or less tolerable new monuments — say, of the Boston average — in them. The business streets where they bear the lines of the frequently recurrent trams are spacious and straight, and though they are not the Corso, the Corso itself, it must be remembered, is only a street of shops by no means impressive, and is mostly dim under the overtowering walls of palaces which have no space to be dignified in. Now and then their open portals betray a glimpse of a fountained or foliaged court, but whether these palaces are outwardly beautiful or not no one can tell from what sight one can get of them; no, not even the most besotted sentimentalist of those who bewail the loss of mediaeval Rome when they mean Rome of the Renaissance. How much of that Rome has been erased by modern Rome I do not know, but I think not so much as people pretend. Some of the ugly baroque churches have been pulled down to allow the excavation of imperial Rome, but there are plenty of ugly baroque churches left. It is said the princely proprietors of the old palaces which are let in apartments along the different Corsos (for the Corso is several) are going to pull them down and put up modern houses, with the hope of modern rents, but again I do not know. More than once the fortuities of hospitality found one the guest of dwellers in such stately domiciles, and I could honestly share the anxiety with which they spoke of these rumors; but there are a great many vast edifices of the sort, and I should not be surprised if I went back to Rome after another forty-three years to find most of them standing in 1951 where they now stand in 1908. Rome was not built in a day, and it will not be unbuilt or rebuilt within the brief period that will make me one hundred and fourteen years old. By that time I shall have outlived most of the medievalists, and I can say to the few survivors: “There, you see that new Rome never went half so far as you expected.”

But no doubt it will go further than it has yet gone, in the way that is for the good and comfort of mankind. In one of the newer quarters, of which the Baths of Diocletian form the imperial centre, my just American pride was flattered by the sign on a handsome apartment-house going up in gardened grounds, which advertised that it was to be finished with a lift and steam-heating. Many of the newer houses are already supplied with lifts, but central heating is as yet only beginning to spread from the hotels, where steam has been installed in compliance with the impassioned American demand to be warm all round when one is in-doors. New Rome is not going so fast and so far but that it will keep, to whatever end it reaches, one of the characteristic charms of the old and older Rome. I shall expect to see when I come back in 1951 the same or the like corners of garden walls, with the tops of shining foliage peering over them, that now enchant the passer in the street; from the windows of my electric-elevatored, steam-heated apartment I shall look down into the seclusion of gardens, with the golden globes of orange espaliers mellowing against the walls, and the fountain in the midst of oleanders and of laurels

 “Shaking its loosened silver in the sun.”

Slim cypresses will then as now blacken through the delicate air against the blue sky, and a stone-pine will spread its umbrella over some sequestered nook. By that time the craze for the eucalyptus which now possesses all Italy will be over, and every palm-tree will be cut down, while the ilex will darken in its place and help the eternal youth of the marbles to a greener old age of moss and mould in the gloom of its spreading shade. All these things beautifully abound in Rome now, as they always have abounded, and there is no reason to fear that they will cease to abound.

Rome grows, and as Italy prospers it will grow more and more, for there must forever be a great and famous capital where there has always been one. The place is so perfectly the seat of an eternal city that it might well seem to have been divinely chosen because of the earth and heaven which are more in sympathy there than anywhere else in the world. The climate is beyond praise for a winter which is mild without being weak; there is a summer of tolerable noonday heat, and of nights deliciously cool; the spring is scarcely earlier than in our latitudes, but the fall is a long, slow decline from the temperature of October to the lowest level of January without the vicissitudes of other autumns. The embrowning or reddening or yellowing leaves turn sere, but drop or cling to their parent boughs as they choose, for there is seldom a frost to loosen their hold, and seldom a storm to tear them away.

So it is said by those who profess a more intimate acquaintance with the Roman meteorology than I can boast, but from the little I know I can believe anything of it that is of good report. Everywhere the prevalence of the ilex, the orange, the laurel, the pine, flatters January with an illusion of June, and under our hotel windows I was witness of the success of the sycamore leaves in keeping a grip of their native twigs even after the new buds came to push them away. In the last days of March a plum-tree hung its robe of white blossoms over the wall of the Capuchin convent from the garden within; but the almond-trees had been in bloom for six weeks before, and the deeper pink of the peach had more warmly flushed the suburbs for fully a fortnight.

Still, a mild winter and an endurable summer will not of themselves make a great capital, and it was probably the Romans themselves who in the past made Rome the capital of the world, first politically and then religiously. Whether they will make it so hereafter remains to be seen. In the sense of all the Italians being Romans, I believe, with my profound faith in the race, that they are very capable of doing it; and they will have the help of the whole world in the work, or what is most liberal and enlightened in the whole world. As it is, Rome has a pull with Occidental civilization which forever constitutes her its head city. The only European capitals comparable with her are London, Paris, and Berlin; one cannot take account of New York, which is merely the commercial metropolis of America, with a possibility of becoming the business centre of both hemispheres. Washington is still in its nonage and of a numerical unimportance in which it must long remain almost ludicrously inferior to other capitals, not to dwell upon its want of anything like artistic, literary, scientific, and historical primacy. It is the voluntary political centre of the greatest republic of any time and of a nation which is already unrivalled in its claim upon the future. But it is not of the involuntary and unconscious growth of a capital like London, which is the centre of a mighty state, deep-rooted in the past, and the capital of that Anglo-Saxon race of which we are ourselves a condition, and of a colonial empire without a present equal. Paris is France in the sense of representing the intense life of a nation unsurpassed in the things which enlighten and ennoble the human intellect and advance mankind. Berlin is the concentration of the strong will of a state which has made itself great out of the weak will of sundry inferior states, homogeneous in their disunity more than in any positive quality, and which stands for a political ideal more nearly reactionary, more nearly mediaeval, than any other modern state. Berlin is not German as Paris is French, and Rome is not so exclusively Italian. In fact, her greatness, accomplished and destined, lies in just the fact that she is not and never can be exclusively Italian. Human interests too universal and imperative for the control of a single race, even so brilliant and so gifted as the Italian race, which is naturally and necessarily in possession, centre about her through history, religion, art, and make every one at home in the city which is the capital of Christendom. Now and then I saw some shining and twinkling Japs going about with Baedekers, and I imagined them giving a modest and unprejudiced mind to Rome without claiming, tacitly or explicitly, the right to dispute the Italian theory and practice in its control. But every Occidental stranger (if any one of European blood is a stranger in the home of Christianity) I knew to be there in a mood more or less critical, and in a disposition to find fault with the Rome which is now making, or making over.

We journeyers or sojourners can do this without expense or inconvenience to ourselves, and we can easily blame the Italian conception of the future city which, to name but one fact, has made it possible for us to visit her in comfort at every season and to come away without having come down with the Roman fever. In spite of the sort of motherly, or at the worst step-motherly, welcome which she gives to all us closely or distantly related children of hers; in spite of her immemorial fame and her immortal beauty; in spite of her admirable housekeeping, in which she rises every morning at daybreak and sweeps clean every hole and corner of her dwelling; in spite of her wonderful sky, her life-giving air; in spite of the level head she keeps in her political affairs, and the miraculous poise she maintains between the antagonism of State and Church; in spite of her wise eclecticism in modern improvements; in spite of her admirable hygiene, which has constituted her one of the healthiest, if not the healthiest city in Europe; in spite of the solvency which she preserves amid expenses to which the vast scale of antiquity obliges her in all her public enterprises (a thing to be hereafter studied), we, the ungracious offspring of her youth, come from our North and West and censure and criticise and carp. I have seldom conversed with any fellow-visitor in Rome who could not improve her in some phase or other, who could not usefully advise her, who, at the best, did not patronize her. I offer myself as almost the sole example of a stranger who was contented with her as she is, or as she is going to be without his help; and I am the more confident, therefore, in suggesting to Rome an expedient by which she can repair the finances which her visitors say are so foolishly and wastefully mismanaged in her civic schemes. A good round tax, such as Carlsbad levies upon all sojourners, if laid upon the multitudinous tourists joining in such a chorus of criticism of Rome would give them the indefeasible right to their opinions and would help to replete a treasury which they believe is always in danger of being exhausted.

III. THE COLOSSEUM AND THE FORUM

As I have told, the first visit I paid to the antique world in Rome was at the Colosseum the day after our arrival. For some unknown reason I was going to begin with the Baths of Caracalla, but, as it happened, these were the very last ruins we visited in Rome; and I do not know just what accident diverted us to the Colosseum; perhaps we stopped because it was on the way to the Baths and looked an easier conquest. At any rate, I shall never regret that we began with it.

After twoscore years and three it was all strangely familiar. I do not say that in 1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance wishing to sell me postcards — these are a much later invention of the Enemy — but I am sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches, and looking, they and their wares, just as they used to look. The Colosseum itself looked unchanged, though I had read that a minion of the wicked Italian government had once scraped its flowers and weeds away and cleaned it up so that it was perfectly spoiled. But it would take a good deal more than that to spoil the Colosseum, for neither the rapine of the mediaeval nobles, who quarried their palaces from it, nor the industrial enterprise of some of the popes, who wished to turn it into workshops, nor the archeology of United Italy had sufficed to weaken in it that hold upon the interest proper to the scene of the most stupendous variety shows that the world has yet witnessed. The terrible stunts in which men fought one another for the delight of other men in every manner of murder, and wild beasts tore the limbs of those glad to perish for their faith, can be as easily imagined there as ever, and the traveller who visits the place has the assistance of increasing hordes of other tourists in imagining them.

I will not be the one to speak slight of that enterprise which marshals troops of the personally conducted through the place and instructs them in divers languages concerning it. Save your time and money so, if you have not too much of either, and be one of an English, French, or German party, rather than try to puzzle the facts out for yourself, with one contorted eye on your Baedeker and the other on the object in question. In such parties a sort of domestic relation seems to grow up through their associated pleasures in sight-seeing, and they are like family parties, though politer and patienter among themselves than real family parties. They are commonly very serious, though they doubtless all have their moments of gayety; and in the Colosseum I saw a French party grouped for photography by a young woman of their number, who ran up and down before them with a kodak and coquettishly hustled them into position with pretty, bird-like chirpings of appeal and reproach, and much graceful self-evidencing. I do not censure her behavior, though doubtless there were ladies among the photographed who thought it overbold; if the reader had been young and blond and svelte, in a Parisian gown and hat, with narrow russet shoes, not too high-heeled for good taste, I do not believe he would have been any better; or, if he would, I should not have liked him so well.

On the earlier day which I began speaking of I found that I was insensibly attaching myself to an English-hearing party of the personally conducted, in the dearth of my own recollections of the local history, but I quickly detached myself for shame and went back and meekly hired the help of a guide who had already offered his services in English, and whom I had haughtily spurned in his own tongue. His English, though queer, was voluminous; but I am not going to drag the reader at our heels laden with lore which can be applied only on the spot or in the presence of postal-card views of the Colosseum. It is enough that before my guide released us we knew where was the box of Caesar, whom those about to die saluted, and where the box of the Vestals whose fatal thumbs gave the signal of life or death for the unsuccessful performer; where the wild beasts were kept, and where the Christians; where were the green-rooms of the gladiators, who waited chatting for their turn to go on and kill one another. One must make light of such things or sink under them; and if I am trying to be a little gay, it is for the readers’ sake, whom I would not have perish of their realization. Our guide spared us nothing, such was his conscience or his science, and I wish I could remember his name, for I could commend him as most intelligent, even, when least intelligible. However, the traveller will know him by the winning smile of his rosy-faced little son, who follows him round and is doubtless bringing himself up as the guide of coming generations of tourists. There had been a full pour of forenoon sunshine on the white dust of the street before our hotel, but the cold of the early morning, though it had not been too much for the birds that sang in the garden back of us, had left a skim of ice in damp spots, and now, in the late gray of the afternoon, the ice was visible and palpable underfoot in the Colosseum, where crowds of people wandered severally or collectively about in the half-frozen mud. They were, indeed, all over the place, up and down, in every variety of costume and aspect, but none were so picturesque as a little group of monks who had climbed to a higher tier of the arches and stood looking down into the depths where we looked up at them, denned against the sky in their black robes, which opened to show their under robes of white. They were picturesque, but they were not so monumental as an old, unmistakable American in high-hat, with long, drooping side-whiskers, not above a purple suspicion of dye, who sat on a broken column and vainly endeavored to collect his family for departure. Whenever he had gathered two or three about him they strayed off as the others came up, and we left him sardonically patient of their adhesions and defections, which seemed destined to continue indefinitely, while we struggled out through the postal-card boys and mosaic-pin men to our carriage. Then we drove away through the quarter of somewhat jerry-built apartment-houses which neighbor the Colosseum, and on into the salmon sunset which, after the gray of the afternoon, we found waiting us at our hotel, with the statues on the balustrated wall of the villa garden behind it effectively posed in the tender light, together with the eidolons of those picturesque monks and that monumental American.

We could safely have stayed longer, for the evening damp no longer brings danger of Roman fever, which people used to take in the Colosseum, unless I am thinking of the signal case of Daisy Miller. She, indeed, I believe, got it there by moonlight; but now people visit the place by moonlight in safety; and there are even certain nights of the season advertised when you may see it by the varicolored lights of the fireworks set off in it. My impression of it was quite vivid enough without that, and the vision of the Colosseum remained, and still remains, the immense skeleton of the stupendous form stripped of all integumental charm and broken down half one side of its vast oval, so that wellnigh a quarter of the structural bones are gone.

With its image there persisted and persists the question constantly recurrent in the presence of all the imperial ruins, whether imperial Rome was not rather ugly than otherwise. The idea of those world-conquerors was first immensity and then beauty, as much as could survive consistently with getting immensity into a given space. The question is most of all poignant in the Forum, which I let wait a full fortnight before moving against it in the warm sun of an amiable February morning. On my first visit to Rome I could hardly wait for day to dawn after my arrival before rushing to the Cow Field, as it was then called, and seeing the wide-horned cattle chewing the cud among the broken monuments now so carefully cherished and, as it were, sedulously cultivated. It is doubtful whether all that has since been done, and which could not but have been done, by the eager science as much involuntarily as voluntarily applied to the task, has resulted in a more potent suggestion of what the Forum was in the republican or imperial day than what that simple, old, unassuming Cow Field afforded. There were then as now the beautiful arches; there were the fragments of the temple porches, with their pillars; there was the “unknown column with the buried base”; there were all the elements of emotion and meditation; and it is possible that sentiment has only been cumbered Avith the riches which archaeology has dug up for it by lowering the surface of the Cow Field fifteen or twenty feet; by scraping clean the buried pavements; by identifying the storied points; by multiplying the fragments of basal or columnar marbles and revealing the plans of temples and palaces and courts and tracing the Sacred Way on which the magnificence of the past went to dusty death. After all, the imagination is very childlike, and it prefers the elements of its pleas-ures simple and few; if the materials are very abundant or complex, it can make little out of them; they embarrass it, and it turns critical in self-defence. The grandeur that was Rome as visioned from the Cow Field becomes in the mind’s eye the kaleidoscopic clutter which the resurrection of the Forum Romanum must more and more realize.

If the visitor would have some rash notion of what the ugliness of the place was like when it was in its glory, he may go look at the plastic reconstruction of it, indefinitely reduced, in the modest building across the way from the official entrance to the Forum. One cannot say but this is intensely interesting, and it affords the consolation which the humble (but not too humble) spirit may gather from witness of the past, that the fashion of this world and the pride of the eyes and all ruthless vainglory defeated themselves in ancient Rome, as they must everywhere when they can work their will. If one had thought that in magnitude and multitude some entire effect of beauty was latent, one had but to look at that huddle of warring forms, each with beauty in it, but beauty lost in the crazy agglomeration of temples and basilicas and columns and arches and statues and palaces, incredibly painted and gilded, and huddled into spaces too little for the least, and crowding severally upon one another, without relation or proportion. Their mass is supremely tasteless, almost senseless; that mob of architectural incongruities was not only without collective beauty, but it was without that far commoner and cheaper thing which we call picturesqueness. This has come to it through ruin, and we must give a new meaning to the word vandalism if we would appreciate what the barbarians did for Rome in tumbling her tawdry splendor into the heaps which are now at least paint-able. Imperial Rome as it stood was not paintable; I doubt if it would have been even photographable to anything but a picture post-card effect.

But as yet I wandered in the Forum safe from the realization of its ugliness when it was in its glory. I cannot say that even now it is picturesque, but it is paintable, and certainly it is pathetic. Stumps of columns, high and low, stand about in the places where they stood in their unbroken pride, and though it seems a hardship that they should not have been left lying in the kindly earth or on it instead of being pulled up and set on end, it must be owned that they are scarcely overworked in their present postures. More touching are those inarticulate heaps, cairns of sculptured fragments, piled here and there together and waiting the knowledge which is some time to assort them and translate them into some measure of coherent meaning. But it must always be remembered that when they were coherent they were only beautiful parts of a whole that was brutally unbeautiful. We have but to use the little common-sense which Heaven has vouchsafed some of us in order to realize that Rome, either republican or imperial, was a state for which we can have no genuine reverence, and that mostly the ruins of her past can stir in us no finer emotion than wonder. But necessarily, for the sake of knowledge, and of ascertaining just what quantity and quality of human interest the material records of Roman antiquity embody, archaeology must devote itself with all possible piety to their recovery. The removal, handful by handful, of the earth from the grave of the past which the whole Forum is, tomb upon tomb, is as dramatic a spectacle as anything one can well witness; for that soil is richer than any gold-mine in its potentiality of treasure, and it must be strictly scrutinized, almost by particles, lest some gem of art should be cast aside with the accumulated rubbish of centuries. Yet this drama, poignantly suggestive as it always must be, was the least incident of that morning in the Forum which it was my fortune to pass there with other better if not older tourists as guest of the Genius Loci. It was not quite a public event, though the Commendatore Boni is so well known to the higher journalism, and even to fiction (as the reader of Anatole France’s La Pierre Blanche will not have forgotten), that nothing which he archaeologically does is without public interest, and this excursion in the domain of antiquity was expected to result in identifying the site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator. It was conjectured that the temple vowed to this specific Jupiter for his public spirit in stopping the flight of a highly demoralized Roman army would be found where we actually found it. Archaeology seems to proceed by hypothesis, like other sciences, and to enjoy a forecast of events before they are actually accomplished. I do not say that I was very vividly aware of the event in question; I could not go now and show where the temple stood, but when I read of it in a cablegram to the American newspapers I almost felt that I had dug it up with my own hands.

Of many other facts I was at the time vividly aware: of the charm of finding the archaeologist in an upper room of the mediaeval church which is turning itself into his study, of listening to his prefatory talk, so informal and so easy that one did not realize how learned it was, and then of following him down to the scene of his researches and hearing him speak wisely, poetically, humorously, even, of what he believed he had reason to expect to find. We stood with him by the Arch of Titus and saw how the sculptures had been broken from it in the fragments found at its base, and how the carved marbles had been burned for lime in the kiln built a few feet off, so that those who wanted the lime need not have the trouble of carrying the sculptures away before burning them. A handful of iridescent glass from a house-drain near by, where it had been thrown by the servants after breaking it, testified of the continuity of human nature in the domestics of all ages. A somewhat bewildering suggestion of the depth at which the different periods of Rome underlie one another spoke from the mouth of the imperial well or cistern which had been sunk on the top of a republican well or cistern at another corner of the arch. In a place not far off, looking like a potter’s clay pit, were graves so old that they seem to have antedated the skill of man to spell any record of himself; and in the small building which seems the provisional repository of the archaeologist’s finds we saw skeletons of the immemorial dead in the coffins of split trees still shutting them imperfectly in. Mostly the bones and bark were of the same indifferent interest, but the eternal pathos of human grief appealed from what mortal part remained of a little child, with beads on her tattered tunic and an ivory bracelet on her withered arm. History in the presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of the Kings, the Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the Forum would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals whose sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever lived.

It is the voluble sorrow common to all the emotional visitors in Rome that the past of the different generations has not been treated by the present with due tenderness, and the Colosseum is a case notoriously in point. But, if it was an Italian archaeologist who destroyed the wilding growths in the Colosseum and scraped it to a bareness which nature is again trying to clothe with grass and weeds, it ought to be remembered that it is another Italian archaeologist who has set laurels all up and down the slopes of the Forum, and has invited roses and honeysuckles to bloom wherever they shall not interfere with science, but may best help repair the wounds he must needs deal the soil in researches which seem no mere dissections, but feats of a conservative, almost a constructive surgery. It is said that the German archaeologists objected to those laurels where the birds sing so sweetly; perhaps they thought them not strictly scientific; but when the German Kaiser, who always knows so much better than all the other Germans put together, visited the Forum, he liked them, and he parted from the Genius Loci with the imperial charge, “Laurels, laurels, evermore laurels.” After that the emotional tourist must be hard indeed to please who would begrudge his laurels to Commendatore Boni, or would not wish him a perpetual crown of them.

IV. THE ANGLO-AMERICAN NEIGHBORHOOD OF THE SPANISH STEPS

It is not every undeserving American who can have the erudition and divination of the Genius Loci in answer to his unuttered prayer during a visit to even a small part of the Roman Forum. But failing the company of the Commendatore Boni, which is without price, there are to be had for a very little money the guidance and philosophy, and, for all I know, the friendship of several peripatetic historians who lead people about the ruins in Rome, and instruct them in the fable, and doubtless in the moral, of the things they see. If I had profited by their learning, so much greater, or at least securer, than any the average American has about him, I should now be tiring the reader with knowledge which I am so willingly leaving him to imagine in me. If he is like the average American, he has really once had some nodding acquaintance with the facts, but history is apt to forsake you on the scene of it, and to come lagging back when it is too late. In this psychological experience you feel the need of help which the peripatetic historian supplies to the groups of perhaps rather oblivious than ignorant tourists of all nations in all languages, but preferably English. We Anglo-Saxons seem to be the most oblivious or most ignorant; but I would not slight our occasionally available culture any more than I would imply that those peripatetic historians are at all like the cicerones whom they have so largely replaced. I believe they are instructed and scholarly men; I offer them my respect; and I wish now that I had been one of their daily disciples, for it is full sixty years since I read Goldsmith’s History of Rome. As I saw them, somewhat beyond earshot, they and their disciples formed a spectacle which was always interesting, and, so far as the human desire for information is affecting, was also affecting. The listeners to the lecturers would carry back to their respective villages and towns, or the yet simpler circles of our ordinary city lift, vastly more association with the storied scene than I had brought to it or should bring away. In fact, there is nothing more impressive in the floating foreign society of Rome than its zeal for self-improvement. No one classes himself with his fellow-tourists, though if he happens to be a traveller he is really one of them; and it is with difficulty I keep myself from the appearance of patronizing them in these praises, which are for the most part reverently meant. Their zeal never seemed to be without knowledge, whatever their age or sex; the intensity of their application reached to all the historical and actual interests, to the religious as well as the social, the political as well as the financial; but, fitly in Rome, it seemed specially turned to the study of antiquity, in the remoter or the nearer past. There was given last winter a series of lectures at the American School of Archaeology by the head of it, which were followed with eager attention by hearers who packed the room. But these lectures, which were so admirably first in. the means of intelligent study, seemed only one of the means by which my fellow-tourists were climbing the different branches of knowledge. All round my apathy I felt, where I did not see, the energy of the others; with my mind’s ear I heard a rustle as of the turning leaves of Baedekers, of Murrays, of Hares, and of the many general histories and monographs of which these intelligent authorities advised the supplementary reading.

If I am not so mistaken as I might very well be, however, the local language is less studied than it was in former times, when far fewer Italians spoke English. My own Italian was of that date; but, though I began by using it, I found myself so often helped for a forgotten meaning that I became subtly demoralized and fell luxuriously into the habit of speaking English like a native of Rome. Yet tacitly, secretly perhaps, there may have been many people who were taking up Italian as zealously as many more were taking up antiquity. One day in the Piazza di Spagna, in a modest little violet of a tea-room, which was venturing to open in the face of the old-established and densely thronged parterre opposite, I noted from my Roman version of a buttered muffin a tall, young Scandinavian girl, clad in complete corduroy, gray in color to the very cap surmounting her bandeaux of dark-red hair. She looked like some of those athletic-minded young women of Ibsen’s plays, and the pile of books on the table beside her tea suggested a student character. When she had finished her tea she put these books back into a leather bag, which they filled to a rigid repletion, and, after a few laconic phrases with the tea-girl, she went out like going off the stage. Her powerful demeanor somehow implied severe studies; but the tea-girl — a massive, confident, confiding Roman — said, No, she was studying Italian, and all those books related to the language, for which she had a passion. She was a Swede; and here the student being exhausted as a topic, and my own nationality being ascertained, What steps, the tea-girl asked, should one take if one wished to go to New York in order to secure a place as cashier in a restaurant?

My facts were not equal to the demand upon them, nor are they equal to anything like exact knowledge of the intellectual pursuits of the many studious foreign youth of all ages and sexes whom one meets in Rome. As I say, our acquaintance with Italian is far less useful, however ornamental, than it used to be. The Romans are so quick that they understand you when they speak no English, and take your meaning before you can formulate it in their own tongue. A classically languaged friend of mine, who was hard bested in bargaining for rooms, tried his potential landlord in Latin, and was promptly answered in Latin. It was a charming proof that in the home of the Church her mother-speech had never ceased to be spoken by some of her children, but I never heard of any Americans, except my friend, recurring to their college courses in order to meet the modern Latins in their ancient parlance. In spite of this instance, and that of the Swedish votary of Italian, I decided that the studies of most strangers were archaeological rather than philological, historical rather than literary, topographical rather than critical. I do not say that I had due confirmation of my theory from the talk of the fellow-sojourners whom one is always meeting at teas and lunches and dinners in Rome. Generally the talk did not get beyond an exchange of enthusiasms for the place, and of experiences of the morning, in the respective researches of the talkers.

Such of us as were staying the winter, of course held aloof from the hurried passers-through, or looked with kindly tolerance on their struggles to get more out of Rome in a given moment than she perhaps yielded with perfect acquiescence. We fancied that she kept something back; she is very subtle, and has her reserves even with people who pass a whole winter within her gates. The fact is, there are a great many of her, though we knew her afar as one mighty personality. There is the antique Rome, the mediaeval Rome, the modern Rome; but that is only the beginning. There is the Rome of the State and the Rome of the Church, which divide between them the Rome of politics and the Rome of fashion; but here is a field so vast that Ave may not enter it without danger of being promptly lost in it. There is the Rome of the visiting nationalities, severally and collectively; there is especially the Anglo-American Rome, which if not so populous as the German, for instance, is more important to the Anglo-Saxons. It sees a great deal of itself socially, but not to the exclusion of the sympathetic Southern temperaments which seem to have a strange but not unnatural affinity with it. So far as we might guess, it was a little more Clerical than Liberal in its local politics; if you were very Liberal, it was well to be careful, for Conversion lurked under many exteriors which gave no outward sign of it; if the White of the monarchy and the Black of the papacy divide the best Roman families, of course foreigners are more intensely one or the other than the natives. But Anglo-Saxon life was easy for one not self-obliged to be of either opinion or party; and it was pleasant in most of its conditions. In Rome our internationalities seemed to have certain quarters largely to themselves. In spite of our abhorrence of the destruction and construction which have made modern Rome so wholesome and delightful, most of us had our habitations in the new quarters; but certain pleasanter of the older streets, like the Via Sistina, Via del Babuino, Via Capo le Case, Via Gregoriana, were our sojourn or our resort. Especially in the two first our language filled the outer air to the exclusion of other conversation, and within doors the shopmen spoke it at least as well as the English think the Americans speak it. It was pleasant to meet the honest English faces, to recognize the English fashions, to note the English walk; and if these were oftener present than their American counterparts, it was not from our habitual minority, but from our occasional sparsity through the panic that had frightened us into a homekeeping foreign to our natures.

In like manner our hyphenated nationalities have the Piazza di Spagna for their own. There are the two English book-stores and the circulating libraries, in each of which the books are so torn and dirty that you think they cannot be quite so bad in the other till you try it; there seems nothing for it, then, but to wash and iron the different Tauchnitz authors, and afterward darn and mend them. The books on sale are, of course, not so bad; they are even quite clean; and except for giving out on the points of interest where you could most wish them to abound, there is nothing in them to complain of. There is less than nothing to complain of in the tea-room which enjoys our international favor except that at the most psychological moment of the afternoon you cannot get a table, in spite of the teas going on in the fashionable hotels and the friendly houses everywhere. The toast is exceptional; the muffins so far from home are at least reminiscent of their native island; the tea and butter are alike blameless. The company, to the eye of the friend of man, is still more acceptable, for, if the Americans have dwindled, the English have increased; and there is nothing more endearing than the sight of a roomful of English people at their afternoon tea in a strange land. No type seems to predominate; there are bohemians as obvious as clerics; there are old ladies and young, alike freshly fair; there are the white beards of age and the clean-shaven cheeks of youth among the men; some are fashionable and some outrageously not; peculiarities of all kinds abound without conflicting. Some talk, frankly audible, and others are frankly silent, but a deep, wide purr, tacit or explicit, close upon a muted hymn of thanksgiving, in that assemblage of mutually repellent personalities, for the nonce united, would best denote the universal content.

Hard by this tea-room there is a public elevator by which the reader will no doubt rather ascend with me than, climb the Spanish Steps without me; after the first time, I never climbed them. The elevator costs but ten centimes, and I will pay for both; there is sometimes drama thrown in that is worth twice the money; for there is war, more or less roaring, set between the old man who works the elevator and the young man who sells the tickets to it. The law is that the elevator will hold only eight persons, but one memorable afternoon the ticket-seller insisted upon giving a ticket to a tall, young English girl who formed an unlawful ninth. The elevator-man, a precisian of the old school, expelled her; the ticket-seller came forward and reinstated her; again the elder stood upon the letter of the law; again the younger demanded its violation. The Tuscan tongue in their Roman mouths flew into unintelligibility, while the poor girl was put into the elevator and out of it; and the respective parties to the quarrel were enjoying it so much that it might never have ended if she had not taken the affair into her own hands. She finally followed the ticket-seller back to his desk, to which he retired after each act of the melodrama, and threw her ticket violently down. “Here is your ticket!” she said in English so severe that he could not help understanding and cowering before it. “Give me back my money!” He was too much stupefied by her decision of character to speak; and he returned her centimes in silence while we got into our cage and mounted to the top, and the elevator-man furiously repeated to himself his side of the recent argument all the way up. This did not prevent his touching his hat to each of us in parting, and assuring us that he revered us; a thing that only old-fashioned Romans seem to do nowadays, in the supposed decay of manners which the comfortable classes everywhere like to note in the uncomfortable. Then some ladies of our number went off on a platform across the house-tops to which the elevator had brought us, as if they expected to go down the chimneys to their apartments; and the rest of us expanded into the Piazza Trinita de’ Monti; and I stopped to lounge against the uppermost balustrade of the Spanish Steps.

It is notable, but not surprising, how soon one forms the habit of this, for, seen from above, the Spanish Steps are only less enchanting than the Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are absolutely the most charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing better than a post-card (which I could have bought him on the spot for fifty a franc), knows how the successive stairways part and flow downward to right and left, like the parted waters of a cascade, and lose themselves at the bottom in banks of flowers. No lovelier architectural effect was ever realized from a happy fancy; but, of course, the pictorial effect is richer from below, especially from the Via dei Condotti, where it opens into the Piazza di Spagna. I suppose there must be hours of the day, and certainly there are hours of the night, when in this prospect the Steps have not the sunset on them. But most of the time they have the sunset on them, warm, tender; a sunset that begins with the banks of daffodils and lilies and anemones and carnations and roses and almond blossoms, keeping the downpour of the marble cascades from flooding the piazza, and mounts, mellowing and yellowing, up their gray stone, until it reaches the Church of Trinita de’ Monti at the top.

There it lingers, I should say, till dawn, bathing the golden-brown facade in an effulgence that lifelong absence cannot eclipse when once it has blessed your sight. It is beauty that rather makes the heart ache, and the charm of the Steps from above is something that you can bear better if you are very, very worthy, or have the conceit of feeling yourself so. It is a charm that imparts itself more in detail and is less exclusively the effect of perpetual sunset. From the parapet against which you lean you have a perfecter conception of the architectural form than you get from below, and you are never tired of seeing the successive falls of the Steps dividing themselves and then coming together on the broad landings and again parting and coming together.

If there were once many models, male, female, and infant, brigands, peasants, sages, and martyrs, lounging on the Spanish Steps, as it seems to me there used to be, and as every one has heard say, waiting there for the artists to come and carry them off to their studios and transfer them to their canvases, they are now no longer there in noticeable number. I saw some small boys in steeple-crowned soft hats and short jackets, with their little legs wound round with the favorite bandaging of brigands; and some mothers suitable for Madonnas, perhaps, with babes at the breast; there was a patriarchal old man or two, ready no doubt to pose for the prophets, or, at a pinch, for yet more celestial persons; but for the rest the Steps were rather given up to flower-girls, fruit-peddlers, and beggars pure and simple, on levels distinctly below those infested by the post-card peddlers. The whole neighborhood abounds in opportunities for charity, and at the corner of the Via Sistina there is a one-legged beggar who professes to black shoes in the intervals of alms-taking, and who early made me his prey. If sometimes I fancied escaping by him to my lounge against the parapet of the steps, he joyously overtook me with a swiftness of which few two-legged men are capable; he wore a soldier’s cap, and I hoped, for the credit of our species, that he had lost his leg in battle, but I do not know.

On a Sunday evening I once hung there a long time, watching with one eye the people who were coming back from their promenade on the Pincian Hill, and with the other the groups descending and ascending the Steps. On the first landing below me there was a boy who gratified me, I dare say unconsciously, by trying to stand on his hands; and a little dramatic spectacle added itself to this feat of the circus. Two pretty girls, smartly dressed in hats and gowns exactly alike, and doubtless sisters, if not twins, passed down to the same level. One was with a handsome young officer, and walked staidly beside him, as if content with her quality of captive or captor. The other was with a civilian, of whom she was apparently not sure. Suddenly she ran away from him to the verge of the next fall of steps, possibly to show him how charmingly she was dressed, possibly to tempt him by her grace in flight to follow her madly. But he followed sanely and slowly, and she waited for him to come up, in a capricious quiet, as if she had not done anything or meant anything. That was all; but I am not hard to suit; and it was richly enough for me.

Her little comedy came to its denouement just under the shoulder of the rose-roofed terrace jutting from a lowish, plainish house on the left, beyond certain palms and eucalyptus-trees. It is one of the most sacred shrines in Rome, for it was in this house that the “young English poet whose name was writ in water” died to deathless fame three or fourscore years ago. It is the Keats house, which when he lived in it was the house of Severn the painter, his host and friend. I had visited it for the kind sake of the one and the dear sake of the others when I first visited Rome in 1864; and it was one of the earliest stations of my second pilgrimage. It is now in form for any and all visitors, but the day I went it had not yet been put in its present simple and tasteful keeping. A somewhat shrill and scraping-voiced matron inquired my pleasure when she followed me into the ground-floor entrance from somewhere without, and then, understanding, called hor young daughter, who led me up to the room where Keats mused his last verse and breathed his last sigh. It is a very little room, looking down over the Spanish Steps, with their dike of bloom, across the piazza to the narrow stretch of the Via del Babuino. I must have stood in it with Severn and heard him talk of Keats and his ultimate days and hours; for I remember some such talk, but not the details of it. He was a very gentle old man and fondly proud of his goodness to the poor dying poet, as he well might be, and I was glad to be one of the many Americans who, he said, came to grieve with him for the dead poet.

Now, on my later visit, it was a cold, rainy day, and it was chill within the house and without, and I imputed my weather to the time of Keats’s sojourn, and thought of him sitting by his table there in that bare, narrow, stony room and coughing at the dismal outlook. Afterward I saw the whole place put in order and warmed by a generous stove, for people who came to see the Keats and Shelley collections of books and pictures; but still the sense of that day remains. The young girl sympathized with my sympathy, and wished to find a rose for me in the trellis through which the rain dripped. She could not, and I suggested that there would be roses in the spring. “No,” she persisted, “sometimes it makes them in the winter,” but I had to come away through the reeking streets without one.

When it rains, it rains easily in Rome. But the weather was divine the evening I looked one of my latest looks down on the Spanish Steps. The sun had sunk rather wanly beyond the city, but a cheerful light of electrics shone up at me from the Via dei Condotti. I stood and thought of as much as I could summon from the past, and I was strongest, I do not know why, with the persecutions of the early Christians. Presently a smell of dinner came from the hotels around and the houses below, and I was reminded to go home to my own table d’hote. My one-legged beggar seemed to have gone to his, and I escaped him; but I was intercepted by the sight of an old woman asleep over her store of matches. She was not wakened by the fall of my ten-centime piece in her tray, but the boy drowsing beside her roused himself, and roused her to the dreamy expression of a gratitude quite out of scale with my alms.

V. AN EFFORT TO BE HONEST WITH ANTIQUITY

My visit to the Roman Forum when the Genius Loci verified to my ignorance and the intelligence of my companions the well-conjectured site of the Temple of Jupiter Stator was not the first nor yet the second visit I had paid the place. There had been intermediate mornings when I met two friends there, indefinitely more instructed, with whom I sauntered from point to point, preying upon their knowledge for my emotion concerning each. Information is an excellent thing — in others; and but for these friends I should not now be able to say that this mouldering heap of brickwork, rather than that, was Julius Caesar’s house; or just where it was that Antony made his oration over the waxen effigy which served him for Caesar’s body. They helped me realize how the business life and largely the social life of Rome centred in the Forum, but spared me so much detail that my fancy could play about among its vanished edifices without inconvenience from the clutter of shops and courts and monuments which were ultimately to hem it in and finally to stifle it. They knew their Forum so well that they could not only gratify any curiosity I had, but could supply me with curiosity when I had none. For the moment I was aware that this spot or that, though it looked so improbable, was the scene of deeds which will reverberate forever; they taught me to be tolerant of what I had too lightly supposed fables as serious traditions closely verging on facts. I learned to believe again that the wolf suckled Romulus and Remus, because she had her den no great way off on the Palatine, and that Romulus himself had really lived, since he had died and was buried in the Forum, where they showed me his tomb, or as much of it as I could imagine in the sullen little cellar so called. They also showed me the rostrum where the Roman orators addressed the mass-meetings of the republican times, and they showed me the lake, or the puddle left of it, into which Curtius (or one of three heroes of the name) leaped at an earlier day as a specific for the pestilence which the medical science of the period had failed to control. In our stroll about the place we were joined by one of the several cats living in the Forum, which offered us collectively its acquaintance, as if wishing to make us feel at home. It joined us and it quitted us from time to time, as the whim took it, but it did not abandon us wholly till we showed a disposition to believe in that lake of Curtius, so called after those three public-spirited heroes, the first being a foreigner. Then the cat, which had more than once stretched itself as if bored, turned from us in contempt and went and lay down in a sunny corner near the tomb of Romulus, and fell asleep.

It is quite possible that my reader does not know, as lately I did not, that the Roman Forum is but one of several forums connected with it by ways long centuries since buried fathoms deep and built upon many stories high. But I am now able to assure him that in the whole region between the Roman Forum and the Forum of Trajan, which were formerly opened into each other by the removal of a hill as tall as the top of Trajan’s Column, you pass over other forums hidden beneath your feet or wheels. You cannot be stayed there, however, by the wonders which archaeology will yet reveal in them (for archaeology has its relentless eye upon every inch of the ground above them), but you will certainly pause at the Forum of Trajan, where archaeology, as it is in Commendatore Boni, has had its way already. In fact, until his work in the Roman Forum is finished, the Forum of Trajan must remain his greatest achievement, and the sculptured column of the great emperor must serve equally as the archaeologist’s monument. I do not remember why in the old time I should have kept coming to look at that column and study the sculptured history of Trajan’s campaigns, toiling around it to its top. I think one could then get close to its base, as now one cannot, what with the deepening of the Forum to its antique level and the enclosure of the whole space with an iron rail. The area below is free only to a large company of those cats which seem to have their dwelling among all the ruins and restorations of ancient Rome. People come to feed the Trajan cats with the fish sold near by for the purpose, and one morning, in pausing to view his column from the respectful distance I had to keep, I counted no less than thirteen of his cats in his forum. They were of every age and color, but much more respectable in appearance than the cats of the Pantheon, which have no such sunny expanse as that forum for their quarters, but only a very damp corner beside the temple, and seem to have suffered in their looks and health from the situation. It was afterward with dismay that I realized the fatal number of the Trajan cats coming to their breakfast that morning so unconscious of evil omen in the figure; but as there are probably no statistics of mortality among the cats of Rome, I shall never know whether any of the thirteen has rendered up one of their hundred and seventeen lives.

However, if I allowed myself to go on about the cats of Rome, either ancient or modern, there would be no end. For instance, in a statuary’s shop in the Via Sistina there is a large yellow cat, which I one day saw dressing the hair of the statuary’s boy. It performed this office with a very motherly anxiety, seated on the top of a high rotary table where ordinarily the statuary worked at his carving, and pausing from time to time, as it licked the boy’s thick, black locks, to get the effect of its labors. On other days or at other hours it slept under the table-top, unvexed by the hammering that went on over its head. Even in Rome, where cats are so abundant, it was a notable cat.

If you visit the Roman Forum in the morning you are only too apt to be hurried home by remembrance of the lunch-hour. That, at any rate, was my case, but I was not so hungry that I would not pause on my way hotelward at what used to be the Temple of Vesta in my earlier time, but which, is now superseded by the more authentic temple in the Forum. I had long revered the first in its former quality, and I now paid it the tribute of unwilling renunciation. It is so nearly a perfect relic of ancient Rome and so much more impressive, in its all but unbroken peristyle, than the later but recumbent claimant to its identity that I am sure the owners of the little bronze or alabaster copies of it scattered over the world must share my pious reluctance. The custodian is still very proud of it, and would have lectured me upon it much longer than I let him; as it was, he kept me while he could cast a blazing copy of the Popolo Romano into the cavernous crypt under it, apparently to show me how deep it was. He may have had other reasons; but in any case I urge the traveller to allow him to do it, for it costs no additional fee, and it seems to do him so much good. If it is not very near lunch-time, let the traveller look well about him in the dusty little piazza there, for the Temple of Fortune, with its bruised but beautiful facade, is hard by, as much in the form that Servius Tullius gave it as could well be expected after all this time.

Perhaps the Circus of Marcellus is on the traveller’s way home to lunch; but he will always be passing the segment of its arcaded wall, filled in with mediaeval masonry; and he need not stop, especially if he has his cab by the hour, for there is nothing more to be seen of the circus. A glimpse, through overhanging foliage, of the steps to the Campidoglio, with Castor and Pollux beside their horses at top, may be a fortunate accident of his course. If this happens it will help to rehabilitate for him the Rome of the paganism to which these divinities remained true through all temptations to Judaize during the unnumbered centuries of their sojourn, forgotten, in the Ghetto. It is hardly possible that his glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius’s head where he sits his bronze charger — an extremely fat one — so majestically in the piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.

A more purposed sight of all this will, of course, supply any defects of chance, though I myself always liked chance encounters with the monuments of the past. I had constantly cherished a remembrance of the nobly beautiful facade which is all that is left of the Temple of Neptune, and I meant deliberately to revisit it if I could find out where it was. A kind fortuity befriended me when one day, driving through the little piazza where it lurks behind the Piazza Co-lonna, I looked up, and there, in awe-striking procession, stood the mighty antique columns sustaining the entablature of mediaeval stucco with their fluted marble. I could not say why their poor, defaced, immortal grandeur should have always so affected me, for I do not know that my veneration was due it more than many other fragments of the past; but no arch or pillar of them all seems so impressive, so pathetic. To make the reader the greatest possible confidence, I will own that I passed five times through the Piazza Colonna to my tailor’s in the next piazza (at Rome your tailor wishes you to try on till you have almost worn your new clothes out in the ordeal) before I realized that the Column of Marcus Aurelius was not the more famous Column of Trajan. There is, in fact, a strong family likeness between these columns, both being bandaged round from bottom to top with the tale of the imperial achievements and having a general effect in common; but there is no brother or cousin to the dignity of that melancholy yet vigorous ruin of the Temple of Neptune, or anything that resembles it in the whole of ancient Rome. It survives having been a custom-house and being a stock-exchange without apparent ignominy, while one feels an incongruity, to say the least, in the Column of Marcus Aurelius looking down on the sign of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York. Whether this is worse than for the Palazzo di Venezia to confront the American Express Company where it is housed on the other side of the piazza I cannot say. What I can say is that I believe the Temple of Neptune would have been superior to either fate; though I may be mistaken.

Ruin, nearly everywhere in Rome, has to be very patient of the environment; and even the monuments of the past which are in comparatively good repair have not always the keeping that the past would probably have chosen for them. One that suffers as little as any, if not the very least, is the Pantheon, on whose glorious porch you are apt to come suddenly, either from a narrow street beside it or across its piazza, beyond the fountain fringed with post-card boys and their bargains. In spite of them, the sight of the temple does mightily lift the heart; and though you may have had, as I had, forty-odd years to believe in it, you must waver in doubt of its reality whenever you see it. It seems too great to be true, standing there in its immortal sublimity, the temple of all the gods by pagan creation, and all the saints by Christian consecration, and challenging your veneration equally as classic or catholic. It is worthy the honor ascribed to it in the very latest edition of Murray’s Handbook as “the best-preserved monument of ancient Rome”; worthy the praise of the fastidious and difficult Hare as “the most perfect pagan building in the city”; worthy whatever higher laud my unconsulted Baedeker bestows upon it. But I speak of the outside; and let not the traveller grieve if he comes upon it at the noon hour, as I did last, and finds its vast bronze doors closing against him until three o’clock; there are many sadder things in life than not seeing the interior of the Pantheon. The gods are all gone, and the saints are gone or going, for the State has taken the Pantheon from the Church and is making it a national mausoleum. Victor Emmanuel the Great and Umberto the Kind already lie there; but otherwise the wide Cyclopean eye of the opening in the roof of the rotunda looks down upon a vacancy which even your own name, as written in the visitors’ book, in the keeping of a solemn beadle, does not suffice to fill, and which the lingering side altars scarcely relieve.

I proved the fact by successive visits; but, after all my content with the outside of the Pantheon, I came to think that what you want in Rome is not the best-preserved monument, not the most perfect pagan building, but the most ruinous ruin you can get. I am not sure that you get this in the mouldering memorials of the past on the Palatine Hill, but you get something more nearly like it than anything I can think of at the moment. In that imperial and patrician and plutocratic residential quarter you see, if you are of the moderately moneyed middle class, what the pride of life must always come to when it has its way; and your consolation is full if you pause to reflect how some day Fifth Avenue and the two millionaire blocks eastward will be as the Palatine now is.

Riches and power are of the same make in every time, though they may wear different faces from age to age; and it will be well for the very wealthy members of our smart set to keep this fact in mind when they visit that huge sepulchre of human vainglory.

But I will not pretend that I did so myself that matchless April morning when I climbed over the ruins of the Palatine and found the sun rather sickeningly hot there. That is to say, it was so in the open spaces which were respectively called the house of this emperor and that, the temple of this deity or that, whose divine honors half the Caesars shared; in the Stadium, beside the Lupercal, and the like. The Lupercal was really imaginable as the home of the patroness wolf of Rome, being a wild knot of hill fitly overgrown with brambles and bushes, and looking very probably the spot where Caesar would thrice have refused the crown that Antony offered him. But for the rest, one ruin might very well pass for another; a temple with a broken statue and the stumps of a few columns could very easily deceive any one but an archaeologist. Fortunately we had the charming companionship of one of the most amiable of archaeologists, who was none the less learned for being a woman; and she made even me dimly aware of identities which would else have been lost upon me. To be sure, I think that without help I should have known the Stadium when I came to it, because it seemed studied from that in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and, though it was indefinitely more dilapidated, was so obviously meant for the same sorts of games and races. I do not know but it was larger than the Cambridge Stadium, though I will not speak so confidently of its size as of that deathly cold in the vaults and subterranean passages by which we found our way to the burning upper air out of the foundations and basements of palaces and temples and libraries and theatres that had ceased to be.

One of the most comfortable of these galleries was that in which Caligula was justly done to death, or, if not Caligula, it was some other tyrant who deserved as little to live. But for our guide I should not have remembered his slaughter there, and how much satisfaction it had given me when I first read of it in Goldsmith’s History of Rome; and really you must not acquaint yourself too early with such facts, for you forget them just when you could turn them to account. History is apt to forsake you in the scene of it and come lagging hack afterward; and you cannot hope always to have an archaeologist at your elbow to remind you of things you have forgotten or possibly have not known. Suetonius, Plutarch, De Quincey, Gibbon, these are no bad preparations for a visit to the Palatine, but it is better to have read them yesterday than the day before if you wish to draw suddenly upon them for associations with any specific spot. If I were to go again to the Palatine, I would take care to fortify myself with such structural facts from Hare’s Walks in Rome, or from Murray, or even from Baedeker, as that it was the home of Augustus and Tiberius, Domitian and Nero and Caligula and Septimius Severus and Germanicus, and a very few of their next friends, and that it radically differed from the Forum in being exclusively private and personal to the residents, while that was inclusively public and common to the whole world. I strongly urge the reader to fortify himself on this point, for otherwise he will miss such significance as the place may possibly have for him. Let him not trust to his impressions from his general reading; there is nothing so treacherous; he may have general reading enough to sink a ship, but unless he has a cargo taken newly on board he will find himself tossing without ballast on those billowy slopes of the Palatine, where he will vainly try for definite anchorage.

The billowy effect of the Palatine, inconvenient to the explorer, is its greatest charm from afar, in whatever morning or evening light, or sun or rain, you get its soft, brownish, greenish, velvety masses. Distance on it is best, and distance in time as well as space. If you can believe the stucco reconstruction opposite the Forum gate, ruin has been even kinder to the Palatine than to the Forum, with which it was equally ugly when in repair, if taken in the altogether, however beautiful in detail. As you see it in that reproduction, it is a horror, and a very vulgar horror, such a horror as only unlimited wealth and uncontrolled power can produce. If you will think of individualism gone mad, and each successive personality crushing out and oversloughing some other, without that regard for proportion and propriety which only the sense of a superior collective right can inspire, you will imagine the Palatine. Mount Morris, at One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, if unscrupulously built upon by the multimillionaires thronging to New York and seeking to house themselves each more splendidly and spaciously than the other, would offer a suggestion in miniature of what the Palatine seems to have been like in its glory. But the ruined Mount Morris, even allowing for the natural growth of the landscape in two thousand years, could show no such prospect twenty centuries hence as we got that morning from a bit of wilding garden near the Convent of San Bonaventura, on the brow of the Palatine. Some snowy tops pillowed themselves on the utmost horizon, and across the Campagna the broken aqueducts stalked and fell down and stumbled to their legs again. The Baths of Caracalla bulked up in rugged, monstrous fragments, and then in the foreground, filling the whole eye, the Colosseum rose and stood, and all Rome sank round it. The Forum lay deep under us, vainly struggling with the broken syllables of its demolition to impart a sense of its past, and at our feet in that bit of garden where the roses were blooming and the plum-trees were blowing and the birds were singing, there stretched itself in the grass a fallen pillar wreathed with the folds of a marble serpent, the emblem of the oldest worship under the sun, as I was proud to remember without present help. It was the same immemorial, universal faith which the Mound Builders of our own West symbolized in the huge earthen serpents they shaped uncounted ages before the red savages came to wonder at them, and doubtless it had been welcomed by Rome in her large, loose, cynical toleration, together with cults which, like that of Isis and Osiris, were fads of yesterday beside it. Somehow it gave the humanest touch in the complex impression of the overhistoried scene. It made one feel very old, yet very young — old with the age and young with the youth of the world — and very much at home.

VI. PERSONAL RELATIONS WITH THE PAST

I was myself part of the antiquity with which I have been trying to be honest; and, though my date was no earlier than the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, still so many and such cataclysmal changes had passed over Rome since my time that I was, as far as concerned my own consciousness, practically of the period of the Pantheon, say. The Pantheon, in fact, was among my first associations with Rome. I lodged very near it, in the next piazza, so that, if we were not contemporaries, we were companions, and I could not go out of my hotel to look up a more permanent sojourn without passing by it. Perhaps I wished to pass by it, and might really have found my way to the Corso without the Pantheon’s help.

I have no longer a definite idea why I should have made my sojourn in the very simple and modest little street called Via del Gambero, which runs along behind the Corso apparently till it gets tired and then stops. But very possibly it was because the Via del Gambero was so simple and modest that I chose it as the measure of my means; or possibly I may have heard of the apartment I took in it from wayfarers passing through Venice, where I then lived, and able to commend it from their own experience of it; people in that kind day used to do such things. However it was, I took the apartment, and found it, though small, apt for me, as Ariosto said of his house, and I dwelt in it with my family a month or more in great comfort and content. In fact, it seemed to us the pleasantest apartment in Rome, where the apartments of passing strangers were not so proud under Pius IX. as they are under Victor Emmanuel III. I do not know why it should have been called the Street of the Lobster, but it may have been in an obscure play of the fancy with the notion of a backward gait in it that I came to believe that, in the many improvements which had befallen Rome, Via del Gambero had disappeared. Destroyed, some traveller from antique lands had told me, I dare say; obliterated, wiped out by the march of municipal progress. At any rate, I had so long resigned the hope of revisiting the quiet scene that when I revisited Rome last winter, after the flight of ages, and one day found myself in a shop on the Corso, it was from something like a hardy irony that I asked the shopman if a street called Via del Gambero still existed in that neighborhood. I said that I had once lodged in it forty-odd years before; but I believed it had been demolished. Not at all, the shopman said; it was just behind his place; and what was the number of the house? I told him, and he laughed for joy in being able to do me a pleasure; me, a stranger from the strange land of sky-scratchers (grattacieli), as the Italians not inadequately translate sky-scrapers. If I would favor him through his back shop he would show me how close I was upon it; and from his threshold he pointed to the corner twenty yards off, which, when I had turned it, left me almost at my own door.

In that transmuted Rome Via del Gambero, at least, was wholly unchanged, and there was not a wrinkle in the front of the house where we had sojourned so comfortably, so contentedly, in our incredible youth. I had not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at home; but, standing across the way and looking up at the window, it seemed to me that I might have seen my own young face peering out in a somewhat suspicious question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there behind me if I was not careful. I could not tell my proud young double that we were one, and that I was going in the archbishop’s red coach as well; he would never have believed it of my gray hairs and sunken figure. I could not even ask him what had become of the grocer near by, whom I used to get some homely supplies of, perhaps eggs or oranges, or the like, when I came out in the December mornings, and who, when I said that it was very cold, would own that it was un poco rigidetto, or a little bit stiffish. The ice on the pavement, not clean-swept as now, but slopped and frozen, had been witness of that; the ice was gone and the grocer with it; and where really was I? At the window up there, or leaning against the apse of the church opposite? What church was it, anyway? I never knew; I never asked. Why should I insist upon a common identity with a man of twenty-seven to whom my threescore and ten could only bring perplexity, to say the least, and very likely vexation? I went away from Via del Gambero, where the piety of the reader will seek either of myselves in vain. In my earlier date one used to see the red legs of the French soldiers about the Roman streets, and the fierce faces of the French officers, fierce as if they felt themselves wrongfully there and were braving it out against their consciences. Very likely they had no conscience about it; they had come there over the dead body of the Roman Republic at the will of their rascal president, and they were staying there by the will of their rascal emperor, to keep on his throne the pope from whom the Italians had hoped for unity and liberty. No one is very much to blame for anything, I suppose, and very likely Pius IX. had not voluntarily disappointed his countrymen, who may have expected too much. But then the French had been there fifteen years, and were to be there another fifteen years yet. Now they are gone, with the archbishop’s red coach, and the complaisant grocer, and the young man of twenty-seven in Via del Gambero, and the rest of the things that the sun looked on and will look on the like of again, no doubt, in our monotonous round of him.

To-day, instead of the red legs of the French soldiers, you see the blue legs of the Italian soldiers, and instead of the fierce faces of their officers, the serious, intelligent, mostly spectacled faces of the Italian officers, in sweeping cloaks of tender blue verging on lavender. They are soldierly men none the less for their gentler aspect, and perhaps something the more; and a better thing yet is that there are comparatively few of them. There are few of the privates also, far fewer than the priests and the students of the ecclesiastical schools, who dress like priests and go dashing through the streets in files and troops.

I have an impression that one sees about the proportion of Italian soldiers in Rome that one sees of American soldiers in Washington, or, at least, not many more. The barracks are apparently outside the walls; there you meet cavalry going and coming, and detachments of bersaglieri; or riflemen, pushing on at their quick trot, or plainer infantry trudging wearily. Certainly, in a capital where the Church holds itself prisoner, there is no show of force on the part of its captors; and this is pleasant to the friend of man and the lover of Italy for other reasons. In the absence of the military you can imagine that not only does the state not wish to boast its political supremacy in the ancient capital of the Church, but it does not desire to show the potentiality of holding its own against the republic which is instinct there. The monarchy is the consensus of all the differing wills in Italy, which naturally would not for the most part have chosen a monarchy. But never was a monarchy so mild-mannered or seated so firmly, for the present at least, in the affection and reason of its people.

This is not the place (as writers say who have not prepared themselves with the requisite ideas at a given point) to speak of the situation in Rome; and I meant only to note that there are more ecclesiastics than conscripts to be seen there. Of all the varying costumes of the varying schools, none is so pleasing, so vivid, as that of the German students as they rush swiftly by in their flying robes of scarlet. The red matches the ruddy health in their cheeks, and there is a sort of gladness in their fling that wins the liking as well as the looking; so that almost one would not mind being a German student of theology one’s self. There are other-costumes running in color from violet, and blue with orange sashes, to unrelieved black and black trimmed with red; but I cannot remember which nationality wears which.

I am not sure but one sees as many priests in Rome now as in the times when they ruled it; and I am no such Protestant that I will pretend I do not like a monsignore when I meet him, either in the street or at afternoon tea, as one sometimes may. I have no grudge against priests of any rank; but I did not seek to see them at the functions, as I used in the old days to do. Shall I say that I now rather tolerated than welcomed myself there through the hospitality which so freely opens the churches of the Church to all comers of whatever creed? What right had I, a heretic and recusant, to come staring and standing round where the faithful were kneeling and praying? If we could conceive of our fast-locked conventicles being thrown as freely open, could we conceive of Catholics wandering up and down their naves and aisles while the hymning or preaching went on? After being so high-minded in the matter, shall I confess that I was a good deal kept out of the churches by the cold in them? It was a sort of stored cold, much greater than that outside, though there was something warming to the fancy, at least, in the smoke and smell of the incense.

Even with the Church of the Capuchins, which we lived opposite, I was dilatory, though in my mediaeval days it had been one of the first places to which I hurried. In those days everybody said you must be sure and go to the Capuchins’, because Guide’s “St. Michael and the Enemy” was there, and still more because the wonderful bone mosaics in the cemetery under the church were not on any account to be missed. I suspect that in both these matters I had then a very crude taste, but it was not from my greater refinement that I now let the Capuchin church go on long un-revisited. It was, for one thing, too instantly and constantly accessible across the street there; and it is well known human nature is such that it will not seek the line of the least resistance as long as it can help. Besides, I could hardly believe that it was really the Capuchin church which I had once so hastened to see, and I neglected it almost two months, contenting myself with the display of those hand-bills on the convent walls, spreading largely and glaringly incongruous over it. When I did go I found the Guido ridiculous, of course, in the painter’s imagination of the archangel as a sort of dancing figure in a tableau vivant, and yet of a sublime authority in the execution. To be more honest, I had little feeling about it and less knowledge.

It was not so cold in the church as I had expected; and in the succession of side chapels, beginning with the St. Michael’s and opening into one another, we found a kind of domesticity close upon cosiness, which we were enjoying for its own sake, when we were aware of a pale, gentle young girl who seemed to be alone there. She asked, in our unmistakable native accents, if we were going to see the Capuchin mosaics in their place below; and one of us said, promptly, No, indeed; but relented at the shadow of disappointment that came over the girl’s face, and asked, Was she going? The girl said, Oh, she guessed she could see them some other time; and then she who had spoken ordered him who had not spoken to go with her. I do not know what question of propriety engaged them with reference to her going alone with the handsome young monk waiting to accompany her; but he was certainly too handsome for a monk of any age. We followed him, however, and I had my usual nausea on viewing the decoration of the ceilings and walls of the place below; it always makes me sick to go into that place; between realizing that I am of the same make as the brothers composing those mosaics, and trying to imagine what the intricate patterns will do at the Resurrection Day, I cannot command myself. Neither am I supported by the sight of some skeletons, the raw material of that grewsome artistry, deposited whole in their coffins in the niches next the ground, though their skulls smile so reassuringly from their cowls; their cheeriness cannot make me like them. But my companion seemed to be merely interested; and I fancied her deciding that it all quite came up to her expectations, while I translated for her from the monk that the dead used to be left in the hallowed earth from Jerusalem covering the ground before they were taken up and decoratively employed, but that since the Italian occupation of Rome the art had fallen into abeyance. She said nothing, but when we came out she stood a moment on the pavement beside our cab and confessed herself a New England girl, from an inland town, who was travelling with relatives. She had been sick, and she had come alone, as soon as she could get out, to see the wonders of the Capuchin church, because she had heard so much of them. We said we hoped she had been pleased, and she said, “Oh yes, indeed,” and then she said, “Well, good-bye,” and gently tilted away, leaving us glad that there could still be in an old, spoiled world such sweetness and innocence and easily gratified love of the beautiful.

Taking Rome so easily, so provisionally, while waiting the eventualities of the colds which mild climates are sure to give their frequenters from the winterlands, I became aware of a latent anxiety respecting St. Peter’s. I did not feel that the church would really get away without our meeting, but I felt that it was somehow culpably hazardous in me to be taking chances with it. As a family, we might never collectively visit it, and, in fact, we never did; but one day I drove boldly (if secretly) off alone and renewed my acquaintance with this contemporary of mine; for, if you have been in Rome a generation and a half ago, you find that you are coeval not only with the regal, the republican, and the imperial Rome, but with each Rome of the successive popes, down, at least, to that of Pius IX. St. Peter’s will not be, by any means, your oldest friend, but it will be an acquaintance of such long standing that you may not wish to use it with all the frankness which its faults invite. If you say, when you drive into its piazza between the sublime colonnades which stretch forth their mighty embrace as if to take the whole world to the church’s heart, that here is the best of St. Peter’s, you will not be wrong. If you say that here is grandeur, and that there where the temple fronts you grandiosity begins, you will be rhetorical, but, again, you will not be wrong. The day of my furtive visit was sober and already waning, with a breeze in which the fountains streamed flaglike, and with a gentle sky on which the population of statues above the colonnades defined themselves in leisure attitudes, so recognizable all that I am sure if they had come down and taken me by the hand we could have called one another by name without a moment’s hesitation. Every detail of a prospect which is without its peer on earth, but may very possibly be matched in Paradise, had been so deeply stamped in my remembrance that I smiled for pleasure in finding myself in an environment far more familiar than any other I could think of at the time. It was measurably the same within the church, but it was not quite the same in the reserves I was obliged to make, the reefs I was obliged to take in my rapture. The fact is, that unless you delight in a hugeness whose bareness no ornamentation can, or does at least, conceal, you do not find the interior of St. Peter’s adequate to the exterior. In the mere article of hugeness, even, it fails through the interposition of the baldachin midway of the vast nave, and each detail seems to fail of the office of beauty more lamentably than another.

I had known, I had never forgotten, that St. Peter’s was very, very baroque, but I had not known, I had not remembered how baroque it was. It is not so badly baroque as the Church of the Jesuits either in Rome or in Venice, or as the Cathedral at Wuerzburg; but still it is badly baroque, though, again, not so baroque in the architecture as in the sculpture. In the statues of most of the saints and popes it could not be more baroque; they swagger in their niches or over their tombs in an excess of decadent taste for which the most bigoted agnostic, however Protestant he may be, must generously grieve. It is not conceivably the taste of the church or the faith; it is the taste of the wicked world, now withered and wasted to powerlessness, which overruled both for evil in art from its evil life. The saints and the popes are, aesthetically, lamentable enough; but the allegories in bronze or marble, which are mostly the sixteenth-century notions of the Virtues, are inexpressible — some of these creatures ought really to be put out of the place; but I suppose their friends would say they ought to be left as typical of the period. In the case of that merciless miscreant, Queen Christina of Sweden, who has her monument in St. Peter’s, there would be people to say she must have her monument in some place; but, all the same, remembering Monaldeschi — how he was stabbed to death by her command, the kinder assassins staying their hands from time to time, while his confessor went vainly to implore her pardon — it is shocking to find her tomb in the prime church in Christendom. At first it offends one to see certain pontiffs with mustaches and imperials and goatees; but, if one reflects that so they wore them in life, one perceives right in it; only when one comes to earlier or later popes, bearded in medieval majority or shaven in the decent modern fashion, one can endure those others only as part of the prevailing baroque of the church. Canova was not so Greek or even so classic as one used to think him, but one hardly has a moment of repose in St. Peter’s till one comes to a monument by him and rests in its quiet. It is tame, it is even weak, if you like; but compared with the frantic agglomeration of gilt clouds and sunbursts, and marble and bronze figures in the high-altar, it is heavenly serene and lovely.

There were not many people in St. Peter’s that afternoon, so that I could give undisturbed attention to the workman repairing the pavement at one point and grinding the marble smooth with a slow, secular movement, as if he were part of its age-Ions: waste and repair. Another day, the last day I came, there were companies of the personally conducted, following their leaders about and listening to the lectures in several languages, which no more stirred the immense tranquillity than they themselves qualified the spacious vacancy of the temple: you were vaguely sensible of the one and of the other like things heard and seen in a drowse. It was a pleasant vagueness in which all angularities of feeling were lost, and you were disposed to a tolerance of the things that had hurt or offended you before. As a contemporary of the edifice, throughout its growth, you could account for them more and more as of their periods. Perhaps through your genial reconciliation there came, however dimly, a suggestion of something unnatural and alien in your presence there as a mere sightseer, or, at best, a connoisseur much or little instructed. If you had been there, say, as a worshipper, would you have been afflicted by the incongruities of the sculptures or by the whole baroque keeping? Possibly this consideration made you go away much modester than you came. “After all,” you may have said, “it is not a gallery; it is not a museum. It is a house of prayer,” and you emerged, let us hope, humbled, and in so far fitted for renewed joy in the beauty, the glory of the sublime colonnades.

VII. CHANCES IN CHURCHES

If any one were to ask me which was the most beautiful church in Rome I should temporize, and perhaps I should end by saying that there was none. Ecclesiastical Rome seems to have inherited the instinct of imperial Rome for ugliness; only, where imperial Rome used the instinct collectively, ecclesiastical Rome has used it distributively in the innumerable churches, each less lovely than the other. This position will do to hedge from; it is a bold outpost from which I may be driven in, especially by travellers who have seen the churches I did not see. I took my chances, they theirs; for nobody can singly see all the churches in Rome; that would need a syndicate.

If imperial Rome was beautiful in detail because it had the Greeks to imagine the things it so hideously grouped, ecclesiastical Rome may be unbeautiful in detail because it had not the Goths to realize the beauty of its religious aspiration — that is, if it was the Goths who invented Gothic architecture; I do not suppose it was. Anyway, there is said to be but one Gothic church in Rome, and this I did not visit, perhaps because I felt that I must inure myself to the prevalent baroque, or perhaps from mere perversity. I can merely say in self-defence that, on the outside, Santa Maria sopra Minerva no more promised an inner beauty than Il Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the power of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches sometimes have. It is a tumult of virtuosity in painting, in sculpture, in architecture. Statues sprawl into frescoed figures at points in the roof, and frescoed figures emerge in marble at others. Marvels of riches are lavished upon chapels and altars, which again are so burdened with bronze gilded or silver plated, and precious stones wrought and unwrought, that the soul, or if not the soul the taste, shrinks dismayed from them. Execution in default of inspiration has had its way to the last excess; there is nothing that it has not done to show what it can do; and all that it has done is a triumph of misguided skill and power. But it would be a mistake for the spectator to imagine that anything has been done from the spirit in which he receives it; everything is the expression of devoted faith in the forms that the art of the time offered.

In the monstrous marble tableau, say, of “Religion Triumphing Over Heresy,” he may be very sure that the artist was not winking an ironical eye where he made Faith spurning Schism with her foot look very much like a lady of imperfect breeding who has lost her temper; he was most devoutly in earnest, or at least those were so, both cleric and laic, for whom he wrought his prodigy. We others, pagans or Protestants, had better understand that the children of the Church, and especially the poor children, were serious through all the shows that seem to us preposterous; they had not renounced something for nothing; if they bowed that very fallible thing, Reason, to Dogma, they got faith for their reward and could gladly accept whatever symbol of it was offered them.

No matter how baroque any church was, it could express something of this sincerity, and in their way the worshippers seemed always simply at home in it. In San Lorenzo in Lucina, where I went to see the truly sublime “Crucifixion” by Guido (there is also a bar of St. Lawrence’s gridiron to be seen, but I did not know it at the time) I liked the unconsciousness of the girl kneeling before the high altar and provisionally gossiping with the young sacristan before she began her devotions. She gave her mind to them when he asked me if I wished to see the Guido, for I could see her lips moving while she shared my veneration of that most affecting masterpiece; the more genuinely affecting because it expresses the rapture and not the anguish of the Passion. I have no doubt she was grateful when the sacristan proposed my having the electric light turned on it, and when, though that I knew it would cost me something more, I assented.

They have the electric light now in all the holy places, and notably in the dungeon where St. Peter was imprisoned, and where the custodian was so proud of it, as the latest improvement, and as far more satisfactory than candles. The shrine of the miraculous Bambino in the Church of Ara Coeli is also lighted by electricity, which spares no detail of the child’s apparel and appearance. To other eyes than those of faith it has the effect of a life-size but not life-like doll, piously bedizened and jewelled over, but rather ill-humored looking, or, if not that, proud looking or severe looking. To the eyes in which its sickbed visits have dried the tears it must wear an aspect of heavenly pity and beauty; and I am very willing to believe that these are the eyes which see it aright. As it was, and taking it literally, it seemed far less mechanical and unfeeling than the monk who pulled it out and pushed it back on its wheeled platform. But he must get tired of showing it to the unbelievers who come out of curiosity, and very likely I should, if I were in his place, as nonchalantly wipe across the glass front of the shrine the card with the Bambino’s legend printed in various languages on it, which you may then buy with the blessing from the glass for whatever you choose to give.

Where art and antiquity are so abundant as in Rome, the Bambino incident is probably what the reader, when he has visited the Church of Ara Coeli will chiefly remember, and I will not pretend to be any better than the reader, though I will say that I have a persistent sense of something important about the roof; and there are the Pinturrichio frescos, which an old Sienese like me must have the taste for. The not easily praiseful Hare says it is “one of the most interesting of Christian churches,” and without allowing that there are any other sorts of churches I may allow that this is one of the least unlovely in Rome. Trinita de’ Monti seemed to be another, but only, I dare say, subjectively, because of the exquisite pleasure we had one afternoon in March when we went into it for the nuns’ singing of the Benediction. That, we had been told, was something which no one coming to Rome should miss; and we were so anxious not to miss it that on our way to the Pincian Hill we stopped at the foot of the church-steps, and reassured ourselves of the hour through the kindness of an English-speaking nurse-maid at the bottom and of a gentle nun at the top, who both told us the hour would be exactly five.

When we came back at that time and bought our way into the church by rightful payment to the two blind beggars who guarded its doors, we found it packed with people who bad been more literally punctual. They were of all nations, but a large part were Anglo-Americans, and a young girl of this race rose and gave her seat, with a sweet insistence that would not be denied, to that one of us who deserved it most. He who was left leaning against the soft side of a pillar hesitated whether to make some young priests spreading over undue space on one of the benches push up, and he enjoyed a rich moment of self-satisfaction in his forbearance. He was there, to be sure, an alien and a heretic, out of mere curiosity, and they were there probably so rapt in their devout attention that they did not notice their errant step-brother, and so did not think to offer him the hospitality of their mother church’s house. But he would not make any such allowance; he condemned them with the unsparing severity of the strap-hanger in a trolley-car, who blushes with shame for the serried rows of men sitting behind their newspapers. When he was at his wit’s end to find excuse for them a priest on another bench made room, and he sank down glad to forgive and forget; but now he would not have yielded his place to any other Protestant in Christendom.

In the collective curiosity he lost the sense of self-reproach for his own, and eagerly bent his gaze on the group of officiating priests at the high altar beyond the grille of the choir. The altar was all a blaze of electric lights, and there was a novel effect in their composition in the crosses resting diagonally on either side of it. Next the grille showed the feathers and fashions of the mothers and sisters of the young girls from the school of the adjoining Convent of the Sacred Heart, and midway between these visitors, like a flock of white birds stooping on some heavenly plain, the white veils of the girls stretched in lovely levels to left and right. Nothing could have attuned the spirit for the surprise awaiting it like this angelic sight; and when the voices of the nuns fell suddenly from the organ gallery, behind all the people, like the singing of the morning stars molten in one adoring music and falling from the zenith down, whatever moments of innocent joy life might have had it could have had none surpassing that.

But when we came out the self-mockery with which life is apt to recover itself from any exaltation began. In returning from the Pincio the only cab we had been able to get was the last left of the very worst cabs in Rome, and we had bidden the driver wait for us at the church-steps, not without some hope that he would play us false. But there he was, true to his word, with such disciplined fidelity as that of the Roman sentinels who used to die at their posts; and we mounted to ours with the muted prayer that we, at least, might reach home alive. This did not seem probable when the driver whipped up his horse. It appeared to have aged and sickened while we were in the church, though we had thought it looked as bad as could be before, and it lurched alarmingly from side to side, recovering itself with a plunge of its heavy head away from the side in which its body was sinking. The driver swayed on his box, having fallen equally decrepit in spite of the restoratives he seemed to have applied for his years and infirmities. His clothes had put on some such effect of extreme decay as those of Rip Van Winkle in the third act; there was danger that he would fall on top of his falling horse, and that their raiment would mingle in one scandalous ruin. Via Sistina had never been so full of people before; never before had it been so long to that point where we were to turn out of it into the friendly obscurity of the little cross street which would bring us to our hotel. We could not consent to arrive in that form; we made the driver stop, and we got out and began overpaying him to release us. But the more generously we overpaid him the more nobly he insisted upon serving us to our door. At last, by such a lavish expenditure as ought richly to provide for the few remaining years of himself and his horse, we prevailed with him to let us go, and reached our hotel glad, almost proud, to arrive on foot.

Hare tells me, now it is too late, that I may reach the Church of Santa Maggiore by keeping straight on through the long, long straightness of the Via Sistina. I reached that church by quite another way after many postponements; for I thought I remembered all about it from my visit in 1864. But really nothing had remained to me save a sense of the exceptional dignity of the church, and the sole fact that the roof of its most noble nave is thickly plated with the first gold mined in South America, which Ferdinand and Isabella gave that least estimable of the popes, Alexander VI. Now I know that it is far richer than any gold could make it in the treasures of history and legend, which fairly encrust it in every part. Doubtless some portion of this wealth my fellow-sightseers were striving to store up out of the guide-books which they bore in their hands and from which they strained their eyes to the memorable points as they slowly paced through the temple. Some were reading one to another in bated voices, and I thought them ridiculous; but perhaps they were wise, and rather he was ridiculous who marched by them and contented himself with a general sense of the grandeur, the splendor. More than any other church except that of San Paolo fuori le Mura, Santa Maria Maggiore imparts this sense, for, as I have already pretended, St. Peter’s fails of it. Without as well as within the church is spacious and impressive from its spaciousness; but it seems more densely fringed than most others with peddlers of post-cards and mosaic pins. On going in you can plunge through their ranks, but in coming out you do not so easily escape. One boy pursued me quite to my cab, in spite of my denials of hand and tongue. There he stayed the driver while he made a last, a humorous appeal. “Skiddoo?” he asked in my native speech. “Yes,” I sullenly replied, “skiddoo!” But it is now one of the regrets which I shall always feel for my wasted opportunities in Rome that I did not buy all his post-cards. Patient gayety like his merited as much.

As it was, I drove callously away from Santa Maria Maggiore to San Pietro in Vincoli, where I expected to renew my veneration for Michelangelo’s Moses. That famous figure is no longer so much in the minds of men as it used to be, I think; and, if one were to be quite honest with one’s self as to the why and wherefore of one’s earlier veneration, one might not get a very distinct or convincing reply. Do sculptors and painters suffer periods of slight as authors do? Are Raphael and Michelangelo only provisionally eclipsed by Botticelli and by Donatello and Mino da Fiesole, or are they remanded to a lasting limbo? I find I have said in my notes that the Moses is improbable and unimpressive, and I pretended a more genuine joy in the heads of the two Pollajuolo brothers which startle you from their tomb as you enter the church. Is the true, then, better than the ideal, or is it only my grovelling spirit which prefers it? What I scarcely venture to say is that those two men evidently lived and still live, and that Michelangelo’s prophet never lived; I scarcely venture, because I remember with tenderness how certain clear and sweet spirits used to bow their reason before the Moses as before a dogma of art which must be implicitly accepted. Do they still do so, those clear and sweet spirits?

The archaeologist who was driving my cab that morning had pointed out to me on the way to this church the tower on which Nero stood fiddling while Rome was burning. It is a strong, square, mediaeval structure which will serve the purpose of legend yet many centuries, if progress does not pull it down; but the fiddle no longer exists, apparently, and Nero himself is dead. When I came out and mounted into my cab, my driver showed me with his whip, beyond a garden wall, a second tower, very beautiful against the blue sky, above the slim cypresses, which he said was the scene of the wicked revels of Lucrezia Borgia. I do not know why it has been chosen for this distinction above other towers; but it was a great satisfaction to have it identified. Very possibly I had seen both of these memorable towers in my former Roman sojourn, but I did not remember them, whereas I renewed my old impressions of San Paolo fuori le Mura in almost every detail.

That is the most majestic church in Rome, I think, and I suppose it is, for a cold splendor, unequalled anywhere. Somehow, from its form and from the great propriety of its decoration, it far surpasses St. Peter’s. The antic touch of the baroque is scarcely present in it, for, being newly rebuilt after the fire which destroyed the fourth-century basilica in 1823, its faults are not those of sixteenth-century excess. It would be a very bold or a very young connoisseur who should venture to appraise its merits beyond this negative valuation; and timid age can affirm no more than that it came away with its sensibilities unwounded. Tradition and history combine with the stately architecture, which reverently includes every possible relic of the original fabric, to render the immense temple venerable; and as it is still in process of construction, with a colonnaded porch in scale and keeping with the body of the basilica, it offers to the eye of wonder the actual spectacle of that unstinted outlay of riches which has filled Rome with its multitudes of pious monuments — monuments mainly ugly, but potent with the imagination even in their ugliness through the piety of their origin. Where did all that riches come from?

Out of what unfathomable opulence, out of what pitiable penury, out of what fear, out of what love? One fancies the dying hands of wealth that released their gift to the sacred use, the knotted hands of work that spared it from their need. The giving continues in this latest Christian age as in the earliest, and Rome is increasingly Rome in a world which its thinkers think no longer believes.

From San Paolo we were going to another shrine, more hallowed to our literary sense, and we drove through the sweet morning sunshine and bird-singing, past pale-pink clouds of almond bloom on the garden slopes, with snowy heights far beyond, to the simple graveyard where Keats and Shelley lie. Our way to the Protestant cemetery held by some shabby apartment-houses of that very modern Rome which was largely so jerry-built, and which I would not leave out of the landscape if I could, for I think their shabbiness rather heightens your sense of the peaceful loveliness to which you come under the cypresses, among the damp aisles, so thickly studded with the stones recording the death in exile of the English strangers lying there far from home. In a faulty perspective of memory, I had always seen the graves of the two poets side by side; but the heart of Shelley rests in a prouder part of the cemetery, where the paths between the finer tombs are carefully kept; and the dust of Keats lies in an old, plain, almost neglected corner, well off beyond a dividing trench. It seems an ungracious chance which has so parted the two poets so inextricably united in their fame; it is as if here, too, the world would have its way; but, of course, it is only at the worst an ungracious chance. Keats, at least, has the companionship of the painter Severn, the friend on whose “fond breast his parting soul relied,” and who has here followed him into the dust.

A few withered daisies had been scattered in the thin grass over the poet, and one hardly dared lift one’s eyes from them to the heartbreaking epitaph which one could not spell for tears.

VIII. A FEW VILLAS

It was but a few minutes’ walk from the hotel to the Porta Pinciana, and, if you took this short walk, you found yourself almost before you knew it in the Villa Borghese. You might then, on your first Sunday in Rome, have fancied yourself in Central Park, for all difference in the easily satisfied Sunday-afternoon crowd. But with me a difference began in the grove of stone-pines, and their desultory stretch toward the Casino, where in the simple young times which are now the old we had hurried, with our Kugler in our hands and other reading in our heads, to see Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love (it has got another name now) and Canova’s Pauline Bonaparte, who was also the Princess Borghese, and all the rest of the precious gallery. However, if I had any purpose of visiting the Casino now, I put it aside, and contented myself with the gentle sun, the gentle shade, and the sweet air, which might have had less dust in it, breathing over grass as green in late January as in early June. I did not care so much for a mounted corporal who was jumping his horse over a two-foot barrier in the circular path rounding between the Villa Borghese and the Pincian Hill, though his admirers hung in rows on the rail beside it so thickly that I could hardly have got a place to see him if I had tried. But there was room enough to the fathers and mothers who had brought their children, and young lovers who had brought each other for the afternoon’s outing, just as the people in Central Park do, and, no doubt, just as any Sunday crowd must do in the planet Mars, if the inhabitants are human. There was a vacherie nearby where not many persons were drinking milk or even coffee; it is never the notion of the Italians that amusement can be had only through the purchase of refreshments.

I did not get as far as the Casino till the last Sunday of our Roman stay, though we came again and again to the park (as we should call it, rather than villa), sometimes to walk, sometimes to drive, and always to rejoice in its loveliness. It was not now a very guarded, if once a very studied, loveliness; not quite neglect, but a forgottenness to which it took kindly, had fallen upon it; the drives seemed largely left to take care of themselves, the walks were such as the frequenters chose to make over the grass or through the woods; the buildings — the aviary, the conservatory, the dairy, the stables — which formed part of the old pleasance, stood about, as if in an absent-minded indifference to their various roles. The weather had grown a little more wintry, or, at least, autumnal, as the season advanced toward spring, and one day at the end of February, when we were passing a woody hollow, the fallen leaves stirred crisply with a sound like that of late October at home. We had been at some pains and expense to put home four thousand miles away, but this sound was the sweetest and dearest we had heard in Rome, and it strangely attuned our spirits to the enjoyment of the fake antiquities, the broken arches, pediments, columns, statues, which, in a region glutted with ruin, the landscape architect of the Villa Borghese had fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial dilapidation. But there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little stadium, with its gradines around the sides, and the game of tennis which some young girls were playing in it. Neither was there anything ungenuine in the rapture of the boy whom we saw racing through the dead leaves of that woody hollow in chase of the wild fancies that fly before boyhood; and I hope that the charm of the plinths and statues in the careless grounds behind the soft, old, yellow Casino was a real charm. At any rate, these things all consoled, and the turf under the pines, now thickly starred with daisies, gave every assurance of being original.

When we came last the daisies were mingled with clustering anemones, which seem a greatly overrated sort of flower, crude and harsh in color, like cheap calico. If it were not for their pretty name I do not see how people could like them; yet the children that day were pouncing upon them and pulling them by handfuls; for the Villa Borghese is now state property and is free to the children of the people in a measure quite beyond Central Park. They can apparently pull anything they want, except mushrooms; there are signs advising people that the state draws the line at mushrooms.

It was once more a Sunday, and it was a free day in the Casino. The trodden earth sent up its homely, kindly smell from many feet on their way to the galleries, which we found full of people looking greater intelligence than the frequenters of such places commonly betray. They might have been such more cultivated sight-seers as could not afford to come on the paydays, and, if they had not crowded the room so, one might have been glad as well as proud to be of their number. They did not really keep one from older friends, from the statues and the pictures which were as familiarly there in 1908 as in 1864. In a world of vicissitudes such things do not change; the Sacred and Profane Love of Titian, though it had changed its name, had not changed its nature, and was as divinely serene, as richly beautiful as before. The Veroneses still glowed from the walls, dimming with their Venetian effulgence all the other pictures but the Botticellis and the Francias, and comforting one with the hope that, if one had always felt their beauty so much, one might, without suspecting it, have always had some little sense of art. But it was probably only a literary sense of art, such as moves the observer when he finds himself again in the presence of Canova’s Pauline Borghese. That is there, on the terms which were those no less of her character than of her time, in the lasting enjoyment of a publicity which her husband denied it in his lifetime; but it had no more to say now than it had so many, many years ago. As, a piece of personal history it is amusing enough, and as a sermon in stone it preaches whatever moral you choose to read into it. But as the masterpiece of the sculptor it testifies to an ideal of his art for which the world has reason to be grateful. Criticism does not now put Canova on the height where we once looked up to him; but criticism is a fickle thing, especially in its final judgments; and one cannot remember the behavior of the Virtues in some of the baroque churches without paying homage to the portrait of a lady who, whatever she was, was not a Virtue, but who yet helped the sculptor to realize in her statue a Venus of exceptional propriety. Tame, yes, we may now safely declare Canova to have been, but sane we must allow; and we must never forget that he has been the inspiration in modern sculpture of the eternal Greek truth of repose from which the art had so wildly wandered, He, more than any other, stayed it in the mad career on which Michelangelo, however remotely, had started it; and we owe it to him that the best marbles now no longer strut or swagger or bully.

It was by one of those accidents which are the best fortunes of travel that I visited the Villa Papa Giulio, when I thought I was merely going to the Piazza del Popolo, to which one cannot go too often. A chance look at my guide-book beguiled me with the notion that the villa was just outside the gate; but it was a deceit which I should be glad to have practised on me every February 17th of my life. If the villa was farther off than I thought, the way to it lay for a while through a tramwayed suburban street delightfully encumbered with wide-horned oxen drawing heavy wagon-loads of grain, donkeys pulling carts laden with vegetables, and children and hens and dogs playing their several parts in a perspective through which one would like to continue indefinitely. But after awhile a dim, cool, curving lane leaves this street and irresistibly invites your cab to follow it; and sooner than you could ask you get to the villa gate. There a gatekeeper tacitly wonders at your arriving before he is well awake, and will keep you a good five minutes while he parleys with another custodian before he can bring himself to sell you a ticket and let you into the beautiful, old, orange-gray cloistered court, where there is a young architect with the T-square of his calling sketching some point of it, and a gardener gently hacking off from the parent stems such palm-leaves as have survived their usefulness. Beyond is the famous fountained court, and a classic temple to the right, and other structures responsive to the impulses of the good Pope Julius III., who was never tired of adding to this pleasure palace of his. It was his favorite resort, with all his court, from the Vatican, and his favorite amusement in it was the somewhat academic diversion of proverbs, which Ranke says sometimes “mingled blushes with the smiles of his guests.”

Lest the reader should think I have gone direct to Ranke for this knowledge, I will own that I got it at second-hand out of Hare’s Walks in Rome, where he tells us also that the pope used to come to his villa every day by water, and that “the richly decorated barge, filled with venerable ecclesiastics, gliding through the osier-fringed banks of the Tiber,... would make a fine subject for a picture.” No doubt, and if I owned such a picture I would lose no time in public-spiritedly bestowing it on the first needy gallery. Our author is, as usual, terribly severe on the Italian government for some wrong done the villa, I could not well make out what. But it seems to involve the present disposition of the Etruscan antiquities in the upper rooms of the casino, where these, the most precious witnesses of that rather inarticulate civilization, must in any arrangement exhaust the most instructed interest. Just when the amateur archaeologist, however, is sinking under his learning, the custodian opens a window and lets him look out on a beautiful hill beyond certain gardens, where a bird is singing angelically. I suppose it is the same bird which sings all through these papers, and I am sorry I do not know its name. But we will call it a blackcap: blackcap has a sweet, saucy sound like its own note, and is the pretty translation of caponero, a name which the bird might gladly know itself by.

Villa Papa Giulio is but a little place compared with something on the scale of the Villa Pamfili Doria though from its casino it has a charm far beyond that. What it may once have been as to grounds and gardens there is little to show now, and the Pamfili Doria itself had not much to show in gardens, though it had grounds, and to spare. It is, in fact, a large park, though whether larger than the Villa Borghese I cannot say. But it has not been taken by the state, and it is so far off on its hills that it is safe from the overrunning of city feet. It is safe even from city wheels, unless they are those of livery carriages, for numbered cabs are not suffered in its proud precincts. You partake of this pride when you come in your rubber-tired remise, and have the consolation of being part of the beautiful exclusiveness. It costs you fifteen francs, but one must suffer for being patrician, even for a single afternoon. Outside we had the satisfaction of seeing innumerable numbered cabs drawn up, and within the villa gates of meeting or passing the plebeians who had come in them, and were now walking while we were smoothly rolling in our victoria. The day was everything we could ask, very warm and bright below the Janiculum, on which we had mounted, and here on the summit delicious with cool currents of air. There had been beggars, on the way up, at every point where our horses must be walked, and we had paid our way handsomely, so that when we went back they bowed without asking again; this is a convention at Rome which no self-respecting beggar will violate; they all touch their hats in recognition of it.

The beautiful prospect from a certain curve of the drive after you have passed the formal sunken garden, at which you pause, is the greatest beauty of the Villa Pamfili Doria. You stop to look at it by the impulse of your coachman, and then you keep on driving round, in the long ellipse which the road describes, through grassy and woody slopes and levels, watered by a pleasant stream, and through long aisles of pine and ilex. We thought twice round was enough, and told the driver so, to his evident surprise and to our own regret, so far as the long aisle of ilex was concerned, for I do not suppose there is a more perfect thing of its kind in the world. The shade under the thick sun-proof roofing of horizontal boughs was practically as old as night, and on our second passage of its dim length it had some Capuchin monks walking down it, who formed the fittest possible human interest in the perspective. Off on the grass at one side some Ursuline nuns were sitting with their pupils, laughing and talking, and one nun was playing ball with the smaller girls, and mingling with their shouts her own gay, innocent cries of joy as she romped among them. Nothing could have been prettier, sweeter, or better suited to the place; all was very simple, and apparently the whole place was hospitably free to the poor women who ranged over it, digging chiccory for salad out of the meadows. The daisies were thick as white clover, and the harsh purple of the anemones showed everywhere.

The casino is plainer than the casino of the Villa Borghese, and is not public like that; its sculptures have been taken to the Doria palace in the city; and there is no longer any excuse for curiosity even to try penetrating it. It stands on the left of the road by which you leave the villa, and to the right on the grassy incline in full view of the casino was something that puzzled us at first. It did not seem probable that the gigantic capital letters grown in box should be spelling the English name Mary, but it proved that they were, and later it proved that this was the name of the noble English lady whom the late Prince Pamfili Doria had married. Whether they marked her grave or merely commemorated her, it was easy to impute a pathos to the fancy of having them there, which it might not have been so easy to verify. You cannot attempt to pass over any ground in Rome without danger of sinking into historical depths from which it will be hard to extricate yourself, and it is best to heed one’s steps and keep them to the day’s activities. But one could not well visit the Villa Pamfili Doria without at least wishing to remember that in 1849 Garibaldi held it for weeks against the whole French army, in his defence of republican Rome. A votive temple within the villa grounds commemorates the invaders who fell in this struggle; on a neighboring height the Italian leader triumphs in the monument his adoring country has raised to him.

If we are to believe the censorious Hare, the love of the hero’s countrymen went rather far when the Roman municipality, to please him, tried to change the course of the Tiber in conformity with a scheme of his, and so spoiled the beauty of the Farnesina garden without effecting a too-difficult piece of engineering. The less passionate Murray says merely that “a large slice of this garden was cut off to widen the river for the Tiber embankment,” and let us hope that it was no worse. I suppose we must have seen the villa in its glory when we went, in 1864, to see the Raphael frescos in the casino there, but in the touching melancholy of the wasted and neglected grounds we easily accepted the present as an image of the past. For all we remembered, the weed-grown, green-mossed gravel-paths of the sort of bewildered garden that remained, with its quenched fountain, its vases of dead or dying plants, and its dishevelled shrubbery, were what had always been; and it was of such a charm that we were gratefully content with it. The truth is, one cannot do much with beauty in perfect repair; the splendor that belongs to somebody else, unless it belongs also to everybody else, wounds one’s vulgar pride and inspires envious doubts of the owner’s rightful possession. But when the blight of ruin has fallen upon it, when dilapidation and disintegration have begun their work of atonement and exculpation, then our hearts melt in compassion of the waning magnificence and in a soft pity for the expropriated possessor, to whom we attribute every fine and endearing quality. It is this which makes us such friends of the past and such critics of the present, and enables us to enjoy the adversity of others without a pang of the jealousy which their prosperity excites.

There was much to please a somewhat peculiar taste in our visit to the Farnesina. The gateman, being an Italian official, had not been at the gate when we arrived, but came running and smiling from his gossip with the door-keeper of the casino, and this was a good deal in itself; but the door-keeper, amiably obese, was better still in her acceptance of the joke with which the hand-mirror for the easier study of the roof frescos was accepted. “It is more convenient,” she suggested, and at the counter-suggestion, “Yes, especially for people with short necks,” she shook with gelatinous laughter, and burst into the generous cry, “Oh, how delightful!” Perhaps this was because she, too, had experienced the advantage of perusing the frescos in the hand-mirror’s reversal. At any rate, she would not be satisfied till she had returned a Roland for that easy Oliver. Her chance came in showing a Rubens in one of the rooms, with the master’s usual assortment of billowy beauties, when she could say — and she ought to have known — that they had eaten too much macaroni. It was not much of a joke; but one hears so few jokes in Rome.

Do I linger in this study of simple character because I feel myself unequal to the ecstasies which the frescos of Raphael and his school in that pleasure dome demanded of me? Something like that, I suppose, but I do not pride myself on my inability. It seemed to me that the coloring of the frescos had lost whatever tenderness it once had; and that what was never meant to be matter of conscious perception, but only of the vague sense which it is the office of decoration to impart, had grown less pleasing with the passage of time. There in the first hall was the story of Cupid and Psyche in the literal illustration of Apuleius, and there in another hall was Galatea on her shell with her Nymphs and Tritons and Amorini; and there were Perseus and Medusa and Icarus and Phaeton and the rest of them. But, if I gave way to all the frankness of my nature, I should own the subjects fallen silly through the old age of an outworn life and redeemed only by the wonderful skill with which they are rendered. At the same time, I will say in self-defence that, if I had a very long summer in which to keep coming and dwelling long hours in the company of these frescos, I think I might live back into the spirit which invented the fables, and enjoy even more the amusing taste that was never tired of their repetition. Masterly conception and incomparable execution are there in histories which are the dreams of worlds almost as extinct as the dead planets whose last rays still reach us and in whose death-glimmer we can fancy, if we will, a unity of life with our own not impossible nor improbable. But more than some such appeal the Raphaels and the Giulio Romanos of the Farnesina hardly make to the eye untrained in the art which created them, or unversed in the technique by which they will live till the last line moulders and the last tint fades.

We came out and stood a long time looking up in the pale afternoon light at the beautiful face of the tenderly aging but not yet decrepit casino. It was utterly charming, and it prompted many vagaries which I might easily have mistaken for ideas. This is perhaps the best of such experiences, and, after you have been with famous works of art and have got them well over and done with, it is natural and it is not unjust that you should wish to make them some return, if not in kind, then in quantity. You will try to believe that you have thought about them, and you should not too strictly inquire as to the fact. It is some such forbearance that accounts for a good deal of the appreciation and even the criticism of works of art.

IX. DRAMATIC INCIDENTS

If the joke of the door-keeper at the Farnesina was not so delicate in any sense as some other jokes, it had, at least, the merit of being voluntary. In fact, it is the only voluntary joke which I remember hearing in the Tuscan tongue from the Roman mouth during a stay of three months in the Eternal City. This was very disappointing, for I had always thought of the Italians as gay and as liking to laugh and to make laugh. In Venice, where I used to live, the gondoliers were full of jokes, good, bad, and indifferent, and an infection of humor seemed to spread from them to all the lower classes, who were as ready to joke as the lower classes of Irish, and who otherwise often reminded one of them. The joking habit extended as far down as Florence, even as Siena, and at Naples I had found cabmen who tempered their predacity with bonhomie. But the Romans were preferably serious, at least with the average American, though, if I had tried them in their English instead of my Italian, it might have been different. At times I thought, they felt the weight of being Romans, as it had descended to them from antiquity, and that the strain of supporting it had sobered them. In any case, though there was shouting by night, and some singing of not at all the Neapolitan quality and still less the Neapolitan quantity, there was no laughing, or, as far as I could see, smiling by day.

Yet one day there was a tragedy in front of the hotel next ours which would have made a dog laugh, as the saying is, unless it was a Roman dog. It was a quarrel, more or less murderous, between a fat, elderly man and an agile stripling of not half his age or girth, of whom the tumult about them permitted only fleeting glimpses. By these the elder seemed to be laboriously laying about him with a five-foot club and the younger to be making wild dashes at him and then escaping to the skirts of the cabmen, mounted and dismounted, who surrounded them. Now and then a cabman drove out of the mellee very excitedly, and then turned and drove excitedly back into the thick of it. All the while the dismounted cabmen pressed about the combatants with their hands on one another’s backs and their heads peering carefully over one another’s shoulders. On the very outermost rim of these, more careful than any, was one of those strange images whom you see about Italian towns in couples, with red-braided swallowtail coats and cocked hats, those carabinieres — namely, who are soldiers in war and policemen in times of peace. Any spectator from a foreign land would have thought it the business of such an officer of the law to press in and stop the fighting; but he did not so interpret his duty. He gingerly touched the shoulders next him with the tips of his fingers, and now and then lifted himself on the tips of his toes to look if the fight had stopped of itself or not.

At last the fat, elderly man, whom his friends — and all the throng except that one wicked youth seemed his friends — were caressing in untimely embraces and coaxing in tones of tender entreaty, burst from them, and, aiming at the head of his enemy, flung his club, to the imminent peril of all the bystanders, and missed him. Then he frankly put himself in the hands of his friends, who lifted him into a cab, where one of them mounted with him and stayed him on the seat, while the cabman drove rapidly away. The wicked youth had vanished in unknown space; but the carabiniere, attended by a group of admirers, marched boldly up the middle of the street, and the crowd, with whatever reluctance, persuaded itself to disperse, though the cabmen, to the number of ten or twenty, continued to drive around in concentric circles and irregular ellipses. In five minutes not an eye-witness of the fray remained, such being the fear of the law, not so much in those who break it as in those who see it broken, and who dread incurring the vengeance of the culprit, if he is acquitted, or of his family if he is convicted on their testimony. The quarrel had gone on a full quarter of an hour, but the concierge of the hotel in front of which it had raged professed to have known nothing of it, having, he said, been in-doors all the time. A cabman whom we eliminated from the hysterical company of his fellows and persuaded to drive us away to see a church attempted to ignore the whole affair when asked about it. With difficulty he could be made to recollect it, and then he dismissed it as a trifle. “Oh,” he said, “chiacchiere di donnicciuole,” which is something like “Clatter of little old women,” a thing not worth noticing. He had, if we could believe him, not cared to know how it began or ended, and he would not talk about it.

Later, still interested by the action of the carabiniere in guarding the public security in his own person, I asked an Italian gentleman, who owned to have seen the affair, why the officer did not break through the crowd and arrest the fighters. “They had knives,” he explained, and it seemed a good reason for the carabiniere’s forbearance, as far as it went; but I thought of the short work the brute locust of an Irish policeman at home would have made of the knives. My friend said he had himself gone to one of the municipal police who was looking on at a pleasant remove and said, “Those fellows have knives; they will kill each other,” and the municipal policeman had answered, with the calm of an antique Roman sentinel on duty in time of earthquake, “Let them kill.”

I could not approve of so much impartiality, but afterward it seemed to me I had little to be proud of in the shorter and easier method of our own police, as contrasted with the caution of that Roman carabiniere who left the combatants to the mild might of their friends’ moral suasion. It was better that the youth should escape, if he did, without a vexatious criminal trial; he may have been no more to blame than the other, who, I learned, had been carried off, in the honorable manner I saw, to a doctor and had his stab looked to. It was not dangerous, and the whole affair ended so. Besides, as I learned, still longer afterward, when it was quite safe for a cabman from the same stand to speak, the combatants were not Romans, but peasants from the Campagna, who had come in with their market-carts and had become heated with the bad spirits which the peasants have the habit of drinking five or six glasses of when they visit Rome. “What we call benzine,” my cabman explained. “We Romans,” he added from a moral height, “drink only a glass or two of wine, and we never carry knives.”

He may have been right concerning the peacefulness of the Romans and their sobriety, and I am bound to say that I never saw any other violent scene during my stay. Sometimes I heard loud quarrelling among our cabmen, and sometimes I was the subject of it, when one driver snatched me, an impartial prey, from another. But the bad feeling, if there was really any, quickly passed, and some other day I fell to the cabman who had been wronged of me. I had not always the fine sense of being booty which I had one day on coming out of a church and blundering toward the wrong cab. Then the driver whom I had left waiting at the door seized me from the very cab of an unjust rival with the indignant cry, “E roba mia!” (He’s my stuff!). It was not quite the phrase I would have chosen, but I had no quarrel, generally speaking, with the cabmen of Rome. To be sure, they have not a rubber tire among them, and their dress leaves much to be desired in professional uniformity. Not one of them looks like a cabman, but many of them in picturesqueness of hats and coats look like brigands. I think they would each prefer to have a fur-lined overcoat, which the Roman of any class likes to wear well into the spring; but they mostly content themselves with an Astrakhan collar, more or less mangy. For the rest, some of them will point out the objects of interest as you pass, and they are proud to do so; they are not extortionate, and, if you overpay them ever so little (which is quite worth while), they will not stand upon a matter of lawful fare. A two-cent tip contents them, one of four cents makes them your friends for life; as for a five-cent tip, I do not know what it does, but I advise the reader when he goes to Rome to try it and see.

One fine thing is that the cabmen are in great superabundance in Rome, and the number of barrel-ribbed, ewe-necked, and broken-kneed horses is in no greater proportion than in Paris. Still, the average is large, though, if you will go to the stand, you may select any horse you please without offence. It was a cheerful sight, verging upon gayety, to see every morning the crowd of cabs at our stand and to hear the drivers’ talk, sometimes rising into protest and mutual upbraiding. But one Thursday morning, the brightest of the spring, a Sunday silence had fallen on the place, and a Sabbath solitude deepened to the eye the mystery that had first addressed itself to the ear. Then, suddenly, we knew that we were in the presence of that Italian conception of a general strike which interprets itself as a sciopero. It is saying very little of that two days’ strike to say that it was far the most impressive experience of our Roman winter; in some sort it was the most impressive experience of my life, for I beheld in it a reduced and imperfect image of what labor could do if it universally chose to do nothing. The dream of William Morris was that a world which we know is pretty much wrong could be put right by this simple process. The trouble has always been to get all sorts of labor to join in the universal strike, but in the Italian sciopero of four years ago the miracle was wrought from one end of the peninsula to the other.

In the Roman strike of last April a partial miracle of the same nature was illustratively wrought, with the same alarming effect on the imagination.

As with the national strike, the inspiration of the Roman strike came from the government’s violent dealing with a popular manifestation which only threatened to be mischievous. A stone-mason was killed by falling from a scaffolding, and his funeral was attended by so many hundreds, amounting to thousands, of workmen that the police conceived, not quite unjustifiably, that it was to be made the occasion of a demonstration, especially as the proposed route of the procession lay through the Piazza di Venezia, under the windows of the Austrian Embassy, Austria being always a red rag to the Italian bull and peculiarly irritating through the reservation of the Palazzo Venezia to the ancient enemy at the cession of Venice to Italy. The mourners were therefore forbidden to pass that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the Piazza Gesu, before the Jesuit church, with a strong detachment of troops to support them. Their wisdom in all this was very questionable after what followed, for the mourners insisted on their rights and would go no way but through the Piazza di Venezia. When the dispute was at its height two wagons laden with bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed upon them, broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police. They had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police would stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in their paroxysms of pain the sufferers began firing their revolvers at the mourners. Four persons were killed, with the usual proportion of innocent spectators. At night the labor unions met, and the sciopero was proclaimed as an expression of the popular indignation; but the police had been left with the victory. Whether it was not in some sort a defeat I do not know, but a retired English officer, whom I had no reason to think a radical, said to me that he thought it a great mistake to have let the police oppose the people with firearms. Soldiers should alone be used for such work; they alone knew when to fire and when to stop, and they never acted without orders. In fact, the troops supporting the police took no part in the fray, as the workmen’s press recognized with patriotic rejoicing.

The next morning a signal silence prevailed throughout the city, where not a wheel stirred or the sound of a hoof broke the hush of the streets. We had noted already that there were seven Sundays every week in Rome, as was fit in the capital of the Christian religion, but this Thursday was of an intenser Sabbath stillness than any first day of the week that we had yet known. There was the clack of passing feet in the street under our windows, but we looked out upon a yawning void where the busy cabs had clustered, and the cabmen had socially chaffed and quarrelled, and entreated the stranger in the cabman’s superstition that a stranger never knows when he wants a cab. Now he could have walked all over Rome without being once invited to drive. Except for here and there a private carriage, or the coupe evidently of a doctor, the streets were empty, and the tourists had to join the citizens in their pedestrian exercise.

The shopkeepers had been notified to close their places of business on the tacit condition of having their windows broken for non-compliance, but in the early forenoon they were still slowly and partially putting up their shutters. You could get in through the darkened doors up till noon; after that it was more and more difficult. But it would be hard to say how far and how deep the sciopero went. In our hotel we knew of it only the second day through the failure of the morning rolls, for there had been no baking overnight. Most of the in-door service was of Swiss or other foreign extraction, and the mechanism of our comfort, our luxury, was operated as usual. Our floor facchino, or porter, went to the meeting of the unions in the evening, being an Italian. Otherwise the strike fell especially on the helpless and guiltless foreigner, who might be, and very often was, in sympathy with the strikers. He had to walk to the ruins, the galleries, the gardens, the churches, if he wanted anything of them; he could not get a carriage even from a stable.

Between the hotels and the station the omnibus traffic was suspended. The railroads being national, push-carts manned by the government employes carried the baggage to and fro, but if one wanted to arrive or depart one had to do it on foot. Tragical scenes presented themselves in relation to this fact. In the afternoon, as I walked up the street toward the great railroad station, I saw coming down the middle of it a strange procession of ladies and gentlemen of every age, gray-haired elders and children of tender years, mixed with porters and push-carts, footing it into the region of the fashionable hotels. They were all laden according to their strength, and people who had never done a stroke of work in their lives were actually carrying their own hand-bags, rugs, and umbrella-cases. It was terrible.

It was terrible for what it was, and terrible for what it suggested, if ever that poor dull beast of labor took the bit permanently into its teeth, or, worse yet, hung back in the breeching and inexorably balked. What would then become of us others, us ladies and gentlemen who had never done a stroke of work and never wished to do one? Should we be forced to the hard necessity of beginning? Could we remain in the comfortable belief that we gave work, or must we be made to own distastefully that it had always been given to us? Should we be able to flatter ourselves with the notion that we had once had dependents because we had money, or should we realize that we had always been dependents because of our having money?

These were the hateful doubts which the Roman strike suggested to the witness, or, at least, one of the witnesses, who has here the pleasure of unburdening himself upon the reader. Yet there was something amusing in the situation; there was a joke — that rarest of all things in Rome — latent in it, which one suspected only from the amiable, the all-but-smiling behavior of the strikers. There was not the slightest disorder during the two days that the strike lasted. When it was called off at a meeting of the unions on Saturday night, one of the seven Sundays of the Roman week dawned upon an activity at the neighboring cab-stand no peacefuller and not much gayer than the silence and solitude of the mornings previous. As for the general effect in the city, you would hardly have known that particular Sunday from those which had gone by the names of Friday and Saturday. Throughout Italy there is now a Sunday-closing law whose effect in a land once of joyous Sabbaths strikes some such chill to the heart as pierces it in Boston on that day, or in the farther eastern or western avenues of New York, when the Family Entrances are religiously locked.

The Italian state has, in fact, so far taken the matter in charge as to have established a secular holiday, coming once a week, which has almost disestablished the holidays of the Church, formerly of much more frequent occurrence. This secular holiday, which every workman has a right to, he may neither give nor sell to his master. He may not even loaf it away in the place where he works, lest he should be clandestinely employed. He must go out of the shop or house or factory or foundry, and spend his ten hours where he cannot be suspected of employing them in productive industry for hire. This law has been enacted in accordance with the will of the unions and no doubt in correction of great abuses. Neither masters nor men now recognize the old-fashioned festa as they once did. Whether the men like the new holiday so well, I did not get any of them explicitly to say. Of course, they cannot all take it at once; they must take it turn about, and they may not find their enforced leisure so lively as the old voluntary saints’ days, when their comrades were resting, too. As for the masters, one of the employers of labor, whom I found filling his man’s place, would merely say: “It is the new law. No doubt we shall adjust ourselves to it.” He did not complain.

X. SEEING ROME AS ROMANS SEE US

Shortly after our settlement in the Eternal City, which has so much more time to be seen than the so-journer has to see it, I pleased myself with the notion of surprising it by visiting in a studied succession the many different piazzas. This, I thought, would acquaint me with the different churches, and on the way to them I should make friends with the various quarters. Everything, old or new, would have the charm of the unexpected; no lurking ruin would escape me; no monument, whether column or obelisk, statue, “storied urn or animated bust” or mere tablet, would be safe from my indirect research. Before I knew it, I should know Rome by heart, and this would be something to boast of long after I had forgotten it.

I could not say what suggested so admirable a notion, but it may have been coming by chance one day on the statue of Giordano Bruno, and realizing that it stood in the Campo di Fieri, on the spot where he was burned three hundred years ago for abetting Copernicus in his sacrilegious system of astronomy, and for divers other heresies, as well as the violation of his monastic vows. I saw it with the thrill which the solemn figure, heavily draped, deeply hooded, must impart as mere mystery, and I made haste to come again in the knowledge of what it was that had moved me so. Naturally I was not moved in the same measure a second time. It was not that the environment was, to my mind, unworthy the martyr, though I found the market at the foot of the statue given over, not to flowers, as the name of the place might imply, but to such homely fruits of the earth as potatoes, carrots, cabbages, and, above all, onions. There was a placidity in the simple scene that pleased me: I liked the quiet gossiping of the old market-women over their baskets of vegetables; the confidential fashion in which a gentle crone came to my elbow and begged of me in undertone, as if she meant the matter to go no further, was even mattering. But the solemnity of the face that looked down on the scene was spoiled by the ribbon drawn across it to fasten a wreath on the head, in the effort of some mistaken zealot of free thought to enhance its majesty by decoration. It was the moment when the society calling itself by Giordano Bruno’s name was making an effort for the suppression of ecclesiastical instruction in the public schools; and on the anniversary of his martyrdom his effigy had suffered this unmeant hurt. In all the churches there had been printed appeals to parents against the agnostic attack on the altar and the home, and there had been some of the open tumults which seem in Rome to express every social emotion. But the clericals had triumphed, and an observer more anxious than I to give a mystical meaning to accident might have interpreted the disfiguring ribbon over Bruno’s bronze lips as a new silencing of the heretic.

I certainly did not construe it so, and, if my notion of serially visiting the piazzas of Rome was not prompted by my chance glimpse of the Campo di Fiori, it was certainly not relinquished because of any mischance in my meditated vision of it. I had merely reflected that I could not hope to carry out my scheme without greater expense both in time and money than I could well afford, for, though cabs in Rome are swift and cheap, yet the piazzas are many and widely distributed; and I finally decided to indulge myself in a novelty of adventure verging close upon originality. It had always seemed to me that the happy strangers mounted on the tiers of seats that rise from front to back on the motor-chariots for seeing New York and looking down, even from the lowest place, on the life of our streets had a peculiar, almost a bird’s-eye view of it which I might well find the means of a fresh impression. But I never had the courage, for reasons which I have not the courage to give, though the reader can perhaps imagine them. In Rome I did not feel that the like reasons held; of all the unknown, I was one of the most unknown; by me nobody would be put to the shame of recognizing an acquaintance on the benches of the like chariot, or forced to the cruelty of cutting him in my person. When once I had fully realized this, it was only a question of the time when I should yield to the temptation which renewed itself as often as I saw the stately automobile passing through the storied streets, with its English legend of “Touring Rome” inscribed on the back of the rear seat. There remained the question whether I should go alone or whether I should ask the countenance of friends in so bold an enterprise. When I suggested it to some persons of the more courageous sex, they did not wait to be asked to go with me; they instantly entreated to be allowed to go; they said they had always wished to see Rome in that way; and we only waited to be chosen by the raw and blustery afternoon which made us its own for the occasion.

It was the eve of the last sad day of such shrunken and faded carnival as is still left to Rome, and there were signs of it in the straggling groups of children in holiday costume, and in here and there a pair of young girls in a cab, safely masked against identification and venting, in the sense of wild escape, the joyous spirits kept in restraint all the rest of the year. Already in the Corso, where our touring-car waited for us at the first corner, a great cafe was turning itself inside out with a spread of chairs and tables over the sidewalk, which we found thronged on our return with spectators far outnumbering the merrymakers of the carnival. Our car was not nearly so packed, and when we mounted to the benches we found that the last and highest of them was left to the sole occupancy of a young man, well enough dressed (his yellow gloves may have been more than well enough) and well-mannered enough, who continued enigmatical to the last. There was a German couple and there were some French-speaking people; the rest of us were bound in the tie of our common English. The agent of the enterprise accompanied us, an international of undetermined race, and beside the chauffeur sat the middle-aged, anxious-looking Italian who presently arose when we made our first stop in the Piazza Colonna and harangued us in three languages — successively, of course — concerning the Column of Marcus Aurelius. He did not use the megaphone of his American confrere; and from the shudder which the first sound of his voice must have sent through a less fastidious substance than mine I perceived that an address by megaphone I could not have borne; to that extreme of excess even my modernism could not go. As it was, there was an instant when I could have wished to be on foot, or even in a cab, with a red Baedeker in my hand; and yet, as the orator went on, I had to own that he was giving me a better account of the column than I could have got for myself out of the guide-book. He spoke first in French, with an Italian accent and occasionally an Italian idiom; then he spoke in English, and then in a German which suffered from his knowledge of English.

He sat down, looking rather spent with his effort, and on the way to our next stop, at the Temple of Neptune, the agent examined us upon our necessities in the article of language. He himself spoke such good English that we could not do otherwise than declare that we could get on perfectly with an address in French. The German pair, perhaps from patriotic grudge, denied a working knowledge of the unfriendly tongue. The solitary on the back seat, being asked in his turn, graciously answered, “Toutes les langues me sont egales,” and thereafter we suffered with the orator only through French and German.

The reply which decided the matter launched us upon yet wider conjecture regarding the unknown: was he a retired courier, a concierge out of place, a professor of languages on his holiday, or merely an amateur of philological studies? His declared proficiency was manifested in unexpected measure as we drove away from the Temple of Neptune on through the narrow street leading to it. Every motor has its peculiar note, and our car had something like the scream of a wild animal in pain, such as might have justly alarmed a stouter spirit than that of the poor little cab-horse which we encountered at the corner of this street. It reared, it plunged; when our chauffeur held us in it still backed and filled so dangerously that the mother and children overflowing the cab followed the example of the driver in spilling to the ground. Then our good international, the agent, jumped down and, mounting to the coachman’s seat, took the reins and urged the horse forward, while its driver pulled it by the bridle. All was of no effect till the solitary of the back seat rose in his place and shouted to the frightened creature in choice American: “What d’ you mean, there? Come on! Come on, you fool!” Then, as if it had been an “impenitent mule” in some far-distant Far-Western incarnation, this Eoman cab-horse recognized the voice of authority; it nerved itself against the imaginary danger, and came steadily forward; our agent regained his place, and we moved shriekingly on to the next object of interest. It was not quite the note blown from level tubes of brass in the progress of a conqueror, but we did not lack the cheers of a disinterested populace, which at several points impartially applauded our orator’s French and German versions of his not always tacit Italian.

Our height above the cheers helped preserve us from the sense of anything ironical in them, and there was an advantage in the outlook from our elevation which the wayfarer in cab or on foot can only imagine. No such wayfarer can realize the vast scope and compass of our excursion, which was but one of two excursions made on alternate afternoons by the Touring-Rome wagons. It included, perhaps not quite in the following order, after the Temple of Neptune, such objects of prime importance as the Palazzo Madama, where Catharine de’ Medici once dwelt and where the Italian Senate now holds its sessions; the Fountain of Trevi, the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, the new Palace of Justice and the Cavour monument beyond the Tiber, the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, the Vatican and St. Peter’s, the Janiculum and the Garibaldi monument on it, and the stupendous prospect of the city from that supreme top, the bridge that Horatius held in Macaulay’s ballad, the island in the Tiber formed after the expulsion of the Tarquins by the river sand and drift catching on the seed-corn thrown into the stream from the fields consecrated to Mars, the Temple of Fortune, the once-supposed House of Rienzi, and the former Temple of Vesta; the Palatine Hill and the Aventine Hill, the Circus Maximus, the Colosseum, the Campidoglio, the Theatre of Marcellus, the worst slum in Rome, where the worst boy in Rome, flown with Carnival, will try to board your passing car; back to Piazza Colonna through Piazza Monte Citerio, where the Italian House of Deputies meets in the plain old palace of the same name.

The mere mention of these storied places will kindle in the reader’s fancy a fire which he will feel all the need of if ever he verifies my account of them in touring Rome on so cold an afternoon as that of our excursion. The wind rose with our ascent of every elevation, if it did not fall with our return to a lower level; on the Janiculum it blew a blizzard in which the incongruous ilexes and laurels bowed and writhed, and some groups of almond-trees in their pale bloom on a distant upland mocked us with a derisive image of spring. At the foot of the steps to the Campidoglio, where some of our party dismounted to go up and view the statue of Marcus Aurelius, it was so cold that nothing but the sense of a strong common interest prevented those who remained from persuading the chauffeur to go on without the sight-seers. But we forbore, both because we knew we were then very near the end of our tour, and because we felt it would have been cruel to abandon the lady who had got out of the car only by turning herself sidewise and could not have made her way home on foot without sufferings which would justly have brought us to shame. Certain idle particulars will always cling to the memory which lets so many ennobling facts slip from it; and I find myself helpless against the recollection of this poor lady’s wearing a thick motoring-veil which no curiosity could pierce, but which, when she lifted it, revealed a complexion of heated copper and a gray mustache such as nature vouchsafes to few women.

The crowd, which thickened most in the Piazza di Venezia, had grown more and more carnivalesque in attire and behavior. We had been obliged to avoid the more densely peopled streets because, as our international explained, if the car had slowed at any point the revellers would have joined our excursion of their own initiative and accompanied us to the end in overwhelming numbers. They wellnigh blocked the entrance of the Corso when we got back to it, and the cafe where we had agreed to have tea was so packed that our gay escapade began to look rather gloomy in the retrospect. But suddenly a table was vacated; a waiter was caught, in the vain attempt to ignore us, and given such a comprehensive order that we could see respect kindling in his eyes, and before we could reasonably have hoped it be spread before us tea and bread and butter and tarts and little cakes, while scores of hungry spectators stood round and flatteringly envied us. In this happy climax our adventure showed as a royal progress throughout. We counted up the wonders of our three hours’ course in an absolutely novel light; and we said that touring Rome was a thing not only not to be despised, but to be forever proud of.

For myself, I decided that if I were some poor hurried fellow-countryman of mine, doing Europe in a month and obliged to scamp Rome with a couple of days, I would not fail to spend two of them in what I must always think of as a triumphal chariot. I resolved to take the second excursion, not the next day perhaps, but certainly the day after the next, and complete the most compendious impression of ancient, mediaeval, and modern Rome that one can have; but the firmest resolution sometimes has not force to hold one to it. The second excursion remains for a second sojourn, when perhaps I may be able to solve the question whether I was moved by a fine instinct of proportion or by mere innate meanness in giving our orator at parting just two francs in recognition of his eloquence. No one else, indeed, gave him anything, and he seemed rather surprised by my tempered munificence. It might have been mystically adjusted to the number of languages he used in addressing us; if he had held to three languages I might have made it three francs; but now I shall never be certain till I take the second excursion with a company which imperatively requires English as well as French and German, and with no solitary in yellow gloves to whom all languages are alike.

To this end I ought to have thrown a copper coin into the Fountain of Trevi as we passed it. You may return to Rome without doing this, but it is well known that if you do it you are sure to come back. The Fountain of Trevi is alone worth coming back for, and I could not see that it poured scanter streams than it formerly poured over brimming brinks or from the clefts of the artificial rocks that spread in fine disorder about the feet of its sea-gods and sea-horses; but they who mourn the old papal rule accuse the present Italian government of stinting the supply of water. To me there seemed no stint of water in any of the fountains of Rome. In some a mere wasteful spilth seems the sole design of the artist, as in the Fontana Paolina on the Janiculum, where the cold wash of its deluge seemed to add a piercing chill to our windy afternoon. The other fountains have each a quaint grace or absolute charm or pleasing absurdity, whether the waters shower over groups of more or less irrelevant statuary in their basins or spout into the air in columns unfurling flags of spray and keeping the pavement about them green with tender mould. The most sympathetic is the Fountain of the Triton, who blows the water through his wreathed horn and on the coldest day seems not to mind its refluent splash on his mossy back; in fact, he seems rather to like it.

He is one of many tritons, rivers, sea-gods, and aqueous allegories similarly employed in Rome and similarly indifferent to what flesh and blood might find the hardship of their calling. I had rashly said to myself that their respective fountains needed the sun on them to be just what one could wish, but the first gray days taught me better. Then the thinly clouded sky dropped a softened light over their glitter and sparkle and gave them a spirituality as much removed from the suggestion of physical cold as any diaphanous apparition would suggest. Then they seemed rapt into a finer beauty than that of earth, though I will not pretend that they were alike beautiful. No fountain can be quite ugly, but some fountains can be quite stupid, like, for instance, those which give its pretty name to the Street of the Four Fountains and which consist of two extremely plain Virtues and two very dull old Rivers, diagonally dozing at each other over their urns in niches of the four converging edifices. They are not quite so idiotic under their disproportionate foliage as the conventional Egyptian lions of the Fountain of Moses, with manes like the wigs of so many lord chancellors, and with thin streams of water drooling from the tubes between their lips. But these are the exceptional fountains; there are few sculptured or architectural designs which the showering or spouting water does not retrieve from error; and in Rome the water (deliciously potable) is so abundant that it has force to do almost anything for beauty, even where, as in the Fontana Paolina, it is merely a torrent tumbling over a facade. It is lavished everywhere; in the Piazza Navona alone there are three fountains, but then the Piazza Navona is very long, and three fountains are few enough for it, even though one is that famous Fountain of Bernini, in which he has made one of the usual rivers — the Nile, I believe — holding his hand before his eyes in mock terror of the ungainly facade of a rival architect’s church opposite, lest it shall fall and crush him. That, however, is the least merit of the fountain; and without any fountain the Piazza Navona would be charming; it is such a vast lake of sunshine and is so wide as well as long, and is so mellowed with such rich browns and golden grays in the noble edifices.

I do not know, now, what all the edifices are, but there are churches, more than one, and palaces, and the reader can find their names in any of the guidebooks. If I were buying piazzas in Rome I should begin with the Navona, but there are enough to suit all purses and tastes. The fountains would be thrown in, I suppose, along with the churches and palaces; but I really never inquired, and, in fact, not having carried out my plan of visiting them all, I am in no position to advise intending purchasers. What I can say is that if you are in a hurry to inspect, that kind of property, and in immediate need of a piazza, you cannot do better than take the wagon for touring Rome. In two days you can visit every piazza worth having, including the Piazza di Spagna, where there is a fountain in the form of a marble galley in which you can embark for any fairyland you like, through the Via del Babuino and the Piazza del Popolo. Come to think of it, I am not so sure but I would as soon have the Piazza del Popolo as the Piazza Navona. If the fountains are not so fine, they are still very fine, and the Pincian Hill overtops one side of the place, with foliaged drives and gardened walks descending into it.

Everything of importance that did not happen elsewhere in Rome seems to have happened in the Piazza del Popolo, and I may name as a few of its attractions for investors the facts that it was here Sulla’s funeral pyre was kindled; that Nero was buried on the left side of it, and out of his tomb grew a huge walnut-tree, the haunt of demoniacal crows till the Madonna appeared to Paschal II. and bade him cut it down; that the arch-heretic Luther sojourned in the Augustinian convent here while in Rome; that the dignitaries of Church and State received Christina of Sweden here when, after her conversion, she visited the city; that Lucrezia Borgia celebrated her betrothal in one of the churches; that it used to be a favorite place for executing brigands, whose wives then became artists’ models, and whose sons, if they were like Cardinal Antonelli, became princes of the Church. So I learn from Hare in his Walks in Rome, and, if he enables me to boast the rivalry of the Piazza Navona in no such array of merits, still I will not deny my love for it. Certainly it was not a favorite place for executing brigands, but the miracle which saved St. Agnes from, cruel shame was wrought in the vaulted chambers under the church of her name there, and that is something beyond all the wonders of the Piazza del Popolo for its pathos and for its poetry. But, if the Piazza Navona had no other claim on me, I should find a peculiar pleasure in the old custom of stopping the escapes from its fountains and flooding with water the place I saw flooded with sun, for the patricians to wade and drive about in during the very hot weather and eat ices and drink coffee, while the plebeians looked sumptuously down on them from the galleries built around the lake.

XI. IN AND ABOUT THE VATICAN

It would be a very bold or very incompetent observer of the Roman situation who should venture upon a decided opinion of the relations of the monarchy and the papacy. You hear it said with intimations of special authority in the matter, that both king and pope are well content with the situation, and it is clearly explained how and why they are so; but I did not understand how or why at the moment of the explanation, or else I have now forgotten whatever was clear in it. I believe, however, it was to the effect that the pope willingly remained self-prisoned in the Vatican because, if he came out, he might not only invalidate a future claim upon the sovereign dignity which the Italian occupation had invaded, but he might incur risks from the more unfriendly extremists which would at least be very offensive. On his part, it was said that the king used the embarrassment occasioned by the pope’s attitude as his own defence against the anti-Clericals, who otherwise would have urged him to far more hostile measures with the Church. The king and the pope were therefore not very real enemies, it was said by those who tried to believe themselves better informed than others.

To the passing or tarrying stranger the situation does not offer many dramatic aspects. When you are going to St. Peter’s, if you will look up at the plain wall of the Vatican palace you will see two windows with their shutters open, and these are the windows of the rooms where Pius X. lives, a voluntary captive; the closed blinds are those of the rooms where Leo XIII. died, a voluntary captive. Whatever we think of the wisdom or the reason of the papal protest against the occupation of the States of the Church by the Italian people, these windows have their pathos. The pope immures himself in the Vatican and takes his walks in the Vatican gardens, whose beauty I could have envied him, if he had not been a prisoner, when I caught a glimpse of them one morning, with the high walls of their privet and laurel alleys blackening in the sun.

But otherwise the severest Protestant could not cherish so unkind a feeling toward the gentle priest whom all men speak well of for his piety and humility. It is a touching fact of his private life that his three maiden sisters, who wish to be as near him as they can, have their simple lodging over a shop for the sale of holy images in a street opening into the Piazza of St. Peter’s. We all know that they are of a Venetian family neither rich nor great; their pride and joy is solely in him, as it well might be, and it is said that when they come to hear him in some high function at the Sistine Chapel their rapture of affection and devotion is as evident as it is sweet and touching.

Their relation to him is the supremely poetic fact of a situation which even one who knows of it merely by hearsay cannot refuse to feel. The tragical effect of the situation is in the straining and sundering of family ties among those who take one side or the other in the difference of the monarchy and papacy. I do not know how equally Roman society, in the large or the small sense, is divided into the Black of the Papists and the White of the Monarchists (for the mediaeval names of Neri and Bianchi are revived in the modern differences), but one cannot help hearing of instances in which their political and religious opinions part fathers and sons and mothers and daughters. These are promptly noted to the least-inquiring foreigner, and his imagination is kindled by the attribution of like variances to the members of the reigning family, who are reported respectively blacker and whiter if they are not as positively black or white as the nobles. Some of these are said to meet one another only in secret across the gulf that divides them openly; but how far the cleavage may descend among other classes I cannot venture to conjecture; I can only testify to some expressions of priest-hatred which might have shocked a hardier heretical substance than mine.

One Sunday we went to the wonderful old Church of San Clemente, which is built three deep into the earth or high into the air, one story above or below the other, in the three successive periods of imperial, mediaeval, and modern Rome. It was the day when the church is illuminated, and the visitors come with their Baedekers and Hares and Murrays to identify its antiquities of architecture and fresco; it was full of people, and, if I fancied an unusual proportion of English-speaking converts among them, that might well have been, since the adjoining convent belongs to the Irish Dominicans. But I carried with me through all the historic and artistic interest of the place the sensation left by two inscriptions daubed in black on the white convent wall next the church. One of these read: “VV. la Repubblica” (Long live the Republic), and the other: “M. ai Preti” (Death to the Priests). No attempt had been made to efface them, and as they expressed an equal hatred for the monarchy and the papacy, neither laity nor clergy may have felt obliged to interfere. Perhaps, however, it was rightly inferred that the ferocity of one inscription might be best left to counteract the influence of the other. I know that with regard to the priests you experience some such effect from the atrocious attacks in the chief satirical paper of Rome, The name of this paper was given me, with a deprecation not unmixed with recognition of its cleverness, by an Italian friend whom I was making my creditor for some knowledge of Roman journalism; and the sole copy of it which I bought was handed to me with a sort of smiling abhorrence by the kindly old kiosk woman whom I liked best to buy my daily papers of. When I came to look it through, I made more and more haste, for its satire of the priests was of an indecency so rank that it seemed to offend the nose as well as the eye. To turn from the paper was easy, but from the fact of its popularity a painful impression remained. It was not a question of whether the priests were so bad as all that, but whether its many readers believed them so, or believed them bad short of it, in the kind of wickedness they were accused of.

There can be no doubt of the constant rancor between the Clericals and the Radicals in their different phases throughout Italy. There can be almost no doubt that the Radicals will have their way increasingly, and that if, for instance, the catechism is kept in the public schools this year, it will be cast out some other year not far hence. Much, of course, depends upon whether the status can maintain itself. It is, like the status everywhere and always, very anomalous; but it is difficult to imagine either the monarchy or the papacy yielding at any point. Apparently the State is the more self-assertive of the two, but this is through the patriotism which is the political life of the people. It must always be remembered that when the Italians entered Rome and made it the capital of their kingdom they did not drive out the French troops, which had already been withdrawn; they drove out the papal troops, the picturesque and inefficient foreign volunteers who remained behind. Every memorial of that event, therefore, is a blow at the Church, so far as the Church is identified with the lost temporal power. One of the chief avenues is named Twenty-second September Street because the national troops entered Rome on that date; the tablets on the Porta Pia where they entered, the monument on the Pincio to the Cairoli brothers, who died for Italy; the statues of Garibaldi, of Cavour, of Victor Emmanuel everywhere painfully remind the papacy of its lost sovereignty. But the national feeling has gone in its expression beyond and behind the patriotic occupation of Rome; and no one who suffered conspicuously, at any time in the past, for freedom of thought through the piety of the fallen power is suffered to be forgotten. On its side the Church enters its perpetual protest in the self-imprisonment of the pope; and here and there, according to its opportunity, it makes record of what it has suffered from the State. For instance, at St. John Lateran, which theoretically forms part of the Leonine City of the Popes and is therefore extraterritorial to Italy, a stretch of wall is suffered to remain scarred by the cannon-shot which the monarchy fired when it took Rome from the papacy.

Doubtless there are other monuments of the kind, but their enumeration would not throw greater light on a situation which endures with no apparent promise of change. The patience of the Church is infinite; it lives and it outlives. Remembering that Arianism was older than Protestantism when Catholicism finally survived it, we must not be surprised if the Roman Church shall hold out against the Italian State not merely decades, but centuries. In the meanwhile to its children from other lands it means Rome above all the other Romes; and on us, its step-children of different faiths or unfaiths, its prison-house — if we choose so to think of the Vatican — has a supreme claim, if we love the sculpture of pagan Rome or the painting of Christian Rome.

We swarm to its galleries in every variety of nationality, with guide-books in every tongue, and we are very queer, for the most part, to any one of our number who can sufficiently exteriorate himself to get the rest of us in perspective. It is probably well that most of us do not stagger under any great knowledge of the crushing history of the place, which has been the scene of the most terrible experiences of the race, the most touching, the most august. Provisionally ignorant, at least, we begin to appear at the earliest practicable hour before the outermost stairway of the Vatican, and, while the Swiss Guards still have on their long, blue cloaks to keep their black and yellow legs warm, mount to the Sistine Chapel. Here we help instruct one another, as we stand about or sit about in twos and threes or larger groups, reading aloud from our polyglot Baedekers while we join in identifying the different facts. Here, stupendously familiar, whether we have seen it before or not, is Michelangelo’s giant fresco of the Judgment, as prodigious as we imagined or remembered it; here are his mighty Prophets and his mighty Sibyls; and here below them, in incomparably greater charm, are the frescos of Botticelli, with the grace of his Primavera playing through them all like a strain of music and taking the soul with joy.

It is the same crowd in the Raphael Stanze, but rather silenter, for by now we have taught ourselves enough from our Baedekers at least to read them under our breaths, and we talk low before the frescos and the canvases. Some of us are even mute in the presence of the School of Athens, whatever reserves we may utter concerning the Transfiguration. If we are honest, we more or less own what our impressions really are from those other famous works, concerning which our impressions are otherwise altogether and inexpressibly unimportant; it is a question of ethics and not aesthetics, as most of our simple-hearted company suppose it to be; and, if we are dishonest, we pretend to have felt and thought things at first-hand from them which we have learned at second-hand from our reading. I will confess, for my small part, that I had more pleasure in the coloring and feeling of some of the older canvases and in here and there a Titian than in all the Raphaels in the Stanze of his name.

I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms, with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art, welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the human mind. I remembered those peaceful pagans so perfectly that I could have gone confidently to this or that and hailed him friend; and though I might not have liked to claim the acquaintance of all of them in the flesh, in the marble I fled to it as refuge from the cruel visions of Christian art. If this is perhaps saying too much, I wish also to hedge from the wholesale censure of my fellow-sight-seers which I may have seemed to imply. They did not prevail so clutteringly in the sculpture galleries as in the Sistine Chapel and the Stanze. One could have the statues as much to one’s self as one liked; there were courts with murmuring fountains in them; and there was a view of Rome from a certain window, where no fellow-tourist intruded between one and the innumerable roofs and domes and towers, and the heights beyond whose snows there was nothing but blue sky. It was a beautiful morning, with a sun mild as English summer, which did not prevent the afternoon from turning cold with wind and raining and hailing and snowing. This in turn did not keep off a fine red sunset, with an evening star of glittering silver that brightened as the sunset faded. At Rome the weather can be of as many minds in March as in April at New York.

But through all one’s remembrance of the Roman winter a sentiment of spring plays enchantingly, like that grace of Botticelli’s Primavera in his Sistine frescos. It is not a sentiment of summer, though it is sometimes a summer warmth which you feel, and except in the steam-heated hotels it does not penetrate to the interiors. In the galleries and the churches you must blow your nails if you wish to thaw your fingers, but, if you go out-of-doors, there is a radiant imitation of May awaiting you. She takes you by your thick glove and leads you in your fur-lined overcoat through sullen streets that open upon sunny squares, with fountains streaming into the crystal air, and makes you own that this is the Italian winter as advertised — that is, if you are a wanderer and a stranger; if you are an Italian and at home you keep in the out-door warmth, but shun the sun, and in-doors you wrap up more thickly than ever, or you go to bed if you have a more luxurious prejudice against shivering. If you are a beggar, as you very well may be in Rome, you impart your personal heat to a specific curbstone or the spot which you select as being most in the path of charity, and cling to it from dawn till dark. Or you acquire somehow the rights of a chair just within the padded curtain of a church, and do not leave it till the hour for closing. The Roman beggars are of all claims upon pity, but preferably I should say they were blind, and some of these are quite young girls, and mostly rather cheerful. But the very gayest beggar I remember was a legless man at the gate of the Vatican Museum; the saddest was a sullen dwarf on the way to this cripple, whose gloom a donative even of twenty-five centessimi did not suffice to abate.

XII. SUPERFICIAL OBSERVATIONS AND CONJECTURES

It had seemed to me that in the afternoons of the old papal times, so dear to foreigners who never knew them, I used to see a series of patrician ladies driving round and round on the Pincio, reclining in their landaus and shielding their complexions from the November suns of the year 1864 with the fringed parasols of the period. In the doubt which attends all recollections of the past, after age renders us uncertain of the present, I hastened on my second Sunday at Rome in February, 1908, to enjoy this vision, if possible. I found the Pincio unexpectedly near; I found the sunshine; I found the familiar winter warmth which in Southern climates is so unlike the summer warmth in ours; but the drive which I had remembered as a long ellipse had narrowed to a little circle, where one could not have driven round faster than a slow trot without danger of vertigo. I did not find that series of apparent principessas or imaginable marchesas leaning at their lovely lengths in their landaus. I found in overwhelming majority the numbered victorias, which pass for cabs in Rome, full of decent tourists, together with a great variety of people on foot, but not much fashion and no swells that my snobbish soul could be sure of. There was, indeed, one fine moment when, at a retired point of the drive, I saw two private carriages drawn up side by side in their encounter, with two stout old ladies, whom I decided to be dowager countesses at the least, partially projected from their opposing windows and lost in a delightful exchange, as I hoped, of scandal. But the only other impressive personality was that of an elderly, obviously American gentleman, in the solitary silk hat and long frock-coat of the scene. There were other Americans, but none so formal; the English were in all degrees of informality down to tan shoes and at least one travelling-cap. The women’s dress, whether they were on foot or in cabs, was not striking, though more than half of them were foreigners and could easily have afforded to outdress the Italians, especially the work people, though these were there in their best.

There was a band-stand in the space first reached by the promenaders, and there ought clearly to have been a band, but I was convinced that there was to be none by a brief colloquy between one of the cab-drivers (doubtless goaded to it by his fair freight) and the gentlest of Roman policemen, whose response was given in accents of hopeful compassion:

CABMAN: “Musica, no?” (No music?)

POLICEMAN: “Forse l’ avremo oramai” (Perhaps we shall have it presently.)

We did not have it at all that Sunday, possibly because it was the day after the assassination of the King of Portugal, and the flags were at half-mast everywhere. So we went, such of us as liked, to the parapet overlooking the Piazza del Popolo, and commanding one of those prospects of Rome which are equally incomparable from every elevation. I, for my part, made the dizzying circuit of the brief drive on foot in the dark shadows of the roofing ilexes (if they are ilexes), and then strolled back and forth on the paths set thick with plinths bearing the heads of the innumerable national great — the poets, historians, artists, scientists, politicians, heroes — from the ancient Roman to the modern Italian times. I particularly looked up the poets of the last hundred years, because I had written about them in one of my many forgotten books, till I fancied a growing consciousness in them at this encounter with an admirer; they, at least, seemed to remember my book. Then I went off to the cafe overlooking them in their different alleys, and had tea next a man who was taking lemon instead of milk in his. Here I was beset with an impassioned longing to know whether he was a Russian or American, since the English always take milk in their tea, but I could not ask, and when I had suffered my question as long as I could in his presence I escaped from it, if you can call it escaping, to the more poignant question of what it would be like to come, Sunday after Sunday, to the Pincio, in the life-long voluntary exile of some Americans I knew, who meant to spend the rest of their years under the spell of Rome. I thought, upon the whole, that it would be a dull, sad fate, for somehow we seem born in a certain country in order to die in it, and I went home, to come again other Sundays to the Pincio, but not all the Sundays I promised myself.

On one of these Sundays I found Roman boys playing an inscrutable game among the busts of their storied compatriots, a sort of “I spy” or “Hide and go whoop,” counting who should be “It” in an Italian version of “Oneary, ory, ickory, an,” and then scattering in every direction behind the plinths and bushes. They were not more molestive than boys always are in a world which ought to be left entirely to old people, and I could not see that they did any harm. But somebody must have done harm, for not only was a bust here and there scribbled over in pencil, but the bust of Machiavelli had its nose freshly broken off in a jagged fracture that was very hurting to look at. This may have been done by some mistaken moralist, who saw in the old republican adviser of princes that enemy of mankind which he was once reputed to be. At any rate, I will not attribute the mutilation to the boys of Rome, whom I saw at other times foregoing so many opportunities of mischief in the Villa Bor-ghese. One of them even refused money from me there when I misunderstood his application for matches and offered him some coppers. He put my tip aside with a dignified wave of his hand and a proud backward step; and, indeed, I ought to have seen from the flat, broad cap he wore that he was a school-boy of civil condition. The Romans are not nearly so dramatic as the Neapolitans or Venetians or even as the Tuscans; but once in the same pleasance I saw a controversy between school-boys which was carried on with an animation full of beauty and finish. They argued back and forth, not violently, but vividly, and one whom I admired most enforced his reasons with charming gesticulations, whirling from his opponents with quick turns of his body and many a renunciatory retirement, and then facing about and advancing again upon the unconvinced. I decided that his admirable drama had been studied from the histrionics of his mother in domestic scenes; and, if I had been one of those other boys, I should have come over to his side instantly.

The Roman manners vary from Roman to Roman, just as our own manners, if we had any, would vary from New-Yorker to New-Yorker. Zola thinks the whole population is more or less spoiled with the conceit of Rome’s ancient greatness, and shows it. One could hardly blame them if this were so; but I did not see any strong proof of it, though I could have imagined it on occasion. I should say rather that they had a republican simplicity of manner, and I liked this better in the shop people and work people than the civility overflowing into servility which one finds among the like folk, for instance, in England. I heard complaints from foreigners that the old-time deference of the lower classes was gone, but I did not miss it. Once in a cafe, indeed, the waiter spoke to me in Voi (you) instead of Lei (lordship), but the Neapolitans often do this, and I took it for a friendly effort to put me at my ease in a strange tongue with a more accustomed form. We were trying to come together on the kind of tea I wanted, but we failed, if I wanted it strong, for I got it very weak and tepid. I thought another day that it would be stronger if I could get it brought hotter, but it was not, and so I went no more to a place where I was liable to be called You instead of Lordship and still get weak tea. I think this was a mistake of mine and a loss, for at that cafe I saw some old-fashioned Italian types drinking their black coffee at afternoon tea-time out of tumblers, and others calling for pen and ink and writing letters, and ladies sweetly asking for newspapers and reading them there; and I ought to have continued coming to study them.

As to my conjectures of republican quality in the Romans, I had explicit confirmation from a very intelligent Italian who said of the anomalous social and political situation in Rome: “We Italians are naturally republicans, and, if it were a question of any other reigning family, we should have the republic. But we feel that we owe everything, the very existence of the nation, to the house of Savoy, and we are loyal to it in our gratitude. Especially we are true to the present king.” It is known, of course, that Menotti Garibaldi continues the republican that his father always was, but I heard of his saying that, if a republic were established, Victor Emmanuel III. would be overwhelmingly chosen the first president. It is the Socialists who hold off unrelentingly from the monarchy, and not the republicans, as they can be differenced from them. One of the well-known Roman anomalies is that some members of the oldest families are or have been Socialists; and such a noble was reproached because he would not go to thank the king in recognition of some signal proof of his public spirit and unselfish patriotism. He owned the generosity of the king’s behavior and his claim upon popular acknowledgment, but he said that he had taught the young men of his party the duty of ignoring the monarchy, and he could not go counter to the doctrine he had preached.

If I venture to speak now of a very extraordinary trait of the municipal situation at Rome, it must be without the least pretence to authority or to more than such superficial knowledge as the most incurious visitor to Rome can hardly help having. In the capital of Christendom, where the head of the Church dwells in a tradition of supremacy hardly less Italian than Christian, the syndic, or mayor, is a Jew, and not merely a Jew, but an alien Jew, English by birth and education, a Londoner and an Oxford man. More yet, he is a Freemason, which in Italy means things anathema to the Church, and he is a very prominent Freemason. With reference to the State, his official existence, though not inimical, is through the fusion of the political parties which elected him hardly less anomalous. This combination overthrew the late Clerical city government, and it included Liberals, Republicans, Socialists, and all the other anti-Clericals. Whatever liberalism or republicanism means, socialism cannot mean less than the economic solution of regality and aristocracy in Europe, and in Italy as elsewhere. It does not mean the old-fashioned revolution; it means simply the effacement of all social differences by equal industrial obligations. So far as the Socialists can characterize it, therefore, the actual municipal government of Rome is as antimonarchical as it is antipapal. But the syndic of Rome is a man of education, of culture, of intelligence, and he is evidently a man of consummate tact. He has known how to reconcile the warring elements, which made peace in his election, to one another and to their outside antagonists, to the Church and to the State, as well as to himself, in the course he holds over a very rugged way. His opportunities of downfall are pretty constant, it will be seen, when it is explained that if a measure with which he is identified fails in the city council it becomes his duty to resign, like the prime-minister of England in the like case with Parliament, But Mr. Nathan, who is as alien in his name as in his race and religion, and is known orally to the Romans as Signor Nahtahn, has not yet been obliged to resign. He has felt his way through every difficulty, and has not yet been identified with any fatally compromising measure. In such an extremely embarrassing predicament as that created by the conflict between the labor unions and the police early in April, and eventuating in the two days’ strike, he knew how to do the wise thing and the right thing. As to the incident, he held his hand and he held his tongue, but he went to visit the wounded workmen in the hospital, and he condoled with their families. He was somewhat blamed for that, but his action kept for him the confidence of that large body of his supporters who earn their living with their hands.

It is said that the common Romans do not willingly earn their living with their hands; that they like better being idle and, so far as they can, ornamental. In this they would not differ from the uncommon Romans, the moneyed, the leisured, the pedigreed classes, who reproach them for their indolence; but I do not know whether they are so indolent as all that or not. I heard it said that they no longer want work, and that when they get it they do not do it well — a supposed effect of the socialism which is supposed to have spoiled their manners. I heard it said more intelligently, as I thought, that they are not easily disciplined, and that they cannot be successfully associated in the industries requiring workmen to toil in large bodies together; they will not stand that. Also I heard it said, as I thought again rather intelligently, that where work is given them to do after a certain model, they will conform perfectly for the first three or four times; then their fatal creativeness comes into play, and they begin to better their instruction by trying to improve upon the patterns — that is, they are artists, not artisans. They must please their fancy in their work or they cannot do it well. From my own experience I cannot say whether this is generally or only sometimes true, but I can affirm that where they delayed or erred in their work they took their failure very amiably. I never saw sweeter patience than that of the Roman matron who had undertaken a small job of getting spots out of a garment, and who quite surpassed me in self-control when she announced, day after appointed day, that the work was not done yet or not done perfectly; she was politeness itself.

On the other hand, some young ladies at a fashionable concert which the queen-mother honored with her presence did not seem very polite. They kept on their immense hats, as women still do in all public places on the European continent, and they seized as many chairs as they could for friends who did not come, and at supreme moments they stood up on their chairs and spoiled such poor chance of seeing the queen-mother as the stranger might have had. While the good King Umberto lived the stranger would have had many other chances, for it is said that the queen showed herself with him to the people at the windows of their palace every afternoon; but in her widowhood she lives retired, though now and then her carriage may be seen passing through the streets, with four special policemen on bicycles following it. These waited about the doorway of the concert-hall that afternoon and formed a very simple, if effective, guard. In fact, it might be said that in its relations with the popular life the reigning family could hardly be simpler. The present king and queen are not so much seen in public as King Umberto and Queen Margherita were, but it is known from many words and deeds that King Victor Emmanuel wishes to be the friend, if not the acquaintance, of his people. When it was proposed to push the present tunnel, with its walks and drives and trolley-lines, under the Quirinal Palace and gardens, so as to connect the two principal business quarters of the city, the king was notified that the noise and jar of the traffic in it might interfere with his comfort. He asked if the tunnel would be for the general advantage, and, when this could not be denied, he gave his consent in words to some such effect as “That settles it.” When the German Emperor last visited Rome he is said to have had some state question as to whether he should drive on a certain occasion to the Palatine with the king’s horses or the pope’s. He who told the story did not remember how the question was solved by the emperor, but he said, “Our king walked.”

All this does not mean republican simplicity in the king; a citizen king is doubtless a contradiction in terms anywhere out of France, and even there Louis Philippe found the part difficult. But there is no doubt that the King of Italy means to be the best sort of constituional king, and, as he is in every way an uncommon man, he will probably succeed. One may fancy in him, if one likes, something of that almost touching anxiety of thoughtful Italians to be and to do all that they can for Italy, in a patriotism that seems as enlightened as it is devoted. If I had any criticism to make of such Italians it would be that they expected, or that they asked, too much of themselves. To be sure, they have a right to expect much, for they have done wonders with a country which, without great natural resources except of heart and brain, entered bankrupt into its national existence, and has now grown financially to the dimensions of its vast treasury building, with a paper currency at par and of equal validity with French and English money. If the industrial conditions in Italy were so bad as we compassionate outsiders have been taught to suppose, this financial change is one of the most important events accomplished in Europe since the great era of the racial unifications began. No one will pretend that there have not been great errors of administration in Italy, but apparently the Italians have known how to learn wisdom from their folly. There has been a great deal of industrial adversity; the cost of living has advanced; the taxes are very heavy, and the burdens are unequally adjusted; many speculators have been ruined, and much honestly invested money has been lost. But wages have increased with the prices and rents and taxes, and in a country where every ounce of coal that drives a wheel of production or transportation has to be brought a thousand miles manufactures and railroads have been multiplied.

The state has now taken over the roads and has added their cost to that of its expensive army and navy, but no reasonable witness can doubt that the Italians will be equal to this as well as their other national undertakings. These in Rome are peculiarly difficult and onerous, because they must be commensurate with the scale of antiquity. In a city surviving amid the colossal ruins of the past it would be grotesque to build anything of the modest modern dimensions such as would satisfy the eye in other capitals. The Palace of Finance, at a time when Italian paper was at a discount almost equal to that of American paper during the Civil War, had to be prophetic of the present solvency in size. The yet-unfinished Palace of Justice (one dare not recognize its beauty above one’s breath) must be planned so huge that the highest story had to be left off if the foundations were to support the superstructure; the memorial of Victor Emmanuel II. must be of a vastness in keeping with the monuments of imperial Rome, some of which it will partly obscure. Yet as the nation has grown in strength under burdens and duties, it will doubtless prove adequate to the colossal architectural enterprises of its capital. Private speculation in Rome brought disaster twenty-five years ago, but now the city has overflowed with new life the edifices that long stood like empty sepulchres, and public enterprises cannot finally fail; otherwise we should not be digging the Panama Canal or be trying to keep the New York streets in repair. We may confide in the ability of the Italians to carry out their undertakings and to pay the cost out of their own pockets. It is easy to criticise them, but we cannot criticise them more severely than they criticise themselves; and perhaps, as our censure cannot profit them, we might with advantage to ourselves, now and then, convert it into recognition of the great things they have accomplished.

XIII. CASUAL IMPRESSIONS

The day that we arrived in Rome the unclouded sun was yellow on the white dust of the streets, which is never laid by a municipal watering-cart, though sometimes it is sprinkled into mire from the garden-hose of the abutting hotels; and in my rashness I said that for Rome you want sun and you want youth. Yet there followed many gray days when my age found Rome very well indeed, and I would not have the septuagenarian keep away because he is no longer in the sunny sixties. He may see through his glasses some things hidden even from the eyes of the early forties. If he drives out beyond the Porta Pia, say, some bright afternoon, and notes how the avenue between the beautiful old villas is also bordered by many vacant lots advertised for sale as well as built up with pleasant new houses, he will be able to carry away with him the significant fact that a convenient and public-spirited trolley-line has the same suburban effect in Rome, Italy, as in Rome, New York. If he meets some squadrons of cavalry or some regiments of foot, in that military necessity of constant movement which the civilian can never understand, he may make the useful reflection that it is much better to have the troops out of the city than in it, and he can praise the wisdom of the Italian government accordingly. On the neighboring mountains the presence or absence of snow forms the difference between summer and winter in Rome, and will suggest the question whether, after all, our one continental weather is better than the many local weathers of Europe; and perhaps he will acquire national modesty in owning that there is something more picturesque in the indications of those azure or silvery tops than in his morning paper’s announcement that there is or is not a lower pressure in the region of the lakes.

At any rate, I would not have him note the intimations of such a drive at less worth than those of any more conventional fact of his Roman sojourn. If one is quite honest, or merely as honest as one may be with safety, one will often own to one’s self that something merely incidental to one’s purpose, in visiting this memorable place or that, was of greater charm and greater value than the fulfilment of a direct purpose. One happy morning I went, being in the vicinity, to renew the acquaintance with the Tarpeian Rock, which I had hastened to make on my first visit to Rome. I had then found it so far from such a frightfully precipitous height as I had led myself to expect that I came away and rather mocked it in print. But now, possibly because the years had moderated all my expectations in life, I thought the Tarpeian Rock very respectably steep and quite impressively lofty; either the houses at its foot had sunk with their chimneys and balconies, or the rock had risen, so that one could no longer be hurled from it with impunity. We looked at it from an arbor of the lovely little garden which we were let into beyond the top of the rock, and which was the pleasance of some sort of hospital. I think there were probably flowers there, since it was a garden, but what was best was the almond-tree covering the whole space with a roof of bloom, and in this roof a score of birds that sang divinely.

I am aware of bringing a great many birds into these papers; but really Rome would not be Rome without them; and I could not exaggerate their number or the sweetness of their song. They particularly abounded in the cloistered and gardened close of the Cistercian Convent, which three hundred years ago ensconsed itself within the ruinous Baths of Diocletian. I have no fable at hand to explain what seems the special preference of the birds for this garden; it is possibly an idiosyncrasy, something like that of the cats which make Trajan’s Forum their favorite resort. All that I can positively say is that if I were a bird I would ask nothing better than to frequent the cypresses of that garden and tune my numbers for the entertainment of the audience of extraordinary monsters in the aisles below, which bea’in plinths of clipped privet and end marble heads of horses, bulls, elephants, rhinoceroses, and their like. I do not pretend to be exact in their nomination; they may be other animals; but I am sure of their attention to the birds. I am not quite so sure of the attention of the antique shapes in the rooms of the Ludovisi collection looking into the close. I fancy them preoccupied with the in-doors cold, so great in all Italian galleries, and scarcely tempered for them by the remote and solitary brazier over which the custodians take turns in stifling themselves. They cannot come down into the sun and song of the garden, to which the American tourist may return from visiting them, to thaw out his love of the beautiful.

They are not so many or so famous as their marble brothers and sisters in the Vatican Museum, but the tourist should not miss seeing them. Neither should he miss any accessible detail of the environing ruins of the Diocletian Baths. Let him not think because they are so handy, and so next door, as it were, to the railway station where he arrives, and to Cook’s office where he goes for his letters next morning, that they are of less merit than other monuments of imperial Rome. They are not only colossally vast, but they are singularly noble, as well as so admirably convenient. Because they are so convenient, the modern Romans have turned their cavernous immensity to account in the trades and industries, and have built them up in carpenters’ and blacksmiths’ and plumbers’ shops, where there is a cheerful hammering and banging much better than the sullen silence of more remote and difficult ruins. In color they are a very agreeable reddish brown, though not so soft to the eye as the velvety masses of the Palatine, which at any distance great enough to obscure their excavation have a beauty like that of primitive nature. I do not know but you see these best from the glazed terrace of that restaurant on the Aventine which is the resort of the well-advised Romans and visitors, and from which you look across to the mount of fallen and buried grandeur over a champaign of gardens and orchards. All round is a landscape which I was not able to think of as less than tremendous, with the whole of Rome in it, and the snow-topped hills about it — a scene to which you may well give more than a moment from the varied company at the other tables, where English, German, French, and Americans, as well as Italians, are returning to the simple life in their enjoyment of the local dishes, washed down with golden draughts of local wine, served ciderwise in generous jugs.

If your mind is, as ours was in that place, to drive farther and see the chapter-house of the Knights of Malta, clinging to the height over the Tiber, and looking up and down its yellow torrent and the black boats along the shore, with universal Rome melting into the distance, you must not fail to stop at the old, old Church of St. Sabina. You will naturally want to see this, not only because there in the cloister (as the ladies can ascertain at the window let into the wall for their dangerous eyes to peer through from the outside) is the successor of the orange-tree transplanted from the Holy Land by St. Dominic six or seven hundred years ago; not only because one of the doors of the church, covered with Bible stories, is thought the oldest wood-carving in the world, but also because there will be sitting in his white robes on a bench beside the nave an aged Dominican monk reading some holy book, with his spectacles fallen forward on his nose and his cowl fallen back on his neck, and his wide tonsure gleaming glacially in the pale light, whom nothing in the church or its visitors can distract from his devotions.

It is very, very cold in there, but he probably would not, if he could, follow you into the warm outer world and on into the garden of the Knights, who came here after they had misruled Malta for centuries and finally rendered a facile submission to General Bonaparte of the French Republican army in 1798. Their fixing here cannot be called anything so vigorous as their last stand; but, without specific reference to the easy-chairs in their chapter-house, it may be fitly called their last seat; and, if it is true that none of plebeian blood may enjoy the order’s privileges, the place will afford another of those satisfactions which the best of all possible worlds is always offering its admirers. Even if one were disposed to moralize the comfortable end of the poor Knights harshly, one must admit that their view of Rome is one of the unrivalled views, and that the glimpse of St. Peter’s through the key-hole of their garden-gate is little short of tin-rivalled. I could not manage the glimpse myself, but I can testify to the unique character of the avenue of clipped box and laurel which the key-hole also commands. Lovers of the supernatural, of which I am the first, will like to be reminded, or perhaps instructed, that the Church of the Priory stands on the spot where Remus had a seance with the spiritual authorities and was advised against building Rome where he proposed, being shown only six vultures as against twelve that Romulus saw in favor of his chosen site. The fact gave the Aventine Hill the fame of bad luck, but any one may safely visit it now, after the long time that has passed.

I do not, however, advise visiting it above any other place in Rome. What I always say is, take your chances with any or every time or place; you cannot fail of some impression which you will always like recurring to as characteristically delightful. For instance, I once walked home from the Piazza di Spagna with some carnival masks frolicking about me through the sun-shotten golden dust of the delicious evening air, and I had a pleasure from the experience which I shall never forget. It was as rich as that I got from the rosy twilight in which I wandered homeward another time from the Piazza di Venezia and found myself passing the Fountain of Trevi, and lingered long there and would not throw my penny into its waters because I knew I could not help coming back to Rome anyhow. Yet another time I was driving through a certain piazza where the peasants stand night long waiting to be hired by the proprietors who come to find them there, and suddenly the piety of the Middle Ages stood before me in the figure of the Brotherhood of the Misericordia, draped to the foot and hooded in their gray, unbleached linen. The brothers were ranged in a file at the doors of the church ready to visit the house of sickness or of mourning, barefooted, with their eyes showing spectrally through their masks and their hands coming soft and white out of their sleeves and betraying the lily class that neither toils nor spins and yet is bound, as in the past, to the poorest and humblest through the only Church that knows how to unite them in the offering and acceptance of reciprocal religious duties.

In Rome, as elsewhere in Catholic countries, it seemed to me that the worshippers were mostly of the poorer classes and were mostly old women, but in the Church of the Jesuits I saw worshippers almost as well dressed as the average of our Christian Scientists, and in that church, whose name I forget, but which is in the wide street or narrow piazza below the windows of the palace where the last Stuarts lived and died, my ineradicable love of gentility was flattered and my faith in the final sanctification of good society restored by the sight of gentlemen coming to and going from prayer with their silk hats in their hands.

The performance of ritual implies a certain measure of mechanism, and the wonder is that in the Catholic churches it is not more mechanical than it actually is. I was no great frequenter of functions, and I cannot claim that my superior spirituality was ever deeply wounded; sometimes it was even supported and consoled. I noted, without offence, in the Church of San Giuseppe how the young monk, who preached an eloquent sermon on the saint’s life and character, exhausted himself before he exhausted his topic, and sat down between the successive heads of his discourse and took a good rest. It was the saint’s day, which seemed more generally observed than any other saint’s day in Rome, and his baroque church in Via Capo le Case was thronged with people, mostly poor and largely peasants, who were apparently not so fatigued by the preacher’s shrill, hard delivery as he was himself. There were many children, whom their elders held up to see, and there was one young girl in a hat as wide as a barrel-head standing up where others sat, and blotting out the prospect of half the church with her flaring brim and flaunting feathers. The worshippers came and went, and while the monk preached and reposed a man crept dizzyingly round the cornice with a taper at the end of a long pole lighting the chandeliers, while two other men on the floor kindled the candles before the altars. As soon as their work was completed, the monk, as if he had been preaching against time, sat definitely down and left us to the rapture of the perfected splendor. The high-altar was canopied and curtained in crimson, fringed with gold, and against this the candle-flames floated like yellow flowers. Suddenly, amid the hush and expectance, a tenor voice pealed from the organ-loft, and a train of priests issued from the sacristy and elbowed and shouldered their way through the crowd to the high-altar, where their intoning, like so many

 “Silver snarling trumpets ‘gan to glide,”

and those flower-like flames and that tenor voice seemed to sing together, and all sense of mortal agency in the effect was lost.

How much our pale Northern faith has suffered from the elimination of the drama which is so large an element in the worship of the South could not be conjectured without offence to both. Drama I have said, but, if I had said opera, it would have been equally with the will merely to recognize the fact and not to censure it. Many have imagined a concert of praise in heaven, and portrayed it as a spectacle of which the elder Christian worship seems emulous. Go, therefore, to Rome, dear fellow-Protestant, with any measure of ignorance short of mine, but leave as much of your prejudice behind you as you can. You are not more likely to become a convert because of your tolerance; in fact, you may be the safer for it; and it will prepare you for a gentler pleasure than you would otherwise enjoy in the rites and ceremonies which seem exotic in our wintrier world, but which are here native to the climate, or, at least, could not have had their origin under any but oriental or meridional skies. The kindlier mood will help you to a truer appreciation of that peculiar keeping of the churches which the stranger is apt to encounter in his approach. Be tender of the hapless mendicants at the door; they are not there for their pleasure, those blind and halt and old. Be modestly receptive of the good office of the whole tribe of cicerones, of custodians, of sacristans; they can save you time, which, though it is not quite the same as money, even in Rome is worth saving, and are the repository of many rejected fables waiting to be recognized as facts again. I, for instance, committed the potential error of wholly rejecting with scorn the services of an authorized guide to the Church of St. John Lateran because he said the tariff was three francs. But after wandering, the helpless prey of my own Baedeker, up and down the huge temple, I was glad to find him waiting my emergence where I had left him, in the church porch, one of the most pathetic figures that ever wrung the remorseful heart.

His poor black clothes showed the lustre of inveterate wear; his waistcoat would have been the better for a whole bottle of benzine; his shoes, if they did not share the polish of those threadbare textures, reciprocated the effect of his broken-spirited cuffs and collar, and the forlorn gentility of his hat. His beard had not been shaved for three days; I do not know why, but doubtless for as good a reason as that his shirt had not been washed for seven. It was with something like a cry for pardon of my previous brutality that I now closed with his unabated demand of a three-franc fee, and we went with him wherever he would, from one holy edifice to another of those that constitute the church; but I will not ask the reader to follow us in the cab which he mounted into with us, but which would not conveniently hold four. Let him look it all up in the admirably compendious pages of Hare and Murray, and believe, if he can, that I missed nothing of that history and mystery. If I speak merely of the marvellous baptistery, it is doubtless not because the other parts were not equally worthy of my wonder, but because I would not have even an enemy miss the music of the singing doors, mighty valves of bronze which, when they turn upon their hinges, emit a murmur of grief or a moan of remorse for whatever heathen uses they once served the wicked Caracalla at his baths. Not to have heard their rich harmony would be like not having heard the echo in the baptistery of Pisa, a life-long loss.

Heaven knows how punctiliously our guide would have acquainted us with every particular of the Lateran group, which for a thousand years before the Vatican was the home of the popes. We begged off from this and that, but even indolence like mine would not spare itself the sight of the Scala Santa. That was another of the things which I distinctly remembered from the year 1864, and I did not find the spectacle of the modern penitents covering the holy steps different in 1908. Now, as then, there was something incongruous in their fashions and aspirations, but one could not doubt that it was a genuine piety that nerved them to climb up and down the hard ascent on their knees, or, at the worst, that it was good exercise. Still, I would rather leave my reader the sense of that most noble facade of the church, with its lofty balustraded entablature, where the gigantic Christ and ten of his saints look out forever to the Alban hills.

XIV. TIVOLI AND FRASCATI

One of the most agreeable illusions of travel is a sort of expectation that if you will give objects of interest time enough they will present themselves to you, and, if they will not actually come to you in your hotel, will happen in your way when you go out. This was my notion of the right way of seeing Rome, but, as the days of my winter passed, so many memorable monuments failed not merely to seek me out, but stiffly held aloof from me in my walks abroad, that I began to feel anxious lest I should miss them altogether. I had, for instance, always had the friendliest curiosity concerning Tivoli and Frascati as the two most amiable Roman neighborhoods, and hoped to see both of them in some informal and casual sort; but they persisted so long in keeping off on * their respective hills that I saw something positive on my part must be done. Clearly I must make the advances; and so when, one morning of mid-March, a friend sent to ask if we would not motor out to Tivoli with him and his family, I closed eagerly with the chance of a compromise which would save feeling all round. My friend has never yet known how he was bringing Tivoli and me together after a mutual diffidence, but, as he was a poet, I am sure he will be glad to know now.

Our road across the Campagna lay the greater part of the distance beside the tram-line, but at other points parted with it and stretched rough, if lately mended, and smooth, if long neglected, between the wide, lonely pastures and narrow drill-sown fields of wheat. The Campagna is said to be ploughed only once in five years by the peasants for the proprietors, who have philosophized its fertility as something that can be better restored by the activities of nature in that time than by phosphates in less. As they are mostly Roman patricians, they have always felt able to wait; but now it is said that northern Italian capital and enterprise are coming in, and the Campagna will soon be cropped every season, though as yet its chief yield seemed to be the two-year-old colts we saw browsing about. For some distance we had the company of the different aqueducts, but their broken stretches presently ceased altogether, and then for other human association we had, besides the fencings of the meadows, only the huts and shelters scattered among the grassy humps and hollows. There were more humps than I had remembered of the Campagna, and probably they were the rounded and turfed-over chunks of antiquity which otherwhere showed their naked masonry unsoft-ened and unfriended by the passing centuries. At times a dusty hamlet, that seemed to crop up from the roadside ditches, followed us a little way with children that shouted for joy in our motor and dogs that barked for pleasure in their joy. Women with the square linen head-dress of the Roman peasants stood and stared, and sallow men, each with his jacket hanging from one of his shoulders, seemed stalking backward from us as we whirled by. Here and there we scared a horse or a mule, but we did not so much as run over a hen; and both man and beast are becoming here, as elsewhere, reconciled to the automobile. Now and then a carter would set his team slantwise in our course and stay us out of good-humored deviltry, and when he let us pass would fling some chaff to the fresh-faced English youngster who was our chauffeur.

“I suppose you don’t always understand what those fellows say,” I suggested from my seat beside him.

“No, sir,” he confessed. “But I give it to ’em back in English,” he added, joyously.

He rather liked these encounters, apparently, but not the beds of sharp, broken stone with which the road was repaired. It was his belief that there was not a steam-roller in all Italy, and he seemed to reserve an opinion of the government’s motives in the matter with respect to motors, as if he thought them bad.

The scenery of the Campagna was not varied. Once we came to a battlemented tomb, of mighty girth and height, as perdurable in its masonry as the naked, stony hills that in the distance propped the mountains fainting along the horizon under their burden of snow. But as we drew nearer Tivoli the hills drew nearer us, and now they were no longer naked, but densely covered with the gray, interminable stretch of the olive forests. The olive is the tree which, of all others, is the friend of civilized man; it is older and kinder even than the apple, which is its next rival in beneficence; but these two kinds are so like each other, in the mass, that this boundless forest of olives around Tivoli offered an image of all the aggregated apple-orchards in the world. Where the trees came closest to the road they seemed to watch our passing, each with its trunk aslant and its branches akimbo, in a humorous make-believe of being in some joke with us, like so many gnarled and twisted apple-trees, used to children’s play-fellowship. You felt a racial intimacy with the whimsical and antic shapes which your brief personal consciousness denied in vain; and you rose among the slopes around Tivoli with a sense of home-coming from the desert of the Campagna. But in the distance to which the olive forests stretched they lost this effect of tricksy familiarity. They looked like a gray sea against the horizon; more fantastically yet, they seemed a vast hoar silence, full of mystery and loneliness.

If Tivoli does not flourish so frankly on its oil as Frascati on its wine, it is perhaps because it has of late years tacitly prospered as much on the electricity which its wonderful and beautiful waterfalls enable it to furnish as abundantly to Rome as our own Niagara to Buffalo. The scrupulous Hare, whose Walks in Rome include Tivoli, does not, indeed, advise you to visit the electrical works, but he says that if you have not strength enough for all the interests and attractions of Tivoli it will be wise to give yourself entirely to the cascades and to the Villa d’Este, and this was what we instinctively did, but in the reverse order. Chance rewarded us before we left the villa with a sight of the electric plant, which just below the villa walls smokes industriously away with a round, redbrick chimney almost as lofty and as ugly as some chimney in America. On our way to and fro we necessarily passed through the town, which, with its widish but not straightish chief street, I found as clean as Rome itself, and looking, after the long tumult of its history, beginning well back in fable, as peaceable as Montclair, New Jersey. It had its charm, and, if I could have spent two weeks there instead of two hours, I might impart its effect in much more circumstance than I can now promise the reader. Most of my little time I gladly gave to the villa, which, with the manifold classic associations of the region, attracts the stranger and helps the cataracts sum up all that most people can keep of Tivoli.

The Villa d’Este is not yet a ruin, but it is ruinous enough to win the fancy without cumbering it with the mere rubbish of decay. Some neglected pleasances are so far gone that you cannot wish to live in them, but the forgottenness of the Villa d’Este hospitably allured me to instant and permanent occupation, so that when I heard it could now be bought, casino and all, for thirty thousand dollars, nothing but the want of the money kept me from making the purchase. I indeed recognized certain difficulties in living there the year round; but who lives anywhere the year round if he can help it? The casino, standing among the simpler town buildings on the plateau above the gardens, would be a little inclement, for all its frescoing and stuccoing by the sixteenth-century arts, and in its noble halls, amid the painted and modelled figures, the new American proprietor would shiver with the former host and guests after the first autumn chill began; but while it was yet summer it Avould be as delicious there as in the aisles and avenues of the garden which its balustrated terrace looked into. From that level you descend by marble steps which must have some trouble in knowing themselves from the cascades pouring down the broken steeps beside them, and companionably sharing their seclusion among the cypresses and ilexes. You are never out of the sight and sound of the plunging water, which is still trained in falls and fountains, or left to a pathetic dribble through the tattered stucco of the neglected grots. It is now a good three centuries and a half since the Cardinal Ippolito d’.Este had these gardens laid out and his pleasure-house built overlooking them; and his gardener did not plan so substantially as his architect. In fact, you might suppose that the landscapist wrought with an eye to the loveliness of the ruin it all would soon fall into, and, where he used stone, used it fragilely, so that it would ultimately suggest old frayed and broken lace. Clearly he meant some of the cataracts to face one another, and to have a centre from which they could all be seen — say the still, dull-green basin which occupies a large space in the grounds between them. But he must have meant this for a surprise to the spectator, who easily misses it under the trees overleaning the moss-grown walks which hardly kept themselves from running wild. There is a sense of crumbling decorations of statues, broken in their rococo caverns; of cypresses carelessly grouped and fallen out of their proper straightness and slimness; of unkempt bushes crowding the space beneath; of fragmentary gods or giants half hid in the tangling grasses. It all has the air of something impatiently done for eager luxury, and its greatest charm is such as might have been expected to be won from eventual waste and wreck. If there was design in the treatment of the propitious ground, self-shaped to an irregular amphitheatre, it is now obscured, and the cultiavted tourist of our day may reasonably please himself with the belief that he is having a better time there than the academic Roman of the sixteenth century.

Academic it all is, however hastily and nonchalantly, and I feel that I have so signally failed to make the charm of the villa felt that I am going to let a far politer observer celebrate the beauties of the other supreme interest of Tivoli. When Mr. Gray (as the poet loved to be called in print) visited the town with Mr. Walpole in May, 1740, the Villa d’Este by no means shared the honors of the cataracts, and Mr. Gray seems not to have thought it worth seriously describing in his letter to Mr. West, but mocks the casino with a playful mention before proceeding to speak fully, if still playfully, of the great attraction of Tivoli: “Dame Nature... has built here three or four little mountains and laid them out in an irregular semicircle; from certain others behind, at a greater distance, she has drawn a canal into which she has put a little river of hers called the Anio,... which she has no sooner done, but, like a heedless chit, it tumbles down a declivity fifty feet perpendicular, breaks itself all to shatters, and is converted into a shower of rain, where the sun forms many a bow — red, green, blue, and yellow.... By this time it has divided itself, being crossed and opposed by the rocks, into four several streams, each of which, in emulation of the greater one, will tumble down, too: and it does tumble down, but not from an equally elevated place; so that you have at one view all these cascades intermixed with groves of olive and little woods, the mountains rising behind them, and on the top of one (that which forms the extremity of the half-circle’s horns) is seated the town itself. At the very extremity of that extremity, on the brink of the precipice, stands the Sibyls’ Temple, the remains of a little rotunda, surrounded with its portico, above half of whose beautiful Corinthian pillars are still standing and entire.”

For the reader who has been on the spot the poet’s words will paint a vivid picture of the scene; for the reader who has not been there, so much the worse; he should lose no time in going, and drinking a cup of the local wine at a table of the restaurant now in possession of Mr. Gray’s point of view. I do not know a more filling moment, exclusive of the wine, than he can enjoy there, with those cascades before him and those temples beside him; for Mr. Gray has mentioned only one of the two, I do not know why, that exist on this enchanted spot, and that define their sharp, black shadows as with an inky line just beyond the restaurant tables. One is round and the other oblong, and the round one has been called the Sibyls’, though now it is getting itself called Vesta’s — the goddess who long unrightfully claimed the temple of Mater Matuta in the Forum Boarium at Rome. As Vesta has lately been dispossessed there by archaeology (which seems in Rome to enjoy the plenary powers of our Boards of Health), she may have been given the Sibyls’ Temple at Tivoli in compensation; but all this does not really matter. What really matters is the mighty chasm which yawns away almost from your feet, where you sit, and the cataracts, from their brinks, high or low, plunging into it, and the wavering columns of mist weakly striving upward out of it: the whole hacked by those mountains Mr. Gray mentions, with belts of olive orchard on their flanks, and wild paths furrowing and wrinkling their stern faces. To your right there is a sheeted cataract falling from the basins of the town laundry, where the toil of the washers melts into music, and their chatter, like that of birds, drifts brokenly across the abyss to you. While you sit musing or murmuring in your rapture, two mandolins and a guitar smilingly intrude, and after a prelude of Italian airs swing into strains which presently, through your revery, you recognize as “In the Bowery” and “Just One Girl,” and the smile of the two mandolins and the guitar spreads to a grin of sympathy, and you are no longer at the Cafe Sibylla in Tivoli, but in your own Manhattan on some fairy roof-garden, or at some sixty-cent table d’hote, with wine and music included.

It was a fortnight later that we paid our visit to Frascati, not proudly motoring now, but traversing the Campagna on the roof of a populous tram-car, which in its lofty narrowness was of the likeness of an old-fashionable lake propeller. The morning was, like most other mornings in Rome, of an amiability which the afternoons often failed of; but none of us passengers for Frascati doubted its promise as we gathered at the tram-station and tried for tickets at the little booth in a wall sparely containing the official who bade us get them in the car. We all did this, whatever our nation — American, English, German, or Italian — and then we mounted to the hurricane-deck of our propeller and entered into a generous rivalry for the best seats. We had a roof over our heads, and there were curtains which we might have drawn if we could have borne to lose a single glimpse of the landscape, or if we would not rather have suffered the chill which our swift progress evoked from the morning’s warmth after we left the shelter of the city streets. We passed through stretches of the ancient aqueducts consorting on familiar terms with rows of shabby tenement-houses, and whisked by the ends of wide, dusty avenues of yet incomplete structure, and by beds of market-gardens, and by simple feeding-places for man and beast, with the tables set close in front of the stalls. An ambitiously frescoed casino had a gigantic peacock painted over a whole story, and the peach-trees were in bloom in the villa spaces. When we struck into the Campagna we found it of like physiognomy with the Campagna toward Tivoli.

There was very little tillage, but wide stretches of grazing-land, with those lumps of turfed or naked antiquity starting out of them, and cattle, sheep, and horses feeding over them, the colts’ tails blowing picturesquely in the wind that seemed more and more opposed to our advance. It dropped, at times, where we paused to leave a passenger near one of those suburbs which the tram-lines are building up round Rome, but on our course building so slowly that our passengers had to walk rather far from the stations before they reached home. There were other pedestrians who looked rather English, especially some ladies making for the gate of a kind, sunny walled old villa, where there was a girl singing and a gardener coming slowly down to let them in. Nearer Frascati were many neat, new stone houses, where Eoman families come out to stay the spring and fall seasons, and even the summer. But these looked too freshly like the suburban cottages on a Boston trolley-line; and we perversely found our delight in a fine breadth of brown woods for the very reason of that homelikeness which gave us pause in the houses. The trees looked American; there were American wood-roads penetrating the forest’s broken and irregular extent; there was one steep-sided ravine worth any man’s American money; and the dead leaves littered the sylvan paths with an allure to the foot which it was hard for the head to resist.

Elsewhere the tram-line that curved upward to Fras-cati was flanked, after it left the Campagna’s level, with vineyards as measureless as the olive orchards of Tivoli. There was yet, at the end of March, no sign of leaf on the newly trimmed vines, which were trained on long poles of canes brought together in peaks to support them and netting the hill-slopes with the endless succession of their tops. The eye wearied itself in following them as in following the checkered wiring of the Kentish hop-fields, and was glad to leave them for the closer-set, but never too closely set, palaces of Frascati: the sort of palaces which we call cottages in our summer cities, and the Italians call casinos from the same instinctive modesty. When we began to doubt of our destination, our car passed a long, shaded promenade, and then stopped in a cheerful square amidst hotels and restaurants, with tables hospitably spread on the sidewalks before them.

We decided not to lunch at that early hour, but we could not keep our eyes from feasting, even at eleven o’clock in the morning, on the wonderful prospect that tempted them, on every hand, away from the more immediate affair of choosing one out of the many cabs that thronged about our arriving train. The cabs of Frascati are all finer than the cabs of Rome, and the horses are handsomer and younger and stronger; we could have taken the worst of the equipages that contested our favor and still fared well; but we chose the best — a glittering victoria and an animal of proud action, with a lustrous coat of bay. He wore a ring of joyous bells; he had, indeed, not a headstall of such gay colors as some others; but you cannot have everything, and his driver was of a mental vividness which compensated for all the color wanting in his horse’s headstall, and of a personal attraction which made us ambitious for his company on any terms. He quickly reduced us from our vain supposition that carriages in a country-place should be cheaper than in a city; because, as he proved, there were fewer strangers to hire them and they ought logically to be dearer. So far from accepting our modest standards of time and money, he all but persuaded us to employ him for the whole day instead of a few hours at a price beyond our imagination; and he only consented to compromise on a half-day at an increased figure.

We supposed that it was the negotiation which drew and held the attention of all the leisure of Frascati, and that it was the driver and our relation to him rather than the horse and our relation to it that concentrated the public interest in us; and when we had convinced him that we had no wish but to see some of the more immediate and memorable villas, we mounted to our places in the victoria and drove out through the reluctantly parting spectators, who remained looking after us as if unable to disperse to their business or pleasure.

Our driver decided for us to go first to the Villa Falconieri, which had lately been bought and presented by a fond subject to the German Emperor, and by him in turn bestowed on the German Academy at Rome. In the cold, clean, stony streets of Frascati, as we rattled through them, there breathed the odor of the great local industry; and the doorways of many buildings, widening almost in a circle to admit the burly tuns of wine, testified how generally, how almost universally, the vintage of that measureless acreage of grapes around the place employed the inhabitants. But there was little else to impress the observer in Frascati, and we willingly passed out of the town in the road climbing the long incline to the Villa Falconieri, with its glimpses, far and near, of woods and gardens. It was a road so much to our minds that nothing was further from us than the notion that our horse might not like it so well; but, at the first distinct rise, he stopped and wheeled round so abruptly, after first pawing the air, that there could be no doubt where the popular interest we had lately enjoyed in Frascati had really originated. Probably our horse’s distinguishing trait was known to everybody in Frascati except his driver. He, at least, showed the greatest surprise at the horse’s behavior, as unprecedented in their acquaintance, which he owned was brief, for he had bought him in Rome only the week before. With successive retreats to level ground he put him again and again at the incline, but as soon as the horse felt the ground rising under his feet he lifted them from it and whirled round for another retreat. All this we witnessed from an advantageous point at the roadside which we had taken up at his first show of reluctance; and at last the driver suggested that we should leave it and go on to the Villa Falconieri on foot. On our part, we suggested that he should attempt some other villa which would not involve an objectionable climb. He then proposed the Villa Mandragone, and the horse seemed to agree with us. As we drove again through the clean, cold, stony streets, with the rounded doorways for the wine-casks, we fancied something clearly ironical in the general interest renewed by our return. But we tried to look as if we had merely done the Villa Falconieri with unexampled rapidity, and pushed on to the Villa Mandragone, where, under the roof of interlacing ilex toughs, our horse ought to have been tempted on in a luxurious unconsciousness of anything like an incline. But he was apparently an animal which would have felt the difference between two rose-leaves and one in a flowery path, and just when we were thinking what a delightful time we were having, and beginning to feel a gentle question as to who the pathetic little cripple halting toward us with a color-box and a camp-stool might be, and whether she painted as well as a kind heart could wish, our horse stopped with the suddenness which we knew to be definite. The sensitive creature could not be deceived; he must have reached rising ground, and we sided with him against our driver, who would have pretended it was fancy.

It was now noon, and we drove back to the piazza, agreeing upon a less price in view of the imperfect service rendered, and deciding to collect our thoughts for a new venture over such luncheon as the best hotel could give us. It was not so good a hotel as the lunch it gave. It was beyond the cleansing tide of modernity which has swept the Roman hotels, and was dirty everywhere, but with a specially dirty, large, shabby dining-room, cold and draughty, yet precious for the large, round brazier near our table which kept one side of us warm in romantic mediaeval fashion, and invited us to rise from time to time and thaw our fingers over its blinking coals. The bath in which our chicken had been boiled formed a good soup; there was an admirable pasta and a creditable, if imperfect, conception of beefsteak; and there was a caraffe of new Frascati wine, sweet, like new cider. If we could have asked more, it would not have been more than the young Italian officer who sat in the other corner with his pretty young wife, and who allowed me to weave a whole realistic fiction out of their being at Frascati so out of season.

Just as I was most satisfyingly accounting for them, our late driver alarmed me by appearing at the door and beckoning me to the outside. The occasion was nothing worse than the presence of a man who, he said, was his brother, with a horse which, upon the same authority, was without moral blame or physical blemish. If anything, it preferred a mountain to a plain country, and could be warranted to balk at nothing. The man, who was almost as exemplary as the horse, would assume the unfulfilled contract of the other man and horse with a slight increase of pay; and yet I had my doubts. The day had clouded, and I meekly contended that it was going to rain; but the man explicitly and the horse tacitly scoffed at the notion, and I yielded. I shall always be glad that I did so, for in the keeping of those good creatures the rest of our day was an unalloyed delight. It appeared, upon further acquaintance, that the man paid a hundred dollars for the horse; his brother had paid a hundred and twenty-five for the balker; but it was the belief of our driver that it would be worth the difference when it had reconciled itself to the rising ground of Frascati; as yet it was truly a stranger there. His own horse was used to ups and downs everywhere; they had just come from a long trip, and he was going to drive to Siena and back the next week with two ladies for passengers, who were to pay him five dollars a day for himself and horse and their joint keep. He said the ladies, whose names he gave, were from Boston; he balked at adding Massachusetts, but I am sure the horse would not; and, if I could have hired them both to carry me about Italy indefinitely, I would have gladly paid them five dollars a day as long as I had the money. The fact is, that driver was charming, a man of sense and intelligence, who reflected credit even upon his brother and his brother’s horse: one of those perfect Italian temperaments which endear their possessors to the head and heart, so that you wonder, at parting, how you are going to live without them.

We did not excite such vivid interest in Frascati at our second start as at our first; but, as we necessarily passed over the same route again, we had the applause of the children in streets now growing familiar, and a glad welcome back from the pretty girls and blithe matrons of all ages rhythmically washing in the public laundry, who recognized us in our new equipage. The public laundry is always the gayest scene in an Italian town, and probably our adventures continued the subject of joyous comment throughout the day which was now passing only too rapidly for us. We were again on the way to the Villa Falconieri, and while our brave horse is valiantly mounting the steep to its gate this is perhaps as good a place as any to own that the Villa Falconieri and the Villa Man-dragone were the only sights we saw in Frascati. We did, indeed, penetrate the chill interior of the local cathedral, but as we did not know at the time that we were sharing it with the memory of the young Stuart pretender Charles Edward, who died in Frascati, and whose brother, Cardinal York, placed a mural tablet to him in the church, we were conscious of no special claim upon our interest. We ought, of course, to have visited the Villa Aldobrandini and the Villa Ruffinella and the Villa Graziola and the Villa Taverna, but we left all these to the reader, who will want some reason for going to Frascati in person, and to whom I commend them as richly worth crossing the Atlantic for. Doubtless from a like motive we left the ruins of Tusculum unvisited, just as at Tivoli we refrained from diverging to Hadrian’s Villa — the two things supremely worthy to be seen in their respective regions. But, if I had seen only half as much as I saw at Frascati — the Villa Falconieri, namely — I should feel forever over-enriched by the experience.

Slowly an ancient servitor, whose family had been in the employ of the Falconieri for a century, advanced as with the burden of their united years and opened the high gate to us and delivered us over to a mild boy. He bestowed on us, for a consideration, a bunch of wild violets, and then, as if to keep us from the too abrupt sight of the repairs and changes going on near the casino, led us first to the fish-pond, in the untouched seclusion of a wooded hill, and silently showed us the magnificent view which the top commanded, if commanded is not too proud a word for a place so pathetic in its endearing neglect. It had once been the haunt of many a gay picnicking crew in hoops and bag-wigs and all the faded fashion of the past, when hosts and guests had planned a wilder escapade than the grove before the casino invited, with its tables of moss-painted marble. There would have been an academic poet, or more than one, in the company, and they would have furnished forth the prospect with phrases far finer than any I have about me, who can only say that the Cam-pagna, clothed in mist and cloud-shadowed, swam round the upland in the colors of a tropic sea.

Our mild boy waited a decent moment, as if to let me do better, and then led down to the casino, round through a wooded valley where there were some men with fowling-pieces, whom I objected to in tones, if not in terms. “What are they shooting?” “They are shooting larks, signore.” “What a pity!” “But the larks are leaving Italy, now, and going north.” It was a reason, like many another that humanity is put to it in giving, and I do not know that I missed any larks, later, from an English meadow where I saw them spiring up in song, and glad as if none of their friends had been shot at the Villa Falconieri. In fact, I did not see those fowlers actually killing any; and I can still hope they were not very good shots.

The workmen who were putting the place in repair were lunching near the casino, in a litter of lumber and other structural material, but the casino itself seemed as yet unprofaned by their touch. At any rate, we had it quite to ourselves, let wander at will through its cool, bare, still spaces. If there was a great deal to see, there was not much to remember, or to remember so much as the satirical frescos of Pier Leone Ghezzi, who has caricatured himself as well as others in them. They are not bitter satires, but, on the contrary, very charming; and still more charming are the family portraits frescoed round the principal room. Under one curve of the vaulted ceiling the whole family of a given time is shown, half-length but life-size, looking down pleasantly on the unexpected American guests who try to pretend they were invited, or at least came by mistaking the house for another. Better even than this most amiable circle, or half-circle, of father, mother, and daughter are the figures of friends or acquaintances or kinsfolk: figures not only life-size, but full-length, in panels of the walls, in the very act of stepping on the floor and coming forward to greet their host and hostess from the other walls. They did not visibly move during our stay, but I know they only waited for us to go; and that at night, especially when there was a moon, or none, they left their backgrounds and mingled in the polite gayeties of their period. One could hardly help looking over one’s shoulder to see if they were not following to that farthermost room called Primavera, which is painted around and aloft like a very bower of spring, with foliage and flowers covering the walls and dropping through the trellis feigned overhead. Of all the caprices of art, which in Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing playfulness as in the decoration of these rooms. If you pass through the last you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without bordering the shores of the Campagna sea.

It was so pathetic to imagine the place going out of the right Italian keeping that I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome, elderly woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron should be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling shadows.

“And the German Emperor owns it now?”

“Yes, they say he has bought it.”

“And the Germans will soon be coming?”

“They say.”

She would not commit herself but by a tone, an inflection, but we knew very well what she and the frescoed presences about us thought. I wish now I could have stayed behind and got the frescos to tell me just how far I ought recognize her sorrow in my tip, but one must always guess at these things, and I shall never know whether I rewarded the aged gatekeeper according to the century of service his generations had rendered those of the frescos.

We were going now to the Villa Mandragone, but we had not yet the courage for the rise of ground where we had failed before, and we entreated our driver to go round some other way, if he could, and descend rather than ascend to it. He said that was easy, and it was when we came away that we passed through that ilex avenue which we had not yet penetrated in its whole length, and where we now met many foot-passengers, lay and cleric, who added to the character of the scene, and saw again the little cripple artist, now trying to seize its features, or some of them. I did not see whether she was succeeding so well as in pity she might and as I knew she did.

In spite of our triumph with the Villa Mandragone in this second attempt, we can never think it half as charming as the Villa Falconieri. I forget what cardinal it was who built it so spacious and splendid, with three hundred and sixty-five windows, in honor of the calendar as reformed by the reigning pope, Gregory XIII. It is a palace enclosing a quadrangle of whole acres (I will not own to less), with a stately colonnade following as far round as the reader likes. When he passes through all this magnificence he will come out on a grassy terrace, with a fountain below it, and below that again the chromatic ocean of the Cam-pagna (I have said sea often enough). A weird sort of barbaric stateliness is given to the place by the twisted and tapering pillars that rise at the several corners, with colossal masques carven at the top and the sky showing through the eye-hollows, as the flame of torches must often have shown at night. But for all the outlandish suggestion of these pillars, the villa now belongs to the Jesuits, who have a college there, where only the sons of noble families are received for education. As we rounded a sunny wall in driving away, we saw a line of people, old and young of both sexes, but probably not of noble families, seated with their backs against the warm stone eating from comfortable bowls a soup which our driver said was the soup of charity and the daily dole of the fathers to such hungry as came for it. The day was now growing colder than it had been, and we felt that the poor needed all the soup, and hot, that they could get.

After a vain visit to Grotta Ferrata, which was signally disappointing, in spite of the traces of a recent country fair and the historical merits of a church of the Greek rite, with a black-bearded monk coming to show it through a gardened cloister, we were glad to take the tram back to Rome and to get into the snug inside of it. The roof, which had been so popular and populous in the morning, was now so little envied that a fat lady descended from it and wedged herself into a row of the interior where a sylph would have fitted better but might not have added so much to the warmth. No one, myself of the number, thought of getting up, though there were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to stand. This was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the conductor ask me to wait for my change, with all the ensuing fears that wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In some things it appears that at Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish we were like them in having such a place as Frascati within easy tram-reach of our cities.

XV. A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS

In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in Hawthorne’s romance of The Marble Faun. We made that our aesthetic handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like manner Story’s statue of Cleopatra was to be seen, because it was the “original” of the imaginary sculptor Kenyon’s Cleopatra, and a certain mediaeval tower was sacred because it was universally identified as the tower where the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the doves that circled around its top. We used to show the new arrivals where Hilda’s tower was, and then stand with them watching the pigeons which made it unmistakable. I should then have thought I could never forget it, but I must have passed it several times unnoting in my latest Roman sojourn, when one afternoon in a pilgrimage to the Via del Gambero a contemporary of that earlier day glanced around the narrow piazza through which we were passing and, seeing a cloud of doves wheeling aloft, joyfully shouted, “Look! There is Hilda’s tower!” and if Hilda herself had waved to us from its battlements we could not have been surer of it. The present vanished, and we were restored to our citizenship in that Rome of the imagination which is greater than any material Rome, and which it needs no archaeologist to discover in its indestructible integrity.

No one to-day, probably, visits the Capitoline Museum for the Faun of Praxiteles because it gave the romance its name; but at my latest sight of it I remembered it with a thrill of the young piety which first drew me to it, and involuntarily I looked again for the pointed, furry ears, as I had done of old, to make sure that it was really the Marble Faun of Hawthorne. I was now, however, for no merit of mine, in official and scientific company with which it would have been idle to share my satisfaction in the verification of the Faun’s ears. Instead of boasting it, I listened to very interesting talk of the deathless Dying Gladiator, who is held to have been originally looked at more from below than he has been seen in modern times, and who is presently to be lifted to something like his antique level. He, in fact, requires this from the spectator who would feel all his pathos, as we realized in sitting down and looking a little upward at him.

In his room and in the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal bronze and marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had known in some anterior life. They were so familiar that I felt no need to go about asking their names, even if the archaeologists had in several cases given them new names. I should have known certain of them by traits which remain in the memory long after names have dropped out of it. Julius Caesar, with his long Celtic upper-lip, still looked like the finer sort of Irish-American politician; Tiberius again surprised me with the sort of racial sanity and beauty surviving in his atrocious personality from his mother’s blood; but the too Neronian head of Nero, which seems to have been studied from the wild young miscreant when trying to look the part, had an unremembered effect of chubby idiocy. A thing that freshly struck me in the busts of those imperialities, which of course must have been done in their lifetimes, was not merely that the subjects were mostly so ugly and evil but that the artists were apparently safe in showing them so. The men might not have minded that, but how had the sculptors managed to portray the women as they did and live? Perhaps they did not live, or live long; they are a forgotten tribe, and no one can say what became of any given artist after executing the bust of an empress; his own execution may have immediately followed. But what is certain is that those ladies are no lovelier in their looks than they were in their lives; to be sure, in their rank they had not so great need of personal charm as women of the lower class. The most touching face as well as the most dignified and beautiful face among them is that of the seated figure which used to be known as that of Agrippina but which, known now as that of a Roman matron, does not relieve the imperial average of plainness. The rest could rival the average American society woman only in the prevailing modernity of their expression; imperial Rome was very modern, as we all know, and nothing in our own time could be more up to date than the lives and looks of its smart people.

The general impression of the other marbles of the Capitoline Museum remains a composite of standing, sitting, stooping, and leaning figures, of urns and vases, of sarcophaguses and bas-reliefs. If you can be definite about some such delightful presence as that old River dozing over his fountain in the little cold court you see first and last as you come and go, it is more than your reader, if he is as wise as you wish him, can ask of you. I have been wondering whether he could profitably ask of me some record of my experiences in the official and scientific company with which I was honored that day at the Campidoglio; but I should have to offer him again a sort of composite psychograph of objects printed one upon another and hardly separable in their succession. There would be the figure of Marcus Aurelius, commanding us with outstretched arm from the back of the bronze charger which would not obey Michelangelo when he bade it “Go,” not because it was not lifelike, but because it was too fat to move. Against the afternoon sky, looking down into the piazza with dreamy unconcern from their vantage would be the statues on the balustrated roof of the museum. There would be the sense, rather than the vision, of the white shoulders of Castor and Pollux beside their steeds above the dark-green garden spaces on either hand; there would be the front of the Church of Ara Coeli visible beyond the insignificance of Rienzi’s monument; and filling in the other end of the piazza which Michelangelo imagined, and not the Romans knew, there would be the palace of the senator, to which the mayor and the common council of modern Rome now mount by a double stairway, and presumably meet at the top in proceeding to their municipal labors. Facing the museum would be the palace of the Conservatori, where in the noblest of its splendid halls the present company would find itself in the carved and gilded arm-chairs of the conservators, seated at an afternoon tea-table and restoring itself from the fatigues of more and more antique art in the galleries about. After this there would be the gardened court of the palace, with a thin lawn, and a soft little fountain musing in the midst of it, and the sunset light lifting on the wall where the fragments of Septimius Severus’s marble map of Rome order themselves in such coherence as archaeology can suggest for them.

In the palace of the Senator (who was not, as I dare say the reader ignorantly supposes, a residuum of the old Roman senate, but was the dictator whom the mediaeval republic summoned from within or without to be its head and its safeguard from the aristocracy) there would be, beyond the chamber where the actual city council of Rome meets under the presidency of the mayor, the great public rooms bannered and memorialled around with heroic and historic blazons; and last there would be the private room where the syndic devotes himself to civic affairs when he can turn from the sight of the Roman Forum, with a peripatetic archaeologist lecturing a group of earnest Americans, while long, velvety shadows of imperial purple stretch from the sunset on the softly rounded and hollowed ruins of the Palatine.

But, if each of these bare facts could be parted from the others and intelligently presented, what would it avail with the reader who has never seen the originals of my psychograph? It is from some such question, and not from want of a hospitable will, that I hesitate to ask him to go with me on a golden morning of March and spend it in the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill. If I could I should like to pour its yellowness and mellowness round him, perfumed with a potpourri of associations from the time of Lucullus down through every mediaeval and modern time to that very day, when I knew Carolus Duran to be living somewhere in these beauteous bounds as the head of the French Academy which has its home in them. The academic garden-paths, with a few happy people wandering between their correctly balanced passages of box; the blond facade of the casino looking down with its statues and reliefs on these parterres; a young girl vanishing up an aisle of the grove beside the garden into whatever dream awaited her youth in the leafy dusk; an old American pair gazing after her from the terrace, with the void of the vanished years aching in their hearts for the Rome that was once young with them: does this represent to the reader an appreciable morning in the Villa Medici? He may be grateful to me if he does, and if he likes. I cannot do more for him without doing less, and yet I know it is a palette rather than a picture I am giving him.

All the while I was there, the guest of the French nation by the payment of fifty centimes gate-money, I was obscurely resenting its retention of a place which Bonaparte bestowed upon the First Republic with so much other loot from Italy. But now I have lately heard that the magnanimous Third Republic is going to restore it to the people rightfully its owners, and the remembrance of my morning in the Villa Medici will remain a pure joy. So few joys in this world, even in the very capital of it, are without some touch of abatement. I could not so much as visit the Catacombs of Domatilla without suffering a frustration which, though incidental merely, left a lasting pang of unrequited interest. As we drew toward the place, I saw in a field the beginning of one of those domestic dramas which are not attributable to Italy alone. Three peasants, a man and two women, were engaged in controversy which, on his side, the man supported with both hands flapping wildly at the heads of the women, who alertly dodged and circled around him in the endeavor to close in upon him. It was instantly conjecturable, if not apparent, that they were his wife and daughter, and that he was the worse for the vintage of their home acre, and would be the better for being got into the house and into bed. The conjecture enlisted the worthier instincts of the witness on the side of the mother and daughter; but he was in no hurry to have the animated action brought to a close, and was about to tell his cabman to drive very, very slowly, when suddenly the cab descended into a valley, and when the eager spectator rose to his former level again the stone wall had risen with him, and he never knew the end of that passage of real life.

It was impossible to bid the cabman drive back for the close of the scene; the abrupt conclusion must be accepted as final; but it is proof of the charm I found in the gentle guide who presently began to marshal us among the paths of the subterranean sanctuary and cemetery that for the moment my bitter sense of loss was assuaged, and it only returns now at long intervals. Such as the woman actors in this brief scene were some early Christians might have been, and it must have been the stubborn old pagan spirit I saw surviving in the husband and father. He was probably such a vessel of wrath as, being filled with Bacchus, would have lent itself to the persecuting rage of Domitian and helped drive the emperor’s gentle cousin Domatilla into the exile whence she returned to found a Christian cemetery in her villa. One understands, of course, under the villa; for the catacombs in some places reach as many as five levels below the surface. I will not follow the reader with that kind guide who will cheer his wanderings through those sunless corridors of death, where many of the sleepers still lie sealed within their tombs on either hand, and show him by the smoky taper’s light the frescos which adorn the cramped chapels. I prefer to stand at the top of the entrance and ask him if he noticed how the artist sometimes seemed not to know whether he was pagan or Christian, and did not mind, for instance, putting a Mercury at the heads of the horses in an Ascent of Elijah. Perhaps the artist was really a pagan and thought a Greek god as good as a Hebrew prophet any day; art was probably one of the last things to be converted, having a presentiment of the dark and bloody themes the new religion would give it to deal with.

The earthy scent of the catacomb will cling to the reader’s clothes, and he will have two minds about keeping for a souvenir the taper which he carried, and which the guide wraps in a bit of newspaper for him; he may prefer the flower which he is allowed to gather from the tiny garden at the entrance to the catacombs. Yet these Catacombs of Domatilla are among the cheerfulest of all the catacombs, and a sense of something sweet and appealing invests them from the memory of the gentle lady whose piety consecrated them as the last home of the refugees and martyrs. They are of the more recent Roman excavations, but I do not know whether later or earlier than those which have revealed the house of the two Christian gentlemen, John and Paul, of unknown surname, where they suffered death for their faith, under the Passionist church named for them. Twenty-four rooms on the two stories have been opened, and there are others yet to be opened; when all are laid bare they will perfectly show what a Roman city dwelling of the better sort was like in the mid-imperial time. The plan differs from that of the average Pompeian house as much as the plan of a cross-town New York dwelling would differ from that of the average Newport cottage. The rooms are incomparably smaller than those of the mediaeval palaces of the Roman nobles, and the decoration is sometimes crudely mixed of pagan and Christian themes and motives; the artists, like the painters of the Domatilla catacombs, were probably lingering in the old Greek tradition.

The young Passionist father who showed us through the church and the house under it made us wait half an hour while he finished his lunch, but he was worth waiting for. He was a charming enthusiast for both, radiantly yet reverently exulting in their respective treasures, and justly but not haughtily proud of the newly introduced electricity which lighted the darkness of the underground rooms and corridors. He told us he had been twenty years a missionary in Rumania, where he had possibly acquired the delightful English he spoke. When he would have us follow him he said, “All persons come this way,” and he politely spoke of the wicked emperor whose bust was somehow there as Mr. Commodus. With all his gentleness, however, that good father had a certain smiling severity before which the spirit bowed. He had made us wait half an hour before he came to let us into the church, and during the hour we were with him there he kept the door locked against an unlucky lady who arrived just too late to enter with us. Not only this, but he utterly refused to go back with her singly and show her the things we had seen. Perhaps it would not have been decorous; they do not let ladies, either singly or plurally, into the garden of the convent, which is memorable among many other facts as being the retreat of Mr. Commodus when he suffered from sleeplessness, and where he once carelessly left his list of victims lying about, so that his friend Marcia found it and, reading her name in it, joined with other friends in his assassination. The sex has indeed had much restraint to bear from the Church, but in some respects it has been rendered fearless in the assertion of its rights. With poor women one of these is the indefeasible right to ask alms, and I admired the courage, almost the ferocity, of the aged crone whom I had promised charity in coming to the place and who rose up as I was being driven past her, in going away, and stayed my cabman with a clamor which he dared not ignore. Her reproaches continued through the ensuing transaction, and followed him away with stings which instinct and experience taught her how to implant in his tenderest sensibilities.

A chapter much longer than any I have written here might well be devoted to the study of the clerical or secular guides in the minor churches of Rome. They are of every manner and degree of kindliness, mixed with a fair measure of intelligence and a very fitting faith in the legends of their churches. You soon get on terms of impersonal intimacy with them, and you cannot come away without sharing their professional zeal, and distinguishing for the moment in favor of their respective churches above every other. It did not matter whether it was that newest church in the Quartiere dei Prati, or that most venerable among the oldest churches, the Church of San Gregorio: I found a reason for agreeing with the sacristan upon its singular claims. These were especially enforced by the good dame, the only woman sacristan I remember, who would not spare us a single object of interest in San Gregorio’s, which is indeed for the visitor of Anglo-Saxon race supremely rich in its associations with the conversions of his ancestors from heathenism.

Being myself of Cymric blood, and of a Christianity several hundred years older than that of the ordinary Anglo-Saxon traveller, I am afraid that it was from a rather patronizing piety that I visited the church where the great St. Gregory dismissed to their mission in England St. Augustine and his fellow-apostles on one of the greatest days of the sixth century. I might have stayed to imagine them kneeling among the people who then thronged the genially irregular piazza, but as we came up some ecclesiastical students were playing ball there, their robes tucked into their girdles for their greater convenience, and we made our way at once into the church. It forms one of a consecrated group of edifices enshrining the memory of the best of the popes, who was also the greatest; and here or in the adjacent convents a score of miracles were wrought through the heavenly beauty of his life. Of these miracles, of whose inspiration you must feel the poetry even if you cannot feel their verity, the loveliest has its substantial witness in one of the little chapels next the church. There you may see with your eyes and touch with your hands the table at which St. Gregory fed every morning twelve poor men, till one morning a thirteenth appeared in the figure of Christ the Lord, as if to own them His disciples. The chapel which enshrines the table is one of three, quaint in form and rich in art, standing in the garden called St. Silvia’s, after the mother of St. Gregory. As we came out through it the westering sun poured the narrow court before the chapel full of golden light and threw the black shadow of a cypress across the way that a file of Comaldolese monks were taking to the adjoining convent. They were talking cheerily together, and swung unheeding by in their white robes so near that I could almost feel the waft of them across the centuries that parted their faith and mine.

We had come to St. Gregory’s from the Baths of Caracalla, which we had set out to see on the first of our Roman holidays, and, after turning aside for the Coliseum, had now visited on next to the last of them. The stupendous ruin could scarcely have been growing in the ten or twelve weeks that had passed, but a bewildering notion of something like this obsessed me as I saw it bulking aloof in overhanging cliffs and precipices, through the cool and bright April air, against a sky of absolute blue. As if it had been cast up out of the earth in some convulsive throe of nature, it floundered over its vast area in shapeless masses which seemed to have capriciously received the effect of human design in the coping of the inaccessible steeps, in the arches flinging themselves across the spaces between the beetling crags, in the monstrous spring and sweep of the vaults, in the gloom of the cavernous apertures of its Titanic walls. For the moment its immensity dwarfed the image of all the other fragments of the Roman world and set definite bounds to their hugeness in the mind. It seemed to have been not so much a single edifice as a whole city, the dwelling instead of the resort of the multitudes that once thronged it. The traces of the ornamentation which had enriched it everywhere and which it had taken ages of ravage to strip from it, accented its savage majesty, and again the sentiment of spring in the fresh afternoon breeze and sunshine, and the innocent beauty of the blooming peach and cherry in the orchards around, imparted to it a pathos in which one’s mere brute wonder was lost. But it was a purely adventitious pathos, and it must be owned here, at the end, that none of the relics of ancient Rome stir a soft emotion in the beholder, and, as for beauty, there is more of it in some ivy-netted fragment of some English abbey which Henry’s Cromwell “hammered down” than in the ruin of all the palaces and temples and theatres and circuses and baths of that imperial Rome which the world is so well rid of.

VII. A WEEK AT LEGHORN

We left Rome with such a nostalgic pang in our hearts that we tried to find relief in a name for it, and we called ourselves Romesick. Afterward, when we practised the name with such friends as we could get to listen, they thought we said homesick. Being better instructed, they stared or simpered, and said, “Oh!” That was not all we could have asked, but Rome herself would understand, and, while we were seeking this outlet for our grief, she followed us as far as she could on her poor, broken aqueducts. At places they gave way under her, and she fell down, but scrambled up again on the next stretch of arches, like some fond cripple pursuing a friend on crutches; when at last our train outran them, and there was no longer an arch to halt upon, she gave up the vain chase and turned back within her walls, where we saw her domes and bell-towers fading into the heaven to which they pointed.

It was a heaven of better than absolute blue, for there were soft, white clouds in it, and the air that our Sunday breathed under it was, at the beginning of April, as bland as that of an American May-end. The orchard trees were in bloom — peach and plum, cherry and pear — whenever you chose to look at them, and all nature seemed to rejoice in the cessation of the two days’ strike which had now enabled us to drive to the station instead of walking and carrying our bags and bundles. There were so many of these that we had taken two cabs, and at the station our drivers attempted to rejoice with nature in an overcharge that would have recouped them for the loss suffered in their recent leisure. But as we were then leaving Koine, and were not yet melted with the grief of absence, I had the courage to resist their demand. Long before we reached Leghorn I was so Romesick that I would have paid them anything they asked.

When we emerged from the suburbs upon the open Campagna, we passed through many fields of wheat, more than we had yet seen on the grassy waste, but there were also many flocks of sheep feeding with the cattle in pastures. Now and then we passed a wretched hut which seemed to be the dwelling of the shepherds we saw tending the flocks, and here and there we came upon a group of farm buildings, all of straw, whether for man or beast, set within a sort of squalid court, with a frowzy suggestion of old women and children about the doors of the cottages. We saw no men, though there must have been men off at work in the fields with the younger women.

As we drew near Civita Vecchia the sea widened on our view, wild with a wind that seemed to have been blowing ever since the stormy evening in 1865 when, after looking at the tossing ships in the harbor, we decided to take the diligence for Leghorn, rather than the little steamer we had meant to take. From our pleasant train we now patronized Civita Vecchia with a recognition of its picturesqueness, unvexed by the choice that then insisted on itself, though the harbor was as full of shipping as of old. There was time to run out for a cup of coffee at the station buffet, where there had been neither station nor buffet in our young time: but doubtless then as now there had been the lonely graveyard outside the town, with its sea-beaten, seaward wall. We buried there the last of our Roman holidays under a sky that had changed from blue to gray since our journey began, and mournfully set out faces northward in the malarial Maremma.

If the Maremma is as malarial as it is famed, it does not look it. There were stretches of hopeless morass, with wide acreages under water, but mostly, I should say, it was rather a hilly country. Now and then we ran by a stony old town on a distant summit like the outcropping of granite or marble, and there were frequent breadths of woodland, oak and pine and, I dare say, walnut and chestnut. Evidently there had been efforts to reclaim the Maremma from its evil air and make it safely habitable, and the farther we penetrated it the more frequent the evidences were. There were many new buildings of a good sort, and of wood as well as stone; when we came to Grosetto, where we had spent a memorable night after being overturned in the Ombrone, in the attempt of our diligence to pass its flood, we were aware, in the evening light, of a prosperity which, if not excessive for the twoscore years that had passed, was still very noticeable. I should not quite say that the brick wall of the city had been scraped and scrubbed, but it looked very neat and new, and there was a pleasant suburb under it where the moat might have been, and people were coming and going who had almost the effect of commuters; at least, they seemed to have come out to their homes by trolley. We resisted an impulse to dismount and go up to the inn in the heart of the town where we had spent that “night of memory and of sighs.”

But we searched the horizon round for the point on the highway where our diligence had failed of the track between the telegraph-poles and softly rolled with us in the muddy waters, like an elephant taking a bath, but, so far from finding it, we could not even find the highway. We began to have our doubts of what we had always believed had happened, and remained as snugly as we could in our compartment, where, to tell the truth, we were not very snug. In too fond a reliance on the almanac, the Italian government had cut off the steam which ought to have heated it, and the cold from the hills, on which we saw snow, pierced our rugs and cushions; but, if we had known what we were coming to in Leghorn, we should have thought ourselves very enviable.

I do not know exactly how far it is from the station in Leghorn to the hotel where we had providently engaged rooms with a fire in at least one of them, but I should say at a rough calculation it was a hundred miles as we covered the distance in a one-horse omnibus, through long, straight streets, after ten o’clock at night. The streets and houses were mostly dark, as houses of good habits should be at that hour, but, after passing through a wide, lonely piazza, we struck into a street longer and straighter than the others, and drew up at our hotel door opposite an hilarious cafe, where there seemed a general rejoicing of some sort. We were unable to make out just what sort, or to join in it without knowing, though it lasted well toward morning, and we were up often during the night to see that the fire did not die out of our one porcelain stove and leave us to perish of cold.

In Leghorn the good Baedeker says that all the hotels are good, and this sweeping verdict may be true if taken in the sense that one is as good as another, but they are of the old Italian type which our winter in Rome had taught us to think obsolete; now we found that it was only obsolescent. We had written to bespeak a room with fire in it, and this was well, for the hotel was otherwise heated only by the bodies of its frequenters, who, when filled with Chianti, might emit a sensible warmth; though it was very modern in being lighted with electricity, and having a lift, in which, after a tepid supper, we were carried to our apartment. We had our landlord’s company at supper, and had learned from him that the most eminent of American financiers, who shall not otherwise be identified here, was in the habit, when coming to Leghorn, of letting him know that he was bringing a party of friends, and commanding of him a banquet such as he alone knew how to furnish a millionaire of that princely quality. After that we were not so much surprised as grieved to find that our elderly chambermaid had profited by our absence to gather all the coals out of our one stove into two scaldini, which were bristling before her where she knelt when we opened the door upon her. She apologized, but still she carried away the coals, and we were left to rekindle the zeal of our stove as best we could. It was not a large stove, and it seemed to feel its inadequacy to the office of taking the chill off that vast, dim room, where it cowered, dark and low upon the floor, with a yearning, upward stretch of its pipe lost in space before it reached the lowermost goddess in the allegory frescoed on the ceiling. If it had been a white porcelain stove, that might have helped, but it was of a gloomy earthen color that imparted no more cheer than warmth.

We rebuilt our fire, after many repeated demands for kindling, which had apparently to be sawed and split in a distant wood-yard before we could get it, and then the long, arctic night set in, unrelieved by the noisy gayeties of the cafe across the way. These burst from time to time the thin film of sleep which formed like a coating of ice over the consciousness, and then one could only get up and put more wood into the despairing stove and more clothes on the beds. Well for us that we had thought to bring all our travelling rugs with us in straps, instead of abandoning them with our other baggage in the station till next day! But, even with these heaping the hotel blankets and com-forters, we shivered, and a superannuated odor that had lurked in the recesses of those rooms, to which the sun or wind had never pierced, grew with the growing cold, and haunted the night like something palpable as well as sensible — the materialization of smells dead and buried there long ago. It was wonderful how little way the electric bulb shed its beams in that naughty air; it would not even light the page which at one time was opened in the vain hope that the author would help the benumbing cold to bring torpor if not slumber to the weary brain.

It is really impossible to say where or how we breakfasted, but it was somehow managed, and then search was made by the swiftest conveyance for the hotel which we had heard of outside the city, as helping make Leghorn the watering-place it is for Italians in the summer, and in the winter as being steam-heated and appointed with every modern comfort for the passing or sojourning stranger. It was all that and more, and only for the fear that I should seem to join it in advertising its merits I should like to celebrate it by name. But perhaps it is as well not; if I did, all my readers would swarm upon that hotel, and there would be no room for me, who hope some day to go back there and spend an old age of luxurious leisure. There was not only steam-heat in the public rooms of the ground floor, but there was furnace heat in all the corridors, and there were fireplaces in certain chambers, which also looked out on the sea, to Corsica and Elba and other isles of it, and would be full of sun as soon as the cold rain closed a fortnight’s activity. That which diffused a blander atmosphere than steam or radiator, register and hearth, however, was the kind will, the benevolent intelligence, which imagined us, and which would not then let us go. We had become not only agnostic as respected the possibility of warmth in Leghorn, we were open sceptics, aggressive infidels. But the landlord himself followed us from one room to another, lighting fires here and there on the hearth, making us feel the warm air rising from the furnace, calling us to witness by palpation the heat of the radiators, soothing our fears, and coaxing our unfaith. His wife joined him in Italian and his son in English, and, if I do not say that these amiable people were worthy all the prosperity which was not then apparent in their establishment, may I never be comfortably lodged or fed again. Our daily return for what we got was a poor twelve francs each; but fancy a haughty American landlord caressing us with such sweet and reassuring civility for any sum of money! Those gentle people made themselves our friends; there was nothing they would not do, or try to do, for us, in the vast, pink palace where we were never twenty guests together, and mostly eight or ten, with the run of a reading-room where there were the latest papers and periodicals from London and Paris, and with a kitchen whence we were served the best luncheons and dinners we ate in Europe.

The place had the true out-of-season charm. There were two stately dining-rooms besides the one where we dined, and there were pleasant spaces where we had afternoon tea or after-dinner coffee, and from which a magnificent stairway ascended to the upper halls, and a quiet lift waited our orders, with the landlord or his son to take us up; and so lonely and quiet and gentle, with porters and chambermaids speaking beautiful Tuscan, and watchful attendants everywhere prophesying and fulfilling our wants. It was a keeping to make the worst believe in their merit, and we were not the worst. Outside, the environment flattered or rewarded us with a garden of laurel and other evergreens, and with flower-beds where the annuals were beginning to show the gardener’s designs in their sprouting seeds. Beyond these ample villa bounds a tram-car murmured to and from the well-removed city, and beyond its track lay a line of open-air theatres and variety shows and bathing establishments, as at our own Atlantic City, but here in enduring masonry instead of the provisional wood of our summer architecture.

This festive preparation intimated the watering-place supremacy which Leghorn enjoys in Italy, and which must make our quiet hotel in the season glisten and twitter and flutter with the vivid national life. The preparation includes a delightful drive by the seashore, with groves and gardens, to the city gate and indefinitely beyond it, which we one day followed as far as an old fort, where a little hotel had nestled with every promise of simple comfort. There was a neighboring village of no very exciting interest, and I do not know that the Italian Naval Academy, which we passed on the way, was very exciting, though with its villa grounds it had a pleasing rural effect. Hard by our hotel, in a piazza that seemed to have nothing to do but surround it, was the colossal bust of an Italian admiral, or the like, which had not the impressiveness of a colossal full-length figure, but which rendered the original with the faithful realism of the Genoese Campo Santo sculpture. In compensation there was, toward the city, near the ship-yards where the great Italian battle-ships are built, the statue of their builder — a man who looked it — standing at large ease, with one hand in his pantaloons pocket, and not apparently conscious of the passer’s gaze. Beyond the ship-yard, in which a battle-ship was then receiving the last touches, was a statue for which I could not claim an equal unconsciousness. In fact, it challenged the public attention and even homage as it extended the baton of command and triumphed over the four Moorish or Algerine corsairs who, in their splendid nudity, were chained to the several corners of the monument and owned themselves galley-slaves. The Medicean grand-duke who lords it over them, and who erected this monument in honor of himself for the victories his admirals had gained in sweeping the pirates from the seas, is a very proud presence, and is certainly worthy of the admiration which his bronze requires from the spectator. I instantly suspected this monument of being the chief sculpture of Leghorn, and I did not wonder that a valet de place was lying in wait for me there to make me observe that from a certain point I could get all four of the galley-slaves’ noses in perspective at once. Upon experiment I did not find that I could do this, but I imputed my failure to want of merit in myself and not the monument, and I willingly paid half a franc for the suggestion; if all one’s failures cost so little, one could save money. I was going then to view at close quarters the port of Leghorn, which is famous for its mole and lighthouse and quarantine, the first of their kind in their time. The old port, with the fortifications, was the work of a natural son of Queen Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester, whose noble origin was so constantly recognized by the Tuscan grand-dukes that he came at last to be accepted as Lord Dudley by the English. From his day, if not from his work, the prosperity of Leghorn began, and the English have always had a great part in it. Early in the nineteenth century there were a score of great British merchants settled there, and, though afterward they declined in number, the trade with England did not decline, and the trade with America has always been such that American merchants and captains have fully shared in the commerce directly or indirectly. Both the old and the new port were a scene of pleasant activity the pleasant afternoon when I visited them, and were full of varied sail as well as many steamers, loading or unloading for or from the Mediterranean ports, east and west, and the Hanseatic cities and the far coasts of Norway.

Any seaport is charming and full of romantic interest, but an Italian port has always a prime picturesqueness. Its sailors are the most ancient mariners, and they look full of history, and capable, each of them, of discovering a continent. I cannot say that I saw any nascent Columbus in the tanned and tarry company I met, but I do not deny that there was one. Leghorn is still in her lusty youth, being not much older than our Boston in the prosperity which has not failed her since the Medici divined her importance toward the close of the sixteenth century, and fortified her harbor till she was one of the strongest places on the Mediterranean. With a hazy general consciousness of her modernity in mind, I had imagined her yet more modern, and I was somewhat surprised to read, in a rather airy and ironical but very capable local guidebook called Su e Giu per Livorno (or Up and Down Leghorn), that the place was settled twenty-six hundred and fifty-six years before Christ. The author records this with a smile, and then, by a leap over some forty centuries, he finds firm footing in the fact that the great Countess Matilde, then much bothering about in the affairs of her Tuscan neighbors everywhere, gave the Livornese coasts to Pisa in 1103. This seems to have been the signal for the Genoese, eleven years later, to ravage and destroy the Pisan settlements; but later the Pisans, confirmed in their possession by the Emperor of Germany, rebuilt and embellished the port. A century after, Charles of Anjou demolished it, and then the Pisans fortified it some more. Then, in the last years of the thirteenth century, the Florentines, Lucchese, and Genoese devastated the whole territory of Pisa, and left Leghorn only one poor little church. Well throughout the fourteenth century there were wars between these republics, and Leghorn suffered the consequences, being, as our author says, “according to custom, assailed, taken, wasted, and destroyed.” But before that century was out she seems to have flourished up again, and to have received with all honor Gregory XL, returning from Avignon to Rome and bringing the papacy back from its long exile to the Eternal City.

The Genoese now sold Leghorn to Milan, and in 1407 she was sold to France for twenty-six thousand florins, which seems low for a whole city. But in less than ten years we find the Genoese back again, and strengthening and adorning her at the greatest rate. It was quite time now that she should be visited by a virulent pestilence, and that, having passed to Florence in the meanwhile, she should have been ceded without a blow to Charles VIII. of France. But in a year she was once more in the hold of Florence and helping that republic fight her enemies the Pisans, and her other enemies under the Emperor Maximilian of Germany.

More fortifying, embellishing, and pestilence followed, and in 1429 Michelangelo came to inspect the new fortifications which the Florentine republic had built at Leghorn to repair the damages she had suffered. The next year the republic fell, and Alessandro de’ Medici, who came in master at Florence, took Leghorn into the favor which his family continued to show her to the end. The first Cosimo greatly improved her harbor, dug canals, and built forts, but he let the Spaniards, for a pleasure to Charles V., place garrisons in Florence, Pisa, and Leghorn, and the Spaniards remained six years at Leghorn. In the last year of the sixteenth century Ferdinand erected to himself the superb monument with the four captive corsairs at the corners, whose noses I had failed to get in range, and in the meanwhile many great public works had been constructed and the city desolated by another plague. It was now time for the English to appear in those waters, and in 1652 they were defeated by the Dutch off Leghorn. About seventy-five years later the grippe paid Leghorn a first visit, and not long after a violent earthquake shook down many buildings and killed many women and children; but the authorities did what they could to secure the city in future by declaring the day a perpetual fast, and forbidding masking and dancing on it.

No disaster worth recording befell the city till Bonaparte came with the Rights of Man in 1796 and left a French garrison, which evacuated the place the next year, after having levied a fine of two million francs. The year after that Nelson occupied it with eight thousand English troops, and the following year the French reoccupied it and sacked the churches and imposed another fine nearly as great as the first. After the Napoleonic victories in the Italian wars, they seem to have come back again and fined the city two million francs more. They now remained five years, and in the mean time a Livornese, Giovanni Antonio Giaschi, invented a submarine-boat for attacking and destroying war-vessels, and a Spanish ship brought the yellow-fever. In 1808 Napoleon gave all Tuscany, and Leghorn with it, to his sister Elisa, but when in 1814 he was deposed, Leghorn was restored to the Tuscan grand-dukes and garrisoned for them by German troops, an earthquake having profited by the general disorder meantime to pay it another visit. The grand-duke now being driven out of Florence by Murat, he took refuge at Leghorn, which fell a prey to an epidemic of typhus. The first steam-vessel appared there in 1818, and in 1835 the Asiatic cholera; in 1847 a telegraphic line to Pisa was opened.

In 1848 the revolutions prevalent throughout Europe had their effect at Leghorn. The citizens shared in the uprising against the grand-duke, and elected among its representatives F. D. Guerrazzi, once famous as the first of Italian novelists and a man of generous mind and heart, who duly suffered arrest and imprisonment when the grand-duke was restored by the Austrians. He was sentenced to fifteen years’ prison with hard labor, but later his sentence was commuted to exile. He lived to return and take part in the Italian unification in 1860, and in 1866 he led the movement against making peace with Austria unless all her Italian-speaking provinces were ceded to Italy. He died in 1873, and is remembered in Leghorn by a monument very ineffective as a whole, but singularly interesting in certain details.

I have omitted from this catalogue of events many of peaceful interest, such as visits from popes, princes, and poets, and I am not sure I have got in all the plagues and earthquakes. Perhaps I have the more willingly suppressed a few war-like facts, in the interest of the superstition I had cherished that Leghorn was without a history, or that it had no more history than, most American cities of equal date with its commercial importance, which began with the wise hospitality of the Medici to merchants of all races and nations, religions and races, settled there, and especially to the Spanish Jews who came in great numbers to the city that it was a common saying that you had as well strike the duke as strike a Jew in Leghorn. Greeks, Turks, Armenians were protected equally with English and Dutch, and infidel and heretic were alike free in their worship. It was the great prison of the galley-slaves, who were chiefly the pirates and corsairs taken on the high seas by the duke’s ships. These captives not only served as models for the Moors at the base of his monument, but they must have been very useful in the different public works which he and his successors carried out. Now they and their like are gone, and though the Greeks, the Armenians, the English, and the Scotch still have their churches, I do not suppose there is a mosque in all Leghorn.

I do not speak very confidently, because my researches in that sort were not exhaustive. I indeed visited the cathedral, not wholly because Inigo Jones had something to do in planning it, but because I had formed the habit of visiting churches in Rome, and I mechanically went into one wherever I saw it. Generally speaking, I think that they were rather bare in painting or sculpture, but they were such churches as in America one would go a long way to see and think one’s self well rewarded by their objects of interest. I do not know what defence to offer for not having visited the galleries of the Museo Civico, where by actual count in the guide-book I missed one hundred and sixty-nine works of art, though just how many masterpieces I am not able to say: probably one out of every ten was a masterpiece. But, if I did not much resort to the churches and galleries in Leghorn, I roamed gladly through its pleasant streets and squares, and by the shores of the canals which once gave it the name of New Venice, and which still invite the smaller shipping up among its houses in right Venetian fashion. The streets of Leghorn are not so straight as they are long, but many are very straight, and the others are curved rather than crooked. The longest and straight-est were streets of low dwelling-houses, uncommon in Italian towns, where each family lived under its own roof with a little garden behind, and a respective entrance, as people still mostly do in our towns. From the force of the mid-April sun in these streets I realized what they might be in summer, and, if I lived in Leghorn, I would rather live on the sea-front, in one of the comfortable, square, stone villas which border it. But everywhere Leghorn seemed a pleasant place to live, and convenient, with lively shops and cafes and trams and open spaces, and statues and monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat radical politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a Victor Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as always, and a Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his poncho and his round, flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a Cavour, and, above all, there is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as to the seated figure, but most interesting, most touching in two of the bas-reliefs below. One represents him proclaiming the provisional government at Florence in 1849, after the expulsion of the grand-duke, where the fact is studied, with the wonderful realism of the Italians, in all its incidents and the costumes of the thronging spectators. The sculptor has hesitated at no top-hat or open umbrella; there are barefooted boys and bareheaded young girls, as well as bearded elders; if my memory serves, the scene is not without a dog or two. But it is the other relief which is so simply and so deeply affecting — the interior of a narrow cell, with one chair and a rude table, at which the patriot novelist wrote his greatest work, The Siege of Florence, and with him standing a little way from it. In spite of the small space and the almost vacant stage, the scene is full of most moving drama, and records a whole Italian epoch, now happily past forever.

These are modern sculptures, and they scarcely contest the palm with the monument of the four galley-slaves and the Medicean grand-duke. In another piazza two princes of the Lorrainese family, if I remember rightly, face each other over its oblong — classic motives, with the figures much undraped, and one of them singularly impressive from the mutton-chop whiskers which modernized him. There are several theatres, and among them a Goldoni theatre, as there should be in a city where the sweet old playwright sojourned for a time and has placed the action of his famous comedy, “La Locandiera.” But I was told that the local theatres were not so much frequented by polite people, especially for opera, as the theatre in Pisa, which, if poorer, is prouder in its society than its old-time vassal by the sea, and attracts the fashion of Leghorn during the season.

As Pisa has ceased to be the colony of literary English it once was, in the time of Byron and Hunt and Shelley, to name no others, so Leghorn has ceased to be the mercantile colony of former days. It has still a great deal of commerce with England, but this is no longer carried on by resident merchants, though here and there an English name lingers in the style of a business house; and the distinctive qualities of both colonies are united in the author of a charming book who fills the post of British consul at Leghorn. His Tuscan Towns must not be confused with another book called Tuscan Cities, though, if the traveller chooses to carry both with him about Tuscany, I will not say that he could do better. In Tuscan Cities there is nothing about Leghorn, I believe, but in Tuscan Towns there is a specially delightful chapter about the place, its people, language, and customs which I can commend to the reader as the best corrective of the errors I must have been constantly falling into here.

It was in company no less enviable than this author’s that I revisited the port on a gray Sunday afternoon of my stay, and then for the first time visited the ancient fortifications which began to be in the time of the Countess Matilde and intermittently increased under the rule of the Pisan, Genoese, and Florentine republics, until the Medicean grand-dukes amplified them in almost the proportions I saw. The brutal first duke of their line, Alessandro de’ Medici, who some say was no Medici, but the bastard of a negro and a washerwoman, stamped his creed in the inscription below his adoptive arms, “Under one Faith and one Law, one Lord,” and it was in the palace here, the story goes, that the wicked Cosimo I. killed his son Don Garzia before the eyes of the boy’s mother. Anything is imaginable of an early Medicean grand-duke, but in a manner the father’s murderous fury was provoked by the fact, if it was a fact, that Don Garzia had just mortally wounded his brother Giovanni. I should like to pretend that the tragedy had wrought in my unconsciousness to the effect of the pensive gloom which the old fortress cast over me, but perhaps I had better not. There are some gray Sunday afternoons of a depressing effect on the spirit which requires no positive or palpable reason.

In any case it was a relief to go from the shadow of the past there through the pleasant city streets to the gentle quiet of the British cemetery, where so many of our race and some even of our own nation are taking their long rest. No one is now buried there, and the place, in the gradual diminution of the English colony at Leghorn, has fallen into a lovely and appealing neglect if not oblivion. Oblivion quite covers its origin, but it is almost as old as Protestantism itself, and, if the ground for it was the gift of the grand-duke who tolerated heretics as well as Jews in the impulse he gave to the city’s growth, it would not be strange. The beautiful porch of the English church, for once Greek and not Gothic, fronts upon it, but the dwindling congregation has no care of it, and there is no fund to keep it so much as free from weeds and brambles and the insidious ivy rending its monuments asunder. The afternoon of our visit it was in the sole charge of a large, gray cat, which, after feasting upon the favorite herb, lay stretched in sleep on a sunny bed of catnip under the walls of a mansion near, at whose windows some young girls looked down in a Sunday listlessness, as we wandered about among the “tall cypresses, myrtles, pines, eucalyptus-trees, oleanders, cactuses, huge bushes of monthly roses, a jungle of periwinkles, sarsaparilla, wild irises, violets, and other loveliest of wild flowers.” On the forgotten tombs were the touching epitaphs of those who had died in exile, and whose monuments are sometimes here while their ashes lie in Florence or Rome, or wherever else they chanced to meet their end. Among them were the inscriptions on the graves of “William Magee Seton, merchant of New York,” who died at Pisa in 1803, and “Henry De Butts, a citizen of Baltimore, N. America,” who died at Sarzana; with “James M. Knight, Esq., Captain of Marines, Citizen of the United States of America,” who died at Leghorn in 1802; and “Thomas Gamble, Late Captain in the Navy of the United States of America,” who died at Pisa in 1818; and doubtless there were other Americans whose tombs I did not see. The memorials of the English were likewise here, whether they died at Leghorn or not; but most of them seem to have ended their lives in that place, where there were once so many English residents, whether for their health or their profit. The youth of some testified to the fact that they had failed to find the air specific for their maladies, and doubtless this would account also for the disproportionate number of noble ladies who rest here, with their hatchments and their coronets and robes of state carven on the stones above them. Among others one reads the titles of “Lady Catharine Burgess born Beauclerk; Jane Isabella, widow of the Earl of Lanesborough and daughter of the Earl of Molesworth; and Catharine Murray, only child of James Murray,... and the Right Honorable Lady Catharine Stewart his Spouse,” with knights, admirals, generals, and other military and naval officers a many. Most important of all is the tomb of that strenuous spirit, more potent for good and ill in the English fiction of his time than any other novelist of his time, and second only to Richardson in the wide influence of his literary method, Tobias Smollett, namely, who here ended his long fight with consumption and the indifference of his country to his claims upon her official recognition. After many years of narrow circumstance in the Southern climates where he spent his later life, he tried in vain for that meek hope of literary ambition, a consulate, perhaps the very post that my companion, a hundred and fifty years later, was worthily holding. The truest monument to his stay in Italy is the book of Italian travel that he wrote, and the best effect is that sort of peripatetic novel which he may be said to have invented in Humphrey Clinker, and which has survived the epistolary form into our own time. It is a very simple shaft that rises over his grave, with the brief record, “Memoriae Tobiae Smollett, qui Liburni animam efflavit, 16 Sept., 1773,” but it is imaginable with what wrath he would have disputed the record, if it is true, according to all the other authorities, that he exhaled his spirit two years earlier, and how he would have had it out with those “friends and fellow-countrymen” who had the error perpetuated above his helpless dust.

It was not easy to quit the sweetly solemn place or to resist the wish which I have here indulged, that some kinsman or kinswoman of those whom the blossoms and leaves are hiding would come to their rescue from nature now claiming an undue part in them, and obliterating their very memories. One would not have a great deal done, but only enough to save their names from entire oblivion, and with the hope of this I have named some of their names. It might not be too much even for the United Kingdom and the United States, though both very poor nations, to join in contributing the sum necessary for the work. Or some millionaire English duke, or some millionaire American manufacturer, might make the outlay alone; I cannot expect any millionaire author to provide a special fund for the care of the tomb of Smollett.

VIII. OVER AT PISA

If the half-hour between Leghorn and Pisa had been spent in any less lovely transit, I should still be grieving for the loss of the thirty minutes which might so much better have been given to either place. But with the constant line of mountains enclosing the landscape on the right, in all its variety of tillage, pasture-land, vineyard, and orchard, and the unchanging level which had once been the bed of the sea, we were gainers in sort beyond the gift of those cities. We had the company, great part of the way, of more stone-pines than we had seen even between Naples and Rome, here gathering into thick woods, with the light beautiful beneath the spread of their horizontal boughs, there grouped in classic groves, and yonder straying off in twos and threes. We had the canal that of old time made Pisa a port of the Mediterranean, with Leghorn for her servant on the shore (or, if it was not this canal, it was another as straight and long), with a peasant walking beside it, under a light-green umbrella, in the showers which threatened our start but spared our arrival. We had then the city, with its domes and towers, grown full height out of the plain through which the Arno curves in the stateliest crescent of all its course.

The day had turned finer than any other day I can now think of in my whole life, and I was once more in Pisa without the care for its history or art or even novelty which had corroded my mind in former visits. I had been there twice before — once in 1864, when I had done its wonders with all the wonder they merited, and again in 1883, when I had lived its memories on the scene of its manifold and mighty experiences. No distinct light from that learning vexed my present vision, but an agreeable mist of association, nothing certain, nothing tangible remaining, but only a gentle vague involving everything, in which I could possess my soul in peace. In this glimmer I recognized a certain cabman as having been waiting there from the dawn of time, with his dark-eyed little son, to make me his willing captive at something above the tariff rates, but destined by the same fate to serve me well, and to part with me friends at the close of the day for a franc more than the excess agreed upon. It costs so small a sum to corrupt the common carrier in Italy that I hold it wrong to fail of any chance, and this driver had not only a horse of uncommon qualities, but he spoke a beautiful Tuscan, and he had his Pisa at his fingers’ ends.

We were of one mind about driving without delay to the famous group which is without rival on the earth, though there may be associated edifices in the red planet Mars that surpass the Cathedral, the Leaning Tower, the Baptistery, and the Campo Santo at Pisa. What genius it was imagined placing them in the pleasant meadow where they sit, just beyond the city streets, I do not know, but it was inspiration beyond any effect of mere taste, and it commanded my worship as much the last as the first time. The meadow still swims round them and breaks in a foam of daisies at their feet; for I take it that it is always mid-April there, and that the grass is as green and the sun as yellow on it as the afternoon we saw it. The sacred edifices are as golden as the light on them, and there is such a joyous lift in the air that it is a wonder they do not swing loose from their foundations and soar away into the celestial blue. For travellers in our willing mood there was, of course, the predestined cicerone waiting for us at the door of the cathedral, who would fix no price for the pleasure he was born to do us, yet still consented to take more than twice that he ought to have had at parting. But he was worth the money; he was worth quite two francs, and, though he was not without the fault of his calling and would have cumbered us with instruction, I will not blame him, for after a moment I perceived that his intelligence was such that I might safely put my hands in my pocket on my shut guide-book and follow him from point to point without fear of missing anything worth noting. Among the things worthiest noting, I saw, as if I had never seen them before, the unforgettable, forgotten Andrea del Sartos, especially the St. Agnes, in whose face you recognize the well-known features of the painter’s wife, but with a gentler look than they usually wore in his Madonnas, perhaps because he happened to study these from that difficult lady when she was in her least celestial moods. Besides the masterpieces of other masters, there is a most noble Sodoma, which the great Napoleon carried away to Paris and which the greater French people afterward restored. At every step in the beautiful temple you may well pause, for it abounds in pictures and sculptures, the least of which would enrich St. Peter’s at Rome beyond the proudest effect of its poverty-stricken grandeur. Ghirlandajo, Michelangelo, Gaddo Gaddi, John of Bologna — the names came back to me out of a past of my own almost as remote as theirs, while our guide repeated them, in their relation to the sculptures or pictures or architecture, with those of lesser lights of art, and that school of Giotto, of all whose frescos once covering its walls the fire of three hundred years ago has left a few figures clinging to one of the pillars, faint and uncertain as the memories of my own former visits to the church. I did, indeed, remember me of an old bronze lamp, by Vincenzo Possenti, hanging from the roof, which I now revered the third time, at intervals of twenty years; from its oscillation Galileo is said to have got the notion of the pendulum; but it is now tied back with a wire, being no longer needed for such an inspiration. Mostly in this last visit I took Pisa as lightly as at the first, when, as I have noted from the printed witness, I was gayly indifferent to the claims of her objects of interest. If they came in my way, I looked at them, but I did not put myself much about for them. I rested mostly in the twilight of old associations, trusting to the guidance of our cicerone, whom, in some form or under some name, the reader will find waiting for him at the cathedral door as we did. But I have since recurred to the record of my second visit in 1883, with amazement at the exact knowledge of events shown there, which became, in 1908, all a blur of dim conjecture. It appears that I was then acquainted with much more Pisan history than any other author I have found own to. I had also surprising adventures of different kinds, such as my poorer experience of the present cannot parallel. I find, for instance, that in 1883 I gave a needy crone in the cathedral a franc instead of the piece of five centimes which I meant for her, and that the lamp of Galileo did nothing to light the gloom into which this error plunged my spirit.

It appears to have jaundiced my view of the whole cathedral, which I did not find at all comparable to that of Siena, whereas in 1908 I thought it all beautiful. This may have been because I was so newly from the ugliness of the Eoman churches; though I felt, as I had felt before, that the whole group of sacred edifices at Pisa was too suggestive of decorative pastry and confectionery. No more than at the second view of it did I now attempt the ascent of the Leaning Tower; I had discharged this duty for life when I first saw it; with my seventy-one years upon me, I was not willing to climb its winding stairs, and I doubted if I could keep it from falling, as I then did, by inclining myself the other way. I resolved that I would leave this to the new-comer; but I gladly followed our cicerone across the daisied green from the cathedral to the baptistery, where I found the famous echo waiting to welcome me back, and greet me with its angelic sweetness, when the custodian who has it in charge appealed to it; though its voice seemed to have been weakened and coarsened in its forced replies to some rude Americans there, who shouted out to it and mocked at it. One wished to ask them if they did not know that this echo was sacred, and that their challenges of it were a species of sacrilege. But doubtless that would not have availed to silence them. By-and-by they went away, and then we were aware of an interesting group of people by the font near the lovely Lombardic pulpit of Nicola Pisano. They were peasants, by their dress — a young father and mother and a little girl or two, and then a gentle, elderly woman, with a baby in her arms, at which she looked proudly down. They were in their simple best, and they had good Tuscan faces, full of kindness. I ventured some propitiatory coppers with the children, and, when the old woman made them thank me, I thought I could not be mistaken and I ventured further: “You are the grandmother?”

“Yes, signer,” she answered; and then we had some talk about the age and the beauty of the baby, which I declared wonderful for both, in praises loud enough for the father and mother to hear. After that they seemed to hold a family council, from which I thought it respectful to stand apart until the grandmother spoke to me again.

I did not understand, and I appealed to our guide for help.

“She wishes you to be godfather to the child.”

I had never yet been a godfather, but I had the belief that it brought grave responsibilities, which in the very casual and impermanent circumstances I did not see how I was to meet. Yet how to refuse without wounding these kind people who had so honored me I did not know until a sudden inspiration came to my rescue.

“Tell them,” I said, “and be careful to make them understand, that I am very grateful and very sorry, but that I am a Protestant, and that I suppose I cannot, for that reason, be godfather to their child.”

He explained, and they received my thanks and regrets with smiling acquiescence; and just then a very stout little old priest (who has baptized nearly all the babies in Pisa for fifty years) came in, and the baptism proceeded without my intervention. But I remained, somehow, disappointed; it would have been pleasant to leave a godchild behind me there in the neighborhood of Pisa; to have sent him from time to time some little remembrance of this remote America, and, perhaps, when he grew up and came to Pisa, and learned the art of the statuary, to have had from him a Leaning Tower which he had cut in alabaster for me. I was taking it for granted he was a boy, but he may not have been; there is always that chance.

If I had been alone, I suppose I should still have gone into the Campo Santo, from mere force of habit; I always go, in Pisa, but I had now with me clearer eyes for art than mine are, and I wished to have their light on the great allegories and histories frescoed round the cloisters, and test with them the objects of my tacit and explicit reserves and misgivings. I needed such eyes, and even some such powerful glasses as would have pierced through the faded and wasted pictures and shown them at least as I had first seen them. They were then in such reasonable disrepair as one might expect after three or four centuries, but in the last thirty years a ruinous waste has set in before which not only the colors have faded, but the surfaces have crumbled under the colors; and as yet no man knows how to stop the ravage. I think I have read that it is caused by a germ; but, if not, the loss is the same, and until a parasite for the germ is found the loss must go on, and the work of Giotto, of Benozzo Gozzoli, of Memmi, must perish with that of the Orgagnas, which may indeed go, for all me. Bible stories, miracles, allegories — they are all hasting to decay, and it can be but a few years until they shall vanish like the splendors of the dawn which they typify in art.

In some things the ruin is not altogether to be regretted. It has softened certain loathsome details of the charnel facts portrayed, and in other pictures the torment and anguish of the lost souls are no longer so painful as the old painters ascertained them. Hell in the Campo Santo is not now the hell of other days, just as the hell of Christian doctrine is not the hell it used to be. Death and the world are indeed immitigable; the corpses in their coffins are as terrifying to the gay lords and ladies who come suddenly upon them as ever they were, though doubtless of no more lasting effect with such sinners than they would be nowadays. But what one must chiefly lament is the waste of the whole quaint and charming series of Scripture incidents by Benozzo Gozzoli. This is indeed most lamentable, and after realizing the loss one is only a little heartened by the gayety of certain grieving widows, sitting in marble for monuments to their husbands at several points under the arcades. What cheer they might have brought us was impaired by the sight of the sarcophaguses and the other antiques against the walls, which inflicted an inappeasable ache for the city where such things abound, and brought our refluent Romesickness back full tide upon us. More than once Pisa elsewhere did us the like involuntary unkindness; she, too, is yellow and mellow like Rome, and she had moments of the Piazza Navona and the Piazza di Spagna which were poignant. But she had moments of her own when Rome could not rival her — such, for instance, as that when she invited us from the perishing frescos of her Campo Santo to turn our eyes on the flower-strewn field of death which the cloisters surrounded, and where in the hallowed earth which her galleys brought from Jerusalem her children, in their several turns, used to sleep so sweetly and safely.

The afternoon sunlight was prolonging the day there as well as it could, and we should have liked to linger with it as late as it would, but there were other places in Pisa calling us, and we must go. We found our driver, and his black-eyed boy beside him on the box, waiting for us at the cathedral door, and we seem to have left it pretty much to them where we should go. They decided us, if we really left it to them, mainly for the outside of things, so that we might see as much of Pisa as possible; but it appears to have been their notion that we ought to visit, at least, the inside of the Church of the Knights of St. Stephen. I do not know whether I protested or not that I had abundantly seen this already, but, at any rate, I am now glad that they took us there. As every traveller will pretend to remember, the main business of the knights was to fight the Barbary pirates, and the main business of their church is now to serve as a repository of the prows of the galleys and the flags which they took in their battles with the infidels. There are other monuments of their valor, but by all odds the flags will be the most interesting to the American visitor, because of the start that many of them will give him by their resemblance to our own banner, with their red-and-white stripes, which the eye follows in vivid expectation of finding the blue field of stars in the upper left-hand corner. It never does find this, and that is the sufficient reason for holding to the theory that our flag was copied from the armorial bearings of the Washington family, and not taken from the standard of those paynim corsairs; but there is poignant instant when one trembles.

We viewed, of course, the exterior of the edifice standing on the site of the Tower of Famine, where the cruel archbishop starved the Count Ugolino and his grandchildren to death; and we drove by the buildings of Pisa’s famous university, which we afterward fancied rather pervaded the city with the young and ardent life of its students. It is no great architectural presence, but there are churches and palaces to make up for that. Everywhere you chance on them in the narrow streets and the ample piazzas, but the palaces follow mostly the stately curve of the Arno, where some of them have condescended to the office of hotels, and where, I believe, one might live in economy and comfort; or, at any rate, I should like to try. It would get rather warm there in May, and July and August are not to be thought of, but all the other year it would be divine, with such a prospect as can hardly be matched anywhere else. Pisa used once to be the resort of many seeking health or warmth, and for mere climate it ought again to come into favor. Probably there is reasonably accessible society there, and, as the Livornese believe, there is at least excellent opera. The time might grow long, but ought not to be very heavy, and there is a cafe, at the very finest point of the curve, where you can get an excellent cup of tea. Whether this attests the resort or sojourn of many English, or the growth of the tea-habit among the Pisans, I cannot say, but that cafe is very charming, with students standing about in it and admiring the ladies who come in to buy pastry, and who do not suppose there is any one there to look at them. I am sure that the handsome mother with the pretty daughter who lingered so long over their choice of little cakes could not have imagined any one was looking, or she would at once have taken macaroons and hurried away: at that cafe they have macaroons almost three inches across, and delicious.

The whole keeping was so pleasant that we hated to leave it to the lengthening shadows from the other shore, but we were to drive down the Arno into the promenade that follows it, I do not know how far; with the foolish greed of travel, we wanted to get in all of Pisa that we could, even if we tore ourselves from its most tempting morsel. But it was all joy, and I should like, at this moment, to be starting on that enchanting drive again. I leave the reader to imagine the lovely scenery for himself; almost any of my many backgrounds will serve; but I will supply him with a piece of statistics such as does not fall in everybody’s way. We noted the great number of anglers who lined the opposite bank, with no appearance of catching anything, and I asked our driver if they never happened to get a bite. “Not in the daytime,” he explained, compassionately, “but as soon as the evening comes they get all the fish they want.”

I could pour out on the reader many other Pisan statistics, but they would be at second-hand. After long vicissitude, the city is again almost as prosperous as she was in the heyday of her national greatness, when she had commerce with every Levantine and Oriental port. We ourselves saw a silk factory pouring forth a tide of pretty girls from their work at the end of the day; there was no ruin or disrepair noticeable anywhere, and the whole city was as clean as Rome, with streets paved with broad, smooth flagstones where you never missed the rubber tires which your carriage failed of. But Pisa had a great air of resting, of taking life easily after a tumultuous existence in the long past which she had put behind her. Throughout the Middle Ages she was always fighting foreign foes without her walls or domestic factions within, now the Saracens wherever she could find them or they could find her, now the Normans in Naples, now the Cor-sicans and Sardinians, now Lucca, now Genoa, now Florence, and now all three. Her wars with these republics were really incessant; they were not so much wars as battles in one long war, with a peace occasionally made during the five or ten or fifteen years, which was no better than a truce. When she fell under the Medici, together with her enemy Florence, she shared the death-quiet the tyrants brought that prepotent republic, and it was the Medicean strength probably which saved her from Lucca and Genoa, though it left them to continue republics down to the nineteenth century. She was at one time an oligarchy, and at another a democracy, and at another the liege of this prince or that priest, but she was never out of trouble as long as she possessed independence or the shadow of it. In the safe hold of united Italy she now sits by her Arno and draws long, deep breaths, which you may almost hear as you pass; and I hope the prospect of increasing prosperity will not tempt her to work too hard. It does not look as if it would.

We were getting a little anxious, but not very anxious, for that one cannot be in Pisa, about our train back to Leghorn; though we did not wish to go, we did not wish to be left; but our driver reassured us, and would not let us shirk the duty of seeing the house where Galileo was born. We found it in a long street on the thither side of the river, and in such a poor quarter that our driver could himself afford to live only a few doors from it. As if they had expected him to pass about this time, his wife and his five children were sitting at his door and playing before it. He proudly pointed them out with his whip, and one of the little ones followed on foot far enough to levy tribute. They were sufficiently comely children, but blond, whereas the boy on the box was both black-eyed and black-haired. When we required an explanation of the mystery, the father easily solved it; this boy was the child of his first wife. If there were other details, I have forgotten them, but we made our romance to the effect that the boy, to whose beautiful eyes we now imputed a lurking sadness, was not happy with his step-mother, and that he took refuge from her on the box with his father. They seemed very good comrades; the boy had shared with his father the small cakes we had given him at the cafe. At the station, in recognition of his hapless lot, I gave him half a franc. By that time his father was radiant from the small extortion I had suffered him to practice with me, and he bade the boy thank me, which he did so charmingly that I almost, but not quite, gave him another half-franc. Now I am sorry I did not. Pisa was worth it.

IX. BACK AT GENOA

There is an old saying, probably as old as Genoa’s first loot of her step-sister republic, “If you want to see Pisa, you must go to Genoa,” which may have obscurely governed us in our purpose of stopping there on our way up out of Italy. We could not have too much of Pisa, as apparently the Genoese could not; but before our journey ended I decided that they would have thought twice before plundering Pisa if they had been forced to make their forays by means of the present railroad connection between the two cities. At least there would have been but one of the many wars of murder and rapine between the republics, and that would have been the first. After a single experience of the eighty tunnels on that line, with the perpetually recurring necessity of putting down and putting up the car-window, no army would have repeated the invasion; and, though we might now be without that satirical old saying, mankind would, on the whole, have been the gainer. As it was, the enemies could luxuriously go and come in their galleys and enjoy the fresh sea-breezes both ways, instead of stifling in the dark and gasping for breath as they came into the light, while their train ran in and out under the serried peaks that form the Mediterranean shore. I myself wished to take a galley from Leghorn, or even a small steamer, but I was overruled by less hardy but more obdurate spirits, and so we took the Florentine express at Pisa, where we changed cars.

The Italian government had providently arranged that the car we changed into should be standing beyond the station in the dash of an unexpected shower, and that it should be provided with steps so high and steep, with Italian ladies standing all over them and sticking their umbrellas into the faces of American citizens trying to get in after them, that it was a feat of something like mountain-climbing to reach the corridor, and then of daring-do to secure a compartment. Though a collectivist, with a firm belief in the government ownership of railroads everywhere, I might have been tempted at times in Italy to abjure my creed if I had not always reflected that the state there had just come into possession of the roads, with all their capitalistic faults of management and outwear of equipment which it would doubtless soon reform and repair. I venture to suggest now, however, that its prime duty is to have platforms level with the car-doors, as they are in England, and not to let Italian ladies stand in the doorways with their umbrellas. I do not insist that it shall impose silence and sobriety upon a party of young French people in the next compartment, but I do think it should remove those mountains back from the sea so that the trains carrying cultivated Americans can run along the open shore the whole way to Genoa. Pending this, it should provide strong and watchful employees to lower and raise the windows at the mouth of each of the eighty tunnels in every car. I do not demand that it shall change the site of the station in Genoa so that it shall not always be the city’s whole length away from the hotel you have chosen, but I think this would be a desirable improvement, especially if it is after dark when you arrive and raining a peculiarly cold, disagreeable rain.

That rain was very disappointing; for, in the intervals between tunnels, we had fancied, from the few brief glimpses we caught of the landscape, that the April so backward elsewhere in Italy was forwarder in the blossomed trees along the eastern Riviera; and we learned at our hotel that the steam-heat had just been taken off because the day had been so hot and dry, though the evening was now so cold and wet. It was fitfully put on and off during the chilly week that ensued, though in our fifth-story garden, to which we sometimes resorted, there was a mildness in the air that was absent in-doors. The hotel itself was disappointing; any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the good-will of former days, there was not the former effect. The corridors crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed, to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful, with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her summer.

I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization. Probably modern enterprise makes travel easy to sorts and conditions of Germans who once would not have dreamed of leaving home, and now tempts these rude Teutonic hordes over or under the Alps and pours them out on the Peninsula, far out-deluging the once-prevalent Anglo-Saxons. The first night there was an Englishman at dinner, but he vanished after breakfast; the next day an Italian officer was at lunch, but he came no more; we were the only Americans, and now we had the sole society of those German tourists. Perhaps it was national vanity, but I could not at the moment think of an equal number of our fellow-citizens of any condition who would not have been less molestively happy. One forgot what one was eating, and left the table bruised as if physically beaten upon by those sound-waves and sight-waves. But our companions must have made themselves acceptable to the city they had come to visit; Genoa is very noisy, and they could not be heard above the trams and omnibuses, and in the streets they could not be seen at table; when I ventured to note to a sacristan, here and there, that there seemed to be a great many Germans in town, the fact apparently roused nothing of the old-time Italian antipathy for the Tedeschi. Severally they may have been cultivated and interesting people; and that blooming maiden may really have been the Blue Flower of Romance that she looked before she began to dine.

We were entering upon our third view of Genoa with the zest of our first, and I was glad to find there were so many things I had left unseen or had forgotten. First of all the Campo Santo allured me, and I went at once to verify the impressions of former years in a tram following the bed of a torrential river which was now dry except in the pools where the laundresses were at work, picturesquely as always in Italy. But here they were not alone the worthy theme of art; their husbands and fathers, and perhaps even their fiances, were at work with them, not, indeed, washing the linen, but spreading to dry it in snowy spaces over the clean gravel. On either bank of the stream newly finished or partly finished apartment-houses testified to the prosperity of the city, which seemed to be growing everywhere, and it would not be too bold to imagine this a favorite quarter because of its convenience to the Cam-po Santo. Already in the early forenoon our train was carrying people to that popular resort, who seemed to be intending to spend the day there. Some had wreaths and flowers, and were clearly sorrowing friends of the dead; others, with their guide-books, were as plainly mere sight-seers, and these were Italians as well as strangers, gratifying what seems the universal passion for cemeteries. In our own villages the graveyards are the favorite Sunday haunt of the young people and the scene of their love-making; and it has been the complaint of English visitors to our cities that the first thing their hosts took them to see was the cemetery. They did not realize that this was often the thing best worth showing them, for our feeble aesthetic instincts found their first expression in the attempt to dignify or beautify the homes of the dead. Each mourner grieved in marble as fitly as he knew how, and, if there was sometimes a rivalry in vaults and shafts, the effect was of a collective interest which all could feel. Sometimes it was touching, sometimes it was revolting; and in Italy it is not otherwise. The Campo Santo of San Miniato at Florence, the Campo Santo at Bologna, the Campo Santo wherever else you find it, you find of one quality with the Campo Santo at Genoa. It makes you the helpless confidant of family pride, of bruised and lacerated love, of fond aspiration, of religious longing, of striving faith, of foolish vanity and vulgar pretence, but, if the traveller would read the local civilization aright, he cannot do better than go to study it there.

My third experience of the Genoese Campo Santo was different only in quantity from the first and second. There seemed more of the things, better and worse, but the increasing witness was of the art which rendered the fact with unsparing realism, sometimes alloyed with allegory and sometimes not, but always outright, literal, strong, rank. The hundreds of groups, reliefs, statues, busts; the long aisles where the dead are sealed in the tableted shelves of the wall, like the dead in the catacombs, the ample space of open ground enclosed by the cloisters and set thick with white crosses, are all dominated by a colossal Christ which, in my fancy, remains of very significant effect. It is as if no presence less mighty and impressive could centre in itself the multitudinous passions, wills, and hopes expressed in those incongruous monuments and reduce them to that unity of meaning which one cannot deny them.

The Campo Santo of Genoa is a mortuary gloss of Genoese history: of the long succession of civic strifes and foreign wars common to all the Italian republics, now pacified at last by a spirit of unity, of brotherhood. At Genoa, more than anywhere else in Italy except Milan, you are aware of the North — its strenuousness, its enterprise, its restless outstretching for worlds beyond itself. Columbus came with the gift of a New World in his hand, and, in the fulness of time, Mazzini came with the gift of a Newer World in his hand: the realization of Christ in the ideal of duties without which the old ideal of rights is heathen and helpless. Against the rude force of Genoa, the aristocratic beauty of such a place as Pisa was nothing; only Florence and Venice might vie with her. But she had not the inspiration of Florence, her art, her literature; the dialect in which she uttered herself is harsh and crabbed, and no poet known beyond it has breathed his soul into it; her architecture was first the Gothic from over the Alps, and then of the Renaissance which built the palaces of her merchants in a giant bulk and of a brutal grandeur. She had not the political genius of Venice, the oligarchic instinct of self-preservation from popular misgovernment and princely aggression. Her story is the usual Italian story of a people jealous of each other, and, in their fear of a native tyrant, impatiently calling in one foreign tyrant after another and then furiously expelling him. When she would govern herself, she first made her elective chief magistrate Doge for life, and then for two years; under both forms she submitted and rebelled at will from 1359 till 1802, when, after having accepted the French notion of freedom from Bonaparte, she enjoyed a lion’s share of his vicissitudes. For a hundred years before that the warring powers had fought over her in their various quarrels about successions, and she ought to have been well inured to suffering when, in 1800, the English and the Austrians besieged her French garrison, and twenty thousand of her people starved in a cause not their own. The English restored the Doges, and the Republic of Genoa fell at last nineteen years after the Republic of Venice and three hundred years after the Republic of Florence. She was given to Piedmont in 1815 by the Congress of Vienna, and she has formed part of Italy ever since the unification. I believe that now she is of rather radical opinions in politics, though the bookseller who found on his shelves a last copy of the interesting sketch of Genoese history which I have profited by so little, said that the Genoese had been disappointed in the Socialists, lately in power, and were now voting Clerical by a large majority.

The fact may have been colored by the book-seller’s feelings. If the Clericals are in superior force, the clerics are not: nowhere in Italy did I see so few priests. All other orders of people throng the narrow, noisy, lofty streets, where the crash of feet and hoofs and wheels beats to the topmost stories of the palaces towering overhead in their stony grandiosity. Everywhere in the structures dating after the Gothic period there is want of sensibility; the art of the Renaissance was not moulded here in the moods of a refined and effeminate patriciate, such as in Venice tempered it to beauty; but it renders in marble the prepotence of a commercialized nobility, and makes good in that form the right of the city to be called Genoa the Proud. Perhaps she would not wish to be called proud because of these palaces alone. It is imaginable that she would like the stranger to remember the magnificence with which she rewarded the patriotism of her greatest citizen after Columbus and Mazzini: that mighty admiral, Andrea Doria, who freed this country first from the rule of Charles V. and then from the rule of Francis I.; who swept the Barbary corsairs from the seas; who beat the Turks in battles on ship and on shore; who took Corsica from the French when he was eighty-eight years old; who suffered from civil faction; who outlived exile as he had outlived war, and who died at the age of ninety-four, after he had refused the sovereignty of the country he had served so long; who was the Washington of his day, and was equally statesman and soldier, and, above all, patriot. It is his portrait that you see in that old palace (called the Palace of the Prince because Charles V. had called him Prince) overlooking the port, where he sits an old, old man, very weary, in the sole society of his sarcastic cat, as I have noted before. The cat seems to have just passed some ironical reflection on the vanity of human things and to be studying him for the effect. Both appear indifferent to the spectator, but perhaps they are not, and you must not for all that fail of a visit to the Church of San Matteo, set round with the palaces of the Doria family — the palace which his grateful country gave the Admiral after he refused to be her master, and the palaces of his kindred neighboring it round.

I do not remember any equal space in all Europe which, through a very little knowledge, so takes the heart as the gentle little church founded by an earlier Doria, and, after four hundred years, restored by a later, and then environed with the stately homes of the race, where they could be domesticated in the honor and reverence of their countrymen because of the goodness and greatness of the loftiest of their line. It is such a place as one may revere and yet possess one’s soul in self-respect, very much as one may revere Mount Vernon. The church, as well as the piazza, is full of Dorian memories, and the cloister must be visited not only for its rather damp beauty, but for the full meaning of the irony which Doria’s cat in the portrait wished to convey: against the wall here are gathered the fragments of the statue of Doria which, when the French Revolution came to Genoa, the patriots threw out of the ducal palace and broke in the street below.

We were some time in finding our way into the magnificent hall of the Great Council where this statue once stood, with the statues of many other Genoese heroes and statesmen, and I am not sure that it was worth all our trouble. Magnificent it certainly was, but coarsely magnificent, like so much elsewhere in Genoa; but, if we had been at ten times the trouble we were in seeing the Palace of the Municipality, I should not think it too much. There in the great hall are the monuments of those Genoese notables whose munificence their country wished to remember in the order of their generosity. I do not remember just what the maximum was, but the Doge or other leading citizen who gave, say, twenty-five thousand ducats to the state had a statue erected to him; one who gave fifteen, a bust; and one who gave five, an honorary tablet. The surprising thing is that nearly all the statues and busts, whether good likenesses or not, are delightful art: it is as if the noble acts of the benefactors of their country had inspired the sculptors to reproduce them not only in true character, but in due dignity. To the American who views them and remembers that we have now so much money that some of us do not know what to do with it, they will suggest that our millionaires have an unrivalled opportunity of immortality in the same sort. There is hardly a town of ten thousand inhabitants in the country where there are not men who could easily afford to give a hundred thousand dollars, or fifty, or twenty to their native or adoptive place and so enter upon a new life in bronze or marble. This would enrich us beyond the dreams of avarice in a high-grade portrait statuary; it would give work to hundreds of sculptors who now have little or nothing to do, and would revive or create the supplementary industries of casting in metal or carving in stone.

The time was in Genoa, it seems, as the time is now with us, when a great many people did not know what to do with their money. There were sumptuary laws which forbade their spending it, either they or their wives or daughters, in dress; apparently they could not even wear Genoa velvet, which had to be sold abroad for the corruption of the outside world; and this is said to be the reason why there were so many palaces built in Genoa in the days of the republic. People who did not wish to figure in that hall of fame put their surplus into the immense and often ugly edifices which we still see ministering to their pride in the wide and narrow streets of the city. Now and then a devout family built or rebuilt a church and gave it to the public; but by far the greater number put up palaces, where, after the house-warming, they dwelt in a cold and economical seclusion. Some of their palaces are now devoted to public uses; they are galleries of pictures and statues most worthy to be seen, or they are municipal offices, or museums, or schools of art or science; but part are still in the keeping of the families that contributed them to the splendor of their city. The streets in which they stand are loud with transit and traffic, but the palaces hold aloof from the turmoil and lift their lofty heads to the level of the gardens behind them. Huge, heavy they are, according to the local ideal, and always wanting the delicacy of Venetian architecture, where something in the native genius tempered to gentleness the cold severity of Palladio, and where Sansovino knew how to bridge the gulf between the Gothic and the Renascent art that would have been Greek but halted at being Roman.

The grandeur of those streets of palaces in Genoa cannot be denied, but perhaps, if the visitor quite consulted his preference or indulged his humor, he would wander rather through the arcades of the busy port, up the chasmal alleys of little shops into the tiny piazzas, no bigger than a good-sized room, opening before some ancient church and packed with busy, noisy people. The perspective there is often like the perspective in old Naples, but the uproar in Genoa does not break in music as it does in Naples, and the chill lingering in the sunless depths of those chasms is the cold of a winter that begins earlier and a spring that loiters later than the genial seasons of the South.

X. EDEN AFTER THE FALL

A few years ago an Englishman who had lived our neighbor in the same villa at San Remo, came and said that he was going away because it was so dull at San Remo. He was going with his wife to Monte Carlo, because you could find amusement every day in the week at the tables of the different games of chance, and Sundays there was a very nice little English church. He did not seem to think there was anything out of the way in his grouping of these advantages, but he did not strongly urge them upon us, and we restricted ourselves in turn to our tacit reflections on the indifference of the English to a point of morals on which the American conscience is apt to suffer more or less anguish if it offends. So far as I know they do not think it wrong to take money won at any game; but possibly their depravity in this matter rather comforted us than offended. At any rate, I am sure of the superiority of our own morals in visiting Monte Carlo after we left Genoa. If we did not look forward with our Englishman’s complacency to the nice little church there, we certainly did not mean to risk our money at the tables of Roulette, nor yet at the tables of Trente et Quarante, in the Casino. What we really wished to do was to look on in the spiritual security of saints while the sinners of both sexes lost and gained to the equal hurt of their souls. We perhaps expected to hear the report of a pistol in the gardens of the Casino, if we did not actually see the ruined gambler falling among the flowers, or if not so much as this, we thought we might witness his dramatic despair as the croupier drew in the last remnant of his fortune and mechanically invited the other Messieurs and Mesdames to make their game; secretly, we might even have been willing to see something hysterical on the part of the Mesdames if fate frowned upon them, or something scandalously exuberant if it smiled. If our motives were not the worst, they were, at any rate, not the best; I suppose they were the usual human motives, and I am afraid they were mixed.

We found it rather long from Genoa to Monte Carlo, but this was not so much because of the distance as because of the delays of our train, which, having started late, grew reckless on the way, and before we reached the Italian frontier at Ventimiglia, had lost all shame and failed to connect there with the French train for the rest of our journey. So, instead of having barely time to affirm our innocence of tobacco, spirits, or perfumes to the customs officers, and to wash down a sandwich with a cup of coffee at the restaurant, we had an hour and forty minutes at Ventimiglia, which I partly spent in vain attempts to buy the poverty of the inspector so far as to prevail with him not to delay the examination of our baggage, but to proceed to it at once, in order that we might have it all off our minds, and devote our long leisure to the inquiry by what steps the ancient Ligurian tribe of the Intemelii lost their name in its actual corruption of Ventimiglia. It is a charming old town, far more charming than the stranger who never has time to walk into it from the station can imagine, and there is a palm-bordered avenue leading from the railway to the sea, with the shops and cafes of Italy on one side and the shops and cafes of France on the other. So late as six o’clock in the evening those cafes and shops preserved a reciprocal integrity which I could not praise too highly, but after dark there must be a ghostly interchange of forbidden commodities among them which no force of customs officers could wholly suppress. At any rate, I should have liked to see them try it, though I should not have liked to be kept in Ventimiglia overnight for any less reason; it seemed a lonesome place, though mighty picturesque, with old walls, and a magnificent old fort toward the sea, and a fine bridge spanning, though for the moment superfluously spanning, the perfectly dry bed of a river.

I wished to ask what the name of the river was, but out of all the files of people coming and going I chose an aged man who could not tell me; he excused himself with real regret on the ground that he was a stranger in those parts. Then there was nothing for me to do but go back to the station and renew my attempt on the inspector, who still remained proof against me. What added to the hardship of the situation was that it was Italy at one end of the station and France at the other, and in one extremity it was an hour earlier than it was at the other, by the time of Central Europe at the east and by the time of Paris at the west, so that I do not know but we were two hours and forty minutes at Ventimiglia instead of one hour and forty minutes. Of this period little could be employed at tea, and we were not otherwise hungry; we could give something of our interminable leisure to counting our baggage and suffering unfounded alarms at failing to make it come out right, but we could not give much.

The weather had turned chilly, the long station was full of draughts, and the invalid of the party, without whom no American party is perfectly national, was rapidly taking cold. We were quite incredulous when the examination actually began, but at last it really did, and it began with our pieces, with such a show of favoring us on the inspector’s part, that when it was over, in about two minutes, one trunk serving as a type of the innocence of all, I furtively held up a piece of five francs in recognition of his kindness. But he slowly shook his head, whether in regret or whether in stern refusal I shall never know. He was an Italian, but in the employment of the French republic, and I have not been able since to credit with certainty his incorruptibility to his native or his adoptive country; I might easily be mistaken in deciding either way.

What I am certain of, and certainly sorry for, is the superiority of the French company’s railway carriage, from Ventimiglia on, to the Italian carriage which had brought us so far, and it is still with unwillingness that I own the corporation’s greater care for our comfort. If we had been in the paternal care of the administration of the gambling-house. at Monte Carlo, we could not have been more tenderly or cleanly cushioned about, or borne away on softer springs; and very possibly a measure of wickedness in the means is a condition of comfort in the end to which we are so tempted to abandon ourselves in a world which is not yet so sternly collectivist as I could wish. It was not quite dark when we arrived at Monte Carlo and began to experience, in the beautiful keeping of the place, how admirably a gambling-house can manage the affairs of a principality when it pays all the taxes. There were many two-horse landaus waiting our pleasure outside the station, and the horses were all so robust and handsome that we were not put to our usual painful endeavor in seeking the best and getting the worst. All those stately equipages were good, and the one that fell to us mounted the hill to our hotel by a grade so insinuating that the balkiest horse in Frascati could hardly have suspected it.

In our easy ascent we were aware of the gray-and-blond houses behind their walls among their groves and gardens, among flowers and blossoms; of the varying inclines and levels from which some lovely difference of prospect appeared at every step; of the admirably tended roadways, and the walks that followed them up hill and down, and crossed to little parks, or led to streets brilliant with shops and hotels, clustering about the great gambling-house, the centre of the common prosperity and animation. The air had softened with the setting sun, and the weather which had at Leghorn and Genoa delayed through two weeks of rain and cold, seemed to confess the control of the Casino administration, as everything else does at Monte Carlo, and promised an amiability to which we eagerly trusted.

It was of course warmer out-doors than in-doors, and while the fire was kindling on our hearth we gave the quarter hour before dinner to looking over our garden-wall into the comely town in the valley below, and to the palace and capital of the Prince of Monaco on the heights beyond. Nothing by day or by night could be more exquisite than the little harbor, a perfect horseshoe in shape, and now, at our first sight of it, set round with electric lights, like diamonds in the scarf-pin of some sporty Titan, or perhaps of Hercules Monoecus himself, who is said to have founded Monaco. In the morning we saw that the waters arranged themselves in the rainbow colors of such a scarf round the shores, and that there were only pleasure-craft moored in them: the yacht of the Prince of Monaco and the yacht of some American Prince, whose title I did not ascertain, but whose flag was unmistakable. There must have been other yachts, but I do not remember them, and possibly there were some workaday craft, of which I do not now recall the impression; but I am certain of the festive air of disoccupation pervading the port from the adjacent towns, both Monte Carlo and Monaco, which its wicked suburb has cleansed in corrupting, and rendered attractive by the example of its elegant leisure. There remains from both places, and from Condamine in the plain between them the sense of a perpetual round of holidays. There seemed to be no more creative business in one place than another, but I do not say there is none; there is certainly a polite distillery of perfumes and liqueurs in Condamine, but what one sees is the commerce of the shops, and the building up of more and more villas and hotels, on every shelf and ledge, to harden and whiten in the sun, and let their gardens hang over the verges of the cliffs. On the northeast, the mountains rise into magnificent steeps whose names would say nothing to the reader, except that of Turbia, which he will recall as the classic Tropaea of Augustus, who marked there the bounds between Italy and Gaul. But we were as yet in no mood to climb this height, even with the help of a funicular railway, and I made my explorations at such convenient elevations as I could reach on foot, or by the help of one of those luxurious landaus peculiar to Monte Carlo.

One such point was undoubtedly the headland of Monaco, where the Greeks of Marseilles, long enough before Augustus, built a temple to Hercules Monoecus. The Grimaldi family which gave Genoa many doges, came early into the sovereignty of Monaco, by the hook or crook those days, but whether it was they who fostered its piracy in the fourteenth century, does not distinctly appear, though it seems certain that one of the Grimaldi princes served against the English under Philip of Valois, and was wounded at Crecy. In 1524 a successor went over to the empire under Charles V. Still later the principality returned to the sovereignty of France, and in 1793 the French republicans frankly annexed it, but it was given back to the Grimaldi in 1814.

The Grimaldi on the whole were a baddish line of potentates, and only lacked largeness of scene to have left the memory of world-tragedies. They murdered one another, at least in two cases; in another, the people killed their ruler by publicly drowning him in the sea for insulting their women; the princes were the protectors of piracy, and in the very late times following their restoration by the Congress of Vienna, the reigning prince confiscated the property of the churches for his own behoof, and took into his hands the whole trade of the principality. He alone bought and ground the grain, and baked the bread, which he sold to his people at an extortionate price; he bought damaged flour in Genoa and fed it to his subjects at the same rate as good. When they murmured and threatened rebellion, he threatened in turn that he would rule them with a rod of iron, as if their actual conditions were not bad enough. Some of his oppressions were of a fantasticality bordering on comic opera: travellers had to give up their provisions at the frontier and eat the official bread of Monaco; ships entering the port were confiscated if they had brought more loaves than sufficed them for their voyage thither; no man might cut his own wood without leave of the police, or prune his trees, or till his land, or irrigate it; the birth and death of every animal must be publicly registered, with the payment of a given tax, and nobody could go out after ten at night without carrying a taxed lantern. When Nice was annexed to France in 1860 Monaco passed under French protection again, and now it is subject to conscription like the rest of France. Ten years after the beginning of this new order of things the great M. Blanc was expelled from Hombourg, and the Prince of Monaco rented to him the-gambling privilege of Monte Carlo.

Then the modern splendor of the place began. The entire population of the three towns, Monaco, Monte Carlo, and Condamine, is not above fifteen thousand, and apparently the greater part of the inhabitants depend upon the gay industry of the Casino for their livelihood. I should say that the most of the houses in Monte Carlo were hotels, or pensions, or furnished villas, or furnished apartments, and if one could be content to live in the atmosphere of the Casino, which is not meteorologically lurid, I do not know where one could live in greater comfort. It is said that everything is rather dearer than in Nice, for instance, but such things as I wanted to buy I did not find very dear. The rates at the most expensive hotels did not seem exhorbitant when reduced to dollars, and if you went a little way from the Casino the hotels were very reasonable, so that you could spend a great deal of money at the tables which in America you would spend in board and lodging. I fancy that a villa could be got there very reasonably, and as the morals of all the inhabitants are scrupulously cared for by the administration of the Casino, and no one living in the principality is allowed to frequent the gaming-tables, it is probable that domestic service is good and cheap. If I may speak from our experience at our very simple little hotel, it is admirable, one waiter sufficing for ten or twelve guests, with leisure for much friendly conversation in the office, between the breakfasts served in our rooms and the excellent dinners at the small tables in the salon. If you liked, he would speak French or Italian, though he spoke English as well as any one, and he was of that excellent Piedmontese race which has been the saving salt of the whole peninsula. As for the food, it was far beyond that of our cold-storage, and it must have been cheap, since it was provided for us at the rate we paid.

The cost of dress varies, according to the taste of and the purse, everywhere. White serge seemed the favorite wear of most of the ladies one saw in the street at Monte Carlo, especially in the region of the Casino. This may have expressed an inner condition, or it may have been a sympathetic response to the advances of the flowers in the pretty beds and parterres so fancifully designed by the gardeners of the administration, or it may have been a token of the helpless submission to which the windows of the milliners and modistes reduced all comers of the dressful sex. Many of the men with the women, or without them, were also in white serge, but they seemed more variably attired; there was a prevailing suggestion of yachting or automobiling in their dress, though doubtless most of them had not sailed or motored to the spot. Some few, say four or five, may have motored away from it, for in the centre of the charming square before the Casino there was an automobile of some newest type being raffled for in the interest of that chiefest of the Christian virtues which makes its most successful appeals in the vicinity of games of chance. Some one must have won the machine and carried a party of his friends away, and triumphantly turned turtle with it over the first of the precipices which abound at Monte Carlo. More than the tables within this opportunity of fortune tempted me, and it was only by the repeated recurrence to my principles that I was able to get away alive. In spite of myself, I did not get away without, however guiltlessly, having yielded to the spirit of the place. It was at the Administrational Art Exhibition, where there were really some good pictures, and where, on my entering, I was given a small brass disk. On going out I attempted to restore this to the door-keeper, but he went back with me to a certain piece of mechanism, where he instructed me to put the disk into a slot. Then the disk ran its course, and a small brass ball came out at the bottom. The door-keeper opened this, and showed me that it was empty; but he gave me to understand that it might have been full of diamonds, or rubies, or seed-pearls, which might have implanted in me a lust of gambling I should never have overcome. Monte Carlo was in every way tempting. A vast oblong, brilliant with flowers in artistic patterns, stretched upward from the Casino, and there was an agreeable park where one might sit. On every other side there were costly hotels and costly restaurants, including that of the unexampled, the insurpassable Giro, where one saw people eating and drinking at the windows whenever one passed, by day or night. Beyond the Casino seaward were the beautiful terraces, planted with palms and other tropic growths, where people might come out and kill themselves when they had nothing left to lose but their lives; and against the dark green of their fronds the temple of fortune lifted a frosted-cake-like front of long extent. I do not know just what type of architecture it is of, but it distinctly suggests the art of the pastry cook when he has triumphed in some edifice crowning the centre of the table at a great public dinner. What mars the pleasing effect most is a detail which enforces this suggestion, for the region of the Casino is thickly frequented by a species of black doves, and when these gather in close lines of black dots along the eaves, they have exactly the effect of flies clustering on the sugary surfaces of the cake. At intervals are bronze statues of what seem a sort of adolescent cherubs, but which have, I do not know why, a peculiarly devilish appearance. No doubt they are harmless enough; but certainly they do nothing to keep the flies off the cake.

In fine, as an edifice the Casino disappoints, and if one is not pressingly curious about the interior, one rather lingers on the terrace overlooking the sea, and the lines of the railroad following the shore, and the panorama of the several towns. It is charming to sit there, and if it is in the afternoon, you may see an artist there painting water-colors of the scenery. Even if he were not painting, you could not help knowing him for an artist, because he wears a black velvet jacket and knickerbockers, and a soft slouch hat, and has a curled black mustache and pointed beard; there is no mistaking him; and at a given moment, after he has been working long enough, he puts above his sketch the sign, “For Sale,” as artists always do, and then, if you want a masterpiece, you go down a few steps from where you are sitting and buy it. But I never did that any more than I took tickets for the charity automobile, though there is no telling what I might not have done if I had broken the bank when at last I went into the Casino.

It seems to open about eleven o’clock in the morning, for gamblers are hard-working, impatient people, and do not want to lose time. A broad stretch of red carpet is laid down the steps from the portal and they begin to go in at once, and people keep going in until I know not what hour at night. But I think mid-afternoon is the best hour to see them, and it is then that I will invite the reader to accompany me, instructing him to turn to the left on entering, and get his gratis billet of admission to the rooms from the polite officials there in charge, who will ask for his card, and inquire his country and city, but will not insist upon his street and his number in it. This form is apparently to make sure that you are not a resident of the principality, and that if you suffer in your morals from your visit to the Casino you shall not be a source of local corruption thereafter. They bow you away, first audibly pronouncing your name with polyglottic accuracy, and then you are free to wander where you like. But probably you will want to go at once from the large, nobly colonnaded reception-hall or atrium, into that series of salons where wickeder visitors than yourself are already closely seated at the oblong tables, and standing one or two deep round them. The salons of the series are four, and the tables in each are from two to five, according to the demands of the season; some are Trente et Quarante-tables, and some, by far the greater number, are Roulette-tables. Roulette seems the simpler game, and the more popular; I formed the notion that there was a sort of aristocratic quality in Trente et Quarante, and that the players of that game were of higher rank and longer purse, but I can allege no reason justifying my notion. All that I can say is that the tables devoted to it commanded the seaward views, and the tops of the gardens where the players withdrew when they wished to commit suicide. The rooms are decorated by several French painters of note, and the whole interior is designed by the famous architect Gamier, to as little effect of beauty as could well be. It is as if these French artists had worked in the German taste, rather than their own, and in any case they have achieved in their several allegories and impersonations something uniformly heavy and dull. One might fancy that the mood of the players at the tables had imparted itself to the figures in the panels, but very likely this is not so, for the players had apparently parted with none of their unpleasing dulness. They were in about equal number men and women, and they partook equally of a look of hard repression. The repression may not have been wholly from within; a little away from each table hovered, with an air of detachment, certain plain and quiet men, who, for all their apparent inattention, may have been agents of the Administration vigilant to subdue the slightest show of drama in the players. I myself saw no drama, unless I may call so the attitude of a certain tall, handsome young man, who stood at the corner of one of the tables, and, with nervously working jaws, staked his money at each invitation of the croupiers. I did not know whether he won or lost, and I could not decide from their faces which of the other men or women were winning or losing. I had supposed that I might see distinguished faces, distinguished figures, but I saw none. The players were of the average of the spectators in dress and carriage, but in the heavy atmosphere of the rooms, which was very hot and very bad, they all alike looked dull. At a psychological moment it suddenly came to me in their presence, that if there was such a place as hell, it must be very dull, like that, and that the finest misery of perdition must be the stupid dulness of it. For some unascertained reason, but probably from a mistaken purpose of ornament, there hung over the centre of each table, almost down to the level of the players’ heads, lengths of large-linked chains, and it was imaginable, though not very probable, that if any of the lost souls rose violently up, or made an unseemly outcry, or other rebellious demonstration, those plain, quiet men, the agents of the Administration, would fling themselves upon him or her, and bind them with those chains, and cast them into such outer darkness as could be symbolized by the shade of the terrace trees. The thing was improbable, as I say, but not impossible, if there is truth in Swedenborg’s relation that the hells are vigilantly policed, and from time to time put in order by angels detailed for that office. To be sure the plain, quiet men did not look like angels, and the Administration of which they were agents, could not, except in its love of order, be likened to any celestial authority.

Commonly in the afternoon there is music in the great atrium from which the gambling-rooms open, and then there is a pleasant movement of people up and down. They are kept in motion perhaps by their preference, somewhat, but also largely by the want of seats. If you can secure one of these you may amuse yourself very well by looking on at the fashion and beauty of those who have not secured any. Here you will see much more distinction than in the gambling-rooms; the air is better, and if you choose to fancy this the limbo of that inferno, it will not be by a violent strain. In the crowd will be many pretty young girls, in proper chaperonage, and dressed in the latest effects of Paris; if they happen to be wearing the mob-cap hats of the moment it is your greater gain; they could not be so charming in anything else, or look more innocent, or more consciously innocent. You could only hope, however, such were the malign associations of the place, that their chaperons would not neglect them for the gaming-tables beyond, but you could not be sure, if the chaperons were all like that old English lady one evening at the opera in the Casino, who came in charge of her niece, or possibly some friend’s daughter. She remained dutifully enough beside the girl through the first act of the stupid musical comedy, and even through the ensuing ballet, and when a flaunting female, in a hat of cart-wheel circumference, came in and shut out the whole stage from the hapless stranger behind, this good old lady authorized her charge to ask him to take the seat next them where he could see something of the action if he wished. But at the end of the ballet, she rose, and bidding the girl wait her return, she vanished in the direction of the gaming-rooms. She may merely have gone to look on at a spectacle which, dulness for dulness, was no worse than that of the musical comedy, and I have no proof that she risked her money there. The girl sat through the next act, and then in a sudden fine alarm, like that of a bird which, from no visible cause, starts from its perch, she took flight, and I hope she found her aunt, or her mother’s friend, quietly sleeping on one of those seats in the atrium. It was one of those tacit, eventless dramas which in travel are always offering themselves to your witness. They begin in silence, and go quietly on to their unfinish, and leave you steeped in an interest which is life-long, whereas a story whose end you know soon perishes from your mind. Art has not yet learned the supreme lesson of life, which is never a tale that is told within the knowledge of the living.

Nowhere, I think, is the “sweet security of streets” felt more than in Monte Carlo. Whether the control of that good Administration of the Casino reaches to the policing of the place in other respects or not, I cannot say, but one walks home at night from the theatre of the Casino with the same sense of safety that one enjoys under that paternal roof. At eleven o’clock all Monte Carlo sleeps the sleep of the innocent and the just in the dwellings of the citizens and permanent residents; though it cannot be denied that there appear to be late suppers in the hotels and restaurants surrounding the Casino, which the iniquitous may be giving to the guilty. Away from the flare of their bold lights the town reposes in a demi-dark, and presents to the more strenuous fancy the effect of a mezzotint study of itself; by day it is a group of wash-drawings near to, and farther off, of water-colors, very richly and broadly treated. I could not insist too much upon this notion with the reader who has never been there, or has not received picture postal-cards from sojourning correspondents. These would afford him a portrait of the chief features and characteristics of the place not too highly flattered, for in fact it would be impossible for even a picture postal-card to exaggerate its beauty. They will besides convey one of the few convincing proofs that in spite of the Blanc Casino and the French Republic the Prince of Monaco is still a reigning sovereign, for the postage-stamps bear the tastefully printed head of that potentate. If the visitor requires other proofs he may take a landau at the station in Monaco, and drive up over the heights of the capital into the piazza before the prince’s palace. When the prince is not at home he can readily get leave to visit the palace for twenty minutes, but on my unlucky day the prince was doubly at home, for he was sick as well as in residence. I satisfied myself as well as I could, and I am very easy to satisfy, with my drive through the pleasant town, which is entirely Italian in effect, with its people standing about or looking out of their windows in their Sunday leisure, and quite Roman in the cleanliness of its streets. I took due pleasure in the unfinished exterior of the Oceanographic Museum and the newly finished interior of the Monaco Cathedral. The cathedral, which is so new as to make one rejoice that most other cathedrals are old, is of a glaring freshness, but is very handsome; somehow in spite of its newness it contains the tombs of the reigning family, and perhaps it has only been newly done over. The museum which is ultimately to be the greatest of its kind in the world, already contains somewhere in its raw inaccessible recesses the collections made by Prince Albert in his many cruises, and is of a palatiality worthy of a sovereign with a tenant so generous and prompt in its rent as the Administration of the Casino of Monte Carlo.

This fact, namely, that the princely grandeur and splendor of Monaco all came out of the gaming-tables, was something that the driver of my landau made me observe, when our intimacy had mounted with our road, and we paused for the magnificent view of the sea from the headland near the museum. He was otherwise a shrewd and conversible Piedmontese who did not make me pay much above the tariff, and who had pity on my poor French after awhile, and consented to speak Italian with me. In the sort of French glare over the whole local civilization of the principality, everybody will wish to seem French, but after you break through the surface, the natives will be as comfortably and endearingly Italian as anybody in the peninsula. Among themselves they speak a Ligurian patois, but with the stranger they will use an Italian easily much better than his, and also much better than their own French. I think they prefer you in their racial parlance after you have shown some knowledge of it, and two kind women of whom I asked my way in Monte Carlo, one day when I was trying for the station of the funicular to Turbia, grew more volubly kind when I asked it in such Tuscan as I could command. That station is really not hard to find when once you know where it is, and at three o’clock in the afternoon I was mounting the precipitous incline of the alp on whose summit Augustus divided Italy from Gaul, and left the stupendous trophy which one sees there in ruins to-day.

I should like to render the sense of my upward progress dramatic by pretending that we mounted from a zone of flowers at Monte Carlo into regions where only the hardiest blossoms greeted us, but what I really noticed was that by-and-by the little patches of vineyard seemed to grow less and the olive-trees scraggier. Perhaps even this was partly fancy; as for the flowers, I cannot bring myself to partake of their deceit; for they are the most shameless fakers, as regards climate, in nature. It is, for instance, perfectly true that they are in bloom along the Riviera all winter long, but this does not prove that the winter of the Riviera is always warm. It merely proves that flowers can stand a degree of cold that nips the nose bent to hale their perfume, and brings tears into the eyes dwelling in rapture on their loveliness. They are like women; they look so fragile and delicate that you think they cannot stand anything, but they can stand pretty much everything, or at least everything they wish to. Throughout that week at Monte Carlo, while we cowered round our fires or went out into a frigid sunshine, the flowers smiled from every garden-ground in a gayety emulous of that of their sisters passing in white serge. So probably I gave less attention to the details of the scenery through which my funicular was passing than to the stupendous prospects of sea and shore which it varyingly commanded. If words could paint these I should not spare the words, but when I recall them, my richest treasure of adjectives seems a beggarly array of color tubes, flattened and twisted past all col-lapsibility. Nothing less than an old-fashioned panoramic show would impart any notion of it, and even that must fail where it should most abound, namely, in the delicacy of that ineffable majesty.

We climbed and climbed, with many a muted hope and many a muted fear of the mechanism which carried us so safely, and then we ran across a stretch of comparative level and reached the last station, under the cliff on which the local hotel stood, with the mighty ruin behind it. Our passengers flocked up to the terrace of the hotel, much shoved and shouldered by automobiles bearing the company which seems proper to those vehicles, and dispersed themselves at the many little tables set about for tea, and the glory of the matchless outlook. While one could yet have the ruin mostly to one’s self, it seemed the most favorable moment to visit the crumbling walls and broken tower, whose fragments strewed the slopes around. The tower was of Augustus, and the fortress into which it was turned in the Middle Ages was of unknown authority, but the ruin was the work of Marshal Villars, who blew up both trophy and stronghold sometime in the French king’s wars with the imperialists in the first half of the eighteenth century. The destruction was incomplete, though probably sufficient for the purpose, but as a ruin, nothing could be more admirable. There seems to be at present something like a restoration going on; it has not gone very far, however; it has developed some fragments of majestic pillars, and some breadths of Roman brick-work; a few spaces about the base of the tower are cleared; but the rehabilitation will probably never proceed to such an extreme that you may not sit down on some carven remnant of the past, and closing your eyes to the surrounding glory of alp and sea find yourself again on the Palatine or amid the memorials of the Forum.

THE END

SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES

CONTENTS

A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL

SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER

IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD

NINE DAYS’ WONDER IN YORK

TWO YORKISH EPISODES

A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM

THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS

ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE

LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE

GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER

A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL

Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be seen and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his first hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George’s Hall, can deny that it is of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of commerce by many other noble edifices.

I

Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway (as the place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but then, as I noted in my account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in, and eluding the tourist eye, and even when they “flank the Mersey for a distance of 6-7 M.” they do not respond to American curiosity so frankly as could be wished. They are like other English things in that, however, and it must be said for them that when apparent they are sometimes unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to think them “wonderful and almost endless,” and so I dare say they are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.

Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant, through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly upright like the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow buttercups, knee-deep, white American daisies, and red clover, and among the sheep we had our choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally abundant. Some of the blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and over all the sky hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces of air like an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell like that of Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and at last radiantly smiling.

II

The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were buying picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly fawning on them in the inept confidences of American women with all persons in official or servile attendance. “Let me stay here,” one of them entreated, “because there’s such a draught at the other window. May I?” She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not, tender creature. As she was in every one else’s way there, possibly she was harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.

{Illustration: ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL}

The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many familiar accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was full of a nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in our East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped to the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.

III

At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of a pastry-cook’s shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.

I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many young couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better, but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The young couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures might have been better, but then they might have been worse (there being examples of Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the Dante’s Dream of Rossetti); and in any case those couples could come and see them when they were old men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of half-holiday which could not last forever.

In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his words did their poor hearts good.

Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the late Queen, who had no special motive I could think of for being shown to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the expressed hope of seeing each other again, and if this should meet his eye and he can recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who chatted with him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual encounter I would be glad of his address.

IV

How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler. Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years with the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay on the stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe, whose Life of Leo X., in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my young zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool have been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the picturesque times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder times when Sir Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to the brave days when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the inglorious epoch when the new city (it was then only some four or five hundred years old) began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the colonies of the Spanish Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic in rum, sugar, and tobacco.

{Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL}

It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It is true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own, that so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination. In this it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and well-written Guardian, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said that not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges, they measurably do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would not be sure that the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to them. As it is, they probably constitute the best society of Liverpool, which the natives have abandoned to them, though they do not constitute it permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of rank and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These have their stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they are not at the landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot stay for the vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his own land, is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are each sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially unborn; they can come into the world only in London, and in their prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all the commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic maturity.

V

The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing, and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger’s being carried overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.

{Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS}

I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands — they are Briarean — free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern, for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to its destination.

SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER

I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps no other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel, which is indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even a ticking, clock in the transom above one’s bedroom door; but the like type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal in England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at the most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains, when not shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and filling with a wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in England they

    “Come like shadows, so depart,”

and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.

I

These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals; one could really give one’s self up to serious emotion, and not be sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the cathedral was simply T’ Owd Church, and in this character it is still venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a monument there if anywhere.

{Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL}

With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in summer, but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading haberdashers in Manchester developed the strange fact that there, in the world-heart of the cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing to be found. In Manchester there are only woollen socks, heavier or lighter, to be bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you say, in your strange madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly, however, it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by the almanac. Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end of August was not the beginning of November.

II

I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public edifices, a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be expected of a place which has always had so much to do besides looking after its figure and complexion. The very charming series or system of parks, public gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and variety, had a sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the spectator passing in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of the Boston or Chicago parkways, and I will own that I had not come to Manchester for them. What interested me more were the miles and miles of comfortable-looking little brick houses in which, for all I knew, the mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly it did not; the mills themselves are now nearly all, or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for this reason I did not find the slums, when shown them, very slummy, and I saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and dirt as in Liverpool. We passed through a quarter of large, old-fashioned mansions, as charming as they were unimagined of Manchester; but these could not have been the dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the mill-owners. The mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and villas, which I fancy by this time are not

 — “pricking a cockney ear,”

as in the time of Tennyson’s “Maud.”

What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind devotee of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put upon them, when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to have taken it all — with what a meek subordination and sufferance! One asks one’s self whether the society of such places can be much inferior to that of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the literary attics of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to spit upon. Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or rather, out of it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or poorer, as I saw it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so many women as men were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be sure that the sex shows there that superiority physically which it has long held morally with us. One learns in the north not to look for the beautiful color of the south and west; but in Manchester the average faces were intelligent and the figures good.

III

With such a journal as the Manchester Guardian still keeping its high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to its effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell’s novels, there may also still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance in a perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism which eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to episcopacy, as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget that one of our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester by Ann Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to such spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those who have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways, can regret with me the decline of the celibate communism which their foundress imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire blacksmith she left behind her.

I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in Black’s excellent Guide to Manchester that before Mrs. Gaskell’s celebrity the fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon his native place, which can still show the house where he was probably born and the grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my forgetfulness, or my ignorance, that Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear to every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of the British constitution, that the great city from whose political fame these names are inseparable should have had no representation in Parliament from Cromwell’s time to Victoria’s. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or Grand Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!

{Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER}

The “Manchester school” of political economy has long since passed into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a potent weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not myself so extreme a laissez-faireist as to have thought of that school with pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good thing in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the opposite social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like this, any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority, or a very powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent populations of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham, names which have stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved by noble sympathies and impulses. It is quite possible that a less generous spirit than mine would have censured the “Manchester school” for the weather of the place, and found in its cold gray light the effect of the Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction in gloom.

IV

I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics of the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps the finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of “the cotton-spinning chorus” which has sent its name so far. The cotton is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to come away without mine.

I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there, there it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on the planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not my fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right hands, but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In the local delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness might have befriended the ignorance of the stranger were “away on their holidays”: that was exactly the phrase.

When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there is no other phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign demons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants, alike staid, whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing in a common type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three o’clock, they were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even then there was no uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied shouting; but from the crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men, there rose a sort of surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking into a shriek of torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for its commercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which could offer itself to the eye in the whole world.

{Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL}

I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit of the beautiful old Chetham College, with its library dating from the seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I had come to Manchester for.

IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD

If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield, I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in it; but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than the roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious, but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its part in heightening the dramatic effect.

I

The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not be able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would so obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them. Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller, or less hurried, will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the capital of the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I thought it felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I could have wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise made for it by other like hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my strength to go and see that colored opera which we had lately sent, after its signal success with us, to an even greater prosperity in England. In Dahomey is a musical drama not pitched in the highest key, but it is a genuine product of our national life, and to witness its performance by the colored brethren who invented it, and were giving it with great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened by our racial prejudices, was an experience which I would not have missed for many Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly full that it could not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly felt that no one there could delight so intelligently as the sole American, in the familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying darky types, which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New York suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs in music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals have evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades of color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against an air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say the poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them. At a fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress, standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity: a young man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable manager, was, I hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.

II

I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals to one’s pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better. The thing ought to be looked into.

At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one place there was a little oblong building between branching streets, round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called, on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger. Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into the boy’s wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting the populace for my selfish pleasure.

III

Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives. It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.

Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches, and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats. The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.

My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope it is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in these multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and drive the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own forging and hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all hand-work. But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who wrought at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did not once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to know that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a distinct relief to pass from their shops into the cool, dim crypt which was filled with tusks of ivory, in all sizes from those of the largest father elephant to those of the babes of the herd; these were milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering showroom as it would have cost me in New York, with the passage money and the duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could never have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill pens. I looked fondly at the maker’s name on the knife I did buy, and said that the table cutlery of a certain small household which set itself up forty years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant salesman did not seem to feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.

IV

There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss. Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure; but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his pilgrims,

    “A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose.”

Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there, as elsewhere in England, was fain to

       “broaden slowly down

    From precedent to precedent.”

Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles must, but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now Sheffield takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.

{Illustration: TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD}

V

We were not there, though, for others’ labor or leisure, which we have plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I had about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question of goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were blood-stained liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen too, and they only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more appealing to the fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts, but Elizabeth was to be pitied because Mary had made it politically imperative for her to kill her. All this we had threshed out many times before, and had said that, cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous because she was the more feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable because she was the more masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore in the right mood to visit Mary’s prison, and we were both indignant and dismayed to find that our driver, called from a mews at a special price set upon his intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where it was.

We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel in a fine flare of sarcasm. “You call yourself a Sheffield man and not know where the Old Manor is!” he began, and presently reduced that proud ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought it at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb up the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange and grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the crater of a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand vents. All detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the retrospect; one was aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which they loomed and gloomed.

Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of little dirty houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very dirtiest-faced children in England playing about them. From time to time our driver had to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns, with babies in their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending shop, or peddling provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him with varying degrees of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a goodish bit, beyond. All at once we came upon the sight of it on an open top, hard by what is left of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey stayed that little while from death. The relics are broken walls, higher here, lower there; with some Tudor fireplaces showing through their hollow windows. What we saw in tolerable repair was the tower of the Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to it across a field, on a track made by farm carts, and presently kept by a dog that showed his teeth in a grin not wholly of amusement at our temerity. While we debated whether we had not better let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich North Country accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen parlor, where his wife was peeling potatoes for their midday dinner, and so led us up the narrow stone stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary miserably passed those many long years of captivity.

The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered, “Well, if people wanted a chair!” He was a rather charmingly quaint, humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not pretend to be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which had been a queen’s prison for many years. One must not judge it too severely, though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl and Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone, whither her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over the lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that blew over it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of the prison, or the bower, below.

The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke, and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide was himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he reported himself in such colloquies as, “I says to Dook,” and, “Dook says to me.” When he understood that we were Americans he asked after a son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before. He had only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being robbed of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy; we suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place; and Mary’s prison-house acquired an added pathos.

VI

We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk’s gift to Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it are many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen. We chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and modern restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady Shrewsbury who were Mary Stuart’s jailers; or if they were not, a pair of their family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The chapel in which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just brushed the carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness that he could not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk round it, and we saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an abnormal tip after severe debate whether a person of this verger’s rich respectability and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the event it appeared that he would.

NINE DAYS’ WONDER IN YORK

Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise to those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having said so much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the 2d to the 12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some wholly, some partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright which the rain kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were quite hot, and sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at least you were wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the evenings were so clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons were very well with neither.

I

The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there was a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we were glad to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag surrounding the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these, and then we found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day turned gray and misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the fields of wheat which the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has heard so much of the decay of the English agriculture that one sees what is apparently the contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The acreage of these wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I could remember to have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in, much ploughing for the next year had been done already, and where the ploughing was finished the work of sowing by drill was going steadily forward, in the faith that such an unprecedented summer as was now passing would return another year. At all these pleasant labors, of course, the rooks were helping, or at least bossing.

II

We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York, and our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we had no other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all but stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he was represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office, who asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken from the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for the races. I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but I privately asked the head porter what races those were which were limiting our proposed sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some difficulty in keeping a head porter’s conventional respect for a formal superior in answering that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week. Then I said, “Oh yes,” and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week which I resolved to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was over.

But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town, as soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still the gray afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour fortunate, and I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour out of the whole twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the glorious fane, the grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt then and I feel now. If I were put to the question and were forced to say in what its supreme grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in its most ample simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no sense of this from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered pillars, and its measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage in autumnal woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at York, and I cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals, like that of Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not be satisfied with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand in clumps, with grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to the sky, that let in the colored evening light.

You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such architectural undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of our visit there were so many other Americans that you could easily have asked your way in your own dialect. We loitered over its lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows, which were like the gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and lingered in a sumptuous delay from going into the choir, delighting in the gray twilight which seemed to gather from the gray walls inward, when suddenly what seemed a metallic curtain was dropped with a clash and the simultaneous up-flashing of electric bulbs inside it, and we were shut out from the sight but not the sound of the service that began in the choir. We could not wholly regret the incident, for as we recalled the like operation of religion in churches of our Italian travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative the Church of England and the Church of Home were, and how little they adjust their ceremonial to the individual, how largely to the collective worshipper. You could come into the Minster of York as into the basilica of St. Mark at Venice for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of the place, and be conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there were no other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to your devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you must obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but somehow the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at York seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.

{Illustration: YORK MINSTER — THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND}

We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted as “scatteringly noble outside.” By this I dare say I meant it had not that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the inside. They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with English cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything, than its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes of little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age. They were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of Doncaster Week.

III

During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and a Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple was built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to make believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of the Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by the tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put our guide to such question in matters of imagination and information as the patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a tale, true or o’ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do not remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe fruits.

For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort of famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad to lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner or later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay I made a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the clearest evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was setting in a transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of those glaring reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but bathed the air in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged with violet. This was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in, and I can see it there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow, its veracious history back to the beginning of the seventh century, whence you can look back further still to the earliest Christian temples where the Romans worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved and converted. But it was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was built on the site of the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian King Eadwine’s baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he replaced the wooden structure with stone. In the next century it was burned, but rebuilt by another pious prince, and probably repaired by yet another after the Danes took the city a hundred years later. It was then in a good state to be destroyed by that devout William the Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon world in its sins of guttling and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop reconstructed or restored the church, and then it began to rise and to spread in glory — nave, transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers, Norman and Early English, and Perpendicular and Decorated — till it found itself at last what the American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two great fires in the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic who had the fancy of seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of destroying part of the roof.

It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more secular history than can be associated with it; but not till the end of the thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St. William was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for two brief centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession of it in behalf of the crown, and the saint’s charge was practically abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased in gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king’s having, who was most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have somehow desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such fact. A more authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the times is the pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza, the poor little wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman Catholic bishop when, to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was heading a procession in York in 1688. The verger showing us through the Minster was a good Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor of his, who when leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the captive staff from its place and shook it in their faces, saying, “Don’t you wish you had it?”

IV

There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which I could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted for my associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine’s scholarly and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason why the better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit fully equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied that I got a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window, which was, at any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was a long walk, almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after supper for one’s health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for staring up at the many restorations going on. From point to point the incomparable Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles of the caves and towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles, which lay in open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the church. While I stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I should never look on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang of it, a verger in a skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and parley long and pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went on around; people going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar noises came from the little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring streets; there seemed to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and there was certainly the misaspirated talk about them. I could not have asked better material for the humble emotions I love; and I was more than content on my way home to find myself one of the congregation at the loud devotions of a detachment of the Salvation Army. After a battering of drums and a clashing of cymbals and a shouting of hymns, the worship settled to the prayer of a weak brother, who was so long in supplication that the head exhorter covered a yawn with his hand, and at the first sign of relenting in the supplicant bade the drums and cymbals strike up. Then, after a hymn, a sister, such a very plain, elderly sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch in her head, began to relate her religious history. It appeared that she had been a much greater sinner than she looked, and that the mercy shown her had been proportionate. She was vain both of her sins and mercies, poor soul, and in her scrimp figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven knows how long she went on. I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the outside of the ring of listening women and children, and looking, I chose to think, somewhat sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him, on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have been the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it; but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.

V

Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day’s sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after the pale debility of labor’s looks in Sheffield. From the chocolate-factories or the railroad-shops, which are the chief industries of York, they would be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the famous stream on which the Romans had their town, and which suggested to the Anglicans to call their Eboracum Eurewic — a town on a river. In due time the Danes modified this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by the name of our own New York, called after the old York, as soon as the English had robbed the Dutch of it, and the King of England had given the province to his brother the Duke of York. Both cities are still towns on rivers, but the Ouse is no more an image or forecast of the Hudson than Old York is of New York. For that reason, the bridge over it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn Bridge, or even to any bridge which is yet to span the Hudson. The difference is so greatly in our favor that we may well yield our city’s mother the primacy in her city wall. We have ourselves as yet no Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet got a mediaeval gate through which the traveller passes in returning from the Flatiron Building to his hotel in the Grand Central Station.

We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome, but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis before Constantine was elected emperor there.

I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or those romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound; but, after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any place before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge. The event of Constantine’s presence and election is so spacious as to leave no room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in it that you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in the close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a railroad hotel garden in New York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons before you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch a little adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work, realize the most august, the most important fact in the story of the race as native to the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are in full view of the Minster, which is to say in view of something like the towers and battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake very early on a morning still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your impending banishment, and look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise reddening the level bars of cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it bulked up against the pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs in all the intervening trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such is the force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not more noise than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has some chance with modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans come and make them slaves and then Christians, and after three or four hundred years send word from the Tiber to the Ouse that they can stay no longer, and so leave them naked to their enemies, the Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course still, the murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the Normans have crushed themselves down into the mass of the vanquished, and formed the English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions, of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate insurrections and rebellions. In the splendid Histories of Shakespeare, which are full of York, the imagination visits and revisits the place, and you are entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,

    “I pray you let us satisfy our eyes

     With the memorials and things of fame,

     That do renown this city,”

where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.

{Illustration: BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER}

VI

Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but, when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end of it was a famous city gate — Bootham Bar, namely — with a practicable portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into “the chamber over the gate,” where it was once worked, and whence its lower beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and Bootham Bar is never closed.

The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair, and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys, with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque, into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down, perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise, I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.

There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores, newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and there was one united florist’s and fruiterer’s which I particularly liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence, as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, “Ah, the Americans are clever people.” Then he added, “I hope you won’t mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are rather harder than our English ladies, sir.”

“Yes,” I eagerly assented. “How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?”

“Well, not just that, sir.”

“More practical? More business-like?” I pursued.

“Well, I shouldn’t like to say that, sir. But — they seem rather harder, sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather harder, sir.”

We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty, and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their advantage with the summer hardness of our women.

VII

It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to lose one’s self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness, if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him, and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them are said to have “richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms, chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled cornices, and pedimented doors,” and I could well believe it, as I passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.

{Illustration: WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN}

At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but I was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there, besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come to York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses at the tidy confectioners’, where persons of civil condition resorted for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only do my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about York histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the shops in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps the pleasanter for that reason.

In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and canopied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in everything one could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many book-stalls as fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness of the abounding flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people’s manners and their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the things they had for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do not say they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception in their looks which their venders abhorred.

VIII

I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.

What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy to have Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the gateway on which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him. But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting. After the citizens drove out Conqueror William’s garrison, and Earl Waltheof provided against the Normans’ return by standing at the castle gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far as Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that “worthy peer,” King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king’s successor. Edward I. and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St. William’s bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king’s varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father’s head on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII. wedded Elizabeth, the “White Rose of York,” and afterward visited her city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched many for the king’s evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure the sort of king’s evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to the Puritans, whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James II., as Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; “proud Cumberland,” returning from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts; perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if it is to fulfil itself and increase York’s seventy-two thousand beyond London’s six million.

IX

I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however, rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of Hadrian’s stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass of the place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more commodiously orb about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy with the poor Punic emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless because, when he fell sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near Bootham Bar, and paid his devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any prevision of the misbehavior of his son Caracalla (whose baths I had long ago visited at Rome) in killing his other son Geta. Everywhere I could be an early Christian, in company with Constantine, in whom the instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds because I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in the railway hotel, which so many of their bones made room for when the foundations of it were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their bones seem to have been left there, after the disturbance, but their sepulchres were respectfully transferred to the museum of the Philosophical Society, in the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey rise like fragments of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading novels.

{Illustration: ST. MARY’S ABBEY}

The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities, which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the villas which people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York, and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of lead and stone for civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the Sixth Legion; the slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties and left to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs must have been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving wives and husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone coffins are those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after two thousand years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid their little ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep. Faith changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not very different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had come so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien rule seemed essentially not only of the same make as me, but the same civilization. Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and called to a like irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal state — jars and vases and simple household utensils — fill the shelves of the museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the hair of a Roman lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl certainly, dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day, and kept in form by pins of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands that used to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves in the silver mirror under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass cast upon the white forehead. This sanctuary of the past was the most interesting place in that most interesting city of York, and the day of our first visit a princess of New York sat reading a book in the midst of it, waiting for the rain to be over, which was waiting for her to come out and then begin again. We knew her from having seen her at the station in relation to some trunks bearing her initials and those of her native city; and she could be about the age of the York princess or young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn hard by.

X

There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage; and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually, we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and not another is indeed its name.

It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own, with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and twelfth century contemporaries.

XI

We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford’s Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built and rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But the tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it by hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with his party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the city, and it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the Christians had harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and riches, when the Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time to time the Jew-hate breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel effect. They were followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that they must be captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew themselves. Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed by their brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown milder, and now they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their homes.

{Illustration: CLIFFORD’S TOWER}

The Clifford Tower leans very much to one side, so that as you ascend it for the magnificent view from the top you have to incline yourself the other way, as you do in the Tower of Pisa, to help it keep its balance. The morning of our visit, so gay in its forgetfulness of the tragical past, we found the place in charge of an old soldier, an Irishman who had learned, as custodian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews of nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our nationality, owned to three “nevvies” in New Haven. So small is the world and so closely knit in the ties of a common humanity and a common citizenship, native and adoptive!

The country around York looked so beautiful from Clifford’s Tower that we would not be satisfied till we had seen it closer, and we chose a bright, cool September afternoon for our drive out of the town and over the breezy, high levels which surround it. The first British capital could hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help grieving that the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early dignity by letting its channel fill up with silt and spoil its navigation. The Thames managed better for York’s upstart rival London, and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of both steam and sail, and I myself have witnessed the energy with which the reluctance of the indolent stream is sometimes overcome. I do not suppose that anywhere else, when the wind is low, is a vessel madly hurled through the water at a mile an hour by means of a rope tied to its mast and pulled by a fatherly old horse under the intermittent drivership of two boys whom he could hardly keep to the work. I loved the banks of a stream where one could see such a triumph of man over nature, and where nature herself was so captivating. All that grassy and shady neighborhood seemed a public promenade, where on a Sunday one could see the lower middle classes in their best and brightest, and it had for all its own the endearing and bewitching name of Ings. Why cannot we have Ings by the Hudson side?

TWO YORKISH EPISODES

Certainly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have gone anywhere, for battle-fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that city that the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and my enemy Charles I. put to one of his worst defeats there, I bought a third-class ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion awaited me there.

I

At an English station you are either overwhelmed with transportation, or you are without any except such as you were born with, and at the station for Marston Moor I asked for a fly in vain. But it was a most walkable afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the station-master indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its level stretch, sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open fields, newly reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with the rowen clover. Sometimes it ran straight and sometimes it curved, but it led so rarely near any human habitation that one would rather not have met any tramps beside one’s self on it. Presently I overtook one, a gentle old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles she bore in either hand, in the hope that she could tell me whether I was near Marston Moor or not. But she could tell me only, what may have been of higher human interest, that her husband had the grass farm of a hundred and fifty acres, which we were coming to, for seventy-five pounds a year; and they had their own cattle, sheep, and horses, and were well content with themselves. She excused herself for not knowing more than vaguely of the battle-field, as not having been many years in the neighborhood; and being now come to a gate in the fields, she thanked me and took her way up a grassy path to the pleasant farmhouse I saw in the distance.

It must have been about this time that it rained, having shone long enough for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken by a friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question uppermost in my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the problem. He was a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from a neighboring town, and he knew the country well, but he did not know where my lost battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he was sure there was no monument to mark the spot. Then we parted friends, with many polite expressions, and he rode on and I walked on.

For a mile and more I met no other wayfarer, and as I felt that it was time to ask for Marston Moor again, I was very glad to be overtaken by a gentleman driving in a dog-cart, with his pretty young daughter on the wide seat with him. He halted at sight of the elderly pilgrim, and hospitably asked if he could not give him a lift, alleging that there was plenty of room. He was interested in my search, which he was not able definitely to promote, but he believed that if I would drive with him to his place I could find the battle-field, and, anyhow, I could get a trap back from the The Sun. I pleaded the heat I was in from walking, and the danger for an old fellow of taking cold in a drive through the cool air; and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about our ages, each claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet young girl sat listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality of age which is so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was sorry, and wished me luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired with my three miles’ tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the first in all the distance, and went in and asked for a cup of tea.

The farm-wife, who came in out of her back garden to answer my knock, pleaded regretfully that her fire was down; but she thought I could get tea at the next house; and she was very conversable about the battle-field. She did not know just where it was, but she was sure it was quite a mile farther on; and at that I gave up the hope of it along with the tea. This is partly the reader’s loss, for I have no doubt I could have been very graphic about it if I had found it; but as for Marston Moor, I feel pretty certain that if it ever existed it does not now. A moor, as I understand, implies a sort of wildness, but nothing could be more domestic than the peaceful fields between which I had come so far, and now easily found my way back to the station. Easily, I say, but there was one point where the road forked, though I was sure it had not forked before, and I felt myself confronted with some sort, any sort, of exciting adventure. By taking myself firmly in hand, and saying, “It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we vainly communed of my evanescent battle-field,” and so keeping on, I got safely to the station with nothing more romantic in my experience than a thrilling apprehension.

II

I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and human nature rasped on its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a provisional harshness. I chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized with the English mood; in the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard the note of Wordsworth’s verse; and by the sky, hung in its low blue with rough, dusky clouds, I was canopied as with a canvas of Constable’s.

It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party, approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and dogs, and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English life another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always rose color. The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once occupied the benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still bleeding prey. I did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the arrogance of class, which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I disabled their looks by finding them as rude as their behavior. How different they were from the kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the dog-cart, or either one of the farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to know where my lost battle-field was!

In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to his share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed victualler’s next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor, when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale or talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I had the exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci’s Last Supper, together with an appropriate view of York Minster.

III

I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was the most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it was much surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our excursion to Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little steamers which ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against its banks. It was a most silvery September afternoon when we started from the quay at York, and after escaping from embarkment on a boat going in the wrong direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to scuttle down the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson, on steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself. We had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing into a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with three women friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed to Bishopsthorpe, where it seemed that the man of the party knew the gardener. With each curve of the river and with each remove we got the city in more and more charming retrospective, till presently its roofs and walls and spires and towers were lost in the distance, and we were left to the sylvan or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant interval from the river a villa rose against a background of rounded tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out before it, but for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land, where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band, playing ‘Way down upon the Suwanee River, while the light played in “ditties no-tone” over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the shadows stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night’s sleep. There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a soft September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle Italian quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so that I thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a pleasant reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but we must be taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for us from its moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could not land, but perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the matter. At any rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took tuppence from each of us for her service, and presently earned it by the interest she showed in our getting to the Archbishop’s palace, or villa, the right way.

{Illustration: YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER}

So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up to the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars, and coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive, two charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of those people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with their friend, the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as fellow-passengers, we made favor with him to see the house. The housekeeper, or some understudy of hers, who received us, said the family were away, but she let us follow her through. That is more than I will let the reader do, for I know the duty of the cultivated American to the intimacies of the gentle English life; it is only with the simple life that I ever make free; there, I own, I have no scruple. But I will say (with my back turned conscientiously to the interior) that nothing could be lovelier than the outlook from the dining-room, and the whole waterfront of the house, on the wavy and willowy Ouse, and that I would willingly be many times an archbishop to have that prospect at all my meals.

IV

We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat-woman’s cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and asked if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if we preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam sandwiches, there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat down in that pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake came out of the oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to a flow of delightful and instructive talk. For our refection we paid sixpence each, but for our edification we are still, and hope ever to be, in debt. Our hostess was of a most cheerful philosophy, such as could not be bought of most modern philosophers for money. The flour for our tea-cakes, she said, was a shilling fivepence a stone, “And not too much for growing and grinding it, and all.” Every week-day morning she rose at half-past four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode their bicycles, or, in the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage into York, where they worked in the railway shops. No, they did not belong to any union; the railway men did not seem to care for it; only a “benefit union.”

She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every hail from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not stupid or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather than the archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one of the palace walls, “Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings every day.”

When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a little too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as cooler, where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she presently followed when the steamer’s whistle sounded, and held her boat for us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered the reflection, as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the pausing steamer, that she must find the ferry business very shattering to the nerves, and she said,

“Yes, but it’s nothing to a murder case I was on, once.”

“Oh, what murder, what murder?” we palpitated back; and both of us forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our ferrywoman began again:

“A man shot a nurse — There! Throw that line, will you?”

But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction let her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled aboard without hearing any more of the murder.

This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one; as good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.

A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM

The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day, as I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure, I might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty he can practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I made myself a pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to Doncaster I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that of Saratoga. I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and having missed Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit of knowledge — I said to myself, “Not mere amusement” — and set out for Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.

I

I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which from the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea to sea, and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway routes.

Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in that eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere. It is the market town of a rich farming region, and has notable manufactures of iron and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and of agricultural machines and implements. Otherwise, it is important only for its races, which began there three hundred years ago, and especially for its St. Leger Day, of which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the patron saint in 1778, though he really established his Day two years earlier.

Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and commonplacely American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling up and down its chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and all of more or less arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our company the reader will have our appetites for lunch, and if he will take his chance with us in the first simple place away from the station, he will help us satisfy them very wholesomely and agreeably at boards which seem festively set up for the occasion, and spread with hot roast-beef and the plain vegetables which accompany the national dish in its native land; or he can have the beef cold, or have cold lamb or chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be, as he may like well enough to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than himself, but they will all seem very respectable, and when they come out together, they will all be equalized in the sudden excitement which has possessed itself of the street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the direction of the station.

II

The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute’s glimpse of them. But how different was the behavior of that easy-going Majesty of England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious I had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it. All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at their face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without exception, his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think well of a king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think ill of him if you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly republican when there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact that his subjects like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom understands better than Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that the more a form he is the more conformable he is to the English ideal of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows better than he when to leave off being a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to his people from time to time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all hands to be a man of great good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by himself, but by the system which he is no more a part of than the least of his subjects. If he will let a weary old man or a delicate woman stand indefinitely before him, he is no more to blame for that than for speaking English with a trace of German in his th sounds; he did not invent his origins or his traditions. Personally, having had it out with life, he is as amiable and as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares, as far as he can, the great and little interests of his people. He has not, so far as noted, the gifts of some of his sisters, but he has much of his mother’s steadfast wisdom, and his father’s instinct for the right side in considerable questions; and he has his father’s prescience of the psychological moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a fetish; no Englishman can deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but he is a fetish with an uncommon share of the common man’s divinity. The system which provides him for the people provides them the best administration in the world, always naturally in the hands of their superiors, social and political; but we could be several times rottener than we administratively are, and still be incalculably reasonabler, as republicans, than those well-governed monarchists.

{Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL — NORTHWEST VIEW}

Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it. But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit of ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in which thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar of Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans; now it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his own people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling which a little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which would be out of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of sense, and not of sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could have no affection for a nation whose existence denies him. He is very civil to Americans; it is part of a constitutional king’s business to be civil to every one; but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we need not be sentimental about him.

He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that day as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he loves beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the sidewise seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the simple turnout of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on the right, and he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he wore, while he lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually, almost absently, to the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the sidewalks. He was very, very stout, even after many seasons of Marienbad, and after the sufferings he had lately undergone, and he was quite like the pictures and effigies of him, down to those on the postage-stamps. He has a handsome face, still bearded in the midst of a mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white hairs prevalent on the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though hardly from the uneasiness of wearing a crown.

It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence that those German majesties were. The good-natured crowd did not strain itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did not stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed myself to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and asked them what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the station, and one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect in England, “Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr. I-don’t-know-what’s-his-name.” The others laughed at this ribald satire of the upper classes, and I thought it safer to follow the King to the races lest I should hear worse things of them.

III

The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did not find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks, although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters and peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as a solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in the familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to show us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand, and mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.

I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.

I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here. With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.

I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here. With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the end of the third race he had softened into something like confidence toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect of my being a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the trustfulness of the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch outside her dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy in a certain supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled suddenly together like the crushing of paper and the sense of something tragically mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of one of the horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if shot, and presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some spoliarium the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf which its hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl, with the watch on her breast, turned and asked, “Isn’t it sad?”

{Illustration: FINCHALE PRIORY}

IV

She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must have been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed themselves from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space from our Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical name, which I would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be irreverent; but paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion. The King never showed himself there at all, though much craned round for and eagerly expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close, and stood and talked together; very tall people, very easily straight and well set up, very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have been really kind and good, or they may have looked so to please the King and keep his spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that these were courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very historical quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will not take from the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the courtiers wore derby hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I am not sure what the fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the ladies had on a dress with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves, and a vast black picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of authority.

The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it was raining or not, but we feared its absent-mindedness, and at the end of the third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day too far; this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it wore on, and we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise of a very refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had got out to the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very gate, that it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to walk back to town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the way by tram; but we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because we presently found ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was an alluring sight and smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of the refection, you could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a very little money. All up and down this happy avenue there went girls of several dozen sizes and ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper to the day and place, and never to be had on any other day in any other place.

We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see the Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing. Our belief was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the churchyard, who said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that they had not seen it because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying the door, and then we came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that it was probably closed for the races. At the bookseller’s, where we stopped to buy some photographs of the interior of the church we had not seen, we lamented our disappointment, and the salesman said, “Perhaps it was closed for the races.” So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on reflection it did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities where people and prince are of one texture in their pleasures and devotions, and the Church is hardly more national than the Turf.

V

At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim, therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where it almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist that turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color, which a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field near the track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing, but running leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the green, and the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded a picture as vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of fox-hunting as I could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see something of the famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the Turf, and there, suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and satisfyingly was. Now, indeed, I felt that my impression of English society was complete, and that I might go home and write novels of English high life, and do something to redeem myself a little from the disgrace I had fallen into with my fellow-plebeians by always writing of common Americans, like themselves, and never grandes dames or ideal persons, or people in the best society.

But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some of the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered into sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track of the reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river, such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion, but is a condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature in it. You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they have even volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the English are so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.

VI

It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I did not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham is, or what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with depths of woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the September wind. As it takes flight for the heavens, to which its business is to invite the thought, it seems to carry the earth with it, for if you climb those noble heights, you find your feet still on the ground, in a most stately space of open level between the cathedral and its neighbor castle, which alone could be worthy of its high company.

The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so Gothic, and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures or memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it a sin to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What chiefly remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is, strangely enough, an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars, alternating with the clustered columns of the interior, and I do not suppose I ever shall: the spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures chiselled in their surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to trifle with their proud bulk.

But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like to live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small, that I saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort is realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is approached by a very stately courtyard, of like spacious effect with the cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century, with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be, perhaps, of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the luxury in which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts live when they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments, dim and rich, and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they sleep and where they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness for the moment to be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit setting. There is also a fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black staircase of ancient oak, and a gallery with classic busts, and other pictures worthy of wonder, let alone a history from the time of William the Conqueror, who first fancied a castle where it stands, down to the present day. The memory of such successive guests as the Empress Matilda and Henry II. her son, King John, Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III., Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and James I., and Charles I., and Edward VII., abides in the guidebook, and may be summoned from its page to the chambers of the beautiful old place by any traveller intending impressions for literary use from a medieval environment in perfect repair.

VII

One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle, and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral. I went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful Weare. There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who I am sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and I asked him, with due entreaty for pardon, “What river was that.” He quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered gently, “The Weare.” “Ah, to be sure! The Weare,” I said, and thanked him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt myself so unworthy that I had not the face to prompt him further. He passed, and then I met a man much more of my own kind, if not probably so little informed. That rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, and he made occasion of this to say, “This is a cold wynd a-blowin’, Mister.” “It is, rather,” I assented. “I was think-in’,” he observed from an apparent generalization, “that I wished I was at home.” Then he suddenly added, “Help a poor man!” I was not wholly surprised at the climax, and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. “Will that do?” He hesitated perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, “Yes, that’ll do,” and so passed on to satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.

{Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL — ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER}

I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near a most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly-looking workman and asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near that would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently with his looks, “Ah doot,” and as he owned that it was a long way to town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.

I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen it, and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my third class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still on my hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now twilight, and too late; but there the charming old town still is, and will long remain, I hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for whoever will visit it. Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in my ample hour. It was as charming to weave my conjectures, about the two gentlemen with whom I had so barely spoken, as to have carried my acquaintance with them further, and I cannot see how it would have profited me to know more even of that fellow-man who, in the cold wynd a-blowing, had just been thinking he wished he was at home.

THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS

It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us from Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a loss. There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th that we went this divine journey. My companion was that companionable archaeologist who had guided my steps in search of the American origins in London, and who was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over the ground where they sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons. At divers places on the way, after we left London, he pointed out some scene associated with American saints or heroes. We traversed the region that George William Curtis’ people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and Eliot’s, the Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo Emerson country, with its big market town of Bishop’s Stortford; and beyond Ely, where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not unworthy of it, at the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I had fallen into in our railway carriage, with the cry: “There! That is where Captain John Smith was born.” “Where? Where?” I implored too late, looking round the compartment everywhere. “Back where those chickens were.”

I

That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was flat, and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that dun sky, with sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the imbrowning oaks and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the full, still streams scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.

We did not reach Boston until six o’clock, when the day was already waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph’s Church stood dim against the sky. It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to the hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched the fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so, because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square of Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light, and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth and brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had dinner, specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from Bath, and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I did. It did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance there we failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was intelligent and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane stateliness, was something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity which, more than his nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful suggestion of the old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he developed a large valise, which I now think held samples. If he was a Dutch Jew, he was probably a Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the difficult reader have more, in the materials for his romance? Did we gather about the grate after we had done dinner, and each tell the story of his life, or at least the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to him?

{Illustration: THE “STUMP” OF ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY}

I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach it we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one of the most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of Faneuil Hall and Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in America. At one side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling of Jean Ingelow, and at the point nearest the church is the statue of Herbert Ingram, the less famous but more locally recognized Bostonian, who founded the Illustrated London News with the money he made by the invention and sale of Old Parr’s Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament from his native town, and he related it to America, after two centuries, by drowning in Lake Michigan. “R. N.,” the otherwise anonymous author of a very intelligent and agreeable Handbook of Boston, relates that in his first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who, when he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion, was told by four of them in succession that they were promised “to their cousin Ingram,” and who thereupon declared that if he had known Ingram “was cousin to the whole town” he would, never have stood against him. Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of Lincolnshire were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing, “R. N.” believes, to the isolation of Boston before the draining of its fens, and not to their conviction that there were no outsiders worthy to mate with them.

II

The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it I do not know from experiment or even inquiry. “R. N.” will say nothing of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.

{Illustration: THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES}

The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall which keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a conjecture of the church’s outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the tower climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads of moving ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights, which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival, began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered, but the fruits and vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and together they swathed the pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach, and all but hid its structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric softening some hard doctrine.

Apparently, however, Cotton’s doctrine was not anywise too hard, or even hard enough, for such “a factious people, who were imbued with the Puritan spirit,” as he found in Boston, when he was first elected vicar of St. Botolph’s; and it was not till Archbishop Laud’s ecclesiastical tyrannies began that he came to see “the Sin of Conformity” and to preach resistance. His conflict with the authorities went so far that exile to another Boston in another hemisphere became his only hope. Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, “if he had been guilty of drunkenness, uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon, but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and Non-conformity, the crime was non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him to flee for his safety.”

The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received from Cotton’s posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge overseas, and “the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are carved with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England.” Edward Everett, one of Cotton’s descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription in Latin, which “R. N.” has Englished in verse, and I am the more scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my usual reluctant honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.

    That here John Cotton’s memory may survive

    Where for so long he labored when alive,

    In James’ reign and Charles’, ere it ceased —

    A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;

    Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God

    He in a new world sought a new abode,

    To a new England, a new Boston came,

    (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)

    Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there —

    Till death deprived it of its shepherd’s care —

    There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,

    Whether with cares of this world or the next;

    Two centuries five lustra from the year

    That saw the exile leave his labors here,

    His family, his townsmen, with delight —

    (Whom to the task their English kin invite) —

    To the fair fane he served so well of yore,

    His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,

    This chapel renovate, this tablet place,

    In this, the year of man’s recovered Grace,

                        1855.

III

I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night, but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous; the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to require even women to be pretty.

{Illustration: THE RIVER AT EVENING}

We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church, under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there seemed shipyards along the river’s course, but at one place there was a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are the ironies of life.

What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember. The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten o’clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.

The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o’clock I found the fruiterer’s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers, but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.

The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to, is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the forenoon. We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its tower from the brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat land to a sea no flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English coast, merely the sea come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater convenience of the fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we saw about the town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging bare-armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty, and money, and culture, and all the good things of this world, and getting them in a measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within the church we saw again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and others like them, and again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we could make out a little better than at first, because its garlands were a little more withered and shrunken away. But better than either we realized the perfection of the church interior as a whole, so ample, so simple, such a comfortable and just sufficient eyeful.

IV

From other interests in St. Botolph’s you somehow keep always, or finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the humor of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could not be in the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a claim upon the spectator’s wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far as I know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a loftier room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet from the ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was done when the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and has not the claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure as he might wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a crick in the neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a way, it is worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment of the tower is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston, Massachusetts, and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is groined.

When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself as usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the town, which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking them about in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller piece over a gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.

{Illustration: LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM}

There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it, but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops, but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which could not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people. Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one of those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes. Being out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found a contractor there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of hot-water heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold of the Boston winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we screwed out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences, select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out of.

V

There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us to Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their “dread lord,” James the First, and were arrested for this crime, and brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town. Their dread lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at Hampton Court, and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so that he was in no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the Pilgrim Fathers, get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at least none of King James’ thinking.

But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor Bradford in his Historie of Plymouth Plantation, where he says that “ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston in Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves, & made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and take them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they accordingly would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, & large expences, though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length & tooke them in, in the night. But when he had them & their goods abord, he betrayed them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers & other officers so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open boats, & ther rifled and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even the women furder then became modestie; and then caried them back into the towne, & made them a spectakle & wonder to the multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus first, by the catchpoule officer, rifled, & stripte of their money, books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they were comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and shewed them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, & sent to the places from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in prison, and bound over to the Assises.”

My excellent “R. N.” of the Handbook of Boston is anxious to have his reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine, distinguish between these future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and scholars who later founded Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its name after that of the town they had dwelt in or often visited before they left the handsome keeping of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were Richard Bellingham, Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel Whiting, and others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even Bradford or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were of the humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston took from their vessel. “Pathetic but splendid figures,” my brave “R. N.” calls them, and he tells how, after a month’s jail, they were “sent home broken men, to endure the scoffs of their neighbors and the rigors of ecclesiastical discipline.”

VI

The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread and water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall kitchens immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with “R. N.” that they were put there “by a refinement of cruelty,” so that they might suffer the more in that vicinage. “The magistrates” who had “used them courteously and shewed them what favour they could,” would not have willed that; but perhaps “the Counsell-table” did; and it was certainly a hardship that the dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as any man may see at this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are any longer used; the spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed, and the cells where the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen jars. For no other or better reason, the large open spaces of the basement outside of them were scattered about with agricultural implements, ploughs, harrows, and the like. It was the belief of my companion, founded on I know not what fact, that the hall in which the Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber which we found occupied by a boys’ school. The door stood partly ajar, and we could see the master within walking up and down before some twenty boys, as if waiting for one of them to answer some question he had put them. Perhaps it was a question of local history, for none of them seemed able to answer it; presently when a boy came out on some errand, and we stopped him, and asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been tried, he did not know, and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims. He was a very nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly he was well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with their elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place like Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and asking so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same or worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England, under the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same hardship did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of Boston, which we were now to visit for their piteous sake.

“The nexte spring after,” as Bradford continues the narrative of their sorrows, “ther was another attempte made by some of these & others, to get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they light of a Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to Zealand; they made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their condition, hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of their owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe & Hull, where was a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the prefixed time, the women & children, with the goods, were sent to the place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a day before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very sicke, prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they lay on ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they were fast, & could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the shipe maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be getting the men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But after the first boat full was gott abord, & she was ready to goe for more, the Mr. espied a greate company, both horse & foote, with bills, & gunes, & other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’ and having the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, & away. But the poore men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their wives and children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute of their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to shifte them with, more then they had on their baks, & some scarce a peney aboute them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from their eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a shore againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly part. The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to escape away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that best might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see the heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping & crying on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in the ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of them, & their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking with could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to another, and from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not what to doe with them; for to imprison so many women & innocent children for no other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them; and to send them home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the trueth was, they had no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or otherwise disposed of their houses & livings. To be shorte, after they had been thus turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to another, they were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes: for all were wearied & tired with them. Though in the mean time they (poore soules) indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie forste a way for them.”

VII

If there is any more touching incident in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was to visit the scene of it near “Grimsbe,” or Great Grimsby, as it is now called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston, over wide plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere. Here and there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told by a brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I may have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such “poore people” as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders, and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had left her bar to fetch it in anticipation of all question.

At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional kind of cab, — looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable to orient itself aright, — available for the long drive to that “large comone a good way distante from any towne,” which we were to make, if we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims’ sufferings in their second attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage, therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove through a country which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and our turnout on each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just beyond the suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell which we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape of the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west, and constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept a good courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel, but when it began to falter away into a country road, he must have lost faith in our sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional respect for his nominal betters which English cabmen never part with except in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well as we could with some grapes and pears, which we found we did not want after our lunch, and which we handed him up through his little trap-door, but a plaintive quaver grew into his voice, and he let his horse lag in the misgiving which it probably shared with him. Nothing of signal interest occurred in our progress except at one point, near a Methodist chapel, where we caught sight of a gayly painted blue van, lettered over with many texts and mottoes, which my friend explained as one of the vans intinerantly used by extreme Protestants of the Anne Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of Romanism in England.

The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant’s cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter’s coal, and he and his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever supports they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition of two, I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type into a cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their too probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.

My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us, they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over “the large comone,” and tried to imagine its looks nearly three hundred years before. They could not have been very different; the place could hardly have been much wilder, and there was the “creeke hardby wher they lay,” the hapless women and children, in their boat “at lowwater,” while the evening came on, no doubt, just as it was doing with us, the weather clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold. Off yonder, away across the solitary moor, was the course of the Humber, marked for us by the trail of a steamer’s smoke through the fringes of trees, and for them by the sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next day that “great company, both horse and foote, with bills and gunes, and other weapons,” coming to harry those poor people, “swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’ and having the wind faire, waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,” leaving those desolate women and their little ones lamenting.

VIII

On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism which persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me the more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I saw a young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart to at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She had such a very charming hat on.

The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both fishing and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of sawlogs from Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only the centre of a vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a still vaster trade in fish. It cuts one’s pride, if one has believed that Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the world, to learn that Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only “one of the principal fishing ports” of the United Kingdom. What can one do against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a single night.

{Illustration: FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY}

After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines, in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.

When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we reflected that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they would probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had bought an excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the trains everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought out the guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to shut us into that compartment, and not let any one else in. There we remained in darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near train-time, the bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard them demanding admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard, if that is the right way to call him. He turned them away with soft answers, answers so very soft that we could not make out what he said, but he seemed to be inviting them into other compartments, which he doubtless pretended were better. The murmurs would die away, and then rise again, and from time to time we knew that a baffled bicycler was pulling at our door, or vainly bumping against it. We listened with our hearts in our mouths; but no one got in, and the train started, and we opened our baskets and began to eat and to drink, like two aristocrats or plutocrats. What made our inhuman behavior worse was that we were really nothing of the kind, but both professed friends of the common people. The story might show that when it comes to a question of selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by the unjust conditions. However, it must be remembered that those people were only bicyclers. If we could have conceived of them as masses we should have known them for brothers, and let them in, probably.

ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE

It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth, but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways, when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro, Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian remoteness. The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage that is at fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render, are music, and they largely record a Christian civilization which was centuries old when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western mountains and to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their race. The Britons of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the baffled Saxon invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and poetry, still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little men, defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable speech.

I

Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they lost under the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to them by conquest as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their h’s when they were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh prince they were promised in the succession of their ancient lines. They had been devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest centuries; as the prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the country abounded in saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and at the Reformation they became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their kindred, the Bretons, remained Catholics. They have characterized the English and Americans with their strong traits in a measure which can be dimly traced in the spread of their ten or twenty national names, and they have kept even with the most modern ideals quite to the verge of co-education in their colleges. It is a fact which no Welshman will deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was unquestionably of Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg misspell it), who set aside the Plantagenet succession, and was the grandsire of “the great Elizabeth,” not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry VIII. But if these are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the English cabinet.

The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly refutive of that Englishman’s position. I can only urge further the noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in which the English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in Wales. The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which rather weary one in England. They said “Yes,” and “No,” but as gently as if they had always added “Sir.” If I have it on my conscience to except from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.

II

In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the good looks of either the men or women was of the American average. I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry which is our peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even tender youth. The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.

After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably; and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings, but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season, they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings because, though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall lastingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would have been one of the best means of studying the local life. But we held out for the London custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has so often made itself felt behind English thrones, could intervene, compliance was promised. After that it remained for the Welsh Power to make our stay difficult, and our going easy.

{Illustration: THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH}

Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon the pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was not much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that parties go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled at most hours with the English who make the place their resort; whose bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other end was the Amusement Pier, with the co-educational college, which is part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind and beyond were the ruins of one of those castles which the Normans planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole means of holding down the swarming, squirming, fighting little dark people of the country. Even then they could not do it, for the Welsh, often overrun, were never conquered, as they will tell you themselves if you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps the most peaceful country in the world. Its prisons for the most part stand empty (it is said), and the people, once so turbulent, are as little given to violence as to vice. In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar declare that in the old times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the fighting, either on the public or the private scale, but the Scotch and Irish who had found a home among them. In any case, it is true that after the Normans had planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was all they could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had imagined having the English King’s son born in one of them did they bring the Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain people broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish among them did.

III

All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately band of tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she gave a glad cry: “Oh, they’re the Neegurs! They’re the white Neegurs!” and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American Sufferance.

But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his writings in the Welsh Gazette, treating our proposed triumph in his distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing; but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and finally took leave of us without rancor.

The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer’s boy to whom our friend presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me understand what an englyn was. I am able now to explain that it is a polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers, or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he said at last, “Let us go into this grocery. There’s a boy here who will show you what an englyn is,” and after I was introduced the kind youth did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston grocer’s boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten, about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are honored according to their poetic worth.

IV

After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came, one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it, was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman’s place not far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices of that friend of ours to be invited with them.

It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the western Welsh coast than on other shores of the “rainy isles,” but not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea, on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us as those did.

I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees, and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.

V

There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn, backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began. Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this trust, unless it was King Arthur’s knights, and I am not sure whether the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.

{Illustration: ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS}

After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans’ hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry, nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to all sufferers ever since it came into her family’s keeping. That they might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.

I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do, in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. “A home of ancient peace,” it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces through which the Chautauquans followed from it.

VI

At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was the difference of the people from the people over the English border in their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful, they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.

The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track, there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King’s Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too literally.

Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes. Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the picture-postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear hard, shiny black straw hats like the men’s. Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.

VII

All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the payment of such part of the Dissenters’ taxes as would go to the support of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came of it I do not know.

Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round, so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach. Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls, though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.

The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.

VIII

I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle, and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell’s lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to Llandudno.

LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE

Froissart’s saying, if it was Froissart’s, that the English amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the English call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.

I

The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their double l and their French u, Thlandidno. According to another, we cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George Borrow’s, who says that the Welsh ll is the same as the Spanish ll, but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it lhl you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix Llan speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled the country in the times when a Saint’s sons were every one saints, and none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally with all his brothers.

But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue, or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with the sight of his country’s flag floating over a tennis-ground at the neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes and principles to which they have religiously adhered.

{Illustration: LLANDUDNO — THE CITY AND HARBOR}

Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves, who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.

II

Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we never knew what it was about.

Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: “At least we think so,” but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day before, my actual Cymric youth said, “Then he asked you too little,” which seemed a non sequitur but was really an unexpected stroke of logic.

It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno. They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the hopes he never fulfils, so that his Wild Wales is a desert of blighted literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the composer.

III

One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go to hear it, not being good for a week’s music without intermission. At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers, which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well enough, and Pierrots are amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.

The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute, so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it. They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen’s apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the spectators’ chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience, who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here, as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.

{Illustration: LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME’S NECK}

On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband’s. It was indeed a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have been friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread over the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or more enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping on it, and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and all the points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the limits of the beautiful beach, Great Orme’s Head, and Little Orme’s Head, are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and manageable beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little Orme’s Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight was not long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme’s Head I was on terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went the length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you may descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous crowd listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you have the favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy is helping herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will have a charming glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will notice that the cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the dog implicitly; it is their Old World convention.

IV

From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing purblindly out when the legions left Britain, and not joining very loudly in the general lamentation at their withdrawal, but probably tempering the popular grief with the reflection that the heathen Saxons could not be much worse.

The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually holidaying on their island, and who were always kind to their children when they had them, and to each other when they had not. They were commonly in couples, very affectionate and inoffensively young. They wandered about, and from time to time went and had tea at one of the tea-houses which are always at hand over there. Except the view there was not much to see; the ways were rough; now and then you came to a pink cottage or a white one where the peasantry, again, sold tea. At one place in our walk over the occiput of Great Orme’s Head into the Happy Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys selling mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette trust, or syndicate, confining its commerce to that flower.

I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme’s Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to be coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached by the stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was no particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I did not see the national emblem in any Welshman’s hat — to be sure, it was not St. David’s Day — it must have been boiling in every Welshman’s pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this remove, in the poor English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as much as about the Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for joking. There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall witch-hats, with one of them saying: “I wass enjoying myself shocking, look you.” There was, of course, nothing serious in this joking; the Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly sold the manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing over them.

The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors at Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of love-making, I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and mothers who used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their different sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought the children charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair of the sand castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now seems strange that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in England subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice little boys would have come to me for money in America. Besides the entertainment of lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it in canopied penny chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages and sexes in the circus prevailing somewhere in the background, and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young elephants neatly carrying each in his trunk the tail of the elephant before him. There were also the delightful shows of the amusement pier where one could go and see Pierrots to one’s heart’s content, if one can ever get enough of Pierrots; I never can.

{Illustration: THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO}

Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one of which I saw Mr. Barrie’s Little Mary given better than in New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner d�collet�e, and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying, after what seems the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get something out of her hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them; and their playful contest went on through a whole act to the distraction of the spectators, who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested the misgiving that perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer outing as well as good; but there was no interference by the police or the management with this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene, all or any of them, too high in rank to be lightly molested in their lively event; or were they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy, but all the same their interlude was a contribution to the evening’s entertainment which would not have been so placidly accepted in, say, Atlantic City, or Coney Island, or even Newport, where people are said to be more accustomed to the caprices of society persons, and more indulgent of their whims.

V

A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the indigenous life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself the day of our visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on our offering to see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle, we were met at the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling gate money, because of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was holding in the interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a chance which we would not have missed on any account. There was a large tent set up in the old castle court, and a table spread with home-made dainties of many sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who served one with tea or whatever else one liked, all for that generously inclusive shilling. They were Welsh, they told us, and they were speaking their language to right and left of us, while they were so courteous to us in English. It was quite like a church fair in some American village, where, however, it could not have had the advantage of a ruined Norman castle for its scene, and where it would not have provided a range for target practice with air-guns, or grounds for running and jumping.

The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle. I must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of people rather than places, though I may note that if there is any more interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them, but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress, however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it, but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as soon the bridge had not tried.

All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the castle. The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without rival in its kind. It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers, among whom one could easily find one’s self incommoded without feeling one’s self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion, such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of venison or round of beef was toward. It was a fine memento of the domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort. Besides, there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.

VI

In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction of Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately eager to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling photographs and ironically inviting her visitors’ guests to a glimpse of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen. She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to leave, and there, not far off, was the “briny beach” where the Walrus and the Carpenter walked together, —

    “And wept like anything to see

     Such quantities of sand.”

For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that Through the Looking-Glass was written.

There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are not hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that Llandudno is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any dear and honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the even tenor of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our love of literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place with the memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We thought with him that Penmaenmawr was “the most charming watering-place in Wales,” and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where I know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and jam en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of the yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as peaceful as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to our jam: to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them.

{Illustration: CONWAY CASTLE}

It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November. All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt the eye in a transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any arrangement of colors would have pleased.

VII

It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now and then one found one’s self among harvest-fields, where the yield of wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile, and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it is out of such houses that the farmers’ boys and girls go to the co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the preference of the farmers that their sons should be educated for the ministry, which in that country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for every color of contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet disestablished English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in speech. The Welsh will have their service and their sermon in their own tongue, and when an Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he must do what he can to conform to the popular demand. It is said that in one case, where the incumbent long held out against the parish, he compromised by reading the service in Welsh with the English pronunciation. But the Welsh churches are now supplied with Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for the Welsh to cling so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its Gaelic shell.

{Illustration: PLAS MAWR}

I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from Chester to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh manners or of English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly below gentlewoman, but very personable and well dressed, got into our carriage where there was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but she was not so old as the American who offered her his seat. She refused it, but consented to sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for her, and so remained till she left the train, while a half-grown boy and several young men kept their countenances and their places, not apparently dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her at all, thought she was well punished for letting the guard crowd her in upon us. By her stature and complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and these youth from theirs were as undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English manners combined.

GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER

Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with “a little Latin and less Greek” from his earliest visitors and invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.

I

No error of the Englishman’s latest invader is commoner than the notion, which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American, tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King, or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said “ge�le,” the Conquered print “gaol,” which the American invader must pronounce “jail,” not “gayol.”

The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago — say, fifteen or twenty — it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment for “the free peoples of antiquity” rather than from the Commonwealth. Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen’s subjects when the Prince of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, “Oh yes, but you know that it is only your people that choose the President, but God gave us the King.” Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at which no man may smile without loss.

I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, “What is loyalty? How did you come by it? Why are you loyal?” — I felt that it would be embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at. That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.

{Illustration: A PRESENTATION AT COURT}

II

Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable, perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is, the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English duke — say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him of Norfolk — with the social power and state which wait upon him in his duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for, though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people into or out of the administration, it is always — or so nearly always that the exception proves the rule — family that rules, from the King down to the least attach� of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had never occurred to anybody before, “Yes, isn’t it strange that those few families should keep it all among themselves!” It was a slender female voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a curious usage of some realm of faery.

III

England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That justifies it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything; though I hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less justifiable: that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets. But it is the universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of the state that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of the will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who can rightfully inherit the primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of volition, the inhabitants of the enchanted island universally agree that there is a class of them which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthwith be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, the realm of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have any existence in nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most absolute of human facts.

It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even with ourselves, who by a seven years’ struggle burst the faery dream a century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it has reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know very well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England stands for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both of these, there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly inconceivable to the natives of a country where there are only millionaires to revere.

IV

The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course, do so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France of the Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always been smiling in each other’s faces when they were by themselves. But the faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old dream. Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even honors them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure of the faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After that he has standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that psychological moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody tries to forget him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if it has not the fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as he keeps to it. Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal independence, without aggression, as in England. There is apparently nothing of it in Germany; in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind that there is no question of it; in the French Republic and in our own, it exists in an excess that is molestive and invasive; in England alone does it strike the observer as being of exactly the just measure.

Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will not insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are slight and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble have to go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in England they were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated. At a railroad junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up stairs and down, and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the company’s servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers this way and that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women, who came up, in the midst of their torment, and pestered them with questions as to the time when trains that had not arrived would leave after they did arrive. I shuddered to think what would have at least verbally happened to such inquirers with us; but, there, not only their lives but their feelings were safe, and they could go away with such self-respect as they had quite intact.

V

In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there, passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other people’s trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think it no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons, have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom fail to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab, and, duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction, my porter seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not unconsidered appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At the next station, the company telegraphed back at its own cost the voluminous message of my anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that the next train would bring my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I arrived at Edinburgh, I casually mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I had not seen before. He asked how the bags were marked, and then he said they had come with us. My porter had run with them to my train, but in despair of getting to my car with his burden, had put them into the last luggage-van, and all I had to do was now to identify them at my journey’s end.

Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people’s baggage, I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in this, the deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream, operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that could otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard paid for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we attempted to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the nearest junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the keeping of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and said that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he was provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our hard case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place as good as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he saw it, and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to him, there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought it best to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When a force of guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against the intruder, who could not, or did not, say that he did not know the compartment was engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had sufficiently stood, or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others precipitated themselves upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of fishing-tackle, such as a gentleman carries who has been asked to somebody’s fishing, and bore it away to another part of the train. They left one piece behind, and the porter who came back for it was radiantly smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke of his antagonist without the least exasperation; evidently, he regarded him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate aggression; his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had not so vigorously asserted ourselves.

VI

A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid into the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time the train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude with a cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out. But, after waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer to admit us, we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly at home. When it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up her belongings, and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there was a typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or whether of the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed itself to this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born, not nearly so high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess her, and who, when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the morrow, which was to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us inspired by some small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest such a possibility for so sacred a day.

I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering to give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization is shown in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and railway folk, who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when they wish your attention. The like happened to me only once in England, and that was at Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands on me instead of speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen American influences of a port at which we arrive so abundantly and indiscriminately. I did not resent the touch, though it is what every one is expected to do, if aggrieved, and every one else does it in England. Within his rights, every one is safe; though there may be some who have no rights. If there were, I did not see them, and I suppose that, as an alien, I might have refused to stand up and uncover when the band began playing God Save the King, as it did at the end of every musical occasion; I might have urged that, being no subject of the King, I did not feel bound to join in the general prayer. But that would have been churlish, and, where every one had been so civil to me, I did not see why I should not be civil to the King, in a small matter. In the aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I suppose that the stranger always finds the patriotism of a country molestive. Patriotism is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole exception of our own, which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especially with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am myself being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them. Upon the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other, they take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it were a thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the present or recent entente cordiale. None of their idiosyncrasies is more notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they do not take it out of us when we are away.

We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the most deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers, the English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The average level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest, and I am always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought me to the distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the mannerless uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from high to low, or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much more than we infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which sweetens casual intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect, almost unknown to us, which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity that democracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave so rudely. Must we come to family government, in order to be filial or fraternal in our bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness?

VII

The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will be clear by-and-by.

Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those story-telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless. It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself of a heavier and grosser fibre.

No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you. But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.

VIII

Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights. In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.

IX

Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances, I heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public, and that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him about his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and girlish she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her glove the window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our cabman we might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal uninsistence largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy exist; the figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background, and appear from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at races, or teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad, and invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.

Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men, whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was said that they were really better, but the people would not have them because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place, just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the struggle of life.

For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English, if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as well as in this.

X

We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life, as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison. At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays, and the minor saints’ days. When once you have mastered this difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it would affect the whole social fabric.

But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He has, for example, always said “financier,” with the accent on the last syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had better let the verb “to be” govern the accusative as the English do, and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or stop! He must not “telegraph,” he must “wire.”

XI

As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping one’s aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is social death “to any he that utters it,” not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing a woman call herself “a lydy.” It may indeed be the contagion of the National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches.

The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them, any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings, which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization (if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage, for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a race.

XII

What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently. We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are “the prize liars of the universe.” He was an expert accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame the others.

I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. “These Welsh farmers,” he said, “send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending his boy to a University!”

We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide. It was the accumulation, not merely within men’s memories, but within the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of enclosing the people’s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin. Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people’s land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in whispered confidence as a “Upas tree.”

XIII

Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we had taken in his enclosure, “That’s a private path!” was unjust. There was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from intrusion. The word “Private” painted up anywhere does the effect of bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are “requested,” and sometimes even “kindly requested”; I do not know but once I was “respectfully requested.” Perhaps that nobleman’s possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from class to class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by the upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with the English nobility and gentry; for those who intend being our nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such high-breeding.

If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the other hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses that have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost universal among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I do not know but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of American spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It is said also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant aid given them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to make them dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of their brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer from the armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold them greatly to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness to receive. If one may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the constant demands for more and more charities, one heaped upon another, there are more good objects in England than anywhere else under the sun, for one only gives to good objects, of course. The oppression of the subscriptions is tempered by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy them. “Five shillings is a subscription,” said a friend who was accused of really always giving five pounds.

XIV

The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do — that is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.

Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts — they were very tattered and draggled — of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind woman “thought she could accommodate” us with a cup of tea, though she was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and small boys coming in for “penn’orths” of that frightful variety of tart and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her activities to the hostess, and she said, “Yes, they all want a bit of cake with their tea, even the poorest”; and when we ventured our supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day, she laughed at the notion. “Last meal! They have a good supper before they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day.”

Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. “They don’t know how to charge!” he said, with an irony that referred to the fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward’s time, five hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread, butter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home without asking, “Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?” When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh, though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache; he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North Britons do, with nothing of our people’s husky whine. I found him on further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered themselves. He belonged to a plumbers’ union, and he had nothing to complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand, he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook on life, but I dare say there was more of it.

XV

I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that only chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me. Now and then, a native observer said something about them which seemed luminous. “We are frightfully feudal,” such an observer said, “especially the poor.” He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only used his adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the poor among the country people, who have at last mastered that principle of the feudal system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing for the benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber, was not the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler in New York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of politics, under the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in the smarter sense, the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to speak of more confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued friend, whether a man’s origin or occupation would make any difference in his social acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he understood, he responded with almost a shout of amazement, “Oh, not the least in the world!” But I have my doubts still; and I should say that it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society, because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to moral differences than ours, and that people with their little taches would find less anxiety in London than in New York lest they should come off on the people they rubbed against. Some Americans, who, even with our increasing prevalence of divorces, are not well seen at home, are cheerfully welcomed in England.

Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures and shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans were distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and then they tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little fantastically. What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the fact of one’s nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and to become as much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality aggressive or positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my ground, I ventured my conviction that Englishmen were not so much interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister, whom I met in the West of England, he received it with surprise and refusal. He said that in his own immediate circle, at least, his friends were interested and increasingly interested in America, what she was and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead in certain high things which Englishmen have ceased to expect of themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the English Sociologists regard America as a back number in those political economics which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do not see any difference between our conditions and theirs, as regards the man who works for his living with his hands, except that wages are higher with us, and that physically there is more elbow-room, though mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that fine spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived in Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself a personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out of touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn breath in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home atmosphere never could again.

XVI

Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his convictions and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed by circumstance, while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our thoughts to ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than they to seem of one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one sees a variety of dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress there not only in keeping with their work and their play, but in the indulgence of any freak of personal fancy, so that in the street of a provincial town, like Bath, for instance, you will encounter in a short walk a greater range of trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets, collars, scarfs, boots and shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet at home in a month of Sundays. The differences do not go to the length of fashions, such as reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe, say, our legs in knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing them, when immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions beyond men’s, gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not voluntarily. In the obedience they show to the rule that they must never wear the same dinner or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever find out the truth of such things?) that they sometimes had sent home from the dressmaker’s a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in succession, only to return them, all but one at least, as not liked, the dressmaker having found her account in her work being shown in society.

{Illustration: AN ENGLISH HOUSEMAID}

I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, “Well, now I suppose I shall have to keep a girl!” The girl would have been kept from the beginning of her husband’s prosperity, and multiplied, till the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.

A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that, while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage. A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance, or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to make it palatable.

XVII

An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France, was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was always coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy way, and one evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough of war, but he added, thoughtfully, “I should like to go out for a couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia.”

The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that I never could feel the fine scorn for “trippers” which I believe all persons of condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all over England, especially at the holiday seasons.

The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age of putting their arms around one another’s waists. The many and many seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds, repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots, who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they go home at the end “high sorrowful and cloyed,” there is no forecast of it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated. The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves with the passive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engagements and marriages.

When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the heroes’ hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew when God Save the King was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however. Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.

{Illustration: LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS}

XVIII

It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday. Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors. Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.

But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still acknowledged as their head “the Bishop of Rome.” Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained that all things English seem righteous because English; with a willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration — with all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately perfect. “They have got it down cold,” he must say to himself, and confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.

XIX

The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits, brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American idea, and a theory of our future. “Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet ... ’tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, ‘Messieurs, je n’en vois pas la n�cessit�.’” In other words, Emerson laid before his great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who, with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself as an eminent example.

The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether the head of the state is born or elected, is called “King” or called “President,” since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes, and one consoles one’s self as one can by holding one’s head higher in better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory, and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of the world. There is no fear that in such company one’s national susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much admired for one’s money as at home. I do not say quite, because there are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly a very rich American would be considered in such English society, but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich Englishman who was also a duke.

I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight of the King’s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it. The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few. We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly, not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.

THE END

FAMILIAR SPANISH TRAVELS

CONTENTS

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY

III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS

IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID

V. PHASES OF MADRID

VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO

VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE

VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE

IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

XI. TO AND IN GRANADA

XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA

I. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL APPROACHES

I.

As the train took its time and ours in mounting the uplands toward Granada on the soft, but not too soft, evening of November 6, 1911, the air that came to me through the open window breathed as if from an autumnal night of the middle eighteen-fifties in a little village of northeastern Ohio. I was now going to see, for the first time, the city where so great a part of my life was then passed, and in this magical air the two epochs were blent in reciprocal association. The question of my present identity was a thing indifferent and apart; it did not matter who or where or when I was. Youth and age were at one with each other: the boy abiding in the old man, and the old man pensively willing to dwell for the enchanted moment in any vantage of the past which would give him shelter.

In that dignified and deliberate Spanish train I was a man of seventy-four crossing the last barrier of hills that helped keep Granada from her conquerors, and at the same time I was a boy of seventeen in the little room under the stairs in a house now practically remoter than the Alhambra, finding my unguided way through some Spanish story of the vanished kingdom of the Moors. The little room which had structurally ceased fifty years before from the house that ceased to be home even longer ago had returned to the world with me in it, and fitted perfectly into the first-class railway compartment which my luxury had provided for it. From its window I saw through the car window the olive groves and white cottages of the Spanish peasants, and the American apple orchards and meadows stretching to the primeval woods that walled the drowsing village round. Then, as the night deepened with me at my book, the train slipped slowly from the hills, and the moon, leaving the Ohio village wholly in the dark, shone over the roofs and gardens of Granada, and I was no longer a boy of seventeen, but altogether a man of seventy-four.

I do not say the experience was so explicit as all this; no experience so mystical could be so explicit; and perhaps what was intimated to me in it was only that if I sometime meant to ask some gentle reader’s company in a retrospect of my Spanish travels, I had better be honest with him and own at the beginning that passion for Spanish things which was the ruling passion of my boyhood; I had better confess that, however unrequited, it held me in the eager bondage of a lover still, so that I never wished to escape from it, but must try to hide the fact whenever the real Spain fell below the ideal, however I might reason with my infatuation or try to scoff it away. It had once been so inextinguishable a part of me that the record of my journey must be more or less autobiographical; and though I should decently endeavor to keep my past out of it, perhaps I should not try very hard and should not always succeed.

Just when this passion began in me I should not be able to say; but probably it was with my first reading of Don Quixote in the later eighteen-forties. I would then have been ten or twelve years old; and, of course, I read that incomparable romance, not only greatest, but sole of its kind, in English. The purpose of some time reading it in Spanish and then the purpose of some time writing the author’s life grew in me with my growing years so strongly that, though I have never yet done either and probably never shall, I should not despair of doing both if I lived to be a hundred. In the mean time my wandering steps had early chanced upon a Spanish grammar, and I had begun those inquiries in it which were based upon a total ignorance of English accidence. I do not remember how I felt my way from it to such reading of the language as has endeared Spanish literature to me. It embraced something of everything: literary and political history, drama, poetry, fiction; but it never condescended to the exigencies of common parlance. These exigencies did not exist for me in my dreams of seeing Spain which were not really expectations. It was not until half a century later, when my longing became a hope and then a purpose, that I foreboded the need of practicable Spanish. Then I invoked the help of a young professor, who came to me for an hour each day of a week in London and let me try to talk with him; but even then I accumulated so little practicable Spanish that my first hour, almost my first moment in Spain, exhausted my store. My professor was from Barcelona, but he beautifully lisped his c’s and z’s like any old Castilian, when he might have hissed them in the accent of his native Catalan; and there is no telling how much I might have profited by his instruction if he had not been such a charming intelligence that I liked to talk with him of literature and philosophy and politics rather than the weather, or the cost of things, or the question of how long the train stopped and when it would start, or the dishes at table, or clothes at the tailor’s, or the forms of greeting and parting. If he did not equip me with the useful colloquial phrases, the fault was mine; and the misfortune was doubly mine when from my old acquaintance with Italian (glib half-sister of the statelier Spanish) the Italian phrases would thrust forward as the equivalent of the English words I could not always think of. The truth is, then, that I was not perfect in my Spanish after quite six weeks in Spain; and if in the course of his travels with me the reader finds me flourishing Spanish idioms in his face he may safely attribute them less to my speaking than my reading knowledge: probably I never employed them in conversation. That reading was itself without order or system, and I am not sure but it had better been less than more. Yet who knows? The days, or the nights of the days, in the eighteen-fifties went quickly, as quickly as the years go now, and it would have all come to the present pass whether that blind devotion to an alien literature had cloistered my youth or not.

I do not know how, with the merciful make I am of, I should then have cared so little, or else ignored so largely the cruelties I certainly knew that the Spaniards had practised in the conquests of Mexico and Peru. I knew of these things, and my heart was with the Incas and the Aztecs, and yet somehow I could not punish the Spaniards for their atrocious destruction of the only American civilizations. As nearly as I can now say, I was of both sides, and wistful to reconcile them, though I do not see now how it could have been done; and in my later hopes for the softening of the human conditions I have found it hard to forgive Pizarro for the overthrow of the most perfectly socialized state known to history. I scarcely realized the base ingratitude of the Spanish sovereigns to Columbus, and there were vast regions of history that I had not penetrated till long afterward in pursuit of Spanish perfidy and inhumanity, as in their monstrous misrule of Holland. When it came in those earlier days to a question of sides between the Spaniards and the Moors, as Washington Irving invited my boyhood to take it in his chronicle of the conquest of Granada, I experienced on a larger scale my difficulty in the case of the Mexicans and Peruvians. The case of these had been reported to me in the school-readers, but here, now, was an affair submitted to the mature judgment of a boy of twelve, and yet I felt as helpless as I was at ten. Will it be credited that at seventy-four I am still often in doubt which side I should have had win, though I used to fight on both? Since the matter was settled more than four hundred years ago, I will not give the reasons for my divided allegiance. They would hardly avail now to reverse the tragic fate of the Moors, and if I try I cannot altogether wish to reverse it. Whatever Spanish misrule has been since Islam was overthrown in Granada, it has been the error of law, and the rule of Islam at the best had always been the effect of personal will, the caprice of despots high and low, the unstatuted sufferance of slaves, high and low. The gloomiest and cruelest error of Inquisitional Spain was nobler, with its adoration of ideal womanhood, than the Mohammedan state with its sensual dreams of Paradise. I will not pretend (as I very well might, and as I perhaps ought) that I thought of these things, all or any, as our train began to slope rather more rapidly toward Granada, and to find its way under the rising moon over the storied Vega. I will as little pretend that my attitude toward Spain was ever that of the impartial observer after I crossed the border of that enchanted realm where we all have our castles. I have thought it best to be open with the reader here at the beginning, and I would not, if I could, deny him the pleasure of doubting my word or disabling my judgment at any point he likes. In return I shall only ask his patience when I strike too persistently the chord of autobiography. That chord is part of the harmony between the boy and the old man who made my Spanish journey together, and were always accusing themselves, the first of dreaming and the last of doddering: perhaps with equal justice. Is there really much difference between the two?

II.

It was fully a month before that first night in Granada that I arrived in Spain after some sixty years’ delay. During this period I had seen almost every other interesting country in Europe. I had lived five or six years in Italy; I had been several months in Germany; and a fortnight in Holland; I had sojourned often in Paris; I had come and gone a dozen times in England and lingered long each time; and yet I had never once visited the land of my devotion. I had often wondered at this, it was so wholly involuntary, and I had sometimes suffered from the surprise of those who knew of my passion for Spain, and kept finding out my dereliction, alleging the Sud-Express to Madrid as something that left me without excuse. The very summer before last I got so far on the way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual acquaintance or agreeable strangers. Yet I returned once more to America with my desire, which was turning into a duty, unfulfilled; and when once more I sailed for Europe in 1911 it was more with foreboding of another failure than a prescience of fruition in my inveterate longing. Even after that boldly decisive week of the professor in London I had my doubts and my self-doubts. There were delays at London, delays at Paris, delays at Tours; and when at last we crossed the Pyrenees and I found myself in Spain, it was with an incredulity which followed me throughout and lingered with me to the end. “Is this truly Spain, and am I actually there?” the thing kept asking itself; and it asks itself still, in terms that fit the accomplished fact.

II. SAN SEBASTIAN AND BEAUTIFUL BISCAY

Even at Irun, where we arrived in Spain from Bayonne, there began at once to be temperamental differences which ought to have wrought against my weird misgivings of my whereabouts. Only in Spain could a customs inspector have felt of one tray in our trunks and then passed them all with an air of such jaded aversion from an employ uncongenial to a gentleman. Perhaps he was also loath to attempt any inquiry in that Desperanto of French, English, and Spanish which raged around us; but the porter to whom we had fallen, while I hesitated at our carriage door whether I should summon him as Mozo or Usted, was master of that lingua franca and recovered us from the customs without question on our part, and understood everything we could not, say. I like to think he was a Basque, because I like the Basques so much for no reason that I can think of. Their being always Carlists would certainly be no reason with me, for I was never a Carlist; and perhaps my liking is only a prejudice in their favor from the air of thrift and work which pervades their beautiful province, or is an effect of their language as I first saw it inscribed on the front of the Credit Lyonnais at Bayonne. It looked so beautifully regular, so scholarly, so Latin, so sister to both Spanish and Italian, so richly and musically voweled, and yet remained so impenetrable to the most daring surmise, that I conceived at once a profound admiration for the race which could keep such a language to itself. When I remembered how blond, how red-blond our sinewy young porter was, I could not well help breveting him of that race, and honoring him because he could have read those words with the eyes that were so blue amid the general Spanish blackness of eyes. He imparted a quiet from his own calm to our nervousness, and if we had appealed to him on the point I am sure he would have saved us from the error of breakfasting in the station restaurant at the deceitful table d’hote, though where else we should have breakfasted I do not know.

I.

One train left for San Sebastian while I was still lost in amaze that what I had taken into my mouth for fried egg should be inwardly fish and full of bones; but he quelled my anxiety with the assurance, which I somehow understood, that there would be another train soon. In the mean time there were most acceptable Spanish families all about, affably conversing together, and freely admitting to their conversation the children, who so publicly abound in Spain, and the nurses who do nothing to prevent their publicity. There were already the typical fat Spanish mothers and lean fathers, with the slender daughters, who, in the tradition of Spanish good-breeding, kept their black eyes to themselves, or only lent them to the spectators in furtive glances. Both older and younger ladies wore the scanty Egyptian skirt of Occidental civilization, lurking or perking in deep-drooping or high-raking hats, though already here and there was the mantilla, which would more and more prevail as we went southward; older and younger, they were all painted and powdered to the favor that Spanish women everywhere corne to.

When the bad breakfast was over, and the waiters were laying the table for another as bad, our Basque porter came in and led us to the train for San Sebastian which he had promised us. It was now raining outside, and we were glad to climb into our apartment without at all seeing what Irun was or was not like. But we thought well of the place because we first experienced there the ample ease of a Spanish car. In Spain the railroad gauge is five feet six inches; and this car of ours was not only very spacious, but very clean, while the French cars that had brought us from Bordeaux to Bayonne and from Bayonne to Irun were neither. I do not say all French cars are dirty, or all Spanish cars are as clean as they are spacious. The cars of both countries are hard to get into, by steep narrow footholds worse even than our flights of steps; in fact, the English cars are the only ones I know which are easy of access. But these have not the ample racks for hand-bags which the Spanish companies provide for travelers willing to take advantage of their trust by transferring much of their heavy stuff to them. Without owning that we were such travelers, I find this the place to say that, with the allowance of a hundred and thirty-two pounds free, our excess baggage in two large steamer-trunks did not cost us three dollars in a month’s travel, with many detours, from Irun in the extreme north to Algeciras in the extreme south of Spain.

II.

But in this sordid detail I am keeping the reader from the scenery. It had been growing more and more striking ever since we began climbing into the Pyrenees from Bayonne; but upon the whole it was not so sublime as it was beautiful. There were some steep, sharp peaks, but mostly there were grassy valleys with white cattle grazing in them, and many fields of Indian corn, endearingly homelike. This at least is mainly the trace that the scenery as far as Irun has left among my notes; and after Irun there is record of more and more corn. There was, in fact, more corn than anything else, though there were many orchards, also endearingly homelike, with apples yellow and red showing among the leaves still green on the trees; if there had been something more wasteful in the farming it would have been still more homelike, but a traveler cannot have everything. The hillsides were often terraced, as in Italy, and the culture apparently close and conscientious. The farmhouses looked friendly and comfortable; at places the landscape was molested by some sort of manufactories which could not conceal their tall chimneys, though they kept the secret of their industry. They were never, really, very bad, and I would have been willing to let them pass for fulling-mills, such as I was so familiar with in Don Quixote, if I had thought of these in time. But one ought to be honest at any cost, and I must own that the Spain I was now for the first time seeing with every-day eyes was so little like the Spain of my boyish vision that I never once recurred to it. That was a Spain of cork-trees, of groves by the green margins of mountain brooks, of habitable hills, where shepherds might feed their flocks and mad lovers and maids forlorn might wander and maunder; and here were fields of corn and apple orchards and vineyards reddening and yellowing up to the doors of those comfortable farmhouses, with nowhere the sign of a Christian cavalier or a turbaned infidel. As a man I could not help liking what I saw, but I could also grieve for the boy who would have been so disappointed if he had come to the Basque provinces of Spain when he was from ten to fifteen years old, instead of seventy-four.

It took our train nearly an hour to get by twenty miles of those pleasant farms and the pretty hamlets which they now and then clustered into. But that was fast for a Spanish way-train, which does not run, but, as it were, walks with dignity and makes long stops at stations, to rest and let the locomotive roll itself a cigarette. By the time we reached San Sebastian our rain had thickened to a heavy downpour, and by the time we mounted to our rooms, three pair up in the hotel, it was storming in a fine fury over the bay under them, and sweeping the curving quays and tossing the feathery foliage of the tamarisk-shaded promenade. The distinct advantage of our lofty perch was the splendid sight of the tempest, held from doing its worst by the mighty headlands standing out to sea on the right and left. But our rooms were cold with the stony cold of the south when it is cooling off from its summer, and we shivered in the splendid sight.

III.

The inhabitants of San Sebastian will not hesitate to say that it is the prettiest town in Spain, and I do not know that they could be hopefully contradicted. It is very modern in its more obvious aspects, with a noble thoroughfare called the Avenida de Libertad for its principal street, shaded with a double row of those feathery tamarisks, and with handsome shops glittering on both sides of it. Very easily it is first of the fashionable watering-places of Spain; the King has his villa there, and the court comes every summer. But they had gone by the time we got there, and the town wore the dejected look of out-of-season summer resorts; though there was the apparatus of gaiety, the fine casino at one end of the beach, and the villas of the rich and noble all along it to the other end. On the sand were still many bathing-machines, but many others had begun to climb for greater safety during the winter to the street above. We saw one hardy bather dripping up from the surf and seeking shelter among those that remained, but they were mostly tenanted by their owners, who looked shoreward through their open doors, and made no secret of their cozy domesticity, where they sat and sewed or knitted and gossiped with their neighbors. Good wives and mothers they doubtless were, but no doubt glad to be resting from the summer pleasure of others. They had their beautiful names written up over their doors, and were for the service of the lady visitors only; there were other machines for gentlemen, and no doubt it was their owners whom we saw gathering the fat seaweed thrown up by the storm into the carts drawn by oxen over the sand. The oxen wore no yokes, but pulled by a band drawn over their foreheads under their horns, and they had the air of not liking the arrangement; though, for the matter of that, I have never seen oxen that seemed to like being yoked.

When we came down to dinner we found the tables fairly full of belated visitors, who presently proved tourists flying south like ourselves. The dinner was good, as it is in nearly all Spanish hotels, where for an average of three dollars a day you have an inclusive rate which you must double for as good accommodation in our States. Let no one, I say, fear the rank cookery so much imagined of the Peninsula, the oil, the pepper, the kid and the like strange meats; as in all other countries of Europe, even England itself, there is a local version, a general convention of the French cuisine, quite as good in Spain as elsewhere, and oftener superabundant than subabundant. The plain water is generally good, With an American edge of freshness; but if you will not trust it (we had to learn to trust it) there are agreeable Spanish mineral waters, as well as the Apollinaris, the St. Galmier, and the Perrier of other civilizations, to be had for the asking, at rather greater cost than the good native wines, often included in the inclusive rate.

Besides this convention of the French cuisine there is almost everywhere a convention of the English language in some one of the waiters. You must not stray far from the beaten path of your immediate wants, but in this you are safe. At San Sebastian we had even a wider range with the English of the little intellectual-looking, pale Spanish waiter, with a fine Napoleonic head, who came to my help when I began to flounder in the language which I had read so much and spoken so little or none. He had been a year in London, he said, and he took us for English, though, now he came to notice it, he perceived we were Americans because we spoke “quicklier” than the English. We did not protest; it was the mildest criticism of our national accent which we were destined to get from English-speaking Spaniards before they found we were not the English we did not wish to be taken for. After dinner we asked for a fire in one of our grates, but the maid declared there was no fuel; and, though the hostess denied this and promised us a fire the next night, she forgot it till nine o’clock, and then we would not have it. The cold abode with us indoors to the last at San Sebastian, but the storm (which had hummed and whistled theatrically at our windows) broke during the first night, and the day followed with several intervals of sunshine, which bathed us in a glowing-expectation of overtaking the fugitive summer farther south.

IV.

In the mean time we hired a beautiful Basque cabman with a red Basque cap and high-hooked Basque nose to drive us about at something above the legal rate and let us not leave any worthy thing in San Sebastian unseen. He took us, naturally, to several churches, old and new, with their Gothic and rococo interiors, which I still find glooming and glinting among my evermore thickening impressions of like things. We got from them the sense of that architectural and sculptural richness which the interior of no Spanish church ever failed measurably to give; but what their historical associations were I will not offer to say. The associations of San Sebastian with the past are in all things vague, at least for me. She was indeed taken from the French by the English under Wellington during the Peninsular War, but of older, if not unhappier farther-off days and battles longer ago her history as I know it seems to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the Basques have been where they are immeasurably beyond the memories of other men; what the scope of their own memories is one could perhaps confidently say only in Basque if one could say anything. Of course, in the nature of things, the Phoenicians must have been there and the Greeks, doubtless, if they ever got outside of the Pillars of Hercules; the Romans, of course, must have settled and civilized and then Christianized the province. It is next neighbor to that province of Asturias in which alone the Arabs failed to conquer the Goths, and from which Spain was to live and grow again and recover all her losses from the Moors; but what the share of San Sebastian was in this heroic fate, again I must leave the Basques to say. They would doubtless say it with sufficient self-respect, for wherever we came in contact that day with the Basque nature we could not help imagining in it a sense of racial merit equaling that of the Welsh themselves, who are indeed another branch of the same immemorial Iberian stock, if the Basques are Iberians. Like the Welsh, they have the devout tradition that they never were conquered, but yielded to circumstances when these became too strong for them.

Among the ancient Spanish liberties which were restricted by the consolidating monarchy from age to age, the Basque fueros, or rights, were the oldest; they lasted quite to our own day; and although it is known to more ignorant men that these privileges (including immunity from conscription) have now been abrogated, the custodian of the House of Provincial Deputies, whom our driver took us to visit, was such a glowing Basque patriot that he treated them as in full force. His pride in the seat of the local government spared us no detail of the whole electric-lighting system, or even the hose-bibs for guarding the edifice against fire, let alone every picture and photograph on the wall of every chamber of greater or less dignity, with every notable table and chair. He certainly earned the peseta I gave him, but he would have done far more for it if we had suffered him to take us up another flight of stairs; and he followed us in our descent with bows and adieux that ought to have left no doubt in our minds of the persistence of the Basque fueros.

V.

It was to such a powerful embodiment of the local patriotism that our driver had brought us from another civic palace overlooking the Plaza de la Constitution, chiefly notable now for having been the old theater of the bull-fights. The windows in the houses round still bear the numbers by which they were sold to spectators as boxes; but now the municipality has built a beautiful brand-new bull-ring in San Sebastian; and I do not know just why we were required to inspect the interior of the edifice overlooking this square. I only know that at sight of our bewilderment a workman doing something to the staircase clapped his hands orientally, and the custodian was quickly upon us in response to a form of summons which we were to find so often used in Spain. He was not so crushingly upon us as that other custodian; he was apologetically proud, rather than boastfully; at times he waved his hands in deprecation, and would have made us observe that the place was little, very little; he deplored it like a host who wishes his possessions praised. Among the artistic treasures of the place from which he did not excuse us there were some pen-drawings, such as writing-masters execute without lifting the pen from the paper, by a native of South America, probably of Basque descent, since the Basques have done so much to people that continent. We not only admired these, but we would not consent to any of the custodian’s deprecations, especially when it came to question of the pretty salon in which Queen Victoria was received on her first visit to San Sebastian. We supposed then, and in fact I had supposed till this moment, that it was Queen Victoria of Great Britain who was meant; but now I realize that it must have been the queen consort of Spain, who seems already to have made herself so liked there.

She, of course, comes every summer to San Sebastian, and presently our driver took us to see the royal villa by the shore, withdrawn, perhaps from a sense of its extreme plainness, not to say ugliness, among its trees and vines behind its gates and walls. Our driver excused himself for not being able to show us through it; he gladly made us free of an unrestricted view of the royal bathing-pavilion, much more frankly splendid in its gilding, beside the beach. Other villas ranked themselves along the hillside, testifying to the gaiety of the social life in summers past and summers to come. In the summer just past the gaiety may have been interrupted by the strikes taking in the newspapers the revolutionary complexion which it was now said they did not wear. At least, when the King had lately come to fetch the royal household away nothing whatever happened, and the “constitutional guarantees,” suspended amidst the ministerial anxieties, were restored during the month, with the ironical applause of the liberal press, which pretended that there had never been any need of their suspension.

VI.

All pleasures, mixed or unmixed, must end, and the qualified joy of our drive through San Sebastian came to a close on our return to our hotel well within the second hour, almost within its first half. When I proposed paying our driver for the exact time, he drooped upon his box and, remembering my remorse in former years for standing upon my just rights in such matters, I increased the fare, peseta by peseta, till his sinking spirits rose, and he smiled gratefully upon me and touched his brave red cap as he drove away. He had earned his money, if racking his invention for objects of interest in San Sebastian was a merit. At the end we were satisfied that it was a well-built town with regular blocks in the modern quarter, and not without the charm of picturesqueness which comes of narrow and crooked lanes in the older parts. Prescient of the incalculable riches before us, we did not ask much of it, and we got all we asked. I should be grateful to San Sebastian, if for nothing else than the two very Spanish experiences I had there. One concerned a letter for me which had been refused by the bankers named in my letter of credit, from a want of faith, I suppose, in my coming. When I did come I was told that I would find it at the post-office. That would be well enough when I found the post-office, which ought to have been easy enough, but which presented certain difficulties in the driving rain of our first afternoon. At last in a fine square I asked a fellow-man in my best conversational Spanish where the post-office was, and after a moment’s apparent suffering he returned, “Do you speak English?” “Yes.” I said, “and I am so glad you do.” “Not at all. I don’t speak anything else. Great pleasure. There is the post-office,” and it seemed that I had hardly escaped collision with it. But this was the beginning, not the end, of my troubles. When I showed my card to the poste restante clerk, he went carefully through the letters bearing the initial of my name and denied that there was any for me. We entered into reciprocally bewildering explanations, and parted altogether baffled. Then, at the hotel, I consulted with a capable young office-lady, who tardily developed a knowledge of English, and we agreed that it would be well to send the chico to the post-office for it. The chico, corresponding in a Spanish hotel to a piccolo in Germany or a page in England, or our own now evanescing bell-boy, was to get a peseta for bringing me the letter. He got the peseta, though he only brought me word that the authorities would send the letter to the hotel by the postman that night. The authorities did not send it that night, and the next morning I recurred to my bankers. There, on my entreaty for some one who could meet my Spanish at least half-way in English, a manager of the bank came out of his office and reassured me concerning the letter which I had now begun to imagine the most important I had ever missed. Even while we talked the postman came in and owned having taken the letter back to the office. He voluntarily promised to bring it to the bank at one o’clock, when I hastened to meet him. At that hour every one was out at lunch; I came again at four, when everybody had returned, but the letter was not delivered; at five, just before the bank closed, the letter, which had now grown from a carta to a cartela, was still on its way. I left San Sebastian without it; and will it be credited that when it was forwarded to me a week later at Madrid it proved the most fatuous missive imaginable, wholly concerning the writer’s own affairs and none of mine?

I cannot guess yet why it was withheld from me, but since the incident brought me that experience of Spanish politeness, I cannot grieve for it. The young banker who left his region of high finance to come out and condole with me, in apologizing for the original refusal of my letter, would not be contented with so little. Nothing would satisfy him but going with me, on my hinted purpose, and inquiring with me at the railroad office into the whole business of circular tickets, and even those kilometric tickets which the Spanish railroads issue to such passengers as will have their photographs affixed to them for the prevention of transference. As it seemed advisable not to go to this extreme till I got to Madrid, my kind young banker put himself at my disposal for any other service I could imagine from him; but I searched myself in vain for any desire, much less necessity, and I parted from him at the door of his bank with the best possible opinion of the Basques. I suppose he was a Basque; at any rate, he was blond, which the Spaniards are mostly not, and the Basques often are. Now I am sorry, since he was so kind, that I did not get him to read me the Basque inscription on the front of his bank, which looked exactly like that on the bank at Bayonne; I should not have understood it, but I should have known what it sounded like, if it sounded like anything but Basque.

Everybody in San Sebastian seemed resolved to outdo every other in kindness. In a shop where we endeavored to explain that we wanted to get a flat cap which should be both Basque and red, a lady who was buying herself a hat asked in English if she could help us. When we gladly answered that she could, she was silent, almost to tears, and it appeared that in this generous offer of aid she had exhausted her whole stock of English. Her mortification, her painful surprise, at the strange catastrophe, was really pitiable, and we hastened to escape from it to a shop across the street. There instantly a small boy rushed enterprisingly out and brought back with him a very pretty girl who spoke most of the little French which has made its way in San Sebastian against the combined Basque and Spanish, and a cap of the right flatness and redness was brought. I must not forget, among the pleasures done us by the place, the pastry cook’s shop which advertised in English “Tea at all Hours,” and which at that hour of our afternoon we now found so opportune, that it seemed almost personally attentive to us as the only Anglo-Saxon visitors in town. The tea might have been better, but it was as good as it knew how; and the small boy who came in with his mother (the Spanish mother seldom fails of the company of a small boy) in her moments of distraction succeeded in touching with his finger all the pieces of pastry except those we were eating.

VII.

The high aquiline nose which is characteristic of the autochthonic race abounds in San Sebastian, but we saw no signs of the high temper which is said to go with it. This, indeed, was known to me chiefly from my first reading in Don Quixote, of the terrific combat between the squire of the Biscayan ladies whose carriage the knight of La Mancha stopped after his engagement with the windmills. In their exchange of insults incident to the knight’s desire that the ladies should go to Toboso and thank Dulcinea for his delivery of them from the necromancers he had put to flight in the persons of two Benedictine monks, “‘Get gone,’ the squire called, in bad Spanish and worse Biscayan, ‘Get gone, thou knight, and Devil go with thou; or by He Who me create... me kill thee now so sure as me be Biscayan,’” and when the knight called him an “inconsiderable mortal,” and said that if he were a gentleman he would chastise him: “‘What! me no gentleman?’ replied the Biscayan. ‘I swear thou be liar as me be Christian.... Me will show thee me be Biscayan, and gentleman by land, gentleman by sea, gentleman in spite of Devil; and thou lie if thou say the contrary.’”

It is a scene which will have lived in the memory of every reader, and I recurred to it hopefully but vainly in San Sebastian, where this fiery threefold gentleman might have lived in his time. It would be interesting to know how far the Basques speak broken Spanish in a fashion of their own, which Cervantes tried to represent in the talk of his Biscayan. Like the Welsh again they strenuously keep their immemorial language against the inroads of the neighboring speech. How much they fix it in a modern literature it would be easier to ask than to say. I suppose there must be Basque newspapers; perhaps there are Basque novelists, there are notoriously Basque bards who recite their verses to the peasants, and doubtless there are poets who print their rhymes: and I blame myself for not inquiring further concerning them of that kindly Basque banker who wished so much to do something for me in compensation for the loss of my worthless letter. I knew, too cheaply, that the Basques have their poetical contests, as the Welsh have their musical competitions in the Eisteddfod, and they are once more like the Welsh, their brothers in antiquity, in calling themselves by a national name of their own. They call themselves Euskaldunac, which is as different from the name of Basque given them by the alien races as Cymru is from Welsh.

All this lore I have easily accumulated from the guide-books since leaving San Sebastian, but I was carelessly ignorant of it in driving from the hotel to the station when we came away, and was much concerned in the overtures made us in a mixed Spanish, English, and French by a charming family from Chili, through the brother to one of the ladies and luisband to the other. When he perceived from my Spanish that we were not English, he rejoiced that we were Americans of the north, and as joyfully proclaimed that they were Americans of the south. We were at once sensible of a community of spirit in our difference from our different ancestral races. They were Spanish, but with a New World blitheness which we nowhere afterward found in the native Spaniards; and we were English, with a willingness to laugh and to joke which they had not perhaps noted in our ancestral contemporaries. Again and again we met them in the different cities where we feared we had lost them, until we feared no more and counted confidently on seeing them wherever we went. They were always radiantly smiling; and upon this narrow ground I am going to base the conjecture that the most distinctive difference of the Western Hemisphere from the Eastern is its habit of seeing the fun of things. With those dear Chilians we saw the fun of many little hardships of travel which might have been insupportable without the vision. Sometimes we surprised one another in the same hotel; sometimes it was in the street that we encountered, usually to exchange amusing misfortunes. If we could have been constantly with these fellow-hemispherists our progress through Spain would have been an unbroken holiday.

There is a superstition of travelers in Spain, much fostered by innkeepers and porters, that you cannot get seats in the fast trains without buying your tickets the day before, and then perhaps not, and we abandoned ourselves to this fear at San Sebastian so far as to get places some hours in advance. But once established in the ten-foot-wide interior of the first-class compartment which we had to ourselves, every anxiety fell from us; and I do not know a more flattering emotion than that which you experience in sinking into your luxurious seat, and, after a glance at your hand-bags in the racks where they have been put with no strain on your own muscles, giving your eyes altogether to the joy of the novel landscape.

The train was what they call a Rapido in Spain; and though we were supposed to be devouring space with indiscriminate gluttony, I do not think that in our mad rush of twenty-five miles an hour we failed to taste any essential detail of the scenery..But I wish now that I had known the Basques were all nobles, and that the peasants owned many of the little farms we saw declaring the general thrift. In the first two hours of the six to Burgos we ran through lovely valleys held in the embrace of gentle hills, where the fields of Indian corn were varied by groves of chestnut trees, where we could see the burrs gaping on their stems. The blades and tassels of the corn had been stripped away, leaving the ripe ears a-tilt at the top of the stalks, which looked like cranes standing on one leg with their heads slanted in pensive contemplation. There were no vineyards, but orchards aplenty near the farmhouses, and all about there were other trees pollarded to the quick and tufted with mistletoe, not only the stout oaks, but the slim poplars trimmed up into tall plumes like the poplars in southern France. The houses, when they did not stand apart like our own farmhouses, gathered into gray-brown villages around some high-shouldered church with a bell-tower in front or at one corner of the fagade. In most of the larger houses an economy of the sun’s heat, the only heat recognized in the winter of southern countries, was practised by glassing in the balconies that stretched quite across their fronts and kept the cold from at least one story. It gave them a very cheery look, and must have made them livable at least in the daytime. Now and then the tall chimney of one of those manufactories we had seen on the way from Irun invited belief in the march of industrial prosperity; but whether the Basque who took work in a mill or a foundry forfeited his nobility remained a part of the universal Basque secret. From time to time a mountain stream brawled from under a world-old bridge, and then spread a quiet tide for the women to kneel beside and wash the clothes which they spread to dry on every bush and grassy slope of the banks.

The whole scene changed after we ran out of the Basque country and into the austere landscape of old Castile. The hills retreated and swelled into mountains that were not less than terrible in their savage nakedness. The fields of corn and the orchards ceased, and the green of the pastures changed to the tawny gray of the measureless wheat-lands into which the valleys flattened and widened. There were no longer any factory chimneys; the villages seemed to turn from stone to mud; the human poverty showed itself in the few patched and tattered figures that followed the oxen in the interminable furrows shallowly scraping the surface of the lonely levels. The haggard mountain ranges were of stone that seemed blanched with geologic superannuation, and at one place we ran by a wall of hoary rock that drew its line a mile long against the sky, and then broke and fell, and then staggered up again in a succession of titanic bulks. But stupendous as these mountain masses were, they were not so wonderful as those wheat-lands which in harvest-time must wash their shores like a sea of gold. Where these now rose and sank with the long ground-swell of the plains in our own West, a thin gray stubble covered them from the feeble culture which leaves Spain, for all their extent in both the Castiles, in Estremadura, in Andalusia, still without bread enough to feed herself, and obliges her to import alien wheat. At the lunch which we had so good in the dining-car we kept our talk to the wonder of the scenery, and well away from the interesting Spanish pair at our table. It is never safe in Latin Europe to count upon ignorance of English in educated people, or people who look so; and with these we had the reward of our prudence when the husband asked after dessert if we minded his smoking. His English seemed meant to open the way for talk, and we were willing he should do the talking. He spoke without a trace of accent, and we at once imagined circles in which it was now as chic for Spaniards to speak English as it once was to speak French. They are said never to speak French quite well; but nobody could have spoken English better than this gentleman, not even we who were, as he said he supposed, English. Truth and patriotism both obliged us to deny his conjecture; and when He intimated that he would not have known us for Americans because we did not speak with the dreadful American accent, I hazarded my belief that this dreadfulness was personal rather than national. But he would not have it. Boston people, yes; they spoke very well, and he allowed other exceptions to the general rule of our nasal twang, which his wife summoned English enough to say was very ugly. They had suffered from it too universally in the Americans they had met during the summer in Germany to believe it was merely personal; and I suppose one may own to strictly American readers that our speech is dreadful, that it is very ugly. These amiable Spaniards had no reason and no wish to wound; and they could never know what sweet and noble natures had been producing their voices through their noses there in Germany. I for my part could not insist; who, indeed, can defend the American accent, which is not so much an accent as a whiffle, a snuffle, a twang? It was mortifying, all the same, to have it openly abhorred by a foreigner, and I willingly got away from the question to that of the weather. We agreed admirably about the heat in England where this gentleman went every summer, and had never found it so hot before. It was hot even in Denmark; but he warned me not to expect any warmth in Spain now that the autumn rains had begun.

If this couple represented a cosmopolitan and modern Spain, it was interesting to escape to something entirely native in the three young girls who got in at the next station and shared our compartment with us as far as we went. They were tenderly kissed by their father in putting them on board, and held in lingering farewells at the window till the train started. The eldest of the three then helped in arranging their baskets in the rack, but the middle sister took motherly charge of the youngest, whom she at once explained to us as enferma. She was the prettiest girl of the conventional Spanish type we Lad yet seen: dark-eyed and dark-haired, regular, but a little overfull of the chin which she would presently have double. She was very, very pale of face, with a pallor in which she had assisted nature with powder, as all Spanish women, old and young, seem to do. But there was no red underglow in the pallor, such as gives many lovely faces among them the complexion of whitewash over pink on a stucco surface. She wrapped up the youngest sister, who would by and by be beautiful, and now being sick had only the flush of fever in her cheeks, and propped her in the coziest corner of the car, where she tried to make her keep still, but could not make her keep silent. In fact, they all babbled together, over the basket of luncheon which the middle sister opened after springing up the little table-leaf of the window, and spread with a substantial variety including fowl and sausage and fruit, such as might tempt any sick appetite, or a well one, even. As she brought out each of these victuals, together with a bottle of wine and a large bottle of milk, she first offered it to us, and when it was duly refused with thanks, she made the invalid eat and drink, especially the milk which she made a wry face at. When she had finished they all began to question whether her fever was rising for the day; the good sister felt the girl’s pulse, and got out a thermometer, which together they arranged under her arm, and then duly inspected. It seemed that the fever was rising, as it might very well be, but the middle sister was not moved from her notable calm, and the eldest did not fear. At a place where a class of young men was to be seen before an ecclesiastical college the girls looked out together, and joyfully decided that the brother (or possibly a cousin) whom they expected to see, was really there among them. When we reached Burgos we felt that we had assisted at a drama of family medicine and affection which was so sweet that if the fever was not very wisely it was very winningly treated. It was not perhaps a very serious case, and it meant a good deal of pleasant excitement for all concerned.

III. BURGOS AND THE BITTER COLD OF BURGOS

It appears to be the use in most minor cities of Spain for the best hotel to send the worst omnibus to the station, as who should say, “Good wine needs no bush.” At Burgos we were almost alarmed by the shabbiness of the omnibus for the hotel we had chosen through a consensus of praise in the guide-books, and thought we must have got the wrong one. It was indeed the wrong one, but because there is no right hotel in Burgos when you arrive there on an afternoon of early October, and feel the prophetic chill of that nine months of winter which is said to contrast there with three months of hell.

I

The air of Burgos when it is not the breath of a furnace is so heavy and clammy through the testimony of all comers that Burgos herself no longer attempts to deny it from her high perch on the uplands of Old Castile. Just when she ceased to deny it, I do not know, but probably when she ceased to be the sole capital and metropolis of Christian Spain and shared her primacy with Toledo sometime in the fourteenth century. Now, in the twentieth, we asked nothing of her but two rooms in which we could have fire, but the best hotel in Burgos openly declared that it had not a fireplace in its whole extent, though there must have been one in the kitchen. The landlord pointed out that it was completely equipped with steam-heating apparatus, but when I made him observe that there was no steam in the shining radiators, he owned with a shrug that there was truth in what I said. He showed us large, pleasant rooms to the south which would have been warm from the sun if the sun which we left playing in San Sebastian had been working that day at Burgos; he showed us his beautiful new dining-room, cold, with the same sunny exposure. I rashly declared that all would not do, and that I would look elsewhere for rooms with fireplaces. I had first to find a cab in order to find the other hotels, but I found instead that in a city of thirty-eight thousand inhabitants there was not one cab standing for hire in the streets. I tried to enlist the sympathies of some private carriages, but they remained indifferent, and I went back foiled, but not crushed, to our hotel. There it seemed that the only vehicle to be had was the omnibus which had brought us from the station. The landlord calmly (I did not then perceive the irony of his calm) had the horses put to and our baggage put on, and we drove away. But first we met our dear Chilians coming to our hotel from the hotel they had chosen, and from a search for hearthstones in others; and we drove to the only hotel they had left unvisited. There at our demand for fires the landlord all but laughed us to scorn; he laid his hand on the cold radiator in the hotel as if to ask what better we could wish than that. We drove back, humbled, to our own hotel, where the landlord met us with the Castilian cairn he had kept at our departure. Then there was nothing for me but to declare myself the Prodigal Son returned to take the rooms he had offered us. We were so perfectly in his power that he could magnanimously afford to offer us other rooms equally cold, but we did not care to move. The Chilians had retired baffled to their own hotel, and there was nothing for us but to accept the long evening of gelid torpor which we foresaw must follow the effort of the soup and wine to warm us at dinner. That night we heard through our closed doors agonized voices which we knew to be the voices of despairing American women wailing through the freezing corridors, “Can’t she understand that I want boiling water?” and, “Can’t’ we go down-stairs to a fire somewhere?” We knew the one meant the chambermaid and the other the kitchen, but apparently neither prayer was answered.

II

As soon as we had accepted our fate, while as yet the sun had not set behind the clouds which had kept it out of our rooms all day, we hurried out not only to escape the rigors of our hotel, but to see as soon as we could, as much as we could of the famous city. We had got an excellent cup of tea in the glass-roofed pavilion of our beautiful cold dining-room, and now our spirits rose level with the opportunities of the entrancing walk we took along the course of the Arlanson. I say course, because that is the right word to use of a river, but really there was no course in the Arlanzon. Between the fine, wide Embankments and under the noble bridges there were smooth expanses of water (naturally with women washing at them), which reflected like an afterglow of the evening sky the splendid masses of yarn hung red from the dyer’s vats on the bank. The expanses of water were bordered by wider spaces of grass which had grown during the rainless summer, but which were no doubt soon to be submerged under the autumnal torrent the river would become. The street which shaped itself to the stream was a rather modern avenue, leading to a beautiful public garden, with the statues and fountains proper to a public garden, and densely shaded against the three infernal months of the Burgos year. But the houses were glazed all along their fronts with the sun-traps which we had noted in the Basque country, and which do not wait for a certain date in the almanac to do the work of steam-heating. They gave a tempting effect to the house-fronts, but they could not distract our admiration from the successive crowds of small boys playing at bull-fighting in the streets below, and in the walks of the public garden. The population of Burgos is above thirty-seven thousand and of the inhabitants at least thirty-six thousand are small boys, as I was convinced by the computation of the husband and brother of the Chilian ladies which agreed perfectly with my own hasty conjecture; the rest are small girls. In fact large families, and large families chiefly of boys, are the rule in Spain everywhere; and they everywhere know how to play bull-fighting, to flap any-colored old shawl, or breadth of cloth in the face of the bull, to avoid his furious charges, and doubtless to deal him his death-wound, though to this climax I could not bear to follow.

One or two of the bull-fighters offered to leave the national sport and show us the House of Miranda, but it was the cathedral which was dominating our desire, as it everywhere dominates the vision, in Burgos and out of Burgos as far as the city can be seen. The iron-gray bulk, all flattered or fretted by Gothic art, rears itself from the clustering brown walls and roofs of the city, which it seems to gather into its mass below while it towers so far above them. We needed no pointing of the way to it; rather we should have needed instruction for shunning it; but we chose the way which led through the gate of Santa Maria where in an arch once part of the city wall, the great Cid, hero above every other hero of Burgos, sits with half a dozen more or less fabled or storied worthies of the renowned city. Then with a minute’s walk up a stony sloping little street we were in the beautiful and reverend presence of one of the most august temples of the Christian faith. The avenue where the old Castilian nobles once dwelt in their now empty palaces climbs along the hillside above the cathedral, which on its lower side seems to elbow off the homes of meaner men, and in front to push them away beyond a plaza not large enough for it. Even this the cathedral had not cleared of the horde of small boys who followed us unbidden to its doors and almost expropriated those authorized blind beggars who own the church doors in Spain. When we declined the further company of these boys they left us with expressions which I am afraid accused our judgment and our personal appearance; but in another moment we were safe from their censure, and hidden as it were in the thick smell of immemorial incense.

It was not the moment for doing the cathedral in the wonted tiresome and vulgar way; that was reserved for the next day; now we simply wandered in the vast twilight spaces; and craned our necks to breaking in trying to pierce the gathered gloom in the vaulting overhead. It was a precious moment, but perhaps too weird, and we were glad to find a sacristan with businesslike activity setting red candlesticks about a bier in the area before the choir, which here, as in the other Spanish cathedrals, is planted frankly in the middle of the edifice, a church by itself, as if to emphasize the incomparable grandeur of the cathedral. The sacristan willingly paused in his task and explained that he was preparing the bier for the funeral of a church dignitary (as we learned later, the dean) which was to take place the next day at noon; and if we would come at that hour we should hear some beautiful music. We knew that he was establishing a claim on our future custom, but we thanked him and provisionally feed him, and left him at his work, at which we might have all but fancied him whistling, so cheerfully and briskly he went about it.

Outside we lingered a moment to give ourselves the solemn joy of the Chapel of the Constable which forms the apse of the cathedral and is its chief glory. It mounted to the hard, gray sky, from which a keen wind was sweeping the narrow street leading to it, and blustering round the corner of the cathedral, so that the marble men holding up the Constable’s coat-of-arms in the rear of his chapel might well have ached from the cold which searched the marrow of flesh-and-blood men below. These hurried by in flat caps and corduroy coats and trousers, with sashes at their waists and comforters round their necks; and they were picturesque quite in the measure of their misery. Some whose tatters were the most conspicuous feature of their costume, I am sure would have charmed me if I had been a painter; as a mere word-painter I find myself wishing I could give the color of their wretchedness to my page.

III

In the absence of any specific record in my notebook I do not know just how it was between this first glimpse of the cathedral and dinner, but it must have been on our return to our hotel, that the little interpreter who had met us at the station, and had been intermittently constituting himself our protector ever since, convinced us that we ought to visit the City Hall, and see the outside of the marble tomb containing the bones of the Cid and his wife. Such as the bones were we found they were not to be seen themselves, and I do not know that I should have been the happier for their inspection. In fact, I have no great opinion of the Cid as an historical character or a poetic fiction. His epic, or his long ballad, formed no part of my young study in Spanish, and when four or five years ago a friend gave me a copy of it, beautifully printed in black letter, with the prayer that I should read it sometime within the twelvemonth, I found the time far too short. As a matter of fact I have never read the poem to this day, though. I have often tried, and I doubt if its author ever intended it to be read. He intended it rather to be recited in stirring episodes, with spaces for refreshing slumber in the connecting narrative. As for the Cid in real life under his proper name of Rodrigo de Vivas, though he made his king publicly swear that he had had no part in the murder of his royal brother, and though he was the stoutest and bravest knight in Castile, I cannot find it altogether admirable in him that when his king banished him he should resolve to fight thereafter for any master who paid him best. That appears to me the part of a road-agent rather than a reformer, and it seems to me no amend for his service under Moorish princes that he should make war against them on his personal behalf or afterward under his own ungrateful king. He is friends now with the Arabian King of Saragossa, and now he defeats the Aragonese under the Castilian sovereign, and again he sends an insulting message by the Moslems to the Christian Count of Barcelona, whom he takes prisoner with his followers, but releases without ransom after a contemptuous audience. Is it well, I ask, that he helps one Moor against another, always for what there is in it, and when he takes Valencia from the infidels, keeps none of his promises to them, but having tortured the governor to make him give up his treasure, buries him to his waist and then burns him alive? After that, to be sure, he enjoys his declining years by making forays in the neighboring country, and dies “satisfied with having done his duty toward his God.”

Our interpreter, who would not let us rest till he had shown us the box holding the Cid’s bones, had himself had a varied career. If you believed him he was born in Madrid and had passed, when three years old, to New York, where he grew up to become a citizen and be the driver of a delivery wagon for a large department-store. He duly married an American woman who could speak not only French, German, and Italian, but also Chinese, and was now living with him in Burgos. His own English had somewhat fallen by the way, but what was left he used with great courage; and he was one of those government interpreters whom you find at every large station throughout Spain in the number of the principal hotels of the place. They pay the government a certain tax for their license, though it was our friend’s expressed belief that the government, on the contrary, paid him a salary of two dollars a day; but perhaps this was no better founded than his belief in a German princess who, when he went as her courier, paid him ten dollars a day and all his expenses. She wished him to come and live near her in Germany, so as to be ready to go with her to South America, but he had not yet made up his mind to leave Burgos, though his poor eyes watered with such a cold as only Burgos can give a man in the early autumn; when I urged him to look to the bad cough he had, he pleaded that it was a very old cough. He had a fascination of his own, which probably came from his imaginative habit of mind, so that I could have wished more adoptive fellow-citizens were like him. He sympathized strongly with us in our grief with the cold of the hotel, and when we said that a small oil-heater would take the chill off a large room, he said that he had advised that very thing, but that our host had replied, with proud finality, “I am the landlord.” Whether this really happened or not, I cannot say, but I have no doubt that our little guide had some faith in it as a real incident. He apparently had faith in the landlord’s boast that he was going to have a stately marble staircase to the public entrance to his hotel, which was presently of common stone, rather tipsy in its treads, and much in need of scrubbing.

There is as little question in my mind that he believed the carriage we had engaged to take us next morning to the Cartuja de Miraflores would be ready at a quarter before nine, and that he may have been disappointed when it was not ready until a quarter after. But it was worth waiting for if to have a team composed of a brown mule on the right hand and a gray horse on the left was to be desired. These animals which nature had so differenced were equalized by art through the lavish provision of sleigh-bells, without some strands of which no team in Spain is properly equipped. Besides, as to his size the mule was quite as large as the horse, and as to his tail he was much more decorative. About two inches after this member left his body it was closely shaved for some six inches or more, and for that space it presented the effect of a rather large size of garden-hose; below, it swept his thighs in a lordly switch. If anything could have added distinction to our turnout it would have been the stiff side-whiskers of our driver: the only pair I saw in real life after seeing them so long in pictures on boxes of raisins and cigars. There they were associated with the look and dress of a torrero, and our coachman, though an old Castilian of the austerest and most taciturn pattern, may have been in his gay youth an Andalusian bull-fighter.

IV

Our pride in our equipage soon gave way to our interest in the market for sheep, cattle, horses, and donkeys which we passed through just outside the city. The market folk were feeling the morning’s cold; shepherds folded in their heavy shawls leaned motionless on their long staves, as if hating to stir; one ingenious boy wore a live lamb round his neck which he held close by the legs for the greater comfort of it; under the trees by the roadside some of the peasants were cooking their breakfasts and warming themselves at the fires. The sun was on duty in a cloudless sky; but all along the road to the Cartuja we drove between rows of trees so thickly planted against his summer rage that no ray of his friendly heat could now reach us. At times it seemed as if from this remorselessly shaded avenue we should escape into the open; the trees gave way and we caught glimpses of wide plains and distant hills; then they closed upon us again, and in their chill shadow it was no comfort to know that in summer, when the townspeople got through their work, they came out to these groves, men, women, and children, and had supper under their hospitable boughs.

One comes to almost any Cartuja at last, and we found ours on a sunny top just when the cold had pinched us almost beyond endurance, and joined a sparse group before the closed gate of the convent. The group was composed of poor people who had come for the dole of food daily distributed from the convent, and better-to-do country-folk who had brought things to sell to the monks, or were there on affairs not openly declared. But it seemed that it was a saint’s day; the monks were having service in the church solely for their own edification, and they had shut us sinners out not only by locking the gate, but by taking away the wire for ringing the bell, and leaving nothing but a knocker of feeble note with which different members of our indignation meeting vainly hammered. Our guide assumed the virtue of the greatest indignation, though he ought to have known that we could not get in on that saint’s day; but it did not avail, and the little group dispersed, led off by the brown peasant who was willing to share my pleasure in our excursion as a good joke on us, and smiled with a show of teeth as white as the eggs in his basket. After all, it was not wholly a hardship; we could walk about in the sunny if somewhat muddy open, and warm ourselves against the icily shaded drive back to town; besides, there was a little girl crouching at the foot of a tree, and playing at a phase of the housekeeping which is the game of little girls the world over. Her sad, still-faced mother standing near, with an interest in her apparently renewed by my own, said that she was four years old, and joined me in watching her as she built a pile of little sticks and boiled an imaginary little kettle over them. I was so glad even of a make-believe fire that I dropped a copper coin beside it, and the mother smiled pensively as if grateful but not very hopeful from this beneficence, though after reflection I had made my gift a “big dog” instead of a “small dog,” as the Spanish call a ten and a five centimo piece. The child bent her pretty head shyly on one side, and went on putting more sticks under her supposititious pot.

I found the little spectacle reward enough in itself and in a sort compensation for our failure to see the exquisite alabaster tomb of Juan II. and his wife Isabel which makes the Cartuja Church so famous. There are a great many beautiful tombs in Burgos, but none so beautiful there (or in the whole world if the books say true) as this; though we made what we could of some in the museum, where we saw for the first time in the recumbent effigies of a husband and wife, with features worn away by time and incapable of expressing the disappointment, the surprise they may have felt in the vain effort to warm their feet on the backs of the little marble angels put there to support them. We made what we could, too, of the noted Casa de Miranda, the most famous of the palaces in which the Castilian nobles have long ceased to live at Burgos. There we satisfied our longing to see a patio, that roofless colonnaded court which is the most distinctive feature of Spanish domestic architecture, and more and more distinctively so the farther south you go, till at Seville you see it in constant prevalence. At Burgos it could never have been a great comfort, but in this House of Miranda it must have been a great glory. The spaces between many of the columns have long been bricked in, but there is fine carving on the front and the vaulting of the staircase that climbs up from it in neglected grandeur. So many feet have trodden its steps that they are worn hollow in the middle, and to keep from falling you must go up next the wall. The object in going up at all is to join in the gallery an old melancholy custodian in looking down into the patio, with his cat making her toilet beside him, and to give them a fee which they receive with equal calm. Then, when you have come down the age-worn steps without breaking your neck, you have done the House of Miranda, and may lend yourself with what emotion you choose to the fact that this ancient seat of hidalgos has now fallen to the low industry of preparing pigskins to be wine-skins.

I do not think that a company of hidalgos in complete medieval armor could have moved me more strongly than that first sight of these wine-skins, distended with wine, which we had caught in approaching the House of Miranda. We had to stop in the narrow street, and let them pass piled high on a vintner’s wagon, and looking like a load of pork: they are trimmed and left to keep the shape of the living pig, which they emulate at its bulkiest, less the head and feet, and seem to roll in fatness. It was joy to realize what they were, to feel how Spanish, how literary, how picturesque, how romantic. There they were such as the wine-skins are that hang from the trees of pleasant groves in many a merry tale, and invite all swains and shepherds and wandering cavaliers to tap their bulk and drain its rich plethora. There they were such as Don Quixote, waking from his dream at the inn, saw them malignant giants and fell enchanters, and slashed them with his sword till he had spilled the room half full of their blood. For me this first sight of them was magic. It brought back my boyhood as nothing else had yet, and I never afterward saw them without a return to those days of my delight in all Spanish things.

Literature and its associations, no matter from how lowly suggestion, must always be first for me, and I still thought of those wine-skins in yielding to the claims of the cathedral on my wonder and reverence when now for the second time we came to it. The funeral ceremony of the dean was still in course, and after listening for a moment to the mighty orchestral music of it — the deep bass of the priests swelling up with the organ notes, and suddenly shot with the shrill, sharp trebles of the choir-boys and pierced with the keen strains of the violins — we left the cathedral to the solemn old ecclesiastics who sat confronting the bier, and once more deferred our more detailed and intimate wonder. We went, in this suspense of emotion, to the famous Convent of Las Huelgas, which invites noble ladies to its cloistered repose a little beyond the town. We entered to the convent church through a sort of slovenly court where a little girl begged severely, almost censoriously, of us, and presently a cold-faced young priest came and opened the church door. Then we found the interior of that rank Spanish baroque which escapes somehow the effeminate effusiveness of the Italian; it does not affect you as decadent, but as something vigorously perfect in its sort, somberly authentic, and ripe from a root and not a graft. In its sort, the high altar, a gigantic triune, with massive twisted columns and swagger statues of saints and heroes in painted wood, is a prodigy of inventive piety, and compositely has a noble exaltation in its powerful lift to the roof.

The nuns came beautifully dressed to hear mass at the grilles giving into the chapel adjoining the church; the tourist may have his glimpse of them there on Sundays, and on week-days he may have his guess of their cloistered life and his wonder how much it continues the tradition of repose which the name of the old garden grounds implies. These lady nuns must be of patrician lineage and of fortune enough to defray their expense in the convent, which is of the courtliest origin, for it was founded eight hundred years ago by Alfonso VIII. “to expiate his sins and to gratify his queen,” who probably knew of them. I wish now I had known, while I was there, that the abbess of Las Huelgas had once had the power of life and death in the neighborhood, and could hang people if she liked; I cannot think just what good it would have done me, but one likes to realize such things on the spot. She is still one of the greatest ladies of Spain, though perhaps not still “lady of ax and gibbet,” and her nuns are of like dignity. In their chapel are the tombs of Alfonso and his queen, whose figures are among those on the high altar of the church. She was Eleanor Plantagenet, the daughter of our Henry II., and was very fond of Las Huelgas, as if it were truly a rest for her in the far-off land of Spain; I say our Henry II., for in the eleventh century we Americans were still English, under the heel of the Normans, as not the fiercest republican of us now need shame to own.

In a sense of this historical unity, at Las Huelgas we felt as much at home as if we had been English tourists, and we had our feudal pride in the palaces where the Gastilian nobles used to live in Burgos as we returned to the town. Their deserted seats are mostly to be seen after you pass through the Moorish gate overarching the stony, dusty, weedy road hard by the place where the house of the Cid is said to have stood. The arch, so gracefully Saracenic, was the first monument of the Moslem obsession of the country which has left its signs so abundantly in the south; here in the far north the thing seemed almost prehistoric, almost preglacially old, the witness of a world utterly outdated. But perhaps it was not more utterly outdated than the residences of the nobles who had once made the ancient Castilian capital splendid, but were now as irrevocably merged in Madrid as the Arabs in Africa.

VI

Some of the palaces looked down from the narrow street along the hillside above the cathedral, but only one of them was kept up in the state of other days; and I could not be sure at what point this street had ceased to be the street where our guide said every one kept cows, and the ladies took big pitchers of milk away to sell every morning. But I am sure those ladies could have been of noble descent only in the farthest possible remove, and I do not suppose their cows were even remotely related to the haughty ox-team which blocked the way in front of the palaces and obliged xis to dismount while our carriage was lifted round the cart. Our driver was coldly disgusted, but the driver of the ox-team preserved a calm as perfect as if he had been an hidalgo interested by the incident before his gate. It delayed us till the psychological moment when the funeral of the dean was over, and we could join the formidable party following the sacristan from chapel to chapel in the cathedral.

We came to an agonized consciousness of the misery of this progress in the Chapel of the Constable, where it threatened to be finally stayed by the indecision of certain ladies of our nation in choosing among the postal cards for sale there. By this time we had suffered much from the wonders of the cathedral. The sacristan had not spared us a jewel or a silvered or gilded sacerdotal garment or any precious vessel of ceremonial, so that our jaded wonder was inadequate to the demand of the beautiful tombs of the Constable and his lady upon it. The coffer of the Cid, fastened against the cathedral wall for a monument of his shrewdness in doing the Jews of Burgos, who, with the characteristic simplicity of their race, received it back full of sand and gravel in payment of the gold they had lent him in it, could as little move us. Perhaps if we could have believed that he finally did return the value received, we might have marveled a little at it, but from what we knew of the Cid this was not credible. We did what we could with the painted wood carving of the cloister doors; the life-size head of a man with its open mouth for a key-hole in another portal; a fearful silver-plated chariot given by a rich blind woman for bearing the Host in the procession of Corpus Christi; but it was very little, and I am not going to share my failure with the reader by the vain rehearsal of its details. No literary art has ever reported a sense of picture or architecture or sculpture to me: the despised postal card is better for that; and probably throughout these “trivial fond records” I shall be found shirking as much as I may the details of such sights, seen or unseen, as embitter the heart of travel with unavailing regret for the impossibility of remembering them. I must leave for some visit of the reader’s own the large and little facts of the many chapels in the cathedral at Burgos, and I will try to overwhelm him with my sense of the whole mighty interior, the rich gloom, the Gothic exaltation, which I made such shift as I could to feel in the company of those picture-postal amateurs. It was like, say, a somber afternoon, verging to the twilight of a cloudy sunset, so that when I came out of it into the open noon it was like emerging into a clear morrow. Perhaps because I could there shed the harassing human environment the outside of the cathedral seemed to me the best of it, and we lingered there for a moment in glad relief.

VII

One house in some forgotten square commemorates the state in which the Castilian nobles used to live in Burgos before Toledo, and then Valladolid, contested the primacy of the grim old capital of the northern uplands. We stayed for a moment to glance from our carriage through the open portal into its leafy patio shivering in the cold, and then we bade our guide hurry back with us to the hot luncheon which would be the only heat in our hotel. But to reach this we had to pass through another square, which we found full of peasants’ ox-carts and mule-teams; and there our guide instantly jumped down and entered into a livelier quarrel with those peaceable men and women than I could afterward have believed possible in Spain. I bade him get back to his seat beside the driver, who was abetting him with an occasional guttural and whom I bade turn round and go another way. I said that I had hired this turnout, and I was master, and I would be obeyed; but it seemed that I was wrong. My proud hirelings never left off their dispute till somehow the ox-carts and mule-teams were jammed together, and a thoroughfare found for us. Then it was explained that those peasants were always blocking that square in that way and that I had, however unwillingly, been discharging the duty of a public-spirited citizen in compelling them to give way. I did not care for that; I prized far more the quiet with which they had taken the whole affair. It was the first exhibition of the national repose of manner which we were to see so often again, south as well as north, and which I find it so beautiful to have seen. In a Europe abounding in volcanic Italians, nervous Germans, and exasperated Frenchmen, it was comforting, it was edifying to see those Castilian peasants so self-respectfully self-possessed in the wrong.

From time to time in the opener spaces we had got into the sun from the chill shadow of the narrow streets, but now it began to be cloudy, and when we re-entered our hotel it was almost as warm indoors as out. We thought our landlord might have so far repented as to put on the steam; but he had sternly adhered to his principle that the radiators were enough of themselves; and after luncheon we had nothing for it but to go away from Burgos, and take with us such scraps of impression as we could. We decided that there was no street of gayer shops than those gloomy ones we had chanced into here and there; I do not remember now anything like a bookseller’s or a milliner’s or a draper’s window. There was no sign of fashion among the ladies of Burgos, so far as we could distinguish them; there was not a glowering or perking hat, and I do not believe there was a hobble-skirt in all the austere old capital except such as some tourist wore; the black lace mantillas and the flowing garments of other periods flitted by through the chill alleys and into the dim doorways. The only cheerfulness in the local color was to be noted in the caparison of the donkeys, which we were to find more and more brilliant southward. Do I say the only cheerfulness? I ought to except also the involuntary hilarity of a certain poor man’s suit which was so patched together of myriad scraps that it looked as if cut from the fabric of a crazy-quilt. I owe him this notice the rather because he almost alone did not beg of us in a city which swarmed with beggars in a forecast of that pest of beggary which infests Spain everywhere. I do not say that the thing is without picturesqueness, without real pathos; the little girl who kissed the copper I gave her in the cathedral remains endeared to me by that perhaps conventional touch of poetry.

There was compensation for the want of presence among the ladies of Burgos, in the leading lady of the theatrical company who dined, the night before, at our hotel with the chief actors of her support, before giving a last performance in our ancient city. It happened another time in our Spanish progress that we had the society of strolling players at our hotel, and it was both times told us that the given company was the best dramatic company in Spain; but at Burgos we did not yet know that we were so singularly honored. The leading lady there had luminous black eyes, large like the head-lamps of a motor-car, and a wide crimson mouth which she employed as at a stage banquet throughout the dinner, while she talked and laughed with her fellow-actors, beautiful as bull-fighters, cleanshaven, serious of face and shapely of limb. They were unaffectedly professional, and the lady made no pretense of not being a leading lady. One could see that she was the kindest creature in the world, and that she took a genuine pleasure in her huge, practicable eyes. At the other end of the room a Spanish family — father, mother, and small children, down to some in arms — were dining and the children wailing as Spanish children will, regardless of time and place; and when the nurse brought one of the disconsolate infants to be kissed by the leading lady one’s heart went out to her for the amiability and abundance of her caresses. The mere sight of their warmth did something to supply the defect of steam in the steam-heating apparatus, but when one got beyond their radius there was nothing for the shivering traveler except to wrap himself in the down quilt of his bed and spread his steamer-rug over his knees till it was time to creep under both of them between the glacial sheets.

We were sorry we had not got tickets for the leading lady’s public performance; it could have been so little more public; but we had not, and there was nothing else in Burgos to invite the foot outdoors after dinner. From my own knowledge I cannot yet say the place was not lighted; but my sense of the tangle of streets lying night long in a rich Gothic gloom shall remain unimpaired by statistics. Very possibly Burgos is brilliantly lighted with electricity; only they have not got the electricity on, as in our steam-heated hotel they had not got the steam on.

VIII

We had authorized our little interpreter to engage tickets for us by the mail-train the next afternoon for Valladolid; he pretended, of course, that the places could be had only by his special intervention, and by telegraphing for them to the arriving train. We accepted his romantic theory of the case, and paid the bonus due the railroad agent in the hotel for his offices in the matter; we would have given anything, we were so eager to get out of Burgos before we were frozen up there. I do not know that we were either surprised or pained to find that our Chilian friends should have got seats in the same car without anything of our diplomacy, by the simple process of showing their tickets. I think our little interpreter was worth everything he cost, and more. I would not have lost a moment of his company as he stood on the platform with me, adding one artless invention to another for my pleasure, and successively extracting peseta after peseta from me till he had made up the sum which he had doubtless idealized as a just reward for his half-day’s service when he first told me that it should be what I pleased. We parted with the affection of fellow-citizens in a strange monarchical country, his English growing less and less as the train delayed, and his eyes watering more and more as with tears of com-patriotic affection. At the moment I could have envied that German princess her ability to make sure of his future companionship at the low cost of fifty pesetas a day; and even now, when my affection has had time to wane, I cannot do less than commend him to any future visitor at Burgos, as in the last degree amiable, and abounding in surprises of intelligence and unexpected feats of reliability.

IV. THE VARIETY OF VALLADOLID

When you leave Burgos at 3.29 of a passably sunny afternoon you are not at once aware of the moral difference between the terms of your approach and those of your departure. You are not changing your earth or your sky very much, but it is not long before you are sensible of a change of mind which insists more and more. There is the same long ground-swell of wheat-fields, but yesterday you were followed in vision by the loveliness of the frugal and fertile Biscayan farms, and to-day this vision has left you, and you are running farther and farther into the economic and topographic waste of Castile. Yesterday there were more or less agreeable shepherdesses in pleasant plaids scattered over the landscape; to-day there are only shepherds of three days’ unshornness; the plaids are ragged, and there is not sufficient compensation in the cavalcades of both men and women riding donkeys in and out of the horizons on the long roads that lose and find themselves there. Flocks of brown and black goats, looking large as cows among the sparse stubble, do little to relieve the scene from desolation; I am not sure but goats, when brown and black, add to the horror of a desolate scene. There are no longer any white farmsteads, or friendly villages gathering about high-shouldered churches, but very far away to the eastward or westward the dun expanse of the wheat-lands is roughed with something which seems a cluster of muddy protuberances, so like the soil at first it is not distinguishable from it, but which as your train passes nearer proves to be a town at the base of tablelands, without a tree or a leaf or any spear of green to endear it to the eye as the abode of living men. You pull yourself together in the effort to visualize the immeasurable fields washing those dreary towns with golden tides of harvest; but it is difficult. What you cannot help seeing is the actual nakedness of the land which with its spindling stubble makes you think of that awful moment of the human head, when utter baldness will be a relief to the spectator.

I

At times and in places, peasants were scratching the dismal surfaces with the sort of plows which Abel must have used, when subsoiling was not yet even a dream; and between the plowmen and their ox-teams it seemed a question as to which should loiter longest in the unfinished furrow. Now and then, the rush of the train gave a motionless goatherd, with his gaunt flock, an effect of comparative celerity to the rearward. The women riding their donkeys over

 The level waste, the rounding gray

in the distance were the only women we saw except those who seemed to be keeping the stations, and one very fat one who came to the train at a small town and gabbled volubly to some passenger who made no audible response. She excited herself, but failed to rouse the interest of the other party to the interview, who remained unseen as well as unheard. I could the more have wished to know what it was all about because nothing happened on board the train to distract the mind from the joyless landscape until we drew near Valladolid. It is true that for a while we shared our compartment with a father and his two sons who lunched on slices of the sausage which seems the favorite refection of the Latin as well as the Germanic races in their travels. But this drama was not of intense interest, and we grappled in vain with the question of our companions’ social standard. The father, while he munched his bread and sausage, read a newspaper which did not rank him or even define his politics; there was a want of fashion in the cut of the young men’s clothes and of freshness in the polish of their tan shoes which defied conjecture. When they left the train without the formalities of leave-taking which had hitherto distinguished our Spanish fellow-travelers, we willingly abandoned them to a sort of middling obscurity; but this may not really have been their origin or their destiny.

That spindling sparseness, worse than utter baldness, of the wheat stubble now disappeared with cinematic suddenness, and our train was running past stretches of vineyard, where, among the green and purple and yellow ranks, the vintagers, with their donkeys and carts, were gathering the grapes in the paling light of the afternoon. Again the scene lacked the charm of woman’s presence which the vintage had in southern France. In Spain we nowhere saw the women sharing the outdoor work of the men; and we fancied their absence the effect of the Oriental jealousy lingering from centuries of Moorish domination; though we could not entirely reconcile our theory with the publicity of their washing clothes at every stream. To be sure, that was work which they did not share with men any more than the men shared the labor of the fields with them.

It was still afternoon, well before sunset, when we arrived at Valladolid, where one of the quaintest of our Spanish surprises awaited us. We knew that the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen would be the shabbiest omnibus at the station, and we saw without great alarm our Chilian friends drive off in an indefinitely finer vehicle. But what we were not prepared for was the fact of octroi at Valladolid, and for the strange behavior of the local customs officer who stopped us on our way into the town. He looked a very amiable young man as he put his face in at the omnibus door, and he received without explicit question our declaration that we had nothing taxable in our trunks. Then, however, he mounted to the top of the omnibus and thumped our trunks about as if to test them for contraband by the sound. The investigation continued on these strange terms until the officer had satisfied himself of our good faith, when he got down and with a friendly smile at the window bowed us into Valladolid.

In its way nothing could have been more charming; and we rather liked being left by the omnibus about a block from our hotel, on the border of a sort of promenade where no vehicles were allowed. We had been halted near a public fountain, where already the mothers and daughters of the neighborhood were gathered with earthen jars for the night’s supply of water. The jars were not so large as to overburden any of them when, after just delay for exchange of gossip, the girls and goodwives put them on their heads and marched erectly away with them, each beautifully picturesque irrespective of her age or looks.

The air was soft, and after Burgos, warm; something southern, unfelt before, began to qualify the whole scene, which as the evening fell grew more dramatic, and made the promenade the theater of emotions permitted such unrestricted play nowhere else in Spain, so far as we were witness. On one side the place was arcaded, and bordered with little shops, not so obtrusively brilliant that the young people who walked up and down before them were in a glare of publicity. A little way off the avenue expanded into a fine oblong place, where some first martyrs of the Inquisition were burned. But the promenades kept well short of this, as they walked up and down, and talked, talked, talked in that inexhaustible interest which youth takes in itself the world over. They were in the standard proportion of two girls to one young man, or, if here and there a girl had an undivided young man to herself, she went before some older maiden or matron whom she left altogether out of the conversation. They mostly wore the skirts and hats of Paris, and if the scene of the fountain was Arabically oriental the promenade was almost Americanly occidental. The promenaders were there by hundreds; they filled the avenue from side to side, and

 The delight of happy laughter

 The delight of low replies

that rose from their progress, with the chirp and whisper of their feet cheered the night as long as we watched and listened from the sun balcony of our hotel.

II

There was no more heat in the radiators of the hotel there than at Burgos, but for that evening at least there was none needed. It was the principal hotel of Valladolid, and the unscrubbed and unswept staircase by which we mounted into it was merely a phase of that genial pause, as for second thought, in the march of progress which marks so much of the modern advance in Spain, and was by no means an evidence of arrested development. We had the choice of reaching our rooms either through the dining-room or by a circuitous detour past the pantries; but our rooms had a proud little vestibule of their own, with a balcony over the great square, and if one of them had a belated feather-bed the other had a new hair mattress, and the whole house was brilliantly lighted with electricity. As for the cooking, it was delicious, and the table was of an abundance and variety which might well have made one ashamed of paying so small a rate as two dollars a day for bed and board, wine included, and very fair wine at that.

In Spain you must take the bad with the good, for whether you get the good or not you are sure of the bad, but only very exceptionally are you sure of the bad only. It was a pleasure not easily definable to find our hotel managed by a mother and two daughters, who gave the orders obeyed by the men-servants, and did not rebuke them for joining in the assurance that when we got used to going so abruptly from the dining-room into our bedrooms we would like it. The elder of the daughters had some useful French, and neither of the younger ladies ever stayed for some ultimate details of dishabille in coming to interpret the mother and ourselves to one another when we encountered her alone in the office. They were all thoroughly kind and nice, and they were supported with surpassing intelligence and ability by the chico, a radiant boy of ten, who united in himself the functions which the amiable inefficiency of the porters and waiters abandoned to him.

When we came out to dinner after settling ourselves in our almost obtrusively accessible rooms, we were convinced of the wisdom of our choice of a hotel by finding our dear Chilians at one of the tables. We rushed together like two kindred streams of transatlantic gaiety, and in our mingled French, Spanish, and English possessed one another of our doubts and fears in coming to our common conclusion. We had already seen a Spanish gentleman whom we knew as a fellow-sufferer at Burgos, roaming the streets of Valladolid, and in what seemed a disconsolate doubt, interrogating the windows of our hotel; and now we learned from the Chilians that he had been bitterly disappointed in the inn which a patrician omnibus had borne him away to from our envious eyes at the station. We learned that our South American compatriots had found their own chosen hotel impossible, and were now lodged in rapturous satisfaction under our roof. Their happiness penetrated us with a glow of equal content, and confirmed us in the resolution always to take the worst omnibus at a Spanish station as the sure index of the best hotel.

The street-cars, which in Valladolid are poetically propelled through lyre-shaped trolleys instead of our prosaic broomstick appliances, groaned unheeded if not unheard under our windows through the night, and we woke to find the sun on duty in our glazed balcony and the promenade below already astir with life: not the exuberant young life of the night before, but still sufficiently awake to be recognizable as life. A crippled newsboy seated under one of the arcades was crying his papers; an Englishman was looking at a plan of Valladolid in a shop window; a splendid cavalry officer went by in braided uniform, and did not stare so hard as they might have expected at some ladies passing in mantillas to mass or market. In the late afternoon as well as the early morning we saw a good deal of the military in Valladolid, where an army corps is stationed. From time to time a company of infantry marched through the streets to gay music, and toward evening slim young officers began to frequent the arcades and glass themselves in the windows of the shops, their spurs clinking on the pavement as they lounged by or stopped and took distinguished attitudes. We speculated in vain as to their social quality, and to this day I do not know whether “the career is open to the talents” in the Spanish army, or whether military rank is merely the just reward of civil rank. Those beautiful young swells in riding-breeches and tight gray jackets approached an Italian type of cavalry officer; they did not look very vigorous, and the common soldiers we saw marching through the streets, largely followed by the populace, were not of formidable stature or figure, though neat and agreeable enough to the eye.

While I indulge the record of these trivialities, which I am by no means sure the reader will care for so much, I feel that it would be wrong to let him remain as ignorant of the history of Valladolid as I was while there. My ignorance was not altogether my fault; I had fancied easily finding at some bookseller’s under the arcade a little sketch of the local history such as you are sure of finding in any Italian town, done by a local antiquary of those always mousing in the city’s archives. But the bookseller’s boy and then the boy’s mother could not at first imagine my wish, and when they did they could only supply me with a sort of business directory, full of addresses and advertisements. So instead of overflowing with information when we set out on our morning ramble, we meagerly knew from the guide-books that Valladolid had once been the capital of Castile, arid after many generations of depression following the removal of the court, had in these latest days renewed its strength in mercantile and industrial prosperity. There are ugly evidences of the prosperity in the windy, dusty avenues and streets of the more modern town; but there are lanes and alleys enough, groping for the churches and monuments in suddenly opening squares, to console the sentimental tourist for the havoc which enterprise has made. The mind readily goes back through these to the palmy prehistoric times from which the town emerged to mention in Ptolemy, and then begins to work forward past Iberian and Roman and Goth and Moor to the Castilian kings who made it their residence in the eleventh century. The capital won its first great distinction when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile were married there in 1469. Thirty-five years later these Catholic Kings, as one had better learn at once to call them in Spain, let Columbus die neglected if not forgotten in the house recently pulled down, where he had come to dwell in their cold shadow; they were much occupied with other things and they could not realize that his discovery of America was the great glory of their reign; probably they thought the conquest of Granada was. Later yet, by twenty years, the dreadful Philip II. was born in Valladolid, and in 1559 a very famous auto da fe wag celebrated in the Plaza Mayor. Fourteen Lutherans were burned alive for their heresy, and the body of a woman suspected of imperfect orthodoxy after her death was exhumed and burned with them. In spite of such precautions as these, and of all the pious diligence of the Holy Office, the reader will hardly believe that there is now a Spanish Protestant church in Valladolid; but such is the fact, though whether it derives from the times of the Inquisition, or is a modern missionary church I do not know. That auto da fe was of the greatest possible distinction; the Infanta Juana presided, and the universal interest was so great that people paid a dollar and twenty-five cents a seat; money then worth five or six times as much as now. Philip himself came to another auto when thirteen persons were burned in the same place, and he always liked Valladolid; it must have pleased him in a different way from Escorial, lying flat as it does on a bare plain swept, but never thoroughly dusted, by winds that blow pretty constantly over it.

While the Inquisition was purging the city of error its great university was renowning it not only throughout Spain, but in France and Italy; students frequented it from those countries, and artists came from many parts of Europe. Literature also came in the person of Cervantes, who seems to have followed the Spanish court in its migrations from Valladolid to Toledo and then to Madrid. Here also came one of the greatest characters in fiction, for it was in Valladolid that Gil Blas learned to practise the art of medicine tinder the instruction of the famous Dr. Sangrado.

IV

I put these facts at the service of the reader for what use he will while he goes with us to visit the cathedral in Valladolid, a cathedral as unlike that of Burgos as the severest mood of Spanish renaissance can render it. In fact, it is the work of Herrera, the architect who made the Escorial so grim, and is the expression in large measure of his austere mastery. If it had ever been finished it might have been quite as dispiriting as the Escorial, but as it has only one of the four ponderous towers it was meant to have, it is not without its alleviations, especially as the actual tower was rebuilt after the fall of the original seventy years ago. The grass springs cheerfully up in the crevices of the flagging from which the broken steps falter to the portal, but within all is firm and solid. The interior is vast, and nowhere softened by decoration, but the space is reduced by the huge bulk of the choir in the center of it; as we entered a fine echo mounted to the cathedral roof from the chanting and intoning within. When the service ended a tall figure in scarlet crossed rapidly toward the sacristy. It was of such imposing presence that we resolved at once it must be the figure of a cardinal, or of an archbishop at the least. But it proved to be one of the sacristans, and when we followed him to the sacristy with half a dozen other sightseers, he showed us a silver monstrance weighing a hundred and fifty pounds and decked with statites of our first parents as they appeared before the Fall. Besides this we saw, much against our will, a great many ecclesiastical vestments of silk and damask richly wrought in gold and silver. But if we were reluctant there was a little fat priest there who must have seen them hundreds of times and had still a childish delight in seeing them again because he had seen them so often; he dimpled and smiled, and for his sake we pretended a joy in them which it would have been cruel to deny him. I suppose we were then led to the sacrifice at the several side altars, but I have no specific recollection of them; I know there was a pale, sick-looking young girl in white who went about with her father, and moved compassion by her gentle sorrowfulness.

Of the University, which we visited next, I recall only the baroque facade; the interior was in reparation and I do not know whether it would have indemnified us for not visiting the University of Salamanca. That was in our list, but the perversity of the time-table forbade. You could go to Salamanca, yes, but you could not come back except at two o’clock in the morning; you could indeed continue on to Lisbon, but perhaps you did not wish to see Lisbon. A like perversity of the time-table, once universal in Spain, but now much reformed, also kept us away from Segovia, which was on our list. But our knowledge of it enabled us to tell a fellow-countrywoman whom we presently met in the museum of the University, how she could best, or worst, get to that city. Our speech gave us away to her, and she turned to us from the other objects of interest to explain first that she was in a hotel where she paid only six pesetas a day, but where she could get no English explanation of the time-table for any money. She had come to Valladolid with a friend who was going next day to Salamanca, but next day was Sunday and she did not like to travel on Sunday, and Segovia seemed the only alternative. We could not make out why, or if it came to that why she should be traveling alone through Spain with such a slender equipment of motive or object, but we perceived she was one of the most estimable souls in the world, and if she cared more for getting to Segovia that afternoon than for looking at the wonders of the place where we were, we could not blame her. We had to leave her when we left the museum in the charge of two custodians who led her, involuntary but unresisting, to an upper chamber where there were some pictures which she could care no more for than for the wood carvings below. We ourselves cared so little for those pictures that we would not go to see them. Pictures you can see anywhere, but not statuary of such singular interest, such transcendant powerfulness as those carvings of Berruguete and other masters less known, which held us fascinated in the lower rooms of the museum. They are the spoil of convents in the region about, suppressed by the government at different times, and collected here with little relevancy to their original appeal. Some are Scriptural subjects and some are figures of the dancers who take part in certain ceremonials of the Spanish churches (notably the cathedral at Seville), which have a quaint reality, an intense personal character. They are of a fascination which I can hope to convey by no phrase of mine; but far beyond this is the motionless force, the tremendous repose of the figures of the Roman soldiers taken in the part of sleeping at the Tomb. These sculptures are in wood, life-size, and painted in the colors of flesh and costume, with every detail and of a strong mass in which the detail is lost and must be found again by the wondering eye. Beyond all other Spanish sculptures they seemed to me expressive of the national temperament; I thought no other race could have produced them, and that in their return to the Greek ideal of color in statuary they were ingenuously frank and unsurpassably bold.

It might have been the exhaustion experienced from the encounter with their strenuousness that suddenly fatigued us past even the thought of doing any more of Valladolid on foot. At any rate, when we came out of the museum we took refuge in a corner grocery (it seems the nature of groceries to seek corners the world over) and asked the grocer where we could find a cab.

The grocer was young and kind, and not so busy but he could give willing attention to our case. He said he would send for a cab, and he called up from his hands and knees a beautiful blond half-grown boy who was scrubbing the floor, and despatched him on this errand, first making him wipe the suds off his hands. The boy was back wonderfully soon to say the cab would come for us in ten minutes, and to receive with self-respectful appreciation the peseta which rewarded his promptness. In the mean time we feigned a small need which we satisfied by a purchase, and then the grocer put us chairs in front of his counter and made us his guests while his other customers came and went. They came oftener than they went, for our interest in them did not surpass their interest in us. We felt that through this we reflected credit upon our amiable host; rumors of the mysterious strangers apparently spread through the neighborhood and the room was soon filled with people who did not all come to buy; but those who did buy were the most, interesting. An elderly man with his wife bought a large bottle which the grocer put into one scale of his balance, and poured its weight in chick-peas into the other. Then he filled the bottle with oil and weighed it, and then he gave the peas along with it to his customers. It seemed a pretty convention, though we could not quite make out its meaning, unless the peas were bestowed as a sort of bonus; but the next convention was clearer to us. An old man in black corduroy with a clean-shaven face and a rather fierce, retired bull-fighter air, bought a whole dried stock-fish (which the Spaniards eat instead of salt cod) talking loudly to the grocer and at us while the grocer cut it across in widths of two inches and folded it into a neat pocketful; then a glass of wine was poured from a cask behind the counter, and the customer drank it off in honor of the transaction with the effect also of pledging us with his keen eyes; all the time he talked, and he was joined in conversation by a very fat woman who studied us not unkindly. Other neighbors who had gathered in had no apparent purpose but to verify our outlandish presence and to hear my occasional Spanish, which was worth hearing if for nothing but the effort it cost me. The grocer accepted with dignity the popularity we had won him, and when at last our cab arrived from Mount Ararat with the mire of the subsiding Deluge encrusted upon it he led us out to it through the small boys who swarmed upon us wherever we stopped or started in Valladolid; and whose bulk was now much increased by the coming of that very fat woman from within the grocery. As the morning was bright we proposed having the top opened, but here still another convention of the place intervened. In Valladolid it seems that no self-respecting cabman will open the top of his cab for an hour’s drive, and we could not promise to keep ours longer. The grocer waited the result of our parley, and then he opened our carriage door and bowed us away. It was charming; if he had a place on Sixth Avenue I would be his customer as long as I lived in New York; and to this moment I do not understand why I did not bargain with that blond boy to come to America with us and be with us always. But there was no city I visited in Spain where I was not sorry to leave some boy behind with the immense rabble of boys whom I hoped never to see again.

VI

After this passage of real life it was not easy to sink again to the level of art, but if we must come down it there could have been no descent less jarring than that which left us in the exquisite patio of the College of San Gregorio, founded for poor students of theology in the time of the Catholic Kings. The students who now thronged the place inside and out looked neither clerical nor poverty-stricken; but I dare say they were good Christians, and whatever their condition they were rich in the constant vision of beauty which one sight of seemed to us more than we merited. Perhaps the facade of the college and that of the neighboring Church of San Pablo may be elsewhere surpassed in the sort of sumptuous delicacy of that Gothic which gets its name of plateresque from the silversmithing spirit of its designs; but I doubt it. The wonderfulness of it is that it is not mechanical or monotonous like the stucco fretting of the Moorish decoration which people rave over in Spain, but has a strength in its refinement which comes from its expression in the exquisitely carven marble. When this is grayed with age it is indeed of the effect of old silver work; but the plateresque in Valladolid does not suggest fragility or triviality; its grace is perhaps rather feminine than masculine; but at the worst it is only the ultimation of the decorative genius of the Gothic. It is, at any rate, the finest surprise which the local architecture has to offer and it leaves one wishing for more rather than less of it, so that after the facade of San Gregorio one is glad of it again in the walls of the patio, whose staircases and galleries, with the painted wooden beams of their ceilings, scarcely tempt the eye from it.

We thought the front of San Pablo deserved a second visit, and we were rewarded by finding it far lovelier than we thought. The church was open, and when we went in we had the advantage of seeing a large silver-gilt car moved from the high altar down the nave to a side altar next the door, probably for use in some public procession. The tongue of the car was pulled by a man with one leg; a half-grown boy under the body of it hoisted it on his back and eased it along; and a monk with his white robe tucked up into his girdle pushed it powerfully from behind. I did not make out why so strange a team should have been employed for the work, but the spectacle of that quaint progress was unique among my experiences at Valladolid and of a value which I wish I could make the reader feel with me. We ourselves were so interested in the event that we took part in it so far as to push aside a bench that blocked the way, and we received a grateful smile from the monk in reward of our zeal.

We were in the mood for simple kindness because of our stiff official reception at the Royal Palace, which we visited in the gratification of our passion for patios. It is now used for provincial or municipal offices and guarded by sentries who indeed admitted us to the courtyard, but would not understand our wish (it was not very articulately expressed) to mount to the cloistered galleries which all the guide-books united in pronouncing so noble, with their decorative busts of the Roman Emperors and arms of the Spanish provinces. The sculptures are by the school of Berruguete, for whom we had formed so strong a taste at the museum; but our disappointment was not at the moment further embittered by knowing that Napoleon resided there in 1809. We made what we could of other patios in the vicinity, especially of one in the palace across from San Gregorio, to which the liveried porter welcomed us, though the noble family was in residence, and allowed us to mount the red-carpeted staircase to a closed portal in consideration of the peseta which he correctly foresaw. It was not a very characteristic patio, bare of flower and fountain as it was, and others more fully appointed did not entirely satisfy us. The fact is the patio is to be seen best in Andalusia, its home, where every house is built round it, and in summer cooled and in winter chilled by it. But if we were not willing to wait for Seville, Valladolid did what it could; and if we saw no house with quite the patio we expected we did see the house where Philip II. was born, unless the enterprising boy who led us to it was mistaken; in that case we were, Ophelia-like, the more deceived.

VII

Such things do not really matter; the guide-book’s object of interest is seldom an object of human interest; you may miss it or ignore it without real personal loss; but if we had failed of that mystic progress of the silver car down the nave of San Pablo we should have been really if not sensibly poorer. So we should if we had failed of the charming experience which awaited us in our hotel at lunch-time. When we went out in the morning we saw a table spread the length of the long dining-room, and now when we returned we found every chair taken. At once we surmised a wedding breakfast, not more from the gaiety than the gravity of the guests; and the head waiter confirmed our impression: it was indeed a boda. The party was just breaking up, and as we sat down at our table the wedding guests rose from theirs. I do not know but in any country the women on such an occasion would look more adequate to it than the men; at any rate, there in Spain they looked altogether superior. It was not only that they were handsomer and better dressed, but that they expressed finer social and intellectual quality.

All the faces had the quiet which the Spanish face has in such degree that the quiet seems national more than personal; but the women’s faces were oval, though rather heavily based, while the men’s were squared, with high cheek-bones, and they seemed more distinctly middle class. Men and women had equally repose of manner, and when the women came to put on their headgear near our corner, it was with a surface calm unbroken by what must have been their inner excitement. They wore hats and mantillas in about the same proportion; but the bride wore a black mantilla and a black dress with sprigs of orange blossoms in her hair and on her breast for the only note of white. Her lovely, gentle face was white, of course, from the universal powder, and so were the faces of the others, who talked in low tones around her, with scarcely more animation than so many masks. The handsomest of them, whom we decided to be her sister, arranged the bride’s mantilla, and was then helped on with hers by the others, with soft smiles and glances. Two little girls, imaginably sorry the feast was over, suppressed their regret in the tutelage of the maiden aunts and grandmothers who put up cakes in napkins to carry home; and then the party vanished in unbroken decorum. When they were gone we found that in studying the behavior of the bride and her friends we had not only failed to identify the bridegroom, but had altogether forgotten to try.

VIII

The terrible Torquemada dwelt for years in Valla-dolid and must there have excogitated some of the methods of the Holy Office in dealing with heresy. As I have noted, Ferdinand and Isabella were married there and Philip II. was born there; but I think the reader will agree with me that the highest honor of the city is that it was long the home of the gallant gentleman who after five years of captivity in Algiers and the loss of his hand in the Battle of Lepanto, wrote there, in his poverty and neglect, the first part of a romance which remains and must always remain one of the first if not the very first of the fictions of the world. I mean that

 Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,

Michael Cervantes; and I wish I could pay here that devoir to his memory and fame which squalid circumstance forbade me to render under the roof that once sheltered him. One can never say enough in his praise, and even Valladolid seems to have thought so, for the city has put up a tablet to him with his bust above it in the front of his incredible house and done him the homage of a reverent inscription. It is a very little house, as small as Ariosto’s in Ferrara, which he said was so apt for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of these a gentleman was stabbed near the author’s house. The alarm brought Cervantes to the door and being the first to reach the dying man he was promptly arrested, together with his wife, his two sisters, and his niece, who were living with him and who were taken up as accessories before the fact. The whole abomination is matter of judicial record, and it appears from this that suspicion fell upon the gentle family (one sister was a nun) because they were living in that infamous place. The man whose renown has since filled the civilized world fuller even than the name of his contemporary, Shakespeare (they died on the same day), was then so unknown to the authorities of Valladolid that he had great ado to establish the innocence of himself and his household. To be sure, his Don Quixote had not yet appeared, though he is said to have finished the first part in that miserable abode in that vile region; but he had written poems and plays, especially his most noble tragedy of “Numancia,” and he had held public employs and lived near enough to courts to be at least in their cold shade. It is all very Spanish and very strange, and perhaps the wonder should be that in this most provincial of royal capitals, in a time devoted to the extirpation of ideas, the fact that he was a poet and a scholar did not tell fatally against him. In his declaration before the magistrates he says that his literary reputation procured him the acquaintance of courtiers and scholars, who visited him in that pitiable abode where the ladies of his family cared for themselves and him with the help of one servant maid.

They had an upper floor of the house, which stands at the base of a stone terrace dropping from the wide, dusty, fly-blown street, where I stayed long enough to buy a melon (I was always buying a melon in Spain) and put it into my cab before I descended the terrace to revere the house of Cervantes on its own level. There was no mistaking it; there was the bust and the inscription; but it was well I bought my melon before I ventured upon this act of piety; I should not have had the stomach for it afterward. I was not satisfied with the outside of the house, but when I entered the open doorway, meaning to mount to the upper floor, it was as if I were immediately blown into the street again by the thick and noisome stench which filled the place from some unmentionable if not unimaginable source.

It was like a filthy insult to the great presence whose sacred shrine the house should have been religiously kept. But Cervantes dead was as forgotten in Valladolid as Cervantes living had been. In some paroxysm of civic pride the tablet had been set in the wall and then the house abandoned to whatever might happen. I thought foul shame of Valladolid for her neglect, and though she might have answered that her burden of memories was more than she could bear, that she could not be forever keeping her celebrity sweet, still I could have retorted, But Cervantes, but Cervantes! There was only one Cervantes in the world and there never would be another, and could not she watch over this poor once home of his for his matchless sake? Then if Valladolid had come back at me with the fact that Cervantes had lived pretty well all over Spain, and what had Seville done, Cordova done, Toledo done, Madrid done, for the upkeep of his divers sojourns more than she had done, after placing a tablet in his house wall? — certainly I could have said that this did not excuse her, but I must have owned that she was not alone, though she seemed most to blame.

IX

Now I look back and am glad I had not consciously with me, as we drove away, the boy who once meant to write the life of Cervantes, and who I knew from my recollection of his idolatry of that chief of Spaniards would not have listened to the excuses of Valladolid for a moment. All appeared fair and noble in that Spain of his which shone with such allure far across the snows through which he trudged morning and evening with his father to and from the printing-office, and made his dream of that great work the common theme of their talk. Now the boy is as utterly gone as the father, who was a boy too at heart, but who died a very old man many years ago; and in the place of both is another old man trammeled in his tangled memories of Spain visited and unvisited.

It would be a poor sort of make-believe if this survivor pretended any lasting indignation with Valladolid because of the stench of Cervantes’s house. There are a great many very bad smells in Spain everywhere, and it is only fair to own that a psychological change toward Valladolid had been operating itself in me since luncheon which Valladolid was not very specifically to blame for. Up to the time the wedding guests left us we had said Valladolid was the most interesting city we had ever seen, and we would like to stay there a week; then, suddenly, we began to turn against it. One thing: the weather had clouded, and it was colder. But we determined to be just, and after we left the house of Cervantes we drove out to the promenades along the banks of the Pisuerga, in hopes of a better mind, for we had read that they were the favorite resort of the citizens in summer, and we did not know but even in autumn we might have some glimpses of their recreation. Our way took us sorrowfully past hospitals and prisons and barracks; and when we came out on the promenade we found ourselves in the gloom of close set mulberry trees, with the dust thick on the paths under them. The leaves hung leaden gray on the boughs and there could never have been a spear of grass along those disconsolate ways. The river was shrunken in its bed, and where its current crept from pool to pool, women were washing some of the rags which already hung so thick on the bushes that it was wonderful there should be any left to wash. Squalid children abounded, and at one point a crowd of people had gathered and stood looking silently and motionlessly over the bank. We looked too and on a sand-bar near the shore we saw three gendarmes standing with a group of civilians. Between their fixed and absolutely motionless figures lay the body of a drowned man on the sand, poorly clothed in a workman’s dress, and with his poor, dead clay-white hands stretched out from him on the sand, and his gray face showing to the sky. Everywhere people were stopping and staring; from one of the crowded windows of the nearest house a woman hung with a rope of her long hair in one hand, and in the other the brush she was passing over it. On the bridge the man who had found the body made a merit of his discovery which he dramatized to a group of spectators without rousing them to a murmur or stirring them from their statuesque fixity. His own excitement in comparison seemed indecent.

X

It was now three o’clock and I thought I might be in time to draw some money on my letter of credit, at the bank which we had found standing in a pleasant garden in the course of our stroll through the town the night before. We had said, How charming it would be to draw money in such an environment; and full of the romantic expectation, I offered my letter at the window, where after a discreet interval I managed to call from their preoccupation some unoccupied persons within. They had not a very financial air, and I thought them the porters they really were, with some fear that I had come after banking-hours. But they joined in reassuring me, and told me that if I would return after five o’clock the proper authorities would be there.

I did not know then what late hours Spain kept in every way; but I concealed my surprise; and I came back at the time suggested, and offered my letter at the window with a request for ten pounds, which I fancied I might need. A clerk took the letter and scrutinized it with a deliberation which I thought it scarcely merited. His self-respect doubtless would not suffer him to betray that he could not read the English of it; and with an air of wishing to consult higher authority he carried it to another clerk at a desk across the room. To this official it seemed to come as something of a blow. Tie made a show of reading it several times over, inside and out, and then from the pigeonhole of his desk he began to accumulate what I supposed corroborative documents, or pieces justificatives. When lie had amassed a heap several inches thick, he rose and hurried out through the gate, across the hall where I sat, into a room beyond. He returned without in any wise referring himself to me and sat down at his desk again. The first clerk explained to the anxious face with which I now approached him that the second clerk had taken my letter to the director. I went back to my seat and waited fifteen minutes longer, fifteen having passed already; then I presented my anxious face, now somewhat indignant, to the first clerk again. “What is the director doing with my letter?” The first clerk referred my question to the second clerk, who answered from his place, “He is verifying the signature.” “But what signature?” I wondered to myself, reflecting that he had as yet had none of mine. Could it be the signature of my New York banker or my London one? I repaired once more to the window, after another wait, and said in polite but firm Castilian, “Do me the favor to return me my letter.” A commotion of protest took place within the barrier, followed by the repeated explanation that the director was verifying the signature. I returned to toy place and considered that the suspicious document which I had presented bore record of moneys drawn in London, in Paris, in Tours, in San Sebastian, which ought to have allayed all suspicion; then for the last time I repaired to the window; more in anger now than in sorrow, and gathered nay severest Spanish together for a final demand: “Do me the favor to give me back my letter without the pounds sterling.” The clerks consulted together; one of them decided to go to the director’s room, and after a dignified delay he came back with my letter, and dashed it down before me with the only rudeness I experienced in Spain.

I was glad to get it on any terms; it was only too probable that it would have been returned without the money if I had not demanded it; and I did what I could with the fact that this amusing financial transaction, involving a total of fifty dollars, had taken place in the chief banking-house of one of the commercial and industrial centers of the country. Valladolid is among other works the seat of the locomotive works of the northern railway lines, and as these machines average a speed of twenty-five miles an hour with express trains, it seemed strange to me that something like their rapidity should not have governed the action of that bank director in forcing me to ask back my discredited letter of credit.

XI

That evening the young voices and the young feet began to chirp again under our sun balcony. But there had been no sun in it since noon and presently a cold thin rain was falling and driving the promenaders under the arcades, where they were perhaps not unhappier for being closely massed. We missed the prettiness of the spectacle, though as yet we did not know that it was the only one of the sort we might hope to see in Spain, where women walk little indoors, and when they go out, drive and increase in the sort of loveliness which may be weighed and measured. Even under the arcades the promenade ceased early and in the adjoining Plaza Mayor, where the autos da fe once took place, the rain still earlier made an end of the municipal music, and the dancing of the lower ranks of the people. But we were fortunate in our Chilian friend’s representation of the dancing; he came to our table at dinner, and did with charming sympathy a mother waltzing with her babe in arms for a partner.

He came to the omnibus at the end of the promenade, when we were starting for the station next morning, not yet shaven, in his friendly zeal to make sure of seeing us off, and we parted with confident prophecies of meeting each other again in Madrid. We had already bidden adieu with effusion to our landlady-sisters-and-mother, and had wished to keep forever our own the adorable chico who, when cautioned against trying to carry a very heavy bag, valiantly jerked it to his shoulder and made off with it to the omnibus, as if it were nothing. I do not believe such a boy breathes out of Spain, where I hope he will grow up to the Oriental calm of so many of his countrymen, and rest from the toils of his nonage. At the last moment after the Chilian had left us, we perceived that one of our trunks had been forgotten, and the chico coursed back to the hotel for it and returned with the delinquent porter bearing it, as if to make sure of his bringing it.

When it was put on top of the omnibus, and we were in probably unparalleled readiness for starting to the station, at an hour when scarcely anybody else in Valladolid was up, a mule composing a portion of our team immediately fell down, as if startled too abruptly from a somnambulic dream. I really do not remember how it was got to its feet again; but I remember the anguish of the delay and the fear that we might not be able to escape from Valladolid after all our pains in trying for the Sud-Express at that hour; and I remember that when we reached the station we found that the Sud-Express was forty minutes behind time and that we were a full hour after that before starting for Madrid.

V. PHASES OF MADRID

I fancied that a kind of Gothic gloom was expressed in the black wine-skins of Old Castile, as contrasted with the fairer color of those which began to prevail even so little south of Burgos as Valladolid. I am not sure that the Old Castilian wine-skins derived their blackness from the complexion of the pigs, or that there are more pale pigs in the south than in the north of Spain; I am sure only of a difference in the color of the skins, which may have come from a difference in the treatment of them. At a venture I should not say that there were more black pigs in Old Castile than in Andalusia, as we observed them from the train, rooting among the unpromising stubble of the wheat-lands. Rather I should say that the prevailing pig of all the Spains was brown, corresponding to the reddish blondness frequent among both the Visigoths and the Moors. The black pig was probably the original, prehistoric Iberian pig, or of an Italian strain imported by the Romans; but I do not offer this as more than a guess. The Visigothic or Arabic pig showed himself an animal of great energy and alertness wherever we saw him, and able to live upon the lean of the land where it was leanest. At his youngest he abounded in the furrows and hollows, matching his russet with the russet of the soil and darting to and fro with the quickness of a hare. He was always of an ingratiating humorousness and endeared himself by an apparent readiness to enter into any joke that was going, especially that of startling the pedestrian by his own sudden apparition from behind a tuft of grass or withered stalk. I will not be sure, but I think we began to see his kind as soon as we got out of Yalladolid, when we began running through a country wooded with heavy, low-crowned pines that looked like the stone-pines of Italy, but were probably not the same. After twenty miles of this landscape the brown pig with pigs of other complexions, as much guarded as possible, multiplied among the patches of vineyard. He had there the company of tall black goats and rather unhappy-looking black sheep, all of whom he excelled in the art of foraging among the vines and the stubble of the surrounding wheat-lands. After the vineyards these opened and stretched themselves wearily, from low dull sky to low dull sky, nowise cheered in aspect by the squalid peasants, scratching their tawny expanses with those crooked prehistoric sticks which they use for plows in Spain. It was a dreary landscape, but it was good to be out of Valladolid on any terms, and especially good to be away from the station which we had left emulating the odors of the house of Cervantes.

I

There had been the usual alarm about the lack of places in the Sud-Express which we were to take at Valladolid, but we chanced getting them, and our boldness was rewarded by getting a whole compartment to ourselves, and a large, fat friendly conductor with an eye out for tips in every direction. The lunch in our dining-car was for the first time in Spain not worth the American price asked for it; everywhere else on the Spanish trains I must testify that the meals were excellent and abundant; and the refection may now have felt in some obscure sort the horror of the world in which the Sud-Express seemed to have lost itself. The scene was as alien to any other known aspect of our comfortable planet as if it were the landscape of some star condemned for the sins of its extinct children to wander through space in unimaginable desolation. It seldom happens in Spain that the scenery is the same on both sides of the railroad track, but here it was malignly alike on one hand and on the other, though we seemed to be running along the slope of an upland, so that the left hand was higher and the right lower. It was more as if we were crossing the face of some prodigious rapid, whose surges were the measureless granite boulders tossing everywhere in masses from the size of a man’s fist to the size of a house. In a wild chaos they wallowed against one another, the greater bearing on their tops or between them on their shoulders smaller regular or irregular masses of the same gray stone. Everywhere among their awful shallows grew gray live-oaks, and in among the rocks and trees spread tufts of gray shrub. Suddenly, over the frenzy of this mad world, a storm of cold rain broke whirling, and cold gray mists drove, blinding the windows and chilling us where we sat within. From time to time the storm lifted and showed again this vision of nature hoary as if with immemorial eld; if at times we seemed to have run away from it again it closed in upon us and held us captive in its desolation.

With longer and longer intervals of relief it closed upon us for the last time in the neighborhood of the gloomiest pile that ever a man built for his life, his death and his prayer between; but before we came to the palace-tomb of the Escorial, we had clear in the distance the vision of the walls and roofs and towers of the medieval city of Avila. It is said to be the perfectest relic of the Middle Ages after or before Rothenburg, and we who had seen Rothenburg solemnly promised ourselves to come back some day from Madrid and spend it in Avila. But we never came, and Avila remains a vision of walls and roofs and towers tawny gray glimpsed in a rift of the storm that again swept toward the Spanish capital.

II

We were very glad indeed to get to Madrid, though dismayed by apprehensions of the octroi which we felt sure awaited us. We recalled the behavior of the amiable officer of Valladolid who bumped our baggage about on the roof of our omnibus, and we thought that in Madrid such an officer could not do less than shatter our boxes and scatter their contents in the streaming street. What was then our surprise, our joy, to find that in Madrid there was no octroi at all, and that the amiable mozos who took our things hardly knew what we meant when we asked for it. At Madrid they scarcely wanted our tickets at the gate of the station, and we found ourselves in the soft embrace of modernity, so dear after the feudal rigors of Old Castile, when we mounted into a motor-bus and sped away through the spectacular town, so like Paris, so like Rome as to have no personality of its own except in this similarity, and never stopped till the liveried service swarmed upon us at the door of the Hotel Ritz.

Here the modernity which had so winningly greeted us at the station welcomed us more and consolingly. There was not only steam-heating, but the steam was on! It wanted but a turn of the hand at the radiators, and the rooms were warm. The rooms themselves responded to our appeal and looked down into a silent inner court, deaf to the clatter of the streets, and sleep haunted the very air, distracted, if at all, by the instant facility and luxury of the appliances. Was it really in Spain that a metallic tablet at the bed-head invited the wanderer to call with one button for the camerero, another for the camerera, and another for the mozo, who would all instantly come speaking English like so many angels? Were we to have these beautiful chambers for a humble two dollars and forty cents a day; and if it was true, why did we ever leave them and try for something ever so much worse and so very little cheaper? Let me be frank with the reader whom I desire for my friend, and own that we were frightened from the Eitz Hotel by the rumor of Eitz prices. I paid my bill there, which was imagined with scrupulous fullness to the last possible centimo, and so I may disinterestedly declare that the Eitz is the only hotel in Madrid where you get the worth of your money, even when the money seems more but scarcely is so. In all Spain I know of only two other hotels which may compare with it, and these are the English hotels, one at Ronda and one at Algeciras. If I add falteringly the hotel where we stayed a night in Toledo and the hotel where we abode a fortnight in Seville, I heap the measure of merit and press it down.

We did not begin at once our insensate search for another hotel in Madrid: but the sky had cleared and we went out into the strange capital so uncharacteristically characteristic, to find tea at a certain cafe we had heard of. It was in the Calle de Alcala (a name which so richly stimulates the imagination), and it looked out across this handsome street, to a club that I never knew the name of, where at a series of open windows was a flare of young men in silk hats leaning out on their elbows and letting no passing fact of the avenue escape them. It was worth their study, and if I had been an idle young Spaniard, or an idle old one, I would have asked nothing better than to spend my Sunday afternoon poring from one of those windows on my well-known world of Madrid as it babbled by. Even in my quality of alien, newly arrived and ignorant of that world, I already felt its fascination.

Sunday in Spain is perhaps different from other days of the week to the Spanish sense, but to the traveler it is too like them to be distinguishable except in that guilty Sabbath consciousness which is probably an effect from original sin in every Protestant soul. The casual eye could not see but that in Madrid every one seemed as much or as little at work as on any other day. My own casual eye noted that the most picturesquely evident thing in the city was the country life which seemed so to pervade it. In the Calle de Alcala, flowing to the Prado out of the Puerta del Sol, there passed a current of farm-carts and farm-wagons more conspicuous than any urban vehicles, as they jingled by, with men and women on their sleigh-belled donkeys, astride or atop the heavily laden panniers. The donkeys bore a part literally leading in all the rustic equipages, and with their superior intellect found a way through the crowds for the string-teams of the three or four large mules that followed them in harness. Whenever we saw a team of mules without this sage guidance we trembled for their safety; as for horses, no team of them attempted the difficult passage, though ox-trains seemed able to dispense with the path-finding donkeys.

To be sure, the horses abounded in the cabs, which were mostly bad, more or less. It is an idiosyncrasy of the cabs in Madrid that only the open victorias have rubber tires; if you go in a coupe you must consent to be ruthlessly bounced over the rough pavements on wheels unsoftened. It “follows as the night the day” that the coupe is not in favor, and that in its conservative disuse it accumulates a smell not to be acquired out of Spain. One such vehicle I had which I thought must have been stabled in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, and rushed on the Sud-Express for my service at Madrid; the stench in it was such that after a short drive to the house of a friend I was fain to dismiss it at a serious loss in pesetas and take the risk of another which might have been as bad. Fortunately a kind lady intervened with a private carriage and a coachman shaved that very day, whereas my poor old cabman, who was of one and the same smell as his cab, had not been shaved for three days.

III

This seems the place to note the fact that no Spaniard in humble life shaves oftener than once in three days, and that you always see him on the third day just before he has shaved. But all this time I have left myself sitting in the cafe looking out on the club that looks out on the Calle de Aleala, and keeping the waiter waiting with a jug of hot milk in his hand while I convince him (such a friendly, smiling man he is, and glad of my instruction!) that in tea one always wants the milk cold. To him that does not seem reasonable, since one wants it hot in coffee and chocolate; but he yields to my prejudice, and after that he always says, “Ah, leche fria!” and we smile radiantly together in the bond of comradery which cold milk establishes between man and man in Spain. As yet tea is a novelty in that country, though the young English queen, universally loved and honored, has made it the fashion in high life. Still it is hard to overcome such a prepossession as that of hot milk in tea, and in some places you cannot get it cold for love or money.

But again I leave myself waiting in that cafe, where slowly, and at last not very overwhelmingly in number, the beautiful plaster-pale Spanish ladies gather with their husbands and have chocolate. It is a riotous dissipation for them, though it does not sound so; the home is the Spanish ideal of the woman’s place, as it is of our anti-suffragists, though there is nothing corresponding to our fireside in it; and the cafe is her husband’s place without her. When she walks in the street, where mostly she drives, she walks with her eyes straight before her; to look either to the right or left, especially if a man is on either hand, is a superfluity of naughtiness. The habit of looking straight ahead is formed in youth, and it continues through life; so at least it is said, and if I cannot affirm it I will not deny it. The beautiful black eyes so discreetly directed looked as often from mantillas as hats, even in Madrid, which is the capital, and much infested by French fashions. You must not believe it when any one tells you that the mantilla is going out; it prevails everywhere, and it increases from north to south, and in Seville it is almost universal. Hats are worn there only in driving, but at Madrid there were many hats worn in walking, though whether by Spanish women or by foreigners, of course one could not, though a wayfaring man and an American, stop them to ask.

There are more women in the street at Madrid than in the provincial cities, perhaps because it is the capital and cosmopolitan, and perhaps because the streets are many of them open and pleasant, though there arc enough of them dark and narrow, too. I do not know just why the Puerta del Sol seems so much ampler and gayer than the Calle de Alcala; it is not really wider, but it seems more to concentrate the coming and going, and with its high-hoteled opposition of corners is of a supreme spectacularity. Besides, the name is so fine: what better could any city place ask than to be called Gate of the Sun? Perpetual trams wheeze and whistle through it; large shops face upon it; the sidewalks are thronged with passers, and the many little streets debouching on it pour their streams of traffic and travel into it on the right and left. It is mainly fed by the avenues leaving the royal palace on the west, and its eddying tide empties through the Calle de Alcala into the groves and gardens of the Prado whence it spreads over all the drives and parks east and north and south.

For a capital purposed and planned Madrid is very well indeed. It has not the symmetry which forethought gave the topography of Washington, or the beauty which afterthought has given Paris. But it makes you think a little of Washington, and a great deal of Paris, though a great deal more yet of Rome. It is Renaissance so far as architecture goes, and it is very modern Latin; so that it is of the older and the newer Rome that it makes you think. From, time to time it seemed to me I must be in. Rome, and I recovered myself with a pang to find I was not. Yet, as I say, Madrid was very well indeed, and when I reflected I had to own that I had come there on purpose to be there, and not to be in Rome, where also I should have been so satisfied to be.

IV

I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it was so Italian, so Roman. It had a wide grape arbor before it, with a generous spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a balustrade of marble, with fat putti, or marble boys, on the corners, who would have watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied with looking like so many thousands of putti in Italy. They looked like Italian putti with a difference, the difference that passes between all the Spanish things and the Italian things they resemble. They were coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough in aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which Italian art learns from nature to give the faces of putti. Yet they were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing in pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not know but dozing in the hours of siesta. If they had been in wood Spanish art would have known how to make them better, but in stone they had been gathering an acceptable weather stain during the human generations they had been there, and their plump stomachs were weather-beaten white.

I do not know if they had been there long enough to have witnessed the murder of Cromwell’s ambassador done in our street by two Jacobite gentlemen who could not abide his coming to honor in the land where they were in exile from England. That must have been sometime about the middle of the century after Philip II., bigot as he was, could not bear the more masterful bigotry of the archbishop of Toledo, and brought his court from that ancient capital, and declared Madrid henceforward the capital forever; which did not prevent Philip III. from taking his court to Valladolid and making that the capital en titre when he liked. However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever, returned with his court to Madrid and it has ever since remained the capital, and has come, with many natural disadvantages, to look its supremacy. For my pleasure I would rather live in Seville, but that would be a luxurious indulgence of the love of beauty, and like a preference of Venice in Italy when there was Rome to live in. Madrid is not Rome, but it makes you think of Rome as I have said, and if it had a better climate it would make you think of Rome still more. Notoriously, however, it has not a good climate and we had not come at the right season to get the best of the bad. The bad season itself was perverse, for the rains do not usually begin in their bitterness at Madrid before November, and now they began early in October. The day would open fair, with only a few little white clouds in the large blue, and if we could trust other’s experience we knew it would rain before the day closed; only a morning absolutely clear could warrant the hope of a day fair till sunset. Shortly after noon the little white clouds would drift together and be joined by others till they hid the large blue, and then the drops would begin to fall. By that time the air would have turned raw and chill, and the rain would be of a cold which it kept through the night.

This habit of raining every afternoon was what kept us from seeing rank, riches, and beauty in the Paseo de la Castellana, where they drive only on fine afternoons; they now remained at home even more persistently than we did, for with that love of the fashionable world for which I am always blaming myself I sometimes took a cab and fared desperately forth in pursuit of them. Only once did I seem to catch a glimpse of them, and that once I saw a closed carriage weltering along the drive between the trees and the trams that border it, with the coachman and footman snugly sheltered under umbrellas on the box. This was something, though not a great deal; I could not make out the people inside the carriage; yet it helped to certify to me the fact that the great world does drive in the Paseo de la Castellana and does not drive in the Paseo del Prado; that is quite abandoned, even on the wettest days, to the very poor and perhaps unfashionable people.

V

It may have been our comparative defeat with fashion in its most distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed ourselves in coming to Spain to set the Spaniards an example of civilization by inflexibly refusing to see a bull-fight under any circumstances or for any consideration; but it seemed to us that it was a sort of public duty to go and see the crowd, what it was like, in the time and place where the Spanish crowd is most like itself. We would go and remain in our places till everybody else was placed, and then, when the picadors and banderilleros and matadors were all ranged in the arena, and the gate was lifted, and the bull came rushing madly in, we would rise before he had time to gore anybody, and go inexorably away. This union of self-indulgence and self-denial seemed almost an act of piety when we learned that the bull-fight was to be on Sunday, and we prepared ourselves with tickets quite early in the week. On Saturday afternoon it rained, of course, but the worst was that it rained on Sunday morning, and the clouds did not lift till noon. Then the glowing concierge of our hotel, a man so gaily hopeful, so expansively promising that I could hardly believe he was not an Italian, said that there could not possibly be a bull-fight that day; the rain would have made the arena so slippery that man, horse, and bull would all fall down together in a common ruin, with no hope whatever of hurting one another.

We gave up this bull-fight at once, but we were the more resolved to see a bull-fight because we still owed it to the Spanish people to come away before we had time to look at it, and we said we would certainly go at Cordova where we should spend the next Sabbath. At Cordova we learned that it was the closed season for bull-fighting, but vague hopes of usefulness to the Spanish public were held out to us at Seville, the very metropolis of bull-fighting, where the bulls came bellowing up from their native fields athirst for the blood of the profession and the aficionados, who outnumber there the amateurs of the whole rest of Spain. But at Seville we were told that there would be no more bull-feasts, as the Spaniards much more preferably call the bullfights, till April, and now we were only in October. We said, Never mind; we would go to a bull-feast in Granada; but at Granada the season was even more hopelessly closed. In Ronda itself, which is the heart, as Seville is the home of the bull-feast, we could only see the inside of the empty arena; and at Algeciras the outside alone offered itself to our vision. By this time the sense of duty was so strong upon us that if there had been a bull-feast we would have shared in it and stayed through till the last espada dropped dead, gored through, at the knees of the last bull transfixed by his unerring sword; and the other toreros, the banderilleros with their darts and the picadors with their disemboweled horses, lay scattered over the blood-stained arena. Such is the force of a high resolve in strangers bent upon a lesson of civilization to a barbarous people when disappointed of their purpose. But we learned too late that only in Madrid is there any bull-feasting in the winter. In the provincial cities the bulls are dispirited by the cold; but in the capital, for the honor of the nation, they somehow pull themselves together and do their poor best to kill and be killed. Yet in the capital where the zeal of the bulls, and I suppose, of the bull-fighters, is such, it is said that there is a subtle decay in the fashionable, if not popular, esteem of the only sport which remembers in the modern world the gladiatorial shows of imperial Rome. It is said, but I do not know whether it is true, that the young English queen who has gladly renounced her nation and religion for the people who seem so to love her, cannot endure the bloody sights of the bull-feast; and when it comes to the horses dragging their entrails across the ring, or the espada despatching the bull, or the bull tossing a landerillero in the air she puts up her fan. It is said also that the young Spanish king, who has shown himself such a merciful-minded youth, and seems so eager to make the best of the bad business of being a king at all, sympathizes with her, and shows an obviously abated interest at these supreme moments.

I do not know whether or not it was because we had failed with the bull-feast that we failed to go to any sort of public entertainment in Madrid. It certainly was in my book to go to the theater, and see some of those modern plays which I had read so many of, and which I had translated one of for Lawrence Barrett in the far-off days before the flood of native American dramas now deluging our theater. That play was “Un Drama Nueva,” by Estebanez, which between us we called “Yorick’s Love” and which my very knightly tragedian made his battle-horse during the latter years of his life. In another version Barrett had seen it fail in New York, but its failure left him with the lasting desire to do it himself. A Spanish friend, now dead but then the gifted and eccentric Consul General at Quebec, got me a copy of the play from Madrid, and I thought there was great reason in a suggestion from another friend that it had failed because it put Shakespeare on the stage as one of its characters; but it seemed to me that the trouble could be got over by making the poet Heywood represent the Shakespearian epoch. I did this and the sole obstacle to its success seemed removed. It went, as the enthusiastic Barrett used to say, “with a shout,” though to please him I had hurt it all I could by some additions and adaptations; and though it was a most ridiculously romantic story of the tragical loves of Yorick (whom the Latins like to go on imagining out of Hamlet a much more interesting and important character than Shakespeare ever meant him to be fancied), and ought to have remained the fiasco it began, still it gained Barrett much money and me some little.

I was always proud of this success, and I boasted of it to the bookseller in Madrid, whom I interested in finding me some still moderner plays after quite failing to interest another bookseller. Your Spanish merchant seems seldom concerned in a mercantile transaction; but perhaps it was not so strange in the case of this Spanish bookseller because he was a German and spoke a surprising English in response to my demand whether he spoke any. He was the frowsiest bookseller I ever saw, and he was in the third day of his unshavenness with a shirt-front and coat-collar plentifully bedandruffed from his shaggy hair; but he entered into the spirit of my affair and said if that Spanish play had succeeded so wonderfully, then I ought to pay fifty per cent, more than the current price for the other Spanish plays which I wanted him to get me. I laughed with him at the joke which I found simple earnest when our glowing concierge gave me the books next day, and I perceived that the proposed supplement had really been paid for them on my account. I should not now be grieving for this incident if the plays had proved better reading than they did on experiment. Some of them were from the Catalan, and all of them dealt with the simpler actual life of Spain; but they did not deal impressively with it, though they seemed to me more hopeful in conception than certain psychological plays of ten or fifteen years ago, which the Spanish authors had too clearly studied from Ibsen.

They might have had their effect in the theater, but the rainy weather had not only spoiled my sole chance of the bull-feast; the effect of it in a stubborn cold forbade me the night air and kept me from testing any of the new dramas on the stage, which is always giving new dramas in Madrid. The stage, or rather the theater, is said to be truly a passion with the Madrilenos, who go every night to see the whole or the part of a play and do not mind seeing the same play constantly, as if it were opera. They may not care to see the play so much as to be seen at it; that happens in every country; but no doubt the plays have a charm which did not impart itself from the printed page. The companies are reported very good: but the reader must take this from me at second hand, as he must take the general society fact. I only know that people ask you to dinner at nine, and if they go to the theater afterward they cannot well come away till toward one o’clock. It is after this hour that the tertulia, that peculiarly Spanish function, begins, but how long it lasts or just what it is I do not know. I am able to report confidently, however, that it is a species of salon and that it is said to be called a tertulia because of the former habit in the guests, and no doubt the hostess, of quoting the poet Tertullian. It is of various constituents, according as it is a fashionable, a literary, or an artistic tertulia, or all three with an infusion of science. Oftenest, I believe, it is a domestic affair and all degrees of cousinship resort to it with brothers and sisters and uncles, who meet with the pleasant Latin liking of frequent meetings among kindred. In some cases no doubt it is a brilliant reunion where lively things are said; in others it may be dull; in far the most cases it seems to be held late at night or early in the morning.

VI

It was hard, after being shut up several days, that one must not go out after nightfall, and if one went out by day, one must go with closed lips and avoid all talking in the street under penalty of incurring the dreaded pneumonia of Madrid. Except for that dreaded pneumonia, I believe the air of Madrid is not so pestilential as it has been reported. Public opinion is beginning to veer in favor of it, just as the criticism which has pronounced Madrid commonplace and unpicturesque because it is not obviously old, is now finding a charm in it peculiar to the place. Its very modernity embodies and imparts the charm, which will grow as the city grows in wideness and straightness. It is in the newer quarter that it recalls Rome or the newer quarters of Rome; but there is an old part of it that recalls the older part of Naples, though the streets are not quite so narrow nor the houses so high. There is like bargaining at the open stands with the buyers and sellers chaffering over them; there is a likeness in the people’s looks, too, but when it comes to the most characteristic thing of Naples, Madrid is not in it for a moment. I mean the bursts of song which all day long and all night long you hear in Naples; and this seems as good a place as any to say that to my experience Spain is a songless land. We had read much of the song and dance there, but though the dance might be hired the song was never offered for love or money. To be sure, in Toledo, once, a woman came to her door across the way under otir hotel window and sang over the slops she emptied into the street, but then she shut the door and we heard her no more. In Cordova there was as brief a peal of music from a house which we passed, and in Algeciras we heard one short sweet strain from a girl whom we could not see behind her lattice. Besides these chance notes we heard no other by any chance. But this is by no means saying that there is not abundant song in Spain, only it was kept quiet; I suppose that if we had been there in the spring instead of the fall we should at least have heard the birds singing. In Madrid there were not even many street cries; a few in the Puerta del Sol, yes; but the peasants who drove their mule-teams through the streets scarcely lifted their voices in reproach or invitation; they could trust the wise donkeys that led them to get them safely through the difficult places. There was no audible quarreling among the cabmen, and when you called a cab it was useless to cry “Heigh!” or shake your umbrella; you made play with your thumb and finger in the air and sibilantly whispered; otherwise the cabman ignored you and went on reading his newspaper. The cabmen of Madrid are great readers, much greater, I am sorry to say, than I was, for whenever I bought a Spanish paper I found it extremely well written. Now and then I expressed my political preferences in buying El Liberal which I thought very able; even El Imparcial I thought able, though it is less radical than El Liberal, a paper which is published simultaneously in Madrid, with local editions in several provincial cities.

For all the street silence there seemed to be a great deal of noise, which I suppose came from the click of boots on the sidewalks and of hoofs in roadways and the grind and squeal of the trams, with the harsh smiting of the unrubbered tires of the closed cabs on the rough granite blocks of the streets. But there are asphalted streets in Madrid where the sound of the hoofs and wheels is subdued, and the streets rough and smooth are kept of a cleanliness which would put the streets of New York to shame if anything could. Ordinarily you could get cabs anywhere, but if you wanted one very badly, when remote from a stand, there was more than one chance that a cab marked Libre would pass you with lordly indifference. As for motor taxi-cabs there are none in the city, and at Cook’s they would not take the responsibility of recommending any automobiles for country excursions.

VII

I linger over these sordid details because I must needs shrink before the mention of that incomparable gallery, the Museo del Prado. I am careful not to call it the greatest gallery in the world, for I think of what the Louvre, the Pitti, and the National Gallery are, and what our own Metropolitan is going to be; but surely the Museo del Prado is incomparable for its peculiar riches. It is part of the autobiographical associations with my Spanish travel that when John Hay, who was not yet, by thirty or forty years, the great statesman he became, but only the breeziest of young Secretaries of Legation, just two weeks from his post in Madrid, blew surprisingly into my little carpenter’s box in Cambridge one day, he boasted almost the first thing that the best Titians in the world were in the Prado galleries. I was too lately from Venice in 1867 not to have my inward question whether there could be anywhere a better Titian than the “Assumption,” but I loved Hay too much to deny him openly. I said that I had no doubt of it, and when the other day I went to the Prado it was with the wish of finding him perfectly right, triumphantly right. I had been from the first a strong partisan of Titian, and in many a heated argument with Ruskin, unaware of our controversy, I had it out with that most prejudiced partisan of Tintoretto. I always got the better of him, as one does in such dramatizations, where one frames one’s opponent’s feeble replies for him; but now in the Prado, sadly and strangely enough, I began to wonder if Ruskin might not have tacitly had the better of me all the time. If Hay was right in holding that the best Titians in the world were in the Prado, then I was wrong in having argued for Titian against Tintoretto with Ruskin. I could only wish that I had the “Assumption” there, or some of those senators whose portraits I remembered in the Academy at Venice. The truth is that to my eye he seemed to weaken before the Spanish masters, though I say this, who must confess that I failed to see the room of his great portraits. The Italians who hold their own with the Spaniards are Tintoretto and Veronese; even Murillo was more than a match for Titian in such pictures of his as I saw (I must own that I did not see the best, or nearly all), though properly speaking Murillo is to be known at his greatest only in Seville.

But Velasquez, but Velasquez! In the Prado there is no one else present when he is by, with his Philips and Charleses, and their “villainous hanging of the nether lip,” with his hideous court dwarfs and his pretty princes and princesses, his grandees and jesters, his allegories and battles, his pastorals and chases, which fitly have a vast salon to themselves, not only that the spectator may realize at once the rich variety and abundance of the master, but that such lesser lights as Rubens, Titian, Correggio, Giorgione, Tintoretto, Veronese, Rembrandt, Zurbaran, El Greco, Murillo, may not be needlessly dimmed by his surpassing splendor. I leave to those who know painting from the painter’s art to appreciate the technical perfection of Velasquez; I take my stand outside of that, and acclaim its supremacy in virtue of that reality which all Spanish art has seemed always to strive for and which in Velasquez it incomparably attains. This is the literary quality which the most untechnical may feel, and which is not clearer to the connoisseur than to the least unlearned.

After Velasquez in the Prado we wanted Goya, and more and more Goya, who is as Spanish and as unlike Velasquez as can very well be. There was not enough Goya abovestairs to satisfy us, but in the Goya room in the basement there was a series of scenes from Spanish life, mostly frolic campestral things, which he did as patterns for tapestries and which came near being enough in their way: the way of that reality which is so far from the reality of Velasquez. There, striving with their strangeness, we found a young American husband and wife who said they were going to Egypt, and seemed so anxious to get out of Spain that they all but asked us which turning to take. They had a Baedeker of 1901. which they had been deceived in at New York as the latest edition, and they were apparently making nothing of the Goyas and were as if lost down there in the basement. They were in doubt about going further in a country which had inveigled them from Gibraltar as far as its capital. They advised with us about Burgos, of all places, and when we said the hotels in Burgos were very cold, they answered, Well they had thought so; and the husband asked, Spain was a pretty good place to cut out, wasn’t it? The wife expected that they would find some one in Egypt who spoke English; she had expected they would speak French in Spain, but had been disappointed. They had left their warm things at Gibraltar and were almost frozen already. They were as good and sweet and nice as they could be, and we were truly sorry to part with them and leave them to what seemed to be a mistake which they were not to blame for.

I wish that all Europeans and all Europeanized Americans knew how to value such incorruptible con-nationals, who would, I was sure, carry into the deepest dark of Egypt and over the whole earth undimmed the light of our American single-heartedness. I would have given something to know from just which kind country town and companionable commonwealth of our Union they had come, but I would not have given much, for I knew that they could have come from almost any. In their modest satisfaction with our own order of things, our language, our climate, our weather, they would not rashly condemn those of other lands, but would give them a fair chance; and, if when they got home again, they would have to report unfavorably of the Old World to the Board of Trade or the Woman’s Club, it would not be without intelligent reservations, even generous reservations. They would know much more than they knew before they came abroad, and if they had not seen Europe distinctly, but in a glass darkly, still they would have seen it and would be the wiser and none the worse for it. They would still be of their shrewd, pure American ideals, and would judge their recollections as they judged their experiences by them; and I wish we were all as confirmed in our fealty to those ideals.

They were not, clearly enough, of that yet older fashion of Americans who used to go through European galleries buying copies of the masterpieces which the local painters were everywhere making. With this pair the various postal-card reproductions must have long superseded the desire or the knowledge of copies, and I doubt if many Americans of any sort now support that honored tradition. Who, then, does support it? The galleries of the Prado seem as full of copyists as they could have been fifty years ago, and many of them were making very good copies. I wish I could say they were working as diligently as copyists used to work, but copyists are now subject to frequent interruptions, not from the tourists but from one another. They used to be all men, mostly grown gray in their pursuit, but now they are both men and women, and younger and the women are sometimes very pretty. In the Prado one saw several pairs of such youth conversing together, forgetful of everything around them, and on terms so very like flirtatious that they could not well be distinguished from them. They were terms that other Spanish girls could enjoy only with a wooden lattice and an iron grille between them and the novios outside their windows; and no tourist of the least heart could help rejoicing with them. In the case of one who stood with her little figure slanted and her little head tilted, looking up into the charmed eyes of a tall rubio, the tourist could not help rejoicing with the young man too.

The day after our day in the Prado we found ourselves in the Museum of Modern Art through the kind offices of our mistaken cabman when we were looking for the Archaeological Museum. But we were not sorry, for some of the new or newer pictures and sculptures were well worth seeing, though we should never have tried for them. The force of the masters which the ideals of the past held in restraint here raged in unbridled excess: but if I like that force so much, why do I say excess? The new or newer Spanish art likes an immense canvas, say as large as the side of a barn, and it chooses mostly a tragical Spanish history in which it riots with a young sense of power brave to see. There were a dozen of those mighty dramas which I would have liked to bring away with me if I had only had a town hall big enough to put them into after I got them home. There were sculptures as masterful and as mighty as the pictures, but among the paintings there was one that seemed to subdue all the infuriate actions to the calm of its awful repose. This was Gisbert’s “Execution of Torrejos and his Companions,” who were shot at Malaga in 1830 for a rising in favor of constitutional government. One does not, if one is as wise as I, attempt to depict pictures, and I leave this most heroic, most pathetic, most heart-breaking, most consoling masterpiece for my reader to go and see for himself; it is almost worth going as far as Madrid to see. Never in any picture do I remember the like of those sad, brave, severe faces of the men standing up there to be shot, where already their friends lay dead at their feet. A tumbled top-hat in the foreground had an effect awfuller than a tumbled head would have had.

VIII

Besides this and those other histories there were energetic portraits and vigorous landscapes in the Modern Museum, where if we had not been bent so on visiting the Archaeological Museum, we would willingly have spent the whole morning. But we were determined to see the Peruvian and Mexican antiquities which we believed must be treasured up in it; and that we might not fail of finding it, I gave one of the custodians a special peseta to take us out on the balcony and show us exactly how to get to it. He was so precise and so full in his directions that we spent the next half-hour in wandering fatuously round the whole region before we stumbled, almost violently, upon it immediately back of the Modern Museum. Will, it be credited that it was then hardly worth seeing for the things we meant to see? The Peruvian and Mexican antiquities were so disappointing that we would hardly look at the Etruscan, Greek, and Roman things which it was so much richer in. To be sure, we had seen and overseen the like of these long before in Italy; but they were admirably arranged in this museum, so that without the eager help of the custodians (which two cents would buy at any turn) we could have found pleasure in them, whereas the Aztec antiquities were mostly copies in plaster and the Inca jewelry not striking.

Before finding the place we had had the help of two policemen and one newsboy and a postman in losing ourselves in the Prado where we mostly sought for it, and with difficulty kept ourselves from being thrust into the gallery there. In Spain a man, or even a boy, does not like to say he does not know where a place is; he is either too proud or too polite to do it, and he will misdirect you without mercy. But the morning was bright, and almost warm, and we should have looked forward to weeks of sunny weather if our experience had not taught us that it would rain in the afternoon, and if greater experience than ours had not instructed us that there would be many days of thick fog now before the climate of Madrid settled itself to the usual brightness of February. We had time to note again in the Paseo Castellana, which is the fashionable drive, that it consists of four rows of acacias and tamarisks and a stretch of lawn, with seats beside it; the rest is bare grasslessness, with a bridle-path on one side and a tram-line on the other. If it had been late afternoon the Paseo would have been filled with the gay world, but being the late forenoon we had to leave it well-nigh unpeopled and go back to our hotel, where the excellent midday breakfast merited the best appetite one could bring to it.

In fact, all the meals of our hotel were good, and of course they were only too superabundant. They were pretty much what they were everywhere in Spain, and they were better everywhere than they were in Granada where we paid most for them. They were appetizing, and not of the cooking which the popular superstition attributes to Spain, where the hotel cooking is not rank with garlic or fiery with pepper, as the untraveled believe. At luncheon in our Madrid hotel we had a liberal choice of eggs in any form, the delicious arroz a la Valencia, a kind of risotto, with saffron to savor and color it; veal cutlets or beefsteak, salad, cheese, grapes, pears, and peaches, and often melon; the ever-admirable melon of Spain, which I had learned to like in England. At dinner there were soup, fish, entree, roast beef, lamb, or poultry, vegetables, salad, sweet, cheese, and fruit; and there was pretty poor wine ad libitum at both meals. For breakfast there was good and true (or true enough) coffee with rich milk, which if we sometimes doubted it to be goat’s milk we were none the worse if none the wiser for, as at dinner we were not either if we unwittingly ate kid for lamb.

There were not many people in the hotel, but the dining-room was filled by citizens who came in with the air of frequenters. They were not people of fashion, as we readily perceived, but kindly-looking mercantile folk, and ladies painted as white as newly calcimined house walls; and all gravely polite. There was one gentleman as large round as a hogshead, with a triple arrangement of fat at the back of his neck which was fascinating. He always bowed when we met (necessarily with his whole back) and he ate with an appetite proportioned to his girth. I could wish still to know who and what he was, for he was a person very much to my mind. So was the head waiter, dark, silent, clean-shaven, who let me use my deplorable Spanish with him, till in the last days he came out with some very fair English which he had been courteously concealing from me. He looked own brother to the room-waiter in our corridor, whose companionship I could desire always to have. One could not be so confident of the sincerity of the little camarera who slipped out of the room with a soft, sidelong “De nada” at one’s thanks for the hot water in the morning; but one could stake one’s life on the goodness of this camarero. He was not so tall as his leanness made him look; he was of a national darkness of eyes and hair which as imparted to his tertian clean-shavenness was a deep blue. He spoke, with a certain hesitation, a beautiful Castilian, delicately lisping the sibilants and strongly throating the gutturals; and what he said you could believe. He never was out of the way when wanted; he darkled with your boots and shoes in a little closet next your door, and came from it with the morning coffee and rolls. In a stress of frequentation he appeared in evening dress in the dining-room at night, and did honor to the place; but otherwise he was to be seen only in our corridor, or in the cold, dark chamber at the stair head where the camareras sat sewing, kept in check by his decorum. Without being explicitly advised of the fact, I am sure he was the best of Catholics, and that he would have burnt me for a heretic if necessary; but he would have done it from his conscience and for my soul’s good after I had recanted. He seldom smiled, but when he did you could see it was from his heart.

His contrast, his very antithesis, the joyous concierge, was always smiling, and was every way more like an Italian than a Spaniard. He followed us into the wettest Madrid weather with the sunny rays of his temperament, and welcomed our returning cab with an effulgence that performed the effect of an umbrella in the longish walk from the curbstone to the hotel door, past the grape arbor whose fruit ripened for us only in a single bunch, though he had so confidently prophesied our daily pleasure in it. He seemed at first to be the landlord, and without reference to higher authority he gave us beautiful rooms overlooking the bacchanal vine which would have been filled with sunshine if the weather had permitted. When he lapsed into the concierge, he got us, for five pesetas, so deep and wide a wood-box, covered with crimson cloth, that he was borne out by the fact in declaring that the wood in it would last us as long as we stayed; it was oak wood, hard as iron, and with the bellows that accompanied it we blew the last billet of it into a solid coal by which we drank our last coffee in that hotel. His spirit, his genial hopefulness, reconciled us to the infirmities of the house during the period of transition beginning for it and covering our stay. It was to be rebuilt on a scale out-Ritzing the Ritz; but in the mean while it was not quite the Ritz. There was a time when the elevator-shaft seemed to have tapped the awful sources of the smell in the house of Cervantes at Valladolid, but I do not remember what blameless origin the concierge assigned to the odor, or whether it had anything to do with the horses and the hens which a chance-opened back door showed us stabled in the rear of the hotel’s grandiose entrance.

Our tourist clientele, thanks I think to the allure of our concierge for all comers, was most respectable, though there was no public place for people to sit but a small reading-room colder than the baths of Apollo. But when he entered the place it was as if a fire were kindled in the minute stove never otherwise heated, and the old English and French newspapers freshened themselves up to the actual date as nearly as they could. We were mostly, perhaps, Spanish families come from our several provinces for a bit of the season which all Spanish families of civil condition desire more or less of: lean, dark fathers, slender, white-stuccoed daughters, and fat, white-stuccoed mothers; very still-faced, and grave-mannered. We were also a few English, and from time to time a few Americans, but I believe we were not, however worthy, very great-world. The concierge who had so skilfully got us together was instant in our errands and commissions, and when it came to two of us being shut up with colds brought from Burgos it vas he who supplemented the promptness of the apothecaries in sending our medicines and coming himself at times to ask after our welfare.

IX

In a strange country all the details of life are interesting, and we noticed with peculiar interest that Spain was a country where the prescriptions were written in the vulgar tongue instead of the little Latin in which prescriptions are addressed to the apothecaries of other lands. We were disposed to praise the faculty if not the art for this, but our doctor forbade. He said it was because the Spanish apothecaries were so unlearned that they could not read even so little Latin as the shortest prescription contained. Still I could not think the custom a bad one, though founded on ignorance, and I do not see why it should not have made for the greater safety of those who took the medicine if those who put it up should follow a formula in their native tongue. I know that at any rate we found the Spanish medicines beneficial and were presently suffered to go out-of-doors, but with those severe injunctions against going out after nightfall or opening our lips when we went out by day. It was rather a bother, but it was fine to feel one’s self in the classic Madrid tradition of danger from pneumonia and to be of the dignified company of the Spanish gentlemen whom we met with the border of their cloaks over their mouths; like being a character in a capa y espada drama.

There was almost as little acted as spoken drama in the streets. I have given my impression of the songlessness of Spain in Madrid as elsewhere, but if there was no street singing there was often street playing by pathetic bands of blind minstrels with guitars and mandolins. The blind abound everywhere in Spain in that profession of street beggary which I always encouraged, believing as I do that comfort in this unbalanced world cannot be too constantly reminded of misery. As the hunchbacks are in Italy, or the wooden peg-legged in England, so the blind are in Spain for number. I could not say how touching the sight of their sightlessness was, or how the remembrance of it makes me wish that I had carried more coppers with me when I set out. I would gladly authorize the reader when he goes to Madrid to do the charity I often neglected; he will be the better man, or even woman, for it; and he need not mind if his beneficiary is occasionally unworthy; he may be unworthy himself; I am sure I was.

But the Spanish street is rarely the theatrical spectacle that the Italian street nearly always is. Now and then there was a bit in Madrid which one would be sorry to have missed, such as the funeral of a civil magistrate, otherwise unknown to me, which I saw pass my cafe window: a most architectural black hearse, under a black roof, drawn by eight black horses, sable-plumed. The hearse was open at the sides, with the coffin fully showing, and a gold-laced chapeau bras lying on it. Behind came twenty or twenty-five gentlemen on foot in the modern ineffectiveness of frock-coats and top-hats, and after them eight or ten closed carriages. The procession passed without the least notice from the crowd, which I saw at other times stirred to a flutter of emulation in its small boys by companies of infantry marching to the music of sharply blown bugles. The men were handsomer than Italian soldiers, but not so handsome as the English, and in figure they were not quite the deplorable pigmies one often sees in France. Their bugles, with the rhythmical note which the tram-cars sound, and the guitars and mandolins of the blind minstrels, made the only street music I remember in Madrid.

Between the daily rains, which came in the afternoon, the sun was sometimes very hot, but it was always cool enough indoors. The indoors interests were not the art or story of the churches. The intensest Catholic capital in Christendom is in fact conspicuous in nothing more than the reputed uninterestingness of its churches. I went into one of them, however, with a Spanish friend, and I found it beautiful, most original, and most impressive for its architecture and painting, but I forget which church it was. We were going rather a desultory drive through those less frequented parts of the city which I have mentioned as like a sort of muted Naples: poor folk living much out-of-doors, buying and selling at hucksters’ stands and booths, and swarming about the chief market, where the guilty were formerly put to death, but the innocent are now provisioned. Outside the market was not attractive, and what it was within we did not look to see. We went rather to satisfy my wish to see whether the Manzanares is as groveling a stream as the guide-books pretend in their effort to give a just idea of the natural disadvantages of Madrid, as the only great capital without an adequate river. But whether abetted by the arts of my friend or not, the Manzanares managed to conceal itself from me; when we left our carriage and went to look for it, I saw only some pretty rills and falls which it possibly fed and which lent their beauty to the charming up and down hill walks, now a public pleasaunce, but formerly the groves and gardens of the royal palace. Our talk in Spanish from him and Italian from me was of Tolstoy and several esthetic and spiritual interests, and when we remounted and drove back to the city, whom should I see, hard by the King’s palace, but those dear Chilians of my heart whom we had left at Valladolid — husband, wife, sister, with the addition of a Spanish lady of very acceptable comeliness, in white gloves, and as blithe as they. In honor of the capital the other ladies wore white gloves too, but the husband and brother still kept the straw hat which I had first known him in at San Sebastian, and which I hope yet to know him by in New York. It was a glad clash of greetings which none of us tried to make coherent or intelligible, and could not if we had tried. They acclaimed their hotel, and I ours; but on both sides I dare say we had our reserves; and then we parted, secure that the kind chances of travel would bring us together again somewhere.

I did not visit the palace, but the Royal Armory I had seen two days before on a gay morning that had not yet sorrowed to the afternoon’s rain. At the gate of the palace I fell into the keeping of one of the authorized guides whom I wish I could identify so that I could send the reader to pay him the tip I came short in. It is a pang to think of the repressed disappointment in his face when in a moment of insensate sparing I gave him the bare peseta to which he was officially entitled, instead of the two or three due his zeal and intelligence; and I strongly urge my readers to be on their guard against a mistaken meanness like mine. I can never repair that, for if I went back to the Royal Armory I should not know him by sight, and if I sought among the guides saying I was the stranger who had behaved in that shabby sort, how would that identify me among so many other shabby strangers? He had the intelligence to leave me and the constant companion of these travels to ourselves as we went about that treasury of wonders, but before we got to the armory he stayed us with a delicate gesture outside the court of the palace till a troop for the guard-mounting had gone in. Then he led us across the fine, beautiful quadrangle to the door of the museum, and waited for us there till we came out. By this time the space was brilliant with the confronted bodies of troops, those about to be relieved of guard duty, and those come to relieve them, and our guide got us excellent places where we could see everything and yet be out of the wind which was beginning to blow cuttingly through the gates and colonnades. There were all arms of the service — horse, foot, and artillery; and the ceremony, with its pantomime and parley, was much more impressive than the changing of the colors which I had once seen at Buckingham Palace. The Spanish privates took the business not less seriously than the British, and however they felt the Spanish officers did not allow themselves to look bored. The marching and countermarching was of a refined stateliness, as if the pace were not a goose step but a peacock step; and the music was of an exquisitely plaintive and tender note, which seemed to grieve rather than exult; I believe it was the royal march which they were playing, but I am not versed in such matters. Nothing could have been fitter than the quiet beauty of the spectacle, opening through the westward colonnade to the hills and woods of the royal demesne, with yellowing and embrowning trees that billowed from distance to distance. Some day these groves and forests must be for the people’s pleasure, as all royal belongings seem finally to be; and in the mean time I did not grudge the landscape to the young king and queen who probably would not have grudged it to me. Our guide valued himself upon our admiration of it; without our special admiration he valued himself upon the impressive buildings of the railway station in the middle distance. I forget whether he followed us out of the quadrangle into the roadway where we had the advantage of some picturesque army wagons, and some wagoners in red-faced jackets and red trousers, and top-boots with heavy fringes of leathern strings. Yet it must have been he who made us aware of a high-walled inclosure where soldiers found worthy of death by court martial could be conveniently shot; though I think we discovered for ourselves the old woman curled up out of the wind in a sentry-box, and sweetly asleep there while the boys were playing marbles on the smooth ground before it. I must not omit the peanut-boaster in front of the palace; it was in the figure of an ocean steamer, nearly as large as the Lusitania, and had smoke coming out of the funnel, with rudder and screw complete and doll sailors climbing over the rigging.

But it is impossible to speak adequately of the things in that wonderful armory. If the reader has any pleasure in the harnesses of Spanish kings and captains, from the great Charles the Fifth down through all the Philips and the Charleses, he can glut it there. Their suits begin almost with their steel baby clothes, and adapt themselves almost to their senile decrepitude. There is the horse-litter in which the great emperor was borne to battle, and there is the sword which Isabella the great queen wore; and I liked looking at the lanterns and the flags of the Turkish galleys from the mighty sea-fight cf Lepanto, and the many other trophies won from the Turks. The pavilion of Francis I. taken at Pavia was of no secondary interest, and everywhere was personal and national history told in the weapons and the armor of those who made the history. Perhaps some time the peoples will gather into museums the pens and pencils and chisels of authors and artists, and the old caps and gowns they wore, or the chairs they sat in at their work, or the pianos and violoncellos of famous musicians, or the planes of surpassing carpenters, or the hammers of eminent ironworkers; but these things will never be so picturesque as the equipments with which the military heroes saved their own lives or took others’. We who have never done either must not be unreasonable or impatient. It will be many a long century yet before we are appreciated at the value we now set upon ourselves. In the mean while we do not have such a bad time, and we are not so easily forgotten as some of those princes and warriors.

XI

One of the first errors of our search for the Archaeological Museum, promoted by the mistaken kindness of people we asked the way, found us in the Academy of Fine Arts, where in the company of a fat and flabby Rubens (Susanna, of course, and those filthy Elders) we chanced on a portrait of Goya by himself: a fine head most takingly shrewd. But there was another portrait by him, of the ridiculous Godoy, Prince of the Peace, a sort of handsome, foolish fleshy George Fourthish person looking his character and history: one of the most incredible parasites who ever fattened on a nation. This impossible creature, hated more than feared, and despised more than hated, who misruled a generous people for twenty-five years, throughout the most heroic period of their annals, the low-born paramour of their queen and the beloved friend of the king her husband, who honored and trusted him with the most pathetic single-hearted and simple-minded devotion, could not look all that he was and was not; but in this portrait by Goya he suggested his unutterable worthlessness: a worthlessness which you can only begin to realize by successively excluding all the virtues, and contrasting it with the sort of abandon of faith on the part of the king; this in the common imbecility, the triune madness of the strange group, has its sublimity. In the next room are two pieces of Goya’s which recall in their absolute realism another passage of Spanish history with unparalleled effect. They represent, one the accused heretics receiving sentence before a tribunal of the Inquisition, and the other the execution of the sentence, where the victims are mocked by a sort of fools’ caps inscribed with the terms of their accusal. Their faces are turned on the spectator, who may forget them if he can.

I had the help of a beautiful face there which Goya had also painted: the face of Moratin, the historian of the Spanish drama whose book had been one of the consolations of exile from Spain in my Ohio village. That fine countenance rapt me far from where I stood, to the village, with its long maple-shaded summer afternoons, and its long lamp-lit winter nights when I was trying to find my way through Moratin’s history of the Spanish drama, and somehow not altogether failing, so that fragments of the fact still hang about me. I wish now I could find the way back through it, or even to it, but between me and it there are so many forgotten passes that it would be hopeless trying. I can only remember the pride and joy of finding my way alone through it, and emerging from time to time into the light that glimmered before me. I cannot at all remember whether it was before or after exploring this history that I ventured upon the trackless waste of a volume of the dramatists themselves, where I faithfully began with the earliest and came down to those of the great age when Cervantes and Calderon and Lope de Vega were writing the plays. It was either my misfortune that I read Lope and not Calderon, or that I do not recall reading Calderon at all, and know him only by a charming little play of Madrid life given ten or fifteen years ago by the pupils of the Dramatic Academy in New York. My lasting ignorance of this master was not for want of knowing how great he was, especially from Lowell, who never failed to dwell on it when the talk was of Spanish literature. The fact is I did not get much pleasure out of Lope, but I did enjoy the great tragedy of Cervantes, and such of his comedies as I found in that massive volume.

I did not realize, however, till I saw that play of Calderon’s, in New York, how much the Spanish drama lias made Madrid its scene; and until one knows modern Spanish fiction one cannot know how essentially the incongruous city is the capital of the Spanish imagination. Of course the action of Gil Bias largely passes there, but Gil Blas in only adoptively a Spanish novel, and the native picaresque story is oftener at home in the provinces; but since Spanish fiction has come to full consciousness in the work of the modern masters it has resorted more and more to Madrid. If I speak only of Galdos and Valdes by name, it is because I know them best as the greatest of their time; but I fancy the allure of the capital has been felt by every other modern more or less; and if I were a Spanish author I should like to put a story there. If I were a Spaniard at all, I should like to live there a part of the year, or to come up for some sojourn, as the real Spaniards do. In such an event I should be able to tell the reader more about Madrid than I now know. I should not be poorly keeping to hotels and galleries and streets and the like surfaces of civilization; but should be saying all sorts of well-informed and surprising things about my fellow-citizens. As it is I have tried somewhat to say how I think they look to a stranger, and if it is not quite as they have looked to other strangers I do not insist upon my own stranger’s impression. There is a great choice of good books about Spain, so that I do not feel bound to add to them with anything like finality.

I have tried to give a sense of the grand-opera effect of the street scene, but I have record of only one passage such as one often sees in Italy where moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to the theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our hotel, against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an admirable background. The woman in a black dress, with a red shawl over her shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable, confronting the middle-class man who, while people went and came about them, poured out his mind to her, with many frenzied gestures, but mostly using one hand for emphasis. He seemed to be telling something rather than asserting himself or accusing her; portraying a past fact or defining a situation; and she waited immovably silent till he had finished. Then she began and warmed to her work, but apparently without anger or prejudice. She talked herself out, as he had talked himself out. He waited and then he left her and crossed to the other corner. She called after him as he kept on down the street. She turned away, but stopped, and turned again and called after him till he passed from sight. Then she turned once more and went her own way. Nobody minded, any more than if they had been two unhappy ghosts invisibly and inaudibly quarreling, but I remained, and remain to this day, afflicted because of the mystery of their dispute.

We did not think there were so many boys, proportionately, or boys let loose, in Madrid as in the other towns we had seen, and we remarked to that sort of foreign sojourner who is so often met in strange cities that the children seemed like little men and women. “Yes,” he said, “the Spaniards are not children until they are thirty or forty, and then they never grow up.” It was perhaps too epigrammatic, but it may have caught at a fact. From another foreign sojourner I heard that the Catholicism of Spain, in spite of all newspaper appearances to the contrary and many bold novels, is still intense and unyieldingly repressive. But how far the severity of the church characterizes manners it would be hard to say. Perhaps these are often the effect of temperament. One heard more than one saw of the indifference of shop-keepers to shoppers in Madrid; in Andalusia, say especially in Seville, one saw nothing of it. But from the testimony of sufferers it appears to be the Madrid shop-keeper’s reasonable conception that if a customer comes to buy something it is because he, or more frequently she, wants it and is more concerned than himself in the transaction. He does not put himself about in serving her, and if she intimates that he is rudely indifferent, and that though she has often come to him before she will never come again, he remains tranquil. From experience I cannot say how true this is; but certainly I failed to awaken any lively emotion in the booksellers of whom I tried to buy some modern plays. It seemed to me that I was vexing them in the Oriental calm which they would have preferred to my money, or even my interest in the new Spanish drama. But in a shop where fans were sold, the shopman, taken in an unguarded moment, seemed really to enter into the spirit of our selection for friends at home; he even corrected my wrong accent in the Spanish word for fan, which was certainly going a great way.

XII

It was not the weather for fans in Madrid, where it rained that cold rain every afternoon, and once the whole of one day, and we could not reasonably expect to see fans in the hands of ladies in real life so much as in the pictures of ladies on the fans themselves. In fact, I suppose that to see the Madrilenas most in character one should see them in summer which in southern countries is the most characteristic season. Theophile Gautier was governed by this belief when he visited Spain in the hottest possible weather, and left for the lasting delight of the world the record of that Voyage en Espagne which he made seventy-two years ago. He then thought the men better dressed than the women at Madrid. Their boots are as “varnished, and they are gloved as white as possible. Their coats are correct and their trousers laudable; but the cravat is not of the same purity, and the waistcoat, that only part of modern dress where the fancy may play, is not always of irreproachable taste.” As to the women: “What we understand in France as the Spanish type does not exist in Spain... One imagines usually, when one says mantilla and senora, an oval, rather long and pale, with large dark eyes, surmounted with brows of velvet, a thin nose, a little arched, a mouth red as a pomegranate, and, above all, a tone warm and golden, justifying the verse of romance, She is yellow like an orange. This is the Arab or Moorish type and not the Spanish type. The Madrilenas are charming in the full acceptation of the word; out of four three will be pretty; but they do not answer at all to the idea we have of them. They are small, delicate, well formed, the foot narrow and the figure curved, the bust of a rich contour; but their skin is very white, the features delicate and mobile, the mouth heart-shaped and representing perfectly certain portraits of the Regency. Often they have fair hair, and you cannot take three turns in the Prado without meeting eight blonds of all shades, from the ashen blond to the most vehement red, the red of the beard of Charles V. It is a mistake to think there are no blonds in Spain. Blue eyes abound there, but they are not so much liked as the black.”

Is this a true picture of the actual Madrilenas? What I say is that seventy-two years have passed since it was painted and the originals have had time to change. What I say is that it was nearly always raining, and I could not be sure. What I say, above all, is that I am not a Frenchman of the high Romantic moment and that what I chiefly noticed was how beautiful the mantilla was whether worn by old or young, how fit, how gentle, how winning. I suppose that the women we saw walking in it were never of the highest class; who would be driving except when we saw them going to church. But they were often of the latest fashion, with their feet hobbled by the narrow skirts, of which they lost the last poignant effect by not having wide or high or slouch or swashbuckler hats on; they were not top-heavy. What seems certain is that the Spanish women are short and slight or short and fat. I find it recorded that when a young English couple came into the Royal Armory the girl looked impossibly tall and fair.

The women of the lower classes are commonly handsome and carry themselves finely; their heads are bare, even of mantillas, and their skirts are ample. When it did not rain they added to the gaiety of the streets, and when it did to their gloom. Wet or dry the streets were always thronged; nobody, apparently, stayed indoors who could go out, and after two days’ housing, even with a fire to air and warm our rooms, we did not wonder at the universal preference. As I have said, the noise that we heard in the streets was mainly the clatter of shoes and hoofs, but now and then there were street cries besides those I have noted. There was in particular a half-grown boy in our street who had a flat basket decorated with oysters at his feet, and for long hours of the day and dark he cried them incessantly. I do not know that he ever sold them or cared; his affair was to cry them.

VI. A NIGHT AND DAY IN TOLEDO

If you choose to make your visit to Toledo an episode of your stay in Madrid, you have still to choose between going at eight in the morning and arriving back at five in the evening, or going at five one evening and coming back at the same hour the next. In either case you will have two hours’ jolting each way over the roughest bit of railroad in the world, and if your mozo, before you could stop him, has selected for your going a compartment over the wheels, you can never be sure that he has done worse for you than you will have done for yourself when you come back in a compartment between the trucks. However you go or come, you remain in doubt whether you have been jolting over rails jointed at every yard, or getting on without any track over a cobble-stone pavement. Still, if the compartment is wide and well cushioned, as it is in Spain nearly always, with free play for your person between roof and floor and wall and wall; and if you go at five o’clock you have from your windows, as long as the afternoon light lasts, while you bound and rebound, glimpses of far-stretching wheat-fields, with nearer kitchen-gardens rich in beets and cabbages, alternating with purple and yellow patches of vineyard.

I

I find from my ever-faithful note-book that the landscape seemed to grow drearier as we got away from Madrid, but this may have been the effect of the waning day: a day which at its brightest had been dim from recurrent rain and incessant damp. The gloom was not relieved by the long stops at the frequent stations, though the stops were good for getting one’s breath, and for trying to plan greater control over one’s activities when the train should be going on again. The stations themselves were not so alluring that we were not willing to get away from them; and we were glad to get away from them by train, instead of by mule-team over the rainy levels to the towns that glimmered along the horizon two or three miles off. There had been nothing to lift the heart in the sight of two small boys ready perched on one horse, or of a priest difficultly mounting another in his long robe. At the only station which I can remember having any town about it a large number of our passengers left the train, and I realized that they were commuters like those who might have been leaving it at some soaking suburb of Long Island or New Jersey. In the sense of human brotherhood which the fact inspired I was not so lonely as I might have been, when we resumed our gloomy progress, with all that punctilio which custom demands of a Spanish way-train. First the station-master rings a bell of alarming note hanging on the wall, and the mozos run along the train shutting the car doors. After an interval some other official sounds a pocket whistle, and then there is still time for a belated passenger to find his car and scramble aboard. When the ensuing pause prolongs itself until you think the train has decided to remain all day, or all night, and several passengers have left it again, the locomotive rouses itself and utters a peremptory screech. This really means going, but your doubt has not been fully overcome when the wheels begin to bump under your compartment, and you set your teeth and clutch your seat, and otherwise prepare yourself for the renewal of your acrobatic feats. I may not get the order of the signals for departure just right, but I am sure of their number. Perhaps the Sud-Express starts with less, but the Sud-Express is partly French.

It had been raining intermittently all day; now that the weary old day was done the young night took up the work and vigorously devoted itself to a steady downpour which, when we reached our hotel in Toledo, had taken the role of a theatrical tempest, with sudden peals of thunder and long loud bellowing reverberations and blinding flashes of lightning, such as the wildest stage effects of the tempest in the Catskills when Rip Van Winkle is lost would have been nothing to. Foreboding the inner chill of a Spanish hotel on such a day, we had telegraphed for a fire in our rooms, and our eccentricity had been interpreted in spirit as well as in letter. It was not the habitual hotel omnibus which met us at the station, but a luxurious closed carriage commanded by an interpreter who intuitively opened our compartment door, and conveyed us dry and warm to our hotel, in every circumstance of tender regard for our comfort, during the slow, sidelong uphill climb to the city midst details of historic and romantic picturesqueness which the lightning momently flashed in sight. From our carriage we passed as in a dream between the dress-coated head waiter and the skull-capped landlord who silently and motionlessly received us in the Gothic doorway, and mounted by a stately stair from a beautiful glass-roofed patio, columned round with airy galleries, to the rooms from which a smoky warmth gushed out to welcome us.

The warmth was from the generous blaze kindled in the fireplace against our coming, and the smoke was from the crevices in a chimneypiece not sufficiently calked with newspapers to keep the smoke going up the flue. The fastidious may think this a defect in our perfect experience, but we would not have had it otherwise, if we could, and probably we could not. We easily assumed that we were in the palace of some haughty hidalgo, adapted to the uses of a modern hotel, with a magical prevision which need not include the accurate jointing of a chimneypiece. The storm bellowed and blazed outside, the rain strummed richly on the patio roof which the lightning illumined, and as we descended that stately stair, with its walls ramped and foliaged over with heraldic fauna and flora, I felt as never before the disadvantage of not being still fourteen years old.

But you cannot be of every age at once and it was no bad thing to be presently sitting down in my actual epoch at one of those excellent Spanish dinners which no European hotel can surpass and no American hotel can equal. It may seem a descent from the high horse, the winged steed of dreaming, to have been following those admirable courses with unflagging appetite, as it were on foot, but man born of woman is hungry after such a ride as ours from Madrid; and it was with no appreciable loss to our sense of enchantment that we presently learned from our host, waiting skull-capped in the patio, that we were in no real palace of an ancient hidalgo, but were housed as we found ourselves by the fancy of a rich nobleman of Toledo whom the whim had taken to equip his city with a hotel of poetic perfection. I am afraid I have forgotten his name; perhaps I should not have the right to parade it here if I remembered it; but I cannot help saluting him brother in imagination, and thanking him for one of the rarest pleasures that travel, even Spanish travel, has given me.

II

One must recall the effect of such a gentle fantasy as his with some such emotion as one recalls a pleasant tale unexpectedly told when one feared a repetition of stale commonplaces, and I now feel a pang of retroactive self-reproach for not spending the whole evening after dinner in reading up the story of that most storied city where this Spanish castle received us. What better could I have done in the smoky warmth of our hearth-fire than to con, by the light of the electric bulb dangling overhead, its annals in some such voluntarily quaint and unconsciously old-fashioned volume as Irving’s Legends of the Conquest of Spain; or to read in some such (if there is any such other) imperishably actual and unfadingly brilliant record of impressions as Gautier’s Voyage en Espagne, the miserably tragic tale of that poor, wicked, over-punished last of the Gothic kings, Don Roderick? It comes to much the same effect in both, and as I knew it already from the notes to Scott’s poem of Don Roderick, which I had read sixty years before in the loft of our log cabin (long before the era of my unguided Spanish studies), I found it better to go to bed after a day which had not been without its pains as well as pleasures. I could recall the story well enough for all purposes of the imagination as I found it in the fine print of those notes, and if I could believe the reader did not know it I would tell him now how this wretched Don Roderick betrayed the daughter of Count Julian whom her father had intrusted to him here in his capital of Toledo, when, with the rest of Spain, it had submitted to his rule. That was in the eighth century when the hearts of kings were more easily corrupted by power than perhaps in the twentieth; and it is possible that there was a good deal of politics mixed up with Count Julian’s passion for revenge on the king, when he invited the Moors to invade his native land and helped them overrun it. The conquest, let me remind the reader, was also abetted by the Jews who had been flourishing mightily under the Gothic anarchy, but whom Don Roderick had reduced to a choice between exile or slavery when he came to full power. Every one knows how in a few weeks the whole peninsula fell before the invaders. Toledo fell after the battle of Guadalete, where even the Bishop of Seville fought on their side, and Roderick was lastingly numbered among the missing, and was no doubt killed, as nothing has since been heard of him. It was not until nearly three hundred years afterward that the Christians recovered the city. By this time they were no longer Arians, but good Catholics; so good that Philip II. himself, one of the best of Catholics (as I have told), is said to have removed the capital to Madrid because he could not endure the still more scrupulous Catholicity of the Toledan Bishop.

Nobody is obliged to believe this, but I should be sorry if any reader of mine questioned the insurpassable antiquity of Toledo, as attested by a cloud of chroniclers. Theophile Gautier notes that “the most moderate place the epoch of its foundation before the Deluge,” and he does not see why they do not put the time “under the pre-Adamite kings, some years before the creation of the world. Some attribute the honor of laying its first stone to Jubal, others to the Greek; some to the Roman consuls Tolmor and Brutus; some to the Jews who entered Spain with Nebuchadnezzar, resting their theory on the etymology of Toledo, which comes from Toledoth, a Hebrew word signifying generations, because the Twelve Tribes had helped to build and people it.”

III

Even if the whole of this was not accurate, it offered such an embarrassing abundance to the choice that I am glad I knew little or nothing of the antagonistic origins when I opened my window to the sunny morning which smiled at the notion of the overnight tempest, and lighted all the landscape on that side of the hotel. The outlook was over vast plowed lands red as Virginia or New Jersey fields, stretching and billowing away from the yellow Tagus in the foreground to the mountain-walled horizon, with far stretches of forest in the middle distance. What riches of gray roof, of white wall, of glossy green, or embrowning foliage in the city gardens the prospect included, one should have the brush rather than the pen to suggest; or else one should have an inexhaustible ink-bottle with every color of the chromatic scale in it to pour the right tints. Mostly, however, I should say that the city of Toledo is of a mellow gray, and the country of Toledo a rich orange. Seen from any elevation the gray of the town made me think of Genoa; and if the reader’s knowledge does not enable him, to realize it from this association, he had better lose no time in going to Genoa.

I myself should prefer going again to Toledo, where we made only a day’s demand upon the city’s wealth of beauty when a lifetime would hardly have exhausted it. Yet I would not counsel any one to pass his whole life in Toledo unless he was sure he could bear the fullness of that beauty. Add insurpassable antiquity, add tragedy, add unendurable orthodoxy, add the pathos of hopeless decay, and I think I would rather give a day than a lifetime to Toledo. Or I would like to go back and give another day to it and come every year and give a day. This very moment, instead of writing of it in a high New York flat and looking out on a prospect incomparably sky-scrapered, I would rather be in that glass-roofed patio of our histrionic hotel, engaging the services of one of the most admirable guides who ever fell to the lot of mortal Americans, while much advised by our skull-capped landlord to shun the cicerone of another hotel as “an Italian man,” with little or no English.

As soon as we appeared outside the beggars of Toledo swarmed upon us; but I hope it was not from them I formed the notion that the beauty of the place was architectural and not personal, though these poor things were as deplorably plain as they were obviously miserable. The inhabitants who did not ask alms were of course in the majority, but neither were these impressive in looks or bearing. Rather, I should say, their average was small and dark, and in color of eyes and hair as well as skin they suggested the African race that held Toledo for four centuries. Neither here nor anywhere else in Spain are there any traces of the Jews who helped bring the Arabs in; once for all, that people have been banished so perfectly that they do not show their noses anywhere. Possibly they exist, but they do not exist openly, any more than the descendants of the Moorish invaders practise their Moslem rites. As for the beggars, to whom I return as they constantly returned to us, it did not avail to do them charity; that by no means dispersed them; the thronging misery and mutilation in the lame, the halt and the blind, was as great at our coming back to our hotel as our going out of it. They were of every age and sex; the very school-children left their sports to chance our charity; and it is still with a pang that I remember the little girl whom we denied a copper when she was really asking for a florecito out of the nosegay that one of us carried. But how could we know that it was a little flower and not a “little dog” she wanted?

There was something vividly spectacular in the square, by no means large, which we came into on turning the corner from our hotel. It was a sort of market-place as well as business place, and it looked as if it might be the resort at certain hours of the polite as well as the impolite leisure of a city of leisure not apparently overworked in any of its classes. But at ten o’clock in the morning it was empty enough, and after a small purchase at one of the shops we passed from it without elbowing or being elbowed, and found ourselves at the portal of that ancient posada where Cervantes is said to have once sojourned at least long enough to write one of his Exemplary Novels. He was of such a ubiquitous habit that if we had visited every city of Spain we should have found some witness of his stay, but I do not believe we could have found any more satisfactory than this. It is verified by a tablet in its outer wall, and within it is convincingly a posada of his time. It has a large low-vaulted interior, with the carts and wagons of the muleteers at the right of the entrance, and beyond these the stalls of the mules where they stood chewing their provender, and glancing uninterestedly round at the intruders, for plainly we were not of the guests who frequent the place. Such, for a chamber like those around and behind the stalls, on the same earthen level, pay five cents of our money a day; they supply their own bed and board and pay five cents more for the use of a fire.

Some guests were coming and going in the dim light of the cavernous spaces; others were squatting on the ground before their morning meal. An endearing smoke-browned wooden gallery went round three sides of the patio overhead; half-way to this at one side rose an immense earthen water jar, dim red; piles of straw mats, which were perhaps the bedding of the guests, heaped the ground or hung from the gallery; and the guests, among them a most beautiful youth, black as Africa, but of a Greek perfection of profile, regarded us with a friendly indifference that contrasted strikingly with the fixed stare of the bluish-gray hound beside one of the wagons. He had a human effect of having brushed his hair from his strange grave eyes, and of a sad, hopeless puzzle in the effort to make us out. If he was haunted by some inexplicable relation in me to the great author whose dog he undoubtedly had been in a retroactive incarnation, and was thinking to question me of that ever unfulfilled boyish self-promise of writing the life of Cervantes, I could as successfully have challenged him to say how and where in such a place as that an Exemplary Novelist could have written even the story of The Illustrious Scullion. But he seemed on reflection not to push the matter with me, and I left him still lost in his puzzle while I came away in mine. Whether Cervantes really wrote one of his tales there or not, it is certain that he could have exactly studied from that posada the setting of the scene for the episode of the enchanted castle in Don Quixote, where the knight suffered all the demoniacal torments which a jealous and infuriate muleteer knew how to inflict.

IV

Upon the whole I am not sure that I was more edified by the cathedral of Toledo, though I am afraid to own it, and must make haste to say that it is a cathedral surpassing in some things any other cathedral in Spain. Chiefly it surpasses them in the glory of that stupendous retablo which fills one whole end of the vast fane, and mounting from floor to roof, tells the Christian story with an ineffable fullness of dramatic detail, up to the tragic climax of the crucifixion, the Calvario, at the summit. Every fact of it fixes itself the more ineffaceably in the consciousness because of that cunningly studied increase in the stature of the actors, who always appear life-size in spite of their lift from level to level above the spectator. But what is the use, what is the use? Am I to abandon the young and younger wisdom with which I have refrained in so many books from attempting the portrayal of any Italian, any English church, and fall into the folly, now that I am old, of trying to say again in words what one of the greatest of Spanish churches says in form, in color? Let me rather turn from that vainest endeavor to the trivialities of sight-seeing which endear the memory of monuments and make the experience of them endurable. The beautiful choir, with its walls pierced in gigantic filigree, might have been art or not, as one chose, but the three young girls who smiled and whispered with the young man near it were nature, which there could be no two minds about. They were pathetically privileged there to a moment of the free interplay of youthful interests and emotions which the Spanish convention forbids less in the churches than anywhere else.

The Spanish religion is, in fact, kind to the young in many ways, and on our way to the cathedral we had paused at a shrine of the Virgin in appreciation of her friendly offices to poor girls wanting husbands; they have only to drop a pin inside the grating before her and draw a husband, tall for a large pin and short for a little one; or if they can make their offering in coin, their chances of marrying money are good. The Virgin is always ready to befriend her devotees, and in the cathedral near that beautiful choir screen she has a shrine above the stone where she alighted when she brought a chasuble to St. Ildefonso (she owed him something for his maintenance of her Immaculate Conception long before it was imagined a dogma) and left the print of her foot in the pavement. The fact is attested by the very simple yet absolute inscription:

 Quando la Reina del Cielo

 Puso los pies en el suelo,

 En esta piedra los puso,

or as my English will have it:

 When the Queen of Heaven put

 Upon the earth her foot,

 She put it on this stone

and left it indelible there, so that now if you thrust your finger through the grille and touch the place you get off three hundred years of purgatory: not much in the count of eternity, but still something.

We saw a woman and a priest touching it as we stood by and going away enviably comforted; but we were there as connoisseurs, not as votaries; and we were trying to be conscious solely of the surpassing grandeur and beauty of the cathedral. Here as elsewhere in Spain the passionate desire of the race to realize a fact in art expresses itself gloriously or grotesquely according to the occasion. The rear of the chorus is one vast riot of rococo sculpture, representing I do not know what mystical event; but down through the midst of the livingly studied performance a mighty angel comes plunging, with his fine legs following his torso through the air, like those of a diver taking a header into the water. Nothing less than the sublime touch of those legs would have satisfied the instinct from which and for which the artist worked; they gave reality to the affair in every part.

I wish I could give reality to every part of that most noble, that most lovably beautiful temple. We had only a poor half-hour for it, and we could not do more than flutter the pages of the epic it was and catch here and there a word, a phrase: a word writ in architecture or sculpture, a phrase richly expressed in gold and silver and precious marble, or painted in the dyes of the dawns and sunsets which used to lend themselves so much more willingly to the arts than they seem to do now. From our note-books I find that this cathedral of Toledo appeared more wonderful to one of us than the cathedral of Burgos; but who knows? It might have been that the day was warmer and brighter and had not yet shivered and saddened to the cold rain it ended in. At any rate the vast church filled itself more and more with the solemn glow in which we left it steeped when we went out and took our dreamway through the narrow, winding, wandering streets that seemed to lure us where they would. One of them climbed with us to the Alcazar, which is no longer any great thing to see in itself, but which opens a hospitable space within its court for a prospect of so much of the world around Toledo, the world of yellow river and red fields and blue mountains, and white-clouded azure sky, that we might well have mistaken it for the whole earth. In itself, as I say, the Alcazar is no great thing for where it is, but if we had here in New York an Alcazar that remembered historically back through French, English, Arabic, Gothic. Roman, and Carthaginian occupations to the inarticulate Iberian past we should come, I suppose, from far and near to visit it. Now, however, after gasping at its outlook, we left it hopelessly, and lost ourselves, except for our kindly guide, in the crooked little stony lanes, with the sun hot on our backs and the shade cool in our faces. There were Moorish bits and suggestions in the white walls and the low flat roofs of the houses, but these were not so jealous of their privacy as such houses were once meant to be. Through the gate of one we were led into a garden of simple flowers belted with a world-old parapet, over which we could look at a stretch of the Gothic wall of King Wamba’s time, before the miserable Roderick won and lost his kingdom. A pomegranate tree, red with fruit, overhung us, and from the borders of marigolds and zinnias and German clover the gray garden-wife gathered a nosegay for us. She said she was three duros and a half old, as who should say three dollars and a half, and she had a grim amusement in so translating her seventy years.

V

It was hard by her cottage that we saw our first mosque, which had begun by being a Gothic church, but had lost itself in paynim hands for centuries, in spite of the lamp always kept burning in it. Then one day the Cid came riding by, and his horse, at sight of a white stone in the street pavement, knelt down and would not budge till men came and dug through the wall of the mosque and disclosed this indefatigable lamp in the church. We expressed our doubt of the man’s knowing so unerringly that the horse meant them to dig through the mosque. “If you can believe the rest I think you can believe that,” our guide argued.

He was like so many taciturn Spaniards, not inconversable, and we had a pleasure in his unobtrusive intelligence which I should be sorry to exaggerate. He supplied us with such statistics of his city as we brought away with us, and as I think the reader may join me in trusting, and in regretting that I did not ask more. Still it is something to have learned that in Toledo now each family lives English fashion in a house of its own, while in the other continental cities it mostly dwells in a flat. This is because the population has fallen from two hundred thousand to twenty thousand, and the houses have not shared its decay, but remain habitable for numbers immensely beyond those of the households. In the summer the family inhabits the first floor which the patio and the subterranean damp from the rains keep cool; in the winter it retreats to the upper chambers which the sun is supposed to warm, and which are at any rate dry even on cloudy days. The rents would be thought low in New York: three dollars a month get a fair house in Toledo; but wages are low, too; three dollars a month for a manservant and a dollar and a half for a maid. If the Toledans from high to low are extravagant in anything it is dress, but dress for the outside, not the inside, which does not show, as our guide satirically explained. They scrimp themselves in food and they pay the penalty in lessened vitality; there is not so much fever as one might think; but there is a great deal of consumption; and as we could not help seeing everywhere in the streets there were many blind, who seemed oftenest to have suffered from smallpox. The beggars were not so well dressed as the other classes, but I saw no such delirious patchwork as at Burgos. On the other hand, there were no idle people who were fashionably dressed; no men or women who looked great-world.

Perhaps if the afternoon had kept the sunny promise of the forenoon they might have been driving in the Paseo, a promenade which Toledo has like every Spanish city; but it rained and we did not stop at the Paseo which looked so pleasant.

The city, as so many have told and as I hope the reader will imagine, is a network of winding and crooked lanes, which the books say are Moorish, but which are medieval like those of every old city. They nowhere lend themselves to walking for pleasure, and the houses do not open their patios to the passer with Andalusian expansiveness; they are in fact of a quite Oriental reserve. I remember no dwellings of the grade, quite, of hovels; but neither do there seem to be many palaces or palatial houses in my hurried impression. Whatever it may be industrially or ecclesiastically, Toledo is now socially provincial and tending to extinction. It is so near Madrid that if I myself were living in Toledo I would want to live in Madrid, and only return for brief sojourns to mourn my want of a serious object in life; at Toledo it must be easy to cherish such an object.

Industrially, of course, one associates it with the manufacture of the famous Toledo blades, which it is said are made as wonderful as ever, and I had a dim idea of getting a large one for decorative use in a New York flat. But the foundry is a mile out of town, and I only got so far as to look at the artists who engrave the smaller sort in shops open to the public eye; and my purpose dwindled to the purchase of a little pair of scissors, much as a high resolve for the famous marchpane of Toledo ended in a piece of that pastry about twice the size of a silver dollar. Not all of the twenty thousand people of Toledo could be engaged in these specialties, and I owe myself to blame for not asking more about the local industries; but it is not too late for the reader, whom I could do no greater favor than sending him there, to repair my deficiency. In self-defense I urge my knowledge of a military school in the Alcazar, where and in the street leading up to it we saw some companies of the comely and kindly-looking cadets. I know also that there are public night schools where those so minded may study the arts and letters, as our guide was doing in certain directions. Now that there are no longer any Jews in Toledo, and the Arabs to whom they betrayed the Gothic capital have all been Christians or exiles for many centuries, we felt that we represented the whole alien element of the place; there seemed to be at least no other visitors of our lineage or language.

VI

We were going to spend the rest of the day driving out through the city into the country beyond the Tagus, and we drove off in our really splendid turnout through swarms of beggars whose prayers our horses’ bells drowned when we left them to their despair at the hotel door. At the moment of course we believe that it was a purely dramatic misery which the wretched creatures represented; but sometimes I have since had moments of remorse in which I wish I had thrown big and little dogs broadcast among them. They could not all have been begging for the profit or pleasure of it; some of them were imaginably out of work and worthily ragged as I saw them, and hungry as I begin to fear them. I am glad now to think that many of them could not see with their poor blind eyes the face which I hardened against them, as we whirled away to the music of our horses’ bells.

The bells pretty well covered our horses from their necks to their haunches, a pair of gallant grays urged to their briskest pace by the driver whose short square face and humorous mouth and eyes were a joy whenever we caught a glimpse of them. He was one of those drivers who know everybody; he passed the time of day with all the men we met, and he had a joking compliment for all the women, who gladdened at sight of him from the thresholds where they sat sewing or knitting: such a driver as brings a gay world to home-keeping souls and leaves them with the feeling of having been in it. I would have given much more than I gave the beggars in Toledo to know just in what terms he and his universal acquaintance bantered each other; but the terms might sometimes have been rather rank. Something, at any rate, qualified the air, which I fancied softer than that of Madrid, with a faint recurrent odor, as if in testimony of the driver’s derivation from those old rancid Christians, as the Spaniards used to call them, whose lineage had never been crossed with Moorish blood. If it was merely something the carriage had acquired from the stable, still it was to be valued for its distinction in a country of many smells; and I would not have been without it.

When we crossed the Tagus by a bridge which a company of workmen willingly paused from mending to let us by, and remained standing absent-mindedly aside some time after we had passed, we found ourselves in a scene which I do not believe was ever surpassed for spectacularity in any theater. I hope this is not giving the notion of something fictitious in it; I only mean that here Nature was in one of her most dramatic moods. The yellow torrent swept through a deep gorge of red earth, which on the farther side climbed in precipitous banks, cleft by enormous fissures, or chasms rather, to the wide plateau where the gray city stood. The roofs of mellow tiles formed a succession of levels from which the irregular towers and pinnacles of the churches stamped themselves against a sky now filled with clouds, but in an air so clear that their beautiful irregularities and differences showed to one very noble effect. The city still looked the ancient capital of the two hundred thousand souls it once embraced, and in its stony repair there was no hint of decay.

On our right, the road mounted through country wild enough at times, but for the most part comparatively friendly, with moments of being almost homelike. There were slopes which, if massive always, were sometimes mild and were gray with immemorial olives. In certain orchard nooks there were apricot trees, yellowing to the autumn, with red-brown withered grasses tangling under them. Men were gathering the fruit of the abounding cactuses in places, and in one place a peasant was bearing an arm-load of them to a wide stone pen in the midst of which stood a lordly black pig, with head lifted and staring, indifferent to cactuses, toward Toledo. His statuesque pose was of a fine hauteur, and a more imaginative tourist than I might have fancied him lost in a dream of the past, piercing beyond the time of the Iberian autochtons to those prehistoric ages

 When wild in woods the noble savage ran,

pursuing or pursued by his tusked and bristled ancestor, and then slowly reverting through the different invasions and civilizations to that signal moment when, after three hundred Moslem years, Toledo became Christian again forever, and pork resumed its primacy at the table. Dark, mysterious, fierce, the proud pig stood, a figure made for sculpture; and if he had been a lion, with the lion’s royal ideal of eating rather than feeding the human race, the reader would not have thought him unworthy of literature; I have seldom seen a lion that looked worthier of it.

We must have met farmer-folk, men and women, on our way and have seen their white houses farther or nearer. But mostly the landscape was lonely and at times nightmarish, as the Castilian landscape has a trick of being, and remanded us momently to the awful entourage of our run from Valladolid to Madrid. We were glad to get back to the Tagus, which if awful is not grisly, but wherever it rolls its yellow flood lends the landscape such a sublimity that it was no esthetic descent from the high perch of that proud pig to the mighty gorge through which, geologically long ago, the river had torn its way. When we drove back the bridge-menders stood aside for us while we were yet far off, and the women came to their doorways at the sound of our bells for another exchange of jokes with our driver. By the time a protracted file of mules had preceded us over the bridge, a brisk shower had come up, and after urging our grays at their topmost speed toward the famous church of San Juan de los Reyes Catolicos, we still had to run from our carriage door through the rain.

Happily the portal was in the keeping of one of those authorized beggars who guard the gates of heaven everywhere in that kind country, and he welcomed us so eagerly from the wet that I could not do less than give him a big dog at once. In a moment of confusion I turned about, and taking him for another beggar, I gave him another big dog; and when we came out of the church he had put off his cap and arranged so complete a disguise with the red handkerchief bravely tied round his head, that my innocence was again abused, and once more a big dog passed between us. But if the merit of the church might only be partially attributed to him, he was worth the whole three. The merit of the church was incalculable, for it was meant to be the sepulcher of the Catholic Kings, who were eventually more fitly buried in the cathedral at Granada, in the heart of their great conquest; and it is a most beautiful church, of a mingled Saracenic plateresque Gothic, as the guide-books remind me, and extravagantly baroque as I myself found it. I personally recall also a sense of chill obscurity and of an airy gallery wandering far aloof in the upper gloom, which remains overhead with me still, and the yet fainter sense of the balconies crowning like capitals the two pillars fronting the high altar. I am now sorry for our haste, but one has not so much time for enjoying such churches in their presence as for regretting them in their absence. One should live near them, and visit them daily, if one would feel their beauty in its recondite details; to have come three thousand miles for three minutes of them is no way of making that beauty part of one’s being, and I will not pretend that I did in this case. What I shall always maintain is that I had a living heartache from the sight of that space on the fagade of this church which is overhung with the chains of the Christian captives rescued from slavery among the Moors by the Catholic Kings in their conquest of Granada. They were not only the memorials of the most sorrowful fact, but they represented the misery of a thousand years of warfare in which the prisoners on either side suffered in chains for being Moslems or being Christians. The manacles and the fetters on the church front are merely decorative to the glance, but to the eye that reads deeper, how structural in their tale of man’s inhumanity to man! How heavily they had hung on weary limbs! How pitilessly they had eaten through bleeding ulcers to the bone! Yet they were very, very decorative, as the flowers are that bloom on battle-fields.

Even with only a few minutes of a scant quarter-hour to spare, I would not have any one miss seeing the cloister, from which the Catholic Kings used to enter the church by the gallery to those balcony capitals, but which the common American must now see by going outside the church. The cloister is turned to the uses of an industrial school, as we were glad to realize because our guide, whom we liked so much, was a night student there. It remains as beautiful and reverend as if it were of no secular use, full of gentle sculptures, with a garden in the middle, raised above the pavement with a border of thin tiles, and flower-pots standing on their coping, all in the shadow of tall trees, overhanging a deep secret-keeping well. From this place, where you will be partly sheltered from the rain, your next profitable sally through the storm will be to Santa Maria la Blanca, once the synagogue of the richest Jews of Toledo, but now turned church in spite of its high authorization as a place of Hebrew worship. It was permitted them to build it because they declared they were of that tribe of Israel which, when Caiaphas, the High Priest, sent round to the different tribes for their vote whether Jesus should live or die, alone voted that He should live. Their response, as Theophile Gautier reports from the chronicles, is preserved in the Vatican with a Latin version of the Hebrew text. The fable, if it is a fable, has its pathos; and I for one can only lament the religious zeal to which the preaching of a fanatical monk roused the Christian neighborhood in the fifteenth century, to such excess that these kind Jews were afterward forbidden their worship in the place. It is a very clean-looking, cold-looking white monument of the Catholic faith, with a retablo attributed to Berruguete, and much plateresque Gothic detail mingled with Byzantine ornament, and Moorish arabesquing and the famous stucco honeycombing which we were destined at Seville and Granada to find almost sickeningly sweet. Where the Rabbis read the law from their pulpit the high altar stands, and the pious populace has for three hundred years pushed the Jews from the surrounding streets, where they had so humbled their dwellings to the lowliest lest they should rouse the jealousy of their sleepless enemies.

VII

When we had visited this church there remained only the house of the painter known as El Greco, for whom we had formed such a distaste, because of the long features of the faces in his pictures, that our guide could hardly persuade us his house was worth seeing. Now I am glad he prevailed with us, for we have since come to find a peculiar charm in these long features and the characteristic coloring of El Greco’s pictures. The little house full of memorials and the little garden full of flowers, which ought to have been all forget-me-nots, were entirely delightful. As every one but I knew, and even I now know, he was born a Greek with the name of Theotocopuli, and studied tinder Titian till he found his account in a manner of his own, making long noses and long chins and high narrow foreheads in ashen gray, and at last went mad in the excess of his manner. The house has been restored by the Marquis de la Vega, according to his notion of an old Spanish house, and has the pleasantest small patio in the world, looked down into from a carved wooden gallery, with a pavement of red tiles interset with Moorish tiles of divers colors. There are interesting pictures everywhere, and on one wall the certificate of the owner’s membership in the Hispanic Society of America, which made me feel at home because it was signed with the name of an American friend of mine, who is repressed by prosperity from being known as a poet and one of the first Spanish scholars of any time.

The whole place is endearingly homelike and so genuinely hospitable that we almost sat down to luncheon in the kitchen with the young Spanish king who had lunched with the Marquis there a few weeks before. There was a veranda outside where we could linger till the rain held up, and look into the garden where the flowers ought to have been forget-me-nots, but were as usual mostly marigolds and zinnias. They crowded round tile-edged pools, and other flowers bloomed in pots on the coping of the garden-seats built up of thin tiles carved on their edges to an inward curve. It is strongly believed that there are several stories under the house, and the Marquis is going some day to dig them up or out to the last one where the original Jewish owner of the house is supposed to have hid his treasure. In the mean time we could look across the low wall that belted the garden in, to a vacant ground a little way off where some boys were playing with a wagon they had made. They had made it out of an oblong box, with wheels so rudely and imperfectly rounded, that they wabbled fearfully and at times gave way under the body; just as they did with the wagons that the boys I knew seventy years ago used to make.

I became so engrossed in the spectacle, so essentially a part of the drama, that I did not make due account of some particulars of the subterranean six stories of El Greco’s house. There must have been other things worth seeing in Toledo, thousands of others, and some others we saw, but most we missed, and many I do not remember. It was now coming the hour to leave Toledo, and we drove back to our enchanted castle for our bill, and for the omnibus to the station. I thought for some time that there was no charge for the fire, or even the smoke we had the night before, but my eyes were holden from the item which I found later, by seeing myself addressed as Milor. I had never been addressed as a lord in any bill before, but I reflected that in the proud old metropolis of the Goths I could not be saluted as less, and I gladly paid the bill, which observed a golden mean between cheapness and dearness, and we parted good friends with our host, and better with our guide, who at the last brought out an English book, given him by an English friend, about the English cathedrals. He was fine, and I could not wish any future traveler kinder fortune than to have his guidance in Toledo. Some day I am going back to profit more fully by it, and to repay him the various fees which he disbursed for me to different doorkeepers and custodians and which I forgot at parting and he was too delicate to remind me of.

When all leaves were taken and we were bowed out and away our horses, covered with bells, burst with the omnibus through a solid mass of beggars come to give us a last chance of meriting heaven by charity to them, and dashed down the hill to the station. There we sat a long half-hour in the wet evening air, wondering how we had been spared seeing those wretches trampled under our horses’ feet, or how the long train of goats climbing to the city to be milked escaped our wheels. But as we were guiltless of inflicting either disaster, we could watch with a good conscience the quiescent industry of some laborers in the brickyard beyond the track. Slowly and more slowly they worked, wearily, apathetically, fetching, carrying, in their divided skirts of cross-barred stuff of a rich Velasquez dirt color. One was especially worthy of admiration from his wide-brimmed black hat and his thoughtful indifference to his task, which was stacking up a sort of bundles of long grass; but I dare say he knew what it all meant. Throughout I was tormented by question of the precise co-racial quality of some English-speaking folk who had come to share our bone-breaking return to Madrid in the train so deliberately waiting there to begin afflicting us. English English they certainly were not; American English as little. If they were Australian English, why should not it have been a convention of polite travel for them to come up and say so, and save us that torment of curiosity? But perhaps they were not Australians.

VII. THE GREAT GRIDIRON OF ST. LAWRENCE

It seems a duty every Protestant owes his heresy to go and see how dismally the arch-enemy of heresy housed his true faith in the palace-tomb-and-church of the Escorial. If the more light-minded tourist shirks this act of piety, he makes a mistake which he will repent afterward in vain. The Escorial is, for its plainness, one of the two or three things worthiest seeing among the two or three hundred things worth seeing in Spain. Yet we feigned meaning to miss it after we returned to Madrid from Toledo, saying that everybody went to the Escorial and that it would be a proud distinction not to go. All the time we knew we should go, and we were not surprised when we were chosen by one of our few bright days for the excursion, though we were taken inordinately early, and might well have been started a little later.

I

Nothing was out of the common on the way to the station, and our sense of the ordinary was not relieved when we found ourselves in a car of the American open-saloon pattern, well filled with other Americans bent upon the same errand as ourselves; though I am bound to say that the backs of the transverse seats rose well toward the roof of the car with a certain originality.

When we cleared the city streets and houses, we began running out into the country through suburbs vulgarly gay with small, bright brick villas, so expressive of commuting that the eye required the vision of young husbands and fathers going in at the gates with gardening tools on their shoulders and under their arms. To be sure, the time of day and the time of year were against this; it was now morning and autumn, though there was a vernal brilliancy in the air; and the grass, flattered by the recent rains, was green where we had last seen it gray. Along a pretty stream, which, for all I know may have been the Manzanares, it was so little, files of Lombardy poplars followed away very agreeably golden in foliage; and scattered about were deciduous-looking evergreens which we questioned for live-oaks. We were going northward over the track which had brought us southward to Madrid two weeks before, and by and by the pleasant levels broke into rough hills and hollows, strewn with granite boulders which, as our train mounted, changed into the savage rock masses of New Castile, and as we drew near the village of Escorial gave the scene the look of that very desolate country. But it could not be so gloomy in the kind sunlight as it was when lashed by the savage storm which we had seen it cowering under before; and at the station we lost all feeling of friendlessness in the welcome of the thronging guides and hotel touters.

Our ideal was a carriage which we could keep throughout the day and use for our return to the train in the afternoon; and this was so exactly the ideal of a driver to whom we committed ourselves that we were somewhat surprised to have his vehicle develop into a motor-omnibus, and himself into a conductor.

When we arrived at the palace some miles off, up a winding way, he underwent another change, and became our guide to the Escorial. In the event he proved a very intelligent guide, as guides go, and I really cannot now see how we could have got on without him. He adapted the Spanish names of things to our English understanding by shortening them; a patio became a pat’, and an old master an old mast’; and an endearing quality was imparted to the grim memory of Philip II. by the diminutive of Philly. We accepted this, but even to have Charles V. brought nearer our hearts as Charley Fif, we could not bear to have our guide exposed to the mockery of less considerate travelers. I instructed him that the emperor’s name was Charles, and that only boys and very familiar friends of that name were called Charley among us. He thanked me, and at once spoke again of Charley Fif; which I afterward found was the universally accepted style of the great emperor among the guides of Spain. In vain I tried to persuade them out of it at Cordova, at Seville, at Granada, and wherever else they had to speak of an emperor whose memory really seems to pervade the whole land.

II

The genuine village of Escorial lies mostly to the left of the station, but the artificial town which grew up with the palace is to the right. Both are called after the slag of the iron-smelting works which were and are the vital industry of the first Escorial; but the road to the palace takes you far from the slag, with a much-hoteled and garden-walled dignity, to the plateau, apparently not altogether natural, where the massive triune edifice stands in the keeping of a throng of American women wondering how they are going to see it, and lunch, and get back to their train in time. Many were trying, the day of our visit, to see the place with no help but that of their bewildering Baedekers, and we had constant reason to be glad of our guide as we met or passed them in the measureless courts and endless corridors.

At this distance of time and place we seem to have hurried first to the gorgeous burial vault where the kings and queens of Spain lie, each one shut in a gilded marble sarcophagus in their several niches of the circular chamber, where under the high altar of the church they have the advantage of all the masses said above them. But on the way we must have passed through the church, immense, bare, cold, and sullener far than that sepulcher; and I am sure that we visited last of all the palace, where it is said the present young king comes so seldom and unwillingly, as if shrinking from the shelf appointed for him in that crypt shining with gold and polished marble.

It is of death, not life, that the Escorial preaches, and it was to eternal death, its pride and gloom, and not life everlasting, that the dark piety of Philip voluntarily, or involuntarily, consecrated the edifice. But it would be doing a wrong to one of the greatest achievements of the human will, if one dwelt too much, or too wholly, upon this gloomy ideal. The Escorial has been many times described; I myself forbear with difficulty the attempt to describe it, and I satisfy my longing to set it visibly before the reader by letting an earlier visitor of my name describe it for me. I think he does it larger justice than modern observers, because he escapes the cumulative obligation which time has laid upon them to find the subjective rather than the objective fulfilment of its founder’s intention in it. At any rate, in March, 1623, James Howell, waiting as secretary of the romantic mission the bursting of the iridescent love-dream which had brought Charles Stuart, Prince of Wales, from England to woo the sister of the Spanish king in Madrid, had leisure to write one of his most delightful “familiar letters” concerning the Escorial to a friend in London.

“I was yesterday at the Escorial to see the monastery of St. Lawrence, the eighth wonder of the world; and truly considering the site of the place, the state of the thing, the symmetry of the structure, with diverse other rareties, it may be called so; for what I have seen in Italy and other places are but baubles to it. It is built among a company of craggy hills, which makes the air the hungrier and wholesomer; it is all built of freestone and marble, and that with such solidity and moderate height that surely Philip the Second’s chief design was to make a sacrifice of it to eternity, and to contest with the meteors and time itself. It cost eight millions; it was twenty-four years abuilding, and the founder himself saw it furnished and enjoyed it twelve years after, and carried his bones himself thither to be buried. The reason that moved King Philip to waste so much treasure was a vow he had made at the battle of St. Quentin, where he was forced to batter a monastery of St. Lawrence friars, and if he had the victory he would erect such a monument to St. Lawrence that the world had not the like; therefore the form of it is like a gridiron, the handle is a huge royal palace, and the body a vast monastery or assembly of quadrangular cloisters, for there are as many as there be months of the year. There be a hundred monks, and every one hath his man and his mule, and a multitude of officers; besides there are three libraries there full of the choicest books for all sciences. It is beyond all expression what grots, gardens, walks, and aqueducts there are there, and what curious fountains in the upper cloisters, for there be two stages of cloisters. In fine, there is nothing that is vulgar there. To take a view of every room in the house one must make account to go ten miles; there is a vault called the Pantheon under the high altar, which is all paved, walled, and arched with marble; there be a number of huge silver candlesticks taller than I am; lamps three yards compass, and diverse chalices and crosses of massive gold; there is one choir made all of burnished brass; pictures and statues like giants; and a world of glorious things that purely ravished me. By this mighty monument it may be inferred that Philip the Second, though he was a little man, yet he had vast gigantic thoughts in him, to leave such a huge pile for posterity to gaze upon and admire in his memory.”

III

Perhaps this description is not very exact, but precision of statement is not to be expected of a Welshman; and if Howell preferred to say Philip built the place in fulfilment of that vow at the battle of St. Quentin, doubtless he believed it; many others did; it has only of late been discovered that Philip was not at St. Quentin, and did not “batter a monastery of St. Lawrence friars” there. I like to think the rest is all as Howell says down to the man and mule for every monk. If there are no men and mules left, there are very few monks either, after the many suppressions of convents. The gardens are there of an unquestionable symmetry and beauty, and the “company of craggy hills” abides all round the prodigious edifice, which is at once so prodigious, and grows larger upon you in the retrospect.

Now that I am this good distance away, and cannot bring myself to book by a second experience, I feel it safe to say that I had a feeling of St. Peter’s-like immensity in the church of the Escorial, with more than St. Peter’s-like bareness. The gray colorlessness of the architecture somberly prevails in memory over the frescoes of the painters invited to relieve it in the roof and the retablo, and thought turns from the red-and-yellow jasper of altar and pulpit, and the bronze-gilt effigies of kneeling kings and queens to that niche near the oratory where the little terrible man who imagined and realized it all used to steal in from his palace, and worship next the small chamber where at last he died. It is said he also read despatches and state papers in this nook, but doubtless only in the intervals of devotion.

Every one to his taste, even in matters of religion; Philip reared a temple to the life beyond this, and as if with the splendor of the mausoleum which it enshrines he hoped to overcome the victorious grave; the Caliph who built the mighty mosque at Cordova, which outlasts every other glory of his capital, dedicated it to the joy of this life as against the gloom of whose who would have put it under the feet of death. “Let us build,” he said to his people, “the Kaaba of the West upon the site of a Christian temple, which we will destroy, so that we may set forth how the Cross shall fall and become abased before the True Prophet. Allah will never place the world beneath the feet of those who make themselves the slaves of drink and sensuality while they preach penitence and the joys of chastity, and while extolling poverty enrich themselves to the loss of their neighbors. For these the sad and silent cloister; for us, the crystalline fountain and the shady grove; for them, the rude and unsocial life of dungeon-like strongholds; for us, the charm of social life and culture; for them, intolerance and tyranny; for us, a ruler who is our father; for them, the darkness of ignorance; for us, letters and instruction as wide-spread as our creed; for them, the wilderness, celibacy, and the doom of the false martyr; for us, plenty, love, brotherhood, and eternal joy.”

In spite of the somewhat vaunting spirit of his appeal, the wager of battle decided against the Arab; it was the Crescent that fell, the Cross that prevailed; in the very heart of Abderrahman’s mosque a Christian cathedral rises. Yet in the very heart of Philip’s temple to the spirit of the cloister, the desert, the martyrdom, one feels that a great deal could be said on Abderrahman’s side. This is a world which will not be renounced, in fact, and even in Christian Spain it has triumphed in the arts and sciences beyond its earlier victories in Moslem Spain. One finds Philip himself, with his despatches in that high nook, rather than among the bronze-gilt royalties at the high altar, though his statue is duly there with those of his three wives. The group does not include that poor Bloody Mary of England, who should have been the fourth there, for surely she suffered enough for his faith and him to be of his domestic circle forever.

IV

It is the distinct merit of the Escorial that it does not, and perhaps cannot take long in doing; otherwise the doer could not bear it. A look round the sumptuous burial chamber of the sovereigns below the high altar of the church; a glance at the lesser sepulchral glories of the infantes and infantas in their chapels and corridors, suffices for the funereal third of the trinity of tomb and temple and palace; and though there are gayer constituents of the last, especially the gallery of the chapter-house, with its surprisingly lively frescoes and its sometimes startling canvases, there is not much that need really keep you from the royal apartments which seem the natural end of your visit. Of these something better can be said than that they are no worse than most other royal apartments; our guide led us to them through many granite courts and corridors where we left groups of unguided Americans still maddening over their Baedekers; and we found them hung with pleasing tapestries, some after such designs of Goya’s as one finds in the basement of the Prado. The furniture was in certain rooms cheerily upholstered in crimson and salmon without sense of color, but as if seeking relief from the gray of the church; and there are battle-pieces on the walls, fights between Moors and Christians, which interested me. The dignified consideration of the custodian who showed us through the apartments seemed to have adapted to our station a manner left over from the infrequent presence of royalty; as I have said, the young king of Spain does not like coming to the Escorial.

I do not know why any one comes there, and I search my consciousness in vain for a better reason than the feeling that I must come, or would be sorrier if I did not than if I did. The worthy Howell does not commit himself to any expression of rejoicing or regretting in having done the Escorial. But the good Theophile Gautier, who visited the place more than two hundred years after, owns frankly that he is “excessively embarrassed in giving his opinion” of it. “So many people,” he says, “serious and well-conditioned, who, I prefer to think, have never seen it, have spoken of it as a chef d’oeuvre, and a supreme effort of the human spirit, so that I should have the air, poor devil of a facilletoniste errant, of wishing to play the original and taking pleasure in my contrary-mindedness; but still in my soul and conscience I cannot help finding the Escorial the most tiresome and the most stupid monument that could be imagined, for the mortification of his fellow-beings, by a morose monk and a suspicious tyrant. I know very well that the Escorial had a serious and religious aim; but gravity is not dryness, melancholy is not marasm, meditation is not ennui, and beauty of forms can always be happily wedded to elevation of ideas.” This is the Frenchman’s language as he goes into the Escorial; he does not cheer up as he passes through the place, and when he comes out he has to say: “I issued from that desert of granite, from that monkish necropolis with an extraordinary feeling of release, of exultation; it seemed to me I was born into life again, that I could be young once more, and rejoice in the creation of the good God, of which I had lost all hope in those funeral vaults. The bland and luminous air wrapt me round like a soft robe of fine wool, and warmed my body frozen in that cadaverous atmosphere; I was saved from that architectural nightmare, which I thought never would end. I advise people who are so fatuous as to pretend that they are ever bored to go and spend three or four days in the Escorial; they will learn what real ennui is and they will enjoy themselves all the rest of their lives in reflecting that they might be in the Escorial and that they are not.”

That was well toward a century ago. It is not quite like that now, but it is something like it; the human race has become inured to the Escorial; more tourists have visited the place and imaginably lightened its burden by sharing it among their increasing number. Still there is now and then one who is oppressed, crushed by it, and cannot relieve himself in such ironies as Gautier’s, but must cry aloud in suffering like that of the more emotional De Amicis: “You approach a courtyard and say, ‘I have seen this already.’ No. You are mistaken; it is another.... You ask the guide where the cloister is and he replies, ‘This is it,’ and you walk on for half an hour. You see the light of another world: you have never seen just such a light; is it the reflection from the stone, or does it come from the moon? No, it is daylight, but sadder than darkness. As you go on from corridor to corridor, from court to court, you look ahead with misgivings, expecting to see suddenly, as you turn a corner, a row of skeleton monks with hoods over their eyes and crosses in their hands; you think of Philip II.... You remember all that you have read about him, of his terrors and the Inquisition; and everything becomes clear to your mind’s eye with a sudden light; for the first time you understand it all; the Escorial is Philip II.... He is still there alive and terrible, with the image of his dreadful God... . Even now, after so long a time, on rainy days, when I am feeling sad, I think of the Escorial, and then look at the walls of my room and congratulate myself.... I see again the courtyards of the Escorial. ... I dream of wandering through the corridors alone in the dark, followed by the ghost of an old friar, crying and pounding at all the doors without finding a way of escape.”

I am of another race both from the Frenchman and the Italian, and I cannot pretend to their experiences, their inferences, and their conclusions; but I am not going to leave the Escorial to the reader without trying to make him feel that I too was terribly impressed by it. To be sure, I had some light moments in it, because when gloom goes too far it becomes ridiculous; and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called Philly by our guide.

Yet I will not say but I was glad to get out of the Escorial alive; and that I welcomed even the sulkiness of the landlord of the hotel where our guide took us for lunch. To this day I do not know why that landlord should have been so sour; his lunch was bad, but I paid his price without murmuring; and still at parting he could scarcely restrain his rage; the Escorial might have entered into his soul. On the way to his hotel the street was empty, but the house bubbled over with children who gaped giggling at his guests from the kitchen door, and were then apparently silenced with food, behind it. There were a great many flies in the hotel, and if I could remember its name I would warn the public against it.

After lunch our guide lapsed again to our conductor and reappeared with his motor-bus and took us to the station, where he overcame the scruples of the lady in the ticket-office concerning our wish to return to Madrid by the Sud-Express instead of the ordinary train. The trouble was about the supplementary fare which we easily paid on board; in fact, there is never any difficulty in paying a supplementary fare in Spain; the authorities meet you quite half-way. But we were nervous because we had already suffered from the delays of people at the last hotel where our motor-bus stopped to take up passengers; they lingered so long over lunch that we were sure we should miss the Sud-Express, and we did not see how we could live in Escorial till the way-train started; yet for all their delays we reached the station in time and more. The train seemed strangely reduced in the number of its cars, but we confidently started with others to board the nearest of them; there we were waved violently away, and bidden get into the dining-car at the rear of the train. In some dudgeon we obeyed, but we were glad to get away from Escorial on any terms, and the dining-car was not bad, though it had a somewhat disheveled air. We could only suppose that all the places in the two other cars were taken, and we resigned ourselves to choosing the least coffee-stained of the coffee-stained tables and ordered more coffee at it. The waiter brought it as promptly as the conductor collected our supplementary fare; he even made a feint of removing the stains from our table-cloth with a flourish of his napkin, and then he left us to our conjectures and reflections till he came for his pay and his fee just before we ran into Madrid.

VI

The mystery persisted and it was only when our train paused in the station that it was solved. There, as we got out of our car, we perceived that a broad red velvet carpet was laid from the car in front into the station; a red carpet such as is used to keep the feet of distinguished persons from their native earth the world over, but more especially in Europe. Along this carpet were loosely grouped a number of solemnly smiling gentlemen in frock-coats with their top-hats genteelly resting in the hollows of their left arms, and without and beyond the station in the space usually filled by closed and open cabs was a swarm of automobiles. Then while our spirits were keyed to the highest pitch, the Queen of Spain descended from the train, wearing a long black satin cloak and a large black hat, very blond and beautiful beyond the report of her pictures. By each hand she led one of her two pretty boys, Don Jaime, the Prince of Asturias, heir apparent, and his younger brother. She walked swiftly, with glad, kind looks around, and her ladies followed her according to their state; then ushered and followed by the gentlemen assembled to receive them, they mounted to their motors and whirred away like so many persons of a histrionic pageant: not least impressive, the court attendants filled a stage drawn by six mules, and clattered after.

From hearsay and reasonable surmise we learned that we had not come from Escorial in the Sud-Express at all, but in the Queen’s special train bringing her and her children from their autumn sojourn at La Granja, and that we had been for an hour a notable feature of the royal party without knowing it, and of course without getting the least good of it. We had indeed ignorantly enjoyed no less of the honor than two other Americans, who came in the dining-car with us, but whether the nice-looking Spanish couple who sat in the corner next us were equally ignorant of their advantage I shall never know. It was but too highly probable that the messed condition of the car was due to royal luncheon in it just before we came aboard; but why we were suffered to come aboard, or why a supplementary fare should have been collected from us remains one of those mysteries which I should once have liked to keep all Spain.

We had to go quite outside of the station grounds to get a cab for our hotel, but from this blow to our dignity I recovered a little later in the day, when the king, attended by as small a troop of cavalry as I suppose a king ever has with him, came driving by in the street where I was walking. As he sat in his open carriage he looked very amiable, and handsomer than most of the pictures make him. He seemed to be gazing at me, and when he bowed I could do no less than return his salutation. As I glanced round to see if people near me were impressed by our exchange of civilities, I perceived an elderly officer next me. He was smiling as I was, and I think he was in the delusion that the king’s bow, which I had so promptly returned, was intended for him.

VIII. CORDOVA AND THE WAY THERE

I should be sorry if I could believe that Cordova experienced the disappointment in us, which I must own we felt in her; but our disappointment was unquestionable, and I will at once offer it to the reader as an inducement for him to go to Cordova with less lively expectations than ours. I would by no means have him stay away; after all, there is only one Cordova in the world which the capital of the Caliphate of the West once filled with her renown; and if the great mosque of Abderrahman is not so beautiful as one has been made to fancy it, still it is wonderful, and could not be missed without loss.

I

Better, I should say, take the rapido which leaves Madrid three times a week at nine-thirty in the morning, than the night express which leaves as often at the same hour in the evening. Since there are now such good day trains on the chief Spanish lines, it is flying in the face of Providence not to go by them; they might be suddenly taken off; besides, they have excellent restaurant-cars, and there is, moreover, always the fascinating and often the memorable landscape which they pass through. By no fault of ours that I can remember, our train was rather crowded; that is, four or five out of the eight places in our corridor compartment were taken, and we were afraid at every stop that more people would get in, though I do not know that it was our anxieties kept them out. For the matter of that, I do not know why I employed an interpreter at Madrid to get my ticket stamped at the ticket-office; it required merely the presentation of the ticket at the window; but the interpreter seemed to wish it and it enabled him to practise his English with me, and I realized that he must live. In a peseta’s worth of gratitude he followed us to our carriage, and he did not molest the mozo in putting our bags into the racks, though he hovered about the door till the train started; and it just now occurs to me that he may have thought a peseta was not a sufficient return for his gratitude; he had rendered us no service.

At Aranjuez the wheat-lands, which began to widen about us as soon as we got beyond the suburbs of Madrid, gave way to the groves and gardens of that really charming pleasaunce, charming quite from the station, with grounds penetrated by placid waters overhung by the English elms which the Castilians are so happy in having naturalized in their treeless waste. Multitudes of nightingales are said to sing among them, but it was not the season for hearing them from the train; and we made what shift we could with the strawberry and asparagus beds which we could see plainly, and the peach trees and cherry trees. One of these had committed the solecism of blossoming in October, instead of April or May, when the nobility came to their villas.

We had often said during our stay in Madrid that we should certainly come for a day at Aranjuez; and here we were, passing it with a five minutes’ stop. I am sure it merited much more, not only for its many proud memories, but for its shameful ones, which are apt to be so much more lasting in the case of royal pleasaunces. The great Catholic King Ferdinand inherited the place with the Mastership of the Order of Santiago; Charles V. used to come there for the shooting, and Philip II., Charleses III. and IV., and Ferdinand VII. built and rebuilt its edifices. But it is also memorable because the wretched Godoy fled there with the king, his friend, and the queen, his paramour, and there the pitiable king abdicated in favor of his abominable son Ferdinand VII. It is the careful Murray who reminds me of this fact; Gautier, who apparently fails to get anything to his purpose out of Aranjuez, passes it with the remark that Godoy built there a gallery from his villa to the royal palace, for his easier access to the royal family in which he held a place so anomalous. From Mr. Martin Hume’s Modern Spain I learn that when the court fled to Aranjuez from Madrid before the advance of Murat, and the mob, civil and military, hunted Godoy’s villa through for him, he jumped out of bed and hid himself under a roll of matting, while the king and the queen, to save him, decreed his dismissal from all his offices and honors.

But here just at the most interesting moment the successive bells and whistles are screeching, and the rapido is hurrying me away from Aranjuez. We are leaving a railway station, but presently it is as if we had set sail on a gray sea, with a long ground-swell such as we remembered from Old Castile. These innumerable pastures and wheat-fields are in New Castile, and before long more distinctively they are in La Mancha, the country dear to fame as the home of Don Quixote. I must own at once it does not look it, or at least look like the country I had read out of his history in my boyhood. For the matter of that, no country ever looks like the country one reads out of a book, however really it may be that country. The trouble probably is that one carries out of one’s reading an image which one had carried into it. When I read Don Quixote and read and read it again, I put La Mancha first into the map of southern Ohio, and then into that, after an interval of seven or eight years, of northern Ohio; and the scenes I arranged for his adventures were landscapes composed from those about me in my earlier and later boyhood. There was then always something soft and mild in the Don Quixote country, with a blue river and gentle uplands, and woods where one could rest in the shade, and hide one’s self if one wished, after easily rescuing the oppressed. Now, instead, a treeless plain unrolled itself from sky to sky, clean, dull, empty; and if some azure tops dimmed the clear line of the western horizon, how could I have got them into my early picture when I had never yet seen a mountain in my life? I could not put the knight and his squire on those naked levels where they should not have got a mile from home without discovery and arrest. I tried to think of them jogging along in talk of the adventures which the knight hoped for; but I could not make it work. I could have done better before we got so far from Aranjuez; there were gardens and orchards and a very suitable river there, and those elm trees overhanging it; but the prospect in La Mancha had only here and there a white-availed white farmhouse to vary its lonely simplicity, its desert fertility; and I could do nothing with the strips and patches of vineyard. It was all strangely African, strangely Mexican, and not at all American, not Ohioan, enough to be anything like the real La Mancha of my invention. To be sure, the doors and windows of the nearer houses were visibly netted against mosquitoes and that was something, but even that did not begin to be noticeable till we were drawing near the Sierra Morena. Then, so long before we reached the mighty chain of mountains which nature has stretched between the gravity of New Castile and the gaiety of Andalusia, as if they could not bear immediate contact, I experienced a moment of perfect reconciliation to the landscape as really wearing the face of that La Mancha familiar to my boyish vision. Late in the forenoon, but early enough to save the face of La Mancha, there appeared certain unquestionable shapes in the nearer and farther distance which I joyously knew for those windmills which Don Quixote had known for giants and spurred at, lance in rest. They were waving their vans in what he had found insolent defiance, but which seemed to us glad welcome, as of windmills waiting that long time for a reader of Cervantes who could enter into their feelings and into the friendly companionship they were offering.

II

Our train did not pass very near, but the distance was not bad for them; it kept them sixty or sixty-five years back in the past where they belonged, and in its dimness I could the more distinctly see Don Quixote careering against them, and Sancho Panza vainly warning, vainly imploring him, and then in his rage and despair, “giving himself to the devil,” as he had so often to do in that master’s service; I do not know now that I would have gone nearer them if I could. Sometimes in the desolate plains where the windmills stood so well aloof men were lazily, or at least leisurely, plowing with their prehistoric crooked sticks. Here and there the clean levels were broken by shallow pools of water; and we were at first much tormented by expanses, almost as great as these pools, of a certain purple flower, which no curiosity of ours could prevail with to yield up the secret of its name or nature. It was one of the anomalies of this desert country that it was apparently prosperous, if one might guess from the comfortable-looking farmsteads scattered over it, inclosing house and stables in the courtyard framed by their white walls. The houses stood at no great distances from one another, but were nowhere grouped in villages. There were commonly no towns near the stations, which were not always uncheerful; sometimes there were flower-beds, unless my memory deceives me. Perhaps there would be a passenger or two, and certainly a loafer or two, and always of the sex which in town life does the loafing; in the background or through the windows the other sex could be seen in its domestic activities. Only once did we see three girls of such as stay for the coming and going of trains the world over; they waited arm in arm, and we were obliged to own they were plain, poor things.

Their whitewash saves the distant towns from the effect of sinking into the earth, or irregularly rising from it, as in Old Castile, and the landscape cheered up more and more as we ran farther south. We passed through the country of the Valdepenas wine, which it is said would so willingly be better than it is; there was even a station of that name, which looked much more of a station than most, and had, I think I remember, buildings necessary to the wine industry about it. Murray, indeed, emboldens me in this halting conjecture with the declaration that the neighboring town of Valdepenas is “completely undermined by wine-cellars of very ancient date” where the wine is “kept in caves in huge earthen jars,” and when removed is put into goat or pig skins in the right Don Quixote fashion.

The whole region begins to reek of Cervantean memories. Ten miles from the station of Argamasilla is the village where he imagined, and the inhabitants believe, Don Quixote to have been born. Somewhere among these little towns Cervantes himself was thrown into prison for presuming to attempt collecting their rents when the people did not want to pay them. This is what I seem to remember having read, but heaven knows where, or if. What is certain is that almost before I was aware we were leaving the neighborhood of Valdepenas, where we saw men with donkeys gathering grapes and letting the donkeys browse on the vine leaves. Then we were mounting among the foothills of the Sierra Morena, not without much besetting trouble of mind because of those certain circles and squares of stone on the nearer and farther slopes which we have since somehow determined were sheep-folds. They abounded almost to the very scene of those capers which Don Quixote cut on the mountainside to testify his love for Dulcinea del Toboso, to the great scandal of Sancho Panza riding away to give his letter to the lady, but unable to bear the sight of the knight skipping on the rocks in a single garment.

III

In the forests about befell all those adventures with the mad Cardenio and the wronged Dorothea, both self-banished to the wilderness through the perfidy of the same false friend and faithless lover. The episodes which end so well, and which form, I think, the heart of the wonderful romance, have, from the car windows, the fittest possible setting; but suddenly the scene changes, and you are among aspects of nature as savagely wild as any in that new western land where the countrymen of Cervantes found a New Spain, just as the countrymen of Shakespeare found a New England. Suddenly, or if not suddenly, then startlingly, we were in a pass of the Sierra called (for some reason which I will leave picturesquely unexplained) the Precipice of Dogs, where bare sharp peaks and spears of rock started into the air, and the faces of the cliffs glared down upon us like the faces of Indian warriors painted yellow and orange and crimson, and every other warlike color. With my poor scruples of moderation I cannot give a just notion of the wild aspects; I must leave it to the reader, with the assurance that he cannot exaggerate it, while I employ myself in noting that already on this awful summit we began to feel ourselves in the south, in Andalusia. Along the mountain stream that slipped silverly away in the valley below, there were oleanders in bloom, such as we had left in Bermuda the April before. Already, north of the Sierra the country had been gentling. The upturned soil had warmed from gray to red; elsewhere the fields were green with sprouting wheat; and there were wide spaces of those purple flowers, like crocuses, which women were gathering in large baskets. Probably they were not crocuses; but there could be no doubt of the vineyards increasing in their acreage; and the farmhouses which had been without windows in their outer walls, now sometimes opened as many as two to the passing train. Flocks of black sheep and goats, through the optical illusion frequent in the Spanish air, looked large as cattle in the offing. Only in one place had we seen the tumbled boulders of Old Castile, and there had been really no greater objection to La Mancha than that it was flat, stale, and unprofitable and wholly unimaginable as the scene of even Don Quixote’s first adventures.

But now that we had mounted to the station among the summits of the Sierra Morena, my fancy began to feel at home, and rested in a scene which did all the work for it. There was ample time for the fancy to rest in that more than co-operative landscape. Just beyond the first station the engine of a freight-train had opportunely left the track in front of us, and we waited there four hours till it could be got back. It would be inhuman to make the reader suffer through this delay with us after it ceased to be pleasure and began to be pain. Of course, everybody of foreign extraction got out of the train and many even, went forward to look at the engine and see what they could do about it; others went partly forward and asked the bolder spirits on their way back what was the matter. Now and then our locomotive whistled as if to scare the wandering engine back to the rails. At moments the station-master gloomily returned to the station from somewhere and diligently despaired in front of it. Then we backed as if to let our locomotive run up the siding and try to butt the freight-train off the track to keep its engine company.

About this time the restaurant-car bethought itself of some sort of late-afternoon repast, and we went forward and ate it with an interest which we prolonged as much as possible. We returned to our car which was now pervaded by an extremely bad smell. The smell drove us out, and we watched a public-spirited peasant beating the acorns from a live-oak near the station with a long pole. He brought a great many down, and first filled his sash-pocket with them; then he distributed them among the children of the third-class passengers who left the train and flocked about him. But nobody seemed to do anything with the acorns, though they were more than an inch long, narrow, and very sharp-pointed. As soon as he had discharged his self-assumed duty the peasant lay down on the sloping bank under the tree, and with his face in the grass, went to sleep for all our stay, and for what I know the whole night after.

It did not now seem likely that we should ever reach Gordova, though people made repeated expeditions to the front of the train, and came back reporting that in an hour we should start. We interested ourselves as intensely as possible in a family from the next compartment, London-tailored, and speaking either Spanish or English as they fancied, who we somehow understood lived at Barcelona; but nothing came of our interest. Then as the day waned we threw ourselves into the interest taken by a fellow-passenger in a young Spanish girl of thirteen or fourteen who had been in the care of a youngish middle-aged man when our train stopped, and been then abandoned by him for hours, while he seemed to be satisfying a vain curiosity at the head of the train. She owned that the deserter was her father, and while we were still poignantly concerned for her he came back and relieved the anxiety which the girl herself had apparently not shared even under pressure of the whole compartment’s sympathy.

IV

The day waned more and more; the sun began to sink, and then it sank with that sudden drop which the sun has at last. The sky flushed crimson, turned mauve, turned gray, and the twilight thickened over the summits billowing softly westward. There had been a good deal of joking, both Spanish and English, among the passengers; I had found particularly cheering the richness of a certain machinist’s trousers of bright golden corduroy; but as the shades of night began to embrown the scene our spirits fell; and at the cry of a lonesome bird, far off where the sunset had been, they followed the sun in its sudden drop. Against the horizon a peasant boy leaned on his staff and darkled against the darkening sky.

Nothing lacked now but the opportune recollection that this was the region where the natives had been so wicked in times past that an ingenious statesman, such as have seldom been wanting to Spain, imagined bringing in a colony of German peasants to mix with them and reform them. That is what some of the books say, but others say that the region had remained unpeopled after the first exile of the conquered Moors. All hold that the notion of mixing the colonists and the natives worked the wrong way; the natives were not reformed, but the colonists were depraved and stood in with the local brigands, ultimately, if not immediately. This is the view suggested, if not taken, by that amusing emissary, George Borrow, who seems in his Bible in Spain to have been equally employed in distributing the truths of the New Testament and collecting material for the most dramatic study of Spanish civilization known to literature. It is a delightful book, and not least delightful in the moments of misgiving which it imparts to the reader, when he does not know whether to prize more the author’s observation or his invention, whichever it may be. Borrow reports a conversation with an innkeeper and his wife of the Colonial German descent, who gave a good enough account of themselves, and then adds the dark intimation of an Italian companion that they could not be honestly keeping a hotel in that unfrequented place. It was not just in that place that our delay had chosen to occur, but it was in the same colonized region, and I am glad now that I had not remembered the incident from my first reading of Borrow. It was sufficiently uncomfortable to have some vague association with the failure of that excellent statesman’s plan, blending creepily with the feeling of desolation from the gathering dark, and I now recall the distinct relief given by the unexpected appearance of two such Guardias Civiles as travel with every Spanish train, in the space before our lonely station.

These admirable friends were part of the system which has made travel as safe throughout Spain as it is in Connecticut, where indeed I sometimes wonder that road-agents do not stop my Boston express in the waste expanse of those certain sand barrens just beyond New Haven. The last time I came through that desert I could not help thinking how nice it would be to have two Guardias Civiles in our Pullman car; but of course at the summit of the Sierra Morena, where our rapido was stalled in the deepening twilight, it was still nicer to see that soldier pair, pacing up and down, trim, straight, very gentle and polite-looking, but firm, with their rifles lying on their shoulders which they kept exactly together. It is part of the system that they may use those rifles upon any evil-doer whom they discover in a deed of violence, acting at once as police, court of law, and executioners; and satisfying public curiosity by pinning to the offender’s coat their official certificate that he was shot by such and such a civil guard for such and such a reason, and then notifying the nearest authorities. It is perhaps too positive, too peremptory, too precise; and the responsibility could not be intrusted to men who had not satisfied the government of their fitness by two years’ service in the army without arrest for any offense, or even any question of misbehavior. But these conditions once satisfied, and their temperament and character approved, they are intrusted with what seem plenary powers till they are retired for old age; then their sons may serve after them as Civil Guards with the same prospect of pensions in the end. I suppose they do not always travel first class, but once their silent, soldierly presence honored our compartment between stations; and once an officer of their corps conversed for long with a fellow-passenger in that courteous ease and self-respect which is so Spanish between persons of all ranks.

It was not very long after the guards appeared so reassuringly before the station, when a series of warning bells and whistles sounded, and our locomotive with an impatient scream began to tug at our train. We were really off, starting from Santa Elena at the very time when we ought to have been stopping at Cordova, with a good stretch of four hours still before us. As our fellow-travelers quitted us at one station and another we were finally left alone with the kindly-looking old man who had seemed interested in us from the first, and who now made some advances in broken English. Presently he told us in Spanish, to account for the English accent on which we complimented him, that he had two sons studying some manufacturing business in Manchester, where he had visited them, and acquired so much of our tongue as we had heard. He was very proud and glad to speak of his sons, and he valued us for our English and the strangeness which commends people to one another in travel. When he got out at a station obscured past identification by its flaring lamps, he would not suffer me to help him with his hand-baggage; while he deplored my offered civility, he reassured me by patting my back at parting. Yet I myself had to endure the kindness which he would not when we arrived at Cordova, where two young fellows, who had got in at a suburban station, helped me with our bags and bundles quite as if they had been two young Americans.

V

Somewhere at a junction our train had been divided and our car, left the last of what remained, had bumped and threatened to beat itself to pieces during its remaining run of fifteen miles. This, with our long retard at Santa Elena, and our opportune defense from the depraved descendants of the reforming German colonists by the Guardias Civiles, had given us a day of so much excitement that we were anxious to have it end tranquilly at midnight in the hotel which we had chosen from, our Baedeker. I would not have any reader of mine choose it again from my experience of it, though it was helplessly rather wilfully bad; certainly the fault was not the hotel’s that it seemed as far from the station as Cordova was from Madrid. It might, under the circumstances, have, been a merit in it to be undergoing a thorough overhauling of the furnishing and decoration of the rooms on the patio which had formed our ideal for a quiet night. A conventionally napkined waiter welcomed us from the stony street, and sent us up to our rooms with the young interpreter who met us at the station, but was obscure as to their location. When we refused them because they were over that loud-echoing alley, the interpreter made himself still more our friend and called mandatorially down the speaking-tube that we wished interiores and would take nothing else, though he must have known that no such rooms were to be had. He even abetted us in visiting the rooms on the patio and satisfying ourselves that they were all dismantled; when the waiter brought up the hot soup which was the only hot thing in the house beside our tempers, he joined with that poor fellow in reconciling us to the inevitable. They declared that the people whom we heard uninterruptedly clattering and chattering by in the street below, and the occasional tempest of wheels and bells and hoofs that clashed up to us would be the very last to pass through there that night, and they gave such good and sufficient reasons for their opinion that we yielded as we needs must. Of course, they were wrong; and perhaps they even knew that they were wrong; but I think we were the only people in that neighborhood who got any sleep that night or the next. We slept the sleep of exhaustion, but I believe those Cordovese preferred waking outdoors to trying to sleep within. It was apparently their custom to walk and talk the night away in the streets, not our street alone, but all the other streets of Cordova; the laughing which I heard may have expressed the popular despair of getting any sleep. The next day we experimented in listening from rooms offered us over another street, and then we remained measurably contented to bear the ills we had. This was after an exhaustive search for a better hotel had partly appeased us; but there remained in the Paseo del Gran Capitan one house unvisited which has ever since grown upon my belief as embracing every comfort and advantage lacking to our hotel. I suppose I am the stronger in this belief because when we came to it we had been so disappointed with the others that we had not the courage to go inside. Smell for smell, the interior of that hotel may have harbored a worse one than the odor of henhouse which pervaded ours, I hope from the materials for calcimining the rooms on the patio.

By the time we returned we found a guide waiting for us, and we agreed with him for a day’s service. He did not differ with other authorities as to the claims of Cordova on the tourist’s interest. From being the most brilliant capital of the Western world in the time of the Caliphs it is now allowed by all the guides and guide-books and most of the travelers, to be one of the dullest of provincial towns. It is no longer the center of learning; and though it cannot help doing a large business in olives, with the orchards covering the hills around it, the business does not seem to be a very active one. “The city once the abode of the flower of Andalusian nobility,” says the intelligent O’Shea in his Guide to Spain, “is inhabited chiefly by administradores of the absentee senorio; their ‘solares’ are desert and wretched, the streets ill paved though clean, and the whitewashed houses unimportant, low, and denuded of all art and meaning, either past or present.” Baedeker gives like reasons for thinking “the traveler whose expectation is on tiptoe as he enters the ancient capital of the Moors will probably be disappointed in all but the cathedral.” Cook’s Guide, latest but not least commendable of the authorities, is of a more divided mind and finds the means of trade and industry and their total want of visible employment at the worst anomalous.

Vacant, narrow streets where the grass does not grow, and there is only an endless going and coming of aimless feet; a market without buyers or sellers to speak of, and a tangle of squat white houses, abounding in lovely patios, sweet and bright with flowers and fountains: this seems to be Cordova in the consensus of the manuals, and with me in the retrospect a sort of puzzle is the ultimate suggestion of the dead capital of the Western Caliphs. Gautier thinks, or seventy-two years ago he thought (and there has not been much change since), that “Cordova has a more African look than any other city of Andalusia; its streets, or rather its lanes, whose tumultuous pavement resembles the bed of dry torrents, all littered with straw from the loads of passing donkeys, have nothing that recalls the manners and customs of Europe. The Moors, if they came back, would have no great trouble to reinstate themselves. ... The universal use of lime-wash gives a uniform tint to the monuments, blunts the lines of the architecture, effaces the ornamentation, and forbids you to read their age.... You cannot know the wall of a century ago from the wall of yesterday. Cordova, once the center of Arab civilization, is now a huddle of little white houses with corridors between them where two mules could hardly pass abreast. Life seems to have ebbed from the vast body, once animated by the active circulation of Moorish blood; nothing is left now but the blanched and calcined skeleton.... In spite of its Moslem air, Cordova is very Christian and rests under the special protection of the Archangel Raphael.” It is all rather contradictory; but Gautier owns that the great mosque is a “monument unique in the world, and novel even for travelers who have had the fortune to admire the wonders of Moorish architecture at Granada or Seville.”

De Amicis, who visited Cordova nearly forty-five years later, and in the heart of spring, brought letters which opened something of the intimate life of that apparently blanched and calcined skeleton. He meets young men and matches Italian verses with their Spanish; spends whole nights sitting in their cafes or walking their plazas, and comes away with his mouth full of the rapturous verses of an Arab poet: “Adieu, Cordova! Would that my life were as long as Noah’s, that I might live forever within thy walls! Would that I had the treasures of Pharaoh, to spend them upon wine and the beautiful women of Cordova, with tho gentle eyes that invite kisses!” He allows that the lines may be “a little too tropical for the taste of a European,” and it seems to me that there may be a golden mean between scolding and flattering which would give the truth about Cordova. I do not promise to strike it; our hotel still rankles in my heart; but I promise to try for it, though I have to say that the very moment we started for the famous mosque it began to rain, and rained throughout the forenoon, while we weltered from wonder to wonder through the town. We were indeed weltering in a closed carriage, which found its way not so badly through the alleys where two mules could not pass abreast. The lime-wash of the walls did not emit the white heat in which the other tourists have basked or baked; the houses looked wet and chill, and if they had those flowered and fountained patios which people talk of they had taken them in out of the rain.

VI

At the mosque the patio was not taken in only because it was so large, but I find by our records that it was much molested by a beggar who followed us when we dismounted at the gate of the Court of Oranges, and all but took our minds off the famous Moorish fountain in the midst. It was not a fountain of the plashing or gushing sort, but a noble great pool in a marble basin. The women who clustered about it were not laughing and chattering, or singing, or even dancing, in the right Andalusian fashion, but stood silent in statuesque poses from which they seemed in no haste to stir for filling their water jars and jugs. The Moorish tradition of irrigation confronting one in all the travels and histories as a supreme agricultural advantage which the Arabs took back to Africa with them, leaving Spain to thirst and fry, lingers here in the circles sunk round the orange trees and fed by little channels. The trees grew about as the fancy took them, and did not mind the incongruous palms towering as irregularly above them. While we wandered toward the mosque a woman robed in white cotton, with a lavender scarf crossing her breast, came in as irrelevantly as the orange trees and stood as stably as the palms; in her night-black hair she alone in Cordova redeemed the pledge of beauty made for all Andalusian women by the reckless poets and romancers, whether in ballads or books of travel.

One enters the court by a gate in a richly yellow tower, with a shrine to St. Michael over the door, and still higher at the lodging of the keeper a bed of bright flowers. Then, however, one is confronted with the first great disappointment in the mosque. Shall it be whispered in awe-stricken undertone that the impression of a bull-ring is what lingers in the memory of the honest sight-seer from his first glance at the edifice? The effect is heightened by the filling of the arcades which encircle it, and which now confront the eye with a rounded wall, where the Saracenic horseshoe remains distinct, but the space of yellow masonry below seems to forbid the outsider stealing knowledge of the spectacle inside. The spectacle is of course no feast of bulls (as the Spanish euphemism has it), but the first amphitheatrical impression is not wholly dispersed by the sight of the interior. In order that the reader at his distance may figure this, he must imagine an indefinite cavernous expanse, with a low roof supported in vaulted arches by some thousand marble pillars, each with a different capital. There used to be perhaps half a thousand more pillars, and Charles V. made the Cordovese his reproaches for destroying the wonder of them when they planted their proud cathedral in the heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of sacrilege, but I think the honest traveler will say that there are still enough of those rather stumpy white marble columns left, and enough of those arches, striped in red and white with their undeniable suggestion of calico awnings. It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings of those colors.

One sees the sanctuary where the great Caliph said his prayers, and the Koran written by Othman and stained with his blood was kept; but I know at least one traveler who saw it without sentiment or any sort of reverent emotion, though he had not the authority of the “old rancid Christianity” of a Castilian for withholding his homage. If people would be as sincere as other people would like them to be, I think no one would profess regret for the Arab civilization in the presence of its monuments. Those Moors were of a religion which revolts all the finer instincts and lifts the soul with no generous hopes; and the records of it have no appeal save to the love of mere beautiful decoration. Even here it mostly fails, to my thinking, and I say that for my part I found nothing so grand in the great mosaue of Cordova as the cathedral which rises in the heart of it. If Abderrahman boasted that he would rear a shrine to the joy of earthly life and the hope of an earthly heaven, in the place of the Christian temple which he would throw down, I should like to overhear what his disembodied spirit would have to say to the saint whose shrine he demolished. I think the saint would have the better of him in any contention for their respective faiths, and could easily convince the impartial witness that his religion then abiding in medieval gloom was of promise for the future which Islam can never be. Yet it cannot be denied that when Abderraham built his mosque the Arabs of Cordova were a finer and wiser people than the Christians who dwelt in intellectual darkness among them, with an ideal of gloom and self-denial and a zeal for aimless martyrdom which must have been very hard for a gentleman and scholar to bear. Gentlemen and scholars were what the Arabs of the Western Caliphate seem to have become, with a primacy in medicine and mathematics beyond the learning of all other Europe in their day. They were tolerant skeptics in matters of religion; polite agnostics, who disliked extremely the passion of some Christians dwelling among them for getting themselves put to death, as they did, for insulting the popularly accepted Mohammedan creed. Probably people of culture in Cordova were quite of Abderrahman’s mind in wishing to substitute the temple of a cheerfuler ideal for the shrine of the medieval Christianity which he destroyed; though they might have had their reserves as to the taste in which his mosque was completed. If they recognized it as a concession to the general preference, they could do so without the discomfort which they must have suffered when some new horde of Berbers, full of faith and fight, came over from Africa to push back the encroaching Spanish frontier, and give the local Christians as much martyrdom as they wanted.

It is all a conjecture based upon material witness no more substantial than that which the Latin domination left long centuries before the Arabs came to possess the land. The mosque from which you drive through the rain to the river is neither newer nor older looking than the beautiful Saracenic bridge over the Guadalquivir which the Arabs themselves say was first built by the Romans in the time of Augustus; the Moorish mill by the thither shore might have ground the first wheat grown in Europe. It is intensely, immemorially African, flat-roofed, white-walled; the mules waiting outside in the wet might have been drooping there ever since the going down of the Flood, from which the river could have got its muddy yellow.

If the reader will be advised by me he will not go to the Archaeological Museum, unless he wishes particularly to contribute to the support of the custodian; the collection will not repay him even for the time in which a whole day of Cordova will seem so superabundant. Any little street will be worthier his study, with its type of passing girls in white and black mantillas, and its shallow shops of all sorts, their fronts thrown open, and their interiors flung, as it were, on the sidewalk. It is said that the streets were the first to be paved in Europe, and they have apparently not been repaved since 850. This indeed will not Hold quite true of that thoroughfare, twenty feet wide at least, which led from our hotel to the Paseo del Gran Capitan. In this were divers shops of the genteeler sort, and some large cafes, standing full of men of leisure, who crowded to their doors and windows, with their hats on and their hands in their pockets, as at a club, and let no fact of the passing world escape their hungry eyes. Their behavior expressed a famine of incident in Cordova which was pathetic.

VII

The people did not look very healthy as to build or color, and there was a sound of coughing everywhere. To be sure, it was now the season of the first colds, which would no doubt wear off with the coming of next spring; and there was at any rate not nearly so much begging as at Toledo, because there could not be anywhere. I am sorry I can contribute no statistics as to the moral or intellectual condition of Cordova; perhaps they will not be expected or desired of me; I can only say that the general intelligence is such that no one will own he does not know anything you ask him even when he does not; but this is a national rather than a local trait, which causes the stranger to go in many wrong directions all over the peninsula. I should not say that there was any noticeable decay of character from the north to the south such as the attributive pride of the old Castilian in the Sheridan Knowlesian drama would teach; the Cordovese looked no more shiftless than the haughtiest citizens of Burgos.

They had decidedly prettier patios and more of them, and they had many public carriages against none whatever in that ancient capital. Rubber tires I did not expect in Cordova and certainly did not get in a city where a single course over the pavements of 850 would have worn them to tatters: but there seems a good deal of public spirit if one may judge from the fact that it is the municipality which keeps Abderrahman’s mosque in repair. There are public gardens, far pleasanter than those of Valladolid, which we visited in an interval of the afternoon, and there is a very personable bull-ring to which we drove in the vain hope of seeing the people come out in a typical multitude. But there had been no feast of bulls; and we had to make what we could out of the walking and driving in the Paseo del Gran Capitan toward evening. In its long, discouraging course there were some good houses, but not many, and the promenaders of any social quality were almost as few. Some ladies in private carriages were driving out, and a great many more in public ones as well dressed as the others, but with no pretense of state in the horses or drivers. The women of the people all wore flowers in their hair, a dahlia or a marigold, whether their hair was black or gray. No ladies were walking in the Paseo, except one pretty mother, with her nice-looking children about her, who totaled the sum of her class; but men of every class rather swarmed. High or low, they all wore the kind of hat which abounds everywhere in Andalusia and is called a Cordovese: flat, stiff, squat in crown and wide in brim, and of every shade of gray, brown, and black.

I ought to have had my associations with the great Captain Gonsalvo in the promenade which the city has named after him, but I am not sure that I had, though his life was one of the Spanish books which I won my way through in the middle years of my pathless teens. A comprehensive ignorance of the countries and histories which formed the setting of his most dramatic career was not the best preparation for knowledge of the man, but it was the best I had, and now I can only look back at my struggle with him and wonder that I came off alive. It is the hard fate of the self-taught that their learning must cost them twice as much labor as it would if they were taught by others; the very books they study are grudging friends if not insidious foes. Long afterward when I came to Italy, and began to make the past part of my present, I began to untangle a little the web that the French and the Aragonese wove in the conquest and reconquest of the wretched Sicilies; but how was I to imagine in the Connecticut Western Reserve the scene of Gonsalvo’s victories in Calabria? Even loath Ferdinand the Catholic said they brought greater glory to his crown than his own conquest of Granada; I dare say I took some unintelligent pride in his being Viceroy of Naples, and I may have been indignant at his recall and then his retirement from court by the jealous king. But my present knowledge of these facts, and of his helping put down the Moorish insurrection in 1500, as well as his exploits as commander of a Spanish armada against the Turks is a recent debt I owe to the Encyclopedia Britannica and not to my boyish researches. Of like actuality is my debt to Mr. Calvert’s Southern Spain, where he quotes the accounting which the Great Captain gave on the greedy king’s demand for a statement of his expenses in the Sicilies.

“Two hundred thousand seven hundred and thirty-six ducats and 9 reals paid to the clergy and the poor who prayed for the victory of the army of Spain.

“One hundred millions in pikes, bullets, and intrenching tools; 10,000 ducats in scented gloves, to preserve the troops from the odor of the enemies’ dead left on the battle-field; 100,000 ducats, spent in the repair of the bells completely worn out by every-day announcing fresh victories gained over our enemies; 50,000 ducats in ‘aguardiente’ for the troops on the eve of battle. A million and a half for the safeguarding prisoners and wounded.

“One million for Masses of Thanksgiving; 700,494 ducats for secret service, etc.

“And one hundred millions for the patience with which I have listened to the king, who demands an account from the man who has presented him with a Kingdom.”

It seems that Gonsalvo was one of the greatest humorists, as well as captains of his age, and the king may very well have liked his fun no better than his fame. Now that he has been dead nearly four hundred years, Ferdinand would, if he were living, no doubt join Cordova in honoring Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de Cordova. After all he was not born in Cordova (as I had supposed till an hour ago), but in the little city of Montilla, five stations away on the railroad to the Malaga, and now more noted for its surpassing sherry than for the greatest soldier of his time. To have given its name to Amontillado is glory enough for Montilla, and it must be owned that Gonzalo Hernandez de Aguila y de Montilla would not sound so well as the title we know the hero by, when we know him at all. There may be some who will say that Cordova merits remembrance less because of him than because of Columbus, who first came to the Catholic kings there to offer them not a mere kingdom, but a whole hemisphere. Cordova was then the Spanish headquarters for the operations against Granada, and one reads of the fact with a luminous sense which one cannot have till one has seen Cordova.

VIII

After our visits to the mosque and the bridge and the museum there remained nothing of our forenoon, and we gave the whole of the earlier afternoon to an excursion which strangers are expected to make into the first climb of hills to the eastward of the city. The road which reaches the Huerto de los Arcos is rather smoother for driving than the streets of Cordova, but the rain had made it heavy, and we were glad of our good horses and their owner’s mercy to them. He stopped so often to breathe them when the ascent began that we had abundant time to note the features of the wayside; the many villas, piously named for saints, set on the incline, and orcharded about with orange trees, in the beginning of that measureless forest of olives which has no limit but the horizon.

From the gate to the villa which we had come to see it was a stiff ascent by terraced beds of roses, zinneas, and purple salvia beside walls heavy with jasmine and trumpet creepers, in full bloom, and orange trees, fruiting and flowering in their desultory way. Before the villa we were to see a fountain much favored by our guide who had a passion for the jets that played ball with themselves as long as the gardener let him turn the water on, and watched with joy to see how high the balls would go before slipping back. The fountain was in a grotto-like nook, where benches of cement decked with scallop shells were set round a basin with the figures of two small boys in it bestriding that of a lamb, all employed in letting the water dribble from their mouths. It was very simple-hearted, as such things seem mostly obliged to be, but nature helped art out so well with a lovely abundance of leaf and petal that a far more exacting taste than ours must have been satisfied. The garden was in fact very pretty, though whether it was worth fifteen pesetas and three hours coming to see the reader must decide for himself when he does it. I think it was, myself, and I would like to be there now, sitting in a shell-covered cement chair at the villa steps, and letting the landscape unroll itself wonderfully before me. We were on a shore of that ocean of olives which in southern Spain washes far up the mountain walls of the blue and bluer distances, and which we were to skirt more and more in bay and inlet and widening and narrowing expanses throughout Andalusia. Before we left it we wearied utterly of it, and in fact the olive of Spain is not the sympathetic olive of Italy, though I should think it a much more practical and profitable tree. It is not planted so much at haphazard as the Italian olive seems to be; its mass looks less like an old apple orchard than the Italian; its regular succession is a march of trim files as far as the horizon or the hillsides, which they often climbed to the top. We were in the season of the olive harvest, and throughout the month of October its nearer lines showed the sturdy trees weighed down by the dense fruit, sometimes very small, sometimes as large as pigeon eggs. There were vineyards and wheat-fields in that vast prospect, and certainly there were towns and villages; but what remains with me is the sense of olives and ever more olives, though this may be the cumulative effect of other such prospects as vast and as monotonous.

While we looked away and away, the gardener and a half-grown boy were about their labors that Sunday afternoon as if it were a week-day, though for that reason perhaps they were not working very hard. They seemed mostly to be sweeping up the fallen leaves from the paths, and where the leaves had not fallen from the horse-chestnuts the boy was assisting nature by climbing the trees and plucking them. We tried to find out why he was doing this, but to this day I do not know why he was doing it, and I must be content to contribute the bare fact to the science of arboriculture. Possibly it was in the interest of neatness, and was a precaution against letting the leaves drop and litter the grass. There was apparently a passion for neatness throughout, which in the villa itself mounted to ecstasy. It was in a state to be come and lived in at any moment, though I believe it was occupied only in the late spring and the early autumn; in winter the noble family went to Madrid, and in summer to some northern watering-place. It was rather small, and expressed a life of the minor hospitalities when the family was in residence. It was no place for house-parties, and scarcely for week-end visits, or even for neighborhood dinners. Perhaps on that terrace there was afternoon ice-cream or chocolate for friends who rode or drove over or out; it seemed so possible that we had to check in ourselves the cozy impulse to pull up our shell-covered cement chairs to some central table of like composition.

Within, the villa was of a spick-and-spanness which I feel that I have not adequately suggested; and may I say that the spray of a garden-hose seemed all that would be needed to put the place in readiness for occupation? Not that even this was needed for that interior of tile and marble, so absolutely apt for the climate and the use the place would be put to. In vain we conjectured, and I hope not impertinently, the characters and tastes of the absentees; the sole clue that offered itself was a bookshelf of some Spanish versions from authors scientific and metaphysical to the verge of agnosticism. I would not swear to Huxley and Herbert Spencer among the English writers, but they were such as these, not in their entire bulk, but in extracts and special essays. I recall the slightly tilted row of the neat paper copies; and I wish I knew who it was liked to read them. The Spanish have a fondness for such dangerous ground; from some of their novels it appears they feel it rather chic to venture on it.

IX

We came away from Cordova with a pretty good conscience as to its sights. Upon the whole we were glad they were so few, when once we had made up our minds about the mosque. But now I have found too late that we ought to have visited the general market in the old square where the tournaments used to take place; we ought to have seen also the Chapel of the Hospital del Cardenal, because it was part of the mosque of Al-Manssour; we ought to have verified the remains of two baths out of the nine hundred once existing in the Calle del Bagno Alta; and we ought finally to have visited the remnant of a Moorish house in the Plazuela de San Nicolas, with its gallery of jasper columns, now unhappily whitewashed. The Campo Santo has an unsatisfied claim upon my interest because it was the place where the perfervid Christian zealots used to find the martyrdom they sought at the hands of the unwilling Arabs; and where, far earlier, Julius Caesar planted a plane tree after his victory over the forces of Pompeii at Munda. The tree no longer exists, but neither does Caesar, or the thirty thousand enemies whom he slew there, or the sons of Pompeii who commanded them. These were so near beating Casar at first that he ran among his soldiers “asking them whether they were not ashamed to deliver him into the hands of boys.” One of the boys escaped, but two days after the fight the head of the elder was brought to Caesar, who was not liked for the triumph he made himself after the event in Rome, where it was thought out of taste to rejoice over the calamity of his fellow-countrymen as if they had been foreign foes; the Romans do not seem to have minded his putting twenty-eight thousand Cordovese to death for their Pompeian politics. If I had remembered all this from my Plutarch, I should certainly have gone to see the place where Caesar planted that plane tree. Perhaps some kind soul will go to see it for me. I myself do not expect to return to Cordova.

IX. FIRST DAYS IN SEVILLE

Cordova seemed to cheer up as much as we at our going. We had undoubtedly had the better night’s sleep; as often as we woke we found Cordova awake, walking and talking, and coughing more than the night before, probably from fresh colds taken in the rain. From time to time there were church-bells, variously like tin pans and iron pots in tone, without sonorousness in their noise, or such wild clangor as some Italian church-bells have. But Cordova had lived through it, and at the station was lively with the arriving and departing trains. The morning was not only bright; it was hot, and the place babbled with many voices. We thought one voice crying “Agua, agua!” was a parrot’s and then we thought it was a girl’s, but really it was a boy with water for sale in a stone bottle. He had not a rose, white or red, in his hair, but if he had been a girl, old or young, he would have had one, white or red. Some of the elder women wore mantillas, but these wore flowers too, and were less pleasing than pathetic for it; one very massive matron was less pleasing and more pathetic than the rest. Peasant women carried bunches of chickens by the legs, and one had a turkey in a rush bag with a narrow neck to put its head out of for its greater convenience in gobbling. At the door of the station a donkey tried to bite a fly on its back; but even a Spanish donkey cannot do everything. There was no attempt to cheat us in the weight of our trunks, as there often is in Italy, and the mozo who put us and our hand-bags into the train was content with his reasonable fee. As for the pair of Civil Guards who were to go with us, they were of an insurpassable beauty and propriety, and we felt it a peculiar honor when one of them got into the compartment beside ours.

We were to take the mail-train to Seville; and in Spain the correo is next to the Sud-Express, which is the last word in the vocabulary of Peninsular railroading. Our correo had been up all night on the way from Madrid, and our compartment had apparently been used as a bedchamber, with moments of supper-room. It seemed to have been occupied by a whole family; there were frowsy pillows crushed into the corners of the seats, and, though a porter caught these away, the cigar stubs, and the cigarette ashes strewing the rug and fixed in it with various liquids, as well as some scattering hair-pins, escaped his care. But when it was dried and aired out by windows opened to the sunny weather, it was by no means a bad compartment. The broad cushions were certainly cleaner than the carpet; and it was something — it was a great deal — to be getting out of Cordova on any terms. Not that Cordova seems at this distance so bad as it seemed on the ground. If we could have had the bright Monday of our departure instead of the rainy Sunday of our stay there we might have wished to stay longer. But as it was the four hours’ run to Seville was delightful, largely because it Was the run from Cordova.

We were running at once over a gentle ground-swell which rose and sank in larger billows now and then, and the yellow Guadalquivir followed us all the way, in a valley that sometimes widened to the blue mountains always walling the horizon. We had first entered Andalusia after dark, and the scene had now a novelty little staled by the distant view of the afternoon before. The olive orchards then seen afar were intimately realized more and more in their amazing extent. None of the trees looked so old, so world-old, as certain trees in the careless olive groves of Italy. They were regularly planted, and most were in a vigorous middle life; where they were old they were closely pollarded; and there were young trees, apparently newly set out; there were holes indefinitely waiting for others. These were often, throughout Andalusia, covered to their first fork with cones of earth; and we remained in the dramatic superstition that this was to protect them against the omnivorous hunger of the goats, till we were told that it was to save their roots from being loosened by the wind. The orchards filled the level foregrounds and the hilly backgrounds to the vanishing-points of the mountainous perspectives; but when I say this I mean the reader to allow for wide expanses of pasturage, where lordly bulls were hoarding themselves for the feasts throughout Spain which the bulls of Andalusia are happy beyond others in supplying. With their devoted families they paraded the meadows, black against the green, or stood in sharp arrest, the most characteristic accent of the scene. In the farther rather than the nearer distance there were towns, very white, very African, keeping jealously away from the stations, as the custom of most towns is in Spain, beyond the wheat-lands which disputed the landscape with the olive orchards.

One of these towns lay white at the base of a hill topped by a yellow Moorish castle against the blue sky, like a subject waiting for its painter and conscious of its wonderful adaptation to water-color. The railroad-banks were hedged with Spanish bayonet, and in places with cactus grown into trees, all knees and elbows, and of a diabolical uncouthness. The air was fresh and springlike, and under the bright sun, which we had already felt hot, men were plowing the gray fields for wheat. Other men were beginning their noonday lunch, which, with the long nap to follow, would last till three o’clock, and perhaps be rashly accounted to them for sloth by the industrious tourist who did not know that their work had begun at dawn and would not end till dusk. Indolence may be a vice of the towns in Spain, but there is no loafing in the country, if I may believe the conclusions of my note-book. The fields often looked barren enough, and large spaces of their surface were covered by a sort of ground palm, as it seemed to be, though whether it was really a ground palm or not I know no more than I know the name or nature of the wild flower which looked an autumn crocus, and which with other wild flowers fringed the whole course of the train. There was especially a small yellow flower, star-shaped, which we afterward learned was called Todos Santos, from its custom of blooming at All Saints, and which washed the sward in the childlike enthusiasm of buttercups. A fine white narcissus abounded, and clumps of a mauve flower which swung its tiny bells over the sward washed by the Todos Santos. There were other flowers, which did what they could to brighten our way, all clinging to the notion of summer, which the weather continued to flatter throughout our fortnight in Seville.

I could not honestly say that the stations or the people about them were more interesting than in La Mancha. But at one place, where some gentlemen in linen jackets dismounted with their guns, a group of men with dogs leashed in pairs and saddle-horses behind them, took me with the sense of something peculiarly native where everything was so native. They were slim, narrow-hipped young fellows, tight-jerkined, loose-trousered, with a sort of divided apron of leather facing the leg and coming to the ankle; and all were of a most masterly Velasquez coloring and drawing. As they stood smoking motionlessly, letting the smoke drift from their nostrils, they seemed somehow of the same make with the slouching hounds, and they leaned forward together, giving the hunters no visible or audible greeting, but questioning their will with one quality of gaze. The hunters moved toward them, but not as if they belonged together, or expected any sort of demonstration from the men, dogs, and horses that were of course there to meet them. As long as our train paused, no electrifying spark kindled them to a show of emotion; but it would have been interesting to see what happened after we left them behind; they could not have kept their attitude of mutual indifference much longer. These peasants, like the Spaniards everywhere, were of an intelligent and sagacious look; they only wanted a chance, one must think, to be a leading race. They have sometimes an anxiety of appeal in their apathy, as if they would like to know more than they do.

There was some livelier thronging at the station where the train stopped for luncheon, but secure with the pretty rush-basket which the head waiter at our hotel, so much better than the hotel, had furnished us at starting, we kept to our car; and there presently we were joined by a young couple who were unmistakably a new married couple. The man was of a rich brown, and the woman of a dead white with dead black hair. They both might have been better-looking than they were, but apparently not better otherwise, for at Seville the groom helped us out of the car with our hand-bags.

I do not know what polite offers from him had already brought out the thanks in which our speech bewrayed us; but at our outlandish accents they at once became easier. They became frankly at home with themselves, and talked in their Andalusian patter with no fear of being understood. I might, indeed, have been far apter in Spanish without understanding their talk, for when printed the Andalusian dialect varies as far from the Castilian as, say, the Venetian varies from the Tuscan, and when spoken, more. It may then be reduced almost wholly to vowel sounds, and from the lips of some speakers it is really no more consonantal than if it came from the beaks of birds. They do not lisp the soft c or the z, as the Castilians do, but hiss them, and lisp the s instead, as the reader will find amusingly noted in the Sevillian chapters of The Sister of San Sulpice, which are the most charming chapters of that most charming novel. At the stations there were sometimes girls and sometimes boys with water for sale from stone bottles, who walked by the cars crying it; and there were bits of bright garden, or there were flowers in pots. There were also poor little human flowers, or call them weeds, if you will, that suddenly sprang up beside our windows, and moved their petals in pitiful prayer for alms. They always sprang up on the off side of the train, so that the trainmen could not see them, but I hope no trainman in Spain would have had the heart to molest them. As a matter of taste in vegetation, however, we preferred an occasional effect of mixed orange and pomegranate trees, with their perennial green and their autumnal red. We were, in fact, so spoiled by the profusion of these little human flowers, or weeds, that we even liked the change to the dried stalk of an old man, flowering at top into a flat basket of pale-pink shrimps. He gave us our first sight of sea-fruit, when we had got, without knowing it, to Seville Junction. There was, oddly enough, no other fruit for sale there; but there was a very agreeable-looking booth at the end of the platform placarded with signs of Puerto Rico coffee, cognac, and other drinks; and outside of it there were wash-basins and clean towels. I do not know how an old woman with a blind daughter made herself effective in the crowd, which did not seem much preoccupied with the opportunities of ablution and refection at that booth; but perhaps she begged with her blind daughter’s help while the crowd was busy in assorting itself for Cadiz and Seville and Malaga and Cordova and other musically syllabled mothers of history and romance.

II

A few miles and a few minutes more and we were in the embrace of the loveliest of them, which was at first the clutch on the octroi. But the octroi at Seville is not serious, and a walrus-mustached old porter, who looked like an old American car-driver of the bearded eighteen-sixties, eased us — not very swiftly, but softly — through the local customs, and then we drove neither so swiftly nor so softly to the hotel, where we had decided we would have rooms on the patio. We had still to learn that if there is a patio in a Spanish hotel you cannot have rooms in it, because they are either in repair or they are occupied. In the present case they were occupied; but we could have rooms over the street, which were the same as in the patio, and which were perfectly quiet, as we could perceive from the trolley-cars grinding and squealing under their windows. The manager (if that was the quality of the patient and amiable old official who received us) seemed surprised to see the cars there, perhaps because they were so inaudible; but he said we could have rooms in the annex, fronting on the adjoining plaza and siding on an inoffensive avenue where there were absolutely no cars. The interior, climbing to a lofty roof by a succession of galleries, was hushed by four silent senoras, all in black, and seated in mute ceremony around a table in chairs from which their little feet scarcely touched the marble pavement. Their quiet confirmed the manager’s assurance of a pervading tranquillity, and though the only bath in the annex was confessedly on the ground floor, and we were to be two floors above, the affair was very simple: the chambermaid would always show us where the bath was.

With misgiving, lost in a sense of our helplessness, we tried to think that the avenue under us was then quieting down with the waning day; and certainly it was not so noisy as the plaza, which, resounded with the whips and quips of the cabmen, and gave no signs of quiescence. Otherwise the annex was very pleasant, and we took the rooms shown us, hoping the best and fearing the worst. Our fears were wiser than our hopes, but we did not know this, and we went as gaily as we could for tea in the patio of our hotel, where a fountain typically trickled amidst its water-plants and a noiseless Englishman at his separate table almost restored our lost faith in a world not wholly racket. A young Spaniard and two young Spanish girls helped out the illusion with their gentle movements and their muted gutturals, and we looked forward to dinner with fond expectation. To tell the truth, the dinner, when we came back to it, was not very good, or at least not very winning, and the next night it was no better, though the head waiter had then, made us so much favor with himself as to promise us a side-table for the rest of our stay. He was a very friendly head waiter, and the dining-room was a long glare of the encaustic tiling which all Seville seems lined with, and of every Moorish motive in the decoration. Besides, there was a young Scotch girl, very interestingly pale and delicate of face, at one of the tables, and at another a Spanish girl with the most wonderful fire-red hair, and there were several miracles of the beautiful obesity which abounds in Spain.

When we returned to the annex it did seem, for the short time we kept our windows shut, that the manager had spoken true, and we promised ourselves a tranquil night, which, after our two nights in Cordova, we needed if we did not merit. But we had counted without the spread of popular education in Spain. Under our windows, just across the way, there proved to be a school of the “Royal Society of Friends of their Country,” as the Spanish inscription in its front proclaimed; and at dusk its pupils, children and young people of both sexes, began clamoring for knowledge at its doors. About ten o’clock they burst from them again with joyous exultation in their acquirements; then, shortly after, every manner of vehicle began to pass, especially heavy market wagons overladen and drawn by horses swarming with bells. Their succession left scarcely a moment of the night unstunned; but if ever a moment seemed to be escaping, there was a maniacal bell in a church near by that clashed out: “Hello! Here’s a bit of silence; let’s knock it on the head!”

We went promptly the next day to the gentle old manager and told him that he had been deceived in thinking he had given us rooms on a quiet street, and appealed to his invention for something, for anything, different. His invention had probably never been put to such stress before, and he showed us an excess of impossible apartments, which we subjected to a consideration worthy of the greatest promise in them. Our search ended in a suite of rooms on the top floor, where we could have the range of a flat roof outside if we wanted; but as the private family living next door kept hens, led by a lordly turkey, on their roof, we were sorrowfully forced to forego our peculiar advantage. Peculiar we then thought it, though we learned afterward that poultry-farming was not uncommon on the flat roofs of Seville, and there is now no telling how we might have prospered if we had taken those rooms and stocked our roof with Plymouth Rocks and Wyandottes. At the moment, however, we thought it would not do, and we could only offer our excuses to the manager, whose resources we had now exhausted, but not whose patience, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem and regret.

Our own grief was sincerer in leaving behind us the enthusiastic chambermaid of the annex who had greeted us with glad service, and was so hopeful that when she said our doors should be made to latch and lock in the morning, it was as if they latched and locked already. Her zeal made the hot water she brought for the baths really hot, “Caliente, caliente,” and her voice would have quieted the street under our windows if music could have soothed it. At a friendly word she grew trustful, and told us how it was hard, hard for poor people in Seville; how she had three dollars a month and her husband four; and how they had to toil for it. When we could not help telling her, cruelly enough, what they singly and jointly earn in New York, she praised rather than coveted the happier chance impossible to them. They would like to go, but they could not go! She was gay with it all, and after we had left the hotel and come back for the shawl which had been forgotten, she ran for it, shouting with laughter, as if we must see it the great joke she did; and she took the reward offered with the self-respect never wanting to the Spanish poor. Very likely if I ransacked my memory I might find instances of their abusing those advantages over the stranger which Providence puts in the reach of the native everywhere; but on the spur of the moment, I do not recall any. In Spain, where a woman earns three dollars a month, as in America where she earns thirty, the poor seem to abound in the comparative virtues which the rich demand in return for the chances of Heaven which they abandon to them. There were few of those rendering us service there whom we would not willingly have brought away with us; but very likely we should have found they had the defects of their qualities.

When we definitely turned our backs on the potential poultry-farm offered us at our hotel, we found ourselves in as good housing at another, overlooking the length and breadth of the stately Plaza San Fernando, with its parallelogram of tall palms, under a full moon swimming in a cloudless heaven by night and by day. By day, of course, we did not see it, but the sun was visibly there, rather blazing hot, even in mid-October, and showing more distinctly than the moon the beautiful tower of the Giralda from the waist up, and the shoulder of the great cathedral, besides features of other noble, though less noble, edifices. Our plaza was so full of romantic suggestion that I am rather glad now I had no association with it. I am sure I could not have borne at the time to know, as I have only now learned by recurring to my Baedeker, that in the old Franciscan cloister once there had stood the equestrian statue of the Comendador who dismounts and comes unbidden to the supper of Don Giovanni in the opera. That was a statue which, seen in my far youth, haunted my nightmares for many a year, and I am sure it would have kept me from sleep in the conditions, now so perfect, of our new housing if I had known, about it.

III

The plaza is named, of course, for King Fernando, who took Seville from the Moors six hundred years ago, and was canonized for his conquests and his virtues. But I must not enter so rashly upon the history of Seville, or forget the arrears of personal impression which I have to bring up. The very drive from the station was full of impressions, from the narrow and crooked streets, the houses of yellow, blue, and pink stucco, the flowered and fountained patios glimpsed passingly, the half-lengths of church-towers, and the fleeting facades of convents and palaces, all lovely in the mild afternoon light. These impressions soon became confluent, so that without the constant witness of our note-books I should now find it impossible to separate them. If they could be imparted to the reader in their complexity, that would doubtless be the ideal, though he would not believe that their confused pattern was a true reflex of Seville; so I recur to the record, which says that the morning after our arrival we hurried to see the great and beautiful cathedral. It had failed, in our approach the afternoon before, to fulfil the promise of one of our half-dozen guide-books (I forget which one) that it would seem to gather Seville about it as a hen gathers her chickens, but its vastness grew upon us with every moment of our more intimate acquaintance. Our acquaintance quickly ripened into the affectionate friendship which became a tender regret when we looked our last upon it; and vast as it was, it was never too large for our embrace. I doubt if there was a moment in our fortnight’s devotion when we thought the doughty canons, its brave-spoken founders, “mad to have undertaken it,” as they said they expected people to think, or any moment when we did not revere them for imagining a temple at once so beautiful and so big.

Our first visit was redeemed from the commonplace of our duty-round of the side-chapels by two things which I can remember without the help of my notes. One, and the great one, was Murillo’s “Vision of St. Anthony,” in which the painter has most surpassed himself, and which not to have seen, Gautier says, is not to have known the painter. It is so glorious a masterpiece, with the Child joyously running down from the clustering angels toward the kneeling saint in the nearest corner of the foreground, that it was distinctly a moment before I realized that the saint had once been cut out of his corner and sent into an incredible exile in America, and then munificently restored to it, though the seam in the canvas only too literally attested the incident. I could not well say how this fact then enhanced the interest of the painting, and then how it ceased from the consciousness, which it must always recur to with any remembrance of it. If one could envy wealth its chance of doing a deed of absolute good, here was the occasion, and I used it. I did envy the mind, along with the money, to do that great thing. Another great thing which still more swelled my American heart and made it glow with patriotic pride was the monument to Columbus, which our suffering his dust to be translated from Havana has made possible in Seville. There may be other noble results of our war on Spain for the suzerainty of Cuba and the conquest of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, but there is none which matches in moral beauty the chance it won us for this Grand Consent. I suppose those effigies of the four Spanish realms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre, which bear the coffin of the discoverer in stateliest processional on their shoulders, may be censured for being too boldly superb, too almost swagger, but I will not be the one to censure them. They are painted the color of life, and they advance colossally, royal-robed and mail-clad, as if marching to some proud music, and would tread you down if you did not stand aside. It is perhaps not art, but it is magnificent; nothing less stupendously Spanish would have sufficed; and I felt that the magnanimity which had yielded Spain this swelling opportunity had made America her equal in it.

We went to the cathedral the first morning after our arrival in Seville, because we did not know how soon we might go away, and then we went every morning or every afternoon of our fortnight there. Habitually we entered by that Gate of Pardon which in former times had opened the sanctuary to any wickedness short of heresy; but, as our need of refuge was not pressing, we wearied of the Gate of Pardon, with its beautiful Saracenic arch converted to Christianity by the Renaissance bas-relief obliterating the texts from the Koran. We tried to form the habit of going in by other gates, but the Gate of Pardon finally prevailed; there was always a gantlet of cabmen to be run beside it, which brought our sins home to us. It led into the badly paved Court of Oranges, where the trees seem planted haphazard and where there used also to be fountains. Gate and court are remnants of the mosque, patterned upon that of Cordova by one of the proud Moorish kings of Seville, and burned by the Normans when they took and sacked his city. His mosque had displaced the early Christian basilica of San Vicente, which the still earlier temple to Venus Salambo had become. Then, after the mosque was rebuilt, the good San Fernando in his turn equipped it with a Gothic choir and chapels and turned it into the cathedral, which was worn out with pious uses when the present edifice was founded, in their folie des grandeurs, by those glorious madmen in the first year of the fifteenth century.

IV

Little of this learning troubled me in my visits to the cathedral, or even the fact that, next to St. Peter’s, it was the largest church in the world. It was sufficient to itself by mere force of architectural presence, without the help of incidents or measurements. It was a city in itself, with a community of priests and sacristans dwelling in it, and a floating population of sightseers and worshipers always passing through it. The first morning we had submitted to make the round of the chapels, patiently paying to have each of them unlocked and wearily wondering at their wonders, but only sympathizing really with the stern cleric who showed the ceremonial vestments and jewels of the cathedral, and whose bitter face expressed, or seemed to express, abhorrence of our whole trivial tourist tribe. After that morning we took our curiosity into our own keeping and looked at nothing that did not interest us, and we were interested most in those fellow-beings who kept coming and going all day long.

Chiefly, of course, they were women. In Catholic countries women have either more sins to be forgiven than the men, or else they are sorrier for them; and here, whether there was service or not, they were dropped everywhere in veiled and motionless prayer. In Seville the law of the mantilla is rigorously enforced. If a woman drives, she may wear a hat; but if she walks, she must wear a mantilla under pain of being pointed at by the finger of scorn. If she is a young girl she may wear colors with it (a cheerful blue seems the favorite), but by far the greater number came to the cathedral in complete black. Those somber figures which clustered before chapel, or singly dotted the pavement everywhere, flitted in and out like shadows in the perpetual twilight. For far the greater number, their coming to the church was almost their sole escape into the world. They sometimes met friends, and after a moment, or an hour, of prayer they could cheer their hearts with neighborly gossip. But for the greater part they appeared and disappeared silently and swiftly, and left the spectator to helpless conjecture of their history. Many of them would have first met their husbands in the cathedral when they prayed, or when they began to look around to see who was looking at them. It might have been their trysting-place, safeguarding them in their lovers’ meetings, and after marriage it had become their social world, when their husbands left them for the clubs or the cafes. They could not go at night, of course, except to some special function, but they could come by day as often as they liked. I do not suppose that the worshipers I saw habitually united love or friendship with their devotions in the cathedral, but some certainly joined business with devotion; at a high function one day an American girl felt herself sharply nudged in the side, and when she turned she found the palm of her kneeling neighbor stretched toward her. They must all have had their parish churches besides the cathedral, and a devotee might make the day a social whirl by visiting one shrine after another. But I do not think that many do. The Spanish women are of a domestic genus, and are expected to keep at home by the men who expect to keep abroad.

I do not know just how it is in the parish churches; they must each have its special rite, which draws and holds the frequenter; but the cathedral constantly offers a drama of irresistible appeal. We non-Catholics can feel this even at the distance to which our Protestantism has remanded us, and at your first visit to the Seville cathedral during mass you cannot help a moment of recreant regret when you wish that a part in the mystery enacting was your birthright. The esthetic emotion is not denied you; the organ-tide that floods the place bears you on it, too; the priests perform their rites before the altar for you; they come and go, they bow and kneel, for you; the censer swings and smokes for you; the little wicked-eyed choir-boys and mischievous-looking acolytes suppress their natures in your behalf as much as if you were a believer, or perhaps more. The whole unstinted hospitality of the service is there for you, as well as for the children of the house, and the heart must be rude and the soul ungrateful that would refuse it. For my part, I accepted it as far as I knew how, and when I left the worshipers on their knees and went tiptoeing from picture to picture and chapel to chapel, it was with shame for the unscrupulous sacristan showing me about, and I felt that he, if not I, ought to be put out and not allowed back till the function was over. I call him sacristan at a venture; but there were several kinds of guides in the cathedral, some in the livery of the place and some in civil dress, willing to supplement our hotel interpreter, or lying in wait for us when we came alone. I wish now I had taken them all, but at the time they tired me, and I denied them.

Though not a day passed but we saw it, I am not able to say what the cathedral was like. The choir was planted in the heart of it, as it might be a celestial refuge in that forest of mighty pillars, as great in girth as the giant redwoods of California, and climbing to a Gothic firmament horizoned round as with sunset light from near a hundred painted windows. The chapels on each side, the most beautiful in Spain, abound in riches of art and pious memorials, with chief among them the Royal Chapel, in the prow, as it were, of the ship which the cathedral has been likened to, keeping the bones not only of the sainted hero, King Fernando, but also, among others, the bones of Peter the Cruel, and of his unwedded love, Maria de Padilla, far too good for Peter in life, if not quite worthy of San Fernando in death. You can see the saint’s body on certain dates four times a year, when, as your Baedeker will tell you, “the troops of the garrison march past and lower their colors” outside the cathedral. We were there on none of these dates, and, far more regretably, not on the day of Corpus Christi, when those boys whose effigies in sculptured and painted wood we had seen in the museum at Valladolid pace in their mystic dance before the people at the opposite portal of the cathedral. But I appoint any reader, so minded, to go and witness the rite some springtime for me. There is no hurry, for it is destined to endure through the device practised in defeating the pope who proposed to abolish it. He ordained that it should continue only as long as the boys’ actual costumes lasted; but by renewing these carefully wherever they began to wear out, they have become practically imperishable.

If we missed this attraction of the cathedral, we had the high good fortune to witness another ceremony peculiar to it, but perhaps less popularly acceptable. The building had often suffered from earthquakes, and on the awful day, dies irae, of the great Lisbon earthquake, during mass and at the moment of the elevation of the Host, when the worshipers were on their knees, there came such a mighty shock in sympathy with the far-off cataclysm that the people started to their feet and ran out of the cathedral. If the priests ran after them, as soon as the apparent danger was past they led the return of their flock and resumed the interrupted rite. It was, of course, by a miracle that the temple was spared, and when it was realized how scarcely Seville had escaped the fate of Lisbon it was natural that the event should be dramatized in a perpetual observance. Every year now, on the 1st of November, the clergy leave the cathedral at a chosen moment of the mass, with much more stateliness than in the original event, and lead the people out of one portal, to return with them by another for the conclusion of the ceremonial.

We waited long for the climax, but at last we almost missed it through the overeagerness of the guide I had chosen out of many that petitioned. He was so politely, so forbearingly insistent in his offer to see that we were vigilantly cared for, that I must have had a heart harder than Peter the Cruel’s to have denied him, and he planted us at the most favorable point for the function in the High Chapel, with instructions which portal to hurry to when the movement began, and took his peseta and went his way. Then, while we confidingly waited, he came rushing back and with a great sweep of his hat wafted us to the door which he had said the procession would go out by, but which he seemed to have learned it would come in by, and we were saved from what had almost been his fatal error. I forgave him the more gladly because I could rejoice in his returning to repair his error, although he had collected his money; and with a heart full of pride in his verification of my theory of the faithful Spanish nature, I gave myself to the shining gorgeousness of the procession that advanced chanting in the blaze of the Sevillian sun. There was every rank of clergy, from the archbishop down, in robes of ceremonial, but I am unable honestly to declare the admiration for their splendor which I would have willingly felt. The ages of faith in which those vestments were designed were apparently not the ages of taste; yet it was the shape of the vestments and not the color which troubled the eye of unfaith, if not of taste. The archbishop in crimson silk, with his train borne by two acolytes, the canons in their purple, the dean in his gold-embroidered robes, and the priests and choristers in their black robes and white surplices richly satisfied it; and if some of the clerics were a little frayed and some of the acolytes were spotted with the droppings of the candles, these were details which one remembered afterward and that did not matter at the time.

When the procession was housed again, we went off and forgot it in the gardens of the Alcazar. But I must not begin yet on the gardens of the Alcazar. We went to them every day, as we did to the cathedral, but we did not see them until our second morning in Seville. We gave what was left from the first morning in the cathedral to a random exploration of the streets and places of the city. There was, no doubt, everywhere some touch of the bravery of our square of San Fernando, where the public windows were hung with crimson tapestries and brocades in honor of St. Raphael; but his holiday did not make itself molestively felt in the city’s business or pleasure. Where we could drive we drove, and where we must we walked, and we walked of course through the famous Calle de las Sierpes, because no one drives there. As a rule no woman walks there, and naturally there were many women walking there, under the eyes of the popular cafes and aristocratic clubs which principally abound in Las Sierpes, for it is also the street of the principal shops, though it is not very long and is narrower than many other streets of Seville. It has its name from so commonplace an origin as the sign over a tavern door, with some snakes painted on it; but if the example of sinuosity had been set it by prehistoric serpents, there were scores of other streets which have bettered its instruction. There were streets that crooked away everywhere, not going anywhere, and breaking from time to time into irregular angular spaces with a church or a convent or a nobleman’s house looking into them.

VI

The noblemen’s houses often showed a severely simple facade to the square or street, and hid their inner glories with what could have been fancied a haughty reserve if it had not been for the frankness with which they opened their patios to the gaze of the stranger, who, when he did not halt his carriage before them, could enjoy their hospitality from a sidewalk sometimes eighteen inches wide. The passing tram-car might grind him against the tall grilles which were the only barriers to the patios, but otherwise there would be nothing to spoil his enjoyment of those marble floors and tiled walls and fountains potted round with flowering plants. In summer he could have seen the family life there; and people who are of such oriental seclusion otherwise will sometimes even suffer the admiring traveler to come as well as look within. But one who would not press their hospitality so far could reward his forbearance by finding some of the patios too new-looking, with rather a glare from their tiles and marbles, their painted iron pillars, and their glass roofs which the rain comes through in the winter. The ladies sit and sew there, or talk, if they prefer, and receive their friends, and turn night into day in the fashion of climates where they are so easily convertible. The patio is the place of that peculiarly Spanish rite, the tertulia, and the family nightly meets its next of kin and then its nearer and farther friends there with that Latin regularity which may also be monotony. One patio is often much like another, though none was perhaps of so much public interest as the patio of the lady who loved a bull-fighter and has made her patio a sort of shrine to him. The famous espada perished in his heroic calling, no worse if no better than those who saw him die, and now his bust is in plain view, with a fit inscription recognizing his worth and prowess, and with the heads of some of the bulls he slew.

Under that clement sky the elements do not waste the works of man as elsewhere, and many of the houses of Seville are said to be such as the Moors built there. We did not know them from the Christian houses; but there are no longer any mosques, while in our wanderings we had the pretty constant succession of the convents which, when they are still in the keeping of their sisterhoods and brotherhoods, remain monuments of the medieval piety of Spain; or, when they are suppressed and turned to secular uses, attest the recurrence of her modern moods of revolution and reform. It is to one of these that Seville owes the stately Alameda de Hercules, a promenade covering the length and breadth of aforetime convent gardens, which you reach from the Street of the Serpents by the Street of the Love of God, and are then startled by the pagan presence of two mighty columns lifting aloft the figures of Caesar and of the titular demigod. Statues and pillars are alike antique, and give you a moment of the Eternal City the more intense because the promenade is of an unkempt and broken surface, like the Cow-field which the Roman Forum used to be. Baedeker calls it shady, and I dare say it is shady, but I do not remember the trees — only those glorious columns climbing the summer sky of the Andalusian autumn, and proclaiming the imperishable memory of the republic that conquered and the empire that ruled the world, and have never loosed their hold upon it. We were rather newly from the grass-grown ruin of a Roman town in Wales, and in this other Iberian land we were always meeting the witnesses of the grandeur which no change short of some universal sea change can wholly sweep from the earth. Before it Goth and Arab shrink, with all their works, into the local and provisional; Rome remains for all time imperial and universal.

To descend from this high-horsed reflection, as I must, I have to record that there did not seem to be so many small boys in Seville as in the Castillian capitals we had visited; in the very home of the bull-feast we did not see one mimic corrida given by the torreros of the future. Not even in the suburb of Triana, where the small boys again consolingly superabounded, was the great national game played among the wheels and hoofs of the dusty streets to which we crossed the Guadalquivir that afternoon. To be sure, we were so taken with other things that a boyish bull-feast might have rioted unnoticed under our horses’ very feet, especially on the long bridge which gives you the far upward and downward stretch of the river, so simple and quiet and empty above, so busy and noisy and thronged with shipping below. I suppose there are lovelier rivers than that — we ourselves are known to brag of our Pharpar and Abana — but I cannot think of anything more nobly beautiful than the Guadalquivir resting at peace in her bed, where she has had so many bad dreams of Carthaginian and Roman and Gothic and Arab and Norman invasion. Now her waters redden, for the time at least, only from the scarlet hulls of the tramp steamers lying in long succession beside the shore where the gardens of the Delicias were waiting to welcome us that afternoon to our first sight of the pride and fashion of Seville. I never got enough of the brave color of those tramp steamers; and in thinking of them as English, Norse, French, and Dutch, fetching or carrying their cargoes over those war-worn, storied waters, I had some finer thrills than in dwelling on the Tower of Gold which rose from the midst of them. It was built in the last century of the Moorish dominion to mark the last point to which the gardens of the Moorish palace of the Alcazar could stretch, but they were long ago obliterated behind it; and though it was so recent, no doubt it would have had its pathos if I could ever have felt pity for the downfall of the Moslem power in Spain. As it was, I found the tramp steamers more moving, and it was these that my eye preferably sought whenever I crossed the Triana bridge.

VII

We were often crossing it on one errand or other, but now we were especially going to see the gipsy quarter of Seville, which disputes with that of Granada the infamy of the loathsomest purlieu imaginable. Perhaps because it was so very loathsome, I would not afterward visit the gipsy quarter in Granada, and if such a thing were possible I would willingly unvisit the gipsy quarter of Seville. All Triana is pretty squalid, though it has merits and charms to which I will try eventually to be just, and I must even now advise the reader to visit the tile potteries there. If he has our good-fortune he may see in the manager of one a type of that fusion of races with which Spain long so cruelly and vainly struggled after the fall of the last Moorish kingdom. He was beautifully lean and clean of limb, and of a grave gentleness of manner; his classically regular face was as swarthy as the darkest mulatto’s, but his quiet eyes were gray. I carried the sense of his fine decency with me when we drove away from his warerooms, and suddenly whirled round the corner of the street into the gipsy quarter, and made it my prophylactic against the human noisomeness which instantly beset our course. Let no Romany Rye romancing Barrow, or other fond fibbing sentimentalist, ever pretend to me hereafter that those persistent savages have even the ridiculous claim of the North American Indians to the interest of the civilized man, except as something to be morally and physically scoured and washed up, and drained and fumigated, and treated with insecticides and put away in mothballs. Our own settled order of things is not agreeable at all points; it reeks and it smells, especially in Spain, when you get down to its lower levels; but it does not assail the senses with such rank offense as smites them in the gipsy quarter with sights and sounds and odors which to eye and ear, as well as nose, were all stenches.

Low huts lined the street, which swarmed at our coming with ragged children running beside us and after us and screaming, “Minny, niooney, money!” in a climax of what they wanted. Men leaned against the door-posts and stared motionless, and hags, lean and fat, sat on the thresholds and wished to tell our fortunes; younger women ranged the sidewalks and offered to dance. They all had flowers in their hair, and some were of a horrible beauty, especially one in a green waist, with both white and red flowers in her dusky locks. Down the middle of the road a troop of children, some blond, but mostly black, tormented a hapless ass colt; and we hurried away as fast as our guide could persuade our cabman to drive. But the gipsy quarter had another street in reserve which made us sorry to have left the first. It paralleled the river, and into the center of it every manner of offal had been cast from the beginning of time to reek and fester and juicily ripen and rot in unspeakable corruption. It was such a thoroughfare as Dante might have imagined in his Hell, if people in his time had minded such horrors; but as it was we could only realize that it was worse than infernal, it was medieval, and that we were driving in such putrid foulness as the gilded carriages of kings and queens and the prancing steeds and palfreys of knights and ladies found their way through whenever they went abroad in the picturesque and romantic Middle Ages. I scarcely remember now how we got away and down to the decent waterside, and then by the helpful bridge to the other shore of the Guadalquivir, painted red with the reflections of those consoling tramp steamers.

After that abhorrent home of indolence, which its children never left except to do a little fortune-telling and mule and donkey trading, eked out with theft in the country round, any show of honest industry looked wholesome and kind. I rejoiced almost as much in the machinery as in the men who were loading the steamers; even the huge casks of olives, which were working from the salt-water poured into them and frothing at the bung in great white sponges of spume, might have been examples of toil by which those noisome vagabonds could well have profited. But now we had come to see another sort of leisure — the famous leisure of fortune and fashion driving in the Delicias, but perhaps never quite fulfilling the traveler’s fond ideal of it. We came many times to the Delicias in hope of it, with decreasing disappointment, indeed, but to the last without entire fruition. For our first visit we could not have had a fitter evening, with its pale sky reddening from a streak of sunset beyond Triana, and we arrived in appropriate circumstance, round the immense circle of the bull-ring and past the palace which the Duc de Montpensier has given the church for a theological seminary, with long stretches of beautiful gardens. Then we were in the famous Paseo, a drive with footways on each side, and on one side dusky groves widening to the river. The paths were lit with gleaming statues, and among the palms and the eucalyptuses were orange trees full of their golden globes, which we wondered were not stolen till we were told they were of that bitter sort which are mostly sent to Scotland, not because they are in accord with the acrid nature of man there, but that they may be wrought into marmalade. On the other hand stretched less formal woods, with fields for such polite athletics as tennis, which the example of the beloved young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and courageously walking, while their carriages followed. A magnate of some sort was shut alone in a brougham, in the care of footman and coachman with deeply silver-banded hats; there were a few military and civil riders, and there was distinctly a young man in a dog-cart with a groom, keeping abreast the landau of three ladies in mantillas, with whom he was improving what seemed a chance acquaintance. Along the course the public park gave way at times to the grounds of private villas; before one of these a boy did what he could for us by playing ball with a priest. At other points there were booths with chairs and tables, where I am sure interesting parties of people would have been sitting if they could have expected us to pass.

VIII

The reader, pampered by the brilliant excitements of our American promenades, may think this spectacle of the gay world of Seville dull; but he ought to have been with us a colder, redder, and sadder evening when we had the Delicias still more to ourselves. Afterward the Delicias seemed to cheer up, and the place was fairly frequented on a holiday, which we had not suspected was one till our cabman convinced us from his tariff that we must pay him double, because you must always do that in Seville on holidays. By this time we knew that most of the Sevillian rank and riches had gone to Madrid for the winter, and we were the more surprised by some evident show of them in the private turnouts where by far most of the turnouts were public. But in Spain a carriage is a carriage, and the Sevillian cabs are really very proper and sometimes even handsome, and we felt that our own did no discredit to the Delicias. Many of the holiday-makers were walking, and there were actually women on foot in hats and hobble-skirts without being openly mocked. On the evening of our last resort to the Delicias it was quite thronged far into the twilight, after a lemon sunset that continued to tinge the east with pink and violet. There were hundreds of carriages, fully half of them private, with coachmen and footmen in livery. With them it seemed to be the rule to stop in the circle at a turning-point a mile off and watch the going and coming. It was a serious spectacle, but not solemn, and it had its reliefs, its high-lights. It was always pleasant to see three Spanish ladies on a carriage seat, the middle one protruding because of their common bulk, and oftener in umbrella-wide hats with towering plumes than in the charming mantilla. There were no top-hats or other formality in the men’s dress; some of them were on horseback, and there were two women riding.

Suddenly, as if it had come up out of the ground, I perceived a tram-car keeping abreast of the riding and walking and driving, and through all I was agreeably aware of files of peasants bestriding their homing donkeys on the bridle-path next the tram. I confess that they interested me more than my social equals and superiors; I should have liked to talk with those fathers and mothers of toil, bestriding or perched on the cruppers of their donkeys, and I should have liked especially to know what passed in the mind of one dear little girl who sat before her father with her bare brown legs tucked into the pockets of the pannier.

X. SEVILLIAN ASPECTS AND INCIDENTS

It is always a question how much or little we had better know about the history of a strange country when seeing it. If the great mass of travelers voted according to their ignorance, the majority in favor of knowing next to nothing would be overwhelming, and I do not say they would be altogether unwise. History itself is often of two minds about the facts, or the truth from them, and when you have stored away its diverse conclusions, and you begin to apply them to the actual conditions, you are constantly embarrassed by the misfits. What did it avail me to believe that when the Goths overran the north of Spain the Vandals overran the south, and when they swept on into Africa and melted away in the hot sun there as a distinctive race, they left nothing but the name Vandalusia, a letter less, behind them? If the Vandals were what they are reported to have been, the name does not at all characterize the liveliest province of Spain. Besides, the very next history told me that they took even their name with them, and forbade me the simple and apt etymology which I had pinned my indolent faith to.

I

Before I left Seville I convinced a principal bookseller, much against his opinions, that there must be some such brief local history of the city as I was fond of finding in Italian towns, and I took it from his own reluctant shelf. It was a very intelligent little guide, this Seville in the Hand, as it calls itself, but I got it too late for use in exploring the city, and now I can turn to it only for those directions which will keep the reader from losing his way in the devious past. The author rejects the fable which the chroniclers delight in, and holds with historians who accept the Phoenicians as the sufficiently remote founders of Seville. This does not put out of commission those Biblical “ships of Tarshish” which Dr. Edward Everett Hale, in his graphic sketch of Spanish history, has sailing to and from the neighboring coasts. Very likely they came up the Guadalquivir, and lay in the stream where a few thousand years later I saw those cheerful tramp-steamers lying. At any rate, the Phoenicians greatly flourished there, and gave their colony the name of Hispalis, which it remained content with till the Romans came and called the town Julia Romula, and Julius Caesar fenced it with the strong walls which the Moorish conquerors, after the Goths, reinforced and have left plain to be seen at this day. The most casual of wayfaring men must have read as he ran that the Moorish power fell before the sword of San Fernando as the Gothic fell before their own, and the Roman before the Gothic. But it is more difficult to realize that earlier than the Gothic, somewhere in between the Vandals and the Romans, had been the Carthaginians, whose great general Hamilcar fancied turning all Spain into a Carthaginian province. They were a branch of the Phoenicians as even the older, unadvertised edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica will tell, and the Phoenicians were a sort of Hebrews. Whether they remained to flourish with the other Jews under the Moors, my Sevilla en la Mano does not say; and I am not sure whether they survived to share the universal exile into which Islam and Israel were finally driven. What is certain is, that the old Phoenician name of Hispalis outlived the Roman name of Julia Romula and reappeared in the Arabic as Ishbiliya (I know it from my Baedeker) and is now permanently established as Seville.

Under the Moors the city was subordinate to Cordova, though I can hardly bear to think so in my far greater love of Seville. But it was the seat of schools of science, art, and agriculture, and after the Christians had got it back, Alfonso the Learned founded other schools there for the study of Latin and Arabic. But her greatest prosperity and glory came to Seville with the discovery of America. Not Columbus only, but all his most famous contemporaries, sailed from the ports of her coasts; she was the capital of the commerce with the new world, ruling and regulating it by the oldest mercantile tribunal in the world, and becoming the richest city of Spain. Then riches flowered in the letters and arts, especially the arts, and Herrera, Pacheco, Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurburan were born and flourished in Seville. In modern times she has taken a prominent part in political events. She led in the patriotic war to drive out the armies of Napoleon, and she seems to have been on both sides in the struggle for liberal and absolutist principles, the establishment of the brief republic of 1868, and the restoration of the present monarchy.

Through all the many changes from better to Worse, from richer to poorer, Seville continued faithful to the ideal of religious unity which the wise Isabel and the shrewd Ferdinand divined was the only means of consolidating the intensely provincial kingdoms of Spain into one nation of Spaniards. Andalusia not being Gothic had never been Aryan, and it was one of her kings who carried his orthodoxy to Castile and established it inexpugnably at Toledo after he succeeded his heretical father there. When four or five hundred years later it became a political necessity of the Catholic Kings to expel their Jewish and Moorish subjects and convert their wealth to pious and patriotic uses, Andalusia was one of the most zealous provinces in the cause. When presently the inquisitions of the Holy Office began, some five hundred heretics were burned alive at Seville before the year was out; many others, who were dead and buried, paid the penalty of their heresy in effigy; in all more than two thousand suffered in the region round about. Before he was in Valladolid, Torquemada was in Seville, and there he drew up the rules that governed the procedure of the Inquisition throughout Spain. A magnificent quemadero, or crematory, second only to that of Madrid, was built: a square stone platform where almost every day the smoke of human sacrifice ascended. This crematory for the living was in the meadow of San Sebastian, now a part of the city park system which we left on the right that first evening when we drove to the Delicias. I do not know why I should now regret not having visited the place of this dreadful altar and offered my unavailing pity there to the memory of those scores of thousands of hapless martyrs who suffered there to no end, not even to the end of confirming Spain in the faith one and indivisible, for there are now, after so many generations of torment, two Protestant churches in Seville. For one thing I did not know where the place of the quemadero was; and I do not yet know where those Protestant churches are.

II

If I went again to Seville I should try to visit them — but, as it was, we gave our second day to the Alcazar, which is merely the first in the series of palaces and gardens once stretching from the flank of the cathedral to the Tower of Gold beside the Guadalquivir. A rich sufficiency is left in the actual Alcazar to suggest the splendor of the series, and more than enough in the gardens to invite our fatigue, day after day, to the sun and shade of its quiet paths and seats when we came spent with the glories and the bustling piety of the cathedral. In our first visit we had the guidance of a patriotic young Granadan whose zeal for the Alhambra would not admit the Alcazar to any comparison, but I myself still prefer it after seeing the Alhambra. It is as purely Moorish as that and it is in better repair if not better taste. The taste in fact is the same, and the Castilian kings consulted it as eagerly as their Arabic predecessors in the talent of the Moslem architects whom they had not yet begun to drive into exile. I am not going to set up rival to the colored picture postals, which give a better notion than I could give of the painted and gilded stucco decoration, the ingenious geometrical designs on the walls, and the cloying sweetness of the honeycombing in the vaulted roofs. Every one will have his feeling about Moorish architecture; mine is that a little goes a great way, and that it is too monotonous to compete with the Gothic in variety, while it lacks the dignity of any form of the Greek or the Renaissance. If the phrase did not insult the sex which the faith of the Moslem insufferably insults, one might sum up one’s slight for it in the word effeminate.

The Alcazar gardens are the best of the Alcazar. But I would not ignore the homelike charm of the vast court by which you enter from the street outside to the palace beyond. It is planted casually about with rather shabby orange trees that children were playing under, and was decorated with the week’s wash of the low, simple dwellings which may be hired at a rental moderate even for Seville, where a handsome and commodious house in a good quarter rents for sixty dollars a year. One of those two-story cottages, as we should call them, in the ante-court of the Alcazar had for the student of Spanish life the special advantage of a lover close to a ground-floor window dropping tender nothings down through the slats of the shutter to some maiden lurking within. The nothings were so tender that you could not hear them drop, and, besides, they were Spanish nothings, and it would not have served any purpose for the stranger to listen for them. Once afterward we saw the national courtship going on at another casement, but that was at night, and here the precious first sight of it was offered at ten o’clock in the morning. Nobody seemed to mind the lover stationed outside the shutter with which the iron bars forbade him the closest contact; and it is only fair to say that he minded nobody; he was there when we went in and there when we came out, and it appears that when it is a question of love-making time is no more an object in Spain than in the United States. The scene would have been better by moonlight, but you cannot always have it moonlight, and the sun did very well; at least, the lover did not seem to miss the moon.

He was only an incident, and I hope the most romantic reader will let me revert from him to the Alcazar gardens. We were always reverting to them on any pretext or occasion, and we mostly had them to ourselves in the gentle afternoons when we strayed or sat about at will in them. The first day we were somewhat molested by the instruction of our patriotic Granadan guide, who had a whopper-jaw and grayish blue eyes, but coal-black hair for all his other blondness. He smoked incessant cigarettes, and he showed us especially the pavilion of Charles the Fifth, whom, after that use of all English-speaking Spanish guides, he called Charley Fift. It appeared that the great emperor used this pavilion for purposes of meditation; but he could not always have meditated there, though the frame of a brazier standing in the center intimated that it was tempered for reflection. The first day we found a small bird in possession, flying from one bit of the carved wooden ceiling to another, and then, taking our presence in dudgeon, out into the sun. Another day there was a nursery-girl there with a baby that cried; on another, still more distractingly, a fashionable young French bride who went kodaking round while her husband talked with an archaeological official, evidently Spanish. In his own time, Charley probably had the place more to himself, though even then his thoughts could not have been altogether cheerful, whether he recalled what he had vainly done to keep out of Spain and yet to take the worst of Spain with him into the Netherlands, where he tried to plant the Inquisition among his Flemings; he was already much soured with a world that had cloyed him, and was perhaps considering even then how he might make his escape from it to the cloister.

III

We did not know as yet how almost entirely dramatic the palace of the Alcazar was, how largely it was representative of what the Spanish successors of the Moorish kings thought those kings would have made it if they had made it; and it was probably through an instinct for the genuine that we preferred the gardens after our first cries of wonder. What remains to me of our many visits is the mass of high borders of box, with roses, jasmine, and orange trees, palms, and cypresses. The fountains dribbled rather than gushed, and everywhere were ranks and rows of plants in large, high earthen pots beside or upon the tiled benching that faced the fountains and would have been easier to sit on if you had not had to supply the back yourself. The flowers were not in great profusion, and chiefly we rejoiced in the familiar quaintness of clumps of massive blood-red coxcombs and strange yellow ones. The walks were bordered with box, and there remains distinctly the impression of marble steps and mosaic seats inlaid with tiles; all Seville seems inlaid with tiles. One afternoon we lingered longer than usual because the day was so sunnily warm in the garden paths and spaces, without being hot. A gardener whom we saw oftenest hung about his flowers in a sort of vegetable calm, and not very different from theirs except that they were not smoking cigarettes. He did not move a muscle or falter in his apparently unseeing gaze; but when one of us picked a seed from the ground and wondered what it was he said it was a magnolia seed, and as if he could bear no more went away. In one wilding place which seemed set apart for a nursery several men were idly working with many pauses, but not so many as to make the spectator nervous. As the afternoon waned and the sun sank, its level rays dwelt on the galleries of the palace which Peter the Cruel built himself and made so ugly with harsh brown stucco ornament that it set your teeth on edge, and with gigantic frescos exaggerated from the Italian, and very coarse and rank.

It was this savage prince who invented much of the Alcazar in the soft Moorish taste; but in those hideous galleries he let his terrible nature loose, though as for that some say he was no crueler than certain other Spanish kings of that period. This is the notion of my unadvertised Encyclopaedia Britannica, and perhaps we ought to think of him leniently as Peter the Ferocious. He was kind to some people and was popularly known as the Justiciary; he especially liked the Moors and Jews, who were gratefully glad, poor things, of being liked by any one under the new Christian rule. But he certainly killed several of his half-brothers, and notably he killed his half-brother Don Fadrique in the Alcazar. That is, if he had no hand in the butchery himself he had him killed after luring him to Seville for the tournaments and forgiving him for all their mutual injuries with every caressing circumstance. One reads that after the king has kissed him he sits down again to his game of backgammon and Don Fadrique goes into the next room to Maria do Padilla, the lovely and gentle lady whom Don Pedro has married as much as he can with a wedded wife shut up in Toledo. She sits there in terror with her damsels and tries with looks and signs to make Don Fadrique aware of his danger. But he imagines no harm till the king and his companions, with their daggers drawn, come to the curtains, which the king parts, commanding, “Seize the Master of Santiago!” Don Fadrique tries to draw his sword, and then he turns and flies through the halls of the Alcazar, where he finds every door bolted and barred. The king’s men are at his heels, and at last one of them fells him with a blow of his mace. The king goes back with a face of sympathy to Maria, who has fallen to the floor.

The treacherous keeping is all rather in the taste of the Italian Renaissance, but the murder itself is more Roman, as the Spanish atrocities and amusements are apt to be. Murray says it was in the beautiful Hall of the Ambassadors that Don Fadrique was killed, but the other manuals are not so specific. Wherever it was, there is a blood-stain in the pavement which our Granadan guide failed to show us, possibly from a patriotic pique that there are no blood-stains in the Alhambra with personal associations. I cannot say that much is to be made of the vaulted tunnel where poor Maria de Padilla used to bathe, probably not much comforted by the courtiers afterward drinking the water from the tank; she must have thought the compliment rather nasty, and no doubt it was paid her to please Don Pedro.

We found it pleasanter going and coming through the corridor leading to the gardens from the public court. This was kept at the outer end by an “old rancid Christian” smoking incessant cigarettes and not explicitly refusing to sell us picture postals after taking our entrance fee; the other end was held by a young, blond, sickly-looking girl, who made us take small nosegays at our own price and whom it became a game to see if we could escape. I have left saying to the last that the king and queen of Spain have a residence in the Alcazar, and that when they come in the early spring they do not mind corning to it through that plebeian quadrangle. I should not mind it myself if I could go back there next spring.

IV

We had refused with loathing the offer of those gipsy jades to dance for us in their noisome purlieu at Triana, but we were not proof against the chance of seeing some gipsy dancing in a cafe-theater one night in Seville. The decent place was filled with the “plain people,” who sat with their hats on at rude tables smoking and drinking coffee from tall glasses. They were apparently nearly all working-men who had left nearly all their wives to keep on working at home, though a few of these also had come. On a small stage four gipsy girls, in unfashionably and untheatrically decent gowns of white, blue, or red, with flowers in their hair, sat in a semicircle with one subtle, silent, darkling man among them. One after another they got up and did the same twisting and posturing, without dancing, and while one posed and contorted the rest unenviously joined the spectators in their clapping and their hoarse cries of “Ole!” It was all perfectly proper except for one high moment of indecency thrown in at the end of each turn, as if to give the house its money’s worth. But the real, overflowing compensation came when that little, lithe, hipless man in black jumped to his feet and stormed the audience with a dance of hands and arms, feet and legs, head, neck, and the whole body, which Mordkin in his finest frenzy could not have equaled or approached. Whatever was fiercest and wildest in nature and boldest in art was there, and now the house went mad with its hand-clappings and table-hammerings and deep-throated “Oles!”

Another night we went to the academy of the world-renowned Otero and saw the instruction of Sevillian youth in native dances of the haute ecole. The academy used to be free to a select public, but now the chosen, who are nearly always people from the hotels, must pay ten pesetas each for their pleasure, and it is not too much for a pleasure so innocent and charming. The academy is on the ground floor of the maestro’s unpretentious house, and in a waiting-room beyond the shoemaker’s shop which filled the vestibule sat, patient in their black mantillas, the mothers and nurses of the pupils. These were mostly quite small children in their every-day clothes, but there were two or three older girls in the conventional dancing costume which a lady from one of the hotels had emulated. Everything was very simple and friendly; Otero found good seats among the aficionados for the guests presented to him, and then began calling his pupils to the floor of the long, narrow room with quick commands of “Venga!” A piano was tucked away in a corner, but the dancers kept time now with castanets and now by snapping their fingers. Two of the oldest girls, who were apparently graduates, were “differently beautiful” in their darkness and fairness, but alike picturesquely Spanish in their vivid dresses and the black veils fluttering from their high combs. A youth in green velvet jacket and orange trousers, whose wonderful dancing did him credit as Otero’s prize pupil, took part with them; he had the square-jawed, high-cheek-boned face of the lower-class Spaniard, and they the oval of all Spanish women. Here there was no mere posturing and contortioning among the girls as with the gipsies; they sprang like flames and stamped the floor with joyous detonations of their slippers. It was their convention to catch the hat from the head of some young spectator and wear it in a figure and then toss it back to him. One of them enacted the part of a torero at a bull-fight, stamping round first in a green satin cloak which she then waved before a man’s felt hat thrown on the ground to represent the bull hemmed about with banderillas stuck quivering into the floor. But the prettiest thing was the dancing of two little girl pupils, one fair and thin and of an angelic gracefulness, and the other plump and dark, who was as dramatic as the blond was lyrical. They accompanied themselves with castanets, and, though the little fatling toed in and wore a common dress of blue-striped gingham, I am afraid she won our hearts from her graceful rival. Both were very serious and gave their whole souls to the dance, but they were not more childishly earnest than an older girl in black who danced with one of the gaudy graduates, panting in her anxious zeal and stopping at last with her image of the Virgin she resembled flung wildly down her back from the place where it had hung over her heart.

V

We preferred walking home from Senor Otero’s house through the bright, quiescing street, because in driving there we had met with an adventure which we did not care to repeat. We were driving most unaggressively across a small plaza, with a driver and a friend on the box beside him to help keep us from harm, when a trolley-car came wildly round a corner at the speed of at least two miles an hour and crossed our track. Our own speed was such that we could not help striking the trolley in a collision which was the fault of no one apparently. The front of the car was severely banged, one mud-guard of our victoria was bent, and our conversation was interrupted. Immediately a crowd assembled from the earth or the air, but after a single exchange of reproaches between the two drivers nothing was said by any one. No policeman arrived to constater the facts, and after the crowd had silently satisfied or dissatisfied itself that no one was hurt it silently dispersed. The car ambled grumbling off and we drove on with some vague murmurs from our driver, whose nerves seemed shaken, but who was supported in a somewhat lurching and devious progress by the caressing arm of the friend on the seat beside him.

All this was in Seville, where the popular emotions are painted in travel and romance as volcanic as at Naples, where no one would have slept the night of our accident and the spectators would be debating it still. In our own surprise and alarm we partook of the taciturnity of the witnesses, which I think was rather fine and was much decenter than any sort of utterance. On our way home we had occasion to practise a like forbearance toward the lover whom we passed as he stood courting through the casement of a ground floor. The soft air was full of the sweet of jasmine and orange blossoms from the open patios. Many people besides ourselves were passing, but in a well-bred avoidance of the dark figure pressed to the grating and scarcely more recognizable than the invisible figure within. I confess I thought it charming, and if at some period of their lives people must make love I do not believe there is a more inoffensive way of doing it.

By the sort of echo notable in life’s experience we had a reverberation of the orange-flower perfume of that night in the orange-flower honey at breakfast next morning. We lived to learn that our own bees gather the same honey from the orange flowers of Florida; but at the time we believed that only the bees of Seville did it, and I still doubt whether anywhere in America the morning wakes to anything like the long, rich, sad calls of the Sevillian street hucksters. It is true that you do not get this plaintive music without the accompanying note of the hucksters’ donkeys, which, if they were better advised, would not close with the sort of inefficient sifflication which they now use in spoiling an otherwise most noble, most leonine roar. But when were donkeys of any sort ever well advised in all respects? Those of Seville, where donkeys abound, were otherwise of the superior intelligence which throughout Spain leaves the horse and even the mule far behind, and constitutes the donkeys, far beyond the idle and useless dogs, the friends of man. They indefinitely outnumber the dogs, and the cats are of course nowhere in the count. Yet I would not misprize the cats of Seville, which apparently have their money price. We stopped to admire a beautiful white one, on our way to see the market one day, praising it as intelligibly as we could, and the owner caught it up, when we had passed and ran after us, and offered to sell it to us.

That might have been because it was near the market where we experienced almost the only mercantile zeal we had known in Spain. Women with ropes and garlands of onions round their necks invited us to buy, and we had hopeful advances from the stalls of salads and fruits, where there was a brave and beautiful show of lettuces and endives, grapes, medlars, and heaps of melons, but no oranges; I do not know why, though there were shining masses of red peppers and green, peppers, and vast earthen bowls with yellow peas soaking in them. The flowers were every gay autumnal sort, especially dahlias, sometimes made into stiff bouquets, perhaps for church offerings. There were mounds of chestnuts, four or five feet high and wide; and these flowers and fruits filled the interior of the market, while the stalls for the flesh and fish were on the outside. There seemed more sellers than buyers; here and there were ladies buying, but it is said that the mistresses commonly send their maids for the daily provision.

Ordinarily I should say you could not go amiss for your profit and pleasure in Seville, but there are certain imperative objects of interest like the Casa de Pilatos which you really have to do. Strangely enough, it is very well worth doing, for, though it is even more factitiously Moorish than the Alcazar, it is of almost as great beauty and of greater dignity. Gardens, galleries, staircases, statues, paintings, all are interesting, with a mingled air of care and neglect which is peculiarly charming, though perhaps the keener sensibilities, the morbider nerves may suffer from the glare and hardness of the tiling which render the place so wonderful and so exquisite. One must complain of something, and I complain of the tiling; I do not mind the house being supposed like the house of Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem.

It belongs to the Duke of Medina-Celi, who no more comes to it from Madrid than the Duke of Alva comes to his house, which I somehow perversely preferred. For one thing, the Alva palace has eleven patios, all far more forgotten than the four in the House of Pilate, and I could fully glut my love of patios without seeing half of them. Besides, it was in the charge of a typical Spanish family: a lean, leathery, sallow father, a fat, immovable mother, and a tall, silent daughter. The girl showed us darkly about the dreary place, with its fountains and orange trees and palms, its damp, Moresque, moldy walls, its damp, moldy, beautiful wooden ceilings, and its damp, moldy staircase leading to the family rooms overhead, which we could not see. The family stays for a little time only in the spring and fall, but if ever they stay so late as we had come the sunlight lying so soft and warm in the patio and the garden out of it must have made them as sorry to leave it as we were.

I am not sure but I valued the House of Alva somewhat for the chance my visit to it gave me of seeing a Sevillian tenement-house such as I had hoped I might see. One hears that such houses are very scrupulously kept by the janitors who compel the tenants to a cleanliness not perhaps always their nature. At any rate, this one, just across the way from the Alva House, was of a surprising neatness. It was built three stories high, with galleries looking into an open court and doors giving from these into the several tenements. As fortune, which does not continually smile on travel, would have it that morning, two ladies of the house were having a vivid difference of opinion on an upper gallery. Or at least one was, for the other remained almost as silent as the spectators who grouped themselves about her or put their heads out of the windows to see, as well as hear, what it was about. I wish I knew and I would tell the reader. The injured party, and I am sure she must have been deeply injured, showered her enemy with reproaches, and each time when she had emptied the vials of her wrath with much shaking of her hands in the wrong-doer’s face she went away a few yards and filled them up again and then returned for a fresh discharge. It was perfectly like a scene of Goldoni and like many a passage of real life in his native city, and I was rapt in it across fifty years to the Venice I used to know. But the difference in Seville was that there was actively only one combatant in the strife, and the witnesses took no more part in it than the passive resistant.

VI

As a contrast to this violent scene which was not so wholly violent but that it was relieved by a boy teasing a cat with his cap in the foreground, and the sweet singing of canaries in the windows of the houses near, I may commend the Casa de los Venerables, ecclesiastics somehow related to the cathedral and having their tranquil dwelling not far from it. The street we took from the Duke of Alva’s palace was so narrow and crooked that we scraped the walls in passing, and we should never have got by one heavily laden donkey if he had not politely pushed the side of his pannier into a doorway to make room for us. When we did get to the Casa de los Venerables we found it mildly yellow-washed and as beautifully serene and sweet as the house of venerable men should be. Its distinction in a world of patios was a patio where the central fountain was sunk half a story below the entrance floor, and encircled by a stairway by which the humble neighbor folk freely descended to fill their water jars. I suppose that gentle mansion has other merits, but the fine staircase that ended under a baroque dome left us facing a bolted door, so that we had to guess at those attractions, which I leave the reader to imagine in turn.

I have kept the unique wonder of Seville waiting too long already for my recognition, though in its eight hundred years it should have learned patience enough for worse things. From its great antiquity alone, if from nothing else, it is plain that the Giralda at Seville could not have been studied from the tower of the Madison Square Garden in New York, which the American will recall when he sees it. If the case must be reversed and we must allow that the Madison Square tower was studied from the Giralda, we must still recognize that it is no servile copy, but in its frank imitation has a grace and beauty which achieves originality. Still, the Giralda is always the Giralda, and, though there had been no Saint-Gaudens to tip its summit with such a flying-footed nymph as poises on our own tower, the figure of Faith which crowns it is at least a good weather-vane, and from its office of turning gives the mighty bell-tower its name. Long centuries before the tower was a belfry it served the mosque, which the cathedral now replaces, as a minaret for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer, but it was then only two-thirds as high. The Christian belfry which continues it is not in offensive discord with the structure below; its other difference in form and spirit achieves an impossible harmony. The Giralda, however, chiefly works its enchantment by its color, but here I must leave the proof of this to the picture postal which now everywhere takes the bread out of the word-painter’s mouth. The time was when with a palette full of tinted adjectives one might hope to do an unrivaled picture of the Giralda; but that time is gone; and if the reader has not a colored postal by him he should lose no time in going to Seville and seeing the original. For the best view of it I must advise a certain beautifully irregular small court in the neighborhood, with simple houses so low that you can easily look up over their roofs and see the mighty bells of the Giralda rioting far aloof, flinging themselves beyond the openings of the belfry and deafeningly making believe to leap out into space. If the traveler fails to find this court (for it seems now and then to be taken in and put away), he need not despair of seeing the Giralda fitly. He cannot see Seville at all without seeing it, and from every point, far or near, he sees it grand and glorious.

I remember it especially from beyond the Guadalquivir in the drive we took through Triana to the village of Italica, where three Roman emperors were born, as the guide-books will officiously hasten to tell, and steal away your chance of treating your reader with any effect of learned research. These emperors (I will not be stopped by any guide-book from saying) were Trajan, Hadrian, and Theodosius; and Triana is named for the first of them. Fortunately, we turned to the right after crossing the bridge and so escaped the gipsy quarter, but we paused through a long street so swarming with children that we wondered to hear whole schoolrooms full of them humming and droning their lessons as we made our way among the tenants. Fortunately, they played mostly in the gutters, the larger looking after the smaller when their years and riches were so few more, with that beautiful care which childhood bestows on babyhood everywhere in Europe. To say that those Spanish children were as tenderly watchful of these Spanish babies as English children is to say everything. Now and then a mother cared for a babe as only a mother can in an office which the pictures and images of the Most Holy Virgin consecrate and endear in lands where the sterilized bottle is unknown, but oftenest it was a little sister that held it in her arms and crooned whatever was the Spanish of —

 Rack back, baby, daddy shot a b’ar;

 Rack back, baby, see it hangin’ thar.

For there are no rocking-chairs in Triana, as there were none in our backwoods, and the little maids tilted to and fro on the fore legs and hind legs of their chairs and lulled their charges to sleep with seismic joltings. When the street turned into a road it turned into a road a hundred feet wide; one of those roads which Charles III., when he came to the Spanish throne from Naples, full of beneficent projects and ideals, bestowed upon his unwilling and ungrateful subjects. These roads were made about the middle of the eighteenth century, and they have been gathering dust ever since, so that the white powder now lies in the one beyond Triana five or six inches deep. Along the sides occasional shade-trees stifled, and beyond these gaunt, verdureless fields widened away, though we were told that in the spring the fields were red with flowers and green with young wheat. There were no market-gardens, and the chief crop seemed brown pigs and black goats. In some of the foregrounds, as well as the backgrounds, were olive orchards with olives heaped under them and peasants still resting from their midday breakfast. A mauve bell-shaped flower plentifully fringed the wayside; our driver said it had no name, and later an old peasant said it was “bad.”

VII

We passed a convent turned into a prosperous-looking manufactory and we met a troop of merry priests talking gayly and laughing together, and very effective in their black robes against the white road. When we came to the village that was a municipium under Augustus and a colonia under Hadrian, we found it indeed scanty and poor, but very neat and self-respectful-looking, and not unworthy to have been founded by Scipio Africanus two hundred years before Christ. Such cottage interiors as we glimpsed seemed cleaner and cozier than some in Wales; men in wide flat-brimmed hats sat like statues at the doors, absolutely motionless, but there were women bustling in and out in their work, and at one place a little girl of ten had been left to do the family wash, and was doing it joyously and spreading the clothes in the dooryard to dry. We did not meet with universal favor as we drove by; some groups of girls mocked our driver; when we said one of them was pretty he answered that he had seen prettier.

At the entrance to the ruins of the amphitheater which forms the tourist’s chief excuse for visiting Italica the popular manners softened toward us; the village children offered to sell us wild narcissus flowers and were even willing to take money in charity. They followed us into the ruins, much forbidden by the fine, toothless old custodian who took possession of us as his proper prey and led us through the moldering caverns and crumbling tiers of seats which form the amphitheater. Vast blocks, vast hunks, of the masonry are broken off from the mass and lie detached, but the mass keeps the form and dignity of the original design; and in the lonely fields there it had something august and proud beyond any quality of the Arena at Verona or the Colosseum at Rome. It is mostly stripped of the marble that once faced the interior, and is like some monstrous oval shaped out of the earth, but near the imperial box lay some white slabs with initials cut in them which restored the vision of the “grandeur that was Rome” pretty well over the known world when this great work was in its prime. Our custodian was qualified by his toothlessness to lisp like any old Castilian the letters that other Andalusians hiss, but my own Spanish was so slight and his patois was so dense that the best we could do was to establish a polite misunderstanding. On this his one word of English, repeated as we passed through the subterranean doors, “Lion, lion, lion,” cast a gleam of intelligence which brightened into a vivid community of ideas when we ended in his cottage, and he prepared to sell us some of the small Roman coins which formed his stock in trade. The poor place was beautifully neat, and from his window he made us free of a sight of Seville, signally the cathedral and the Giralda, such as could not be bought for money in New York.

Then we set out on our return, leaving unvisited to the left the church of San Isidore de Campo, with its tombs of Guzman the Good and that Better Lady Dona Urraca Osorio, whom Peter the Cruel had burned. I say better, because I hold it nobler in Urraca to have rejected the love of a wicked king than in Guzman to have let the Moors slay his son rather than surrender a city to them. But I could only pay honor to her pathetic memory and the memory of that nameless handmaid of hers who rushed into the flames to right the garments on the form which the wind had blown them away from, and so perished with her. We had to take on trust from the guide-books all trace of the Roman town where the three emperors were born, and whose “palaces, aqueducts, and temples and circus were magnificent.” We had bought some of the “coins daily dug up,” but we intrusted to the elements those “vestiges of vestiges” left of Trajan’s palaces after an envious earthquake destroyed them so lately as 1755.

The one incident of our return worthy of literature was the dramatic triumph of a woman over a man and a mule as we saw it exhibited on the parapet of a culvert over a dry torrent’s bed. It was the purpose of this woman, standing on the coping in statuesque relief and showing against the sky the comfortable proportions of the Spanish housewife, to mount the mule behind the man. She waited patiently while the man slowly and as we thought faithlessly urged the mule to the parapet; then, when she put out her hands and leaned forward to take her seat, the mule inched softly away and left her to recover her balance at the risk of a fall on the other side. We were too far for anything but the dumb show, but there were, no doubt, words which conveyed her opinions unmistakably to both man and mule. With our hearts in our mouths we witnessed the scene and its repetitions till we could bear it no longer, and we had bidden our cabman drive on when with a sudden spring the brave woman launched herself semicircularly forward and descended upon the exact spot which she had been aiming at. There solidly established on the mule, with her arms fast round the man, she rode off; and I do not think any reader of mine would like to have been that mule or that man for the rest of the way home.

We met many other mules, much more exemplary, in teams of two, three, and four, covered with bells and drawing every kind of carryall and stage and omnibus. These vehicles were built when the road was, about 1750, and were, like the road, left to the natural forces for keeping themselves in repair. The natural forces were not wholly adequate in either case, but the vehicles were not so thick with dust as the road, because they could shake it off. They had each two or four passengers seated with the driver; passengers clustered over the top and packed the inside, but every one was in the joyous mood of people going home for the day. In a plaza not far from the Triana bridge you may see these decrepit conveyances assembling every afternoon for their suburban journeys, and there is no more picturesque sight in Seville, more homelike, more endearing. Of course, when I say this I leave out of the count the bridge over the Guadalquivir at the morning or evening hour when it is covered with brightly caparisoned donkeys, themselves covered with men needing a shave, and gay-kerchiefed women of every age, with boys and dogs underfoot, and pedestrians of every kind, and hucksters selling sea-fruit and land-fruit and whatever else the stranger would rather see than eat. Very little outcry was needed for the sale of these things, which in Naples or even in Venice would have been attended by such vociferation as would have sufficed to proclaim a city in flames.

On a day not long after our expedition to Italica we went a drive with a young American friend living in Seville, whom I look to for a book about that famous city such as I should like to write myself if I had the time to live it as he has done. He promised that he would show us a piece of the old Roman wall, but he showed us ever so much more, beginning with the fore court of the conventual church of Santa Paula, where we found the afternoon light waiting to illumine for us with its tender caress the Luca della Robbia-like colored porcelain figures of the portal and the beautiful octagon tower staying a moment before taking flight for heaven: the most exquisite moment of our whole fortnight in Seville. Tall pots of flowers stood round, and the grass came green through the crevices of the old foot-worn pavement. When we passed out a small boy scuffled for our copper with the little girl who opened the gate for us, but was brought to justice by us, and joined cheerfully in the chorus of children chanting “Mo-ney, mo-ney!” round us, but no more expecting an answer to their prayer than if we had been saints off the church door.

We passed out of the city by a gate where in a little coign of vantage a cobbler was thoughtfully hammering away in the tumult at a shoe-sole, and then suddenly on our right we had the Julian wall: not a mere fragment, but a good long stretch of it. The Moors had built upon it and characterized it, but had not so masked it as to hide the perdurable physiognomy of the Roman work. It was vastly more Roman wall than you see at Rome; but far better than this heroic image of war and waste was the beautiful old aqueduct, perfectly Roman still, with no visible touch from Moor, or from Christian, before or after the Moor, and performing its beneficent use after two thousand years as effectively as in the years before Christ came to bless the peacemakers. Nine miles from its mountain source the graceful arches bring the water on their shoulders; and though there is now an English company that pipes other streams to the city through its underground mains, the Roman aqueduct, eternally sublime in its usefulness, is constant to the purpose of the forgotten men who imagined it. The outer surfaces of the channel which it lifted to the light and air were tagged with weeds and immemorial mosses, and dripped as with the sweat of its twenty-centuried toil.

We followed it as far as it went on our way to a modern work of peace and use which the ancient friend and servant of man would feel no unworthy rival. Beyond the drives and gardens of the Delicias, where we lingered our last to look at the pleasurers haunting them, we drove far across the wheat-fields where a ship-canal five miles long is cutting to rectify the curve of the Guadalquivir and bring Seville many miles nearer the sea than it has ever been before; hitherto the tramp steamers have had to follow the course of the ships of Tarshish in their winding approach. The canal is the notion of the young king of Spain, and the work on it goes forward night and day. The electric lights were shedding their blinding glare on the deafening clatter of the excavating machinery, and it was an unworthy relief to escape from the intense modernity of the scene to that medieval retreat nearer the city where the aficionados night-long watch the bulls coming up from their pastures for the fight or the feast, whichever you choose to call it, of the morrow. These amateurs, whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk in the wayside cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in that darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing, these hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great thing for the aficionados who may imagine in that bellowing the the gladiator’s hail of Morituri salutant. At any rate, it is very chic; it gives a man standing in Seville, which disputes with Madrid the primacy in bull-feasting. If the national capital has bull-feasting every Sunday of the year, all the famous torreros come from Andalusia, with the bulls, their brave antagonists, and in the great provincial capital there are bull-feasts of insurpassable, if not incomparable, splendor.

Before our pleasant drive ended we passed, as we had already passed several times, the scene of the famous Feria of Seville, the cattle show which draws tens of thousands to the city every springtime for business and pleasure, but mostly pleasure. The Feria focuses in its greatest intensity at one of the entrances to the Delicias, where the street is then so dense with every sort of vehicle that people can cross it only by the branching viaduct, which rises in two several ascents from each footway, intersecting at top and delivering their endless multitudes on the opposite sidewalk. Along the street are gay pavilions and cottages where the nobility live through the Feria with their families and welcome the public to the sight of their revelry through the open doors and windows. Then, if ever, the stranger may see the dancing, and hear the singing and playing which all the other year in Seville disappoints him of.

VIII

On the eve of All Saints, after we had driven over the worst road in the world outside of Spain or America, we arrived at the entrance of the cemetery where Baedeker had mysteriously said “some sort of fair was held.” Then we perceived that we were present at the preparations for celebrating one of the most affecting events of the Spanish year. This was the visit of kindred and friends bringing tokens of remembrance and affection to the dead. The whole long, rough way we had passed them on foot, and at the cemetery gate we found them arriving in public cabs, as well as in private carriages, with the dignity and gravity of smooth-shaven footmen and coachmen. In Spain these functionaries look their office more solemnly even than in England and affect you as peculiarly correct and eighteenth-century. But apart from their looks the occasion seemed more a festivity than a solemnity. The people bore flowers, mostly artificial, as well as lanterns, and within the cemetery they were furbishing up the monuments with every appliance according to the material, scrubbing the marble, whitewashing the stucco, and repainting the galvanized iron. The lanterns were made to match the monuments and fences architecturally, and the mourners were attaching them with a gentle satisfaction in their fitness; I suppose they were to be lighted at dark and to burn through the night. There were men among the mourners, but most of them were women and children; some were weeping, like a father leading his two little ones, and an old woman grieving for her dead with tears. But what prevailed was a community of quiet resignation, almost to the sort of cheerfulness which bereavement sometimes knows. The scene was tenderly affecting, but it had a tremendous touch of tragic setting in the long, straight avenue of black cypresses which slimly climbed the upward slope from the entrance to the farther bound of the cemetery. Otherwise there was only the patience of entire faith in this annually recurring visit of the living to the dead: the fixed belief that these should rise from the places where they lay. and they who survived them for yet a little more of time should join them from whatever end of the earth in the morning of the Last Day.

All along I have been shirking what any right-minded traveler would feel almost his duty, but I now own that there is a museum in Seville, the Museo Provincial, which was of course once a convent and is now a gallery, with the best, but not the very best, Murillos in it, not to speak of the best Zurburans. I will not speak at all of those pictures, because I could in no wise say what they were, or were like, and because I would not have the reader come to them with any opinions of mine which he might bring away with him in the belief that they were his own. Let him not fail to go to the museum, however; he will be the poorer beyond calculation if he does not; but he will be a beggar if he does not go to the Hospital de la Caridad, where in the church he will find six Murillos out-Murilloing any others excepting always the incomparable “Vision of St. Anthony” in the cathedral. We did not think of those six Murillos when we went to the hospital; we knew nothing of the peculiar beauty and dignity of the church; but we came because we wished to see what the repentance of a man could do for others after a youth spent in wicked riot. The gentle, pensive little Mother who received us carefully said at once that the hospital was not for the sick, but only for the superannuated and the poor and friendless who came to pass a night or an indefinite time in it, according to the pressure of their need; and after showing us the rich little church, she led us through long, clean corridors where old men lay in their white beds or sat beside them eating their breakfasts, very savory-looking, out of ample white bowls. Some of them saluted us, but the others we excused because they were so preoccupied. In a special room set apart for them were what we brutally call tramps, but who doubtless are known in Spain for indigent brethren overtaken on their wayfaring without a lodging for the night. Here they could come for it and cook their supper and breakfast at the large circular fireplace which filled one end of their room. They rose at our entrance and bowed; and how I wish I could have asked them, every one, about their lives!

There was nothing more except the doubt of that dear little Mother when I gave her a silver dollar for her kindness. She seemed surprised and worried, and asked, “Is it for the charity or for me?” What could I do but answer, “Oh, for your Grace,” and add another for the charity. She still looked perplexed, but there was no way out of our misunderstanding, if it was one, and we left her with her sweet, troubled face between the white wings of her cap, like angel’s wings mounting to it from her shoulders. Then we went to look at the statue of the founder bearing a hapless stranger in his arms in a space of flowers before the hospital, where a gardener kept watch that no visitor should escape without a bunch worth at least a peseta. He had no belief that the peseta could possibly be for the charity, and the poverty of the poor neighborhood was so much relieved by the mere presence of the hospital that it begged of us very little as we passed through.

IX

We had expected to go to Granada after a week in Seville, but man is always proposing beyond his disposing in strange lands as well as at home, and we were fully a fortnight in the far lovelier capital. In the mean time we had changed from our rooms in the rear of the hotel to others in the front, where we entered intimately into the life of the Plaza San Fernando as far as we might share it from our windows. It was not very active life; even the cabmen whose neat victorias bordered the place on three sides were not eager for custom; they invited the stranger, but they did not urge; there was a continual but not a rapid passing through the ample oblong; there was a good deal of still life on the benches where leisure enjoyed the feathery shadow of the palms, for the sun was apt to be too hot at the hour of noon, though later it conduced to the slumber which in Spain accompanies the digestion of the midday meal in all classes. As the afternoon advanced numbers of little girls came into the plaza and played children’s games which seemed a translation of games familiar to our own country. One evening a small boy was playing with them, but after a while he seemed to be found unequal to the sport; he was ejected from the group and went off gloomily to grieve apart with his little thumb in his mouth. The sight of his dignified desolation was insupportable, and we tried what a copper of the big-dog value would do to comfort him. He took it without looking up and ran away to the peanut-stand which is always steaming at the first corner all over Christendom. Late in the evening — in fact, after the night had fairly fallen — we saw him making his way into a house fronting on the plaza. He tried at the door with one hand and in the other he held an unexhausted bag of peanuts. He had wasted no word of thanks on us, and he did not now. When he got the door open he backed into the interior still facing us and so fading from our sight and knowledge.

He had the touch of comedy which makes pathos endurable, but another incident was wholly pathetic. As we came out of an antiquity shop near the cathedral one afternoon we found on the elevated footway near the Gate of Pardon a mother and daughter, both of the same second youth, who gently and jointly pronounced to us the magical word encajes. Rather, they questioned us with it, and they only suggested, very forbearingly, that we should come to their house with them to see those laces, which of course were old laces; their house was quite near. But that one of us twain who was singly concerned in encajes had fatigued and perhaps overbought herself at the antiquity shop, and she signified a regret which they divined too well was dissent. They looked rather than expressed a keen little disappointment; the mother began a faint insistence, but the daughter would not suffer it. Here was the pride of poverty, if not poverty itself, and it was with a pang that we parted from these mutely appealing ladies. We could not have borne it if we had not instantly promised ourselves to come the next day and meet them and go home with them and buy all their encajes that we had money for. We kept our promise, and we came the next day and the next and every day we remained in Seville, and lingered so long that we implanted in the cabmen beside the curbing the inextinguishable belief that we were in need of a cab; but we never saw those dear ladies again.

These are some of the cruel memories which the happiest travel leaves, and I gratefully recall that in the case of a custodian of the Columbian Museum, which adjoins the cathedral, we did not inflict a pang that rankled in our hearts for long. I gave him a handful of copper coins which I thought made up a peseta, but his eyes were keener, and a sorrow gloomed his brow which projected its shadow so darkly over us when we went into the cathedral for one of our daily looks that we hastened to return and make up the full peseta with another heap of coppers; a whole sunburst of smiles illumined his face, and a rainbow of the brightest colors arched our sky and still arches it whenever we think of that custodian and his rehabilitated trust in man.

This seems the crevice where I can crowd in the fact that bits of family wash hung from the rail of the old pulpit in the Court of Oranges beside the cathedral, and a pumpkin vine lavishly decorated an arcade near a doorway which perhaps gave into the dwelling of that very custodian. At the same time I must not fail to urge the reader’s seeing the Columbian Museum, which is richly interesting and chiefly for those Latin and Italian authors annotated by the immortal admiral’s own hand. These give the American a sense of him as the discoverer of our hemisphere which nothing else could, and insurpassably render the New World credible. At the same time they somehow bring a lump of pity and piety into the throat at the thought of the things he did and suffered. They bring him from history and make him at home in the beholder’s heart, and there seems a mystical significance in the fact that the volume most abounding in marginalia should be Seneca’s Prophecies.

The frequent passing of men as well as women and children through our Plaza San Fernando and the prevalence of men asleep on the benches; the immense majority of boys everywhere; the moralized abattoir outside the walls where the humanity dormant at the bull-feast wakes to hide every detail of slaughter for the market; a large family of cats basking at their ease in a sunny doorway; trains of milch goats with wicker muzzles, led by a milch cow from door to door through the streets; the sudden solemn beauty of the high altar in the cathedral, seen by chance on a brilliant day; the bright, inspiriting air of Seville; a glorious glimpse of the Giralda coming home from a drive; the figure of a girl outlined in a lofty window; a middle-aged Finnish pair trying to give themselves in murmured talk to the colored stucco of the Hall of the Ambassadors in what seems their wedding journey; two artists working near with sketches tilted against the wall; a large American lady who arrives one forenoon in traveling dress and goes out after luncheon in a mantilla with a fan and high comb; another American lady who appears after dinner in the costume of a Spanish dancing-girl; the fact that there is no Spanish butter and that the only good butter comes from France and the passable butter from Denmark; the soft long veils of pink cloud that trail themselves in the sky across our Plaza, and then dissolve in the silvery radiance of the gibbous moon; the yellowish-red electric Brush lights swinging from palm to palm as in the decoration of some vast ballroom; a second drive through Triana, and a failure to reach the church we set out for; the droves of brown pigs and flocks of brown sheep; the goatherds unloading olive boughs in the fields for the goats to browse; a dirty, kind, peaceful village, with an English factory in it, and a mansion of galvanized iron with an automobile before it; a pink villa on a hillside and a family group on the shoulder of a high-walled garden; a girl looking down from the wall, and a young man resting his hand on the masonry and looking up at her; the good faces of the people, men and women; boys wrestling and frolicking in the village streets; the wide dust-heap of a road, full of sudden holes; the heat of the sun in the first November week after touches of cold; the tram-cars that wander from one side of the city street to the other, and then barely miss scraping the house walls; in our drive home from our failure for that church, men with trains of oxen plowing and showing against the round red rayless sun; a stretch of the river with the crimson-hulled steamers, and a distant sail-boat seen across the fields; the gray moon that burnishes itself and rides bright and high for our return; people in balconies, and the air full of golden dust shot with bluish electric lights; here is a handful of suggestions from my note-book which each and every one would expand into a chapter or a small volume under the intensive culture which the reader may well have come to dread. But I fling them all down here for him to do what he likes with, and turn to speak at more length of the University, or, rather the University Church, which I would not have any reader of mine fail to visit.

X

With my desire to find likeness rather than difference in strange peoples, I was glad to have two of the students loitering in the patio play just such a trick on a carter at the gate as school-boys might play in our own land. While his back was turned they took his whip and hid it and duly triumphed in his mystification and dismay. We did not wait for the catastrophe, but by the politeness of another student found the booth of the custodian, who showed us to the library. A noise of recitation from the windows looking into the patio followed us up-stairs; but maturer students were reading at tables in the hushed library, and at a large central table a circle of grave authorities of some sort were smoking the air blue with their cigarettes. One, who seemed chief among them, rose and bowed us into the freedom of the place, and again rose and bowed when we went out. We did not stay long, for a library is of the repellent interest of a wine-cellar; unless the books or bottles are broached it is useless to linger. There are eighty thousand volumes in that library, but we had to come away without examining half of them. The church was more appreciable, and its value was enhanced to us by the reluctance of the stiff old sacristan to unlock it. We found it rich in a most wonderful retablo carved in wood and painted. Besides the excellent pictures at the high altar, there are two portrait brasses which were meant to be recumbent, but which are stood up against the wall, perhaps to their surprise, without loss of impressiveness. Most notable of all is the mural tomb of Pedro Enriquez de Ribera and his wife: he who built the Casa de Pilatos, and as he had visited the Holy Land was naturally fabled to have copied it from the House of Pilate. Now, as if still continuing his travels, he reposes with his wife in a sort of double-decker monument, where the Evil One would have them suggest to the beholder the notion of passengers in the upper and lower berths of a Pullman sleeper.

Of all the Spanish cities that I saw, Seville was the most charming, not for those attributive blandishments of the song and dance which the tourist is supposed to find it, but which we quite failed of, but for the simpler and less conventional amiabilities which she was so rich in. I have tried to hint at these, but really one must go to Seville for them and let them happen as they will. Many happened in our hotel where we liked everybody, from the kindly, most capable Catalonian head waiter to the fine-headed little Napoleonic-looking waiter who had identified us at San Sebastian as Americans, because we spoke “quicklier” than the English, and who ran to us when we came into the hotel and shook hands with its as if we were his oldest and dearest friends. There was a Swiss concierge who could not be bought for money, and the manager was the mirror of managers. Fancy the landlord of the Waldorf-Astoria, or the St. Regis, coming out on the sidewalk and beating down a taxicabman from a charge of fifteen pesetas to six for a certain drive! It is not thinkable, and yet the like of it happened to xis in Seville from our manager. It was not his fault, when our rear apartment became a little too chill, and we took a parlor in the front and came back on the first day hoping to find it stored full of the afternoon sun’s warmth, but found that the camerera had opened the windows and closed the shutters in our absence so that our parlor was of a frigidity which no glitter of the electric light could temper. The halls and public rooms were chill in anticipation and remembrance of any cold outside, but in otir parlor there was a hole for the sort of stove which we saw in the reading-room, twice as large as an average teakettle, with a pipe as big around as the average rain-pipe. I am sure this apparatus would have heated us admirably, but the weather grew milder and milder and we never had occasion to make the successful experiment. Meanwhile the moral atmosphere of the hotel was of a blandness which would have gone far to content us with any meteorological perversity. When we left it we were on those human terms with every one who ruled or served in it which one never attains in an American hotel, and rarely in an English one.

At noon on the 4th of November the sun was really hot in our plaza; but we were instructed that before the winter was over there would be cold enough, not of great frosty severity, of course, but nasty and hard to bear in the summer conditions which prevail through the year. I wish I could tell how the people live then in their beautiful, cool houses, but I do not know, and I do not know how they live at any season except from the scantiest hearsay. The women remain at home except when they go to church or to drive in the Delicias — that is to say, the women of society, of the nobility. There is no society in our sense among people of the middle classes; the men when they are not at business are at the cafe; the women when they are not at mass are at home. That is what we were told, and yet at a moving-picture show we saw many women of the middle as well as the lower classes. The frequent holidays afford them an outlet, and indoors they constantly see their friends and kindred at their tertulias.

The land is in large holdings which are managed by the factors or agents of the noble proprietors. These, when they are not at Madrid, are to be found at their clubs, where their business men bring them papers to be signed, often unread. This sounds a little romantic, and perhaps it is not true. Some gentlemen take a great interest in the bull-feasts and breed the bulls and cultivate the bull-fighters; what other esthetic interests they have I do not know. All classes are said to be of an Oriental philosophy of life; they hold that the English striving and running to and fro and seeing strange countries comes in the end to the same thing as sitting still; and why should they bother? There is something in that, but one may sit still too much; the Spanish ladies, as I many times heard, do overdo it. Not only they do not walk abroad; they do not walk at home; everything is carried to and from them; they do not lift hand or foot. The consequence is that they have very small hands and feet; Gautier, who seems to have grown tired when he reached Seville, and has comparatively little to say of it, says that a child may hold a Sevillian lady’s foot in its hand; he does not say he saw it done. What is true is that no child could begin to clasp with both hands the waist of an average Sevillian lady. But here again the rule has its exceptions and will probably have more. Not only is the English queen-consort stimulating the Andalusian girls to play tennis by her example when she comes to Seville, but it has somehow become the fashion for ladies of all ages to leave their carriages in the Delicias and walk up and down; we saw at least a dozen doing it.

Whatever flirting and intriguing goes on, the public sees nothing of it. In the street there is no gleam of sheep’s-eying or any manner of indecorum. The women look sensible and good, and I should say the same of the men; the stranger’s experience must have been more unfortunate than mine if he has had any unkindness from them. One heard that Spanish women do not smoke, unless they are cigarreras and work in the large tobacco factory, where the “Carmen” tradition has given place to the mother-of-a-family type, with her baby on the floor beside her. Even these may prefer not to set the baby a bad example and have her grow up and smoke like those English and American women. The strength of the Church is, of course, in the women’s faith, and its strength is unquestionable, if not quite unquestioned. In Seville, as I have said, there are two Spanish Protestant churches, and their worship, is not molested. Society does not receive their members; but we heard that with most Spanish people Protestantism is a puzzle rather than offense. They know we are not Jews, but Christians; yet we are not Catholics; and what, then, are we? With the Protestants, as with the Catholics, there is always religious marriage. There is civil marriage for all, but without the religious rite the pair are not well seen by either sect.

It is said that the editor of the ablest paper in Madrid, which publishes a local edition at Seville, is a Protestant. The queen mother is extremely clerical, though one of the wisest and best women who ever ruled; the king and queen consort are as liberal as possible, and the king is notoriously a democrat, with a dash of Haroun al Rashid, he likes to take his governmental subordinates unawares, and a story is told of his dropping in at the post-office on a late visit to Seville, and asking for the chief. He was out, and so were all the subordinate officials down to the lowest, whom the king found at his work. The others have since been diligent at theirs. The story is characteristic of the king, if not of the post-office people.

Political freedom is almost grotesquely unrestricted. In our American republic we should scarcely tolerate a party in favor of a monarchy, but in the Spanish monarchy a republican party is recognized and represented. It holds public meetings and counts among its members many able and distinguished men, such as the novelist Perez Galdos, one of the most brilliant novelists not only in Spain but in Europe. With this unbounded liberty in Andalusia, it is said that the Spaniards of the north are still more radical.

Though the climate is most favorable for consumptives, the habits of the people are so unwholesome that tuberculosis prevails, and there are two or three deaths a day from it in Seville. There is no avoidance of tuberculous suspects; they cough, and the men spit everywhere in the streets and on the floors and carpets of the clubs. The women suffer for want of fresh air, though now with the example of the English queen before them and the young girls who used to lie abed till noon getting up early ta play tennis, it will be different. Their mothers and aunts still drive to the Delicias to prove that they have carriages, but when there they alight and walk up and down by their doctor’s advice.

I only know that during our fortnight in Seville I suffered no wound to a sensibility which has been kept in full repair for literary, if not for humanitarian purposes. The climate was as kind as the people. It is notorious that in summer the heat is that of a furnace, but even then it is bearable because it is a dry heat, like that of our indoor furnaces. The 5th of November was our last day, and then it was too hot for comfort in the sun, but one is willing to find the November sun too hot; it is an agreeable solecism; and I only wish that we could have found the sun too hot during the next three days in Granada. If the 5th of November had been worse for heat than it was it must still remain dear in our memory, because in the afternoon we met once more these Chilians of our hearts whom we had met in San Sebastian and Burgos and Valladolid and Madrid. We knew we should meet them in Seville and were not the least surprised. They were as glad and gay as ever, and in our common polyglot they possessed us of the fact that they had just completed the eastern hemicycle of their Peninsular tour. They were latest from Malaga, and now they were going northward. It was our last meeting, but better friends I could not hope to meet again, whether in the Old World or the New, or that Other World which we hope will somehow be the summation of all that is best in both.

XI. TO AND IN GRANADA

The train which leaves Seville at ten of a sunny morning is supposed to arrive in Granada at seven of a moonlight evening. This is a mistake; the moonlight is on time, but the train arrives at a quarter of nine. Still, if the day has been sunny the whole way and the moonlight is there at the end, no harm has really been done; and measurably the promise of the train has been kept.

I

There was not a moment of the long journey over the levels of Andahisia which was not charming; when it began to be over the uplands of the last Moorish kingdom, it was richly impressive. The only thing that I can remember against the landscape is the prevalence of olive orchards. I hailed as a relief the stubble-fields immeasurably spread at times, and I did not always resent the roadside planting of some sort of tall hedges which now and then hid the olives. But olive orchards may vary their monotony by the spectacle of peasants on ladders gathering their fruit into wide-mouthed sacks, and occasionally their ranks of symmetrical green may be broken by the yellow and red of poplars and pomegranates around the pleasant farmsteads. The nearer we drew to Granada the pleasanter these grew, till in the famous Vega they thickly dotted the landscape with their brown roofs and white walls.

We had not this effect till we had climbed the first barrier of hills and began to descend on the thither side; but we had incident enough to keep us engaged without the picturesqueness. The beggars alone, who did not fail us at any station, were enough; for what could the most exacting tourist ask more than to be eating his luncheon under the eyes of the children who besieged his car windows and protested their famine in accents which would have melted a heart of stone or of anything less obdurate than travel? We had always our brace of Civil Guards, who preserved us from bandits, but they left the beggars unmolested by getting out on the train next the station and pacing the platform, while the rabble of hunger thronged us on the other side. There was especially a hoy who, after being compassionated in money for his misfortune, continued to fling his wooden leg into the air and wave it at our window by some masterly gymnastics; and there was another boy who kept lamenting that he had no mother, till, having duly feed and fed him, I suggested, “But you have a father?” Then, as if he had never seen the case in that light before, he was silent, and presently went away without further insistence on his bereavement.

The laconic fidelity of my note-book enables me to recall here that the last we saw of Seville was the Cathedral and the Giralda, which the guide-books had promised us we should see first; that we passed some fields of alfalfa which the Moors had brought from Africa and the Spanish have carried to America; that in places men were plowing and that the plowed land was red; that the towns on the uplands in the distance were white and not gray, or mud-colored, as in Castile; that the morning sky was blue, with thin, pale clouds; that the first station out was charmingly called Two Brothers, and that the loungers about it were plain, but kind-looking men-folk with good faces, some actually clean-shaven, and a woman with a white rose in her hair; that Two Brothers is a suburb of Seville, frequented in the winter, and has orange orchards about it; that farther on at one place the green of the fields spread up to the walls of a white farm with a fine sense of color; that there were hawks sailing in the blue air; that there were grotesque hedges of cactus and piles of crooked cactus logs; that there were many eucalyptus trees; that there were plantations of young olives, as if never to let that all-pervading industry perish; that there were irregular mountain ranges on the right, but never the same kind of scenery on both sides of the track; that there was once a white cottage on a yellow hill and a pink villa with two towers; that there was a solitary fig tree near the road, and that there were vast lonely fields when there were not olive orchards.

Taking breath after one o’clock, much restored by our luncheon, my note-book remembers a gray-roofed, yellow-walled town, very suitable for a water-color, and just beyond it the first vineyard we had come to. Then there were pomegranate trees, golden-leaved, and tall poplars pollarded plume fashion as in southern France; and in a field a herd of brown pigs feeding, which commended itself to observance, doubtless, as color in some possible word-painting. There now abounded pomegranates, figs, young corn, and more and more olives; and as if the old olives and young olives were not enough, the earth began to be pitted with holes dug for the olives which had not yet been planted.

II

At Bobadilla, the junction where an English railway company begins to get in its work and to animate the Spanish environment to unwonted enterprise, there was a varied luncheon far past our capacity. But when a Cockney voice asked over my shoulder, “Tea, sir?” I gladly closed with the proposition. “But you’ve put hot milk into it!” I protested. “I know it, sir. We ‘ave no cold milk at Bobadilla,” and instantly a baleful suspicion implanted itself which has since grown into a upas tree of poisonous conviction: goat’s milk does not keep well, and it was not only hot milk, but hot goat’s milk which they were serving us at Bobadilla. However, there were admirable ham sandwiches, not of goat’s flesh, at the other end of the room, and with these one could console oneself. There was also a commendable pancake whose honored name I never knew, but whose acquaintance I should be sorry not to have made; and all about Bobadilla there was an agreeable bustle, which we enjoyed the more when we had made sure that we had changed into the right train for Granada and found in our compartment the charming young Swedish couple who had come with us from Seville.

Thoroughly refreshed by the tea with hot goat’s milk in it, by the genuine ham sandwiches and the pancakes, my note-book takes up the tale once more. It dwells upon the rich look of the land and the comfort of the farms contrasting with the wild irregularity of the mountain ranges which now began to serrate the horizon; and I have no doubt that if I had then read that most charming of all Washington Irving’s Spanish studies, the story, namely, of his journey over quite the same way we had come seventy-five years later, my note-book would abound in lively comment on the changed aspect of the whole landscape. Even as it is, I find it exclamatory over the wonder of the mountain coloring which it professes to have found green, brown, red, gray, and blue, but whether all at once or not it does not say. It is more definite as to the plain we were traversing, with its increasing number of white cottages, cheerfully testifying to the distribution of the land in small holdings, so different from the vast estates abandoned to homeless expanses of wheat-fields and olive orchards which we had been passing through. It did not appear on later inquiry that these small holdings were of peasant ownership, as I could have wished; they were tenant farms, but their neatness testified to the prosperity of the tenants, and their frequency cheered our way as the evening waned and the lamps began to twinkle from their windows. At a certain station, I am reminded by my careful mentor, the craggy mountain-tops were softened by the sunset pink, and that then the warm afternoon air began to grow cooler, and the dying day to empurple the uplands everywhere, without abating the charm of the blithe cottages. It seems to have been mostly a very homelike scene, and where there was a certain stretch of woodland its loneliness was relieved by the antic feat of a goat lifting itself on its hind legs to browse the olive leaves on their native bough. The air was thinner and cooler, but never damp, and at times it relented and blew lullingly in at our window. We made such long stops that the lights began to fade out of the farm-windows, but kept bright in the villages, when at a station which we were so long in coming to that we thought it must be next to Granada, a Spanish gentleman got in with us; and though the prohibitory notice of No Fumadores stared him in the face, it did not stare him out of countenance; for he continued to smoke like a locomotive the whole way to our journey’s end. From time to time I meditated a severe rebuke, but in the end I made him none, and I am now convinced that this was wise, for he probably would not have minded it, and as it was, when I addressed him some commonplace as to the probable time of our arrival he answered in the same spirit, and then presently grew very courteously communicative. He told me for one thing, after we had passed the mountain gates of the famous Vega and were making our way under the moonlight over the storied expanse, drenched with the blood of battles long ago, that the tall chimneys we began to see blackening the air with their volumed fumes were the chimneys of fourteen beet-root sugar factories belonging to the Duke of Wellington. Then I divined, as afterward I learned, that the lands devoted to this industry were part of the rich gift which Spain bestowed upon the Great Duke in gratitude for his services against the Napoleonic invasion. His present heir has imagined a benevolent use of his heritage by inviting the peasantry of the Vega to the culture of the sugar-beet; but whether the enterprise was prospering I could not say; and I do not suppose any reader of mine will care so much for it as I did in the pour of the moonlight over the roofs and towers that were now becoming Granada, and quickening my slow old emotions to a youthful glow. At the station, which, in spite of Boabdil el Chico and Ferdinand and Isabel, was quite like every other railway station of southern Europe, we parted friends with our Spanish fellow-traveler, whom we left smoking and who is probably smoking still. Then we mounted with our Swedish friends into the omnibus of the hotel we had chosen and which began, after discreet delays, to climb the hill town toward the Alhambra through a commonplace-looking town gay with the lights of cafes and shops, and to lose itself in the more congenial darkness of narrower streets barred with moonlight. It was drawn by four mules, covered with bells and constantly coaxed and cursed by at least two drivers on the box, while a vigorous boy ran alongside and lashed their legs without ceasing till we reached the shelf where our hotel perched.

III

I had taken the precaution to write for rooms, and we got the best in the house, or if not that then the best we could wish at a price which I could have wished much less, till we stepped out upon our balcony, and looked down and over the most beautiful, the most magnificent scene that eyes, or at least my eyes, ever dwelt on. Beside us and before us the silver cup of the Sierra Nevada, which held the city in its tiled hollow, poured it out over the immeasurable Vega washed with moonshine which brightened and darkened its spread in a thousand radiances and obscurities of windows and walls and roofs and trees and lurking gardens. Because it was unspeakable we could not speak, but I may say now that this was our supreme moment of Granada. There were other fine moments, but none unmixed with the reservations which truth obliges honest travel to own. Now, when from some secret spot there rose the wild cry of a sentinel, and prolonged itself to another who caught it dying up and breathed new life into it and sent it echoing on till it had made the round of the whole fairy city, the heart shut with a pang of pure ecstasy. One could bear no more; we stepped within, and closed the window behind us. That is, we tried to close it, but it would not latch, and we were obliged to ring for a camerero to come and see what ailed it.

The infirmity of the door-latch was emblematic of a temperamental infirmity in the whole hotel. The promises were those of Madrid, but the performances were those of Segovia. There was a glitter, almost a glare, of Ritz-like splendor, and the rates were Ritz-like, but there the resemblance ceased. The porter followed us to our rooms on our arrival and told us in excellent English (which excelled less and less throughout our stay) that he was the hall porter and that we could confidently refer all our wants to him; but their reference seemed always to close the incident. There was a secretary who assured us that our rooms were not dear, and who could not out of regard to our honor and comfort consider cheaper ones; and then ceased to be until he receipted our bill when we went away. There was a splendid dining-room with waiters of such beauty and dignity, and so purple from clean shaving, that we scarcely dared face them, and there were luncheons and dinners of rich and delicate superabundance in the menu, but of an exquisite insipidity on the palate, and of a swiftly vanishing Barmecide insubstantiality, as if they were banquets from the Arabian Nights imagined under the rule of the Moors. Everywhere shone silver-bright radiators, such as we had not seen since we left their like freezing in Burgos; but though the weather presently changed from an Andalusian softness to a Castilian severity after a snowfall in the Sierra, the radiators remained insensible to the difference and the air nipped the nose and fingers wherever one went in the hotel. The hall porter, who knew everything, said the boilers were out of order, and a traveler who had been there the winter before confirmed him with the testimony that they were out of order even in January. There may not have been any fire under them then, as there was none now; but if they needed repairing now it was clearly because they needed repairing then. In the corner of one of our rooms the frescoed plastering had scaled off, and we knew that if we came back a year later the same spot would offer us a familiar welcome.

But why do I gird at that hotel in Granada as if I knew of no faults in American hotels? I know of many and like faults, and I do not know of a single hotel of ours with such a glorious outlook and downlook as that hotel in Granada. The details which the sunlight of the morrow revealed to us when we had mastered the mystery of our window-catch and stood again on our balcony took nothing from the loveliness of the moonlight picture, but rather added to it, and, besides a more incredible scene of mountain and plain and city, it gave us one particular tree in a garden almost under us which my heart clings to still with a rapture changing to a fond regret. At first the tree, of what name or nature I cannot tell, stood full and perfect, a mass of foliage all yellow as if made up of “patines of bright gold.” Then day by day, almost hour by hour, it darkened and the tree shrank as if huddling its leaves closer about it in the cold that fell from the ever-snowier Sierra. On the last morning we left its boughs shaking in the rain against the cold,

 Bare, ruined choir where late the sweet birds sang.

IV

But we anticipate, as I should say if I were still a romantic novelist. Many other trees in and about Granada were yellower than that one, and the air hung dim with a thin haze as of Indian summer when we left our hotel in eager haste to see the Alhambra such as travelers use when they do not want some wonder of the world to escape them. Of course there was really no need of haste, and we had to wait till our guide could borrow a match to light the first of the cigarettes which he never ceased to smoke. He was commended to us by the hall porter, who said he could speak French, and so he could, to the extreme of constantly saying, with a wave of his cigarette, “N’est ce pas?” For the rest he helped himself out willingly with my small Spanish. At the end he would have delivered us over to a dealer in antiquities hard by the gate of the palace if I had not prevented him, as it were, by main force; he did not repine, but we were not sorry that he should be engaged for the next day.

Our way to the gate, which was the famous Gate of Justice and was lovely enough to be the Gate of Mercy, lay through the beautiful woods, mostly elms, planted there by the English early in the last century. The birds sang in their tops, and the waters warbled at their feet, and it was somewhat thrillingly cold in their dense shade, so that we were glad to get out of it, and into the sunshine where the old Moorish palace lay basking and dreaming. At once let me confide to the impatient reader that the whole Alhambra, by which he must understand a citadel, and almost a city, since it could, if it never did, hold twenty thousand people within its walls, is only historically and not artistically more Moorish than the Alcazar at Seville. Far nobler and more beautiful than its Arabic decorativeness in tinted stucco is the palace begun by Charles V., after a design in the spirit of the supreme hour of the Italian Renaissance. It is not a ruin in its long arrest, and one hears with hopeful sympathy that the Spanish king means some day to complete it. To be sure, the world is, perhaps, already full enough of royal palaces, but since they return sooner or later to the people whose pockets they come out of, one must be willing to have this palace completed as the architect imagined it.

We were followed into the Moorish palace by the music of three blind minstrels who began to tune their guitars as soon as they felt us: see us they could not. Then presently we were in the famous Court of the Lions, where a group of those beasts, at once archaic and puerile in conception, sustained the basin of a fountain in the midst of a graveled court arabesqued and honeycombed round with the wonted ornamentation of the Moors.

The place was disappointing to the boy in me who had once passed so much of his leisure there, and had made it all marble and gold. The floor is not only gravel, and the lions are not only more like sheep, but the environing architecture and decoration are of a faded prettiness which cannot bear comparison with the fresh rougeing, equally Moorish, of the Alcazar at Seville. Was this indeed the place where the Abencerrages were brought in from supper one by one and beheaded into the fountain at the behest of their royal host? Was it here that the haughty Don Juan de Vera, coming to demand for the Catholic kings the arrears of tribute due them from the Moor, “paused to regard its celebrated fountain” and “fell into discourse with the Moorish courtiers on certain mysteries of the Christian faith”? So Washington Irving says, and so I once believed, with glowing heart and throbbing brow as I read how “this most Christian knight and discreet ambassador restrained himself within the limits of lofty gravity, leaning on the pommel of his sword and looking down with ineffable scorn upon the weak casuists around him. The quick and subtle Arabian witlings redoubled their light attacks on the stately Spaniard, but when one of them, of the race of the Abencerrages dared to question, with a sneer, the immaculate conception of the blessed Virgin, the Catholic knight could no longer restrain his ire. Elevating his voice of a sudden, he told the infidel he lied, and raising his arm at the same time he smote him on the head with his sheathed sword. In an instant the Court of Lions glistened with the flash of arms,” insomuch that the American lady whom we saw writing a letter beside a friend sketching there must have been startled from her opening words, “I am sitting here with my portfolio on my knees in the beautiful Court of the Lions,” and if Muley Aben Hassan had not “overheard the tumult and forbade all appeal to force, pronouncing the person of the ambassador sacred,” she never could have gone on.

V

I did not doubt the fact when I read of it under the level boughs of the beechen tree with J. W., sixty years ago, by the green woodland light of the primeval forest which hemmed our village in, and since I am well away from the Alhambra again I do not doubt it now. I doubt nothing that Irving says of the Alhambra; he is the gentle genius of the place, and I could almost wish that I had paid the ten pesetas extra which the custodian demanded for showing his apartment in the palace. On the ground the demand of two dollars seemed a gross extortion; yet it was not too much for a devotion so rich as mine to have paid, and I advise other travelers to buy themselves off from a vain regret by giving it. If ever a memory merited the right to levy tribute on all comers to the place it haunts, Washington Irving’s is that memory. His Conquest of Granada is still the history which one would wish to read; his Tales of the Alhambra embody fable and fact in just the right measure for the heart’s desire in the presence of the monuments they verify or falsify. They belong to that strange age of romance which is now so almost pathetic and to which one cannot refuse his sympathy without sensible loss. But for the eager make-believe of that time we should still have to hoard up much rubbish which we can now leave aside, or accept without bothering to assay for the few grains of gold in it. Washington Irving had just the playful kindness which sufficed best to deal with the accumulations of his age; if he does not forbid you to believe, he does not oblige you to disbelieve, and he has always a tolerant civility in his humor which comports best with the duty of taking leniently a history impossible to take altogether seriously. Till the Spaniards had put an end to the Moorish misrule, with its ruthless despotism and bloody civil brawls, the Moors deserved to be conquered; it was not till their power was broken forever that they became truly heroic in their vain struggles and their unavailing sorrows. Then their pathetic resignation to persecution and exile lent dignity even to their ridiculous religion; but it was of the first and not the second period that Irving had to treat.

VI

The Alhambra is not so impressive by its glory or grandeur as by the unparalleled beauty of its place. If it is not very noble as an effect of art, the inspiration of its founders is affirmed by their choice of an outlook which commands one of the most magnificent panoramas in the whole world. It would be useless to rehearse the proofs by name. Think of far-off silver-crested summits and of a peopled plain stretching away from them out of eye-shot, dense first with roofs and domes and towers, and then freeing itself within fields and vineyards and orchards and forests to the vanishing-point of the perspective; think of steep and sudden plunges into chasms at the foot of the palace walls, and one crooked stream stealing snakelike in their depths; think of whatever splendid impossible dramas of topography that you will, of a tremendous map outstretched in colored relief, and you will perhaps have some notion of the prospect from the giddy windows of the Alhambra; and perhaps not. Of one thing we made memorably sure beyond the gulf of the Darro, and that was the famous gipsy quarter which the traveler visits at the risk of his life in order to have his fortune told. At the same moment we made sure that we should not go nearer it, for though we knew that it was insurpassably dirty as well as dangerous, we remembered so distinctly the loathsomeness of the gipsy quarter at Seville that we felt no desire to put it to the comparison.

We preferred rather the bird’s-eye study of the beautiful Generalife which our outlook enabled us to make, and which we supplemented by a visit the next day. We preferred, after the Barmecide lunch at our hotel, taking the tram-car that noisily and more noisily clambers up and down, and descending into the town by it. The ascent is so steep that at a certain point the electric current no longer suffices, and the car bites into the line of cogs with its sort of powerful under-jaw and so arrives. Yet it is a kindly little vehicle, with a conductor so affectionately careful in transporting the stranger that I felt after a single day we should soon become brothers, or at least step-brothers. Whenever we left or took his car, after the beginning or ending of the cogway, he was alert to see that we made the right change to or from it, and that we no more overpaid than underpaid him. Such homely natures console the traveler for the thousand inhospitalities of travel, and bind races and religions together in spite of patriotism and piety.

We were going first to the Cartuja, and in the city, which we found curiously much more modern, after the Latin notion, than Seville, with freshly built apartment-houses and business blocks, we took a cab, not so modern as to be a taxicab, and drove through the quarter said to have been assigned to the Moors after the fall of Granada. The dust lay thick in the roadway where filthy children played, but in the sunny doorways good mothers of families crouched taking away the popular reproach of vermin by searching one another’s heads. Men bestriding their donkeys rode fearlessly through the dust, and one cleanly-looking old peasant woman, who sat hers plumply cushioned and framed in with a chair-back and arms, showed a patience with the young trees planted for future shade along the desperate avenue which I could wish we had emulated. When we reached the entrance of the old Carthusian Convent, long since suppressed and its brothers exiled, a strong force of beggarmen waited for us, but a modest beggar-woman, old and sad, had withdrawn to the church door, where she shared in our impartial alms. We were admitted to the cloister, rather oddly, by a young girl, who went for one of the remaining monks to show us the church. He came with a newspaper (I hope of clerical politics) in his hand, and distracted himself from it only long enough to draw a curtain, or turn on a light, and point out a picture or statue from time to time. But he was visibly anxious to get back to it, and sped us more eagerly than he welcomed us in a church which upon the whole is richer in its peculiar treasures of painting, sculpture, especially in wood, costly marble, and precious stones than any other I remember. According to my custom, I leave it to the guide-books to name these, and to the abounding critics of Spanish art to celebrate the pictures and statues; it is enough for me that I have now forgotten them all except those scenes of the martyrdom inflicted by certain Protestants on members of the Carthusian brotherhood at the time when all sorts of Christians felt bound to correct the opinions of all other sorts by the cruelest tortures they could invent. When the monk had put us to shame by the sight of these paintings (bad as their subjects), he put us out, letting his eyes fall back upon his newspaper before the door had well closed upon us.

The beggarmen had waited in their places to give us another chance of meriting heaven; and at the church door still crouched the old beggarwoman. I saw now that the imploring eyes she lifted were sightless, and I could not forbear another alms, and as I put my copper big-dog in her leathern palm I said, “Adios, madre.” Then happened something that I had long desired. I had heard and read that in Spain people always said at parting, “Go with God,” but up to that moment nobody had said it to me, though I had lingeringly given many the opportunity. Now, at my words and at the touch of my coin this old beggarwoman smiled beneficently and said, “Go with God,” or, as she put it in her Spanish, “Vaya vested con Dios.” Immediately I ought to have pressed another coin in her palm, with a “Gracias, madre; muchas gracias,” out of regard to the literary climax; but whether I really did so I cannot now remember; I can only hope I did.

VII

I think that it was while I was still in this high satisfaction that we went a drive in the promenade, which in all Spanish cities is the Alameda, except Seville, where it so deservedly is the Delicias. It was in every way a contrast to the road we had come from the Cartuja: an avenue of gardened paths and embowered driveways, where we hoped to join the rank and fashion of Granada in their afternoon’s outing. But there was only one carriage besides our own with people in it, who looked no greater world than ourselves, and a little girl riding with her groom. On one hand were pretty villas, new-looking and neat, which I heard could sometimes be taken for the summer at rents so low that I am glad I have forgotten the exact figures lest the reader should doubt my word. Nothing but the fact that the winter was then hanging over us from the Sierras prevented my taking one of them for the summer that had passed, the Granadan summer being notoriously the most delightful in the world. On the other hand stretched the wonderful Vega, which covers so many acres in history and romance, and there, so near that we look down into them at times were “the silvery windings of the Xenil,” which glides through so many descriptive passages of Irving’s page; only now, on account of recent rain, its windings were rather coppery.

At the hotel on the terrace under our balcony we found on our return a party of Spanish ladies and gentlemen taking tea, or whatever drink stood for it in their custom: no doubt chocolate; but it was at least the afternoon-tea hour. The women’s clothes were just from Paris, and the men’s from London, but their customs, I suppose, were national; the women sat on one side of the table and talked across it to the men, while they ate and drank, and then each sex grouped itself apart and talked to its kind, the women in those hardened vowels of a dialect from which the Andalusians for conversational purposes have eliminated all consonants. The sun was setting red and rayless, with a play of many lights and tints, over the landscape up to the snow-line on the Sierra. The town lay a stretch of gray roofs and white walls, intermixed with yellow poplars and black cypresses, and misted over with smoke from the chimneys of the sugar factories. The mountains stood flat against the sky, purple with wide stretches of brown, and dark, slanting furrows. The light became lemon-yellow before nightfall, and then a dull crimson under pale violet.

The twitter of the Spanish women was overborne at times by the voices of an American party whose presence I was rather proud of as another American. They were all young men, and they were making an educational tour of the world in the charge of a professor who saw to it that they learned as much of its languages and history and civilization as possible on the way. They ranged in their years from about fifteen to twenty and even more, and they were preparing for college, or doing what they could to repair the loss of university training before they took up the work of life. It seemed to me a charming notion, and charming the seriousness with which they were fulfilling it. They were not so serious in everything as to miss any incidental pleasure; they had a large table to themselves in our Barmecide banquet-hall, where they seemed always to be having a good time, and where once they celebrated the birthday of one of them with a gaiety which would have penetrated, if anything could, the shining chill of the hostelry. In the evening we heard them in the billiard-room below lifting their voices in the lays of our college muse, and waking to ecstasy the living piano in the strains of our national ragtime. They were never intrusively cheerful; one might remain, in spite of them, as dispirited as the place would have one; but as far as the genius loci would let me, I liked them; and so far as I made their acquaintance I thought that they were very intelligently carrying out the enterprise imagined for them.

VIII

I wish now that I had known them well enough to ask them what they candidly thought of the city of which I felt the witchery under the dying day I have left celebrating for the moment in order to speak of them. It seems to me at this distance of time and space that I did not duly reflect that in places it was a city which smelled very badly and was almost as dirty as New York in others, and very ill paved. The worst places are in the older quarters, where the streets are very crooked and very narrow, so narrow that the tram-car can barely scrape through them. They are old enough to be streets belonging to the Moorish city, like many streets in Cordova and Seville, but no fond inquiry of our guides could identify this lane or that alley as of Moorish origin. There is indeed a group of picturesque shops clearly faked to look Moorish, which the lover of that period may pin his faith to, and for a moment I did so, but upon second thought I unpinned it.

We visited this plated fragment of the old Moorish capital when we descended from our hotel with a new guide to see the great, the stupendous cathedral, where the Catholic kings lie triumphantly entombed in the heart of their conquest. It is altogether unlike the other Spanish cathedrals of my knowledge; for though the cathedral of Valladolid is of Renaissance architecture in its austere simplicity, it is somehow even less like that of Granada than the Gothic fanes of Burgos or Toledo or Seville. All the detail at Granada is classicistic, but the whole is often of Gothic effect, especially in the mass of those clustered Corinthian columns that lift its domes aloof on their prodigious bulk, huge as that of the grouped pillars in the York Minster. The white of the marble walls, the gold of altars, the colors of painted wooden sculpture form the tones of the place, subdued to one bizarre richness which I may as well leave first as last to the reader’s fancy; though, let his fancy riot as it will, it never can picture that gorgeousness. Mass was saying at a side altar as we entered, and the music of stringed instruments and the shrill voices of choir-boys pierced the spaces here and there, but no more filled them than the immemorable plastic and pictorial facts: than a certain very lively bishop kneeling on his tomb and looking like George Washington; or than a St. Jerome in the Desert, outwrinkling age, with his lion curled cozily up in his mantle; or than the colossal busts of Adam and Eve and the praying figures of Ferdinand and Isabel, richly gilded in the exquisite temple forming the high altar; or than the St. James on horseback, with his horse’s hoof planted on the throat of a Moor; or than the Blessed Virgins in jeweled crowns and stomachers and brocaded skirts; or than that unsparing decapitation of John the Baptist bloodily falling forward with his severed gullet thrusting at the spectator. Nothing has ever been too terrible in life for Spanish art to represent; it is as ruthlessly veracious as Russian literature; and of all the painters and sculptors who have portrayed the story of Christianity as a tale of torture and slaughter, the Spaniards seem to have studied it closest from the fact; perhaps because for centuries the Inquisition lavished the fact upon them.

The supreme interest of the cathedral is, of course, the Royal Chapel, where in a sunken level Ferdinand and Isabel lie, with their poor mad daughter Joan and her idolized unfaithful husband Philip the Fair, whose body she bore about with her while she lived. The picture postal has these monuments in its keeping and can show them better than my pen, which falters also from the tremendous retablo of the chapel dense with the agonies of martyrdom and serene with the piety of the Catholic Kings kneeling placidly amid the horrors. If the picture postal will not supply these, or reproduce the many and many relics and memorials which abound there and in the sacristy — jewels and vestments and banners and draperies of the royal camp-altar — there is nothing for the reader but to go himself and see. It is richly worth his while, and if he cannot believe in a box which will be shown him as the box Isabel gave Columbus her jewels in merely because he has been shown a reliquary as her hand-glass, so much the worse for him. He will not then merit the company of a small choir-boy who efficiently opens the iron gate to the crypt and gives the custodian as good as he sends in back-talk and defiantly pockets the coppers he has earned. Much less will he deserve to witness the homely scene in an area outside of the Royal Chapel, where many milch goats are assembled, and when a customer comes, preferably a little girl with a tin cup, one of the mothers of the flock is pinioned much against her will by a street boy volunteering for the office, and her head held tight while the goatherdess milks the measure full at the other end.

IX

Everywhere about the cathedral beggars lay in wait, and the neighboring streets were lively with bargains of prickly pears spread open on the ground by old women who did not care whether any one bought or not. There were also bargains in palmistry; and at one place a delightful humorist was selling clothing at auction. He allured the bidders by having his left hand dressed as a puppet and holding a sparkling dialogue with it; when it did not respond to his liking he beat it with his right hand, and every now and then he rang a little bell. He had a pleased crowd about him in the sunny square; but it seemed to me that all the newer part of Granada was lively with commerce in ample, tram-trodden streets which gave the shops, larger than any we had seen out of Madrid, a chance uncommon in the narrow ways of other Spanish cities. Yet when I went to get money on my letter of credit, I found the bank withdrawn from the modernity in a seclusion reached through a lovely patio. We were seated in old-fashioned welcome, such as used to honor a banker’s customers in Venice, and all comers bowed and bade us good day. The bankers had no such question of the different signatures as vexed those of Valladolid, and after no more delay than due ceremony demanded, I went away with both my money and my letter, courteously seen to the door.

The guide, to whom we had fallen in the absence of our French-speaking guide of the day before, spoke a little English, and he seemed to grow in sympathetic intelligence as the morning passed. He made our sightseeing include visits to the church of St. John of God, and the church of San Geronimo, which was built by Gonsalvo de Cordova, the Great Captain, and remains now a memorial to him. We rang at the door, and after long delay a woman came and let us into an interior stranger ever than her being there as custodian. It was frescoed from floor to ceiling everywhere, except the places of the altars now kept by the painted retablos and the tombs and the statues of the various saints and heroes. The retablo of the high altar is almost more beautiful than wonderful, but the chief glory of the place is in the kneeling figures of the Great Captain and his wife, one on either side of the altar, and farther away the effigies of his famous companions-in-arms, and on the walls above their heraldic blazons and his. The church Was unfinished when the Great Captain died in the displeasure of his ungrateful king, and its sumptuous completion testifies to the devotion of his wife and her taste in choosing the best artists for the work.

I have still the sense of a noonday quiet that lingered with us after we left this church and which seemed to go with us to the Hospital of St. John of God, founded, with other hospitals, by the pious Portuguese, who, after a life of good works, took this name on his well-merited canonization. The hospital is the monument of his devotion to good works, and is full of every manner of religious curio. I cannot remember to have seen so many relics under one roof, bones of both holy men and women, with idols of the heathen brought from Portuguese possessions in the East which are now faded from the map, as well as the body of St. John of God shrined in silver in the midst of all.

I do not know why I should have brought away from these two places a peacefulness of mind such as seldom follows a visit to show-places, but the fact is so; perhaps it was because we drove to and from them, and were not so tired as footworn sight-seers are, or so rebellious. One who had seen not only the body of St. John of God, but his cane with a whistle in it to warn the charitable of his coming and attune their minds to alms-giving, and the straw basket in which he collected food for the poor, now preserved under an embroidered satin covering, and an autograph letter of his framed in glass and silver, might even have been refreshed by his experience. At any rate, we were so far from tired that after luncheon we walked to the Garden of the Generalife, and then walked all over it. The afternoon was of the very mood for such a visit, and we passed it there in these walks and bowers, and the black cypress aisles, and the trees and vines yellowing to the fall of their leaves. The melancholy laugh of water chasing down the steep channels and gurgling through the stone rails of stairways was everywhere, and its dim smile gleamed from pools and tanks. In the court where it stretched in a long basin an English girl was painting and another girl was sewing, to whom I now tardily offer my thanks for adding to the charm of the place. Not many other people were there to dispute our afternoon’s ownership. I count a peasant family, the women in black shawls and the men wearing wide, black sashes, rather as our guests than as strangers; and I am often there still with no sense of molestation. Even the reader who does not conceive of a garden being less flowers and shrubs than fountains and pavilions and porches and borders of box and walls of clipped evergreens, will scarcely follow me to the Generalife or outstay me there.

The place is probably dense with history and suffocating with association, but I prefer to leave all that to the imagination where my own ignorance found it. A painter had told me once of his spending a summer in it, and he showed some beautiful pieces of color in proof, but otherwise I came to it with a blank surface on which it might photograph itself without blurring any earlier record. This, perhaps, is why I love so much to dwell there on that never-ending afternoon of late October. It was long past the hour of its summer bloom, but the autumnal air was enriching it beyond the dreams of avarice with the gold which prevails in the Spanish landscape wherever the green is gone, and we could look out of its yellowing bowers over a landscape immeasurable in beauty. Of course, we tried to master the facts of the Generalife’s past, but we really did not care for them and scarcely believed that Charles V. had doubted the sincerity of the converted Moor who had it from Ferdinand of Aragon, and so withheld it from his heirs for four generations until they could ripen to a genuine Christianity at Genoa, whither they withdrew and became the patrician family now its proprietors. The arms of this family decorate the roof and walls of the colonnaded belvedere from which you look out over the city and the plain and the mountains; and there are remnants of Moorish decoration in many places, but otherwise the Generalife is now as Christian as the noble Pallavicini who possess it. There were plenty of flower-beds, box-bordered, but there were no flowers in them; the flowers preferred standing about in tall pots. There was an arbor overhung with black forgotten grapes before the keeper’s door and in the corner of it dangled ropes of fire-red peppers.

This detail is what, with written help, I remember of the Generalife, but no loveliness of it shall fade from, my soul. From its embowered and many-fountained height it looks over to the Alhambra, dull red, and the city wall climbing the opposite slope across the Darro to a church on the hilltop which was once a mosque. The precipice to which the garden clings plunges sheer to the river-bed with a downlook insurpassably thrilling; but the best view of the city is from the flowery walk that runs along the side of the Alcazaba, which was once a fortress and is now a garden, long forgetful of its office of defending the Alhambra palace. From this terrace Granada looks worthy of her place in history and romance. We visited the Alcazaba after the Generalife, and were very critical, but I must own the supremacy of this prospect. I should not mind owning its supremacy among all the prospects in the world.

XI

Meanwhile our shining hotel had begun to thrill with something besides the cold which nightly pierced it from the snowy Sierra. This was the excitement pending from an event promised the next day, which was the production of a drama in verse, of peculiar and intense interest for Granada, where the scene of it was laid in the Alhambra at one of the highest moments of its history, and the persons were some of those dearest to its romance. Not only the company to perform it (of course the first company in Spain) had been in the hotel overnight, and the ladies of it had gleamed and gloomed through the cold corridors, but the poet had been conspicuous at dinner, with his wife, young and beautiful and blond, and powdered so white that her blondness was of quite a violet cast. There was not so much a question of whether we should take tickets as whether we could get them, but for this the powerful influence of our guide availed, and he got tickets providentially given up in the morning for a price so exorbitant I should be ashamed to confess it. They were for the afternoon performance, and at three o’clock we went with the rest of the gay and great world of Granada to the principal theater.

The Latin conception of a theater is of something rather more barnlike than ours, but this theater was of a sufficiently handsome presence, and when we had been carried into it by the physical pressure exerted upon us by the crowd at the entrance we found its vastness already thronged. The seats in the orchestra were mostly taken; the gallery under the roof was loud with the impatience for the play which the auditors there testified by cries and whistlings and stampings until the curtain lifted; the tiers of boxes rising all round the theater were filled with family parties. The fathers and mothers sat in front with the children between them of all ages down to babies in their nurses’ arms. These made themselves perfectly at home, in one case reaching over the edge of the box and clawing the hair of a gentleman standing below and openly enjoying the joke. The friendly equality of the prevailing spirit was expressed in the presence of the family servants at the back of the family boxes, from which the latest fashions showed themselves here and there, as well as the belated local versions of them. In the orchestra the men had promptly lighted their cigars and the air was blue with smoke. Friends found one another, to their joyful amaze, not having met since morning; and especially young girls were enraptured to recognize young men; one girl shook hands twice with a young man, and gurgled with laughter as long as he stood near her.

As a lifelong lover of the drama and a boyish friend of Granadan romance, I ought to have cared more for the play than the people who had come to it, but I did not. The play was unintentionally amusing enough; but after listening for two hours to the monotonous cadences of the speeches which the persons of it recited to one another, while the ladies of the Moorish world took as public a part in its events as if they had been so many American Christians, we came away. We had already enjoyed the first entr’acte, when the men all rose and went out, or lighted fresh cigars and went to talk with the Paris hats and plumes or the Spanish mantillas and high combs in the boxes. The curtain had scarcely fallen when the author of the play was called before it and applauded by the generous, the madly generous, spectators. He stood bowing and bowing on tiptoe, as if the wings of his rapture lifted him to them and would presently fly away with him. He could not drink deep enough of the delicious draught, put brimming to his lips, and the divine intoxication must have lasted him through the night, for after breakfast the next morning I met him in our common corridor at the hotel smiling to himself, and when I could not forbear smiling in return he smiled more; he beamed, he glowed upon me as if I were a crowded house still cheering him to the echo. It was a beautiful moment and I realized even better than the afternoon before what it was to be a young poet and a young Spanish poet, and to have had a first play given for the first time in the city of Granada, where the morning papers glowed with praise so ardent that the print all but smoked with it. We were alone in the corridor where we met, and our eyes confessed us kindred spirits, and I hope he understood me better than if I had taken him in my arms and kissed him on both cheeks.

I really had no time for that; I was on my way down-stairs to witness the farewell scene between the leading lady and the large group of young Granadans who had come up to see her off. When she came out to the carriage with her husband, by a delicate refinement of homage they cheered him, and left him to deliver their devotion to her, which she acknowledged only with a smile. But not so the leading lady’s lady’s-maid, when her turn came to bid good-by from our omnibus window to the assembled upper servants of the hotel. She put her head out and said in a voice hoarse with excitement and good-fellowship, “Adios, hombres!” (“Good-by, men!”), and vanished with us from their applausive presence.

With us, I say, for we, too, were leaving Granada in rain which was snow on the Sierra and so cold that we might well have seemed leaving Greenland. The brave mules which had so gallantly, under the lash of the running foot-boy beside them, galloped uphill with us the moonlight night of our coming, now felt their anxious way down in the dismal drizzle of that last morning, and brought us at last to the plaza before the station. It was a wide puddle where I thought our craft should have floundered, but it made its way to the door, and left us dry shod within and glad to be quitting the city of my young dreams.

XII. THE SURPRISES OF RONDA

The rain that pelted sharply into the puddle before the station at Granada was snow on the Sierra, and the snow that fell farther and farther down the mountainsides resolved itself over the Vega into a fog as white and almost as cold. Half-way across the storied and fabled plain the rain stopped and the fog lifted, and then we saw by day, as we had already seen by night, how the Vega was plentifully dotted with white cottages amid breadths of wheat-land where the peasants were plowing. Here and there were fields of Indian corn, and in a certain place there was a small vineyard; in one of the middle distances there spread a forest of Lombardy poplars, yellow as gold, and there was abundance of this autumn coloring in the landscape, which grew lonelier as we began to mount from the level. Olives, of course, abounded, and there were oak woods and clumps of wild cherry trees. The towns were far from the stations, which we reached at the rate of perhaps two miles an hour as we approached the top of the hills; and we might have got out and walked without fear of being left behind by our train, which made long stops, as if to get its breath for another climb. Before this the sole companion of our journey, whom we decided to be a landed proprietor coming out in his riding-gear to inspect his possessions, had left us, but at the first station after our descent began other passengers got in, with a captain of Civil Guards among them, very loquacious and very courteous, and much deferred to by the rest of us. At Bobadilla, where again we had tea with hot goat’s milk in it, we changed cars, and from that on we had the company of a Rock-Scorpion pair whose name was beautifully Italian and whose speech was beautifully English, as the speech of those born at Gibraltar should rightfully be.

I

It was quite dark at Ronda when our omnibus drove into the gardened grounds of one of those admirable inns which an English company is building in Spain, and put us down at the door of the office, where a typical English manageress and her assistant appointed us pleasant rooms and had fires kindled in them while we dined. There were already fires in the pleasant reading-room, which did not diffuse a heat too great for health but imparted to the eye a sense of warmth such as we had experienced nowhere else in Spain. Over all was spread a quiet and quieting British influence; outside of the office the nature of the service was Spanish, but the character of it was English; the Spanish waiters spoke English, and they looked English in dress and manner; superficially the chambermaid was as English as one could have found her in the United Kingdom, but at heart you could see she was as absolutely and instinctively a Spanish camerera as any in a hotel of Madrid or Seville. In the atmosphere of insularity the few Spanish guests were scarcely distinguishable from Anglo-Saxons, though a group of magnificent girls at a middle table, quelled by the duenna-like correctness of their mother, looked with their exaggerated hair and eyes like Spanish ladies made up for English parts in a play.

We had our breakfast in the reading-room where all the rest were breakfasting and trying not to see that they were keeping one another from the fire. It was very cold, for Ronda is high in the mountains which hem it round and tower far above it. We had already had our first glimpse of their summits from our own windows, but it was from the terrace outside the reading-room that we felt their grandeur most after we had drunk our coffee: we could scarcely have borne it before. In their presence, we could not realize at once that Ronda itself was a mountain, a mere mighty mass of rock, cleft in twain, with chasmal depths where we saw pygmy men and mules creeping out upon the valley that stretched upward to the foot of the Sierra. Why there should ever have been a town built there in the prehistoric beginning, except that the rock was so impossible to take, and why it should have therefore been taken by that series of invaders who pervaded all Spain — by the Phoenicians, by the Carthaginians, by the Romans, by the Goths, by the Moors, by the Christians, and after many centuries by the French, and finally by the Spaniards again — it would not be easy to say. Among its many conquerors, the Moors left their impress upon it, though here as often as elsewhere in Spain their impress is sometimes merely a decoration of earlier Roman work. There remains a Roman bridge which the Moors did not make over into the likeness of their architecture, but built a bridge of their own which also remains and may be seen from the magnificent structure with which the Spaniards have arched the abyss where the river rushes writhing and foaming through the gorge three hundred feet below. There on the steps that lead from the brink, the eye of pity may still see the files of Christian captives bringing water up to their Moslem masters; but as one cannot help them now, even by the wildest throe, it is as well to give a vain regret to the architect of the Spanish bridge, who fell to his death from its parapet, and then push on to the market hard by.

II

You have probably come to see that market because you have read in your guide-books that the region round about Ronda is one of the richest in Spain for grapes and peaches and medlars and melons and other fruits whose names melt in the mouth. If you do not find in the market the abundance you expect of its picturesqueness you must blame the lateness of the season, and go visit the bull-ring, one of the most famous in the world, for Ronda is not less noted for its toreros and aficionados than for its vineyards and orchards. But here again the season will have been before you with the glory of those corridas which you have still hoped not to witness but to turn from as an example to the natives before the first horse is disemboweled or the first bull slain, or even the first banderillero tossed over the barrier.

The bull-ring seemed fast shut to the public when we approached it, but we found ourselves smilingly welcomed to the interior by the kindly mother in charge. She made us free of the whole vast place, where eight thousand people could witness in perfect comfort the dying agonies of beasts and men, but especially she showed us the chamber over the gate, full of bullfighting properties: the pikes, the little barbed pennons, the long sword by which the bull suffers and dies, as well as the cumbrous saddles and bridles and spears for the unhappy horses and their riders. She was especially compassionate of the horses, and she had apparently no pleasure in any of the cruel things, though she was not critical of the sport. The King of Spain is president of the Ronda bull-fighting association, and she took us into the royal box, which is the worthier to be seen because under it the bulls are shunted and shouted into the ring from the pen where they have been kept in the dark. Before we escaped her husband sold us some very vivid postal cards representing the sport; so that with the help of a large black cat holding the center of the ring, we felt that we had seen as much of a bull-fight as we could reasonably wish.

We were seeing the wonders of the city in the guidance of a charming boy whom we had found in wait for us at the gate of the hotel garden when we came out. He offered his services in the best English he had, and he had enough of it to match my Spanish word for word throughout the morning. He led us from the bull-ring to the church known to few visitors, I believe, where the last male descendant of Montezuma lies entombed, under a fit inscription, and then through the Plaza past the college of Montezuma, probably named for this heir of the Aztec empire. I do not know why the poor prince should have come to die in Ronda, but there are many things in Ronda which I could not explain: especially why a certain fruit is sold by an old woman on the bridge. Its berries are threaded on a straw and look like the most luscious strawberries but taste like turpentine, though they may be avoided under the name of madrones. But on no account would I have the reader avoid the Church of Santa Maria Mayor. It is so dark within that he will not see the finely carved choir seats without the help of matches, or the pictures at all; but it is worth realizing, as one presently may, that the hither part of the church is a tolerably perfect mosque of Moorish architecture, through which you must pass to the Renaissance temple of the Christian faith.

Near by is the Casa de Mondragon which he should as little miss if he has any pleasure in houses with two patios perching on the gardened brink of a precipice and overlooking one of the most beautiful valleys in the whole world, with donkey-trains climbing up from it over the face of the cliff. The garden is as charming as red geraniums and blue cabbages can make a garden, and the house is fascinatingly quaint and unutterably Spanish, with the inner patio furnished in bright-colored cushions and wicker chairs, and looked into by a brown wooden gallery. A stately lemon-colored elderly woman followed us silently about, and the whole place was pervaded by a smell that was impossible at the time and now seems incredible.

III

I here hesitate before a little adventure which I would not make too much of nor yet minify: it seems to me so gentle and winning. I had long meant to buy a donkey, and I thought I could make no fitter beginning to this end than by buying a donkey’s head-stall in the country where donkeys are more respected and more brilliantly accoutred than anywhere else in the whole earth. When I ventured to suggest my notion, or call it dream, to our young guide, he instantly imagined it in its full beauty, and he led us directly to a shop in the principal street which for the richness and variety of the coloring in its display might have been a florist’s shop. Donkeys’ trappings in brilliant yellow, vermillion, and magenta hung from the walls, and head-stalls, gorgeously woven and embroidered, dangled from the roof. Among them and under them the donkeys’ harness-maker sat at his work, a short, brown, handsome man with eyes that seemed the more prominent because of his close-shaven head. We chose a headstall of such splendor that no heart could have resisted it, and while he sewed to it the twine muzzle which Spanish donkeys wear on their noses for the protection of the public, our guide expatiated upon us, and said, among other things to our credit, that we were from America and were going to take the head-stall back with us.

The harness-maker lifted his head alertly. “Where, in America?” and we answered for ourselves, “From New York.”

Then the harness-maker rose and went to an inner doorway and called through it something that brought out a comely, motherly woman as alert as himself. She verified our statement for herself, and having paved the way firmly for her next question she asked, “Do you know the Escuela Mann?”

As well as our surprise would let us, we said that we knew the Mann School, both where and what it was.

She waited with a sort of rapturous patience before saying, “My son, our eldest son, was educated at the Escuela Mann, to be a teacher, and now he is a professor in the Commercial College in Puerto Rico.”

If our joint interest in this did not satisfy her expectation I for my part can never forgive myself; certainly I tried to put as much passion into my interest as I could, when she added that his education at the Escuela Mann was without cost to him. By this time, in fact, I was so proud of the Escuela Mann that I could not forbear proclaiming that a member of my own family, no less than the father of the grandson for whose potential donkey I was buying that headstall, was one of the architects of the Escuela Mann building.

She now vanished within, and when she came out she brought her daughter, a gentle young girl who sat down and smiled upon us through the rest of the interview. She brought also an armful of books, the Spanish-English Ollendorff which her son had used in studying our language, his dictionary, and the copy-book where he had written his exercises, with two photographs of him, not yet too Americanized; and she showed us not only how correctly but how beautifully his exercises were done. If I did not admire these enough, again I cannot forgive myself, but she seemed satisfied with what I did, and she talked on about him, not too loquaciously, but lovingly and lovably as a mother should, and proudly as the mother of such a boy should, though without vainglory; I have forgotten to say that she had a certain distinction of face, and was appropriately dressed in black. By this time we felt that a head-stall for such a donkey as I was going to buy was not enough to get of such people, and I added a piece of embroidered leather such as goes in Spain on the front of a donkey’s saddle; if we could not use it so, in final defect of the donkey, we could put it on a veranda chair. The saddler gave it at so low a price that we perceived he must have tacitly abated something from the visual demand, and when we did not try to beat him down, his wife went again into that inner room and came out with an iron-holder of scarlet flannel backed with canvas, and fringed with magenta, and richly inwrought with a Moorish design, in white, yellow, green, and purple. I say Moorish, because one must say something, but if it was a pattern of her own invention the gift was the more precious when she bestowed it on the sister of one of the architects of the Escuela Mann. That led to more conversation about the Escuela Mann, and about the graduate of it who was now a professor in Puerto Rico, and we all grew such friends, and so proud of one another, and of the country so wide open to the talents without cost to them, that when I asked her if she would not sometime be going to America, her husband answered almost fiercely in his determination, “I am going when I have learned English!” and to prove that this was no idle boast, he pronounced some words of our language at random, but very well. We parted in a glow of reciprocal esteem and I still think of that quarter-hour as one of my happiest; and whatever others may say, I say that to have done such a favor to one Spanish family as the Escuela Mann had been the means of our nation doing this one was a greater thing than to have taken Cuba from Spain and bought the Philippines when we had seized them already and had led the Filipinos to believe that we meant to give their islands to them.

IV

Suddenly, on the way home to our very English hotel, the air of Ronda seemed charged with English. We were already used to the English of our young guide, which so far as it went, went firmly and courageously after forethought and reflection for each sentence, but we were not quite prepared for the English of two polite youths who lifted their hats as they passed us and said, “Good afternoon.” The general English lasted quite overnight and far into the next day when we found several natives prepared to try it on us in the pretty Alameda, and learned from one, who proved to be the teacher of it in the public school, that there were some twenty boys studying it there: heaven knows why, but the English hotel and its success may have suggested it to them as a means of prosperity. The students seem each prepared to guide strangers through Ronda, but sometimes they fail of strangers. That was the case with the pathetic young hunchback whom we met in Alameda, and who owned that he had guided none that day. In view of this and as a prophylactic against a course of bad luck, I made so bold as to ask if I might venture to repair the loss of the peseta which he would otherwise have earned. He smiled wanly, and then with the countenance of the teacher, he submitted and thanked me in English which I can cordially recommend to strangers knowing no Spanish.

All this was at the end of another morning when we had set out with the purpose of seeing the rest of Ronda for ourselves. We chose a back street parallel to the great thoroughfare leading to the new bridge, and of a squalor which we might have imagined but had not. The dwellers in the decent-looking houses did not seem to mind the sights and scents of their street, but these revolted us, and we made haste out of it into the avenue where the greater world of Ronda was strolling or standing about, but preferably standing about. In the midst of it, at the entrance of the new bridge we heard ourselves civilly saluted and recognized with some hesitation the donkey’s harness-maker who, in his Sunday dress and with his hat on, was not just the work-day presence we knew. He held by the hand a pretty boy of eleven years, whom he introduced as his second son, self-destined to follow the elder brother to America, and duly take up the profession of teaching in Puerto Rico after experiencing the advantages of the Escuela Mann. His father said that he already knew some English, and he proposed that the boy should go about with us and practise it, and after polite demur and insistence the child came with us, to our great pleasure. He bore himself with fit gravity, in his cap and long linen pinafore as he went before us, and we were personally proud of his fine, long face and his serious eyes, dark and darkened yet more by their long lashes. He knew the way to just such a book store as we wanted, where the lady behind the desk knew him and willingly promised to get me some books in the Andalusian dialect, and send them to our hotel by him at half past twelve. Naturally she did not do so, but he came to report her failure to get them. We had offered to pay him for his trouble, but he forbade us, and when we had overcome his scruple he brought the money back, and we had our trouble over again to make him keep it. To this hour I do not know how we ever brought ourselves to part with him; perhaps it was his promise of coming to America next year that prevailed with us; his brother was returning on a visit and then they were going back together.

V

Our search for literature in Ronda was not wholly a failure. At another bookstore, I found one of those local histories which I was always vainly trying for in other Spanish towns, and I can praise the Historia de Ronda par Federico Lozano Gutierrez as well done, and telling all that one would ask to know about that famous city. The author’s picture is on the cover, and with his charming letter dedicating the book to his father goes far to win the reader’s heart. Outside the bookseller’s a blind minstrel was playing the guitar in the care of a small boy who was selling, not singing, the ballads. They celebrated the prowess of Spain in recent wars, and it would not be praising them too highly to say that they seemed such as might have been written by a drum-major. Not that I think less of them for that reason, or that I think I need humble myself greatly to the historian of Ronda for associating their purchase with that of his excellent little book. If I had bought some of the blind minstrel’s almanacs and jest-books I might indeed apologize, but ballads are another thing.

After we left the bookseller’s, our little guide asked us if we would like to see a church, and we said that we would, and he took us into a white and gold interior, with altar splendors out of proportion to its simplicity, all in the charge of a boy no older than himself, who was presently joined by two other contemporaries. They followed us gravely about, and we felt that it was an even thing between ourselves and the church as objects of interest equally ignored by Baedeker. Then we thought we would go home and proposed going by the Alameda.

That is a beautiful place, where one may walk a good deal, and drive, rather less, but not sit down much unless indeed one likes being swarmed upon by the beggars who have a just priority of the benches. There seemed at first to be nobody walking in the Alameda except a gentleman pacing to and from the handsome modern house at the first corner, which our guide said was this cavalier’s house. He interested me beyond any reason I could give; he looked as if he might represent the highest society in Ronda, but did not find it an adequate occupation, and might well have interests and ambitions beyond it. I make him my excuses for intruding my print upon him, but I would give untold gold if I had it to know all about such a man in such a city, walking up and down under the embrowning trees and shrinking flowers of its Alameda, on a Sunday morning like that.

Our guide led us to the back gate of our hotel garden, where we found ourselves in the company of several other students of English. There was our charming young guide of the day before and there was that sad hunchback already mentioned, and there was their teacher who seemed so few years older and master of so little more English. Together we looked into the valley into which the vision makes its prodigious plunge at Ronda before lifting again over the fertile plain to the amphitheater of its mighty mountains; and there we took leave of that nice boy who would not follow us into our garden because, as he showed us by the sign, it was forbidden to any but guests. He said he was going into the country with his family for the afternoon, and with some difficulty he owned that he expected to play there; it was truly an admission hard to make for a boy of his gravity. We shook hands at parting with him, and with our yesterday’s guide, and with the teacher and with the hunchback; they all offered it in the bond of our common English; and then we felt that we had parted with much, very much of what was sweetest and best in Ronda.

VI

The day had been so lovely till now that we said we would stay many days in Ronda, and we loitered in the sun admiring the garden; the young landlady among her flowers said that all the soil had to be brought for it in carts and panniers, and this made us admire its autumn blaze the more. That afternoon we had planned taking our tea on the terrace for the advantage of looking at the sunset light on the mountains, but suddenly great black clouds blotted it out. Then we lost courage; it appeared to us that it would be both brighter and, warmer by the sea and that near Gibraltar we could more effectually prevent our steamer from getting away to New York without us. We called for our bill, and after luncheon the head waiter who brought it said that the large black cat which had just made friends with us always woke him if he slept late in the morning and followed him into the town like a dog when he walked there.

It was hard to part with a cat like that, but it was hard to part with anything in Ronda. Yet we made the break, and instead of ruining over the precipitous face of the rock where the city stands, as we might have expected, we glided smoothly down the long grade into the storm-swept lowlands sloping to the sea. They grew more fertile as we descended and after we had left a mountain valley where the mist hung grayest and chillest, we suddenly burst into a region of mellow fruitfulness, where the haze was all luminous, and where the oranges hung gold and green upon the trees, and the women brought grapes and peaches and apples to the train. The towns seemed to welcome us southward and the woods we knew instantly to be of cork trees, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza under their branches anywhere we chose to look.

Otherwise, the journey was without those incidents which have so often rendered these pages thrilling. Just before we left Ronda a couple, self-evidently the domestics of a good family, got into our first-class carriage though they had unquestionably only third-class tickets. They had the good family’s dog with them, and after an unintelligible appeal to us and to the young English couple in the other corner, they remained and banished any misgivings they had by cheerful dialogue. The dog coiled himself down at my feet and put his nose close to my ankles, so that without rousing his resentment I could not express in Spanish my indignation at what I felt to be an outrageous intrusion: servants, we all are, but in traveling first class one must draw the line at dogs, I said as much to the English couple, but they silently refused any part in the demonstration. Presently the conductor came out to the window for our fares, and he made the Spanish pair observe that they had third-class tickets and their dog had none. He told them they must get out, but they noted to him the fact that none of us had objected to their company, or their dog’s, and they all remained, referring themselves to us for sympathy when the conductor left. After the next station the same thing happened with little change; the conductor was perhaps firmer and they rather more yielding in their disobedience. Once more after a stop the conductor appeared and told them that when the train halted again, they and their dog must certainly get out. Then something surprising happened: they really got out, and very amiably; perhaps it was the place where they had always meant to get out; but it was a great triumph for the railway company, which owed nothing in the way of countenance to the young English couple; they had done nothing but lunch from their basket and bottle. We ourselves arrived safely soon after nightfall at Algeciras, just in time for dinner in the comfortable mother-hotel whose pretty daughter had made us so much at home in Ronda.

XIII. ALGECIRAS AND TARIFA

When we walked out on the terrace of our hotel at Algeciras after breakfast, the first morning, we were greeted by the familiar form of the Rock of Gibraltar still advertising, as we had seen it three years before, a well-known American insurance company. It rose beyond five miles of land-locked water, which we were to cross every other day for three weeks on many idle and anxious errands, until we sailed from it at last for New York.

Meanwhile Algeciras was altogether delightful not only because of our Kate-Greenaway hotel, embowered in ten or twelve acres of gardened ground, with walks going and coming under its palms and eucalyptuses, beside beds of geraniums and past trellises of roses and jasmines, all in the keeping of a captive stork which was apt unexpectedly to meet the stranger and clap its formidable mandibles at him, and then hop away with half-lifted wings. Algeciras had other claims which it urged day after day more winningly upon us as the last place where we should feel the charm of Spain unbroken in the tradition which reaches from modern fact far back into antique fable. I will not follow it beyond the historic clue, for I think the reader ought to be satisfied with knowing that the Moors held it as early as the seven hundreds and as late as the thirteen hundreds, when the Christians definitively recaptured it and their kings became kings of Algeciras as well as kings of Spain, and remain so to this day. At the end of the eighteenth century one of these kings made it his lookout for watching the movements of the inimical English fleets, and then Algeciras slumbered again, haunted only by “a deep dream of peace” till the European diplomats, rather unexpectedly assisted by an American envoy, made it the scene of their famous conference for settling the Morocco question in. 1906.

I think this is my whole duty to the political interest of Algeciras, and until I come to our excursion to Tarifa I am going to give myself altogether to our pleasure in the place unvexed by any event of history. I disdain even to note that the Moors took the city again from the Christians, after twenty-five years, and demolished it, for I prefer to remember it as it has been rebuilt and lies white by its bay, a series of red-tiled levels of roof with a few church-towers topping them. It is a pretty place, and remarkably clean, inhabited mostly by beggars, with a minority of industrial, commercial, and professional citizens, who live in agreeable little houses, with patios open to the passer, and with balconies overhanging him. It has of course a bull-ring, enviously closed during our stay, and it has one of the pleasantest Alamedas and the best swept in Spain, where some nice boys are playing in the afternoon sun, and a gentleman, coming out of one of the villas bordering on it, is courteously interested in the two strangers whom he sees sitting on a bench beside the walk, with the leaves of the plane trees dropping round them in the still air.

The Alameda is quite at the thither end of Algeciras. At the end next our hotel, but with the intervention of a space of cliff, topped and faced by summer cottages and gardens, is the station with a train usually ready to start from it for Ronda or Seville or Malaga, I do not know which, and with the usual company of freight-cars idling about, empty or laden with sheets of cork, as indifferent to them as if they were so much mere pine or spruce lumber. There is a sufficiently attractive hotel here for transients, and as an allurement to the marine and military leisure of Gibraltar, “The Picnic Restaurant,” and “The Cabin Tea Room,” where no doubt there is something to be had beside sandwiches and tea. Here also is the pier for the Gibraltar boats, with the Spanish custom-house which their passengers must pass through and have their packages and persons searched for contraband. One heard of wild caprices on the part of the inspectors in levying duties which were sometimes made to pass the prime cost of the goods in Gibraltar. I myself only carried in books which after the first few declarations were recognized as of no imaginable value and passed with a genial tolerance, as a sort of joke, by officers whom I saw feeling the persons of their fellow-Spaniards unsparingly over.

We had, if anything, less business really in Algeciras than in Gibraltar, but we went into the town nearly every afternoon, and wantonly bought things. By this means we proved that the Andalusian shopmen had not the proud phlegm of the Castilians across their counters. In the principal dry-goods store two salesmen rivaled each other in showing us politeness, and sent home our small purchases as promptly as if we had done them a favor in buying. We were indeed the wonder of our fellow-customers who were not buying; but our pride was brought down in the little shop where the proprietress was too much concerned in cooking her dinner (it smelled delicious) to mind our wish for a very cheap green vase, inestimably Spanish after we got it home. However, in another shop where the lady was ironing her week’s wash on the counter, a lady friend who was making her an afternoon call got such a vase down for us and transacted the negotiation out of pure good will for both parties to it.

Parallel with the railway was a channel where small fishing-craft lay, and where a leisurely dredging-machine was stirring up the depths in a stench so dire that I wonder we do not smell it across the Atlantic. Over this channel a bridge led into the town, and offered the convenient support of its parapet to the crowd of spectators who wished to inhale that powerful odor at their ease, and who hung there throughout the working-day; the working-day of the dredging-machine, that is. The population was so much absorbed in this that when we first crossed into the town, we found no beggar children even, though there were a few blind beggarmen, but so few that a boy who had one of them in charge was obliged to leave off smelling the river and run and hunt him up for us. Other boys were busy in street-sweeping and b-r-r-r-r-ing to the donkeys that carried off the sweepings in panniers; and in the fine large plaza before the principal church of Algeciras there was a boy who had plainly nothing but mischief to do, though he did not molest us farther than to ask in English, “Want to see the cathedral?” Then he went his way swiftly and we went into the church, which we found very whitewashed and very Moorish in architecture, but very Spanish in the Blessed Virgins on most of the altars, dressed in brocades and jewels. A sacristan was brushing and dusting the place, but he did not bother us, and we went freely about among the tall candles standing on the floor as well as on the altars, and bearing each a placard attached with black ribbon, and dedicated in black letters on silver “To the Repose of This or That” one among the dead.

The meaning was evident enough, but we sought something further of the druggist at the corner, who did his best for us in such English as he had. It was not quite the English of Ronda; but he praised his grammar while he owned that his vocabulary was in decay from want of practise. In fact, he well-nigh committed us to the purchase of one of those votive candles, which he understood we wished to buy; he all but sent to the sacristan to get one. There were several onlookers, as there always are in Latin pharmacies, and there was a sad young mother waiting for medicine with a sick baby in her arms. The druggist said it had fever of the stomach; he seemed proud of the fact, and some talk passed between him and the bystanders which related to it. We asked if he had any of the quince jelly which we had learned to like in Seville, but he could only refer us to the confectioner’s on the other corner. Here was not indeed quince jelly, but we compromised on quince cheese, as the English call it; and we bought several boxes of it to take to America, which I am sorry to say moulded before our voyage began, and had to be thrown away. Near this confectioner’s was a booth where boiled sweet-potatoes were sold, with oranges and joints of sugar-cane, and, spitted on straws, that terrible fruit of the strawberry tree which we had tasted at Honda without wishing to taste it ever again. Yet there was a boy boldly buying several straws of it and chancing the intoxication which over-indulgence in it is said to cause. Whether the excitement of these events was too great or not, we found ourselves suddenly unwilling, if not unable, to walk back to our hotel, and we took a cab of the three standing in the plaza. One was without a horse, another without a driver, but the third had both, as in some sort of riddle, and we had no sooner taken it than a horse was put into the first and a driver ran out and got on the box of the second, as if that was the answer to the riddle.

II

It was then too late for them to share our custom, but I am not sure that it was not one of these very horses or drivers whom we got another day for our drive about the town and its suburbs, and an excursion to a section of the Moorish aqueduct which remains after a thousand years. You can see it at a distance, but no horse or driver in our employ could ever find the way to it; in fact, it seemed to vanish on approach, and we were always bringing up in our hotel gardens without having got to it; I do not know what we should have done with it if we had. We were not able to do anything definite with the new villas built or building around Algeciras, though they looked very livable, and seemed proof of a prosperity in the place for which I can give no reason except the great natural beauty of the nearer neighborhood, and the magnificence of the farther, mountain-walled and skyed over with a September blue in November. I think it would be a good place to spend the winter if one liked each day to be exactly like every other. I do not know whether it is inhabited by English people from Gibraltar, where there are of course those resources of sport and society which an English colony always carries with it.

The popular amusements of Algeciras in the off season for bull-feasts did not readily lend themselves to observance. Chiefly we noted two young men with a graphophone on wheels which, being pushed about, wheezed out the latest songs to the acceptance of large crowds. We ourselves amused a large crowd when one of us attempted to sketch the yellow facade of a church so small that it seemed all facade; and another day when that one of us who held the coppers, commonly kept sacred to blind beggars, delighted an innumerable multitude of mendicants having their eyesight perfect. They were most of them in the vigor of youth, and they were waiting on a certain street for the monthly dole with which a resident of Algeciras may buy immunity for all the other days of the month. They instantly recognized in the stranger a fraudulent tax-dodger, and when he attempted tardily to purchase immunity they poured upon him; in front, behind, on both sides, all round, they boiled up and bubbled about him; and the exhaustion of his riches alone saved him alive. It must have been a wonderful spectacle, and I do not suppose the like of it was ever seen in Algeciras before. It was a triumph over charity, and left quite out of comparison the organized onsets of the infant gang which always beset the way to the hotel under a leader whose battle-cry, at once a demand and a promise, was “Penny-go-way, Penny-go-way!”

Along that pleasant shore bare-legged fishermen spread their nets, and going and coming by the Gibraltar boats were sometimes white-hosed, brown-cloaked, white-turbaned Moors, who occasionally wore Christian boots, but otherwise looked just such Moslems as landed at Algeciras in the eighth century; people do not change much in Africa. They were probably hucksters from the Moorish market in Gibraltar, where they had given their geese and turkeys the holiday they were taking themselves. They were handsome men, tall and vigorous, but they did not win me to sympathy with their architecture or religion, and I am not sure but, if there had been any concerted movement against them on the landing at Algeciras, I should have joined in driving them out of Spain. As it was I made as much Africa as I could of them in defect of crossing to Tangier, which we had firmly meant to do, but which we forbore doing till the plague had ceased to rage there. By this time the boat which touched at Tangier on the way to Cadiz stopped going to Cadiz, and if we could not go to Cadiz we did not care for going to Tangier. It was something like this, if not quite like it, and it ended in our seeing Africa only from the southernmost verge of Europe at Tarifa. At that little distance across it looked dazzlingly white, like the cotton vestments of those Moorish marketmen, but probably would have been no cleaner on closer approach.

III

As a matter of fact, we were very near not going even to Tarifa, though we had promised ourselves going from the first. But it was very charming to linger in the civilization of that hotel; to wander through its garden paths in the afternoon after a forenoon’s writing and inhale the keen aromatic odors of the eucalyptus, and when the day waned to have tea at an iron table on the seaward terrace. Or if we went to Gibraltar, it was interesting to wonder why we had gone, and to be so glad of getting back, and after dinner joining a pleasant international group in the long reading-room with the hearth-fires at either end which, if you got near them, were so comforting against the evening chill. Sometimes the pleasure of the time was heightened by the rain pattering on the glass roof of the patio, where in the afternoon a bulky Spanish mother sat mute beside her basket of laces which you could buy if you would, but need not if you would rather not; in either case she smiled placidly.

At last we did get together courage enough to drive twelve miles over the hills to Tarifa, but this courage was pieced out of the fragments of the courage we had lost for going to Cadiz by the public automobile which runs daily from Algeciras. The road after you passed Tarifa was so bad that those who had endured it said nobody could endure it, and in such a case I was sure I could not, but now I am sorry I did not venture, for since then I have motored over some of the roads in the state of Maine and lived. If people in Maine had that Spanish road as far as Tarifa they would think it the superb Massachusetts state road gone astray, and it would be thought a good road anywhere, with the promise of being better when the young eucalyptus trees planted every few yards along it grew big enough to shade it. But we were glad of as much sun as we could get on the brisk November morning when we drove out of the hotel garden and began the long climb, with little intervals of level and even of lapse. We started at ten o’clock, and it was not too late in that land of anomalous hours to meet peasants on their mules and donkeys bringing loads of stuff to market in Algeciras. Men were plowing with many yoke of oxen in the wheat-fields; elsewhere there were green pastures with herds of horses grazing in them, an abundance of brown pigs, and flocks of sheep with small lambs plaintively bleating. The pretty white farmhouses, named each after a favorite saint, and gathering at times into villages, had grapes and figs and pomegranates in their gardens; and when we left them and climbed higher, we began passing through long stretches of cork woods.

The trees grew wild, sometimes sturdily like our oaks, and sometimes gnarled and twisted like our seaside cedars, and in every state of excoriation. The bark is taken from them each seventh year, and it begins to be taken long before the first seventh. The tender saplings and the superannuated shell wasting to its fall yield alike their bark, which is stripped from the roots to the highest boughs. Where they have been flayed recently they look literally as if they were left bleeding, for the sap turns a red color; but with time this changes to brown, and the bark begins to renew itself and grows again till the next seventh year. Upon the whole the cork-wood forest is not cheerful, and I would rather frequent it in the pages of Don Quixote than out; though if the trees do not mind being barked it is mere sentimentality in me to pity them.

The country grew lonelier and drearier as we mounted, and the wind blew colder over the fields blotched with that sort of ground-palm, which lays waste so much land in southern Spain. When we descended the winding road from the summit we came in sight of the sea with Africa clearly visible beyond, and we did not lose sight of it again. Sometimes we met soldiers possibly looking out for smugglers but, let us hope, not molesting them; and once we met a brace of the all-respected Civil Guards, marching shoulder to shoulder, with their cloaks swinging free and their carbines on their arms, severe, serene, silent. Now and then a mounted wayfarer came toward us looking like a landed proprietor in his own equipment and that of his steed, and there were peasant women solidly perched on donkeys, and draped in long black cloaks and hooded in white kerchiefs.

IV

The landscape softened again, with tilled fields and gardened spaces around the cottages, and now we had Tarifa always in sight, a stretch of white walls beside the blue sea with an effect of vicinity which it was very long in realizing. We had meant when we reached the town at last to choose which fonda we should stop at for our luncheon, but our driver chose the Fonda de Villanueva outside the town wall, and I do not believe we could have chosen better if he had let us. He really put us down across the way at the venta where he was going to bait his horses; and in what might well have seemed the custody of a little policeman with a sword at his side, we were conducted to the fonda and shown up into the very neat icy cold parlor where a young girl with a yellow flower in her hair received us. We were chill and stiff from our drive and we hoped for something warmer from the dining-room, which we perceived must face southward, and must be full of sun. But we reckoned without the ideal of the girl with the yellow flower in her hair: in the little saloon, shining round with glazed tiles where we next found ourselves, the sun had been carefully screened and scarcely pierced the scrim shades. But this was the worst, this was all that was bad, in that fonda. When the breakfast or the luncheon, or whatever corresponds in our usage to the Spanish almuerzo, began to come, it seemed as if it never would stop. An original but admirable omelette with potatoes and bacon in it was followed by fried fish flavored with saffron. Then there was brought in fried kid with a dish of kidneys; more fried fish came after, and then boiled beef, with a dessert of small cakes. Of course there was wine, as much as you would, such as it was, and several sorts of fruit. I am sorry to have forgotten how little all this cost, but at a venture I will say forty cents, or fifty at the outside; and so great kindness and good will went with it from the family who cooked it in the next room and served it with such cordial insistence that I think it was worth quite the larger sum. It would not have been polite to note how much of this superabundance was consumed by the three Spanish gentlemen who had so courteously saluted us in sitting down at table with us. I only know that they made us the conventional acknowledgment in refusing our conventional offer of some things we had brought with us from our hotel to eat in the event of famine at Tarifa.

When we had come at last to the last course, we turned our thoughts somewhat anxiously to the question of a guide for the town which we felt so little able to explore without one; and it seemed to me that I had better ask the policeman who had brought us to our fonda. He was sitting at the head of the stairs where we had left him, and so far from being baffled by my problem, he instantly solved it by offering himself to be our guide. Perhaps it was a profession which he merely joined to his civic function, but it was as if we were taken into custody when he put himself in charge of us and led us to the objects of interest which I cannot say Tarifa abounds in. That is, if you leave out of the count the irregular, to and fro, up and down, narrow lanes, passing the blank walls of low houses, and glimpsing leafy and flowery patios through open gates, and suddenly expanding into broader streets and unexpected plazas, with shops and cafes and churches in them.

Tarifa is perhaps the quaintest town left in the world, either in or out of Spain, but whether it is more Moorish than parts of Cordova or Seville I could not say. It is at least pre-eminent in a feature of the women’s costume which you are promised at the first mention of the place, and which is said to be a survival of the Moslem civilization. Of course we were eager for it, and when we came into the first wide street, there at the principal corner three women were standing, just as advertised, with black skirts caught up from their waists over their heads and held before their faces so that only one eye could look out at the strangers. It was like the women’s costume at Chiozza on the Venetian lagoon, but there it is not claimed for Moorish and here it was authenticated by being black. “Moorish ladies,” our guide proudly proclaimed them in his scanty English, but I suspect they were Spanish; if they were really Orientals, they followed us with those eyes single as daringly as if they had been of our own Christian Occident.

The event was so perfect in its way that it seemed as if our guiding policeman might have especially ordered it; but this could not have really been, and was no such effect of his office as the immunity from beggars which we enjoyed in his charge. The worst boy in Tarifa (we did not identify him) dared not approach for a big-dog or a little, and we were safe from the boldest blind man, the hardiest hag, however pockmarked. The lanes and the streets and the plazas were clean as though our guide had them newly swept for us, and the plaza of the principal church (no guide-book remembers its name) is perhaps the cleanest in all Spain.

VI

The church itself we found very clean, and of an interest quite beyond the promise of the rather bare outside. A painted window above the door cast a glare of fresh red and blue over the interior, and over the comfortably matted floor; and there was a quite freshly carved and gilded chapel which the pleasant youth supplementing our policeman for the time said was done by artists still living in Tarifa. The edifice was of a very flamboyant Gothic, with clusters of slender columns and a vault brilliantly swirled over with decorations of the effect of peacock feathers. But above all there was on a small side altar a figure of the Child Jesus dressed in the corduroy suit and felt hat of a Spanish shepherd, with a silver crook in one hand and leading a toy lamb by a string in the other. Our young guide took the image down for us to look at, and showed its shepherd’s dress with peculiar satisfaction; and then he left it on the ground while he went to show us something else. When we came back we found two small boys playing with the Child, putting its hat off and on, and feeling of its clothes. Our guide took it from them, not unkindly, and put it back on the altar; and whether the reader will agree with me or not, I must own that I did not find the incident irreverent or without a certain touchingness, as if those children and He were all of one family and they were at home with Him there.

Rather suddenly, after we left the church, by way of one of those unexpectedly expanding lanes, we found ourselves on the shore of the purple sea where the Moors first triumphed over the Goths twelve hundred years before, and five centuries later the Spaniards heat them back from their attempt to reconquer the city. There were barracks, empty of the Spanish soldiers gone to fight the same old battle of the Moors on their own ground in Africa, and there was the castle which Alfonso Perez de Guzman held against them in 1292, and made the scene of one of those acts of self-devotion which the heart of this time has scarcely strength for. The Moors when they had vainly summoned him to yield brought out his son whom they held captive, and threatened to kill him. Guzman drew his knife and flung it down to them, and they slew the boy, but Tarif a was saved. His king decreed that thereafter the father should be known as Guzman the Good, and the fact has gone into a ballad, but the name somehow does not seem quite to fit, and one wishes that the father had not won it that way.

We were glad to go away from the dreadful place, though Tangier was so plain across the strait, and we were almost in Africa there, and hard by, in the waters tossing free, the great battle of Trafalgar was fought. From the fountains of my far youth, when I first heard of Guzman’s dreadful heroism, I endeavored to pump up an adequate emotion; I succeeded somewhat better with Nelson and his pathetic prayer of “Kiss me, Hardy,” as he lay dying on his bloody deck; but I did not much triumph with either, and I was grateful when our good little policeman comfortably questioned the deed of Guzman which he said some doubted, though he took us to the very spot where the Moors had parleyed with Guzman, and showed us the tablet over the castle gate affirming the fact.

We liked far better the pretty Alameda rising in terraces from it with beds of flowers beside the promenade, and boys playing up and down, and old men sitting in the sun, and trying to ignore the wind that blew over them too freshly for us. Our policeman confessed that there was nothing more worth seeing in Tarifa, and we entreated of him the favor of showing us a shop where we could buy a Cordovese hat; a hat which we had seen nourishing on the heads of all men in Cordova and Seville and Granada and Ronda, and had always forborne to buy because we could get it anywhere; and now we were almost leaving Spain without it. We wanted one brown in color, as well as stiff and flat of brim, and slightly conical in form; and our policeman promptly imagined it, and took us to a shop abounding solely in hats, and especially in Cordoveses. The proprietor came out wiping his mouth from an inner room, where he had left his family visibly at their almuerzo; and then we were desolated together that he should only have Cordoveses that were black. But passing a patio where there was a poinsettia in brilliant bloom against the wall, we found ourselves in a variety store where there were Cordoveses of all colors; and we chose one of the right brown, with the picture of a beautiful Spanish girl, wearing a pink shawl, inside the crown which was fluted round in green and red ribbon. Seven pesetas was the monstrous asking price, but we beat it down to five and a half, and then came a trying moment: we could not carry a Cordovese in tissue-paper through the streets of Tarifa, but could we ask our guide, who was also our armed escort, to carry it? He simplified the situation by taking it himself and bearing it back to the fonda as proudly as if he had not also worn a sword at his side; and we parted there in a kindness which I should like to think he shared equally with us.

He was practically the last of those Spaniards who were always winning my heart (save in the bank at Valladolid where they must have misunderstood me), and whom I remember with tenderness for their courtesy and amiability. In little things and large, I found the Spaniards everywhere what I heard a Piedmontese commercial traveler say of them in Venice fifty years ago: “They are the honestest people in Europe.” In Italy I never began to see the cruelty to animals which English tourists report, and in Spain I saw none at all. If the reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity, the Spaniards have contrived to build up their repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity; how with their love of bull-feasts and the suffering to man and brute which these involve, they should yet seem so kind to both, I answer frankly, I do not know. I do not know how the Americans are reputed good and just and law-abiding, although they often shoot one another, and upon mere suspicion rather often burn negroes alive.

THE END

The Non-Fiction

Howells lived an itinerant life, but his last semi-permanent residence was at Dow House, St Augustine, Florida

LIFE OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN

CONTENTS

PREFACE.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

PREFACE.

WHEN one has written a hurried hook, one likes to dwell upon the fact, that if the time had not been wanting one could have made it a great deal better.

This fact is of the greatest comfort to the author, and not of the slightest consequence to anybody else.

It is perfectly reasonable, therefore, that every writer should urge it.

A work which seeks only to acquaint people with the personal history of a man for whom they are asked to cast their votes — and whose past ceases to concern them in proportion as his present employs them — will not be numbered with those immortal books which survive the year of their publication. It does not challenge criticism; it fulfills the end of its being if it presents facts and incidents in a manner not altogether barren of interest.

It is believed that the following biographical sketch of ABRAHAM LINCOLN will be found reliable. The information upon which the narrative is based, has been derived chiefly from the remembrance of MR. LINCOLN’S old friends, and may, therefore, be considered authentic. It is hardly necessary to add, that no one but the writer is responsible for his manner of treating events and men.

CHAPTER I.

IT is necessary that every American should have an indisputable grandfather, in order to be represented in the Revolutionary period by actual ancestral service, or connected with it by ancestral reminiscence. Further back than a grandfather few can go with satisfaction. Everything lies wrapt in colonial obscurity and confusion; and you have either to claim that the Smiths came over in the Mayflower, or that the Joneses were originally a Huguenot family of vast wealth and the gentlest blood; or that the Browns are descended from the race of Powhattan in the direct line; or you are left in an extremely embarrassing uncertainty as to the fact of great-grandparents.

. We da not find it profitable to travel far into the past in search of Abraham Lincoln’s ancestry. There is a dim possibility that he is of the stock of the New England Lincolns, of Plymouth colony; but the noble science of heraldry is almost obsolete in this country, and none of Mr. Lincoln’s family seems to have been aware of the preciousness of long pedigrees, so that the records are meagre. The first that is known of his forefathers is that they were Quakers, who may have assisted in those shrewd bargains which honest William Penn drove with the Indians, for we find them settled at an early day in the old county of Berks, in Pennsylvania, where doubtless some of their descendants yet remain. Whether these have fallen away from the calm faith of their ancestors is not a matter of history, but it is certain that the family from which the present Abraham Lincoln derives his lineage, long ago ceased to be Quaker in everything but its devout Scriptural names. His grandfather, (anterior to whom is incertitude, and absolute darkness of names and dates,) was born in Rockingham county, Virginia, whither part of the family had emigrated from Pennsylvania; and had four brothers, patriarchially and apostolically named Isaac, Jacob, John, and Thomas; himself heading the list as Abraham Lincoln.

The descendants of Jacob and John, if any survive, still reside in Virginia; Thomas settled in the Cumberland region, near the adjunction of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and very probably his children’s children may there be found. Late in the last century, Abraham, with his wife and five children, removed from Rockingham to Kentucky, at a time when the border was the scene of savage warfare between the Indians and the whites, and when frontier life was diversified by continuous incursions, repulsions, and reprisals, on one side and on the other. In one of these frequent invasions, Abraham Lincoln was killed by the Indians, who stole upon him while he was at work and shot him. There is historical mention made of an Indian expedition to Hardin county, Kentucky, in 1781, which resulted in the massacre of some of the settlers; but the date of Lincoln’s death is fixed some three years later, and there is no other account of it than family tradition.

His wife, his three sons and two daughters survived him; but the dispersion of his family soon took place; the daughters marrying, and the sons seeking their fortunes in different localities. Of the latter, Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham Lincoln of to-day, was the youngest, and doubtless felt more severely than the rest the loss which had befallen them. They were poor, even for that rude time and country; and as a child, Thomas made acquaintance only with hardship and privation. He was a wandering, homeless boy, working when he could find work, and enduring when he could not. He grew up without education; his sole accomplishment in chirography being his own clumsy signature. At twenty-eight he married Lucy Hanks, and settled in Hardin county, where, on the 12th of February, 1809, ABRAHAM LINCOLN was born.

Lincoln’s mother was, like his father, Virginian; but beyond this, little or nothing is known of her. From both his parents young Lincoln inherited an iron constitution and a decent poverty. From his father came that knack of story-telling, which has made him so delightful among acquaintances, and so irresistible in his stump and forensic drolleries. It is a matter of some regret that the information with regard to Thomas Lincoln and his wife is so meager. The information is, however, not altogether necessary to the present history, and the conjecture to which one is tempted would be as idle as impertinent. It is certain that Lincoln cherished, with just pride, a family repute for native ability, and alluded to it in after life, when he felt the first impulses of ambition, and began in earnest his struggle with the accidents of ignorance and poverty.

A younger brother of Abraham’s died in infancy; and a sister, older than himself, married and died many years ago. With her he attended school during his early childhood in Kentucky, and acquired the alphabet, and other rudiments of education. The schooling which Abraham then received from the books and birch of Zachariah Riney and Caleb Hazel, (of pedagogic memory,) and afterward from Azel W. Dorsey, and one or two others in Indiana, amounted in time to nearly a year, and can not be otherwise computed. It is certain, however, that this brief period limits his scholastic course. Outside of it, his education took place through the rough and wholesome experiences of borderlife, the promptings of a restless ambition, and a profound love of knowledge for its own sake. Under these influences, he has ripened into a hardy physical manhood, and acquired a wide and thorough intelligence, without the aid of schools or preceptors.

In the autumn of 1816, when Abraham was eight years old, his father determined to quit Kentucky. Already the evil influences of slavery were beginning to be felt by the poor and the non-slaveholders. But the emigration of Thomas Lincoln is, we believe, to be chiefly attributed to the insecurity of the right by which he held his Kentucky land; for, in those days, land-titles were rather more uncertain than other human affairs. Abandoning his old home, and striking through the forests in a northwesterly direction, he fixed his new dwelling-place in the heart of the “forest primeval” of what is now Spencer county, Indiana. The dumb solitude there had never echoed to the ax, and the whole land was a wilderness.

The rude cabin of the settler was hastily erected, and then those struggles and hardships commenced which are the common trials of frontier life, and of which the story has been so often repeated. Abraham was a hardy boy, large for his years, and with his ax did manful service in clearing the land. Indeed, with that implement, he literally hewed out his path to manhood; for, until he was twenty-three, the ax was seldom out of his hand, except in the intervals of labor, or when it was exchanged for the plow, the hoe, or the sickle. His youthful experiences in this forest life did not differ from those familiar to many others. As an adventurous boy, no doubt the wood was full of delight and excitement to him. No doubt he hunted the coon, trapped the turkey, and robbed the nest of the pheasant. As a hunter with the rifle, however, he did not acquire great skill, for he has never excelled an exploit of his eighth year, when he shot the leader of a flock of turkeys which ventured within sight of the cabin during his father’s absence.

The family had hardly been two years in their new home when it was desolated by the death of Abraham’s mother. This heavy loss was afterward partially repaired by the marriage of his father to Mrs. Sally Johnston, of Elizabethtown, Kentucky. She was the parent of three children by a former husband, and was always a good and affectionate mother to Thomas Lincoln’s motherless son.

The Lincolns continued to live in Spencer county, until 1830, nothing interrupting the even tenor of Abraham’s life, except in his nineteeth year, a flat-boat trip to New Orleans. He and a son of the owner composed the crew, and without other assistance, voyaged

“Down the beautiful river,

Past the Ohio shore, and past the mouth of the Wabash,

Into the golden stream of the broad and swift Mississippi,”

Trafficking here and there, in their course, with the inhabitants, and catching glimpses of the great world so long shut out by the woods. One night, having tied up their “cumbrous boat,” near a solitary plantation on the sugar coast, they were attacked and boarded by seven stalwart negroes; but Lincoln and his comrade, after a severe contest in which both were hurt, succeeded in beating; their assailants and driving; them from the boat. After which they weighed what anchor they had, as speedily as possible, and gave themselves to the middle current again. With this sole adventure, Lincoln resumed his quiet back-woods life in Indiana.

Four years afterward, on the first of March, 1830, his father determined to emigrate once more, and the family abandoned the cabin which had been their home so long, and set out for Illinois. The emigrant company was made up of Thomas Lincoln’s family, and the families of Mrs. Lincoln’s two sons-in-law. Their means of progress and conveyance were ox-wagons, one of which Abraham Lincoln drove. Before the month was elapsed they had arrived at Macon county, Illinois, where they remained a short time, and Lincoln’s family “located” on some new land, about ten miles northwest of Decatur, on the north bank of the Sangamon river, at a junction of forest and prairie land. Here the father and son built a log-cabin, and split rails enough to fence in their land. It is supposed that these are the rails which have since become historic; though they were by no means the only ones which the robust young back woodsman made. Indeed, there are other particular rails (Mr. George Close, the partner of Lincoln in the rail-splitting business, says that Lincoln was, at this time, a farm laborer, working from day to day, for different people, chopping wood, mauling rails, or doing whatever was to be done. the country was poor, and hard work was the common lot; the heaviest share falling to young unmarried men, with whom it was a continual struggle to earn a livelihood. Lincoln and Mr. Close made about one thousand rails together, for James Hawks and William Miller, receiving their pay in homespun clothing. Lincoln’s bargain with Miller’s wife, was, that he should have one yard of brown jeans, (richly dyed with walnut bark,) for every four hundred rails made, until he should have enough for a pair of trowsers. As Lincoln was already of great altitude, the number of rails that went to the acquirement of his pantaloons was necessarily immense.) which dispute a celebrity somewhat indifferent to the sincere admirer of Mr. Lincoln. The work done was in the course of farm labor, and went to the development of Mr. Lincoln’s muscle. Otherwise it is difficult to perceive how it has affected his career.

CHAPTER II.

IN his time, Denton Offutt was a man of substance an enterprising and adventurous merchant, trading between the up-river settlements and the city of New Orleans, and fitting out frequent flat-boat expeditions to that cosmopolitan port, where the French voyageur and the rude hunter that trapped the beaver on the Osage and Missouri, met the polished old-world exile, and the tongues of France, Spain, and England made babel in the streets. In view of his experience, it is not too extravagant to picture Denton Offutt as a backwoods Ulysses, wise beyond the home-keeping pioneers about him —

“Forever roaming with a hungry heart,”

bargaining with the Indians, and spoiling them, doubtless, as was the universal custom in those times; learning the life of the wild Mississippi towns, with their lawless frolics, deep potations, and reckless gambling; meeting under his own roof-tree the many-negroed planter of the sugar-coast, and the patriarchal creole of Louisiana; ruling the boatman who managed his craft, and defying the steamboat captain that swept by the slow broad-horn with his stately palace of paint and gilding; with his body inured to toil and privation, and with his wits sharpened by traffic; such, no doubt, was Denton Offutt, who had seen

— “Cities of men,

And manners, climates, councils, governments,”

and such was one of Lincoln’s earliest friends. He quickly discovered the sterling qualities of honesty and fidelity, and the higher qualities of intellect which lay hid under the young Kentuckian’s awkward exterior, and he at once took Lincoln into his employment. He was now about sending another flat-boat to New Orleans, and he engaged Lincoln, and the husband of one of Lincoln’s step-sisters, together with their comrade, John Hanks, (Now a well known railroad man in Illinois.) to take charge of his craft for the voyage from Beardstown, in Illinois, to the Crescent City.

In this winter of 1830-31, a deep snow, long remembered in Illinois, covered the whole land for many weeks, and did not disappear until the first of March, when the waters of the thaw inundated the country. Overland travel from Macon county to Beardstown was rendered impossible; Lincoln, and his relative, therefore, took a canoe and descended the Sangamon river to Springfield, where they found Offutt. He had not succeeded in getting a flat-boat at Beardstown, as he expected; but with innumerable flat-boats growing up in their primal element of timber about him, he was not the man to be baffled by the trifling consideration that he had no flat-boat built. He offered to Lincoln and each of his friends, twelve dollars a month for the time they should be occupied in getting out lumber, and making the boat. The offer was accepted. The ax did its work; the planks were sawed with a whip-saw; Denton’s ark was put together, and the trip to New Orleans triumphantly and profitably made.

On his return to Illinois, Lincoln found that his father had (in pursuance of a previous intention) removed from Macon, and was now living in Coles county. His relative rejoined his family there; but New Salem, on the Sangamon river, became the home of Lincoln, whose “location” there was accidental rather than otherwise. He was descending the river with another flat-boat for Offutt, and near New Salem grounded on a dam. An old friend and ardent admirer, who made his acquaintance on this occasion, says that Lincoln was standing in the water on the dam, when he first caught sight of him, devoting all his energies to the release of the boat. His dress at this time consisted of a pair of blue jeans trowsers indefinitely rolled up, a cotton shirt, striped white and blue, (of the sort known in song and tradition as hickory.) and a buckeye-chip hat for which a demand of twelve and a half cents would have been exorbitant.

The future president failed to dislodge his boat; though he did adopt the ingenious expedient of lightening it by boring a hole in the end that hung over the dam and letting out the water — an incident which Mr. Douglas humorously turned to account in one of his speeches. The boat stuck there stubborn, immovable.

Offutt, as has been seen, was a man of resource and decision. He came ashore from his flat-boat and resolutely rented the very mill of which the dam had caused his disaster, together with an old store-room, which he filled with a stock of goods, and gave in the clerkly charge of Abraham Lincoln, with the munificent salary of fifteen dollars a month.

Lincoln had already made his first speech. General W. L. D. Ewing, and a politician named Posey, who afterward achieved notoriety in the Black Hawk war, had addressed the freemen of Macon the year previous, “on the issues of the day.” Mr. Posey had, however, in violation of venerable precedent and sacred etiquette, failed to invite the sovereigns to drink something. They were justly indignant, and persuaded Lincoln to reply, in the expectation that he would possibly make himself offensive to Posey. Lincoln, however, took the stump with characteristic modesty, and begging his friends not to laugh if he broke down, treated very courteously the two speakers who had preceded him, discussed questions of politics, and in his peroration eloquently pictured the future of Illinois. There was sense and reason in his arguments, and his imaginative flight tickled the State pride of the Illinoians. It was declared that Lincoln had made the best speech of the day; and he, to his great astonishment, found himself a prophet among those of his own household, while his titled fellow-orator cordially complimented his performance.

At New Salem, he now found the leisure and the opportunity to initiate a system of self-education. At last, he had struggled to a point, where he could not only take breath, but could stoop and drink from those springs of knowledge, which a hopeless poverty, incessant toil, and his roving, uncertain life, had, till then, forbidden to his lips.

There seems never to have been any doubt of his ability among Lincoln’s acquaintances, any more than there was a doubt of his honesty, his generosity, and gentle heartedness. When, therefore, he began to make rapid progress in his intellectual pursuits, it surprised none of them — least of all, Lincoln’s shrewd patron, Offutt, who had been known to declare, with pardonable enthusiasm, that Lincoln was the smartest man in the United States.

The first branch of learning which he took up, was English grammar, acquiring that science from the old-fashioned treatise of Kirkham. The book was not to be had in the immediate vicinity, and Lincoln walked seven or eight miles to borrow a copy. He then devoted himself to the study with the whole strength of his resolute nature; and in three weeks he had gained a fair practical knowledge of the grammar. No doubt the thing was hard to the uncultivated mind, though that mind was of great depth and fertility. One of his friends relates that Lincoln used to take him aside, and require explanations of the sententious Kirkham, whenever he visited New Salem.

This young backwoodsman had the stubborn notion that because the Lincolns had always been people of excellent sense, he, a Lincoln, might become a person of distinction. He had talked, he said, with men who were regarded as great, and he did not see where they differed so much from others. He reasoned, probably, that the secret of their success lay in the fact of original capacity, and untiring industry. He was conscious of his own powers; he was a logician, and could not resist logical conclusions. If he studied, why might not he achieve?

And Kirkham fell before him. One incident of his study, was a dispute with the learned man of the place, — a very savant among the unlettered pioneers — in regard to a grammatical nicety, and the question being referred to competent authority, it was decided in Lincoln’s favor, to his pride and exultation.

Concluding his grammatical studies with Kirkham, he next turned his attention to mathematics, and took up a work on surveying, with which he made himself thoroughly acquainted.

So great was his ardor in study, at this time, that shrewd suspicions with regard to Offutt’s clerk got abroad; the honest neighbors began to question whether one who would voluntarily spend all his leisure in

— “poring over miserable books,”

could be altogether right in his mind.

The peculiar manner in which he afterward pursued his law studies, was not calculated to allay popular feeling. He bought an old copy of Blackstone, one day, at auction, in Springfield, and on his return to New Salem, attacked the work with characteristic energy.

His favorite place of study was a wooded knoll near New Salem, where he threw himself under a wide-spreading oak, and expansively made a reading desk of the hillside. Here he would pore over Blackstone day after day, shifting his position as the sun rose and sank, so as to keep in the shade, and utterly unconscious of everything but the principles of common law. People went by, and he took no account of them; the salutations of acquaintances were returned with silence, or a vacant stare; and altogether the manner of the absorbed student was not unlike that of one distraught.

Since that day, his habits of study have changed somewhat, but his ardor remains unabated, and he is now regarded as one of the best informed, as he is certainly the ablest, man in Illinois.

When practicing law, before his election to Congress, a copy of Burns was his inseparable companion on the circuit; and this he perused so constantly, that it is said he has now by heart every line of his favorite poet. He is also a diligent student of Shakspeare, “to know whom is a liberal education,”

The bent of his mind, however, is mathematical and metaphysical, and he is therefore pleased with the absolute and logical method of Poe’s tales and sketches, in which the problem of mystery is given, and wrought out into every-day facts by processes of cunning analysis. It is said that he suffers no year to pass without the perusal of this author.

Books, of all sorts, the eager student devoured with an insatiable appetite; and newspapers were no less precious to him. The first publication for which he ever subscribed, was the Louisville Journal, which he paid for when he could secure the intellectual luxury only at the expense of physical comfort.

It was a day of great rejoicing with Lincoln, when President Jackson appointed him postmaster at New Salem. He was a Whig, but the office was of so little pecuniary significance, that it was bestowed irrespective of politics. Lincoln, indeed, was the only person in the community whose accomplishments were equal to the task of making out the mail returns for the Department.

An acquaintance says that the Presidency can never make our candidate happier than the post-office did then. He foresaw unlimited opportunities for reading newspapers, and of satisfying his appetite for knowledge.

But it was not through reading alone that Lincoln cultivated his intellect. The grave and practical American mind has always found entertainment and profit in disputation, and the debating clubs are what every American youth is subject to. They are useful in many ways. They safely vent the mental exuberance of youth; those whom destiny intended for the bar and the Senate, they assist; those who have a mistaken vocation to oratory, they mercifully extinguish.

Even in that day, and that rude country, where learning was a marvelous and fearful exception, the debating school flourished, in part as a literary institution, and in part as a rustic frolic.

Lincoln delighted in practicing polemics, as it was called, and used to walk six and seven miles through the woods to attend the disputations in his neighborhood. Of course, many of the debates were infinitely funny, for the disputants were, frequently, men without education. Here, no doubt, Lincoln stored his mind with anecdote and comic illustration, while he delighted his auditors with his own wit and reason, and added to his growing popularity.

This popularity had been early founded by a stroke of firmness and bravery on Lincoln’s part, when he first came into Sangamon county.

He had returned from that famous voyage made with; Offutt’s impromptu flat-boat to New Orleans, and descending the Sangamon river, had, as has been already related, fixed upon the little village of New Salem, by fortuity rather than intention, as his future home. Nevertheless, he had first to undergo an ordeal to which every new corner was subjected, before his residence could be generally acknowledged. Then, when it was much more necessary to be equal parts of horse and alligator, and to be able to vanquish one’s weight in wild cats, than now, there flourished, in the region of New Salem, a band of jolly, roystering blades, calling themselves “Clary’s Grove Boys,” who not only gave the law to the neighborhood, as Regulators, but united judicial to legislative functions, by establishing themselves a tribunal to try the stuff of every one who came into that region. They were, at once, the protectors and the scourge of the whole country-side, and must have been some such company as that of Brom Bones, in Sleepy Hollow, upon whom the “neighbors all looked with a mixture of awe, admiration, and good-will.” Their mode of receiving a stranger was to appoint some one of their number to wrestle with him, fight with him, or run a foot-race with him, according to their pleasure, and his appearance.

As soon as young Lincoln appeared, the “Clary’s Grove Boys” determined to signalize their prowess anew by a triumph over a stalwart fellow, who stood six feet three inches without stockings. The leader and champion of their band, (one Jack Armstrong, who seems himself to have been another Brom Bones,) challenged Lincoln to a wrestling-match. When the encounter took place, the “Clary’s Grove Boy” found that he had decidedly the worst half of the affair, and the bout would have ended in his ignominious defeat, had not all his fellow-boys come to his assistance. Lincoln then refused to continue the unequal struggle. He would wrestle with them fairly, or he would run a foot-race, or if any of them desired to fight, he generously offered to thrash that particular individual. He looked every word he said, and none of the Boys saw fit to accept his offer. Jack Armstrong was willing to call the affair drawn; and Lincoln’s fearless conduct had already won the hearts of his enemies. He was invited to become one of their company. His popularity was assured. The Boys idolized him, and when the Black Hawk war broke out, he was chosen their captain, and remained at their head throughout the campaign. Their favor still pursued him, and, two years afterward, he was elected to the Legislature, through the influence created by his famous wrestling-match.

Many of the Boys are now distinguished citizens of Illinois, and are among Lincoln’s warmest friends; though they acknowledge that if he had shown signs of cowardice when they came to the rescue of their champion, it would have fared grievously with him.

Indeed, this seems to have been one of the most significant incidents of his early life. It gave him reputation for courage necessary in a new country, and opened a career to him which his great qualities have enabled him to pursue with brilliance and success.

CHAPTER III.

IN 1832, Black Hawk’s war broke out. In the light of history, this war seems to have been a struggle involuntarily commenced by the Indians against the white settlers. A treaty had been made by the Sacs and Foxes, ceding to the United States all the land east of the Mississippi — a treaty which the Sac chief, Black Hawk, declared to be illegal. A war with the Sacs ensued, which was terminated by treaty in 1825. Meanwhile Illinois had been admitted to the Union, and the country had filled up with whites, who extended the lines of their settlements around the country of the Indians, and pressed closer and closer upon them. Outrages, on one part and on the other, were of constant occurrence; and in revenge for some wrong, a party of Chippeway Indians fired upon a keel-boat conveying stores to Fort Snelling. Through mistake or injustice, Black Hawk was arrested for this, and lay imprisoned a whole year before he could be brought to trial and acquitted. After his release, it was believed that he engaged in negotiations to unite all the Indians, from Rock River to the Gulf of Mexico, in a general war upon the whites. The alarm, of course, was very great, and active preparations for hostilities were made. Regular forces were marched against the Indians at Rock Island, and large bodies of militia were called into the field. It appears that Black Hawk never succeeded in rallying about him more than two or three hundred warriors of his tribe; the Indians being desirous of peace, and willing to abide by the treaty of the chief Keokuk, who favored the cession of land. Indeed, Black Hawk himself attempted to treat with the whites several times when he met them, and only fought after his flags of truce had been fired upon. The war was brought to a close by the battle of Bad-Ax, in which glorious action a great number of squaws and papooses, not to mention several warriors, were killed. The Indians then retreated beyond the Mississippi, and Black Hawk was brought a prisoner into the camp of the whites. He made the grand tour of the Atlantic cities, where he received the usual attentions bestowed upon lions of every tribe, and returning to the West a sadder and a wiser Indian, passed into oblivion.

There can not be any doubt that the war was a very serious matter to the people who were engaged in it; and there is as little doubt that their panic exaggerated their danger, and rendered them merciless in their determination to expel the Indians.

Offutt’s business had long been failing, and at the time the war broke out, Lincoln had the leisure, as well as the patriotism, to join one of the volunteer companies which was formed in the neighborhood of New Salem. To his unbounded surprise and satisfaction, he was chosen captain by his fellow-soldiers. The place of rendezvous was at Richland, and as soon as the members of the company met, the election took place. It was expected that the captaincy would be conferred on a man of much wealth and consequence among the people, for whom Lincoln had once worked. He was a harsh and exacting employer, and had treated the young man, whom everybody else loved and esteemed, with the greatest rigor; a course which had not increased his popularity. The method of election was for the candidates to step out of the ranks, when the electors advanced and joined the man whom they chose to lead them. Three-fourths of the company at once went to Lincoln; and when it was seen how strongly the tide was set in his favor, the friends of the rival candidate deserted him, one after another, until he was left standing almost alone. He was unspeakably mortified and disappointed, while Lincoln’s joy was proportionably great.

The latter served three months in the Black Hawk war, and made acquaintance with the usual campaigning experiences, but was in no battle. He still owns the lands in Iowa that he located with warrants for service performed in the war.

An incident of the campaign, in which Lincoln is concerned, illustrates a trait of his character no less prominent than his qualities of integrity and truth. One day an old Indian wandered into Lincoln’s camp, and was instantly seized by his men. The general opinion was that he ought to be put to death. They were in the field for the purpose of killing Indians, and to spare the slaughter of one that Providence had delivered into their hands was something of which these honest pioneers could not abide the thought. It was to little purpose that the wretched aborigine showed a letter signed by General Cass, and certifying him to be not only a model of ail the savage virtues, but a sincere friend of the whites. He was about to be sacrificed, when Lincoln boldly declared that the sacrifice should not take place. He was at once accused of cowardice, and of a desire to conciliate the Indians. Nevertheless, he stood firm, proclaiming that even barbarians would not kill a helpless prisoner. If any one thought him a coward, let him step out and be satisfied of his mistake, in any way he chose. As to this poor old Indian, he had no doubt he was all that the letter of General Cass affirmed; he declared that they should kill him before they touched the prisoner. His argument, in fine, was so convincing, and his manner so determined, that the copper-colored ally of the whites was suffered to go his ways, and departed out of the hostile camp of his friends unhurt.

After his return from the wars, Lincoln determine! to test the strength of his popularity, by offering himself as a candidate for the Legislature. Added to the goodwill which had carried him into the captaincy, he had achieved a warmer place in the hearts of those who had followed his fortunes during the war, by his bravery, social qualities, and uprightness. He was warm-hearted and good-natured, and told his stories, of which he had numbers, in better style than any other man in the camp. No one was so fleet of foot; and in those wrestlings which daily enlivened the tedium of camp life, he was never thrown but once, and then by a man of superior science who was not his equal in strength. These were qualities which commended him to the people, and made him the favorite officer of the battalion.

Parties, at’ this time, were distinguished as Adams parties and Jackson parties, and in Lincoln’s county the Jackson men were vastly in the ascendant. He was a stanch Adams man, and, being comparatively unknown in the remoter parts of the county, was defeated. In his own neighborhood the vote was almost unanimous in his favor; though he had only arrived from the war and announced himself as a candidate ten days before the election. Indeed, he received, at this election, one more vote in his precinct than both of the rival candidates for Congress together.

Defeated, but far from dismayed, Lincoln once more turned his attention to business. He was still poor, for though thrifty enough, he never could withstand the appeals of distress, nor sometimes refuse to become security for those who asked the use of his name. His first surveying had been done with a grape-vine instead of a chain, and having indorsed a note which was not paid, his compass was seized and sold. One James Short bought it and returned it to Lincoln. The surveyor of Sangamon county, John Calhoun, (since notorious for his candle-box concealment of the election returns in Kansas) deputed to Lincoln that part of the county in which he resided, and he now assumed the active practice of surveying, and continued to live upon the slender fees of his office until 1834, when he was elected to the Legislature by the largest vote cast for any candidate.

Before this election Lincoln had engaged and failed in merchandising on his own account.

It is supposed that it was at New Salem that Lincoln, while a “clerk” in Offutt’s store, first saw Stephen A. Douglas, and, probably, the acquaintance was renewed during Lincoln’s proprietorship of the store which he afterward bought in the same place.

One Reuben Radford was Lincoln’s predecessor. He had fallen, by some means, into disfavor with Clary’s Grove Boys, who, one evening, took occasion to break in the windows of his establishment. Reuben was discouraged. Perhaps it would not be going too far to allude to his situation as discouraging. At any rate, he told a young farmer, who came to trade with him the next day, that he was going to close out his business. What would Mr. Green give him for his stock? Mr. Green looked about him and replied, only half in earnest, Four hundred dollars. The offer was instantly accepted, and the business transferred to Mr. Green. On the following day Lincoln chanced to come in, and being informed of the transaction, proposed that he and Green should invoice the stock, and see how much he had made. They found that it was worth about six hundred dollars, and Lincoln gave Mr. Green a hundred and twenty-five dollars for his bargain, while Green indorsed the notes of Lincoln and one Berry, to Radford for the remaining four hundred. Berry was a thriftless soul, it seems, and after a while the store fell into a chronic decay, and, in the idiom of the region, finally winked out.

Lincoln was moneyless, having previously invested his whole fortune in a surveyor’s compass and books, and Berry was uncertain. Young Green was compelled to pay the notes given to Radford. He afterward removed to Tennessee, where he married, and was living in forgetfulness of his transaction with Lincoln, when he one day received a letter from that person, stating he was now able to pay back to Green the amount for which he had indorsed. Lincoln was by this time in the practice of the law, and it was with the first earnings of his profession, that he discharged this debt, principal and interest.

The moral need not be insisted on, and this instance is not out of the order of Abraham Lincoln’s whole life. That the old neighbors and friends of such a man should regard him with an affection and faith little short of man-worship, is the logical result of a life singularly pure, and an integrity without flaw.

CHAPTER IV.

IT is seen that Abraham Lincoln was first elected to a seat in the Legislature, in 1834, in the face of the unpopularity of his political principles, by a larger vote than that given to any other candidate. As a legislator he served his constituents so well that he was three times afterward returned to his place; in 1836, in 1838, and in 1840. He then terminated his legislative career by a positive refusal to be again a candidate.

The period embraced by the eight years in which Lincoln represented Sangamon county, was one of the greatest material activity in Illinois. So early as 1820, the young State was seized with the “generous rage” for public internal improvements, then prevalent in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and in its sessions for a score of succeeding years, the Legislature was occupied by the discussion of various schemes for enhancing the prosperity of the State. The large canal uniting the waters of Lake Michigan and the Illinois river was completed at a cost of more than eight millions. By a Board of Commissioners of Public Works, specially created, provisions were made for expensive improvements of the rivers Wabash. Illinois. Rock, Kaskaskia, and Little Wabash, and the great Western mail route from

Vincennes to St. Louis. Under the charge of the same Board, six railroads connecting principal points were projected, and appropriations made for their completion at an immense outlay.

One effect of a policy so wild and extravagant was to sink the State in debt. Another was to attract vast immigration, and fill up her broad prairies with settlers. Individuals were ruined; the corporate State became embarrassed; but benefits have resulted in a far greater degree than could have been hoped when the crash first came. It is not yet time to estimate the ultimate good to be derived from these improvements, though the immediate evil has been tangible enough.

The name of Abraham Lincoln is not found recorded in favor of the more visionary of these schemes; but he has always favored public improvements, and his voice was for whatever project seemed feasible and practical. During his first term of service, he was a member of the Committee on Public Accounts and Expenditures. He voted for a bill to incorporate agricultural societies; for the improvement of public roads; for the incorporation of various institutions of learning; for the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal; he always fostered the interests of public education, and favored low salaries for public officials. In whatever pertained to the local, benefit of his own county, he was active and careful; but his record on this subject is of little interest to the general reader. — .

Lincoln’s voice was ever for measures that relieved the struggling poor man from pecuniary or political difficulties; he had himself experienced these difficulties. He therefore supported resolutions for the removal of the property qualification in franchise, and for the granting of pre-emption rights to settlers on the public lands. He was the author of a measure permitting Revolutionary pensioners to loan their pension money without taxation. He advocated a bill exempting from execution Bibles, school-books, and mechanics’ tools.

His first recorded vote against Stephen A. Douglas, was on ‘the election of that politician to the Attorney-Generalship by the Legislature.

He twice voted for the Whig candidates for the United States Senate. Otherwise than in the election of Senators, State Legislatures were not then occupied with national affairs, and it is difficult to find anything in Mr. Lincoln’s legislative history which is of great national interest. There were no exciting questions, and Mr. Lincoln’s speeches were few and brief. (A protest from Mr. Lincoln appears on the journal of the House, in regard to some resolutions which had passed. In this protest he pronounces distinctly against slavery, and takes the first public step toward what is now Republican doctrino.) He was twice the candidate (in 1838 and 1840) of the Whig minority for Speaker of the House.

In 1836, when Lincoln was first re-elected to the Legislature, Sangamon county, then of greater geographical importance than now, was represented by nine members, no one of whom was less than six feet in height — several of them considerably exceeding that altitude. This immensity of stature attracted attention, and the Sangamon members were at once nicknamed The Long-Nine, They” were genial, hearty-humored fellows, famous whittiers, and distinguished spinners of yarns. They all boarded at the same place, and being of gregarious habits, spent their evenings together. Lincoln was the favorite of the circle; admired for his gift of storytelling, and highly esteemed for his excellent qualities of head and heart, his intellectual shrewdness, his reliability, his good-nature, and generosity. The Illinois Legislature then held its sessions at Vandalia, and Lincoln used to perform his journeys between New Salem and the seat of government on foot, though the remaining eight of the Long-Nine traveled on horseback.

A pleasant story connected with this part of his political career is related by Hon. John H. Stuart. Lincoln and Stuart were both candidates for the Legislature in 1834. Stuart’s election was conceded, while that of Lincoln was thought to be comparatively uncertain. The two candidates happened to be present together at a back-woods frolic, when some disaffected of Stuart’s party took Lincoln aside, and offered to withdraw votes enough from Stuart to elect him. He rejected the proposal, and at once disclosed the scheme to Stuart, declaring that he would not make such a bargain for any office.

It is by such manly and generous acts that Lincoln has endeared himself to all his old neighbors. It maybe said of him without extravagance that he is beloved of all — even by those against whose interests he has conscientiously acted. When in the practice of the law he was never known to undertake a cause which he believed founded in wrong and injustice. “You are not strictly in the right,” he said to a person who once wished him to bring a certain suit, and who now tells the story with profound admiration. “I might give the other parties considerable trouble, and perhaps beat them at law, but there would be no justice in it. I am sorry — I can not undertake your case.”

“I never knew Lincoln to do a mean act in his life,” said Stuart, the veteran lawyer, who first encouraged Lincoln to adopt his profession. “God never made a finer man,” exclaimed the old backwoods-man, Close, when applied to for reminiscences of Lincoln. So by the testimony of all, and in the memory of every one who has known him, Lincoln is a pure, candid, and upright man, unblemished by those vices which so often disfigure greatness, utterly incapable of falsehood, and without one base or sordid trait.

During the Legislative canvass of 1834, John D. Stuart advised Lincoln to study law, and after the election he borrowed some of Stuart’s books, and began to read. Other warm and influential friends, (Wm. Butler, the present Treasurer of State in Illinois, was one of these,) came to Lincoln’s material aid and encouragement, and assisted him to retrieve his early errors of generosity. With the support of these friends — for

Lincoln is a man “who could receive benefits as nobly as be conferred them — and the slender revenues of his surveyorship, he struggled through the term of his law studies, and was admitted to the bar in 1836. Business flowed in upon him, and quitting New Salem, he took up his residence at Springfield, where he united his professional fortunes with those of Major Stuart. The two old friends remained in partnership until Stuart’s election to Congress, by which time Lincoln had elevated himself to a position among the first lawyers of the place. In the midst of affairs, however, he never relaxed his habits of study; taking up, one by one, the natural sciences, and thoroughly acquainting himself with the abstruses! metaphysics. He remains to this day a severe and indefatigable student — never suffering any subject to which he directs his attention, to pass without profound investigation.

CHAPTER V.

WE now find Abraham Lincoln beginning to assume an active part in the political affairs of Illinois.

He is known to the Whigs throughout the State, and his general popularity is as great as the esteem and regard in which he is held by those personally acquainted with him.

The talented young Whig has founded his reputation upon qualities that make every man proud to say he is the friend of Lincoln.

No admirer, who speaks in his praise, must pause to conceal a stain upon his good name. No true man falters in his affection at the remembrance of any mean action or littleness in the life of Lincoln.

The purity of his reputation, the greatness and dignity of his ambition, ennoble every incident of his career, and give significance to all the events of his past.

It is true that simply to have mauled rails, and commanded a flat-boat, is not to have performed splendid actions. But the fact that Lincoln has done these things, and has risen above them by his own force, confers a dignity upon them; and the rustic boy, who is to be President in 1900, may well be consoled and encouraged in his labors when he recalls these incidents in the history of one whose future once wore no brighter aspect than his own wears now.

The emigrant, at the head of the slow oxen that drag his household gods toward the setting sun — toward some Illinois yet further west — will take heart and hope when he remembers that Lincoln made no prouder entrance into the State of which he is now the first citizen.

The young student, climbing unaided up the steep ascent — he who has begun the journey after the best hours of the morning are lost forever — shall not be without encouragement when he finds the footprints of another in the most toilsome windings of his path.

Lincoln’s future success or unsuccess can affect nothing in the past. The grandeur of his triumph over all the obstacles of fortune, will remain the same. Office can not confer honors brighter than those he has already achieved; it is the Presidency, not a great man, that is elevated, if such be chosen chief magistrate.

We have seen that, in 1842, he declines re-election to the State Legislature, after eight years’ service in that body. He has already been on the Harrison electoral ticket, and has distinguished himself in the famous canvass of 1840.

But it is not as a politician alone, that Lincoln is heard of at this time. After Stuart’s election to Congress has dissolved their connection; Lincoln forms a partnership with Judge Logan, one of the first in his profession at Springfield, and continues the practice of the law, with rising repute.

His characteristics as an advocate, are an earnestness and sincerity of manner, and a directness, conciseness, and strength of style; ho appeals, at other times, to the weapons of good-humored ridicule as ably as to the heavier arms of forensic combat. He is strongest in civil cases, but in a criminal cause that enlists his sympathy he is also great. It is then that the advocate’s, convictions, presented to the jury in terse and forcible, yet eloquent language, sometimes outweigh the charge of the judge. Juries listen to him, and concur in his arguments; for his known truth has preceded his arguments, and he triumphs. There may be law and evidence against him, but the belief that Lincoln is right, nothing can shake in the minds of those who know the man.

He prepares his cases with infinite care, when he has nothing but technical work before him. The smallest detail of the affair does not escape him. All the parts are perfectly fitted together, and the peculiar powers of his keen, analytic mind are brought into full play. He has not the quickness which characterizes Douglas, and which is so useful to the man who adventures in law or politics. But he is sufficiently alert, and recovers himself in time to achieve success.

Lincoln does not grow rich at the law, and has not grown rich to this day, though possessing a decent competence, and owing no man anything. Poor men, who have the misfortune to do with courts, come to Lincoln, who has never been known to exact an exorbitant fee, and whose demands are always proportioned to their poverty. There is record of a case which he gained for a young mechanic, after carrying it through three courts, and of his refusal to receive more than a comparative trifle in return.

Meantime, in the year 1842, Lincoln married a woman worthy to be the companion of his progress toward honor and distinction. Miss Mary Todd, who became his wife, is the daughter of Robert Todd, of Lexington, Kentucky, a man well known in that State, and formerly the clerk of the lower House of Congress. At the time of her marriage, Miss Todd was the belle of Springfield society — accomplished and intellectual, and possessing all the social graces native in the women of Kentucky. (Three living sons are the children of this marriage; the first of whom was born in 1843, the second in 1850, and the third in 1853. Another son, who was born in 1846, is now dead.)

If, at this point of his career, Lincoln looked back over his past life with proud satisfaction, his feeling was one in which every reader, who has traced his history, must sympathize.

It was hardly more than a half-score of years since he had entered Illinois, driving an ox-wagon, laden with the “plunder” of a backwoods emigrant. He was utterly unknown, and without friends who could advance him in any way. He was uneducated, and almost unlettered.

In ten years he had reversed all the relations of his life. No man had now more friends among all classes of people. No man among his neighbors had a wider intelligence, or more eager and comprehensive mind. No man of his age stood better in his profession, or in politics. No one was in a fairer road to happiness and success. And all this had been accomplished through his own exertion, and the favor which his many noble traits awakened in those around him.

He might well exult in view of all that had been, and all that was.

But, however this may have been, Lincoln did not pause to exult. He exulted in full career; for already the great battle of 1844 was approaching, and he was to take a prominent part in the contest. Many of the people of Illinois have distinct recollection of the brilliant debates which he conducted with Calhoun and Thomas, and these are loth to concede that they have ever been surpassed. The debaters met in all the principal cities and towns of that State, and afterward carried the war into Indiana.

It may be supposed that the fortunes of the war varied, but there are popular stories related of these encounters that give rather amusing results of one of Lincoln’s frequent successes.

The contest turned upon the annexation of Texas, to which measure Lincoln was opposed, in proportion as he loved and honored Henry Clay. It has been said that no man ever had such friends as Clay possessed. It may be said that he never possessed a friend more ardent, attached, and faithful than Abraham Lincoln. Throughout that disastrous campaign of 1844, Lincoln was a zealous and indefatigable soldier in the Whig cause. His name was on the electoral ticket of Illinois, and he shared the defeat of his gallant leader — a defeat which precipitated the Mexican war, with its attendant evils, and the long train of dissensions, discords, and pro-slavery aggressions which have followed.

In the lull which comes after a Presidential battle, Lincoln, while mingling in State politics, devoted himself more particularly to professional affairs, though he continued an enemy to the Mexican war, and his election to Congress in 1846, took place in full view of this enmity. It is worthy of note, in this connection, that he was the only Whig elected in Illinois at that time.

CHAPTER VI.

THE period over which Lincoln’s Congressional career extends, is one of the most interesting of our history.

Mr. Polk’s favorite scheme of a war of glory and aggrandizement, had been in full course of unsatisfactory experiment. Our little army in Mexico had conquered a peace as rapidly as possible. The battles of Palo Alto, Reseca de la Palma, Monterey, Buena Vista, Cerro Gordo, and the rest, had been fought to the triumph and honor of the American arms. Everywhere, the people had regarded these successes with patriotic pride. They had felt a yet deeper interest in them because the volunteer system had taken the war out of the hands of mercenaries, and made it, in some sort, the crusade of Anglo-Saxon civilization and vigor against the semi-barbarism and effeteness of the Mexican and Spanish races.

Yet, notwithstanding the popular character thus given to the army, the war itself had not increased in popularity. People, in their sober second thought, rejected the specious creed, “Our country, right or wrong,” and many looked forward earnestly and anxiously to a conclusion of hostilities.

The elections of Congressmen had taken place, and in the Thirtieth Congress, which assembled on the 6th of December, 1847, the people, by a majority of seven Whigs in the House, pronounced against the war, though hardly more than a year had elapsed since their Representatives, by a vote of one hundred and twenty-two to fourteen, had declared war to exist through the act of Mexico. — .

In those days, great men shaped the destinies of the nation. In the Senate sat Clay, Calhoun. Benton, Webster, Corwin. In the House were Palfrey, Winthrop, Wilmot, Giddings, Adams.

The new member from Illinois, who had distinguished himself in 1SI4 as the friend of Clay and the enemy of Texan annexation, took his seat-among these great men as a representative of the purest Whig principles; he was opposed to the war, as Corwin was; he was antislavery, as Clay was; he favored internal improvements, as all the great Whigs did.

And as Abraham Lincoln never sat astride of any fence, unless in his rail-splitting days; as water was never carried on both of his square shoulders; as his prayers to Heaven have never been made with reference to a compromise with other powers; so, throughout his Congressional career, you find him the bold advocate of the principles which he believed to be right. He never dodged a vote. He never minced matters with his opponents. He had not been fifteen days in the House when he made known what manner of man he was.

On the 22d of December he offered a series of resolutions, making the most damaging inquiries of the President, as to the verity of certain statements in his messages of May and December. Mr. Polk had represented that the Mexicans were the first aggressors in the existing hostilities, by an invasion of American soil, and an effusion of American blood, after rejecting the friendly overtures made by this country.

(The following are the resolutions, which it is judged best to print here in full:

“Whereas, the President of the United States, in his Message of May 11, 1846, has declared that ‘the Mexican government refused to receive him, [the envoy of the United States,] or listen to his propositions, but, after a long-continued series of menaces, have at last invaded our territory, and shed the blood of our fellow-citizens on our own soil.’

“And again, in his Message of December S, 1846, that ‘we had ample cause of war against Mexico long before the breaking out of hostilities; but even then we forbore to take redress into our own hands, until Mexico basely became the aggressor, by invading our soit in hostile array, and shedding the blood of our citizens.’

“And yet again, in his Message of December 7, 1847, ‘The Mexican government refused even to hear the terms of adjustment which he (our minister of peace) was authorized to propose, and finally, under wholly unjustifiable pretexts, involved the two countries in war, by invading the territory of the State of Texas, striking the first blow, and shedding the blood of our citizens on our own soil.’

“And whereas this House is desirous to obtain a full knowledge of all the facts which go to establish whether the particular spot on which the blood of our citizens was so shed, was, or was not, at that time, our own soil. Therefore,

“Resolved, by the House of Representatives, That the President of the United States ho respectfully requested to inform this House —

“1st. Whether the spot on which the blood of our citizens was shed, as in his memorial declared, was, or was not within the territory of Spain, at least, after the treaty of 1810, until the Mexican revolution.

“2d. Whether that spot is, or is not within the territory which was wrested from Spain by the revolutionary government of Mexico.

“3d. Whether that spot is, or is not within a settlement of people, which settlement has existed ever since long before the Texas Devolution, and until its inhabitants fled before the approach of the United States army.

“4th. Whether that settlement is, or is not isolated from any and all other settlements of the Gulf and the Rio Grande on the south and west, and of wide uninhabited regions on the north and east.

“5th. Whether the people of that settlement, or a majority of thorn, have ever submitted themselves to the government or laws of Texas, or of the United States, of consent or of compulsion, either of accepting office or voting at elections, or paying taxes, or serving on juries, or having process served on them or In any other way.

“6th. Whether the people of that settlement did or did not flee at the approaching of the United States army, leaving unprotected their homes and their growing crops before the blood was shed, as in the message stated; and whether the first blood so shed was, or was not shod within the inclosure of one of the people who had thus fled from it.

“7th. Whether our citizens whose blood was shed, as in his message declared, were, or were not, at that time, armed officers and soldiers sent into that settlement by the military order of the President, through the Secretary of War.

“8th. Whether the military force of the United States was, or was not so sent into that settlement after General Taylor had more than once intimated to the War Department that, in his opinion, no such movement was necessary to the defense or protection of Texas.” — Congressional Globe, vol xviii, 1st session, 30th Congress, page 64.

Globe Appendix, vol, xix, page 93.)

Mr. Lincoln’s resolutions demanded to know whether the spot on which American blood had been shed, was not Mexican, or at least, disputed territory; whether the Mexicans who shed this blood had not been driven from their homes by the approach of our arms; whether the Americans killed were not armed soldiers sent into Mexican territory, by order of the President of the United States.

Parliamentary strategy defeated the proposed inquiry, the resolutions going over under the rules.

On the 12th of January, Mr. Lincoln made a speech on the reference of different parts of the President’s message. In this speech he justified a previous vote of sentiment, declaring that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President of the United States.” That vote had been pressed upon the opposition of the House, by the President’s friends, in order to force an expression of opinion which should seem unjust to that functionary. Discussing this point, Mr. Lincoln coolly argued to conclusions the most injurious to the administration; showing that even though the President had attempted to construe a vote of supplies for the army into a vote applauding his official course, the opposition had remained silent, until Mr. Polk’s friends forced this matter upon them. Mr. Lincoln then took up the arguments of the President’s message, one by one, and exposed their fallacy; and following the line of inquiry marked out by his resolutions of December, proved that the first American blood shed by Mexicans, was in retaliation for injuries received from us, and that hostilities had commenced on Mexican soil. The speech was characterized by all the excellences of Lincoln’s later style — boldness, trenchant logic, and dry humor.

He next appears in the debates, as briefly advocating a measure to give bounty lands to the surviving volunteer soldiers of the war of 1812, and arguing the propriety of permitting all soldiers holding land warrants, to locate their lands in different parcels, instead of requiring the location to be made in one body.

As Lincoln is a man who never talks unless he has something particular to say, (rare and inestimable virtue!) a period of some three months elapsed before he made another speech in Congress. On the 20th of June,

1848, the Civil and Diplomatic Appropriation bill being under consideration, he addressed to the House and the country, a clear and solid argument in favor of the improvement of rivers and harbors. As a Western man, and as a man whom his own boating experiences had furnished with actual knowledge of the perils of snags and sawyers, he had always been in favor of a measure which commended itself at once to the heart and the pocket of the West. As the representative of a State with many hundred miles of Mississippi river, and vast river interests, he argued to show that an enlightened system of internal improvements, must be of national as well as local benefit. The prevailing Democratic errors on this subject, as Mr. Lincoln succinctly stated them, were as follows:

“That internal improvements ought not to be made by the General Government:

“1. Because they would overwhelm the Treasury.

“2. Because, while their burdens would be general, their benefits would be local and partial, involving an obnoxious inequality; and,

“3. Because they would be unconstitutional.

“4. Because the States may do enough by the levy and collection of tonnage duties; or, if not,

“5. That the Constitution may be amended.

‘The sum,” said Lincoln, “of these positions is, Do nothing at all, lest you do something wrong.”

He then proceeded to assail each of the positions, demolishing them one after another. That admirable simplicity of diction which dashes straight at the heart of a subject, and that singular good sense which teaches a man to stop when he is done, are no less the characteristics of this effort than of all the other speeches of Mr. Lincoln.

Of a different manner, but illustrating a phase of his mind equally marked, is the speech he made in the House on the 27th of July,* when he discussed the political questions of the day with reference to the Presidential contest between General Taylor and Mr. Cass. It abounds in broad ridicule and broad drollery — the most effective and the most good-natured. Severe and sarcastic enough, when treating a false principle, it seems never to have been one of Lincoln’s traits to indulge in bitter personalities. His only enemies, therefore, are those who hate his principles.

On the 21st of December, 1848, Mr. Gott, of New York, offered a resolution in the House, instructing the Committee on the District of Columbia to report a bill for the abolition of the slave-trade in that District. There were men in Congress then who had not forgotten the traditions of the Republican fathers, and who were indignant that slaves should be bought and soldin the shadow of the capital — that the slave-trader should make the political metropolis of the Republic a depot on the line of his abominable traffic.

As soon as the resolution of Mr. Gott was read, a motion was made to lay it on the table, which was lost by a vote of eighty-one to eighty-five. A hot struggle ensued; but the resolution was adopted. An immediate attempt to reconsider proved ineffectual. The action upon reconsideration was postponed from day to day, until the 10th of January following, when Mr. Lincoln proposed that the committee should be instructed to report a bill forbidding the sale, beyond the District of Columbia, of any slave born within its limits, or the removal of slaves from the District, except such servants as were in attendance upon their masters temporarily residing at Washington; establishing an apprenticeship of twenty-one years for all slaves born within the District subsequent to the year 1850; providing for their emancipation at the expiration of the apprenticeship; authorizing the United States to buy and emancipate all slaves within the District, whose owners should desire to set them free in that manner; finally submitting the bill to a vote of the citizens of the District for approval.

It is well known that the efforts to abolish the slave-trade in the District of Columbia have resulted in nothing. (Mr. Lincoln’s proposition had received the approval of Mayor Seaton, of Washington, who informed him that it would meet the approbation of the) The wise, humane, and temperate measure of Mr. Lincoln shared the fate of all the rest.

Another great measure of the Congress in which Mr. Lincoln figured, was the Wilmot Proviso — now a favorite Republican measure — and so pervading, with its distinctive principle (opposition to slavery extension) the whole Republican soul, that, whether in or out of platforms, it remains the life and strength of the party. To this measure Mr. Lincoln was fully committed. Indeed, it is a peculiarity of this man, that he has always acted decidedly one way or the other. He thought the Mexican war wrong. He opposed it with his whole heart and strength. He thought the Wilmot Proviso right and he says he “had the pleasure of voting for it, in one way or another, about forty times.”

Mr. Lincoln was one of those who advocated the nomination of General Taylor, in the National Whig Convention of 1848. Returning to Illinois after the adjournment of Congress, he took the stump for his favorite candidate, and was active throughout that famous canvass. In 1849, he retired from Congress, firmly declining re-nomination, and resumed the practice of his profession.

The position which he maintained in the House of Representatives was eminently respectable. His name appears oftener in the ayes and noes, than in the debates; he spoke therefore with the more force and effect when he felt called upon to express his opinion.

The impression that his Congressional speeches give you, is the same left by all others that he has made. You feel that he has not argued to gain a point, but to show the truth; that it is not Lincoln he wishes to sustain, but Lincoln’s principles.

CHAPTER VII.

PEACE to the old Whig party, which is dead! When a man has ceased to live, we are cheaply magnanimous in the exaltation of his virtues, and we repair whatever wrong we did him when alive by remorselessly abusing every one who hints that he may have been an imperceptible trifle lower than the angels.

It is with such post-mortem greatness of soul that the leaders of the Democracy have cherished the memory of the Whig party, and gone about the stump, clad in. moral sackcloth and craped hats.

If you will believe these stricken mourners, virtue went out with that lamented organization; and there is but one true man unhanged in America, and he is a stoutish giant, somewhat under the middle size.

In speaking, therefore, of the Whig party, you have first to avoid offense to the gentlemen who reviled its great men in their lifetime, and who have a fondness for throwing the honored dust of the past into the eyes of the present. Then, respect is due to the feelings of those Republicans who abandoned the Whig party only after the last consolations of religion had been administered, and who still remember it with sincere regret.

The prejudices of another class of our friends must be treated with decent regard. Very many old Democrats in the Republican ranks are earnestly persuaded that in former times they were right in their opposition to the Whigs.

Yet one more variety of opinion must be consulted — the opinion that the Whig party had survived its usefulness, and that all which was good in it has now entered upon a higher and purer state of existence in the Republican organization.

Doubtless it would be better not to mention the Whig party at all. Unfortunately for the ends of strict prudence, the story of Abraham Lincoln’s life involves allusion to it, since he was once a Whig, and became a Republican, and not a Democrat. But as every Republican is a code of by-laws unto himself — subject only to the Chicago platform — perhaps we may venture to reverently speak of the shade which still, it is said, revisits the glimpses of Boston; and to recount the events which preceded its becoming a shade.

So early as 1848 the dismemberment of the Whig party commenced. It had been distinguished by many of the characteristics of the Republican party, among which is the reserved right of each member of the organization to think and act for himself, on his own responsibility, as already intimated. Whenever its leaders deflected from the straight line of principle, their followers called them to account; and a persistence in the advocacy of measures repugnant to the individual sense of right, caused disaffection.

Many sincere and earnest men, who supported Henry Clay with ardor, ceased to be Whigs when General Taylor was nominated, because they conceived that his nomination was a departure from the Clay Whig principles of opposition to the Mexican war and the acquisition of slave territory.

This is not the place to pronounce upon the wisdom or justice of their course. Others, as sincere and earnest as they, supported General Taylor, and continued to act with the Whig party throughout the Fillmore administration.

The assimilation of the two great parties on the slavery question in 1852, widened the distance between the Whigs and the Free Soilers, and the former were, in the opinion of the latter, demoralized before the election in which they suffered so total an overthrow, though they continued steadfast in their devotion to the Whig name until 1854, when the first organization of the Republicans took place, under the name of the Anti-Nebraska party.

The Whig Free Soilers were eager and glad to fraternize with their old friends; and all greeted with enthusiasm the vast accessions which the new party received from the men who had given spiritual vitality to the Democracy.

Those members of both the old parties, who were particularly sensible to the attractions of office, those whom no pro-slavery aggression could render superior to the luxury of a feeble or selfish acquiescence, also coalesced, and now constitute, with a few sincere political reminiscences, the Democracy of the North.

Up to the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, Abraham Lincoln remained a Whig, both from conviction and affection.

In 1848, he had made speeches in favor of the election of General Taylor, in Maryland, in Massachusetts, and in Illinois, In his own Congressional district, where his word has always been platform enough, the success of his canvass was declared by a majority of fifteen hundred for Taylor.

After his retirement from Congress, he devoted himself, with greater earnestness than ever before, to the duties of his profession, and extended his business and repute. He did not reappear in the political arena until 1852, when his name was placed on the Scott electoral ticket.

In the canvass of that year, so disastrous to the Whig party throughout the country, Lincoln appeared several times before the people of his State as the advocate of Scott’s claims for the Presidency. But the prospect was everywhere so disheartening, and in Illinois the cause was so utterly desperate, that the energies of the Whigs were paralyzed, and Lincoln did less in this Presidential struggle than any in which he had ever engaged.

During that lethargy which preceded the dissolution of his party, re had almost relinquished political aspirations. Successful in his profession, happy in his home, secure in the affection of his neighbors, with books, competence, and leisure — ambition could not tempt him. It required the more thrilling voice of danger to freedom, to call the veteran of so many good fights into the field. The call was made.

It would be useless to recount here the history of the Missouri Compromise, and the circumstances attending the violation of that compact, though that history is properly a part of the biography of every public man in the country. Throughout the fierce contest which preceded the repeal of the Compromise, and the storm of indignation which followed that repeal, the whole story was brought vividly before the people, and can not now have faded from their recollection. Those to whom it is yet strange, will find it briefly and faithfully related in the speech of Abraham Lincoln, made in reply to Douglas, at Peoria, in October, 1854.

The people were glad to hear the voice of their favorite once more, and Lincoln’s canvass of Illinois was most triumphant. The legislative elections were held, and those who denounced the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, were found to be in the majority.

The election of a United States Senator took place the following winter, and General Shields was superseded. This gentleman, who, listening to the seductive persuasions of his voiceful colleague, was said to have voted for the repeal of the Compromise against his own convictions, was a candidate for re-election. On the part of the opposition majority there were two candidates, Lincoln and Trumbull. The great body of the opposition voted steadily for the former on several ballots; but some Democrats who had been elected on the anti-Nebraska issue, continued to cast their votes for Trumbull.

Lincoln feared that this dissension, might result in the election of a less positive man than Trumbull, and with his usual unselfishness, appealed to his friends to vote for Trumbull, adjuring them by their friendship to him to make this concession of individual preference. His appeal was not in vain, and Trumbull was elected Senator.

This, however, was not the first sacrifice which be made to conciliation and union. The anti-Nebraska party of the same year offered him the nomination for Governor; but in the existing state of organizations, he declined for the sake of the cause which all had espoused. It occurs in politics that a force which suddenly rallies about a principle, may be disheartened by the choice of a leader whom recent animosities have rendered obnoxious. Lincoln, as a Whig, had been one of the most decided and powerful opponents of Democracy in Illinois. The period since his opposition to many Democratic members of the anti-Nebraska party had ceased was very brief, and old feelings of antagonism had not died away. He perceived that the advancement of himself might impede the advancement of his principles. Doubtless, he could be elected Governor of Illinois, but the victory which bore him into office might be less brilliant and useful than that which could be achieved under another. He therefore withdrew his name, and threw his influence in favor of Governor Bissell, who had been a Democrat, and who was triumphantly elected.

It must be remembered that the Republican party had, as yet, no definite existence in Illinois. The anti-Nebraska party was the temporary name of the Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers, who opposed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. It was charged by Douglas that a Republican Convention met at Springfield and passed the resolutions found below. This was an error. No Convention was held at Springfield, but the resolutions were offered at a small meeting in Kane county, of which Lincoln knew nothing.

“1. Resolved, That we believe this truth to be self-evident, that when parties become subversive of the ends for which they are established, or incapable of restoring the Government, to the true principles of the Constitution, it is the right and duty of the people to dissolve the political bands by which they may have been connected therewith, and to organize new parties upon such principles and with such views as the circumstances and exigencies of the nation may demand.

“2. Resolved, That the times imperatively demand the reorganization of parties, and, repudiating all previous party attachments, names, and predilections, we unite ourselves together in defence of the liberty and Constitution of the country, and will hereafter co-operate as the Republican party, pledged to the accomplishment of the following purposes: To bring the administration of the Government back to the control of first principles; to restore Nebraska and Kansas to the position of free territories; that, as the Constitution of the United States vests in the States, and not in Congress, the power to legislate for the extradition of fugitives from labor, to repeal and entirely abrogate the Fugitive Slave law; to restrict slavery to those states in which it exists; to prohibit the admission of any more slave states into the Union; to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia; to exclude slavery from all the territories over which the General Government has exclusive jurisdiction; and to resist the acquirement of any more territories unless the practice of slavery therein forever shall have been prohibited.

“3. Resolved, That in furtherance of these principles we will use such Constitutional and lawful means as shall seem best adapted to their accomplishment, and that we will support no man for office, under the General or State Government, who is not positively and fully committed to the support of these principles, and whose personal character and conduct is not a guarantee that he is reliable, and who shall not have abjured old party allegiance and ties.”

In the course of the first debate between Douglas and Lincoln, which was held at Ottawa, in August, 1858, Douglas read these resolutions, declaring that Lincoln had participated in the Convention, and assisted in their adoption. Lincoln met this earliest of a series of misrepresentations with prompt denial, and proved that he was not a member of the Convention.

The actual Republican party of Illinois, dates its formation from a period somewhat later; and Lincoln was one of the first members of the present organization. Not so ultra, probably, as the indignant men who framed the resolutions quoted, he was quite as firmly opposed to slavery. In the speech from which he read, in reply to the charge of Douglas, he gives with Wesleyan point, the reason why indifference to slavery should be abhorred:

“This declared indifference, but, as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world — enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites — causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty — criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

CHAPTER VIII.

IN the Republican National Convention of 1856, Abraham Lincoln received one hundred and two votes for the Vice-Presidential nomination. When the standard-bearers of the party had been selected, he took his rank in the army of freedom, and engaged in the great conflict which followed. The Republicans showed their appreciation of his strength and ability by placing him at the head of their electoral ticket in Illinois; and when in 1858 it was determined to give the Senatorial question the form of a popular contest, by the election of a Legislature pledged to the people, for or against Douglas, Abraham Lincoln was chosen without dissent as the champion of his party.

Much might here be said with regard to his eminent fitness for the conduct of such a canvass; but the result of the election, and his published debates with Douglas, are the best commentary upon his qualifications.

The Republican State ticket of that year was carried by a decisive majority, and the Legislature was lost only through the unfair manner in which the State was districted, and which threw that body into the hands of the Democrats in spite of the popular will.

It may not be improper to allude particularly to circumstances connected with the debates between Lincoln and Douglas, which have been so significant in their result, and which have practically made United States Senators in Illinois elective by the people instead of the Legislature.

Lincoln’s first great speech of that year was made at Springfield, on the 17th of June, before the State Convention which named him as the Republican candidate for Senator. In this speech he preached the moral conflict, which has always existed and always must exist between the principle of freedom and the principle of slavery; noticed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott decision, and the revival of the slave-trade; and with masterly effect exhibited the secret concert with which all the enemies of freedom had acted in their assaults upon our liberties. The speaker concluded with these memorable words, which every Republican should keep in mind, for they have gathered significance in the two years elapsed since their utterance:

“Our cause, then, must be intrusted to, and conducted by, its own undoubted friends — those whose hands are free, whose hearts are in the work — who do care for the result. Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong. We did this under the single impulse of resistance to a common danger, with every external circumstance against us. Of strange, discordant, and even hostile elements, we gathered from the four winds, and formed and fought the battle through, tinder the constant hot fire of a disciplined, proud, and pampered enemy. Did we brave all then, to falter now? — now, when that same enemy is wavering, dissevered, and belligerent? The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail — if we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise counsels may accelerate, or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later, the victory is sure to come.”

The reply made by Douglas to this speech was on the occasion of his reception at Chicago in the July following. Lincoln was present, and spoke in the same city on the next day. Two more great speeches by Douglas, and one more speech by Lincoln were made before they entered the lists in debate.

In one of those speeches, Douglas found occasion — for he’ was then addressing Lincoln’s old friends at Springfield — to pay his tribute to the worth and greatness of his opponent: — „ *

“You all know that I am an amiable, good-natured man, and I take great pleasure in bearing testimony to the fact that Mr. Lincoln is a kind-hearted, amiable, good-natured gentleman, with whom no man has a right to pick a quarrel, even if he wanted one. He is a worthy gentleman. I have known him for twenty-five years, and there is no better citizen, and in kinder-hearted man. He is a fine lawyer, possesses high ability, and there is no objection to him, except the monstrous revolutionary doctrines with which he is identified.”

On the 24th of July, Lincoln wrote to Douglas proposing the debates which have since become so famous.

Douglas made answer that “recent events had interposed difficulties in the way of such an arrangement,” that the Democratic Central Committee had already made appointments for him at different places; but in order to accommodate Mr. Lincoln, he would meet him in seven of the nine Congressional Districts where they had not yet spoken. He expressed surprise, that if it was Lincoln’s original intention to propose these debates, he should have waited until after the plan of the campaign had been arranged by the Democratic Central Committee, before he made known his proposition.

This letter was also written on the 24th of July. On the 29th Lincoln replied, from Springfield:

“Protesting that your insinuations of attempted unfairness on my part are unjust, and with the hope that you did not very considerately make them, I proceed to reply. To your statement that ‘It has been suggested, recently, that an arrangement had been made to bring out a third candidate for the United States Senate, who, with yourself, should canvass the State in opposition to me,’ etc., I can only say, that such suggestion must have been made by yourself, for certainly none such has been made by or to me, or otherwise, to my knowledge. Surely, you did not deliberately conclude, as you insinuate, that I was expecting to draw you into an arrangement of terms, to be agreed on by yourself, by which a third candidate and myself, ‘in concert, might be able to take the opening and closing speech in every case.”

“As to your surprise that I did not sooner make the proposal to divide time with you. I can only say, I made it as soon as I resolved to make it. I did not know but that such proposal would come from you; I waited, respectfully, to see. It may have been well known to you that you went to Springfield for the purpose of agreeing on the plan of campaign; but it was not so known to me. When your appointments were announced in the papers, extending only to the 21st of August, I, for the first time, considered it certain that you would make no proposal to me, and then resolved that, if my friends concurred, I would make one to you. As soon thereafter as I could see and consult with friends satisfactorily, I did make the proposal. It did not occur to me that the proposed arrangement could derange your plans after the latest of your appointments already made. After that, there was, before the election, largely over two months of clear time.

“For you to say that we have already spoken at Chicago and Springfield, and that on both occasions I had the concluding speech, is hardly a fair statement. The truth rather is this: At Chicago, July 9th, you made a carefully-prepared conclusion on my speech of June 16th. Twenty-four hours after, I made a hasty conclusion on yours of the 9th. You had six days to prepare, and concluded on me again at Bloomington on the 16th. Twenty-four hours after, I concluded again on you at Springfield. In the mean time, you had made another conclusion on me at Springfield, which I did not hear, and of the contents of which I knew nothing when I spoke; so that your speech made in daylight, and mine at night, of the 17th, at Springfield, were both made in perfect independence of each other. The dates of making all these speeches will show, I think, that in the matter of time for preparation, the advantage has all been on your side; and that none of the external circumstances have stood to my advantage.”

Lincoln having left all the arrangements of time, place, and manner of debate to Douglas, the latter made the following proposition, which, (although it allowed Douglas four openings and closes to Lincoln’s three, and so gave considerable advantage to him,) Lincoln promptly accepted:

“BEMENT, PIATT CO., III., July 30, 1858.

“DEAR SIR:

“Your letter, dated yesterday, accepting my proposition for a joint discussion at one prominent point in each Congressional District, as stated in my previous letter, was received this morning.

“The times and places designated are as follows:

“I agree to your suggestion that we shall alternately open and close the discussion. I will speak at Ottawa one hour, you can reply, occupying an hour and a half, and I will then follow for half an hour. At Freeport, you shall open the discussion and speak one hour; I will follow for an hour and a half, and you can then reply for half an hour. We will alternate in like manner in each successive place.

“Very respectfully, your obedient servant,

“S. A. DOUGLAS.

“HON. A. LINCOLN, Springfield, Ill.”

In the intervals between the debates, which took place as arranged, both speakers addressed audiences separately, and the work on both sides was carried on with unflagging energy.

No one, it seems to me, can read these debates without admiration of Lincoln’s ability, courage, and truth, while the impression left by Douglas is that of a great mind bending all its energies to a purpose beneath it; of an acute logician resorting to sophistry when meeting his opponent’s arguments, and to adroit misrepresentation of language and position, when assailing his opinions.

The questions discussed were substantially the same that are at issue now. The spirit of pro-slavery aggression takes many forms, but in nature remains unchanged. Lincoln pursued it through all its disguises, and exposed it at every turn. The subtlest and most audacious champion of slavery that had ever proved false to freedom, was not equal to the conflict. As the pretended advocate of the right of every man to govern himself and regulate his own affairs, Douglas was full of words. When a flash of truth showed him the real advocate of one man’s right to enslave another, he was dumb. The banner of popular sovereignty smote pleasantly upon the sight. When Lincoln reversed it, and men read the true inscription, they saw that it was the signal of discord, oppression, and violence. There were old stains upon that gay piece of bunting; stains of blood from the cabin hearths of Kansas, and from the marble floor of the Senate hall; and a marvelous ill-odor of cruelty hung about it, as if it were, in fact, no better than the flag of a slave-ship. Where its shadow fell across the future of a State, civilization and humanity seemed to shrink back, and a race of bondmen and their masters thinly peopled a barren land that would have “laughed in harvests” in the light of freedom.

The Douglas dogma never has been so thoroughly refuted, as by Lincoln’s speeches in those debates; and Douglas himself never suffered such entire defeat, in the eyes of the country. The truth gave the victory to Lincoln; a trick bestowed the Senatorship upon Douglas.

In May, 1859, when the amendment to the Constitution of Massachusetts, extending the term of naturalization, aroused the apprehensions of many German Republicans, Dr. Theodor Canisius, a German citizen of Illinois, addressed a letter to Lincoln, asking his opinion of the amendment, and inquiring whether he favored a fusion of the Republicans with the other elements of opposition in 1860. Writing from Springfield, Lincoln replies:

“Massachusetts is a sovereign and independent State, and I have no right to advise her in her policy. Yet, if any one is desirous to draw a conclusion as to what I would do from what she has done, I may speak without impropriety. I say, then, that so far as I understand the Massachusetts provision, I am against its adoption, not only in Illinois, but in every other place in which I have the right to oppose it. As I understand the spirit of our institutions, it is designed to promote the elevation of men. I am, therefore, hostile to anything that tends to their debasement. It is well known that I deplore the oppressed condition of the blacks, and it would, therefore, be very inconsistent for me to look with approval upon any measure that infringes upon the inalienable rights of white men, whether or not they are born in another land or speak a different language from our own.

“In respect to a fusion, I am in favor of it whenever it can be effected on Republican principles, but upon no other condition. A fusion upon any other platform would be as insane as unprincipled. It would thereby lose the whole North, while the common enemy would still have the support of the entire South. The question in relation to men is different. There are good and patriotic men and able statesmen in the South whom I would willingly support if they would place themselves on Republican ground; but I shall oppose the lowering of the Republican standard even by a hair’s-breadth.”

During the gubernatorial canvass of 1859, in Ohio, Lincoln was invited to address the people of that State, and appeared before them, at Columbus and Cincinnati, in September. The impression made was one of universal favor; and it was through the interest awakened by these speeches, that the Republican Central Committee and State officers of Ohio, were led to request copies of his debates with Douglas, for publication in book-form. The Ohioans went to hear him with full allowances for the exaggerations of Illinois enthusiasm; when they had heard him, their own admiration equaled that of the Illinoians.

It was, doubtless, with still greater surprise that New England and New York listened to him. His speech at the Cooper Institute, in the commercial and intellectual metropolis, was the most brilliant success in everything that makes such an effort successful. His audience was vast in numbers, and profoundly attentive. They found him, indeed, lank and angular in form, but of fine oratorial presence; lucid and simple in his style, vigorous in argument, speaking with a full, clear voice. He addressed appeals of reason to the sense and conscience of his hearers, and skillfully hit the humor of a critical and unfamiliar people.

CHAPTER IX.

THE Republican National Convention, which assembled at Chicago on the 16th of May, was no less marked by a diversity of preferences than a unity of interests. In three days it accomplished its work — the conciliation of men and the assimilation of sections on minor points of difference. In three days Abraham Lincoln was nominated, and the armies of the irrepressible conflict were united under the banner of the man who was the first to utter that great truth, which all men felt.

I need hardly recount the incidents of that Convention, of which the great event has proven so satisfactory. They are all fresh in the minds of the people, who watched, hour by hour, and day by day, the proceedings of one of the most distinguished bodies which ever assembled in this country.

The Convention met in Chicago without factitious advantages. The failure of the Democracy to nominate at Charleston left the Republicans in the dark as to the champion whom they were to combat, and there was nothing to be gained by the choice of a man with reference to a Democratic probability.

What lay before the Convention, then, was the task of choosing a positive man embodying decided Republican principles, whose strength and decision of opinions should attract one side of the party, while nothing in his history should repel the other.

Up to the time of the third ballot, which resulted in the nomination of Abraham Lincoln, all the indications were favorable to the success of William H. Seward. That great man, whom no fortuity can lessen in the proud regard of the party, had rallied to his cause a host of friends — attached, powerful, vigilant. These came to Chicago, and into the Convention, with a solid strength that swept everything before it.

Mr. Lincoln was the only candidate upon whom a considerable number of those who opposed Mr. Seward from policy, were united; but it was not until after two votes of sentiment that a sufficient force was diverted from other favorites to swell Mr. Lincoln’s vote into a majority.

The leader of the New York delegation, who had worked so faithfully for Mr. Seward, was the first to move the unanimous nomination of Lincoln, which was done amid demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm, in the wigwam of the Convention and throughout the city of Chicago. At the same instant the lightning flashed the tidings throughout the land, and in a thousand towns and cities the cannon thundered back the jubilant responses of the people.

The fact of his nomination was at once telegraphed to Lincoln, at Springfield. He received it with characteristic quiet. Seated in the Illinois State Journal office, talking over the Convention with a number of friends, he was approached by the telegraphic operator. “Mr. Lincoln you are nominated for the Presidency.” Lincoln took the proffered dispatch in silence, and read it. At length he folded it carefully, and saying to the exuberant bystanders, “There is a little woman down street who would like to know something about this,” went home to communicate the news to his wife.

The little city of Springfield was in a phrensy of excitement; and that night all the streets were ablaze with bonfires, and thronged by the rejoicing Republicans. The fact of the nomination of the man whom every one of his fellow-townsmen regarded with pride, was excuse enough for all sorts of vocal and pyrotechnic extravagances.

The next day, the excursion train arrived from Chicago with a large number of delegates, and the Committee appointed by the Convention to make Lincoln officially acquainted with his nomination.

The deputation was received at Mr. Lincoln’s house, and when the guests had assembled in the parlor, Mr. Ashmun, the President of the Convention, said:

“I have, sir, the honor, in behalf of the gentlemen who are present, a Committee appointed by the Republican Convention, recently assembled at Chicago, to discharge a most pleasant duty. We have come, sir, under a vote of instructions to that Committee, to notify you that you have been selected by the Convention of the Republicans at Chicago, for President of the United States. They instruct us, sir, to notify you of that selection, and that Committee deem it not only respectful to yourself, but appropriate to the important matter which they have in hand, that they should come in person, and present to you the authentic evidence of the action of that Convention; and, sir, without any phrase which shall either be considered personally plauditory to yourself, or which shall have any reference to the principles involved in the questions which are connected with your nomination, I desire to present to you the letter which has been prepared, and which informs you of the nomination, and with it the platform, resolutions, and sentiments which the Convention adopted. Sir, at your convenience we shall be glad to receive from you such a response as it may be your pleasure to give us.”

To this address Mr. Lincoln listened with grave attention, and replied:

“MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN OF THE COMMITTEE:

“I tender to you and through you to the Republican National Convention, and all the people represented in it, ray profoundest thanks for the high honor done me, which you now formally announce. Deeply, and even painfully sensible of the great responsibility which is inseparable from this high honor — a responsibility which

I could almost wish had fallen upon some one of the far more eminent men and experienced statesmen whose distinguished names were before the Convention, I shall, by your leave, consider more fully the resolutions of the Convention denominated the platform, and without unnecessary or unreasonable delay, respond to you, Mr. Chairman, in writing, not doubting that the platform will be found satisfactory, and the nomination gratefully accepted.

“And now I will not longer defer the pleasure of taking you, and each of you, by the hand.”

After this response, it is proper to immediately add the letter in which Mr. Lincoln has since formally accepted the nomination:

“SPRINGFIELD, ILLINOIS, May 23, 1860.

“HON. GEORGE ASHMUN,

“President of the Republican National Convention:

“SIR: I accept the nomination tendered me by the Convention over which you presided, of which I am formally apprised in the letter of yourself and others acting as a Committee of the Convention for that purpose. The declaration of principles and sentiments which accompanies your letter meets my approval, and it shall be my care not to violate it, or disregard it in any part.

“Imploring the assistance of Divine Providence, and with due regard to the views and feelings of all who were represented in the Convention, to the rights of all the states and territories and people of the nation, to the inviolability of the Constitution, and the perpetual union, harmony, and prosperity of all, I am most happy to co-operate for the practical success of the principles declared by the Convention.

            “Your obliged friend and fellow-citizen,

                            “ABRAHAM LINCOLN.”

People who visit Mr. Lincoln are pleased no less at the simple and quiet style in which he lives, than at the perfect ease and cordiality with which they are received. The host puts off half his angularity at home, or hides it beneath the mantle of hospitality; and the hostess is found “a pattern of lady-like courtesy and polish,” who “converses with freedom and grace, and is thoroughly au fail in all the little amenities of society,” and who will “do the honors of the White House with appropriate grace.” Intellectually, she is said to be little her husband’s inferior.

Lincoln’s residence is a comfortable two-story frame house, not now new in appearance, and situated in the northeast part of Springfield. The grounds about it, which are not spacious, are neatly and tastefully kept.

Mr. Lincoln’s political room is an apartment in the State House, at the door of which you knock unceremoniously. A sturdy voice calls out, “Come in!” and you find yourself in the presence of a man who rises to the height of six feet three inches, as you enter. He shakes you with earnest cordiality by the hand — receiving you as in the old days he would have received a friend who called upon him at his farm-work; for those who have always known him, say that, though Lincoln is now more distinguished, he has always been a great man, and his simple and hearty manners have undergone no change. You find him, in physique, thin and wiry, and he has an appearance of standing infirmly upon his feet, which often deceived those who contended with him in the wrestle, in his younger days.

The great feature of the man’s face is his brilliant and piercing eye, which has never been dimmed by any vice, great or small. His rude and vigorous early life contributed to strengthen the robust constitution which he inherited, and he is now, at fifty, in the prime of life, with rugged health, though bearing, in the lines of his face, the trace of severe and earnest thought.

The biographer’s task ends here, and he does not feel that any speculations with regard to the future would be of great worth or pertinence, though conjecture is easy and a prophetic reputation possible. He prefers to leave the future of Lincoln to Providence and to the people, who often make history without the slightest respect to the arrangements of sagacious writers.

MODERN ITALIAN POETS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS

GIUSEPPE PARINI

VITTORIO ALFIERI

SCENE I.

VINCENZO MONTI AND UGO FOSCOLO

ALESSANDRO MANZONI

SCENE — THE PRISON.

SILVIO PELLICO, TOMASSO GROSSI, LUIGI CAREER, AND GIOVANNI BERCHET

GIAMBATTISTA NICCOLINI

GIACOMO LEOPARDI

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI

FRANCESCO DALL’ ONGARO

GIOVANNI PRATI

ALEARDO ALEARDI

GUILIO CARCANO, ARNALDO FUSINATO AND LUIGI MERCANTINI

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

This book has grown out of studies begun twenty years ago in Italy, and continued fitfully, as I found the mood and time for them, long after their original circumstance had become a pleasant memory. If any one were to say that it did not fully represent the Italian poetry of the period which it covers chronologically, I should applaud his discernment; and perhaps I should not contend that it did much more than indicate the general character of that poetry. At the same time, I think that it does not ignore any principal name among the Italian poets of the great movement which resulted in the national freedom and unity, and it does form a sketch, however slight and desultory, of the history of Italian poetry during the hundred years ending in 1870.

Since that time, literature has found in Italy the scientific and realistic development which has marked it in all other countries. The romantic school came distinctly to a close there with the close of the long period of patriotic aspiration and endeavor; but I do not know the more recent work, except in some of the novels, and I have not attempted to speak of the newer poetry represented by Carducci. The translations here are my own; I have tried to make them faithful; I am sure they are careful.

Possibly I should not offer my book to the public at all if I knew of another work in English studying even with my incoherence the Italian poetry of the time mentioned, or giving a due impression of its extraordinary solidarity. It forms part of the great intellectual movement of which the most unmistakable signs were the French revolution, and its numerous brood of revolutions, of the first, second, and third generations, throughout Europe; but this poetry is unique in the history of literature for the unswerving singleness of its tendency.

The boundaries of epochs are very obscure, and of course the poetry of the century closing in 1870 has much in common with earlier Italian poetry. Parini did not begin it, nor Alfieri; it began them, and its spirit must have been felt in the perfumed air of the soft Lorrainese despotism at Florence when Filicaja breathed over his native land the sigh which makes him immortal. Yet finally, every age is individual; it has a moment of its own when its character has ceased to be general, and has not yet begun to be general, and it is one of these moments which is eternized in the poetry before us. It was, perhaps, more than any other poetry in the world, an incident and an instrument of the political redemption of the people among whom it arose. “In free and tranquil countries,” said the novelist Guerrazzi in conversation with M. Monnier, the sprightly Swiss critic, recently dead, who wrote so much and so well about modern Italian literature, “men have the happiness and the right to be artists for art’s sake: with us, this would be weakness and apathy. When I write it is because I have something to do; my books are not productions, but deeds. Before all, here in Italy we must be men. When we have not the sword, we must take the pen. We heap together materials for building batteries and fortresses, and it is our misfortune if these structures are not works of art. To write slowly, coldly, of our times and of our country, with the set purpose of creating a chef-d’oeuvre, would be almost an impiety. When I compose a book, I think only of freeing my soul, of imparting my idea or my belief. As vehicle, I choose the form of romance, since it is popular and best liked at this day; my picture is my thoughts, my doubts, or my dreams. I begin a story to draw the crowd; when I feel that I have caught its ear, I say what I have to say; when I think the lesson is growing tiresome, I take up the anecdote again; and whenever I can leave it, I go back to my moralizing. Detestable aesthetics, I grant you; my works of siege will be destroyed after the war, I don’t doubt; but what does it matter?”

II

The political purpose of literature in Italy had become conscious long before Guerrazzi’s time; but it was the motive of poetry long before it became conscious. When Alfieri, for example, began to write, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there was no reason to suppose that the future of Italy was ever to differ very much from its past. Italian civilization had long worn a fixed character, and Italian literature had reflected its traits; it was soft, unambitious, elegant, and trivial. At that time Piedmont had a king whom she loved, but not that free constitution which she has since shared with the whole peninsula. Lombardy had lapsed from Spanish to Austrian despotism; the Republic of Venice still retained a feeble hold upon her wide territories of the main-land, and had little trouble in drugging any intellectual aspiration among her subjects with the sensual pleasures of her capital. Tuscany was quiet under the Lorrainese dukes who had succeeded the Medici; the little states of Modena and Parma enjoyed each its little court and its little Bourbon prince, apparently without a dream of liberty; the Holy Father ruled over Bologna, Ferrara, Ancona, and all the great cities and towns of the Romagna; and Naples was equally divided between the Bourbons and the bandits. There seemed no reason, for anything that priests or princes of that day could foresee, why this state of things should not continue indefinitely; and it would be a long story to say just why it did not continue. What every one knows is that the French revolution took place, that armies of French democrats overran all these languid lordships and drowsy despotisms, and awakened their subjects, more or less willingly or unwillingly, to a sense of the rights of man, as Frenchmen understood them, and to the approach of the nineteenth century. The whole of Italy fell, directly or indirectly, under French sway; the Piedmontese and Neapolitan kings were driven away, as were the smaller princes of the other states; the Republic of Venice ceased to be, and the Pope became very much less a prince, if not more a priest, than he had been for a great many ages. In due time French democracy passed into French imperialism, and then French imperialism passed altogether away; and so after 1815 came the Holy Alliance with its consecrated contrivances for fettering mankind. Lombardy, with all Venetia, was given to Austria; the dukes of Parma, of Modena, and Tuscany were brought back and propped up on their thrones again. The Bourbons returned to Naples, and the Pope’s temporal glory and power were restored to him. This condition of affairs endured, with more or less disturbance from the plots of the Carbonari and many other ineffectual aspirants and conspirators, until 1848, when, as we know, the Austrians were driven out, as well as the Pope and the various princes small and great, except the King of Sardinia, who not only gave a constitution to his people, but singularly kept the oath he swore to support it. The Pope and the other princes, even the Austrians, had given constitutions and sworn oaths, but their memories were bad, and their repute for veracity was so poor that they were not believed or trusted. The Italians had then the idea of freedom and independence, but not of unity, and their enemies easily broke, one at a time, the power of states which, even if bound together, could hardly have resisted their attack. In a little while the Austrians were once more in Milan and Venice, the dukes and grand-dukes in their different places, the Pope in Rome, the Bourbons in Naples, and all was as if nothing had been, or worse than nothing, except in Sardinia, where the constitution was still maintained, and the foundations of the present kingdom of Italy were laid. Carlo Alberto had abdicated on that battle-field where an Austrian victory over the Sardinians sealed the fate of the Italian states allied with him, and his son, Victor Emmanuel, succeeded him. As to what took place ten years later, when the Austrians were finally expelled from Lombardy, and the transitory sovereigns of the duchies and of Naples flitted for good, and the Pope’s dominion was reduced to the meager size it kept till 1871, and the Italian states were united under one constitutional king — I need not speak.

In this way the governments of Italy had been four times wholly changed, and each of these changes was attended by the most marked variations in the intellectual life of the people; yet its general tendency always continued the same.

III

The longing for freedom is the instinct of self-preservation in literature; and, consciously or unconsciously, the Italian poets of the last hundred years constantly inspired the Italian people with ideas of liberty and independence. Of course the popular movements affected literature in turn; and I should by no means attempt to say which had been the greater agency of progress. It is not to be supposed that a man like Alfieri, with all his tragical eloquence against tyrants, arose singly out of a perfectly servile society. His time was, no doubt, ready for him, though it did not seem so; but, on the other hand, there is no doubt that he gave not only an utterance but a mighty impulse to contemporary thought and feeling. He was in literature what the revolution was in politics, and if hardly any principle that either sought immediately to establish now stands, it is none the less certain that the time had come to destroy what they overthrew, and that what they overthrew was hopelessly vicious.

In Alfieri the great literary movement came from the north, and by far the larger number of the writers of whom I shall have to speak were northern Italians. Alfieri may represent for us the period of time covered by the French democratic conquests. The principal poets under the Italian governments of Napoleon during the first twelve years of this century were Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo — the former a Ferrarese by birth and the latter a Greco-Venetian. The literary as well as the political center was then Milan, and it continued to be so for many years after the return of the Austrians, when the so-called School of Resignation nourished there. This epoch may be most intelligibly represented by the names of Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, and Tommaso Grossi — all Lombards. About 1830 a new literary life began to be felt in Florence under the indifferentism or toleration of the grand-dukes. The chiefs of this school were Giacomo Leopardi; Giambattista Niccolini, the author of certain famous tragedies of political complexion; Guerrazzi, the writer of a great number of revolutionary romances; and Giuseppe Giusti, a poet of very marked and peculiar powers, and perhaps the greatest political satirist of the century. The chief poets of a later time were Aleardo Aleardi, a Veronese; Giovanni Prati, who was born in the Trentino, near the Tyrol; and Francesco Dall Ongaro, a native of Trieste. I shall mention all these and others particularly hereafter, and I have now only named them to show how almost entirely the literary life of militant Italy sprang from the north. There were one or two Neapolitan poets of less note, among whom was Gabriele Rossetti, the father of the English Rossettis, now so well known in art and literature.

IV

In dealing with this poetry, I naturally seek to give its universal and aesthetic flavor wherever it is separable from its political quality; for I should not hope to interest any one else in what I had myself often found very tiresome. I suspect, indeed, that political satire and invective are not relished best in free countries. No danger attends their exercise; there is none of the charm of secrecy or the pleasure of transgression in their production; there is no special poignancy to free administrations in any one of ten thousand assaults upon them; the poets leave this sort of thing mostly to the newspapers. Besides, we have not, so to speak, the grounds that such a long-struggling people as the Italians had for the enjoyment of patriotic poetry. As an average American, I have found myself very greatly embarrassed when required, by Count Alfieri, for example, to hate tyrants. Of course I do hate them in a general sort of way; but having never seen one, how is it possible for me to feel any personal fury toward them? When the later Italian poets ask me to loathe spies and priests I am equally at a loss. I can hardly form the idea of a spy, of an agent of the police, paid to haunt the steps of honest men, to overhear their speech, and, if possible, entrap them into a political offense. As to priests — well, yes, I suppose they are bad, though I do not know this from experience; and I find them generally upon acquaintance very amiable. But all this was different with the Italians: they had known, seen, and felt tyrants, both foreign and domestic, of every kind; spies and informers had helped to make their restricted lives anxious and insecure; and priests had leagued themselves with the police and the oppressors until the Church, which should have been kept a sacred refuge from all the sorrows and wrongs of the world, became the most dreadful of its prisons. It is no wonder that the literature of these people should have been so filled with the patriotic passion of their life; and I am not sure that literature is not as nobly employed in exciting men to heroism and martyrdom for a great cause as in the purveyance of mere intellectual delights. What it was in Italy when it made this its chief business we may best learn from an inquiry that I have at last found somewhat amusing. It will lead us over vast meadows of green baize enameled with artificial flowers, among streams that do nothing but purl. In this region the shadows are mostly brown, and the mountains are invariably horrid; there are tumbling floods and sighing groves; there are naturally nymphs and swains; and the chief business of life is to be in love and not to be in love; to burn and to freeze without regard to the mercury. Need I say that this region is Arcady?

ARCADIAN SHEPHERDS

One day, near the close of the seventeenth century, a number of ladies and gentlemen — mostly poets and poetesses according to their thinking were assembled on a pleasant hill in the neighborhood of Rome. As they lounged upon the grass, in attitudes as graceful and picturesque as they could contrive, and listened to a sonnet or an ode with the sweet patience of their race, — for they were all Italians, — it occurred to the most conscious man among them that here was something uncommonly like the Golden Age, unless that epoch had been flattered. There had been reading and praising of odes and sonnets the whole blessed afternoon, and now he cried out to the complaisant, canorous company, “Behold Arcadia revived in us!”

This struck everybody at once by its truth. It struck, most of all, a certain Giovan Maria Crescimbeni, honored in his day and despised in ours as a poet and critic. He was of a cold, dull temperament; “a mind half lead, half wood”, as one Italian writer calls him; but he was an inveterate maker of verses, and he was wise in his own generation. He straightway proposed to the tuneful abb�s, cavalieri serventi, and pr�cieuses, who went singing and love-making up and down Italy in those times, the foundation of a new academy, to be called the Academy of the Arcadians.

Literary academies were then the fashion in Italy, and every part of the peninsula abounded in them. They bore names fanciful or grotesque, such as The Ardent, The Illuminated, The Unconquered, The Intrepid, or The Dissonant, The Sterile, The Insipid, The Obtuse, The Astray, The Stunned, and they were all devoted to one purpose, namely, the production and the perpetuation of twaddle. It is prodigious to think of the incessant wash of slip-slop which they poured out in verse; of the grave disputations they held upon the most trivial questions; of the inane formalities of their sessions. At the meetings of a famous academy in Milan, they placed in the chair a child just able to talk; a question was proposed, and the answer of the child, whatever it was, was held by one side to solve the problem, and the debates, pro and con, followed upon this point. Other academies in other cities had other follies; but whatever the absurdity, it was encouraged alike by Church and State, and honored by all the great world. The governments of Italy in that day, whether lay or clerical, liked nothing so well as to have the intellectual life of the nation squandered in the trivialities of the academies — in their debates about nothing, their odes and madrigals and masks and sonnets; and the greatest politeness you could show a stranger was to invite him to a sitting of your academy; to be furnished with a letter to the academy in the next city was the highest favor you could ask for yourself.

In literature, the humorous Bernesque school had passed; Tasso had long been dead; and the Neapolitan Marini, called the Corrupter of Italian poetry, ruled from his grave the taste of the time. This taste was so bad as to require a very desperate remedy, and it was professedly to counteract it that the Academy of the Arcadians had arisen.

The epoch was favorable, and, as Emiliani-Giudici (whom we shall follow for the present) teaches, in his History of Italian Literature, the idea of Crescimbeni spread electrically throughout Italy. The gayest of the finest ladies and gentlemen the world ever saw, the illustrissimi of that polite age, united with monks, priests, cardinals, and scientific thinkers in establishing the Arcadia; and even popes and kings were proud to enlist in the crusade for the true poetic faith. In all the chief cities Arcadian colonies were formed, “dependent upon the Roman Arcadia, as upon the supreme Arch-Flock”, and in three years the Academy numbered thirteen hundred members, every one of whom had first been obliged to give proof that he was a good poet. They prettily called themselves by the names of shepherds and shepherdesses out of Theocritus, and, being a republic, they refused to own any earthly prince or ruler, but declared the Baby Jesus to be the Protector of Arcadia. Their code of laws was written in elegant Latin by a grave and learned man, and inscribed upon tablets of marble.

According to one of the articles, the Academicians must study to reproduce the customs of the ancient Arcadians and the character of their poetry; and straightway “Italy was filled on every hand with Thyrsides, Menalcases, and Meliboeuses, who made their harmonious songs resound the names of their Chlorises, their Phyllises, their Niceas; and there was poured out a deluge of pastoral compositions”, some of them by “earnest thinkers and philosophical writers, who were not ashamed to assist in sustaining that miserable literary vanity which, in the history of human thought, will remain a lamentable witness to the moral depression of the Italian nation.” As a pattern of perfect poetizing, these artless nymphs and swains chose Constanzo, a very fair poet of the sixteenth century. They collected his verse, and printed it at the expense of the Academy; and it was established without dissent that each Arcadian in turn, at the hut of some conspicuous shepherd, in the presence of the keeper (such was the jargon of those most amusing unrealities), should deliver a commentary upon some sonnet of Constanzo. As for Crescimbeni, who declared that Arcadia was instituted “strictly for the purpose of exterminating bad taste and of guarding against its revival, pursuing it continually, wherever it should pause or lurk, even to the most remote and unconsidered villages and hamlets” — Crescimbeni could not do less than write four dialogues, as he did, in which he evolved from four of Constanzo’s sonnets all that was necessary for Tuscan lyric poetry.

“Thus,” says Emiliani-Giudici, referring to the crusading intent of Crescimbeni, “the Arcadians were a sect of poetical Sanfedista, who, taking for example the zeal and performance of San Domingo de Gruzman, proposed to renew in literature the scenes of the Holy Office among the Albigenses. Happily, the fire of Arcadian verse did not really burn! The institution was at first derided, then it triumphed and prevailed in such fame and greatness that, shining forth like a new sun, it consumed the splendor of the lesser lights of heaven, eclipsing the glitter of all those academies — the Thunderstruck, the Extravagant, the Humid, the Tipsy, the Imbeciles, and the like — which had hitherto formed the glory of the Peninsula.”

I

Giuseppe Torelli, a charming modern Italian writer, in a volume called Paessaggi e Profili (Landscapes and Profiles), makes a study of Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, one of the most famous of the famous Arcadian shepherds; and from this we may learn something of the age and society in which such a folly could not only be possible but illustrious. The patriotic Italian critics and historians are apt to give at least a full share of blame to foreign rulers for the corruption of their nation, and Signor Torelli finds the Spanish domination over a vast part of Italy responsible for the degradation of Italian mind and manners in the seventeenth century. He declares that, because of the Spaniards, the Italian theater was then silent, “or filled with the noise of insipid allegories”; there was little or no education among the common people; the slender literature that survived existed solely for the amusement and distinction of the great; the army and the Church were the only avenues of escape from obscurity and poverty; all classes were sunk in indolence.

The social customs were mostly copied from France, except that purely Italian invention, the cavaliere servente, who was in great vogue. But there were everywhere in the cities coteries of fine ladies, called preziose, who were formed upon the French pr�cieuses ridiculed by Moli�re, and were, I suppose, something like what is called in Boston demi-semi-literary ladies — ladies who cultivated alike the muses and the modes. The preziose held weekly receptions at their houses, and assembled poets and cavaliers from all quarters, who entertained the ladies with their lampoons and gallantries, their madrigals and gossip, their sonnets and their repartees. “Little by little the poets had the better of the cavaliers: a felicitous rhyme was valued more than an elaborately constructed compliment.” And this easy form of literature became the highest fashion. People hastened to call themselves by the sentimental pastoral names of the Arcadians, and almost forgot their love-intrigues so much were they absorbed in the production and applause of “toasts, epitaphs for dogs, verses on wagers, epigrams on fruits, on Echo, on the Marchioness’s canaries, on the Saints. These were read here and repeated there, declaimed in the public resorts and on the promenades”, and gravely studied and commented on. A strange and surprising jargon arose, the utterance of the feeblest and emptiest affectation. “In those days eyes were not eyes, but pupils; not pupils, but orbs; not orbs, but the Devil knows what,” says Signor Torelli, losing patience. It was the golden age of pretty words; and as to the sense of a composition, good society troubled itself very little about that. Good society expressed itself in a sort of poetical gibberish, “and whoever had said, for example, Muses instead of Castalian Divinities, would have passed for a lowbred person dropped from some mountain village. Men of fine mind, rich gentlemen of leisure, brilliant and accomplished ladies, had resolved that the time was come to lose their wits academically.”

II

In such a world Arcadia nourished; into such a world that illustrious shepherd, Carlo Innocenze Frugoni, was born. He was the younger son of a noble family of Genoa, and in youth was sent into a cloister as a genteel means of existence rather than from regard to his own wishes or fitness. He was, in fact, of a very gay and mundane temper, and escaped from his monastery as soon as ever he could, and spent his long life thereafter at the comfortable court of Parma, where he sang with great constancy the fortunes of varying dynasties and celebrated in his verse all the polite events of society. Of course, even a life so pleasant as this had its little pains and mortifications; and it is history that when, in 1731, the last duke of the Farnese family died, leaving a widow, “Frugoni predicted and maintained in twenty-five sonnets that she would yet give an heir to the duke; but in spite of the twenty-five sonnets the affair turned out otherwise, and the extinction of the house of Farnese was written.”

Frugoni, however, was taken into favor by the Spanish Bourbon who succeeded, and after he had got himself unfrocked with infinite difficulty (and only upon the intercession of divers princes and prelates), he was as happy as any man of real talent could be who devoted his gifts to the merest intellectual trifling. Not long before his death he was addressed by one that wished to write his life. He made answer that he had been a versifier and nothing more, epigrammatically recounted the chief facts of his career, and ended by saying, “of what I have written it is not worth while to speak”; and posterity has upon the whole agreed with him, though, of course, no edition of the Italian classics would be perfect without him. We know this from the classics of our own tongue, which abound in marvels of insipidity and emptiness.

But all this does not make him less interesting as a figure in that amusing literarified society; and we may be glad to see him in Parma with Signor Torelli’s eyes, as he “issues smug, ornate, with his well-fitting, polished shoe, his handsome leg in its neat stocking, his whole immaculate person, and his demure visage, and, gently sauntering from Casa Caprara, takes his way toward Casa Landi.”

I do not know Casa Landi; I have never seen it; and yet I think I can tell you of it: a gloomy-fronted pile of Romanesque architecture, the lower story remarkable for its weather-stained, vermiculated stone, and the ornamental iron gratings at the windows. The porte-coch�re stands wide open and shows the leaf and blossom of a lovely garden inside, with a tinkling fountain in the midst. The marble nymphs and naiads inhabiting the shrubbery and the water are already somewhat time-worn, and have here and there a touch of envious mildew; but as yet their noses are unbroken, and they have all the legs and arms that the sculptor designed them with; and the fountain, which after disasters must choke, plays prettily enough over their nude loveliness; for it is now the first half of the eighteenth century, and Casa Landi is the uninvaded sanctuary of Illustrissimi and Illustrissime. The resplendent porter who admits our melodious Abbate Carlo, and the gay lackey who runs before his smiling face to open the door of the sala where the company is assembled, may have had nothing to speak of for breakfast, but they are full of zeal for the grandeur they serve, and would not know what the rights of man were if you told them. They, too, have their idleness and their intrigues and their life of pleasure; but, poor souls! they fade pitiably in the magnificence of that noble assembly in the sala. What coats of silk and waistcoats of satin, what trig rapiers and flowing wigs and laces and ruffles; and, ah me! what hoops and brocades, what paint and patches! Behind the chair of every lady stands her cavaliere servente, or bows before her with a cup of chocolate, or, sweet abasement! stoops to adjust the foot-stool better to her satin shoe. There is a buzz of satirical expectation, no doubt, till the abbate arrives, “and then, after the first compliments and obeisances,” says Signor Torelli, “he throws his hat upon the great arm-chair, recounts the chronicle of the gay world,” and prepares for the special entertainment of the occasion.

“‘What is there new on Parnassus?’ he is probably asked.

“‘Nothing’, he replies, ‘save the bleating of a lambkin lost upon the lonely heights of the sacred hill.’

“‘I’ll wager,’ cries one of the ladies, ‘that the shepherd who has lost this lambkin is our Abbate Carlo!’

“‘And what can escape the penetrating eye of Aglauro Cidonia?’ retorts Frugoni, softly, with a modest air.

“‘Let us hear its bleating!’ cries the lady of the house.

“‘Let us hear it!’ echo her husband and her cavaliere servente.

“‘Let us hear it!’ cry one, two, three, a half-dozen, visitors.

“Frugoni reads his new production; ten exclamations receive the first strophe; the second awakens twenty evvivas; and when the reading is ended the noise of the plaudits is so great that they cannot be counted. His new production has cost Frugoni half an hour’s work; it is possibly the answer to some Mecaenas who has invited him to his country-seat, or the funeral eulogy of some well-known cat. Is fame bought at so cheap a rate? He is a fool who would buy it dearer; and with this reasoning, which certainly is not without foundation, Frugoni remained Frugoni when he might have been something very much better.... If a bird sang, or a cat sneezed, or a dinner was given, or the talk turned upon anything no matter how remote from poetry, it was still for Frugoni an invitation to some impromptu effusion. If he pricked his finger in mending a pen, he called from on high the god of Lemnos and all the ironworkers of Olympus, not excepting Mars, whom it was not reasonable to disturb for so little, and launched innumerable reproaches at them, since without their invention of arms a penknife would never have been made. If the heavens cleared up after a long rain, all the signs of the zodiac were laid under contribution and charged to give an account of their performance. If somebody died, he instantly poured forth rivers of tears in company with the nymphs of Eridanus and the Heliades; he upraided Phaethon, Themis, the Shades of Erebus, and the Parcae.... The Amaryllises, the Dryads, the Fauns, the woolly lambs, the shepherds, the groves, the demigods, the Castalian Virgins, the loose-haired nymphs, the leafy boughs, the goat-footed gods, the Graces, the pastoral pipes, and all the other sylvan rubbish were the prime materials of every poetic composition.”

III

Signor Torelli is less severe than Emiliani-Giudici upon the founders of the Arcadia, and thinks they may have had intentions quite different from the academical follies that resulted; while Leigh Hunt, who has some account of the Arcadia in his charming essay on the Sonnet, feels none of the national shame of the Italian critics, and is able to write of it with perfect gayety. He finds a reason for its amazing success in the childlike traits of Italian character; and, reminding his readers that the Arcadia was established in 1690, declares that what the Englishmen of William and Mary’s reign would have received with shouts of laughter, and the French under Louis XIV, would have corrupted and made perilous to decency, “was so mixed up with better things in these imaginative and, strange as it may seem, most unaffected people, the Italians, — for such they are, — that, far from disgusting a nation accustomed to romantic impulses and to the singing of poetry in their streets and gondolas, their gravest and most distinguished men and, in many instances, women, too, ran childlike into the delusion. The best of their poets”, the sweet-tongued Filicaja among others, “accepted farms in Arcadia forthwith; ... and so little transitory did the fashion turn out to be, that not only was Crescimbeni its active officer for eight-and-thirty years, but the society, to whatever state of insignificance it may have been reduced, exists at the present moment”.

Leigh Hunt names among Englishmen who were made Shepherds of Arcadia, Mathias, author of the “Pursuits of Literature”, and Joseph Cowper, “who wrote the Memoirs of Tassoni and an historical memoir of Italian tragedy”, Haly, and Mrs. Thrale, as well as those poor Delia Cruscans whom bloody-minded Gifford champed between his tusked jaws in his now forgotten satires. Pope Pius VII. gave the Arcadians a suite of apartments in the Vatican; but I dare say the wicked tyranny now existing at Rome has deprived the harmless swains of this shelter, if indeed they had not been turned out before Victor Emmanuel came.

In the chapter on the Arcadia, with which Vernon Lee opens her admirable Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, she tells us of several visits which she recently paid to the Bosco Parrasio, long the chief fold of the Academy. She found it with difficulty on the road to the Villa Pamphili, in a neighborhood wholly ignorant of Arcadia and of the relation of Bosco Parrasio to it. “The house, once the summer resort of Arcadian sonneteers, was now abandoned to a family of market-gardeners, who hung their hats and jackets on the marble heads of improvvisatori and crowned poetesses, and threw their beans, maize, and garden-tools into the corners of the desolate reception-rooms, from whose mildewed walls looked down a host of celebrities — brocaded doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals, simpering drearily in their desolation,” and “sad, haggard poetesses in sea-green and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks and meager arms, holding lyres; fat, ill-shaven priests in white bands and mop-wigs; sonneteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-colored stomachers and embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary poets, flaunting in many-colored waistcoats and gorgeous shawls.”

But whatever the material adversity of Arcadia, it still continues to reward ascertained merit by grants of pasturage out of its ideal domains. Indeed, it is but a few years since our own Longfellow, on a visit to Rome, was waited upon by the secretary of the Arch-Flock, and presented, after due ceremonies and the reading of a floral and herbaceous sonnet, with a parchment bestowing upon him some very magnificent possessions in that extraordinary dreamland. In telling me of this he tried to recall his Arcadian name, but could only remember that it was “Olympico something.”

GIUSEPPE PARINI

I

In 1748 began for Italy a peace of nearly fifty years, when the Wars of the Succession, with which the contesting strangers had ravaged her soil, absolutely ceased. In Lombardy the Austrian rulers who had succeeded the Spaniards did and suffered to be done many things for the material improvement of a province which they were content to hold, while leaving the administration mainly to the Lombards; the Spanish Bourbon at Naples also did as little harm and as much good to his realm as a Bourbon could; Pier Leopoldo of Tuscany, Don Filippo I. of Parma, Francis III. of Modena, and the Popes Benedict XIV., Clement XIV., and Pius VI. were all disposed to be paternally beneficent to their peoples, who at least had repose under them, and in this period gave such names to science as those of Galvani and Volta, to humanity that of Beccaria, to letters those of Alfieri, Filicaja, Goldoni, Parini, and many others.

But in spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period, Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue to the social history of the time; but the idea which remains in the mind is one of a tranquillity in which every person of breeding devoted himself to the cult of some muse or other, and established himself as the conventional admirer of his neighbor’s wife. The great Academy of Arcadia, founded to restore good taste in poetry, prescribed conditions by which everybody, of whatever age or sex, could become a poetaster, and good society expected every gentleman and lady to be in love. The Arcadia still exists, but that gallant society hardly survived the eighteenth century. Perhaps the greatest wonder about it is that it could have lasted so long as it did. Its end was certainly not delayed for want of satirists who perceived its folly and pursued it with scorn. But this again only brings one doubt, often felt, whether satire ever accomplished anything beyond a lively portraiture of conditions it proposed to reform.

It is the opinion of some Italian critics that Italian demoralization began with the reaction against Luther, when the Jesuits rose to supreme power in the Church and gathered the whole education of the young into the hands of the priests. Cesare Cant�, whose book on Parini ed il suo Secolo may be read with pleasure and instruction by such as like to know more fully the time of which I speak, was of this mind; he became before his death a leader of the clerical party in Italy, and may be supposed to be without unfriendly prejudice. He alleges that the priestly education made the Italians literati rather than citizens; Latinists, poets, instead of good magistrates, workers, fathers of families; it cultivated the memory at the expense of the judgment, the fancy at the cost of the reason, and made them selfish, polished, false; it left a boy “apathetic, irresolute, thoughtless, pusillanimous; he flattered his superiors and hated his fellows, in each of whom he dreaded a spy.” He knew the beautiful and loved the grandiose; his pride of family and ancestry was inordinately pampered. What other training he had was in the graces and accomplishments; he was thoroughly instructed in so much of warlike exercise as enabled him to handle a rapier perfectly and to conduct or fight a duel with punctilio.

But he was no warrior; his career was peace. The old medieval Italians who had combated like lions against the French and Germans and against each other, when resting from the labors and the high conceptions which have left us the chief sculptures and architecture of the Peninsula, were dead; and their posterity had almost ceased to know war. Italy had indeed still remained a battle-ground, but not for Italian quarrels nor for Italian swords; the powers which, like Venice, could afford to have quarrels of their own, mostly hired other people to fight them out. All the independent states of the Peninsula had armies, but armies that did nothing; in Lombardy, neither Frenchman, Spaniard, nor Austrian had been able to recruit or draft soldiers; the flight of young men from the conscription depopulated the province, until at last Francis II. declared it exempt from military service; Piedmont, the Macedon, the Boeotia of that Greece, alone remained warlike, and Piedmont was alone able, when the hour came, to show Italy how to do for herself.

Yet, except in the maritime republics, the army, idle and unwarlike as it was in most cases, continued to be one of the three careers open to the younger sons of good family; the civil service and the Church were the other two. In Genoa, nobles had engaged in commerce with equal honor and profit; nearly every argosy that sailed to or from the port of Venice belonged to some lordly speculator; but in Milan a noble who descended to trade lost his nobility, by a law not abrogated till the time of Charles IV. The nobles had therefore nothing to do. They could not go into business; if they entered the army it was not to fight; the civil service was of course actually performed by subordinates; there were not cures for half the priests, and there grew up that odd, polite rabble of abbati, like our good Frugoni, priests without cures, sometimes attached to noble families as chaplains, sometimes devoting themselves to literature or science, sometimes leading lives of mere leisure and fashion; they were mostly of plebeian origin when they did anything at all besides pay court to the ladies.

In Milan the nobles were exempt from many taxes paid by the plebeians; they had separate courts of law, with judges of their own order, before whom a plebeian plaintiff appeared with what hope of justice can be imagined. Yet they were not oppressive; they were at worst only insolent to their inferiors, and they commonly used them with the gentleness which an Italian can hardly fail in. There were many ties of kindness between the classes, the memory of favors and services between master and servant, landlord and tenant, in relations which then lasted a life-time, and even for generations. In Venice, where it was one of the high privileges of the patrician to spit from his box at the theater upon the heads of the people in the pit, the familiar bond of patron and client so endeared the old republican nobles to the populace that the Venetian poor of this day, who know them only by tradition, still lament them. But, on the whole, men have found it at Venice, as elsewhere, better not to be spit upon, even by an affectionate nobility.

The patricians were luxurious everywhere. In Rome they built splendid palaces, in Milan they gave gorgeous dinners. Goldoni, in his charming memoirs, tells us that the Milanese of his time never met anywhere without talking of eating, and they did eat upon all possible occasions, public, domestic, and religious; throughout Italy they have yet the nickname of lupi lombardi (Lombard wolves) which their good appetites won them. The nobles of that gay old Milan were very hospitable, easy of access to persons of the proper number of descents, and full of invitations for the stranger. A French writer found their cooking delicate and estimable as that of his own nation; but he adds that many of these friendly, well-dining aristocrats had not good ton. One can think of them at our distance of time and place with a kindness which Italian critics, especially those of the bitter period of struggle about the middle of this century, do not affect. Emiliani-Giudici, for example, does not, when he calls them and their order throughout Italy an aristocratic leprosy. He assures us that at the time of that long peace “the moral degradation of what the French call the great world was the inveterate habit of centuries; the nobles wallowed in their filth untouched by remorse”; and he speaks of them as “gilded swine, vain of the glories of their blazons, which they dragged through the mire of their vices.”

II

This is when he is about to consider a poem in which the Lombard nobility are satirized — if it was satire to paint them to the life. He says that he would be at a loss what passages to quote from it, but fortunately “an unanimous posterity has done Parini due honor”; and he supposes “now there is no man, of whatever sect or opinion, but has read his immortal poem, and has its finest scenes by heart.” It is this fact which embarrasses me, however, for how am I to rehabilitate a certain obsolete characteristic figure without quoting from Parini, and constantly wearying people with what they know already so well? The gentle reader, familiar with Parini’s immortal poem ——

The Gentle Reader. — His immortal poem? What is his immortal poem? I never heard even the name of it!

Is it possible? But you, fair reader, who have its finest scenes by heart ——

The Fair Reader. — Yes, certainly; of course. But one reads so many things. I don’t believe I half remember those striking passages of —— what is the poem? And who did you say the author was?

Oh, madam! And is this undying fame? Is this the immortality for which we waste our time? Is this the remembrance for which the essayist sicklies his visage over with the pale cast of thought? Why, at this rate, even those whose books are favorably noticed by the newspapers will be forgotten in a thousand years. But it is at least consoling to know that you have merely forgotten Parini’s poems, the subject of which you will at once recollect when I remind you that it is called The Day, and celebrates The Morning, The Noon, The Evening, and The Night of a gentleman of fashion as Milan knew him for fifty years in the last century.

This gentleman, whatever his nominal business in the world might be, was first and above all a cavaliere servente, and the cavaliere servente was the invention, it is said, of Genoese husbands who had not the leisure to attend their wives to the theater, the promenade, the card-table, the conversazione, and so installed their nearest idle friends permanently in the office. The arrangement was found so convenient that the cavaliere servente presently spread throughout Italy; no lady of fashion was thought properly appointed without one; and the office was now no longer reserved to bachelors; it was not at all good form for husband and wife to love each other, and the husband became the cavalier of some other lady, and the whole fine world was thus united, by a usage of which it is very hard to know just how far it was wicked and how far it was only foolish; perhaps it is safest to say that at the best it was apt to be somewhat of the one and always a great deal of the other. In the good society of that day, marriage meant a settlement in life for the girl who had escaped her sister’s fate of a sometimes forced religious vocation. But it did not matter so much about the husband if the marriage contract stipulated that she should have her cavaliere servente, and, as sometimes happened, specified him by name. With her husband there was a union of fortunes, with the expectation of heirs; the companionship, the confidence, the faith, was with the cavalier; there could be no domesticity, no family life with either. The cavaliere servente went with his lady to church, where he dipped his finger in the holy-water and offered it her to moisten her own finger at; and he held her prayer-book for her when she rose from her knees and bowed to the high altar. In fact, his place seems to have been as fully acknowledged and honored, if not by the Church, then by all the other competent authorities, as that of the husband. Like other things, his relation to his lady was subject to complication and abuse; no doubt, ladies of fickle minds changed their cavaliers rather often; and in those days following the disorder of the French invasions, the relation suffered deplorable exaggerations and perversions. But when Giuseppe Parini so minutely and graphically depicted the day of a noble Lombard youth, the cavaliere servente was in his most prosperous and illustrious state; and some who have studied Italian social conditions in the past bid us not too virtuously condemn him, since, preposterous as he was, his existence was an amelioration of disorders at which we shall find it better not even to look askance.

Parini’s poem is written in the form of instructions to the hero for the politest disposal of his time; and in a strain of polished irony allots the follies of his day to their proper hours. The poet’s apparent seriousness never fails him, but he does not suffer his irony to become a burden to the reader, relieving it constantly with pictures, episodes, and excursions, and now and then breaking into a strain of solemn poetry which is fine enough. The work will suggest to the English reader the light mockery of “The Rape of the Lock”, and in less degree some qualities of Gray’s “Trivia”; but in form and manner it is more like Phillips’s “Splendid Shilling” than either of these; and yet it is not at all like the last in being a mere burlesque of the epic style. These resemblances have been noted by Italian critics, who find them as unsatisfactory as myself; but they will serve to make the extracts I am to give a little more intelligible to the reader who does not recur to the whole poem. Parini was not one to break a butterfly upon a wheel; he felt the fatuity of heavily moralizing upon his material; the only way was to treat it with affected gravity, and to use his hero with the respect which best mocks absurdity. One of his arts is to contrast the deeds of his hero with those of his forefathers, of which he is so proud, — of course the contrast is to the disadvantage of the forefathers, — and in these allusions to the past glories of Italy it seems to me that the modern patriotic poetry which has done so much to make Italy begins for the first time to feel its wings.

Parini was in all things a very stanch, brave, and original spirit, and if he was of any school, it was that of the Venetian, Gasparo Gozzi, who wrote pungent and amusing social satires in blank verse, and published at Venice an essay-paper, like the “Spectator”, the name of which he turned into l’Osservatore. It dealt, like the “Spectator” and all that race of journals, with questions of letters and manners, and was long honored, like the “Spectator”, as a model of prose. With an apparent prevalence of French taste, there was in fact much study by Italian authors of English literature at this time, which was encouraged by Dr. Johnson’s friend, Baretti, the author of the famous Frusta Letteraria (Literary Scourge), which drew blood from so many authorlings, now bloodless; it was wielded with more severity than wisdom, and fell pretty indiscriminately upon the bad and the good. It scourged among others Goldoni, the greatest master of the comic art then living, but it spared our Parini, the first part of whose poem Baretti salutes with many kindly phrases, though he cannot help advising him to turn the poem into rhyme. But when did a critic ever know less than a poet about a poet’s business?

III

The first part of Parini’s Day is Morning, that mature hour at which the hero awakes from the glories and fatigues of the past night. His valet appears, and throwing open the shutters asks whether he will have coffee or chocolate in bed, and when he has broken his fast and risen, the business of the day begins. The earliest comer is perhaps the dancing-master, whose elegant presence we must not deny ourselves:

                He, entering, stops

  Erect upon the threshold, elevating

  Both shoulders; then contracting like a tortoise

  His neck a little, at the same time drops

  Slightly his chin, and, with the extremest tip

  Of his plumed hat, lightly touches his lips.

In their order come the singing-master and the master of the violin, and, with more impressiveness than the rest, the teacher of French, whose advent hushes all Italian sounds, and who is to instruct the hero to forget his plebeian native tongue. He is to send meanwhile to ask how the lady he serves has passed the night, and attending her response he may read Voltaire in a sumptuous Dutch or French binding, or he may amuse himself with a French romance; or it may happen that the artist whom he has engaged to paint the miniature of his lady (to be placed in the same jeweled case with his own) shall bring his work at this hour for criticism. Then the valets robe him from head to foot in readiness for the hair-dresser and the barber, whose work is completed with the powdering of his hair.

  At last the labor of the learned comb

  Is finished, and the elegant artist strews

  With lightly shaken hand a powdery mist

  To whiten ere their time thy youthful locks.

                          Now take heart,

  And in the bosom of that whirling cloud

  Plunge fearlessly. O brave! O mighty! Thus

  Appeared thine ancestor through smoke and fire

  Of battle, when his country’s trembling gods

  His sword avenged, and shattered the fierce foe

  And put to flight. But he, his visage stained,

  With dust and smoke, and smirched with gore and sweat,

  His hair torn and tossed wild, came from the strife

  A terrible vision, even to compatriots

  His hand had rescued; milder thou by far,

  And fairer to behold, in white array

  Shalt issue presently to bless the eyes

  Of thy fond country, which the mighty arm

  Of thy forefather and thy heavenly smile

  Equally keep content and prosperous.

When the hero is finally dressed for the visit to his lady, it is in this splendid figure:

  Let purple gaiters, clasp thine ankles fine

  In noble leather, that no dust or mire

  Blemish thy foot; down from thy shoulders flow

  Loosely a tunic fair, thy shapely arms

  Cased in its closely-fitting sleeves, whose borders

  Of crimson or of azure velvet let

  The heliotrope’s color tinge. Thy slender throat,

  Encircle with a soft and gauzy band.

                   Thy watch already

  Bids thee make haste to go. O me, how fair

  The Arsenal of tiny charms that hang

  With a harmonious tinkling from its chain!

  What hangs not there of fairy carriages

  And fairy steeds so marvelously feigned

  In gold that every charger seems alive?

This magnificent swell, of the times when swells had the world quite their own way, finds his lady already surrounded with visitors when he calls to revere her, as he would have said, and he can therefore make the more effective arrival. Entering her presence he puts on his very finest manner, which I am sure we might all study to our advantage.

  Let thy right hand be pressed against thy side

  Beneath thy waistcoat, and the other hand

  Upon thy snowy linen rest, and hide

  Next to thy heart; let the breast rise sublime,

  The shoulders broaden both, and bend toward her

  Thy pliant neck; then at the corners close

  Thy lips a little, pointed in the middle

  Somewhat; and from thy month thus set exhale

  A murmur inaudible. Meanwhile her right

  Let her have given, and now softly drop

  On the warm ivory a double kiss.

  Seat thyself then, and with one hand draw closer

  Thy chair to hers, while every tongue is stilled.

  Thou only, bending slightly over, with her

  Exchange in whisper secret nothings, which

  Ye both accompany with mutual smiles

  And covert glances that betray, or seem

  At least, your tender passion to betray.

It must have been mighty pretty, as Master Pepys says, to look at the life from which this scene was painted, for many a dandy of either sex doubtless sat for it. The scene was sometimes heightened by the different humor in which the lady and the cavalier received each other, as for instance when they met with reproaches and offered the spectacle of a lover’s quarrel to the company. In either case, it is for the hero to lead the lady out to dinner.

                                 With a bound

  Rise to thy feet, signor, and give thy hand

  Unto thy lady, whom, tenderly drooping,

  Support thou with thy strength, and to the table

  Accompany, while the guests come after you.

  And last of all the husband follows....

Or rather —

                    If to the husband still

  The vestige of a generous soul remain,

  Let him frequent another board; beside

  Another lady sit, whose husband dines

  Yet somewhere else beside another lady,

  Whose spouse is likewise absent; and so add

  New links unto the chain immense, wherewith

  Love, alternating, binds the whole wide world.

  Behold thy lady seated at the board:

  Relinquish now her hand, and while the servant

  Places the chair that not too far she sit,

  And not so near that her soft bosom press

  Too close against the table, with a spring

  Stoop thou and gather round thy lady’s feet

  The wandering volume of her robe. Beside her

  Then sit thee down; for the true cavalier

  Is not permitted to forsake the side

  Of her he serves, except there should arise

  Some strange occasion warranting the use

  Of so great freedom.

When one reads of these springs and little hops, which were once so elegant, it is almost with a sigh for a world which no longer springs or hops in the service of beauty, or even dreams of doing it. But a passage which will touch the sympathetic with a still keener sense of loss is one which hints how lovely a lady looked when carving, as she then sometimes did:

                      Swiftly now the blade,

  That sharp and polished at thy right hand lies,

  Draw naked forth, and like the blade of Mars

  Flash it upon the eyes of all. The point

  Press ‘twixt thy finger-tips, and bowing low

  Offer the handle to her. Now is seen

  The soft and delicate playing of the muscles

  In the white hand upon its work intent.

  The graces that around the lady stoop

  Clothe themselves in new forms, and from her fingers

  Sportively flying, flutter to the tips

  Of her unconscious rosy knuckles, thence

  To dip into the hollows of the dimples

  That Love beside her knuckles has impressed.

Throughout the dinner it is the part of the well-bred husband — if so ill-bred as to remain at all to sit impassive and quiescent while the cavalier watches over the wife with tender care, prepares her food, offers what agrees with her, and forbids what harms. He is virtually master of the house; he can order the servants about; if the dinner is not to his mind, it is even his high prerogative to scold the cook.

The poet reports something of the talk at table; and here occurs one of the most admired passages of the poem, the light irony of which it is hard to reproduce in a version. One of the guests, in a strain of affected sensibility, has been denouncing man’s cruelty to animals:

  Thus he discourses; and a gentle tear

  Springs, while he speaks, into thy lady’s eyes.

                         She recalls the day —

  Alas, the cruel day! — what time her lap-dog,

  Her beauteous lap-dog, darling of the Graces,

  Sporting in youthful gayety, impressed

  The light mark of her ivory tooth upon

  The rude foot of a menial; he, with bold

  And sacrilegious toe, flung her away.

  Over and over thrice she rolled, and thrice

  Rumpled her silken coat, and thrice inhaled

  With tender nostril the thick, choking dust,

  Then raised imploring cries, and “Help, help, help!”

  She seemed to call, while from the gilded vaults

  Compassionate Echo answered her again,

  And from their cloistral basements in dismay

  The servants rushed, and from the upper rooms

  The pallid maidens trembling flew; all came.

  Thy lady’s face was with reviving essence

  Sprinkled, and she awakened from her swoon.

  Anger and grief convulsed her still; she cast

  A lightning glance upon the guilty menial,

  And thrice with languid voice she called her pet,

  Who rushed to her embrace and seemed to invoke

  Vengeance with her shrill tenor. And revenge

  Thou hadst, fair poodle, darling of the Graces.

  The guilty menial trembled, and with eyes

  Downcast received his doom. Naught him availed

  His twenty years’ desert; naught him availed

  His zeal in secret services; for him

  In vain were prayer and promise; forth he went,

  Spoiled of the livery that till now had made him

  Enviable with the vulgar. And in vain

  He hoped another lord; the tender dames

  Were horror-struck at his atrocious crime,

  And loathed the author. The false wretch succumbed

  With all his squalid brood, and in the streets

  With his lean wife in tatters at his side

  Vainly lamented to the passer-by.

It would be quite out of taste for the lover to sit as apathetic as the husband in the presence of his lady’s guests, and he is to mingle gracefully in the talk from time to time, turning it to such topics as may best serve to exploit his own accomplishments. As a man of the first fashion, he must be in the habit of seeming to have read Horace a little, and it will be a pretty effect to quote him now; one may also show one’s acquaintance with the new French philosophy, and approve its skepticism, while keeping clear of its pernicious doctrines, which insidiously teach —

  That every mortal is his fellow’s peer;

  That not less dear to Nature and to God

  Is he who drives thy carriage, or who guides

  The plow across thy field, than thine own self.

But at last the lady makes a signal to the cavalier that it is time to rise from the table:

                           Spring to thy feet

  The first of all, and drawing near thy lady

  Remove her chair and offer her thy hand,

  And lead her to the other rooms, nor suffer longer

  That the stale reek of viands shall offend

  Her delicate sense. Thee with the rest invites

  The grateful odor of the coffee, where

  It smokes upon a smaller table hid

  And graced with Indian webs. The redolent gums

  That meanwhile burn sweeten and purify

  The heavy atmosphere, and banish thence

  All lingering traces of the feast. — Ye sick

  And poor, whom misery or whom hope perchance

  Has guided in the noonday to these doors,

  Tumultuous, naked, and unsightly throng,

  With mutilated limbs and squalid faces,

  In litters and on crutches, from afar

  Comfort yourselves, and with expanded nostrils

  Drink in the nectar of the feast divine

  That favorable zephyrs waft to you;

  But do not dare besiege these noble precincts,

  Importunately offering her that reigns

  Within your loathsome spectacle of woe!

 — And now, sir, ’tis your office to prepare

  The tiny cup that then shall minister,

  Slow sipped, its liquor to thy lady’s lips;

  And now bethink thee whether she prefer

  The boiling beverage much or little tempered

  With sweet; or if perchance she like it best

  As doth the barbarous spouse, then, when she sits

  Upon brocades of Persia, with light fingers

  The bearded visage of her lord caressing.

With the dinner the second part of the poem, entitled The Noon, concludes, and The Afternoon begins with the visit which the hero and his lady pay to one of her friends. He has already thought with which of the husband’s horses they shall drive out; he has suggested which dress his lady shall wear and which fan she shall carry; he has witnessed the agonizing scene of her parting with her lap-dog, — her children are at nurse and never intrude, — and they have arrived in the palace of the lady on whom they are to call:

  And now the ardent friends to greet each other

  Impatient fly, and pressing breast to breast

  They tenderly embrace, and with alternate kisses

  Their cheeks resound; then, clasping hands, they drop

  Plummet-like down upon the sofa, both

  Together. Seated thus, one flings a phrase,

  Subtle and pointed, at the other’s heart,

  Hinting of certain things that rumor tells,

  And in her turn the other with a sting

  Assails. The lovely face of one is flushed

  With beauteous anger, and the other bites

  Her pretty lips a little; evermore

  At every instant waxes violent

  The anxious agitation of the fans.

  So, in the age of Turpin, if two knights

  Illustrious and well cased in mail encountered

  Upon the way, each cavalier aspired

  To prove the valor of the other in arms,

  And, after greetings courteous and fair,

  They lowered their lances and their chargers dashed

  Ferociously together; then they flung

  The splintered fragments of their spears aside,

  And, fired with generous fury, drew their huge,

  Two-handed swords and rushed upon each other!

  But in the distance through a savage wood

  The clamor of a messenger is heard,

  Who comes full gallop to recall the one

  Unto King Charles, and th’ other to the camp

  Of the young Agramante. Dare thou, too,

  Dare thou, invincible youth, to expose the curls

  And the toupet, so exquisitely dressed

  This very morning, to the deadly shock

  Of the infuriate fans; to new emprises

  Thy fair invite, and thus the extreme effects

  Of their periculous enmity suspend.

Is not this most charmingly done? It seems to me that the warlike interpretation of the scene is delightful; and those embattled fans — their perfumed breath comes down a hundred years in the verse!

The cavalier and his lady now betake them to the promenade, where all the fair world of Milan is walking or driving, with a punctual regularity which still distinguishes Italians in their walks and drives. The place is full of their common acquaintance, and the carriages are at rest for the exchange of greetings and gossip, in which the hero must take his part. All this is described in the same note of ironical seriousness as the rest of the poem, and The Afternoon closes with a strain of stately and grave poetry which admirably heightens the desired effect:

      Behold the servants

  Ready for thy descent; and now skip down

  And smooth the creases from thy coat, and order

  The laces on thy breast; a little stoop,

  And on thy snowy stockings bend a glance,

  And then erect thyself and strut away

  Either to pace the promenade alone, —

  ‘T is thine, if ‘t please thee walk; or else to draw

  Anigh the carriages of other dames.

  Thou clamberest up, and thrustest in thy head

  And arms and shoulders, half thyself within

  The carriage door. There let thy laughter rise

  So loud that from afar thy lady hear,

  And rage to hear, and interrupt the wit

  Of other heroes who had swiftly run

  Amid the dusk to keep her company

  While thou wast absent. O ye powers supreme,

  Suspend the night, and let the noble deeds

  Of my young hero shine upon the world

  In the clear day! Nay, night must follow still

  Her own inviolable laws, and droop

  With silent shades over one half the globe;

  And slowly moving on her dewy feet,

  She blends the varied colors infinite,

  And with the border of her mighty garments

  Blots everything; the sister she of Death

  Leaves but one aspect indistinct, one guise

  To fields and trees, to flowers, to birds and beasts,

  And to the great and to the lowly born,

  Confounding with the painted cheek of beauty

  The haggard face of want, and gold with tatters.

  Nor me will the blind air permit to see

  Which carriages depart, and which remain,

  Secret amidst the shades; but from my hand

  The pencil caught, my hero is involved

  Within the tenebrous and humid veil.

The concluding section of the poem, by chance or by wise design of the author, remains a fragment. In this he follows his hero from the promenade to the evening party, with an account of which The Night is mainly occupied, so far as it goes. There are many lively pictures in it, with light sketches of expression and attitude; but on the whole it has not so many distinctly quotable passages as the other parts of the poem. The perfunctory devotion of the cavalier and the lady continues throughout, and the same ironical reverence depicts them alighting from their carriage, arriving in the presence of the hostess, sharing in the gossip of the guests, supping, and sitting down at those games of chance with which every fashionable house was provided and at which the lady loses or doubles her pin-money. In Milan long trains were then the mode, and any woman might wear them, but only patricians were allowed to have them carried by servants; the rich plebeian must drag her costly skirts in the dust; and the nobility of our hero’s lady is honored by the flunkeys who lift her train as she enters the house. The hostess, seated on a sofa, receives her guests with a few murmured greetings, and then abandons herself to the arduous task of arranging the various partners at cards. When the cavalier serves his lady at supper, he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and spreads it on her lap; such usages and the differences of costume distinguished an evening party at Milan then from the like joy in our time and country.

IV

The poet who sings this gay world with such mocking seriousness was not himself born to the manner of it. He was born plebeian in 1729 at Bosisio, near Lake Pusiano, and his parents were poor. He himself adds that they were honest, but the phrase has now lost its freshness. His father was a dealer in raw silk, and was able to send him to school in Milan, where his scholarship was not equal to his early literary promise. At least he took no prizes; but this often happens with people whose laurels come abundantly later. He was to enter the Church, and in due time he took orders, but he did not desire a cure, and he became, like so many other accomplished abbati, a teacher in noble families (the great and saintly family Borromeo among others), in whose houses and in those he frequented with them he saw the life he paints in his poem. His father was now dead, and he had already supported himself and his mother by copying law-papers; he had, also, at the age of twenty-three, published a small volume of poems, and had been elected a shepherd of Arcadia; but in a country where one’s copyright was good for nothing across the border — scarcely a fair stone’s-throw away — of one’s own little duchy or province, and the printers everywhere stole a book as soon as it was worth stealing, it is not likely that he made great gains by a volume of verses which, later in life, he repudiated. Baretti had then returned from living in London, where he had seen the prosperity of “the trade of an author” in days which we do not now think so very prosperous, and he viewed with open disgust the abject state of authorship in his own country. So there was nothing for Parini to do but to become a maestro in casa. With the Borromei he always remained friends, and in their company he went into society a good deal. Emiliani-Giudici supposes that he came to despise the great world with the same scorn that shows in his poem; but probably he regarded it quite as much with the amused sense of the artist as with the moralist’s indignation; some of his contemporaries accused him of a snobbish fondness for the great, but certainly he did not flatter them, and in one passage of his poem he is at the pains to remind his noble acquaintance that not the smallest drop of patrician blood is microscopically discoverable in his veins. His days were rendered more comfortable when he was appointed editor of the government newspaper, — the only newspaper in Milan, — and yet easier when he was made professor of eloquence in the Academy of Fine Arts. In this employment it was his hard duty to write poems from time to time in praise of archdukes and emperors; but by and by the French Revolution arrived in Milan, and Parini was relieved of that labor. The revolution made an end of archdukes and emperors, but the liberty it bestowed was peculiar, and consisted chiefly in not allowing one to do anything that one liked. The altars were abased, and trees of liberty were planted; for making a tumult about an outraged saint a mob was severely handled by the military, and for “insulting” a tree of liberty a poor fellow at Como was shot. Parini was chosen one of the municipal government, which, apparently popular, could really do nothing but register the decrees of the military commandant. He proved so little useful in this government that he was expelled from it, and, giving his salary to his native parish, he fell into something like his old poverty. He who had laughed to scorn the insolence and folly of the nobles could not enjoy the insolence and folly of the plebeians, and he was unhappy in that wild ferment of ideas, hopes, principles, sentiments, which Milan became in the time of the Cisalpine Republic. He led a retired life, and at last, in 1799, having risen one day to studies which he had never remitted, he died suddenly in his arm-chair.

Many stories are told of his sayings and doings in those troubled days when he tried to serve the public. At the theater once some one cried out, “Long live the republic, death to the aristocrats!” “No,” shouted Parini, who abhorred the abominable bloodthirstiness of the liberators, “long live the republic, death to nobody!” They were going to take away a crucifix from a room where he appeared on public business. “Very well,” he observed; “where Citizen Christ cannot stay, I have nothing to do,” and went out. “Equality doesn’t consist in dragging me down to your level,” he said to one who had impudently given him the thou, “but in raising you to mine, if possible. You will always be a pitiful creature, even though you call yourself Citizen; and though you call me Citizen, you can’t help my being the Abbate Parini.” To another, who reproached him for kindness to an Austrian prisoner, he answered, “I would do as much for a Turk, a Jew, an Arab; I would do it even for you if you were in need.” In his closing years many sought him for literary counsel; those for whom there was hope he encouraged; those for whom there was none, he made it a matter of conscience not to praise. A poor fellow came to repeat him two sonnets, in order to be advised which to print; Parini heard the first, and, without waiting further, besought him “Print the other!”

VITTORIO ALFIERI

Vittorio Alfieri, the Italian poet whom his countrymen would undoubtedly name next after Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, and who, in spite of his limitations, was a man of signal and distinct dramatic power, not surpassed if equaled since, is scarcely more than a name to most English readers. He was born in the year 1749, at Asti, a little city of that Piedmont where there has always been a greater regard for feudal traditions than in any other part of Italy; and he belonged by birth to a nobility which is still the proudest in Europe. “What a singular country is ours!” said the Chevalier Nigra, one of the first diplomats of our time, who for many years managed the delicate and difficult relations of Italy with France during the second empire, but who was the son of an apothecary. “In Paris they admit me everywhere; I am asked to court and petted as few Frenchmen are; but here, in my own city of Turin, it would not be possible for me to be received by the Marchioness Doria;” and if this was true in the afternoon of the nineteenth century, one easily fancies what society must have been at Turin in the forenoon of the eighteenth.

I

It was in the order of the things of that day and country that Alfieri should leave home while a child and go to school at the Academy of Turin. Here, as he tells in that most amusing autobiography of his, he spent several years in acquiring a profound ignorance of whatever he was meant to learn; and he came away a stranger not only to the humanities, but to any one language, speaking a barbarous mixture of French and Piedmontese, and reading little or nothing. Doubtless he does not spare color in this statement, but almost anything you like could be true of the education of a gentleman as a gentleman got it from the Italian priests of the last century. “We translated,” he says, “the ‘Lives of Cornelius Nepos’; but none of us, perhaps not even the masters, knew who these men were whose lives we translated, nor where was their country, nor in what times they lived, nor under what governments, nor what any government was.” He learned Latin enough to turn Virgil’s “Georgics” into his sort of Italian; but when he read Ariosto by stealth, he atoned for his transgression by failing to understand him. Yet Alfieri tells us that he was one of the first scholars of that admirable academy, and he really had some impulses even then toward literature; for he liked reading Goldoni and Metastasio, though he had never heard of the name of Tasso. This was whilst he was still in the primary classes, under strict priestly control; when he passed to a more advanced grade and found himself free to do what he liked in the manner that pleased him best, in common with the young Russians, Germans, and Englishmen then enjoying the advantages of the Academy of Turin, he says that being grounded in no study, directed by no one, and not understanding any language well, he did not know what study to take up, or how to study. “The reading of many French romances,” he goes on, “the constant association with foreigners, and the want of all occasion to speak Italian, or to hear it spoken, drove from my head that small amount of wretched Tuscan which I had contrived to put there in those two or three years of burlesque study of the humanities and asinine rhetoric. In place of it,” he says, “the French entered into my empty brain”; but he is careful to disclaim any literary merit for the French he knew, and he afterward came to hate it, with everything else that was French, very bitterly.

It was before this, a little, that Alfieri contrived his first sonnet, which, when he read it to the uncle with whom he lived, made that old soldier laugh unmercifully, so that until his twenty-fifth year the poet made no further attempts in verse. When he left school he spent three years in travel, after the fashion of those grand-touring days when you had to be a gentleman of birth and fortune in order to travel, and when you journeyed by your own conveyance from capital to capital, with letters to your sovereign’s ambassadors everywhere, and spent your money handsomely upon the dissipations of the countries through which you passed. Alfieri is constantly at the trouble to have us know that he was a very morose and ill-conditioned young animal, and the figure he makes as a traveler is no more amiable than edifying. He had a ruling passion for horses, and then several smaller passions quite as wasteful and idle. He was driven from place to place by a demon of unrest, and was mainly concerned, after reaching a city, in getting away from it as soon as he could. He gives anecdotes enough in proof of this, and he forgets nothing that can enhance the surprise of his future literary greatness. At the Ambrosian Library in Milan they showed him a manuscript of Petrarch’s, which, “like a true barbarian,” as he says, he flung aside, declaring that he knew nothing about it, having a rancor against this Petrarch, whom he had once tried to read and had understood as little as Ariosto. At Rome the Sardinian minister innocently affronted him by repeating some verses of Marcellus, which the sulky young noble could not comprehend. In Ferrara he did not remember that it was the city of that divine Ariosto whose poem was the first that came into his hands, and which he had now read in part with infinite pleasure. “But my poor intellect,” he says, “was then sleeping a most sordid sleep, and every day, as far as regards letters, rusted more and more. It is true, however, that with respect to knowledge of the world and of men I constantly learned not a little, without taking note of it, so many and diverse were the phases of life and manners that I daily beheld.” At Florence he visited the galleries and churches with much disgust and no feeling, for the beautiful, especially in painting, his eyes being very dull to color. “If I liked anything better, it was sculpture a little, and architecture yet a little more”; and it is interesting to note how all his tragedies reflect these preferences, in their lack of color and in their sculpturesque sharpness of outline.

From Italy he passed as restlessly into France, yet with something of a more definite intention, for he meant to frequent the French theater. He had seen a company of French players at Turin, and had acquainted himself with the most famous French tragedies and comedies, but with no thought of writing tragedies of his own. He felt no creative impulse, and he liked the comedies best, though, as he says, he was by nature more inclined to tears than to laughter. But he does not seem to have enjoyed the theater much in Paris, a city for which he conceived at once the greatest dislike, he says, “on account of the squalor and barbarity of the buildings, the absurd and pitiful pomp of the few houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably misshapen and beplastered faces of those ugliest of women.”

He had at this time already conceived that hatred of kings which breathes, or, I may better say, bellows, from his tragedies; and he was enraged even beyond his habitual fury by his reception at court, where it was etiquette for Louis XV. to stare at him from head to foot and give no sign of having received any impression whatever.

In Holland he fell in love, for the first time, and as was requisite in the polite society of that day, the object of his passion was another man’s wife. In England he fell in love the second time, and as fashionably as before. The intrigue lasted for months; in the end it came to a duel with the lady’s husband and a great scandal in the newspapers; but in spite of these displeasures, Alfieri liked everything in England. “The streets, the taverns, the horses, the women, the universal prosperity, the life and activity of that island, the cleanliness and convenience of the houses, though extremely little,” — as they still strike every one coming from Italy, — these and other charms of “that fortunate and free country” made an impression upon him that never was effaced. He did not at that time, he says, “study profoundly the constitution, mother of so much prosperity,” but he “knew enough to observe and value its sublime effects.”

Before his memorable sojourn in England, he spent half a year at Turin reading Rousseau, among other philosophers, and Voltaire, whose prose delighted and whose verse wearied him. “But the book of books for me,” he says, “and the one which that winter caused me to pass hours of bliss and rapture, was Plutarch, his Lives of the truly great; and some of these, as Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and others, I read and read again, with such a transport of cries, tears, and fury, that if any one had heard me in the next room he would surely have thought me mad. In meditating certain grand traits of these supreme men, I often leaped to my feet, agitated and out of my senses, and tears of grief and rage escaped me to think that I was born in Piedmont, and in a time, and under a government, where no high thing could be done or said; and it was almost useless to think or feel it.”

{Illustration: Vittorio Alfieri.}

These characters had a life-long fascination for Alfieri, and his admiration of such types deeply influenced his tragedies. So great was his scorn of kings at the time he writes of, that he despised even those who liked them, and poor little Metastasio, who lived by the bounty of Maria Theresa, fell under Alfieri’s bitterest contempt when in Vienna he saw his brother-poet before the empress in the imperial gardens at Schonbrunn, “performing the customary genuflexions with a servilely contented and adulatory face.” This loathing of royalty was naturally intensified beyond utterance in Prussia. “On entering the states of Frederick, I felt redoubled and triplicated my hate for that infamous military trade, most infamous and sole base of arbitrary power.” He told his minister that he would be presented only in civil dress, because there were uniforms enough at that court, and he declares that on beholding Frederick he felt “no emotion of wonder, or of respect, but rather of indignation and rage.... The king addressed me the three or four customary words; I fixed my eyes respectfully upon his, and inwardly blessed Heaven that I had not been born his slave; and I issued from that universal Prussian barracks ... abhorring it as it deserved.”

In Paris Alfieri bought the principal Italian authors, which he afterwards carried everywhere with him on his travels; but he says that he made very little use of them, having neither the will nor the power to apply his mind to anything. In fact, he knew very little Italian, most of the authors in his collection were strange to him, and at the age of twenty-two he had read nothing whatever of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Boccaccio, or Machiavelli.

He made a journey into Spain, among other countries, where he admired the Andalusian horses, and bored himself as usual with what interests educated people; and he signalized his stay at Madrid by a murderous outburst of one of the worst tempers in the world. One night his servant Elia, in dressing his hair, had the misfortune to twitch one of his locks in such a way as to give him a slight pain; on which Alfieri leaped to his feet, seized a heavy candlestick, and without a word struck the valet such a blow upon his temple that the blood gushed out over his face, and over the person of a young Spanish gentleman who had been supping with Alfieri. Elia sprang upon his master, who drew his sword, but the Spaniard after great ado quieted them both; “and so ended this horrible encounter,” says Alfieri, “for which I remained deeply afflicted and ashamed. I told Elia that he would have done well to kill me; and he was the man to have done it, being a palm taller than myself, who am very tall, and of a strength and courage not inferior to his height. Two hours later, his wound being dressed and everything put in order, I went to bed, leaving the door from my room into Elia’s open as usual, without listening to the Spaniard, who warned me not thus to invite a provoked and outraged man to vengeance: I called to Elia, who had already gone to bed, that he could, if he liked and thought proper, kill me that night, for I deserved it. But he was no less heroic than I, and would take no other revenge than to keep two handkerchiefs, which had been drenched in his blood, and which from time to time he showed me in the course of many years. This reciprocal mixture of fierceness and generosity on both our parts will not be easily understood by those who have had no experience of the customs and of the temper of us Piedmontese;” though here, perhaps, Alfieri does his country too much honor in making his ferocity a national trait. For the rest, he says, he never struck a servant except as he would have done an equal — not with a cane, but with his fist, or a chair, or anything else that came to hand; and he seems to have thought this a democratic if not an amiable habit. When at last he went back to Turin, he fell once more into his old life of mere vacancy, varied before long by a most unworthy amour, of which he tells us that he finally cured himself by causing his servant to tie him in his chair, and so keep him a prisoner in his own house. A violent distemper followed this treatment, which the light-moraled gossip of the town said Alfieri had invented exclusively for his own use; many days he lay in bed tormented by this anguish; but when he rose he was no longer a slave to his passion. Shortly after, he wrote a tragedy, or a tragic dialogue rather, in Italian blank verse, called Cleopatra, which was played in a Turinese theater with a success of which he tells us he was at once and always ashamed.

Yet apparently it encouraged him to persevere in literature, his qualifications for tragical authorship being “a resolute spirit, very obstinate and untamed, a heart running over with passions of every kind, among which predominated a bizarre mixture of love and all its furies, and a profound and most ferocious rage and abhorrence against all tyranny whatsoever; ... a very dim and uncertain remembrance of various French tragedies seen in the theaters many years before; ... an almost total ignorance of all the rules of tragic art, and an unskillfulness almost total in the divine and most necessary art of writing and managing my own language.” With this stock in trade, he set about turning his Filippo and his Polinice, which he wrote first in French prose, into Italian verse, making at the same time a careful study of the Italian poets. It was at this period that the poet Ossian was introduced to mankind by the ingenious and self-sacrificing Mr. Macpherson, and Cesarotti’s translation of him came into Alfieri’s hands. These blank verses were the first that really pleased him; with a little modification he thought they would be an excellent model for the verse of dialogue.

He had now refused himself the pleasure of reading French, and he had nowhere to turn for tragic literature but to the classics, which he read in literal versions while he renewed his faded Latin with the help of a teacher. But he believed that his originality as a tragic author suffered from his reading, and he determined to read no more tragedies till he had made his own. For this reason he had already given up Shakespeare. “The more that author accorded with my humor (though I very well perceived all his defects), the more I was resolved to abstain,” he tells us.

This was during a literary sojourn in Tuscany, whither he had gone to accustom himself “to speak, hear, think, and dream in Tuscan, and not otherwise evermore.” Here he versified his first two tragedies, and sketched others; and here, he says, “I deluged my brain with the verses of Petrarch, of Dante, of Tasso, and of Ariosto, convinced that the day would infallibly come in which all these forms, phrases, and words of others would return from its cells, blended and identified with my own ideas and emotions.”

He had now indeed entered with all the fury of his nature into the business of making tragedies, which he did very much as if he had been making love. He abandoned everything else for it — country, home, money, friends; for having decided to live henceforth only in Tuscany, and hating to ask that royal permission to remain abroad, without which, annually renewed, the Piedmontese noble of that day could not reside out of his own country, he gave up his estates at Asti to his sister, keeping for himself a pension that came only to about half his former income. The king of Piedmont was very well, as kings went in that day; and he did nothing to hinder the poet’s expatriation. The long period of study and production which followed Alfieri spent chiefly at Florence, but partly also at Rome and Naples. During this time he wrote and printed most of his tragedies; and he formed that relation, common enough in the best society of the eighteenth century, with the Countess of Albany, which continued as long as he lived. The countess’s husband was the Pretender Charles Edward, the last of the English Stuarts, who, like all his house, abetted his own evil destiny, and was then drinking himself to death. There were difficulties in the way of her living with Alfieri which would not perhaps have beset a less exalted lady, and which required an especial grace on the part of the Pope. But this the Pope refused ever to bestow, even after being much prayed; and when her husband was dead, she and Alfieri were privately married, or were not married; the fact is still in dispute. Their house became a center of fashionable and intellectual society in Florence, and to be received in it was the best that could happen to any one. The relation seems to have been a sufficiently happy one; neither was painfully scrupulous in observing its ties, and after Alfieri’s death the countess gave to the painter Fabre “a heart which,” says Massimo d’Azeglio in his Memoirs, “according to the usage of the time, and especially of high society, felt the invincible necessity of keeping itself in continual exercise.” A cynical little story of Alfieri reading one of his tragedies in company, while Fabre stood behind him making eyes at the countess, and from time to time kissing her ring on his finger, was told to D’Azeglio by an aunt of his who witnessed the scene.

In 1787 the poet went to France to oversee the printing of a complete edition of his works, and five years later he found himself in Paris when the Revolution was at its height. The countess was with him, and, after great trouble, he got passports for both, and hurried to the city barrier. The National Guards stationed there would have let them pass, but a party of drunken patriots coming up had their worst fears aroused by the sight of two carriages with sober and decent people in them, and heavily laden with baggage. While they parleyed whether they had better stone the equipages, or set fire to them, Alfieri leaped out, and a scene ensued which placed him in a very characteristic light, and which enables us to see him as it were in person. When the patriots had read the passports, he seized them, and, as he says, “full of disgust and rage, and not knowing at the moment, or in my passion despising the immense peril that attended us, I thrice shook my passport in my hand, and shouted at the top of my voice, ‘Look! Listen! Alfieri is my name; Italian and not French; tall, lean, pale, red hair; I am he; look at me: I have my passport, and I have had it legitimately from those who could give it; we wish to pass, and, by Heaven, we will pass!’”

They passed, and two days later the authorities that had approved their passports confiscated the horses, furniture, and books that Alfieri had left behind him in Paris, and declared him and the countess — both foreigners — to be refugee aristocrats!

He established himself again in Florence, where, in his forty-sixth year, he took up the study of Greek, and made himself master of that literature, though, till then, he had scarcely known the Greek alphabet. The chief fruit of this study was a tragedy in the manner of Euripides, which he wrote in secret, and which he read to a company so polite that they thought it really was Euripides during the whole of the first two acts.

Alfieri’s remaining years were spent in study and the revision of his works, to the number of which he added six comedies in 1800. The presence and domination of the detested French in Florence embittered his life somewhat; but if they had not been there he could never have had the pleasure of refusing to see the French commandant, who had a taste for literary people if not for literature, and would fain have paid his respects to the poet. He must also have found consolation in the thought that if the French had become masters of Europe, many kings had been dethroned, and every tyrant who wore a crown was in a very pitiable state of terror or disaster.

Nothing in Alfieri’s life was more like him than his death, of which the Abbate di Caluso gives a full account in his conclusion of the poet’s biography. His malady was gout, and amidst its tortures he still labored at the comedies he was then writing. He was impatient at being kept in-doors, and when they added plasters on the feet to the irksomeness of his confinement, he tore away the bandages that prevented him from walking about his room. He would not go to bed, and they gave him opiates to ease his anguish; under their influence his mind was molested by many memories of things long past. “The studies and labors of thirty years,” says the Abbate, “recurred to him, and what was yet more wonderful, he repeated in order, from memory, a good number of Greek verses from the beginning of Hesiod, which he had read but once. These he said over to the Signora Contessa, who sat by his side, but it does not appear, for all this, that there ever came to him the thought that death, which he had been for a long time used to imagine near, was then imminent. It is certain at least that he made no sign to the contessa though she did not leave him till morning. About six o’clock he took oil and magnesia without the physician’s advice, and near eight he was observed to be in great danger, and the Signora Contessa, being called, found him in agonies that took away his breath. Nevertheless, he rose from his chair, and going to the bed, leaned upon it, and presently the day was darkened to him, his eyes closed and he expired. The duties and consolations of religion were not forgotten, but the evil was not thought so near, nor haste necessary, and so the confessor who was called did not come in time.” D’Azeglio relates that the confessor arrived at the supreme moment, and saw the poet bow his head: “He thought it was a salutation, but it was the death of Vittorio Alfieri.”

II

I once fancied that a parallel between Alfieri and Byron might be drawn, but their disparities are greater than their resemblances, on the whole. Both, however, were born noble, both lived in voluntary exile, both imagined themselves friends and admirers of liberty, both had violent natures, and both indulged the curious hypocrisy of desiring to seem worse than they were, and of trying to make out a shocking case for themselves when they could. They were men who hardly outgrew their boyishness. Alfieri, indeed, had to struggle against so many defects of training that he could not have reached maturity in the longest life; and he was ruled by passions and ideals; he hated with equal noisiness the tyrants of Europe and the Frenchmen who dethroned them.

When he left the life of a dissolute young noble for that of tragic authorship, he seized upon such histories and fables as would give the freest course to a harsh, narrow, gloomy, vindictive, and declamatory nature; and his dramas reproduce the terrible fatalistic traditions of the Greeks, the stories of Oedipus, Myrrha, Alcestis, Clytemnestra, Orestes, and such passages of Roman history as those relating to the Brutuses and to Virginia. In modern history he has taken such characters and events as those of Philip II., Mary Stuart, Don Garzia, and the Conspiracy of the Pazzi. Two of his tragedies are from the Bible, the Abel and the Saul; one, the Rosmunda, from Longobardic history. And these themes, varying so vastly as to the times, races, and religions with which they originated, are all treated in the same spirit — the spirit Alfieri believed Greek. Their interest comes from the situation and the action; of character, as we have it in the romantic drama, and supremely in Shakespeare, there is scarcely anything; and the language is shorn of all metaphor and picturesque expression. Of course their form is wholly unlike that of the romantic drama; Alfieri holds fast by the famous unities as the chief and saving grace of tragedy. All his actions take place within twenty-four hours; there is no change of scene, and so far as he can master that most obstinate unity, the unity of action, each piece is furnished with a tangible beginning, middle, and ending. The wide stretches of time which the old Spanish and English and all modern dramas cover, and their frequent transitions from place to place, were impossible and abhorrent to him.

Emiliani-Giudici, the Italian critic, writing about the middle of our century, declares that when the fiery love of freedom shall have purged Italy, the Alfierian drama will be the only representation worthy of a great and free people. This critic holds that Alfieri’s tragical ideal was of such a simplicity that it would seem derived regularly from the Greek, but for the fact that when he felt irresistibly moved to write tragedy, he probably did not know even the names of the Greek dramatists, and could not have known the structure of their dramas by indirect means, having read then only some Metastasian plays of the French school; so that he created that ideal of his by pure, instinctive force of genius. With him, as with the Greeks, art arose spontaneously; he felt the form of Greek art by inspiration. He believed from the very first that the dramatic poet should assume to render the spectators unconscious of theatrical artifice, and make them take part with the actors; and he banished from the scene everything that could diminish their illusion; he would not mar the intensity of the effect by changing the action from place to place, or by compressing within the brief time of the representation the events of months and years. To achieve the unity of action, he dispensed with all those parts which did not seem to him the most principal, and he studied how to show the subject of the drama in the clearest light. In all this he went to the extreme, but he so wrought “that the print of his cothurnus stamped upon the field of art should remain forever singular and inimitable. Reading his tragedies in order, from the Cleopatra to the Saul, you see how he never changed his tragic ideal, but discerned it more and more distinctly until he fully realized it. Aeschylus and Alfieri are two links that unite the chain in a circle. In Alfieri art once more achieved the faultless purity of its proper character; Greek tragedy reached the same height in the Italian’s Saul that it touched in the Greek’s Prometheus, two dramas which are perhaps the most gigantic creations of any literature.” Emiliani-Giudici thinks that the literary ineducation of Alfieri was the principal exterior cause of this prodigious development, that a more regular course of study would have restrained his creative genius, and, while smoothing the way before it, would have subjected it to methods and robbed it of originality of feeling and conception. “Tragedy, born sublime, terrible, vigorous, heroic, the life of liberty, ... was, as it were, redeemed by Vittorio Alfieri, reassumed the masculine, athletic forms of its original existence, and recommenced the exercise of its lost ministry.”

I do not begin to think this is all true. Alfieri himself owns his acquaintance with the French theater before the time when he began to write, and we must believe that he got at least some of his ideas of Athens from Paris, though he liked the Frenchmen none the better for his obligation to them. A less mechanical conception of the Greek idea than his would have prevented its application to historical subjects. In Alfieri’s Brutus the First, a far greater stretch of imagination is required from the spectator in order to preserve the unities of time and place than the most capricious changes of scene would have asked. The scene is always in the forum in Rome; the action occurs within twenty-four hours. During this limited time, we see the body of Lucretia borne along in the distance; Brutus harangues the people with the bloody dagger in his hand. The emissaries of Tarquin arrive and organize a conspiracy against the new republic; the sons of Brutus are found in the plot, and are convicted and put to death.

III

But such incongruities as these do not affect us in the tragedies based on the heroic fables; here the poet takes, without offense, any liberty he likes with time and place; the whole affair is in his hands, to do what he will, so long as he respects the internal harmony of his own work. For this reason, I think, we find Alfieri at his best in these tragedies, among which I have liked the Orestes best, as giving the widest range of feeling with the greatest vigor of action. The Agamemnon, which precedes it, and which ought to be read first, closes with its most powerful scene. Agamemnon has returned from Troy to Argos with his captive Cassandra, and Aegisthus has persuaded Clytemnestra that her husband intends to raise Cassandra to the throne. She kills him and reigns with Aegisthus, Electra concealing Orestes on the night of the murder, and sending him secretly away with Strophius, king of Phocis.

In the last scene, as Clytemnestra steals through the darkness to her husband’s chamber, she soliloquizes, with the dagger in her hand:

  It is the hour; and sunk in slumber now

  Lies Agamemnon. Shall he nevermore

  Open his eyes to the fair light? My hand,

  Once pledge to him of stainless love and faith,

  Is it to be the minister of his death?

  Did I swear that? Ay, that; and I must keep

  My oath. Quick, let me go! My foot, heart, hand —

  All over I tremble. Oh, what did I promise?

  Wretch! what do I attempt? How all my courage

  Hath vanished from me since Aegisthus vanished!

  I only see the immense atrocity

  Of this, my horrible deed; I only see

  The bloody specter of Atrides! Ah,

  In vain do I accuse thee! No, thou lovest

  Cassandra not. Me, only me, thou lovest,

  Unworthy of thy love. Thou hast no blame,

  Save that thou art my husband, in the world!

  Of trustful sleep, to death’s arms by my hand?

  And where then shall I hide me? O perfidy!

  Can I e’er hope for peace? O woful life —

  Life of remorse, of madness, and of tears!

  How shall Aegisthus, even Aegisthus, dare

  To rest beside the parricidal wife

  Upon her murder-stained marriage-bed,

  Nor tremble for himself? Away, away, —

  Hence, horrible instrument of all my guilt

  And harm, thou execrable dagger, hence!

  I’ll lose at once my lover and my life,

  But never by this hand betrayed shall fall

  So great a hero! Live, honor of Greece

  And Asia’s terror! Live to glory, live

  To thy dear children, and a better wife!

 — But what are these hushed steps? Into these rooms

  Who is it comes by night? Aegisthus? — Lost,

  I am lost!

  Aegisthus. Hast thou not done the deed?

  Cly.                                 Aegisthus ——

  Aeg. What, stand’st thou here, wasting thyself in

  tears?

  Woman, untimely are thy tears; ‘t is late,

  ‘T is vain, and it may cost us dear!

  Cly.                                     Thou here?

  But how — woe’s me, what did I promise thee!

  What wicked counsel —

  Aeg. Was it not thy counsel?

  Love gave it thee and fear annuls it — well!

  Since thou repentest, I am glad; and glad

  To know thee guiltless shall I be in death.

  I told thee that the enterprise was hard,

  But thou, unduly trusting in the heart,

  That hath not a man’s courage in it, chose

  Thyself thy feeble hands to strike the blow.

  Now may Heaven grant that the intent of evil

  Turn not to harm thee! Hither I by stealth

  And favor of the darkness have returned

  Unseen, I hope. For I perforce must come

  Myself to tell thee that irrevocably

  My life is dedicated to the vengeance

  Of Agamemnon.

He appeals to her pity for him, and her fear for herself; he reminds her of Agamemnon’s consent to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, and goads her on to the crime from which she had recoiled. She goes into Agamemnon’s chamber, whence his dying outcries are heard: —

                      O treachery!

  Thou, wife? O headens, I die! O treachery!

Clytemnestra comes out with the dagger in her hand:

  The dagger drips with blood; my hands, my robe,

  My face — they all are wet with blood. What vengeance

  Shall yet be taken for this blood? Already

  I see this very steel turned on my breast,

  And by whose hand!

The son whom she forebodes as the avenger of Agamemnon’s death passes his childhood and early youth at the court of Strophius in Phocis. The tragedy named for him opens with Electra’s soliloquy as she goes to weep at the tomb of their father: —

  Night, gloomy, horrible, atrocious night,

  Forever present to my thought! each year

  For now two lusters I have seen thee come,

  Clothed on with darkness and with dreams of blood,

  And blood that should have expiated thine

  Is not yet spilt! O memory, O sight!

  Upon these stones I saw thee murdered lie,

  Murdered, and by whose hand!...

                                   I swear to thee,

  If I in Argos, in thy palace live,

  Slave of Aegisthus, with my wicked mother,

  Nothing makes me endure a life like this

  Saving the hope of vengeance. Far away

  Orestes is; but living! I saved thee, brother;

  I keep myself for thee, till the day rise

  When thou shalt make to stream upon yon tomb

  Not helpless tears like these, but our foe’s blood.

While Electra fiercely muses, Clytemnestra enters, with the appeal:

  Cly. Daughter!

  El.           What voice! Oh Heaven, thou here?

  Cly.                                My daughter,

  Ah, do not fly me! Thy pious task I fain

  Would share with thee. Aegisthus in vain forbids,

  He shall not know. Ah, come! go we together

  Unto the tomb.

  El.        Whose tomb?

  Cly.                          Thy — hapless — father’s.

  El. Wherefore not say thy husband’s tomb? ‘T is well:

  Thou darest not speak it. But how dost thou dare

  Turn thitherward thy steps — thou that dost reek

  Yet with his blood?

  Cly.                  Two lusters now are passed

  Since that dread day, and two whole lusters now

  I weep my crime.

  El.        And what time were enough

  For that? Ah, if thy tears should be eternal,

  They yet were nothing. Look! Seest thou not still

  The blood upon these horrid walls the blood

  That thou didst splash them with? And at thy presence

  Lo, how it reddens and grows quick again!

  Fly, thou, whom I must never more call mother!

   * * * *

  Cly. Oh, woe is me! What can I answer? Pity —

  But I merit none! — And yet if in my heart,

  Daughter, thou couldst but read — ah, who could look

  Into the secret of a heart like mine,

  Contaminated with such infamy,

  And not abhor me? I blame not thy wrath,

  No, nor thy hate. On earth I feel already

  The guilty pangs of hell. Scarce had the blow

  Escaped my hand before a swift remorse,

  Swift but too late, fell terrible upon me.

  From that hour still the sanguinary ghost

  By day and night, and ever horrible,

  Hath moved before mine eyes. Whene’er I turn

  I see its bleeding footsteps trace the path

  That I must follow; at table, on the throne,

  It sits beside me; on my bitter pillow

  If e’er it chance I close mine eyes in sleep,

  The specter — fatal vision! — instantly

  Shows itself in my dreams, and tears the breast,

  Already mangled, with a furious hand,

  And thence draws both its palms full of dark blood,

  To dash it in my face! On dreadful nights

  Follow more dreadful days. In a long death

  I live my life. Daughter, — whate’er I am,

  Thou art my daughter still, — dost thou not weep

  At tears like mine?

Clytemnestra confesses that Aegisthus no longer loves her, but she loves him, and she shrinks from Electra’s fierce counsel that she shall kill him. He enters to find her in tears, and a violent scene between him and Electra follows, in which Clytemnestra interposes.

  Cly. O daughter, he is my husband. Think, Aegisthus,

  She is my daughter.

  Aeg. She is Atrides’ daughter!

  El. He is Atrides’ murderer!

  Cly.                             Electra!

  Have pity, Aegisthus! Look — the tomb! Oh, look,

  The horrible tomb! — and art thou not content?

  Aeg. Woman, be less unlike thyself. Atrides, —

  Tell me by whose hand in yon tomb he lies?

  Cly. O mortal blame! What else is lacking now

  To my unhappy, miserable life?

  Who drove me to it now upbraids my crime!

  El. O marvelous joy! O only joy that’s blessed

  My heart in these ten years! I see you both

  At last the prey of anger and remorse;

  I hear at last what must the endearments be

  Of love so blood-stained.

The first act closes with a scene between Aegisthus and Clytemnestra, in which he urges her to consent that he shall send to have Orestes murdered, and reminds her of her former crimes when she revolts from this. The scene is very well managed, with that sparing phrase which in Alfieri is quite as apt to be touchingly simple as bare and poor. In the opening scene of the second act, Orestes has returned in disguise to Argos with Pylades the son of Strophius, to whom he speaks:

  We are come at last. Here Agamemnon fell,

  Murdered, and here Aegisthus reigns. Here rose

  In memory still, though I a child departed,

  These natal walls, and the just Heaven in time

  Leads me back hither.

  Twice five years have passed

  This very day since that dread night of blood,

  When, slain by treachery, my father made

  The whole wide palace with his dolorous cries

  Echo again. Oh, well do I remember!

  Electra swiftly bore me through this hall

  Thither where Strophius in his pitying arms

  Received me — Strophius, less by far thy father

  Than mine, thereafter — and fled onward with me

  By yonder postern-gate, all tremulous;

  And after me there ran upon the air

  Long a wild clamor and a lamentation

  That made me weep and shudder and lament,

  I knew not why, and weeping Strophius ran,

  Preventing with his hand my outcries shrill,

  Clasping me close, and sprinkling all my face

  With bitter tears; and to the lonely coast,

  Where only now we landed, with his charge

  He came apace; and eagerly unfurled

  His sails before the wind.

Pylades strives to restrain the passion for revenge in Orestes, which imperils them both. The friend proposes that they shall feign themselves messengers sent by Strophius with tidings of Orestes’ death, and Orestes has reluctantly consented, when Electra re-appears, and they recognize each other. Pylades discloses their plan, and when her brother urges, “The means is vile,” she answers, all woman, —

  Less vile than is Aegisthus. There is none

  Better or surer, none, believe me. When

  You are led to him, let it be mine to think

  Of all — the place, the manner, time, and arms,

  To kill him. Still I keep, Orestes, still

  I keep the steel that in her husband’s breast

  She plunged whom nevermore we might call mother.

  Orestes. How fares it with that impious woman?

  Electra.                                 Ah,

  Thou canst not know how she drags out her life!

  Save only Agamemnon’s children, all

  Must pity her — and even we must pity.

  Full ever of suspicion and of terror,

  And held in scorn even by Aegisthus’ self,

  Loving Aegisthus though she know his guilt;

  Repentant, and yet ready to renew

  Her crime, perchance, if the unworthy love

  Which is her shame and her abhorrence, would;

  Now wife, now mother, never wife nor mother,

  Bitter remorse gnaws at her heart by day

  Unceasingly, and horrible shapes by night

  Scare slumber from her eyes. — So fares it with her.

In the third scene of the following act Clytemnestra meets Orestes and Pylades, who announce themselves as messengers from Phocis to the king; she bids them deliver their tidings to her, and they finally do so, Pylades struggling to prevent Orestes from revealing himself. There are touchingly simple and natural passages in the lament that Clytemnestra breaks into over her son’s death, and there is fire, with its true natural extinction in tears, when she upbraids Aegisthus, who now enters:

  My only son beloved, I gave thee all.

  All that I gave thou did’st account as nothing

  While aught remained to take. Who ever saw

  At once so cruel and so false a heart?

  The guilty love that thou did’st feign so ill

  And I believed so well, what hindrance to it,

  What hindrance, tell me, was the child Orestes?

  Yet scarce had Agamemnon died before

  Thou did’st cry out for his son’s blood; and searched

  Through all the palace in thy fury. Then

  The blade thou durst not wield against the father,

  Then thou didst brandish! Ay, bold wast thou then

  Against a helpless child!...

  Unhappy son, what booted it to save thee

  From thy sire’s murderer, since thou hast found

  Death ere thy time in strange lands far away?

  Aegisthus, villainous usurper! Thou,

  Thou hast slain my son! Aegisthus — Oh forgive!

  I was a mother, and am so no more.

Throughout this scene, and in the soliloquy preceding it, Alfieri paints very forcibly the struggle in Clytemnestra between her love for her son and her love for Aegisthus, to whom she clings even while he exults in the tidings that wring her heart. It is all too baldly presented, doubtless, but it is very effective and affecting.

Orestes and Pylades are now brought before Aegisthus, and he demands how and where Orestes died, for after his first rejoicing he has come to doubt the fact. Pylades responds in one of those speeches with which Alfieri seems to carve the scene in bas-relief:

  Every fifth year an ancient use renews

  In Crete the games and offerings unto Jove.

  The love of glory and innate ambition

  Lure to that coast the youth; and by his side

  Goes Pylades, inseparable from him.

  In the light car upon the arena wide,

  The hopes of triumph urge him to contest

  The proud palm of the flying-footed steeds,

  And, too intent on winning, there his life

  He gives for victory.

  Aeg.                       But how? Say on.

  Pyl. Too fierce, impatient, and incautious, he

  Now frights his horses on with threatening cries,

  Now whirls his blood-stained whip, and lashes them,

  Till past the goal the ill-tamed coursers fly

  Faster and faster. Reckless of the rein,

  Deaf to the voice that fain would soothe them now,

  Their nostrils breathing fire, their loose manes tossed

  Upon the wind, and in thick clouds involved

  Of choking dust, round the vast circle’s bound,

  As lightning swift they whirl and whirl again.

  Fright, horror, mad confusion, death, the car

  Spreads in its crooked circles everywhere,

  Until at last, the smoking axle dashed

  With horrible shock against a marble pillar,

  Orestes headlong falls —

  Cly.                   No more! Ah, peace!

  His mother hears thee.

  Pyl.               It is true. Forgive me.

  I will not tell how, horribly dragged on,

  His streaming life-blood soaked the arena’s dust —

  Pylades ran — in vain — within his arms

  His friend expired.

  Cly.                       O wicked death!

  Pyl.                             In Crete

  All men lamented him, so potent in him

  Were beauty, grace, and daring.

  Cly.                     Nay, who would not

  Lament him save this wretch alone? Dear son,

  Must I then never, never see thee more?

  O me! too well I see thee crossing now

  The Stygian stream to clasp thy father’s shade:

  Both turn your frowning eyes askance on me,

  Burning with dreadful wrath! Yea, it was I,

  ‘T was I that slew you both. Infamous mother

  And guilty wife! — Now art content, Aegisthus?

Aegisthus still doubts, and pursues the pretended messengers with such insulting question that Orestes, goaded beyond endurance, betrays that their character is assumed. They are seized and about to be led to prison in chains, when Electra enters and in her anguish at the sight exclaims, “Orestes led to die!” Then ensues a heroic scene, in which each of the friends claims to be Orestes. At last Orestes shows the dagger Electra has given him, and offers it to Clytemnestra, that she may stab Aegisthus with the same weapon with which she killed Agamemnon:

  Whom then I would call mother. Take it; thou know’st how

  To wield it; plunge it in Aegisthus’ heart!

  Leave me to die; I care not, if I see

  My father avenged. I ask no other proof

  Of thy maternal love from thee. Quick, now,

  Strike! Oh, what is it that I see? Thou tremblest?

  Thou growest pale? Thou weepest? From thy hand

  The dagger falls? Thou lov’st Aegisthus, lov’st him

  And art Orestes’ mother? Madness! Go

  And never let me look on thee again!

Aegisthus dooms Electra to the same death with Orestes and Pylades, but on the way to prison the guards liberate them all, and the Argives rise against the usurper with the beginning of the fifth act, which I shall give entire, because I think it very characteristic of Alfieri, and necessary to a conception of his vehement, if somewhat arid, genius. I translate as heretofore almost line for line, and word for word, keeping the Italian order as nearly as I can.

SCENE I.

AEGISTHUS and Soldiers.

 Aeg. O treachery unforseen! O madness! Freed,

 Orestes freed? Now we shall see....

 Enter CLYTEMNESTRA.

 Cly.                              Ah! turn

 Backward thy steps.

 Aeg.            Ah, wretch, dost thou arm too

 Against me?

 Cly.        I would save thee. Hearken to me,

 I am no longer —

 Aeg.          Traitress —

 Cly.        Stay!

 Aeg.                       Thou ‘st promised

 Haply to give me to that wretch alive?

 Cly. To keep thee, save thee from him, I have sworn,

 Though I should perish for thee! Ah, remain

 And hide thee here in safety. I will be

 Thy stay against his fury —

 Aeg.                         Against his fury

 My sword shall be my stay. Go, leave me!

 I go —

 Cly. Whither?

 Aeg.      To kill him!

 Cly.                 To thy death thou goest!

 O me! What dost thou? Hark! Dost thou not hear

 The yells and threats of the whole people? Hold!

 I will not leave thee.

 Aeg.               Nay, thou hop’st in vain

 To save thy impious son from death. Hence! Peace!

 Or I will else —

 Cly.             Oh, yes, Aegisthus, kill me,

 If thou believest me not. “Orestes!” Hark!

 “Orestes!” How that terrible name on high

 Rings everywhere! I am no longer mother

 When thou ‘rt in danger. Against my blood I grow

 Cruel once more.

 Aeg.          Thou knowest well the Argives

 Do hate thy face, and at the sight of thee

 The fury were redoubled in their hearts.

 The tumult rises. Ah, thou wicked wretch,

 Thou wast the cause! For thee did I delay

 Vengeance that turns on me now.

 Cly.                             Kill me, then!

 Aeg. I’ll find escape some other way.

 Cly.                                 I follow —

 Aeg. Ill shield wert thou for me. Leave me — away, away!

 At no price would I have thee by my side! {Exit.

 Cly. All hunt me from them! O most hapless state!

 My son no longer owns me for his mother,

 My husband for his wife: and wife and mother

 I still must be! O misery! Afar

 I’ll follow him, nor lose the way he went.

 Enter ELECTRA.

 El. Mother, where goest thou! Turn thy steps again

 Into the palace. Danger —

 Cly.                            Orestes — speak!

 Where is he now? What does he do?

 El.                                   Orestes,

 Pylades, and myself, we are all safe.

 Even Aegisthus’ minions pitied us.

 They cried, “This is Orestes!” and the people,

 “Long live Orestes! Let Aegisthus die!”

 Cly. What do I hear?

 El.                  Calm thyself, mother; soon

 Thou shalt behold thy son again, and soon

 Th’ infamous tyrant’s corse —

 Cly.                        Ah, cruel, leave me!

 I go —

 El. No, stay! The people rage, and cry

 Out on thee for a parricidal wife.

 Show thyself not as yet, or thou incurrest

 Great peril. ‘T was for this I came. In thee

 A mother’s agony appeared, to see

 Thy children dragged to death, and thou hast now

 Atoned for thy misdeed. My brother sends me

 To comfort thee, to succor and to hide thee

 From dreadful sights. To find Aegisthus out,

 All armed meanwhile, he and his Pylades

 Search everywhere. Where is the wicked wretch?

 Cly. Orestes is the wicked wretch!

 El.                                    O Heaven!

 Cly. I go to save him or to perish with him.

 El. Nay, mother, thou shalt never go. Thou ravest —

 Cly. The penalty is mine. I go —

 El.                                    O mother!

 The monster that but now thy children doomed

 To death, wouldst thou —

 Cly. Yes, I would save him — I!

 Out of my path! My terrible destiny

 I must obey. He is my husband. All

 Too dear he cost me. I will not, can not lose him.

 You I abhor, traitors, not children to me!

 I go to him. Loose me, thou wicked girl!

 At any risk I go, and may I only

 Reach him in time! {Exit.

 El.                   Go to thy fate, then, go,

 If thou wilt so, but be thy steps too late!

 Why can not I, too, arm me with a dagger,

 To pierce with stabs a thousand-fold the breast

 Of infamous Aegisthus! O blind mother, oh,

 How art thou fettered to his baseness! Yet,

 And yet, I tremble — If the angry mob

 Avenge their murdered king on her — O Heaven!

 Let me go after her — But who comes here?

 Pylades, and my brother not beside him?

 Enter PYLADES.

 Oh, tell me! Orestes — ?

 Pyl.                     Compasses the palace

 About with swords. And now our prey is safe.

 Where lurks Aegisthus! Hast thou seen him?

 El.                                        Nay,

 I saw and strove in vain a moment since

 To stay his maddened wife. She flung herself

 Out of this door, crying that she would make

 Herself a shield unto Aegisthus. He

 Already had fled the palace.

 Pyl.                            Durst he then

 Show himself in the sight of Argos? Why,

 Then he is slain ere this! Happy the man

 That struck him first. Nearer and louder yet

 I hear their yells.

 El.                  “Orestes!” Ah, were’t so!

 Pyl. Look at him in his fury where he comes!

 Enter ORESTES and his followers.

 Or. No man of you attempt to slay Aegisthus:

 There is no wounding sword here save my own.

 Aegisthus, ho! Where art thou, coward! Speak!

 Aegisthus, where art thou? Come forth: it is

 The voice of Death that calls thee! Thou comest not?

 Ah, villain, dost thou hide thyself? In vain:

 The midmost deep of Erebus should not hide thee!

 Thou shalt soon see if I be Atrides’ son.

 El. He is not here; he —

 Or.                  Traitors! You perchance

 Have slain him without me?

 Pyl.                           Before I came

 He had fled the palace.

 Or.                       In the palace still

 Somewhere he lurks; but I will drag him forth;

 By his soft locks I’ll drag him with my hand:

 There is no prayer, nor god, nor force of hell

 Shall snatch thee from me. I will make thee plow

 The dust with thy vile body to the tomb

 Of Agamemnon, — I will drag thee thither

 And pour out there all thine adulterous blood.

 El. Orestes, dost thou not believe me? — me!

 Or. Who’rt thou? I want Aegisthus.

 El.                                He is fled.

 Or. He’s fled, and you, ye wretches, linger here?

 But I will find him.

 Enter CLYTEMNESTRA.

 Cly.            Oh, have pity, son!

 Or. Pity? Whose son am I? Atrides’ son

 Am I.

 Cly. Aegisthus, loaded with chains —

 Or.                               He lives yet?

 O joy! Let me go slay him!

 Cly.                Nay, kill me!

 I slew thy father — I alone. Aegisthus

 Had no guilt in it.

 Or.         Who, who grips my arm!

 Who holds me back? O Madness! Ah Aegisthus!

 I see him; they drag him hither — Off with thee!

 Cly. Orestes, dost thou not know thy mother?

 Or.                                         Die,

 Aegisthus! By Orestes’ hand, die, villain! {Exit.

 Cly. Ah, thou’st escaped me! Thou shalt slay me

 first! {Exit.

 El. Pylades, go! Run, run! Oh, stay her! fly;

 Bring her back hither! {Exit PYLADES.

                        I shudder! She is still

 His mother, and he must have pity on her.

 Yet only now she saw her children stand

 Upon the brink of an ignoble death;

 And was her sorrow and her daring then

 As great as they are now for him? At last

 The day so long desired has come; at last,

 Tyrant, thou diest; and once more I hear

 The palace all resound with wails and cries,

 As on that horrible and bloody night,

 Which was my father’s last, I heard it ring.

 Already hath Orestes struck the blow,

 The mighty blow; already is Aegisthus

 Fallen — the tumult of the crowd proclaims it.

 Behold Orestes conqueror, his sword

 Dripping with blood!

 Enter ORESTES.

                      O brother mine, come,

 Avenger of the king of kings, our father,

 Argos, and me, come to my heart!

 Or.                         Sister,

 At last thou seest me Atrides’ worthy son.

 Look,’t is Aegisthus’ blood! I hardly saw him

 And ran to slay him where he stood, forgetting

 To drag him to our father’s sepulcher.

 Full twice seven times I plunged and plunged my sword

 Into his cowardly and quaking heart;

 Yet have I slaked not my long thirst of vengeance!

 El. Then Clytemnestra did not come in time

 To stay thine arm?

 Or.            And who had been enough

 For that? To stay my arm? I hurled myself

 Upon him; not more swift the thunderbolt.

 The coward wept, and those vile tears the more

 Filled me with hate. A man that durst not die

 Slew thee, my father!

 El.            Now is our sire avenged!

 Calm thyself now, and tell me, did thine eyes

 Behold not Pylades?

 Or.         I saw Aegisthus;

 None other. Where is dear Pylades? And why

 Did he not second me in this glorious deed?

 El. I had confided to his care our mad

 And desperate mother.

 Or.           I knew nothing of them.

 Enter PYLADES.

 El. See, Pylades returns — O heavens, what do I see?

 Returns alone?

 Or.     And sad? Oh wherefore sad,

 Part of myself, art thou? Know’st not I’ve slain

 Yon villain? Look, how with his life-blood yet

 My sword is dripping! Ah, thou did’st not share

 His death-blow with me! Feed then on this sight

 Thine eyes, my Pylades!

 Pyl.               O sight! Orestes,

 Give me that sword.

 Or.              And wherefore?

 Pyl.                                   Give it me.

 Or. Take it.

 Pyl.        Oh listen! We may not tarry longer

 Within these borders; come —

 Or.                      But what —

 El.                                      Oh speak!

 Where’s Clytemnestra?

 Or.                 Leave her; she is perchance

 Kindling the pyre unto her traitor husband.

 Pyl. Oh, thou hast far more than fulfilled thy vengeance.

 Come, now, and ask no more.

 Or.                           What dost thou say?

 El. Our mother! I beseech thee yet again!

 Pylades — Oh what chill is this that creeps

 Through all my veins?

 Pyl.               The heavens —

 El.                              Ah, she is dead!

 Or. Hath turned her dagger, maddened, on herself?

 El. Alas, Pylades! Why dost thou not answer?

 Or.. Speak! What hath been?

 Pyl.                 Slain —

 Or.                     And by whose hand?

 Pyl.                                      Come!

 El. (To ORESTES.) Thou slewest her!

 Or.                            I parricide?

 Pyl.                                   Unknowing

 Thou plung�dst in her heart thy sword, as blind

 With rage thou rannest on Aegisthus —

 Or.                                        Oh,

 What horror seizes me! I parricide?

 My sword! Pylades, give it me; I’ll have it —

 Pyl. It shall not be.

 El.                 Brother —

 Or.                       Who calls me brother?

 Thou, haply, impious wretch, thou that didst save me

 To life and matricide? Give me my sword!

 My sword! O fury! Where am I? What is it

 That I have done? Who stays me? Who follows me?

 Ah, whither shall I fly, where hide myself? —

 O father, dost thou look on me askance?

 Thou wouldst have blood of me, and this is blood;

 For thee alone — for thee alone I shed it!

 El. Orestes, Orestes — miserable brother!

 He hears us not! ah, he is mad! Forever,

 Pylades, we must go beside him.

 Pyl.                               Hard,

 Inevitable law of ruthless Fate!

IV

Alfieri himself wrote a critical comment on each of his tragedies, discussing their qualities and the question of their failure or success dispassionately enough. For example, he frankly says of his Maria Stuarda that it is the worst tragedy he ever wrote, and the only one that he could wish not to have written; of his Agamennone, that all the good in it came from the author and all the bad from the subject; of his Fillippo II., that it may make a very terrible impression indeed of mingled pity and horror, or that it may disgust, through the cold atrocity of Philip, even to the point of nausea. On the Orestes, we may very well consult him more at length. He declares: “This tragic action has no other motive or development, nor admits any other passion, than an implacable revenge; but the passion of revenge (though very strong by nature), having become greatly enfeebled among civilized peoples, is regarded as a vile passion, and its effects are wont to be blamed and looked upon with loathing. Nevertheless, when it is just, when the offense received is very atrocious, when the persons and the circumstances are such that no human law can indemnify the aggrieved and punish the aggressor, then revenge, under the names of war, invasion, conspiracy, the duel, and the like, ennobles itself, and so works upon our minds as not only to be endured but to be admirable and sublime.”

In his Orestes he confesses that he sees much to praise and very little to blame: “Orestes, to my thinking, is ardent in sublime degree, and this daring character of his, together with the perils he confronts, may greatly diminish in him the atrocity and coldness of a meditated revenge.... Let those who do not believe in the force of a passion for high and just revenge add to it, in the heart of Orestes, private interest, the love of power, rage at beholding his natural heritage occupied by a murderous usurper, and then they will have a sufficient reason for all his fury. Let them consider, also, the ferocious ideas in which he must have been nurtured by Strophius, king of Phocis, the persecutions which he knows to have been everywhere moved against him by the usurper, — his being, in fine, the son of Agamemnon, and greatly priding himself thereon, — and all these things will certainly account for the vindictive passion of Orestes.... Clytemnestra is very difficult to treat in this tragedy, since she must be here,

  “Now wife, now mother, never wife nor mother,

“which is much easier to say in a verse than to manage in the space of five acts. Yet I believe that Clytemnestra, through the terrible remorse she feels, the vile treatment which she receives from Aegisthus, and the awful perplexity in which she lives ... will be considered sufficiently punished by the spectator. Aegisthus is never able to elevate his soul; ... he will always be an unpleasing, vile, and difficult personage to manage well; a character that brings small praise to the author when made sufferable, and much blame if not made so.... I believe the fourth and fifth acts would produce the highest effect on the stage if well represented. In the fifth, there is a movement, a brevity, a rapidly operating heat, that ought to touch, agitate, and singularly surprise the spirit. So it seems to me, but perhaps it is not so.”

This analysis is not only very amusing for the candor with which Alfieri praises himself, but it is also remarkable for the justice with which the praise is given, and the strong, conscious hold which it shows him to have had upon his creations. It leaves one very little to add, but I cannot help saying that I think the management of Clytemnestra especially admirable throughout. She loves Aegisthus with the fatal passion which no scorn or cruelty on his part can quench; but while he is in power and triumphant, her heart turns tenderly to her hapless children, whom she abhors as soon as his calamity comes; then she has no thought but to save him. She can join her children in hating the murder which she has herself done on Agamemnon, but she cannot avenge it on Aegisthus, and thus expiate her crime in their eyes. Aegisthus is never able to conceive of the unselfishness of her love; he believes her ready to betray him when danger threatens and to shield herself behind him from the anger of the Argives; it is a deep knowledge of human nature that makes him interpose the memory of her unatoned-for crime between her and any purpose of good.

Orestes always sees his revenge as something sacred, and that is a great scene in which he offers his dagger to Clytemnestra and bids her kill Aegisthus with it, believing for the instant that even she must exult to share his vengeance. His feeling towards Aegisthus never changes; it is not revolting to the spectator, since Orestes is so absolutely unconscious of wrong in putting him to death. He shows his blood-stained sword to Pylades with a real sorrow that his friend should not also have enjoyed the rapture of killing the usurper. His story of his escape on the night of Agamemnon’s murder is as simple and grand in movement as that of figures in an antique bas-relief. Here and elsewhere one feels how Alfieri does not paint, but sculptures his scenes and persons, cuts their outlines deep, and strongly carves their attitudes and expression.

Electra is the worthy sister of Orestes, and the family likeness between them is sharply traced. She has all his faith in the sacredness of his purpose, while she has, woman-like, a far keener and more specific hatred of Aegisthus. The ferocity of her exultation when Clytemnestra and Aegisthus upbraid each other is terrible, but the picture she draws for Orestes of their mother’s life is touched with an exquisite filial pity. She seems to me studied with marvelous success.

The close of the tragedy is full of fire and life, yet never wanting in a sort of lofty, austere grace, that lapses at last into a truly statuesque despair. Orestes mad, with Electra and Pylades on either side: it is the attitude and gesture of Greek sculpture, a group forever fixed in the imperishable sorrow of stone.

In reading Alfieri, I am always struck with what I may call the narrowness of his tragedies. They have height and depth, but not breadth. The range of sentiment is as limited in any one of them as the range of phrase in this Orestes, where the recurrence of the same epithets, horrible, bloody, terrible, fatal, awful, is not apparently felt by the poet as monotonous. Four or five persons, each representing a purpose or a passion, occupy the scene, and obviously contribute by every word and deed to the advancement of the tragic action; and this narrowness and rigidity of intent would be intolerable, if the tragedies were not so brief: I do not think any of them is much longer than a single act of one of Shakespeare’s plays. They are in all other ways equally unlike Shakespeare’s plays. When you read Macbeth or Hamlet, you find yourself in a world where the interests and passions are complex and divided against themselves, as they are here and now. The action progresses fitfully, as events do in life; it is promoted by the things that seem to retard it; and it includes long stretches of time and many places. When you read Orestes, you find yourself attendant upon an imminent calamity, which nothing can avert or delay. In a solitude like that of dreams, those hapless phantasms, dark types of remorse, of cruel ambition, of inexorable revenge, move swiftly on the fatal end. They do not grow or develop on the imagination; their character is stamped at once, and they have but to act it out. There is no lingering upon episodes, no digressions, no reliefs. They cannot stir from that spot where they are doomed to expiate or consummate their crimes; one little day is given them, and then all is over.

Mr. Lowell, in his essay on Dryden, speaks of “a style of poetry whose great excellence was that it was in perfect sympathy with the genius of the people among whom it came into being”, and this I conceive to be the virtue of the Alferian poetry. The Italians love beauty of form, and we Goths love picturesque effect; and Alfieri has little or none of the kind of excellence which we enjoy. But while

  I look and own myself a happy Goth,

I have moods, in the presence of his simplicity and severity, when I feel that he and all the classicists may be right. When I see how much he achieves with his sparing phrase, his sparsely populated scene, his narrow plot and angular design, when I find him perfectly sufficient in expression and entirely adequate in suggestion, the Classic alone appears elegant and true — till I read Shakespeare again; or till I turn to Nature, whom I do not find sparing or severe, but full of variety and change and relief, and yet having a sort of elegance and truth of her own.

In the treatment of historical subjects Alfieri allowed himself every freedom. He makes Lorenzo de’ Medici, a brutal and very insolent tyrant, a tyrant after the high Roman fashion, a tyrant almost after the fashion of the late Edwin Forrest. Yet there are some good passages in the Congiura dei Pazzi, of the peculiarly hard Alfierian sort:

  An enemy insulted and not slain!

  What breast in triple iron armed, but needs

  Must tremble at him?

is a saying of Giuliano de’ Medici, who, when asked if he does not fear one of the conspirators, puts the whole political wisdom of the sixteenth century into his answer, —

  Being feared, I fear.

The Filippo of Alfieri must always have an interest for English readers because of its chance relation to Keats, who, sick to death of consumption, bought a copy of Alfieri when on his way to Rome. As Mr. Lowell relates in his sketch of the poet’s life, the dying man opened the book at the second page, and read the lines — perhaps the tenderest that Alfieri ever wrote —

  Misero me! sollievo a me non resta

  Altro che il pianto, e il pianto � delitto!

Keats read these words, and then laid down the book and opened it no more. The closing scene of the fourth act of this tragedy can well be studied as a striking example of Alfieri’s power of condensation.

Some of the non-political tragedies of Alfieri are still played; Ristori has played his Mirra, and Salvini his Saul; but I believe there is now no Italian critic who praises him so entirely as Giudici did. Yet the poet finds a warm defender against the French and German critics in De Sanctis, {note: Saggi Critici. Di Francesco de Sanctis. Napoli: Antonio Morano. 1859.} a very clever and brilliant Italian, who accounts for Alfieri in a way that helps to make all Italian things more intelligible to us. He is speaking of Alfieri’s epoch and social circumstances: “Education had been classic for ages. Our ideal was Rome and Greece, our heroes Brutus and Cato, our books Livy, Tacitus, and Plutarch; and if this was true of all Europe, how much more so of Italy, where this history might be called domestic, a thing of our own, a part of our traditions, still alive to the eye in our cities and monuments. From Dante to Machiavelli, from Machiavelli to Metastasio, our classical tradition was never broken.... In the social dissolution of the last century, all disappeared except this ideal. In fact, in that first enthusiasm, when the minds of men confidently sought final perfection, it passed from the schools into life, ruled the imagination, inflamed the will. People lived and died Romanly.... The situations that Alfieri has chosen in his tragedies have a visible relation to the social state, to the fears and to the hopes of his own time. It is always resistance to oppression, of man against man, of people against tyrant.... In the classicism of Alfieri there is no positive side. It is an ideal Rome and Greece, outside of time and space, floating in the vague, ... which his contemporaries filled up with their own life.”

Giuseppe Arnaud, in his admirable criticisms on the Patriotic Poets of Italy, has treated of the literary side of Alfieri in terms that seem to me, on the whole, very just: “He sacrificed the foreshortening, which has so great a charm for the spectator, to the sculptured full figure that always presents itself face to face with you, and in entire relief. The grand passions, which are commonly sparing of words, are in his system condemned to speak much, and to explain themselves too much.... To what shall we attribute that respectful somnolence which nowadays reigns over the audience during the recitation of Alfieri’s tragedies, if they are not sustained by some theatrical celebrity? You will certainly say, to the mediocrity of the actors. But I hold that the tragic effect can be produced even by mediocre actors, if this effect truly abounds in the plot of the tragedy.... I know that these opinions of mine will not be shared by the great majority of the Italian public, and so be it. The contrary will always be favorable to one who greatly loved his country, always desired to serve her, and succeeded in his own time and own manner. Whoever should say that Alfieri’s tragedies, in spite of many eminent merits, were constructed on a theory opposed to grand scenic effects and to one of the two bases of tragedy, namely, compassion, would certainly not say what was far from the truth. And yet, with all this, Alfieri will still remain that dry, harsh blast which swept away the noxious miasms with which the Italian air was infected. He will still remain that poet who aroused his country from its dishonorable slumber, and inspired its heart with intolerance of servile conditions and with regard for its dignity. Up to his time we had bleated, and he roared.” “In fact,” says D’Azeglio, “one of the merits of that proud heart was to have found Italy Metastasian and left it Alfierian; and his first and greatest merit was, to my thinking, that he discovered Italy, so to speak, as Columbus discovered America, and initiated the idea of Italy as a nation. I place this merit far beyond that of his verses and his tragedies.”

Besides his tragedies, Alfieri wrote, as I have already stated, some comedies in his last years; but I must own my ignorance of all six of them; and he wrote various satires, odes, sonnets, epigrams, and other poems. Most of these are of political interest; the Miso-Gallo is an expression of his scorn and hatred of the French nation; the America Liberata celebrates our separation from England; the Etruria Vendicata praises the murder of the abominable Alessandro de’ Medici by his kinsman, Lorenzaccio. None of the satires, whether on kings, aristocrats, or people, have lent themselves easily to my perusal; the epigrams are signally unreadable, but some of the sonnets are very good. He seems to find in their limitations the same sort of strength that he finds in his restricted tragedies; and they are all in the truest sense sonnets.

Here is one, which loses, of course, by translation. In this and other of my versions, I have rarely found the English too concise for the Italian, and often not concise enough:

  HE IMAGINES THE DEATH OF HIS LADY.

  The sad bell that within my bosom aye

    Clamors and bids me still renew my tears,

  Doth stun my senses and my soul bewray

    With wandering fantasies and cheating fears;

  The gentle form of her that is but ta’en

    A little from my sight I seem to see

  At life’s bourne lying faint and pale with pain, —

    My love that to these tears abandons me.

  “O my own true one,” tenderly she cries,

    “I grieve for thee, love, that thou winnest naught

  Save hapless life with all thy many sighs.”

    Life? Never! Though thy blessed steps have taught

  My feet the path in all well-doing, stay! —

    At this last pass ‘t is mine to lead the way.

There is a still more characteristic sonnet of Alfieri’s, with which I shall close, as I began, in the very open air of his autobiography:

  HIS PORTRAIT.

  Thou mirror of veracious speech sublime,

    What I am like in soul and body, show:

  Red hair, — in front grown somewhat thin with time;

    Tall stature, with an earthward head bowed low;

  A meager form, with two straight legs beneath;

    An aspect good; white skin with eyes of blue;

  A proper nose; fine lips and choicest teeth;

    Face paler than a throned king’s in hue;

  Now hard and bitter, yielding now and mild;

    Malignant never, passionate alway,

  With mind and heart in endless strife embroiled;

    Sad mostly, and then gayest of the gay.

  Achilles now, Thersites in his turn:

  Man, art thou great or vile? Die and thou ‘lt learn!

VINCENZO MONTI AND UGO FOSCOLO

I

The period of Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo is that covered in political history by the events of the French revolution, the French invasion of Italy and the Napoleonic wars there against the Austrians, the establishment of the Cisalpine Republic and of the kingdom of Italy, the final overthrow of the French dominion, and the restoration of the Austrians. During all these events, the city of Milan remained the literary as well as the political center of Italy, and whatever were the moral reforms wrought by the disasters of which it was also the center, there is no doubt that intellectually a vast change had taken place since the days when Parini’s satire was true concerning the life of the Milanese nobles. The transformation of national character by war is never, perhaps, so immediate or entire as we are apt to expect. When our own war broke out, those who believed that we were to be purged and ennobled in all our purposes by calamity looked for a sort of total and instant conversion. This, indeed, seemed to take place, but there was afterward the inevitable reaction, and it appears that there are still some small blemishes upon our political and social state. Yet, for all this, each of us is conscious of some vast and inestimable difference in the nation.

It is instructive, if it is not ennobling, to be moved by great and noble impulses, to feel one’s self part of a people, and to recognize country for once as the supreme interest; and these were the privileges the French revolution gave the Italians. It shed their blood, and wasted their treasure, and stole their statues and pictures, but it bade them believe themselves men; it forced them to think of Italy as a nation, and the very tyranny in which it ended was a realization of unity, and more to be desired a thousand times than the shameless tranquillity in which it had found them. It is imaginable that when the revolution advanced upon Milan it did not seem the greatest and finest thing in life to serve a lady; when the battles of Marengo and Lodi were fought, and Mantua was lost and won, to court one’s neighbor’s wife must have appeared to some gentlemen rather a waste of time; when the youth of the Italian legion in Napoleon’s campaign perished amidst the snows of Russia, their brothers and sisters, and fathers and mothers, must have found intrigues and operas and fashions but a poor sort of distraction. By these terrible means the old forces of society were destroyed, not quickly, but irreparably. The cavaliere servente was extinct early in this century; and men and women opened their eyes upon an era of work, the most industrious age that the world has ever seen.

The change took place slowly; much of the material was old and hopelessly rotten; but in the new generation the growth towards better and greater things was more rapid.

Yet it would not be well to conjure up too heroic an image of Italian revolutionary society: we know what vices fester and passions rage in war-time, and Italy was then almost constantly involved in war. Intellectually, men are active, but the great poems are not written in war-time, nor the highest effects of civilization produced. There is a taint of insanity and of instability in everything, a mark of feverishness and haste and transition. The revolution gave Italy a chance for new life, but this was the most the revolution could do. It was a great gift, not a perfect one; and as it remained for the Italians to improve the opportunity, they did it partially, fitfully, as men do everything.

II

The poets who belong to this time are numerous enough, but those best known are Vincenzo Monti and Ugo Foscolo. These men were long the most conspicuous literati in the capital of Lombardy, but neither was Lombard. Monti was educated in the folds of Arcadia at Rome; Foscolo was a native of one of the Greek islands dependent on Venice, and passed his youth and earlier manhood in the lagoons. The accident of residence at Milan brought the two men together, and made friends of those who had naturally very little in common. They can only be considered together as part of the literary history of the time in which they both happened to be born, and as one of its most striking contrasts.

In 1802, Napoleon bestowed a republican constitution on Lombardy and the other provinces of Italy which had been united under the name of the Cisalpine Republic, and Milan became the capital of the new state. Thither at once turned all that was patriotic, hopeful, and ambitious in Italian life; and though one must not judge this phase of Italian civilization from Vincenzo Monti, it is an interesting comment on its effervescent, unstable, fictitious, and partial nature that he was its most conspicuous poet. Few men appear so base as Monti; but it is not certain that he was of more fickle and truthless soul than many other contemplative and cultivated men of the poetic temperament who are never confronted with exigent events, and who therefore never betray the vast difference that lies between the ideal heroism of the poet’s vision and the actual heroism of occasion. We all have excellent principles until we are tempted, and it was Monti’s misfortune to be born in an age which put his principles to the test, with a prospect of more than the usual prosperity in reward for servility and compliance, and more than the usual want, suffering, and danger in punishment of candor and constancy.

He was born near Ferrara in 1754; and having early distinguished himself in poetry, he was conducted to Rome by the Cardinal-Legate Borghesi. At Rome he entered the Arcadian fold of course, and piped by rule there with extraordinary acceptance, and might have died a Shepherd but for the French Revolution, which broke out and gave him a chance to be a Man. The secretary of the French Legation at Naples, appearing in Rome with the tri-color of the Republic, was attacked by the foolish populace, and killed; and Monti, the petted and caressed of priests, the elegant and tuneful young poet in the train of Cardinal Borghesi, seized the event of Ugo Bassville’s death, and turned it to epic account. In the moment of dissolution, Bassville, repenting his republicanism, receives pardon; but, as a condition of his acceptance into final bliss, he is shown, through several cantos of terza rima, the woes which the Revolution has brought upon France and the world. The bad people of the poem are naturally the French Revolutionists; the good people, those who hate them. The most admired episode is that descriptive of poor Louis XVI.’s ascent into heaven from the scaffold.

{Illustration: VINCENZO MONTI.}

There is some reason to suppose that Monti was sincerer in this poem than in any other of political bearing which he wrote; and the Dantesque plan of the work gave it, with the occasional help of Dante’s own phraseology and many fine turns of expression picked up in the course of a multifarious reading, a dignity from which the absurdity of the apotheosis of priests and princes detracted nothing among its readers. At any rate, it was received by Arcadia with rapturous acclaim, though its theme was not the Golden Age; and on the Bassvilliana the little that is solid in Monti’s fame rests at this day. His lyric poetry is seldom quoted; his tragedies are no longer played, not even his Galeoto Manfredi, in which he has stolen almost enough from Shakespeare to vitalize one of the characters. After a while the Romans wearied of their idol, and began to attack him in politics and literature; and in 1797 Monti, after a sojourn of twenty years in the Papal capital, fled from Rome to Milan. Here he was assailed in one of the journals by a fanatical Neapolitan, who had also written a Bassvilliana, but with celestial powers, heroes and martyrs of French politics, and who now accused Monti of enmity to the rights of man. Monti responded by a letter to this poet, in which he declared that his Bassvilliana was no expression of his own feelings, but that he had merely written it to escape the fury of Bassville’s murderers, who were incensed against him as Bassville’s friend! But for all this the Bassvilliana was publicly burnt before the cathedral in Milan, and Monti was turned out of a government place he had got, because “he had published books calculated to inspire hatred of democracy, or predilection for the government of kings, of theocrats and aristocrats.” The poet was equal to this exigency; and he now reprinted his works, and made them praise the French and the revolutionists wherever they had blamed them before; all the bad systems and characters were depicted as monarchies and kings and popes, instead of anarchies and demagogues. Bonaparte was exalted, and poor Louis XVI., sent to heaven with so much ceremony in the Bassvilliana, was abased in a later ode on Superstition.

Monti was amazed that all this did not suffice “to overcome that fatal combination of circumstances which had caused him to be judged as the courtier of despotism.” “How gladly,” he writes, “would I have accepted the destiny which envy could not reach! But this scourge of honest men clings to my flesh, and I cannot hope to escape it, except I turn scoundrel to become fortunate!” When the Austrians returned to Milan, the only honest man unhanged in Italy fled with other democrats to Paris, whither the fatal combination of circumstances followed him, and caused him to be looked on with coldness and suspicion by the republicans. After Bonaparte was made First Consul, Monti invoked his might against the Germans in Italy, and carried his own injured virtue back to Milan in the train of the conqueror. When Bonaparte was crowned emperor, this democrat and patriot was the first to hail and glorify him; and the emperor rewarded the poet’s devotion with a chair in the University of Pavia, and a pension attached to the place of Historiographer. Monti accepted the honors and emoluments due to long-suffering integrity and inalterable virtue, and continued in the enjoyment of them till the Austrians came back to Milan a second time, in 1815, when his chaste muse was stirred to a new passion by the charms of German despotism, and celebrated as “the wise, the just, the best of kings, Francis Augustus”, who, if one were to believe Monti, “in war was a whirlwind and in peace a zephyr.” But the heavy Austrian, who knew he was nothing of the kind, thrust out his surly under lip at these blandishments, said that this muse’s favors were mercenary, and cut off Monti’s pension. Stung by such ingratitude, the victim of his own honesty retired forever from courts, and thenceforward sang only the merits of rich persons in private station, who could afford to pay for spontaneous and incorruptible adulation. He died in 1826, having probably endured more pain and rungreater peril in his desire to avoid danger and suffering than the bravest and truest man in a time when courage and truth seldom went in company. It is not probable that he thought himself despicable or other than unjustly wretched.

Perhaps, after all, he was not so greatly to blame. As De Sanctis subtly observes: “He was always a liberal. How not be liberal in those days when even the reactionaries shouted for liberty — of course, true liberty, as they called it? And in that name he glorified all governments.... And it was not with hypocrisy.... He was a man who would have liked to reconcile the old and the new ideas, all opinions, yet, being forced to choose, he clung to the majority, with no desire to play the martyr. So he became the secretary of the dominant feeling, the poet of success. Kindly, tolerant, sincere, a good friend, a courtier more from necessity and weakness than perversity or wickedness; if he could have retired into his own heart, he might have come out a poet.” Monti, in fact, was always an improvvisatore, and the subjects which events cast in his way were like the themes which the improvvisatore receives from his audience. He applied his poetic faculty to their celebration with marvelous facility, and, doubtless, regarded the results as rhetorical feats. His poetry was an art, not a principle; and perhaps he was really surprised when people thought him in earnest, and held him personally to account for what he wrote. “A man of sensation, rather than sentiment,” says Arnaud, “Monti cared only for the objective side of life. He poured out melodies, colors, and chaff in the service of all causes; he was the poet-advocate, the Siren of the Italian Parnassus.” Of course such a man instinctively hated the ideas of the Romantic school, and he contested their progress in literature with great bitterness. He believed that poetry meant feigning, not making; and he declared that “the hard truth was the grave of the beautiful.” The latter years of his life were spent in futile battle with the “audacious boreal school” and in noxious revival of the foolish old disputes of the Italian grammarians; and Emiliani-Giudici condemns him for having done more than any enemy of his country to turn Italian thought from questions of patriotic interest to questions of philology, from the unity of Italy to the unity of the language, from the usurpations and tyranny of Austria to the assumptions of Della Crusca. But Monti could scarcely help any cause which he espoused; and it seems to me that he was as well employed in disputing the claims of the Tuscan dialect to be considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other way. The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted and approved in Italy. He knew little more than the Greek alphabet, and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars before he printed it. His poems fill many volumes; and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore. From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new. The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great. He is a classic of those classics common to all languages — dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air.

III

From the Bassvilliana I have translated the passage descriptive of Louis XVI.’s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite justly, in illustration of what I have been saying of Monti as a poet. There is something of his curious verbal beauty in it, and his singular good luck of phrase, with his fortunate reminiscences of other poets; the collocation of the different parts is very comical, and the application of it all to Louis XVI. is one of the most preposterous things in literature. But one must remember that the poor king was merely a subject, a theme, with the poet.

  As when the sun uprears himself among

  The lesser dazzling substances, and drives

  His eager steeds along the fervid curve, —

  When in one only hue is painted all

  The heavenly vault, and every other star

  Is touched with pallor and doth veil its front,

  So with sidereal splendor all aflame

  Amid a thousand glad souls following,

  High into heaven arose that beauteous soul.

  Smiled, as he passed them, the majestical,

  Tremulous daughters of the light, and shook

  Their glowing and dewy tresses as they moved,

  He among all with longing and with love

  Beaming, ascended until he was come

  Before the triune uncreated life;

  There his flight ceases, there the heart, become

  Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,

  And all the urgence of desire is lost;

  There on his temples he receives the crown

  Of living amaranth immortal, on

  His cheek the kiss of everlasting peace.

  And then were heard consonances and notes

  Of an ineffable sweetness, and the orbs

  Began again to move their starry wheels.

  More swiftly yet the steeds that bore the day

  Exulting flew, and with their mighty tread,

  Did beat the circuit of their airy way.

In this there are three really beautiful lines; namely, those which describe the arrival of the spirit in the presence of God:

  There his flight ceases, there the heart, become

  Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,

  And all the urgence of desire is lost;

Or, as it stands in the Italian:

  Ivi queta il suo voi, ivi s’appunta

  In tre sguardi beata, ivi il cor tace,

  E tutta perde del desio la punta.

It was the fortune of Monti, as I have said, to sing all round and upon every side of every subject, and he was governed only by knowledge of which side was for the moment uppermost. If a poem attacked the French when their triumph seemed doubtful, the offending verses were erased as soon as the French conquered, and the same poem unblushingly exalted them in a new edition; — now religion and the Church were celebrated in Monti’s song, now the goddess of Reason and the reign of liberty; the Pope was lauded in Rome, and the Inquisition was attacked in Milan; England was praised whilst Monti was in the anti-French interest, and as soon as the poet could turn his coat of many colors, the sun was urged to withdraw from England the small amount of light and heat which it vouchsafed the foggy island; and the Rev. Henry Boyd, who translated the Bassvilliana into our tongue, must have been very much dismayed to find this eloquent foe of revolutions assailing the hereditary enemy of France in his next poem, and uttering the hope that she might be surrounded with waves of blood and with darkness, and shaken with earthquakes. But all this was nothing to Monti’s treatment of the shade of poor King Louis XVI. We have seen with how much ceremony the poet ushered that unhappy prince into eternal bliss, and in Mr. Boyd’s translation of the Bassvilliana, we can read the portents with which Monti makes the heavens recognize the crime of his execution in Paris.

  Then from their houses, like a billowy tide,

  Men rush enfrenzied, and, from every breast

  Banished shrinks Pity, weeping, terrified.

  Now the earth quivers, trampled and oppressed

  By wheels, by feet of horses and of men;

  The air in hollow moans speaks its unrest;

  Like distant thunder’s roar, scarce within ken,

  Like the hoarse murmurs of the midnight surge,

  Like the north wind rushing from its far-off den.

  Through the dark crowds that round the scaffold flock

  The monarch see with look and gait appear

  That might to soft compassion melt a rock;

  Melt rocks, from hardest flint draw pity’s tear, —

  But not from Gallic tigers; to what fate,

  Monsters, have ye brought him who loved you dear?

It seems scarcely possible that a personage so flatteringly attended from the scaffold to the very presence of the Trinity, could afterward have been used with disrespect by the same master of ceremonies; yet in his Ode on Superstition, Monti has later occasion to refer to the French monarch in these terms:

                   The tyrant has fallen. Ye peoples

                   Oppress�d, rise! Nature breathes freely.

                   Proud kings, bow before them and tremble;

                   Yonder crumbles the greatest of thrones!

  (Repeat.) There was stricken the vile perjurer Capet,

(He will only give Louis his family name!)

                   Who had worn out the patience of God!

                   In that pitiless blood dip thy fingers,

                   France, delivered from fetters unworthy!

                   ‘T is blood sucked from the veins of thy children

                   Whom the despot has cruelly wronged!

                   O freemen to arms that are flying,

                   Bathe, bathe in that blood your bright weapons,

                   Triumph rests ‘mid the terror of battle

                   Upon swords that have smitten a king!

This, every one must allow, was a very unhandsome way of treating an ex-martyr, but at the time Monti wrote he was in Milan, in the midst of most revolutionary spirits, and he felt obliged to be rude to the memory of the unhappy king. After all, probably it did not hurt the king so much as the poet.

IV

The troubled life of Ugo Foscolo is a career altogether wholesomer than Monti’s to contemplate. There is much of violence, vanity, and adventure in it, to remind of Byron; but Foscolo had neither the badness of Byron’s heart nor the greatness of his talent. He was, moreover, a better scholar and a man of truer feeling. Coming to Venice from Zante, in 1793, he witnessed the downfall of a system which Venetians do not yet know whether to lament or execrate; and he was young and generous enough to believe that Bonaparte really meant to build up a democratic republic on the ruins of the fallen oligarchy. Foscolo had been one of the popular innovators before the Republic perished, and he became the secretary of the provisional government, and was greatly beloved by the people. It is related that they were so used to his voice, and so fond of hearing it, that one day, when they heard another reading in his place, they became quite turbulent, till the president called out with that deliciously caressing Venetian familiarity, Popolo, ste cheto; Foscolo xe rochio! “People, be quiet; Foscolo is hoarse.” While in this office, he brought out his first tragedy, which met with great success; and at the same time Napoleon played the cruel farce with which he had beguiled the Venetians, by selling them to Austria, at Campo-Formio. Foscolo then left Venice, and went to Milan, where he established a patriotic journal, in which a genuine love of country found expression, and in which he defended unworthy Monti against the attacks of the red republicans. He also defended the Latin language, when the legislature, which found time in a season of great public peril and anxiety to regulate philology, fulminated a decree against that classic tongue; and he soon afterward quitted Milan, in despair of the Republic’s future. He had many such fits of disgust, and in one of them he wrote that the wickedness and shame of Italy were so great, that they could never be effaced till the two seas covered her. There was fighting in those days, for such as had stomach for it, in every part of Italy; and Foscolo, being enrolled in the Italian Legion, was present at the battle of Cento, and took part in the defense of Genoa, but found time, amid all his warlike occupations, for literature. He had written, in the flush of youthful faith and generosity, an ode to Bonaparte Liberator; and he employed the leisure of the besieged in republishing it at Genoa, affixing to the verses a reproach to Napoleon for the treaty of Campo-Formio, and menacing him with a Tacitus. He returned to Milan after the battle of Marengo, but his enemies procured his removal to Boulogne, whither the Italian Legion had been ordered, and where Foscolo cultivated his knowledge of English and his hatred of Napoleon. After travel in Holland and marriage with an Englishwoman there, he again came back to Milan, which he found full as ever of folly, intrigue, baseness, and envy. Leaving the capital, says Arnaud, “he took up his abode on the hills of Brescia, and for two weeks was seen wandering over the heights, declaiming and gesticulating. The mountaineers thought him mad. One morning he descended to the city with the manuscript of the Sepoleri. It was in 1807. Not Jena, not Friedland, could dull the sensation it imparted to the Italian republic of letters.”

V

It is doubtful whether this poem, which Giudici calls the sublimest lyrical composition modern literature has produced, will stir the English reader to enthusiastic admiration. The poem is of its age — declamatory, ambitious, eloquent; but the ideas do not seem great or new, though that, perhaps, is because they have been so often repeated since. De Sanctis declares it the “earliest lyrical note of the new literature, the affirmation of the rehabilitated conscience of the new manhood. A law of the Republic— “the French Republic” — prescribed the equality of men before death. The splender of monuments seemed a privilege of the nobles and the rich, and the Republicans contested the privilege, the distinction of classes, even in this form ... This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries clouded the poetry of life for him.... He lacked the religious idea, but the sense of humanity in its progress and its aims, bound together by the family, the state, liberty, glory — from this Foscolo drew his harmonies, a new religion of the tomb.”....

He touches in it on the funeral usages of different times and peoples, with here and there an episodic allusion to the fate of heroes and poets, and disquisitions on the aesthetic and spiritual significance of posthumous honors. The most-admired passage of the poem is that in which the poet turns to the monuments of Italy’s noblest dead, in the church of Santa Croce, at Florence:

  The urn�d ashes of the mighty kindle

  The great soul to great actions, Pindemonte,

  And fair and holy to the pilgrim make

  The earth that holds them. When I saw the tomb

  Where rests the body of that great one, who

  Tempering the scepter of the potentate,

  Strips off its laurels, and to the people shows

  With what tears it doth reek, and with what blood;

  When I beheld the place of him who raised

  A new Olympus to the gods in Rome, —

  Of him who saw the worlds wheel through the heights

  Of heaven, illumined by the moveless sun,

  And to the Anglian oped the skyey ways

  He swept with such a vast and tireless wing, —

  O happy! I cried, in thy life-giving air,

  And in the fountains that the Apennine

  Down from his summit pours for thee! The moon,

  Glad in thy breath, laps in her clearest light

  Thy hills with vintage laughing; and thy vales,

  Filled with their clustering cots and olive-groves,

  Send heavenward th’ incense of a thousand flowers.

  And thou wert first, Florence, to hear the song

  With which the Ghibelline exile charmed his wrath,

  And thou his language and his ancestry

  Gavest that sweet lip of Calliope,

  Who clothing on in whitest purity

  Love in Greece nude and nude in Rome, again

  Restored him unto the celestial Venus; —

  But happiest I count thee that thou keep’st

  Treasured beneath one temple-roof the glories

  Of Italy, — now thy sole heritage,

  Since the ill-guarded Alps and the inconstant

  Omnipotence of human destinies

  Have rent from thee thy substance and thy arms,

  Thy altars, country, — save thy memories, all.

  Ah! here, where yet a ray of glory lingers,

  Let a light shine unto all generous souls,

  And be Italia’s hope! Unto these stones

  Oft came Vittorio for inspiration,

  Wroth to his country’s gods. Dumbly he roved

  Where Arno is most lonely, anxiously

  Brooding upon the heavens and the fields;

  Then when no living aspect could console,

  Here rested the Austere, upon his face

  Death’s pallor and the deathless light of hope.

  Here with these great he dwells for evermore,

  His dust yet quick with love of country. Yes,

  A god speaks to us from this sacred peace,

  That nursed for Persians upon Marathon,

  Where Athens gave her heroes sepulture,

  Greek ire and virtue. There the mariner

  That sailed the sea under Euboea saw

  Flashing amidst the wide obscurity

  The steel of helmets and of clashing brands,

  The smoke and lurid flame of funeral pyres,

  And phantom warriors, clad in glittering mail,

  Seeking the combat. Through the silences

  And horror of the night, along the field,

  The tumult of the phalanxes arose,

  Mixing itself with sound of warlike tubes,

  And clatter of the hoofs of steeds, that rushed

  Trampling the helms of dying warriors, —

  And sobs, and hymns, and the wild Parcae’s songs!

ALESSANDRO MANZONI

I

It was not till the turbulent days of the Napoleonic age were past, that the theories and thoughts of Romance were introduced into Italy. When these days came to an end, the whole political character of the peninsula reverted, as nearly as possible, to that of the times preceding the revolutions. The Bourbons were restored to Naples, the Pope to Rome, the Dukes and Grand Dukes to their several states, the House of Savoy to Piedmont, and the Austrians to Venice and Lombardy; and it was agreed among all these despotic governments that there was to be no Italy save, as Metternich suggested, in a geographical sense. They encouraged a relapse, among their subjects, into the follies and vices of the past, and they largely succeeded. But, after all, the age was against them; and people who have once desired and done great things are slow to forget them, though the censor may forbid them to be named, and the prison and the scaffold may enforce his behest.

With the restoration of the Austrians, there came a tranquillity to Milan which was not the apathy it seemed. It was now impossible for literary patriotism to be openly militant, as it had been in Alfieri and Foscolo, but it took on the retrospective phase of Romance, and devoted itself to the celebration of the past glories of Italy. In this way it still fulfilled its educative and regenerative mission. It dwelt on the victories which Italians had won in other days over their oppressors, and it tacitly reminded them that they were still oppressed by foreign governments; it portrayed their own former corruption and crimes, and so taught them the virtues which alone could cure the ills their vices had brought upon them. Only secondarily political, and primarily moral, it forbade the Italians to hope to be good citizens without being good men. This was Romance in its highest office, as Manzoni, Grossi, and D’Azeglio conceived it. Aesthetically, the new school struggled to overthrow the classic traditions; to liberate tragedy from the bondage of the unities, and let it concern itself with any tragical incident of life; to give comedy the generous scope of English and Spanish comedy; to seek poetry in the common experiences of men and to find beauty in any theme; to be utterly free, untrammeled, and abundant; to be in literature what the Gothic is in architecture. It perished because it came to look for Beauty only, and all that was good in it became merged in Realism which looks for Truth.

These were the purposes of Romance, and the masters in whom the Italian Romanticists had studied them were the great German and English poets. The tragedies of Shakespeare were translated and admired, and the dramas of Schiller were reproduced in Italian verse; the poems of Byron and of Scott were made known, and the ballads of such lyrical Germans as B�rger. But, of course, so quick and curious a people as the Italians had been sensitive to all preceding influences in the literary world, and before what we call Romance came in from Germany, a breath of nature had already swept over the languid elegance of Arcady from the northern lands of storms and mists; and the effects of this are visible in the poetry of Foscolo’s period.

The enthusiasm with which Ossian was received in France remained, or perhaps only began, after the hoax was exploded in England. In Italy, the misty essence of the Caledonian bard was hailed as a substantial presence. The king took his spear, and struck his deeply sounding shield, as it hung on the willows over the neatly kept garden-walks, and the Shepherds and Shepherdesses promenading there in perpetual villeggiatura were alarmed and perplexed out of a composure which many noble voices had not been able to move. Emiliani-Giudici declares that Melchiorre Cesarotti, a professor in the University of Padua, dealt the first blow against the power of Arcadia. This professor of Greek made the acquaintance of George Sackville, who inflamed him with a desire to read Ossian’s poems, then just published in England; and Cesarotti studied the English language in order to acquaint himself with a poet whom he believed greater than Homer. He translated Macpherson into Italian verse, retaining, however, in extraordinary degree, the genius of the language in which he found the poetry. He is said (for I have not read his version) to have twisted the Italian into our curt idioms, and indulged himself in excesses of compound words, to express the manner of his original. He believed that the Italian language had become “sterile, timid, and superstitious”, through the fault of the grammarians; and in adopting the blank verse for his translation, he ventured upon new forms, and achieved complete popularity, if not complete success. “In fact,” says Giudici, “the poems of Ossian were no sooner published than Italy was filled with uproar by the new methods of poetry, clothed in all the magic of magnificent forms till then unknown. The Arcadian flocks were thrown into tumult, and proclaimed a crusade against Cesarotti as a subverter of ancient order and a mover of anarchy in the peaceful republic — it was a tyranny, and they called it a republic — of letters. Cesarotti was called corrupter, sacrilegious, profane, and assailed with titles of obscene contumely; but the poems of Ossian were read by all, and the name of the translator, till then little known, became famous in and out of Italy.” In fine, Cesarotti founded a school; but, blinded by his marvelous success, he attempted to translate Homer into the same fearless Italian which had received his Ossian. He failed, and was laughed at. Ossian, however, remained a power in Italian letters, though Cesarotti fell; and his influence was felt for romance before the time of the Romantic School. Monti imitated him as he found him in Italian; yet, though Monti’s verse abounds, like Ossian, in phantoms and apparitions, they are not northern specters, but respectable shades, classic, well-mannered, orderly, and have no kinship with anything but the personifications, Vice, Virtue, Fear, Pleasure, and the rest of their genteel allegorical company. Unconsciously, however, Monti had helped to prepare the way for romantic realism by his choice of living themes. Louis XVI, though decked in epic dignity, was something that touched and interested the age; and Bonaparte, even in pagan apotheosis, was so positive a subject that the improvvisatore acquired a sort of truth and sincerity in celebrating him. Bonaparte might not be the Sun he was hailed to be, but even in Monti’s verse he was a soldier, ambitious, unscrupulous, irresistible, recognizable in every guise.

In Germany, where the great revival of romantic letters took place, — where the poets and scholars, studying their own Minnesingers and the ballads of England and Scotland, reproduced the simplicity and directness of thought characteristic of young literatures, — the life as well as the song of the people had once been romantic. But in Italy there had never been such a period. The people were municipal, mercantile; the poets burlesqued the tales of chivalry, and the traders made money out of the Crusades. In Italy, moreover, the patriotic instincts of the people, as well as their habits and associations, were opposed to those which fostered romance in Germany; and the poets and novelists, who sought to naturalize the new element of literature, were naturally accused of political friendship with the hated Germans. The obstacles in the way of the Romantic School at Milan were very great, and it may be questioned if, after all, its disciples succeeded in endearing to the Italians any form of romantic literature except the historical novel, which came from England, and the untrammeled drama, which was studied from English models. They produced great results for good in Italian letters; but, as usual, these results were indirect, and not just those at which the Romanticists aimed.

In Italy the Romantic School was not so sharply divided into a first and second period as in Germany, where it was superseded for a time by the classicism following the study of Winckelmann. Yet it kept, in its own way, the general tendency of German literature. For the “Sorrows of Werther”, the Italians had the “Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis”; for the brood of poets who arose in the fatherland to defy the Revolution, incarnate in Napoleon, with hymn and ballad, a retrospective national feeling in Italy found the same channels of expression through the Lombard group of lyrists and dramatists, while the historical romance flourished as richly as in England, and for a much longer season.

De Sanctis studies the literary situation in the concluding pages of his history; they are almost the most brilliant pages, and they embody a conception of it so luminous that it would be idle to pretend to offer the reader anything better than a r�sum� of his work. The revolution had passed away under the horror of its excesses; more temperate ideas prevailed; the need of a religious and moral restoration was felt. “Foscolo died in 1827, and Pellico, Manzoni, Grossi, Berchet, had risen above the horizon. The Romantic School,’the audacious boreal school,’ had appeared. 1815 is a memorable date.... It marks the official manifestation of a reaction, not only political, but philosophical and literary.... The reaction was as rapid and violent as the revolution.... The white terror succeeded to the red.”

Our critic says that there were at this time two enemies, materialism and skepticism, and that there rose against them a spirituality carried to idealism, to mysticism. “To the right of nature was opposed the divine right, to popular sovereignty legitimacy, to individual rights the State, to liberty authority or order. The middle ages returned in triumph.... Christianity, hitherto the target of all offense, became the center of every philosophical investigation, the banner of all social and religious progress.... The criterions of art were changed. There was a pagan art and a Christian art, whose highest expression was sought in the Gothic, in the glooms, the mysteries, the vague, the indefinite, in a beyond which was called the ideal, in an aspiration towards the infinite, incapable of fruition and therefore melancholy.... To Voltaire and Rousseau succeeded Chateaubriand, De Sta�l, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais. And in 1815 appeared the Sacred Hymns of the young Manzoni.”

The Romantic movement was as universal then as the Realistic movement is now, and as irresistible. It was the literary expression of monarchy and aristocracy, as Realism is the literary expression of republicanism and democracy. What De Sanctis shows is that out of the political tempest absolutism issued stronger than ever, that the clergy and the nobles, once its rivals, became its creatures; the prevailing bureaucracy interested the citizen class in the perpetuity of the state, but turned them into office-seekers; the police became the main-spring of power; the office-holder, the priest and the soldier became spies. “There resulted an organized corruption called government, absolute in form, or under a mask of constitutionalism. ... Such a reaction, in violent contradiction of modern ideas, could not last.” There were outbreaks in Spain, Naples, Piedmont, the Romagna; Greece and Belgium rose; legitimacy fell; citizen-kings came in; and a long quiet followed, in which the sciences and letters nourished. Even in Austria-ridden Italy, where constitutionalism was impossible, the middle class was allowed a part in the administration. “Little by little the new and the old learned to live together: the divine right and the popular will were associated in laws and writs. ... The movement was the same revolution as before, mastered by experience and self-disciplined.... Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Victor Hugo, Lamennais, Manzoni, Grossi, Pellico, were liberal no less than Voltaire and Rousseau, Alfieri and Foscolo.... The religious sentiment, too deeply offended, vindicated itself; yet it could not escape from the lines of the revolution ... it was a reaction transmuted into a reconciliation.”

The literary movement was called Romantic as against the old Classicism; medieval and Christian, it made the papacy the hero of its poetry; it abandoned Greek and Roman antiquity for national antiquity, but the modern spirit finally informed Romanticism as it had informed Classicism; Parini and Manzoni were equally modern men. Religion is restored, but, “it is no longer a creed, it is an artistic motive.... It is not enough that there are saints, they must be beautiful; the Christian idea returns as art.... Providence comes back to the world, the miracle re-appears in story, hope and prayer revive, the heart softens, it opens itself to gentle influences.... Manzoni reconstructs the ideal of the Christian Paradise and reconciles it with the modern spirit. Mythology goes, the classic remains; the eighteenth century is denied, its ideas prevail.”

The pantheistic idealism which resulted pleased the citizen-fancy; the notion of “evolution succeeded to that of revolution”; one said civilization, progress, culture, instead of liberty. “Louis Philippe realized the citizen ideal.... The problem was solved, the skein untangled. God might rest.... The supernatural was not believed, but it was explained and respected. One did not accept Christ as divine, but a human Christ was exalted to the stars; religion was spoken of with earnestness, and the ministers of God with reverence.”

A new criticism arose, and bade literature draw from life, while a vivid idealism accompanied anxiety for historical truth. In Italy, where the liberals could not attack the governments, they attacked Aristotle, and a tremendous war arose between the Romanticists and the Classicists. The former grouped themselves at Milan chiefly, and battled through the Conciliatore, a literary journal famous in Italian annals. They vaunted the English and Germans; they could not endure mythology; they laughed the three unities to scorn. At Paris Manzoni had imbibed the new principles, and made friends with the new masters; for Goethe and Schiller he abandoned Alfieri and Monti. “Yet if the Romantic School, by its name, its ties, its studies, its impressions, was allied to German traditions and French fashions, it was at bottom Italian in accent, aspiration, form, and motive.... Every one felt our hopes palpitating under the medieval robe; the least allusion, the remotest meanings, were caught by the public, which was in the closest accord with the writers. The middle ages were no longer treated with historical and positive intention; they became the garments of our ideals, the transparent expression of our hopes.”

It is this fact which is especially palpable in Manzoni’s work, and Manzoni was the chief poet of the Romantic School in that land where it found the most realistic development, and set itself seriously to interpret the emotions and desires of the nation. When these were fulfilled, even the form of Romanticism ceased to be.

III

ALESSANDRO MANZONI was born at Milan in 1784, and inherited from his father the title of Count, which he always refused to wear; from his mother, who was the daughter of Beccaria, the famous and humane writer on Crimes and Punishments, he may have received the nobility which his whole life has shown.

{Illustration: Alessandro Manzoni.}

In his youth he was a liberal thinker in matters of religion; the stricter sort of Catholics used to class him with the Voltaireans, and there seems to have been some ground for their distrust of his orthodoxy. But in 1808 he married Mlle. Louisa Henriette Blondel, the daughter of a banker of Geneva, who, having herself been converted from Protestantism to the Catholic faith on coming to Milan, converted her husband in turn, and thereafter there was no question concerning his religion. She was long remembered in her second country “for her fresh blond head, and her blue eyes, her lovely eyes”, and she made her husband very happy while she lived. The young poet signalized his devotion to his young bride, and the faith to which she restored him, in his Sacred Hymns, published in this devout and joyous time. But Manzoni was never a Catholic of those Catholics who believed in the temporal power of the Pope. He said to Madam Colet, the author of “L’Italie des Italiens”, a silly and gossiping but entertaining book, “I bow humbly to the Pope, and the Church has no more respectful son; but why confound the interests of earth and those of heaven? The Roman people are right in asking their freedom — there are hours for nations, as for governments, in which they must occupy themselves, not with what is convenient, but with what is just. Let us lay hands boldly upon the temporal power, but let us not touch the doctrine of the Church. The one is as distinct from the other as the immortal soul from the frail and mortal body. To believe that the Church is attacked in taking away its earthly possessions is a real heresy to every true Christian.”

The Sacred Hymns were published in 1815, and in 1820 Manzoni gave the world his first tragedy, Il Conte di Carmagnola, a romantic drama written in the boldest defiance of the unities of time and place. He dispensed with these hitherto indispensable conditions of dramatic composition among the Italians eight years before Victor Hugo braved their tyranny in his Cromwell; and in an introduction to his tragedy he gave his reasons for this audacious innovation. Following the Carmagnola, in 1822, came his second and last tragedy, Adelchi. In the mean time he had written his magnificent ode on the Death of Napoleon, “Il Cinque Maggio”, which was at once translated by Goethe, and recognized by the French themselves as the last word on the subject. It placed him at the head of the whole continental Romantic School.

In 1825 he published his romance, “I Promessi Sposi”, known to every one knowing anything of Italian, and translated into all modern languages. Besides these works, and some earlier poems, Manzoni wrote only a few essays upon historical and literary subjects, and he always led a very quiet and uneventful life. He was very fond of the country; early every spring he left the city for his farm, whose labors he directed and shared. His life was so quiet, indeed, and his fate so happy, in contrast with that of Pellico and other literary contemporaries at Milan, that he was accused of indifference in political matters by those who could not see the subtler tendency of his whole life and works. Marc Monnier says, “There are countries where it is a shame not to be persecuted,” and this is the only disgrace which has ever fallen upon Manzoni.

When the Austrians took possession of Milan, after the retirement of the French, they invited the patricians to inscribe themselves in a book of nobility, under pain of losing their titles, and Manzoni preferred to lose his. He constantly refused honors offered him by the Government, and he sent back the ribbon of a knightly order with the answer that he had made a vow never to wear any decoration. When Victor Emanuel in turn wished to do him a like honor, he held himself bound by his excuse to the Austrians, but accepted the honorary presidency of the Lombard Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts. In 1860 he was elected a Senator of the realm; he appeared in order to take the oath and then he retired to a privacy never afterwards broken.

IV

“Goethe’s praise,” says a sneer turned proverb, “is a brevet of mediocrity.” Manzoni must rest under this damaging applause, which was not too freely bestowed upon other Italian poets of his time, or upon Italy at all, for that matter.

Goethe could not laud Manzoni’s tragedies too highly; he did not find one word too much or too little in them; the style was free, noble, full and rich. As to the religious lyrics, the manner of their treatment was fresh and individual although the matter and the significance were not new; and the poet was “a Christian without fanaticism, a Roman Catholic without bigotry, a zealot without hardness.”

The tragedies had no success upon the stage. The Carmagnola was given in Florence in 1828, but in spite of the favor of the court, and the open rancor of the friends of the Classic School, it failed; at Turin, where the Adelchi was tried, Pellico regretted that the attempt to play it had been made, and deplored the “vile irreverence of the public.”

Both tragedies deal with patriotic themes, but they are both concerned with occurrences of remote epochs. The time of the Carmagnola is the fifteenth century; that of the Adelchi the eighth century; and however strongly marked are the characters, — and they are very strongly marked, and differ widely from most persons of Italian classic tragedy in this respect, — one still feels that they are subordinate to the great contests of elements and principles for which the tragedy furnishes a scene. In the Carmagnola the pathos is chiefly in the feeling embodied by the magnificent chorus lamenting the slaughter of Italians by Italians at the battle of Maclodio; in the Adelchi we are conscious of no emotion so strong as that we experience when we hear the wail of the Italian people, to whom the overthrow of their Longobard oppressors by the Franks is but the signal of a new enslavement. This chorus is almost as fine as the more famous one in the Carmagnola; both are incomparably finer than anything else in the tragedies and are much more dramatic than the dialogue. It is in the emotion of a spectator belonging to our own time rather than in that of an actor of those past times that the poet shows his dramatic strength; and whenever he speaks abstractly for country and humanity he moves us in a way that permits no doubt of his greatness.

After all, there is but one Shakespeare, and in the drama below him Manzoni holds a high place. The faults of his tragedies are those of most plays which are not acting plays, and their merits are much greater than the great number of such plays can boast. I have not meant to imply that you want sympathy with the persons of the drama, but only less sympathy than with the ideas embodied in them. There are many affecting scenes, and the whole of each tragedy is conceived in the highest and best ideal.

V

In the Carmagnola, the action extends from the moment when the Venetian Senate, at war with the Duke of Milan, places its armies under the command of the count, who is a soldier of fortune and has formerly been in the service of the Duke. The Senate sends two commissioners into his camp to represent the state there, and to be spies upon his conduct. This was a somewhat clumsy contrivance of the Republic to give a patriotic character to its armies, which were often recruited from mercenaries and generaled by them; and, of course, the hireling leaders must always have chafed under the surveillance. After the battle of Maclodio, in which the Venetian mercenaries defeated the Milanese, the victors, according to the custom of their trade, began to free their comrades of the other side whom they had taken prisoners. The commissioners protested against this waste of results, but Carmagnola answered that it was the usage of his soldiers, and he could not forbid it; he went further, and himself liberated some remaining prisoners. His action was duly reported to the Senate, and as he had formerly been in the service of the Duke of Milan, whose kinswoman he had married, he was suspected of treason. He was invited to Venice, and received with great honor, and conducted with every flattering ceremony to the hall of the Grand Council. After a brief delay, sufficient to exclude Carmagnola’s followers, the Doge ordered him to be seized, and upon a summary trial he was put to death. From this tragedy I give first a translation of that famous chorus of which I have already spoken; I have kept the measure and the movement of the original at some loss of literality. The poem is introduced into the scene immediately succeeding the battle of Maclodio, where the two bands of those Italian condottieri had met to butcher each other in the interests severally of the Duke of Milan and the Signory of Venice.

  CHORUS.

  On the right hand a trumpet is sounding,

    On the left hand a trumpet replying,

  The field upon all sides resounding

      With the trampling of foot and of horse.

    Yonder flashes a flag; yonder flying

  Through the still air a bannerol glances;

  Here a squadron embattled advances,

      There another that threatens its course.

  The space ‘twixt the foes now beneath them

    Is hid, and on swords the sword ringeth;

  In the hearts of each other they sheathe them;

      Blood runs, they redouble their blows.

    Who are these? To our fair fields what bringeth

  To make war upon us, this stranger?

  Which is he that hath sworn to avenge her,

      The land of his birth, on her foes?

  They are all of one land and one nation,

    One speech; and the foreigner names them

  All brothers, of one generation;

      In each visage their kindred is seen;

    This land is the mother that claims them,

  This land that their life blood is steeping,

  That God, from all other lands keeping,

      Set the seas and the mountains between.

  Ah, which drew the first blade among them

    To strike at the heart of his brother?

  What wrong, or what insult hath stung them

      To wipe out what stain, or to die?

    They know not; to slay one another

  They come in a cause none hath told them;

  A chief that was purchased hath sold them;

      They combat for him, nor ask why.

  Ah, woe for the mothers that bare them,

    For the wives of these warriors maddened!

  Why come not their loved ones to tear them

      Away from the infamous field?

    Their sires, whom long years have saddened,

  And thoughts of the sepulcher chastened,

  In warning why have they not hastened

      To bid them to hold and to yield?

  As under the vine that embowers

    His own happy threshold, the smiling

  Clown watches the tempest that lowers

      On the furrows his plow has not turned,

    So each waits in safety, beguiling

  The time with his count of those falling

  Afar in the fight, and the appalling

      Flames of towns and of villages burned.

  There, intent on the lips of their mothers,

    Thou shalt hear little children with scorning

  Learn to follow and flout at the brothers

      Whose blood they shall go forth to shed;

  Thou shalt see wives and maidens adorning

  Their bosoms and hair with the splendor

  Of gems but now torn from the tender,

      Hapless daughters and wives of the dead.

  Oh, disaster, disaster, disaster!

    With the slain the earth’s hidden already;

  With blood reeks the whole plain, and vaster

      And fiercer the strife than before!

    But along the ranks, rent and unsteady,

  Many waver — they yield, they are flying!

  With the last hope of victory dying

      The love of life rises again.

  As out of the fan, when it tosses

    The grain in its breath, the grain flashes,

  So over the field of their losses

      Fly the vanquished. But now in their course

    Starts a squadron that suddenly dashes

  Athwart their wild flight and that stays them,

  While hard on the hindmost dismays them

      The pursuit of the enemy’s horse.

  At the feet of the foe they fall trembling,

    And yield life and sword to his keeping;

  In the shouts of the victors assembling,

      The moans of the dying are drowned.

    To the saddle a courier leaping,

  Takes a missive, and through all resistance,

  Spurs, lashes, devours the distance;

      Every hamlet awakes at the sound.

  Ah, why from their rest and their labor

    To the hoof-beaten road do they gather?

  Why turns every one to his neighbor

      The jubilant tidings to hear?

    Thou know’st whence he comes, wretched father?

  And thou long’st for his news, hapless mother?

  In fight brother fell upon brother!

    These terrible tidings I bring.

  All around I hear cries of rejoicing;

    The temples are decked; the song swelleth

  From the hearts of the fratricides, voicing

     Praise and thanks that are hateful to God.

    Meantime from the Alps where he dwelleth

  The Stranger turns hither his vision,

  And numbers with cruel derision

      The brave that have bitten the sod.

  Leave your games, leave your songs and exulting;

    Fill again your battalions and rally

  Again to your banners! Insulting

      The stranger descends, he is come!

    Are ye feeble and few in your sally,

  Ye victors? For this he descendeth!

  ’Tis for this that his challenge he sendeth

      From the fields where your brothers lie dumb!

  Thou that strait to thy children appearedst,

    Thou that knew’st not in peace how to tend them,

  Fatal land! now the stranger thou fearedst

      Receive, with the judgment he brings!

    A foe unprovoked to offend them

  At thy board sitteth down, and derideth,

  The spoil of thy foolish divideth,

      Strips the sword from the hand of thy kings.

  Foolish he, too! What people was ever

    For bloodshedding blest, or oppression?

  To the vanquished alone comes harm never;

      To tears turns the wrong-doer’s joy!

    Though he ‘scape through the years’ long progression,

  Yet the vengeance eternal o’ertaketh

  Him surely; it waiteth and waketh;

      It seizes him at the last sigh!

  We are all made in one Likeness holy,

    Ransomed all by one only redemption;

  Near or far, rich or poor, high or lowly,

      Wherever we breathe in life’s air,

    We are brothers, by one great pre�mption

  Bound all; and accursed be its wronger,

  Who would ruin by right of the stronger,

      Wring the hearts of the weak with despair.

Here is the whole political history of Italy. In this poem the picture of the confronted hosts, the vivid scenes of the combat, the lamentations over the ferocity of the embattled brothers, and the indifference of those that behold their kinsmen’s carnage, the strokes by which the victory, the rout, and the captivity are given, and then the apostrophe to Italy, and finally the appeal to conscience — are all masterly effects. I do not know just how to express my sense of near approach through that last stanza to the heart of a very great and good man, but I am certain that I have such a feeling.

The noble, sonorous music, the solemn movement of the poem are in great part lost by its version into English; yet, I hope that enough are left to suggest the original. I think it quite unsurpassed in its combination of great artistic and moral qualities, which I am sure my version has not wholly obscured, bad as it is.

VI

The scene following first upon this chorus also strikes me with the grand spirit in which it is wrought; and in its revelations of the motives and ideas of the old professional soldier-life, it reminds me of Schiller’s Wallenstein’s Camp. Manzoni’s canvas has not the breadth of that of the other master, but he paints with as free and bold a hand, and his figures have an equal heroism of attitude and motive. The generous soldierly pride of Carmagnola, and the strange esprit du corps of the mercenaries, who now stood side by side, and now front to front in battle; who sold themselves to any buyer that wanted killing done, and whose noblest usage was in violation of the letter of their bargains, are the qualities on which the poet touches, in order to waken our pity for what has already raised our horror. It is humanity in either case that inspires him — a humanity characteristic of many Italians of this century, who have studied so long in the school of suffering that they know how to abhor a system of wrong, and yet excuse its agents.

The scene I am to give is in the tent of the great condottiere. Carmagnola is speaking with one of the Commissioners of the Venetian Republic, when the other suddenly enters:

 Commissioner.     My lord, if instantly

 You haste not to prevent it, treachery

 Shameless and bold will be accomplished, making

 Our victory vain, as’t partly hath already.

 Count. How now?

 Com. The prisoners leave the camp in troops!

 The leaders and the soldiers vie together

 To set them free; and nothing can restrain them

 Saving command of yours.

 Count.              Command of mine?

 Com. You hesitate to give it?

 Count.                   ‘T is a use,

 This, of the war, you know. It is so sweet

 To pardon when we conquer; and their hate

 Is quickly turned to friendship in the hearts

 That throb beneath the steel. Ah, do not seek

 To take this noble privilege from those

 Who risked their lives for your sake, and to-day

 Are generous because valiant yesterday.

 Com. Let him be generous who fights for himself,

 My lord! But these — and it rests upon their honor —

 Have fought at our expense, and unto us

 Belong the prisoners.

 Count.              You may well think so,

 Doubtless, but those who met them front to front,

 Who felt their blows, and fought so hard to lay

 Their bleeding hands upon them, they will not

 So easily believe it.

 Com.                And is this

 A joust for pleasure then? And doth not Venice

 Conquer to keep? And shall her victory

 Be all in vain?

 Count.         Already I have heard it,

 And I must hear that word again? ’Tis bitter;

 Importunate it comes upon me, like an insect

 That, driven once away, returns to buzz

 About my face.... The victory is in vain!

 The field is heaped with corpses; scattered wide,

 And broken, are the rest — a most flourishing

 Army, with which, if it were still united,

 And it were mine, mine truly, I’d engage

 To overrun all Italy! Every design

 Of the enemy baffled; even the hope of harm

 Taken away from him; and from my hand

 Hardly escaped, and glad of their escape,

 Four captains against whom but yesterday

 It were a boast to show resistance; vanished

 Half of the dread of those great names; in us

 Doubled the daring that the foe has lost;

 The whole choice of the war now in our hands;

 And ours the lands they’ve left — is’t nothing?

 Think you that they will go back to the Duke,

 Those prisoners; and that they love him, or

 Care more for him than you? that they have fought

 In his behalf? Nay, they have combatted

 Because a sovereign voice within the heart

 Of men that follow any banner cries,

 “Combat and conquer!” they have lost and so

 Are set at liberty; they’ll sell themselves —

 O, such is now the soldier! — to the first

 That seeks to buy them — Buy them; they are yours!

 1st Com. When we paid those that were to fight with

 them,

 We then believed ourselves to have purchased them.

 2d Com. My lord, Venice confides in you; in you

 She sees a son; and all that to her good

 And to her glory can redound, expects

 Shall be done by you.

 Count.                 Everything I can.

 2d Com. And what can you not do upon this field?

 Count. The thing you ask. An ancient use, a use

 Dear to the soldier, I can not violate.

 2d Com. You, whom no one resists, on whom so

 promptly

 Every will follows, so that none can say,

 Whether for love or fear it yield itself;

 You, in this camp, you are not able, you,

 To make a law, and to enforce it?

 Count.                              I said

 I could not; now I rather say, I will not!

 No further words; with friends this hath been ever

 My ancient custom; satisfy at once

 And gladly all just prayers, and for all other

 Refuse them openly and promptly. Soldier!

 Com.   Nay — what is your purpose?

 Count.             You will see anon.

                  {To a soldier who enters

 How many prisoners still remain?

 Soldier.                           I think,

 My lord, four hundred.

 Count.              Call them hither — call

 The bravest of them — those you meet the first;

 Send them here quickly.            {Exit soldier.

                            Surely, I might do it —

 If I gave such a sign, there were not heard

 A murmur in the camp. But these, my children,

 My comrades amid peril, and in joy,

 Those who confide in me, believe they follow

 A leader ever ready to defend

 The honor and advantage of the soldier;

 I play them false, and make more slavish yet,

 More vile and base their calling, than ’tis now?

 Lords, I am trustful, as the soldier is,

 But if you now insist on that from me

 Which shall deprive me of my comrades’ love,

 If you desire to separate me from them,

 And so reduce me that I have no stay

 Saving yourselves — in spite of me I say it,

 You force me, you, to doubt —

 Com.                          What do you say?

 {The prisoners, among them young Pergola, enter.

 Count (To the prisoners). O brave in vain! Unfortunate!

 To you,

 Fortune is cruelest, then? And you alone

 Are to a sad captivity reserved?

 A prisoner. Such, mighty lord, was never our belief.

 When we were called into your presence, we

 Did seem to hear a messenger that gave

 Our freedom to us. Already, all of those

 That yielded them to captains less than you

 Have been released, and only we —

 Count.                                Who was it,

 That made you prisoners?

 Prisoner.                        We were the last

 To give our arms up. All the rest were taken

 Or put to flight, and for a few brief moments

 The evil fortune of the battle weighed

 On us alone. At last you made a sign

 That we should draw nigh to your banner, — we

 Alone not conquered, relics of the lost.

 Count. You are those? I am very glad, my friends,

 To see you again, and I can testify

 That you fought bravely; and if so much valor

 Were not betrayed, and if a captain equal

 Unto yourselves had led you, it had been

 No pleasant thing to stand before you.

 Prisoner.                                And now

 Shall it be our misfortune to have yielded

 Only to you, my lord? And they that found

 A conqueror less glorious, shall they find

 More courtesy in him? In vain, we asked

 Our freedom of your soldiers — no one durst

 Dispose of us without your own assent,

 But all did promise it. “O, if you can,

 Show yourselves to the Count,” they said. “Be sure,

 He’ll not embitter fortune to the vanquished;

 An ancient courtesy of war will never

 Be ta’en away by him; he would have been

 Rather the first to have invented it.”

 Count. (To the Coms.) You hear them, lords? Well,

       then, what do you say?

 What would you do, you? (To the prisoners)

                               Heaven forbid that any

 Should think more highly than myself of me!

 You are all free, my friends; farewell! Go, follow

 Your fortune, and if e’er again it lead you

 Under a banner that’s adverse to mine,

 Why, we shall see each other. (The Count observes

       young Pergola and stops him.)

                               Ho, young man,

 Thou art not of the vulgar! Dress, and face

 More clearly still, proclaims it; yet with the others

 Thou minglest and art silent?

 Pergola.               Vanquished men

 Have nought to say, O captain.

 Count.                 This ill-fortune

 Thou bearest so, that thou dost show thyself

 Worthy a better. What’s thy name?

 Pergola.                        A name

 Whose fame ‘t were hard to greaten, and that lays

 On him who bears it a great obligation.

 Pergola is my name.

 Count.          What! thou ‘rt the son

 Of that brave man?

 Pergola.        I am he.

 Count.                   Come, embrace

 Thy father’s ancient friend! Such as thou art

 That I was when I knew him first. Thou bringest

 Happy days back to me! the happy days Of hope.

 And take thou heart! Fortune did give

 A happier beginning unto me;

 But fortune’s promises are for the brave.

 And soon or late she keeps them. Greet for me

 Thy father, boy, and say to him that I

 Asked it not of thee, but that I was sure

 This battle was not of his choosing.

 Pergola.                      Surely,

 He chose it not; but his words were as wind.

 Count. Let it not grieve thee; ‘t is the leader’s shame

 Who is defeated; he begins well ever

 Who like a brave man fights where he is placed.

 Come with me, (takes his hand)

     I would show thee to my comrades.

 I’d give thee back thy sword. Adieu, my lords;

                                    (To the Coms.)

 I never will be merciful to your foes

 Till I have conquered them.

A notable thing in this tragedy of Carmagnola is that the interest of love is entirely wanting to it, and herein it differs very widely from the play of Schiller. The soldiers are simply soldiers; and this singleness of motive is in harmony with the Italian conception of art. Yet the Carmagnola of Manzoni is by no means like the heroes of the Alfierian tragedy. He is a man, not merely an embodied passion or mood; his character is rounded, and has all the checks and counterpoises, the inconsistencies, in a word, without which nothing actually lives in literature, or usefully lives in the world. In his generous and magnificent illogicality, he comes the nearest being a woman of all the characters in the tragedy. There is no other personage in it equaling him in interest; but he also is subordinated to the author’s purpose of teaching his countrymen an enlightened patriotism. I am loath to blame this didactic aim, which, I suppose, mars the aesthetic excellence ofthe piece.

Carmagnola’s liberation of the prisoners was not forgiven him by Venice, who, indeed, never forgave anything; he was in due time entrapped in the hall of the Grand Council, and condemned to die. The tragedy ends with a scene in his prison, where he awaits his wife and daughter, who are coming with one of his old comrades, Gonzaga, to bid him a last farewell. These passages present the poet in his sweeter and tenderer moods, and they have had a great charm for me.

SCENE — THE PRISON.

 Count (speaking of his wife and daughter). By this time

     they must know my fate. Ah! why

 Might I not die far from them? Dread, indeed,

 Would be the news that reached them, but, at least,

 The darkest hour of agony would be past,

 And now it stands before us. We must needs

 Drink the draft drop by drop. O open fields,

 O liberal sunshine, O uproar of arms,

 O joy of peril, O trumpets, and the cries

 Of combatants, O my true steed! ‘midst you

 ‘T were fair to die; but now I go rebellious

 To meet my destiny, driven to my doom

 Like some vile criminal, uttering on the way

 Impotent vows, and pitiful complaints.

 But I shall see my dear ones once again

 And, alas! hear their moans; the last adieu

 Hear from their lips — shall find myself once more

 Within their arms — then part from them forever.

 They come! O God, bend down from heaven on them

 One look of pity.

       {Enter ANTONIETTA, MATILDE, and GONZAGA.

 Antonietta.         My husband!

 Matilde.                         O my father!

 Antonietta. Ah, thus thou comest back! Is this the moment

 So long desired?

 Count.           O poor souls! Heaven knows

 That only for your sake is it dreadful to me.

 I who so long am used to look on death,

 And to expect it, only for your sakes

 Do I need courage. And you, you will not surely

 Take it away from me? God, when he makes

 Disaster fall on the innocent, he gives, too,

 The heart to bear it. Ah! let yours be equal

 To your affliction now! Let us enjoy

 This last embrace — it likewise is Heaven’s gift.

 Daughter, thou weepest; and thou, wife! Oh, when

 I chose thee mine, serenely did they days

 Glide on in peace; but made I thee companion

 Of a sad destiny. And it is this thought

 Embitters death to me. Would that I could not

 See how unhappy I have made thee!

 Antonietta.                       O husband

 Of my glad days, thou mad’st them glad! My heart, —

 Yes, thou may’st read it! — I die of sorrow! Yet

 I could not wish that I had not been thine.

 Count. O love, I know how much I lose in thee:

 Make me not feel it now too much.

 Matilde.                          The murderers!

 Count. No, no, my sweet Matilde; let not those

 Fierce cries of hatred and of vengeance rise

 From out thine innocent soul. Nay, do not mar

 These moments; they are holy; the wrong’s great,

 But pardon it, and thou shalt see in midst of ills

 A lofty joy remaining still. My death,

 The cruelest enemy could do no more

 Than hasten it. Oh surely men did never

 Discover death, for they had made it fierce

 And insupportable! It is from Heaven

 That it doth come, and Heaven accompanies it,

 Still with such comfort as men cannot give

 Nor take away. O daughter and dear wife,

 Hear my last words! All bitterly, I see,

 They fall upon your hearts. But you one day will have

 Some solace in remembering them together.

 Dear wife, live thou; conquer thy sorrow, live;

 Let not this poor girl utterly be orphaned.

 Fly from this land, and quickly; to thy kindred

 Take her with thee. She is their blood; to them

 Thou once wast dear, and when thou didst become

 Wife of their foe, only less dear; the cruel

 Reasons of state have long time made adverse

 The names of Carmagnola and Visconti;

 But thou go’st back unhappy; the sad cause

 Of hate is gone. Death’s a great peacemaker!

 And thou, my tender flower, that to my arms

 Wast wont to come and make my spirit light,

 Thou bow’st thy head? Aye, aye, the tempest roars

 Above thee! Thou dost tremble, and thy breast

 Is shaken with thy sobs. Upon my face

 I feel thy burning tears fall down on me,

 And cannot wipe them from thy tender eyes.

                             ... Thou seem’st to ask

 Pity of me, Matilde. Ah! thy father

 Can do naught for thee. But there is in heaven,

 There is a Father thou know’st for the forsaken;

 Trust him and live on tranquil if not glad.

 Gonzaga, I offer thee this hand, which often

 Thou hast pressed upon the morn of battle, when

 We knew not if we e’er should meet again:

 Wilt press it now once more, and give to me

 Thy faith that thou wilt be defense and guard

 Of these poor women, till they are returned

 Unto their kinsmen?

 Gonzaga.              I do promise thee.

 Count. When thou go’st back to camp,

 Salute my brothers for me; and say to them

 That I die innocent; witness thou hast been

 Of all my deeds and thoughts — thou knowest it.

 Tell them that I did never stain my sword

 With treason — I did never stain it — and

 I am betrayed. — And when the trumpets blow,

 And when the banners beat against the wind,

 Give thou a thought to thine old comrade then!

 And on some mighty day of battle, when

 Upon the field of slaughter the priest lifts

 His hands amid the doleful noises, offering up

 The sacrifice to heaven for the dead,

 Bethink thyself of me, for I too thought

 To die in battle.

 Antonietta.       O God, have pity on us!

 Count. O wife! Matilde! now the hour is near

 We needs must part. Farewell!

 Matilde.             No, father —

 Count.                           Yet

 Once more, come to my heart! Once more, and now,

 In mercy, go!

 Antonietta. Ah, no! they shall unclasp us

 By force!

             {A sound of armed men is heard without.

 Matilde. What sound is that?

 Antonietta.                    Almighty God!

          {The door opens in the middle; armed men

               are seen. Their leader advances toward

               the Count; the women swoon.

 Count. Merciful God! Thou hast removed from them

 This cruel moment, and I thank Thee! Friend,

 Succor them, and from this unhappy place

 Bear them! And when they see the light again,

 Tell them that nothing more is left to fear.

VII

In the Carmagnola having dealt with the internal wars which desolated medieval Italy, Manzoni in the Adelchi takes a step further back in time, and evolves his tragedy from the downfall of the Longobard kingdom and the invasion of the Franks. These enter Italy at the bidding of the priests, to sustain the Church against the disobedience and contumacy of the Longobards.

Desiderio and his son Adelchi are kings of the Longobards, and the tragedy opens with the return to their city Pavia of Ermenegarda, Adelchi’s sister, who was espoused to Carlo, king of the Franks, and has been repudiated by him. The Longobards have seized certain territories belonging to the Church, and as they refuse to restore them, the ecclesiastics send a messenger, who crosses the Alps on foot, to the camp of the Franks, and invites their king into Italy to help the cause of the Church. The Franks descend into the valley of Susa, and soon after defeat the Longobards. It is in this scene that the chorus of the Italian peasants, who suffer, no matter which side conquers, is introduced. The Longobards retire to Verona, and Ermenegarda, whose character is painted with great tenderness and delicacy, and whom we may take for a type of what little goodness and gentleness, sorely puzzled, there was in the world at that time (which was really one of the worst of all the bad times in the world), dies in a convent near Brescia, while the war rages all round her retreat. A defection takes place among the Longobards; Desiderio is captured; a last stand is made by Adelchi at Verona, where he is mortally wounded, and is brought prisoner to his father in the tent of Carlo. The tragedy ends with his death; and I give the whole of the last scene:

              {Enter CARLO and DESIDERIO.

 Desiderio. Oh, how heavily

 Hast thou descended upon my gray head,

 Thou hand of God! How comes my son to me!

 My son, my only glory, here I languish,

 And tremble to behold thee! Shall I see

 Thy deadly wounded body, I that should

 Be wept by thee? I, miserable, alone,

 Dragged thee to this; blind dotard I, that fain

 Had made earth fair to thee, I digged thy grave.

 If only thou amidst thy warriors’ songs

 Hadst fallen on some day of victory,

 Or had I closed upon thy royal bed

 Thine eyes amidst the sobs and reverent grief

 Of thy true liegemen, ah; it still had been

 Anguish ineffable! And now thou diest,

 No king, deserted, in thy foeman’s land,

 With no lament, saving thy father’s, uttered

 Before the man that doth exult to hear it.

 Carlo. Old man, thy grief deceives thee. Sorrowful,

 And not exultant do I see the fate

 Of a brave man and king. Adelchi’s foe

 Was I, and he was mine, nor such that I

 Might rest upon this new throne, if he lived

 And were not in my hands. But now he is

 In God’s own hands, whither no enmity

 Of man can follow him.

 Des.               ‘T is a fatal gift

 Thy pity, if it never is bestowed

 Save upon those fallen beyond all hope —

 If thou dost never stay thine arm until

 Thou canst find no place to inflict a wound!

        (Adelchi is brought in, mortally wounded.)

 Des. My son!

 Adelchi.    And do I see thee once more, father?

 Oh come, and touch my hand!

 Des. ‘T is terrible

 For me to see thee so!

 Ad.         Many in battle

 Did fall so by my sword.

 Des.           Ah, then, this wound

 Thou hast, it is incurable?

 Ad.          Incurable.

 Des.                  Alas, atrocious war!

 And cruel I that made it. ‘T is I kill thee.

 Ad. Not thou nor he (pointing to Carlo), but the

       Lord God of all.

 Des. Oh, dear unto those eyes! how far away

 From thee I suffered! and it was one thought

 Among so many woes upheld me. ‘T was the hope

 To tell thee all one day in some safe hour

 Of peace —

 Ad. That hour of peace has come to me.

 Believe it, father, save that I leave thee

 Crushed with thy sorrow here below.

 Des.                             O front

 Serene and bold! O fearless hand! O eyes

 That once struck terror!

 Ad.                 Cease thy lamentations,

 Cease, father, in God’s name! For was not this

 The time to die? But thou that shalt live captive,

 And hast lived all thy days a king, oh listen:

 Life’s a great secret that is not revealed

 Save in the latest hour. Thou’st lost a kingdom;

 Nay, do not weep! Trust me, when to this hour

 Thou also shalt draw nigh, most jubilant

 And fair shall pass before thy thought the years

 In which thou wast not king — the years in which

 No tears shall be recorded in the skies

 Against thee, and thy name shall not ascend

 Mixed with the curses of the unhappy. Oh,

 Rejoice that thou art king no longer! that

 All ways are closed against thee! There is none

 For innocent action, and there but remains

 To do wrong or to suffer wrong. A power

 Fierce, pitiless, grasps the world, and calls itself

 The right. The ruthless hands of our forefathers

 Did sow injustice, and our fathers then

 Did water it with blood; and now the earth

 No other harvest bears. It is not meet

 To uphold crime, thou’st proved it, and if ‘t were,

 Must it not end thus? Nay, this happy man

 Whose throne my dying renders more secure,

 Whom all men smile on and applaud, and serve,

 He is a man and he shall die.

 Des.                          But I

 That lose my son, what shall console me?

 Ad.                                      God!

 Who comforts us for all things. And oh, thou

 Proud foe of mine!        (Turning to Carlo.)

 Carlo.            Nay, by this name, Adelchi,

 Call me no more; I was so, but toward death

 Hatred is impious and villainous. Nor such,

 Believe me, knows the heart of Carlo.

 Ad.                                 Friendly

 My speech shall be, then, very meek and free

 Of every bitter memory to both.

 For this I pray thee, and my dying hand

 I lay in thine! I do not ask that thou

 Should’st let go free so great a captive — no,

 For I well see that my prayer were in vain

 And vain the prayer of any mortal. Firm

 Thy heart is — must be — nor so far extends

 Thy pity. That which thou can’st not deny

 Without being cruel, that I ask thee! Mild

 As it can be, and free of insult, be

 This old man’s bondage, even such as thou

 Would’st have implored for thy father, if the heavens

 Had destined thee the sorrow of leaving him

 In others’ power. His venerable head

 Keep thou from every outrage; for against

 The fallen many are brave; and let him not

 Endure the cruel sight of any of those

 His vassals that betrayed him.

 Carlo.                         Take in death

 This glad assurance, Adelchi! and be Heaven

 My testimony, that thy prayer is as

 The word of Carlo!

 Ad.                And thy enemy,

 In dying, prays for thee!

 Enter ARVINO.

 Armno. (Impatiently) O mighty king, thy warriors and chiefs

 Ask entrance.

 Ad. (Appealingly.) Carlo!

 Carlo.                    Let not any dare

 To draw anigh this tent; for here Adelchi

 Is sovereign; and no one but Adelchi’s father

 And the meek minister of divine forgiveness

 Have access here.

 Des.              O my beloved son!

 Ad.                                 O my father,

 The light forsakes these eyes.

 Des.                           Adelchi, — No!

 Thou shalt not leave me!

 Ad.                     O King of kings! betrayed

 By one of Thine, by all the rest abandoned:

 I come to seek Thy peace, and do Thou take

 My weary soul!

 Des.           He heareth thee, my son,

 And thou art gone, and I in servitude

 Remain to weep.

I wish to give another passage from this tragedy: the speech which the emissary of the Church makes to Carlo when he reaches his presence after his arduous passage of the Alps. I suppose that all will note the beauty and reality of the description in the story this messenger tells of his adventures; and I feel, for my part, a profound effect of wildness and loneliness in the verse, which has almost the solemn light and balsamy perfume of those mountain solitudes:

                                    From the camp,

 Unseen, I issued, and retraced the steps

 But lately taken. Thence upon the right

 I turned toward Aquilone. Abandoning

 The beaten paths, I found myself within

 A dark and narrow valley; but it grew

 Wider before my eyes as further on

 I kept my way. Here, now and then, I saw

 The wandering flocks, and huts of shepherds. ‘T was

 The furthermost abode of men. I entered

 One of the huts, craved shelter, and upon

 The woolly fleece I slept the night away.

 Rising at dawn, of my good shepherd host

 I asked my way to France. “Beyond those heights

 Are other heights,” he said, “and others yet;

 And France is far and far away; but path

 There’s none, and thousands are those mountains —

 Steep, naked, dreadful, uninhabited

 Unless by ghosts, and never mortal man

 Passed over them.” “The ways of God are many,

 Far more than those of mortals,” I replied,

 “And God sends me.” “And God guide you!” he said.

 Then, from among the loaves he kept in store,

 He gathered up as many as a pilgrim

 May carry, and in a coarse sack wrapping them,

 He laid them on my shoulders. Recompense

 I prayed from Heaven for him, and took my way.

 Beaching the valley’s top, a peak arose,

 And, putting faith in God, I climbed it. Here

 No trace of man appeared, only the forests

 Of untouched pines, rivers unknown, and vales

 Without a path. All hushed, and nothing else

 But my own steps I heard, and now and then

 The rushing of the torrents, and the sudden

 Scream of the hawk, or else the eagle, launched

 From his high nest, and hurtling through the dawn,

 Passed close above my head; or then at noon,

 Struck by the sun, the crackling of the cones

 Of the wild pines. And so three days I walked,

 And under the great trees, and in the clefts,

 Three nights I rested. The sun was my guide;

 I rose with him, and him upon his journey

 I followed till he set. Uncertain still,

 Of my own way I went; from vale to vale

 Crossing forever; or, if it chanced at times

 I saw the accessible slope of some great height

 Rising before me, and attained its crest,

 Yet loftier summits still, before, around,

 Towered over me; and other heights with snow

 From foot to summit whitening, that did seem

 Like steep, sharp tents fixed in the soil; and others

 Appeared like iron, and arose in guise

 Of walls insuperable. The third day fell

 What time I had a mighty mountain seen

 That raised its top above the others; ‘t was

 All one green slope, and all its top was crowned

 With trees. And thither eagerly I turned

 My weary steps. It was the eastern side,

 Sire, of this very mountain on which lies

 Thy camp that faces toward the setting sun.

 While I yet lingered on its spurs the darkness

 Did overtake me; and upon the dry

 And slippery needles of the pine that covered

 The ground, I made my bed, and pillowed me

 Against their ancient trunks. A smiling hope

 Awakened me at daybreak; and all full

 Of a strange vigor, up the steep I climbed.

 Scarce had I reached the summit when my ear

 Was smitten with a murmur that from far

 Appeared to come, deep, ceaseless; and I stood

 And listened motionless. ‘T was not the waters

 Broken upon the rocks below; ’twas not the wind

 That blew athwart the woods and whistling ran

 From one tree to another, but verily

 A sound of living men, an indistinct

 Rumor of words, of arms, of trampling feet,

 Swarming from far away; an agitation

 Immense, of men! My heart leaped, and my steps

 I hastened. On that peak, O king, that seems

 To us like some sharp blade to pierce the heaven,

 There lies an ample plain that’s covered thick

 With grass ne’er trod before.  And this I crossed

 The quickest way; and now at every instant

 The murmur nearer grew, and I devoured

 The space between; I reached the brink, I launched

 My glance into the valley and I saw,

 I saw the tents of Israel, the desired

 Pavilion of Jacob; on the ground

 I fell, thanked God, adored him, and descended.

VIII

I could easily multiply beautiful and effective passages from the poetry of Manzoni; but I will give only one more version, “The Fifth of May”, that ode on the death of Napoleon, which, if not the most perfect lyric of modern times as the Italians vaunt it to be, is certainly very grand. I have followed the movement and kept the meter of the Italian, and have at the same time reproduced it quite literally; yet I feel that any translation of such a poem is only a little better than none. I think I have caught the shadow of this splendid lyric; but there is yet no photography that transfers the splendor itself, the life, the light, the color; I can give you the meaning, but not the feeling, that pervades every syllable as the blood warms every fiber of a man, not the words that flashed upon the poet as he wrote, nor the yet more precious and inspired words that came afterward to his patient waiting and pondering, and touched the whole with fresh delight and grace. If you will take any familiar passage from one of our poets in which every motion of the music is endeared by long association and remembrance, and every tone is sweet upon the tongue, and substitute a few strange words for the original, you will have some notion of the wrong done by translation.

  THE FIFTH OF MAY.

  He passed; and as immovable

    As, with the last sigh given,

  Lay his own clay, oblivious,

    From that great spirit riven,

  So the world stricken and wondering

     Stands at the tidings dread:

  Mutely pondering the ultimate

    Hour of that fateful being,

  And in the vast futurity

    No peer of his foreseeing

  Among the countless myriads

     Her blood-stained dust that tread.

  Him on his throne and glorious

    Silent saw I, that never —

  When with awful vicissitude

    He sank, rose, fell forever —

  Mixed my voice with the numberless

     Voices that pealed on high;

  Guiltless of servile flattery

    And of the scorn of coward,

  Come I when darkness suddenly

    On so great light hath lowered,

  And offer a song at his sepulcher

     That haply shall not die.

  From the Alps unto the Pyramids,

    From Rhine to Manzanares

  Unfailingly the thunderstroke

    His lightning purpose carries;

  Bursts from Scylla to Tanais, —

     From one to the other sea.

  Was it true glory? — Posterity,

    Thine be the hard decision;

  Bow we before the mightiest,

    Who willed in him the vision

  Of his creative majesty

     Most grandly traced should be.

  The eager and tempestuous

    Joy of the great plan’s hour,

  The throe of the heart that controllessly

    Burns with a dream of power,

  And wins it, and seizes victory

     It had seemed folly to hope —

  All he hath known: the infinite

    Rapture after the danger,

  The flight, the throne of sovereignty,

    The salt bread of the stranger;

  Twice ‘neath the feet of the worshipers,

     Twice ‘neath the altar’s cope.

  He spoke his name; two centuries,

    Armed and threatening either,

  Turned unto him submissively,

    As waiting fate together;

  He made a silence, and arbiter

     He sat between the two.

  He vanished; his days in the idleness

    Of his island-prison spending,

  Mark of immense malignity,

    And of a pity unending,

  Of hatred inappeasable,

     Of deathless love and true.

  As on the head of the mariner,

    Its weight some billow heaping,

  Falls even while the castaway,

    With strained sight far sweeping,

  Scanneth the empty distances

     For some dim sail in vain;

  So over his soul the memories

    Billowed and gathered ever!

  How oft to tell posterity

    Himself he did endeavor,

  And on the pages helplessly

     Fell his weary hand again.

  How many times, when listlessly

    In the long, dull day’s declining —

  Downcast those glances fulminant,

    His arms on his breast entwining —

  He stood assailed by the memories

     Of days that were passed away;

  He thought of the camps, the arduous

    Assaults, the shock of forces,

  The lightning-flash of the infantry,

    The billowy rush of horses,

  The thrill in his supremacy,

     The eagerness to obey.

  Ah, haply in so great agony

    His panting soul had ended

  Despairing, but that potently

    A hand, from heaven extended,

  Into a clearer atmosphere

     In mercy lifted him.

  And led him on by blossoming

    Pathways of hope ascending

  To deathless fields, to happiness

    All earthly dreams transcending,

  Where in the glory celestial

     Earth’s fame is dumb and dim.

  Beautiful, deathless, beneficent

    Faith! used to triumphs, even

  This also write exultantly:

    No loftier pride ‘neath heaven

  Unto the shame of Calvary

     Stooped ever yet its crest.

  Thou from his weary mortality

    Disperse all bitter passions:

  The God that humbleth and hearteneth,

    That comforts and that chastens,

  Upon the pillow else desolate

     To his pale lips lay pressed!

IX

Giuseppe Arnaud says that in his sacred poetry Manzoni gave the Catholic dogmas the most moral explanation, in the most attractive poetical language; and he suggests that Manzoni had a patriotic purpose in them, or at least a sympathy with the effort of the Romantic writers to give priests and princes assurance that patriotism was religious, and thus win them to favor the Italian cause. It must be confessed that such a temporal design as this would fatally affect the devotional quality of the hymns, even if the poet’s consciousness did not; but I am not able to see any evidence of such sympathy in the poems themselves. I detect there a perfectly sincere religious feeling, and nothing of devotional rapture. The poet had, no doubt, a satisfaction in bringing out the beauty and sublimity of his faith; and, as a literary artist, he had a right to be proud of his work, for its spirit is one of which the tuneful piety of Italy had long been void. In truth, since David, king of Israel, left making psalms, religious songs have been poorer than any other sort of songs; and it is high praise of Manzoni’s “Inni Sacri” to say that they are in irreproachable taste, and unite in unaffected poetic appreciation of the grandeur of Christianity as much reason as may coexist with obedience.

The poetry of Manzoni is so small in quantity, that we must refer chiefly to excellence of quality the influence and the fame it has won him, though I do not deny that his success may have been partly owing at first to the errors of the school which preceded him. It could be easily shown, from literary history, that every great poet has appeared at a moment fortunate for his renown, just as we might prove, from natural science, that it is felicitous for the sun to get up about day-break. Manzoni’s art was very great, and he never gave his thought defective expression, while the expression was always secondary to the thought. For the self-respect, then, of an honest man, which would not permit him to poetize insincerity and shape the void, and for the great purpose he always cherished of making literature an agent of civilization and Christianity, the Italians are right to honor Manzoni. Arnaud thinks that the school he founded lingered too long on the educative and religious ground he chose; and Marc Monnier declares Manzoni to be the poet of resignation, thus distinguishing him from the poets of revolution. The former critic is the nearer right of the two, though neither is quite just, as it seems to me; for I do not understand how any one can read the romance and the dramas of Manzoni without finding him full of sympathy for all Italy has suffered, and a patriot very far from resigned; and I think political conditions — or the Austrians in Milan, to put it more concretely — scarcely left to the choice of the Lombard school that attitude of aggression which others assumed under a weaker, if not a milder, despotism at Florence. The utmost allowed the Milanese poets was the expression of a retrospective patriotism, which celebrated the glories of Italy’s past, which deplored her errors, and which denounced her crimes, and thus contributed to keep the sense of nationality alive. Under such governments as endured in Piedmont until 1848, in Lombardy until 1859, in Venetia until 1866, literature must remain educative, or must cease to be. In the works, therefore, of Manzoni and of nearly all his immediate followers, there is nothing directly revolutionary except in Giovanni Berchet. The line between them and the directly revolutionary poets is by no means to be traced with exactness, however, in their literature, and in their lives they were all alike patriotic.

Manzoni lived to see all his hopes fulfilled, and died two years after the fall of the temporal power, in 1873. “Toward mid-day,” says a Milanese journal at the time of his death, “he turned suddenly to the household friends about him, and said: ‘This man is failing — sinking — call my confessor!’

“The confessor came, and he communed with him half an hour, speaking, as usual, from a mind calm and clear. After the confessor left the room, Manzoni called his friends and said to them: ‘When I am dead, do what I did every day: pray for Italy — pray for the king and his family — so good to me!’ His country was the last thought of this great man dying as in his whole long life it had been his most vivid and constant affection.”

SILVIO PELLICO, TOMASSO GROSSI, LUIGI CAREER, AND GIOVANNI BERCHET

I

As I have noted, nearly all the poets of the Romantic School were Lombards, and they had nearly all lived at Milan under the censorship and espionage of the Austrian government. What sort of life this must have been, we, born and reared in a free country, can hardly imagine. We have no experience by which we can judge it, and we never can do full justice to the intellectual courage and devotion of a people who, amid inconceivable obstacles and oppressions, expressed themselves in a new and vigorous literature. It was not, I have explained, openly revolutionary; but whatever tended to make men think and feel was a sort of indirect rebellion against Austria. When a society of learned Milanese gentlemen once presented an address to the Emperor, he replied, with brutal insolence, that he wanted obedient subjects in Italy, nothing more; and it is certain that the activity of the Romantic School was regarded with jealousy and dislike by the government from the first. The authorities awaited only a pretext for striking a deadly blow at the poets and novelists, who ought to have been satisfied with being good subjects, but who, instead, must needs even found a newspaper, and discuss in it projects for giving the Italians a literary life, since they could not have a political existence. The perils of contributing to the Conciliatore were such as would attend house-breaking and horse-stealing in happier countries and later times. The government forbade any of its employees to write for it, under pain of losing their places; the police, through whose hands every article intended for publication had to pass, not only struck out all possibly offensive expressions, but informed one of the authors that if his articles continued to come to them so full of objectionable things, he should be banished, even though those things never reached the public. At last the time came for suppressing this journal and punishing its managers. The chief editor was a young Piedmontese poet, who politically was one of the most harmless and inoffensive of men; his literary creed obliged him to choose Italian subjects for his poems, and he thus erred by mentioning Italy; yet Arnaud, in his “Poeti Patriottici”, tells us he could find but two lines from which this poet could be suspected of patriotism, and he altogether refuses to class him with the poets who have promoted revolution. Nevertheless, it is probable that this poet wished Freedom well. He was indefinitely hopeful for Italy; he was young, generous, and credulous of goodness and justice. His youth, his generosity, his truth, made him odious to Austria. One day he returned from a visit to Turin, and was arrested. He could have escaped when danger first threatened, but his faith in his own innocence ruined him. After a tedious imprisonment, and repeated examinations in Milan, he was taken to Venice, and lodged in the famous piombi, or cells in the roof of the Ducal Palace. There, after long delays, he had his trial, and was sentenced to twenty years in the prison of Spielberg. By a sort of poetical license which the imperial clemency sometimes used, the nights were counted as days, and the term was thus reduced to ten years. Many other young and gifted Italians suffered at the same time; most of them came to this country at the end of their long durance; this Piedmontese poet returned to his own city of Turin, an old and broken-spirited man, doubting of the political future, and half a Jesuit in religion. He was devastated, and for once a cruel injustice seemed to have accomplished its purpose.

Such is the grim outline of the story of Silvio Pellico. He was arrested for no offense, save that he was an Italian and an intellectual man; for no other offense he was condemned and suffered. His famous book, “My Prisons”, is the touching and forgiving record of one of the greatest crimes ever perpetrated.

Few have borne wrong with such Christlike meekness and charity as Pellico. One cannot read his Prigioni without doing homage to his purity and goodness, and cannot turn to his other works without the misgiving that the sole poem he has left the world is the story of his most fatal and unmerited suffering. I have not the hardihood to pretend that I have read all his works. I must confess that I found it impossible to do so, though I came to their perusal inured to drought by travel through Saharas of Italian verse. I can boast only of having read the Francesca da Rimini, among the tragedies, and two or three of the canticles, — or romantic stories of the Middle Ages, in blank verse, — which now refuse to be identified. I know, from a despairing reference to his volume, that his remaining poems are chiefly of a religious cast.

II

A much better poet of the Romantic School was Tommaso Grossi, who, like Manzoni and Pellico, is now best known by a prose work — a novel which enjoys a popularity as great as that of “Le Mie Prigioni”, and which has been nearly as much read in Italy as “I Promessi Sposi”. The “Marco Visconti” of Grossi is a romance of the thirteenth century; and though not, as Cant� says, an historic “episode, but a succession of episodes, which do not leave a general and unique impression,” it yet contrives to bring you so pleasantly acquainted with the splendid, squalid, poetic, miserable Italian life in Milan, and on its neighboring hills and lakes, during the Middle Ages, that you cannot help reading it to the end. I suppose that this is the highest praise which can be bestowed upon an historical romance, and that it implies great charm of narrative and beauty of style. I can add, that the feeling of Grossi’s “Marco Visconti” is genuine and exalted, and that its morality is blameless. It has scarcely the right to be analyzed here, however, and should not have been more than mentioned, but for the fact that it chances to be the setting of the author’s best thing in verse. I hope that, even in my crude English version, the artless pathos and sweet natural grace of one of the tenderest little songs in any tongue have not wholly perished.

{Illustration: TOMMASO GROSSI.}

  THE FAIR PRISONER TO THE SWALLOW.

  Pilgrim swallow! pilgrim swallow!

    On my grated window’s sill,

  Singing, as the mornings follow,

    Quaint and pensive ditties still,

  What would’st tell me in thy lay?

  Prithee, pilgrim swallow, say!

  All forgotten, com’st thou hither

    Of thy tender spouse forlorn,

  That we two may grieve together,

    Little widow, sorrow worn?

  Grieve then, weep then, in thy lay!

  Pilgrim swallow, grieve alway!

  Yet a lighter woe thou weepest:

    Thou at least art free of wing,

  And while land and lake thou sweepest,

    May’st make heaven with sorrow ring,

  Calling his dear name alway,

  Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.

  Could I too! that am forbidden

    By this low and narrow cell,

  Whence the sun’s fair light is hidden,

    Whence thou scarce can’st hear me tell

  Sorrows that I breathe alway,

  While thou pip’st thy plaintive lay.

  Ah! September quickly coming,

    Thou shalt take farewell of me,

  And, to other summers roaming,

    Other hills and waters see, —

  Greeting them with songs more gay,

  Pilgrim swallow, far away.

  Still, with every hopeless morrow,

    While I ope mine eyes in tears,

  Sweetly through my brooding sorrow

    Thy dear song shall reach mine ears, —

  Pitying me, though far away,

  Pilgrim swallow, in thy lay.

  Thou, when thou and spring together

   Here return, a cross shalt see, —

  In the pleasant evening weather,

    Wheel and pipe, here, over me!

  Peace and peace! the coming May,

  Sing me in thy roundelay!

It is a great good fortune for a man to have written a thing so beautiful as this, and not a singular fortune that he should have written nothing else comparable to it. The like happens in all literatures; and no one need be surprised to learn that I found the other poems of Grossi often difficult, and sometimes almost impossible to read.

Grossi was born in 1791, at Bollano, by lovely Como, whose hills and waters he remembers in all his works with constant affection. He studied law at the University of Pavia, but went early to Milan, where he cultivated literature rather than the austerer science to which he had been bred, and soon became the fashion, writing tales in Milanese and Italian verse, and making the women cry by his pathetic art of story-telling. “Ildegonda”, published in 1820, was the most popular of all these tales, and won Grossi an immense number of admirers, every one (says his biographer Cant�) of the fair sex, who began to wear Ildegonda dresses and Ildegonda bonnets. The poem was printed and reprinted; it is the heart-breaking story of a poor little maiden in the middle ages, whom her father and brother shut up in a convent because she is in love with the right person and will not marry the wrong one — a common thing in all ages. The cruel abbess and wicked nuns, by the order of Ildegonda’s family, try to force her to take the veil; but she, supported by her own repugnance to the cloister, and, by the secret counsels of one of the sisters, with whom force had succeeded, resists persuasion, reproach, starvation, cold, imprisonment, and chains. Her lover attempts to rescue her by means of a subterranean vault under the convent; but the plot is discovered, and the unhappy pair are assailed by armed men at the very moment of escape. Ildegonda is dragged back to her dungeon; and Rizzardo, already under accusation of heresy, is quickly convicted and burnt at the stake. They bring the poor girl word of this, and her sick brain turns. In her delirium she sees her lover in torment for his heresy, and, flying from the hideous apparition, she falls and strikes her head against a stone. She wakes in the arms of the beloved sister who had always befriended her. The cruel efforts against her cease now, and she writes to her father imploring his pardon, which he gives, with a prayer for hers. At last she dies peacefully. The story is pathetic; and it is told with art, though its lapses of taste are woful, and its faults those of the whole class of Italian poetry to which it belongs. The agony is tedious, as Italian agony is apt to be, the passion is outrageously violent or excessively tender, the description too often prosaic; the effects are sometimes produced by very “rough magic”. The more than occasional infelicity and awkwardness of diction which offend in Byron’s poetic tales are not felt so much in those of Grossi; but in “Ildegonda” there is horror more material even than in “Parisina”. Here is a picture of Rizzardo’s apparition, for which my faint English has no stomach:

  Ch� dalla bocca fuori gli pendea

  La coda smisurata d’ un serpente,

  E il flagellava per la faccia, mentre

  Il capo e il tronco gli scendean nel ventre.

  Fischia la biscia nell’ orribil lutta

  Entro il ventre profondo del dannato,

  Che dalla bocca lacerata erutta

  Un torrente di sangue aggruppato;

  E bava gialla, venenosa e brutta,

  Dalle narici fuor manda col fiato,

  La qual pel mento gi� gli cola, e lassa

  Insolcata la carne, ovunque passa.

It seems to have been the fate of Grossi as a poet to achieve fashion, and not fame; and his great poem in fifteen cantos, called “I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata”, which made so great a noise in its day, was eclipsed in reputation by his subsequent novel of “Marco Visconti”. Since the “Gerusalemma” of Tasso, it is said that no poem has made so great a sensation in Italy as “I Lombardi”, in which the theme treated by the elder poet is celebrated according to the aesthetics of the Romantic School. Such parts of the poem as I have read have not tempted me to undertake the whole; but many people must have at least bought it, for it gave the author thirty thousand francs in solid proof of popularity.

After the “Marco Visconti”, Grossi seems to have produced no work of importance. He married late, but happily; and he now devoted himself almost exclusively to the profession of the law, in Milan, where he died in 1853, leaving the memory of a good man, and the fame of a poet unspotted by reproach. As long as he lived, he was the beloved friend of Manzoni. He dwelt many years under the influence of the stronger mind, but not servile to it; adopting its literary principles, but giving them his own expression.

III

Luigi Carrer of Venice was the first of that large number of minor poets and dramatists to which the states of the old Republic have given birth during the present century. His life began with our century, and he died in 1850. During this time he witnessed great political events — the retirement of the French after the fall of Napoleon; the failure of all the schemes and hopes of the Carbonarito shake off the yoke of the stranger; and that revolution in 1848 which drove out the Austrians, only that, a year later, they should return in such force as to make the hope of Venetian independence through the valor of Venetian arms a vain dream forever. There is not wanting evidence of a tender love of country in the poems of Carrer, and probably the effectiveness of the Austrian system of repression, rather than his own indifference, is witnessed by the fact that he has scarcely a line to betray a hope for the future, or a consciousness of political anomaly in the present.

Carrer was poor, but the rich were glad to be his friends, without putting him to shame; and as long as the once famous conversazioni were held in the great Venetian houses, he was the star of whatever place assembled genius and beauty. He had a professorship in a private school, and while he was young he printed his verses in the journals. As he grew older, he wrote graceful books of prose, and drew his slender support from their sale and from the minute pay of some offices in the gift of his native city.

Carrer’s ballads are esteemed the best of his poems; and I may offer an idea of the quality and manner of some of his ballads by the following translation, but I cannot render his peculiar elegance, nor give the whole range of his fancy:

  THE DUCHESS.

  From the horrible profound

    Of the voiceless sepulcher

  Comes, or seems to come, a sound;

    Is’t his Grace, the Duke, astir?

  In his trance he hath been laid

  As one dead among the dead!

  The relentless stone he tries

    With his utmost strength to move;

  Fails, and in his fury cries,

    Smiting his hands, that those above,

  If any shall be passing there,

  Hear his blasphemy, or his prayer.

  And at last he seems to hear

    Light feet overhead go by;

  “O, whoever passes near

    Where I am, the Duke am I!

  All my states and all I have

  To him that takes me from this grave.”

  There is no one that replies;

    Surely, some one seemed to come!

  On his brow the cold sweat lies,

    As he waits an instant dumb;

  Then he cries with broken breath,

  “Save me, take me back from death!”

  “Where thou liest, lie thou must,

    Prayers and curses alike are vain:

  Over thee dead Gismond’s dust —

    Whom thy pitiless hand hath slain —

  On this stone so heavily

  Rests, we cannot set thee free.”

  From the sepulcher’s thick walls

    Comes a low wail of dismay,

  And, as when a body falls,

    A dull sound; — and the next day

  In a convent the Duke’s wife

  Hideth her remorseful life.

Of course, Carrer wrote much poetry besides his ballads. There are idyls, and romances in verse, and hymns; sonnets of feeling and of occasion; odes, sometimes of considerable beauty; apologues, of such exceeding fineness of point, that it often escapes one; satires and essays, or sermoni, some of which I have read with no great relish. The same spirit dominates nearly all — the spirit of pensive disappointment which life brings to delicate and sensitive natures, and which they love to affect even more than they feel. Among Carrer’s many sonnets, I think I like best the following, of which the sentiment seems to me simple and sweet, and the expression very winning:

  I am a pilgrim swallow, and I roam

    Beyond strange seas, of other lands in quest,

  Leaving the well-known lakes and hills of home,

    And that dear roof where late I hung my nest;

  All things beloved and love’s eternal woes

    I fly, an exile from my native shore:

  I cross the cliffs and woods, but with me goes

    The care I thought to abandon evermore.

  Along the banks of streams unknown to me,

    I pipe the elms and willows pensive lays,

  And call on her whom I despair to see,

    And pass in banishment and tears my days.

  Breathe, air of spring, for which I pine and yearn,

  That to his nest the swallow may return!

The prose writings of Carrer are essays on Aesthetics and morals, and sentimentalized history. His chief work is of the latter nature. “I Sette Gemme di Venezia” are sketches of the lives of the seven Venetian women who have done most to distinguish the name of their countrywomen by their talents, or misfortunes, or sins. You feel, in looking through the book, that its interest is in great part factitious. The stories are all expanded, and filled up with facile but not very relevant discourse, which a pleasant fancy easily supplies, and which is always best left to the reader’s own thought. The style is somewhat florid; but the author contrives to retain in his fantastic strain much of the grace of simplicity. It is the work of a cunning artist; but it has a certain insipidity, and it wearies. Carrer did well in the limit which he assigned himself, but his range was circumscribed. At the time of his death, he had written sixteen cantos of an epic poem called “La Fata Vergine”, which a Venetian critic has extravagantly praised, and which I have not seen. He exercised upon the poetry of his day an influence favorable to lyric naturalness, and his ballads were long popular.

IV

GIOVANNI BERCHET was a poet who alone ought to be enough to take from the Lombard romanticists the unjust reproach of “resignation”. “Where our poetry,” says De Sanctis, “throws off every disguise, romantic or classic, is in the verse of Berchet.... If Giovanni Berchet had remained in Italy, probably his genius would have remained enveloped in the allusions and shadows of romanticism. But in his exile at London he uttered the sorrow and the wrath of his betrayed and vanquished country. It was the accent of the national indignation which, leaving the generalities of the sonnets and the ballads, dramatized itself and portrayed our life in its most touching phases.”

Berchet’s family was of French origin, but he was the most Italian of Italians, and nearly all his poems are of an ardent political tint and temperature. Naturally, he spent a great part of his life in exile after the Austrians were reestablished in Milan; he was some time in England, and I believe he died in Switzerland.

I have most of his patriotic poems in a little book which is curiously historical of a situation forever past. I picked it up, I do not remember where or when, in Venice; and as it is a collection of pieces all meant to embitter the spirit against Austria, it had doubtless not been brought into the city with the connivance of the police. There is no telling where it was printed, the mysterious date of publication being “Italy, 1861”, and nothing more, with the English motto: “Adieu, my native land, adieu!”

The principal poem here is called “Le Fantasie”, and consists of a series of lyrics in which an Italian exile contrasts the Lombards, who drove out Frederick Barbarossa in the twelfth century, with the Lombards of 1829, who crouched under the power defied of old. It is full of burning reproaches, sarcasms, and appeals; and it probably had some influence in renewing the political agitation which in Italy followed the French revolution of 1830. Other poems of Berchet represent social aspects of the Austrian rule, like one entitled “Remorse”, which paints the isolation and wretchedness of an Italian woman married to an Austrian; and another, “Giulia”, which gives a picture of the frantic misery of an Austrian conscription in Italy. A very impressive poem is that called “The Hermit of Mt. Cenis”. A traveler reaches the summit of the pass, and, looking over upon the beauty and magnificence of the Italian plains, and seeing only their loveliness and peace, his face is lighted up with an involuntary smile, when suddenly the hermit who knows all the invisible disaster and despair of the scene suddenly accosts him with, “Accursed be he who approaches without tears this home of sorrow!”

At the time the Romantic School rose in Italian literature, say from 1815 till 1820, society was brilliant, if not contented or happy. In Lombardy and Venetia, immediately after the treaties of the Holy Alliance had consigned these provinces to Austria, there flourished famous conversazioni at many noble houses. In those of Milan many distinguished literary men of other nations met. Byron and Hobhouse were frequenters of the same salons as Pellico, Manzoni, and Grossi; the Schlegels represented the German Romantic School, and Madame de Sta�l the sympathizing movement in France. There was very much that was vicious still, and very much that was ignoble in Italian society, but this was by sufferance and not as of old by approval; and it appears that the tone of the highest life was intellectual. It cannot be claimed that this tone was at all so general as the badness of the last century. It was not so easily imitated as that, and it could not penetrate so subtly into all ranks and conditions. Still it was very observable, and mingled with it in many leading minds was the strain of religious resignation, audible in Manzoni’s poetry. That was a time when the Italians might, if ever, have adapted themselves to foreign rule; but the Austrians, sofar from having learned political wisdom during the period of their expulsion from Italy, had actually retrograded; from being passive authorities whom long sojourn was gradually Italianizing, they had, in their absence, become active and relentless tyrants, and they now seemed to study how most effectually to alienate themselves. They found out their error later, but when too late to repair it, and from 1820 until 1859 in Milan, and until 1866 in Venice, the hatred, which they had themselves enkindled, burned fiercer and fiercer against them. It is not extravagant to say that if their rule had continued a hundred years longer the Italians would never have been reconciled to it. Society took the form of habitual and implacable defiance to them. The life of the whole people might be said to have resolved itself into a protest against their presence. This hatred was the heritage of children from their parents, the bond between friends, the basis of social faith; it was a thread even in the tie between lovers; it was so intense and so pervasive that it cannot be spoken.

Berchet was the vividest, if not the earliest, expression of it in literature, and the following poem, which I have already mentioned, is, therefore, not only intensely true to Italian feeling, but entirely realistic in its truth to a common fact.

  REMORSE.

  Alone in the midst of the throng,

    ‘Mid the lights and the splendor alone,

  Her eyes, dropped for shame of her wrong,

    She lifts not to eyes she has known:

  Around her the whirl and the stir

    Of the light-footing dancers she hears;

  None seeks her; no whisper for her

    Of the gracious words filling her ears.

  The fair boy that runs to her knees,

    With a shout for his mother, and kiss

  For the tear-drop that welling he sees

    To her eyes from her sorrow’s abyss, —

  Though he blooms like a rose, the fair boy,

    No praise of his beauty is heard;

  None with him stays to jest or to toy,

    None to her gives a smile or a word.

  If, unknowing, one ask who may be

    This woman, that, as in disgrace,

  O’er the curls of the boy at her knee

    Bows her beautiful, joyless face,

  A hundred tongues answer in scorn,

    A hundred lips teach him to know —

  “Wife of one of our tyrants, forsworn

    To her friends in her truth to their foe.”

  At the play, in the streets, in the lanes,

    At the fane of the merciful God,

  ‘Midst a people in prison and chains,

    Spy-haunted, at home and abroad —

  Steals through all like the hiss of a snake

    Hate, by terror itself unsuppressed:

  “Cursed be the Italian could take

    The Austrian foe to her breast!”

  Alone — but the absence she mourned

    As widowhood mourneth, is past:

  Her heart leaps for her husband returned

    From his garrison far-off at last?

  Ah, no! For this woman forlorn

    Love is dead, she has felt him depart:

  With far other thoughts she is torn,

    Far other the grief at her heart.

  When the shame that has darkened her days

    Fantasmal at night fills the gloom,

  When her soul, lost in wildering ways,

    Flies the past, and the terror to come —

  When she leaps from her slumbers to hark,

    As if for her little one’s call,

  It is then to the pitiless dark

    That her woe-burdened soul utters all:

  “Woe is me! It was God’s righteous hand

    My brain with its madness that smote:

  At the alien’s flattering command

    The land of my birth I forgot!

  I, the girl who was loved and adored,

    Feasted, honored in every place,

  Now what am I? The apostate abhorred,

    Who was false to her home and her race!

  “I turned from the common disaster;

    My brothers oppressed I denied;

  I smiled on their insolent master;

    I came and sat down by his side.

  Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought;

    Thou hast wrought it — it clingeth to thee,

  And for all that thou sufferest, naught

    From its meshes thy spirit can free.

  “Oh, the scorn I have tasted! They know not,

    Who pour it on me, how it burns;

  How it galls the meek spirit, whose woe not

    Their hating with hating returns!

  Fool! I merit it: I have not holden

    My feet from their paths! Mine the blame:

  I have sought in their eyes to embolden

    This visage devoted to shame!

  “Rejected and followed with scorn,

    My child, like a child born of sin,

  In the land where my darling was born,

    He lives exiled! A refuge to win

  From their hatred, he runs in dismay

    To my arms. But the day may yet be

  When my son shall the insult repay,

    I have nurtured him in, unto me!

  “If it chances that ever the slave

    Snaps the shackles that bind him, and leaps

  Into life in the heart of the brave

    The sense of the might that now sleeps —

  To which people, which side shall I cleave?

    Which fate shall I curse with my own?

  To which banner pray Heaven to give

    The triumph? Which desire o’erthrown?

  “Italian, and sister, and wife,

    And mother, unfriended, alone,

  Outcast, I wander through life,

    Over shard and bramble and stone!

  Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought;

    Thou hast wrought it — it clingeth to thee,

  And for all that thou sufferest, naught

    From its meshes thy spirit shall free!”

GIAMBATTISTA NICCOLINI

I

The school of Romantic poets and novelists was practically dispersed by the Austrian police after the Carbonari disturbances in 1821-22, and the literary spirit of the nation took refuge under the mild and careless despotism of the grand dukes at Florence.

In 1821 Austria was mistress of pretty near all Italy. She held in her own grasp the vast provinces of Lombardy and Venetia; she had garrisons in Naples, Piedmont, and the Romagna; and Rome was ruled according to her will. But there is always something fatally defective in the vigilance of a policeman; and in the very place which perhaps Austria thought it quite needless to guard, the restless and indomitable spirit of free thought entered. It was in Tuscany, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, reigned over by a family set on the grand-ducal throne by Austria herself, and united to her Hapsburgs by many ties of blood and affection — in Tuscany, right under both noses of the double-headed eagle, as it were, that a new literary and political life began for Italy. The Leopoldine code was famously mild toward criminals, and the Lorrainese princes did not show themselves crueler than they could help toward poets, essayists, historians, philologists, and that class of malefactors. Indeed it was the philosophy of their family to let matters alone; and the grand duke restored after the fall of Napoleon was, as has been said, an absolute monarch, but he was also an honest man. This galantuomo had even a minister who successfully combated the Austrian influences, and so, though there were, of course, spies and a censorship in Florence, there was also indulgence; and if it was not altogether a pleasant place for literary men to live, it was at least tolerable, and there they gathered from their exile and their silence throughout Italy. Their point of union, and their means of affecting the popular mind, was for twelve years the critical journal entitled the Antologia, founded by that Vieusseux who also opened those delightful and beneficent reading-rooms whither we all rush, as soon as we reach Florence, to look at the newspapers and magazines of our native land. The Antologia had at last the misfortune to offend the Emperor of Russia, and to do that prince a pleasure the Tuscan government suppressed it: such being the international amenities when sovereigns really reigned in Europe. After the Antologia there came another review, published at Leghorn, but it was not so successful, and in fact the conditions of literature gradually grew more irksome in Tuscany, until the violent liberation came in ‘48, and a little later the violent re�nslavement.

Giambattista Niccolini, like nearly all the poets of his time and country, was of noble birth, his father being a cavaliere, and holding a small government office at San Giuliano, near Pistoja. Here, in 1782, Niccolini was born to very decided penury. His father had only that little office, and his income died with him; the mother had nothing — possibly because she was descended from a poet, the famous Filicaja. From his mother, doubtless, Niccolini inherited his power, and perhaps his patriotism. But little or nothing is known of his early life. It is certain, merely, that after leaving school, he continued his studies in the University of Pisa, and that he very soon showed himself a poet. His first published effort was a sort of lamentation over an epidemic that desolated Tuscany in 1804, and this was followed by five or six pretty thoroughly forgotten tragedies in the classic or Alfierian manner. Of these, only the Medea is still played, but they all made a stir in their time; and for another he was crowned by the Accademia della Crusca, which I suppose does not mean a great deal. The fact that Niccolini early caught the attention and won the praises of Ugo Foscolo is more important. There grew up, indeed, between the two poets such esteem that the elder at this time dedicated one of his books to the younger, and their friendship continued through life.

When Elisa Bonaparte was made queen of Etruria by Napoleon, Niccolini became secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, and professor of history and mythology. It is said that in the latter capacity he instilled into his hearers his own notions of liberty and civic virtue. He was, in truth, a democrat, and he suffered with the other Jacobins, as they were called in Italy, when the Napoleonic governments were overthrown. The benefits which the French Revolution conferred upon the people of their conquered provinces when not very doubtful were still such as they were not prepared to receive; and after the withdrawal of the French support, all the Italians through whom they had ruled fell a prey to the popular hate and contumely. In those days when dynasties, restored to their thrones after the lapse of a score of years, ignored the intervening period and treated all its events as if they had no bearing upon the future, it was thought the part of the true friends of order to resume the old fashions which went out with the old r�gime. The queue, or pigtail, had always been worn, when it was safe to wear it, by the supporters of religion and good government (from this fashion came the famous political nickname codino, pigtail-wearer, or conservative, which used to occur so often in Italian talk and literature), and now whoever appeared on the street without this emblem of loyalty and piety was in danger of public outrage. A great many Jacobins bowed their heads to the popular will, and had pigtails sewed on them — a device which the idle boys and other unemployed friends of legitimacy busied themselves in detecting. They laid rude hands on this ornament singing,

  If the queue remains in your hand,

    A true republican is he;

  Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!

    Give him a kick for liberty.

It is related that the superficial and occasional character of Niccolini’s conversion was discovered by this test, and that he underwent the apposite penalty. He rebelled against the treatment he received, and was arrested and imprisoned for his contumacy. When Ferdinando III had returned and established his government on the let-alone principle to which I have alluded, the dramatist was made librarian of the Palatine Library at the Pitti Palace, but he could not endure the necessary attendance at court, where his politics were remembered against him by the courtiers, and he gave up the place. The grand duke was sorry, and said so, adding that he was perfectly contented. “Your Highness,” answered the poet, “in this case it takes two to be contented.”

II

The first political tragedy of Niccolini was the Nebuchadnezzar, which was printed in London in 1819, and figured, under that Scriptural disguise, the career of Napoleon. After that came his Antonio Foscarini, in which the poet, who had heretofore been a classicist, tried to reconcile that school with the romantic by violating the sacred unities in a moderate manner. In his subsequent tragedies he seems not to have regarded them at all, and to have been romantic as the most romantic Lombard of them all could have asked. Of course, his defection gave exquisite pain to the lovers of Italian good taste, as the classicists called themselves, but these were finally silenced by the success of his tragedy. The reader of it nowadays, we suspect, will think its success not very expensively achieved, and it certainly has a main fault that makes it strangely disagreeable. When the past was chiefly the affair of fable, the storehouse of tradition, it was well enough for the poet to take historical events and figures, and fashion them in any way that served his purpose; but this will not do in our modern daylight, where a freedom with the truth is an offense against common knowledge, and does not charm the fancy, but painfully bewilders it at the best, and at the second best is impudent and ludicrous. In his tragedy, Niccolini takes two very familiar incidents of Venetian history: that of the Foscari, which Byron has used; and that of Antonio Foscarini, who was unjustly hanged more than a hundred years later for privity to a conspiracy against the state, whereas the attributive crime of Jacopo Foscari was the assassination of a fellow-patrician. The poet is then forced to make the Doge Foscari do duty throughout as the father of Foscarini, the only doge of whose name served out his term very peaceably, and died the author of an extremely dull official history of Venetian literature. Foscarini, who, up to the time of his hanging, was an honored servant of the state, and had been ambassador to France, is obliged, on his part, to undergo all of Jacopo Foscari’s troubles; and I have not been able to see why the poet should have vexed himself to make all this confusion, and why the story of the Foscari was not sufficient for his purpose. In the tragedy there is much denunciation of the oligarchic oppression of the Ten in Venice, and it may be regarded as the first of Niccolini’s dramatic appeals to the love of freedom and the manhood of the Italians.

It is much easier to understand the success of Niccolini’s subsequent drama, Lodovico il Moro, which is in many respects a touching and effective tragedy, and the historical truth is better observed in it; though, as none of our race can ever love his country with that passionate and personal devotion which the Italians feel, we shall never relish the high patriotic flavor of the piece. The story is simply that of Giovan-Galeazzo Sforza, Duke of Milan, whose uncle, Lodovico, on pretense of relieving him of the cares of government, has usurped the sovereignty, and keeps Galeazzo and his wife in virtual imprisonment, the young duke wasting away with a slow but fatal malady. To further his ambitious schemes in Lombardy, Lodovico has called in Charles VIII. of France, who claims the crown of Naples against the Aragonese family, and pauses, on his way to Naples, at Milan. Isabella, wife of Galeazzo, appeals to Charles to liberate them, but reaches his presence in such an irregular way that she is suspected of treason both to her husband and to Charles. Yet the king is convinced of her innocence, and he places the sick duke under the protection of a French garrison, and continues his march on Naples. Lodovico has appeared to consent, but by seeming to favor the popular leaders has procured the citizens to insist upon his remaining in power; he has also secretly received the investiture from the Emperor of Germany, to be published upon the death of Galeazzo. He now, therefore, defies the French; Galeazzo, tormented by alternate hope and despair, dies suddenly; and Lodovico, throwing off the mask of a popular ruler, puts the republican leaders to death, and reigns the feudatory of the Emperor. The interest of the play is almost entirely political, and patriotism is the chief passion involved. The main personal attraction of the tragedy is in the love of Galeazzo and his wife, and in the character of the latter the dreamy languor of a hopeless invalid is delicately painted.

The Giovanni da Procida was a further advance in political literature. In this tragedy, abandoning the indirectly liberal teachings of the Foscarini, Niccolini set himself to the purpose of awakening a Tuscan hatred of foreign rule. The subject is the expulsion of the French from Sicily; and when the French ambassador complained to the Austrian that such a play should be tolerated by the Tuscan government, the Austrian answered, “The address is to the French, but the letter is for the Germans.” The Giovanni da Procida was a further development of Niccolini’s political purposes in literature, and at the time of its first representation it raised the Florentines to a frenzy of theater-going patriotism. The tragedy ends with the terrible Sicilian Vespers, but its main affair is with preceding events, largely imagined by the poet, and the persons are in great part fictitious; yet they all bear a certain relation to fact, and the historical persons are more or less historically painted. Giovanni da Procida, a great Sicilian nobleman, believed dead by the French, comes home to Palermo, after long exile, to stir up the Sicilians to rebellion, and finds that his daughter is married to the son of one of the French rulers, though neither this daughter Imelda nor her husband Tancredi knew the origin of the latter at the time of their marriage. Precida, in his all-absorbing hate of the oppressors, cannot forgive them; yet he seizes Tancredi, and imprisons him in his castle, in order to save his life from the impending massacre of the French; and in a scene with Imelda, he tells her that, while she was a babe, the father of Tancredi had abducted her mother and carried her to France. Years after, she returned heart-broken to die in her husband’s arms, a secret which she tries to reveal perishing with her. While Imelda remains horror-struck by this history, Procida receives an intercepted letter from Eriberto, Tancredi’s father, in which he tells the young man that he and Imelda are children of the same mother. Procida in pity of his daughter, the victim of this awful fatality, prepares to send her away to a convent in Pisa; but a French law forbids any ship to sail at that time, and Imelda is brought back and confronted in a public place with Tancredi, who has been rescued by the French.

He claims her as his wife, but she, filled with the horror of what she knows, declares that he is not her husband. It is the moment of the Vespers, and Tancredi falls among the first slain by the Sicilians. He implores Imelda for a last kiss, but wildly answering that they are brother and sister, she swoons away, while Tancredi dies in this climax of self-loathing and despair. The management of a plot so terrible is very simple. The feelings of the characters in the hideous maze which involves them are given only such expression as should come from those utterly broken by their calamity. Imelda swoons when she hears the letter of Eriberto declaring the fatal tie of blood that binds her to her husband, and forever separates her from him. When she is restored, she finds her father weeping over her, and says:

               Ah, thou dost look on me

  And weep! At least this comfort I can feel

  In the horror of my state: thou canst not hate

  A woman so unhappy....

   ... Oh, from all

  Be hid the atrocity! to some holy shelter

  Let me be taken far from hence. I feel

  Naught can be more than my calamity,

  Saving God’s pity. I have no father now,

  Nor child, nor husband (heavens, what do I say?

  He is my brother now! and well I know

  I must not ask to see him more). I, living, lose

  Everything death robs other women of.

By far the greater feeling and passion are shown in the passages describing the wrongs which the Sicilians have suffered from the French, and expressing the aspiration and hate of Procida and his fellow-patriots. Niccolini does not often use pathos, and he is on that account perhaps the more effective in the use of it. However this may be, I find it very touching when, after coming back from his long exile, Procida says to Imelda, who is trembling for the secret of her marriage amidst her joy in his return:

                    Daughter, art thou still

    So sad? I have not heard yet from thy lips

    A word of the old love....

        ... Ah, thou knowest not

    What sweetness hath the natal spot, how many

    The longings exile hath; how heavy’t is

    To arrive at doors of homes where no one waits thee!

    Imelda, thou may’st abandon thine own land,

    But not forget her; I, a pilgrim, saw

    Many a city; but none among them had

    A memory that spoke unto my heart;

    And fairer still than any other seemed

    The country whither still my spirit turned.

In a vein as fierce and passionate as this is tender, Procida relates how, returning to Sicily when he was believed dead by the French, he passed in secret over the island and inflamed Italian hatred of the foreigners:

                    I sought the pathless woods,

  And drew the cowards thence and made them blush,

  And then made fury follow on their shame.

  I hailed the peasant in his fertile fields,

  Where, ‘neath the burden of the cruel tribute,

  He dropped from famine ‘midst the harvest sheaves,

  With his starved brood: “Open thou with thy scythe

  The breasts of Frenchmen; let the earth no more

  Be fertile to our tyrants.” I found my way

  In palaces, in hovels; tranquil, I

  Both great and lowly did make drunk with rage.

  I knew the art to call forth cruel tears

  In every eye, to wake in every heart

  A love of slaughter, a ferocious need

  Of blood. And in a thousand strong right hands

  Glitter the arms I gave.

In the last act occurs one of those lyrical passages in which Niccolini excels, and two lines from this chorus are among the most famous in modern Italian poetry:

  Perch� tanto sorriso del cielo

  Sulla terra del vile dolor?

The scene is in a public place in Palermo, and the time is the moment before the massacre of the French begins. A chorus of Sicilian poets remind the people of their sorrows and degradation, and sing:

  The wind vexes the forest no longer,

  In the sunshine the leaflets expand:

  With barrenness cursed be the land

  That is bathed with the sweat of the slave!

  On the fields now the harvests are waving,

  On the fields that our blood has made red;

  Harvests grown for our enemy’s bread

  From the bones of our children they wave!

  With a veil of black clouds would the tempest

  Might the face of this Italy cover;

  Why should Heaven smile so glorious over

  The land of our infamous woe?

  All nature is suddenly wakened,

  Here in slumbers unending man sleeps;

  Dust trod evermore by the steps

  Of ever-strange lords he lies low!

{Illustration: Giambattista Niccolini.}

“With this tragedy,” says an Italian biographer of Niccolini, “the poet potently touched all chords of the human heart, from the most impassioned love to the most implacable hate.... The enthusiasm rose to the greatest height, and for as many nights of the severe winter of 1830 as the tragedy was given, the theater was always thronged by the overflowing audience; the doors of the Cocomero were opened to the impatient people many hours before the spectacle began. Spectators thought themselves fortunate to secure a seat next the roof of the theater; even in the prompter’s hole {Note: On the Italian stage the prompter rises from a hole in the floor behind the foot-lights, and is hidden from the audience merely by a canvas shade.} places were sought to witness the admired work.... And whilst they wept over the ill-starred love of Imelda, and all hearts palpitated in the touching situation of the drama, — where the public and the personal interests so wonderfully blended, and the vengeance of a people mingled with that of a man outraged in the most sacred affections of the heart, — Procida rose terrible as the billows of his sea, imprecating before all the wrongs of their oppressed country, in whatever servitude inflicted, by whatever aliens, among all those that had trampled, derided, and martyred her, and raising the cry of resistance which stirred the heart of all Italy. At the picture of the abject sufferings of their common country, the whole audience rose and repeated with tears of rage:

 “Why should heaven smile so glorious over

  The land of our infamous woe?”

By the year 1837 had begun the singular illusion of the Italians, that their freedom and unity were to be accomplished through a liberal and patriotic Pope. Niccolini, however, never was cheated by it, though he was very much disgusted, and he retired, not only from the political agitation, but almost from the world. He was seldom seen upon the street, but to those who had access to him he did not fail to express all the contempt and distrust he felt. “A liberal Pope! a liberal Pope!” he said, with a scornful enjoyment of that contradiction in terms. He was thoroughly Florentine and Tuscan in his anti-papal spirit, and he was faithful in it to the tradition of Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Alfieri, who all doubted and combated the papal influence as necessarily fatal to Italian hopes. In 1843 he published his great and principal tragedy, Arnaldo da Brescia, which was a response to the ideas of the papal school of patriots. In due time Pius IX. justified Niccolini, and all others that distrusted him, by turning his back upon the revolution, which belief in him, more than anything else, had excited.

The tragedies which succeeded the Arnaldo were the Filippo Strozzi, published in 1847; the Beatrice Cenci, a version from the English of Shelley, and the Mario e i Cimbri.

A part of the Arnaldo da Brescia was performed in Florence in 1858, not long before the war which has finally established Italian freedom. The name of the Cocomero theater had been changed to the Teatro Niccolini, and, in spite of the governmental anxiety and opposition, the occasion was made a popular demonstration in favor of Niccolini’s ideas as well as himself. His biographer says: “The audience now maintained a religious silence; now, moved by irresistible force, broke out into uproarious applause as the eloquent protests of the friar and the insolent responses of the Pope awakened their interest; for Italy then, like the unhappy martyr, had risen to proclaim the decline of that monstrous power which, in the name of a religion profaned by it, sanctifies its own illegitimate and feudal origin, its abuses, its pride, its vices, its crimes. It was a beautiful and affecting spectacle to see the illustrious poet receiving the warm congratulations of his fellow-citizens, who enthusiastically recognized in him the utterer of so many lofty truths and the prophet of Italy. That night Niccolini was accompanied to his house by the applauding multitude.” And if all this was a good deal like the honors the Florentines were accustomed to pay to a very pretty ballerina or a successful prima donna, there is no doubt that a poet is much worthier the popular frenzy; and it is a pity that the forms of popular frenzy have to be so cheapened by frequent use. The two remaining years of Niccolini’s life were spent in great retirement, and in a satisfaction with the fortunes of Italy which was only marred by the fact that the French still remained in Rome, and that the temporal power yet stood. He died in 1861.

III

The work of Niccolini in which he has poured out all the lifelong hatred and distrust he had felt for the temporal power of the popes is the Arnaldo da Brescia. This we shall best understand through a sketch of the life of Arnaldo, who is really one of the most heroic figures of the past, deserving to rank far above Savonarola, and with the leaders of the Reformation, though he preceded these nearly four hundred years. He was born in Brescia of Lombardy, about the year 1105, and was partly educated in France, in the school of the famous Abelard. He early embraced the ecclesiastical life, and, when he returned to his own country, entered a convent, but not to waste his time in idleness and the corruptions of his order. In fact, he began at once to preach against these, and against the usurpation of temporal power by all the great and little dignitaries of the Church. He thus identified himself with the democratic side in politics, which was then locally arrayed against the bishop aspiring to rule Brescia. Arnaldo denounced the political power of the Pope, as well as that of the prelates; and the bishop, making this known to the pontiff at Rome, had sufficient influence to procure a sentence against Arnaldo as a schismatic, and an order enjoining silence upon him. He was also banished from Italy; whereupon, retiring to France, he got himself into further trouble by aiding Abelard in the defense of his teachings, which had been attainted of heresy. Both Abelard and Arnaldo were at this time bitterly persecuted by St. Bernard, and Arnaldo took refuge in Switzerland, whence, after several years, he passed to Rome, and there began to assume an active part in the popular movements against the papal rule. He was an ardent republican, and was a useful and efficient partisan, teaching openly that, whilst the Pope was to be respected in all spiritual things, he was not to be recognized at all as a temporal prince. When the English monk, Nicholas Breakspear, became Pope Adrian IV., he excommunicated and banished Arnaldo; but Arnaldo, protected by the senate and certain powerful nobles, remained at Rome in spite of the Pope’s decree, and disputed the lawfulness of the excommunication. Finally, the whole city was laid under interdict until Arnaldo should be driven out. Holy Week was drawing near; the people were eager to have their churches thrown open and to witness the usual shows and splendors, and they consented to the exile of their leader. The followers of a cardinal arrested him, but he was rescued by his friends, certain counts of the Campagna, who held him for a saint, and who now lodged him safely in one of their castles. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, coming to Rome to assume the imperial crown, was met by embassies from both parties in the city. He warmly favored that of the Pope, and not only received that of the people very coldly, but arrested one of the counts who had rescued Arnaldo, and forced him to name the castle in which the monk lay concealed. Arnaldo was then given into the hands of the cardinals, and these delivered him to the prefect of Rome, who caused him to be hanged, his body to be burned upon a spit, and his ashes to be scattered in the Tiber, that the people might not venerate his relics as those of a saint. “This happened,” says the priest Giovanni Battista Guadagnini, of Brescia, whose Life, published in 1790, I have made use of— “this happened in the year 1155 before the 18th of June, previous to the coronation of Frederick, Arnaldo being, according to my thinking, fifty years of age. His eloquence,” continues Guadagnini, “was celebrated by his enemies themselves; the exemplarity of his life was superior to their malignity, constraining them all to silence, although they were in such great number, and it received a splendid eulogy from St. Bernard, the luminary of that century, who, being strongly impressed against him, condemned him first as a schismatic, and then for the affair of the Council of Sens (the defense of Abelard), persecuted him as a heretic, and then had finally nothing to say against him. His courage and his zeal for the discipline of the Church have been sufficiently attested by the toils, the persecutions, and the death which he underwent for that cause.”

IV

The scene of the first act of Niccolini’s tragedy is near the Capitoline Hill, in Rome, where two rival leaders, Frangipani and Giordano Pierleone, are disputing in the midst of their adherents. The former is a supporter of the papal usurpations; the latter is a republican chief, who has been excommunicated for his politics, and is also under sentence of banishment; but who, like Arnaldo, remains in Rome in spite of Church and State. Giordano withdraws to the Campid�glio with his adherents, and there Arnaldo suddenly appears among them. When the people ask what cure there is for their troubles, Arnaldo answers, in denunciation of the papacy:

              Liberty and God.

  A voice from the orient,

  A voice from the Occident,

  A voice from thy deserts,

  A voice of echoes from the open graves,

  Accuses thee, thou shameless harlot! Drunk

  Art thou with blood of saints, and thou hast lain

  With all the kings of earth. Ah, you behold her!

  She is clothed on with purple; gold and pearls

  And gems are heaped upon her; and her vestments

  Once white, the pleasure of her former spouse,

  That now’s in heaven, she has dragged in dust.

  Lo, is she full of names and blasphemies,

  And on her brow is written Mystery!

  Ah, nevermore you hear her voice console

  The afflicted; all she threatens, and creates

  With her perennial curse in trembling souls

  Ineffable pangs; the unhappy — as we here

  Are all of us — fly in their common sorrows

  To embrace each other; she, the cruel one,

  Sunders them in the name of Jesus; fathers

  She kindles against sons, and wives she parts

  From husbands, and she makes a war between

  Harmonious brothers; of the Evangel she

  Is cruel interpreter, and teaches hate

  Out of the book of love. The years are come

  Whereof the rapt Evangelist of Patmos

  Did prophesy; and, to deceive the people,

  Satan has broken the chains he bore of old;

  And she, the cruel, on the infinite waters

  Of tears that are poured out for her, sits throned.

  The enemy of man two goblets places

  Unto her shameless lips; and one is blood,

  And gold is in the other; greedy and fierce

  She drinks so from them both, the world knows not

  If she of blood or gold have greater thirst....

  Lord, those that fled before thy scourge of old

  No longer stand to barter offerings

  About thy temple’s borders, but within

  Man’s self is sold, and thine own blood is trafficked,

  Thou son of God!

The people ask Arnaldo what he counsels them to do, and he advises them to restore the senate and the tribunes, appealing to the glorious memories of the place where they stand, the Capitoline Hill:

  Where the earth calls at every step, “Oh, pause,

  Thou treadest on a hero!”

They desire to make him a tribune, but he refuses, promising, however, that he will not withhold his counsel. Whilst he speaks, some cardinals, with nobles of the papal party, appear, and announce the election of the new Pope, Adrian. “What is his name?” the people demand; and a cardinal answers, “Breakspear, a Briton.” Giordano exclaims:

  Impious race! you’ve chosen Rome for shepherd

  A cruel barbarian, and even his name

  Tortures our ears.

  Arnaldo. I never care to ask

  Where popes are born; and from long suffering,

  You, Romans, before heaven, should have learnt

  That priests can have no country....

  I know this man; his father was a thrall,

  And he is fit to be a slave. He made

  Friends with the Norman that enslaves his country;

  A wandering beggar to Avignon’s cloisters

  He came in boyhood and was known to do

  All abject services; there those false monks

  He with astute humility cajoled;

  He learned their arts, and ‘mid intrigues and hates

  He rose at last out of his native filth

  A tyrant of the vile.

The cardinals, confounded by Arnaldo’s presence and invectives, withdraw, but leave one of their party to work on the fears of the Romans, and make them return to their allegiance by pictures of the desolating war which Barbarossa, now approaching Rome to support Adrian, has waged upon the rebellious Lombards at Rosate and elsewhere. Arnaldo replies: —

                                      Romans,

  I will tell all the things that he has hid;

  I know not how to cheat you. Yes, Rosate

  A ruin is, from which the smoke ascends.

  The bishop, lord of Monferrato, guided

  The German arms against Chieri and Asti,

  Now turned to dust; that shepherd pitiless

  Did thus avenge his own offenses on

  His flying flocks; himself with torches armed

  The German hand; houses and churches saw

  Destroyed, and gave his blessing on the flames.

  This is the pardon that you may expect

  From mitered tyrants. A heap of ashes now

  Crowneth the hill where once Tortona stood;

  And drunken with her wine and with her blood,

  Fallen there amidst their spoil upon the dead,

  Slept the wild beasts of Germany: like ghosts

  Dim wandering through the darkness of the night,

  Those that were left by famine and the sword,

  Hidden within the heart of thy dim caverns,

  Desolate city! rose and turned their steps

  Noiselessly toward compassionate Milan.

  There they have borne their swords and hopes: I see

  A thousand heroes born from the example

  Tortona gave. O city, if I could,

  O sacred city! upon the ruins fall

  Reverently, and take them in my loving arms,

  The relics of thy brave I’d gather up

  In precious urns, and from the altars here

  In days of battle offer to be kissed!

  Oh, praise be to the Lord! Men die no more

  For chains and errors; martyrs now at last

  Hast thou, O holy Freedom; and fain were I

  Ashes for thee! — But I see you grow pale,

  Ye Romans! Down, go down; this holy height

  Is not for cowards.  In the valley there

  Your tyrant waits you; go and fall before him

  And cover his haughty foot with tears and kisses.

  He’ll tread you in the dust, and then absolve you.

  The People. The arms we have are strange and few,

  Our walls Are fallen and ruinous.

  Arnaldo.           Their hearts are walls

  Unto the brave....

                       And they shall rise again,

  The walls that blood of freemen has baptized,

  But among slaves their ruins are eternal.

  People. You outrage us, sir!

  Arnaldo.               Wherefore do ye tremble

  Before the trumpet sounds? O thou that wast

  Once the world’s lord and first in Italy,

  Wilt thou be now the last?

  People. No more!  Cease, or thou diest!

Arnaldo, having roused the pride of the Romans, now tells them that two thousand Swiss have followed him from his exile; and the act closes with some lyrical passages leading to the fraternization of the people with these.

The second act of this curious tragedy, where there may be said to be scarcely any personal interest, but where we are aware of such an impassioned treatment of public interests as perhaps never was before, opens with a scene between the Pope Adrian and the Cardinal Guido. The character of both is finely studied by the poet; and Guido, the type of ecclesiastical submission, has not more faith in the sacredness and righteousness of Adrian, than Adrian, the type of ecclesiastical ambition, has in himself. The Pope tells Guido that he stands doubting between the cities of Lombardy leagued against Frederick, and Frederick, who is coming to Rome, not so much to befriend the papacy as to place himself in a better attitude to crush the Lombards. The German dreams of the restoration of Charlemagne’s empire; he believes the Church corrupt; and he and Arnaldo would be friends, if it were not for Arnaldo’s vain hope of re�stablishing the republican liberties of Rome. The Pope utters his ardent desire to bring Arnaldo back to his allegiance; and when Guido reminds him that Arnaldo has been condemned by a council of the Church, and that it is scarcely in his power to restore him, Adrian turns upon him:

                         What sayest thou?

  I can do all. Dare the audacious members

  Rebel against the head? Within these hands

  Lie not the keys that once were given to Peter?

  The heavens repeat as ‘t were the word of God,

  My word that here has power to loose and bind.

  Arnaldo did not dare so much. The kingdom

  Of earth alone he did deny me. Thou

  Art more outside the Church than he.

  Guido (kneeling at Adrian’s feet). O God,

  I erred; forgive! I rise not from thy feet

  Till thou absolve me. My zeal blinded me.

  I’m clay before thee; shape me as thou wilt,

  A vessel apt to glory or to shame.

Guido then withdraws at the Pope’s bidding, in order to send a messenger to Arnaldo, and Adrian utters this fine soliloquy:

  At every step by which I’ve hither climbed

  I’ve found a sorrow; but upon the summit

  All sorrows are; and thorns more thickly spring

  Around my chair than ever round a throne.

  What weary toil to keep up from the dust

  This mantle that’s weighed down the strongest limbs!

  These splendid gems that blaze in my tiara,

  They are a fire that burns the aching brow,

  I lift with many tears, O Lord, to thee!

  Yet I must fear not; He that did know how

  To bear the cross, so heavy with the sins

  Of all the world, will succor the weak servant

  That represents his power here on earth.

  Of mine own isle that make the light o’ the sun

  Obscure as one day was my lot, amidst

  The furious tumults of this guilty Rome,

  Here, under the superb effulgency

  Of burning skies, I think of you and weep!

The Pope’s messenger finds Arnaldo in the castle of Giordano, where these two are talking of the present fortunes and future chances of Rome. The patrician forebodes evil from the approach of the emperor, but Arnaldo encourages him, and, when the Pope’s messenger appears, he is eager to go to Adrian, believing that good to their cause will come of it. Giordano in vain warns him against treachery, bidding him remember that Adrian will hold any falsehood sacred that is used with a heretic. It is observable throughout that Niccolini is always careful to make his rebellious priest a good Catholic; and now Arnaldo rebukes Giordano for some doubts of the spiritual authority of the Pope. When Giordano says:

  These modern pharisees, upon the cross,

  Where Christ hung dying once, have nailed mankind,

Arnaldo answers:

  He will know how to save that rose and conquered;

And Giordano replies:

  Yes, Christ arose; but Freedom cannot break

  The stone that shuts her ancient sepulcher,

  For on it stands the altar.

Adrian, when Arnaldo appears before him, bids him fall down and kiss his feet, and speak to him as to God; he will hear Arnaldo only as a penitent. Arnaldo answers:

                                 The feet

  Of his disciples did that meek One kiss

  Whom here thou representest. But I hear

  Now from thy lips the voice of fiercest pride.

  Repent, O Peter, that deniest him,

  And near the temple art, but far from God!

                           The name of the king

  Is never heard in Rome. And if thou are

  The vicar of Christ on earth, well should’st thou know

  That of thorns only was the crown he wore.

  Adrian. He gave to me the empire of the earth

  When this great mantly I put on, and took

  The Church’s high seat I was chosen to;

  The word of God did erst create the world,

  And now mine guides it. Would’st thou that the soul

  Should serve the body? Thou dost dream of freedom,

  And makest war on him who sole on earth

  Can shield man from his tyrants. O Arnaldo,

  Be Wise; believe me, all thy words are vain,

  Vain sound that perish or disperse themselves

  Amidst the wilderness of Rome. I only

  Can speak the words that the whole world repeats.

  Arnaldo. Thy words were never Freedom’s; placed between

  The people and their tyrants, still the Church

  With the weak cruel, with the mighty vile,

  Has been, and crushed in pitiless embraces

  That emperors and pontiffs have exchanged.

  Man has been ever.

  Why seek’st thou empire here, and great on earth

  Art mean in heaven? Ah! vainly in thy prayer

  Thou criest, “Let the heart be lifted up!”

  ‘T is ever bowed to earth.

                     Now, then, if thou wilt,

  Put forth the power that thou dost vaunt; repress

  The crimes of bishops, make the Church ashamed

  To be a step-mother to the poor and lowly.

  In all the Lombard cities every priest

  Has grown a despot, in shrewd perfidy

  Now siding with the Church, now with the Empire.

  They have dainty food, magnificent apparel,

  Lascivious joys, and on their altars cold

  Gathers the dust, where lies the miter dropt,

  Forgotten, from the haughty brow that wears

  The helmet, and no longer bows itself

  Before God’s face in th’ empty sanctuaries;

  But upon the fields of slaughter, smoking still,

  Bends o’er the fallen foe, and aims the blows

  O’ th’ sacrilegious sword, with cruel triumph

  Insulting o’er the prayers of dying men.

  There the priest rides o’er breasts of fallen foes,

  And stains with blood his courser’s iron heel.

  When comes a brief, false peace, and wearily

  Amidst the havoc doth the priest sit down,

  His pleasures are a crime, and after rapine

  Luxury follows. Like a thief he climbs

  Into the fold, and that desired by day

  He dares amid the dark, and violence

  Is the priest’s marriage. Vainly did Rome hope

  That they had thrown aside the burden vile

  Of the desires that weigh down other men.

  Theirs is the ungrateful lust of the wild beast,

  That doth forget the mother nor knows the child.

  ... On the altar of Christ,

  Who is the prince of pardon and of peace,

  Vows of revenge are registered, and torches

  That are thrown into hearts of leaguered cities

  Are lit from tapers burning before God.

  Become thou king of sacrifice; ascend

  The holy hill of God; on these perverse

  Launch thou thy thunderbolts; and feared again

  And great thou wilt be. Tell me, Adrian,

  Must thou not bear a burden that were heavy

  Even for angels? Wherefore wilt thou join

  Death unto life, and make the word of God,

  That says, “My kingdom is not of this world,”

  A lie? Oh, follow Christ’s example here

  In Rome; it pleased both God and her

  To abase the proud and to uplift the weak.

  I’ll kiss the foot that treads on kings!

  Adrian.                       Arnaldo,

  I parley not, I rule; and I, become

  On earth as God in heaven, am judge of all,

  And none of me; I watch, and I dispense

  Terrors and hopes, rewards and punishments,

  To peoples and to kings; fountain and source

  Of life am I, who make the Church of God

  One and all-powerful. Many thrones and peoples

  She has seen tost upon the madding waves

  Of time, and broken on the immovable rock

  Whereon she sits; and since one errless spirit

  Rules in her evermore, she doth not rave

  For changeful doctrine, but she keeps eternal

  The grandeur of her will and purposes.

   ... Arnaldo,

  Thou movest me to pity. In vain thou seek’st

  To warm thy heart over these ruins, groping

  Among the sepulchers of Rome. Thou’lt find

  No bones to which thou canst say, “Rise!” Ah, here

  Remaineth not one hero’s dust. Thou thinkest

  That with old names old virtues shall return?

  And thou desirest tribunes, senators,

  Equestrian orders, Rome! A greater glory

  Thy sovereign pontiff is who doth not guard

  The rights uncertain of a crazy rabble;

  But tribune of the world he sits in Rome,

  And “I forbid,” to kings and peoples cries.

  I tell thee a greater than the impious power

  That thou in vain endeavorest to renew

  Here built the dying fisherman of Judea.

  Out of his blood he made a fatherland

  For all the nations, and this place, that once

  A city was, became a world; the borders

  That did divide the nations, by Christ’s law

  Are ta’en away, and this the kingdom is

  For which he asked his Father in his prayer.

  The Church has sons in every race; I rule,

  An unseen king, and Rome is everywhere!

  Arnaldo. Thou errest, Adrian. Rome’s thunderbolts

  Wake little terror now, and reason shakes

  The bonds that thou fain would’st were everlasting.

   ... Christ calls to her

  As of old to the sick man, “Rise and walk.”

  She ‘ll tread on you if you go not before.

  The world has other truth besides the altar’s.

  It will not have a temple that hides heaven.

  Thou wast a shepherd: be a father. The race

  Of man is weary of being called a flock.

Adrian’s final reply is, that if Arnaldo will renounce his false doctrine and leave Rome, the Pope will, through him, give the Lombard cities a liberty that shall not offend the Church. Arnaldo refuses, and quits Adrian’s presence. It is quite needless to note the bold character of the thought here, or the nobility of the poetry, which Niccolini puts as well into the mouth of the Pope whom he hates as the monk whom he loves.

Following this scene is one of greater dramatic force, in which the Cardinal Guido, sent to the Campidoglio by the Pope to disperse the popular assembly, is stoned by the people and killed. He dies full of faith in the Church and the righteousness of his cause, and his body, taken up by the priests, is carried into the square before St. Peter’s. A throng, including many women, has followed; and now Niccolini introduces a phase of the great Italian struggle which was perhaps the most perplexing of all. The subjection of the women to the priests is what has always greatly contributed to defeat Italian efforts for reform; it now helps to unnerve the Roman multitude; and the poet finally makes it the weakness through which Arnaldo is dealt his death. With a few strokes in the scene that follows the death of Guido, he indicates the remorse and dismay of the people when the Pope repels them from the church door and proclaims the interdict; and then follow some splendid lyrical passages, in which the Pope commands the pictures and images to be veiled and the relics to be concealed, and curses the enemies of the Church. I shall but poorly render this curse by a rhymeless translation, and yet I am tempted to give it:

  The Pope. To-day let the perfidious

  Learn at thy name to tremble,

  Nor triumph o’er the ruinous

  Place of thy vanished altars.

  Oh, brief be their days and uncertain;

  In the desert their wandering footsteps,

  Every tremulous leaflet affright them!

  The Cardinals. Anathema, anathema, anathema!

  Pope. May their widows sit down ‘mid the ashes

  On the hearths of their desolate houses,

  With their little ones wailing around them.

  Cardinals. Anathema, anathema, anathema!

  Pope. May he who was born to the fury

  Of heaven, afar from his country

  Be lost in his ultimate anguish.

  Cardinals. Anathema, anathema, anathema!

  Pope. May he fly to the house of the alien oppressor

  That is filled with the spoil of his brothers, with women

  Destroyed by the pitiless hands that defiled them;

  There in accents unknown and derided, abase him

  At portals ne’er opened in mercy, imploring

  A morsel of bread.

  Cardinals.       Be that morsel denied him!

  Pope. I hear the wicked cry: I from the Lord

  Will fly away with swift and tireless feet;

  His anger follows me upon the sea;

  I’ll seek the desert; who will give me wings?

  In cloudy horror, who shall lead my steps?

  The eye of God maketh the night as day.

              O brothers, fulfill then

              The terrible duty;

              Throw down from the altars

              The dim-burning tapers;

  And be all joy, and be the love of God

  In thankless hearts that know not Peter, quenched,

  As is the little flame that falls and dies,

  Here in these tapers trampled under foot.

In the first scene of the third act, which is a desolate place in the Campagna, near the sea, Arnaldo appears. He has been expelled from Rome by the people, eager for the opening of their churches, and he soliloquizes upon his fate in language that subtly hints all his passing moods, and paints the struggle of his soul. It appears to me that it is a wise thing to make him almost regret the cloister in the midst of his hatred of it, and then shrink from that regret with horror; and there is also a fine sense of night and loneliness in the scene:

                           Like this sand

  Is life itself, and evermore each path

  Is traced in suffering, and one footprint still

  Obliterates another; and we are all

  Vain shadows here that seem a little while,

  And suffer, and pass. Let me not fight in vain,

  O Son of God, with thine immortal word,

  Yon tyrant of eternity and time,

  Who doth usurp thy place on earth, whose feet

  Are in the depths, whose head is in the clouds,

  Who thunders all abroad, The world is mine!

  Laws, virtues, liberty I have attempted

  To give thee, Rome. Ah! only where death is

  Abides thy glory. Here the laurel only

  Flourishes on the ruins and the tombs.

  I will repose upon this fallen column

  My weary limbs. Ah, lower than this ye lie,

  You Latin souls, and to your ancient height

  Who shall uplift you? I am all weighed down

  By the great trouble of the lofty hopes

  Of Italy still deluded, and I find

  Within my soul a drearer desert far

  Than this, where the air already darkens round,

  And the soft notes of distant convent bells

  Announce the coming night.... I cannot hear them

  Without a trembling wish that in my heart

  Wakens a memory that becomes remorse....

  Ah, Reason, soon thou languishest in us,

  Accustomed to such outrage all our lives.

  Thou know’st the cloister; thou a youth didst enter

  That sepulcher of the living where is war, —

  Remember it and shudder! The damp wind

  Stirs this gray hair. I’m near the sea.

  Thy silence is no more; sweet on the ear

  Cometh the far-off murmur of the floods

  In the vast desert; now no more the darkness

  Imprisons wholly; now less gloomily

  Lowers the sky that lately threatened storm.

  Less thick the air is, and the trembling light

  O’ the stars among the breaking clouds appears.

  Praise to the Lord! The eternal harmony

  Of all his work I feel. Though these vague beams

  Reveal to me here only fens and tombs,

  My soul is not so heavily weighed down

  By burdens that oppressed it....

  I rise to grander purposes: man’s tents

  Are here below, his city is in heaven.

  I doubt no more; the terror of the cloister

  No longer assails me.

Presently Giordano comes to join Arnaldo in this desolate place, and, in the sad colloquy which follows, tells him of the events of Rome, and the hopelessness of their cause, unless they have the aid and countenance of the Emperor. He implores Arnaldo to accompany the embassy which he is about to send to Frederick; but Arnaldo, with a melancholy disdain, refuses. He asks where are the Swiss who accompanied him to Rome, and he is answered by one of the Swiss captains, who at that moment appears. The Emperor has ordered them to return home, under penalty of the ban of the empire. He begs Arnaldo to return with them, but Arnaldo will not; and Giordano sends him under a strong escort to the castle of Ostasio. Arnaldo departs with much misgiving, for the wife of Ostasio is Adelasia, a bigoted papist, who has hitherto resisted the teaching to which her husband has been converted.

As the escort departs, the returning Swiss are seen. One of their leaders expresses the fear that moves them, when he says that the Germans will desolate their homes if they do not return to them. Moreover, the Italian sun, which destroys even those born under it, drains their life, and man and nature are leagued against them there. “What have you known here!” he asks, and his soldiers reply in chorus:

  The pride of old names, the caprices of fate,

  In vast desert spaces the silence of death,

  Or in mist-hidden lowlands, his wandering fires;

  No sweet song of birds, no heart-cheering sound,

  But eternal memorials of ancient despair,

  And ruins and tombs that waken dismay

  At the moan of the pines that are stirred by the wind.

  Full of dark and mysterious peril the woods;

  No life-giving fountains, but only bare sands,

  Or some deep-bedded river that silently moves,

  With a wave that is livid and stagnant, between

  Its margins ungladdened by grass or by flowers,

  And in sterile sands vanishes wholly away.

  Out of huts that by turns have been shambles and tombs,

  All pallid and naked, and burned by their fevers,

  The peasant folk suddenly stare as you pass,

  With visages ghastly, and eyes full of hate,

  Aroused by the accent that’s strange to their ears.

  Oh, heavily hang the clouds here on the head!

  Wan and sick is the earth, and the sun is a tyrant.

Then one of the Swiss soldiers speaks alone:

  The unconquerable love of our own land

  Draws us away till we behold again

  The eternal walls the Almighty builded there.

  Upon the arid ways of faithless lands

  I am tormented by a tender dream

  Of that sweet rill which runs before my cot.

  Oh, let me rest beside the smiling lake,

  And hear the music of familiar words,

  And on its lonely margin, wild and fair,

  Lie down and think of my beloved ones.

There is no page of this tragedy which does not present some terrible or touching picture, which is not full of brave and robust thought, which has not also great dramatic power. But I am obliged to curtail the proof of this, and I feel that, after all, I shall not give a complete idea of the tragedy’s grandeur, its subtlety, its vast scope and meaning.

There is a striking dialogue between a Roman partisan of Arnaldo, who, with his fancy oppressed by the heresy of his cause, is wavering in his allegiance, and a Brescian, whom the outrages of the priests have forever emancipated from faith in their power to bless or ban in the world to come. Then ensues a vivid scene, in which a fanatical and insolent monk of Arnaldo’s order, leading a number of soldiers, arrests him by command of Adrian. Ostasio’s soldiers approaching to rescue him, the monk orders him to be slain, but he is saved, and the act closes with the triumphal chorus of his friends. Here is fine occasion for the play of different passions, and the occasion is not lost.

With the fourth act is introduced the new interest of the German oppression; and as we have had hitherto almost wholly a study of the effect of the papal tyranny upon Italy, we are now confronted with the shame and woe which the empire has wrought her. Exiles from the different Lombard cities destroyed by Barbarossa meet on their way to seek redress from the Pope, and they pour out their sorrows in pathetic and passionate lyrics. To read these passages gives one a favorable notion of the liberality or the stupidity of the government which permitted the publication of the tragedy. The events alluded to were many centuries past, the empire had long ceased to be; but the Italian hatred of the Germans was one and indivisible for every moment of all times, and we may be sure that to each of Niccolini’s readers these mediaeval horrors were but masks for cruelties exercised by the Austrians in his own day, and that in those lyrical bursts of rage and grief there was full utterance for his smothered sense of present wrong. There is a great charm in these strophes; they add unspeakable pathos to a drama which is so largely concerned with political interests; and they make us feel that it is a beautiful and noble work of art, as well as grand appeal to the patriotism of the Italians and the justice of mankind.

When we are brought into the presence of Barbarossa, we find him awaiting the arrival of Adrian, who is to accompany him to Rome and crown him emperor, in return for the aid that Barbarossa shall give in reducing the rebellious citizens and delivering Arnaldo into the power of the papacy. Heralds come to announce Adrian’s approach, and riding forth a little way, Frederick dismounts in order to go forward on foot and meet the Pope, who advances, preceded by his clergy, and attended by a multitude of his partisans. As Frederick perceives the Pope and quits his horse, he muses:

                             I leave thee,

  O faithful comrade mine in many perils,

  Thou generous steed! and now, upon the ground

  That should have thundered under thine advance,

  With humble foot I silent steps must trace.

  But what do I behold? Toward us comes,

  With tranquil pride, the servant of the lowly,

  Upon a white horse docile to the rein

  As he would kings were; all about the path

  That Adrian moves on, warriors and people

  Of either sex, all ages, in blind homage,

  Mingle, press near and fall upon the ground,

  Or one upon another; and man, whom God

  Made to look up to heaven, becomes as dust

  Under the feet of pride; and they believe

  The gates of Paradise would be set wide

  To any one whom his steed crushed to death.

  With me thou never hast thine empire shared;

  Thou alone hold’st the world! He will not turn

  On me in sign of greeting that proud head,

  Encircled by the tiara; and he sees,

  Like God, all under him in murmured prayer

  Or silence, blesses them, and passes on.

  What wonder if he will not deign to touch

  The earth I tread on with his haughty foot!

  He gives it to be kissed of kings; I too

  Must stoop to the vile act.

Since the time of Henry II. it had been the custom of the emperors to lead the Pope’s horse by the bridle, and to hold his stirrup while he descended. Adrian waits in vain for this homage from Frederick, and then alights with the help of his ministers, and seats himself in his episcopal chair, while Frederick draws near, saying aside:

  I read there in his face his insolent pride

  Veiled by humility.

He bows before Adrian and kisses his foot, and then offers him the kiss of peace, which Adrian refuses, and haughtily reminds him of the fate of Henry. Frederick answers furiously that the thought of this fate has always filled him with hatred of the papacy; and Adrian, perceiving that he has pressed too far in this direction, turns and soothes the Emperor:

                              I am truth,

  And thou art force, and if thou part’st from me,

  Blind thou becomest, helpless I remain.

  We are but one at last....

                              Caesar and Peter,

  They are the heights of God; man from the earth

  Contemplates them with awe, and never questions

  Which thrusts its peak the higher into heaven.

  Therefore be wise, and learn from the example

  Of impious Arnaldo. He’s the foe

  Of thrones who wars upon the altar.

But he strives in vain to persuade Frederick to the despised act of homage, and it is only at the intercession of the Emperor’s kinsmen and the German princes that he consents to it. When it is done in the presence of all the army and the clerical retinue, Adrian mounts, and says to Frederick, with scarcely hidden irony:

                       In truth thou art

  An apt and ready squire, and thou hast held

  My stirrup firmly. Take, then, O my son,

  The kiss of peace, for thou hast well fulfilled

  All of thy duties.

But Frederick, crying aloud, and fixing the sense of the multitude upon him, answers:

                   Nay, not all, O Father! —

  Princes and soldiers, hear! I have done homage

  To Peter, not to him.

The Church and the Empire being now reconciled, Frederick receives the ambassadors of the Roman republic with scorn; he outrages all their pretensions to restore Rome to her old freedom and renown; insults their prayer that he will make her his capital, and heaps contempt upon the weakness and vileness of the people they represent. Giordano replies for them:

                  When will you dream,

  You Germans, in your thousand stolid dreams, —

  The fume of drunkenness, — a future greater

  Than our Rome’s memories? Never be her banner

  Usurped by you! In prison and in darkness

  Was born your eagle, that did but descend

  Upon the helpless prey of Roman dead,

  But never dared to try the ways of heaven,

  With its weak vision wounded by the sun.

  Ye prate of Germany. The whole world conspired,

  And even more in vain, to work us harm,

  Before that day when, the world being conquered,

  Rome slew herself.

   ... Of man’s great brotherhood

  Unworthy still, ye change not with the skies.

  In Italy the German’s fate was ever

  To grow luxurious and continue cruel.

The soldiers of Barbarossa press upon Giordano to kill him, and Frederick saves the ambassadors with difficulty, and hurries them away.

In the first part of the fifth act, Niccolini deals again with the r�le which woman has played in the tragedy of Italian history, the hopes she has defeated, and the plans she has marred through those religious instincts which should have blest her country, but which through their perversion by priestcraft have been one of its greatest curses. Adrian is in the Vatican, after his triumphant return to Rome, when Adelasia, the wife of that Ostasio, Count of the Campagna, in whose castle Arnaldo is concealed, and who shares his excommunication, is ushered into the Pope’s presence. She is half mad with terror at the penalties under which her husband has fallen, in days when the excommunicated were shunned like lepers, and to shelter them, or to eat and drink with them, even to salute them, was to incur privation of the sacraments; when a bier was placed at their door, and their houses were stoned; when King Robert of France, who fell under the anathema, was abandoned by all his courtiers and servants, and the beggars refused the meat that was left from his table — and she comes into Adrian’s presence accusing herself as the greatest of sinners. The Pope asks:

                     Hast thou betrayed

  Thy husband, or from some yet greater crime

  Cometh the terror that oppresses thee?

  Hast slain him?

  Adelasia. Haply I ought to slay him.

  Adrian.                            What?

  Adelasia. I fain would hate him and I cannot.

  Adrian.                            What

  Hath his fault been?

  Ad.            Oh, the most horrible

  Of all.

  Adr. And yet is he dear unto thee?

  Ad. I love him, yes, I love him, though he’s changed

  From that he was. Some gloomy cloud involves

  That face one day so fair, and ‘neath the feet,

  Now grown deformed, the flowers wither away.

  I know not if I sleep or if I wake,

  If what I see be a vision or a dream.

  But all is dreadful, and I cannot tell

  The falsehood from the truth; for if I reason,

  I fear to sin. I fly the happy bed

  Where I became a mother, but return

  In midnight’s horror, where my husband lies

  Wrapt in a sleep so deep it frightens me,

  And question with my trembling hand his heart,

  The fountain of his life, if it still beat.

  Then a cold kiss I give him, then embrace him

  With shuddering joy, and then I fly again, —

  For I do fear his love, — and to the place

  Where sleep my little ones I hurl myself,

  And wake them with my moans, and drag them forth

  Before an old miraculous shrine of her,

  The Queen of Heaven, to whom I’ve consecrated,

  With never-ceasing vigils, burning lamps.

  There naked, stretched upon the hard earth, weep

  My pretty babes, and each of them repeats

  The name of Mary whom I call upon;

  And I would swear that she looks down and weeps.

  Then I cry out, “Have pity on my children!

  Thou wast a mother, and the good obtain

  Forgiveness for the guilty.”

Adrian has little trouble to draw from the distracted woman the fact that her husband is a heretic — that heretic, indeed, in whose castle Arnaldo is concealed. On his promise that he will save her husband, she tells him the name of the castle. He summons Frederick, who claims Ostasio as his vassal, and declares that he shall die, and his children shall be carried to Germany. Adrian, after coldly asking the Emperor to spare him, feigns himself helpless, and Adelasia too late awakens to a knowledge of his perfidy. She falls at his feet:

  I clasp thy knees once more, and I do hope

  Thou hast not cheated me!... Ah, now I see

  Thy wicked arts! Because thou knewest well

  My husband was a vassal of the empire,

  That pardon which it was not thine to give

  Thou didst pretend to promise me. O priest,

  Is this thy pity? Sorrow gives me back

  My wandering reason, and I waken on

  The brink of an abyss; and from this wretch

  The mask that did so hide his face drops down

  And shows it in its naked hideousness

  Unto the light of truth.

Frederick sends his soldiers to secure Arnaldo, but as to Ostasio and his children he relents somewhat, being touched by the anguish of Adelasia. Adrian rebukes his weakness, saying that he learned in the cloister to subdue these compassionate impulses. In the next scene, which is on the Capitoline Hill, the Roman Senate resolves to defend the city against the Germans to the last, and then we have Arnaldo a prisoner in a cell of the Castle of St. Angelo. The Prefect of Rome vainly entreats him to recant his heresy, and then leaves him with the announcement that he is to die before the following day. As to the soliloquy which follows, Niccolini says: “I have feigned in Arnaldo in the solemn hour of death these doubts, and I believe them exceedingly probable in a disciple of Abelard. This struggle between reason and faith is found more or less in the intellect of every one, and constitutes a sublime torment in the life of those who, like the Brescian monk, have devoted themselves from an early age to the study of philosophy and religion. None of the ideas which I attribute to Arnaldo were unknown to him, and, according to M�ller, he believed that God was all, and that the whole creation was but one of his thoughts. His other conceptions in regard to divinity are found in one of his contemporaries.” The soliloquy is as follows:

  Aforetime thou hast said, O King of heaven,

  That in the world thou wilt not power or riches.

  And can he be divided from the Church

  Who keeps his faith in thine immortal word,

  The light of souls? To remain in the truth

  It only needs that I confess to thee

  All sins of mine. O thou eternal priest,

  Thou read’st my heart, and that which I can scarce

  Express thou seest. A great mystery

  Is man unto himself, conscience a deep

  Which only thou canst sound. What storm is there

  Of guilty thoughts! Oh, pardon my rebellion!

  Evil springs up within the mind of man,

  As in its native soil, since that day Adam

  Abused thy great gift, and created guilt.

  And if each thought of ours became a deed,

  Who would be innocent? I did once defend

  The cause of Abelard, and at the decree

  Imposing silence on him I, too, ceased.

  What fault in me? Bernard in vain inspired

  The potentates of Europe to defend

  The sepulcher of God. Mankind, his temple,

  I sought to liberate, and upon the earth

  Desired the triumph of the love divine,

  And life, and liberty, and progress. This,

  This was my doctrine, and God only knows

  How reason struggles with the faith in me

  For the supremacy of my spirit. Oh,

  Forgive me, Lord. These in their war are like

  The rivers twain of heaven, till they return

  To their eternal origin, and the truth

  Is seen in thee, and God denies not God.

  I ought to pray. Thinking on thee, I pray.

  Yet how thy substance by three persons shared,

  Each equal with the other, one remains,

  I cannot comprehend, nor give in thee

  Bounds to the infinite and human names.

  Father of the world, that which thou here revealest

  Perchance is but a thought of thine; or this

  Movable veil that covers here below

  All thy creation is eternal illusion

  That hides God from us. Where to rest itself

  The mind hath not. It palpitates uncertain

  In infinite darkness, and denies more wisely

  Than it affirms. O God omnipotent!

  I know not what thou art, or, if I know,

  How can I utter thee? The tongue has not

  Words for thee, and it falters with my thought

  That wrongs thee by its effort. Soon I go

  Out of the last doubt unto the first truth.

  What did I say? The intellect is soothed

  To faith in Christ, and therein it reposes

  As in the bosom of a tender mother

  Her son. Arnaldo, that which thou art seeking

  With sterile torment, thy great teacher sought

  Long time in vain, and at the cross’s foot

  His weary reason cast itself at last.

  Follow his great example, and with tears

  Wash out thy sins.

We leave Arnaldo in his prison, and it is supposed that he is put to death during the combat that follows between the Germans and Romans immediately after the coronation of Frederick. As the forces stand opposed to each other, two beautiful choruses are introduced — one of Romans and one of Germans. And, just before the onset, Adelasia appears and confesses that she has betrayed Arnaldo, and that he is now in the power of the papacy. At the same time the clergy are heard chanting Frederick’s coronation hymn, and then the battle begins. The Romans are beaten by the number and discipline of their enemies, and their leaders are driven out. The Germans appear before Frederic and Adrian with two hundred prisoners, and ask mercy for them. Adrian delivers them to his prefect, and it is implied that they are put to death. Then turning to Frederick, Adrian says:

  Art thou content? for I have given to thee

  More than the crown. My words have consecrated

  Thy power. So let the Church and Empire be

  Now at last reconciled. The mystery

  That holds three persons in one substance, nor

  Confounds them, may it make us here on earth

  To reign forever, image of itself,

  In unity which is like to that of God.

V

So ends the tragedy, and so was accomplished the union which rested so heavily ever after upon the hearts and hopes, not only of Italians, but of all Christian men. So was confirmed that temporal power of the popes, whose destruction will be known in history as infinitely the greatest event of our greatly eventful time, and will free from the doubt and dread of many one of the most powerful agencies for good in the world; namely, the Catholic Church.

I have tried to give an idea of the magnificence and scope of this mighty tragedy of Niccolini’s, and I do not know that I can now add anything which will make this clearer. If we think of the grandeur of its plan, and how it employs for its effect the evil and the perverted good of the time in which the scene was laid, how it accords perfect sincerity to all the great actors, — to the Pope as well as to Arnaldo, to the Emperor as well as to the leaders of the people, — we must perceive that its conception is that of a very great artist. It seems to me that the execution is no less admirable. We cannot judge it by the narrow rule which the tragedies of the stage must obey; we must look at it with the generosity and the liberal imagination with which we can alone enjoy a great fiction. Then the patience, the subtlety, the strength, with which each character, individual and typical, is evolved; the picturesqueness with which every event is presented; the lyrical sweetness and beauty with which so many passages are enriched, will all be apparent to us, and we shall feel the esthetic sublimity of the work as well as its moral force and its political significance.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI

I

In the year 1798, at Recanati, a little mountain town of Tuscany, was born, noble and miserable, the poet Giacomo Leopardi, who began even in childhood to suffer the malice of that strange conspiracy of ills which consumed him. His constitution was very fragile, and it early felt the effect of the passionate ardor with which the sickly boy dedicated his life to literature. From the first he seems to have had little or no direction in his own studies, and hardly any instruction. He literally lived among his books, rarely leaving his own room except to pass into his father’s library; his research and erudition were marvelous, and at the age of sixteen he presented his father a Latin translation and comment on Plotinus, of which Sainte-Beuve said that “one who had studied Plotinus his whole life could find something useful in this work of a boy.” At that age Leopardi already knew all Greek and Latin literature; he knew French, Spanish, and English; he knew Hebrew, and disputed in that tongue with the rabbis of Ancona.

The poet’s father was Count Monaldo Leopardi, who had written little books of a religious and political character; the religion very bigoted, the politics very reactionary. His library was the largest anywhere in that region, but he seems not to have learned wisdom in it; and, though otherwise a blameless man, he used his son, who grew to manhood differing from him in all his opinions, with a rigor that was scarcely less than cruel. He was bitterly opposed to what was called progress, to religious and civil liberty; he was devoted to what was called order, which meant merely the existing order of things, the divinely appointed prince, the infallible priest. He had a mediaeval taste, and he made his palace at Recanati as much like a feudal castle as he could, with all sorts of baronial bric-�-brac. An armed vassal at his gate was out of the question, but at the door of his own chamber stood an effigy in rusty armor, bearing a tarnished halberd. He abhorred the fashions of our century, and wore those of an earlier epoch; his wife, who shared his prejudices and opinions, fantastically appareled herself to look like the portrait of some gentlewoman of as remote a date. Halls hung in damask, vast mirrors in carven frames, and stately furniture of antique form attested throughout the palace “the splendor of a race which, if its fortunes had somewhat declined, still knew how to maintain its ancient state.”

In this home passed the youth and early manhood of a poet who no sooner began to think for himself than he began to think things most discordant with his father’s principles and ideas. He believed in neither the religion nor the politics of his race; he cherished with the desire of literary achievement that vague faith in humanity, in freedom, in the future, against which the Count Monaldo had so sternly set his face; he chafed under the restraints of his father’s authority, and longed for some escape into the world. The Italians sometimes write of Leopardi’s unhappiness with passionate condemnation of his father; but neither was Count Monaldo’s part an enviable one, and it was certainly not at this period that he had all the wrong in his differences with his son. Nevertheless, it is pathetic to read how the heartsick, frail, ambitious boy, when he found some article in a newspaper that greatly pleased him, would write to the author and ask his friendship. When these journalists, who were possibly not always the wisest publicists of their time, so far responded to the young scholar’s advances as to give him their personal acquaintance as well as their friendship, the old count received them with a courteous tolerance, which had no kindness in it for their progressive ideas. He lived in dread of his son’s becoming involved in some of the many plots then hatching against order and religion, and he repressed with all his strength Leopardi’s revolutionary tendencies, which must always have been mere matters of sentiment, and not deserving of great rigor.

He seems not so much to have loved Italy as to have hated Recanati. It is a small village high up in the Apennines, between Loreto and Macerata, and is chiefly accessible in ox-carts. Small towns everywhere are dull, and perhaps are not more deadly so in Italy than they are elsewhere, but there they have a peculiarly obscure, narrow life indoors. Outdoors there is a little lounging about the caff�, a little stir on holidays among the lower classes and the neighboring peasants, a great deal of gossip at all times, and hardly anything more. The local nobleman, perhaps, cultivates literature as Leopardi’s father did; there is always some abbate mousing about in the local archives and writing pamphlets on disputed points of the local history; and there is the parish priest, to help form the polite society of the place. As if this social barrenness were not enough, Recanati was physically hurtful to Leopardi: the climate was very fickle; the harsh, damp air was cruel to his nerves. He says it seems to him a den where no good or beautiful thing ever comes; he bewails the common ignorance; in Recanati there is no love for letters, for the humanizing arts; nobody frequents his father’s great library, nobody buys books, nobody reads the newspapers. Yet this forlorn and detestable little town has one good thing. It has a pre�minently good Italian accent, better even, he thinks, than the Roman, — which would be a greater consolation to an Italian than we can well understand. Nevertheless it was not society, and it did not make his fellow-townsmen endurable to him. He recoiled from them more and more, and the solitude in which he lived among his books filled him with a black melancholy, which he describes as a poison, corroding the life of body and soul alike. To a friend who tries to reconcile him to Recanati, he writes: “It is very well to tell me that Plutarch and Alfieri loved Chaeronea and Asti; they loved them, but they left them; and so shall I love my native place when I am away from it. Now I say I hate it because I am in it. To recall the spot where one’s childhood days were passed is dear and sweet; it is a fine saying, ‘Here you were born, and here Providence wills you to stay.’ All very fine! Say to the sick man striving to be well that he is flying in the face of Providence; tell the poor man struggling to advance himself that he is defying heaven; bid the Turk beware of baptism, for God has made him a Turk!” So Leopardi wrote when he was in comparative health and able to continue his studies. But there were long periods when his ailments denied him his sole consolation of work. Then he rose late, and walked listlessly about without opening his lips or looking at a book the whole day. As soon as he might, he returned to his studies; when he must, he abandoned them again. At such a time he once wrote to a friend who understood and loved him: “I have not energy enough to conceive a single desire, not even for death; not because I fear death, but because I cannot see any difference between that and my present life. For the first time ennui not merely oppresses and wearies me, but it also agonizes and lacerates me, like a cruel pain. I am overwhelmed with a sense of the vanity of all things and the condition of men. My passions are dead, my very despair seems nonentity. As to my studies, which you urge me to continue, for the last eight months I have not known what study means; the nerves of my eyes and of my whole head are so weakened and disordered that I cannot read or listen to reading, nor can I fix my mind upon any subject.”

{Illustration: GIACOMO LEOPARDI}

At Recanati Leopardi suffered not merely solitude, but the contact of people whom he despised, and whose vulgarity was all the greater oppression when it showed itself in a sort of stupid compassionate tenderness for him. He had already suffered one of those disappointments which are the rule rather than the exception, and his first love had ended as first love always does when it ends fortunately — in disappointment. He scarcely knew the object of his passion, a young girl of humble lot, whom he used to hear singing at her loom in the house opposite his father’s palace. Count Monaldo promptly interfered, and not long afterward the young girl died. But the sensitive boy, and his biographers after him, made the most of this sorrow; and doubtless it helped to render life under his father’s roof yet heavier and harder to bear. Such as it was, it seems to have been the only love that Leopardi ever really felt, and the young girl’s memory passed into the melancholy of his life and poetry.

But he did not summon courage to abandon Recanati before his twenty-fourth year, and then he did not go with his father’s entire good-will. The count wished him to become a priest, but Leopardi shrank from the idea with horror, and there remained between him and his father not only the difference of their religious and political opinions, but an unkindness which must be remembered against the judgment, if not the heart, of the latter. He gave his son so meager an allowance that it scarcely kept him above want, and obliged him to labors and subjected him to cares which his frail health was not able bear.

From Recanati Leopardi first went to Rome; but he carried Recanati everywhere with him, and he was as solitary and as wretched in the capital of the world as in the little village of the Apennines. He despised the Romans, as they deserved, upon very short acquaintance, and he declared that his dullest fellow-villager had a greater share of good sense than the best of them. Their frivolity was incredible; the men moved him to rage and pity; the women, high and low, to loathing. In one of his letters to his brother Carlo, he says of Rome, as he found it: “I have spoken to you only about the women, because I am at a loss what to say to you about literature. Horrors upon horrors! The most sacred names profaned, the most absurd follies praised to the skies, the greatest spirits of the century trampled under foot as inferior to the smallest literary man in Rome. Philosophy despised; genius, imagination, feeling, names — I do not say things, but even names — unknown and alien to these professional poets and poetesses! Antiquarianism placed at the summit of human learning, and considered invariably and universally as the only true study of man!” This was Rome in 1822. “I do not exaggerate,” he writes, “because it is impossible, and I do not even say enough.” One of the things that moved him to the greatest disgust in the childish and insipid society of a city where he had fondly hoped to find a response to his high thoughts was the sensation caused throughout Rome by the dress and theatrical effectiveness with which a certain prelate said mass. All Rome talked of it, cardinals and noble ladies complimented the performer as if he were a ballet-dancer, and the flattered prelate used to rehearse his part, and expatiate upon his methods of study for it, to private audiences of admirers. In fact, society had then touched almost the lowest depth of degradation where society had always been corrupt and dissolute, and the reader of Massimo d’Azeglio’s memoirs may learn particulars (given with shame and regret, indeed, and yet with perfect Italian frankness) which it is not necessary to repeat here.

There were, however, many foreigners living at Rome in whose company Leopardi took great pleasure. They were chiefly Germans, and first among them was Niebuhr, who says of his first meeting with the poet: “Conceive of my astonishment when I saw standing before me in the poor little chamber a mere youth, pale and shy, frail in person, and obviously in ill health, who was by far the first, in fact the only, Greek philologist in Italy, the author of critical comments and observations which would have won honor for the first philologist in Germany, and yet only twenty-two years old! He had become thus profoundly learned without school, without instructor, without help, without encouragement, in his father’s house. I understand, too, that he is one of the first of the rising poets of Italy. What a nobly gifted people!”

Niebuhr offered to procure him a professorship of Greek philosophy in Berlin, but Leopardi would not consent to leave his own country; and then Niebuhr unsuccessfully used his influence to get him some employment from the papal government, — compliments and good wishes it gave him, but no employment and no pay.

From Rome Leopardi went to Milan, where he earned something — very little — as editor of a comment upon Petrarch. A little later he went to Bologna, where a generous and sympathetic nobleman made him tutor in his family; but Leopardi returned not long after to Recanati, where he probably found no greater content than he left there. Presently we find him at Pisa, and then at Florence, eking out the allowance from his father by such literary work as he could find to do. In the latter place it is somewhat dimly established that he again fell in love, though he despised the Florentine women almost as much as the Romans, for their extreme ignorance, folly, and pride. This love also was unhappy. There is no reason to believe that Leopardi, who inspired tender and ardent friendships in men, ever moved any woman to love. The Florentine ladies are darkly accused by one of his biographers of having laughed at the poor young pessimist, and it is very possible; but that need not make us think the worse of him, or of them either, for that matter. He is supposed to have figured the lady of his latest love under the name of Aspasia, in one of his poems, as he did his first love under that of Sylvia, in the poem so called. Doubtless the experience further embittered a life already sufficiently miserable. He left Florence, but after a brief sojourn at Rome he returned thither, where his friend Antonio Ranieri watched with a heavy heart the gradual decay of his forces, and persuaded him finally to seek the milder air of Naples. Ranieri’s father was, like Leopardi’s, of reactionary opinions, and the Neapolitan, dreading the effect of their discord, did not take his friend to his own house, but hired a villa at Capodimonte, where he lived four years in fraternal intimacy with Leopardi, and where the poet died in 1837.

Ranieri has in some sort made himself the champion of Leopardi’s fame. He has edited his poems, and has written a touching and beautiful sketch of his life. Their friendship, which was of the greatest tenderness, began when Leopardi sorely needed it; and Ranieri devoted himself to the hapless poet like a lover, as if to console him for the many years in which he had known neither reverence nor love. He indulged all the eccentricities of his guest, who for a sick man had certain strange habits, often not rising till evening, dining at midnight, and going to bed at dawn. Ranieri’s sister Paolina kept house for the friends, and shared all her brother’s compassion for Leopardi, whose family appears to have willingly left him to the care of these friends. How far the old unkindness between him and his father continued, it is hard to say. His last letter was written to his mother in May, 1837, some two weeks before his death; he thanks her for a present of ten dollars, — one may imagine from the gift and the gratitude that he was still held in a strict and parsimonious tutelage, — and begs her prayers and his father’s, for after he has seen them again, he shall not have long to live.

He did not see them again, but he continued to smile at the anxieties of his friends, who had too great reason to think that the end was much nearer than Leopardi himself supposed. On the night of the 14th of June, while they were waiting for the carriage which was to take them into the country, where they intended to pass the time together and sup at daybreak, Leopardi felt so great a difficulty of breathing — he called it asthma, but it was dropsy of the heart — that he begged them to send for a doctor. The doctor on seeing the sick man took Ranieri apart, and bade him fetch a priest without delay, and while they waited the coming of the friar, Leopardi spoke now and then with them, but sank rapidly. Finally, says Ranieri, “Leopardi opened his eyes, now larger even than their wont, and looked at me more fixedly than before. ‘I can’t see you,’ he said, with a kind of sigh. And he ceased to breathe, and his pulse and heart beat no more; and at the same moment the Friar Felice of the barefoot order of St. Augustine entered the chamber, while I, quite beside myself, called with a loud voice on him who had been my friend, my brother, my father, and who answered me nothing, and yet seemed to gaze upon me.... His death was inconceivable to me; the others were dismayed and mute; there arose between the good friar and myself the most cruel and painful dispute, ... I madly contending that my friend was still alive, and beseeching him with tears to accompany with the offices of religion the passing of that great soul. But he, touching again and again the pulse and the heart, continually answered that the spirit had taken flight. At last, a spontaneous and solemn silence fell upon all in the room; the friar knelt beside the dead, and we all followed his example. Then after long and profound meditation he prayed, and we prayed with him.”

In another place Ranieri says: “The malady of Leopardi was indefinable, for having its spring in the most secret sources of life, it was like life itself, inexplicable. The bones softened and dissolved away, refusing their frail support to the flesh that covered them. The flesh itself grew thinner and more lifeless every day, for the organs of nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty. With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life, moving with such great effort, seemed from moment to moment about to pause forever. Perhaps the great cerebral sponge, beginning and end of that mysterious circle, had prepotently sucked up all the vital forces, and itself consumed in a brief time all that was meant to suffice the whole system for a long period. However it may be, the life of Leopardi was not a course, as in most men, but truly a precipitation toward death.”

Some years before he died, Leopardi had a presentiment of his death, and his end was perhaps hastened by the nervous shock of the terror produced by the cholera, which was then raging in Naples. At that time the body of a Neapolitan minister of state who had died of cholera was cast into the common burial-pit at Naples — such was the fear of contagion, and so rapidly were the dead hurried to the grave. A heavy bribe secured the remains of Leopardi from this fate, and his dust now reposes in a little church on the road to Pozzuoli.

II

“In the years of boyhood,” says the Neapolitan critic, Francesco de Sanctis, “Leopardi saw his youth vanish forever; he lived obscure, and achieved posthumous envy and renown; he was rich and noble, and he suffered from want and despite; no woman’s love ever smiled upon him, the solitary lover of his own mind, to which he gave the names of Sylvia, Aspasia, and Nerina. Therefore, with a precocious and bitter penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections which have returned to the heart for want of nourishment in the world. Mournful colloquies and yet pleasing, where man is the suicidal vulture perpetually preying upon himself, and caressing the wound that drags him to the grave.... The first cause of his sorrow is Recanati: the intellect, capable of the universe, feels itself oppressed in an obscure village, cruel to the body and deadly to the spirit.... He leaves Recanati; he arrives in Rome; we believe him content at last, and he too believes it. Brief illusion! Rome, Bologna, Milan, Florence, Naples, are all different places, where he forever meets the same man, himself. Read the first letter that he writes from Rome: ‘In the great things I see I do not feel the least pleasure, for I know that they are marvelous, but I do not feel it, and I assure you that their multitude and grandeur wearied me after the first day.’... To Leopardi it is rarely given to interest himself in any spectacle of nature, and he never does it without a sudden and agonized return to himself.... Malign and heartless men have pretended that Leopardi was a misanthrope, a fierce hater and enemy of the human race!... Love, inexhaustible and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of that angelic heart, and never left it during life. ‘Love me, for God’s sake,’ he beseeches his brother Carlo; ‘I have need of love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life.’ And in truth it may be said that pain and love form the twofold poetry of his life.”

Leopardi lived in Italy during the long contest between the Classic and Romantic schools, and it may be said that in him many of the leading ideas of both parties were reconciled. His literary form was as severe and sculpturesque as that of Alfieri himself, whilst the most subjective and introspective of the Romantic poets did not so much color the world with his own mental and spiritual hue as Leopardi. It is not plain whether he ever declared himself for one theory or the other. He was a contributor to the literary journal which the partisans of the Romantic School founded at Florence; but he was a man so weighed upon by his own sense of the futility and vanity of all things that he could have had little spirit for mere literary contentions. His admirers try hard to make out that he was positively and actively patriotic; and it is certain that in his earlier youth he disagreed with his father’s conservative opinions, and despised the existing state of things; but later in life he satirized the aspirations and purposes of progress, though without sympathizing with those of reaction.

The poem which his chief claim to classification with the poets militant of his time rests upon is that addressed “To Italy”. Those who have read even only a little of Leopardi have read it; and I must ask their patience with a version which drops the irregular rhyme of the piece for the sake of keeping its peculiar rhythm and measure.

    My native land, I see the walls and arches,

  The columns and the statues, and the lonely

  Towers of our ancestors,

  But not their glory, not

  The laurel and the steel that of old time

  Our great forefathers bore. Disarm�d now,

  Naked thou showest thy forehead and thy breast!

  O me, how many wounds,

  What bruises and what blood! How do I see thee,

  Thou loveliest Lady! Unto Heaven I cry,

  And to the world: “Say, say,

  Who brought her unto this?” To this and worse,

  For both her arms are loaded down with chains,

  So that, unveiled and with disheveled hair,

  She crouches all forgotten and forlorn,

  Hiding her beautiful face

  Between her knees, and weeps.

  Weep, weep, for well thou may’st, my Italy!

  Born, as thou wert, to conquest,

  Alike in evil and in prosperous sort!

    If thy sweet eyes were each a living stream,

  Thou could’st not weep enough

  For all thy sorrow and for all thy shame.

  For thou wast queen, and now thou art a slave.

  Who speaks of thee or writes,

  That thinking on thy glory in the past

  But says, “She was great once, but is no more.”

  Wherefore, oh, wherefore? Where is the ancient strength,

  The valor and the arms, and constancy?

  Who rent the sword from thee?

  Who hath betrayed thee? What art, or what toil,

  Or what o’erwhelming force,

  Hath stripped thy robe and golden wreath from thee?

  How did’st thou fall, and when,

  From such a height unto a depth so low?

  Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee,

  None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone

  Will fight and fall for thee.

  Grant me, O Heaven, my blood

  Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts!

    Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms,

  Of wheels, of voices, and of drums;

  In foreign fields afar

  Thy children fight and fall.

  Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see,

  A tumult as of infantry and horse,

  And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords

  Like lightning among clouds.

  Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn

  Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close?

  For what, in yonder fields,

  Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods,

  For other lands Italian swords are drawn!

  Oh, misery for him who dies in war,

  Not for his native shores and his beloved,

  His wife and children dear,

  But by the foes of others

  For others’ cause, and cannot dying say,

  “Dear land of mine,

  The life thou gavest me I give thee back.”

This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man’s blood; his real country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note in this address to Death.

  And thou, that ever from my life’s beginning

  I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only

  Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity:

  If ever celebrated

  Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted

  To recompense the insult

  That vulgar terror offers

  Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen

  To prayers so rarely uttered:

  Shut to the light forever,

  Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish!

I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long, hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the re�stablishment of all the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration, for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet’s song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe with the invalid’s loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death, might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no promise of better things in their earthly lot.

Leopardi’s malady was such that when he did not positively suffer he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation, are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The passing color of other men’s minds is the prevailing cast of his, and he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed his despair in such utterances as this:

  TO HIMSELF.

  Now thou shalt rest forever,

  O weary heart! The last deceit is ended,

  For I believed myself immortal. Cherished

  Hopes, and beloved delusions,

  And longings to be deluded, — all are perished!

  Rest thee forever! Oh, greatly,

  Heart, hast thou palpitated. There is nothing

  Worthy to move thee more, nor is earth worthy

  Thy sighs. For life is only

  Bitterness and vexation; earth is only

  A heap of dust. So rest thee!

  Despair for the last time. To our race Fortune

  Never gave any gift but death. Disdain, then,

  Thyself and Nature and the Power

  Occultly reigning to the common ruin:

  Scorn, heart, the infinite emptiness of all things!

Nature was so cruel a stepmother to this man that he could see nothing but harm even in her apparent beneficence, and his verse repeats again and again his dark mistrust of the very loveliness which so keenly delights his sense. One of his early poems, called “The Quiet after the Storm”, strikes the key in which nearly all his songs are pitched. The observation of nature is very sweet and honest, and I cannot see that the philosophy in its perversion of the relations of physical and spiritual facts is less mature than that of his later work: it is a philosophy of which the first conception cannot well differ from the final expression.

  ... See yon blue sky that breaks

  The clouds above the mountain in the west!

  The fields disclose themselves,

  And in the valley bright the river runs.

  All hearts are glad; on every side

  Arise the happy sounds

  Of toil begun anew.

  The workman, singing, to the threshold comes,

  With work in hand, to judge the sky,

  Still humid, and the damsel next,

  On his report, comes forth to brim her pail

  With the fresh-fallen rain.

  The noisy fruiterers

  From lane to lane resume

  Their customary cry.

  The sun looks out again, and smiles upon

  The houses and the hills. Windows and doors

  Are opened wide; and on the far-off road

  You hear the tinkling bells and rattling wheels

  Of travelers that set out upon their journey.

  Every heart is glad;

  So grateful and so sweet

  When is our life as now?

  O Pleasure, child of Pain,

  Vain joy which is the fruit

  Of bygone suffering overshadow�d

  And wrung with cruel fears

  Of death, whom life abhors;

  Wherein, in long suspense,

  Silent and cold and pale,

  Man sat, and shook and shuddered to behold

  Lightnings and clouds and winds,

  Furious in his offense!

  Beneficent Nature, these,

  These are thy bounteous gifts:

  These, these are the delights

  Thou offerest unto mortals! To escape

  From pain is bliss to us;

  Anguish thou scatterest broadcast, and our woes

  Spring up spontaneous, and that little joy

  Born sometimes, for a miracle and show,

  Of terror is our mightiest gain. O man,

  Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate

  If now and then relief

  Thou hast from pain, and blest

  When death shall come to heal thee of all pain!

“The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime, and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord, while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again.” This is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi’s death, when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi’s style, “without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of contrasts, without poetic leaven,” hard to read. “Despoil those verses of their masterly polish,” he says, “reduce those thoughts to prose, and you will see how little they are akin to poetry.”

I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi’s work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage which this critic desires for it. Yet, after doing my worst, I am not wholly able to agree with him. It seems to me that there is the indestructible charm in it which, wherever we find it, we must call poetry. It is true that “its strange sweetness wins you again and again,” and that this “lonely pipe of death” thrills and solemnly delights as no other stop has done. Let us hear it again, as the poet sounds it, figuring himself a Syrian shepherd, guarding his flock by night, and weaving his song under the Eastern moon:

  O flock that liest at rest, O bless�d thou

  That knowest not thy fate, however hard,

  How utterly I envy thee!

  Not merely that thou goest almost free

  Of all this weary pain, —

  That every misery and every toil

  And every fear thou straightway dost forget, —

  But most because thou knowest not ennui

  When on the grass thou liest in the shade.

  I see thee tranquil and content,

  And great part of thy years

  Untroubled by ennui thou passest thus.

  I likewise in the shadow, on the grass.

  Lie, and a dull disgust beclouds

  My soul, and I am goaded with a spur,

  So that, reposing, I am farthest still

  From finding peace or place.

  And yet I want for naught,

  And have not had till now a cause for tears.

  What is thy bliss, how much,

  I cannot tell; but thou art fortunate.

  Or, it may be, my thought

  Errs, running thus to others’ destiny;

  May be, to everything,

  Wherever born, in cradle or in fold,

  That day is terrible when it was born.

It is the same note, the same voice; the theme does not change, but perhaps it is deepened in this ode:

  ON THE LIKENESS OP A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN CARVEN

                UPON HER TOMB.

  Such wast thou: now under earth

  A skeleton and dust. O’er dust and bones

  Immovably and vainly set, and mute,

  Looking upon the flight of centuries,

  Sole keeper of memory

  And of regret is this fair counterfeit

  Of loveliness now vanished. That sweet look,

  Which made men tremble when it fell on them,

  As now it falls on me; that lip, which once,

  Like some full vase of sweets,

  Ran over with delight; that fair neck, clasped

  By longing, and that soft and amorous hand,

  Which often did impart

  An icy thrill unto the hand it touched;

  That breast, which visibly

  Blanched with its beauty him who looked on it —

  All these things were, and now

  Dust art thou, filth, a fell

  And hideous sight hidden beneath a stone.

  Thus fate hath wrought its will

  Upon the semblance that to us did seem

  Heaven’s vividest image! Eternal mystery

  Of mortal being! To-day the ineffable

  Fountain of thoughts and feelings vast and high,

  Beauty reigns sovereign, and seems

  Like splendor thrown afar

  From some immortal essence on these sands,

  To give our mortal state

  A sign and hope secure of destinies

  Higher than human, and of fortunate realms,

  And golden worlds unknown.

  To-morrow, at a touch,

  Loathsome to see, abominable, abject,

  Becomes the thing that was

  All but angelical before;

  And from men’s memories

  All that its loveliness

  Inspired forever faults and fades away.

    Ineffable desires

  And visions high and pure

  Rise in the happy soul,

  Lulled by the sound of cunning harmonies

  Whereon the spirit floats,

  As at his pleasure floats

  Some fearless swimmer over the deep sea;

  But if a discord strike

  The wounded sense, to naught

  All that fair paradise in an instant falls.

    Mortality! if thou

  Be wholly frail and vile,

  Be only dust and shadow, how canst thou

  So deeply feel? And if thou be

  In part divine, how can thy will and thought

  By things so poor and base

  So easily be awaken�d and quenched?

Let us touch for the last time this pensive chord, and listen to its response of hopeless love. This poem, in which he turns to address the spirit of the poor child whom he loved boyishly at Recanati, is pathetic with the fact that possibly she alone ever reciprocated the tenderness with which his heart was filled.

  TO SYLVIA.

    Sylvia, dost thou remember

  In this that season of thy mortal being

  When from thine eyes shone beauty,

  In thy shy glances fugitive and smiling,

  And joyously and pensively the borders

  Of childhood thou did’st traverse?

    All day the quiet chambers

  And the ways near resounded

  To thy perpetual singing,

  When thou, intent upon some girlish labor,

  Sat’st utterly contented,

  With the fair future brightening in thy vision.

  It was the fragrant month of May, and ever

  Thus thou thy days beguiledst.

    I, leaving my fair studies,

  Leaving my manuscripts and toil-stained volumes,

  Wherein I spent the better

  Part of myself and of my young existence,

  Leaned sometimes idly from my father’s windows,

  And listened to the music of thy singing,

  And to thy hand, that fleetly

  Ran o’er the threads of webs that thou wast weaving.

  I looked to the calm heavens,

  Unto the golden lanes and orchards,

  And unto the far sea and to the mountains;

  No mortal tongue may utter

  What in my heart I felt then.

    O Sylvia mine, what visions,

  What hopes, what hearts, we had in that far season!

  How fair and good before us

  Seemed human life and fortune!

  When I remember hope so great, beloved,

  An utter desolation

  And bitterness o’erwhelm me,

  And I return to mourn my evil fortune.

  O Nature, faithless Nature,

  Wherefore dost thou not give us

  That which thou promisest? Wherefore deceivest,

  With so great guile, thy children?

    Thou, ere the freshness of thy spring was withered.

  Stricken by thy fell malady, and vanquished,

  Did’st perish, O my darling! and the blossom

  Of thy years sawest;

  Thy heart was never melted

  At the sweet praise, now of thy raven tresses,

  Now of thy glances amorous and bashful;

  Never with thee the holiday-free maidens

  Reasoned of love and loving.

    Ah! briefly perished, likewise,

  My own sweet hope; and destiny denied me

  Youth, even in my childhood!

  Alas, alas, belov�d,

  Companion of my childhood!

  Alas, my mourn�d hope! how art thou vanished

  Out of my place forever!

  This is that world? the pleasures,

  The love, the labors, the events, we talked of,

  These, when we prattled long ago together?

  Is this the fortune of our race, O Heaven?

  At the truth’s joyless dawning,

  Thou fellest, sad one, with thy pale hand pointing

  Unto cold death, and an unknown and naked

  Sepulcher in the distance.

III

These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon his prose writings — his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm — and his unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame, and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have of hovering about the idea of death — of playing with the great catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi’s poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life, though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain with an appeal or apostrophe to death — not the real death, that comes with a sharp, quick agony, or “after long lying in bed”, after many days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we abandon — if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him. There is little doubt that Leopardi was sincere, and there is little reason why he should not have been so, for life could give him nothing but pain.

De Sanctis, whom I have quoted already, and who speaks, I believe, with rather more authority than any other modern Italian critic, and certainly with great clearness and acuteness, does not commit himself to specific praise of Leopardi’s work. But he seems to regard him as an important expression, if not force or influence, and he has some words about him, at the close of his “History of Italian Literature”, which have interested me, not only for the estimate of Leopardi which they embody, but for the singularly distinct statement which they make of the modern literary attitude. I should not, myself, have felt that Leopardi represented this, but I am willing that the reader should feel it, if he can. De Sanctis has been speaking of the Romantic period in Italy, when he says:

“Giacomo Leopardi marks the close of this period. Metaphysics at war with theology had ended in this attempt at reconciliation. The multiplicity of systems had discredited science itself. Metaphysics was regarded as a revival of theology. The Idea seemed a substitute for providence. Those philosophies of history, of religion, of humanity, had the air of poetical inventions.... That reconciliation between the old and new, tolerated as a temporary political necessity, seemed at bottom a profanation of science, a moral weakness.... Faith in revelation had been wanting; faith in philosophy itself was now wanting. Mystery re-appeared. The philosopher knew as much as the peasant. Of this mystery, Giacomo Leopardi was the echo in the solitude of his thought and his pain. His skepticism announced the dissolution of this theologico-metaphysical world, and inaugurated the reign of the arid True, of the Real. His songs are the most profound and occult voices of that laborious transition called the nineteenth century. That which has importance is not the brilliant exterior of that century of progress, and it is not without irony that he speaks of the progressive destinies of mankind. That which has importance is the exploration of one’s own breast, the inner world, virtue, liberty, love, all the ideals of religion, of science, and of poetry — shadows and illusions in the presence of reason, yet which warm the heart, and will not die. Mystery destroys the intellectual world; it leaves the moral world intact. This tenacious life of the inner world, despite the fall of all theological and metaphysical worlds, is the originality of Leopardi, and gives his skepticism a religious stamp. ... Every one feels in it a new creation. The instrument of this renovation is criticism.... The sense of the real continues to develop itself; the positive sciences come to the top, and cast out all the ideal and systematic constructions. New dogmas lose credit. Criticism remains intact. The patient labor of analysis begins again.... Socialism re-appears in the political order, positivism in the intellectual order. The word is no longer liberty, but justice. ... Literature also undergoes transformation. It rejects classes, distinctions, privileges. The ugly stands beside the beautiful; or rather, there is no longer ugly or beautiful, neither ideal nor real, neither infinite nor finite.... There is but one thing only, the Living.”

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI

I

Giuseppe Giusti, who is the greatest Italian satirist of this century, and is in some respects the greatest Italian poet, was born in 1809 at Mossummano in Tuscany, of parentage noble and otherwise distinguished; one of his paternal ancestors had assisted the liberal Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo to compile his famous code, and his mother’s father had been a republican in 1799. There was also an hereditary taste for literature in the family; and Giusti says, in one of his charming letters, that almost as soon as he had learned to speak, his father taught him the ballad of Count Ugolino, and he adds, “I have always had a passion for song, a passion for verses, and more than a passion for Dante.” His education passed later into the hands of a priest, who had spent much time as a teacher in Vienna, and was impetuous, choleric, and thoroughly German in principle. “I was given him to be taught,” says Giusti, “but he undertook to tame me”; and he remembered reading with him a Plutarch for youth, and the “Lives of the Saints”, but chiefly was, as he says, so “caned, contraried, and martyred” by him, that, when the priest wept at their final parting, the boy could by no means account for the burst of tenderness. Giusti was then going to Florence to be placed in a school where he had the immeasurable good fortune to fall into the hands of one whose gentleness and wisdom he remembered through life. “Drea Francioni,” he says, “had not time to finish his work, but he was the first and the only one to put into my heart the need and love of study. Oh, better far than stuffing the head with Latin, with histories and with fables! Endear study, even if you teach nothing; this is the great task!” And he afterward dedicated his book on Tuscan proverbs, which he thought one of his best performances, to this beloved teacher.

He had learned to love study, yet from this school, and from others to which he was afterward sent, he came away with little Latin and no Greek; but, what is more important, he began life about this time as a poet — by stealing a sonnet. His theft was suspected, but could not be proved. “And so,” he says of his teacher and himself, “we remained, he in his doubt and I in my lie. Who would have thought from this ugly beginning that I should really have gone on to make sonnets of my own?... The Muses once known, the vice grew upon me, and from my twelfth to my fifteenth year I rasped, and rasped, and rasped, until finally I came out with a sonnet to Italy, represented in the usual fashion, by the usual matron weeping as usual over her highly estimable misfortunes. In school, under certain priests who were more Chinese than Italian, and without knowing whether Italy were round or square, long or short, how that sonnet to Italy should get into my head I don’t know. I only know that it was found beautiful, and I was advised to hide it,” — that being the proper thing to do with patriotic poetry in those days.

After leaving school, Giusti passed three idle years with his family, and then went to study the humanities at Pisa, where he found the caf� better adapted to their pursuit than the University, since he could there unite with it the pursuit of the exact science of billiards. He represents himself in his letters and verses to have led just the life at Pisa which was most agreeable to former governments of Italy, — a life of sensual gayety, abounding in the small excitements which turn the thought from the real interests of the time, and weaken at once the moral and intellectual fiber. But how far a man can be credited to his own disgrace is one of the unsettled questions: the repentant and the unrepentant are so apt to over-accuse themselves. It is very wisely conjectured by some of Giusti’s biographers that he did not waste himself so much as he says in the dissipations of student life at Pisa. At any rate, it is certain that he began there to make those sarcastic poems upon political events which are so much less agreeable to a paternal despotism than almost any sort of love-songs. He is said to have begun by writing in the manner of B�ranger, and several critics have labored to prove the similarity of their genius, with scarcely more effect, it seems to us, than those who would make him out the Heinrich Heine of Italy, as they call him. He was a political satirist, whose success was due to his genius, but who can never be thoroughly appreciated by a foreigner, or even an Italian not intimately acquainted with the affairs of his times; and his reputation must inevitably diminish with the waning interest of men in the obsolete politics of those vanished kingdoms and duchies. How mean and little were all their concerns is scarcely credible; but Giusti tells an adventure of his, at the period, which throws light upon some of the springs of action in Tuscany. He had been arrested for a supposed share in applause supposed revolutionary at the theater; he boldly denied that he had been at the play. “If you were not at the theater, how came your name on the list of the accused?” demanded the logical commissary. “Perhaps,” answered Giusti, “the spies have me so much in mind that they see me where I am not.... Here,” he continues, “the commissary fell into a rage, but I remained firm, and cited the Count Mastiani in proof, with whom the man often dined,” — Mastiani being governor in Pisa and the head of society. “At the name of Mastiani there seemed to pass before the commissary a long array of stewed and roast, eaten and to be eaten, so that he instantly turned and said to me, ‘Go, and at any rate take this summons for a paternal admonition.’” Ever since the French Revolution of 1830, and the sympathetic movements in Italy, Giusti had written political satires which passed from hand to hand in manuscript copies, the possession of which was rendered all the more eager and relishing by the pleasure of concealing them from spies; so that for a defective copy a person by no means rich would give as much as ten scudi. When a Swiss printed edition appeared in 1844, half the delight in them was gone; the violation of the law being naturally so dear to the human heart that, when combined with patriotism, it is almost a rapture.

But, in the midst of his political satirizing, Giusti felt the sting of one who is himself a greater satirist than any, when he will, though he is commonly known for a sentimentalist. The poet fell in love very seriously and, it proved, very unhappily, as he has recorded in three or four poems of great sweetness and grace, but no very characteristic merit. This passion is improbably believed to have had a disastrous effect upon Giusti’s health, and ultimately to have shortened his life; but then the Italians always like to have their poets agonizzanti, at least. Like a true humorist, Giusti has himself taken both sides of the question; professing himself properly heart-broken in the poems referred to, and in a letter written late in life, after he had encountered his faded love at his own home in Pescia, making a jest of any reconciliation or renewal of the old passion between them.

“Apropos of the heart,” says Giusti in this letter, “you ask me about a certain person who once had mine, whole and sound, roots and all. I saw her this morning in passing, out of the corner of my eye, and I know that she is well and enjoying herself. As to our coming together again, the case, if it were once remote, is now impossible; for you can well imagine that, all things considered, I could never be such a donkey as to tempt her to a comparison of me with myself. I am certain that, after having tolerated me for a day or two for simple appearance’ sake, she would find some good excuse for planting me a yard outside the door. In many, obstinacy increases with the ails and wrinkles; but in me, thank Heaven, there comes a meekness, a resignation, not to be expressed. Perhaps it has not happened otherwise with her. In that case we could accommodate ourselves, and talk as long as the evening lasted of magnesia, of quinine, and of nervines; lament, not the rising and sinking of the heart, but of the barometer; talk, not of the theater and all the rest, but whether it is better to crawl out into the sun like lizards, or stay at home behind battened windows. ‘Good-evening, my dear, how have you been to-day?’ ‘Eh! you know, my love, the usual rheumatism; but for the rest I don’t complain.’ ‘Did you sleep well last night?’ ‘Not so bad; and you?’ ‘O, little or none at all; and I got up feeling as if all my bones were broken.’ ‘My idol, take a little laudanum. Think that when you are not well I suffer with you. And your appetite, how is it?’ ‘O, don’t speak of it! I can’t get anything down.’ ‘My soul, if you don’t eat you’ll not be able to keep up.’ ‘But, my heart, what would you do if the mouthfuls stuck in your throat?’ ‘Take a little quassia; ... but, dost thou remember, once — ?’ ‘Yes, I remember; but once was once,’ ... and so forth, and so forth. Then some evening, if a priest came in, we could take a hand at whist with a dummy, and so live on to the age of crutches in a passion whose phases are confided to the apothecary rather than to the confessor.”

{Illustration: GIUSEPPE GIUSTI.}

Giusti’s first political poems had been inspired by the revolutionary events of 1830 in France; and he continued part of that literary force which, quite as much as the policy of Cavour, has educated Italians for freedom and independence. When the French revolution of 1848 took place, and the responsive outbreaks followed all over Europe, Tuscany drove out her Grand Duke, as France drove out her king, and, still emulous of that wise exemplar, put the novelist Guerrazzi at the head of her affairs, as the next best thing to such a poet as Lamartine, which she had not. The affair ended in the most natural way; the Florentines under the supposed popular government became very tired of themselves, and called back their Grand Duke, who came again with Austrian bayonets to support him in the affections of his subjects, where he remained secure until the persuasive bayonets disappeared before Garibaldi ten years later.

Throughout these occurrences the voice of Giusti was heard whenever that of good sense and a temperate zeal for liberty could be made audible. He was an aristocrat by birth and at heart, and he looked upon the democratic shows of the time with distrust, if not dislike, though he never lost faith in the capacity of the Italians for an independent national government. His broken health would not let him join the Tuscan volunteers who marched to encounter the Austrians in Lombardy; and though he was once elected member of the representative body from Pescia, he did not shine in it, and refused to be chosen a second time. His letters of this period afford the liveliest and truest record of feeling in Tuscany during that memorable time of alternating hopes and fears, generous impulses, and mean derelictions, and they strike me as among the best letters in any language.

Giusti supported the Grand Duke’s return philosophically, with a sarcastic serenity of spirit, and something also of the indifference of mortal sickness. His health was rapidly breaking, and in March, 1850, he died very suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs.

II

In noticing Giusti’s poetry I have a difficulty already hinted, for if I presented some of the pieces which gave him his greatest fame among his contemporaries, I should be doing, as far as my present purpose is concerned, a very unprofitable thing. The greatest part of his poetry was inspired by the political events or passions of the time at which it was written, and, except some five or six pieces, it is all of a political cast. These events are now many of them grown unimportant and obscure, and the passions are, for the most part, quite extinct; so that it would be useless to give certain of his most popular pieces as historical, while others do not represent him at his best as a poet. Some degree of social satire is involved; but the poems are principally light, brilliant mockeries of transient aspects of politics, or outcries against forgotten wrongs, or appeals for long-since-accomplished or defeated purposes. We know how dreary this sort of poetry generally is in our own language, after the occasion is once past, and how nothing but the enforced privacy of a desolate island could induce us to read, however ardent our sympathies may have been, the lyrics about slavery or the war, except in very rare cases. The truth is, the Muse, for a lady who has seen so much of life and the ways of the world, is an excessively jealous personification, and is apt to punish with oblivion a mixed devotion at her shrine. The poet who desires to improve and exalt his time must make up his mind to a double martyrdom, — first, to be execrated by vast numbers of respectable people, and then to be forgotten by all. It is a great pity, but it cannot be helped. It is chiefly your

  Rogue of canzonets and serenades

who survives. Anacreon lives; but the poets who appealed to their Ionian fellow-citizens as men and brethren, and lectured them upon their servility and their habits of wine-bibbing and of basking away the dearest rights of humanity in the sun, who ever heard of them? I do not mean to say that Giusti ever lectured his generation; he was too good an artist for that; but at least one Italian critic forebodes that the figure he made in the patriotic imagination must diminish rapidly with the establishment of the very conditions he labored to bring about. The wit of much that he said must grow dim with the fading remembrance of what provoked it; the sting lie pointless and painless in the dust of those who writhed under it, — so much of the poet’s virtue perishing in their death. We can only judge of all this vaguely and for a great part from the outside, for we cannot pretend to taste the finest flavor of the poetry which, is sealed to a foreigner in the local phrases and racy Florentine words which Giusti used; but I think posterity in Italy will stand in much the same attitude toward him that we do now. Not much of the social life of his time is preserved in his poetry, and he will not be resorted to as that satirist of the period to whom historians are fond of alluding in support of conjectures relative to society in the past. Now and then he touches upon some prevailing intellectual or literary affectation, as in the poem describing the dandified, desperate young poet of fashion, who,

  Immersed in suppers and balls,

  A martyr in yellow gloves,

sings of Italy, of the people, of progress, with the rhetoricalities of the modern Arcadians; and he has a poem called “The Ball”, which must fairly, as it certainly does wittily, represent one of those anomalous entertainments which rich foreigners give in Italy, and to which all sorts of irregular aliens resort, something of the local aristocracy appearing also in a ghostly and bewildered way. Yet even in this poem there is a political lesson.

I suppose, in fine, that I shall most interest my readers in Giusti, if I translate here the pieces that have most interested me. Of all, I like best the poem which he calls “St. Ambrose”, and I think the reader will agree with me about it. It seems not only very perfect as a bit of art, with its subtly intended and apparently capricious mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military music of the Austrians tended to lighten the burden of a German garrison in an Italian city; but certainly whoever has heard that music must have felt, for one base and shameful moment, that the noise of so much of a free press as opposed his own opinions might be advantageously exchanged for it. The poem of “St. Ambrose”, written in 1846, when the Germans seemed so firmly fixed in Milan, is impersonally addressed to some Italian, holding office under the Austrian government, and, therefore, in the German interest.

  ST. AMBROSE.

  Your Excellency is not pleased with me

  Because of certain jests I made of late,

  And, for my putting rogues in pillory,

  Accuse me of being anti-German. Wait,

  And hear a thing that happened recently:

  When wandering here and there one day as fate

  Led me, by some odd accident I ran

  On the old church St. Ambrose, at Milan.

  My comrade of the moment was, by chance,

  The young son of one Sandro — one of those

  Troublesome heads — an author of romance —

  Promessi Sposi — your Excellency knows

  The book, perhaps? — has given it a glance?

  Ah, no? I see! God give your brain repose;

  With graver interests occupied, your head

  To all such stuff as literature is dead.

  I enter, and the church is full of troops:

  Of northern soldiers, of Croatians, say,

  And of Bohemians, standing there in groups

  As stiff as dry poles stuck in vineyards, — nay,

  As stiff as if impaled, and no one stoops

  Out of the plumb of soldierly array;

  All stand, with whiskers and mustache of tow,

  Before their God like spindles in a row.

  I started back: I cannot well deny

  That being rained down, as it were, and thrust

  Into that herd of human cattle, I

  Could not suppress a feeling of disgust

  Unknown, I fancy, to your Excellency,

  By reason of your office. Pardon! I must

  Say the church stank of heated grease, and that

  The very altar-candles seemed of fat.

  But when the priest had risen to devote

  The mystic wafer, from the band that stood

  About the altar came a sudden note

  Of sweetness over my disdainful mood;

  A voice that, speaking from the brazen throat

  Of warlike trumpets, came like the subdued

  Moan of a people bound in sore distress,

  And thinking on lost hopes and happiness.

  ‘T was Verdi’s tender chorus rose aloof, —

  That song the Lombards there, dying of thirst,

  Send up to God, “Lord, from the native roof.”

  O’er countless thrilling hearts the song has burst,

  And here I, whom its magic put to proof,

  Beginning to be no longer I, immersed

  Myself amidst those tallowy fellow-men

  As if they had been of my land and kin.

  What would your Excellency? The piece was fine,

  And ours, and played, too, as it should be played;

  It drives old grudges out when such divine

  Music as that mounts up into your head!

  But when the piece was done, back to my line

  I crept again, and there I should have staid,

  But that just then, to give me another turn,

  From those mole-mouths a hymn began to yearn:

  A German anthem, that to heaven went

  On unseen wings, up from the holy fane;

  It was a prayer, and seemed like a lament,

  Of such a pensive, grave, pathetic strain

  That in my soul it never shall be spent;

  And how such heavenly harmony in the brain

  Of those thick-skulled barbarians should dwell

  I must confess it passes me to tell.

  In that sad hymn, I felt the bitter sweet

  Of the songs heard in childhood, which the soul

  Learns from beloved voices, to repeat

  To its own anguish in the days of dole;

  A thought of the dear mother, a regret,

  A longing for repose and love, — the whole

  Anguish of distant exile seemed to run

  Over my heart and leave it all undone:

  When the strain ceased, it left me pondering

  Tenderer thoughts and stronger and more clear;

  These men, I mused, the self-same despot king,

  Who rules in Slavic and Italian fear,

  Tears from their homes and arms that round them cling.

  And drives them slaves thence, to keep us slaves here;

  From their familiar fields afar they pass

  Like herds to winter in some strange morass.

  To a hard life, to a hard discipline,

  Derided, solitary, dumb, they go;

  Blind instruments of many-eyed Rapine

  And purposes they share not, and scarce know;

  And this fell hate that makes a gulf between

  The Lombard and the German, aids the foe

  Who tramples both divided, and whose bane

  Is in the love and brotherhood of men.

  Poor souls! far off from all that they hold dear,

  And in a land that hates them! Who shall say

  That at the bottom of their hearts they bear

  Love for our tyrant? I should like to lay

  They’ve our hate for him in their pockets! Here,

  But that I turned in haste and broke away,

  I should have kissed a corporal, stiff and tall,

  And like a scarecrow stuck against the wall.

Note : Alessandro Manzoni.

I could not well praise this poem enough, without praising it too much. It depicts a whole order of things, and it brings vividly before us the scene described; while its deep feeling is so lightly and effortlessly expressed, that one does not know which to like best, the exquisite manner or the excellent sense. To prove that Giusti was really a fine poet, I need give nothing more, for this alone would imply poetic power; not perhaps of the high epic sort, but of the kind that gives far more comfort to the heart of mankind, amusing and consoling it. “Giusti composed satires, but no poems,” says a French critic; but I think most will not, after reading this piece, agree with him. There are satires and satires, and some are fierce enough and brutal enough; but when a satire can breathe so much tenderness, such generous humanity, such pity for the means, at the same time with such hatred of the source of wrong, and all with an air of such smiling pathos, I say, if it is not poetry, it is something better, and by all means let us have it instead of poetry. It is humor, in its best sense; and, after religion, there is nothing in the world can make men so conscious, thoughtful, and modest.

A certain pensiveness very perceptible in “St. Ambrose” is the prevailing sentiment of another poem of Giusti’s, which I like very much, because it is more intelligible than his political satires, and because it places the reader in immediate sympathy with a man who had not only the subtlety to depict the faults of the time, but the sad wisdom to know that he was no better himself merely for seeing them. The poem was written in 1844, and addressed to Gino Capponi, the life-long friend in whose house Giusti died, and the descendant of the great Gino Capponi who threatened the threatening Frenchmen when Charles VIII occupied Florence: “If you sound your trumpets,” as a call to arms against the Florentines, “we will ring our bells,” he said.

Giusti speaks of the part which he bears as a spectator and critic of passing events, and then apostrophizes himself:

  Who art thou that a scourge so keen dost bear

  And pitilessly dost the truth proclaim,

  And that so loath of praise for good and fair,

  So eager art with bitter songs of blame?

  Hast thou achieved, in thine ideal’s pursuit,

  The secret and the ministry of art?

  Did’st thou seek first to kill and to uproot

  All pride and folly out of thine own heart

  Ere turning to teach other men their part?

  O wretched scorn! from which alone I sing,

  Thou weariest and saddenest my soul!

  O butterfly that joyest on thy wing,

  Pausing from bloom to bloom, without a goal —

  And thou, that singing of love for evermore,

  Fond nightingale! from wood to wood dost go,

  My life is as a never-ending war

  Of doubts, when likened to the peace ye know,

  And wears what seems a smile and is

  a throe!

There is another famous poem of Giusti’s in quite a different mood. It is called “Instructions to an Emissary”, sent down into Italy to excite a revolution, and give Austria a pretext for interference, and the supposed speaker is an Austrian minister. It is done with excellent sarcasm, and it is useful as light upon a state of things which, whether it existed wholly in fact or partly in the suspicion of the Italians, is equally interesting and curious. The poem was written in 1847, when the Italians were everywhere aspiring to a national independence and self-government, and their rulers were conceding privileges while secretly leaguing with Austria to continue the old order of an Italy divided among many small tyrants. The reader will readily believe that my English is not as good as the Italian.

  INSTRUCTIONS TO AN EMISSARY.

  You will go into Italy; you have here

    Your passport and your letters of exchange;

  You travel as a count, it would appear,

    Going for pleasure and a little change;

  Once there, you play the rodomont, the queer

    Crack-brain good fellow, idle gamester, strange

  Spendthrift and madcap. Give yourself full swing;

  People are taken with that kind of thing.

  When you behold — and it will happen so —

    The birds flock down about the net, be wary;

  Talk from a warm and open heart, and show

    Yourself with everybody bold and merry.

  The North’s a dungeon, say, a waste of snow,

    The very house and home of January,

  Compared with that fair garden of the earth,

  Beautiful, free, and full of life and mirth.

  And throwing in your discourse this word free,

    Just to fill up, and as by accident,

  Look round among your listeners, and see

    If it has had at all the effect you meant;

  Beat a retreat if it fails, carelessly

    Talking of this and that; but in the event

  Some one is taken with it, never fear,

  Push boldly forward, for the road is clear.

  Be bold and shrewd; and do not be too quick,

    As some are, and plunge headlong on your prey

  When, if the snare shall happen not to stick,

    Your uproar frightens all the rest away;

  To take your hare by carriage is the trick;

    Make a wide circle, do not mind delay;

  Experiment and work in silence; scheme

  With that wise prudence that shall folly seem.

The minister bids the emissary, “Turn me into a jest; say I’m sleepy and begin to dote; invent what lies you will, I give you carte-bianche.”

  Of governments down yonder say this, too,

    At the caf�s and theaters; indeed

  For this, I’ve made a little sign for you

    Upon your passport that the wise will read

  For an express command to let you do

    Whatever you think best, and take no heed.

Then the emissary is instructed to make himself center of the party of extremes, and in different companies to pity the country, to laugh at moderate progress as a sham, and to say that the concessions of the local governments are merely ruses to pacify and delude the people, — as in great part they were, though Giusti and his party did not believe so. The instructions to the emissary conclude with the charge to

  Scatter republican ideas, and say

    That all the rich and all the well-to-do

  Use common people hardly better, nay,

    Worse, than their dogs; and add some hard words, too:

  Declare that bread’s the question of the day,

    And that the communists alone are true;

  And that the foes of the agrarian cause

  Waste more than half of all by wicked laws.

Then, he tells him, when the storm begins to blow, and the pockets of the people feel its effect, and the mob grows hungry, to contrive that there shall be some sort of outbreak, with a bit of pillage, —

  So that the kings down there, pushed to the wall,

  For congresses and bayonets shall call.

  If you should have occasion to spend, spend,

    The money won’t be wasted; there must be

  Policemen in retirement, spies without end,

    Shameless and penniless; buy, you are free.

  If destiny should be so much your friend

    That you could shake a throne or two for me,

  Pour me out treasures. I shall be content;

  My gains will be at least seven cent, per cent.

  Or, in the event the inconstant goddess frown,

    Let me know instantly when you are caught;

  A thunderbolt shall burst upon your crown,

    And you become a martyr on the spot.

  As minister I turn all upside down,

    Our government disowns you as it ought.

  And so the cake is turned upon the fire,

  And we can use you next as we desire.

  In order not to awaken any fear

    In the post-office, ‘t is my plan that you

  Shall always correspond with liberals here;

    Don’t doubt but I shall hear of all you do.

  ...’s a Republican known far and near;

    I haven’t another spy that’s half as true!

  You understand, and I need say no more;

  Lucky for you if you get me up a war!

We get the flavor of this, at least the literary flavor, the satire, and the irony, but it inevitably falls somewhat cold upon us, because it had its origin in a condition of things which, though historical, are so opposed to all our own experience that they are hard to be imagined. Yet we can fancy the effect such a poem must have had, at the time when it was written, upon a people who felt in the midst of their aspirations some disturbing element from without, and believed this to be espionage and Austrian interference. If the poem had also to be passed about secretly from one hand to another, its enjoyment must have been still keener; but strip it of all these costly and melancholy advantages, and it is still a piece of subtle and polished satire.

Most of Giusti’s poems, however, are written in moods and manners very different from this; there is sparkle and dash in the movement, as well as the thought, which I cannot reproduce, and in giving another poem I can only hope to show something of his varying manner. Some foreigner, Lamartine, I think, called Italy the Land of the Dead, — whereupon Giusti responded with a poem of that title, addressed to his friend Gino Capponi:

  THE LAND OF THE DEAD.

  ‘Mongst us phantoms of Italians, —

    Mummies even from our birth, —

  The very babies’ nurses

    Help to put them under earth.

  ‘T is a waste of holy water

    When we’re taken to the font:

  They that make us pay for burial

    Swindle us to that amount.

  In appearance we’re constructed

    Much like Adam’s other sons, —

  Seem of flesh and blood, but really

    We are nothing but dry bones.

  O deluded apparitions,

    What do you do among men?

  Be resigned to fate, and vanish

    Back into the past again!

  Ah! of a perished people

    What boots now the brilliant story?

  Why should skeletons be bothering

    About liberty and glory?

  Why deck this funeral service

    With such pomp of torch and flower?

  Let us, without more palaver,

    Growl this requiem, of ours.

And so the poet recounts the Italian names distinguished in modern literature, and describes the intellectual activity that prevails in this Land of the Dead. Then he turns to the innumerable visitors of Italy:

  O you people hailed down on us

    From the living, overhead,

  With what face can you confront us,

    Seeking health among us dead?

  Soon or late this pestilential

    Clime shall work you harm — beware!

  Even you shall likewise find it

    Foul and poisonous grave-yard air.

  O ye grim, sepulchral friars

    Ye inquisitorial ghouls,

  Lay down, lay down forever,

    The ignorant censor’s tools.

  This wretched gift of thinking,

    O ye donkeys, is your doom;

  Do you care to expurgate us,

    Positively, in the tomb?

  Why plant this bayonet forest

    On our sepulchers? what dread

  Causes you to place such jealous

    Custody upon the dead?

  Well, the mighty book of Nature

    Chapter first and last must have;

  Yours is now the light of heaven,

    Ours the darkness of the grave.

  But, then, if you ask it,

    We lived greatly in our turn;

  We were grand and glorious, Gino,

   Ere our friends up there were born!

  O majestic mausoleums,

    City walls outworn with time,

  To our eyes are even your ruins

    Apotheosis sublime!

  O barbarian unquiet

    Raze each storied sepulcher!

  With their memories and their beauty

    All the lifeless ashes stir.

  O’er these monuments in vigil

    Cloudless the sun flames and glows

  In the wind for funeral torches, —

    And the violet, and the rose,

  And the grape, the fig, the olive,

    Are the emblems fit of grieving;

  ‘T is, in fact, a cemetery

    To strike envy in the living.

  Well, in fine, O brother corpses,

    Let them pipe on as they like;

  Let us see on whom hereafter

    Such a death as ours shall strike!

  ‘Mongst the anthems of the function

    Is not Dies Irae? Nay,

  In all the days to come yet,

    Shall there be no Judgment Day?

In a vein of like irony, the greater part of Giusti’s political poems are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the tang of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people’s quaintness and originality — and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet — it was Giusti’s habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by these words and phrases the frankness and fineness of dialect.

But Giusti had so much gentleness, sweetness, and meekness in his heart, that I do not like to leave the impression of him as a satirist last upon the reader. Rather let me close these meager notices with the beautiful little poem, said to be the last he wrote, as he passed his days in the slow death of the consumptive. It is called

  A PRAYER.

  For the spirit confused

  With misgiving and with sorrow,

  Let me, my Saviour, borrow

  The light of faith from thee.

  O lift from it the burden

  That bows it down before thee.

  With sighs and with weeping

  I commend myself to thee;

  My faded life, thou knowest,

  Little by little is wasted

  Like wax before the fire,

  Like snow-wreaths in the sun.

  And for the soul that panteth

  For its refuge in thy bosom,

  Break, thou, the ties, my Saviour,

  That hinder it from thee.

FRANCESCO DALL’ ONGARO

I

In the month of March, 1848, news came to Rome of the insurrection in Vienna, and a multitude of the citizens assembled to bear the tidings to the Austrian Ambassador, who resided in the ancient palace of the Venetian Republic. The throng swept down the Corso, gathering numbers as it went, and paused in the open space before the Palazzo di Venezia. At its summons, the ambassador abandoned his quarters, and fled without waiting to hear the details of the intelligence from Vienna. The people, incited by a number of Venetian exiles, tore down the double-headed eagle from the portal, and carried it for a more solemn and impressive destruction to the Piazza del Popolo, while a young poet erased the inscription asserting the Austrian claim to the palace, and wrote in its stead the words, “Palazzo della Dieta Italiana.”

The sentiment of national unity expressed in this legend had been the ruling motive of the young poet Francesco Dall’ Ongaro’s life, and had already made his name famous through the patriotic songs that were sung all over Italy. Garibaldi had chanted one of his Stornelli when embarking from Montevideo in the spring of 1848 to take part in the Italian revolutions, of which these little ballads had become the rallying-cries; and if the voice of the people is in fact inspired, this poet could certainly have claimed the poet’s long-lost honors of prophecy, for it was he who had shaped their utterance. He had ceased to assume any other sacred authority, though educated a priest, and at the time when he devoted the Palazzo di Venezia to the idea of united Italy, there was probably no person in Rome less sacerdotal than he.

Francesco Dall’ Ongaro was born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice, and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the Titians and Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to more than one of my readers to behold many little sedate old men in their teens, lounging up and down the cool, humid courts there, and trailing their black priestly robes over the springing mold. The sun seldom strikes into that sad close, and when the boys form into long files, two by two, and march out for recreation, they have a torpid and melancholy aspect, upon which the daylight seems to smile in vain. They march solemnly up the long Zattere, with a pale young father at their head, and then march solemnly back again, sweet, genteel, pathetic specters of childhood, and re�nter their common tomb, doubtless unenvied by the hungriest and raggedest street boy, who asks charity of them as they pass, and hoarsely whispers “Raven!” when their leader is beyond hearing. There is no reason to suppose that a boy, born poet among the mountains, and full of the wild and free romance of his native scenes, could love the life led at the Seminary of the Salute, even though it included the study of literature and philosophy. From his childhood Dall’ Ongaro had given proofs of his poetic gift, and the reverend ravens of the seminary were unconsciously hatching a bird as little like themselves as might be. Nevertheless, Dall’ Ongaro left their school to enter the University of Padua as student of theology, and after graduating took orders, and went to Este, where he lived some time as teacher of belles-lettres.

At Este his life was without scope, and he was restless and unhappy, full of ardent and patriotic impulses, and doubly restricted by his narrow field and his priestly vocation. In no long time he had trouble with the Bishop of Padua, and, abandoning Este, seems also to have abandoned the Church forever. The chief fruit of his sojourn in that quaint and ancient village was a poem entitled II Venerd� Santo, in which he celebrated some incidents of the life of Lord Byron, somewhat as Byron would have done. Dall’ Ongaro’s poems, however, confess the influence of the English poet less than those of other modern Italians, whom Byron infected so much more than his own nation.

From Este, Dall’ Ongaro went to Trieste, where he taught literature and philosophy, wrote for the theater, and established a journal in which, for ten years, he labored to educate the people in his ideas of Italian unity and progress. That these did not coincide with the ideas of most Italian dreamers and politicians of the time may be inferred from the fact that he began in 1846 a course of lectures on Dante, in which he combated the clerical tendencies of Gioberti and Balbo, and criticised the first acts of Pius IX. He had as profound doubt of Papal liberality as Niccolini, at a time when other patriots were fondly cherishing the hope of a united Italy under an Italian pontiff; and at Rome, two years later, he sought to direct popular feeling from the man to the end, in one of the earliest of his graceful Stornelli.

  PIO NONO.

  Pio Nono is a name, and not the man

    Who saws the air from yonder Bishop’s seat;

  Pio Nono is the offspring of our brain,

    The idol of our hearts, a vision sweet;

  Pio Nono is a banner, a refrain,

    A name that sounds well sung upon the street.

  Who calls, “Long live Pio Nono!” means to call,

  Long live our country, and good-will to all!

  And country and good-will, these signify

  That it is well for Italy to die;

  But not to die for a vain dream or hope,

  Not to die for a throne and for a Pope!

During these years at Trieste, however, Dall’ Ongaro seems to have been also much occupied with pure literature, and to have given a great deal of study to the sources of national poetry, as he discovered them in the popular life and legends. He had been touched with the prevailing romanticism; he had written hymns like Manzoni, and, like Carrer, he sought to poetize the traditions and superstitions of his countrymen. He found a richer and deeper vein than the Venetian poet among his native hills and the neighboring mountains of Slavonia, but I cannot say that he wrought it to much better effect. The two volumes which he published in 1840 contain many ballads which are very graceful and musical, but which lack the fresh spirit of songs springing from the popular heart, while they also want the airy and delicate beauty of the modern German ballads. Among the best of them are two which Dall’ Ongaro built up from mere lines and fragments of lines current among the people, as in later years he more successfully restored us two plays of Menander from the plots and a dozen verses of each. “One may imitate,” he says, “more or less fortunately, Manzoni, Byron, or any other poet, but not the simple inspirations of the people. And ‘The Pilgrim who comes from Rome,’ and the ‘Rosettina,’ if one could have them complete as they once were, would probably make me blush for my elaborate variations.” But study which was so well directed, and yet so conscious of its limitations, could not but be of great value; and Dall’ Ongaro, no doubt, owed to it his gift of speaking so authentically for the popular heart. That which he did later showed that he studied the people’s thought and expression con amore, and in no vain sentiment of dilettanteism, or antiquarian research, or literary patronage.

It is not to be supposed that Dall’ Ongaro’s literary life had at this period an altogether objective tendency. In the volumes mentioned, there is abundant evidence that he was of the same humor as all men of poetic feeling must be at a certain time of life. Here are pretty verses of occasion, upon weddings and betrothals, such as people write in Italy; here are stanzas from albums, such as people used to write everywhere; here are didactic lines; here are bursts of mere sentiment and emotion. In the volume of Fantasie, published at Florence in 1866, Dall’ Ongaro collected some of the ballads from his early works, but left out the more subjective effusions.

I give one of these in which, under a fantastic name and in a fantastic form, the poet expresses the tragic and pathetic interest of the life to which he was himself vowed.

  THE SISTER OF THE MOON.

  Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy pensive light

           Be faithful unto me:

  I have a sister in the lonely night

           When I commune with thee.

  Alone and friendless in the world am I,

           Sorrow’s forgotten maid,

  Like some poor dove abandoned to die

           By her first love unwed.

  Like some poor floweret in a desert land

          I pass my days alone;

  In vain upon the air its leaves expand,

          In vain its sweets are blown.

  No loving hand shall save it from the waste,

          And wear the lonely thing;

  My heart shall throb upon no loving breast

          In my neglected spring.

  That trouble which consumes my weary soul

          No cunning can relieve,

  No wisdom understand the secret dole

          Of the sad sighs I heave.

  My fond heart cherished once a hope, a vow,

          The leaf of autumn gales!

  In convent gloom, a dim lamp burning low,

          My spirit lacks and fails.

  I shall have prayers and hymns like some dead saint

          Painted upon a shrine,

  But in love’s blessed power to fall and faint,

          It never shall be mine.

  Born to entwine my life with others, born

          To love and to be wed,

  Apart from all I lead my life forlorn,

          Sorrow’s forgotten maid.

  Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy tender light

          Be faithful unto me:

  Speak to me of the life beyond the night

          I shall enjoy with thee.

II

It will here satisfy the strongest love of contrasts to turn from Dall’ Ongaro the sentimental poet to Dall’ Ongaro the politician, and find him on his feet and making a speech at a public dinner given to Richard Cobden at Trieste, in 1847. Cobden was then, as always, the advocate of free trade, and Dall’ Ongaro was then, as always, the advocate of free government. He saw in the union of the Italians under a customs-bond the hope of their political union, and in their emancipation from oppressive imposts their final escape from yet more galling oppression. He expressed something of this, and, though repeatedly interrupted by the police, he succeeded in saying so much as to secure his expulsion from Trieste.

Italy was already in a ferment, and insurrections were preparing in Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome; and Dall’ Ongaro, consulting with the Venetian leaders Manin and Tommaseo, retired to Tuscany, and took part in the movements which wrung a constitution from the Grand Duke, and preceded the flight of that prince. In December he went to Rome, where he joined himself with the Venetian refugees and with other Italian patriots, like D’Azeglio and Durando, who were striving to direct the popular mind toward Italian unity. The following March he was, as we have seen, one of the exiles who led the people against the Palazzodi Venezia. In the mean time the insurrection of the glorious Five Days had taken place at Milan, and the Lombard cities, rising one after another, had driven out the Austrian garrisons. Dall’ Ongaro went from Rome to Milan, and thence, by advice of the revolutionary leaders, to animate the defense against the Austrians in Friuli; one of his brothers was killed at Palmanuova, and another severely wounded. Treviso, whither he had retired, falling into the hands of the Germans, he went to Venice, then a republic under the presidency of Manin; and here he established a popular journal, which opposed the union of the struggling republic with Piedmont under Carlo Alberto. Dall’ Ongaro was finally expelled and passed next to Ravenna, where he found Garibaldi, who had been banished by the Roman government, and was in doubt as to how he might employ his sword on behalf of his country. In those days the Pope’s moderately liberal minister, Rossi, was stabbed, and Count Pompeo Campello, an old literary friend and acquaintance of Dall’ Ongaro, was appointed minister of war. With Garibaldi’s consent the poet went to Rome, and used his influence to such effect that Garibaldi was authorized to raise a legion of volunteers, and was appointed general of those forces which took so glorious a part in the cause of Italian Independence. Soon after, when the Pope fled to Gaeta, and the Republic was proclaimed, Dall’ Ongaro and Garibaldi were chosen representatives of the people. Then followed events of which it is still a pang keen to read: the troops of the French Republic marched upon Rome, and, after a defense more splendid and heroic than any victory, the city fell. The Pope returned, and all who loved Italy and freedom turned in exile from Rome. The cities of the Romagna, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venetia had fallen again under the Pope, the Grand Duke, and the Austrians, and Dall’ Ongaro took refuge in Switzerland.

{Illustration: FRANCESCO DALL’ ONGARA}

Without presuming to say whether Dall’ Ongaro was mistaken in his political ideas, we may safely admit that he was no wiser a politician than Dante or Petrarch. He was an anti-Papist, as these were, and like these he opposed an Italy of little principalities and little republics. But his dream, unlike theirs, was of a great Italian democracy, and in 1848-49 he opposed the union of the Italian patriots under Carlo Alberto, because this would have tended to the monarchy.

III

But it is not so much with Dall’ Ongaro’s political opinions that we have to do as with his poetry of the revolutionary period of 1848, as we find in it the little collection of lyrics which he calls “Stornelli.” These commemorate nearly all the interesting aspects of that epoch; and in their wit and enthusiasm and aspiration, we feel the spirit of a race at once the most intellectual and the most emotional in the world, whose poets write as passionately of politics as of love. Arnaud awards Dall’ Ongaro the highest praise, and declares him “the first to formulate in the common language of Italy patriotic songs which, current on the tongues of the people, should also remain the patrimony of the national literature.... In his popular songs,” continues this critic, “Dall’ Ongaro has given all that constitutes true, good, and — not the least merit — novel poetry. Meter and rhythm second the expression, imbue the thought with harmony, and develop its symmetry.... How enviable is that perspicuity which does not oblige you to re-read a single line to evolve therefrom the latent idea!” And we shall have no less to admire the perfect art which, never passing the intelligence of the people, is never ignoble in sentiment or idea, but always as refined as it is natural.

I do not know how I could better approach our poet than by first offering this lyric, written when, in 1847, the people of Leghorn rose in arms to repel a threatened invasion of the Austrians.

  THE WOMAN OF LEGHORN.

  Adieu, Livorno! adieu, paternal walls!

    Perchance I never shall behold you more!

  On father’s and mother’s grave the shadow falls.

    My love has gone under our flag to war;

  And I will follow him where fortune calls;

    I have had a rifle in my hands before.

  The ball intended for my lover’s breast,

  Before he knows it my heart shall arrest;

  And over his dead comrade’s visage he

  Shall pitying stoop, and look whom it can be.

  Then he shall see and know that it is I:

  Poor boy! how bitterly my love will cry!

The Italian editor of the “Stornelli” does not give the closing lines too great praise when he declares that “they say more than all the lament of Tancred over Clorinda.” In this little flight of song, we pass over more tragedy than Messer Torquato could have dreamed in the conquest of many Jerusalems; for, after all, there is nothing so tragic as fact. The poem is full at once of the grand national impulse, and of purely personal and tender devotion; and that fluttering, vehement purpose, thrilling and faltering in alternate lines, and breaking into a sob at last, is in every syllable the utterance of a woman’s spirit and a woman’s nature.

Quite as womanly, though entirely different, is this lament, which the poet attributes to his sister for their brother, who fell at Palmanuova, May 14, 1848.

  THE SISTER.

  (Palma, May 14, 1848.)

  And he, my brother, to the fort had gone,

    And the grenade, it struck him in the breast;

  He fought for liberty, and death he won,

    For country here, and found in heaven rest.

  And now only to follow him I sigh;

  A new desire has taken me to die, —

  To follow him where is no enemy,

  Where every one lives happy and is free.

All hope and purpose are gone from this woman’s heart, for whom Italy died in her brother, and who has only these artless, half-bewildered words of regret to speak, and speaks them as if to some tender and sympathetic friend acquainted with all the history going before their abrupt beginning. I think it most pathetic and natural, also, that even in her grief and her aspiration for heaven, her words should have the tint of her time, and she should count freedom among the joys of eternity.

Quite as womanly again, and quite as different once more, is the lyric which the reader will better appreciate when I remind him how the Austrians massacred the unarmed people in Milan, in January, 1848, and how, later, during the Five Days, they murdered their Italian prisoners, sparing neither sex nor age.

Note : “Many foreigners,” says Emilie Dandolo, in his restrained and temperate history of “I Volontarii e Bersaglieri Lombardi”, “have cast a doubt upon the incredible ferocity of the Austrians during the Five Days, and especially before evacuating the city. But, alas! the witnesses are too many to be doubted. A Croat was seen carrying a babe transfixed upon his bayonet. All know of those women’s hands and ears found in the haversacks of the prisoners; of those twelve unhappy men burnt alive at Porta Tosa; of those nineteen buried in a lime-pit at the Castello, whose scorched bodies we found. I myself, ordered with a detachment, after the departure of the enemy, to examine the Castello and neighborhood, was horror-struck at the sight of a babe nailed to a post.”

  THE LOMBARD WOMAN.

  (Milan, January, 1848.)

  Here, take these gaudy robes and put them by;

    I will go dress me black as widowhood;

  I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry

    Of him that struck and him that vainly sued.

  Henceforth no other ornament will I

    But on my breast a ribbon red as blood.

  And when they ask what dyed the silk so red,

  I’ll say, The life-blood of my brothers dead.

  And when they ask how it may cleans�d be,

  I’ll say, O, not in river nor in sea;

  Dishonor passes not in wave nor flood;

  My ribbon ye must wash in German blood.

The repressed horror in the lines,

  I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry

    Of him that struck and him that vainly sued,

is the sentiment of a picture that presents the scene to the reader’s eye as this shuddering woman saw it; and the heart of woman’s fierceness and hate is in that fragment of drama with which the brief poem closes. It is the history of an epoch. That epoch is now past, however; so long and so irrevocably past, that Dall’ Ongaro commented in a note upon the poem: “The word ‘German’ is left as a key to the opinions of the time. Human brotherhood has been greatly promoted since 1848. German is now no longer synonymous with enemy. Italy has made peace with the peoples, and is leagued with them all against their common oppressors.”

There is still another of these songs, in which the heart of womanhood speaks, though this time with a voice of pride and happiness.

  THE DECORATION.

  My love looks well under his helmet’s crest;

    He went to war, and did not let them see

  His back, and so his wound is in the breast:

    For one he got, he struck and gave them three.

  When he came back, I loved him, hurt so, best;

    He married me and loves me tenderly.

  When he goes by, and people give him way,

  I thank God for my fortune every day;

  When he goes by he seems more grand and fair

  Than any crossed and ribboned cavalier:

  The cavalier grew up with his cross on,

  And I know how my darling’s cross was won!

This poem, like that of La Livornese and La Donna Lombarda, is a vivid picture: it is a liberated city, and the streets are filled with jubilant people; the first victorious combats have taken place, and it is a wounded hero who passes with his ribbon on his breast. As the fond crowd gives way to him, his young wife looks on him from her window with an exultant love, unshadowed by any possibility of harm:

  Mi men� a moglie e mi vuol tanto bene!

This is country and freedom to her, — this is strength which despots cannot break, — this is joy to which defeat and ruin can never come nigh! It might be any one of the sarcastic and quickwitted people talking politics in the streets of Rome in 1847, who sees the newly elected Senator — the head of the Roman municipality, and the legitimate mediator between Pope and people — as he passes, and speaks to him in these lines the dominant feeling of the moment:

  THE CARDINALS.

  O Senator of Rome! if true and well

    You are reckoned honest, in the Vatican,

  Let it be yours His Holiness to tell,

    There are many Cardinals, and not one man.

  They are made like lobsters, and, when they are dead,

  Like lobsters change their colors and turn red;

  And while they are living, with their backward gait

  Displace and tangle good Saint Peter’s net.

An impulse of the time is strong again in the following Stornello, — a cry of reproach that seems to follow some recreant from a beleaguered camp of true comrades, and to utter the feeling of men who marched to battle through defection, and were strong chiefly in their just cause. It bears the date of that fatal hour when the king of Naples, after a brief show of liberality, recalled his troops from Bologna, where they had been acting against Austria with the confederated forces of the other Italian states, and when every man lost to Italy was as an ebbing drop of her life’s blood.

  THE DESERTER.

  (Bologna, May, 1818.)

  Never did grain grow out of frozen earth;

    From the dead branch never did blossom start:

  If thou lovest not the land that gave thee birth,

    Within thy breast thou bear’st a frozen heart;

  If thou lovest not this land of ancient worth,

    To love aught else, say, traitor, how thou art!

  To thine own land thou could’st not faithful be, —

  Woe to the woman that puts faith in thee!

  To him that trusteth in the recreant, woe!

  Never from frozen earth did harvest grow:

  To her that trusteth a deserter, shame!

  Out of the dead branch never blossom came.

And this song, so fine in its picturesque and its dramatic qualities, is not less true to the hope of the Venetians when they rose in 1848, and intrusted their destinies to Daniele Manin.

  THE RING OF THE LAST DOGE.

  I saw the widowed Lady of the Sea

    Crown�d with corals and sea-weed and shells,

  Who her long anguish and adversity

    Had seemed to drown in plays and festivals.

  I said: “Where is thine ancient fealty fled? —

  Where is the ring with which Manin did wed

  His bride?” With tearful visage she:

  “An eagle with two beaks tore it from me.

  Suddenly I arose, and how it came

  I know not, but I heard my bridegroom’s name.”

  Poor widow! ‘t is not he. Yet he may bring —

  Who knows? — back to the bride her long-lost ring.

The Venetians of that day dreamed that San Marco might live again, and the fineness and significance of the poem could not have been lost on the humblest in Venice, where all were quick to beauty and vividly remembered that the last Doge who wedded the sea was named, like the new President, Manin.

I think the Stornelli of the revolutionary period of 1848 have a peculiar value, because they embody, in forms of artistic perfection, the evanescent as well as the enduring qualities of popular feeling. They give us what had otherwise been lost, in the passing humor of the time. They do not celebrate the battles or the great political occurrences. If they deal with events at all, is it with events that express some belief or longing, — rather with what people hoped or dreamed than with what they did. They sing the Friulan volunteers, who bore the laurel instead of the olive during Holy Week, in token that the patriotic war had become a religion; they remind us that the first fruits of Italian longing for unity were the cannons sent to the Romans by the Genoese; they tell us that the tricolor was placed in the hand of the statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitol, to signify that Rome was no more, and that Italy was to be. But the Stornelli touch with most effect those yet more intimate ties between national and individual life that vibrate in the hearts of the Livornese and the Lombard woman, of the lover who sees his bride in the patriotic colors, of the maiden who will be a sister of charity that she may follow her lover through all perils, of the mother who names her new-born babe Costanza in the very hour of the Venetian republic’s fall. And I like the Stornelli all the better because they preserve the generous ardor of the time, even in its fondness and excess.

After the fall of Rome, the poet did not long remain unmolested even in his Swiss retreat. In 1852 the Federal Council yielded to the instances of the Austrian government, and expelled Dall’ Ongaro from the Republic. He retired with his sister and nephew to Brussels, where he resumed the lectures upon Dante, interrupted by his exile from Trieste in 1847, and thus supported his family. Three years later he gained permission to enter France, and up to the spring-time of 1859 he remained in Paris, busying himself with literature, and watching events with all an exile’s eagerness. The war with Austria broke out, and the poet seized the long-coveted opportunity to return to Italy, whither he went as the correspondent of a French newspaper. On the conclusion of peace at Villafranca, this journal changed its tone, and being no longer in sympathy with Dall’ Ongaro’s opinions, he left it. Baron Ricasoli, to induce him to make Tuscany his home, instituted a chair of comparative dramatic literature in connection with the University of Pisa, and offered it to Dall’ Ongaro, whose wide general learning and special dramatic studies peculiarly qualified him to hold it. He therefore took up his abode at Florence, dedicating his main industry to a comparative course of ancient and modern dramatic literature, and writing his wonderful restorations of Menander’s “Phasma” and “Treasure”. He was well known to the local American and English Society, and was mourned by many friends when he died there, some ten years ago.

As with Dall’ Ongaro literature had always been but an instrument for the redemption of Italy, even after his appointment to a university professorship he did not forget this prime object. In nearly all that he afterwards wrote, he kept the great aim of his life in view, and few of the events or hopes of that dreary period of suspense and abortive effort between the conclusion of peace at Villafranca and the acquisition of Venice went unsung by him. Indeed, some of his most characteristic “Stornelli” belong to this epoch. After Savoy and Nice had been betrayed to France, and while the Italians waited in angry suspicion for the next demand of their hated ally, which might be the surrender of the island of Sardinia or the sacrifice of the Genoese province, but which no one could guess in the impervious Napoleonic silence, our poet wrote:

  THE IMPERIAL EGG.

  (Milan, 1862.)

  Who knows what hidden devil it may be

    Under yon mute, grim bird that looks our way? —

  Yon silent bird of evil omen, — he

    That, wanting peace, breathes discord and dismay.

  Quick, quick, and change his egg, my Italy,

    Before there hatch from it some bird of prey, —

  Before some beak of rapine be set free,

  That, after the mountains, shall infest the sea;

  Before some ravenous eaglet shall be sent

  After our isles to gorge the continent.

  I’d rather a goose even from yon egg should come, —

  If only of the breed that once saved Rome!

The flight of the Grand Duke from Florence in 1859, and his conciliatory address to his late subjects after Villafranca, in which by fair promises he hoped to win them back to their allegiance; the union of Tuscany with the kingdom of Italy; the removal of the Austrian flags from Milan; Garibaldi’s crusade in Sicily; the movement upon Rome in 1862; Aspromonte, — all these events, with the shifting phases of public feeling throughout that time, the alternate hopes and fears of the Italian nation, are celebrated in the later Stornelli of Dall’ Ongaro. Venice has long since fallen to Italy; and Rome has become the capital of the nation. But the unification was not accomplished till Garibaldi, who had done so much for Italy, had been wounded by her king’s troops in his impatient attempt to expel the French at Aspromonte.

  TO MY SONGS.

  Fly, O my songs, to Varignano, fly!

    Like some lost flock of swallows homeward flying,

  And hail me Rome’s Dictator, who there doth lie

    Broken with wounds, but conquered not, nor dying;

  Bid him think on the April that is nigh,

    Month of the flowers and ventures fear-defying.

  Or if it is not nigh, it soon shall come,

  As shall the swallow to his last year’s home,

  As on its naked stem the rose shall burn,

  As to the empty sky the stars return,

  As hope comes back to hearts crushed by regret; —

  Nay, say not this to his heart ne’er crushed yet!

Let us conclude these notices with one of the Stornelli which is non-political, but which I think we won’t find the less agreeable for that reason. I like it because it says a pretty thing or two very daintily, and is interfused with a certain arch and playful spirit which is not so common but we ought to be glad to recognize it.

  If you are good as you are fair, indeed,

    Keep to yourself those sweet eyes, I implore!

  A little flame burns under either lid

    That might in old age kindle youth once more:

  I am like a hermit in his cavern hid,

    But can I look on you and not adore?

  Fair, if you do not mean my misery

  Those lovely eyes lift upward to the sky;

  I shall believe you some saint shrined above,

  And may adore you if I may not love;

  I shall believe you some bright soul in bliss,

  And may look on you and not look amiss.

I have already noted the more obvious merits of the Stornelli, and I need not greatly insist upon them. Their defects are equally plain; one sees that their simplicity all but ceases to be a virtue at times, and that at times their feeling is too much intellectualized. Yet for all this we must recognize their excellence, and the skill as well as the truth of the poet. It is very notable with what directness he expresses his thought, and with what discretion he leaves it when expressed. The form is always most graceful, and the success with which dramatic, picturesque, and didactic qualities are blent, for a sole effect, in the brief compass of the poems, is not too highly praised in the epithet of novelty. Nothing is lost for the sake of attitude; the actor is absent from the most dramatic touches, the painter is not visible in lines which are each a picture, the teacher does not appear for the purpose of enforcing the moral. It is not the grandest poetry, but is true feeling, admirable art.

GIOVANNI PRATI

I

The Italian poet who most resembles in theme and treatment the German romanticists of the second period was nearest them geographically in his origin. Giovanni Prati was born at Dasindo, a mountain village of the Trentino, and his boyhood was passed amidst the wild scenes of that picturesque region, whose dark valleys and snowy, cloud-capped heights, foaming torrents and rolling mists, lend their gloom and splendor to so much of his verse. His family was poor, but it was noble, and he received, through whatever sacrifice of those who remained at home, the education of a gentleman, as the Italians understand it. He went to school in Trent, and won some early laurels by his Latin poems, which the good priests who kept the collegio gathered and piously preserved in an album for the admiration and emulation of future scholars; when in due time he matriculated at the University of Padua as student of law, he again shone as a poet, and there he wrote his “Edmenegarda”, a poem that gave him instant popularity throughout Italy. When he quitted the university he visited different parts of the country, “having the need” of frequent change of scenes and impressions; but everywhere he poured out songs, ballads, and romances, and was already a voluminous poet in 1840, when, in his thirtieth year, he began to abandon his Teutonic phantoms and hectic maidens, and to make Italy in various disguises the heroine of his song. Whether Austria penetrated these disguises or not, he was a little later ordered to leave Milan. He took refuge in Piedmont, whose brave king, in spite of diplomatic remonstrances from his neighbors, made Prati his poeta cesareo, or poet laureate. This was in 1843; and five years later he took an active part in inciting with his verse the patriotic revolts which broke out all over Italy. But he was supposed by virtue of his office to be monarchical in his sympathies, and when he ventured to Florence, the novelist Guerrezzi, who was at the head of the revolutionary government there, sent the poet back across the border in charge of a carbineer. In 1851 he had the misfortune to write a poem in censure of Orsini’s attempt upon the life of Napoleon III., and to take money for it from the gratified emperor. He seems to have remained up to his death in the enjoyment of his office at Turin. His latest poem, if one may venture to speak of any as the last among poems poured out with such bewildering rapidity, was “Satan and the Graces”, which De Sanctis made himself very merry over.

The Edmenegarda, which first won him repute, was perhaps not more youthful, but it was a subject that appealed peculiarly to the heart of youth, and was sufficiently mawkish. All the characters of the Edmenegarda were living at the time of its publication, and were instantly recognized; yet there seems to have been no complaint against the poet on their part, nor any reproach on the part of criticism. Indeed, at least one of the characters was nattered by the celebrity given him. “So great,” says Prati’s biographer, in the Galler�a Nazionale, “was the enthusiasm awakened everywhere, and in every heart, by the Edmenegarda, that the young man portrayed in it, under the name of Leoni, imagining himself to have become, through Prati’s merit, an eminently poetical subject, presented himself to the poet in the Caff� Pedrocchi at Padua, and returned him his warmest thanks. Prati also made the acquaintance, at the Caff� Nazionale in Turin, of his Edmenegarda, but after the wrinkles had seamed the visage of his ideal, and canceled perhaps from her soul the memory of anguish suffered.” If we are to believe this writer, the story of a wife’s betrayal, abandonment by her lover, and repudiation by her husband, produced effects upon the Italian public as various as profound. “In this pathetic story of an unhappy love was found so much truth of passion, so much naturalness of sentiment, and so much power, that every sad heart was filled with love for the young poet, so compassionate toward innocent misfortune, so sympathetic in form, in thought, in sentiment. Prom that moment Prati became the poet of suffering youth; in every corner of Italy the tender verses of the Edmenegarda were read with love, and sometimes frenzied passion; the political prisoners of Rome, of Naples, and Palermo found them a grateful solace amid the privations and heavy tedium of incarceration; many sundered lovers were reconjoined indissolubly in the kiss of peace; more than one desperate girl was restrained from the folly of suicide; and even the students in the ecclesiastical seminaries at Milan revolted, as it were, against their rector, and petitioned the Archbishop of Gaisruk that they might be permitted to read the fantastic romance.”

{Illustration: GIOVANNI PRATI.}

What he was at first, Prati seems always to have remained in character and in ideals. “Would you know the poet in ordinary of the king of Sardinia?” says Marc-Monnier. “Go up the great street of the Po, under the arcades to the left, around the Caff� Florio, which is the center of Turin. If you meet a great youngster of forty years, with brown hair, wandering eyes, long visage, lengthened by the imperial, prominent nose, diminished by the mustache, — good head, in fine, and proclaiming the artist at first glance, say to yourself that this is he, give him your hand, and he will give you his. He is the openest of Italians, and the best fellow in the world. It is here that he lives, under the arcades. Do not look for his dwelling; he does not dwell, he promenades. Life for him is not a combat nor a journey; it is a saunter (fl�nerie), cigar in mouth, eyes to the wind; a comrade whom he meets, and passes a pleasant word with; a group of men who talk politics, and leave you to read the newspapers; puis c� et l�, par hasard, une bonne fortune; a woman or an artist who understands you, and who listens while you talk of art or repeat your verses. Prati lives so the whole year round. From time to time he disappears for a week or two. Where is he? Nobody knows. You grow uneasy; you ask his address: he has none. Some say he is ill; others, he is dead; but some fine morning, cheerful as ever, he re-appears under the arcades. He has come from the bottom of a wood or the top of a mountain, and he has made two thousand verses.... He is hardly forty-one years old, and he has already written a million lines. I have read seven volumes of his, and I have not read all.”

I have not myself had the patience here boasted by M. Marc-Monnier; but three or four volumes of Prati’s have sufficed to teach me the spirit and purpose of his poetry. Born in 1815, and breathing his first inspirations from that sense of romance blowing into Italy with every northern gale, — a son of the Italian Tyrol, the region where the fire meets the snow, — he has some excuse, if not a perfect reason, for being half-German in his feeling. It is natural that Prati should love the ballad form above all, and should pour into its easy verse the wild legends heard during a boyhood passed among mountains and mountaineers. As I read his poetic tales, with a little heart-break, more or less fictitious, in each, I seem to have found again the sweet German songs that fluttered away out of my memory long ago. There is a tender light on the pages; a mistier passion than that of the south breathes through the dejected lines; and in the ballads we see all our old acquaintance once more, — the dying girls, the galloping horsemen, the moonbeams, the familiar, inconsequent phantoms, — scarcely changed in the least, and only betraying now and then that they have been at times in the bad company of Lara, and Medora, and other dissipated and vulgar people. The following poem will give some proof of all this, and will not unfairly witness of the quality of Prati in most of the poetry he has written:

  THE MIDNIGHT RIDE.

  I.

  Ruello, Ruello, devour the way!

    On your breath bear us with you, O winds, as ye swell!

  My darling, she lies near her death to-day, —

    Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!

  That my spurs have torn open thy flanks, alas!

    With thy long, sad neighing, thou need’st not tell;

  We have many a league yet of desert to pass, —

    Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!

  Hear’st that mocking laugh overhead in space?

    Hear’st the shriek of the storm, as it drives, swift and fell?

  A scent as of graves is blown into my face, —

    Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!

  Ah, God! and if that be the sound I hear

    Of the mourner’s song and the passing-bell!

  O heaven! What see I? The cross and the bier? —

    Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!

  Thou falt’rest, Ruello? Oh, courage, my steed!

    Wilt fail me, O traitor I trusted so well?

  The tempest roars over us, — halt not, nor heed! —

    Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!

  Gallop, Ruello, oh, faster yet!

    Good God, that flash! O God! I am chill, —

  Something hangs on my eyelids heavy as death, —

    Gallop, gallop, gallop, Ruel!

  II.

  Smitten with the lightning stroke,

    From his seat the cavalier

  Fell, and forth the charger broke,

    Rider-free and mad with fear, —

  Through the tempest and the night,

  Like a winged thing in flight.

  In the wind his mane blown back,

    With a frantic plunge and neigh, —

  In the shadow a shadow black,

    Ever wilder he flies away, —

  Through the tempest and the night,

  Like a winged thing in flight.

  From his throbbing flanks arise

    Smokes of fever and of sweat, —

  Over him the pebble flies

    From his swift feet  swifter yet, —

  Through the tempest and the night,

  Like a winged thing in flight.

  From the cliff unto the wood,

    Twenty leagues he passed in all;

  Soaked with bloody foam and blood,

    Blind he struck against the wall:

  Death is in the seat; no more

  Stirs the steed that flew before.

  III.

  And the while, upon the colorless,

    Death-white visage of the dying

  Maiden, still and faint and fair,

    Rosy lights arise and wane;

  And her weakness lifting tremulous

    From the couch where she was lying

  Her long, beautiful, loose hair

    Strives she to adorn in vain.

  “Mother, what it is has startled me

    From my sleep I cannot tell thee:

  Only, rise and deck me well

    In my fairest robes again.

  For, last night, in the thick silences, —

    I know not how it befell me, —

  But the gallop of Ruel,

    More than once I heard it plain.

  “Look, O mother, through yon shadowy

    Trees, beyond their gloomy cover:

  Canst thou not an atom see

    Toward us from the distance start?

  Seest thou not the dust rise cloudily,

    And above the highway hover?

  Come at last! ‘T is he! ‘t is he!

    Mother, something breaks my heart.”

  Ah, poor child! she raises wearily

    Her dim eyes, and, turning slowly,

  Seeks the sun, and leaves this strife

    With a loved name in her breath.

  Ah, poor child! in vain she waited him.

    In the grave they made her lowly

  Bridal bed. And thou, O life!

    Hast no hopes that know not death?

Among Prati’s patriotic poems, I have read one which seems to me rather vivid, and which because it reflects yet another phase of that great Italian resurrection, as well as represents Prati in one of his best moods, I will give here:

  THE SPY.

  With ears intent, with eyes abased,

  Like a shadow still my steps thou hast chased;

  If I whisper aught to my friend, I feel

  Thee follow quickly upon my heel.

  Poor wretch, thou fill’st me with loathing; fly!

                        Thou art a spy!

  When thou eatest the bread that thou dost win

  With the filthy wages of thy sin,

  The hideous face of treason anear

  Dost thou not see? dost thou not fear?

  Poor wretch, thou fill’st me with loathing; fly!

                        Thou art a spy!

  The thief may sometimes my pity claim;

  Sometimes the harlot for her shame;

  Even the murderer in his chains

  A hidden fear from me constrains;

  But thou only fill’st me with loathing; fly!

                        Thou art a spy!

  Fly, poor villain; draw thy hat down,

  Close be thy mantle about thee thrown;

  And if ever my words weigh on thy heart,

  Betake thyself to some church apart;

  There, “Lord, have mercy!” weep and cry:

                       “I am a spy!”

  Forgiveness for thy great sin alone

  Thou may’st hope to find before his throne.

  Dismayed by thy snares that all abhor,

  Brothers on earth thou hast no more;

  Poor wretch, thou fill’st me with loathing; fly!

                       Thou art a spy!

ALEARDO ALEARDI

I.

In the first quarter of the century was born a poet, in the village of San Giorgio, near Verona, of parents who endowed their son with the magnificent name of Aleardo Aleardi. His father was one of those small proprietors numerous in the Veneto, and, though not indigent, was by no means a rich man. He lived on his farm, and loved it, and tried to improve the condition of his tenants. Aleardo’s childhood was spent in the country, — a happy fortune for a boy anywhere, the happiest fortune if that country be Italy, and its scenes the grand and beautiful scenes of the valley of the Adige. Here he learned to love nature with the passion that declares itself everywhere in his verse; and hence he was in due time taken and placed at school in the Collegio {note: Not a college in the American sense, but a private school of a high grade.} of Sant’ Anastasia, in Verona, according to the Italian system, now fallen into disuse, of fitting a boy for the world by giving him the training of a cloister. It is not greatly to Aleardi’s discredit that he seemed to learn nothing there, and that he drove his reverend preceptors to the desperate course of advising his removal. They told his father he would make a good farmer, but a scholar, never. They nicknamed him the mole, for his dullness; but, in the mean time, he was making underground progress of his own, and he came to the surface one day, a mole no longer, to everybody’s amazement, but a thing of such flight and song as they had never seen before, — in fine, a poet. He was rather a scapegrace, after he ceased to be a mole, at school; but when he went to the University at Padua, he became conspicuous among the idle, dissolute students of that day for temperate life and severe study. There he studied law, and learned patriotism; political poetry and interviews with the police were the consequence, but no serious trouble.

One of the offensive poems, which he says he and his friends had the audacity to call an ode, was this:

  Sing we our country. ‘T is a desolate

        And frozen cemetery;

        Over its portals undulates

        A banner black and yellow;

        And within it throng the myriad

        Phantoms of slaves and kings:

  A man on a worn-out, tottering

        Throne watches o’er the tombs:

        The pallid lord of consciences,

        The despot of ideas.

        Tricoronate he vaunts himself

        And without crown is he.

In this poem the yellow and black flag is, of course, the Austrian, and the enthroned man is the pope, of whose temporal power our poet was always the enemy. “The Austrian police,” says Aleardi’s biographer, “like an affectionate mother, anxious about everything, came into possession of these verses; and the author was admonished, in the way of maternal counsel, not to touch such topics, if he would not lose the favor of the police, and be looked on as a prodigal son.” He had already been admonished for carrying a cane on the top of which was an old Italian pound, or lira, with the inscription, Kingdom of Italy, — for it was an offense to have such words about one in any way, so trivial and petty was the cruel government that once reigned over the Italians.

In due time he took that garland of paper laurel and gilt pasteboard with which the graduates of Padua are sublimely crowned, and returned to Verona, where he entered the office of an advocate to learn the practical workings of the law. These disgusted him, naturally enough; and it was doubtless far less to the hurt of his feelings than of his fortune that the government always refused him the post of advocate.

In this time he wrote his first long poem, Arnaldo, which was published at Milan in 1842, and which won him immediate applause. It was followed by the tragedy of Bragadino; and in the year 1845 he wrote Le Prime Storie, which he suffered to lie unpublished for twelve years. It appeared in Verona in 1857, a year after the publication of his Monte Circellio, written in 1846.

{Illustration: ALEARDO ALEARDI.}

The revolution of 1848 took place; the Austrians retired from the dominion of Venice, and a provisional republican government, under the presidency of Daniele Manin, was established, and Aleardi was sent as one of its plenipotentiaries to Paris, where he learnt how many fine speeches the friends of a struggling nation can make when they do not mean to help it. The young Venetian republic fell. Aleardi left Paris, and, after assisting at the ceremony of being bombarded in Bologna, retired to Genoa. He later returned to Verona, and there passed several years of tranquil study. In 1852, for the part he had taken in the revolution, he was arrested and imprisoned in the fortress at Mantua, thus fulfilling the destiny of an Italian poet of those times.

All the circumstances and facts of this arrest and imprisonment are so characteristic of the Austrian method of governing Italy, that I do not think it out of place to give them with some fullness. In the year named, the Austrians were still avenging themselves upon the patriots who had driven them out of Venetia in 1848, and their courts were sitting in Mantua for the trial of political prisoners, many of whom were exiled, sentenced to long imprisonment, or put to death. Aleardi was first confined in the military prison at Verona, but was soon removed to Mantua, whither several of his friends had already been sent. All the other prisons being full, he was thrust into a place which till now had seemed too horrible for use. It was a narrow room, dark, and reeking with the dampness of the great dead lagoon which surrounds Mantua. A broken window, guarded by several gratings, let in a little light from above; the day in that cell lasted six hours, the night eighteen. A mattress on the floor, and a can of water for drinking, were the furniture. In the morning they brought him two pieces of hard, black bread; at ten o’clock a thick soup of rice and potatoes; and nothing else throughout the day. In this dungeon he remained sixty days, without books, without pen or paper, without any means of relieving the terrible gloom and solitude. At the end of this time, he was summoned to the hall above to see his sister, whom he tenderly loved. The light blinded him so that for a while he could not perceive her, but he talked to her calmly and even cheerfully, that she might not know what he had suffered. Then he was remanded to his cell, where, as her retreating footsteps ceased upon his ear, he cast himself upon the ground in a passion of despair. Three months passed, and he had never seen the face of judge or accuser, though once the prison inspector, with threats and promises, tried to entrap him into a confession. One night his sleep was broken by a continued hammering; in the morning half a score of his friends were hanged upon the gallows which had been built outside his cell.

By this time his punishment had been so far mitigated that he had been allowed a German grammar and dictionary, and for the first time studied that language, on the literature of which he afterward lectured in Florence. He had, like most of the young Venetians of his day, hated the language, together with those who spoke it, until then.

At last, one morning at dawn, a few days after the execution of his friends, Aleardi and others were thrust into carriages and driven to the castle. There the roll of the prisoners was called; to several names none answered, for those who had borne them were dead. Were the survivors now to be shot, or sentenced to some prison in Bohemia or Hungary? They grimly jested among themselves as to their fate. They were marched out into the piazza, under the heavy rain, and there these men who had not only not been tried for any crime, but had not even been accused of any, received the grace of the imperial pardon.

Aleardi returned to Verona and to his books, publishing another poem in 1856, called Le Citt� Italiane Marinare e Commercianti. His next publication was, in 1857, Rafaello e la Fornarina; then followed Un’ Ora della mia Giovinezza, Le Tre Fiume, and Le Tre Fanciulle, in 1858.

The war of 1859 broke out between Austria and France and Italy. Aleardi spent the brief period of the campaign in a military prison at Verona, where his sympathies were given an ounce of prevention. He had committed no offense, but at midnight the police appeared, examined his papers, found nothing, and bade him rise and go to prison. After the peace of Villafranca he was liberated, and left the Austrian states, retiring first to Brescia, and then to Florence. His publications since 1859 have been a Canto Politico and I Sette Soldati. He was condemned for his voluntary exile, by the Austrian courts, and I remember reading in the newspapers the official invitation given him to come back to Verona and be punished. But, oddly enough, he declined to do so.

II

The first considerable work of Aleardi was Le Prime Storie (Primal Histories), in which he traces the course of the human race through the Scriptural story of its creation, its fall, and its destruction by the deluge, through the Greek and Latin days, through the darkness and glory of the feudal times, down to our own, — following it from Eden to Babylon and Tyre, from Tyre and Babylon to Athens and Rome, from Florence and Genoa to the shores of the New World, full of shadowy tradition and the promise of a peaceful and happy future.

He takes this fruitful theme, because he feels it to be alive with eternal interest, and rejects the well-worn classic fables, because

  Under the bushes of the odorous mint

  The Dryads are buried, and the placid Dian

  Guides now no longer through the nights below

  Th’ invulnerable hinds and pearly car,

  To bless the Carian shepherd’s dreams. No more

  The valley echoes to the stolen kisses,

  Or to the twanging bow, or to the bay

  Of the immortal hounds, or to the Fauns’

  Plebeian laughter. From the golden rim

  Of shells, dewy with pearl, in ocean’s depths

  The snowy loveliness of Galatea

  Has fallen; and with her, their endless sleep

  In coral sepulchers the Nereids

  Forgotten sleep in peace.

The poet cannot turn to his theme, however, without a sad and scornful apostrophe to his own land, where he figures himself sitting by the way, and craving of the frivolous, heartless, luxurious Italian throngs that pass the charity of love for Italy. They pass him by unheeded, and he cries:

                           Hast thou seen

  In the deep circle of the valley of Siddim,

  Under the shining skies of Palestine,

  The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt?

  Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of damnation,

  Forever foe to every living thing,

  Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird

  That, on the shore of the perfidious sea,

  Athirsting dies, — that watery sepulcher

  Of the five cities of iniquity,

  Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low,

  Passes in silence, and the lightning dies, —

  If thou hast seen them, bitterly hath been

  Thy heart wrung with the misery and despair

  Of that dread vision!

                           Yet there is on earth

  A woe more desperate and miserable, —

  A spectacle wherein the wrath of God

  Avenges him more terribly. It is

  A vain, weak people of faint-heart old men,

  That, for three hundred years of dull repose,

  Has lain perpetual dreamer, folded in

  The ragged purple of its ancestors,

  Stretching its limbs wide in its country’s sun,

  To warm them; drinking the soft airs of autumn

  Forgetful, on the fields where its forefathers

  Like lions fought! From overflowing hands,

  Strew we with hellebore and poppies thick

  The way.

But the throngs have passed by, and the poet takes up his theme. Abel sits before an altar upon the borders of Eden, and looks with an exile’s longing toward the Paradise of his father, where, high above all the other trees, he beholds,

  Lording it proudly in the garden’s midst,

  The guilty apple with its fatal beauty.

He weeps; and Cain, furiously returning from the unaccepted labor of the fields, lifts his hand against his brother.

                      It was at sunset;

  The air was severed with a mother’s shriek,

  And stretched beside the o’erturned altar’s foot

  Lay the first corse.

                      Ah! that primal stain

  Of blood that made earth hideous, did forebode

  To all the nations of mankind to come

  The cruel household stripes, and the relentless

  Battles of civil wars, the poisoned cup,

  The gleam of axes lifted up to strike

  The prone necks on the block.

                     The fratricide

  Beheld that blood amazed, and from on high

  He heard the awful voice of cursing leap,

  And in the middle of his forehead felt

  God’s lightning strike....

                  ....And there from out the heart

  All stained with guiltiness emerged the coward

  Religion that is born of loveless fears.

  And, moved and shaken like a conscious thing,

  The tree of sin dilated horribly

  Its frondage over all the land and sea,

  And with its poisonous shadow followed far

  The flight of Cain....

                      .... And he who first

  By th’ arduous solitudes and by the heights

  And labyrinths of the virgin earth conducted

  This ever-wandering, lost Humanity

  Was the Accursed.

Cain passes away, and his children fill the world, and the joy of guiltless labor brightens the poet’s somber verse.

  The murmur of the works of man arose

  Up from the plains; the caves reverberated

  The blows of restless hammers that revealed,

  Deep in the bowels of the fruitful hills,

  The iron and the faithless gold, with rays

  Of evil charm. And all the cliffs repeated

  The beetle’s fall, and the unceasing leap

  Of waters on the paddles of the wheel

  Volubly busy; and with heavy strokes

  Upon the borders of the inviolate woods

  The ax was heard descending on the trees,

  Upon the odorous bark of mighty pines.

  Over the imminent upland’s utmost brink

  The blonde wild-goat stretched forth his neck to meet

  The unknown sound, and, caught with sudden fear,

  Down the steep bounded, and the arrow cut

  Midway the flight of his aerial foot.

So all the wild earth was tamed to the hand of man, and the wisdom of the stars began to reveal itself to the shepherds,

  Who, in the leisure of the argent nights,

  Leading their flocks upon a sea of meadows,

turned their eyes upon the heavenly bodies, and questioned them in their courses. But a taint of guilt was in all the blood of Cain, which the deluge alone could purge.

  And beautiful beyond all utterance

  Were the earth’s first-born daughters. Phantasms these

  That now enamor us decrepit, by

  The light of that prime beauty! And the glance

  Those ardent sinners darted had beguiled

  God’s angels even, so that the Lord’s command

  Was weaker than the bidding of their eyes.

  And there were seen, descending from on high,

  His messengers, and in the tepid eyes

  Gathering their flight about the secret founts

  Where came the virgins wandering sole to stretch

  The nude pomp of their perfect loveliness.

  Caught by some sudden flash of light afar,

  The shepherd looked, and deemed that he beheld

  A fallen star, and knew not that he saw

  A fallen angel, whose distended wings,

  All tremulous with voluptuous delight,

  Strove vainly to lift him to the skies again.

  The earth with her malign embraces blest

  The heavenly-born, and they straightway forgot

  The joys of God’s eternal paradise

  For the brief rapture of a guilty love.

  And from these nuptials, violent and strange,

  A strange and violent race of giants rose;

  A chain of sin had linked the earth to heaven;

  And God repented him of his own work.

The destroying rains descended,

                        And the ocean rose,

  And on the cities and the villages

  The terror fell apace. There was a strife

  Of suppliants at the altars; blasphemy

  Launched at the impotent idols and the kings;

  There were embraces desperate and dear,

  And news of suddenest forgivenesses,

  And a relinquishment of all sweet things;

  And, guided onward by the pallid prophets,

  The people climbed, with lamentable cries,

  In pilgrimage up the mountains.

                        But in vain;

  For swifter than they climbed the ocean rose,

  And hid the palms, and buried the sepulchers

  Far underneath the buried pyramids;

  And the victorious billow swelled and beat

  At eagles’ Alpine nests, extinguishing

  All lingering breath of life; and dreadfuller

  Than the yell rising from the battle-field

  Seemed the hush of every human sound.

    On the high solitude of the waters naught

  Was seen but here and there unfrequently

  A frail raft, heaped with languid men that fought

  Weakly with one another for the grass

  Hanging about a cliff not yet submerged,

  And here and there a drowned man’s head, and here

  And there a file of birds, that beat the air

  With weary wings.

After the deluge, the race of Noah repeoples the empty world, and the history of mankind begins anew in the Orient. Rome is built, and the Christian era dawns, and Rome falls under the feet of the barbarians. Then the enthusiasm of Christendom sweeps toward the East, in the repeated Crusades; and then, “after long years of twilight”, Dante, the sun of Italian civilization, rises; and at last comes the dream of another world, unknown to the eyes of elder times.

    But between that and our shore roared diffuse

  Abysmal seas and fabulous hurricanes

  Which, thought on, blanched the faces of the bold;

  For the dread secret of the heavens was then

  The Western world. Yet on the Italian coasts

  A boy grew into manhood, in whose soul

  The instinct of the unknown continent burned.

  He saw in his prophetic mind depicted

  The opposite visage of the earth, and, turning

  With joyful defiance to the ocean, sailed

  Forth with two secret pilots, God and Genius.

  Last of the prophets, he returned in chains

  And glory.

In the New World are the traces, as in the Old, of a restless humanity, wandering from coast to coast, growing, building cities, and utterly vanishing. There are graves and ruins everywhere; and the poet’s thought returns from these scenes of unstoried desolation, to follow again the course of man in the Old World annals. But here, also, he is lost in the confusion of man’s advance and retirement, and he muses:

  How many were the peoples? Where the trace

  Of their lost steps? Where the funereal fields

  In which they sleep? Go, ask the clouds of heaven

  How many bolts are hidden in their breasts,

  And when they shall be launched; and ask the path

  That they shall keep in the unfurrowed air.

  The peoples passed. Obscure as destiny,

  Forever stirred by secret hope, forever

  Waiting upon the promised mysteries,

  Unknowing God, that urged them, turning still

  To some kind star, — they swept o’er the sea-weed

  In unknown waters, fearless swam the course

  Of nameless rivers, wrote with flying feet

  The mountain pass on pathless snows; impatient

  Of rest, for aye, from Babylon to Memphis,

  From the Acropolis to Rome, they hurried.

    And with them passed their guardian household gods,

  And faithful wisdom of their ancestors,

  And the seed sown in mother fields, and gathered,

  A fruitful harvest in their happier years.

  And, ‘companying the order of their steps

  Upon the way, they sung the choruses

  And sacred burdens of their country’s songs,

  And, sitting down by hospitable gates,

  They told the histories of their far-off cities.

  And sometimes in the lonely darknesses

  Upon the ambiguous way they found a light, —

  The deathless lamp of some great truth, that Heaven

  Sent in compassionate answer to their prayers.

    But not to all was given it to endure

  That ceaseless pilgrimage, and not on all

  Did the heavens smile perennity of life

  Revirginate with never-ceasing change;

  And when it had completed the great work

  Which God had destined for its race to do,

  Sometimes a weary people laid them down

  To rest them, like a weary man, and left

  Their nude bones in a vale of expiation,

  And passed away as utterly forever

  As mist that snows itself into the sea.

The poet views this growth of nations from youth to decrepitude, and, coming back at last to himself and to his own laud and time, breaks forth into a lament of grave and touching beauty:

  Muse of an aged people, in the eve

  Of fading civilization, I was born

  Of kindred that have greatly expiated

  And greatly wept. For me the ambrosial fingers

  Of Graces never wove the laurel crown,

  But the Fates shadowed, from my youngest days,

  My brow with passion-flowers, and I have lived

  Unknown to my dear land. Oh, fortunate

  My sisters that in the heroic dawn

  Of races sung! To them did destiny give

  The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness

  Of their land’s speech; and, reverenced, their hands

  Ran over potent strings. To me, the hopes

  Turbid with hate; to me, the senile rage;

  To me, the painted fancies clothed by art

  Degenerate; to me, the desperate wish,

  Not in my soul to nurse ungenerous dreams,

  But to contend, and with the sword of song

  To fight my battles too.

Such is the spirit, such is the manner, of the Prime Storie of Aleardi. The merits of the poem are so obvious, that it seems scarcely profitable to comment upon its picturesqueness, upon the clearness and ease of its style, upon the art which quickens its frequent descriptions of nature with a human interest. The defects of the poem are quite as plain, and I have again to acknowledge the critical acuteness of Arnaud, who says of Aleardi: “Instead of synthetizing his conceptions, and giving relief to the principal lines, the poet lingers caressingly upon the particulars, preferring the descriptive to the dramatic element. Prom this results poetry of beautiful arabesques and exquisite fragments, of harmonious verse and brilliant diction.”

Nevertheless, the same critic confesses that the poetry of Aleardi “is not academically common”, and pleases by the originality of its very mannerism.

III.

Like Primal Histories, the Hour of my Youth is a contemplative poem, to which frequency of episode gives life and movement; but its scope is less grand, and the poet, recalling his early days, remembers chiefly the events of defeated revolution which give such heroic sadness and splendor to the history of the first third of this century. The work is characterized by the same opulence of diction, and the same luxury of epithet and imagery, as the Primal Histories, but it somehow fails to win our interest in equal degree: perhaps because the patriot now begins to overshadow the poet, and appeal is often made rather to the sympathies than the imagination. It is certain that art ceases to be less, and country more, in the poetry of Aleardi from this time. It could scarcely be otherwise; and had it been otherwise, the poet would have become despicable, not great, in the eyes of his countrymen.

The Hour of my Youth opens with a picture, where, for once at least, all the brilliant effects are synthetized; the poet has ordered here the whole Northern world, and you can dream of nothing grand or beautiful in those lonely regions which you do not behold in it.

  Ere yet upon the unhappy Arctic lands,

  In dying autumn, Erebus descends

  With the night’s thousand hours, along the verge

  Of the horizon, like a fugitive,

  Through the long days wanders the weary sun;

  And when at last under the wave is quenched

  The last gleam of its golden countenance,

  Interminable twilight land and sea

  Discolors, and the north-wind covers deep

  All things in snow, as in their sepulchers

  The dead are buried. In the distances

  The shock of warring Cyclades of ice

  Makes music as of wild and strange lament;

  And up in heaven now tardily are lit

  The solitary polar star and seven

  Lamps of the Bear. And now the warlike race

  Of swans gather their hosts upon the breast

  Of some far gulf, and, bidding their farewell

  To the white cliffs, and slender junipers,

  And sea-weed bridal-beds, intone the song

  Of parting, and a sad metallic clang

  Send through the mists. Upon their southward way

  They greet the beryl-tinted icebergs; greet

  Flamy volcanoes, and the seething founts

  Of Geysers, and the melancholy yellow

  Of the Icelandic fields; and, wearying,

  Their lily wings amid the boreal lights,

  Journey away unto the joyous shores

  Of morning.

In a strain of equal nobility, but of more personal and subjective effect, the thought is completed:

  So likewise, my own soul, from these obscure

  Days without glory, wings its flight afar

  Backward, and journeys to the years of youth

  And morning. Oh, give me back once more,

  Oh, give me, Lord, one hour of youth again!

  For in that time I was serene and bold,

  And uncontaminate, and enraptured with

  The universe. I did not know the pangs

  Of the proud mind, nor the sweet miseries

  Of love; and I had never gathered yet,

  After those fires so sweet in burning, bitter

  Handfuls of ashes, that, with tardy tears

  Sprinkled, at last have nourished into bloom

  The solitary flower of penitence.

  The baseness of the many was unknown,

  And civic woes had not yet sown with salt

  Life’s narrow field. Ah! then the infinite

  Voices that Nature sends her worshipers

  From land, from sea, and from the cloudy depths

  Of heaven smote the echoing soul of youth

  To music. And at the first morning sigh

  Of the poor wood-lark, — at the measured bell

  Of homeward flocks, and at the opaline wings

  Of dragon-flies in their a�rial dances

  Above the gorgeous carpets of the marsh, —

  At the wind’s moan, and at the sudden gleam

  Of lamps lighting in some far town by night, —

  And at the dash of rain that April shoots

  Through the air odorous with the smitten dust, —

  My spirits rose, and glad and swift my thought

  Over the sea of being sped all-sails.

There is a description of a battle, in the Hour of my Youth, which. I cannot help quoting before I leave the poem. The battle took place between the Austrians and the French on the 14th of January, 1797, in the Chiusa, a narrow valley near Verona, and the fiercest part of the fight was for the possession of the hill of Rivoli.

                   Clouds of smoke

  Floated along the heights; and, with her wild,

  Incessant echo, Chiusa still repeated

  The harmony of the muskets. Rival hosts

  Contended for the poverty of a hill

  That scarce could give their number sepulcher;

  But from that hill-crest waved the glorious locks

  Of Victory. And round its bloody spurs,

  Taken and lost with fierce vicissitude,

  Serried and splendid, swept and tempested

  Long-haired dragoons, together with the might

  Of the Homeric foot, delirious

  With fury; and the horses with their teeth

  Tore one another, or, tossing wild their manes,

  Fled with their helpless riders up the crags,

  By strait and imminent paths of rock, till down,

  Like angels thunder-smitten, to the depths

  Of that abyss the riders fell. With slain

  Was heaped the dreadful amphitheater;

  The rocks dropped blood; and if with gasping breath

  Some wounded swimmer beat away the waves

  Weakly between him and the other shore,

  The merciless riflemen from the cliffs above,

  With their inexorable aim, beneath

  The waters sunk him.

The Monte Circellio is part of a poem in four cantos, dispersed, it is said, to avoid the researches of the police, in which the poet recounts in picturesque verse the glories and events of the Italian land and history through which he passes. A slender but potent cord of common feeling unites the episodes, and the lament for the present fate of Italy rises into hope for her future. More than half of the poem is given to a description of the geological growth of the earth, in which the imagination of the poet has unbridled range, and in which there is a success unknown to most other attempts to poetize the facts of science. The epochs of darkness and inundation, of the monstrous races of bats and lizards, of the mammoths and the gigantic vegetation, pass, and, after thousands of years, the earth is tempered and purified to the use of man by fire; and that

           Paradise of land and sea, forever

  Stirred by great hopes and by volcanic fires,

  Called Italy,

takes shape: its burning mountains rise, its valleys sink, its plains extend, its streams run. But first of all, the hills of Rome lifted themselves from the waters, that day when the spirit of God dwelling upon their face

  Saw a fierce group of seven enkindled hills,

  In number like the mystic candles lighted

  Within his future temple. Then he bent

  Upon that mystic pleiades of flame

  His luminous regard, and spoke to it:

  “Thou art to be my Rome.” The harmony

  Of that note to the nebulous heights supreme,

  And to the bounds of the created world,

  Rolled like the voice of myriad organ-stops,

  And sank, and ceased. The heavenly orbs resumed

  Their daily dance and their unending journey;

  A mighty rush of plumes disturbed the rest

  Of the vast silence; here and there like stars

  About the sky, flashed the immortal eyes

  Of choral angels following after him.

The opening lines of Monte Circellio are scarcely less beautiful than the first part of Un’ Ora della mia Giovinezza, but I must content myself with only one other extract from the poem, leaving the rest to the reader of the original. The fact that every summer the Roman hospitals are filled with the unhappy peasants who descend from the hills of the Abruzzi to snatch its harvests from the feverish Campagna will help us to understand all the meaning of the following passage, though nothing could add to its pathos, unless, perhaps, the story given by Aleardi in a note at the foot of his page: “How do you live here?” asked a traveler of one of the peasants who reap the Campagna. The Abruzzese answered, “Signor, we die.”

                                   What time,

  In hours of summer, sad with so much light,

  The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields,

  The harvesters, as famine urges them,

  Draw hither in thousands, and they wear

  The look of those that dolorously go

  In exile, and already their brown eyes

  Are heavy with the poison of the air.

  Here never note of amorous bird consoles

  Their drooping hearts; here never the gay songs

  Of their Abruzzi sound to gladden these

  Pathetic hands. But taciturn they toil,

  Reaping the harvest for their unknown lords;

  And when the weary tabor is performed,

  Taciturn they retire; and not till then

  Their bagpipes crown the joys of the return,

  Swelling the heart with their familiar strain.

  Alas! not all return, for there is one

  That dying in the furrow sits, and seeks

  With his last look some faithful kinsman out,

  To give his life’s wage, that he carry it

  Unto his trembling mother, with the last

  Words of her son that comes no more. And dying,

  Deserted and alone, far off he hears

  His comrades going, with their pipes in time

  Joyfully measuring their homeward steps.

  And when in after years an orphan comes

  To reap the harvest here, and feels his blade

  Go quivering through the swaths of falling grain,

  He weeps and thinks: haply these heavy stalks

  Ripened on his unburied father’s bones.

In the poem called The Marine and Commercial Cities of Italy (Le Citt� Italiane Marinare e Commercianti), Aleardi recounts the glorious rise, the jealousies, the fratricidal wars, and the ignoble fall of Venice, Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, in strains of grandeur and pathos; he has pride in the wealth and freedom of those old queens of traffic, and scorn and lamentation for the blind selfishness that kept them Venetian, Florentine, Pisan, and Genoese, and never suffered them to be Italian. I take from this poem the prophetic vision of the greatness of Venice, which, according to the patriotic tradition of Sabellico, Saint Mark beheld five hundred years before the foundation of the city, when one day, journeying toward Aquileja, his ship lost her course among the islands of the lagoons. The saint looked out over those melancholy swamps, and saw the phantom of a Byzantine cathedral rest upon the reeds, while a multitudinous voice broke the silence with the Venetian battle-cry, “Viva San Marco!” The lines that follow illustrate the pride and splendor of Venetian story, and are notable, I think, for a certain lofty grace of movement and opulence of diction.

  There thou shalt lie, O Saint! but compassed round

  Thickly by shining groves

  Of pillars; on thy regal portico,

  Lifting their glittering and impatient hooves,

  Corinth’s fierce steeds shall bound;

  And at thy name, the hymn of future wars,

  From their funereal caves

  The bandits of the waves

  Shall fly in exile; brought from bloody fields

  Hard won and lost in far-off Palestine,

  The glimmer of a thousand Arab moons

  Shall fill thy broad lagoons;

  And on the false Byzantine’s towers shall climb

  A blind old man sublime,

  Whom victory shall behold

  Amidst his enemies with thy sacred flag,

  All battle-rent, unrolled.

GUILIO CARCANO, ARNALDO FUSINATO AND LUIGI MERCANTINI

No one could be more opposed, in spirit and method, to Aleardo Aleardi than Giulio Carcano; but both of these poets betray love and study of English masters. In the former there is something to remind us of Milton, of Ossian, who is still believed a poet in Latin countries, and of Byron; and in the latter, Arnaud notes very obvious resemblances to Gray, Crabbe, and Wordsworth in the simplicity or the proud humility of the theme, and the courage of its treatment. The critic declares the poet’s aesthetic creed to be God, the family, and country; and in a beautiful essay on Domestic Poetry, written amidst the universal political discouragement of 1839, Carcano himself declares that in the cultivation of a popular and homelike feeling in literature the hope of Italy no less than of Italian poetry lies. He was ready to respond to the impulses of the nation’s heart, which he had felt in his communion with its purest and best life, when, in later years, its expectation gave place to action, and many of his political poems are bold and noble. But his finest poems are those which celebrate the affections of the household, and poetize the pathetic beauty of toil and poverty in city and country. He sings with a tenderness peculiarly winning of the love of mothers and children, and I shall give the best notion of the poet’s best in the following beautiful lullaby, premising merely that the title of the poem is the Italian infantile for sleep:

  Sleep, sleep, sleep! my little girl:

  Mother is near thee. Sleep, unfurl

  Thy veil o’er the cradle where baby lies!

  Dream, baby, of angels in the skies!

  On the sorrowful earth, in hopeless quest,

  Passes the exile without rest;

  Where’er he goes, in sun or snow,

  Trouble and pain beside him go.

  But when I look upon thy sleep,

  And hear thy breathing soft and deep,

  My soul turns with a faith serene

  To days of sorrow that have been,

  And I feel that of love and happiness

  Heaven has given my life excess;

  The Lord in his mercy gave me thee,

  And thou in truth art part of me!

  Thou knowest not, as I bend above thee,

  How much I love thee, how much I love thee;

  Thou art the very life of my heart,

  Thou art my joy, thou art my smart!

  Thy day begins uncertain, child:

  Thou art a blossom in the wild;

  But over thee, with his wings abroad,

  Blossom, watches the angel of God.

  Ah! wherefore with so sad a face

  Must thy father look on thy happiness?

  In thy little bed he kissed thee now,

  And dropped a tear upon thy brow.

  Lord, to this mute and pensive soul

  Temper the sharpness of his dole:

  Give him peace whose love my life hath kept:

  He too has hoped, though he has wept.

  And over thee, my own delight,

  Watch that sweet Mother, day and night,

  To whom the exiles consecrate

  Altar and heart in every fate.

  By her name I have called my little girl;

  But on life’s sea, in the tempest’s whirl,

  Thy helpless mother, my darling, may

  Only tremble and only pray!

  Sleep, sleep, sleep! my baby dear;

  Dream of the light of some sweet star.

  Sleep, sleep! and I will keep

  Thoughtful vigils above thy sleep.

  Oh, in the days that are to come,

  With unknown trial and unknown doom,

  Thy little heart can ne’er love me

  As thy mother loves and shall love thee!

II

Arnaldo Fusinato of Padua has written for the most part comic poetry, his principal piece of this sort being one in which he celebrates and satirizes the student-life at the University of Padua. He had afterward to make a formal reparation to the students, which he did in a poem singing their many virtues. The original poem of The Student is a rather lively series of pictures, from which we learn that it was once the habit of studious youth at Padua, when freshmen, or matricolini, to be terrible dandies, to swear aloud upon the public ways, to pass whole nights at billiards, to be noisy at the theater, to stand treat for the Seniors, joyfully to lend these money, and to acquire knowledge of the world at any cost. Later, they advanced to the dignity of breaking street-lamps and of being arrested by the Austrian garrison, for in Padua the students were under a kind of martial law. Sometimes they were expelled; they lost money at play, and wrote deceitful letters to their parents for more; they shunned labor, and failed to take degrees. But we cannot be interested in traits so foreign to what I understand is our own student-life. Generally, the comic as well as the sentimental poetry of Fusinato deals with incidents of popular life; and, of course, it has hits at the fleeting fashions and passing sensations: for example, Il Bloomerismo is satirized.

The poem which I translate, however, is in a different strain from any of these. It will be remembered that when the Austrians returned to take Venice in 1849, after they had been driven out for eighteen months, the city stood a bombardment of many weeks, contesting every inch of the approach with the invaders. But the Venetians were very few in number, and poorly equipped; a famine prevailed among them; the cholera broke out, and raged furiously; the bombs began to drop into the square of St. Mark, and then the Venetians yielded, and ran up the white flag on the dearly contested lagoon bridge, by which the railway traveler enters the city. The poet is imagined in one of the little towns on the nearest main-land.

  The twilight is deepening, still is the wave;

  I sit by the window, mute as by a grave;

  Silent, companionless, secret I pine;

  Through tears where thou liest I look, Venice mine.

  On the clouds brokenly strewn through the west

  Dies the last ray of the sun sunk to rest;

  And a sad sibilance under the moon

  Sighs from the broken heart of the lagoon.

  Out of the city a boat draweth near:

  “You of the gondola! tell us what cheer!”

  “Bread lacks, the cholera deadlier grows;

  From the lagoon bridge the white banner blows.”

  No, no, nevermore on so great woe,

  Bright sun of Italy, nevermore glow!

  But o’er Venetian hopes shattered so soon,

  Moan in thy sorrow forever, lagoon!

  Venice, to thee comes at last the last hour;

  Martyr illustrious, in thy foe’s power;

  Bread lacks, the cholera deadlier grows;

  From the lagoon bridge the white banner blows.

  Not all the battle-flames over thee streaming;

  Not all the numberless bolts o’er thee screaming;

  Not for these terrors thy free days are dead:

  Long live Venice! She’s dying for bread!

  On thy immortal page, sculpture, O Story,

  Others’iniquity, Venice’s glory;

  And three times infamous ever be he

  Who triumphed by famine, O Venice, o’er thee.

  Long live Venice! Undaunted she fell;

  Bravely she fought for her banner and well;

  But bread lacks; the cholera deadlier grows;

  From the lagoon bridge the white banner blows.

  And now be shivered upon the stone here

  Till thou be free again, O lyre I bear.

  Unto thee, Venice, shall be my last song,

  To thee the last kiss and the last tear belong.

  Exiled and lonely, from hence I depart,

  But Venice forever shall live in my heart;

  In my heart’s sacred place Venice shall be

  As is the face of my first love to me.

  But the wind rises, and over the pale

  Face of its waters the deep sends a wail;

  Breaking, the chords shriek, and the voice dies.

  On the lagoon bridge the white banner flies!

III

Among the later Italian poets is Luigi Mercantini, of Palermo, who has written almost entirely upon political themes — events of the different revolutions and attempts at revolution in which Italian history so abounds. I have not read him so thoroughly as to warrant me in speaking very confidently about him, but from the examination which I have given his poetry, I think that he treats his subjects with as little inflation as possible, and he now and then touches a point of naturalness — the high-water mark of balladry, to which modern poets, with their affected unaffectedness and elaborate simplicity, attain only with the greatest pains and labor. Such a triumph of Mercantini’s is this poem which I am about to give. It celebrates the daring and self-sacrifice of three hundred brave young patriots, led by Carlo Pisacane, who landed on the coast of Naples in 1857, for the purpose of exciting a revolution against the Bourbons, and were all killed. In a note the poet reproduces the pledge signed by these young heroes, which is so fine as not to be marred even by their dramatic, almost theatrical, consciousness.

We who are here written down, having all sworn,

despising the calumnies of the vulgar, strong in the

justice of our cause and the boldness of our spirits, do

solemnly declare ourselves the initiators of the Italian

revolution. If the country does not respond to our appeal,

we, without reproaching it, will know how to die

like brave men, following the noble phalanx of Italian

martyrs. Let any other nation of the world find men

who, like us, shall immolate themselves to liberty, and

then only may it compare itself to Italy, though she still

be a slave.

Mercantini puts his poem in the mouth of a peasant girl, and calls it

  THE GLEANER OF SAPRI.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

              And they are dead!

  That morning I was going out to glean;

  A ship in the middle of the sea was seen

  A barque it was of those that go by steam,

  And from its top a tricolor flag did stream.

  It anchored off the isle of Ponza; then

  It stopped awhile, and then it turned again

  Toward this place, and here they came ashore.

  They came with arms, but not on us made war.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

              And they are dead!

  They came in arms, but not on us made war;

  But down they stooped until they kissed the shore,

  And one by one I looked them in the face, —

  A tear and smile in each one I could trace.

  They were all thieves and robbers, their foes said.

  They never took from us a loaf of bread.

  I heard them utter nothing but this cry:

  “We have come to die, for our dear land to die.”

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

              And they are dead!

  With his blue eyes and with his golden hair

  There was a youth that marched before them there,

  And I made bold and took him by the hand,

  And “Whither goest thou, captain of this band?”

  He looked at me and said: “Oh, sister mine,

  I’m going to die for this dear land of thine.”

  I felt my bosom tremble through and through;

  I could not say, “May the Lord help you!”

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

              And they are dead!

  I did forget to glean afield that day,

  But after them I wandered on their way.

  And twice I saw them fall on the gendarmes,

  And both times saw them take away their arms,

  But when they came to the Certosa’s wall

  There rose a sound of horns and drums, and all

  Amidst the smoke and shot and darting flame

  More than a thousand foemen fell on them.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

              And they are dead!

  They were three hundred and they would not fly;

  They seemed three thousand and they chose to die.

  They chose to die with each his sword in hand.

  Before them ran their blood upon the land;

  I prayed for them while I could see them fight,

  But all at once I swooned and lost the sight;

  I saw no more with them that captain fair,

  With his blue eyes and with his golden hair.

  They were three hundred; they were young and strong,

              And they are dead.

CONCLUSION

Little remains to be said in general of poetry whose character and tendency are so single. It is, in a measure, rarely, if ever, known to other literatures, a patriotic expression and aspiration. Under whatever mask or disguise, it hides the same longing for freedom, the same impulse toward unity, toward nationality, toward Italy. It is both voice and force.

It helped incalculably in the accomplishment of what all Italians desired, and, like other things which fulfill their function, it died with the need that created it. No one now writes political poetry in Italy; no one writes poetry at all with so much power as to make himself felt in men’s vital hopes and fears. Carducci seems an agnostic flowering of the old romantic stalk; and for the rest, the Italians write realistic novels, as the French do, the Russians, the Spaniards — as every people do who have any literary life in them. In Italy, as elsewhere, realism is the ultimation of romanticism.

Whether poetry will rise again is a question there as it is everywhere else, and there is a good deal of idle prophesying about it. In the mean time it is certain that it shares the universal decay.

Compendio della Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Di Paolo Emiliano-Giudici. Firenze: Poligrafia Italiana, 1851.

Della Letteratura Italiana. Esempj e Giudizi, esposti da Cesare Cant�. A Complemento della sua Storia degli Italiani. Torino: Presso l’Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1860.

Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Di Francesco de Sanctis. Napoli: Antonio Morano, Editore, 1879. Saggi Critici. Di Francesco de Sanctis. Napoli: Antonio Morano, Librajo-Editore, 1869.

I Contemporanei Italiani. Galleria Nazionale del Secolo XIX. Torino: Dall’Unione Tipografico-Editrice, 1862.

L’Italie est-elle la Terre des Morts? Par Marc-Monnier. Paris: Hachette & Cie., 1860.

I Poeti Patriottici. Studii di Giuseppe Arnaud. Milano: 1862.

The Tuscan Poet Giuseppe Giusti and his Times. By Susan Horner. London: Macmillan & Co., 1864.

IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES

CONTENTS

THE COUNTRY PRINTER

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

POLICE REPORT

I

II

III

IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

XI

A TALK OF DREAMS

I

II

III

IV

VI

VII

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

I

II

III

IV

VI

TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER

I

II

III

IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

XI

XII

THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL

I

II

III

IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK

I

II

III

IV

NEW YORK STREETS

I

II

III

IV

VI

VII

VIII

IX

THE COUNTRY PRINTER

MY earliest memories, or those which I can make sure are not the sort of early hearsay that we mistake for remembrance later in life, concern a country newspaper, or, rather, a country printing-office. The office was in my childish consciousness some years before the paper was; the compositors rhythmically swaying before their cases of type; the pressman flinging himself back on the bar that made the impression, with a swirl of his long hair; the apprentice rolling the forms, and the foreman bending over the imposing-stone, were familiar to me when I could not grasp the notion of any effect from their labors. In due time I came to know all about it, and to understand that these activities went to the making of the Whig newspaper which my father edited to the confusion of the Locofocos, and in the especial interest of Henry Clay; I myself supported this leader so vigorously for the A Presidency in nay seventh year that it was long before I could realize that the election of 1844 had resulted in his defeat. My father had already been a printer for a good many years, and some time in the early thirties he had led a literary forlorn hope, in a West Virginian town, with a monthly magazine, which he printed himself and edited with the help of his sister.

As long as he remained in business he remained a country editor and a country printer; he began to study medicine when he was a young man, but he abandoned it for the calling of his life without regret, and though with his speculative and inventive temperament he was tempted to experiment in other things, I do not think he would ever have lastingly forsaken his newspaper for them. In fact, the art of printing was in our blood; it never brought us great honor or profit; and we were always planning and dreaming to get out of it, or get it out of us; but we are all in some sort bound up with it still. To me it is now so endeared by the associations of childhood that I cannot breathe the familiar odor of types and presses without emotion; and I should not be surprised if I found myself trying to cast a halo of romance about the old-fashioned country office in what I shall have to say of it here.

I

Our first newspaper was published in southwestern Ohio, but after a series of varying fortunes, which I need not dwell upon, we found ourselves in possession of an office in the northeastern corner of the State, where the prevalent political feeling promised a prosperity to one of my father’s anti-slavery opinions which he had never yet enjoyed. He had no money, but in those days it was an easy matter to get an interest in a country paper on credit, and we all went gladly to work to help him pay for the share that he acquired in one by this means. An office  which gave a fair enough living, as living was then, could be bought for twelve or fifteen hundred dollars; but this was an uncommonly good office, and I suppose the half of it  which my father took was worth one sum or the other. Afterward, within a few months, when it was arranged to remove the paper from the village where it had always been published to the county-seat, a sort of joint-stock company was formed, and the value of his moiety increased so much, nominally at least, that he was nearly ten years paying for it. By this time I was long out of the story, but at the beginning I was very vividly in it, and before the world began to call me with that voice  which the heart of youth cannot resist, it was very interesting; I felt its charm then, and now, as I turn hack to it, I feel its charm again, though it was always a story of steady work, if not hard work.

The county-seat, where it had been judged best to transfer the paper lest some other paper of like politics should be established there, was a village of only six or seven hundred inhabitants. But, as the United States Senator who was one of its citizens used to say, it was “a place of great political privileges.” The dauntless man who represented the district in the House for twenty years, and who had fought the antislavery battle from the first, was his fellow-villager, and more than compèer in distinction; and besides these, there was nearly always a State Senator or Representative among us. The county officers, of course, lived at the county-seat, and the leading lawyers, who were the leading politicians, made their homes in the shadow of the court house, where one of them was presently elected to preside as Judge of the Common Pleas. In politics, the county was already overwhelmingly Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called; the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would not vote at all under a constitution recognizing the right of men to own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out of the territories, and confined to the old Slave States. With the removal of the press to the county-seat there was a hope that this field could be widened, till every Freesoil voter became a subscriber. It did not fall out so; even of those who subscribed in the ardor of their political sympathies, many never paid; but our list was nevertheless handsomely increased, and numbered fifteen or sixteen hundred. I do not know how it may be now, but then most country papers had a list of four or five hundred subscribers; a few had a thousand, a very few twelve hundred, and these were fairly decimated by delinquents. We were so flown with hope that I remember there was serious talk of risking the loss of the delinquents on our list by exacting payment in advance; but the measure was thought too bold, and we compromised by demanding two dollars a year for the paper, and taking a dollar and a half if paid in advance. Twenty-five years later my brother, who had followed my father in the business, discovered that a man who never meant to pay for his paper would as lief owe two dollars as any less sum, and he at last risked the loss of the delinquents by requiring advance payment; it was an heroic venture, but it was perhaps time to make it.

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of the region. The portable steam sawmills dropped down on the borders of the woods have long since eaten their way through and through them, and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in the hands of the farmers there, though there is still so little that by any city scale it would seem comically little, pathetically little; but forty years ago there was so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made in kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for the huge box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and then did not heat the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the building. In that cold lake-shore country the people dwelt in wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case; the inking rollers had to be thawed before they could be used on the press; and if the current of the editor’s soul had not been the most genial that ever flowed in this rough world, it must have been congealed at its source. The eases of type had to be placed very near the windows so as to get all the light there was, and they got all the cold there was, too. From time to. time, the compositor’s fingers became so stiff that blowing on them would not avail; he passed the time in excursions between his stand and the stove; in very cold weather, he practiced the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and when it lost heat, warming it again. The man at the press-wheel was then the enviable man; those who handled the chill damp sheets of paper were no more fortunate than the compositors.

II

THE first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without much change. It could never have been a very luxurious dwelling, and my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region is rough and fierce; and the late winds have a malice sharper than the saltest gales of the North Shore of Massachusetts. I know that there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the “slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion for Don Quixote, and I was then, at the age of fifteen, preparing to write a life of Cervantes. This scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots froze.

III

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together these always kept life interesting and sunshiny to him. With his serene temperament and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly well fitted to encounter the hardships of a country editor’s lot. But for the moment, and for what now seems a long time after the removal of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The printing-office was the centre of civic and social interest; it was frequented by visitors at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gayety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office seems always to be: the walls were splotched with ink and the floor littered with refuse newspapers; but lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village flocked in, and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter, and lively energy in folding the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now of what sorrow life and death have since wrought for all those happy young creatures, but I may recall without too much pathos the sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from his gravity far enough to relieve the regular mercenary at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the applause of the whole company.

We were very vain of that press, which replaced the hand press hitherto employed in printing the paper. This was of the style and make of the hand-press which superseded the Ramage press of Franklin’s time; but it had been decided to signalize our new departure by the purchase of a power-press of modern contrivance, and of a speed fitted to meet the demands of a subscription list  which might be indefinitely extended. A deputation of the leading politicians accompanied the editor to New York, where he went to choose the machine, and where he bought a second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and patent. I do not know, or at this date I would not undertake to say, just what principle governed his selection of this superannuated veteran; it seems not to have been very cheap; but possibly he had a prescience of the disabilities which were to task his ingenuity to the very last days of that press. Certainly no man of less gift and skill could have coped with its infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed nursing it into such activity as carried it hysterically through those far-off publication days. It had obscure functional disorders of various kinds, so that it would from time to time cease to act, and would have to be doctored by the hour before it would go on. There was probably some organic trouble, too, for though it did not really fall to pieces on our hands, it showed itself incapable of profiting by several improvements which he invented, and could, no doubt, have successfully applied to the press if its constitution had not been undermined. It went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel which revolved at a great rate, till it came to the moment of making the impression, when the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance as nothing but an heroic effort at the crank could overcome. It finally made so great a draught upon our forces that it was decided to substitute steam for muscle in its operation, and we got a small engine, which could fully sympathize with the press in having seen better days. I do not know that there was anything the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler had some peculiarities which might well mystify the casual spectator. He could easily have satisfied himself that there was no danger of its blowing up, when he saw my brother feeding bran or corn-meal into its safety-valve, in order to fill up certain seams or fissures in it, which caused it to give out at the moments of the greatest reluctance in the press. But still, he must have had his misgivings of latent danger of some other kind, though nothing ever actually happened of a hurtful character. To this day, I do not know just where those seams or fissures were, but I think they were in the boiler-head, and that it was therefore suffering from a kind of chronic fracture of the skull. What is certain is that, somehow, the engine and the press did always get us through publication day, and not only with safety but often with credit; so that not long ago, when I was at home, and my brother and I were looking over an old file of his paper, we found it much better printed than either of us expected; as well printed, in fact, as if it had been done on an old hand-press, instead of the steam power-press which it vaunted the use of. The wonder was that, under all the disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on our steam power-press at all; it was little short of miraculous that it was legibly printed, and altogether unaccountable that such impressions as we found in that file could come from it. Of course, they were not average impressions; they were the very best out of the whole edition, and were as creditable as the editorial make-up of the sheet.

IV

On the first page was a poem, which I suppose I must have selected, and then a story, filling all the rest of the page, which my brother more probably chose; for he had a decided fancy in fiction, and had a scrap-book of inexhaustible riches, which he could draw upon indefinitely for old personal or family favorites. The next page was filled with selections of various kinds, and with original matter interesting to farmers. Then came a page of advertisements, and then the editorial page, where my father had given his opinions of the political questions which interested him, and which he thought it the duty of the country press to discuss, with sometimes essays in the field of religion and morals. There was a letter of two columns from Washington, contributed every week by the congressman who represented our district; and there was a letter from New York, written by a young-lady of the county who was studying art under a master of portraiture then flourishing in the metropolis; if that is not stating it too largely for the renown of Thomas Hicks, as we see it in a vanishing perspective. The rest of this page, as well as the greater part of the next, was filled with general news, clipped from the daily papers, and partly condensed from them. There was also such local intelligence as offered itself, and communications on the affairs of village and county; but the editor did not welcome tidings of new barns and abnormal vegetation, or flatter hens to lay eggs of unusual size or with unusual frequency by undue public notice. All that order of minute neighborhood gossip which now makes the country paper a sort of open letter was then unknown. He published marriages and deaths, and such obituary notices as the sorrowing fondness of friends prompted them to send him; and he introduced the custom of publishing births, after the English fashion, which the people took to kindly.

We had an ambition, even so remotely as that day, in the direction of the illustration which has since so flourished in the newspapers. Till then we had never gone further in the art than to print a jubilant raccoon over the news of some Whig victory, or, what was to the same purpose, an inverted cockerel in mockery of the beaten Democrats; but now we rose to the notion of illustrated journalism. We published a story with a woodcut in it, and we watched to see bow that cut came out all through the edition with a pride that was perhaps too exhaustive; at any rate, we never tried another.

Of course, much of the political writing in the paper was controversial, and was carried on with editors of other opinions elsewhere in the county, for we had no rival in our own village. In this, which has always been the vice of American journalism, the country press was then fully as provincial as the great metropolitan journals are now. These may he more pitilessly personal in the conduct of their political discussions, and a little more skilled in obloquy and insult; but the bickering went on in the country papers quite as idly and foolishly. I fancy nobody really cared for our quarrels, and that those who followed them were disgusted when they were more than merely wearied.

The space given to them might better have been given even to original poetry. This was sometimes accepted, but was not invited; though our sixth page commonly began with verse of some kind. Then came more prose selections, but never at any time accounts of murder or violent crimes, which the editor abominated in themselves and believed thoroughly corrupting. Advertisements of various kinds filled out the sheet, which was simple and quiet in typography, wholly without the hand-bill display which now renders nearly all newspapers repulsive to the eye. I am rather proud, in my quality of printer, that this was the style which I established; and we maintained it against all advertisers, who then as now wished to out-shriek one another in large type and ugly woodcuts.

It was by no means easy to hold a firm-hand with the “live business men” of our village and country, who came out twice a year with the spring and fall announcements of their fresh stocks of goods, which they had personally visited New York to lay in; but one of the moral advantages of an enterprise so modest as ours was that the counting-room and the editorial-room were united under the same head, and this head was the editor’s. After all, I think we lost nothing by the bold stand we made in behalf of good taste, and at any rate we risked it when we had not the courage to cut off our delinquent subscribers.

We had business advertising from all the villages in the county, for the paper had a large circle of readers in each, and a certain authority, in virtue of representing the county-seat. But a great deal of our advertising was of patent medicines, as the advertising still is in the country papers. It was very profitable, and so was the legal advertising, when we could get the money for it. The money had to come by order of court, and about half the time the order of court failed to include the costs of advertising. Then we did not get it, and we never got it, though we were always glad to get the legal advertising on the chance of getting the pay. It was not official, but was made up of the lawyers’ notices to defendants of the suits brought against them. If it had all been paid for, I am not sure that we should now be in a position to complain of the ingratitude of the working-classes, or prepared to discuss, from a vantage of personal experience, the duty of vast wealth to the community; but still we should have been better off for that money, as well as the money we lost by a large and loyal list of delinquent subscribers. From time to time there were stirring appeals to these adherents in the editorial columns, which did not stir them, and again the most flattering offers to take any kind of produce in payment of subscription. Sometimes my brother boldly tracked the delinquents to their lairs. In most cases I fancy they escaped whatever arts he used to take them; many died peacefully in their beds afterward, and their debts follow them to this day. Still, he must now and then have got money from them, and I am sure he did get different kinds of “trade.” Once, I remember, he brought back in the tail of his wagon a young pig, a pig so very young that my father pronounced it “merely an organization.” Whether it had been wrought to frenzy or not by the strange experiences of its journey, I cannot say, but as soon as it was set down on the ground it began to run madly, and it kept on running till it fell down and perished miserably. It had been taken for a year’s subscription, and it was quite as if we had lost a delinquent subscriber.

V

Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at conscientious and self-respecting journalism; it addressed itself seriously to the minds of its readers; it sought to form their tastes and opinions. I do not know how much it influenced them, if it influenced them at all, and as to any effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that cannot be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. But since no good effort is altogether lost, I am sure that this endeavor must have had some tacit effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from a sincerity of conviction that devoted itself to the highest interest of the reader, that appealed to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It went from our home to the homes of the people in a very literal sense, for my father usually brought his exchanges from the office at the end of his day there, and made his selections or wrote his editorials while the household work went on around him, and his children gathered about the same lamp, with their hooks or their jokes; there were apt to be a good many of both.

Our county was the most characteristic of that remarkable group of counties in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty years ago the population was almost purely New England in origin, either by direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly after the sojourn of a generation in New York State. We were ourselves from southern Ohio, where the life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted Yankees cold and blunt in their manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. They formed in that day a leaven of right thinking and feeling which was to leaven the whole lump of the otherwise proslavery or indifferent state; and I suppose that outside of the antislavery circles of Boston there was nowhere in the country a population so resolute and so intelligent in its political opinions. They were very radical in every way, and, hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested more new religions and new patents than have been even heard of in less inquiring communities. When we came among them they had lately been swept by the fires of spiritualism, which left behind a great deal of smoke and ashes where the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. A belief in the saving efficacy of spirit phenomena still exists among them, but not, I fancy, at all in the former measure, when nearly every household had its medium, and the tables that tipped outnumbered the tables that did not tip. The old New York Tribune, which was circulated in the country almost as widely as our own paper, had deeply schooled the people in the economics of Horace Greeley, and they were ready for any sort of millennium, religious or industrial, that should arrive, while they looked very wisely after the main chance in the meantime. They were temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up to the County Fair once a year, when they were apt to visit the printing-office and pay for their papers. In spite of the English superstition to the contrary, the average American is not very curious, if one may judge from his reticence in the presence of things strange enough to excite question; and if our craft surprised these witnesses they rarely confessed it.

They thought it droll, as people of the simpler occupations are apt to think all the more complex arts; and one of them once went so far in expression of his humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the type in his case, “Like an old hen pickin’ up millet.” This sort of silence, and this sort of comment, both exasperated the printers, who took their revenge as they could. They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber’s horse, tied before the office, crossed his hind-legs and sat down in his harness like a tired man, and they proposed to go out and offer him a chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to come inside. But fate did not often give them such innings; they mostly had to create their chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that.

There was always a good deal of talk going on, but although we were very ardent politicians, the talk was not political. When it was not mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed about authors among ourselves, and with the village wits who dropped in. There were several of these who were readers, and they liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare.

It was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our tongues; indeed, the printing-office of former days had so much affinity with the theatre that compositors and comedians were easily convertible; and I have seen our printers engaged in hand-to-hand combats with column-rules, two up and two down, quite like the real bouts on the stage. Religion entered a good deal into our discussions, which my father, the most tolerant of men, would not suffer to become irreverent, even on the lips of law students bathing themselves in the fiery spirit of Tom Paine. He was willing to meet any one in debate of moral, religious, or political questions, and the wildest-haired Comeouter, the most ruthless sceptic, the most credulous spiritualist, found him ready to take them seriously, even when it was hard not to take them in joke.

It was part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, to bear patiently with another kind of frequenter: the type of farmer who thought he wished to discontinue his paper, and really wished to be talked into continuing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting the subscriber talk himself out, and carrying him from point to point in his argument, always consenting that he knew best what he wanted to do, but skilfully persuading him at last that a home-paper was more suited to his needs than any city substitute. Once I could have given the heads of his reasoning, but they are gone from me now. The editor was especially interested in the farming of the region, and I think it was partly owing to the attention he called to the question that its character was so largely changed. It is still a dairy country, but now it exports grain, and formerly the farmers had to buy their flour.

He did not neglect any real local interest in his purpose of keeping his readers alive to matters of more general importance, but he was fortunate in addressing himself to people who eared for the larger, if remoter, themes he loved. In fact, as long as slavery remained a question in our politics, they had a seriousness and dignity which the present generation can hardly imagine; and men of all callings felt themselves uplifted by the appeal this question made to their reason and conscience. My father constantly taught in his paper that if slavery could he kept out of the territories it would perish, and, as I have said, this was the belief of the vast majority of his readers. They were more or less fervid in it, according to their personal temperaments; some of them were fierce in their convictions, and some humorous, but they were all in earnest. The editor sympathized more with those who took the true faith gayly. All were agreed that the Fugitive Slave Law was to be violated at any risk; it would not have been possible to take an escaping slave out of that county without bloodshed, but the people would have enjoyed outwitting his captors more than destroying them. Even in the great John Brown times, when it was known that there was a deposit of his impracticable pikes somewhere in our woods, and he and his followers came and went among us on some mysterious business of insurrectionary aim, the affair had its droll aspects which none appreciated more keenly than the Quaker-born editor. With his cheerful scepticism, he could never have believed that any harm or danger would come of it all; and I think he would have been hardly surprised to wake up any morning and find that slavery had died suddenly during the night, of its own iniquity.

He was like all country editors then, and I dare say now, in being a printer as well as an editor, and be took a full share in the mechanical labors. These were formerly much more burdensome, for twice or thrice the present type-setting was then done in the country offices. At the present day the country printer buys of a city agency his paper already printed on one side, and he gets it for the cost of the blank paper, the agency finding its account in the advertisements it puts in. Besides this patent inside, as it is called, the printer buys stereotyped selections of other agencies, which offer him almost as wide a range of matter as the exchange newspapers he used to choose from. The few columns left for local gossip and general news, and for whatever editorial comment he cares to make on passing events, can be easily filled up by two compositors. But in my time we had three journeymen at work and two or three girl-compositors, and commonly a boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer in a personal quality, and the printing-office was unquestionably more of a school. After we began to take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as they cared to profit by it; but I think it did not serve to widen their thoughts or quicken their wits as it did those of the men. They looked to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they had no pride in it. They did not learn the whole trade, as the journeymen had done, and served only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set type. They were then paid by the thousand ems, and their earnings were usually as great at the end of a month as at the end of a year. But the boy who came up from his father’s farm, with the wish to be a printer because Franklin had been one, and with the intent of making the office his university, began by sweeping it out, by hewing wood and carrying water for it. He became a roller-boy, and served long behind the press before he was promoted to the case, where he learned slowly and painfully to set type. His wage was forty dollars a year and two suits of clothes, for three years, when his apprenticeship ended, and his wander-years (too often literally) began. He was glad of being inky and stained with the marks of his trade; he wore a four-cornered paper cap, in the earlier stages of his service, and even an apron. When he became a journeyman, he clothed himself in black doeskin and broadcloth, and put on a silk hat and the thinnest-soled fine boots that could be found, and comported himself as much like a man of the world as he knew how to do. His work brought him acquainted with a vast variety of interests, and kept his mind as well as hands employed; he could not help thinking about them, and he did not fail to talk about them. His comments had generally a slightly acid flavor, and his constant survey of the world, in the “map of busy life” always under his eye, bred in him the contempt of familiarity. He was none the less agreeable for that, and the jokes that flew about from case to case in our office were something the editor would have been the last man to interfere with. He read or wrote on through them all, and now and then turned from his papers to join in them.

VI

The journeyman of that time and place was much better than the printer whom we had known earlier and in a more lax civilization, who was too apt to be sober only when he had not the means to be otherwise, and who arrived out of the unknown with nothing in his pocket, and departed into it with only money enough to carry him to the next printing-office. If we had no work for him it was the custom to take up a collection in the office, and he accepted it as a usage of the craft, without loss of self-respect. It could happen that his often infirmity would overtake him before he got out of town, but in this case he did not return for a second collection; I suppose that would not have been good form. Now and then a printer of this earlier sort appeared among us for a little time, but the air of the Western Reserve was somehow unfriendly to him, and he soon left us for the kindlier clime of the Ohio River, or for the more southerly region which we were ourselves sometimes so homesick for, and which his soft, rolling accent so pleasantly reminded us of. Still, there was something about the business — perhaps the arsenic in the type-metal — which everywhere affected the morals as it was said sometimes to affect the nerves.

There was one of our printers who was a capital compositor, a most engaging companion, and of unimpeachable Western Reserve lineage, who would work along in apparent perpetuity on the line of duty, and then suddenly deflect from it. If he wanted a day off, or several days, he would take the time, without notice, and with a princely indifference to any exigency we might be in. He came back when he chose, and offered to go to work again, and I do not remember that he was ever refused. He was never in drink; his behavior was the effect of some obscure principle of conduct, unless it was that moral contagion from the material he wrought in.

I do not know that he was any more characteristic, though, than another printer of ours, who was dear to my soul from the quaintness of his humor and his love of literature. I think he was, upon the whole, the most original spirit I have known, and it was not the least part of his originality that he was then aiming to become a professor in some college, and was diligently training himself for the calling in all the leisure he could get from his work. The usual thing would have been to read law and crowd forward in political life, hut my friend despised this common ideal. We were both studying Latin, he quite by himself, as he studied Greek and German, and I with such help as I could find in reciting to a kindly old minister, who had forgotten most of his own Latin, and whom I do not now wish to blame for falling asleep over the lessons in my presence; I did not know them well enough to keep him up to the work. My friend and I read the language, he more and I less, and we tried to speak it together, to give ourselves consequence, and to have the pleasure of saying before some people’s faces what we should otherwise have said behind their backs; I should not now undertake to speak Latin to achieve either of these aims. Besides this, we read a great deal together, mainly Shakespeare and Cervantes. I had a task of a certain number of thousand ems a day, and when I had finished that I was free to do what I liked; he would stop work at the same time, and then we would take our Don Quixote into some clean, sweet beech-woods there were near the village, and laugh our hearts out over it. I can see my friend’s strange face now, very regular, very fine, and smooth as a girl’s, with quaint blue eyes, shut long, long ago, to this dolce lome; and some day I should like to tell all about him; but this is not the place. When the war broke out he left the position he had got by that time in some college or academy farther west and went into the army. One morning, in Louisiana, he was killed by a guerilla who got a shot at him when he was a little way from his company, and who was probably proud of picking off the Yankee captain. But as yet such a fate was unimaginable. He was the first friend of my youth; he was older than I by five or six years; but we met in an equality of ambition and purpose, though he was rather more inclined to the severity of the scholar’s ideal, and I hoped to slip through somehow with a mere literary use of my learning.

VII

As I have tried to say, the printers of that day had nearly all some affinity with literature, if not some love of it; it was in a sort always at their fingers-ends, and they must have got some touch of it whether they would or not. They thought their trade a poor one, moneywise, hut they were fond of it and they did not often forsake it. Their hope was somehow to get hold of a country paper and become editors and publishers; and my friend and I, when he was twenty-four and I eighteen, once crossed over into Pennsylvania, where we had heard there was a paper for sale; but we had not the courage to offer even promises to pay for it. The craft had a repute for insolvency which it merited, and it was at odds with the community at large by reason of something not immediately intelligible in it, or at least not classifiable. I remember that when I began to write a certain story of mine, I told Mark Twain, who was once a printer, that I was going to make the hero a printer, and he said, “Better not. People will not understand him. Printing is something every village has in it, but it is always a sort of mystery, and the reader does not like to be perplexed by something that he thinks he knows about.” This seemed very acute and just, though I made my hero a printer all the same, and I offer it to the public as a light on the anomalous relation the country printer bears to his fellow-citizens. They see him following his strange calling among them, but to neither wealth nor worship, and they cannot understand why he does not take up something else, something respectable and remunerative; they feel that there must be something weak, something wrong in a man who is willing to wear his life out in a vocation which keeps him poor and dependent on the favor they grudge him. It is like the relation which all the arts bear to the world, and which is peculiarly thankless in a purely commercial civilization like ours; though I cannot pretend that printing is an art in the highest sense. I have heard old journeymen claim that it was a profession and ought to rank with the learned professions, but I am afraid that was from too fond a pride in it. It is in one sort a handicraft, like any other, like carpentering or stone-cutting; but it has its artistic delight, as every handicraft has. There is the ideal in all work; and I have had moments of unsurpassed gladness in feeling that I had come very near the ideal in what I had done in my trade. This joy is the right of every worker, and in so far as modern methods have taken it from him they have wronged him. I can understand Ruskin in his wish to restore it to some of the handicrafts which have lost it in the “base mechanical” operations of the great manufactories, where men spend their lives in making one thing, or a part of a thing, and cannot follow their work constructively. If that were to be the end, the operative would forever lose the delight in work which is the best thing in the world. But I hope this is not to be the end, and that when people like again to make things for use and not merely for profit, the workman will have again the reward that is more than wages.

I know that in the old-fashioned country printing-office we had this, and we enjoyed our trade as the decorative art it also is. Questions of taste constantly arose in the arrangement of a title-page, the display of a placard or a handbill, the use of this type or that. They did not go far, these questions, but they employed the critical faculty and the aesthetic instinct, and they allied us, however slightly and unconsciously, with the creators of the beautiful.

But now, it must be confessed, printing has shared the fate of all other handicrafts. Thanks to united labor, it is better paid in each of its subdivisions than it once was as a whole. In my time, the hire of a first-rate country printer, who usually worked by the week, was a dollar a day; but of course this was not so little in 1852 as it would be in 1892. My childish remembrance is of the journeymen working two hours after supper, every night, so as to make out a day of twelve hours; but at the time I write of the day of ten hours was the law and the rule, and nobody worked longer, except when the President’s Message was to be put in type, or on some other august occasion.

The pay is not only increased in proportion to the cost of living, but it is really greater, and the conditions are all very much better. But I believe no apprentice now learns the whole trade, and each of our printers, forty years ago, would have known how to do everything in the kind of office he hoped to own. He would have had to make a good many things which the printer now buys, and first among them the rollers, which are used for inking the type on the press. These were of a composition of glue and molasses, and were of an india-rubbery elasticity and consistency, as long as they were in good condition. But with use and time they became hard, the ink smeared on them, and they failed to impart it evenly to the type; they had to be thrown away, or melted over again. This was done on the office stove, in a large bucket which they were cut up into, with fresh glue and molasses added. It seems in the retrospect to have been rather a simple affair, and I do not now see why casting a roller should have involved so much absolute failure, and rarely have given a satisfactory result. The mould was a large copper cylinder, and the wooden core of the roller was fixed in place by an iron cap and foot-piece. The mixture boiled away, as it now seems to me, for days, and far into the sleepy nights, when as a child I was proud of sitting up with it very late. Then at some weird hour, my father or my brother poured it into the mould, and we went home and left the rest with fate. The next morning the whole office crowded round to see the roller drawn from the mould, and it usually came out with such long hollows and gaps in its sides that it had to he cut up at once and melted over again. At present, all rollers are bought somewhere in New York or Chicago, I believe, and a printer would no more think of making a roller than of making any other part of his press. “And you know,” said my brother, who told me of this change, “we don’t wet the paper now.”

“Good heavens,” said I, “you don’t print it dry!”

“Yes, and it doesn’t blur any more than if it were wet.” I suppose wetting the paper was a usage that antedated the invention of movable type. It used to be drawn, quire by quire, through a vat of clear water, and then the night before publication day it was turned and sprinkled. Now it was printed dry, I felt as if it were time to class Benjamin Franklin with the sun-myths.

VIII

Publication day was always a time of great excitement. We were busy all the morning getting the last editorials and the latest news in type, and when the paper went to press in the afternoon the entire force was drafted to the work of helping the engine and the press through their various disabilities and reluctances. Several hands were needed to run the press, even when it was in a willing frame; others folded the papers as they came from it; as many more were called from their wonted work to address them to the subscribers; for with the well-known fickleness of their sex, the young ladies of the village ceased to do this as soon as the novelty of the affair wore off. Still, the office was always rather a lively scene, for the paper was not delivered at the village houses, and each subscriber came and got his copy; the villagers began to come about the hour we went to press, the neighboring farmers called next day and throughout the week. Nearly everybody who witnessed the throes of our machinery had advice or sympathy to offer, and in a place where many people were of a mechanical turn the spectacular failure of the editor’s additions and improvements was naturally a source of public entertainment; perhaps others got as much pleasure out of his inventions as he did.

Of course, about election time the excitement was intensified; we had no railroad or telegraphic communication with the outer world, but it was felt that we somehow had the news, and it was known that we had the latest papers from Cleveland, and that our sheet would report the intelligence from them. After all, however, there was nothing very burning or seething in the eagerness of our subscribers. They could wait; their knowledge of the event would not change it, or add or take away one vote either way. I dare say it is not so very different now, when the railroad and the telegraph have made the little place simultaneous with New York and London. We people who fret our lives out in cities do not know how tranquil life in the country still is. We talk of the whirl and rush, as if it went on everywhere, but if you will leave the express train anywhere and pass five miles into the country, away from the great through lines, you will not find the whirl and rush. People sometimes go mad there from the dulness and ennui, as in the cities they sometimes go mad from the stress and the struggle; and the problem of equalizing conditions has no phase more interesting than that of getting the good of the city and the country out of the one into the other. The old-fashioned country newspaper formed almost the sole intellectual experience of the remote and quiet folks who dwelt in their lonely farmsteads on the borders of the woods, with few neighbors and infrequent visits to the township centre, where the church, a store or two, and a tavern constituted a village. They got it out of the post-office there once a week, and read it in the scanty leisure left them by their farm-work or their household drudgery, and I dare say they found it interesting. There were some men in every neighborhood, tongueyer than the rest, who, when they called on us, seemed to have got it by heart, and who were ready to defend or combat its positions with all comers; this sort usually took some other paper, too, an agricultural paper, or the New York Trybune, as they called it; or a weekly edition of a Cleveland journal. It was generally believed that Horace Greeley wrote everything in the Trybune, and when a country subscriber unfolded his Trybune, he said, with comfortable expectation, “Well, let’s see what old Horace says this week.” But by far the greater number of our subscribers took no paper but our own. I do not know whether there is much more reading done now on the farms, but I doubt it. In the villages, however, the circulation of the nearest city dailies is pretty general, and there is a large sale of the Sunday editions. I am not sure that this is an advantage, but in the undeniable decay of interest in the local preaching, some sort of mental relish for the only day of leisure is necessary. It is not so much a pity that they read the Sunday papers, as that the Sunday papers are so bad. If they were carefully and conscientiously made up, they would be of great use; they wait their reformer, and they do not seem impatient for him.

In the old time, we printers were rather more in touch with the world outside on the journalistic lines than most of our fellow-villagers, but otherwise we were as remote as any of them, and the weekly issue of the paper had not often anything tumultuously exciting for us. The greatest event of our year was the publication of the President’s Message, which was a thrill in my childish life long before I had any conception of its meaning. I fancy that the patent inside, now so universally used by the country papers, originated in the custom which the printers within easy reach of a large city had of supplying themselves with an edition of the President’s Message, to he folded into their own sheet, when they did not print their outside on the hack of it. There was always a hot rivalry between the local papers in getting out the Message, whether it was bought ready printed, or whether it was set up in the office and printed in the body of the paper. We had no local rival, but all the same we made haste when it was a question of the Message. The printers filled their cases with type, ready for the early copy of the Message, which the editor used every device to secure; when it was once in hand they worked day and night till it was all up, and then the paper was put to press at once, without regard to the usual publication day; and the community was as nearly electrified as could be with our journalistic enterprise, which was more important in our eyes than the matters the Message treated of.

There is no longer the eager popular expectation of the President’s Message that there once seemed to be; and I think it is something of a loss, that ebb of the high tide of political feeling which began with the era of our immense material prosperity. It was a feeling that formed a solidarity of all the citizens, and if it was not always, or often, the highest interest which can unite men, it was at least not that deadly and selfish cult of business which centres each of us in his own affairs and kills even our curiosity about others. Very likely people were less bent on the pursuit of wealth in those days, because there was less chance to grow rich, but the fact remains that they were less bent in that direction, and that they gave their minds to other things more than they do now. I think those other things were larger things, and that our civic type was once nobler than it is. It was before the period of corruption, when it was not yet fully known that dollars can do the work of votes, when the votes as yet rather outnumbered the dollars, and more of us had the one than the other. The great statesman, not the great millionaire, was then the American ideal, and all about in the villages and on the farms the people were eager to know what the President had said to Congress. They are not eager to know now, and that seems rather a pity. Is it because in the war which destroyed slavery, the American Democracy died, and by operation of the same fatal anomaly the American Plutocracy, which Lincoln foreboded, was horn; and the people instinctively feel that they have no longer the old interest in President or Congress?

There are those that say so, and, whether they are right or not, it is certain that into the great centres where money is heaped up the life of the country is drained, and the country press has suffered with the other local interests. The railroads penetrate everywhere, and carry the city papers seven times a week, where the home paper pays its tardy visit once, with a patent inside imported from the nearest money-centre, and its few columns of neighborhood gossip, too inconsiderable to be gathered up by the correspondents of the invasive dailies. Other causes have worked against the country press. In counties where there were once two or three papers, there are now eight or ten, without a material increase of population to draw upon for support. The county printing, which the paper of the dominant party could reckon upon, is now shared with other papers of the same politics, and the amateur printing-offices belonging to ingenious boys in every neighborhood get much of the small job-work which once came to the publisher.

It is useless to quarrel with the course of events, for which no one is more to blame than another, though human nature loves a scapegoat, and from time to time we load up some individual with the common sins, and drive him into a wilderness where he seems rather to enjoy himself than otherwise. I suppose that even if the conditions had continued favorable, the country press could never have become the influence which our editor fondly hoped and earnestly strove to make it. Like all of us who work at all, the country printer had to work too hard; and he had little time to think or to tell how to make life better and truer in any sort. His paper had once perhaps as much influence as the country pulpit; its support was certainly of the same scanty and reluctant sort, and it was without consecration by an avowed self-devotion. He was concerned with the main chance first, and after that there was often no other chance, or he lost sight of it. I should not instance him as an exemplary man, and I should he very far from idealizing him; I should not like even to undertake the task of idealizing a city journalist; and yet, in the retrospect at least, the country printer has his pathos for me — the pathos of a man who began to follow a thankless calling because he loved it, and kept on at it because he loved it, or else because its service had warped and cramped him out of form to follow any other.

POLICE REPORT

ONE day in summer, when people whom I had been urging to behave in some degree like human beings persisted in acting rather more like the poor creatures who pass for men and women in most stage-plays, I shut my manuscript in a drawer, and the next morning took an early train into the city. I do not remember just what whim it was that Jed me to visit the police court: perhaps I went because it was in the dead vast and middle of the summer, and the town afforded little other amusement; perhaps it was because, in my revolt against unreality, I was in the humor to see life whose reality asserts itself every day in the newspapers with indisputable force. If this was so, I was fated to a measure of disappointment, for when the court opened this reality often appeared no more substantial than the fiction with which I had lost my patience at home. But I am bound to say that it was much more entertaining, and that it was, so to speak, much more artistically treated. It resolved itself into melodrama, or romantic tragedy, having a prevailing comic interest, with moments of intensity, and with effects so thrilling that I came away with a sense of the highest theatrical illusion.

I

The police court in Boston is an upper room of the temple of justice, and is a large, square, dismal-complexioned chamber, with the usual seams and cracks configuring its walls and ceilings; its high, curtainless windows were long glares of sunless light, crossed with the fine drizzle of an easterly rain on the morning of my visit. About one-third of the floor is allotted to spectators, and supplied with benches of penitential severity; the remaining space is occupied by a series of curved tables set in a horse-shoe, and by a raised platform, railed off from the auditorium, as I may call it, and supporting in successive gradations the clerk’s desk, on a very long, narrow table, and the judge’s table and easy-chair. At either end of the table on which the clerk’s desk was placed was a bar, representing in one case the witness stand, and in the other the prisoner’s box; midway, the clerk stood within a screen of open iron-work, hemmed in with books of record and tin boxes full of docketed papers.

Outside of the railing were the desks of two officers of the court, whose proper titles my unfamiliarity with the place disables me from giving. They were both well in flesh, as I remember, and in spite of their blue flannel suits and the exercise of a wise discretion, by which one of them had discarded his waistcoat and neckcloth, they visibly suffered from the moist, close heat which the storm outside had driven into the court-room. From time to time one of them cried out, “Silence!” to quell a restive movement in the audience; and once the cravatless officer left his place, and came down to mine near the door, and drove out the boys who were sitting round me. “Leave!” he shouted. “This is no place for boys!” They went out obediently, and some others just like them came in immediately and took their places. They might have been the same boys, so far as any difference for the better in their looks went. They were not pleasant to the eye, nor to any other sense; and neither were the young men nor old men who for the rest formed the audience of this free dramatic spectacle. Their coat-collars came up above their shirt-collars; but, greasy as they were, the observer could not regret this misfit when chance gave an occasional glimpse of their linen — or their cotton, to be exact. For the most part, they wore their hair very short, and exposed necks which I should, I believe, have preferred to have covered. Under the influence of the humid heat, and with the wet they brought from the outside, they sent up a really deplorable smell. I do not know that I have a right to criticise the appearance of some of their eyes — they seemed perfectly good eyes to see with, in spite of their sinister or vacant expression and gloomy accessories; and certain scars and mutilations of the face and fingers were the affair of their owners rather than mine. Whenever they fell into talk, an officer of the court marched upon them and crushed them to silence. “This is no place for conversation,” he said; and the greater part of them had evidently no disposition or capacity for that art. I believe they were men and boys whose utmost mental effort sufficed to let their mouths hang open in the absorption of the performance, and was by no means equal to comment upon it. I fancied that they came there, day after day, the year round, and enjoyed themselves in their poor way, realizing many of the situations presented by experience of like predicaments, more than by sympathy or an effort of the imagination.

I had taken my place among them next the door, so that if my courage failed me at any time I could go out without disturbing the others. One need not be a very proud man to object to classing himself with them, and there were moments when I doubted if I could stand my fellow-spectators much longer; but these accesses of arrogance passed, as I watched the preparations for the play with the interest of a novice. There were already half a dozen policemen seated at the tables in semicircle, and chatting pleasantly together; and their number was constantly increased by new arrivals, who, as they came in, put their round-topped straw hats on one end of the semicircle, and sat down to fill out certain printed forms, which I suppose related to the arrests they had made, for they were presently handed to the clerk, who used them in calling up the cases. A little apart from the policemen was a group of young men, whom I took to be the gentlemen of the bar; among them, rather more dapper than the rest, was a colored lawyer, who afterwards, by an irony of Nemesis, appeared for some desperate and luckless defendants of the white race and of Irish accent. By and by two or three desks, placed conveniently for seeing and hearing everything against the railing on the clerk’s right, were occupied by reporters, unmistakable with their pencil and paper. Looking from them I saw that the judge’s chair was now filled by a quiet-looking gentleman, who seemed, behind his spectacles, to be communing with himself in a sad and bored anticipation. At times he leaned forward and spoke with the clerk or one of the gentlemen of the bar, and then fell back in sober meditation.

Like all other public exhibitions, the police court failed a little in point of punctuality. It was advertised to open at nine o’clock, but it was nearer ten when, after several false alarms, the clerk in a rapid, inarticulate formula declared it now opened, and invoked the blessing of God on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Even then there was a long wait before we of the audience heard the scuffling of the feet of the prisoners on what seemed a broad stairway behind the barrier at the judge’s right, and before any of them came in sight they were commanded by the attendant policeman to sit down, and apparently did so, on the top of the stairs. The clerk now turned towards them with a sheaf of the forms which the policemen had filled out in his hand, and successively addressed them by name: —

“Larry McShane!”

“Here, sor.”

“Complained of for being drunk. Guilty or not guilty?”

“Guilty, sor.”

“Pay a fine of one dollar and costs, and stand committed to the House of Industry.”

He jotted something down on the back of each indictment, and half turned to toss it on to his desk, and then resumed the catalogue of these offenders, accusing and dooming them all in the same weary and passionless monotone.

I confess that I had at the time the strongest curiosity to see them, hut it has since struck me that it was a finer effect merely to hear their voices in response, and to leave their figures and faces to the fancy. Sometimes the voice that answered “Guilty” was youthful, and sometimes, I grieve to say, it was feminine, though under the circumstances it had naturally that subdued tone which is thought such an excellent thing in woman. Usually, however, the voices were old and raucous, as if they had many times made the same plea in the same place, and they pronounced sir sor. The clerk’s sheaf of accusations being exhausted, they all apparently scuffled downstairs again. But a number must have remained, for now, after this sort of overture, the entertainment began in earnest, the actors on the scene appearing as they were summoned from the same invisible space behind the railing, which I think was probably sunk a little lower than the level of the auditorium, and which might, to humor the theatrical illusion, he regarded as the green-room.

II

The first piece was what I may call a little Police Pastoral, in recognition of the pretty touch of poetry which graced it. A half-grown, haddish-looking boy was arraigned for assault and battery, and took his place at one end of that long table on which rested the clerk’s desk, while a young girl of thirteen or fourteen advanced from the audience and placed herself at the other end. She was dressed in a well-fitting, ready-made suit, which somehow suggested itself as having been “marked down” to come within her means; and she wore a cheap yet tasteful hat, under which her face, as honest as it was comely, looked modestly up at the judge when he questioned her. It appeared that she was passing the apple-stand which the defendant was keeping for his mother, when he had suddenly abandoned his charge, followed her into a gate where she had taken refuge, and struck her; her cries attracted the police, and he was arrested. The officer corroborated her story, and then the judge made a signal to the prisoner, by which it seemed that he was privileged to cross-question his accuser. The injured youth seized the occasion, and in a loud, bullying, yet plaintive, tone proceeded as best he could to damage the case against him.

He: “Didn’t you pass my mother’s stand with them girls the day before?”

She, frankly: “ Yes, I did.”

He: “And didn’t you laugh at me, and call me an apple-woman?”

She, as before: “Yes, I did.”

He: “And hain’t you hit me, sometimes, before this?”

She, evasively: “I’ve never hit you to hurt you.”

He: “Now, that hain’t the question. The question is whether you’ve ever hit me.”

She: “Yes, I have — when you were trying to hold me. It was the other girls called you names. I only called you names once.”

He: “I want to know whether I hurt you any when you hollered out that way?”

She: “Yes, you did. And if I hadn’t screamed you would have done it. I don’t suppose you’d have hurt me a great deal, but you have hurt some of the girls.”

The Judge: “Did he bruise you severely when he struck you?”

She, with a relenting glance, full of soft compassion, at her enemy: “Well, he didn’t bruise me very much.”

The Judge: “Has he been in the habit of assaulting the other young girls?”

She: “He never did me before.” Then, with a sudden burst: “And I think I was every bit as much to blame as he was! I had no business to tease him.”

Here the judge, instead of joining the hands of these children and sending them forward with his blessing to dance and sing a little duet together, as would have happened on any other stage, said that he would fine the defendant seven dollars. The defendant gave way to a burst of grief, and the plaintiff, astonished at this untoward conclusion, threw the judge a pathetic and reproachful look and left the stand in painful bewilderment. I felt sorry for her, but I could not share her pity for the defendant, and my light mind was quickly distracted by the next piece.

III

I  may say here that the features of the performance followed one another rapidly, as at a variety theatre, without any disagreeable waits or the drop of a curtain. If I had anything to complain of it was the swiftness of their succession. I was not yet habituated to this, when I found the scene occupied by the two principal actors in a laughable little interlude of Habitual Drunkenness. A powerfully built, middle-aged Irishman, with evidences of coal-heaving thick upon his hands and ground into his face to the roots of his hair, was standing at one end of that long table, and listening to the tale of the policeman who, finding him quarrelsomely and noisily drunk, and not being able to prevail with him to go home, had arrested him. When he finished, the judge said to the defendant, who had stood rolling his eyes — conspicuous from the black around them — upon the spectators, as if at a loss to make out what all this might be about, that he could ask any questions he liked of the plaintiff.

“I don’t want to ask him anything, sor,” replied the defendant, like one surprised at being expected to take an interest in some alien affair.

“Have you ever seen the defendant drunk before?” asked the judge.

“Yes, your honor; I’ve seen him drunk half a dozen times, and I’ve taken him home to keep him out of harm’s way. He’s an industrious man when he isn’t in drink.”

“Is he usually disorderly when drunk?”

“Well, he and his wife generally fight when he gets home,” the policeman suggested.

The judge desisted, and the defendant’s counsel rose and signified his intention to cross-question the plaintiff: the counsel was that attorney of African race whom I have mentioned.

“How, we don’t deny that the defendant was drunk at the time of his arrest; but the question is whether he is an habitual drunkard. How many times have you seen him drunk the past month?”

“About half a dozen times.”

“Seven times?”

“I can’t say.”

“Three times?”

“More than three times.”

“More than twice you will swear to?”

“Yes.”

“How, I wish you to be very careful, please: can you state, under oath, that you have seen him drunk four times?”

“Yes,” said the policeman, “I can swear to that.”

“Very good,” said the counsel, with the air of having caught the witness tripping. “That is all.”

Aside from the satisfaction that one naturally feels in seeing any policeman bullied, I think it did me good to have my learned colored brother badger a white man. The thing was so long the other way, in every walk of life, that for the sake of the bad old times, when the sight would have been something to destroy the Constitution and subvert social order, I could have wished that he might have succeeded better in browbeating his witness. But it was really a failure, as far as concerned his object.

“The question, your honor,” the lawyer added, turning to the judge, “is, what is habitual drunkenness? I should like to ask the defendant a query or two. Now, Mr. O’Ryan, how often do you indulge yourself in a social glass?”

“Sor?”

“How often do you drink?”

“Whenever I can get it, sor.”

The audience appreciated this frankness, and were silenced by a threatening foray of the cravatless officer.

“You mean,” suggested the attorney, smoothly, “that you take a drink of beer, now and then, when you are at work.”

“I mane that, sor. A horse couldn’t do widout it.”

“Very good. But you deny that you are habitually intoxicated?”

“Sor?”

“You are not in the habit of getting drunk?”

“No, sor!”

“Very good. You are not in the habit of getting drunk.”

“I never get dhrunk whin I’m at work, sor. I get dhrunk Saturday nights.”

“Yes; when you have had a hard week’s work. I understand that—”

“I have a hard wake’s worruk every wake!” interrupted the defendant.

“But this is a thing that has grown upon you of late, as I understand. You were formerly a sober, temperate man, as your habits of industry imply.”

“Sor?”

“You have lately given way to a fondness for liquor, but up to within six months or a year ago you never drank to excess.”

“No, sor! I’ve dhrunk ever since I was born, and I’ll dhrink till I die.”

The officer could not keep ns quiet now. The counsel looked down at his table in a futile way, and then took his seat after some rambling observations, amid smiles of ironical congratulation from the other gentlemen of the bar.

The defendant confronted the judge with the calm face of a man who has established his innocence beyond cavil.

“What is the reputation of this man in his neighborhood?” inquired the judge of the policeman.

“He’s an ugly fellow. And his wife is full as bad. They generally get drunk together.”

“Any children?”

“No, sir.”

The defendant regarded the judge with heightened satisfaction in this confirmation of his own declaration. The judge leaned over and said in a confidential way to the clerk, “Give him six months in the House of Correction.”

A wild lament broke from the audience, and a woman with a face bruised to a symphony in green, yellow, and black thus identified herself as the wife of the defendant, who stood vacantly turning his cap round in his hand while sympathizing friends hurried her from the room. The poor creature probably knew that if in their late differences she had got more than she deserved, she had not got more than she had been willing to give, and was moved by this reflection. Other moralists, who do not like to treat woman as a reasonable being, may attribute her sorrow to mere blind tenderness or hysterical excitement. I could not see that it touched the spectators in any way; and I suspect that, whatever was thought of her escape from a like fate, there was a general acquiescence in the justice of his. He was either stunned by it, or failed to take it in, for he remained standing at the end of the table and facing the judge till the policeman in charge took him by the arm and stood him aside.

IV

He sat down, and I saw him no more; but I had no time to regret him, for his place was instantly occupied by a person who stepped within the bar from the audience. I had already noticed him coming in and going out of the court-room, apparently under strong excitement, and hovering about, now among the gentlemen of the bar and now among friends in the audience. He had an excited and eccentric look, and yet he looked like a gentleman — a gentleman in distress of mind; I had supposed that he could not he one of the criminal classes, or he would scarcely have been allowed so much at large. At the same time that he took his place he was confronted from the other end of the long table by a person whom I will call a lady, because I observed that every one else did so. This lady’s person tended to fat; she had a large, red face, and I learned without surprise that she was a cook. She wore a crimson shawl, and a bonnet abounding in blossoms and vegetables of striking colors, and she had one arm, between the wrist and elbow, impressively swathed in linen; she caressed, as it were, a small water-pitcher, which I felt, in spite of its ordinary appearance, wa3 somehow historical. In fact, it came out that this pitcher played an important part in the assault which the lady accused the gentleman at the other end of the table of committing upon her.

It seemed from her story that the gentleman was a boarder in the house where she was cook, and that he was in the habit of intruding upon her in the kitchen against her will and express command. A week before (I understood that she had spent the intervening time in suffering and disability) she had ordered him out, and he had turned furiously upon her with an uplifted chair and struck her on the arm with it, and then had thrown at her head the pitcher which she now held in her hands.

There were other circumstances of outrage which I cannot now recall, but they are not important in view of the leading facts.

Further testimony in behalf of the plaintiff was offered by another lady, whose countenance expressed second - girl as unmistakably as that of the plaintiff expressed cook. She was of the dish-faced Irish type, and whereas the cook was of an Old-World robustness, her witness had the pallor and flat-chestedness of the women of her race who are born in America; she preferred several shades of blue in her costume, which was of ready-made and marked-down effect. This lady with difficulty comprehended the questions intended to elicit her name and the fact of her acquaintance with the plaintiff, and I noticed a like density of understanding in most of the other persons testifying or arraigned in this court. In fact, I came to wonder if the thick-headedness of average uneducated people was not much greater than I had hitherto suspected, in my easy optimism. It was certainly inconceivable why, with intelligence enough to come in when it rained, the cook should have summoned this witness. She testified at once that she had not seen the assault, and did not know that the cook had been hurt; and no prompting of the plaintiff’s counsel could inspire her with a better recollection. In the hands of the defendant’s lawyer she developed the fact that his client was reputed a quiet, inoffensive boarder, and that she never knew of any displeasures between him and the cook.

“Did you ever see this lady intoxicated?” inquired the lawyer.

The witness reflected. “I don’t understand you,” she answered, finally.

“Have you ever known her to be overcome by drink?”

The witness considered this point also, and in due time gave it up, and turned a face of blank appeal upon the judge, who came to her rescue.

“Does she drink — drink liquor? Does she get drunk?”

“Oh! Oh yes; she’s tipsy sometimes.”

“Was she tipsy,” asked the lawyer, “on the day of the alleged assault?”

The witness again turned to the magistrate for help. “Was she tipsy on the day when she says this gentleman struck her with a chair and threw the pitcher at her head?”

“Yes, sir,” replied the witness, “she was.”

“Was she very tipsy?” the lawyer pursued.

The witness was equal to this question. “Well, yes, sir, she was. Anyway, she hadn’t left anything in the bottle on her bureau.”

“When did you see the bottle full?”

“The night before. Or in the evening. She commenced drinking in the night.”

“What was in the bottle?”

“A pint of whiskey.”

“That will do,” said the lawyer.

The witness stepped down and genteelly resumed her place near the plaintiff. Neither of the ladies changed countenance, or seemed in any wise aware that the testimony just given had been detrimental to the plaintiff’s cause. They talked pleasantly together, and were presently alike interested in the testimony of a witness to the defendant’s good character. He testified that the defendant was a notoriously peaceable person, who was in some sort of scientific employment, but where or what I could not make out; he was a college graduate, and it was quite unimaginable to the witness that he should be the object of this sort of charge.

When the witness stood aside the defendant was allowed to testify in his own behalf, which he did with great energy. He provided himself with a chair, and when he came to the question of the assault he dramatized the scene with appropriate action. He described with vividness the relative positions of himself and the cook when, on the day given, he went into the kitchen to see if the landlady were there, and was ordered out by her. “She didn’t give me time to go, but caught up a chair and came at me, thus.” Here he represented with the chair in his hand an assault that made the reporters, who sat near him, quail before the violence of the mere dumb-show. “I caught the rung of the chair in my hand, thus, and instinctively pushed it, thus. I suppose,” he added, in diction of memorable elegance, “that the impact of the chair in falling back against her wrist may have produced the contusions of which she complains.”

The judge and the bar smiled; the audience, not understanding, looked serious.

“And what,” said the judge, “about throwing the pitcher at her?”

“I never saw the pitcher, your honor, till I saw it in court. I threw no pitcher at her, but retreated from the kitchen as quickly as possible.”

“That will do,” said the judge. The plaintiff’s counsel did the best that could he done for no case at all in a brief argument. The judge heard him patiently, and then quietly remarked: “The charge is dismissed. The defendant is discharged. Call the next case.”

The plaintiff had probably imagined that the affair was going in her favor. She evidently required the explanation of her counsel that it had gone against her and all was over; for she looked at the judge in some surprise before she turned and walked out of the court-room, with quiet dignity, still caressing her pitcher and amicably accompanied by the other lady, her damaging witness.

V

Before she was well out of the door, a lady-like young woman in black was on the stand, testifying against a prisoner, who did not confront her from the other end of the long table, but stood where he seemed to have been seated on the top of those stairs I have imagined behind the railing. He looked twenty one or two years of age, and he had not at all a bad face, but rather refined; he was well dressed, and was gentlemanlike in the same degree that she was ladylike. From her testimony it appeared to me that his offence was one that might fitly be condoned, and in my ignorance I was surprised to find that it was taken seriously by the court. She had seen him, from the top of some steps in the shop where she was employed, open a drawer in the bookkeeper’s desk, and take out of it a revolver and some postage-stamps; but on his discovering her he had instantly replaced them and tried to make his escape. She gave her evidence in a low voice, and, as I thought, reluctantly; and one could very well imagine that she might have regretted causing his arrest; but it was to he considered that her own reputation was probably at stake, and if his theft had succeeded she might have been accused of it. When she stood aside, the judge turned to the defendant, who had kept quite still, nervously twisting something between his fingers, and questioned him. He did not attempt to deny the facts; he admitted them, but urged that he had immediately put the stamps and pistol back into the drawer, from which, indeed, he had hardly lifted them. The judge heard him patiently, and the young man went on, with something of encouragement, to explain that he only meant to take the things to spite the owner of the shop, on account of some grudge between them, and that he had not realized that it was stealing. He besought the judge, in terms that were moving, but not abject, to deal mercifully with him; and he stood twisting that invisible something between his fingers and keeping his eyes fixed on those of the magistrate, with a miserable smile, while he promised that he would not offend again.

The judge passed his hand to and fro over his chin, and now dropped his eyes, and now glanced at the culprit, who seemed scarcely more unhappy.

“Haven’t I seen you here before?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” I could hardly hear the prisoner assent.

“How often?”

“Twice.”

“What for?”

“Theft,” gasped the wretched creature.

The judge moved in his chair with a discomfort that he had not shown throughout the morning’s business. “If this were the first time, or the second, I should have been glad to let you off with a slight fine. But I can’t do that now. I must send you to the

House of Correction.” He nodded to the clerk: “Two months.”

The prisoner remained, with that nervous twisting of his fingers, eying the judge with his vague smile, as if he could not realize what had befallen. He did not sit down till the next culprit rose and stood near him. Then a sort of fatal change passed over his face. It looked like despair. I confess that I had not much heart for his successor. I was sick, thinking how, so far as this world was concerned, this wretch had been sent to hell; for the House of Correction is not a purgatory even, out of which one can hopefully undertake to pray periculant spirits. To he sure, the police court is not a cure of souls; and doubtless his doom was as light as the law allowed. But I could have wished that the judge had distrusted his memory or taken on his conscience the merciful sin of ignoring it. He seemed very patient, and I do not question but he acted according to light and knowledge. This may have been a hopeless thief. But it was nevertheless a terrible fate. The chances were a thousand against one that he should hereafter be anything but a thief, if he were not worse. After all, when one thinks of what the consequences of justice are, one doubts if there is any justice in it. Perhaps the thing we call mercy is the divine conception of justice.

VI

It was a thief again who was on the stage; but not a thief like that other, who, for all the reality there was in the spectacle, might have gone behind the scenes and washed the chalk off his white face. This thief was of the kind whose fortunes the old naturalistic novelists were fond of following in fictions of autobiographic form, and who sometimes actually wrote their own histories; a conventional thief, of those dear to De Foe and the Spanish picaresque romancers, with a flavor of good literature about him. Nothing could have been more classic in incident than the story of the plaintiff, an honest-looking young fellow, who testified that he had met the prisoner on the street, and, learning that he was out of work and out of money, had taken him home to his room and shared his bed with him. I do not know in just what calling this primitive and trustful hospitality is practised; the plaintiff looked and was dressed like a working-man. His strange bedfellow proved an early riser; he stole away without disturbing his host, and carried with him all the money that was in his host’s pockets. By an odd turn of luck the two encountered shortly after breakfast, and the prisoner ran. The plaintiff followed, but the other eluded him, and was again sauntering about in safety, when the eye of a third actor in the drama fell upon him. This was a young man who kept some sort of a small shop, and who was called to the witness-stand in behalf of the prosecution. He was as stupid as he could well be in some respects, and very simple questions had to be repeated several times to him. Yet he had the ferret-like instinct of the thief-catcher, and he instantly saw that his look fluttered the guilty rogue, who straightway turned and fled. But this time he had a sharper pursuer than his host, and he was coursed through all his turns and windings, up stairs and down, in houses and out, and gripped at last.

“As soon as I saw him start to run,” said the witness, who told his story with a graphic jauntiness, “I knowed he’d got something.”

“You didn’t know I’d got anything!” exclaimed the thief.

“I knowed you’d get ninety days if I caught up with you,” retorted the witness, wagging his head triumphantly.

As the officer entered the station-house with his prisoner, the host, by another odd chance, was coming out, after stating his loss to the police, and identified his truant guest.

The money, all but thirty cents, was found upon him; and though he represented that he had lawfully earned it by haying in Dedham, the fact that it was in notes of the denominations which the plaintiff remembered was counted against him, and he got the ninety days which his captor had prophesied. He, too, sat down, and I saw him no more.

VII

Now arose literally a cloud of witnesses, who came forward from some of the back seats and occupied the benches hitherto held by the plaintiffs and witnesses in the preceding cases. They were of all shades of blackness, and of both sexes and divers ages, and they were there in their solemn best clothes, with their faces full of a decorous if superficial seriousness. I must except from this sweeping assertion, however, the lady who was the defendant in the case: she was a young person with a great deal of what is called style about her, and I had seen her going and coming throughout the morning in a high excitement which she seemed to enjoy. It is difficult for a lady whose lips have such a generous breadth and such a fine outward roll to keep from smiling, perhaps, under any circumstances; and it may have been light-heartedness rather than lightmindedness that enabled her to support so gayly a responsibility that weighed down all the other parties concerned. She wore a tight-skirted black walking-dress, with a waist of perhaps caricatured smallness; her hat was full of red and yellow flowers; on her hands, which were in drawing with her lips rather than her waist, were a pair of white kid gloves. As she advanced to take her place inside the prisoner’s bar she gave in charge to a very mournful-looking elder of her race a little girl, two or three years of age, as fashionably dressed as herself, and tottering upon little high-heeled hoots. The old man lifted the child in his arms and funereally took his seat among the witnesses, while the culprit turned her full-blown smile upon the judge and confidently pleaded not guilty to the clerk’s reading of the indictment, in which she was charged with threatening the person and life of the plaintiff. At the same moment a sort of pleased expectation lighted up all those dull countenances in the court-room which had been growing more and more jaded under the process of the accusations and condemnations. The soddenest habitué of the place brightened, the lawyers and policemen eased themselves in their chairs, and I fancied that the judge himself relaxed. I could not refuse my sympathy to the general content; I took another respite from the thought of my poor thief, and I too lent myself to the hope of enjoyment from this Laughable After-piece.

The accuser also wore black, but her fashionableness, as compared with that of the defendant, was as the fashionableness of Boston to that of New York; she had studied a subdued elegance, and she wore a crape veil instead of flowers on her hat. She was of a sort of dusky pallor, and her features had not the Congoish fulness nor her skin the brilliancy of the defendant’s. Her taste in kid gloves was a decorous black.

She testified that she was employed as second-girl in a respectable family, and that the day before she had received a visit at the door from the defendant, who had invited her to come down the street to a certain point and be beaten within an inch of her life. On her failure to appear, the defendant came again, and notified her that she should hold the beating in store for her and bestow it whenever she caught her out-of-doors. These visits and threats had terrified the plaintiff, and annoyed the respectable family with which she lived, and she had invoked the law.

During the delivery of her complaint, the defendant had been lifting and lowering herself by the bar at which she stood, in anticipation of the judge’s permission to question the plaintiff. At a nod from him she now flung herself half across it.

“What’d I say I’d whip you for?”

The Plaintiff, thoughtfully: “What’d you say you’d whip me for?”

The Defendant, beating the railing with her hand: “Yes, that’s what I ast you: what for?”

The Plaintiff, with dignity: “I don’t know as you told me what for.”

The Defendant: “Now, now, none o’ that! You just answer my question.”

The Judge: “She has answered it.”

The Defendant, after a moment of surprise: “Well, then, I’ll ast her another question. Didn’t I tell you if I ever caught you goin’ to a ball with my husband ag’in I’d—”

The Plaintiff: “I didn’t go to no ball with your husband!”

The Defendant: “You didn’t go with him! Ah—” The Plaintiff: “I went with the crowd. I didn’t know who I went with.”

The Defendant: “Well, I know who paid fifty cents for your ticket! Why don’t he give me any of his money? Hain’t spent fifty cents on me or his child, there, since it was born. An’ he goes with you all the time — to church and everywhere.”

The Judge: “That will do.”

The plaintiff, who had listened “with sick and scornful looks averse,” stepped from the stand, and a dusky gentlewoman, as she looked, took her place, and corroborated her testimony. She also wore genteel black, and she haughtily turned from the defendant’s splendors as she answered much the same questions that the latter had put to the plaintiff. She used her with the disdain that a lady who takes care of bank parlors may show to a social inferior with whom her grandson has been trapped into a distasteful marriage, and she expressed by a certain lift of the chin and a fall of the eyelids the absence of all quality in her granddaughter-in-law as no words could have done it. I suppose it will be long before these poor creatures will cease to seem as if they were playing at our social conditions, or the prejudices and passions when painted black will seem otherwise than funny. But if this old lady had been born a duchess, or the daughter of a merchant one remove from retail trade, she could not have represented the unrelenting dowager more vividly. She bore witness to the blameless character of the plaintiff, to whom her grandson had paid only those attentions permissible from a gentleman unhappy in his marriage and living apart from his wife — a wife, she insinuated, unworthy both before and since the union which she had used sinister arts in forming with a family every way above her. She did not overdo the part, and she descended from the stand with the same hauteur toward the old man who succeeded her as she had shown his daughter.

The hapless sire — for this was the character he attempted — came upon the stand with his forsaken grandchild in his arms, and bore his testimony to the fact that his daughter was a good girl, and had always done what was right, and had been brought up to it. He dwelt upon her fidelity to her virtuous family training, with no apparent sense of incongruity in the facts — elicited by counsel — to the contrary; and he was an old man whose perceptions were somewhat blunted as to other things. He maundered on about his son-in-law’s neglect of his wife and child, and the expense which he had been put to on their account, and especially about the wrongs his family had suffered since his son-in-law “got to going” with the plaintiff.

“You say,” interpreted the judge, “that the plaintiff tried to seduce the affections of your daughter’s husband from her?”

The old man was brought to a long and thoughtful pause, from which he was startled by a repetition of the judge’s question. “I — I don’ know as I understand you, judge,” he faltered.

“Do you mean that the plaintiff — the person whom your daughter threatened to beat — has been trying to get your daughter’s husband’s affections away from her?”

“Why, he hain’t never showed her no affections, judge! He’s just left me to support her.”

“Very well, then. Has the plaintiff tried to get your daughter’s husband away from her?”

“I guess not, judge. He hain’t never took any notice of my daughter since he married her.”

“Well, does your son-in-law go with this person?”

“With who, judge?”

“With the plaintiff.”

“De of woman? Ho, he don’ go wid de ol’ woman any: she’s his grandmother.”

“Well, does he go with the young woman?”

“Oh yes! Yes! He goes with the young woman. Goes with her all the time. That’s the one he goes with!”

He seemed to be greatly surprised and delighted to find that this point was what the judge had been trying to get at, and the audience shared his pleasure.

I  really forget how the case was decided. Perhaps my train, which I began to be anxious not to lose, hurried me away before the denouement, as often happens with the suburban play-goer. But to one who cares rather for character than for plot it made little difference. I came away thinking that if the actors in the little drama were of another complexion, how finely the situation would have served in a certain sort of intense novel; the patrician dowager, inappeasably offended by the low match her grandson has made, and willing to encourage his penchant for the lady of his own rank, whom some fortuity may yet enable him to marry; the wife, with her vulgar but strong passions, stung to madness by the neglect and disdain of her husband’s family — it is certainly a very pretty intrigue, and I commend it to my brother (or sister) novelists who like to be praised by the reviewers for what the reviewers think profundity and power.

VIII

It was nearly a year later that I paid my second visit to the police court, on a day, like the first, humid and dull, but very close and suffocatingly hot. It was a Monday morning, and there was a full dock, as I have learned that the prisoner’s pen at the right of the clerk’s desk is called. The clerk was standing with that sheaf of indictments in his hand, and saying, “John O’Brien!” and John O’Brien was answering, “Here, sor!” and the clerk was proceeding, “Complained of for being drunk guilty or not guilty pay a fine of one dollar and costs stand committed to the House of Industry,” and then writing on the indictment and tossing it aside. As I modestly took my stand at the door, till I should gather courage to cross the room to one of the vacant seats which I saw among the policemen, one of these officers of the court approached me and said, “No room for you here to-day, my friend. Go up on the Common.” In spite of my share of that purely American vanity which delights in official recognition, I could not be flattered at this, and it was with relief that I found he was addressing a fellow-habitue behind me. The court-room was, in fact, very full, and there were no seats on the benches ordinarily allotted to spectators; so I at once crossed to my place, and sat down among the policemen, to whom I authorized my intrusion by taking my notebook from my pocket. I have some hopes that the spectators thought me a detective in plain clothes, and revered me accordingly. There was such a person near me, with his club sticking out of his back-pocket, whom I am sure I revered.

I had not come to report the events of this session of the court, but to refresh the impressions of my first visit, and I was glad to find them so just. There was, of course, some little change; but the same magistrate was there, serene, patient, mercifully inclined of visage; the colored attorney was there, in charge, as before, of a disastrous Irish case. The officials who tried to keep order had put off their flannel coats for coats of seersucker, and each carried a Japanese fan; neither wore a collar, now, and I fancied them both a little more in flesh. I think they were even less successful than formerly in quelling disturbances, though they were even more polished in the terms of their appeal. “Too much conversation in the court!” they called out to us collectively. “Conversation must cease,” they added. Then one, walking up to a benchful of voluble witnesses, would say, “‘Must cease that conversation,” and to my fellow-policemen, “Less conversation, gentlemen”; then again to the room at large, “Stop all conversation in the court,” and “All conversation must cease entirely.”

The Irish case, which presently came on, was a question of assault and battery between Mrs. O’Hara and Mrs. MacMannis; it had finally to be dismissed, after much testimony to the guilt and peaceable character of both parties. A dozen or more witnesses were called, principally young girls, who had come in their best, and with whom one could fancy this an occasion of present satisfying excitement and future celebrity. The witnesses were generally more interesting than the parties to the suits, I thought, and I could not get tired of my fellow-spectators, I suppose, if I went a great many times. I liked to consider the hungry gravity of their countenances, as they listened to the facts elicited, and to speculate as to the ultimate effect upon their moral natures — or their immoral natures — of the gross and palpable shocks daily imparted to them by the details of vice and crime. I have tried to treat my material lightly and entertainingly, as a true reporter should, but I would not have my reader suppose that I did not feel the essential cruelty of an exhibition that tore its poor rags from all that squalid shame, and its mask from all that lying, cowering guilt, or did not suspect how it must harden and deprave those whom it daily entertained. As I dwelt upon the dull visages of the spectators, certain spectacles vaguely related themselves to what I saw: the women who sat and knitted at the sessions of the Revolutionary tribunals of Paris and overwhelmed with their clamor the judges’ feeble impulses to mercy; the roaring populace at the Spanish bull-fight and the Roman arena. Here the same elements were held in absolute silence — debarred even from “conversation” — hut it was impossible not to feel that here in degree were the conditions that trained men to demand blood, to rave for the guillotine, to turn down the thumb. This procession of misdeeds, passing under their eyes day after day, must leave a miasm of moral death behind it which no prison or workhouse can hereafter cure. We all know that the genius of our law is publicity; but it may be questioned whether criminal trials may not be as profitably kept private as hangings, the popular attendance on which was once supposed to be a bulwark of religion and morality.

IX

Not that there was any avoidable brutality, or even indecorum, in the conduct of the trials that I saw. A spade was necessarily called a spade; but it seemed to me that with all the lapse of time and foreign alloy the old Puritan seriousness was making itself felt even here, and subduing the tone of the procedure to a grave decency consonant with the inquiries of justice. For it was really justice that was administered, so far as I could see; and justice that was by no means blind, but very open-eyed and keen-sighted. The causes were decided by one man, from evidence usually extracted out of writhing reluctance or abysmal stupidity, and the judgment must be formed and the sentence given where the magistrate sat, amid the confusion of the crowded room. Yet, except in the case of my poor thief, I did not see him hesitate; and I did not doubt his wisdom even in that case. His decisions seemed to me the result of most patient and wonderfully rapid cogitation, and in dealing with the witnesses he never lost his temper amid densities of dulness which it is quite impossible to do more than indicate. If it were necessary, for example, to establish the fact that a handkerchief was white, it was not to be done without some such colloquy as this:

“Was it a white handkerchief?”

“Sor?”

“Was the handkerchief white?”

“Was it white, sor?”

“Yes, was it white?”

“Was what white, sor?”

“The handkerchief — was the handkerchief white?”

“What handkerchief, sor?”

“The handkerchief you just mentioned — the handkerchief that the defendant dropped.”

“I didn’t see it, sor.”

“Didn’t see the handkerchief?”

“Didn’t see him drop it, sor,”

“Well, did you see the handkerchief?”

“The handkerchief, sor? Oh yes, sor! I saw it — I saw the handkerchief “Well, was it while?”

It was, sor.”

A boy who complained of another for assaulting him said that he knocked him down. “How did he knock you down?” asked the judge. “Did he knock you down with his fist or his open hand?”

“Yes, sor.”

“Which did he do it with?”

“Put his arms round me and knocked me down.”

“Then he didn’t knock you down. He threw you down.”

“Yes, Sor. He didn’t t’row me down. Put his arms round me and knocked me down.”

It would he impossible to caricature these things, or to exaggerate the charitable long-suffering that dealt with such cases. Sometimes, as if in mere despair, the judge called the parties to him and questioned them privately; after which the case seemed to be settled without further trial.

X

I have spoken of the theatrical illusion which the proceedings of the court produced; but it often seemed to me also like a school where bad boys and girls were brought up for punishment. They were, indeed, like children, those poor offenders, and had a sort of innocent simplicity in their wickedness, as good people have in their goodness. One case came up on the occasion of my last visit, which I should like to report verbatim in illustration, but it was of too lurid a sort to be treated by native realism; we can only bear that sort when imported; and undoubtedly there is something still to be said in behalf of decency, at least in the English language. I can only hint that this case was one which in some form or other has been coming up in the police courts ever since police courts began. It must have been familiar to those of Thebes three thousand years ago, and will be so in those of cities which shall look back on Boston in an antiquity as hoary. A hard-working old fool with a month’s pay in his pocket and the lost soul with whom he carouses; the theft; the quarrel between the lost soul and the yet more fallen spirit who harbored her and traded at second-hand in her perdition as to who stole the fool’s money, — what stale materials! Yet I was as much interested as if this were the first case of the kind, and, confronted with the fool and the lost soul and the yet more fallen spirit, I could not feel that they were — let me say it in all seriousness and reverence — so very bad. Perhaps it was because they stood there reduced to the very nakedness of their shame, and confessedly guilty in what human nature struggles to the last to deny — stood there, as a premise, far past the hope of lying — that they seemed rather subjects for pity than abhorrence. The fool and the lost soul were light and trivial; they even laughed at some of the grosser facts; but that yet more fallen spirit was ghastly tragical, as bit by bit the confession of her business was torn from her; it was torture that seemed hideously out of proportion to any end to be attained; yet as things are it had to be. If then and there some sort of redemption might have begun!

The divine life which is in these poor creatures, as in the best and purest, seemed to be struggling back to some relation and likeness to our average sinful humanity, insisting that if socially and publicly we denied it we should not hold it wholly outcast in our secret hearts, nor refuse it our sympathy. Seeing that on their hopelessly sunken level their common humanity kept that symmetry and proportion which physical deformity shows, one could not doubt that a distorted kindliness and good-nature remained to them in the midst of their depravity: the man was like a grayheaded, foolish boy; the two women as simple and cunning as two naughty children. It could be imagined that they had their friendly moments; that in extremity they might care for each other; that even such a life as theirs had its reliefs from perdition, as in disease there is relief from pain, and no suffering, out of romance, is incessant. They had certainly their decorums, their criterions. On their plane, everything but the theft and the noisy quarrel was of custom and for granted; but these were misdemeanors and disgraceful. Like another hostess of the sort, the fallen spirit was aggrieved at these. “Do you think I keep thieves in my house?... The tithe of a hair was never lost in my house before.... I’ll no swaggerers.... There comes no swaggering here.... I will bar no honest man my house, nor no cheater; but I do not love swaggering.” This is the sum of what she said that she had said in rebuke of the lost soul; that thieving and that swaggering, they incensed her, and roused in her all the instincts of a moral and respectable person. Humanity adjusts itself to all conditions, and doubtless God forsakes it in none, but still shapes it to some semblance of health in its sickness, of order in its disorder, of righteousness in its sin.

I dare say that it was not a wholesome feeling, this leniency that acquaintance with sinners produces. There is much to be urged on that side, and I would like to urge it in considering the effect of daily attendance at the police court upon these spectators whom I have tried to study for the reader’s advantage. I must own that the trial at which I have hinted did not affect them seriously, and I doubt if they psychologized upon it. They craned their necks forward and gloated on those women with an unmistakably obscene delight. If they were not beyond being the worse for anything, they were the worse for that trial. Why were they present? Theoretically, perhaps, to see that justice was done. But if justice had not been done, how could they have helped it? The public shame seemed purely depraving both to those who suffered it and to those who saw it, and it ought to have been no part of the punishment inflicted. It was horrible, and it sometimes befell those who were accused off nothing, but  were merely there to he tortured as witnesses. The lawyer who forced that wretched hostess to confess the character of her house used no unfair means, and he dealt with her as sparingly as he might; yet it was still a shocking spectacle; for she was, curiously enough, not lost to shame, but most alive to it, and, standing there before that brutal crowd, gave up her name to infamy, with atrocious pain and hate; her face was such a visage as hell-fire might flash into sight among the newly damned, but such as our familiar and respectable sunlight would do well not to reveal to any eyes but magistrates’ and priests’. Till one has seen such a thing it is incredible that it should be, and then incredible that it should possibly be of daily occurrence. It was as if the physicians in charge of a public hospital should permit that rabble to be present at a clinique for some loathsome disease, to see that there was no malpractice. If the whole trial could have taken place with closed doors, and with none present but the parties, the lawyers, and the court, what possible harm could have been done? I think none whatever, and I am so sure of this that I would not only have all the police trials secret, but I would never have another police report in print — after this! Then the decency of mystery, and perhaps something of its awe, would surround the vulgar shame and terror of the police court, and a system which does no good would at least do less harm than at present.

XI

It will be perceived that, like all reformers, I am going too far. I begin with demanding secrecy in police trials, and I end by suggesting that they be abolished altogether. But, in fact, nothing struck me more forcibly in the proceedings of the police court than their apparent futility. It was all a mere suppression of symptoms in the vicious classes, not a cure. This one or that one would not steal, or assault and hatter, for the given term of his imprisonment, but this was ludicrously far from touching even the tendency to theft and violence. These bad boys and girls came up and had their thrashing or their rap over the knuckles, and were practically bidden by the conditions of our civilization to go and sin some more. Perhaps there is no cure for vice and crime. Perhaps there is nothing but prevention, in the application of which there is always difficulty, obscurity, and uncertainty.

The other day, as I passed the court-house, that sad vehicle which is called the Black Maria was driving away from the high portal into which it backs to receive its dead. The word came inevitably; it is not so far wrong, and it may stand.) The Black Maria may still be Maria (the reason why it should ever have been I do not know), but it is black no longer. On the contrary, it is painted a not uncheerful salmon color, with its false sash picked out in drab; and at first glance, among the rattling express-wagons, it looked not unlike an omnibus of the living, and could have passed through the street without making the casual observer realize what a dreary hearse it was. I dare say it was on its way to the House of Industry, or the House of Correction, or Deer Island, or some of those places where people are put to go from bad to worse; and it was fulfilling its function with a merciful privacy, for its load of convicts might have been dragged through the streets on open hurdles for the further edification of the populace. Yet I could not help thinking — or perhaps the thought only occurs to me now — that for all reasonable hope as to the future of its inmates the Black Maria might as well have been fitted with one of those ingenious pieces of mechanism sometimes employed by the Enemies of Society, and driven out to some wide, open space where the explosion could do no harm to the vicinity, and so when the horses and driver had removed to a safe distance —

But this is perhaps pessimism.

It is very hard to say what pessimism really is, and almost any honest expression concerning the monotonous endeavor and failure of society to repress the monotonous evolution of the criminal in conditions that render his evolution inevitable must seem pessimistic. I do not suppose that we ought to kill him merely because we cannot hope to cure him, though society goes to this extreme in certain extreme cases. Is it right to kill the criminal at one stage of his career, and not at another? After the first conviction the rest is inevitable, and each succeeding conviction follows as a matter of course. A bleaker pessimist than myself might say that all criminal courts seem to be part of the process in the evolution of the criminal. Still, criminal courts must be.

A TALK OF DREAMS

BUT it is mostly my own dreams I talk of, and that will somewhat excuse me for talking of dreams at all. Every one knows how delightful the dreams are that one dreams one’s self, and how insipid the dreams of others are. I had an illustration of the fact, not many evenings ago, when a company of us got telling dreams. I had by far the best dreams of any; to be quite frank, mine were the only dreams worth listening to; they were richly imaginative, delicately fantastic, exquisitely whimsical, and humorous in the last degree; and I wondered that when the rest could have listened to them they were always eager to cut in with some silly, senseless, tasteless thing that made me sorry and ashamed for them. I shall not be going too far if I say that it was on their part the grossest betrayal of vanity that I ever witnessed.

But the egotism of some people concerning their dreams is almost incredible. They will come down to breakfast and bore everybody with a recital of the nonsense that has passed through their brains in sleep, as if they were not bad enough when they were awake; they will not spare the slightest detail; and if, by the mercy of Heaven, they have forgotten something, they will be sure to recollect it, and go back and give it all over again with added circumstance. Such people do not reflect that there is something so purely and intensely personal in dreams that they can rarely interest any one but the dreamer, and that to the dearest friend, the closest relation or connection, they can seldom be otherwise than tedious and impertinent. The habit husbands and wives have of making each other listen to their dreams is especially cruel. They have each other quite helpless, and for this reason they should all the more carefully guard themselves from abusing their advantage. Parents should not afflict their offspring with the rehearsal of their mental maunderings in sleep, and children should learn that one of the first duties a child owes its parents is to spare them the anguish of hearing what it has dreamed about overnight. A like forbearance in regard to the community at large should be taught as the first trait of good manners in the public schools, if we ever come to teach good manners there.

I

Certain exceptional dreams, however, are so imperatively significant, so vitally important, that it would be wrong to withhold them from the knowledge of those who happened not to dream them, and I feel some such quality in my own dreams so strongly that I could scarcely forgive myself if I did not, however briefly, impart them. It was only the last week, for instance, that I found myself one night in the company of the Duke of Wellington, the great Duke, the Iron one, in fact; and after a few moments of agreeable conversation on topics of interest among gentlemen, his Grace said that now, if I pleased, he would like a couple of those towels. We had not been speaking of towels, that I remember, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should mention them in the connection, whatever it was, and I went at once to get them for him. At the place where they gave out towels, and where I found some very civil people, they told me that what I wanted was not towels, and they gave me instead two bath-gowns, of rather scanty measure, butternut in color and Turkish in texture. The garments made somehow a very strong impression upon me, so that I could draw them now, if I could draw anything, as they looked when they were held up to me. At the same moment, for no reason that I can allege, I passed from a social to a menial relation to the Duke, and foresaw that when I went back to him with those bath-gowns he would not thank me as one gentleman would another, but would offer me a tip as if I were a servant. This gave me no trouble, for I at once dramatized a little scene between myself and the Duke, in which I should bring him the bath-gowns, and he should offer me the tip, and I should refuse it with a low bow, and say that I was an American. What I did not dramatize, or what seemed to enter into the dialogue quite without my agency, was the Duke’s reply to my proud speech. It was foreshown me that he would say, He did not see why that should make any difference. I suppose it was in the hurt I felt at this wound to our national dignity that I now instantly invented the society of some ladies, whom I told of my business with those bath-gowns (I still had them in my hands), and urged them to go with me and call upon the Duke. They expressed, somehow, that they would rather not, and then I urged that the Duke was very handsome. This seemed to end the whole affair, and I passed on to other visions, which I cannot recall.

I have not often had a dream of such international import, in the offence offered through me to the American character and its well-known superiority to tips, but I have had others quite as humiliating to me personally. In fact, I am rather in the habit of having such dreams, and I think I may not unjustly attribute to them the disciplined modesty which the reader will hardly fail to detect in the present essay. It has more than once been my fate to find myself during sleep in battle, where I behave with so little courage as to bring discredit upon our flag and shame upon myself. In these circumstances I am not anxious to make even a showing of courage; my one thought is to get away as rapidly and safely as possible. It is said that this is really the wish of all novices under fire, and that the difference between a hero and a coward is that the hero hides it, with a duplicity which finally does him honor, and that the coward frankly runs away. I have never really been in battle, and if it is anything like a battle in dreams I would not willingly qualify myself to speak by the card on this point. Neither have I ever really been upon the stage, but in dreams I have often been there, and always in a great trouble of mind at not knowing my part. It seems a little odd that I should not sometimes be prepared, but I never am, and I feel that when the curtain rises I shall be disgraced beyond all reprieve. I dare say it is the suffering from this that awakens me in time, or changes the current of my dreams so that I have never yet been actually hooted from the stage.

II

But I do not so much object to these ordeals as to some social experiences which I have in dreams. I cannot understand why one should dream of being slighted or snubbed in society, but this is what I have done more than once, though never perhaps so signally as in the instance I am about to give. I found myself in a large room, where people were sitting at lunch or supper around small tables, as is the custom, I am told, at parties in the houses of our nobility and gentry. I was feeling very well; not too proud, I hope, but in harmony with the time and place. I was very well dressed, for me; and as I stood talking to some ladies at one of the tables I was saying some rather brilliant things, for me; I lounged easily on one foot, as I have observed men of fashion do, and as I talked, I flipped my gloves, which I held in one hand, across the other; I remember thinking that this was a peculiarly distinguished action. Upon the whole I comported myself like one in the habit of such affairs, and I turned to walk away to another table, very well satisfied with myself and with the effect of my splendor upon the ladies. But I had got only a few paces off when I perceived (I could not see with my back turned) one of the ladies lean forward, and heard her say to the rest in a tone of killing condescension and patronage: “I don’t see why that person isn’t as well as another.”

I say that I do not like this sort of dreams, and I never would have them if I could help. They make me ask myself if I am really such a snob when I am waking, and this in itself is very unpleasant. If I am, I cannot help hoping that it will not be found out; and in my dreams I am always less sorry for the misdeeds I commit than for their possible discovery. I have done some very bad things in dreams which I have no concern for whatever, except as they seem to threaten me with publicity or bring me within the penalty of the law; and I believe this is the attitude of most other criminals, remorse being a fiction of the poets, according to the students of the criminal class. It is not agreeable to bring this home to one’s self, but the fact is not without its significance in another direction. It implies that both in the case of the dream-criminal and the deed-criminal there is perhaps the same taint of insanity; only in the deed-criminal it is active, and in the dream-criminal it is passive. In both, the inhibitory clause that forbids evil is off, but the dreamer is not hidden to do evil as the maniac is, or as the malefactor often seems to he. The dreamer is purely unmoral; good and had are the same to his conscience; he has no more to do with right and wrong than the animals; he is reduced to the state of the merely natural man; and perhaps the primitive men were really like what we all are now in our dreams. Perhaps all life to them was merely dreaming, and they never had anything like our waking consciousness, which seems to he the offspring of conscience, or else the parent of it. Until men passed the first stage of being, perhaps that which we call the soul, for want of a better name, or a worse, could hardly have existed, and perhaps in dreams the soul is mostly absent now. The soul, or the principle that we call the soul, is the supernal criticism of the deeds done in the body, which goes perpetually on in the waking mind. While this watches, and warns or commands, we go right; but  when it is off duty we go neither right nor wrong, but  are as the beasts that perish.

A common theory is that the dreams which we remember are those we have in the drowse which precedes sleeping and waking; but I do not altogether accept this theory. In fact, there is very little proof of it. We often wake from a dream, literally, but  there is no proof that we did not dream in the middle of the night the dream which is quite as vividly with us in the morning as the one we wake from. I should think that the dream which has some color of conscience in it was the drowse-dream, and that the dream which has none is the sleep-dream; and I believe that the most of our dreams will be found by this test to be sleep-dreams. It is in these we may know what we would be without our souls, without their supernal criticism of the mind; for the mind keeps on working in them, with the lights of waking knowledge, both experience and observation, but ruthlessly, remorselessly. By them we may know what the state of the habitual criminal is, what the state of the lunatic, the animal, the devil is. In them the personal character ceases; the dreamer is remanded to his type.

III

It is very strange, in the matter of dreadful dreams, how the body of the terror is, in the course of often dreaming, reduced to a mere convention. For a long time I was tormented with a nightmare of burglars, and at first I used to dramatize the whole affair in detail, from the time the burglars approached the house till they mounted the stairs and the light of their dark-lanterns shone under the door into my room. Now I have blue-pencilled all that introductory detail; I have a light shining in under my door at once; I know that it is my old burglars; and I have the effect of nightmare without further ceremony. There are other nightmares that still cost me a great deal of trouble in their construction, as, for instance, the nightmare of clinging to the face of a precipice or the eaves of a lofty building; I have to take as much pains with the arrangement of these as if I were now dreaming them for the first time and were hardly more than an apprentice in the business.

Perhaps the most universal dream of all is that disgraceful dream of appearing in public places and in society with very little or nothing on. This dream spares neither age nor sex, I believe, and I dare say the innocency of wordless infancy is abused by it and dotage pursued to the tomb. I have not the least doubt Adam and Eve had it in Eden; though, up to the moment the fig-leaf came in, it is difficult to imagine just what plight they found themselves in that seemed improper; probably there was some plight. The most amusing thing about this dream is the sort of defensive process that goes on in the mind in search of selfjustification or explanation. Is there not some peculiar circumstance or special condition in whose virtue it is wholly right and proper for one to come to a fashionable assembly clad simply in a towel, or to go about the street in nothing but a pair of kid gloves, or of pajamas at the most? This, or something like it, the mind of the dreamer struggles to establish, with a good deal of anxious appeal to the bystanders and a final sense of the hopelessness of the cause.

One may easily laugh off this sort of dream in the morning, but there are other shameful dreams whose inculpation projects itself far into the day, and whose infamy often lingers about one till lunch-time. Every one, nearly, has had them, but it is not the kind of dream that any one is fond of telling: the gross vanity of the most besotted dream-teller keeps that sort back. During the forenoon, at least, the victim goes about with the dim question whether he is not really that kind of man harassing him, and a sort of remote fear that he may be. I fancy that as to his nature and as to his mind he is so, and that but for the supernal criticism, but for his soul, he might be that kind of man in very act and deed.

The dreams we sometimes have about other people are not without a curious suggestion; and the superstitious (of those superstitious who like to invent their own superstitions) might very well imagine that the persons dreamed of had a witting complicity in their facts, as well as the dreamer. This is a conjecture that must, of course, not be forced to any conclusion. One must not go to one of these persons and ask, however much one would like to ask: “Sir, have you no recollection of such and such a thing, at such and such a time and place, which happened to us in my dream?” Any such person would be fully justified in not answering the question. It would be, of all interviewing, the most intolerable species. Yet a singular interest, a curiosity not altogether indefensible, will attach to these persons in the dreamer’s mind, and he will not be without the sense, ever after, that he and they have a secret in common. This is dreadful, but the only thing that I can think to do about it is to urge people to keep out of other people’s dreams by every means in their power.

IV

There are things in dreams very awful, which would not be at all so in waking — quite witless and aimless things, which at the time were of such baleful effect that it remains forever. I remember dreaming when I was quite a small boy, not more than ten years old, a dream which is vivider in my mind now than anything that happened at the time. I suppose it came remotely from my reading of certain “Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque,” which had just then fallen into my hands; and it involved simply an action of the fire-company in the little town where I lived. They were working the brakes of the old fire-engine, which would seldom respond to their efforts, and as their hands rose and fell they set up the heart-shaking and soul - desolating cry of “Arms Poe! arms Poe Î arms Poe!” This and nothing more was the body of my horror; and if the reader is not moved by it the fault is his and not mine; for I can assure him that nothing in my experience had been more dreadful to me.

I  can hardly except the dismaying apparition of a clown whom I once saw, somewhat later in life, rise through the air in a sitting posture and float lightly over the house-roof, snapping his fingers and vaguely smiling, while the antennæ on his forehead, which clowns have in common with some other insects, nodded elasticity. I do not know why this portent should have been so terrifying, or indeed that it was a portent at all, for nothing ever came of it; what I know is that it was to the last degree threatening and awful. I never got anything but joy out of the circuses where this dream must have originated, but the pantomime of “Don Giovanni,” which I saw at the theatre, was as grewsome to me waking as it was to me dreaming. The statue of the Commendatore, in getting down from his horse to pursue the wicked hero (I think that is what he gets down for), set an example by which a long line of statues afterward profited in my dreams. For many years, and I do not know but quite up to the time when I adopted burglars as the theme of my nightmares, I was almost always chased by a marble statue with an uplifted arm, and almost always I ran along the verge of a pond to escape it. I believe that got this pond out of my remote childhood, and that it may have been a fish-pond embowered by weeping-willows which I used to admire in the door-yard of a neighbor. I have somehow a greater respect for the material of this earlier nightmare than I have for that of the later ones, and no doubt the reader will agree with me that it is much more romantic to be pursued by a statue than to be threatened by burglars. It is but a few hours ago, however, that I saved myself from these inveterate enemies by waking up just in time for breakfast. They did not come with that light of the dark-lanterns shining under the door, or I should have known them at once, and not had so much bother; but they intimated their presence in the catch of the lock, which would not close securely, and there was some question at first whether they were not ghosts. I thought of tying the door-knob on the inside of my room to my bedpost (a bedpost that has not been in existence for fifty years), but after suffering awhile I decided to speak to them from an upper window. By this time they had turned into a trio of harmless, necessary tramps, and at my appeal to them, absolutely nonsensical as I now believe it to have been, to regard the peculiar circumstances, whatever they were or were not, they did really get up from the back porch where they were seated and go quietly away.

Burglars are not always so easily to be entreated. On one occasion, when I found a party of them digging at the corner of my house on Concord Avenue in Cambridge, and opened the window over them to expostulate, the leader looked up at me in well-affected surprise. He lifted his hand, with a twenty - dollar note in it, toward me, and said: “Oh! Can you change me a twenty-dollar bill?” I expressed a polite regret that I had not so much money about me, and then he said to the rest, “Go ahead, boys,” and they went on undermining my house. I do not know what came of it all.

Of ghosts I have seldom dreamed, so far as I can remember; in fact, I have never dreamed of the kind of ghosts that we are all more or less afraid of, though I have dreamed rather often of the spirits of departed friends. But I once dreamed of dying, and the reader, who has never died yet, may be interested to know what it is like. According to this experience of mine, which I do not claim is typical, it is like a fire kindling in an air-tight stove with paper and shavings; the gathering smoke and gases suddenly burst into flame and puff the door out, and all is over.

I  have not yet been led to execution for the many crimes I have committed in my dreams, but I was once in the hands of a barber who added to the shaving and shampooing business the art of removing his customers’ heads in treatment for headache. As I took my seat in his chair I had some lingering doubts as to the effect of a treatment so drastic, and I ventured to mention the case of a friend of mine, a gentleman somewhat eminent in the law, who after several weeks was still going about without his head. The barber did not attempt to refute my position. He merely said: “Oh, well, he had such a very thick sort of a head, anyway.”

This was a sarcasm, but I think it was urged as a reason, though it may not have been. We rarely bring away from sleep the things that seem so brilliant to us in our dreams. Verse is especially apt to fade away, or turn into doggerel in the memory, and the witty sayings which we contrive to remember will hardly bear the test of daylight. The most perfect thing of the kind out of my own dreams was something that I seemed to wake with the very sound of in my ears.

It was after a certain dinner, which had been rather uncommonly gay, with a good deal of very good talk, which seemed to go on all night, and when I woke in the morning some one was saying: “Oh, I shouldn’t at all mind his robbing Peter to pay Paul, if I felt sure that Paul would get the money.” This I think really humorous, and an extremely neat bit of characterization; I feel free to praise it, because it was not I who said it.

V

Apparently the greater part of dreams have no more mirth than sense in them. This is perhaps because the man is in dreams reduced to the brute condition, and is the lawless inferior of the waking man intellectually, as the lawless in waking are always the inferiors of the lawful. Some loose thinkers suppose that if we give the rein to imagination it will do great things, but it will really do little things, foolish and worthless things, as we witness in dreams, where it is quite unbridled. It must keep close to truth, and it must be under the law if it would work strongly and sanely. The man in his dreams is really lower than the lunatic in his deliriums. These have a logic of their own; but the dreamer has not even a crazy logic.

“Like a dog, he hunts in dreams,”

 and probably his dreams and the dog’s are not only alike, but are of the same quality. In his wicked dreams the man is not only animal, he is devil, so wholly is he let into his evils, as the Swedenborgians say. The wrong is indifferent to him until the fear of detection and punishment steals in upon him. Even then he is not sorry for his misdeed, as I have said before; he is only anxious to escape its consequences. It seems probable that when this fear makes itself felt he is near to waking; and probably when we dream, as we often do, that the thing is only a dream, and hope for rescue from it by waking, we are always just about to wake. This double effect is very strange, but still more strange is the effect which we are privy to in the minds of others when they not merely say things to us which are wholly unexpected, but think things that we know they are thinking, and that they do not express in words. A great many years ago, when I was young, I dreamed that my father, who was in another town, came into the room where I was really lying asleep and stood by my bed. He wished to greet me, after our separation, but he reasoned that if he did so I should wake, and he turned and left the room without touching me. This process in his mind, which I knew as clearly and accurately as if it had apparently gone on in my own, was apparently confined to his mind as absolutely as anything could be that was not spoken or in any wise uttered.

Of course, it was of my agency, like any other part of the dream, and it was something like the operation of the novelist’s intention through the mind of his characters. But in this there is the author’s consciousness that he is doing it all himself, while in my dream this reasoning in the mind of another was something that I felt myself mere witness of. In fact, there is no analogy, so far as I can make out, between the process of literary invention and the process of dreaming. In the invention, the critical faculty is vividly and constantly alert; in dreaming, it seems altogether absent. It seems absent, too, in what we call daydreaming, or that sort of dramatizing action which perhaps goes on perpetually in the mind, or some minds. But this day-dreaming is not otherwise any more like night-dreaming than invention is; for the man is never more actively and consciously a man, and never has a greater will to be fine and high and grand than in his day-dreams, while in his night-dreams he is quite willing to be a miscreant of any worst sort.

It is very remarkable, in view of this fact, that we have now and then, though ever so much more rarely, dreams that are as angelic as those others are demoniac. Is it possible that then the dreamer is let into his goods (the word is Swedenborg’s again) instead of his evils? It may be supposed that in sleep the dreamer lies passive, while his proper soul is away, and other spirits, celestial and infernal, have free access to his mind, and abuse it to their own ends in the one case, and use it in his behalf in the other.

That would be an explanation, but nothing seems quite to hold in regard to dreams. If it is true, why should the dreamer’s state so much oftener be imbued with evil than with good? It might be answered that the evil forces are much more positive and aggressive than the good; or that the love of the dreamer, which is his life, being mainly evil, invites the wicked spirits oftener. But that is a point which I would rather leave each dreamer to settle for himself. The greater number of every one’s dreams, like the romantic novel, I fancy, concern incident rather than character, and I am not sure, after all, that the dream which convicts the dreamer of an essential baseness is commoner than the dream that tells in his favor morally.

I dare say every reader of this book has had dreams so amusing that he has wakened himself from them by laughing, and then not found them so very funny, or perhaps not been able to recall them at all. I have had at least one of this sort, remarkable for other reasons, which remains perfect in my mind, though it is now some ten years old. One of the children had been exposed to a very remote chance of scarlet-fever at the house of a friend, and had been duly scolded for the risk, which was then quite forgotten. I dreamed that this friend, however, was giving a ladies’ lunch, at which I was unaccountably and invisibly present, and the talk began to run upon the scarlet-fever cases in her family. She said that after the last she had fumigated the whole house for seventy-two hours (the period seemed very significant and important in my dream), and had burned everything she could lay her hands on.

“And what did the nurse burn?” asked one of the other ladies.

The hostess began to laugh. “The nurse didn’t burn  a thing!”

Then all the rest burst out laughing at the joke, and the laughter woke me, to see the boy sitting up in his bed and hear him saying: “Oh, I am so sick!”

It was the nausea which announces scarlet - fever, and for six weeks after that we were in quarantine. Very likely the fear of the contagion had been in my nether mind all the time, but, so far as consciousness could testify of it, I had wholly forgotten it.

VI

One rarely loses one’s personality in dreams; it is rather intensified, with all the proper circumstances and relations of it, but I have had at least one dream in which I seemed to transcend my own circumstance and condition with remarkable completeness. Even my epoch, my precious present, I left behind (or ahead, rather), and in my unity with the persons of my dream I became strictly mediaeval. In fact, I have always called it my mediaeval dream, to such as I could get to listen to it; and it had for its scene a feudal tower in some waste place, a tower open at the top and with a deep, clear pool of water at the bottom, so that it instantly became known to me, as if I had always known it, for the Pool Tower. While I stood looking into it, in a mediaeval dress and a mediaeval mood, there came flying in at the open door of the ruin beside me the duke’s hunchback, and after him, furious and shrieking maledictions, the swarthy beauty whom I was aware the duke was tired of. The keeping was now not only ducal, but thoroughly Italian, and it was suggested somehow to my own subtle Italian perception that the hunchback had been set on to tease the girl and provoke her so that she would turn upon him and try to wreak her fury on him and chase him into the Pool Tower and up the stone stairs that wound round its hollow to the top, where the solemn sky showed. The fearful spire of the steps was unguarded, and when I had lost the pair from sight, with the dwarf’s mocking laughter and the girl’s angry cries in my ears, there came fluttering from the height, like a bird wounded and whirling from a lofty tree, the figure of the girl, while far aloof the hunchback peered over at her fall. Midway in her descent her head struck against the edge of the steps, with a kish, such as an egg-shell makes when broken against the edge of a platter, and then plunged into the dark pool at my feet, where I could presently see her lying in the clear depths and the blood curling upward from the wound in her skull like a dark smoke. I was not sensible of any great pity; I accepted the affair, quite mediævally, as something that might very well have happened, given the girl, the duke and the dwarf, and the time and place. I am rather fond of a mediæval setting for those “Dreams that wave before the half-shut eye,” just closing for an afternoon nap. Then I invite to my vision a wide landscape, with a cold, wintry afternoon light upon it, and over this plain I have hands and groups of people scurrying, in mediæval hose of divers colors and mediæval leathern jerkins, hugging themselves against the frost, and very miserable. They affect me with a profound compassion; they represent to me, somehow, the vast mass of humanity, the mass that does the work, and earns the bread, and goes cold and hungry through all the ages. I should he at a loss to say why this was the effect, and I am utterly unable to say why these fore-dreams, which I partially solicit, should have such a tremendous significance as they seem to have. They are mostly of the most evanescent and intangible character, but they have one trait in common. They always involve the attribution of ethical motive and quality to material things, and in their passage through my brain they promise me a solution off the riddle of the painful earth in the very instant when they are gone forever. They are of innumerable multitude, chasing each other with the swiftness of light, and never staying to be seized by the memory, which seems already drugged with sleep before their course begins. One of these dreams, indeed, I did capture, and I found it to be the figure 8, but lying on its side, and in that posture involving the mystery and the revelation of the mystery of the universe. I leave the reader to imagine why.

As we grow older, I think we are less and less able to remember our dreams. This is perhaps because the experience of youth is less dense, and the empty spaces of the young consciousness are more hospitable to these airy visitants. A few dreams of my later life stand out in strong relief, but for the most part they blend in an indistinguishable mass, and pass away with the actualities into a common oblivion. I should say that they were more frequent with me than they used to be; it seems to me that now I dream whole nights through, and much more about the business of my waking life than formerly. As I earn my living by weaving a certain sort of dreams into literary form, it might be supposed that I would sometime dream of the personages in these dreams, but I cannot remember that I have ever done so. The two kinds of inventing, the voluntary and the involuntary, seem absolutely and finally distinct.

Of the prophetic dreams which people sometimes have I have mentioned the only one of mine which had any dramatic interest, but I have verified in my own experience the theory of Ribot that approaching disease sometimes intimates itself in dreams of the disorder impending, before it is otherwise declared in the organism. In actual sickness I think that I dream rather less than in health. I had a malarial fever when I was a boy, and I had a sort of continuous dream in it that distressed me greatly. It was of gliding down the school-house stairs without touching my feet to the steps, and this was indescribably appalling.

The anguish of mind that one suffers from the imaginary dangers of dreams is probably of the same quality as that inspired by real peril in waking. A curious proof of this happened within my knowledge not many years ago. One of the neighbor’s children was coasting down a long hill with a railroad at the foot of it, and as he neared the bottom an express-train rushed round the curve. The flag-man ran forward and shouted to the boy to throw himself off his sled, but he kept on and ran into the locomotive, and was so hurt that he died. His injuries, however, were to the spine, and they were of a kind that rendered him insensible to pain while he lived. He talked very clearly and calmly of his accident, and when he was asked why he did not throw himself off his sled, as the flag-man bade him, he said: “I thought it was a dream” The reality had, through the mental stress, no doubt transmuted itself to the very substance of dreams, and he had felt the same kind and quality of suffering as he would have done if he had been dreaming. The Norwegian poet and novelist Bjornstjerne Bjornson was at my house shortly after this happened, and he was greatly struck by the psychological implications of the incident; it seemed to mean for him all sorts of possibilities in the obscure realm where it cast a fitful light.

But such a glimmer soon fades, and the darkness thickens round us again. It is not with the blindfold sense of sleep that we shall ever find out the secret of life, I fancy, either in the dreams which seem personal to us each one, or those universal dreams which we apparently share with the whole race. Of the race-dream, as I may call it, there is one hardly less common than that dream of going about insufficiently clad, which I have already mentioned, and that is the dream of suddenly falling from some height and waking with a start. The experience before the start is extremely dim, and latterly I have condensed this dread almost as much as the preliminary passages of my burglar-dream. I am aware of nothing but an instant of danger, and then comes the jar or jolt that wakens me. Upon the whole, I find this a great saving of emotion, and I do not know but there is a tendency, as I grow older, to shorten up the detail of what may be styled the conventional dream, the dream which we have so often that it is like a story read before. Indeed, the plots of dreams are not much more varied than the plots of romantic novels, which are notoriously stale and hackneyed. It would be interesting, and possibly important, if some observer would note the recurrence of this sort of dreams and classify their Varieties. I think we should all be astonished to find how few and slight the variations were.

VII

If I come to speak of dreams concerning the dead, it must be with a tenderness and awe that all who have had them will share with me. Nothing is more remarkable in them than the fact that the dead, though they are dead, yet live, and are, to our commerce with them, quite like all other living persons. We may recognize, and they may recognize, that they are no longer in the body, but they are as verily living as we are. This may be merely an effect from the doctrine of immortality which we all hold or have held, and yet I would fain believe that it may be something like proof of it. No one really knows, or can know, but one may at least hope, without offending science, which indeed no longer frowns so darkly upon faith. This persistence of life in those whom we mourn as dead, may not it be a witness of the fact that the consciousness cannot accept the notion of death at all, and,

“Whatever crazy sorrow saith,”

 that We have never truly felt them lost? Sometimes those who have died come back in dreams as parts of a common life which seems never to have been broken; the old circle is restored without a flaw; but whether they do this, or whether it is acknowledged between them and us that they have died, and are now disembodied spirits, the effect of life is the same. Perhaps in those dreams they and we are alike disembodied spirits, and the soul of the dreamer, which so often seems to abandon the body to the animal, is then the conscious entity, the thing which the dreamer feels to be himself, and is mingling with the souls of the departed on something like the terms which shall hereafter be constant.

I think very few of those who have lost their beloved have failed to receive some sign or message from them in dreams, and often it is of deep and abiding consolation. It may be that this is our anguish compelling the echo of love out of the darkness where nothing is, but it may be that there is something there which answers to our throe with pity and with longing like our own. Again, no one knows, but in a matter impossible of definite solution I will not refuse the comfort which belief can give. Unbelief can be no gain, and belief no loss. But those dreams are so dear, so sacred, so interwoven with the finest and tenderest tissues of our being that one cannot speak of them freely, or indeed more than most vaguely. It is enough to say that one has had them, and to know that almost every one else has had them, too. They seem to be among the universal dreams, and a strange quality of them is that, though they deal with a fact of universal doubt, they are, to my experience at least, not nearly so fantastic or Capricious as the dreams that deal with the facts of every-day life and with the affairs of people still in this world.

I do not know whether it is common to dream of faces or figures strange to our waking knowledge, but occasionally I have done this. I suppose it is much the same kind of invention that causes the person we dream of to say or do a thing unexpected to us. But this is rather common, and the creation of a novel aspect, the physiognomy of a stranger, in the person we dream of, is rather rare. In all my dreams I can recall but one presence of the kind. I have never dreamed of any sort of monster foreign to my knowledge, or even of any grotesque thing made up of elements familiar to it; the grotesqueness has always been in the motive or circumstance of the dream. I have very seldom dreamed of animals, though once, when I was a boy, for a time after I had passed a corn-field where there were some bundles of snakes, writhen and knotted together in the cold of an early spring day, I had dreams infested by like images of those loathsome reptiles. I suppose that every one has had dreams of finding his way through unnamable filth and of feeding upon hideous carnage; these are clearly the punishment of gluttony, and are the fumes of a rebellious stomach.

I have heard people say they have sometimes dreamed of a thing, and awakened from their dream and then fallen asleep and dreamed of the same thing; but I believe that this is all one continuous dream; that they did not really awaken, but only dreamed that they awakened. I have never had any such dream, but at one time I had a recurrent dream, which was so singular that I thought no one else had ever had a recurrent dream till I proved that it was rather common by starting the inquiry in the Contributors’ Club in the Atlantic Monthly, when I found that great numbers of people have recurrent dreams. My own recurrent dreams began to come during the first year of my consulate at Venice, where I had hoped to find the same kind of poetic dimness on the phases of American life, which I wished to treat in literature, as the distance in time would have given. I should not wish any such dimness now; but those were my romantic days, and I was sorely baffled by its absence. The disappointment began to haunt my nights as well as my days, and a dream repeated itself from week to week for a matter of eight or ten months to one effect. I dreamed that I had gone home to America, and that people met me and said, “Why, you have given up your place!” and I always answered: “Certainly not; I haven’t done at all what I mean to do there, yet. I am only here on my ten days’ leave.” I meant the ten days which a consul might take each quarter without applying to the Department of State; and then I would reflect how impossible it was that I should make the visit in that time. I saw that I should he found out and dismissed from my office and publicly disgraced. Then, suddenly, I was not consul at Venice, and had not been, but consul at Delhi, in India; and the distress I felt would all end in a splendid Oriental phantasmagory of elephants and native princes, with their retinues in procession, which I suppose was mostly out of my reading of De Quincey. This dream, with no variation that I can recall, persisted till I broke it up by saying, in the morning after it had recurred, that I had dreamed that dream again; and so it began to fade away, coming less and less frequently, and at last ceasing altogether.

I am rather proud of that dream; it is really my battle-horse among dreams, and I think I will ride away on it.

AN EAST-SIDE RAMBLE

THE New-Yorkers, following the custom, of Europe, often fence themselves about with a great deal of ceremony in social matters, even such small social matters as making calls.

Some ladies have days when they receive calls; others have no specified day, and then you take your chance of being turned from the door without seeing them, or if you find them, of finding them reluctant and preoccupied. A friend of mine says he has often felt as if he had been admitted through the error of the man or the maid who opened the door to him at such houses, and who returned, after carrying up his name, to say, with a frightened air, that the lady would be down in a moment.

But when there are days there is never any misgiving about letting you in. The door is whisked open before you have had time to ring, sometimes by a servant who has the effect of not belonging to the house, but hired for the afternoon. Then you leave your card on a platter of some sort in the hall to attest the fact of your visit, and at the simpler houses find your way into the drawing-room unannounced, though the English custom of shouting your name before you is very common and is always observed where there is any pretence to fashion. Certain ladies receive once a week throughout the season; others receive on some day each week of December or January or February, as the case may be. When there is this limit to a month the reception insensibly takes on the character of an afternoon tea, and, in fact, it varies from that only in being a little less crowded. There is tea or chocolate or mild punch, and a table spread with pastries and sweets, which hardly any one touches. A young lady dedicates herself to the service of each urn and offers you the beverage that flows from it. There is a great air of gayety, a very excited chatter of female voices, a constant flutter of greeting and leave-taking, and a general sense of amiable emptiness and bewildered kindness when you come away. The genius of these little affairs is supposed to be informality, but at some houses where you enjoy such informalities you find two men in livery on the steps outside, a third opens the door for you, a fourth takes your hat and stick, a fifth receives your overcoat, and a sixth catches at your name and miscalls it into the drawing-room.

I

But I must not give too exclusive an impression of ceremony in the New-Yorkers. I made some calls about Christmas - time last year in a quarter of the city where the informalities are real and where the hospitalities, such as they were, I thought as sincere as in the houses where the informalities are more apparent. The sort of calls I made were rather fashionable some years ago, but are so no longer. It was a fad to make them, and the fad, like all really nice fads, came from England, and perhaps it has now died out here because it has died out there. At any rate, it seems certain that there is now less interest, less curiosity, concerning the home life of the poor than there was then among the comfortable people. I do not say there is less sympathy — there must be still a good deal of sympathy — but I should say there was less hope with the well-to-do of bettering the condition of the ill-to-do; some philosophers even warn us against indulging a feeling of commiseration, lest it should encourage the poor to attempt themselves to better their condition.

Yet there are no signs of rebellion on the part of the poor, whom I found as tame and peaceful, apparently, when I went the rounds of their unceremonious at-homes as the most anxious philosopher could desire. My calls were by no means of the nature of a perquisition, but they left very little unknown to me, I fancy, of the way the poor live, so frank and simple is their life. They included some tenements of the American quarter, near the point of the island, on the West Side, and a rather greater number on the East Side, in the heart of the district abandoned chiefly to the Russian Jews, though there are no doubt other nationalities to be found there. It is said to be more densely populated than any other area in the world, or at least in Christendom, for within a square mile there are more than three hundred and fifty thousand men, women, and children. One can imagine from this fact alone how they are housed and what their chances of the comforts and decencies of life may be. But I must not hurry to the region of these homes before I have first tried to show the interiors of that quarter called American, where I found the Americans represented, as they are so often, by Irish people. The friend who went with me on my calls led me across the usual surface tracks, under the usual elevated tracks, and suddenly dodged before me into an alleyway about two feet wide. This crept under houses fronting on the squalid street we had left and gave into a sort of court some ten or twelve feet wide by thirty or forty feet long. The buildings surrounding it were low and very old. One of them was a stable, which contributed its stench to the odors that rose from the reeking pavement and from the closets filling an end of the court, with a corner left beside them for the hydrant that supplied the water of the whole enclosure. It is from this court that the inmates of the tenements have their sole chance of sun and air. What the place must be in summer I had not the heart to think, and on the wintry day of my visit I could not feel the fury of the skies which my guide said would have been evident to me if I had seen it in August. I could better fancy this when I climbed the rickety stairs within one of the houses and found myself in a typical New York tenement. Then I almost choked at the thought of what a hot day, what a hot night, must be in such a place, with the two small windows inhaling the putrid breath of the court and transmitting it, twice fouled by the passage through the living-room, to the black hole in the rear, where the whole family lay on the heap of rags that passed for a bed.

We had our choice which door to knock at on the narrow landing, a yard wide at most, which opened into such tenements to the right and left as many stories up as the stairs mounted. We stood at once in the presence of the hostess; there was no ceremony of sending in our cards here or having our names called to her. In one case we found her over the washtub, with her three weeks’ babe bundled in a chair beside it. A table, with a half-eaten loaf that formed her breakfast, on it, helped, with the cooking-stove, to crowd the place past any possibility of sitting down, if there had been chairs to sit in; so we stood, as people do at an afternoon tea. At sight of us the woman began to cry and complain that her man had been drunk and idle for a month and did nothing for her; though in these times he might have been sober and idle and done as little. Some good soul was paying the rent for her, which was half as great as would have hired a decent flat in a good part of the town; but how her food came or the coal for her stove remained a mystery which we did not try to solve. She wiped her tears at the exhibition of a small coin, which she had perhaps dimly foreseen through them from the moment they began to flow. It was wrong, perhaps, to give her money, but it was not very wrong, perhaps, for the money was not very much, and if it pauperized her it could not have been said that she was wholly unpauperized before she took it. These are very difficult cases, but all life is a hopeless tangle, and the right is something that does not show itself at once, especially in economical affairs.

In another tenement we found a family as gay and hopeful as this was dismal and desperate. An Irish lady, with a stylish fringe of red hair decorating her forehead, welcomed us with excuses for the state of the apartment, which in the next breath she proved herself very proud of, for she said that if people were not comfortable in their houses it was because they were slovenly and untidy. I could not see that she was neater than her neighbor on the landing below. She had a florid taste in pictures, and half a dozen large colored prints went far to hide the walls, which, she said, the landlord had lately had whitewashed, though to eyes less fond than hers they showed a livid blue. The whitewashing was the sole repairs which had been put upon her tenement since she came into it, but she seemed to think it quite enough; and her man, who sat at leisure near the stove, in the three days’ beard which seems inseparable from idle poverty, was quite boastful of its advantages. He said that he had lived in that court for thirty years and there was no such air anywhere else in this world. I could readily believe him, being there to smell it and coming away with the taste of it in my mouth. Like other necessaries of life, it must have been rather scanty in that happy home, especially at night, when the dark fell outside and a double dark thickened in the small bin which stood open to our gaze at the end of the room. The whitewash seemed not to have penetrated to this lair, where a frowzy mattress showed itself on a rickety bedstead. The beds in these sleeping-holes were never made up; they were rounded into a heap and seemed commonly of a coarse brown sacking. They had always a horrible fascination for me. I fancied them astir with a certain life which, if there had been a consensus of it to that effect, might have walked off with them.

All the tenements here were of this size and shape — a room with windows opening upon the court, and at the rear the small black bin or pen for the bed. The room was perhaps twelve feet square and the bin was six, and for such a dwelling the tenant pays six dollars a month. If he fails to pay it he is evicted, and some thirty thousand evictions have taken place in the past year. But an eviction is by no means the dreadful hardship the reader would perhaps imagine it. To be sure, it means putting the tenant on the sidewalk with his poor household gear in any weather and at any hour; but, if it is very cold or very wet weather, the evicted family is seldom suffered to pass the night there. The wretched neighbors gather about and take them in, and their life begins again on the old terms; or the charities come to their aid, and they are dispersed into the different refuges until the father or mother can find another hole for them to crawl into. Still, natural as it all is, I should think it must surprise an Irishman, who supposed he had left eviction behind him in his native land, to find it so rife in the country of his adoption.

II

My friend asked me if I would like to go into any other tenements, but I thought that if what I had seen was typical I had seen enough in that quarter. The truth is, I had not yet accustomed myself to going in upon people in that way, though they seemed accustomed to being gone in upon without any ceremony but the robust “Good-morning!” my companion gave them by way of accounting for our presence, and I wanted a little interval to prepare myself for further forays. The people seemed quite ready to be questioned, and answered us as persons in authority. They may have taken us for detectives, or agents of benevolent societies, or journalists in search of copy. In any case, they had nothing to lose and they might have something to gain; so they received us kindly and made us as much at home among them as they knew how. It may have been that in some instances they supposed that we were members of the Board of Health and were their natural allies against their landlords.

I had not realized before how much this noble institution can befriend the poor, so potently sustained as it is in the discharge of its duties by the popular sentiment in a land where popular sentiment is so often so weak. It has full power, in the public interest, to order repairs and betterments necessary for the general health in any domicile, rich or poor, in the city, and no man’s pleasure or profit may hinder it. In cases of contagion or infection, it may isolate the neighborhood or vacate the premises, or, in certain desperate conditions, destroy them. As there are always pestilences of some sort preying upon the poor (as if their poverty were not enough), my companion could point out a typhus quarter, which the Board had shut up and which we must not approach. Such minor plagues as small-pox, scarlet-fever, and diphtheria are quickly discovered and made known, and the places that they have infested are closed till they can be thoroughly purified. Any tenant believing his premises to be in an unwholesome or dangerous state may call in the Board, and from its decision the landlord has no appeal. He must make the changes the Board ordains, and he must make them at his own cost, though no doubt, when the tenant can pay, he contrives somehow to make him pay in the end. The landlord, especially if he battens on the poorer sort of tenants, is always in fear of the Board, and the tenant is in love with it, for he knows that, in a community otherwise delivered over to the pursuit of pelf or pleasure, it stands his ready friend, whose mandate private interest obeys as it obeys no other. It seems to have more honor than any other institution among us, and, amid the most frightful corruption of every kind, to remain incorruptible. Very likely the landlord may sometimes think that it abuses its power, but the tenant never thinks so, and the public seems always to agree with the tenant. The press, which is so keen to scent out paternalism in municipal or national affairs, has not vet perceived any odor of it in the Board of Health, and stands its constant friend, though it embodies in the most distinctive form the principle that, in a civilized community, the collective interest is supreme. Even if such an extension of its powers were not in the order of evolution, it would not be so illogical for the Board of Health to command the abatement of poverty when the diseases that flow from poverty cannot he otherwise abated. I should not like to prophesy that it will ever do so, but stranger things have happened through the necessity that knows no law, not even the law of demand and supply — the demand of Moloch and the supply of Misery.

III

I do not know whether the Hebrew quarter, when I began to make my calls there, seemed any worse than the American quarter or not. But I noticed presently a curious subjective effect in myself, which I offer for the reader’s speculation.

There is something in a very little experience of such places that blunts the perception, so that they do not seem so dreadful as they are; and I should feel as if I were exaggerating if I recorded my first impression of their loathsomeness. I soon came to look upon the conditions as normal, not for me, indeed, or for the kind of people I mostly consort with, but for the inmates of the dens and lairs about me. Perhaps this was partly their fault; they were uncomplaining, if not patient, in circumstances where I believe a single week’s sojourn, with no more hope of a better lot than they could have, would make anarchists of the best people in the city. Perhaps the poor people themselves are not so thoroughly persuaded that there is anything very unjust in their fate, as the compassionate think. They at least do hot know the better fortune of others, and they have the habit of passively enduring their own. I found them usually cheerful in the Hebrew quarter, and they had so much courage as enabled them to keep themselves noticeably clean in an environment where I am afraid their betters would scarcely have had heart to wash their faces and comb their hair. There was even a decent tidiness in their dress, which I did not find very ragged, though it often seemed unseasonable and insufficient. But here again, as in many other phases of life, I was struck by men’s heroic superiority to their fate, if their fate is hard; and I felt anew that if prosperous and comfortable people were as good in proportion to their fortune as these people were they Would he as the angels of light, which I am afraid they now but faintly resemble.

One of the places we visited was a court somewhat like that we had already seen in the American quarter, but rather smaller and with more the effect of a pit, since the walls around it were so much higher. There was the same row of closets at one side and the hydrant next them, but here the hydrant was bound up in rags to keep it from freezing, apparently, and the wretched place was by no means so foul under foot. To be sure, there was no stable to contribute its filth, but we learned that a suitable stench was not wanting from a bakery in one of the basements, which a man in good clothes arid a large watch-chain told us rose from it in suffocating fumes at a certain hour, when the baker was doing Some unimaginable thing to the bread. This man seemed to be the employer of labor in one of the rooms above, and he said that when the smell began they could hardly breathe. He caught promptly at the notion of the Board of Health, and I dare say that the baker will be duly abated. None of the other people complained, but that was perhaps because they had only their Yiddish to complain in, and knew that it would be wasted on us. They seemed neither curious nor suspicious concerning us; they let us go everywhere, as if they had no thought of hindering us. One of the tenements we entered had just been vacated; but there was a little girl of ten there, with some much smaller children, amusing them in the empty space. Through a public-spirited boy, who had taken charge of us from the beginning and had a justly humorous sense of the situation, we learned that this little maid was not the sister but the servant of the others, for even in these low levels society makes its distinctions. I dare say that the servant was not suffered to eat with the others when they had anything to eat, and that when they had nothing her inferiority was somehow brought home to her. She may have been made to wait and famish after the others had hungered some time. She was a cheerful and friendly creature, and her small brood were kept tidy like herself.

The basement under this vacant tenement we found inhabited, and, though it was a most preposterous place for people to live, it was not as dirty as one would think. To be sure, it was not very light and all the dirt may not have been visible. One of the smiling women who were there made their excuses, “Poor people; cannot keep very nice,” and laughed as if she had said a good thing. There was nothing in the room but a table and a few chairs and a stove, without fire, but they were all contentedly there together in the dark, which hardly let them see one another’s faces. My companion struck a match and held it to the cavernous mouth of an inner cellar half as large as the room we were in, where it winked and paled so soon that I had only a glimpse of the bed, with the rounded heap of bedding on it; but out of this hole, as if she had been a rat, scared from it by the light, a young girl came, rubbing her eyes and vaguely smiling, and vanished up-stairs somewhere.

IV

I found no shape or size of tenement but this. There was always the one room, where the inmates lived by day, and the one den, where they slept by night, apparently all in the same bed, though probably the children were strewn about the floor. If the tenement were high up, the living-room had more light and air than if it were low down; but the sleeping-hole never had any light or air of its own. My calls were made on one of the mild days which fell before last Christmas, and so I suppose I saw these places at their best; but what they must be when the summer is seven times heated without, as it often is in New York, or when the arctic cold has pierced these hapless abodes and the inmates huddle together for their animal heat, the reader must imagine for himself. The Irish-Americans had flaming stoves, even on that soft day, but in the Hebrew tenements I found no fire. They were doubtless the better for this, and it is one of the comical anomalies of the whole affair that they are singularly healthy. The death-rate among them is one of the lowest in the city, though whether for their final advantage it might not better be the highest, is one of the things one must not ask one’s self. In their presence I should not dare to ask it, even in my deepest thought They are then so like other human beings and really so little different from the best, except in their environment, that I had to get away from this before I could regard them as wild beasts.

I suppose there are and have been worse conditions of life, but if I stopped short of savage life I found it hard to imagine them. I did not exaggerate to myself the squalor that I saw, and I do not exaggerate it to the reader. As I have said, I was so far from sentimentalizing it that I almost immediately reconciled myself to it, as far as its victims were concerned. Still, it was squalor of a kind which, it seemed to me, it could not be possible to outrival anywhere in the life one commonly calls civilized. It is true that the Indians who formerly inhabited this island were no more comfortably lodged in their wigwams of bark and skins than these poor New-Yorkers in their tenements. But the wild men pay no rent, and if they are crowded together upon terms that equally forbid decency and comfort in their shelter, they have the freedom of the forest and the prairie about them; they have the illimitable sky and the whole light of day and the four winds to breathe when they issue into the Open air. The New York tenement d Wellers, even when they leave their lairs, are still pent in their high-walled streets, and inhale a thousand stenches of their own and others’ making. The street, except in snow and rain, is always better than their horrible houses, and it is doubtless because they pass so much of their time in the street that the death-rate is so low among them. Perhaps their domiciles can be best likened for darkness and discomfort to the dugouts or sod huts of the settlers on the great plains. But these are only temporary shelters, while the tenement dwellers have no hope of better housing; they have neither the prospect of a happier fortune through their own energy as the settlers have, nor any chance from the humane efforts and teachings of missionaries, like the savages. With the tenement dwellers it is from generation to generation, if not for the individual, then for the class, since no one expects that there will not always be tenement dwellers in New York as long as our present economical conditions endure.

V

When I first set out on my calls I provided myself with some small silver, which I thought I might fitly give, at least to the children, and in some of the first places I did this. But presently I began to fancy an unseemliness in it, as if it were an indignity added to the hardship of their lot, and to feel that unless I gave all my worldly wealth to them I was in a manner mocking their misery. I could not give everything, for then I should have had to come upon charity myself, and so I mostly kept my little coins in my pocket; but when we mounted into the court again from that cellar apartment and found an old, old woman there, wrinkled and yellow, with twinkling eyes and a toothless smile, waiting to see us, as if she were as curious in her way as we were in ours, I was tempted. She said in her Yiddish, which the humorous boy interpreted, that she was eighty years old, and she looked a hundred, while she babbled unintelligibly but very cheerfully on. I gave her a piece of twenty-five cents and she burst into a blessing that I should not have thought could be bought for money. We did not stay to hear it out, but the boy did, and he followed to report it to me, with a gleeful interest in its beneficent exaggerations. If it is fulfilled, I shall live to be a man of many and prosperous years, and I shall die possessed of wealth that will endow a great many colleges and found a score of libraries. I do not know whether the boy envied me or not, but I wish I could have left that benediction to him, for I took a great liking to him, his shrewd smile, his gay eyes, his promise of a Hebrew nose, and his whole wise little visage. He said that he went to school and studied reading, writing, geography, and everything. All the children we spoke to said that they went to school, and they were quick and intelligent. They could mostly speak English, while most of their elders knew only Yiddish.

The sound of this was around us on the street we issued into, and which seemed from end to end a vast bazaar, where there was a great deal of selling, whether there was much buying or not. The place is humorously called the pig-market by the Christians, because everything in the world but pork is to be found there. To me its activity was a sorrowfully amusing satire upon the business ideal of our plutocratic civilization. These people were desperately poor, yet they preyed upon one another in their commerce, as if they could be enriched by selling dear or buying cheap. So far as I could see, they would only impoverish one another more and more, but they trafficked as eagerly as if there were wealth in every bargain. The sidewalks and the roadways were thronged with peddlers and purchasers, and everywhere I saw splendid types of that old Hebrew world which had the sense if not the knowledge of God when all the rest of us lay sunk in heathen darkness. There were women with oval faces and olive tints, and clear, dark eyes, relucent as evening pools, and men with long beards of jetty black or silvery white and the noble profiles of their race. I said to myself that it was among such throngs that Christ walked, it was from such people that he chose his Disciples and his friends; but I looked in vain for him in Hester Street. Probably he was at that moment in Fifth Avenue.

VI

After all, I was loath to come away. I should have liked to stay and live awhile with such as they, if the terms of their life had been possible, for there were phases of it that were very attractive. That constant meeting and that neighborly intimacy were superficially, at least, of a very pleasant effect, and, though the whole place seemed abandoned to mere trade, it may have been a necessity of the case, for I am told that many of these Hebrews have another ideal, and think and vote in the hope that the land of their refuge shall yet some day keep its word to the world, so that men shall be equally free in it to the pursuit of happiness. I suppose they are mostly fugitives from the Russian persecution, and that from the cradle their days must have been full of fear and care, and from the time they could toil that they must have toiled at whatever their hands found to do. Yet they had not the look of a degraded people; they were quiet and orderly, and I saw none of the drunkenness or the truculence of an Irish or low American neighborhood among them. There were no policemen in sight, and the quiet behavior that struck me so much seemed not to have been enforced. Very likely they may have moods different from that I saw, but I only tell of what I saw, and I am by no means ready yet to preach “ — poverty as a saving grace. Though they seemed so patient and even cheerful in some cases, I do not think it is well for human beings to live whole families together in one room with a kennel out of it, where modesty may survive, but decency is impossible. Neither do I think they can be the better men and women for being insufficiently clothed and fed, though so many of us appear none the better for being housed in palaces and clad in purple and fine linen and faring sumptuously every day.

I have tried to report simply and honestly what I saw of the life of our poorest people that day. One might say it was not so bad as it is painted, but I think it is quite as bad as it appeared; and I could not see that in itself or in its conditions it held the promise or the hope of anything better. If it is tolerable, it must endure; if it is intolerable, still it must endure. Here and there one will release himself from it, and doubtless numbers are always doing this, as in the days of slavery there were always fugitives; but for the great mass the captivity remains. Upon the present terms of leaving the poor to be housed by private landlords, whose interest it is to get the greatest return of money for the money invested, the very poorest must always be housed as they are now. Nothing but public control in some form or other can secure them a shelter fit for human beings.

TRIBULATIONS OF A CHEERFUL GIVER

SOME months ago, as I was passing through a downtown street on my way to the elevated station, I saw a man sitting on the steps of a house. He seemed to be resting his elbows on his knees and holding out both his hands. As I came nearer I perceived that he had no hands, but only stumps, where the fingers had been cut off close to the palms, and that it was these stumps he was holding out in the mute appeal which was his form of begging. Otherwise he did not ask charity. When I approached him he did not look up, and when I stopped in front of him he did not speak. I thought this rather fine, in its way; except for his mutilation, which the man really could not help, there was nothing to offend the taste; and his immobile silence was certainly impressive.

I decided at once to give him something; for when I am in the presence of want, or even the appearance of want, there is something that says to me, “Give to him that asketh,” and I have to give, or else go away with a bad conscience — a thing I hate. Of course I do not give much, for I wish to be a good citizen as well as a good Christian; and, as soon as I obey that voice which I cannot disobey, I hear another voice reproaching me for encouraging street beggary. I have been taught that street beggary is wrong, and when I have to unbutton two coats and go through three or four pockets before I can reach the small coin I mean to give in compliance with that imperative voice I certainly feel it to be wrong. So I compromise, and I am never able to make sure that either of those voices is satisfied with me. I am not even satisfied with myself; but I am better satisfied than if I gave nothing. That was the selfish reason I now had for deciding to yield to my better nature, and to obey the voice which bade me “Give to him that asketh”; for, as I said, I hate a bad conscience, and of two bad consciences I always choose the least, which in a case like this is the one that incensed political economy gives me.

I

I put my hand into my hip-pocket, where I keep my silver, and found nothing there but half a dollar. This at once changed the whole current of my feelings; and it was not chill penury that repressed my noble rage, but chill affluence. It was manifestly wrong to give half a dollar to a man who had no hands, or to any sort of beggar. I was willing to commit a small act of incivism, but I had not the courage to flout political economy to the extent of fifty cents; and I felt that when I was bidden “Give to him that asketh,” I was never meant to give so much as a half-dollar, but a cent or a half-dime or, at the most, a quarter. I wished I had a quarter. I would gladly have given a quarter, but there was nothing in my pocket but that fatal, that inexorably indivisible half-dollar, the continent of two quarters, but not practically a quarter. I would have asked anybody in sight to change it for me, but there was no one passing; it was a quiet street of brown-stone dwellings, and not a thronged thoroughfare at any time. At that hour of the late afternoon it was deserted, except for the beggar and myself; and I am not sure that he had any business to be sitting there on the steps of another man’s house, or that I had the right to encourage his invasion by giving him anything. For a moment I did not know quite what to do. To be sure, I was not bound to the man in any way. He had not asked me for charity, and I had barely paused before him; I could go on and ignore the incident. I thought of doing this, but then I thought of the bad conscience I should be certain to have, and I could not go on. I glanced across the street, and near the corner I saw a decent-looking restaurant; and “Wait a minute,” I said to the man, as if he were likely to go away, and I ran across to get my half-dollar changed at the restaurant.

I was now quite resolved to give him a quarter and be done with it; the thing was getting to be a bore. But, when I entered the restaurant, I saw no one there but a young man quite at the end of a long room; and when he had come all the way forward to find what I wanted I was ashamed to ask him to change my half-dollar, and I pretended that I wanted a package of Sweet Caporal cigarettes, which I did not want, and which it was a pure waste for me to buy, since I do not smoke, though doubtless it was better to buy them and encourage commerce than to give the half-dollar and encourage beggary. At any rate, I instinctively felt that I had political economy on my side in the transaction, and I made haste to go back to the man on the steps, and secure myself with Christian charity, too. On the way over to him, however, I decided that I would not give him a quarter, and I ended by poising fifteen cents on one of his out-stretched stumps.

He seemed very grateful, and thanked me earnestly, with a little note of surprise in his voice, as if he were not used to such splendid charity as that; and, in fact, I suppose very few people gave so handsomely to him. He spoke with a German accent; and when I asked him how he had lost his hands he answered, “Frost. Frozen off, here in the city.” I could not go on and ask him for further particulars, for I thought it but too likely that he had been drunk when exposed to weather that would freeze one’s hands off, and that he was now paying the penalty of his debauchery. I was in no wise so much at peace with myself as I had expected to be; and I was still less so when a young girl halted as she came by, and, seeing what I had done, and hearing what the man said, put a dime on the other stump. She looked poor herself; her sack was quite shabby about the seams. I did not think she could afford to give so much to a single beggar, and I was aware of having tempted her to the excess by my own profusion. If she had seen me giving the man only a nickel, she would perhaps have given him a cent, which was probably all she could afford.

II

I came away feeling indescribably squalid. I perceived now that I could have taken my stand upon the high ground of discouraging street beggary, and given nothing; but, having once lowered myself to the level of the early Christians, I ought to have given the half-dollar. It did not console me to remember the surprise in the man’s gratitude, and to reflect that I had probably given him at least three times as much as he usually got from the tenderest-hearted people. I perceived that I had been the divinely appointed bearer of half a dollar to his mutilation and his misery, and I had given him fifteen cents out of it, and wasted ten, and kept the other twenty-five; in other words, I had embezzled the greater part of the money intrusted to me for him.

When I got home and told them at dinner just what I had done, they all agreed that I had done a mighty shabby thing. I do not know whether the reader will agree with them or not — perhaps I would rather not know; and, on the other hand, I shall not ask him what he would have done in the like case. Now that it is laid before him in all its shameless nakedness, I dare say he will pretend that he would have given the half-dollar. But I doubt if he would; and there is a curious principle governing this whole matter of giving, which I would like him to consider with me. Charity is a very simple thing when you look at it from the stand-point of the good Christian, but it is very complex when you look at it from the stand-point of the good citizen; and there seems to be an instinctive effort on our part to reconcile two duties by a certain proportion which we observe in giving. Whether we say so to ourselves or not, we behave as if it would be the wildest folly to give at all in the measure Christ bade; and by an apt psychological juggle we adjust our succor to the various degrees of need that present themelves. To the absolutely destitute it is plain that anything will be better than nothing, and so we give the smallest charity to those who need charity most. I dare say people will deny this, but it is true, all the same, as the reader will allow when he thinks about it. We act upon a kind of logic in the matter, though I do not suppose many act consciously upon it. Here is a man whispering to you in the dark that he has not had anything to eat all day, and does not know where to sleep. Shall you give him a dollar to get a good supper and a decent lodging? Certainly not: you shall give him a dime, and trust that some one else will give him another; or, if you have some charity tickets about you, then you give him one of them, and go away feeling that you have at once befriended and outwitted him; for the supposition is that he is a fraud, and has been trying to work you.

This is not a question which affects the excellence of the charities system. I know how good and kind and just that is; but it is a question that affects the whole Christian philosophy of giving. A friend whom I was talking the matter over with was inclined to doubt whether Christ’s doctrine was applicable, in its sweeping simplicity, to our complex modern conditions; whether it was final, whether it was the last word, as we say. Of course, it does seem a little absurd to give to him that asketh, when you do not know what he is going to do with the money, and when you do not know whether he has not come to want by his own fault, or whether he is really in want.

III

I must say that his statement of his own case is usually incoherent. The poor fellows have very little imagination or invention; they might almost as well be realistic novelists. I find that those who strike me for a night’s lodging, when they stop me in the street at night, come as a rule from Pittsburg, and are ironworkers of some sort: the last one said he was a puddler, “A skilled mechanic,” he explained— “what is called a skilled mechanic”; and, of course, he was only watching for some chance to get back to Pittsburg, though there was no chance of work, from what he told me, after he got there. On the other hand, I find that most of those who ask by day for money to get a dinner are from Philadelphia, or the rural parts of eastern Pennsylvania, though within six months I have extended hospitality (I think that is the right phrase) to two architectural draftsmen from Boston. They were both entirely decent-looking, sober-looking young men, who spoke like men of education, and they each gratefully accepted a quarter from me. I do not attempt to account for them, for they made no attempt to account for themselves; and I think the effect was more artistic so.

I am rarely approached by any professed New-Yorker, which is perhaps a proof of the superior industry or prosperity of our city; but now and then a fellow-citizen who has fallen out asks me for money in the street, and perhaps goes straight and spends it for drink. Drink, however, is as necessary in some forms as food itself, and a rich, generous port wine is often prescribed for invalids. These men, without exception, look like invalids, and I dare say that they would prefer to buy a rich, generous port wine if I gave them money enough. I never do that, though I have a means of making my alms seem greater, to myself at least, by practising a little cordiality with the poor fellows. I do not give grudgingly or silently, but I say, if I give at all, when they ask me, “Why, of course!” or “Yes, certainty”; and sometimes I invite them to use their feeble powers of invention in my behalf, and tell how they wish me to think they have come to the sad pass of beggary. This seems to flatter them, and it makes me feel much better, which is realty my motive for doing it.

Now and then they will offer me some apology for begging, in a tone that says, “I know how it is myself”; and once there was one who began by saying, “I know it’s a shame for a strong man like me to be begging, but—” They seldom have any devices for working me, beyond the simple statement of their destitution; though there was a ease in which I helped a poor fellow raise a quarter upon a postal-order, which he then kept as a pledge of my good faith. Their main reliance seems to be lead - pencils, which they have in all inferior variety. I find that they will take it kindly if you do not want any change back when you have given them a coin worth more than they asked for the pencil, and that they will even let you off without taking the pencil after you have bought it. In the end you have to use some means to save yourself from the accumulation of pencils, unless you are willing to burn them for kindling-wood; and I find the simplest way is not to take them after you have paid for them. It is amusing how quickly you can establish a comity with these pencil people; they will not only let you leave your pencils with them, but they will sometimes excuse you from buying if you remind them that you have bought of them lately. Then, if they do not remember you, they at least smile politely and pretend to do so.

IV

Ought one to give money to a hand-organist who is manifestly making himself a nuisance before the door of some one else? I have asked myself this when I have been tempted, and I am not yet quite clear about it. At present, therefore, I give only to the inaudible street minstrels, who earn an honest living and make no noise about it. I cannot think that a ballad-singer on Sixth Avenue, who pours forth his artless lay amid the roar and rattle of the elevated trains, the jangle and clatter of the horse-cars, the bang of the grocers’ carts, and the thunder of the express-wagons, is practically molesting anybody; and I believe that one can reward his innocent efforts without wronging his neighbors. It is always amusing to have him stop in his most effective phrase to say, “Thank you, thank you, sir,” and then go on again. The other day, as I dropped my contribution into the extended hat, I asked, “How is business?” and the singer interrupted himself to answer, “ Nothing-to-brag-of-sir-thank-you,” and resumed with continuous tenderness, the “ditty of no tone” that he was piping to the inattentive uproar of the street.

It may be doubted whether a balladist who is not making himself heard is earning his money; but, on the other hand, it may be asked if he is not less regrettable for that reason. A great many good people do not earn their money, and yet by universal consent they seem to have a right to it. We cannot oblige the poor to earn their money any more than the rich, without attacking the principle on which society is based and classing ourselves with its enemies. If people get money out of other people, we ought not to ask how they get it, whether it is much or little; and I, at any rate, will not scan too closely the honesty of the inaudible balladist of the avenue. Neither will I question the gains of those silentious minstrels who grind small, mute organs at the corners of the pavement, with a little tin cup beside them to receive tribute. They are usually old, old women, and I suppose Italians; but they seem not to be very distinctively anything. How they can sit upon the cold stone all day long without taking their deaths, passes me to say; and I am inclined to think that they do really earn their money, if not as minstrels, then as monuments of human endurance. The average American grandmother would sneeze in five seconds, under the same conditions, and be laid up for the rest of the winter. But these hardy aliens remain unaffected by cold or wet, light or dark. One night I came upon one sleeping on her curbstone, — such a small, dull wad of outworn womanhood! — her gray old head bent upon her knees, and her withered arms wound in her thin shawl. It was very chill that night, with a sharp wind sweeping the street that the Street Department had neglected; but this poor old thing slept on, while I stood by her trying to imagine her short and simple annals: a dim, far-off childhood in some peasant hut, a girlhood with its tender dreams, a motherhood with its cares, a grandmotherhood with its pains — the whole round of woman’s life, with want through all, wound into this last result of houseless age at my feet. How much of human life comes to no more — if, indeed, one ought not to say how little comes to so much! I sighed, as people of feeling used to do it in the eighteenth century, and dropped a dime into the tin cup. The sound startled the beldame, and I hope that before she woke and looked up at me she had time to dream riches and luxury for the rest of her life. “Bella musical” I said, with a fine irony, and she smiled and shrugged, and began to feel for the handle of her organ, as if she were willing to begin giving me my money’s worth on the spot. If we did not see such sights every day how impossible they would seem!

V

The whole spectacle of poverty, indeed, is incredible. As soon as you cease to have it before your eyes, — even when you have it before your eyes, — you can hardly believe it, and that is perhaps why so many people deny that it exists, or is much more than a superstition of the sentimentalist. When I get back into my own comfortable room, among my papers and books, I remember it as I remember something at the theatre. It seems to be turned off, as Niagara does, when you come away. The difficulty here in New York is that the moment you go out again you find it turned on, full tide. I used to live in a country supposed to be peculiarly infested by beggars; but I believe I was not so much asked for charity in Venice as I am in New York. There are as many beggars on our streets as in Venice, and, as for the organized efforts to get at one’s compassion, there is no parallel for New York anywhere. The letters asking aid for air funds, salt and fresh, for homes and shelters, for reading-rooms and eating-rooms, for hospitals and refuges, for the lame, halt, and blind, for the old, for the young, for the anhungered and ashamed, of all imaginable descriptions, storm in with every mail, so that one hates to open one’s letters nowadays; for instead of finding a pleasant line from a friend, one finds an appeal, in print imitating typewriting, from several of the millionaires in the city for aid of some good object to which they have lent the influence of their signatures, and enclosing an envelope, directed but not stamped, for your subscription. You do not escape from the proof of poverty even by keeping in-doors amid your own luxurious environment; besides, your digestion becomes impaired, and you have to go out, if you are to have any appetite for your dinner; and then the trouble begins on other terms.

One of my minor difficulties, if I may keep on confessing myself to the reader, is a very small pattern of newsboys, whom I am tempted to make keep the change when I get a one-cent paper of them and give them a five-cent piece. I see men, well dressed, well brushed, with the air of being exemplary citizens, fathers of families, and pillars of churches, wait patiently or impatiently, while these little fellows search one pocket and another for the pennies due, or run to some comrade Chonnie or Chimmie for them; and I cannot help feeling that I may be doing something very disorganizing or demoralizing in failing to demand my change. At first I used to pass on without apparently noticing that I had given too much, but I perceived that then these small wretches sometimes winked to their friends, in the belief that they had cheated me; and now I let them offer to get the change before I let them keep it. I may be undermining society, and teaching them to trust in a fickle fortune rather than their own enterprise, by overpaying them; but at least I will not corrupt them by letting them think they have taken advantage of my ignorance. If the reader will not whisper it again, I will own that I have sometimes paid as high as ten cents for a one-cent paper, which I did not want, when it has been offered me by a very minute newsboy near midnight; and I have done this in conscious defiance of the well-known fact that it is a ruse of very minute newsboys to be out late when they ought to be in bed at home, or at the Home (which seems different), in order to work the sympathies of unwary philanthropists. The statistics in regard to these miscreants are as unquestionable as those relating to street beggars who have amassed fortunes and died amid rags and riches of dramatic character. I am sorry that I cannot say where the statistics are to be found.

VI

The actual practice of fraud, even when you discover it, must give you interesting question, unless you are cock-sure of your sociology. I was once met by a little girl on a cross-street in a respectable quarter of the town, who burst into tears at sight of me, and asked for money to buy her sick mother bread. The very next day I was passing through the same street, and I saw the same little girl burst into tears at the sight of a benevolent-looking lady, whom undoubtedly she asked for money for the same good object. The benevolent-looking lady gave her nothing, and she tried her woes upon several other people, none of whom gave her anything. I was forced to doubt whether, upon the whole, her game was worth the candle, or whether she was really making a provision for her declining years by this means. To be sure, her time was not worth much, and she could hardly have got any other work, she was so young; but it seemed hardly a paying industry. By any careful calculation, I do not believe she would have been found to have amassed more than ten or fifteen cents a day; and perhaps she really had a sick mother at home. Many persons are obliged to force their emotions for money whom we should not account wholly undeserving; yet I suppose a really good citizen who found this little girl trying to cultivate the sympathies of charitable people by that system of irrigation would have had her suppressed as an impostor.

In a way she was an impostor, though her sick mother may have been starving, as she said. It is a nice question. Shall we always give to him that asketh? Or shall we give to him that asketh only when we know that he has come by his destitution honestly?

In other words, what is a deserving case of charity — or, rather, what is not?. Is a starving or freezing person to be denied because he or she is drunken or vicious? What is desert in the poor? What is desert in the rich, I suppose the reader would answer. If this is so, and if we ought not to succor an undeserving poor person, then we ought not to succor an undeserving rich person. It will be said that a rich person, however undeserving, will never be in need of our succor, but this is not so clear. If we saw a rich person fall in a fit before the horses of a Fifth Avenue omnibus, ought not we to run and lift him up, although we knew him to be a man whose life was stained by every vice and excess, and cruel, wanton, idle, luxurious? I know that I am imagining a quite impossible rich person; but, once imagined, ought not we to save him all the same as if he were deserving? I do not believe the most virtuous person will say we ought not; and ought not we, then, to rescue the most worthless tramp fallen under the wheels of the Juggernaut of want? Is charity the reward of merit?

VII

My friend who was not sure that Christ’s doctrine was the last word in regard to charity was quite sure that you ought to have a conscience against dead-beats, whom I suggested for his consideration, especially the dead-beats who come to your house and try to work you upon one pretext or another. He said he never gave to them, and I asked what he answered them when they professed themselves in instant want; and whether he plumply denied them; and it appeared that he told them he had other uses for his money. I suspect this was a proper answer to make. It had never occurred to me, but I think I will try it with the next one who comes, and see what effect it has upon him. Hitherto I have had no better way than to offer them a compromise: if they ask twenty, to propose ten; and, if they ask ten, to propose five; and so on down. The first time I did this (it was with an actor, who gave me his! O U — the first and only! O U that I ever got: I suppose he was used to giving it on the stage) it seemed to me that I had made ten dollars, and since then it has seemed to me that I made five dollars on several occasions: but I now think this was an illusion, and that I only saved the money: I did not actually add to my store.

It is usually indigent literature which presents itself with these imaginative demands, and I think usually fictionists of the romantic school. I do not know but it would be well for me as a man of principle to confine my benefactions to destitute realists: I am sure it would be cheaper. Last winter there came to me a gentleman thrown out of employment by the completion of an encyclopædia he had been at work on, and he said that he was in absolute want of food for his family, who had that morning been set out with all his household stuff on the sidewalk for default of rent. I relieved his immediate necessity, and suggested to him that if he would write a simple, unrhetorical account of his eviction I could probably sell it for him; that this sort of thing mostly happened to the inarticulate classes; and that he had the chance of doing a perfectly fresh thing in literature. He caught at the notion, and said he would begin at once, and I said the sooner the better. He asked if it would not be well to get the narrative typewritten, and I begged him not to wait for that; but he said that he knew a person who would typewrite it for him without charge. I could only urge haste, and he went away in a glow of enterprise. He left with me the address of a twenty-five - cent lodging - house in the Bowery; for he explained that he had got money enough, by selling his furniture on the sidewalk, to send his family into the country, and he was living alone and as cheaply as he could. While at work on his narrative he came for more relief, and then he vanished out of my knowledge altogether. I had a leisure afternoon, and went down into the Bowery to his lodging-house, and found that he really lodged there, but he was then out; and, so far as I am concerned, he is out still. I am out myself, in the amount I advanced him, and which he was to repay me from the money for his eviction article. He never wrote it, apparently; and perhaps his experiences of eviction lacked the vital elements of reality. I am quite sure he was at heart a romanticist, for he was an Englishman, and the Englishmen are all romanticists.

VIII

I was at one time worked for a period of years by a German-born veteran of our war, whom I was called out to see one night from dinner, when I was full of good cheer, and, of course, quite helpless against a case of want like his. He represented that he was the victim of an infirmity brought on by falling from a burning bridge under the rebel fire, and was liable to be overtaken by it at any moment; and he showed me all sorts of surgeons’ certificates in proof of the fact, as well as kindly notes from college professors and clergymen. I had, therefore, a double motive for befriending him, I had as little wish that he should be overtaken by his infirmity in my reception-room as that he should go on sleeping in unfinished houses and basement areas; and so I gave him some money at once. He was to have his pension money at the end of the month, and till then he said he could live on what I gave him. I hurried him out of the house as fast as I could, for I did not feel safe from his infirmity while he was there. But he kept coming hack, and always, in view of his threatening infirmity, got money from me; I am not sure that I always pitied him so much. At last he agreed to seek refuge in a soldiers’ home, upon my urgence, and I lost sight of him for several years. When he reappeared, one summer at the seaside, as destitute as ever, and as threatening as ever in regard to his infirmity, it seemed that he had passed the time in working his way from one soldiers’ home to another, in Maine and in New York, in Virginia and in Ohio, but everywhere, because of some informality in his papers, the gates were closed against him. I gave him a suit of clothes and some more money, and I thought I had done with him at last, for he said that now, as soon as he got his next pension money, he was going home to Germany, to spend his last years with his brother, — a surgeon, retired from the German army, — who could take care of him and his infirmity, and they could live cheaply together, upon their joint pensions. I applauded so wise a plan, and we parted with expressions of mutual esteem. Two or three months later, after I had come from the sea-side place where he visited me, to New York for the winter, he presented himself again to me. Heaven knows how he had found me out, but there he was, with his infirmity, and his story was that now he had money enough to buy his steamer ticket to Hamburg, but that he lacked his railroad fare from Hamburg to the little village where his brother lived. His notion seemed to he that I should subscribe with others to supply the amount; but I had at last a gleam of worldly wisdom. I said I thought the subscription business had gone on long enough; and he assented that it had at least gone on a good while.

“Very well, then,” I added; “you go now with the money you have for your steamer ticket, and buy it. Come back here with the ticket, and I will not oblige you to wait till you can collect your railroad fare from different people; I will give you the whole of it myself.”

Will it be credited that this sufferer did not come back with his steamer ticket? I have never seen him since, though a few weeks later I went to call upon him at the ten-cent hotel in the Bowery where he said he slept. The clerk said he was staying there, but he could not throw any light upon his intention of going back to Germany, for he had never heard him say anything about it. He was out at the moment, like my romanticist Englishman.

Whilst I lived in Boston I had a visit from another romanticistic Englishman, who professed to be no other than the cousin of Mr. Walter Besant, though he gave me reason to think he was mistaken. It seems that he had arrived that very morning from Central Africa, and, for all I know, from the mystic presence of She herself. In that strange land, he wished me to believe, he had been a playwright and a journalist, but he really looked and spoke and smelled like a groom. He dropped his aspirates everywhere, and, when he picked them up he put them on in the wrong places. In his parlance I was a bird of night, or several such, and I cannot rid myself now of the belated conjecture that he had possibly mistaken me for Mr. ‘Aggard.

He was a cheery little creature, however; and when I put it to him, as between man and man, whether he did not think he was telling me a rather improbable story, he owned so sweetly he did that I could not help contributing to pay his expenses ‘ome to Hengland. He was not quite clear why he should have come round by way of Boston, but he said he would send me the money hack directly he got ‘ome.

He did not do so, and my experience is that they never do so. They may forget it; they may never he able to spare the money. Never? I am wrong. Only last winter I made my usual compromise with a man who asked ten, and lent him five; and though he was yet another Englishman, and, for anything I can say, another romanticist, he returned my little loan with such a manly, honest letter that my heart smote me for not having made it ten. I looked upon his five-dollar hill as a gift from heaven, and I made haste to bestow it where I am sure it will never stand the remotest chance of getting hack to me.

IX

I wish, sometimes, that they would not say they were going to send the money back; but I wish this rather for their sake than for mine. I am pretty well inured to the disappointment sure to follow; but I am afraid that the poor pretence demoralizes them, and, above all, I do not wish to demoralize them by my connivance. Once, when I was a visitor for the Associated Charities in Boston, the question came up in the weekly meeting whether, if one gave money when there was no hope of getting work, one ought to let the beneficiary suppose that one expected to get it back. Ought one to say that he was making his gift a loan? Would it not be better to treat it frankly as a gift? A man to whose goodness I mentally uncover said he had given that point some thought, and he believed one ought not to pretend that it was a loan when it was not; but one might fitly say: “I let you have this money. If you are ever able to give it back, I shall be glad to have you do so.” It seems to me that this is the wisest possible word on the subject.

Of course, the reason why we have such a bad conscience in giving is that we feel we ought not to pauperize people. Perhaps this is one reason why we give so little to obvious destitution. I am this moment just in from the street, where I gave alms to a onearmed tatterdemalion, with something of this obscure struggle in my mind. As I came up with him, well fenced against the bitter wind that blew through his ruins, I foresaw that I should give him something, and I took from my outside pocket all the change there was in it — three coppers, a nickel, and a piece of twenty-five. I was ashamed to give the coppers, and I felt that a good citizen ought not to give a quarter for fear of pauperizing a man who had already nothing in the world, and no hopeful appearance of being able to get anything. So I gave him the nickel, and I am not quite easy in my mind about it.

Perhaps I was remotely influenced not to give a quarter to this one-armed man by the behavior of another one-armed man whom I befriended. I did give him a quarter, not from a good impulse, but because I had no smaller change, and it was that or nothing. The gift seemed to astound him. It was in a shoe-store, where I had only one boot on, in the process of trying a pair, and I was quite helpless against him when he burst into blessings of Irish picturesqueness, and asked my name, apparently that he might pray for me without making a mistake in the address; and when I said, from a natural bashfulness, or a mean fear that he might find me out at home and come again to beg of me, that I would take the chance of the answer of his prayers getting to me, he told me all about the railroad accident that lost him his arm; and, not content with this, he took his poor stump — as if to prove that it was real — and rubbed it over me, and blessed me and blessed me again, till I was quite ashamed of getting so much more than my money’s worth. Shall I own that I began to fear this grateful man was not entirely sober?

X

I dare say poverty and the pangs of hunger and cold do not foster habits of strict temperance. It is a great pity they do not, since they are so common. If they did, they could do more than anything else to advance the cause of prohibition. Still, I will not say that all the poor I give to are in liquor at the moment, or that drunkenness is peculiarly the vice of one - armed destitution. Neither is gratitude a very common or articulate emotion in my beneficiaries. They are mostly, if thankful at all, silently thankful; and I find this in better taste. I do not believe that, as a rule, they are very imaginative, or at least so imaginative as romantic novelists. Yet there was one sufferer came up the back elevator on a certain evening not long ago, and burst upon me suddenly, somehow as if he had come up through a trap in the stage, who seemed to have rather a gift in that way. He was most amusingly shabby and dirty (though I do not know why shabbiness and dirt should he amusing), with a cutaway coat worn down to its ultimate gloss, a frayed neckcloth, and the very foulest collar I can remember seeing. But he had a brisk and pleasing address, and I must say an excellent diction. He called me by name, and at once said that friends whom he had expected to find in New York were most inopportunely in Europe at this moment of his arrival from a protracted sojourn in the West. But he was very anxious to get on that night to Hartford and complete his journey home from Denver, where he had fallen a prey to the hard times in the very hour of the most prosperous speculation; and he proposed, as an inducement to a loan, borrowing only enough money to take him to New Haven by the boat — he would walk the rest of the way to Hartford. I no more believed him than I should believe a ghost if it said it was a ghost. But I believed that he was in want, — his clothes proved that, — and I gave him the little sum he asked. He said he would send it back the instant he reached Hartford; and I am left to think that he has not yet arrived. But I am sure that even that brief moment of his airy and almost joyous companionship was worth the money. He was of an order of classic impostors dear to literature, and grown all too few in these times of hurry and fierce competition. I wish I had seen more of him, and yet I cannot say that I wish he would come back; it might be embarrassing for both of us.

Not long before his visit I had a call from another imaginative person, whom I was not able to meet so fully in her views. This was a middle-aged lady who said she had come on that morning from Boston to see me. She owned we had never met before, and that she was quite unknown to me: but apparently she did not think this any bar to her asking me for two hundred and fifty dollars to aid in the education of her son. I confess that I was bewildered for a moment. My simple device of offering half the amount demanded would have been too costly: I really could not have afforded to give her one hundred and twenty-five dollars, even if she had been willing to compromise, which I was not sure of. I am afraid the reader will think I shirked. I said that I had a great many demands upon me, and I ended by refusing to give anything. I really do not know how I had the courage; perhaps it was only frenzy. She insisted, with reasons for my giving which she laid before me; but either they did not convince me or I had hardened my heart so well that they could not prevail with me, and she got up and went away. As she went out of the room she looked about its appointments, which I had not thought very luxurious before, and said that she saw I was able to live very comfortably, at any rate; and left me to the mute reproach of my carpets and easy-chairs.

I do not remember whether she alleged any inspiration in coming to see me for this good object; but a summer or two since a lady came to me, at my hotel in the mountains, who said that she had been moved to do so by an impulse which seemed little short of mystical. She said that she was not ordinarily superstitious, but she had wakened that morning in Boston with my name the first thing in her thoughts, and it seemed so directly related to what she had in view that she could not resist the suggestion it conveyed that she should come at once to lay her scheme before me. She took a good deal of time to do this; and, romantic as it appeared, I felt sure that she was working with real material. It was of a nature so complex, however, and on a scale so vast, that I should despair of getting it intelligibly before the reader, and I will not attempt it. I listened with the greatest interest; but, at the end, I was obliged to say that I thought her mystical impulse was mistaken; I was sorry it had deceived her; I was quite certain that I had not the means or the tastes to enter upon the æsthetic enterprise which she proposed. In return, I suggested a number of millionaires whose notorious softness of heart, or whose wish to get themselves before the public by their good deeds, ought to make them more available, and we parted the best of friends. I am not yet quite able to make up my mind that she was not the victim of a hypnotic suggestion from the unseen world, and altogether innocent in her appeal to me.

XI

In fact, I am not able to think very ill even of impostors. It is a great pity for them, and even a great shame, to go about deceiving people of means; but I do not believe they are so numerous as people of means imagine. As a rule, I do not suppose they succeed for long, and their lives must he full of cares and anxieties, which, of course, one must not sympathize with, but which are real enough, nevertheless. People of means would do well to consider this, and at least not plume themselves very much upon not being cheated. If they have means, it is perhaps part of the curse of money, or of that unfriendliness to riches which our religion is full of, that money should he got from them by unworthy persons. They have their little romantic superstitions, too. One of these is the belief that beggars are generally persons who will not work, and that they are often persons of secret wealth, which they constantly increase by preying upon the public. I take leave to doubt this altogether. Beggary appears to me in its conditions almost harder than any other trade; and, from what I have seen of the amount it earns, the return it makes is smaller than any other. I should not myself feel safe in refusing anything to a beggar upon the theory of a fortune sewn into a mattress, to be discovered after the beggar has died intestate. I know that a great many good people pin their faith to such mattresses; but I should be greatly surprised if one such could be discovered in the whole city of New York.

On the other hand, I feel pretty sure that there are hundreds and even thousands of people who are insufficiently fed and clad in New York; and if here and there one of these has the courage of his misery and asks alms, one must not be too cock-sure it is a sin to give to him.

Of course, one must not pauperize him: that ought by all means to be avoided; I am always agreeing to that. But if he is already pauperized; if we know by statistics and personal knowledge that there are hundreds and even thousands of people who cannot get work, and that they must suffer if they do not beg, let us not be too hard upon them. Let us refuse them kindly, and try not to see them; for if we see their misery and do not give, that demoralizes us. Come, I say; have not we some rights, too? No man strikes another man a blow without becoming in sort and measure a devil; and to see what looks like want, and to deny its prayer, has an effect upon the heart which is not less depraving. Perhaps it would be a fair division of the work if we let the deserving rich give only to the deserving poor, and kept the undeserving poor for ourselves, who, if we are not rich, are not deserving, either.

XII

I should be sorry if anything I have said seemed to cast slight upon the organized efforts at relieving want, especially such as unite inquiry into the facts and the provision of work with the relief of want. All that I contend for is the right — or call it the privilege — of giving to him that asketh, even when you do not know that he needs, or deserves to need. Both here and in Boston I have lent myself — sparingly and grudgingly, I’ll own — to those organized efforts; and I know how sincere and generous they are, how effective they often are, how ineffective. They used to let me go mostly to the Italian folk who applied for aid in Boston, because I could more or less meet them in their own language; but once they gave me a Russian to manage — I think because I was known to have a devotion for Tolstoy and for the other Russian novelists. The Russian in question was not a novelist, but a washer of hags in a sugar-refinery; and at the time I went to make my first call upon him he had been “laid off,” as the euphemism is, for two months — that is, he had been without work, and had been wholly dependent upon the allowance the charities made him. He had a wife and a complement of children — I do not know just how many; but they all seemed to live in one attic room in the North End. I acquainted myself fully with the case and went about looking for work in his behalf. In this, I think, I found my only use: but it was use to me only, for the people of whom I asked work for him treated me with much the same ignominy as if I had been seeking it for myself; and it was well that I should learn just what the exasperated mind of a fellow-being is when he is asked for work and has none to give. He regards the applicant as an oppressor, or, at least, an aggressor, and he is eager to get rid of him by bluntness, by coldness, even by rudeness. After the unavailing activity of a week or two, I myself began to resent the Russian’s desire for work, and I visited him at longer and longer intervals to find whether he had got anything to do, for he was looking after work, too. At last I let a month go by, and, when I came, he met me at the street door — or, say, alley door — of the tenement-house with a smiling face. He was always smiling, poor fellow, but now he smiled joyously. He had got a job — they always call it a job, and the Italians pronounce it a giobbe. His job was one which testified to the heterogeneous character of American civilization in even amusing measure. The Jews had come into a neighboring street so thickly that they had crowded every one else out; they had bought the Congregational meeting-house, which they were turning into a synagogue, and they had given this orthodox Russian the job of knocking the nails out of the old woodwork. His only complaint was that the Jews would not let him work on Saturday, and the Christians would not let him work on Sunday, and so he could earn but five dollars a week. He did not blame me for my long failure to help him; on the contrary, so far as I could make out from the limited vocabulary we enjoyed in common, he was grateful. But I have no doubt he was glad to he rid of me; and heaven knows how glad I was to he rid of him.

I do not believe I ever found work for any one, though I tried diligently and, I think, not unwisely.

Perhaps the best effect from my efforts was that they inspired the poor creatures to efforts of their own, which were sometimes successful. I had on my hands and heart for nearly a whole winter the most meritorious Italian family I ever knew, without being able to do anything but sympathize and offer secret alms in little gifts to the children. Once I got one of the boys a place in a book-store, but the law would not allow him to take it because he was not past the age of compulsory schooling. The father had a peripatetic fruit-stand, which he pushed about on a cart; and his great aim was to get the privilege of stationing himself at one of the railroad depots. I found that there were stations which were considered particularly desirable by the fruiterers, and that the chief of these was in front of the old United States court-house. A fruiterer out of place, whose family I visited for the charities, tried, even to corrupt me, and promised me that if I would get him this stendio (they Italianize “stand” to that effect, just as they translate “bar” into barra, and so on) he would give me something outright. “E poi, ci sarà sempre la mancia” (“And then there will always be the drink-money”). I lost an occasion to lecture him upon the duties of the citizen; but I am not a ready speaker.

The sole success — but it was very signal — of my winter’s work was getting a young Italian into the hospital. He had got a rheumatic trouble of the heart from keeping a stendio in a cellarway, and, when I saw him I thought it would be little use to get him into the hospital. The young doctor who had charge of him, and whom I looked up, was of the same mind. But I could not help trying for him; and, when the sisters at the hospital (where he got well, in spite of all) said he could be received, I made favor for an ambulance to carry him to it. It was a beautiful white spring day when I went to tell him the hour the ambulance would call; the sky was blue overhead, the canaries sang in their cages along the street. I left all this behind when I entered the dark, chill tenement-house, where that dreadful poverty-smell struck the life out of the spring in my soul at the first breath. The sick man’s apartment was clean and sweet, through his mother’s care (this poor woman was as wholly a lady as any I have seen); but, when I passed into his room, he clutched himself up from the bed and stretched his arms toward me with gasps of “Lo spedale! lo spedale!” The spring, the coming glory of this world, was nothing to him. It was the hospital he wanted; and to the poor, to the incurable disease of our conditions, the hospital is the best we have to give. To be sure, there is also the grave.

THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL

IT scarcely began before the last of August, when the guests ebbed away by floods, in every train. The end of the season was purely conventional. One day the almanac said it was August, and the hotel was full; another day the almanac said it was September, and the vast caravansary was instantly touched with depletion, and within a week it hung loose upon its inmates like the raiment upon the frame of a man who has been banting. There was no change in the weather; that remained as summer-like as ever, and grew more and more divinely beautiful. The conditions continued the same, only more agreeable; the service was still abundant and perfect; the table was of an unimpaired variety; there was no such sudden revival of business or pleasure in the city that people should abandon the leisure of the sea-shore; the ocean smiled as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the beach; the country, for those who were to prolong their outing, would be dry and dusty. But a certain Action of the calendar had reported itself in the human consciousness; and, as men are the prey of superstition and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry yielded by a single impulse to the pressure of the pretence that it was September.

I

Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know that I can add to the effect of size which I wish to impart by saying that it is of a veritably American immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore of a continent; and, when I walked from one end of its seaward veranda to the other, I felt as if I were going from Castine in Maine to St. Augustine in Florida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length, but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter that my fancy takes wing when I think of it, and will not brook a briefer flight. In like manner, when I speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I am perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing my roof with four or five persons.

They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the place was so spacious that I had large areas of the piazza to myself whenever I liked, and I was often a solitary wayfarer up and down the halls that projected themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between the suites of rooms on the right hand and on the left. It was the dining-room, with its forest of pine posts, its labyrinth of tables, its army of black waiters, and its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could not feel in greater degree even in the tenement quarters of the East Side. This was peculiarly the case on a Sunday, when the guests had guests; and in the tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and the harsh jangle of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, subdued sound of the guttling and guzzling, there was something like the noise of a legion stirring in its harness and hailing Cæsar with the war-like devotion inspired by a munificent donative.

In the early morning there was a hardly less powerful impression of numbers, when the crying children, the half-hushed quarrelling of some husbands and wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others parting for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms and mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters’ trunk - bearing trucks, pushed over the long carpeted stretches with the voluble clatter of so many lawn-mowers, the flight of the call-boys’ feet, the fierce clangor of the chambermaids’ bells, and the strongly brogued controversies and gossip of the chambermaids themselves. No doubt all these effects were exaggerated by the senses just unfolding themselves in the waking consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a single roof was nevertheless very great: at the height of the season, the guests and the servants, the drones and the workers, were some fifteen hundred together.

II

All at once, as I say, a great part of the multitude vanished. All at once, on the verandas, and in the wide office swept with yet cooler currents from the sweet-breathed sea, I was sensible of a sudden decimation. I cannot fix the date with precision, but one night at about half-past eight the great moony electrics which swung in space high over the floors of the office, the ball-room, and the dining-room paled their effectual fires, which they never afterward resumed, and left us to the bat-like waverings of the naphtha gas. I remember the sinking of the heart with which my senses took cognizance of the fact. No one spoke or audibly noted it; the talking groups talked on in fallen tones; the people who were reading books or papers drew them a little nearer, or put them a little farther; those who were writing letters at the long tables in the reading-room silently adjusted their vision to the obscurity. It was like the effect of some august natural catastrophe; the general disposition was to ignore the fact, as we shall perhaps try to ignore the fact that the world has begun to burn up when it begins to burn, and pretend that it is merely a fire over in Hoboken or Long Island City that the department will soon have under control.

It may have been the morning of that day or the morning of the next, but it was at least some neighboring morning that I sauntered down to one of the forenoon trains and saw a large detachment of our colored troops departing. They were very gay, as they nearly always are, poor fellows; and they were exchanging humorous and derisive adieux with a detachment of those who were to remain, and who pretended on their part to mock their departing comrades. These helped them off with their baggage, wheeling the heavy truck-loads of the trunks which the porters left to them; and, when all was ready, shaking hands again and, again, and telling them to be good to themselves. At the last moment a very short, stout, little black man appeared with a truck heaped high with baggage, and rushed it down the long esplanade to the platform beside the train, amid the wild cheers and wagers of the going and staying spectators. He had all the cry till the train actually started, when a young colored brother burst out of the front door of a car from which it had detached itself and began to run it down with a heavy grip-sack flying wildly about and beating his legs and flanks. He had taken his place in this car unaware of its fate, and had remained in it, exulting from the open window in his sole possession; and now the secret of his proprietorship had been revealed to his dismay. Hut it was a very kindly train; when his pursuit became known, the locomotive obligingly slowed to a stand, and he was pulled aboard the rear platform amid a jubilation which few real advantages inspire in this world.

III

An indefinable gloom settled upon me as the train curved out into the marsh, and the laughing, chattering, cheering, hat-waving remnant came back to the hotel and dispersed about their work. There were still a great many of them, and there were still a great many of us, but I felt that the end had begun. I do not know whether I felt this fact more keenly or not when the dentist, whose presence I had been tacitly proud of all through August, abandoned the house which he had helped to render metropolitan. But I am sure that it was a definite shock to lose him; and that the tooth which his presence had held in abeyance asserted itself in a wild throe at his going. Once as I passed the door of his office his name was on it and his hours; when I returned fifteen minutes later to ask an appointment with him his name was gone, and the useless hours alone remained. On his way to take passage in his cat-boat for the farthermost parts of the Great South Bay, he kindly stopped and advised about the grumbling tooth. Then he passed out of the hotel, and left it to ache if it must, with an unrequited longing for the filling fatally delayed.

The doctor went a week later, but before this other changes had taken place, among which the most cataclysmal was the passing of the band, which vanished, as it were, in a sudden crash of silence. The whole month long I had heard it playing in the afternoon midway of the long veranda, and in the evening on its platform in the ballroom, and with my imperfect knowledge of music had waited each day and night till it came to that dissolute, melancholy melody to which, the Eastern girls danced their wicked dance at the World’s Fair; not because I like dissolute and melancholy things, but because I was then able to make sure what tune the band was playing. I had in this way become used to the band, and I missed it poignantly, if one can miss a thing poignantly; which. I doubt. Other people seemed to enjoy it, and I like to see people enjoying themselves. Besides, its going brought the dancing to a close, which I enjoyed myself. —

I mean that I enjoyed looking at the dancing. This was for the most part, even at the height of our gayety, performed by boys and girls, and very young children, whom I saw led away to bed heart-broken at nine o’clock. One small couple of these I loved very much. I fancied them a little brother and sister, and I delighted in their courage and perseverance in taking the floor for every dance, and through all changes of tune and figure turning solemnly round and round with their arms about each other’s waists. One night there came a bad, bad boy, who posted himself in front of them and plagued them, jumping up and down before them and hindering their serious gyration. Another evening the little brother was cross and would not dance, and the little sister had to pull him out on the floor and make him.

Sometimes, however, there were even grown people on the floor. Then I chose a very pretty young couple, whom I called my couple, and shared their joy in the waltz without their knowing it. We were by all odds the best dancers and the best looking. We stayed long enough to poison the others with jealousy, but we always went away rather early. When the band left, all this innocent pleasure ended. There was one delirious evening, indeed, when the floor-manager, in default of other music, whistled a waltz, and the young ladies, in default of young men, trod a mad measure with one another to his sibilation. But this was a dying burst of gayety: it did not and could not happen again.

IV

I have to accuse myself of giving no just idea of the constant flowing and dribbling away of the guests, who never ceased departing. The trains that bore them and their baggage brought no others to replace them, and the house gradually emptied itself until not more than a poor three hundred remained. With each defection of a considerable number of guests there followed a reduction of the helping force, who now no longer departed laughing, but with a touch of that loneliness falling upon us all. It must be understood that we were all staying on in our closing hotel by sufferance. It closed officially on the 10th, but the landlord was to remain, and such guests as wished might remain, too. This made us eager to linger till the very last moment we were allowed.

Ever since the elevator had ceased to run, there had been a sense of doom in the air. One day we noted a fine reluctance in the elevator; when people crowded it full, it would not go up. Then it began to waver under a few; it made false starts and stops. A placard presently said, “Elevator not running.” Then this was removed, and the elevator ran again for a day or two. At last it ceased to run so finally that no placard was needed. The elevator-boys went away; it was as if the elevator were extinct.

I think it was on the same day that the hall clock 146 stopped. The clock was started again by the head-porter; but after that the hotel ran on borrowed time. Once it borrowed the time of me, whose watch has not once been right in thirty-three years, a whole generation!

The temperature of the water ceased to be reported even before the end of August; the hours of high and low tide were no longer given. Twice when the reporters came down to see the yacht-race off our beach the bulletin-board was covered with yellow telegrams from the coast where it was really seen, boasting the victory and triumphant defeat of the Defender. This quickened our pulses for the moment; and one night the ladies all put on their best dresses and assembled for a progressive euchre-party in the vast acreage of the parlor. It was a heroic but perhaps desperate act of gayety.

V

One of the most striking natural phenomena of the hotel closing was the arrival of the gulls on our beach, or rather on the waters beyond the beach. I had wondered at their absence all August long, but punctually on the first day of September they came. The weather had not changed for them any more than it had for the guests who fled the place at the same date, but perhaps the wild wheeling and screaming things had a prescience of the autumnal storms, and came with prophetic welcome in their wings.

Otherwise the premonitions of change were within the hotel itself, and they were more impressive whenever they assumed an official character. It was with a real emotion that one day I missed one of the clerks out of the number within the office. He was there, and then he was not there; it was as if he had been lost overboard during his watch. I had scarcely recovered from his loss when another clerk, upon whose distribution of the mail we all used to hang impatient for the equal disappointment of letters or no letters, ceased from his ministrations as if he had all along been a wraith of mist and had simply melted away. The room clerk, who was a more definite personality to us, went next, with a less supernatural effect; he even said he might come back, but he did not come back, and the office force was reduced to the cashier and a young clerk not perceptible earlier in the season.

At all great hotels the landlord is usually a remote and problematical personage, and so it was with ours until the office force began to thin away around him. Then he became more and more visible, tangible, conversable, and proved a distinctly agreeable addition to our circle, in which the note of an increasing domesticity was struck. I do not know of anything that gave so keen a sense of our resolution into a single family, still large, but insensibly drawn together by the need of a mutual comfort and encouragement, as the invasion of the hotel by a multitude of crickets. Whether it was the departure of the human host which tempted the crickets in-doors, or whether it was some such instinct as brought the gulls to our seas, they were all at once all over the place, piercing its deepening silence with their harsh stridulation. In the chambers they carked so loud and clear that one could hardly sleep for them, and in the glooming reaches and expanses of the corridors, parlors, halls, and dining-room they shrilled in incessant chorus.

VI

After the first moment, when the association with the home hearth and the simple fireside evenings of other days had spent itself, the crickets were rather awful, and personally I would rather have had the band back. But their weird music prompted a closer union of the guests, and our chairs were closer together on the veranda and in the office. We found that we were very charming and interesting people, and I began to wonder if I had not lost more than I could ever make good by not seeking the acquaintance of the seven hundred others who were gone. From day to day, from night to night, our numbers were lessened, but we never spoke of the departures; we instinctively recognized that it would have been bad form; we were like the garrison of a beleaguered city, that lost a few men by famine or foray from time to time, but kept up a heroic pretence that they were as many as ever. Or, we were like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a waterlogged vessel, and caught from it now and then by a hungry shark or a hungry wave, or dropping away into the gulf from mere exhaustion.

These figures are rather violent, and present only a subjective effect in the more sensitive spirits. As a matter of fact, we lived luxuriously all the time. The time came when we heard that on a certain day the chef was going, but we should not have known he was gone by any difference in the table. It grew rather more attractive; if there were fewer dishes, they were better cooked; one could fancy a touch of personal attention in them which one could not have fancied when we were seven hundred and fifty at table and the help who served us were three hundred and fifty.

VII

The help had gradually dwindled away till there were not more than fifty. I had kept my waiter through all; he was a quiet elderly man of formed habits, whom I associated with the idea of permanency in every way, so that I could scarcely believe that we were to be parted. But one morning he was seized by the curious foreboding of departure which seemed really one of its symptoms among his tribe, and he said he did not know but he should be going soon. I said, Oh, I hoped not; and he answered bravely that he hoped not, too, but he shook his head, and we both felt that it was best to let a final half-dollar pass between us in expression of a provisional farewell.

That was indeed the last of him, and that day when I came in to lunch I found that I was appointed another table, in another place, with another waiter to take my order. It was a little shock, but I was not unprepared. I had noted the gradual dismantling of the tables until now they stretched long rows of barren surfaces down the tenth of a mile which the dining-room covered, and showed their reverberated labyrinth in the mirrors of the vast sideboards at either end of the hall. The remaining guests were snugly grouped on the seaward side of the room, where our tables commanded the marine views that I had long vainly envied others.

But after the first transition I was changed to another table with another waiter — a tall student from Yale, who joined to a scholarly absence of mind concerning my wants an appreciation of my style of jokes that went far to console me, though I was not sure that it was quite decorous for him to laugh at them when they were addressed to others. I tried to grapple him to me with early and frequent donatives, and he would have been willing enough to stay; but the guests kept going and the helpers were cut off, one by one, till the hour came when we both felt —

“The first slight swerving of the heart

That words are powerless to express,

And leave it still unsaid in part,

Or say it in too great excess.”

The next morning he told me he was going; and, as I sauntered down to take the train for a brief flight to New York, I saw him on the platform in citizen’s dress and smoking a cigarette. He was laughing and joking with some of the waiters who still lingered, and bidding them take care of themselves, and promising a like vigilance of his own welfare.

After that there was the short interval of a single meal when I was served by a detached waiter, before I was handed over to the kindly helper who next had charge of me. I clung to him anxiously, for I did not know what day or hour I should lose him; I did not know how soon he might lose me.

In the passing of the head-porter there was something deeply dramatic, almost tragic for me. We had become acquaintances, friends, even, I hope, and I had become sensible of the gradual disappearance of his subordinates until they were reduced to what I may call the tail-porter in contradistinction to the head-porter. Then the head-porter said that he had a great mind to be going himself; but, when I asked him why, he could not well say, and he agreed with me that it might be better for him to stay. We counted up the remaining families together, and found them twenty, and I convinced him that by the most modest computation here were twenty dollars in fees before him. I thought that I had secured his allegiance to the end, but the very morning before the pensive record of these events I went to look for him in his accustomed place to get my shoes “shined,” and he was not there. The barber was there, looking in a vague disoccupation across the marshes to the northward of the hotel, and I asked him where the porter was. He closed his eyes that he might open his lips more impressively and breathed the word “Andato.”

“Gone?” I echoed.

The barber was a beautifully smiling, richly languaged Sicilian, and he responded in an elegant sympathy with my dismay: “Si; andato. Me ne vado anch’ io, fra pochi giorni. M’ impazzo qui. Guardi!” (Yes; gone. I am going, I myself, in a few days. I madden here. Look!). With the last word he touched my arm lightly to make me turn, and pointed to the long plank footway, stilted upon the marshes from one to the other side of the railroad curve, and leading to the boat-house on the bay beyond their wide levels. Midway of this I saw a solitary figure, whose lank length and forward droop I could not mistake. The departing porter looked like the last citizen abandoning the ruins of Persepolis, and I — I felt like Persepolis!

VIII

I strive, perhaps in vain, to impart a sense of the slowly creeping desolation, the gradual paresis, that was seizing upon the late full and happy life of our hotel; and I have not strictly observed the order of the successive events. I have not spoken of the swift evanescence of the bell-boys, the first of whom began so jubilantly with me when I came, covenanting to deliver a pitcher of ice-water at my door every morning at ten and every evening at eight. He was faithful to his trust, and embarrassed me with a superfluity of ice-water, which ten men could hardly have drunk and lived; but, when the economic frame of our hotel began to be shaken, he was early in warning me that he might go at any moment. He was No. 18, but he promised me that No. 10 would see that I was daily and nightly deluged with ice-water, and No. 10 was exemplarily true to me for a day. Then he vanished, too, with a grateful sense, I hope, of my folly in bestowing a preliminary half-dollar upon him. But he had made interest for me, I found, with No. 4, and No. 4 deluded me by his fleeting permanency for a week. One morning he told me he was going, and he took a last half-dollar from me with a true compassion for my forlorn case. He was so visibly the last of the bell-boys that he could not assign me to a lower number. For one night the head-porter brought my ice-water. Now the night-porter brings it, and if he should leave before I do — But I will not anticipate, as the older romancers used to say. I will not look forward, even in the case of the chambermaids, of whom there have been already three changes, with the prospect next week of having in some of the laundry girls to do up the work.

IX

The laundry itself was attacked ten days ago by the general paralysis of the hotel’s functions, so far as the guests’ linen was concerned, which has since had to be sent far inland by the enterprise of one of the bathing-pavilion men, and precariously returned on a variable date. I forget whether the laundry succumbed before or after the closing of the refreshment room. The hotel sold no strong drinks, and the magnificent facilities of the bar were inadequately employed by a soda-fountain, a variety of mineral waters in bottles, a supply of ginger-ale, and lemons for lemonade. On an opposite counter were Huyler’s candies and a choice of chewing-gum — the salubrious pepsin or the merely innocent peppermint. When the moment for dismantling this festive place arrived, with the unexpectedness of all the other moments of our slow dehabilitation, I was present, and saw the presiding genius packing up his stock of lemons. It gave me a peculiar pang. I had never bought any of them, or wanted any, but I had personally acquainted myself with almost every example of the fruit; I knew those lemons apart, and from often study of them on their shelf, as I stood hardily sipping my ginger-ale before the counter, I was almost as intimate with them as with the stock of the newsdealer.

I must say that as to the books his stock was terribly dull. He owned himself that it was dull, and when I asked him where in the world he got together such a lot of stupid books, he could only say that they were such as were appointed to be sold in summer hotels by the news company. The newspapers were rather better: if they were not livelier, they were lighter, or at least more ephemeral. I bought freely of them — the dailies in the mornings and the weeklies in the afternoons, with their longer leisure. I bought the magazines, which are now often as cheap as the papers, and, unlike the books, are seldom dull all through. Then I formed the intimacy of many illustrated papers which I did not buy, but studied on the strings where they hung stretched high over the counter. In one was the picture of a young lady habited in the mingled colors of Yale and Princeton, with a Cupid throwing a football at her heart. She was a great resource, and could not be stared out of countenance.

Besides, there was on a wire frame over the showcase a platter, of native decoration, representing the whole of Long Island in a railroad map. It was a strangely ugly object, like some sort of sad, dissected fish, but fascinating. The newsdealer and I had often discussed its price, and I had invariably refused it at one dollar and twenty-five cents, though it was originally put upon the market at two dollars and fifty cents.

After he had packed up his stock, I could hold out no longer. I looked about for him, and found him playing checkers with the ex-keeper of the refreshment-room. I asked him if that hideous platter had now got down to a dollar, and he went and hunted it out of his stock. Upon inspection he seemed to discover that it was still one dollar and twenty-five cents. In a desperation I paid the money; and almost at the same moment the newsdealer’s place knew him no more, and I remained with my platter for a memorial of one of the weirdest experiences of a life which has not been barren of weirdness.

X

“You ought to have seen an old-time closing of this hotel,” said the clerk one evening toward the last. He had by this time resumed in his own person almost as many functions as the ancient mariner of the “Bab Ballad” who had eaten the former survivors of the Nancy brig and claimed to represent them all by virtue of his superior appetite and digestion. Our clerk was now cashier, postmaster, room-clerk, night-clerk, and day-clerk, with moments of bell-boy; he spoke with authority, and we listened with the respect due to his manifold quality.

“The guests,” he continued, “would run down toward the end of August to about two hundred. Then notice would be put up in the office, ‘ The hotel will close to-morrow after breakfast.’ The band would be still here, and the bell-boys all on duty, and the night before all the guests would gather in the office. The band would play, and the talking and laughing would go on all through the evening, like the height of the season, and perhaps there would be a little dancing. Everybody would say good-night, the same as ever, and as soon as breakfast was over in the morning you would see them streaming away to the train, till there wasn’t a soul left in the house but clerks and the help. Then this stair carpet would come down with a run.” He pointed to the wide stairway. “The rugs would come up all through the halls; the dining-room would be cleared before you could look, and all the chairs would be on the tables with their legs in the air. The help would come to the desk in a steady file and get their money and go. Before noon the cleaners would have the whole house to themselves.”

We owned that it must have been fine, that it was spectacular and impressive, even dramatic, but in our hearts we felt that there was a finer poetic quality in our closing, which was like one of the slow processes of nature, and emulated the pensive close of summer, when the leaves do not all fall in a night, or the flowers wither or the grass droop in a single day, but the trees slowly drop their crowns through many weeks, and the successive frosts lay a chill touch on a blossom here and a petal there, and the summer passes in a euthanasy which suffers you to say at no given moment, “The summer is dead,” till it has long been dead.

Several aspects of the elementally simple landscape about us seemed peculiarly to sympathize with the quiet passing of the life of the great hotel. There could be no change in the long, irregular, gray sand dunes before it, which dropped themselves in lumpish masses, like the stretched and twisted shape of some vast bisected serpent. The stiff grasses and arid weeds that clothed them thinly, like a growth of dreadful green hair, kept their rigidity and their color with a sort of terrestrial immortality, or rather of an imperishable lifelessness; but over them fluttered a multitude of butterflies, thick as the leaves of autumn, and of much the same ultimate color, like spirits already released to their palingenesis. Flights of others, of a gay white and yellow, like the innocent souls of little ones, haunted the leaf-plant beds before the hotel, or tried to make friends with the harsh little evergreens surviving the plantations of a more courageous period of the enterprise, and stolidly presenting a wood at the borders of the plank walks. To the landward the mighty marshes stretched their innumerable acres to the sunrise and the sunset and the northern lights, one wash of pale yellow-green. Before we left, this began to be splashed as with flame or blood by the reddening of that certain small weed which loves the salt of tide-flooded meadows. The hollyhock-like bells of the marsh-roses drooped and fell, but other and gayer flowers, like ox-eye daisies of taller stem, came to replace them; and still, with the rising tide, the larger and the lesser craft that plied upon the many channels of the meadows blew softly back and forth and seemed to sail upon their undulant grasses. In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature toward decay, seemed to express a consciousness of the hotel’s unhurried dissolution, to wait gently upon it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness till the last light should he quenched, of all those that had made it flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, and that had faded from veranda and balcony to the glitter of the clustered lamps in the office and dining-room.

XI

There came, indeed, about the middle of September a sudden rude shock of cold, which seemed to express an impatience with the dying hotel, hitherto unknown to the gently varying moods of nature. The wind blew for a day from the northwest, and stiffened its wasted and flaccid frame until one fancied its teeth chattering, as it were; but even then the sea did not share the harsh sentiment of the inland weather. It lay smiling as serenely as ever, and the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners that began to flock before our beach about the end of August rocked and tilted, like things in a dream, as they had for the last fortnight. It was said that one of them dragged her anchor and came ashore in the night, but this happened in the dark, and we knew of it only by hearsay, after she had got off and sailed away. A day later they were all there again, and some flew in close to the beach, and skimmed back and forth, as fearless of its ever-shifting sands as the fish-hawks that sailed the deeps of blue air above them.

The water remained as warm as ever; warmer, they said, who tried it in a bath. I did not. The next to the last time I bathed I had for sole companion a literary clergyman, with whom I walked down to the beach discussing the amusing aspects of the Ninth Crusade, which the Venetians so cannily turned aside from the conquest of the Holy Land to the conquest of Constantinople. The New York Dump was unpleasantly evident in the sea that day; and the last time the Dump had the sea all to itself. It is not agreeable to bathe among old brooms, bottles, decayed fruit, trunk lids, vegetable cans, broken boxes, and the other refuse of the ash-barrel, and I came out almost before the life-guard could get ready to throw me a life-preserver.

He was not the gaudy giant of bronze who posed between the life-lines at the height of the bathing season, when twoscore spectators on the benches provided for them watched a half-dozen men and women weltering in the surf, or popping up and down after the manner of ladies taking a sea-bath. But I dare say he was quite as efficient, and, as I had the good-fortune to make his acquaintance, I liked him better. I specially liked his pelting about the bathing-pavilion before he went on duty with me, in his bare legs and feet, and wearing over his bathing-tights a cutaway coat, with a derby hat, to complete his ceremonial costume.

He was not so much in keeping with the inlander’s ideal of bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in the waves or loll upon the sands in the flirtatious poses familiar to the observer of them in the illustrated papers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting cap, his black jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown arms folded upon his breast, where they half revealed, half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a far fitter figure. But for the real bathers I think the guard in the cut-away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be trusted; he was simple, substantial, and unpretentious; and surf-bathing, let me whisper in the innumerable ear of the inland myriads who have never seen it, is not often the gay frolic they have fancied: rather, it is sober, serious, sloppy.

XII

At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the closing hotel was one of heroic self-applause. We wore a brave and smiling front; we said it was so much nicer than when the house was full, than when there were a thousand or even a hundred in it; and we all declared that we were going to stay as long as the landlord would let us. But from time to time there were defections; one table after another was dismantled; face after face vanished; first a white face, then a black face. I do not think we were so smiling after four of the beach trains were taken off; secretly, I think each of us wondered, What if we should stay till the last train was taken off and we could not get away! What should we do then?

We have become rather more serious; we do not talk trivially when we talk, and we scarcely talk at all; we have traversed each other’s conversable territory so often that there is no longer the hope of discovery in it. We have not only become serious; I have reached the point where I have asked in thought if we are not a little absurd. Why should we stay? What is keeping us? The waves of autumn will soon reach the kitchen fires; and then? —

Last night our waiter said he was going on Monday. This morning the newsboy passed through the office on his way to serve the cottagers with the papers. Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests, he went on without answering. It may be because he is an officer of a railroad, whose officers reluctantly answer questions; but perhaps he has come to feel a ghostly quality in us, and regard us as so many simulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men.

The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner yesterday; the halls gloomed like illimitable caverns late in the gathered dusk.

Shall I he able to stay till Friday? We shall see.

XIII

A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the reaches of space.

The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the sun slants upon it, and reflects the rays from myriad facets of steel. You cannot look at it long there, but now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant when he called it

“The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land.”

All day yesterday, which was the great day for the arriving European steamers, they came hurrying in. We counted ten or twelve, each blocking the length of an express train out of the rim of the horizon. Today there are none: only a few far - off full - sailed ships, and nearer shore the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners, tilting and swaying, and now and then flying in so close to the beach that we can see the men on board, and trailing their small boats through a drift of foamy sea.

There are twenty-three guests in the house now — the house that holds a thousand! Two hunters came down with their guns Friday night and re-enforced us. After breakfast a gay group gathered on the great midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men told the ladies stories and made them laugh. Every one is acquainted now, and speaks freely to every one else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if we were normally conditioned?

We have a very good two-o’clock dinner: the cook still remembers it is Sunday. After dinner two of us go down to the bathing-beach, and from the spectators’ benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bathing and is now lying in the warm sand where the rising tide has flung him. We wait to see it reach him again and draw him back, but it does not. It seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take a stick and tilt him into the sea. I do not know whether he likes that, either; but he cannot help himself. He could not help himself in the sun.

XIV

It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped in cold gray clouds, which seem to have meant something unpleasant to the fishing-craft, for they have all vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath of the sea, rises steadily, and bemoans itself in all the angles and projections of the house. The lanterns of the veranda, which have not been lighted for a week, rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long line of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of ladies used to sit and gossip together stretches emptily away. The wind pushes against the tall hacks of the chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if the ghosts of the gossipers invisibly filled them and still inaudibly babbled on. Where some of the chairs are grouped facing one another, the effect is very creepy. Will they keep up their spectral colloquies all winter?

I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and in the corridor, three up-town blocks away, I behold a small chambermaid balancing herself against a large bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic.

The wind rises, and by mid-afternoon blows half a gale. The sea froths and roars and tumbles on the beach, and far out the serried breakers toss their white-caps against the sky-line, like so many cooks abandoning the hotel kitchen.

About three o’clock the life-guard of the bathing-beach, having cast his derby and cutaway, appears with three other men in tights and pulls in the life-lines and the buoys. Now the Dump will have the ocean for its own. —

A stranded boat which lies on the beach to the northward came ashore in the gale last night from some of the fishermen. It is in good condition, and if the trains should stop running before noon to-morrow we can be taken off in it. Eighteen of our number went away this morning; and there are now but four of us left. We could easily get away in that boat.

XV

The wind rose till nightfall, and then its passion broke in tears. A tempestuous night threatened; but — the weather changed its mind as swiftly as a woman, and the day dawned as sweetly and softly this morning as a day of young June. The sea is again a shining level, veiled in a tender mist. Out of this the fishing-sail come stealing silently one after another till again a fleet of them is tilting and swaying in front of the hotel. One large, goblin sail, which remained throughout the threats of the weather, looks like the picture of the goblin in the “Bab Ballad” which tries to frighten the image before the tobacconist’s shop.

The gang of Italians who have toiled for three months to hide the infamies of the Dump, burying them in the sand as fast as the sea cast them ashore, are taking up the plank walks to the bathing-beach. The season is over. The barrel which formed the outermost buoy swings monumentally (if monuments can swing) at anchor among the breakers.

At the station the railroad people have become unnaturally amiable. They call me by name; they take a personal interest in getting off my telegrams and express packages. In one of my visits to them I meet the life-guard in full citizen’s dress, with even shoes on. He salutes me, but I have to look twice before I know him.

XVI

A generous contention has arisen between ourselves and the other remaining family as to which shall be last to leave the hotel. They go on the 10.25, and we have outstayed them! We are the last guests in the house. The landlord’s Italian greyhound seems instinctively to feel our pathetic distinction. He rushes upon me from far down the veranda and fawns upon me.

The cook and a last helper of some unknown function carry our trunks to the station. But it has now suddenly become a question whether we shall go on the 12.20 or wait for the 5.20. It depends finally upon our getting a last lunch at the restaurant of the bathing-beach. We ask, limiting our demands to a clam-chowder. We are answered that there are still clams, but the man who knows how to make chowder is gone. The restaurant family are going to lunch upon a ham-bone, which is now being scraped for them. We refuse to share it, with many thanks, and decide to go on the 12.20.

I have paid my last bill.

On the 10th of August a pomp of liveried menials met me as I alighted from the train and contented for the honor and profit of carrying my umbrella into the hotel.

On the 17th of September I myself carry a heavy satchel in each hand out through the echoing corridors down the wide veranda stairs to the train, unattended by a single fee-taker.

The hotel is closed.

GLIMPSES OF CENTRAL PARK

THIS morning, as I sat on a bench in one of the most frequented walks of Central Park, I could almost have touched the sparrows on the sprays about me; a squirrel, foraging for nuts, climbed on my knees as if to explore my pockets. Of course, there is a policeman at every turn to see that no wrong is done these pretty creatures, and that no sort of trespass is committed by any in the domain of all; but I like to think that the security and immunity of the Park is proof of something besides the vigilance of its guardians; that it is a hint of a growing sense in Americans that what is common is the personal charge of every one in the community.

As I turn from my page and look out upon it, I see the domes and spires of its foliage beginning to feel the autumn and taking on the wonderful sunset tints of the year in its decline; when I stray through its pleasant paths, I feel the pathos of the tender October air; but, better than these sensuous delights, in everything of it and in it, I imagine a prophecy of the truer state which I believe America is destined yet to see established. It cannot be that the countless thousands who continually visit it, and share equally in its beauty, can all come away insensible of the meaning of it; here and there some one must ask himself, and then ask others, why the whole of life should not be as generous and as just as this part of it; why he should not have a country as palpably his own as the Central Park is, where his ownership excludes the ownership of no other. Some workman out of work, as he trudges aimlessly through its paths, must wonder why the city cannot minister to his need as well as his pleasure, and not hold aloof from him till he is thrown a pauper on its fitful charities. If it can give him this magnificent garden for his forced leisure, why cannot it give him a shop where he can go in extremity to earn his bread?

I

I may he mistaken. His thoughts may never take this turn at all. The poor are slaves of habit, they bear what they have borne, they suffer on from generation to generation, and seem to look for nothing different. But this is what I think for poor people in the Park, not alone for the workman recently out of work, but for the workman so long out of it that he has rotted into one of the sodden tramps whom I meet now and then, looking like some forlorn wild beast, in the light of the autumnal leaves. That is the great trouble in New York; you cannot anywhere get away from the misery of life. You would think that the rich for their own sakes would wish to see conditions bettered, so that they might not be confronted at every turn by the mere loathliness of poverty. But they likewise are the slaves of habit, and go the way the rich have gone since the beginning of time. Sometimes I think that as Shakespeare says of the living and the dead, the rich and the poor are “but as pictures” to one another without vital reality.

Sometimes I am glad to lose the sense of their reality, and this is why I would rather walk in the pathways of the Park than in the streets of the city, for the contrasts there are not so frequent, if they are glaring still. I do get away from them now and then, for a moment or two, and give myself wholly up to the delight of the place. It has been treated with the artistic sense which always finds its best expression in the service of the community, but I do not think we generally understand this, the civic spirit is so weak in us yet; and I doubt if the artists themselves are conscious of it, they are so rarely given the chance to serve the community. When this chance offers, however, it finds the right man to profit by it, as in the system of parks at Chicago, the gardened spaces at Washington, and the Central Park in New York.

Some of the decorative features here are bad, the sculpture is often foolish or worse, and the architecture is the outgrowth of a mood, where it is not merely puerile. The footways have been asphalted, and this is out of keeping with the rustic character of the place, but the whole design, and much of the detail in the treatment of the landscape, bears the stamp of a kindly and poetic genius. The Park is in no wise taken away from Nature, but is rendered back to her, when all has been done to beautify it, an American woodland, breaking into meadows, here and there, and brightened with pools and ponds lurking among rude masses of rock, and gleaming between leafy knolls and grassy levels. It stretches and widens away, mile after mile, in the heart of the city — a memory of the land as it was before the havoc of the city began, and giving to the city-prisoned poor an image of what the free country still is, everywhere. It is all penetrated by well-kept drives and paths; and it is in these paths that I find my pleasure. They are very simple woodland paths, but for the asphalt; though here and there an effect of art is studied with charming felicity; and I like to mount some steps graded in the rock at one place and come upon a plinth supporting the bust of a poet, as I might in an old Italian garden. But there is otherwise very little effect of gardening except near the large fountain by the principal lake where there is some flare of flowers on the sloping lawns. There is an excess in the viaduct, with its sweeping stairways and carven freestone massiveness; but it is charming in a way, too, and the basin of the fountain is full of lotuses and papyrus reeds, so that you do not much notice the bronze angle atop, who seems to be holding her skirt to one side and picking her steps, and to be rather afraid of falling into the water. There is, in fact, only one thoroughly good piece of sculpture in the Park, which I am glad to find in sympathy with the primeval suggestiveness of the landscape-gardening: an American Indian hunting with his dog, as the Indians must have hunted through the wilds here before the white men came.

II

This group is always a great pleasure to me, from whatever point I come upon it, or catch a glimpse of it; and I like to go and find the dog’s prototype in the wolves at the menagerie which the city offers free to the wonder of the crowds constantly thronging its grounds and houses. The captive brutes seem to be of that solidarity of good-fellowship which unites all the frequenters of the Park; the tigers and the stupidly majestic lions have an air different to me from tigers and lions shown for profit. Among the milder sorts, I do not care so much for the wallowing hippopotamuses and the lumbering elephants and the supercilious camels which one sees in menageries everywhere, as for those types which represent a period as extinct as that of the American pioneers; I have rather a preference for going and musing upon the ragged bison pair as they stand with their livid mouths open at the pale of their paddock, expecting the children’s peanuts, and unconscious of their importance as survivors of the untold millions of their kind which a quarter of a century ago blackened the Western plains for miles and miles. There are now only some forty or fifty left; for, of all the forces of our plutocratic conditions, so few are conservative that the American buffalo is as rare as the old-fashioned American mechanic, proud of his independence and glorying in his citizenship.

In some other enclosures are pairs of beautiful deer, which I wish might be enlarged to the whole extent of the Park. But I can only imagine them on the great sweeps of grass, which recall the savannahs and prairies, though there is a very satisfactory flock of sheep which nibbles the herbage there, when these spaces are not thrown open to the ball - players who are allowed on certain days of the week. I like to watch them, and so do great numbers of other frequenters of the Park, apparently; and when I have walked far up beyond the reservoirs of city water, which serve the purpose of natural lakes in the landscape, I like to come upon that expanse in the heart of the woods where the tennis-players have stretched their nets over a score of courts, and the art students have set up their easels on the edges of the lawns, for what effect of the autumnal foliage they have the luck or the skill to get. It is all very sweet and friendly, and in keeping with the purpose of the Park and its frank and simple treatment throughout.

III

I think this treatment is best for the greatest number of those who visit the place, and for whom the aspect of simple nature is the thing to be desired. Their pleasure in it, as far as the children are concerned, is visible and audible enough, but I like, as I stroll along, to note the quiet comfort which the elder people take in this domain of theirs, as they sit on the benches in the woodland ways, or under the arching trees of the Mall, unmolested by the company of some of the worst of all the bad statues in the world. They are mostly foreigners, I believe, but I find every now and then an American among them, who has released himself, or has been forced by want of work, to share their leisure for the time; I fancy he has always a bad conscience, if he is taking the time off, from the continual pressure of our duty to add dollar to dollar and provide for the future as well as the present need. The foreigner, who has been bred up without the American’s hope of advancement, has not his anxiety, and is a happier man, so far as that goes; but the Park imparts something of its peace to every one, even to some of the people who drive and form a spectacle for those who walk.

For me they all unite to form a spectacle I never cease to marvel at, with a perpetual hunger of conjecture as to what they really think of one another. Apparently, they are all, whether they walk or whether they drive, willing collectively, if not individually, to go on forever in the economy which perpetuates their inequality, and makes a mock of the polity which assures them their liberty. The difference which money creates among men is always preposterous, and whenever I take my eyes from it the thing ceases to he credible; yet this difference is what the vast majority of Americans have agreed to accept forever as right and justice. If I were to go and sit beside some poor man in the Park, and ask him why a man no better than he was driving before him in a luxurious carriage, he would say that the other man had the money to do it; and he would really think he had given me a reason; the man in the carriage himself could not regard the answer as more full and final than the man on the bench. They have both been reared in the belief that it is a sufficient answer, and they would both regard me with the same misgiving if I ventured to say that it was not a reason; for, if their positions were to he at once reversed, they would both acquiesce in the moral outlawry of their inequality. The man on foot would think it had simply come his turn to drive in a carriage, and the man whom he ousted would think it was rather hard luck, but he would realize that it was what, at the bottom of his heart, he had always expected.

Only once have I happened to find any one who questioned the situation from a stand-point outside of it, and that was a shabbily dressed man whom I overheard talking to a poor woman in one of those pleasant arbors which crown certain points of rising ground in the Park. She had a paper bundle on the seat beside her, and she looked like some working-woman out of place, with that hapless, wistful air which such people often have. Her poor little hands, which lay in her lap, were stiffened and hardened with work, but  they were clean, except for the black of the nails, and she was very decently clad in garments beginning to fray into rags; she had a good, kind, faithful face, and she listened without rancor to the man as he unfolded the truth to her concerning the conditions in which they lived. It was the wisdom of the poor, hopeless, joyless, as it now and then makes itself heard in the process of the years and ages, and then sinks again into silence. He showed her how she had no permanent place in the economy, not because she had momentarily lost work, but because in the nature of things as we have them, it could only be a question of time when she must be thrown out of any place she found. He blamed no one; he only blamed the conditions. I doubt whether his wisdom made the friendless woman happier, but I could not have gainsaid it, when he saw me listening, if he had asked, “Isn’t that the truth?” I left him talking sadly on, and I never saw him again. He was threadbare, but he, too, was cleanly and decent in his dress, and not at all of that type of agitators of whom we have made an effigy like nothing I have seen, as if merely for the childish pleasure of reviling it.

IV

The whole incident was infinitely pathetic to me; and yet we must not romance the poor, or imagine that they are morally better than the rich; we must not fancy that a poor man, when he ceases to be a poor man, would be kinder for having been poor. He would perhaps oftener, and certainly more logically, be unkinder, for there would be mixed with his vanity of possession a quality of cruel fear, an apprehension of loss, which the man who had always been rich would not feel. The self-made man, when he has made himself of money, seems to have been deformed by his original destitution, and I think that if I were in need I would rather take my chance of pity from the man who had never been poor. Of course, this is generalization, and there are instances to the contrary, which at once occur to me. But what is absolutely true is that our prosperity, the selfish joy of having, at the necessary cost of those who cannot have, is blighted by the feeling of insecurity which every man has in his secret soul, and which the man who has known want must have in greater measure than the man who has never known want.

There is, indeed, no security for wealth, which we think the chief good of life, in the system that warrants it. When a man has gathered his millions, he cannot be reduced to want, probably; but while he is amassing them, while he is in the midst of the fight, or the game, as most men are, there are ninety-five chances out of a hundred that he will be beaten. Perhaps it is best so, and I should be glad it was so if I could be sure that the common danger bred a common kindness between the rich and the poor, but it seems not to do so. As far as I can see, the rule of chance, which they all live under, does nothing more than reduce them to a community of anxieties.

To the eye of the observer they have the monotony of the sea, where some tenth wave runs a little higher than the rest, but sinks at last, or breaks upon the rocks or sands, as inevitably as the other nine. Our inequality is without picturesqueness and without distinction. The people in the carriages are better dressed than those on foot, especially the women; but otherwise they do not greatly differ from the most of these. The spectacle of the driving in the Park has none of that dignity which characterizes such spectacles in European capitals. This may be because many people of the finest social quality are seldom seen there, or it may be because the differences growing out of money can never have the effect of those growing out of birth; that a plutocracy can never have the last wicked grace of an aristocracy. It would be impossible, for instance, to weave any romance about the figures you see in our carriages; they do not even suggest the poetry of ages of prescriptive wrong; they are of to-day, and there is no guessing whether they will be of to-morrow or not.

In Europe, this sort of tragi-comedy is at least well played; but in America you always have the feeling that the performance is that of second-rate amateurs, who, if they would really live out the life implied by America, would be the superiors of the whole world. I am moved to laughter by some of the things I see among them, when perhaps I ought to be awed, as, for instance, by the sight of a little, lavishly dressed lady, lolling in the corner of a ponderous landau, with the effect of holding fast lest she should be shaken out of it, while two powerful horses, in jingling, silver-plated harness, -with due equipment of coachman and footman, seated on their bright-buttoned overcoats on the box together, get her majestically over the ground at a slow trot. This is what I sometimes see, with not so much reverence as I feel for the simple mother pushing her baby-carriage on the asphalt beside me and doubtless envying the wonderful creature in the landau. Sometimes it is a fat old man in the landau; or a husband and wife, not speaking; or a pair of grim old ladies, who look as if they had lived so long aloof from their unluckier sisters that they could not be too severe with the mere sight of them. Generally speaking, the people in the carriages do not seem any happier for being there, though I have sometimes seen a jolly party of strangers in a public carriage, drawn by those broken-kneed horses which seem peculiarly devoted to this service.

The best place to see the driving is at a point where the different driveways converge, not far from the Egyptian obelisk which the Khedive gave us some years ago, and which we have set up here in one of the finest eminences of the Park. He had, of course, no moral right to rob his miserable land of any one of its characteristic monuments, but I do not know that it is not as well in New York as in Alexandria. If its heart of aged stone could feel the continuity of conditions, it must be aware of the essential unity of the civilizations beside the Nile and beside the Hudson; and, if Cleopatra’s Needle had really an eye to see, it must perceive that there is nothing truly civic in either. As the tide of dissatisfied and weary wealth rolls by its base here, in the fantastic variety of its equipages, does the needle discern so much difference between their occupants and the occupants of the chariots that swept beneath it in the capital of the Ptolemies two thousand years ago? I can imagine it at times winking such an eye and cocking in derision the gilded cap with which the New-Yorkers have lately crowned it. They pass it in all kinds of vehicles, and there are all kinds of people in them, though there are sometimes no people at all, as when the servants have been sent out to exercise the horses, for nobody’s good or pleasure, and in the spirit of that atrocious waste which runs through our whole life. I have now and then seen a gentleman driving a four-in-hand, with everything to minister to his vanity in the exact imitation of a nobleman driving a four-in-hand over English roads, and with no one to be drawn by his crop-tailed bays or blacks except himself and the solemn groom on his perch; I have wondered how much more nearly equal they were in their aspirations and instincts than either of them imagined. A gentleman driving a pair, abreast or tandem, with a groom on the rumble, for no purpose except to express his quality, is a common sight enough; and sometimes you see a lady illustrating her consequence in like manner. A lady driving, while a gentleman occupies the seat behind her, is a sight which always affects me like the sight of a man taking a woman’s arm in walking, as the man of an underbred sort is apt to do.

Horsy - looking women, who are, to ladies at least, what horsy - looking men are to gentlemen, drive together; often they are really ladies, and sometimes they are nice young girls, out for an innocent dash and chat. They are all very much and very unimpressively dressed, whether they sit in state behind the regulation coachman and footman or handle the reins themselves. Now and then you see a lady with a dog on the seat beside her for an airing, but not often a child; once or twice I have seen one with a large spaniel seated comfortably in front of her, and I have asked myself what would happen if, instead of the dog, she had taken into her carriage some pale woman or weary old man, such as I sometimes see gazing patiently after her. But the thing would be altogether impossible. I should be the first to feel the want of keeping in it; for, however recent wealth may be here, it has equipped itself with all the apparatus of long-inherited riches, which it is as strongly bound to maintain intact as if it were really old and hereditary — perhaps more strongly. I must say that, mostly, its owners look very tired of it, or of something, in public, and that our American plutocrats, if they have not the distinction of an aristocracy, have at least the ennui.

V

But these stylish turnouts form only a part of the spectacle in the Park driveways, though they form, perhaps, the larger part. Bicyclers weave their dangerous and devious way everywhere through the roads, and seem to be forbidden the bridle-paths, where from point to point you catch a glimpse of the riders. There are boys and girls in village carts, the happiest of all the people you see; and there are cheap-looking buggies, like those you meet in the country, with each a young man and young girl in them, as if they had come in from some remote suburb; turnouts shabbier yet, with poor old horses, poke about with some elderly pair, like a farmer and his wife. There are family carryalls, with friendly-looking families, old and young, getting the good of the Park together in a long, leisurely jog; and open buggies with yellow wheels and raffish men in them behind their widespread trotters; or with some sharp-faced young fellow getting all the speed out of a lively span that the mounted policeman, stationed at intervals along the driveways, will allow. The finer vehicles are of all types, patterned, like everything else that is fine in America, upon something fine in Europe; but just now a very high-backed phaeton appears to be most in favor; and, in fact, I get a great deal of pleasure out of these myself, as I do not have to sit stiffly up in them. They make me think somehow of those eighteenth-century English novels, of the times when young ladies like Evelina drove out in phaetons and were the passionate pursuit of Lord Orvilles and Sir Clement Willoughbys.

How far do the New-Yorkers publicly carry their travesty of the European aristocratic life? I should say, from what I have seen of the driving in the Park, it does not err on the side of excess. The equipages, when they are fine, are rather simple; and the liveries are such as express a proprietary grandeur in coat-buttons, silver or gilt, and in a darker or lighter drab of the cloth the servants wear; they are often in brown or dark green. Now and then you see the tightly cased legs and top-boots and cockaded hat of a groom, but  this is oftenest on a four-in-hand coach or the rumble of a tandem cart; the soul of the free-born republican is rarely bowed before it on the box of a family carriage. I have seen nothing like an attempt at family colors in the trappings of the coachman and horses.

I should say that the imitation was quite within the bounds of good taste. The bad taste is in the wish to imitate Europe at all; but, with the abundance of money, the imitation is simply inevitable. There is no American life for wealth; there is no native formula for the expression of social superiority; because America means equality, if it means anything, in the last analysis. But in all this show on the Park driveways you get no effect so vivid as the effect of sterility in that liberty without equality which seems to satisfy us Americans. A man may come into the Park with any sort of vehicle, so that it is not for the carriage of merchandise, and he is free to spoil what might be a fine effect with the intrusion of whatever squalor of turnout he will. He has as much right there as any one, but the right to be shabby in the presence of people who are fine is not one that I should envy him. I do not think that he can be comfortable in it, for the superiority around him puts him to shame, as it puts the poor man to shame at every turn in life, though some people, with an impudence that is pitiable, will tell you that it does not put him to shame; that he feels himself as good as any one. We are always talking about human nature and what it is, and what it is not; but we try in our blind worship of inequality to refuse the first and simplest knowledge of human nature, which testifies of itself in every throb of our own hearts, as we try even to refuse a knowledge of the divine nature, and attribute to the Father of all a design in the injustice we have ourselves created.

To me the lesson of Central Park is that, where it is used in the spirit of fraternity and equality, the pleasure in it is pure and fine, and that its frequenters have for the moment a hint of the beauty which might be perpetually in their lives; but where it is invaded by the motives of the strife that raves all round it in the city outside, its joys are fouled with contempt and envy, the worst passions that tear the human heart. Ninety-nine Americans out of a hundred have never seen a man in livery; they have never dreamed of such a display as this in the Park. Yet, with our conditions, I fear that at sight of it ninety-nine Americans out of every hundred would lust for their turn of the wheel, their throw of the dice, so that they might succeed to a place in it, and flaunt their luxury in the face of poverty and abash humility with their pride.

NEW YORK STREETS

IF the reader will look at a plan of New York, he will see that Central Park is really in the centre of the place, if a thing which has length only, or is so nearly without breadth or thickness, can be said to have a centre. South of the Park the whole island is dense with life and business; it is pretty solidly built up on either side; but to the northward the blocks of houses are no longer of a compact succession; they struggle up, at irregular intervals, from open fields, and sink again on the streets pushed beyond them into the simple country, where even a suburban character is lost. It can only be a few years, at most, before all the empty spaces will be occupied, and the town, such as it is, and such as it seems to have been ever since the colonial period, will have anchored itself fast in the rock that underlies the larger half of it and imparted its peculiar effect to every street — an effect of arrogant untidiness, of superficial and formal gentility, of immediate neglect and overuse.

I

You will see more of the neglect and overuse in the avenues which penetrate the city’s mass from north to south, and more of the superficial and formal gentility in the streets that cross these avenues from east to west; but the arrogant untidiness you will find nearly everywhere, except in some of the newest quarters westward from the Park and still farther up - town. These are really very clean; but they have a bare look, as if they were not yet inhabited, and, in fact, many of the houses are still empty. Lower down, the streets are often as shabby and as squalid as the avenues that run parallel with the river-sides; and at least two of the avenues are as decent as the decentest cross-streets.

Of late, a good many streets and several avenues have been asphalted, and the din of wheels on the rough pavement no longer torments the ear so cruelly; but there is still the sharp clatter of the horses’ shoes everywhere; and their pulverized manure, which forms so great a part of the city’s dust, and is constantly taken into people’s stomachs and lungs, seems to blow more freely about on the asphalt than on the old-fashioned pavements. A few years ago scraps of paper, straw, fruit-peel, and all manner of minor waste and rubbish littered all the thoroughfares; under a reform administration this has been amended; but no one knows how long a reform will last in New York.

When I leave Central Park, where I like best to walk, I usually take one of the avenues southward, and then turn eastward or westward on one of the crossstreets whose perspective appeals to my curiosity, and stroll through it to one of the rivers. The avenues are fifteen or sixteen in number, and they stretch, some farther than others, up and down the island, but most of them end in the old town, where its irregularity begins, at the south, and several are interrupted by the different parks at the north. Together with the streets that intersect them between the old town and Central Park, they form one of the most characteristic parts of modern New York. Like the streets, they are numbered, rather than named, from a want of imagination, or from a preference of mere convenience to the poetry and associations that cluster about a name, and can never cling to a number; or from a business impatience to be quickly done with the matter. This must rather defeat itself, however, when a hurried man undertakes to tell you that he lives at three hundred and seventy-five on One Hundred and Fifty-seventh Street. Toward the rivers the avenues grow shabbier and shabbier, though this statement must be qualified, like all general statements. Seventh Avenue, on the west, is pleasanter than Sixth Avenue; and Second Avenue, on the east, is more agreeable than Third Avenue. In fact, the other afternoon, as I strayed over to the East River, I found several blocks of Avenue A, which runs nearest it, very quiet, built up with comfortable dwellings, and even clean, as cleanliness is understood in New York.

But it is Fifth Avenue which divides the city lengthwise nearest the middle, and it is this avenue which affords the norm of style and comfort to the other avenues on either hand, and to all the streets that intersect it. Madison Avenue is its rival, and has suffered less from the invasion of shops and hotels, but a long stretch of Fifth Avenue is still the most aristocratic quarter of the city, and is upon the whole its finest thoroughfare. I do not think any New York street fine; but, generally, Fifth Avenue and the crossstreets in its better part have a certain regularity in their mansions of brown-stone which give something of the pleasure one gets from symmetry. They are at least not so chaotic as they might be; though they always suggest money more than taste, I cannot at certain moments, and under the favor of an evening sky, deny them a sort of unlovely and forbidding beauty. There are not many of these cross-streets which have remained intact from the business of the other avenues. They have always a drinking-saloon or a provision-store or an apothecary’s shop at the corners where they intersect; the modistes find lodgment in them almost before the residents are aware. Beyond Sixth Avenue, or Seventh at farthest, on the west, and Fourth Avenue or Lexington, on the east, they lose their genteel character; their dwellings degenerate into apartment-houses, and then into tenement-houses of lower and lower grade till the rude traffic and the offensive industries of the river shores are reached.

But once more I must hedge, for sometimes a street is respectable almost to the water on one side or the other; and there are whole neighborhoods of pleasant dwellings, far down-town, which seem to have been forgotten by the enterprise of business, or neglected by its caprice, and to have escaped for a time at least the contagion of poverty. Business and poverty are everywhere slowly or swiftly eating their way into the haunts of respectability and destroying its pleasant homes. They already have the whole of the old town to themselves. In large spaces of it no one dwells but the janitors with their families, who keep the skyscraping edifices where business frets the time away; and by night in the streets where myriads throng by day no one walks but the outcast and the watch.

Many of these business streets are the handsomest in the city, with a good sky-line and an architectural ideal too good for the uses of commerce. This is often realized in antipathetic iron, but often there is good honest work in stone, and an effect better than the best of Fifth Avenue. But this is stupid and wasteful; it is for the pleasure of no one’s taste or sense; the business men who traffic in these edifices have no time for their beauty, or no perception of it; the porters and truckmen and expressmen, who toil and moil in these thoroughfares, have no use for the grandeur that catches the eye of a chance passer.

Other spaces are abandoned to the poverty which festers in the squalid houses and swarms day and night in the squalid streets; but business presses closer and harder upon the refuges of its foster-child, not to say its offspring, and it is only a question of time before it shall wholly possess them. It is only a question of time before all the comfortable quarters of the city, northward from the old town to the Park, shall be invaded, and the people driven to the streets building up on the west and east of it for a little longer sojourn. Where their last stay shall be, Heaven knows; perhaps they will be forced into the country.

In this sort of invasion, however, it is poverty that seems mostly to come first, and it is business that follows and holds the conquest, though this is far from being always the case. Whether it is so or not, however, poverty is certain at some time to impart its taint; for it is perpetual here, from generation to generation, like death itself. In our conditions, poverty is incurable; the very hope of cure is laughed to scorn by those who cling the closest to these conditions; it may be better at one time and worse at another; but it must always be, somehow, till time shall be no more. It is from everlasting to everlasting.

II

When I come home from these walks of mine, I have a vision of the wretched quarters through which I have passed, as blotches of disease upon the civic body, as loathsome sores, destined to eat deeper and deeper into it; and I am haunted by this sense of them, until I plunge deep into the Park, and wash my consciousness clean of it all for a while. But when I am actually in these leprous spots I become hardened, for the moment, to the deeply underlying fact of human discomfort. I feel their picturesqueness, with a callous indifference to that ruin, or that defect, which must so largely constitute the charm of the picturesque. A street of tenement-houses is always more picturesque than a street of brown-stone residences, which the same thoroughfare usually is before it slopes to either river. The fronts of the edifices are decorated with the iron balconies and ladders of the fire-escapes, and have in the perspective a false air of gayety, which is travestied in their rear by the lines thickly woven from the windows to the tall poles set between the backs of the houses and fluttering with drying clothes as with banners.

The sidewalks swarm with children, and the air rings with their clamor, as they fly back and forth at play; on the thresholds, the mothers sit nursing their babes and the old women gossip together; young girls lean from the casements, alow and aloft, or flirt from the doorways with the hucksters who leave their carts in the street, while they come forward with some bargain in fruit or vegetables and then resume their leisurely progress and their jarring cries. The place has all the attraction of close neighborhood, which the poor love, and which affords them for nothing the spectacle of the human drama, with themselves for actors. In a picture it would be most pleasingly effective, for then you could be in it, and yet have the distance on it which it needs. But to be in it, and not have the distance, is to inhale the stenches of the neglected street, and to catch that yet fouler and dreadfuller poverty-smell which breathes from the open doorways. It is to see the children quarrelling in their games, and beating one another in the face, and rolling one another in the gutter, like the little savage outlaws they are. It is to see the work-worn look of the mothers, the squalor of the babes, the haggish ugliness of the old women, the slovenly frowziness of the young girls. All this makes you hasten your pace down to the river, where the tall buildings break and dwindle into stables and shanties of wood, and finally end in the piers, commanding the whole stretch of the mighty waterway with its shipping and the wooded heights of its western bank.

I am supposing you to have walked down a street of tenement-houses to the North River, as the New-Yorkers call the Hudson; and I wish I could give some notion of the beauty and majesty of the stream, some sense of the mean and ignoble effect of the city’s invasion of the hither shore. The ugliness is, indeed, only worse in degree, but not in kind, than that of all city water-fronts. Instead of pleasant homes, with green lawns and orchards sloping to the brink, huge factories and foundries, lumber - yards, breweries, slaughter-houses, and warehouses, abruptly interspersed with stables and hovels and drinking-saloons, disfigure the shore, and in the nearest avenue the freight - trains come and go on lines of railroads, in all the middle portion of New York. South of it, in the business section, the poverty section, the river region is a mere chaos of individual and commercial strife and pauper wretchedness. North of it there are gardened driveways following the shore; and even at many points between, when you finally reach the river, there is a kind of peace, or at least a truce to the frantic activities of business. To be sure, the heavy trucks grind up and down the long piers, but  on either side the docks are full of leisurely canal-boats, and if you could come with me in the late afternoon, you would see the smoke curling upward from their cabin roofs, as from the chimneys of so many rustic cottages, and smell the evening meal cooking within, while the canal-wives lounged at the gangway hatches for a breath of the sunset air, and the boatmen smoked on the gunwales or indolently plied the long sweeps of their pumps. All the hurry and turmoil of the city is lost among these people, whose clumsy craft recall the grassy inland levels remote from the metropolis and the slow movement of life in the quiet country ways. Some of the mothers from the tenement-houses stroll down on the piers with their babies in their arms, and watch their men-kind, of all ages, fishing along the sides of the dock, or casting their lines far out into the current at the end. They do not seem to catch many fish, and never large ones, but they silently enjoy the sport, which they probably find leisure for in the general want of work in these hard times; if they swear a little at their luck, now and then, it is, perhaps, no more than their luck deserves. Some do not even fish, but sit with their legs dangling over the water and watch the swift tugs or the lagging sloops that pass, with now and then a larger sail or a towering passenger-steamboat. Far down the stream they can see the forests of masts fringing either shore and following the point of the island round and up into the great channel called the East River. These vessels seem as multitudinous as the houses that spread everywhere from them over the shore farther than the eye can reach. They bring the commerce of the world to this mighty city, which, with all its riches, is the parent of such misery, and with all its traffic abounds in idle men who cannot find work. The ships look happy and free, in the stream, but they are of the overworked world, too, as well as the houses; and, let them spread their wings ever so widely, they still bear with them the sorrows of the poor.

III

The other evening I walked over to the East River through one of the tenement streets, and I reached the water-side just as the soft night was beginning to fall in all its autumnal beauty. The afterglow died from the river, while I hung upon a parapet over a gulf ravined out of the bank for a street, and experienced that artistic delight which cultivated people are often proud of feeling, in the aspect of the long prison island which breaks the expanse of the channel. I knew the buildings on it were prisons, and that the men and women in them, bad before, could only come out of them worse than before and doomed to a life of outlawry and of crime. I was aware that they were each an image of that loveless and hopeless perdition which men once imagined that God had prepared for the souls of the damned, but I could not see the barred windows of those hells in the waning light. I could only see the trees along their walks, their dim lawns and gardens, and the castellated forms of the prisons; and the aesthetic sense, which is careful to keep itself pure from pity, was tickled with an agreeable impression of something old and fair. The dusk thickened, and the vast steamboats which ply between the city and the New England ports on Long Island Sound, and daily convey whole populations of passengers between New York and Boston, began to sweep by silently, swiftly, luminous masses on the black water. Their lights aloft at how and stern, floated with them like lambent planets; the lights of lesser craft dipped by, and came arid went in the distance; the lamps of the nearer and farther shores twinkled into sight, and a peace that ignored all the misery of it, fell upon the scene.

IV

The greatest problem of this metropolis is not how best to he in this place or that, but how fastest to go from one to the other, and the New-Yorkers have made guesses at the riddle, had and worse, on each of the avenues, which, in their character of mere roadways, look as if the different car-tracks had been in them first, and the buildings, high and low, had chanced along their sides afterward. This is not the fact, of course, and it is not so much the effect on Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue and Lexington Avenue, which are streets of dwellings, solidly built up, like the cross-streets. But it is undoubtedly the effect on all the other avenues, in great part of their extent. They vary but little in appearance otherwise, from east to west, except so far as the elevated railroads disfigure them, if thoroughfares so shabby and repulsive as they mostly are, can be said to be disfigured, and not beautified by whatever can be done to hide any part of their Ugliness. Where this is left to make its full impression upon the spectators, there are lines of horse-cars perpetually jingling up and down, except on Fifth Avenue, where they have stages, as the New-Yorkers call the unwieldy and unsightly vehicles that ply there, and Lexington Avenue, where they have the cable-cars. But the horse-cars run even under the elevated tracks, and no experience of noise can enable you to conceive of the furious din that bursts upon the sense when at some corner two cars encounter on the parallel tracks below, while two trains roar and shriek and hiss on the rails overhead, and a turmoil of rattling express-wagons, heavy drays and trucks, and carts, hacks, carriages, and huge vans rolls itself between and beneath the prime agents of the uproar. The noise is not only deafening, it is bewildering; you cannot know which side the danger threatens most, and you literally take your life in your hands when you cross in the midst of it. Broadway, which traverses the district I am thinking of in a diagonal line till it loses its distinctive character beyond the Park, is the course of the cable-cars running with a silent speed that is more dangerous even than the tumultuous rush on the avenues. Now and then the apparatus for gripping the chain will not release it, and then the car rushes wildly over the track, running amuck through everything in its way, and spreading terror on every hand. When under control the long saloons advance swiftly, from either direction, at intervals of half a minute, with a monotonous alarum of their gongs, and the foot-passenger has to look well to his way if he ventures across the track, lest in avoiding one car another roll him under its wheels.

Apparently, the danger is guarded as well as it can be, and it has simply to be taken into the account of life in New York, for it cannot be abated, and no one is to be blamed for what is the fault of every one. It is true that there ought not, perhaps, to be any track in such a thoroughfare, but it would be hard to prove that people could get on without it, as they did before the theft of the street for the original horse-car track. Perhaps it was not a theft; but at all events, and at the best, the street was given away by the city to an adventurer who wished to lay the tracks in it for his private gain, and none of the property owners along the line could help themselves. There is nothing that Americans hold so dear, or count so sacred, as private property; life and limb are cheap in comparison; but private enterprise is allowed to violate the rights of private property, from time to time here, in the most dramatic way.

The street - car company which took possession of Broadway never paid the abutters anything, I believe; and the elevated railroad companies are still resisting payment of damages on the four avenues which they occupied for their way up and down the city without offering compensation to the property owners along their route. If the community had built these roads, it would have indemnified every one, for the community is always just when it is the expression of the common honesty; and if it is ever unjust, it is because the uncommon dishonesty has contrived to corrupt it.

The elevated roads and the cable road had no right to be, on the terms that the New-Yorkers have them, but they are by far the best means of transit in the city, and I must say that, if they were not abuses, they would offer great comfort and great facility to the public. This is especially true of the elevated roads, which, when you can put their moral offence out of your mind, are always delightful in their ease and airy swiftness. You fly smoothly along between the second and third story windows of the houses, which are shops below and dwellings above, on the avenues. The stations, though they have the prevailing effect of overuse and look dirty and unkempt, are rather pretty in themselves; and you reach them, at frequent intervals, by flights of not ungraceful iron steps. The elevated roads are always picturesque, with here and there a sweeping curve that might almost be called beautiful.

They darken the avenues, of course, and till them with an abominable uproar. Yet traffic goes on underneath, and life goes on alongside and overhead, and the city has adjusted itself to them, as a man adjusts himself to a chronic disease. I do not know whether they add to the foulness of the streets they pass through or not; I hardly think they do. The mud lies longer, after a rain, in the interminable tunnels which they form over the horse-car tracks in the middle of the avenues, and which you can look through for miles; but the mud does not blow into your nose and mouth as the dust does, and that is, so far, a positive advantage. A negative advantage, which I have hinted, is that they hide so much of the street from sight, and keep you from seeing all its shabbiness, pitilessly open to the eyes in the avenues which have only horse-car tracks in them. In fact, now that the elevated railroads are built, and the wrong they have done to persons is mainly past recall, perhaps the worst that can be said of them is that they do not serve their purpose. Of course, in our conditions, where ten men are always doing the work of one man in rivalry with one another, the passage of people to and from business is enormous — the passage of men to get money and the passage of women to spend it; and at the hours of the morning and the afternoon when the volume of travel is the greatest the trains of the elevated roads offer a spectacle that is really incredible.

Every seat in them is taken, and every foot of space in the aisles between the seats is held by people standing and swaying miserably to and fro by the leather straps dangling from the roofs. Men and women are indecently crushed together, without regard for that personal dignity which we seem to know nothing of and care nothing for. The multitude overflows from the car, at either end, and the passengers are as tightly wedged on the platform without as they are within. The long trains follow one another at intervals of two or three minutes, and at each station they make a stop of but a few seconds, when those who wish to alight fight their way through the struggling mass. Those who wish to mount fight their way into the car or on to the platform, where the guard slams an iron gate against the stomachs and in the faces of those arriving too late. Sometimes horrible accidents happen; a man clinging to the outside of the gate has the life crushed out of his body against the posts of the station as the train pulls out. But in this land, where people have such a dread of civic collectivism of any kind, lest individuality should suffer, the individual is practically nothing in the regard of the corporate collectivities which abound.

V

It is not only the corporations which outrage personal rights; where there is a question of interest, there seems to he no question of rights between individuals. They prey upon one another and seize advantages by force and by fraud in too many ways for me to hope to make the whole situation evident. The avenues to the eastward and westward have not grown up solidly and continuously in obedience to any law of order or in pursuance of any meditated design. They have been pushed along given lines, in fragments, as builders saw their interest in offering buyers a house or a row of houses, or as they could glut or trick the greed of land-owners clinging to their land, and counting upon some need of it, in the hope of extorting an unearned profit from it. In one place you will see a vast and lofty edifice, of brick or stone, and on each side of it or in front of it a structure one-fourth as high, or a row of scurvy hovels, left there till a purchaser comes, not to pay the honest worth of the land for it, but to yield the price the owner wants. In other places you see long stretches of high board fence, shutting in vacant lots, often the best lots on the street, which the landlord holds for the rise destined to accrue to him from the building all round and beyond his property. In the mean time he pays a low tax on his land compared with the tax which the improved property pays, and gets some meagre return for the use of his fence by the Italian fruiterers who build their stalls into it, and by the bill-posters who cover it with a medley of theatrical announcements, picturing the scenes of the different plays and the persons of the players. There are many things which unite to render the avenues unseemly and unsightly, such as the apparently desperate tastelessness and the apparently instinctive uncleanliness of the New-Yorkers. But as I stand at some point commanding a long stretch of one of their tiresome perspectives, which is architecturally like nothing so much as a horse’s jawbone, with the teeth broken or dislodged at intervals, I can blame nothing so much for the hideous effect as the rapacity of the land-owner holding on for a rise, as it is called. It is he who most spoils the sky-line, and keeps the street, mean and poor at the best in design, a defeated purpose and a chaos come again.

Even when the owners begin to build, to improve their real estate, as the phrase is, it is without regard to the rights of their neighbors or the feelings or tastes of the public, so far as the public may be supposed to have any. This is not true of the shabbier avenues alone, but of the finest, and of all the streets. If you will look, for instance, at the street facing the southern limit of the Park, you will get some notion of what I mean, and I hope you will he willing to suffer by a little study of it. At the western end you will see a vacant lot, with its high hoard fence covered with painted signs; then a tall mass of apartment-houses; then a stretch of ordinary New York dwellings of the old, commonplace brown-stone sort; then a stable, and a wooden liquor saloon at the corner. Across the next avenue there rises far aloof the compact bulk of a series of apartment-houses, which in color and design are the pleasantest in the city, and are so far worthy of their site. Beyond them to the eastward the buildings decline and fall, till they sink into another two-story drinking-shop on the corner of another avenue, where you will see the terminus of one of the elevated roads. Beyond this avenue is the fence of a large vacant lot, covered, as usual, with theatrical posters, and then there surges skyward another series of apartment-houses. The highest of these is nearly fifty feet higher than its nearest neighbors, which sink again till you suddenly drop from their nondescript monotony to the Gothic façade of a house of a wholly different color, in its pale sandstone, from the red of their brick fronts.

A vacant lot yawns here again, with a flare of theatrical posters on its fence, and beyond this, on the corner, is a huge hotel, the most agreeable of the three that tower above the fine square at the gate of the Park. With our silly American weakness for something foreign, this square is called the Plaza; I believe it is not at all like a Spanish plaza, but the name is its least offence. An irregular space in the centre is planted with trees, in whose shade the broken-kneed hacks of the public carriages droop their unhappy heads, without the spirit to bite the flies that trouble their dreams; and below this you get a glimpse of the conventional cross-street terminating the Plaza. At the eastern corner of the avenue is a costly new apartment-house of a modified Gothic style, and then you come to the second of the great hotels which give the Plaza such character as it has. It is of a light-colored stone, and it towers far above the first, which is of brick. It is thirteen stories high, and it stops abruptly in a flat roof. On the next corner north is another hotel, which rises six or seven stories higher yet, and terminates in a sort of mansard, topping a romanesque cliff of yellow brick and red sandstone. I seek a term for the architectural order, but it may not be the right one. There is no term for the disorder of what succeeds. From the summit of this enormous acclivity there is a precipitous fall of twelve stories to the roof of the next edifice, which is a grocery; and then to the florist’s and photographer’s next is another descent of three stories; on the corner is a drinking-saloon, one story in height, with a brick front and a wooden side. I will not ask you to go farther with me; the avenue continues northward and southward in a delirium of lines and colors — a savage anarchy of shapes which I should think the general experience of the Fair City at Chicago would now render perceptible even to the dullest sense.

VI

There are other points on Fifth Avenue nearly as bad as this, but not quite, and there are long stretches of it which, if dull, have at least a handsome uniformity. I have said already that it is still, upon the whole, the best of the avenues, in the sense of being the abode of the best — that is, the richest — people; we Americans habitually use best in this sense. Madison Avenue stretches northwest farther than the eye can reach, an interminable perspective of brown-stone dwellings, as yet little invaded by business. Lexington Avenue is of the same character, but of a humbler sort. On Second Avenue, down-town, there are large old mansions of the time when Fifth Avenue was still the home of the parvenus; and at different points on such other avenues as are spared by the elevated roads there are blocks of decent and comfortable dwellings; but for the most part they are wholly given up to shops. Of course, these reiterate with the insane wastefulness of our system the same business, the same enterprise, a thousand times.

One hears a good deal about the vast emporiums which are gathering the retail trade into themselves, and devastating the minor commerce, but there are perhaps a score of these at most in New York; and on the shabbier avenues and cross-streets there are at least a hundred miles of little shops, where an immense population of little dealers levy tribute on the public through the profit they live by. Until you actually see this, you can hardly conceive of such a multitude of people taken away from productive labor and solely devoted to marketing the things made by people who are overworked in making them.

Yet I prefer the smaller shops, where I can enter into some human relation with the merchant, if it is only for the moment. I have already tried to give some notion of the multitude of these; and I must say now that they add much in their infinite number and variety to such effect of gayety as the city has. They are especially attractive at night, when their brilliant lamps, with the shadows they cast, unite to an effect of gayety which the day will not allow.

The great stores contribute nothing to this, for they all close at six o’clock in the evening. On the other hand, they do not mar such poor beauty as the place has with the superfluity of signs that the minor traffic renders itself so offensive with. One sign, rather simple and unostentatious, suffices for a large store; a little store will want half a dozen, and will have them painted and hung all over its façade, and stood about in front of it as obtrusively as the police will permit. The effect is bizarre and grotesque beyond expression. If one thing in the business streets makes New York more hideous than another it is the signs, with their discordant colors, their infinite variety of tasteless shapes. If by chance there is any architectural beauty in a business edifice, it is spoiled, insulted, outraged by these huckstering appeals; while the prevailing unsightliness is emphasized and heightened by them. A vast, hulking, bare brick wall, rising six or seven stories above the neighboring buildings, one would think bad enough in all conscience: how, then, shall I give any notion of the horror it becomes when its unlovely space is blocked out in a ground of white with a sign painted on it in black letters ten feet high?

The signs that deface the chief of our cities seem trying to shout and shriek each other down, wherever one turns; they deface the fronts and sides and tops of the edifices; in all the approaches to the metropolis they stretch on long extents of fencing in the vacant suburban lands and cover the roofs and sides of the barns. The darkness does not shield you from them, and by night the very sky is starred with the electric bulbs that spell out, on the roofs of the lofty buildings, the frantic announcement of this or that business enterprise.

The strangest part of all this is, no one finds it offensive, or at least no one says that it is offensive. It is, indeed, a necessary phase of the economic warfare in which our people live, for the most as unconsciously as people lived in feudal cities, while the nobles fought out their private quarrels in the midst of them. No one dares relax his vigilance or his activity in the commercial strife, and in the absence of any public opinion, or any public sentiment concerning them, it seems as if the signs might eventually hide the city. That would not be so bad if something could then be done to hide the signs.

VII

Nothing seems so characteristic of this city, after its architectural shapelessness, as the eating and drinking constantly going on in the restaurants and hotels, of every quality, and the innumerable saloons. There may not be really more of these in New York, in proportion to the population, than in other great cities, but apparently there are more; for in this, as in all her other characteristics, New York is very open; her virtues and her vices, her luxury and her misery, are in plain sight; and a famishing man must suffer peculiarly here from the spectacle of people everywhere at sumptuous tables. Many of the finest hotels, if not most of them, have their dining-rooms on the level of the street, and the windows, whether curtained or uncurtained, reveal the continual riot within. I confess that the effect upon some hungry passer is always present to my imagination; but the New-Yorkers are so used to the perpetual encounter of famine and of surfeit that they do not seem to mind it.

There is scarcely a block on any of the poorer avenues which has not its liquor-store, and generally there are two; wherever a street crosses them there is a saloon on at least one of the corners; sometimes on two, sometimes on three, sometimes, even, on all four. I had the curiosity to count the saloons on Sixth Avenue, between the Park and the point down-town where the avenue properly ends. In a stretch of some two miles I counted ninety of them, besides the eating-houses where you can buy drink with your meat; and this avenue is probably far less infested with the traffic than some others.

You may, therefore, safely suppose that, out of the hundred miles of shops, there are ten or fifteen or twenty miles of saloons. They have the best places on the avenues, and on the whole they make the handsomest show. They all have a cheerful and inviting look, and if you step within, you find them cosey, quiet, and, for New York, clean. There are commonly tables set about in them, where their frequenters can take their beer or whiskey at their ease, and eat the free lunch which is often given in them; in a rear room you see a billiard-table. In fact, they form the poor man’s club-house, and if he might resort to them with his family, and be in the control of the State as to the amount he should spend and drink there, I could not think them without their rightful place in an economy which saps the vital forces of the laborer with overwork, or keeps him in a fever of hope or a fever of despair as to the chances of getting or not getting work when he has lost it. If you suggested this to the average American, however, he would be horror-struck. He would tell you that what you proposed was little better than anarchy; that in a free country you must always leave private persons free to debauch men’s souls and bodies with drink, and make money out of their ruin; that anything else was contrary to human nature, and an invasion of the sacred rights of the individual. Here in New York, this valuable principle is so scrupulously respected that the saloon controls the municipality, and the New-Yorkers think this is much better than for the municipality to control the saloon. It is from the saloon that their political bosses rise to power; it is in the saloon that all the election frauds are planned and fostered; and it would he infinitely comic, if it were not so pathetic, to read the solemn homilies on these abuses in the journals which hold by the good old American doctrine of private trade in drink as one of the bulwarks of the Constitution.

VIII

Without the saloon there would be far less poverty than there is, but poverty is a good old American institution, too; there would inevitably be less inequality, but inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself. In New York the inequality has that effect upon the architecture which I have tried to give some notion of; but, in fact, it deforms life at every turn, and in nothing more than in the dress of the people, high and low. New York is, on the whole, without doubt, the best-dressed community in America, or at least there is a certain number of people here more expensively and scrupulously attired than you will find anywhere else in the country. The rich copy the fashions set for them in Paris or in London, and then the less rich, and the still less rich, down to the poor, follow them as they can, until you arrive at the very poorest, who wear the cast-off and tattered fashions of former years and masquerade in a burlesque of the fortunate that never fails to shock and grieve me. They must all somehow be clothed; the climate and the custom require it; but sometimes I think their nakedness would be less offensive; and when I meet a wretched man, with his coat out at the elbows, or split up the back, in broken shoes, battered hat, and frayed trousers, or some old woman or young girl in a worn-out, second-hand gown and bonnet, tattered and threadbare and foul, I think that if I were a believer in it I would uncover my head to them and ask their forgiveness for the system that condemns some one always to such humiliation as theirs.

We say such people are not humiliated, that they do not mind it, that they are used to it; but if we ever look these people in the eye, and see the shrinking, averted glance of their shame and tortured pride, we must know that what we say is a cruel lie. At any rate, the presence of these outcasts must spoil the beauty of any dress near them, and there is always so much more penury than affluence that the sight of the crowd in the New York streets must give more pain than pleasure. The other day on Fifth Avenue it did not console me to meet a young and lovely girl, exquisitely dressed in the last effect of Paris, after I had just parted from a young fellow who had begged me to give him a little money to get something to eat, for he had been looking for work a week and had got nothing. I suppose I ought to have doubted his word, he was so decently clad, but I had a present vision of him in rags, and I gave to the frowzy tramp he must soon become.

Of course, this social contrast was extreme, like some of those architectural contrasts I have been noting, but  it was by no means exceptional, as those were not. In fact, I do not know but I may say that it was characteristic of the place, though you might say that the prevalent American slovenliness was also characteristic of the New York street crowds; I mean the slovenliness of the men — the women, of whatever order they are, are always as much dandies as they can be. But most American men are too busy to look much after their dress, and when they are very well-to-do they care very little for it. You see few men dressed in New York with the distinction of the better class of Londoners, and, when you do meet them, they have the air of playing a part, as, in fact, they are: they are playing the part of men of leisure in a nation of men whose reality is constant work, whether they work for bread or whether they work for money, and who, when they are at work, outdo the world, but sink, when they are at leisure, into something third-rate and fourth-rate. The commonness of effect in the street crowds is not absent from Fifth Avenue or from Madison Avenue any more than it is from First Avenue or Tenth Avenue; and the tide of wealth and fashion that rolls up and down the better avenues in the splendid carriages makes the shabbiness of the foot-passenger, when he is shabby, as he often is, the more apparent. On the far east side, and on the far west side, the horse-cars, which form the only means of transit, have got the dirt and grime of the streets and the dwellings on them and in them, and there is one tone of foulness in the passengers and the vehicles. I do not wish to speak other than tenderly of the poor, but it is useless to pretend that they are other than offensive in aspect, and I have to take my sympathy in both hands when I try to bestow it upon them. Neither they nor the quarter they live in has any palliating quaintness; and the soul, starved of beauty, will seek in vain to feed itself with the husks of picturesqueness in their aspect.

IX

As I have said before, the shabby avenues have a picturesqueness of their own, but it is a repulsive picturesqueness, as I have already suggested, except at a distance. There are some differences of level on the avenues near the rivers that give them an advantage of the more central avenues, and there is now and then a break of their line by the water which is always good. I have noticed this particularly on the eastern side of the city, which is also the older part, and which has been less subject to the changes perpetually going on elsewhere, so that First Avenue has really a finer sky-line, in many parts, than most parts of Fifth Avenue. There are certain bits, as the artists say, in the old quarters of the town once forming Greenwich village which, when I think of them, make me almost wish to take back what I have said of the absence even of quaintness in New York. If I recall the aspect of Mulberry Bend and Elizabeth Street, on a mild afternoon, when their Italian denizens are all either on the pavement or have their heads poked out of the windows, I am still more in doubt of my own words. But I am sure, at least, that there is no kindliness in the quaintness, such as you are said to find in European cities. It has undergone the same sort of malign change here that has transformed the Italians from the friendly folk they are at home to the surly race they mostly show themselves here: shrewd for their advancement in the material things, which seem the only good things to the Americanized aliens of all races, and fierce for their full share of the political pottage. The Italians have a whole region of the city to themselves, and they might feel at home in it if the filthiness of their native environment could repatriate them.

As you pass through these streets there is much to appeal to your pity in the squalid aspect of the people and the place, but nothing to take your fancy; and perhaps this is best, for I think that there is nothing more infernal than the juggle that transmutes for the tenderest - hearted people the misery of their fellows into something comic or poetic. Only very rarely have I got any relief from the sheer distress which the prevalent poverty gives; and perhaps the reader will not he able to understand how I could find this in the sight of some chickens going to roost on a row of carts drawn up by the street-side, near a little hovel where some old people lived in a temporary respite from the building about them; or from a cottage in outlying suburban fields, with a tar-roofed shanty for a stable, and an old horse cropping the pasturage of the enclosure, with a brood of turkeys at his heels.

But in New York you come to be glad of anything that will suggest a sweeter and a gentler life than that which you mostly see. The life of the poor here seemed to me symbolized in a waste and ruined field that I came upon the other day in one of the westward avenues, which had once been the grounds about a pleasant home. Till I saw this I did not think any piece of our mother earth could have been made to look so brutal and desolate amidst the habitations of men. But every spear of grass had been torn from it; the hardened and barren soil was furrowed like a haggard face, and it was all strewn with clubs and stones, as if it had been a savage battle-ground. A few trees stood aloof from the borders next the streets, where some courses of an ancient stone wall rose in places above the pavement. I found the sight of it actually depraving; it made me feel ruffianly, and I mused upon it in helpless wonder as to the influence its ugliness must have had amidst the structural ugliness all about it, if some wretch had turned to it in hopes of respite.

But probably none ever does. Probably the people on the shabby streets and avenues are no more sensible of their hideousness than the people in the finer streets and avenues are aware of their dulness or their frantic disproportion. I have never heard a New-Yorker speak of these things, and I have no doubt that if my words could come to the eyes of the average New-Yorker he would be honestly surprised that any one should find his city so ugly as it is. As for that first lesson of civilization which my words implicate, a civic control of the private architecture of the place, he would shrink from it with about as much horror as from civic control of the liquor trade. If he did not, he would still be unable to understand how the individual liberty that suffers a man to build offensively to his neighbor or to the public at large is not liberty, but is a barbarous tyranny, which puts an end instantly to beauty, and extinguishes the common and the personal rights of every one who lives near the offender or passes by his edifice. We Americans are yet so far lost in the dark ages as to suppose that there is freedom where the caprice of one citizen can interfere with the comfort or pleasure of the rest.

THE END

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE

First published in 1900, this non-fiction work collects several pieces originally written for magazines during the 1890’s. A second edition added “A Belated Guest” (on Bret Harte) and “My Mark Twain” and was published in 1910. As well as being a personal memoir and a literary estimation of the subjects of the various essays, the work as a whole constitutes an intriguing account of the literary-historical context in which Howells himself wrote – the kinds of ideas that informed his work or against which his work was constructed.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND

I.

II.

III

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

STUDIES OF LOWELL

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

A BELATED GUEST

I.

II.

III.

IV.

MY MARK TWAIN

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

Cover of the first edition

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work. Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and, though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring to share them with the reader.

The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here, beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it from the manuscript to the editor of Harper’s Magazine, where we lay under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it had been anticipated in Harper’s by other reminiscences of him, and it was therefore first printed in Scribner’s Magazine. It was the paper with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend, the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.

It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New England in quality.

While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories, with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.

There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call the book by that name who likes.

Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of 1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the “hochst angenehmer Schmerz,” of seeking to live here with those who live here no more.

W. D. H.

MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND

I.

If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches, and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet. But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio, as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs. I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and Longfellow, and I — I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French book penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. One of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our houses, “Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?” could be answered, with cold superiority, “There are several contributors to the Atlantic in Columbus.” There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully several as twenty are.

II.

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met. I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him know that:

    “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,”

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press, and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.

In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet, my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing. Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host’s guest, whom I afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he had not shone in ours.

III

At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe’s, if he had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines from time to time: in the first Putnam’s (where there was a dashing picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper’s, and in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself after his hour on the platform.

He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto, and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the evening of a first day’s lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say, to my great amaze and happiness, “Hello, here’s Howells!”

“Oh,” I broke out upon him, “I was just looking for some one I knew. I hope you are some one who knows me!”

“Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press,” said the young fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment. He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy, four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff’s lager-beer cellar on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had known them, were apt to make me sick.

I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me, or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last, as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at Doctor —— — ‘s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversation ended.

He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it, and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the critic or the public.

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training. I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me of the early thirties!

I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, “Oh, but you know, I expect to use it in the other world.” Yea, that made it worth while, I consented; but was he sure of the other world? “As sure as I am of this,” he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement, were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his life.

IV

I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not, was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters, in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master in more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier’s splendid lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs. Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she was still writing.

This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time, and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then, when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto, and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam’s Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper’s New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of Putnam’s, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner’s, the Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, and I know not what others, were still unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it was by nativity.

Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham’s Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey’s Lady’s Book and Peterson’s Magazine, publications really incredible in their insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal, with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor & Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.

V.

Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey; but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features, and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look, and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at home.

At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment. Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to, and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.

But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe, now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I got my friend to show me

      “ —— the breezy dome of groves,

       The shadows of Deering’s woods,”

because they were in one of Longfellow’s loveliest and tenderest poems; and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the

      “ — black wharves and the slips,

       And the sea-tides tossing free,

       And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,

       And the beauty and mystery of the ships,

       And the magic of the sea,”

mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond vision of the poet’s past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or a later time that I went to revere

      “ — the dead captains as they lay

       In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay,

       where they in battle died,”

but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under

      “ — the trees which shadow each well-known street,

       As they balance up and down,”

for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I well remember.

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as material that might be turned into literature, or that might be associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them, which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them together.

VI.

I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop, with the sheriff’s return of execution upon it, which I found at the Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of red in my memory.

The kind old ship’s captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him. Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities, which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia, where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to the tree that stood

       “Auf brennender Felsenwand.”

Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold height, I am in doubt to this day.

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines, or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again. If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.

VII.

I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.

I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order, ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man, coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to excel in fashion.

I will suppose, for convenience’ sake, that I visited Haverhill, too, before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in, and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston, there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to the literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been, professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets. That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my earlier ignorance.

I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.

The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in the “groves of academe” at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of “Old Harvard’s scholar factories red,” then far fewer than now. It must have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge, addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with him he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to put my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past, and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could not tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him. In the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near the Delta.

Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the ‘Fable for Critics’ than by the ‘Biglow Papers’, probably. But in the ‘Vision of Sir Launfal’ and the ‘Legend of Brittany’ he had won a liking if not a listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American poet,

       “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

                 The love of love,”

and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender rhyme, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, which I can not yet read without something of the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it. At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before he could do that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me; I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the Christ-look which Page’s portrait has flattered in it.

His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation, the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction — I did not know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.

I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something about Heine’s search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense, that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house, which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with “James Howel,” and took down a volume of the ‘Familiar Letters’ from the shelves behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken; but

       “The love he bore to learning was at fault”

for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels’s name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it. He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that is all; but “it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign.” He said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections, for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of type.

He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire’s time.

I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo, that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, “I commonly do that the first time,” as if it were a frequent habit with him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.

VIII.

We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.

I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war begun in Jackson’s time was then silently stretching itself under its long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for its completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went about with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city it seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert at Copeland’s restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought some idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even after Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no fault of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like enough to warrant me in addressing him.

He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks, which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my place.

I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery, unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature, and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.

I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets, though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds, that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me, for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before, pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about him of those who knew, they said, “Oh, he is at Nahant,” and I thought that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of ‘The Amber Gods’ who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides, it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then very much longed to have. They said, “Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,” but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him. In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness that with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm in seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great or little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he is likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has done. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the rules that govern us with common men.

IX.

My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt, if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the book on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor & Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr. Fields’s little room at the back of the store, with its window looking upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, “I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold.”

But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the moment all my pleasure and pride. It was ‘The Pilot’s Story,’ which I suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out upon him with the demand:

  “What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint

  Louis?”

I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural enough, and he had made the line read:

  “What will you say to our boy when he cries for ‘Ma,’ there in Saint

  Louis?”

He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr. Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters, and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another’s. But the publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it, but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which had nearly been my end.

X.

As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people in some little upper room at Parker’s, which I was never afterwards able to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was there with him.

Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination, and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found range enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty. His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected to find myself in the Autocrat’s presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile, the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to me as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found him physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps, and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.

A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure were complete.

Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell’s right, I felt through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host, and said, with a laughing look at me, “Well, James, this is something like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” I took his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them still cordially boys together.

I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of Doctor Holmes’s wit, and the constant glow of Lowell’s incandescent sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the ‘Saturday Press’, which was running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New York Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did not address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies between himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain matters of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing could induce him to use ‘neath for beneath, no exigency of versification or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word that carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion. Fields casually mentioned that he thought “The Dandelion” was the most popularly liked of Lowell’s briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.

Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house had just published his “Marble Faun,” and who had recently come home on the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: “Ah, well! I don’t know that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel.”

They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was ‘prentice to probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell’s which he was fond of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he liked to warn himself and others with his homely, “Remember the dinner-bell.” What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted. Even at Governor Chase’s table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of the dinner ‘a la Russe’, as it was then called, only from books; and it was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and then to the ‘petits verres’ of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether visionary.

Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting, he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the morning.

XI.

I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full “beard as broad as ony spade,” that flowed from his throat in Homeric curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in the West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the London tailor.

Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me; and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my day. He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, but he was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one can forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper of the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblest calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler. The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement, I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in the visible measure of it.

In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might belong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are only with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was unknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out through leaves and flowers upon the river’s coming and going tides, and whose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the contemporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he said, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, “Come up and see the sad English sunset!” which had an instant value to me such as some rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile. Still I patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly that in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold so well as ‘The Marble Faun’. This made the effect that I wished, but whether it was true or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leading bookseller, and I made no question of it myself.

After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me with the sight of authors’ copies, and volumes invaluable with the autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me from my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the living celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade, but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.

I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked. But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat’s publisher in the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and that made a whole world’s difference.

XII.

The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation, which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic. Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o’clock, or seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat’s tea table the cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at the publisher’s in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to it. “Ah, yes,” he said; “but this is the flower of the souchong; it is the blossom, the poetry of tea,” and then he told me how it had been given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.

The Autocrat’s windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the publisher’s, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close, and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned with a passport ‘en regle’ and properly ‘vise’; and he held his light course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.

I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to one Congregational Church in Columbus.

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise. It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit of fire-eating.

I rent myself away from the Autocrat’s presence as early as I could, and as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience with the necessarily insoluble problem.

XIII.

I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I started. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but pathos to this day.

XIV.

I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well for me to be standing by,

       “With sick and scornful looks averse,”

while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours’ work a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they rested from their toil.

I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord, past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys. From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the glisten of the open fields.

I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off, began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but she was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness, so that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey if I could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled in the evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the high excitement of the prodigious adventure.

XV.

Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon; and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.

I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell’s letter to Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne, and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me, doubly enriched by Hawthorne’s keeping. But now if I were to see him at all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some easier means of escaping me.

The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many pictures of it. But Hawthorne’s look was different from that of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one night at Longfellow’s table, when one of the guests happened to speak of the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell said, after a glance at it, “Yes, it’s good; but it hasn’t his fine ‘accipitral’ [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.] look.”

In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth. Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have instantly felt him to be a personage.

I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill together. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked. Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we got on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately from Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous English authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether this was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the time. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of Europe and America. He was curious about the West, which he seemed to fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West must finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers, and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or Lowell had.

With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself, as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention, that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is still strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top, and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case, where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves, and said, coldly, “This is my library.” I knew that men were his books, and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my finger on the ‘Blithedale Romance’ and said that I preferred that to the others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans liked that best too.

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things; and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got away, to be, “I find this young man worthy.” The quaintness, the little stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.

Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything, for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from his hand; the ‘Marble Faun’ had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer interval than usual, the ‘Blithedale Romance’, and the ‘House of Seven Gables’, and the ‘Scarlet Letter’, and had, perhaps carried his name higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his difference from all men evermore.

I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling, but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne’s impalpability, such as I afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less veridical for all that.

XVI.

I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.

He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then, when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.

It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my forces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown than there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine, and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I think, or I venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth I was then.

XVII.

Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity, while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man has done. There was a strange charm in Emerson’s eyes, which I felt then and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln’s, but shyer, but sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly, not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.

It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible, the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many; yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be leading the thought of the world.

I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a neighbor. “But his last book,” he added, reflectively, “is a mere mush,” and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must leave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was concerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place, especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.

He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to what the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say that I had never heard of him.

I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner, and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his “pleached garden” a little, and then we came again into his library, where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe’s criticisms: cruel and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.

“Whose criticisms?” asked Emerson.

“Poe’s,” I said again.

“Oh,” he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far search for my meaning, “you mean the jingle-man!”

I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down, with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.

A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused retreat from Emerson’s presence I had failed in a certain slight point of ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note, and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither, and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage, and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me, and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there could be none in this.

But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields, to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already. But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,

“Why, how old are you?”

“I am twenty-three,” I answered, and then the laughing fit took him again.

“Well,” he said, “you begin young, out there!”

In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy, I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New England.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK

It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860, which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark, after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the literary situation in the metropolis.

I.

Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could, for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters, it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere. What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of respectability. If respectability was your ‘bete noire’, then you were a Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose, then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that fashion myself, but I had not the courage.

This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses. There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did. They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure, yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this may be the secret of Boston.

II.

It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was to be in the company of Fitz James O’Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true that, as Henry Giles said of it, “Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone,” the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then; I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with “Oh, a couple of shysters!” and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken very seriously by me.

In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so distinctively Bohemian in these ‘anime prave’, these souls so baleful by their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away. It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes came to Pfaff’s: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow was cast forward upon Pfaff’s, whose name often figured in the verse and the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the ‘Saturday Press’. I felt that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not share the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they had very good at Pfaff’s, and to listening to the whirling words of my commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous space under the pavement. There were writers for the ‘Saturday Press’ and for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for worse things till eleven o’clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his contributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the young fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material. It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and still waits its second palingenesis.

The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff’s with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking friends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a passage from a private letter of Emerson’s, though I believe he would not have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure only of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp, translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.

As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very “imperial anarch” in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called his verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better; there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial, such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one’s emotions; yet I would not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does, and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly, fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me and spoke to me.

III.

That night at Pfaff’s must have been the last of the Bohemians for me, and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that table under the pavement, in Pfaff’s beer-cellar, and listened to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat’s, and felt that I had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards, that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a secret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could have done, in some respects.

My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge. I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet, and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty, but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler’s poem had given me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The ‘Potiphar Papers’ had spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and the mountains.

The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for that place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time, but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting, and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in anywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep me against the undertow. In this rite I had the company of a young New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the city, and which has always attracted me. He told me much about his life, and how he lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at a fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half, and I thought it a good deal. But those were the days before the war, when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was incredibly inexpensive.

After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.

IV.

I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston and Harper’s in New York were the magazines that paid, though the Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine, though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before. After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor, of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a barrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that sketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, though I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the next day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for some verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair. I was then on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised. I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince, but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President’s secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.

If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr. Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written, and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the other, and how we had some young men’s joking and laughing together, in the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before; but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the indistinguishable person in whose “integrity and abilities he had reposed such special confidence” as to have appointed him consul for Venice and the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand, did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.

V.

I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O’Connor, at the house of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman’s champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon’s name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as “the fat peasant of Stratford,” and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered round the first fires of autumn, O’Connor would lift his beautiful head with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, “Friends, I feel a sense of victory in the air.” He was not wrong; only the victory was for the other aide.

Who beside O’Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’, and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know. Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a friend’s house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness, and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the joyful realms of hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston, the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his ideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters from Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press could call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these days of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business, and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many more singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors. But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock Exchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature and to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community which seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.

But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many; but any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each said how much he liked certain thing of the other’s; I even seized my advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem, for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic sense of fitness, “Forlorn,” and I tried it first with the ‘Atlantic Monthly’, which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to a former editor of ‘Harper’s Monthly’, but he could not see his advantage in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point I sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry it away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took it to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning with the ‘Fortnightly Review’, sent it to him for me. It was promptly returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I offered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of Mr. Lucas’s death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the office of the ‘Nation’ newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr. Fields’s assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where it was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleased it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its misfortunes endeared it to its author.

But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and with poet’s eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him, as much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing upon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as the superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal, for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, “Think of a man like sitting in judgment on a man like you!” I thought of it, and was avenged if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman’s standing up so stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its votaries.

I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very, very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever. Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it, from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.

I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out. We sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the time at least no

      “ —— rumor of oppression or defeat,

       Of unsuccessful or successful war,”

could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it. I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then, and for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world where there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for me as anything I could think of.

The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors, and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for long afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp in the City Hall Park. Fitz James O’Brien, the brilliant young Irishman who had dazzled us with his story of “The Diamond Lens,” and frozen our blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost— “What was It” — a ghost that could be felt and heard, but not seen — had enlisted for the war, and risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it. In that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw from a wound received in battle.

VI.

Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston, which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At dinner (which we had at two o’clock) the talk turned upon my appointment, and he said of me to his wife: “Think of his having got Stillman’s place! We ought to put poison in his wine,” and he told me of the wish the painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin’s work there in a book of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.

The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist, traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written myself.

At Lowell’s table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He died in it, at last.

In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance. As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring women.

ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON

During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in Lowell’s classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart’s content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He died too young, with his life’s possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he was.

I.

Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as letters to the ‘Boston Advertiser’, after vainly offering them to more aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it were, from his soldier’s grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great new series of the ‘Biglow Papers’ gathered volume with the force they had from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic, where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking.

At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln’s so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.

I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London. Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives, especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all occasions in “the dress of an American gentleman.” The morning after his arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which, according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice, Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his newspapers from the general rule.

Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the Lieutenant-Governor, and “How fortunate,” he added, when we were got back into the gondola, “that I should have happened to bring my court dress with me!” I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.

I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley, except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, “to act officiously, not officially, in the matter,” and the hapless claimant got what was left of his estate.

I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his worshipper’s own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted, single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were not so many as they have since become.

For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well thought of in every way.

At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister, could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna.

II.

One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States, according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics. I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but I had read, before I met him, his novel of ‘Archy Moore, or The White Slave’, which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out of it. I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain than fame. He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was wholly to darken him before he died. He was a tall thin man, absent, silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came.

I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing could win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to bed. Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded without looking round,

      “They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

       Through Eden took their solitary way,”

and so left the room.

I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a deserting sailor must be kept in the consul’s custody till some vessel of our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the deserter and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of any. So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to that port, where now and then an American ship did touch. The flag determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a clean breast of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been in his life, nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there. The case certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of masterly diplomacy.

Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit, and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to attest the authenticity of the American eagle.

III.

Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for “Recent Italian Comedy.”

It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.

Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand, at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer, try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes, almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it. The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction, never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book. I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.

At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in the book called Italian Journeys.

But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens. At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late into the night, and early into the morning. About two o’clock, when all the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar, and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:

      “If you have a friend to dine,

       Give him your best wine;

       If you have two,

       The second-best will do.”

As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people, for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey, than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to me as if we were equal in deed and in fame?

The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and bidding each other the ‘Dorma bene’ which has the quality of a benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement it holds highest and best.

IV.

I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati; there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere, and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight.

My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard’s. “Get a basis,” said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised with him, among other acquaintances. “Get a salaried place, something regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest.” But it was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a quarter where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis, though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy a man. He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly that I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects.

There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper, then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, “Well, we’ve concluded to waive the idea of an engagement,” and once more my bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been buying my material.

I had begun printing in the ‘Nation’ those letters about my Italian journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the ‘Nation’. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week, and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the skies.

This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it (not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew up under my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an end.

I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned high, to my heart’s content, of literary things with them and him.

With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality. There was another house which we much resorted to — the house of James Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself. There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we all went into the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. “Whose hand is this, Lorry?” he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in both his own hands. Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, “whose hand is this?” Then there was nothing for Graham but to say, “It’s Lincoln’s hand,” and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly down without a word.

V.

It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters, and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton’s in Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in discussing an obscure point in Browning’s poem of ‘My Last Duchess’. I have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis’s personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy.

He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer, his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in literature, for the ‘Howadji’ books, and for the lovely fantasies of ‘Prue and I’, and for the sound-hearted satire of the ‘Potiphar Papers’, and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him.

His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly, so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic, though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women’s rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little question of their own honesty.

I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in concerning him.

There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor, the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts.

VI.

Of those evenings at the Taylors’ in New York, I can recall best the one which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr. and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly, “Don’t despise Boston!” and I answered, as we shook hands, “Few are worthy to live in Boston.” It was New-Year’s eve, and that night it came on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the ‘Atlantic Monthly’. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the ‘Nation’, and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor & Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details. I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began my work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with Lowell; he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions. The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life’s feast the course of humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly.

LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT

Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.

I.

I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin, for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the “splendid exile” of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock. It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, which they by no means fully represent.

The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the case is now different, and the best known among living American writers are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism.

Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs. Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, dwelt in her father’s house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature, though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law, science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have anything like a national literature; but that was something like a national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination as Hawthorne’s, such wisdom as Emerson’s, such poetry as Longfellow’s, such prophecy as Whittier’s, such wit and grace as Holmes’s, such humor and humanity as Lowell’s.

II.

The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure, the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was imperfect — and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its imperfections — it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it. They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such a fantasy as Judd’s Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which has hardly the novelists’s scope. New England, in Hawthorne’s work, achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself.

Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a signal exception as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, I think that what I say holds true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but really, is it a novel, in the sense that ‘War and Peace’ is a novel, or ‘Madame Flaubert’, or ‘L’Assommoir’, or ‘Phineas Finn’, or ‘Dona Perfecta’, or ‘Esther Waters’, or ‘Marta y Maria’, or ‘The Return of the Native’, or ‘Virgin Soil’, or ‘David Grieve’? In a certain way it is greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.

This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs of those who had brought the learning of the universities to Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage as the English of the mother-country.

III.

The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was, then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that it was in a “state of transition,” as everything is always and everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of ‘Every Saturday’ when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in the hand that lays itself upon the reader’s heart with the pulse of the poet’s heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we can feel only

      “When a great thought strikes along the brain

       And flushes all the cheek.”

When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about the same; for if the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was a somewhat prouder affair than an eclectic weekly like ‘Every Saturday’, he was supreme in his place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with Fields himself.

We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded his future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune reduced the size and number of its periodicals. ‘The Young Folks’ was sold outright, and the ‘North American Review’ (long before Mr. Rice bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own periodical, ‘Every Saturday’, was first enlarged to a stately quarto and illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ and ‘Every Saturday’ were sold away from their old ownership, and ‘Every Saturday’ was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed by one unkindness.

IV.

But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ and ‘Harper’s’ then divided our magazine world between them; the ‘North American Review’, in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had entered upon a new life; ‘Every Saturday’ was an instant success in the charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best editors; and ‘Our Young Folks’ had the field of juvenile periodical literature to itself.

It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it.

Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her comely face, which made me think of the Madonna’s in Titian’s “Assumption,” and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, “A New England Girlhood.” She was the author of many poems, whose number she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly, famed for the one poem, ‘Hannah Binding Shoes’, which years before my days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very well hold up one’s head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to the great others there, “I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes.” Her poem is very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to that city every winter from her native town.

By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess, whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew’s. She was a most beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was: fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed, could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied, and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient of the pallor of words.

She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid personality; as the authoress of ‘Amber Gods’, and ‘In a Cellar’, and ‘Circumstance’, and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life.

Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.

V.

I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston. I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from neighborhood was just begun.

Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P. Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple’s censure. He wrote strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly grew with an interrogative habit of mind.

He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work, to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater than his sense of it.

I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed. Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses, and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the memory of all who ever knew him.

VI.

Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London, with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great impersonal cordiality, with “How do you do? When did you come?” and other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with an intonation that was now “Why, how are you; how are you?” for me alone. It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued. an eagle’s, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the humor which characterizes the whole American people.

I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of ‘Wensley’ (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, “educated whiskers,” and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having used in my ‘Venetian Life’ the Briticism ‘directly’ for ‘as soon as.’

Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession, because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and for conscience’ sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests, which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.

Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its youth. I do not know whether his ‘Six Months in Italy’ still keeps itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South, and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, “Perhaps; perhaps.”

He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy; and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting them so contemporaneously.

VII.

The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it. Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand, “Child, where is your religion?” After the many years of an acquaintance which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city endures.

VIII.

The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow’s table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in Cambridge at all except at Longfellow’s funeral. In my first years on the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave, rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him, as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions, and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him.

If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one to whose vision

      “Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,

       Vast images in glimmering dawn,

       Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.”

It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an ‘Atlantic Breakfast’ where it was part of my editorial function to preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter, was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his character, his personality, his identity fully persisted.

I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not, but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of Holmes’s gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman’s public use of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly) that there had been an abuse of it.

IX.

The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields’s room at the publishing office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was just after his poem, ‘Snow Bound’, had made its great success, in the modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second meeting, about Bayard Taylor’s ‘Story of Kennett’, which had then lately appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of), and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who were Foes to good manners.

Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others, especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure.

There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them.

After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson’s poem back in time for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same number with Doctor Holmes’s; the subjects were cognate, and I had my misgivings. He wrote me back to “return the proofs and break up the forms.” I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds.

X.

Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a world too vast to be the test that her own

       “One entire and perfect crysolite”

would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ her syntax was such a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was something almost fearfully scrupulous and perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it, accepting or rejecting the author’s judgment according as he was entitled by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader for a last revision in the plates.

It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, waiting in this statesman’s study amidst the prints and engravings that attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.

Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her only at the Fieldses’ in Boston, where one night I witnessed a controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the person to take ‘au grand serieux’ the monstrous imaginations of Lady Byron’s jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.

In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a differentiation of the New England type which was not less characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer’s wages; but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the regularly successive volumes of ‘The Jesuits in North America, The Old Regime in Canada’, the ‘Wolfe and Montcalm’, and the others that went to make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge, where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later.

His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of ‘The Rise of Silas Lapham’, in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full; whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a great distinction.

It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton, another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the ‘Life of Voltaire’, which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him, and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh discoverer.

There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made later than either Parkman’s or Parton’s, and whose very recent death leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character. It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback, but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war. Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.

The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him. He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York, full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and whose society he preferred to his contemporaries’. One could not blame him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew.

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

I.

Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies. Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS. of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or serving as apothecaries’ ‘prentices — we were good society from the beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the better for good society.

Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician, in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader’s thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.

Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to stand in his ‘second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the times when a man’s city was a man’s country, something Athenian, something Florentine. The war that nationalized us liberated this love to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston, and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with himself. The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.

II.

In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the ‘Nation’ claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position. To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had, with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be. The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the book, and not liked him. “I understood, of course,” he said, “that he was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian,” and I could truthfully answer that this was by all means my own understanding too.

His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man came in for the doctor’s help as a physician, though he looked so very well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat. The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. “And if you don’t know where Washington Street is,” he said, with a gay burst at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man’s face, “you don’t know anything.”

We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy two cents’ worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards barbarism.

The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, “Holmes, you are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” “I am, I am,” said the doctor. “From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I’m alive, I’m alive!” Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.

III.

He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter, however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow’s, or when I came in to dine at the Fieldses’, in Boston. It was at certain meetings of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout, a spiritualist Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he was at the table too, it took all the poet’s delicate skill to keep him and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as convincing as the natural.

There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him, far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the error concerning him.

It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his “medicated novels.” That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things of the soul.

IV.

In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls; and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men; we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences, however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity. “Yes,” he said, “I always felt as if English servants expected to be trampled on; but I can’t do that. If they want to be trampled on, they must get some one else.” He thought that our American way was infinitely better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his fellow-man. I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat, which could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if you went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with a sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for the time was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the doctor’s humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor’s sallies, when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the carriage-side.

The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness. Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was were those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence that there could be no trespassing in point of time. If now and then some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he would not be.

I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher, then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter. His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new public in the present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the personal question. As commonly happens in the solution of such problems, it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.

We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean “Homesick in Heaven,” which seems to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating. The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. The great talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes could come. It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the periodical must always hold in the history of American literature. Lowell was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes’s doing something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author’s misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own mind.

V.

He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man’s intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less surprising. If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise. The printer’s toe never galled the author’s kibe in his case; he wished to have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch, and he did not keep it long. He had really done all his work in the manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen, in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the pleasure he must have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and when they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said “Eh, b’en,” instead of “Eh, bien.” He knew that we must be always on the lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which in earlier times hesitated applause, “Why don’t they give me three times three? I can stand it!” He himself gave in the generous fulness he desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently. In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for this, but usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New England than otherwise.

It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to the celebration of the Class of ‘29, and all the multitude of Boston occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse, somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own detriment from it.

VI.

After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses’, and at Longfellow’s, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often, and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the publisher’s I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity. He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter; and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.

He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz, of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime.

For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world. But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat as if the sloven disarray of most authors’ desks were impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work, which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own; he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have had, of course, an old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities; but it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.

It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note, going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, “My Aviary,” which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.

VII.

As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there came a cheery cry of wellcome: “Is that you? Come up, come up!” and I found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat’s peculiar merits.

The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best.

It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France. He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won; nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more. The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of it before. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am a little hard of hearing on one side. But it isn’t deafness.”

He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure. Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something that was said, and “They will shrink, you know,” he added, as if he were not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street, you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going. Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a thing could have been.

He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others, and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it, though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has said it in print, — [Holmes said it in print many times, in his three novels and scattered through the “Breakfast Table” series. D.W.] — that unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already; the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.

VIII.

I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at home with the people who greeted him. There was no interval needed for fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we had made him believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor bits of houses, and “Ah,” he said, “the cellar and the well?” He added, to the company generally, “Do you know what I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?” and he began to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems, until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full, because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:

    “Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,

    The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?

    Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,

    A century’s showery torrents wash in vain;

    Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,

    And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;

    Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen

    Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;

    Its knot-grass, plantain, — all the social weeds,

    Man’s mute companions following where he leads;

    Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,

    Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;

    Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;

    Its roses breathing of the olden time;

    All the poor shows the curious idler sees,

    As life’s thin shadows waste by slow degrees,

    Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,

    Save home’s last wrecks — the CELLAR AND THE WELL!”

The poet’s chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and “There,” he said, “isn’t it so? The cellar and the well — they can’t be thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest and defy decay.” He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty of the picture to which they give the final touch.

He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly out of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present, as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other people’s, and who was not wont

    “To bait his homilies with his brother worms.”

At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous; but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.

In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and dearest in his recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism, he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.

He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive. “He was ten years younger than I,” said the doctor.

I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could not write something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of age. But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary things. Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author called. I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man’s tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so. That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me that his youthful satire of the ‘Spectre Pig’ had been provoked by a poem of the elder Dana’s, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed, with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly nature.

In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear, he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: “Fifty-six years ago — more than half a century — I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could tell him how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I love to think is all that divides us.”

Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how inevitably men’s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women, and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and “Yes,” said the owner of the preserve, “I have spoken of that,” and he went on to tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have found them in his book, and forgotten it.

He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh, of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads. Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed, that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region, and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach of its salt breath.

I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I was sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the association of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.

When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take, as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that he would have found in actually going.

I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood, through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that which every reader receives from his work.

That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation, no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one felt this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of his books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.

IX.

It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I, for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.

THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW

We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step. Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few, and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter’s box, of a sort which is readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted) with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses; across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole, though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.

I.

It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but one private carriage (naturally, a publisher’s); and there was not one livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike, who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of amazing depth and thickness.

The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of the higher education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say, in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of gentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe we shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governed it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests; they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the income of the poorest.

In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun., John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons, Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte, when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a partial rehearsal of them, “Why, you couldn’t fire a revolver from your front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!” Everybody had written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the cities of men.

II.

We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till October that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.

Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the ‘Paradiso’, and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o’clock supper that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.

The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named, was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that, the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines: I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion, believe thoroughly in Longfellow’s plan. When I read his version my sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been considered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to his mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste to say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly, even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me, growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to him.

All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good, for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow’s mildness. I remember the poet’s asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes, “Unhappily, it is obsolete.” I dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked.

When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert, one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.

III.

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me, so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all these vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields’s story or Tom Appleton’s wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his unequalled intuitions.

The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate, as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the cayenne poised above his bluepoints, “It’s astonishing how fond these fellows are of pepper.”

The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough awake to repress an “Ah?” of deep interest in this fact of natural history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. “Yes, I’ve dropped a red pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen.”

“Is it possible?” cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to save him from worse, and turned the talk.

I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I remember once Doctor Holmes’s talking of the physician as the true seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which intellectual people like to play with.

I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. “And now,” he demanded, “what do you say to that?” “Well, Mr. Appleton,” Agassiz answered, to Appleton’s infinite delight, “I say that it did not happen.”

One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but, apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.

Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our whole continent, and at Longfellow’s table he found the champagne even surprisingly fine. “But,” he said to his host, who now told the story, “it cawn’t be genuine, you know!”

Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with him at Longfellow’s, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him to Harvard Square and put him aboard. “Put him aboard, and don’t leave him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn’t get off.”

These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with angelic patience, “Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!”

There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb and the city on the street railways. “I did think,” Longfellow pathetically lamented, “that when the horse-cars stopped running, I should have a little respite from L., but he walks out.”

In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, “I think these things are more adapted to music than the magazine,” and this seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I answered, confidently, “I think they are rather more adapted to music.” He calmly asked, “Why?” and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker now.

IV.

The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.

Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington’s headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness, bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress, and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury, which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her feet.

       “Dust is in her beautiful eyes,”

and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place took Longfellow’s fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard, and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow’s study where he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.

The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine; in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his devotions. “He rebuked him,” said Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round the pupils of his eyes, “by throwing his scabbard at his head.”

All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a design of the poet’s own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long night-gown on it.

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow’s; perhaps I ought to do it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: “Does it kick? Does it kick?” No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was one most memorable supper, when he read the “Bigelow Paper” he had finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in those dark hours of Johnson’s time seemed to have been

    “Butchered to make a blind man’s holiday.”

The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow’s old friend George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle, suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow’s arm in going out to dinner, where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him upon his arm again for their return to the study.

He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I would most like to live over again — if I must live any. The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then completing his version of the ‘Vita Nuova’. This has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow’s translation of the ‘Commedia’. In fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of the ‘Commedia’ than in this of the ‘Vita Nuova’, but I do not believe he could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the right hands.

V.

After three or four years we sold the carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest, “Longfellow, why don’t you do that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?” The demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the challenger’s invention. Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow’s death he was driving by Craigie House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I did not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his presence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have had that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do, and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace. He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers at home; some people complained of a certain ‘gene’ in him; and he had a reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of friendship, as Lowell’s did. He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York. You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer’s himself, and we often found ourselves together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but they were always signed in autograph.

I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one’s overcoat and overshoes.

I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him, and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer visitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitable in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his preferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the German beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire; in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with the accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed to “Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow,” which he said was the very most amusing superscription he had ever seen.

It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through the good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had put in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected, and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman who had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the pretty collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No man was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said, firmly, “Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can’t accept a decoration from a Catholic prince.” His decision was from his conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will approve his decision.

VI.

Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of “Olimipico something.” But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast renown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands, few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the “Psalm of Life” in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.

Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently, and with perfect impunity. Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as I can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice against Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it only as Swedenborg’s most celestial angels perceived evil, as something distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all criticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to make any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments. No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which he did not suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of “Longfellow and other Plagiarists,” Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe’s case. He very, very rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which he did not fail to share with all who live.

He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it was braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their company if they continued to assail him.

But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side, and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the environment. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance. He admired the skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could never have done that sort of thing himself. It was entirely safe to invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often have been urged upon him.

Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than a quarter of a century. He found the slight transition change enough from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked. Agassiz was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they reached Boston. His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the indefatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.

The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the worldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners and men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the man who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest. The poet’s heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of “The Challenge,” then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the fancy of

      “The poverty-stricken millions

       Who challenge our wine and bread,

       And impeach us all as traitors,

       Both the living and the dead,”

his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, “Yes, I often think of those things.” He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. He did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not see the wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure or criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. On a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few of his circle were church-goers. Once he said something very vague and uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.

VII.

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: “Evangeline,” “Hiawatha,” and the “Courtship of Miles Standish” were by that time old stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of another. The hexameter piece, “Elizabeth,” in the third part of “Tales of a Wayside Inn,” was one of these, and he liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and success.

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer wished to produce his “Masque of Pandora,” with music, and he was patient when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of his generous character, had taken my play of “A Counterfeit Presentment,” and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own work. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the performance. No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors and employees of the theatre, high and low. They thronged the scenery, those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration, intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every step in going out, and made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers produced from their persons.

He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first and loudest.

Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When the Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected to offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, “I wanted to ask you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming, he named his fellow-guests!” I answered that though I should probably never come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask me much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and good friend seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak too confidently of our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but I had certainly the advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had built my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful informality convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friend Greene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with more or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of Italian poetry and Italian character. One day there came a note from him saying, in effect, “Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night, and I want you to come too. There will be no one else but Greene and myself, and we will have an Italian dinner.”

Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this invitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but how could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow’s table on terms like these? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with delicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote risk of wounding my friend’s susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life, and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.

Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told, while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day in Boston at a tobacconist’s, where a certain brand of cigars was recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. “Ah, then I must have some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box,” said Longfellow, and he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the smile of a worsted champion, and said, “Well, I guess you had me, that time.” At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of suggesting a theme of common interest, began, “You’ve buried, I believe?”

Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no knowledge of it except that it had been Washington’s headquarters. Of course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have chicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general regard to the public welfare.

I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and them. I never heard from him anything that was ‘de haut en bas’, when he spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and Longfellow’s house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an entire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in any company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and one another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent. He disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemption from it.

VIII.

Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that knew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonal habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally this brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. But this leniency of Longfellow’s was what constituted him great as well as good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean to say that he had no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness of my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense we mostly attach to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come from the tenderest affections of his heart. But as a man shows himself to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I ever heard said of him was that he had ‘gene’, and this was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found ‘gene’ in a celestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days of their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, “Give my love to the White Mr. Longfellow.”

A good many, years before Longfellow’s death he began to be sleepless, and he suffered greatly. He said to me once that he felt as if he were going about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through he would not be aware of having slept. “But,” he would add, with his heavenly patience, “I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so long.” I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw him less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings to cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could not be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house more luminous for his having been there. Once he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I had some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him. He told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.

After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did not find him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston to finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet was failing in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at his door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar, and a maid showed her face wet with tears. “How is Mr. Longfellow?” I palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, “Oh, the poor gentleman has just departed!” I turned away as if from a helpless intrusion at a death-bed.

At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I saw the poet for the last time, where

       “Dead he lay among his books,”

in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails to bring serenity to all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in Longfellow’s noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as it had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to dignify it with “the peace of God.” All who were left of his old Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson. He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: “The gentleman we have just been burying,” he said, to the friend who had come with him, “was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.”

I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should be published.

There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite fragmentary. I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two men only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most patient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow. I shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time. It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to withhold itself.

What Longfellow’s place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say; that is Time’s affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.

STUDIES OF LOWELL

I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in 1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866; and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed between this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?

I.

It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy. The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as I knew the place — a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.

My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his town. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have made me sup with him (dinner was at two o’clock) and then go with him for a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been kind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both.

He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me, but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. I disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much that he would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed with inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he would take punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes humorous and always touching.

Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the feeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in the retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my enthusiasm. That was always Lowell’s attitude towards the opinions of people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just intelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and he suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble. In the whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own.

II.

Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as “the village”: for so he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was charming to be treated ‘da signore’, but he seemed to doubt whether it was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty to the American ideal.

It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical interest of the time in Lowell’s talk. It had been all about literature and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years. He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old, with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening, and his father saying, “Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives here — what little boy?” At another time he pointed out a certain window in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he could only get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his father’s fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.

III.

My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6 writing in the office of ‘The Nation’. I contributed several sketches of Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had read without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he bade me “sweat the Heine out of” me, “as men sweat the mercury out of their bones.”

When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take the position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation); and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.

He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton’s, for one of the Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the “Claudian Emissary,” and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like “Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?” “You are in Cambridge, Mr. Howells,” Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion. Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes, “Goodnight, fellow-townsman.” “I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen,” I returned. He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.

He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk. These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit listener’s surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her, with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger brother and sister; or like his own children. He included our children in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were something that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early kindness for them.

IV.

In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached a quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American custom-house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself, and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have it, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence. This was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the anti-slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord with Lowell’s feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later thinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he wished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than he was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone. There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of Europe, and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded, he spoke of her as “The Land of Broken Promise.” It was a splendid reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, to the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who love their country most among us. It is well to hold one’s country to her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. I do not suppose it was the “common man” of Lincoln’s dream that Lowell thought America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender of the common man’s hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with them, too, as it was in “the time when the slave would not let him sleep.”

He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he

                 “ — not of the race

       That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,”

but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish servant’s disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his table.

He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics owed him. They were “to do as they were bid,” and yet he had a tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain transaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man’s indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any resentment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to exceed him in shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, “Siete il benvenuto,” or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with him in the region where we were most at home together.

Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having once a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where we sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked a pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of his chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for the truth that he would not question it even in jest.

If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the ‘Divina Commedia’, which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting

       “Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,

       Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago.”

He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered all his adoration and despair in one word. “Damn!” he said, and no more. I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the ‘somma poeta’. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought anything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I recall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him say anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would have you believe that he was full of quaint humor.

V.

While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental work worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry and prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the time will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex him now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the things that people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is known how he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attempted it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a novel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been a failure. “But I shall never finish it,” he sighed, as if he felt irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily in ‘The Nooning’ and ‘FitzAdam’s Story’. Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through its personages.

He enjoyed writing such a poem as “The Cathedral,” which is not of his best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later his satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friends concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him; perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and they stand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he first wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in a second revision go back to the first version.

He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.

In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to Elmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning’s post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession, the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs. Akers’s “Among the Laurels” by Lowell’s “Foot-path.” He was not only much more sensitive of others’ rights than his own, but in spite of a certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them.

VI.

At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses, and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the truth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he was content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especially could not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste, their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was by one day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it had gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that she was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her a great kiss, with the words, “You are a very good girl, my dear,” and practically putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatious type, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them, and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run.

I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully himself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his younger manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. His was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man over in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought him out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and their love, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It was that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly wait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate, without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone, what might not one expect of American democracy!

His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonial mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those from the elms and the syringas where

    “The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang.”

From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner of his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the willows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter the deep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind the house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. All was of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell loved but did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal his annoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which the simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. There was a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which the dining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last, in the southwest corner of the house, was his study.

There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew him after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there among his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night yet more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow’s, and he was familiarly in and out at Mr. Norton’s, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.

For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself, and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than of winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through the snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow’s house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious faith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the New Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up with their hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal punishment of the wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was very reverent of other people’s religious feelings. He expressed a special tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I suspect that all religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the strong. I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was so vast, and we saw such a little part of it.

As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their potentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet must be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told me that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of one of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see double.

He then said he used often to see people’s Doppelganger; at another time, as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of ‘em. Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other imprecation, and this one seldom.

Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only very rarely, the human nature of some story “unmeet for ladies” was too much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of it reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men, though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life. He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he would not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road even if it had some dirt sticking to it.

He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the country, he was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I had discovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had cultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure; but this was after all less envy than a fine regret.

At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell’s dress or bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life were not always too proud to make advances to any one. In this retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon all out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw him with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in London; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and as conventional as he had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he was apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left the sensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours, were notably white. At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hair somewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching and full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows; neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember. When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and alert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music. Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well from the ground.

VII.

It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born. But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides, Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and was willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any wise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching, however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the ‘Biglow Papers’ were all the talk. I need not declare that there was nothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down his laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through the modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it otherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint of this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the eyes of the public. “I see that you have dropped me this year,” he wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to believe the truth when I told him.

He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends. If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment. This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.

He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the city would cut down Lowell’s elms: his English elms, which his father had planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!

VIII.

In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he was an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of his finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote his poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was usually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit took him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it.

The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called ‘Among My Books’ and ‘My Study Windows’. He wished to name these more soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they took from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in a literary way, he submitted to others’ judgment in all such matters. I doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without reference to former payments. This happened with a long poem in the Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal handsomely with him for. I did not know how many hundred they gave him, and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had done their part. He held up four fingers, “Quattro,” he said in Italian, and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, “I thought they might have made it cinque.”

Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in mind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sure to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means of getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the payment to me. “It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a watch.”

I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money

    “Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give.”

more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to money.

He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were worth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line

    “The silvern chords of the piano trembled,”

he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of another piece:

    “And what she would, would rather that she would not”

he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last word made it “public-school English,” and he mocked it with the answer a maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at home. She said, “No, sir, he is not,” when she ought to have said “No, sir, he isn’t.” He was appeased when I came back the next day with the stanza amended so that the verse could read:

    “And what she would, would rather she would not so”

but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.

He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories: my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and the like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to their faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying, “You’re rather shady, there, old fellow.” But he would not have had me too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his scholarship.

His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret of his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he seldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on very well under Lowell’s discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not bear to cut anything.

IX.

He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell’s friends that he should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes. After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would have-been an act of bad faith.

He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and left him heart-loose as he had not been before.

I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it through. When he had read it, he gave a quick “Ah!” and threw it over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we turned into his study without further allusion to the matter.

A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said with a sigh of vague reluctance, “I should like to see a play of Calderon,” as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could still be fulfilled. “Upon this hint I acted,” and in due time it was found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.

X.

When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again in London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.

But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I should not lose anything of their charm.

He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England, and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society, perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers their cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the strength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone in his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country, slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had barely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said he had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials and to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of a certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders, but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a recognition of it as suffering.

He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I first knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of a young man’s. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties, was still “You young dog” to him. It was a bright and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place, like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he had to gratify in that way.

He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight terminate in Lord Percy’s coming

    “To hammer stone for life in Concord jail.”

It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who are not gingerly with other people’s sensibilities came from the frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he spoke it.

We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books; when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication, and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, “Fanny, that was a fine dinner you gave us.” Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great that people spoke of him seriously, as “an addition to society” in London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in, with a young lover-like fondness.

XI.

In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American’s coming into his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.

With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast, and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the courage of my convictions, both literary and social.

He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction, though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon’s factitiousness the delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years, and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to wish it.

XII.

After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so agreeable to him.

It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr. Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump difference — unless he disliked the differer.

For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at home. One winter he passed at his sister’s home in Boston, but mostly he lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimate relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years. His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as it remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here.

He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat, and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of this in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by saying, “I like you because you don’t put your hands on me,” and I heard of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, “Yes, if they won’t shake hands.”

Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.

He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life. He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance, he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies, and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting him to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor’s assurance, and his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time shown himself so cheerful.

It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and recovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two o’clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf, but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his back with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott closed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott’s novels. Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I shall not look upon his like.

I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either alone.

CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS

Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me. At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age, time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of the Atlantic Monthly. As for the social environment I should have been puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century. They are now nearly all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death’s doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise.

I.

One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis J. Child. He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name. He was of low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight, short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet. In a time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven, and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair, clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off. I believe he never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his inextinguishable youth.

It is well known how great was Professor Child’s scholarship in the branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task as any American has performed. But he might have been indefinitely less than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as that of Longfellow himself.

We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the beginning of a life-long friendship with him. I was known to him only by my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which after wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined a home-school, to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his own daughter under his roof. These things drew us closer together, and he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble. At one such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil. It passed, for that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known in him. But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such pompous acknowledgment as, “Professor Child, all that I have become, sir, I owe to your influence in my college career.” He did, with delicious mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college did not form the sunniest exposure for young folly and vanity. I know that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery could take him off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cutting phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage that offers itself at times to all men. But mostly he wished to do people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his heart.

Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the affection which he divided with them and with his flowers. I recall him in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his gardening. This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses, which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he spent his summers in Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly across at you. If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a succession of hospitable obeisances.

He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as “Il Pesceballo” (he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style finely personal to himself. His learning in the line of his Harvard teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time, and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched. I fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest life. At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary superiority; and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite learning for a moment, with the cry, “Scendiamo fra il popolo!” (Let us go down among the people.)

II.

Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and trouble for another. He once took thought for me at a time when it was very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear. I do not remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he did not seek quite that martyrdom.

He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was always willing to do for others. In the form of a favor to himself he brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor, I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor’s two o’clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of ‘Gunnar’, and read it to us.

Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a ‘stev’ together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones of the poet’s voice in the poet’s verse. These were most characteristic of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.

Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the professor’s roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson’s stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen’s religion more than the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves on common ground in our worship of it. I was a decade his senior, but at thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent poetic mass. I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet. His work took the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a touch of grace and beauty. Some years after this first meeting of ours I remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry. In those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!

Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by works in fiction which better illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in matter and method stands ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’. The lovely idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened life into it. Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular effect. Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’ embodied the thought of his manhood.

III.

It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint, and he never made the same mistake twice. He lived his English as fast as he learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong word with instant and final rejection. He had not learned American English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters in such matters, its difference from true American and true English. It was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without his choosing. In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the first; his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing.

I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression. Our speech is rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other writers born to different languages who have handled English with anything like his mastery. Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand, and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but none of them surpassed him. Yet he was a man grown when he began to speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in Norway before he came to America. What English he knew he learned the use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of it as Americans.

He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge. He had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism. His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here he was almost as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate essays in fiction.

After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He did not strike it again till he wrote ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’, and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch. There are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful sense of their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of human nature, and of American character. He understood our character quite as well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not to do so. I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought to have been resting instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command of alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen’s achievements we must never forget that he was born strange to our language and to our life. In ‘Gunnar’ he handled the one with grace and charm; in his great novel he handled both with masterly strength. I call ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’ a great novel, and I am quite willing to say that I know few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with American types and conditions. It has the vast horizon of the masterpieces of fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone, but for every reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at an end.

I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please him any more. But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things. Boyesen could “toil terribly,” but for his fame he did not always toil wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his best; it was always the best he could do. Several years after our first meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world, and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he should have written less and less. He never wrote anything that was not worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure. The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the direction of the work which he loved so well. When a man adds to his achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction, and four books for boys.

Boyesen’s energies were inexhaustible. He was not content to be merely a scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to know American life better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil; and as a matter of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with us had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most Americans. When he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had kept themselves open. As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.

He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of life; both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. When he explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a king and we under a president. But he was proud of his American citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity. He divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social, but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.

When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in his appointment in Columbia.

New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which our citizenship is worth having.

I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love it proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first knew him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deepest interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the friend of every Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with Norway in her quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.

But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he talked as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality, indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.

I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was in this ‘dolce lome’, he hardly let a week go by without passing a long evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times. I still found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did. This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other’s hearts in our devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another’s. That mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with them.

IV.

It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man, very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also mine. But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men. He did not do this in any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way, with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual realities from which they project. His piety, which sometimes expressed itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were. Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the doctrine of the Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate. He put into this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible. But I have only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly suggestive: I mean the one called ‘Society the Redeemed Form of Man.’

He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil; but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of themselves he presented in the image of “simmering in their own fat and putting a nice brown on each other.”

Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He thought that very likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny; and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace, and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone could render again a strictly literal report of them.

As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed, however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession. I went one evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the angelic life. James fastened upon him with the suggestion that according to Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious of their own perfection, and that if the Shakers felt they were of angelic condition they were probably the sport of the hells. I was very glad to get my poor old friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware of being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake himself.

With spiritualists James had little or no sympathy; he was not so impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells. His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social and civil facts through his religion. He was essentially religious, but he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided opinions upon political questions. My own darkness as to anything like social reform was then so dense that I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such matters, but I have the impression that it was far more radical than I could understand. He was of a very merciful mind regarding things often held in pitiless condemnation, but of charity, as it is commonly understood, he had misgivings. He would never have turned away from him that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some of his benefactions in the past, large gifts of money to individuals, which he now thought had done more harm than good.

I never knew him to judge men by the society scale. He was most human in his relations with others, and was in correspondence with all sorts of people seeking light and help; he answered their letters and tried to instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or she could reach him on his or her own level, though he had his humorous perception of their foibles and disabilities; and he had that keen sense of the grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of his dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor House, where such a man could seldom have found himself. When they were served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat on James’s plate: he disliked fat. James said that he considered the request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented.

He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave. He was indeed tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself to have given.

At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them, he said, “He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced him.” His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness, but it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he wore.

V.

The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin, and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization, and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but love of the place. “He is always an Europaen,” said Lowell one day, in distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was able to extract this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State’s money as if it were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously. He compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian generosity. It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in Cambridge. He said that he had not come to America without going over every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against it. He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.

Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how, after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his failing health he had broken down in his friend’s study, and wept like an ‘Europaer’, and lamented, “I shall never finish my work!” Some papers which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic, but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he voluntarily spoke of Agassiz’s methods, which he agreed with rather than his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian. I think he said Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single example, but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a question of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.

Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs. Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and demanded, “You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a certain group of fossil fishes?” “Yes, yes!” “Well, I have just been reading —— — ‘s new book, and he has shown me that there isn’t the least truth in my theory”; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in relinquishing his error.

I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side, of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California, and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological “Society upon the Stanislow.” He quoted to the author some passages from the poem recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that delicious poem.

Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally of the Swiss “Brahminical caste,” as so many of his friends in Cambridge were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became, by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.

VI.

Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of Richard Henry Dana, the author of ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’ Like nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell anomalous even to himself. He is part of the anti-slavery history of his time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their service. He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal bondage he remembered as bound with them in his ‘Two Years Before the Mast,’ and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South. He was able to temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it was very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every ship’s master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of Dana’s instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination. The final demand comes through the trumpet, “What cargo?” and the captain so challenged yields to temptation and roars back “Furs!” A moment of hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, “Here and there a horn?”

There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She shouts back through her captain’s trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into parley with her. “What cargo?” The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology, “Only from Liverpool, sir!” and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as possible.

Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge. He was a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston. One was apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth between the two cities, and which were often so full of one’s acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea. They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform. I do not mean that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the illustration of my point. His book probably carried the American name farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best might in a heartless neglect even at home. The book was delightful, and I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that classics are made of. I venture no conjecture as to its present popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best. The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father, the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition, being alive, though past literary activity. It was distinctively a literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its continued literary vitality in the romance of ‘Espiritu Santo’ by the youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.

VII.

There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be named with ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’ Ralph Keeler wrote the ‘Vagabond Adventures’ which he had lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as he claimed, “a cruel uncle’s ward” in his early orphan-hood, and while yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart’s desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri. They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler’s faith in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its correspondent.

“Don’t go, Keeler,” I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his intention. “They’ll garrote you down there.”

“Well,” he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in a fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, “that’s what Aldrich says, and he’s agreed to write my biography, on condition that I make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it, ‘If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of ‘Marjorie Daw and Other People,’ I should not now be in this place.’”

He went, and he did not come back. He was not indeed garroted as his friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was never heard of again.

I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men commonly do. If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully trusted that “the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us.” The faith worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed, and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance. “Why do you use bias for opinion?” I demanded, in going over a proof with him. “Oh, because I’m such an ass — such a bi-ass.”

He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his listener’s shoulder: “Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it. It’s the only one you’ve got, or ever will have.” This light and joyous creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses. I am not sure that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed rather for men’s liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his manner. Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to be greatly vexed by it. He lived on in the house of a suave old actor, who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning stroll. The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.

I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.

VIII.

Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of real quality as a poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of “The Old Sergeant” Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary beauty of face in an oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness. He was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him at Longfellow’s, he could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.

He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of supernatural things. He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters. But none was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it almost the best ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson’s father appeared to him, and stood before him. Willson was accustomed to apparitions, and so he said simply, “Won’t you sit down, father?” The phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work. “Ah!” he said, “I forgot that I was not substance.”

I do not know whether “The Old Sergeant” is ever read now; it has probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am afraid none of Willson’s other verse is remembered. But he was then a distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our poets. I did not see him again. Shortly afterwards I heard that he had left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid course, for a very little later came the news of his death.

IX.

The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived; for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself, if not me, with the declaration, “Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge never let a man keep a cold yet!”

If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.

Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew. I knew him first in the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were born. It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the shadow of elms that are shadows themselves. The ‘genius loci’ was limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the beholder.

In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done, and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.

I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out.

He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge than anything else. He held his native town in an idolatry which was not blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her droll points and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so many virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended me to him. I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write again for me. Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.

When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way. He had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till he died. In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him. “But you know,” he would explain, “I haven’t a house of my own to ask you to, and I should like to give you the supper here.” When I had agreed to this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and then say, as if a great load were off his mind, “Well, then, I will send up a few oysters to-morrow,” or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his way. On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth bag, sagged by some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be as entirely of his own giving as possible. He was forced to let us do the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained inundated for days. He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at our own table.

X.

It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not well understand it myself. But if he resented it, he never showed his resentment. As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too ethereal for remembrance. The last time I met him was at Lowell’s funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the friend we mourned.

My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose chimney-tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us. He was one of the first of my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages to count against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my youth in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a most gentle and kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its interests. As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In this temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the doctor’s insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with him, and refused even to answer his letters. “Of course,” the doctor said, “I was not going to stand that from my mother’s son, and I simply kept on writing.” So he prevailed, but the fiery old gentleman from Louisiana was reconciled to nothing in the North but his brother, and when he came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his cause of quarrel with us. “I can’t vote,” he declared, “but my coachman can, and I don’t know how I’m to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me all over with the iodine he’s using for my rheumatic side.”

Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahminical caste and was long an eminent Unitarian minister, but at the time I began to know him he had long quitted the pulpit. He was so far of civic or public character as to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neighbors, but this officiality was probably so little in keeping with his nature that it was like a return to his truer self when he ceased to hold the place, and gave his time altogether to his history. It is a work which will hardly be superseded in the interest of those who value thorough research and temperate expression. It is very just, and without endeavor for picture or drama it is to me very attractive. Much that has to be recorded of New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dignity and presence to the memories of the past, and the finer moments of that great story, he gave with the simplicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such an apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself, and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of the best and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gentleness of his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of the Puritan severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial as it was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather better and not worse than other people of the same time. He was himself a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to leave it to its own punishment. Personally he was without any flavor of harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the gentlest I have ever known.

Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He could not only play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and painted pictures perhaps not so good. I always liked his Venetian pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as well as liked many of his poems. During the time that I knew him more than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist soul and the poet heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that shadowed his visage. My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York. We met at Longfellow’s table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song, “On Springfield Mountain there did dwell,” which he gave with a perfectly killing mock-gravity.

XI.

At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that of the neighboring capital. It would be rather hard to prove this, and I must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it. The great interests in that pleasant world, which I think does not present itself to my memory in a false iridiscence, were the intellectual interests, and all other interests were lost in these to such as did not seek them too insistently.

People held themselves high; they held themselves personally aloof from people not duly assayed; their civilization was still Puritan though their belief had long ceased to be so. They had weights and measure, stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the test. These standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them; most Americans have no standards of their own, but these are not satisfied even with other people’s, and so our society is in a state of tolerant and tremulous misgiving.

Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it counts in New England everywhere, but family alone did not mean position, and the want of family did not mean the want of it. Money still less than family commanded; one could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame, or shame at all, for no one was very rich there, and no one was proud of his riches.

I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder at my good fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its alloys. I was young and unknown and was making my way, and I had to suffer some of the penalties of these disadvantages; but I do not believe that anywhere else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vainly imagined that the material struggle forms a high incentive and inspiration, would my penalties have been so light. On the other hand, the good that was done me I could never repay if I lived all over again for others the life that I have so long lived for myself. At times, when I had experienced from those elect spirits with whom I was associated, some act of friendship, as signal as it was delicate, I used to ask myself, how I could ever do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any one again; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it.

The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing, but what was of good import in me flourished in it. The life of the place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened illimitably. I speak of it frankly because that life as I witnessed it is now almost wholly of the past. Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E. Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest had not yet their actual prominence. One, in deed among so many absent, is still present there, whom from time to time I have hitherto named without offering him the recognition which I should have known an infringement of his preferences. But the literary Cambridge of thirty years ago could not be clearly imagined or justly estimated without taking into account the creative sympathy of a man whose contributions to our literature only partially represent what he has constantly done for the humanities. I am sure that, after the easy heroes of the day are long forgot, and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle to their essential insignificance before those of the gentle life, we shall all see in Charles Eliot Norton the eminent scholar who left the quiet of his books to become our chief citizen at the moment when he warned his countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong.

A BELATED GUEST

It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries, of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people, they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such gleams of this ‘dolce lome’ as your reminiscences can shed upon them? Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms, that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or three instances, if one does one’s duty by each. People begin to say, and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: “Ah, here he is again with his recollections!” Well, but if the recollections by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least excused?

I.

My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those earliest tales of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’, and ‘Tennessee’s Partner’, and ‘Maggles’, and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’, were the earnests of an American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure, that is not Harte’s fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing, but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.

When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise. Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this

       “Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,”

his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco? Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded, and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest. However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the most winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead, then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time could say to him, “Mr. Harte, aren’t you afraid to go about in the cars so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?” “No, madam,” he could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, “I bear a charmed life.”

The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and prospered them.

Before they came in sight of the editor’s humble roof he had mocked himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to him, he said, “why, you couldn’t stand on your front porch and fire off your revolver without bringing down a two volumer,” and no doubt the pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had invented.

II.

Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon’s flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.

Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.

It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the appreciation of another’s fit word which goes far to establish for a man the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the incidents that “broke up the society upon the Stanislow.” It was a little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of ‘The Cathedral.’ But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink as he

    “Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.”

This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly. Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte’s gift, while he sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father’s side; he had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.

With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to class together as “the old saints,” Harte had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and to see the fun of a minor literary man’s relation to them. Emerson’s smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how Emerson at Concord had proposed having a “wet night” with him over a glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with a hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of Longfellow’s he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow’s beautiful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic’s own fineness.

III.

As for Harte’s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not, apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante’s noticing how the dog’s skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.

But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that Sandy drunkenly slept under in ‘The Idyl of Iced Gulch’, he asked, “Why, is that an azalea?” To be sure, this might have been less from his ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea of Californian size could easily lend itself to.

You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant fellow-Hebrew Heine, as “rather scorbutic.” He preferred to talk about the little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be living. “Why,” the postman said, “there is no Phillips Avenue in Cambridge. There’s Phillips Place.” “Well,” Harte assented, “Phillips Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue.” He entered eagerly into the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer’s china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the lofty ‘epergnes’ set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in to note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structures were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of the towering forms that dwarfed it so.

He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized then and there. “Look at him,” he said, from time to time. “This is the dream of his life,” and then shouted and choked with fun at the difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have imagined in his commensal’s mind. At a dinner long after in London, where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, “or few or none,” to “shake against the cold,” had whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mustache had kept its youthful black. “He looks,” one of his friends said to another as they walked home together, “like a French marquis of the ancien regime.” “Yes,” the other assented, thoughtfully, “or like an American actor made up for the part.”

The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte’s nature. Never was any man less a ‘poseur’; he made simply and helplessly known what he was at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law’s presence who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, “Well, Harte, this is the old literary tradition; this is the Fleet business over again,” he joyously smote his thigh and crowed out, “Yes, the Fleet!” No doubt he tasted all the delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite unaffected.

If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason, was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be found on our map.

It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.

Whatever minds there may be about Harte’s fiction finally, there can hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet; whether he wrote what drolly called itself “dialect,” or wrote language, he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems, characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them. In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.

The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book, which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,

    “With sick and scornful looks averse,”

confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston counting-room. It was the volume which contained “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the booksellers’ counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New York.

It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien conditions, — [See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its people. Twain’s rebuttal (Mr. Froude’s Progress) would have been ‘a propos’ for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.] — and he had always his temperament against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.

It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not doing anything.

IV.

The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the happiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the fondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station; there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some cigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car. But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of the rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that he was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in picturesque farewell from the platform.

Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed to death between a moving train and such an archway.

Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities in the world,

    “In life’s morning march when his bosom was young,”

and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that blithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains the witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it. Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer’s sense is rapt with the mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other.

[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet writes the best prose. D.W.]

MY MARK TWAIN

I.

It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had intimated my reservations concerning the ‘Innocents Abroad’, but I had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author. He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.

At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know what droll comment was in Fields’s mind with respect to this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of, “Oh, Youth!” That was her name for him among their friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for just the boy he was.

II.

There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books, ‘Vagabond Adventures’, a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields, much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full of good fellowship, Bret Harte’s fleeting dramatization of Clemens’s mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why, fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark’s life,” and I remember the glance from under Clemens’s feathery eyebrows which betrayed his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed to Clemens.

Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner’s, but Clemens had come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it should be called the English violet order of architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner’s humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences. The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands in completed sale. Of the ‘Innocents Abroad’ he said, “It sells right along just like the Bible,” and ‘Roughing It’ was swiftly following, without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in. “Anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation,” he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that opulence.

III.

The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in Warner’s European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing a syllable till we had occasion to say, “Well, we’re there.” Then, with our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over again. Or at times he would reason high —

      “Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,

       Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,”

walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.

He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife’s belief, for it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. “He asked me,” Clemens would say, “if I couldn’t give him the names of people who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard from him. ‘Well, Mr. Clemens,’ he said, ‘nobody seems to have a very good word for you.’ I hadn’t referred him to people that I thought were going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed. ‘So I guess I shall have to back you myself.’”

Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say, but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little children. There had been a boy, and “Yes, I killed him,” Clemens once said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain this was through its father’s imprudence. I never heard him speak of his son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin and talking and talking.

It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs. Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run over, and he was glad the whole world should see it.

His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this, as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness. Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, “I wish I was with Livy.” I do not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses, and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of them was his equal in humanity.

IV.

Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect’s connivance, a luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship. It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and, without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke, could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I knew already from his many stories about him.

We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness, but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.

I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words, of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me, I suppose after he had been reading some of my unsparing praises of her — I am always praising her, “You seem to think that woman could write,” and he forbore withering me with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any. He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me over Clemens wrote, “That man seems to have been to you what Browning was to me.” I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay’s it was that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the vengefulness of William Morris’s ‘Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,’ and how he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker’s joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:

      “I am threescore years and ten,

       And my hair is ‘nigh turned gray,

       But I am glad to think of the moment when

       I took his life away.”

Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it, and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.

Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his compilations. — [Nowhere is this characteristic better found than in Twain’s ‘Autobiography,’ it was not a “style” it was unselfconscious thought D.W.] — I helped him with a Library of Humor, which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition, with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all apart, and “chucked” the pieces in wherever the fancy, for them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it; and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.

V.

At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable “mush of concession,” as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little stronger language than ‘The Atlantic’ had stomach for, and once when I sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He wrote back: “Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript to her I skipped that.” It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to their friends.

I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country, and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of being eager for him, but it is to the publisher’s credit that he tried, so far as the modest traditions of ‘The Atlantic’ would permit, to meet the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens’s books might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page did not surfeit the author of books that “sold right along just like the Bible.”

We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the making of his great book, ‘Life on the Mississippi’. Upon the whole I have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was supported in his opinion by that of the ‘portier’ in his hotel at Vienna, and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly guard their vested interests against them. ‘The New York Times’ and the ‘St. Louis Democrat’ profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent them to reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted field. Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure, and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as ever.

VI.

It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of ‘The Gilded Age.’ This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah, whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. This he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent, who counted out the author’s share of the gate money, and sent him a note of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.

One hundred and fifty dollars — two hundred dollars — three hundred dollars were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then, flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in.

By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according to Clemens’s intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way.

We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after, when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read them over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house before them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my fondness.

At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give it back with the despairing renunciation, “That is a Raymond play.” We tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could get Raymond to do it. In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with a play for the winter — a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in no hurry for ours. Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. In the end it did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had no doubt he would do it the next winter. So I gave him the manuscript, in spite of Clemens’s charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor’s hands. But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. In due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. In this effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible. At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him. He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.

Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and “in visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed,” ghastly forms of failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: “Here is a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools.” Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York; and yet I think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.

VII.

There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to Hartford in response to Clemens’s telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. “Oh, but he doesn’t like that sort of thing, does he?” “He likes Mr. Clemens very much,” my representative answered, “and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew.” I was still Clemens’s guest at Hartford when Arnold came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception. While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. “Who-who in the world is that?” I looked and said, “Oh, that is Mark Twain.” I do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold’s wish, but I have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens’s house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk. He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes, under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you.

VIII.

I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him, but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath, or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from the thread of thought in my mind. “I wonder why we hate the past so,” and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, “It’s so damned humiliating,” which is what any man would say of his past if he were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.

He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring Brace’s ‘Gesta Christi’; or, ‘History of Humane Progress’, and I could offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and regarded as an evangel of a new gospel — the gospel of free thought. He took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church, and he groaned out: “Oh yes, I go. It ‘most kills me, but I go,” and I did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had finally come to her saying, “Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you.” He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic lies, which for love’s sake he held above even the truth, and he went to her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart, and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him declare it merely functional.

To make an end of these records as to Clemens’s beliefs, so far as I knew them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause, a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest, and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness. All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite compassion, “Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?” Nothing more, but the look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from my sense.

IX.

He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on you — fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a girl’s, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt to do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of us becomes, I should say that Clemens’s central and final personality was something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps, from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens’s meaning to the public without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said, “You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn’t come down to see the Twelve Apostles.” George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself, and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith away content with himself and all the rest of the world.

The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of conduct “unbecoming an officer and gentleman,” and there was the usual shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white, but, “Oh yes,” Clemens said, with bitter irony, “it was that one part black that undid him.” It made him a “nigger” and incapable of being a gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white were guiltless.

Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history. He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that “it was not yet time” to philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must “wait till its passions had cooled,” and “the clouds of strife had cleared away.” He maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on fable.

He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had been in California at the beginning of Clemens’s career, and had witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it, once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful, not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.

X.

I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest, with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science, Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, “The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it,” and he gave his guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens’s best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner; luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say; he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another’s remark and gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor to their trebles in singing.

Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk. Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess, after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost killed her, but it was worth it.

In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and had gone promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged him.

He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post of duty.

Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn steps of Porter’s Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled panting back to Boston, with “their tongues hanging out like dogs,” but we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord, passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion, which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we stood, lost in this “contest of civilities,” the coach passed us, with gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to Concord that day and did not.

We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted wisdom of taking the train at Porter’s Station, and had agreed to say that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt detection.

XI.

From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens’s affection for me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end, and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was preoccupied in a flirtation with a “gentleman friend,” that emulous of the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book. Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to comment, “I suppose you will report this fellow.” “Yes,” he answered, slowly and sadly. “That’s what I should have done once. But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month.”

Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that with Unions was the working-man’s only present hope of standing up like a man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the ‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’

XII.

Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their journey with a night’s rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in two days. Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott’s Tower, ten miles out of Hartford. As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked. Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired, for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.

He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation. But in his own country it was different. In proportion as people thought themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less. He stopped as if with the long Semitic curve of Clemens’s nose, which in the indulgence of his passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends who accepted him with the English, the European entirety — namely, Charles Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He met Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand, he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.

I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens’s instance in his own uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband’s true and cordial adviser, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking, when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely, I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, I hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a car with his MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted, concerning it. I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were his wife’s misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and tenderness and “natural piety”; and she would not have had him judged by a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer’s life. This is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those doubts.

XIII.

Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man’s falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to die; he would have liked the rapping back.

He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for something of amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked his friends and authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till well toward the winter twilight.

He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of the now worn-out Authors’ Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop (everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading, but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens’s turn to read he introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give, but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded of Darwin’s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long day’s exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him, and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt secure of a good night’s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as ‘The Prince and the Pauper;’ but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from unprinted chapters (say, out of ‘The Undiscovered Country’ or ‘A Modern Instance’) he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.

XIV.

There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform. The Authors’ Readings when they had won their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from one’s book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture’s purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for living on the fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise, which he provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully imagined ‘Memorable Murders’ for subscription publication; we both abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for a year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them.

He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated me on having gone into “the lecture field,” and then he said: “I know where you are now. You are in hell.”

It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader’s eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as he was. “Pay what thou owest.” That is right, even when thou owest it by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy need.

Clemens’s behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel, but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there is no telling. I should not be surprised if He accounted it of less merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and his payment of his portion of our race’s debt to the race of the colored student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who shot it. These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the discharge of his firm’s liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and I least of all men.

He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri — a most inadequate person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. He came the whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons, joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.

Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her, and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably she had no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when mortally sick or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be, and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator in witnessing the inexorable doom of others.

XV.

When Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors, who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the subtle fiend of advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave great pleasure and no pain. I forget some of the “emergent occasions,” but I am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by Whittier, and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as to the pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and came so near being the death of us all. At the breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady contributors’ company, but that night there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived.

I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant, and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.

But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it at all.

The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred. function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and Charles Dudley Warner’s saying, in the gloom, “Well, Mark, you’re a funny fellow.” It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens seemed unable to accept the tribute.

I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow, a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and said, “Ah, he is a wag!” and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost an instant in replying to Clemens’s letter, and assuring him that there had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the matter again. “He said that he was a fool, but he was God’s fool,” Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of the self-abasement.

To me Clemens wrote a week later, “It doesn’t get any better; it burns like fire.” But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, “But I don’t admit that it was a mistake,” and it was not so in the minds of all witnesses at second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper report of it, praising Clemens’s burlesque as the richest piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in Clemens’s soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child’s note on the other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. I am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them; nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.

XVI.

Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together without something out of the common happening, and one day something far out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously impersonal interest, “Oh, see that woman getting into the water!” This would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door, and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment. Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild creature on our hands. She was not very young and not very pretty, and we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our neighborhood knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to us or unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We had to circumvent our charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring in both of us to enforce our arguments. Nobody else appeared to be interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to be so entirely ignored.

There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge of our hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked design. After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. He took possession of our captive, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with our joint instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and few things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay; but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.

XVII.

A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before, where there was a “little Scotch lord” present, to whom the English tacitly referred Clemens’s talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say, and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves different from other men.

Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it. He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the sufferer’s knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.

He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or, he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years, he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him, and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies, but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies; their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him. He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance, a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against him. At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor’s head. Later, he wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him to have the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months? Just two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was acquitted, and the editor’s life was spared. The wretch never knew how near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.

His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur’s administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his friendship with Grant and Grant’s friendship with Arthur. I asked him to write to Grant in my father’s behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant’s publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to find Grant in his business office, that place where his business innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr. Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.

It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions of Clemens’s often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant. It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large. He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through his report how Grant described his suffering.

The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens’s adversity, for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss, and the success of Grant’s book tempted him to launch on publishing seas where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of, when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens’s book agents would carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so exuberantly jubilant.

XIX.

The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact, sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness, and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a dinner, but now he was silent, as if “high sorrowful and cloyed”; and it was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed for the actor.

He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which eventuated with him in his theory of what he called “the damned human race.” This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably, as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the reflection that now she should not hear so much about “the damned human race.” He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel really minded it much more than that Guardian. Angel of his. It probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it. Nothing came of his pose regarding “the damned human race” except his invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their indifference.

In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest, the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero’s courage in the field and the martyr’s at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or “reformed the lords,” as it might be called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable blessing to the English people and the world. Clemens was always beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased as “the Majesty of England.” He rolled the words deep-throatedly out, and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the world. He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like the game of Authors) for children. I do not know whether he ever perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market. Very likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings.

XX.

He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary interest in the inventions of others. At one moment “the damned human race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood, or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree hitherto impossible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not mistaken as to Clemens’s enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses in paying its way to ultimate failure. He was simultaneously absorbed in the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was practically impracticable. We were both printers by trade, and I could take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. This sum was prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in vainly trying to get this money together. In the mean time simpler machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to witness its performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him devote the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor.

In these things, and in his other schemes for the ‘subiti guadagni’ of the speculator and the “sudden making of splendid names” for the benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it, but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and dispirited him. No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we abound in. I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of emotion sent over the world by ‘Looking Backward,’ and again when we were all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the workingman’s cause. At all other times he seemed to know that whatever wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right.

When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had culminated the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that forlorn bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight by the miracle worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn that “the damned human race” was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for evermore. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the investments which he had made from “the substance of things hoped for,” and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmon.

XXI.

For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father’s and mother’s hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home of exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year’s; he hastened to say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth. It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy’s book, or his admiration of her genius for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the minds of men. He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human credulity and folly.

An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians, but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in. He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.

XXII.

The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this: our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.

Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as he did everything she wanted. ‘At one place, some suburban villa, he could get no answer to his ring, and he “hove” his cards over the gate just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his unexplanatory French to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting himself on the drivers’ mercy he always managed to get where he wanted. The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him to do what the cat might.

It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in look and limb, that Clemens’s universally pervasive popularity began in his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider “the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn’t expect people to keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners, receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens’s health alone that they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should change for his wife’s sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly: “What? What?” as if it might be an asking for him instead of the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking voice: “Oh, why didn’t you ever tell her? She thought you didn’t like her.” What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.

To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in recovering the money paid over by that brother’s publisher to a false friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he proposed sending to the false friend. For once I had some sense, and answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to withhold the money. Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him. He acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him, and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the first place. Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the matter. He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was, who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred to the incident. It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.

XXIII.

During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the last time at Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens’s window, where we could read our manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out without disturbing her. At first she had been about the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun. He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of those constructive tricks that people’s memories indulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be found. Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I have mentioned. The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own concerning them. Not only does he seem to have read me those first chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole story.

I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more largely his than the lives of most men’s wives are theirs. For his own life I believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of one who was so absolutely without pose as he was. He said that he never saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done with it. Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in subjects of curious inquiry. When the time came for his wife’s removal from York Harbor I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up the best means of her conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him: the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New York and left at Riverdale. There was no particular of the business which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the least detail.

He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim. But when he came home again it was for good and all. It was natural that he should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant year in Tenth Street. I used to see him there in an upper room, looking south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign against the missionaries in China. He had not yet formed his habit of lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of it.

My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time things aright. But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at 21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography. He meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. As we talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. We said it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library, but a literature. It should make good the world’s loss through Omar’s barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was really done on a colossal scale. But one day he said that as to veracity it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could. How far he had carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it, and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these. It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means of knowing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be minimized for all the survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely dropped it; I never asked.

We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends, and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of joking reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us very frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few streets above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived through the episode of Kossuth’s visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the “oppressed of Europe”; the oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not count. I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and I think now I set the figure too high. I had already refused to sign the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced in Gorky’s presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused. The next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human nature.

I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens’s familiar head gave us away to the reporters waiting at the elevator’s mouth for all who went to see Gorky. As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing to say of Gorky’s domestic affairs; for the public interest had now strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. But with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I forget how long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. That was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then “blowing a cone off,” as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crashed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see Clemens.

“How many?” he demanded.

“Five,” the butler faltered.

“Reporters?”

The butler feigned uncertainty.

“What would you do?” he asked me.

“I wouldn’t see them,” I said, and then Clemens went directly down to them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong, and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not their wives. Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime.

XXIV.

To the period of Clemens’s residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his efflorescence in white serge. He was always rather aggressively indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. But the white serge was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon. The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors’ hearing before the Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.

It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The red and the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could not do. His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered to him if he had known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth Avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.

He disliked clubs; I don’t know whether he belonged to any in New York, but I never met him in one. As I have told, he himself had formed the Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted. There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I alone came. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it. He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far enough apart. I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.

XXV.

My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him by his wife’s father when they were first married, and been kept all those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro “spiritual” which I heard him sing with such fervor, when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way northward. ‘Go Down, Daniel’, was one in which I can hear his quavering tenor now. He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. No one could read ‘Uncle Remus’ like him; his voice echoed the voices of the negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember especially his rapture with Mr. Cable’s ‘Old Creole Days,’ and the thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper’s brother when the city’s survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage where the leper lived in hiding: “Strit must not pass!”

Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes — I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.

LITERATURE AND LIFE

This collection of short pieces was published in 1902, although many of the items had previously appeared in magazines. Arranged into four sections, the first contains biographical sketches, some of which deal with Howells’s career as a professional writer. The second section contains more generic short stories and essays on various themes. In the third section, Howells discusses some of his ‘literary passions’, which span the whole length and breadth of literature in English. The final section is an extended essay on the theme of ‘Criticism and Fiction’.

Title page of the first edition

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

PART I.

THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII

IX.

X.

XI.

CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST

I.

II.

III.

IV

THE EDITOR’S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL (1897)

I.

II.

III

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR

I.

II.

III.

IV.

AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY

I.

II.

STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

PART II. SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK

I.

II.

III.

SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN

I.

II.

III.

IV.

WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT

I.

II.

III.

IV

A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

A SHE HAMLET

I.

II.

III.

THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

SAWDUST IN THE ARENA

I.

II.

III.

AT A DIME MUSEUM

I.

II.

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

I.

II.

THE HORSE SHOW

I.

II.

III.

IV.

THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER

I.

II.

III.

AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO

I.

II.

FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

THE ART OF THE ADSMITH

I.

II.

III.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM

I.

II.

PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION

I.

II.

THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART

I.

II.

III.

POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

I.

II.

III.

IV.

STORAGE

I.

II.

III.

IV

“FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O”

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

PART III. MY LITERARY PASSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME

II. GOLDSMITH

III. CERVANTES

IV. IRVING

V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA

VI. LONGFELLOW’S “SPANISH STUDENT”

VII. SCOTT

VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES

IX. POPE

X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES

XI. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

XII. OSSIAN

XIII. SHAKESPEARE

XIV. IK MARVEL

XV. DICKENS

XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER

XVII. MACAULAY

XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS

XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE

XX. THACKERAY

XXI. “LAZARILLO DE TORMES”

XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL

XXIII. TENNYSON

XXIV. HEINE

XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW

XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE

XXVII. CHARLES READE

XXVIII. DANTE

XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D’AZEGLIO

XXX. “PASTOR FIDO,” “AMINTA,” “ROMOLA,” “YEAST,” “PAUL FERROLL”

XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON

XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH

XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES

XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY

XXXV. TOLSTOY

PART IV. CRITICISM AND FICTION

I

II

III

IV

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVII.

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Cover of the first edition

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Perhaps the reader may not feel in these papers that inner solidarity which the writer is conscious of; and it is in this doubt that the writer wishes to offer a word of explanation. He owns, as he must, that they have every appearance of a group of desultory sketches and essays, without palpable relation to one another, or superficial allegiance to any central motive. Yet he ventures to hope that the reader who makes his way through them will be aware, in the retrospect, of something like this relation and this allegiance.

For my own part, if I am to identify myself with the writer who is here on his defence, I have never been able to see much difference between what seemed to me Literature and what seemed to me Life. If I did not find life in what professed to be literature, I disabled its profession, and possibly from this habit, now inveterate with me, I am never quite sure of life unless I find literature in it. Unless the thing seen reveals to me an intrinsic poetry, and puts on phrases that clothe it pleasingly to the imagination, I do not much care for it; but if it will do this, I do not mind how poor or common or squalid it shows at first glance: it challenges my curiosity and keeps my sympathy. Instantly I love it and wish to share my pleasure in it with some one else, or as many ones else as I can get to look or listen. If the thing is something read, rather than seen, I am not anxious about the matter: if it is like life, I know that it is poetry, and take it to my heart. There can be no offence in it for which its truth will not make me amends.

Out of this way of thinking and feeling about these two great things, about Literature and Life, there may have arisen a confusion as to which is which. But I do not wish to part them, and in their union I have found, since I learned my letters, a joy in them both which I hope will last till I forget my letters.

      “So was it when my life began;

       So is it, now I am a man;

       So be it when I shall grow old.”

It is the rainbow in the sky for me; and I have seldom seen a sky without some bit of rainbow in it. Sometimes I can make others see it, sometimes not; but I always like to try, and if I fail I harbor no worse thought of them than that they have not had their eyes examined and fitted with glasses which would at least have helped their vision.

As to the where and when of the different papers, in which I suppose their bibliography properly lies, I need not be very exact. “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business” was written in a hotel at Lakewood in the May of 1892 or 1893, and pretty promptly printed in Scribner’s Magazine; “Confessions of a Summer Colonist” was done at York Harbor in the fall of 1898 for the Atlantic Monthly, and was a study of life at that pleasant resort as it was lived-in the idyllic times of the earlier settlement, long before motors and almost before private carriages; “American Literary Centres,” “American Literature in Exile,” “Puritanism in American Fiction,” “Politics of American Authors,” were, with three or four other papers, the endeavors of the American correspondent of the London Times’s literary supplement, to enlighten the British understanding as to our ways of thinking and writing eleven years ago, and are here left to bear the defects of the qualities of their obsolete actuality in the year 1899. Most of the studies and sketches are from an extinct department of “Life and Letters” which I invented for Harper’s Weekly, and operated for a year or so toward the close of the nineteenth century. Notable among these is the “Last Days in a Dutch Hotel,” which was written at Paris in 1897; it is rather a favorite of mine, perhaps because I liked Holland so much; others, which more or less personally recognize effects of sojourn in New York or excursions into New England, are from the same department; several may be recalled by the longer- memoried reader as papers from the “Editor’s Easy Chair” in Harper’s Monthly; “Wild Flowers of the Asphalt” is the review of an ever- delightful book which I printed in Harper’s Bazar; “The Editor’s Relations with the Young Contributor” was my endeavor in Youth’s Companion to shed a kindly light from my experience in both seats upon the too-often and too needlessly embittered souls of literary beginners.

So it goes as to the motives and origins of the collection which may persist in disintegrating under the reader’s eye, in spite of my well- meant endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. From the beginning the journalist’s independence of the scholar’s solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the narrow possibilities of a candle-stand, without a dictionary in the whole house, or a book of reference even in the running brooks outside.
W. D. HOWELLS. </>

PART I.

THE MAN OF LETTERS AS A MAN OF BUSINESS

I think that every man ought to work for his living, without exception, and that, when he has once avouched his willingness to work, society should provide him with work and warrant him a living. I do not think any man ought to live by an art. A man’s art should be his privilege, when he has proven his fitness to exercise it, and has otherwise earned his daily bread; and its results should be free to all. There is an instinctive sense of this, even in the midst of the grotesque confusion of our economic being; people feel that there is something profane, something impious, in taking money for a picture, or a poem, or a statue. Most of all, the artist himself feels this. He puts on a bold front with the world, to be sure, and brazens it out as Business; but he knows very well that there is something false and vulgar in it; and that the work which cannot be truly priced in money cannot be truly paid in money. He can, of course, say that the priest takes money for reading the marriage service, for christening the new-born babe, and for saying the last office for the dead; that the physician sells healing; that justice itself is paid for; and that he is merely a party to the thing that is and must be. He can say that, as the thing is, unless he sells his art he cannot live, that society will leave him to starve if he does not hit its fancy in a picture, or a poem, or a statue; and all this is bitterly true. He is, and he must be, only too glad if there is a market for his wares. Without a market for his wares he must perish, or turn to making something that will sell better than pictures, or poems, or statues. All the same, the sin and the shame remain, and the averted eye sees them still, with its inward vision. Many will make believe otherwise, but I would rather not make believe otherwise; and in trying to write of Literature as Business I am tempted to begin by saying that Business is the opprobrium of Literature.

I.

Literature is at once the most intimate and the most articulate of the arts. It cannot impart its effect through the senses or the nerves as the other arts can; it is beautiful only through the intelligence; it is the mind speaking to the mind; until it has been put into absolute terms, of an invariable significance, it does not exist at all. It cannot awaken this emotion in one, and that in another; if it fails to express precisely the meaning of the author, if it does not say him, it says nothing, and is nothing. So that when a poet has put his heart, much or little, into a poem, and sold it to a magazine, the scandal is greater than when a painter has sold a picture to a patron, or a sculptor has modelled a statue to order. These are artists less articulate and less intimate than the poet; they are more exterior to their work; they are less personally in it; they part with less of themselves in the dicker. It does not change the nature of the case to say that Tennyson and Longfellow and Emerson sold the poems in which they couched the most mystical messages their genius was charged to bear mankind. They submitted to the conditions which none can escape; but that does not justify the conditions, which are none the less the conditions of hucksters because they are imposed upon poets. If it will serve to make my meaning a little clearer, we will suppose that a poet has been crossed in love, or has suffered some real sorrow, like the loss of a wife or child. He pours out his broken heart in verse that shall bring tears of sacred sympathy from his readers, and an editor pays him a hundred dollars for the right of bringing his verse to their notice. It is perfectly true that the poem was not written for these dollars, but it is perfectly true that it was sold for them. The poet must use his emotions to pay his provision bills; he has no other means; society does not propose to pay his bills for him. Yet, and at the end of the ends, the unsophisticated witness finds the transaction ridiculous, finds it repulsive, finds it shabby. Somehow he knows that if our huckstering civilization did not at every moment violate the eternal fitness of things, the poet’s song would have been given to the world, and the poet would have been cared for by the whole human brotherhood, as any man should be who does the duty that every man owes it.

The instinctive sense of the dishonor which money-purchase does to art is so strong that sometimes a man of letters who can pay his way otherwise refuses pay for his work, as Lord Byron did, for a while, from a noble pride, and as Count Tolstoy has tried to do, from a noble conscience. But Byron’s publisher profited by a generosity which did not reach his readers; and the Countess Tolstoy collects the copyright which her husband foregoes; so that these two eminent instances of protest against business in literature may be said not to have shaken its money basis. I know of no others; but there may be many that I am culpably ignorant of. Still, I doubt if there are enough to affect the fact that Literature is Business as well as Art, and almost as soon. At present business is the only human solidarity; we are all bound together with that chain, whatever interests and tastes and principles separate us, and I feel quite sure that in writing of the Man of Letters as a Man of Business I shall attract far more readers than I should in writing of him as an Artist. Besides, as an artist he has been done a great deal already; and a commercial state like ours has really more concern in him as a business man. Perhaps it may sometime be different; I do not believe it will till the conditions are different, and that is a long way off.

II.

In the mean time I confidently appeal to the reader’s imagination with the fact that there are several men of letters among us who are such good men of business that they can command a hundred dollars a thousand words for all they write. It is easy to write a thousand words a day, and, supposing one of these authors to work steadily, it can be seen that his net earnings during the year would come to some such sum as the President of the United States gets for doing far less work of a much more perishable sort. If the man of letters were wholly a business man, this is what would happen; he would make his forty or fifty thousand dollars a year, and be able to consort with bank presidents, and railroad officials, and rich tradesmen, and other flowers of our plutocracy on equal terms. But, unfortunately, from a business point of view, he is also an artist, and the very qualities that enable him to delight the public disable him from delighting it uninterruptedly. “No rose blooms right along,” as the English boys at Oxford made an American collegian say in a theme which they imagined for him in his national parlance; and the man of letters, as an artist, is apt to have times and seasons when he cannot blossom. Very often it shall happen that his mind will lie fallow between novels or stories for weeks and months at a stretch; when the suggestions of the friendly editor shall fail to fruit in the essays or articles desired; when the muse shall altogether withhold herself, or shall respond only in a feeble dribble of verse which he might sell indeed, but which it would not be good business for him to put on the market. But supposing him to be a very diligent and continuous worker, and so happy as to have fallen on a theme that delights him and bears him along, he may please himself so ill with the result of his labors that he can do nothing less in artistic conscience than destroy a day’s work, a week’s work, a month’s work. I know one man of letters who wrote to-day and tore up tomorrow for nearly a whole summer. But even if part of the mistaken work may be saved, because it is good work out of place, and not intrinsically bad, the task of reconstruction wants almost as much time as the production; and then, when all seems done, comes the anxious and endless process of revision. These drawbacks reduce the earning capacity of what I may call the high-cost man of letters in such measure that an author whose name is known everywhere, and whose reputation is commensurate with the boundaries of his country, if it does not transcend them, shall have the income, say, of a rising young physician, known to a few people in a subordinate city.

In view of this fact, so humiliating to an author in the presence of a nation of business men like ours, I do not know that I can establish the man of letters in the popular esteem as very much of a business man, after all. He must still have a low rank among practical people; and he will be regarded by the great mass of Americans as perhaps a little off, a little funny, a little soft! Perhaps not; and yet I would rather not have a consensus of public opinion on the question; I think I am more comfortable without it.

III.

There is this to be said in defence of men of letters on the business side, that literature is still an infant industry with us, and, so far from having been protected by our laws, it was exposed for ninety years after the foundation of the republic to the vicious competition of stolen goods. It is true that we now have the international copyright law at last, and we can at least begin to forget our shame; but literary property has only forty-two years of life under our unjust statutes, and if it is attacked by robbers the law does not seek out the aggressors and punish them, as it would seek out and punish the trespassers upon any other kind of property; it leaves the aggrieved owner to bring suit against them, and recover damages, if he can. This may be right enough in itself; but I think, then, that all property should be defended by civil suit, and should become public after forty-two years of private tenure. The Constitution guarantees us all equality before the law, but the law-makers seem to have forgotten this in the case of our literary industry. So long as this remains the case, we cannot expect the best business talent to go into literature, and the man of letters must keep his present low grade among business men.

As I have hinted, it is but a little while that he has had any standing at all. I may say that it is only since the Civil War that literature has become a business with us. Before that time we had authors, and very good ones; it is astonishing how good they were; but I do not remember any of them who lived by literature except Edgar A. Poe, perhaps; and we all know how he lived; it was largely upon loans. They were either men of fortune, or they were editors or professors, with salaries or incomes apart from the small gains of their pens; or they were helped out with public offices; one need not go over their names or classify them. Some of them must have made money by their books, but I question whether any one could have lived, even very simply, upon the money his books brought him. No one could do that now, unless he wrote a book that we could not recognize as a work of literature. But many authors live now, and live prettily enough, by the sale of the serial publication of their writings to the magazines. They do not live so nicely as successful tradespeople, of course, or as men in the other professions when they begin to make themselves names; the high state of brokers, bankers, railroad operators, and the like is, in the nature of the case, beyond their fondest dreams of pecuniary affluence and social splendor. Perhaps they do not want the chief seats in the synagogue; it is certain they do not get them. Still, they do very fairly well, as things go; and several have incomes that would seem riches to the great mass of worthy Americans who work with their hands for a living — when they can get the work. Their incomes are mainly from serial publication in the different magazines; and the prosperity of the magazines has given a whole class existence which, as a class, was wholly unknown among us before the Civil War. It is not only the famous or fully recognized authors who live in this way, but the much larger number of clever people who are as yet known chiefly to the editors, and who may never make themselves a public, but who do well a kind of acceptable work. These are the sort who do not get reprinted from the periodicals; but the better recognized authors do get reprinted, and then their serial work in its completed form appeals to the readers who say they do not read serials. The multitude of these is not great, and if an author rested his hopes upon their favor he would be a much more imbittered man than he now generally is. But he understands perfectly well that his reward is in the serial and not in the book; the return from that he may count as so much money found in the road — a few hundreds, a very few thousands, at the most, unless he is the author of an historical romance.

IV.

I doubt, indeed, whether the earnings of literary men are absolutely as great as they were earlier in the century, in any of the English-speaking countries; relatively they are nothing like as great. Scott had forty thousand dollars for ‘Woodstock,’ which was not a very large novel, and was by no means one of his best; and forty thousand dollars then had at least the purchasing power of sixty thousand now. Moore had three thousand guineas for ‘Lalla Rookh,’ but what publisher would be rash enough to pay fifteen thousand dollars for the masterpiece of a minor poet now? The book, except in very rare instances, makes nothing like the return to the author that the magazine makes, and there are few leading authors who find their account in that form of publication. Those who do, those who sell the most widely in book form, are often not at all desired by editors; with difficulty they get a serial accepted by any principal magazine. On the other hand, there are authors whose books, compared with those of the popular favorites, do not sell, and yet they are eagerly sought for by editors; they are paid the highest prices, and nothing that they offer is refused. These are literary artists; and it ought to be plain from what I am saying that in belles-lettres, at least, most of the best literature now first sees the light in the magazines, and most of the second-best appears first in book form. The old-fashioned people who flatter themselves upon their distinction in not reading magazine fiction or magazine poetry make a great mistake, and simply class themselves with the public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best. Of course, this is true mainly, if not merely, of belles-lettres; history, science, politics, metaphysics, in spite of the many excellent articles and papers in these sorts upon what used to be called various emergent occasions, are still to be found at their best in books. The most monumental example of literature, at once light and good, which has first reached the public in book form is in the different publications of Mark Twain; but Mr. Clemens has of late turned to the magazines too, and now takes their mint-mark before he passes into general circulation. All this may change again, but at present the magazines — we have no longer any reviews form the most direct approach to that part of our reading public which likes the highest things in literary art. Their readers, if we may judge from the quality of the literature they get, are more refined than the book readers in our community; and their taste has no doubt been cultivated by that of the disciplined and experienced editors. So far as I have known these, they are men of aesthetic conscience and of generous sympathy. They have their preferences in the different kinds, and they have their theory of what kind will be most acceptable to their readers; but they exercise their selective function with the wish to give them the best things they can. I do not know one of them — and it has been, my good fortune to know them nearly all — who would print a wholly inferior thing for the sake of an inferior class of readers, though they may sometimes decline a good thing because for one reason or another, they believe it would not be liked. Still, even this does not often happen; they would rather chance the good thing they doubted of than underrate their readers’ judgment.

The young author who wins recognition in a first-class magazine has achieved a double success, first, with the editor, and then with the best reading public. Many factitious and fallacious literary reputations have been made through books, but very few have been made through the magazines, which are not only the best means of living, but of outliving, with the author; they are both bread and fame to him. If I insist a little upon the high office which this modern form of publication fulfils in the literary world, it is because I am impatient of the antiquated and ignorant prejudice which classes the magazines as ephemeral. They are ephemeral in form, but in substance they are not ephemeral, and what is best in them awaits its resurrection in the book, which, as the first form, is so often a lasting death. An interesting proof of the value of the magazine to literature is the fact that a good novel will often have wider acceptance as a book from having been a magazine serial.

V.

Under the ‘regime’ of the great literary periodicals the prosperity of literary men would be much greater than it actually is if the magazines were altogether literary. But they are not, and this is one reason why literature is still the hungriest of the professions. Two-thirds of the magazines are made up of material which, however excellent, is without literary quality. Very probably this is because even the highest class of readers, who are the magazine readers, have small love of pure literature, which seems to have been growing less and less in all classes. I say seems, because there are really no means of ascertaining the fact, and it may be that the editors are mistaken in making their periodicals two-thirds popular science, politics, economics, and the timely topics which I will call contemporanics. But, however that may be, their efforts in this direction have narrowed the field of literary industry, and darkened the hope of literary prosperity kindled by the unexampled prosperity of their periodicals. They pay very well indeed for literature; they pay from five or six dollars a thousand words for the work of the unknown writer to a hundred and fifty dollars a thousand words for that of the most famous, or the most popular, if there is a difference between fame and popularity; but they do not, altogether, want enough literature to justify the best business talent in devoting itself to belles-lettres, to fiction, or poetry, or humorous sketches of travel, or light essays; business talent can do far better in dry goods, groceries, drugs, stocks, real estate, railroads, and the like. I do not think there is any danger of a ruinous competition from it in the field which, though narrow, seems so rich to us poor fellows, whose business talent is small, at the best.

The most of the material contributed to the magazines is the subject of agreement between the editor and the author; it is either suggested by the author or is the fruit of some suggestion from the editor; in any case the price is stipulated beforehand, and it is no longer the custom for a well-known contributor to leave the payment to the justice or the generosity of the publisher; that was never a fair thing to either, nor ever a wise thing. Usually, the price is so much a thousand words, a truly odious method of computing literary value, and one well calculated to make the author feel keenly the hatefulness of selling his art at all. It is as if a painter sold his picture at so much a square inch, or a sculptor bargained away a group of statuary by the pound. But it is a custom that you cannot always successfully quarrel with, and most writers gladly consent to it, if only the price a thousand words is large enough. The sale to the editor means the sale of the serial rights only, but if the publisher of the magazine is also a publisher of books, the republication of the material is supposed to be his right, unless there is an understanding to the contrary; the terms for this are another affair. Formerly something more could be got for the author by the simultaneous appearance of his work in an English magazine; but now the great American magazines, which pay far higher prices than any others in the world, have a circulation in England so much exceeding that of any English periodical that the simultaneous publication can no longer be arranged for from this side, though I believe it is still done here from the other side.

VI.

I think this is the case of authorship as it now stands with regard to the magazines. I am not sure that the case is in every way improved for young authors. The magazines all maintain a staff for the careful examination of manuscripts, but as most of the material they print has been engaged, the number of volunteer contributions that they can use is very small; one of the greatest of them, I know, does not use fifty in the course of a year. The new writer, then, must be very good to be accepted, and when accepted he may wait long before he is printed. The pressure is so great in these avenues to the public favor that one, two, three years, are no uncommon periods of delay. If the young writer has not the patience for this, or has a soul above cooling his heels in the courts of fame, or must do his best to earn something at once, the book is his immediate hope. How slight a hope the book is I have tried to hint already, but if a book is vulgar enough in sentiment, and crude enough in taste, and flashy enough in incident, or, better or worse still, if it is a bit hot in the mouth, and promises impropriety if not indecency, there is a very fair chance of its success; I do not mean success with a self-respecting publisher, but with the public, which does not personally put its name to it, and is not openly smirched by it. I will not talk of that kind of book, however, but of the book which the young author has written out of an unspoiled heart and an untainted mind, such as most young men and women write; and I will suppose that it has found a publisher. It is human nature, as competition has deformed human nature, for the publisher to wish the author to take all the risks, and he possibly proposes that the author shall publish it at his own expense, and let him have a percentage of the retail price for managing it. If not that, he proposes that the author shall pay for the stereotype plates, and take fifteen per cent. of the price of the book; or if this will not go, if the author cannot, rather than will not, do it (he is commonly only too glad to do any thing he can), then the publisher offers him ten per cent. of the retail price after the first thousand copies have been sold. But if he fully believes in the book, he will give ten per cent. from the first copy sold, and pay all the costs of publication himself. The book is to be retailed for a dollar and a half, and the publisher is not displeased with a new book that sells fifteen hundred copies. Whether the author has as much reason to be pleased is a question, but if the book does not sell more he has only himself to blame, and had better pocket in silence the two hundred and twenty-five dollars he gets for it, and bless his publisher, and try to find work somewhere at five dollars a week. The publisher has not made any more, if quite as much as the author, and until a book has sold two thousand copies the division is fair enough. After that, the heavier expenses of manufacturing have been defrayed and the book goes on advertising itself; there is merely the cost of paper, printing, binding, and marketing to be met, and the arrangement becomes fairer and fairer for the publisher. The author has no right to complain of this, in the case of his first book, which he is only too grateful to get accepted at all. If it succeeds, he has himself to blame for making the same arrangement for his second or third; it is his fault, or else it is his necessity, which is practically the same thing. It will be business for the publisher to take advantage of his necessity quite the same as if it were his fault; but I do not say that he will always do so; I believe he will very often not do so.

At one time there seemed a probability of the enlargement of the author’s gains by subscription publication, and one very well-known American author prospered fabulously in that way. The percentage offered by the subscription houses was only about half as much as that paid by the trade, but the sales were so much greater that the author could very well afford to take it. Where the book-dealer sold ten, the book-agent sold a hundred; or at least he did so in the case of Mark Twain’s books; and we all thought it reasonable he could do so with ours. Such of us as made experiment of him, however, found the facts illogical. No book of literary quality was made to go by subscription except Mr. Clemens’s books, and I think these went because the subscription public never knew what good literature they were. This sort of readers, or buyers, were so used to getting something worthless for their money that they would not spend it for artistic fiction, or, indeed, for any fiction at all except Mr. Clemens’s, which they probably supposed bad. Some good books of travel had a measurable success through the book-agents, but not at all the success that had been hoped for; and I believe now the subscription trade again publishes only compilations, or such works as owe more to the skill of the editor than the art of the writer. Mr. Clemens himself no longer offers his books to the public in that way.

It is not common, I think, in this country, to publish on the half- profits system, but it is very common in England, where, owing probably to the moisture in the air, which lends a fairy outline to every prospect, it seems to be peculiarly alluring. One of my own early books was published there on these terms, which I accepted with the insensate joy of the young author in getting any terms from a publisher. The book sold, sold every copy of the small first edition, and in due time the publisher’s statement came. I did not think my half of the profits was very great, but it seemed a fair division after every imaginable cost had been charged up against my poor book, and that frail venture had been made to pay the expenses of composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies. The wonder ought to have been that there was anything at all coming to me, but I was young and greedy then, and I really thought there ought to have been more. I was disappointed, but I made the best of it, of course, and took the account to the junior partner of the house which employed me, and said that I should like to draw on him for the sum due me from the London publishers. He said, Certainly; but after a glance at the account he smiled and said he supposed I knew how much the sum was? I answered, Yes; it was eleven pounds nine shillings, was not it? But I owned at the same time that I never was good at figures, and that I found English money peculiarly baffling. He laughed now, and said, It was eleven shillings and ninepence. In fact, after all those charges for composition, corrections, paper, printing, binding, advertising, and editorial copies, there was a most ingenious and wholly surprising charge of ten per cent. commission on sales, which reduced my half from pounds to shillings, and handsomely increased the publisher’s half in proportion. I do not now dispute the justice of the charge. It was not the fault of the half- profits system; it was the fault of the glad young author who did not distinctly inform himself of its mysterious nature in agreeing to it, and had only to reproach himself if he was finally disappointed.

But there is always something disappointing in the accounts of publishers, which I fancy is because authors are strangely constituted, rather than because publishers are so. I will confess that I have such inordinate expectations of the sale of my books, which I hope I think modestly of, that the sales reported to me never seem great enough. The copyright due me, no matter how handsome it is, appears deplorably mean, and I feel impoverished for several days after I get it. But, then, I ought to add that my balance in the bank is always much less than I have supposed it to be, and my own checks, when they come back to me, have the air of having been in a conspiracy to betray me.

No, we literary men must learn, no matter how we boast ourselves in business, that the distress we feel from our publisher’s accounts is simply idiopathic; and I for one wish to bear my witness to the constant good faith and uprightness of publishers. It is supposed that because they have the affair altogether in their hands they are apt to take advantage in it; but this does not follow, and as a matter of fact they have the affair no more in their own hands than any other business man you have an open account with. There is nothing to prevent you from looking at their books, except your own innermost belief and fear that their books are correct, and that your literature has brought you so little because it has sold so little.

The author is not to blame for his superficial delusion to the contrary, especially if he has written a book that has set every one talking, because it is of a vital interest. It may be of a vital interest, without being at all the kind of book people want to buy; it may be the kind of book that they are content to know at second hand; there are such fatal books; but hearing so much, and reading so much about it, the author cannot help hoping that it has sold much more than the publisher says. The publisher is undoubtedly honest, however, and the author had better put away the comforting question of his integrity.

The English writers seem largely to suspect their publishers; but I believe that American authors, when not flown with flattering reviews, as largely trust theirs. Of course there are rogues in every walk of life. I will not say that I ever personally met them in the flowery paths of literature, but I have heard of other people meeting them there, just as I have heard of people seeing ghosts, and I have to believe in both the rogues and the ghosts, without the witness of my own senses. I suppose, upon such grounds mainly, that there are wicked publishers, but, in the case of our books that do not sell, I am afraid that it is the graceless and inappreciative public which is far more to blame than the wickedest of the publishers. It is true that publishers will drive a hard bargain when they can, or when they must; but there is nothing to hinder an author from driving a hard bargain, too, when he can, or when he must; and it is to be said of the publisher that he is always more willing to abide by the bargain when it is made than the author is; perhaps because he has the best of it. But he has not always the best of it; I have known publishers too generous to take advantage of the innocence of authors; and I fancy that if publishers had to do with any race less diffident than authors, they would have won a repute for unselfishness that they do now now enjoy. It is certain that in the long period when we flew the black flag of piracy there were many among our corsairs on the high seas of literature who paid a fair price for the stranger craft they seized; still oftener they removed the cargo and released their capture with several weeks’ provision; and although there was undoubtedly a good deal of actual throat-cutting and scuttling, still I feel sure that there was less of it than there would have been in any other line of business released to the unrestricted plunder of the neighbor. There was for a long time even a comity among these amiable buccaneers, who agreed not to interfere with each other, and so were enabled to pay over to their victims some portion of the profit from their stolen goods. Of all business men publishers are probably the most faithful and honorable, and are only surpassed in virtue when men of letters turn business men.

VII.

Publishers have their little theories, their little superstitions, and their blind faith in the great god Chance which we all worship. These things lead them into temptation and adversity, but they seem to do fairly well as business men, even in their own behalf. They do not make above the usual ninety-five per cent. of failures, and more publishers than authors get rich.

Some theories or superstitions publishers and authors share together. One of these is that it is best to keep your books all in the hands of one publisher if you can, because then he can give them more attention and sell more of them. But my own experience is that when my books were in the hands of three publishers they sold quite as well as when one had them; and a fellow-author whom I approached in question of this venerable belief laughed at it. This bold heretic held that it was best to give each new book to a new publisher, for then the fresh man put all his energies into pushing it; but if you had them all together, the publisher rested in a vain security that one book would sell another, and that the fresh venture would revive the public interest in the stale ones. I never knew this to happen; and I must class it with the superstitions of the trade. It may be so in other and more constant countries, but in our fickle republic each last book has to fight its own way to public favor, much as if it had no sort of literary lineage. Of course this is stating it rather largely, and the truth will be found inside rather than outside of my statement; but there is at least truth enough in it to give the young author pause. While one is preparing to sell his basket of glass, he may as well ask himself whether it is better to part with all to one dealer or not; and if he kicks it over, in spurning the imaginary customer who asks the favor of taking the entire stock, that will be his fault, and not the fault of the customer.

However, the most important question of all with the man of letters as a man of business is what kind of book will sell the best of itself, because, at the end of the ends, a book sells itself or does not sell at all; kissing, after long ages of reasoning and a great deal of culture, still goes by favor, and though innumerable generations of horses have been led to the water, not one horse has yet been made to drink. With the best, or the worst, will in the world, no publisher can force a book into acceptance. Advertising will not avail, and reviewing is notoriously futile. If the book does not strike the popular fancy, or deal with some universal interest, which need by no means be a profound or important one, the drums and the cymbals shall be beaten in vain. The book may be one of the best and wisest books in the world, but if it has not this sort of appeal in it the readers of it, and, worse yet, the purchasers, will remain few, though fit. The secret of this, like most other secrets of a rather ridiculous world, is in the awful keeping of fate, and we can only hope to surprise it by some lucky chance. To plan a surprise of it, to aim a book at the public favor, is the most hopeless of all endeavors, as it is one of the unworthiest; and I can, neither as a man of letters nor as a man of business, counsel the young author to do it. The best that you can do is to write the book that it gives you the most pleasure to write, to put as much heart and soul as you have about you into it, and then hope as hard as you can to reach the heart and soul of the great multitude of your fellow-men. That, and that alone, is good business for a man of letters.

The man of letters must make up his mind that in the United States the fate of a book is in the hands of the women. It is the women with us who have the most leisure, and they read the most books. They are far better educated, for the most part, than our men, and their tastes, if not their minds, are more cultivated. Our men read the newspapers, but our women read the books; the more refined among them read the magazines. If they do not always know what is good, they do know what pleases them, and it is useless to quarrel with their decisions, for there is no appeal from them. To go from them to the men would be going from a higher to a lower court, which would be honestly surprised and bewildered, if the thing were possible. As I say, the author of light literature, and often the author of solid literature, must resign himself to obscurity unless the ladies choose to recognize him. Yet it would be impossible to forecast their favor for this kind or that. Who could prophesy it for another, who guess it for himself? We must strive blindly for it, and hope somehow that our best will also be our prettiest; but we must remember at the same time that it is not the ladies’ man who is the favorite of the ladies.

There are, of course, a few, a very few, of our greatest authors who have striven forward to the first place in our Valhalla without the help of the largest reading-class among us; but I should say that these were chiefly the humorists, for whom women are said nowhere to have any warm liking, and who have generally with us come up through the newspapers, and have never lost the favor of the newspaper readers. They have become literary men, as it were, without the newspaper readers’ knowing it; but those who have approached literature from another direction have won fame in it chiefly by grace of the women, who first read them; and then made their husbands and fathers read them. Perhaps, then, and as a matter of business, it would be well for a serious author, when he finds that he is not pleasing the women, and probably never will please them, to turn humorous author, and aim at the countenance of the men. Except as a humorist he certainly never will get it, for your American, when he is not making money, or trying to do it, is making a joke, or trying to do it.

VIII

I hope that I have not been hinting that the author who approaches literature through journalism is not as fine and high a literary man as the author who comes directly to it, or through some other avenue; I have not the least notion of condemning myself by any such judgment. But I think it is pretty certain that fewer and fewer authors are turning from journalism to literature, though the ‘entente cordiale’ between the two professions seems as great as ever. I fancy, though I may be as mistaken in this as I am in a good many other things, that most journalists would have been literary men if they could, at the beginning, and that the kindness they almost always show to young authors is an effect of the self-pity they feel for their own thwarted wish to be authors. When an author is once warm in the saddle, and is riding his winged horse to glory, the case is different: they have then often no sentiment about him; he is no longer the image of their own young aspiration, and they would willingly see Pegasus buck under him, or have him otherwise brought to grief and shame. They are apt to gird at him for his unhallowed gains, and they would be quite right in this if they proposed any way for him to live without them; as I have allowed at the outset, the gains are unhallowed. Apparently it is unseemly for two or three authors to be making half as much by their pens as popular ministers often receive in salary; the public is used to the pecuniary prosperity of some of the clergy, and at least sees nothing droll in it; but the paragrapher can always get a smile out of his readers at the gross disparity between the ten thousand dollars Jones gets for his novel and the five pounds Milton got for his epic. I have always thought Milton was paid too little, but I will own that he ought not to have been paid at all, if it comes to that. Again I say that no man ought to live by any art; it is a shame to the art if not to the artist; but as yet there is no means of the artist’s living otherwise and continuing an artist.

The literary man has certainly no complaint to make of the newspaper man, generally speaking. I have often thought with amazement of the kindness shown by the press to our whole unworthy craft, and of the help so lavishly and freely given to rising and even risen authors. To put it coarsely, brutally, I do not suppose that any other business receives so much gratuitous advertising, except the theatre. It is, enormous, the space given in the newspapers to literary notes, literary announcements, reviews, interviews, personal paragraphs, biographies, and all the rest, not to mention the vigorous and incisive attacks made from time to time upon different authors for their opinions of romanticism, realism, capitalism, socialism, Catholicism, and Sandemanianism. I have sometimes doubted whether the public cared for so much of it all as the editors gave them, but I have always said this under my breath, and I have thankfully taken my share of the common bounty. A curious fact, however, is that this vast newspaper publicity seems to have very little to do with an author’s popularity, though ever so much with his notoriety. Some of those strange subterranean fellows who never come to the surface in the newspapers, except for a contemptuous paragraph at long intervals, outsell the famousest of the celebrities, and secretly have their horses and yachts and country seats, while immodest merit is left to get about on foot and look up summer-board at the cheaper hotels. That is probably right, or it would not happen; it seems to be in the general scheme, like millionairism and pauperism; but it becomes a question, then, whether the newspapers, with all their friendship for literature, and their actual generosity to literary men, can really help one much to fortune, however much they help one to fame. Such a question is almost too dreadful, and, though I have asked it, I will not attempt to answer it. I would much rather consider the question whether, if the newspapers can make an author, they can also unmake him, and I feel pretty safe in saying that I do not think they can. The Afreet, once out of the bottle, can never be coaxed back or cudgelled back; and the author whom the newspapers have made cannot be unmade by the newspapers. Perhaps he could if they would let him alone; but the art of letting alone the creature of your favor, when he has forfeited your favor, is yet in its infancy with the newspapers. They consign him to oblivion with a rumor that fills the land, and they keep visiting him there with an uproar which attracts more and more notice to him. An author who has long enjoyed their favor suddenly and rather mysteriously loses it, through his opinions on certain matters of literary taste, say. For the space of five or six years he is denounced with a unanimity and an incisive vigor that ought to convince him there is something wrong. If he thinks it is his censors, he clings to his opinions with an abiding constancy, while ridicule, obloquy, caricature, burlesque, critical refutation, and personal detraction follow unsparingly upon every expression, for instance, of his belief that romantic fiction is the highest form of fiction, and that the base, sordid, photographic, commonplace school of Tolstoy, Tourgunief, Zola, Hardy, and James is unworthy a moment’s comparison with the school of Rider Haggard. All this ought certainly to unmake the author in question, but this is not really the effect. Slowly but surely the clamor dies away, and the author, without relinquishing one of his wicked opinions, or in any wise showing himself repentant, remains apparently whole; and he even returns in a measure to the old kindness — not indeed to the earlier day of perfectly smooth things, but certainly to as much of it as he merits.

I would not have the young author, from this imaginary case; believe that it is well either to court or to defy the good opinion of the press. In fact, it will not only be better taste, but it will be better business, for him to keep it altogether out of his mind. There is only one whom he can safely try to please, and that is himself. If he does this he will very probably please other people; but if he does not please himself he may be sure that he will not please them; the book which he has not enjoyed writing no one will enjoy reading. Still, I would not have him attach too little consequence to the influence of the press. I should say, let him take the celebrity it gives him gratefully but not too seriously; let him reflect that he is often the necessity rather than the ideal of the paragrapher, and that the notoriety the journalists bestow upon him is not the measure of their acquaintance with his work, far less his meaning. They are good fellows, those hard-pushed, poor fellows of the press, but the very conditions of their censure, friendly or unfriendly, forbid it thoroughness, and it must often have more zeal than knowledge in it.

IX.

There are some sorts of light literature once greatly in demand, but now apparently no longer desired by magazine editors, who ought to know what their readers desire. Among these is the travel sketch, to me a very agreeable kind, and really to be regretted in its decline. There are some reasons for its decline besides a change of taste in readers, and a possible surfeit. Travel itself has become so universal that everybody, in a manner, has been everywhere, and the foreign scene has no longer the charm of strangeness. We do not think the Old World either so romantic or so ridiculous as we used; and perhaps from an instinctive perception of this altered mood writers no longer appeal to our sentiment or our humor with sketches of outlandish people and places. Of course, this can hold true only in a general way; the thing is still done, but not nearly so much done as formerly. When one thinks of the long line of American writers who have greatly pleased in this sort, and who even got their first fame in it, one must grieve to see it obsolescent. Irving, Curtis, Bayard Taylor, Herman Melville, Ross Browne, Warner, Ik Marvell, Longfellow, Lowell, Story, Mr. James, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Hay, Mrs. Hunt, Mr. C. W. Stoddard, Mark Twain, and many others whose names will not come to me at the moment, have in their several ways richly contributed to our pleasure in it; but I cannot now fancy a young author finding favor with an editor in a sketch of travel or a study of foreign manners and customs; his work would have to be of the most signal importance and brilliancy to overcome the editor’s feeling that the thing had been done already; and I believe that a publisher, if offered a book of such things, would look at it askance and plead the well-known quiet of the trade. Still, I may be mistaken.

I am rather more confident about the decline of another literary species — namely, the light essay. We have essays enough and to spare of certain soberer and severer sorts, such as grapple with problems and deal with conditions; but the kind that I mean, the slightly humorous, gentle, refined, and humane kind, seems no longer to abound as it once did. I do not know whether the editor discourages them, knowing his readers’ frame, or whether they do not offer themselves, but I seldom find them in the magazines. I certainly do not believe that if any one were now to write essays such as Warner’s Backlog Studies, an editor would refuse them; and perhaps nobody really writes them. Nobody seems to write the sort that Colonel Higginson formerly contributed to the periodicals, or such as Emerson wrote. Without a great name behind it, I am afraid that a volume of essays would find few buyers, even after the essays had made a public in the magazines. There are, of course, instances to the contrary, but they are not so many or so striking as to make me think that the essay could be offered as a good opening for business talent.

I suspect that good poetry by well-known hands was never better paid in the magazines than it is now. I must say, too, that I think the quality of the minor poetry of our day is better than that of twenty-five or thirty years ago. I could name half a score of young poets whose work from time to time gives me great pleasure, by the reality of its feeling and the delicate perfection of its art, but I will not name them, for fear of passing over half a score of others equally meritorious. We have certainly no reason to be discouraged, whatever reason the poets themselves have to be so, and I do not think that even in the short story our younger writers are doing better work than they are doing in the slighter forms of verse. Yet the notion of inviting business talent into this field would be as preposterous as that of asking it to devote itself to the essay. What book of verse by a recent poet, if we except some such peculiarly gifted poet as Mr. Whitcomb Riley, has paid its expenses, not to speak of any profit to the author? Of course, it would be rather more offensive and ridiculous that it should do so than that any other form of literary art should do so; and yet there is no more provision in our economic system for the support of the poet apart from his poems than there is for the support of the novelist apart from his novel. One could not make any more money by writing poetry than by writing history, but it is a curious fact that while the historians have usually been rich men, and able to afford the luxury of writing history, the poets have usually been poor men, with no pecuniary justification in their devotion to a calling which is so seldom an election.

To be sure, it can be said for them that it costs far less to set up poet than to set up historian. There is no outlay for copying documents, or visiting libraries, or buying books. In fact, except as historian, the man of letters, in whatever walk, has not only none of the expenses of other men of business, but none of the expenses of other artists. He has no such outlay to make for materials, or models, or studio rent as the painter or the sculptor has, and his income, such as it is, is immediate. If he strikes the fancy of the editor with the first thing he offers, as he very well may, it is as well with him as with other men after long years of apprenticeship. Although he will always be the better for an apprenticeship, and the longer apprenticeship the better, he may practically need none at all. Such are the strange conditions of his acceptance with the public, that he may please better without it than with it. An author’s first book is too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but a painter or a sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can give himself.

X.

In view of this fact it becomes again very hard to establish the author’s status in the business world, and at moments I have grave question whether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist. There is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any other sort of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some measure of preparation. A young writer may produce a brilliant and very perfect romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel of manners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the outset. For this work he needs experience and observation, not so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters will all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and character with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire only through his own heart. A man remains in a measure strange to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources of novelty in his work will be within himself; he can continue to give it freshness in no other way than by knowing himself better and better. But a young writer and an untrained writer has not yet begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other men. The world around him remains a secret as well as the world within him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience of joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time. Until he is well on towards forty, he will hardly have assimilated the materials of a great novel, although he may have amassed them. The novelist, then, is a man of letters who is like a man of business in the necessity of preparation for his calling, though he does not pay store-rent, and may carry all his affairs under his hat, as the phrase is. He alone among men of letters may look forward to that sort of continuous prosperity which follows from capacity and diligence in other vocations; for story-telling is now a fairly recognized trade, and the story-teller has a money-standing in the economic world. It is not a very high standing, I think, and I have expressed the belief that it does not bring him the respect felt for men in other lines of business. Still our people cannot deny some consideration to a man who gets a hundred dollars a thousand words or whose book sells five hundred thousand copies or less. That is a fact appreciable to business, and the man of letters in the line of fiction may reasonably feel that his place in our civilization, though he may owe it to the women who form the great mass of his readers, has something of the character of a vested interest in the eyes of men. There is, indeed, as yet no conspiracy law which will avenge the attempt to injure him in his business. A critic, or a dark conjuration of critics, may damage him at will and to the extent of their power, and he has no recourse but to write better books, or worse. The law will do nothing for him, and a boycott of his books might be preached with immunity by any class of men not liking his opinions on the question of industrial slavery or antipaedobaptism. Still the market for his wares is steadier than the market for any other kind of literary wares, and the prices are better. The historian, who is a kind of inferior realist, has something like the same steadiness in the market, but the prices he can command are much lower, and the two branches of the novelist’s trade are not to be compared in a business way. As for the essayist, the poet, the traveller, the popular scientist, they are nowhere in the competition for the favor of readers. The reviewer, indeed, has a pretty steady call for his work, but I fancy the reviewers who get a hundred dollars a thousand words could all stand upon the point of a needle without crowding one another; I should rather like to see them doing it. Another gratifying fact of the situation is that the best writers of fiction, who are most in demand with the magazines, probably get nearly as much money for their work as the inferior novelists who outsell them by tens of thousands, and who make their appeal to the innumerable multitude of the less educated and less cultivated buyers of fiction in book form. I think they earn their money, but if I did not think all of the higher class of novelists earned so much money as they get, I should not be so invidious as to single out for reproach those who did not.

The difficulty about payment, as I have hinted, is that literature has no objective value really, but only a subjective value, if I may so express it. A poem, an essay, a novel, even a paper on political economy, may be worth gold untold to one reader, and worth nothing whatever to another. It may be precious to one mood of the reader, and worthless to another mood of the same reader. How, then, is it to be priced, and how is it to be fairly marketed? All people must be fed, and all people must be clothed, and all people must be housed; and so meat, raiment, and shelter are things of positive and obvious necessity, which may fitly have a market price put upon them. But there is no such positive and obvious necessity, I am sorry to say, for fiction, or not for the higher sort of fiction. The sort of fiction which corresponds in literature to the circus and the variety theatre in the show-business seems essential to the spiritual health of the masses, but the most cultivated of the classes can get on, from time to time, without an artistic novel. This is a great pity, and I should be-very willing that readers might feel something like the pangs of hunger and cold, when deprived of their finer fiction; but apparently they never do. Their dumb and passive need is apt only to manifest itself negatively, or in the form of weariness of this author or that. The publisher of books can ascertain the fact through the declining sales of a writer; but the editor of a magazine, who is the best customer of the best writers, must feel the market with a much more delicate touch. Sometimes it may be years before he can satisfy himself that his readers are sick of Smith, and are pining for Jones; even then he cannot know how long their mood will last, and he is by no means safe in cutting down Smith’s price and putting up Jones’s. With the best will in the world to pay justly, he cannot. Smith, who has been boring his readers to death for a year, may write tomorrow a thing that will please them so much that he will at once be a prime favorite again; and Jones, whom they have been asking for, may do something so uncharacteristic and alien that it will be a flat failure in the magazine. The only thing that gives either writer positive value is his acceptance with the reader; but the acceptance is from month to month wholly uncertain. Authors are largely matters of fashion, like this style of bonnet, or that shape of gown. Last spring the dresses were all made with lace berthas, and Smith was read; this year the butterfly capes are worn, and Jones is the favorite author. Who shall forecast the fall and winter modes?

XI.

In this inquiry it is always the author rather than the publisher, always the contributor rather than the editor, whom I am concerned for. I study the difficulties of the publisher and editor only because they involve the author and the contributor; if they did not, I will not say with how hard a heart I should turn from them; my only pang now in scrutinizing the business conditions of literature is for the makers of literature, not the purveyors of it.

After all, and in spite of my vaunting title, is the man of letters ever am business man? I suppose that, strictly speaking, he never is, except in those rare instances where, through need or choice, he is the publisher as well as the author of his books. Then he puts something on the market and tries to sell it there, and is a man of business. But otherwise he is an artist merely, and is allied to the great mass of wage-workers who are paid for the labor they have put into the thing done or the thing made; who live by doing or making a thing, and not by marketing a thing after some other man has done it or made it. The quality of the thing has nothing to do with the economic nature of the case; the author is, in the last analysis, merely a working-man, and is under the rule that governs the working-man’s life. If he is sick or sad, and cannot work, if he is lazy or tipsy, and will not, then he earns nothing. He cannot delegate his business to a clerk or a manager; it will not go on while he is sleeping. The wage he can command depends strictly upon his skill and diligence.

I myself am neither sorry nor ashamed for this; I am glad and proud to be of those who eat their bread in the sweat of their own brows, and not the sweat of other men’s brows; I think my bread is the sweeter for it. In the mean time, I have no blame for business men; they are no more of the condition of things than we working-men are; they did no more to cause it or create it; but I would rather be in my place than in theirs, and I wish that I could make all my fellow-artists realize that economically they are the same as mechanics, farmers, day-laborers. It ought to be our glory that we produce something, that we bring into the world something that was not choately there before; that at least we fashion or shape something anew; and we ought to feel the tie that binds us to all the toilers of the shop and field, not as a galling chain, but as a mystic bond also uniting us to Him who works hitherto and evermore. I know very well that to the vast multitude of our fellow-working-men we artists are the shadows of names, or not even the shadows. I like to look the facts in the face, for though their lineaments are often terrible, yet there is light nowhere else; and I will not pretend, in this light, that the masses care any more for us than we care for the masses, or so much. Nevertheless, and most distinctly, we are not of the classes. Except in our work, they have no use for us; if now and then they fancy qualifying their material splendor or their spiritual dulness with some artistic presence, the attempt is always a failure that bruises and abashes. In so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the less an artist, and if he fashions himself upon fashion, he deforms his art. We all know that ghastly type; it is more absurd even than the figure which is really of the world, which was born and bred in it, and conceives of nothing outside of it, or above it. In the social world, as well as in the business world, the artist is anomalous, in the actual conditions, and he is perhaps a little ridiculous.

Yet he has to be somewhere, poor fellow, and I think that he will do well to regard himself as in a transition state. He is really of the masses, but they do not know it, and what is worse, they do not know him; as yet the common people do not hear him gladly or hear him at all. He is apparently of the classes; they know him, and they listen to him; he often amuses them very much; but he is not quite at ease among them; whether they know it or not, he knows that he is not of their kind. Perhaps he will never be at home anywhere in the world as long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot consort with. The prospect is not brilliant for any artist now living, but perhaps the artist of the future will see in the flesh the accomplishment of that human equality of which the instinct has been divinely planted in the human soul.

CONFESSIONS OF A SUMMER COLONIST

The season is ending in the little summer settlement on the Down East coast where I have been passing the last three months, and with each loath day the sense of its peculiar charm grows more poignant. A prescience of the homesickness I shall feel for it when I go already begins to torment me, and I find myself wishing to imagine some form of words which shall keep a likeness of it at least through the winter; some shadowy semblance which I may turn to hereafter if any chance or change should destroy or transform it, or, what is more likely, if I should never come back to it. Perhaps others in the distant future may turn to it for a glimpse of our actual life in one of its most characteristic phases; I am sure that in the distant present there are many millions of our own inlanders to whom it would be altogether strange.

I.

In a certain sort fragile is written all over our colony; as far as the visible body of it is concerned it is inexpressibly perishable; a fire and a high wind could sweep it all away; and one of the most American of all American things is the least fitted among them to survive from the present to the future, and impart to it the significance of what may soon be a “portion and parcel” of our extremely forgetful past.

It is also in a supremely transitional moment: one might say that last year it was not quite what it is now, and next year it may be altogether different. In fact, our summer colony is in that happy hour when the rudeness of the first summer conditions has been left far behind, and vulgar luxury has not yet cumbrously succeeded to a sort of sylvan distinction.

The type of its simple and sufficing hospitalities is the seven-o’clock supper. Every one, in hotel or in cottage, dines between one and two, and no less scrupulously sups at seven, unless it is a few extremists who sup at half-past seven. At this function, which is our chief social event, it is ‘de rigueur’ for the men not to dress, and they come in any sort of sack or jacket or cutaway, letting the ladies make up the pomps which they forego. From this fact may be inferred the informality of the men’s day-time attire; and the same note is sounded in the whole range of the cottage life, so that once a visitor from the world outside, who had been exasperated beyond endurance by the absence of form among us (if such an effect could be from a cause so negative), burst out with the reproach, “Oh, you make a fetish of your informality!”

“Fetish” is, perhaps, rather too strong a word, but I should not mind saying that informality was the tutelary genius of the place. American men are everywhere impatient of form. It burdens and bothers them, and they like to throw it off whenever they can. We may not be so very democratic at heart as we seem, but we are impatient of ceremonies that separate us when it is our business or our pleasure to get at one another; and it is part of our splendor to ignore the ceremonies, as we do the expenses. We have all the decent grades of riches and poverty in our colony, but our informality is not more the treasure of the humble than of the great. In the nature of things it cannot last, however, and the only question is how long it will last. I think, myself, until some one imagines giving an eight-o’clock dinner; then all the informalities will go, and the whole train of evils which such a dinner connotes will rush in.

II.

The cottages themselves are of several sorts, and some still exist in the earlier stages of mutation from the fishermen’s and farmers’ houses which formed their germ. But these are now mostly let as lodgings to bachelors and other single or semi-detached folks who go for their meals to the neighboring hotels or boarding-houses. The hotels are each the centre of this sort of centripetal life, as well as the homes of their own scores or hundreds of inmates. A single boarding-house gathers about it half a dozen dependent cottages which it cares for, and feeds at its table; and even where the cottages have kitchens and all the housekeeping facilities, their inmates sometimes prefer to dine at the hotels. By far the greater number of cottagers, however, keep house, bringing their service with them from the cities, and settling in their summer homes for three or four or five months.

The houses conform more or less to one type: a picturesque structure of colonial pattern, shingled to the ground, and stained or left to take a weather-stain of grayish brown, with cavernous verandas, and dormer- windowed roofs covering ten or twelve rooms. Within they are, if not elaborately finished, elaborately fitted up, with a constant regard to health in the plumbing and drainage. The water is brought in a system of pipes from a lake five miles away, and as it is only for summer use the pipes are not buried from the frost, but wander along the surface, through the ferns and brambles of the tough little sea-side knolls on which the cottages are perched, and climb the old tumbling stone walls of the original pastures before diving into the cemented basements.

Most of the cottages are owned by their occupants, and furnished by them; the rest, not less attractive and hardly less tastefully furnished, belong to natives, who have caught on to the architectural and domestic preferences of the summer people, and have built them to let. The rugosities of the stony pasture land end in a wooded point seaward, and curve east and north in a succession of beaches. It is on the point, and mainly short of its wooded extremity, that the cottages of our settlement are dropped, as near the ocean as may be, and with as little order as birds’ nests in the grass, among the sweet-fern, laurel, bay, wild raspberries, and dog-roses, which it is the ideal to leave as untouched as possible. Wheel-worn lanes that twist about among the hollows find the cottages from the highway, but foot-paths approach one cottage from another, and people walk rather than drive to each other’s doors. From the deep-bosomed, well-sheltered little harbor the tides swim inland, half a score of winding miles, up the channel of a river which without them would be a trickling rivulet. An irregular line of cottages follows the shore a little way, and then leaves the river to the schooners and barges which navigate it as far as the oldest pile-built wooden bridge in New England, and these in their turn abandon it to the fleets of row-boats and canoes in which summer youth of both sexes explore it to its source over depths as clear as glass, past wooded headlands and low, rush-bordered meadows, through reaches and openings of pastoral fields, and under the shadow of dreaming groves.

If there is anything lovelier than the scenery of this gentle river I do not know it; and I doubt if the sky is purer and bluer in paradise. This seems to be the consensus, tacit or explicit, of the youth who visit it, and employ the landscape for their picnics and their water parties from the beginning to the end of summer.

The river is very much used for sunsets by the cottagers who live on it, and who claim a superiority through them to the cottagers on the point. An impartial mind obliges me to say that the sunsets are all good in our colony; there is no place from which they are bad; and yet for a certain tragical sunset, where the dying day bleeds slowly into the channel till it is filled from shore to shore with red as far as the eye can reach, the river is unmatched.

For my own purposes, it is not less acceptable, however, when the fog has come in from the sea like a visible reverie, and blurred the whole valley with its whiteness. I find that particularly good to look at from the trolley-car which visits and revisits the river before finally leaving it, with a sort of desperation, and hiding its passion with a sudden plunge into the woods.

III.

The old fishing and seafaring village, which has now almost lost the recollection of its first estate in its absorption with the care of the summer colony, was sparsely dropped along the highway bordering the harbor, and the shores of the river, where the piles of the time-worn wharves are still rotting. A few houses of the past remain, but the type of the summer cottage has impressed itself upon all the later building, and the native is passing architecturally, if not personally, into abeyance. He takes the situation philosophically, and in the season he caters to the summer colony not only as the landlord of the rented cottages, and the keeper of the hotels and boarding-houses, but as livery-stableman, grocer, butcher, marketman, apothecary, and doctor; there is not one foreign accent in any of these callings. If the native is a farmer, he devotes himself to vegetables, poultry, eggs, and fruit for the summer folks, and brings these supplies to their doors; his children appear with flowers; and there are many proofs that he has accurately sized the cottagers up in their tastes and fancies as well as their needs. I doubt if we have sized him up so well, or if our somewhat conventionalized ideal of him is perfectly representative. He is, perhaps, more complex than he seems; he is certainly much more self-sufficing than might have been expected. The summer folks are the material from which his prosperity is wrought, but he is not dependent, and is very far from submissive. As in all right conditions, it is here the employer who asks for work, not the employee; and the work must be respectfully asked for. There are many fables to this effect, as, for instance, that of the lady who said to a summer visitor, critical of the week’s wash she had brought home, “I’ll wash you and I’ll iron you, but I won’t take none of your jaw.” A primitive independence is the keynote of the native character, and it suffers no infringement, but rather boasts itself. “We’re independent here, I tell you,” said the friendly person who consented to take off the wire door. “I was down Bangor way doin’ a piece of work, and a fellow come along, and says he, ‘I want you should hurry up on that job.’ ‘Hello!’ says I, ‘I guess I’ll pull out.’ Well, we calculate to do our work,” he added, with an accent which sufficiently implied that their consciences needed no bossing in the performance.

The native compliance with any summer-visiting request is commonly in some such form as, “Well, I don’t know but what I can,” or, “I guess there ain’t anything to hinder me.” This compliance is so rarely, if ever, carried to the point of domestic service that it may fairly be said that all the domestic service, at least of the cottagers, is imported. The natives will wait at the hotel tables; they will come in “to accommodate”; but they will not “live out.” I was one day witness of the extreme failure of a friend whose city cook had suddenly abandoned him, and who applied to a friendly farmer’s wife in the vain hope that she might help him to some one who would help his family out in their strait. “Why, there ain’t a girl in the Hollow that lives out! Why, if you was sick abed, I don’t know as I know anybody ‘t you could git to set up with you.” The natives will not live out because they cannot keep their self-respect in the conditions of domestic service. Some people laugh at this self-respect, but most summer folks like it, as I own I do.

In our partly mythical estimate of the native and his relation to us, he is imagined as holding a kind of carnival when we leave him at the end of the season, and it is believed that he likes us to go early. We have had his good offices at a fair price all summer, but as it draws to a close they are rendered more and more fitfully. From some, perhaps flattered, reports of the happiness of the natives at the departure of the sojourners, I have pictured them dancing a sort of farandole, and stretching with linked hands from the farthest summer cottage up the river to the last on the wooded point. It is certain that they get tired, and I could not blame them if they were glad to be rid of their guests, and to go back to their own social life. This includes church festivals of divers kinds, lectures and shows, sleigh-rides, theatricals, and reading-clubs, and a plentiful use of books from the excellently chosen free village library. They say frankly that the summer folks have no idea how pleasant it is when they are gone, and I am sure that the gayeties to which we leave them must be more tolerable than those which we go back to in the city. It may be, however, that I am too confident, and that their gayeties are only different. I should really like to know just what the entertainments are which are given in a building devoted to them in a country neighborhood three or four miles from the village. It was once a church, but is now used solely for social amusements.

IV

The amusements of the summer colony I have already hinted at. Besides suppers, there are also teas, of larger scope, both afternoon and evening. There are hops every week at the two largest hotels, which are practically free to all; and the bathing-beach is, of course, a supreme attraction. The bath-houses, which are very clean and well equipped, are not very cheap, either for the season or for a single bath, and there is a pretty pavilion at the edge of the sands. This is always full of gossiping spectators of the hardy adventurers who brave tides too remote from the Gulf Stream to be ever much warmer than sixty or sixty-five degrees. The bathers are mostly young people, who have the courage of their pretty bathing-costumes or the inextinguishable ardor of their years. If it is not rather serious business with them all, still I admire the fortitude with which some of them remain in fifteen minutes. Beyond our colony, which calls itself the Port, there is a far more populous watering-place, east of the Point, known as the Beach, which is the resort of people several grades of gentility lower than ours: so many, in fact, that we never can speak of the Beach without averting our faces, or, at the best, with a tolerant smile. It is really a succession of beaches, all much longer and, I am bound to say, more beautiful than ours, lined with rows of the humbler sort of summer cottages known as shells, and with many hotels of corresponding degree. The cottages may be hired by the week or month at about two dollars a day, and they are supposed to be taken by inland people of little social importance. Very likely this is true; but they seemed to be very nice, quiet people, and I commonly saw the ladies reading, on their verandas, books and magazines, while the gentlemen sprayed the dusty road before them with the garden hose. The place had also for me an agreeable alien suggestion, and in passing the long row of cottages I was slightly reminded of Scheveningen. Beyond the cottage settlements is a struggling little park, dedicated to the only Indian saint I ever heard of, though there may be others. His statue, colossal in sheet-lead, and painted the copper color of his race, offers any heathen comer the choice between a Bible in one of his hands and a tomahawk in the other, at the entrance of the park; and there are other sheet-lead groups and figures in the white of allegory at different points. It promises to be a pretty enough little place in future years, but as yet it is not much resorted to by the excursions which largely form the prosperity of the Beach. The concerts and the “high-class vaudeville” promised have not flourished in the pavilion provided for them, and one of two monkeys in the zoological department has perished of the public inattention. This has not fatally affected the captive bear, who rises to his hind legs, and eats peanuts and doughnuts in that position like a fellow-citizen. With the cockatoos and parrots, and the dozen deer in an inclosure of wire netting, he is no mean attraction; but he does not charm the excursionists away from the summer village at the shore, where they spend long afternoons splashing among the waves, or in lolling groups of men, women, and children on the sand. In the more active gayeties, I have seen nothing so decided during the whole season as the behavior of three young girls who once came up out of the sea, and obliged me by dancing a measure on the smooth, hard beach in their bathing-dresses.

I thought it very pretty, but I do not believe such a thing could have been seen on OUR beach, which is safe from all excursionists, and sacred to the cottage and hotel life of the Port.

Besides our beach and its bathing, we have a reading-club for the men, evolved from one of the old native houses, and verandaed round for summer use; and we have golf-links and a golf club-house within easy trolley reach. The links are as energetically, if not as generally, frequented as the sands, and the sport finds the favor which attends it everywhere in the decay of tennis. The tennis-courts which I saw thronged about by eager girl-crowds, here, seven years ago, are now almost wholly abandoned to the lovers of the game, who are nearly always men.

Perhaps the only thing (besides, of course, our common mortality) which we have in common with the excursionists is our love of the trolley-line. This, by its admirable equipment, and by the terror it inspires in horses, has well-nigh abolished driving; and following the old country roads, as it does, with an occasional short-cut though the deep, green- lighted woods or across the prismatic salt meadows, it is of a picturesque variety entirely satisfying. After a year of fervent opposition and protest, the whole community — whether of summer or of winter folks — now gladly accepts the trolley, and the grandest cottager and the lowliest hotel dweller meet in a grateful appreciation of its beauty and comfort.

Some pass a great part of every afternoon on the trolley, and one lady has achieved celebrity by spending four dollars a week in trolley-rides. The exhilaration of these is varied with an occasional apprehension when the car pitches down a sharp incline, and twists almost at right angles on a sudden curve at the bottom without slacking its speed. A lady who ventured an appeal to the conductor at one such crisis was reassured, and at the same time taught her place, by his reply: “That motorman’s life, ma’am, is just as precious to him as what yours is to you.”

She had, perhaps, really ventured too far, for ordinarily the employees of the trolley do not find occasion to use so much severity with their passengers. They look after their comfort as far as possible, and seek even to anticipate their wants in unexpected cases, if I may believe a story which was told by a witness. She had long expected to see some one thrown out of the open car at one of the sharp curves, and one day she actually saw a woman hurled from the seat into the road. Luckily the woman slighted on her feet, and stood looking round in a daze.

“Oh! oh!” exclaimed another woman in the seat behind, “she’s left her umbrella!”

The conductor promptly threw it out to her.

“Why,” demanded the witness, “did that lady wish to get out here?”

The conductor hesitated before he jerked the bellpull to go on: Then he said, “Well, she’ll want her umbrella, anyway.”

The conductors are, in fact, very civil as well as kind. If they see a horse in anxiety at the approach of the car, they considerately stop, and let him get by with his driver in safety. By such means, with their frequent trips and low fares, and with the ease and comfort of their cars, they have conciliated public favor, and the trolley has drawn travel away from the steam railroad in such measure that it ran no trains last winter.

The trolley, in fact, is a fad of the summer folks this year; but what it will be another no one knows; it may be their hissing and by-word. In the mean time, as I have already suggested, they have other amusements. These are not always of a nature so general as the trolley, or so particular as the tea. But each of the larger hotels has been fully supplied with entertainments for the benefit of their projectors, though nearly everything of the sort had some sort of charitable slant. I assisted at a stereopticon lecture on Alaska for the aid of some youthful Alaskans of both sexes, who were shown first in their savage state, and then as they appeared after a merely rudimental education, in the costumes and profiles of our own civilization. I never would have supposed that education could do so much in so short a time; and I gladly gave my mite for their further development in classic beauty and a final elegance. My mite was taken up in a hat, which, passed round among the audience, is a common means of collecting the spectators’ expressions of appreciation. Other entertainments, of a prouder frame, exact an admission fee, but I am not sure that these are better than some of the hat-shows, as they are called.

The tale of our summer amusements would be sadly incomplete without some record of the bull-fights given by the Spanish prisoners of war on the neighboring island, where they were confined the year of the war. Admission to these could be had only by favor of the officers in charge, and even among the Elite of the colony those who went were a more elect few. Still, the day I went, there were some fifty or seventy-five spectators, who arrived by trolley near the island, and walked to the stockade which confined the captives. A real bull-fight, I believe, is always given on Sunday, and Puritan prejudice yielded to usage even in the case of a burlesque bull-fight; at any rate, it was on a Sunday that we crouched in an irregular semicircle on a rising ground within the prison pale, and faced the captive audience in another semicircle, across a little alley for the entrances and exits of the performers. The president of the bull-fight was first brought to the place of honor in a hand-cart, and then came the banderilleros, the picadores, and the espada, wonderfully effective and correct in white muslin and colored tissue-paper. Much may be done in personal decoration with advertising placards; and the lofty mural crown of the president urged the public on both sides to Use Plug Cut. The picador’s pasteboard horse was attached to his middle, fore and aft, and looked quite the sort of hapless jade which is ordinarily sacrificed to the bulls. The toro himself was composed of two prisoners, whose horizontal backs were covered with a brown blanket; and his feet, sometimes bare and sometimes shod with india-rubber boots, were of the human pattern. Practicable horns, of a somewhat too yielding substance, branched from a front of pasteboard, and a cloth tail, apt to come off in the charge, swung from his rear. I have never seen a genuine corrida, but a lady present, who had, told me that this was conducted with all the right circumstance; and it is certain that the performers entered into their parts with the artistic gust of their race. The picador sustained some terrific falls, and in his quality of horse had to be taken out repeatedly and sewed up; the banderilleros tormented and eluded the toro with table-covers, one red and two drab, till the espada took him from them, and with due ceremony, after a speech to the president, drove his blade home to the bull’s heart. I stayed to see three bulls killed; the last was uncommonly fierce, and when his hindquarters came off or out, his forequarters charged joyously among the aficionados on the prisoners’ side, and made havoc in their thickly packed ranks. The espada who killed this bull was showered with cigars and cigarettes from our side.

I do not know what the Sabbath-keeping shades of the old Puritans made of our presence at such a fete on Sunday; but possibly they had got on so far in a better life as to be less shocked at the decay of piety among us than pleased at the rise of such Christianity as had brought us, like friends and comrades, together with our public enemies in this harmless fun. I wish to say that the tobacco lavished upon the espada was collected for the behoof of all the prisoners.

Our fiction has made so much of our summer places as the mise en scene of its love stories that I suppose I ought to say something of this side of our colonial life. But after sixty I suspect that one’s eyes are poor for that sort of thing, and I can only say that in its earliest and simplest epoch the Port was particularly famous for the good times that the young people had. They still have good times, though whether on just the old terms I do not know. I know that the river is still here with its canoes and rowboats, its meadowy reaches apt for dual solitude, and its groves for picnics. There is not much bicycling — the roads are rough and hilly — but there is something of it, and it is mighty pretty to see the youth of both sexes bicycling with their heads bare. They go about bareheaded on foot and in buggies, too, and the young girls seek the tan which their mothers used so anxiously to shun.

The sail-boats, manned by weather-worn and weatherwise skippers, are rather for the pleasure of such older summer folks as have a taste for cod-fishing, which is here very good. But at every age, and in whatever sort our colonists amuse themselves, it is with the least possible ceremony. It is as if, Nature having taken them so hospitably to her heart, they felt convention an affront to her. Around their cottages, as I have said, they prefer to leave her primitive beauty untouched, and she rewards their forbearance with such a profusion of wild flowers as I have seen nowhere else. The low, pink laurel flushed all the stony fields to the edges of their verandas when we first came; the meadows were milk- white with daisies; in the swampy places delicate orchids grew, in the pools the flags and flowering rushes; all the paths and way-sides were set with dog-roses; the hollows and stony tops were broadly matted with ground juniper. Since then the goldenrod has passed from glory to glory, first mixing its yellow-powdered plumes with the red-purple tufts of the iron-weed, and then with the wild asters everywhere. There has come later a dwarf sort, six or ten inches high, wonderfully rich and fine, which, with a low, white aster, seems to hold the field against everything else, though the taller golden-rod and the masses of the high, blue asters nod less thickly above it. But these smaller blooms deck the ground in incredible profusion, and have an innocent air of being stuck in, as if they had been fancifully used for ornament by children or Indians.

In a little while now, as it is almost the end of September, all the feathery gold will have faded to the soft, pale ghosts of that loveliness. The summer birds have long been silent; the crows, as if they were so many exultant natives, are shouting in the blue sky above the windrows of the rowan, in jubilant prescience of the depopulation of our colony, which fled the hotels a fortnight ago. The days are growing shorter, and the red evenings falling earlier; so that the cottagers’ husbands who come up every Saturday from town might well be impatient for a Monday of final return. Those who came from remoter distances have gone back already; and the lady cottagers, lingering hardily on till October, must find the sight of the empty hotels and the windows of the neighboring houses, which no longer brighten after the chilly nightfall, rather depressing. Every one says that this is the loveliest time of year, and that it will be divine here all through October. But there are sudden and unexpected defections; there is a steady pull of the heart cityward, which it is hard to resist. The first great exodus was on the first of the month, when the hotels were deserted by four-fifths of their guests. The rest followed, half of them within the week, and within a fortnight none but an all but inaudible and invisible remnant were left, who made no impression of summer sojourn in the deserted trolleys.

The days now go by in moods of rapid succession. There have been days when the sea has lain smiling in placid derision of the recreants who have fled the lingering summer; there have been nights when the winds have roared round the cottages in wild menace of the faithful few who have remained.

We have had a magnificent storm, which came, as an equinoctial storm should, exactly at the equinox, and for a day and a night heaped the sea upon the shore in thundering surges twenty and thirty feet high. I watched these at their awfulest, from the wide windows of a cottage that crouched in the very edge of the surf, with the effect of clutching the rocks with one hand and holding its roof on with the other. The sea was such a sight as I have not seen on shipboard, and while I luxuriously shuddered at it, I had the advantage of a mellow log-fire at my back, purring and softly crackling in a quiet indifference to the storm.

Twenty-four hours more made all serene again. Bloodcurdling tales of lobster-pots carried to sea filled the air; but the air was as blandly unconscious of ever having been a fury as a lady who has found her lost temper. Swift alternations of weather are so characteristic of our colonial climate that the other afternoon I went out with my umbrella against the raw, cold rain of the morning, and had to raise it against the broiling sun. Three days ago I could say that the green of the woods had no touch of hectic in it; but already the low trees of the swamp-land have flamed into crimson. Every morning, when I look out, this crimson is of a fierier intensity, and the trees on the distant uplands are beginning slowly to kindle, with a sort of inner glow which has not yet burst into a blaze. Here and there the golden-rod is rusting; but there seems only to be more and more asters sorts; and I have seen ladies coming home with sheaves of blue gentians; I have heard that the orchids are beginning again to light their tender lamps from the burning blackberry vines that stray from the pastures to the edge of the swamps.

After an apparently total evanescence there has been a like resuscitation of the spirit of summer society. In the very last week of September we have gone to a supper, which lingered far out of its season like one of these late flowers, and there has been an afternoon tea which assembled an astonishing number of cottagers, all secretly surprised to find one another still here, and professing openly a pity tinged with contempt for those who are here no longer.

I blamed those who had gone home, but I myself sniff the asphalt afar; the roar of the street calls to me with the magic that the voice of the sea is losing. Just now it shines entreatingly, it shines winningly, in the sun which is mellowing to an October tenderness, and it shines under a moon of perfect orb, which seems to have the whole heavens to itself in “the first watch of the night,” except for “the red planet Mars.” This begins to burn in the west before the flush of sunset has passed from it; and then, later, a few moon-washed stars pierce the vast vault with their keen points. The stars which so powdered the summer sky seem mostly to have gone back to town, where no doubt people take them for electric lights.

THE EDITOR’S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR

One of the trustiest jokes of the humorous paragrapher is that the editor is in great and constant dread of the young contributor; but neither my experience nor my observation bears out his theory of the case.

Of course one must not say anything to encourage a young person to abandon an honest industry in the vain hope of early honor and profit from literature; but there have been and there will be literary men and women always, and these in the beginning have nearly always been young; and I cannot see that there is risk of any serious harm in saying that it is to the young contributor the editor looks for rescue from the old contributor, or from his failing force and charm.

The chances, naturally, are against the young contributor, and vastly against him; but if any periodical is to live, and to live long, it is by the infusion of new blood; and nobody knows this better than the editor, who may seem so unfriendly and uncareful to the young contributor. The strange voice, the novel scene, the odor of fresh woods and pastures new, the breath of morning, the dawn of tomorrow — these are what the editor is eager for, if he is fit to be an editor at all; and these are what the young contributor alone can give him.

A man does not draw near the sixties without wishing people to believe that he is as young as ever, and he has not written almost as many books as he has lived years without persuading himself that each new work of his has all the surprise of spring; but possibly there are wonted traits and familiar airs and graces in it which forbid him to persuade others. I do not say these characteristics are not charming; I am very far from wishing to say that; but I do say and must say that after the fiftieth time they do not charm for the first time; and this is where the advantage of the new contributor lies, if he happens to charm at all.

I.

The new contributor who does charm can have little notion how much he charms his first reader, who is the editor. That functionary may bide his pleasure in a short, stiff note of acceptance, or he may mask his joy in a check of slender figure; but the contributor may be sure that he has missed no merit in his work, and that he has felt, perhaps far more than the public will feel, such delight as it can give.

The contributor may take the acceptance as a token that his efforts have not been neglected, and that his achievements will always be warmly welcomed; that even his failures will be leniently and reluctantly recognized as failures, and that he must persist long in failure before the friend he has made will finally forsake him.

I do not wish to paint the situation wholly rose color; the editor will have his moods, when he will not see so clearly or judge so justly as at other times; when he will seem exacting and fastidious, and will want this or that mistaken thing done to the story, or poem, or sketch, which the author knows to be simply perfect as it stands; but he is worth bearing with, and he will be constant to the new contributor as long as there is the least hope of him.

The contributor may be the man or the woman of one story, one poem, one sketch, for there are such; but the editor will wait the evidence of indefinite failure to this effect. His hope always is that he or she is the man or the woman of many stories, many poems, many sketches, all as good as the first.

From my own long experience as a magazine editor, I may say that the editor is more doubtful of failure in one who has once done well than of a second success. After all, the writer who can do but one good thing is rarer than people are apt to think in their love of the improbable; but the real danger with a young contributor is that he may become his own rival.

What would have been quite good enough from him in the first instance is not good enough in the second, because he has himself fixed his standard so high. His only hope is to surpass himself, and not begin resting on his laurels too soon; perhaps it is never well, soon or late, to rest upon one’s laurels. It is well for one to make one’s self scarce, and the best way to do this is to be more and more jealous of perfection in one’s work.

The editor’s conditions are that having found a good thing he must get as much of it as he can, and the chances are that he will be less exacting than the contributor imagines. It is for the contributor to be exacting, and to let nothing go to the editor as long as there is the possibility of making it better. He need not be afraid of being forgotten because he does not keep sending; the editor’s memory is simply relentless; he could not forget the writer who has pleased him if he would, for such writers are few.

I do not believe that in my editorial service on the Atlantic Monthly, which lasted fifteen years in all, I forgot the name or the characteristic quality, or even the handwriting, of a contributor who had pleased me, and I forgot thousands who did not. I never lost faith in a contributor who had done a good thing; to the end I expected another good thing from him. I think I was always at least as patient with him as he was with me, though he may not have known it.

At the time I was connected with that periodical it had almost a monopoly of the work of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe, Parkman, Higginson, Aldrich, Stedman, and many others not so well known, but still well known. These distinguished writers were frequent contributors, and they could be counted upon to respond to almost any appeal of the magazine; yet the constant effort of the editors was to discover new talent, and their wish was to welcome it.

I know that, so far as I was concerned, the success of a young contributor was as precious as if I had myself written his paper or poem, and I doubt if it gave him more pleasure. The editor is, in fact, a sort of second self for the contributor, equally eager that he should stand well with the public, and able to promote his triumphs without egotism and share them without vanity.

II.

In fact, my curious experience was that if the public seemed not to feel my delight in a contribution I thought good, my vexation and disappointment were as great as if the work hod been my own. It was even greater, for if I had really written it I might have had my misgivings of its merit, but in the case of another I could not console myself with this doubt. The sentiment was at the same time one which I could not cherish for the work of an old contributor; such a one stood more upon his own feet; and the young contributor may be sure that the editor’s pride, self-interest, and sense of editorial infallibility will all prompt him to stand by the author whom he has introduced to the public, and whom he has vouched for.

I hope I am not giving the young contributor too high an estimate of his value to the editor. After all, he must remember that he is but one of a great many others, and that the editor’s affections, if constant, are necessarily divided. It is good for the literary aspirant to realize very early that he is but one of many; for the vice of our comparatively virtuous craft is that it tends to make each of us imagine himself central, if not sole.

As a matter of fact, however, the universe does not revolve around any one of us; we make our circuit of the sun along with the other inhabitants of the earth, a planet of inferior magnitude. The thing we strive for is recognition, but when this comes it is apt to turn our heads. I should say, then, that it was better it should not come in a great glare and aloud shout, all at once, but should steal slowly upon us, ray by ray, breath by breath.

In the mean time, if this happens, we shall have several chances of reflection, and can ask ourselves whether we are really so great as we seem to other people, or seem to seem.

The prime condition of good work is that we shall get ourselves out of our minds. Sympathy we need, of course, and encouragement; but I am not sure that the lack of these is not a very good thing, too. Praise enervates, flattery poisons; but a smart, brisk snub is always rather wholesome.

I should say that it was not at all a bad thing for a young contributor to get his manuscript back, even after a first acceptance, and even a general newspaper proclamation that he is one to make the immortals tremble for their wreaths of asphodel — or is it amaranth? I am never sure which.

Of course one must have one’s hour, or day, or week, of disabling the editor’s judgment, of calling him to one’s self fool, and rogue, and wretch; but after that, if one is worth while at all, one puts the rejected thing by, or sends it off to some other magazine, and sets about the capture of the erring editor with something better, or at least something else.

III.

I think it a great pity that editors ever deal other than frankly with young contributors, or put them off with smooth generalities of excuse, instead of saying they do not like this thing or that offered them. It is impossible to make a criticism of all rejected manuscripts, but in the case of those which show promise I think it is quite possible; and if I were to sin my sins over again, I think I should sin a little more on the side of candid severity. I am sure I should do more good in that way, and I am sure that when I used to dissemble my real mind I did harm to those whose feelings I wished to spare. There ought not, in fact, to be question of feeling in the editor’s mind.

I know from much suffering of my own that it is terrible to get back a manuscript, but it is not fatal, or I should have been dead a great many times before I was thirty, when the thing mostly ceased for me. One survives it again and again, and one ought to make the reflection that it is not the first business of a periodical to print contributions of this one or of that, but that its first business is to amuse and instruct its readers.

To do this it is necessary to print contributions, but whose they are, or how the writer will feel if they are not printed, cannot be considered. The editor can consider only what they are, and the young contributor will do well to consider that, although the editor may not be an infallible judge, or quite a good judge, it is his business to judge, and to judge without mercy. Mercy ought no more to qualify judgment in an artistic result than in a mathematical result.

IV.

I suppose, since I used to have it myself, that there is a superstition with most young contributors concerning their geographical position. I used to think that it was a disadvantage to send a thing from a small or unknown place, and that it doubled my insignificance to do so. I believed that if my envelope had borne the postmark of New York, or Boston, or some other city of literary distinction, it would have arrived on the editor’s table with a great deal more authority. But I am sure this was a mistake from the first, and when I came to be an editor myself I constantly verified the fact from my own dealings with contributors. A contribution from a remote and obscure place at once piqued my curiosity, and I soon learned that the fresh things, the original things, were apt to come from such places, and not from the literary centres. One of the most interesting facts concerning the arts of all kinds is that those who wish to give their lives to them do not appear where the appliances for instruction in them exist. An artistic atmosphere does not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators; poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a picture seen.

This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning, but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the instruments and means of beauty. It may also suggest to that scholar- pride, that vanity of technique, which is so apt to vaunt itself in the teacher, that the best he can do, after all, is to let the pupil teach himself. If he comes with divine authority to the thing he attempts, he will know how to use the appliances, of which the teacher is only the first.

The editor, if he does not consciously perceive the truth, will instinctively feel it, and will expect the acceptable young contributor from the country, the village, the small town, and he will look eagerly at anything that promises literature from Montana or Texas, for he will know that it also promises novelty.

If he is a wise editor, he will wish to hold his hand as much as possible; he will think twice before he asks the contributor to change this or correct that; he will leave him as much to himself as he can. The young contributor; on his part, will do well to realize this, and to receive all the editorial suggestions, which are veiled commands in most cases, as meekly and as imaginatively as possible.

The editor cannot always give his reasons; however strongly he may feel them, but the contributor, if sufficiently docile, can always divine them. It behooves him to be docile at all times, for this is merely the willingness to learn; and whether he learns that he is wrong, or that the editor is wrong, still he gains knowledge.

A great deal of knowledge comes simply from doing, and a great deal more from doing over, and this is what the editor generally means.

I think that every author who is honest with himself must own that his work would be twice as good if it were done twice. I was once so fortunately circumstanced that I was able entirely to rewrite one of my novels, and I have always thought it the best written, or at least indefinitely better than it would have been with a single writing. As a matter of fact, nearly all of them have been rewritten in a certain way. They have not actually been rewritten throughout, as in the case I speak of, but they have been gone over so often in manuscript and in proof that the effect has been much the same.

Unless you are sensible of some strong frame within your work, something vertebral, it is best to renounce it, and attempt something else in which you can feel it. If you are secure of the frame you must observe the quality and character of everything you build about it; you must touch, you must almost taste, you must certainly test, every material you employ; every bit of decoration must undergo the same scrutiny as the structure.

It will be some vague perception of the want of this vigilance in the young contributor’s work which causes the editor to return it to him for revision, with those suggestions which he will do well to make the most of; for when the editor once finds a contributor he can trust, he rejoices in him with a fondness which the contributor will never perhaps understand.

It will not do to write for the editor alone; the wise editor understands this, and averts his countenance from the contributor who writes at him; but if he feels that the contributor conceives the situation, and will conform to the conditions which his periodical has invented for itself, and will transgress none of its unwritten laws; if he perceives that he has put artistic conscience in every general and detail, and though he has not done the best, has done the best that he can do, he will begin to liberate him from every trammel except those he must wear himself, and will be only too glad to leave him free. He understands, if he is at all fit for his place, that a writer can do well only what he likes to do, and his wish is to leave him to himself as soon as possible.

V.

In my own case, I noticed that the contributors who could be best left to themselves were those who were most amenable to suggestion and even correction, who took the blue pencil with a smile, and bowed gladly to the rod of the proof-reader. Those who were on the alert for offence, who resented a marginal note as a slight, and bumptiously demanded that their work should be printed just as they had written it, were commonly not much more desired by the reader than by the editor.

Of course the contributor naturally feels that the public is the test of his excellence, but he must not forget that the editor is the beginning of the public; and I believe he is a faithfuller and kinder critic than the writer will ever find again.

Since my time there is a new tradition of editing, which I do not think so favorable to the young contributor as the old. Formerly the magazines were made up of volunteer contributions in much greater measure than they are now. At present most of the material is invited and even engaged; it is arranged for a long while beforehand, and the space that can be given to the aspirant, the unknown good, the potential excellence, grows constantly less and less.

A great deal can be said for either tradition; perhaps some editor will yet imagine a return to the earlier method. In the mean time we must deal with the thing that is, and submit to it until it is changed. The moral to the young contributor is to be better than ever, to leave nothing undone that shall enhance his small chances of acceptance. If he takes care to be so good that the editor must accept him in spite of all the pressure upon his pages, he will not only be serving-himself best, but may be helping the editor to a conception of his duty that shall be more hospitable to all other young contributors. As it is, however, it must be owned that their hope of acceptance is very, very small, and they will do well to make sure that they love literature so much that they can suffer long and often repeated disappointment in its cause.

The love of it is the great and only test of fitness for it. It is really inconceivable how any one should attempt it without this, but apparently a great many do. It is evident to every editor that a vast number of those who write the things he looks at so faithfully, and reads more or less, have no artistic motive.

People write because they wish to be known, or because they have heard that money is easily made in that way, or because they think they will chance that among a number of other things. The ignorance of technique which they often show is not nearly so disheartening as the palpable factitiousness of their product. It is something that they have made; it is not anything that has grown out of their lives.

I should think it would profit the young contributor, before he puts pen to paper, to ask himself why he does so, and, if he finds that he has no motive in the love of the thing, to forbear.

Am I interested in what I am going to write about? Do I feel it strongly? Do I know it thoroughly? Do I imagine it clearly? The young contributor had better ask himself all these questions, and as many more like them as he can think of. Perhaps he will end by not being a young contributor.

But if he is able to answer them satisfactorily to his own conscience, by all means let him begin. He may at once put aside all anxiety about style; that is a thing that will take care of itself; it will be added unto him if he really has something to say; for style is only a man’s way of saying a thing.

If he has not much to say, or if he has nothing to say, perhaps he will try to say it in some other man’s way, or to hide his own vacuity with rags of rhetoric and tags and fringes of manner, borrowed from this author and that. He will fancy that in this disguise his work will be more literary, and that there is somehow a quality, a grace, imparted to it which will charm in spite of the inward hollowness. His vain hope would be pitiful if it were not so shameful, but it is destined to suffer defeat at the first glance of the editorial eye.

If he really has something to say, however, about something he knows and loves, he is in the best possible case to say it well. Still, from time to time he may advantageously call a halt, and consider whether he is saying the thing clearly and simply.

If he has a good ear he will say it gracefully, and musically; and I would by no means have him aim to say it barely or sparely. It is not so that people talk, who talk well, and literature is only the thought of the writer flowing from the pen instead of the tongue.

To aim at succinctness and brevity merely, as some teach, is to practice a kind of quackery almost as offensive as the charlatanry of rhetoric. In either case the life goes out of the subject.

To please one’s self, honestly and thoroughly, is the only way to please others in matters of art. I do not mean to say that if you please yourself you will always please others, but that unless you please yourself you will please no one else. It is the sweet and sacred privilege of work done artistically to delight the doer. Art is the highest joy, but any work done in the love of it is art, in a kind, and it strikes the note of happiness as nothing else can.

We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, if you do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as digging ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the same blessings of God, become arts if they are done with conscience and the sense of beauty.

The young contributor may test his work before the editor assays it, if he will, and he may know by a rule that is pretty infallible whether it is good or not, from his own experience in doing it. Did it give him pleasure? Did he love it as it grew under his hand? Was he glad and willing with it? Or did he force himself to it, and did it hang heavy upon him?

There is nothing mystical in all this; it is a matter of plain, every-day experience, and I think nearly every artist will say the same thing about it, if he examines himself faithfully.

If the young contributor finds that he has no delight in the thing he has attempted, he may very well give it up, for no one else will delight in it. But he need not give it up at once; perhaps his mood is bad; let him wait for a better, and try it again. He may not have learned how to do it well, and therefore he cannot love it, but perhaps he can learn to do it well.

The wonder and glory of art is that it is without formulas. Or, rather, each new piece of work requires the invention of new formulas, which will not serve again for another. You must apprentice yourself afresh at every fresh undertaking, and our mastery is always a victory over certain unexpected difficulties, and not a dominion of difficulties overcome before.

I believe, in other words, that mastery is merely the strength that comes of overcoming and is never a sovereign power that smooths the path of all obstacles. The combinations in art are infinite, and almost never the same; you must make your key and fit it to each, and the key that unlocks one combination will not unlock another.

VI.

There is no royal road to excellence in literature, but the young contributor need not be dismayed at that. Royal roads are the ways that kings travel, and kings are mostly dull fellows, and rarely have a good time. They do not go along singing; the spring that trickles into the mossy log is not for them, nor

       “The wildwood flower that simply blows.”

But the traveller on the country road may stop for each of these; and it is not a bad condition of his progress that he must move so slowly that he can learn every detail of the landscape, both earth and sky, by heart.

The trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind, or apart. The successful writer especially is in danger of becoming isolated from the realities that nurtured in him the strength to win success. When he becomes famous, he becomes precious to criticism, to society, to all the things that do not exist from themselves, or have not the root of the matter in them.

Therefore, I think that a young writer’s upward course should be slow and beset with many obstacles, even hardships. Not that I believe in hardships as having inherent virtues; I think it is stupid to regard them in that way; but they oftener bring out the virtues inherent in the sufferer from them than what I may call the ‘softships’; and at least they stop him, and give him time to think.

This is the great matter, for if we prosper forward rapidly, we have no time for anything but prospering forward rapidly. We have no time for art, even the art by which we prosper.

I would have the young contributor above all things realize that success is not his concern. Good work, true work, beautiful work is his affair, and nothing else. If he does this, success will take care of itself.

He has no business to think of the thing that will take. It is the editor’s business to think of that, and it is the contributor’s business to think of the thing that he can do with pleasure, the high pleasure that comes from the sense of worth in the thing done. Let him do the best he can, and trust the editor to decide whether it will take.

It will take far oftener than anything he attempts perfunctorily; and even if the editor thinks it will not take, and feels obliged to return it for that reason, he will return it with a real regret, with the honor and affection which we cannot help feeling for any one who has done a piece of good work, and with the will and the hope to get something from him that will take the next time, or the next, or the next.

LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL (1897)

When we said that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle of September, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be very cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already; and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for a whole week, so that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemed to rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so many autumn leaves. We were but a poor hundred at most where five hundred would not have been a crowd; and, when we sat down at the long tables d’hote in the great dining-room, we had to warm our hands with our plates before we could hold our spoons. From time to time the weather varied, as it does in Europe (American weather is of an exemplary constancy in comparison), and three or four times a day it rained, and three or four times it cleared; but through all the wind blew cold and colder. We were promised, however, that the hotel would not close till October, and we made shift, with a warm chimney in one room and three gas-burners in another, if not to keep warm quite, yet certainly to get used to the cold.

I.

In the mean time the sea-bathing went resolutely on with all its forms. Every morning the bathing machines were drawn down to the beach from the esplanade, where they were secured against the gale every night; and every day a half-dozen hardy invalids braved the rigors of wind and wave. At the discreet distance which one ought always to keep one could not always be sure whether these bold bathers were mermen or mermaids; for the sea costume of both sexes is the same here, as regards an absence of skirts and a presence of what are, after the first plunge, effectively tights. The first time I walked down to the beach I was puzzled to make out some object rolling about in the low surf, which looked like a barrel, and which two bathing-machine men were watching with apparently the purpose of fishing it out. Suddenly this object reared itself from the surf and floundered towards the steps of a machine; then I saw that it was evidently not a barrel, but a lady, and after that I never dared carry my researches so far. I suppose that the bathing-tights are more becoming in some cases than in others; but I hold to a modest preference for skirts, however brief, in the sea-gear of ladies. Without them there may sometimes be the effect of beauty, and sometimes the effect of barrel.

For the convenience and safety of the bathers there were, even in the last half of September, some twenty machines, and half as many bath-men and bath-women, who waded into the water and watched that the bathers came to no harm, instead of a solitary lifeguard showing his statuesque shape as he paced the shore beside the lifelines, or cynically rocked in his boat beyond the breakers, as the custom is on Long Island. Here there is no need of life-lines, and, unless one held his head resolutely under water, I do not see how he could drown within quarter of a mile of the shore. Perhaps it is to prevent suicide that the bathmen are so plentifully provided.

They are a provision of the hotel, I believe, which does not relax itself in any essential towards its guests as they grow fewer. It seems, on the contrary, to use them with a more tender care, and to console them as it may for the inevitable parting near at hand. Now, within three or four days of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as it could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sit down every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love or vastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America. It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going on delicately, almost silently. A strip of carpeting has come up from along our corridor, but we hardly miss it from the matting which remains. Through the open doors of vacant chambers we can see that beds are coming down, and the dismantling extends into the halls at places. Certain decorative carved chairs which repeated themselves outside the doors have ceased to be there; but the pictures still hang on the walls, and within our own rooms everything is as conscientious as in midsummer. The service is instant, and, if there is some change in it, the change is not for the worse. Yesterday our waiter bade me good-bye, and when I said I was sorry he was going he alleged a boil on his cheek in excuse; he would not allow that his going had anything to do with the closing of the hotel, and he was promptly replaced by another who speaks excellent English. Now that the first is gone, I may own that he seemed not to speak any foreign language long, but, when cornered in English, took refuge in French, and then fled from pursuit in that to German, and brought up in final Dutch, where he was practically inaccessible.

The elevator runs regularly, if not rapidly; the papers arrive unfailingly in the reading-room, including a solitary London Times, which even I do not read, perhaps because I have no English-reading rival to contend for it with. Till yesterday, an English artist sometimes got it; but he then instantly offered it to me; and I had to refuse it because I would not be outdone in politeness. Now even he is gone, and on all sides I find myself in an unbroken circle of Dutch and German, where no one would dispute the Times with me if he could.

Every night the corridors are fully lighted, and some mornings swept, while the washing that goes on all over Holland, night and morning, does not always spare our unfrequented halls and stairs. I note these little facts, for the contrast with those of an American hotel which we once assisted in closing, and where the elevator stopped two weeks before we left, and we fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died out before us except at long intervals in the passages; while there were lightning changes in the service, and a final failure of it till we had to go down and get our own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, after the last bell-boy had winked out.

II.

But in Europe everything is permanent, and in America everything is provisional. This is the great distinction which, if always kept in mind, will save a great deal of idle astonishment. It is in nothing more apparent than in the preparation here at Scheveningen for centuries of summer visitors, while at our Long Island hotel there was a losing bet on a scant generation of them. When it seemed likely that it might be a winning bet the sand was planked there in front of the hotel to the sea with spruce boards. It was very handsomely planked, but it was never afterwards touched, apparently, for any manner of repairs. Here, for half a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored up with massive masonry, and bricked for carriages, and tiled for foot-passengers; and it is all kept as clean as if wheel or foot had never passed over it. I am sure that there is not a broken brick or a broken tile in the whole length or breadth of it. But the hotel here is not a bet; it is a business. It has come to stay; and on Long Island it had come to see how it would like it.

Beyond the walk and drive, however, the dunes are left to the winds, and to the vegetation with which the Dutch planting clothes them against the winds. First a coarse grass or rush is sown; then a finer herbage comes; then a tough brushwood, with flowers and blackberry-vines; so that while the seaward slopes of the dunes are somewhat patched and tattered, the landward side and all the pleasant hollows between are fairly held against such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon. The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop. On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocks devoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who are here as freely and fearlessly affectionate as at home. Rocking there is not, and cannot be, in the nature of things, as there used to be at Mount Desert; but what is called Twoing at York Harbor is perfectly practicable.

It is practicable not only in the nooks and corners of the dunes, but on discreeter terms in those hooded willow chairs, so characteristic of the Dutch sea-side. These, if faced in pairs towards each other, must be as favorable to the exchange of vows as of opinions, and if the crowd is ever very great, perhaps one chair could be made to hold two persons. It was distinctly a pang, the other day, to see men carrying them up from the beach, and putting them away to hibernate in the basement of the hotel. Not all, but most of them, were taken; though I dare say that on fine days throughout October they will go trooping back to the sands on the heads of the same men, like a procession of monstrous, two-legged crabs. Such a day was last Sunday, and then the beach offered a lively image of its summer gayety. It was dotted with hundreds of hooded chairs, which foregathered in gossiping groups or confidential couples; and as the sun shone quite warm the flaps of the little tents next the dunes were let down against it, and ladies in summer white saved themselves from sunstroke in their shelter. The wooden booths for the sale of candies and mineral waters, and beer and sandwiches, were flushed with a sudden prosperity, so that when I went to buy my pound of grapes from the good woman who understands my Dutch, I dreaded an indifference in her which by no means appeared. She welcomed me as warmly as if I had been her sole customer, and did not put up the price on me; perhaps because it was already so very high that her imagination could not rise above it.

III

The hotel showed the same admirable constancy. The restaurant was thronged with new-comers, who spread out even over the many-tabled esplanade before it; but it was in no wise demoralized. That night we sat down in multiplied numbers to a table d’hote of serenely unconscious perfection; and we permanent guests — alas! we are now becoming transient, too — were used with unfaltering recognition of our superior worth. We shared the respect which, all over Europe, attaches to establishment, and which sometimes makes us poor Americans wish for a hereditary nobility, so that we could all mirror our ancestral value in the deference of our inferiors. Where we should get our inferiors is another thing, but I suppose we could import them for the purpose, if the duties were not too great under our tariff.

We have not yet imported the idea of a European hotel in any respect, though we long ago imported what we call the European plan. No travelled American knows it in the extortionate prices of rooms when he gets home, or the preposterous charges of our restaurants, where one portion of roast beef swimming in a lake of lukewarm juice costs as much as a diversified and delicate dinner in Germany or Holland. But even if there were any proportion in these things the European hotel will not be with us till we have the European portier, who is its spring and inspiration. He must not, dear home-keeping reader, be at all imagined in the moral or material figure of our hotel porter, who appears always in his shirt- sleeves, and speaks with the accent of Cork or of Congo. The European portier wears a uniform, I do not know why, and a gold-banded cap, and he inhabits a little office at the entrance of the hotel. He speaks eight or ten languages, up to certain limit, rather better than people born to them, and his presence commands an instant reverence softening to affection under his universal helpfulness. There is nothing he cannot tell you, cannot do for you; and you may trust yourself implicitly to him. He has the priceless gift of making each nationality, each personality, believe that he is devoted to its service alone. He turns lightly from one language to another, as if he had each under his tongue, and he answers simultaneously a fussy French woman, an angry English tourist, a stiff Prussian major, and a thin-voiced American girl in behalf of a timorous mother, and he never mixes the replies. He is an inexhaustible bottle of dialects; but this is the least of his merits, of his miracles.

Our portier here is a tall, slim Dutchman (most Dutchmen are tall and slim), and in spite of the waning season he treats me as if I were multitude, while at the same time he uses me with the distinction due the last of his guests. Twenty times in as many hours he wishes me good-day, putting his hand to his cap for the purpose; and to oblige me he wears silver braid instead of gilt on his cap and coat. I apologized yesterday for troubling him so often for stamps, and said that I supposed he was much more bothered in the season.

“Between the first of August and the fifteenth,” he answered, “you cannot think. All that you can do is to say, Yes, No; Yes, No.” And he left me to imagine his responsibilities.

I am sure he will hold out to the end, and will smile me a friendly farewell from the door of his office, which is also his dining-room, as I know from often disturbing him at his meals there. I have no fear of the waiters either, or of the little errand-boys who wear suits of sailor blue, and touch their foreheads when they bring you your letters like so many ancient sea-dogs. I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suit of snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we step out of his elevator for the last time as unfalteringly as if we had just arrived at the beginning of the summer.

IV

It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and I will try to recall in their pathetic order the events of the final week.

Nothing has been stranger throughout than the fluctuation of the guests. At times they have dwindled to so small a number that one must reckon chiefly upon their quality for consolation; at other times they swelled to such a tide as to overflow the table, long or short, at dinner, and eddy round a second board beside it. There have been nights when I have walked down the long corridor to my seaward room through a harking solitude of empty chambers; there have been mornings when I have come out to breakfast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes, and door- post hooks where dangling coats and trousers peopled the place with a lively if a somewhat flaccid semblance of human presence. The worst was that, when some one went, we lost a friend, and when some one came we only won a stranger.

Among the first to go were the kindly English folk whose acquaintance we made across the table the first night, and who took with them so large a share of our facile affections that we quite forgot the ancestral enmities, and grieved for them as much as if they had been Americans. There have been, in fact, no Americans here but ourselves, and we have done what we could with the Germans who spoke English. The nicest of these were a charming family from F —— , father and mother, and son and daughter, with whom we had a pleasant week of dinners. At the very first we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and Sudermann that I was almost sorry to have the son take our modern side of the controversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors with us. Our frank literary difference established a kindness between us that was strengthened by our community of English, and when they went they left us to the sympathy of another German family with whom we had mainly our humanity in common. They spoke no English, and I only a German which they must have understood with their hearts rather than their heads, since it consisted chiefly of good-will. But in the air of their sweet natures it flourished surprisingly, and sufficed each day for praise of the weather after it began to be fine, and at parting for some fond regrets, not unmixed with philosophical reflections, sadly perplexed in the genders and the order of the verbs: with me the verb will seldom wait, as it should in German, to the end. Both of these families, very different in social tradition, I fancied, were one in the amiability which makes the alien forgive so much militarism to the German nation, and hope for its final escape from the drill-sergeant. When they went, we were left for some meals to our own American tongue, with a brief interval of that English painter and his wife with whom we spoke, our language as nearly like English as we could. Then followed a desperate lunch and dinner where an unbroken forest of German, and a still more impenetrable morass of Dutch, hemmed us in. But last night it was our joy to be addressed in our own speech by a lady who spoke it as admirably as our dear friends from F —— . She was Dutch, and when she found we were Americans she praised our historian Motley, and told us how his portrait is gratefully honored with a place in the Queen’s palace, The House in the Woods, near Scheveningen.

V.

She had come up from her place in the country, four hours away, for the last of the concerts here, which have been given throughout the summer by the best orchestra in Europe, and which have been thronged every afternoon and evening by people from The Hague.

One honored day this week even the Queen and the Queen Mother came down to the concert, and gave us incomparably the greatest event of our waning season. I had noticed all the morning a floral perturbation about the main entrance of the hotel, which settled into the form of banks of autumnal bloom on either side of the specially carpeted stairs, and put forth on the roof of the arcade in a crown, much bigger round than a barrel, of orange-colored asters, in honor of the Queen’s ancestral house of Orange. Flags of blue, white, and red fluttered nervously about in the breeze from the sea, and imparted to us an agreeable anxiety not to miss seeing the Queens, as the Dutch succinctly call their sovereign and her parent; and at three o’clock we saw them drive up to the hotel. Certain officials in civil dress stood at the door of the concert-room to usher the Queens in, and a bareheaded, bald-headed dignity of military figure backed up the stairs before them. I would not rashly commit myself to particulars concerning their dress, but I am sure that the elder Queen wore black, and the younger white. The mother has one of the best and wisest faces I have seen any woman wear (and most of the good, wise faces in this imperfectly balanced world are women’s) and the daughter one of the sweetest and prettiest. Pretty is the word for her face, and it showed pink through her blond veil, as she smiled and bowed right and left; her features are small and fine, and she is not above the middle height.

As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, we who had waited to see her go in ran round to another door and joined the two or three thousand people who were standing to receive the Queens. These had already mounted to the royal box, and they stood there while the orchestra played one of the Dutch national airs. (One air is not enough for the Dutch; they must have two.) Then the mother faded somewhere into the background, and the daughter sat alone in the front, on a gilt throne, with a gilt crown at top, and a very uncomfortable carved Gothic back. She looked so young, so gentle, and so good that the rudest Republican could not have helped wishing her well out of a position so essentially and irreparably false as a hereditary sovereign’s. One forgot in the presence of her innocent seventeen years that most of the ruling princes of the world had left it the worse for their having been in it; at moments one forgot her altogether as a princess, and saw her only as a charming young girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly.

At the end of the programme the Queens rose and walked slowly out, while the orchestra played the other national air.

VI.

I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and I like Holland so much that I should hate to differ with the Dutch in anything. But, as a matter of fact, they are neither of them quite Queens; the mother is the regent and the daughter will not be crowned till next year.

But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme emotion to our dying season, and thrilled the hotel with a fulness of summer life. Since they went, the season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can just say that it is still alive. Last Sunday was fine, and great crowds came down from The Hague to the concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace of the hotel, around the little tables which I fancied that the waiters had each morning wiped dry of the dew, from a mere Dutch desire of cleaning something. The hooded chairs covered the beach; the children played in the edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the lovers wandered up into the hollows of the dunes.

There was only the human life, however. I have looked in vain for the crabs, big and little, that swarm on the Long Island shore, and there are hardly any gulls, even; perhaps because there are no crabs for them to eat, if they eat crabs; I never saw gulls doing it, but they must eat something. Dogs there are, of course, wherever there are people; but they are part of the human life. Dutch dogs are in fact very human; and one I saw yesterday behaved quite as badly as a bad boy, with respect to his muzzle. He did not like his muzzle, and by dint of turning somersaults in the sand he got it off, and went frolicking to his master in triumph to show him what he had done.

VII.

It is now the last day, and the desolation is thickening upon our hotel. This morning the door-posts up and down my corridor showed not a single pair of trousers; not a pair of boots flattered the lonely doormats. In the lower hall I found the tables of the great dining-room assembled, and the chairs inverted on them with their legs in the air; but decently, decorously, not with the reckless abandon displayed by the chairs in our Long Island hotel for weeks before it closed. In the smaller dining-room the table was set for lunch as if we were to go on dining there forever; in the breakfast-room the service and the provision were as perfect as ever. The coffee was good, the bread delicious, the butter of an unfaltering sweetness; and the glaze of wear on the polished dress-coats of the waiters as respectable as it could have been on the first day of the season. All was correct, and if of a funereal correctness to me, I am sure this effect was purely subjective.

The little bell-boys in sailor suits (perhaps they ought to be spelled bell-buoys) clustered about the elevator-boy like so many Roman sentinels at their posts; the elevator-boy and his elevator were ready to take us up or down at any moment.

The portier and I ignored together the hour of parting, which we had definitely ascertained and agreed upon, and we exchanged some compliments to the weather, which is now settled, as if we expected to enjoy it long together. I rather dread going in to lunch, however, for I fear the empty places.

VIII.

All is over; we are off. The lunch was an heroic effort of the hotel to hide the fact of our separation. It was perfect, unless the boiled beef was a confession of human weakness; but even this boiled beef was exquisite, and the horseradish that went with it was so mellowed by art that it checked rather than provoked the parting tear. The table d’hote had reserved a final surprise for us; and when we sat down with the fear of nothing but German around us, we heard the sound of our own speech from the pleasantest English pair we had yet encountered; and the travelling English are pleasant; I will say it, who am said by Sir Walter Besant to be the only American who hates their nation. It was really an added pang to go, on their account, but the carriage was waiting at the door; the ‘domestique’ had already carried our baggage to the steam-tram station; the kindly menial train formed around us for an ultimate ‘douceur’, and we were off, after the ‘portier’ had shut us into our vehicle and touched his oft-touched cap for the last time, while the hotel facade dissembled its grief by architecturally smiling in the soft Dutch sun.

I liked this manner of leaving better than carrying part of my own baggage to the train, as I had to do on Long Island, though that, too, had its charm; the charm of the whole fresh, pungent American life, which at this distance is so dear.

SOME ANOMALIES OF THE SHORT STORY

The interesting experiment of one of our great publishing houses in putting out serially several volumes of short stories, with the hope that a courageous persistence may overcome the popular indifference to such collections when severally administered, suggests some questions as to this eldest form of fiction which I should like to ask the reader’s patience with. I do not know that I shall be able to answer them, or that I shall try to do so; the vitality of a question that is answered seems to exhale in the event; it palpitates no longer; curiosity flutters away from the faded flower, which is fit then only to be folded away in the ‘hortus siccus’ of accomplished facts. In view of this I may wish merely to state the problems and leave them for the reader’s solution, or, more amusingly, for his mystification.

I.

One of the most amusing questions concerning the short story is why a form which is singly so attractive that every one likes to read a short story when he finds it alone is collectively so repellent as it is said to be. Before now I have imagined the case to be somewhat the same as that of a number of pleasant people who are most acceptable as separate householders, but who lose caste and cease to be desirable acquaintances when gathered into a boarding-house.

Yet the case is not the same quite, for we see that the short story where it is ranged with others of its species within the covers of a magazine is so welcome that the editor thinks his number the more brilliant the more short story writers he can call about his board, or under the roof of his pension. Here the boardinghouse analogy breaks, breaks so signally that I was lately moved to ask a distinguished editor why a book of short stories usually failed and a magazine usually succeeded because of them. He answered, gayly, that the short stories in most books of them were bad; that where they were good, they went; and he alleged several well-known instances in which books of prime short stories had a great vogue. He was so handsomely interested in my inquiry that I could not well say I thought some of the short stories which he had boasted in his last number were indifferent good, and yet, as he allowed, had mainly helped sell it. I had in mind many books of short stories of the first excellence which had failed as decidedly as those others had succeeded, for no reason that I could see; possibly there is really no reason in any literary success or failure that can be predicted, or applied in another Base.

I could name these books, if it would serve any purpose, but, in my doubt, I will leave the reader to think of them, for I believe that his indolence or intellectual reluctance is largely to blame for the failure of good books of short stories. He is commonly so averse to any imaginative exertion that he finds it a hardship to respond to that peculiar demand which a book of good short stories makes upon him. He can read one good short story in a magazine with refreshment, and a pleasant sense of excitement, in the sort of spur it gives to his own constructive faculty. But, if this is repeated in ten or twenty stories, he becomes fluttered and exhausted by the draft upon his energies; whereas a continuous fiction of the same quantity acts as an agreeable sedative. A condition that the short story tacitly makes with the reader, through its limitations, is that he shall subjectively fill in the details and carry out the scheme which in its small dimensions the story can only suggest; and the greater number of readers find this too much for their feeble powers, while they cannot resist the incitement to attempt it.

My theory does not wholly account for the fact (no theory wholly accounts for any fact), and I own that the same objections would lie from the reader against a number of short stories in a magazine. But it may be that the effect is not the same in the magazine because of the variety in the authorship, and because it would be impossibly jolting to read all the short stories in a magazine ‘seriatim’. On the other hand, the identity of authorship gives a continuity of attraction to the short stories in a book which forms that exhausting strain upon the imagination of the involuntary co-partner.

II.

Then, what is the solution as to the form of publication for short stories, since people do not object to them singly but collectively, and not in variety, but in identity of authorship? Are they to be printed only in the magazines, or are they to be collected in volumes combining a variety of authorship? Rather, I could wish, it might be found feasible to purvey them in some pretty shape where each would appeal singly to the reader and would not exhaust him in the subjective after-work required of him. In this event many short stories now cramped into undue limits by the editorial exigencies of the magazines might expand to greater length and breadth, and without ceasing to be each a short story might not make so heavy a demand upon the subliminal forces of the reader.

If any one were to say that all this was a little fantastic, I should not contradict him; but I hope there is some reason in it, if reason can help the short story to greater favor, for it is a form which I have great pleasure in as a reader, and pride in as an American. If we have not excelled all other moderns in it, we have certainly excelled in it; possibly because we are in the period of our literary development which corresponds to that of other peoples when the short story pre-eminently flourished among them. But when one has said a thing like this, it immediately accuses one of loose and inaccurate statement, and requires one to refine upon it, either for one’s own peace of conscience or for one’s safety from the thoughtful reader. I am not much afraid of that sort of reader, for he is very rare, but I do like to know myself what I mean, if I mean anything in particular.

In this instance I am obliged to ask myself whether our literary development can be recognized separately from that of the whole English- speaking world. I think it can, though, as I am always saying American literature is merely a condition of English literature. In some sense every European literature is a condition of some other European literature, yet the impulse in each eventuates, if it does not originate indigenously. A younger literature will choose, by a sort of natural selection, some things for assimilation from an elder literature, for no more apparent reason than it will reject other things, and it will transform them in the process so that it will give them the effect of indigeneity. The short story among the Italians, who called it the novella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to fiction of epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if it derived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and enlarged itself in the variety of its types. But still these remained types, and they remained types with the French imitators of the Italian novella. It was not till the Spaniards borrowed the form of the novella and transplanted it to their racier soil that it began to bear character, and to fruit in the richness of their picaresque fiction. When the English borrowed it they adapted it, in the metrical tales of Chaucer, to the genius of their nation, which was then both poetical and humorous. Here it was full of character, too, and more and more personality began to enlarge the bounds of the conventional types and to imbue fresh ones. But in so far as the novella was studied in the Italian sources, the French, Spanish, and English literatures were conditions of Italian literature as distinctly, though, of course, not so thoroughly, as American literature is a condition of English literature. Each borrower gave a national cast to the thing borrowed, and that is what has happened with us, in the full measure that our nationality has differenced itself from the English.

Whatever truth there is in all this, and I will confess that a good deal of it seems to me hardy conjecture, rather favors my position that we are in some such period of our literary development as those other peoples when the short story flourished among them. Or, if I restrict our claim, I may safely claim that they abundantly had the novella when they had not the novel at all, and we now abundantly have the novella, while we have the novel only subordinately and of at least no such quantitative importance as the English, French, Spanish, Norwegians, Russians, and some others of our esteemed contemporaries, not to name the Italians. We surpass the Germans, who, like ourselves, have as distinctly excelled in the modern novella as they have fallen short in the novel. Or, if I may not quite say this, I will make bold to say that I can think of many German novelle that I should like to read again, but scarcely one German novel; and I could honestly say the same of American novelle, though not of American novels.

III.

The abeyance, not to say the desuetude, that the novella fell into for several centuries is very curious, and fully as remarkable as the modern rise of the short story. It began to prevail in the dramatic form, for a play is a short story put on the stage; it may have satisfied in that form the early love of it, and it has continued to please in that form; but in its original shape it quite vanished, unless we consider the little studies and sketches and allegories of the Spectator and Tatler and Idler and Rambler and their imitations on the Continent as guises of the novella. The germ of the modern short story may have survived in these, or in the metrical form of the novella which appeared in Chaucer and never wholly disappeared. With Crabbe the novella became as distinctly the short story as it has become in the hands of Miss Wilkins. But it was not till our time that its great merit as a form was felt, for until our time so great work was never done with it. I remind myself of Boccaccio, and of the Arabian Nights, without the wish to hedge from my bold stand. They are all elemental; compared with some finer modern work which deepens inward immeasurably, they are all of their superficial limits. They amuse, but they do not hold, the mind and stamp it with large and profound impressions.

An Occidental cannot judge the literary quality of the Eastern tales; but I will own my suspicion that the perfection of the Italian work is philological rather than artistic, while the web woven by Mr. James or Miss Jewett, by Kielland or Bjornson, by Maupassant, by Palacio Valdes, by Giovanni Verga, by Tourguenief, in one of those little frames seems to me of an exquisite color and texture and of an entire literary preciousness, not only as regards the diction, but as regards those more intangible graces of form, those virtues of truth and reality, and those lasting significances which distinguish the masterpiece.

The novella has in fact been carried so far in the short story that it might be asked whether it had not left the novel behind, as to perfection of form; though one might not like to affirm this. Yet there have been but few modern fictions of the novel’s dimensions which have the beauty of form many a novella embodies. Is this because it is easier to give form in the small than in the large, or only because it is easier to hide formlessness? It is easier to give form in the novella than in the novel, because the design of less scope can be more definite, and because the persons and facts are fewer, and each can be more carefully treated. But, on the other hand, the slightest error in execution shows more in the small than in the large, and a fault of conception is more evident. The novella must be clearly imagined, above all things, for there is no room in it for those felicities of characterization or comment by which the artist of faltering design saves himself in the novel.

IV.

The question as to where the short story distinguishes itself from the anecdote is of the same nature as that which concerns the bound set between it and the novel. In both cases the difference of the novella is in the motive, or the origination. The anecdote is too palpably simple and single to be regarded as a novella, though there is now and then a novella like The Father, by Bjornson, which is of the actual brevity of the anecdote, but which, when released in the reader’s consciousness, expands to dramatic dimensions impossible to the anecdote. Many anecdotes have come down from antiquity, but not, I believe, one short story, at least in prose; and the Italians, if they did not invent the story, gave us something most sensibly distinguishable from the classic anecdote in the novella. The anecdote offers an illustration of character, or records a moment of action; the novella embodies a drama and develops a type.

It is not quite so clear as to when and where a piece of fiction ceases to be a novella and becomes a novel. The frontiers are so vague that one is obliged to recognize a middle species, or rather a middle magnitude, which paradoxically, but necessarily enough, we call the novelette. First we have the short story, or novella, then we have the long story, or novel, and between these we have the novelette, which is in name a smaller than the short story, though it is in point of fact two or three times longer than a short story. We may realize them physically if we will adopt the magazine parlance and speak of the novella as a one-number story, of the novel as a serial, and of the novelette as a two-number or a three-number story; if it passes the three-number limit it seems to become a novel. As a two-number or three-number story it is the despair of editors and publishers. The interest of so brief a serial will not mount sufficiently to carry strongly over from month to month; when the tale is completed it will not make a book which the Trade (inexorable force!) cares to handle. It is therefore still awaiting its authoritative avatar, which it will be some one’s prosperity and glory to imagine; for in the novelette are possibilities for fiction as yet scarcely divined.

The novelette can have almost as perfect form as the novella. In fact, the novel has form in the measure that it approaches the novelette; and some of the most symmetrical modern novels are scarcely more than novelettes, like Tourguenief’s Dmitri Rudine, or his Smoke, or Spring Floods. The Vicar of Wakefield, the father of the modern novel, is scarcely more than a novelette, and I have sometimes fancied, but no doubt vainly, that the ultimated novel might be of the dimensions of Hamlet. If any one should say there was not room in Hamlet for the character and incident requisite in a novel, I should be ready to answer that there seemed a good deal of both in Hamlet.

But no doubt there are other reasons why the novel should not finally be of the length of Hamlet, and I must not let my enthusiasm for the novelette carry me too far, or, rather, bring me up too short. I am disposed to dwell upon it, I suppose, because it has not yet shared the favor which the novella and the novel have enjoyed, and because until somebody invents a way for it to the public it cannot prosper like the one-number story or the serial. I should like to say as my last word for it here that I believe there are many novels which, if stripped of their padding, would turn out to have been all along merely novelettes in disguise.

It does not follow, however, that there are many novelle which, if they were duly padded, would be found novelettes. In that dim, subjective region where the aesthetic origins present themselves almost with the authority of inspirations there is nothing clearer than the difference between the short-story motive and the long-story motive. One, if one is in that line of work, feels instinctively just the size and carrying power of the given motive. Or, if the reader prefers a different figure, the mind which the seed has been dropped into from Somewhere is mystically aware whether the seed is going to grow up a bush or is going to grow up a tree, if left to itself. Of course, the mind to which the seed is intrusted may play it false, and wilfully dwarf the growth, or force it to unnatural dimensions; but the critical observer will easily detect the fact of such treasons. Almost in the first germinal impulse the inventive mind forefeels the ultimate difference and recognizes the essential simplicity or complexity of the motive. There will be a prophetic subdivision into a variety of motives and a multiplication of characters and incidents and situations; or the original motive will be divined indivisible, and there will be a small group of people immediately interested and controlled by a single, or predominant, fact. The uninspired may contend that this is bosh, and I own that something might be said for their contention, but upon the whole I think it is gospel.

The right novel is never a congeries of novelle, as might appear to the uninspired. If it indulges even in episodes, it loses in reality and vitality. It is one stock from which its various branches put out, and form it a living growth identical throughout. The right novella is never a novel cropped back from the size of a tree to a bush, or the branch of a tree stuck into the ground and made to serve for a bush. It is another species, destined by the agencies at work in the realm of unconsciousness to be brought into being of its own kind, and not of another.

V.

This was always its case, but in the process of time the short story, while keeping the natural limits of the primal novella (if ever there was one), has shown almost limitless possibilities within them. It has shown itself capable of imparting the effect of every sort of intention, whether of humor or pathos, of tragedy or comedy or broad farce or delicate irony, of character or action. The thing that first made itself known as a little tale, usually salacious, dealing with conventionalized types and conventionalized incidents, has proved itself possibly the most flexible of all the literary forms in its adaptation to the needs of the mind that wishes to utter itself, inventively or constructively, upon some fresh occasion, or wishes briefly to criticise or represent some phase or fact of life.

The riches in this shape of fiction are effectively inestimable, if we consider what has been done in the short story, and is still doing everywhere. The good novels may be easily counted, but the good novelle, since Boccaccio began (if it was he that first began) to make them, cannot be computed. In quantity they are inexhaustible, and in quality they are wonderfully satisfying. Then, why is it that so very, very few of the most satisfactory of that innumerable multitude stay by you, as the country people say, in characterization or action? How hard it is to recall a person or a fact out of any of them, out of the most signally good! We seem to be delightfully nourished as we read, but is it, after all, a full meal? We become of a perfect intimacy and a devoted friendship with the men and women in the short stories, but not apparently of a lasting acquaintance. It is a single meeting we have with them, and though we instantly love or hate them dearly, recurrence and repetition seem necessary to that familiar knowledge in which we hold the personages in a novel.

It is here that the novella, so much more perfect in form, shows its irremediable inferiority to the novel, and somehow to the play, to the very farce, which it may quantitatively excel. We can all recall by name many characters out of comedies and farces; but how many characters out of short stories can we recall? Most persons of the drama give themselves away by name for types, mere figments of allegory, and perhaps oblivion is the penalty that the novella pays for the fineness of its characterizations; but perhaps, also, the dramatic form has greater facilities for repetition, and so can stamp its persons more indelibly on the imagination than the narrative form in the same small space. The narrative must give to description what the drama trusts to representation; but this cannot account for the superior permanency of the dramatic types in so great measure as we might at first imagine, for they remain as much in mind from reading as from seeing the plays. It is possible that as the novella becomes more conscious, its persons will become more memorable; but as it is, though we now vividly and with lasting delight remember certain short stories, we scarcely remember by name any of the people in them. I may be risking too much in offering an instance, but who, in even such signal instances as The Revolt of Mother, by Miss Wilkins, or The Dulham Ladies, by Miss Jewett, can recall by name the characters that made them delightful?

VI.

The defect of the novella which we have been acknowledging seems an essential limitation; but perhaps it is not insuperable; and we may yet have short stories which shall supply the delighted imagination with creations of as much immortality as we can reasonably demand. The structural change would not be greater than the moral or material change which has been wrought in it since it began as a yarn, gross and palpable, which the narrator spun out of the coarsest and often the filthiest stuff, to snare the thick fancy or amuse the lewd leisure of listeners willing as children to have the same persons and the same things over and over again. Now it has not only varied the persons and things, but it has refined and verified them in the direction of the natural and the supernatural, until it is above all other literary forms the vehicle of reality and spirituality. When one thinks of a bit of Mr. James’s psychology in this form, or a bit of Verga’s or Kielland’s sociology, or a bit of Miss Jewett’s exquisite veracity, one perceives the immense distance which the short story has come on the way to the height it has reached. It serves equally the ideal and the real; that which it is loath to serve is the unreal, so that among the short stories which have recently made reputations for their authors very few are of that peculiar cast which we have no name for but romanticistic. The only distinguished modern writer of romanticistic novelle whom I can think of is Mr. Bret Harte, and he is of a period when romanticism was so imperative as to be almost a condition of fiction. I am never so enamoured of a cause that I will not admit facts that seem to tell against it, and I will allow that this writer of romanticistic short stories has more than any other supplied us with memorable types and characters. We remember Mr. John Oakhurst by name; we remember Kentuck and Tennessee’s Partner, at least by nickname; and we remember their several qualities. These figures, if we cannot quite consent that they are persons, exist in our memories by force of their creator’s imagination, and at the moment I cannot think of any others that do, out of the myriad of American short stories, except Rip Van Winkle out of Irving’s Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Marjorie Daw out of Mr. Aldrich’s famous little caprice of that title, and Mr. James’s Daisy Miller.

It appears to be the fact that those writers who have first distinguished themselves in the novella have seldom written novels of prime order. Mr. Kipling is an eminent example, but Mr. Kipling has yet a long life before him in which to upset any theory about him, and one can only instance him provisionally. On the other hand, one can be much more confident that the best novelle have been written by the greatest novelists, conspicuously Maupassant, Verga, Bjornson, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. James, Mr. Cable, Tourguenief, Tolstoy, Valdes, not to name others. These have, in fact, all done work so good in this form that one is tempted to call it their best work. It is really not their best, but it is work so good that it ought to have equal acceptance with their novels, if that distinguished editor was right who said that short stories sold well when they were good short stories. That they ought to do so is so evident that a devoted reader of them, to whom I was submitting the anomaly the other day, insisted that they did. I could only allege the testimony of publishers and authors to the contrary, and this did not satisfy him.

It does not satisfy me, and I wish that the general reader, with whom the fault lies, could be made to say why, if he likes one short story by itself and four short stories in a magazine, he does not like, or will not have, a dozen short stories in a book. This was the baffling question which I began with and which I find myself forced to end with, after all the light I have thrown upon the subject. I leave it where I found it, but perhaps that is a good deal for a critic to do. If I had left it anywhere else the reader might not feel bound to deal with it practically by reading all the books of short stories he could lay hands on, and either divining why he did not enjoy them, or else forever foregoing his prejudice against them because of his pleasure in them.

SPANISH PRISONERS OF WAR

Certain summers ago our cruisers, the St. Louis and the Harvard, arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, with sixteen or seventeen hundred Spanish prisoners from Santiago de Cuba. They were partly soldiers of the land forces picked up by our troops in the fights before the city, but by far the greater part were sailors and marines from Cervera’s ill-fated fleet. I have not much stomach for war, but the poetry of the fact I have stated made a very potent appeal to me on my literary side, and I did not hold out against it longer than to let the St. Louis get away with Cervera to Annapolis, when only her less dignified captives remained with those of the Harvard to feed either the vainglory or the pensive curiosity of the spectator. Then I went over from our summer colony to Kittery Point, and got a boat, and sailed out to have a look at these subordinate enemies in the first hours of their imprisonment.

I.

It was an afternoon of the brilliancy known only to an afternoon of the American summer, and the water of the swift Piscataqua River glittered in the sun with a really incomparable brilliancy. But nothing could light up the great monster of a ship, painted the dismal lead-color which our White Squadrons put on with the outbreak of the war, and she lay sullen in the stream with a look of ponderous repose, to which the activities of the coaling-barges at her side, and of the sailors washing her decks, seemed quite unrelated. A long gun forward and a long gun aft threatened the fleet of launches, tugs, dories, and cat-boats which fluttered about her, but the Harvard looked tired and bored, and seemed as if asleep. She had, in fact, finished her mission. The captives whom death had released had been carried out and sunk in the sea; those who survived to a further imprisonment had all been taken to the pretty island a mile farther up in the river, where the tide rushes back and forth through the Narrows like a torrent. Its defiant rapidity has won it there the graphic name of Pull-and-be-Damned; and we could only hope to reach the island by a series of skilful tacks, which should humor both the wind and the tide, both dead against us. Our boatman, one of those shore New Englanders who are born with a knowledge of sailing, was easily master of the art of this, but it took time, and gave me more than the leisure I wanted for trying to see the shore with the strange eyes of the captives who had just looked upon it. It was beautiful, I had to own, even in my quality of exile and prisoner. The meadows and the orchards came down to the water, or, where the wandering line of the land was broken and lifted in black fronts of rock, they crept to the edge of the cliff and peered over it. A summer hotel stretched its verandas along a lovely level; everywhere in clovery hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farmhouses and summer cottages-like weather-beaten birds’ nests, and like freshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness which made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village, shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water, and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic alertness. The sweet, keen breeze made me shiver, and the northern sky, from which my blinding southern sun was blazing, was as hard as sapphire. I tried to bewilder myself in the ignorance of a Catalonian or Asturian fisherman, and to wonder with his darkened mind why it should all or any of it have been, and why I should have escaped from the iron hell in which I had fought no quarrel of my own to fall into the hands of strangers, and to be haled over seas to these alien shores for a captivity of unknown term. But I need not have been at so much pains; the intelligence (I do not wish to boast) of an American author would have sufficed; for if there is anything more grotesque than another in war it is its monstrous inconsequence. If we had a grief with the Spanish government, and if it was so mortal we must do murder for it, we might have sent a joint committee of the House and Senate, and, with the improved means of assassination which modern science has put at our command, killed off the Spanish cabinet, and even the queen — mother and the little king. This would have been consequent, logical, and in a sort reasonable; but to butcher and capture a lot of wretched Spanish peasants and fishermen, hapless conscripts to whom personally and nationally we were as so many men in the moon, was that melancholy and humiliating necessity of war which makes it homicide in which there is not even the saving grace of hate, or the excuse of hot blood.

I was able to console myself perhaps a little better for the captivity of the Spaniards than if I had really been one of them, as we drew nearer and nearer their prison isle, and it opened its knotty points and little ravines, overrun with sweet-fern, blueberry-bushes, bay, and low blackberry-vines, and rigidly traversed with a high stockade of yellow pine boards. Six or eight long, low, wooden barracks stretched side by side across the general slope, with the captive officers’ quarters, sheathed in weather-proof black paper, at one end of them. About their doors swarmed the common prisoners, spilling out over the steps and on the grass, where some of them lounged smoking. One operatic figure in a long blanket stalked athwart an open space; but there was such poverty of drama in the spectacle at the distance we were keeping that we were glad of so much as a shirt-sleeved contractor driving out of the stockade in his buggy. On the heights overlooking the enclosure Gatling guns were posted at three or four points, and every thirty or forty feet sentries met and parted, so indifferent to us, apparently, that we wondered if we might get nearer. We ventured, but at a certain moment a sentry called to us, “Fifty yards off, please!” Our young skipper answered, “All right,” and as the sentry had a gun on his shoulder which we had every reason to believe was loaded, it was easily our pleasure to retreat to the specified limit. In fact, we came away altogether, after that, so little promise was there of our being able to satisfy our curiosity further. We came away care fully nursing such impression as we had got of a spec tacle whose historical quality we did our poor best to feel. It related us, after solicitation, to the wars against the Moors, against the Mexicans and Peruvians, against the Dutch; to the Italian campaigns of the Gran Capitan, to the Siege of Florence, to the Sack of Rome, to the wars of the Spanish Succession, and what others. I do not deny that there was a certain aesthetic joy in having the Spanish prisoners there for this effect; we came away duly grateful for what we had seen of them; and we had long duly resigned ourselves to seeing no more, when word was sent to us that our young skipper had got a permit to visit the island, and wished us to go with him.

II.

It was just such another afternoon when we went again, but this time we took the joyous trolley-car, and bounded and pirouetted along as far as the navyyard of Kittery, and there we dismounted and walked among the vast, ghostly ship-sheds, so long empty of ships. The grass grew in the Kittery navy-yard, but it was all the pleasanter for the grass, and those pale, silent sheds were far more impressive in their silence than they would have been if resonant with saw and hammer. At several points, an unarmed marine left his leisure somewhere, and lunged across our path with a mute appeal for our permit; but we were nowhere delayed till we came to the office where it had to be countersigned, and after that we had presently crossed a bridge, by shady, rustic ways, and were on the prison island. Here, if possible, the sense of something pastoral deepened; a man driving a file of cows passed before us under kindly trees, and the bell which the foremost of these milky mothers wore about her silken throat sent forth its clear, tender note as if from the depth of some grassy bosk, and instantly witched me away to the woods-pastures which my boyhood knew in southern Ohio. Even when we got to what seemed fortifications they turned out to be the walls of an old reservoir, and bore on their gate a paternal warning that children unaccompanied by adults were not allowed within.

We mounted some stone steps over this portal and were met by a young marine, who left his Gatling gun for a moment to ask for our permit, and then went back satisfied. Then we found ourselves in the presence of a sentry with a rifle on his shoulder, who was rather more exacting. Still, he only wished to be convinced, and when he had pointed out the headquarters where we were next to go, he let us over his beat. At the headquarters there was another sentry, equally serious, but equally civil, and with the intervention of an orderly our leader saw the officer of the day. He came out of the quarters looking rather blank, for he had learned that his pass admitted our party to the lines, but not to the stockade, which we might approach, at a certain point of vantage and look over into, but not penetrate. We resigned ourselves, as we must, and made what we could of the nearest prison barrack, whose door overflowed and whose windows swarmed with swarthy captives. Here they were, at such close quarters that their black, eager eyes easily pierced the pockets full of cigarettes which we had brought for them. They looked mostly very young, and there was one smiling rogue at the first window who was obviously prepared to catch anything thrown to him. He caught, in fact, the first box of cigarettes shied over the stockade; the next box flew open, and spilled its precious contents outside the dead-line under the window, where I hope some compassionate guard gathered them up and gave them to the captives.

Our fellows looked capable of any kindness to their wards short of letting them go. They were a most friendly company, with an effect of picnicking there among the sweet-fern and blueberries, where they had pitched their wooden tents with as little disturbance to the shrubbery as possible. They were very polite to us, and when, after that misadventure with the cigarettes (I had put our young leader up to throwing the box, merely supplying the corpus delicti myself), I wandered vaguely towards a Gatling gun planted on an earthen platform where the laurel and the dogroses had been cut away for it, the man in charge explained with a smile of apology that I must not pass a certain path I had already crossed.

One always accepts the apologies of a man with a Gatling gun to back them, and I retreated. That seemed the end; and we were going crestfallenly away when the officer of the day came out and allowed us to make his acquaintance. He permitted us, with laughing reluctance, to learn that he had been in the fight at Santiago, and had come with the prisoners, and he was most obligingly sorry that our permit did not let us into the stockade. I said I had some cigarettes for the prisoners, and I supposed I might send them; in, but he said he could not allow this, for they had money to buy tobacco; and he answered another of our party, who had not a soul above buttons, and who asked if she could get one from the Spaniards, that so far from promoting her wish, he would have been obliged to take away any buttons she might have got from them.

“The fact is,” he explained, “you’ve come to the wrong end for transactions in buttons and tobacco.”

But perhaps innocence so great as ours had wrought upon him. When we said we were going, and thanked him for his unavailing good-will, he looked at his watch and said they were just going to feed the prisoners; and after some parley he suddenly called out, “Music of the guard!” Instead of a regimental band, which I had supposed summoned, a single corporal ran out the barracks, touching his cap.

“Take this party round to the gate,” the officer said, and he promised us that he would see us there, and hoped we would not mind a rough walk. We could have answered that to see his prisoners fed we would wade through fathoms of red-tape; but in fact we were arrested at the last point by nothing worse than the barbed wire which fortified the outer gate. Here two marines were willing to tell us how well the prisoners lived, while we stared into the stockade through an inner gate of plank which was run back for us. They said the Spaniards had a breakfast of coffee, and hash or stew and potatoes, and a dinner of soup and roast; and now at five o’clock they were to have bread and coffee, which indeed we saw the white-capped, whitejacketed cooks bringing out in huge tin wash-boilers. Our marines were of opinion, and no doubt rightly, that these poor Spaniards had never known in their lives before what it was to have full stomachs. But the marines said they never acknowledged it, and the one who had a German accent intimated that gratitude was not a virtue of any Roman (I suppose he meant Latin) people. But I do not know that if I were a prisoner, for no fault of my own, I should be very explicitly thankful for being unusually well fed. I thought (or I think now) that a fig or a bunch of grapes would have been more acceptable to me under my own vine and fig-tree than the stew and roast of captors who were indeed showing themselves less my enemies than my own government, but were still not quite my hosts.

III.

How is it the great pieces of good luck fall to us? The clock strikes twelve as it strikes two, and with no more premonition. As we stood there expecting nothing better of it than three at the most, it suddenly struck twelve. Our officer appeared at the inner gate and bade our marines slide away the gate of barbed wire and let us into the enclosure, where he welcomed us to seats on the grass against the stockade, with many polite regrets that the tough little knots of earth beside it were not chairs.

The prisoners were already filing out of their quarters, at a rapid trot towards the benches where those great wash-boilers of coffee were set. Each man had a soup-plate and bowl of enamelled tin, and each in his turn received quarter of a loaf of fresh bread and a big ladleful of steaming coffee, which he made off with to his place at one of the long tables under a shed at the side of the stockade. One young fellow tried to get a place not his own in the shade, and our officer when he came back explained that he was a guerrillero, and rather unruly. We heard that eight of the prisoners were in irons, by sentence of their own officers, for misconduct, but all save this guerrillero here were docile and obedient enough, and seemed only too glad to get peacefully at their bread and coffee.

First among them came the men of the Cristobal Colon, and these were the best looking of all the captives. From their pretty fair average the others varied to worse and worse, till a very scrub lot, said to be ex-convicts, brought up the rear. They were nearly all little fellows, and very dark, though here and there a six-footer towered up, or a blond showed among them. They were joking and laughing together, harmlessly enough, but I must own that they looked a crew of rather sorry jail-birds; though whether any run of humanity clad in misfits of our navy blue and white, and other chance garments, with close-shaven heads, and sometimes bare feet, would have looked much less like jail-birds I am not sure. Still, they were not prepossessing, and though some of them were pathetically young, they had none of the charm of boyhood. No doubt they did not do themselves justice, and to be herded there like cattle did not improve their chances of making a favorable impression on the observer. They were kindly used by our officer and his subordinates, who mixed among them, and straightened out the confusion they got into at times, and perhaps sometimes wilfully. Their guards employed a few handy words of Spanish with them; where these did not avail, they took them by the arm and directed them; but I did not hear a harsh tone, and I saw no violence, or even so much indignity offered them as the ordinary trolley- car passenger is subjected to in Broadway. At a certain bugle-call they dispersed, when they had finished their bread and coffee, and scattered about over the grass, or returned to their barracks. We were told that these children of the sun dreaded its heat, and kept out of it whenever they could, even in its decline; but they seemed not so much to withdraw and hide themselves from that, as to vanish into the history of “old, unhappy, far-off” times, where prisoners of war, properly belong. I roused myself with a start as if I had lost them in the past.

Our officer came towards us and said gayly, “Well, you have seen the animals fed,” and let us take our grateful leave. I think we were rather a loss, in our going, to the marines, who seemed glad of a chance to talk. I am sure we were a loss to the man on guard at the inner gate, who walked his beat with reluctance when it took him from us, and eagerly when it brought him back. Then he delayed for a rapid and comprehensive exchange of opinions and ideas, successfully blending military subordination with American equality in his manner.

The whole thing was very American in the perfect decorum and the utter absence of ceremony. Those good fellows were in the clothes they wore through the fights at Santiago, and they could not have put on much splendor if they had wished, but apparently they did not wish. They were simple, straightforward, and adequate. There was some dry joking about the superiority of the prisoners’ rations and lodgings, and our officer ironically professed his intention of messing with the Spanish officers. But there was no grudge, and not a shadow of ill will, or of that stupid and atrocious hate towards the public enemy which abominable newspapers and politicians had tried to breed in the popular mind. There was nothing manifest but a sort of cheerful purpose to live up to that military ideal of duty which is so much nobler than the civil ideal of self-interest. Perhaps duty will yet become the civil ideal, when the peoples shall have learned to live for the common good, and are united for the operation of the industries as they now are for the hostilities.

IV.

Shall I say that a sense of something domestic, something homelike, imparted itself from what I had seen? Or was this more properly an effect from our visit, on the way back to the hospital, where a hundred and fifty of the prisoners lay sick of wounds and fevers? I cannot say that a humaner spirit prevailed here than in the camp; it was only a more positive humanity which was at work. Most of the sufferers were stretched on the clean cots of two long, airy, wooden shells, which received them, four days after the orders for their reception had come, with every equipment for their comfort. At five o’clock, when we passed down the aisles between their beds, many of them had a gay, nonchalant effect of having toothpicks or cigarettes in their mouths; but it was really the thermometers with which the nurses were taking their temperature. It suggested a possibility to me, however, and I asked if they were allowed to smoke, and being answered that they did smoke, anyway, whenever they could, I got rid at last of those boxes of cigarettes which had been burning my pockets, as it were, all afternoon. I gave them to such as I was told were the most deserving among the sick captives, but Heaven knows I would as willingly have given them to the least. They took my largesse gravely, as became Spaniards; one said, smiling sadly, “Muchas gracias,” but the others merely smiled sadly; and I looked in vain for the response which would have twinkled up in the faces of even moribund Italians at our looks of pity. Italians would have met our sympathy halfway; but these poor fellows were of another tradition, and in fact not all the Latin peoples are the same, though we sometimes conveniently group them together for our detestation. Perhaps there are even personal distinctions among their several nationalities, and there are some Spaniards who are as true and kind as some Americans. When we remember Cortez let us not forget Las Casas.

They lay in their beds there, these little Spanish men, whose dark faces their sickness could not blanch to more than a sickly sallow, and as they turned their dull black eyes upon us I must own that I could not “support the government” so fiercely as I might have done elsewhere. But the truth is, I was demoralized by the looks of these poor little men, who, in spite of their character of public enemies, did look so much like somebody’s brothers, and even somebody’s children. I may have been infected by the air of compassion, of scientific compassion, which prevailed in the place. There it was as wholly business to be kind and to cure as in another branch of the service it was business to be cruel and to kill. How droll these things are! The surgeons had their favorites among the patients, to all of whom they were equally devoted; inarticulate friendships had sprung up between them and certain of their hapless foes, whom they spoke of as “a sort of pets.” One of these was very useful in making the mutinous take their medicine; another was liked apparently because he was so likable. At a certain cot the chief surgeon stopped and said, “We did not expect this boy to live through the night.” He took the boy’s wrist between his thumb and finger, and asked tenderly as he leaned over him, “Poco mejor?” The boy could not speak to say that he was a little better; he tried to smile — such things do move the witness; nor does the sight of a man whose bandaged cheek has been half chopped away by a machete tend to restore one’s composure.

AMERICAN LITERARY CENTRES

One of the facts which we Americans have a difficulty in making clear to a rather inattentive world outside is that, while we have apparently a literature of our own, we have no literary centre. We have so much literature that from time to time it seems even to us we must have a literary centre. We say to ourselves, with a good deal of logic, Where there is so much smoke there must be some fire, or at least a fireplace. But it is just here that, misled by tradition, and even by history, we deceive ourselves. Really, we have no fireplace for such fire as we have kindled; or, if any one is disposed to deny this, then I say, we have a dozen fireplaces; which is quite as bad, so far as the notion of a literary centre is concerned, if it is not worse.

I once proved this fact to my own satisfaction in some papers which I wrote several years ago; but it appears, from a question which has lately come to me from England, that I did not carry conviction quite so far as that island; and I still have my work all before me, if I understand the London friend who wishes “a comparative view of the centres of literary production” among us; “how and why they change; how they stand at present; and what is the relation, for instance, of Boston to other such centres.”

I.

Here, if I cut my coat according to my cloth, t should have a garment which this whole volume would hardly stuff out with its form; and I have a fancy that if I begin by answering, as I have sometimes rather too succinctly done, that we have no more a single literary centre than Italy or than Germany has (or had before their unification), I shall not be taken at my word. I shall be right, all the same, and if I am told that in those countries there is now a tendency to such a centre, I can only say that there is none in this, and that, so far as I can see, we get further every day from having such a centre. The fault, if it is a fault, grows upon us, for the whole present tendency of American life is centrifugal, and just so far as literature is the language of our life, it shares this tendency. I do not attempt to say how it will be when, in order to spread ourselves over the earth, and convincingly to preach the blessings of our deeply incorporated civilization by the mouths of our eight-inch guns, the mind of the nation shall be politically centred at some capital; that is the function of prophecy, and I am only writing literary history, on a very small scale, with a somewhat crushing sense of limits.

Once, twice, thrice there was apparently an American literary centre: at Philadelphia, from the time Franklin went to live there until the death of Charles Brockden Brown, our first romancer; then at New York, during the period which may be roughly described as that of Irving, Poe, Willis, and Bryant; then at Boston, for the thirty or forty years illumined by the presence of Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne, Emerson, Holmes, Prescott, Parkman, and many lesser lights. These are all still great publishing centres. If it were not that the house with the largest list of American authors was still at Boston, I should say New York was now the chief publishing centre; but in the sense that London and Paris, or even Madrid and Petersburg, are literary centres, with a controlling influence throughout England and France, Spain and Russia, neither New York nor Boston is now our literary centre, whatever they may once have been. Not to take Philadelphia too seriously, I may note that when New York seemed our literary centre Irving alone among those who gave it lustre was a New-Yorker, and he mainly lived abroad; Bryant, who was a New Englander, was alone constant to the city of his adoption; Willis, a Bostonian, and Poe, a Marylander, went and came as their poverty or their prosperity compelled or invited; neither dwelt here unbrokenly, and Poe did not even die here, though he often came near starving. One cannot then strictly speak of any early American literary centre except Boston, and Boston, strictly speaking, was the New England literary centre.

However, we had really no use for an American literary centre before the Civil War, for it was only after the Civil War that we really began to have an American literature. Up to that time we had a Colonial literature, a Knickerbocker literature, and a New England literature. But as soon as the country began to feel its life in every limb with the coming of peace, it began to speak in the varying accents of all the different sections — North, East, South, West, and Farthest West; but not before that time.

II.

Perhaps the first note of this national concord, or discord, was sounded from California, in the voices of Mr. Bret Harte, of Mark Twain, of Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard (I am sorry for those who do not know his beautiful Idyls of the South Seas), and others of the remarkable group of poets and humorists whom these names must stand for. The San Francisco school briefly flourished from 1867 till 1872 or so, and while it endured it made San Francisco the first national literary centre we ever had, for its writers were of every American origin except Californian.

After the Pacific Slope, the great Middle West found utterance in the dialect verse of Mr. John Hay, and after that began the exploitation of all the local parlances, which has sometimes seemed to stop, and then has begun again. It went on in the South in the fables of Mr. Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, and in the fiction of Miss Murfree, who so long masqueraded as Charles Egbert Craddock. Louisiana found expression in the Creole stories of Mr. G. W. Cable, Indiana in the Hoosier poems of Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, and central New York in the novels of Mr. Harold Frederic; but nowhere was the new impulse so firmly and finely directed as in New England, where Miss Sarah Orne Jewett’s studies of country life antedated Miss Mary Wilkins’s work. To be sure, the portrayal of Yankee character began before either of these artists was known; Lowell’s Bigelow Papers first reflected it; Mrs. Stowe’s Old Town Stories caught it again and again; Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, in her unromantic moods, was of an excellent fidelity to it; and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke was even truer to the New England of Connecticut. With the later group Mrs. Lily Chase Wyman has pictured Rhode Island work-life with truth pitiless to the beholder, and full of that tender humanity for the material which characterizes Russian fiction.

Mr. James Lane Allen has let in the light upon Kentucky; the Red Men and White of the great plains have found their interpreter in Mr. Owen Wister, a young Philadelphian witness of their dramatic conditions and characteristics; Mr. Hamlin Garlafid had already expressed the sad circumstances of the rural Northwest in his pathetic idyls, colored from the experience of one who had been part of what he saw. Later came Mr. Henry B. Fuller, and gave us what was hardest and most sordid, as well as something of what was most touching and most amusing, in the burly-burly of Chicago.

III.

A survey of this sort imparts no just sense of the facts, and I own that I am impatient of merely naming authors and books that each tempt me to an expansion far beyond the limits of this essay; for, if I may be so personal, I have watched the growth of our literature in Americanism with intense sympathy. In my poor way I have always liked the truth, and in times past I am afraid that I have helped to make it odious to those who believed beauty was something different; but I hope that I shall not now be doing our decentralized literature a disservice by saying that its chief value is its honesty, its fidelity to our decentralized life. Sometimes I wish this were a little more constant; but upon the whole I have no reason to complain; and I think that as a very interested spectator of New York I have reason to be content with the veracity with which some phases of it have been rendered. The lightning — or the flash-light, to speak more accurately — has been rather late in striking this ungainly metropolis, but it has already got in its work with notable effect at some points. This began, I believe, with the local dramas of Mr. Edward Harrigan, a species of farces, or sketches of character, loosely hung together, with little sequence or relevancy, upon the thread of a plot which would keep the stage for two or three hours. It was very rough magic, as a whole, but in parts it was exquisite, and it held the mirror up towards politics on their social and political side, and gave us East-Side types — Irish, German, negro, and Italian — which were instantly recognizable and deliciously satisfying. I never could understand why Mr. Harrigan did not go further, but perhaps he had gone far enough; and, at any rate, he left the field open for others. The next to appear noticeably in it was Mr. Stephen Crane, whose Red Badge of Courage wronged the finer art which he showed in such New York studies as Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, and George’s Mother. He has been followed by Abraham Cahan, a Russian Hebrew, who has done portraits of his race and nation with uncommon power. They are the very Russian Hebrews of Hester Street translated from their native Yiddish into English, which the author mastered after coming here in his early manhood. He brought to his work the artistic qualities of both the Slav and the Jew, and in his ‘Jekl: A Story of the Ghetto’, he gave proof of talent which his more recent book of sketches— ‘The Imported Bride groom’ — confirms. He sees his people humorously, and he is as unsparing of their sordidness as he is compassionate of their hard circumstance and the somewhat frowsy pathos of their lives. He is a Socialist, but his fiction is wholly without “tendentiousness.”

A good many years ago — ten or twelve, at least — Mr. Harry Harland had shown us some politer New York Jews, with a romantic coloring, though with genuine feeling for the novelty and picturesqueness of his material; but I do not think of any one who has adequately dealt with our Gentile society. Mr. James has treated it historically in Washington Square, and more modernly in some passages of The Bostonians, as well as in some of his shorter stories; Mr. Edgar Fawcett has dealt with it intelligently and authoritatively in a novel or two; and Mr. Brander Matthews has sketched it, in this aspect, and that with his Gallic cleverness, neatness, and point. In the novel, ‘His Father’s Son’, he in fact faces it squarely and renders certain forms of it with masterly skill. He has done something more distinctive still in ‘The Action and the Word’, one of the best American stories I know. But except for these writers, our literature has hardly taken to New York society.

IV.

It is an even thing: New York society has not taken to our literature. New York publishes it, criticises it, and circulates it, but I doubt if New York society much reads it or cares for it, and New York is therefore by no means the literary centre that Boston once was, though a large number of our literary men live in or about New York. Boston, in my time at least, had distinctly a literary atmosphere, which more or less pervaded society; but New York has distinctly nothing of the kind, in any pervasive sense. It is a vast mart, and literature is one of the things marketed here; but our good society cares no more for it than for some other products bought and sold here; it does not care nearly so much for books as for horses or for stocks, and I suppose it is not unlike the good society of any other metropolis in this. To the general, here, journalism is a far more appreciable thing than literature, and has greater recognition, for some very good reasons; but in Boston literature had vastly more honor, and even more popular recognition, than journalism. There journalism desired to be literary, and here literature has to try hard not to be journalistic. If New York is a literary centre on the business side, as London is, Boston was a literary centre, as Weimar was, and as Edinburgh was. It felt literature, as those capitals felt it, and if it did not love it quite so much as might seem, it always respected it.

To be quite clear in what I wish to say of the present relation of Boston to our other literary centres, I must repeat that we have now no such literary centre as Boston was. Boston itself has perhaps outgrown the literary consciousness which formerly distinguished it from all our other large towns. In a place of nearly a million people (I count in the outlying places) newspapers must be more than books; and that alone says everything.

Mr. Aldrich once noticed that whenever an author died in Boston, the New-Yorkers thought they had a literary centre; and it is by some such means that the primacy has passed from Boston, even if it has not passed to New York. But still there is enough literature left in the body at Boston to keep her first among equals in some things, if not easily first in all.

Mr. Aldrich himself lives in Boston, and he is, with Mr. Stedman, the foremost of our poets. At Cambridge live Colonel T. W. Higginson, an essayist in a certain sort without rival among us; and Mr. William James, the most interesting and the most literary of psychologists, whose repute is European as well as American. Mr. Charles Eliot Norton alone survives of the earlier Cambridge group — Longfellow, Lowell, Richard Henry Dana, Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, and Henry James, the father of the novelist and the psychologist.

To Boston Mr. James Ford Rhodes, the latest of our abler historians, has gone from Ohio; and there Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Senator, whose work in literature is making itself more and more known, was born and belongs, politically, socially, and intellectually. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, a poet of wide fame in an elder generation, lives there; Mr. T. B. Aldrich lives there; and thereabouts live Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward and Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford, the first of a fame beyond the last, who was known to us so long before her. Then at Boston, or near Boston, live those artists supreme in the kind of short story which we have carried so far: Miss Jewett, Miss Wilkins, Miss Alice Brown, Mrs. Chase-Wyman, and Miss Gertrude Smith, who comes from Kansas, and writes of the prairie farm-life, though she leaves Mr. E. W. Howe (of ‘The Story of a Country Town’ and presently of the Atchison Daily Globe) to constitute, with the humorous poet Ironquill, a frontier literary centre at Topeka. Of Boston, too, though she is of western Pennsylvania origin, is Mrs. Margaret Deland, one of our most successful novelists. Miss Wilkins has married out of Massachusetts into New Jersey, and is the neighbor of Mr. H. M. Alden at Metuchen.

All these are more or less embodied and represented in the Atlantic Monthly, still the most literary, and in many things still the first of our magazines. Finally, after the chief publishing house in New York, the greatest American publishing house is in Boston, with by far the largest list of the best American books. Recently several firms of younger vigor and valor have recruited the wasted ranks of the Boston publishers, and are especially to be noted for the number of rather nice new poets they give to the light.

V.

Dealing with the question geographically, in the right American way, we descend to Hartford obliquely by way of Springfield, Massachusetts, where, in a little city of fifty thousand, a newspaper of metropolitan influence and of distinctly literary tone is published. At Hartford while Charles Dudley Warner lived, there was an indisputable literary centre; Mark Twain lives there no longer, and now we can scarcely count Hartford among our literary centres, though it is a publishing centre of much activity in subscription books.

At New Haven, Yale University has latterly attracted Mr. William H. Bishop, whose novels I always liked for the best reasons, and has long held Professor J. T. Lounsbury, who is, since Professor Child’s death at Cambridge, our best Chaucer scholar. Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, once endeared to the whole fickle American public by his Reveries of a Bachelor and his Dream Life, dwells on the borders of the pleasant town, which is also the home of Mr. J. W. De Forest, the earliest real American novelist, and for certain gifts in seeing and telling our life also one of the greatest.

As to New York (where the imagination may arrive daily from New Haven, either by a Sound boat or by eight or ten of the swiftest express trains in the world), I confess I am more and more puzzled. Here abide the poets, Mr. R. H. Stoddard, Mr. E. C. Stedman, Mr. R. W. Gilder, and many whom an envious etcetera must hide from view; the fictionists, Mr. R. H. Davis, Mrs. Kate Douglas Wiggin, Mr. Brander Matthews, Mr. Frank Hopkinson Smith, Mr. Abraham Cahan, Mr. Frank Norris, and Mr. James Lane Allen, who has left Kentucky to join the large Southern contingent, which includes Mrs. Burton Harrison and Mrs. McEnery Stuart; the historians, Professor William M. Sloane and Dr. Eggleston (reformed from a novelist); the literary and religious and economic essayists, Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, Mr. H. M. Alden, Mr. J. J. Chapman, and Mr. E. L. Godkin, with critics, dramatists, satirists, magazinists, and journalists of literary stamp in number to convince the wavering reason against itself that here beyond all question is the great literary centre of these States. There is an Authors’ Club, which alone includes a hundred and fifty authors, and, if you come to editors, there is simply no end. Magazines are published here and circulated hence throughout the land by millions; and books by the ton are the daily output of our publishers, who are the largest in the country.

If these things do not mean a great literary centre, it would be hard to say what does; and I am not going to try for a reason against such facts. It is not quality that is wanting, but perhaps it is the quantity of the quality; there is leaven, but not for so large a lump. It may be that New York is going to be our literary centre, as London is the literary centre of England, by gathering into itself all our writing talent, but it has by no means done this yet. What we can say is that more authors come here from the West and South than go elsewhere; but they often stay at home, and I fancy very wisely. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris stays at Atlanta, in Georgia; Mr. James Whitcomb Riley stays at Indianapolis; Mr. Maurice Thompson spent his whole literary life, and General Lew. Wallace still lives at Crawfordsville, Indiana; Mr. Madison Cawein stays at Louisville, Kentucky; Miss Murfree stays at St. Louis, Missouri; Francis R. Stockton spent the greater part of the year at his place in West Virginia, and came only for the winter months to New York; Mr. Edward Bellamy, until his failing health exiled him to the Far West, remained at Chicopee, Massachusetts; and I cannot think of one of these writers whom it would have advantaged in any literary wise to dwell in New York. He would not have found greater incentive than at home; and in society he would not have found that literary tone which all society had, or wished to have, in Boston when Boston was a great town and not yet a big town.

In fact, I doubt if anywhere in the world there was ever so much taste and feeling for literature as there was in that Boston. At Edinburgh (as I imagine it) there was a large and distinguished literary class, and at Weimar there was a cultivated court circle; but in Boston there was not only such a group of authors as we shall hardly see here again for hundreds of years, but there was such regard for them and their calling, not only in good society, but among the extremely well-read people of the whole intelligent city, as hardly another community has shown. New York, I am quite sure, never was such a centre, and I see no signs that it ever will be. It does not influence the literature of the whole country as Boston once did through writers whom all the young writers wished to resemble; it does not give the law, and it does not inspire the love that literary Boston inspired. There is no ideal that it represents.

A glance at the map of the Union will show how very widely our smaller literary centres are scattered; and perhaps it will be useful in following me to other more populous literary centres. Dropping southward from New York, now, we find ourselves in a literary centre of importance at Philadelphia, since that is the home of Mr. J. B. McMasters, the historian of the American people; of Mr. Owen Wister, whose fresh and vigorous work I have mentioned; and of Dr. Weir Mitchell, a novelist of power long known to the better public, and now recognized by the larger in the immense success of his historical romance, Hugh Wynne.

If I skip Baltimore, I may ignore a literary centre of great promise, but while I do not forget the excellent work of Johns Hopkins University in training men for the solider literature of the future, no Baltimore names to conjure with occur to me at the moment; and we must really get on to Washington. This, till he became ambassador at the Court of St. James, was the home of Mr. John Hay, a poet whose biography of Lincoln must rank him with the historians, and whose public service as Secretary of State classes him high among statesmen. He blotted out one literary centre at Cleveland, Ohio, when he removed to Washington, and Mr. Thomas Nelson Page another at Richmond, Virginia, when he came to the national capital. Mr. Paul Dunbar, the first negro poet to divine and utter his race, carried with him the literary centre of Dayton, Ohio, when he came to be an employee in the Congressional Library; and Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, in settling at Washington as Professor of Literature in the Catholic University, brought somewhat indirectly away with him the last traces of the old literary centre at San Francisco.

A more recent literary centre in the Californian metropolis went to pieces when Mr. Gelett Burgess came to New York and silenced the ‘Lark’, a bird of as new and rare a note as ever made itself heard in this air; but since he has returned to California, there is hope that the literary centre may form itself there again. I do not know whether Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Stetson wrecked a literary centre in leaving Los Angeles or not. I am sure only that she has enriched the literary centre of New York by the addition of a talent in sociological satire which would be extraordinary even if it were not altogether unrivalled among us.

Could one say too much of the literary centre at Chicago? I fancy, yes; or too much, at least, for the taste of the notable people who constitute it. In Mr. Henry B. Fuller we have reason to hope, from what he has already done, an American novelist of such greatness that he may well leave being the great American novelist to any one who likes taking that role. Mr. Hamlin Garland is another writer of genuine and original gift who centres at Chicago; and Mrs. Mary Catherwood has made her name well known in romantic fiction. Miss Edith Wyatt is a talent, newly known, of the finest quality in minor fiction; Mr. Robert Herrick, Mr. Will Payne in their novels, and Mr. George Ade and Mr. Peter Dump in their satires form with those named a group not to be matched elsewhere in the country. It would be hard to match among our critical journals the ‘Dial’ of Chicago; and with a fair amount of publishing in a sort of books often as good within as they are uncommonly pretty without, Chicago has a claim to rank with our first literary centres.

It is certainly to be reckoned not so very far below London, which, with Mr. Henry James, Mr. Harry Harland, and Mr. Bret Harte, seems to me an American literary centre worthy to be named with contemporary Boston. Which is our chief literary centre, however, I am not, after all, ready to say. When I remember Mr. G. W. Cable, at Northampton, Massachusetts, I am shaken in all my preoccupations; when I think of Mark Twain, it seems to me that our greatest literary centre is just now at Riverdale- on-the-Hudson.

THE STANDARD HOUSEHOLD-EFFECT COMPANY

My friend came in the other day, before we had left town, and looked round at the appointments of the room in their summer shrouds, and said, with a faint sigh, “I see you have had the eternal-womanly with you, too.”

I.

“Isn’t the eternal-womanly everywhere? What has happened to you?” I asked.

“I wish you would come to my house and see. Every rug has been up for a month, and we have been living on bare floors. Everything that could be tied up has been tied up, everything that could be sewed up has been sewed up. Everything that could be moth-balled and put away in chests has been moth-balled and put away. Everything that could be taken down has been taken down. Bags with draw-strings at their necks have been pulled over the chandeliers and tied. The pictures have been hidden in cheese-cloth, and the mirrors veiled in gauze so that I cannot see my own miserable face anywhere.”

“Come! That’s something.”

“Yes, it’s something. But I have been thinking this matter over very seriously, and I believe it is going from bad to worse. I have heard praises of the thorough housekeeping of our grandmothers, but the housekeeping of their granddaughters is a thousand times more intense.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked. “And if you do, what of it?”

“Simply this, that if we don’t put a stop to it, at the gait it’s going, it will put a stop to the eternal-womanly.”

“I suppose we should hate that.”

“Yes, it would be bad. It would be very bad; and I have been turning the matter over in my mind, and studying out a remedy.”

“The highest type of philosopher turns a thing over in his mind and lets some one else study out a remedy.”

“Yes, I know. I feel that I may be wrong in my processes, but I am sure that I am right in my results. The reason why our grandmothers could be such good housekeepers without danger of putting a stop to the eternal- womanly was that they had so few things to look after in their houses. Life was indefinitely simpler with them. But the modern improvements, as we call them, have multiplied the cares of housekeeping without subtracting its burdens, as they were expected to do. Every novel convenience and comfort, every article of beauty and luxury, every means of refinement and enjoyment in our houses, has been so much added to the burdens of housekeeping, and the granddaughters have inherited from the grandmothers an undiminished conscience against rust and the moth, which will not suffer them to forget the least duty they owe to the naughtiest of their superfluities.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” I said. This is what one usually says when one does not quite know what another is driving at; but in this case I really did know, or thought I did. “That survival of the conscience is a very curious thing, especially in our eternal-womanly. I suppose that the North American conscience was evolved from the rudimental European conscience during the first centuries of struggle here, and was more or less religious and economical in its origin. But with the advance of wealth and the decay of faith among us, the conscience seems to be simply conscientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social. The eternal-womanly continues along the old lines of housekeeping from an atavistic impulse, and no one woman can stop because all the other women are going on. It is something in the air, or something in the blood. Perhaps it is something in both.”

“Yes,” said my friend, quite as I had said already, “I see what you mean. But I think it is in the air more than in the blood. I was in Paris, about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag with drawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests. At any rate, I was there. One day I left my wife in New York carefully tagging three worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, and tagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at the house of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her house when she went into the country for the summer. ‘Leave them just as they are,’ she said. ‘But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust and the tarnish?’ She said, ‘Why, the things would have to be all gone over when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself double trouble?’ I asked her if she didn’t even roll anything up and put it away in closets, and she said: ‘Oh, you mean that old American horror of getting ready to go away. I used to go through all that at home, too, but I shouldn’t dream of it here. In the first place, there are no closets in the house, and I couldn’t put anything away if I wanted to. And really nothing happens. I scatter some Persian powder along the edges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and I pull down the shades. When I come back in the fall I have the powder swept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again. Suppose a little dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and there? The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of putting everything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of discomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit. No, thank goodness — I left American housekeeping in America.’ I asked her: ‘But if you went back?’ and she gave a sigh, and said:

“‘I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest. Everybody does it there.’ So you see,” my friend concluded, “it’s in the air, rather than the blood.”

“Then your famous specific is that our eternal-womanly should go and live in Paris?”

“Oh, dear, not” said my friend. “Nothing so drastic as all that. Merely the extinction of household property.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. “But — what do you mean?”

“Simply that hired houses, such as most of us live in, shall all be furnished houses, and that the landlord shall own every stick in them, and every appliance down to the last spoon and ultimate towel. There must be no compromise, by which the tenant agrees to provide his own linen and silver; that would neutralize the effect I intend by the expropriation of the personal proprietor, if that says what I mean. It must be in the lease, with severe penalties against the tenant in case of violation, that the landlord into furnish everything in perfect order when the tenant comes in, and is to put everything in perfect order when the tenant goes out, and the tenant is not to touch anything, to clean it, or dust it, or roll it up in moth-balls and put it away in chests. All is to be so sacredly and inalienably the property of the landlord that it shall constitute a kind of trespass if the tenant attempts to close the house for the summer or to open it for the winter in the usual way that houses are now closed and opened. Otherwise my scheme would be measurably vitiated.”

“I see what you mean,” I murmured. “Well?”

“Some years ago,” my friend went on, “when we came home from Europe, we left our furniture in storage for a time, while we rather drifted about, and did not settle anywhere in particular. During that interval my wife opened and closed five furnished houses in two years.”

“And she has lived to tell the tale?”

“She has lived to tell it a great many times. She can hardly be kept from telling it yet. But it is my belief that, although she brought to the work all the anguish of a quickened conscience, under the influence of the American conditions she had returned to, she suffered far less in her encounters with either of those furnished houses than she now does with our own furniture when she shuts up our house in the summer, and opens it for the winter. But if there had been a clause in the lease, as there should have been, forbidding her to put those houses in order when she left them, life would have been simply a rapture. Why, in Europe custom almost supplies the place of statute in such cases, and you come and go so lightly in and out of furnished houses that you do not mind taking them for a month, or a few weeks. We are very far behind in this matter, but I have no doubt that if we once came to do it on any extended scale we should do it, as we do everything else we attempt, more perfectly than any other people in the world. You see what I mean?”

“I am not sure that I do. But go on.”

“I would invert the whole Henry George principle, and I would tax personal property of the household kind so heavily that it would necessarily pass out of private hands; I would make its tenure so costly that it would be impossible to any but the very rich, who are also the very wicked, and ought to suffer.”

“Oh, come, now!”

“I refer you to your Testament. In the end, all household property would pass into the hands of the state.”

“Aren’t you getting worse and worse?”

“Oh, I’m not supposing there won’t be a long interval when household property will be in the hands of powerful monopolies, and many millionaires will be made by letting it out to middle-class tenants like you and me, along with the houses we hire of them. I have no doubt that there will be a Standard Household-Effect Company, which will extend its relations to Europe, and get the household effects of the whole world into its grasp. It will be a fearful oppression, and we shall probably groan under it for generations, but it will liberate us from our personal ownership of them, and from the far more crushing weight of the mothball. We shall suffer, but—”

“I see what you mean,” I hastened to interrupt at this point, “but these suggestive remarks of yours are getting beyond — Do you think you could defer the rest of your incompleted sentence for a week?”

“Well, for not more than a week,” said my friend, with an air of discomfort in his arrest.

II.

— “We shall not suffer so much as we do under our present system,” said my friend, completing his sentence after the interruption of a week. By this time we had both left town, and were taking up the talk again on the veranda of a sea-side hotel. “As for the eternal-womanly, it will be her salvation from herself. When once she is expropriated from her household effects, and forbidden under severe penalties from meddling with those of the Standard Household-Effect Company, she will begin to get back her peace of mind, and be the same blessing she was before she began housekeeping.”

“That may all very well be,” I assented, though I did not believe it, and I found something almost too fantastical in my friend’s scheme. “But when we are expropriated from all our dearest belongings, what is to become of our tender and sacred associations with them?”

“What has become of devotion to the family gods, and the worship of ancestors? Once the graves of the dead were at the door of the living, so that libations might be conveniently poured out on them, and the ground where they lay was inalienable because it was supposed to be used by their spirits as well as their bodies. A man could not sell the bones, because he could not sell the ghosts, of his kindred. By-and by, when religion ceased to be domestic and became social, and the service of the gods was carried on in temples common to all, it was found that the tombs of one’s forefathers could be sold without violence to their spectres. I dare say it wouldn’t be different in the case of our tender and sacred associations with tables and chairs, pots and pans, beds and bedding, pictures and bric-a-brac. We have only to evolve a little further. In fact we have already evolved far beyond the point that troubles you. Most people in modern towns and cities have changed their domiciles from ten to twenty times during their lives, and have not paid the slightest attention to the tender and sacred associations connected with them. I don’t suppose you would say that a man has no such associations with the house that has sheltered him, while he has them with the stuff that has furnished it?”

“No, I shouldn’t say that.”

“If anything, the house should be dearer than the household gear. Yet at each remove we drag a lengthening chain of tables, chairs, side-boards, portraits, landscapes, bedsteads, washstands, stoves, kitchen utensils, and bric-a-brac after us, because, as my wife says, we cannot bear to part with them. At several times in our own lives we have accumulated stuff enough to furnish two or three house and have paid a pretty stiff house-rent in the form of storage for the overflow. Why, I am doing that very thing now! Aren’t you?”

“I am — in a certain degree,” I assented.

“We all are, we well-to-do people, as we think ourselves. Once my wife and I revolted by a common impulse against the ridiculous waste and slavery of the thing. We went to the storage warehouse and sent three or four vanloads of the rubbish to the auctioneer. Some of the pieces we had not seen for years, and as each was hauled out for us to inspect and decide upon, we condemned it to the auction-block with shouts of rejoicing. Tender and sacred associations! We hadn’t had such light hearts since we had put everything in storage and gone to Europe indefinitely as we had when we left those things to be carted out of our lives forever. Not one had been a pleasure to us; the sight of every one had been a pang. All we wanted was never to set eyes on them again.”

“I must say you have disposed of the tender and sacred associations pretty effectually, so far as they relate to things in storage. But the things that we have in daily use?”

“It is exactly the same with them. Why should they be more to us than the floors and walls of the houses we move in and move out of with no particular pathos? And I think we ought not to care for them, certainly not to the point of letting them destroy our eternal-womanly with the anxiety she feels for them. She is really much more precious, if she could but realize it, than anything she swathes in cheese-cloth or wraps up with moth-balls. The proof of the fact that the whole thing is a piece of mere sentimentality is that we may live in a furnished house for years, amid all the accidents of birth and death, joy and sorrow, and yet not form the slightest attachment to the furniture. Why should we have tender and sacred associations with a thing we have bought, and not with a thing we have hired?”

“I confess, I don’t know. And do you really think we could liberate ourselves from our belongings if they didn’t belong to us? Wouldn’t the eternal-womanly still keep putting them away for summer and taking them out for winter?”

“At first, yes, there might be some such mechanical action in her; but it would be purely mechanical, and it would soon cease. When the Standard Household-Effect Company came down on the temporal-manly with a penalty for violation of the lease, the eternal-womanly would see the folly of her ways and stop; for the eternal-womanly is essentially economical, whatever we say about the dressmaker’s bills; and the very futilities of putting away and taking out, that she now wears herself to a thread with, are founded in the instinct of saving.”

“But,” I asked, “wouldn’t our household belongings lose a good deal of character if they didn’t belong to us? Wouldn’t our domestic interiors become dreadfully impersonal?”

“How many houses now have character-personality? Most people let the different dealers choose for them, as it is. Why not let the Standard Household-Effect Company, and finally the state? I am sure that either would choose much more wisely than people choose for themselves, in the few cases where they even seem to choose for themselves. In most interiors the appointments are without fitness, taste, or sense; they are the mere accretions of accident in the greater number of cases; where they are the result of design, they are worse. I see what you mean by character and personality in them. You mean the sort of madness that let itself loose a few years ago in what was called household art, and has since gone to make the junk-shops hideous. Each of the eternal-womanly was supposed suddenly to have acquired a talent for decoration and a gift for the selection and arrangement of furniture, and each began to stamp herself upon our interiors. One painted a high-shouldered stone bottle with a stork and stood it at the right corner of the mantel on a scarf; another gilded the bottle and stood it at the left corner, and tied the scarf through its handle. One knotted a ribbon around the arm of a chair; another knotted it around the leg. In a day, an hour, a moment, the chairs suddenly became angular, cushionless, springless; and the sofas were stood across corners, or parallel with the fireplace, in slants expressive of the personality of the presiding genius. The walls became all frieze and dado; and instead of the simple and dignified ugliness of the impersonal period our interiors abandoned themselves to a hysterical chaos, full of character. Some people had their doors painted black, and the daughter or mother of the house then decorated them with morning-glories. I saw such a door in a house I looked at the other day, thinking I might hire it. The sight of that black door and its morning- glories made me wish to turn aside and live with the cattle, as Walt Whitman says. No, the less we try to get personality and character into our household effects the more beautiful and interesting they will be. As soon as we put the Standard Household-Effect Company in possession and render it a relentless monopoly, it will corrupt a competent architect and decorator in each of our large towns and cities, and when you hire a new house these will be sent to advise with the eternal-womanly concerning its appointments, and tell her what she wants, and what she will like; for at present the eternal womanly, as soon as she has got a thing she wants, begins to hate it. The company’s agents will begin by convincing her that she does not need half the things she has lumbered up her house with, and that every useless thing is an ugly thing, even in the region of pure aesthetics. I once asked an Italian painter if he did not think a certain nobly imagined drawing-room was fine, and he said ‘SI. Ma troppa roba.’ There were too many rugs, tables, chairs, sofas, pictures; vases, statues, chandeliers. ‘Troppa roba’ is the vice of all our household furnishing, and it will be the death of the eternal-womanly if it is not stopped. But the corrupt agents of a giant monopoly will teach the eternal-womanly something of the wise simplicity of the South, and she will end by returning to the ideal of housekeeping as it prevails among the Latin races, whom it began with, whom civilization began with. What of a harmless, necessary moth or two, or even a few fleas?”

“That might be all very well as far as furniture and carpets and curtains are concerned,” I said, “but surely you wouldn’t apply it to pictures and objects of art?”

“I would apply it to them first of all and above all,” rejoined my friend, hardily. “Among all the people who buy and own such things there is not one in a thousand who has any real taste or feeling for them, and the objects they choose are generally such as can only deprave and degrade them further. The pictures, statues, and vases supplied by the Standard Household-Effect Company would be selected by agents with a real sense of art, and a knowledge of it. When the house-letting and house- furnishing finally passed into the hands of the state, these things would be lent from the public galleries, or from immense municipal stores for the purpose.”

“And I suppose you would have ancestral portraits supplied along with the other pictures?” I sneered.

“Ancestral portraits, of course,” said my friend, with unruffled temper. “So few people have ancestors of their own that they will be very glad to have ancestral portraits chosen for them out of the collections of the company or the state. The agents of the one, or the officers of the other, will study the existing type of family face, and will select ancestors and ancestresses whose modelling, coloring, and expression agree with it, and will keep in view the race and nationality of the family whose ancestral portraits are to be supplied, so that there shall be no chance of the grossly improbable effect which ancestral portraits now have in many cases. Yes, I see no flaw in the scheme,” my friend concluded, “and no difficulty that can’t be easily overcome. We must alienate our household furniture, and make it so sensitively and exclusively the property of some impersonal agency — company or community, I don’t care which — that any care of it shall be a sort of crime; any sense of responsibility for its preservation a species of incivism punishable by fine or imprisonment. This, and nothing short of it, will be the salvation of the eternal-womanly.”

“And the perdition of something even more precious than that!”

“What can be more precious?”

“Individuality.”

“My dear friend,” demanded my visitor, who had risen, and whom I was gradually edging to the door, “do you mean to say there is any individuality in such things now? What have we been saying about character?”

“Ah, I see what you mean,” I said.

STACCATO NOTES OF A VANISHED SUMMER

Monday afternoon the storm which had been beating up against the southeasterly wind nearly all day thickened, fold upon fold, in the northwest. The gale increased, and blackened the harbor and whitened the open sea beyond, where sail after sail appeared round the reef of Whaleback Light, and ran in a wild scamper for the safe anchorages within.

Since noon cautious coasters of all sorts had been dropping in with a casual air; the coal schooners and barges had rocked and nodded knowingly to one another, with their taper and truncated masts, on the breast of the invisible swell; and the flock of little yachts and pleasure-boats which always fleck the bay huddled together in the safe waters. The craft that came scurrying in just before nightfall were mackerel seiners from Gloucester. They were all of one graceful shape and one size; they came with all sail set, taking the waning light like sunshine on their flying-jibs, and trailing each two dories behind them, with their seines piled in black heaps between the thwarts. As soon as they came inside their jibs weakened and fell, and the anchor-chains rattled from their bows. Before the dark hid them we could have counted sixty or seventy ships in the harbor, and as the night fell they improvised a little Venice under the hill with their lights, which twinkled rhythmically, like the lamps in the basin of St. Mark, between the Maine and New Hampshire coasts.

There was a dash of rain, and we thought the storm had begun; but that ended it, as so many times this summer a dash of rain has ended a storm. The morning came veiled in a fog that kept the shipping at anchor through the day; but the next night the weather cleared. We woke to the clucking of tackle, and saw the whole fleet standing dreamily out to sea. When they were fairly gone, the summer, which had held aloof in dismay of the sudden cold, seemed to return and possess the land again; and the succession of silver days and crystal nights resumed the tranquil round which we thought had ceased.

I.

One says of every summer, when it is drawing near its end, “There never was such a summer”; but if the summer is one of those which slip from the feeble hold of elderly hands, when the days of the years may be reckoned with the scientific logic of the insurance tables and the sad conviction of the psalmist, one sees it go with a passionate prescience of never seeing its like again such as the younger witness cannot know. Each new summer of the few left must be shorter and swifter than the last: its Junes will be thirty days long, and its Julys and Augusts thirty-one, in compliance with the almanac; but the days will be of so small a compass that fourteen of them will rattle round in a week of the old size like shrivelled peas in a pod.

To be sure they swell somewhat in the retrospect, like the same peas put to soak; and I am aware now of some June days of those which we first spent at Kittery Point this year, which were nearly twenty-four hours long. Even the days of declining years linger a little here, where there is nothing to hurry them, and where it is pleasant to loiter, and muse beside the sea and shore, which are so netted together at Kittery Point that they hardly know themselves apart. The days, whatever their length, are divided, not into hours, but into mails. They begin, without regard to the sun, at eight o’clock, when the first mail comes with a few letters and papers which had forgotten themselves the night before. At half-past eleven the great mid-day mail arrives; at four o’clock there is another indifferent and scattering post, much like that at eight in the morning; and at seven the last mail arrives with the Boston evening papers and the New York morning papers, to make you forget any letters you were looking for. The opening of the mid-day mail is that which most throngs with summer folks the little postoffice under the elms, opposite the weather-beaten mansion of Sir William Pepperrell; but the evening mail attracts a large and mainly disinterested circle of natives. The day’s work on land and sea is then over, and the village leisure, perched upon fences and stayed against house walls, is of a picturesqueness which we should prize if we saw it abroad, and which I am not willing to slight on our own ground.

II.

The type is mostly of a seafaring brown, a complexion which seems to be inherited rather than personally acquired; for the commerce of Kittery Point perished long ago, and the fishing fleets that used to fit out from her wharves have almost as long ago passed to Gloucester. All that is left of the fishing interest is the weir outside which supplies, fitfully and uncertainly, the fish shipped fresh to the nearest markets. But in spite of this the tint taken from the suns and winds of the sea lingers on the local complexion; and the local manner is that freer and easier manner of people who have known other coasts, and are in some sort citizens of the world. It is very different from the inland New England manner; as different as the gentle, slow speech of the shore from the clipped nasals of the hill-country. The lounging native walk is not the heavy plod taught by the furrow, but has the lurch and the sway of the deck in it.

Nothing could be better suited to progress through the long village, which rises and sinks beside the shore like a landscape with its sea-legs on; and nothing could be more charming and friendly than this village. It is quite untainted as yet by the summer cottages which have covered so much of the coast, and made it look as if the aesthetic suburbs of New York and Boston had gone ashore upon it. There are two or three old-fashioned summer hotels; but the summer life distinctly fails to characterize the place. The people live where their forefathers have lived for two hundred and fifty years; and for the century since the baronial domain of Sir William was broken up and his possessions confiscated by the young Republic, they have dwelt in small red or white houses on their small holdings along the slopes and levels of the low hills beside the water, where a man may pass with the least inconvenience and delay from his threshold to his gunwale. Not all the houses are small; some are spacious and ambitious to be of ugly modern patterns; but most are simple and homelike. Their gardens, following the example of Sir William’s vanished pleasaunce, drop southward to the shore, where the lobster-traps and the hen-coops meet in unembarrassed promiscuity. But the fish-flakes which once gave these inclines the effect of terraced vineyards have passed as utterly as the proud parterres of the old baronet; and Kittery Point no longer “makes” a cod or a haddock for the market.

Three groceries, a butcher shop, and a small variety store study the few native wants; and with a little money one may live in as great real comfort here as for much in a larger place. The street takes care of itself; the seafaring housekeeping of New England is not of the insatiable Dutch type which will not spare the stones of the highway; but within the houses are of almost terrifying cleanliness. The other day I found myself in a kitchen where the stove shone like oxidized silver; the pump and sink were clad in oilcloth as with blue tiles; the walls were papered; the stainless floor was strewn with home-made hooked and braided rugs; and I felt the place so altogether too good for me that I pleaded to stay there for the transaction of my business, lest a sharper sense of my unfitness should await me in the parlor.

The village, with scarcely an interval of farm-lands, stretches four miles along the water-side to Portsmouth; but it seems to me that just at the point where our lines have fallen there is the greatest concentration of its character. This has apparently not been weakened, it has been accented, by the trolley-line which passes through its whole length, with gayly freighted cars coming and going every half-hour. I suppose they are not longer than other trolley-cars, but they each affect me like a procession. They are cheerful presences by day, and by night they light up the dim, winding street with the flare of their electric bulbs, and bring to the country a vision of city splendor upon terms that do not humiliate or disquiet. During July and August they are mostly filled with summer folks from a great summer resort beyond us, and their lights reveal the pretty fashions of hats and gowns in all the charm of the latest lines and tints. But there is an increasing democracy in these splendors, and one might easily mistake a passing excursionist from some neighboring inland town, or even a local native with the instinct of clothes, for a social leader from York Harbor.

With the falling leaf, the barge-like open cars close up into well-warmed saloons, and falter to hourly intervals in their course. But we are still far from the falling leaf; we are hardly come to the blushing or fading leaf. Here and there an impassioned maple confesses the autumn; the ancient Pepperrell elms fling down showers of the baronet’s fairy gold in the September gusts; the sumacs and the blackberry vines are ablaze along the tumbling black stone walls; but it is still summer, it is still summer: I cannot allow otherwise!

III.

The other day I visited for the first time (in the opulent indifference of one who could see it any time) the stately tomb of the first Pepperrell, who came from Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finally at Kittery Point. He laid there the foundations of the greatest fortune in colonial New England, which revolutionary New England seized and dispersed, as I cannot but feel, a little ruthlessly. In my personal quality I am of course averse to all great fortunes; and in my civic capacity I am a patriot. But still I feel a sort of grace in wealth a century old, and if I could now have my way, I would not have had their possessions reft from those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly help being loyal to the fountain of their baronial honors. Sir William, indeed; had helped, more than any other man, to bring the people who despoiled him to a national consciousness. If he did not imagine, he mainly managed the plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg at Cape Breton a half century before the War of Independence; and his splendid success in rending that stronghold from the French taught the colonists that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer than they liked. His soldiers were of the stamp of all succeeding American armies, and his leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sort natural to an amiable man who knew most of them personally. He was already the richest man in America, and his grateful king made him a baronet; but he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his old life in a region where he had the comfortable consideration of an unrivalled magnate. He built himself the dignified mansion which still stands across the way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within an easy stone’s cast of the far older house, where his father wedded Margery Bray, when he came, a thrifty young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles of Shoals, and established his family on Kittery. The Bray house had been the finest in the region a hundred years before the Pepperrell mansion was built; it still remembers its consequence in the panelling and wainscoting of the large, square parlor where the young people were married and in the elaborate staircase cramped into the little, square hall; and the Bray fortune helped materially to swell the wealth of the Pepperrells.

I do not know that I should care now to have a man able to ride thirty miles on his own land; but I do not mind Sir William’s having done it here a hundred and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had left his family, say, about a mile of it. They could now, indeed, enjoy it only in the collateral branches, for all Sir William’s line is extinct. The splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, and the fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his death belongs to the remotest of kinsmen. A group of these, the descendants of a prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point as the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove of drooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of Sir William’s father, cherishes the family memories with due American “proceedings.”

IV.

The meeting of the Pepperrell Association was by no means the chief excitement of our summer. In fact, I do not know that it was an excitement at all; and I am sure it was not comparable to the presence of our naval squadron, when for four days the mighty dragon and kraken shapes of steel, which had crumbled the decrepit pride of Spain in the fight at Santiago, weltered in our peaceful waters, almost under my window.

I try now to dignify them with handsome epithets; but while they were here I had moments of thinking they looked like a lot of whited locomotives, which had broken through from some trestle, in a recent accident, and were waiting the offices of a wrecking-train. The poetry of the man-of-war still clings to the “three-decker out of the foam” of the past; it is too soon yet for it to have cast a mischievous halo about the modern battle-ship; and I looked at the New York and the Texas and the Brooklyn and the rest, and thought, “Ah, but for you, and our need of proving your dire efficiency, perhaps we could have got on with the wickedness of Spanish rule in Cuba, and there had been no war!” Under my reluctant eyes the great, dreadful spectacle of the Santiago fight displayed itself in peaceful Kittery Harbor. I saw the Spanish ships drive upon the reef where a man from Dover, New Hampshire, was camping in a little wooden shanty unconscious; and I heard the dying screams of the Spanish sailors, seethed and scalded within the steel walls of their own wicked war-kettles.

As for the guns, battle or no battle, our ships, like “kind Lieutenant Belay of the ‘Hot Cross-Bun’,” seemed to be “banging away the whole day long.” They set a bad example to the dreamy old fort on the Newcastle shore, which, till they came, only recollected itself to salute the sunrise and sunset with a single gun; but which, under provocation of the squadron, formed a habit of firing twenty or thirty times at noon.

Other martial shows and noises were not so bad. I rather liked seeing the morning drill of the marines and the bluejackets on the iron decks, with the lively music that went with it. The bugle calls and the bells were charming; the week’s wash hung out to dry had its picturesqueness by day, and by night the spectral play of the search-lights along the waves and shores, and against the startled skies, was even more impressive. There was a band which gave us every evening the airs of the latest coon-songs, and the national anthems which we have borrowed from various nations; and yes, I remember the white squadron kindly, though I was so glad to have it go, and let us lapse back into our summer silence and calm. It was (I do not mind saying now) a majestic sight to see those grotesque monsters gather themselves together, and go wallowing, one after another, out of the harbor, and drop behind the ledge of Whaleback Light, as if they had sunk into the sea.

V.

A deep peace fell upon us when they went, and it must have been at this most receptive moment, when all our sympathies were adjusted in a mood of hospitable expectation, that Jim appeared.

Jim was, and still is, and I hope will long be, a cat; but unless one has lived at Kittery Point, and realized, from observation and experience, what a leading part cats may play in society, one cannot feel the full import of this fact. Not only has every house in Kittery its cat, but every house seems to have its half-dozen cats, large, little, old, and young; of divers colors, tending mostly to a dark tortoise-shell. With a whole ocean inviting to the tragic rite, I do not believe there is ever a kitten drowned in Kittery; the illimitable sea rather employs itself in supplying the fish to which “no cat’s averse,” but which the cats of Kittery demand to have cooked. They do not like raw fish; they say it plainly, and they prefer to have the bones taken out for them, though they do not insist upon that point.

At least, Jim never did so from the time when he first scented the odor of delicate young mackerel in the evening air about our kitchen, and dropped in upon the maids there with a fine casual effect of being merely out for a walk, and feeling it a neighborly thing to call. He had on a silver collar, engraved with his name and surname, which offered itself for introduction like a visiting-card. He was too polite to ask himself to the table at once, but after he had been welcomed to the family circle, he formed the habit of finding himself with us at breakfast and supper, when he sauntered in like one who should say, “Did I smell fish?” but would not go further in the way of hinting.

He had no need to do so. He was made at home, and freely invited to our best not only in fish, but in chicken, for which he showed a nice taste, and in sweetcorn, for which he revealed a most surprising fondness when it was cut from the cob for him. After he had breakfasted or supped he gracefully suggested that he was thirsty by climbing to the table where the water-pitcher stood and stretching his fine feline head towards it. When he had lapped up his saucer of water; he marched into the parlor, and riveted the chains upon our fondness by taking the best chair and going to sleep in it in attitudes of Egyptian, of Assyrian majesty. His arts were few or none; he rather disdained to practise any; he completed our conquest by maintaining himself simply a fascinating presence; and perhaps we spoiled Jim. It is certain that he came under my window at two o’clock one night, and tried the kitchen door. It resisted his efforts to get in, and then Jim began to use language which I had never heard from the lips of a cat before, and seldom from the lips of a man. I will not repeat it; enough that it carried to the listener the conviction that Jim was not sober. Where he could have got his liquor in the totally abstinent State of Maine I could not positively say, but probably of some sailor who had brought it from the neighboring New Hampshire coast. There could be no doubt, however, that Jim was drunk; and a dash from the water-pitcher seemed the only thing for him. The water did not touch him, but he started back in surprise and grief, and vanished into the night without a word.

His feelings must have been deeply wounded, for it was almost a week before he came near us again; and then I think that nothing but young lobster would have brought him. He forgave us finally, and made us of his party in the quarrel he began gradually to have with the large yellow cat of a next-door neighbor. This culminated one afternoon, after a long exchange of mediaeval defiance and insult, in a battle upon a bed of ragweed, with wild shrieks of rage, and prodigious feats of ground and lofty tumbling. It seemed to our anxious eyes that Jim was getting the worst of it; but when we afterwards visited the battle-field and picked up several tufts of blond fur, we were in a doubt which was afterwards heightened by Jim’s invasion of the yellow cat’s territory, where he stretched himself defiantly upon the grass and seemed to be challenging the yellow cat to come out and try to put him off the premises.

PART II. SHORT STORIES AND ESSAYS

WORRIES OF A WINTER WALK

The other winter, as I was taking a morning walk down to the East River, I came upon a bit of our motley life, a fact of our piebald civilization, which has perplexed me from time to time, ever since, and which I wish now to leave with the reader, for his or her more thoughtful consideration.

I.

The morning was extremely cold. It professed to be sunny, and there was really some sort of hard glitter in the air, which, so far from being tempered by this effulgence, seemed all the stonier for it. Blasts of frigid wind swept the streets, and buffeted each other in a fury of resentment when they met around the corners. Although I was passing through a populous tenement-house quarter, my way was not hindered by the sports of the tenement-house children, who commonly crowd one from the sidewalks; no frowzy head looked out over the fire-escapes; there were no peddlers’ carts or voices in the road-way; not above three or four shawl-hooded women cowered out of the little shops with small purchases in their hands; not so many tiny girls with jugs opened the doors of the beer saloons. The butchers’ windows were painted with patterns of frost, through which I could dimly see the frozen meats hanging like hideous stalactites from the roof. When I came to the river, I ached in sympathy with the shipping painfully atilt on the rocklike surface of the brine, which broke against the piers, and sprayed itself over them like showers of powdered quartz.

But it was before I reached this final point that I received into my consciousness the moments of the human comedy which have been an increasing burden to it. Within a block of the river I met a child so small that at first I almost refused to take any account of her, until she appealed to my sense of humor by her amusing disproportion to the pail which she was lugging in front of her with both of her little mittened hands. I am scrupulous about mittens, though I was tempted to write of her little naked hands, red with the pitiless cold. This would have been more effective, but it would not have been true, and the truth obliges me to own that she had a stout, warm-looking knit jacket on. The pail-which was half her height and twice her bulk-was filled to overflowing with small pieces of coal and coke, and if it had not been for this I might have taken her for a child of the better classes, she was so comfortably clad. But in that case she would have had to be fifteen or sixteen years old, in order to be doing so efficiently and responsibly the work which, as the child of the worse classes, she was actually doing at five or six. We must, indeed, allow that the early self-helpfulness of such children is very remarkable, and all the more so because they grow up into men and women so stupid that, according to the theories of all polite economists, they have to have their discontent with their conditions put into their heads by malevolent agitators.

From time to time this tiny creature put down her heavy burden to rest; it was, of course, only relatively heavy; a man would have made nothing of it. From time to time she was forced to stop and pick up the bits of coke that tumbled from her heaping pail. She could not consent to lose one of them, and at last, when she found she could not make all of them stay on the heap, she thriftily tucked them into the pockets of her jacket, and trudged sturdily on till she met a boy some years older, who planted himself in her path and stood looking at her, with his hands in his pockets. I do not say he was a bad boy, but I could see in his furtive eye that she was a sore temptation to him. The chance to have fun with her by upsetting her bucket, and scattering her coke about till she cried with vexation, was one which might not often present itself, and I do not know what made him forego it, but I know that he did, and that he finally passed her, as I have seen a young dog pass a little cat, after having stopped it, and thoughtfully considered worrying it.

I turned to watch the child out of sight, and when I faced about towards the river again I received the second instalment of my present perplexity. A cart, heavily laden with coke, drove out of the coal-yard which I now perceived I had come to, and after this cart followed two brisk old women, snugly clothed and tightly tucked in against the cold like the child, who vied with each other in catching up the lumps of coke that were jolted from the load, and filling their aprons with them; such old women, so hale, so spry, so tough and tireless, with the withered apples red in their cheeks, I have not often seen. They may have been about sixty years, or sixty-five, the time of life when most women are grandmothers and are relegated on their merits to the cushioned seats of their children’s homes, softly silk-gowned and lace-capped, dear visions of lilac and lavender, to be loved and petted by their grandchildren. The fancy can hardly put such sweet ladies in the place of those nimble beldams, who hopped about there in the wind-swept street, plucking up their day’s supply of firing from the involuntary bounty of the cart. Even the attempt is unseemly, and whether mine is at best but a feeble fancy, not bred to strenuous feats of any kind, it fails to bring them before me in that figure. I cannot imagine ladies doing that kind of thing; I can only imagine women who had lived hard and worked hard all their lives doing it; who had begun to fight with want from their cradles, like that little one with the pail, and must fight without ceasing to their graves. But I am not unreasonable; I understand and I understood what I saw to be one of the things that must be, for the perfectly good and sufficient reason that they always have been; and at the moment I got what pleasure I could out of the stolid indifference of the cart-driver, who never looked about him at the scene which interested me, but jolted onward, leaving a trail of pungent odors from his pipe in the freezing eddies of the air behind him.

II.

It is still not at all, or not so much, the fact that troubles me; it is what to do with the fact. The question began with me almost at once, or at least as soon as I faced about and began to walk homeward with the wind at my back. I was then so much more comfortable that the aesthetic instinct thawed out in me, and I found myself wondering what use I could make of what I had seen in the way of my trade. Should I have something very pathetic, like the old grandmother going out day after day to pick up coke for her sick daughter’s freezing orphans till she fell sick herself? What should I do with the family in that case? They could not be left at that point, and I promptly imagined a granddaughter, a girl of about eighteen, very pretty and rather proud, a sort of belle in her humble neighborhood, who should take her grandmother’s place. I decided that I should have her Italian, because I knew something of Italians, and could manage that nationality best, and I should call her Maddalena; either Maddalena or Marina; Marina would be more Venetian, and I saw that I must make her Venetian. Here I was on safe ground, and at once the love-interest appeared to help me out. By virtue of the law of contrasts; it appeared to me in the person of a Scandinavian lover, tall, silent, blond, whom I at once felt I could do, from my acquaintance with Scandinavian lovers in Norwegian novels. His name was Janssen, a good, distinctive Scandinavian name; I do not know but it is Swedish; and I thought he might very well be a Swede; I could imagine his manner from that of a Swedish waitress we once had.

Janssen — Jan Janssen, say-drove the coke-cart which Marina’s grandmother used to follow out of the coke-yard, to pick up the bits of coke as they were jolted from it, and he had often noticed her with deep indifference. At first he noticed Marina — or Nina, as I soon saw I must call her — with the same unconcern; for in her grandmother’s hood and jacket and check apron, with her head held shamefacedly downward, she looked exactly like the old woman. I thought I would have Nina make her self-sacrifice rebelliously, as a girl like her would be apt to do, and follow the cokecart with tears. This would catch Janssen’s notice, and he would wonder, perhaps with a little pang, what the old woman was crying about, and then he would see that it was not the old woman. He would see that it was Nina, and he would be in love with her at once, for she would not only be very pretty, but he would know that she was good, if she were willing to help her family in that way.

He would respect the girl, in his dull, sluggish, Northern way. He would do nothing to betray himself. But little by little he would begin to befriend her. He would carelessly overload his cart before he left the yard, so that the coke would fall from it more lavishly; and not only this, but if he saw a stone or a piece of coal in the street he would drive over it, so that more coke would be jolted from his load.

Nina would get to watching for him. She must not notice him much at first, except as the driver of the overladen, carelessly driven cart. But after several mornings she must see that he is very strong and handsome. Then, after several mornings more, their eyes must meet, her vivid black eyes, with the tears of rage and shame in them, and his cold blue eyes. This must be the climax; and just at this point I gave my fancy a rest, while I went into a drugstore at the corner of Avenue B to get my hands warm.

They were abominably cold, even in my pockets, and I had suffered past several places trying to think of an excuse to go in. I now asked the druggist if he had something which I felt pretty sure he had not, and this put him in the wrong, so that when we fell into talk he was very polite. We agreed admirably about the hard times, and he gave way respectfully when I doubted his opinion that the winters were getting milder. I made him reflect that there was no reason for this, and that it was probably an illusion from that deeper impression which all experiences made on us in the past, when we were younger; I ought to say that he was an elderly man, too. I said I fancied such a morning as this was not very mild for people that had no fires, and this brought me back again to Janssen and Marina, by way of the coke-cart. The thought of them rapt me so far from the druggist that I listened to his answer with a glazing eye, and did not know what he said. My hands had now got warm, and I bade him good-morning with a parting regret, which he civilly shared, that he had not the thing I had not wanted, and I pushed out again into the cold, which I found not so bad as before.

My hero and heroine were waiting for me there, and I saw that to be truly modern, to be at once realistic and mystical, to have both delicacy and strength, I must not let them get further acquainted with each other. The affair must simply go on from day to day, till one morning Jan must note that it was again the grandmother and no longer the girl who was following his cart. She must be very weak from a long sickness — I was not sure whether to have it the grippe or not, but I decided upon that provisionally and she must totter after Janssen, so that he must get down after a while to speak to her under pretence of arranging the tail-board of his cart, or something of that kind; I did not care for the detail. They should get into talk in the broken English which was the only language they could have in common, and she should burst into tears, and tell him that now Nina was sick; I imagined making this very simple, but very touching, and I really made it so touching that it brought the lump into my own throat, and I knew it would be effective with the reader. Then I had Jan get back upon his cart, and drive stolidly on again, and the old woman limp feebly after.

There should not be any more, I decided, except that one very cold morning, like that; Jan should be driving through that street, and should be passing the door of the tenement house where Nina had lived, just as a little procession should be issuing from it. The fact must be told in brief sentences, with a total absence of emotionality. The last touch must be Jan’s cart turning the street corner with Jan’s figure sharply silhouetted against the clear, cold morning light. Nothing more.

But it was at this point that another notion came into my mind, so antic, so impish, so fiendish, that if there were still any Evil One, in a world which gets on so poorly without him, I should attribute it to his suggestion; and this was that the procession which Jan saw issuing from the tenement-house door was not a funeral procession, as the reader will have rashly fancied, but a wedding procession, with Nina at the head of it, quite well again, and going to be married to the little brown youth with ear-rings who had long had her heart.

With a truly perverse instinct, I saw how strong this might be made, at the fond reader’s expense, to be sure, and how much more pathetic, in such a case, the silhouetted figure on the coke-cart would really be. I should, of course, make it perfectly plain that no one was to blame, and that the whole affair had been so tacit on Jan’s part that Nina might very well have known nothing of his feeling for her. Perhaps at the very end I might subtly insinuate that it was possible he might have had no such feeling towards her as the reader had been led to imagine.

III.

The question as to which ending I ought to have given my romance is what has ever since remained to perplex me, and it is what has prevented my ever writing it. Here is material of the best sort lying useless on my hands, which, if I could only make up my mind, might be wrought into a short story as affecting as any that wring our hearts in fiction; and I think I could get something fairly unintelligible out of the broken English of Jan and Nina’s grandmother, and certainly something novel. All that I can do now, however, is to put the case before the reader, and let him decide for himself how it should end.

The mere humanist, I suppose, might say, that I am rightly served for having regarded the fact I had witnessed as material for fiction at all; that I had no business to bewitch it with my miserable art; that I ought to have spoken to that little child and those poor old women, and tried to learn something of their lives from them, that I might offer my knowledge again for the instruction of those whose lives are easy and happy in the indifference which ignorance breeds in us. I own there is something in this, but then, on the other hand, I have heard it urged by nice people that they do not want to know about such squalid lives, that it is offensive and out of taste to be always bringing them in, and that we ought to be writing about good society, and especially creating grandes dames for their amusement. This sort of people could say to the humanist that he ought to be glad there are coke-carts for fuel to fall off from for the lower classes, and that here was no case for sentiment; for if one is to be interested in such things at all, it must be aesthetically, though even this is deplorable in the presence of fiction already overloaded with low life, and so poor in grades dames as ours.

SUMMER ISLES OF EDEN

It may be all an illusion of the map, where the Summer Islands glimmer a small and solitary little group of dots and wrinkles, remote from continental shores, with a straight line descending southeastwardly upon them, to show how sharp and swift the ship’s course is, but they seem so far and alien from my wonted place that it is as if I had slid down a steepy slant from the home-planet to a group of asteroids nebulous somewhere in middle space, and were resting there, still vibrant from the rush of the meteoric fall. There were, of course, facts and incidents contrary to such a theory: a steamer starting from New York in the raw March morning, and lurching and twisting through two days of diagonal seas, with people aboard dining and undining, and talking and smoking and cocktailing and hot-scotching and beef-teaing; but when the ship came in sight of the islands, and they began to lift their cedared slopes from the turquoise waters, and to explain their drifted snows as the white walls and white roofs of houses, then the waking sense became the dreaming sense, and the sweet impossibility of that drop through air became the sole reality.

I.

Everything here, indeed, is so strange that you placidly accept whatever offers itself as the simplest and naturalest fact. Those low hills, that climb, with their tough, dark cedars, from the summer sea to the summer sky, might have drifted down across the Gulf Stream from the coast of Maine; but when, upon closer inspection, you find them skirted with palms and bananas, and hedged with oleanders, you merely wonder that you had never noticed these growths in Maine before, where you were so familiar with the cedars. The hotel itself, which has brought the Green Mountains with it, in every detail, from the dormer-windowed mansard-roof, and the white-painted, green-shuttered walls, to the neat, school-mistressly waitresses in the dining-room, has a clump of palmettos beside it, swaying and sighing in the tropic breeze, and you know that when it migrates back to the New England hill-country, at the end of the season, you shall find it with the palmettos still before its veranda, and equally at home, somewhere in the Vermont or New Hampshire July. There will be the same American groups looking out over them, and rocking and smoking, though, alas! not so many smoking as rocking.

But where, in that translation, would be the gold braided red or blue jackets of the British army and navy which lend their lustre and color here to the veranda groups? Where should one get the house walls of whitewashed stone and the garden walls which everywhere glow in the sun, and belt in little spaces full of roses and lilies? These things must come from some other association, and in the case of him who here confesses, the lustrous uniforms and the glowing walls rise from waters as far away in time as in space, and a long-ago apparition of Venetian Junes haunts the coral shore. (They are beginning to say the shore is not coral; but no matter.) To be sure, the white roofs are not accounted for in this visionary presence; and if one may not relate them to the snowfalls of home winters, then one must frankly own them absolutely tropical, together with the green-pillared and green-latticed galleries. They at least suggest the tropical scenery of Prue and I as one remembers seeing it through Titbottom’s spectacles; and yet, if one supplies roofs of brown-red tiles, it is all Venetian enough, with the lagoon-like expanses that lend themselves to the fond effect. It is so Venetian, indeed, that it wants but a few silent gondolas and noisy gondoliers, in place of the dark, taciturn oarsmen of the clumsy native boats, to complete the coming and going illusion; and there is no good reason why the rough little isles that fill the bay should not call themselves respectively San Giorgio and San Clemente, and Sant’ Elena and San Lazzaro: they probably have no other names!

II.

These summer isles of Eden have this advantage over the scriptural Eden, that apparently it was not woman and her seed who were expelled, when once she set foot here, but the serpent and his seed: women now abound in the Summer Islands, and there is not a snake anywhere to be found. There are some tortoises and a great many frogs in their season, but no other reptiles. The frogs are fabled of a note so deep and hoarse that its vibration almost springs the environing mines of dynamite, though it has never yet done so; the tortoises grow to a great size and a patriarchal age, and are fond of Boston brown bread and baked beans, if their preferences may be judged from those of a colossal specimen in the care of an American family living on the islands. The observer who contributes this fact to science is able to report the case of a parrot-fish, on the same premises, so exactly like a large brown and purple cockatoo that, seeing such a cockatoo later on dry land, it was with a sense of something like cruelty in its exile from its native waters. The angel-fish he thinks not so much like angels; they are of a transparent purity of substance, and a cherubic innocence of expression, but they terminate in two tails, which somehow will not lend themselves to the resemblance.

Certainly the angel-fish is not so well named as the parrot-fish; it might better be called the ghostfish, it is so like a moonbeam in the pools it haunts, and of such a convertible quality with the iridescent vegetable growths about it. All things here are of a weird convertibility to the alien perception, and the richest and rarest facts of nature lavish themselves in humble association with the commonest and most familiar. You drive through long stretches of wayside willows, and realize only now and then that these willows are thick clumps of oleanders; and through them you can catch glimpses of banana-orchards, which look like dishevelled patches of gigantic cornstalks. The fields of Easter lilies do not quite live up to their photographs; they are presently suffering from a mysterious blight, and their flowers are not frequent enough to lend them that sculpturesque effect near to, which they wear as far off as New York. The potato-fields, on the other hand, are of a tender delicacy of coloring which compensates for the lilies’ lack, and the palms give no just cause for complaint, unless because they are not nearly enough to characterize the landscape, which in spite of their presence remains so northern in aspect. They were much whipped and torn by a late hurricane, which afflicted all the vegetation of the islands, and some of the royal palms were blown down. Where these are yet standing, as four or five of them are in a famous avenue now quite one-sided, they are of a majesty befitting that of any king who could pass by them: no sovereign except Philip of Macedon in his least judicial moments could pass between them.

The century-plant, which here does not require pampering under glass, but boldly takes its place out doors with the other trees of the garden, employs much less than a hundred years to bring itself to bloom. It often flowers twice or thrice in that space of time, and ought to take away the reproach of the inhabitants for a want of industry and enterprise: a century-plant at least could do no more in any air, and it merits praise for its activity in the breath of these languorous seas. One such must be in bloom at this very writing, in the garden of a house which this very writer marked for his own on his first drive ashore from the steamer to the hotel, when he bestowed in its dim, unknown interior one of the many multiples of himself which are now pretty well dispersed among the pleasant places of the earth. It fills the night with a heavy heliotropean sweetness, and on the herb beneath, in the effulgence of the waxing moon, the multiple which has spiritually expropriated the legal owners stretches itself in an interminable reverie, and hears Youth come laughing back to it on the waters kissing the adjacent shore, where other white houses (which also it inhabits) bathe their snowy underpinning. In this dream the multiple drives home from the balls of either hotel with the young girls in the little victorias which must pass its sojourn; and, being but a vision itself, fore casts the shapes of flirtation which shall night-long gild the visions of their sleep with the flash of military and naval uniforms. Of course the multiple has been at the dance too (with a shadowy heartache for the dances of forty years ago), and knows enough not to confuse the uniforms.

III.

In whatever way you walk, at whatever hour, the birds are sweetly calling in the way-side oleanders and the wild sage-bushes and the cedar-tops. They are mostly cat-birds, quite like our own; and bluebirds, but of a deeper blue than ours, and redbirds of as liquid a note, but not so varied, as that of the redbirds of our woods. How came they all here, seven hundred miles from any larger land? Some think, on the stronger wings of tempests, for it is not within the knowledge of men that men brought them. Men did, indeed, bring the pestilent sparrows which swarm about their habitations here, and beat away the gentler and lovelier birds with a ferocity unknown in the human occupation of the islands. Still, the sparrows have by no means conquered, and in the wilder places the catbird makes common cause with the bluebird and the redbird, and holds its own against them. The little ground-doves mimic in miniature the form and markings and the gait and mild behavior of our turtle-doves, but perhaps not their melancholy cooing. Nature has nowhere anything prettier than these exquisite creatures, unless it be the long-tailed white gulls which sail over the emerald shallows of the landlocked seas, and take the green upon their translucent bodies as they trail their meteoric splendor against the midday sky. Full twenty-four inches they measure from the beak to the tip of the single pen that protracts them a foot beyond their real bulk; but it is said their tempers are shorter than they, and they attack fiercely anything they suspect of too intimate a curiosity concerning their nests.

They are probably the only short-tempered things in the Summer Islands, where time is so long that if you lose your patience you easily find it again. Sweetness, if not light, seems to be the prevailing human quality, and a good share of it belongs to such of the natives as are in no wise light. Our poor brethren of a different pigment are in the large majority, and they have been seventy years out of slavery, with the full enjoyment of all their civil rights, without lifting themselves from their old inferiority. They do the hard work, in their own easy way, and possibly do not find life the burden they make it for the white man, whom here, as in our own country, they load up with the conundrum which their existence involves for him. They are not very gay, and do not rise to a joke with that flashing eagerness which they show for it at home. If you have them against a background of banana-stems, or low palms, or feathery canes, nothing could be more acceptably characteristic of the air and sky; nor are they out of place on the box of the little victorias, where visitors of the more inquisitive sex put them to constant question. Such visitors spare no islander of any color. Once, in the pretty Public Garden which the multiple had claimed for its private property, three unmerciful American women suddenly descended from the heavens and began to question the multiple’s gardener, who was peacefully digging at the rate of a spadeful every five minutes. Presently he sat down on his wheelbarrow, and then shifted, without relief, from one handle of it to the other. Then he rose and braced himself desperately against the tool-house, where, when his tormentors drifted away, he seemed to the soft eye of pity pinned to the wall by their cruel interrogations, whose barbed points were buried in the stucco behind him, and whose feathered shafts stuck out half a yard before his breast.

Whether he was black or not, pity could not see, but probably he was. At least the garrison of the islands is all black, being a Jamaican regiment of that color; and when one of the warriors comes down the white street, with his swagger-stick in his hand, and flaming in scarlet and gold upon the ground of his own blackness, it is as if a gigantic oriole were coming towards you, or a mighty tulip. These gorgeous creatures seem so much readier than the natives to laugh, that you wish to test them with a joke. But it might fail. The Summer Islands are a British colony, and the joke does not flourish so luxuriantly, here as some other things.

To be sure, one of the native fruits seems a sort of joke when you hear it first named, and when you are offered a ‘loquat’, if you are of a frivolous mind you search your mind for the connection with ‘loquor’ which it seems to intimate. Failing in this, you taste the fruit, and then, if it is not perfectly ripe, you are as far from loquaciousness as if you had bitten a green persimmon. But if it is ripe, it is delicious, and may be consumed indefinitely. It is the only native fruit which one can wish to eat at all, with an unpractised palate, though it is claimed that with experience a relish may come for the pawpaws. These break out in clusters of the size of oranges at the top of a thick pole, which may have some leaves or may not, and ripen as they fancy in the indefinite summer. They are of the color and flavor of a very insipid little muskmelon which has grown too near a patch of squashes.

One may learn to like this pawpaw, yes, but one must study hard. It is best when plucked by a young islander of Italian blood whose father orders him up the bare pole in the sunny Sunday morning air to oblige the signori, and then with a pawpaw in either hand stands talking with them about the two bad years there have been in Bermuda, and the probability of his doing better in Nuova York. He has not imagined our winter, however, and he shrinks from its boldly pictured rigors, and lets the signori go with a sigh, and a bunch of pink and crimson roses.

The roses are here, budding and blooming in the quiet bewilderment which attends the flowers and plants from the temperate zone in this latitude, and which in the case of the strawberries offered with cream and cake at another public garden expresses itself in a confusion of red, ripe fruit and white blossoms on the same stem. They are a pleasure to the nose and eye rather than the palate, as happens with so many growths of the tropics, if indeed the Summer Islands are tropical, which some plausibly deny; though why should not strawberries, fresh picked from the plant in mid-March, enjoy the right to be indifferent sweet?

IV.

What remains? The events of the Summer Islands are few, and none out of the order of athletics between teams of the army and navy, and what may be called societetics, have happened in the past enchanted fortnight. But far better things than events have happened: sunshine and rain of such like quality that one could not grumble at either, and gales, now from the south and now from the north, with the languor of the one and the vigor of the other in them. There were drives upon drives that were always to somewhere, but would have been delightful the same if they had been mere goings and comings, past the white houses overlooking little lawns through the umbrage of their palm-trees. The lawns professed to be of grass, but were really mats of close little herbs which were not grass; but which, where the sparse cattle were grazing them, seemed to satisfy their inexacting stomachs. They are never very green, and in fact the landscape often has an air of exhaustion and pause which it wears with us in late August; and why not, after all its interminable, innumerable summers? Everywhere in the gentle hollows which the coral hills (if they are coral) sink into are the patches of potatoes and lilies and onions drawing their geometrical lines across the brown-red, weedless soil; and in very sheltered spots are banana-orchards which are never so snugly sheltered there but their broad leaves are whipped to shreds. The white road winds between gray walls crumbling in an amiable disintegration, but held together against ruin by a network of maidenhair ferns and creepers of unknown name, and overhung by trees where the cactus climbs and hangs in spiky links, or if another sort, pierces them with speary stems as tall and straight as the stalks of the neighboring bamboo. The loquat-trees cluster — like quinces in the garden closes, and show their pale golden, plum-shaped fruit.

For the most part the road runs by still inland waters, but sometimes it climbs to the high downs beside the open sea, grotesque with wind-worn and wave-worn rocks, and beautiful with opalescent beaches, and the black legs of the negro children paddling in the tints of the prostrate rainbow.

All this seems probable and natural enough at the writing; but how will it be when one has turned one’s back upon it? Will it not lapse into the gross fable of travellers, and be as the things which the liars who swap them cannot themselves believe? What will be said to you when you tell that in the Summer Islands one has but to saw a hole in his back yard and take out a house of soft, creamy sandstone and set it up and go to living in it? What, when you relate that among the northern and southern evergreens there are deciduous trees which, in a clime where there is no fall or spring, simply drop their leaves when they are tired of keeping them on, and put out others when they feel like it? What, when you pretend that in the absence of serpents there are centipedes a span long, and spiders the bigness of bats, and mosquitoes that sweetly sing in the drowsing ear, but bite not; or that there are swamps but no streams, and in the marshes stand mangrove-trees whose branches grow downward into the ooze, as if they wished to get back into the earth and pull in after them the holes they emerged from?

These every-day facts seem not only incredible to the liar himself, even in their presence, but when you begin the ascent of that steep slant back to New York you foresee that they will become impossible. As impossible as the summit of the slant now appears to the sense which shudderingly figures it a Bermuda pawpaw-tree seven hundred miles high, and fruiting icicles and snowballs in the March air!

WILD FLOWERS OF THE ASPHALT

Looking through Mrs. Caroline A. Creevey’s charming book on the Flowers of Field, Hill, and Swamp, the other day, I was very forcibly reminded of the number of these pretty, wilding growths which I had been finding all the season long among the streets of asphalt and the sidewalks of artificial stone in this city; and I am quite sure that any one who has been kept in New York, as I have been this year, beyond the natural time of going into the country, can have as real a pleasure in this sylvan invasion as mine, if he will but give himself up to a sense of it.

I.

Of course it is altogether too late, now, to look for any of the early spring flowers, but I can recall the exquisite effect of the tender blue hepatica fringing the centre rail of the grip-cars, all up and down Broadway, and apparently springing from the hollow beneath, where the cable ran with such a brooklike gurgle that any damp-living plant must find itself at home there. The water-pimpernel may now be seen, by any sympathetic eye, blowing delicately along the track, in the breeze of the passing cabs, and elastically lifting itself from the rush of the cars. The reader can easily verify it by the picture in Mrs. Creevey’s book. He knows it by its other name of brook weed; and he will have my delight, I am sure, in the cardinal-flower which will be with us in August. It is a shy flower, loving the more sequestered nooks, and may be sought along the shady stretches of Third Avenue, where the Elevated Road overhead forms a shelter as of interlacing boughs. The arrow-head likes such swampy expanses as the converging surface roads form at Dead Man’s Curve and the corners of Twenty third Street. This is in flower now, and will be till September; and St.-John’s-wort, which some call the false goldenrod, is already here. You may find it in any moist, low ground, but the gutters of Wall Street, or even the banks of the Stock Exchange, are not too dry for it. The real golden-rod is not much in evidence with us, for it comes only when summer is on the wane. The other night, however, on the promenade of the Madison Square Roof Garden, I was delighted to see it growing all over the oblong dome of the auditorium, in response to the cry of a homesick cricket which found itself in exile there at the base of a potted ever green. This lonely insect had no sooner sounded its winter-boding note than the fond flower began sympathetically to wave and droop along those tarry slopes, as I have seen it on how many hill-side pastures! But this may have been only a transitory response to the cricket, and I cannot promise the visitor to the Roof Garden that he will find golden-rod there every night. I believe there is always Golden Seal, but it is the kind that comes in bottles, and not in the gloom of “deep, cool, moist woods,” where Mrs. Creevey describes it as growing, along with other wildings of such sweet names or quaint as Celandine, and Dwarf Larkspur, and Squirrel-corn, and Dutchman’s breeches, and Pearlwort, and Wood-sorrel, and Bishop’s — cap, and Wintergreen, and Indian-pipe, and Snowberry, and Adder’s-tongue, and Wakerobin, and Dragon-root, and Adam-and-Eve, and twenty more, which must have got their names from some fairy of genius. I should say it was a female fairy of genius who called them so, and that she had her own sex among mortals in mind when she invented their nomenclature, and was thinking of little girls, and slim, pretty maids, and happy young wives. The author tells how they all look, with a fine sense of their charm in her words, but one would know how they looked from their names; and when you call them over they at once transplant themselves to the depths of the dells between our sky-scrapers, and find a brief sojourn in the cavernous excavations whence other sky-scrapers are to rise.

II.

That night on the Roof Garden, when the cricket’s cry flowered the dome with golden-rod, the tall stems of rye growing among the orchestra sloped all one way at times, just like the bows of violins, in the half-dollar gale that always blows over the city at that height. But as one turns the leaves of Mrs. Creevey’s magic book-perhaps one ought to say turns its petals — the forests and the fields come and make themselves at home in the city everywhere. By virtue of it I have been more in the country in a half-hour than if I had lived all June there. When I lift my eyes from its pictures or its letter-press my vision prints the eidolons of wild flowers everywhere, as it prints the image of the sun against the air after dwelling on his brightness. The rose-mallow flaunts along Fifth Avenue and the golden threads of the dodder embroider the house fronts on the principal cross streets; and I might think at times that it was all mere fancy, it has so much the quality of a pleasing illusion.

Yet Mrs. Creevey’s book is not one to lend itself to such a deceit by any of the ordinary arts. It is rather matter of fact in form and manner, and largely owes what magic it has to the inherent charm of its subject. One feels this in merely glancing at the index, and reading such titles of chapters as “Wet Meadows and Low Grounds”; “Dry Fields — Waste Places — Waysides”; “Hills and Rocky Woods, Open Woods”; and “Deep, Cool, Moist Woods”; each a poem in itself, lyric or pastoral, and of a surpassing opulence of suggestion. The spring and, summer months pass in stately processional through the book, each with her fillet inscribed with the names of her characteristic flowers or blossoms, and brightened with the blooms themselves.

They are plucked from where nature bade them grow in the wild places, or their own wayward wills led them astray. A singularly fascinating chapter is that called “Escaped from Gardens,” in which some of these pretty runagates are catalogued. I supposed in my liberal ignorance that the Bouncing Bet was the only one of these, but I have learned that the Pansy and the Sweet Violet love to gad, and that the Caraway, the Snapdragon, the Prince’s Feather, the Summer Savory, the Star of Bethlehem, the Day-Lily, and the Tiger-Lily, and even the sluggish Stone Crop are of the vagrant, fragrant company. One is not surprised to meet the Tiger-Lily in it; that must always have had the jungle in its heart; but that the Baby’s Breath should be found wandering by the road-sides from Massachusetts and Virginia to Ohio, gives one a tender pang as for a lost child. Perhaps the poor human tramps, who sleep in barns and feed at back doors along those dusty ways, are mindful of the Baby’s Breath, and keep a kindly eye out for the little truant.

III.

As I was writing those homely names I felt again how fit and lovely they were, how much more fit and lovely than the scientific names of the flowers. Mrs. Creevey will make a botanist of you if you will let her, and I fancy a very good botanist, though I cannot speak from experience, but she will make a poet of you in spite of yourself, as I very well know; and she will do this simply by giving you first the familiar name of the flowers she loves to write of. I am not saying that the Day-Lily would not smell as sweet by her title of ‘Hemerocallis Fulva’, or that the homely, hearty Bouncing Bet would not kiss as deliciously in her scholar’s cap and gown of ‘Saponaria Officinalis’; but merely that their college degrees do not lend themselves so willingly to verse, or even melodious prose, which is what the poet is often after nowadays. So I like best to hail the flowers by the names that the fairies gave them, and the children know them by, especially when my longing for them makes them grow here in the city streets. I have a fancy that they would all vanish away if I saluted them in botanical terms. As long as I talk of cat-tail rushes, the homeless grimalkins of the areas and the back fences help me to a vision of the swamps thickly studded with their stiff spears; but if I called them ‘Typha Latifolia’, or even ‘Typha Angustifolia’, there is not the hardiest and fiercest prowler of the roof and the fire-escape but would fly the sound of my voice and leave me forlorn amid the withered foliage of my dream. The street sparrows, pestiferous and persistent as they are, would forsake my sylvan pageant if I spoke of the Bird-foot Violet as the ‘Viola Pedata’; and the commonest cur would run howling if he beard the gentle Poison Dogwood maligned as the ‘Rhus Venenata’. The very milk-cans would turn to their native pumps in disgust from my attempt to invoke our simple American Cowslip as the ‘Dodecatheon Meadia’.

IV

Yet I do not deny that such scientific nomenclature has its uses; and I should be far from undervaluing this side of Mrs. Creevey’s book. In fact, I secretly respect it the more for its botanical lore, and if ever I get into the woods or fields again I mean to go up to some of the humblest flowers, such as I can feel myself on easy terms with, and tell them what they are in Latin. I think it will surprise them, and I dare say they will some of them like it, and will want their initials inscribed on their leaves, like those signatures which the medicinal plants bear, or are supposed to bear. But as long as I am engaged in their culture amid this stone and iron and asphalt, I find it best to invite their presence by their familiar names, and I hope they will not think them too familiar. I should like to get them all naturalized here, so that the thousands of poor city children, who never saw them growing in their native places, might have some notion of how bountifully the world is equipped with beauty, and how it is governed by many laws which are not enforced by policemen. I think that would interest them very much, and I shall not mind their plucking my Barmecide blossoms, and carrying them home by the armfuls. When good-will costs nothing we ought to practise it even with the tramps, and these are very welcome, in their wanderings over the city pave, to rest their weary limbs in any of my pleached bowers they come to.

A CIRCUS IN THE SUBURBS

We dwellers in cities and large towns, if we are well-to-do, have more than our fill of pleasures of all kinds; and for now many years past we have been used to a form of circus where surfeit is nearly as great misery as famine in that kind could be. For our sins, or some of our friends’ sins, perhaps, we have now gone so long to circuses of three rings and two raised-platforms that we scarcely realize that in the country there are still circuses of one ring and no platform at all. We are accustomed, in the gross and foolish-superfluity of these city circuses, to see no feat quite through, but to turn our greedy eyes at the most important instant in the hope of greater wonders in another ring. We have four or five clowns, in as many varieties of grotesque costume, as well as a lady clown in befitting dress; but we hear none of them speak, not even the lady clown, while in the country circus the old clown of our childhood, one and indivisible, makes the same style of jokes, if not the very same jokes, that we used to hear there. It is not easy to believe all this, and I do not know that I should quite believe it myself if I had not lately been witness of it in the suburban village where I was passing the summer.

I.

The circus announced itself in the good old way weeks beforehand by the vast posters of former days and by a profusion of small bills which fell upon the village as from the clouds, and left it littered everywhere with their festive pink. They prophesied it in a name borne by the first circus I ever saw, which was also an animal show, but the animals must all have died during the fifty years past, for there is now no menagerie attached to it. I did not know this when I heard the band braying through the streets of the village on the morning of the performance, and for me the mangy old camels and the pimpled elephants of yore led the procession through accompanying ranks of boys who have mostly been in their graves for half a lifetime; the distracted ostrich thrust an advertising neck through the top of its cage, and the lion roared to himself in the darkness of his moving prison. I felt the old thrill of excitement, the vain hope of something preternatural and impossible, and I do not know what could have kept me from that circus as soon as I had done lunch. My heart rose at sight of the large tent (which was yet so very little in comparison with the tents of the three-ring and two-platform circuses); the alluring and illusory sideshows of fat women and lean men; the horses tethered in the background and stamping under the fly-bites; the old, weather-beaten grand chariot, which looked like the ghost of the grand chariot which used to drag me captive in its triumph; and the canvas shelters where the cooks were already at work over their kettles on the evening meal of the circus folk.

I expected to be kept a long while from the ticket-wagon by the crowd, but there was no crowd, and perhaps there never used to be much of a crowd. I bought my admittances without a moment’s delay, and the man who sold me my reserve seats had even leisure to call me back and ask to look at the change he had given me, mostly nickels. “I thought I didn’t give you enough,” he said, and he added one more, and sent me on to the doorkeeper with my faith in human nature confirmed and refreshed. It was cool enough outside, but within it was very warm, as it should be, to give the men with palm-leaf fans and ice-cold lemonade a chance. They were already making their rounds, and crying their wares with voices from the tombs of the dead past; and the child of the young mother who took my seat-ticket from me was going to sleep at full length on the lowermost tread of the benches, so that I had to step across its prostrate form. These reserved seats were carpeted; but I had forgotten how little one rank was raised above another, and how very trying they were upon the back and legs. But for the carpeting, I could not see how I was advantaged above the commoner folk in the unreserved seats, and I reflected how often in this world we paid for an inappreciable splendor. I could not see but they were as well off as I; they were much more gayly dressed, and some of them were even smoking cigars, while they were nearly all younger by ten, twenty, forty, or fifty years, and even more. They did not look like the country people whom I rather hoped and expected to see, but were apparently my fellow-villagers, in different stages of excitement. They manifested by the usual signs their impatience to have the performance begin, and I confess that I shared this, though I did not take part in the demonstration.

II.

I have no intention of following the events seriatim. Front time to time during their progress I renewed my old one-sided acquaintance with the circus-men. They were quite the same people, I believe, but strangely softened and ameliorated, as I hope I am, and looking not a day older, which I cannot say of myself, exactly. The supernumeraries were patently farmer boys who had entered newly upon that life in a spirit of adventure, and who wore their partial liveries, a braided coat here and a pair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and were very glad when they were not. The man who went round with a dog to keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. The man came up and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferred that the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to all the great, kind-hearted, simple circus family. He was good to the poor supes, and instructed them, not at all sneeringly, how best to manage the guy ropes for the nets when the trapeze events began.

There was, in fact, an air of pleasing domesticity diffused over the whole circus. This was, perhaps, partly an effect from our extreme proximity to its performances; I had never been on quite such intimate terms with equitation and aerostation of all kinds; but I think it was also largely from the good hearts of the whole company. A circus must become, during the season, a great brotherhood and sisterhood, especially sisterhood, and its members must forget finally that they are not united by ties of blood. I dare say they often become so, as husbands and wives and fathers and mothers, if not as brothers.

The domestic effect was heightened almost poignantly when a young lady in a Turkish-towel bath-gown came out and stood close by the band, waiting for her act on a barebacked horse of a conventional pattern. She really looked like a young goddess in a Turkish-towel bath-gown: goddesses must have worn bath-gowns, especially Venus, who was often imagined in the bath, or just out of it. But when this goddess threw off her bath-gown, and came bounding into the ring as gracefully as the clogs she wore on her slippers would let her, she was much more modestly dressed than most goddesses. What I am trying to say, however, is that, while she stood there by the band, she no more interested the musicians than if she were their collective sister. They were all in their shirt-sleeves for the sake of the coolness, and they banged and trumpeted and fluted away as indifferent to her as so many born brothers.

Indeed, when the gyrations of her horse brought her to our side of the ring, she was visibly not so youthful and not so divine as she might have been; but the girl who did the trapeze acts, and did them wonderfully, left nothing to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see why we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other people. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contemplation of her perils. One could follow every motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which she forbade herself any shrinking or reluctance.

III.

How strange is life, how sad and perplexing its contradictions! Why should such an exhibition as that be supposed to give pleasure? Perhaps it does not give pleasure, but is only a necessary fulfilment of one of the many delusions we are in with regard to each other in this bewildering world. They are of all sorts and degrees, these delusions, and I suppose that in the last analysis it was not pleasure I got from the clown and his clowning, clowned he ever so merrily. I remember that I liked hearing his old jokes, not because they were jokes, but because they were old and endeared by long association. He sang one song which I must have heard him sing at my first circus (I am sure it was he), about “Things that I don’t like to see,” and I heartily agreed with him that his book of songs, which he sent round to be sold, was fully worth the half-dime asked for it, though I did not buy it.

Perhaps the rival author in me withheld me, but, as a brother man, I will not allow that I did not feel for him and suffer with him because of the thick, white pigment which plentifully coated his face, and, with the sweat drops upon it, made me think of a newly painted wall in the rain. He was infinitely older than his personality, than his oldest joke (though you never can be sure how old a joke is), and, representatively, I dare say he outdated the pyramids. They must have made clowns whiten their faces in the dawn of time, and no doubt there were drolls among the antediluvians who enhanced the effect of their fun by that means. All the same, I pitied this clown for it, and I fancied in his wildest waggery the note of a real irascibility. Shall I say that he seemed the only member of that little circus who was not of an amiable temper? But I do not blame him, and I think it much to have seen a clown once more who jested audibly with the ringmaster and always got the better of him in repartee. It was long since I had known that pleasure.

IV.

Throughout the performance at this circus I was troubled by a curious question, whether it were really of the same moral and material grandeur as the circuses it brought to memory, or whether these were thin and slight, too. We all know how the places of our childhood, the heights, the distances, shrink and dwindle when we go back to them, and was it possible that I had been deceived in the splendor of my early circuses? The doubt was painful, but I was forced to own that there might be more truth in it than in a blind fealty to their remembered magnificence. Very likely circuses have grown not only in size, but in the richness and variety of their entertainments, and I was spoiled for the simple joys of this. But I could see no reflection of my dissatisfaction on the young faces around me, and I must confess that there was at least so much of the circus that I left when it was half over. I meant to go into the side-shows and see the fat woman and the living skeleton, and take the giant by the hand and the armless man by his friendly foot, if I might be so honored. But I did none of these things, and I am willing to believe the fault was in me, if I was disappointed in the circus. It was I who had shrunk and dwindled, and not it. To real boys it was still the size of the firmament, and was a world of wonders and delights. At least I can recognize this fact now, and can rejoice in the peaceful progress all over the country of the simple circuses which the towns never see, but which help to render the summer fairer and brighter to the unspoiled eyes and hearts they appeal to. I hope it will be long before they cease to find profit in the pleasure they give.

A SHE HAMLET

The other night as I sat before the curtain of the Garden Theatre and waited for it to rise upon the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt, a thrill of the rich expectation which cannot fail to precede the rise of any curtain upon any Hamlet passed through my eager frame. There is, indeed, no scene of drama which is of a finer horror (eighteenth-century horror) than that which opens the great tragedy. The sentry pacing up and down upon the platform at Elsinore under the winter night; the greeting between him and the comrade arriving to relieve him, with its hints of the bitter cold; the entrance of Horatio and Marcellus to these before they can part; the mention of the ghost, and, while the soldiers are in the act of protesting it a veridical phantom, the apparition of the ghost, taking the word from their lips and hushing all into a pulseless awe: what could be more simply and sublimely real, more naturally supernatural? What promise of high mystical things to come there is in the mere syllabling of the noble verse, and how it enlarges us from ourselves, for that time at least, to a disembodied unity with the troubled soul whose martyry seems foreboded in the solemn accents! As the many Hamlets on which the curtain had risen in my time passed in long procession through my memory, I seemed to myself so much of their world, and so little of the world that arrogantly calls itself the actual one, that I should hardly have been surprised to find myself one of the less considered persons of the drama who were seen but not heard in its course.

I.

The trouble in judging anything is that if you have the materials for an intelligent criticism, the case is already prejudiced in your hands. You do not bring a free mind to it, and all your efforts to free your mind are a species of gymnastics more or less admirable, but not really effective for the purpose. The best way is to own yourself unfair at the start, and then you can have some hope of doing yourself justice, if not your subject. In other words, if you went to see the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt frankly expecting to be disappointed, you were less likely in the end to be disappointed in your expectations, and you could not blame her if you were. To be ideally fair to that representation, it would be better not to have known any other Hamlet, and, above all, the Hamlet of Shakespeare.

From the first it was evident that she had three things overwhelmingly against her — her sex, her race, and her speech. You never ceased to feel for a moment that it was a woman who was doing that melancholy Dane, and that the woman was a Jewess, and the Jewess a French Jewess. These three removes put a gulf impassable between her utmost skill and the impassioned irresolution of that inscrutable Northern nature which is in nothing so masculine as its feminine reluctances and hesitations, or so little French as in those obscure emotions which the English poetry expressed with more than Gallic clearness, but which the French words always failed to convey. The battle was lost from the first, and all you could feel about it for the rest was that if it was magnificent it was not war.

While the battle went on I was the more anxious to be fair, because I had, as it were, pre-espoused the winning side; and I welcomed, in the interest of critical impartiality, another Hamlet which came to mind, through readily traceable associations. This was a Hamlet also of French extraction in the skill and school of the actor, but as much more deeply derived than the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt as the large imagination of Charles Fechter transcended in its virile range the effect of her subtlest womanish intuition. His was the first blond Hamlet known to our stage, and hers was also blond, if a reddish-yellow wig may stand for a complexion; and it was of the quality of his Hamlet in masterly technique.

II.

The Hamlet of Fechter, which rose ghostlike out of the gulf of the past, and cloudily possessed the stage where the Hamlet of Mme. Bernhardt was figuring, was called a romantic Hamlet thirty years ago; and so it was in being a break from the classic Hamlets of the Anglo-American theatre. It was romantic as Shakespeare himself was romantic, in an elder sense of the word, and not romanticistic as Dumas was romanticistic. It was, therefore, the most realistic Hamlet ever yet seen, because the most naturally poetic. Mme. Bernhardt recalled it by the perfection of her school; for Fechter’s poetic naturalness differed from the conventionality of the accepted Hamlets in nothing so much as the superiority of its self-instruction. In Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet, as in his, nothing was trusted to chance, or “inspiration.” Good or bad, what one saw was what was meant to be seen. When Fechter played Edmond Dantes or Claude Melnotte, he put reality into those preposterous inventions, and in Hamlet even his alien accent helped him vitalize the part; it might be held to be nearer the Elizabethan accent than ours; and after all, you said Hamlet was a foreigner, and in your high content with what he gave you did not mind its being in a broken vessel. When he challenged the ghost with “I call thee keeng, father, rawl-Dane,” you Would hardly have had the erring utterance bettered. It sufficed as it was; and when he said to Rosencrantz, “Will you pleh upon this pyip?” it was with such a princely authority and comradely entreaty that you made no note of the slips in the vowels except to have pleasure of their quaintness afterwards. For the most part you were not aware of these betrayals of his speech; and in certain high things it was soul interpreted to soul through the poetry of Shakespeare so finely, so directly, that there was scarcely a sense of the histrionic means.

He put such divine despair into the words, “Except my life, except my life, except my life!” following the mockery with which he had assured Polonius there was nothing he would more willingly part withal than his leave, that the heart-break of them had lingered with me for thirty years, and I had been alert for them with every Hamlet since. But before I knew, Mme. Bernhardt had uttered them with no effect whatever. Her Hamlet, indeed, cut many of the things that we have learned to think the points of Hamlet, and it so transformed others by its interpretation of the translator’s interpretation of Shakespeare that they passed unrecognized. Soliloquies are the weak invention of the enemy, for the most part, but as such things go that soliloquy of Hamlet’s, “To be or not to be,” is at least very noble poetry; and yet Mme. Bernhardt was so unimpressive in it that you scarcely noticed the act of its delivery. Perhaps this happened because the sumptuous and sombre melancholy of Shakespeare’s thought was transmitted in phrases that refused it its proper mystery. But there was always a hardness, not always from the translation, upon this feminine Hamlet. It was like a thick shell with no crevice in it through which the tenderness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet could show, except for the one moment at Ophelia’s grave, where he reproaches Laertes with those pathetic words —

      “What is the reason that you use me thus?

       I loved you ever; but it is no matter.”

Here Mme. Bernhardt betrayed a real grief, but as a woman would, and not a man. At the close of the Gonzago play, when Hamlet triumphs in a mad whirl, her Hamlet hopped up and down like a mischievous crow, a mischievous she-crow.

There was no repose in her Hamlet, though there were moments of leaden lapse which suggested physical exhaustion; and there was no range in her elocution expressive of the large vibration of that tormented spirit. Her voice dropped out, or jerked itself out, and in the crises of strong emotion it was the voice of a scolding or a hysterical woman. At times her movements, which she must have studied so hard to master, were drolly womanish, especially those of the whole person. Her quickened pace was a woman’s nervous little run, and not a man’s swift stride; and to give herself due stature, it was her foible to wear a woman’s high heels to her shoes, and she could not help tilting on them.

In the scene with the queen after the play, most English and American Hamlets have required her to look upon the counterfeit presentment of two brothers in miniatures something the size of tea-plates; but Mme. Bernhardt’s preferred full-length, life-size family portraits. The dead king’s effigy did not appear a flattered likeness in the scene-painter’s art, but it was useful in disclosing his ghost by giving place to it in the wall at the right moment. She achieved a novelty by this treatment of the portraits, and she achieved a novelty in the tone she took with the wretched queen. Hamlet appeared to scold her mother, but though it could be said that her mother deserved a scolding, was it the part of a good daughter to give it her?

One should, of course, say a good son, but long before this it had become impossible to think at all of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet as a man, if it ever had been possible. She had traversed the bounds which tradition as well as nature has set, and violated the only condition upon which an actress may personate a man. This condition is that there shall be always a hint of comedy in the part, that the spectator shall know all the time that the actress is a woman, and that she shall confess herself such before the play is over; she shall be fascinating in the guise of a man only because she is so much more intensely a woman in it. Shakespeare had rather a fancy for women in men’s roles, which, as women’s roles in his time were always taken by pretty and clever boys, could be more naturally managed then than now. But when it came to the eclaircissement, and the pretty boys, who had been playing the parts of women disguised as men, had to own themselves women, the effect must have been confused if not weakened. If Mme. Bernhardt, in the necessity of doing something Shakespearean, had chosen to do Rosalind, or Viola, or Portia, she could have done it with all the modern advantages of women in men’s roles. These characters are, of course, “lighter motions bounded in a shallower brain” than the creation she aimed at; but she could at least have made much of them, and she does not make much of Hamlet.

III.

The strongest reason against any woman Hamlet is that it does violence to an ideal. Literature is not so rich in great imaginary masculine types that we can afford to have them transformed to women; and after seeing Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet no one can altogether liberate himself from the fancy that the Prince of Denmark was a girl of uncertain age, with crises of mannishness in which she did not seem quite a lady. Hamlet is in nothing more a man than in the things to which as a man he found himself unequal; for as a woman he would have been easily superior to them. If we could suppose him a woman as Mme. Bernhardt, in spite of herself, invites us to do, we could only suppose him to have solved his perplexities with the delightful precipitation of his putative sex. As the niece of a wicked uncle, who in that case would have had to be a wicked aunt, wedded to Hamlet’s father hard upon the murder of her mother, she would have made short work of her vengeance. No fine scruples would have delayed her; she would not have had a moment’s question whether she had not better kill herself; she would have out with her bare bodkin and ended the doubt by first passing it through her aunt’s breast.

To be sure, there would then have been no play of “Hamlet,” as we have it; but a Hamlet like that imagined, a frankly feminine Hamlet, Mme. Bernhardt could have rendered wonderfully. It is in attempting a masculine Hamlet that she transcends the imaginable and violates an ideal. It is not thinkable. After you have seen it done, you say, as Mr. Clemens is said to have said of bicycling: “Yes, I have seen it, but it’s impossible. It doesn’t stand to reason.”

Art, like law, is the perfection of reason, and whatever is unreasonable in the work of an artist is inartistic. By the time I had reached these bold conclusions I was ready to deduce a principle from them, and to declare that in a true civilization such a thing as that Hamlet would be forbidden, as an offence against public morals, a violence to something precious and sacred.

In the absence of any public regulation the precious and sacred ideals in the arts must be trusted to the several artists, who bring themselves to judgment when they violate them. After Mme. Bernhardt was perversely willing to attempt the part of Hamlet, the question whether she did it well or not was of slight consequence. She had already made her failure in wishing to play the part. Her wish impugned her greatness as an artist; of a really great actress it would have been as unimaginable as the assumption of a sublime feminine role by a really great actor. There is an obscure law in this matter which it would be interesting to trace, but for the present I must leave the inquiry with the reader. I can note merely that it seems somehow more permissible for women in imaginary actions to figure as men than for men to figure as women. In the theatre we have conjectured how and why this may be, but the privilege, for less obvious reasons, seems yet more liberally granted in fiction. A woman may tell a story in the character of a man and not give offence, but a man cannot write a novel in autobiographical form from the personality of a woman without imparting the sense of something unwholesome. One feels this true even in the work of such a master as Tolstoy, whose Katia is a case in point. Perhaps a woman may play Hamlet with a less shocking effect than a man may play Desdemona, but all the same she must not play Hamlet at all. That sublime ideal is the property of the human imagination, and may not be profaned by a talent enamoured of the impossible. No harm could be done by the broadest burlesque, the most irreverent travesty, for these would still leave the ideal untouched. Hamlet, after all the horse-play, would be Hamlet; but Hamlet played by a woman, to satisfy her caprice, or to feed her famine for a fresh effect, is Hamlet disabled, for a long time, at least, in its vital essence. I felt that it would take many returns to the Hamlet of Shakespeare to efface the impression of Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet; and as I prepared to escape from my row of stalls in the darkening theatre, I experienced a noble shame for having seen the Dane so disnatured, to use Mr. Lowell’s word. I had not been obliged to come; I had voluntarily shared in the wrong done; by my presence I had made myself an accomplice in the wrong. It was high ground, but not too high for me, and I recovered a measure of self-respect in assuming it.

THE MIDNIGHT PLATOON

He had often heard of it. Connoisseurs of such matters, young newspaper men trying to make literature out of life and smuggle it into print under the guard of unwary editors, and young authors eager to get life into their literature, had recommended it to him as one of the most impressive sights of the city; and he had willingly agreed with them that he ought to see it. He imagined it very dramatic, and he was surprised to find it in his experience so largely subjective. If there was any drama at all it was wholly in his own consciousness. But the thing was certainly impressive in its way.

I.

He thought it a great piece of luck that he should come upon it by chance, and so long after he had forgotten about it that he was surprised to recognize it for the spectacle he had often promised himself the pleasure of seeing.

Pleasure is the right word; for pleasure of the painful sort that all hedonists will easily imagine was what he expected to get from it; though upon the face of it there seems no reason why a man should delight to see his fellow-men waiting in the winter street for the midnight dole of bread which must in some cases be their only meal from the last midnight to the next midnight. But the mere thought of it gave him pleasure, and the sight of it, from the very first instant. He was proud of knowing just what it was at once, with the sort of pride which one has in knowing an earthquake, though one has never felt one before. He saw the double file of men stretching up one street, and stretching down the other from the corner of the bakery where the loaves were to be given out on the stroke of twelve, and he hugged himself in a luxurious content with his perspicacity.

It was all the more comfortable to do this because he was in a coup, warmly shut against the sharp, wholesome Christmas-week weather, and was wrapped to the chin in a long fur overcoat, which he wore that night as a duty to his family, with a conscience against taking cold and alarming them for his health. He now practised another piece of self-denial: he let the cabman drive rapidly past the interesting spectacle, and carry him to the house where he was going to fetch away the child from the Christmas party. He wished to be in good time, so as to save the child from anxiety about his coming; but he promised himself to stop, going back, and glut his sensibility in a leisurely study of the scene. He got the child, with her arms full of things from the Christmas-tree, into the coup, and then he said to the cabman, respectfully leaning as far over from his box to listen as his thick greatcoat would let him: “When you get up there near that bakery again, drive slowly. I want to have a look at those men.”

“All right, sir,” said the driver intelligently, and he found his why skilfully out of the street among the high banks of the seasonable Christmas-week snow, which the street-cleaners had heaped up there till they could get round to it with their carts.

When they were in Broadway again it seemed lonelier and silenter than it was a few minutes before. Except for their own coup, the cable-cars, with their flaming foreheads, and the mechanical clangor of their gongs at the corners, seemed to have it altogether to themselves. A tall, lumbering United States mail van rolled by, and impressed my friend in the coup with a cheap and agreeable sense of mystery relative to the letters it was carrying to their varied destination at the Grand Central Station. He listened with half an ear to the child’s account of the fun she had at the party, and he watched with both eyes for the sight of the men waiting at the bakery for the charity of the midnight loaves.

He played with a fear that they might all have vanished, and with an apprehension that the cabman might forget and whirl him rapidly by the place where he had left them. But the driver remembered, and checked his horses in good time; and there were the men still, but in even greater number than before, stretching farther up Broadway and farther out along the side street. They stood slouched in dim and solemn phalanx under the night sky, so seasonably, clear and frostily atwinkle with Christmas-week stars; two by two they stood, slouched close together, perhaps for their mutual warmth, perhaps in an unconscious effort to get near the door where the loaves were to be given out, in time to share in them before they were all gone.

II.

My friend’s heart beat with glad anticipation. He was really to see this important, this representative thing to the greatest possible advantage. He rapidly explained to his companion that the giver of the midnight loaves got rid of what was left of his daily bread in that way: the next day it could not be sold, and he preferred to give it away to those who needed it, rather than try to find his account in it otherwise. She understood, and he tried to think that sometimes coffee was given with the bread, but he could not make sure of this, though he would have liked very much to have it done; it would have been much more dramatic. Afterwards he learned that it was done, and he was proud of having fancied it.

He decided that when he came alongside of the Broadway file he would get out, and go to the side door of the bakery and watch the men receiving the bread. Perhaps he would find courage to speak to them, and ask them about themselves. At the time it did not strike him that it would be indecent.

A great many things about them were open to reasonable conjecture. It was not probable that they were any of them there for their health, as the saying is. They were all there because they were hungry, or else they were there in behalf of some one else who was hungry. But it was always possible that some of them were impostors, and he wondered if any test was applied to them that would prove them deserving or undeserving. If one were poor, one ought to be deserving; if one were rich, it did not so much matter.

It seemed to him very likely that if he asked these men questions they would tell him lies. A fantastic association of their double files and those of the galley-slaves whom Don Quixote released, with the tonguey Gines de Passamonte at their head, came into his mind. He smiled, and then he thought how these men were really a sort of slaves and convicts — slaves to want and self-convicted of poverty. All at once he fancied them actually manacled there together, two by two, a coffle of captives taken in some cruel foray, and driven to a market where no man wanted to buy. He thought how old their slavery was; and he wondered if it would ever be abolished, as other slaveries had been. Would the world ever outlive it? Would some New-Year’s day come when some President would proclaim, amid some dire struggle, that their slavery was to be no more? That would be fine.

III.

He noticed how still the most of them were. A few of them stepped a little out of the line, and stamped to shake off the cold; but all the rest remained motionless, shrinking into themselves, and closer together. They might have been their own dismal ghosts, they were so still, with no more need of defence from the cold than the dead have.

He observed now that not one among them had a fur overcoat on; and at a second glance he saw that there was not an overcoat of any kind among them. He made his reflection that if any of them were impostors, and not true men, with real hunger, and if they were alive to feel that stiff, wholesome, Christmas-week cold, they were justly punished for their deceit.

He was interested by the celerity, the simultaneity of his impressions, his reflections. It occurred to him that his abnormal alertness must be something like that of a drowning person, or a person in mortal peril, and being perfectly safe and well, he was obscurely flattered by the fact.

To test his condition further he took note of the fine mass of the great dry-goods store on the hither corner, blocking itself out of the blue-black night, and of the Gothic beauty of the church beyond, so near that the coffle of captives might have issued from its sculptured portal, after vain prayer.

Fragments of conjecture, of speculation, drifted through his mind. How early did these files begin to form themselves for the midnight dole of bread? As early as ten, as nine o’clock? If so, did the fact argue habitual destitution, or merely habitual leisure? Did the slaves in the coffle make acquaintance, or remain strangers to one another, though they were closely neighbored night after night by their misery? Perhaps they joked away the weary hours of waiting; they must have their jokes. Which of them were old-comers, and which novices? Did they ever quarrel over questions of precedence? Had they some comity, some etiquette, which a man forced to leave his place could appeal to, and so get it back? Could one say to his next-hand man, “Will you please keep my place?” and would this man say to an interloper, “Excuse me, this place is engaged”? How was it with them, when the coffle worked slowly or swiftly past the door where the bread and coffee were given out, and word passed to the rear that the supply was exhausted? This must sometimes happen, and what did they do then?

IV.

My friend did not quite like to think. Vague, reproachful thoughts for all the remote and immediate luxury of his life passed through his mind. If he reformed that and gave the saving to hunger and cold? But what was the use? There was so much hunger, so much cold, that it could not go round.

The cabman was obeying his orders too faithfully. He was not only walking by the Broadway coffle, he was creeping by. His action caught the notice of the slaves, and as the coups passed them they all turned and faced it, like soldiers under review making ready to salute a superior. They were perfectly silent, perfectly respectful, but their eyes seemed to pierce the coupe through and through.

My friend was suddenly aware of a certain quality of representivity; he stood to these men for all the ease and safety that they could never, never hope to know. He was Society: Society that was to be preserved because it embodies Civilization. He wondered if they hated him in his capacity of Better Classes. He no longer thought of getting out and watching their behavior as they took their bread and coffee. He would have liked to excuse that thought, and protest that he was ashamed of it; that he was their friend, and wished them well — as well as might be without the sacrifice of his own advantages or superfluities, which he could have persuaded them would be perfectly useless. He put his hand on that of his companion trembling on his arm with sympathy, or at least with intelligence.

“You mustn’t mind. What we are and what we do is all right. It’s what they are and what they suffer that’s all wrong.”

V.

“Does that view of the situation still satisfy you?” I asked, when he had told me of this singular experience; I liked his apparently not coloring it at all.

“I don’t know,” he answered. “It seems to be the only way out.”

“Well, it’s an easy way,” I admitted, “and it’s an idea that ought to gratify the midnight platoon.”

THE BEACH AT ROCKAWAY

I confess that I cannot hear people rejoice in their summer sojourn as beyond the reach of excursionists without a certain rebellion; and yet I have to confess also that after spending a Sunday afternoon of late July, four or five years ago, with the excursionists at one of the beaches near New York, I was rather glad that my own summer sojourn was not within reach of them. I know very well that the excursionists must go somewhere, and as a man and a brother I am willing they should go anywhere, but as a friend of quiet and seclusion I should be sorry to have them come much where I am. It is not because I would deny them a share of any pleasure I enjoy, but because they are so many and I am so few that I think they would get all the pleasure and I none. I hope the reader will see how this attitude distinguishes me from the selfish people who inhumanly exult in their remoteness from excursionists.

I.

It was at Rockaway Beach that I saw these fellow-beings whose mere multitude was too much for me. They were otherwise wholly without offence towards me, and so far as I noted, towards each other; they were, in fact, the most entirely peaceable multitude I ever saw in any country, and the very quietest.

There were thousands, mounting well up towards tens of thousands, of them, in every variety of age and sex; yet I heard no voice lifted above the conversational level, except that of some infant ignorant of its privileges in a day at the sea-side, or some showman crying the attractions of the spectacle in his charge. I used to think the American crowds rather boisterous and unruly, and many years ago, when I lived in Italy, I celebrated the greater amiability and self-control of the Italian crowds. But we have certainly changed all that within a generation, and if what I saw the other day was a typical New York crowd, then the popular joy of our poorer classes is no longer the terror it once was to the peaceful observer. The tough was not visibly present, nor the toughness, either of the pure native East Side stock or of the Celtic extraction; yet there were large numbers of Americans with rather fewer recognizable Irish among the masses, who were mainly Germans, Russians, Poles, and the Jews of these several nationalities.

There was eating and drinking without limit, on every hand and in every kind, at the booths abounding in fried seafood, and at the tables under all the wide-spreading verandas of the hotels and restaurants; yet I saw not one drunken man, and of course not any drunken women. No one that I saw was even affected by drink, and no one was guilty of any rude or unseemly behavior. The crowd was, in short, a monument to the democratic ideal of life in that very important expression of life, personal conduct, I have not any notion who or what the people were, or how virtuous or vicious they privately might be; but I am sure that no society assemblage could be of a goodlier outside; and to be of a goodly outside is all that the mere spectator has a right to ask of any crowd.

I fancied, however, that great numbers of this crowd, or at least all the Americans in it, were Long-Islanders from the inland farms and villages within easy distance of the beach. They had probably the hereditary habit of coming to it, for it was a favorite resort in the time of their fathers and grandfathers, who had

      — “many an hour whiled away

         Listening to the breakers’ roar

         That washed the beach at Rockaway.”

But the clothing store and the paper pattern have equalized the cheaper dress of the people so that you can no longer know citizen and countryman apart by their clothes, still less citizeness and countrywoman; and I can only conjecture that the foreign-looking folk I saw were from New York and Brooklyn. They came by boat, and came and went by the continually arriving and departing trains, and last but not least by bicycles, both sexes. A few came in the public carriages and omnibuses of the neighborhood, but by far the vaster number whom neither the boats nor the trains had brought had their own vehicles, the all-pervading bicycles, which no one seemed so poor as not to be able to keep. The bicyclers stormed into the frantic village of the beach the whole afternoon, in the proportion of one woman to five men, and most of these must have ridden down on their wheels from the great cities. Boys ran about in the roadway with bunches of brasses, to check the wheels, and put them for safekeeping in what had once been the stable-yards of the hotels; the restaurants had racks for them, where you could see them in solid masses, side by side, for a hundred feet, and no shop was without its door-side rack, which the wheelman might slide his wheel into when he stopped for a soda, a cigar, or a sandwich. All along the road the gay bicycler and bicycless swarmed upon the piazzas of the inns, munching, lunching, while their wheels formed a fantastic decoration for the underpinning of the house and a novel balustering for the steps.

II.

The amusements provided for these throngs of people were not different from those provided for throngs of people everywhere, who must be of much the same mind and taste the world over. I had fine moments when I moved in an illusion of the Midway Plaisance; again I was at the Fete de Neuilly, with all of Paris but the accent about me; yet again the county agricultural fairs of my youth spread their spectral joys before me. At none of these places, however, was there a sounding sea or a mountainous chute, and I made haste to experience the variety these afforded, beginning with the chute, since the sea was always there, and the chute might be closed for the day if I waited to view it last. I meant only to enjoy the pleasure of others in it, and I confined my own participation to the ascent of the height from which the boat plunges down the watery steep into the oblong pool below. When I bought my ticket for the car that carried passengers up, they gave me also a pasteboard medal, certifying for me, “You have shot the chute,” and I resolved to keep this and show it to doubting friends as a proof of my daring; but it is a curious evidence of my unfitness for such deceptions that I afterwards could not find the medal. So I will frankly own that for me it was quite enough to see others shoot the chute, and that I came tamely down myself in the car. There is a very charming view from the top, of the sea with its ships, and all the mad gayety of the shore, but of course my main object was to exult in the wild absurdity of those who shot the chute. There was always a lady among the people in the clumsy flat-boat that flew down the long track, and she tried usually to be a pretty girl, who clutched her friends and lovers and shrieked aloud in her flight; but sometimes it was a sober mother of a family, with her brood about her, who was probably meditating, all the way, the inculpation of their father for any harm that came of it. Apparently no harm came of it in any case.

The boat struck the water with the impetus gained from a half- perpendicular slide of a hundred feet, bounded high into the air, struck again and again, and so flounced awkwardly across the pond to the farther shore, where the passengers debarked and went away to commune with their viscera, and to get their breath as they could. I did not ask any of them what their emotions or sensations were, but, so far as I could conjecture, the experience of shooting the chute must comprise the rare transport of a fall from a ten-story building and the delight of a tempestuous passage of the Atlantic, powerfully condensed.

The mere sight was so athletic that it took away any appetite I might have had to witness the feats of strength performed by Madame La Noire at the nearest booth on my coming out, though madame herself was at the door-to testify, in her own living picture, how much muscular force may be masked in vast masses of adipose. She had a weary, bored look, and was not without her pathos, poor soul, as few of those are who amuse the public; but I could not find her quite justifiable as a Sunday entertainment. One forgot, however, what day it was, and for the time I did not pretend to be so much better than my neighbors that I would not compromise upon a visit to, an animal show a little farther on. It was a pretty fair collection of beasts that had once been wild, perhaps, and in the cage of the lions there was a slight, sad-looking, long-haired young man, exciting them to madness by blows of a whip and pistol-shots whom I was extremely glad to have get away without being torn in pieces, or at least bitten in two. A little later I saw him at the door of the tent, very breathless, dishevelled, and as to his dress not of the spotlessness one could wish. But perhaps spotlessness is not compatible with the intimacy of lions and lionesses. He had had his little triumph; one spectator of his feat had declared that you would not see anything like that at Coney Island; and soiled and dusty as he was in his cotton tights, he was preferable to the living picture of a young lady whom he replaced as an attraction of the show. It was professedly a moral show; the manager exhorted us as we came out to say whether it was good or not; and in the box-office sat a kind and motherly faced matron who would have apparently abhorred to look upon a living picture at any distance, much less have it at her elbow.

Upon the whole, there seemed a melancholy mistake in it all; the people to whom the showmen made their appeal were all so much better, evidently, than the showmen supposed; the showmen themselves appeared harmless enough, and one could not say that there was personally any harm in the living picture; rather she looked listless and dull, but as to the face respectable enough.

I would not give the impression that most of the amusements were not in every respect decorous. As a means of pleasure, the merry-go-round, both horizontal with horses and vertical with swinging cradles, prevailed, and was none the worse for being called by the French name of carrousel, for our people aniglicize the word, and squeeze the last drop of Gallic wickedness from it by pronouncing it carousal. At every other step there were machines for weighing you and ascertaining your height; there were photographers’ booths, and X-ray apparatus for showing you the inside of your watch; and in one open tent I saw a gentleman (with his back to the public) having his fortune read in the lines of his hand by an Egyptian seeress. Of course there was everywhere soda, and places of the softer drinks abounded.

III.

I think you could only get a hard drink by ordering something to eat and sitting down to your wine or beer at a table. Again I say that I saw no effects of drink in the crowd, and in one of the great restaurants built out over the sea on piers, where there was perpetual dancing to the braying of a brass-band, the cotillon had no fire imparted to its figures by the fumes of the bar. In fact it was a very rigid sobriety that reigned here, governing the common behavior by means of the placards which hung from the roof over the heads of the dancers, and repeatedly announced that gentlemen were not allowed to dance together, or to carry umbrellas or canes while dancing, while all were entreated not to spit on the floor.

The dancers looked happy and harmless, if not very wise or splendid; they seemed people of the same simple neighborhoods, village lovers, young wives and husbands, and parties of friends who had come together for the day’s pleasure. A slight mother, much weighed down by a heavy baby, passed, rapt in an innocent envy of them, and I think she and the child’s father meant to join them as soon as they could find a place where to lay it. Almost any place would do; at another great restaurant I saw two chairs faced together, and a baby sleeping on them as quietly amid the coming and going of lagers and frankfurters as if in its cradle at home.

Lagers and frankfurters were much in evidence everywhere, especially frankfurters, which seemed to have whole booths devoted to broiling them. They disputed this dignity with soft-shell crabs, and sections of eels, piled attractively on large platters, or sizzling to an impassioned brown in deep skillets of fat. The old acrid smell of frying brought back many holidays of Italy to me, and I was again at times on the Riva at Venice, and in the Mercato Vecchio at Florence. But the Continental Sunday cannot be felt to have quite replaced the old American Sabbath yet; the Puritan leaven works still, and though so many of our own people consent willingly to the transformation, I fancy they always enjoy themselves on Sunday with a certain consciousness of wrong-doing.

IV.

I have already said that the spectator quite lost sense of what day it was. Nothing could be more secular than all the sights and sounds. It was the Fourth of July, less the fire-crackers and the drunkenness, and it was the high day of the week. But if it was very wicked, and I must recognize that the scene would be shocking to most of my readers, I feel bound to say that the people themselves did not look wicked. They looked harmless; they even looked good, the most of them. I am sorry to say they were not very good-looking. The women were pretty enough, and the men were handsome enough; perhaps the average was higher in respect of beauty than the average is anywhere else; I was lately from New England, where the people were distinctly more hard-favored; but among all those thousands at Rockaway I found no striking types. It may be that as we grow older and our satisfaction with our own looks wanes, we become more fastidious as to the looks of others. At any rate, there seems to be much less beauty in the world than there was thirty or forty years ago.

On the other hand, the dresses seem indefinitely prettier, as they should be in compensation. When we were all so handsome we could well afford to wear hoops or peg-top trousers, but now it is different, and the poor things must eke out their personal ungainliness with all the devices of the modiste and the tailor. I do not mean that there was any distinction in the dress of the crowd, but I saw nothing positively ugly or grotesquely out of taste. The costumes were as good as the customs, and I have already celebrated the manners of this crowd. I believe I must except the costumes of the bicyclesses, who were unfailingly dumpy in effect when dismounted, and who were all the more lamentable for tottering about, in their short skirts, upon the tips of their narrow little, sharp-pointed, silly high-heeled shoes. How severe I am! But those high heels seemed to take all honesty from their daring in the wholesome exercise of the wheel, and to keep them in the tradition of cheap coquetry still, and imbecilly dependent.

V.

I have almost forgotten in the interest of the human spectacle that there is a sea somewhere about at Rockaway Beach, and it is this that the people have come for. I might well forget that modest sea, it is so built out of sight by the restaurants and bath-houses and switch-backs and shops that border it, and by the hotels and saloons and shows flaring along the road that divides the village, and the planked streets that intersect this. But if you walk southward on any of the streets, you presently find the planks foundering in sand, which drifts far up over them, and then you find yourself in full sight of the ocean and the ocean bathing. Swarms and heaps of people in all lolling and lying and wallowing shapes strew the beach, and the water is full of slopping and shouting and shrieking human creatures, clinging with bare white arms to the life-lines that run from the shore to the buoys; beyond these the lifeguard stays himself in his boat with outspread oars, and rocks on the incoming surf.

All that you can say of it is that it is queer. It is not picturesque, or poetic, or dramatic; it is queer. An enfilading glance gives this impression and no other; if you go to the balcony of the nearest marine restaurant for a flanking eye-shot, it is still queer, with the added effect, in all those arms upstretched to the life-lines, of frogs’ legs inverted in a downward plunge.

On the sand before this spectacle I talked with a philosopher of humble condition who backed upon me and knocked my umbrella out of my hand. This made us beg each other’s pardon; he said that he did not know I was there, and I said it did not matter. Then we both looked at the bathing, and he said:

“I don’t like that.”

“Why,” I asked, “do you see any harm in it?”

“No. But I don’t like the looks of it. It ain’t nice. It’s queer.”

It was indeed like one of those uncomfortable dreams where you are not dressed sufficiently for company, or perhaps at all, and yet are making a very public appearance. This promiscuous bathing was not much in excess of the convention that governs the sea-bathing of the politest people; it could not be; and it was marked by no grave misconduct. Here and there a gentleman was teaching a lady to swim, with his arms round her; here and there a wild nereid was splashing another; a young Jew pursued a flight of naiads with a section of dead eel in his hand. But otherwise all was a damp and dreary decorum. I challenged my philosopher in vain for a specific cause of his dislike of the scene.

Most of the people on the sand were in bathing-dress, but there were a multitude of others who had apparently come for the sea-air and not the sea-bathing. A mother sat with a sick child on her knees; babies were cradled in the sand asleep, and people walked carefully round and over them. There were everywhere a great many poor mothers and children, who seemed getting the most of the good that was going.

VI.

But upon the whole, though I drove away from the beach celebrating the good temper and the good order of the scene to an applausive driver, I have since thought of it as rather melancholy. It was in fact no wiser or livelier than a society function in the means of enjoyment it afforded. The best thing about it was that it left the guests very much to their own devices. The established pleasures were clumsy and tiresome-looking; but one could eschew them. The more of them one eschewed, the merrier perhaps; for I doubt if the race is formed for much pleasure; and even a day’s rest is more than most people can bear. They endure it in passing, but they get home weary and cross, even after a twenty-mile run on the wheel. The road, by-the-by, was full of homeward wheels by this time, single and double and tandem, and my driver professed that their multitude greatly increased the difficulties of his profession.

SAWDUST IN THE ARENA

It was in the old Roman arena of beautiful Verona that the circus events I wish to speak of took place; in fact, I had the honor and profit of seeing two circuses there. Or, strictly speaking, it was one entire circus that I saw, and the unique speciality of another, the dying glory of a circus on its last legs, the triumphal fall of a circus superb in adversity.

I.

The entire circus was altogether Italian, with the exception of the clowns, who, to the credit of our nation, are always Americans, or advertised as such, in Italy. Its chief and almost absorbing event was a reproduction of the tournament which had then lately been held at Rome in celebration of Prince Tommaso’s coming of age, and for a copy of a copy it was really fine. It had fitness in the arena, which must have witnessed many such mediaeval shows in their time, and I am sensible still of the pleasure its effects of color gave me. There was one beautiful woman, a red blonde in a green velvet gown, who might have ridden, as she was, out of a canvas of Titian’s, if he had ever painted equestrian pictures, and who at any rate was an excellent Carpaccio. Then, the ‘Clowns Americani’ were very amusing, from a platform devoted solely to them, and it was a source of pride if not of joy with me to think that we were almost the only people present who understood their jokes. In the vast oval of the arena, however, the circus ring looked very little, not half so large, say, as the rim of a lady’s hat in front of you at the play; and on the gradines of the ancient amphitheatre we were all such a great way off that a good field-glass would have been needed to distinguish the features of the actors. I could not make out, therefore, whether the ‘Clowns Americani’ had the national expression or not, but one of them, I am sorry to say, spoke the United States language with a cockney accent. I suspect that he was an Englishman who had passed himself off upon the Italian management as a true Yankee, and who had formed himself upon our school of clowning, just as some of the recent English humorists have patterned after certain famous wits of ours. I do not know that I would have exposed this impostor, even if occasion had offered, for, after all, his fraud was a tribute to our own primacy in clowning, and the Veronese were none the worse for his erring aspirates.

The audience was for me the best part of the spectacle, as the audience always is in Italy, and I indulged my fancy in some cheap excursions concerning the place and people. I reflected that it was the same race essentially as that which used to watch the gladiatorial shows in that arena when it was new, and that very possibly there were among these spectators persons of the same blood as those Veronese patricians who had left their names carved on the front of the gradines in places, to claim this or that seat for their own. In fact, there was so little difference, probably, in their qualities, from that time to this, that I felt the process of the generations to be a sort of impertinence; and if Nature had been present, I might very well have asked her why, when she had once arrived at a given expression of humanity, she must go on repeating it indefinitely? How were all those similar souls to know themselves apart in their common eternity? Merely to have been differently circumstanced in time did not seem enough; and I think Nature would have been puzzled to answer me. But perhaps not; she may have had her reasons, as that you cannot have too much of a good thing, and that when the type was so fine in most respects as the Italian you could not do better than go on repeating impressions from it.

Certainly I myself could have wished no variation from it in the young officer of ‘bersaglieri’, who had come down from antiquity to the topmost gradine of the arena over against me, and stood there defined against the clear evening sky, one hand on his hip, and the other at his side, while his thin cockerel plumes streamed in the light wind. I have since wondered if he knew how beautiful he was, and I am sure that, if he did not, all the women there did, and that was doubtless enough for the young officer of ‘bersaglieri’.

II.

I think that he was preliminary to the sole event of that partial circus I have mentioned. This event was one that I have often witnessed elsewhere, but never in such noble and worthy keeping. The top of the outer arena wall must itself be fifty feet high, and the pole in the centre of its oval seemed to rise fifty feet higher yet. At its base an immense net was stretched, and a man in a Prince Albert coat and a derby hat was figuring about, anxiously directing the workmen who were fixing the guy-ropes, and testing every particular of the preparation with his own hands. While this went on, a young girl ran out into the arena, and, after a bow to the spectators, quickly mounted to the top of the pole, where she presently stood in statuesque beauty that took all eyes even from the loveliness of the officer of ‘bersaglieri’. There the man in the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat stepped back from the net and looked up at her.

She called down, in English that sounded like some delocalized, denaturalized speech, it was so strange then and there, “Is it all right?”

He shouted back in the same alienated tongue, “Yes; keep to the left,” and she dived straight downward in the long plunge, till, just before she reached the net, she turned a quick somersault into its elastic mesh.

It was all so exquisitely graceful that one forgot how wickedly dangerous it was; but I think that the brief English colloquy was the great wonder of the event for me, and I doubt if I could ever have been perfectly happy again, if chance had not amiably suffered me to satisfy my curiosity concerning the speakers. A few evenings after that, I was at that copy of a copy of a tournament, and, a few gradines below me, I saw the man of the Prince Albert coat and the derby hat. I had already made up my mind that he was an American, for I supposed that an Englishman would rather perish than wear such a coat with such a hat, and as I had wished all my life to speak to a circus-man, I went down and boldly accosted him. “Are you a brother Yankee?” I asked, and he laughed, and confessed that he was an Englishman, but he said he was glad to meet any one who spoke English, and he made a place for me by his side. He was very willing to tell how he happened to be there, and he explained that he was the manager of a circus, which had been playing to very good business all winter in Spain. In an evil hour he decided to come to Italy, but he found the prices so ruinously low that he was forced to disband his company. This diving girl was all that remained to him of its many attractions, and he was trying to make a living for both in a country where the admission to a circus was six of our cents, with fifty for a reserved seat. But he was about to give it up and come to America, where he said Barnum had offered him an engagement. I hope he found it profitable, and is long since an American citizen, with as good right as any of us to wear a Prince Albert coat with a derby hat.

III.

There used to be very good circuses in Venice, where many Venetians had the only opportunity of their lives to see a horse. The horses were the great attraction for them, and, perhaps in concession to their habitual destitution in this respect, the riding was providentially very good. It was so good that it did not bore me, as circus-riding mostly does, especially that of the silk-clad jockey who stands in his high boots, on his back-bared horse, and ends by waving an American flag in triumph at having been so tiresome.

I am at a loss to know why they make such an ado about the lady who jumps through paper hoops, which have first had holes poked in them to render her transit easy, or why it should be thought such a merit in her to hop over a succession of banners which are swept under her feet in a manner to minify her exertion almost to nothing, but I observe it is so at all circuses. At my first Venetian circus, which was on a broad expanse of the Riva degli Schiavoni, there was a girl who flung herself to the ground and back to her horse again, holding by his mane with one hand, quite like the goddess out of the bath-gown at my village circus the other day; and apparently there are more circuses in the world than circus events. It must be as hard to think up anything new in that kind as in romanticistic fiction, which circus-acting otherwise largely resembles.

At a circus which played all one winter in Florence I saw for the first time-outside of polite society — the clown in evening dress, who now seems essential to all circuses of metropolitan pretensions, and whom I missed so gladly at my village circus. He is nearly as futile as the lady clown, who is one of the saddest and strangest developments of New Womanhood.

Of the clowns who do not speak, I believe I like most the clown who catches a succession of peak-crowned soft hats on his head, when thrown across the ring by an accomplice. This is a very pretty sight always, and at the Hippodrome in Paris I once saw a gifted creature take his stand high up on the benches among the audience and catch these hats on his head from a flight of a hundred feet through the air. This made me proud of human nature, which is often so humiliating; and altogether I do not think that after a real country circus there are many better things in life than the Hippodrome. It had a state, a dignity, a smoothness, a polish, which I should not know where to match, and when the superb coach drove into the ring to convey the lady performers to the scene of their events, there was a majesty in the effect which I doubt if courts have the power to rival. Still, it should be remembered that I have never been at court, and speak from a knowledge of the Hippodrome only.

AT A DIME MUSEUM

“I see,” said my friend, “that you have been writing a good deal about the theatre during the past winter. You have been attacking its high hats and its high prices, and its low morals; and I suppose that you think you have done good, as people call it.”

I.

This seemed like a challenge of some sort, and I prepared myself to take it up warily. I said I should be very sorry to do good, as people called it; because such a line of action nearly always ended in spiritual pride for the doer and general demoralization for the doee. Still, I said, a law had lately been passed in Ohio giving a man who found himself behind a high hat at the theatre a claim for damages against the manager; and if the passage of this law could be traced ever so faintly and indirectly to my teachings, I should not altogether grieve for the good I had done. I added that if all the States should pass such a law, and other laws fixing a low price for a certain number of seats at the theatres, or obliging the managers to give one free performance every month, as the law does in Paris, and should then forbid indecent and immoral plays —

“I see what you mean,” said my friend, a little impatiently. “You mean sumptuary legislation. But I have not come to talk to you upon that subject, for then you would probably want to do all the talking yourself. I want to ask you if you have visited any of the cheaper amusements of this metropolis, or know anything of the really clever and charming things one may see there for a very little money.”

“Ten cents, for instance?”

“Yes.”

I answered that I would never own to having come as low down as that; and I expressed a hardy and somewhat inconsistent doubt of the quality of the amusement that could be had for that money. I questioned if anything intellectual could be had for it.

“What do you say to the ten-cent magazines?” my friend retorted. “And do you pretend that the two-dollar drama is intellectual?”

I had to confess that it generally was not, and that this was part of my grief with it.

Then he said: “I don’t contend that it is intellectual, but I say that it is often clever and charming at the ten-cent shows, just as it is less often clever and charming in the ten-cent magazines. I think the average of propriety is rather higher than it is at the two-dollar theatres; and it is much more instructive at the ten-cent shows, if you come to that. The other day,” said my friend, and in squaring himself comfortably in his chair and finding room for his elbow on the corner of my table he knocked off some books for review, “I went to a dime museum for an hour that I had between two appointments, and I must say that I never passed an hour’s time more agreeably. In the curio hall, as one of the lecturers on the curios called it — they had several lecturers in white wigs and scholars’ caps and gowns — there was not a great deal to see, I confess; but everything was very high-class. There was the inventor of a perpetual motion, who lectured upon it and explained it from a diagram. There was a fortune-teller in a three-foot tent whom I did not interview; there were five macaws in one cage, and two gloomy apes in another. On a platform at the end of the hall was an Australian family a good deal gloomier than the apes, who sat in the costume of our latitude, staring down the room with varying expressions all verging upon melancholy madness, and who gave me such a pang of compassion as I have seldom got from the tragedy of the two-dollar theatres. They allowed me to come quite close up to them, and to feed my pity upon their wild dejection in exile without stint. I couldn’t enter into conversation with them, and express my regret at finding them so far from their native boomerangs and kangaroos and pinetree grubs, but I know they felt my sympathy, it was so evident. I didn’t see their performance, and I don’t know that they had any. They may simply have been there ethnologically, but this was a good object, and the sight of their spiritual misery was alone worth the price of admission.

“After the inventor of the perpetual motion had brought his harangue to a close, we all went round to the dais where a lady in blue spectacles lectured us upon a fire-escape which she had invented, and operated a small model of it. None of the events were so exciting that we could regret it when the chief lecturer announced that this was the end of the entertainment in the curio hall, and that now the performance in the theatre was about to begin. He invited us to buy tickets at an additional charge of five, ten, or fifteen cents for the gallery, orchestra circle, or orchestra.

“I thought I could afford an orchestra stall, for once. We were three in the orchestra, another man and a young mother, not counting the little boy she had with her; there were two people in the gallery, and a dozen at least in the orchestra circle. An attendant shouted, ‘Hats off!’ and the other man and I uncovered, and a lady came up from under the stage and began to play the piano in front of it. The curtain rose, and the entertainment began at once. It was a passage apparently from real life, and it involved a dissatisfied boarder and the daughter of the landlady. There was not much coherence in it, but there was a good deal of conscience on the part of the actors, who toiled through it with unflagging energy. The young woman was equipped for the dance she brought into it at one point rather than for the part she had to sustain in the drama. It was a very blameless dance, and she gave it as if she was tired of it, but was not going to falter. She delivered her lines with a hard, Southwestern accent, and I liked fancying her having come up in a simpler-hearted section of the country than ours, encouraged by a strong local belief that she was destined to do Juliet and Lady Macbeth, or Peg Woffington at the least; but very likely she had not.

“Her performance was followed by an event involving a single character. The actor, naturally, was blackened as to his skin, but as to his dress he was all in white, and at the first glance I could see that he had temperament. I suspect that he thought I had, too, for he began to address his entire drama to me. This was not surprising, for it would not have been the thing for him to single out the young mother; and the other man in the orchestra stalls seemed a vague and inexperienced youth, whom he would hardly have given the preference over me. I felt the compliment, but upon the whole it embarrassed me; it was too intimate, and it gave me a publicity I would willingly have foregone. I did what I could to reject it, by feigning an indifference to his jokes; I even frowned a measure of disapproval; but this merely stimulated his ambition. He was really a merry creature, and when he had got off a number of very good things which were received in perfect silence, and looked over his audience with a woe-begone eye, and said, with an effect of delicate apology, ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you any,’ I broke down and laughed, and that delivered me into his hand. He immediately said to me that now he would tell me about a friend of his, who had a pretty large family, eight of them living, and one in Philadelphia; and then for no reason he seemed to change his mind, and said he would sing me a song written expressly for him — by an expressman; and he went on from one wild gayety to another, until he had worked his audience up to quite a frenzy of enthusiasm, and almost had a recall when he went off.

“I was rather glad to be rid of him, and I was glad that the next performers, who were a lady and a gentleman contortionist of Spanish- American extraction, behaved more impartially. They were really remarkable artists in their way, and though it’s a painful way, I couldn’t help admiring their gift in bowknots and other difficult poses. The gentleman got abundant applause, but the lady at first got none. I think perhaps it was because, with the correct feeling that prevailed among us, we could not see a lady contort herself with so much approval as a gentleman, and that there was a wound to our sense of propriety in witnessing her skill. But I could see that the poor girl was hurt in her artist pride by our severity, and at the next thing she did I led off the applause with my umbrella. She instantly lighted up with a joyful smile, and the young mother in the orchestra leaned forward to nod her sympathy to me while she clapped. We were fast becoming a domestic circle, and it was very pleasant, but I thought that upon the whole I had better go.”

“And do you think you had a profitable hour at that show?” I asked, with a smile that was meant to be sceptical.

“Profitable?” said my friend. “I said agreeable. I don’t know about the profit. But it was very good variety, and it was very cheap. I understand that this is the kind of thing you want the two-dollar theatre to come down to, or up to.”

“Not exactly, or not quite,” I returned, thoughtfully, “though I must say I think your time was as well spent as it would have been at most of the plays I have seen this winter.”

My friend left the point, and said, with a dreamy air: “It was all very pathetic, in a way. Three out of those five people were really clever, and certainly artists. That colored brother was almost a genius, a very common variety of genius, but still a genius, with a gift for his calling that couldn’t be disputed. He was a genuine humorist, and I sorrowed over him — after I got safely away from his intimacy — as I should over some author who was struggling along without winning his public. Why not? One is as much in the show business as the other. There is a difference of quality rather than of kind. Perhaps by-and-by my colored humorist will make a strike with his branch of the public, as you are always hoping to do with yours.”

“You don’t think you’re making yourself rather offensive?” I suggested.

“Not intentionally. Aren’t the arts one? How can you say that any art is higher than the others? Why is it nobler to contort the mind than to contort the body?”

“I am always saying that it is not at all noble to contort the mind,” I returned, “and I feel that to aim at nothing higher than the amusement of your readers is to bring yourself most distinctly to the level of the show business.”

“Yes, I know that is your pose,” said my friend. “And I dare say you really think that you make a distinction in facts when you make a distinction in terms. If you don’t amuse your readers, you don’t keep them; practically, you cease to exist. You may call it interesting them, if you like; but, really, what is the difference? You do your little act, and because the stage is large and the house is fine, you fancy you are not of that sad brotherhood which aims to please in humbler places, with perhaps cruder means—”

“I don’t know whether I like your saws less than your instances, or your instances less than your saws,” I broke in. “Have you been at the circus yet?”

II.

“Yet?” demanded my friend. “I went the first night, and I have been a good deal interested in the examination of my emotions ever since. I can’t find out just why I have so much pleasure in the trapeze. Half the time I want to shut my eyes, and a good part of the time I do look away; but I wouldn’t spare any actor the most dangerous feat. One of the poor girls, that night, dropped awkwardly into the net after her performance, and limped off to the dressing-room with a sprained ankle. It made me rather sad to think that now she must perhaps give up her perilous work for a while, and pay a doctor, and lose her salary, but it didn’t take away my interest in the other trapezists flying through the air above another net.

“If I had honestly complained of anything it would have been of the superfluity which glutted rather than fed me. How can you watch three sets of trapezists at once? You really see neither well. It’s the same with the three rings. There should be one ring, and each act should have a fair chance with the spectator, if it took six hours; I would willingly give the time. Fancy three stages at the theatre, with three plays going on at once!”

“No, don’t fancy that!” I entreated. “One play is bad enough.”

“Or fancy reading three novels simultaneously, and listening at the same time to a lecture and a sermon, which could represent the two platforms between the rings,” my friend calmly persisted. “The three rings are an abuse and an outrage, but I don’t know but I object still more to the silencing of the clowns. They have a great many clowns now, but they are all dumb, and you only get half the good you used to get out of the single clown of the old one-ring circus. Why, it’s as if the literary humorist were to lead up to a charming conceit or a subtle jest, and then put asterisks where the humor ought to come in.”

“Don’t you think you are going from bad to worse?” I asked.

My friend went on: “I’m afraid the circus is spoiled for me. It has become too much of a good thing; for it is a good thing; almost the best thing in the way of an entertainment that there is. I’m still very fond of it, but I come away defeated and defrauded because I have been embarrassed with riches, and have been given more than I was able to grasp. My greed has been overfed. I think I must keep to those entertainments where you can come at ten in the morning and stay till ten at night, with a perpetual change of bill, only one stage, and no fall of the curtain. I suppose you would object to them because they’re getting rather dear; at the best of them now they ask you a dollar for the first seats.”

I said that I did not think this too much for twelve hours, if the intellectual character of the entertainment was correspondingly high.

“It’s as high as that of some magazines,” said my friend, “though I could sometimes wish it were higher. It’s like the matter in the Sunday papers — about that average. Some of it’s good, and most of it isn’t. Some of it could hardly be worse. But there is a great deal of it, and you get it consecutively and not simultaneously. That constitutes its advantage over the circus.”

My friend stopped, with a vague smile, and I asked:

“Then, do I understand that you would advise me to recommend the dime museums, the circus, and the perpetual-motion varieties in the place of the theatres?”

“You have recommended books instead, and that notion doesn’t seem to have met with much favor, though you urged their comparative cheapness. Now, why not suggest something that is really level with the popular taste?”

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN EXILE

A recently lecturing Englishman is reported to have noted the unenviable primacy of the United States among countries where the struggle for material prosperity has been disastrous to the pursuit of literature. He said, or is said to have said (one cannot be too careful in attributing to a public man the thoughts that may be really due to an imaginative frame in the reporter), that among us, “the old race of writers of distinction, such as Longfellow, Bryant, Holmes, and Washington Irving, have (sic) died out, and the Americans who are most prominent in cultivated European opinion in art or literature, like Sargent, Henry James, or Marion Crawford, live habitually out of America, and draw their inspiration from England, France, and Italy.”

I.

If this were true, I confess that I am so indifferent to what many Americans glory in that it would not distress me, or wound me in the sort of self-love which calls itself patriotism. If it would at all help to put an end to that struggle for material prosperity which has eventuated with us in so many millionaires and so many tramps, I should be glad to believe that it was driving our literary men out of the country. This would be a tremendous object-lesson, and might be a warning to the millionaires and the tramps. But I am afraid it would not have this effect, for neither our very rich nor our very poor care at all for the state of polite learning among us; though for the matter of that, I believe that economic conditions have little to do with it; and that if a general mediocrity of fortune prevailed and there were no haste to be rich and to get poor, the state of polite learning would not be considerably affected. As matters stand, I think we may reasonably ask whether the Americans “most prominent in cultivated European opinion,” the Americans who “live habitually out of America,” are not less exiles than advance agents of the expansion now advertising itself to the world. They may be the vanguard of the great army of adventurers destined to overrun the earth from these shores, and exploit all foreign countries to our advantage. They probably themselves do not know it, but in the act of “drawing their inspiration” from alien scenes, or taking their own where they find it, are not they simply transporting to Europe “the struggle for material prosperity,” which Sir Lepel supposes to be fatal to them here?

There is a question, however, which comes before this, and that is the question whether they have quitted us in such numbers as justly to alarm our patriotism. Qualitatively, in the authors named and in the late Mr. Bret Harte, Mr. Harry Harland, and the late Mr. Harold Frederic, as well as in Mark Twain, once temporarily resident abroad, the defection is very great; but quantitatively it is not such as to leave us without a fair measure of home-keeping authorship. Our destitution is not nearly so great now in the absence of Mr. James and Mr. Crawford as it was in the times before the “struggle for material prosperity” when Washington Irving went and lived in England and on the European continent well-nigh half his life.

Sir Lepel Griffin — or Sir Lepel Griffin’s reporter — seems to forget the fact of Irving’s long absenteeism when he classes him with “the old race” of eminent American authors who stayed at home. But really none of those he names were so constant to our air as he seems — or his reporter seems — to think. Longfellow sojourned three or four years in Germany, Spain, and Italy; Holmes spent as great time in Paris; Bryant was a frequent traveller, and each of them “drew his inspiration” now and then from alien sources. Lowell was many years in Italy, Spain, and England; Motley spent more than half his life abroad; Hawthorne was away from us nearly a decade.

II.

If I seem to be proving too much in one way, I do not feel that I am proving too much in another. My facts go to show that the literary spirit is the true world-citizen, and is at home everywhere. If any good American were distressed by the absenteeism of our authors, I should first advise him that American literature was not derived from the folklore of the red Indians, but was, as I have said once before, a condition of English literature, and was independent even of our independence. Then I should entreat him to consider the case of foreign authors who had found it more comfortable or more profitable to live out of their respective countries than in them. I should allege for his consolation the case of Byron, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt, and more latterly that of the Brownings and Walter Savage Landor, who preferred an Italian to an English sojourn; and yet more recently that of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, who voluntarily lived several years in Vermont, and has “drawn his inspiration” in notable instances from the life of these States. It will serve him also to consider that the two greatest Norwegian authors, Bjornsen and Ibsen, have both lived long in France and Italy. Heinrich Heine loved to live in Paris much better than in Dusseldorf, or even in Hamburg; and Tourguenief himself, who said that any man’s country could get on without him, but no man could get on without his country, managed to dispense with his own in the French capital, and died there after he was quite free to go back to St. Petersburg. In the last century Rousseau lived in France rather than Switzerland; Voltaire at least tried to live in Prussia, and was obliged to a long exile elsewhere; Goldoni left fame and friends in Venice for the favor of princes in Paris.

Literary absenteeism, it seems to me, is not peculiarly an American vice or an American virtue. It is an expression and a proof of the modern sense which enlarges one’s country to the bounds of civilization. I cannot think it justly a reproach in the eyes of the world, and if any American feels it a grievance, I suggest that he do what he can to have embodied in the platform of his party a plank affirming the right of American authors to a public provision that will enable them to live as agreeably at home as they can abroad on the same money. In the mean time, their absenteeism is not a consequence of “the struggle for material prosperity,” not a high disdain of the strife which goes on not less in Europe than in America, and must, of course, go on everywhere as long as competitive conditions endure, but is the result of chances and preferences which mean nothing nationally calamitous or discreditable.

THE HORSE SHOW

“As good as the circus — not so good as the circus — better than the circus.” These were my varying impressions, as I sat looking down upon the tanbark, the other day, at the Horse Show in Madison Square Garden; and I came away with their blend for my final opinion.

I.

I might think that the Horse Show (which is so largely a Man Show and a Woman Show) was better or worse than the circus, or about as good; but I could not get away from the circus, in my impression of it. Perhaps the circus is the norm of all splendors where the horse and his master are joined for an effect upon the imagination of the spectator. I am sure that I have never been able quite to dissociate from it the picturesqueness of chivalry, and that it will hereafter always suggest to me the last correctness of fashion. It is through the horse that these far extremes meet; in all times the horse has been the supreme expression of aristocracy; and it may very well be that a dream of the elder world prophesied the ultimate type of the future, when the Swell shall have evolved into the Centaur.

Some such teasing notion of their mystical affinity is what haunts you as you make your round of the vast ellipse, with the well-groomed men about you and the well-groomed horses beyond the barrier.

In this first affair of the new-comer, the horses are not so much on show as the swells; you get only glimpses of shining coats and tossing manes, with a glint here and there of a flying hoof through the lines of people coming and going, and the ranks of people, three or four feet deep, against the rails of the ellipse; but the swells are there in perfect relief, and it is they who finally embody the Horse Show to you. The fact is that they are there to see, of course, but the effect is that they are there to be seen.

The whole spectacle had an historical quality, which I tasted with pleasure. It was the thing that had eventuated in every civilization, and the American might feel a characteristic pride that what came to Rome in five hundred years had come to America in a single century. There was something fine in the absolutely fatal nature of the result, and I perceived that nowhere else in our life, which is apt to be reclusive in its exclusiveness, is the prime motive at work in it so dramatically apparent. “Yes,” I found myself thinking, “this is what it all comes to: the ‘subiti guadagni’ of the new rich, made in large masses and seeking a swift and eager exploitation, and the slowly accumulated fortunes, put together from sparing and scrimping, from slaving and enslaving, in former times, and now in the stainless white hands of the second or third generation, they both meet here to the purpose of a common ostentation, and create a Horse Show.”

I cannot say that its creators looked much as if they liked it, now they had got it; and, so far as I have been able to observe them, people of wealth and fashion always dissemble their joy, and have the air of being bored in the midst of their amusements. This reserve of rapture may be their delicacy, their unwillingness to awaken envy in the less prospered; and I should not have objected to the swells at the Horse Show looking dreary if they had looked more like swells; except for a certain hardness of the countenance (which I found my own sympathetically taking on) I should not have thought them very patrician, and this hardness may have been merely the consequence of being so much stared at. Perhaps, indeed, they were not swells whom I saw in the boxes, but only companies of ordinary people who had clubbed together and hired their boxes; I understand that this can be done, and the student of civilization so far misled. But certainly if they were swells they did not look quite up to themselves; though, for that matter, neither do the nobilities of foreign countries, and on one or two occasions when I have seen them, kings and emperors have failed me in like manner. They have all wanted that indescribable something which I have found so satisfying in aristocracies and royalties on the stage; and here at the Horse Show, while I made my tour, I constantly met handsome, actor-like folk on foot who could much better have taken the role of the people in the boxes. The promenaders may not have been actors at all; they may have been the real thing for which I was in vain scanning the boxes, but they looked like actors, who indeed set an example to us all in personal beauty and in correctness of dress.

I mean nothing offensive either to swells or to actors. We have not distinction, as a people; Matthew Arnold noted that; and it is not our business to have it: When it is our business our swells will have it, just as our actors now have it, especially our actors of English birth. I had not this reflection about me at the time to console me for my disappointment, and it only now occurs to me that what I took for an absence of distinction may have been such a universal prevalence of it that the result was necessarily a species of indistinction. But in the complexion of any social assembly we Americans are at a disadvantage with Europeans from the want of uniforms. A few military scattered about in those boxes, or even a few sporting bishops in shovel-hats and aprons, would have done much to relieve them from the reproach I have been heaping upon them. Our women, indeed, poor things, always do their duty in personal splendor, and it is not of a poverty in their modes at the Horse Show that I am complaining. If the men had borne their part as well, there would not have been these tears: and yet, what am I saying? There was here and there a clean-shaven face (which I will not believe was always an actor’s), and here and there a figure superbly set up, and so faultlessly appointed as to shoes, trousers, coat, tie, hat, and gloves as to have a salience from the mass of good looks and good clothes which I will not at last call less than distinction.

II.

At any rate, I missed these marked presences when I left the lines of the promenaders around the ellipse, and climbed to a seat some tiers above the boxes. I am rather anxious to have it known that my seat was not one of those cheap ones in the upper gallery, but was with the virtuous poor who could afford to pay a dollar and a half for their tickets. I bought it of a speculator on the sidewalk, who said it was his last, so that I conceived it the last in the house; but I found the chairs by no means all filled, though it was as good an audience as I have sometimes seen in the same place at other circuses. The people about me were such as I had noted at the other circuses, hotel-sojourners, kindly-looking comers from provincial towns and cities, whom I instantly felt myself at home with, and free to put off that gloomy severity of aspect which had grown upon me during my association with the swells below. My neighbors were sufficiently well dressed, and if they had no more distinction than their betters, or their richers, they had not the burden of the occasion upon them, and seemed really glad of what was going on in the ring.

There again I was sensible of the vast advantage of costume. The bugler who stood up at one end of the central platform and blew a fine fanfare (I hope it was a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to enter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape that filled my romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the management I thought very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters. At any rate, their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from the fashions in the boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumes are always more sincere, if not more effective, than fashions. As I have hinted, I do not know just what costumes they were, but they took the light well from the girandole far aloof and from the thousands of little electric bulbs that beaded the roof in long lines, and dispersed the sullenness of the dull, rainy afternoon. When the knights entered the lists on the seats of their dog-carts, with their squires beside them, and their shining tandems before them, they took the light well, too, and the spectacle was so brilliant that I trust my imagery may be forgiven a novelist pining for the pageantries of the past. I do not know to this moment whether these knights were bona fide gentlemen, or only their deputies, driving their tandems for them, and I am equally at a loss to account for the variety, of their hats. Some wore tall, shining silk hats; some flat-topped, brown derbys; some simple black pot-hats; — and is there, then, no rigor as to the head-gear of people driving tandems? I felt that there ought to be, and that there ought to be some rule as to where the number of each tandem should be displayed. As it was, this was sometimes carelessly stuck into the seat of the cart; sometimes it was worn at the back of the groom’s waist, and sometimes full upon his stomach. In the last position it gave a touch of burlesque which wounded me; for these are vital matters, and I found myself very exacting in them.

With the horses themselves I could find no fault upon the grounds of my censure of the show in some other ways. They had distinction; they were patrician; they were swell. They felt it, they showed it, they rejoiced in it; and the most reluctant observer could not deny them the glory of blood, of birth, which the thoroughbred horse has expressed in all lands and ages. Their lordly port was a thing that no one could dispute, and for an aristocracy I suppose that they had a high average of intelligence, though there might be two minds about this. They made me think of mettled youths and haughty dames; they abashed the humble spirit of the beholder with the pride of their high-stepping, their curvetting and caracoling, as they jingled in their shining harness around the long ring. Their noble uselessness took the fancy, for I suppose that there is nothing so superbly superfluous as a tandem, outside or inside of the best society. It is something which only the ambition of wealth and unbroken leisure can mount to; and I was glad that the display of tandems was the first event of the Horse Show which I witnessed, for it seemed to me that it must beyond all others typify the power which created the Horse Show. I wished that the human side of it could have been more unquestionably adequate, but the equine side of the event was perfect. Still, I felt a certain relief, as in something innocent and simple and childlike, in the next event.

III.

This was the inundation of the tan-bark with troops of pretty Shetland ponies of all ages, sizes, and colors. A cry of delight went up from a group of little people near me, and the spell of the Horse Show was broken. It was no longer a solemnity of fashion, it was a sweet and kindly pleasure which every one could share, or every one who had ever had, or ever wished to have, a Shetland pony; the touch of nature made the whole show kin. I could not see that the freakish, kittenish creatures did anything to claim our admiration, but they won our affection by every trait of ponyish caprice and obstinacy. The small colts broke away from the small mares, and gambolled over the tanbark in wanton groups, with gay or plaintive whinnyings, which might well have touched a responsive chord in the bosom of fashion itself: I dare say it is not so hard as it looks. The scene remanded us to a moment of childhood; and I found myself so fond of all the ponies that I felt it invidious of the judges to choose among them for the prizes; they ought every one to have had the prize.

I suppose a Shetland pony is not a very useful animal in our conditions; no doubt a good, tough, stubbed donkey would be worth all their tribe when it came down to hard work; but we cannot all be hard-working donkeys, and some of us may be toys and playthings without too great reproach. I gazed after the broken, refluent wave of these amiable creatures, with the vague toleration here formulated, but I was not quite at peace in it, or fully consoled in my habitual ethicism till the next event brought the hunters with their high-jumping into the ring. These noble animals unite use and beauty in such measure that the censor must be of Catonian severity who can refuse them his praise. When I reflected that by them and their devoted riders our civilization had been assimilated to that of the mother-country in its finest expression, and another tie added to those that bind us to her through the language of Shakespeare and Milton; that they had tamed the haughty spirit of the American farmer in several parts of the country so that he submitted for a consideration to have his crops ridden over, and that they had all but exterminated the ferocious anise-seed bag, once so common and destructive among us, I was in a fit mood to welcome the bars and hurdles which were now set up at four or five places for the purposes of the high-jumping. As to the beauty of the hunting-horse, though, I think I must hedge a little, while I stand firmly to my admiration of his use. To be honest, the tandem horse is more to my taste. He is better shaped, and he bears himself more proudly. The hunter is apt to behave, whatever his reserve of intelligence, like an excited hen; he is apt to be ewe-necked and bred away to nothing where the ideal horse abounds; he has the behavior of a turkey-hen when not behaving like the common or garden hen. But there can be no question of his jumping, which seems to be his chief business in a world where we are all appointed our several duties, and I at once began to take a vivid pleasure in his proficiency. I have always felt a blind and insensate joy in running races, which has no relation to any particular horse, and I now experienced an impartial rapture in the performances of these hunters. They looked very much alike, and if it had not been for the changing numbers on the sign-board in the centre of the ring announcing that 650, 675, or 602 was now jumping, I might have thought it was 650 all the time.

A high jump is not so fine a sight as a running race when the horses have got half a mile away and look like a covey of swift birds, but it is still a fine sight. I became very fastidious as to which moment of it was the finest, whether when the horse rose in profile, or when his aerial hoof touched the ground (with the effect of half jerking his rider’s head half off), or when he showed a flying heel in perspective; and I do not know to this hour which I prefer. But I suppose I was becoming gradually spoiled by my pleasure, for as time went on I noticed that I was not satisfied with the monotonous excellence of the horses’ execution. Will it be credited that I became willing something should happen, anything, to vary it? I asked myself why, if some of the more exciting incidents of the hunting-field which I had read of must befall; I should not see them. Several of the horses had balked at the barriers, and almost thrown their riders across them over their necks, but not quite done it; several had carried away the green-tufted top rail with their heels; when suddenly there came a loud clatter from the farther side of the ellipse, where a whole panel of fence had gone down. I looked eagerly for the prostrate horse and rider under the bars, but they were cantering safely away.

IV.

It was enough, however. I perceived that I was becoming demoralized, and that if I were to write of the Horse Show with at all the superiority one likes to feel towards the rich and great, I had better come away. But I came away critical, even in my downfall, and feeling that, circus for circus, the Greatest Show on Earth which I had often seen in that place had certain distinct advantages of the Horse Show. It had three rings and two platforms; and, for another thing, the drivers and riders in the races, when they won, bore the banner of victory aloft in their hands, instead of poorly letting a blue or red ribbon flicker at their horses’ ears. The events were more frequent and rapid; the costumes infinitely more varied and picturesque. As for the people in the boxes, I do not know that they were less distinguished than these at the Horse Show, but if they were not of the same high level in which distinction was impossible, they did not show it in their looks.

The Horse Show, in fine, struck me as a circus of not all the first qualities; and I had moments of suspecting that it was no more than the evolution of the county cattle show. But in any case I had to own that its great success was quite legitimate; for the horse, upon the whole, appeals to a wider range of humanity, vertically as well as horizontally, than any other interest, not excepting politics or religion. I cannot, indeed, regard him as a civilizing influence; but then we cannot be always civilizing.

THE PROBLEM OF THE SUMMER

It has sometimes seemed to me that the solution of the problem how and where to spend the summer was simplest with those who were obliged to spend it as they spent the winter, and increasingly difficult in the proportion of one’s ability to spend it wherever and however one chose. Few are absolutely released to this choice, however, and those few are greatly to be pitied. I know that they are often envied and hated for it by those who have no such choice, but that is a pathetic mistake. If we could look into their hearts, indeed, we should witness there so much misery that we should wish rather to weep over them than to reproach them with their better fortune, or what appeared so.

I.

For most people choice is a curse, and it is this curse that the summer brings upon great numbers who would not perhaps otherwise be afflicted. They are not in the happy case of those who must stay at home; their hard necessity is that they can go away, and try to be more agreeably placed somewhere else; but although I say they are in great numbers, they are an infinitesimal minority of the whole bulk of our population. Their bane is not, in its highest form, that of the average American who has no choice of the kind; and when one begins to speak of the summer problem, one must begin at once to distinguish. It is the problem of the East rather than of the West (where people are much more in the habit of staying at home the year round), and it is the problem of the city and not of the country. I am not sure that there is one practical farmer in the whole United States who is obliged to witness in his household those sad dissensions which almost separate the families of professional men as to where and how they shall pass the summer. People of this class, which is a class with some measure of money, ease, and taste, are commonly of varying and decided minds, and I once knew a family of the sort whose combined ideal for their summer outing was summed up in the simple desire for society and solitude, mountain-air and sea-bathing. They spent the whole months of April, May, and June in a futile inquiry for a resort uniting these attractions, and on the first of July they drove to the station with no definite point in view. But they found that they could get return tickets for a certain place on an inland lake at a low figure, and they took the first train for it. There they decided next morning to push on to the mountains, and sent their baggage to the station, but before it was checked they changed their minds, and remained two weeks where they were. Then they took train for a place on the coast, but in the cars a friend told them they ought to go to another place; they decided to go there, but before arriving at the junction they decided again to keep on. They arrived at their original destination, and the following day telegraphed for rooms at a hotel farther down the coast. The answer came that there were no rooms, and being by this time ready to start, they started, and in due time reported themselves at the hotel. The landlord saw that something must be done, and he got them rooms, at a smaller house, and ‘mealed’ them (as it used to be called at Mt. Desert) in his own. But upon experiment of the fare at the smaller house they liked it so well that they resolved to live there altogether, and they spent a summer of the greatest comfort there, so that they would hardly come away when the house closed in the fall.

This was an extreme case, and perhaps such a venture might not always turn out so happily; but I think that people might oftener trust themselves to Providence in these matters than they do. There is really an infinite variety of pleasant resorts of all kinds now, and one could quite safely leave it to the man in the ticket-office where one should go, and check one’s baggage accordingly. I think the chances of an agreeable summer would be as good in that way as in making a hard-and- fast choice of a certain place and sticking to it. My own experience is that in these things chance makes a very good choice for one, as it does in most non-moral things.

II.

A joke dies hard, and I am not sure that the life is yet quite out of the kindly ridicule that was cast for a whole generation upon the people who left their comfortable houses in town to starve upon farm-board or stifle in the narrow rooms of mountain and seaside hotels. Yet such people were in the right, and their mockers were in the wrong, and their patient persistence in going out of town for the summer in the face of severe discouragements has multiplied indefinitely the kinds of summer resorts, and reformed them altogether. I believe the city boarding-house remains very much what it used to be; but I am bound to say that the country boarding-house has vastly improved since I began to know it. As for the summer hotel, by steep or by strand, it leaves little to be complained of except the prices. I take it for granted, therefore, that the out-of- town summer has come to stay, for all who can afford it, and that the chief sorrow attending it is that curse of choice, which I have already spoken of.

I have rather favored chance than choice, because, whatever choice you make, you are pretty sure to regret it, with a bitter sense of responsibility added, which you cannot feel if chance has chosen for you. I observe that people who own summer cottages are often apt to wish they did not, and were foot-loose to roam where they listed, and I have been told that even a yacht is not a source of unmixed content, though so eminently detachable. To great numbers Europe looks from this shore like a safe refuge from the American summer problem; and yet I am not sure that it is altogether so; for it is not enough merely to go to Europe; one has to choose where to go when one has got there. A European city is certainly always more tolerable than an American city, but one cannot very well pass the summer in Paris, or even in London. The heart there, as here, will yearn for some blessed seat

      “Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,

       Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies

       Deep-meadow’d, happy, fair with orchard lawns

       And bowery hollows crown’d with summer sea,”

and still, after your keel touches the strand of that alluring old world, you must buy your ticket and register your trunk for somewhere in particular.

III.

It is truly a terrible stress, this summer problem, and, as I say, my heart aches much more for those who have to solve it and suffer the consequences of their choice than for those who have no choice, but must stay the summer through where their work is, and be humbly glad that they have any work to keep them there. I am not meaning now, of course, business men obliged to remain in the city to earn the bread — or, more correctly, the cake — of their families in the country, or even their clerks and bookkeepers, and porters and messengers, but such people as I sometimes catch sight of from the elevated trains (in my reluctant midsummer flights through the city), sweltering in upper rooms over sewing-machines or lap-boards, or stewing in the breathless tenement streets, or driving clangorous trucks, or monotonous cars, or bending over wash-tubs at open windows for breaths of the no-air without. These all get on somehow, and at the end of the summer they have not to accuse themselves of folly in going to one place rather than another. Their fate is decided for them, and they submit to it; whereas those who decide their fate are always rebelling against it. They it is whom I am truly sorry for, and whom I write of with tears in my ink. Their case is hard, and it will seem all the harder if we consider how foolish they will look and how flat they will feel at the judgment-day, when they are asked about their summer outings. I do not really suppose we shall be held to a very strict account for our pleasures because everybody else has not enjoyed them, too; that would be a pity of our lives; and yet there is an old-fashioned compunction which will sometimes visit the heart if we take our pleasures ungraciously, when so many have no pleasures to take. I would suggest, then, to those on whom the curse of choice between pleasures rests, that they should keep in mind those who have chiefly pains to their portion in life.

I am not, I hope, urging my readers to any active benevolence, or counselling them to share their pleasures with others; it has been accurately ascertained that there are not pleasures enough to go round, as things now are; but I would seriously entreat them to consider whether they could not somewhat alleviate the hardships of their own lot at the sea-side or among the mountains, by contrasting it with the lot of others in the sweat-shops and the boiler-factories of life. I know very well that it is no longer considered very good sense or very good morality to take comfort in one’s advantages from the disadvantages of others, and this is not quite what I mean to teach. Perhaps I mean nothing more than an overhauling of the whole subject of advantages and disadvantages, which would be a light and agreeable occupation for the leisure of the summer outer. It might be very interesting, and possibly it might be amusing, for one stretched upon the beach or swaying in the hammock to inquire into the reasons for his or her being so favored, and it is not beyond the bounds of expectation that a consensus of summer opinion on this subject would go far to enlighten the world upon a question that has vexed the world ever since mankind was divided into those who work too much and those who rest too much.

AESTHETIC NEW YORK FIFTY-ODD YEARS AGO

A study of New York civilization in 1849 has lately come into my hands, with a mortifying effect, which I should like to share with the reader, to my pride of modernity. I had somehow believed that after half a century of material prosperity, such as the world has never seen before, New York in 1902 must be very different from New York in 1849, but if I am to trust either the impressions of the earlier student or my own, New York is essentially the same now that it was then. The spirit of the place has not changed; it is as it was, splendidly and sordidly commercial. Even the body of it has undergone little or no alteration; it was as shapeless, as incongruous; as ugly when the author of ‘New York in Slices’ wrote as it is at this writing; it has simply grown, or overgrown, on the moral and material lines which seem to have been structural in it from the beginning. He felt in his time the same vulgarity, the same violence, in its architectural anarchy that I have felt in my time, and he noted how all dignity and beauty perished, amid the warring forms, with a prescience of my own affliction, which deprives me of the satisfaction of a discoverer and leaves me merely the sense of being rather old-fashioned in my painful emotions.

I.

I wish I could pretend that my author philosophized the facts of his New York with something less than the raw haste of the young journalist; but I am afraid I must own that ‘New York in Slices’ affects one as having first been printed in an evening paper, and that the writer brings to the study of the metropolis something like the eager horror of a country visitor. This probably enabled him to heighten the effect he wished to make with readers of a kindred tradition, and for me it adds a certain innocent charm to his work. I may make myself better understood if I say that his attitude towards the depravities of a smaller New York is much the same as that of Mr. Stead towards the wickedness of a much larger Chicago. He seizes with some such avidity upon the darker facts of the prisons, the slums, the gambling-houses, the mock auctions, the toughs (who then called themselves b’hoys and g’hals), the quacks, the theatres, and even the intelligence offices, and exploits their iniquities with a ready virtue which the wickedest reader can enjoy with him.

But if he treated of these things alone, I should not perhaps have brought his curious little book to the polite notice of my readers. He treats also of the press, the drama, the art, and, above all, “the literary soirees” of that remote New York of his in a manner to make us latest New-Yorkers feel our close proximity to it. Fifty-odd years ago journalism had already become “the absorbing, remorseless, clamorous thing” we now know, and very different from the thing it was when “expresses were unheard of, and telegraphs were uncrystallized from the lightning’s blue and fiery film.” Reporterism was beginning to assume its present importance, but it had not yet become the paramount intellectual interest, and did not yet “stand shoulder to shoulder” with the counting-room in authority. Great editors, then as now, ranked great authors in the public esteem, or achieved a double primacy by uniting journalism and literature in the same personality. They were often the owners as well as the writers of their respective papers, and they indulged for the advantage of the community the rancorous rivalries, recriminations, and scurrilities which often form the charm, if not the chief use, of our contemporaneous journals. Apparently, however, notarially authenticated boasts of circulation had not yet been made the delight of their readers, and the press had not become the detective agency that it now is, nor the organizer and distributer of charities.

But as dark a cloud of doubt rested upon its relations to the theatre as still eclipses the popular faith in dramatic criticism. “How can you expect,” our author asks, “a frank and unbiassed criticism upon the performance of George Frederick Cooke Snooks . . . when the editor or reporter who is to write it has just been supping on beefsteak and stewed potatoes at Windust’s, and regaling himself on brandy-and-water cold, without, at the expense of the aforesaid George Frederick Cooke Snooks?” The severest censor of the press, however, would hardly declare now that “as to such a thing as impartial and independent criticism upon theatres in the present state of the relations between editors, reporters, managers, actors — and actresses — the thing is palpably out of the question,” and if matters were really at the pass hinted, the press has certainly improved in fifty years, if one may judge from its present frank condemnations of plays and players. The theatre apparently has not, for we read that at that period “a very great majority of the standard plays and farces on the stage depend mostly for their piquancy and their power of interesting an audience upon intrigues with married women, elopements, seductions, bribery, cheating, and fraud of every description . . . . Stage costume, too, wherever there is half a chance, is usually made as lascivious and immodest as possible; and a freedom and impropriety prevails among the characters of the piece which would be kicked out of private society the instant it would have the audacity to make its appearance there.”

II.

I hope private society in New York would still be found as correct if not quite so violent; and I wish I could believe that the fine arts were presently in as flourishing a condition among us as they were in 1849. That was the prosperous day of the Art Unions, in which the artists clubbed their output, and the subscribers parted the works among themselves by something so very like raffling that the Art Unions were finally suppressed under the law against lotteries. While they lasted, however, they had exhibitions thronged by our wealth, fashion, and intellect (to name them in the order they hold the New York mind), as our private views now are, or ought to be; and the author “devotes an entire number” of his series “to a single institution” — fearless of being accused of partiality by any who rightly appreciate the influences of the fine arts upon the morals and refinement of mankind.

He devotes even more than an entire number to literature; for, besides treating of various literary celebrities at the “literary soirees,” he imagines encountering several of them at the high-class restaurants. At Delmonico’s, where if you had “French and money” you could get in that day “a dinner which, as a work of art, ranks with a picture by Huntington, a poem by Willis, or a statue by Powers,” he meets such a musical critic as Richard Grant White, such an intellectual epicurean as N. P. Willis, such a lyric poet as Charles Fenno Hoffman. But it would be a warm day for Delmonico’s when the observer in this epoch could chance upon so much genius at its tables, perhaps because genius among us has no longer the French or the money. Indeed, the author of ‘New York in Slices’ seems finally to think that he has gone too far, even for his own period, and brings himself up with the qualifying reservation that if Willis and Hoffman never did dine together at Delmonico’s, they ought to have done so. He has apparently no misgivings as to the famous musical critic, and he has no scruple in assembling for us at his “literary soiree” a dozen distinguished-looking men and “twice as many women.... listening to a tall, deaconly man, who stands between two candles held by a couple of sticks summoned from the recesses of the back parlor, reading a basketful of gilt-edged notes. It is . . . the annual Valentine Party, to which all the male and female authors have contributed for the purpose of saying on paper charming things of each other, and at which, for a few hours, all are gratified with the full meed of that praise which a cold world is chary of bestowing upon its literary cobweb- spinners.”

It must be owned that we have no longer anything so like a ‘salon’ as this. It is, indeed, rather terrible, and it is of a quality in its celebrities which may well carry dismay to any among us presently intending immortality. Shall we, one day, we who are now in the rich and full enjoyment of our far-reaching fame, affect the imagination of posterity as these phantoms of the past affect ours? Shall we, too, appear in some pale limbo of unimportance as thin and faded as “John Inman, the getter-up of innumerable things for the annuals and magazines,” or as Dr. Rufus Griswold, supposed for picturesque purposes to be “stalking about with an immense quarto volume under his arm . . . an early copy of his forthcoming ‘Female Poets of America’”; or as Lewis Gaylord Clark, the “sunnyfaced, smiling” editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine, “who don’t look as if the Ink-Fiend had ever heard of him,” as he stands up to dance a polka with “a demure lady who has evidently spilled the inkstand over her dress”; or as “the stately Mrs. Seba Smith, bending aristocratically over the centre-table, and talking in a bright, cold, steady stream, like an antique fountain by moonlight”; or as “the spiritual and dainty Fanny Osgood, clapping her hands and crowing like a baby,” where she sits “nestled under a shawl of heraldic devices, like a bird escaped from its cage”; or as Margaret Fuller, “her large, gray eyes Tamping inspiration, and her thin, quivering lip prophesying like a Pythoness”?

I hope not; I earnestly hope not. Whatever I said at the outset, affirming the persistent equality of New York characteristics and circumstances, I wish to take back at this point; and I wish to warn malign foreign observers, of the sort who have so often refused to see us as we see ourselves, that they must not expect to find us now grouped in the taste of 1849. Possibly it was not so much the taste of 1849 as the author of ‘New York in Slices’ would have us believe; and perhaps any one who trusted his pictures of life among us otherwise would be deceived by a parity of the spirit in which they are portrayed with that of our modern “society journalism.”

FROM NEW YORK INTO NEW ENGLAND

There is, of course, almost a world’s difference between England and the Continent anywhere; but I do not recall just now any transition between Continental countries which involves a more distinct change in the superficial aspect of things than the passage from the Middle States into New England. It is all American, but American of diverse ideals; and you are hardly over the border before you are sensible of diverse effects, which are the more apparent to you the more American you are. If you want the contrast at its sharpest you had better leave New York on a Sound boat; for then you sleep out of the Middle State civilization and wake into the civilization of New England, which seems to give its stamp to nature herself. As to man, he takes it whether native or alien; and if he is foreign-born it marks him another Irishman, Italian, Canadian, Jew, or negro from his brother in any other part of the United States.

I.

When you have a theory of any kind, proofs of it are apt to seek you out, and I, who am rather fond of my faith in New England’s influence of this sort, had as pretty an instance of it the day after my arrival as I could wish. A colored brother of Massachusetts birth, as black as a man can well be, and of a merely anthropoidal profile, was driving me along shore in search of a sea-side hotel when we came upon a weak-minded young chicken in the road. The natural expectation is that any chicken in these circumstances will wait for your vehicle, and then fly up before it with a loud screech; but this chicken may have been overcome by the heat (it was a land breeze and it drew like the breath of a furnace over the hay-cocks and the clover), or it may have mistimed the wheel, which passed over its head and left it to flop a moment in the dust and then fall still. The poor little tragedy was sufficiently distressful to me, but I bore it well, compared with my driver. He could hardly stop lamenting it; and when presently we met a young farmer, he pulled up. “You goin’ past Jim Marden’s?” “Yes.” “Well, I wish you’d tell him I just run over a chicken of his, and I killed it, I guess. I guess it was a pretty big one.” “Oh no,” I put in, “it was only a broiler. What do you think it was worth?” I took out some money, and the farmer noted the largest coin in my hand; “About half a dollar, I guess.” On this I put it all back in my pocket, and then he said, “Well, if a chicken don’t know enough to get out of the road, I guess you ain’t to blame.” I expressed that this was my own view of the case, and we drove on. When we parted I gave the half-dollar to my driver, and begged him not to let the owner of the chicken come on me for damages; and though he chuckled his pleasure in the joke, I could see that he was still unhappy, and I have no doubt that he has that pullet on his conscience yet, unless he has paid for it. He was of a race which elsewhere has so immemorially plundered hen-roosts that chickens are as free to it as the air it breathes, without any conceivable taint of private ownership. But the spirit of New England had so deeply entered into him that the imbecile broiler of another, slain by pure accident and by its own contributory negligence, was saddening him, while I was off in my train without a pang for the owner and with only an agreeable pathos for the pullet.

II.

The instance is perhaps extreme; and, at any rate, it has carried me in a psychological direction away from the simpler differences which I meant to note in New England. They were evident as soon as our train began to run from the steamboat landing into the country, and they have intensified, if they have not multiplied, themselves as I have penetrated deeper and deeper into the beautiful region. The land is poorer than the land to the southward — one sees that at once; the soil is thin, and often so thickly burdened with granite bowlders that it could never have borne any other crop since the first Puritans, or Pilgrims, cut away the primeval woods and betrayed its hopeless sterility to the light. But wherever you come to a farm-house, whether standing alone or in one of the village groups that New England farm-houses have always liked to gather themselves into, it is of a neatness that brings despair, and of a repair that ought to bring shame to the beholder from more easy-going conditions. Everything is kept up with a strenuous virtue that imparts an air of self-respect to the landscape, which the bleaching and blackening stone walls, wandering over the hill-slopes, divide into wood lots of white birch and pine, stony pastures, and little patches of potatoes and corn. The mowing-lands alone are rich; and if the New England year is in the glory of the latest June, the breath of the clover blows honey — sweet into the car windows, and the fragrance of the new-cut hay rises hot from the heavy swaths that seem to smoke in the sun.

We have struck a hot spell, one of those torrid mood of continental weather which we have telegraphed us ahead to heighten our suffering by anticipation. But the farmsteads and village houses are safe in the shade of their sheltering trees amid the fluctuation of the grass that grows so tall about them that the June roses have to strain upward to get themselves free of it. Behind each dwelling is a billowy mass of orchard, and before it the Gothic archway of the elms stretches above the quiet street. There is no tree in the world so full of sentiment as the American elm, and it is nowhere so graceful as in these New England villages, which are themselves, I think, the prettiest and wholesomest of mortal sojourns. By a happy instinct, their wooden houses are all painted white, to a marble effect that suits our meridional sky, and the contrast of their dark-green shutters is deliciously refreshing. There was an evil hour, the terrible moment of the aesthetic revival now happily past, when white walls and green blinds were thought in bad taste, and the village houses were often tinged a dreary ground color, or a doleful olive, or a gloomy red, but now they have returned to their earlier love. Not the first love; that was a pale buff with white trim; but I doubt if it were good for all kinds of village houses; the eye rather demands the white. The pale buff does very well for large colonial mansions, like Lowell’s or Longfellow’s in Cambridge; but when you come, say, to see the great square houses built in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; early in this century, and painted white, you find that white, after all, is the thing for our climate, even in the towns.

In such a village as my colored brother drove me through on the way to the beach it was of an absolute fitness; and I wish I could convey a due sense of the exquisite keeping of the place. Each white house was more or less closely belted in with a white fence, of panels or pickets; the grassy door-yards glowed with flowers, and often a climbing rose embowered the door-way with its bloom. Away backward or sidewise stretched the woodshed from the dwelling to the barn, and shut the whole under one cover; the turf grew to the wheel-tracks of the road-way, over which the elms rose and drooped; and from one end of the village to the other you could not, as the saying is, find a stone to throw at a dog. I know Holland; I have seen the wives of Scheveningen scrubbing up for Sunday to the very middle of their brick streets, but I doubt if Dutch cleanliness goes so far without, or comes from so deep a scruple within, as the cleanliness of New England. I felt so keenly the feminine quality of its motive as I passed through that village, that I think if I had dropped so much as a piece of paper in the street I must have knocked at the first door and begged the lady of the house (who would have opened it in person after wiping her hands from her work, taking off her apron, and giving a glance at herself in the mirror and at me through the window blind) to report me to the selectmen in the interest of good morals.

III.

I did not know at once quite how to reconcile the present foulness of the New England capital with the fairness of the New England country; and I am still somewhat embarrassed to own that after New York (even under the relaxing rule of Tammany) Boston seemed very dirty when we arrived there. At best I was never more than a naturalized Bostonian; but it used to give me great pleasure — so penetratingly does the place qualify even the sojourning Westerner — to think of the defect of New York in the virtue that is next to godliness; and now I had to hang my head for shame at the mortifying contrast of the Boston streets to the well-swept asphalt which I had left frying in the New York sun the afternoon before. Later, however, when I began to meet the sort of Boston faces I remembered so well — good, just, pure, but set and severe, with their look of challenge, of interrogation, almost of reproof — they not only ignored the disgraceful untidiness of the streets, but they convinced me of a state of transition which would leave the place swept and garnished behind it; and comforted me against the litter of the winding thoroughfares and narrow lanes, where the dust had blown up against the brick walls, and seemed permanently to have smutched and discolored them.

In New York you see the American face as Europe characterizes it; in Boston you see it as it characterizes Europe; and it is in Boston that you can best imagine the strenuous grapple of the native forces which all alien things must yield to till they take the American cast. It is almost dismaying, that physiognomy, before it familiarizes itself anew; and in the brief first moment while it is yet objective, you ransack your conscience for any sins you may have committed in your absence from it and make ready to do penance for them. I felt almost as if I had brought the dirty streets with me, and were guilty of having left them lying about, so impossible were they with reference to the Boston face.

It is a face that expresses care, even to the point of anxiety, and it looked into the window of our carriage with the serious eyes of our elderly hackman to make perfectly sure of our destination before we drove away from the station. It was a little rigorous with us, as requiring us to have a clear mind; but it was not unfriendly, not unkind, and it was patient from long experience. In New York there are no elderly hackmen; but in Boston they abound, and I cannot believe they would be capable of bad faith with travellers. In fact, I doubt if this class is anywhere as predatory as it is painted; but in Boston it appears to have the public honor in its keeping. I do not mean that it was less mature, less self-respectful in Portsmouth, where we were next to arrive; more so it could not be; an equal sense of safety, of ease, began with it in both places, and all through New England it is of native birth, while in New York it is composed of men of many nations, with a weight in numbers towards the Celtic strain. The prevalence of the native in New England helps you sensibly to realize from the first moment that here you are in America as the first Americans imagined and meant it; and nowhere in New England is the original tradition more purely kept than in the beautiful old seaport of New Hampshire. In fact, without being quite prepared to defend a thesis to this effect, I believe that Portsmouth is preeminently American, and in this it differs from Newburyport and from Salem, which have suffered from different causes an equal commercial decline, and, though among the earliest of the great Puritan towns after Boston, are now largely made up of aliens in race and religion; these are actually the majority, I believe, in Newburyport.

IV.

The adversity of Portsmouth began early in the century, but before that time she had prospered so greatly that her merchant princes were able to build themselves wooden palaces with white walls and green shutters, of a grandeur and beauty unmatched elsewhere in the country. I do not know what architect had his way with them, though his name is richly worth remembrance, but they let him make them habitations of such graceful proportion and of such delicate ornament that they have become shrines of pious pilgrimage with the young architects of our day who hope to house our well-to-do people fitly in country or suburbs. The decoration is oftenest spent on a porch or portal, or a frieze of peculiar refinement; or perhaps it feels its way to the carven casements or to the delicate iron-work of the transoms; the rest is a simplicity and a faultless propriety of form in the stately mansions which stand under the arching elms, with their gardens sloping, or dropping by easy terraces behind them to the river, or to the borders of other pleasances. They are all of wood, except for the granite foundations and doorsteps, but the stout edifices rarely sway out of the true line given them, and they look as if they might keep it yet another century.

Between them, in the sun-shotten shade, lie the quiet streets, whose gravelled stretch is probably never cleaned because it never needs cleaning. Even the business streets, and the quaint square which gives the most American of towns an air so foreign and Old Worldly, look as if the wind and rain alone cared for them; but they are not foul, and the narrower avenues, where the smaller houses of gray, unpainted wood crowd each other, flush upon the pavements, towards the water — side, are doubtless unvisited by the hoe or broom, and must be kept clean by a New England conscience against getting them untidy.

When you get to the river-side there is one stretch of narrow, high- shouldered warehouses which recall Holland, especially in a few with their gables broken in steps, after the Dutch fashion. These, with their mouldering piers and grass-grown wharves, have their pathos, and the whole place embodies in its architecture an interesting record of the past, from the time when the homesick exiles huddled close to the water’s edge till the period of post-colonial prosperity, when proud merchants and opulent captains set their vast square houses each in its handsome space of gardened ground.

My adjectives might mislead as to size, but they could not as to beauty, and I seek in vain for those that can duly impart the peculiar charm of the town. Portsmouth still awaits her novelist; he will find a rich field when he comes; and I hope he will come of the right sex, for it needs some minute and subtle feminine skill, like that of Jane Austen, to express a fit sense of its life in the past. Of its life in the present I know nothing. I could only go by those delightful, silent houses, and sigh my longing soul into their dim interiors. When now and then a young shape in summer silk, or a group of young shapes in diaphanous muslin, fluttered out of them, I was no wiser; and doubtless my elderly fancy would have been unable to deal with what went on in them. Some girl of those flitting through the warm, odorous twilight must become the creative historian of the place; I can at least imagine a Jane Austen now growing up in Portsmouth.

V.

If Miss Jewett were of a little longer breath than she has yet shown herself in fiction, I might say the Jane Austen of Portsmouth was already with us, and had merely not yet begun to deal with its precious material. One day when we crossed the Piscataqua from New Hampshire into Maine, and took the trolley-line for a run along through the lovely coast country, we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of her own people, who are a little different sort of New-Englanders from those of Miss Wilkins. They began to flock into the car, young maidens and old, mothers and grandmothers, and nice boys and girls, with a very, very few farmer youth of marriageable age, and more rustic and seafaring elders long past it, all in the Sunday best which they had worn to the graduation exercises at the High School, where we took them mostly up. The womenkind were in a nervous twitter of talk and laughter, and the men tolerantly gay beyond their wont, “passing the time of day” with one another, and helping the more tumultuous sex to get settled in the overcrowded open car. They courteously made room for one another, and let the children stand between their knees, or took them in their laps, with that unfailing American kindness which I am prouder of than the American valor in battle, observing in all that American decorum which is no bad thing either. We had chanced upon the high and mighty occasion of the neighborhood year, when people might well have been a little off their balance, but there was not a boisterous note in the subdued affair. As we passed the school-house door, three dear, pretty maids in white gowns and white slippers stood on the steps and gently smiled upon our company. One could see that they were inwardly glowing and thrilling with the excitement of their graduation, but were controlling their emotions to a calm worthy of the august event, so that no one might ever have it to say that they had appeared silly.

The car swept on, and stopped to set down passengers at their doors or gates, where they severally left it, with an easy air as of private ownership, into some sense of which the trolley promptly flatters people along its obliging lines. One comfortable matron, in a cinnamon silk, was just such a figure as that in the Miss Wilkins’s story where the bridegroom fails to come on the wedding-day; but, as I say, they made me think more of Miss Jewett’s people. The shore folk and the Down-Easters are specifically hers; and these were just such as might have belonged in ‘The Country of the Pointed Firs’, or ‘Sister Wisby’s Courtship’, or ‘Dulham Ladies’, or ‘An Autumn Ramble’, or twenty other entrancing tales. Sometimes one of them would try her front door, and then, with a bridling toss of the head, express that she had forgotten locking it, and slip round to the kitchen; but most of the ladies made their way back at once between the roses and syringas of their grassy door-yards, which were as neat and prim as their own persons, or the best chamber in their white- walled, green-shuttered, story-and-a-half house, and as perfectly kept as the very kitchen itself.

The trolley-line had been opened only since the last September, but in an effect of familiar use it was as if it had always been there, and it climbed and crooked and clambered about with the easy freedom of the country road which it followed. It is a land of low hills, broken by frequent reaches of the sea, and it is most amusing, most amazing, to see how frankly the trolley-car takes and overcomes its difficulties. It scrambles up and down the little steeps like a cat, and whisks round a sharp and sudden curve with a feline screech, broadening into a loud caterwaul as it darts over the estuaries on its trestles. Its course does not lack excitement, and I suppose it does not lack danger; but as yet there have been no accidents, and it is not so disfiguring as one would think. The landscape has already accepted it, and is making the best of it; and to the country people it is an inestimable convenience. It passes everybody’s front door or back door, and the farmers can get themselves or their produce (for it runs an express car) into Portsmouth in an hour, twice an hour, all day long. In summer the cars are open, with transverse seats, and stout curtains that quite shut out a squall of wind or rain. In winter the cars are closed, and heated by electricity. The young motorman whom I spoke with, while we waited on a siding to let a car from the opposite direction get by, told me that he was caught out in a blizzard last Winter, and passed the night in a snowdrift. “But the cah was so wa’m, I neva suff’ed a mite.”

“Well,” I summarized, “it must be a great advantage to all the people along the line.”

“Well, you wouldn’t ‘a’ thought so, from the kick they made.”

“I suppose the cottagers” — the summer colony— “didn’t like the noise.”

“Oh yes; that’s what I mean. The’s whe’ the kick was. The natives like it. I guess the summa folks ‘ll like it, too.”

He looked round at me with enjoyment of his joke in his eye, for we both understood that the summer folks could not help themselves, and must bow to the will of the majority.

THE ART OF THE ADSMITH

The other day, a friend of mine, who professes all the intimacy of a bad conscience with many of my thoughts and convictions, came in with a bulky book under his arm, and said, “I see by a guilty look in your eye that you are meaning to write about spring.”

“I am not,” I retorted, “and if I were, it would be because none of the new things have been said yet about spring, and because spring is never an old story, any more than youth or love.”

“I have heard something like that before,” said my friend, “and I understand. The simple truth of the matter is that this is the fag-end of the season, and you have run low in your subjects. Now take my advice and don’t write about spring; it will make everybody hate you, and will do no good. Write about advertising.” He tapped the book under his arm significantly. “Here is a theme for you.”

I.

He had no sooner pronounced these words than I began to feel a weird and potent fascination in his suggestion. I took the book from him and looked it eagerly through. It was called Good Advertising, and it was written by one of the experts in the business who have advanced it almost to the grade of an art, or a humanity.

“But I see nothing here,” I said, musingly, “which would enable a self-respecting author to come to the help of his publisher in giving due hold upon the public interest those charming characteristics of his book which no one else can feel so penetratingly or celebrate so persuasively.”

“I expected some such objection from you,” said my friend. “You will admit that there is everything else here?”

“Everything but that most essential thing. You know how we all feel about it: the bitter disappointment, the heart-sickening sense of insufficiency that the advertised praises of our books give us poor authors. The effect is far worse than that of the reviews, for the reviewer is not your ally and copartner, while your publisher—”

“I see what you mean,” said my friend. “But you must have patience. If the author of this book can write so luminously of advertising in other respects, I am sure he will yet be able to cast a satisfactory light upon your problem. The question is, I believe, how to translate into irresistible terms all that fond and exultant regard which a writer feels for his book, all his pervasive appreciation of its singular beauty, unique value, and utter charm, and transfer it to print, without infringing upon the delicate and shrinking modesty which is the distinguishing ornament of the literary spirit?”

“Something like that. But you understand.”

“Perhaps a Roentgen ray might be got to do it,” said my friend, thoughtfully, “or perhaps this author may bring his mind to bear upon it yet. He seems to have considered every kind of advertising except book-advertising.”

“The most important of all!” I cried, impatiently.

“You think so because you are in that line. If you were in the line of varnish, or bicycles, or soap, or typewriters, or extract of beef, or of malt—”

“Still I should be interested in book — advertising, because it is the most vital of human interests.”

“Tell me,” said my friend, “do you read the advertisements of the books of rival authors?”

“Brother authors,” I corrected him.

“Well, brother authors.”

I said, No, candidly, I did not; and I forbore to add that I thought them little better than a waste of the publishers’ money.

II.

My friend did not pursue his inquiry to my personal disadvantage, but seemed to prefer a more general philosophy of the matter.

“I have often wondered,” he said, “at the enormous expansion of advertising, and doubted whether it was not mostly wasted. But my author, here, has suggested a brilliant fact which I was unwittingly groping for. When you take up a Sunday paper” — I shuddered, and my friend smiled intelligence— “you are simply appalled at the miles of announcements of all sorts. Who can possibly read them? Who cares even to look at them? But if you want something in particular — to furnish a house, or buy a suburban place, or take a steamer for Europe, or go, to the theatre — then you find out at once who reads the advertisements, and cares to look at them. They respond to the multifarious wants of the whole community. You have before you the living operation of that law of demand and supply which it has always been such a bore to hear about. As often happens, the supply seems to come before the demand; but that’s only an appearance. You wanted something, and you found an offer to meet your want.”

“Then you don’t believe that the offer to meet your want suggested it?”

“I see that my author believes something of the kind. We may be full of all sorts of unconscious wants which merely need the vivifying influence of an advertisement to make them spring into active being; but I have a feeling that the money paid for advertising which appeals to potential wants is largely thrown away. You must want a thing, or think you want it; otherwise you resent the proffer of it as a kind of impertinence.”

“There are some kinds of advertisements, all the same, that I read without the slightest interest in the subject matter. Simply the beauty of the style attracts me.”

“I know. But does it ever move you to get what you don’t want?”

“Never; and I should be glad to know what your author thinks of that sort of advertising: the literary, or dramatic, or humorous, or quaint.”

“He doesn’t contemn it, quite. But I think he feels that it may have had its day. Do you still read such advertisements with your early zest?”

“No; the zest for nearly everything goes. I don’t care so much for Tourguenief as I used. Still, if I come upon the jaunty and laconic suggestions of a certain well-known clothing-house, concerning the season’s wear, I read them with a measure of satisfaction. The advertising expert—”

“This author calls him the adsmith.”

“Delightful! Ad is a loathly little word, but we must come to it. It’s as legitimate as lunch. But as I was saying, the adsmith seems to have caught the American business tone, as perfectly as any of our novelists have caught the American social tone.”

“Yes,” said my friend, “and he seems to have prospered as richly by it. You know some of those chaps make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by adsmithing. They have put their art quite on a level with fiction pecuniarily.”

“Perhaps it is a branch of fiction.”

“No; they claim that it is pure fact. My author discourages the slightest admixture of fable. The truth, clearly and simply expressed, is the best in an ad.

“It is best in a wof, too. I am always saying that.”

“Wof?”

“Well, work of fiction. It’s another new word, like lunch or ad.”

“But in a wof,” said my friend, instantly adopting it, “my author insinuates that the fashion of payment tempts you to verbosity, while in an ad the conditions oblige you to the greatest possible succinctness. In one case you are paid by the word; in the other you pay by the word. That is where the adsmith stands upon higher moral ground than the wofsmith.”

“I should think your author might have written a recent article in ‘The ——  —— , reproaching fiction with its unhallowed gains.”

“If you mean that for a sneer, it is misplaced. He would have been incapable of it. My author is no more the friend of honesty in adsmithing than he is of propriety, He deprecates jocosity in apothecaries and undertakers, not only as bad taste, but as bad business; and he is as severe as any one could be upon ads that seize the attention by disgusting or shocking the reader.

“He is to be praised for that, and for the other thing; and I shouldn’t have minded his criticising the ready wofsmith. I hope he attacks the use of display type, which makes our newspapers look like the poster- plastered fences around vacant lots. In New York there is only one paper whose advertisements are not typographically a shock to the nerves.”

“Well,” said my friend, “he attacks foolish and ineffective display.”

“It is all foolish and ineffective. It is like a crowd of people trying to make themselves heard by shouting each at the top of his voice. A paper full of display advertisements is an image of our whole congested and delirious state of competition; but even in competitive conditions it is unnecessary, and it is futile. Compare any New York paper but one with the London papers, and you will see what I mean. Of course I refer to the ad pages; the rest of our exception is as offensive with pictures and scare heads as all the rest. I wish your author could revise his opinions and condemn all display in ads.”

“I dare say he will when he knows what you think,” said my friend, with imaginable sarcasm.

III.

“I wish,” I went on, “that he would give us some philosophy of the prodigious increase of advertising within the last twenty-five years, and some conjecture as to the end of it all. Evidently, it can’t keep on increasing at the present rate. If it does, there will presently be no room in the world for things; it will be filled up with the advertisements of things.”

“Before that time, perhaps,” my friend suggested, “adsmithing will have become so fine and potent an art that advertising will be reduced in bulk, while keeping all its energy and even increasing its effectiveness.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “some silent electrical process will be contrived, so that the attractions of a new line of dress-goods or the fascination of a spring or fall opening may be imparted to a lady’s consciousness without even the agency of words. All other facts of commercial and industrial interest could be dealt with in the same way. A fine thrill could be made to go from the last new book through the whole community, so that people would not willingly rest till they had it. Yes, one can see an indefinite future for advertising in that way. The adsmith may be the supreme artist of the twentieth century. He may assemble in his grasp, and employ at will, all the arts and sciences.”

“Yes,” said my friend, with a sort of fall in his voice, “that is very well. But what is to become of the race when it is penetrated at every pore with a sense of the world’s demand and supply?”

“Oh, that is another affair. I was merely imagining the possible resources of invention in providing for the increase of advertising while guarding the integrity of the planet. I think, very likely, if the thing keeps on, we shall all go mad; but then we shall none of us be able to criticise the others. Or possibly the thing may work its own cure. You know the ingenuity of the political economists in justifying the egotism to which conditions appeal. They do not deny that these foster greed and rapacity in merciless degree, but they contend that when the wealth- winner drops off gorged there is a kind of miracle wrought, and good comes of it all. I never could see how; but if it is true, why shouldn’t a sort of ultimate immunity come back to us from the very excess and invasion of the appeals now made to us, and destined to be made to us still more by the adsmith? Come, isn’t there hope in that?”

“I see a great opportunity for the wofsmith in some such dream,” said my friend. “Why don’t you turn it to account?”

“You know that isn’t my line; I must leave that sort of wofsmithing to the romantic novelist. Besides, I have my well-known panacea for all the ills our state is heir to, in a civilization which shall legislate foolish and vicious and ugly and adulterate things out of the possibility of existence. Most of the adsmithing is now employed in persuading people that such things are useful, beautiful, and pure. But in any civilization they shall not even be suffered to be made, much less foisted upon the community by adsmiths.”

“I see what you mean,” said my friend; and he sighed gently. “I had much better let you write about spring.”

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAGIARISM

A late incident in the history of a very widespread English novelist, triumphantly closed by the statement of his friend that the novelist had casually failed to accredit a given passage in his novel to the real author, has brought freshly to my mind a curious question in ethics. The friend who vindicated the novelist, or, rather, who contemptuously dismissed the matter, not only confessed the fact of adoption, but declared that it was one of many which could be found in the novelist’s works. The novelist, he said, was quite in the habit of so using material in the rough, which he implied was like using any fact or idea from life, and he declared that the novelist could not bother to answer critics who regarded these exploitations as a sort of depredation. In a manner he brushed the impertinent accusers aside, assuring the general public that the novelist always meant, at his leisure, and in his own way, duly to ticket the flies preserved in his amber.

I.

When I read this haughty vindication, I thought at first that if the case were mine I would rather have several deadly enemies than such a friend as that; but since, I have not been so sure. I have asked myself upon a careful review of the matter whether plagiarism may not be frankly avowed, as in nowise dishonest, and I wish some abler casuist would take the affair into consideration and make it clear for me. If we are to suppose that offences against society disgrace the offender, and that public dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparently plagiarism is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases it does not disgrace. The dictionary, indeed, defines it as “the crime of literary theft”; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame, it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the offence, if it is an offence (one has to call it something, and I hope the word is not harsh), is some such harmless infraction of the moral law as white-lying.

The much-perverted saying of Moliere, that he took his own where he found it, is perhaps in the consciousness of those who appropriate the things other people have rushed in with before them. But really they seem to need neither excuse nor defence with the impartial public if they are caught in the act of reclaiming their property or despoiling the rash intruder upon their premises. The novelist in question is by no means the only recent example, and is by no means a flagrant example. While the ratification of the treaty with Spain was pending before the Senate of the United States, a member of that body opposed it in a speech almost word for word the same as a sermon delivered in New York City only a few days earlier and published broadcast. He was promptly exposed by the parallel-column system; but I have never heard that his standing was affected or his usefulness impaired by the offence proven against him. A few years ago an eminent divine in one of our cities preached as his own the sermon of a brother divine, no longer living; he, too, was detected and promptly exposed by the parallel-column system, but nothing whatever happened from the exposure. Every one must recall like instances, more or less remote. I remember one within my youthfuller knowledge of a journalist who used as his own all the denunciatory passages of Macaulay’s article on Barrere, and applied them with changes of name to the character and conduct of a local politician whom he felt it his duty to devote to infamy. He was caught in the fact, and by means of the parallel column pilloried before the community. But the community did not mind it a bit, and the journalist did not either. He prospered on amid those who all knew what he had done, and when he removed to another city it was to a larger one, and to a position of more commanding influence, from which he was long conspicuous in helping shape the destinies of the nation.

So far as any effect from these exposures was concerned, they were as harmless as those exposures of fraudulent spiritistic mediums which from time to time are supposed to shake the spiritistic superstition to its foundations. They really do nothing of the kind; the table-tippings, rappings, materializations, and levitations keep on as before; and I do not believe that the exposure of the novelist who has been the latest victim of the parallel column will injure him a jot in the hearts or heads of his readers.

II.

I am very glad of it, being a disbeliever in punishments of all sorts. I am always glad to have sinners get off, for I like to get off from my own sins; and I have a bad moment from my sense of them whenever another’s have found him out. But as yet I have not convinced myself that the sort of thing we have been considering is a sin at all, for it seems to deprave no more than it dishonors; or that it is what the dictionary (with very unnecessary brutality) calls a “crime” and a “theft.” If it is either, it is differently conditioned, if not differently natured, from all other crimes and thefts. These may be more or less artfully and hopefully concealed, but plagiarism carries inevitable detection with it. If you take a man’s hat or coat out of his hall, you may pawn it before the police overtake you; if you take his horse out of his stable, you may ride it away beyond pursuit and sell it; if you take his purse out of his pocket, you may pass it to a pal in the crowd, and easily prove your innocence. But if you take his sermon, or his essay, or even his apposite reflection, you cannot escape discovery. The world is full of idle people reading books, and they are only too glad to act as detectives; they please their miserable vanity by showing their alertness, and are proud to hear witness against you in the court of parallel columns. You have no safety in the obscurity of the author from whom you take your own; there is always that most terrible reader, the reader of one book, who knows that very author, and will the more indecently hasten to bring you to the bar because he knows no other, and wishes to display his erudition. A man may escape for centuries and yet be found out. In the notorious case of William Shakespeare the offender seemed finally secure of his prey; and yet one poor lady, who ended in a lunatic asylum, was able to detect him at last, and to restore the goods to their rightful owner, Sir Francis Bacon.

In spite, however, of this almost absolute certainty of exposure, plagiarism goes on as it has always gone on; and there is no probability that it will cease as long as there are novelists, senators, divines, and journalists hard pressed for ideas which they happen not to have in mind at the time, and which they see going to waste elsewhere. Now and then it takes a more violent form and becomes a real mania, as when the plagiarist openly claims and urges his right to a well-known piece of literary property. When Mr. William Allen Butler’s famous poem of “Nothing to Wear” achieved its extraordinary popularity, a young girl declared and apparently quite believed that she had written it and lost the MS. in an omnibus. All her friends apparently believed so, too; and the friends of the different gentlemen and ladies who claimed the authorship of “Beautiful Snow” and “Rock Me to Sleep” were ready to support them by affidavit against the real authors of those pretty worthless pieces.

From all these facts it must appear to the philosophic reader that plagiarism is not the simple “crime” or “theft” that the lexicographers would have us believe. It argues a strange and peculiar courage on the part of those who commit it or indulge it, since they are sure of having it brought home to them, for they seem to dread the exposure, though it involves no punishment outside of themselves. Why do they do it, or, having done it, why do they mind it, since the public does not? Their temerity and their timidity are things almost irreconcilable, and the whole position leaves one quite puzzled as to what one would do if one’s own plagiarisms were found out. But this is a mere question of conduct, and of infinitely less interest than that of the nature or essence of the thing itself.

PURITANISM IN AMERICAN FICTION

The question whether the fiction which gives a vivid impression of reality does truly represent the conditions studied in it, is one of those inquiries to which there is no very final answer. The most baffling fact of such fiction is that its truths are self-evident; and if you go about to prove them you are in some danger of shaking the convictions of those whom they have persuaded. It will not do to affirm anything wholesale concerning them; a hundred examples to the contrary present themselves if you know the ground, and you are left in doubt of the verity which you cannot gainsay. The most that you can do is to appeal to your own consciousness, and that is not proof to anybody else. Perhaps the best test in this difficult matter is the quality of the art which created the picture. Is it clear, simple, unaffected? Is it true to human experience generally? If it is so, then it cannot well be false to the special human experience it deals with.

I.

Not long ago I heard of something which amusingly, which pathetically, illustrated the sense of reality imparted by the work of one of our writers, whose art is of the kind I mean. A lady was driving with a young girl of the lighter-minded civilization of New York through one of those little towns of the North Shore in Massachusetts, where the small; wooden houses cling to the edges of the shallow bay, and the schooners slip, in and out on the hidden channels of the salt meadows as if they were blown about through the tall grass. She tried to make her feel the shy charm of the place, that almost subjective beauty, which those to the manner born are so keenly aware of in old-fashioned New England villages; but she found that the girl was not only not looking at the sad-colored cottages, with their weather-worn shingle walls, their grassy door-yards lit by patches of summer bloom, and their shutterless windows with their close-drawn shades, but she was resolutely averting her eyes from them, and staring straightforward until she should be out of sight of them altogether. She said that they were terrible, and she knew that in each of them was one of those dreary old women, or disappointed girls, or unhappy wives, or bereaved mothers, she had read of in Miss Wilkins’s stories.

She had been too little sensible of the humor which forms the relief of these stories, as it forms the relief of the bare, duteous, conscientious, deeply individualized lives portrayed in them; and no doubt this cannot make its full appeal to the heart of youth aching for their stoical sorrows. Without being so very young, I, too, have found the humor hardly enough at times, and if one has not the habit of experiencing support in tragedy itself, one gets through a remote New England village, at nightfall, say, rather limp than otherwise, and in quite the mood that Miss Wilkins’s bleaker studies leave one in. At midday, or in the bright sunshine of the morning, it is quite possible to fling off the melancholy which breathes the same note in the fact and the fiction; and I have even had some pleasure at such times in identifying this or, that one-story cottage with its lean-to as a Mary Wilkins house and in placing one of her muted dramas in it. One cannot know the people of such places without recognizing her types in them, and one cannot know New England without owning the fidelity of her stories to New England character, though, as I have already suggested, quite another sort of stories could be written which should as faithfully represent other phases of New England village life.

To the alien inquirer, however, I should be by no means confident that their truth would evince itself, for the reason that human nature is seldom on show anywhere. I am perfectly certain of the truth of Tolstoy and Tourguenief to Russian life, yet I should not be surprised if I went through Russia and met none of their people. I should be rather more surprised if I went through Italy and met none of Verga’s or Fogazzaro’s, but that would be because I already knew Italy a little. In fact, I suspect that the last delight of truth in any art comes only to the connoisseur who is as well acquainted with the subject as the artist himself. One must not be too severe in challenging the truth of an author to life; and one must bring a great deal of sympathy and a great deal of patience to the scrutiny. Types are very backward and shrinking things, after all; character is of such a mimosan sensibility that if you seize it too abruptly its leaves are apt to shut and hide all that is distinctive in it; so that it is not without some risk to an author’s reputation for honesty that he gives his readers the impression of his truth.

II.

The difficulty with characters in fiction is that the reader there finds them dramatized; not only their actions, but also their emotions are dramatized; and the very same sort of persons when one meets them in real life are recreantly undramatic. One might go through a New England village and see Mary Wilkins houses and Mary Wilkins people, and yet not witness a scene nor hear a word such as one finds in her tales. It is only too probable that the inhabitants one met would say nothing quaint or humorous, or betray at all the nature that she reveals in them; and yet I should not question her revelation on that account. The life of New England, such as Miss Wilkins deals with, and Miss Sarah O. Jewett, and Miss Alice Brown, is not on the surface, or not visibly so, except to the accustomed eye. It is Puritanism scarcely animated at all by the Puritanic theology. One must not be very positive in such things, and I may be too bold in venturing to say that while the belief of some New Englanders approaches this theology the belief of most is now far from it; and yet its penetrating individualism so deeply influenced the New England character that Puritanism survives in the moral and mental make of the people almost in its early strength. Conduct and manner conform to a dead religious ideal; the wish to be sincere, the wish to be just, the wish to be righteous are before the wish to be kind, merciful, humble. A people are not a chosen people for half a dozen generations without acquiring a spiritual pride that remains with them long after they cease to believe themselves chosen. They are often stiffened in the neck and they are often hardened in the heart by it, to the point of making them angular and cold; but they are of an inveterate responsibility to a power higher than themselves, and they are strengthened for any fate. They are what we see in the stories which, perhaps, hold the first place in American fiction.

As a matter of fact, the religion of New England is not now so Puritanical as that of many parts of the South and West, and yet the inherited Puritanism stamps the New England manner, and differences it from the manner of the straightest sects elsewhere. There was, however, always a revolt against Puritanism when Puritanism was severest and securest; this resulted in types of shiftlessness if not wickedness, which have not yet been duly studied, and which would make the fortune of some novelist who cared to do a fresh thing. There is also a sentimentality, or pseudo-emotionality (I have not the right phrase for it), which awaits full recognition in fiction. This efflorescence from the dust of systems and creeds, carried into natures left vacant by the ancestral doctrine, has scarcely been noticed by the painters of New England manners. It is often a last state of Unitarianism, which prevailed in the larger towns and cities when the Calvinistic theology ceased to be dominant, and it is often an effect of the spiritualism so common in New England, and, in fact, everywhere in America. Then, there is a wide-spread love of literature in the country towns and villages which has in great measure replaced the old interest in dogma, and which forms with us an author’s closest appreciation, if not his best. But as yet little hint of all this has got into the short stories, and still less of that larger intellectual life of New England, or that exalted beauty of character which tempts one to say that Puritanism was a blessing if it made the New-Englanders what they are; though one can always be glad not to have lived among them in the disciplinary period. Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losing itself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large. The good causes, the generous causes, are first befriended there, and in a wholesome sort the New England culture, as well as the New England conscience, has imparted itself to the American people.

Even the power of writing short stories, which we suppose ourselves to have in such excellent degree, has spread from New England. That is, indeed, the home of the American short story, and it has there been brought to such perfection in the work of Miss Wilkins, of Miss Jewett, of Miss Brown, and of that most faithful, forgotten painter of manners, Mrs. Rose Terry Cook, that it presents upon the whole a truthful picture of New England village life in some of its more obvious phases. I say obvious because I must, but I have already said that this is a life which is very little obvious; and I should not blame any one who brought the portrait to the test of reality, and found it exaggerated, overdrawn, and unnatural, though I should be perfectly sure that such a critic was wrong.

THE WHAT AND THE HOW IN ART

One of the things always enforcing itself upon the consciousness of the artist in any sort is the fact that those whom artists work for rarely care for their work artistically. They care for it morally, personally, partially. I suspect that criticism itself has rather a muddled preference for the what over the how, and that it is always haunted by a philistine question of the material when it should, aesthetically speaking, be concerned solely with the form.

I.

The other night at the theatre I was witness of a curious and amusing illustration of my point. They were playing a most soul-filling melodrama, of the sort which gives you assurance from the very first that there will be no trouble in the end, but everything will come out just as it should, no matter what obstacles oppose themselves in the course of the action. An over-ruling Providence, long accustomed to the exigencies of the stage, could not fail to intervene at the critical moment in behalf of innocence and virtue, and the spectator never had the least occasion for anxiety. Not unnaturally there was a black-hearted villain in the piece; so very black-hearted that he seemed not to have a single good impulse from first to last. Yet he was, in the keeping of the stage Providence, as harmless as a blank cartridge, in spite of his deadly aims. He accomplished no more mischief, in fact, than if all his intents had been of the best; except for the satisfaction afforded by the edifying spectacle of his defeat and shame, he need not have been in the play at all; and one might almost have felt sorry for him, he was so continually baffled. But this was not enough for the audience, or for that part of it which filled the gallery to the roof. Perhaps he was such an uncommonly black-hearted villain, so very, very cold-blooded in his wickedness that the justice unsparingly dealt out to him by the dramatist could not suffice. At any rate, the gallery took such a vivid interest in his punishment that it had out the actor who impersonated the wretch between all the acts, and hissed him throughout his deliberate passage across the stage before the curtain. The hisses were not at all for the actor, but altogether for the character. The performance was fairly good, quite as good as the performance of any virtuous part in the piece, and easily up to the level of other villanous performances (I never find much nature in them, perhaps because there is not much nature in villany itself; that is, villany pure and simple); but the mere conception of the wickedness this bad man had attempted was too much for an audience of the average popular goodness. It was only after he had taken poison, and fallen dead before their eyes, that the spectators forbore to visit him with a lively proof of their abhorrence; apparently they did not care to “give him a realizing sense that there was a punishment after death,” as the man in Lincoln’s story did with the dead dog.

II.

The whole affair was very amusing at first, but it has since put me upon thinking (I like to be put upon thinking; the eighteenth-century essayists were) that the attitude of the audience towards this deplorable reprobate is really the attitude of most readers of books, lookers at pictures and statues, listeners to music, and so on through the whole list of the arts. It is absolutely different from the artist’s attitude, from the connoisseur’s attitude; it is quite irreconcilable with their attitude, and yet I wonder if in the end it is not what the artist works for. Art is not produced for artists, or even for connoisseurs; it is produced for the general, who can never view it otherwise than morally, personally, partially, from their associations and preconceptions.

Whether the effect with the general is what the artist works for or not, he, does not succeed without it. Their brute liking or misliking is the final test; it is universal suffrage that elects, after all. Only, in some cases of this sort the polls do not close at four o’clock on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, but remain open forever, and the voting goes on. Still, even the first day’s canvass is important, or at least significant. It will not do for the artist to electioneer, but if he is beaten, he ought to ponder the causes of his defeat, and question how he has failed to touch the chord of universal interest. He is in the world to make beauty and truth evident to his fellowmen, who are as a rule incredibly stupid and ignorant of both, but whose judgment he must nevertheless not despise. If he can make something that they will cheer, or something that they will hiss, he may not have done any great thing, but if he has made something that they will neither cheer nor hiss, he may well have his misgivings, no matter how well, how finely, how truly he has done the thing.

This is very humiliating, but a tacit snub to one’s artist-pride such as one gets from public silence is not a bad thing for one. Not long ago I was talking about pictures with a painter, a very great painter, to my thinking; one whose pieces give me the same feeling I have from reading poetry; and I was excusing myself to him with respect to art, and perhaps putting on a little more modesty than I felt. I said that I could enjoy pictures only on the literary side, and could get no answer from my soul to those excellences of handling and execution which seem chiefly to interest painters. He replied that it was a confession of weakness in a painter if he appealed merely or mainly to technical knowledge in the spectator; that he narrowed his field and dwarfed his work by it; and that if he painted for painters merely, or for the connoisseurs of painting, he was denying his office, which was to say something clear and appreciable to all sorts of men in the terms of art. He even insisted that a picture ought to tell a story.

The difficulty in humbling one’s self to this view of art is in the ease with which one may please the general by art which is no art. Neither the play nor the playing that I saw at the theatre when the actor was hissed for the wickedness of the villain he was personating, was at all fine; and yet I perceived, on reflection, that they had achieved a supreme effect. If I may be so confidential, I will say that I should be very sorry to have written that piece; yet I should be very proud if, on the level I chose and with the quality I cared for, I could invent a villain that the populace would have out and hiss for his surpassing wickedness. In other words, I think it a thousand pities whenever an artist gets so far away from the general, so far within himself or a little circle of amateurs, that his highest and best work awakens no response in the multitude. I am afraid this is rather the danger of the arts among us, and how to escape it is not so very plain. It makes one sick and sorry often to see how cheaply the applause of the common people is won. It is not an infallible test of merit, but if it is wanting to any performance, we may be pretty sure it is not the greatest performance.

III.

The paradox lies in wait here, as in most other human affairs, to confound us, and we try to baffle it, in this way and in that. We talk, for instance, of poetry for poets, and we fondly imagine that this is different from talking of cookery for cooks. Poetry is not made for poets; they have enough poetry of their own, but it is made for people who are not poets. If it does not please these, it may still be poetry, but it is poetry which has failed of its truest office. It is none the less its truest office because some very wretched verse seems often to do it.

The logic of such a fact is not that the poet should try to achieve this truest office of his art by means of doggerel, but that he should study how and where and why the beauty and the truth he has made manifest are wanting in universal interest, in human appeal. Leaving the drama out of the question, and the theatre which seems now to be seeking only the favor of the dull rich, I believe that there never was a time or a race more open to the impressions of beauty and of truth than ours. The artist who feels their divine charm, and longs to impart it, has now and here a chance to impart it more widely than ever artist had in the world before. Of course, the means of reaching the widest range of humanity are the simple and the elementary, but there is no telling when the complex and the recondite may not universally please. 288

The art is to make them plain to every one, for every one has them in him. Lowell used to say that Shakespeare was subtle, but in letters a foot high.

The painter, sculptor, or author who pleases the polite only has a success to be proud of as far as it goes, and to be ashamed of that it goes no further. He need not shrink from giving pleasure to the vulgar because bad art pleases them. It is part of his reason for being that he should please them, too; and if he does not it is a proof that he is wanting in force, however much he abounds in fineness. Who would not wish his picture to draw a crowd about it? Who would not wish his novel to sell five hundred thousand copies, for reasons besides the sordid love of gain which I am told governs novelists? One should not really wish it any the less because chromos and historical romances are popular.

Sometime, I believe, the artist and his public will draw nearer together in a mutual understanding, though perhaps not in our present conditions. I put that understanding off till the good time when life shall be more than living, more even than the question of getting a living; but in the mean time I think that the artist might very well study the springs of feeling in others; and if I were a dramatist I think I should quite humbly go to that play where they hiss the villain for his villany, and inquire how his wickedness had been made so appreciable, so vital, so personal. Not being a dramatist, I still cannot indulge the greatest contempt of that play and its public.

POLITICS OF AMERICAN AUTHORS

No thornier theme could well be suggested than I was once invited to consider by an Englishman who wished to know how far American politicians were scholars, and how far American authors took part in politics. In my mind I first revolted from the inquiry, and then I cast about, in the fascination it began to have for me, to see how I might handle it and prick myself least. In a sort, which it would take too long to set forth, politics are very intimate matters with us, and if one were to deal quite frankly with the politics of a contemporary author, one might accuse one’s self of an unwarrantable personality. So, in what I shall have to say in answer to the question asked me, I shall seek above all things not to be quite frank.

I.

My uncandor need not be so jealously guarded in speaking of authors no longer living. Not to go too far back among these, it is perfectly safe to say that when the slavery question began to divide all kinds of men among us, Lowell, Longfellow, Whittier, Curtis, Emerson, and Bryant more or less promptly and openly took sides against slavery. Holmes was very much later in doing so, but he made up for his long delay by his final strenuousness; as for Hawthorne, he was, perhaps, too essentially a spectator of life to be classed with either party, though his associations, if not his sympathies, were with the Northern men who had Southern principles until the civil war came. After the war, when our political questions ceased to be moral and emotional and became economic and sociological, literary men found their standing with greater difficulty. They remained mostly Republicans, because the Republicans were the anti-slavery party, and were still waging war against slavery in their nerves.

I should say that they also continued very largely the emotional tradition in politics, and it is doubtful if in the nature of things the politics of literary men can ever be otherwise than emotional. In fact, though the questions may no longer be so, the politics of vastly the greater number of Americans are so. Nothing else would account for the fact that during the last ten or fifteen years men have remained Republicans and remained Democrats upon no tangible issues except of office, which could practically concern only a few hundreds or thousands out of every million voters. Party fealty is praised as a virtue, and disloyalty to party is treated as a species of incivism next in wickedness to treason. If any one were to ask me why then American authors were not active in American politics, as they once were, I should feel a certain diffidence in replying that the question of other people’s accession to office was, however emotional, unimportant to them as compared with literary questions. I should have the more diffidence because it might be retorted that literary men were too unpractical for politics when they did not deal with moral issues.

Such a retort would be rather mild and civil, as things go, and might even be regarded as complimentary. It is not our custom to be tender with any one who doubts if any actuality is right, or might not be bettered, especially in public affairs. We are apt to call such a one out of his name and to punish him for opinions he has never held. This may be a better reason than either given why authors do not take part in politics with us. They are a thin-skinned race, fastidious often, and always averse to hard knocks; they are rather modest, too, and distrust their fitness to lead, when they have quite a firm faith in their convictions. They hesitate to urge these in the face of practical politicians, who have a confidence in their ability to settle all affairs of State not surpassed even by that of business men in dealing with economic questions.

I think it is a pity that our authors do not go into politics at least for the sake of the material it would yield them; but really they do not. Our politics are often vulgar, but they are very picturesque; yet, so far, our fiction has shunned them even more decidedly than it has shunned our good society — which is not picturesque or apparently anything but a tiresome adaptation of the sort of drama that goes on abroad under the same name. In nearly the degree that our authors have dealt with our politics as material, they have given the practical politicians only too much reason to doubt their insight and their capacity to understand the mere machinery, the simplest motives, of political life.

II.

There are exceptions, of course, and if my promise of reticence did not withhold me I might name some striking ones. Privately and unprofessionally, I think our authors take as vivid an interest in public affairs as any other class of our citizens, and I should be sorry to think that they took a less intelligent interest. Now and then, but only very rarely, one of them speaks out, and usually on the unpopular side. In this event he is spared none of the penalties with which we like to visit difference of opinion; rather they are accumulated on him.

Such things are not serious, and they are such as no serious man need shrink from, but they have a bearing upon what I am trying to explain, and in a certain measure they account for a certain attitude in our literary men. No one likes to have stones, not to say mud, thrown at him, though they are not meant to hurt him badly and may be partly thrown in joke. But it is pretty certain that if a man not in politics takes them seriously, he will have more or less mud, not to say stones, thrown at him. He might burlesque or caricature them, or misrepresent them, with safety; but if he spoke of public questions with heart and conscience, he could not do it with impunity, unless he were authorized to do so by some practical relation to them. I do not mean that then he would escape; but in this country, where there were once supposed to be no classes, people are more strictly classified than in any other. Business to the business man, law to the lawyer, medicine to the physician, politics to the politician, and letters to the literary man; that is the rule. One is not expected to transcend his function, and commonly one does not. We keep each to his last, as if there were not human interests, civic interests, which had a higher claim than the last upon our thinking and feeling. The tendency has grown upon us severally and collectively through the long persistence of our prosperity; if public affairs were going ill, private affairs were going so well that we did not mind the others; and we Americans are, I think, meridional in our improvidence. We are so essentially of to-day that we behave as if to-morrow no more concerned us than yesterday. We have taught ourselves to believe that it will all come out right in the end so long that we have come to act upon our belief; we are optimistic fatalists.

III.

The turn which our politics have taken towards economics, if I may so phrase the rise of the questions of labor and capital, has not largely attracted literary men. It is doubtful whether Edward Bellamy himself, whose fancy of better conditions has become the abiding faith of vast numbers of Americans, supposed that he was entering the field of practical politics, or dreamed of influencing elections by his hopes of economic equality. But he virtually founded the Populist party, which, as the vital principle of the Democratic party, came so near electing its candidate for the Presidency some years ago; and he is to be named first among our authors who have dealt with politics on their more human side since the days of the old antislavery agitation. Without too great disregard of the reticence concerning the living which I promised myself, I may mention Dr. Edward Everett Hale and Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson as prominent authors who encouraged the Nationalist movement eventuating in Populism, though they were never Populists. It may be interesting to note that Dr. Hale and Colonel Higginson, who later came together in their sociological sympathies, were divided by the schism of 1884, when the first remained with the Republicans and the last went off to the Democrats. More remotely, Colonel Higginson was anti slavery almost to the point of Abolitionism, and he led a negro regiment in the war. Dr. Hale was of those who were less radically opposed to slavery before the war, but hardly so after it came. Since the war a sort of refluence of the old anti-slavery politics carried from his moorings in Southern tradition Mr. George W. Cable, who, against the white sentiment of his section, sided with the former slaves, and would, if the indignant renunciation of his fellow-Southerners could avail, have consequently ceased to be the first of Southern authors, though he would still have continued the author of at least one of the greatest American novels.

If I must burn my ships behind me in alleging these modern instances, as I seem really to be doing, I may mention Mr. R. W. Gilder, the poet, as an author who has taken part in the politics of municipal reform, Mr. Hamlin Garland has been known from the first as a zealous George man, or single-taxer. Mr. John Hay, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, and Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge are Republican politicians, as well as recognized literary men. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, when not writing Uncle Remus, writes political articles in a leading Southern journal. Mark Twain is a leading anti-imperialist.

IV.

I am not sure whether I have made out a case for our authors or against them; perhaps I have not done so badly; but I have certainly not tried to be exhaustive; the exhaustion is so apt to extend from the subject to the reader, and I wish to leave him in a condition to judge for himself whether American literary men take part in American politics or not. I think they bear their share, in the quieter sort of way which we hope (it may be too fondly) is the American way. They are none of them politicians in the Latin sort. Few, if any, of our statesmen have come forward with small volumes of verse in their hands as they used to do in Spain; none of our poets or historians have been chosen Presidents of the republic as has happened to their French confreres; no great novelist of ours has been exiled as Victor Hugo was, or atrociously mishandled as Zola has been, though I have no doubt that if, for instance, one had once said the Spanish war wrong he would be pretty generally ‘conspue’. They have none of them reached the heights of political power, as several English authors have done; but they have often been ambassadors, ministers, and consuls, though they may not often have been appointed for political reasons. I fancy they discharge their duties in voting rather faithfully, though they do not often take part in caucuses or conventions.

As for the other half of the question — how far American politicians are scholars — one’s first impulse would be to say that they never were so. But I have always had an heretical belief that there were snakes in Ireland; and it may be some such disposition to question authority that keeps me from yielding to this impulse. The law of demand and supply alone ought to have settled the question in favor of the presence of the scholar in our politics, there has been such a cry for him among us for almost a generation past. Perhaps the response has not been very direct, but I imagine that our politicians have never been quite so destitute of scholarship as they would sometimes make appear. I do not think so many of them now write a good style, or speak a good style, as the politicians of forty, or fifty, or sixty years ago; but this may be merely part of the impression of the general worsening of things, familiar after middle life to every one’s experience, from the beginning of recorded time. If something not so literary is meant by scholarship, if a study of finance, of economics, of international affairs is in question, it seems to go on rather more to their own satisfaction than that of their critics. But without being always very proud of the result, and without professing to know the facts very profoundly, one may still suspect that under an outside by no means academic there is a process of thinking in our statesmen which is not so loose, not so unscientific, and not even so unscholarly as it might be supposed. It is not the effect of specific training, and yet it is the effect of training. I do not find that the matters dealt with are anywhere in the world intrusted to experts; and in this sense scholarship has not been called to the aid of our legislation or administration; but still I should not like to say that none of our politicians were scholars. That would be offensive, and it might not be true. In fact, I can think of several whom I should be tempted to call scholars if I were not just here recalled to a sense of my purpose not to deal quite frankly with this inquiry.

STORAGE

It has been the belief of certain kindly philosophers that if the one half of mankind knew how the other half lived, the two halves might be brought together in a family affection not now so observable in human relations. Probably if this knowledge were perfect, there would still be things, to bar the perfect brotherhood; and yet the knowledge itself is so interesting, if not so salutary as it has been imagined, that one can hardly refuse to impart it if one has it, and can reasonably hope, in the advantage of the ignorant, to find one’s excuse with the better informed.

I.

City and country are still so widely apart in every civilization that one can safely count upon a reciprocal strangeness in many every-day things. For instance, in the country, when people break up house-keeping, they sell their household goods and gods, as they did in cities fifty or a hundred years ago; but now in cities they simply store them; and vast warehouses in all the principal towns have been devoted to their storage. The warehouses are of all types, from dusty lofts over stores, and ammoniacal lofts over stables, to buildings offering acres of space, and carefully planned for the purpose. They are more or less fire-proof, slow-burning, or briskly combustible, like the dwellings they have devastated. But the modern tendency is to a type where flames do not destroy, nor moth corrupt, nor thieves break through and steal. Such a warehouse is a city in itself, laid out in streets and avenues, with the private tenements on either hand duly numbered, and accessible only to the tenants or their order. The aisles are concreted, the doors are iron, and the roofs are ceiled with iron; the whole place is heated by steam and lighted by electricity. Behind the iron doors, which in the New York warehouses must number hundreds of thousands, and throughout all our other cities, millions, the furniture of a myriad households is stored — the effects of people who have gone to Europe, or broken up house-keeping provisionally or definitively, or have died, or been divorced. They are the dead bones of homes, or their ghosts, or their yet living bodies held in hypnotic trances; destined again in some future time to animate some house or flat anew. In certain cases the spell lasts for many years, in others for a few, and in others yet it prolongs itself indefinitely.

I may mention the case of one owner whom I saw visiting the warehouse to take out the household stuff that had lain there a long fifteen years. He had been all that while in Europe, expecting any day to come home and begin life again, in his own land. That dream had passed, and now he was taking his stuff out of storage and shipping it to Italy. I did not envy him his feelings as the parts of his long-dead past rose round him in formless resurrection. It was not that they were all broken or defaced. On the contrary, they were in a state of preservation far more heartbreaking than any decay. In well-managed storage warehouses the things are handled with scrupulous care, and they are so packed into the appointed rooms that if not disturbed they could suffer little harm in fifteen or fifty years. The places are wonderfully well kept, and if you will visit them, say in midwinter, after the fall influx of furniture has all been hidden away behind the iron doors of the several cells, you shall find their far-branching corridors scrupulously swept and dusted, and shall walk up and down their concrete length with some such sense of secure finality as you would experience in pacing the aisle of your family vault.

That is what it comes to. One may feign that these storage warehouses are cities, but they are really cemeteries: sad columbaria on whose shelves are stowed exanimate things once so intimately of their owners’ lives that it is with the sense of looking at pieces and bits of one’s dead self that one revisits them. If one takes the fragments out to fit them to new circumstance, one finds them not only uncomformable and incapable, but so volubly confidential of the associations in which they are steeped, that one wishes to hurry them back to their cell and lock it upon them forever. One feels then that the old way was far better, and that if the things had been auctioned off, and scattered up and down, as chance willed, to serve new uses with people who wanted them enough to pay for them even a tithe of their cost, it would have been wiser. Failing this, a fire seems the only thing for them, and their removal to the cheaper custody of a combustible or slow-burning warehouse the best recourse. Desperate people, aging husbands and wives, who have attempted the reconstruction of their homes with these

    “Portions and parcels of the dreadful past”

have been known to wish for an earthquake, even, that would involve their belongings in an indiscriminate ruin.

II.

In fact, each new start in life should be made with material new to you, if comfort is to attend the enterprise. It is not only sorrowful but it is futile to store your possessions, if you hope to find the old happiness in taking them out and using them again. It is not that they will not go into place, after a fashion, and perform their old office, but that the pang they will inflict through the suggestion of the other places where they served their purpose in other years will be only the keener for the perfection with which they do it now. If they cannot be sold, and if no fire comes down from heaven to consume them, then they had better be stored with no thought of ever taking them out again.

That will be expensive, or it will be inexpensive, according to the sort of storage they are put into. The inexperienced in such matters may be surprised, and if they have hearts they may be grieved, to learn that the fire-proof storage of the furniture of the average house would equal the rent of a very comfortable domicile in a small town, or a farm by which a family’s living can be earned, with a decent dwelling in which it can be sheltered. Yet the space required is not very great; three fair-sized rooms will hold everything; and there is sometimes a fierce satisfaction in seeing how closely the things that once stood largely about, and seemed to fill ample parlors and chambers, can be packed away. To be sure they are not in their familiar attitudes; they lie on their sides or backs, or stand upon their heads; between the legs of library or dining tables are stuffed all kinds of minor movables, with cushions, pillows, pictures, cunningly adjusted to the environment; and mattresses pad the walls, or interpose their soft bulk between pieces of furniture that would otherwise rend each other. Carpets sewn in cotton against moths, and rugs in long rolls; the piano hovering under its ample frame a whole brood of helpless little guitars, mandolins, and banjos, and supporting on its broad back a bulk of lighter cases to the fire-proof ceiling of the cell; paintings in boxes indistinguishable outwardly from their companioning mirrors; barrels of china and kitchen utensils, and all the what-not of householding and house-keeping contribute to the repletion.

There is a science observed in the arrangement of the various effects; against the rear wall and packed along the floor, and then in front of and on top of these, is built a superstructure of the things that may be first wanted, in case of removal, or oftenest wanted in some exigency of the homeless life of the owners, pending removal. The lightest and slightest articles float loosely about the door, or are interwoven in a kind of fabric just within, and curtaining the ponderous mass behind. The effect is not so artistic as the mortuary mosaics which the Roman Capuchins design with the bones of their dead brethren in the crypt of their church, but the warehousemen no doubt have their just pride in it, and feel an artistic pang in its provisional or final disturbance.

It had better never be disturbed, for it is disturbed only in some futile dream of returning to the past; and we never can return to the past on the old terms. It is well in all things to accept life implicitly, and when an end has come to treat it as the end, and not vainly mock it as a suspense of function. When the poor break up their homes, with no immediate hope of founding others, they must sell their belongings because they cannot afford to pay storage on them. The rich or richer store their household effects, and cheat themselves with the illusion that they are going some time to rehabilitate with them just such a home as they have dismantled. But the illusion probably deceives nobody so little as those who cherish the vain hope. As long as they cherish it, however — and they must cherish it till their furniture or themselves fall to dust — they cannot begin life anew, as the poor do who have kept nothing of the sort to link them to the past. This is one of the disabilities of the prosperous, who will probably not be relieved of it till some means of storing the owner as well as the’ furniture is invented. In the immense range of modern ingenuity, this is perhaps not impossible. Why not, while we are still in life, some sweet oblivious antidote which shall drug us against memory, and after time shall elapse for the reconstruction of a new home in place of the old, shall repossess us of ourselves as unchanged as the things with which we shall again array it? Here is a pretty idea for some dreamer to spin into the filmy fabric of a romance, and I handsomely make a present of it to the first comer. If the dreamer is of the right quality he will know how to make the reader feel that with the universal longing to return to former conditions or circumstances it must always be a mistake to do so, and he will subtly insinuate the disappointment and discomfort of the stored personality in resuming its old relations. With that just mixture of the comic and pathetic which we desire in romance, he will teach convincingly that a stored personality is to be desired only if it is permanently stored, with the implication of a like finality in the storage of its belongings.

Save in some signal exception, a thing taken out of storage cannot be established in its former function without a sense of its comparative inadequacy. It stands in the old place, it serves the old use, and yet a new thing would be better; it would even in some subtle wise be more appropriate, if I may indulge so audacious a paradox; for the time is new, and so will be all the subconscious keeping in which our lives are mainly passed. We are supposed to have associations with the old things which render them precious, but do not the associations rather render them painful? If that is true of the inanimate things, how much truer it is of those personalities which once environed and furnished our lives! Take the article of old friends, for instance: has it ever happened to the reader to witness the encounter of old friends after the lapse of years? Such a meeting is conventionally imagined to be full of tender joy, a rapture that vents itself in manly tears, perhaps, and certainly in womanly tears. But really is it any such emotion? Honestly is not it a cruel embarrassment, which all the hypocritical pretences cannot hide? The old friends smile and laugh, and babble incoherently at one another, but are they genuinely glad? Is not each wishing the other at that end of the earth from which he came? Have they any use for each other such as people of unbroken associations have?

I have lately been privy to the reunion of two old comrades who are bound together more closely than most men in a community of interests, occupations, and ideals. During a long separation they had kept account of each other’s opinions as well as experiences; they had exchanged letters, from time to time, in which they opened their minds fully to each other, and found themselves constantly in accord. When they met they made a great shouting, and each pretended that he found the other just what he used to be. They talked a long, long time, fighting the invisible enemy which they felt between them. The enemy was habit, the habit of other minds and hearts, the daily use of persons and things which in their separation they had not had in common. When the old friends parted they promised to meet every day, and now, since their lines had been cast in the same places again, to repair the ravage of the envious years, and become again to each other all that they had ever been. But though they live in the same town, and often dine at the same table, and belong to the same club, yet they have not grown together again. They have grown more and more apart, and are uneasy in each other’s presence, tacitly self-reproachful for the same effect which neither of them could avert or repair. They had been respectively in storage, and each, in taking the other out, has experienced in him the unfitness which grows upon the things put away for a time and reinstated in a former function.

III.

I have not touched upon these facts of life, without the purpose of finding some way out of the coil. There seems none better than the counsel of keeping one’s face set well forward, and one’s eyes fixed steadfastly upon the future. This is the hint we will get from nature if we will heed her, and note how she never recurs, never stores or takes out of storage. Fancy rehabilitating one’s first love: how nature would mock at that! We cannot go back and be the men and women we were, any more than we can go back and be children. As we grow older, each year’s change in us is more chasmal and complete. There is no elixir whose magic will recover us to ourselves as we were last year; but perhaps we shall return to ourselves more and more in the times, or the eternity, to come. Some instinct or inspiration implies the promise of this, but only on condition that we shall not cling to the life that has been ours, and hoard its mummified image in our hearts. We must not seek to store ourselves, but must part with what we were for the use and behoof of others, as the poor part with their worldly gear when they move from one place to another. It is a curious and significant property of our outworn characteristics that, like our old furniture, they will serve admirably in the life of some other, and that this other can profitably make them his when we can no longer keep them ours, or ever hope to resume them. They not only go down to successive generations, but they spread beyond our lineages, and serve the turn of those whom we never knew to be within the circle of our influence.

Civilization imparts itself by some such means, and the lower classes are clothed in the cast conduct of the upper, which if it had been stored would have left the inferiors rude and barbarous. We have only to think how socially naked most of us would be if we had not had the beautiful manners of our exclusive society to put on at each change of fashion when it dropped them.

All earthly and material things should be worn out with use, and not preserved against decay by any unnatural artifice. Even when broken and disabled from overuse they have a kind of respectability which must commend itself to the observer, and which partakes of the pensive grace of ruin. An old table with one leg gone, and slowly lapsing to decay in the woodshed, is the emblem of a fitter order than the same table, with all its legs intact, stored with the rest of the furniture from a broken home. Spinning-wheels gathering dust in the garret of a house that is itself falling to pieces have a dignity that deserts them when they are dragged from their refuge, and furbished up with ribbons and a tuft of fresh tow, and made to serve the hollow occasions of bric-a-brac, as they were a few years ago. A pitcher broken at the fountain, or a battered kettle on a rubbish heap, is a venerable object, but not crockery and copper-ware stored in the possibility of future need. However carefully handed down from one generation to another, the old objects have a forlorn incongruity in their successive surroundings which appeals to the compassion rather than the veneration of the witness.

It was from a truth deeply mystical that Hawthorne declared against any sort of permanence in the dwellings of men, and held that each generation should newly house itself. He preferred the perishability of the wooden American house to the durability of the piles of brick or stone which in Europe affected him as with some moral miasm from the succession of sires and sons and grandsons that had died out of them. But even of such structures as these it is impressive how little the earth makes with the passage of time. Where once a great city of them stood, you shall find a few tottering walls, scarcely more mindful of the past than “the cellar and the well” which Holmes marked as the ultimate monuments, the last witnesses, to the existence of our more transitory habitations. It is the law of the patient sun that everything under it shall decay, and if by reason of some swift calamity, some fiery cataclysm, the perishable shall be overtaken by a fate that fixes it in unwasting arrest, it cannot be felt that the law has been set aside in the interest of men’s happiness or cheerfulness. Neither Pompeii nor Herculaneum invites the gayety of the spectator, who as he walks their disinterred thoroughfares has the weird sense of taking a former civilization out of storage, and the ache of finding it wholly unadapted to the actual world. As far as his comfort is concerned, it had been far better that those cities had not been stored, but had fallen to the ruin that has overtaken all their contemporaries.

IV

No, good friend, sir or madam, as the case may be, but most likely madam: if you are about to break up your household for any indefinite period, and are not so poor that you need sell your things, be warned against putting them in storage, unless of the most briskly combustible type. Better, far better, give them away, and disperse them by that means to a continuous use that shall end in using them up; or if no one will take them, then hire a vacant lot, somewhere, and devote them to the flames. By that means you shall bear witness against a custom that insults the order of nature, and crowds the cities with the cemeteries of dead homes, where there is scarcely space for the living homes. Do not vainly fancy that you shall take your stuff out of storage and find it adapted to the ends that it served before it was put in. You will not be the same, or have the same needs or desire, when you take it out, and the new place which you shall hope to equip with it will receive it with cold reluctance, or openly refuse it, insisting upon forms and dimensions that render it ridiculous or impossible. The law is that nothing taken out of storage is the same as it was when put in, and this law, hieroglyphed in those rude ‘graffiti’ apparently inscribed by accident in the process of removal, has only such exceptions as prove the rule.

The world to which it has returned is not the same, and that makes all the difference. Yet, truth and beauty do not change, however the moods and fashions change. The ideals remain, and these alone you can go back to, secure of finding them the same, to-day and to-morrow, that they were yesterday. This perhaps is because they have never been in storage, but in constant use, while the moods and fashions have been put away and taken out a thousand times. Most people have never had ideals, but only moods and fashions, but such people, least of all, are fitted to find in them that pleasure of the rococo which consoles the idealist when the old moods and fashions reappear.

“FLOATING DOWN THE RIVER ON THE O-HI-O”

There was not much promise of pleasure in the sodden afternoon of a mid-March day at Pittsburg, where the smoke of a thousand foundry chimneys gave up trying to rise through the thick, soft air, and fell with the constant rain which it dyed its own black. But early memories stirred joyfully in the two travellers in whose consciousness I was making my tour, at sight of the familiar stern-wheel steamboat lying beside the wharf boat at the foot of the dilapidated levee, and doing its best to represent the hundreds of steamboats that used to lie there in the old days. It had the help of three others in its generous effort, and the levee itself made a gallant pretence of being crowded with freight, and succeeded in displaying several saturated piles of barrels and agricultural implements on the irregular pavement whose wheel-worn stones, in long stretches, were sunken out of sight in their parent mud. The boats and the levee were jointly quite equal to the demand made upon them by the light-hearted youngsters of sixty-five and seventy, who were setting out on their journey in fulfilment of a long-cherished dream, and for whom much less freight and much fewer boats would have rehabilitated the past.

I.

When they mounted the broad stairway, tidily strewn with straw to save it from the mud of careless boots, and entered the long saloon of the steamboat, the promise of their fancy was more than made good for them. From the clerk’s office, where they eagerly paid their fare, the saloon stretched two hundred feet by thirty away to the stern, a cavernous splendor of white paint and gilding, starred with electric bulbs, and fenced at the stern with wide windows of painted glass. Midway between the great stove in the bow where the men were herded, and the great stove at the stern where the women kept themselves in the seclusion which the tradition of Western river travel still guards, after well-nigh a hundred years, they were given ample state-rooms, whose appointments so exactly duplicated those they remembered from far-off days that they could have believed themselves awakened from a dream of insubstantial time, with the events in which it had seemed to lapse, mere feints of experience. When they sat down at the supper-table and were served with the sort of belated steamboat dinner which it recalled as vividly, the kind, sooty faces and snowy aprons of those who served them were so quite those of other days that they decided all repasts since were mere Barmecide feasts, and made up for the long fraud practised upon them with the appetites of the year 1850.

II.

A rigider sincerity than shall be practised here might own that the table of the good steamboat ‘Avonek’ left something to be desired, if tested by more sophisticated cuisines, but in the article of corn-bread it was of an inapproachable preeminence. This bread was made of the white corn which North knows not, nor the hapless East; and the buckwheat cakes at breakfast were without blame, and there was a simple variety in the abundance which ought to have satisfied if it did not flatter the choice. The only thing that seemed strangely, that seemed sadly, anomalous in a land flowing with ham and bacon was that the ‘Avonek’ had not imagined providing either for the guests, no one of whom could have had a religious scruple against them.

The thing, indeed, which was first and last conspicuous in the passengers, was their perfectly American race and character. At the start, when with an acceptable observance of Western steamboat tradition the ‘Avonek’ left her wharf eight hours behind her appointed time, there were very few passengers; but they began to come aboard at the little towns of both shores as she swam southward and westward, till all the tables were so full that, in observance of another Western steamboat tradition; one did well to stand guard over his chair lest some other who liked it should seize it earlier. The passengers were of every age and condition, except perhaps the highest condition, and they seemed none the worse for being more like Americans of the middle of the last century than of the beginning of this. Their fashions were of an approximation to those of the present, but did not scrupulously study detail; their manners were those of simpler if not sincerer days.

The women kept to themselves at their end of the saloon, aloof from the study of any but their husbands or kindred, but the men were everywhere else about, and open to observation. They were not so open to conversation, for your mid-Westerner is not a facile, though not an unwilling, talker. They sat by their tall, cast-iron stove (of the oval pattern unvaried since the earliest stove of the region), and silently ruminated their tobacco and spat into the clustering, cuspidors at their feet. They would always answer civilly if questioned, and oftenest intelligently, but they asked nothing in return, and they seemed to have none of that curiosity once known or imagined in them by Dickens and other averse aliens. They had mostly faces of resolute power, and such a looking of knowing exactly what they wanted as would not have promised well for any collectively or individually opposing them. If ever the sense of human equality has expressed itself in the human countenance it speaks unmistakably from American faces like theirs.

They were neither handsome nor unhandsome; but for a few striking exceptions, they had been impartially treated by nature; and where they were notably plain their look of force made up for their lack of beauty. They were notably handsomest in a tall young fellow of a lean face, absolute Greek in profile, amply thwarted with a branching mustache, and slender of figure, on whom his clothes, lustrous from much sitting down and leaning up, grew like the bark on a tree, and who moved slowly and gently about, and spoke with a low, kind voice. In his young comeliness he was like a god, as the gods were fancied in the elder world: a chewing and a spitting god, indeed, but divine in his passionless calm.

He was a serious divinity, and so were all the mid-Western human-beings about him. One heard no joking either of the dapper or cockney sort of cities, or the quaint graphic phrasing of Eastern country folk; and it may have been not far enough West for the true Western humor. At any rate, when they were not silent these men still were serious.

The women were apparently serious, too, and where they were associated with the men were, if they were not really subject, strictly abeyant, in the spectator’s eye. The average of them was certainly not above the American woman’s average in good looks, though one young mother of six children, well grown save for the baby in her arms, was of the type some masters loved to paint, with eyes set wide under low arched brows. She had the placid dignity and the air of motherly goodness which goes fitly with such beauty, and the sight of her was such as to disperse many of the misgivings that beset the beholder who looketh upon the woman when she is New. As she seemed, so any man might wish to remember his mother seeming.

All these river folk, who came from the farms and villages along the stream, and never from the great towns or cities, were well mannered, if quiet manners are good; and though the men nearly all chewed tobacco and spat between meals, at the table they were of an exemplary behavior. The use of the fork appeared strange to them, and they handled it strenuously rather than agilely, yet they never used their knives shovel-wise, however they planted their forks like daggers in the steak: the steak deserved no gentler usage, indeed. They were usually young, and they were constantly changing, bent upon short journeys between the shore villages; they were mostly farm youth, apparently, though some were said to be going to find work at the great potteries up the river for wages fabulous to home-keeping experience.

One personality which greatly took the liking of one of our tourists was a Kentucky mountaineer who, after three years’ exile in a West Virginia oil town, was gladly returning to the home for which he and all his brood-of large and little comely, red-haired boys and girls-had never ceased to pine. His eagerness to get back was more than touching; it was awing; for it was founded on a sort of mediaeval patriotism that could own no excellence beyond the borders of the natal region. He had prospered at high wages in his trade at that oil town, and his wife and children had managed a hired farm so well as to pay all the family expenses from it, but he was gladly leaving opportunity behind, that he might return to a land where, if you were passing a house at meal-time, they came out and made you come in and eat. “When you eat where I’ve been living you pay fifty cents,” he explained. “And are you taking all your household stuff with you?” “Only the cook-stove. Well, I’ll tell you: we made the other things ourselves; made them out of plank, and they were not worth-moving.” Here was the backwoods surviving into the day of Trusts; and yet we talk of a world drifted hopelessly far from the old ideals!

III.

The new ideals, the ideals of a pitiless industrialism, were sufficiently expressed along the busy shores, where the innumerable derricks of oil-wells silhouetted their gibbet shapes against the horizon, and the myriad chimneys of the foundries sent up the smoke of their torment into the quiet skies and flamed upon the forehead of the evening like baleful suns. But why should I be so violent of phrase against these guiltless means of millionairing? There must be iron and coal as well as wheat and corn in the world, and without their combination we cannot have bread. If the combination is in the form of a trust, such as has laid its giant clutch upon all those warring industries beside the Ohio and swept them into one great monopoly, why, it has still to show that it is worse than competition; that it is not, indeed, merely the first blind stirrings of the universal cooperation of which the dreamers of ideal commonwealths have always had the vision.

The derricks and the chimneys, when one saw them, seem to have all the land to themselves; but this was an appearance only, terrifying in its strenuousness, but not, after all, the prevalent aspect. That was rather of farm, farms, and evermore farms, lying along the rich levels of the stream, and climbing as far up its beautiful hills as the plough could drive. In the spring and in the Mall, when it is suddenly swollen by the earlier and the later rains, the river scales its banks and swims over those levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leaves the cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since the forests were first cut from the land. Other fertilizing the fields have never had any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptied into their laps. They feel themselves so rich that they part with great lengths and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good for the river, and is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whose ease learns slowly, are beginning more and more to fence their borders with the young willows which form a hedge in the shallow wash such a great part of the way up and down the Ohio. Elms and maples wade in among the willows, and in time the river will be denied the indigestion which it confesses in shoals and bars at low water, and in a difficulty of channel at all stages.

Meanwhile the fields flourish in spite of their unwise largesse to the stream, whose shores the comfortable farmsteads keep so constantly that they are never out of sight. Most commonly they are of brick, but sometimes of painted wood, and they are set on little eminences high enough to save them from the freshets, but always so near the river that they cannot fail of its passing life. Usually a group of planted evergreens half hides the house from the boat, but its inmates will not lose any detail of the show, and come down to the gate of the paling fence to watch the ‘Avonek’ float by: motionless men and women, who lean upon the supporting barrier, and rapt children who hold by their skirts and hands. There is not the eager New England neatness about these homes; now and then they have rather a sloven air, which does not discord with their air of comfort; and very, very rarely they stagger drunkenly in a ruinous neglect. Except where a log cabin has hardily survived the pioneer period, the houses are nearly all of one pattern; their facades front the river, and low chimneys point either gable, where a half-story forms the attic of the two stories below. Gardens of pot-herbs flank them, and behind cluster the corn-cribs, and the barns and stables stretch into the fields that stretch out to the hills, now scantily wooded, but ever lovely in the lines that change with the steamer’s course.

Except in the immediate suburbs of the large towns, there is no ambition beyond that of rustic comfort in the buildings on the shore. There is no such thing, apparently, as a summer cottage, with its mock humility of name, up or down the whole tortuous length of the Ohio. As yet the land is not openly depraved by shows of wealth; those who amass it either keep it to themselves or come away to spend it in European travel, or pause to waste it unrecognized on the ungrateful Atlantic seaboard. The only distinctions that are marked are between the homes of honest industry above the banks and the homes below them of the leisure, which it is hoped is not dishonest. But, honest or dishonest, it is there apparently to stay in the house-boats which line the shores by thousands, and repeat on Occidental terms in our new land the river-life of old and far Cathay.

They formed the only feature of their travel which our tourists found absolutely novel; they could clearly or dimly recall from the past every other feature but the houseboats, which they instantly and gladly naturalized to their memories of it. The houses had in common the form of a freight-car set in a flat-bottomed boat; the car would be shorter or longer, with one, or two, or three windows in its sides, and a section of stovepipe softly smoking from its roof. The windows might be curtained or they might be bare, but apparently there was no other distinction among the houseboat dwellers, whose sluggish craft lay moored among the willows, or tied to an elm or a maple, or even made fast to a stake on shore. There were cases in which they had not followed the fall of the river promptly enough, and lay slanted on the beach, or propped up to a more habitable level on its slope; in a sole, sad instance, the house had gone down with the boat and lay wallowing in the wash of the flood. But they all gave evidence of a tranquil and unhurried life which the soul of the beholder envied within him, whether it manifested itself in the lord of the house-boat fishing from its bow, or the lady coming to cleanse some household utensil at its stern. Infrequently a group of the house- boat dwellers seemed to be drawing a net, and in one high event they exhibited a good-sized fish of their capture, but nothing so strenuous characterized their attitude on any other occasion. The accepted theory of them was that they did by day as nearly nothing as men could do and live, and that by night their forays on the bordering farms supplied the simple needs of people who desired neither to toil nor to spin, but only to emulate Solomon in his glory with the least possible exertion. The joyful witness of their ease would willingly have sacrificed to them any amount of the facile industrial or agricultural prosperity about them and left them slumberously afloat, unmolested by dreams of landlord or tax- gatherer. Their existence for the fleeting time seemed the true interpretation of the sage’s philosophy, the fulfilment of the poet’s aspiration.

  “Why should we only toil, that are the roof and crown of things.”

How did they pass their illimitable leisure, when they rested from the fishing-net by day and the chicken-coop by night? Did they read the new historical fictions aloud to one another? Did some of them even meditate the thankless muse and not mind her ingratitude? Perhaps the ladies of the house-boats, when they found themselves — as they often did — in companies of four or five, had each other in to “evenings,” at which one of them read a paper on some artistic or literary topic.

IV.

The trader’s boat, of an elder and more authentic tradition, sometimes shouldered the house-boats away from a village landing, but it, too, was a peaceful home, where the family life visibly went hand-in-hand with commerce. When the trader has supplied all the wants and wishes of a neighborhood, he unmoors his craft and drops down the river’s tide to where it meets the ocean’s tide in the farthermost Mississippi, and there either sells out both his boat and his stock, or hitches his home to some returning steamboat, and climbs slowly, with many pauses, back to the upper Ohio. But his home is not so interesting as that of the houseboatman, nor so picturesque as that of the raftsman, whose floor of logs rocks flexibly under his shanty, but securely rides the current. As the pilots said, a steamboat never tries to hurt a raft of logs, which is adapted to dangerous retaliation; and by night it always gives a wide berth to the lantern tilting above the raft from a swaying pole. By day the raft forms one of the pleasantest aspects of the river-life, with its convoy of skiffs always searching the stream or shore for logs which have broken from it, and which the skiffmen recognize by distinctive brands or stamps. Here and there the logs lie in long ranks upon the shelving beaches, mixed with the drift of trees and fence-rails, and frames of corn-cribs and hencoops, and even house walls, which the freshets have brought down and left stranded. The tops of the little willows are tufted gayly with hay and rags, and other spoil of the flood; and in one place a disordered mattress was lodged high among the boughs of a water- maple, where it would form building material for countless generations of birds. The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere were proofs of the river’s power to devastate as well as enrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power against it, in its moments of insensate rage, and the land no protection from its encroachments except in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if planted, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of themselves and kept the torrent from the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwise crumbling helplessly into it.

The rafts were very well, and the house-boats and the traders’ boats, but the most majestic feature of the riverlife was the tow of coal-barges which, going or coming, the ‘Avonek’ met every few miles. Whether going or coming they were pushed, not pulled, by the powerful steamer which gathered them in tens and twenties before her, and rode the mid-current with them, when they were full, or kept the slower water near shore when they were empty. They claimed the river where they passed, and the ‘Avonek’ bowed to an unwritten law in giving them the full right of way, from the time when their low bulk first rose in sight, with the chimneys of their steamer towering above them and her gay contours gradually making themselves seen, till she receded from the encounter, with the wheel at her stern pouring a cataract of yellow water from its blades. It was insurpassably picturesque always, and not the tapering masts or the swelling sails of any sea-going craft could match it.

V.

So at least the travellers thought who were here revisiting the earliest scenes of childhood, and who perhaps found them unduly endeared. They perused them mostly from an easy seat at the bow of the hurricane-deck, and, whenever the weather favored them, spent the idle time in selecting shelters for their declining years among the farmsteads that offered themselves to their choice up and down the shores. The weather commonly favored them, and there was at least one whole day on the lower river when the weather was divinely flattering. The soft, dull air lulled their nerves while it buffeted their faces, and the sun, that looked through veils of mist and smoke, gently warmed their aging frames and found itself again in their hearts. Perhaps it was there that the water- elms and watermaples chiefly budded, and the red-birds sang, and the drifting flocks of blackbirds called and clattered; but surely these also spread their gray and pink against the sky and filled it with their voices. There were meadow-larks and robins without as well as within, and it was no subjective plough that turned the earliest furrows in those opulent fields.

When they were tired of sitting there, they climbed, invited or uninvited, but always welcomed, to the pilothouse, where either pilot of the two who were always on watch poured out in an unstinted stream the lore of the river on which all their days had been passed. They knew from indelible association every ever-changing line of the constant hills; every dwelling by the low banks; every aspect of the smoky towns; every caprice of the river; every-tree, every stump; probably every bud and bird in the sky. They talked only of the river; they cared for nothing else. The Cuban cumber and the Philippine folly were equally far from them; the German prince was not only as if he had never been here, but as if he never had been; no public question concerned them but that of abandoning the canals which the Ohio legislature was then foolishly debating. Were not the canals water-ways, too, like the river, and if the State unnaturally abandoned them would not it be for the behoof of those railroads which the rivermen had always fought, and which would have made a solitude of the river if they could?

But they could not, and there was nothing more surprising and delightful in this blissful voyage than the evident fact that the old river traffic had strongly survived, and seemed to be more strongly reviving. Perhaps it was not; perhaps the fondness of those Ohio-river-born passengers was abused by an illusion (as subjective as that of the buds and birds) of a vivid variety of business and pleasure on the beloved stream. But again, perhaps not. They were seldom out of sight of the substantial proofs of both in the through or way packets they encountered, or the nondescript steam craft that swarmed about the mouths of the contributory rivers, and climbed their shallowing courses into the recesses of their remotest hills, to the last lurking-places of their oil and coal.

VI.

The Avonek was always stopping to put off or take on merchandise or men. She would stop for a single passenger, plaited in the mud with his telescope valise or gripsack under the edge of a lonely cornfield, or to gather upon her decks the few or many casks or bales that a farmer wished to ship. She lay long hours by the wharf-boats of busy towns, exchanging one cargo for another, in that anarchic fetching and carrying which we call commerce, and which we drolly suppose to be governed by laws. But wherever she paused or parted, she tested the pilot’s marvellous skill; for no landing, no matter how often she landed in the same place, could be twice the same. At each return the varying stream and shore must be studied, and every caprice of either divined. It was always a triumph, a miracle, whether by day or by night, a constant wonder how under the pilot’s inspired touch she glided softly to her moorings, and without a jar slipped from them again and went on her course.

But the landings by night were of course the finest. Then the wide fan of the search-light was unfurled upon the point to be attained and the heavy staging lowered from the bow to the brink, perhaps crushing the willow hedges in it’s fall, and scarcely touching the land before a black, ragged deck-hand had run out through the splendor and made a line fast to the trunk of the nearest tree. Then the work of lading or unlading rapidly began in the witching play of the light that set into radiant relief the black, eager faces and the black, eager figures of the deck-hands struggling up or down the staging under boxes of heavy wares, or kegs of nails, or bales of straw, or blocks of stone, steadily mocked or cursed at in their shapeless effort, till the last of them reeled back to the deck down the steep of the lifting stage, and dropped to his broken sleep wherever he could coil himself, doglike, down among the heaps of freight.

No dog, indeed, leads such a hapless life as theirs; and ah! and ah! why should their sable shadows intrude in a picture that was meant to be all so gay and glad? But ah! and ah! where, in what business of this hard world, is not prosperity built upon the struggle of toiling men, who still endeavor their poor best, and writhe and writhe under the burden of their brothers above, till they lie still under the lighter load of their mother earth?

PART III. MY LITERARY PASSIONS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

The papers collected here under the name of ‘My Literary Passions’ were printed serially in a periodical of such vast circulation that they might well have been supposed to have found there all the acceptance that could be reasonably hoped for them. Nevertheless, they were reissued in a volume the year after they first appeared, in 1895, and they had a pleasing share of such favor as their author’s books have enjoyed. But it is to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so much as he liked writing them — say, some time in the years 1893 and 1894, in a New York flat, where he could look from his lofty windows over two miles and a half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his fancy wherever he chose in that faery realm of books which he re-entered in reminiscences perhaps too fond at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader’s following. The name was thought by the friendly editor of the popular publication where they were serialized a main part of such inspiration as they might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom happens with editor and author, cordially agreed upon before they were begun.

The name says, indeed, so exactly and so fully what they are that little remains for their bibliographer to add beyond the meagre historical detail here given. Their short and simple annals could be eked out by confidences which would not appreciably enrich the materials of the literary history of their time, and it seems better to leave them to the imagination of such posterity as they may reach. They are rather helplessly frank, but not, I hope, with all their rather helpless frankness, offensively frank. They are at least not part of the polemic which their author sustained in the essays following them in this volume, and which might have been called, in conformity with ‘My Literary Passions’, by the title of ‘My Literary Opinions’ better than by the vague name which they actually wear.

They deal, to be sure, with the office of Criticism and the art of Fiction, and so far their present name is not a misnomer. It follows them from an earlier date and could not easily be changed, and it may serve to recall to an elder generation than this the time when their author was breaking so many lances in the great, forgotten war between Realism and Romanticism that the floor of the “Editor’s Study” in Harper’s Magazine was strewn with the embattled splinters. The “Editor’s Study” is now quite another place, but he who originally imagined it in 1886, and abode in it until 1892, made it at once the scene of such constant offence that he had no time, if he had the temper, for defence. The great Zola, or call him the immense Zola, was the prime mover in the attack upon the masters of the Romanticistic school; but he lived to own that he had fought a losing fight, and there are some proofs that he was right. The Realists, who were undoubtedly the masters of fiction in their passing generation, and who prevailed not only in France, but in Russia, in Scandinavia, in Spain, in Portugal, were overborne in all Anglo-Saxon countries by the innumerable hosts of Romanticism, who to this day possess the land; though still, whenever a young novelist does work instantly recognizable for its truth and beauty among us, he is seen and felt to have wrought in the spirit of Realism. Not even yet, however, does the average critic recognize this, and such lesson as the “Editor’s Study” assumed to teach remains here in all its essentials for his improvement.

Month after month for the six years in which the “Editor’s Study” continued in the keeping of its first occupant, its lesson was more or less stormily delivered, to the exclusion, for the greater part, of other prophecy, but it has not been found well to keep the tempestuous manner along with the fulminant matter in this volume. When the author came to revise the material, he found sins against taste which his zeal for righteousness could not suffice to atone for. He did not hesitate to omit the proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a precept, but an example in criticism. He hopes that in other and slighter things he has bettered his own instruction, and that in form and in fact the book is altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from which it has here been a second time evolved.

The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the product of those unities of time and place which were the happy conditioning of ‘My Literary Passions.’ They could not have been written in quite so many places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable variety of origin. Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston suburb, on the shores of Lake George, in a Western New York health resort, in Buffalo, in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with reversions to Boston, and summer excursions to the hills and waters of New England, until it seemed that their author had at last said his say, and he voluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause of friends and enemies alike.

The papers had made him more of the last than of the first, but not as still appears to him with greater reason. At moments his deliverances seemed to stir people of different minds to fury in two continents, so far as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of the seven seas; and some of these came back at him with such violent personalities as it is his satisfaction to remember that he never indulged in his attacks upon their theories of criticism and fiction. His opinions were always impersonal; and now as their manner rather than their make has been slightly tempered, it may surprise the belated reader to learn that it was the belief of one English critic that their author had “placed himself beyond the pale of decency” by them. It ought to be less surprising that, since these dreadful words were written of him, more than one magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to the author the feeling that he was not so far wrong in his overboldly hazarded convictions. The penitence of his countrymen is still waiting expression, but it may come to that when they have recurred to the evidences of his offence in their present shape.

KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.

I. THE BOOKCASE AT HOME

To give an account of one’s reading is in some sort to give an account of one’s life; and I hope that I shall not offend those who follow me in these papers, if I cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of the authors I must call my masters: my masters not because they taught me this or that directly, but because I had such delight in them that I could not fail to teach myself from them whatever I was capable of learning. I do not know whether I have been what people call a great reader; I cannot claim even to have been a very wise reader; but I have always been conscious of a high purpose to read much more, and more discreetly, than I have ever really done, and probably it is from the vantage-ground of this good intention that I shall sometimes be found writing here rather than from the facts of the case.

But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always kept the lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right to use authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience. I shall try not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here of all my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of those books, or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for. I have known such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly of the loves of my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the more frankly because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than that of any other person.

I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literature in a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes. From a letter of my great-grandmother’s written to a stubborn daughter upon some unfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that she was fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the wilful child that she has “planted a dagger in her mother’s heart,” and I should not be surprised if it were from this fine-languaged lady that my grandfather derived his taste for poetry rather than from his father, who was of a worldly wiser mind. To be sure, he became a Friend by Convincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine that he was altogether worldly; but he had an eye to the main chance: he founded the industry of making flannels in the little Welsh town where he lived, and he seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than any of us have since grown for ours. My grandfather, indeed, was concerned chiefly in getting away from the world and its wickedness. He came to this country early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log-cabin in the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences of the village where he was managing some woollen-mills. But he kept his affection for certain poets of the graver, not to say gloomier sort, and he must have suffered his children to read them, pending that great question of their souls’ salvation which was a lifelong trouble to him.

My father, at any rate, had such a decided bent in the direction of literature, that he was not content in any of his several economical experiments till he became the editor of a newspaper, which was then the sole means of satisfying a literary passion. His paper, at the date when I began to know him, was a living, comfortable and decent, but without the least promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much better condition. I think now that he was wise not to care for the advancement which most of us have our hearts set upon, and that it was one of his finest qualities that he was content with a lot in life where he was not exempt from work with his hands, and yet where he was not so pressed by need but he could give himself at will not only to the things of the spirit, but the things of the mind too. After a season of scepticism he had become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his own fashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather: a Friend who had married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist. My father, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetings where my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, and had at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with a content that has lasted him all the days of his many years. Ever since I can remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library; he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a “Memorable Relation” from them to us children. But he did not force them upon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was very well. I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so. But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and when I began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice.

His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was not given to theology, was given to poetry. I call it the library now, but then we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally it was, because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection of books, it was a larger private collection than any other in the town where we lived. Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in a case of very few shelves. It was not considerably enlarged during my childhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulged himself in buying them even more rarely. My grandfather’s book store (it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock of literature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers’ agent came to replenish it, he gave my father several volumes for review. One of these was a copy of Thomson’s Seasons, a finely illustrated edition, whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the most beautiful things that ever were. My father read passages of the book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself. For the matter of that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no harm; we get harm from the evil we understand. He loved Burns, too, and he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressible weariness. I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feel the charm of the poet’s wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos. Moore, I could manage better; and when my father read “Lalla Rookh” to my mother I sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story of the “Fire Worshippers.” I drew the line at the “Veiled Prophet of Khorassan,” though I had some sense of the humor of the poet’s conception of the critic in “Fadladeen.” But I liked Scott’s poems far better, and got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy. I followed the “Lady of the Lake” throughout, and when I first began to contrive verses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre.

Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, were Pope’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden’s Virgil, pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me. It was as if they said to me in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of such pictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try. At any rate, I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume of Shakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me in like manner with its wood-cuts. I cannot say just why I conceived that there was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps this was a tint from the reputation of the rather profligate young man from whom my father had it. If he were not profligate I ask his pardon. I have not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had of him, whoever he was, or wherever he now is. There may never have been such a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pure invention of my own, like many things with children, who do not very distinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in the world where both project the same quality of shadow.

There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which my consciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I remember. Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe’s ‘Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque’ (I long afflicted myself as to what those words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out) and Bulwer’s Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding. History is known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a History of the United States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my way through; and by a ‘Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada’, by the ever dear and precious Fray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in making out to be one and the same as Washington Irving.

In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and I cannot say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not really very much in school, and so I got small harm from it. The printing- office was my school from a very early date. My father thoroughly believed in it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustrated as soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed. We could go to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work, with an equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must do something, for our souls’ sake, though he was willing enough we should play, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to enjoy the pleasures that manhood can share with childhood. I suppose that as the world goes now we were poor. His income was never above twelve hundred a year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or then; we lived in the simple abundance of that time and place, and we did not know that we were poor. As yet the unequal modern conditions were undreamed of (who indeed could have dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) in the little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of my most happy boyhood was passed.

II. GOLDSMITH

When I began to have literary likings of my own, and to love certain books above others, the first authors of my heart were Goldsmith, Cervantes, and Irving. In the sharply foreshortened perspective of the past I seem to have read them all at once, but I am aware of an order of time in the pleasure they gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came first. He came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began to read him, but it must have been before I was ten years old. I read other books about that time, notably a small book on Grecian and Roman mythology, which I perused with such a passion for those pagan gods and goddesses that, if it had ever been a question of sacrificing to Diana, I do not really know whether I should have been able to refuse. I adored indiscriminately all the tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and heroes, as well as the high ones of Olympus; and I am afraid that by day I dwelt in a world peopled and ruled by them, though I faithfully said my prayers at night, and fell asleep in sorrow for my sins. I do not know in the least how Goldsmith’s Greece came into my hands, though I fancy it must have been procured for me because of a taste which I showed for that kind of reading, and I can imagine no greater luck for a small boy in a small town of Southwestern Ohio well-nigh fifty years ago. I have the books yet; two little, stout volumes in fine print, with the marks of wear on them, but without those dishonorable blots, or those other injuries which boys inflict upon books in resentment of their dulness, or out of mere wantonness. I was always sensitive to the maltreatment of books; I could not bear to see a book faced down or dogs-eared or broken-backed. It was like a hurt or an insult to a thing that could feel.

Goldsmith’s History of Rome came to me much later, but quite as immemorably, and after I had formed a preference for the Greek Republics, which I dare say was not mistaken. Of course I liked Athens best, and yet there was something in the fine behavior of the Spartans in battle, which won a heart formed for hero-worship. I mastered the notion of their communism, and approved of their iron money, with the poverty it obliged them to, yet somehow their cruel treatment of the Helots failed to shock me; perhaps I forgave it to their patriotism, as I had to forgive many ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs. There was hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon in those days to the slayers of tyrants; and the swagger form of such as despatched a despot with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I could only grieve that I was born too late to do and to say those things.

I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made them all live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist using for my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to see the loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my own poor account. I tried to make verses like those I listened to when my father read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no such happiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then of attempting to write like Goldsmith. I accepted his beautiful work as ignorantly as I did my other blessings. I was concerned in getting at the Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and by what lovely ways I was led to them. Some retrospective perception of this came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all of his poetry, and later yet when I read the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’; but for the present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in the world of art. What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got at them was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse, and in dramatic verse at that. The Romans were less civilized than the Greeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy’s purpose. I did not make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of the Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the “Lady of the Lake.” I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am not sure that I ever made it known to them. Still, they were not ignorant of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certain boy, who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so outranked me in that little boys’ world, once sent to ask me the name of the Roman emperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done nothing worthy, that he had lost a day. The boy was going to use the story, in a composition, as we called the school themes then, and I told him the emperor’s name; I could not tell him now without turning to the book.

My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect it to rank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I have since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the world of men’s activities, either idle or useful. We literary folk try to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense. At every period of life, among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, and want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted. I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith’s Greece and Rome, or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have no recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing the allegories and fables of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, a book which seems to have been in my hands about the same time or a little later. I had a delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannot account for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusion it made of my ancient Greeks and Romans. They were not at all the ancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith’s histories.

I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have been odd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already beginning to be troubled with work. As I have said, I was to and fro between the schoolhouse and the printing-office so much that when I tired of the one I must have been very promptly given my choice of the other. The reading, however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and no doubt my love for it won me a chance for it. There were some famous cherry-trees in our yard, which, as I look back at them, seem to have been in flower or fruit the year round; and in one of them there was a level branch where a boy could sit with a book till his dangling legs went to sleep, or till some idler or busier boy came to the gate and called him down to play marbles or go swimming. When this happened the ancient world was rolled up like a scroll, and put away until the next day, with all its orators and conspirators, its nymphs and satyrs, gods and demigods; though sometimes they escaped at night and got into the boy’s dreams.

I do not think I cared as much as some of the other boys for the ‘Arabian Nights’ or ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ but when it came to the ‘Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha,’ I was not only first, I was sole.

Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had my boyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt to that not unequal or unkindred spirit. I have said it was long after I had read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilers as they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came to know his poetry. My father must have read the “Deserted Village” to us, and told us something of the author’s pathetic life, for I cannot remember when I first knew of “sweet Auburn,” or had the light of the poet’s own troubled day upon the “loveliest village of the plain.” The ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ must have come into my life after that poem and before ‘The Traveler’. It was when I would have said that I knew all Goldsmith; we often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this way without having any tangible assets; and my reading has always been very desultory. I should like to say here that the reading of any one who reads to much purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps I had better not say so, but merely state the fact in my case, and own that I never read any one author quite through without wandering from him to others. When I first read the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ (for I have since read it several times, and hope yet to read it many times), I found its persons and incidents familiar, and so I suppose I must have heard it read. It is still for me one of the most modern novels: that is to say, one of the best. It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and then unmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be forever imperishable. Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion; it is these in Goldsmith which make him our contemporary, and it is worth the while of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take a little thought of them. They are the source of all refinement, and I do not believe that the best art in any kind exists without them. The style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that we shall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speech betrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtly yet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart. As to Goldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, of worldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do not think that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized, his spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in the literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in his work.

I should have my reservations and my animadversions if it came to close criticism of his work, but I am glad that he was the first author I loved, and that even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted reader. I was not consciously his admirer till I began to read, when I was fourteen, a little volume of his essays, made up, I dare say, from the ‘Citizen of the World’ and other unsuccessful ventures of his. It contained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I tried to write sketches and studies of life in their manner. But this attempt at Goldsmith’s manner followed a long time after I tried to write in the style of Edgar A. Poe, as I knew it from his ‘Tales of the Grotesque erred Arabesque.’ I suppose the very poorest of these was the “Devil in the Belfry,” but such as it was I followed it as closely as I could in the “Devil in the Smoke-Pipes”; I meant tobacco-pipes. The resemblance was noted by those to whom I read my story; I alone could not see it or would not own it, and I really felt it a hardship that I should be found to have produced an imitation.

It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, though I had imitated several poets like Moore, Campbell, and Goldsmith himself. I have never greatly loved an author without wishing to write like him. I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not see why I should not say that it was a long time before I found it best to be as like myself as I could, even when I did not think so well of myself as of some others. I hope I shall always be able and willing to learn something from the masters of literature and still be myself, but for the young writer this seems impossible. He must form himself from time to time upon the different authors he is in love with, but when he has done this he must wish it not to be known, for that is natural too. The lover always desires to ignore the object of his passion, and the adoration which a young writer has for a great one is truly a passion passing the love of women. I think it hardly less fortunate that Cervantes was one of my early passions, though I sat at his feet with no more sense of his mastery than I had of Goldsmith’s.

III. CERVANTES

I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of ‘Don Quixote,’ while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly with anybody’s authorship. I was still too young to conceive of authorship, even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion of literature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually come out rightly rhymed and measured. The moment was at the close of a summer’s day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlessly late, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about her work, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brother and me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of a book that he had once read. We boys were all shelling peas, but the story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever our fingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land of adventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight truly without fear and without reproach burned itself out. I dare say that my father tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book. I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do at once was to get that book and plunge into its story. He told us at random of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the night in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of the inn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of the island that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the duke’s and duchess’s, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of the capture of Mambrino’s helmet, and of Sancho’s invention of the enchanted Dulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in the most wonderful and delightful book in the world. I do not know when or where my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time that passed between my hearing of it and my having it. The event must have been most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment when the precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of that there is nothing more capricious than a child’s memory, what it will hold and what it will lose.

It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout volumes not much bigger each than my Goldsmith’s ‘Greece’, bound in a sort of law-calf, well fitted to withstand the wear they were destined to undergo. The translation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of Jervas, which, whether it was a closely faithful version or not, was honest eighteenth- century English, and reported faithfully enough the spirit of the original. If it had any literary influence with me the influence must have been good. But I cannot make out that I was sensible of the literature; it was the forever enchanting story that I enjoyed. I exulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the open air of that immense scene, where adventure followed adventure with the natural sequence of life, and the days and the nights were not long enough for the events that thronged them, amidst the fields and woods, the streams and hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, prisons and palaces, which were the setting of that matchless history. I took it as simply as I took everything else in the world about me. It was full of meaning that I could not grasp, and there were significances of the kind that literature unhappily abounds in, but they were lost upon my innocence. I did not know whether it was well written or not; I never thought about that; it was simply there in its vast entirety, its inexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the dreams of avarice.

My father must have told us that night about Cervantes as well as about his ‘Don Quixote’, for I seem to have known from the beginning that he was once a slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, and I loved him with a sort of personal affection, as if he were still living and he could somehow return my love. His name and nature endeared the Spanish name and nature to me, so that they were always my romance, and to this day I cannot meet a Spanish man without clothing him in something of the honor and worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child. While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came to see our school, one day, a Mexican gentleman who was studying the American system of education; a mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have died to please for Cervantes’ and Don Quixote’s sake, because I knew he spoke their tongue. But he smiled upon us all, and I had no chance to distinguish myself from the rest by any act of devotion before the blessed vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impassioned reveries, I accosted him and claimed him kindred because of my fealty, and because I would have been Spanish if I could.

I would not have had the boy-world about me know anything of these fond dreams; but it was my tastes alone, my passions, which were alien there; in everything else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had never heard of Don Quixote. But I believe that I carried the book about with me most of the time, so as not to lose any chance moment of reading it. Even in the blank of certain years, when I added little other reading to my store, I must still have been reading it. This was after we had removed from the town where the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and I had barely adjusted myself to the strange environment when one of my uncles asked me to come with him and learn the drug business, in the place, forty miles away, where he practised medicine. We made the long journey, longer than any I have made since, in the stage-coach of those days, and we arrived at his house about twilight, he glad to get home, and I sick to death with yearning for the home I had left. I do not know how it was that in this state, when all the world was one hopeless blackness around me, I should have got my ‘Don Quixote’ out of my bag; I seem to have had it with me as an essential part of my equipment for my new career. Perhaps I had been asked to show it, with the notion of beguiling me from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to drown my sorrows in it. But anyhow I have before me now the vision of my sweet young aunt and her young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stood together on the lawn in the summer evening light. My aunt held my Don Quixote open in one hand, while she clasped with the other the child she carried on her arm. She looked at the book, and then from time to time she looked at me, very kindly but very curiously, with a faint smile, so that as I stood there, inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had the sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy. She returned the book without comment, after some questions, and I took it off to my room, where the confidential friend of Cervantes cried himself to sleep.

In the morning I rose up and told them I could not stand it, and I was going home. Nothing they could say availed, and my uncle went down to the stage-office with me and took my passage back.

The horror of cholera was then in the land; and we heard in the stage- office that a man lay dead of it in the hotel overhead. But my uncle led me to his drugstore, where the stage was to call for me, and made me taste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cervantes and I somehow got home together alive.

The reading of ‘Don Quixote’ went on throughout my boyhood, so that I cannot recall any distinctive period of it when I was not, more or less, reading that book. In a boy’s way I knew it well when I was ten, and a few years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in the admirable new version of Ormsby, and found it so full of myself and of my own irrevocable past that I did not find it very gay. But I made a great many discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were there, and must always have been there, and other things wore a new face, and made a new effect upon me. I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had given it my whole heart without question, and yet in what formed the greatness of the book it seemed to me greater than ever. I believe that its free and simple design, where event follows event without the fettering control of intrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions, is the supreme form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if we ever have a great American novel it must be built upon some such large and noble lines. As for the central figure, Don Quixote himself, in his dignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotion to them, he is always heroic and beautiful; and I was glad to find in my latest look at his history that I had truly conceived of him at first, and had felt the sublimity of his nature. I did not want to laugh at him so much, and I could not laugh at all any more at some of the things done to him. Once they seemed funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, so that it was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as both flowing from the same mind. But in my mature experience, which threw a broader light on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an author who had been almost personally, dear to me.

IV. IRVING

I have told how Cervantes made his race precious to me, and I am sure that it must have been he who fitted me to understand and enjoy the American author who now stayed me on Spanish ground and kept me happy in Spanish air, though I cannot trace the tie in time and circumstance between Irving and Cervantes. The most I can make sure of is that I read the ‘Conquest of Granada’ after I read Don Quixote, and that I loved the historian so much because I had loved the novelist much more. Of course I did not perceive then that Irving’s charm came largely from Cervantes and the other Spanish humorists yet unknown to me, and that he had formed himself upon them almost as much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say that this fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking. Afterwards I came to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving’s own in Irving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and his original, if somewhat too studied grace. But as yet there was no critical question with me. I gave my heart simply and passionately to the author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in my sympathy, and companioned me with the stately and gracious actors in them.

I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more. I fought on both sides; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, and yet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them; and when the poor young King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan and at the same time a follower of his fiery old uncle and rival, Hamet el Zegri) heaved the Last Sigh of the Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, it was as much my grief as if it had burst from my own breast. I put both these princes into the first and last historical romance I ever wrote. I have now no idea what they did in it, but as the story never came to a conclusion it does not greatly matter. I had never yet read an historical romance that I can make sure of, and probably my attempt must have been based almost solely upon the facts of Irving’s history. I am certain I could not have thought of adding anything to them, or at all varying them.

In reading his ‘Chronicle’ I suffered for a time from its attribution to Fray Antonio Agapida, the pious monk whom he feigns to have written it, just as in reading ‘Don Quixote’ I suffered from Cervantes masquerading as the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben Engeli. My father explained the literary caprice, but it remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and I made a practice of skipping those passages where either author insisted upon his invention. I will own that I am rather glad that sort of thing seems to be out of fashion now, and I think the directer and franker methods of modern fiction will forbid its revival. Thackeray was fond of such open disguises, and liked to greet his reader from the mask of Yellowplush and Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was in his least modern moments.

My ‘Conquest of Granada’ was in two octavo volumes, bound in drab boards, and printed on paper very much yellowed with time at its irregular edges. I do not know when the books happened in my hands. I have no remembrance that they were in any wise offered or commended to me, and in a sort of way they were as authentically mine as if I had made them. I saw them at home, not many months ago, in my father’s library (it has long outgrown the old bookcase, which has gone I know not where), and upon the whole I rather shrank from taking them down, much more from opening them, though I could not say why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps finding the ghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat like a withered leaf, somewhere between the familiar pages.

When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, of writing the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-odd years to do it in. I taught myself the language, or began to do so, when I knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of the book. My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himself written a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let me plunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs, nouns and pronouns, and all the rest, when as yet I could not confidently call them by name, with the serene belief that if I did not swim I would still somehow get ashore without sinking. The end, perhaps, justified him, and I suppose I did not do all that work without getting some strength from it; but I wish I had back the time that it cost me; I should like to waste it in some other way. However, time seemed interminable then, and I thought there would be enough of it for me in which to read all Spanish literature; or, at least, I did not propose to do anything less.

I followed Irving, too, in my later reading, but at haphazard, and with other authors at the same time. I did my poor best to be amused by his ‘Knickerbocker History of New York’, because my father liked it so much, but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years ago when I went carefully through it again. I could not laugh. Even as a boy I found some other things of his uphill work. There was the beautiful manner, but the thought seemed thin; and I do not remember having been much amused by ‘Bracebridge Hall’, though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense that it would be very ‘comme il faut’ to like it. But I did like the ‘Life of Goldsmith’; I liked it a great deal better than the more authoritative ‘Life by Forster’, and I think there is a deeper and sweeter sense of Goldsmith in it. Better than all, except the ‘Conquest of Granada’, I liked the ‘Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ and the story of Rip Van Winkle, with their humorous and affectionate caricatures of life that was once of our own soil and air; and the ‘Tales of the Alhambra’, which transported me again, to the scenes of my youth beside the Xenil. It was long after my acquaintance with his work that I came to a due sense of Irving as an artist, and perhaps I have come to feel a full sense of it only now, when I perceive that he worked willingly only when he worked inventively. At last I can do justice to the exquisite conception of his ‘Conquest of Granada’, a study of history which, in unique measure, conveys not only the pathos, but the humor of one of the most splendid and impressive situations in the experience of the race. Very possibly something of the severer truth might have been sacrificed to the effect of the pleasing and touching tale, but I do not under stand that this was really done. Upon the whole I am very well content with my first three loves in literature, and if I were to choose for any other boy I do not see how I could choose better than Goldsmith and Cervantes and Irving, kindred spirits, and each not a master only, but a sweet and gentle friend, whose kindness could not fail to profit him.

V. FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA

In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certain Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in the paths I had set out upon. They were years of the work, of the over-work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should be ashamed to speak of it except in accounting for the fact. My father had sold his paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another at Dayton, and we were all straining our utmost to help pay for it. My daily tasks began so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if I had the spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, but what was really release, came to us that I got back again to my books. Then we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress of toil, with the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like the horror of an evil dream. The only new book which I remember to have read in those two or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to have read any old ones, was the novel of ‘Jane Eyre,’ which I took in very imperfectly, and which I associate with the first rumor of the Rochester Knockings, then just beginning to reverberate through a world that they have not since left wholly at peace. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon when the book came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the story was an anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nails and come and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures had been doing in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spirits were beginning to make themselves felt. The thing did not really happen in my case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily have happened.

If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand my acquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself. There was a hapless company of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us for their printing. I believe they never paid for it, or at least never wholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I can make out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, every night. They gave two or three plays at every performance to houses ungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper that would not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the bill each day. In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I read him, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, and I saw “Macbeth” and “Hamlet,” and above all “Richard III.,” again and again. I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send me to the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase at home, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I am not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer, than “Rollo,” “The Wife,” “The Stranger,” “Barbarossa,” “The Miser of Marseilles,” and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which I saw at that time. I have a notion that there were some clever people in one of these companies, and that the lighter pieces at least were well played, but I may be altogether wrong. The gentleman who took the part of villain, with an unfailing love of evil, in the different dramas, used to come about the printing-office a good deal, and I was puzzled to find him a very mild and gentle person. To be sure he had a mustache, which in those days devoted a man to wickedness, but by day it was a blond mustache, quite flaxen, in fact, and not at all the dark and deadly thing it was behind the footlights at night. I could scarcely gasp in his presence, my heart bounded so in awe and honor of him when he paid a visit to us; perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills. The company he belonged to left town in the adversity habitual with them.

Our own adversity had been growing, and now it became overwhelming. We had to give up the paper we had struggled so hard to keep, but when the worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before. There was no more waiting till midnight for the telegraphic news, no more waking at dawn to deliver the papers, no more weary days at the case, heavier for the doom hanging over us. My father and his brothers had long dreamed of a sort of family colony somewhere in the country, and now the uncle who was most prosperous bought a milling property on a river not far from Dayton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the others could shape their business to follow him. The scheme came to nothing finally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and its sorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country, which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin, while a house was building for us.

VI. LONGFELLOW’S “SPANISH STUDENT”

This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and in the loft were stored in barrels the books that had now begun to overflow the bookcase. I do not know why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friendship with them. The light could not have been good, though if I brought my books to the little gable window that overlooked the groaning and whistling gristmill I could see well enough. But perhaps I liked the loft best because the books were handiest there, and because I could be alone. At any rate, it was there that I read Longfellow’s “Spanish Student,” which I found in an old paper copy of his poems in one of the barrels, and I instantly conceived for it the passion which all things Spanish inspired in me. As I read I not only renewed my acquaintance with literature, but renewed my delight in people and places where I had been happy before those heavy years in Dayton. At the same time I felt a little jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else should love them as well as I, and if the poem had not been so beautiful I should have hated the poet for trespassing on my ground. But I could not hold out long against the witchery of his verse. The “Spanish Student” became one of my passions; a minor passion, not a grand one, like ‘Don Quixote’ and the ‘Conquest of Granada’, but still a passion, and I should dread a little to read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal of its beauty. The hero’s rogue servant, Chispa, seemed to me, then and long afterwards, so fine a bit of Spanish character that I chose his name for my first pseudonym when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed my legislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper with it. I was in love with the heroine, the lovely dancer whose ‘cachucha’ turned my head, along with that of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten, and I went about with the thought of her burning in my heart, as if she had been a real person.

VII. SCOTT

All the while I was bringing up the long arrears of play which I had not enjoyed in the toil-years at Dayton, and was trying to make my Spanish reading serve in the sports that we had in the woods and by the river. We were Moors and Spaniards almost as often as we were British and Americans, or settlers and Indians. I suspect that the large, mild boy, the son of a neighboring farmer, who mainly shared our games, had but a dim notion of what I meant by my strange people, but I did my best to enlighten him, and he helped me make a dream out of my life, and did his best to dwell in the region of unrealities where I preferably had my being; he was from time to time a Moor when I think he would rather have been a Mingo.

I got hold of Scott’s poems, too, in that cabin loft, and read most of the tales which were yet unknown to me after those earlier readings of my father’s. I could not say why “Harold the Dauntless” most took my fancy; the fine, strongly flowing rhythm of the verse had a good deal to do with it, I believe. I liked these things, all of them, and in after years I liked the “Lady of the Lake” more and more, and from mere love of it got great lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that Scott was then or ever a great passion with me. It was a sobered affection at best, which came from my sympathy with his love of nature, and the whole kindly and humane keeping of his genius. Many years later, during the month when I was waiting for my passport as Consul for Venice, and had the time on my hands, I passed it chiefly in reading all his novels, one after another, without the interruption of other reading. ‘Ivanhoe’ I had known before, and the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’ and ‘Woodstock’, but the rest had remained in that sort of abeyance which is often the fate of books people expect to read as a matter of course, and come very near not reading at all, or read only very late. Taking them in this swift sequence, little or nothing of them remained with me, and my experience with them is against that sort of ordered and regular reading, which I have so often heard advised for young people by their elders. I always suspect their elders of not having done that kind of reading themselves.

For my own part I believe I have never got any good from a book that I did not read lawlessly and wilfully, out of all leading and following, and merely because I wanted to read it; and I here make bold to praise that way of doing. The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you. It may happen that it will yield you an unexpected delight, but this will be in its own unentreated way and in spite of your good intentions. Little of the book read for a purpose stays with the reader, and this is one reason why reading for review is so vain and unprofitable. I have done a vast deal of this, but I have usually been aware that the book was subtly withholding from me the best a book can give, since I was not reading it for its own sake and because I loved it, but for selfish ends of my own, and because I wished to possess myself of it for business purposes, as it were. The reading that does one good, and lasting good, is the reading that one does for pleasure, and simply and unselfishly, as children do. Art will still withhold herself from thrift, and she does well, for nothing but love has any right to her.

Little remains of the events of any period, however vivid they were in passing. The memory may hold record of everything, as it is believed, but it will not be easily entreated to give up its facts, and I find myself striving in vein to recall the things that I must have read that year in the country. Probably I read the old things over; certainly I kept on with Cervantes, and very likely with Goldsmith. There was a delightful history of Ohio, stuffed with tales of the pioneer times, which was a good deal in the hands of us boys; and there was a book of Western Adventure, full of Indian fights and captivities, which we wore to pieces. Still, I think that it was now that I began to have a literary sense of what I was reading. I wrote a diary, and I tried to give its record form and style, but mostly failed. The versifying which I was always at was easier, and yielded itself more to my hand. I should be very glad to, know at present what it dealt with.

VIII. LIGHTER FANCIES

When my uncles changed their minds in regard to colonizing their families at the mills, as they did in about a year, it became necessary for my father to look about for some new employment, and he naturally looked in the old direction. There were several schemes for getting hold of this paper and that, and there were offers that came to nothing. In that day there were few salaried editors in the country outside of New York, and the only hope we could have was of some place as printers in an office which we might finally buy. The affair ended in our going to the State capital, where my father found work as a reporter of legislative proceedings for one of the daily journals, and I was taken into the office as a compositor. In this way I came into living contact with literature again, and the daydreams began once more over the familiar cases of type. A definite literary ambition grew up in me, and in the long reveries of the afternoon, when I was distributing my case, I fashioned a future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity. I should be ashamed to say what literary triumphs I achieved in those preposterous deliriums. What I actually did was to write a good many copies of verse, in imitation, never owned, of Moore and Goldsmith, and some minor poets, whose work caught my fancy, as I read it in the newspapers or put it into type.

One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary performances as to treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing I ever had in print. My father offered it to the editor of the paper I worked on, and I first knew, with mingled shame and pride, of what he had done when I saw it in the journal. In the tumult of my emotions I promised myself that if I got through this experience safely I would never suffer anything else of mine to be published; but it was not long before I offered the editor a poem myself. I am now glad to think it dealt with so humble a fact as a farmer’s family leaving their old home for the West. The only fame of my poem which reached me was when another boy in the office quoted some lines of it in derision. This covered me with such confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the earth. At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and even yet I think it was attempted in a way which was not false or wrong. I had tried to sketch an aspect of life that I had seen and known, and that was very well indeed, and I had wrought patiently and carefully in the art of the poor little affair.

My elder brother, for whom there was no place in the office where I worked, had found one in a store, and he beguiled the leisure that light trade left on his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat. I read them after him with a great deal of amusement, but without the passion that I bestowed upon my favorite authors. I believe I had no critical reserves in regard to them, but simply they did not take my fancy. Still, we had great fun with Japhet in ‘Search of a Father’, and with ‘Midshipman Easy’, and we felt a fine physical shiver in the darkling moods of ‘Snarle-yow the Dog-Fiend.’ I do not remember even the names of the other novels, except ‘Jacob Faithful,’ which I chanced upon a few years ago and found very, hard reading.

We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields were homesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate with this longing the ‘Farmer’s Boy of Bloomfield,’ which my father got for me. It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mild woodcuts in it. I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vague resentment of its trespass upon Thomson’s ground in the division of its parts under the names of the seasons. I do not know why I need have felt this. I was not yet very fond of Thomson. I really liked Bloomfield better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics which I preferred to any other verse.

IX. POPE

I infer, from the fact of this preference that I had already begun to read Pope, and that I must have read the “Deserted Village” of Goldsmith. I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the “Battle of the Frogs and Mice” was in the second volume, and it took me so much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic epic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, with the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods and goddesses. It was in some hundreds of verses, which I did my best to balance as Pope did, with a caesura falling in the middle of the line, and a neat antithesis at the end.

The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, and I had moments of being intimate friends with Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase, and was coming to read more with a sense of the author, and less with a sense of his characters as real persons; that is, I was growing more literary, and less human. I fell in love with Pope, whose life I read with an ardor of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited. I was of his side in all his quarrels, as far as I understood them, and if I did not understand them I was of his side anyway. When I found that he was a Catholic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion for his sake; but I perceived that this was not necessary when I came to know that most of his friends were Protestants. If the truth must be told, I did not like his best things at first, but long remained chiefly attached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was perpetually imitating, with a whole apparatus of swains and shepherdesses, purling brooks, enamelled meads, rolling years, and the like.

After my day’s work at the case I wore the evening away in my boyish literary attempts, forcing my poor invention in that unnatural kind, and rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope’s, was like none of mine. With all my pains I do not think I ever managed to bring any of my pastorals to a satisfactory close. They all stopped somewhere about halfway. My swains could not think of anything more to say, and the merits of my shepherdesses remained undecided. To this day I do not know whether in any given instance it was the champion of Chloe or of Sylvia that carried off the prize for his fair, but I dare say it does not much matter. I am sure that I produced a rhetoric as artificial and treated of things as unreal as my master in the art, and I am rather glad that I acquainted myself so thoroughly with a mood of literature which, whatever we may say against it, seems to have expressed very perfectly a mood of civilization.

The severe schooling I gave myself was not without its immediate use. I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness, and though I often employed them decoratively and with no vital sense of their qualities, still in mere decoration they had to be chosen intelligently, and after some thought about their structure and meaning. I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his method was to the last degree intelligent. He certainly knew what he was doing, and although I did not always know what I was doing, he made me wish to know, and ashamed of not knowing. There are several truer poets who might not have done this; and after all the modern contempt of Pope, he seems to me to have been at least one of the great masters, if not one of the great poets. The poor man’s life was as weak and crooked as his frail, tormented body, but he had a dauntless spirit, and he fought his way against odds that might well have appalled a stronger nature. I suppose I must own that he was from time to time a snob, and from time to time a liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would have liked always to respect himself if he could. He violently revolted, now and again, from the abasement to which he forced himself, and he always bit the heel that trod on him, especially if it was a very high, narrow heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above it. I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards despised him, but now I am not sorry for the love, and I am very sorry for the despite. I humbly, own a vast debt to him, not the least part of which is the perception that he is a model of ever so much more to be shunned than to be followed in literature.

He was the first of the writers of great Anna’s time whom I knew, and he made me ready to understand, if he did not make me understand at once, the order of mind and life which he belonged to. Thanks to his pastorals, I could long afterwards enjoy with the double sense requisite for full pleasure in them, such divinely excellent artificialities at Tasso’s “Aminta” and Guarini’s “Pastor Fido”; things which you will thoroughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking how people once seriously liked them as high examples of poetry.

Of course I read other things of Pope’s besides his pastorals, even at the time I read these so much. I read, or not very easily or willingly read at, his ‘Essay on Man,’ which my father admired, and which he probably put Pope’s works into my hands to have me read; and I read the ‘Dunciad,’ with quite a furious ardor in the tiresome quarrels it celebrates, and an interest in its machinery, which it fatigues me to think of. But it was only a few years ago that I read the ‘Rape of the Lock,’ a thing perfect of its kind, whatever we may choose to think of the kind. Upon the whole I think much better of the kind than I once did, though still not so much as I should have thought if I had read the poem when the fever of my love for Pope was at the highest.

It is a nice question how far one is helped or hurt by one’s idealizations of historical or imaginary characters, and I shall not try to answer it fully. I suppose that if I once cherished such a passion for Pope personally that I would willingly have done the things that he did, and told the lies, and vented the malice, and inflicted the cruelties that the poor soul was full of, it was for the reason, partly, that I did not see these things as they were, and that in the glamour of his talent I was blind to all but the virtues of his defects, which he certainly had, and partly that in my love of him I could not take sides against him, even when I knew him to be wrong. After all, I fancy not much harm comes to the devoted boy from his enthusiasms for this imperfect hero or that. In my own case I am sure that I distinguished as to certain sins in my idols. I could not cast them down or cease to worship them, but some of their frailties grieved me and put me to secret shame for them. I did not excuse these things in them, or try to believe that they were less evil for them than they would have been for less people. This was after I came more or less to the knowledge of good and evil. While I remained in the innocence of childhood I did not even understand the wrong. When I realized what lives some of my poets had led, how they were drunkards, and swindlers, and unchaste, and untrue, I lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and to this day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxes itself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he should suffer more blame. The worst of the literature of past times, before an ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the race compelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthy images and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that the boy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from these through his ignorance. Still I wish they were not there, and I hope the time will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in us that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way. At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt. We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from literature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people. The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some to think of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation to generation, and carefully passed down from age to age as something precious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which they are.

During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father read things aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with the rest. I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson’s ‘Castle of Indolence’ in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient of having things read to me. The trouble was that I caught some thought or image from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that while the reading went on, and I lost the rest. But I think the reading was less in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting and his leisure less. My own hours in the printing-office began at seven and ended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used for putting down such verses as had come to me during the morning. As soon as supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept in great disorder, and written in several different hands on several different kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, and hammered away at my blessed Popean heroics till nine, when I went regularly to bed, to rise again at five. Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off on Saturdays, and though the days were long the work was not always constant, and was never very severe. I suspect now the office was not so prosperous as might have been wished. I was shifted from place to place in it, and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over the distribution of my case. I was very fond of my work, though, and proud of my swiftness and skill in it. Once when the perplexed foreman could not think of any task to set me he offered me a holiday, but I would not take it, so I fancy that at this time I was not more interested in my art of poetry than in my trade of printing. What went on in the office interested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of English letters, and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapeless diary which I kept, partly in verse and partly in prose, but always of a distinctly lower literary kind than that I was trying otherwise to write. There must have been some mention in it of the tremendous combat with wet sponges I saw there one day between two of the boys who hurled them back and forth at each other. This amiable fray, carried on during the foreman’s absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy who has come to be a name well-known in literature. I admired his vigor as a combatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamed that he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely as myself. Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both become journalists, and had both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for the Atlantic Monthly, and then we formed a literary friendship which eventuated in the joint publication of a volume of verse. ‘The Poems of Two Friends’ became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came back upon the publisher’s hands. I imagine these copies were “ground up” in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single example of the book quoted the other day in a book-seller’s catalogue at ten dollars, and I infer that it is so rare as to be prized at least for its rarity. It was a very pretty little book, printed on tinted paper then called “blush,” in the trade, and it was manufactured in the same office where we had once been boys together, unknown to each other. Another boy of that time had by this time become foreman in the office, and he was very severe with us about the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the margin. Perhaps he thought we might be going to take on airs, and perhaps we might have taken on airs if the fate of our book had been different. As it was I really think we behaved with sufficient meekness, and after thirty four or five years for reflection I am still of a very modest mind about my share of the book, in spite of the price it bears in the book- seller’s catalogue. But I have steadily grown in liking for my friend’s share in it, and I think that there is at present no American of twenty- three writing verse of so good a quality, with an ideal so pure and high, and from an impulse so authentic as John J. Piatt’s were then. He already knew how to breathe into his glowing rhyme the very spirit of the region where we were both native, and in him the Middle West has its true poet, who was much more than its poet, who had a rich and tender imagination, a lovely sense of color, and a touch even then securely and fully his own. I was reading over his poems in that poor little book a few days ago, and wondering with shame and contrition that I had not at once known their incomparable superiority to mine. But I used then and for long afterwards to tax him with obscurity, not knowing that my own want of simplicity and directness was to blame for that effect. My reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, of definiteness; anything left in the vague was intolerable to me; but my long subjection to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me so strictly literary in my point of view that sometimes I could not see what was, if more naturally approached and without any technical preoccupation, perfectly transparent. It remained for another great passion, perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves in which I was trying so hard to dance, and free me forever from the bonds which I had spent so much time and trouble to involve myself in. But I was not to know that passion for five or six years yet, and in the mean time I kept on as I had been going, and worked out my deliverance in the predestined way. What I liked then was regularity, uniformity, exactness. I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life, and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable, and unfixed, even if at the risk of some vagueness.

X. VARIOUS PREFERENCES

My father was very fond of Byron, and I must before this have known that his poems were in our bookcase. While we were still in Columbus I began to read them, but I did not read so much of them as could have helped me to a truer and freer ideal. I read “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,” and I liked its vulgar music and its heavy-handed sarcasm. These would, perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a fanaticism for methodical verse that any variation from the octosyllabic and decasyllabic couplets was painful to me. The Spencerian stanza, with its rich variety of movement and its harmonious closes, long shut “Childe Harold” from me, and whenever I found a poem in any book which did not rhyme its second line with its first I read it unwillingly or not at all.

This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted beyond our stay in Columbus, which ended with the winter, when the Legislature adjourned, and my father’s employment ceased. He tried to find some editorial work on the paper which had printed his reports, but every place was full, and it was hopeless to dream of getting a proprietary interest in it. We had nothing, and we must seek a chance where something besides money would avail us. This offered itself in the village of Ashtabula, in the northeastern part of the State, and there we all found ourselves one moonlight night of early summer. The Lake Shore Railroad then ended at Ashtabula, in a bank of sand, and my elder brother and I walked up from the station, while the rest of the family, which pretty well filled the omnibus, rode. We had been very happy at Columbus, as we were apt to be anywhere, but none of us liked the narrowness of city streets, even so near to the woods as those were, and we were eager for the country again. We had always lived hitherto in large towns, except for that year at the Mills, and we were eager to see what a village was like, especially a village peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported it. I must own that we found it far prettier than anything we had known in Southern Ohio, which we were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look back it still seems to me one of the prettiest little places I have ever known, with its white wooden houses, glimmering in the dark of its elms and maples, and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, grass- bordered, sandy streets between them. The hotel, where we rejoined our family, lurked behind a group of lofty elms, and we drank at the town pump before it just for the pleasure of pumping it.

The village was all that we could have imagined of simply and sweetly romantic in the moonlight, and when the day came it did not rob it of its charm. It was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of the plain, and it had the advantage of realizing the Deserted Village without being deserted.

XI. UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

The book that moved me most, in our stay of six months at Ashtabula, was then beginning to move the whole world more than any other book has moved it. I read it as it came out week after week in the old National Era, and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as every one else did. Yet I cannot say that it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the other books that I had loved intensely. I felt its greatness when I read it first, and as often as I have read it since, I have seen more and more clearly that it was a very great novel. With certain obvious lapses in its art, and with an art that is at its best very simple, and perhaps primitive, the book is still a work of art. I knew this, in a measure then, as I know it now, and yet neither the literary pride I was beginning to have in the perception of such things, nor the powerful appeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to impassion me of it. I could not say why this was so. Why does the young man’s fancy, when it lightly turns to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that? There seems no more reason for one than for the other.

Instead of remaining steeped to the lips in the strong interest of what is still perhaps our chief fiction, I shed my tribute of tears, and went on my way. I did not try to write a story of slaver, as I might very well have done; I did not imitate either the make or the manner of Mrs. Stowe’s romance; I kept on at my imitation of Pope’s pastorals, which I dare say I thought much finer, and worthier the powers of such a poet as I meant to be. I did this, as I must have felt then, at some personal risk of a supernatural kind, for my studies were apt to be prolonged into the night after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and a certain ghost, which I had every reason to fear, might very well have visited the small room given me to write in. There was a story, which I shrank from verifying, that a former inmate of our house had hung himself in it, but I do not know to this day whether it was true or not. The doubt did not prevent him from dangling at the door-post, in my consciousness, and many a time I shunned the sight of this problematical suicide by keeping my eyes fastened on the book before me. It was a very simple device, but perfectly effective, as I think any one will find who employs it in like circumstances; and I would really like to commend it to growing boys troubled as I was then.

I never heard who the poor soul was, or why he took himself out of the world, if he really did so, or if he ever was in it; but I am sure that my passion for Pope, and my purpose of writing pastorals, must have been powerful indeed to carry me through dangers of that kind. I suspect that the strongest proof of their existence was the gloomy and ruinous look of the house, which was one of the oldest in the village, and the only one that was for rent there. We went into it because we must, and we were to leave it as soon as we could find a better. But before this happened we left Ashtabula, and I parted with one of the few possibilities I have enjoyed of seeing a ghost on his own ground, as it were.

I was not sorry, for I believe I never went in or came out of the place, by day or by night, without a shudder, more or less secret; and at least, now, we should be able to get another house.

XII. OSSIAN

Very likely the reading of Ossian had something to do with my morbid anxieties. I had read Byron’s imitation of him before that, and admired it prodigiously, and when my father got me the book — as usual I did not know where or how he got it — not all the tall forms that moved before the eyes of haunted bards in the dusky vale of autumn could have kept me from it. There were certain outline illustrations in it, which were very good in the cold Flaxman manner, and helped largely to heighten the fascination of the poems for me. They did not supplant the pastorals of Pope in my affections, and they were never the grand passion with me that Pope’s poems had been.

I began at once to make my imitations of Ossian, and I dare say they were not windier and mistier than the original. At the same time I read the literature of the subject, and gave the pretensions of Macpherson an unquestioning faith. I should have made very short work of any one who had impugned the authenticity of the poems, but happily there was no one who held the contrary opinion in that village, so far as I knew, or who cared for Ossian, or had even heard of him. This saved me a great deal of heated controversy with my contemporaries, but I had it out in many angry reveries with Dr. Johnson and others, who had dared to say in their time that the poems of Ossian were not genuine lays of the Gaelic bard, handed down from father to son, and taken from the lips of old women in Highland huts, as Macpherson claimed.

In fact I lived over in my small way the epoch of the eighteenth century in which these curious frauds found polite acceptance all over Europe, and I think yet that they were really worthier of acceptance than most of the artificialities that then passed for poetry. There was a light of nature in them, and this must have been what pleased me, so long-shut up to the studio-work of Pope. But strangely enough I did not falter in my allegiance to him, or realize that here in this free form was a deliverance, if I liked, from the fetters and manacles which I had been at so much pains to fit myself with. Probably nothing would then have persuaded me to put them off permanently, or to do more than lay them aside for the moment while I tried that new stop and that new step.

I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessness was really better than formality. Something, it seems to me, may be contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everything spills and wastes away. This is what I find the fatal defect of our American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies. He had great moments, beautiful and noble thoughts, generous aspirations, and a heart wide and warm enough for the whole race, but he had no bounds, no shape; he was as liberal as the casing air, but he was often as vague and intangible. I cannot say how long my passion for Ossian lasted, but not long, I fancy, for I cannot find any trace of it in the time following our removal from Ashtabula to the county seat at Jefferson. I kept on with Pope, I kept on with Cervantes, I kept on with Irving, but I suppose there was really not substance enough in Ossian to feed my passion, and it died of inanition.

XIII. SHAKESPEARE

The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been none before, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events so filling that they left little room for any other excitement but that of getting acquainted with the young people of the village, and going to parties, and sleigh rides, and walks, and drives, and picnics, and dances, and all the other pleasures in which that community seemed to indulge beyond any other we had known. The village was smaller than the one we had just left, but it was by no means less lively, and I think that for its size and time and place it had an uncommon share of what has since been called culture. The intellectual experience of the people was mainly theological and political, as it was everywhere in that day, but there were several among them who had a real love for books, and when they met at the druggist’s, as they did every night, to dispute of the inspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party, the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens and Thackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron. There were law students who read “Noctes Ambrosianae,” the ‘Age of Reason’, and Bailey’s “Festus,” as well as Blackstone’s ‘Commentaries;’ and there was a public library in that village of six hundred people, small but very well selected, which was kept in one of the lawyers’ offices, and was free to all. It seems to me now that the people met there oftener than they do in most country places, and rubbed their wits together more, but this may be one of those pleasing illusions of memory which men in later life are subject to.

I insist upon nothing, but certainly the air was friendlier to the tastes I had formed than any I had yet known, and I found a wider if not deeper sympathy with them. There was one of our printers who liked books, and we went through ‘Don Quixote’ together again, and through the ‘Conquest of Granada’, and we began to read other things of Irving’s. There was a very good little stock of books at the village drugstore, and among those that began to come into my hands were the poems of Dr. Holmes, stray volumes of De Quincey, and here and there minor works of Thackeray. I believe I had no money to buy them, but there was an open account, or a comity, between the printer and the bookseller, and I must have been allowed a certain discretion in regard to getting books.

Still I do not think I went far in the more modern authors, or gave my heart to any of them. Suddenly, it was now given to Shakespeare, without notice or reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked him too, and that we found it a double pleasure to read him together. Printers in the old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or less, and I suppose I could not have kept away from him much longer in the nature of things. I cannot fix the time or place when my friend and I began to read him, but it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition of ours, and presently we had great lengths of him by heart, out of “Hamlet,” out of “The Tempest,” out of “Macbeth,” out of “Richard III.,” out of “Midsummer-Night’s Dream,” out of the “Comedy of Errors,” out of “Julius Caesar,” out of “Measure for Measure,” out of “Romeo and Juliet,” out of “Two Gentlemen of Verona.”

These were the plays that we loved, and must have read in common, or at least at the same time: but others that I more especially liked were the Histories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaff appeared. This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy. I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph, and Nym. I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was a personal pang to me when the prince, crowned king, denied him: blackguard for blackguard, I still think the prince the worse blackguard. Perhaps I flatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen, I fully conceived of Falstaff’s character, and entered into the author’s wonderfully humorous conception of him. There is no such perfect conception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception is all the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice of Falstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow, though a merry companion. I am not sure but I should put him beside Hamlet, and on the name level, for the merit of his artistic completeness, and at one time I much preferred him, or at least his humor.

As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather fastidious, and would not have made friends with him in the flesh, much or little. I revelled in all his appearances in the Histories, and I tried to be as happy where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to life again in the “Merry Wives of Windsor,” though at the bottom of my heart I felt the difference. I began to make my imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 57 out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph talked together, in that Ercles vein which is so easily caught. This was after a year or two of the irregular and interrupted acquaintance with the author which has been my mode of friendship with all the authors I have loved. My worship of Shakespeare went to heights and lengths that it had reached with no earlier idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I found myself saying that the creation of Shakespeare was as great as the creation of a planet.

There ought certainly to be some bound beyond which the cult of favorite authors should not be suffered to go. I should keep well within the limit of that early excess now, and should not liken the creation of Shakespeare to the creation of any heavenly body bigger, say, than one of the nameless asteroids that revolve between Mars and Jupiter. Even this I do not feel to be a true means of comparison, and I think that in the case of all great men we like to let our wonder mount and mount, till it leaves the truth behind, and honesty is pretty much cast out as ballast. A wise criticism will no more magnify Shakespeare because he is already great than it will magnify any less man. But we are loaded down with the responsibility of finding him all we have been told he is, and we must do this or suspect ourselves of a want of taste, a want of sensibility. At the same time, we may really be honester than those who have led us to expect this or that of him, and more truly his friends. I wish the time might come when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and Homer, as sincerely and as fairly as we read any new book by the least known of our contemporaries. The course of criticism is towards this, but when I began to read Shakespeare I should not have ventured to think that he was not at every moment great. I should no more have thought of questioning the poetry of any passage in him than of questioning the proofs of holy writ. All the same, I knew very well that much which I read was really poor stuff, and the persons and positions were often preposterous. It is a great pity that the ardent youth should not be permitted and even encouraged to say this to himself, instead of falling slavishly before a great author and accepting him at all points as infallible. Shakespeare is fine enough and great enough when all the possible detractions are made, and I have no fear of saying now that he would be finer and greater for the loss of half his work, though if I had heard any one say such a thing then I should have held him as little better than one of the wicked.

Upon the whole it was well that I had not found my way to Shakespeare earlier, though it is rather strange that I had not. I knew him on the stage in most of the plays that used to be given. I had shared the conscience of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Hamlet; many times, in my natural affinity for villains, I had mocked and suffered with Richard III.

Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever brought more to it. There have been few joys for me in life comparable to that of seeing the curtain rise on “Hamlet,” and hearing the guards begin to talk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself without any material embodiment! It is the same in the whole range of his plays: they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul. They are neither worse nor better because of the theatre. They are so great that it cannot hamper them; they are so vital that they enlarge it to their own proportions and endue it with something of their own living force. They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so wholly that you think no more of it than you think of the physiognomy of one who talks importantly to you. I have heard people say that they would rather not see Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but I cannot agree with them. He can better afford to be played ill than any other man that ever wrote. Whoever is on the stage, it is always Shakespeare who is speaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in the past I can trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them.

The effect is so equal from either experience that I am not sure as to some plays whether I read them or saw them first, though as to most of them I am aware that I never saw them at all; and if the whole truth must be told there is still one of his plays that I have not read, and I believe it is esteemed one of his greatest. There are several, with all my reading of others, that I had not read till within a few years; and I do not think I should have lost much if I, had never read “Pericles” and “Winter’s Tale.”

In those early days I had no philosophized preference for reality in literature, and I dare say if I had been asked, I should have said that the plays of Shakespeare where reality is least felt were the most imaginative; that is the belief of the puerile critics still; but I suppose it was my instinctive liking for reality that made the great Histories so delightful to me, and that rendered “Macbeth” and “Hamlet” vital in their very ghosts and witches. There I found a world appreciable to experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and grander than the poor little affair that I had only known a small obscure corner of, and yet of one quality with it, so that I could be as much at home and citizen in it as where I actually lived. There I found joy and sorrow mixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything standing for itself, and not for some other thing. Then, I suppose it was the interfusion of humor through so much of it, that made it all precious and friendly. I think I had a native love of laughing, which was fostered in me by my father’s way of looking at life, and had certainly been flattered by my intimacy with Cervantes; but whether this was so or not, I know that I liked best and felt deepest those plays and passages in Shakespeare where the alliance of the tragic and the comic was closest. Perhaps in a time when self-consciousness is so widespread, it is the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am sure that without it I should not have been naturalized to that world of Shakespeare’s Histories, where I used to spend so much of my leisure, with such a sense of his own intimate companionship there as I had nowhere else. I felt that he must somehow like my being in the joke of it all, and that in his great heart he had room for a boy willing absolutely to lose himself in him, and be as one of his creations.

It was the time of life with me when a boy begins to be in love with the pretty faces that then peopled this world so thickly, and I did not fail to fall in love with the ladies of that Shakespeare-world where I lived equally. I cannot tell whether it was because I found them like my ideals here, or whether my ideals acquired merit because of their likeness to the realities there; they appeared to be all of one degree of enchanting loveliness; but upon the whole I must have preferred them in the plays, because it was so much easier to get on with them there; I was always much better dressed there; I was vastly handsomer; I was not bashful or afraid, and I had some defects of these advantages to contend with here.

That friend of mine, the printer whom I have mentioned, was one with me in a sense of the Shakespearean humor, and he dwelt with me in the sort of double being I had in those two worlds. We took the book into the woods at the ends of the long summer afternoons that remained to us when we had finished our work, and on the shining Sundays of the warm, late spring, the early, warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes or heaps of fallen leaves; so that much of the poetry is mixed for me with a rapturous sense of the out-door beauty of this lovely natural world. We read turn about, one taking the story up as the other tired, and as we read the drama played itself under the open sky and in the free air with such orchestral effects as the soughing woods or some rippling stream afforded. It was not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on us from the top of a tall hickory; and the plaint of a meadow-lark prolonged itself with unbroken sweetness from one world to the other.

But I think it takes two to read in the open air. The pressure of walls is wanted to keep the mind within itself when one reads alone; otherwise it wanders and disperses itself through nature. When my friend left us for want of work in the office, or from the vagarious impulse which is so strong in our craft, I took my Shakespeare no longer to the woods and fields, but pored upon him mostly by night, in the narrow little space which I had for my study, under the stairs at home. There was a desk pushed back against the wall, which the irregular ceiling eloped down to meet behind it, and at my left was a window, which gave a good light on the writing-leaf of my desk. This was my workshop for six or seven years, and it was not at all a bad one; I have had many since that were not so much to the purpose; and though I would not live my life over, I would willingly enough have that little study mine again. But it is gone an utterly as the faces and voices that made home around it, and that I was fierce to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest me in the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, blindly, with very little hope, but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave way under no burden, before no obstacle. Long ago changes were made in the low, rambling house which threw my little closet into a larger room; but this was not until after I had left it many years; and as long as I remained a part of that dear and simple home it was my place to read, to write, to muse, to dream.

I sometimes wish in these later years that I had spent less time in it, or that world of books which it opened into; that I had seen more of the actual world, and had learned to know my brethren in it better. I might so have amassed more material for after use in literature, but I had to fit myself to use it, and I suppose that this was what I was doing, in my own way, and by such light as I had. I often toiled wrongly and foolishly; but certainly I toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted. Some strength, I hope, was coming to me, even from my mistakes, and though I went over ground that I need not have traversed, if I had not been left so much to find the way alone, yet I was not standing still, and some of the things that I then wished to do I have done. I do not mind owning that in others I have failed. For instance, I have never surpassed Shakespeare as a poet, though I once firmly meant to do so; but then, it is to be remembered that very few other people have surpassed him, and that it would not have been easy.

XIV. IK MARVEL

My ardor for Shakespeare must have been at its height when I was between sixteen and seventeen years old, for I fancy when I began to formulate my admiration, and to try to measure his greatness in phrases, I was less simply impassioned than at some earlier time. At any rate, I am sure that I did not proclaim his planetary importance in creation until I was at least nineteen. But even at an earlier age I no longer worshipped at a single shrine; there were many gods in the temple of my idolatry, and I bowed the knee to them all in a devotion which, if it was not of one quality, was certainly impartial. While I was reading, and thinking, and living Shakespeare with such an intensity that I do not see how there could have been room in my consciousness for anything else, there seem to have been half a dozen other divinities there, great and small, whom I have some present difficulty in distinguishing. I kept Irving, and Goldsmith, and Cervantes on their old altars, but I added new ones, and these I translated from the contemporary: literary world quite as often as from the past. I am rather glad that among them was the gentle and kindly Ik Marvel, whose ‘Reveries of a Bachelor’ and whose ‘Dream Life’ the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture which would not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people of this. The books have survived the span of immortality fixed by our amusing copyright laws, and seem now, when any pirate publisher may plunder their author, to have a new life before them. Perhaps this is ordered by Providence, that those who have no right to them may profit by them, in that divine contempt of such profit which Providence so often shows.

I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I suppose it was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning to read, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and I could not say why I thought it would be very ‘comme il faut’ to like them. Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbing shoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of its powder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be of it, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do it now. But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends, and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow of purpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from their sentiment. I dare say I should find their pose now a little old-fashioned. I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs and starts, expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am sure that the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all times and always the latest wear. Whatever it was, it sufficed to win my heart, and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and most pathetic in it. I read ‘Dream Life’ first — though the ‘Reveries of a Bachelor’ was written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book — and ‘Dream Life’ remains first in my affections. I have now little notion what it was about, but I love its memory. The book is associated especially in my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when I carried it into the woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter of emotion over its page. I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember how the light struck through it and flushed the print with the gules of the foliage. My friend was away by this time on one of his several absences in the Northwest, and I was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevant melancholy with which I read myself and my circumstances into the book. I began to read them out again in due time, clothed with the literary airs and graces that I admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel in the voluminous letters I wrote my friend in compliance with his Shakespearean prayer:

    “To Milan let me hear from thee by letters,

    Of thy success in love, and what news else

    Betideth here in absence of thy friend;

    And I likewise will visit thee with mine.”

Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our little village; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the real places would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else in the situation was really this or that. Heaven knows what gaudy sentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travesty had kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough. My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story, in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, for that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was all very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I went on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it. My material gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered and threatened to perish on my hands. To crown my misery there grew up an impatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to me one day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say that he did not think that story amounted to much. I did not think so either, but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortal effect of the stroke I do not know. Somehow I managed to bring the wretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past. Slowly it seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and there is always this consolation to be whispered in the ear of wounded vanity, that the world’s memory is equally bad for failure and success; that if it will not keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, neither will it long dwell upon your defeats. But that experience was really terrible. It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one’s self in battle without the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action, or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appear in. I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame and anguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badly conceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken. If it were not for what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story on the same lines in the future.

XV. DICKENS

What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at the same time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing about the reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detach themselves one from another. This may be so because my reading was much more multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was reading always two or three authors at a time. I think Macaulay a little antedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of that masterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as to the times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail to fall under his spell.

This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in broken health the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends. It seemed for a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of the afternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down to my books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until the family were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough that I should like to do it. The most that can be said in defence of such a thing is that with the strong native impulse and the conditions it was inevitable. If I was to do the thing I wanted to do I was to do it in that way, and I wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, more than I wanted to do anything else, and even more than I wanted to do nothing. I cannot make out that I was fond of study, or cared for the things I was trying to do, except as a means to other things. As far as my pleasure went, or my natural bent was concerned, I would rather have been wandering through the woods with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under a tree, or reading some book that cost me no sort of effort. But there was much more than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aim to achieve, and I could no more have left off trying for what I hoped and aimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know very distinctly what either was. As I look back at the endeavor of those days much of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering. I can see that doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a sort of helpless force.

I studied Latin because I believed that I should read the Latin authors, and I suppose I got as much of the language as most school-boys of my age, but I never read any Latin author but Cornelius Nepos. I studied Greek, and I learned so much of it as to read a chapter of the Testament, and an ode of Anacreon. Then I left it, not because I did not mean to go farther, or indeed stop short of reading all Greek literature, but because that friend of mine and I talked it over and decided that I could go on with Greek any time, but I had better for the present study German, with the help of a German who had come to the village. Apparently I was carrying forward an attack on French at the same time, for I distinctly recall my failure to enlist with me an old gentleman who had once lived a long time in France, and whom I hoped to get at least an accent from. Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth speaking of, or perhaps because he did not want the bother of imparting it, he never would keep any of the engagements he made with me, and when we did meet he so abounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally escaped me, and I was left to acquire an Italian accent of French in Venice seven or eight years later. At the same time I was reading Spanish, more or less, but neither wisely nor too well. Having had so little help in my studies, I had a stupid pride in refusing all, even such as I might have availed myself of, without shame, in books, and I would not read any Spanish author with English notes. I would have him in an edition wholly Spanish from beginning to end, and I would fight my way through him single-handed, with only such aid as I must borrow from a lexicon.

I now call this stupid, but I have really no more right to blame the boy who was once I than I have to praise him, and I am certainly not going to do that. In his day and place he did what he could in his own way; he had no true perspective of life, but I do not know that youth ever has that. Some strength came to him finally from the mere struggle, undirected and misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as he had was toughened by the prolonged stress. It could be said, of course, that the time apparently wasted in these effectless studies could have been well spent in deepening and widening a knowledge of English literature never yet too great, and I have often said this myself; but then, again, I am not sure that the studies were altogether effectless. I have sometimes thought that greater skill had come to my hand from them than it would have had without, and I have trusted that in making known to me the sources of so much English, my little Latin and less Greek have enabled me to use my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I should have had otherwise.

But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture. What is certain is that for the present my studies, without method and without stint, began to tell upon my health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner of hypochondriacal fears. These finally resolved themselves into one, incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only through bodily fatigue, or through some absorbing interest that took me out of myself altogether and filled my morbid mind with the images of another’s creation.

In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the reading I had listened to. But now I devoured his books one after another as fast as I could read them. I plunged from the heart of one to another, so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me. Some of them remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so that when I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow. But I have since read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinking Dickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived in the days of the mighty magician. I fancy the readers who have come to him since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have little notion how great it was. In that time he colored the parlance of the English-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talent attempting fiction. While his glamour lasted it was no more possible for a young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poet to escape writing Tennyson. I admired other authors more; I loved them more, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fiction I was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially in his way.

All the while that he held me so fast by his potent charm I was aware that it was a very rough magic now and again, but I could not assert my sense of this against him in matters of character and structure. To these I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of their divine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius in these kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted without sacrilege. But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, I suffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind about his style, which I thought bad.

I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I borrowed his books from, and who might almost have come out of his books. He lived in Dickens in a measure that I have never known another to do, and my contumely must have brought him a pang that was truly a personal grief. He forgave it, no doubt because I bowed in the Dickens worship without question on all other points. He was then a man well on towards fifty, and he had come to America early in life, and had lived in our village many years, without casting one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of a contrary opinion on every question, political, religious and social. He had no fixed belief, but he went to the service of his church whenever it was held among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer while he disputed the authority of the Bible with all comers. He had become a citizen, but he despised democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency only by voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures friendly to the institution which he considered the scandal and reproach of the American name. From a heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage and cynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid him. I know nothing of his origin, except the fact of his being an Englishman, or what his first calling had been; but he had evolved among us from a house-painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate love of music. He built his organs from the ground up, and made every part of them with his own hands; I believe they were very good, and at any rate the churches in the country about took them from him as fast as he could make them. He had one in his own house, and it was fine to see him as he sat before it, with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, his noble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted in the rapture of his music. He was a rarely intelligent creature, and an artist in every fibre; and if you did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he was a delightful companion.

After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we took long, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door, or lounged over the books in the drug-store, and talked evermore of literature. He must have been nearly three times my age, but that did not matter; we met in the equality of the ideal world where there is neither old nor young, any more than there is rich or poor. He had read a great deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and was always coming back to him with affection, whenever the talk strayed. He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and when I praised Thackeray’s style to the disadvantage of Dickens’s he could only accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference. Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upper ten thousand. His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure that it was altogether mistaken.

There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters the reader into the belief that he is better than other people. I do not mean to say that this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens, but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons why I liked him better; if I appreciated him so fully as I felt, I must be of a finer porcelain than the earthen pots which were not aware of any particular difference in the various liquors poured into them. In Dickens the virtue of his social defect is that he never appeals to the principle which sniffs, in his reader. The base of his work is the whole breadth and depth of humanity itself. It is helplessly elemental, but it is not the less grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifestations of character, character affected by the interests and passions rather than the tastes and preferences, it certainly deals with the larger moods through them. I do not know that in the whole range of his work he once suffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature through any social accident, or except for some moral cause. This makes him very fit reading for a boy, and I should say that a boy could get only good from him. His view of the world and of society, though it was very little philosophized, was instinctively sane and reasonable, even when it was most impossible.

We are just beginning to discern that certain conceptions of our relations to our fellow-men, once formulated in generalities which met with a dramatic acceptation from the world, and were then rejected by it as mere rhetoric, have really a vital truth in them, and that if they have ever seemed false it was because of the false conditions in which we still live. Equality and fraternity, these are the ideals which once moved the world, and then fell into despite and mockery, as unrealities; but now they assert themselves in our hearts once more.

Blindly, unwittingly, erringly as Dickens often urged them, these ideals mark the whole tendency of his fiction, and they are what endear him to the heart, and will keep him dear to it long after many a cunninger artificer in letters has passed into forgetfulness. I do not pretend that I perceived the full scope of his books, but I was aware of it in the finer sense which is not consciousness. While I read him, I was in a world where the right came out best, as I believe it will yet do in this world, and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will yet attend it in our daily life, untrammelled by social convention or economic circumstance. In that world of his, in the ideal world, to which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end, and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right. Of course it was in a way all crude enough, and was already contradicted by experience in the small sphere of my own being; but nevertheless it was true with that truth which is at the bottom of things, and I was happy in it. I could not fail to love the mind which conceived it, and my worship of Dickens was more grateful than that I had yet given any writer. I did not establish with him that one-sided understanding which I had with Cervantes and Shakespeare; with a contemporary that was not possible, and as an American I was deeply hurt at the things he had said against us, and the more hurt because I felt that they were often so just. But I was for the time entirely his, and I could not have wished to write like any one else.

I do not pretend that the spell I was under was wholly of a moral or social texture. For the most part I was charmed with him because he was a delightful story-teller; because he could thrill me, and make me hot and cold; because he could make me laugh and cry, and stop my pulse and breath at will. There seemed an inexhaustible source of humor and pathos in his work, which I now find choked and dry; I cannot laugh any more at Pickwick or Sam Weller, or weep for little Nell or Paul Dombey; their jokes, their griefs, seemed to me to be turned on, and to have a mechanical action. But beneath all is still the strong drift of a genuine emotion, a sympathy, deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly, the unfortunate. In all that vast range of fiction, there is nothing that tells for the strong, because they are strong, against the weak, nothing that tells for the haughty against the humble, nothing that tells for wealth against poverty. The effect of Dickens is purely democratic, and however contemptible he found our pseudo-equality, he was more truly democratic than any American who had yet written fiction. I suppose it was our instinctive perception in the region of his instinctive expression, that made him so dear to us, and wounded our silly vanity so keenly through our love when he told us the truth about our horrible sham of a slave-based freedom. But at any rate the democracy is there in his work more than he knew perhaps, or would ever have known, or ever recognized by his own life. In fact, when one comes to read the story of his life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of having once put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his mother for suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was the slave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highest function of his fiction to help destroy.

I imagine that my early likes and dislikes in Dickens were not very discriminating. I liked ‘David Copperfield,’ and ‘Barnaby Rudge,’ and ‘Bleak House,’ and I still like them; but I do not think I liked them more than ‘Dombey & Son,’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ and the ‘Pickwick Papers,’ which I cannot read now with any sort of patience, not to speak of pleasure. I liked ‘Martin Chuzzlewit,’ too, and the other day I read a great part of it again, and found it roughly true in the passages that referred to America, though it was surcharged in the serious moods, and caricatured in the comic. The English are always inadequate observers; they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears for any alien people; but as far as an Englishman could, Dickens had caught the look of our life in certain aspects. His report of it was clumsy and farcical; but in a large, loose way it was like enough; at least he had caught the note of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality, and this was not altogether lost in his mocking horse-play.

I cannot make out that I was any the less fond of Dickens because of it. I believe I was rather more willing to accept it as a faithful portraiture then than I should be now; and I certainly never made any question of it with my friend the organ-builder. ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ was a favorite book with him, and so was the ‘Old Curiosity Shop.’ No doubt a fancied affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of music made him like that most sentimental and improbable personage, whom he would have disowned and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life; but it was a purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with Little Nell and her grandfather. He was fond of reading the pathetic passages from both books, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered in tremulous emotion on the periods he loved. He would catch the volume up anywhere, any time, and begin to read, at the book-store, or the harness- shop, or the law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of a country village, in those days before the war, when people had all the time there was; and he was sure of his audience as long as he chose to read. One Christmas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the ‘Christmas Carol’ in the Court-house, and people came from all about to hear him.

He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a life of suffering in the saddest way. Several years before his death money fell to his family, and he went with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vain to make himself at home. He never ceased to pine for the village he had left, with its old companionships, its easy usages, its familiar faces; and he escaped to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed, and he could come back no more. He was never reconciled to the change, and in a manner he did really die of the homesickness which deepened an hereditary taint, and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him. off. My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my memories of this quaint and most original genius, and though I knew Dickens long before I knew his lover, I can scarcely think of one without thinking of the other.

XVI. WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER

Certain other books I associate with another pathetic nature, of whom the organ-builder and I were both fond. This was the young poet who looked after the book half of the village drug and book store, and who wrote poetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and with such strength as he found in the disease preying upon him. He must have been far gone in consumption when I first knew him, for I have no recollection of a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his sweet smile wan, and his blue eyes dull with the disease that wasted him away,

       “Like wax in the fire,

       Like snow in the sun.”

People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragile and pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom, and not hoping or seeking to escape it. As the end drew near he left his employment and went home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to see him once through the deep snow of a winter which was to be his last. My heart was heavy all the time, but he tried to make the visit pass cheerfully with our wonted talk about books. Only at parting, when he took my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he said, “I suppose my disease is progressing,” with the patience he always showed.

I did not see him again, and I am not sure now that his gift was very distinct or very great. It was slight and graceful rather, I fancy, and if he had lived it might not have sufficed to make him widely known, but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty in literature, and I believe it was through sympathy with his preferences that I came into appreciation of several authors whom I had not known, or had not cared for before. There could not have been many shelves of books in that store, and I came to be pretty well acquainted with them all before I began to buy them. For the most part, I do not think it occurred to me that they were there to be sold; for this pale poet seemed indifferent to the commercial property in them, and only to wish me to like them.

I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found in his charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond of Dr. Holmes’s poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each represented in his slender stock by some distinctive work. There were several stray volumes of Thackeray’s minor writings, and I still have the ‘Yellowplush Papers’ in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton’s Popular Library, which I bought there. But most of the books were in the famous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant of excellence in the literature it covered. Besides these there were standard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, from wornout plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth in this shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the “Excursion” in it, for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it is very right and fit to have read the “Excursion.” To be honest, it was very hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I have ever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that, I do not suppose that any one ever did. I tried hard enough to like everything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I ought to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual and moral inferiority in me. My early idol, Pope, had already been tumbled into the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately been given in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in such newspaper report as I had of them. So, my preoccupations were all in favor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience to like Wordsworth. If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the fault remains very much what it first was.

I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not think that I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I am sure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him. After suffering once through the “Excursion” I did not afflict myself with it again, but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancy it is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fond of. Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine; on the other hand, neither was Byron. Him, too, I liked in passages and in certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read him throughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try to imitate Wordsworth.

Those lectures of Lowell’s had a great influence with me, and I tried to like whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young people when they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic pride is touched; they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the critic admires. From this motive they do a great deal of factitious liking; but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can only avail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective. When I read Lowell’s praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer, and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and as often as I have tried I have found it impossible. It was not so with Chaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted in those lectures, and in Chambers’s ‘Encyclopaedia of English Literature,’ which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder.

In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read him with that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembled him in a certain sweet and cheery humanity. But I do not allege this as the reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like either of them. Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot quite account for one’s passions in either; what is certain is, I liked Chaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinity between reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name it, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earth in human life. By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could find in the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made a clerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me the poet’s works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with a glossary. It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and lifted my heart with a sense of noble companionship.

I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet’s time, which I found often enough in the poet’s verse, as well as the goodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certain misgiving about it. He repeated to me the librarian’s question as to whether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the hands of a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me. It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify him, and I suppose he had not given me the book without due reflection. Probably he reasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad would become known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better know that he knew it.

The streams of filth flow down through the ages in literature, which sometimes seems little better than an open sewer, and, as I have said, I do not see why the time should not come when the noxious and noisome channels should be stopped; but the base of the mind is bestial, and so far the beast in us has insisted upon having his full say. The worst of lewd literature is that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the life, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: that is the danger and the harm, and I think the fact ought not to be blinked. Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucer was probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am not going to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which a boy would be the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praise him. The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of a means of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, and even falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects just what it is, and not to feign it otherwise. I am not ready to say that the harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared with it, and the filthy thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it does not corrupt the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader’s tongue and pen to sin in kind.

I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the best in him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to look for the best, and to know it when I had found it. Of course I began to copy him. That is, I did not attempt anything like his tales in kind; they must have seemed too hopelessly far away in taste and time, but I studied his verse, and imitated a stanza which I found in some of his things and had not found elsewhere; I rejoiced in the freshness and sweetness of his diction, and though I felt that his structure was obsolete, there was in his wording something homelier and heartier than the imported analogues that had taken the place of the phrases he used.

I began to employ in my own work the archaic words that I fancied most, which was futile and foolish enough, and I formed a preference for the simpler Anglo-Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad. Of course, being left so much as I was to my own whim in such things, I could not keep a just mean; I had an aversion for the Latin derivatives which was nothing short of a craze. Some half-bred critic whom I had read made me believe that English could be written without them, and had better be written so, and I did not escape from this lamentable error until I had produced with weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prose wholly composed of monosyllables. I suspect now that I did not always stop to consider whether my short words were not as Latin by race as any of the long words I rejected, and that I only made sure they were short.

The frivolous ingenuity which wasted itself in this exercise happily could not hold out long, and in verse it was pretty well helpless from the beginning. Yet I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know, as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in that sort; and in the revolt from the slavish bondage I took upon myself I did not go so far as to plunge into any very wild polysyllabic excesses. I still like the little word if it says the thing I want to say as well as the big one, but I honor above all the word that says the thing. At the same time I confess that I have a prejudice against certain words that I cannot overcome; the sight of some offends me, the sound of others, and rather than use one of those detested vocables, even when I perceive that it would convey my exact meaning, I would cast about long for some other. I think this is a foible, and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it.

An author who had much to do with preparing me for the quixotic folly in point was that Thomas Babington Macaulay, who taught simplicity of diction in phrases of as “learned length and thundering sound,” as any he would have had me shun, and who deplored the Latinistic English of Johnson in terms emulous of the great doctor’s orotundity and ronderosity. I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoided his medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavor as vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived. It was none the less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificed myself to it with such infinite pains and labor. But this was long after I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before Dickens or Chaucer.

XVII. MACAULAY

One of the many characters of the village was the machinist who had his shop under our printing-office when we first brought our newspaper to the place, and who was just then a machinist because he was tired of being many other things, and had not yet made up his mind what he should be next. He could have been whatever he turned his agile intellect and his cunning hand to; he had been a schoolmaster and a watch-maker, and I believe an amateur doctor and irregular lawyer; he talked and wrote brilliantly, and he was one of the group that nightly disposed of every manner of theoretical and practical question at the drug-store; it was quite indifferent to him which side he took; what he enjoyed was the mental exercise. He was in consumption, as so many were in that region, and he carbonized against it, as he said; he took his carbon in the liquid form, and the last time I saw him the carbon had finally prevailed over the consumption, but it had itself become a seated vice; that was many years since, and it is many years since he died.

He must have been known to me earlier, but I remember him first as he swam vividly into my ken, with a volume of Macaulay’s essays in his hand, one day. Less figuratively speaking, he came up into the printing-office to expose from the book the nefarious plagiarism of an editor in a neighboring city, who had adapted with the change of names and a word or two here and there, whole passages from the essay on Barere, to the denunciation of a brother editor. It was a very simple-hearted fraud, and it was all done with an innocent trust in the popular ignorance which now seems to me a little pathetic; but it was certainly very barefaced, and merited the public punishment which the discoverer inflicted by means of what journalists call the deadly parallel column. The effect ought logically to have been ruinous for the plagiarist, but it was really nothing of the kind. He simply ignored the exposure, and the comments of the other city papers, and in the process of time he easily lived down the memory of it and went on to greater usefulness in his profession.

But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous crisis, and I listened as the minister of justice read his communication, with a thrill which lost itself in the interest I suddenly felt in the plundered author. Those facile and brilliant phrases and ideas struck me as the finest things I had yet known in literature, and I borrowed the book and read it through. Then I borrowed another volume of Macaulay’s essays, and another and another, till I had read them every one. It was like a long debauch, from which I emerged with regret that it should ever end.

I tried other essayists, other critics, whom the machinist had in his library, but it was useless; neither Sidney Smith nor Thomas Carlyle could console me; I sighed for more Macaulay and evermore Macaulay. I read his History of England, and I could measurably console myself with that, but only measurably; and I could not go back to the essays and read them again, for it seemed to me I had absorbed them so thoroughly that I had left nothing unenjoyed in them. I used to talk with the machinist about them, and with the organ-builder, and with my friend the printer, but no one seemed to feel the intense fascination in them that I did, and that I should now be quite unable to account for.

Once more I had an author for whom I could feel a personal devotion, whom I could dream of and dote upon, and whom I could offer my intimacy in many an impassioned revery. I do not think T. B. Macaulay would really have liked it; I dare say he would not have valued the friendship of the sort of a youth I was, but in the conditions he was helpless, and I poured out my love upon him without a rebuff. Of course I reformed my prose style, which had been carefully modelled upon that of Goldsmith and Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick sentences, and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words, which he prescribed, but did not practise. As for his notions of literature, I simply accepted them with the feeling that any question of them would have been little better than blasphemy.

For a long time he spoiled my taste for any other criticism; he made it seem pale, and poor, and weak; and he blunted my sense to subtler excellences than I found in him. I think this was a pity, but it was a thing not to be helped, like a great many things that happen to our hurt in life; it was simply inevitable. How or when my frenzy for him began to abate I cannot say, but it certainly waned, and it must have waned rapidly, for after no great while I found myself feeling the charm of quite different minds, as fully as if his had never enslaved me. I cannot regret that I enjoyed him so keenly as I did; it was in a way a generous delight, and though he swayed me helplessly whatever way he thought, I do not think yet that he swayed me in any very wrong way. He was a bright and clear intelligence, and if his light did not go far, it is to be said of him that his worst fault was only to have stopped short of the finest truth in art, in morals, in politics.

XVIII. CRITICS AND REVIEWS

What remained to me from my love of Macaulay was a love of criticism, and I read almost as much in criticism as I read in poetry and history and fiction. It was of an eccentric doctor, another of the village characters, that I got the works of Edgar A. Poe; I do not know just how, but it must have been in some exchange of books; he preferred metaphysics. At any rate I fell greedily upon them, and I read with no less zest than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-minded criticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes. As usual, I accepted them implicitly, and it was not till long afterwards that I understood how worthless they were.

I think that hardly less immoral than the lubricity of literature, and its celebration of the monkey and the goat in us, is the spectacle such criticism affords of the tigerish play of satire. It is monstrous that for no offence but the wish to produce something beautiful, and the mistake of his powers in that direction, a writer should become the prey of some ferocious wit, and that his tormentor should achieve credit by his lightness and ease in rending his prey; it is shocking to think how alluring and depraving the fact is to the young reader emulous of such credit, and eager to achieve it. Because I admired these barbarities of Poe’s, I wished to irritate them, to spit some hapless victim on my own spear, to make him suffer and to make the reader laugh. This is as far as possible from the criticism that enlightens and ennobles, but it is still the ideal of most critics, deny it as they will; and because it is the ideal of most critics criticism still remains behind all the other literary arts.

I am glad to remember that at the same time I exulted in these ferocities I had mind enough and heart enough to find pleasure in the truer and finer work, the humaner work of other writers, like Hazlitt, and Leigh Hunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date I cannot exactly fix. I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarify and formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done; Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and on every hand I was reaching out for light that should enable me to place in literary history the authors I knew and loved.

I fancy it was well for me at this period to have got at the four great English reviews, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the London Quarterly, and the North British, which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood’s Magazine. We got them in the American editions in payment for printing the publisher’s prospectus, and their arrival was an excitement, a joy, and a satisfaction with me, which I could not now describe without having to accuse myself of exaggeration. The love of literature, and the hope of doing something in it, had become my life to the exclusion of all other interests, or it was at least the great reality, and all other things were as shadows. I was living in a time of high political tumult, and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our Fugitive Slave Law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest in literature. If I was not to live by it, I was somehow to live for it.

If I thought of taking up some other calling it was as a means only; literature was always the end I had in view, immediately or finally. I did not see how it was to yield me a living, for I knew that almost all the literary men in the country had other professions; they were editors, lawyers, or had public or private employments; or they were men of wealth; there was then not one who earned his bread solely by his pen in fiction, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a day when people wanted very much less butter on their bread than they do now. But I kept blindly at my studies, and yet not altogether blindly, for, as I have said, the reading I did had more tendency than before, and I was beginning to see authors in their proportion to one another, and to the body of literature.

The English reviews were of great use to me in this; I made a rule of reading each one of them quite through. To be sure I often broke this rule, as people are apt to do with rules of the kind; it was not possible for a boy to wade through heavy articles relating to English politics and economics, but I do not think I left any paper upon a literary topic unread, and I did read enough politics, especially in Blackwood’s, to be of Tory opinions; they were very fit opinions for a boy, and they did not exact of me any change in regard to the slavery question.

XIX. A NON-LITERARY EPISODE

I suppose I might almost class my devotion to English reviews among my literary passions, but it was of very short lease, not beyond a year or two at the most. In the midst of it I made my first and only essay aside from the lines of literature, or rather wholly apart from it. After some talk with my father it was decided, mainly by myself, I suspect, that I should leave the printing-office and study law; and it was arranged with the United States Senator who lived in our village, and who was at home from Washington for the summer, that I was to come into his office. The Senator was by no means to undertake my instruction himself; his nephew, who had just begun to read law, was to be my fellow-student, and we were to keep each other up to the work, and to recite to each other, until we thought we had enough law to go before a board of attorneys and test our fitness for admission to the bar.

This was the custom in that day and place, as I suppose it is still in most parts of the country. We were to be fitted for practice in the courts, not only by our reading, but by a season of pettifogging before justices of the peace, which I looked forward to with no small shrinking of my shy spirit; but what really troubled me most, and was always the grain of sand between my teeth, was Blackstone’s confession of his own original preference for literature, and his perception that the law was “a jealous mistress,” who would suffer no rival in his affections. I agreed with him that I could not go through life with a divided interest; I must give up literature or I must give up law. I not only consented to this logically, but I realized it in my attempt to carry on the reading I had loved, and to keep at the efforts I was always making to write something in verse or prose, at night, after studying law all day. The strain was great enough when I had merely the work in the printing-office; but now I came home from my Blackstone mentally fagged, and I could not take up the authors whom at the bottom of my heart I loved so much better. I tried it a month, but almost from the fatal day when I found that confession of Blackstone’s, my whole being turned from the “jealous mistress” to the high minded muses: I had not only to go back to literature, but I had also to go back to the printing-office. I did not regret it, but I had made my change of front in the public eye, and I felt that it put me at a certain disadvantage with my fellow- citizens; as for the Senator, whose office I had forsaken, I met him now and then in the street, without trying to detain him, and once when he came to the printing-office for his paper we encountered at a point where we could not help speaking. He looked me over in my general effect of base mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; I had only to answer him I had, and our conference ended. It was a terrible moment for me, because I knew that in his opinion I had chosen a path in life, which if it did not lead to the Poor House was at least no way to the White House. I suppose now that he thought I had merely gone back to my trade, and so for the time I had; but I have no reason to suppose that he judged my case narrow-mindedly, and I ought to have had the courage to have the affair out with him, and tell him just why I had left the law; we had sometimes talked the English reviews over, for he read them as well as I, and it ought not to have been impossible for me to be frank with him; but as yet I could not trust any one with my secret hope of some day living for literature, although I had already lived for nothing else. I preferred the disadvantage which I must be at in his eyes, and in the eyes of most of my fellow-citizens; I believe I had the applause of the organ-builder, who thought the law no calling for me.

In that village there was a social equality which, if not absolute, was as nearly so as can ever be in a competitive civilization; and I could have suffered no slight in the general esteem for giving up a profession and going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it was because I had thrown away the chance of material advancement; I dare say some people thought I was a fool to do that. No one, indeed, could have imagined the rapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from my shoulders when I dropped the law from them. Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could have conceived of my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision reached I was not returning to literature, but to the printing business, and I myself felt the difference. My reading had given me criterions different from those of the simple life of our village, and I did not flatter myself that my calling would have been thought one of great social dignity in the world where I hoped some day to make my living. My convictions were all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was a snob, and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought to have felt it an honor to do; this, whatever we falsely pretend to the contrary, is the frame of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands. I do not know how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think it was through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to a knowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine.

XX. THACKERAY

It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray’s books first. He knew their literary quality, and their rank in the literary, world; but I believe he was surprised at the passion I instantly conceived for them. He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as a moral defect in me; though he honored it as a proof of my critical taste. In a certain measure he was right.

What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates him with Thackeray. With his air of looking down on the highest, and confidentially inviting you to be of his company in the seat of the scorner he is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, too, is balm and solace to the reader who secretly admires the splendors he affects to despise. His sentimentality is also dear to the heart of youth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easy pathos. Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is taken with that abundance of literary turn and allusion in Thackeray; there is hardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a great literary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque life right and left from the literature always at his command. At the same time he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his own simple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues. It is so pleasing to one’s ‘vanity, and so safe, to be of the master’s side when he assails those vices and foibles which are inherent in the system of things, and which one can contemn with vast applause so long as one does not attempt to undo the conditions they spring from.

I exulted to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats, and expose their wicked pride and meanness, and I never noticed that he did not propose to do away with aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it has been, and which cannot be changed while it exists at all. He appeared to me one of the noblest creatures that ever was when he derided the shams of society; and I was far from seeing that society, as we have it, was necessarily a sham; when he made a mock of snobbishness I did not know but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by ridicule. Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs; we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub and crawl. I know that it is futile to, spurn them, or lash them for trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from the selfish motives which underlie our economic life. But I did not know these things then, nor for long afterwards, and so I gave my heart to Thackeray, who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world a refuge from the shame I felt for my own want of figure in it. He had the effect of taking me into the great world, and making me a party to his splendid indifference to titles, and even to royalties; and I could not see that sham for sham he was unwittingly the greatest sham of all.

I think it was ‘Pendennis’ I began with, and I lived in the book to the very last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to the smallest detail. I am still not sure but it is the author’s greatest book, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he has written, except the Virginians, which I have never been able to read quite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twenty times.

After reading ‘Pendennis’ I went to ‘Vanity Fair,’ which I now think the poorest of Thackeray’s novels — crude, heavy-handed, caricatured. About the same time I revelled in the romanticism of ‘Henry Esmond,’ with its pseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its appeals to an overwrought ideal of gentlemanhood and honor. It was long before I was duly revolted by Esmond’s transfer of his passion from the daughter to the mother whom he is successively enamoured of. I believe this unpleasant and preposterous affair is thought one of the fine things in the story; I do not mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was seventeen; and if I could have found a Beatrix to be in love with, and a Lady Castlewood to be in love with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune. The glamour of Henry Esmond was all the deeper because I was reading the ‘Spectator’ then, and was constantly in the company of Addison, and Steele, and Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will’s, who are presented evanescently in the romance. The intensely literary keeping, as well as quality, of the story I suppose is what formed its highest fascination for me; but that effect of great world which it imparts to the reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading citizen of it, was what helped turn my head.

This is the toxic property of all Thackeray’s writing. He is himself forever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tells you it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while. It is not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; his meek folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glint of mundane splendor, in his lowliest. He rails at the order of things, but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness, and cruelty, and hypocrisy are well-nigh inevitable, and, for most of those who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable. He has a good word for the virtues, he patronizes the Christian graces, he pats humble merit on the head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence and pride of birth, and purse-pride. But, after all, he is of the world, worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in the world and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends.

I should be far from blaming him for all this. He was of his time; but since his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a vision which makes his seem rather purblind. He must have been immensely in advance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people then used to accuse his sentimental pessimism of cynical qualities which we could hardly find in it now. It was the age of intense individualism, when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as a gentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon your character, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thing because it was wrong, but because it was mean. It was romanticism carried into the region of morals. But I had very little concern then as to that sort of error.

I was on a very high esthetic horse, which I could not have conveniently stooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray’s novels were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at least with myself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking them so much. It must be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of the feeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able to enjoy such a fine sort. No doubt I should have been a coxcomb of some kind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous in censuring Thackeray for his effect upon me in this way. No doubt the effect was already in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it.

In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety of his minor works — his ‘Yellowplush,’ and ‘Letters of Mr. Brown,’ and ‘Adventures of Major Gahagan,’ and the ‘Paris Sketch Book,’ and the ‘Irish Sketch Book,’ and the ‘Great Hoggarty Diamond,’ and the ‘Book of Snobs,’ and the ‘English Humorists,’ and the ‘Four Georges,’ and all the multitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures — as in the spacious designs of his huge novels, the ‘Newcomes,’ and ‘Pendennis,’ and ‘Vanity Fair,’ and ‘Henry Esmond,’ and ‘Barry Lyndon.’

There was something in the art of the last which seemed to me then, and still seems, the farthest reach of the author’s great talent. It is couched, like so much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which next to the dramatic form is the most natural, and which lends itself with such flexibility to the purpose of the author. In ‘Barry Lyndon’ there is imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he never supposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so, in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day. Of course, the picture is over-colored; it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray’s time, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that a generation apparently much slower, if not duller than ours, should not possibly miss the artist’s meaning. But I do not think it is so much surcharged as ‘Esmond;’ ‘Barry Lyndon’ is by no manner of means so conscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifold self-reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to think he is the most perfect creation of Thackeray’s mind.

I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray’s books all at once, or even in rapid succession, and he at no time possessed the whole empire of my catholic, not to say, fickle, affections, during the years I was compassing a full knowledge and sense of his greatness, and burning incense at his shrine. But there was a moment when he so outshone and overtopped all other divinities in my worship that I was effectively his alone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypnotized devotee of three or four others of the very great. From his art there flowed into me a literary quality which tinged my whole mental substance, and made it impossible for me to say, or wish to say, anything without giving it the literary color. That is, while he dominated my love and fancy, if I had been so fortunate as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I must have tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint that would remind the reader of books even before it reminded him of men.

It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a try at it, and I do not know that I shall be able to do better unless I add that Thackeray, of all the writers that I have known, is the most thoroughly and profoundly imbued with literature, so that when he speaks it is not with words and blood, but with words and ink. You may read the greatest part of Dickens, as you may read the greatest part of Hawthorne or Tolstoy, and not once be reminded of literature as a business or a cult, but you can hardly read a paragraph, hardly a sentence, of Thackeray’s without being reminded of it either by suggestion or downright allusion.

I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have been any other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talent is not that which breathes of the library, but that which breathes of the street, the field, the open sky, the simple earth. I began to imitate this master of mine almost as soon as I began to read him; this must be, and I had a greater pride and joy in my success than I should probably have known in anything really creative; I should have suspected that, I should have distrusted that, because I had nothing to test it by, no model; but here before me was the very finest and noblest model, and I had but to form my lines upon it, and I had produced a work of art altogether more estimable in my eyes than anything else could have been. I saw the little world about me through the lenses of my master’s spectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his attitude, with his self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire. I need not say I was perfectly satisfied with the result, or that to be able to imitate Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have been able to imitate nature. In fact, I could have valued any picture of the life and character I knew only as it put me in mind of life and character as these had shown themselves to me in his books.

XXI. “LAZARILLO DE TORMES”

At the same time, I was not only reading many books besides Thackeray’s, but I was studying to get a smattering of several languages as well as I could, with or without help. I could now manage Spanish fairly well, and I was sending on to New York for authors in that tongue. I do not remember how I got the money to buy them; to be sure it was no great sum; but it must have been given me out of the sums we were all working so hard to make up for the debt, and the interest on the debt (that is always the wicked pinch for the debtor!), we had incurred in the purchase of the newspaper which we lived by, and the house which we lived in. I spent no money on any other sort of pleasure, and so, I suppose, it was afforded me the more readily; but I cannot really recall the history of those acquisitions on its financial side. In any case, if the sums I laid out in literature could not have been comparatively great, the excitement attending the outlay was prodigious.

I know that I used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lockwood & Son, New York, for my Spanish books, and I dare say that my letters were sufficiently pedantic, and filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanish literature. Heaven knows what they must have thought, if they thought anything, of their queer customer in that obscure little Ohio village; but he could not have been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers, I am sure. I haunted the post-office about the time the books were due, and when I found one of them in our deep box among a heap of exchange newspapers and business letters, my emotion was so great that it almost took my breath. I hurried home with the precious volume, and shut myself into my little den, where I gave myself up to a sort of transport in it. These books were always from the collection of Spanish authors published by Baudry in Paris, and they were in saffron-colored paper cover, printed full of a perfectly intoxicating catalogue of other Spanish books which I meant to read, every one, some time. The paper and the ink had a certain odor which was sweeter to me than the perfumes of Araby. The look of the type took me more than the glance of a girl, and I had a fever of longing to know the heart of the book, which was like a lover’s passion. Some times I did not reach its heart, but commonly I did. Moratin’s ‘Origins of the Spanish Theatre,’ and a large volume of Spanish dramatic authors, were the first Spanish books I sent for, but I could not say why I sent for them, unless it was because I saw that there were some plays of Cervantes among the rest. I read these and I read several comedies of Lope de Vega, and numbers of archaic dramas in Moratin’s history, and I really got a fairish perspective of the Spanish drama, which has now almost wholly faded from my mind. It is more intelligible to me why I should have read Conde’s ‘Dominion of the Arabs in Spain;’ for that was in the line of my reading in Irving, which would account for my pleasure in the ‘History of the Civil Wars of Granada;’ it was some time before I realized that the chronicles in this were a bundle of romances and not veritable records; and my whole study in these things was wholly undirected and unenlightened. But I meant to be thorough in it, and I could not rest satisfied with the Spanish-English grammars I had; I was not willing to stop short of the official grammar of the Spanish Academy. I sent to New York for it, and my booksellers there reported that they would have to send to Spain for it. I lived till it came to hand through them from Madrid; and I do not understand why I did not perish then from the pride and joy I had in it.

But, after all, I am not a Spanish scholar, and can neither speak nor write the language. I never got more than a good reading use of it, perhaps because I never really tried for more. But I am very glad of that, because it has been a great pleasure to me, and even some profit, and it has lighted up many meanings in literature, which must always have remained dark to me. Not to speak now of the modern Spanish writers whom it has enabled me to know in their own houses as it were, I had even in that remote day a rapturous delight in a certain Spanish book, which was well worth all the pains I had undergone to get at it. This was the famous picaresque novel, ‘Lazarillo de Tormes,’ by Hurtado de Mendoza, whose name then so familiarized itself to my fondness that now as I write it I feel as if it were that of an old personal friend whom I had known in the flesh. I believe it would not have been always comfortable to know Mendoza outside of his books; he was rather a terrible person; he was one of the Spanish invaders of Italy, and is known in Italian history as the Tyrant of Sierra. But at my distance of time and place I could safely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him a most charming companion. The adventures of his rogue of a hero, who began life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and then adventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought back the atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder- world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with all the old delight.

I do not know that I should counsel others to do so, or that the general reader would find his account in it, but I am sure that the intending author of American fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresque novels; for in their simplicity of design he will find one of the best forms for an American story. The intrigue of close texture will never suit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable; each man’s life among us is a romance of the Spanish model, if it is the life of a man who has risen, as we nearly all have, with many ups and downs. The story of ‘Latzarillo’ is gross in its facts, and is mostly “unmeet for ladies,” like most of the fiction in all languages before our times; but there is an honest simplicity in the narration, a pervading humor, and a rich feeling for character that gives it value.

I think that a good deal of its foulness was lost upon me, but I certainly understood that it would not do to present it to an American public just as it was, in the translation which I presently planned to make. I went about telling the story to people, and trying to make them find it as amusing as I did, but whether I ever succeeded I cannot say, though the notion of a version with modifications constantly grew with me, till one day I went to the city of Cleveland with my father. There was a branch house of an Eastern firm of publishers in that place, and I must have had the hope that I might have the courage to propose a translation of Lazarillo to them. My father urged me to try my fortune, but my heart failed me. I was half blind with one of the headaches that tormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign, “J. P. Jewett & Co., Publishers,” which held me fascinated, and went home without at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused.

XXII. CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL

I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that in those days. It had necessarily passed beyond my father’s suggestion, and I think it must have been largely by accident or experiment that I read one book rather than another. He made some sort of newspaper arrangement with a book-store in Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our home library with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but none the worse for that, and new in the only way that books need be new to the lover of them. Among these I found a treasure in Curtis’s two books, the ‘Nile Notes of a Howadji,’ and the ‘Howadji in Syria.’ I already knew him by his ‘Potiphar Papers,’ and the ever-delightful reveries which have since gone under the name of ‘Prue and I;’ but those books of Eastern travel opened a new world of thinking and feeling. They had at once a great influence upon me. The smooth richness of their diction; the amiable sweetness of their mood, their gracious caprice, the delicacy of their satire (which was so kind that it should have some other name), their abundance of light and color, and the deep heart of humanity underlying their airiest fantasticality, all united in an effect which was different from any I had yet known.

As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first runnings of my fancy when I began to pour it out afterwards were of their flavor. I tried to write like this new master; but whether I had tried or not, I should probably have done so from the love I bore him. He was a favorite not only of mine, but of all the young people in the village who were reading current literature, so that on this ground at least I had abundant sympathy. The present generation can have little notion of the deep impression made upon the intelligence and conscience of the whole nation by the ‘Potiphar Papers,’ or how its fancy was rapt with the ‘Prue and I’ sketches, These are among the most veritable literary successes we have had, and probably we who were so glad when the author of these beautiful things turned aside from the flowery paths where he led us, to battle for freedom in the field of politics, would have felt the sacrifice too great if we could have dreamed it would be life-long. But, as it was, we could only honor him the more, and give him a place in our hearts which he shared with Longfellow.

This divine poet I have never ceased to read. His Hiawatha was a new book during one of those terrible Lake Shore winters, but all the other poems were old friends with me by that time. With a sister who is no longer living I had a peculiar affection for his pretty and touching and lightly humorous tale of ‘Kavanagh,’ which was of a village life enough like our own, in some things, to make us know the truth of its delicate realism. We used to read it and talk it fondly over together, and I believe some stories of like make and manner grew out of our pleasure in it. They were never finished, but it was enough to begin them, and there were few writers, if any, among those I delighted in who escaped the tribute of an imitation. One has to begin that way, or at least one had in my day; perhaps it is now possible for a young writer to begin by being himself; but for my part, that was not half so important as to be like some one else. Literature, not life, was my aim, and to reproduce it was my joy and my pride.

I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and involuntarily, and I was always chancing upon some book that served this end among the great number of books that I read merely for my pleasure without any real result of the sort. Schlegel’s ‘Lectures on Dramatic Literature’ came into my hands not long after I had finished my studies in the history of the Spanish theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous. I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by the light it cast upon paths where I had dimly made my way before, but which I now followed in the full day.

Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said. I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italian theatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic drama which had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, and which was crowned with the fame of the Cervantes and the Shakespeare whom I seemed to own, they owned me so completely. It vexes me now to find that I cannot remember how the book came into my hands, or who could have suggested it to me. It is possible that it may have been that artist who came and stayed a month with us while she painted my mother’s portrait. She was fresh from her studies in New York, where she had met authors and artists at the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen my adored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken with him. Her talk about these things simply emparadised me; it lifted me into a heaven of hope that I, too, might some day meet such elect spirits and converse with them face to face. My mood was sufficiently foolish, but it was not such a frame of mind as I can be ashamed of; and I could wish a boy no happier fortune than to possess it for a time, at least.

XXIII. TENNYSON

I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the things I had in hand more or less. It is perfectly clear to me that I did none of them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other than excellently. I was attempting the study of no less than four languages, and I presently added a fifth to these. I was reading right and left in every direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction. From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a ‘coup de main,’ or sat down before it for a prolonged siege. There was occasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietly gave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors were few. I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, and the relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knew pretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committed myself to the task of reading it. Always I read for pleasure, for the delight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very different thing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as I do still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts. There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read; I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at the period I speak of I do not think I wasted much time.

My day began about seven o’clock, in the printing-office, where it took me till noon to do my task of so many thousand ems, say four or five. Then we had dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work with their hands for their dinners. In the afternoon I went back and corrected the proof of the type I had set, and distributed my case for the next day. At two or three o’clock I was free, and then I went home and began my studies; or tried to write something; or read a book. We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced in literature, till I went to bed at ten or eleven. I cannot think of any time when I did not go gladly to my books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as well as a high privilege.

But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of break which was not yet known as nervous prostration. When I could not sleep after my studies, and the sick headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks of hypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well; but that was not the day of anxiety for such things, and if it was thought best that I should leave work and study for a while, it was not with the notion that the case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure. I passed days in the woods and fields, gunning or picking berries; I spent myself in heavy work; I made little journeys; and all this was very wholesome and very well; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts to write. No doubt I was secretly proud to have been invalided in so great a cause, and to be sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, rather than by some ignoble ague or the devastating consumption of that region. If I lay awake, noting the wild pulsations of my heart, and listening to the death-watch in the wall, I was certainly very much scared, but I was not without the consolation that I was at least a sufferer for literature. At the same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I could have composed an epitaph which would have moved others to tears for my untimely fate. But there was really not impairment of my constitution, and after a while I began to be better, and little by little the health which has never since failed me under any reasonable stress of work established itself.

I was in the midst of this unequal struggle when I first became acquainted with the poet who at once possessed himself of what was best worth having in me. Probably I knew of Tennyson by extracts, and from the English reviews, but I believe it was from reading one of Curtis’s “Easy Chair” papers that I was prompted to get the new poem of “Maud,” which I understood from the “Easy Chair” was then moving polite youth in the East. It did not seem to me that I could very well live without that poem, and when I went to Cleveland with the hope that I might have courage to propose a translation of Lazarillo to a publisher it was with the fixed purpose of getting “Maud” if it was to be found in any bookstore there.

I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tennyson, and I can only account for it by the fact that I was always reading rather the earlier than the later English poetry. To be sure I had passed through what I may call a paroxysm of Alexander Smith, a poet deeply unknown to the present generation, but then acclaimed immortal by all the critics, and put with Shakespeare, who must be a good deal astonished from time to time in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon him. I read this now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved of him by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his “Life-Drama” by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passages from it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the sole critic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun in Graham’s Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphian species. I cannot tell how I came out of this craze, but neither could any of the critics who led me into it, I dare say. The reading world is very susceptible of such-lunacies, and all that can be said is that at a given time it was time for criticism to go mad over a poet who was neither better nor worse than many another third-rate poet apotheosized before and since. What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of the poets who had a vital heat in them; and it was by mere chance that I bathed myself in his second-hand effulgence. I already knew pretty well the origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson’s worship a sudden convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive. Like every other great poet he somehow expressed the feelings of his day, and I suppose that at the time he wrote “Maud” he said more fully what the whole English-speaking race were then dimly longing to utter than any English poet who has lived.

One need not question the greatness of Browning in owning the fact that the two poets of his day who preeminently voiced their generation were Tennyson and Longfellow; though Browning, like Emerson, is possibly now more modern than either. However, I had then nothing to do with Tennyson’s comparative claim on my adoration; there was for the time no parallel for him in the whole range of literary divinities that I had bowed the knee to. For that while, the temple was not only emptied of all the other idols, but I had a richly flattering illusion of being his only worshipper. When I came to the sense of this error, it was with the belief that at least no one else had ever appreciated him so fully, stood so close to him in that holy of holies where he wrought his miracles.

I say tawdily and ineffectively and falsely what was a very precious and sacred experience with me. This great poet opened to me a whole world of thinking and feeling, where I had my being with him in that mystic intimacy, which cannot be put into words. I at once identified myself not only with the hero of the poem, but in some so with the poet himself, when I read “Maud”; but that was only the first step towards the lasting state in which his poetry has upon the whole been more to me than that of any other poet. I have never read any other so closely and continuously, or read myself so much into and out of his verse. There have been times and moods when I have had my questions, and made my cavils, and when it seemed to me that the poet was less than I had thought him; and certainly I do not revere equally and unreservedly all that he has written; that would be impossible. But when I think over all the other poets I have read, he is supreme above them in his response to some need in me that he has satisfied so perfectly.

Of course, “Maud” seemed to me the finest poem I had read, up to that time, but I am not sure that this conclusion was wholly my own; I think it was partially formed for me by the admiration of the poem which I felt to be everywhere in the critical atmosphere, and which had already penetrated to me. I did not like all parts of it equally well, and some parts of it seemed thin and poor (though I would not suffer myself to say so then), and they still seem so. But there were whole passages and spaces of it whose divine and perfect beauty lifted me above life. I did not fully understand the poem then; I do not fully understand it now, but that did not and does not matter; for there something in poetry that reaches the soul by other enues than the intelligence. Both in this poem and others of Tennyson, and in every poet that I have loved, there are melodies and harmonies enfolding significance that appeared long after I had first read them, and had even learned them by heart; that lay weedy in my outer ear and were enough in their Mere beauty of phrasing, till the time came for them to reveal their whole meaning. In fact they could do this only to later and greater knowledge of myself and others, as every one must recognize who recurs in after-life to a book that he read when young; then he finds it twice as full of meaning as it was at first.

I could not rest satisfied with “Maud”; I sent the same summer to Cleveland for the little volume which then held all the poet’s work, and abandoned myself so wholly to it, that for a year I read no other verse that I can remember. The volume was the first of that pretty blue-and- gold series which Ticknor & Fields began to publish in 1856, and which their imprint, so rarely affixed to an unworthy book, at once carried far and wide. Their modest old brown cloth binding had long been a quiet warrant of quality in the literature it covered, and now this splendid blossom of the bookmaking art, as it seemed, was fitly employed to convey the sweetness and richness of the loveliest poetry that I thought the world had yet known. After an old fashion of mine, I read it continuously, with frequent recurrences from each new poem to some that had already pleased me, and with a most capricious range among the pieces. “In Memoriam” was in that book, and the “Princess”; I read the “Princess” through and through, and over and over, but I did not then read “In Memoriam” through, and I have never read it in course; I am not sure that I have even yet read every part of it. I did not come to the “Princess,” either, until I had saturated my fancy and my memory with some of the shorter poems, with the “Dream of Fair Women,” with the “Lotus-Eaters,” with the “Miller’s Daughter,” with the “Morte d’Arthur,” with “Edwin Morris, or The Lake,” with “Love and Duty,” and a score of other minor and briefer poems. I read the book night and day, in-doors and out, to myself and to whomever I could make listen. I have no words to tell the rapture it was to me; but I hope that in some more articulate being, if it should ever be my unmerited fortune to meet that ‘sommo poeta’ face to face, it shall somehow be uttered from me to him, and he will understand how completely he became the life of the boy I was then. I think it might please, or at least amuse, that lofty ghost, and that he would not resent it, as he would probably have done on earth. I can well understand why the homage of his worshippers should have afflicted him here, and I could never have been one to burn incense in his earthly presence; but perhaps it might be done hereafter without offence. I eagerly caught up and treasured every personal word I could find about him, and I dwelt in that sort of charmed intimacy with him through his verse, in which I could not presume nor he repel, and which I had enjoyed in turn with Cervantes and Shakespeare, without a snub from them.

I have never ceased to adore Tennyson, though the rapture of the new convert could not last. That must pass like the flush of any other passion. I think I have now a better sense of his comparative greatness, but a better sense of his positive greatness I could not have than I had at the beginning; and I believe this is the essential knowledge of a poet. It is very well to say one is greater than Keats, or not so great as Wordsworth; that one is or is not of the highest order of poets like Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but that does not mean anything of value, and I never find my account in it. I know it is not possible for any less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one’s life. Some dazzling comer may enter and possess it for a day, but he soon wears his welcome out, and presently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at- home if he knocks again. But it was only this morning that I read one of the new last poems of Tennyson with a return of the emotion which he first woke in me well-nigh forty years ago. There has been no year of those many when I have not read him and loved him with something of the early fire if not all the early conflagration; and each successive poem of his has been for me a fresh joy.

He went with me into the world from my village when I left it to make my first venture away from home. My father had got one of those legislative clerkships which used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors when their party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out a scheme for corresponding with some city newspapers. We were to furnish a daily, letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings which I was mainly to write up from material he helped me to get together. The letters at once found favor with the editors who agreed to take them, and my father then withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them who was doing it. We were afraid they might not care for the reports of a boy of nineteen, but they did not seem to take my age into account, and I did not boast of my youth among the lawmakers. I looked three or four years older than I was; but I experienced a terrible moment once when a fatherly Senator asked me my age. I got away somehow without saying, but it was a great relief to me when my twentieth birthday came that winter, and I could honestly proclaim that I was in my twenty-first year.

I had now the free range of the State Library, and I drew many sorts of books from it. Largely, however, they were fiction, and I read all the novels of Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from ‘The Caxtons’ and ‘My Novel.’ I was dazzled by them, and I thought him a great writer, if not so great a one as he thought himself. Little or nothing of those romances, with their swelling prefaces about the poet and his function, their glittering criminals, and showy rakes and rogues of all kinds, and their patrician perfume and social splendor, remained with me; they may have been better or worse; I will not attempt to say. If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, I must say that it was but a fitful fever. I also read many volumes of Zschokke’s admirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey. These authors I recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly as they passed through my hands. I got at some versions of Icelandic poems, in the metre of “Hiawatha”; I had for a while a notion of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn the language later. By this time I must have begun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author at least, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson; but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry. I suspect that I carried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraid that I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I was ready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation. This is the worst of the ardent lover of literature: he wishes to make every one else share his rapture, will he, nill he. Many good fellows suffered from my admiration of this author or that, and many more pretty, patient maids. I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I am afraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in the case of the poems I did worse, I repeated them. This seems rather incredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at least attests my sincerity. It was long before I cured myself of so pestilent a habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safely trusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener. I dare say I could not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was not so nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me; I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish to make them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as he was to mine. My head was full of him; his words were always behind my lips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some one else, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could. It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for the future in which I must make my own place in the world. Work, and hard work, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by no means the whole story. You may get on without much of it, or you may do a great deal, and not get on. I was willing to do as much of it as I could get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had many forebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to the substance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget. I was already imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthy model for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did. None of the authors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could not have believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me. In fact, as I have expressed, none ever has been.

XXIV. HEINE

That winter passed very quickly and happily for me, and at the end of the legislative session I had acquitted myself so much to the satisfaction of one of the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a place on it. I was asked to be city editor, as it was called in that day, and I was to have charge of the local reporting. It was a great temptation, and for a while I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune. I went down to Cincinnati to acquaint myself with the details of the work, and to fit myself for it by beginning as reporter myself. One night’s round of the police stations with the other reporters satisfied me that I was not meant for that work, and I attempted it no farther. I have often been sorry since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life that I have always remained ignorant of, but I did not know then that life was supremely interesting and important. I fancied that literature, that poetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable to think of myself torn from my high ideals by labors like those of the reporter. I would not consent even to do the office work of the department, and the proprietor and editor who was more especially my friend tried to make some other place for me. All the departments were full but the one I would have nothing to do with, and after a few weeks of sufferance and suffering I turned my back on a thousand dollars a year, and for the second time returned to the printing-office.

I was glad to get home, for I had been all the time tormented by my old malady of homesickness. But otherwise the situation was not cheerful for me, and I now began trying to write something for publication that I could sell. I sent off poems and they came back; I offered little translations from the Spanish that nobody wanted. At the same time I took up the study of German, which I must have already played with, at such odd times as I could find. My father knew something of it, and that friend of mine among the printers was already reading it and trying to speak it. I had their help with the first steps so far as the recitations from Ollendorff were concerned, but I was impatient to read German, or rather to read one German poet who had seized my fancy from the first line of his I had seen.

This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one author that I have known. Where or when I first acquainted myself with his most fascinating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in some article of the Westminster Review, where several poems of his were given in English and German; and their singular beauty and grace at once possessed my soul. I was in a fever to know more of him, and it was my great good luck to fall in with a German in the village who had his books. He was a bookbinder, one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 1848 sent to us in great numbers. He was a Hanoverian, and his accent was then, I believe, the standard, though the Berlinese is now the accepted pronunciation. But I cared very little for accent; my wish was to get at Heine with as little delay as possible; and I began to cultivate the friendship of that bookbinder in every way. I dare say he was glad of mine, for he was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had no companionship outside of his own family. I clothed him in all the romantic interest I began to feel for his race and language, which new took the place of the Spaniards and Spanish in my affections. He was a very quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy for my love of our author’s humor than for my love of his sentiment, and I can remember very well the twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tartar slant, and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensitive nose, when we came to some passage of biting satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew had unpacked all the insult of his soul.

We began to read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almost word by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder’s English was rather scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the grammar, I was getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from other sources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or a conjugation. As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home to the books, and worked away at them until supper. Then my bookbinder and I met in my father’s editorial room, and with a couple of candles on the table between us, and our Heine and the dictionary before us, we read till we were both tired out.

The candles were tallow, and they lopped at different angles in the flat candlesticks heavily loaded with lead, which compositors once used. It seems to have been summer when our readings began, and they are associated in my memory with the smell of the neighboring gardens, which came in at the open doors and windows, and with the fluttering of moths, and the bumbling of the dorbugs, that stole in along with the odors. I can see the perspiration on the shining forehead of the bookbinder as he looks up from some brilliant passage, to exchange a smile of triumph with me at having made out the meaning with the meagre facilities we had for the purpose; he had beautiful red pouting lips, and a stiff little branching mustache above them, that went to the making of his smile. Sometimes, in the truce we made with the text, he told a little story of his life at home, or some anecdote relevant to our reading, or quoted a passage from some other author. It seemed to me the make of a high intellectual banquet, and I should be glad if I could enjoy anything as much now.

We walked home as far as his house, or rather his apartment over one of the village stores; and as he mounted to it by an outside staircase, we exchanged a joyous “Gute Nacht,” and I kept on homeward through the dark and silent village street, which was really not that street, but some other, where Heine had been, some street out of the Reisebilder, of his knowledge, or of his dream. When I reached home it was useless to go to bed. I shut myself into my little study, and went over what we had read, till my brain was so full of it that when I crept up to my room at last, it was to lie down to slumbers which were often a mere phantasmagory of those witching Pictures of Travel.

I was awake at my father’s call in the morning, and before my mother had breakfast ready I had recited my lesson in Ollendorff to him. To tell the truth, I hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the love of literature, and the hope of getting at it, could ever have made me go through them. Naturally, I never got any scholarly use of the languages I was worrying at, and though I could once write a passable literary German, it has all gone from me now, except for the purposes of reading. It cost me so much trouble, however, to dig the sense out of the grammar and lexicon, as I went on with the authors I was impatient to read, that I remember the words very well in all their forms and inflections, and I have still what I think I may call a fair German vocabulary.

The German of Heine, when once you are in the joke of his capricious genius, is very simple, and in his poetry it is simple from the first, so that he was, perhaps, the best author I could have fallen in with if I wanted to go fast rather than far. I found this out later, when I attempted other German authors without the glitter of his wit or the lambent glow of his fancy to light me on my hard way. I should find it hard to say just why his peculiar genius had such an absolute fascination for me from the very first, and perhaps I had better content myself with saying simply that my literary liberation began with almost the earliest word from him; for if he chained me to himself he freed me from all other bondage. I had been at infinite pains from time to time, now upon one model and now upon another, to literarify myself, if I may make a word which does not quite say the thing for me. What I mean is that I had supposed, with the sense at times that I was all wrong, that the expression of literature must be different from the expression of life; that it must be an attitude, a pose, with something of state or at least of formality in it; that it must be this style, and not that; that it must be like that sort of acting which you know is acting when you see it and never mistake for reality. There are a great many children, apparently grown-up, and largely accepted as critical authorities, who are still of this youthful opinion of mine. But Heine at once showed me that this ideal of literature was false; that the life of literature was from the springs of the best common speech and that the nearer it could be made to conform, in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy, picturesque and humorous or impassioned talk, the better it was.

He did not impart these truths without imparting certain tricks with them, which I was careful to imitate as soon as I began to write in his manner, that is to say instantly. His tricks he had mostly at second-hand, and mainly from Sterne, whom I did not know well enough then to know their origin. But in all essentials he was himself, and my final lesson from him, or the final effect of all my lessons from him, was to find myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really was.

I kept on writing as much like Heine as I could for several years, though, and for a much longer time than I should have done if I had ever become equally impassioned of any other author.

Some traces of his method lingered so long in my work that nearly ten years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that he had been reading: “You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as men do mercury,” and his kindness for me would not be content with less than the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time saved my life. I dare say it was all well enough not to have it in my bones after it had done its office, but it did do its office.

It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen analysis had found the Heine, but the foreign property had been so prevalent in my earlier work in verse that he kept the first contribution he accepted from me for the Atlantic Monthly a long time, or long enough to make sure that it was not a translation of Heine. Then he printed it, and I am bound to say that the poem now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not see why Heine should not have had the name of writing it if he had wanted. His potent spirit became immediately so wholly my “control,” as the mediums say, that my poems might as well have been communications from him so far as any authority of my own was concerned; and they were quite like other inspirations from the other world in being so inferior to the work of the spirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied and obliged to use a medium. But I do not think that either Heine or I had much lasting harm from it, and I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was one that can only end with me. He undid my hands, which had taken so much pains to tie behind my back, and he forever persuaded me that though it may be ingenious and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither pretty nor useful.

XXV. DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW

Another author who was a prime favorite with me about this time was De Quincey, whose books I took out of the State Library, one after another, until I had read them all. We who were young people of that day thought his style something wonderful, and so indeed it was, especially in those passages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life with an intimacy which was always-more rather than less. His rhetoric there, and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminous richness, without losing its colloquial ease. I keenly enjoyed this subtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lighted up so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksy glimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with certain morbid moods and experiences so like my own, as I was pleased to fancy. I have not looked at his Twelve Caesars for twice as many years, but I should be greatly surprised to find it other than one of the greatest historical monographs ever written. His literary criticisms seemed to me not only exquisitely humorous, but perfectly sane and just; and it delighted me to have him personally present, with the warmth of his own temperament in regions of cold abstraction; I am not sure that I should like that so much now. De Quincey was hardly less autobiographical when he wrote of Kant, or the Flight of the Crim-Tartars, than when he wrote of his own boyhood or the miseries of the opium habit. He had the hospitable gift of making you at home with him, and appealing to your sense of comradery with something of the flattering confidentiality of Thackeray, but with a wholly different effect.

In fact, although De Quincey was from time to time perfunctorily Tory, and always a good and faithful British subject, he was so eliminated from his time and place by his single love for books, that one could be in his company through the whole vast range of his writings, and come away without a touch of snobbishness; and that is saying a great deal for an English writer. He was a great little creature, and through his intense personality he achieved a sort of impersonality, so that you loved the man, who was forever talking-of himself, for his modesty and reticence. He left you feeling intimate with him but by no means familiar; with all his frailties, and with all those freedoms he permitted himself with the lives of his contemporaries, he is to me a figure of delicate dignity, and winning kindness. I think it a misfortune for the present generation that his books have fallen into a kind of neglect, and I believe that they will emerge from it again to the advantage of literature.

In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Quincey had a large place in my affections, though this was perhaps because he was not a poet; for more than those two great poets there was then not much room. I read him the first winter I was at Columbus, and when I went down from the village the next winter, to take up my legislative correspondence again, I read him more than ever. But that was destined to be for me a very disheartening time. I had just passed through a rheumatic fever, which left my health more broken than before, and one morning shortly after I was settled in the capital, I woke to find the room going round me like a wheel. It was the beginning of a vertigo which lasted for six months, and which I began to fight with various devices and must yield to at last. I tried medicine and exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to take my letters off my hands while I gave myself some ineffectual respites. I made a little journey to my old home in southern Ohio, but there and everywhere, the sure and firm-set earth waved and billowed under my feet, and I came back to Columbus and tried to forget in my work the fact that I was no better. I did not give up trying to read, as usual, and part of my endeavor that winter was with Schiller, and Uhland, and even Goethe, whose ‘Wahlverwandschaften,’ hardly yielded up its mystery to me. To tell the truth, I do not think that I found my account in that novel. It must needs be a disappointment after Wilhelm Meister, which I had read in English; but I dare say my disappointment was largely my own fault; I had certainly no right to expect such constant proofs and instances of wisdom in Goethe as the unwisdom of his critics had led me to hope for. I remember little or nothing of the story, which I tried to find very memorable, as I held my sick way through it. Longfellow’s “Miles Standish” came out that winter, and I suspect that I got vastly more real pleasure from that one poem of his than I found in all my German authors put together, the adored Heine always excepted; though certainly I felt the romantic beauty of ‘Uhland,’ and was aware of something of Schiller’s generous grandeur.

Of the American writers Longfellow has been most a passion with me, as the English, and German, and Spanish, and Russian writers have been. I am sure that this was largely by mere chance. It was because I happened, in such a frame and at such a time, to come upon his books that I loved them above those of other men as great. I am perfectly sensible that Lowell and Emerson outvalue many of the poets and prophets I have given my heart to; I have read them with delight and with a deep sense of their greatness, and yet they have not been my life like those other, those lesser, men. But none of the passions are reasoned, and I do not try to account for my literary preferences or to justify them.

I dragged along through several months of that winter, and did my best to carry out that notable scheme of not minding my vertigo. I tried doing half-work, and helping my father with the correspondence, but when it appeared that nothing would avail, he remained in charge of it, till the close of the session, and I went home to try what a complete and prolonged rest would do for me. I was not fit for work in the printing- office, but that was a simpler matter than the literary work that was always tempting me. I could get away from it only by taking my gun and tramping day after day through the deep, primeval woods. The fatigue was wholesome, and I was so bad a shot that no other creature suffered loss from my gain except one hapless wild pigeon. The thawing snow left the fallen beechnuts of the autumn before uncovered among the dead leaves, and the forest was full of the beautiful birds. In most parts of the middle West they are no longer seen, except in twos or threes, but once they were like the sands of the sea for multitude. It was not now the season when they hid half the heavens with their flight day after day; but they were in myriads all through the woods, where their iridescent breasts shone like a sudden untimely growth of flowers when you came upon them from the front. When they rose in fright, it was like the upward leap of fire, and with the roar of flame. I use images which, after all, are false to the thing I wish to express; but they must serve. I tried honestly enough to kill the pigeons, but I had no luck, or too much, till I happened to bring down one of a pair that I found apart from the rest in a softy tree-top. The poor creature I had widowed followed me to the verge of the woods, as I started home with my prey, and I do not care to know more personally the feelings of a murderer than I did then. I tried to shoot the bird, but my aim was so bad that I could not do her this mercy, and at last she flew away, and I saw her no more.

The spring was now opening, and I was able to keep more and more with Nature, who was kinder to me than I was to her other children, or wished to be, and I got the better of my malady, which gradually left me for no more reason apparently than it came upon me. But I was still far from well, and I was in despair of my future. I began to read again — I suppose I had really never altogether stopped. I borrowed from my friend the bookbinder a German novel, which had for me a message of lasting cheer. It was the ‘Afraja’ of Theodore Mugge, a story of life in Norway during the last century, and I remember it as a very lovely story indeed, with honest studies of character among the Norwegians, and a tender pathos in the fate of the little Lap heroine Gula, who was perhaps sufficiently romanced. The hero was a young Dane, who was going up among the fiords to seek his fortune in the northern fisheries; and by a process inevitable in youth I became identified with him, so that I adventured, and enjoyed, and suffered in his person throughout. There was a supreme moment when he was sailing through the fiords, and finding himself apparently locked in by their mountain walls without sign or hope of escape, but somehow always escaping by some unimagined channel, and keeping on. The lesson for him was one of trust and courage; and I, who seemed to be then shut in upon a mountain-walled fiord without inlet or outlet, took the lesson home and promised myself not to lose heart again. It seems a little odd that this passage of a book, by no means of the greatest, should have had such an effect with me at a time when I was no longer so young as to be unduly impressed by what I read; but it is true that I have never since found myself in circumstances where there seemed to be no getting forward or going back, without a vision of that fiord scenery, and then a rise of faith, that if I kept on I should, somehow, come out of my prisoning environment.

XXVI. GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE

I got back health enough to be of use in the printing office that autumn, and I was quietly at work there with no visible break in my surroundings when suddenly the whole world opened to me through what had seemed an impenetrable wall. The Republican newspaper at the capital had been bought by a new management, and the editorial force reorganized upon a footing of what we then thought metropolitan enterprise; and to my great joy and astonishment I was asked to come and take a place in it. The place offered me was not one of lordly distinction; in fact, it was partly of the character of that I had already rejected in Cincinnati, but I hoped that in the smaller city its duties would not be so odious; and by the time I came to fill it, a change had taken place in the arrangements so that I was given charge of the news department. This included the literary notices and the book reviews, and I am afraid that I at once gave my prime attention to these.

It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much time for reading and study as I had at home. But now society began to claim a share of this leisure, which I by no means begrudged it. Society was very charming in Columbus then, with a pretty constant round of dances and suppers, and an easy cordiality, which I dare say young people still find in it everywhere. I met a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies, and there were several houses where we young fellows went and came almost as freely as if they were our own. There we had music and cards, and talk about books, and life appeared to me richly worth living; if any one had said this was not the best planet in the universe I should have called him a pessimist, or at least thought him so, for we had not the word in those days. A world in which all those pretty and gracious women dwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat between about the last instalment of ‘The Newcomes,’ was good enough world for me; I was only afraid it was too good. There were, of course, some girls who did not read, but few openly professed indifference to literature, and there was much lending of books back and forth, and much debate of them. That was the day when ‘Adam Bede’ was a new book, and in this I had my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had no passion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; and which has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics.

I state these things simply and somewhat baldly; I might easily refine upon them, and study that subtle effect for good and for evil which young people are always receiving from the fiction they read; but this its not the time or place for the inquiry, and I only wish to own that so far as I understand it, the chief part of my ethical experience has been from novels. The life and character I have found portrayed there have appealed always to the consciousness of right and wrong implanted in me; and from no one has this appeal been stronger than from George Eliot. Her influence continued through many years, and I can question it now only in the undue burden she seems to throw upon the individual, and her failure to account largely enough for motive from the social environment. There her work seems to me unphilosophical.

It shares whatever error there is in its perspective with that of Hawthorne, whose ‘Marble Faun’ was a new book at the same time that ‘Adam Bede’ was new, and whose books now came into my life and gave it their tinge. He was always dealing with the problem of evil, too, and I found a more potent charm in his more artistic handling of it than I found in George Eliot. Of course, I then preferred the region of pure romance where he liked to place his action; but I did not find his instances the less veritable because they shone out in

    “The light that never was on sea or land.”

I read the ‘Marble Faun’ first, and then the ‘Scarlet Letter,’ and then the ‘House of Seven Gables,’ and then the ‘Blithedale Romance;’ but I always liked best the last, which is more nearly a novel, and more realistic than the others. They all moved me with a sort of effect such as I had not felt before. They veers so far from time and place that, although most of them related to our country and epoch, I could not imagine anything approximate from them; and Hawthorne himself seemed a remote and impalpable agency, rather than a person whom one might actually meet, as not long afterward happened with me. I did not hold the sort of fancied converse with him that I held with ether authors, and I cannot pretend that I had the affection for him that attracted me to them. But he held me by his potent spell, and for a time he dominated me as completely as any author I have read. More truly than any other American author he has been a passion with me, and lately I heard with a kind of pang a young man saying that he did not believe I should find the ‘Scarlet Letter’ bear reading now. I did not assent to the possibility, but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay. I thought how much that book had been to me, how much all of Hawthorne’s books had been, and to have parted with my faith in their perfection would have been something I would not willingly have risked doing.

Of course there is always something fatally weak in the scheme of the pure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out of it, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; and perhaps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic felt in the ‘Scarlet Letter.’ But none of Hawthorne’s fables are without a profound and distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being. He came back from his researches with no solution of the question, with no message, indeed, but the awful warning, “Be true, be true,” which is the burden of the Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughts that we think only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death. It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow in sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things that can never be said. Some of his shorter stories I have found thin and cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the ‘House of Seven Gables,’ but the other day I was reading the ‘Blithedale Romance’ again, and I found it as potent, as significant, as sadly and strangely true as when it first enthralled my soul.

In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar of Goethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and somewhat of his poetry, but it was to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through with his Faust and come to know its power. For the present, I read ‘Wilhelm Meister’ and the ‘Wahlverwandschaften,’ and worshipped him much at second-hand through Heine. In the mean time I invested such Germans as I met with the halo of their national poetry, and there was one lady of whom I heard with awe that she had once known my Heine. When I came to meet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served at her house on Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, and some few things he said, I suffered an indescribable disappointment; and if I could have been frank with myself I should have owned to a fear that it might have been something like that, if I had myself met the poet in the flesh, and tried to hold the intimate converse with him that I held in the spirit. But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and went on reading him much more than I read any other German author. I went on writing him too, just as I went on reading and writing Tennyson. Heine was always a personal interest with me, and every word of his made me long to have had him say it to me, and tell me why he said it. In a poet of alien race and language and religion I found a greater sympathy than I have experienced with any other. Perhaps the Jews are still the chosen people, but now they bear the message of humanity, while once they bore the message of divinity. I knew the ugliness of Heine’s nature: his revengefulness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and uncleanness; and yet he was supremely charming among the poets I have read. The tenderness I still feel for him is not a reasoned love, I must own; but, as I am always asking, when was love ever reasoned?

I had a room-mate that winter in Columbus who was already a contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and who read Browning as devotedly as I read Heine. I will not say that he wrote him as constantly, but if that had been so, I should not have cared. What I could not endure without pangs of secret jealousy was that he should like Heine, too, and should read him, though it was but an arm’s-length in an English version. He had found the origins of those tricks and turns of Heine’s in ‘Tristram Shandy’ and the ‘Sentimental Journey;’ and this galled me, as if he had shown that some mistress of my soul had studied her graces from another girl, and that it was not all her own hair that she wore. I hid my rancor as well as I could, and took what revenge lay in my power by insinuating that he might have a very different view if he read Heine in the original. I also made haste to try my own fate with the Atlantic, and I sent off to Mr. Lowell that poem which he kept so long in order to make sure that Heine had not written it, as well as authorized it.

XXVII. CHARLES READE

This was the winter when my friend Piatt and I made our first literary venture together in those ‘Poems of Two Friends;’ which hardly passed the circle of our amity; and it was altogether a time of high literary exaltation with me. I walked the streets of the friendly little city by day and by night with my head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases that it seemed as if their buzzing might have been heard several yards away; and I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of my newspaper paragraphs. Out of the newspaper I could not keep it, and from time to time I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amusement of the leading editor, who knew me for a young man with a very sharp tooth for such self-betrayals in others. He wanted to print a burlesque review he wrote of the ‘Poems of Two Friends’ in our paper, but I would not suffer it. I must allow that it was very, funny, and that he was always a generous friend, whose wounds would have been as faithful as any that could have been dealt me then. He did not indeed care much for any poetry but that of Shakespeare and the ‘Ingoldsby Legends;’ and when one morning a State Senator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson, and began to read,

    “The poet in a golden clime was born,

    With golden stars above;

    Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn

    The love of love,”

he hitched his chair about, and started in on his leader for the day.

He might have been more patient if he had known that this State Senator was to be President Garfield. But who could know anything of the tragical history that was so soon to follow that winter of 1859-60? Not I; at least I listened rapt by the poet and the reader, and it seemed to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever, and that was to be all there was of it. To be sure I had my hard little journalistic misgivings that it was not quite the thing for a State Senator to come round reading Tennyson at ten o’clock in the morning, and I dare say I felt myself superior in my point of view, though I could not resist the charm of the verse. I myself did not bring Tennyson to the office at that time. I brought Thackeray, and I remember that one day when I had read half an hour or so in the ‘Book of Snobs,’ the leading editor said frankly, Well, now, he guessed we had had enough of that. He apologized afterwards as if he were to blame, and not I, but I dare say I was a nuisance with my different literary passions, and must have made many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors. I had some consciousness of the fact, but I could not help it.

I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites an author who was then beginning to have his greatest vogue, and who somehow just missed of being a very great one. We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, knowing books, and some of us were questioning whether we ought not to set him above Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, ‘tulli quanti’, so great was the effect that Charles Reade had with our generation. He was a man who stood at the parting of the ways between realism and romanticism, and if he had been somewhat more of a man he might have been the master of a great school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained content to use the materials of realism and produce the effect of romanticism. He saw that life itself infinitely outvalued anything that could be feigned about it, but its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not the clear, ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to be realistic when probably her artistic prepossessions were romantic.

As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the matter, and Charles Reade was writing books of tremendous adventure and exaggerated character, which he prided himself on deriving from the facts of the world around him. He was intoxicated with the discovery he had made that the truth was beyond invention, but he did not know what to do with the truth in art after he had found it in life, and to this day the English mostly do not. We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and we read him with much the same fury, that he wrote. ‘Never Too Late to Mend;’ ‘Love Me Little, Love Me Long;’ ‘Christie Johnstone;’ ‘Peg Woffington;’ and then, later, ‘Hard Cash,’ ‘The Cloister and the Hearth,’ ‘Foul Play,’ ‘Put Yourself in His Place’ — how much they all meant once, or seemed to mean!

The first of them, and the other poems and fictions I was reading, meant more to me than the rumors of war that were then filling the air, and that so soon became its awful actualities. To us who have our lives so largely in books the material world is always the fable, and the ideal the fact. I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the clouds, as light as any of them. I neither praise nor blame this fact; but I feel bound to own it, for that time, and for every time in my life, since the witchery of literature began with me.

Those two happy winters in Columbus, when I was finding opportunity and recognition, were the heydey of life for me. There has been no time like them since, though there have been smiling and prosperous times a plenty; for then I was in the blossom of my youth, and what I had not I could hope for without unreason, for I had so much of that which I had most desired. Those times passed, and there came other times, long years of abeyance, and waiting, and defeat, which I thought would never end, but they passed, too.

I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I went home to wait for my passport and to spend the last days, so full of civic trouble, before I should set out for my post. If I hoped to serve my country there and sweep the Confederate cruisers from the Adriatic, I am afraid my prime intent was to add to her literature and to my own credit. I intended, while keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems. concerning American life which should eclipse anything yet done in that kind, and in the mean time I read voraciously and perpetually, to make the days go swiftly which I should have been so glad to have linger. In this month I devoured all the ‘Waverley novels,’ but I must have been devouring a great many others, for Charles Reade’s ‘Christie Johnstone’ is associated with the last moment of the last days.

A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again, after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it with amazement at its prevailing artistic vulgarity, its prevailing aesthetic error shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the truth that Reade himself was always dimly groping for. The book is written throughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjectures across its border, and with lapses into the fool’s paradise of romanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility. But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the last word that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell that held us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety for the years that must pass, with all their redoubled chances, before our home circle could be made whole again. I read on, and the rest listened, till the wheels of the old stage made themselves heard in their approach through the absolute silence of the village street. Then we shut the book and all went down to the gate together, and parted under the pale sky of the October night. There was one of the home group whom I was not to see again: the young brother who died in the blossom of his years before I returned from my far and strange sojourn. He was too young then to share our reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to bid him good-by I found him awake, and, with aching hearts, we bade each other good-by forever!

XXVIII. DANTE

I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and from my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a reading acquaintance with the language. I had really wanted to go to Germany, that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I first applied for the consulate at Munich. The powers at Washington thought it quite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of the Roman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to decline it. Then the President’s private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had written poems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, and promised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year, under the new law to embarrass privateers. It was really put up to fifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the city whose influence changed the whole course of my literary life.

No privateers ever came, though I once had notice from Turin that the Florida had been sighted off Ancona; and I had nearly four years of nearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ in reading all Italian literature, and writing a history of the republic. The history, of course, I expected would be a long affair, and I did not quite suppose that I could despatch the literature in any short time; besides, I had several considerable poems on hand that occupied me a good deal, and worked at these as well as advanced myself in Italian, preparatory to the efforts before me.

I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind. As a matter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of all these, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went off from them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrights who interested me so much more. After my wonted fashion I read half a dozen of these authors together, so that it would be hard to say which I began with, but I had really a devotion to Dante, though not at that time, or ever for the whole of Dante. During my first year in Venice I met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, and who was willing to lead my faltering steps through the “Inferno.” This part of the “Divine Comedy” I read with a beginner’s carefulness, and with a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do not appear in every line.

Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not honest about the masterpieces of literature, and does not confess that they are not every moment masterly, that they are often dull and tough and dry, as is certainly the case with Dante’s. Some day, perhaps, we shall have this way of treating literature, and then the lover of it will not feel obliged to browbeat himself into the belief that if he is not always enjoying himself it is his own fault. At any rate I will permit myself the luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense of the majesty and grandeur of Dante’s design, many points of its execution bored me, and that I found the intermixture of small local fact and neighborhood history in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its noblest effect. What is marvellous in it is its expression of Dante’s personality, and I can never think that his personalities enhance its greatness as a work of art. I enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed them the more, as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began to open all about me. Then, indeed, I understood the origins if I did not understand the aims of Dante, which there is still much dispute about among those who profess to know them clearly. What I finally perceived was that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, such as it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expresses that life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, its love and its hate.

Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the end of the ends the “Divine Comedy” will stand for the patriotism of medieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and lofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned. This is vague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess also that I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the “Inferno.” I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was that sort which finds its account in the fine passages, the brilliant episodes, the striking pictures. This was the effect with me of all the criticism which I had hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that the criticism which tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things “whole,” is of any definite effect. As a matter of fact we see nothing whole, neither life nor art. We are so made, in soul and in sense, that we can deal only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the endeavor to compass any entirety must involve a discomfort and a danger very threatening to our intellectual integrity.

Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am very glad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, and pathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourth dimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible. I took my sad heart’s fill of the sad story of “Paolo and Francesca,” which I already knew in Leigh Hunt’s adorable dilution, and most of the lines read themselves into my memory, where they linger yet. I supped on the horrors of Ugolino’s fate with the strong gust of youth, which finds every exercise of sympathy a pleasure. My good priest sat beside me in these rich moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of the snuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness into my joy in things that he had often before enjoyed. No doubt he had an inexhaustible pleasure in them apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in them perennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I have read or repeated any of the great passages of the poem to myself. This pleasure came often from some vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of a phrase quite apart from its meaning. I did not get then, and I have not got since, a distinct conception of the journey through Hell, and as often as I have tried to understand the topography of the poem I have fatigued myself to no purpose, but I do not think the essential meaning was lost upon me.

I dare say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport, the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it, while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul. He seemed, at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings in the philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help. Then he would read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have in reading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out of the mere music of the poem, like the color the blind feel in sound.

I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of the strange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature — the printer, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and the bookbinder — I am afraid he is dead. In fact, I who was then I, might be said to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self in anything but the “increasing purpose” which has kept me one in my love of literature. He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing, quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled. I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact I was instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful how I consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy. I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believed him other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I was then giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me.

Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the “Divina Commedia,” and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so remote that no editor would print it. This was the first fruits and the last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as I would have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is too unconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is in him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that others may catch.

XXIX. GOLDONI, MANZONI, D’AZEGLIO

However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly, all the others that I wrote at this time; they came back to me with unfailing regularity from all the magazine editors of the English-speaking world; I had no success with any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper on recent Italian comedy for the North American Review, which he and Professor Norton had then begun to edit. I was in the mean time printing the material of Venetian Life and the Italian Journeys in a Boston newspaper after its rejection by the magazines; and my literary life, almost without my willing it, had taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their actuality.

That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word, wherever I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me, and in such literature of Italy as was then modern. In this pursuit I made a discovery that greatly interested me, and that specialized my inquiries. I found that the Italians had no novels which treated of their contemporary life; that they had no modern fiction but the historical romance. I found that if I wished to know their life from their literature I must go to their drama, which was even then endeavoring to give their stage a faithful picture of their civilization. There was even then in the new circumstance of a people just liberated from every variety of intellectual repression and political oppression, a group of dramatic authors, whose plays were not only delightful to see but delightful to read, working in the good tradition of one of the greatest realists who has ever lived, and producing a drama of vital strength and charm. One of them, whom I by no means thought the best, has given us a play, known to all the world, which I am almost ready to think with Zola is the greatest play of modern times; or if it is not so, I should be puzzled to name the modern drama that surpasses “La Morte Civile” of Paolo Giacometti. I learned to know all the dramatists pretty well, in the whole range of their work, on the stage and in the closet, and I learned to know still better, and to love supremely, the fine, amiable genius whom, as one of them said, they did not so much imitate as learn from to imitate nature.

This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the realists, but antedating conscious realism so long as to have been born at Venice early in the eighteenth century, and to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with the romanticism of his day almost before that century had reached its noon. In the early sixties of our own century I was no more conscious of his realism than he was himself a hundred years before; but I had eyes in my head, and I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before was so true that it was the very life of Venice in my own day; and because I have loved the truth in art above all other things, I fell instantly and lastingly in love with Carlo Goldoni. I was reading his memoirs, and learning to know his sweet, honest, simple nature while I was learning to know his work, and I wish that every one who reads his plays would read his life as well; one must know him before one can fully know them. I believe, in fact, that his autobiography came into my hands first. But, at any rate, both are associated with the fervors and languors of that first summer in Venice, so that I cannot now take up a book of Goldoni’s without a renewed sense of that sunlight and moonlight, and of the sounds and silences of a city that is at once the stillest and shrillest in the world.

Perhaps because I never found his work of great ethical or aesthetical proportions, but recognized that it pretended to be good only within its strict limitations, I recur to it now without that painful feeling of a diminished grandeur in it, which attends us so often when we go back to something that once greatly pleased us. It seemed to me at the time that I must have read all his comedies in Venice, but I kept reading new ones after I came home, and still I can take a volume of his from the shelf, and when thirty years are past, find a play or two that I missed before. Their number is very great, but perhaps those that I fancy I have not read, I have really read once or more and forgotten. That might very easily be, for there is seldom anything more poignant in any one of them than there is in the average course of things. The plays are light and amusing transcripts from life, for the most part, and where at times they deepen into powerful situations, or express strong emotions, they do so with persons so little different from the average of our acquaintance that we do not remember just who the persons are.

There is no doubt but the kindly playwright had his conscience, and meant to make people think as well as laugh. I know of none of his plays that is of wrong effect, or that violates the instincts of purity, or insults common sense with the romantic pretence that wrong will be right if you will only paint it rose-color. He is at some obvious pains to “punish vice and reward virtue,” but I do not mean that easy morality when I praise his; I mean the more difficult sort that recognizes in each man’s soul the arbiter not of his fate surely, but surely of his peace. He never makes a fool of the spectator by feigning that passion is a reason or justification, or that suffering of one kind can atone for wrong of another. That was left for the romanticists of our own century to discover; even the romanticists whom Goldoni drove from the stage, were of that simpler eighteenth-century sort who had not yet liberated the individual from society, but held him accountable in the old way. As for Goldoni himself, he apparently never dreams of transgression; he is of rather an explicit conventionality in most things, and he deals with society as something finally settled. How artfully he deals with it, how decently, how wholesomely, those who know Venetian society of the eighteenth century historically, will perceive when they recall the adequate impression he gives of it without offence in character or language or situation. This is the perpetual miracle of his comedy, that it says so much to experience and worldly wisdom, and so little to inexperience and worldly innocence. No doubt the Serenest Republic was very strict with the theatre, and suffered it to hold the mirror up to nature only when nature was behaving well, or at least behaving as if young people were present. Yet the Italians are rather plain-spoken, and they recognize facts which our company manners at least do not admit the existence of. I should say that Goldoni was almost English, almost American, indeed, in his observance of the proprieties, and I like this in him; though the proprieties are not virtues, they are very good things, and at least are better than the improprieties.

This, however, I must own, had not a great deal to do with my liking him so much, and I should be puzzled to account for my passion, as much in his case as in most others. If there was any reason for it, perhaps it was that he had the power of taking me out of my life, and putting me into the lives of others, whom I felt to be human beings as much as myself. To make one live in others, this is the highest effect of religion as well as of art, and possibly it will be the highest bliss we shall ever know. I do not pretend that my translation was through my unselfishness; it was distinctly through that selfishness which perceives that self is misery; and I may as well confess here that I do not regard the artistic ecstasy as in any sort noble. It is not noble to love the beautiful, or to live for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining. I would not have any reader of mine, looking forward to some aesthetic career, suppose that this love is any merit in itself; it may be the grossest egotism. If you cannot look beyond the end you aim at, and seek the good which is not your own, all your sacrifice is to yourself and not of yourself, and you might as well be going into business. In itself and for itself it is no more honorable to win fame than to make money, and the wish to do the one is no more elevating than the wish to do the other.

But in the days I write of I had no conception of this, and I am sure that my blindness to so plain a fact kept me even from seeking and knowing the highest beauty in the things I worshipped. I believe that if I had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humane Italian poets and novelists as Manzoni and D’Azeglio, whom I perceived to be delightful, without dreaming of them in the length and breadth of their goodness. Now and then its extent flashed upon me, but the glimpse was lost to my retroverted vision almost as soon as won. It is only in thinking back to there that I can realize how much they might always have meant to me. They were both living in my time in Italy, and they were two men whom I should now like very much to have seen, if I could have done so without that futility which seems to attend every effort to pay one’s duty to such men.

The love of country in all the Italian poets and romancers of the long period of the national resurrection ennobled their art in a measure which criticism has not yet taken account of. I conceived of its effect then, but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; now I am by no means sure that it was so; hereafter the creation of beauty, as we call it, for beauty’s sake, may be considered something monstrous. There is forever a poignant meaning in life beyond what mere living involves, and why should not there be this reference in art to the ends beyond art? The situation, the long patience, the hope against hope, dignified and beautified the nature of the Italian writers of that day, and evoked from them a quality which I was too little trained in their school to appreciate. But in a sort I did feel it, I did know it in them all, so far as I knew any of them, and in the tragedies of Manzoni, and in the romances of D’Azeglio, and yet more in the simple and modest records of D’Azeglio’s life published after his death, I profited by it, and unconsciously prepared myself for that point of view whence all the arts appear one with all the uses, and there is nothing beautiful that is false.

I am very glad of that experience of Italian literature, which I look back upon as altogether wholesome and sanative, after my excesses of Heine. No doubt it was all a minor affair as compared with equal knowledge of French literature, and so far it was a loss of time. It is idle to dispute the general positions of criticism, and there is no useful gainsaying its judgment that French literature is a major literature and Italian a minor literature in this century; but whether this verdict will stand for all time, there may be a reasonable doubt. Criterions may change, and hereafter people may look at the whole affair so differently that a literature which went to the making of a people will not be accounted a minor literature, but will take its place with the great literary movements.

I do not insist upon this possibility, and I am far from defending myself for liking the comedies of Goldoni better than the comedies of Moliere, upon purely aesthetic grounds, where there is no question as to the artistic quality. Perhaps it is because I came to Moliere’s comedies later, and with my taste formed for those of Goldoni; but again, it is here a matter of affection; I find Goldoni for me more sympathetic, and because he is more sympathetic I cannot do otherwise than find him more natural, more true. I will allow that this is vulnerable, and as I say, I do not defend it. Moliere has a place in literature infinitely loftier than Goldoni’s; and he has supplied types, characters, phrases, to the currency of thought, and Goldoni has supplied none. It is, therefore, without reason which I can allege that I enjoy Goldoni more. I am perfectly willing to be rated low for my preference, and yet I think that if it had been Goldoni’s luck to have had the great age of a mighty monarchy for his scene, instead of the decline of an outworn republic, his place in literature might have been different.

XXX. “PASTOR FIDO,” “AMINTA,” “ROMOLA,” “YEAST,” “PAUL FERROLL”

I have always had a great love for the absolutely unreal, the purely fanciful in all the arts, as well as of the absolutely real; I like the one on a far lower plane than the other, but it delights me, as a pantomime at a theatre does, or a comic opera, which has its being wholly outside the realm of the probabilities. When I once transport myself to this sphere I have no longer any care for them, and if I could I would not exact of them an allegiance which has no concern with them. For this reason I have always vastly enjoyed the artificialities of pastoral poetry; and in Venice I read with a pleasure few serious poems have given me the “Pastor Fido” of Guarini. I came later but not with fainter zest to the “Aminta” of Tasso, without which, perhaps, the “Pastor Fido” would not have been, and I revelled in the pretty impossibilities of both these charming effects of the liberated imagination.

I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one does not live by sweets, unless one is willing to spoil one’s digestion; but one may now and then indulge one’s self without harm, and a sugar-plum or two after dinner may even be of advantage. What I object to is the romantic thing which asks to be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground of reality; that seems to me hopelessly bad. But I have been able to dwell in their charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds and shepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso and Guarini, and I take the finest pleasure in their company, their Dresden china loves and sorrows, their airy raptures, their painless throes, their polite anguish, their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as the purling streams of their enamelled meadows. I wish there were more of that sort of writing; I should like very much to read it.

The greater part of my reading in Venice, when I began to find that I could not help writing about the place, was in books relating to its life and history, which I made use of rather than found pleasure in. My studies in Italian literature were full of the most charming interest, and if I had to read a good many books for conscience’ sake, there were a good many others I read for their own sake. They were chiefly poetry; and after the first essays in which I tasted the classic poets, they were chiefly the books of the modern poets.

For the present I went no farther in German literature, and I recurred to it in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine; my Spanish was ignored, as all first loves are when one has reached the age of twenty-six. My English reading was almost wholly in the Tauchnitz editions, for otherwise English books were not easily come at then and there. George Eliot’s ‘Romola’ was then new, and I read it again and again with the sense of moral enlargement which the first fiction to conceive of the true nature of evil gave all of us who were young in that day. Tito Malema was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and I trembled before him as in the presence of a warning and a message from the only veritable perdition. His life, in which so much that was good was mixed, with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain of egotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worst were to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolute division in texture and color. The book was undoubtedly a favorite of mine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it which were afterwards evident to me.

There were not Romolas to read all the time, though, and I had to devolve upon inferior authors for my fiction the greater part of the time. Of course, I kept up with ‘Our Mutual Friend,’ which Dickens was then writing, and with ‘Philip,’ which was to be the last of Thackeray. I was not yet sufficiently instructed to appreciate Trollope, and I did not read him at all.

I got hold of Kingsley, and read ‘Yeast,’ and I think some other novels of his, with great relish, and without sensibility to his Charles Readeish lapses from his art into the material of his art. But of all the minor fiction that I read at this time none impressed me so much as three books which had then already had their vogue, and which I knew somewhat from reviews. They were Paul Ferroll, ‘Why Paul Ferroll Killed His Wife,’ and ‘Day after Day.’ The first two were, of course, related to each other, and they were all three full of unwholesome force. As to their aesthetic merit I will not say anything, for I have not looked at either of the books for thirty years. I fancy, however, that their strength was rather of the tetanic than the titanic sort. They made your sympathies go with the hero, who deliberately puts his wife to death for the lie she told to break off his marriage with the woman he had loved, and who then marries this tender and gentle girl, and lives in great happiness with her till her death. Murder in the first degree is flattered by his fate up to the point of letting him die peacefully in Boston after these dealings of his in England; and altogether his story could not be commended to people with a morbid taste for bloodshed. Naturally enough the books were written by a perfectly good woman, the wife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized by them. As a sort of atonement she wrote ‘Day after Day,’ the story of a dismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faint and farheard, filling the whole chamber. A carefuller study of the phenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by the steam escaping from the hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid.

As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking of these books, and I am so far from wishing to justify it that I think I ought rather to excuse it. But since I was really greatly fascinated with them, and read them with an evergrowing fascination, the only honest thing to do is to own my subjection to them. It would be an interesting and important question for criticism to study, that question why certain books at a. certain time greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly better have no influence with us. A curious proof of the subtlety of these Paul Ferroll books in the appeal they made to the imagination is the fact that I came to them fresh from ‘Romolo,’ and full of horror for myself in Tito; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, and was glad when he got away.

XXXI. ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON

On my return to America, my literary life immediately took such form that most of my reading was done for review. I wrote at first a good many of the lighter criticisms in ‘The Nation’, at New York, and after I went to Boston to become the assistant editor of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ I wrote the literary notices in that periodical for four or five years.

It was only when I came into full charge of the magazine that I began to share these labors with others, and I continued them in some measure as long as I had any relation to it. My reading for reading’s sake, as I had hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily for the sake of writing about the book in hand, and secondarily for the pleasure it might give me. This was always considerable, and sometimes so great that I forgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure. I was master to review this book or that as I chose, and generally I reviewed only books I liked to read, though sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book, and did it from a sense of duty; these perfunctory criticisms I do not think were very useful, but I tried to make them honest.

In a long sickness, which I had shortly after I went to live in Cambridge, a friend brought me several of the stories of Erckmann- Chatrian, whom people were then reading much more than they are now, I believe; and I had a great joy in them, which I have renewed since as often as I have read one of their books. They have much the same quality of simple and sincerely moralized realism that I found afterwards in the work of the early Swiss realist, Jeremias Gotthelf, and very likely it was this that captivated my judgment. As for my affections, battered and exhausted as they ought to have been in many literary passions, they never went out with fresher enjoyment than they did to the charming story of ‘L’Ami Fritz,’ which, when I merely name it, breathes the spring sun and air about me, and fills my senses with the beauty and sweetness of cherry blossoms. It is one of the loveliest and kindest books that ever was written, and my heart belongs to it still; to be sure it belongs to several hundreds of other books in equal entirety.

It belongs to all the books of the great Norwegian Bjorstjerne Bjornson, whose ‘Arne,’ and whose ‘Happy Boy,’ and whose ‘Fisher Maiden’ I read in this same fortunate sickness. I have since read every other book of his that I could lay hands on: ‘Sinnove Solbakken,’ and ‘Magnhild,’ and ‘Captain Manzanca,’ and ‘Dust,’ and ‘In God’s Ways,’ and ‘Sigurd,’ and plays like “The Glove” and “The Bankrupt.” He has never, as some authors have, dwindled in my sense; when I open his page, there I find him as large, and free, and bold as ever. He is a great talent, a clear conscience, a beautiful art. He has my love not only because he is a poet of the most exquisite verity, but because he is a lover of men, with a faith in them such as can move mountains of ignorance, and dulness, and greed. He is next to Tolstoy in his willingness to give himself for his kind; if he would rather give himself in fighting than in suffering wrong, I do not know that his self-sacrifice is less in degree.

I confess, however, that I do not think of him as a patriot and a socialist when I read him; he is then purely a poet, whose gift holds me rapt above the world where I have left my troublesome and wearisome self for the time. I do not know of any novels that a young endeavorer in fiction could more profitably read than his for their large and simple method, their trust of the reader’s intelligence, their sympathy with life. With him the problems are all soluble by the enlightened and regenerate will; there is no baffling Fate, but a helping God. In Bjornson there is nothing of Ibsen’s scornful despair, nothing of his anarchistic contempt, but his art is full of the warmth and color of a poetic soul, with no touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in the other. I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I should be far from denying his mighty mastery, but he has never possessed me with the delight that Bjornson has.

In those days I read not only all the new books, but I made many forays into the past, and came back now and then with rich spoil, though I confess that for the most part I had my trouble for my pains; and I wish now that I had given the time I spent on the English classics to contemporary literature, which I have not the least hesitation in saying I like vastly better. In fact, I believe that the preference for the literature of the past, except in the case of the greatest masters, is mainly the affectation of people who cannot otherwise distinguish themselves from the herd, and who wish very much to do so.

There is much to be learned from the minor novelists and poets of the past about people’s ways of thinking and feeling, but not much that the masters do not give you in better quality and fuller measure; and I should say, Read the old masters and let their schools go, rather than neglect any possible master of your own time. Above all, I would not have any one read an old author merely that he might not be ignorant of him; that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it. When literature becomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, and all the schoolmastering in the world, solemnly addressed to the conscience, cannot make the fact otherwise. It is well to read for the sake of knowing a certain ground if you are to make use of your knowledge in a certain way, but it would be a mistake to suppose that this is a love of literature.

XXXII. TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH

In those years at Cambridge my most notable literary experience without doubt was the knowledge of Tourguenief’s novels, which began to be recognized in all their greatness about the middle seventies. I think they made their way with such of our public as were able to appreciate them before they were accepted in England; but that does not matter. It is enough for the present purpose that ‘Smoke,’ and ‘Lisa,’ and ‘On the Eve,’ and ‘Dimitri Roudine,’ and ‘Spring Floods,’ passed one after another through my hands, and that I formed for their author one of the profoundest literary passions of my life.

I now think that there is a finer and truer method than his, but in its way, Tourguenief’s method is as far as art can go. That is to say, his fiction is to the last degree dramatic. The persons are sparely described, and briefly accounted for, and then they are left to transact their affair, whatever it is, with the least possible comment or explanation from the author. The effect flows naturally from their characters, and when they have done or said a thing you conjecture why as unerringly as you would if they were people whom you knew outside of a book. I had already conceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson, who practises the same method, but I was still too sunken in the gross darkness of English fiction to rise to a full consciousness of its excellence. When I remembered the deliberate and impertinent moralizing of Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods and winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and limelighting of Dickens, even the fine and important analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a joyful astonishment that I realized the great art of Tourguenief.

Here was a master who was apparently not trying to work out a plot, who was not even trying to work out a character, but was standing aside from the whole affair, and letting the characters work the plot out. The method was revealed perfectly in ‘Smoke,’ but each successive book of his that I read was a fresh proof of its truth, a revelation of its transcendent superiority. I think now that I exaggerated its value somewhat; but this was inevitable in the first surprise. The sane aesthetics of the first Russian author I read, however, have seemed more and more an essential part of the sane ethics of all the Russians I have read. It was not only that Tourguenief had painted life truly, but that he had painted it conscientiously.

Tourguenief was of that great race which has more than any other fully and freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or false shame in its nakedness. His themes were oftenest those of the French novelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner and with the French spirit! In his hands sin suffered no dramatic punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personal sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace. If the end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared. Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read Tourguenief; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical responsibilities I had not known before. My gay American horizons were bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful. At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an intimacy she had not hitherto shown me. There are passages in this wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader’s own knowledge; who else but Tourguenief and one’s own most secret self ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air drawing in at the open window, of the fires burning in the darkness on the distant fields? I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle sympathy with nature which scarcely put itself into words with him. As for the people of his fiction, though they were of orders and civilizations so remote from my experience, they were of the eternal human types whose origin and potentialities every one may find in his own heart, and I felt their verity in every touch.

I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impart some sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I had been waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richly content forever. I do not mean to say that the art of Tourguenief surpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine and true. But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstances for the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has to do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene is often as large as Europe. Even when it is as remote as Norway, it is still related to the great capitals by the history if not the actuality of the characters. Most of Tourguenief’s books I have read many times over, all of them I have read more than twice. For a number of years I read them again and again without much caring for other fiction. It was only the other day that I read Smoke through once more, with no diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my first satisfaction in its art. Perhaps this was because I had reached the point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even of the artifice that hid itself. In ‘Smoke’ I was now aware of an artifice that kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisibly operating the story.

I must not fail to own the great pleasure that I have had in some of the stories of Auerbach. It is true that I have never cared greatly for ‘On the Heights,’ which in its dealing with royalties seems too far aloof from the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fades out into a German mistiness. But I speak of it with the imperfect knowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I have really no right to speak of it. The book of his that pleased me most was ‘Edelweiss,’ which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true. I still think it very delicately done, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach’s work which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies.

XXXIII. CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES

I have always loved history, whether in the annals of peoples or in the lives of persons, and I have at all times read it. I am not sure but I rather prefer it to fiction, though I am aware that in looking back over this record of my literary passions I must seem to have cared for very little besides fiction. I read at the time I have just been speaking of, nearly all the new poetry as it came out, and I constantly recurred to it in its mossier sources, where it sprang from the green English ground, or trickled from the antique urns of Italy.

I do not think that I have ever cared much for metaphysics, or to read much in that way, but from time to time I have done something of it.

Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great human story, and autobiography has at times appeared to me the most delightful reading in the world; I have a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have never enjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such Italians as have reasoned of themselves.

I suppose I have not been a great reader of the drama, and I do not know that I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare and Goldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so of Marlow’s, and all of Ibsen’s and Maeterlinck’s. The taste for the old English dramatists I believe I have never formed.

Criticism, ever since I filled myself so full of it in my boyhood, I have not cared for, and often I have found it repulsive.

I have a fondness for books of popular science, perhaps because they too are part of the human story.

I have read somewhat of the theology of the Swedenborgian faith I was brought up in, but I have not read other theological works; and I do not apologize for not liking any. The Bible itself was not much known to me at an age when most children have been obliged to read it several times over; the gospels were indeed familiar, and they have always been to me the supreme human story; but the rest of the New Testament I had not read when a man grown, and only passages of the Old Testament, like the story of the Creation, and the story of Joseph, and the poems of Job and Ecclesiastes, with occasional Psalms. I therefore came to the Scriptures with a sense at once fresh and mature, and I can never be too glad that I learned to see them under the vaster horizon and in the truer perspectives of experience.

Again as lights on the human story I have liked to read such books of medicine as have fallen in my way, and I seldom take up a medical periodical without reading of all the cases it describes, and in fact every article in it.

But I did not mean to make even this slight departure from the main business of these papers, which is to confide my literary passions to the reader; he probably has had a great many of his own. I think I may class the “Ring and the Book” among them, though I have never been otherwise a devotee of Browning. But I was still newly home from Italy, or away from home, when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was because it took me so with the old enchantment of that land, I gave my heart promptly to it. Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tired of the same story told over and over from the different points of view, and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificent breadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himself heavily. There are certain books of it— “Caponsacchi’s story,” “Pompilia’s story,” and “Count Guido’s story” — that I think ought to rank with the greatest poetry ever written, and that have a direct, dramatic expression of the fact and character, which is without rival. There is a noble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi’s statement, an artless and manly break from his self-control throughout, that seems to me the last possible effect in its kind; and Pompilia’s story holds all of womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tenderness, the helplessness. But if I begin to praise this or any of the things I have liked, I do not know when I should stop. Yes, as I think it over, the “Ring and the Book” appears to me one of the great few poems whose splendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, however it may have presently fallen into abeyance. If it had impossibly come down to us from some elder time, or had not been so perfectly modern in its recognition of feeling and motives ignored by the less conscious poetry of the past, it might be ranked with the great epics.

Of other modern poets I have read some things of William Morris, like the “Life and Death of Jason,” the “Story of Gudrun,” and the “Trial of Guinevere,” with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I have equally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti. I have had a high joy in some of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves over Concord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled tread expresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American muse so often gets about in.

The “Commemoration Ode” of Lowell has also been a source from which I drank something of the divine ecstasy of the poet’s own exalted mood, and I would set this level with the ‘Biglow Papers,’ high above all his other work, and chief of the things this age of our country shall be remembered by. Holmes I always loved, and not for his wit alone, which is so obvious to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his in which he shows himself the lover of nature and the brother of men. The deep spiritual insight, the celestial music, and the brooding tenderness of Whittier have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and his civic virtues, though I do not underrate the value of these in his verse.

My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many I do not name because they are so many, has been continuous with their work, and my pleasure in it not inconstant if not equal. I have spoken before of Longfellow as one of my first passions, and I have never ceased to delight in him; but some of the very newest and youngest of our poets have given me thrills of happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter.

Long after I had thought never to read it — in fact when I was ‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’ — I read Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and found in it a majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsed the worth of those lesser poems which I had ignorantly accounted his worthiest. In fact, it was one of the literary passions of the time I speak of, and it shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and (shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez. After all, it is best to be honest, and if it is not best, it is at least easiest; it involves the fewest embarrassing consequences; and if I confess the spell that the Revenge of Joseph Noirel cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall be able to whisper the reader behind my hand that I have never yet read the “AEneid” of Virgil; the “Georgics,” yes; but the “AEneid,” no. Some time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely. That is often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.

One fact of my experience which the reader may, find interesting is that when I am writing steadily I have little relish for reading. I fancy, that reading is not merely a pastime when it is apparently the merest pastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is used up in it, and that if you are using up all the mind stuff you have, much or little, in some other way, you do not read because you have not the mind-stuff for it. At any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for my failure to read a great deal during four years of the amplest quiet that I spent in the country at Belmont, whither we removed from Cambridge. I had promised myself that in this quiet, now that I had given up reviewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine but my stories, I should again read purely for the pleasure of it, as I had in the early days before the critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy. But I found that not being forced to read a number of books each month, so that I might write about them, I did not read at all, comparatively speaking. To be sure I dawdled over a great many books that I had read before, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but I had no intense pleasure from reading in that time, and have no passions to record of it. It may have been a period when no new thing happened in literature deeply to stir one’s interest; I only state the fact concerning myself, and suggest the most plausible theory I can think of.

I wish also to note another incident, which may or may not have its psychological value. An important event of these years was a long sickness which kept me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I was forced to read in order to pass the intolerable time. But in this misery I found that I could not read anything of a dramatic cast, whether in the form of plays or of novels. The mere sight of the printed page, broken up in dialogue, was anguish. Yet it was not the excitement of the fiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives of travel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, or shipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was the dramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up to in the speech of his characters that I could not bear. I found a like impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a mistaken friend sent in to me, and which with its scare-headings, and artfully wrought sensations, had the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was.

At the end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away the appetite for reading as completely as writing did. I recall nothing read in that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little, except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wrote of.

XXXIV. VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY

In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life again in Boston, in the old atmosphere of work, that I turned once more to books. Even then I had to wait for the time when I undertook a critical department in one of the magazines, before I felt the rise of the old enthusiasm for an author. That is to say, I had to begin reading for business again before I began reading for pleasure. One of the first great pleasures which I had upon these terms was in the book of a contemporary Spanish author. This was the ‘Marta y Maria’ of Armando Palacio Valdes, a novelist who delights me beyond words by his friendly and abundant humor, his feeling for character, and his subtle insight. I like every one of his books that I have read, and I believe that I have read nearly every one that he has written. As I mention ‘Riverito, Maximina, Un Idilio de un Inferno, La Hermana de San Sulpizio, El Cuarto Poder, Espuma,’ the mere names conjure up the scenes and events that have moved me to tears and laughter, and filled me with a vivid sense of the life portrayed in them. I think the ‘Marta y Maria’ one of the most truthful and profound fictions I have read, and ‘Maximina’ one of the most pathetic, and ‘La Hermana de San Sulpizio’ one of the most amusing. Fortunately, these books of Valdes’s have nearly all been translated, and the reader may test the matter in English; though it necessarily halts somewhat behind the Spanish.

I do not know whether the Spaniards themselves rank Valdes with Galdos or not, and I have no wish to decide upon their relative merits. They are both present passions of mine, and I may say of the ‘Dona Perfecta’ of Galdos that no book, if I except those of the greatest Russians, has given me a keener and deeper impression; it is infinitely pathetic, and is full of humor, which, if more caustic than that of Valdes, is not less delicious. But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, and though he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism than Valdes, since he has worked finally into such realism as that of Leon Roch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired.

I have read one of the books of Emilia Pardo-Bazan, called ‘Morrina,’ which must rank her with the great realists of her country and age; she, too, has that humor of her race, which brings us nearer the Spanish than any other non-Anglo-Saxon people.

A contemporary Italian, whom I like hardly less than these noble Spaniards, is Giovanni Verga, who wrote ‘I Malavoglia,’ or, as we call it in English, ‘The House by the Medlar Tree’: a story of infinite beauty, tenderness and truth. As I have said before, I think with Zola that Giacometti, the Italian author of “La Morte Civile,” has written almost the greatest play, all round, of modern times.

But what shall I say of Zola himself, and my admiration of his epic greatness? About his material there is no disputing among people of our Puritanic tradition. It is simply abhorrent, but when you have once granted him his material for his own use, it is idle and foolish to deny his power. Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I took up ‘L’Assommoir,’ though unconsciously I had always been as much of a realist as I could, but the book possessed me with the same fascination that I felt the other day in reading his ‘L’Argent.’ The critics know now that Zola is not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is full of the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated so much; but for what he is, there is but one novelist of our time, or of any, that outmasters him, and that is Tolstoy. For my own part, I think that the books of Zola are not immoral, but they are indecent through the facts that they nakedly represent; they are infinitely more moral than the books of any other French novelist. This may not be saying a great deal, but it is saying the truth, and I do not mind owning that he has been one of my great literary passions, almost as great as Flaubert, and greater than Daudet or Maupassant, though I have profoundly appreciated the exquisite artistry of both these. No French writer, however, has moved me so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in the humor which endears these, and is the quintessence of their charm.

You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke, and I suppose this is what deprived me of a final satisfaction in the company of Anthony Trollope, who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I should otherwise make bold to declare the greatest of English novelists; as it is, I must put before him Jane Austen, whose books, late in life, have been a youthful rapture with me. Even without, much humor Trollope’s books have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple truthfulness. Perhaps if they were more humorous they would not be so true to the British life and character present in them in the whole length and breadth of its expansive commonplaceness. It is their serious fidelity which gives them a value unique in literature, and which if it were carefully analyzed would afford a principle of the same quality in an author who was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists as well as the most Philistine of men.

I came rather late, but I came with all the ardor of what seems my perennial literary youth, to the love of Thomas Hardy, whom I first knew in his story ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes.’ As usual, after I had read this book and felt the new charm in it, I wished to read the books of no other author, and to read his books over and over. I love even the faults of Hardy; I will let him play me any trick he chooses (and he is not above playing tricks, when he seems to get tired of his story or perplexed with it), if only he will go on making his peasants talk, and his rather uncertain ladies get in and out of love, and serve themselves of every chance that fortune offers them of having their own way. We shrink from the unmorality of the Latin races, but Hardy has divined in the heart of our own race a lingering heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainly been no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Parisians. His heroines especially exemplify it, and I should be safe in saying that his Ethelbertas, his Eustacias, his Elfridas, his Bathshebas, his Fancies, are wholly pagan. I should not dare to ask how much of their charm came from that fact; and the author does not fail to show you how much harm, so that it is not on my conscience. His people live very close to the heart of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief, gives you a richer and sweeter sense of her unity with human nature. Hardy is a great poet as well as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist also his humor would be enough to endear him to me.

XXXV. TOLSTOY

I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of all these enthusiasms — namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy. I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I do not know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect of exaggeration. As much as one merely human being can help another I believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in aesthetics only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I saw it before I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be a man; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really. He leads you back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of the gentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men, but identified with them, to that Presence in which the finest gentleman shows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measure of his miserable egotism. I learned from Tolstoy to try character and motive by no other test, and though I am perpetually false to that sublime ideal myself, still the ideal remains with me, to make me ashamed that I am not true to it. Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the world may yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it, when all Caesars things shall be finally rendered unto Caesar, and men shall come into their own, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the fruits of their labor, each one master of himself and servant to every other. He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever impossible personal happiness, but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the whole human family; and I can never lose this vision, however I close my eyes, and strive to see my own interest as the highest good. He gave me new criterions, new principles, which, after all, were those that are taught us in our earliest childhood, before we have come to the evil wisdom of the world. As I read his different ethical books, ‘What to Do,’ ‘My Confession,’ and ‘My Religion,’ I recognized their truth with a rapture such as I have known in no other reading, and I rendered them my allegiance, heart and soul, with whatever sickness of the one and despair of the other. They have it yet, and I believe they will have it while I live. It is with inexpressible astonishment that I bear them attainted of pessimism, as if the teaching of a man whose ideal was simple goodness must mean the prevalence of evil. The way he showed me seemed indeed impossible to my will, but to my conscience it was and is the only possible way. If there, is any point on which he has not convinced my reason it is that of our ability to walk this narrow way alone. Even there he is logical, but as Zola subtly distinguishes in speaking of Tolstoy’s essay on “Money,” he is not reasonable. Solitude enfeebles and palsies, and it is as comrades and brothers that men must save the world from itself, rather than themselves from the world. It was so the earliest Christians, who had all things common, understood the life of Christ, and I believe that the latest will understand it so.

I have spoken first of the ethical works of Tolstoy, because they are of the first importance to me, but I think that his aesthetical works are as perfect. To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highest beauty, all other works of fiction that have been written, and I believe that they do this because they obey the law of the author’s own life. His conscience is one ethically and one aesthetically; with his will to be true to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others. I thought the last word in literary art had been said to me by the novels of Tourguenief, but it seemed like the first, merely, when I began to acquaint myself with the simpler method of Tolstoy. I came to it by accident, and without any manner, of preoccupation in The Cossacks, one of his early books, which had been on my shelves unread for five or six years. I did not know even Tolstoy’s name when I opened it, and it was with a kind of amaze that I read it, and felt word by word, and line by line, the truth of a new art in it.

I do not know how it is that the great Russians have the secret of simplicity. Some say it is because they have not a long literary past and are not conventionalized by the usage of many generations of other writers, but this will hardly account for the brotherly directness of their dealing with human nature; the absence of experience elsewhere characterizes the artist with crudeness, and simplicity is the last effect of knowledge. Tolstoy is, of course, the first of them in this supreme grace. He has not only Tourguenief’s transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality should be in a portrait; but he has a method which not only seems without artifice, but is so. I can get at the manner of most writers, and tell what it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy’s manner is; perhaps he has no manner. This appears to me true of his novels, which, with their vast variety of character and incident, are alike in their single endeavor to get the persons living before you, both in their action and in the peculiarly dramatic interpretation of their emotion and cogitation. There are plenty of novelists to tell you that their characters felt and thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust; Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so with them and not otherwise. If there is anything in him which can be copied or burlesqued it is this ability of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly; it is the only trait of his which I can put my hand on.

After ‘The Cossacks’ I read ‘Anna Karenina’ with a deepening sense of the author’s unrivalled greatness. I thought that I saw through his eyes a human affair of that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to the Infinite Compassion; the book is a sort of revelation of human nature in circumstances that have been so perpetually lied about that we have almost lost the faculty of perceiving the truth concerning an illicit love. When you have once read ‘Anna Karenina’ you know how fatally miserable and essentially unhappy such a love must be. But the character of Karenin himself is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna and Vronsky. It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philistine and even mean in certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), in fiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive with dignity. There is something crucial, and something triumphant, not beyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in this effect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic, but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of man.

The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of ‘War and Peace’ made it as great a surprise for me in the historical novel as ‘Anna Karenina’ had been in the study of contemporary life; and its people and interests did not seem more remote, since they are of a civilization always as strange and of a humanity always as known.

I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy’s before I came to this greatest work of his: I read ‘Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,’ which is so much of the same quality as ‘War and Peace;’ and I read ‘Policoushka’ and most of his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as I had never felt with the people of other fiction.

His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwindle into allegories; perhaps they do their work the better for this, with the simple intelligences they address; but I think that where Tolstoy becomes impatient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a teacher, he robs himself of more than half his strength with those he can move only through the realization of themselves in others. The simple pathos, and the apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of ‘Poticoushka,’ the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value to the world at large than all his parables; and ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,’ the Philistine worldling, will turn the hearts of many more from the love of the world than such pale fables of the early Christian life as “Work while ye have the Light.” A man’s gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man who has the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or to let it rust out in disuse.

Terrible as the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ was, it had a moral effect dramatically which it lost altogether when the author descended to exegesis, and applied to marriage the lesson of one evil marriage. In fine, Tolstoy is certainly not to be held up as infallible. He is very, distinctly fallible, but I think his life is not less instructive because in certain things it seems a failure. There was but one life ever lived upon the earth which was without failure, and that was Christ’s, whose erring and stumbling follower Tolstoy is. There is no other example, no other ideal, and the chief use of Tolstoy is to enforce this fact in our age, after nineteen centuries of hopeless endeavor to substitute ceremony for character, and the creed for the life. I recognize the truth of this without pretending to have been changed in anything but my point of view of it. What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean and sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy.

Artistically, he has shown me a greatness that he can never teach me. I am long past the age when I could wish to form myself upon another writer, and I do not think I could now insensibly take on the likeness of another; but his work has been a revelation and a delight to me, such as I am sure I can never know again. I do not believe that in the whole course of my reading, and not even in the early moment of my literary enthusiasms, I have known such utter satisfaction in any writer, and this supreme joy has come to me at a time of life when new friendships, not to say new passions, are rare and reluctant. It is as if the best wine at this high feast where I have sat so long had been kept for the last, and I need not deny a miracle in it in order to attest my skill in judging vintages. In fact, I prefer to believe that my life has been full of miracles, and that the good has always come to me at the right time, so that I could profit most by it. I believe if I had not turned the corner of my fiftieth year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have been able to know him as fully as I did. He has been to me that final consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on “Life.” I came in it to the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt of before, and began at least to discern my relations to the race, without which we are each nothing. The supreme art in literature had its highest effect in making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with the wish to offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind, which any man can pay another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy.

PART IV. CRITICISM AND FICTION

The question of a final criterion for the appreciation of art is one that perpetually recurs to those interested in any sort of aesthetic endeavor. Mr. John Addington Symonds, in a chapter of ‘The Renaissance in Italy’ treating of the Bolognese school of painting, which once had so great cry, and was vaunted the supreme exemplar of the grand style, but which he now believes fallen into lasting contempt for its emptiness and soullessness, seeks to determine whether there can be an enduring criterion or not; and his conclusion is applicable to literature as to the other arts. “Our hope,” he says, “with regard to the unity of taste in the future then is, that all sentimental or academical seekings after the ideal having been abandoned, momentary theories founded upon idiosyncratic or temporary partialities exploded, and nothing accepted but what is solid and positive, the scientific spirit shall make men progressively more and more conscious of these ‘bleibende Verhaltnisse,’ more and more capable of living in the whole; also, that in proportion as we gain a firmer hold upon our own place in the world, we shall come to comprehend with more instinctive certitude what is simple, natural, and honest, welcoming with gladness all artistic products that exhibit these qualities. The perception of the enlightened man will then be the task of a healthy person who has made himself acquainted with the laws of evolution in art and in society, and is able to test the excellence of work in any stage from immaturity to decadence by discerning what there is of truth, sincerity, and natural vigor in it.”

I

That is to say, as I understand, that moods and tastes and fashions change; people fancy now this and now that; but what is unpretentious and what is true is always beautiful and good, and nothing else is so. This is not saying that fantastic and monstrous and artificial things do not please; everybody knows that they do please immensely for a time, and then, after the lapse of a much longer time, they have the charm of the rococo. Nothing is more curious than the charm that fashion has. Fashion in women’s dress, almost every fashion, is somehow delightful, else it would never have been the fashion; but if any one will look through a collection of old fashion plates, he must own that most fashions have been ugly. A few, which could be readily instanced, have been very pretty, and even beautiful, but it is doubtful if these have pleased the greatest number of people. The ugly delights as well as the beautiful, and not merely because the ugly in fashion is associated with the young loveliness of the women who wear the ugly fashions, and wins a grace from them, not because the vast majority of mankind are tasteless, but for some cause that is not perhaps ascertainable. It is quite as likely to return in the fashions of our clothes and houses and furniture, and poetry and fiction and painting, as the beautiful, and it may be from an instinctive or a reasoned sense of this that some of the extreme naturalists have refused to make the old discrimination against it, or to regard the ugly as any less worthy of celebration in art than the beautiful; some of them, in fact, seem to regard it as rather more worthy, if anything. Possibly there is no absolutely ugly, no absolutely beautiful; or possibly the ugly contains always an element of the beautiful better adapted to the general appreciation than the more perfectly beautiful. This is a somewhat discouraging conjecture, but I offer it for no more than it is worth; and I do not pin my faith to the saying of one whom I heard denying, the other day, that a thing of beauty was a joy forever. He contended that Keats’s line should have read, “Some things of beauty are sometimes joys forever,” and that any assertion beyond this was too hazardous.

II

I should, indeed, prefer another line of Keats’s, if I were to profess any formulated creed, and should feel much safer with his “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” than even with my friend’s reformation of the more quoted verse. It brings us back to the solid ground taken by Mr. Symonds, which is not essentially different from that taken in the great Mr. Burke’s Essay on the Sublime and the Beautiful — a singularly modern book, considering how long ago it was wrote (as the great Mr. Steele would have written the participle a little longer ago), and full of a certain well-mannered and agreeable instruction. In some things it is of that droll little eighteenth-century world, when philosophy had got the neat little universe into the hollow of its hand, and knew just what it was, and what it was for; but it is quite without arrogance. “As for those called critics,” the author says, “they have generally sought the rule of the arts in the wrong place; they have sought among poems, pictures, engravings, statues, and buildings; but art can never give the rules that make an art. This is, I believe, the reason why artists in general, and poets principally, have been confined in so narrow a circle; they have been rather imitators of one another than of nature. Critics follow them, and therefore can do little as guides. I can judge but poorly of anything while I measure it by no other standard than itself. The true standard of the arts is in every man’s power; and an easy observation of the most common, sometimes of the meanest things, in nature will give the truest lights, where the greatest sagacity and industry that slights such observation must leave us in the dark, or, what is worse, amuse and mislead us by false lights.”

If this should happen to be true and it certainly commends itself to acceptance — it might portend an immediate danger to the vested interests of criticism, only that it was written a hundred years ago; and we shall probably have the “sagacity and industry that slights the observation” of nature long enough yet to allow most critics the time to learn some more useful trade than criticism as they pursue it. Nevertheless, I am in hopes that the communistic era in taste foreshadowed by Burke is approaching, and that it will occur within the lives of men now overawed by the foolish old superstition that literature and art are anything but the expression of life, and are to be judged by any other test than that of their fidelity to it. The time is coming, I hope, when each new author, each new artist, will be considered, not in his proportion to any other author or artist, but in his relation to the human nature, known to us all, which it is his privilege, his high duty, to interpret. “The true standard of the artist is in every man’s power” already, as Burke says; Michelangelo’s “light of the piazza,” the glance of the common eye, is and always was the best light on a statue; Goethe’s “boys and blackbirds” have in all ages been the real connoisseurs of berries; but hitherto the mass of common men have been afraid to apply their own simplicity, naturalness, and honesty to the appreciation of the beautiful. They have always cast about for the instruction of some one who professed to know better, and who browbeat wholesome common-sense into the self-distrust that ends in sophistication. They have fallen generally to the worst of this bad species, and have been “amused and misled” (how pretty that quaint old use of amuse is!) “by the false lights” of critical vanity and self-righteousness. They have been taught to compare what they see and what they read, not with the things that they have observed and known, but with the things that some other artist or writer has done. Especially if they have themselves the artistic impulse in any direction they are taught to form themselves, not upon life, but upon the masters who became masters only by forming themselves upon life. The seeds of death are planted in them, and they can produce only the still-born, the academic. They are not told to take their work into the public square and see if it seems true to the chance passer, but to test it by the work of the very men who refused and decried any other test of their own work. The young writer who attempts to report the phrase and carriage of every-day life, who tries to tell just how he has heard men talk and seen them look, is made to feel guilty of something low and unworthy by people who would like to have him show how Shakespeare’s men talked and looked, or Scott’s, or Thackeray’s, or Balzac’s, or Hawthorne’s, or Dickens’s; he is instructed to idealize his personages, that is, to take the life-likeness out of them, and put the book-likeness into them. He is approached in the spirit of the pedantry into which learning, much or little, always decays when it withdraws itself and stands apart from experience in an attitude of imagined superiority, and which would say with the same confidence to the scientist: “I see that you are looking at a grasshopper there which you have found in the grass, and I suppose you intend to describe it. Now don’t waste your time and sin against culture in that way. I’ve got a grasshopper here, which has been evolved at considerable pains and expense out of the grasshopper in general; in fact, it’s a type. It’s made up of wire and card-board, very prettily painted in a conventional tint, and it’s perfectly indestructible. It isn’t very much like a real grasshopper, but it’s a great deal nicer, and it’s served to represent the notion of a grasshopper ever since man emerged from barbarism. You may say that it’s artificial. Well, it is artificial; but then it’s ideal too; and what you want to do is to cultivate the ideal. You’ll find the books full of my kind of grasshopper, and scarcely a trace of yours in any of them. The thing that you are proposing to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn’t commonplace, for the very reason that it hasn’t been done before, you’ll have to admit that it’s photographic.”

As I said, I hope the time is coming when not only the artist, but the common, average man, who always “has the standard of the arts in his power,” will have also the courage to apply it, and will reject the ideal grasshopper wherever he finds it, in science, in literature, in art, because it is not “simple, natural, and honest,” because it is not like a real grasshopper. But I will own that I think the time is yet far off, and that the people who have been brought up on the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic card-board grasshopper, must die out before the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper can have a fair field. I am in no haste to compass the end of these good people, whom I find in the mean time very amusing. It is delightful to meet one of them, either in print or out of it — some sweet elderly lady or excellent gentleman whose youth was pastured on the literature of thirty or forty years ago — and to witness the confidence with which they preach their favorite authors as all the law and the prophets. They have commonly read little or nothing since, or, if they have, they have judged it by a standard taken from these authors, and never dreamed of judging it by nature; they are destitute of the documents in the case of the later writers; they suppose that Balzac was the beginning of realism, and that Zola is its wicked end; they are quite ignorant, but they are ready to talk you down, if you differ from them, with an assumption of knowledge sufficient for any occasion. The horror, the resentment, with which they receive any question of their literary saints is genuine; you descend at once very far in the moral and social scale, and anything short of offensive personality is too good for you; it is expressed to you that you are one to be avoided, and put down even a little lower than you have naturally fallen.

These worthy persons are not to blame; it is part of their intellectual mission to represent the petrifaction of taste, and to preserve an image of a smaller and cruder and emptier world than we now live in, a world which was feeling its way towards the simple, the natural, the honest, but was a good deal “amused and misled” by lights now no longer mistakable for heavenly luminaries. They belong to a time, just passing away, when certain authors were considered authorities in certain kinds, when they must be accepted entire and not questioned in any particular. Now we are beginning to see and to say that no author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent. These moments are not continuous with any authors in the past, and they are rare with all. Therefore I am not afraid to say now that the greatest classics are sometimes not at all great, and that we can profit by them only when we hold them, like our meanest contemporaries, to a strict accounting, and verify their work by the standard of the arts which we all have in our power, the simple, the natural, and the honest.

Those good people must always have a hero, an idol of some sort, and it is droll to find Balzac, who suffered from their sort such bitter scorn and hate for his realism while he was alive, now become a fetich in his turn, to be shaken in the faces of those who will not blindly worship him. But it is no new thing in the history of literature: whatever is established is sacred with those who do not think. At the beginning of the century, when romance was making the same fight against effete classicism which realism is making to-day against effete romanticism, the Italian poet Monti declared that “the romantic was the cold grave of the Beautiful,” just as the realistic is now supposed to be. The romantic of that day and the real of this are in certain degree the same. Romanticism then sought, as realism seeks now, to widen the bounds of sympathy, to level every barrier against aesthetic freedom, to escape from the paralysis of tradition. It exhausted itself in this impulse; and it remained for realism to assert that fidelity to experience and probability of motive are essential conditions of a great imaginative literature. It is not a new theory, but it has never before universally characterized literary endeavor. When realism becomes false to itself, when it heaps up facts merely, and maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish too. Every true realist instinctively knows this, and it is perhaps the reason why he is careful of every fact, and feels himself bound to express or to indicate its meaning at the risk of overmoralizing. In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells for destiny and character; nothing that God has made is contemptible. He cannot look upon human life and declare this thing or that thing unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry. He feels in every nerve the equality of things and the unity of men; his soul is exalted, not by vain shows and shadows and ideals, but by realities, in which alone the truth lives. In criticism it is his business to break the images of false gods and misshapen heroes, to take away the poor silly, toys that many grown people would still like to play with. He cannot keep terms with “Jack the Giant-killer” or “Puss-in-Boots,” under any name or in any place, even when they reappear as the convict Vautrec, or the Marquis de Montrivaut, or the Sworn Thirteen Noblemen. He must say to himself that Balzac, when he imagined these monsters, was not Balzac, he was Dumas; he was not realistic, he was romanticistic.

III

Such a critic will not respect Balzac’s good work the less for contemning his bad work. He will easily account for the bad work historically, and when he has recognized it, will trouble himself no further with it. In his view no living man is a type, but a character; now noble, now ignoble; now grand, now little; complex, full of vicissitude. He will not expect Balzac to be always Balzac, and will be perhaps even more attracted to the study of him when he was trying to be Balzac than when he had become so. In ‘Cesar Birotteau,’ for instance, he will be interested to note how Balzac stood at the beginning of the great things that have followed since in fiction. There is an interesting likeness between his work in this and Nicolas Gogol’s in ‘Dead Souls,’ which serves to illustrate the simultaneity of the literary movement in men of such widely separated civilizations and conditions. Both represent their characters with the touch of exaggeration which typifies; but in bringing his story to a close, Balzac employs a beneficence unknown to the Russian, and almost as universal and as apt as that which smiles upon the fortunes of the good in the Vicar of Wakefield. It is not enough to have rehabilitated Birotteau pecuniarily and socially; he must make him die triumphantly, spectacularly, of an opportune hemorrhage, in the midst of the festivities which celebrate his restoration to his old home. Before this happens, human nature has been laid under contribution right and left for acts of generosity towards the righteous bankrupt; even the king sends him six thousand francs. It is very pretty; it is touching, and brings the lump into the reader’s throat; but it is too much, and one perceives that Balzac lived too soon to profit by Balzac. The later men, especially the Russians, have known how to forbear the excesses of analysis, to withhold the weakly recurring descriptive and caressing epithets, to let the characters suffice for themselves. All this does not mean that ‘Cesar Birotteau’ is not a beautiful and pathetic story, full of shrewdly considered knowledge of men, and of a good art struggling to free itself from self-consciousness. But it does mean that Balzac, when he wrote it, was under the burden of the very traditions which he has helped fiction to throw off. He felt obliged to construct a mechanical plot, to surcharge his characters, to moralize openly and baldly; he permitted himself to “sympathize” with certain of his people, and to point out others for the abhorrence of his readers. This is not so bad in him as it would be in a novelist of our day. It is simply primitive and inevitable, and he is not to be judged by it.

IV

In the beginning of any art even the most gifted worker must be crude in his methods, and we ought to keep this fact always in mind when we turn, say, from the purblind worshippers of Scott to Scott himself, and recognize that he often wrote a style cumbrous and diffuse; that he was tediously analytical where the modern novelist is dramatic, and evolved his characters by means of long-winded explanation and commentary; that, except in the case of his lower-class personages, he made them talk as seldom man and never woman talked; that he was tiresomely descriptive; that on the simplest occasions he went about half a mile to express a thought that could be uttered in ten paces across lots; and that he trusted his readers’ intuitions so little that he was apt to rub in his appeals to them. He was probably right: the generation which he wrote for was duller than this; slower-witted, aesthetically untrained, and in maturity not so apprehensive of an artistic intention as the children of to-day. All this is not saying Scott was not a great man; he was a great man, and a very great novelist as compared with the novelists who went before him. He can still amuse young people, but they ought to be instructed how false and how mistaken he often is, with his mediaeval ideals, his blind Jacobitism, his intense devotion to aristocracy and royalty; his acquiescence in the division of men into noble and ignoble, patrician and plebeian, sovereign and subject, as if it were the law of God; for all which, indeed, he is not to blame as he would be if he were one of our contemporaries. Something of this is true of another master, greater than Scott in being less romantic, and inferior in being more German, namely, the great Goethe himself. He taught us, in novels otherwise now antiquated, and always full of German clumsiness, that it was false to good art — which is never anything but the reflection of life — to pursue and round the career of the persons introduced, whom he often allowed to appear and disappear in our knowledge as people in the actual world do. This is a lesson which the writers able to profit by it can never be too grateful for; and it is equally a benefaction to readers; but there is very little else in the conduct of the Goethean novels which is in advance of their time; this remains almost their sole contribution to the science of fiction. They are very primitive in certain characteristics, and unite with their calm, deep insight, an amusing helplessness in dramatization. “Wilhelm retired to his room, and indulged in the following reflections,” is a mode of analysis which would not be practised nowadays; and all that fancifulness of nomenclature in Wilhelm Meister is very drolly sentimental and feeble. The adventures with robbers seem as if dreamed out of books of chivalry, and the tendency to allegorization affects one like an endeavor on the author’s part to escape from the unrealities which he must have felt harassingly, German as he was. Mixed up with the shadows and illusions are honest, wholesome, every-day people, who have the air of wandering homelessly about among them, without definite direction; and the mists are full of a luminosity which, in spite of them, we know for common-sense and poetry. What is useful in any review of Goethe’s methods is the recognition of the fact, which it must bring, that the greatest master cannot produce a masterpiece in a new kind. The novel was too recently invented in Goethe’s day not to be, even in his hands, full of the faults of apprentice work.

V.

In fact, a great master may sin against the “modesty of nature” in many ways, and I have felt this painfully in reading Balzac’s romance — it is not worthy the name of novel— ‘Le Pere Goriot,’ which is full of a malarial restlessness, wholly alien to healthful art. After that exquisitely careful and truthful setting of his story in the shabby boarding-house, he fills the scene with figures jerked about by the exaggerated passions and motives of the stage. We cannot have a cynic reasonably wicked, disagreeable, egoistic; we must have a lurid villain of melodrama, a disguised convict, with a vast criminal organization at his command, and

       “So dyed double red”

in deed and purpose that he lights up the faces of the horrified spectators with his glare. A father fond of unworthy children, and leading a life of self-denial for their sake, as may probably and pathetically be, is not enough; there must be an imbecile, trembling dotard, willing to promote even the liaisons of his daughters to give them happiness and to teach the sublimity of the paternal instinct. The hero cannot sufficiently be a selfish young fellow, with alternating impulses of greed and generosity; he must superfluously intend a career of iniquitous splendor, and be swerved from it by nothing but the most cataclysmal interpositions. It can be said that without such personages the plot could not be transacted; but so much the worse for the plot. Such a plot had no business to be; and while actions so unnatural are imagined, no mastery can save fiction from contempt with those who really think about it. To Balzac it can be forgiven, not only because in his better mood he gave us such biographies as ‘Eugenie Grandet,’ but because he wrote at a time when fiction was just beginning to verify the externals of life, to portray faithfully the outside of men and things. It was still held that in order to interest the reader the characters must be moved by the old romantic ideals; we were to be taught that “heroes” and “heroines” existed all around us, and that these abnormal beings needed only to be discovered in their several humble disguises, and then we should see every-day people actuated by the fine frenzy of the creatures of the poets. How false that notion was, few but the critics, who are apt to be rather belated, need now be told. Some of these poor fellows, however, still contend that it ought to be done, and that human feelings and motives, as God made them and as men know them, are not good enough for novel-readers.

This is more explicable than would appear at first glance. The critics — and in speaking of them one always modestly leaves one’s self out of the count, for some reason — when they are not elders ossified in tradition, are apt to be young people, and young people are necessarily conservative in their tastes and theories. They have the tastes and theories of their instructors, who perhaps caught the truth of their day, but whose routine life has been alien to any other truth. There is probably no chair of literature in this country from which the principles now shaping the literary expression of every civilized people are not denounced and confounded with certain objectionable French novels, or which teaches young men anything of the universal impulse which has given us the work, not only of Zola, but of Tourguenief and Tolstoy in Russia, of Bjornson and Ibsen in Norway, of Valdes and Galdos in Spain, of Verga in Italy. Till these younger critics have learned to think as well as to write for themselves they will persist in heaving a sigh, more and more perfunctory, for the truth as it was in Sir Walter, and as it was in Dickens and in Hawthorne. Presently all will have been changed; they will have seen the new truth in larger and larger degree; and when it shall have become the old truth, they will perhaps see it all.

VI.

In the mean time the average of criticism is not wholly bad with us. To be sure, the critic sometimes appears in the panoply of the savages whom we have supplanted on this continent; and it is hard to believe that his use of the tomahawk and the scalping-knife is a form of conservative surgery. It is still his conception of his office that he should assail those who differ with him in matters of taste or opinion; that he must be rude with those he does not like. It is too largely his superstition that because he likes a thing it is good, and because he dislikes a thing it is bad; the reverse is quite possibly the case, but he is yet indefinitely far from knowing that in affairs of taste his personal preference enters very little. Commonly he has no principles, but only an assortment of prepossessions for and against; and this otherwise very perfect character is sometimes uncandid to the verge of dishonesty. He seems not to mind misstating the position of any one he supposes himself to disagree with, and then attacking him for what he never said, or even implied; he thinks this is droll, and appears not to suspect that it is immoral. He is not tolerant; he thinks it a virtue to be intolerant; it is hard for him to understand that the same thing may be admirable at one time and deplorable at another; and that it is really his business to classify and analyze the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel, or an essay that does not please him as in the botanist’s grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify the species and then explain how and where the specimen is imperfect and irregular. If he could once acquire this simple idea of his duty he would be much more agreeable company than he now is, and a more useful member of society; though considering the hard conditions under which he works, his necessity of writing hurriedly from an imperfect examination of far more books, on a greater variety of subjects, than he can even hope to read, the average American critic — the ordinary critic of commerce, so to speak — is even now very, well indeed. Collectively he is more than this; for the joint effect of our criticism is the pretty thorough appreciation of any book submitted to it.

VII.

The misfortune rather than the fault of our individual critic is that he is the heir of the false theory and bad manners of the English school. The theory of that school has apparently been that almost any person of glib and lively expression is competent to write of almost any branch of polite literature; its manners are what we know. The American, whom it has largely formed, is by nature very glib and very lively, and commonly his criticism, viewed as imaginative work, is more agreeable than that of the Englishman; but it is, like the art of both countries, apt to be amateurish. In some degree our authors have freed themselves from English models; they have gained some notion of the more serious work of the Continent: but it is still the ambition of the American critic to write like the English critic, to show his wit if not his learning, to strive to eclipse the author under review rather than illustrate him. He has not yet caught on to the fact that it is really no part of his business to display himself, but that it is altogether his duty to place a book in such a light that the reader shall know its class, its function, its character. The vast good-nature of our people preserves us from the worst effects of this criticism without principles. Our critic, at his lowest, is rarely malignant; and when he is rude or untruthful, it is mostly without truculence; I suspect that he is often offensive without knowing that he is so. Now and then he acts simply under instruction from higher authority, and denounces because it is the tradition of his publication to do so. In other cases the critic is obliged to support his journal’s repute for severity, or for wit, or for morality, though he may himself be entirely amiable, dull, and wicked; this necessity more or less warps his verdicts.

The worst is that he is personal, perhaps because it is so easy and so natural to be personal, and so instantly attractive. In this respect our criticism has not improved from the accession of numbers of ladies to its ranks, though we still hope so much from women in our politics when they shall come to vote. They have come to write, and with the effect to increase the amount of little-digging, which rather superabounded in our literary criticism before. They “know what they like” — that pernicious maxim of those who do not know what they ought to like and they pass readily from censuring an author’s performance to censuring him. They bring a stock of lively misapprehensions and prejudices to their work; they would rather have heard about than known about a book; and they take kindly to the public wish to be amused rather than edified. But neither have they so much harm in them: they, too, are more ignorant than malevolent.

VIII.

Our criticism is disabled by the unwillingness of the critic to learn from an author, and his readiness to mistrust him. A writer passes his whole life in fitting himself for a certain kind of performance; the critic does not ask why, or whether the performance is good or bad, but if he does not like the kind, he instructs the writer to go off and do some other sort of thing — usually the sort that has been done already, and done sufficiently. If he could once understand that a man who has written the book he dislikes, probably knows infinitely more about its kind and his own fitness for doing it than any one else, the critic might learn something, and might help the reader to learn; but by putting himself in a false position, a position of superiority, he is of no use. He is not to suppose that an author has committed an offence against him by writing the kind of book he does not like; he will be far more profitably employed on behalf of the reader in finding out whether they had better not both like it. Let him conceive of an author as not in any wise on trial before him, but as a reflection of this or that aspect of life, and he will not be tempted to browbeat him or bully him.

The critic need not be impolite even to the youngest and weakest author. A little courtesy, or a good deal, a constant perception of the fact that a book is not a misdemeanor, a decent self-respect that must forbid the civilized man the savage pleasure of wounding, are what I would ask for our criticism, as something which will add sensibly to its present lustre.

IX.

I would have my fellow-critics consider what they are really in the world for. The critic must perceive, if he will question himself more carefully, that his office is mainly to ascertain facts and traits of literature, not to invent or denounce them; to discover principles, not to establish them; to report, not to create.

It is so much easier to say that you like this or dislike that, than to tell why one thing is, or where another thing comes from, that many flourishing critics will have to go out of business altogether if the scientific method comes in, for then the critic will have to know something besides his own mind. He will have to know something of the laws of that mind, and of its generic history.

The history of all literature shows that even with the youngest and weakest author criticism is quite powerless against his will to do his own work in his own way; and if this is the case in the green wood, how much more in the dry! It has been thought by the sentimentalist that criticism, if it cannot cure, can at least kill, and Keats was long alleged in proof of its efficacy in this sort. But criticism neither cured nor killed Keats, as we all now very well know. It wounded, it cruelly hurt him, no doubt; and it is always in the power of the critic to give pain to the author — the meanest critic to the greatest author — for no one can help feeling a rudeness. But every literary movement has been violently opposed at the start, and yet never stayed in the least, or arrested, by criticism; every author has been condemned for his virtues, but in no wise changed by it. In the beginning he reads the critics; but presently perceiving that he alone makes or mars himself, and that they have no instruction for him, he mostly leaves off reading them, though he is always glad of their kindness or grieved by their harshness when he chances upon it. This, I believe, is the general experience, modified, of course, by exceptions.

Then, are we critics of no use in the world? I should not like to think that, though I am not quite ready to define our use. More than one sober thinker is inclining at present to suspect that aesthetically or specifically we are of no use, and that we are only useful historically; that we may register laws, but not enact them. I am not quite prepared to admit that aesthetic criticism is useless, though in view of its futility in any given instance it is hard to deny that it is so. It certainly seems as useless against a book that strikes the popular fancy, and prospers on in spite of condemnation by the best critics, as it is against a book which does not generally please, and which no critical favor can make acceptable. This is so common a phenomenon that I wonder it has never hitherto suggested to criticism that its point of view was altogether mistaken, and that it was really necessary to judge books not as dead things, but as living things — things which have an influence and a power irrespective of beauty and wisdom, and merely as expressions of actuality in thought and feeling. Perhaps criticism has a cumulative and final effect; perhaps it does some good we do not know of. It apparently does not affect the author directly, but it may reach him through the reader. It may in some cases enlarge or diminish his audience for a while, until he has thoroughly measured and tested his own powers. If criticism is to affect literature at all, it must be through the writers who have newly left the starting-point, and are reasonably uncertain of the race, not with those who have won it again and again in their own way.

X.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that the crudest expression of any creative art is better than the finest comment upon it. I have sometimes suspected that more thinking, more feeling certainly, goes to the creation of a poor novel than to the production of a brilliant criticism; and if any novel of our time fails to live a hundred years, will any censure of it live? Who can endure to read old reviews? One can hardly read them if they are in praise of one’s own books.

The author neglected or overlooked need not despair for that reason, if he will reflect that criticism can neither make nor unmake authors; that there have not been greater books since criticism became an art than there were before; that in fact the greatest books seem to have come much earlier.

That which criticism seems most certainly to have done is to have put a literary consciousness into books unfelt in the early masterpieces, but unfelt now only in the books of men whose lives have been passed in activities, who have been used to employing language as they would have employed any implement, to effect an object, who have regarded a thing to be said as in no wise different from a thing to be done. In this sort I have seen no modern book so unconscious as General Grant’s ‘Personal Memoirs.’ The author’s one end and aim is to get the facts out in words. He does not cast about for phrases, but takes the word, whatever it is, that will best give his meaning, as if it were a man or a force of men for the accomplishment of a feat of arms. There is not a moment wasted in preening and prettifying, after the fashion of literary men; there is no thought of style, and so the style is good as it is in the ‘Book of Chronicles,’ as it is in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ with a peculiar, almost plebeian, plainness at times. There is no more attempt at dramatic effect than there is at ceremonious pose; things happen in that tale of a mighty war as they happened in the mighty war itself, without setting, without artificial reliefs one after another, as if they were all of one quality and degree. Judgments are delivered with the same unimposing quiet; no awe surrounds the tribunal except that which comes from the weight and justice of the opinions; it is always an unaffected, unpretentious man who is talking; and throughout he prefers to wear the uniform of a private, with nothing of the general about him but the shoulder-straps, which he sometimes forgets.

XI.

Canon Fairfax,’s opinions of literary criticism are very much to my liking, perhaps because when I read them I found them so like my own, already delivered in print. He tells the critics that “they are in no sense the legislators of literature, barely even its judges and police”; and he reminds them of Mr. Ruskin’s saying that “a bad critic is probably the most mischievous person in the world,” though a sense of their relative proportion to the whole of life would perhaps acquit the worst among them of this extreme of culpability. A bad critic is as bad a thing as can be, but, after all, his mischief does not carry very far. Otherwise it would be mainly the conventional books and not the original books which would survive; for the censor who imagines himself a law-giver can give law only to the imitative and never to the creative mind. Criticism has condemned whatever was, from time to time, fresh and vital in literature; it has always fought the new good thing in behalf of the old good thing; it has invariably fostered and encouraged the tame, the trite, the negative. Yet upon the whole it is the native, the novel, the positive that has survived in literature. Whereas, if bad criticism were the most mischievous thing in the world, in the full implication of the words, it must have been the tame, the trite, the negative, that survived.

Bad criticism is mischievous enough, however; and I think that much if not most current criticism as practised among the English and Americans is bad, is falsely principled, and is conditioned in evil. It is falsely principled because it is unprincipled, or without principles; and it is conditioned in evil because it is almost wholly anonymous. At the best its opinions are not conclusions from certain easily verifiable principles, but are effects from the worship of certain models. They are in so far quite worthless, for it is the very nature of things that the original mind cannot conform to models; it has its norm within itself; it can work only in its own way, and by its self-given laws. Criticism does not inquire whether a work is true to life, but tacitly or explicitly compares it with models, and tests it by them. If literary art travelled by any such road as criticism would have it go, it would travel in a vicious circle, and would arrive only at the point of departure. Yet this is the course that criticism must always prescribe when it attempts to give laws. Being itself artificial, it cannot conceive of the original except as the abnormal. It must altogether reconceive its office before it can be of use to literature. It must reduce this to the business of observing, recording, and comparing; to analyzing the material before it, and then synthetizing its impressions. Even then, it is not too much to say that literature as an art could get on perfectly well without it. Just as many good novels, poems, plays, essays, sketches, would be written if there were no such thing as criticism in the literary world, and no more bad ones.

But it will be long before criticism ceases to imagine itself a controlling force, to give itself airs of sovereignty, and to issue decrees. As it exists it is mostly a mischief, though not the greatest mischief; but it may be greatly ameliorated in character and softened in manner by the total abolition of anonymity.

I think it would be safe to say that in no other relation of life is so much brutality permitted by civilized society as in the criticism of literature and the arts. Canon Farrar is quite right in reproaching literary criticism with the uncandor of judging an author without reference to his aims; with pursuing certain writers from spite and prejudice, and mere habit; with misrepresenting a book by quoting a phrase or passage apart from the context; with magnifying misprints and careless expressions into important faults; with abusing an author for his opinions; with base and personal motives.

Every writer of experience knows that certain critical journals will condemn his work without regard to its quality, even if it has never been his fortune to learn, as one author did from a repentent reviewer, that in a journal pretending to literary taste his books were given out for review with the caution, “Remember that the Clarion is opposed to Mr. Blank’s books.”

The final conclusion appears to be that the man, or even the young lady, who is given a gun, and told to shoot at some passer from behind a hedge, is placed in circumstances of temptation almost too strong for human nature.

XII.

As I have already intimated, I doubt the more lasting effects of unjust criticism. It is no part of my belief that Keats’s fame was long delayed by it, or Wordsworth’s, or Browning’s. Something unwonted, unexpected, in the quality of each delayed his recognition; each was not only a poet, he was a revolution, a new order of things, to which the critical perceptions and habitudes had painfully to adjust themselves: But I have no question of the gross and stupid injustice with which these great men were used, and of the barbarization of the public mind by the sight of the wrong inflicted on them with impunity. This savage condition still persists in the toleration of anonymous criticism, an abuse that ought to be as extinct as the torture of witnesses. It is hard enough to treat a fellow-author with respect even when one has to address him, name to name, upon the same level, in plain day; swooping down upon him in the dark, panoplied in the authority of a great journal, it is impossible. Every now and then some idealist comes forward and declares that you should say nothing in criticism of a man’s book which you would not say of it to his face. But I am afraid this is asking too much. I am afraid it would put an end to all criticism; and that if it were practised literature would be left to purify itself. I have no doubt literature would do this; but in such a state of things there would be no provision for the critics. We ought not to destroy critics, we ought to reform them, or rather transform them, or turn them from the assumption of authority to a realization of their true function in the civilized state. They are no worse at heart, probably, than many others, and there are probably good husbands and tender fathers, loving daughters and careful mothers, among them.

It is evident to any student of human nature that the critic who is obliged to sign his review will be more careful of an author’s feelings than he would if he could intangibly and invisibly deal with him as the representative of a great journal. He will be loath to have his name connected with those perversions and misstatements of an author’s meaning in which the critic now indulges without danger of being turned out of honest company. He will be in some degree forced to be fair and just with a book he dislikes; he will not wish to misrepresent it when his sin can be traced directly to him in person; he will not be willing to voice the prejudice of a journal which is “opposed to the books” of this or that author; and the journal itself, when it is no longer responsible for the behavior of its critic, may find it interesting and profitable to give to an author his innings when he feels wronged by a reviewer and desires to right himself; it may even be eager to offer him the opportunity. We shall then, perhaps, frequently witness the spectacle of authors turning upon their reviewers, and improving their manners and morals by confronting them in public with the errors they may now commit with impunity. Many an author smarts under injuries and indignities which he might resent to the advantage of literature and civilization, if he were not afraid of being browbeaten by the journal whose nameless critic has outraged him.

The public is now of opinion that it involves loss of dignity to creative talent to try to right itself if wronged, but here we are without the requisite statistics. Creative talent may come off with all the dignity it went in with, and it may accomplish a very good work in demolishing criticism.

In any other relation of life the man who thinks himself wronged tries to right himself, violently, if he is a mistaken man, and lawfully if he is a wise man or a rich one, which is practically the same thing. But the author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, whose book, play, picture, statue, has been unfairly dealt with, as he believes, must make no effort to right himself with the public; he must bear his wrong in silence; he is even expected to grin and bear it, as if it were funny. Every body understands that it is not funny to him, not in the least funny, but everybody says that he cannot make an effort to get the public to take his point of view without loss of dignity. This is very odd, but it is the fact, and I suppose that it comes from the feeling that the author, dramatist, painter, sculptor, has already said the best he can for his side in his book, play, picture, statue. This is partly true, and yet if he wishes to add something more to prove the critic wrong, I do not see how his attempt to do so should involve loss of dignity. The public, which is so jealous for his dignity, does not otherwise use him as if he were a very great and invaluable creature; if he fails, it lets him starve like any one else. I should say that he lost dignity or not as he behaved, in his effort to right himself, with petulance or with principle. If he betrayed a wounded vanity, if he impugned the motives and accused the lives of his critics, I should certainly feel that he was losing dignity; but if he temperately examined their theories, and tried to show where they were mistaken, I think he would not only gain dignity, but would perform a very useful work.

XIII.

I would beseech the literary critics of our country to disabuse themselves of the mischievous notion that they are essential to the progress of literature in the way critics have imagined. Canon Farrar confesses that with the best will in the world to profit by the many criticisms of his books, he has never profited in the least by any of them; and this is almost the universal experience of authors. It is not always the fault of the critics. They sometimes deal honestly and fairly by a book, and not so often they deal adequately. But in making a book, if it is at all a good book, the author has learned all that is knowable about it, and every strong point and every weak point in it, far more accurately than any one else can possibly learn them. He has learned to do better than well for the future; but if his book is bad, he cannot be taught anything about it from the outside. It will perish; and if he has not the root of literature in him, he will perish as an author with it. But what is it that gives tendency in art, then? What is it makes people like this at one time, and that at another? Above all, what makes a better fashion change for a worse; how can the ugly come to be preferred to the beautiful; in other words, how can an art decay?

This question came up in my mind lately with regard to English fiction and its form, or rather its formlessness. How, for instance, could people who had once known the simple verity, the refined perfection of Miss Austere, enjoy, anything less refined and less perfect?

With her example before them, why should not English novelists have gone on writing simply, honestly, artistically, ever after? One would think it must have been impossible for them to do otherwise, if one did not remember, say, the lamentable behavior of the actors who support Mr. Jefferson, and their theatricality in the very presence of his beautiful naturalness. It is very difficult, that simplicity, and nothing is so hard as to be honest, as the reader, if he has ever happened to try it, must know. “The big bow-wow I can do myself, like anyone going,” said Scott, but he owned that the exquisite touch of Miss Austere was denied him; and it seems certainly to have been denied in greater or less measure to all her successors. But though reading and writing come by nature, as Dogberry justly said, a taste in them may be cultivated, or once cultivated, it may be preserved; and why was it not so among those poor islanders? One does not ask such things in order to be at the pains of answering them one’s self, but with the hope that some one else will take the trouble to do so, and I propose to be rather a silent partner in the enterprise, which I shall leave mainly to Senor Armando Palacio Valdes. This delightful author will, however, only be able to answer my question indirectly from the essay on fiction with which he prefaces one of his novels, the charming story of ‘The Sister of San Sulpizio,’ and I shall have some little labor in fitting his saws to my instances. It is an essay which I wish every one intending to read, or even to write, a novel, might acquaint himself with; for it contains some of the best and clearest things which have been said of the art of fiction in a time when nearly all who practise it have turned to talk about it.

Senor Valdes is a realist, but a realist according to his own conception of realism; and he has some words of just censure for the French naturalists, whom he finds unnecessarily, and suspects of being sometimes even mercenarily, nasty. He sees the wide difference that passes between this naturalism and the realism of the English and Spanish; and he goes somewhat further than I should go in condemning it. “The French naturalism represents only a moment, and an insignificant part of life.” . . . It is characterized by sadness and narrowness. The prototype of this literature is the ‘Madame Bovary’ of Flaubert. I am an admirer of this novelist, and especially of this novel; but often in thinking of it I have said, How dreary would literature be if it were no more than this! There is something antipathetic and gloomy and limited in it, as there is in modern French life; but this seems to me exactly the best possible reason for its being. I believe with Senor Valdes that “no literature can live long without joy,” not because of its mistaken aesthetics, however, but because no civilization can live long without joy. The expression of French life will change when French life changes; and French naturalism is better at its worst than French unnaturalism at its best. “No one,” as Senor Valdes truly says, “can rise from the perusal of a naturalistic book . . . without a vivid desire to escape” from the wretched world depicted in it, “and a purpose, more or less vague, of helping to better the lot and morally elevate the abject beings who figure in it. Naturalistic art, then, is not immoral in itself, for then it would not merit the name of art; for though it is not the business of art to preach morality, still I think that, resting on a divine and spiritual principle, like the idea of the beautiful, it is perforce moral. I hold much more immoral other books which, under a glamour of something spiritual and beautiful and sublime, portray the vices in which we are allied to the beasts. Such, for example, are the works of Octave Feuillet, Arsene Houssaye, Georges Ohnet, and other contemporary novelists much in vogue among the higher classes of society.”

But what is this idea of the beautiful which art rests upon, and so becomes moral? “The man of our time,” says Senor Valdes, “wishes to know everything and enjoy everything: he turns the objective of a powerful equatorial towards the heavenly spaces where gravitates the infinitude of the stars, just as he applies the microscope to the infinitude of the smallest insects; for their laws are identical. His experience, united with intuition, has convinced him that in nature there is neither great nor small; all is equal. All is equally grand, all is equally just, all is equally beautiful, because all is equally divine.” But beauty, Senor Valdes explains, exists in the human spirit, and is the beautiful effect which it receives from the true meaning of things; it does not matter what the things are, and it is the function of the artist who feels this effect to impart it to others. I may add that there is no joy in art except this perception of the meaning of things and its communication; when you have felt it, and portrayed it in a poem, a symphony, a novel, a statue, a picture, an edifice, you have fulfilled the purpose for which you were born an artist.

The reflection of exterior nature in the individual spirit, Senor Valdes believes to be the fundamental of art. “To say, then, that the artist must not copy but create is nonsense, because he can in no wise copy, and in no wise create. He who sets deliberately about modifying nature, shows that he has not felt her beauty, and therefore cannot make others feel it. The puerile desire which some artists without genius manifest to go about selecting in nature, not what seems to them beautiful, but what they think will seem beautiful to others, and rejecting what may displease them, ordinarily produces cold and insipid works. For, instead of exploring the illimitable fields of reality, they cling to the forms invented by other artists who have succeeded, and they make statues of statues, poems of poems, novels of novels. It is entirely false that the great romantic, symbolic, or classic poets modified nature; such as they have expressed her they felt her; and in this view they are as much realists as ourselves. In like manner if in the realistic tide that now bears us on there are some spirits who feel nature in another way, in the romantic way, or the classic way, they would not falsify her in expressing her so. Only those falsify her who, without feeling classic wise or romantic wise, set about being classic or romantic, wearisomely reproducing the models of former ages; and equally those who, without sharing the sentiment of realism, which now prevails, force themselves to be realists merely to follow the fashion.”

The pseudo-realists, in fact, are the worse offenders, to my thinking, for they sin against the living; whereas those who continue to celebrate the heroic adventures of “Puss-in-Boots” and the hair-breadth escapes of “Tom Thumb,” under various aliases, only cast disrespect upon the immortals who have passed beyond these noises.

XIV.

“The principal cause,” our Spaniard says, “of the decadence of contemporary literature is found, to my thinking, in the vice which has been very graphically called effectism, or the itch of awaking at all cost in the reader vivid and violent emotions, which shall do credit to the invention and originality of the writer. This vice has its roots in human nature itself, and more particularly in that of the artist; he has always some thing feminine in him, which tempts him to coquet with the reader, and display qualities that he thinks will astonish him, as women laugh for no reason, to show their teeth when they have them white and small and even, or lift their dresses to show their feet when there is no mud in the street . . . . What many writers nowadays wish, is to produce an effect, grand and immediate, to play the part of geniuses. For this they have learned that it is only necessary to write exaggerated works in any sort, since the vulgar do not ask that they shall be quietly made to think and feel, but that they shall be startled; and among the vulgar, of course, I include the great part of those who write literary criticism, and who constitute the worst vulgar, since they teach what they do not know .. . . There are many persons who suppose that the highest proof an artist can give of his fantasy is the invention of a complicated plot, spiced with perils, surprises, and suspenses; and that anything else is the sign of a poor and tepid imagination. And not only people who seem cultivated, but are not so, suppose this, but there are sensible persons, and even sagacious and intelligent critics, who sometimes allow themselves to be hoodwinked by the dramatic mystery and the surprising and fantastic scenes of a novel. They own it is all false; but they admire the imagination, what they call the ‘power’ of the author. Very well; all I have to say is that the ‘power’ to dazzle with strange incidents, to entertain with complicated plots and impossible characters, now belongs to some hundreds of writers in Europe; while there are not much above a dozen who know how to interest with the ordinary events of life, and by the portrayal of characters truly human. If the former is a talent, it must be owned that it is much commoner than the latter . . . . If we are to rate novelists according to their fecundity, or the riches of their invention, we must put Alexander Dumas above Cervantes. Cervantes wrote a novel with the simplest plot, without belying much or little the natural and logical course of events. This novel which was called ‘Don Quixote,’ is perhaps the greatest work of human wit. Very well; the same Cervantes, mischievously influenced afterwards by the ideas of the vulgar, who were then what they are now and always will be, attempted to please them by a work giving a lively proof of his inventive talent, and wrote the ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ where the strange incidents, the vivid complications, the surprises, the pathetic scenes, succeed one another so rapidly and constantly that it really fatigues you . . . . But in spite of this flood of invention, imagine,” says Seflor Valdes, “the place that Cervantes would now occupy in the heaven of art, if he had never written ‘Don Quixote,’” but only ‘Persiles and Sigismund!’

From the point of view of modern English criticism, which likes to be melted, and horrified, and astonished, and blood-curdled, and goose- fleshed, no less than to be “chippered up” in fiction, Senor Valdes were indeed incorrigible. Not only does he despise the novel of complicated plot, and everywhere prefer ‘Don Quixote’ to ‘Persiles and Sigismunda,’ but he has a lively contempt for another class of novels much in favor with the gentilities of all countries. He calls their writers “novelists of the world,” and he says that more than any others they have the rage of effectism. “They do not seek to produce effect by novelty and invention in plot . . . they seek it in character. For this end they begin by deliberately falsifying human feelings, giving them a paradoxical appearance completely inadmissible . . . . Love that disguises itself as hate, incomparable energy under the cloak of weakness, virginal innocence under the aspect of malice and impudence, wit masquerading as folly, etc., etc. By this means they hope to make an effect of which they are incapable through the direct, frank, and conscientious study of character.” He mentions Octave Feuillet as the greatest offender in this sort among the French, and Bulwer among the English; but Dickens is full of it (Boffin in ‘Our Mutual Friend’ will suffice for all example), and most drama is witness of the result of this effectism when allowed full play.

But what, then, if he is not pleased with Dumas, or with the effectists who delight genteel people at all the theatres, and in most of the romances, what, I ask, will satisfy this extremely difficult Spanish gentleman? He would pretend, very little. Give him simple, lifelike character; that is all he wants. “For me, the only condition of character is that it be human, and that is enough. If I wished to know what was human, I should study humanity.”

But, Senor Valdes, Senor Valdes! Do not you know that this small condition of yours implies in its fulfilment hardly less than the gift of the whole earth? You merely ask that the character portrayed in fiction be human; and you suggest that the novelist should study humanity if he would know whether his personages are human. This appears to me the cruelest irony, the most sarcastic affectation of humility. If you had asked that character in fiction be superhuman, or subterhuman, or preterhuman, or intrahuman, and had bidden the novelist go, not to humanity, but the humanities, for the proof of his excellence, it would have been all very easy. The books are full of those “creations,” of every pattern, of all ages, of both sexes; and it is so much handier to get at books than to get at Men; and when you have portrayed “passion” instead of feeling, and used “power” instead of common-sense, and shown yourself a “genius” instead of an artist, the applause is so prompt and the glory so cheap, that really anything else seems wickedly wasteful of one’s time. One may not make one’s reader enjoy or suffer nobly, but one may give him the kind of pleasure that arises from conjuring, or from a puppet-show, or a modern stage-play, and leave him, if he is an old fool, in the sort of stupor that comes from hitting the pipe; or if he is a young fool, half crazed with the spectacle of qualities and impulses like his own in an apotheosis of achievement and fruition far beyond any earthly experience.

But apparently Senor Valdes would not think this any great artistic result. “Things that appear ugliest in reality to the spectator who is not an artist, are transformed into beauty and poetry when the spirit of the artist possesses itself of them. We all take part every day in a thousand domestic scenes, every day we see a thousand pictures in life, that do not make any impression upon us, or if they make any it is one of repugnance; but let the novelist come, and without betraying the truth, but painting them as they appear to his vision, he produces a most interesting work, whose perusal enchants us. That which in life left us indifferent, or repelled us, in art delights us. Why? Simply because the artist has made us see the idea that resides in it. Let not the novelists, then, endeavor to add anything to reality, to turn it and twist it, to restrict it. Since nature has endowed them with this precious gift of discovering ideas in things, their work will be beautiful if they paint these as they appear. But if the reality does not impress them, in vain will they strive to make their work impress others.”

XV.

Which brings us again, after this long way about, to Jane Austen and her novels, and that troublesome question about them. She was great and they were beautiful, because she and they were honest, and dealt with nature nearly a hundred years ago as realism deals with it to-day. Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material, and Jane Austen was the first and the last of the English novelists to treat material with entire truthfulness. Because she did this, she remains the most artistic of the English novelists, and alone worthy to be matched with the great Scandinavian and Slavic and Latin artists. It is not a question of intellect, or not wholly that. The English have mind enough; but they have not taste enough; or, rather, their taste has been perverted by their false criticism, which is based upon personal preference, and not upon, principle; which instructs a man to think that what he likes is good, instead of teaching him first to distinguish what is good before he likes it. The art of fiction, as Jane Austen knew it, declined from her through Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens, and Charlotte Bronte, and Thackeray, and even George Eliot, because the mania of romanticism had seized upon all Europe, and these great writers could not escape the taint of their time; but it has shown few signs of recovery in England, because English criticism, in the presence of the Continental masterpieces, has continued provincial and special and personal, and has expressed a love and a hate which had to do with the quality of the artist rather than the character of his work. It was inevitable that in their time the English romanticists should treat, as Senor Valdes says, “the barbarous customs of the Middle Ages, softening and distorting them, as Walter Scott and his kind did;” that they should “devote themselves to falsifying nature, refining and subtilizing sentiment, and modifying psychology after their own fancy,” like Bulwer and Dickens, as well as like Rousseau and Madame de Stael, not to mention Balzac, the worst of all that sort at his worst. This was the natural course of the disease; but it really seems as if it were their criticism that was to blame for the rest: not, indeed, for the performance of this writer or that, for criticism can never affect the actual doing of a thing; but for the esteem in which this writer or that is held through the perpetuation of false ideals. The only observer of English middle-class life since Jane Austen worthy to be named with her was not George Eliot, who was first ethical and then artistic, who transcended her in everything but the form and method most essential to art, and there fell hopelessly below her. It was Anthony Trollope who was most like her in simple honesty and instinctive truth, as unphilosophized as the light of common day; but he was so warped from a wholesome ideal as to wish at times to be like Thackeray, and to stand about in his scene, talking it over with his hands in his pockets, interrupting the action, and spoiling the illusion in which alone the truth of art resides. Mainly, his instinct was too much for his ideal, and with a low view of life in its civic relations and a thoroughly bourgeois soul, he yet produced works whose beauty is surpassed only by the effect of a more poetic writer in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Yet if a vote of English criticism even at this late day, when all Continental Europe has the light of aesthetic truth, could be taken, the majority against these artists would be overwhelmingly in favor of a writer who had so little artistic sensibility, that he never hesitated on any occasion, great or small, to make a foray among his characters, and catch them up to show them to the reader and tell him how beautiful or ugly they were; and cry out over their amazing properties.

“How few materials,” says Emerson, “are yet used by our arts! The mass of creatures and of qualities are still hid and expectant,” and to break new ground is still one of the uncommonest and most heroic of the virtues. The artists are not alone to blame for the timidity that keeps them in the old furrows of the worn-out fields; most of those whom they live to please, or live by pleasing, prefer to have them remain there; it wants rare virtue to appreciate what is new, as well as to invent it; and the “easy things to understand” are the conventional things. This is why the ordinary English novel, with its hackneyed plot, scenes, and figures, is more comfortable to the ordinary American than an American novel, which deals, at its worst, with comparatively new interests and motives. To adjust one’s self to the enjoyment of these costs an intellectual effort, and an intellectual effort is what no ordinary person likes to make. It is only the extraordinary person who can say, with Emerson: “I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic . . . . I embrace the common; I sit at the feet of the familiar and the low . . . . Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and wondrous than things remote . . . . The perception of the worth of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries . . . . The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual . . . . To-day always looks mean to the thoughtless; but to-day is a king in disguise . . . . Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphos.”

Perhaps we ought not to deny their town of Troy and their temple of Delphos to the dull people; but if we ought, and if we did, they would still insist upon having them. An English novel, full of titles and rank, is apparently essential to the happiness of such people; their weak and childish imagination is at home in its familiar environment; they know what they are reading; the fact that it is hash many times warmed over reassures them; whereas a story of our own life, honestly studied and faithfully represented, troubles them with varied misgiving. They are not sure that it is literature; they do not feel that it is good society; its characters, so like their own, strike them as commonplace; they say they do not wish to know such people.

Everything in England is appreciable to the literary sense, while the sense of the literary worth of things in America is still faint and weak with most people, with the vast majority who “ask for the great, the remote, the romantic,” who cannot “embrace the common,” cannot “sit at the feet of the familiar and the low,” in the good company of Emerson. We are all, or nearly all, struggling to be distinguished from the mass, and to be set apart in select circles and upper classes like the fine people we have read about. We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world; but that is not bad; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore “the worth of the vulgar,” in believing that the superfine is better.

XVII.

Another Spanish novelist of our day, whose books have given me great pleasure, is so far from being of the same mind of Senor Valdes about fiction that he boldly declares himself, in the preface to his ‘Pepita Ximenez,’ “an advocate of art for art’s sake.” I heartily agree with him that it is “in very bad taste, always impertinent and often pedantic, to attempt to prove theses by writing stories,” and yet if it is true that “the object of a novel should be to charm through a faithful representation of human actions and human passions, and to create by this fidelity to nature a beautiful work,” and if “the creation of the beautiful” is solely “the object of art,” it never was and never can be solely its effect as long as men are men and women are women. If ever the race is resolved into abstract qualities, perhaps this may happen; but till then the finest effect of the “beautiful” will be ethical and not aesthetic merely. Morality penetrates all things, it is the soul of all things. Beauty may clothe it on, whether it is false morality and an evil soul, or whether it is true and a good soul. In the one case the beauty will corrupt, and in the other it will edify, and in either case it will infallibly and inevitably have an ethical effect, now light, now grave, according as the thing is light or grave. We cannot escape from this; we are shut up to it by the very conditions of our being. For the moment, it is charming to have a story end happily, but after one has lived a certain number of years, and read a certain number of novels, it is not the prosperous or adverse fortune of the characters that affects one, but the good or bad faith of the novelist in dealing with them. Will he play us false or will he be true in the operation of this or that principle involved? I cannot hold him to less account than this: he must be true to what life has taught me is the truth, and after that he may let any fate betide his people; the novel ends well that ends faithfully. The greater his power, the greater his responsibility before the human conscience, which is God in us. But men come and go, and what they do in their limited physical lives is of comparatively little moment; it is what they say that really survives to bless or to ban; and it is the evil which Wordsworth felt in Goethe, that must long sur vive him. There is a kind of thing — a kind of metaphysical lie against righteousness and common-sense which is called the Unmoral; and is supposed to be different from the Immoral; and it is this which is supposed to cover many of the faults of Goethe. His ‘Wilhelm Meister,’ for example, is so far removed within the region of the “ideal” that its unprincipled, its evil principled, tenor in regard to women is pronounced “unmorality,” and is therefore inferably harmless. But no study of Goethe is complete without some recognition of the qualities which caused Wordsworth to hurl the book across the room with an indignant perception of its sensuality. For the sins of his life Goethe was perhaps sufficiently punished in his life by his final marriage with Christiane; for the sins of his literature many others must suffer. I do not despair, however, of the day when the poor honest herd of man kind shall give universal utterance to the universal instinct, and shall hold selfish power in politics, in art, in religion, for the devil that it is; when neither its crazy pride nor its amusing vanity shall be flattered by the puissance of the “geniuses” who have forgotten their duty to the common weakness, and have abused it to their own glory. In that day we shall shudder at many monsters of passion, of self-indulgence, of heartlessness, whom we still more or less openly adore for their “genius,” and shall account no man worshipful whom we do not feel and know to be good. The spectacle of strenuous achievement will then not dazzle or mislead; it will not sanctify or palliate iniquity; it will only render it the more hideous and pitiable.

In fact, the whole belief in “genius” seems to me rather a mischievous superstition, and if not mischievous always, still always a superstition. From the account of those who talk about it, “genius” appears to be the attribute of a sort of very potent and admirable prodigy which God has created out of the common for the astonishment and confusion of the rest of us poor human beings. But do they really believe it? Do they mean anything more or less than the Mastery which comes to any man according to his powers and diligence in any direction? If not, why not have an end of the superstition which has caused our race to go on so long writing and reading of the difference between talent and genius? It is within the memory of middle-aged men that the Maelstrom existed in the belief of the geographers, but we now get on perfectly well without it; and why should we still suffer under the notion of “genius” which keeps so many poor little authorlings trembling in question whether they have it, or have only “talent”?

One of the greatest captains who ever lived [General U. S. Grant D.W.] — a plain, taciturn, unaffected soul — has told the story of his wonderful life as unconsciously as if it were all an every-day affair, not different from other lives, except as a great exigency of the human race gave it importance. So far as he knew, he had no natural aptitude for arms, and certainly no love for the calling. But he went to West Point because, as he quaintly tells us, his father “rather thought he would go”; and he fought through one war with credit, but without glory. The other war, which was to claim his powers and his science, found him engaged in the most prosaic of peaceful occupations; he obeyed its call because he loved his country, and not because he loved war. All the world knows the rest, and all the world knows that greater military mastery has not been shown than his campaigns illustrated. He does not say this in his book, or hint it in any way; he gives you the facts, and leaves them with you. But the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, written as simply and straightforwardly as his battles were fought, couched in the most unpretentious phrase, with never a touch of grandiosity or attitudinizing, familiar, homely in style, form a great piece of literature, because great literature is nothing more nor less than the clear expression of minds that have some thing great in them, whether religion, or beauty, or deep experience. Probably Grant would have said that he had no more vocation to literature than he had to war. He owns, with something like contrition, that he used to read a great many novels; but we think he would have denied the soft impeachment of literary power. Nevertheless, he shows it, as he showed military power, unexpectedly, almost miraculously. All the conditions here, then, are favorable to supposing a case of “genius.” Yet who would trifle with that great heir of fame, that plain, grand, manly soul, by speaking of “genius” and him together? Who calls Washington a genius? or Franklin, or Bismarck, or Cavour, or Columbus, or Luther, or Darwin, or Lincoln? Were these men second-rate in their way? Or is “genius” that indefinable, preternatural quality, sacred to the musicians, the painters, the sculptors, the actors, the poets, and above all, the poets? Or is it that the poets, having most of the say in this world, abuse it to shameless self-flattery, and would persuade the inarticulate classes that they are on peculiar terms of confidence with the deity?

XVIII.

In General Grant’s confession of novel-reading there is a sort of inference that he had wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience of the novelist in me imagines such an inference. But however this may be, there is certainly no question concerning the intention of a correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather bragging claims I had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. “I have very grave doubts,” he said, “as to the whole list of magnificent things that you seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in myself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in my mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter- of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine.”

I am not sure that I had the controversy with this correspondent that he seemed to suppose; but novels are now so fully accepted by every one pretending to cultivated taste and they really form the whole intellectual life of such immense numbers of people, without question of their influence, good or bad, upon the mind that it is refreshing to have them frankly denounced, and to be invited to revise one’s ideas and feelings in regard to them. A little honesty, or a great deal of honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, and as we have already begun to have it, no harm; and for my own part I will confess that I believe fiction in the past to have been largely injurious, as I believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its aimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading which people fancy an intellectual pastime is the emptiest dissipation, hardly more related to thought or the wholesome exercise of the mental faculties than opium-eating; in either case the brain is drugged, and left weaker and crazier for the debauch. If this may be called the negative result of the fiction habit, the positive injury that most novels work is by no means so easily to be measured in the case of young men whose character they help so much to form or deform, and the women of all ages whom they keep so much in ignorance of the world they misrepresent. Grown men have little harm from them, but in the other cases, which are the vast majority, they hurt because they are not true — not because they are malevolent, but because they are idle lies about human nature and the social fabric, which it behooves us to know and to understand, that we may deal justly with ourselves and with one another. One need not go so far as our correspondent, and trace to the fiction habit “whatever is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious,” in one’s life; bad as the fiction habit is it is probably not responsible for the whole sum of evil in its victims, and I believe that if the reader will use care in choosing from this fungus-growth with which the fields of literature teem every day, he may nourish himself as with the true mushroom, at no risk from the poisonous species.

The tests are very plain and simple, and they are perfectly infallible. If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous; it may not kill, but it will certainly injure; and this test will alone exclude an entire class of fiction, of which eminent examples will occur to all. Then the whole spawn of so-called unmoral romances, which imagine a world where the sins of sense are unvisited by the penalties following, swift or slow, but inexorably sure, in the real world, are deadly poison: these do kill. The novels that merely tickle our prejudices and lull our judgment, or that coddle our sensibilities or pamper our gross appetite for the marvellous, are not so fatal, but they are innutritious, and clog the soul with unwholesome vapors of all kinds. No doubt they too help to weaken the moral fibre, and make their readers indifferent to “plodding perseverance and plain industry,” and to “matter-of-fact poverty and commonplace distress.”

Without taking them too seriously, it still must be owned that the “gaudy hero and heroine” are to blame for a great deal of harm in the world. That heroine long taught by example, if not precept, that Love, or the passion or fancy she mistook for it, was the chief interest of a life, which is really concerned with a great many other things; that it was lasting in the way she knew it; that it was worthy of every sacrifice, and was altogether a finer thing than prudence, obedience, reason; that love alone was glorious and beautiful, and these were mean and ugly in comparison with it. More lately she has begun to idolize and illustrate Duty, and she is hardly less mischievous in this new role, opposing duty, as she did love, to prudence, obedience, and reason. The stock hero, whom, if we met him, we could not fail to see was a most deplorable person, has undoubtedly imposed himself upon the victims of the fiction habit as admirable. With him, too, love was and is the great affair, whether in its old romantic phase of chivalrous achievement or manifold suffering for love’s sake, or its more recent development of the “virile,” the bullying, and the brutal, or its still more recent agonies of self-sacrifice, as idle and useless as the moral experiences of the insane asylums. With his vain posturings and his ridiculous splendor he is really a painted barbarian, the prey of his passions and his delusions, full of obsolete ideals, and the motives and ethics of a savage, which the guilty author of his being does his best — or his worst — in spite of his own light and knowledge, to foist upon the reader as something generous and noble. I am not merely bringing this charge against that sort of fiction which is beneath literature and outside of it, “the shoreless lakes of ditch-water,” whose miasms fill the air below the empyrean where the great ones sit; but I am accusing the work of some of the most famous, who have, in this instance or in that, sinned against the truth, which can alone exalt and purify men. I do not say that they have constantly done so, or even commonly done so; but that they have done so at all marks them as of the past, to be read with the due historical allowance for their epoch and their conditions. For I believe that, while inferior writers will and must continue to imitate them in their foibles and their errors, no one here after will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties. The light of civilization has already broken even upon the novel, and no conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong, what is noble and what is base, what is health and what is perdition, in the actions and the characters he portrays.

The fiction that aims merely to entertain — the fiction that is to serious fiction as the opera-bouffe, the ballet, and the pantomime are to the true drama — need not feel the burden of this obligation so deeply; but even such fiction will not be gay or trivial to any reader’s hurt, and criticism should hold it to account if it passes from painting to teaching folly.

I confess that I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first of all applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before we ask anything else, Is it true? — true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women? This truth, which necessarily includes the highest morality and the highest artistry — this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak; and without it all graces of style and feats of invention and cunning of construction are so many superfluities of naughtiness. It is well for the truth to have all these, and shine in them, but for falsehood they are merely meretricious, the bedizenment of the wanton; they atone for nothing, they count for nothing. But in fact they come naturally of truth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it. In the whole range of fiction I know of no true picture of life — that is, of human nature — which is not also a masterpiece of literature, full of divine and natural beauty. It may have no touch or tint of this special civilization or of that; it had better have this local color well ascertained; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, and if the book is true to what men and women know of one another’s souls it will be true enough, and it will be great and beautiful. It is the conception of literature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof, which makes it really unimportant to the great mass of mankind, without a message or a meaning for them; and it is the notion that a novel may be false in its portrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contemptible even to those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as a serious or right-minded person. If they do not in some moment of indignation cry out against all novels, as my correspondent does, they remain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with no higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as the frequenter of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fills his pipe with the drug.

Or, as in the case of another correspondent who writes that in his youth he “read a great many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement, like horse racing and card-playing,” for which he had no time when he entered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merely contemptuous. His view of the matter may be commended to the brotherhood and sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion; and I urge them not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that of some Boeotian dull to the beauty of art. Refuse it as we may, it is still the feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life is earnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it in our books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars’ gowns, and close the doors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but we cannot shut it out. It comes to us from wherever men are at work, from wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, of triviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape conviction except he prove himself worthy of his time — a time in which the great masters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veins with the red tides of reality. We cannot all equal them; we need not copy them; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration and their power; and to draw from these no one need go far — no one need really go out of himself.

Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom it was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote in his study of Diderot: “Were it not reasonable to prophesy that this exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into the nurseries, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric into the dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to understand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and will forever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance to us? Poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing but higher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons), Reality.”

If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for “children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes,” it is nevertheless one of the hopefulest signs of the world’s progress that it has begun to work for “grown persons,” and if not exactly in the way that Carlyle might have solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead of building the “novel-fabric,” still it has, in the highest and widest sense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do not even care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceive of a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade of make-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is too much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. But let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know; let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires; let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know — the language of unaffected people everywhere — and there can be no doubt of an unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.

XIX.

This is what I say in my severer moods, but at other times I know that, of course, no one is going to hold all fiction to such strict account. There is a great deal of it which may be very well left to amuse us, if it can, when we are sick or when we are silly, and I am not inclined to despise it in the performance of this office. Or, if people find pleasure in having their blood curdled for the sake of having it uncurdled again at the end of the book, I would not interfere with their amusement, though I do not desire it.

There is a certain demand in primitive natures for the kind of fiction that does this, and the author of it is usually very proud of it. The kind of novels he likes, and likes to write, are intended to take his reader’s mind, or what that reader would probably call his mind, off himself; they make one forget life and all its cares and duties; they are not in the least like the novels which make you think of these, and shame you into at least wishing to be a helpfuller and wholesomer creature than you are. No sordid details of verity here, if you please; no wretched being humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering for his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortification of self, and in the help of others; nothing of all this, but a great, whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroic adventure and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage “picture” at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in a row, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their right hands to the audience, in the old way that has always charmed and always will charm, Heaven bless it!

In a world which loves the spectacular drama and the practically bloodless sports of the modern amphitheatre the author of this sort of fiction has his place, and we must not seek to destroy him because he fancies it the first place. In fact, it is a condition of his doing well the kind of work he does that he should think it important, that he should believe in himself; and I would not take away this faith of his, even if I could. As I say, he has his place. The world often likes to forget itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, his feats, his hair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly breaches, and the poor, foolish, childish old world renews the excitements of its nonage. Perhaps this is a work of beneficence; and perhaps our brave conjurer in his cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in disguise.

Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole English-speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the “recrudescence” of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable in America than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anything that is wild and strange and unlike itself. But the recrudescence has been evident enough here, too; and a writer in one of our periodicals has put into convenient shape some common errors concerning popularity as a test of merit in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the love of the marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by “the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters” for fiction of that sort, but by the “literary elect” also, is proof of some principle in human nature which ought to be respected as well as tolerated. He seems to believe that the ebullition of this passion forms a sufficient answer to those who say that art should represent life, and that the art which misrepresents life is feeble art and false art. But it appears to me that a little carefuller reasoning from a little closer inspection of the facts would not have brought him to these conclusions. In the first place, I doubt very much whether the “literary elect” have been fascinated in great numbers by the fiction in question; but if I supposed them to have really fallen under that spell, I should still be able to account for their fondness and that of the “unthinking multitude” upon the same grounds, without honoring either very much. It is the habit of hasty casuists to regard civilization as inclusive of all the members of a civilized community; but this is a palpable error. Many persons in every civilized community live in a state of more or less evident savagery with respect to their habits, their morals, and their propensities; and they are held in check only by the law. Many more yet are savage in their tastes, as they show by the decoration of their houses and persons, and by their choice of books and pictures; and these are left to the restraints of public opinion. In fact, no man can be said to be thoroughly civilized or always civilized; the most refined, the most enlightened person has his moods, his moments of barbarism, in which the best, or even the second best, shall not please him. At these times the lettered and the unlettered are alike primitive and their gratifications are of the same simple sort; the highly cultivated person may then like melodrama, impossible fiction, and the trapeze as sincerely and thoroughly as a boy of thirteen or a barbarian of any age.

I do not blame him for these moods; I find something instructive and interesting in them; but if they lastingly established themselves in him, I could not help deploring the state of that person. No one can really think that the “literary elect,” who are said to have joined the “unthinking multitude” in clamoring about the book counters for the romances of no-man’s land, take the same kind of pleasure in them as they do in a novel of Tolstoy, Tourguenief, George Eliot, Thackeray, Balzac, Manzoni, Hawthorne, Mr. Henry James, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Senor Palacio Valdes, or even Walter Scott. They have joined the “unthinking multitude,” perhaps because they are tired of thinking, and expect to find relaxation in feeling — feeling crudely, grossly, merely. For once in a way there is no great harm in this; perhaps no harm at all. It is perfectly natural; let them have their innocent debauch. But let us distinguish, for our own sake and guidance, between the different kinds of things that please the same kind of people; between the things that please them habitually and those that please them occasionally; between the pleasures that edify them and those that amuse them. Otherwise we shall be in danger of becoming permanently part of the “unthinking multitude,” and of remaining puerile, primitive, savage. We shall be so in moods and at moments; but let us not fancy that those are high moods or fortunate moments. If they are harmless, that is the most that can be said for them. They are lapses from which we can perhaps go forward more vigorously; but even this is not certain.

My own philosophy of the matter, however, would not bring me to prohibition of such literary amusements as the writer quoted seems to find significant of a growing indifference to truth and sanity in fiction. Once more, I say, these amusements have their place, as the circus has, and the burlesque and negro minstrelsy, and the ballet, and prestidigitation. No one of these is to be despised in its place; but we had better understand that it is not the highest place, and that it is hardly an intellectual delight. The lapse of all the “literary elect” in the world could not dignify unreality; and their present mood, if it exists, is of no more weight against that beauty in literature which comes from truth alone, and never can come from anything else, than the permanent state of the “unthinking multitude.”

Yet even as regards the “unthinking multitude,” I believe I am not able to take the attitude of the writer I have quoted. I am afraid that I respect them more than he would like to have me, though I cannot always respect their taste, any more than that of the “literary elect.” I respect them for their good sense in most practical matters; for their laborious, honest lives; for their kindness, their good-will; for that aspiration towards something better than themselves which seems to stir, however dumbly, in every human breast not abandoned to literary pride or other forms of self-righteousness. I find every man interesting, whether he thinks or unthinks, whether he is savage or civilized; for this reason I cannot thank the novelist who teaches us not to know but to unknow our kind. Yet I should by no means hold him to such strict account as Emerson, who felt the absence of the best motive, even in the greatest of the masters, when he said of Shakespeare that, after all, he was only master of the revels. The judgment is so severe, even with the praise which precedes it, that one winces under it; and if one is still young, with the world gay before him, and life full of joyous promise, one is apt to ask, defiantly, Well, what is better than being such a master of the revels as Shakespeare was? Let each judge for himself. To the heart again of serious youth, uncontaminate and exigent of ideal good, it must always be a grief that the great masters seem so often to have been willing to amuse the leisure and vacancy of meaner men, and leave their mission to the soul but partially fulfilled. This, perhaps, was what Emerson had in mind; and if he had it in mind of Shakespeare, who gave us, with his histories and comedies and problems, such a searching homily as “Macbeth,” one feels that he scarcely recognized the limitations of the dramatist’s art. Few consciences, at times, seem so enlightened as that of this personally unknown person, so withdrawn into his work, and so lost to the intensest curiosity of after-time; at other times he seems merely Elizabethan in his coarseness, his courtliness, his imperfect sympathy.

XX.

Of the finer kinds of romance, as distinguished from the novel, I would even encourage the writing, though it is one of the hard conditions of romance that its personages starting with a ‘parti pris’ can rarely be characters with a living growth, but are apt to be types, limited to the expression of one principle, simple, elemental, lacking the God-given complexity of motive which we find in all the human beings we know.

Hawthorne, the great master of the romance, had the insight and the power to create it anew as a kind in fiction; though I am not sure that ‘The Scarlet Letter’ and the ‘Blithedale Romance’ are not, strictly speaking, novels rather than romances. They, do not play with some old superstition long outgrown, and they do not invent a new superstition to play with, but deal with things vital in every one’s pulse. I am not saying that what may be called the fantastic romance — the romance that descends from ‘Frankenstein’ rather than ‘The Scarlet Letter’ — ought not to be. On the contrary, I should grieve to lose it, as I should grieve to lose the pantomime or the comic opera, or many other graceful things that amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world where men actually sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to the decorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot be ranked with the works of the imagination — the works that represent and body forth human experience. Its ingenuity, can always afford a refined pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuable truth.

Perhaps the whole region of historical romance might be reopened with advantage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face to face with human nature, but require the haze of distance or a far perspective, in which all the disagreeable details shall be lost. There is no good reason why these harmless people should not be amused, or their little preferences indulged.

But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some recent instances are so fatuous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though I find them admirably contrived in some respects. When I have owned the excellence of the staging in every respect, and the conscience with which the carpenter (as the theatrical folks say) has done his work, I am at the end of my praises. The people affect me like persons of our generation made up for the parts; well trained, well costumed, but actors, and almost amateurs. They have the quality that makes the histrionics of amateurs endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, the wickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind the scene.

Yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a reversion to the earlier types of thinking and feeling, to earlier ways of looking at human nature, and I will not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by the poetic romancer or the historical romancer because I find my pleasure chiefly in Tolstoy and Valdes and Thomas Hardy and Tourguenief, and Balzac at his best.

XXI.

It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in America, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there were so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity; and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky’s novel, ‘The Crime and the Punishment,’ that whoever struck a note so profoundly tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing — as false and as mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth; and in a land where journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is comparatively small, and the wrong from class to class has been almost inappreciable, though all this is changing for the worse. Our novelists, therefore, concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by conditions which formerly at least could not be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire. Sin and suffering and shame there must always be in the world, I suppose, but I believe that in this new world of ours it is still mainly from one to another one, and oftener still from one to one’s self. We have death, too, in America, and a great deal of disagreeable and painful disease, which the multiplicity of our patent medicines does not seem to cure; but this is tragedy that comes in the very nature of things, and is not peculiarly American, as the large, cheerful average of health and success and happy life is. It will not do to boast, but it is well to be true to the facts, and to see that, apart from these purely mortal troubles, the race here has enjoyed conditions in which most of the ills that have darkened its annals might be averted by honest work and unselfish behavior.

Fine artists we have among us, and right-minded as far as they go; and we must not forget this at evil moments when it seems as if all the women had taken to writing hysterical improprieties, and some of the men were trying to be at least as hysterical in despair of being as improper. Other traits are much more characteristic of our life and our fiction. In most American novels, vivid and graphic as the best of them are, the people are segregated if not sequestered, and the scene is sparsely populated. The effect may be in instinctive response to the vacancy of our social life, and I shall not make haste to blame it. There are few places, few occasions among us, in which a novelist can get a large number of polite people together, or at least keep them together. Unless he carries a snap-camera his picture of them has no probability; they affect one like the figures perfunctorily associated in such deadly old engravings as that of “Washington Irving and his Friends.” Perhaps it is for this reason that we excel in small pieces with three or four figures, or in studies of rustic communities, where there is propinquity if not society. Our grasp of more urbane life is feeble; most attempts to assemble it in our pictures are failures, possibly because it is too transitory, too intangible in its nature with us, to be truthfully represented as really existent.

I am not sure that the Americans have not brought the short story nearer perfection in the all-round sense that almost any other people, and for reasons very simple and near at hand. It might be argued from the national hurry and impatience that it was a literary form peculiarly adapted to the American temperament, but I suspect that its extraordinary development among us is owing much more to more tangible facts. The success of American magazines, which is nothing less than prodigious, is only commensurate with their excellence. Their sort of success is not only from the courage to decide which ought to please, but from the knowledge of what does please; and it is probable that, aside from the pictures, it is the short stories which please the readers of our best magazines. The serial novels they must have, of course; but rather more of course they must have short stories, and by operation of the law of supply and demand, the short stories, abundant in quantity and excellent in quality, are forthcoming because they are wanted. By another operation of the same law, which political economists have more recently taken account of, the demand follows the supply, and short stories are sought for because there is a proven ability to furnish them, and people read them willingly because they are usually very good. The art of writing them is now so disciplined and diffused with us that there is no lack either for the magazines or for the newspaper “syndicates” which deal in them almost to the exclusion of the serials.

An interesting fact in regard to the different varieties of the short story among us is that the sketches and studies by the women seem faithfuller and more realistic than those of the men, in proportion to their number. Their tendency is more distinctly in that direction, and there is a solidity, an honest observation, in the work of such women, which often leaves little to be desired. I should, upon the whole, be disposed to rank American short stories only below those of such Russian writers as I have read, and I should praise rather than blame their free use of our different local parlances, or “dialects,” as people call them. I like this because I hope that our inherited English may be constantly freshened and revived from the native sources which our literary decentralization will help to keep open, and I will own that as I turn over novels coming from Philadelphia, from New Mexico, from Boston, from Tennessee, from rural New England, from New York, every local flavor of diction gives me courage and pleasure. Alphonse Daudet, in a conversation with H. H. Boyesen said, speaking of Tourguenief, “What a luxury it must be to have a great big untrodden barbaric language to wade into! We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing. The crown- jewels of our French tongue have passed through the hands of so many generations of monarchs that it seems like presumption on the part of any late-born pretender to attempt to wear them.”

This grief is, of course, a little whimsical, yet it has a certain measure of reason in it, and the same regret has been more seriously expressed by the Italian poet Aleardi:

    “Muse of an aged people, in the eve

    Of fading civilization, I was born.

    . . . . . . Oh, fortunate,

    My sisters, who in the heroic dawn

    Of races sung! To them did destiny give

    The virgin fire and chaste ingenuousness

    Of their land’s speech; and, reverenced, their hands

    Ran over potent strings.”

It will never do to allow that we are at such a desperate pass in English, but something of this divine despair we may feel too in thinking of “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when the poets were trying the stops of the young language, and thrilling with the surprises of their own music. We may comfort ourselves, however, unless we prefer a luxury of grief, by remembering that no language is ever old on the lips of those who speak it, no matter how decrepit it drops from the pen. We have only to leave our studies, editorial and other, and go into the shops and fields to find the “spacious times” again; and from the beginning Realism, before she had put on her capital letter, had divined this near-at-hand truth along with the rest. Lowell, almost the greatest and finest realist who ever wrought in verse, showed us that Elizabeth was still Queen where he heard Yankee farmers talk. One need not invite slang into the company of its betters, though perhaps slang has been dropping its “s” and becoming language ever since the world began, and is certainly sometimes delightful and forcible beyond the reach of the dictionary. I would not have any one go about for new words, but if one of them came aptly, not to reject its help. For our novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive, would be a dismal error, but being born Americans, I then use “Americanisms” whenever these serve their turn; and when their characters speak, I should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying Tennesseean, Philadelphian, Bostonian, and New York accents. If we bother ourselves to write what the critics imagine to be “English,” we shall be priggish and artificial, and still more so if we make our Americans talk “English.” There is also this serious disadvantage about “English,” that if we wrote the best “English” in the world, probably the English themselves would not know it, or, if they did, certainly would not own it. It has always been supposed by grammarians and purists that a language can be kept as they find it; but languages, while they live, are perpetually changing. God apparently meant them for the common people; and the common people will use them freely as they use other gifts of God. On their lips our continental English will differ more and more from the insular English, and I believe that this is not deplorable, but desirable.

In fine, I would have our American novelists be as American as they unconsciously can. Matthew Arnold complained that he found no “distinction” in our life, and I would gladly persuade all artists intending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. We have been now some hundred years building up a state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men in their rights and duties, and whether we have been right or been wrong the gods have taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilization in which there is no “distinction” perceptible to the eye that loves and values it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. It seems to me that these conditions invite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order of things. The talent that is robust enough to front the every-day world and catch the charm of its work-worn, care-worn, brave, kindly face, need not fear the encounter, though it seems terrible to the sort nurtured in the superstition of the romantic, the bizarre, the heroic, the distinguished, as the things alone worthy of painting or carving or writing. The arts must become democratic, and then we shall have the expression of America in art; and the reproach which Arnold was half right in making us shall have no justice in it any longer; we shall be “distinguished.”

XXII.

In the mean time it has been said with a superficial justice that our fiction is narrow; though in the same sense I suppose the present English fiction is as narrow as our own; and most modern fiction is narrow in a certain sense. In Italy the best men are writing novels as brief and restricted in range as ours; in Spain the novels are intense and deep, and not spacious; the French school, with the exception of Zola, is narrow; the Norwegians are narrow; the Russians, except Tolstoy, are narrow, and the next greatest after him, Tourguenief, is the narrowest great novelist, as to mere dimensions, that ever lived, dealing nearly always with small groups, isolated and analyzed in the most American fashion. In fact, the charge of narrowness accuses the whole tendency of modern fiction as much as the American school. But I do not by any means allow that this narrowness is a defect, while denying that it is a universal characteristic of our fiction; it is rather, for the present, a virtue. Indeed, I should call the present American work, North and South, thorough rather than narrow. In one sense it is as broad as life, for each man is a microcosm, and the writer who is able to acquaint us intimately with half a dozen people, or the conditions of a neighborhood or a class, has done something which cannot in any, bad sense be called narrow; his breadth is vertical instead of lateral, that is all; and this depth is more desirable than horizontal expansion in a civilization like ours, where the differences are not of classes, but of types, and not of types either so much as of characters. A new method was necessary in dealing with the new conditions, and the new method is worldwide, because the whole world is more or less Americanized. Tolstoy is exceptionally voluminous among modern writers, even Russian writers; and it might be said that the forte of Tolstoy himself is not in his breadth sidewise, but in his breadth upward and downward. ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyitch’ leaves as vast an impression on the reader’s soul as any episode of ‘War and Peace,’ which, indeed, can be recalled only in episodes, and not as a whole. I think that our writers may be safely counselled to continue their work in the modern way, because it is the best way yet known. If they make it true, it will be large, no matter what its superficies are; and it would be the greatest mistake to try to make it big. A big book is necessarily a group of episodes more or less loosely connected by a thread of narrative, and there seems no reason why this thread must always be supplied. Each episode may be quite distinct, or it may be one of a connected group; the final effect will be from the truth of each episode, not from the size of the group.

The whole field of human experience as never so nearly covered by imaginative literature in any age as in this; and American life especially is getting represented with unexampled fulness. It is true that no one writer, no one book, represents it, for that is not possible; our social and political decentralization forbids this, and may forever forbid it. But a great number of very good writers are instinctively striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our civilization known to all the other parts; and their work is not narrow in any feeble or vicious sense. The world was once very little, and it is now very large. Formerly, all science could be grasped by a single mind; but now the man who hopes to become great or useful in science must devote himself to a single department. It is so in everything — all arts, all trades; and the novelist is not superior to the universal rule against universality. He contributes his share to a thorough knowledge of groups of the human race under conditions which are full of inspiring novelty and interest. He works more fearlessly, frankly, and faithfully than the novelist ever worked before; his work, or much of it, may be destined never to be reprinted from the monthly magazines; but if he turns to his book-shelf and regards the array of the British or other classics, he knows that they, too, are for the most part dead; he knows that the planet itself is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun at last, with all its surviving literature upon it. The question is merely one of time. He consoles himself, therefore, if he is wise, and works on; and we may all take some comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped. Especially a movement in literature like that which the world is now witnessing cannot be helped; and we could no more turn back and be of the literary fashions of any age before this than we could turn back and be of its social, economical, or political conditions.

If I were authorized to address any word directly to our novelists I should say, Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural: remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered.

At least three-fifths of the literature called classic, in all languages, no more lives than the poems and stories that perish monthly in our magazines. It is all printed and reprinted, generation after generation, century after century; but it is not alive; it is as dead as the people who wrote it and read it, and to whom it meant something, perhaps; with whom it was a fashion, a caprice, a passing taste. A superstitious piety preserves it, and pretends that it has aesthetic qualities which can delight or edify; but nobody really enjoys it, except as a reflection of the past moods and humors of the race, or a revelation of the author’s character; otherwise it is trash, and often very filthy trash, which the present trash generally is not.

XXIII.

One of the great newspapers the other day invited the prominent American authors to speak their minds upon a point in the theory and practice of fiction which had already vexed some of them. It was the question of how much or how little the American novel ought to deal with certain facts of life which are not usually talked of before young people, and especially young ladies. Of course the question was not decided, and I forget just how far the balance inclined in favor of a larger freedom in the matter. But it certainly inclined that way; one or two writers of the sex which is somehow supposed to have purity in its keeping (as if purity were a thing that did not practically concern the other sex, preoccupied with serious affairs) gave it a rather vigorous tilt to that side. In view of this fact it would not be the part of prudence to make an effort to dress the balance; and indeed I do not know that I was going to make any such effort. But there are some things to say, around and about the subject, which I should like to have some one else say, and which I may myself possibly be safe in suggesting.

One of the first of these is the fact, generally lost sight of by those who censure the Anglo-Saxon novel for its prudishness, that it is really not such a prude after all; and that if it is sometimes apparently anxious to avoid those experiences of life not spoken of before young people, this may be an appearance only. Sometimes a novel which has this shuffling air, this effect of truckling to propriety, might defend itself, if it could speak for itself, by saying that such experiences happened not to come within its scheme, and that, so far from maiming or mutilating itself in ignoring them, it was all the more faithfully representative of the tone of modern life in dealing with love that was chaste, and with passion so honest that it could be openly spoken of before the tenderest society bud at dinner. It might say that the guilty intrigue, the betrayal, the extreme flirtation even, was the exceptional thing in life, and unless the scheme of the story necessarily involved it, that it would be bad art to lug it in, and as bad taste as to introduce such topics in a mixed company. It could say very justly that the novel in our civilization now always addresses a mixed company, and that the vast majority of the company are ladies, and that very many, if not most, of these ladies are young girls. If the novel were written for men and for married women alone, as in continental Europe, it might be altogether different. But the simple fact is that it is not written for them alone among us, and it is a question of writing, under cover of our universal acceptance, things for young girls to read which you would be put out-of-doors for saying to them, or of frankly giving notice of your intention, and so cutting yourself off from the pleasure — and it is a very high and sweet one of appealing to these vivid, responsive intelligences, which are none the less brilliant and admirable because they are innocent.

One day a novelist who liked, after the manner of other men, to repine at his hard fate, complained to his friend, a critic, that he was tired of the restriction he had put upon himself in this regard; for it is a mistake, as can be readily shown, to suppose that others impose it. “See how free those French fellows are!” he rebelled. “Shall we always be shut up to our tradition of decency?”

“Do you think it’s much worse than being shut up to their tradition of indecency?” said his friend.

Then that novelist began to reflect, and he remembered how sick the invariable motive of the French novel made him. He perceived finally that, convention for convention, ours was not only more tolerable, but on the whole was truer to life, not only to its complexion, but also to its texture. No one will pretend that there is not vicious love beneath the surface of our society; if he did, the fetid explosions of the divorce trials would refute him; but if he pretended that it was in any just sense characteristic of our society, he could be still more easily refuted. Yet it exists, and it is unquestionably the material of tragedy, the stuff from which intense effects are wrought. The question, after owning this fact, is whether these intense effects are not rather cheap effects. I incline to think they are, and I will try to say why I think so, if I may do so without offence. The material itself, the mere mention of it, has an instant fascination; it arrests, it detains, till the last word is said, and while there is anything to be hinted. This is what makes a love intrigue of some sort all but essential to the popularity of any fiction. Without such an intrigue the intellectual equipment of the author must be of the highest, and then he will succeed only with the highest class of readers. But any author who will deal with a guilty love intrigue holds all readers in his hand, the highest with the lowest, as long as he hints the slightest hope of the smallest potential naughtiness. He need not at all be a great author; he may be a very shabby wretch, if he has but the courage or the trick of that sort of thing. The critics will call him “virile” and “passionate”; decent people will be ashamed to have been limed by him; but the low average will only ask another chance of flocking into his net. If he happens to be an able writer, his really fine and costly work will be unheeded, and the lure to the appetite will be chiefly remembered. There may be other qualities which make reputations for other men, but in his case they will count for nothing. He pays this penalty for his success in that kind; and every one pays some such penalty who deals with some such material.

But I do not mean to imply that his case covers the whole ground. So far as it goes, though, it ought to stop the mouths of those who complain that fiction is enslaved to propriety among us. It appears that of a certain kind of impropriety it is free to give us all it will, and more. But this is not what serious men and women writing fiction mean when they rebel against the limitations of their art in our civilization. They have no desire to deal with nakedness, as painters and sculptors freely do in the worship of beauty; or with certain facts of life, as the stage does, in the service of sensation. But they ask why, when the conventions of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their followers to the portrayal of almost any phase of the physical or of the emotional nature, an American novelist may not write a story on the lines of ‘Anna Karenina’ or ‘Madame Bovary.’ They wish to touch one of the most serious and sorrowful problems of life in the spirit of Tolstoy and Flaubert, and they ask why they may not. At one time, they remind us, the Anglo-Saxon novelist did deal with such problems — De Foe in his spirit, Richardson in his, Goldsmith in his. At what moment did our fiction lose this privilege? In what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the lips of Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vital interests of life?

Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom, or whether I wished to encourage them, I should begin to answer them by saying that the Young Girl has never done anything of the kind. The manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that is all. Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors’ wives, as they once did. Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; they have not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but they have grown comparatively decent; there is no doubt about that. They require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; they require a sort of scientific decorum. He can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, something like that of a physician or a priest, and they expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions; they hold him solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence. If he will accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, and he may then treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, of such experiences, such relations of men and women as George Eliot treats in ‘Adam Bede,’ in ‘Daniel Deronda,’ in ‘Romola,’ in almost all her books; such as Hawthorne treats in ‘The Scarlet Letter;’ such as Dickens treats in ‘David Copperfield;’ such as Thackeray treats in ‘Pendennis,’ and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the masters of English fiction have at same time treated more or less openly. It is quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left untouched these most important realities of life. They have only not made them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective in regard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the space and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in England and America. They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly well that unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laid down in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could be made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and consequences.

I justify them in this view not only because I hate what is cheap and meretricious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics who require “passion” as something in itself admirable and desirable in a novel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of feeling and character. Most of these critics who demand “passion” would seem to have no conception of any passion but one. Yet there are several other passions: the passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion of pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship; and all these have a greater part in the drama of life than the passion of love, and infinitely greater than the passion of guilty love. Wittingly or unwittingly, English fiction and American fiction have recognized this truth, not fully, not in the measure it merits, but in greater degree than most other fiction.

XXIV.

Who can deny that fiction would be incomparably stronger, incomparably truer, if once it could tear off the habit which enslaves it to the celebration chiefly of a single passion, in one phase or another, and could frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, all the interests, all the facts? Every novelist who has thought about his art knows that it would, and I think that upon reflection he must doubt whether his sphere would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treat freely the darker aspects of the favorite passion. But, as I have shown, the privilege, the right to do this, is already perfectly recognized. This is proved again by the fact that serious criticism recognizes as master-works (I will not push the question of supremacy) the two great novels which above all others have, moved the world by their study of guilty love. If by any chance, if by some prodigious miracle, any American should now arise to treat it on the level of ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘Madame Bovary,’ he would be absolutely sure of success, and of fame and gratitude as great as those books have won for their authors.

But what editor of what American magazine would print such a story?

Certainly I do not think any one would; and here our novelist must again submit to conditions. If he wishes to publish such a story (supposing him to have once written it), he must publish it as a book. A book is something by itself, responsible for its character, which becomes quickly known, and it does not necessarily penetrate to every member of the household. The father or the mother may say to the child, “I would rather you wouldn’t read that book”; if the child cannot be trusted, the book may be locked up. But with the magazine and its serial the affair is different. Between the editor of a reputable English or American magazine and the families which receive it there is a tacit agreement that he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daughter, or safely leave her to read herself.

After all, it is a matter of business; and the insurgent novelist should consider the situation with coolness and common-sense. The editor did not create the situation; but it exists, and he could not even attempt to change it without many sorts of disaster. He respects it, therefore, with the good faith of an honest man. Even when he is himself a novelist, with ardor for his art and impatience of the limitations put upon it, he interposes his veto, as Thackeray did in the case of Trollope when a contributor approaches forbidden ground.

It does not avail to say that the daily papers teem with facts far fouler and deadlier than any which fiction could imagine. That is true, but it is true also that the sex which reads the most novels reads the fewest newspapers; and, besides, the reporter does not command the novelist’s skill to fix impressions in a young girl’s mind or to suggest conjecture. The magazine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unquestionably its favor is essential to success, and its conditions are not such narrow ones. You cannot deal with Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s subjects in the absolute artistic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, that is unknown among us; but if you deal with them in the manner of George Eliot, of Thackeray, of Dickens, of society, you may deal with them even in the magazines. There is no other restriction upon you. All the horrors and miseries and tortures are open to you; your pages may drop blood; sometimes it may happen that the editor will even exact such strong material from you. But probably he will require nothing but the observance of the convention in question; and if you do not yourself prefer bloodshed he will leave you free to use all sweet and peaceable means of interesting his readers.

It is no narrow field he throws open to you, with that little sign to keep off the grass up at one point only. Its vastness is still almost unexplored, and whole regions in it are unknown to the fictionist. Dig anywhere, and do but dig deep enough, and you strike riches; or, if you are of the mind to range, the gentler climes, the softer temperatures, the serener skies, are all free to you, and are so little visited that the chance of novelty is greater among them.

XXV.

While the Americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally, they have almost created a species of it in the Thanksgiving story. We have transplanted the Christmas story from England, while the Thanksgiving story is native to our air; but both are of Anglo-Saxon growth. Their difference is from a difference of environment; and the Christmas story when naturalized among us becomes almost identical in motive, incident, and treatment with the Thanksgiving story. If I were to generalize a distinction between them, I should say that the one dealt more with marvels and the other more with morals; and yet the critic should beware of speaking too confidently on this point. It is certain, however, that the Christmas season is meteorologically more favorable to the effective return of persons long supposed lost at sea, or from a prodigal life, or from a darkened mind. The longer, darker, and colder nights are better adapted to the apparition of ghosts, and to all manner of signs and portents; while they seem to present a wider field for the intervention of angels in behalf of orphans and outcasts. The dreams of elderly sleepers at this time are apt to be such as will effect a lasting change in them when they awake, turning them from the hard, cruel, and grasping habits of a lifetime, and reconciling them to their sons, daughters, and nephews, who have thwarted them in marriage; or softening them to their meek, uncomplaining wives, whose hearts they have trampled upon in their reckless pursuit of wealth; and generally disposing them to a distribution of hampers among the sick and poor, and to a friendly reception of gentlemen with charity subscription papers.

Ships readily drive upon rocks in the early twilight, and offer exciting difficulties of salvage; and the heavy snows gather quickly round the steps of wanderers who lie down to die in them, preparatory to their discovery and rescue by immediate relatives. The midnight weather is also very suitable for encounter with murderers and burglars; and the contrast of its freezing gloom with the light and cheer in-doors promotes the gayeties which merge, at all well-regulated country-houses, in love and marriage. In the region of pure character no moment could be so available for flinging off the mask of frivolity, or imbecility, or savagery, which one has worn for ten or twenty long years, say, for the purpose of foiling some villain, and surprising the reader, and helping the author out with his plot. Persons abroad in the Alps, or Apennines, or Pyrenees, or anywhere seeking shelter in the huts of shepherds or the dens of smugglers, find no time like it for lying in a feigned slumber, and listening to the whispered machinations of their suspicious looking entertainers, and then suddenly starting up and fighting their way out; or else springing from the real sleep into which they have sunk exhausted, and finding it broad day and the good peasants whom they had so unjustly doubted, waiting breakfast for them.

We need not point out the superior advantages of the Christmas season for anything one has a mind to do with the French Revolution, of the Arctic explorations, or the Indian Mutiny, or the horrors of Siberian exile; there is no time so good for the use of this material; and ghosts on shipboard are notoriously fond of Christmas Eve. In our own logging camps the man who has gone into the woods for the winter, after quarrelling with his wife, then hears her sad appealing voice, and is moved to good resolutions as at no other period of the year; and in the mining regions, first in California and later in Colorado, the hardened reprobate, dying in his boots, smells his mother’s doughnuts, and breathes his last in a soliloquized vision of the old home, and the little brother, or sister, or the old father coming to meet him from heaven; while his rude companions listen round him, and dry their eyes on the butts of their revolvers.

It has to be very grim, all that, to be truly effective; and here, already, we have a touch in the Americanized Christmas story of the moralistic quality of the American Thanksgiving story. This was seldom written, at first, for the mere entertainment of the reader; it was meant to entertain him, of course; but it was meant to edify him, too, and to improve him; and some such intention is still present in it. I rather think that it deals more probably with character to this end than its English cousin, the Christmas story, does. It is not so improbable that a man should leave off being a drunkard on Thanksgiving, as that he should leave off being a curmudgeon on Christmas; that he should conquer his appetite as that he should instantly change his nature, by good resolutions. He would be very likely, indeed, to break his resolutions in either case, but not so likely in the one as in the other.

Generically, the Thanksgiving story is cheerfuller in its drama and simpler in its persons than the Christmas story. Rarely has it dealt with the supernatural, either the apparition of ghosts or the intervention of angels. The weather being so much milder at the close of November than it is a month later, very little can be done with the elements; though on the coast a northeasterly storm has been, and can be, very usefully employed. The Thanksgiving story is more restricted in its range; the scene is still mostly in New England, and the characters are of New England extraction, who come home from the West usually, or New York, for the event of the little drama, whatever it may be. It may be the reconciliation of kinsfolk who have quarrelled; or the union of lovers long estranged; or husbands and wives who have had hard words and parted; or mothers who had thought their sons dead in California and find themselves agreeably disappointed in their return; or fathers who for old time’s sake receive back their erring and conveniently dying daughters. The notes are not many which this simple music sounds, but they have a Sabbath tone, mostly, and win the listener to kindlier thoughts and better moods. The art is at its highest in some strong sketch of Rose Terry Cooke’s, or some perfectly satisfying study of Miss Jewett’s, or some graphic situation of Miss Wilkins’s; and then it is a very fine art. But mostly it is poor and rude enough, and makes openly, shamelessly, for the reader’s emotions, as well as his morals. It is inclined to be rather descriptive. The turkey, the pumpkin, the corn-field, figure throughout; and the leafless woods are blue and cold against the evening sky behind the low hip-roofed, old-fashioned homestead. The parlance is usually the Yankee dialect and its Western modifications.

The Thanksgiving story is mostly confined in scene to the country; it does not seem possible to do much with it in town; and it is a serious question whether with its geographical and topical limitations it can hold its own against the Christmas story; and whether it would not be well for authors to consider a combination with its elder rival.

The two feasts are so near together in point of time that they could be easily covered by the sentiment of even a brief narrative. Under the agglutinated style of ‘A Thanksgiving-Christmas Story,’ fiction appropriate to both could be produced, and both could be employed naturally and probably in the transaction of its affairs and the development of its characters. The plot for such a story could easily be made to include a total-abstinence pledge and family reunion at Thanksgiving, and an apparition and spiritual regeneration over a bowl of punch at Christmas.

XXVI.

It would be interesting to know the far beginnings of holiday literature, and I commend the quest to the scientific spirit which now specializes research in every branch of history. In the mean time, without being too confident of the facts, I venture to suggest that it came in with the romantic movement about the beginning of this century, when mountains ceased to be horrid and became picturesque; when ruins of all sorts, but particularly abbeys and castles, became habitable to the most delicate constitutions; when the despised Gothick of Addison dropped its “k,” and arose the chivalrous and religious Gothic of Scott; when ghosts were redeemed from the contempt into which they had fallen, and resumed their place in polite society; in fact, the politer the society; the welcomer the ghosts, and whatever else was out of the common. In that day the Annual flourished, and this artificial flower was probably the first literary blossom on the Christmas Tree which has since borne so much tinsel foliage and painted fruit. But the Annual was extremely Oriental; it was much preoccupied with, Haidees and Gulnares and Zuleikas, with Hindas and Nourmahals, owing to the distinction which Byron and Moore had given such ladies; and when it began to concern itself with the actualities of British beauty, the daughters of Albion, though inscribed with the names of real countesses and duchesses, betrayed their descent from the well-known Eastern odalisques. It was possibly through an American that holiday literature became distinctively English in material, and Washington Irving, with his New World love of the past, may have given the impulse to the literary worship of Christmas which has since so widely established itself. A festival revived in popular interest by a New-Yorker to whom Dutch associations with New-year’s had endeared the German ideal of Christmas, and whom the robust gayeties of the season in old-fashioned country-houses had charmed, would be one of those roundabout results which destiny likes, and “would at least be Early English.”

If we cannot claim with all the patriotic confidence we should like to feel that it was Irving who set Christmas in that light in which Dickens saw its aesthetic capabilities, it is perhaps because all origins are obscure. For anything that we positively know to the contrary, the Druidic rites from which English Christmas borrowed the inviting mistletoe, if not the decorative holly, may have been accompanied by the recitations of holiday triads. But it is certain that several plays of Shakespeare were produced, if not written, for the celebration of the holidays, and that then the black tide of Puritanism which swept over men’s souls blotted out all such observance of Christmas with the festival itself. It came in again, by a natural reaction, with the returning Stuarts, and throughout the period of the Restoration it enjoyed a perfunctory favor. There is mention of it; often enough in the eighteenth-century essayists, in the Spectators and Idlers and Tatlers; but the world about the middle of the last century laments the neglect into which it had fallen. Irving seems to have been the first to observe its surviving rites lovingly, and Dickens divined its immense advantage as a literary occasion. He made it in some sort entirely his for a time, and there can be no question but it was he who again endeared it to the whole English-speaking world, and gave it a wider and deeper hold than it had ever had before upon the fancies and affections of our race.

The might of that great talent no one can gainsay, though in the light of the truer work which has since been done his literary principles seem almost as grotesque as his theories of political economy. In no one direction was his erring force more felt than in the creation of holiday literature as we have known it for the last half-century. Creation, of course, is the wrong word; it says too much; but in default of a better word, it may stand. He did not make something out of nothing; the material was there before him; the mood and even the need of his time contributed immensely to his success, as the volition of the subject helps on the mesmerist; but it is within bounds to say that he was the chief agency in the development of holiday literature as we have known it, as he was the chief agency in universalizing the great Christian holiday as we now have it. Other agencies wrought with him and after him; but it was he who rescued Christmas from Puritan distrust, and humanized it and consecrated it to the hearts and homes of all.

Very rough magic, as it now seems, he used in working his miracle, but there is no doubt about his working it. One opens his Christmas stories in this later day— ‘The Carol, The Chimes, The Haunted Man, The Cricket on the Hearth,’ and all the rest — and with “a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,” asks himself for the preternatural virtue that they once had. The pathos appears false and strained; the humor largely horseplay; the character theatrical; the joviality pumped; the psychology commonplace; the sociology alone funny. It is a world of real clothes, earth, air, water, and the rest; the people often speak the language of life, but their motives are as disproportioned and improbable, and their passions and purposes as overcharged, as those of the worst of Balzac’s people. Yet all these monstrosities, as they now appear, seem to have once had symmetry and verity; they moved the most cultivated intelligences of the time; they touched true hearts; they made everybody laugh and cry.

This was perhaps because the imagination, from having been fed mostly upon gross unrealities, always responds readily to fantastic appeals. There has been an amusing sort of awe of it, as if it were the channel of inspired thought, and were somehow sacred. The most preposterous inventions of its activity have been regarded in their time as the greatest feats of the human mind, and in its receptive form it has been nursed into an imbecility to which the truth is repugnant, and the fact that the beautiful resides nowhere else is inconceivable. It has been flattered out of all sufferance in its toyings with the mere elements of character, and its attempts to present these in combinations foreign to experience are still praised by the poorer sort of critics as masterpieces of creative work.

In the day of Dickens’s early Christmas stories it was thought admirable for the author to take types of humanity which everybody knew, and to add to them from his imagination till they were as strange as beasts and birds talking. Now we begin to feel that human nature is quite enough, and that the best an author can do is to show it as it is. But in those stories of his Dickens said to his readers, Let us make believe so-and- so; and the result was a joint juggle, a child’s-play, in which the wholesome allegiance to life was lost. Artistically, therefore, the scheme was false, and artistically, therefore, it must perish. It did not perish, however, before it had propagated itself in a whole school of unrealities so ghastly that one can hardly recall without a shudder those sentimentalities at secondhand to which holiday literature was abandoned long after the original conjurer had wearied of his performance.

Under his own eye and of conscious purpose a circle of imitators grew up in the fabrication of Christmas stories. They obviously formed themselves upon his sobered ideals; they collaborated with him, and it was often hard to know whether it was Dickens or Sala or Collins who was writing. The Christmas book had by that time lost its direct application to Christmas. It dealt with shipwrecks a good deal, and with perilous adventures of all kinds, and with unmerited suffering, and with ghosts and mysteries, because human nature, secure from storm and danger in a well-lighted room before a cheerful fire, likes to have these things imaged for it, and its long-puerilized fancy will bear an endless repetition of them. The wizards who wrought their spells with them contented themselves with the lasting efficacy of these simple means; and the apprentice-wizards and journeyman-wizards who have succeeded them practise the same arts at the old stand; but the ethical intention which gave dignity to Dickens’s Christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly disappeared. It was a quality which could not be worked so long as the phantoms and hair-breadth escapes. People always knew that character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghost cannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that a life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, by the most allegorical apparition; that want and sin and shame cannot be cured by kettles singing on the hob; and gradually they ceased to make believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances. Yet the ethical intention was not fruitless, crude as it now appears.

It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of the savagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race; the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor. It did not necessarily detract from the value of the lesson that, with the imperfect art of the time, he made his paupers and porters not only human, but superhuman, and too altogether virtuous; and it remained true that home life may be lovely under the lowliest roof, although he liked to paint it without a shadow on its beauty there. It is still a fact that the sick are very often saintly, although he put no peevishness into their patience with their ills. His ethical intention told for manhood and fraternity and tolerance, and when this intention disappeared from the better holiday literature, that literature was sensibly the poorer for the loss.

XXVII.

But if the humanitarian impulse has mostly disappeared from Christmas fiction, I think it has never so generally characterized all fiction. One may refuse to recognize this impulse; one may deny that it is in any greater degree shaping life than ever before, but no one who has the current of literature under his eye can fail to note it there. People are thinking and feeling generously, if not living justly, in our time; it is a day of anxiety to be saved from the curse that is on selfishness, of eager question how others shall be helped, of bold denial that the conditions in which we would fain have rested are sacred or immutable. Especially in America, where the race has gained a height never reached before, the eminence enables more men than ever before to see how even here vast masses of men are sunk in misery that must grow every day more hopeless, or embroiled in a struggle for mere life that must end in enslaving and imbruting them.

Art, indeed, is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish. It perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. The men and women who do the hard work of the world have learned that they have a right to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them they will have it. In all ages poetry has affirmed something of this sort, but it remained for ours to perceive it and express it somehow in every form of literature. But this is only one phase of the devotion of the best literature of our time to the service of humanity. No book written with a low or cynical motive could succeed now, no matter how brilliantly written; and the work done in the past to the glorification of mere passion and power, to the deification of self, appears monstrous and hideous. The romantic spirit worshipped genius, worshipped heroism, but at its best, in such a man as Victor Hugo, this spirit recognized the supreme claim of the lowest humanity. Its error was to idealize the victims of society, to paint them impossibly virtuous and beautiful; but truth, which has succeeded to the highest mission of romance, paints these victims as they are, and bids the world consider them not because they are beautiful and virtuous, but because they are ugly and vicious, cruel, filthy, and only not altogether loathsome because the divine can never wholly die out of the human. The truth does not find these victims among the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged; but it also finds them among the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool’s paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfishness.

I do not think the fiction of our own time even always equal to this work, or perhaps more than seldom so. But as I once expressed, to the long-reverberating discontent of two continents, fiction is now a finer art than it, has been hitherto, and more nearly meets the requirements of the infallible standard. I have hopes of real usefulness in it, because it is at last building on the only sure foundation; but I am by no means certain that it will be the ultimate literary form, or will remain as important as we believe it is destined to become. On the contrary, it is quite imaginable that when the great mass of readers, now sunk in the foolish joys of mere fable, shall be lifted to an interest in the meaning of things through the faithful portrayal of life in fiction, then fiction the most faithful may be superseded by a still more faithful form of contemporaneous history. I willingly leave the precise character of this form to the more robust imagination of readers whose minds have been nurtured upon romantic novels, and who really have an imagination worth speaking of, and confine myself, as usual, to the hither side of the regions of conjecture.

The art which in the mean time disdains the office of teacher is one of the last refuges of the aristocratic spirit which is disappearing from politics and society, and is now seeking to shelter itself in aesthetics. The pride of caste is becoming the pride of taste; but as before, it is averse to the mass of men; it consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise. It seeks to withdraw itself, to stand aloof; to be distinguished, and not to be identified. Democracy in literature is the reverse of all this. It wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there; it does not care to paint the marvellous and impossible for the vulgar many, or to sentimentalize and falsify the actual for the vulgar few. Men are more like than unlike one another: let us make them know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity. Neither arts, nor letters, nor sciences, except as they somehow, clearly or obscurely, tend to make the race better and kinder, are to be regarded as serious interests; they are all lower than the rudest crafts that feed and house and clothe, for except they do this office they are idle; and they cannot do this except from and through the truth.

MR. CHARLES W. CHESNUTT’S STORIES

A review: May 1 1900

The critical reader of the story called “The Wife of his Youth,” which appeared its these pages two years ago, must have noticed uncommon traits in what was altogether a remarkable piece of work. The first was the novelty of the material; for the writer dealt not only with people who were not white, but with people who were not black enough to contrast grotesquely with white people — who in fact were of that near approach to the ordinary American in race and color which leaves, at the last degree, every one but the connoisseur in doubt whether they are Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-African. Quite as striking as this novelty of the material was the author’s thorough mastery of it, and his unerring knowledge of the life he had chosen in its peculiar racial characteristics. But above all, the story was notable for the passionless handling of a phase of our common life which is tense with potential tragedy; for the attitude, almost ironical, in which the artist observes the play of contesting emotions in the drama under his eyes; and for his apparently reluctant, apparently helpless consent to let the spectator know his real feeling in the matter. Any one accustomed to study methods in fiction, to distinguish between good and bad art, to feel the joy which the delicate skill possible only from a love of truth can give, must have known a high pleasure in the quiet self-restraint of the performance; and such a reader would probably have decided that the social situation in the piece was studied wholly from the outside, by an observer with special opportunities for knowing it, who was, as it were, surprised into final sympathy.

Now, however, it is known that the author of this story is of negro blood — diluted, indeed, in such measure that if he did not admit this descent few would imagine it, but still quite of that middle world which lies next, though wholly outside, our own. Since his first story appeared he has contributed several others to these pages, and he now makes a showing palpable to criticism in a volume called The Wife of his Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line; a volume of Southern sketches called The Conjure Woman; said a short life of Frederick Douglass, in the Beacon Series of biographies. The last is a simple, solid, straight piece of work, not remarkable above many other biographical studies by people entirely white, and yet important as the work of a man not entirely white treating of a great man of his inalienable race list. But the volumes of fiction are remarkable above many, above most short stories by people entirely white, and would be worthy of unusual notice if they were not the work of a mail not entirely white.

It is not from their racial interest that we could first wish to speak of them, though that must have a very great and very just claim upon the critic. It is much more simply and directly, as works of art, that they make their appeal, and we must allow the force of this quite independently of the other interest. Yet it cannot always be allowed. There are times in each of the stories of the first volume when the simplicity lapses, and the effect is as of a week and uninstructed touch. There are other times when the attitude, severely impartial and studiously aloof, accuses itself of a little pompousness. There are still other times when the literature is it little too ornate for beauty, and the diction is journalistic, reporteristic. But it is right to add that these are the exceptional times, and that for far the greatest past Mr. Chesnutt seems to know quite as well what he wants to do in a given case as Maupassant, or ‘I’orguénief, or Mr. James, or Miss Jewett, or Miss Wilkins, in other given cases, and has done it with an art of kindred quiet and force. He belongs, in other words, to the good school, the only school, all aberrations from nature being so much truancy and anarchy. He sees his people very clearly, very justly, and he shows them as he sees them, leaving the reader to divine the depth of his feeling for them. He touches all the stops, and with equal delicacy in stories of real tragedy and comedy and pathos, so that it would be hard to say which is the finest in such admirably rendered effects as The Web of Circumstance, The Bouquet, and Uncle Wellington’s Wives. In some others the comedy degenerates into satire, with a look in the reader’s direction which the author’s friend must deplore.

As these stories are of our own time and country, and as there is not a swashbuckler of the seventeenth century, or a sentimentalist of this, or a princess of an imaginary kingdom, in any of them, they will possibly not reach half a million readers in six months, but in twelve months possibly more readers will remember them than if they had reached the half million. They are new and fresh and strong, as life always is, and fable never is; and the stories of The Conjure Woman have a wild, indigenous poetry, the creation of sincere and original imagination, which is imparted with a tender humorousness and a very artistic reticence. As far as his race is concerned, or his sixteenth part of a race, it does not greatly matter whether Mr. Chesnutt invented their motives, or found them, as he feigns, among his distant cousins of the Southern cabins. In either ease, the wonder of their beauty is the same; and whatever is primitive and sylvan or campestral in the reader’s heart is touched by the spells thrown on the simple black lives in these enchanting tales. Character, the most precious thing in fiction, is as faithfully portrayed against this poetic background as in the setting of the Stories of the Color Line.

Yet these stories, after all, are Mr. Chesnutt’s most important work, whether we consider them merely as realistic fiction, apart from their author, or as studies of that middle world of which he is naturally and voluntarily a citizen. We had known the nethermost world of the grotesque and comical negro and the terrible and tragic negro through the white observer on the outside, and black character in its lyrical moods we had known from such an inside witness as Mr. Paul Dunbar; but it had remained for Mr. Chesnutt to acquaint us with those regions where the paler shades dwell as hopelessly, with relation to ourselves, as the blackest negro. He has not shown the dwellers there as very different from ourselves. They have within their own circles the same social ambitions and prejudices; they intrigue and truckle and crawl, and are snobs, like ourselves, both of the snobs that snub and the snobs that are snubbed. We may choose to think them droll in their parody of pure white society, but perhaps it would he wiser to recognize that they are like us because they are of our blood by more than a half, or three quarters, or nine tenths. It is not, in such eases, their negro blood that characterizes them; but it is their negro blood that excludes them, and that will imaginably fortify them and exalt them. Bound in that sad solidarity from which there is no hope of entrance into polite white society for them, they may create a civilization of their own, which need not lack the highest quality. They need not be ashamed of the race from which they have sprung, and whose exile they share; for in many of the arts it has already shown, during a single generation of freedom, gifts which slavery apparently only obscured. With Mr. Booker Washington the first American orator of our time, fresh upon the time of Frederick Douglass; with Mr. Dunbar among the truest of our poets; with Mr. Tanner, a black American, among the only three Americans from whom the French government ever bought a picture, Mr. Chesnutt may well be willing to own his color.

But that is his personal affair. Our own more universal interest in him arises from the more than promise he has given in a department of literature where Americans hold the foremost place. In this there is, happily, no color line; and if he has it in him to go forward on the way which he has traced for himself, to be true to life as he has known it, to deny himself the glories of the cheap success which awaits the charlatan in fiction, one of the places at the top is open to him. He has sounded a fresh note, boldly, not blatantly, and he has won the ear of the more intelligent public.

FRANK NORRIS

THE projection which death gives the work of a man against the history of his time, is the doubtful gain we have to set against the recent loss of such authors as George Douglas, the Scotchman, who wrote “The House with the Green Shutters,” and Frank Norris, the American, who wrote “McTeague” and The Octopus,” and other novels, antedating and postdating the first of these, and less clearly prophesying his future than the last. The gain is doubtful, because, though their work is now freed from the cloud of question which always involves the work of a living man in the mind of the general, if his work is good (if it is bad they give it no faltering welcome), its value was already apparent to those who judge from the certainty within themselves, and not from the uncertainty without. Every one in a way knows a thing to be good, but the most have not the courage to acknowledge it, in their sophistication with canons and criterions. The many, who in the tale of the criticism are not worth minding, are immensely unworthy of the test which death alone seems to put into their power. The few, who had the test before, were ready to own that Douglas’s study of Scottish temperaments offered a hope of Scottish fiction freed the Scottish sentimentality which had kept it provincial; and that Norris’s two mature novels, one personal and one social, imparted the assurance of an American fiction so largely commensurate with American circumstance as to liberate it from the casual and the occasional, in which it seemed lastingly trammelled. But the parallel between the two does not hold much farther. What Norris did, not merely what he dreamed of doing, was of vaster frame, and inclusive of imaginative intentions far beyond those of the only immediate contemporary to be matched with him, while it was of as fine and firm an intellectual quality, and of as intense and fusing an emotionality.

I.

In several times and places, it has been my rare pleasure to bear witness to the excellence of what Norris had done, and the richness of his promise. The vitality of his work was so abundant, the pulse of health was so full and strong in it, that it is incredible it should not be persistent still. The grief with which we accept such a death as his is without the consolation that we feel when we can say of some one that his life was a struggle, and that he is well out of the unequal strife, as we might say when Stephen Crane died. The physical slightness, if I may so suggest one characteristic of Crane’s vibrant achievement, reflected the delicacy of energies that could be put forth only in nervous spurts, in impulses vivid and keen, but wanting in breadth and bulk of effect. Curiously enough, on the other hand, this very lyrical spirit, whose freedom was its life, was the absolute slave of reality. It was interesting to hear him defend what he had written, in obedience to his experience of things, against any change in the interest of convention. “No,” he would contend, in behalf of the profanities of his people, “that is the way they talk. I have thought of that, and whether I ought to leave such things out, but if I do I am not giving the thing as I know it.” He felt the constraint of those semi-savage natures, such as he depicted in “Maggie,” and “George’s Mother,” and was forced through the fealty of his own nature to report them as they spoke no less than as they looked. When it came to “The Red Badge of Courage,” where he took leave of these simple aesthetics, and lost himself in a whirl of wild guesses at the fact from the ground of insufficient witness, he made the failure which formed the break between his first and his second manner, though it was what the public counted a success, with every reason to do so from the report of the sales.

The true Stephen Crane was the Stephen Crane of the earlier books, the earliest book; for “Maggie” remains the best thing he did. All he did was lyrical, but this was the aspect and accent as well as the spirit of the tragically squalid life he sang, while “The Red Badge of Courage,” and the other things that followed it, were the throes of an art failing with material to which it could not render an absolute devotion from an absolute knowledge. He sang, but his voice erred up and down the scale, with occasional flashes of brilliant melody, which could not redeem the errors. New York was essentially his inspiration, the New York of suffering and baffled and beaten life, of inarticulate or blasphemous life; and away from it he was not at home, with any theme, or any sort of character. It was the pity of his fate that he must quit New York, first as a theme, and then as a habitat: for he rested nowhere else, and wrought with nothing else as with the lurid depths which he gave proof of knowing better than any one else. Every one is limited, and perhaps no one is more limited than another; only, the direction of the limitation is different in each. Perhaps George Douglas, if he had lived, would still have done nothing greater than “The House with the Green Shutters,” and might have failed in the proportion of a larger range as Stephen Crane did. I am not going to say that either of these extraordinary talents was of narrower bound than Frank Norris; such measures are not of the map. But I am still less going to say that they were of finer quality because their achievement seems more poignant, through the sort of physical concentration which it has. Just as a whole unhappy world agonizes in the little space their stories circumscribe, so what is sharpest and subtlest in that anguish finds its like in the epical breadths of Norris’s fiction.

II.

At the other times when I so gladly owned the importance of this fiction, I frankly recognized what seemed to me the author’s debt to an older master; and now, in trying to sum up my sense of it in an estimate to which his loss gives a sort of finality for me, I must own again that he seemed to derive his ideal of the novel from the novels of Zola. I cannot say that, if the novels of Zola had not been cast in the epic mould, the novels of Frank Norris would not have been epical. This is by no means certain; while it is, I think, certain that they owe nothing beyond the form to the master from whom he may have imagined it. Or they owe no more to him, essentially, than to the other masters of the time in which Norris lived out his life all too soon. It is not for nothing that any novelist is born in one age, and not another, unless we are to except that aoristic freak, the historical novelist; and by what Frank Norris wrote one might easily know what he had read. He had read, and had profited, with as much originality as any man may keep for himself, by his study of the great realists whose fiction has illustrated the latter part of the nineteenth century beyond any other time in the history of fiction; and if he seemed to have served his apprenticeship rather more to one of them than to another, this may be the effect of an inspiration not finally derived from that one. An Italian poet says that in Columbus “the instinct of the unknown continent burned;” and it may be that this young novelist, who had his instincts mostly so well intellectualized, was moved quite from within when he imagined treating American things in an epical relation as something most expressive of their actual relation. I am not so sure that this is so, but I am sure that he believed it so, and that neither in material nor in treatment are his novels Zolaesque, though their form is Zolaesque, in the fashion which Zola did not invent, though he stamped it so deeply with his nature and his name.

I may allow also that he was like Zola in his occasional indulgence of a helpless fondness for the romantic, but he quite transcended Zola in the rich strain of poetry coloring his thought, and the mysticism in which he now and then steeped his story. I do not care enough, however, for what is called originality in any writer to fatigue myself greatly in the effort to establish that of a writer who will avouch his fresh and vigorous powers to any one capable of feeling them. I prefer, in the presence of a large design left unfulfilled, to note the generous ideal, the ample purpose, forecast in the novel forming the first of the trilogy he imagined.

In one of those few meetings which seem, too late, as if they might have been so many, but which the Hew York conditions of overwork for all who work at all begrudge, I remember how he himself outlined his plan. The story of the Wheat was for him the allegory of the industrial and financial America which is the real America, and he had begun already to tell the first part of this story in the tragedy of the railroad-ridden farms of California, since published as “The Octopus.” The second part, as he then designed, was to carry the tale to Chicago, where the distribution of the Wheat was to be the theme, as its production had already been the theme in the first. The last part was to find its scene in Europe, among the representative cities where the consumption of the Wheat was to form the motive. Norris believed himself peculiarly qualified for the work by the accidents of his life; for he was born in Chicago and had lived there till he was fifteen years old; then he had gone to California, and had grown up into the knowledge of the scene and action which he has portrayed so powerfully; later, he had acquainted himself with Europe, by long sojourn; and so he argued, with an enthusiasm tempered by a fine sense of his moral and artistic responsibility, that he had within himself the means of realizing the whole fact to the reader’s imagination. He was aware that such a plan could be carried out only by years of ardent and patient study, and he expected to dedicate the best part of his strong young life to it.

III.

Those who know “The Octopus” know how his work justified his faith in himself; but those who had known “McTeague” could not have doubted but he would do what he had undertaken, in the spirit of the undertaking. Norris did give the time and toil to the right documentation of his history. He went to California and renewed his vital knowledge of his scene; he was in California again, studying the course of the fact which was to bring him to Chicago, when death overtook him and ended his high emprise. But in the meantime he had given us “The Octopus,” and before that he had given us “McTeague,” books not all so unlike in their nature as their surfaces might suggest. Both are epical, though the one is pivoted on the common ambition of a coarse human animal, destined to prevail in a half-quackish triumph, and the other revolves about one of the largest interests of modern civilization. The author thought at first of calling “McTeague,” as he told me, “The Golden Tooth,” which would have been more significant of the irregular dentist’s supremacy in the story, and the ideal which inspired him; but perhaps he felt a final impossibility in the name. Yet, the name is a mere mask; and when one opens the book, the mask falls, and the drama confronts us with as living a physiognomy as I have seen in fiction. There is a bad moment when the author is overcome by his lingering passion for the romantic, and indulges himself in a passage of rank melodrama; but even there he does nothing that denies the reality of his characters, and they are always of a reality so intense that one lives with them in the grotesquely shabby San Francisco street where, but for the final episode, the action passes.

What is good is good, it matters not what other things are better or worse; and I could ask nothing for Norris, in my sense of his admirable achievement, but a mind freed to criticism absolute and not relative. He is of his time, and, as I have said, his school is evident; and yet I think he has a right to make his appeal in “The Octopus” irrespective of the other great canvases beside which that picture must be put. One should dissociate it as far as possible from the work of his masters — we all have masters; the masters themselves had them — not because it is an imitation, and would suffer from the comparison, but because it is so essentially different, so boldly and frankly native, that one is in danger of blaming it for a want of conformity to models, rather than for too close a following. Yet this, again, does not say quite the right thing, and what 1 feel, and wish others to feel, in regard to it, is the strong security of its most conscientious and instructed art. Here is nothing of experiment, of protest, of rebellion; the author does not break away from form in any sprawling endeavor for something newly or incomparably American, Californian, Western, but finds scope enough for his powers within the limits where the greatest fiction of our period “orbs about.” The time, if there ever was one, for a prose Walt Whitman was past; and he perceived that the indigenous quality was to be imparted to his work by the use of fresh material, freshly felt, but used in the fashion and the form which a world-old art had evolved in its long endeavor.

“McTeague” was a personal epic, the Odyssey of a simple, semi-savage nature adventuring and experiencing along the low social levels which the story kept, and almost never rose or fell from. As I review it in the light of the first strong impressions, I must own it greater than I have ever yet acknowledged it, and 1 do this now with the regret which I hope the critic is apt to feel for not praising enough when praise could have helped most. I do not think my strictures of it were mistaken, for they related to the limits which certain facts of it would give it with the public, rather than to the ethical or æsthetic qualities which would establish it with the connoisseur. Yet, lest any reader of mine should be left without due sense of these, I wish now to affirm my strong sense of them, and to testify to the value which this extraordinary book has from its perfectly simple fidelity: from the truthfulness in which there is no self-doubt and no self-excuse.

IV.

But, with all its power, “McTeague” is no such book as “The Octopus,” which is the Iliad to its Odyssey.

It will not be suggesting too much for the story to say, that there is a kind of Homeric largeness in the play of the passions moving it. They are not autochthons, these Californians of the great Wheat farms, choking in the folds of the railroad, but Americans of more than one transplantation; yet there is something rankly earthy and elemental in them, which gives them the pathos of tormented Titans. It is hard to choose any of them as the type, as it is hard to chose any scene as the representative moment. If we choose Annixeter, growing out of an absolute, yet not gross, materiality, through the fire of a purifying love, into a kind of final spirituality, we think, with misgiving for our decision, of Magnus Derrick, the high, pure leader of the rebellion against the railroad, falling into ruin, moral and mental, through the use of the enemy’s bad means for his good cause. Half a score of other figures, from either camp, crowd upon the fancy to contest the supreme interest, men figures, women figures; and, when it comes to choosing this episode or that as the supreme event, the confusion of the critic is even greater. If one were to instance the fight between the farmers and the sheriff’s deputies, with the accompanying evictions, one must recall the tremendous passages of the train-robbery by the crazy victim of the railroad’s treachery, taking his revenge in his hopeless extremity. Again, a half score of other scenes, other episodes rise from the remembered pages, and defy selection.

The story is not less but more epical, in being a strongly inter-wrought group of episodes. The play of an imagination fed by a rich consciousness of the mystical relations of nature and human nature, the body and the soul of earthly life, steeps the whole theme in an odor of common growth. It is as if the Wheat sprang out of the hearts of men, in the conception of the young poet who writes its Iliad, and who shows how it overwhelms their lives, and germinates anew from their deaths. His poem, of which the terms are naked prose, is a picture of the civilization, the society, the culture which is the efflorescence of the wheaten prosperity; and the social California, rank, crude, lusty, which he depicts is as convincing as the agricultural California, which is the ground of his work. It will be easily believed that in the handling nothing essential to the strong impression is blinked; but nothing, on the other hand, is forced in. The episode of Venamee and Angèle, with its hideous tragedy, and the long mystical epilogue ending almost in anti-climax, is the only passage which can be accused of irrelevance, and it is easier to bring than to prove this accusation.

As I write, and scarcely touch the living allegory here and there, it rises before me in its large inclusion, and makes me feel once more how little any analysis of a work of art can represent it. After all the critic must ask the reader to take his word for it that the thing is great, and entreat him to go see for himself: see, in this instance, the breadth and the fineness, the beauty and the dread, the baseness and the grandeur, the sensuality and the spirituality, working together for the effect of a novel unequalled for scope and for grasp in our fiction.

V.

Fine work we have enough of and to spare in our fiction. No one can say it is wanting in subtlety of motive and delicate grace of form. But something still was lacking, something that was not merely the word but the deed of commensurateness. Perhaps, after all, those who have demanded Continentality of American literature had some reason in their folly. One thinks so, when one considers work like Norris’s, and finds it so vast in scope while so fine and beautiful in detail. Hugeness was probably what those poor fellows were wanting when they asked for Continentality; and from any fit response that has come from them one might well fancy them dismayed and puzzled to have been given greatness instead. But Continentality he also gave them.

His last book is a fragment, a part of a greater work, but it is a mighty fragment, and it has its completeness. In any time but this, when the air is filled with the fizz and sputter of a thousand pin-wheels, the descent of such a massive aërolite as “The Octopus” would have stirred all men’s wonder, but its light to most eyes appears to have seemed of one quality with those cheap explosives which all the publishing houses are setting off, and advertising as meteoric. If the time will still come for acknowledgment of its greatness, it will not be the time for him who put his heart and soul into it. That is the pity, but that in the human conditions is what cannot be helped. We are here to do something, we do not know why; we think it is for ourselves, but it is for almost anyone but ourselves. If it is great, some one else shall get the good of it, and the doer shall get the glory too late; if it is mean, the doer shall have the glory, but who shall have the good? This would not be so bad if there were life long enough for the processes of art; if the artist could outlive the doubt and the delay into which every great work of art seems necessarily to plunge the world anew, after all its experience of great work.

I am not saying, I hope, that Frank Norris had not his success, but only that he had not success enough, the success which he would have had if he had lived, and which will still be his too late. The two novels he has left behind him are sufficient for his fame, but though they have their completeness and their adequacy, one cannot help thinking of the series of their like that is now lost to us. It is Aladdin’s palace, and yet,

“The unfinished window in Aladdin’s palace

Unfinished must remain,”

 and we never can look upon it without an ache of longing and regret.

Personally, the young novelist gave one the impression of strength and courage that would hold out to all lengths. Health was in him always as it never was in that other rare talent of ours with whom I associate him in my sense of the irretrievable, the irreparable. I never met him but he made me feel that he could do it, the thing he meant to do, and do it robustly and quietly, without the tremor of “those electrical nerves” which imparted itself from the presence of Stephen Crane. With him my last talk of the right way and the true way of doing things was saddened by the confession of his belief that we were soon to be overwhelmed by the rising tide of romanticism, whose crazy rote he heard afar, and expected with the resignation which the sick experience with all things. But Norris heard nothing, or seemed to hear nothing, but the full music of his own aspiration, the rich diapason of purposes securely shaping themselves in performance.

Who shall inherit these, and carry forward work so instinct with the Continent as his? Probably, no one; and yet good work shall not fail us, manly work, great work. One need not be overhopeful to be certain of this. Bad work, false, silly, ludicrous work, we shall always have, for the most of those who read are so, as well as the most of those who write; and yet there shall be here and there one to see the varying sides of our manifold life truly and to say what he sees. When I think of Mr. Brand Whitlock and his novel of “The Thirteenth District,” which has embodied the very spirit of American politics as American politicians know them in all the Congressional districts; when I think of the author of “The Spenders,” so wholly good in one half that one forgets the other half is only half good; when I think of such work as Mr. William Allen White’s, Mr. Robert Herrick’s, Mr. Will Payne’s — all these among the younger men — it is certainly not to despair because we shall have no such work as Frank Norris’s from them. They, and the like of them, will do their good work as he did his.

W. D. HOWELLS.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL COUNTER-CURRENT IN RECENT FICTION

It is consoling as often as dismaying to find in what seems a cataclysmal tide of a certain direction a strong drift to the opposite quarter. It is so divinable, if not so perceptible, that its presence may usually be recognized as a beginning of the turn in every tide which is sure, sooner or later, to come. In reform, it is the menace of reaction; in reaction, it is the promise of reform; we may take heart as we must lose heart from it. A few years ago, when a movement which carried fiction to the highest place in literature was apparently of such onward and upward sweep that there could be no return or descent, there was a counter-current in it which stayed it at last, and pulled it back to that lamentable level where fiction is now sunk, and the word “novel” is again the synonym of all that is morally false and mentally despicable. Yet that this, too, is partly apparent, I think can be shown from some phases of actual fiction which happen to be its very latest phases, and which are of a significance as hopeful as it is interesting. Quite as surely as romanticism lurked at the heart of realism, something that we may call “psychologism” has been present in the romanticism of the last four or five years, and has now begun to evolve itself in examples which it is the pleasure as well as the duty of criticism to deal with.

I.

No one in his day has done more to popularize the romanticism, now decadent, than Mr. Gilbert Parker; and he made way for it at its worst just because he was so much better than it was at its worst, because he was a poet of undeniable quality, and because he could bring to its intellectual squalor the graces and the powers which charm, though they could not avail to save it from final contempt. He saves himself in his latest novel, because, though still so largely romanticistic, its prevalent effect is psychologistic, which is the finer analogue of realistic, and which gave realism whatever was vital in it, as now it gives romanticism whatever will survive it. In “The Right of Way” Mr. Parker is not in a world where mere determinism rules, where there is nothing but the happening of things, and where this one or that one is important or unimportant according as things are happening to him or not, but has in himself no claim upon the reader’s attention. Once more the novel begins to rise to its higher function, and to teach that men are somehow masters of their fate. His Charley Steele is, indeed, as unpromising material for the experiment, in certain ways, as could well be chosen. One of the few memorable things that Bulwer said, who said so many quotable things, was that pure intellectuality is the devil, and on his plane Charley Steele comes near being pure intellectual. He apprehends all things from the mind, and does the effects even of goodness from the pride of mental strength. Add to these conditions of his personality that pathologically he is from time to time a drunkard, with always the danger of remaining a drunkard, and you have a figure of which so much may be despaired that it might almost be called hopeless. I confess that in the beginning this brilliant, pitiless lawyer, this consciencelessly powerful advocate, at once mocker and poseur, all but failed to interest me. A little of him and his monocle went such a great way with me that I thought I had enough of him by the end of the trial, where he gets off a man charged with murder, and then cruelly snubs the homicide in his gratitude; and I do not quite know how I kept on to the point where Steele in his drunkenness first dazzles and then insults the gang of drunken lumbermen, and begins his second life in the river where they have thrown him, and where his former client finds him. From that point I could not forsake him to the end, though I found myself more than once in the world where things happen of themselves and do not happen from the temperaments of its inhabitants. In a better and wiser world, the homicide would not perhaps be at hand so opportunely to save the life of the advocate who had saved his; but one consents to this, as one consents to a great deal besides in the story, which is imaginably the survival of a former method. The artist’s affair is to report the appearance, the effect; and in the real world, the appearance, the effect, is that of law and not of miracle. Nature employs the miracle so very sparingly that most of us go through life without seeing one, and some of us contract such a prejudice against miracles that when they are performed for us we suspect a trick. When I suffered from this suspicion in “The Right of Way” I was the more vexed because I felt that I was in the hands of a connoisseur of character who had no need of miracles.

I have liked Mr. Parker’s treatment of French-Canadian life, as far as I have known it; and in this novel it is one of the principal pleasures for me. He may not have his habitant, his seigneur or his cure down cold, but he makes me believe that he has, and I can ask no more than that of him. In like manner, he makes the ambient, physical as well as social, sensible around me: the cold rivers, the hard, clear skies, the snowy woods and fields, the little frozen villages of Canada. In this book, which is historical of the present rather than the past, he gives one a realizing sense of the Canadians, not only in the country but in the city, at least so far as they affect each other psychologically in society, and makes one feel their interesting temperamental difference from Americans. His Montrealers are still Englishmen in their strenuous individuality; but in the frank expression of character, of eccentricity, Charley Steele is like a type of lawyer in our West, of an epoch when people were not yet content to witness ideals of themselves, but when they wished to be their poetry rather than to read it. In his second life he has the charm for the imagination that a disembodied spirit might have, if it could be made known to us in the circumstances of another world. He has, indeed, made almost as clean a break with his past as if he had really been drowned in the river. When, after the term of oblivion, in which he knows nothing of his past self, he is restored to his identity by a famous surgeon too opportunely out of Paris, on a visit to his brother, the cure, the problem is how he shall expiate the errors of his past, work out his redemption in his new life; and the author solves it for him by appointing him to a life of unselfish labor, illumined by actions of positive beneficence. It is something like the solution which Goethe imagines for Faust, and perhaps no other is imaginable. In contriving it, Mr. Parker indulges the weaker brethren with an abundance of accident and a luxury of catastrophe, which the reader interested in the psychology of the story may take as little account of as he likes. Without so much of them he might have made a sculpturesque romance as clearly and nobly definite as “The Scarlet Letter”; with them he has made a most picturesque romantic novel. His work, as I began by saying, or hinting, is the work of a poet, in conception, and I wish that in some details of diction it were as elect as the author’s verse is. But one must not expect everything; and in what it is, “The Right of Way” satisfies a reasonable demand on the side of literature, while it more than meets a reasonable expectation on the side of psychological interest. Distinctly it marks an epoch in contemporary noveling, and mounts far above the average best toward the day of better things which I hope it is not rash to image dawning.

II.

I am sure I do not merely fancy the auroral light in a group of stories by another poet. “The Ruling Passion,” Dr. Henry Van Dyke calls his book, which relates itself by a double tie to Mr. Parker’s novel through kinship of Canadian landscape and character, and through the prevalence of psychologism over determinism in it. In the situations and incidents studied with sentiment that saves itself from sentimentality sometimes with greater and sometimes with less ease, but saves itself, the appeal is from the soul in the character to the soul in the reader, and not from brute event to his sensation. I believe that I like best among these charming things the two sketches — they are hardly stories— “A Year of Nobility” and “The Keeper of the Dight,” though if I were asked to say why, I should be puzzled. Perhaps it is because I find in the two pieces named a greater detachment than I find in some others of Dr. Van Dyke’s delightful volume, and greater evidence that he has himself so thoroughly and finally mastered his material that he is no longer in danger of being unduly affected by it. That is a danger which in his very quality of lyrical poet he is most liable to, for he is above all a lyrical poet, and such drama as the chorus usually comments is the drama next his heart. The pieces, in fact, are so many idyls, and their realism is an effect which he has felt rather than reasoned his way to. It is implicational rather than intentional. It is none the worse but all the better on that account, and I cannot say that the psychologism is the worse for being frankly, however uninsistently, moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories, plays through them, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything human transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from their native woods and waters. Canada seems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survives there among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, their picturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their new world customs. It is the land not only of the habitant, but of his oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord the seigneur, now faded economically, but still lingering socially in the scene of his large possessions. Their personality imparts a charm to the many books about them which at present there seems to be no end to the making of; and such a fine touch as Dr. Van Dyke’s gives us a likeness of them, which if it is idealized is idealized by reservation, not by attribution.

III.

Mr. William Allen White’s method is the reverse of Dr. Van Dyke’s. If he has held his hand anywhere the reader does not suspect it, for it seems, with its relentless power of realization, to be laid upon the whole political life of Kansas, which it keeps in a clutch so penetrating, so comprehensive, that the reader does not quite feel his own vitals free from it. Very likely, it does not grasp the whole situation; after all, it is a picture, not a map, that Mr. White has been making, and the photograph itself, though it may include, does not represent everything. Some years ago there was a silly attempt to reproach the true painters of manners by calling them photographic, but I doubt if even then Mr. White would have minded any such censure of his conscientious work, and I am sure that now he would count it honor. He cannot be the admirable artist he is without knowing that it is the inwardness as well as the outwardness of men that he photographs, and if the reader does not know it, the worse for the reader. He is not the sort of reader who will rise from this book humiliated and fortified, as any reader worthy of it will.

The author has put his best foot forward in the opening story, “The Man on Horseback,” which, when I read it a few years ago in the magazine where it first appeared, seemed to me so perfect in its way that I should not have known how to better it. Of course, this is a good deal for a critic to say; it is something like abdicating his office; but I repeat it. It takes rather more courage for a man to be honest in fiction than out of it, for people do not much expect it of him, or altogether like it in him; but in “The Man on Horseback” Mr. White is at every moment honest. He is honest, if not so impressively honest, in the other stories, “A Victory for the People,” “A Triumph’s Evidence,” “The Mercy of Death,” and “A Most Lamentable Comedy;” and where he fails of perfect justice to his material, I think it is because of his unconscious political bias, rather than anything wilfuller. In the story last named this betrays itself in his treatment of a type of man who could not be faithful to any sort of movement, and whose unfaithfulness does not necessarily censure the movement Mr. White dislikes. Wonderfully good as the portrait of Dan Gregg is, it wants the final touch which could have come only from a little kindness. His story might have been called “The Man on Foot,” by the sort of antithesis which I should not blame Mr. White for scorning, and I should not say anything of it worse than that it is pitilessly hard, which the story of “The Man on Horseback” is not, or any of the other stories. Sentimentality of any kind is alien to the author’s nature, but not tenderness, especially that sparing sort which gives his life to the man who is down.

Most of the men whom Mr. White deals with are down, as most men in the struggle of life are. Few of us can be on top morally, almost as few as can be on top materially; and probably nothing will more surprise the saints at the judgment day than to find themselves in such a small minority. But probably not the saints alone will be saved, and it is some such hope that Mr. White has constantly in mind when making his constant appeal to conscience. It is, of course, a dramatic, not a didactic appeal. He preaches so little and is so effectively reticent that I could almost with he had left out the preface of his book, good as it is. Yes, just because it is so good I could wish he had left it out. It is a perfect justification of his purpose and methods, but they are their own justification with all who can think about them, and the others are themselves not worth thinking about. The stories are so bravely faithful to human nature in that political aspect which is but one phase of our whole average life that they are magnificently above all need of excusing or defending. They form a substantial body of political fiction, such as we have so long sighed for, and such as some of us will still go on sighing for quite as if it had not been supplied. Some others will be aware that it has been supplied in a form as artistically fine as the material itself is coarse and common, if indeed any sort of humanity is coarse and common except to those who themselves are so.

The meaning that animates the stories is that our political opportunity is trammelled only so far as we have trammelled it by our greed and falsehood; and in this aspect the psychology of Mr. White offers the strongest contrast to that of the latest Russian master in fiction. Maxim Gorky’s wholly hopeless study of degeneracy in the life of “Foma Gordyeeff” accuses conditions which we can only imagine with difficulty. As one advances through the moral waste of that strange book one slowly perceives that he is in a land of No Use, in an ambient of such iron fixity and inexorable bounds that perhaps Foma’s willingness to rot through vice into imbecility is as wise as anything else there. It is a book that saturates the soul with despair, and blights it with the negation which seems the only possible truth in the circumstances; so that one questions whether the Russian in which Turgenieff and Tolstoy, and even Dostoyevsky, could animate the volition and the expectation of better things has not sunk to depths beyond any counsel of amelioration. To come up out of that Bottomless Pit into the measureless air of Mr. White’s Kansas plains is like waking from death to life. We are still among dreadfully fallible human beings, but we are no longer among the damned; with the worst there is a purgatorial possibility of Paradise. Even the perdition of Dan Gregg then seems not the worst that could befall him; he might again have been governor.

IV.

If the human beings in Dr. Weir Mitchell’s very interesting novel of “Circumstance” do not seem so human as those Russians of Gorky and those Kansans of Mr. White, it is because people in society are always human with difficulty, and his Philadelphians are mostly in society. They are almost reproachfully exemplary, in some instances; and it is when they give way to the natural man, and especially the natural woman, that they are consoling and edifying. When Mary Fairthorne begins to scold her cousin, Kitty Morrow, at the party where she finds Kitty wearing her dead mother’s pearls, and even takes hold of her in a way that makes the reader hope she is going to shake her, she is delightful; and when Kitty complains that Mary has “pinched” her, she is adorable. One is really in love with her for the moment; and in that moment of nature the thick air of good society seems to blow away and let one breathe freely. The bad people in the book are better than the good people, and the good people are best in their worst tempers. They are so exclusively well born and well bred that the fitness of the medical student, Blount, for their society can be ascertained only by his reference to a New England ancestry of the high antiquity that can excuse even dubious cuffs and finger-nails in a descendant of good principles and generous instincts.

The psychological problem studied in the book with such artistic fineness and scientific thoroughness is personally a certain Mrs. Hunter, who manages through the weak-minded and selfish Kitty Morrow to work her way to authority in the household of Kitty’s uncle, where she displaces Mary Fairthorne, and makes the place odious to all the kith and kin of Kitty. Intellectually, she is a clever woman, or rather, she is a woman of great cunning that rises at times to sagacity; but she is limited by a bad heart and an absence of conscience. She is bold up to a point, and then she is timid; she will go to lengths, but not to all lengths; and when it comes to poisoning Fairthorne to keep him from changing his mind about the bequest he has made her, she has not quite the courage of her convictions. She hesitates and does not do it, and it is in this point she becomes so aesthetically successful. The guilt of the uncommitted crimes is more important than the guilt of those which have been committed; and the author does a good thing morally as well as artistically in leaving Mrs. Hunter still something of a problem to his reader. In most things she is almost too plain a case; she is sly, and vulgar, and depraved and cruel; she is all that a murderess should be; but, in hesitating at murder, she becomes and remains a mystery, and the reader does not get rid of her as he would if she had really done the deed. In the inferior exigencies she strikes fearlessly; and when the man who has divorced her looms up in her horizon with doom in his presence, she goes and makes love to him. She is not the less successful because she disgusts him; he agrees to let her alone so long as she does no mischief; she has, at least, made him unwilling to feel himself her persecutor, and that is enough for her.

Mrs. Hunter is a study of extreme interest in degeneracy, but I am not sure that Kitty Morrow is not a rarer contribution to knowledge. Of course, that sort of selfish girl has always been known, but she has not met the open recognition which constitutes knowledge, and so she has the preciousness of a find. She is at once tiresome and vivacious; she is cold-hearted but not cold-blooded, and when she lets herself go in an outburst of passion for the celibate young ritualist, Knellwood, she becomes fascinating. She does not let herself go without having assured herself that he loves her, and somehow one is not shocked at her making love to him; one even wishes that she had won him. I am not sure but the case would have been a little truer if she had won him, but as it is I am richly content with it. Perhaps I am the more content because in the case of Kitty Morrow I find a concession to reality more entire than the case of Mrs. Hunter. She is of the heredity from which you would expect her depravity; but Kitty Morrow, who lets herself go so recklessly, is, for all one knows, as well born and as well bred as those other Philadelphians. In my admiration of her, as a work of art, however, I must not fail of justice to the higher beauty of Mary Fairthorne’s character. She is really a good girl, and saved from the unreality which always threatens goodness in fiction by those limitations of temper which I have already hinted.

V.

It is far from the ambient of any of these imaginary lives to that of the half-caste heroine of “A Japanese Nightingale” and the young American whom she marries in one of those marriages which neither the Oriental nor the Occidental expects to last till death parts them. It is far, and all is very strange under that remote sky; but what is true to humanity anywhere is true everywhere; and the story of Yuki and Bigelow, as the Japanese author tells it in very choice English, is of as palpitant actuality as any which should treat of lovers next door. If I have ever read any record of young married love that was so frank, so sweet, so pure, I do not remember it. Yet, Yuki, though she loves Bigelow, does not marry him because she loves him, but because she wishes with the money he gives her to help her brother through college in America. When this brother comes back to Japan — he is the touch of melodrama in the pretty idyl — he is maddened by an acquired Occidental sense of his sister’s disgrace in her marriage, and falls into a fever and dies out of the story, which closes with the lasting happiness of the young wife and husband. There is enough incident, but of the kind that is characterized and does not characterize. The charm, the delight, the supreme interest is in the personality of Yuki. Her father was an Englishman who had married her mother in the same sort of marriage she makes herself; but he is true to his wife till he dies, and possibly something of the English constancy which is not always so evident as in his case qualifies the daughter’s nature. Her mother was, of course, constant, and Yuki, though an outcast from her own people — the conventions seen to be as imperative in Tokyo as in Philadelphia — because of her half-caste origin, is justly Japanese in what makes her loveliest. There is a quite indescribable freshness in the art of this pretty novelette — it is hardly of the dimensions of a novel — which is like no other art except in the simplicity which is native to the best art everywhere. Yuki herself is of a surpassing lovableness. Nothing but the irresistible charm of the American girl could, I should think keep the young men who read Mrs. Watana’s book from going out and marrying Japanese girls. They are safe from this, however, for the reason suggested, and therefore it can be safely commended at least to young men intending fiction, as such a lesson in the art of imitating nature as has not come under my hand for a long while. It has its little defects, but its directness, and sincerity, and its felicity through the sparing touch make me unwilling to note them. In fact, I have forgotten them.

VI.

I wish that I could at all times praise as much the literature of an author who speaks for another colored race, not so far from us as the Japanese, but of as much claim upon our conscience, if not our interest. Mr. Chesnutt, it seems to me, has lost literary quality in acquiring literary quantity, and though his book, “The Marrow of Tradition,” is of the same strong material as his earlier books, it is less simple throughout, and therefore less excellent in manner. At his worst, he is no worse than the higher average of the ordinary novelist, but he ought always to be very much better, for he began better, and he is of that race which has, first of all, to get rid of the cakewalk, if it will not suffer from a smile far more blighting than any frown. He is fighting a battle, and it is not for him to pick up the cheap graces and poses of the jouster. He does, indeed, cast them all from him when he gets down to his work, and in the dramatic climaxes and closes of his story he shortens his weapons and deals his blows so absolutely without flourish that I have nothing but admiration for him. “The Marrow of Tradition,” like everything else he has written, has to do with the relations of the blacks and whites, and in that republic of letters where all men are free and equal he stands up for his own people with a courage which has more justice than mercy in it. The book is, in fact, bitter, bitter. There is no reason in history why it should not be so, if wrong is to be repaid with hate, and yet it would be better if it was not so bitter. I am not saying that he is so inartistic as to play the advocate; whatever his minor foibles may be, he is an artist whom his stepbrother Americans may well be proud of; but while he recognizes pretty well all the facts in the case, he is too clearly of a judgment that is made up. One cannot blame him for that; what would one be one’s self? If the tables could once be turned, and it could be that it was the black race which violently and lastingly triumphed in the bloody revolution at Wilmington, North Carolina, a few years ago, what would not we excuse to the white man who made the atrocity the argument of his fiction?

Mr. Chesnutt goes far back of the historic event in his novel, and shows us the sources of the cataclysm which swept away a legal government and perpetuated an insurrection, but he does not paint the blacks all good, or the whites all bad. He paints them as slavery made them on both sides, and if in the very end he gives the moral victory to the blacks — if he suffers the daughter of the black wife to have pity on her father’s daughter by his white wife, and while her own child lies dead from a shot fired in the revolt, gives her husband’s skill to save the life of her sister’s child — it cannot be said that either his aesthetics or ethics are false. Those who would question either must allow, at least, that the negroes have had the greater practice in forgiveness, and that there are many probabilities to favor his interpretation of the fact. No one who reads the book can deny that the case is presented with great power, or fail to recognize in the writer a portent of the sort of negro equality against which no series of hangings and burnings will finally avail.

VII.

In Mr. Chesnutt’s novel the psychologism is of that universal implication which will distinguish itself to the observer from the psychologism of that more personal sort — the words are not as apt as I should like — evident in some of the interesting books under notice here. I have tried to say that it is none the less a work of art for that reason, and I can praise the art of another novel, in which the same sort of psychologism prevails, though I must confess it a fiction of the rankest tendenciousness. “Lay Down Your Arms” is the name of the English version of the Baroness von Suttner’s story, “Die Waffen Nieder,” which has become a watchword with the peacemakers on the continent of Europe. Its success there has been very great, and I wish its success on the continent of America could be so great that it might replace in the hands of our millions the baleful books which have lately been glorifying bloodshed in the private and public wars of the past, if not present. The wars which “Lay Down Your Arms” deals with are not quite immediate, and yet they are not so far off historically, either. They are the Franco-Austrian war of 1859, the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and the Franco-German war of 1870; and the heroine whose personal relation makes them live so cruelly again is a young Austrian lady of high birth. She is the daughter and the sister of soldiers, and when the handsome young officer, of equal rank with her own, whom she first marries, makes love to her just before the outbreak of the war first named, she is as much in love with his soldiership as with himself. But when the call to arms comes, it strikes to her heart such a sense of war as she has never known before. He is killed in one of the battles of Italy, and after a time she marries another soldier, not such a beau sabreur as the first, but a mature and thoughtful man, who fights through that second war from a sense of duty rather than from love of fighting, and comes out of it with such abhorrence that he quits the army and goes with his family to live in Paris. There the third war overtakes him, and in the siege, this Austrian, who has fought the Prussians to the death, is arrested by the communards as a Prussian spy and shot.

The bare outline of the story gives, of course, no just notion of the intense passion of grief which fills it. Neither does it convey a due impression of the character in the different persons which, amidst the heartbreak, is ascertained with some such truth and impartiality as pervade the effects of “War and Peace.” I do not rank it with that work, but in its sincerity and veracity it easily ranks above any other novel treating of war which I know, and it ought to do for the German peoples what the novels of Erckmann-Chatrian did for the French, in at least one generation. Will it do anything for the Anglo-Saxon peoples? Probably not till we have pacified the Philippines and South Africa. We Americans are still apparently in love with fighting, though the English are apparently not so much so; and as it is always well to face the facts, I will transfer to my page some facts of fighting from this graphic book, which the read may apply to the actualities in the Philippines, with a little imagination. They are taken from a letter written to the heroine by her second husband after one of the Austrian defeats. “The people poured boiling water and oil on the Prussians from the windows of the houses at —— …. The village is ours — no, it is the enemy’s, now ours again — and yet once more the enemy’s; but it is no longer a village, but a smoking mass of ruins of houses….One family has remained behind…an old married couple and their daughter, the latter in childbed. The husband is serving in our regiment…. Poor devil! he got there just in time to see the mother and child die; a shell had exploded under their bed…. I saw a breastwork there which was formed of corpses. The defenders had heaped all the slain who were lying near, in order, from that rampart, to fire over at their assailants. I shall surely never forget that wall in my life. A man who formed one of its bricks was still alive, and was waving his arm…. What is happening there? The execution party is drawn out. Has a spy been caught? Seventeen this time. There they come, in four ranks, each one of four men, surrounded by a square of soldiers. The condemned men step out, with their heads down. Behind comes a cart with a corpse in it, and bound to the corpse the dead man’s son, a boy of twelve, also condemned…. Steep, rocky heights; Jaegers, nimble as cats, climbing up them…. Some of them, who are hit by the enemy’s shot, suddenly stretch out both their arms, let their muskets fall, and, with their heads falling backwards, drop off the height, step by step, from one rocky point to another, smashing their limbs to pieces. I saw a horseman at some distance, obliquely behind me, at whose side a shell burst. His horse swerved aside and came against the tail of mind, then shot past me. The man sat still in the saddle, but a fragment of the shell had ripped his belly open and torn out all the intestines. The upper part of his body was held to the lower only by the spine. From the ribs to the thighs nothing but one great, bleeding cavity. A short distance farther he fell to the ground, one foot still clinging in the stirrup, and the galloping horse dragging him on over the stony soil…. Another street fight in the little town of Saar…. In the middle of the square stands a high pillar of the Virgin. The mother of God holds her child in one arm, and stretches the other out in blessing…. Here the fight was prolonged, man to man. They were hacking at me, I laying about me on all sides…. A Prussian dragoon, strong as Goliath, tore one of our officers (a pretty, dandified lieutenant — how many girls are, perhaps, mad after him?) out of his saddle and split his skull at the feet of the Virgin’s pillar. The gentle saint looked on unmoved. Another of the enemy’s dragoons — a Goliath, too — seized, just before me almost, my right-hand man, and bent him backwards in his saddle so powerfully that he broke his back — I myself heard it crack. To this the Madonna gave her blessing also.”

VIII.

It can be said that these incidents of battle are imagined, like the facts of Vereschagin’s pictures, but like these they are imagined rather below than above the real horror of war, and represent them inadequately. The incidents of another book, the last on my list, are of the warfare which goes on in times of peace, and which will go on as long as there are human passions, and mankind are divided into men and women, and saints and sinners. Of all the books on my list, “Let Not Man Put Asunder” is, narrowing the word to the recognition of the author’s intellectual alertness and vividness, the cleverest. The story is of people who constantly talk so wonderfully well beyond the wont even of society people that the utmost skill of the author, who cannot subdue their brilliancy, is needed to make us feel their reality. But he does make us feel this in most cases, the important cases, and in the other cases his power of interesting us is so great that we do not stop to examine the grounds of our sensation, or to question the validity of our emotions. The action, which is positively of to-day, or yesterday at the furthest, passes in Boston and England, among people of such great fortune and high rank and transcendent fashion that the proudest reader cannot complain of their social quality. As to their moral quality, one might have thought the less said the better, if the author had not said so much that is pertinent and impressive. It is from first to last a book with a conscience in it, and its highest appeal is to the conscience. It is so very nearly a great book, so very nearly a true book, that it is with a kind of grief one recognizes its limitations, a kind of surprise at its shortcomings, which, nevertheless, are not shortcomings that impair its supreme effect. This, I take it, is the intimation of a mystical authority in marriage against which divorce sins in vain, which no recreancy can subvert, and by virtue of which it claims eternally its own the lovers united in it; though they seem to become haters, it cannot release them to happiness in a new union through any human law.

If the author had done dramatically (and his doing is mainly dramatic) no more than this, he would have established his right to be taken seriously, but he has done very much more, and has made us acquainted with types and characters which we do not readily forget, and with characters much more real than their ambient. For instance, the Old Cambridge in which the Vassalls live is not the Old Cambridge of fact, but the Vassalls are the Vassalls of fact, though the ancestral halls in which they dwell are of a baroniality difficult of verification. Their honor, their righteousness, their purity are veracious, though their social state is magnified beyond any post-revolutionary experience. The social Boston of the novel is more like; its difference from an older Boston is sensitively felt, and finely suggested, especially on the side of that greater lawlessness in which it is not the greater Boston. Petrina Faneuil, the heroine, is derivatively of the older Boston which has passed away, and actually of the newer Boston which will not be so much regretted when it passes, the fast Boston, the almost rowdy Boston, the decadent Boston. It is, of course, a Boston much worse in the report than in the fact, but it is not unimaginably bad to the student who notes that the lapse from any high ideals is to a level lower than that of people who have never had them. As for Petrina herself, who was in Boston more than of it, she is so admirably analyzed in the chapter devoted to the task that I am tempted to instance it as the best piece of work in the book, though it does not make one hold one’s breath like some of the dramatic episodes: “Whatever religious instinct had been in the family had spent itself at least two generations before her time. She was a pagan — a tolerant, indifferent, slightly scornful pagan…. But she was none the less a Puritan. Certain of her ways of thought and habits of life, had survived the beliefs which had given them birth, as an effect will often outlive its cause. If she was a pagan, she was a serious one, a pagan with a New England conscience.”

This is mighty well said, and the like things that are said of Petrina’s sister-in-law, who has married an English title, are mighty well, too. “She had inherited a countenance whose expression was like the light which lingers in the sky long after sunset — the light of some ancestral fire gone out. If in her face there were prayers, they had been said by Pepperells and Vassalls now sleeping in Massachusetts churchyards. If in her voice there were tears, they had been shed by those who would weep no more. She mirrored the emotions she had never felt; and all that was left of joys and sorrows and spiritual aspirations which had once thrilled human hearts was in that plaintive echo they had given to this woman’s tone, and the light of petition they had left burning in her eyes.”

No one who reads such passages can deny that the author of “Let Not Man Put Asunder” can think subtly as well as say clearly, and the book abounds in proofs of his ability to portray human nature in its lighter aspects. Lady de Bohun, with her pathetic face, is a most amusing creature, with all her tragedy, and she is on the whole the most perfectly characterized personality in the story. The author gives you a real sense of her beauty, her grace, her being always charmingly in a hurry and always late. The greatest scene is hers: the scene in which she meets her divorced husband with his second wife. One may suspect some of the other scenes, but one must accept that scene as one of genuine dramatic worth. Too much of the drama in the book is theatre rather than drama, and yet the author’s gift is essentially dramatic. He knows how to tell a story on his stage that holds you to the fall of the curtain, and makes you almost patient of the muted violins and the limelight of the closing scene. Such things, you say, do not happen in Brookline, Mass., whatever happens in London or in English country houses; and yet the people have at one time or other convinced you of their verity. Of the things that are not natural, you feel like saying that they are supernatural rather than unnatural, and you own that at its worst the book is worth while in a time when most novels are not worth while.

IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS

CONTENTS

IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

XV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

XX

XXI

XXII

XXIII

XXIV

XXV

OTHER ESSAYS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

IMAGINARY INTERVIEWS

I

THE RESTORATION OF THE EASY CHAIR BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

It is not generally known that after forty-two years of constant use the aged and honored movable which now again finds itself put back in its old place in the rear of Harper’s Magazine was stored in the warehouse of a certain safety-deposit company, in the winter of 1892. The event which had then vacated the chair is still so near as to be full of a pathos tenderly personal to all readers of that magazine, and may not be lightly mentioned in any travesty of the facts by one who was thought of for the empty place. He, before putting on the mask and mimic editorial robes — for it was never the real editor who sat in the Easy Chair, except for that brief hour when he took it to pay his deep-thought and deep-felt tribute to its last occupant — stood with bowed face and uncovered head in that bravest and gentlest presence which, while it abode with us here, men knew as George William Curtis.

It was, of course, in one of the best of the fireproof warehouses that the real editor had the Easy Chair stored, and when the unreal editor went to take it out of storage he found it without trouble in one of those vast rooms where the more valuable furniture and bric-à-brac are guarded in a special tutelage. If instinct had not taught him, he would have known it by its homely fashion, which the first unreal editor had suggested when he described it as an “old red-backed Easy Chair that has long been an ornament of our dingy office.” That unreality was Mr. Donald G. Mitchell, the graceful and gracious Ik Marvel, dear to the old hearts that are still young for his Dream Life and his Reveries of a Bachelor, and never unreal in anything but his pretence of being the real editor of the magazine. In this disguise he feigned that he had “a way of throwing” himself back in the Easy Chair, “and indulging in an easy and careless overlook of the gossiping papers of the day, and in such chit-chat with chance visitors as kept him informed of the drift of the town talk, while it relieved greatly the monotony of his office hours.” Not “bent on choosing mere gossip,” he promised to be “on the watch for such topics or incidents as” seemed really important and suggestive, and to set them “down with all that gloss, and that happy lack of sequence, which make every-day talk so much better than every-day writing.”

While the actual unreality stood thinking how perfectly the theory and practice of the Easy Chair for hard upon fifty years had been forecast in these words, and while the warehouse agent stood waiting his pleasure, the Easy Chair fetched a long, deep sigh. Sigh one must call the sound, but it was rather like that soft complaint of the woody fibres in a table which disembodied spirits are about to visit, and which continues to exhale from it till their peculiar vocabulary utters itself in a staccato of muffled taps. No one who has heard that sound can mistake it for another, and the unreal editor knew at once that he confronted in the Easy Chair an animate presence.

“How long have I been here?” it asked, like one wakened from a deep sleep.

“About eight years,” said the unreal editor.

“Ah, I remember,” the Easy Chair murmured, and, as the unreal editor bent forward to pluck away certain sprays of foliage that clung to its old red back, it demanded, “What is that?”

“Some bits of holly and mistletoe.”

“Yes,” the Easy Chair softly murmured again. “The last essay he wrote in me was about Christmas. I have not forgotten one word of it all: how it began, how it went on, and how it ended! ‘In the very promise of the year appears the hectic of its decay.... The question that we have to ask, forecasting in these summer days the coming of Christmas which already shines afar off, is this: whether while we praise Christmas as a day of general joy we take care to keep it so.... Thackeray describes a little dinner at the Timminses’. A modest couple make themselves miserable and spend all their little earnings in order to give a dinner to people for whom they do not care, and who do not care for them.... Christmas is made miserable to the Timminses because they feel that they must spend lavishly and buy gifts like their richer neighbors.... You cannot buy Christmas at the shops, and a sign of friendly sympathy costs little.... Should not the extravagance of Christmas cause every honest man and woman practically to protest by refusing to yield to the extravagance?’ There!” the Easy Chair broke off from quoting, “that was Curtis! The kind and reasonable mood, the righteous conscience incarnate in the studied art, the charming literary allusion for the sake of the unliterary lesson, the genial philosophy —

‘not too good
For human nature’s daily food’ —

the wisdom alike of the closet and the public square, the large patience and the undying hopefulness! Do you think,” the Easy Chair said, with a searching severity one would not have expected of it, “that you are fit to take his place?”

In evasion of this hard question the unreal editor temporized with the effect of not having heard it. “I believe that he and Mr. Mitchell were the only writers of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last?”

The Easy Chair responded, dryly, “You forget Aldrich.”

“If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time that does or will,” retorted the unreal editor. “But he wrote you for only two months. I well remember what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how to make his readers share his pleasure! Still, it was Mr. Mitchell who invented you, and it was Curtis who characterized you beyond all the rest.”

“For a while,” said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish, “they wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably characterized me. He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his youth he trusted in a time

‘When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,’

and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of my best papers, the famous paper on Brook Farm, ‘Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will substitute co-operation for competition.’ He expected the world to be made over in the image of heaven some time, but meanwhile he was glad to help make it even a little better and pleasanter than he found it. He was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a drop of oil on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up from the Bottomless Pit—”

“And I also believe in alleviations,” the unreal editor interrupted. “I love justice, but charity is far better than nothing; and it would be abominable not to do all we can because we cannot at once do everything. Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, even the compromises, en attendant the millennium. Let us accept the provisional, the makeshift. He who came on Christmas Day, and whose mission, as every Christmas Day comes to remind us, was the brotherhood, the freedom, the equality of men, did not He warn us against hastily putting new wine into old bottles? To get the new bottles ready is slow work: that kind of bottle must grow; it cannot be made; and in the mean time let us keep our latest vintages in the vat till we have some vessel proof against their fermentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel is usually mocked as mere optimism, but I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism, or is at least as well founded; and since the one can no more establish itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have optimism. That was always the philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why that should be changed. The conditions are not changed.”

There was a silence which neither the Easy Chair nor the unreal editor broke for a while. Then the Chair suggested, “I suppose that there is not much change in Christmas, at any rate?”

“No,” said the unreal editor; “it goes on pretty much as it used. The Timminses, who give tiresome little dinners which they cannot afford to dull people who don’t want them, are still alive and miserably bent on heaping reluctant beneficiaries with undesired favors, and spoiling the simple ‘pleasure of the time’ with the activities of their fatuous vanity. Or perhaps you think I ought to bring a hopeful mind even to the Timminses?”

“I don’t see why not,” said the Easy Chair. “They are not the architects of their own personalities.”

“Ah, take care, take care!” cried the unreal editor. “You will be saying next that we are the creatures of our environment; that the Timminses would be wiser and better if the conditions were not idiotic and pernicious; and you know what that comes to!”

“No, I am in no danger of that,” the Easy Chair retorted. “The Timminses are no such victims of the conditions. They are of that vast moderately moneyed class who can perfectly well behave with sense if they will. Nobody above them or below them asks them to be foolish and wasteful.”

“And just now you were making excuses for them!”

“I said they were not the architects of their own personalities; but, nevertheless, they are masters of themselves. They are really free to leave off giving little dinners any day they think so. It should be the moralist’s business to teach them to think so.”

“And that was what Curtis gladly made his business,” the unreal editor somewhat sadly confessed, with an unspoken regret for his own difference. More than once it had seemed to him in considering that rare nature that he differed from most reformers chiefly in loving the right rather than in hating the wrong; in fact, in not hating at all, but in pitying and accounting for the wrong as an ancient use corrupted into an abuse. Involuntarily the words of the real editor in that beautiful tribute to the high soul they were praising came to the unreal editor’s lips, and he quoted aloud to the Easy Chair: “‘His love of goodness was a passion. He would fain have seen all that was fair and good, and he strove to find it so; and, finding it otherwise, he strove to make it so.... With no heart for satire, the discord that fell upon his sensitive ear made itself felt in his dauntless comment upon social shams and falsehoods.... But he was a lover of peace, and, ... as he was the ideal gentleman, the ideal citizen, he was also the ideal reformer, without eccentricity or exaggeration. However high his ideal, it never parted company with good sense. He never wanted better bread than could be made of wheat, but the wheat must be kept good and sound,’ and I may add,” the unreal editor broke off, “that he did not hurry the unripe grain to the hopper. He would not have sent all the horses at once to the abattoir because they made the city noisy and noisome, but would first have waited till there were automobiles enough to supply their place.”

The Easy Chair caught at the word. “Automobiles?” it echoed.

“Ah, I forgot how long you have been stored,” said the unreal editor, and he explained as well as he could the new mode of motion, and how already, with its soft rubber galoshes, the automobile had everywhere stolen a march upon the iron heels of the horses in the city avenues.

He fancied the Easy Chair did not understand, quite, from the intelligent air with which it eagerly quitted the subject.

“Well,” it said at last, “this isn’t such a bad time to live in, after all, it appears. But for a supreme test of your optimism, now, what good can you find to say of Christmas? What sermon could you preach on that hackneyed theme which would please the fancy and gladden the heart of the readers of a Christmas number, where you should make your first appearance in the Easy Chair?”

To himself the unreal editor had to own that this was a poser. In his heart he was sick of Christmas: not of the dear and high event, the greatest in the memory of the world, which it records and embodies, but the stale and wearisome Christmas of the Christmas presents, purchased in rage and bestowed in despair; the Christmas of Christmas fiction; the Christmas of heavy Christmas dinners and indigestions; the Christmas of all superfluity and surfeit and sentimentality; the Christmas of the Timminses and the Tiny Tims. But while he thought of these, by operation of the divine law which renders all things sensible by their opposites, he thought of the other kinds of Christmas which can never weary or disgust: the Christmas of the little children and the simple-hearted and the poor; and suddenly he addressed himself to the Easy Chair with unexpected and surprising courage.

“Why should that be so very difficult?” he demanded. “If you look at it rightly, Christmas is always full of inspiration; and songs as well as sermons will flow from it till time shall be no more. The trouble with us is that we think it is for the pleasure of opulent and elderly people, for whom there can be no pleasures, but only habits. They are used to having everything, and as joy dwells in novelty it has ceased to be for them in Christmas gifts and giving and all manner of Christmas conventions. But for the young to whom these things are new, and for the poor to whom they are rare, Christmas and Christmasing are sources of perennial happiness. All that you have to do is to guard yourself from growing rich and from growing old, and then the delight of Christmas is yours forever. It is not difficult; it is very simple; for even if years and riches come upon you in a literal way, you can by a little trying keep yourself young and poor in spirit. Then you can always rejoice with the innocent and riot with the destitute.

“I once knew a father,” the unreal editor continued, “a most doting and devoted father, who, when he bent over the beds of his children to bid them good-night, and found them ‘high sorrowful and cloyed,’ as the little ones are apt to be after a hard day’s pleasure, used to bid them ‘Think about Christmas.’ If he offered this counsel on the night, say, of the 26th of December, and they had to look forward to a whole year before their hopes of consolation could possibly find fruition, they had (as they afterward confessed to him) a sense of fatuity if not of mocking in it. Even on the Fourth of July, after the last cracker had been fired and the last roman candle spent, they owned that they had never been able to think about Christmas to an extent that greatly assuaged their vague regrets. It was not till the following Thanksgiving that they succeeded in thinking about Christmas with anything like the entire cheerfulness expected of them.”

“I don’t see any application in this homily,” said the Easy Chair, “or only an application disastrous to your imaginable postulate that Christmas is a beneficent and consolatory factor in our lives.”

“That is because you have not allowed me to conclude,” the unreal editor protested, when the Easy Chair cut in with,

“There is nothing I would so willingly allow you to do,” and “laughed and shook” as if it had been “Rabelais’s easy chair.”

The unreal editor thought it best to ignore the untimely attempt at wit. “The difficulty in this case with both the father and the children was largely temperamental; but it was chiefly because of a defect in their way of thinking about Christmas. It was a very ancient error, by no means peculiar to this amiable family, and it consisted in thinking about Christmas with reference to one’s self instead of others.”

“Isn’t that rather banal?” the Easy Chair asked.

“Not at all banal,” said the unreal editor, resisting an impulse to do the Easy Chair some sort of violence. At the same time he made his reflection that if preachers were criticised in that way to their faces there would shortly be very few saints left in the pulpit. He gave himself a few moments to recover his temper, and then he went on: “If Christmas means anything at all, it means anything but one’s own pleasure. Up to the first Christmas Day the whole world had supposed that it could be happy selfishly, and its children still suppose so. But there is really no such thing as selfish, as personal happiness.”

“Tolstoy,” the Easy Chair noted.

“Yes, Tolstoy,” the unreal editor retorted. “He more than any other has brought us back to the knowledge of this truth which came into the world with Christmas, perhaps because he, more than any other, has tried to think and to live Christianity. When once you have got this vital truth into your mind, the whole universe is luminously filled with the possibilities of impersonal, unselfish happiness. The joy of living is suddenly expanded to the dimensions of humanity, and you can go on taking your pleasure as long as there is one unfriended soul and body in the world.

“It is well to realize this at all times, but it is peculiarly fit to do so at Christmas-time, for it is in this truth that the worship of Christ begins. Now, too, is the best time to give the Divine Word form in deed, to translate love into charity. I do not mean only the material charity that expresses itself in turkeys and plum-puddings for the poor, but also that spiritual charity which takes thought how so to amend the sorrowful conditions of civilization that poverty, which is the antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and less.

‘Now is the time, now is the time,
Now is the hour of golden prime’

for asking one’s self, not how much one has given in goods or moneys during the past year, but how much one has given in thought and will to remove forever the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to consider what one may do in the coming year to help put the poor lastingly beyond the need of help.

“To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to sin against the light of Christmas Day, to confess its ideal a delusion, its practice a failure. If on no other day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we must on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the highest mercy.”

The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the unreal editor, having made his point, went on after the manner of preachers, when they are also editors, to make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly, unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair had shrunk forward until all its leathern seat was wrinkled and its carven top was bent over its old red back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent asked in whisper,

“What do you want done with it, sir?”

“Oh,” said the unreal editor, “send it back to Franklin Square”; and then, with a sudden realization of the fact, he softly added, “Don’t wake it.”

There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was set up in the rear of the magazine, where it has become not only the place, but the stuff of dreams such as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, its reveries, its illusions, which some may call deliverances, have gone on with more and more a disposition to dramatize themselves. It has seemed to the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had suffered with it some sort of land-change from a sole entity to a multiple personality in which his several selves conversed with one another, and came and went unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether his imagination was not frequented by the phantoms of delight which in the flesh had formerly filled his place, whether the spirits which haunted him in it were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he became satisfied from their multitude and nature that they were the subdivisions of his own ego, and as such he has more and more frankly treated them.

II

A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH

On one of those fine days which the April of the other year meanly grudged us, a poet, flown with the acceptance of a quarter-page lyric by the real editor in the Study next door, came into the place where the Easy Chair sat rapt in the music of the elevated trains and the vision of the Brooklyn Bridge towers. “Era la stagione nella quale la rivestita terra, più che tutto l’ altro anno, si mostra bella,” he said, without other salutation, throwing his soft gray hat on a heap of magazines and newspapers in the corner, and finding what perch he could for himself on the window-sill.

“What is that?” he of the Easy Chair gruffly demanded; he knew perfectly well, but he liked marring the bloom on a fellow-creature’s joy by a show of savage ignorance.

“It’s the divine beginning of Boccaccio’s ‘Fiammetta,’ it is the very soul of spring; and it is so inalienably of Boccaccio’s own time and tongue and sun and air that there is no turning it into the language of another period or climate. What would you find to thrill you in, ‘It was the season in which the reapparelled earth, more than in all the other year, shows herself fair’? The rhythm is lost; the flow, sweet as the first runnings of the maple where the woodpecker has tapped it, stiffens into sugar, the liquid form is solidified into the cake adulterated with glucose, and sold for a cent as the pure Vermont product.”

As he of the Easy Chair could not deny this, he laughed recklessly. “I understood what your passage from Boccaccio meant, and why you came in here praising spring in its words. You are happy because you have sold a poem, probably for more than it is worth. But why do you praise spring? What do you fellows do it for? You know perfectly well that it is the most capricious, the most treacherous, the most delusive, deadly, slatternly, down-at-heels, milkmaid-handed season of the year, without decision of character or fixed principles, and with only the vaguest raw-girlish ideals, a red nose between crazy smiles and streaming eyes. If it did not come at the end of winter, when people are glad of any change, nobody could endure it, and it would be cast neck and crop out of the calendar. Fancy spring coming at the end of summer! It would not be tolerated for a moment, with the contrast of its crude, formless beauty and the ripe loveliness of August. Every satisfied sense of happiness, secure and established, would be insulted by its haphazard promises made only to be broken. ‘Rather,’ the outraged mortal would say, ‘the last tender hours of autumn, the first deathful-thrilling snowfall, with all the thoughts of life wandering flake-like through the dim air — rather these than the recurrence of those impulses and pauses, those kisses frozen on the lips, those tender rays turning to the lash of sleet across the face of nature. No, the only advantage spring can claim over her sister seasons is her novelty, the only reason she can offer for being the spoiled child of the poets is that nobody but the poets could keep on fancying that there was any longer the least originality in her novelty.”

The poet attempted to speak, in the little stop he of the Easy Chair made for taking breath, but he was not suffered to do so.

“Every atom of originality has been drained from the novelty of spring ‘in the process of the suns,’ and science is rapidly depriving her even of novelty. What was once supposed to be the spring grass has been found to be nothing but the fall grass, with the green stealing back into the withered blades. As for the spring lamb which used to crop the spring grass, it is now out of the cold-storage where the spring chicken and the new-laid eggs of yesteryear come from. It is said that there are no birds in last year’s nests, but probably a careful examination would discover a plentiful hatch of nestlings which have hibernated in the habitations popularly supposed to be deserted the June before this. Early spring vegetables are in market throughout the twelvemonth, and spring flowers abound at the florists’ in December and January. There is no reason why spring should not be absorbed into winter and summer by some such partition as took place politically in the case of Poland. Like that unhappy kingdom, she has abused her independence and become a molestation and discomfort to the annual meteorology. As a season she is distinctly a failure, being neither one thing nor the other, neither hot nor cold, a very Laodicean. Her winds were once supposed to be very siccative, and peculiarly useful in drying the plaster in new houses; but now the contractors put in radiators as soon as the walls are up, and the work is done much better. As for the germinative force of her suns, in these days of intensive farming, when electricity is applied to the work once done by them, they can claim to have no virtue beyond the suns of July or August, which most seeds find effective enough. If spring were absorbed into summer, the heat of that season would be qualified, and its gentler warmth would be extended to autumn, which would be prolonged into the winter. The rigors of winter would be much abated, and the partition of spring among the other seasons would perform the mystic office of the Gulf Stream in ameliorating our climate, besides ridding us of a time of most tedious and annoying suspense. And what should we lose by it?”

The poet seemed not to be answering the Easy Chair directly, but only to be murmuring to himself, “Youth.”

“Youth! Youth!” the Easy Chair repeated in exasperation. “And what is youth?”

“The best thing in the world.”

“For whom is it the best thing?”

This question seemed to give the poet pause. “Well,” he said, finally, with a not very forcible smile, “for itself.”

“Ah, there you are!” he of the Easy Chair exclaimed; but he could not help a forgiving laugh. “In a way you are right. The world belongs to youth, and so it ought to be the best thing for itself in it. Youth is a very curious thing, and in that it is like spring, especially like the spring we have just been having, to our cost. It is the only period of life, as spring is the only season of the year, that has too much time on its hands. Yet it does not seem to waste time, as age does, as winter does; it keeps doing something all the while. The things it does are apparently very futile and superfluous, some of them, but in the end something has been accomplished. After a March of whimsical suns and snows, an April of quite fantastical frosts and thaws, and a May, at least partially, of cold mists and parching winds, the flowers, which the florists have been forcing for the purpose, are blooming in the park; the grass is green wherever it has not had the roots trodden out of it, and a filmy foliage, like the soft foulard tissues which the young girls are wearing, drips from the trees. You can say it is all very painty, the verdure; too painty; but you cannot reject the picture because of this little mannerism of the painter. To be sure, you miss the sheeted snows and the dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky. Still, now it has come, you cannot deny that the spring is pretty, or that the fashionable colors which it has introduced are charming. It is said that these are so charming that a woman of the worst taste cannot choose amiss among them. In spite of her taste, her hat comes out a harmonic miracle; her gown, against all her endeavors, flows in an exquisite symphony of the tender audacities of tint with which nature mixes her palette; little notes of chiffon, of tulle, of feather, blow all about her. This is rather a medley of metaphors, to which several arts contribute, but you get my meaning?” In making this appeal, he of the Easy Chair saw in the fixed eye of the poet that remoteness of regard which denotes that your listener has been hearing very little of what you have been saying.

“Yes,” the poet replied with a long breath, “you are right about that dreamy weft of leafless twigs against the hard, blue sky; and I wonder if we quite do justice to the beauty of winter, of age, we poets, when we are so glad to have the spring come.”

“I don’t know about winter,” he of the Easy Chair said, “but in an opera which the English Lord Chamberlain provisionally suppressed, out of tenderness for an alliance not eventually or potentially to the advantage of these States, Mr. William Gilbert has done his duty to the decline of life, where he sings,

‘There is beauty in extreme old age;
There’s a fascination frantic
In a ruin that’s romantic’

Or, at least no one else has said so much for ‘that time of life,’ which another librettist has stigmatized as

‘Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.’”

“Yes, I know,” the poet returned, clinging to the thread of thought on which he had cast himself loose. “But I believe a great deal more could be said for age by the poets if they really tried. I am not satisfied of Mr. Gilbert’s earnestness in the passage you quote from the ‘Mikado,’ and I prefer Shakespeare’s ‘bare, ruined choirs.’ I don’t know but I prefer the hard, unflattering portrait which Hamlet mockingly draws for Polonius, and there is something almost caressing in the notion of ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon.’ The worst of it is that we old fellows look so plain to one another; I dare say young people don’t find us so bad. I can remember from my own youth that I thought old men, and especially old women, rather attractive. I am not sure that we elders realize the charm of a perfectly bald head as it presents itself to the eye of youth. Yet, an infant’s head is often quite bald.”

“Yes, and so is an egg,” the Easy Chair retorted, “but there is not the same winning appeal in the baldness of the superannuated bird which has evolved from it — eagle or nightingale, parrot or

Many-wintered crow that leads the clanging rookery home.

Tennyson has done his best in showing us venerable in his picture of

‘the Ionian father of the rest:
A million wrinkles carved his silver skin,
A hundred winters snowed upon his breast.’

But who would not rather be Helen than Homer, her face launching a thousand ships and burning the topless tower of Ilion — fairer than the evening air and simply but effectively attired in the beauty of a thousand stars? What poet has ever said things like that of an old man, even of Methuselah?”

“Yes,” the poet sighed. “I suppose you are partly right. Meteorology certainly has the advantage of humanity in some things. We cannot make much of age here, and hereafter we can only conceive of its being turned into youth. Fancy an eternity of sensibility!”

“No, I would rather not!” he of the Easy Chair returned, sharply. “Besides, it is you who are trying to make age out a tolerable, even a desirable thing.”

“But I have given it up,” the poet meekly replied. “The great thing would be some rearrangement of our mortal conditions so that once a year we could wake from our dream of winter and find ourselves young. Not merely younger, but young — the genuine article. A tree can do that, and does it every year, until after a hundred years, or three hundred, or a thousand, it dies. Why should not a man, or, much more importantly, a woman, do it? I think we are very much scanted in that respect.”

“My dear fellow, if you begin fault-finding with creation, there will be no end to it. It might be answered that, in this case, you can walk about and a tree cannot; you can call upon me and a tree cannot. And other things. Come! the trees have not got it all their own way. Besides, imagine the discomforts of a human springtime, blowing hot and blowing cold, freezing, thawing, raining, and drouthing, and never being sure whether we are young or old, May or December. We should be such nuisances to one another that we should ask the gods to take back their gift, and you know very well they cannot.”

“Our rejuvenescence would be a matter of temperament, not temperature,” the poet said, searching the air hopefully for an idea. “I have noticed this spring that the isothermal line is as crooked as a railroad on the map of a rival. I have been down in New Hampshire since I saw you, and I found the spring temperamentally as far advanced there as here in New York. Of course not as far advanced as in Union Square, but quite as far as in Central Park. Between Boston and Portsmouth there were bits of railroad bank that were as green as the sward beside the Mall, and every now and then there was an enthusiastic maple in the wet lowlands that hung the air as full of color as any maple that reddened the flying landscape when I first got beyond the New York suburbs on my way north. At Portsmouth the birds were singing the same songs as in the Park. I could not make out the slightest difference.”

“With the same note of nervous apprehension in them?”

“I did not observe that. But they were spring songs, certainly.”

“Then,” the Easy Chair said, “I would rather my winter were turned into summer, or early autumn, than spring, if there is going to be any change of the mortal conditions. I like settled weather, the calm of that time of life when the sins and follies have been committed, the passions burned themselves out, and the ambitions frustrated so that they do not bother, the aspirations defeated, the hopes brought low. Then you have some comfort. This turmoil of vernal striving makes me tired.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” the poet assented. “But you cannot have the seasons out of their order in the rearrangement of the mortal conditions. You must have spring and you must have summer before you can have autumn.”

“Are those the terms? Then I say, Winter at once! Winter is bad enough, but I would not go through spring again for any — In winter you can get away from the cold, with a good, warm book, or a sunny picture, or a cozy old song, or a new play; but in spring how will you escape the rawness if you have left off your flannels and let out the furnace? No, my dear friend, we could not stand going back to youth every year. The trees can, because they have been used to it from the beginning of time, but the men could not. Even the women — —”

At this moment a beatific presence made itself sensible, and the Easy Chair recognized the poet’s Muse, who had come for him. The poet put the question to her. “Young?” she said. “Why, you and I are always young, silly boy! Get your hat, and come over to Long Island City with me, and see the pussy-willows along the railroad-banks. The mosquitoes are beginning to sing in the ditches already.”

III

SCLEROSIS OF THE TASTES

The other day one of those convertible familiars of the Easy Chair, who

“Change and pass and come again,”

looked in upon it, after some months’ absence, with the effect of having aged considerably in the interval. But this was only his latest avatar; he was no older, as he was no younger, than before; to support a fresh character, he had to put on an appropriate aspect, and having, at former interviews, been a poet, a novelist, a philosopher, a reformer, a moralist, he was now merely looking the part of a veteran observer, of a psychologist grown gray in divining the character of others from his own consciousness.

“Have you ever noticed,” he began, “that the first things we get stiff in, as we advance in life, are our tastes? We suppose that it is our joints which feel the premonitions of age; and that because we no longer wish to dance or play ball or sprint in college races we are in the earliest stage of that sapless condition when the hinges of the body grind dryly upon one another, and we lose a good inch of our stature, through shrinkage, though the spine still holds us steadfastly upright.”

“Well, isn’t that so?” the Easy Chair asked, tranquilly.

“It may be so, or it may not be so,” the veteran observer replied. “Ultimately, I dare say, it is so. But what I wish to enforce is the fact that before you begin to feel the faintest sense of stiffening joints you are allowing yourself to fall into that voluntary senescence which I call getting stiff in the tastes. It is something that I think we ought to guard ourselves against as a sort of mental sclerosis which must end fatally long before we have reached the patriarchal age which that unbelieving believer Metchnikoff says we can attain if we fight off physical sclerosis. He can only negatively teach us how to do this, but I maintain we can have each of us in our power the remedy against stiffening tastes.”

“I don’t see how,” the Easy Chair said, more to provoke the sage to explanation than to express dissent.

“I will teach you how,” he said, “if you will allow me to make it a personal matter, and use you in illustration.”

“Why not use yourself?”

“Because that would be egotistical, and the prime ingredient of my specific against getting stiff in the tastes is that spiritual grace which is the very antidote, the very antithesis of egotism. Up to a certain point, a certain time, we are usefully employed in cultivating our tastes, in refining them, and in defining them. We cannot be too strenuous in defining them; and, as long as we are young, the catholicity of youth will preserve us from a bigoted narrowness. In æsthetic matters — and I imagine we both understand that we are dealing with these — the youngest youth has no tastes; it has merely appetites. All is fish that comes to its net; if anything, it prefers the gaudier of the finny tribes; it is only when it becomes sophisticated that its appetites turn into tastes, and it begins to appreciate the flavor of that diseased but pearl-bearing species of oyster which we call genius, because we have no accurate name for it. With the appreciation of this flavor comes the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed the taste for it, youth will have no other flavor, and it is at this moment that its danger of hardening into premature age begins. The conceit of having recognized genius takes the form of a bigoted denial of its existence save in the instances recognized. This conceit does not admit the possibility of error or omission in the search, and it does not allow that the diseased oyster can transmit its pearl-bearing qualities and its peculiar flavors; so that the attitude of aging youth, in the stiffening of its tastes, is one of rejection toward all new bivalves, or, not to be tediously metaphorical, books.”

The veteran observer fell silent at this point, and the Easy Chair seized the occasion to remark: “Yes, there is something in what you say. But this stiffening of the tastes, this sclerosis of the mind, is hardly an infectious disease — —”

“Ah, but it is infectious,” the veteran observer exclaimed, rousing himself, “infectious as far as the victim can possibly make it so. He wishes nothing so much as to impart his opinions in all their rigidity to everybody else. Take your own case, for instance — —”

“No, we would rather not,” the Easy Chair interposed.

“But you must make the sacrifice,” the veteran observer persisted. “You will allow that you are extremely opinionated?”

“Not at all.”

“Well, then, that you are devoutly conscientious in the tenure of your æsthetic beliefs?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“And you cannot deny that in times past you have tried your best to make others think with you?”

“It was our duty.”

“Well, let it pass for that. It amounted to an effort to make your mental sclerosis infectious, and it was all the worse because, in you, the stiffening of the tastes had taken the form of aversions rather than preferences. You did not so much wish your readers to like your favorite authors as to hate all the others. At the time when there was a fad for making lists of The Hundred Best Authors, I always wondered that you didn’t put forth some such schedule.”

“We had the notion of doing something of the kind,” the Easy Chair confessed, “but we could not think of more than ten or a dozen really first-rate authors, and if we had begun to compile a list of the best authors we should have had to leave out most of their works. Nearly all the classics would have gone by the board. What havoc we should have made with the British poets! The Elizabethan dramatists would mostly have fallen under the ban of our negation, to a play, if not to a man. Chaucer, but for a few poems, is impossible; Spenser’s poetry is generally duller than the Presidents’ messages before Mr. Roosevelt’s time; Milton is a trial of the spirit in three-fourths of his verse; Wordsworth is only not so bad as Byron, who thought him so much worse; Shakespeare himself, when he is reverently supposed not to be Shakespeare, is reading for martyrs; Dante’s science and politics outweigh his poetry a thousandfold, and so on through the whole catalogue. Among the novelists — —”

“No, don’t begin on the novelists! Every one knows your heresies there, and would like to burn you along with the romances which I’ve no doubt you would still commit to the flames. I see you are the Bourbon of criticism; you have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But why don’t you turn your adamantine immutability to some practical account, and give the world a list of The Hundred Worst Books?”

“Because a hundred books out of the worst would be a drop out of the sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our minds are not turned to it by examples.”

“Ah,” our visitor said, “I see that you are afraid to confess yourself the popular failure as a critic which you are. You are afraid that if you made a list of The Hundred Worst Books you would send the classes to buying them in the most expensive binding, and the masses to taking them out of all the public libraries.”

“There is something in what you say,” the Easy Chair confessed. “Our popular failure as a critic is notorious; it cannot be denied. The stamp of our disapproval at one time gave a whole order of fiction a currency that was not less than torrential. The flood of romantic novels which passed over the land, and which is still to be traced in the tatters of the rag-doll heroes and heroines caught in the memories of readers along its course, was undoubtedly the effect of our adverse criticism. No, we could not in conscience compile and publish a list of The Hundred Worst Books; it would be contrary, for the reasons you give, to public morals.”

“And don’t you think,” the observer said, with a Socratic subtlety that betrayed itself in his gleaming eye, in the joyous hope of seeing his victim fall into the pit that his own admissions had digged for him, “and don’t you think that it would also bring to you the unpleasant consciousness of having stiffened in your tastes?”

“It might up to a certain point,” we consented. “But we should prefer to call it confirmed in our convictions. Wherever we have liked or disliked in literature it has been upon grounds hardly distinguishable from moral grounds. Bad art is a vice; untruth to nature is the eighth of the seven deadly sins; a false school in literature is a seminary of crime. We are speaking largely, of course — —”

“It certainly sounds rather tall,” our friend sarcastically noted, “and it sounds very familiar.”

“Yes,” we went on, “all the ascertained veracities are immutable. One holds to them, or, rather, they hold to one, with an indissoluble tenacity. But convictions are in the region of character and are of remote origin. In their safety one indulges one’s self in expectations, in tolerances, and these rather increase with the lapse of time. We should say that your theory of the stiffening tastes is applicable to the earlier rather than the later middle life. We should say that the tastes if they stiffen at the one period limber at the other; their forbidding rigidity is succeeded by an acquiescent suppleness. One is aware of an involuntary hospitality toward a good many authors whom one would once have turned destitute from the door, or with a dole of Organized Charity meal-tickets at the best. But in that maturer time one hesitates, and possibly ends by asking the stranger in, especially if he is young, or even if he is merely new, and setting before him the cold potato of a qualified approval. One says to him: ‘You know I don’t think you are the real thing quite, but taking you on your own ground you are not so bad. Come, you shall have a night’s lodging at least, and if you improve, if you show a tendency to change in the right direction, there is no telling but you may be allowed to stay the week. But you must not presume; you must not take this frosty welcome for an effect of fire from the hearth where we sit with our chosen friends.’ Ten to one the stranger does not like this sort of talk, and goes his way — the wrong way. But, at any rate, one has shown an open mind, a liberal spirit; one has proved that one has not stiffened in one’s tastes; that one can make hopeful allowances in hopeful cases.”

“Such as?” the observer insinuated.

“Such as do not fit the point exactly. Very likely the case may be that of an old or elderly author. It has been only within a year or two that we have formed the taste for an English writer, no longer living, save in his charming books. James Payn was a favorite with many in the middle Victorian period, but it is proof of the flexibility of our tastes that we have only just come to him. After shunning Anthony Trollope for fifty years, we came to him, almost as with a rush, long after our half-century was past. Now, James Payn is the solace of our autumnal equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes had stiffened we could have cared only for the most modern of the naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and Spanish schools. A signal proof of their continued suppleness came but the other day when we acquainted ourselves with the work of the English novelist, Mr. Percy White, and it was the more signal because we perceived that he had formed himself upon a method of Thackeray’s, which recalled that master, as the occasional aberrations of Payn and Trollope recall a manner of him. But it is Thackeray’s most artistic method which Mr. White recalls in his studies of scamps and snobs; he allows them, as Thackeray allows Barry Lyndon and the rest, to tell their own stories, and in their unconsciousness of their own natures he finds play for an irony as keen and graphic as anything in fiction. He deals with the actual English world, and the pleasure he gave us was such as to make us resolve to return to Thackeray’s vision of his own contemporaneous English world at the first opportunity. We have not done so yet; but after we have fortified ourselves with a course of Scott and Dickens, we are confident of being able to bear up under the heaviest-handed satire of Vanity Fair. As for The Luck of Barry Lyndon and The Yellowplush Papers, and such like, they have never ceased to have their prime delight for us. But their proportion is quite large enough to survive from any author for any reader; as we are often saying, it is only in bits that authors survive; their resurrection is not by the whole body, but here and there a perfecter fragment. Most of our present likes and dislikes are of the period when you say people begin to stiffen in their tastes. We could count the authors by the score who have become our favorites in that period, and those we have dropped are almost as many. It is not necessary to say who they all are, but we may remark that we still read, and read, and read again the poetry of Keats, and that we no longer read the poetry of Alexander Smith. But it is through the growth of the truly great upon his mature perception that the aging reader finds novel excellences in them. It was only the other day that we picked up Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, and realized in it, from a chance page or two, a sardonic quality of insurpassable subtlety and reach. This was something quite new to us in it. We had known the terrible pathos of the story, its immeasurable tragedy, but that deadly, quiet, pitiless, freezing irony of a witness holding himself aloof from its course, and losing, for that page or two, the moralist in the mere observer, was a revelation that had come to that time of life in us when you think the tastes stiffen and one refuses new pleasures because they are new.”

Our visitor yawned visibly, audibly. “And what is all this you have been saying? You have made yourself out an extraordinary example of what may be done by guarding against the stiffening of the tastes after the end of second youth. But have you proved that there is no such danger? Or was your idea simply to celebrate yourself? At moments I fancied something like that.”

We owned the stroke with an indulgent smile. “No, not exactly that. The truth is we have been very much interested by your notion — if it was yours, which is not altogether probable — and we have been turning its light upon our own experience, in what we should not so much call self-celebration as self-exploitation. One uses one’s self as the stuff for knowledge of others, or for the solution of any given problem. There is no other way of getting at the answers to the questions.”

“And what is your conclusion as to my notion, if it is mine?” the veteran observer asked, with superiority.

“That there is nothing in it. The fact is that the tastes are never so tolerant, so liberal, so generous, so supple as they are at that time of life when they begin, according to your notion, to stiffen, to harden, to contract. We have in this very period formed a new taste — or taken a new lease of an old one — for reading history, which had been dormant all through our first and second youth. We expect to see the time when we shall read the Elizabethan dramatists with avidity. We may not improbably find a delight in statistics; there must be a hidden charm in them. We may even form a relish for the vagaries of pseudo-psychology — —”

At this point we perceived the veteran observer had vanished and that we were talking to ourselves.

IV

THE PRACTICES AND PRECEPTS OF VAUDEVILLE

A Friend of the Easy Chair came in the other day after a frost from the magazine editor which had nipped a tender manuscript in its bloom, and was received with the easy hospitality we are able to show the rejected from a function involving neither power nor responsibility.

“Ah!” we breathed, sadly, at the sight of the wilted offering in the hands of our friend. “What is it he won’t take now?”

“Wait till I get my second wind,” the victim of unrequited literature answered, dropping into the Easy Chair, from which the occupant had risen; and he sighed, pensively, “I felt so sure I had got him this time.” He closed his eyes, and leaned his head back against the uncomfortably carven top of the Easy Chair. It was perhaps his failure to find rest in it that restored him to animation. “It is a little thing,” he murmured, “on the decline of the vaudeville.”

“The decline of the vaudeville?” we repeated, wrinkling our forehead in grave misgiving. Then, for want of something better, we asked, “Do you think that is a very dignified subject for the magazine?”

“Why, bless my soul!” the rejected one cried, starting somewhat violently forward, “what is your magazine itself but vaudeville, with your contributors all doing their stunts of fiction, or poetry, or travel, or sketches of life, or articles of popular science and sociological interest, and I don’t know what all! What are your illustrations but the moving pictures of the kalatechnoscope! Why,” he said, with inspiration, “what are you yourself but a species of Chaser that comes at the end of the show, and helps clear the ground for the next month’s performance by tiring out the lingering readers?”

“You don’t think,” we suggested, “you’re being rather unpleasant?”

Our friend laughed harshly, and we were glad to see him restored to so much cheerfulness, at any rate. “I think the notion is a pretty good fit, though if you don’t like to wear it I don’t insist. Why should you object to being likened to those poor fellows who come last on the programme at the vaudeville? Very often they are as good as the others, and sometimes, when I have determined to get my five hours’ enjoyment to the last moment before six o’clock, I have had my reward in something unexpectedly delightful in the work of the Chasers. I have got into close human relations with them, I and the half-dozen brave spirits who have stuck it out with me, while the ushers went impatiently about, clacking the seats back, and picking up the programmes and lost articles under them. I have had the same sense of kindly comradery with you, and now and then my patience has been rewarded by you, just as it has been by the Chasers at the vaudeville, and I’ve said so to people. I’ve said: ‘You’re wrong to put down the magazine the way most of you do before you get to those departments at the end. Sometimes there are quite good things in them.’”

“Really,” said the unreal editor, “you seem to have had these remarks left over from your visit to the real editor. We advise you to go back and repeat them. They may cause him to revise his opinion of your contribution.”

“It’s no use my going back. I read finality in his eye before I left him, and I feel that no compliment, the most fulsome, would move him. Don’t turn me out! I take it all back about your being a Chaser. You are the first act on the bill for me. I read the magazine like a Chinese book — from the back. I always begin with the Easy Chair.”

“Ah, now you are talking,” we said, and we thought it no more than human to ask, “What is it you have been saying about the vaudeville, anyway?”

The rejected one instantly unfolded his manuscript. “I will just read—”

“No, no!” we interposed. “Tell us about it — give us the general drift. We never can follow anything read to us.”

The other looked incredulous, but he was not master of the situation, and he resigned himself to the secondary pleasure of sketching the paper he would so much rather have read.

“Why, you know what an inveterate vaudeville-goer I have always been?”

We nodded. “We know how you are always trying to get us to neglect the masterpieces of our undying modern dramatists, on the legitimate stage, and go with you to see the ridiculous stunts you delight in.”

“Well, it comes to the same thing. I am an inveterate vaudeville-goer, for the simple reason that I find better acting in the vaudeville, and better drama, on the whole, than you ever get, or you generally get, on your legitimate stage. I don’t know why it is so very legitimate. I have no doubt but the vaudeville, or continuous variety performance, is the older, the more authentic form of histrionic art. Before the Greek dramatists, or the longer-winded Sanskrit playwrights, or the exquisitely conventionalized Chinese and Japanese and Javanese were heard of, it is probable that there were companies of vaudeville artists going about the country and doing the turns that they had invented themselves, and getting and giving the joy that comes of voluntary and original work, just as they are now. And in the palmiest days of the Greek tragedy or the Roman comedy, there were, of course, variety shows all over Athens and Rome where you could have got twice the amusement for half the money that you would at the regular theatres. While the openly wretched and secretly rebellious actors whom Euripides and Terence had cast for their parts were going through rôles they would never have chosen themselves, the wilding heirs of art at the vaudeville were giving things of their own imagination, which they had worked up from some vague inspiration into a sketch of artistic effect. No manager had foisted upon them his ideals of ‘what the people wanted,’ none had shaped their performance according to his own notion of histrionics. They had each come to him with his or her little specialty, that would play fifteen or twenty minutes, and had, after trying it before him, had it rejected or accepted in its entirety. Then, author and actor in one, they had each made his or her appeal to the public.”

“There were no hers on the stage in those days,” we interposed.

“No matter,” the rejected contributor retorted. “There are now, and that is the important matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted.” He drew a long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: “It is all of a charming unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box at the door, and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat in the best place I can get, away from interposing posts and persons, and settle down to a long afternoon’s delight, I like to fancy myself a far-fetched phantom of the past, who used to do the same thing at Thebes or Nineveh as many thousand years ago as you please. I like to think that I too am an unbroken tradition, and my pleasure will be such as shaped smiles immemorially gone to dust.”

We made our reflection that this passage was probably out of the rejected contribution, but we did not say anything, and our visitor went on.

“And what a lot of pleasure I did get, yesterday, for my fifty cents! There were twelve stunts on the bill, not counting the kalatechnoscope, and I got in before the first was over, so that I had the immediate advantage of seeing a gifted fellow-creature lightly swinging himself between two chairs which had their outer legs balanced on the tops of caraffes full of water, and making no more of the feat than if it were a walk in the Park or down Fifth Avenue. How I respected that man! What study had gone to the perfection of that act, and the others that he equally made nothing of! He was simply billed as ‘Equilibrist,’ when his name ought to have been blazoned in letters a foot high if they were in any wise to match his merit. He was followed by ‘Twin Sisters,’ who, as ‘Refined Singers and Dancers,’ appeared in sweeping confections of white silk, with deeply drooping, widely spreading white hats, and long-fringed white parasols heaped with artificial roses, and sang a little tropical romance, whose burden was

‘Under the bámboo-trée,’

brought in at unexpected intervals. They also danced this romance with languid undulations, and before you could tell how or why, they had disappeared and reappeared in short green skirts, and then shorter white skirts, with steps and stops appropriate to their costumes, but always, I am bound to say, of the refinement promised. I can’t tell you in what their refinement consisted, but I am sure it was there, just as I am sure of the humor of the two brothers who next appeared as ‘Singing and Dancing Comedians’ of the coon type. I know that they sang and they danced, and worked sable pleasantries upon one another with the help of the pianist, who often helps out the dialogue of the stage in vaudeville. They were not so good as the next people, a jealous husband and a pretty wife, who seized every occasion in the slight drama of ‘The Singing Lesson,’ and turned it to account in giving their favorite airs. I like to have a husband disguise himself as a German maestro, and musically make out why his wife is so zealous in studying with him, and I do not mind in the least having the sketch close without reason: it leaves something to my imagination. Two of ‘America’s Leading Banjoists’ charmed me next, for, after all, there is nothing like the banjo. If one does not one’s self rejoice in its plunking, there are others who do, and that is enough for my altruistic spirit. Besides, it is America’s leading instrument, and those who excel upon it appeal to the patriotism which is never really dormant in us. Its close association with color in our civilization seemed to render it the fitting prelude of the next act, which consisted of ‘Monologue and Songs’ by a divine creature in lampblack, a shirt-waist worn outside his trousers, and an exaggerated development of stomach. What did he say, what did he sing? I don’t know; I only know that it rested the soul and brain, that it soothed the conscience, and appeased the hungerings of ambition. Just to sit there and listen to that unalloyed nonsense was better than to ‘sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair,’ or to be the object of a votive dinner, or to be forgiven one’s sins; there is no such complete purgation of care as one gets from the real Afro-American when he is unreal, and lures one completely away from life, while professing to give his impressions of it. You, with your brute preferences for literality, will not understand this, and I suppose you would say I ought to have got a purer and higher joy out of the little passage of drama, which followed, and I don’t know but I did. It was nothing but the notion of a hapless, half-grown girl, who has run away from the poorhouse for a half-holiday, and brings up in the dooryard of an old farmer of the codger type, who knew her father and mother. She at once sings, one doesn’t know why, ‘Oh, dear, what can the matter be,’ and she takes out of her poor little carpet-bag a rag-doll, and puts it to sleep with ‘By low, baby,’ and the old codger puts the other dolls to sleep, nodding his head, and kicking his foot out in time, and he ends by offering that poor thing a home with him. If he had not done it, I do not know how I could have borne it, for my heart was in my throat with pity, and the tears were in my eyes. Good heavens! What simple instruments we men are! The falsest note in all Hamlet is in those words of his to Guildenstern: ‘You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.... ‘S blood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?’ Guildenstern ought to have said: ‘Much, my lord! Here is an actor who has been summering in the country, and has caught a glimpse of pathetic fact commoner than the dust in the road, and has built it up in a bit of drama as artless as a child would fancy, and yet it swells your heart and makes you cry. Your mystery? You have no mystery to an honest man. It is only fakes and frauds who do not understand the soul. The simplest willow whistle is an instrument more complex than man.’ That is what I should have said in Guildenstern’s place if I had had Hamlet with me there at the vaudeville show.

“In the pretty language of the playbill,” the contributor went on, “this piece was called ‘A Pastoral Playlet,’ and I should have been willing to see ‘Mandy Hawkins’ over again, instead of the ‘Seals and Sea Lions,’ next placarded at the sides of the curtain immediately lifted on them. Perhaps I have seen too much of seals, but I find the range of their accomplishments limited, and their impatience for fish and lump sugar too frankly greedy before and after each act. Their banjo-playing is of a most casual and irrelevant sort; they ring bells, to be sure; in extreme cases they fire small cannon; and their feat of balancing large and little balls on their noses is beyond praise. But it may be that the difficulties overcome are too obvious in their instances; I find myself holding my breath, and helping them along too strenuously for my comfort. I am always glad when the curtain goes down on them; their mere flumping about the stage makes me unhappy; but they are not so bad, after all, as trained dogs. They were followed by three ‘Artistic European Acrobats,’ who compensated and consoled me for the seals, by the exquisite ease with which they wrought the impossibilities of their art, in the familiar sack-coats and top-coats of every day. I really prefer tights and spangles, but I will not refuse impossibilities simply because they are performed, as our diplomats are instructed to appear at European courts, in the ordinary dress of a gentleman; it may even add a poignancy to the pleasure I own so reluctantly.

“There came another pair of ‘Singers and Dancers,’ and then a ‘Trick Cyclist,’ but really I cannot stand trick cycling, now that plain cycling, glory be! has so nearly gone out. As soon as the cyclist began to make his wheel rear up on its hind leg and carry him round the stage in that posture, I went away. But I had had enough without counting him, though I left the kalatechnoscope, with its shivering and shimmering unseen. I had had my fill of pleasure, rich and pure, such as I could have got at no legitimate theatre in town, and I came away opulently content.”

We reflected awhile before we remarked: “Then I don’t see what you have to complain of or to write of. Where does the decline of the vaudeville come in?”

“Oh,” the rejected contributor said, with a laugh, “I forgot that. It’s still so good, when compared with the mechanical drama of the legitimate theatre, that I don’t know whether I can make out a case against it now. But I think I can, both in quality and quantity. I think the change began insidiously to steal upon the variety show with the increasing predominance of short plays. Since they were short, I should not have minded them so much, but they were always so bad! Still, I could go out, when they came on, and return for the tramp magician, or the comic musician, who played upon joints of stovepipe and the legs of reception-chairs and the like, and scratched matches on his two days’ beard, and smoked a plaintive air on a cigarette. But when the ‘playlets’ began following one another in unbroken succession, I did not know what to do. Almost before I was aware of their purpose three of the leading vaudeville houses threw off the mask, and gave plays that took up the whole afternoon; and though they professed to intersperse the acts with what they called ‘big vaudeville,’ I could not be deceived, and I simply stopped going. When I want to see a four-act play, I will go to the legitimate theatre, and see something that I can smell, too. The influence of the vaudeville has, on the whole, been so elevating and refining that its audiences cannot stand either the impurity or the imbecility of the fashionable drama. But now the vaudeville itself is beginning to decline in quality as well as quantity.”

“Not toward immodesty?”

“No, not so much that. But the fine intellectual superiority of the continuous performance is beginning to suffer contamination from the plays where there are waits between the acts. I spoke just now of the tramp magician, but I see him no longer at the variety houses. The comic musician is of the rarest occurrence; during the whole season I have as yet heard no cornet solo on a revolver or a rolling-pin. The most dangerous acts of the trapeze have been withdrawn. The acrobats still abound, but it is three long years since I looked upon a coon act with real Afro-Americans in it, or saw a citizen of Cincinnati in a fur overcoat keeping a silk hat, an open umbrella, and a small wad of paper in the air with one hand. It is true that the conquest of the vaudeville houses by the full-fledged drama has revived the old-fashioned stock companies in many cases, and has so far worked for good, but it is a doubtful advantage when compared with the loss of the direct inspiration of the artists who created and performed their stunts.”

“Delightful word!” we dreamily noted. “How did it originate?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It’s probably a perversion of stint, a task or part, which is also to be found in the dictionary as stent. What does it matter? There is the word, and there is the thing, and both are charming. I approve of the stunt because it is always the stuntist’s own. He imagined it, he made it, and he loves it. He seems never to be tired of it, even when it is bad, and when nobody in the house lends him a hand with it. Of course, when it comes to that, it has to go, and he with it. It has to go when it is good, after it has had its day, though I don’t see why it should go; for my part there are stunts I could see endlessly over again, and not weary of them. Can you say as much of any play?”

“Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas,” we suggested.

“That is true. But without the music? And even with the music, the public won’t have them any longer. I would like to see the stunt fully developed. I should like to have that lovely wilding growth delicately nurtured into drama as limitless and lawless as life itself, owing no allegiance to plot, submitting to no rule or canon, but going gayly on to nothingness as human existence does, full of gleaming lights, and dark with inconsequent glooms, musical, merry, melancholy, mad, but never-ending as the race itself.”

“You would like a good deal more than you are ever likely to get,” we said; and here we thought it was time to bring our visitor to book again. “But about the decline of vaudeville?”

“Well, it isn’t grovelling yet in the mire with popular fiction, but it is standing still, and whatever is standing still is going backward, or at least other things are passing it. To hold its own, the vaudeville must grab something more than its own. It must venture into regions yet unexplored. It must seize not only the fleeting moments, but the enduring moments of experience; it should be wise not only to the whims and moods, but the passions, the feelings, the natures of men; for it appeals to a public not sophisticated by mistaken ideals of art, but instantly responsive to representations of life. Nothing is lost upon the vaudeville audience, not the lightest touch, not the airiest shadow of meaning. Compared with the ordinary audience at the legitimate theatres—”

“Then what you wish,” we concluded, “is to elevate the vaudeville.”

The visitor got himself out of the Easy Chair, with something between a groan and a growl. “You mean to kill it.”

V

INTIMATIONS OF ITALIAN OPERA

Whether pleasure of the first experience is more truly pleasure than that which comes rich in associations from pleasures of the past is a doubt that no hedonistic philosopher seems to have solved yet. We should, in fact, be sorry if any had, for in that case we should be without such small occasion as we now have to suggest it in the forefront of a paper which will not finally pass beyond the suggestion. When the reader has arrived at our last word we can safely promise him he will still have the misgiving we set out with, and will be confirmed in it by the reflection that no pleasure, either of the earliest or the latest experience, can be unmixed with pain. One will be fresher than the other; that is all; but it is not certain that the surprise will have less of disappointment in it than the unsurprise. In the one case, the case of youth, say, there will be the racial disappointment to count with, and in the other, the case of age, there will be the personal disappointment, which is probably a lighter thing. The racial disappointment is expressed in what used to be called, somewhat untranslatably, Weltschmerz. This was peculiarly the appanage of youth, being the anticipative melancholy, the pensive foreboding, distilled from the blighted hopes of former generations of youth. Mixed with the effervescent blood of the young heart, it acted like a subtle poison, and eventuated in more or less rhythmical deliriums, in cynical excesses of sentiment, in extravagances of behavior, in effects which commonly passed when the subject himself became ancestor, and transmitted his inherited burden of Weltschmerz to his posterity. The old are sometimes sad, on account of the sins and follies they have personally committed and know they will commit again, but for pure gloom — gloom positive, absolute, all but palpable — you must go to youth. That is not merely the time of disappointment, it is in itself disappointment; it is not what it expected to be; and it finds nothing which confronts it quite, if at all, responsive to the inward vision. The greatest, the loveliest things in the world lose their iridescence or dwindle before it. The old come to things measurably prepared to see them as they are, take them for what they are worth; but the young are the prey of impassioned prepossessions which can never be the true measures.

The disadvantage of an opening like this is that it holds the same quality, if not quantity, of disappointment as those other sublime things, and we earnestly entreat the reader to guard himself against expecting anything considerable from it. Probably the inexperienced reader has imagined from our weighty prologue something of signal importance to follow; but the reader who has been our reader through thick and thin for many years will have known from the first that we were not going to deal with anything more vital, say, than a few emotions and memories, prompted, one night of the other winter, by hearing one of the old-fashioned Italian operas which a more than commonly inspired management had been purveying to an over-Wagnered public. In fact, we had a sense that this sort of reader was there with us the night we saw “L’Elisir d’Amore,” and that it was in his personality we felt and remembered many things which we could have fancied personal only to ourselves.

He began to take the affair out of our keeping from the first moment, when, after passing through the crowd arriving from the snowy street, we found our way through the distracted vestibule of the opera-house into the concentred auditorium and hushed ourselves in the presence of the glowing spectacle of the stage. “Ah, this is the real thing,” he whispered, and he would not let us, at any moment when we could have done so without molesting our neighbors, censure the introduction of Alpine architecture in the entourage of an Italian village piazza. “It is a village at the foot of the Alps probably,” he said, “and if not, no matter. It is as really the thing as all the rest: as the chorus of peasants and soldiers, of men and women who impartially accompany the orchestra in the differing sentiments of the occasion; as the rivals who vie with one another in recitative and aria; as the heroine who holds them both in a passion of suspense while she weaves the enchantment of her trills and runs about them; as the whole circumstance of the divinely impossible thing which defies nature and triumphs over prostrate probability. What does a little Swiss Gothic matter? The thing is always opera, and it is always Italy. I was thinking, as we crowded in there from the outside, with our lives in our hands, through all those trolleys and autos and carriages and cabs and sidewalk ticket-brokers, of the first time I saw this piece. It was in Venice, forty-odd years ago, and I arrived at the theatre in a gondola, slipping to the water-gate with a waft of the gondolier’s oar that was both impulse and arrest, and I was helped up the sea-weedy, slippery steps by a beggar whom age and sorrow had bowed to just the right angle for supporting my hand on the shoulder he lent it. The blackness of the tide was pierced with the red plunge of a few lamps, and it gurgled and chuckled as my gondola lurched off and gave way to another; and when I got to my box — a box was two florins, but I could afford it — I looked down on just this scene, over a pit full of Austrian officers and soldiers, and round on a few Venetians darkling in the other boxes and half-heartedly enjoying the music. It was the most hopeless hour of the Austrian occupation, and the air was heavy with its oppression and tobacco, for the officers smoked between the acts. It was only the more intensely Italian for that; but it was not more Italian than this; and when I see those impossible people on the stage, and hear them sing, I breathe an atmosphere that is like the ether beyond the pull of our planet, and is as far from all its laws and limitations.”

Our friend continued to talk pretty well through the whole interval between the first and second acts; and we were careful not to interrupt him, for from the literary quality of his diction we fancied him talking for publication, and we wished to take note of every turn of his phrase.

“It’s astonishing,” he said, “how little art needs in order to give the effect of life. A touch here and there is enough; but art is so conditioned that it has to work against time and space, and is obliged to fill up and round out its own body with much stuff that gives no sense of life. The realists,” he went on, “were only half right.”

“Isn’t it better to be half right than wrong altogether?” we interposed.

“I’m not sure. What I wanted to express is that every now and then I find in very defective art of all kinds that mere look of the real thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose body of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn’t the spectator held in the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work, and which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall hide all defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, or the other year, about the vaudeville shows — ?

“Hush!” we entreated. “Don’t bring those low associations into this high presence.”

“Why not? It is all the same thing. There is no inequality in the region of art; and I have seen things on the vaudeville stage which were graced with touches of truth so exquisite, so ideally fine, that I might have believed I was getting them at first hand and pure from the street-corner. Of course, the poor fellows who had caught them from life had done their worst to imprison them in false terms, to labor them out of shape, and build them up in acts where anything less precious would have been lost; but they survived all that and gladdened the soul. I realized that I should have been making a mistake if I had required any ‘stunt’ which embodied them to be altogether composed of touches of truth, of moments of life. We can stand only a very little radium; the captured sunshine burns with the fires that heat the summers of the farthest planets; and we cannot handle the miraculous substance as if it were mere mineral. A touch of truth is perhaps not only all we need, but all we can endure in any one example of art.”

“You are lucky if you get so much,” we said, “even at a vaudeville show.”

“Or at an opera,” he returned, and then the curtain rose on the second act. When it fell again, he resumed, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of a sentence. “What should you say was the supreme moment of this thing, or was the radioactive property, the very soul? Of course, it is there where Nemorino drinks the elixir and finds himself freed from Adina; when he bursts into the joyous song of liberation and gives that delightful caper

‘Which signifies indifference, indifference,
Which signifies indifference,’

and which not uncommonly results from a philter composed entirely of claret. When Adina advances in the midst of his indifference and breaks into the lyrical lament

‘Neppur mi guarda!’

she expresses the mystery of the sex which can be best provoked to love by the sense of loss, and the vital spark of the opera is kindled. The rest is mere incorporative material. It has to be. In other conditions the soul may be disembodied, and we may have knowledge of it without the interposition of anything material; but if there are spiritual bodies as there are material bodies, still the soul may wrap itself from other souls and emit itself only in gleams. But putting all that aside, I should like to bet that the germ, the vital spark of the opera, felt itself life, felt itself flame, first of all in that exquisite moment of release which Nemorino’s caper conveys. Till then it must have been rather blind groping, with nothing better in hand than that old, worn-out notion of a love-philter. What will you bet?”

“We never bet,” we virtuously replied. “We are principled against it in all cases where we feel sure of losing; though in this case we could never settle it, for both composer and librettist are dead.”

“Yes, isn’t it sad that spirits so gay should be gone from a world that needs gayety so much? That is probably the worst of death; it is so indiscriminate,” the reader thoughtfully observed.

“But aren’t you,” we asked, “getting rather far away from the question whether the pleasure of experience isn’t greater than the pleasure of inexperience — whether later operas don’t give more joy than the first?”

“Was that the question?” he returned. “I thought it was whether Italian opera was not as much at home in exile as in its native land.”

“Well, make it that,” we responded, tolerantly.

“Oh no,” he met us half-way. “But it naturalizes itself everywhere. They have it in St. Petersburg and in Irkutsk, for all I know, and certainly in Calcutta and Australia, the same as in Milan and Venice and Naples, or as here in New York, where everything is so much at home, or so little. It’s the most universal form of art.”

“Is it? Why more so than sculpture or painting or architecture?”

Our demand gave the reader pause. Then he said: “I think it is more immediately universal than the other forms of art. These all want time to denationalize themselves. It is their nationality which first authorizes them to be; but it takes decades, centuries sometimes, for them to begin their universal life. It seems different with operas. ‘Cavalleria Rusticana’ was as much at home with us in its first year as ‘L’Elisir d’Amore’ is now in its sixtieth or seventieth.”

“But it isn’t,” we protested, “denationalized. What can be more intensely Italian than an Italian opera is anywhere?”

“You’re right,” the reader owned, as the reader always must, if honest, in dealing with the writer. “It is the operatic audience, not the opera, which is denationalized when the opera becomes universal. We are all Italians here to-night. I only wish we were in our native land, listening to this musical peal of ghostly laughter from the past.”

The reader was silent a moment while the vast house buzzed and murmured and babbled from floor to roof. Perhaps the general note of the conversation, if it could have been tested, would have been found voluntary rather than spontaneous; but the sound was gay, and there could be no question of the splendor of the sight. We may decry our own almost as much as we please, but there is a point where we must cease to depreciate ourselves; even for the sake of evincing our superiority to our possessions, we must not undervalue some of them. One of these is the Metropolitan Opera House, where the pride of wealth, the vanity of fashion, the beauty of youth, and the taste and love of music fill its mighty cup to the brim in the proportions that they bear to one another in the community. Wherever else we fail of our ideal, there we surely realize it on terms peculiarly our own. Subjectively the scene is intensely responsive to the New York spirit, and objectively it is most expressive of the American character in that certain surface effect of thin brilliancy which remains with the spectator the most memorable expression of its physiognomy.

No doubt something like this was in the reader’s mind when he resumed, with a sigh: “It’s rather pathetic how much more magnificently Italian opera has always been circumstanced in exile than at home. It had to emigrate in order to better its fortunes; it could soon be better seen if not heard outside of Italy than in its native country. It was only where it could be purely conventional as well as ideal that it could achieve its greatest triumphs. It had to make a hard fight for its primacy among the amusements that flatter the pride as well as charm the sense. You remember how the correspondents of Mr. Spectator wrote to him in scorn of the affected taste of ‘the town’ when the town in London first began to forsake the theatre and to go to the opera?”

“Yes, they were very severe on the town for pretending to a pleasure imparted in a language it could not understand a word of. They had all the reason on their side, and they needed it; but the opera is independent of reason, and the town felt that for its own part it could dispense with reason, too. The town can always do that. It would not go seriously or constantly to English opera, though ever so much invited to do so, for all the reasons, especially the patriotic reasons. Isn’t it strange, by-the-way, how English opera is a fashion, while Italian opera remains a passion? We had it at its best, didn’t we, in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which were the most charming things in the world; but they charmed only for a while, and it may be doubted whether they ever greatly charmed the town. The manager of the Metropolitan replaces German with Italian opera, and finds his account in it, but could he find his account in it if he put on ‘The Mikado’ instead of ‘L’Elisir d’Amore’? If he did so, the town would not be here. Why?”

The reader did not try to answer at once. He seemed to be thinking, but perhaps he was not; other readers may judge from his reply, which, when it came, was this: “There seems to be something eternally as well as universally pleasing in Italian opera; but what the thing is, or how much of a thing it is, I wouldn’t undertake to say. Possibly the fault of English opera is its actuality. It seizes upon a contemporaneous mood or fad, and satirizes it; but the Italian opera at its lightest deals with a principle of human nature, and it is never satirical; it needn’t be, for it is as independent of the morals as of the reasons. It isn’t obliged, by the terms of its existence, to teach, any more than it is obliged to convince. It’s the most absolute thing in the world; and from its unnatural height it can stoop at will in moments of enrapturing naturalness without ever losing poise. Wasn’t that delightful where Caruso hesitated about his encore, and then, with a shrug and a waft of his left hand to the house, went off in order to come back and give his aria with more effect? That was a touch of naturalness not in the scheme of the opera.”

“Yes, but it was more racial, more personal, than natural. It was delicious, but we are not sure we approved of it.”

“Ah, in Italian opera you’re not asked to approve; you’re only desired to enjoy!”

“Well, then that bit of racial personality was of the effect of actuality, and it jarred.”

“Perhaps you’re right,” the reader sighed, but he added: “It was charming; yes, it made itself part of the piece. Nemorino would have done just as Caruso did.”

At the last fall of the curtain the reader and the writer rose in unison, a drop of that full tide of life which ebbed by many channels out of the vast auditorium, and in two or three minutes left it dry. They stayed in their duplex personality to glance at the silken evanescences from the boxes, and then, being in the mood for the best society, they joined the shining presences in the vestibule where these waited for their carriages and automobiles. Of this company the interlocutors felt themselves so inseparably part that they could with difficulty externate themselves so far as to observe that it was of the quality of “the town” which had gone to Italian opera from the first.

In Mr. Spectator’s time the town would have been lighted by the smoky torches of linkboys to its chairs; now it was called to its electric autos in the blaze of a hundred incandescent bulbs; but the difference was not enough to break the tradition. There was something in the aspect of that patrician throng, as it waited the turn of each, which struck the reader and writer jointly as a novel effect from any American crowd, but which the writer scarcely dares intimate to the general reader, for the general reader is much more than generally a woman, and she may not like it. Perhaps we can keep it from offending by supposing that the fact can be true only of the most elect socially, but in any case the fact seemed to be that the men were handsomer than the women. They were not only handsomer, but they were sweller (if we may use a comparative hitherto unachieved) in look, and even in dress.

How this could have happened in a civilization so peculiarly devoted as ours to the evolution of female beauty and style is a question which must be referred to scientific inquiry. It does not affect the vast average of woman’s loveliness and taste among us in ranks below the very highest; this remains unquestioned and unquestionable; and perhaps, in the given instance, it was an appearance and not a fact, or perhaps the joint spectator was deceived as to the supreme social value of those rapidly dwindling and dissolving groups.

The reader and the writer were some time in finding their true level, when they issued into the common life of the street, and they walked home as much like driving home as they could. On the way the reader, who was so remotely lost in thought that the writer could scarcely find him, made himself heard in a musing suspiration: “There was something missing. Can you think what it was?”

“Yes, certainly; there was no ballet.”

“Ah, to be sure: no ballet! And there used always to be a ballet! You remember,” the reader said, “how beatific it always was to have the minor coryphees subside in nebulous ranks on either side of the stage, and have the great planetary splendor of the prima ballerina come swiftly floating down the centre to the very footlights, beaming right and left? Ah, there’s nothing in life now like that radiant moment! But even that was eclipsed when she rose on tiptoe and stubbed it down the scene on the points of her slippers, with the soles of her feet showing vertical in the act. Why couldn’t we have had that to-night? Yes, we have been cruelly wronged.”

“But you don’t give the true measure of our injury. You forget that supreme instant when the master-spirit of the ballet comes skipping suddenly forward, and leaping into the air with calves that exchange a shimmer of kisses, and catches the prima ballerina at the waist, and tosses her aloft, and when she comes down supports her as she bends this way and that way, and all at once stiffens for her bow to the house. Think of our having been defrauded of that!”

“Yes, we have been wickedly defrauded.” The reader was silent for a while, and then he said: “I wonder if anybody except the choreographic composer ever knew what the story of any ballet was? Were you ever able to follow it?”

“Certainly not. It is bad enough following the opera. All that one wishes to do in one case is to look, just as in the other case all one wishes to do is to listen. We would as lief try to think out the full meaning of a Browning poem in the pleasure it gave us, as to mix our joy in the opera or the ballet with any severe question of their purport.”

VI

THE SUPERIORITY OF OUR INFERIORS

The satirical reader introduced himself with a gleam in his eye which kindled apprehension in the unreal editor’s breast, and perhaps roused in him a certain guilty self-consciousness.

“I didn’t know,” the reader said, “that you were such a well-appointed arbiter elegantiarum.”

“Meaning our little discourse last month on the proper form of addressing letters?” the editor boldly grappled with the insinuation. “Oh yes; etiquette is part of our function. We merely hadn’t got round to the matter before. You liked our remarks?”

“Very much,” our visitor said, with the fine irony characteristic of him. “All the more because I hadn’t expected that sort of thing of you. What I have expected of you hitherto was something more of the major morality.”

“But the large-sized morals did not enter into that scheme. We deal at times with the minor morality, too, if the occasion demands, as we have suggested. You should not have been surprised to find politeness, as well as righteousness, advocated or applauded here. Naturally, of course, we prefer the larger-sized morals as questions for discussion. Had you one of the larger-sized questions of morality to present?”

“I was thinking it was a larger-sized question of manners.”

“For example.”

“The experience of one of those transatlantic celebrities who seem to be rather multiplying upon us of late, and who come here with a proclamation of their worship of American women ready to present, as if in print, to the swarming interviewers on the pier, and who then proceed to find fault with our civilization on every other point, almost before they drive up to their hotels.”

“But isn’t that rather an old story?”

“I suppose it is rather old, but it always interests us; we are never free from that longing for a flattered appearance in the eyes of others which we so seldom achieve. This last, or next to last, celebrity — in the early winter it is impossible to fix their swift succession — seems to have suffered amaze at the rude behavior of some dairymaids in the milk-room of the lady who was showing the celebrity over her premises. I didn’t understand the situation very clearly. The lady must have been a lady farmer, in order to have a milk-room with dairymaids in it; but in any case the fact is that when the lady entered with the celebrity the maids remained seated, where they were grouped together, instead of rising and standing in the presence of their superiors, as they would have done in the hemisphere that the celebrity came from.”

“Well, what came of it?”

“Oh, nothing. It was explained to the celebrity that the maids did not rise because they felt themselves as good as their mistress and her guest, and saw no reason for showing them a servile deference: that this was the American ideal.”

“In the minds of those Swedish, Irish, English, Polish, German, or Bohemian dairymaids,” we murmured, dreamily, and when our reader roused us from our muse with a sharp “What?” we explained, “Of course they were not American dairymaids, for it stands to reason that if they were dairymaids they could not be Americans, or if Americans they could not be dairymaids.”

“True,” our friend assented, “but all the same you admit that they were behaving from an American ideal?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that ideal is what the celebrity objects to. The celebrity doesn’t like it — on very high grounds.”

“The grounds of social inequality, the inferiority of those who work to those who pay, and the right of the superiors to the respect of the inferiors?”

“No, the politeness due from one class to another.”

“Such as lives between classes in Europe, we suppose. Well, that is very interesting. Is it of record that the lady and her guest, on going into the milk-room where the dairymaids remained rudely seated, bowed or nodded to them or said, ‘Good-day, young ladies’?”

“No, that is not of record.”

“Their human quality, their human equality, being altogether out of the question, was probably in no wise recognized. Why, then, should they have recognized the human quality of their visitors?” Our satirical reader was silent, and we went on. “There is something very droll in all that. We suppose you have often been vexed, or even outraged, by the ingratitude of the waiter whom you had given a handsome tip, over and above the extortionate charge of the house, and who gathered up your quarter or half-dollar and slipped it into his pocket without a word, or even an inarticulate murmur, of thanks?”

“Often. Outraged is no word for it.”

“Yes,” we assented, feeling our way delicately. “Has it ever happened that in the exceptional case where the waiter has said, ‘Thank you very much,’ or the like, you have responded with a cordial, ‘You’re welcome,’ or, ‘Not at all’?”

“Certainly not.”

“Why not?”

“Because — because — those are terms of politeness between—”

Our friend hesitated, and we interrogatively supplied the word, “Equals? There are always difficulties between unequals. But try this, some day, and see what a real gratitude you will get from the waiter. It isn’t infallible, but the chances are he will feel that you have treated him like a man, and will do or say something to show his feeling: he will give a twitch to your under-coat when he has helped you on with your top-coat, which will almost pull you over. We have even tried saying ‘You are welcome’ to a beggar. It’s astonishing how they like it. By-the-way, have you the habit of looking at your waiter when he comes to take your order; or do you let him stand facing you, without giving him a glance above the lower button of his poor, greasy waistcoat?”

“No, the theory is that he is part of the mechanism of the establishment.”

“That is the theory. But it has its inconveniences. We ourselves used to act upon it, but often, when we found him long in bringing our order, we were at a loss which waiter to ask whether it would be ready some time during the evening; and occasionally we have blown up the wrong waiter, who did not fail to bring us to shame for our error.”

“They do look so confoundedly alike,” our visitor said, thoughtfully.

“We others look confoundedly alike to them, no doubt. If they studied us as little as we study them, if they ignored us as contemptuously as we do them, upon the theory that we, too, are part of the mechanism, the next man would be as likely as we to get our dinner.”

“They are paid to study us,” our visitor urged.

“Ah, paid! The intercourse of unequals is a commercial transaction, but when the inferiors propose to make it purely so the superiors object: they want something to boot, something thrown in, some show of respect, some appearance of gratitude. Perhaps those dairymaids did not consider that they were paid to stand up when their employer and the visiting celebrity came into the milk-room, and so, unless they were civilly recognized — we don’t say they weren’t in this case — they thought they would do some of the ignoring, too. It is surprising how much the superiors think they ought to get for their money from the inferiors in that commercial transaction. For instance, they think they buy the right to call their inferiors by their first names, but they don’t think they sell a similar right with regard to themselves. They call them Mary and John, but they would be surprised and hurt if the butler and waitress addressed them as Mary and John. Yet there is no reason for their surprise. Do you remember in that entrancing and edifying comedy of ‘Arms and the Man’ — Mr. Bernard Shaw’s very best, as we think — the wild Bulgarian maid calls the daughter of the house by her Christian name? ‘But you mustn’t do that,’ the mother of the house instructs her. ‘Why not?’ the girl demands. ‘She calls me Louka.’”

“Capital!” our friend agreed. “But, of course, Shaw doesn’t mean it.”

“You never can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he meant in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you shall look where you stand.”

Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his gayety. “Aren’t you taking the matter a little too seriously?”

“Perhaps. But we thought you wanted us to be more serious than we were about addressing letters properly. This is the larger-sized morality, the real No. 11 sort, and you don’t like it, though you said you expected it of us.”

“Oh, but I do like it, though just at present I hadn’t expected it. But if you’re in earnest you must admit that the lower classes with us are abominably rude. Now, I have the fancy — perhaps from living on the Continent a good deal in early life, where I formed the habit — of saying good-morning to the maid or the butler when I come down. But they never seem to like it, and I can’t get a good-morning back unless I dig it out of them. I don’t want them to treat me as a superior; I only ask to be treated as an equal.”

“We have heard something like that before, but we doubt it. What you really want is to have your condescension recognized; they feel that, if they don’t know it. Besides, their manners have been formed by people who don’t ask good-morning from them; they are so used to being treated as if they were not there that they cannot realize they are there. We have heard city people complain of the wane of civility among country people when they went to them in the summer to get the good of their country air. They say that the natives no longer salute them in meeting, but we never heard that this happened when they first saluted the natives. Try passing the time of day with the next farmer you meet on a load of wood, and you will find that the old-fashioned civility is still to be had for the asking. But it won’t be offered without the asking; the American who thinks from your dress and address that you don’t regard him as an equal will not treat you as one at the risk of a snub; and he is right. As for domestics — or servants, as we insolently call them — their manners are formed on their masters’, and are often very bad. But they are not always bad. We, too, have had that fancy of yours for saying good-morning when we come down; it doesn’t always work, but it oftener works than not. A friend of ours has tried some such civility at others’ houses: at his host’s house when the door was opened to him, arriving for dinner, and he was gloomily offered a tiny envelope with the name of the lady he was to take out. At first it surprised, but when it was imagined to be well meant it was apparently liked; in extreme cases it led to note of the weather; the second or third time at the same house it established something that would have passed, with the hopeful spectator, for a human relation. Of course, you can’t carry this sort of thing too far. You can be kind, but you must not give the notion that you do not know your place.”

“Ah! You draw the line,” our friend exulted. “I thought so. But where?”

“At the point where you might have the impression that you respected butlers, when you merely loved your fellow-men. You see the difference?”

“But isn’t loving your fellow-men enough? Why should you respect butlers?”

“To be sure. But come to think of it, why shouldn’t you? What is it in domestic employ that degrades, that makes us stigmatize it as ‘service’? As soon as you get out-of-doors the case changes. You must often have seen ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; and as for chauffeurs, who may kill you or somebody else at any moment, the mental attitude of the average automobilaire toward them must be one of abject deference. But there have been some really heroic, some almost seraphic, efforts to readjust the terms of a relation that seems to have something essentially odious in it. In the old times, the times of the simple life now passed forever, when the daughter of one family ‘lived out’ in another, she ate with the family and shared alike with them. She was their help, but she became their hindrance when she insisted upon the primitive custom after ‘waiting at table’ had passed the stage when the dishes were all set down, and the commensals ‘did their own stretching.’ Heroes and seraphs did their utmost to sweeten and soften the situation, but the unkind tendency could not be stayed. The daughter of the neighbor who ‘lived out’ became ‘the hired girl,’ and then she became the waitress, especially when she was of neighbors beyond seas; and then the game was up. Those who thought humanely of the predicament and wished to live humanely in it tried one thing and tried another. That great soul of H.D.L., one of the noblest and wisest of our economic reformers, now gone to the account which any might envy him, had a usage which he practised with all guests who came to his table. Before they sat down he or his wife said, looking at the maid who was to serve the dinner, ‘This is our friend, Miss Murphy’; and then the guests were obliged in some sort to join the host and hostess in recognizing the human quality of the attendant. It was going rather far, but we never heard that any harm came of it. Some thought it rather odd, but most people thought it rather nice.”

“And you advocate the general adoption of such a custom?” our friend asked, getting back to the sarcasm of his opening note. “Suppose a larger dinner, a fashionable dinner, with half a dozen men waiters? That sort of thing might do at the table of a reformer, which only the more advanced were invited to; but it wouldn’t work with the average retarded society woman or clubman.”

“What good thing works with them?” we retorted, spiritedly. “But no, the custom would not be readily adopted even among enlightened thinkers. We do not insist upon it; the men and the maids might object; they might not like knowing the kind of people who are sometimes asked to quite good houses. To be sure, they are not obliged to recognize them out of the house.”

“But what,” our friend asked, “has all this got to do with the question of ‘the decent respect’ due from domestics, as you prefer to call them, to their employers?”

“As in that case of the dairymaids which we began with? But why was any show of respect due from them? Was it nominated in the bond that for their four or five dollars a week they were to stand up when their ‘mistress’ and her ‘company’ entered the room? Why, in fine, should any human being respect another, seeing what human beings generally are? We may love one another, but respect! No, those maids might, and probably did, love their mistress; but they felt that they could show their love as well sitting down as standing up. They would not stand up to show their love for one another.”

“Then you think there is some love lost between the master and man or mistress and maid nowadays,” our beaten antagonist feebly sneered.

“The masters and mistresses may not, but the men and maids may, have whole treasures of affection ready to lavish at the first sign of a desire for it; they do not say so, for they are not very articulate. In the mean time the masters and mistresses want more than they have paid for. They want honor as well as obedience, respect as well as love, the sort of thing that money used to buy when it was worth more than it is now. Well, they won’t get it. They will get it less and less as time goes on. Whatever the good new times may bring, they won’t bring back the hypocritical servility of the good old times. They—”

We looked round for our visiting reader, but he had faded back into the millions of readers whom we are always addressing in print.

VII

UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS

A visitor of the Easy Chair who seemed to have no conception of his frequency, and who was able to supply from his imagination the welcome which his host did not always hurry to offer him, found a place for himself on the window-sill among the mistaken MSS. sent in the delusion that the editor of the Chair was the editor of the magazine.

“I have got a subject for you,” he said.

“Have you ever heard,” we retorted, “of carrying coals to Newcastle? What made you think we wanted a subject?”

“Merely that perfunctory air of so many of your disquisitions. I should think you would feel the want yourself. Your readers all feel it for you.”

“Well, we can tell you,” we said, “that there could be no greater mistake. We are turning away subjects from these premises every day. They come here, hat in hand, from morning till night, asking to be treated; and after dark they form a Topic Line at our door, begging for the merest pittance of a notice, for the slightest allusion, for the most cursory mention. Do you know that there are at least two hundred thousand subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have got a subject, you had better take it to the country press; the New York magazines and reviews are overstocked with them; the newspapers, morning and evening, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot get standing-room in the theatres. Why, we have just this moment dismissed a subject of the first interest. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting one lady friend of votes for women declared herself an admirer of monarchies because they always gave women more recognition, more honor, than republics?”

“No, I haven’t,” our visitor said.

“Well, it happened,” we affirmed. “But every nook and cranny of our brain was so full of subjects that we simply could not give this a moment’s consideration, and we see that all the other editors in New York were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though they must have felt, as we did, that it was of prime importance.”

From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, and began to nurse one of his knees between his clasped hands. “But if,” he asked, “you had been able to consider the subject, what should you have said?”

“There are a great many ways of considering a subject like that,” we replied. “We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how far the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of the commonwealth’s existence, and by corrupting the heart of American motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to the point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and titles and the splendor of court life.”

“Wouldn’t you have been rather mixing your metaphors?” our visitor asked, with an air of having followed us over a difficult country.

“In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would have minded mixing his metaphors. He would have felt that the great thing was to keep his motives pure; and in treating such a subject our motives would have remained the purest, whatever became of our metaphors. At the same time this would not have prevented our doing justice to the position taken by that friend of votes for women. We should have frankly acknowledged that there was a great deal to be said for it, and that republics had hitherto been remiss in not officially acknowledging the social primacy of woman, but, in fact, distinctly inviting her to a back seat in public affairs. We should then have appealed to our thoughtful readers to give the matter their most earnest attention, and with the conservatism of all serious inquirers we should have urged them to beware of bestowing the suffrage on a class of the community disposed so boldly to own its love of the splendors of the state. Would it be sage, would it be safe, to indulge with democratic equality a sex which already had its eyes on the flattering inequality of monarchy? Perhaps at this point we should digress a little and mention Montesquieu, whose delightful Spirit of Laws we have lately been reading. We should remind the reader, who would like to think he had read him too, how Montesquieu distinguishes between the principles on which the three sorts of government are founded: civic virtue being the base of a republic, honor the ruling motive in the subjects of a monarchy, and fear the dominant passion in the slaves of a despotism. Then we should ask whether men were prepared to intrust the reins of government to women when they had received this timely intimation that women were more eager to arrive splendidly than to bring the car of state in safety to the goal. How long would it be, we should poignantly demand, before in passing from the love of civic virtue to the ambition of honor, we should sink in the dread of power?”

Our visitor was apparently not so deeply impressed by the treatment of the subject here outlined as we had been intending and expecting he should be. He asked, after a moment, “Don’t you think that would be rather a heavy-handed way of dealing with the matter?”

“Oh,” we returned, “we have light methods of treating the weightiest questions. There is the semi-ironical vein, for instance, which you must have noticed a good deal in us, and perhaps it would be better suited to the occasion.”

“Yes?” our visitor suggested.

“Yes,” we repeated. “In that vein we should question at the start whether any such praise of monarchy had been spoken, and then we should suppose it had, and begin playfully to consider what the honors and distinctions were that women had enjoyed under monarchy. We should make a merit at the start of throwing up the sponge for republics. We should own they had never done the statesmanlike qualities of women justice. We should glance, but always a little mockingly, at the position of woman in the Greek republics, and contrast, greatly to the republican disadvantage, her place in the democracy of Athens with that she held in the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact that the Athenian women were not only not in politics, but were not even in society, except a class which could be only fugitively mentioned, and we should freely admit that the Spartan women were the heroic inspiration of the men in all the virtues of patriotism at home as well as in the field. We should recognize the sort of middle station women held in the Roman republic, where they were not shut up in the almost Oriental seclusion of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in competitive athletics like the Spartan daughters. We should note that if a Spartan mother had the habit of bidding her son return with his shield or on it, a Roman mother expressed a finer sense of her importance in the state when she intimated that it was enough for her to be the parent of the Gracchi. But we should not insist upon our point, which, after all, would not prove that the decorative quality of women in public life was recognized in Rome as it always has been in monarchies, and we should recur to the fact that this was the point which had been made against all republics. Coming down to the Italian republics, we should have to own that Venice, with her ducal figurehead, had practically a court at which women shone as they do in monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of Madame de Montespan, of Madame de Pompadour, following one another in brilliant succession, and sharing not only the glory but the authority of the line of princes whose affections they ruled. Of course, we should have to use an ironical gravity in concealing their real quality and the character of the courts where they flourished; and in comparing the womanless obscurity of the English Commonwealth with the feminine effulgence of the Restoration, we should seek a greater effect in our true aim by concealing the name and nature of the ladies who illustrated the court of Charles II.”

“And what would your true aim be?” our visitor pressed, with an unseemly eagerness which we chose to snub by ignoring it.

“As for the position of women in despotisms,” we continued, “we should confess that it seemed to be as ignobly subordinate as that of women in republics. They were scarcely more conspicuous than the Citizenesses who succeeded in the twilight of the One and Indivisible the marquises and comtesses and duchesses of the Ancien Régime, unless they happened, as they sometimes did, to be the head of the state. Without going back to the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should glance at the characters of Cleopatra and certain Byzantine usurpresses, and with a look askance at the two empresses of Russia, should arrive at her late imperial majesty of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain would concern us no more than the great, good Victoria of England, for they were the heads of monarchies and not of despotisms; but we should subtly insinuate that the reigns of female sovereigns were nowhere adorned by ladies of the distinction so common as hardly to be distinction in the annals of kings and emperors. What famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or either Mary? Even Anne’s Mrs. Masham was not a shining personality, and her Sarah of Marlborough was only a brilliant shrew.

“At this point we should digress a little, but we should pursue our inquiry in the same satirical tenor. We hope we are not of those moralists who assume a merit in denouncing the international marriages which have brought our women, some to think tolerantly and some to think favorably of a monarchy as affording greater scope for their social genius. But we should ask, with the mock-seriousness befitting such a psychological study, how it was that, while American girls married baronets and viscounts and earls and dukes, almost none, if any, of their brothers married the sisters or daughters of such noblemen. It could not be that they were not equally rich and therefore equally acceptable, and could it be that they made it a matter of conscience not to marry ladies of title? Were our men, then, more patriotic than our women? Were men naturally more republican than women?

“This question would bring us to the pass where we should more or less drop the mocking mask. We should picture a state of things in which we had actually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real sovereign and a nobility and a court, and the rest of the tradition. With a sudden severity we should ask where, since they could not all be of the highest rank, our women would consent to strike the procession of precedence? How, with their inborn and inbred notions of the deference due their sex, with that pride of womanhood which our republican chivalry has cherished in them, they would like, when they went to court, to stand, for hours perhaps, while a strong young man, or a fat old man, or a robust man in the prime of life, remained seated in the midst of them? Would it flatter their hopes of distinction to find the worst scenes of trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the highest social function in the land, with not even a hanging-strap to support their weariness, their weakness, or, if we must say it, their declining years? Would the glory of being part of a spectacle testifying in our time to the meanness and rudeness of the past be a compensation for the aching legs and breaking backs under the trailing robes and the nodding plumes of a court dress?”

“That would be a telling stroke,” our visitor said, “but wouldn’t it be a stroke retold? It doesn’t seem to me very new.”

“No matter,” we said. “The question is not what a thing is, but how it is done. You asked how we should treat a given subject, and we have answered.”

“And is that all you could make of it?”

“By no means. As subjects are never exhausted, so no subject is ever exhausted. We could go on with this indefinitely. We could point out that the trouble was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little; that women’s civic equality with men was perhaps the next step, and not the social inequality among persons of both sexes. Without feeling that it affected our position, we would acknowledge that there was now greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great Britain than in a republic like the United States; with shame we would acknowledge it; but we would never admit that it was so because of the monarchism of the first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally be very earnest with this phase of our subject, and we should urge our fair readers to realize that citizenship was a duty as well as a right. We should ask them before accepting the suffrage to consider its responsibilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing attitude of their husbands and fathers, or the brothers of one another, toward the state. We should make them observe that the actual citizen was not immediately concerned with the pomps and glories of public life; that parties and constituencies were not made up of one’s fellow-aristocrats, but were mostly composed of plebeians very jealous of any show of distinction, and that, in spite of the displeasures of political association with them, there was no present disposition in American men to escape to monarchy from them. We cannot, we should remind them, all be of good family; that takes time, or has taken it; and without good family the chances of social eminence, or even prominence, are small at courts. Distinction is more evenly distributed in a democracy like ours; everybody has a chance at it. To be sure, it is not the shining honor bestowed by kings, but when we remember how often the royal hand needs washing we must feel that the honor from it may have the shimmer of putrescence. This is, of course, the extreme view of the case; and the condition of the royal hand is seldom scrutinized by those who receive or those who witness the honor bestowed. But the honor won from one’s fellow-citizens is something worth having, though it is not expressed in a ribbon or a title. Such honor, it seems probable, will soon be the reward of civic virtue in women as well as men, and we hope women will not misprize it. The great end to be achieved for them by the suffrage is self-government, but with this goes the government of others, and that is very pleasant. The head of our state may be a woman, chosen at no far-distant election; and though it now seems droll to think of a woman being president, it will come in due time to seem no more so than for a woman to be a queen or an empress. At any rate, we must habituate our minds to the idea; we must realize it with the hope it implies that no woman will then care socially to outshine her sister; at the most she will be emulous of her in civic virtue, the peculiar grace and glory of republics. We understand that this is already the case in New Zealand and Colorado and Wyoming. It is too soon, perhaps, to look for the effect of suffrage on the female character in Denmark; it may be mixed, because there the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which may contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which is the moving principle in a monarchy. And now,” we turned lightly to our visitor, “what is the topic you wish us to treat?”

“Oh,” he said, rising, “you have put it quite out of my head; I’ve been so absorbed in what you were saying. But may I ask just where in your treatment of the theme your irony ends?”

“Where yours begins,” we neatly responded.

VIII

HAVING JUST GOT HOME

The air of having just got home from Europe was very evident in the friend who came to interview himself with us the other day. It was not, of course, so distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, and it lent him a superiority which he could not wholly conceal. His superiority, so involuntary, would, if he had wished to dissemble, have affirmed itself in the English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his top-hat, which was so newly from a London shop as not yet to have lost the whiteness of its sweat-band. But his difference from ourselves appeared most in a certain consciousness of novel impressions, which presently escaped from him in the critical tone of his remarks.

“Well,” we said, with our accustomed subtlety, “how do you find your fellow-savages on returning to them after a three months’ absence?”

“Don’t ask me yet,” he answered, laying his hat down on a pile of rejected MSS., delicately, so as not to dim the lustre of its nap. “I am trying to get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed in time. But I would rather not be hurried in my opinions.”

“You find some relief from the summer’s accumulation of sky-scrapers amid the aching void of our manners?” we suggested.

“Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You won’t find the English objecting to them half so much as some of our own fellows. But you are all right about the aching void of manners. That is truly the bottomless pit with us.”

“You think we get worse?”

“I don’t say that, exactly. How could we?”

“It might be difficult.”

“I will tell you what,” he said, after a moment’s muse. “There does not seem to be so much an increase of bad manners, or no manners, as a diffusion. The foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are as rude as the best of us, especially the younger generations. The older people, Italians, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities now compose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of their home civility; but their children, their grandchildren, pick up our impoliteness with the first words of our language, or our slang, which they make their adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that it is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it better than language, and as no manners are easier than manners, they prefer the impoliteness they find waiting them here. I have no doubt that their morals improve; we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry pistols instead of knives; they shoot instead of stabbing.”

“Have you been attacked with any particular type of revolver since your return?” we inquired, caustically.

“I have been careful not to give offence.”

“Then why are you so severe upon your fellow-savages, especially the minors of foreign extraction?”

“I was giving the instances which I supposed I was asked for; and I am only saying that I have found our manners merely worse quantitatively, or in the proportion of our increasing population. But this prompt succession of the new Americans to the heritage of the old Americans is truly grievous. They must so soon outnumber us, three to one, ten to one, twenty, fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities in geometrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed—”

“Oh, you landed at Boston!” we exclaimed, as if this accounted for everything; but we were really only trying to gain time. “If you had landed at New York, do you think your sensibilities would have suffered in the same degree?” We added, inconsequently enough, “We always supposed that Boston was exemplary in the matters you are complaining of.”

“And when you interrupted me, with a want of breeding which is no doubt national rather than individual, I was going on to say that I found much alleviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had forgotten. I moan the sort of caressing irony which has come to be the most characteristic expression of our native kindliness. There can be no doubt of our kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old race-suicidal stock are not, we are kind; and I think that our expression of our most national mood has acquired a fineness, a delicacy, with our people of all degrees, unknown to any other irony in the world. Do you remember The House with the Green Shutters — I can never think of the book without a pang of personal grief for the too-early death of the author — how the bitter, ironical temper of the Scotch villagers is realized? Well, our ironical temper is just the antithesis of that. It is all sweetness, but it is of the same origin as that of those terrible villagers: it comes from that perfect, that familiar understanding, that penetrating reciprocal intelligence, of people who have lived intimately in one another’s lives, as people in small communities do. We are a small community thrown up large, as they say of photographs; we are not so much a nation as a family; we each of us know just what any other, or all others, of us intend to the finest shade of meaning, by the lightest hint.”

“Ah!” we breathed, quite as if we were a character in a novel which had inspired the author with a new phrase. “Now you are becoming interesting. Should you mind giving a few instances?”

“Well, that is not so easy. But I may say that the friendly ironies began for us as soon as we were out of the more single-minded keeping of the ship’s stewards, who had brought our hand-baggage ashore, and, after extracting the last shilling of tip from us, had delivered us over to the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking tone of the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they touched or lifted the contents with a mocking hand, and at times carried the joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But they helped put them back with a smile for the odd taste of the Government. I do not suppose that an exasperating duty was ever so inexasperatingly fulfilled.”

“Aren’t you rather straining to make out a case? We have heard of travellers who had a very different experience.”

“At New York, yes, where we are infected with the foreign singleness more than at Boston. Perhaps a still livelier illustration of our ironical temperament was given me once before when I brought some things into Boston. There were some Swiss pewters, which the officers joined me for a moment in trying to make out were more than two hundred years old; but failing, jocosely levied thirty per cent. ad valorem on them; and then in the same gay spirit taxed me twenty per cent. on a medallion of myself done by an American sculptor, who had forgotten to verify an invoice of it before the American consul at the port of shipment.”

“It seems to us,” we suggested, “that this was a piece of dead earnest.”

“The fact was earnest,” our friend maintained, “but the spirit in which it was realized was that of a brotherly persuasion that I would see the affair in its true light, as a joke that was on me. It was a joke that cost me thirty dollars.”

“Still, we fail to see the irony of the transaction.”

“Possibly,” our friend said, after a moment’s muse, “I am letting my sense of another incident color the general event too widely. But before I come to that I wish to allege some proofs of the national irony which I received on two occasions when landing in New York. On the first of these occasions the commissioner who came aboard the steamer, to take the sworn declaration of the passengers that they were not smugglers, recognized my name as that of a well-known financier who had been abroad for a much-needed rest, and personally welcomed me home in such terms that I felt sure of complete exemption from the duties levied on others. When we landed I found that this good friend had looked out for me to the extent of getting me the first inspector, and he had guarded my integrity to the extent of committing me to a statement in severalty of the things my family had bought abroad, so that I had to pay twenty-eight dollars on my daughter’s excess of the hundred dollars allowed free, although my wife was bringing in only seventy-five dollars’ value, and I less than fifty.”

“You mean that you had meant to lump the imports and escape the tax altogether?” we asked.

“Something like that.”

“And the officer’s idea of caressing irony was to let you think you could escape equally well by being perfectly candid?”

“Something like that.”

“And what was the other occasion?”

“Oh, it was when I had a letter to the customs officer, and he said it would be all right, and then furnished me an inspector who opened every piece of my baggage just as if I had been one of the wicked.”

We could not help laughing, and our friend grinned appreciatively. “And what was that supreme instance of caressing irony which you experienced in Boston?” we pursued.

“Ah, there is something I don’t think you can question. But I didn’t experience it; I merely observed it. We were coming down the stairs to take our hack at the foot of the pier, and an elderly lady who was coming down with us found the footing a little insecure. The man in charge bade her be careful, and then she turned upon him in severe reproof, and scolded him well. She told him that he ought to have those stairs looked after, for otherwise somebody would be killed one of these days. ‘Well, ma’am,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t like that. I was in a railroad accident once. But I tell you what you do. The next time you come over here, you just telephone me, and I’ll have these steps fixed. Or, I’ll tell you: you just write me a letter and let me know exactly how you want ’em fixed, and I’ll see to it myself.’”

“That was charming,” we had to own, “and it was of an irony truly caressing, as you say. Do you think it was exactly respectful?”

“It was affectionate, and I think the lady liked it as much as any of us, or as the humorist himself.”

“Yes, it was just so her own son might have joked her,” we assented. “But tell us, Crœsus,” we continued, in the form of Socratic dialogue, “did you find at Boston that multiple unmannerliness which you say is apparent from the vast increase of adoptive citizens? We have been in the habit of going to Boston when we wished to refresh our impression that we had a native country; when we wished to find ourselves in the midst of the good old American faces, which were sometimes rather arraigning in their expression, but not too severe for the welfare of a person imaginably demoralized by a New York sojourn.”

Our friend allowed himself time for reflection. “I don’t think you could do that now with any great hope of success. I should say that the predominant face in Boston now was some type of Irish face. You know that the civic affairs of Boston are now in the hands of the Irish. And with reason, if the Irish are in the majority.”

“In New York it has long been the same without the reason,” we dreamily suggested.

“In Boston,” our friend went on, without regarding us, “the Catholics outvote the Protestants, and not because they vote oftener, but because there are more of them.”

“And the heavens do not fall?”

“It is not a question of that; it is a question of whether the Irish are as amiable and civil as the Americans, now they are on top.”

“We always supposed they were one of the most amiable and civil of the human races. Surely you found them so?”

“I did at Queenstown, but at Boston I had not the courage to test the fact. I would not have liked to try a joke with one of them as I would at Queenstown, or as I would at Boston with an American. Their faces did not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very curious, and I may have misread them.”

“Oh, probably not,” we lightly mocked. “They were taking it out of you for ages of English oppression; they were making you stand for the Black Cromwell.”

“Oh, very likely,” our friend said, in acceptance of our irony, because he liked irony so much. “But, all the same, I thought it a pity, as I think it a pity when I meet a surly Italian here, who at home would be so sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We have spoiled them by our rudeness; they think it is American to be as rude as the Americans. They mistake our incivility for our liberty.”

“There is something in what you say,” we agreed, “if you will allow us to be serious. They are here in our large, free air, without the parasites that kept them in bounds in their own original habitat. We must invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive and not destructive, and will supply the eventual good without the provisional evil.”

“Then we must go a great way back, and begin with our grandfathers, with the ancestors who freed us from Great Britain, but did not free themselves from the illusion that equality resides in incivility and honesty in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to us intact, so that we are now not only the best-hearted but the worst-mannered of mankind. If our habitual carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we should be an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, at least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back I have been reading a curious old book by James Fenimore Cooper, which I understand made a great stir in its day. Do you know it? — Home as Found?”

“We know it as one may know a book which one has not read. It pretty nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn’t take so kindly to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to like so much. What is the drift of the book besides the general censure?”

“Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American family returning home after a long sojourn in Europe so high-bred that you want to kill them, and so superior to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Americans who have not been away. The author’s unconsciousness of the vulgarity of his exemplary people is not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive for a short stay in New York before they go to their country-seat somewhere up the State, and the sketches of New York society as it was in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century are certainly delightful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in spirit. Of course, it was very provincial, but society is always and everywhere provincial. One thing about it then was different from what it is now: I mean the attitude of the stay-at-homes toward the been-abroads. They revered them and deferred to them, and they called them Hajii, or travellers, in a cant which must have been very common, since George William Curtis used the same Oriental term for his Howadji in Syria and his Nile Notes of a Howadji.”

“We must read it,” we said, with the readiness of one who never intends to read the book referred to. “What you say of it is certainly very suggestive. But how do you account for the decay of the reverence and deference in which the Hajii were once held?”

“Well, they may have overworked their superiority.”

“Or?” we prompted.

“The stay-at-homes may have got onto the been-abroads in a point where we all fail, unless we have guarded ourselves very scrupulously.”

“And that is?”

“There is something very vulgarizing for Americans in the European atmosphere, so that we are apt to come back worse-mannered than we went away, and vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is impoliter to criticise than to be criticised.”

“And is that why your tone has been one of universal praise for your countrymen in the present interview?”

Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled edge of the crown, and blew a speck of dust from it. “One reasons to a conclusion,” he said, “not from it.”

IX

NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER’S EYE

Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and though a month had passed, we knew, as well as if it were only a day, that he had come to require of us the meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if she ever got it.

“Well,” he said, “have you cleared your mind yet sufficiently to ‘pour the day’ on mine? Or hadn’t you any meaning in what you said? I’ve sometimes suspected it.”

The truth is that we had not had very much meaning of the sort that you stand and deliver, though we were aware of a large, vague wisdom in our words. But we perceived that our friend had no intention of helping us out, and on the whole we thought it best to temporize.

“In the first place,” we said, “we should like to know what impression New York made on you when you arrived here, if there was any room left on your soul-surface after the image of Boston had been imprinted there.”

No man is unwilling to expatiate concerning himself, even when he is trying to corner a fellow-man. This principle of human nature perhaps accounts for the frequent failure of thieves to catch thieves, in spite of the proverb; the pursuit suggests somehow the pleasures of autobiography, and while they are reminded of this and that the suspects escape the detectives. Our friend gladly paused to reply:

“I wish I could say! It was as unbeautiful as it could be, but it was wonderful! Has anybody else ever said that there is no place like it? On some accounts I am glad there isn’t; one place of the kind is enough; but what I mean is that I went about all the next day after arriving from Boston, with Europe still in my brain, and tried for something suggestive of some other metropolis, and failed. There was no question of Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my first glimpse of Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward from the Grand Central Station. But I tried with Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with Paris, and found it a blonder and blither Boston; with London, and found it sombrely irrelevant and incomparable. New York is like London only in not being like any other place, and it is next to London in magnitude. So far, so good; but the resemblance ends there, though New York is oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than we willingly allow to Londoners. Both, however, have an admirable quality which is not beauty. One might call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and in New York one might call it—”

He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine line for the greater convenience of mentally visioning.

“What?” we impatiently prompted.

“I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think of sublimity?”

“We always defend New York against you. We accept sublimity. How?”

“I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer Fifth Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in the other measures of the city’s extent.”

FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET

“This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave out of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West Side?”

“I don’t, altogether,” our friend replied. “Especially I don’t leave out the upper West Side. That has moments of being even beautiful. But there is a point beyond which sublimity cannot go; and that is about the fifteenth story. When you get a group of those sky-scrapers, all soaring beyond this point, you have, in an inverted phase, the unimpressiveness which Taine noted as the real effect of a prospect from the summit of a very lofty mountain. The other day I found myself arrested before a shop-window by a large photograph labelled ‘The Heart of New York.’ It was a map of that region of sky-scrapers which you seem to think not justly beyond the scope of attributive sublimity. It was a horror; it set my teeth on edge; it made me think of scrap-iron — heaps, heights, pinnacles of scrap-iron. Don’t ask me why scrap-iron! Go and look at that photograph and you will understand. Below those monstrous cliffs the lower roofs were like broken foot-hills; the streets were chasms, gulches, gashes. It looked as if there had been a conflagration, and the houses had been burned into the cellars; and the eye sought the nerve-racking tangle of pipe and wire which remains among the ruins after a great fire. Perhaps this was what made me think of scrap-iron — heaps, heights, pinnacles of it. No, there was no sublimity there. Some astronomers have latterly assigned bounds to immensity, but the sky-scrapers go beyond these bounds; they are primordial, abnormal.”

“You strain for a phrase,” we said, “as if you felt the essential unreality of your censure. Aren’t you aware that mediæval Florence, mediæval Siena, must have looked, with their innumerable towers, like our sky-scrapered New York? They must have looked quite like it.”

“And very ugly. It was only when those towers, which were devoted to party warfare as ours are devoted to business warfare, were levelled, that Florence became fair and Siena superb. I should not object to a New York of demolished sky-scrapers. They would make fine ruins; I would like to see them as ruins. In fact, now I think of it, ‘The Heart of New York’ reminded me of the Roman Forum. I wonder I didn’t think of that before. But if you want sublimity, the distinguishing quality of New York, as I feel it more and more, while I talk of it, you must take that stretch of Fifth Avenue from a motor-bus top.”

“But that stretch of Fifth Avenue abounds in sky-scrapers!” we lamented the man’s inconsistency.

“Sky-scrapers in subordination, yes. There is one to every other block. There is that supreme sky-scraper, the Flatiron. But just as the Flatiron, since the newspapers have ceased to celebrate its pranks with men’s umbrellas, and the feathers and flounces and ‘tempestuous petticoats’ of the women, has sunk back into a measurable inconspicuity, so all the other tall buildings have somehow harmonized themselves with the prospect and no longer form the barbarous architectural chaos of lower New York. I don’t object to their being mainly business houses and hotels; I think that it is much more respectable than being palaces or war-like eminences, Guelf or Ghibelline; and as I ride up-town in my motor-bus, I thrill with their grandeur and glow with their condescension. Yes, they condescend; and although their tall white flanks climb in the distance, they seem to sink on nearer approach, and amiably decline to disfigure the line of progress, or to dwarf the adjacent edifices. Down-town, in the heart of New York, poor old Trinity looks driven into the ground by the surrounding heights and bulks; but along my sublime upper Fifth Avenue there is spire after spire that does not unduly dwindle, but looks as if tenderly, reverently, protected by the neighboring giants. They are very good and kind giants, apparently. But the acme of the sublimity, the quality in which I find my fancy insisting more and more, is in those two stately hostelries, the Gog and Magog of that giant company, which guard the approach to the Park like mighty pillars, the posts of vast city gates folded back from them.”

“Come!” we said. “This is beginning to be something like.”

“In November,” our friend said, taking breath for a fresh spurt of praise, “there were a good many sympathetic afternoons which lent themselves to motor-bus progress up that magnificent avenue, and if you mounted to your place on top, about three o’clock, you looked up or down the long vista of blue air till it turned mirk at either vanishing-point under a sky of measureless cloudlessness. That dimness, almost smokiness at the closes of the prospect, was something unspeakably rich. It made me think, quite out of relation or relevance, of these nobly mystical lines of Keats:

‘His soul shall know the sadness of her night,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.’”

We closed our eyes in the attempt to grope after him. “Explain, O Howadji!”

“I would rather not, as you say when you can’t,” he replied. “But I will come down a little nearer earth, if you prefer. Short of those visionary distances there are features of the prospect either way in which I differently rejoice. One thing is the shining black roofs of the cabs, moving and pausing like processions of huge turtles up and down the street; obeying the gesture of the mid-stream policemen where they stand at the successive crossings to stay them, and floating with the coming and going tides as he drops his inhibitory hand and speeds them in the continuous current. That is, of course, something you get in greater quantity, though not such intense quality, in a London ‘block,’ but there is something more fluent, more mercurially impatient, in a New York street jam, which our nerves more vividly partake. Don’t ask me to explain! I would rather not!” he said, and we submitted.

He went on to what seemed an unjustifiable remove from the point. “Nothing has struck me so much, after a half-year’s absence, in this novel revelation of sublimity in New York, as the evident increase on the street crowds. The city seems to have grown a whole new population, and the means of traffic and transportation have been duplicated in response to the demand of the multiplying freights and feet.” Our friend laughed in self-derision, as he went on. “I remember when we first began to have the electric trolleys—”

“Trams, we believe you call them,” we insinuated.

“Not when I’m on this side,” he retorted, and he resumed: “I used to be afraid to cross the avenues where they ran. At certain junctions I particularly took my life in my hand, and my ‘courage in both hands.’ Where Sixth Avenue flows into Fifty-ninth Street, and at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, and at Dead Man’s Curve (he has long been resuscitated) on Fourteenth Street, I held my breath till I got over alive, and I blessed Heaven for my safe passage at Forty-second and Twenty-third streets, and at divers places on Third Avenue. Now I regard these interlacing iron currents with no more anxiety than I would so many purling brooks, with stepping-stones in them to keep my feet from the wet: they are like gentle eddies — soft, clear, slow tides — where one may pause in the midst at will, compared with the deadly expanses of Fifth Avenue, with their rush of all manner of vehicles over the smooth asphalt surface. There I stand long at the brink; I look for a policeman to guide and guard my steps; I crane my neck forward from my coign of vantage and count the cabs, the taxicabs, the carriages, the private automobiles, the motor-buses, the express-wagons, and calculate my chances. Then I shrink back. If it is a corner where there is no policeman to bank the tides up on either hand and lead me over, I wait for some bold, big team to make the transit of the avenue from the cross-street, and then in its lee I find my way to the other side. As for the trolleys, I now mock myself of them, as Thackeray’s Frenchmen were said to say in their peculiar English. (I wonder if they really did?) It is the taxicabs that now turn my heart to water. It is astonishing how they have multiplied — they have multiplied even beyond the ratio of our self-reduplicating population. There are so many already that this morning I read in my paper of a trolley-car striking a horse-cab! The reporter had written quite unconsciously, just as he used to write horseless carriage. Yes, the motor-cab is now the type, the norm, and the horse-cab is the — the — the — —”

He hesitated for the antithesis, and we proposed “Abnorm?”

“Say abnorm! It is hideous, but I don’t know that it is wrong. Where was I?”

“You had got quite away from the sublimity of New York, which upon the whole you seemed to attribute to the tall buildings along Fifth Avenue. We should like you to explain again why, if ‘The Heart of New York,’ with its sky-scrapers, made you think of scrap-iron, the Flatiron soothed your lacerated sensibilities?”

FIFTH AVENUE FROM THE TOP OF A MOTOR-BUS

“The Flatiron is an incident, an accent merely, in the mighty music of the Avenue, a happy discord that makes for harmony. It is no longer nefarious, or even mischievous, now the reporters have got done attributing a malign meteorological influence to it. I wish I could say as much for the white marble rocket presently soaring up from the east side of Madison Square, and sinking the beautiful reproduction of the Giralda tower in the Garden half-way into the ground. As I look at this pale yellowish brown imitation of the Seville original, it has a pathos which I might not make you feel. But I would rather not look away from Fifth Avenue at all. It is astonishing how that street has assumed and resumed all the larger and denser life of the other streets. Certain of the avenues, like Third and Sixth, remain immutably and characteristically noisy and ignoble; and Fifth Avenue has not reduced them to insignificance as it has Broadway. That is now a provincial High Street beside its lordlier compeer; but I remember when Broadway stormed and swarmed with busy life. Why, I remember the party-colored ‘buses which used to thunder up and down; and I can fancy some Rip Van Winkle of the interior returning to the remembered terrors and splendors of that mighty thoroughfare, and expecting to be killed at every crossing — I can fancy such a visitor looking round in wonder at the difference and asking the last decaying survivor of the famous Broadway Squad what they had done with Broadway from the Battery to Madison Square. Beyond that, to be sure, there is a mighty flare of electrics blazoning the virtues of the popular beers, whiskeys, and actresses, which might well mislead my elderly revisitor with the belief that Broadway was only taken in by day, and was set out again after dark in its pristine — I think pristine is the word; it used to be — glory. But even by night that special length of Broadway lacks the sublimity of Fifth Avenue, as I see it or imagine it from my motor-bus top. I knew Fifth Avenue in the Lincolnian period of brick and brownstone, when it had a quiet, exclusive beauty, the beauty of the unbroken sky-line and the regularity of facade which it has not yet got back, and may never get. You will get some notion of it still in Madison Avenue, say from Twenty-eighth to Forty-second streets, and perhaps you will think it was dull as well as proud. It is proud now, but it is certainly not dull. There is something of columnar majesty in the lofty flanks of these tall shops and hotels as you approach them, which makes you think of some capital decked for a national holiday. But in Fifth Avenue it is always holiday—”

“Enough of streets!” we cried, impatiently. “Now, what of men? What of that heterogeneity for which New York is famous, or infamous? You noticed the contrasting Celtic and Pelasgic tribes in Boston. What of them here, with all the tribes of Israel, lost and found, and the ‘sledded Polack,’ the Czech, the Hun, the German, the Gaul, the Gothic and Iberian Spaniard, and the swart stranger from our sister continent to the southward, and the islands of the seven seas, who so sorely outnumber us?”

Our friend smiled thoughtfully. “Why, that is very curious! Do you know that in Fifth Avenue the American type seems to have got back its old supremacy? It is as if no other would so well suit with that sublimity! I have not heard that race-suicide has been pronounced by the courts amenable to our wise State law against felo de se, but in the modern Fifth Avenue it is as if our stirp had suddenly reclaimed its old-time sovereignty. I don’t say that there are not other faces, other tongues than ours to be seen, heard, there; far from it! But I do say it is a sense of the American face, the American tongue, which prevails. Once more, after long exile in the streets of our own metropolis, you find yourself in an American city. Your native features, your native accents, have returned in such force from abroad, or have thronged here in such multitude from the prospering Pittsburgs, Cincinnatis, Chicagos, St. Louises, and San Franciscos of the West, that you feel as much at home in Fifth Avenue as you would in Piccadilly, or in the Champs Elysées, or on the Pincian Hill. Yes, it is very curious.”

“Perhaps,” we suggested, after a moment’s reflection, “it isn’t true.”

X

CHEAPNESS OF THE COSTLIEST CITY ON EARTH

“One of my surprises on Getting Back,” the more or less imaginary interlocutor who had got back from Europe said in his latest visit to the Easy Chair, “is the cheapness of the means of living in New York.”

At this the Easy Chair certainly sat up. “Stay not a moment, Howadji,” we exclaimed, “in removing our deep-seated prepossession that New York is the most expensive place on the planet.”

But instead of instantly complying our friend fell into a smiling muse, from which he broke at last to say: “I have long been touched by the pathos of a fact which I believe is not yet generally known. Do you know yourself, with the searching knowledge which is called feeling it in your bones, that a good many Southerners and Southerly Westerners make this town their summer resort?” We intimated that want of penetrating statistics which we perceived would gratify him, and he went on. “They put up at our hotels which in the ‘anguish of the solstice’ they find invitingly vacant. As soon as they have registered the clerk recognizes them as Colonel, or Major, or Judge, but gives them the rooms which no amount of family or social prestige could command in the season, and there they stay, waking each day from unmosquitoed nights to iced-melon mornings, until a greater anguish is telegraphed forward by the Associated Press. Then they turn their keys in their doors, and flit to the neighboring Atlantic or the adjacent Catskills, till the solstice recovers a little, and then they return to their hotel and resume their life in the city, which they have almost to themselves, with its parks and drives and roof-gardens and vaudevilles, unelbowed by the three or four millions of natives whom we leave behind us when we go to Europe, or Newport, or Bar Harbor, or the Adirondacks. Sometimes they take furnished flats along the Park, and settle into a greater permanency than their hotel sojourn implies. They get the flats at about half the rent paid by the lessees who sublet them, but I call it pathetic that they should count it joy to come where we should think it misery to stay. Still, everything is comparative, and I suppose they are as reasonably happy in New York as I am in my London lodgings in the London season, where I sometimes stifle in a heat not so pure and clear as that I have fled from.”

“Very well,” we said, dryly, “you have established the fact that the Southerners come here for the summer and live in great luxury; but what has that to do with the cheapness of living in New York, which you began by boasting?”

“Ah, I was coming back to that,” the Howadji said, with a glow of inspiration. “I have been imagining, in the relation which you do not see, that New York can be made the inexpensive exile of its own children as it has been made the summer home of those sympathetic Southerners. If I can establish the fact of its potential cheapness, as I think I can, I shall deprive them of some reasons for going abroad, though I’m not sure they will thank me, when the reasons for Europe are growing fewer and fewer. Culture can now be acquired almost as advantageously here as there. Except for the ‘monuments,’ in which we include all ancient and modern masterpieces in the several arts, we have no excuse for going to Europe, and even in these masterpieces Europe is coming to us so increasingly in every manner of reproduction that we allege the monuments almost in vain. The very ruins of the past are now so accurately copied in various sorts of portable plasticity that we may know them here with nearly the same emotion as on their own ground. The education of their daughters which once availed with mothers willing to sacrifice themselves and their husbands to the common good, no longer avails. The daughters know the far better time they will have at home, and refuse to go, as far as daughters may, and in our civilization this, you know, is very far. But it was always held a prime reason and convincing argument that Dresden, Berlin, Paris, Rome, and even London, were so much cheaper than New York that it was a waste of money to stay at home.”

“Well, wasn’t it?” we impatiently demanded.

“I will not say, for I needn’t, as yet. There were always at the same time philosophers who contended that if we lived in those capitals as we lived at home, they would be dearer than New York. But what is really relevant is the question whether New York isn’t cheaper now.”

“We thought it had got past a question with you. We thought you began by saying that New York is cheaper.”

“I can’t believe I was so crude,” the Howadji returned, with a fine annoyance. “That is the conclusion you have characteristically jumped to without looking before you leap. I was going to approach the fact much more delicately, and I don’t know but what by your haste you have shattered my ideal of the conditions. But I’ll own that the great stumbling-block to my belief that the means of living in New York are cheaper than in the European capitals is that the house rents here are so incomparably higher than they are there. But I must distinguish and say that I mean flat-rents, for, oddly enough, flats are much dearer than houses. You can get a very pretty little house, in a fair quarter, with plenty of light and a good deal of sun, for two-thirds and sometimes one-half what you must pay for a flat with the same number of rooms, mostly dark or dim, and almost never sunny. Of course, a house is more expensive and more difficult to ‘run,’ but even with the cost of the greater service and of the furnace heat the rent does not reach that of a far less wholesome and commodious flat. There is one thing to be said in favor of a flat, however, and that is the women are in favor of it. The feminine instinct is averse to stairs; the sex likes to be safely housed against burglars, and when it must be left alone, it desires the security of neighbors, however strange the neighbors may be; it likes the authority of a janitor, the society of an elevator-boy. It hates a lower door, an area, an ash-barrel, and a back yard. But if it were willing to confront all these inconveniences, it is intimately, it is osseously, convinced that a house is not cheaper than a flat. As a matter of fact, neither a house nor a flat is cheap enough in New York to bear me out in my theory that New York is no more expensive than those Old World cities. To aid efficiently in my support I must invoke the prices of provisions, which I find, by inquiry at several markets on the better avenues, have reverted to the genial level of the earlier nineteen-hundreds, before the cattle combined with the trusts to send them up. I won’t prosily rehearse the quotations of beef, mutton, pork, poultry, and fish; they can be had at any dealer’s on demand; and they will be found less, on the whole, than in London, less than in Paris, less even than in Rome. They are greater no doubt than the prices in our large Western cities, but they are twenty per cent. less than the prices in Boston, and in the New England towns which hang upon Boston’s favor for their marketing. I do not know how or why it is that while we wicked New-Yorkers pay twenty-five cents for our beefsteak, these righteous Bostonians should have to pay thirty, for the same cut and quality. Here I give twenty-eight a pound for my Java coffee; in the summer I live near an otherwise delightful New Hampshire town where I must give thirty-eight. It is strange that the siftings of three kingdoms, as the Rev. Mr. Higginson called his fellow-Puritans, should have come in their great-grandchildren to a harder fate in this than the bran and shorts and middlings of such harvestings as the fields of Ireland and Italy, of Holland and Hungary, of Poland and Transylvania and Muscovy afford. Perhaps it is because those siftings have run to such a low percentage of the whole New England population that they must suffer, along with the refuse of the mills — the Mills of the Gods — abounding in our city and its dependencies.

“I don’t know how much our housekeepers note the fall of the prices in their monthly bills, but in browsing about for my meals, as I rather like to do, I distinctly see it in the restaurant rates. I don’t mean the restaurants to which the rich or reckless resort, but those modester places which consult the means of the careful middle class to which I belong. As you know, I live ostensibly at the Hotel Universe. I have a room there, and that is my address — —”

“We know,” we derisively murmured. “So few of our visitors can afford it.”

“I can’t afford it myself,” our friend said. “But I save a little by breakfasting there, and lunching and dining elsewhere. Or, I did till the eggs got so bad that I had to go out for my breakfast, too. Now I get perfect eggs, of the day before, for half the price that the extortionate hens laying for the Universe exact for their last week’s product. At a very good Broadway hotel, which simple strangers from Europe think first class, I get a ‘combination’ breakfast of fresh eggs, fresh butter, and fresh rolls, with a pot of blameless Souchong or Ceylon tea, for thirty cents; if I plunge to the extent of a baked apple, I pay thirty-five. Do you remember what you last paid in Paris or Rome for coffee, rolls, and butter?”

“A franc fifty,” we remembered.

“And in London for the same with eggs you paid one and six, didn’t you?”

“Very likely,” we assented.

“Well, then, you begin to see. There are several good restaurants quite near that good hotel where I get the same combination breakfast for the same price; and if I go to one of those shining halls which you find in a score of places, up and down Broadway and the side streets, I get it for twenty-five cents. But though those shining halls glare at you with roofs and walls of stainless tile and glass, and tables of polished marble, their bill of fare is so inflexibly adjusted to the general demand that I cannot get Souchong or Ceylon tea for any money; I can only get Oolong; otherwise I must take a cup of their excellent coffee. If I wander from my wonted breakfast, I can get almost anything in the old American range of dishes for five or ten cents a portion, and the quality and quantity are both all I can ask. As I have learned upon inquiry, the great basal virtues of these places are good eggs and good butter: I like to cut from the thick slice of butter under the perfect cube of ice, better than to have my butter pawed into balls or cut into shavings, as they serve your butter in Europe. But I prefer having a small table to myself, with my hat and overcoat vis-à-vis on the chair opposite, as I have it at that good hotel. In those shining halls I am elbowed by three others at my polished marble table; but if there were more room I should never object to the company. It is the good, kind, cleanly, comely American average, which is the best company in the world, with a more than occasional fine head, and faces delicately sculptured by thought and study. I address myself fearlessly to the old and young of my own sex, without ever a snub such as I might get from the self-respectful maids or matrons who resort to the shining halls, severally or collectively, if I ventured upon the same freedom with them. I must say that my commensals lunch or dine as wisely as I do for the most part, but sometimes I have had to make my tacit criticisms; and I am glad that I forbore one night with a friendly young man at my elbow, who had just got his order of butter-cakes—”

“Butter-cakes?” we queried.

“That is what they call a rich, round, tumid product of the griddle, which they serve very hot, and open to close again upon a large lump of butter. For two of those cakes and his coffee my unknown friend paid fifteen cents, and made a supper, after which I should not have needed to break my fast the next morning. But he fearlessly consumed it, and while he ate he confided that he was of a minor clerical employ in one of the great hotels near by, and when I praised our shining hall and its guests he laughed and said he came regularly, and he always saw people there who were registered at his hotel: they found it good and they found it cheap. I suppose you know that New York abounds in tables d’hôte of a cheapness unapproached in the European capitals?”

We said we had heard so; at the same time we tried to look as if we always dined somewhere in society, but Heaven knows whether we succeeded.

“The combination breakfast is a form of table d’hôte; and at a very attractive restaurant in a good place I have seen such a breakfast — fruit, cereal, eggs, rolls, and coffee — offered for fifteen cents. I have never tried it, not because I had not the courage, but because I thought thirty cents cheap enough; those who do not I should still hold worthy of esteem if they ate the fifteen-cent breakfast. I have also seen placarded a ‘business men’s lunch’ for fifteen cents, which also I have not tried; I am not a business man. I make bold to say, however, that I often go for my lunch or my dinner to a certain Italian place on a good avenue, which I will not locate more definitely lest you should think me a partner of the enterprise, for fifty and sixty cents, ‘vino compreso.’ The material is excellent, and the treatment is artistic; the company of a simple and self-respectful domesticity which I think it an honor to be part of: fathers and mothers of families, aunts, cousins, uncles, grandparents. I do not deny a Merry Widow hat here and there, but the face under it, though often fair and young, is not a Merry Widow face. Those people all look as kind and harmless as the circle which I used to frequent farther down-town at a fifty-cent French table d’hôte, but with a bouillabaisse added which I should not, but for my actual experiences, have expected to buy for any money. But there are plenty of Italian and French tables d’hôte for the same price all over town. If you venture outside of the Latin race, you pay dearer and you fare worse, unless you go to those shining halls which I have been praising. If you go to a German place, you get grosser dishes and uncouth manners for more money; I do not know why that amiable race should be so dear and rude in its feeding-places, but that is my experience.”

“You wander, you wander!” we exclaimed. “Why should we care for your impressions of German cooking and waiting, unless they go to prove or disprove that living in New York is cheaper than in the European capitals?”

“Perhaps I was going to say that even those Germans are not so dear as they are in the fatherland, though rude. They do not tend much if at all to tables d’hôte, but the Italians and the French who do, serve you a better meal for a lower price than you would get in Paris, or Rome, or Naples. There the prevalent ideal is five francs, with neither wine nor coffee included. I’ll allow that the cheap table d’hôte is mainly the affair of single men and women, and does not merit the consideration I’ve given it. If it helps a young couple to do with one maid, or with none, instead of two, it makes for cheapness of living. Service is costly and it is greedy, and except in large households its diet is the same as the family’s, so that anything which reduces it is a great saving. But the table d’hôte which is cheap for one or two is not cheap for more, and it is not available if there are children. Housing and raw-provisioning and serving are the main questions, and in Europe the first and last are apparently much less expensive. Marketing is undoubtedly cheaper with us, and if you count in what you get with the newness, the wholesomeness, and handiness of an American flat, the rent is not so much greater than that of a European flat, with its elementary bareness. You could not, here, unless you descended from the apartment to the tenement, hire any quarter where you would not be supplied with hot and cold water, with steam heating, with a bath-room, and all the rest of it.”

“But,” we said, “you are showing that we are more comfortably housed than the Europeans, when you should be treating the fact of relative cheapness.”

“I was coming to that even in the matter of housing—”

“It is too late to come to it in this paper. You have now talked three thousand words, and that is the limit. You must be silent for at least another month.”

“But if I have something important to say at this juncture? If I may not care to recur to the subject a month hence? If I may have returned to Europe by that time?”

“Then you can the better verify your statistics. But the rule in this place is inflexible. Three thousand words, neither more nor less. The wisdom of Solomon would be blue-pencilled if it ran to more.”

XI

WAYS AND MEANS OF LIVING IN NEW YORK

The Howadji, or the Hajii, us people called his sort in the days of Home as Found, was prompt to the hour when his month’s absence was up, and he began without a moment’s delay: “But of course the lion in the way of my thesis that New York is comparatively cheap is the rent, the rent of flats or houses in the parts of the town where people of gentle tastes and feelings are willing to live. Provisions are cheap; furnishings of all kinds are cheap; service, especially when you mainly or wholly dispense with it, is cheap, for one maid here will do the work of two abroad, and if the mistress of the house does her own work she can make the modern appliances her handmaids at no cost whatever. It is ridiculous, in fact, leaving all those beautiful and ingenious helps in housework to the hirelings who work only twice as hard with them for more wages than the hirelings of countries where they don’t exist.”

“Don’t be so breathless,” we interposed. “You will only be allowed to talk three thousand words, whether you talk fast or slow, and you might as well take your ease.”

“That is true,” the Howadji reflected. “But I am full of my subject, and I have the feeling that I am getting more out, even if I can’t get more in, by talking fast. The rent question itself,” he hurried on, “has been satisfactorily solved of late in the new invention of co-operative housing which you may have heard of.”

We owned that we had, with the light indifference of one whom matters of more money or less did not concern, and our friend went on.

“The plan was invented, you know, by a group of artists who imagined putting up a large composite dwelling in a street where the cost of land was not absolutely throat-cutting, and finishing it with tasteful plainness in painted pine and the like, but equipping it with every modern convenience in the interest of easier housekeeping. The characteristic and imperative fact of each apartment was a vast and lofty studio whose height was elsewhere divided into two floors, and so gave abundant living-rooms in little space. The proprietorial group may have been ten, say, but the number of apartments was twice as many, and the basic hope was to let the ten other apartments for rents which would carry the expense of the whole, and house the owners at little or no cost. The curious fact is that this apparently too simple-hearted plan worked. The Philistines, as the outsiders may be called, liked being near the self-chosen people; they liked the large life-giving studio which imparted light and air to the two floors of its rearward division, and they eagerly paid the sustaining rents. The fortunate experience of one æsthetic group moved others to like enterprises; and now there are eight or ten of these co-operative studio apartment-houses in different parts of the town.”

“With the same fortunate experience for the owners?” we queried, with suppressed sarcasm.

“Not exactly,” our friend assented to our intention. “The successive groups have constantly sought more central, more desirable, more fashionable situations. They have built not better than they knew, for that could not be, but costlier, and they have finished in hard woods, with marble halls and marbleized hall-boys, and the first expense has been much greater; but actual disaster has not yet followed; perhaps it is too soon; we must not be impatient; but what has already happened is what happens with other beautiful things that the æsthetic invent. It has happened notoriously with all the most lovable and livable summer places which the artists and authors find out and settle themselves cheaply and tastefully in. The Philistines, a people wholly without invention, a cuckoo tribe incapable of self-nesting, stumble upon those joyous homes by chance, or by mistaken invitation. They submit meekly enough at first to be sub-neighbors ruled in all things by the genius of the place; but once in, they begin to lay their golden eggs in some humble cottage, and then they hatch out broods of palatial villas equipped with men and maid servants, horses, carriages, motors, yachts; and if the original settlers remain it is in a helpless inferiority, a broken spirit, and an overridden ideal. This tragical history is the same at Magnolia, and at York Harbor, and at Dublin, and at Bar Harbor; even at Newport itself; the co-operative housing of New York is making a like history. It is true that the Philistines do not come in and dispossess the autochthonic groups; these will not sell to them; but they have imagined doing on a sophisticated and expensive scale what the æsthetics have done simply and cheaply. They are buying the pleasanter sites, and are building co-operatively; though they have already eliminated the studio and the central principle, and they build for the sole occupancy of the owners. But the cost of their housing then is such that it puts them out of the range of our inquiry as their riches has already put them beyond the range of our sympathy. It still remains for any impecunious group to buy the cheaper lots, and build simpler houses on the old studio principle, with rents enough to pay the cost of operation, and leave the owners merely the interest and taxes, with the eventual payment of these also by the tenants. Some of the studio apartments are equipped with restaurants, and the dwellers need only do such light housekeeping as ladies may attempt without disgrace, or too much fatigue.”

“Or distraction from their duties to society,” we suggested.

“It depends upon what you mean by society; it’s a very general and inexact term. If you mean formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions, and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of society’s claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full weight of all the meals, for their father and brother, and yet are most gracefully and most acceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated, travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in others. These ladies do not pretend to ‘entertain,’ but their table is such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general health. They employ æsthetically the beautiful alleviations with which science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse; it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming, that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself.”

“But you do forbear,” we interposed; “and do you imagine that their example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?”

“No, they will continue to ‘keep a girl’ whom they will enslave to the performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of Europe.”

We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our friend, and we objected: “But those ladies you speak of give their whole lives to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such an expense?”

“In the first place, they don’t; and, if they do, what do the one-girl or the two-girl housekeepers give their lives to? or, for the matter of that, the ten or twenty girl housekeepers? The ladies of whom I speak have always read the latest book worth reading; they have seen the picture which people worth while are talking of; they know through that best society which likes a cup of their tea all the æsthetic gossip of the day; they are part of the intellectual movement, that part which neither the arts nor the letters can afford to ignore; they help to make up the polite public whose opinions are the court of final appeal.”

“They strike us,” we said, stubbornly, “as rather romantic.”

“Ah, there you are! Well, they are romantic — romantic like a gentle poem, like an idyllic tale; but I deny that they are romanticistic. Their whole lives deal with realities, the every-other-day as well as the every-day realities. But the lives of those others who make all life costly by refusing their share of its work dwell in a web of threadbare fictions which never had any color of truth in this country. They are trying to imitate poor imitations, to copy those vulgar copies of the European ideal which form the society-page’s contribution to the history of our contemporary civilization.”

We were so far moved as to say, “We think we see what you mean,” and our friend went on.

“Speaking of civilization, do you know what a genial change the tea-room is working in our morals and manners? There are many interesting phases of its progress among us, and not the least interesting of these is its being so largely the enterprise of ladies who must not only save money, but must earn money, in order to live, not cheaply, but at all. Their fearlessness in going to work has often the charm of a patrician past, for many of them are Southern women who have come to New York to repair their broken fortunes. The tea-room has offered itself as a graceful means to this end, and they have accepted its conditions, which are mainly the more delicate kinds of cookery, with those personal and racial touches in which Southern women are so expert. But there are tea-rooms managed by Western women, if I may judge from the accents involuntarily overheard in their talk at the telephone. The tea of the tea-room means lunch, too, and in some places breakfast and dinner, or rather supper, on much the plan of the several Women’s Exchanges; but these are mostly of New England inspiration and operation, and their cooking has a Northern quality. They, as well as the tea-rooms, leave something to be desired in cheapness, though they might be dearer; in some you get tea for fifteen cents, in others a no better brew for twenty-five. But they are all charmingly peaceful, and when at the noon hour they overflow with conversation, still there is a prevailing sense of quiet, finely qualified by the feminine invention and influence. Mere men are allowed to frequent these places, not only under the protection of women, but also quite unchaperoned, and when one sees them gently sipping their Souchong or Oolong, and respectfully munching their toasted muffins or their chicken-pie, one remembers with tender gratitude how recently they would have stood crooking their elbows at deleterious bars, and visiting the bowls of cheese and shredded fish and crackers to which their drink freed them, while it enslaved them to the witchery of those lurid ladies contributed by art to the evil attractions of such places: you see nowhere else ladies depicted with so little on, except in the Paris salon. The New York tea-rooms are not yet nearly so frequent as in London, but I think they are on the average cosier, and on the whole I cannot say that they are dearer. They really cheapen the midday meal to many who would otherwise make it at hotels and restaurants, and, so far as they contribute to the spread of the afternoon-tea habit, they actually lessen the cost of living: many guests can now be fobbed off with tea who must once have been asked to lunch.”

“But,” we suggested, “isn’t that cheapness at the cost of shabbiness, which no one can really afford?”

“No, I don’t think so. Whatever lightens hospitality of its cumbrousness makes for civilization, which is really more compatible with a refined frugality than with an unbridled luxury. If every à-la-carte restaurant, in the hotels and out of them, could be replaced by tea-rooms, and for the elaborate lunches and dinners of private life the informality and simplicity of the afternoon tea were substituted, we should all be healthier, wealthier, and wiser; and I should not be obliged to protract this contention for the superior cheapness of New York.”

“But, wait!” we said. “There is something just occurs to us. If you proved New York the cheapest great city in the world, wouldn’t it tend to increase our population even beyond the present figure, which you once found so deplorable?”

“No, I imagine not. Or, rather, it would add to our population only those who desire to save instead of those who desire to waste. We should increase through the new-comers in virtuous economy, and not as now in spendthrift vainglory. In the end the effect would be the same for civilization as if we shrank to the size of Boston.”

“You will have to explain a little, Howadji,” we said, “if you expect us to understand your very interesting position.”

“Why, you know,” he answered, with easy superiority, “that now our great influx is of opulent strangers who have made a good deal of money, and of destitute strangers willing to help them live on it. The last we needn’t take account of; they are common to all cities in all ages; but the first are as new as any phenomenon can be in a world of such tiresome tautologies as ours. They come up from our industrial provinces, eager to squander their wealth in the commercial metropolis; they throw down their purses as the heroes of old threw down their gantlets for a gage of battle, and they challenge the local champions of extortion to take them up. It is said that they do not want a seasonable or a beautiful thing; they want a costly thing. If, for instance, they are offered a house or an apartment at a rental of ten or fifteen thousand, they will not have it; they require a rental of fifteen or twenty thousand, so that it may be known, ‘back home,’ that they are spending that much for rent in New York, and the provincial imagination taxed to proportion the cost of their living otherwise to such a sum. You may say that it is rather splendid, but you cannot deny that it is also stupid.”

“Stupid, no; but barbaric, yes,” we formulated the case. “It is splendid, as barbaric pearls and gold are splendid.”

“But you must allow that nothing could be more mischievous. When next we go with our modest incomes against these landlords, they suppose that we too want rentals of fifteen thousand, whereas we would easily be satisfied with one of fifteen hundred or a thousand. The poor fellows’ fancy is crazed by those prodigals, and we must all suffer for their madness. The extravagance of the new-comers does not affect the price of provisions so much, or of clothes; the whole population demands food and raiment within the general means, however much it must exceed its means in the cost of shelter. The spendthrifts cannot set the pace for such expenditures, no matter how much they lavish on their backs and—”

“Forbear!” we cried. “Turning from the danger we have saved you from, you will say, we suppose, that New York would be the cheapest of the great cities if it were not for the cost of shelter.”

“Something like that,” he assented.

“But as we understand, that difficulty is to be solved by co-operative, or composite, housing?”

“Something like that,” he said again, but there was a note of misgiving in his voice.

“What is the ‘out’?” we asked.

“There is no ‘out,’” he said, with a deep, evasive sigh.

XII

THE QUALITY OF BOSTON AND THE QUANTITY OF NEW YORK

Later in the summer, or earlier in the fall, than when we saw him newly returned from Europe, that friend whom the veteran reader will recall as having so brashly offered his impressions of the national complexion and temperament looked in again on the Easy Chair.

“Well,” we said, “do you wish to qualify, to hedge, to retract? People usually do after they have been at home as long as you.”

“But I do not,” he said. He took his former seat, but now laid on the heap of rejected MSS., not the silken cylinder he had so daintily poised there before, but a gray fedora that fell carelessly over in lazy curves and hollows. “I wish to modify by adding the effect of further observation and adjusting it to my first conclusions. Since I saw you I have been back to Boston; in fact, I have just come from there.”

We murmured some banality about not knowing a place where one could better come from than Boston. But he brushed it by without notice.

“To begin with, I wish to add that I was quite wrong in finding the typical Boston face now prevalently Celtic.”

“You call that adding?” we satirized.

He ignored the poor sneer.

“My earlier observation was correct enough, but it was a result of that custom which peoples the hills, the shores, and the sister continent in summer with the New-Englanders of the past, and leaves their capital to those New-Englanders of the future dominantly represented by the Irish. At the time of my second visit the exiles had returned, and there were the faces again that, instead of simply forbidding me, arraigned me and held me guilty till I had proved myself innocent.”

“Do you think,” we suggested, “that you would find this sort of indictment in them if you had a better conscience?”

“Perhaps not. And I must own I did not find them so accusing when I could study them in their contemplation of some more important subject than myself. One such occasion for philosophizing them distinctly offered itself to my chance witness when an event of the last seriousness had called some hundreds of them together. One sees strong faces elsewhere; I have seen them assembled especially in England; but I have never seen such faces as those Boston faces, so intense, so full of a manly dignity, a subdued yet potent personality, a consciousness as far as could be from self-consciousness. I found something finely visionary in it all, as if I were looking on a piece of multiple portraiture such as you see in those Dutch paintings of companies at Amsterdam, for instance. It expressed purity of race, continuity of tradition, fidelity to ideals such as no other group of faces would now express. You might have had the like at Rome, at Athens, at Florence, at Amsterdam, in their prime, possibly in the England of the resurgent parliament, though there it would have been mixed with a fanaticism absent in Boston. You felt that these men no doubt had their limitations, but their limitations were lateral, not vertical.”

“Then why,” we asked, not very relevantly, “don’t you go and live in Boston?”

“It wouldn’t make me such a Bostonian if I did; I should want a half-dozen generations behind me for that. Besides, I feel my shortcomings less in New York.”

“You are difficult. Why not fling yourself into the tide of joy here, instead of shivering on the brink in the blast of that east wind which you do not even find regenerative? Why not forget our inferiority, since you cannot forgive it? Or do you think that by being continually reminded of it we can become as those Bostonians are? Can we reduce ourselves, by repenting, from four millions to less than one, and by narrowing our phylacteries achieve the unlimited Bostonian verticality, and go as deep and as high?”

“No,” our friend said. “Good as they are, we can only be better by being different. We have our own message to the future, which we must deliver as soon as we understand it.”

“Is it in Esperanto?”

“It is at least polyglot. But you are taking me too seriously. I wished merely to qualify my midsummer impressions of a prevailing Celtic Boston by my autumnal impressions of a persisting Puritanic Boston. But it is wonderful how that strongly persistent past still characterizes the present in every development. Even those Irish faces which I wouldn’t have ventured a joke with were no doubt sobered by it; and when the Italians shall come forward to replace them it will be with no laughing Pulcinello masks, but visages as severe as those that first challenged the wilderness of Massachusetts Bay, and made the Three Hills tremble to their foundations.”

“It seems to us that you are yielding to rhetoric a little, aren’t you?” we suggested.

“Perhaps I am. But you see what I mean. And I should like to explain further that I believe the Celtic present and the Pelasgic future will rule Boston in their turn as the Puritanic past learned so admirably to rule it: by the mild might of irony, by the beneficent power which, in the man who sees the joke of himself enables him to enter brotherly into the great human joke, and be friends with every good and kind thing.”

“Could you be a little more explicit?”

“I would rather not for the moment. But I should like to make you observe that the Boston to be has more to hope and less to fear from the newer Americans than this metropolis where these are so much more heterogeneous. Here salvation must be of the Jews among the swarming natives of the East Side; but in Boston there is no reason why the artistic instincts of the Celtic and Pelasgic successors of the Puritans should not unite in that effect of beauty which is an effect of truth, and keep Boston the first of our cities in good looks as well as good works. With us here in New York a civic job has the chance of turning out a city joy, but it is a fighting chance. In Boston there is little doubt of such a job turning out a joy. The municipality of Boston has had almost the felicity of Goldsmith — it has touched nothing which it has not adorned. Wherever its hand has been laid upon Nature, Nature has purred in responsive beauty. They used to talk about the made land in Boston, but half Boston is the work of man, and it shows what the universe might have been if the Bostonians had been taken into the confidence of the Creator at the beginning. The Back Bay was only the suggestion of what has since been done; and I never go to Boston without some new cause for wonder. There is no other such charming union of pleasaunce and residence as the Fenways; the system of parks is a garden of delight; and now the State has taken up the work, no doubt at the city’s suggestion, and, turning from the land to the water, has laid a restraining touch on the tides of the sea, which, ever since the moon entered on their management, have flowed and ebbed through the channel of the Charles. The State has dammed the river; the brine of the ocean no longer enters it, but it feeds itself full of sweet water from the springs in the deep bosom of the country. The Beacon Street houses back upon a steadfast expanse as fresh as the constant floods of the Great Lakes.”

CHARLES EMBANKMENT, BELOW HARVARD BRIDGE

“And we dare say that it looks as large as Lake Superior to Boston eyes. What do they call their dam? The Charlesea?”

“You may be sure they will call it something tasteful and fit,” our friend responded, in rejection of our feeble mockery. “Charlesea would not be bad. But what I wish to make you observe is that all which has yet been done for beauty in Boston has been done from the unexhausted instinct of it in the cold heart of Puritanism, where it ‘burns frore and does the effect of fire.’ As yet the Celtic and Pelasgic agencies have had no part in advancing the city. The first have been content with voting themselves into office, and the last with owning their masters out-of-doors; for the Irish are the lords, and the Italians are the landlords. But when these two gifted races, with their divinely implanted sense of art, shall join forces with the deeply conscienced taste of the Puritans, what mayn’t we expect Boston to be?”

“And what mayn’t we expect New York to be on the same terms, or, say, when the Celtic and Pelasgic and Hebraic and Slavic elements join with the old Batavians, in whom the love of the artistic is by right also native? Come! Why shouldn’t we have a larger Boston here?”

“Because we are too large,” our friend retorted, undauntedly. “When graft subtly crept among the nobler motives which created the park system of Boston the city could turn for help to the State and get it; but could our city get help from our State? Our city is too big to profit by that help; our State too small to render it. The commonwealth of Massachusetts is creating a new Garden of Eden on the banks of the Charlesea; but what is the State of New York doing to emparadise the shores of the Hudson?”

“All the better for us, perhaps,” we stubbornly, but not very sincerely, contended, “if we have to do our good works ourselves.”

“Yes, if we do them. But shall they remain undone if we don’t do them? The city of New York is so great that it swings the State of New York. The virtues that are in each do not complement one another, as the virtues of Boston and Massachusetts do. Where shall you find, in our house or in our grounds, the city and the State joining to an effect of beauty? When you come to New York, what you see of grandeur is the work of commercialism; what you see of grandeur in Boston is the work of civic patriotism. We hire the arts to build and decorate the homes of business; the Bostonians inspire them to devote beauty and dignity to the public pleasure and use. No,” our friend concluded with irritating triumph, “we are too vast, too many, for the finest work of the civic spirit. Athens could be beautiful — Florence, Venice, Genoa were — but Rome, which hired or enslaved genius to create beautiful palaces, temples, columns, statues, could only be immense. She could only huddle the lines of Greek loveliness into a hideous agglomeration, and lose their effect as utterly as if one should multiply Greek noses and Greek chins, Greek lips and Greek eyes, Greek brows and Greek heads of violet hair, in one monstrous visage. No,” he exulted, in this mortifying image of our future ugliness, “when a city passes a certain limit of space and population, she adorns herself in vain. London, the most lovable of the mighty mothers of men, has not the charm of Paris, which, if one cannot quite speak of her virgin allure, has yet a youth and grace which lend themselves to the fondness of the arts. Boston is fast becoming of the size of Paris, but if I have not misread her future she will be careful not to pass it, and become as New York is.”

We were so alarmed by this reasoning that we asked in considerable dismay: “But what shall we do? We could not help growing; perhaps we wished to overgrow; but is there no such thing as ungrowing? When the fair, when the sex which we instinctively attribute to cities, finds itself too large in its actuality for a Directoire ideal, there are means, there are methods, of reduction. Is there no remedy, then, for municipal excess of size? Is there no harmless potion or powder by which a city may lose a thousand inhabitants a day, as the superabounding fair loses a pound of beauty? Is there nothing for New York analogous to rolling on the floor, to the straight-front corset, to the sugarless, starchless diet? Come, you must not deny us all hope! How did Boston manage to remain so small? What elixirs, what exercises, did she take or use? Surely she did not do it all by reading and thinking!” Our friend continued somewhat inexorably silent, and we pursued: “Do you think that by laying waste our Long Island suburbs, by burning the whole affiliated Jersey shore, by strangling the Bronx, as it were, in its cradle, and by confining ourselves rigidly to our native isle of Manhattan, we could do something to regain our lost opportunity? We should then have the outline of a fish; true, a nondescript fish; but the fish was one of the Greek ideals of the female form.” He was silent still, and we gathered courage to press on. “As it is, we are not altogether hideous. We doubt whether there are not more beautiful buildings in New York now than there are in Boston; and as for statues, where are the like there of our Macmonnies Hale, of our Saint-Gaudens Farragut and Sherman, of our Ward Indian Hunter?”

“The Shaw monument blots them all out,” our friend relentlessly answered. “But these are merely details. Our civic good things are accidental. Boston’s are intentional. That is the great, the vital difference.”

It did not occur to us that he was wrong, he had so crushed us under foot. But, with the trodden worm’s endeavor to turn, we made a last appeal. “And with the sky-scraper itself we still expect to do something, something stupendously beautiful. Say that we have lost our sky-line! What shall we not have of grandeur, of titanic loveliness, when we have got a sky-scraper-line?”

It seemed to us that here was a point which he could not meet; and, in fact, he could only say, whether in irony or not, “I would rather not think.”

We were silent, and, upon the reflection to which our silence invited us, we found that we would rather not ourselves think of the image we had invoked. We preferred to take up the question at another point.

“Well,” we said, “in your impressions of Bostonian greatness we suppose that you received the effect of her continued supremacy in authors as well as authorship, in artists as well as art? You did not meet Emerson or Longfellow or Lowell or Prescott or Holmes or Hawthorne or Whittier about her streets, but surely you met their peers, alive and in the flesh?”

“No,” our friend admitted, “not at every corner. But what I did meet was the effect of those high souls having abode there while on the earth. The great Boston authors are dead, and the great Boston artists are worse — they have come to New York; they have not even waited to die. But whether they have died, or whether they have come to New York, they have left their inspiration in Boston. In one sense the place that has known them shall know them no more forever; but in another sense it has never ceased to know them. I can’t say how it is, exactly, but though you don’t see them in Boston, you feel them. But here in New York — our dear, immense, slattern mother — who feels anything of the character of her great children? Who remembers in these streets Bryant or Poe or Hallock or Curtis or Stoddard or Stedman, or the other poets who once dwelt in them? Who remembers even such great editors as Greeley or James Gordon Bennett or Godkin or Dana? What malignant magic, what black art, is it that reduces us all to one level of forgottenness when we are gone, and even before we are gone? Have those high souls left their inspiration here, for common men to breathe the breath of finer and nobler life from? I won’t abuse the millionaires who are now our only great figures; even the millionaires are gone when they go. They die, and they leave no sign, quite as if they were so many painters and poets. You can recall some of their names, but not easily. No, if New York has any hold upon the present from the past, it isn’t in the mystical persistence of such spirits among us.”

“Well,” we retorted, hardily, “we have no need of them. It is the high souls of the future which influence us.”

Our friend looked at us as if he thought there might be something in what we said. “Will you explain?” he asked.

“Some other time,” we consented.

XIII

THE WHIRL OF LIFE IN OUR FIRST CIRCLES

One of those recurrent selves who frequent the habitat of the Easy Chair, with every effect of exterior identities, looked in and said, before he sat down, and much before he was asked to sit down, “Are you one of those critics of smart or swell society (or whatever it’s called now) who despise it because they can’t get into it, or one of those censors who won’t go into it because they despise it?”

“Your question,” we replied, “seems to be rather offensive, but we don’t know that it’s voluntarily so, and it’s certainly interesting. On your part, will you say what has prompted you, just at the moment, to accost us with this inquiry?” Before he could answer, we hastened to add: “By-the-way, what a fine, old-fashioned, gentlemanly word accost is! People used to accost one another a great deal in polite literature. ‘Seeing her embarrassment from his abrupt and vigorous stare, he thus accosted her.’ Or, ‘Embarrassed by his fixed and penetrating regard, she timidly accosted him.’ It seems to us that we remember a great many passages like these. Why has the word gone out? It was admirably fitted for such junctures, and it was so polished by use that it slipped from the pen without any effort of the brain, and—”

“I have no time for idle discussions of a mere literary nature,” our other self returned. “I am very full of the subject which I have sprung upon you, and which I see you are trying to shirk.”

“Not at all,” we smilingly retorted. “We will answer you according to your folly without the least reluctance. We are not in smart or swell society because we cannot get in; but at the same time we would not get in if we could, because we despise it too much. We wonder,” we continued, speculatively, “why we always suspect the society satirist of suffering from a social snub? It doesn’t in the least follow. Was Pope, when he invited his S’in’ John to

‘leave all meaner things
To low ambition and the pride of kings’

goaded to magnanimity by a slight from royalty? Was Mr. Benson when he came over here from London excluded from the shining first circles of New York and Newport, which are apparently reflected with such brilliant fidelity in The Relentless City, and was he wreaking an unworthy resentment in portraying our richly moneyed, blue-blooded society to the life? How are manners ever to be corrected with a smile if the smile is always suspected of being an agonized grin, the contortion of the features by the throes of a mortified spirit? Was George William Curtis in his amusing but unsparing Potiphar Papers—”

“Ah, now you are shouting!” our other self exclaimed.

“Your slang is rather antiquated,” we returned, with grave severity. “But just what do you mean by it in this instance?”

“I mean that manners are never corrected with a smile, whether of compassion or of derision. The manners that are bad, that are silly, that are vulgar, that are vicious, go on unchastened from generation to generation. Even the good manners don’t seem to decay: simplicity, sincerity, kindness, don’t really go out, any more than the other things, and fortunately the other things are confined only to a small group in every civilization, to the black sheep of the great, whity-brown or golden-fleeced human family.”

“What has all this vague optimism to do with the Potiphar Papers and smart society and George William Curtis?” we brought the intruder sharply to book.

“A great deal, especially the part relating to the continuity of bad manners. I’ve just been reading an extremely clever little book by a new writer, called New York Society on Parade, which so far as its basal facts are concerned might have been written by the writer of ‘Our Best Society’ and the other Potiphar Papers. The temperament varies from book to book; Mr. Ralph Pulitzer has a neater and lighter touch than George William Curtis; his book is more compact, more directly and distinctly a study, and it is less alloyed with the hopes of society reform which could be more reasonably indulged fifty-six years ago. Do you remember when ‘Our Best Society’ came out in the eldest Putnam’s Magazine, that phoenix of monthlies which has since twice risen from its ashes? Don’t pretend that our common memory doesn’t run back to the year 1853! We have so many things in common that I can’t let you disgrace the firm by any such vain assumption of extreme youth!”

“Why should we assume it? The Easy Chair had then been three years firmly on its legs, or its rockers, and the succession of great spirits, now disembodied, whom its ease invited, were all more or less in mature flesh. We remember that paper on ‘Our Best Society’ vividly, and we recall the shock that its facts concerning the Upper Ten Thousand of New York imparted to the innocent, or at least the virtuous, Lower Twenty Millions inhabiting the rest of the United States. Do you mean to say that the Four Hundred of this day are no better than the Ten Thousand of that? Has nothing been gained for quality by that prodigious reduction in quantity?”

“On the contrary, the folly, the vanity, the meanness, the heartlessness, the vulgarity, have only been condensed and concentrated, if we are to believe Mr. Pulitzer; and I don’t see why we should doubt him. Did you say you hadn’t seen his very shapely little study? It takes, with all the unpitying sincerity of a kodak, the likeness of our best society in its three most characteristic aspects; full-face at dinner, three-quarters-face at the opera, and profile at a ball, where proud beauty hides its face on the shoulder of haughty commercial or financial youth, and moneyed age dips its nose in whatever symbolizes the Gascon wine in the paternal library. Mr. Pulitzer makes no attempt at dramatizing his persons. There is no ambitious Mrs. Potiphar with a longing for fashionable New York worlds to conquer, yet with a secret heartache for the love of her country girlhood; no good, kind, sordid Potiphar bewildered and bedevilled by the surroundings she creates for him; no soft Rev. Cream Cheese, tenderly respectful of Mammon while ritually serving God; no factitious Ottoman of a Kurz Pasha, laughingly yet sadly observant of us playing at the forms of European society. Those devices of the satirist belonged to the sentimentalist mood of the Thackerayan epoch. But it is astonishing how exactly history repeats itself in the facts of the ball in 1910 from the ball of 1852. The motives, the personnel, almost the matériel, the incidents, are the same. I should think it would amuse Mr. Pulitzer, imitating nature from his actual observation, to find how essentially his study is the same with that of Curtis imitating nature fifty-seven years ago. There is more of nature in bulk, not in variety, to be imitated now, but as Mr. Pulitzer studies it in the glass of fashion, her mean, foolish, selfish face is the same. He would find in the sketches of the Mid-Victorian satirist all sorts of tender relentings and generous hopes concerning the ‘gay’ New York of that time which the Early Edwardian satirist cannot indulge concerning the gay New York of this time. It seems as if we had really gone from bad to worse, not qualitatively — we couldn’t — but quantitatively. There is more money, there are more men, more women, but otherwise our proud world is the proud world of 1853.”

“You keep saying the same thing with ‘damnable iterance,’” we remarked. “Don’t you suppose that outside of New York there is now a vast society, as there was then, which enjoys itself sweetly, kindly, harmlessly? Is there no gentle Chicago or kind St. Louis, no pastoral Pittsburg, no sequestered Cincinnati, no bucolic Boston, no friendly Philadelphia, where ‘the heart that is humble may look for’ disinterested pleasure in the high-society functions of the day or night? Does New York set the pace for all these places, and are dinners given there as here, not for the delight of the guests, but as the dire duty of the hostesses? Do the inhabitants of those simple sojourns go to the opera to be seen and not to hear? Do they follow on to balls before the piece is done only to bear the fardels of ignominy heaped upon them by the german’s leaders, or to see their elders and fatters getting all the beautiful and costly favors while their own young and gracile loveliness is passed slighted by because they give no balls where those cruel captains can hope to shine in the van? It seems to us that in our own far prime — now well-nigh lost in the mists of antiquity — life was ordered kindlier; that dinners and opera-parties and dances were given

‘To bless and never to ban.’”

“Very likely, on the low society level on which our joint life moved,” our other self replied, with his unsparing candor. “You know we were a country village, city-of-the-second-class personality. Even in the distant epoch painted in the Potiphar Papers the motives of New York society were the same as now. It was not the place where birth and rank and fame relaxed or sported, as in Europe, or where ardent innocence played and feasted as in the incorrupt towns of our interior. If Curtis once represented it rightly, it was the same ridiculous, hard-worked, greedy, costly, stupid thing which Mr. Pulitzer again represents it.”

“And yet,” we mused aloud, “this is the sort of thing which the ‘unthinking multitude’ who criticise, or at least review, books are always lamenting that our fiction doesn’t deal with. Why, in its emptiness and heaviness, its smartness and dulness, it would be the death of our poor fiction!”

“Well, I don’t know,” our counterpart responded. “If our fiction took it on the human ground, and ascertained its inner pathos, its real lamentableness, it might do a very good thing with those clubmen and society girls and grandes dames. But that remains to be seen. In the mean time it is very much to have such a study of society as Mr. Pulitzer has given us. For the most part it is ‘satire with no pity in it,’ but there’s here and there a touch of compassion, which moves the more because of its rarity. When the author notes that here and there a pretty dear finds herself left with no one to take her out to supper at the ball, his few words wring the heart. ‘These poor victims of their sex cannot, like the men, form tables of their own. All that each can do is to disappear as swiftly and as secretly as possible, hurrying home in humiliation for the present and despair for the future.’”

“Do such cruel things really happen in our best society?” we palpitated, in an anguish of sympathy.

“Such things and worse,” our other self responded, “as when in the german the fair débutante sees the leader advancing toward her with a splendid and costly favor, only to have him veer abruptly off to bestow it on some fat elderling who is going to give the next ball. But Mr. Pulitzer, though he has these spare intimations of pity, has none of the sentiment which there is rather a swash of in the Potiphar Papers. It’s the difference between the Mid-Victorian and the Early Edwardian point of view. Both satirists are disillusioned, but in the page of Curtis there is

‘The tender grace of a day that is dead’

and the soft suffusion of hope for better things, while in the page of Mr. Pulitzer there is no such qualification of the disillusion. Both are enamoured of the beauty of those daughters of Mammon, and of the distinction of our iron-clad youth, the athletic, well-groomed, well-tailored worldlings who hurry up-town from their banks and brokers’ offices and lawyers’ offices to the dinners and opera-boxes and dances of fashion. ‘The girls and women are of a higher average of beauty than any European ball-room could produce. The men, too, are generally well built, tall, and handsome, easily distinguishable from the waiters,’ Mr. Pulitzer assures us.”

“Well, oughtn’t that to console?” we defied our other self. “Come! It’s a great thing to be easily distinguishable from the waiters, when the waiters are so often disappointed ‘remittance men’ of good English family, or the scions of Continental nobility. We mustn’t ask everything.”

“No, and apparently the feeding is less gross than it was in Curtis’s less sophisticated time. Many of the men seem still to smoke and booze throughout the night with the host in his ‘library,’ but the dancing youth don’t get drunk as some of them did at Mrs. Potiphar’s supper, and people don’t throw things from their plates under the table.”

“Well, why do you say, then, that there is no change for the better in our best society, that there is no hope for it?”

“Did I say that? If I did, I will stick to it. We must let our best society be as it now imagines itself. I don’t suppose that in all that gang of beautiful, splendid, wasteful, expensively surfeited people there are more than two or three young men of intellectual prowess or spiritual distinction, though there must be some clever and brilliant toadies of the artist variety. In fact, Mr. Pulitzer says as much outright; and it is the hard lot of some of the arts to have to tout for custom among the vulgar ranks of our best society.”

“Very well, then,” we said, with considerable resolution, “we must change the popular ideal of the best society. We must have a four hundred made up of the most brilliant artists, authors, doctors, professors, scientists, musicians, actors, and ministers, with their wives, daughters, and sisters, who will walk to one another’s dinners, or at worst go by trolley, and occupy the cheaper seats at the opera, and dance in small and early assemblages, and live in seven-room-with-bath flats. Money must not count at all in the choice of these elect and beautiful natures. The question is, how shall we get the dense, unenlightened masses to regard them as the best society; howteach the reporters to run after them, and the press to chronicle their entertainments, engagements, marriages, divorces, voyages to and from Europe, and the other facts which now so dazzle the common fancy when it finds them recorded in the society intelligence of the newspapers?”

“Yes, as General Sherman said when he had once advocated the restriction of the suffrage and had been asked how he was going to get the consent of the majority whose votes he meant to take away— ‘yes, that is the devil of it.’”

We were silent for a time, and then we suggested, “Don’t you think that a beginning could be made by those real élite we have decided on refusing to let associate with what now calls itself our best society?”

“But hasn’t our soi-disant best society already made that beginning for its betters by excluding them?” our other self responded.

“There is something in what you say,” we reluctantly assented, “but by no means everything. The beginning you speak of has been made at the wrong end. The true beginning of society reform must be made by the moral, æsthetic, and intellectual superiors of fashionable society as we now have it. The grandes dames must be somehow persuaded that to be really swell, really smart, or whatever the last word for the thing is, they must search Who’s Who in New York for men and women of the most brilliant promise and performance and invite them. They must not search the banks and brokers’ offices and lawyers’ offices for their dancing-men, but the studios, the editorial-rooms, the dramatic agencies, the pulpits, for the most gifted young artists, assignment men, interviewers, actors, and preachers, and apply to the labor-unions for the cleverest and handsomest artisans; they must look up the most beautiful and intelligent girl-students of all the arts and sciences, and department stores for cultivated and attractive salesladies. Then, when all such people have received cards to dinners or dances, it will only remain for them to have previous engagements, and the true beginning is made. Come! You can’t say the thing is impossible.”

“Not impossible, no,” our complementary self replied. “But difficult.”

XIV

THE MAGAZINE MUSE

Two aging if not aged poets, one much better if not much older than the other, were talking of the Muse as she was in their day and of the Muse as she is in this. At the end, their common mind was that she was a far more facile Muse formerly than she is now. In other words, as the elder and better poet put it, they both decided that many, many pieces of verse are written in these times, and hidden away in the multitude of the magazines, which in those times would have won general recognition if not reputation for the authors; they would have been remembered from month to month, and their verses copied into the newspapers from the two or three periodicals then published, and, if they were not enabled to retire upon their incomes, they would have been in the enjoyment of a general attention beyond anything money can buy at the present day. This conclusion was the handsomer in the two poets, because they had nothing to gain and something to lose by it if their opinion should ever become known. It was in a sort the confession of equality, and perhaps even inferiority, which people do not make, unless they are obliged to it, in any case. But these poets were generous even beyond their unenvious tribe, and the younger, with a rashness which his years measurably excused, set about verifying his conviction in a practical way, perhaps the only practical way.

He asked his publishers to get him all the American magazines published; and has the home-keeping reader any notion of the vastness of the sea on which this poet had embarked in his daring exploration? His publishers sent him a list of some eighty-two monthly periodicals in all kinds, which, when he had begged them to confine it to the literary kind, the æsthetic kind only, amounted to some fifty. By far the greater number of these, he found, were published in New York, but two were from Philadelphia, one from Boston, one from Indianapolis, and one even from Chicago; two were from the Pacific Slope generally. That is to say, in this city there are issued every month about forty-five magazines devoted to belles-lettres, of varying degrees of excellence, not always connoted by their varying prices. Most of them are of the ten-cent variety, and are worth in most cases ten cents, and in a few cases twenty-five or thirty-five cents, quite like those which ask such sums for themselves. The cheapest are not offensive to the eye altogether, as they lie closed on the dealer’s counter, though when you open them you find them sometimes printed on paper of the wood-pulp, wood-pulpy sort, and very loathly to the touch. Others of the cheapest present their literature on paper apparently as good as that of the dearest; and as it is not always money which buys literary value, especially from the beginners in literature, there seemed every reason for the poet to hope that there would be as good poetry in the one sort as in the other. In his generous animation, he hoped to find some good poetry on the wood-pulp paper just as in the Golden Age he might have found it carved by amorous shepherds on the bark of trees.

He promised himself a great and noble pleasure from his verification of the opinion he shared with that elder and better poet, and if his delight must be mixed with a certain feeling of reserved superiority, it could hardly be less a delight for that reason. In turning critic, the friendliest critic, he could not meet these dear and fair young poets on their own level, but he could at least keep from them, and from himself as much as possible, the fact that he was looking down on them. All the magazines before him were for the month of January, and though it was possible that they might have shown a certain exhaustion from their extraordinary efforts in their Christmas numbers, still there was a chance of the overflow of riches from those numbers which would trim the balance and give them at least the average poetic value. At this point, however, it ought to be confessed that the poet, or critic, was never so willing a reader as writer of occasional verse, and it cannot be denied that there was some girding up of the loins for him before the grapple with that half-hundred of magazines. Though he took them at their weakest point, might they not be too much for him?

He fetched a long breath, and opened first that magazine, clarum et venerabile nomen, from which he might reasonably expect the greatest surprises of merit in the verse. There were only two pieces, and neither seemed to him of the old-time quality, but neither was such as he would himself have perhaps rejected if he had been editor. Then he plunged at the heap, and in a fifteen-cent magazine of recent renown he found among five poems a good straight piece of realistic characterization which did much to cheer him. In this, a little piece of two stanzas, the author had got at the heart of a good deal of America. In another cheap magazine, professing to be devoted wholly to stories, he hoped for a breathing-space, and was tasked by nothing less familiar than Swift’s versification of a well-known maxim of La Rouchefoucauld. In a ten-cent magazine which is too easily the best of that sort, he found two pieces of uncommon worth, which opened the way so promisingly, indeed, for happier fortunes that he was not as much surprised as he might later have been in finding five poems, all good, in one of the four greater, or at least dearer, magazines. One of these pieces was excellent landscape, and another a capital nature piece; if a third was somewhat strained, it was also rather strong, and a fourth had the quiet which it is hard to know from repose. Two poems in another of the high-priced magazines were noticeable, one for sound poetic thinking, and the other as very truthfully pathetic. The two in a cheap magazine, by two Kentucky poets, a song and a landscape, were one genuinely a song, and the other a charming communion with nature. In a pair of periodicals devoted to outdoor life, on the tamer or wilder scale, there were three poems, one celebrating the delights of a winter camp, which he found simple, true in feeling, and informal in phrasing; another full of the joy of a country ride, very songy, very blithe, and original; and a third a study of scenery which it realized to the mind’s eye, with some straining in the wording, but much felicity in the imagining. A Mid-Western magazine had an excellent piece by a poet of noted name, who failed to observe that his poem ended a stanza sooner than he did. In a periodical devoted to short stories, or abandoned to them, there were two good pieces, one of them delicately yet distinctly reproducing certain poetic aspects of New York, and giving the sense of a fresh talent. Where the critic would hardly have looked for them, in a magazine of professed fashion and avowed smartness, he came upon three pieces, one sweet and fine, one wise and good, one fresh and well turned. A newer periodical, rather going in for literary quality, had one fine piece, with a pretty surprise in it, and another touched with imaginative observation.

The researches of the critic carried him far into the night, or at least hours beyond his bedtime, and in the dreamy mood in which he finally pursued them he was more interested in certain psychological conditions of his own than in many of the verses. Together with a mounting aversion to the work, he noted a growing strength for it. He could dispatch a dozen poems in almost as many minutes, and not slight them, either; but he no longer jumped to his work. He was aware of trying to cheat himself in it, of pretending that the brief space between titles in the table of contents, which naturally implied a poem, sometimes really indicated a short bit of prose. He would run his eye hastily over an index, and seek to miss rather than find the word “poem” repeated after a title, and when this ruse succeeded he would go back to the poem he had skipped with the utmost unwillingness. If his behavior was sinful, he was duly punished for it, in the case of a magazine which he took up well toward midnight, rejoicing to come upon no visible sign of poetry in it. But his glance fell to a grouping of titles in a small-print paragraph at the bottom of the page, and he perceived, on close inspection, that these were all poems, and that there were eighteen of them.

He calculated, roughly, that he had read from eighty-five to a hundred poems before he finished; after a while he ceased to take accurate count as he went on, but a subsequent review of the magazines showed that his guess was reasonably correct. From this review it appeared that the greater number of the magazines published two poems in each month, while several published but one, and several five or seven or four. Another remarkable fact was that the one or two in the more self-denying were as bad as the whole five or seven or nine or eighteen of those which had more freely indulged themselves in verse. Yet another singular feature of the inquiry was that one woman had a poem in five or six of the magazines, and, stranger yet, always a good poem, so that no editor would have been justified in refusing it. There was a pretty frequent recurrence of names in the title-pages, and mostly these names were a warrant of quality, but not always of the author’s best quality. The authorship was rather equally divided between the sexes, and the poets were both young and old, or as old as poets ever can be.

When the explorer had returned from the search, which covered apparently a great stretch of time, but really of space, he took his notes and went with them to that elder friend of his whose generous enthusiasm had prompted his inquiry. Together they looked them over and discussed the points evolved. “Then what is your conclusion?” the elder of the two demanded. “Do you still think I was right, or have you come to a different opinion?”

“Oh, how should I safely confess that I am of a different opinion? You would easily forgive me, but what would all those hundred poets whom I thought not so promising as you believed do to my next book? Especially what would the poetesses?”

“There is something in that. But you need not be explicit. If you differ with me, you can generalize. What, on the whole, was the impression you got? Had none of the pieces what we call distinction, for want of a better word or a clearer idea?”

“I understand. No, I should say, not one; though here and there one nearly had it — so nearly that I held my breath from not being quite sure. But, on the other hand, I should say that there was a good deal of excellence, if you know what that means.”

“I can imagine,” the elder poet said. “It is another subterfuge. What do you really intend?”

“Why, that the level was pretty high. Never so high as the sky, but sometimes as high as the sky-scraper. There was an occasional tallness, the effect, I think, of straining to be higher than the thought or the feeling warranted. And some of the things had a great deal of naturalness.”

“Come! That isn’t so bad.”

“But naturalness can be carried to a point where it becomes affectation. This happened in some cases where I thought I was going to have some pleasure of the simplicity, but found at last that the simplicity was a pose. Sometimes there was a great air of being untrammelled. But there is such a thing as being informal, and there is such a thing as being unmannerly.”

“Yes?”

“I think that in the endeavor to escape from convention our poets have lost the wish for elegance, which was a prime charm of the Golden Age. Technically, as well as emotionally, they let themselves loose too much, and the people of the Golden Age never let themselves loose. There is too much Nature in them, which is to say, not enough; for, after all, in her little æsthetic attempts, Nature is very modest.”

The elder poet brought the younger sharply to book. “Now you are wandering. Explain again.”

“Why, when you and I were young — you were always and always will be young—”

“None of that!”

“It seemed to me that we wished to be as careful of the form as the most formal of our poetic forebears, and that we would not let the smallest irregularity escape us in our study to make the form perfect. We cut out the tall word; we restrained the straining; we tried to keep the wording within the bounds of the dictionary; we wished for beauty in our work so much that our very roughness was the effect of hammering; the grain we left was where we had used the file to produce it.”

“Was it? And you say that with these new fellows it isn’t so?”

“Well, what do you say to such a word as ‘dankening,’ which occurred in a very good landscape?”

“One such word in a hundred poems?”

“One such word in a million would have been too many. It made me feel that they would all have liked to say ‘dankening,’ or something of the sort. And in the new poets, on other occasions, I have found faulty syntax, bad rhymes, limping feet. The editors are to blame for that, when it happens. The editor who printed ‘dankening’ was more to blame than the poet who wrote it, and loved the other ugly word above all his other vocables.” The elder poet was silent, and the other took fresh courage. “Yes, I say it! You were wrong in your praise of the present magazine verse at the cost of that in our day. When we were commencing poets, the young or younger reputations were those of Stedman, of Bayard Taylor, of the Stoddards, of Aldrich, of Celia Thaxter, of Rose Terry, of Harriet Prescott, of Bret Harte, of Charles Warren Stoddard, of the Piatts, of Fitz James O’Brien, of Fitzhugh Ludlow, of a dozen more, whom the best of the newest moderns cannot rival. These were all delicate and devoted and indefatigable artists and lovers of form. It cannot do the later generation any good to equal them with ours.”

“There is something in what you say.” The elder poet was silent for a time. Then he asked, “Out of the hundred poems you read in your fifty magazines, how many did you say were what you would call good?”

His junior counted up, and reported, “About twenty-four.”

“Well, don’t you call that pretty fair, in a hundred? I do. Reflect that these were all the magazines of one month, and it is probable that there will be as many good poems in the magazines of every month in the year. That will give us two hundred and eighty-eight good poems during 1907. Before the first decade of the new century is ended, we shall have had eleven hundred and fifty-two good magazine poems. Do you suppose that as many good magazine poems were written during the last four years of the first decade of the eighteenth century? Can you name as many yourself?”

“Certainly not. Nobody remembers the magazine poems of that time, and nobody will remember the poems of the four years ending the present decade.”

“Do you mean to say that not one of them is worth remembering?”

The younger poet paused a moment. Then he said, with the air of a cross-examined witness, “Under advice of counsel, I decline to answer.”

XV

COMPARATIVE LUXURIES OF TRAVEL

On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the Easy Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was walking wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wondering if the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if the time did come, whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train, and of course he had engaged a lower berth in the sleeping-car; there are certain things that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have thought of travelling in one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would have thought of going by stage, as he could remember doing in his boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential passengers with amaze and compassion; he laughed at the notion of his being himself one of them; and, when he turned his back on them, he was arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for reasons of its own, was waiting in luminous detachment apart from the day coaches. There was something engaging in the gentle humility of the elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon with an effect not so much of ignorance as of inexperience. They were apparently not so rustic as they were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls villaginous; and they seemed not of the commonest uninformed villaginosity, but of general intelligence such as comes of reading and thinking of many modern things which one has never seen. As the eavesdropper presently made out from a colloquy unrestrained by consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car before, except perhaps as it flashed by their meek little home depot with the rest of some express train that never stopped there.

“It is splendid, John,” the woman said, holding by the man’s arm while she leaned forward to the window which she tiptoed to reach with her eager eyes.

“I guess it’s all of that,” the man consented, sadly.

“I presume we sha’n’t ever go in one,” she suggested.

“Not likely,” he owned, in the same discouraged tone.

They were both silent for a time. Then the woman said, with a deep, hopeless aspiration, “Dear! I wish I could see inside one, once!”

The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold ambition he made no sign.

The eavesdropper faltered near their kind backs, wishing for something more from them which should give their souls away, but they remained silently standing there, and he did not somehow feel authorized to make them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, it must be open, and that the friendly porter somewhere within would not mind letting them look through it under his eye. Perhaps they did reflect, and the woman was trying to embolden the man to the hardy venture. In the end they did not attempt it, but they turned away with another sigh from the woman which found its echo in the eavesdropper’s heart. Doubtless if they had penetrated that splendid interior without having paid for seats, it would, in some fine, mystical sort, have pauperized them; it would have corrupted them; they would have wished after that always to travel in such cars, when clearly they could not afford it; very possibly it might have led to their moral if not financial ruin. So he tried to still his bosom’s ache, but he could never quite forget that gentle pair with their unrequited longing, and the other day they came almost the first thing into his mind when he read that a great German steamship company had some thoughts of putting on a train of Pullman cars from the port of arrival to the mercantile metropolis which was the real end of their ships’ voyages. He thought, whimsically, perversely, how little difference it would make to that pair, how little to those measureless most whose journeys shall end in heaven, where Pullman passengers, or even passengers by the ordinary European first-class cars, may be only too glad to meet them. He gave a looser rein to his thoughts and considered how very little the ordinary necessities of life, such as Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric radiators and non-storage chickens and unsalted butter concern the great mass of the saints, who would find them the rarest luxuries, and could hardly be imagined coveting them; and then from this wild revery he fell to asking himself whether a Pullman train would be such a great advance or advantage over the old-fashioned European first-class carriages in which he had been so long content to travel with the native nobility. Self-brought to book on this point, he had to own that he had once had moments of thinking in a German second-class car that he would not change to an American Pullman if he could for even less than a third more money. He recalled a pleasant run from Crewe to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when he never once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was no better. To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his third-class fellow-passengers had got out, and he was left to the sole enjoyment of two-thirds of the seats. It is the luxury of space which your more money buys you in England, where no one much lower than a duke or a prime minister now goes first class for a long haul. For short hauls it is different, and on the Continent it is altogether different. There you are often uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so that if you are wise, or only well informed, you will give the guard a shilling to telegraph before leaving London and get you a number on the Rapide from Calais to Paris.

It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such advisable precaution spreads among even such arrogantly stupid people as first-class passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had started for Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair’s already mentioned, every soul in his first-class compartment had telegraphed ahead, and when they arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his hand-baggage, so that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up and down and scream, and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he could find room for his valise, and then calm down and show himself the sweetest and civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble servant of the Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for his bag.

At this point the fable teaches that money will not buy everything in European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not, for instance, buy comfort or decency, though it will secure privacy in a French sleeper between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a first-class ticket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by the first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars; or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman passengers?

No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried sleepers behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy; but so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in Germany, and in Italy — poor, dear Italy! — they are worse still. That is because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth, which must bear the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad as heart could wish — the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one still went by diligence or vettura. The only absolutely good railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the Pullman has realized the most exacting ideal of the traveller of any class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained perfection at a bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in simplicity and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit gratitude from the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to Liverpool leaves the swollen, mistimed dinner on the Boston express —

“But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?” our friend exults to ask; and we condescend to answer with forced candor:

Yes, that was rather droll. No Englishman would dream of ordering afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is truly famine. Besides, the amiable agent who came to our compartment for our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was the tea. What he had failed to specify was that the dining-car had been left, by divers defections at the junctions passed, the last car in our train, and that it was now straining at its leash in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced into one’s seat by such athletics as one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton kind) crossing the Gulf Stream. When once comparatively secure in one’s chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and all one’s cunning of fence was needed to hold one’s own with the chops. But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating, and how the spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship’s steward, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations in their service. He did not deprecate the capers of the car, but only casually owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it did pitch about a bit, sir.

No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the English corridor train; nor will our palatial, porterless depots vie with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft endearments of the railway servants penetrate to the very interior of the arriving stranger’s compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn, where his baggage remains in the porter’s charge till it is put back into the train, who will contend that our parcels’ windows, with their high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths standing like receiving and paying tellers within, compare with the English cloak-room? Its very name descends from the balls and assemblies of the past, and graces the public enjoyment of its convenience with something of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the upper classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white shoulders bent over trim maids slippering slim feet, and to another the faint, proud odors of flowers that withered a hundred years ago.

But what vain concession is this to the outworn ideals of a state and a condition justly superseded! How far we have got from that gentle pair with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! To such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are not put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the vast horde of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of trolleys and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when we turn from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter and keep our hunger for the table d’hôte of the dining-car; when we buy a room in the steamboat in disdain of the berth that comes with our ticket; when we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of the simpler steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel of less than twenty or thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos in the saloon; when we forsake the clothing-store with its democratic misfit for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of public land in northwestern Canada.

There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely own, has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts of life for the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman trains between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we go to the Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the second-class German cars quite good enough for them, and better than our day coaches at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn the dust of our summer ways in their automobiles, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is the use? It will soon not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, at the ports of European arrival, and a Pullman train will look sadly strange and old to the debarking passengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would now want to take a bicycle, or even a “bicycle built for two.” These things are all comparative; there is nothing positive, nothing ultimate in the luxuries, the splendors of life. Soon the last word in them takes on a vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them “with sick and scornful looks averse,” and listens for the

“airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.”

Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be the next word — the word that follows the last, the woman’s word.

XVI

QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS

They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of the man’s trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was holding very still, flattered by the squirrel’s confidence, and anxious not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their native independence to something like the condition of those pauper wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the Government’s dole of beef-cattle.

The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the squirrel: “I suppose that’s an expression of the sort of thing we’ve been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn’t it, of the ‘natural piety’ embracing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man?”

THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK

“I don’t think it’s quite so modern as that formulation,” the other friend questioned. “I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and remembered those in bonds as bound with them.”

“Yes, you may say that,” the first allowed. “But benevolence toward dumb creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century. There was St. Francis of Assisi, you know, who preached to the birds, didn’t he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And several animals — cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like — enjoyed a good deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They were rather kind to animals, weren’t they? Why should Pliny’s Doves have come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of broiled squabs? It’s true that the modern Roman, before the extension of the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a Christian.”

“I don’t remember about the Stoics exactly,” the second friend mused aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. “They had so many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not to

‘enter on my list of friends the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,’

and

‘Never to mix my pleasure or my pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.’”

“Yes, but I don’t like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come back to their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for the last generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it’s hard to see that the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves to be proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say Christians) are always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good.”

“What do you mean,” the second of the friends demanded, “by coming back to their ground?”

“Why,” the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, “I suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don’t so much deny the Deity as ignore Him — —”

“I see,” the second answered, sadly. “But aren’t you throwing up the sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend, ‘You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.’ And inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age of belief is rather certain to follow.”

“Well, well, I’m willing. I’m no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed. But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still care to do my duty? And I certainly always do.”

“What, always?”

“Well, nearly always.”

The friends laughed together, and the first said, “What a pity the Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can’t adapt it to a daily need any longer without the risk of not being followed.”

The other sighed. “Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went out, I don’t think I should have much pleasure in life.”

“No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from

‘La somma sapienza e il primo amore,’

it is the sense of duty, ‘the moral law within us,’ which Kant divined as unmistakably delivered from God to man. I use the old terminology.”

“Don’t apologize. It still serves our turn; I don’t know that anything else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D. C —— told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she stopped him. She said, ‘There is nothing but duty, the duty we have wished to do and tried to do.’”

The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first said, “I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don’t try or don’t try hard enough.”

The other conjectured, “Perhaps, after all, it’s a question of strength; wickedness is weakness.”

“That formula won’t always serve; still, it will serve in a good many cases; possibly most. It won’t do to preach it, though.”

“No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?”

“Well, your Stoics—”

“My Stoics?”

“Anybody’s Stoics — did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a duty coming they stepped out and did it.”

“It seems very simple. But aren’t you rather cynical?”

“That’s what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But perhaps I’ve rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn’t have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented the Christian ideal of duty.”

“And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in the beginning.”

The second of the friends said at this, “I don’t know that I should go so far as that.”

The first returned, “Well, I don’t know that I should ask you. I don’t know that I go that far myself,” he said, and then they laughed together again.

The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady, greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with his paws.

“No, no,” the first of the friends said to the squirrel; “we are on the way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues. You won’t get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven’t got any.”

“There’s a boy,” the second friend dreamily suggested, “down by the boat-house with a basketful.”

“But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a nobler squirrel all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn’t get. That’s like what I always try to feel in my own case. It’s what I call character-building. Get along!”

The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.

“I thought,” the second of the friends said, “that your humanity included kindness to animals.”

“I am acting for this animal’s best good. I don’t say but that, if the peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn’t have yielded to my natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He seems to have been rather a saving squirrel — when he was gorged.”

The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had to ask, “Where were we?”

“Cultivating force of character in squirrels.”

“I thought we had got by that.”

“Then we had come round to ourselves again.”

“Something like that,” the first friend reluctantly allowed.

“What a vicious circle! It seems to me that our first duty, if that’s what you mean, is to get rid of ourselves.”

“Whom should we have left? Other people? We mustn’t pamper their egotism in chastising our own. We must use a great deal of caution in doing our duty. If I really loved that squirrel, if I were truly kind to animals, if I studied their best good, as disagreeable friends say they study ours, I should go after him and give him a hickory-nut that would wear down his teeth as nature intended; civilization is undermining the health of squirrels by feeding them peanuts, which allow their teeth to overgrow.”

“That is true. Isn’t it doing something of the same sort in other ways for all of us? If I hadn’t lost my teeth so long ago, I’m sure I should feel them piercing from one jaw to another in their inordinate development. It’s duty that keeps down the overgrowths that luxury incites. By-the-way, what set you thinking so severely about duty this beautiful Sunday morning? The neglected duty of going to church?”

“Ah, I call going to church a pleasure. No, I suppose it was an effect, a reverberation, of the tumult of my struggle to vote for the right man on Tuesday, when I knew that I was throwing my vote away if I did vote for him.”

“But you voted for him?”

The first friend nodded.

“Which man was it?”

“What’s the use? He was beaten —

‘That is all you know or need to know.’”

“Of course he was beaten if it was your duty to vote for him,” the second friend mused. “How patient the Creator must be with the result of His counsel to His creatures! He keeps on communing, commanding, if we are to believe Kant. It is His one certain way to affirm and corroborate Himself. Without His perpetual message to the human conscience, He does not recognizably exist; and yet more than half the time His mandate sends us to certain defeat, to certain death. It’s enough to make one go in for the other side. Of course, we have to suppose that the same voice which intimates duty to us intimates duty to them?”

“And that they would like to obey it, if they could consistently with other interests and obligations?”

“Yes, they juggle with their sense of it; they pretend that the Voice does not mean exactly what it says. They get out of it that way.”

“And the great, vital difference between ourselves and them is that we promptly and explicitly obey it; we don’t palter with it in the slightest; ‘we don’t bandy words with our sovereign,’ as Doctor Johnson said. I wonder,” the speaker added, with the briskness of one to whom a vivid thought suddenly occurs, “how it would work if one went and did exactly the contrary of what was intimated to the human conscience?”

“That’s not a new idea. There are people who habitually do so, or, rather, to whom an inverted moral law is delivered.”

“You mean the people who beat you at the polls last Tuesday?”

“No, I mean the people in the asylums, some of them. They are said to hear the voice that bids us do right commanding them to do wrong. ‘Thou shalt kill,’ they hear it say, ‘thou shalt steal, thou shalt bear false witness, thou shalt commit adultery, thou shalt not honor thy father and thy mother,’ and so on through the Decalogue, with the inhibition thrown off or put on, as the case may be.”

“How very hideous!” the second friend exclaimed. “It’s like an emanation from the Pit. I mean the Pit that used to be. It’s been abolished.”

“And a very good thing. The noises from it went far to drown the voice of God, and bewildered some men so that they did not rightly know what the voice was saying. Now when people hear a voice bidding them do evil, we know what to do with them.”

“And you think that the fellows who outvoted you on Tuesday heard the same voice that you heard; and they disobeyed it?”

“Ah, it’s hard to say. We haven’t got to the bottom of such things yet. Perhaps they disobeyed the voice provisionally, expecting to make a satisfactory explanation later on. Or perhaps they had put their civic consciences in the keeping of others, who gave them an official interpretation of the command, with instructions not to take it literally.”

“That’s very interesting,” the second friend said. “Then it’s your idea that no one really prefers to do wrong?”

“Not outside of the asylums. And even there they can plead authority. No, no, no! In a world pretty full of evil there isn’t any purely voluntary evil among the sane. When the ‘wicked,’ as we call them, do wrong, it is provisionally only; they mean to do right presently and make it up with the heavenly powers. As long as an evil-doer lives he means to cease some time to do evil. He may put it off too long, or until he becomes ethically unsound. You know Swedenborg found that the last state of sinners was insanity.”

“Dreadful!”

“But I’ve always thought very few reached that state. There’s this curious thing about it all: we are not only ethically prompted by that inner voice, we are æsthetically prompted; it’s a matter of taste as well as of conduct, too. The virtues are so clean, the vices so repulsively dirty. Justice is beautifully symmetrical; injustice is so shapeless, so unbalanced. Truth is such a pure line; falsehood is so out of drawing. The iniquities make you uncomfortable. The arts deny them.”

The second friend drew a long breath. “Then I don’t see why there are so many.”

“Well,” the first friend suggested, “there seems to be a difficulty. Some say that they have to be employed as antitheses; we can’t get on without them, at least at this stage of the proceedings. Perhaps we shall advance so far that we shall be able to use historical or accomplished evil for the contrasts by which we shall know actual good.”

“I don’t see how you make that out.”

“Why, there are already some regions of the globe where the summer does not require the antithesis of winter for its consciousness. Perhaps in the moral world there will yet be a condition in which right shall not need to contrast itself with wrong. We are still meteorologically very imperfect.”

“And how do you expect to bring the condition about? By our always doing our duty?”

“Well, we sha’n’t by not doing it.”

XVII

A WASTED OPPORTUNITY

The Easy Chair saw at once that its friend was full of improving conversation, and it let him begin without the least attempt to stay him; anything of the kind, in fact, would have been a provocation to greater circumstance in him. He said:

“It was Christmas Eve, and I don’t know whether he arrived by chance or design at a time when the heart is supposed to be softest and the mind openest. It’s a time when, unless you look out, you will believe anything people tell you and do anything they ask you. I must say I was prepossessed by his appearance; he was fair and slender, and he looked about thirty-five years old; and when he said at once that he would not deceive me, but would confess that he was just out of the penitentiary of a neighboring State where he had been serving a two years’ sentence, I could have taken him in my arms. Even if he had not pretended that he had the same surname as myself, I should have known him for a brother, and though I suspected that he was wrong in supposing that his surname was at all like mine, I was glad that he had sent it in, and so piqued my curiosity that I had him shown up, instead of having my pampered menial spurn him from my door, as I might if he had said his name was Brown, Jones, or Robinson.”

“We dare say you have your self-justification,” we put in at this point, “but you must own that it doesn’t appear in what you are saying. As a good citizen, with the true interests of the poor at heart, you would certainly have had your pampered menial spurn him from your door. His being of your name, or claiming to be so, had nothing to do with his merit or want of it.”

“Oh, I acknowledge that, and I’ll own that there was something in his case, as he stated it, that appealed to my fancy even more than his community of surname appealed to my family affection. He said he was a Scotchman, which I am not, and that he had got a job on a cattle-steamer, to work his way back to his native port. The steamer would sail on Monday, and it was now Friday night, and the question which he hesitated, which he intimated, in terms so tacit that I should not call them an expression of it, was how he was to live till Monday.”

“He left the calculation entirely to me, which he might not have done if he had known what a poor head I had for figures, and I entered into it with a reluctance which he politely ignored. I had some quite new two-dollar notes in my pocket-book, the crisp sort, which rustle in fiction when people take them out to succor the unfortunate or bribe the dishonest, and I thought I would give him one if I could make it go round for him till his steamer sailed. I was rather sorry for its being fresh, but I had no old, shabby, or dirty notes such as one gives to cases of dire need, you know.”

“No, we don’t know. We so seldom give paper at all; we prefer to give copper.”

“Well, that is right; one ought to give copper if the need is very pressing; if not so pressing, one gives small silver, and so on up. But here was an instance which involved a more extended application of alms. ‘You know,’ I told him, while I was doing my sum in mental arithmetic, ‘there are the Mills hotels, where you can get a bed for twenty-five cents; I don’t remember whether they throw in breakfast or not.’ I felt a certain squalor in my attitude, which was not relieved by the air of gentle patience with which he listened, my poor namesake, if not kinsman; we were both at least sons of Adam. He looked not only gentle, but refined; I made my reflection that this was probably the effect of being shut up for two years where the winds were not allowed to visit him roughly, and the reflection strengthened me to say, ‘I think two dollars will tide you over till Monday.’ I can’t say whether he thought so, too, but he did not say he did not think so. He left it quite to me, and I found another mathematical difficulty. There were three nights’ lodging to be paid for, and then he would have a dollar and a quarter for food. I often spend as much as that on a single lunch, including a quarter to the waiter, and I wouldn’t have liked making it pay for three days’ board. But I didn’t say so; I left the question entirely to him, and he said nothing.

“In fact, he was engaged in searching himself for credentials, first in one pocket, and then in another; but he found nothing better than a pawn-ticket, which he offered me. ‘What’s this?’ I asked. ‘My overcoat,’ he said, and I noted that he had borrowed a dollar and a half on it. I did not like that; it seemed to me that he was taking unfair advantage of me, and I said, ‘Oh, I think you can get along without your overcoat.’ I’m glad to think now that it hadn’t begun to snow yet, and that I had no prescience of the blizzard — what the papers fondly called the Baby Blizzard (such a pretty fancy of theirs!) — which was to begin the next afternoon, wasn’t making the faintest threat from the moonlit sky then. He said, ‘It’s rather cold,’ but I ignored his position. At the same time, I gave him a quarter.”

“That was magnificent, but it was not political economy,” we commented. “You should have held to your irrefutable argument that he could get along without his overcoat. You should have told him that he would not need it on shipboard.”

“Well, do you know,” our friend said, “I really did tell him something like that, and it didn’t seem to convince him, though it made me ashamed. I suppose I was thinking how he could keep close to the reading-room fire, and I did not trouble to realize that he would not be asked to draw up his chair when he came in from looking after the cattle.”

“It would have been an idle compliment, anyway,” we said. “You can’t draw up the reading-room chairs on shipboard; they’re riveted down.”

“I remembered afterward. But still I was determined not to take his overcoat out of pawn, and he must have seen it in my eye. He put back his pawn-ticket, and did not try to produce any other credentials. I had noticed that the ticket did not bear the surname we enjoyed in common; I said to myself that the name of Smith, which it did bear, must be the euphemism of many who didn’t wish to identify themselves with their poverty even to a pawnbroker. But I said to him, ‘Here!’ and I pulled open my table drawer, and took from it a small envelope full of English coins, which I had been left stranded with on several returns from Europe; the inhuman stewards had failed to relieve me of them; and as I always vow, when I have got through our customs, that I will never go to Europe again, I had often wondered what I should do with those coins. I now took out the largest and handsomest of them: ‘Do you know what that is?’ ‘Yes,’ he said; ‘it’s two shillings and sixpence — what we call a half-crown.’ His promptness restored my faith in him; I saw that he must be what he said; undoubtedly he had been in the penitentiary; very likely our name was the same; an emotion of kinship stirred in my heart. ‘Here!’ I said, and I handed him the coin; it did not seem so bad as giving him more American money. ‘They can change that on the ship for you. I guess you can manage now till Monday,’ and my confidence in Providence diffused such a genial warmth through my steam-heated apartment that I forgot all about his overcoat. I wish I could forget about it now.”

We felt that we ought to say something to comfort a man who owned his excess of beneficence. “Oh, you mustn’t mind giving him so much money. We can’t always remember our duty to cut the unfortunate as close as we ought. Another time you will do better. Come! Cheer up!”

Our friend did not seem entirely consoled by our amiability. In fact, he seemed not to notice it. He heaved a great sigh in resuming: “He appeared to think I was hinting that it was time for him to go, for he got up from the lounge where I had thoughtlessly had the decency to make him sit down, and went out into the hall, thanking me as I followed him to the door. I was sorry to let him go; he had interested me somehow beyond anything particularly appealing in his personality; in fact, his personality was rather null than otherwise, as far as that asserted any claim; such a mere man and brother! Before he put his hand on my door-knob a belated curiosity stirred in me, which I tried, as delicately as I could, to appease. ‘Was your trouble something about the’ — I was going to say the ladies, but that seemed too mawkish, and I boldly outed with— ‘women?’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, meekly; ‘it was just cloth, a piece of cloth,’ ‘Breaking and entering?’ I led on. ‘Well, not exactly, but — it came to grand larceny,’ and I might have fancied a touch of mounting self-respect in his confession of a considerable offence.

“I didn’t know exactly what to say, so I let myself off with a little philosophy: ‘Well, you see, it didn’t pay, exactly,’ ‘Oh no,’ he said, sadly enough, and he went out.”

Our friend was silent at this point, and we felt that we ought to improve the occasion in his behalf. “Well, there you lost a great opportunity. You ought to have rubbed it in. You ought to have made him reflect upon the utter folly of his crime. You ought to have made him realize that for a ridiculous value of forty, or fifty, or seventy-five dollars, he had risked the loss of his liberty for two years, and not only his liberty, but his labor, for he had come out of the penitentiary after two years of hard work as destitute as he went in; he had not even the piece of cloth to show for it all. Yes, you lost a great opportunity.”

Our friend rose from the dejected posture in which he had been sitting, and blazed out — we have no milder word for it — blazed out in a sort of fiery torrent which made us recoil: “Yes, I lost that great opportunity, and I lost a greater still. I lost the opportunity of telling that miserable man that, thief for thief, and robber for robber, the State which had imprisoned him for two years, and then cast him out again without a cent of pay for the wages he had been earning all that dreadful time, was a worse thief and a worse robber than he! I ought to have told him that in so far as he had been cheated of his wages by the law he was the victim, the martyr of an atrocious survival of barbarism. Oh, I have thought of it since with shame and sorrow! I was sending him out into the cold that was gathering for the Baby Blizzard without the hope of his overcoat, but since then I have comforted myself by considering how small my crime was compared with that of the State which had thrown him destitute upon the world after the two years’ labor it had stolen from him. At the lowest rate of wages for unskilled labor, it owed him at least a thousand dollars, or, with half subtracted for board and lodging, five hundred. It was his delinquent debtor in that sum, and it had let him loose to prey upon society in my person because it had defrauded him of the money he had earned.”

“But, our dear friend!” we entreated, “don’t you realize that this theft, this robbery, this fraud, as you call it, was part of the sanative punishment which the State had inflicted upon him?”

“And you don’t think two years’ prison, two years’ slavery, was sanative enough without the denial of his just compensation?”

We perceived that it would be useless to argue with a man in this truculent mood, and we silently forbore to urge that the vision of destitution which the criminal must have before his eyes, advancing hand in hand with liberty to meet him at the end of his term when his prison gates opened into the world which would not feed, or shelter, or clothe, or in any wise employ him, would be a powerful deterrent from future crime, and act as one of the most efficient agencies of virtue which the ingenuity of the law has ever invented. But our silence did not wholly avail us, for our poor misguided friend went on to say:

“Suppose he had a wife and children — he may have had several of both, for all I know — dependent on him, would it have been particularly sanative for them to be deprived of his earnings, too?”

“We cannot answer these sophistries,” we were exasperated into replying. “All that we can say is that anything else — anything like what you call justice to the criminal, the prisoner — would disrupt society,” and we felt that disrupt was a word which must carry conviction to the densest understanding. It really appeared to do so in this case, for our friend went away without more words, leaving behind him a manuscript, which we mentally rejected, while seeing our way to use the material in it for the present essay; it is the well-known custom of editors to employ in this way the ideas of rejected contributors.

A few days later we met our friend, and as we strolled beside him in the maniacal hubbub of the New York streets, so favorable to philosophic communion, we said, “Well, have you met your namesake since you came to his rescue against the robber State, or did he really sail on the cattle-steamer, as he said he was going to do?”

Our friend gave a vague, embarrassed laugh. “He didn’t sail, exactly, at least not on that particular steamer. The fact is, I have just parted from him at my own door — the outside of it. It appears that the authorities of that particular line wished to take advantage of him by requiring him to pay down a sum of money as a guarantee of good faith, and that he refused to do so — not having the money, for one reason. I did not understand the situation exactly, but this was not essential to his purpose, which made itself evident through a good deal of irrelevant discourse. Since I had seen him, society had emulated the State in the practice of a truly sanative attitude toward him. At the place where he went to have his half-crown changed into American money they would only give him forty cents for it, but he was afterward assured by an acquaintance that the current rate was sixty cents. In fact, a half-crown is worth a little more.”

“Well, what can you expect of money-changers?” we returned, consolingly. “And what is going to become of your unhappy beneficiary now?”

“Why, according to his report, fortune has smiled, or half-smiled, as the novelists say, upon him. He has found a berth on another line of cattle-steamers, where they don’t require a deposit as a guarantee of good faith. In fact, the head steward has taken a liking to him, and he is going out as one of the table-stewards instead of one of the herdsmen; I’m not sure that herdsmen is what they call them.”

We laughed sardonically. “And do you believe he is really going?”

Our friend sighed heavily. “Well, I don’t believe he’s coming back. I only gave him the loose change I had in my pocket, and I don’t think it will support him so handsomely to the end of the week that he will wish to call upon me for more.”

We were both silent, just as the characters are in a novel till the author can think what to make them say next. Then we asked, “And you still think he had been in the penitentiary?”

“I don’t see why he should have said so if he wasn’t.”

“Well, then,” we retorted bitterly, again like a character in fiction, “you have lost another great opportunity: not a moral opportunity this time, but an æsthetic opportunity. You could have got him to tell you all about his life in prison, and perhaps his whole career leading up to it, and you could have made something interesting of it. You might have written a picaresque novel or a picaresque short story, anyway.”

Our friend allowed, with a mortified air, “It was rather a break.”

“You threw away the chance of a lifetime. Namesakes who have been in jail don’t turn up every day. In his intimate relation to you, he would have opened up, he would have poured out his whole heart to you. Think of the material you have lost.”

We thought of it ourselves, and with mounting exasperation. When we reflected that he would probably have put it into his paper, and when we reflected that we could have given so much more color to our essay, we could not endure it. “Well, good-day,” we said, coldly; “we are going down this way.”

Our friend shook hands, lingeringly, absently. Then he came to himself with a mocking laugh. “Well, perhaps he wasn’t, after all, what he said.”

XVIII

A NIECE’S LITERARY ADVICE TO HER UNCLE

A Veteran Novelist, who was also an intimate friend of the Easy Chair’s, sat before his desk pensively supporting his cheek in his left hand while his right toyed with the pen from which, for the moment at least, fiction refused to flow. His great-niece, who seemed such a contradiction in terms, being as little and vivid personally as she was nominally large and stately, opened the door and advanced upon him.

“Do I disturb you, uncle?” she asked; she did not call him great-uncle, because that, she rightly said, was ridiculous; and now, as part of the informality, she went on without waiting for him to answer, “Because, you know, you wanted me to tell you what I thought of your last story; and I’ve just read it.”

“Oh yes!” the Veteran Novelist assented brightly, hiding his struggle to recall which story it was. “Well?”

“Well,” she said, firmly but kindly, “you want me to be frank with you, don’t you?”

“By all means, my dear. It’s very good of you to read my story.” By this time, he had, with the help of the rather lean volume into which his publishers had expanded a long-short story, and which she now held intensely clasped to her breast, really remembered.

“Not at all!” she said. She sat down very elastically in the chair on the other side of his desk, and as she talked she accented each of her emotions by a spring from the cushioned seat. “In the first place,” she said, with the effect of coming directly to business, “I suppose you know yourself that it couldn’t be called virile.”

“No?” he returned. “What is virile?”

“Well, I can’t explain, precisely; but it’s something that all the critics say of a book that is very strong, don’t you know; and masterful; and relentless; and makes you feel as if somebody had taken you by the throat; and shakes you up awfully; and seems to throw you into the air, and trample you under foot.”

“Good heavens, my dear!” the Veteran Novelist exclaimed. “I hope I’m a gentleman, even when I’m writing a novel.”

“Your being a gentleman has nothing to do with it, uncle!” she said, severely, for she thought she perceived a disposition in the Veteran Novelist to shuffle. “You can’t be virile and at the same time remember that you are a gentleman. Lots of women write virile books.”

“Ladies?” the novelist asked.

“Don’t I say that has nothing to do with it? If you wish to grip the reader’s attention you must let yourself go, whether you’re a gentleman or a lady. Of course,” she relented, “your book’s very idyllic, and delightful, and all that; but,” she resumed, severely, “do you think an honest critic could say there was not a dull page in it from cover to cover?”

The novelist sighed. “I’m sure I don’t know. They seem to say it — in the passages quoted in the advertisements — of all the books published. Except mine,” he added, sadly.

“Well, we will pass that point,” his great-niece relented again. “I didn’t intend to wound your feelings, uncle.”

“Oh, you haven’t. I suppose I am a little too easy-going at times.”

“Yes, that is it. One can’t say dull; but too easy-going. No faithful critic could begin a notice of your book with such a passage as: ‘Have you read it? No? Then hop, skip, and jump, and get it. Don’t wait to find your hat or drink your coffee. March! It’s going like the wind, and you must kite if you want one of the first edition of fifty thousand!’ Now that,” his great-niece ended, fondly, “is what I should like every critic to say of your book, uncle.”

The Veteran Novelist reflected for a moment. Then he said, more spiritedly, “I don’t believe I should, my dear.”

“Then you must; that’s all. But that’s a small thing. What I really wonder at is that, with all your experience, you are not more of a stylist.”

“Stylist?”

“Yes. I don’t believe there’s an epigram in your book from beginning to end. That’s the reason the critics don’t quote any brilliant sentences from it, and the publishers can’t advertise it properly. It makes me mad to find the girls repeating other authors’ sayings, and I never catch a word from a book of yours, though you’ve been writing more than a century.”

“Not quite so long, my dear, I think; though very, very long. But just what do you mean by style?”

“Well, you ought to say even the simplest things in a distinguished way; and here, all through, I find you saying the most distinguished things in the simplest way. But I won’t worry you about things that are not vital. I’ll allow, for the sake of argument, that you can’t have virility if you remember that you are a gentleman even when you are writing fiction. But you can have passion. Why don’t you?”

“Don’t I? I thought—”

“Not a speck of it — not a single speck! It’s rather a delicate point, and I don’t exactly know how to put it, but, if you want me to be frank, I must.” She looked at her great-uncle, and he nodded encouragement. “I don’t believe there’s a single place where he crushes her to his heart, or presses his lips to hers in a long kiss. He kisses her cheek once, but I don’t call that anything. Why, in lots of the books, nowadays, the girls themselves cling to the men in a close embrace, or put their mouths tenderly to theirs — Well, of course, it sounds rather disgusting, but in your own earlier books, I’m sure there’s more of it — of passion. Isn’t there? Think!”

The Veteran Novelist tried to think. “To tell you the truth, my dear, I can’t remember. I hope there was, and there always will be, love, and true love, in my novels — the kind that sometimes ends in happy marriage, but is always rather shy of showing itself off to the reader in caresses of any kind. I think passion can be intimated, and is better so than brutally stated. If you have a lot of hugging and kissing—”

“Uncle!”

“ — How are your lovers different from those poor things in the Park that make you ashamed as you pass them?”

“The police ought to put a stop to it. They are perfectly disgraceful!”

“And they ought to put a stop to it in the novels. It’s not only indecent, but it’s highly insanitary. Nice people don’t want you to kiss their children, nowadays, and yet they expect us novelists to supply them with passion of the most demonstrative sort in our fiction. Among the Japanese, who are now one of the great world-powers, kissing is quite unknown in real life. I don’t know the Japanese fiction very well, but I doubt whether there’s a single kiss, or double, in it. I believe that a novel full of intense passion could be written without the help of one embrace from beginning to end.”

“Uncle!” the girl vividly exclaimed, “why don’t you do it? It would be the greatest success! Just give them the wink, somehow, at the start — just hint that there was the greatest kind of passion going on all the time and never once showing itself, and the girls would be raving about it. Why don’t you do it, uncle? You know I do so want you, for once, to write the most popular book of the month!”

“I want to do it myself, my dear. But as to my writing a book full of suppressed passion, that’s a story in itself.”

“Tell it!” she entreated.

“The Easy Chair wouldn’t give me room for it. But I’ll tell you something else. When I was a boy I had a knack at versing, which came rather in anticipation of the subjects to use it on. I exhausted Spring and Morning and Snow and Memory, and the whole range of mythological topics, and then I had my knack lying idle. I observed that there was one subject that the other poets found inexhaustible, but somehow I felt myself disqualified for treating it. How could I sing of Love when I had never been in love? For I didn’t count those youthful affairs when I was only in the Third Reader and the first part of the Arithmetic. I went about trying to be in love, as a matter of business; but I couldn’t manage it. Suddenly it managed itself; and then I found myself worse disqualified than ever. I didn’t want to mention it; either to myself or to her, much less to the world at large. It seemed a little too personal.”

“Oh, uncle! How funny you are!”

“Do you think so? I didn’t think it much fun then, and I don’t now. Once I didn’t know what love was, and now I’ve forgotten!”

“No such thing, uncle! You write about it beautifully, even if you’re not very virile or epigrammatic or passionate. I won’t let you say so.”

“Well, then, my dear, if I haven’t forgotten, I’m not interested. You see, I know so much more about it than my lovers do. I can’t take their point of view any longer. To tell you the truth, I don’t care a rap whether they get married or not. In that story there, that you’ve been reading, I got awfully tired of the girl. She was such a fool, and the fellow was a perfect donkey.”

“But he was the dearest donkey in the world! I wanted to h — shake hands with him, and I wanted to kiss — yes, kiss! — her, she was such a lovable fool.”

“You’re very kind to say so, my dear, but you can’t keep on making delightful idiots go down with the public. That was what I was thinking when you came in and found me looking so dismal. I had stopped in the middle of a most exciting scene because I had discovered that I was poking fun at my lovers.”

“And here I,” the girl lamented, “didn’t take the slightest notice, but began on you with the harshest criticisms!”

“I didn’t mind. I dare say it was for my good.”

“I’m sure I meant it so, uncle. And what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, I must get a new point of view.”

“Yes?”

“I must change my ground altogether. I can’t pretend any longer to be the contemporary of my lovers, or to have the least sympathy with their hopes and fears. If I were to be perfectly honest with them, I should tell them, perhaps, that disappointed love was the best thing that could happen to either of them, but, if they insisted on happiness, that a good broken engagement promised more of it than anything else I could think of.”

“That is true,” the girl sighed. “There are a great many unhappy marriages. Of course, people would say it was rather pessimistic, wouldn’t they?”

“People will say anything. One mustn’t mind them. But now I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking all the time we’ve been talking.”

“Well? I knew you were not thinking of my nonsense!”

“It was very good nonsense, as nonsense goes, my dear. What I’ve been thinking is that I must still have the love interest in my books, and have it the main interest, but I must treat it from the vantage-ground of age; it must be something I look back upon, and a little down upon.”

“I see what you mean,” the girl dissentingly assented.

“I must be in the whole secret — the secret, not merely of my lovers’ love, but the secret of love itself. I must know, and I must subtly intimate, that it doesn’t really matter to anybody how their affair turns out; for in a few years, twenty or thirty years, it’s a thousand to one that they won’t care anything about it themselves. I must maintain the attitude of the sage, dealing not unkindly but truthfully with the situation.”

“It would be rather sad,” the girl murmured. “But one likes sad things.”

“When one is young, one does; when one is old, one likes true things. But, of course, my love-stories would be only for those who have outlived love. I ought to be fair with my readers, and forewarn them that my story was not for the young, the hopeful, the happy.”

The girl jumped to her feet and stood magnificent. “Uncle! It’s grand!”

He rose, too. “What is?” he faltered.

“The idea! Don’t you see? You can have the publisher announce it as a story for the disillusioned, the wretched, and the despairing, and that would make every girl want it, for that’s what every girl thinks she is, and they would talk to the men about it, and then they would want it, and it would be the book of the month! Don’t say another word. Oh, you dear!” In spite of the insanitary nature of the action, she caught her uncle round the neck, and kissed him on his bald spot, and ran out of the room. She opened the door to call back: “Don’t lose a single minute. Begin it now!”

But the Veteran Novelist sank again into his chair in the posture in which she had surprised him.

XIX

A SEARCH FOR CELEBRITY

We lately received a publication which has interested us somewhat out of proportion to its size. It is called The Way into Print, but it does not treat, as the reader might rashly suppose, of the best method of getting your name into the newspapers, either as a lady who is giving a dinner to thirteen otherwise unknown persons, or is making a coming-out tea for her débutante daughter, or had a box full of expensively confectioned friends at the opera or the vaudeville, or is going to read a paper at a woman’s club, or is in any sort figuring in the thousand and one modern phases of publicity; it does not even advise her guests or hearers how to appear among those present, or those who were invited and did not come, or those who would not have come if they had been invited. Its scope is far more restricted, yet its plane is infinitely higher, its reach incomparably further. The Print which it proposes to lead the Way into is that print where the elect, who were once few and are now many, are making the corridors of time resound to their footsteps, as poets, essayists, humorists, or other literary forms of immortality. Their procession, which from the point of the impartial spectator has been looking more and more like a cake-walk in these later years, is so increasingly the attraction of young-eyed ambition that nothing interests a very large class of people more than advice for the means of joining it, and it is this advice which the publication in point supplies: supplies, we must say, with as much good sense and good feeling as is consistent with an office which does not seem so dignified as we could wish.

Inevitably the adviser must now and then stoop to the folly of the aspirant, inevitably he must use that folly from time to time with wholesome severity, but he does not feel himself equal to the work unaided. Our sudden national expansion, through the irresistible force of our imaginative work, into an intellectual world-power has thrust a responsibility upon the veterans of a simpler time which they may not shirk, and the author of The Way into Print calls upon them to share his task. He is not satisfied with the interesting chapters contributed by younger authors who are in the act of winning their spurs, but he appeals to those established in the public recognition to do their part in aiding us to hold our conquest through the instruction and discipline of those who must take their places when they put their armor off. He does this by means of a letter, almost an open letter, addressed personally to each veteran by means of the substitution of his typewritten name for that of some other veteran, but not differenced in the terms of the ensuing appeal to his kindness or his conscience. He puts himself upon a broad humanitarian ground, and asks that the typewritten author, who, he assumes, is “prominently before the public,” shall answer certain questions to which the appellant owns that he has already received hundreds of replies.

By an odd mischance one of his half-open letters found its way to the Easy Chair, and, although that judgment-seat felt relieved from the sense of anything like a lonely prominence before the public by the very multitude of those similarly consulted, it did not remain as Easy as it would have liked under the erring attribution of prominence. Yet to have refused to help in so good a work would not have been in its nature, and it lost as little time as possible in summoning a real author of prominence to consider the problems so baffling to a mere editorial effigy; for, as we ought to explain, the de facto editor is to be found in the Study next door, and never in the Easy Chair. The author prominently before the public came at once, for that kind of author has very little to do, and is only too happy to respond to calls like that of the friend of rising authorship. Most of his time is spent at symposiums, imagined by the Sunday editions of the newspapers, to consider, decide the question whether fig-paste is truly a health-food; or whether, in view of a recent colossal gift for educational purposes, the product of the Standard Oil Company was the midnight oil which Shakespeare had in mind when he spoke of the scholar wasting it; or something of that kind. His mind is whetted to the sharpest edge by its employment with these problems, and is in prime condition for such simple practical inquiries as those proposed by the letter we had received. But, of course, he put on an air of great hurry, and spoke of the different poems, novels, essays, and sketches which he had laid aside to oblige us, and begged us to get down to business at once.

“We wish nothing better than to do so,” we said, to humor him, “for we know you are a very busy man, and we will not keep you a moment longer than is absolutely necessary. Would you like to have all the questions at once, or would you rather study them one after another?”

He said he thought he could better give an undivided mind to each if he had them one at a time, and so we began with the first:

“‘1. Would you advise the young story-writer to study the old masters in literature or the stories in the current magazines, in order to meet the demands of the current editors?’”

“Will you read that again?” the author prominently before the public demanded, but when we had read it a second time it seemed only to plunge him deeper into despair. He clutched his revered head with both hands, and but for an opportune baldness would probably have torn his hair. He murmured, huskily, “Do you think you have got it right?”

We avoided the response “Sure thing” by an appropriate circumlocution, and then he thundered back: “How in — nature — is a young writer to forecast the demands of current editors? If an editor is worth his salt — his Attic salt — he does not know himself what he wants, except by the eternal yearning of the editorial soul for something new and good. If he has any other demands, he is not a current editor, he is a stagnant editor. Is it possible that there is a superstition to the contrary?”

“Apparently.”

“Then that would account for many things. But go on.”

“Go on yourself. You have not answered the question.”

“Oh, by all means,” the author sardonically answered; “if the current editor has demands beyond freshness and goodness, let the young writer avoid the masters in literature and study the stories in the current magazines.”

“You are not treating the matter seriously,” we expostulated.

“Yes, I am — seriously, sadly, even tragically. I could not have imagined a condition of things so bad, even with the results all round us. Let us have the second question of your correspondent.”

“Here it is: ‘2. Has the unknown writer an equal chance with the well-known author, provided his work is up to the standard of the latter’s?’”

“Of the latter’s? — of the latter’s? — of the latter’s?” Our friend whispered the phrase to himself before he groaned out: “What a frightful locution! Really, really, it is more than I can bear!”

“For the cause you ought to bear anything. What do you really think?”

“Why, if the former’s work is as good as the latter’s, why isn’t the former’s chance as good if the current editor’s demands are for the same kind in the former’s case as in the latter’s? If the latter’s aim is to meet the imaginary demands of the stagnant editor, then the former’s work ought to be as attractive as the latter’s. Ha, ha, ha!”

He laughed wildly, and in order to recall him to himself we read the third question: “‘3. Which is the more acceptable — a well-told story with a weak plot, or a poorly told story with a strong plot?’”

“Oh, but that is a conundrum, pure and simple!” the author protested. “It is a poor parody on the old End-man pleasantry, ‘Would you rather be as foolish as you look, or look as foolish as you are?’ You are making it up!”

“We assure you we are not. It is no more a conundrum than the others. Come: question!”

“Well, in the first place, I should like to know what a plot is. Something that has occurred to you primarily as an effect from your experience or observation? Or something you have carpentered out of the old stuff of your reading, with a wooden hero and heroine reciprocally dying for each other, and a wooden villain trying to foil them?”

“You had better ask a current editor or a stagnant. Do you confess yourself posed by this plain problem? Do you give it up?”

“For the present. Perhaps I may gather light from the next question.”

“Then here it is: ‘4. What do you consider the primary weakness in the average stories or verses of the old writers?”

“Oh, that is easy. The same as in the average stories and verses of the younger writers — absence of mind.”

“Are you sure you are not shirking? Cannot you give a categorical answer — something that will really help some younger writer to take the place which you are now more or less fraudulently holding? The younger writers will cheerfully allow that the trouble is absence of mind, but what line of reading would you suggest which would turn this into presence of mind?”

“There is none, except to have themselves newly ancestored. Presence of mind as well as absence of mind is something derived; you cannot acquire it.”

“We think you might be a little less sardonic. Now here is the next problem: ‘5. What are the successful author’s necessary qualifications in the matters of natural ability, education, life as he sees it and lives it, technical training, etc?’”

“This will be the death of me!” the prominent author lamented. “Couldn’t I skip that one?”

“It seems to cover some of the most important points. We do not think your self-respect will allow you to skip it. At any rate, make an effort to answer it.”

Thus challenged, the prominent author pulled himself together. “Oh,” he said, sadly, “which of us knows whether he has natural ability or not, and what is education, and what is life as one sees it, and what is technical training? Do these poor young fellows think that one is tall or short by taking thought? It is the same as that, it seems to me; or if you prefer a mystical solution, I should say, if you have a longing, from your earliest consciousness, to write poetry or fiction, and cannot keep from doing it for any long time together, you are possibly born with a gift for it. But this may be altogether a mistake; it may be the effect of your early and incessant scribblings on the minds of spectators wholly incompetent to judge of your abilities, such as your fond parents. This must rather often happen if we can judge from what nine-tenths of what is called literature is composed of. If your longing to write is the real thing, or is not, still education will not help or hinder you in doing it. No man was ever yet taught any art. He may be taught a trade, and that is what most of the versing and prosing is, I suppose. If you have the gift, you will technically train yourself: that is, you will learn how to be simple and clear and honest. Charm you will have got from your great-grandfather or great-grandmother; and life, which is only another sort of school, will not qualify you to depict life; but if you do not want to depict life, you will perhaps be able to meet the demands of what our friend calls the current editors.”

Here the prominent author rose, but we stayed him with a gesture. “There is another question, the last: ‘6. Do you care to convey any hints or suggestions gleaned from your personal experiences in the climb to success that may make easier the gaining of the heights for the beginner?”

The prominent author roared with laughter. “Read that again!” But when we had done so, he became grave, even sorrowful. “Is it really true, then, as we seem to see, that there is a large body of young people taking up literature as a business? The thing that all my life I have fondly dreamed was an art, dear and almost holy! Are they going into it for the money there is in it? And am I, in my prominence — more or less fraudulent, as you say — an incentive to them to persevere in their enterprises? Is that what one has to come to after a life of conscientious devotion to — an ideal? Come, old friend, say it isn’t so bad as that! It is? Then” — the prominent author paused and sank weakly into the chair from which he had risen— “perhaps I have been dreaming all these years; but in my dream it seems to me that everything outside of myself which seemed to hinder me has really helped me. There has been no obstacle in my way which if I were at the bottom of the hill, where I might very rightfully be, I would have removed. I am glad that the climb to success, as your friend calls it, has been hard and long, and I bless God for my difficulties and backsets, all of them. Sometimes they seemed cruel; they filled me with despair and shame; but there was not one that did not make me stronger and fitter for my work, if I was fit for it. You know very well that in this art of ours we need all the strength we can get from our overthrows. There is no training that can ever make the true artist’s work easy to him, and if he is a true artist he will suspect everything easily done as ill done. What comes hard and slow and hopelessly, that is the thing which when we look at it we find is the thing that was worth doing. I had my downs with my ups, and when I was beginning the downs outnumbered the ups ten to one. For one manuscript accepted, and after the days of many years printed, I had a dozen rejected and rejected without delay. But every such rejection helped me. In some cases I had to swallow the bitter dose and own that the editor was right; but the bitter was wholesome. In other cases I knew that he was wrong, and then I set my teeth, and took my courage in both hands, and tried and tried with that rejected manuscript till the divinely appointed editor owned that I was right. But these are the commonplaces of literary biography. I don’t brag of them; and I have always tried to keep my head in such shape that even defeat has not swelled it beyond the No. 7 I began with. Why should I be so wicked as to help another and a younger man over the bad places? If I could only gain his confidence I should like to tell him that these are the places that will strengthen his heart for the climb. But if he has a weak heart, he had better try some other road. There! I have given you all the ‘hints and suggestions from my experience’ that I can think of, and now let me go.”

Once more he rose, and once more we stayed him. “Yes,” we said, “no doubt you think you have spoken honestly and faithfully, but you have addressed yourself to the wrong audience. You have spoken to artists, born and self-made, but artists can always manage without help. Your help was invoked in behalf of artisans, of adventurers, of speculators. What was wanted of you was a formula for the fabrication of gold bricks which would meet the demands of current dealers in that sort of wares.”

“But if I have never made gold bricks myself, or not knowingly?”

“Ah, that is what you say! But do you suppose anybody will believe you?”

The prominent author put on the hat which he flattered himself was a No. 7, but which we could plainly see was a No. 12, and said, with an air of patronizing compassion, “You have sat here so long in your cushioned comfort, looking out on the publishing world, that you have become corrupt, cynical, pessimistic.”

XX

PRACTICAL IMMORTALITY ON EARTH

The talk at a dinner given by the Easy Chair to some of its most valued friends was of the life after death, and it will not surprise any experienced observer to learn that the talk went on amid much unserious chatter, with laughing irrelevancies more appropriate to the pouring of champagne, and the changing of plates, than to the very solemn affair in hand. It may not really have been so very solemn. Nobody at table took the topic much to heart apparently. The women, some of them, affected an earnest attention, but were not uncheerful; others frankly talked of other things; some, at the farther end of the table, asked what a given speaker was saying; the men did not, in some cases, conceal that they were bored.

“No,” the first speaker said, after weighing the pros and cons, “for my part, I don’t desire it. When I am through, here, I don’t ask to begin again elsewhere.”

“And you don’t expect to?” his closest listener inquired.

“And I don’t expect to.”

“It is curious,” the closest listener went on, “how much our beliefs are governed by our wishes in this matter. When we are young and are still hungering for things to happen, we have a strong faith in immortality. When we are older, and the whole round of things, except death, has happened, we think it very likely we shall not live again. It seems to be the same with peoples; the new peoples believe, the old peoples doubt. It occurs to very, very few men to be convinced, as a friend of mine has been convinced against the grain, of the reality of the life after death. I will not say by what means he was convinced, for that is not pertinent; but he was fully convinced, and he said to me: ‘Personally, I would rather not live again, but it seems that people do. The facts are too many; the proofs I have had are irresistible; and I have had to give way to them in spite of my wish to reject them.’”

“Yes,” the first speaker said, “that is certainly an uncommon experience. You think that if I were perfectly honest, I should envy him his experience? Well, then, honestly, I don’t.”

“No,” the other rejoined, “I don’t know that I accuse your sincerity. But, may I ask, what are your personal objections to immortality?”

“It wouldn’t be easy to say. If I could have had my way, I would not have been at all. Speaking selfishly, as we always do when we speak truly, I have not had a great deal of happiness, though I have had a good deal of fun. But things seem to wear out. I like to laugh, and I have laughed, in my time, consumedly. But I find that the laugh goes out of the specific instances of laughability, just as grieving goes out of grief. The thing that at the first and third time amused me enormously leaves me sad at the fourth, or at least unmoved. You see, I can’t trust immortality to be permanently interesting. The reasonable chances are that in the lapse of a few æons I should find eternity hanging heavy on my hands. But it isn’t that, exactly, and it would be hard to say what my objection to immortality exactly is. It would be simpler to say what it really is. It is personal, temperamental, congenital. I was born, I suspect, an indifferentist, as far as this life is concerned, and as to another life, I have an acquired antipathy.”

“That is curious, but not incredible, and of course not inconceivable,” the closest listener assented.

“I’m not so sure of that,” a light skirmisher broke his silence for the first time. “Do you mean to say,” he asked of the first speaker, “that you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and that you would rather like it if that were actually the end of you?”

The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just emptied, and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied, “Precisely.”

“Then you have already, at your age, evolved that ‘instinct of death,’ which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will come to when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty years or more, as they once did.”

“Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his strange book?” the light skirmisher cut in.

“He’s the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris, and his book is called The Nature of Man.”

“That blighting book!” One of the women who had caught on to the drift of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration.

“Blighting? Is it blighting?” the first speaker parleyed.

“Don’t you call it blighting,” she returned, “to be told not only that you are the descendant of an anthropoid ape — we had got used to that — but of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?”

“Sort of simian degenerate,” the light skirmisher formulated the case. “We are merely apes in error.”

The closest listener put this playfulness by. “What seems to me a fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a constant fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we are badly made, and that there are all sorts of ‘disharmonies,’ as Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are not all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in earlier or later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if anything, than younger people. His contention for an average life four or five times longer than the present average life seems to be based upon an obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall satisfy hereafter.”

“Well, I suppose,” the first speaker said, “that Metchnikoff may err in his premises through a temperamental ‘disharmony’ of Russian nature rather than of less specific human nature. The great Russian authors seem to recognize that perpetual dread of death in themselves and their readers which we don’t recognize in ourselves or our Occidental friends and neighbors. Other people don’t think of death so much as he supposes, and when they do they don’t dread it so much. But I think he is still more interestingly wrong in supposing that the young are less afraid of death than the old because they risk their lives more readily. That is not from indifference to death, it is from inexperience of life; they haven’t learned yet the dangers which beset it and the old have; that is all.”

“I don’t know but you’re right,” the first speaker said. “And I couldn’t see the logic of Metchnikoff’s position in regard to the ‘instinct of death’ which he expects us to develop after we have lived, say, a hundred and thirty or forty years, so that at a hundred and fifty we shall be glad to go, and shall not want anything but death after we die. The apparent line of his argument is that in youth we have not the instinct of life so strongly but that we willingly risk life. Then, until we live to a hundred and thirty or forty or so, we have the instinct of life so strongly that we are anxious to shun death; lastly the instinct of death grows in us and we are eager to lay down life. I don’t see how or why this should be. As a matter of fact, children dread death far more than men who are not yet old enough to have developed the instinct of it. Still, it’s a fascinating and suggestive book.”

“But not enough so to console us for the precious hope of living again which it takes away so pitilessly,” said the woman who had followed the talk.

“Is that such a very precious hope?” the first speaker asked.

“I know you pretend not,” she said, “but I don’t believe you.”

“Then you think that the dying, who almost universally make a good end, are buoyed up by that hope?”

“I don’t see why they shouldn’t be. I know it’s the custom for scientific people to say that the resignation of the dying is merely part of the general sinking and so is just physical; but they can’t prove that. Else why should persons who are condemned to death be just as much resigned to it as the sick and even more exalted?”

“Ah,” the light skirmisher put in, “some of the scientific people dispose of that point very simply. They say it’s self-hypnotism.”

“Well, but they can’t prove that, either,” she retorted. Then she went on: “Besides, the dying are not almost universally willing to die. Sometimes they are very unwilling: and they seem to be unwilling because they have no hope of living again. Why wouldn’t it be just as reasonable to suppose that we could evolve the instinct of death by believing in the life hereafter as by living here a hundred and fifty years? For the present, it’s as easy to do the one as the other.”

“But not for the future,” the first speaker said. “As you suggest, it may be just as reasonable to think we can evolve the instinct of death by faith as by longevity, but it isn’t as scientific.”

“What M. Metchnikoff wants is the scientific certainty — which we can have only by beginning to live a century and a half apiece — that the coming man will not be afraid to die.” This, of course, was from the light skirmisher.

The woman contended, “The coming man may be scientifically resigned if he prefers, but the going man, the gone man, was rapturously ready to die, in untold thousands of martyrdoms, because he believed that he should live again.”

The first speaker smiled compassionately, and perhaps also a little patronizingly. “I’m not sure that you have met the point exactly. Metchnikoff denies, on the basis of scientific knowledge, that it is possible for a man, being dead, to live again. In those two extremely interesting chapters of his, which treat of the ‘Religious Remedies’ and the ‘Philosophical Remedies’ for the ‘disharmonies of the human constitution,’ he is quite as unsparing of the sages as of the saints. The Christians and the Buddhists fare no worse than Plato and the Stoics; the last are no less unscientific than the first in his view, and no less fallacious. What he asks is not that we shall be resigned or enraptured in view of death, but that we shall physically desire it when we are tired of living, just as we physically desire sleep when we are tired of waking.”

“And to that end,” the light skirmisher said, “he asks nothing but that we shall live a hundred and fifty years.”

“No, he asks that we shall live such natural lives that we shall die natural deaths, which are voluntary deaths. He contends that most of us now die accidental and violent deaths.”

The woman who had caught on demanded, “Why does he think we could live a century and a half?”

“From analogies in the lives of other animals and from the facts of our constitution. He instances the remarkable cases of longevity recorded in the Bible.”

“I think he’s very inconsistent,” his pursuer continued. “The Bible says men lived anywhere from a hundred to nine hundred years, and he thinks it quite possible. The Bible says that men live after death, and he thinks that’s impossible.”

“Well, have you ever met a man who had lived after death?” the first speaker asked.

“No. Have you ever met a man two hundred years old? If it comes to undeniable proof there is far more proof of ghosts than of bicentenarians.”

“Very well, then, I get out of it by saying that I don’t believe in either.”

“And leave Metchnikoff in the lurch!” the light skirmisher reproached him. “You don’t believe in the instinct of death! And I was just going to begin living to a hundred and fifty and dying voluntarily by leaving off cheese. Now I will take some of the Gorgonzola.”

Everybody laughed but the first speaker and the woman who had caught on; they both looked rather grave, and the closest listener left off laughing soonest.

“We can’t be too grateful to science for its devotion to truth. But isn’t it possible for it to overlook one kind of truth in looking for another? Isn’t it imaginable that when a certain anthropoid ape went wrong and blundered into a man, he also blundered into a soul, and as a slight compensation for having involuntarily degenerated from his anthropoid ancestor, came into the birthright of eternal life?”

“It’s imaginable,” the first speaker granted. “But science leaves imagining things to religion and philosophy.”

“Ah, that’s just where you’re mistaken!” the woman who had caught on exclaimed. “Science does nothing but imagine things!”

“Well, not quite,” the light skirmisher mocked.

She persisted unheeding: “First the suggestion from the mystical somewhere — the same where, probably, that music and pictures and poetry come from; then the hypothesis; then the proof; then the established fact. Established till some new scientist comes along and knocks it over.”

“It would be very interesting if some one would proceed hypothetically concerning the soul and its immortality, as the scientific people do in their inquiries concerning the origin of man, electricity, disease, and the rest.”

“Yes,” the light skirmisher agreed. “Why doesn’t some fellow bet himself that he has an undying soul and then go on to accumulate the proofs?” The others seemed now to have touched bottom in the discussion, and he launched a random inquiry upon the general silence. “By-the-way, I wonder why women are so much more anxious to live again than men, as a general thing.”

“Because they don’t feel,” one of them at table ventured, “that they have had a fair chance here.”

“Oh! I thought maybe they felt that they hadn’t had their say.”

“Is it quite certain,” the closest listener asked, “that they are more anxious to live again than men?” He looked round at the ladies present, and at first none of them answered; perhaps because they feared the men would think them weak if they owned to a greater longing than themselves for immortality.

Finally the woman who had caught on said: “I don’t know whether it’s so or not; and I don’t think it matters. But I don’t mind saying that I long to live again; I am not ashamed of it. I don’t think very much of myself; but I’m interested in living. Then” — she dropped her voice a little— “there are some I should like to see again. I have known people — characters — natures — that I can’t believe are wasted. And those that were dear to us and that we have lost—”

She stopped, and the first speaker now looked at her with a compassion unalloyed by patronage, and did not ask, as he might, “What has all that to do with it?”

In fact, a sympathetic silence possessed the whole company. It was broken at last by the closest listener’s saying: “After all, I don’t know that Metchnikoff’s book is so very blighting. It’s certainly a very important book, and it produces a reaction which may be wholesome or unwholesome as you choose to think. And no matter what we believe, we must respect the honesty of the scientific attitude in regard to a matter that has been too much abandoned to the emotions, perhaps. In all seriousness I wish some scientific man would apply the scientific method to finding out the soul, as you” — he turned to the light skirmisher— “suggest. Why shouldn’t it be investigated?”

Upon this invitation the light skirmisher tried to imagine some psychological experiments which should bear a certain analogy to those of the physicists, but he failed to keep the level of his suggestion.

“As I said,” the closest listener remarked, “he produces a secondary state of revolt which is desirable, for in that state we begin to inquire not only where we stand, but where he stands.”

“And what is your conclusion as to his place in the inquiry?”

“That it isn’t different from yours or mine, really. We all share the illusion of the race from the beginning that somehow our opinion of the matter affects its reality. I should distinguish so far as to say that we think we believe, and he thinks he knows. For my own part, I have the impression that he has helped my belief.”

The light skirmisher made a desperate effort to retrieve himself: “Then a few more books like his would restore the age of faith.”

XXI

AROUND A RAINY-DAY FIRE

A number of the Easy Chair’s friends were sitting round the fire in the library of a country-house. The room was large and full of a soft, flattering light. The fire was freshly kindled, and flashed and crackled with a young vivacity, letting its rays frolic over the serried bindings on the shelves, the glazed pictures on the walls, the cups of after-luncheon coffee in the hands of the people, and the tall jugs and pots in the tray left standing on the library table. It was summer, but a cold rain was falling forbiddingly without. No one else could come, and no one could wish to go. The conditions all favored a just self-esteem, and a sense of providential preference in the accidental assemblage of those people at that time and place.

The talk was rather naturally, though not necessarily, of books, and one of the people was noting that children seemed to like short stories because their minds had not the strength to keep the facts of a whole book. The effort tired them, and they gave it up, not because a book did not interest them, but because it exhausted their little powers. They were good for a leap, or a dash, or a short flight in literature, even very high literature, but they had not really the force for anything covering greater time and space.

Another declared this very suggestive, and declared it in such a way that the whole company perceived he had something behind his words, and besought him to say what he meant. He did so, as well as he could, after protesting that it was not very novel, or if so, perhaps not very important, and if it was important, perhaps it was not true. They said they would take the chances; and then he said that it was merely a notion which had occurred to him at the moment concerning the new reading of the new reading public, whether it might not be all juvenile literature, adapted in mature terms to people of physical adolescence but of undeveloped thinking and feeling: not really feeble-minded youth, but æsthetically and intellectually children, who might presently grow into the power of enjoying and digesting food for men. By-and-by they might gather fortitude for pleasure in real literature, in fiction which should not be a travesty of the old fairy-tales, or stories of adventures among giants and robbers and pirates, or fables with human beings speaking from the motives and passions of animals. He mentioned fiction, he said, because the new reading of the new reading public seemed to be nearly altogether fiction.

All this had so much the effect of philosophical analysis that those comfortable people were lulled into self-approving assent; and putting themselves altogether apart from the new reading public, they begged him to say what he meant. He answered that there was nothing more phenomenal in the modern American life; and he paid a pretty tribute to their ignorance in owning that he was not surprised they knew nothing of that public. He promised that he would try to define it, and he began by remarking that it seemed to be largely composed of the kind of persons who at the theatre audibly interpret the action to one another. The present company must have heard them?

His listeners again assented. Was the new reading public drawn from the theatre-going, or more definitely speaking, the matinée class?

There was something odd, there, the philosopher returned. The matinée class was as large as ever: larger; while the new reading public, perfectly interchangeable with it in its intellectual pleasure and experiences, had suddenly outnumbered it a thousandfold. The popular novel and the popular play were so entirely of one fibre and texture, and so easily convertible, that a new novel was scarcely in every one’s bread-trough before it was on the boards of all the theatres. This led some to believe that we were experiencing a revival of the drama, and that if we kept on having authors who sold half a million copies we could not help having a Shakespeare by-and-by: he must follow.

One of those listening asked, But how had these people begun so instantaneously to form themselves into this new innumerable reading public? If they were of that quality of mind which requires the translation of an unmistakable meaning from the players to the playgoers, they must find themselves helpless when grappling in solitude with the sense of a book. Why did not they go increasingly to the theatre instead of turning so overwhelmingly to the printed word?

The philosopher replied that they had not now begun to do this, but only seemed to have begun, since there really was no beginning in anything. The readers had always been in the immense majority, because they could read anywhere, and they could see plays only in the cities and towns. If the theatre were universal, undoubtedly they would prefer plays, because a play makes far less draft upon the mental capacities or energies than the silliest book; and what seemed their effort to interpret it to one another might very well be the exchange of their delight in it. The books they preferred were of the nature of poor plays, full of “easy things to understand,” cheap, common incidents, obvious motives, and vulgar passions, such as had been used a thousand times over in literature. They were fitted for the new reading public for this reason; the constant repetition of the same characters, events, scenes, plots, gave their infantile minds the pleasure which children find in having a story told over and over in exactly the same terms. The new reading public would rebel against any variance, just as children do.

The most of the company silently acquiesced, or at least were silent, but one of them made the speaker observe that he had not told them what this innumerable unreasoning multitude had read before the present plague of handsome, empty, foolish duodecimos had infested everybody’s bread-trough.

The philosopher said the actual interior form of non-literary literature was an effect of the thin spread of our literary culture, and outwardly was the effect of the thick spread of our material prosperity. The dollar-and-a-half novel of to-day was the dime novel of yesterday in an avatar which left its essence unchanged. It was even worse, for it was less sincerely and forcibly written, and it could not be so quickly worn out and thrown away. Its beauty of paper, print, and binding gave it a claim to regard which could not be ignored, and established for it a sort of right to lie upon the table, and then stand upon the shelf, where it seemed to relate itself to genuine literature, and to be of the same race and lineage. As for this vast new reading public, it was the vast old reading public with more means in its pocket of satisfying its crude, childish taste. Its head was the same empty head.

There was a sort of dreadful finality in this, and for a while no one spoke. Then some one tried in vain to turn the subject, while the philosopher smiled upon the desolation he had made; and then one of that sex which when satisfied of the truth likes to have its “sense of satisfaction ache” through the increase of conviction, asked him why the English reading public, which must be so much more cultivated than our new reading public, seemed to like the same sort of puerile effects in works of imagination, the stirring incidents, the well-worn plots, the primitive passions, and the robustious incentives. He owned the fact, but he contended that the fact, though interesting, was not so mysterious as it appeared at first sight. It could be explained that the English had never taken the imagination very seriously, and that in their dense, close civilization, packed tight with social, political, and material interests, they asked of the imagination chiefly excitement and amusement. They had not turned to it for edification or instruction, for that thrill of solemn joy which comes of vital truth profoundly seen and clearly shown. For this reason when all Europe besides turned her face to the light, some decades ago, in the pages of the great prose poets who made the age illustrious, England preferred the smoky links and dancing camp-fires which had pleased her immature fancy, and kept herself well in the twilight of the old ideal of imagination as the mother of unrealities. There could be no doubt, the philosopher thought, that the recrudescence which her best wits recognized as the effects of this perversity, was the origin of the preposterous fiction which we now feed to the new reading public, and which we think must somehow be right because it was hers and is ours, and has the sanction of race and tradition.

It was not, he continued, a thing to shed the tear of unavailing regret for, though it was not a transitory phase, or a state of transition, for the condition that now existed had always existed. The new reading public was larger than ever before not merely because there was a fresh demand for reading, but because more people were lettered and moneyed and leisured, and did not know what otherwise to do with themselves. It was quite simple, and the fact was less to be regretted in itself than for an indirect result which might be feared from it. He paused at this, in order to be asked what this result was, and being promptly asked he went on.

It was, he said, the degradation of authorship as a calling, in the popular regard. He owned that in the past authorship had enjoyed too much honor in the reverence and affection of the world: not always, indeed, but at certain times. As long as authors were the clients and dependents of the great, they could not have been the objects of a general interest or honor. They had then passed the stage when the simple poet or story-teller was wont to

 — sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,

to wondering and admiring circles of simple listeners, and they had not yet come to that hour of authorship when it reverted to the peasantry, now turned people, and threw itself upon the people’s generous acceptance and recognition for bread and fame. But when that hour came, it brought with it the honor of a reverent and persistent curiosity concerning literature and the literary life, which the philosopher said he was afraid could not survive the actual superabundance of authors and the transformation of the novelist into the artisan. There seemed, he pursued, a fixed formula for the manufacture of a work of fiction, to be studied and practised like any other. Literature was degraded from an art to a poor sort of science, in the practical application of which thousands were seen prospering; for the immense output of our press represented the industry of hundreds and thousands. A book was concocted, according to a patent recipe, advertised, and sold like any other nostrum, and perhaps the time was already here when it was no longer more creditable to be known as the author of a popular novel than as the author of a popular medicine, a Pain-killer, a Soothing Syrup, a Vegetable Compound, a Horse Liniment, or a Germicide. Was it possible, he asked, for a reader of the last book selling a hundred thousand copies to stand in the loving or thrilling awe of the author that we used to feel for Longfellow and Tennyson, for Emerson and Carlyle, for Hawthorne and George Eliot, for Irving and Scott, or for any of their great elders or youngers? He repeated that perhaps authorship had worked its worshippers too hard, but there was no doubt that their worship was a genuine devotion. For at least a hundred and fifty years it had been eagerly offered in a full acceptance of the Schiller superstition that at the sharing of the earth the poet, representing authorship, had been so much preoccupied with higher things that he had left the fleshpots and the loaves and fishes to others, and was to be compensated with a share of the divine honors paid to Jove himself. From Goethe to Carlyle, what a long roll of gods, demigods, and demisemigods it was! It might have been bad for the deities, and the philosopher rather thought it was, but burning incense on the different shrines was an excellent thing for the votaries, and kept them out of all sorts of mischiefs, low pleasures, and vain amusements. Whether that was really so or not, the doubt remained whether authorship was not now a creed outworn. Did tender maids and virtuous matrons still cherish the hope of some day meeting their literary idols in the flesh? Did generous youth aspire to see them merely at a distance, and did doting sires teach their children that it was an epoch-making event when a great poet or novelist visited the country; or when they passed afar, did they whip some favored boy, as the father of Benvenuto Cellini whipped him at sight of a salamander in the fire that he might not forget the prodigy? Now that the earth had been divided over again, and the poet in his actual guise of novelist had richly shared in its goods with the farmer, the noble, the merchant, and the abbot, was it necessary or even fair that he should be the guest of heaven? In other words, now that every successful author could keep his automobile, did any one want his autograph?

In the silence that fell upon the company at these words, the ticking of the clock under its classic pediment on the mantel was painfully audible, and had the effect of intimating that time now had its innings and eternity was altogether out of it. Several minutes seemed to pass before any one had the courage to ask whether the degradation of authorship was not partially the result of the stand taken by the naturalists in Zola, who scorned the name of art for his calling and aspired to that of science. The hardy adventurer who suggested this possibility said that it was difficult to imagine the soul stirred to the same high passion by the botanist, the astronomer, the geologist, the electrician, or even the entomologist as in former times by the poet, the humorist, the novelist, or the playwright. If the fictionist of whatever sort had succeeded in identifying himself with the scientist, he must leave the enjoyment of divine honors to the pianist, the farce-comedian, the portrait-painter, the emotional actor, and the architect, who still deigned to practise an art.

The philosopher smiled, and owned that this was very interesting, and opened up a fresh field of inquiry. The first question there was whether the imaginative author were not rather to blame for not having gone far enough in the scientific direction in the right scientific fashion than for having taken that course at all. The famous reproach of poetry made by Huxley, that it was mostly “sensual caterwauling,” might well have given the singer pause in striking the sympathetic catgut of his lyre: perhaps the strings were metallic; but no matter. The reproach had a justice in it that must have stung, and made the lyrist wish to be an atomic theorist at any cost. In fact, at that very moment science had, as it were, caught the bread out of fiction’s mouth, and usurped the highest functions of imagination. In almost every direction of its recent advance it had made believe that such and such a thing was so, and then proceeded to prove it. To this method we owed not only the possession of our present happy abundance of microbes in every sort, but our knowledge of the universe in almost every respect. Science no longer waited for the apple to fall before inferring a law of gravitation, but went about with a stick knocking fruit off every bough in the hope that something suggestive would come of it. On make-believes of all kinds it based the edifices of all kinds of eternal veracities. It behooved poetry, or fiction, which was radically the same, to return to its earliest and simplest devices if it would find itself in the embrace of science, and practise the make-beliefs of its infancy. Out of so many there were chances of some coming true if they were carried far enough and long enough. In fact, the hypothetical method of science had apparently been used in the art of advertising the works in which the appetite of the new reading public was flattered. The publishers had hypothesized from the fact of a population of seventy millions, the existence of an immense body of raw, coarse minds, untouched by taste or intelligence, and boldly addressed the new fiction to it. As in many suppositions of science their guess proved true.

Then why, the hardy listener who had spoken before inquired, was not make-believe the right method for the author, if it was the right method for the scientist and the publisher? Why should not the novelist hypothesize cases hitherto unknown to experience, and then go on by persistent study to find them true? It seemed to this inquirer that the mistake of fiction, when it refused longer to be called an art and wished to be known as a science, was in taking up the obsolescent scientific methods, and in accumulating facts, or human documents, and deducing a case from them, instead of boldly supposing a case, as the new science did, and then looking about for occurrences to verify it.

The philosopher said, Exactly; this was the very thing he was contending for. The documents should be collected in support of the hypothesis; the hypothesis should not be based on documents already collected. First the inference, then the fact; was not that the new scientific way? It looked like it; and it seemed as if the favorite literature of the new reading public were quite in the spirit of the new science. Its bold events, its prodigious characters, its incredible motives, were not they quite of the nature of the fearless conjecture which imagined long and short electric waves and then spread a mesh of wire to intercept them and seize their message?

The hardy inquirer demanded: Then if so, why despise the literature of the new reading public? Why despise the new reading public, anyway?

The philosopher responded that he despised nothing, not even a thing so unphilosophical as modern science. He merely wished his interpellant to observe again that the unification of the literary spirit and the scientific spirit was degrading the literary man to the level of the scientific man. He thought this was bad for the small remnant of mankind, who in default of their former idolatry might take to the worship of themselves. Now, however bad a writer might be, it was always well for the reader to believe him better than himself. If we had not been brought up in this superstition, what would have become of the classics of all tongues? But for this, what was to prevent the present company from making a clearance of three-fourths of the surrounding shelves and feeding that dying flame on the hearth?

At this the host, who had been keeping himself in a modest abeyance, came forward and put some sticks on the fire. He said he would like to see any one touch his bindings; which seemed to be his notion of books. Nobody minded him; but one of those dutyolators, who abound in a certain sex, asked the philosopher what he thought we ought to do for the maintenance of author-worship among us.

He answered, he had not thought of that; his mind had been fixed upon the fact of its decay. But perhaps something could be done by looking up the author whose book had sold least during the season, and asking him candidly whether he would not like to be paid the divine honors now going begging from one big seller to another; for the decay of author-worship must be as much from the indifference of the authors as from the irreverence of the readers. If such a low-selling author did not seem to regard it as rather invidious, then pay him the divine honors; it might be a wholesome and stimulating example; but perhaps we should afterward have the demigod on our hands. Something might be safelier done by writing, as with the present company, and inquiring into “the present condition of polite learning.” This would keep the sacred flame alive, and give us the comfort of refined association in an exquisite moment of joy from the sense of our superiority to other people. That, after all, was the great thing.

The company drew a little closer round the fire. The rain beat upon the panes, and the wind swept the wet leaves against them, while each exhaled a sigh of aspiration not unmixed with a soft regret.

XXII

THE ADVANTAGES OF QUOTATIONAL CRITICISM

The talk round the Easy Chair one day was of that strange passion for reading which has of late possessed the public, and the contagion or infection by which it has passed to hundreds of thousands who never read before; and then the talk was of how this prodigious force might be controlled and turned in the right way: not suffered to run to waste like water over the dam, but directed into channels pouring upon wheels that turn the mills of the gods or something like that. There were, of course, a great many words; in fact, talk is composed of words, and the people at that luncheon were there for talking as well as eating, and they did not mind how many words they used. But the sum of their words was the hope, after a due season of despair, that the present passion for reading might be made to eventuate in more civilization than it seemed to be doing, if it could be brought back to good literature, supposing it was ever there in great strength, and the question was how to do this.

One of the company said he had lately been reading a good many books of Leigh Hunt’s, and after everybody had interrupted with “Delightful!” “Perfectly charming!” and the like, he went on to observe that one of the chief merits of Hunt seemed to be his aptness in quotation. That, he remarked, was almost a lost art with critics, who had got to thinking that they could tell better what an author was than the author himself could. Like every other power disused, the power of apt quotation had died, and there were very few critics now who knew how to quote: not one knew, as Hunt, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or the least of the great quotational school of critics, knew. These had perhaps overworked their gift, and might have been justly accused, as they certainly were accused, of misleading the reader and making him think that the poets, whose best they quoted, putting the finest lines in italics so that they could not be missed, were as good throughout as in the passages given. It was this sense of having abused innocence, or ignorance, which led to the present reaction in criticism no doubt, and yet the present reaction was an error. Suppose that the poets whose best was given by quotation were not altogether as good as that? The critics never pretended they were; they were merely showing how very good these poets could be, and at the same time offering a delicate pleasure to the reader, who could not complain that his digestion was overtaxed by the choice morsels. If his pleasure in them prompted him to go to the entire poet quoted, in the hope of rioting gluttonously upon him, the reader was rightly served in one sense. In another, he was certainly not misserved or his time wasted. It would be hard for him to prove that he could have employed it more profitably.

Everybody, more or less, now sat up, and he who had the eye and ear of the table went on to remark that he had not meant to make a defence of the extinct school of quotational criticism. What he really meant to do was to suggest a way out of the present situation in which the new multitude of voracious readers were grossly feeding upon such intellectual husks as swine would not eat, and imagining themselves nourished by their fodder. There might be some person present who could improve upon his suggestion, but his notion, as he conceived it, was that something might be done in the line of quotational criticism to restore the great poets to the public favor, for he understood that good authors were now proportionately less read than they once were. He thought that a pity: and the rest of the company joined in asking him how he proposed to employ the quotational method for his purpose.

In answering he said that he would not go outside of the English classics, and he would, for the present, deal only with the greatest of these. He took it for granted that those listening were all agreed that mankind would be advantaged in their minds or manners by a more or less familiar acquaintance with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Cowper, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, and Browning; he himself did not mind adding Scott to the list, whose poetry he found much better than his prose. To bring about an acquaintance which might very profitably ripen into intimacy, he would have each of these poets treated in the whole measure of his work as many or most of them had been topically or partially treated by the quotational critics. Some one here made him observe that he was laying out rather a large piece of work, and to this he answered, Not at all; the work had been already done. Asked then, somewhat derisively, why it need be done over again, he explained, with a modesty and patience which restored him to the regard he had lost by the derision (all had impartially united in it), that though the work had already been done, there needed some slight additions to it which would easily fit it to his purpose. He was not thinking of going in for one of those dreadful series of books which seemed the dismay alike of publisher and reader, and required rewriting of matter more than enough rewritten. In fact, he said, that for his purpose the writing was done fully and probably better than it could be done again, and it was only the reading and quoting that demanded editorial attention.

Another said he did not see how that could be, and the inventor of the brave scheme, which was still in petto, said that he would try to show him. We had, he contended, only too great riches in the criticisms of the poets open to our choice, but suppose we took Spenser and let Lowell introduce him to us. There would be needed a very brief biographical note, and then some able hand to intersperse the criticism with passages from Spenser, or with amplifications of the existing quotations, such as would give a full notion of the poet’s scope and quality. The story of each of his poems could be given in a few words, where the poems themselves could not be given even in part, and with the constant help of the critic the reader could be possessed of a luminous idea of the poet, such as he probably could not get by going to him direct, though this was not to be deprecated, but encouraged, after the preparatory acquaintance. The explanatory and illustrative passages could be interpolated in the text of the criticism without interrupting the critic, and something for Spenser might thus be done on the scale of what Addison did for Milton. It was known how those successive papers in the Spectator had rehabilitated one of the greatest English poets, or, rather, rehabilitated the English public, and restored the poet and the public to each other. They formed almost an ideal body of criticism, and if they did not embody all that the reader need know of Milton, they embodied so much that he could no longer feel himself ignorant of Milton. In fact, they possessed him of a high degree of Miltonian culture, which was what one wanted to have with respect to any poet. They might be extended with still greater quotation, and if something more yet were needed the essay on Milton which made Macaulay’s reputation might be employed as a vessel to catch the overrunnings of the precious ichor.

Who could not wish to know the poetry of Keats as we already knew his life through the matchless essay of Lowell? That might be filled out with the most striking passages of his poetry, simply let in at appropriate places, without breaking the flow of that high discourse, and forming a rich accompaniment which could leave no reader unpleasured or uninstructed. The passages given from the poet need not be relevant to the text of the critic; they might be quite irrelevant and serve the imaginable end still better. For instance, some passages might be given in the teeth of the critic, and made to gainsay what he had been saying. This would probably send the reader, if he was very much perplexed, to the poet himself, which was the imaginable end. He might be disappointed one way or he might be disappointed the other way, but in the mean while he would have passed his time, and he would have instructed if he had not amused himself.

It would be very interesting to take such a criticism as that of Lowell on Dryden and give not only the fine things from him, but the things that counted for the critic in his interesting contention that Dryden failed of being a prime poet because of the great weight of prose in him, and very good prose; or, as the critic charmingly put it, he had wings that helped him run along the ground, but did not enable him to fly. It would be most valuable for us to see how Dryden was a great literary man, but not one of the greatest poets, and yet must be ranked as a great poet. If the balance inclined now toward this opinion, and now against it, very possibly the reader would find himself impelled to turn to the poet’s work, and again the imaginable end would be served.

A listener here asked why the talker went chiefly to Lowell for the illustration of his theory, and was frankly answered, For the same reason that he had first alluded to Leigh Hunt: because he had lately been reading him. It was not because he had not read any other criticism, or not that he entirely admired Lowell’s; in fact, he often found fault with that. Lowell was too much a poet to be a perfect critic. He was no more the greatest sort of critic than Dryden was the greatest sort of poet. To turn his figure round, he had wings that lifted him into the air when he ought to be running along the ground.

The company laughed civilly at this piece of luck, and then they asked, civilly still, if Leigh Hunt had not done for a great many poets just what he was proposing to have done. What about the treatment of the poets and the quotations from them in the volumes on Wit and Humor, Imagination and Fancy, A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla, and the rest? The talker owned that there was a great deal about these which was to his purpose, but, upon the whole, the criticism was too desultory and fragmentary, and the quotation was illustrative rather than representative, and so far it was illusory. He had a notion that Hunt’s stories from the Italian poets were rather more in the line he would have followed, but he had not read these since he was a boy, and he was not prepared to answer for them.

One of the company said that she had read those Italian poets in Leigh Hunt’s version of them when she was a girl, and it had had the effect of making her think she had read the poets themselves, and she had not since read directly Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, or Tasso. She regarded that as an irreparable injury, and she doubted whether, if the great English poets could be introduced in that manner, very many people would pursue their acquaintance for themselves. They would think they were familiar with them already.

Yes, the talker assented, if that were the scheme, but it was not; or, at least, it was only part of the scheme. The scheme was to give the ever-increasing multitude of readers a chance to know something of the best literature. If they chose to pursue the acquaintance, very good; if they chose not to pursue the acquaintance, still very good; they could not have made it at all without being somewhat refined and enlightened. He felt very much about it as he felt about seeing Europe, which some people left unseen because they could not give all the time to it they would like. He always said to such people, Go if they could only be gone a month. A day in Rome, or London, or Paris, was a treasure such as a lifetime at home could not lay up; an hour of Venice or Florence was precious; a moment of Milan or Verona, of Siena or Mantua, was beyond price. So you could not know a great poet so little as not to be enriched by him. A look from a beautiful woman, or a witty word from a wise one, distinguished and embellished the life into which it fell, so that it could never afterward be so common as it was before.

Why, it was asked from a silence in which all the ladies tried to think whether the speaker had her in mind or not, and whether he ought really to be so personal, why could not Mr. Morley’s English Men of Letters series be used to carry out the scheme proposed; and its proposer said he had nothing to say against that, except perhaps that the frames might be too much for the pictures. He would rather choose a critical essay, as he had intimated, for the frame of each picture; in this sort of thing we had an endless choice, both new and old. If he had any preference it would be for the older-fashioned critics, like Hazlitt or perhaps like De Quincey; he was not sure, speaking without the book, whether De Quincey treated authors so much as topics, but he had the sense of wonderful things in him about the eighteenth-century poets: things that made you think you knew them, and that yet made you burn to be on the same intimate terms with them as De Quincey himself.

His method of knowing the poets through the critics, the sympathetic critics, who were the only real critics, would have the advantage of acquainting the reader with the critics as well as the poets. The critics got a good deal of ingratitude from the reader generally, and perhaps in their character of mere reviewers they got no more than they merited, but in their friendly function of ushers to the good things, even the best things, in the authors they were studying, they had a claim upon him which he could not requite too generously. They acted the part of real friends, and in the high company where the reader found himself strange and alone, they hospitably made him at home. Above all other kinds of writers, they made one feel that he was uttering the good things they said. Of course, for the young reader, there was the danger of his continuing always to think their thoughts in their terms, but there were also great chances that he would begin by-and-by to think his own thoughts in terms of his own.

The more quotational the critics were, the better. For himself the speaker said that he liked that old custom of printing the very finest things in italics when it came to citing corroborative passages. It had not only the charm of the rococo, the pathos of a bygone fashion, but it was of the greatest use. No one is the worse for having a great beauty pointed out in the author one is reading or reading from. Sometimes one does not see the given beauty at first, and then he has the pleasure of puzzling it out; sometimes he never sees it, and then his life is sublimed with an insoluble conundrum. Sometimes, still, he sees what the critic means, and disagrees with him. In this case he is not likely to go to the end of his journey without finding a critic whom he agrees with about the passage in question.

After all, however, it was asked by one that had not spoken before (with that fine air of saying a novel thing which people put on who have not spoken before), would not the superficial knowledge of the poets imparted by quotational criticism result in a sort of pseudo-culture which would be rather worse than nothing, a kind of intellectual plated ware or æsthetic near-silk?

The talker said he thought not, and that he had already touched upon some such point in what he had said about going to Europe for a few months. He offered the opinion that there was no such thing as pseudo-culture; there was culture or there was not; and the reader of a quotational criticism, if he enjoyed the quotations, became, so far, cultivated. It could not be said that he knew the poets treated of, but neither could it be said that he was quite ignorant of them. As a matter of fact, he did know them in a fashion, through a mind larger and clearer than his own.

For this reason the talker favored the reading of criticism, especially the kind of criticism that quoted. He would even go so far as to say that there was no just and honest criticism without quotation. The critic was bound to make out his case, or else abdicate his function, and he could not make out his case, either for or against an author, without calling him to testify. Therefore, he was in favor of quotational criticism, for fairness’ sake, as well as for his pleasure; and it was for the extension of it that he now contended. He was not sure that he wished to send the reader to the authors quoted in all cases. The reader could get through the passages cited a pretty good notion of the authors’ quality, and as for their quantity, that was often made up of commonplaces or worse. In the case of the old poets, and most of the English classics, there was a great deal of filth which the reader would be better for not taking into his mind and which the most copiously quotational critics would hardly offer him. If any one said that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of those authors, he should be disposed to distinguish, and to say that without the filth one could not get a fair idea of their age, but of themselves, yes. Their beauty and their greatness were personal to them; even their dulness might be so; but their foulness was what had come off on them from living at periods when manners were foul.

XXIII

READING FOR A GRANDFATHER

A young girl (much respected by the Easy Chair) who had always had the real good of her grandfather at heart, wished to make him a Christmas present befitting his years and agreeable to his tastes. She thought, only to dismiss them for their banality, of a box of the finest cigars, of a soft flannel dressing-gown, a bath robe of Turkish towelling embroidered by herself, of a velvet jacket, and of a pair of house shoes. She decided against some of these things because he did not smoke, because he never took off his walking coat and shoes till he went to bed, and because he had an old bath robe made him by her grandmother, very short and very scant (according to her notion at the chance moments when she had surprised him in it), from which neither love nor money could part him; the others she rejected for the reason already assigned. Little or nothing remained, then, but to give him books, and she was glad that she was forced to this conclusion because, when she reflected, she realized that his reading seemed to be very much neglected, or at least without any lift of imagination or any quality of modernity in it. As far as she had observed, he read the same old things over and over again, and did not know at all what was now going on in the great world of literature. She herself was a famous reader, and an authority about books with other girls, and with the young men who asked her across the afternoon tea-cups whether she had seen this or that new book, and scrabbled round, in choosing between cream and lemon, to hide the fact that they had not seen it themselves. She was therefore exactly the person to select a little library of the latest reading for an old gentleman who was so behind the times as her grandfather; but before she plunged into the mad vortex of new publications she thought she would delicately find out his preferences, or if he had none, would try to inspire him with a curiosity concerning these or those new books.

“Now, grandfather,” she began, “you know I always give you a Christmas present.”

“Yes, my dear,” the old gentleman patiently assented, “I know you do. You are very thoughtful.”

“Not at all. If there is anything I hate, it is being thoughtful. What I like is being spontaneous.”

“Well, then, my dear, I don’t mind saying you are very spontaneous.”

“And I detest surprises. If any one wishes to make a lasting enemy of me, let him surprise me. So I am going to tell you now what I am going to give you. Do you like that?”

“I like everything you do, my child.”

“Well, this time you will like it better than ever. I am going to give you books. And in order not to disappoint you by giving you books that you have read before, I want to catechise you a little. Shall you mind it?”

“Oh no, but I’m afraid you won’t find me very frank.”

“I shall make you be. If you are not frank, there is no fun in not surprising you, or in not giving you books that you have read.”

“There is something in that,” her grandfather assented. “But now, instead of finding out what I have read, or what I like, why not tell me what I ought to read and to like? I think I have seen a vast deal of advice to girls about their reading: why shouldn’t the girls turn the tables and advise their elders? I often feel the need of advice from girls on all sorts of subjects, and you would find me very grateful, I believe.”

The girl’s eyes sparkled and then softened toward this docile ancestor. “Do you really mean it, grandfather? It would be fun if you did.”

“But I should want it to be serious, my dear. I should be glad if your good counsel could include the whole conduct of life, for I am sensible sometimes of a tendency to be silly and wicked, which I am sure you could help me to combat.”

“Oh, grandfather,” said the girl, tenderly, “you know that isn’t true!”

“Well, admit for the sake of argument that it isn’t. My difficulty in regard to reading remains, and there you certainly could help me. At moments it seems to me that I have come to the end of my line.”

The old gentleman’s voice fell, and she could no longer suspect him of joking. So she began, “Why, what have you been reading last?”

“Well, my dear, I have been looking into the Spectator a little.”

“The London Spectator? Jim says they have it at the club, and he swears by it. But I mean, what books; and that’s a weekly newspaper, or a kind of review, isn’t it?”

“The Spectator I mean was a London newspaper, and it was a kind of review, but it was a daily. Is it possible that you’ve never heard of it?” The young girl shook her head thoughtfully, regretfully, but upon the whole not anxiously; she was not afraid that any important thing in literature had escaped her. “But you’ve heard of Addison, and Steele, and Pope, and Swift?”

“Oh yes, we had them at school, when we were reading Henry Esmond; they all came into that. And I remember, now: Colonel Esmond wrote a number of the Spectator for a surprise to Beatrix; but I thought it was all a make-up.”

“And you don’t know about Sir Roger de Coverley?”

“Of course I do! It’s what the English call the Virginia Reel. But why do you ask? I thought we were talking about your reading. I don’t see how you could get an old file of a daily newspaper, but if it amuses you! Is it so amusing?”

“It’s charming, but after one has read it as often as I have one begins to know it a little too well.”

“Yes; and what else have you been reading?”

“Well, Leigh Hunt a little lately. He continues the old essayist tradition, and he is gently delightful.”

“Never heard of him!” the girl frankly declared.

“He was a poet, too, and he wrote the Story of Rimini — about Paolo and Francesca, you know.”

“Oh, there you’re away off, grandfather! Mr. Philips wrote about them; and that horrid D’Annunzio. Why, Duse gave D’Annunzio’s play last winter! What are you thinking of?”

“Perhaps I am wandering a little,” the grandfather meekly submitted, and the girl had to make him go on.

“Do you read poetry a great deal?” she asked, and she thought if his taste was mainly for poetry, it would simplify the difficulty of choosing the books for her present.

“Well, I’m rather returning to it. I’ve been looking into Crabbe of late, and I have found him full of a quaint charm.”

“Crabbe? I never heard of him!” she owned as boldly as before, for if he had been worth hearing of, she knew that she would have heard of him. “Don’t you like Kipling?”

“Yes, when he is not noisy. I think I prefer William Watson among your very modern moderns.”

“Why, is he living yet? I thought he wrote ten or fifteen years ago! You don’t call him modern! You like Stevenson, don’t you? He’s a great stylist; everybody says he is, and so is George Meredith. You must like him?”

“He’s a great intellect, but a little of him goes almost as long a way as a little of Browning. I think I prefer Henry James.”

“Oh yes, he’s just coming up. He’s the one that has distinction. But the people who write like him are a great deal more popular. They have all his distinction, and they don’t tax your mind so much. But don’t let’s get off on novelists or there’s no end to it. Who are really your favorite poets?”

“Well, I read Shakespeare rather often, and I read Dante by fits and starts; and I do not mind Milton from time to time. I like Wordsworth, and I like Keats a great deal better; every now and then I take up Cowper with pleasure, and I have found myself going back to Pope with real relish. And Byron; yes, Byron! But I shouldn’t advise your reading Don Juan.”

“That’s an opera, isn’t it? What they call ‘Don Giovanni.’ I never heard of any such poem.”

“That shows how careful you have been of your reading.”

“Oh, we read everything nowadays — if it’s up to date; and if Don Juan had been, you may be sure I would have heard of it. I suppose you like Tennyson, and Longfellow, and Emerson, and those old poets?”

“Are they old? They used to be so new! Yes, I like them, and I like Whittier and some things of Bryant’s.”

At the last two names the girl looked vague, but she said: “Oh yes, I suppose so. And I suppose you like the old dramatists?”

“Some of them — Marlowe, and Beaumont and Fletcher: a few of their plays. But I can’t stand most of the Elizabethans; I can’t stand Ben Jonson at all.”

“Oh yes— ‘Rasselas.’ I can’t stand him either, grandfather. I’m quite with you about Ben Jonson. ‘Too much Johnson,’ you know.”

The grandfather looked rather blank. “Too different Johnsons, I think, my dear. But perhaps you didn’t mean the Elizabethans; perhaps you mean the dramatists of the other Johnson’s time. Well, I like Sheridan pretty well, though his wit strikes me as mechanical, and I really prefer Goldsmith; in his case, I prefer his Vicar of Wakefield, and his poems to his plays. Plays are not very easy reading, unless they are the very best. Shakespeare’s are the only plays that one wants to read.”

The young girl held up her charming chin, with the air of keeping it above water too deep for her. “And Ibsen?” she suggested. “I hope you despise Ibsen as much as I do. He’s clear gone out now, thank goodness! Don’t you think Ghosts was horrid?”

“It’s dreadful, my dear; but I shouldn’t say it was horrid. No, I don’t despise Ibsen; and I have found Mr. Pinero’s plays good reading.”

“Oh,” the girl said, getting her foot on the ground. “‘The Gay Lord Quex’; Miss Vanbrugh was great in that. But now don’t get off on the theatre, grandfather, or there will be no end to it. Which of the old, old poets — before Burns or Shelley even — do you like?”

“Well, when I was a boy, I read Chaucer, and liked him very much; and the other day when I was looking over Leigh Hunt’s essays, I found a number of them about Chaucer with long, well-chosen extracts; and I don’t know when I’ve found greater pleasure in poetry. If I must have a favorite among the old poets, I will take Chaucer. Of course, Spenser is rather more modern.”

“Yes, but I can’t bear his agnosticism, can you? And I hate metaphysics, anyway.”

The grandfather looked bewildered; then he said, “Now, I’m afraid we are getting too much Spenser.”

The girl went off at a tangent. “Don’t you just love Mr. Gillette in ‘Sherlock Holmes’? There’s a play I should think you would like to read! They say there’s a novel been made out of it. I wish I could get hold of it for you. Well, go on, grandfather!”

“No, my dear, it’s for you to go on. But don’t you think you’ve catechised me sufficiently about my reading? You must find it very old-fashioned.”

“No, not at all. I like old things myself. The girls are always laughing at me because I read George Eliot, and Dickens, and Thackeray, and Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins, and those back numbers. But I should say, if I said anything, that you were rather deficient in fiction, grandfather. You seem to have read everything but novels.”

“Is that so? I was afraid I had read nothing but novels. I — —”

“Tell me what novels you have read,” she broke in upon him imperatively. “The ones you consider the greatest.”

The grandfather had to think. “It is rather a long list — so long that I’m ashamed of it. Perhaps I’d better mention only the very greatest, like Don Quixote, and Gil Blas, and Wilhelm Meister, and The Vicar of Wakefield, and Clarissa Harlowe, and Emma, and Pride and Prejudice, and The Bride of Lammermoor, and I Promessi Sposi, and Belinda, and Frankenstein, and Chartreuse de Parme, and César Birotteau, and The Last Days of Pompeii, and David Copperfield, and Pendennis, and The Scarlet Letter, and Blithedale Romance, and The Cloister and the Hearth, and Middlemarch, and Smoke, and Fathers and Sons, and A Nest of Nobles, and War and Peace, and Anna Karénina, and Resurrection, and Dona Perfecta, and Marta y Maria, and I Malavoglia, and The Return of the Native, and L’Assomoir, and Madame Bovary, and The Awkward Age, and The Grandissimes — and most of the other books of the same authors. Of course, I’ve read many more perhaps as great as these, that I can’t think of at the moment.”

The young girl listened, in a vain effort to follow her agile ancestor in and out of the labyrinths of his favorite fiction, most of which she did not recognize by the names he gave and some of which she believed to be very shocking, in a vague association of it with deeply moralized, denunciatory criticisms which she had read of the books or the authors. Upon the whole, she was rather pained by the confession which his reading formed for her grandfather, and she felt more than ever the necessity of undertaking his education, or at least his reform, in respect to it. She was glad now that she had decided to give him books for a Christmas present, for there was no time like Christmas for good resolutions, and if her grandfather was ever going to turn over a new leaf, this was the very hour to help him do it.

She smiled very sweetly upon him, so as not to alarm him too much, and said she had never been so much interested as in knowing what books he really liked. But as he had read all those he named —

“Oh, dozens of times!” he broke in.

 — Then perhaps he would leave it to her to choose an entirely new list for him, so that he could have something freshly entertaining; she did not like to say more edifying for fear of hurting his feelings, and taking his silence for consent she went up and kissed him on his bald head and ran away to take the matter under immediate advisement. Her notion then was to look over several lists of the world’s best hundred books which she had been keeping by her, but when she came to compare them, she found that they contained most of the books he had mentioned, besides many others. It would never do to give him any one of these libraries of the best hundred books for this reason, and for the reason that a hundred books would cost more of her grandfather’s money than she felt justified in spending on him at a season when she had to make so many other presents.

Just when she was at her wit’s end, a sudden inspiration seized her. She pinned on her hat, and put on her new winter jacket, and went out and bought the last number of The Bookworm. At the end of this periodical she had often got suggestions for her own reading, and she was sure that she should find there the means of helping her poor grandfather to a better taste in literature than he seemed to have. So she took the different letters from Chicago, San Francisco, Denver, Cincinnati, New Orleans, Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, Philadelphia, and up-town and down-town in New York, giving the best-selling books of the month in all those places, and compiled an eclectic list from them, which she gave to her bookseller with orders to get them as nearly of the same sizes and colors as possible. He followed her instructions with a great deal of taste and allowed her twenty-five per cent. off, which she applied toward a wedding-present she would have to give shortly. In this way she was able to provide her grandfather for the new year with reading that everybody was talking about, and that brought him up to date with a round turn.

XXIV

SOME MOMENTS WITH THE MUSE

Among the many letters which the Easy Chair has received after its conference on the state of poetry, one of most decided note was from a writer confessing herself of the contrary-minded. “I love some children, but not childhood in general merely because it is childhood. So I love some poems rather than poetry in general just because it is poetry.... I object to the tinkle. I object to the poetic license which performs a Germanic divorce between subject and verb, so that instead of a complete thought which can be mastered before another is set before the brain, there is a twist in the grammatical sequence that requires a conscious effort of will to keep the original thread. The world is too busy to do this; reading must be a relaxation, not a study.... When poetry conforms in its mental tone to the spirit of the times; when it reflects the life and more or less the common thought of the day, then more of the common people will read it.”

There were other things in this letter which seemed to us of so much importance that we submitted it as a whole to a Woman’s Club of our acquaintance. The nine ladies composing the club were not all literary, but they were all of æsthetic pursuits, and together they brought a good deal of culture to bear on the main points of the letter. They were not quite of one mind, but they were so far agreed that what they had to say might be fairly regarded as a consensus of opinion. We will not attempt to report their remarks at any length — they ran to all lengths — but in offering a résumé of what they variously said to a sole effect, we will do what we can to further the cause they joined in defending.

The Muses — for we will no longer conceal that this Woman’s Club was composed of the tuneful Nine — acknowledged that there was a great deal in what their contrary-minded sister said. They did not blame her one bit for the way she felt; they would have felt just so themselves in her place; but being as it were professionally dedicated to the beautiful in all its established forms, they thought themselves bound to direct her attention to one or two aspects of the case which she had apparently overlooked. They were only sorry that she was not there to take her own part; and they confessed, in her behalf, that it was ridiculous for poetry to turn the language upside down, and to take it apart and put it together wrong-end to, as it did. If anybody spoke the language so, or in prose wrote it so, they would certainly be a fool; but the Muses wished the sister to observe that every art existed by its convention, or by what in the moral world Ibsen would call its life-lie. If you looked at it from the colloquial standpoint, music was the absurdest thing in the world. In the orchestral part of an opera, for instance, there were more repetitions than in the scolding of the worst kind of shrew, and if you were to go about singing what you had to say, and singing it over and over, and stretching it out by runs and trills, or even expressing yourself in recitativo secco, it would simply set people wild. In painting it was worse, if anything: you had to make believe that things two inches high were life-size, and that there were relief and distance where there was nothing but a flat canvas, and that colors which were really like nothing in nature were natural. As for sculpture, it was too laughable for anything, whether you took it in bas-reliefs with persons stuck onto walls, half or three-quarters out, or in groups with people in eternal action; or in single figures, standing on one leg or holding out arms that would drop off if they were not supported by stone pegs; or sitting down outdoors bareheaded where they would take their deaths of cold, or get sun-struck, or lay up rheumatism to beat the band, in the rain and snow and often without a stitch of clothes on.

All this and more the Muses freely conceded to the position of the contrary-minded correspondent of the Easy Chair, and having behaved so handsomely, they felt justified in adding that her demand seemed to them perfectly preposterous. It was the very essence and office of poetry not to conform to “the mental tone and spirit of the times”; and though it might very well reflect the life, it must not reflect “the common thought of the day” upon pain of vulgarizing and annulling itself. Poetry was static in its nature, and its business was the interpretation of enduring beauty and eternal veracity. If it stooped in submission to any such expectation as that expressed, and dedicated itself to the crude vaticination of the transitory emotions and opinions, it had better turn journalism at once. It had its law, and its law was distinction of ideal and elevation of tendency, no matter what material it dealt with. It might deal with the commonest, the cheapest material, but always in such a way as to dignify and beautify the material.

Concerning the first point, that modern poetry was wrong to indulge all those inversions, those translocations, those ground and lofty syntactical tumblings which have mainly constituted poetic license, the ladies again relented, and allowed that there was much to say for what our correspondent said. In fact, they agreed, or agreed as nearly as nine ladies could, that it was perhaps time that poetry should, as it certainly might, write itself straightforwardly, with the verb in its true English place, and the adjective walking soberly before the noun; shunning those silly elisions like ne’er and o’er, and, above all, avoiding the weak and loathly omission of the definite article. Of the tinkle, by which they supposed the contrary-minded sister meant the rhyme, they said they could very well remember when there was no such thing in poetry; their native Greek had got on perfectly well without it, and even those poets at second-hand, the Romans. They observed that though Dante used it, Shakespeare did not, and Milton did not, in their greatest works; and a good half of the time the first-rate moderns managed very well with blank verse.

The Easy Chair did not like to dissent from these ladies, both because they were really great authorities and because it is always best to agree with ladies when you can. Besides, it would not have seemed quite the thing when they were inclining to this favorable view of their sister’s contrary-mindedness, to take sides against her. In short, the Easy Chair reserved its misgivings for some such very intimate occasion as this, when it could impart them without wounding the susceptibilities of others, or risking a painful snub for itself. But it appeared to the Chair that the Muses did not go quite far enough in justifying the convention, or the life-lie, by which poetry, as a form, existed. They could easily have proved that much of the mystical charm which differences poetry from prose resides in its license, its syntactical acrobatics, its affectations of diction, its elisions, its rhymes. As a man inverting his head and looking at the landscape between his legs gets an entirely new effect on the familiar prospect, so literature forsaking the wonted grammatical attitudes really achieves something richly strange by the novel and surprising postures permissible in verse. The phrases, the lines, the stanzas which the ear keeps lingering in its porches, loath to let them depart, are usually full of these licenses. They have a witchery which could be as little proved as denied; and when any poet proposes to forego them, and adhere rigidly to the law of prose in his rhythm, he practises a loyalty which is a sort of treason to his calling and will go far toward undoing him.

While the ladies of that club were talking, some such thoughts as these were in our mind, suggested by summer-long reading of a dear, delightful poet, altogether neglected in these days, who deserves to be known again wherever reality is prized or simplicity is loved. It is proof, indeed, how shallow was all the debate about realism and romanticism that the poetic tales of George Crabbe were never once alleged in witness of the charm which truth to condition and character has, in whatever form. But once, long before that ineffectual clamor arose, he was valued as he should be still. Edmund Burke was the first to understand his purpose and appreciate his work. He helped the poet not only with praises but with pounds till he could get upon his feet. He introduced Crabbe’s verse to his great friends, to Doctor Johnson, who perceived at once that he would go far; to Sir Joshua Reynolds, who felt the brother-artist in him; to the Lord Chancellor Thurlow, whose oaths were harder than his heart toward the fearlessy fearful young singer. The sympathy and admiration of the highest and the best followed him through his long life to his death. The great Mr. Fox loved him and his rhyme, and wished his tales to be read to him on the bed he never left alive. Earl Grey, Lord Holland, and the brilliant Canning wrote him letters of cordial acclaim; Walter Scott, the generous, the magnanimous, hailed him brother, and would always have his books by him; none of his poems appeared without the warmest welcome, the most discriminating and applausive criticism from Jeffrey, the first critic of his long day.

Crabbe had not only this exquisitely intelligent hearing, but he was accepted on his own terms, as a poet who saw so much beauty in simple and common life that he could not help painting it. He painted it in pieces of matchless fidelity to the fact, with nothing of flattery, but everything of charm in the likeness. His work is the enduring witness of persons, circumstances, customs, experiences utterly passed from the actual world, but recognizably true with every sincere reader. These tales of village life in England a hundred years ago are of an absolute directness and frankness. They blink nothing of the sordid, the mean, the vicious, the wicked in that life, from which they rarely rise in some glimpse of the state of the neighboring gentry, and yet they abound in beauty that consoles and encourages. They are full of keen analysis, sly wit, kindly humor, and of a satire too conscientious to bear the name; of pathos, of compassion, of reverence, while in unaffected singleness of ideal they are unsurpassed.

Will our contrary-minded correspondent believe that these studies, these finished pictures, which so perfectly “reflect the common life ... of the day,” are full of the license, the tinkle, the German divorce of verb and subject, the twisted grammatical sequence which her soul abhors in verse? Crabbe chose for his vehicle the heroic couplet in which English poetry had jog-trotted ever since the time of Pope, as it often had before; and he made it go as like Pope’s couplet as he could, with the same cæsura, the same antithetical balance, the same feats of rhetoric, the same inversions, and the same closes of the sense in each couplet. The most artificial and the most natural poets were at one in their literary convention. Yet such was the freshness of Crabbe’s impulse, such his divine authority to deal with material unemployed in English poetry before, that you forget all the affectations of the outward convention, or remember them only for a pleasure in the quaintness of their use for his purposes. How imperishable, anyway, is the interest of things important to the spirit, the fancy, and how largely does this interest lie in the freshness of the mind bringing itself to the things, how little in the novelty of the things! The demand for strangeness in the things themselves is the demand of the sophisticated mind: the mind which has lost its simplicity in the process of continuing unenlightened. It is this demand which betrays the mediocre mind of the Anglo-Saxon race, the sophistication of the English mind, and the obfuscation (which is sophistication at second-hand) of the American mind. The non-imaginative person is nowhere so much at home as in a voluntary exile; and this may be why it was sometime said that travel is the fool’s paradise. For such a person to realize anything the terms are that he shall go abroad, either into an alien scene or into a period of the past; then he can begin to have some pleasure. He must first of all get away from himself, and he is not to be blamed for that; any one else would wish to get away from him. His exaction is not a test of merit; it is merely the clew to a psychological situation which is neither so novel nor so important as to require of our hard-worked civilization the production of an order of more inspired criticism than it has worried along with hitherto.

XXV

A NORMAL HERO AND HEROINE OUT OF WORK

They sat together on a bench in the Park, far enough apart to distinguish themselves from the many other pairs who were but too obviously lovers. It could not be said quite that these two were actually lovers; but there was an air of passionate provisionality over and around them, a light such as in springtime seems to enfold the tree before it takes the positive color of bud or blossom; and, with an eye for literary material that had rarely failed him, he of the Easy Chair perceived that they were a hero and heroine of a kind which he instantly felt it a great pity he should not have met oftener in fiction of late. As he looked at them he was more and more penetrated by a delicate pathos in the fact that, such as he saw them, they belonged in their fine sort to the great host of the Unemployed. No one else might have seen it, but he saw, with that inner eye of his, which compassion suffused but did not obscure, that they were out of a job, and he was not surprised when he heard the young girl fetch a muted sigh and then say: “No, they don’t want us any more. I don’t understand why; it is very strange; but it is perfectly certain.”

“Yes, there’s no doubt of that,” the young man returned, in a despair tinged with resentment.

She was very pretty and he was handsome, and they were both tastefully dressed, with a due deference to fashion, yet with a personal qualification of the cut and color of their clothes which, if it promised more than it could fulfil in some ways, implied a modest self-respect, better than the arrogance of great social success or worldly splendor. She could have been the only daughter of a widowed father in moderate circumstances; or an orphan brought up by a careful aunt, or a duteous sister in a large family of girls, with whom she shared the shelter of a wisely ordered, if somewhat crowded, home; or she could have been a serious student of any of the various arts and sciences which girls study now in an independence compatible with true beauty of behavior. He might have been a young lawyer or doctor or business man; or a painter or architect; or a professor in some college or a minister in charge of his first parish. What struck the observer in them and pleased him was that they seemed of that finer American average which is the best, and, rightly seen, the most interesting phase of civilized life yet known.

“I sometimes think,” the girl resumed, in the silence of her companion, “that I made a mistake in my origin or my early education. It’s a great disadvantage, in fiction nowadays, for a girl to speak grammatically, as I always do, without any trace of accent or dialect. Of course, if I had been high-born or low-born in the olden times, somewhere or other, I shouldn’t have to be looking for a place now; or if I had been unhappily married, or divorced, or merely separated from my husband, the story-writers would have had some use for me. But I have tried always to be good and nice and lady-like, and I haven’t been in a short story for ages.”

“Is it so bad as that?” the young man asked, sadly.

“Quite. If I could only have had something askew in my heredity, I know lots of authoresses who would have jumped at me. I can’t do anything wildly adventurous in the Middle Ages or the Revolutionary period, because I’m so afraid; but I know that in the course of modern life I’ve always been fairly equal to emergencies, and I don’t believe that I should fail in case of trouble, or that if it came to poverty I should be ashamed to share the deprivations that fell to my lot. I don’t think I’m very selfish; I would be willing to stay in town all summer if an author wanted me, and I know I could make it interesting for his readers. I could marry an English nobleman if it was really necessary, and, if I didn’t like to live in England because I was fond of my own country, I believe I could get him to stay here half the time with me; and that would appeal to a large class. I don’t know whether I would care to be rescued a great deal; it would depend upon what it was from. But I could stand a great deal of pain if need be, and I hope that if it came to anything like right or wrong I should act conscientiously. In society, I shouldn’t mind any amount of dancing or dining or teaing, and I should be willing to take my part in the lighter athletics. But,” she ended, as she began, with a sigh, “I’m not wanted.”

“Yes, I see what you mean,” the young man said, with a thoughtful knot between his brows. “I’m not wanted myself, at present, in the short stories; but in the last dozen or so where I had an engagement I certainly didn’t meet you; and it is pleasant to be paired off in a story with a heroine who has the instincts and habits of a lady. Of course, a hero is only something in an author’s fancy, and I’ve no right to be exacting; but it does go against me to love a girl who ropes cattle, or a woman who has a past, or a husband, or something of the kind. I always do my best for the author, but I can’t forget that I’m a gentleman, and it’s difficult to win a heroine when the very idea of her makes you shudder. I sometimes wonder how the authors would like it themselves if they had to do what they expect of us in that way. They’re generally very decent fellows, good husbands and fathers, who have married lady-like girls and wouldn’t think of associating with a shady or ignorant person.”

“The authoresses are quite as inconsistent,” the professional heroine rejoined. “They wouldn’t speak to the kind of young men whom they expect a heroine to be passionately in love with. They must know how very oddly a girl feels about people who are outside of the world she’s been brought up in. It isn’t enough that a man should be very noble at heart and do grand things, or save your life every now and then, or be masterful and use his giant will to make you in love with him. I don’t see why they can’t let one have, now and then, the kind of husbands they get for themselves. For my part, I should like always to give my heart to a normal, sensible, well-bred, conscientious, agreeable man who could offer me a pleasant home — I wouldn’t mind the suburbs; and I could work with him and work for him till I dropped — the kind of man that the real world seems to be so full of. I’ve never had a fair chance to show what was in me; I’ve always been placed in such a false position. Now I have no position at all, not even a false one!”

Her companion was silent for a while. Then he said: “Yes, they all seem, authors and authoresses both, to lose sight of the fact that the constitution of our society is more picturesque, more dramatic, more poetical than any in the world. We can have the play of all the passions and emotions in ordinary, innocent love-making that other peoples can have only on the worst conditions; and yet the story-writers won’t avail themselves of the beauty that lies next to their hands. They go abroad for impossible circumstances, or they want to bewitch ours with the chemistry of all sorts of eccentric characters, exaggerated incentives, morbid propensities, pathological conditions, or diseased psychology. As I said before, I know I’m only a creature of the storyteller’s fancy, and a creature out of work at that; but I believe I was imagined in a good moment — I’m sure you were — and I should like an engagement in an honest, wholesome situation. I think I could do creditable work in it.”

“I know you could,” the heroine rejoined, fervently, almost tenderly, so that it seemed to the listener there was an involuntary rapprochement of their shadowy substances on the bench where they floated in a sitting posture. “I don’t want to be greedy; I believe in living and letting live. I think the abnormal has just as good a right to be in the stories as the normal; but why shut the normal out altogether? What I should like to ask the short-story writers is whether they and their readers are so bored with themselves and the people they know in the real world that they have no use for anything like its average in their fiction. It’s impossible for us to change—”

“I shouldn’t wish you to change,” the hero said, so fondly that the witness trembled for something more demonstrative.

“Thank you! But what I mean is, couldn’t they change a little? Couldn’t they give us another trial? They’ve been using the abnormal, in some shape or other, so long that I should think they would find a hero and heroine who simply fell in love at a dance or a dinner, or in a house-party or at a picnic, and worked out their characters to each other, through the natural worry and difficulty, and pleasure and happiness, till they got married — a relief from, well, the other thing. I’m sure if they offered me the chance, I could make myself attractive to their readers, and I believe I should have the charm of novelty.”

“You would have more than the charm of novelty,” the hero said, and the witness trembled again for the convenances which one so often sees offended on the benches in the Park. But then he remembered that these young people were avowedly nice, and that they were morally incapable of misbehavior. “And for a time, at least, I believe you — I believe we, for I must necessarily be engaged with you — would succeed. The difficulty would be to get the notion of our employment to the authors.” It was on the listener’s tongue to say that he thought he could manage that, when the hero arrested him with the sad misgiving, “But they would say we were commonplace, and that would kill the chance of our ever having a run.”

A tremendous longing filled the witness, a potent desire to rescue this engaging pair from the dismay into which they fell at the fatal word. “No, no!” he conjured them. “Not commonplace. A judicious paragraph anticipative of your reappearance could be arranged, in which you could be hailed as the normal hero and heroine, and greeted as a grateful relief from the hackneyed freaks and deformities of the prevalent short story, or the impassioned paper-doll pattern of the mediæval men and maidens, or the spotted and battered figures of the studies in morbid analysis which pass for fiction in the magazines. We must get that luminous word normal before the reading public at once, and you will be rightly seen in its benign ray and recognized from the start — yes! in advance of the start — for what you are: types of the loveliness of our average life, the fairest blossoms of that faith in human nature which has flourished here into the most beautiful and glorious civilization of all times. With us the average life is enchanting, the normal is the exquisite. Have patience, have courage; your time is coming again!”

It seemed to him that the gentle shapes wavered in his vehement breath, and he could not realize that in their alien realm they could not have heard a word he uttered. They remained dreamily silent, as if he had not spoken, and then the heroine said: “Perhaps we shall have to wait for a new school of short-story writers before we can get back into the magazines. Some beginner must see in us what has always pleased: the likeness to himself or herself, the truth to nature, the loyalty to the American ideal of happiness. He will find that we easily and probably end well, and that we’re a consolation and refuge for readers, who can take heart from our happy dénouements, when they see a family resemblance in us, and can reasonably hope that if they follow our examples they will share our blessings. Authors can’t really enjoy themselves in the company of those degenerates, as I call them. They’re mostly as young and right-principled and well-behaved as ourselves, and, if they could get to know us, we should be the best of friends. They would realize that there was plenty of harmless fun, as well as love, in the world, and that there was lots of good-luck.”

“Like ours, now, with no work and no prospect of it?” he returned, in his refusal to be persuaded, yet ready to be comforted.

Having set out on that road, she would not turn back; she persisted, like any woman who is contraried, no matter how far she ends from her first position: “Yes, like ours now. For this is probably the dark hour before the dawn. We must wait.”

“And perish in the mean time?”

“Oh, we shall not perish,” she responded, heroinically. “It’s not for nothing that we are immortal,” and as she spoke she passed her translucent hand through his arm, and, rising, they drifted off together and left the emissary of the Easy Chair watching them till they mixed with the mists under the trees in the perspective of the Mall.

OTHER ESSAYS

I

AUTUMN IN THE COUNTRY AND CITY

In the morning the trees stood perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet. Not a pulse of air stirred their stricken foliage, but the leaves left the spray and dripped silently, vertically down, with a faint, ticking sound. They fell like the tears of a grief which is too inward for any other outward sign; an absent grief, almost self-forgetful. By-and-by, softly, very softly, as Nature does things when she emulates the best Art and shuns the showiness and noisiness of the second-best, the wind crept in from the leaden sea, which turned iron under it, corrugated iron. Then the trees began to bend, and writhe, and sigh, and moan; and their leaves flew through the air, and blew and scuttled over the grass, and in an hour all the boughs were bare. The summer, which had been living till then and dying, was now dead.

That was the reason why certain people who had been living with it, and seemed dying in it, were now in a manner dead with it, so that their ghosts were glad to get back to town, where the ghosts of thousands and hundreds of thousands of others were hustling in the streets and the trolleys and subways and elevateds, and shops and factories and offices, and making believe to be much more alive than they were in the country. Yet the town, the haunt of those harassed and hurried spectres, who are not without their illusory hilarity, their phantasmal happiness, has a charm which we of the Easy Chair always feel, on first returning to it in the autumn, and which the representative of the family we are imagining finds rather an impassioned pleasure in. He came on to New York, while the others lingered in a dim Bostonian limbo, and he amused himself very well, in a shadowy sort, looking at those other shades who had arrived in like sort, or different, and were there together with him in those fine days just preceding the election; after which the season broke in tears again, and the autumn advanced another step toward winter.

There is no moment of the New York year which is more characteristic of it than that mid-autumnal moment, which the summer and the winter are equally far from. Mid-May is very well, and the weather then is perfect, but that is a moment pierced with the unrest of going or getting ready to go away. The call of the eld in Europe, or the call of the wild in Newport, has already depopulated our streets of what is richest and naturally best in our city life; the shops, indeed, show a fevered activity in the near-richest and near-best who are providing for their summer wants at mountain or sea-shore; but the theatres are closing like fading flowers, and shedding their chorus-girls on every outward breeze; the tables d’hôte express a relaxed enterprise in the nonchalance of the management and service; the hotels yawn wearily from their hollow rooms; the greengroceries try to mask the barrenness of their windows in a show of tropic or semi-tropic fruits; the provision-men merely disgust with their retarded displays of butcher’s meats and poultry.

BROADWAY AT NIGHT

But with what a difference the mid-autumn of the town welcomes its returners! Ghosts, we have called them, mainly to humor a figure we began with, but they are ghosts rather in the meaning of revenants, which is a good meaning enough. They must be a very aged or very stupid sort of revenants if their palingenetic substance does not thrill at the first nightly vision of Broadway, of that fairy flare of electric lights, advertising whiskeys and actresses and beers, and luring the beholder into a hundred hotels and theatres and restaurants. It is now past the hour of roof-gardens with their songs and dances, but the vaudeville is in full bloom, and the play-houses are blossoming in the bills of their new comedies and operas and burlesques. The pavements are filled, but not yet crowded, with people going to dinner at the tables d’hôte; the shop windows glitter and shine, and promise a delight for the morrow which the morrow may or may not realize.

But as yet the town is not replete to choking, as it will be later, when those who fancy they constitute the town have got back to it from their Europes, their Newports, their Bar Harbors, their Lenoxes, their Tuxedos, weary of scorning delights and living laborious days in that round of intellectual and moral events duly celebrated in the society news of the Sunday papers. Fifth Avenue abounds in automobiles but does not yet super-abound; you do not quite take your life in your hand in crossing the street at those corners where there is no policeman’s hand to put it in. Everywhere are cars, carts, carriages; and the motorist whirs through the intersecting streets and round the corners, bent on suicide or homicide, and the kind old trolleys and hansoms that once seemed so threatening have almost become so many arks of safety from the furious machines replacing them. But a few short years ago the passer on the Avenue could pride himself on a count of twenty automobiles in his walk from Murray Hill to the Plaza; now he can easily number hundreds, without an emotion of self-approval.

But their abundance is only provisional, a mere forecast of the superabundance to come. All things are provisional, all sights, all sounds, and this forms the peculiar charm of the hour, its haunting and winning charm. If you take the omnibus-top to be trundled whiningly up to one of the farther east-side entrances of the Park, and then dismount and walk back to the Plaza through it, you are even more keenly aware of the suspensive quality of the time. The summer, which you left for dead by mountain or sea-shore, stirs with lingering consciousness in the bland air of the great pleasance. Many leaves are yet green on the trees, and where they are not green and not there they are gay on the grass under the trees. There are birds, not, to be sure, singing, but cheerfully chirping; and there are occasional blazons of courageous flowers; the benches beside the walks, which the northern blasts will soon sweep bare, are still kept by the lovers and loafers who have frequented them ever since the spring, and by the nurses, who cumber the footway before them with their perambulators. The fat squirrels waddle over the asphalt, and cock the impudent eye of the sturdy beggar at the passer whom they suspect of latent peanuts; it is high carnival of the children with hoops and balls; it is the supreme moment of the saddle-donkeys in the by-paths, and the carriage-goats in the Mall, and of the rowboats on the ponds, which presently will be withdrawn for their secret hibernation, where no man can find them out. When the first snow flies, even while it is yet poising for flight in the dim pits of air, all these delights will have vanished, and the winter, which will claim the city for its own through a good four months, will be upon it.

Always come back, therefore, if you must come at all, about the beginning of November, and if you can manage to take in Election Day, and especially Election Night, it will not be a bad notion. New York has five saturnalia every year: New Year’s Night, Decoration Day, Fourth of July, Election Night, and Thanksgiving, and not the least of these is Election Night. If it is a right first Tuesday of November, the daytime wind will be veering from west to south and back, sun and cloud will equally share the hours between them, and a not unnatural quiet, as of political passions hushed under the blanket of the Australian ballot, will prevail. The streets will be rather emptied than filled, and the litter of straw and scrap-paper, and the ordure and other filth of the great slattern town, will blow agreeably about under your feet and into your eyes and teeth. But with the falling of the night there will be a rise of the urban spirits; the sidewalks will thicken with citizens of all ages and sexes and nations; and if you will then seek some large centre for the cinematographic dissemination of the election news, you will find yourself one of a multitude gloating on the scenes of comedy and tragedy thrown up on the canvas to stay your impatience for the returns. Along the curbstones are stationed wagons for the sale of the wind and string instruments, whose raw, harsh discords of whistling and twanging will begin with the sight of the vote from the first precinct. Meantime policemen, nervously fondling their clubs in their hands, hang upon the fringes of the crowd, which is yet so good-natured that it seems to have no impulse but to lift children on its shoulders and put pretty girls before it, and caress old women and cripples into favorable positions, so that they may see better. You will wish to leave it before the clubbing begins, and either go home to the slumbers which the whistling and twanging will duly attend; or join the diners going into or coming out of the restaurants, or the throngs strolling down into the fairy realms of Broadway, under the flare of the whiskeys and the actresses.

At such a time it is best to be young, but it is not so very bad to be old, for the charm of the hour, the air, and the place is such that even the heart of age must rise a little at it. What the night may really be, if it is not positively raining, you “do not know or need to know.” Those soft lamps overhead, which might alike seem let garlanding down from the vault above or flowering up from the gulfs below out of a still greater pyrotechnic richness, supply the defect, if there is any, of moon and stars. Only the air is actual, the air of the New York night, which is as different from that of the London night as from that of the Paris night, or, for all we know, the St. Petersburg night. At times we have fancied in its early autumnal tones something Florentine, something Venetian, but, after all, it is not quite either, even when the tones of these are crudest. It is the subtlest, the most penetrating expression of the New York temperament; but what that is, who shall say? That mystic air is haunted little from the past, for properly speaking there never was a city so unhistorical in temperament. A record of civic corruption, running back to the first servants of the Dutch Companies, does not constitute municipal history, and our part in national events from the time we felt the stirrings of national consciousness has not been glorious, as these have not been impressive. Of New York’s present at any given moment you wish to say in her patient-impatient slang, “Forget it, forget it.” There remains only the future from which she can derive that temperamental effect in her night air; but, again, what that is, who shall say? If any one were so daring, he might say it was confidence modified by anxiety; a rash expectation of luck derived from immunity for past transgression; the hopes of youth shot with youth’s despairs: not sweet, innocent youth, but youth knowing and experienced, though not unwilling to shun evil because of the bad morrow it sometimes brings. No other city under the sun, we doubt, is so expressive of that youth: that modern youth, able, agile, eager, audacious; not the youth of the poets, but the youth of the true, the grim realists.

ELECTION-NIGHT CROWDS

Something, a faint, faint consciousness of this, visits even the sad heart of age on any New York night when it is not raining too hard, and one thinks only of getting indoors, where all nights are alike. But mostly it comes when the autumn is dreaming toward winter in that interlude of the seasons which we call Indian Summer. It is a stretch of time which we have handsomely bestowed upon our aborigines, in compensation for the four seasons we have taken from them, like some of those Reservations which we have left them in lieu of the immeasurable lands we have alienated. It used to be longer than it is now; it used to be several weeks long; in the sense of childhood, it was almost months. It is still qualitatively the same, and it is more than any other time expressive of the New York temperament, perhaps because we have honored in the civic ideal the polity of our Indian predecessors, and in Tammany and its recurrently triumphant braves, have kept their memory green. But if this is not so, the spiritual fact remains, and under the sky of the Election Night you feel New York as you do in no other hour. The sense extends through the other autumn nights till that night, sure to come, when the pensive weather breaks in tears, and the next day it rains and rains, and the streets stream with the flood, and the dull air reeks with a sort of inner steam, hot, close, and sticky as a brother: a brother whose wants are many and whose resources are few. The morning after the storm, there will be a keen thrill in the air, keen but wholesome and bracing as a good resolution and not necessarily more lasting. The asphalt has been washed as clean as a renovated conscience, and the city presses forward again to the future in which alone it has its being, with the gay confidence of a sinner who has forgiven himself his sins and is no longer sorry for them.

After that interlude, when the streets of the Advanced Vaudeville, which we know as New York, begin again and continue till the Chasers come in late May, there will be many other sorts of weather, but none so characteristic of her. There will be the sort of weather toward the end of January, when really it seems as if nothing else could console him for the intolerable freezing and thawing, the snow upon snow, the rain upon rain, the winds that soak him and the winds that shrivel him, and the suns that mock him from a subtropic sky through subarctic air. We foresee him then settling into his arm-chair, while the wind whistles as naturally as the wind in the theatre around the angles of his lofty flat, and drives the snow of the shredded paper through the air or beats it in soft clots against the pane. He turns our page, and as he catches our vague drift, before yielding himself wholly to its allure, he questions, as readers like to do, whether the writer is altogether right in his contention that the mid-autumnal moment is the most characteristic moment of the New York year. Is not the mid-winter moment yet more characteristic? He conjures up, in the rich content of his indoor remoteness, the vision of the vile street below his flat, banked high with the garnered heaps of filthy snow, which alternately freeze and thaw, which the rain does not wash nor the wind blow away, and which the shredded-paper flakes are now drifting higher. He sees the foot-passers struggling under their umbrellas toward the avenues where the reluctant trolleys pause jarringly for them, and the elevated trains roar along the trestle overhead; where the saloon winks a wicked eye on every corner; where the signs of the whiskeys and actresses flare through the thickened night; and the cab tilts and rocks across the trolley rails, and the crowds of hotel-sojourners seek the shelter of the theatres, and all is bleak and wet and squalid. In more respectful vision he beholds the darkened mansions of the richest and best, who have already fled the scene of their brief winter revel and are forcing the spring in their Floridas, their Egypts, their Rivieras. He himself remains midway between the last fall and the next spring; and perhaps he decides against the writer, as the perverse reader sometimes will, and holds that this hour of suspense and misgiving is the supreme, the duodecimal hour of the metropolitan dial. He may be right; who knows? New York’s hours are all characteristic; and the hour whose mystical quality we have been trying to intimate is already past, and we must wait another year before we can put it to the test again; wait till the trees once more stand perfectly still: yellow, yellowish-green, crimson, russet, and the wind comes up and blows them bare, and yet another summer is dead, and the mourners, the ghosts, the revenants have once more returned to town.

II

PERSONAL AND EPISTOLARY ADDRESSES

A constant reader of the Easy Chair has come to it with a difficulty which, at the generous Christmas-tide, we hope his fellow-readers will join us in helping solve: they may, if they like, regard it as a merry jest of the patron saint of the day, a sort of riddle thrown upon the table at the general feast for each to try his wits upon

“Across the walnuts and the wine.”

“How,” this puzzled spirit has asked, “shall I address a friend of mine who, besides being a person of civil condition, with a right to the respect that we like to show people of standing in directing our letters to them, has the distinction of being a doctor of philosophy, of letters, and of laws by the vote of several great universities? Shall I greet him as, say, Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes, or Smythe Johnes, Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D., or simply Mr. Smythe Johnes?”

Decidedly, we should answer, to begin with, not “Mr. Smythe Johnes” if you wish to keep the finest bloom on your friendship with any man who knows the world. He will much prefer being addressed simply “Smythe Johnes,” with his street and number, for he feels himself classed by your “Mr. Smythe Johnes” with all those Mr. Smythe Johneses whom he loves and honors in their quality of tradesmen and working-men, but does not hold of quite the same social rank as himself. After our revolt in essentials from the English in the eighteenth century, we are now conforming more and more in the twentieth to their usages in non-essentials, and the English always write Smythe Johnes, Esq., or Dr. Smythe Johnes or the like, unless Mr. Smythe Johnes is in trade or below it. They, indeed, sometimes carry their scruple so far that they will address him as Mr. Smythe Johnes at his place of business, and Smythe Johnes, Esq., at his private residence.

The English, who like their taffy thick and slab, and who, if one of them happens to be the Earl of Tolloller, are not richly enough satisfied to be so accosted by letter, but exact some such address as The Right Honorable the Earl of Tolloller, all like distinctions in their taffy, and are offended if you give them a commoner sort than they think their due. But the Americans, who pretend to a manlier self-respect, had once pretty generally decided upon Mr. Smythe Johnes as the right direction for his letters. They argued that Esquire was the proper address for lawyers, apparently because lawyers are so commonly called Squire in the simpler life. In the disuse of the older form of Armiger they forgot that inter arma silent leges, and that Esquire was logically as unfit for lawyers as for civil doctors, divines, or mediciners. He of the Easy Chair, when an editor long ago, yielded to the prevalent American misrendering for a time, and indiscriminately addressed all his contributors as “Mr.” One of them, the most liberal of them in principle, bore the ignominy for about a year, and then he protested. After that the young editor (he was then almost as young as any one now writing deathless fiction) indiscriminately addressed his contributors as Esq. Yet he had an abiding sense of the absurdity in directing letters to John G. Whittier, Esq., for if the poet was truly a Friend and an abhorrer of war, he could not be hailed Armiger without something like insult.

With doctors of divinity the question is not so vexing or vexed; but it is said that of late a lion is rising in the way of rightly addressing doctors of medicine. If you wish to be attended by a physician who pays all visits after nightfall in evening dress, it is said that you are now to write Smythe Johnes, M.D., Esq., and not Dr. Smythe Johnes, as formerly. In England, the source of all our ceremonial woes, you cannot call a surgeon “doctor” without offence; he is Mr. Smythe Johnes when spoken to, but whether he is Mr. Smythe Johnes through the post, Heaven knows.

It is a thousand pities that when we cut ourselves off from that troubled source politically, we did not dam it up in all the things of etiquette. We indeed struck for freedom and sense at the very highest point, and began at once to write George Washington, President, as we still write William H. Taft, President. The Chief Magistrate is offered no taffy in our nation, or perhaps the word President is held to be taffy enough and to spare; for only the Governor of Massachusetts is legally even so much as Excellency. Yet by usage you are expected to address all ambassadors and ministers as Excellencies, and all persons in public office from members of Congress and of the Cabinet down to the lowest legislative or judicial functionaries as Honorables. This simplifies the task of directing envelopes to them, and, if a man once holds military rank in any peace establishment, he makes life a little easier for his correspondents by remaining General, or Captain, or Admiral, or Commander. You cannot Mister him, and you cannot Esquire him, and there is, therefore, no question as to what you shall superscribe him.

A score of years ago two friends, now, alas! both doctors of philosophy, of letters, and of laws, agreed to superscribe their letters simply Smythe Johnes and Johnes Smythe respectively, without any vain prefix or affix. They kept up this good custom till in process of time they went to Europe for prolonged sojourns, and there corrupted their manners, so that when they came home they began addressing each other as Esq., and have done so ever since. Neither is any the better for the honors they exchange on the envelopes they do not look at, and doubtless if mankind could be brought to the renunciation of the vain prefixes and affixes which these friends once disused the race would be none the worse for it, but all the better. One prints Mr. Smythe Johnes on one’s visiting-card because it passes through the hands of a menial who is not to be supposed for a moment to announce plain Smythe Johnes; but it is the United States post-office which delivers the letters of Smythe Johnes, and they can suffer no contamination from a service which conveys the letters of plain William H. Taft to him with merely the explanatory affix of President, lest they should go to some other William H. Taft.

Undoubtedly the address of a person by the name with which he was christened can convey no shadow of disrespect. The Society of Friends understood this from the beginning, and they felt that they were wanting in no essential civility when they refused name-honor as well as hat-honor to all and every. They remained covered in the highest presences, and addressed each by his Christian name, without conveying slight; so that a King and Queen of England, who had once questioned whether they could suffer themselves to be called Thy Majesty instead of Your Majesty by certain Quakers, found it no derogation of their dignity to be saluted as Friend George and Friend Charlotte. The signory of the proudest republic in the world held that their family names were of sufficiency to which titles could add nothing, and the Venetian who called himself Loredano, or Gradenigo, or Morosini, or Renier, or Rezzonico did not ask to be called differently. In our own day a lady of the ancient and splendid family of the Peruzzi in Florence denied that the title of count existed in it or need exist: “Ognuno può essere conte: Peruzzi, no.” (“Any one may be a count; but not a Peruzzi.”) In like manner such names as Lincoln and Franklin, and Washington and Grant, and Longfellow and Bryant could have gained nothing by Mr. before them or Esq. after them. Doctor Socrates or Doctor Seneca would not have descended to us in higher regard with the help of these titles; and Rear-Admiral Themistocles or Major-General Epaminondas could not have had greater glory from the survival of parchments so directed to them.

The Venetian nobles who disdained titles came in process of time to be saluted as Illustrissimo; but in process of time this address when used orally began to shed its syllables till Illustrissimo became Lustrissimo, and then Strissimo, and at last Striss, when perhaps the family name again sufficed. So with us, Doctor has familiarly become “Doc,” and Captain, “Cap,” until one might rather have no title at all. Mr. itself is a grotesque malformation of a better word, and Miss is a silly shortening of the fine form of Mistress. This, pronounced Misses, can hardly add dignity to the name of the lady addressed, though doubtless it cannot be disused till we are all of the Society of Friends. The popular necessity has resulted in the vulgar vocative use of Lady, but the same use of Gentleman has not even a vulgar success, though it is not unknown. You may say, with your hand on the bell-strap, “Step lively, lady,” but you cannot say, “Step lively, gentleman,” and the fine old vocative “Sir” is quite obsolete. We ourselves remember it on the tongues of two elderly men who greeted each other with “Sir!” and “Sir!” when they met; and “Step lively, sir,” might convey the same delicate regard from the trolley conductor as “Step lively, lady.” Sir might look very well on the back of a letter; Smythe Johnes, Sir, would on some accounts be preferable to Smythe Johnes, Esq., and, oddly enough, it would be less archaic.

Such of our readers as have dined with the late Queen or the present King of England will recall how much it eased the yoke of ceremony to say to the sovereign, “Yes, ma’am,” or “Yes, sir,” as the use is, instead of your Majesty. But to others you cannot say “Yes, ma’am,” or “Yes, sir,” unless you are in that station of life to which you would be very sorry it had pleased God to call you. Yet these forms seem undeniably fit when used by the young to their elders, if the difference of years is great enough.

The difficulty remains, however. You cannot as yet write on an envelope, Smythe Johnes, Sir, or Mary Johnes, Lady; and, in view of this fact, we find ourselves no nearer the solution of our constant reader’s difficulty than we were at first. The Socialists, who wish to simplify themselves and others, would address Mr. Johnes as Comrade Smythe Johnes, but could they address Mrs. Johnes as Comradess? We fancy not; besides, Comrade suggests arms and bloodshed, which is hardly the meaning of the red flag of brotherhood, and at the best Comrade looks affected and sounds even more so. Friend would be better, but orally, on the lips of non-Quakers, it has an effect of patronage, though no one could rightly feel slight in a letter addressed to him as Friend Smythe Johnes.

It is wonderful to consider how the ancients apparently got on without the use of any sort of prefix or affix to their names on the roll of parchment or fold of papyrus addressed to them. For all we know, Cæsar was simply C. Julius Cæsar to his correspondents, and Pericles was yet more simply Pericles to the least of his fellow-citizens. These historical personages may have had the number of their houses inscribed on their letters; or Pericles might have had Son of Xanthippus added to his name for purposes of identification; but apparently he managed quite as well as our Presidents, without anything equivalent to Excellency or Hon. or Mr. or Esq. To be sure, with the decline of

“The glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome,”

name-honors crept in more and more. It was then not only politer but much safer to address your petition To the Divine Domitian, or To the Divine Nero, than to greet those emperors by the mere given names which were not yet Christian; probably it would not have been enough to add Cæsar to the last name, though Cæsar seems to have finally served the turn of Esq., for all the right that the emperors had to bear it. In the Eastern Empire, we are not ready to say what was the correct style for imperial dignitaries; but among the sovereigns who divided the Roman state and inherited its splendor, some rulers came to be sacred majesties, though this is still a sensible remove from divine.

However, our present difficulty is with that vast average who in common parlance are Mr. and Mrs. Smythe Johnes. How shall they be styled on the backs of their letters? How shall Mrs. Smythe Johnes especially, in signing herself Mary Johnes, indicate that she is not Miss Mary but Mrs. Smythe Johnes? When she is left a widow, how soon does she cease to be Mrs. Smythe Johnes and become Mrs. Mary? Is it requisite to write in the case of any literary doctorate, Smythe Johnes, LL.D., or Litt.D., or Ph.D., or is it sufficient to write Dr. before his name? In the case of a divine, do you put Rev. Dr. before the name, or Rev. before it and D.D. after it? These are important questions, or, if they are not important, they are at least interesting. Among the vast mass of unceremonied, or call it unmannered, Americans the receiver of a letter probably knows no better than the sender how it should be addressed; but in the rarer case in which he does know, his self-respect or his self-love is wounded if it is misaddressed. It is something like having your name misspelled, though of course not so bad as that, quite; and every one would be glad to avoid the chance of it.

The matter is very delicate and can hardly be managed by legislation, as it was on the point of our pen to suggest it should be. The first French Republic, one and indivisible, decreed a really charming form of address, which could be used without offence to the self-love or the self-respect of any one. Citoyen for all men and Citoyenne for all women was absolutely tasteful, modest, and dignified; but some things, though they are such kindred things, cannot be done as well as others. The same imaginative commonwealth invented a decimal chronology, and a new era, very handy and very clear; but the old week of seven days came back and replaced the week of ten days, and the Year of our Lord resumed the place of the Year of the Republic, as Monsieur and Madame returned victorious over Citoyen and Citoyenne. Yet the reform of weights and measures, when once established, continued, and spread from France to most other countries — to nearly all, indeed, less stupid than Great Britain and the United States — so that the whole civilized world now counts in grammes and metres. What can be the fine difference? Here is a pretty inquiry for the psychologist, who has an opportunity to prove himself practically useful. Is it that grammes and metres are less personal than week-days and addresses? That can hardly be, or else the Society of Friends could not have so absolutely substituted First Day and Second Day, etc., for the old heathen names of our week-days, and could not have successfully refused all name-honor whatsoever in addressing their fellow-mortals.

But titles have come back full-tide in the third French Republic, one and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest the experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the letters of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board, something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we should not like to be included in a committee whose members must be prepared to take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety. The lady’s condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband’s given names could be added.

III

DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER

Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not last very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes, and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand, whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described as “supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes.” It is not even certain just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this authority; what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no white male citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there unless clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket known to us as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the guest, the paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper’s judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in anything but a dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses were not barred against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque. It is possible that the managers imagined themselves acquiring merit with that large body of our vulgar who demand exclusiveness by their avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter. But at this distance of time no one can confidently say how the incident was closed with respect to the pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud tavern. Whether the wayfarer, forced by the conditions of travel upon the company of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in the public banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or must take his evening meal in his room, with a penalty in the form of an extra charge for service, nowise appears.

What is apparent from the whole affair is that the old ideal of one’s inn, as a place where one shall take one’s ease, has perished in the evolution of the magnificent American hotel which we have been maliciously seeking to minify in the image of its Old World germ. One may take one’s ease in one’s hotel only if one is dressed to the mind of the hotel-keeper, or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is more important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate, tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice, would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like, with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest hotels in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority of his paying guests than some such authority, for they could wish nothing so much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the example of the real characters in the social drama which they were impersonating. They had the stage and the scenery; they had spared no expense in their costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and for the space of their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of aristocratic society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. After that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra of another theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of their colossal columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour when they shone primarily just like the paying guests in the finest English hotel, and secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable dinners of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private houses in London.

Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing lower than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question which we have been holding back by main force from the beginning, and which now persists in precipitating itself in our peaceful page. It is a question which merits wider and closer study than we can give it, and it will, we hope, find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom of the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eugenio in a recent experience of his at a famous seaside resort which does not remit its charm even in the heart of winter, and which with the first tremor of the opening spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers and the subways with an irresistible appeal. We need not further specify the place, but it is necessary to add that it draws not only the jaded or sated New-Yorker, but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do people from every part of their country who have got bored out with their happy homes and want a few days’ or a few weeks’ change. One may not perhaps meet a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade, or at least more distinguished than one’s own; with the best will in the world to find such figures, Eugenio could count but three or four: a tall, alert, correct man or two; an electly fashioned, perfectly set-up, dominant woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy of a set in some unquestionable world. But there was obvious riches aplenty, and aplenty of the kind wholesomeness of the good, true, intelligent, and heaven-bound virtue of what we must begin to call our middle class, offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there the effect of champagne in the hair, which deceived no one but the wearer, was to be noted; here and there, high-rolling, a presence with the effect of something more than champagne in the face loomed in the perspective through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, immensely far, the greater number of his fellow-frequenters of the charming promenade were simple, domestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio himself, of a varying simplicity indeed, but always of a simplicity. They were the stuff with which his fancy (he never presumed to call it his imagination) had hitherto delighted to play, fondly shaping out of the collective material those lineaments and expressions which he hoped contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe.

The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted with his kind for half a century of æsthetic consciousness, and now had he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not this question itself proof that his mind was still importunately active? If that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases about his like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. “No,” he wrote back, “it is not that you have seen all these people, and that they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the last twenty years, society in America has reached its goal, has ‘arrived,’ and is creating no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of which are genuine, some only false peaks without solid rock foundations.”

Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling, but it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which his fancy — never imagination — began to play forward with the vivacity of that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of eighty-five. If all this were true — and its truth shone the more distinctly from a ground of potential dissent — was not there the stuff in the actual conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to be, now that the first glow of his prime was past, might fashion an image of our decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so perfectly dull and uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly glowed to realize, was opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had been easy — how easy it had been! — to catch the likeness of those formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted palace and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young republic, when men forgot themselves in the struggle with the wild continent, were past; true, the years were gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing from her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind her in lasting subjection gave to fiction industrial heroes fierce and bold as those of classic fable or mediæval romance. But there remained the days of the years which shall apparently have no end, but shall abound forever in an inexhaustible wealth of the sort wishing not so much to rise itself as to keep down and out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang.

The sort of type which would represent this condition would be vainly sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either at home or abroad, with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which culture is contemptible; which can feel the theatre, but not literature; which has passed from the horse to the automobile; which has its moral and material yacht, cruising all social coasts and making port in none where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its own. Even in trying to understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim, the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that the Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the Noble Savage have come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave and the Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that the Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted, hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that the Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of unapproached delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has never yet taken the eyes of wonder.

We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any genre result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that Bartholdi’s colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving emotion of an immense hotel dining-room, all in décolletée and frac paré, the old, simple-lived American, wearing a sack-coat and a colored shirt, shall be led out between the eminent innkeeper and the head waiter and delivered over to the police to be conducted in ignominy to the nearest Italian table d’hôte. The national character, on the broad level of equality which fiction once delighted to paint, no longer exists, but if a deeper, a richer, a more enduring monotony replaces it, we have no fear but some genius will arrive and impart the effect of the society which has arrived.

IV

THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH

As Eugenio — we will call him Eugenio: a fine impersonal name — grew older, and became, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known for his writings, he found himself increasingly the subject of appeal from young writers who wished in their turn to become, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known. This is not, indeed, stating the case with the precision which we like. His correspondents were young enough already, but they were sometimes not yet writers; they had only the ambition to be writers. Our loose formulation of the fact, however, will cover all its meaning, and we will let it go that they were young writers, for, whether they were or not, they all wished to know one thing: namely, how he did it.

What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his recipe for making the kind of literature which had made him famous: they did stint their phrase, and they said famous. That always caused Eugenio to blush, at first with shame and then with pleasure; whatever one’s modesty, one likes to be called famous, and Eugenio’s pleasure in their flatteries was so much greater than his shame that he thought only how to return them the pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out to those generous youths, who sometimes confessed themselves still in their teens, and often of the sex which is commonly most effective with the fancy while still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing to show them the way to do what he had done, and, while disclaiming any merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he never imagined directing his correspondents to those others’ methods; he said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he felt that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left them out of the question.

In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way he had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did, he put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that, he was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the beginning to captivate the reader’s fancy as well as convince his reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he was more ashamed than he had been with their praise.

Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was impossible. If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer in his own secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said with perfect honesty would have been that he had never found any royal road to literature; that to his experience there was not even a common highway; that there were only byways; private paths over other people’s grounds; easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and giving by a subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense of discovery to the latest-comer.

His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they knew that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it themselves from his having practised.

The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked himself if the willingness to arrive only after you had got there had gone out of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he recalled the stock criticism of the connoisseur in The Vicar of Wakefield, that the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains; but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of pathetic wisdom in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt’s, which he had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but his words applied to the respective schools in their highest work, and he could only save his patriotic pride, so far as he might, by saying: “Courage is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will and passion. The English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely, because the end with them absorbs the means.”

Eugenio knew nothing practically and very little theoretically of painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the consolation of our race’s superiority in poetry because it was will and passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps the young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul had glowed over some “cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,” and had been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end could no more justify bad means in æsthetics than in ethics; in fact, without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result. If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the wrong shop.

Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when he had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to the end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There were times when it changed to some other end or took a different significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to himself that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it out as it first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in the events and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified by all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out leaves, breaking into blossom, and setting its young apples, or whatever else it was going to bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, and he might have been mistakenly expecting to grow peaches from an apple stock when he was surprised to find apples on it, or the end of his novel turning out other than he had forecast it.

In literature the reader’s affair is with results, but the author’s with processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds, and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.

As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art, and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like Hamlet, say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia from the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow branch, forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and walk the world forever.

Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done? The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the earnestness of his nature, to write their Hamlets from the beginning forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective Hamlets; they must slowly make their Hamlets’ acquaintance by living with them.

If Eugenio’s correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the perfecting of details. This would make their performance a succession of little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate triumph.

“But style, but style!” they might return. “What about style? That was one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a style?”

“By no means,” Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this come-back. “Do not think about style. If you do your work well, patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you. That is the one thing you must not try for. If you try for style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or Dante?”

Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could do this only by their own devout and constant toil in the line of their aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?

One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure, coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval, the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our choice of two things — stop working; stop going, cease to move, to exist — or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which we have not dropped, drops us.

Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could sell or give or lend it.

Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that, whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men, and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work, patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it?

If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art was a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider, deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made it, partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in his achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it was given to was how, after he found it out, to make the most of his gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done and call him master.

But how could Eugenio make such things — so true and yet so self-contradictory, so mutually repellent — clear to these simple-hearted young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more he resolved to do nothing about it.

V

THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM

It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one’s books are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues, but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course, the defects of one’s virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these.

Now, Eugenio’s theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that, if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt, that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly been cropped the season before.

The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he could not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted, quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would notice the coincidence.

He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and which lift authors’ hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it which the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a novice, of course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of course, if it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or fiftieth, it is merely one of a long series which fully represents him. Even these collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to them, if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but obliged to say that here is one of those enchanting girls whom the author in question has endeared to generations of readers; or one of those tedious prudes for whom his name is a synonyme. If, after many psychological romances, the author has stepped down to the level of actual life, he is praised or blamed for the vital or servile naturalism of his work; or if the contrary is the case, he has to read of himself as doing something habitual and entirely characteristic of him. In vain, so far as that acute young critic is concerned, has he broken new ground. But if he has with much compunction consciously turned his furrows in a field tilled before, he stands a fair chance of being hailed at the outset of a new career.

He cannot openly complain, and if he could the critic cannot help being what he is. If the critic were older and more versed in the veteran author, he might not like him so well, and he could not, at any rate, bring the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer brings. What Eugenio would really wish would be to have each successive book of his given for review to some lifelong admirer, some dear and faithful friend, all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had liked him from the beginning and was intimately versed in all his work. Such a critic would know that Eugenio was always breaking new ground, and that he was never more true to this inherent tendency than when he seemed to be ploughing the same old furrows in the same old fields. Such a critic would be alert to detect those fine differences of situation which distinguish a later from an earlier predicament. He would note with unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which constitute Florindo an essentially novel character when presented under the name of Lindoro, or Floribella a fresh delight when she reappears as Doralinda. Even when he could not deny that these persons were in themselves one and the same, he would be able to make the reader observe that the new light thrown upon them by the author’s ever-renascent art revealed in familiar creations traits of mind and charms of spirit unimagined before. He would insist that, if not new, they were newer, because being more fully ascertained they were truer. He would boldly recur to the personages in Eugenio’s former books whom they reminded one of, and, studying them in contrast, would convince the reader that the increasing purpose of the author in the treatment of the well-known types had been to reveal the infinite variety of character which lay hid in each and every human type.

Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits of a veteran author.

In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic, coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion, when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer, because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor, as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might be the means of destroying himself as a great author.

After all, authors are not the self-satisfied generation they must often seem to the public which has tried to spoil them with praise. There is much in doing a thing which makes a man modest in regard to the way he has done it. Even if he knows that he has done it well, if the testimony of all his faculties is to that effect, there is somehow the lurking sense that it was not he who really did it, but that there is a power, to turn Matthew Arnold’s phrase to our use, “not ourselves, that works for” beauty as well as righteousness, and that it was this mystical force which wrought through him to the exquisite result. If you come to the second-best results, to the gold so alloyed that you may confidently stamp it your own, do you wish to proclaim it the precious metal without alloy? Do you wish to declare that it is to all intents and purposes quite as good as pure gold, or even better? Do you hold yourself quit of the duty of saying that it is second-best, that it is something mixed with copper or nickel, and of the value of oroide, say? You cannot bring yourself to this extreme of candor, and what right, then, have you to recognize that something else is fine gold when it is really so? Ought not you to feign that it is only about thirteen carats when it is actually eighteen?

Considerations like these always stayed Eugenio when it came to the point of deciding whether he would care to be his own reviewer, but the desire to be adequately reviewed still remained with him, a fond longing amid repeated disappointments. An author often feels that he has got too much praise, though he never has got all he wants. “Why don’t they clap?” Doctor Holmes once whimsically demanded, speaking of his audiences in those simple early days when he went about lecturing like Emerson and Alcott and other saints and sages of New England. “Do they think I can’t stand it? Why don’t they give me three times three? I can stand it very well.” An author may sometimes think he is fulsomely praised and may even feel a sort of disgust for the slab adulation trowelled upon him, but his admirer need not fear being accused of insincerity. He may confidently count upon being regarded as a fine fellow who has at worst gone wrong in the right direction. It ought, therefore, to be a very simple matter to content a veteran author in the article of criticism, but somehow it is not.

Perhaps the trouble is in the nature of criticism, which, unwillingly enough, no doubt, assumes to be and to do more than it can. Its convention is that it is an examination of a book and a report upon its qualities. But it is not such a report, and it cannot be in the limits assigned it, which are the only tolerable limits with the reader. The author would not mind if the critic’s report were physically commensurate with his book; but, of course, the reader could not stand that; and, generous as they are, other authors might complain. Sometimes, as it is, they think that any one of their number who gets something like a good report from a critic is getting more than his deserts. Yet authors, though a difficult, are not an impossible generation. Few of them would allow that they are even unreasonable with regard to criticism, and they would probably hail any improvement in its theories and methods with gratitude.

As criticism cannot be an adequate report upon the qualities of a book, even a book which has not been examined, why should it assume to do more than talk about it and talk all the better for being merely tentative and altogether unfinal? Nobody can really be authoritative concerning anything, for there is no one whose wisdom will not be disputed by others of the wise. The best way, then, might be for a reviewer to go round collecting sentiment and opinion about the book he means to talk of, and then to give as many qualifying varieties of impression as the general unhandsomeness of human nature will allow him to give when they differ from his own impression. On the terms of the old and still accepted convention of criticism, Eugenio had himself done a vast deal of reviewing, an amount of it, in fact, that he could not consider without amaze, and in all this reviewing he had not once satisfied himself with his work. Never once had he written a criticism which seemed to him adequate, or more than an approximation to justice, even when he had most carefully, almost prayerfully, examined the work he reported upon. He was aware of writing from this mood or that, of feeling hampered by editorial conditions, of becoming impatient or jaded, and finally employing the hay-scales when he ought to have used the delicate balances with which one weighs out life-giving elixirs or deadly poisons. But he used to imagine that if he could have put himself in the attitude of easy discussion or light comment, instead of the judicial pose he felt obliged to take, he could have administered a far finer and more generous measure of justice. In these moments he used to wonder whether something stated and organized in the way of intelligent talk about books might not be substituted for the conventional verdicts and sentences of the courts of criticism.

In this notion he proceeded upon a principle evolved from his own experience in fields far from the flinty and sterile ranges of criticism. He had not only done much reviewing in those days, but he had already written much in the kinds which he could not, in his modesty, bring himself to call “creative,” though he did not mind others calling it so. Whatever had been the shortcomings of the conventional reports upon his work, it was his glad experience that nothing he said or meant, not the slightest intention or airiest intimation in his books, was ever wholly lost. Somewhere, some one, somehow had caught it, liked it, remembered it, and had by a happy inspiration written him of it, it might be diffident, it might be confident, of his pleasure in the recognition.

Such recognition was always more precious than the reports of the conventional critics, though if these were favorable the author was glad of them, as of any good that the gods gave. But what struck Eugenio was that such recognition was the real, the very, the vital criticism, and that if it could be evoked in behalf of others, in its sincerity, it might be helpful to the cause of literature far beyond anything that the courts of criticism could do or effect in its behalf. After all, as he said to himself, an author wrote for his readers and not for his critics, for pleasure and not for judgment; and if he could be assured publicly, as he sometimes was assured privately, that nothing he did was lost, he might be encouraged to keep on doing his best. Why, indeed, should not there be a critical journal embodying in a species of fragrant bouquet the flowers of thought and emotion springing up in the brains and bosoms of readers responsive to the influence of a new book? Such readers would have only to suppose themselves addressing the author direct, and the thing could be done. It might be done in another way by the authors contributing the praises privately sent him. In a time when personal letters to authors are constantly quoted in advertisements, this might not seem so immodest as in some earlier literary condition.

In the mean time the question of what shall be done for veteran authors who are always breaking new ground still remains, and it is complicated by a fact of psychological import for the reader as well as the author. What first gives an author his hold upon the reader is not the novelty of his theme, but a pleasing, it may be a painfully pleasing, quality which in its peculiar variation must be called his personal quality. It is the sense of this in each of his successive books which deepens his hold upon the reader, and not the style, or the characters, or the intrigue. As long as this personal quality delights, he is new whether he breaks new ground or not, or he is newly welcome. With his own generation, with the readers who began young with him and have grown old with him, he is always safe. But there is danger for him with the readers who begin young with him after he has grown old. It is they who find his tales twice told and himself hackneyed, unless they have been trained to like his personal quality by their elders. This might be difficult, but it is not impossible, and ought not it to be the glad, the grateful care of such elders?

VI

THE FICKLENESS OF AGE

All forms of literature probably hold a great deal more meaning than people commonly get out of them; but prose may be likened to a cup which one can easily see to the bottom of, though it is often deeper and fuller than it looks; while verse is the fount through which thought and feeling continually bubble from the heart of things. The sources that underlie all life may be finding vent in a rhyme where the poet imagined he was breathing some little, superficial vein of his own; but in the reader he may unawares have reached the wells of inmost passion and given them release. The reader may himself live with a certain verse and be aware of it now and then merely as a teasing iterance that

“From some odd corner of the mind
Beats time to nothing in the brain.”

But suddenly some experience, or perhaps the exfoliation of the outer self through the falling away of the withered years, shall open to him its vital and cosmical significance. He shall know then that it is not an idle whisper of song, but a message to his soul from the senate where the immortals gather in secular counsel and muse the wisdom of all the centuries since humanity came to its earliest consciousness. The bearer of the message may not have known it in the translation which it wears to the receiver; each must read it in his own tongue and read meaning into it; perhaps it always takes two to make a poet, and singer and listener are the twin spheres that form one star.

A valued correspondent of ours, one of those whose letters are oftener than we should like to own fraught with the suggestion of our most fortunate inspirations, believes himself to have been recently the confidant of the inner sense of certain lines in a familiar poem of Longfellow’s. Its refrain had, from the first reading, chanted in the outer chamber of his ear, but suddenly, the other day, it sang to his soul with a newly realized purport in the words,

“A boy’s will is the wind’s will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

The words are, as the poet promptly declares, the burden of a Lapland song, which “is haunting his memory still,” which “murmurs and whispers still,” which “is singing and saying still,” which “is mournful” and “sweet” and “fitful” and “fatal” and “strange” and “beautiful.” Yet he seems not to have known, as our friend now thinks he himself knows, that they express a difference, unrecognized hitherto, between youth and age, and rightfully attribute to the young a steadfastness and persistence in objects and ideals formerly supposed the distinguishing qualities of the old. In other words, they have precipitated into his consciousness a truth unwittingly held in solution by both the poets in their verse. Or, if it was conveyed to him by their sensible connivance, he is the first who has been made its repository. Or, if he cannot claim an exclusive property in the revelation, it is now his, in his turn, by that sad right of seniority whose advantages are not ours till there are few or none left to contest them with us. One has not been promoted to them because of any merit or achievement; one has simply lived into them; and how much of one has died in the process of survival! The lines speak to our friend’s age a language which his youth could not have understood, and it is because he is no longer young that he perceives how long the thoughts of youth were and how brief the thoughts of age.

He had always fancied that his later years should be a time of repose in the faiths, loves, and joys through which he realized himself. But nothing apparently was farther from the fact. Such length of thoughts as he had, such abiding pleasures, such persistent hopes, were from his youth; and the later sort were as the leaves of the tree to the tree itself. He put them forth at the beginning of an epoch, a season, and they dropped from him at the close. In as great bitterness as is consonant with his temperament he has asked us why youth should ever have been deemed fickle and age constant when so precisely the contrary is true. Youth, he owns, is indeed full of vain endeavors and of enterprises that come to nothing, but it is far more fixed than age in its aspirations. His aspirations change now with such rapidity that they seem different not only from year to year, but from month to month, from day to day. He has not merely discarded his old ideals, he loathes them. He used to like going out to dinner, above all things; and he was fond of lunches, even of afternoon teas; but in a day, in an hour, such delights became wearinesses and vexations of spirit. Formerly he enjoyed travel with all its necessary concomitants. It amused him to check his baggage and depart from stations, to arrive at hotels and settle himself in new rooms; the very domiciliation in sleeping-cars or the domestication in diners had a charm which was apparently perennial; a trip in a river-boat was rapture; an ocean voyage was ecstasy. The succession of strange faces, new minds, was an unfailing interest, and there was no occurrence, in or out of the ordinary, which did not give him release from self and form a true recreation. The theatre does not amuse him now, though the time has been, and lately, for the curtain, when it rose on a play, new or old, to lift his spirit with it and to hold him entranced till its fall. As for the circus, he once rejoiced in all its feats; performing elephants could not bore him, nor acts of horsemanship stale its infinite variety. But the time has come abruptly when the smell of the sawdust, or the odor of the trodden weed, mixed with the aroma of ice-cold lemonade, is a stench in his nostrils.

These changes of ideal have occurred, not through the failure of any powers that he can note in himself, but as part of the great change from youth to age, which he thinks is far greater morally than physically. He is still fairly strong; he has not lost his appetite or the teeth to gratify it; he can walk his miles, always rather two than ten, and rest refreshed from them; except that he does not like to kill things, he could trudge the whole day through fields and woods with his gun on his shoulder; though he does not golf, and cannot know whether or no it would bore him, he likes to wield the axe and the scythe in the groves and meadows of his summer place. When he stretches himself on the breast of the mother alike of flesh and grass, it is with a delicious sense of her restorative powers and no fear of rheumatism. If he rests a little longer than he once used, he is much more rested when he rises from his repose.

His body rejoices still in its experiences, but not his soul: it is not interested; it does not care to have known its experiences or wish to repeat them. For this reason he thinks that it is his spirit which is superannuated, while its “muddy vesture of decay” is in very tolerable repair. His natural man is still comparatively young, and lives on in the long, long thoughts of youth; but his supernatural man has aged, with certain moral effects which alarm his doubts of the pleasures he once predicated of eternity. “If it is going to be like this with me!” he says to himself, and shrinks from supplying the responsive clause of his conditional.

But mainly his mind turns upon itself in contemplation of its earthly metamorphoses, in which it hardly knows itself for the mind of the same man. Its apprehensions are for the time when, having exhausted all the differences, it shall care for none; but meanwhile it is interested in noting the absurdity of that conventional view of age as the period of fixed ideals. It may be the period of fixed habits, of those helpless iterances which imply no intentions or purposes; but it is not the period in which the mind continues in this or that desire and strives for its fulfilment. The same poet who sang at second hand those words of the Lapland song,

“The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,”

erred, to our friend’s sense, in singing of

“The young heart hot and restless,
And the old subdued and slow.”

He believes the reverse would rightly characterize the heart of youth and the heart of age. Age is not slow in its mental motions; it is hurried and anxious, with that awful mystical apprehension of the swift-coming moment when time shall be no more and nothing but eternity shall be left. It is not subdued; its heart is hot with rebellion against the inevitable. But for youth there is no inevitable; there is no conclusion, no catastrophe, which it may not hope to escape; and, so it is patient of chances, it is glad of them. Its heart is not restless; it is quite at peace in the bosom which is secure of all the time there is.

Our friend believes that a variety of popular superstitions will fall at the recognition of the truth in this matter, and none more finally than that which attributes to the junior partner the unhappiness of those marriages in which youth and crabbed age try to live together. In such hazardous unions the junior partner is, for some unexplained reason, of the sex which has the repute of a generic fickleness as well as the supposed volatility of its fewer years. Probably repute wrongs it as much in one respect as in the other, but our friend contends only for greater justice to it in the last. In the light that he has come into, he holds that where such unions are unhappy, though they may have been formed with a fair appearance of affection, it is the senior partner who is to blame if blame may ever be attached to involuntary change. It is the senior partner who has wearied first of the companionship and wished for release with the impatience natural to age. This is intolerant of the annoyances which seem inherent in every union of the kind, and impatient of those differences of temperament which tell far more than any disparities of age, and which exist even where there are no such disparities. The intolerance, the impatience, is not more characteristic of the husband where he is the elder than of the wife in the much fewer instances of her seniority. In the unions where two old people join their faltering destinies, the risks of unhappiness are, logically, doubled; and our friend holds it a grotesque folly to expect anything else of marriages in which two lovers, disappointed of each other in their youth, attempt to repair the loss in their age. Where any such survive into later life, with the passion of earlier life still rife in their hearts, he argues that they had much better remain as they are, for in such a belated union as they aspire to the chances are overwhelmingly against them.

Very probably, like other discoverers, he is too much impressed with the value of his divination. It is something that, at any rate, can appeal for recognition only to the aged or the aging. With these we could imagine it bringing a certain consolation, a relief from vain regret, an acquittal from self-accusation. If one has suddenly changed for no apparent reason, one must be glad to find a reason in the constitution of things, and to attribute one’s fickleness to one’s time of life. Youth’s errors have possibly been too much condoned upon grounds where age could more justly base its defence. It may be more reckless than age, but it is not nearly so rash. It keeps thinking its long, long thoughts and questioning the conclusions to which age eagerly hobbles or hurls itself from its crutches. Youth is deliberate, for it has plenty of time, while, as our friend notes, age has little but eternity before it. Not youth, but age, leaps from life’s trolley while it is still in motion, or, after mismeasuring the time and space, limps impatiently before it and is rolled under its fender. You may see physical proof of this difference, our friend insists, in the behavior of two people, one young and one old, at any street-crossing; and why should so many old ladies fall on the stairs, but that they are apt to precipitate themselves wildly from landings where young girls linger to dream yet one dream more before they glide slowly down to greet the young men who would willingly wait years for them?

The distrust of eternity at which our friend hints is perhaps the painfulest of his newly discovered differences between youth and age. Resting so serenely as it does in practically unlimited time, with ideals and desires which scarcely vary from year to year, youth has no fears of infinity. It is not afraid but it shall have abundant occupation in the æons before it, or that its emotions or volitions shall first be exhausted. Its blithe notion of immortality is that it is immortal youth. It has no conception of age, and could not imagine an eternity of accomplished facts. It is, perhaps, for this reason that doubt of immortality never really comes to youth. One of the few things which our friend still believes is that every sceptic who deals honestly with his only history must be aware of an hour, almost a moment, of waning youth, when the vague potentiality of disbelief became a living doubt, thence-forward to abide with him till death resolve it. Endless not-being is unthinkable before that time, as after it endless being is unthinkable. Yet this unthinkable endless being is all that is left to age, and it is in the notion of it alone that age can get back to the long, long thoughts in which is surcease from unrest. Our old friend may accuse us of proposing the most impossible of paradoxes when we invite him to take refuge from his whirling ideals, not in an unavailing endeavor to renew the conditions of youth in time, but in the forecast of youth in eternity. We think that the error of his impatience, his despair with the state he has come to here, is largely if not wholly through his failure to realize that he is not going to wake up old in some other being, but young, and that the capacity of long, long thoughts will be renewed in him with the renewal of his life. The restlessness of age, its fickleness, its volatility, is the expression of immense fatigue. It tosses from side to side and tries for this and that like a sick man from sheer weakness; or, rather, if the reader prefers another image, it is like some hapless wild thing caught by rising floods on a height of land which they must soon submerge, and running incessantly hither and thither as the water more narrowly hems it in.

Undoubtedly the mutability of age in its ideals has been increased of late by the restriction of human hope to the years which remain, few and brief to the longest earthly life, by the sciences which provisionally darken counsel. When these shall have penetrated to a point where they can discern the light, they will “pour the day” on the dim orbs of age and illumine the future with new hope. Then doubting age can enter into the rest now forbidden it and take its repose between illimitable horizons in the long, long thoughts of eternal youth. We speak here in behalf of the sceptic, the agnostic few. For the many who have not lost their hope because they have never lost their faith, doubtless all the trouble of change which disquiets our friend will seem something temperamental merely, and not something essential or inseparable from human nature. Their thoughts have remained long, their ideals steadfast, because they have not lost the most precious jewel of their youth — the star of trust and hope which

“Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.”

These are the most enviable of their kind, and there are signs that their turn may be coming once more in the primacy to which their numbers have always entitled them. Only the other day we were reading a paper by a man of that science which deals with life on strictly physical lines, and drawing from it an immense consolation because it reaffirmed that the soul has not only its old excuse for being in the unthinkability of an automatic universe and the necessity of an intentional first cause, but with Evolution, in the regard of some scientists, tottering on its throne, and Natural Selection entering the twilight into which the elder pagan deities have vanished, is newly warranted in claiming existence as that indestructible life-property or organizing power which characterizes kind through kind from everlasting to everlasting. In this consolation we seemed well on our way back to the encounter of a human spirit such as used to be rapt to heaven or cast into hell for very disproportionate merits or demerits; but we were supported for the meeting by the probability that in the fortunate event the spirit would be found issuing from all the clouds of superstition, and when it was reconstituted in the universal belief, that the time, with eternity in its train, would have returned for fitly hailing it in the apostrophe of the Addisonian Cato:

“But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth,
Unhurt amidst the war of elements,
The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.”

VII

THE RENEWAL OF INSPIRATION

There comes a time in the experience of perhaps every stated purveyor of intellectual food when the stock he has long been drawing upon seems finally exhausted. There is not a grain left in the barns where he had garnered up the harvests of the past; there is not a head of wheat to be found in the fields where he had always been able to glean something; if he shakes the tree of knowledge in the hope of a nut to crack or a frozen-thaw to munch, nothing comes down but a shower of withered leaves. His condition is what, in the parlance of his vocation, he calls being out of a subject, and it is what may happen to him equally whether he is preaching twice a Sunday from the pulpit, or writing leaders every day for a prominent journal, or merely contributing a monthly essay to a magazine. As the day or hour or moment approaches when he must give forth something from his destitution, he envies the hungriest of his auditors or readers who do not yet know that there is nothing in him to appease their famine. There is only the barren will to give which only a miracle can transform into a vitalizing bounty.

Yet is not this miracle always wrought? When did a pulpit ever fail of a sermon, or a journal of a leading article, or a magazine of its stated essay? The fact might argue the very contrary of the appearance and convince the desperate purveyor that what he mistook for hopeless need was choice which mocked him with a myriad alternatives. From cover to cover the Scripture is full of texts; every day brings forth its increase of incident; the moral and social and æsthetical world is open on every side to polite inquiry and teems with inspiring suggestion. If ever the preacher or editor or essayist fancies he has exhausted these resources, he may well pause and ask whether it is not himself that he has exhausted. There may be wanting the eye to see the riches which lie near or far, rather than the riches which are always inviting the eye.

A curious trait of the psychology of this matter is that it is oftener the young eye than the old which lacks the visual force. When Eugenio was beginning author and used to talk with other adolescent immortals of the joyful and sorrowful mysteries of their high calling, the dearth of subjects was the cause of much misgiving and even despair among them. Upon a certain occasion one of that divine company, so much diviner than any of the sort now, made bold to affirm: “I feel that I have got my technique perfect. I believe that my poetic art will stand the test of any experiment in the handling of verse, and now all that I want is a subject.” It seemed a great hardship to the others, and they felt it the more keenly because every one of them was more or less in the same case. They might have none of them so frankly owned their fitness for their work as the one who had spoken, but they were all as deeply aware of it; and if any subject had appeared above the horizon there could have been no question among them except as to which should first mount his winged steed and ride it down. It did not occur to any of them that the want of a subject was the defect of their art, and that until they were equipped with the eye that never fails to see occasion for song all round the heavens they were not yet the champions of poetry which they fancied themselves. He who had uttered their common belief sufficiently proved afterward, in the range of things he did, that he had ultimately come into possession of the highest of the poetic gifts, the poetic vision of life, and that he had completed his art at a point where it had been most imperfect before, when he supposed it so perfect. As soon as he ceased looking for subjects, which were mainly the conventional themes of verse, the real and vital subjects began looking for him.

Eugenio himself, on his lower level, had something of the same experience. When he first began those inventions in prose which long seemed to him worthy of the best that his kindest friends said of them, he had great trouble in contriving facts sufficiently wonderful for the characters who were to deal with them, and characters high and noble enough to deal with the great and exalted facts. On one hand or the other his scheme was always giving out. The mirage of fancy which painted itself so alluringly before him faded on his advance and left him planted heavy-footed in the desert sands. In other words, he was always getting out of a subject. In the intervals between his last fiction and his next, when his friends supposed he was purposely letting his mind lie fallow (and perhaps willingly acquiesced in the rest they were sharing with him), he was really in an anguish of inquiry for something on which to employ his powers; he was in a state of excruciating activity of which the incessant agitation of the atoms in the physical world is but a faint image; his repose was the mask of violent vibrations, of volcanic emotions, which required months to clear themselves in the realization of some ideal altogether disproportioned to the expenditure of energy which had been tacitly taking place. At these periods it seemed to him that his lot had been cast in a world where he was himself about the only interesting fact, and from which every attractive subject had been removed before he came into it.

He could never tell just how or when all this changed, and a little ray, very faint and thin at first, stole in upon his darkness and broadened to an effulgence which showed his narrow circle a boundless universe thronged with the most available passions, interests, motives, situations, catastrophes and dénouements, and characters eagerly fitting themselves with the most appropriate circumstances. As nearly as he could make out, his liberation to this delightful cosmos took place through his gradual perception that human nature was of a vast equality in the important things, and had its difference only in trifles. He had but to take other men in the same liberal spirit that he took himself to find them all heroes; he had but to take women at their own estimate to find them all heroines, if not divinely beautiful, then interesting, fascinating, irresistibly better than beautiful. The situation was something like this; it will not do to give away his whole secret; but the reader needs only a hint in order to understand how in his new mind Eugenio was overwhelmed with subjects.

After this illumination of his the only anxiety he had was concerning his ability to produce all the masterpieces he felt himself capable of in the short time allotted to the longest-lived writer. He was aware of a duty to the material he had discovered, and this indeed sometimes weighed upon him. However, he took courage from the hope that others would seize his point of view and be able to carry on the work of producing masterpieces indefinitely. They could never use up all the subjects, any more than men can exhaust the elements of the aluminium which abound in every piece of the common earth; but, in their constant reliance upon every-day life as the true and only source of surprise and delight in art, they could never be in the terrible despair which had afflicted him from time to time before his illumination.

Doubtless there is an overruling Providence in this matter which we may not distrust without accusing the order which has not yet failed in the due succession of the seasons and the days and nights. While we are saying it is never going to rain, it rains; or when it seems as if nature were finally frozen up, a thaw begins; when we feel that the dark will not end, the dawn is already streaking the east. If the preacher thinks that the old texts are no longer applicable to life, there is suddenly reported an outbreak of vice in the city which puts him in mind of Sodom and Gomorrah; or the opportune flight of a defaulter furnishes material for a homily which searches the consciences of half the congregation with the words of the commandment against stealing. The journalist wakes in heavy-eyed despair, but he finds from the papers on his breakfast-table that there has been a revolution in South America, or that the Socialists have been doing something in Belgium almost too bad even for Socialists as the capitalists imagine them, and his heart rises again. Even the poor magazine essayist, who has lived through the long month in dread of the hour when his copy shall be due, is not forbidden his reprieve. He may not have anything to say, but he certainly has something to say it about. The world is always as interesting to-day as it was yesterday, and probably to-morrow will not be so dull as it promises.

One reason for the disability of the essayist, as distinguished from the preacher or the journalist, is that he does not give himself range enough. Expecting to keep scrupulously to one subject, he cannot put his hand on a theme which he is sure will hold out under him to the end. Once it was not so. The essayists of antiquity were the most vagariously garrulous people imaginable. There was not one of them who, to our small acquaintance with them, kept to his proposition or ended anywhere in sight of it. Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plutarch, they talk of anything but the matter in hand, after mentioning it; and when you come down to the moderns, for instance, to such a modern as Montaigne, you find him wandering all over the place. He has no sooner stated his subject than he begins to talk about something else; it reminds him (like Lincoln) of a story which has nothing to do with it; and that story reminds him of another, and so on, till the original thesis is left flapping in the breeze somewhere at the vanishing-point in the tortuous perspective and vainly signalling the essayist back. It was the same, or nearly the same, with the English essayists quite down to the beginning of the last century, when they began to cease being. The writers in the Spectator, the Guardian, the Tatler, the Rambler, and the rest, contrived to keep a loose allegiance to the stated topic, because they treated it so very briefly, and were explicitly off to something else in the next page or two with a fresh text. But if we come to such delightful masters of the art as Lamb and Leigh Hunt and De Quincey and Hazlitt, it will not be easy, opening at any chance point, to make out what they are talking about. They are apparently talking about everything else in the world but the business they started with. But they are always talking delightfully, and that is the great matter with any sort of talker.

When the reviewers began to supplant the essayists, they were even more contemptuously indifferent to the obligations of constancy. Their text was nominally some book, but almost as soon as they had named it they shut it and went off on the subject of it, perhaps, or perhaps not. It was for the most part lucky for the author that they did so, for their main affair with the author was to cuff him soundly for his ignorance and impudence, and then leave him and not return to him except for a few supplementary cuffs at the close, just to show that they had not forgotten him. Macaulay was a notorious offender in this sort; though why do we say offender? Was not he always delightful? He was and he is, though we no longer think him a fine critic; and he meant to be just, or as just as any one could be with a man whom one differed from in the early Victorian period.

But Macaulay certainly did not keep harking back to his text, if ever he returned to it at all. His instinct was that a preacher’s concern was with his text, but not an essayist’s or a reviewer’s, and he was right enough. The essayist certainly has no such obligation or necessity. His reader can leave him at any moment, unless he is very interesting, and it does not matter where they part company. In fact, it might be argued that the modern fidelity to its subject is one of the chief evidences or causes of the essay’s decay. The essayist tries to make a mechanical conscience perform the duty of that fine spiritual freedom in which the essay once had its highest effect with the reader, and in his dull loyalty to the stated thesis he is superficial as well as tiresome.

The true subject is not one subject only, but many. It is like that pungent bulb whose odorous energy increases with exfoliation, and remains a potent fragrance in the air after the bulb has substantially ceased to be under the fingers. The error of the modern essayist is to suppose that he can ever have a single subject in hand; he has a score, he has a hundred, as his elders and betters all know; and what he mistakes for his destitution is really his superfluity. If he will be honest (as he may with difficulty be), must not he recognize that what seems a search for one theme is a hesitation between many pressing forward for his choice? If he will make this admission we believe he will be nearer the fact, and he will be a much more respectable figure than he could feel himself in blindly fumbling about for a single thesis. Life is never, and in nothing, the famine, perhaps, that we imagine it. Much more probably it is a surfeit, and what we suppose are the pangs of hunger are really the miseries of repletion. More people are suffering from too much than from too little. Especially are the good things here in a demoralizing profusion. Ask any large employer of labor, and he will tell you that what ails the working-classes is an excess of pianos and buggies and opera-boxes. Ask any workman what ails his employer, and he will say that it is the ownership of the earth, with a mortgage on planetary space. Both are probably right, or at least one is as right as the other.

When we have with difficulty made our selection from the divine redundancy of the ideal world, and so far as we could have reduced ourselves to the penury of a sole possession, why do not we turn our eyes to the example of Nature in not only bringing forth a hundred or a thousand fold of the kind of seed planted, but in accompanying its growth with that of an endless variety of other plants, all coming to bear in a like profusion? Observe that wise husbandwoman (this is not the contradiction in terms it seems), how when her business is apparently a hay harvest, she mingles myriads of daisies and milkweed and wild carrot and redtop with the grass, and lets her fancy riot all round the meadow in a broidery of blackberries and asters and dogroses and goldenrod. She never works without playing; and she plays even while man is working — plays so graciously and winningly that it takes the heart with joy. Who has ever looked upon an old-world wheat-field, where poppies and vetches are frolicking among the ears, and begrudged Nature her pastime? No one, we will venture, but the owner of the field, who is perhaps also too much of a philosopher to grieve over it. In the ideal world it is much the same. There, too, art having chosen a kind brings it to bear with all the other kinds which have been lurking in the unconscious soil of the mind and only waiting tilth for any purpose before springing up in company with the selected seed. This is what makes the poets and novelists and dramatists so much more profitable reading than the moralists. From whom, indeed, has the vital wisdom of the race been garnered? Not from those hard, ethical masters who have sought to narrow culture to the business of growing precepts, but from the genial teachers who have inculcated amusement and breathed into the unwary mind some inspiration which escaped as unconsciously from themselves. Which philosopher or sage of them all has instructed mankind a hundredth part as much as Shakespeare, who supposed himself to be merely providing diversion for the patrons of the Globe Theatre?

It follows, if not directly, then a long way about, from what we have been saying, that the real artist is never at a loss for a subject. His trouble is too many themes, not too few; and, having chosen among them, his error will be in an iron sequence rather than in a desultory progression. He is to arrive, if at all, laden with the spoil of the wayside, and bringing with him the odor of the wild flowers carpeting or roofing the by-paths; if he is a little bothered by the flowering brambles which have affectionately caught at him in his course, that does not greatly matter; or, at least, it is better than coming back to his starting-point in boots covered with the mud of the high-road or coat powdered with its dust. The sauntering ease, the excursive delays, will be natural to the poet or the novelist, who is born to them; but the essayist must in a manner make them his own, if he would be an artist and survive among the masters, which there has been some doubt of his doing. It should be his care to shun every appearance of continuity; only in the practice of the fitful, the capricious, the desultory, can he hope to emulate the effects of the creative. With any other ideal he cannot hope to be fit company for the high minds who have furnished mankind with quotations. But for the prevalence of the qualities which we have been urging the essayist to cultivate, in the essays of Bacon, it is not probable that any one would ever have fancied that Bacon wrote Shakespeare.

VIII

THE SUMMER SOJOURN OF FLORINDO AND LINDORA

At the moment of this writing, everybody is hurrying into the country, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the city; at the moment when it becomes that reading we hope for, everybody will be hurrying into the city, eager to escape the horrors of summer in the country. At either moment the experiences of Florindo and Lindora should have a certain interest.

Florindo and Lindora are a married pair, still comparatively happy after forty years of wedded life, who have spent the part or the whole of each hot season out of town, sometimes in the hills, sometimes by the sea, sometimes in Europe. Their acquaintance with either form of sojourn, if not exhaustive, is so comprehensive that it might be cited as encyclopædic.

The first season or so they did not think of shutting up their house in the city, or doing more than taking, the latter part of August, a trip to Niagara or Saratoga or Cape May or Lake George, or some of those simple, old-fashioned resorts whose mere mention brings a sense of pre-existence, with a thrill of fond regret, to the age which can no longer be described as middle and is perhaps flattered by the epithet of three-quartering. No doubt people go to those places yet, but Florindo and Lindora have not been to any of them for so many summers that they can hardly realize them as still open: for them they were closed in the earliest of the eighteen-seventies.

After that, say the third summer of their marriage, it appeared to Lindora essential to take board somewhere for the whole summer, at such an easy distance that Florindo could run up or down or out every Saturday afternoon and stay Sunday with her and the children; for there had now begun to be children, who could not teethe in town, and for whom the abundance of pure milk, small fruits, and fresh vegetables promised with the shade and safety of the farm was really requisite. She kept the house in town still open, as before, or rather half-open, for she left only the cook in it to care for her husband, and do the family wash, sent to and fro by express, while she took the second girl with her as maid. In the first days of September, when the most enterprising of the fresh vegetables were beginning to appear on the table, and the mosquitoes were going, and the smell of old potatoes in the cellar and rats in the walls was airing out, and she was getting used to the peculiar undulations of her bed, she took the little teethers back to town with her; and when she found her husband in the comfortable dimensions of their own house, with melons and berries and tender steak, and rich cream (such as never comes on “pure milk”), and hot and cold baths, and no flies, she could not help feeling that he had been very selfish. Now she understood, at least, why he never failed on Monday morning to wake in time for the stage to carry him to the station, and she said, No more farm-board for her if she knew it.

In those idyllic days, while they were making their way, and counting the cost of every step as if it were the proverbial first step, the next step for Lindora was a large boarding-house for the summer. She tried it first in the country, and she tried it next at the seaside, with the same number of feet of piazza in both cases, and with no distinct difference except in the price. It was always dearer at the seaside, but if it had been better she should not have thought it so dear. Yet, as it was dearer, she could not help thinking it was better; and there was the beach for the teethers to dig in, and there was an effect of superior fashion in the gossipers on the piazza, one to every three of the three hundred feet of the piazza, rocking and talking, and guessing at the yachts in the offing, and then bathing and coming out to lie on the sand and dry their hair.

At the farm she had paid seven dollars a week for herself, and half-price for the children; at the country boarding-house she had paid ten for herself, and again half-price for the children; at the seaside boarding-house the rate for her was fourteen dollars, and nine for the children and the maid. Everybody on the piazza said it was very cheap, but to Lindora it was so dear that she decided for Florindo that they could not go on keeping the house open and the cook in it just for him, as the expressage on the wash took away all the saving in that. If she allowed him to sleep in the house, he could pick up his meals for much less than they now cost. They must not burn their candle at both ends; he must put out his end. There was reason in this, because now Florindo was sometimes kept so late at business that he could not get the last train Saturday night for the beach, and he missed the Sunday with his family on which she counted so much. Thinking these things over during the ensuing winter, she began to divine, toward spring, that the only thing for the teethers, and the true way for Florindo, was for her to get away from the city to a good distance, where there would be a real change of air, and that a moderate hotel in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks was the only hopeful guess at their problem. If Florindo could not come for Sunday when they were off only an hour or two, it would be no worse for them to be seven or eight hours off. Florindo agreed the more easily because he had now joined a club, where he got his meals as comfortably as at home and quite as economically, counting in the cook. He could get a room also at the club, and if they shut the house altogether, and had it wired by the burglar-insurance company, they would be cutting off a frightful drain.

It was, therefore, in the interest of clearly ascertained economy that Lindora took her brood with her to a White Mountain hotel, where she made a merit of getting board for seventeen dollars and a half a week, when so many were paying twenty and twenty-five. Florindo came up twice during the summer, and stayed a fortnight each time, and fished, and said that it had been a complete rest. On the way back to town Lindora stopped for October in one of those nice spring-and-fall places where you put in the half-season which is so unwholesome in the city after a long summer in the country, and afterward she always did this. Fortunately, Florindo was prospering, and he could afford the increased cost of this method of saving. The system was practised with great success for four or five years, and then, suddenly, it failed.

Lindora was tired of always going to the same place, sick and tired; and, as far as she could see, all those mountain-places were the same places. She could get no good of the air if she bored herself; the nice people did not go to hotels so much now, anyway, and the children were dreadful, no fit associates for the teethers, who had long ceased to teethe but needed a summer outing as much as ever. A series of seasons followed when the married pair did not know where to go, in the person of the partner who represented them, and they had each spring a controversy vividly resembling a quarrel, but which was really not a quarrel, because the Dear knew that if it were not for the children Lindora would only be too glad never to leave their own house winter or summer, but just to stick there, year out and year in. Then, at least, she could look a little after Florindo, who had lived so much at the club that he had fairly forgotten he had a wife and children. The trouble was all with Florindo, anyway; he cared more for his business than his family, much; if he did not, he could have managed somehow to spend the summers with them. Other men did it, and ran down once a month, or once a fortnight, to put things in shape, and then came back.

Sleeping on a midnight view of her hard case, Lindora woke one morning with an inspiration; it might not be too much to call it a revelation. She wondered at herself, she was ashamed of herself, for not having thought of it before. Europe, of course, was the only solution. Once in Europe, you need not worry about where to go, for you could go anywhere. Europe was everywhere, and you had your choice of the Swiss mountains, where every breath made another person of you, or the Italian lakes with their glorious scenery, or the English lakes with their literary associations, or Scheveningen and all Holland, or Étretât, or Ostend, or any of those thousands of German baths where you could get over whatever you had, and the children could pick up languages with tutors, and the life was so amusing. Going to Europe was excuse enough in itself for Florindo to leave his business, and, if he could not be gone more than one summer, he could place her and the children out there till their health and education were completed, and they could all return home when it was time for the girls to think of coming out and the boys of going to college.

Florindo, as she expected, had not a reasonable word to say against a scheme that must commend itself to any reasonable man. In fact, he scarcely opposed it. He said he had begun to feel a little run down, and he had just been going to propose Europe himself as the true solution. She gladly gave him credit for the idea, and said he had the most inventive mind she ever heard of. She agreed without a murmur to the particular German baths which the doctor said would be best for him, because she just knew that the waters would be good for all of them; and when he had taken his cure the family made his after-cure with him, and they had the greatest fun, after the after-cure, in travelling about Germany. They got as far down as the Italian lakes in the early autumn, and by the time Florindo had to go back the rest were comfortably settled in Paris for the winter.

As a solution Europe was perfect, but it was not perpetual. After three years the bottom seemed to fall out, as Florindo phrased it, and the family came home to face the old fearful problem of where to spend the summer. Lindora knew where not to spend it, but her wisdom ended there, and when a friend who was going to Europe offered them her furnished cottage at a merely nominal rent, Lindora took it because she could not think of anything else. They all found it so charming that after that summer she never would think again of hotels or any manner of boarding. They hired cottages, at rents not so nominal as at first, but not so very extravagant if you had not to keep the city rent going, too; and it finally seemed best to buy a cottage, and stop the leak of the rent, however small it was. Lindora did not count the interest on the purchase-money, or the taxes, or the repairs, or the winter care-taking.

She was now living, and is still living, as most of her contemporaries and social equals are living, not quite free of care, but free of tiresome associations, cramped rooms, bad beds, and bad food, with an environment which you can perfectly control if you are willing to pay the price. The situation is ideal to those without, and, if not ideal to those within, it is nevertheless the best way of spending the hot season known to competitive civilization. What is most interesting to the student of that civilization is the surprisingly short time in which it has been evolved. Half a century ago it was known only to some of the richest people. A few very old and opulent families in New York had country-places on the Hudson; in Boston the same class had summer houses at Nahant or in Pepperell. The wealthy planters of the South came North to the hotels of Saratoga, Lake George, and Niagara, whither the vast majority of the fashionable Northern people also resorted. In the West it was the custom to leave home for a summer trip up the lakes or down the St. Lawrence. But this was the custom only for the very sophisticated, and even now in the West people do not summer outside of their winter homes to at all the same extent as in the East.

The experience of Florindo and Lindora is easily parallelable in that of innumerable other married pairs of American race, who were the primitive joke of the paragrapher and the caricaturist when the day of farm-boarding began. Though the sun of that day has long set for Florindo and Lindora, it seems to be still at the zenith for most young couples beginning life on their forgotten terms, and the joke holds in its pristine freshness with the lowlier satirists, who hunt the city boarder in the country and the seaside boarding-houses. The Florindos and the Lindoras of a little greater age and better fortune abound in the summer hotels at the beaches and in the mountains, though at the more worldly watering-places the cottagers have killed off the hotels, as the graphic parlance has it. The hotels nowhere, perhaps, flourish in their old vigor; except for a brief six weeks, when they are fairly full, they languish along the rivers, among the hills, and even by the shores of the mournful and misty Atlantic.

The summer cottage, in fine, is what Florindo and Lindora have typically come to in so many cases that it may be regarded as the typical experience of the easily circumstanced American of the East, if not of the West. The slightest relaxation of the pressure of narrow domestic things seems to indicate it, and the reader would probably be astonished to find what great numbers of people, who are comparatively poor, have summer cottages, though the cottage in most cases is perhaps as much below the dignity of a real cottage as the sumptuous villas of Newport are above it. Summer cottages with the great average of those who have them began in the slightest and simplest of shanties, progressing toward those simulacra of houses aptly called shells, and gradually arriving at picturesque structures, prettily decorated, with all the modern conveniences, in which one may spend two-thirds of the year and more of one’s income than one has a quiet conscience in.

It would not be so bad, if one could live in them simply, as Lindora proposed doing when she made Florindo buy hers for her, but the graces of life cannot be had for nothing, or anything like nothing, and when you have a charming cottage, and are living on city terms in it, you have the wish to have people see you doing it. This ambition leads to endless and rather aimless hospitality, so that some Lindoras have been known, after keeping a private hotel in their cottages for a series of summers, to shut them or let them, and go abroad for a much-needed rest, leaving their Florindos to their clubs as in the days of their youth, or even allowing them to live in their own houses with their cooks.

Nothing in this world, it seems, is quite what we want it to be; we ourselves are not all that we could wish; and, whatever shape our summering takes, the crumpled rose-leaf is there to disturb our repose. The only people who have no crumpled rose-leaves under them are those who have no repose, but stay striving on amid the heat of the city while the prey of the crumpled rose-leaf is suffering among the hills or by the sea. Those home-keeping Sybarites, composing seven-eighths of our urban populations, immune from the anguish of the rose-leaf, form themselves the pang of its victims in certain extreme cases; the thought of them poisons the pure air, and hums about the sleepless rest-seeker in the resorts where there are no mosquitoes. There are Florindos, there are Lindoras, so sensitively conscienced that, in the most picturesque, the most prettily appointed and thoroughly convenienced cottages, they cannot forget their fellow-mortals in the summer hotels, in the boarding-houses by sea or shore, in the farms where they have small fruits, fresh vegetables, and abundance of milk and eggs; yes, they even remember those distant relations who toil and swelter in the offices, the shops, the streets, the sewers; and they are not without an unavailing shame for their own good-fortune.

But is it really their good-fortune? They would not exchange it for the better fortune of the home-keepers, and yet it seems worse than that of people less voluntarily circumstanced. There is nothing left for Florindo and Lindora to try, except spending the summer on a yacht, which they see many other Florindos and Lindoras doing. Even these gay voyagers, or gay anchorers (for they seem most of the time to be moored in safe harbors), do not appear altogether to like their lot, or to be so constantly contented with it but that they are always coming off in boats to dine at the neighboring hotels. Doubtless a yacht has a crumpled rose-leaf under it, and possibly the keelless hull of the houseboat feels the irk of a folded petal somewhere.

Florindo and Lindora are not spoiled, she is sure of that in her own case, for she has never been unreasonably exacting of circumstance. She has always tried to be more comfortable than she found herself, but that is the condition of progress, and it is from the perpetual endeavor for the amelioration of circumstance that civilization springs. The fault may be with Florindo, in some way that she cannot see, but it is certainly not with her, and, if it is not with him, then it is with the summer, which is a season so unreasonable that it will not allow itself to be satisfactorily disposed of. In town it is intolerable; in the mountains it is sultry by day and all but freezing by night; at the seaside it is cold and wet or dry and cold; there are flies and mosquitoes everywhere but in Europe, and, with the bottom once out of Europe, you cannot go there without dropping through. In Lindora’s experience the summer has had the deceitful effect of owning its riddle read at each new conjecture, but, having exhausted all her practical guesses, she finds the summer still the mute, inexorable sphinx for which neither farm-board, boarding-houses, hotels, European sojourn, nor cottaging is the true answer.

Sometimes Florindo or Lindora is out of all patience with the summer, and in a despair which she is careful to share with Florindo, as far as she can make him a partner of it. But as it is his business to provide the means of each new condition, and hers to prove it impossible, he is not apt to give way so fully as she. He tells her that their trouble is that they have always endeavored to escape an ordeal which if frankly borne might not have been so bad, and he has tried to make her believe that some of the best times he has had in summer have been when he was too busy to think about it. She retorts that she is busy, too, from morning till night, without finding the least relief from the summer ordeal or forgetting it a single moment.

The other day he came home from the club with a beaming face, and told her that he had just heard of a place where the summer was properly disposed of, and she said that they would go there at once, she did not care where it was.

“Well, I don’t know,” he answered. “There would have to be two opinions, I believe.”

“Why?” she demanded, sharply. “Where is it?”

“In the other world. Fanshawe, the Swedenborgian, was telling me about it. In one of the celestial heavens — there seem to be seven of them — it appears that all the four seasons are absorbed into one, as all the different ages are absorbed into a sort of second youth. This sole season is neither hot nor cold, but has the quality of a perpetual springtime. How would you like that?”

Lindora was too vexed with him to make any answer, and he was sorry. He, too, felt the trouble of the summer more than he would allow, and he would willingly have got away from it if he could. Lindora’s impatience with it amused him, but it is doubtful if in the moment of his greatest amusement with her impatience he had any glimpse of that law of the universal life by which no human creature is permitted to escape a due share of the responsibilities and burdens of the common lot, or realized that to seek escape from them is a species of immorality which is unfailingly punished like any other sin, in and from itself.

IX

TO HAVE THE HONOR OF MEETING

As the winter deepens and darkens, the people who have time and money to waste, and who are always seeking opportunities for squandering both, find none so gracious and graceful as giving dinners to other people who have time and money to waste. The prime condition of such dinners is that neither host nor guest shall need them. The presence of a person who actually wanted meat and drink would imply certain insuperable disqualifications. The guest must have the habit of dining, with the accumulated indifference to dinners and the inveterate inability to deal peptically with them which result from the habit of them. Your true diner must be well on in middle life, for though the young may eat and drink together and apparently dine, it is of the gray head difficultly bowed over the successive courses, and the full form of third youth straining its silken calyx and bursting all too richly out above it, that the vision presents itself when one thinks of dinners and diners.

After all the exclusions are made, dinner is still a theme so large that one poor Easy Chair paper could not compass it, or do more than attach itself here and there to its expanse. In fact, it was only one kind of dinner we had in mind at the beginning, and that was the larger or smaller public dinner. There the process of exclusion is carried yet a step further, and the guests are all men, and for the most part elderly men. The exceptional public dinners where women are asked need not be counted; and at other public dinners they do not seem eager to throng the galleries, where they are handsomely privileged to sit, looking down, among the sculptured and frescoed arabesques, on the sea of bald heads and shirt-fronts that surge about the tables below, and showing like dim, décolleté angels to the bleared vision raised to them from the floor. As they are not expected to appear till the smoking and speaking have begun, they grow fainter and fainter through the clouds of tobacco and oratory, and it is never known to the diners whether they abuse the chary hospitality of coffee and ices offered them in their skyey height, where from time to time the sympathetic ear may hear them softly gasping, gently coughing.

It is a pity that none of these witnesses of a large public dinner has recorded her bird’s-eye impression of it at the interesting moment when their presence is suffered or desired. All those gray or bald heads, and all those bulging shirt-fronts, must look alike at the first glance, and it can be only to carefuler scrutiny that certain distinctions of projecting whiskers and mustaches pronounce themselves. The various figures, lax or stiff in their repletion, must more or less repeat one another, and the pudgy hands, resting heavily on the tables’ edges or planted on their owners’ thighs, must seem of a very characterless monotony. The poor old fellows ranked in serried sameness at the tables slanted or curved from the dais where the chairman and the speakers sit must have one effect of wishing themselves at home in bed.

What do they really think of it, those angels, leaning over and looking down on it? Does it strike them with envy, with admiration? Does it seem one of the last effects of a high and noble civilization? To their “finer female sense,” what is the appeal of that evanescing spectacle, as the noise of the cheering and the laughing and the clapping of hands rises to them at some more rocket-like explosion of oratory? Is the oratory mainly of the same quality to those supernal intelligences as the fading spectacle? None of them has said, and we may have still the hope that the whole affair may have seemed to them the splendid and graceful ceremonial which it appears in the illustrations of the next day’s papers.

The speaking is perhaps not always so good as it seems to the mellowed tolerance of the listener, when it begins after all those courses of meat and drink, but not perhaps always so bad as he thinks it when, the morning following, he wakes “high sorrowful and cloyed,” and has not yet read the reports of it. In confidence, however, it may be owned that it is apt rather to be bad than good. If what has led up to it has softened the critical edge of the listener, it has not sharpened the critical edge of the speaker, and they meet on the common ground where any platitude passes, where a farrago of funny stories serves the purpose of coherent humor, where any feeble flash of wit lights up the obscurity as with an electric radiance, where any slightest trickle or rinsing of sentiment refreshes “the burning forehead and the parching tongue” like a gush of genuine poetry. The mere reputation of the speaker goes a great way, almost the whole way; and, especially if he is a comic speaker, he might rise up and sit down without a word and yet leave his hearers the sense of having been richly amused. If he does more, if he really says something droll, no matter how much below the average of the give and take of common talk, the listener’s gratitude is frantic. It is so eager, it so outruns utterance, that it is not strange the after-dinner speech should be the favorite field of the fake-humorist, who reaps a full and ever-ripened harvest in it, and prospers on to a celebrity for brilliancy which there is little danger of his ever forfeiting so long as he keeps there.

The fake-humorous speaker has an easier career than even the fake-eloquent speaker. Yet at any given dinner the orator who passes out mere elocution to his hearers has a success almost as instant and splendid as his clowning brother. It is amazing what things people will applaud when they have the courage of one another’s ineptitude. They will listen, after dinner, to anything but reason. They prefer also the old speakers to new ones; they like the familiar taps of humor, of eloquence; if they have tasted the brew before, they know what they are going to get. The note of their mood is tolerance, but tolerance of the accustomed, the expected; not tolerance of the novel, the surprising. They wish to be at rest, and what taxes their minds molests their intellectual repose. They do not wish to climb any great heights to reach the level of the orator. Perhaps, after all, they are difficult in their torpidity.

The oratory seems to vary less throughout any given dinner than from dinner to dinner, and it seems better or worse according as the dinner is occasional or personal. The occasional dinner is in observance of some notable event, as the Landing of the Pilgrims, or the Surrender of Cornwallis, or the Invention of Gunpowder, or the Discovery of America. Its nature invites the orator to a great range of talk; he may browse at large in all the fields of verbiage without seeming to break bounds. It rests with him, of course, to decide whether he will talk too long, for the danger that he may do so cannot be guarded from the outside. The only good after-dinner speaker is the man who likes to speak, and the man who likes to speak is always apt to speak too much. The hapless wretch whom the chairman drags to his feet in a cold perspiration of despair, and who blunders through half a dozen mismated sentences, leaving out whatever he meant to say, is not to be feared; he is to be pitied from the bottom of one’s soul. But the man whose words come actively to the support of his thoughts, and whose last word suggests to him another thought, he is the speaker to be feared, and yet not feared the worst of all. There is another speaker more dreadful still, who thinks as little standing as sitting, and whose words come reluctantly, but who keeps on and on in the vain hope of being able to say something before he stops, and so cannot stop.

The speaking at the occasional dinner, however, is much more in the control of the chairman than the speaking at the personal dinner. The old fashion of toasts is pretty well past, but the chairman still appoints, more or less, the subject of the speaker he calls up. He may say, if the dinner is in honor of the Invention of Gunpowder, “We have with us to-night a distinguished soldier who has burned a good deal of gunpowder in his time; and I am sure we should all like to hear from General Jones something of his experience with the new smokeless explosives.” Or if it is the Discovery of America they are commemorating, he may call to his feet some representatively venerable citizen, with a well-earned compliment to his antiquity, and the humorous suggestion that he was personally knowing to the landing of Columbus. Then General Jones, or the venerable citizen, will treat at his pleasure of any subject under heaven, after having made his manners to that given him by the chairman and professed his unfitness to handle it.

At the personal dinner, the speaker must in decency stick for a while at least to his text, which is always the high achievement of the honored guest, in law, letters, medicine, arms, drainage, dry-goods, poultry-farming, or whatever. He must not, at once, turn his back on the honored guest and talk of other things; and when sometimes he does so it seems rude.

The menu laid before the diner at this sort of dinner may report a variety of food for the others, but for the honored guest the sole course is taffy, with plenty of drawn butter in a lordly dish. The honored guest is put up beside the chairman, with his mouth propped open for the taffy, and before the end he is streaming drawn butter from every limb. The chairman has poured it over him with a generous ladle in his opening speech, and each speaker bathes him with it anew from the lordly dish. The several speakers try to surpass one another in the application, searching out some corner or crevice of his personality which has escaped the previous orators, and filling it up to overflowing. The listeners exult with them in their discoveries, and roar at each triumph of the sort: it is apparently a proof of brilliant intuition when a speaker seizes upon some forgotten point in the honored guest’s character or career and drenches it with drawn butter.

To what good end do men so flatter and befool one of their harmless fellows? What is there in the nature of literary or agricultural achievement which justifies the outrage of his modest sense of inadequacy? It is a preposterous performance, but it does not reach the climax of its absurdity till the honored guest rises, with his mouth filled with taffy, and, dripping drawn butter all over the place, proceeds to ladle out from the lordly dish, restored to its place before the chairman, a portion for each of the preceding speakers. He may not feel quite like doing it. In their fierce rivalry of adulation, some of them, in order to give fresh flavor to the taffy, may have mingled a little vinegar with it. One may have said that the bantams of the honored guest were not perhaps as small as some other bantams, but that the colossal size of his shanghais was beyond parallel. Another may have hinted, for the purpose of superiorly praising his masterly treatment of the pip, that the diet of his hens was not such as to impart to their eggs the last exquisite flavor demanded by the pampered palate of the epicure. Another yet may have admitted that the honored guest had not successfully grappled with the great question of how to make hens lay every working-day of the year, and he may have done this in order to heighten his grand climax that the man who teaches a hen to lay an egg with two yolks where she laid eggs of but one yolk before is a greater benefactor to the human race than all the inventors of all the missiles of modern warfare. Such a poultry-farmer, he may have declared, preparatory to taking his seat amid thunders of applause, is to other poultry-farmers what the poet who makes the songs of a people is to the boss who makes their laws. This sentiment may have been met with a furore of acceptance, all the other guests leaning forward to look at the honored guest and concentrate their applause upon him, as they clapped and cheered, and one fine fellow springing to his feet and shouting, “Here’s to the man who made two-yolk eggs grow where one-yolk eggs grew before.”

Yet these artfully studied qualifications of the cloying sweet may have been all of the taste of wormwood to the honored guest, who cared nothing for his easy triumph with shanghais and the pip and these two-yolk eggs, but prided himself on his bantams and his hen-food, and was clinging to the hope that his discoveries in the higher education would teach hens to observe the legal holidays if they could not be taught to lay on every working-day, and was trusting to keep his measure of failure a secret from the world. It would not do, however, to betray anything of his vexation. That would be ungracious and ungrateful, and so he must render back taffy for taffy, drawn butter for drawn butter, till the whole place sticks and reeks with it.

Of course, the reader — especially if he has never been asked to a personal dinner of this sort — will be saying that the fault is not with the solemnity or its nature, but with the taste of those who conduct the ceremony. He will no doubt be thinking that if he were ever made the object of such a solemnity, or the chairman, or the least of the speakers, he would manage differently. Very likely he will allege the example of the Greeks, as we have it recorded in the accounts of the banquet offered to Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and the supper given to Æschylus on the hundredth performance of the Œdipus of Sophocles.

The supper has always been considered rather a refinement upon the banquet, in taste, as it was offered to the venerable poet not upon the occasion of any achievement of his own, but in recognition of the prolonged triumph of his brother dramatist, in which it was assumed that he would feel a generous interest. The banquet to Themistocles was more in the nature of a public rejoicing, for it celebrated a victory due as much to the valor of all the Greeks as to the genius of the admiral; and it could, therefore, be made more directly a compliment to him. Even under these circumstances, however, the guest of the evening occupied an inconspicuous place at the reporters’ table, while he was represented on the chairman’s right by the bust of Poseidon, hastily modelled for the occasion by Praxiteles, and dedicated to Themistocles, who was a plain man, but whose portrait, even if he had been handsome, it was thought would not have looked well in such a position at a time when portrait-statuary was unknown. The only direct allusion to him was in the opening toast, “The Dewey of Our Day,” which was drunk sitting, the guests rising from their recumbent postures in honor of it. The chairman’s opening address was almost wholly a plea for the enlargement of the Athenian navy: the implication that the republic had been saved, in spite of its inefficient armament, was accepted as the finest possible compliment to the guest of the evening. The note of all the other speeches was their exquisite impersonality. They got further and further from the occasion of the evening, until the effort of Demosthenes closed the speaking with a scathing denunciation of the machine politicians who had involved the Athenians in a war with Persia to further the interests of Sparta. It was held that this was the noblest tribute which could be paid to the genius of the man who had brought them safely out of it. As the company broke up, Diogenes with his lantern approached Themistocles, who was giving the reporters copies of the speech he had not been asked to deliver, and, after examining his countenance with a sigh of disappointment, accompanied him home as far as his own tub; Athens at that time being imperfectly lighted, and the reform government having not yet replaced the street names wantonly obliterated under the régime of the Thirty Tyrants.

At the supper to Æschylus the tablets of the menu were inscribed with verses from the elder poet ingeniously chosen for their imaginable reference to the masterpiece of the younger, whose modesty was delicately spared at every point. It was a question whether the committee managing the affair had not perhaps gone too far in giving the supper while Sophocles was away from Athens staging the piece at Corinth; but there was no division of opinion as to the taste with which some of the details had been studied. It was considered a stroke of inspiration to have on the speaker’s left, where Sophocles would have sat if he had been present at a supper given to Æschylus, the sitting figure of Melpomene, crowned with rosemary for remembrance. No allusion was made to Æschylus during the evening, after his health had been proposed by the chairman and drunk in silence, but a great and exquisite surprise was reserved for him in the matter of the speeches that followed. By prior agreement among the speakers they were all ostensibly devoted to the examination of the Œdipus and the other dramas of Sophocles, which in his absence were very frankly dealt with. But the unsparing criticism of their defects was made implicitly to take the character of appreciation of the Æschylus tragedies, whose good points were all turned to the light without open mention of them. This afforded the aged poet an opportunity of magnanimously defending his younger confrère, and he rose to the occasion, beaming, as some one said, from head to foot and oozing self-satisfaction at every pore. He could not put from him the compliments not ostensibly directed at him, but he could and did take up the criticisms of the Sophoclean drama, point by point, and refute them in the interest of literature, with a masterly elimination of himself and his own part in it. A Roman gentleman present remarked that he had seen nothing like it, for sincere deprecation, since Cæsar had refused the thrice-offered crown on the Lupercal; and the effect was that intended throughout — the supreme honor of Æschylus in the guise of a tribute to Sophocles. The note of the whole affair was struck by the comic poet Aristophanes, whom the chairman called upon to make the closing speech of the evening, and who merely sat up long enough to quote the old Attic proverb, “Gentlemen, there are many ways to kill a dog besides choking him to death with butter,” and then lay down again amid shrieks of merriment from the whole company.

There is, perhaps, a middle course between the American and Athenian ways of recognizing achievement in the arts or interests, or of commemorating great public events. This would probably derive from each certain advantages, or at least the ancient might temper the modern world to a little more restraint than it now practises in the celebration of private worth, especially. The public events may be more safely allowed to take care of themselves, though it is to be questioned whether it is well for any people to make overmuch of themselves. They cannot do it without making themselves ridiculous, and perhaps making themselves sick of what little real glory there is in any given affair; they will have got that so inextricably mixed up with the vainglory that they will have to reject the one to free themselves from the humiliating memory of the other.

There is nothing that so certainly turns to shame in the retrospect as vainglory, and this is what the personal dinner is chiefly supposed to inspire in the victim of it. If he is at all honest with himself, and he probably is before he can have done anything worthy of notice, he knows perfectly well that he has not merited all if any of the fond flatteries with which he is heaped, as he sits helpless with meat and drink, and suffers under them with the fatuous smile which we all have seen and which some of us have worn. But as the flatterers keep coming on and on, each with his garland of tuberoses or sunflowers, he begins to think that there must be some fire where there is so much smoke, and to feel the glow of the flame which he is not able exactly to locate. He burns in sympathy with his ardent votaries, he becomes inevitably a partner in his own apotheosis. It is the office of the sad, cold morrow, and the sadder and colder after-morrows, to undo this illusion, to compress his head to the measure of his hat, to remove the drawn butter from his soul.

They may never wholly succeed, but this is not probable, and it is not against a permanent folie des grandeurs that we need seek to guard the victim of a personal dinner. We have, indeed, so much faith in the ultimate discretion of the race that we should be quite willing to intrust the remarkable man himself with the office of giving himself a public dinner when he felt that his work merited signal recognition. In this way the whole affair could be kept within bounds. He could strike the note, he could set the pace, in his opening address; and, having appointed the speakers, with a full knowledge of their honesty and subordination, he could trust the speeches to be sane and temperate. In calling the speakers successively up, he could protest against anything that seemed excessive eulogy in the words already spoken, and could invite a more modest estimate of his qualities and achievements in the speeches to follow.

X

A DAY AT BRONX PARK

In the beginning of the season which is called Silly in the world of journalism, because the outer vacuity then responds to the inner, and the empty brain vainly interrogates the empty environment for something to write of, two friends of the Easy Chair offered to spend a holiday in search of material for a paper. The only conditions they made were that the Easy Chair should not exact material of weight or importance, but should gratefully accept whatever they brought back to it, and make the most of it. On these terms they set out on their labor of love.

By the time the sun had quitted the face of the vast apartment-house on which the day habitually broke, and had gone about its business of lighting and heating the city roofs and streets, the holiday companions were well on their way up the Third Avenue Elevated toward that region of the Bronx which, in all their New York years, they had never yet visited. They exulted at each stop and start of the train in the long succession of streets which followed so fast upon one another that the guards gave up trying to call them out as a hundred-and-so-many, and simply said Fifty-fifth, and Sixty-sixth, and Seventy-seventh Street. This slight of their duty to the public comported agreeably with the slip-shod effectiveness of the whole apparatus of the New York life: the rows and rows of shops, the rows and rows of flats, the rows and rows of back yards with miles of wash flying in the soft May wind, which, probably, the people in the open car ahead felt almost a gale.

When the train got as far as the composite ugliness of the ships and tugs and drawbridges of Harlem River, the companions accepted the ensemble as picturesqueness, and did not require beauty of it. Once they did get beauty in a certain civic building which fronted the track and let fall a double stairway from its level in a way to recall the Spanish Steps and to get itself likened to the Trinità de’ Monti at Rome.

It was, of course, like that only in their fond remembrance, but this was not the only Roman quality in their cup of pleasure that day; and they did not care to inquire whether it was merely the flavoring extract of fancy, or was a genuine infusion from the Italian sky overhead, the classic architectural forms, the loosely straggling grass, the flowering woods, the rapture of the birds, the stretches of the river, the tumbling rapids, which so delicately intoxicated them. There was a certain fountain gave a peculiar authenticity to their pleasure, as of some assurance blown in the bottle from which their joy-draught was poured. Nowhere else but in Rome could they have imagined such a group of bronze men and maidens and web-footed horses struggling so bravely, so aimlessly (except to show their figures), in a shallow bowl from which the water spilled so unstintedly over white marble brims beginning to paint themselves palely green.

At the end of their glad day this fountain came last of the things that made Bronx Park such a paradise for eight hours; though it might have been their first delight if they had taken one way about instead of another in their tour of the large, easy pleasance. But suddenly at half-past eleven they found themselves ravenously hungry, and demanded to be driven to the best restaurant by the shortest way that the mild youth whom they fell to at once inside the park gate could find.

He had the very horse he ought to have had — old, weary, infirm, decently hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive there with its fares, kindred spirits, who could appreciate the privacy of a bland Monday after the popular outing of the day before. Almost nobody else was in the park. For a time they noted only a young fellow with a shut book in his hand taking his way up a woody slope and fading into a green shadow; but presently they came to a grassy point running down to the road, where, under a tree, there was a young mother sitting with an open book in her lap, and, a little way from her outstretched little foot, her baby asleep in the smallest of go-carts — the collapsible sort that you can fold and carry in the cars and then unfold for use when you come to the right place. The baby had a white sunbonnet, and a thick fringe of her straw-colored hair came out over her forehead under it, and when the companions smiled together at the baby, and the horse intelligently faltered, the young mother fluttered the idle leaves of her book with her hand and smiled back at them, and took the credit of the little one, not unkindly, yet proudly. They said it was all as nice as it could be, and they were still so content in her and her baby that, when they had to drive out of the park to cross a street to the section where the restaurant and the menagerie were, they waited deferentially for a long, long funeral to get by. They felt pity for the bereaved, and then admiration for people who could afford to have so many carriages; and they made their driver ask the mounted policeman whose funeral it was. He addressed the policeman by name, and the companions felt included in the circle of an acquaintance where a good deal of domesticity seemed to prevail. The policeman would not join in the conjecture that it was some distinguished person; he did not give his reasons; and the pair began to fret at their delay, and mentally to hurry that poor unknown underground — so short is our patience with the dead! When at last their driver went up round the endless queue of hacks, it suddenly came to an end, and they were again in the park and among the cages and pens and ranges of the animals, in the midst of which their own restaurant appeared. An Italian band of mandolins and guitars was already at noonday softly murmuring and whimpering in the corner of the veranda where the tables were set; and they got an amiable old waiter, whose fault it was not if spring-lamb matures so early in the summer of its brief term as to seem last-fall-lamb. There is no good reason either to suppose he did not really believe in the pease. But why will pease that know they have been the whole winter in the can pretend to be just out of the pod? Doubtless it is for every implication that all vegetation is of one ichor with humanity; but the waiter was honester than the pease. He telephoned for two wheeled chairs, and then said he had countermanded them because they would be half an hour coming; but again he telephoned, for by this time the pair had learned that they might drive into the zoological grounds, but not drive round them; and they saw from the window the sun smoking hot on the asphalt paths their feet must press.

ZOÖLOGICAL GARDENS, BRONX PARK

While the chairs lingered on the way, they went to get what comfort they could from the bears, whose house was near at hand. They might well have learned patience here from a bear trying to cope with a mocking cask in a pool. He pushed it under the water with his paw and held it hard down; when he turned away as if that cask were done for, there it was bobbing about on the surface, and he had to down it again and hold it under till life seemed extinct. At last he gave it up and left it floating in triumph, but one could infer with what perseverance he would renew the struggle presently.

There might have been too many bears; but this was the fault of all their fellow-captives except perhaps the elephants. One cannot really have enough of elephants; and one would have liked a whole herd of giraffes, and a whole troop of gnus would not have glutted one’s pleasure in their goat-faces, cow-heads, horse-tails, and pig-feet. But why so many snakes of a kind? Why such a multiplicity of crocodiles? Why even more than one of that special pattern of Mexican iguana which looked as if cut out of zinc and painted a dull Paris green? Why, above all, so many small mammals?

Small mammals was the favorite phrase of the friendly colored chairman, who by this time had appeared with an old-soldier comrade and was pushing the companions about from house to house and cage to cage. Small mammals, he warned them, were of an offensive odor, and he was right; but he was proud of them and of such scientific knowledge of them as he had. The old soldier did not pretend to have any such knowledge. He fell into a natural subordination, and let his colored superior lead the way mostly, though he asserted the principle that this is a white man’s country by pushing first to the lions’ house instead of going to the flying-cage, as his dark comrade instructed him.

It was his sole revolt. “But what,” we hear the reader asking, “is the flying-cage?” We have not come to that yet; we are lingering still at the lions’ house, where two of the most amiable lions in the world smilingly illustrate the effect of civilization in such of their savage species as are born in the genial captivity of Bronx Park. We are staying a moment in the cool stone stable of the elephants and the rhinoceroses and the hippopotamuses; we are fondly clinging to the wires of the cages where the hermit-thrushes, snatched from their loved solitude and mixed with an indiscriminate company of bolder birds, tune their angelic notes only in a tentative staccato; we are standing rapt before the awful bell-bird ringing his sharp, unchanging, unceasing peal, as unconscious of us as if he had us in the heart of his tropical forest; we are waiting for the mighty blue Brazilian macaw to catch our names and syllable them to the shrieking, shrilling, snarling society of parrots trapezing and acrobating about him; we are even stopping to see the white peahen wearing her heart out and her tail out against her imprisoning wires; we are delaying to let the flying-cage burst upon us in the unrivalled immensity promised. That is, we are doing all this in the personalities of those holiday companions, who generously found the cage as wide and high as their chair-men wished, and gratefully gloated upon its pelicans and storks and cranes and swans and wild geese and wood-ducks and curlews and sea-pigeons, and gulls, and whatever other water-fowl soars and swims. It was well, they felt, to have had this kept for the last, with its great lesson of a communistic captivity in which all nations of men might be cooped together in amity and equality, instead of being, as now, shut up each in his own cell of need and fear.

Not having come in an automobile, the companions were forced by an invidious regulation to find their carriage outside the gate of the Concourse; but neither the horse nor the driver seemed to feel the slight of the discrimination. They started off to complete the round of the park with all their morning cheerfulness and more; for they had now added several dollars to their tariff of charges by the delay of their fares, and they might well be gayer. Their fares did not refuse to share their mood, and when they crossed the Bronx and came into the region of the walks and drives they were even gayer than their horse and man. These were more used to the smooth level of the river where it stretched itself out between its meadowy shores and mirrored the blue heaven, rough with dusky white clouds, in its bosom; they could not feel, as their fares did, the novelty in the beauty of that hollow, that wide grassy cup by which they drove, bathed in the flowery and blossomy sweetness that filled it to its wood-bordered brim.

But what is the use of counting one by one the joys of a day so richly jewelled with delight? Rather let us heap them at once in the reader’s lap and not try to part the recurrence of the level-branched dogwoods in bloom; the sunny and the shadowy reaches of the woods still in the silken filminess of their fresh young leaves; the grass springing slenderly, tenderly on the unmown slopes of the roadsides, or giving up its life in spicy sweetness from the scythe; the gardeners pausing from their leisurely employ, and once in the person of their foreman touching their hats to the companions; the wistaria-garlanded cottage of the keeper of the estate now ceded to the city; the Gothic stable of the former proprietor looking like a Gothic chapel in its dell; the stone mansion on its height opening to curiosity a vague collection of minerals, and recalling with its dim, hardwood interior the ineffectual state of a time already further outdated than any colonial prime; the old snuff-mill of the founders, hard by; the dam breaking into foam in the valley below; the rustic bridge crossing from shore to shore, with steel-engraving figures leaning on its parapet and other steel-engraving presences by the water’s brink.

The supreme charm is that you are so free to all things in that generous park; that you may touch them and test them by every sense; that you may stray among the trees, and lie down upon the grass, and possess yourself indiscriminately of them quite as if they were your own.

They are indeed yours in the nobler sense of public proprietorship which will one day, no doubt, supersede all private ownership. You have your share of the lands and waters, the birds in the cages and the beasts, from the lions and elephants in their palaces, and the giraffes freely browsing and grazing in their paddock, down to the smallest of the small mammals giving their odor in their pens. You have as much right as another to the sculptures (all hand-carved, as your colored chairman will repeatedly tell you) on the mansions of the lordlier brutes, and there is none to dispute your just portion of the Paris-green zinc iguana, for you have helped pay for them all.

The key-word of this reflection makes you anxious to find whether your driver will make you pay him too much, but when you tot up the hours by his tariff, and timidly suggest that it will be so many dollars and offer him a bill for the same, he surprises you by saying, No, he owes you fifty cents on that; and paying it back.

Such at least was the endearing experience of the companions at the end of their day’s pleasure. Not that it was really the end, for there was the airy swoop homeward in the Elevated train, through all that ugly picturesqueness of bridges and boats and blocks of buildings, with the added interest of seeing the back-flying streets below now full of children let loose from school for the afternoon, and possessing the roadways and sidewalks as if these, too, were common property like the park. It seemed to the companions that the children increased toward the shabbier waterside, and decreased wherever the houses looked better, through that mystical law of population by which poverty is richer than prosperity is in children. They could see them yelling and screaming at their games, though they could not hear them, and they yelled and screamed the louder to the eye because they were visibly for the greatest part boys. If they were the offspring of alien parents, they might be a proof of American decay; but, on the other hand, the preponderance of boys was in repair of that disproportion of the sexes which in the east of these States is such a crying evil.

Perhaps it was the behavior of the child in the opposite seat which made the companions think of girls as a crying evil; the mental operations are so devious and capricious; but this child was really a girl. She was a pretty child and prettily dressed, with a little face full of a petulant and wilful charm, which might well have been too much for her weak, meek young mother. She wanted to be leaning more than half out of the window and looking both ways at once, and she fought away the feebly restraining hands with sharp, bird-like shrieks, so that the companions expected every moment to see her succeed in dashing herself to death, and suffered many things from their fear. When it seemed as if nothing could save them, the guard came in and told the weak, meek mother that the child must not lean out of the window. Instantly, such is the force of all constituted authority among us, the child sat down quietly in her mother’s lap, and for the rest of the journey remained an example to angels, so that the companions could rejoice as much in her goodness as in her loveliness. She became, indeed, the crown of their happy day, a day so happy that now in the faint air of August it is hard to believe it even of May.

THE END

HEROINES OF FICTION

CONTENTS

VOLUME I.

SOME NINETEENTH-CENTURY HEROINES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

FRANCES BURNEY’S EVELINA

TWO HEROINES OF MARIA EDGEWORTH’S

JANE AUSTEN’S ELIZABETH BENNET

JANE AUSTEN’S ANNE ELLIOT AND CATHARINE MORLAND

JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA WOODHOUSE, MARIANNE DASHWOOD, AND FANNY PRICE

HEROINES OF MISS FERRIER, MRS. OPIE, AND MRS. RADCLIFFE

SCOTT’S REBECCA AND ROWENA, AND LUCY ASHTON

SCOTT’S JEANIE DEANS AND COOPER’S LACK OF HEROINES

A HEROINE OF BULWER’S

THE EARLIER HEROINES OF CHARLES DICKENS

HEROINES OF CHARLES DICKENS’S MIDDLE PERIOD

DICKENS’S LATER HEROINES

HAWTHORNE’S HESTER PRYNNE

HAWTHORNE’S ZENOBIA AND PRISCILLA, AND MIRIAM AND HILDA

THACKERAY’S BAD HEROINES

THACKERAY’S GOOD HEROINES

THACKERAY’S ETHEL NEWCOME AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE

THE TWO CATHARINES OF EMILY BRONTÈ

VOLUME II.

CHARLES KINGSLEY’S HYPATIA

THE NATURE OF CHARLES READE’S HEROINES

VARIATIONS OF READE’S TYPE OF HEROINES

GEORGE ELIOT’S MAGGIE TULLIVER AND HETTY SORREL

GEORGE ELIOTS ROSAMOND VINCY AND DOROTHEA BROOKE

GEORGE ELIOT’S GWENDOLEN HARLETH AND JANET DEMPSTER

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S LILY DALE

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S LUCY ROBARTS AND GRISELDA GRANTLY

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S MRS. PROUDIE

THE HEROINE OF “THE INITIALS”

THE HEROINE OF “KATE BEAUMONT”

MR. JAMES’S DAISY MILLER

MR. THOMAS HARDY’S HEROINES

MR. THOMAS HARDY’S BATHSHEBA EVERDENE AND PAULA POWER

WILLIAM BLACK’S GERTRUDE WHITE

MR. BRET HARTE’S MIGGLES, AND MR. T. B. ALDRICH’S MARJORIE DAW

MR. G. W. CABLE’S AURORA AND CLOTILDE NANCANOU

MR. H. B. FULLER’S JANE MARSHALL AND MISS M. E. WILKINS’S JANE FIELD

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD’S HEROINES

VOLUME I.

SOME NINETEENTH-CENTURY HEROINES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

IN proposing to confine these studies to the nineteenth-century heroines of Anglo-Saxon fiction, I find myself confronted by a certain question, which I should like to share with the reader.

A day, a month, a year, these are natural divisions of time, and must be respected as such; but a century, like a week or a fortnight, is a mere convention of the chronologers, and need not be taken very literally in its claim to be exactly a hundred years long. As to its qualities and characteristics, it had much better not be taken so; and in a study like the present one is by no means bound to date the heroines of nineteenth-century fiction from the close of the eighteenth century, even if the whole world were agreed just when that was. In fact, since the heroines of fiction are of a race so mixed that there is no finding out just where they came from, there is some reason why a study of nineteenth-century heroines should go back to their greatest-grandmothers in the Byzantine romances, or even beyond these, to the yet elder Greek lineages in the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.” But there is still more reason why it should not do anything of the sort We may amuse ourselves, if we choose, in tracing resemblances and origins; but, after all, the heroines of English and American fiction are of easily distinguishable types, and their evolution in their native Anglo-Saxon environment has been, in no very great lapse of time, singularly uninfluenced from without. They have been responsive at different moments to this ideal and to that, but they have always been English and American; and they have constantly grown more interesting as they have grown more modern.

I

The best thing in the expression of any sort of modernity is a voluntary naturalness, an instructed simplicity; and there is no writer of the present moment, not Mr. Hardy, not Count Tolstoy himself, who is more modem than De Foe in these essentials, though De Foe wrote two hundred and fifty years ago. But we cannot go back to De Foe in this place any more than we could turn, say, to M. Zola. De Foe is distinctly of the nineteenth century in the voluntary naturalness and instructed simplicity of his art, but he is no more of the English nineteenth-century tradition, or principle or superstition, call it what you will, than M. Zola. He wrote the clearest, purest English, the most lifelike English; and his novels are of a self-evident and most convincing fidelity to life. But he was, frankly, of the day before we began to dwell in decencies, before women began to read novels so much that the novel had to change the subject, or so limit its discussion that it came to the same thing. De Foe was of a vastly nobler morality than Fielding, and his books are less corrupting; they are not corrupting at all, in fact; they are as well intentioned as Richardson’s, which sometimes deal with experiences far from edifying in order to edify. He is a greater, a more modem artist than either of the others; but because of his matter, and not because of his manner or motive, his heroines must remain under lock and key, and cannot be so much as named in mixed companies. De Foe’s novels cannot be freely read and criticised; only his immortal romance is open to all comers, of every age and sex, and it is a thousand pities that “Robinson Crusoe” has no heroine. We must not begin to study our heroines of nineteenth-century fiction with him, though, aesthetically and ethically, nineteenth-century fiction derives from him in some things that are best in it, especially in that voluntary naturalness and instructed simplicity which are the chiefest marks of modernity.

We cannot begin a hundred years later with the heroines of Samuel Richardson, though one of them at least is as freshly modem as any girl of yesterday or tomorrow. Clarissa Harlowe, in spite of her eighteenth-century costume and keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that Ever-Womanly which is of all times and places. The form of the novel in which she appears, the epistolary novel, is of all forms the most averse to the apparent unconsciousness so fascinating in a heroine; yet the cunning of Richardson (it was in some things an unrivalled cunning) triumphs over the form and shows us Clarissa with no more of pose than she would confront herself with in the glass. It is in her own words that she gives herself to our knowledge, but we feel that she gives herself truly, and with only the mental reserves that a girl would actually use: there is always some final fact that a girl must withhold.

She gives not herself alone, but all her environment, vividly, credibly, convincingly, in the letters she writes. She persuades us that she lives and suffers; and though it is preposterous in the novelist to study her love-affair so minutely as he does, it is not preposterous but most simple and natural for her to dwell upon it in every detail It is all the world, the centre of the universe to her experience, and however the author permits her to tire the reader, she cannot be supposed to tire herself or tire her ardent friend and correspondent, Miss Anna Howe, in her unstinted outpourings. Indeed, when the reader has once put himself in sympathy with a heroine who does not always deserve it, he too is eager for the smallest particulars of her pathetic fate.

The situation in “Clarissa Harlowe” is one which the author was apparently much more at home in than in the situations of either “Pamela” or “Sir Charles Grandison.” Richardson was not native to the low life of the one or the high life of the other, but to the middle-class life where Clarissa Harlowe belongs. There, at ease in the setting, he had merely to imagine an impulsive, affectionate, right-principled girl, persecuted by her philistine family, who try to force her into a hateful marriage, till they drive her to the protection of the lover who plots her ruin. It is very imaginable that when she cannot save herself from him, she should reject the offer of his hand, and that she should die of her griefs; but these are not the vital facts of the case from an artistic point of view. From such a point of view, the heroine’s gentle and lovable nature, the characters of the different personages, and the incidents that arise from them and reveal them, are the main matters, and it is here that Richardson has his greatest success. Clarissa is more lifelike in what she does than in what she says, for she has to say too much, though in her spirited resentment of her wrongs from her detestable family, she brings palpably before us her weak mother and father, her hateful sister and brutal brother, and all the abetting cousins and aunts and uncles. Her waverings, however, her hesitations and withdrawals, her resistances and persistences, it is in these that the author most truly finds her and reveals her. As he finds her and reveals her she is like girls of our widely different circumstance in the measure that many great-grandmotherly miniatures are like the photographs of their great-granddaughters. She is, in her character, of the nineteenth century, but in her environment she is almost as impossible as the heroines of De Foe, from whom she derives in the right realistic line.

II

It remained for a still later, but not much later, novelist to portray in the sister-heroines of “The Vicar of Wakefield,” two dear girls who are far more appreciable and acceptable to our nineteenth-century notions. They are as distinctly of the eighteenth-century circumstance as Clarissa Harlowe, but they are somehow so transcendently imagined that they have survived into our time with the effect of being born in it.

It can hardly be claimed that Goldsmith was a greater imagination than Richardson; but he was certainly a greater artist. He had the instinct of reticence, which Richardson had not, and it is not going much too far to say that the nineteenth-century English novel, as we understand it now, with its admirable limitations, was invented by Oliver Goldsmith. The novel that respects the right of innocence to pleasure in a true picture of manners, and honors the claim of inexperience to be amused and edified without being abashed, was his creation. He did not know himself, perhaps, how wonderfully he was prophesying, in “The Vicar of Wakefield,” the best modem fiction of England and America.

He does not portray the incidents or characters which Richardson studies with a pious abhorrence, or Fielding with a blackguardly sympathy. His realism stops short of the facts which may appall or which may defile the fancy. It contents itself with the gentle domestic situation of the story and its change from happiness to misery through chances none the less probable because they are operated by the author so much more obviously than they would be now by an author of infinitely less inspiration. Such an artist would not now accumulate disaster upon Dr. Primrose’s head so clearly with his own hand; disaster has become much more accustomed to the affliction of fictitious character and makes its approaches with the indirectness and delays noticeable in the actual world. Neither would such an artist have employed means so little psychological as the good man’s sudden loss of fortune and his swift precipitation to misery by the wretch who breaks the heart of his daughter, and spoils the joy of all those harmless lives. Happily for the finer art of our time, the betrayer does not now imaginably find his way into the family of a country clergyman with the intent to dishonor and destroy it; but even in the brutal time when such things were justly imaginable the author spares us the worst with a sort of prophetic sensibility. The fair Olivia is, indeed, eloped with if not quite abducted; things could not be otherwise managed in that day without defiance of the traditions alike of fiction and of fact; but she stoops to folly only through a mock marriage, and this in the end, as is well known, proves a real marriage, thanks to the twofold duplicity of the wicked lover’s agent, who, for purposes of his own, has had the ceremony performed by a real clergyman. Her tragic fate gives her a sort of dignity not innate in her; and in her potential relenting towards the ultimate disaster of the scoundrel who has so cruelly misused her, she has the highest charm of the Ever-Womanly — at least to the Ever-Manly witness. But it is at no time pretended that she is a wise person, even by the fond father who tells the story of his family. “Olivia, now about eighteen,” he says in such antithetical portraiture of his daughters as the age delighted in, “had that luxuriancy of beauty with which painters generally draw Hebe; open, sprightly and commanding. Sophia’s features were not so striking at first, but often did more execution; for they were soft, modest and alluring. Olivia wished for many lovers; Sophia to secure one. Olivia was often affected from too great desire to please; Sophia even repressed excellence from her fear to offend.... I have often seen them exchange characters for a whole day together. A suit of mourning has transformed my coquette into a prude, and a new set of ribbands has given her younger sister more than natural vivacity.”

III

It is a picture that makes one wish the more that the good doctor had carried his complaisance a little farther and told us what color his girls’ eyes and hair were of, and which was the taller or slighter. In the absence of positive information one is left to suppose from the internal evidence that Olivia was large and fair, and Sophia of a low stature and a brunette complexion; or the reverse, as one likes. As to their dress, that is not so wholly matter of conjecture, for their father tells us that even after the loss of his fortune, when they were forced to live humbly like their country neighbors, he “still found them attached to their former finery. They still loved laces, ribbands, bugles and catgut; my wife herself retained a passion for her crimson paduasoy.... When we were to assemble in the morning at breakfast, down came my wife and daughters dressed out in all their former splendor: their hair plastered up with pomatum, their faces patched to taste, their trains bundled up into a heap behind, and rustling at every motion.”

It is well known how the ladies were portrayed in the famous picture of the Primrose family, which, when the wandering limner had finished it out-doors, was found too big to be got into the house. “My wife desired to be represented as Venus, and the painter was requested not to be too frugal of his diamonds in her stomacher and hair... Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon, sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green joseph, richly laced with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepardess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing.”

The behavior of the ladies was in conformity to the dispositions respectively assigned to them; but all the world has long been too familiar with it to suffer more than one or two illustrative instances. When young Thornhill first presented himself without invitation among them, it is known how coldly they received him, but how, when he refused to be repulsed, they relented, and the girls, at their mother’s bidding, played and sang for him. “Mr. Thornhill seemed highly delighted with their performance and choice, and then took up the guitar himself. He played very indifferently; but my eldest daughter repaid his former applause with interest, and assured him that his tones were louder even than those of her master.... As soon as he was gone my wife called a council.... ‘Tell me, Sophia, my dear, what do you think of our new visitor? Don’t you think he seemed to be very good-natured?’  ‘Immensely so, indeed, mamma,’ replied she. ‘I think he has a great deal to say upon every subject, and is never at a loss; and the more trifling the subject the more he has to say.’  ‘Yes,’ cried Olivia, ‘he is well enough for a man, but for my part I don’t much like him, he is so extremely impudent and familiar; but on the guitar he is shocking.’”

It is of course in keeping with her character that this mother meets her hapless daughter with cruel upbraiding when she comes back to her ruined home, but wholly forgives her in the end when she finds that Olivia has been incontestably “made an honest woman of” by the machinations of her betrayer’s betrayer. Mrs. Primrose, however, is by no means a harsh nature, even if she is a woman so little wiser than some men. She is always a most acceptable presence in the story, and never more so than when she is most foolish. She is very modem in being of the illogical and inconsequent type of her sex which fiction has rather over-delighted in painting since her day. Probably there were hints of her in fiction from the very beginning, but it was Goldsmith who first painted one of the many ancestresses of Mrs. Nickleby in full length. She reasons from her wishes and believes from her-hopes, with those vast leaps from premises to conclusions which we have all witnessed in ladies of her mental make, both in and out of novels. She prevails by the qualities of her heart, and her adequacy to most domestic occasions shows that the home may be governed with as little wisdom as the world. She influences the sage Sophia as strongly as the giddy Olivia, and it is pleasant to see how she is held in her motherly supremacy by the affection of her children, and the love of her husband, who perfectly understands her. In fact, a very pretty case might be made out of her as the real heroine of the book.

She and Olivia are both of much more readily perceptible quality than Sophia. One expects Olivia to do what she does; it is almost inevitable; and then one expects an interval of good sense in her after her misfortunes, which, it is intimated, have chastened without essentially changing her. Sophia is a more difficult nature to deal with, for her charm has to be shown in negative ways. She has a great deal more mind than either her mother or sister, but she is mostly subject to them, and follows their lead as younger daughters and sisters do, or at least used to do. She will practically share in many of Olivia’s absurdities in spite of her greater light and knowledge, and she is preserved from her disasters apparently by a fate that does not always befriend passive principle. It is just in her passivity, however, that she is so dear to the heart, so like so many other nice girls who are often so much wiser than anything they do, or even say. One of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s heroines is reported to have been able to converse like a philosopher, but to be apt, in emergency, to behave like a robin in a green-house. If this was not quite the case with Sophia, it must be owned that her main superiority to Olivia was shown in her being fallen in love with by a better man, and in her refusing to be carried off by the villain who had deceived her sister; though it ought to be said in Olivia’s behalf that it is much easier to resist being carried off against your will than with it.

IV

It was the age of moral sentiments, and to have them at hand was the sovereignest thing against temptation from without and within. Heroines used to express them whenever the least danger threatened, and sometimes when they were in perfect safety. Under instruction of the good Samuel Richardson they sought the welfare of themselves, their lovers, and their correspondents in formularies prescribing the virtues for every exigency, and praising right conduct with a constancy which ought to have availed rather more promptly than it did. But neither of the girls in “The Vicar of Wakefield” is very profuse of them, and this marks either a lapsing faith in their efficacy, or a rising art in the novelist. Goldsmith, at any rate, confines the precepts and reflections to the father of his heroines, as he might fitly do in the case of the supposed narrator; Richardson, or rather the epistolary form of his novels, obliges his heroines to make them. Yet he was a great master, and, in spite of his preaching, a great artist He was a man of a mighty middle-class conscience, and in an age not so corrupt as some former ages, but still of abominable social usages, he could not withhold the protest of a righteous soul, though he risked rendering a little tedious the interesting girls who uttered it for him.

He was blamed for portraying facts which were not so edifying as the morals to be drawn from them; and this may have been why he made his heroines so didactic. Somehow he had to trim the balance, and if the faithful portraiture of vice involved danger of contamination to the reader, virtue must be the more explicit and prodigal of its prophylactics and antidotes. His excess in both directions was corrected by the wiser art if not the purer instinct of the group of great women novelists who inherited his moral ideals and refined upon his materials and methods. Society had perhaps not grown much less licentious when Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen began to write, but it was growing less openly licentious, and it might be studied in pictures less alarming to propriety, if not to innocence. These women, who fixed the ideal of the Anglo-Saxon heroines, wrote at the close of the last century and the beginning of this, some thirty years after the masterpieces of Richardson appeared, and fifteen or twenty years after “The Vicar of Wakefield” imparted to all Europe the conception of a more exquisite fiction. In some sort Richardson served them as a model, and Goldsmith as an inspiration, but it was they who characterized the modem Anglo-Saxon novel which these masters had perhaps invented. The most beautiful, the most consoling of all the arts owes its universal acceptance among us, its opportunity of pleasing and helping readers of every age and sex, to this group of high-souled women. They forever dedicated it to decency; as women they were faithful to their charge of the chaste mind; and as artists they taught the reading world to be in love with the sort of heroines who knew how not only to win the wandering hearts of men, but to keep their homes pure and inviolable. They imagined the heroine who was above all a Nice Girl; who still remains the ideal of our fiction; to whom it returns with a final constancy, after whatever aberration; so that probably if a composite photograph of the best heroines of our day could be made, it would look so much like a composite miniature of their great-great-grandmothers in the novels of these authors that the two could not well be told apart

FRANCES BURNEY’S EVELINA

THE author and the heroine of “Evelina” can never be quite separable in the fancy of the reader who studies the characters of both in the stories of their lives, though their lives themselves were so very different; and the happiness that came to the heroine so dramatically and so decisively was so long a time on its way to the author.

I

“Evelina” was published in 1788 and made its instant success; a few years later, her sister-heroine “Cecilia” appeared in the novel of that name, and yet a few years later the brilliant young author was tempted from her charming home, the fond circle of her friends such as Johnson, Burke and Reynolds, the public that idolized her, to become the waiting-woman of the commonplace queen of George III. It was an error so cruel that it hurts one yet to think of it; one rages against it as if it were still actual, and is not consoled by the fact that the victim never thoroughly realized her suffering as wrong to literature. It spoiled her career, and broke her health, but she seems to have thought to the last that her slavery was an honor; and she was prouder of the kindness which her devotion had inspired even in the heart of royalty, than of anything else in her history. When after five years she left the grudging queen’s service, her father, who had urged her to enter it, could never understand why she wished to leave it He indeed welcomed her back to her home and her broken literary life, and many years later she began to write novels again; but the simplicity, the girlish spirit, the young grace was gone from her work, and “Camilla” and “The Wanderer” are conscious, academic poses of a talent once so spontaneous. It was a talent once so spontaneous, so vivid, so unaffected, that when Fanny Burney first had before her the task of depicting the nature and behavior of “A Young Lady on her Entrance in the World,” she looked in her glass for her model, and wrought with the naïveté of the true artist, especially the true artist who is also young.

It is not to be supposed that she purposely drew herself in Evelina Anville. That is not the way of good art, though the end, the effect is self-portraiture. It is essential to the charm of a fictitious character that he or she who makes it in his or her image should not be aware of doing so; and no doubt Miss Burney kept well within her illusions. If she had perfectly known what she was doing, there would have been touches of self-defence, of self-flattery in Evelina which would have spoiled our pleasure in her; but probably; there were people who knew who Evelina was at the time, if Miss Burney did not, and had not to wait ‘nearly fifty years for the “Diary and Letters of Mme. D’Arblay” to let them into the open secret. The great Dr. Johnson knew it, and if he did not declare it, he came little short of it in his recognition of her admirable and endearing qualities. The great Mr. Burke must have known it, and all that famous and friendly company which resorted to her father’s house when the timid and gentle girl suddenly astonished them by proving herself a novelist hitherto unrivalled in a certain charm and truth.

II

Before “The Vicar of Wakefield “ there had been no English fiction in which the loveliness of family life had made itself felt; before Evelina the heart of girlhood had never been so fully opened in literature. There had been girls and girls, but none in whom the traits and actions of the girls familiar to their fathers, brothers and lovers were so fully recognized; and the contemporaneity instantly felt in Evelina has lasted to this day. The changes since her entrance into the world have been so tremendous that we might almost as well be living in another planet, for all that is left of the world she so trembled at and rejoiced in. But whoever opens the book of her adventures, finds himself in that vanished society with her, because she is herself so living that she makes everything about her alive.

She is of course imagined upon terms of the romantic singularity which we no longer require in letting a nice girl have our hearts. Her father is of a species so very hard-hearted as to be extinct now, even in the theatre. He denies his marriage with her mother, and destroys the proof of it for no very apparent motive (he seems to have been very much in love with his wife), except to equip his daughter with a mystery and an unnatural parent for purposes of fiction. He retires into the background of the story before Evelina is born, and does not emerge from it until he is needed to be forgiven at the end, when he bestows her hand upon the hero with proper authority. In the mean time she has been brought up in great seclusion by the Rev. Arthur Villars, a friend of her mother’s father, who has devoted himself to her education, and has cherished her as if she were his own child. It is solely to him that her fondest thoughts and affections turn when at the age of seventeen she leaves Berry Hill with his approval and launches upon the gay world of London in the care of certain friends of his.

It duly appears that, besides the exceptionally ruthless father who will have nothing to do with her, Evelina has a very terrible grandmother, who was an English servant when her beauty caught the young fancy of Evelina’s grandfather. He expiates his passion by many years of marriage with her in France, and after his death she returns in a second widowhood to London, just at the moment Evelina is entering the fashionable world there, and becomes the low comedy and low tragedy of the story. She is not only very awful herself, with a French bourgeois vulgarity thickly overlaying her English servile vulgarity, but she is surrounded by Evelina’s city cousins, who have a cockney vulgarity all their own, and for whom she claims the girl’s affection, together with her duty to herself. They complicate the poor child’s relations with the finer world to which she belongs by instinct and breeding, in all sorts of ways; and if anything could prevent her predestined union with the exemplary Lord Orville, their behavior would do it. She is horribly ashamed of them, but she does nothing cruel to escape them, and she submits to her grandmother not only because she must, but because she will. In short, at the moment when snobbery was first coming to its consciousness in literature Evelina was not a snob. She otherwise shows herself a thoroughly good girl, and she does it charmingly, though she has to do it without seeming to do so, in the long letters which she writes relating her adventures and which, with those of her correspondents, form the old-fashioned vehicle of the story.

III

Her letters are mostly addressed to the admirable, the almost too admirable, Mr. Villars, who replies to her abounding confidences with sympathy and wisdom from his seclusion at Berry Hill. In an age of unfeeling fathers his tenderness is more than paternal, but except that the story would have had to stop if he had done so, there seem times when he might have usefully given her a little more paternal protection. He has armed her against fate merely with a variety of high principles, and Evelina herself has to own that she is never in trouble when she is true to them. She learns very early the difference between meaning to behave always in perfect conformity to them and really doing so, for at her very first ball she refuses to dance with a fop she does not like, and, forgetting she has told him she is not dancing at all, she dances with Lord Orville, whom she does like from the moment she sees him. Worse than this, she cannot help laughing at the beau’s grotesque indignation with her innocent perfidy; and at the very next ball she has profited so little by her experience that she again falls a prey to her own rather ingenuous duplicity. Lord Orville did not come to ask her for the first dance, as she hoped he might; but “a very fashionable, gay-looking man, who seemed about thirty years of age,... begged the honor.” Her chaperon, from whom she had become separated, had told her “it was highly improper for a young woman to dance with strangers at any public assembly,” and not wishing to risk the sort of offence she had given at her first ball, she answers this gentleman that she is engaged already. “I meant,” she writes to Mr. Villars, and she owns that she blushes to write it, “to keep myself at liberty to dance or not, as matters should fall out.... He looked at me as if incredulous. — .. asked me a thousand questions, and at last he said: ‘Is it really possible a man whom you have honored with your acceptance can fail to be on hand? You are missing the most delightful dance in the world... — .

Will you give me leave to seek him?... Pray, what coat has he on?. — . — . My indignation is so great that I long to kick the fellow round the room.’” In vain she tries to escape her lively tormentor; to her shame and confusion he attaches himself to her and leads the way through the rooms, entreating her to let him find her recreant partner. “‘Is that he?’ pointing to an old man who was lame, ‘or that?’ And in this manner he asked me of whoever was old or ugly in the room.” She frankly tells him at last that he has spoiled all her happiness for the whole evening, but he will not leave amusing himself with her distress till she feigns at sight of Lord Orville that it is he whom she was to dance with. She does no more than glance at his lordship, but that is quite enough for her persecutor.” His eyes instantly followed mine. ‘Why, is that the gentleman?’... At this instant Mrs. Mirvan, followed by Lord Orville, walked up to us,... when this strange man, destined to be the scourge of my artifice, exclaimed, ‘Ha, my Lord Orville I — I protest I did not know your lordship. What can I say for my usurpation? Yet, faith, my Lord, such a prize should not be neglected!’ My shame and confusion were unspeakable. Who could have supposed or foreseen that this man knew Lord Orville? But falsehood is not more unjustifiable than unsafe! Lord Orville — well he might — looked all amazement. ‘The philosophic coldness of your lordship,’ continued this odious creature, ‘every man is not endowed with.’. — .. He suddenly seized my hand, saying, ‘Think, my Lord, what must be my reluctance to resign this fair hand to your lordship!’ In the same instant Lord Orville took it of him... — . To compel him then to dance I could not endure, and eagerly called out, ‘By no means — not for the world! I must beg— “Will you honor with your commands, madam?’ cried my tormentor.... ‘But do you dance or not? You see his lordship waits!’,.. ‘For Heaven’s sake, my dear,’ cried Mrs., Mirvan, who could no longer contain her surprise, ‘what does all this mean? Were you preengaged? Had Lord Orville— “No, madam,’ cried I,— ‘only — only I did not know this gentleman — and so I thought — I intended — I—’... I had not strength to make my mortifying explanation; my spirits quite failed me, and I burst into tears. They all seemed shocked and amazed.... ‘What have I done?’ exclaimed my evil genius, and ran officiously for a glass of water. However, a hint was sufficient for Lord Orville, who comprehended all I would have explained. He immediately led me to a seat, and said to me in a very low voice, ‘Be not distressed, I beseech you; I shall ever think my name honored by your making use of it.’”

IV

The scene in the ball-room, where Evelina becomes the prey of the tease whom she has not meant to deceive harmfully, is one of many in which Sir Clement Willoughby pursues and torments her. He begins by teasing her, and ends by loving her, but he never imagines marrying her. That is reserved for Lord Orville, who thought her rather a poor thing at first, but comes more and more to feel her charm and realize her worth. She has not an instant’s misgiving as to him. From the earliest moment she finds his “conversation really delightful. His manners are so elegant and so gentle, so unassuming that they engage esteem and diffuse complacence,” quite as they would with Dr. Johnson, in whose diction Miss Burney upon this occasion speaks for her heroine. But in fact Lord Orville is a gentleman and not a prig, at a time when the choice between being a prig and being a blackguard was difficult for a young man in good society. It has been rather the custom of criticism to decry this hero, but he never shows himself unequal to his great office of appreciating Evelina. No matter what box she is in he divines that she got there for some reason that was honorable to her heart if not to her head.

It is with a fine courage that Miss Burney shows her heroine in her silliness as well as her sense, but she can do this without that suspicion of satirizing her sex which would attach to a writer of the other sex. In fact, one great charm of the story is that it is not satire at all. It is mostly light comedy; it is sometimes low comedy; it is at other times serious melodrama; but the lesson from it is never barbed, and the author’s attitude towards her characters has never that sarcastic knowingness which has been the most odious vice of English novelists.

V

It was an age when in a lady’s house, and almost in the presence of the man who loves her, a young girl could be pursued by the impudent addresses of men who thought her too poor and too humble for marriage. This is Evelina’s fate, which she thinks hard, but does not seem to think exceptional; though she is at least preserved from being carried off by such a man. She is indeed inveigled from her friends at the opera by Sir Clement Willoughby who had known her only as a gentleman might know a young lady in society nowadays, and hurried into his chariot (it looks like a coupé in the old pictures), to be driven anywhere but to her chaperon’s address. She saves herself by putting her head out of the window and screaming; then he drives home with her; but the incident does not seem to put an end to their acquaintance, or even to his professions of love. Nothing does that but her engagement to Lord Orville, who, till he asks her to marry him, could not have seen anything so very monstrous in Sir Clement Willoughby’s behavior, though he would himself have been incapable of it.

The elopement as a popular means of moving the reader flourished much longer in fiction; but apparently the abduction, which had been so frequently and so effectively employed, was already going out; and in Evelina we find it reduced to such a poor attempt as Sir Clement Willoughby’s. It was perhaps going out. in society, but it would not be safe to say it had gone out. Probably in the last decades of the century, an heiress would not, even in Ireland, be attacked by her cousin in her uncle’s presence, and carried off shrieking, with her clothes half tom from her person, to be tied hand and foot and bound upon a horse behind her captor; or, when she had flung herself to the ground and got possession of a sword for her defence, would be savagely stabbed by one of the abducting party, and then buried to her chin in a bog to hide her from the pursuit of her rescuers. But all this happened about 1745 to Miss Macdermot, who saved herself from a forced marriage with her abductor by catching a pipkin of hot milk from the fire and flinging it into the face of the officiating priest.

Horace Walpole sneered, and probably with reason, at Richardson’s novels as pictures of English high life. The old printer, who once had all Europe thrilling over his pages, must have made many minor mistakes as to the diction and deportment of people of fashion; but doubtless he knew his times very well, and would not go astray in the particulars of an abduction, even an abduction in high life.

In few of the novels before “Evelina “ could the reader help being privy to some such high-handed outrage. All over England heroines were carried off in chairs and chariots to lonely country houses, there to be kept at the mercy of their captors till the exigencies of the plot forced their release. It must have been a startling innovation that Evelina should be let off so easily as she was, but even this was not so strange as that in an age of epistolary fiction she should be allowed to portray in herself that character of a bewitching goose that she really was, and that her author should effect this without apparent knowingness, or any manner of wink to the reader. Evelina is a masterpiece, and she could not be spared from the group of great and real heroines. The means of realizing her are now as quaint and obsolete almost as the manners of the outdated world to which she was born. Nobody writes novels in letters any more; just as people no longer call each other and Madam, and are favored and obliged and commanded upon every slight occasion; just as young ladies no longer cry out, when strongly moved, “Good God, sir,” in writing to their reverend guardians; or receive prodigious compliments; or make set speeches, or have verses to them posted in public places; or go to amusements where they are likely to be confused with dubious characters. Evelina is forced to see and to suffer things now scarcely credible, and it is her business in the long letters she writes her foster-father to depict scenes of vulgarity among her city cousins which make the reader shudder and creep. She depicts other scenes among people of fashion which are not less vulgar, and are far crueller, like that where two gentlemen of rank have two poor old women run a race upon a wager and push the hapless creatures on to the contest with cheers and curses. A whole world of extinct characters and customs centres around her; but she outlives them all in the inextinguishable ingenuousness of a girlish mind which nothing pollutes, and in the purity of a nature to which everything coarse and unkind is alien. She is tempted at times to laugh at things that other people think funny, but she seems a little finer even than her inventor in all this, and it appears less Evelina than Miss Burney who expects you to enjoy the savage comedy of Captain Mervin’s insulting pranks at the expense of Madame Duval. In fine, Evelina, though a goose, is perhaps the sweetest and dearest goose in all fiction. We laugh at her (we must not forget that it is she herself who lets us laugh at her), but we love her, and we rejoice in the happiness which she finds so supernally satisfying, as she passes out of the story, panting with rapturous expectation of bliss in keeping of Lord Orville.

TWO HEROINES OF MARIA EDGEWORTH’S

FEW figures in literary history appeal to the remembrance so pathetically as the author of “Evelina.” She had many trials which she bore with sweetness and patience; her blessings were mainly from her gift of being content with little, and of overprizing any kindness people did her, as if it were the effect of extraordinary virtue in them. Indeed, Fanny Burney was Evelina. She had not only written herself into the character of that heroine, but she had so thoroughly written herself out in it, that she seemed not to have had the stuff for another heroine left in her nature. Or, if this is going too far, it is certain that neither Cecilia nor Camilla makes herself remembered like Evelina as a real personality.

I

“Cecilia” was written while the author of “Evelina” was still Miss Burney, and before she entered the service of the Queen; “Camilla” was written long after she had left that service, and was published after she had become the wife of the émigré noble D’Arblay. In “Cecilia” she was not yet so overweighted by the fear and favor of the great Dr. Johnson that she wished to write her novels as he would have written them, and the language, if not quite the language of life, is often easy, gay, and natural. The mighty lexicographer was not to do his worst with her diction till many years later in “Camilla,” where he prevailed with an effect which the image of a fawn advancing with the gait of a hippopotamus feebly suggests, though in more vital things “Camilla” is far from a mistaken performance. All three of the Burney-D’Arblay novels are on the same ground. They have mainly to do with the London of rank and fashion, and the London of trade and vulgarity; but a good part of the action passes in the country, and another good part in the several English spas whose waters were then the mode, and whose pump-rooms are the scenes of so much love-making in contemporary fiction. But in both “Cecilia” and “Camilla,” the nominal heroines are of a less engaging, a less amusing quality. Cecilia is a girl of much more sense than Evelina; she has wit and she has beauty; and yet somehow she fails to take the heart as Evelina does. She moves in a world much more ascertained in its characteristics, through a much more ingenious intrigue. A cloud of genteel company at a dozen different places is suggested; vivid and amusing figures swarm in the pages of the novel. There are, indeed, only too many of them for remembrance, though probably no one who has met such a type of “agreeable rattle” as Miss Lerolle will have quite forgotten her; or her anti-type of supercilious passivity, Miss Leeson. That Lady Honoria who likes getting her father angry because he makes such funny faces and swears so divertingly when he is in a temper, is perhaps not so justifiably dear to the fancy; but she outlives most of the serious personages in the reader’s remembrance. In the handling of all, a sense of the author’s maturing art grows upon the critic; and in fact the “Cecilia” as a novel is as much superior to the “Evelina” which preceded it as it is to the “Camilla “which followed it.

II

It is always possible, of course, that “Evelina” might have eventuated in “Camilla,” even if the author had not spent five or six years, as the Queen’s tire-woman, in the narcotic neighborhood of royalty. The tendency which Richardson had given to the best English fiction, and which is so strongly felt in “The Vicar of Wakefield,’ might have persisted in Fanny Burney’s novels, and overweighted them at last, though she had remained in the world of literature, and looked on uninterruptedly at the world of fashion. Society was then so bad, not in its standards, but in its indifference to them, that all decent writers had it on their consciences to better it to their utmost by the force of imaginary examples. Fiction had not yet conceived of the supreme ethics which consist in portraying life truly and letting the lesson take care of itself. After a hundred years this conception is not yet very clear to many novelists, or, what is worse, to their critics; and the novel, to save itself alive from the contempt and abhorrence in which the most of good people once held it, had to be good in the fashion of the sermon rather than in the fashion of the drama. It felt its way slowly and painfully by heavy sloughs of didacticism and through dreary tracts of moral sentiment to the standing it now has, and we ought to look back at its flounderings, not with wonder that it floundered so long, but that it ever arrived. In fact, it did not flounder so very long, and it arrived at what is still almost an ideal perfection in the art of Jane Austen. But first it had to pass through the school of Maria Edgeworth, who was as severe a disciplinarian as ever the lighter-minded muses came under. They have long since had their revenge, poor things, and she has had to pay for her severity in the popular superstition which still prevails that she was all precept, all principle, all preaching. Nothing could be more mistaken, as any one may prove who will turn to her entertaining novels of English fashionable life, her faithful and sympathetic sketches of Irish character, high and low. It is known that Tourguênief, from his pleasure in her Irish stories, conceived the notion of making like studies of Russian conditions; that to this influence the world owes the “Notes of a Sportsman, “and that the Russian serfs, from the influence of that book with the Czar, finally owed their emancipation.

Fame could have brought Maria Edgeworth’s noble spirit no sweeter consolation than such an event; she would have counted such an indirect effect of her work infinitely beyond the inspiration of such a consummate artist as Tourguénief, but her long life ended just before our century had reached its fiftieth year, and thirty years before the serfs were freed. She began author Well back in the eighteenth century, but she began novelist distinctly within the nineteenth. As her “Castle Rackrent “ appeared in 1801, there can be no dispute concerning this fact; and no one who will read that capital story, or almost any other novel of hers, can question her right to stand with the foremost in nineteenth-century fiction by virtue of many things besides her priority in time. Such a reader will feel it his privilege, his highest pleasure, to help reverse the sentence which relegates this artist to the sad society of the mere sermoners. She did preach, there is no denying that, but she also pictured life so faithfully that Scott could wish for nothing greater than “Miss Edgeworth’s wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them live as beings in your mind.”

She knew her Ireland closely, lovingly, humorously, down to the last whimsicality of the tatterdemalion peasantry and the last eccentricity of the reckless, jovial gentry; but she knew her England, too, and the scenes of London fashion in her books are as graphic as Fanny Burney’s. Indeed, it cannot be said that those London stories which have Ireland for a background are better than those which deal solely with English interests and characters. “The Absentee” and its kind are of inferior aesthetic quality, for in these the author has a moral to enforce, a social principle to preach; and in the others she has only character to paint, and personal conduct to portray. For this reason such a novel as “Belinda” is a better test of her powers than “The Absentee,” After all, there is no situation so universally appealing to the sympathy and the fancy as that which Miss Burney chose in “Evelina” and “Cecilia,” and which Miss Edgeworth again chose in “Belinda.” A young girl gently bred, and coming up for the first time from the country to view the world of London society with innocent, astonished eyes — what could be sweeter, more suggestive, more abundant in exciting chance than this?

III

Belinda Portman is no such ingenue as Evelina; she is of a far more sophisticated good sense even than Cecilia, whose more reasoned and tempered innocence she rather partakes. She has a very worldly-minded Mrs. Selina Stanhope for her aunt, who at Bath arranges her invitation for a London season from Lady Delacour, and supplies her with a store of mundane maxims, such as Mrs. Stanhope had found effectual in managing the matrimonial campaigns of five other nieces. The first interesting quality in Belinda is that she has not the wish to profit by this dark wisdom of Mrs. Stanhope’s; but early in her London career a mortifying accident acquaints her with the fact that she is supposed to be there to further these matchmaking schemes of her aunt. She is already in love with one of the young men she hears talking her over, and with the hurt to her girlish dignity and delicacy, she begins to think and to reflect. From that hour her evolution into a woman of good sense and good-will, of magnanimous impulses and generous actions is probably and entertainingly accomplished by the author, with unfailing confidence in an apparently inexhaustible knowledge of the London world.

What this world was, how dissipated, unprincipled, brutal, reckless, steeped in debt and drink, has never been more frankly shown. The moral is always present in the picture, and it is too often applied with inartistic directness, but it is not always so applied. There are abundant moments of pure drama, when the character is expressed in the action; and though much of the motive that ought to be seen is stated, still enough of it is seen to constitute the story a work of art. The author proves herself in all her books an aesthetic force; she was perverted in her artistic instincts by false! ideals of duty; but she knew human nature, and when she would allow herself to do so she could represent life; with masterly power. She does not get Belinda fully before the reader without many needless devices to deepen the intrigue, and many tiresome lectures to enforce the lesson, but she does give at last the full sense of a beautiful girl who gains rather than loses in delightfulness by growing wiser and better. Discreet Belinda has always been, but at first she is discreet for herself only; and at last she is wise for others as well.

A fair half of the book might be thrown away with the effect of twice enriching what was left; perhaps two-thirds might be parted with to advantage; certainly all that does not relate to Belinda’s friendship with Lady Delacour and her love for Clarence Harvey would not be missed by the reader who likes art better than artifice, and prefers to make his own applications of the facts. The friendship between Belinda and Lady Delacour is more important than the love between Belinda and Clarence; but if the story were reduced to the truly wonderful study of Lady Delacour’s passionate and distorted nature, she and not Belinda would be the heroine of “Belinda,’ As it is, it is she who has the greater fascination for the experienced witness, and for any student of womanhood the dramatic portrayal of her jealousy must appeal as a masterpiece almost unique in that sort.

IV

The domestic situation in Lady Delacour’s household is promptly developed through the mysterious contradictions that cloud her conduct: the wild gayety, the listless melancholy, the moody despair. “For some days after Belinda’s arrival in town she heard nothing of Lord Delacour; his lady never mentioned his name except once accidentally, as she was showing Miss Portman the house..., The first time Belinda ever saw His Lordship, he was dead drunk in the arms of two footmen who were carrying him up-stairs to his bedroom; his lady, who was just returned from Ranelagh, passed him by on the landing-place with a look of sovereign contempt. ‘What is the matter? Who is this?’ said Belinda. ‘Only the body of Lord Delacour,’ said her ladyship.... ‘Don’t look so shocked and amazed, Belinda; don’t look so child; this funeral of my lord’s intellects is to me a nightly, or,’ added her ladyship, looking at her watch and yawning, ‘I believe I should say, a daily ceremony — six o’clock, I protest!’ The next morning... after a very late breakfast, Lord Delacour entered the room. ‘Lord Delacour, sober, my dear,’ said her ladyship to Miss Portman, by way of introducing him.”

The cat-and-dog life which this couple lead is very unreservedly portrayed, and Belinda is so far deceived as not to suppose that they can be in love with each other, in spite of all. My lord’s days and nights are given to debauchery, his lady’s to the wildest dissipation at balls and routs (one faintly imagines what a was!) and gay parties at those public resorts which were once so much the fashion in London, or at least in London novels, Where from Vauxhall to Ranelagh, from Ranelagh to the Pantheon, from the Pantheon to Almack’s, there is a perpetual glitter of their misleading lights.

On leaving the masquerade where Belinda has overheard that killing talk about herself among the young men of her circle, she repeats it in an anguish of shame to her friend, as they drive away from Lady Singleton’s to the Pantheon in their respective disguises of the tragic and the comic muse. ‘And is this all?’ cried Lady Delacour. ‘Lord, my dear, you must either give tip living in the world or expect to hear yourself, and your aunts, and your cousins, and your friends, from generation to generation, abused every hour in the day by their friends and your friends; ’tis the common course of things. Now you know what a multitude of obedient servants, dear creatures, and very sincere and most affectionate friends I have.... Do you think I’m fool enough to imagine that they would care the hundredth part of a straw if I were this minute thrown into the Red or the Black Sea?’... The carriage stopped at the Pantheon.... To Belinda the night appeared long and dull; the commonplace wit of chimney-sweepers and gypsies; the antics of harlequins; the graces of flower-girls and Cleopatras had not power to amuse her; for her thoughts still recurred to that conversation which had given her so much pain.. — .. ‘How happy you are, Lady Delacour,’ said she, when they got into the carriage to go home,... ‘to have such an amazing flow of spirits!’  ‘Amazing you might Well say, if you knew all,’ said Lady Delacour, and she heaved a deep sigh, threw herself back in the carriage, let fall her mask, and was silent. It was broad daylight, and Belinda had a full view of her countenance, which was a picture of despair.... Her ladyship started up and exclaimed, ‘If I had served myself with half the zeal I have served the world I should not now be thus forsaken.... But it is all over now. I am dying.’... Belinda... gazed at Lady Delacour, and repeated the word, ‘Dying!’ ‘I tell you I am dying,’ said her ladyship.’

At home she bade Belinda “follow her to her dressing-room.... ‘Come in; what is it you are afraid of?’ said she. Belinda went in, and Lady Delacour shut and locked the door. There was no light except what came from the candle which Lady Delacour held in her hand.... Belinda, as she looked around, saw nothing but a confusion of linen rags; vials, some empty, some full, and she perceived there was a strong smell of medicines. Lady Delacour... looked from side to side of the room without seeming to know what she was in search of. She then, in a species of fury, wiped the paint from her face, and returning to Belinda, held the candle so as to throw the light full on her livid features... which formed a horrid contrast with her gay, fantastic dress. ‘You are shocked, Belinda,’ said she, ‘but as yet you have seen nothing — look here’ — baring half her bosom.... Belinda sunk back into a chair; Lady Delacour flung herself on her knees before her. ‘Am I humbled, am I wretched enough?”’

The story of Belinda’s friendship for the miserable woman from this moment on is imagined with a knowledge of human nature and a divination of its nobler possibilities worthy of Tolstoy, though it is wrought with an art indefinitely more fallible. Miss Edgeworth was not only in herself very inconstantly an artist, but, as is well known, she subordinated her judgment to that of her honored father, whom she allowed to meddle with her work, and mar it in the cause of good morals as much as he would. It is but fair to lay to the charge of her well-willing, ill-witting parent at least half of the crude and clumsy didacticism with which Belinda’s fine nature is unfolded in her efforts to serve and to save Lady Delacour; but perhaps the crude and clumsy mechanism of the affair is all Miss Edgeworth’s own. We may easily grant this, and still in the dramatic moments find enough evidence of her power to prove her a great artist.

Lady Delacour, of course, believes that she has a cancer, and she has put herself in the hands of a quack who preys upon her fears. Her secret is known only to her waiting-woman, till she herself betrays it to Belinda, whom she binds to her by the most solemn vows of silence. But the girl can find no peace till she has got Lady Delacour’s leave to speak of it to a physician (who is, of course, Edgeworthianly over-wise and over-good); and as Belinda has not lived for several weeks under the roof of Lord Delacour without surprising in him some traits of kindness for his wife, she wins Lady Delacour’s consent to let him know that some great calamity is threatening her. Belinda sets herself with all her innate discreetness to make them friends, but she does not, discreet as she is, manage this without rousing the jealousy of Lady Delacour, which finds food in her returning love for her husband. Seeing Belinda and Lord Delacour on such increasingly good terms in her interest, she can only believe that they wish to be on better in their own as soon as she is out of the way. As the story was always to end well, however, the cancer proves no cancer, and is cured with very slight scientific attention; Lady Delacour is reconciled to her husband without losing her friend, and Belinda is duly married to Clarence Harvey, whom she has been in love with from the beginning.

Such a meagre résumé of merely one order of its events does no justice to the many-sided interest of the novel, and its rich abundance of characterization, which sometimes accuses itself of caricature, but which probably embodies a presentation of fashionable life at the beginning of our century faithfuller than it can now appear. Still, the jealousy of Lady Delacour, though but one interest of the story, becomes in its finer artistic treatment the chief interest; and the scene in which it betrays itself becomes the greatest moment of the drama. The episode is almost altogether admirable, but its climax sufficiently suggests the whole encounter between the unsuspecting Belinda and Lady Delacour, when her passion is fired by the girl’s suppression of certain passages in a letter from her aunt Stanhope, giving some worldly advice which her ladyship ironically congratulates Belinda upon not needing.

“The rapid, unconnected manner in which Lady Delacour spoke, the hurry of her motions, the quick, suspicious, angry gleams of her eye, her laugh, her unintelligible words, all conspired at this moment to give Belinda the idea that her intellects were suddenly disordered.... She went towards her with the intention of soothing her by caresses; but at her approach Lady Delacour pushed the table on which she had been writing from her with violence; started up, flung back the veil which fell over her face as she rose, and darted upon Belinda a look which fixed her to the spot where she stood.... Belinda’s blood ran cold — she had no longer any doubt that this was insanity. She shut the penknife that lay upon the table, and put it in her pocket. ‘Cowardly creature!’ cried Lady Delacour, and her countenance changed to an expression of ineffable contempt. ‘What is it you fear?’  ‘That you should injure yourself. Sit down — for Heaven’s sake listen to your friend, to Belinda.’  ‘My friend! My Belinda!’ cried Lady Delacour.... ‘O, Belinda! You whom I have so loved, so trusted!’ The tears rolled fast down her painted cheeks; she wiped them hastily away, but so roughly that she became a strange and ghastly spectacle. Unconscious of her disordered appearance, she rushed past Belinda, who vainly attempted to stop her, threw up the sash, and, stretching herself far out of the window, gasped for breath. Miss Portman drew her back, and closed the window, saying, ‘The rouge is all off your face, my dear Lady Delacour; you are not fit to be seen.’... ‘Rouge! Not fit to be seen! At such a time as this, to talk to me in this manner! O, niece of Mrs. Stanhope! dupe, dupe, that I am.’”

Belinda tries to reason with Lady Delacour’s jealousy, which takes the form of ironical meekness, only to burst out again in envenomed accusation. “‘You are goodness itself, and gentleness, and prudence personified. You know perfectly how to manage her whom you fear you have driven to madness. But, tell me, good, gentle, prudent Miss Portman, why need you dread so much that I should go mad?... Nobody would believe me whatever I said.... And would not this be almost as if I were dead and buried? No; your calculations are better than mine: the poor mad wife would... yet stand between you and the fond object of your secret soul — a coronet.... O, Belinda, do not you see that a coronet cannot confer happiness?’  ‘I have seen it long; I pity you from the bottom of my soul,’ said Belinda, bursting into tears.”

Lady Delacour cannot believe the girl is leaving her house when she leaves the room; she determines to balk the hope of being pressed to stay, which she imagines in Belinda; and when some people call she swiftly repairs her looks and goes to receive them. “Fresh rouged, and beautifully dressed, she was performing her part to a brilliant audience, when Belinda entered the drawing-room.... ‘You dine with Lady Anne, Miss Portman, I understand. Though you talk of running away from me... I am with all due humility so confident of the irresistible attractions of this house, that I defy Oakley Park and all its charms. So, Miss Portman, instead of adieu, I shall only say au revoir!” Adieu, Lady Delacour!’ said Belinda, with a look and tone that struck her ladyship to the heart. All her suspicions, all her pride, all her affected gayety forsook her.... She flew after Miss Portman, stopped her at the head of the stairs and exclaimed, ‘My dearest Belinda, are you gone? My best, my only friend, say you are not gone forever! Say you will return!’  ‘Adieu,’ repeated Belinda,”

We are told that she broke from Lady Delacour with a heart full of pity for her, but sure of the right and wisdom of her course; and nothing in the whole scene between them is more finely ascertained than the delicate dignity and goodness with which Belinda behaves. In this she is worthy to be the heroine of her own story, and though she must divide the honors with Lady Delacour, in the dramatic moments, she has the heroine’s true supremacy as a subtler study of character, and a newer type. The intensely emotional nature like Lady Delacour, vivid, violent, reckless, has been often done, and it is always fascinating; but it has seldom been so well done as by Miss Edgeworth, who, with a few touches of analysis, has allowed it to express itself. Yet, after all, a nature like Belinda’s, ruled by principles and bound by scruples, the nature of a lady, is far more difficult to do.

JANE AUSTEN’S ELIZABETH BENNET

THE fashion of Maria Edgeworth’s world has long passed away, but human nature is still here, and the fiction which was so true to it in the first years of the century is true to it in the last. “The Absentee,” “Vivian,” “Ennui,” “Helen,” “Patronage,” show their kindred with “Belinda,” and by their frank and fresh treatment of character, their knowledge of society, and their employment of the major rather than the minor means of moving and amending the reader, they all declare themselves of the same lineage. In their primitive ethicism they own “Pamela,” and “Sir Charles Grandison” for their ancestors; but they are much more dramatic than Richardson’s novels; they are almost theatrical in their haste for a direct moral effect. In this they are like the Burney-D’Arblay novels, which also deal with fashionable life, with dissipated lords and ladies, with gay parties at Vauxhall and Ranelagh, with debts and duns, with balls and routs in splendid houses, whose doors are haunted by sheriff’s officers, with bankruptcies and arrests, or flights and suicides. But the drama of the Edgeworth fiction tends mostly to tragedy, and that of the Burney-D’Arblay fiction to comedy; though there are cases in the first where the wrong-doer is saved alive, and cases in the last where he is lost in his sins. The author of “Evelina “ was a good but light spirit, the author of “Belinda” was a good but very serious soul and was amusing with many misgivings. Maria Edgeworth was a humorist in spite of herself; Frances Burney was often not as funny as she meant, and was, as it were, forced into tragical effects by the pressure of circumstances. You feel that she would much rather have got on without them; just as you feel that Miss Edgeworth rejoices in them, and is not sure that her jokes will be equally blessed to you.

I

It remained for the greatest of the gifted women, who beyond any or all other novelists have fixed the character and behavior of Anglo-Saxon fiction, to assemble in her delightful talent all that was best in that of her sisters. Jane Austen was indeed so fine an artist, that we are still only beginning to realize how fine she was; to perceive, after a hundred years, that in the form of imagined fact, in the expression of personality, in conduct of the narrative, and the subordination of t to character, she is still unapproached in the English branch of Anglo-Saxon fiction. In American fiction Hawthorne is to be named with her for perfection of form; the best American novels are built upon more symmetrical fines than the best English novels, and have unconsciously shaped themselves upon the ideal which she instinctively and instantly realized.

Of course it was not merely in externals that Jane Austen so promptly achieved her supremacy. The wonder of any beautiful thing is that it is beautiful in so many ways; and her fiction is as admirable for its lovely humor, its delicate satire, its good sense, its kindness, its truth to nature, as for its form. There is nothing hurried or huddled in it, nothing confused or obscured; nothing excessive or inordinate. The marvel of it is none the less because it is evident that she wrote from familiar acquaintance with the fiction that had gone before her. In her letters there are hints of her intimacy with the novels of Goldsmith, of Richardson, of Frances Burney, and of Maria Edgeworth; but in her stories there are scarcely more traces of their influence than of Mrs. Radcliffe’s, or any of the romantic writers whom she delighted to mock. She is obviously of her generation, but in all literature she is one of the most original and independent spirits. Her deeply domesticated life was passed in the country scenes, the county society, which her books portray, far from literary men and events; and writing as she used, amidst the cheerful chatter of her home, she produced literature of still unrivalled excellence in its way, apparently without literary ambition, and merely for the pleasure of getting the life she knew before her outward vision. With the instinct and love of doing it, and not with the sense of doing anything uncommon, she achieved that masterpiece, “Pride and Prejudice,” which is quite as remarkable for being one of several masterpieces as for its absolute excellence. There have been authors enough who have written one extraordinary book; but all Jane Austen’s books are extraordinary, and “Persuasion,” Northanger Abbey,”

“Emma,”

“Mansfield Park,” land “Sense and Sensibility,” are each a masterpiece, (inferior only to “Pride and Prejudice,” which was written first. After the young girl of twenty had written it, she kept it half as many years longer before she printed it. In mere order of chronology it belongs to the eighteenth century, but in spirit it is distinctly of the nineteenth century, as we feel that cycle to have been when we feel proudest of it. In manners as much as in methods it is such a vast advance upon the work of her sister novelists that you wonder whether some change had not already taken place in English society which she notes, and which they fail to note.

The topics of the best fiction of any time will probably be those which decent men and women talk of together in the best company; and such topics vary greatly from time to time. There is no reason to think that Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth were less pureminded than Jane Austen, but they dealt with phases of human experience which she did not deal with, because their friends and acquaintances did so, without being essentially worse than hers. A tendency towards a more scrupulous tone seems to have been the effect of the general revival in religion at the close of the last century, which persisted down to that time in our own century when the rise of scientific agnosticism loosed the bonds of expression. Now again of late years men and women in the best company talk together of things which would not have been discussed during the second and third quarters of the century. One must hedge one’s position on such a point with many perhapses; nothing can be affirmed with certainty; the most that can be said is that the tone if not the temper, the manners if not the morals, which have lately been called fin de siècle, are noticeably more akin to what was fin de siècle a hundred years ago, than they are to what was thought fit in polite society fifty years ago. Possibly another revival of religion will bring another change, such as the purity of Jane Austen’s fiction may have forecast rather than reported. But we do not know this, and possibly again her books are what they are in matter and manner because the little world of county society which she observed was wholesomer and decenter than the great world of London society which Miss Burney and Miss Edgeworth studied.

An author is as great for what he leaves out as for what he puts in; and Jane Austen shows her mastery in nothing more than in her avoidance of moving accidents for her most moving effects. She seems to have known intuitively that character resides in habit, and that for the novelist to seek its expression in violent events would be as stupid as for the painter to expect an alarm of fire or burglary to startle his sitter into a valuable revelation of his qualities. She puts from her, therefore, all the tremendous contrivances of her predecessors, and takes her place quietly on the ground to which they were, the best of them, falteringly and uncertainly feeling their way. After De Foe and Goldsmith she was the first to write a thoroughly artistic novel in English, and she surpassed Goldsmith as far in method as she refined upon De Foe in material. Among her contemporaries she was as easily first as Shakspere among the Elizabethan dramatists; and in the high excellencies of symmetrical form, force of characterization, clearness of conception, simplicity and temperance of means, she is still supreme: that girl who began at twenty with such a masterpiece as “Pride and Prejudice,” and ended with such a masterpiece as “Persuasion” at forty-two!

II

The story of “Pride and Prejudice” has of late years become known to a constantly, almost rapidly, increasing cult, as it must be called, for the readers of Jane Austen are hardly ever less than her adorers: she is a passion and a creed, if not quite a religion. A beautiful, clever, and cultivated girl is already piqued and interested if not in love with a handsome, high-principled, excessively proud man, when she becomes bitterly prejudiced against him by the slanders of a worthless beneficiary of his family. The girl is Elizabeth Bennet, the young man is Fitzwilliam Darcy, and they first meet at a ball, where he behaves with ungracious indifference to her, and afterwards at the dinners and parties of a small country neighborhood where persons theoretically beyond the pale of gentility are admitted at least on sufferance; the stately manners of the day are relaxed by youth and high spirits; and no doubt the academic elevation of the language lapses oftener on the lips of the pretty girls and the lively young men than an author still in her nonage, and zealous for the dignity of her style, will allow to appear in the conversation of her hero and heroine.

From the beginning it seems to Darcy that Elizabeth shines in talk beyond all the other women, though sometimes she shines to Iris cost. But banter from a pretty girl goes farther than flattery with a generous man; and from the first Darcy is attracted by Elizabeth Bennet’s wit, as much as he is repelled by her family. In fact, he cannot get on with her family, for though the Bennets have a sufficiently good standing, in virtue of the father’s quality as a gentleman, it is in spite the mother’s folly and vulgarity, and the folly and vulgarity of all her sisters but one. Mrs. Bennet is probably the most entire and perfect simpleton ever drawn in fiction, and her husband renders life with her supportable by amusing himself with her absurdities. He buries himself in his books and leaves her the management of his daughters in society, getting what comfort he can out of the humor and intellectual sympathy of Elizabeth and the charming goodness of her elder sister Jane. The rest of his family are almost as impossible to him as they are to Darcy, to whom Mr. Bennet himself is rather impossible, and who resolves not only to crush out his own passion for Elizabeth, but to break off his friend Bingley’s love for her sister Jane. His success in doing the one is not so great but he duly comes to offer himself to Elizabeth, and he owns in the humiliation of rejection that he believes he has failed in the other.

From this point the affair, already so daringly imagined, is one of the most daring in fiction; and less courage, less art, less truth than the author brings to its management would not have availed. It is a great stroke of originality to have Darcy write the letter he does after his rejection, not only confessing, but defending his course; and it is from the subtle but perfectly honest sense of character in her heroine that the author has Elizabeth do justice to him in what she so bitterly resents. When she has once acknowledged the reason of much that he says of her family (and she has to acknowledge that even about her adored father he is measurably right), it is a question merely of friendly chances as to the event. These are overwhelmingly supplied, to Elizabeth’s confusion, by Darcy’s behavior in helping save her sister Lydia from the shame and min of her elopement with the worthless Wickham. Lydia, who is only less entirely and delightfully a fool than Mrs. Bennet herself, is thus the means of Elizabeth’s coming to such a good mind in regard to Darcy that her only misgiving is lest it may be too late. But Darcy has been enlightened as well as she: he does everything a man can to repair his wrongs and blunders, and with a very little leading from Elizabeth, he is brought to offer himself again, and is accepted with what maybe called demure transport, and certainly with alacrity.

There is nothing more deliciously lover-like than the talks in which they go over all the past events when they are sure of each other; and Elizabeth, who is apt to seem at other times a little too sarcastic, a little too ironical, is here sweetly and dearly and wisely herself. The latest of these talks was that in which she “wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his ever having fallen in love with her. ‘How could you begin? I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but what could have set you off in the first place?” I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look which first laid the foundation.... I was in the middle of it before I knew I had begun.’  ‘My beauty you had early withstood, and as to my manners — my behavior to you was at least always bordering on the uncivil, and I never spoke to you without rather wishing to give you pain than not. Now, be sincere; did you admire me for my impertinence?’  ‘For the liveliness of your mind, I did.’  ‘You may as well call it impertinence at once. It was very little less. The fact is, you were sick of civility, of deference, of officious attention. You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking, and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused and interested you because I was so unlike them. Had you not been really amiable you would have hated me for it, but in spite of the pains you took to disguise yourself, your feelings were always noble and just.... There, I have saved you the trouble of accounting for it, and, all things considered, I begin to think it perfectly reasonable. To be sure, you knew no actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.... What made you so shy of me when you first called, and afterwards dined here?... You might have talked to me more.’  ‘A man who felt less might.’  ‘How unlucky you should have a reasonable answer to give, and I should be so reasonable as to admit it! But I wonder how long you would have gone on if you had been left to yourself?’  ‘Lady Catharine’s unjustifiable endeavors to separate us were the means of removing all my doubts.... My aunt’s intelligence had given me hope, and I was determined at once to know everything.’”

The aunt whom Darcy means is Lady Catharine de Burgh, as great a fool as Mrs. Bennet or Lydia, and much more offensive. She has all Darcy’s arrogance, without a ray of the good sense and heart which enlighten and control it and when she hears a rumor of his engagement to Elizabeth, she comes to question the girl. Their encounter is perhaps the supreme moment of objective drama in the book, and is a bit of very amusing comedy, which is the more interesting to the modem spectator because it expresses the beginning of that revolt against aristocratic pretension characteristic of the best English fiction of our century. Its spirit seems to have worked in the clear intelligence of the young girl to more than one effect of laughing satire, and one feels that Elizabeth Bennet is speaking Jane Austen’s mind, and perhaps avenging her for patronage and impertinence otherwise suffered in silence, when she gives Lady de Burgh her famous setting-down.

“Lady Catharine very resolutely, and not very politely, declined eating anything, and then, rising up, said to Elizabeth: ‘Miss Bennet, there seems to be a prettyish kind of a little wilderness on one side of your lawn. I should be glad to take a turn in it, if you will favor me with your company,’... Elizabeth obeyed, and running into her own room for her parksol, attended her noble guest down-stairs.... As soon as they reached the copse, Lady Catharine began in the following manner: ‘You cannot be at a loss, Miss Bennet, to understand the reason of my visit hither. Your own heart, your own conscience, must tell you why I came.’ Elizabeth looked with unaffected astonishment. ‘Indeed, you are mistaken, madam; I have not been at all able to account for the honor of seeing you here.’  ‘Miss Bennet,’ replied her ladyship in an angry tone, ‘you ought to know that I am not to be trifled with. But however insincere you may choose to be, you shall not find me so.... A report of a most alarming nature reached me two days ago. I was told... that you, Miss Elizabeth Bennet, would, in all likelihood, be soon afterwards united to my nephew, to my own nephew, Mr. Darcy. Though I knew it must be a scandalous falsehood, though I would not injure him so much as to suppose the truth of it possible, I instantly resolved on setting off for this place, that I might make my sentiments known to you.” If you believed it impossible to be true,’ said Elizabeth, coloring with astonishment and disdain, ‘I wonder you took the trouble of coming so far. What could your ladyship propose by it?’  ‘This is not to be borne. Miss Bennet, I insist upon being satisfied. Has he, has my nephew made you an offer of marriage?’  ‘Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible.’  ‘It must be so while he retains the use of his reason. But your allurements may, in a moment of infatuation, have made him forget what he owes to himself and to all his family. You may have drawn him in,’  ‘If I have, I shall be the last person to confess it. ‘Miss Bennet, do you know who I am? I have not been accustomed to such language as this.... This match, to which you have the presumption to aspire, can never take place....

Because honor, decorum, precedence, nay interest forbid it. Yes, Miss Bennet, interest; for do not expect to be noticed by his family or friends.... Your affiance will be a disgrace; your name will never even be mentioned by any of us.... Let us sit down.

You are to understand, Miss Bennet, that I came here with the determined resolution of carrying my purpose.

... I have not been in the habit of brooking disappointment.’  ‘That will make your ladyship’s situation at present more pitiable; but it will have no effect on me.’  ‘I will not be interrupted!... If you were sensible of your own good, you would not wish to quit the sphere in which you have been brought up.’

‘In marrying your nephew, I should not consider myself as quitting that sphere. He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal.’  ‘True, you are a gentleman’s daughter. But what was your mother? Who are your uncles and aunts?’...

‘Whatever my connections may be,’ said Elizabeth, ‘if your nephew does not object to them, they can be nothing to you.’  ‘Tell me, once for all, are you engaged to him?’ Though Elizabeth would not for the mere purpose of obliging Lady Catharine, she could not but say, after a moment’s deliberation, ‘I am not.’ Lady Catharine seemed pleased. ‘And will you promise me never to enter into such an engagement?” I will make no promise of the kind.... How far your nephew might approve of your interference in his affairs, I cannot tell; but you have certainly no right to concern yourself in mine. I must beg, therefore, to be importuned no further on the subject.... You have insulted me in every possible method. I must beg to return to the house.’ And she rose as she spoke. Lady Catharine rose also and they turned back. Her ladyship was highly incensed. ‘And this... is your final resolve! Very well, I shall know how to act. Do not imagine, Miss Bennet, that your ambition will ever be gratified. I came to try you. I hoped to find you reasonable; but depend upon it, I shall carry my point.’ In this manner Lady Catharine talked on till they were at the door of the carriage, when, turning hastily round, she added, ‘I take no leave of you, Miss Bennet. I send no compliments to your mother. You deserve no such attention. I am most seriously displeased.’ Elizabeth made no answer; and without attempting to persuade her ladyship to return into the house, walked quietly into it herself.”

In all this the heroine easily gets the better of her antagonist not only in the mere article of, to which it must be owned her lively wit occasionally tends, but in the more valuable qualities of personal dignity. She is much more a lady than her ladyship, as me author means she shall be; but her superiority is not invented for the crisis; it springs from her temperament and character, cool, humorous, intelligent and just: a combination of attributes which renders Elizabeth Bennet one of the most admirable and attractive girls in the world of fiction. It is impossible, however, not to feel that her triumph over Lady de Burgh is something more than personal: it is a protest, it is an insurrection, though probably the discreet, the amiable author would have been the last to recognize or to acknowledge the fact. An indignant sense of the value of humanity as against the pretensions of rank, such as had not been felt in English fiction before, stirs throughout the story, and reveals itself in such crucial tests as dear “little Burney,” for instance, would never have imagined. For when Miss Burney introduces city people, it is to let them display their cockney vulgarity; but though Jane Austen shows the people whom the Bennets’ gentility frays off into on the mother’s side vulgar and ridiculous, they are not shown necessarily so because they are in trade or the law; and on the father’s side it is apparent that their social inferiority is not incompatible with gentle natures, cultivated minds, and pleasing manners.

JANE AUSTEN’S ANNE ELLIOT AND CATHARINE MORLAND

THAT protest already noted, that revolt against the arrogance of rank, which makes itself felt more or less in all the novels of Jane Austen, might have been something that she inhaled with the stormy air of the time, and respired again with the unconsciousness of breathing. But whether she knew it or not, this quiet little woman, who wrote her novels in the bosom of her clerical family; who was herself so contentedly of the established English order; who believed in inequality and its implications as of divine ordinance; who loved the delights of fine society, and rejoiced as few girls have in balls and parties, was in her way asserting the Rights of Man as unmistakably as the French revolutionists whose volcanic activity was of about the same compass of time as her literary industry. In her books the snob, not yet named or classified, is fully ascertained for the first time. Lady Catharine de Burgh in “Pride and Prejudice,” John Dashwood in “Sense and Sensibility,” Mr. Elton in “Emma,” General Tilney in “Northanger Abbey,” and above all Sir Walter Eliot in “Persuasion,” are immortal types of insolence or meanness which foreshadow the kindred shapes of Thackeray’s vaster snob-world, and fix the date when they began to be recognized and detested. But their recognition and detestation were only an incident of the larger circumstance studied in the different stories; and in “Persuasion” the snobbishness of Sir Walter has little to do with the fortunes of his daughter Anne after the first unhappy moment of her broken engagement.

I

People will prefer Anne Elliot to Elizabeth Bennet according as they enjoy a gentle sufferance in women more than a lively rebellion: and it would not be profitable to try converting the worshippers of the one to the cult of the other. But without offence to either following, it may be maintained that “Persuasion” is imagined with as great novelty and daring as “Pride and Prejudice,’ and that Anne is as genuinely a heroine as Elizabeth.

In “Persuasion” Jane Austen made bold to take the case of a girl, neither weak nor ambitious, who lets the doubts and dislikes of her family and friends prevail with her, and gives up the man she loves because they think him beneath her in family and fortune. She yields because she is gentle and diffident of herself, and her indignant lover resents and despises her submission if he does not despise her. He is a young officer of the navy, rising to prominence in the service which was then giving England the supremacy of the seas, but he is not thought the equal of a daughter of such a baronet as Sir Walter Elliot. It is quite possible that in her portrayal of the odious situation Jane Austen avenges with personal satisfaction the new order against the old, for her brothers were of the navy, and the family hope and pride of the Austens were bound up with its glories. At any rate, when Sir Walter’s debts oblige him to let Kellynch Hall, and live on a simple scale in Bath, it is a newly made admiral who becomes his tenant; and it is the brother of the admiral’s wife who is Anne’s rejected lover, and who now comes to visit his sister, full of victory and prize-money, with the avowed purpose of marrying and settling in life.

Seven years have passed since Frederick Wentworth angrily parted with Anne Elliot. They have never really ceased to love each other; but the effect has been very different with the active, successful man, and the quiet, dispirited girl. No longer in her first youth, she devotes herself to a little round of duties, principally in the family of her foolish, peevish younger sister; and finds her chief consolation in the friendship of the woman who so conscientiously urged her to her great mistake. The lovers meet in the Musgrove family into which Anne’s sister has married, and Wentworth’s fancy seems taken with one of the pretty daughters. Divers transparent devices are then employed rather to pique the reader’s interest than to persuade him that the end is going to be other than what it must be. Nothing can be quite said to determine it among the things that happen; Wentworth and Anne simply live back into the mutual recognition of their love. He learns to know better her lovely and unselfish nature, and so far from having formally to forgive her, he prizes her the more for the very qualities which made their unhappiness possible. For her part, she has merely to own again the affection which has been a dull ache in her heart for seven years. Her father’s pride is reconciled to her marriage, which is now with a somebody instead of the nobody Captain Wentworth once was. Sir Walter “was much struck with his personal claims, and felt that his superiority of appearance might not be unfairly balanced against her superiority of rank....

He was now esteemed quite worthy to address the daughter of a foolish, spendthrift baronet who had not principle or sense enough to maintain himself in the situation in which Providence had placed him.” As for Anne’s mischievous, well-meaning friend who had urged her to break with Wentworth before, “there was nothing less for Lady Russell to do than to admit that she had been completely wrong, and to take up a new set of opinions and hopes.”

II

This outline of the story gives no just sense of its quality, which resides mainly in its constancy to nature; and it gives no sufficient notion of the variety of character involved in the uneventful, quiet action. Anne’s arrogant and selfish father, her cold-hearted, selfish elder sister, and her mean, silly, empty-headed younger sister, with the simple, kindly Musgrove family, form rather the witnesses than the persons of the drama, which transacts itself with the connivance rather than the participation of Sir Walter’s heir-at-law, the clever, depraved and unscrupulous cousin, William Walter Eliot; Lady Russell, the ill-advised adviser of the broken engagement; the low-born, manoeuvring Mrs. Clay, who all but captures the unwary Sir Walter; the frank, warm-hearted Admiral Crofts and his wife, and the whole sympathetic naval contingent at Lyme Regis. They brighten the reality of the picture, and form its atmosphere; they could not be spared, and yet, with the exception of Louisa Musgrove, who jumps from the sea-wall at Regis, and by her happy accident brings about the final understanding of the lovers, none of them actively contributes to the event, which for the most part accomplishes itself subjectively through the nature of Anne and Wentworth.

Of the two Anne is by far the more interesting and important personage; her story is distinctly the story of a heroine; yet never was there a heroine so little self-assertive, so far from forth-putting. When the book opens we find her neglected and contemned by her father and elder sister, and sunken passively if not willingly into mere aunthood to her younger sister’s children, with no friend who feels her value but that Lady Russell who has helped her to spoil her life. She goes to pay a long visit to her sister as soon as Kellynch Hall is taken by the Croftses, and it is in a characteristic moment of her usefulness there that Wentworth happens upon her, after their first cold and distant meeting before others.

The mother, as usual, had left a sick child to Anne’s care, when “Captain Wentworth walked into the drawing-room at the Cottage, where were only herself and the little invalid Charles, who was lying on the sofa....

He started, and could only say, ‘I thought the Miss Musgroves had been here; Mrs. Musgrove told me I should find them here,’ before he walked to the window to recollect himself, and feel how he ought to behave. ‘They are up-stairs with my sister; they will be down in a few minutes, I dare say,’ had been Anne’s reply in all the confusion that was natural; and if the child had not called to her to come and do something for him, she would have been out of the room the next moment, and released Captain Wentworth as well as herself. He continued at the window, and after calmly and politely saying, ‘I hope the little boy is better,’ was silent. She was obliged to kneel by the sofa, and remain there to satisfy her patient, and thus they continued a few minutes, when, to her very great satisfaction, she heard some other person crossing the vestibule. It proved to be Charles Hayter,” who supposes Wentworth to be his rival for one of the Miss Musgroves. He seats himself, and takes up a newspaper, ignoring Wentworth’s willingness to talk. “Another minute brought another addition. The younger boy, a remarkably stout, forward child of two years old, having got the door opened, made his determined appearance among them, and went straight to the sofa to see what was going on, and put in his claim to anything good that might be given away. There being nothing to eat, he could only have some play, and as his aunt would not let him tease his sick brother, he began to fasten himself upon her, as she knelt, in a way that, busy as she was about Charles, she could not shake him off. She spoke to him, ordered, insisted, and entreated in vain. Once she did contrive to push him away, but the boy had the greater pleasure in getting upon her back again directly. ‘Walter,’ said she, ‘get down this moment. You are extremely troublesome. I am very angry with you,’  ‘Walter,’ cried Charles Hayter, ‘why do you not do as you are bid?... Come to me, Walter,’ But not a bit did Walter stir. In another moment she found herself in the state of being released from him; some one was taking him from her, though he had bent down her head so much that his sturdy little hands were unfastened from around her neck and he was resolutely borne away, before she knew that Captain Wentworth had done it.... She could not even thank him. She could only hang over little Charles with most disordered feelings... with the conviction soon forced upon her by the noise he was studiously making with the child, that he meant to avoid hearing her thanks... till enabled by the entrance of Mary and the Miss Musgroves to make over her patient to their care and leave the room. She could not stay.... She was ashamed of herself, quite ashamed of being so nervous, and of being overcome by such a trifle; but so it was, and it required a long application of solitude and reflection to recover her.”

III

As any practised reader of fiction could easily demonstrate, this is not the sort of rescue to bring about a reconciliation between lovers in a true novel. There it must be something more formidable than a naughty little boy that the heroine is saved from: it must be a deadly miscreant, or a mad bull, or a frightened horse, or an express train, or a sinking ship. Still it cannot be denied that this simple, this homely scene, is very pretty, and is very like things that happen in life, where there is reason to think love is oftener shown in quality than quantity, and does its effect as perfectly in the little as in the great events. Even the most tremendous incident of the book, the famous passage which made Tennyson, when he visited Lyme Regis, wish to see first of all the place where Louisa Musgrove fell from the Cobb, has hardly heroic proportions, though it is of greater intensity in its lifelikeness, and it reverses the relations of Anne and Wentworth in the characters of helper and helped.

“There was too much wind to make the high part of the new Cobb pleasant for the ladies, and they agreed to get down the steps to the lower, and all were contented to pass quietly and safely down the steep steps excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth.... She was safely down, and instantly to shew her enjoyment, ran up the steps to be jumped down again. He advised her against it, thought the jar too great; but no, he reasoned and talked in vain, she smiled and said, ‘I am determined I will ‘: he put out his hands; she was too precipitate by half a second; she fell on the pavement on the Lower Cobb, and was taken up lifeless! There was no wound, no visible bruise; but her eyes were closed, she breathed not, her face was like death.... Captain Wentworth, who had caught her up, knelt with her in his arms, looking on her with a face as pallid as her own in an agony of silence. ‘She is dead!’ screamed Mary, catching hold of her husband, and contributing with her own horror to make him immovable; and in the same moment, Henrietta, sinking under the conviction, lost her senses, too, and would have fallen on the steps, but for Captain Benwick and Anne, who supported her between them. ‘Is there no one to help me?’ were the first words that burst from Captain Wentworth. ‘Go to him; go to him,’ cried Anne; ‘for Heaven’s sake, go to him. Leave me and go to him. Rub her hands, rub her temples; here are salts; take them, take them. ‘Louisa was raised up and supported between them. Everything was done that Anne had prompted, but in vain; while Captain Wentworth, staggering against the wall for his support, exclaimed in the bitterest agony, ‘Oh, God! Her father and mother!’  ‘A surgeon!’ said Anne. He caught at the word; it seemed to route him at once; and saying only, ‘True, true; a surgeon this instant.’... Anne, attending with all the strength and zeal and thought, which instinct supplied, to Henrietta, still tried, at intervals, to suggest comfort to the others, tried to quiet Mary, to animate Charles, to assuage the feelings of Captain Wentworth. Both seemed to look to her for direction. ‘Anne, Anne,’ cried Charles, ‘what in Heaven’s name is to be done next?’ Captain Wentworth’s eyes were also turned towards her. ‘Had she not better be carried to the inn? Yes, I am sure; carry her to the inn.’  ‘Yes, yes, to the inn,’ repeated Wentworth.... ‘I will carry her myself.’”

Anne has to show, with all this presence of mind, a greatness of mind superior to the mi; Try of imagining that Wentworth is in love with Louisa, and that his impassioned remorse is an expression of his love. Only when they are going home together, to tell Louisa’s parents of the accident, does she make one meek little tacit reflection in her own behalf. “‘Don’t talk of it, don’t talk of it,’ he cried. ‘Oh, God, that I had not given way to her at that fatal moment! Had I done as I ought! But so eager and so resolute! Dear, sweet Louisa!’ Anne wondered whether it ever occurred to him now to question the justness of his own previous opinion as to the universal felicity and advantage of firmness of character.... She thought it could scarcely escape him to feel that a persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favor of happiness as a very resolute character.”

IV

One of the things that Jane Austen was first in was the personal description of her heroines. Almost to her time the appearance of the different characters was left to the reader’s imagination; it is only in the modern novel that the author seems to feel it his duty to tell how his people look. We have seen how meagrely and formally the heroines of “The Vicar of Wakefield” are presented. In “Sir Charles Grandison,” there is a great pretence of describing the beauty of Harriet Byron, but the image given is vague and conventional. So far as I recall them, the looks of Fanny Burney’s and Maria Edgeworth’s heroines are left to the reader’s liking; and I do not remember any portrait even of Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” It is in her later stories that Jane Austen offers this proof of modernity among so many other proofs of it, and tells us how her girls appeared to her. She tells us not very elaborately, to be sure, though in the case of Emma Woodhouse, in “Emma,” the picture is quite finished. In” Persuasion” Anne Eliot is slightly sketched; and we must be content with the fact that she had “mild dark eyes and delicate features,” and that at the time we are introduced to her she fully looked her twenty-seven years. But this is a good deal better than nothing, and in “Northanger Abbey” Catharine Morland is still more tangibly presented. “The Morlands... were in general very plain, and Catharine was, for many years of her life, as plain as any.

She had a thin, awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank hair, and strong features.... At fifteen, appearances were mending.... Her complexion improved, her features were softened by plumpness and color, her eyes gained more animation, and her figure more consequence.” At seventeen, when we make her acquaintance, her manners were “just removed from the awkwardness and shyness of a girl; her person pleasing, and when in good looks, pretty.”

These particulars are from that delightful first chapter where the character as well as the person of the heroine is studied with the playful irony in which the whole story is conceived. From the beginning we know that it is a comedy the author has in hand; and we lose sight of her obvious purpose of satirizing the Radcliffe school of romance in our delight with the character of the heroine and her adventures in Bath and at Northanger Abbey. Catharine Morland is a goose, but a very engaging goose, and a goose you must respect for her sincerity, her high principles, her generous trust of others, and her patience under trials that would be great for much stronger heads. It is no wonder that the accomplished Henry Tilney falls in love with her when he finds that she is already a little in love with him; and when his father brutally sends her home from the Abbey where he has pressed her to visit his daughter on the belief that she is rich and will be a good match for his son, it is no wonder that Tilney follows her and offers himself to her. She prevails by her innocence and sweetness, and in spite of her romantic folly she has so much good heart that it serves her in place of good sense.

V

The chapters of the story relating to Catharine’s stay at the Abbey are rather perfunctorily devoted to burlesquing romantic fiction, in accordance with the author’s original design, and they have not the easy charm of the scenes at Bath, where Catharine, as the guest of Mrs. Allen, meets Henry Tilney at a public ball. — Mrs.

Allen was one of that numerous class of females whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough to marry them.... The air of a gentle woman, a great deal of quiet, inactive good temper, and a trifling turn of mind were all that could account for her being the choice of a sensible, intelligent man like Mr. Allen. In one respect she was admirably fitted to introduce a young lady into public, being as fond of going everywhere, and seeing everything herself, as any young lady could.” But at the first ball she knows nobody, and she can only say to Catharine from time to time, “I wish we had a large acquaintance here,” but at their next appearance in the Lower Rooms (how much the words say to the reader of old-fashioned fiction!) the master of ceremonies introduces a partner to Catharine. “His name was Tilney. He seemed to be about four or five and twenty, was rather tall, had a pleasing countenance, a very lively and intelligent eye, and, if not quite handsome, was very near it.... When they were seated at tea she found him as agreeable as she had already given him credit for being.... After chatting for some time on such matters as naturally arose from the objects around them, he suddenly addressed her with— ‘I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath, whether you were ever here before, whether you have been at the Upper Rooms, the theatre, and the concert, and how you like the place altogether. I have been very negligent; but are you now at leisure to satisfy me in these particulars? If you are, I will begin directly.’  ‘You need not give yourself that trouble, sir,” No trouble, I assure you, madam,’ Then, forming his features in a soft smile, and affectedly softening his voice, he added with a simpering air, ‘Have you been long in Bath, madam?” About a week, sir,’ replied Catharine, trying not to laugh. ‘Really!’ with affected astonishment. ‘Why should you be surprised, sir?” Why, indeed?’ said he in his natural tone. ‘But some emotion must appear to be raised by your reply, and surprise is more easily assumed, and not less reasonable, than any other. Now let us go on. Were you ever here before, madam?” Never, sir,” Indeed! Have you yet honored the Upper Rooms?’  ‘Yes, sir; I was there last Monday.” Have you been to the theatre?’  ‘Yes, sir; I was at the play on Tuesday.’  ‘To the concert?’  ‘Yes, sir; on Wednesday.’  ‘And you are altogether pleased with Bath?’  ‘Yes, I like it very well.” Now, I must give one more smirk, and then we may be rational again.’ Catharine turned away her head, not knowing whether she ought venture to laugh. ‘I see what you think of me,’ said he gravely. ‘I shall make but a poor figure in your journal to-morrow.... I know exactly what you will say. Friday went to the Lower Rooms; wore my sprigged muslin robe with blue trimmings, plain black shoes; appeared to much advantage, but was strangely harassed by a queer, half-witted man who would make me dance with him, and distressed me by his nonsense.’  ‘Indeed I shall say no such thing.’  ‘Shall I tell you what you ought to say?’  ‘If you please.’  ‘I danced with a very agreeable young man, had a good deal of conversation with him, seems a most extraordinary genius; hope I may know more of him. That, madam, is what I wish you to say.’  ‘But perhaps I keep no journal.’  ‘Perhaps you are not sitting in this room, and I am not sitting beside you.’”

It is plain from the beginning what must be Catharine’s fate with a young man who can laugh at her so caressingly, and what must be his with a girl so helplessly transparent to his eyes. Henry Tilney is as good as he is subtle, and he knows how to value her wholesome honesty aright; but all her friends are not witty young clergymen, and one of them is as little like him in appreciation of Catharine’s rare nature as she is like Catharine in the qualities which take him. This is putting it rather too severely if it conveys the reproach of wilful bad faith in the case of Isabella Thorp, who becomes the bosom friend of Catharine at a moment’s notice, and the betrothed of Catharine’s brother with very little more delay. She is simply what she was born, a self-centred jilt in every motion of her being, and not to be blamed for fulfilling the jilt’s function in a world where she is divined in almost her modem importance. In this character, the author forecasts the supremacy of a type which had scarcely been recognized before, but which has since played so dominant a part in fiction, and as with the several types of snobs, proves herself not only artist but prophet. Isabella is not of the lineage of the high and mighty flirts, the dark and deadly flirts, who deal destruction round among the hearts of men. She is what was known in her time as a “rattle”; her tongue runs while her eyes fly, and her charms are perpetually alert for admiration. She is involved in an incessant drama of fictitious occurrences; she is as romantic in her own way as Catharine is in hers; she peoples an unreal world with conquests, while Catharine dwells in the devotion of one true, if quite imaginary lover. As Catharine cannot make anything of such a character, she decides to love and believe in her utterly, and she cannot well do more after Isabella becomes engaged to her brother James, and declares that she is going to withdraw from the world in his absence, and vows that though she may go to the assembly she will do it merely because Catharine asks it. “‘ But do not insist upon my being very agreeable, for my heart you know will be forty miles off; and as for dancing, do not mention it, I beg; that is quite out of the question.’”

Catharine takes her friend so literally that when Tilney asks her in behalf of his handsome brother the question whether Miss Thorp would have any objection to dancing, “‘Your brother will not mind it, I know,’ said she, ‘because I heard him say before that he hated dancing; but it was very good-natured of him to think of it. I suppose he saw Isabella sitting down, and fancied she might wish for a partner, but... she would not dance on any account in the world,’ Henry smiled and said, ‘How very little trouble it can give you to understand the motive of other people’s actions.’  ‘Why, what do you mean?’... ‘I only meant that your attributing my brother’s wish of dancing with Miss Thorp to good-nature, convinced me of your being superior in good-nature yourself to all the rest of the world.’ Catharine blushed and disclaimed.... She drew back for some time, forgetting to speak or to listen... till roused by the voice of Isabella, she looked up and saw her with Captain Tilney preparing to give their hands across. Isabella shrugged her shoulders and smiled, the only explanation of this extraordinary change which could at that time be given. Catharine... spoke her astonishment in very plain terms to her partner. ‘I cannot think how it could happen. Isabella was so determined not to dance. “And did Isabella never change her mind before?’  ‘Oh! but because — and your brother! After what you told him from me, how could he think of going to ask her?’... ‘The fairness of your friend was an open at traction; her firmness, you know, could only be understood by yourself.’  ‘You are laughing; but I assure you Isabella is very firm in general,’... The friends were not able to get together... till after the dancing was over; but then as they walked about the room arm in arm, Isabella thus explained herself: ‘I do not wonder at your surprise, and I am really fatigued to death.... I would have given the world to sit still.’  ‘Then why did not you?’... ‘Oh, my dear, it would have looked so particular, and you know how I abhor doing that.... You have no idea how he pressed me.... I found there would be no peace if I did not stand up. Besides, I thought Mrs. Hughes, who introduced him, might take it ill if I did; and your dear brother, I am sure, would have been miserable if I had sat down the whole evening. My spirits are quite jaded, listening to his nonsense; and then being such a smart young fellow, I saw every eye was upon us.’  ‘He is very handsome indeed.’  ‘Handsome? Yes, I suppose he may... But he is not at all in my style of beauty. I hate a florid complexion and dark eyes in a man. However, he is very well. Amazingly conceited, I am sure. I took him down, several times, you know, in my way.’”

The born jilt, the jilt so natured that the part she perpetually plays is as unconscious with her as the circulation of the blood, has never been more perfectly presented than in Isabella Thorp, in whom she was first presented; and her whole family, so thoroughly false that they live in an atmosphere of lies, are miracles of art. The soft, kindly, really well-meaning mother, is as great a liar as her hollow-hearted, hollow-headed daughter, or her braggart son who babbles blasphemous falsehoods because they are his native speech, with only the purpose of a momentary effect, and hardly the hope or wish of deceit. His pursuit of the trusting Catharine, who desires to believe in him as the friend of her brother, is the farcical element of the pretty comedy. The farce darkens into as much tragedy as the scheme will suffer when General Tilney, a liar in his own way, is taken in by John Thorp’s talk, and believes her very rich; but it all brightens into the sweetest and loveliest comedy again, when Henry Tilney follows her home from his father’s house, and the cheerful scene is not again eclipsed till the curtain goes down upon her radiant happiness.

JANE AUSTEN’S EMMA WOODHOUSE, MARIANNE DASHWOOD, AND FANNY PRICE

IN primitive fiction plot is more important than character; as the art advances character becomes the chief interest, and the action is such as springs from it. In the old tales and romances there is no such thing as character in the modem sense; their readers were satisfied with what the heroes and heroines did and suffered.

When the desire for character arose, the novelists loaded their types with attributes; but still there was no character, which is rooted in personality. The novelist of to-day who has not conceived of this is as archaic as any romancer of the Middle Ages in his ideal of art. Most of the novels printed in the last year, in fact, are as crudely devised as those which have amused people of childish imagination at any time in the last thousand years; and it will always be so with most novels, because most people are of childish imagination. The masterpieces in fiction are those which delight the mind with the traits of personality, with human nature recognizable by the reader through its truth to himself. The wonder of Jane Austen is that at a time when even the best fiction was overloaded with incident, and its types went staggering about under the attributes heaped upon them, she imagined getting on with only so much incident as would suffice to let her characters express their natures movingly or amusingly. She seems to have reached this really unsurpassable degree of perfection without a formulated philosophy, and merely by her clear vision of the true relation of art to life; but however she came to be what she was, she was so unquestionably great, so unmistakably the norm and prophecy of most that is excellent in Anglo-Saxon fiction since her time, that I shall make no excuse for what may seem a disproportionate study of her heroines.

I

Emma Woodhouse, in the story named after her, is one of the most boldly imagined of Jane Austen’s heroines. Perhaps she is the very most so, for it took supreme courage to portray a girl, meant to win and keep the reader’s fancy, with the characteristics frankly ascribed to Emma Woodhouse. We are indeed allowed to know that she is pretty; not formally, but casually, from the words of a partial friend:— “Such an eye! — the true hazel eye — and so brilliant! — regular features, open countenance, with a complexion — ah, what a bloom of full health, and such a pretty height and size; such a firm and upright figure.” But, before we are allowed to see her personal beauty we are made to see in her some of the qualities which are the destined source of trouble for herself and her friends. In her wish to be useful she is patronizing and a little presumptuous; her self-sufficiency early appears, and there are hints of her willingness to shape the future of others without having past enough of her own to enable her to do it judiciously. The man who afterwards marries her says of her: “‘She will never submit to anything requiring industry and patience, mid a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.... Emma is spoiled by being the cleverest of her family. At ten years old she had the misfortune of being able to answer questions which puzzled her sister at seventeen. She was always quick and assured... and ever since she was twelve Emma has been mistress of the house and you all.’”

An officious and self-confident girl, even if pretty, is not usually one to take the fancy, and yet Emma takes the fancy. She manages the delightful and whimsical old invalid her father, but she is devotedly and unselfishly good to him. She takes the destiny of Harriet Smith unwarrantably into her charge, but she breaks off the girl’s love-affair only in the interest of a better match. She decides that Frank Churchill, the stepson of her former governess, will be in love with her, but she never dreams that Mr. Elton, whom she means for Harriet Smith, can be so. She is not above a little manoeuvring for the advantage of those she wishes to serve, but the tacit insincerity of Churchill is intolerable to her. She is unfeelingly neglectful of Jane Fairfax and cruelly suspicious of her, but she generously does what she can to repair the wrong, and she takes her punishment for it meekly and contritely. She makes thoughtless and heartless fun of poor, babbling Miss Bates, but when Knightley calls her to account for it, she repents her unkindness with bitter tears. She will not be advised against her pragmatical schemes by Knightley, but she is humbly anxious for his good opinion. She is charming in the very degree of her feminine complexity, which is finally an endearing single-heartedness.

Her character is shown in an action so slight that the novel of “Emma” may be said to be hardly more than an exemplification of Emma. In the placid circumstance of English country life where she is the principal social figure the story makes its round with a few events so unexciting as to leave the reader in doubt whether anything at all has happened. Mr. Elton, a clerical snob as odious as Mr. Collins in “Pride and Prejudice” is amusing, indignantly resents Emma’s plan for supplying him with a wife in Harriet Smith,’ and marries a woman who has Emma’s delects without their qualities. Frank Churchill keeps his engagement with Jane Fairfax a secret till all -the possible mischief can come from it, and then acknowledges it just when the fact must be most mortifying and humiliating to Emma. After she has been put to shame before Knightley in every way, she finds herself beloved and honored by him and in the way to be happily married. There are, meantime, a few dances and picnics, dinners and teas; Harriet Smith is frightened by gypsies, and some hen-roosts are robbed. There is not an accident, even of the mild and beneficent type of Louisa Musgrove’s in “Persuasion”; there is not an elopement, even of the bouffe nature of Lydia’s in “Pride and Prejudice”; there is nothing at all so tragic as Catharine Morland’s expulsion by General Tilney in “Northanger Abbey.” Duels and abductions, of course, there are none; for Jane Austen had put from her all the machinery of the great and little novelists of the eighteenth century, and openly mocked at it. This has not prevented its being frequently used since, and she shows herself more modem than all her predecessors and contemporaries and most of her successors, in the rejection of the major means and the employment of the minor means to produce the enduring effects of “Emma.” Among her quiet books it is almost the quietest, and so far as the novel can suggest that repose which is the ideal of art “Emma” suggests it, in an action of unsurpassed unity, consequence, and simplicity.

It is difficult to detach from the drama any scene which shall present Emma in a moment more characteristic than other moments; but that in which Knightley takes her to task for her behavior to Miss Bates can be chosen, because it illustrates the courageous naturalness with which she is studied throughout. “While waiting for the carriage, she found Mr. Knightley at her side. He looked around, as if to see that no one were near, and then said, ‘Emma, I must once more speak to you as I have been used to do.... I cannot see you acting wrong without a remonstrance. How could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent in your wit to a woman of her character, age, and situation? Emma, I had not thought it possible!’ Emma recollected, blushed, was sorry, but tried to laugh it off. ‘Nay, how could I have helped saying what I did? Nobody could have helped it. It was not so very bad. I dare say she did not understand me.” I assure you she did. She felt your full meaning. She has talked of it since. I wish you could have heard how she talked of it — with what candor and generosity. I wish you could have heard her honoring your forbearance... when her society must be so irksome.’  ‘Oh,’ cried Emma, ‘I know there is not a better creature in the world; but you must allow that what is good and what is ridiculous are most unfortunately blended in her.’  ‘They are blended, I acknowledge,’ he said, ‘and were... she a woman of fortune, I would leave her every harmless absurdity to take its chance.... Were she your equal in situation — but, Emma, consider how far this is from being the case! She is poor; she is sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she should live to old age must probably sink more. Her situation should secure your compassion. It was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honor — to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, humble her — and before her niece, too — and before many others, many of whom (certainly some) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her. ‘This is not pleasant to you, Emma, and it is very far from pleasant to me; but I must, I will — I will tell you truths while I can... trusting that you will some time or other do me greater justice than you can do now,’ While they talked, they were advancing towards the carriage; it was ready, and before she could speak again he had handed her in. He had misinterpreted the feelings which had kept her face averted and her tongue motionless. They were combined only of anger against herself, mortification, and deep concern. She had not been able to speak, and on entering the carriage, sunk back for a moment overcome; then reproaching herself for having taken no leave, making no acknowledgment, parting in apparent sullenness, she looked out with voice and hand eager to show a difference; but it was too late. He had turned away, and the horses were in motion.... Emma felt the tears running down her cheeks almost all the way home, without being at any trouble to check them, extraordinary as they were.”

It is not on such grounds, in such terms, that a heroine is often talked to in a novel, and it is not so that she commonly takes a talking-to. But it is to be remembered that Knightley is not only Emma’s tacit lover; he is the brother of her sister’s husband, and much her own elder, and as a family friend has some right to scold her. It is to be considered also that she is herself a singular type among heroines: a type which Jane Austen perfected if she did not invent, and in that varied sisterhood she has the distinction, it not the advantage, of being an entirely natural girl, and a nice girl, in spite of her faults.

II

“Sense and Sensibility” is the most conventional, the most mechanical of the author’s novels. The title, like that of “Pride and Prejudice,” implies the task of developing two opposite characters in the antithesis which suggests itself; but Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are contrasted much more directly and obviously than Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. These, indeed, are often interchangeably proud and prejudiced; but Elinor is always a person of sense, and Marianne is always a person of sensibility. One sister always looks the facts of life in the face; the other always sees them through a cloud of romantic emotions. It is not pretended that the wise virgin escapes suffering any more than the foolish, and so far the novel attests itself the effect of Jane Austen’s clear perception and faithful observation. It abounds in the truth and courage which distinguish everything she did, and it is perhaps more humorously just and more unsparingly exigent of true ideals than some other books of hers. But it is built more than her other books upon the lines of the accepted fiction of her time, or of the times before hers. In the affair of Marianne’s false-hearted lover Willoughby there is almost a reversion to the novel in which young men habitually sought the love of trusting girls and betrayed it. It was in fact her earliest novel and she first wrote it in the form of letters. Then, after she had practised her ‘prentice hand to mastery in “Pride and Prejudice,” she recast “Sense and Sensibility” in its present shape. It is only inferior to her other novels; compared with most of the novels that had gone before hers, this least of Jane Austen’s is a masterpiece; and the romantic Marianne, even more than the matter-of-fact Elinor, is a picture of girlhood touched in with tender truth, and with the caressing irony which still leaves the character pleasing.

The story is distinctively modem in giving a description of the sister heroines, which was probably an afterthought, and occurred to the author in the making over. “Miss Dashwood,” she says, “had a delicate complexion, regular features, and a remarkably pretty figure. Marianne was still handsomer. Her form, though not so correct as her sister’s, in having the advantage of height, was more striking.... Her skin was very brown, but from its transparency, her complexion was uncommonly brilliant; her features were all good; her smile sweet and attractive, and in her eyes, which were very dark, there was a life, a spirit, an eagerness, which could hardly be seen without delight.” Marianne’s mother is as romantic as the girl herself, and it is by her connivance that the girl thinks it a kind of merit to be a credulous simpleton, and to believe more in the love of the cruel scoundrel who flatters and jilts her than he openly asks her to do. When she finds herself in London, shortly after their parting in the country with all the forms of tacit devotion, on his part, and he snubs her at their first meeting in society, she owns in her shame and grief, that there has been no engagement. “‘It was every day implied, but never professedly declared. Sometimes I thought it had been — but it never was.’ Yet with a faith in his unplighted truth as absolute as the sense of her own loyalty to him, she would have been ready to seize upon him, and claim all his remembered tenderness, if her sister had not prevented her.

“‘Good Heaven!’ she exclaimed, ‘he is there, he is there! Oh! why does he not look at me? Why cannot I speak to him?’  ‘Pray, pray, be composed,’ cried Elinor, ‘and do not betray what you feel to every one present. Perhaps he has not observed you yet.’ This, however, was more than she could believe herself, and to be composed at such a moment was not only beyond the reach of Marianne, it was beyond her wish. She sat in an agony of impatience that affected every feature. At last he turned round again, and regarded them both; she started up, and pronouncing his name in a tone of affection, held out her hand to him. He approached, and, addressing himself rather to Elinor than Marianne, inquired in a hurried manner after Mrs. Dashwood, and asked how long they had been in town. Elinor was robbed of all presence of mind by such an address.... The feelings of her sister were instantly expressed.... ‘Good God, Willoughby! what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my letters? Will you not shake hands with me?’ He could not then avoid it, but her touch seemed painful to him, and he held her hand only for a moment. ‘I did myself the honor of calling in Berkeley Street, last Tuesday....

My card was not lost, I hope?” But have you not received my notes?’ cried Marianne, in the wildest anxiety.... ‘Tell me, Willoughby — for Heaven’s sake, tell me, what is the matter?’ He made no reply; his complexion changed, and all his embarrassment returned; but as if, on catching the eye of the young lady with whom he had been previously talking, he felt the necessity of instant exertion, he recovered himself again, and after saying, ‘Yes, I had the pleasure of receiving the information of your arrival in town, which you were so good as to send me,’ turned hastily away with a slight bow, and joined his friend. Marianne, now looking dreadfully white, and unable to stand, sunk into her chair.... ‘Go to him, Elinor,’ she said, as soon as she could speak, ‘and force him to come to me.... I cannot rest, I cannot have a moment’s peace, till this is explained — some dreadful misapprehension or other. Oh, go to him this moment.’  ‘How can that be done? No, my dearest Marianne, you must wait. This is not a place for explanations ‘... Marianne continued incessantly to give way... in exclamations of wretchedness. In a short time Elinor saw Willoughby quit the room... and telling Marianne that he was gone, urged the impossibility of speaking to him again that evening.”

III

In an earlier age of fiction, if not of society, the folly of Marianne would have meant her ruin; but in the wiser and milder aesthetics of Jane Austen it meant merely her present heart-break, with her final happiness through a worthier love. Hers is a very simple nature, studied with a simpler art than such an intricate character as Emma’s. She has only at all times to be herself, responsive to her mainspring of emotionality; and a girl like Emma has apparently to be different people at different times, in obedience to inconsistent and unexpected impulses. She is therefore perhaps the greatest of Jane Austen’s creations, and certainly the most modem; yet even so slight and elemental a character as Marianne is handled with the security and mastery, which were sometimes greater and sometimes less in the author’s work.

“Persuasion,” which was the latest of her novels, is in places the poorest, and “Sense and Sensibility,” which is, on the whole, the poorest, has moments of being the greatest. There is no such meanness portrayed in all fiction as John Dashwood’s, and yet you are made to feel that he would like not to be mean if only he could once rise above himself. In Marianne and her mother, who are such a pair of emotional simpletons, there are traits of generosity that almost redeem their folly, and their limitations in the direction of silliness are as distinctly shown as their excesses. Willoughby himself, who lives to realize that he has never loved any one but Marianne, and has been given to understand by the relation who leaves her money away from him, “that if he had behaved with honor towards Marianne, he might at once have been happy and rich,” even he is not committed wholesale to unavailing regret. “That his repentance of misconduct, which thus brought its own punishment, was sincere, need not be doubted....

But that he was forever inconsolable — that he fled from society, or contracted a habitual gloom of temper, of died of a broken heart — must not be depended upon, for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humor, nor his house always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horsey and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.”

It was not Jane Austen’s way to do anything wholesale; she was far too well acquainted with life, and of too sensitive an artistic conscience for that; and especially in “Mansfield Park” is one aware of the hand that is held from overdoing. As in “Sense and Sensibility,” and in fact all her other novels, the subordinate characters are of delightful verity and vitality. Mrs. Norris is of a meanness which in its sort may almost match with John Dashwood’s, and Lady Bertram’s indolent affections and principles form a personality of almost unique charm. These sisters of Mrs. Price who made an unhappy love marriage beneath her, are of the same quality as she, and their differentiation by environment is one of the subtle triumphs of the author’s art.

It is by the same skill that a character so prevalently passive as that of sweet Fanny Price is made insensibly to take and gently to keep the hold of a heroine upon the reader. It would have been so easy in so many ways to overdo her. But she is never once overdone, either when as a child she meets with the cold welcome of charity in her uncle’s family, where she afterwards makes herself indispensable, or in her return to her childhood home, which has forgotten her in her long absence. It is not pretended that she is treated by her cousins and her aunts with active unkindness, and she suffers none of the crueller snubbing which cheaply wins a heroine the heart of the witness. When she goes back to Portsmouth on that famous visit, after nine years at Mansfield Park, it is not concealed that she is ashamed of her home, of her weak and slattern mother, of her drinky, smoky, and sweary father, of her rude little brothers and sisters, of the whole shabby and vulgar household. None of the younger children remember her; her father and mother, from moment to moment, in their preoccupation with her brother, who comes with her to get his ship at Portsmouth (we are again among naval people), fail to remember her. All the circumstances are conducive to disgust and resentment in a girl who might reasonably have expected to be a distinguished guest for a while at least. But once more that delicately discriminating hand of Jane Austen does its work; it presently appears that the Price household is not so altogether impossible, and that a girl who wishes to be of use to others is not condemned to lasting misery and disgrace in any circumstances. Always the humorous sense of limitations comes in, but the human sense of good-will is there; the recognition of the effect of good-will is distinct but not elaborate. There is more philosophizing and satirizing than would be present in a more recent novel of equal mastery; but the characterization is as net as in the highest art of any time.

Sweet Fanny Price goes back to Mansfield Park with almost as little notice from her family as when she came to Portsmouth; but she has done them good, and is the better and stronger for her unrequited self-devotion. It is not pretended that she takes any active part in supporting the family at Mansfield Park under the disgrace which has befallen them through the elopement of one daughter to be divorced and of another to be married. Her function is best suggested by the exclamation with which her aunt Bertram falls upon her neck, “Dear Fanny, now I shall be comfortable.” To be a comfort, that has always been Fanny Price’s rare privilege, and she imparts to the reader something of the consolation she brings to all the people in the story who need the help of her sympathy. Possibly there was never a heroine, except Anne Eliot, who was so passive, without being spectacularly passive, if it is permitted so to phrase the rather intangible fact; and yet who so endeared herself to the fancy.

One is not passionately in love with Fanny Price, as one is with some heroines; one is quite willing Edward Bertram should have her in the end; but she is one of the sweetest and dearest girls in the world, though these words, too, rather oversay her. She is another proof of Jane Austen’s constant courage, which was also her constant wisdom, in being true to life. It is not only wit like Elizabeth Bennet’s, sensibility like Marianne Dashwood’s, complexity like Emma Woodhouse’s, or utter innocence like Catharine Morland’s that is charming. Goodness is charming, patience, usefulness, forbearance, meekness, are charming, as Jane Austen divined in such contrasting types as Fanny Price and Anne Eliot. If any young lady has a mind to be like them, she can learn how in two of the most interesting books in the world.

Some of the old English novels were amazing successes even when compared with the most worthless novels of recent days. “Pamela,” and “Clarissa,” and “Sir Charles Grandison” were read all over the Continent. The “Vicar of Wakefield” was the gospel of a new art to Germany, where Goethe said that it permanently influenced his character. “Evelina” and “Cecilia” were the passions of people of taste everywhere, and when their trembling author was presented to Louis XVIII. in Paris, he complimented her upon her novels, which were known also to the first Napoleon. No such glories attended Jane Austen in her lifetime. She found with difficulty a publisher for her greatest book, and a public quite as slow and reluctant. But her publishers and her public have been increasing ever since, and they were never so numerous as now. Whether they will ever be fewer, it would be useless to ask; what we know without asking, from the evidence of her work, is that in the real qualities of greatness she is still the most actual of all her contemporaries, of nearly all her successors.

HEROINES OF MISS FERRIER, MRS. OPIE, AND MRS. RADCLIFFE

DE FOE, Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen: this is the lineage of the English fiction whose ideal is reality, whose prototype is nature. To this illustrious company there are others worthy to be added, especially that Miss Susan Edmondstone Ferrier, who wrote “Marriage,”

“Inheritance,” and “Destiny,” and whom Scott praised with his habitual generosity, and grouped with Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen, as having “given portraits of real society far superior to anything” men had attempted. The more voluminous Mrs. Amelia Opie may be named with the others for the effect of nature which she secondarily achieved in her characters when primarily seeking the improvement of her readers. She was extolled by the highest criticism in the first quarter of the century for qualities that do not now appeal from her novels, but many of her tales can still be read with amusement, and with a sense of the helpless allegiance to life which her hyperethicized art could not withhold.

I

I do not know what measure of favor the recent London and Boston editions of Miss Ferrier’s novels have met with; but I think the reader can find an uncommon pleasure in them if he will first thoroughly advise himself that they are no such works of art as Jane Austen’s stories. Miss Ferrier was one who caricatured and Satirized and moralized; and yet her fiction is largely true, with delightful instances in which it is altogether true. In fact, any author who aims at truth to his own knowledge of what is just and right, can hardly fail of truth in portraying life. His conscience governs him in his art, his conscience becomes his art; and the two work together to an issue at once ethical and aesthetic.

Nearly every character in “Marriage,” which we may agree upon for the time as Miss Ferrier’s best story, has some touch of the amusing eccentricity, the lawless originality, which afterwards in much eviller times developed into the excesses of Dickensosity. But her people are not merely eccentrics or originals; and one remembers them for their qualities as well as for their singularities. Lady Juliana Courtland, who makes a runaway match with Henry Douglas, and who, when cast off by her father, goes with her lapdogs and parrots to find a home with her husband’s family in the Scotch Highlands, is only a superaccentuated expression of the weak, shallow, persistent selfishness of which the best society in all times and countries offers abundant examples. But she is skilfully differenced from other examples of the kind, and she passes through the story quite visibly and tangibly. The three old-maid sisters of the laird of Glenfern are eccentrics, without the inconsistency which distinguishes characters; they are as infallibly themselves as so many lunatics. Their devoutly admired Lady MacLaughlin, with her medicines and all her maxims, is also a type, inflexibly consistent, but capable of variation from her rude prepotence, in favor of the supercilious triviality of the English earl’s daughter, who promptly tramples the obsequious pride of the poor ladies of Glenfern under her silk-shod feet. She is a true aristocrat in the unfailing assertion of her superiority, and they are true aristocrats in their acknowledgment of it. When her captivity in the abhorred Highlands comes to an end through the good offices of that old friend of her husband’s who manages Douglas’s recall to his regiment, and makes him an allowance, she gladly leaves one of her twin daughters behind her with the sister-in-law who adopts it; and with insolent exultation before her husband’s family, she goes back to the spendthrift life in London from which her mistaken love-marriage had exiled her. She is studied in bold black and white; and there is little shading used or needed in the portrayal of her growth from a selfish young woman of fashion into a selfish old woman of fashion.

One of the prime virtues with which an aristocracy supplies itself at the expense of the lower classes is frankness; and the frankness with which Lady Juliana and all her noble family discover their good and bad traits is shown with perhaps more mastery than anything else in the story. Her niece, Lady Emily, is rather a pleasing accident of the kindly patrician wilfulness, such as Thackeray was fond of imagining; but neither she nor Lady Juliana’s spoiled daughter Adelaide, nor her neglected daughter Mary, is the heroine of “Marriage.” That is always Lady Juliana herself, who grudges letting Mary come to her for a few months, when the girl’s health is failing in Scotland, as shamelessly as she refuses following her husband to India when his regiment is ordered away. She has never in her whole selfish life had a doubt of her right to the things she enjoys wasting, and has never had a regret except for a pleasure she has missed. She grows older very naturally; her caprice becomes obstinacy, her wilfulness severity, her levity foolishness; she screeches, she scolds, she makes herself a bore and a nuisance. She is truly the incarnation of the meretricious spirit, and her instinct is to spoil and devour, to crave and to grudge.

II

Lady Juliana is as amusingly a warning as Emma Castlemain in Mrs. Opie’s “Temper” is intolerably an example. Few young women in fiction have been so offensively good, have had so few moments of passive virtue in which the reader could cease longing for their extirpation. It would be almost as hard to match her for the complications of her origin and destiny. She advances through the story, with a cloud upon the question of her mother’s marriage which is lifted just in season to prevent her own marriage with her half-brother; and all this in no obscure lands or times, but in England and France, at such a recent date that she narrowly misses seeing the First Consul review his troops before the Tuileries. A foreign sojourn and an atmosphere of contemporaneous history seem to be necessary, in the author’s view, to the development of a heroine who might have shown herself a prig, alternately sentimental and sarcastic, in far less formidable circumstances; but it cannot be honestly said that the political actualities are entertainingly employed in the story of Emma’s love-affairs. As far as this story is an illustration of the social spirit of the first decade of the century, it fails to convey any hint of that revolt which stirs in Jane Austen’s novels. In “Temper” there are some wicked people of good birth; but all the contemptible people are middle class or lower class. People in trade, or rich from trade, are invariably vulgar, as they are in “Evelina” and “Camilla” and “Cecilia,” and there is no recognition of snobbery, because for that time, at least, the author is a snob, as dear Fanny Burney was apparently at all times. The story is worth while chiefly as an instance of the prevailing literary tendency. It bears, in motive and object, an allegiance to the great school of nature which had flourished from the time of Richardson, but it refuses the simpler means by which the lessons of this school were enforced. It seeks its effects by tremendous feats of invention, by mysterious and prodigious accidents; and in this it forecasts the later moods of romanticism even more than it reflects the wild necromancy of Mrs. Radcliffe. In fact, I find myself disposed, not too strangely, I hope, to justify that poor, lady’s art, so long mocked and rejected, as something quite consistent in itself, as against the decadent naturalism of Mrs. Opie.

III

The heroines of Anne Radcliffe, who was born in 1764, may be claimed for our century, because their author did not die till 1823, and the romances, whose shades they still haunt, did not begin to appear until the last decade of the eighteenth century. Chief of those which still remain to touch or appall the reader, are “The House in the Forest,” published in 1791, and “The Mysteries of Udolpho,” published in 1794; and I have lately read both with a surprise I am not ashamed to confess at their vigorous handling of incident, and their fertility in gloomy and goose-fleshing situations. I can well understand why such an artist as Jane Austen must contest their universal acceptance, but I have not the least doubt she enjoyed them, and privately thrilled while she laughed at them. As literature they are distinctly not despicable, as Walpole’s “Castle of Otranto,” which presaged them, distinctly is. They abound in a poetry which makes itself felt nearly everywhere, except in the verse which they also abound in. They witness in the author a true feeling for nature, especially in the sombre aspects, and an unquestionable power of logically relating the emotions of personality to these. Her tremendous schemes sometimes broke under her, and the reader is left to confront an anticlimax, instead of a veridical phantom; but all the same there is sublimity in the vastness of her schemes; a certain force in the conception of her types, and no slight grasp of the social facts of such countries as her travels had acquainted her with, or as she had studied from her husband’s familiarity with them. Her Frenchmen and Italians are the Frenchmen and Italians of the prevailing Anglo-Saxon convention; but they are not therefore false, though they are inadequate and partial. Her villains are villains through and through, and never otherwise, and her good people always good, her fools always foolish, her sages always wise. Her heroines are never unworthy of their high mission of being rapt away by miscreants and held captive till their true lovers come to their relief. They have a gentle dignity, and a pious resignation in their trials, and at moments their emotions shape themselves in verse of indifferent quality. In any emergency they are apt to fall senseless, when it would be more convenient for them to command themselves; their morals are at all points unassailable; and under no stress will they yield to the voice of self-interest. Sometimes they are rather hard of hearing when common-sense speaks; yet they are by no means wanting in reason; and at the worst they are more probable and more lovable than such moralized heroines of the realistic decadence as Emma Castlemain. In “The Romance of the Forest” Adeline de Montait is almost a personality, and in her most insubstantial moments she is pleasing or pathetic, as the case happens to be. She has to sustain the rôle of a young girl ignorant of her parentage, who is pursued by the passion of a profligate uncle, equally ignorant of her parentage, and is only fitfully and partially protected by a gentleman hiding from justice among the ruins of an ancient abbey in the heart of a gloomy forest on her uncle’s estates. In circumstances which would be so difficult in real life, she has to suffer the jealousy of her uncertain protector’s wife, and to forbid the suit of their son, an amiable youth not unworthy of the love which is won by another. But this situation is by no means impossible to the heroine, even when aggravated by her uncle’s persecution of the excellent young officer to whom she gives her heart, and whom he manages to have sentenced to death for a breach of military discipline. One cannot be altogether surprised that she triumphs over her misfortunes, and is rewarded in the - same moment by the reversal of her lover’s sentence and the verification of her noble origin.

From the very beginning, indeed, one is taught to expect anything from a girl who is introduced to her protector, La Motte, under conditions of such a very extraordinary character as those portrayed in the opening chapter of the romance. In his flight from the King’s officers La Motte loses the road, and is attracted by the light from a lonely house on the borders of the forest. Entering to inquire his way, “between the pauses of the wind he thought he distinguished the sobs and moaning of a female,” and was presently confronted by a man “leading, or rather, forcibly dragging along a beautiful girl who appeared to be about eighteen. Her features were bathed in tears, and she seemed to suffer the utmost distress. The man... advanced towards La Motte, who had before observed other persons in the passage, and pointed a pistol at his breast. ‘You are wholly in our power,’ he cried. ‘No assistance can reach you; if you wish to save your life swear that you will convey this girl where I may never see her more.... Answer quickly; you have no time to lose,’ He... hurried her towards La Motte, whom surprise kept silent. She sunk at his feet, and with supplicating eyes that streamed with tears implored him to have pity on her.... Her features, which were delicately beautiful, had gained from distress a captivating sweetness, she had

‘ — An eye

As when the blue sky trembles through a cloud

Of purest white.’

A habit of gray camlet, with short slashed sleeves, showed but did not adorn her figure; it was thrown open at the bosom, upon which part of her hair had  fallen in disorder, while the light veil, hastily thrown on, had in her confusion been suffered to fall back....

Such elegance and apparent refinement, contrasted with the desolation of the house, and the savage manners of its inhabitants, seemed to him like a romance of imagination rather than an occurrence of real life.” It well might seem so; but the horror (the eighteenth-century horror) of this incident is better calculated to fortify the reader against the events which ensue than the scenes of soft tranquillity which open the dark drama of “The Mysteries of Udolpho.” We first see Emily St. Aubert in the tender care of a dying mother and an idyllic father, who also dies before the story is far advanced. They are all people of sensibility, residing upon an ancestral estate in Gascony, surrounded by an operatic peasantry, who “in this gay climate were often seen on an evening, when the day’s labor was done, dancing in groups on the margin of the river.... Under the ample shade of a spreading palm-tree... St. Aubert loved to read and converse with Madam St. Aubert, or to play with his children, resigning himself to the influence of those sweet affections which are ever attendant on simplicity and nature.... In person Emily resembled her mother, having the same elegant symmetry of form, the same delicacy of features, and the same blue eyes, full of tender sweetness.... St. Aubert cultivated her understanding with the most scrupulous care. He gave her a general view of the sciences, and an exact acquaintance with every part of elegant literature. He taught her Latin and English, chiefly that she might understand the sublimity of their best poets.’

When deprived untimely of these tender parents, at once so academically and so pastorally pleasing, Emily becomes the ward of a worldly and vulgarly ambitious sister of her father, and goes to live with her at Toulouse. Here she meets again the young Valancourt whom she has already met on a journey with her father and given her heart. Her aunt is dazzled by the brilliancy of the match, and the lovers are about to be united, when the aunt marries an Italian, much younger than herself, and at the bidding of her husband, the lurid Count Montoni, breaks off Emily’s marriage. Montoni wishes to get possession of the niece’s property as well as the aunt’s; he travels suddenly into Italy with them, and after a sojourn amidst the pleasant corruptions of Venice, he carries them off to his castle of Udolpho in the Apennines, where the mysteries which give name to the story develop themselves, and Emily remains the prey of terror until Valancourt duly appears and effects her rescue.

The mysteries when you come to them are never quite so blood-curdling as they promise while you are working up to them; but it cannot be denied that Mrs. Radcliffe was mistress of the art of suspense in her effects. She knew how to paint a lonely landscape, and how to suggest the solitude and gloomy majesty of a fortress in the mountain forests. She understood how to touch the nerves, to blanch the cheek, to bid the hair rise and the pulse falter. In a fashion she could make the types she used do the office of characters; she almost persuades you that Montoni lives, and quite that his wife does. If she is not so convincing in the case of Emily, still with a youthful reader on her side she has little trouble in enlisting all the necessary sympathy, all the needed hopes and fears in her behalf. Who, indeed, can withhold an appropriate shudder, when in that vast silent chamber where the girl is put to sleep, away from all the other inhabitants of the castle, she hears the sliding of the rusty bolts on the outside of her door, which has no fastening within? Whose back can resist the cold chills that the midnight music of the unseen lute, moving mystically about the halls and corridors of the castle, invites to run down it? What heart is proof against the supreme terrors of the veiled picture?

“Emily passed on till she came to a chamber hung with pictures, and took the light to examine that of a soldier... resembling Montoni. She shuddered and turned from it; passing the light over several other pictures, she came to one concealed by a veil of black silk. The singularity of the circumstance struck her and she stopped before it, wishing to remove the veil, and examine what could be thus carefully concealed, but somewhat wanting courage. ‘Holy Virgin! What can this mean?’ exclaimed Annette. ‘This is surely the picture they told me of at Venice,’ Emily, turning round, saw Annette’s countenance grow pale. ‘And what have you heard of this picture to terrify you so, my good girl?’ said she. ‘Nothing, ma’amselle; I have heard nothing; only I have heard there is something very dreadful belonging to it,’ “It is not strange that those hints, and that tragical story of a former lady of the castle, who suddenly vanished and was never heard of more, should fix themselves in Emily’s fancy, or that the next day, when exploring the castle near her room, she should think of the veiled picture, and “resolve to examine it. As she passed through the chambers that led to this, she found herself somewhat agitated; its connection with the late lady of the castle, together with the circumstance of the veil, throwing a mystery over the object that excited a faint degree of terror. But a terror of this nature, as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object from which we appear to shrink. Emily passed on with faltering steps, and having paused a moment at the door before she attempted to open it, she then hastily entered the chamber, and went towards the picture, which appeared to be enclosed in a frame of uncommon size, that hung in a dark part of the room. She paused again, and then with a timid hand lifted the veil, but instantly let it fall — perceiving that what it had concealed was no picture; and before she could leave the chamber dropped senseless upon the floor.”

What was behind the veil?

In a famous conversation between Catharine Morland and Isabella Thorp in “Northanger Abbey,” Catharine says she has been reading “Udolpho” ever since she woke and is “got to the black veil.”

“Are you, indeed?” cries Isabella. “Oh, I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are you not wild to know?”

“Oh yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me; I would not be told on any account. I know it must be a skeleton; I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton.”

This conjecture of Catharine’s is so much more effective than the fact that I prefer to leave it; but if any reader is impatient of it, he may satisfy his curiosity by turning to the last chapters of the romance, where all the “Mysteries of Udolpho” are conscientiously explained»

SCOTT’S REBECCA AND ROWENA, AND LUCY ASHTON

IT is not only in her conscientious explanation of the “Mysteries of Udolpho” that Mrs. Radcliffe pays tribute to the realistic ideal of her time. Her romances are as chaste in motive and as modest in material as Jane Austen’s novels, and far decenter than most novels of any age. They might be blamed for their blending of sublimity and absurdity, but there is no specious mixture of good and bad in them to confound the conscience by the spectacle of noble rascality or virtuous depravity in any form. One may squander one’s time on them, but one cannot get positive harm from them. They may misrepresent manners, but they do not misrepresent morals; and in their idyllic passages, such as that episode of the pastor La Luc in “The Romance of the Forest,” they are refining, and even edifying. It is hard not to wish a little to be like Mrs. Radcliffe’s good people, and one never wishes to be like her bad people. The love-making between her heroes and heroines is of virginal purity; the heroine is always a Nice Girl, just as a heroine of Jane Austen or Frances Burney is, even if she is not a Real Girl; and it is to be claimed for Anne Radcliffe that she too helped with the other great women authors of her time to characterize Anglo-Saxon fiction with decency. When the magic wand fell from her hold, it passed to the keeping of a man whose ideal was as high and pure as her own.

I

So far as any man may be said to invent anything, Walter Scott invented the historical novel. His fiction drew upon the life of the past for characters and events, which he colored and shaped and posed to serve the ends of a fancied scheme. Historical personages had been used before his time, as in those monstrous and tedious fables classified in the annals of fiction as the heroical romances. Many Asian and African princes, wondrously translated, figure in the illimitable pages of Gomberville, Calprenade, and Scuderi; the rival families of Granada, after valiant service in the supposititious Spanish chronicles, were made to amuse the vast leisure of the ladies and gentlemen of Louis XIV.’s court by the same authors. But these authors took liberties with the originals of their creations such as Scott never allowed himself. He did not mind forcing a civilization in the hot-bed of his fancy, or transposing the peculiarities of one epoch to another; but he kept a fairly good conscience as to personality, and his historical characters realize in reasonable measure the ideal of tradition, if not of veritable record.

His evolution as a historical novelist reveals the simplicity of his nature and the open-hearted directness of his aim so winningly that you love the man more and more, while you respect the artist less and less. It is not that in going from the desultory Scotch stories he began with to the English, Continental, and Oriental motives he ended with, he did not learn something more of form and effect. But what he gained in these, he lost in more vital things. He no longer wrote of what he knew and believed in, but what he studied and made believe in. His earlier Scotch stories show his wish for truth to life, not only in the facts which he accumulates in prefaces and notes to attest the verity of the incidents, but in those finer things which the heart of the reader best corroborates. This wish was the principle of the realists whom he followed and surpassed in the popular favor, with a frank and generous shame for his triumph; but when he abandoned his native ground in the fear he so single-heartedly owns that his readers must get tired of his Scotch stories if he kept on with them, he did not perhaps abandon this principle, but he abandoned the best means of fulfilling it. He was a great literary force; he had got an immense creative impetus, and he could not help doing things that attracted and interested, but it must be confessed that he weakened more and more in the power of doing things that convinced. The early Scotch stories are those which his grown-up readers have not tired of; while all but boys and girls (and rather young boys and girls) have tired of the romances which he forsook them for In these the characters degenerate into types, heroic, hollow, that resound with echoing verbiage, and personate one quality and tendency. This seems to me especially true of the women, or the types of women, who are what he makes them, not what he finds them. He clothes them in certain attributes, as he habits them in certain garments, and he appoints them certain ceremonial relations to the facts which are mostly outside of the real drama, or inessential to it. In “Ivanhoe” the action scarcely concerns either Rebecca or Rowena; the love-making, so far as there is any, is between Rebecca and Ivanhoe, and yet Ivanhoe placidly marries Rowena, with whom he has, to the reader’s knowledge, not made love at all. In fiction women exist in the past, present, or future tenses, the infinitive, indicative, potential, or imperative moods of love-making; otherwise they do not exist at all, and no phantom of delight, masquerading in their clothes, suffices. Both Rowena and Rebecca might be left out of “Ivanhoe,” and the story would not be the poorer for their absence. Rowena, in fact, is a large, blond, calm nonentity, not only passionless, but traitless. Rebecca is conventionally filial, conventionally noble and pathetic; but she is without inconsistency, without variation, which are the soul of feminine identity, and she does not persuade us that she has any real business in the scene. Her moment of greatest vitality is that where she is imprisoned in the tower of Front-de-Boeuf’s castle, and reports to her fellow-captive, the wounded Ivanhoe, the events of the assault as they pass under her eye around the beleaguered walls. I do not know whether this is accounted a scene of uncommon power by the critics or not, but it seems to me so.

“‘And I must lie here like a bedridden monk,’ exclaimed Ivanhoe, ‘while the game that gives me freedom or death is played out by others! Look from the window once again, kind maiden, but beware that you are not marked by the archers beneath.... What dost thou see, Rebecca?’  ‘Nothing but the cloud of arrows that fly so thick as to dazzle mine eyes, and to hide the bowmen who shoot them.’  ‘That cannot endure,’ cried Ivanhoe. ‘If they press not right on to carry the castle by pure force of arms, the archery may avail but little against stone walls and bulwarks,’...

She turned her head from the lattice as if unable longer to endure a sight so terrible. ‘Look forth again, Rebecca,’ said Ivanhoe, mistaking the cause of her retiring.... ‘ There is now less danger,’ Rebecca again looked forth and almost immediately exclaimed, ‘Holy prophets of the law! Front-de-Boeuf and the Black Knight fight hand to hand in the breach, amid the roar of their followers, who watch the progress of the strife with the cause of the oppressed and of the captive!’ She then uttered a loud shriek, and exclaimed, ‘He is down! — he is down!’  ‘Who is down?’ cried Ivanhoe. ‘For our dear Lady’s sake, tell me which has fallen.’  ‘The Black Knight,’ answered Rebecca faintly; then instantly again shouted with joyful eagerness—’ But no! — but no! — the name of the Lord of Hosts be blessed! — he is on foot again, and fights as if there were twenty men’s strength in his single arm. His sword is broken — he snatches an axe from a yeoman — he presses Front-de-Boeuf with blow on blow — the giant stoops and totters like an oak under the steel of the woodsman — he falls, he falls!’  ‘Front-de-Boeuf?’ exclaimed Ivanhoe. ‘Front-de-Boeuf!’ answered the Jewess. ‘The assailants have won the postern gate, have they not?’ asked Ivanhoe. ‘They have, they have,’ exclaimed Rebecca, ‘and they press the besieged hard upon the outer wall; some plant ladders, some swarm like bees, and endeavor to ascend upon the shoulders of each other — down go stones, beams, and trunks of trees. As they bear the wounded to the rear, fresh men supply their places in the assault.... The Black Knight approaches the postern with his huge axe — the thundering blows which he deals, you may hear them above all the din and shouts of the battle. Stones and beams are hailed down on the bold champion — he regards them no more than if they were thistle-down or feathers!... The postern gate shakes, it crashes, it is splintered by his blows — they rush in — the outwork is gone — Oh, God! — they hurl the defenders from the battlements — they throw them into the moat — Oh, men, if ye be men indeed, spare them that can resist no longer!... Our friends strengthen themselves within the outwork which they have mastered; and it affords them so good a shelter from the foeman’s shot, that the garrison only bestow a few bolts on it from interval to interval, as if rather to disquiet, than effectually to injure them.’”

II

One easily perceives that it is the author, and not a young mediaeval Jewess who is describing the scene in these literary terms; and it is no great wonder that Ivanhoe, finding himself in company with an elderly novelist instead of a beautiful girl, drops off to sleep upon the assurance of victory for his side, after a brief argument upholding the ideal of chivalry against that of humanity, which the supposed Jewess maintains. The passage must often have been praised, and the situation is so well imagined that the unreality of the heroine cannot spoil it quite. It may be said that she is as real as the hero, and she is certainly as well fitted to take the fancy of those boys of all ages to whom the romance of “Ivanhoe” has now almost wholly fallen. Rebecca is not much more probable or palpable in the scenes where she repels the wicked love of the Templar, or meets his accusation before the judges who condemn her to death, or even in that climax where Ivanhoe rises from a sick-bed to do battle for her against her enemy and his. But she is always so much more alive than Rowena, that she exists at least by contrast.

The story in which she has her being seems to have been the first which Scott wrote when he began to be afraid his Scotch stories were wearying his public. The romance which immediately preceded “Ivanhoe” was “The Bride of Lammennoor,” not perhaps the best of the Scotch stories, but a tale which has most deeply appealed to the hearts of gentle readers. Of all Scott’s heroines Lucy Ashton is, after Jeanie Deans, perhaps the most persuasive of her reality. She is almost purely tragical. From the very beginning you can see her dark fate following the yielding and tender creature on “that way madness lies,” and it avails little that the Master of Ravenswood saves her from a mad bull in the opening chapters, or that they plight their troth and have their brief hour of happiness in the shadow of her doom. When you see her at last, gibbering and gloating over the bleeding body of the husband whom she had stabbed on her wedding-night, it is as if you had foreseen it all from the first. She has fewer words in her tragedy than even Ophelia in hers; but she remains in the memory with the like clinging hold upon the pity of the witness. The book is much better in construction than most of Scott’s novels; it has far more form than he commonly knew how to give them, and, basing itself so largely as it does upon facts known to him, it has a truth that the others seldom had. This truth, strangely enough, is concentrated in the passive girl who scarcely speaks; who is blown about like a lily in the stormy events and the violent passions that surge around her, and suffers everything, but does nothing. She hardly utters a word in that last scene between Ravenswood and herself, when he returns to the house from which he has been driven with atrocious insult by her mother, to question the hapless creature of her own part in her betrothal to Bucklaw; yet she is the very soul of the tremendous incident.

“He planted himself full in the middle of the apartment, opposite to the table at which Lucy was seated, on whom, as if she had been alone in the chamber, he bent his eyes with a mingled expression of deep grief and deliberate indignation. His dark-colored riding cloak, displaced from one shoulder, hung around one side of his person in the ample folds of the Spanish mantle. His slouched hat, which he had not removed at entrance, gave an additional gloom to his dark features, which, wasted by sorrow and marked by the ghastly look communicated by long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stem and wild, a fierce and even savage expression.... He said not a single word, and there was a deep silence in the company for more than two minutes. It was broken by Lady Ashton, who in that space partly recovered her natural audacity. She demanded to know the cause of this unauthorized intrusion. ‘That is a question, madam,’ said her son, ‘which I have the best right to ask,’... Bucklaw interposed, saying, ‘No man on earth should usurp his previous right in demanding an explanation from the Master,’... The passions of the two young men thus counteracting each other, gave Ravenswood leisure to exclaim, in a stem and steady voice, ‘Silence! — let him who really seeks danger, lake the fitting time when it may be found; my mission here will shortly be accomplished. Is that your handwriting, madam?’ he added, in a softer tone, extending towards Miss Ashton her last letter. A faltering ‘Yes,’ seemed rather to escape from her lips than to be uttered as a voluntary answer. ‘And is this your handwriting?’ extending towards her their mutual engagement. Lucy remained silent. Terror and a yet stronger and more confused feeling so utterly disturbed her understanding that she probably scarcely comprehended the question that was put to her.... ‘Sir William Ashton,’ said Ravenswood... ‘if this young lady of her own free will desires the restoration of this contract, as her letter would seem to imply, there is not a withered leaf which this autumn wind strews on the heath, that is more valueless in my eyes. But I must and will hear the truth from her own mouth.. . alone, and without witnesses. Lady Ashton is welcome to remain, but let all others depart,’ Ravenswood, when the men had left the room, bolted the door, and returned, raised his hat from his forehead, and gazing upon Lucy with eyes HEROINES OF FICTION in which an expression of sorrow overcame their late fierceness... said, ‘Do you know me, Miss Ashton? I am still Edgar Ravenswood. ‘She was silent, and he went on with increasing vehemence, ‘I am still that Edgar Ravenswood, who... for your sake forgave, nay clasped hands with the oppressor and pillager of his house — the traducer and murderer of his father,” My daughter,’ answered Lady Ashton, ‘has no occasion to dispute the identity of your person; the venom of your present language is sufficient to remind her that she speaks with the mortal enemy of her father. “ I pray you to be patient, madam.... My answer must come from her own lips. Once more, Miss Lucy Ashton, I am that Ravenswood to whom you granted the solemn engagement which you now desire to retract and cancel,’ Lucy’s bloodless lips could only falter out the words, ‘It was my mother.’  ‘She speaks truly,’ said Lady Ashton. ‘It was I, who, authorized alike by the laws of God and man, advised her and concurred with her to set aside an unhappy and precipitate engagement — and to annul it by the authority of Scripture itself....

You have asked what questions you thought fit. You see the total incapacity of my daughter to answer you. You desire to know whether Lucy Ashton of her own free will desires to annul the engagement into which she has been trepanned.... Here is the contract which she this morning subscribed... with Mr.

Hastings of Bucklaw,’ Ravenswood gazed upon the deed as if petrified, “this is indeed, madam, an undeniable piece of evidence.... There, madam,’ he ,’ said, laying down before Lucy the signed paper and the broken piece of gold—’ there are the evidences of your first engagement; may you be more faithful to that which you have just formed. I will trouble you to return the corresponding tokens of my ill-placed confidence — I ought rather to say my egregious folly,’ Lucy returned the scornful glance of her lover with a gaze from which perception seemed to have been banished; yet she seemed partly to have understood his meaning, for she raised her hands as if to undo a blue ribbon which she wore about her neck. She was unable to accomplish her purpose, but Lady Ashton cut the ribbon asunder, and detached the broken piece of gold, which Miss Ashton had till then worn in her bosom; the written counterpart of the lover’s engagement she for some time had had in her own possession. With a haughty courtesy she delivered both to Ravenswood.”

In spite of the slovenly construction of these passages, the repetitions, the touches of melodrama, the whole want of artistic delicacy and precision, the spirit of an immensely affecting tragedy is here present. Lucy’s part is so greatly and simply imagined that a word more from her, the least expression of protest or imploring would detract from its heart-breaking beauty. Such a scene could not be the work of less than a master, who alone would know how a little later to add, stiffly and formally, indeed, but with skill to extract yet a drop more of pathos from the fact, “Miss Ashton never alluded to what had passed in the state room. It seemed doubtful if she was even conscious of it, for she was often observed to raise her hands to her neck, as if in search of the ribbon that had been taken from it, and to mutter in surprise and discontent, when she could not find it, ‘It was the link that bound me to life.’”

III

Scott’s failures were among his gentilities, his lords and ladies, his princes and princesses, who are always more or less like the poorer sort of stage players. I do not know that he fails more signally with his women than with his men in high life; but Lucy Ashton is the only woman of gentle birth in his romances whom I remember, from my first long-ago reading, for her distinguished qualities, if indeed she has more than one of these. All his women of lower station, however, especially those that come casually and momentarily into the story, are alive, and speak a tongue as different from the literary language of their betters as nature is from artifice. He was essentially a humorist and humanist; he dearly loved and enjoyed such of his fellow-beings as he could come close to through their originality, or eccentricity, or simplicity; and there is no laird’s leddy, no bare-legged lassie, no screaming or scolding old-wife, who is not as veritable as any man of her rank, and far more so than any man of higher rank. Such figures abound in his Scotch stories and give them that air of reality which is never quite absent from them. But again when he transcends the sort of character which he knows personally or by familiar hearsay, he fails as dismally in diving low as in soaring high With such a figure as Meg Merrilies, for instance, he does nothing that convinces you of her verity; she remains as strictly of melodrama as any mouthing champion in “Ivanhoe “; Rowena herself is not more really unreal, not more improbably moved; and she is far less noisy and tiresome; for the maledictions of Meg Merrilies actually bore one; and Meg is mostly maledictions.

In the story which resounds with them, there is one young lady who divides the honors of heroine with the gypsy; and in her, for once, Scott is able to impart the charm of a lively girlishness. Julia Mannering is sinuously true, after the manner of her sex, and light of tongue and heart rather than head. She is a genuine personality; and she carries off an impossible part in the plot with so much vivacity and naturalness that one is almost as much in love with her as with any of the ignorant and amusing housewives and farm-bodies.

“Waverley “ offers no such figure as this young lady in “Guy Mannering,’ to my liking. Rose Bradwardine is a nice girl, and fit to be married by a hero who repents being fool enough to have fought for the Pretender. But the farthest stretch of charity cannot find her a character. She does what a young lady ought because she is bidden; her speech is the effect of that ventriloquism which Scott too obviously practised in speaking his own words from whatever lips were convenient. She is not the worst instrument of this sort; and Flora Mac Ivor is not the most diaphanous of the author’s failures to construct a credible image of historic motive and personality. It is not that the sister of a Highland chieftain, supporting the rebellion of Charles Edward Stuart, might not play the part assigned to Flora Mac Ivor; but that she does not play it in a way to make us feel that she is deeply interested in it. We are told much about her, but we are shown very little; and are made witnesses of but one moment of poignant feeling in a woman who must have had many, if she were really a woman. This climax is fitly reached in that last interview of Waverley’s with Flora when he finds her sewing upon the shroud of her brother who is about to be executed for treason. Then she blames herself for her brother’s doom as something that her own impassioned loyalty to the Stuarts had urged him forward to. She realizes that the cause was always hopeless, and while she still believes it just and sacred, she agonizes at her part in it for her brother’s sake. This point is really fine — the finest in a story whose course is loose and straggling, and whose effects have rarely the compactness that deep passion alone can give.

SCOTT’S JEANIE DEANS AND COOPER’S LACK OF HEROINES

THE nature of Scott’s heroines is such that the choice of this one or that, as the most representative, is a question of intellectual preference rather than of passion, and could hardly rouse feeling in any but their duly appointed lovers. Fortunately for Scott, he does not live by them; one cannot quite say that without them he would still be one of the greatest novelists, and chief of the great romancers; but one may very safely say that such general impression as one keeps of his fiction is not strengthened by a vivid sense of these ladies. Only now and then, and here and there, are they essential to the lasting effect; one recalls them vaguely and with an effort; they are not voluntarily constant to the fancy like the women of Thackeray, of George Eliot, of Charles Reade, even of Dickens; and of some other more modem novelists, above all Mr. Hardy. In the imaginary world of Scott’s creation, woman remained as subordinate as he found her in the civic world about him. He invented a man’s world, and perhaps because women did not come into their rights in it, his man’s world has now mostly lapsed to a boy’s world, where there is little need of the glamour which women cast upon life.

I

I have already noted one chief exception to the prevailing nullity of Scott’s heroines in the sad reality of Lucy Ashton, and I shall hardly contrary any critical reader in suggesting Jeanie Deans as another. No characters could well be more strongly contrasted, and one cannot think of them without feeling that in this direction, as in so many others, Scott’s performance was a very imperfect measure of his possibility. If he had not been driven to make quantity, what quality might not he have given us! If he had not had the burden of telling a story upon him, how much more he might have told us of life! If he had not felt bound to portray swashbucklers, with what gracious and touching portraits of womanhood might not he have enriched his page! The man himself was so modest and single of heart that the secret of the ever-womanly would gladly have imparted itself to him if he had not been, as it were, too shy to suffer the confidence. Whenever he caught some hint of it by chance, how clearly he set it down! But for the most part, as I have already said, these chances addressed him from low life; gentlewomen seem rarely to have confided their more complex natures to him. For once, indeed, he saw a Lucy Ashton in the plain air of day, where many Lucy Ashtons dwell and have dwelt, and not less importantly he saw Jeanie Deans; but it was more in his way to see such as Jeanie than to see such as Lucy, and I cannot help thinking it was less an achievement to have fixed her presence lastingly in the reader’s consciousness.

Such as she is, however, she stands foremost, I believe, in the critical appreciation of Scott’s heroines, and it will be useless to oppose the figure of Effie Deans as somewhat unfairly overshadowed by her. Jeanie has the great weight of moral sentiment on her side; and yet I have a fancy that Scott himself, if he could really have been got at, would have owned he thought it a little finer to keep Effie impenitently true to herself throughout than to show Jeanie equal to the burden which her sister’s lightness cast upon her. At any rate, it seems to me an effect of great mastery (once more surprising than now) to let us see that Effie was always the same nature, in the shame of her unlawful motherhood, in the stress of her trial for the crime against her child’s life which she was guiltless of, in the horror of the scaffold to which she was unjustly doomed, and in the rebound from the danger and disgrace when Jeanie’s devotion had won her release from both. She was wrought upon by the passing facts, but not changed in her nature by them, as Jeanie was not changed in hers. We judge one another so inadequately and unfairly in the actual world, however, that beings of the imaginary world must not expect better treatment. There as here, the light nature will be condemned for the deeds done in it as if they were done in a serious nature, and a serious nature will be honored for truth to itself as if it had overcome in this the weakness of a light nature. Especially among all peoples of Anglo-Saxon birth and breeding will the same inflexible measure of morality be applied, and the characterization of one who has done nobly will be thought greater than that of one who has not done nobly.

II

In this I hope I am not giving the notion that I wish to undervalue the character of Jeanie Deans as a piece of art. I value it above that of any other woman, except Lucy Ashton, or except Effie Deans, in all Scott’s romances; but that is saying less than I should like in praise of it. Her character grows upon you, as no doubt it grew upon Scott himself, who must have found that he had something constantly greater and truer in hand than he first imagined. The simple girl matures slowly into shapeliness and strength, much as the straggling story of “The Heart of Midlothian” itself does, and it is not till her young sister’s misfortune and the suspicion of child-murder begins to blacken about the hapless Effie that Jeanie shows the force of a heroine. She stands nearest the Covenanter conscience of their “dour” old father, and she stands between his conscience and her sister’s blame when it comes to that, with a hold upon the reader’s heart that tightens to suffocation at that awful moment in court when her helpless truth gives away her sister’s life.

The intensity of this feeling for her increases rather than lessens after Effie’s sentence, when Jeanie goes up to London, alone and unfriended, to sue for the King’s mercy. It is finely shown how she does not change, but enlarges in character to the measure of her tremendous mission. Through all her difficulties and dangers, and in every demand upon her truth to herself and faith in her sister’s innocence of the crime which Effie is doomed to die for, she is still the same plain Scotch country body that we saw her at first, of a presence which the author is too wise to flatter. “She was short, and rather too stoutly made for her size, her gray eyes, light-colored hair, a round, good-humored face, much tanned by the sun; and her only peculiar charm was an air of inexpressible serenity, which a good conscience, kind feelings, contented temper and the regular discharge of all her duties, spread over her features.” In this figure she visits the Duke of Argyle, the embodiment to her unworldliness of all worldly greatness under royalty, and wins his promise to help her see the King. Not only her calm, wholesome goodness, her sore-tried love for her sister, and her innocent naïveté appear in the interview, but there are charming hints of the Scotch canniness which qualifies and quickens her virtues, if it is indeed not one of them.

‘“I wad hae putten on a cap, sir,’ said Jeanie, when Argyle bids her go dressed as she is to the audience he has got for her, ‘but your honor knows it isna the fashion of my country for single women; and I judged that being sae mony hundred miles frae home, your Grace’s heart wad warm to the tartan,’ looking at the corner of her plaid. ‘You judged quite right,’ said the Duke. ‘Macallumore’s heart will be as cold as death can make it, when it does not warm to the tartan. Now, go away, and do not be out of the way when I send.’  ‘There is little fear of that, sir.... But if I might say to your gracious honor, that if ye ever condescend to speak to ony ane that is of greater degree than yoursel’, though maybe it isna civil in me to say sae, just if ye wad think there canna be any sic odds as between poor Jeanie Deans of St. Leonard’s and the Duke of Argyle; and so dinna be chappit back or cast down by the first rough answer!’  ‘I am not apt,’ said the Duke, laughing, ‘to mind rough answers much.... I will do my best, but God has the hearts of kings in His own hand.’ “The incidents of Jeanie’s audience with Caroline, whom the girl does not know for the Queen till the end, when Caroline gives her a little needle-book for remembrance, are of note too common for reproduction; but I like so much a pretty touch in her ensuing conversation with Argyle, that I wish I could believe myself the first to feel it. “‘And that leddy was the Queen hersel’?’ said Jeanie. ‘I misdoubted it when I saw your honor didna put on your hat.’  ‘It was certainly Queen Caroline.... Have you no curiosity to see what is in the little pocket-book?” Do you think the pardon will be in it?’ said Jeanie with the eager animation of hope. ‘Why, no.... They seldom carry these things about them... and besides, her Majesty told you it was the King, not she, who was to grant it.” That is true,’ said Jeanie, ‘but I am so confused in my mind.’” In such slight things, such casual, lateral touches, the master shows himself rather than in what Scott called “the big bow-bow,” and abandoned himself to, alas! so much, because the big bow-bow is so pleasing. A student of human nature will find more of Jeanie in these than in the signal moments of the story where she has the heroine’s official part to play; as he will find more of Effie in her flying with her lover, when her pardon comes, without staying Jeanie’s return, than in the incidents of her imprisonment and trial. It is from a yet deeper and bolder knowledge of the heart that the author ventures to show, when Effie is married and comes back a lady of rank to visit poor Jeanie, that they both perceive how little they have in common, and willingly part again. Still, that is a great scene, a piece of mighty drama, at the trial, when Jeanie is called to testify concerning Effie under the atrocious law which judged the mother guilty of her child’s death if this happened because she had not sought the needed help in the hour of her agony and dishonor. It was the hope of the defence that Effie might be shown to have trusted Jeanie with her secret, and “the poor prisoner instantly started up, and stretched herself half-way over the bar, toward the side at which her sister was to enter. And when, slowly following the official, the witness advanced to the foot of the table, Effie, with the whole expression of her countenance altered from that of confused shame and dismay to an eager, imploring and almost ecstatic earnestness of entreaty, with outstretched hand, hair streaming back, eyes raised eagerly to her sister’s face and glistening through tears, exclaimed, in a tone that went to the heart of all who heard her, ‘O, Jeanie, Jeanie, save me, save me!’... Old Deans drew himself still further back under cover of the bench so that... his venerable form was no longer visible. “Fairbrother, Effie’s counsel, “saw the necessity of letting the witness compose herself. In his heart he suspected that she came to bear false witness in her sister’s cause....

He asked whether she had not remarked her sister’s state of health to be altered. ‘And she told you the cause of it, my dear, I suppose?... Take courage, — speak out.’  ‘I asked her,’ replied Jeanie, ‘what ailed her.’  ‘Very well — take your own time — and what was the answer she made?’... Jeanie was silent, and looked deadly pale. It was not that she at any one instant entertained an idea of the possibility of prevarication — it was the natural hesitation to extinguish the last spark of hope that remained for her sister. ‘Take courage, young woman,’ said Fairbrother. ‘I asked what she said ailed her when you inquired.’  ‘Nothing,’ answered Jeanie, with a faint voice which was yet distinctly heard in the most distant corner of the court-room, such an awful and profound silence had been preserved.... Fairbrother’s countenance fell.

... ‘Nothing? True, you mean nothing at first, but when you asked her again, did she not tell you what ailed her?’ The question was put in a tone meant to make her comprehend the importance of her answer... With less pause than at first she now replied, ‘Alack, alack! she never breathed a word to me about it. ‘A deep groan passed through the court. It was echoed by one deeper and more agonized from the unfortunate father... and the venerable old man fell forward senseless... with his head at the foot of his terrified daughter.... The unfortunate prisoner... strove with the guards.... ‘Let me gang to my father! I will gang to him! He is dead — he is killed — I hae killed him!’ Even in this moment of agony Jeanie did not lose that superiority which a deep and firm mind assures to its possessor.... ‘He is my father — he is our father,’ she mildly repeated to those who endeavored to separate them, as she stooped, shaded aside his gray hairs and began assiduously to chafe his temples.”

III

The loose, inaccurate and ineffectual languaging of this scene is partially concealed by the condensation of the foregoing passages. I know that to many it will seem irreverence little short of sacrilege to speak of Scott’s work in these terms; but truth is more precious than sentiment, and no harm but much help can come from recognizing the facts. In verse, Scott was a master of diction, compact, clear, simple; in prose, at least the prose of his novels, he was shapeless, tautological, heavy, infirm, wandering, melodramatic and over-literary. The incident, however, is here so nobly imagined that the reader is held above the course of its feeble and inadequate realization, and shares with the author in the greatness of his concept. It is quite useless to pretend otherwise, and one has only to think how Tolstoy, for instance, or Tourguénief would have presented the scene, in order to feel the vast imperfection, the deficiency in surplus, of Scott’s treatment. But the world has done him justice, in such things, and where his idea is great, it has measured him by the affluence of his concept, and not by the poverty of his product.

He was of an age which was over-literary, and which the influence of his error was making more and more so. His error was not wholly his; it was largely the effect of precedent conditions; but it was not the necessary effect. He fell into it, because it was easy, and offered itself to his hurry and his careless hand, as a ready means of satisfying a public ignorant of truth and indifferent to beauty. Artifice can hide the lack of art, melodrama can conceal the absence of drama; and the time for which Scott wrote really preferred artifice and melodrama. In an admirable essay on the romances of Charles Brockden Brown, the first American novelist to give us standing in the world of fiction, Colonel T. W. Higginson justly notes in defence of Brown’s turgidity that “the general style of the period... was itself melodramatic.... One has only to read over the private letters of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech.” All this is very true, but it is also true that, in spite of the common tendency, there was a strong, lucid undercurrent back to nature in the writings of authors whose excellence Scott himself generously recognized. He praised these as his superiors, and it is hard in the face of his fine modesty to blame him for not emulating their sanity and verity. But he must be blamed for doing what he knew better than to do; and the student of his work will always be to blame if he fails to declare that with all his moral virtues Scott in fiction was of a low aesthetic ideal. He consciously preferred, with his great poetic soul, the folly and the falsity of the romantic to the beauty of the natural, and he wittingly, however unwillingly, extended the realm of Anne Radcliffe rather than the realm of Jane Austen. It was easier to do this, far easier; for the true, the only beautiful, is exigent of patience and of pains that Scott would not or could not give. Whether he could not or would not, he made it harder for his contemporaries and successors to be of a higher ideal than that by which he won his immense success. I believe the badness of Scott’s prose in fiction is owing to the lowness of his ideal rather than to the general style of his own period. Sometimes the greatness of a concept can show through the hollow and pompous forms of the product; but this happens rarely. What happens often is that the artificiality of the product is a fair expression of the concept.

This is true of the work of Scott’s greatest follower and disciple, James Fenimore Cooper. It would be pleasant to believe that he was of his own initiative, but it would not be true; and though Cooper was so far original through his patriotism as to prefer American scenes and themes in his fiction, he most distinctly was because Scott had been. His literature was both better and worse than Scott’s. It was more compact and more dramatic, no doubt from his more strenuous temperament; but it lacked that depth of humanity which one always feels under Scott’s turbid surfaces, and it is wholly without the sweet play of his humor, the sudden flashes of his inspiration. So far as I know it, his romance has never the grace that Scott wins now and again for his from the presence of a genuine heroine. But on this point I was willing to own myself not very well fitted to judge, since my knowledge of Cooper was at best vague and of remote date; and in my misgiving I turned to a literary friend who had made rather a special study of him, and entreated him to help me out with a heroine from him. He answered in effect that the heroines of Cooper did not exist even in the imagination of his readers; there were certain figures in his pages, always introduced as “females,” and of such an extremely conventional and ladylike deportment in all circumstances that you wished to kill them. But he added, in a magnanimous despair, that if I would I might read “The Last of the Mohicans,” and possibly come away with a heroine. I have just finished the book, with a true regret that I was not a boy of fourteen, or else a man in the second quarter of the century, when I read it; but I have not come away with a heroine. This is not because I have killed either Cora Munro or her sister Alice; but since I am guiltless of their death I am glad they are dead. Long ago I read several romances of Charles Brockden Brown, but of those dreams nothing more remains to me now than of some that I dreamed myself about the year 1875. Certainly, no shadow of a heroine remains from them, and I am sure that if there had been the shadow of a heroine in them she would have remained. In fact, the heroine of a romantic novel seldom does, or can, remain with the reader, for the plain reason that she seldom exists. Apparently the ever-womanly refuses herself to the novelist who proposes anything but truth to nature; apparently she cannot trust him. She may not always be so very sincere herself, but she requires sincerity in the artist who would take her likeness, and it is only in the fiction of one who faithfully reports his knowledge of things seen that she will deign to show her face, to let her divine presence be felt. That is the highest and best fiction, and her presence is the supreme evidence of its truth to the whole of life.

A HEROINE OF BULWER’S

MANY proofs of the fact that a novel is great or not, as its women are important or unimportant, might be alleged. There are exceptions to the rule, but they are among novels of ages and countries different from ours. As we approach our own time, women in fiction become more and more interesting, and are of greater consequence than the men in fiction, and the skill with which they are portrayed is more and more a test of mastery. By this test the romantic novel shows its inferiority, if by no other; we have only to compare the work of Richardson, Goldsmith, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Thackeray, George Eliot, Mr. Thomas Hardy, Mr. George Moore, Mr. Henry James, Harold Frederic, Mr. George W. Cable, Miss Mary E. Wilkins, Mrs. Humphry Ward, and the other realistic or realescent novelists with that of the romanticists, in order to see how vast this inferiority is. If we go outside of our own language, we must note the supremacy of women in the fiction of Goethe, Manzoni, Balzac, Tourguénief, Zola, Maupassant, Bjômsen, Valdés, Galdôs, Verga, and Sudermann. These masters have presented women livingly, winningly, convincingly as no master of romance has. The greatest exception that occurs to me is, of course, Hawthorne; but even he created his most lifelike woman character, Zenobia, in his most realistic story, “The Blithedale Romance.” Women, above all others, should love the fiction which is faithful to life, for no other fiction has paid the homage and done the justice due to women, or recognized their paramount interest.

I

Mrs. Radcliffe inspired our Charles Brockden Brown, just as Scott inspired our James Fenimore Cooper. Scott, of course, influenced all Europe, as Richardson and Goldsmith had done in their time; and until the rise of Balzac a whole generation wrote little else but historical novels, though in Germany the romantic movement eventuated in something that was more purely romance, like the “Undine “ of De la Motte Fouqué. To a certain extent among the English the romantic impulse resulted in a yet more psychological type, of which Mrs. Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is a superlative example. But in that thin air woman, who is far more of “this sensible warm motion” than man, gasped for breath; and scarcely a palpable heroine remains to us from all that generation of romancers. Such diaphanous embodiments as they could give her traits, waned more and more into symbols; the art of presenting her with her vital charm, distinct, individual, actual as the early realists had known her, seemed lost; and when a realescent talent like Balzac arrived, and began to cast about him in every-day life for the bizarre contrasts and eccentricities, the surprising accidents and tremendous catastrophes which the romancers had sought afar in remote times and under strange skies, he did little to give woman her old importance in fiction. The pathetic and beautiful vision of his Eugénie Grandet rises to reproach me for saying this, and I hasten to acknowledge in her a heroine worthy of the best age of fiction. But still I think that what I say holds true, and that again, as with Hawthorne, the exception proves the rule.

As for the nautical romance which Cooper popularized, and which Captain Marryat carried forward upon the impulse Cooper had given him, it was, still less than the historical or psychological romance, the habitat of the true heroine. In my time I read every one of Marryat’s novels, but no gleam of a woman’s eye, or drift of a woman’s drapery haunts my remembrance of them. Cooper could occasionally find use for a “female” as a captive among his Indians; and no doubt there were figures which passed for heroines in Marryat’s landgoing stories. Until Mr. Clark Russell’s time, however, the marine novel was unfavorable to the heroine. He alone seems to have had the secret of divining lovely girls on water-logged wrecks, or of having his heroes marooned with them on palmy islands of the Spanish Main; though it is due to the many-sidedness of Charles Reade to recall that in “Foul Play,” which is so largely a sea story, there is a heroine of such charm, so sweetly and truly a woman, that any man would be willing to be cast away with her on a desert coast, and very loath to be rescued, except in her company.

II

We may explain the absence of genuine women in romantic fiction less charitably than I have already explained it, and suppose that it was a revulsion from their extreme prevalence in the early realistic fiction. Or, we may allow that in all the more active adventures and more tremendous exigencies, a heroine was so difficult to manage that she had to be left out as much as the hero’s functional requirement of some one to love would permit. In a representation of every-day life she could always very credibly give a good account of herself, but in what may be called every-other-day life she apparently did not know what to do. Her simple and single device of a “falling lifeless,’ as in the case of “females” of “sensibility,’ was soon exhausted, and, even when in a dead faint, she was apt to be a burden on the action; the hero had to lug her off, either in his arms or on his saddle-bow, or else leave her to the villain, who could seldom be trusted with the care of a lady.

The possibilities of the swoon, indeed, had been pretty well exhausted, when the novel began slowly to return to the study of human nature under the ordinary social conditions. Heroines were confronted with situations to which they were more equal as women, and they fainted less as time went on, until now a lady “falls lifeless “ in fiction almost as rarely as in life. The effect in these matters is largely reciprocal, and no doubt the evanescence of the swoon in life is due in turn to its disappearance in fiction. At any rate, fainting is as obsolete as “ bursting a blood-vessel,” which used to be so common in novels; and the habit of carrying salts which every lady had who wished to pass for a “ delicate female,” and which continued till the middle of the century, would seem something too funny to her golfing granddaughters, who talk of each other as “women” and share the hardy sports of “men.” The novelists themselves began to find hysterics funny, and some employed them to move the mirth of their readers, while the heroines of others were still swooning seriously. To this day they still “burst into tears,” and “choke with sobs “; but so do women in life, and so did men once. In the novels of Richardson men weep quite as copiously as women, and upon as little provocation; and possibly one of the few good effects of the novel of adventure was to steel the nerves of the hero, at least, against the melting mood. It may be supposed that in the stress of saving his own life or taking the life of some one else, he could not find the moment for bursting into tears, or choking with sobs; and that he behaved something more like a man from mere pressure of business.

One may go further than this, and imagine that the two schools profited by each other both in the way of warning and the way of example. Certainly the realescents, like Balzac and Hugo, and like Bulwer and Dickens, who followed the romancers, copied some of their virtues as well as their faults; and if they did not copy all the virtues of the early realists, they eschewed most of their faults.

Bulwer and Dickens both brought fiction back to the study of life upon terms as novel as their respective points of view were different. Bulwer was some ten years before Dickens in imparting the surprise they each had for his contemporaries; and the surprise that Bulwer operated in “Pelham” must have been much greater than we can imagine now when we look back and find the story so vulgarly and viciously commonplace under the glare of its worldly splendor. He called it “ The Adventures of a Gentleman,” and so it might have been, as gentlemen went in those days; but now it would rather be called “The Adventures of a Blackguard,” so much have gentlemen or blackguards since improved. In abandoning the fanciful realm of the romancers, and returning to the world of actualities, Bulwer did not return to the unsparing ideal of the first realists, and seek the good of his reader by pointing the moral of his tale; still less did he conceive of the principle which has vitalized the later realists, and leave a faithful study of life, in cause and effect, to enforce its own lesson. In his early fiction we move in a region where the moral law is apparently suspended, as it often seems to be in this unhappy world of ours, and where good does not follow from good or evil from evil, as it finally does to our experience. Cynical conventions, and not the mysterious statutes written in all hearts, govern the world in which Henry Pelham adventures; and in this malarial, this mephitic air, the womanly gasps and perishes.

The literary technique is so much better than Scott’s; the story is so much shapelier, the style so much clearer and quicker, the diction so much more accurate, that one at first feels a certain joy in escaping to it But this soon fades, and you find yourself longing for the foolishest page of romance, for the worst of Scott, of Cooper, of Brockden Brown, of Mrs. Radcliffe, as something truer and better, after all; for these authors, at their worst, were untrue only to the manifestations of human nature, and Bulwer, at his best, misrepresents the surface of life, and he is untrue to its essence.

In the long stretch of his novels, from “Pelham,” which was not the first, to “My Novel,” which was not the last, but which respectively mark the extremes of his ill-doing and well-doing, there is an apparent effort to retrieve the primal error, the original sin of “Pelham.” But one does not feel that Bulwer ever quite works out his redemption. Womanhood, at least, does not forgive him; or it does not countenance his work by its presence so far as to suffer him any memorable heroine. I read all his books at that most impressionable time of life when but to name a woman’s name is to conjure up a phantom of delight in the young fancy; but nothing remains to me now from the multitude of his inventions in the figure of women but the vague image of the blind girl Nydia in “The Last Days of Pompeii.” I think this sort of general remembrance or oblivion no bad test in such matters, and I feel pretty sure that if Bulwer had imagined any other heroine of equal authenticity I should find some trace of her charm in my memory. But I find none from the books of an author whom I once thought so brilliant and profound, and whom I now think so solemnly empty, so imposingly unimportant. He was a clever artificer, and he is to be credited with doing much to stay the decadence of British prose in fiction, and to rebuild the British novel upon shapely lines. But in all he has written there is an air of meditated purpose, a lack of impulse, an absence of spontaneity. He meant extremely well by literature; he had ideals so tall that he enjoyed something like a moral elevation from them; he respected the novelist so highly that he wished to call him the Poet, and did call him so in his prefaces; he was a man of polite learning, or at least, of scholarly reading; he wished always to do better than he did; in the lack of artistic instincts he had artistic principles, which if mistaken were sincere; and with all he was thoroughly mediocre. He did not grow as an artist, and his “ Last Days of Pompeii,” which was one of his early novels, is one of his best.

III

As I have said, the blind girl Nydia remains to me from “The Last Days of Pompeii” not only chief but almost sole among Bulwer’s heroines, in the sort that heroines outlive the definite recollection of their environment, their individuality, and sometimes of their very names. She is not without rivalry in her native pages: there are the Greek lone whom the hero Glaucus loves, and the Roman Julia who loves him, and who, in the make-up of a Pompeian grande dame, resumes her baleful fires more distinctly under the old eyes reviewing the scenes of the story. On the other hand, however, the slave girl has to contend in this later impression with the disadvantage of being a flower girl, now after flower girls have been done so much. But in her day flower girls in fiction were not yet so faded, and she came with such a freshness of appeal to a much simpler-hearted age than this, that youth in all ranks of life were touched and won by her. The romance, in fact, had an acceptance as great in its time as we have since given “Quo Vadis,’ which it is not saying much to say it surpassed in most essentials, and certainly preceded in such interest as the contrasts of late paganism and early Christianity always awaken.

Nydia fairly operates the whole action, in which the machinery creaks more audibly than it once did; but she is imagined upon old-fashioned lines of girlhood which have their charm. Like Milton’s ideal of poetry, she is “simple, sensuous, passionate,’ and from her first meeting with Glaucus, the young Athenian swell who goes about snubbing the Latin civilization at Pompeii, she loves him. He saves her from the scourge of the savage virago who owns her, but when he has bought her he sends her to bear the declaration of his love to the beautiful lone; and Nydia has to hear, if not to see, the tenderness of the lovers. The rich Julia makes interest with the jealous child, and they visit together a potent witch who gives the Roman a philter to win her the love of Glaucus. Nydia steals the potion and administers it herself to Glaucus; he drinks and goes mad, and during his frenzy he is implicated in the murder of Ione’s brother, whom Arbaces, the Egyptian high-priest of Isis, has slain. Glaucus is condemned to the lions in the arena; but Nydia contrives to escape from the durance of Arbaces, and manages the release of the priest Calenas, who has witnessed the murder; together they rouse the good voluptuary Sallust from the morrow of a debauch and fly with him to the arena. Glaucus has already been exposed to one lion which has forborne to harm him, and has crept back into his cage, so that Sallust appeals to the ædile in time to save the Greek. Then, as is well known, the eruption of Vesuvius takes place. Through the storm of fire Nydia and Glaucus rush to the house of Arbaces where lone is imprisoned, and the three save themselves from the universal calamity. It must be owned that all this is a good deal for one poor Thessalian girl, a slave and blind, to do; but she has the author to her friend, and she does not fail. When her task is finished, and she finds herself on the bark which is bearing the reunited lovers back to Athens, she quietly drowns herself while they are asleep.

Though they profess to live in the first century, the characters of the story are naturally nineteenth-century people, unless indeed Glaucus speaks of Nydia, in the letter he writes Sallust from Athens, with rather the rhetorical sensibility of the eighteenth:— “Our beloved, our remembered Nydia! I have reared a tomb to her shade, and I see it every day from the window of my study. It keeps alive in me a tender recollection — a not unpleasing sadness — which are but a fitting homage to her fidelity and the mysteriousness of her early death lone gathers the flowers, but my own hand daily wreathes them round the tomb.”

By this time lone must have suspected why, and would naturally have limited her gratitude for Nydia’s self-sacrifice to gathering the flowers. If not, she must have been less or more a woman than the blind girl, whose jealousy of her is one of the truest things in a book not superabounding in true things. The situation is of the stage; and for the stage the conception of a slave girl rescued from a cruel mistress, to become the servant of the woman whose lover she loves, is not too fine. In all Bulwer’s novels there is a strain which suggests that he would have been a better dramatist, or melodramatist, than novelist. But in the case of Nydia, at least, the execution is not so good as the conception, even, and it is hard to find a passage which will do the conception justice.

“When Glaucus returned to Pompeii, Nydia had told another year of life; that year with its sorrows, its loneliness, its trials, had greatly developed her mind and heart.... Nydia felt suddenly, and as by revelation, that these feelings she had long and innocently cherished, were of love.... Sometimes she dreaded lest Glaucus should discover her secret; sometimes she felt indignant that it should be suspected; it was a sign of contempt.... Her feelings for lone ebbed and flowed with every hour; now she loved her because he did; now she hated her for the same cause. There were moments when she could have murdered her unconscious mistress, moments when she could have laid down her life for her.... One morning when she repaired to her usual task in the garden... she found Glaucus under the columns of the peristyle, with a merchant of the town; he was selecting jewels for his destined bride.... ‘Come hither, Nydia; put down thy vase and come hither. Thou must take this chain from me — stay — there, I have put it on. There, Servillius, does it not become her?’  ‘Wonderfully!’ answered the jeweller.... ‘But when these ear-rings glitter in the ears of the noble lone, then, by Bacchus! you will see whether my art adds anything to beauty!’  ‘Ione?’ repeated Nydia, who had hitherto acknowledged by smiles and blushes the gift of Glaucus. ‘Yes,’ replied the Athenian, carelessly toying with the gems; ‘I am choosing a present for lone; but there are none worthy of her.’ He was startled as he spoke by an abrupt gesture of Nydia; she tore the chain violently from her neck, and dashed it on the ground. ‘How is this? Why, Nydia, dost thou not like the bauble? Art thou offended?” You treat me ever as a slave and a child,’ replied the Thessalian, with a breast heaving with ill-suppressed sobs.”

There is nature here, almost naturally expressed; but if the reader is not willing that the heroine should keep this aspect of petulant jealousy he may take leave of her in that supreme moment when Nydia acts more like a heroine and talks altogether like one. She has saved Glaucus from the lion; she has helped him save lone from the Egyptian; she has guided him, “half leading, half carrying lone,” to the sea-shore; she has done all that a blind girl could do, and perhaps more; and now the lovers are dreaming away the terrors of yesterday in the early dawn after their escape, and the bark on which they have set sail seems to be laying its own course for the Piraeus.

“In the silence of the general sleep Nydia rose gently. She bent over the face of Glaucus — she inhaled the deep breath of his heavy slumber — timidly and sadly she kissed his brow, his lips; she felt for his hand — it was locked in that of lone; she sighed deeply and her face darkened. Again she kissed his brow, and with her hair wiped from it the damp of night. ‘May the gods bless you, Athenian,’ she murmured; ‘may you be happy with your beloved one! — may you sometimes remember Nydia! Alas, she is of no further use on earth!’ Slowly she crept along the fori, or platform, to the further side of the vessel, and, passing, bent low over the deep; the cool spray dashed upward over her fevered brow. ‘It is the kiss of death,’ she said; ‘it is welcome,’ The balmy air played through her waving tresses — and she raised those eyes, so tender though sightless, to the sky whose soft face she had never seen. ‘No, no!’ she said, half aloud, and in a musing and thoughtful tone, ‘I cannot endure it; this jealous, exacting love, it shatters my whole soul in madness.... Oh, sacred Sea! I hear thy voice invitingly.... They say that. in thy embrace is dishonor — that thy victims cross not the fatal Styx. Be it so! I would not meet him in the Shades, for I should meet him still with her! Rest — rest — rest! — there is no other Elysium for a heart like mine!’ A sailor, half dozing on the deck, heard a slight splash on the waters; drowsily he looked up, and behind, as the vessel bounded merrily on, he fancied he saw something white above the waves, but it vanished in an instant.”

It may seem hard that a novelist whose fiction afterwards went so far and wide in the great English world of society and politics, should have lodged no other heroine so securely in the memory of his public as she of his early romance; but this appears to have been the fate of Bulwer. Yet, after all, it is no mean achievement. She was so well imagined, in a time when her type was fresher than now, that one’s regret is rather for the heroine than the author; one wishes that she had been the creature of a talent able to do her full justice in the realization.

THE EARLIER HEROINES OF CHARLES DICKENS

I SHOULD be at a loss to say exactly why Bulwer holds in my mind some such relation to English fiction as Balzac holds to the French. Perhaps it is because they were so nearly contemporaneous in their work, and dealt in it so largely both with criminals and with swells, and both dabbled in mysticism. They were alike in theorizing about their art, and in meaning greater things than they ever did, though Balzac did so much greater things than Bulwer. They escaped together from the hold of decadent romance, but not without continuing in certain things very romanticistic. Bulwer, it is true, wrote a number of historical novels, and Balzac wrote one or two novels (notably “Eugénie Grandet” and “César Birotteau”), almost purely realistic, and of a truth never approached by Bulwer in any of the stories where he tried so hard for the likeness of life. Another talent, far greater than he, and of a quality still unique in English literature, resembled Balzac in the employment of bizarre and eccentric characters, while he led all the other romanticists in the use of such effectisms as people keeping their identity concealed through a whole action, or good people masking as bad people, or clever persons sustaining the part of foolish persons, in order to confound the wicked. Of course I am speaking of Charles Dickens, a mighty imagination, whose vices grew upon him with his virtues, tinder the immense favor he almost instantly achieved.

I

In the characterization of women I do not think Dickens ever struck a truer note than in some of his very earliest heroines, who were so much more real than the more elaborate figures that follow them in interminable procession through the long perspective of his fiction. The scheme of his first novel, if “Pickwick Papers” can be called a novel, is so desultory that the young ladies in it have little to do in bringing about its comedy closes, and are there, in such action as they share, solely for the purpose of being pretty and provoking, and ensnaring the hearts of their lovers, and then being easily won by them. This is not a very high conception of woman’s business in the world, but so very many women seem to be in the world for nothing else that we can hardly blame those who are restricted to it in fiction. It is to be said in their defence, besides, that when Dickens began to draw women of a different type, he did not seem to get them so true; he made us believe in them by dint of appealing to our consciences or our sensibilities, and he achieved a moral rather than an artistic triumph in heroines who are for our good rather than our pleasure.

After all, though, why should not Arabella Allen and Emily Wardle be for our good, too? They are nice girls, of the true Anglo-Saxon tradition in heroines. But their innocent lures are more obvious than those of Jane Austen’s or Frances Burney’s nice girls; they are something more of romps, and were such girls as the young reporter had probably himself known in the society which he then frequented. At the Christmas festivities, where we first meet Miss Allen, she is a guest of the hospitable Wardle household which comes out to meet Mr. Pickwick and his friends, and is “the black-eyed young lady in a very nice little pair of boots with fur round the top,” who was “ observed to scream very loudly when Mr. Winkle offered to help her over” the stile. At an allusion to an approaching marriage this “ young lady with the black eyes and the fur round the boots whispered something in Emily’s ear, and then glanced archly at Mr. Snodgrass.” In the evening, after the dance, when it was a question of being kissed under the mistletoe, and the young ladies all “ screamed and struggled, and ran into comers, and threatened and remonstrated, and did everything but leave the room,... Mr. Winkle kissed the young lady with the black eyes, and Mr. Snodgrass kissed Emily.” Several chapters later, when the Pickwickians are again at Manor Farm, Miss Allen is still there, and at the pond where they all go to skate she urges Mr. Winkle to skate, and then is not ashamed of him for having pretended to know how, and fallen down on the ice, and had his skates ignominiously taken off him by Mr. Pickwick’s order. After this it is only an affair of time, and not much time, as to her elopement with Mr. Winkle, whose father provisionally disowns him till he decides to see Arabella, and judge of his son’s folly for himself. “Arabella’s tears flowed fast, as she pleaded in extenuation that she was young and inexperienced;... that she had been deprived of the counsel and guidance of her parents almost from infancy. ‘It was my fault, all my fault, sir,’ replied poor Arabella, weeping. ‘Nonsense,’ said the old gentleman, ‘it was not your fault that he fell in love with you, I suppose. Yes, it was, though,’ said the old gentleman, looking rather shyly at Arabella. ‘It was your fault; he couldn’t help it.’”

All this is supposed to have happened when our century was in its early thirties, and people took life much less psychologically than they do now, and had spirits for anything. “Pickwick Papers” themselves seem the effect of the most robust high spirits, sometimes the most resolute high spirits, as we read them in this late twilight, and wonder a little what used to make us laugh so much. A serious heroine, or even a heroine seriously treated, would have been out of place in that rollicking atmosphere, and Arabella Allen does better than a finer personality. As for the love-making, there is none to the reader’s direct knowledge, and only inferentially a little at the Christmas dance, when the absence of the lovers keeps the music waiting. “ ‘Where’s Arabella Allen?’ cried a dozen voices. ‘And Winkle?’ added Mr. Tupman. ‘Here we are!’ exclaimed that gentleman, emerging with his pretty companion from the corner; as he did so it would have been hard to tell which was the redder in the face, he or the young lady with the black eyes. ‘What an extraordinary thing it is, Winkle,’ said Mr. Pickwick, rather pettishly, ‘that you couldn’t have taken your place before.’  ‘Not at all extraordinary,’ said Mr. Winkle. ‘Well,’ said Mr. Pickwick, with a very expressive smile, as his eyes rested upon Arabella— ‘well, I don’t know that it was extraordinary, either, after all.’”

II

The love in “Pickwick Papers” is, in fact, all readymade; but there is no subtlety in the author that leaves you in doubt of its being love. He put on subtlety enough of all sorts afterwards, except of the sort that really conceals something, and that is perhaps why he became and remains such a universal favorite, for there is nothing that the average novel-reader (who is nearly as low an intelligence as the average play-goer) likes so much as a deep mystery which he is in the secret of. Dickens attempted something finer in his next novel than anything he tried in “Pickwick Papers,’ and in “Nicholas Nickleby” we have the choice of two heroines, Kate Nickleby and Madeline Gray, who are as far as possible from the elemental arts of Arabella Allen, but who exist more to touch than to take the reader’s heart. We have no longer the pure comedy of “Pickwick Papers,” but the tragedy is not so good as the comedy in “Nicholas Nickleby,” and the farcical people are all more real, grotesque caricatures as they mostly are, than the serious people. Of the women, Mrs. Nickleby is the most vital, and yet in the part of absolute fool Mrs. Nickleby is not to be spoken of in the same breath with Mrs. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” Her folly is burlesqued, and the charm of Mrs. Bennet’s folly is that it is never burlesqued. You can always go back to the book and laugh at her as gladly any time as the first time; but your pleasure in Mrs. Nickleby soon passes. You get the trick of her, the parenthetical incoherence which Dickens worked afterwards in Flora Casby, Mrs. Lirriper, David Copperfield’s landlady, Mrs. Plornish, and I do not know how many others, and then, if one is not in one’s prime, she very quickly stales. In my own prime, however, I used to take my life in my hand, so killingly funny I found it all, when I ventured to read of the mad gentleman next door, throwing vegetables over the wall as a token of his love for Mrs. Nickleby, and afterwards scrambling down her chimney in further proof of his passion, and being pulled out over the grate and dropped floundering on the floor by Frank Cheeryble.

“‘Oh, yes, yes,’ said Kate, directly the whole figure of this singular visitor appeared in this abrupt manner. ‘I know who it is.... Is he hurt? I hope not — oh, pray, see if he is hurt.’  ‘He is not, I assure you,’ said Frank, handling the object of his surprise, after this appeal, with sudden tenderness and respect.... ‘But may I ask you what this means, and whether you expected this old gentleman? ‘Oh, no,’ said Kate; ‘of course not; but he — mamma does not think so, I believe — but he is a mad gentleman who has escaped from the next house, and must have found an opportunity of secreting himself there.’  ‘Kate,’ interposed Mrs. Nickleby, with severe dignity, ‘I am surprised at you.... I am quite astonished that you should join the persecutors of this unfortunate gentleman....

You ought not to allow your feelings to be influenced; it’s not right, very far from it. What should my feelings be, do you suppose? If anybody ought to be indignant, who is it? I, of course, and very properly so. Still, at the same time, I wouldn’t commit such an injustice for the world. No,’ continued Mrs. Nickleby, drawing herself up and looking another way with a kind of bashful stateliness, ‘this gentleman will understand me when I tell him that I repeat the answer I gave the other day — that I always will repeat it, though I do believe him to be sincere when I find him placing himself in such dreadful situations on my account — and that I request him to go away immediately.... I am obliged to him, very much obliged to him, but I cannot listen to his addresses for a moment. It’s quite impossible,’... The old gentleman, with his nose and cheeks embellished with large patches of soot, sat upon the ground with his arms folded, eying the spectators in profound silence, and with a very majestic demeanor. He did not take the smallest notice of what Mrs. Nickleby had said, but when she had ceased to speak he honored her with a long stare and inquired if she had quite finished. ‘I have nothing more to say,’ replied that lady modestly.... ‘Very good,’ said the old gentleman, raising his voice, ‘then bring in the bottled lightning, a clean tumbler, and a corkscrew,’ Nobody executing this order, the old gentleman, after a short pause, raised his voice again, and demanded a thunder sandwich. This article not being forthcoming, either, he requested to be served with fricassee of boot-tops and gold-fish sauce, and then, laughing heartily, he gratified his hearers with a very long, loud, and melodious bellow. But still Mrs. Nickleby, in reply to the significant looks of those about her, shook her head as though to assure them that she saw nothing in all this, unless indeed it were a slight degree of eccentricity.”

III

When some misgivings of the infallibility of Dickens’s wonderful powers began to insinuate themselves among his worshippers, certain of the more candid were inclined to own that he might err on the side of pathos, but held that on the side of humor really he was without sin. Yet it cannot be denied that there was always a touch of horse-play in his humor, and at times it was all horse-play. It grew better, it grew finer, there is no denying that, either, but at the very end it was not the best, not the finest humor. His pathos was not the finest pathos, but that improved in quality, too, and the pathos of his latest books is no such swash of sentimentality as flooded the readers of “Old Curiosity Shop.” A whole generation, on either side of the Atlantic, used to fall sobbing at the name of Little Nell, which will hardly bring tears to the eyes of any one now, though it is still apparent that the child was imagined with real feeling, and her sad little melodrama was staged with sympathetic skill. When all is said against the lapses of taste and truth, the notion of the young girl wandering up and down the country with her demented grandfather, and meeting good and evil fortune with the same devotion, till death overtakes her, is something that must always touch the heart. It is preposterously overdone, yes, and the author himself falls into pages of hysterical rhythm, which once moved people, when he ought to have been writing plain, straight prose; yet there is in all a sense of the divinity in common and humble lives, which is the most precious quality of literature, as it is almost the rarest, and it is this which moves and consoles. It is this quality in Dickens which Tolstoy prizes and accepts as proof of his great art, and which the true critic must always set above any effect of literary mastery. It remained with Dickens to the last, and long after success had spoiled him and made him conscious. He still had it, and could impart it, but not so sweetly and purely as in the poor, rude people among whom Little Nell and her grandfather wandered till she died, and who opened their hearts to her helplessness with a tenderness that the reader cannot but share. She lives in this compassion, and not in the shadowy and purposeless objectivity which the author gives her.

IV

In “Oliver Twist” Dickens goes on to another ideal in Nancy Sykes, who, like Little Nell, is a heroine by default, for the book has no other, though it is duly supplied in Rose Maylie with the sort of sexless lay-figure, with a semblance of personality, which he learned more and more to arrive at. The story is not so loosely contrived as that of “ Old Curiosity Shop,’ but it is not easy to find out why any one, rather than another, does this or that in it, and the best that can be said of Nancy is that her function is more distinct and her presence more reasonably accounted for than some others’. First she is useful in trapping little Oliver, and getting him back into the power of Fagin, the Jewish professor of petty larceny, and then she is useful in repentantly saving him from a life of crime, and restoring him to his friends. But her chief office is to illustrate the constancy of woman’s nature by her devotion to the burglar, her brutal paramour, and to die by his hand when he suspects her of treachery. It cannot be said that she is convincingly identified with her class in manner or parlance; all the attempts so to characterize her are limp and crude; we must take her upon faith, and believe, because the author tells us so, that a girl of her hapless sort would speak and act as she does. In fact, she is evolved, as a personality, from a convention of lost womanhood, and is clothed and colored by the author’s fancy to the effect we were once all so familiar with. She is helped out with tremendous situations and grisly catastrophes, and she dies a death of bloodcurdling horror at the hands of her lover, which has so often been represented on the stage that she might well seem native there. Yet, for the theatre, where it belongs, the scene is, as such things go, potently imagined, and we may look upon it once more, supposing the lights down and the quivering violins muted, and realize the greatness of the author’s strictly melodramatic gift.

“He had roused her from her sleep, for she raised herself up with a hurried and startled look. ‘Get up!’ said the man. ‘It is you, Bill!’ said the girl, with an expression of pleasure at his return. ‘It is,’ was the reply. ‘Get up.’... ‘Bill,’ said the girl, in the low voice of alarm, ‘why do you look like that at me?’ The robber sat regarding her, for a few seconds, with dilated nostrils and heaving breast; and then, grasping her by the head and throat, dragged her into the middle of the room, and, looking once towards the door, placed his heavy hand upon her mouth. ‘Bill, Bill!’ gasped the girl, wrestling with the strength of mortal fear— ‘I — I won’t scream or cry — not once — hear me — speak to me — tell me what I have done!’  ‘You know, you she-devil!’ returned the robber, suppressing his breath. ‘You were watched to-night; every word you said was heard.’  ‘Then spare my life, for the love of Heaven, as I spared yours,’ rejoined the girl, clinging to him. ‘Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have the heart to kill me. Oh! think of all I have given up, only this one night, for you. You shall have time to think, and save yourself this crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot throw me off. Bill, Bill, for dear God’s sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my blood! I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!’ The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl were clasped round his, and tear her as he would he could not tear them away. ‘Bill,’ cried the girl, striving to lay her head upon his breast, ‘the gentleman, and that dear lady, told me to-night of a home in some foreign country where I could end my days in solitude and peace. Let me see them again, and beg them, on my knees, to show the same mercy and goodness to you, and let us both leave this dreadful place, and far apart lead better lives, and forget how we have lived, except in prayers, and never see each other more. It is never too late to repent. They told me so — I feel it now — but we must have time — a little, little time!’ The housebreaker freed one arm and grasped his pistol. The certainty of immediate detection if he fired flashed across his mind even in the midst of his fury; and he beat it twice, with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own. She staggered and fell; nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief — Rose Maylie’s own — and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker. It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer, staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down.”

HEROINES OF CHARLES DICKENS’S MIDDLE PERIOD

I HAVE compunctions (which I am not sure I shall find just, on examination) for having passed over Dickens’s earlier books without mentioning certain of his womenkind who have found a place in our associations with his name, or have achieved a sort of independent existence in proverb. I mean such surcharged travesties as Fanny Squeers and Tilly Price and Miss La Creevy in “Nicholas Nickleby”; such grotesques as Sally Brass in “ Old Curiosity Shop,” and the elderly Miss Wardle in “ Pickwick Papers”; such frantic burlesques as abound in “Oliver Twist.” But even if I were to hold myself to stricter account in cataloguing these than I have found necessary, I should not feel justified in citing them as heroines; and I hope not to have a bad conscience in ignoring now and hereafter the innumerable freaks and monsters with which the author peoples his page and to which he wildly and whirlingly attributes the sex and nature of women.

I

In any just sense there is no heroine in “ Barnaby Rudge,” which is a book of more skill and power than any that Dickens had yet written. We may dismiss without self-reproach such a ladylike lay-figure as Emma Haredale, and a goblin effigy like Miss Miggs, and come without delay to Dolly Varden, who, in turn, need hardly delay us longer. She is a cheap little coquette, imagined upon the commonest lines, with abundant assertion as to her good looks and graces, but without evidence of the charm that the silliest flirt has in reality. She is nothing and she does nothing; and she cannot be petted and patted by her inventor, with all his fondness, into any semblance of personality. Dickens, however, had himself such potent charm that what he said went, at least with his own generation; and so Dolly Varden passed for a pretty girl such as in life knows how to snare the hearts of men, and play with them and throw them away. Perhaps the falsest note in her was her supposed capability of deep regret for the love she had trifled with and a final constancy to it; but we were told this was so, and we obediently imagined it.

Now that we have lived beyond the glamour of Dickens’s wonderful power, it is incredible what things we were asked and made to believe by him. It was like a kind of game, such as children play together, in which it is pretended that things are so and so, without reference to any inherent probability or possibility; and the power of the master of the revels was so great that when you came under his spell you were glad to be under it, and did not question the means by which he worked his wonders, any more than children do in playing a game.

It cannot be denied that he refined upon his means, though the trick remained essentially the same, as he wrote more and more. But he was always and inalienably of the theatre, and as one reads his novels now it is with an immense regret that he did not frankly make them plays. His melodrama then might have seemed drama; his stage scenery aspects of nature, so much less would his faults have appeared in plays than they do in novels.

II

A certain difference is noticeable in the novels which Dickens began to write after his visit to America, though it cannot be pretended that the change was an effect of his visit. Rather it was an effect of his maturing talent and his growing self-knowledge. He was still so far from maturity that he did not create any feminine character (however misshapen or idealized) till he gave us Mrs. Dombey and her mother, Mrs. Skewton, in “ Dombey and Son.” Even in these he could not tame his superabounding spirits to the work of ascertaining their nature and representing it. They were in a sort characters, but they were without limitations, and they impersonated the frenzied excess of his fancy in the direction of the qualities ascribed to them. Not before “David Copperfield” did any novel of Dickens offer that last proof of ripened powers which only a true heroine attests. In “ Martin Chuzzlewit,’ which followed hard upon his return home from America, and which hastily embodied in fiction the impressions of his sojourn among us, there is no heroine, though there are a multitude of caricatures in women’s clothes and with women’s names, and falsetto suggestions of women’s natures in the minor and meaner qualities assigned to them. Some of these are English and some are American, and the author simple-heartedly expected that the Americans would like the last because the first were quite as monstrous. His error is no part of his condemnation, and in fact he is not to be condemned at all for the abnormal creatures of his fancy: Mrs. Hominy and Mrs. Major Pawkins are certainly no worse than Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig, and we could once laugh equally at them all, though now the laughing is more difficult than the liking. Our preference must be for the English inventions, with which at least their inventor is more at home, and whose accents he distinguishes more successfully. As always, the light is the light of the footlights and the setting is that of the theatre; the whole affair is operated almost as openly as in the new ventriloquism of the vaudeville stage, where the actor-dramatist stands behind his row of puppets, and with his hand now on this and now on that supplies the dialogue and imparts the appropriate action, which he sometimes renders extraordinarily lifelike at the end by walking off the stage arm in arm with the principal puppet.

What has become of all the delight that was once in these things? The fun of the printed page is no less obvious; the old materials of laughter are there; but somehow the convention by which we agreed to split our sides at the grotesquery of Sairey Gamp and Betsey Prig is disabled, and in its broken condition Dickens can no more make us smile than Rabelais himself. There must have been something in the air of that time, gone from this, by which he had power upon us; and in every age some great novelist has like power at which the next generation incredulously wonders.

III

It is doubtful if the pathos of Little Paul or Florence Dombey could make us cry, now, though it used to wring tears from all eyes, and we could not find the hysterical emotion of the author in working it up a sob or a sigh too much. We did not, in fact, blame his art in any way, we who were his true lieges, but were glad of all his fustian in portraying the alienation of the proud Edith Dombey from her arrogant husband. We gratefully exulted in her design of wounding Dombey in the tenderest place by eloping with his confidential man Carker, and then in turn mocking the hopes of the traitor and flinging his guilty love in his teeth. We followed with panting eagerness every advance of the plot, and gasped for breath in that high climax where Mrs. Dombey, safe away from her husband in France, suddenly unmasked her hatred to her would-be paramour; even yet we cannot help seeing what a tremendously telling scene it would be on the stage.

“As the sound of Carker’s fastening the door resounded through the intermediate rooms, and seemed to come hushed and stifled into that last one, the sound of the Cathedral clock striking twelve mingled with it, in Edith’s ears. She heard him pause, as if he heard it too and listened; and then come back towards her, laying a long train of footsteps through the silence, and shutting all the doors behind him as he came along. Her hand, for a moment, left the velvet chair to bring a knife within her reach upon the table; then she stood as she had stood before.... ‘I have never,’ resumed Carker, ‘seen you look so handsome as you do to-night,’... He was coming gayly towards her, when, in an instant, she caught the knife up from the table and started one pace back. ‘Stand still!’ she said, ‘or I shall murder you!’ The sudden change in her, the towering fury and intense abhorrence sparkling in her eyes and lighting up her brow, made him stop as if a fire had stopped him. ‘Stand still!’ she said, ‘come no nearer me, upon your life!’ They both stood looking at each other. Rage and astonishment were in his face, but he controlled them, and said lightly, ‘Come, come! Tush! we are alone, and out of everybody’s sight and hearing. Do you think to frighten me with those tricks of virtue?’  ‘Do you think to frighten me,’ she answered, fiercely, ‘from any purpose that I have, and any course I am resolved upon, by reminding me of the solitude of this place and there being no help near? Me, who am here alone, designedly? If I feared you, should I not have avoided you? If I feared you, should I be here, in the dead of night, telling you to your face what I am going to tell?’...

‘Do you mistake me for your husband?’ he retorted, with a grin. Disdaining to reply, she stretched her arm out, pointing to the chair. He bit his lip, laughed, and sat down in it, with an impatient air he was unable to conceal; and biting his nail nervously, and looking at her sideways, with bitter discomfiture, even while he feigned to be amused by her caprice. She put the knife down upon the table, and, touching her bosom with her hand, said: ‘I have something lying here that is no love trinket; and sooner than endure your touch once more I would use it on you — and you know it, while I speak — with less reluctance than I would on any other creeping thing that lives.’ He affected to laugh jestingly, and entreated her to act her play out quickly, for the supper was growing cold. But the secret look with which he regarded her was more sullen and lowering, and he struck his foot once upon the floor with a muttered oath. ‘How many times,’ said Edith, bending her darkest glance upon him, ‘has your bold knavery assailed me with outrage and insult? How many times in your smooth manner and mocking words and looks have I been twitted with my courtship and my marriage?... From my marriage day I found myself exposed to such new shame — to such solicitation and pursuit (expressed as clearly as if it had been written in the coarsest words, and thrust into my hand at every turn) from one mean villain, that I felt as if I had never known humiliation till that time. This shame my husband fixed upon me; hemmed me round with, himself; steeped me in, with his own hands, and of his own act, repeated hundreds of times. And thus — forced by the two from every point of rest I had,... driven from each to each, and beset by one when I escaped the other — my anger rose almost to distraction against both. I do not know against which it rose higher — the master or the man I” He watched her closely, as she stood before him in the very triumph of her indignant beauty. She was resolute, he saw; undauntable; with no more fear of him than of a worm. ‘But if I tell you that the lightest touch of your hand makes my blood cold with antipathy; that from the hour when I first saw and hated you, to now, when my instinctive repugnance is enhanced by every minute’s knowledge of you I have since had, you have been a loathsome creature to me which has not its like on earth — how then?... We meet and part to-night,’ she said.

‘You have fallen on Sicilian days and sensual rest, too soon.’

‘Edith!’ he retorted, menacing her with his hand ‘Sit down! Have done with this! What devil possesses you?’  ‘Their name is Legion,’ she replied, uprearing her proud form as if she would have crushed him; ‘you and your master have raised them in a fruitful house, and they shall tear you both....

In every vaunt you make, I have my triumph. I single out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper and may rankle more. Boast, and revenge me on him! You know how you came here to-night; you know how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colors quite as despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you. Boast then, and revenge me on yourself,’ The foam was on his lips; the wet stood on his forehead. If she would have faltered once, for only one half-moment, he would have pinioned her; but she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes never left him. ‘We don’t part so,’ he said. ‘Do you think I am drivelling, to let you go in your mad temper?” Do you think,’ she answered, ‘that I am to be stayed?’  ‘I’ll try, my dear,’ he said, with a ferocious gesture of his head. ‘God’s mercy on you, if you try by coming near me!’ she replied.... ‘Come!’ and his teeth fairly shone again. ‘We must make a treaty of this, or I may take some unexpected course. Sit down, sit down!’... He did not venture to advance towards her; but the door by which he had entered was behind him, and he stepped back to lock it. ‘Lastly, take my warning! look to yourself!’ she said, and smiled again. ‘You have been betrayed, as all betrayers are. It has been made known that you are in this place, or were to be, or have been. If I live, I saw my husband in a carriage in the street to-night!’  ‘Strumpet, it’s false!’ cried Carker. At the moment, the bell rang loudly in the hall. He turned white, as she held her hand up like an enchantress, at whose invocation the sound had come. ‘Hark! do you hear it?’”

IV

This would be a great scene on the stage, I say, but it is in no wise the language or the attitude of life. It is not necessary to say that the whole thing is impossible, almost from beginning to end. As impossibilities go, however, it is not a bad one; is not wholly a piece of effectism. The woman’s hatred of her husband is imaginable enough, and she might well wish to make the means of her humiliation the means of his shame; but only in the theatre could the chances of worse be so successfully and triumphantly safeguarded.

Edith Dombey is the first of that deadly-haughty line of heroines which Dickens afterwards prolonged through many of his novels; and in much of the other characterizations in “Dombey and Son” he achieved novelty and increasing verity. There are no longer such mere monstrosities in the personifications. Each, of course, is furnished with a trick by which you know him or her, and by this trick each is worked more or less, but still the figures have greater reality and initiative; they have mostly a genuine function, and they contribute to the evolution of the plot by fulfilling their function; they are not merely there to amuse themselves or the reader.

It is in the tragedy and the pathos that the author oftenest falls down, as we now perceive, though the time was when Macaulay, the historian and critic, cried over Florence Dombey, as he has himself recorded, in inconsolable heart-break. This is the more wonderful because Macaulay, more than any other, had felt the incomparable fineness of Jane Austen’s art. It must be that the critical fibre of the British public, never too sensitive, had been coarsened by a whole generation of romanticistic fiction, until the bearing on and rubbing in of Dickens was not only not an affliction, but a positive delight. He could not help bearing on and rubbing in, even in the case so delicately imagined as that of the little girl neglected and ignored by her father; he must make her a good monster as he makes the father a bad monster; and as he makes monsters, in their several kinds, of Susan Nipper and Miss Blimber and “ good “ Mrs. Brown and her daughter Alice and Mrs. Chick and Mrs. MacStinger and Mrs. Pipchin and Mrs. Toodle and Miss Tox and the other pieces in the game. They are each reduced to a single quality and propensity, and then intensified out of all nature; and yet in their conception they are genuine and probable enough. This is especially true of Mrs. Dombey, who is for a while not overworked in her specialty of haughty revolt against her husband’s hauteur. She is a sincere nature, and abhors the hollow, husband-hunting life which the hideous old coquette, her mother, has led her; and there are hints of noble tragedy in her love and pity for her husband’s neglected daughter Florence. But the tender beauty of this reality is sacrificed to the gross ends of melodrama, and Edith’s characterization ends in blue fire and muted violins, as we have seen. Still, she was the first semblance of a heroine that Dickens had contrived.

V

In “David Copperfield” there are perhaps as many monsters as in “ Dombey and Son,” but they are not so merely monsters, and there are many more personalities. The first of these is David’s poor, pretty young widowed mother, who in her hapless second marriage is very tenderly and truly portrayed, and the next are David’s successive and contrasted wives, Dora Spenlow and Agnes Wickfield. Mrs. Steerforth, in her proud love of her son, is also a personality; so, in a way, is the faithful Peggotty; so is Miss Murdstone; so, in less measure, is Little Emily; so is Miss Trotwood; so is Rosa Dartle.

This is not saying that these personalities are not every one overdone, and at times each carried to the verge of monstrosity; but the autobiographical form of the novel seems somehow to have held the author in, check, and saved him in some measure from his besetting sin of excess. It remains the best of his novels, the shapeliest, the sanest; and the necessity which he was in, through the form, of working out character inductively, kept him truer to what he had seen of life. In no other book, probably, did he draw so much and so directly from life. It was autobiographical in fact as well as in form, and it was biographical through the introduction, with little disguise, of Dickens’s father and family circumstance. Through subsequent study of its origins, the point where the fiction begins in most cases has been ascertained, but there is always a borderland where such figures move unconscious whether they are quite fiction or fact. No doubt they are always much more fiction than fact; the autobiography of David Copperfield is so transmuted that it is no longer Dickens’s autobiography; and probably, if there was any living original for Dora Spenlow, Dora Spenlow bears her far less allegiance than Flora Casby, in “Our Mutual Friend,” bears Dora Spenlow, whom Dickens ultimated in her.

All this does not in the least matter. The question is of the treatment of such a nature as Dora’s, and the affair being that of a first love, in which anything fantastic may happen, the answer to the question seems to be that the author has given us here perhaps his first entirely living heroine. It is one of the saving facts concerning a talent who left his adorers several things to regret, that he had beyond any other novelist the inspiration of innocent young girlhood. At times it was almost little girlhood that inspired him, so sexless do such natures, or supernatures, as Florence Dombey and Esther Summerson and Little Dorrit appear. He predicates marriage of them, and contrives a shadowy wooing for them, however incredibly and almost shockingly; but Dora has sex, and the witchery of it; childish and slight as she is, she is a woman, with a woman’s, not an angel’s, charm. She is not more innocent than David himself, and she is quite as passionately in love, in their mutually innocent way, as he; she is as immediately in love, and wants him as badly as he wants her. I do not know in all fiction a purer study of young love, of the entirely human sort, than their courtship; and it is a pity that it has to go off into the pathos of her early death after her marriage. It is true that it was no true solution of life’s problem for David; and in the background all the while, is Agnes Wickfield, waiting for her innings. But a truer art than Dickens’s, or Dickens’s time (these things are apparently chronical, rather than personal, in great measure), would have recognized a higher duty than the reader’s comfort in the situation. A child-wife is really quite as likely to live as to die; and she is apt to outlive her husband and to marry again. This was what David’s mother did; and it might have been better for fiction to testify merely of the indefinitely continued marriage of the young lovers. That might not have done so badly. David was good, and Dora, after all, though she was spoiled, was sweet, and of a final good sense.

DICKENS’S LATER HEROINES

“DAVID COPPERFIELD” was a shapelier book than any that Dickens had yet written, or, for that matter, than any he was yet to write; though “Hard Times,”

“A Tale of Two Cities,” and “Great Expectations “ all had more form than his other novels. In fact, he seems to have done most of his best in “ David Copperfield,” and least of his worst. He set himself to represent life as the hero lived it and witnessed it, and the terms of his intention were such that he could not always stray very wide of it. In spite of his Gothic tendency to grotesque and monstrous decoration, he did something primarily structural for once; and though certain parts of the work were overlaid with adventitious and impertinent episodes, it was not weakened by them. It comes together in the retrospect; it does not straggle about or tumble apart; one can almost recall it as a whole. The characters obey the law of the comprehensive yet coherent story, and have an uncommon logic and unity. They are sometimes, of course, personifications of this or that quality, this or that propensity; but very often they are persons, and very real persons.

I

Dora Spenlow is as little dependent upon any mechanical means for recognition as much more important conceptions of Dickens’s, though when it comes to importance, I do not know why she should not be considered important, if in art the question is not of what the thing is, but how the thing is done. Perhaps the natural exuberance of Dickens is less unnatural in the affair of young love than it is in other matters, and certainly it is less offensive; one is willing to stand it, though always with the doubt whether a sense of the rapture and the bliss could not have been as perfectly imparted in saner terms. Still, it is all very sweet, and essentially it is all very true. The identity of Dora is admirably preserved; with comparatively little insistence upon the trick of her, she is kept vividly present; and she is herself quite to the end. To be sure, there is a measure of make-believe required; you are expected to suppose that a human creature, capable of being taught polite accomplishments, of playing a part in society, and of imagining self-devotion in love and marriage, can be otherwise rather less than a child; but women are of all impossible kinds, and perhaps Dora is of as possible a sort as some others. The charm of her does not cease with courtship; after her marriage she is more intoxicating, to the reader at least, than before; and though one may have known her for forty years — it is nearer fifty years, in a certain case — the charm does not stale. The tragicomedy of their young housekeeping is as funny as ever, and the comitragedy of David’s attempts to turn Dora to any serious account, as sad. The humor of it all is very lovely, but is so pervasive and so diffused in the story that it can scarcely be detached for proof in a separate passage; and I think that the following passage is merely as well as another. It presents the scene between David and Dora when, after his aunt has lost her money, he goes to tell her, and release her, if she wishes, from her engagement.

“Dora came to the drawing-room door to meet me; and Jip came scrambling out, tumbling over his own growls, under the impression that I was a bandit; and we all three went in, as happy and loving as could be. I soon carried desolation into the bosom of our joys — not that I meant to do it, but that I was so full of the subject — by asking Dora, without the smallest preparation, if she could love a beggar? My pretty, little startled Dora! Her only association with the word was a yellow face and a flight-cap, or a pair of crutches, or a wooden leg, or a dog with a decanter-stand in his mouth, or something of that kind; and she stared at me with the most delightful wonder. ‘How can you ask me anything so foolish?’ pouted Dora. ‘Love a beggar!’  ‘Dora, my own dearest!’ said I. ‘am a beggar!’  ‘How can you be such a silly thing,’ replied Dora, slapping my hand, ‘as to sit there, telling such stories? I’ll make Jip bite you! I declare I’ll make Jip bite you!’ said Dora, shaking her curls, ‘if you are so ridiculous.’ But I looked so serious that Dora left off shaking her curls, and laid her trembling little hand upon my shoulder, and first looked scared and anxious, and then began to cry.... Then I told her with my arms clasped round her, how I loved her, so dearly, and so dearly; how I felt it right to offer to release her from her engagement, because now I was poor.

... ‘Is your heart mine still, dear Dora?’ said I, rapturously, for I knew by her clinging to me that it was. Oh, yes!’ cried Dora. ‘Oh, yes, it’s all yours. Oh, don’t be dreadful!’  I dreadful! To Dora! ‘Don’t talk about being poor and working hard!’ said Dora, nestling closer to me. I drew a picture of our frugal home, made independent by my labor — sketching in the little house I had seen at Highgate, and my aunt in her room up-stairs. ‘I am not dreadful now, Dora?’ said I, tenderly. ‘Oh, no, no!’ cried Dora. ‘But I hope your aunt will keep her own room a good deal! And I hope she’s not a scolding old thing!’... ‘My love, no. Perseverance and strength of character will enable us to bear much worse things.’  ‘But I haven’t got any strength at all,’ said Dora, shaking her curls. ‘Have I, Jip? Oh, do kiss Jip, and be agreeable!’ It was impossible to resist kissing Jip, when she held him up to me for that purpose, putting her own bright, rosy little mouth into kissing form, as she directed the operation, which she insisted should be performed symmetrically, on the centre of his nose. I did as she bade me — rewarding myself afterwards for my obedience — and she charmed me out of my graver character for I don’t know how long. ‘But, Dora, my beloved!’ said I, at last resuming it; ‘I was going to mention something.... If you will sometimes think — not despondingly, you know; far from that! — but if you will sometimes think — just to encourage yourself — that you are engaged to a poor man—” Don’t, don’t! Pray don’t!” cried Dora. ‘It’s so very dreadful.’”

All this is very pretty and very winning. But one is aware, as one reads, of joining in the make-believe; one knows that given these very characters, in that very situation, it would not have happened just so; though if it had happened so upon the stage, it would have been delightful, and would have seemed very lifelike.

II

When it is a question of Little Emily and her betrayal in the same story, or of Agnes Wickfield and her long tacit love for David, the affair is still further from nature. The part which each of these is forced to play limits her to the expression of a single intention of the author, without regard to the complexity of motive, the contrariety of action, recognizable in every human being. It is happily not possible that a girl like Agnes, however good and high, shall patiently see the man she loves give himself to another woman, and live in tender sisterly friendship with the wife till she dies, and then inherit the husband with the confession that she has always loved him. This is not only impossible, but love being the simple, selfish, honest thing it is, the pretence is odious, and even repulsive. Neither is it credible that a girl like Emily, all humility, all sincerity, all unselfishness, shall become the prey of her pure love for her seducer. Without some alloy of vanity, of duplicity, of self-love in her it cannot happen, and never did happen since woman began to stoop to folly. To have made Agnes and Emily without the defects of their qualities is to have made them half-natures, half-persons, and aesthetically altogether inferior to such whole natures, whole persons, as Dora and as Rosa Dartle. There is more truth, there is more true art, in Rosa’s outburst of furious and revengeful hate against Emily because she has loved Steerforth than in all the long-drawn tragedy of Emily’s betrayal.

Rosa Dartle is the second of the deadly-haughty heroines whom Dickens first discovered or invented in Edith Dombey, and whom he elaborated to the last degree in Lady Dedlock, who is, more than any one else, the heroine of “Bleak House.” She is a tremendously effective figure, as she is seen against the background of her mysterious past, with the shadow of a guilty love dimly present in it, and in the foreground the offspring of that love, the journalizing Esther Summerson, forever gelatinously quivering on the verge of discovering her secret, but withheld by her mother’s pride and shame. Till the curtain is rung down you abandon yourself to the luxury of the illusion, the transport of the make-believe; but when you have got on your rubbers and overcoat, and found your umbrella, and the ushers are beginning to flap the seats up and to look for missing articles on the floor, Lady Dedlock has already ceased to convince, and you are aware of her washing the paint off in the dressing-room.

There is vastly more reality in Mrs. Lou Bounderby in “Hard Times,’ but the probabilities are in favor of her going off with James Harthouse, rather than of her taking refuge in her father’s house from both her husband and her lover. In this novel, as in all the fiction of its author, the means of any effect to be accomplished are so far beyond the requisite that one is inclined to ask with the Irishman challenged to astonishment at the prodigious fall of water at Niagara, “What’s to hinder it?” There is a glut of material, ethical, emotional, economic, and political, in “Hard Times,” of which the moral that you must not leave fancy and affection out of life enforces itself by the mere statement; and the wonder would be that anything less happens than could possibly happen. Yet in spite of this plethora, the book has more affinity with the actual world than most other novels of Dickens. He bears on, he rubs in here, as always, as everywhere; he never could hold his hand, and we of the generation who adored him must have been thick-skinned and coarse-fibred beyond all present imagination not to have felt it a heavy affliction. We did not feel it such; every repeated pressure lulled and delighted us; and there was no make-believe too frantically impossible for us to join in. In “A Tale of Two Cities,” where Lucie Manette passes for the heroine, we worshipfully accepted the atrocious and abominable notion of Sidney Carton seeking to be guillotined in place of the husband of the woman he loves. In “Great Expectations,” we eagerly agreed to the proposition of a woman, defeated of marriage, and keeping all her life long her bridal-room in the decaying appointments of her wedding-day, who, against her own will, perverted and poisoned the nature of her adopted daughter, but not so finally that Estella (who passes for the heroine of the story) does not give herself in true love to the boyish lover of her childhood.

It would be injustice as gross as these ridiculous fables to pretend that they were all, or more than the beginning, or a very small part of either story. The sorcery which wrought the preposterous ends was of such a force, somehow, that a world lived by it in every book: not the world of men and women we know, but a world of characteristics, of propensities, of purposes singly impersonated and active to a single end; and in all these and around them was accumulated such vast wealth of action and situation that to refuse it was to leave one’s self poorer than one could well afford to be.

Probably so long as any fiction can last that of Dickens will remain a monument of the contemporary excess alike in author and in reader. It will stand like some vast, fantastic structure, left aside by the course of art, and visited by the curious student of our century with amaze for the age that could have found it beautiful, but not without a certain awe for the mighty talent which reared it with such unbridled strength in obedience to the forces animating the long revolt of romanticism against the classical conventions. The revolution must waste with fire and sword, but its works are not the patterns and the examples of after-time; these will always be the things done in the serene veracity which is the sole law of beauty and lord of all moods and times. We need not totally condemn the mistaken achievements of a false taste in an age of debauched ideals; and the criticism of Dickens which denied him great power and great deed in fiction would be more dishonest than his worst faking. But in his fiction there is never the open air, never the light of day, always the air of the theatre, always the light of the lamps. It is not to be supposed that he knew this, or that he wittingly wrought to the effect he produced. But the convention of his fiction was really the man himself; it was the make-believe by which, as an artist, he lived. In its glamour he was learning to the last to do his sort of things better and better, to fasten the theatre more firmly, in tragedy, melodrama, comedy, and broad farce, around the spectator, and to make him share his own illusion that it was life.

I have spoken of “ A Tale of Two Cities” and “Great Expectations” before “Little Dorrit,” but they followed in order of time that far more characteristic romance, and they were followed by “Our Mutual Friend,” in which Dickens was still more himself again. Their heroines were sufficiently unconvincing as to their womanhood, but they were not so entirely, so angelically sexless as Little Dorrit, in the long elaboration of whom Dickens returned in greater force than before to his falsest note. Fortunately, however, Little Dorrit had a selfish sister, vulgar, ungrateful, worldly, but not so very bad, according to her lights; and therefore the novel has a genuine heroine. There is uncommon reason as well as logic in the conception of Fanny Dorrit, and in her Dickens has come near portraying, on a certain low level, a real woman. A ballet-dancer when we first know her, in the days when her father seems destined to die in a debtor’s prison, she lives to be a lady of fashion, and wins a high place in the world by those gifts for winning a man with more money than brains which it would be unfit to call arts. In fact, Fanny Dorrit, for all the blame cast upon her, is a very honest creature in her way, with a conscience which she keeps clean after a fashion of her own; and when the rich Mrs. Merdle, whose weak-witted son by her first husband Fanny has captured, makes a cogent appeal to her, she means to give him up and abide by her bargain. The famous scene of their final interview, in which she makes Little Dorrit participate as the representative of her family, is as characteristic of Dickens’s later manner as anything in Dickens’s work, and subordinated it is very characteristic of Fanny.

In “Our Mutual Friend” there are again two sister heroines; but as the better of these is never so insufferably good as Dickens’s other good girls, Bella Wilfer is a very good heroine. She has a most preposterous part to play, as the ward of the rich Boffin, who pretends to be a wicked miser in order to test her, and find whether she is a selfish worldling or not; and as the beloved of John Rokesmith, who maintains a long disguise, to make sure, as the poor secretary of the pseudo-bad Boffin, that she loves him for himself. But she remains, superior to all this absurdity, a charming, natural girl, not without faults, but humaner on account of them, and sweeter and dearer, at least to the reader. Her relations to her vixenish sister Lavinia, to her majestic shrew of a mother, and to her poor little persecuted cherub of a father, are all most amusingly substantialized, and if her relations to her lover are left somewhat more shadowy, that is because of the utter impossibility of the situation, which denies him anything like true character. She quarrels with Boffin, as he and Rokesmith mean she shall, about his pseudo-bad treatment of Rokesmith, and in leaving the house v of her rich protectors, to return home with her father, she engages herself to marry Rokesmith. He comes home with her and her father as far as the gate, where they are delivered over to Mrs. Wilfer, Lavinia, and her young man, George Sampson, and welcomed with a mystified and icy grandeur to the family supper-table by Mrs. Wilfer, who fears that after “Mr. Boffin’s board “ a “ cold neck of mutton and a lettuce “ will seem meagre fare to Bella. But Bella disperses the mystery, and, heroically backed by her father, tells why she has come home.

“‘I hope you are not sorry to see me, ma, dear,’ kissing her; ‘and I hope you are not sorry to see me, Lavvy,’ kissing her too; ‘and as I notice the lettuce ma mentioned, on the table, I’ll make the salad,’ Bella playfully setting herself about the task, Mrs. Wilfer’s impressive countenance followed her with glaring eyes, presenting a combination of the once popular sign of the Saracen’s Head with a piece of Dutch clock-work.... The cherub not presuming to address so tremendous an object, transacted her supper through the agency of a third person, as ‘Mutton to your ma, Bella, my dear,’ and ‘Lavvy, I dare say your ma would take some lettuce if you were to put it on her plate.’ Mrs. Wilfer’s manner of receiving those viands was marked by petrified absence of mind; in which state, likewise, she partook of them, occasionally laying down her knife and fork, as saying within her own spirit, ‘What is this I am doing?’ and glaring at one or other of the party, as if in indignant search of information....

Miss Lavinia... made a dash at her stately parent now, with the greatest impetuosity. ‘Ma, pray don’t sit staring at me in that intensely aggravating manner! If you see a black on my nose, tell me so; if you don’t, leave me alone.” Do you address Me in those words?’ said Mrs. Wilfer. ‘Do you presume?’  ‘Don’t talk about presuming, ma, for goodness’ sake. A girl who is old enough to be engaged is quite old enough to object to be stared at as if she was a clock....

I am not going to be eyed as if had come from the Boffins’, and sit silent under it I am not going to have George Sampson eyed as if he had come from the Boffins’, and sit silent under it. If pa thinks proper to be eyed as if he had come from the Boffins’ also, well and good. I don’t choose to. And I won’t!’ Lavinia’s engineering having made this crooked opening at Bella, Mrs. Wilfer strode into it ‘You rebellious spirit! You mutinous child! Tell me this, Lavinia. If, in violation of your mother’s sentiments, you had condescended to allow yourself to be patronized by the Boffins, and if you had come from those halls of slavery—” That’s mere nonsense, ma,’ said Lavinia. ‘How!’ exclaimed Mrs. Wilfer, with sublime severity. ‘Halls of slavery, ma, is mere stuff and nonsense,’ returned the unmoved Irrepressible.... Bella rose and said, ‘Good-night, dear ma. I have had a tiring day, and I’ll go to bed.’ This broke up the agreeable party. Mrs. Wilfer, washing her hands of the Boffins, went to bed after the manner of Lady Macbeth; and R. W. was left alone among the dilapidations of the supper-table, in a melancholy attitude. But, a light footstep roused him from his meditations, and it was Bella’s. Her pretty hair was hanging all about her, and she had tripped down softly, brush in hand, and barefoot, to say good-night to him. ‘My dear, you most unquestionably are a lovely woman,’ said the cherub, taking up a tress in his hand. ‘Look here, sir,’ said Bella; ‘when your lovely woman marries, you shall have that piece if you like, and she’ll make you a chain of it. Would you prize that remembrance of the dear creature?’  ‘Yes, my precious.’  ‘Then you shall have it if you’re good, sir. I am sorry, very sorry, dearest pa, to have brought home all this trouble.’  ‘My pet,’ returned her father, in the simplest good faith, ‘don’t make yourself uneasy about that. It really is not worth mentioning, because things at home would have taken pretty much the same turn, anyway. If your mother and sister don’t find one subject to get at times a little wearing on, they find another. We’re never out of a wearing subject, my dear, I assure you. I am afraid you find your old room with Lavvy dreadfully inconvenient, Bella,” No, I don’t, pa; I don’t mind. Why don’t I mind, do you think, pa.... Because I am so thankful and so happy!’ Here she choked him until her long hair made him sneeze, and then she laughed until she made him laugh, and then she choked him again that they might not be overheard. ‘Listen, sir,’ said Bella. ‘Your lovely woman was told her fortune to-night on her way home. It won’t be a large fortune, because if the lovely woman’s Intended gets a certain appointment that he hopes to get soon, she will marry on a hundred and fifty pounds a year. But that’s at first, and even if it should never be more the lovely woman will make it quite enough. But that’s not all, sir. In the fortune there’s a certain fair man — a little man, the fortuneteller said — who, it seems, will always find himself near the lovely woman, and will always have kept, expressly for him, such a peaceful corner in the lovely woman’s little house as never was. Dear pa, the lovely woman means to look forward to this fortune that has been told for her, so delightfully, and to cause it to make her a much better lovely woman than she ever has been yet. What the little fair man is expected to do, sir, is to look forward to it also, by saying to himself when he is in danger of being over-worried, “I see land at last!” “I see land at last!’ repeated her father. ‘There’s a dear Knave of Wilfers!’ exclaimed Bella; then, putting out her small, white, bare foot, ‘That’s the mark, sir. Come to the mark. Put your boot against it. We keep to it together, mind! Now, sir, you may kiss the lovely woman before she runs away, so thankful and so happy. Oh, yes, fair little man, so thankful and so happy!”’

It is all of stage quality, but it is very sweet, as to Bella and her father, and very amusing as to Lavinia and her mother. If it were only on the stage as well as of it, we should cry out over its truth to nature; and as it is, why should we quarrel with it? We understand the conditions on which Dickens was able to work his miracles; and it is accurate to say that what he did was largely and loosely inclusive of life rather than exclusive of it. The impersonation of a quality or a propensity was misrepresentative only as far as it was single. Human nature is never single; it is warm as well as cold; it is light as well as dark; it is noble as well as ignoble; it is good as well as bad; and, in view of this fact, his one-sided types are not characters. But having got this well in mind, we can allow for the truth that is in them, and permit ourselves the pleasure they can give, without treason to a clearer ideal. When, now and then, as in Dora Spenlow, and yet more distinctly in Belle Wilfer, he creates a figure with something like the living woman’s moral complexity, we have a glimpse of the great possibilities to which a clearer conception of his art would have enlarged him.

HAWTHORNE’S HESTER PRYNNE

THERE had been among the friendlier prophets overseas a vague expectation that the genuine American fiction, when it came, would be somehow aesthetically responsive to our vast continental spaces and the mighty forces that were taming the forests and prairies, the lakes and rivers, to the use of man. But when it came, the American fiction which owed nothing to English models differed from English fiction in nothing so much as its greater refinement, its subtler beauty, and its delicate perfection of form. While Dickens was writing in England, Hawthorne was writing in America; and for all the ostensible reasons the romances of Hawthorne ought to have been rude, shapeless, provisional, the novels of Dickens ought to have been fastidiously elect in method and material and of the last scrupulosity in literary finish. That is, they ought to have been so, if the obvious inferences from an old civilization ripened in its native air, and the same civilization so newly conditioned under alien skies that it seemed essentially new, were the right inferences. But there were some facts which such hasty conclusions must have ignored: chiefly the fact that the first impulse of a new artistic life is to escape from crude conditions; and subordinately the fact that Hawthorne was writing to and from a sensitiveness of nerve in the English race that it had never known in its English home. We need not deny the greatness of Dickens in order to feel a patriotic content in the reflection that he represented English Action in his time, and Hawthorne represented American fiction, as with the same implications Carlyle represented English thought and Emerson American thought

I

Apart from the racial differences of the two writers, there was the widest possible difference of ideal in Dickens and Hawthorne; the difference between the romanticistic and the romantic, which is almost as great as that between the romantic and the realistic. Romance, as in Hawthorne, seeks the effect of reality in — visionary conditions; romanticism, as in Dickens, tries for a visionary effect in actual conditions. These different ideals eventuated with Hawthorne in characters being, doing, and suffering as vitally as any we have known in the world; with Dickens in types, outwardly of our every-day acquaintance, but inwardly moved by a single propensity and existing to justify in some fantastic excess the attribution of their controlling quality. In their mystical world, withdrawn afar from us in the past, or apart from us in anomalous conditions, the characters of Hawthorne speak and act for themselves, and from an authentic individuality compact of good and evil; in times, terms, and places analogous to those in which actual men have their being, the types of Dickens are always speaking for him, in fulfilment of a mechanical conception and a rigid limitation of their function in the drama. They are, in every sense, parts, and Hawthorne’s creations are Persons, rounded, whole. This fact appears in what has already been shown of Dickens, and it will appear concerning Hawthorne from any critical study of his romances.

II

There is, of course, a choice in Hawthorne’s romances, and I myself prefer “The Blithedale Romance” and “The Scarlet Letter” to “The Marble Faun” and “The House of the Seven Gables.” The last, indeed, I have found as nearly tiresome as I could find anything of Hawthorne’s. I do not think it is censuring it unjustly to say that it seems the expansion of a short story motive to the dimensions of a novel; and the slight narrative in which the concept is nursed with whimsical pathos to the limp end, appears sometimes to falter, and alarms the sympathetic reader at other times with the fear of an absolute lapse. The characters all lack the vitality which the author gives the people of his other books. The notion of the hapless Clifford Pyncheon, who was natured for happiness and beauty, but was fated to such a hard and ugly doom, is perhaps too single for the realization of a complete personality; and poor old Hepzibah, his sister, is of scarcely more sufficient material. They move dim, forlorn wraiths before the fancy, and they bring only such proofs of their reality as ghosts seen by others can supply. The careful elaboration with which they are studied seems only to render them more doubtful, and there is not much in the pretty, fresh-hearted little Phoebe Pyncheon, or her lover Holgrave, with all his generous rebellion against the obsession of the present by the past, to render the central figures convincing. Hawthorne could not help giving form to his work, but as nearly as any work of his could be so “ The House of the Seven Gables” is straggling. There is at any rate no great womanly presence to pull it powerfully together, and hold it in the beautiful unity characteristic of “The Blithedale Romance “ and “The Scarlet Letter,’ What solidarity it has is in the simple Salem circumstance of the story, where the antique Puritanic atmosphere merges with the modem air in a complexion of perennial provinciality.

From the first there is no affectation of shadowy uncertainty in the setting of the great tragedy of “ The Scarlet Letter.” As nearly as can be, the scenes of the several events are ascertained, and are identified with places in actual Boston. With a like inward sense of strong reality in his material, and perhaps compelled to its expression by that force in the concept, each detail of the drama, in motive, action, and character, is substantiated, so that from first to last it is visible, audible, tangible. From Hester Prynne in her prison — before she goes out to stand with her unlawful child in her arms and the scarlet letter on her breast before the Puritan magistracy and ministry and people, and be charged by the child’s own father, as her pastor, to give him up to like ignominy — to Hester Prynne, kneeling over her dying paramour, on the scaffold, and mutely helping him to own his sin before all that terrible little world, there is the same strong truth beating with equal pulse from the core of the central reality, and clothing all its manifestations in the forms of credible, of indisputable personality.

In its kind the romance remains sole, and it is hard to see how it shall ever be surpassed, or even companioned. It is not without faults, without quaint foibles of manner which strike one oddly in the majestic movement of the story; but with the exception of the love-child or sin-child, Pearl, there is no character, important or unimportant, about which you are asked to make believe: they are all there to speak and act for themselves, and they do not need the help of your fancy. They are all of a verity so robust that if one comes to declare Hester chief among them, it is with instant misgivings for the right of her secret paramour, Arthur Dimmesdale, and her secret husband, Roger Chillingworth, to that sorrowful supremacy. A like doubt besets the choice of any one moment of her history as most specific, most signal. Shall it be that dread moment on the pillory, when she faces the crowd with her child in her arms, and her lover adjures her to name its father, while her old husband on the borders of the throng waits and listens?

“The Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came forward. ‘Hester Prynne,’ said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down steadfastly into her eyes,. — ...... ‘if thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so, than to hide a guilty heart through life.... Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph over the evil within thee, and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him — who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself — the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!’ The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby, at Hester’s bosom, was affected by the same influence; for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms, with a half - pleased, half - plaintive murmur....

Hester shook her head. ‘Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!’ cried the Rev. Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before.... ‘Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast.” Never!’ replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. ‘It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony, as well as mine!’  ‘Speak, woman!’ said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold. ‘Speak; and give your child a father!’  ‘I will not speak!’ answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. ‘And my child must seek a heavenly Father; she shall never know an earthly one!’  ‘She will not speak!’ murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back, with a long respiration. ‘Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!’”

III

One could hardly read this aloud without some such gasp and catch as must have been in the minister’s own breath as he spoke. Yet piercing as the pathos of it is, it wants the ripened richness of anguish, which the passing years of suffering bring to that meeting between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale in the forest, when she tells him that his physician and closest companion is her husband, and that Chillingworth’s subtlety has divined the minister’s relation to herself and her child. The reader must go to the book itself for a full comprehension of the passage, but no one can fail of its dramatic sense who recalls that Hester has by this time accustomed the little Puritan community to the blazon of her scarlet letter, and in her lonely life of usefulness has conciliated her fellow-townsfolk almost to forgiveness and forgetfulness of her sin. She has gone in and out among them, still unaccompanied, but no longer unfriended, earning her bread with her needle and care of the sick, and Dimmesdale has held aloof from her like the rest, except for their one meeting by midnight, when he stands with her and their child upon the scaffold, and in that ghastly travesty forecasts the union before the people which forms the catastrophe of the tremendous story.

In certain things “The Scarlet Letter,” which was the first of Hawthorne’s romances, is the modernest and maturest. The remoteness of the time and the strangeness of the Puritan conditions authorize that stateliness of the dialogue which he loved. The characters may imaginably say “methinks” and “peradventure,” and the other things dear to the characters of the historical romancer; the narrator himself may use an antiquated or unwonted phrase in which he finds color, and may eschew the short-cuts and informalities of our actual speech, without impeaching himself of literary insincerity. In fact, he may heighten by these means the effect he is seeking; and if he will only keep human nature strongly and truly in mind, as Hawthorne does in “The Scarlet Letter,” we shall gratefully allow him a privilege which may or may not be law. Through the veil of the quaint parlance, and under the seventeenth-century costuming, we see the human heart beating there the same as in our own time and in all times, and the antagonistic motives working which have governed human conduct from the beginning and shall govern it forever, world without end.

Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale are no mere types of open shame and secret remorse. It is never concealed from us that he was a man whose high and pure soul had its strongest contrast in the nature

“Mixt with cunning sparks of hell,”

 in which it was tabernacled for earth. It is still less hidden that, without one voluntary lure or wicked art, she was of a look and make to win him with the love that was their undoing. “He was a person of a very striking aspect, with a wide, lofty, and impending brow; large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless he compressed it, was apt to be tremulous.... The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from the regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognized as its indication.” They were both of their time and place, materially as well as spiritually; their lives were under the law, but their natures had once been outside it, and might be again. The shock of this simple truth can hardly be less for the witness, when, after its slow and subtle evolution, it is unexpectedly flashed upon him, than it must have been for the guilty actors in this drama, when they recognize that, in spite of all their open and secret misery, they are still lovers, and capable of claiming for the very body of their sin a species of justification.

We all know with what rich but noiseless preparation the consummate artist sets the scene of his most consummate effect; and how, when Hester and Pearl have parted with Roger Chillingworth by the shore, and then parted with each other in the forest, the mother to rest in the shadow of the trees, and the child to follow her fancies in play, he invokes the presence of Arthur Dimmesdale, as it were, silently, with a waft of the hand.

“Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length, she succeeded. ‘Arthur Dimmesdale!” she said, faintly at first; then louder, but hoarsely, ‘Arthur Dimmesdale!” ‘Who speaks?” answered the minister.... He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter. ‘Hester! Hester Prynne!” said he. ‘Is it thou? Art thou in life?’  ‘Even so!” she answered. ‘In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?”... So strangely did they meet, in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread; as not yet familiar with their state nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings.... It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere. Without a word more spoken — neither he nor she assuming the guidance, but with an unexpected consent — they glided back into the shadow of the woods, whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting.... ‘Hester,’ said he, ‘hast thou found peace?’ She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom. ‘Hast thou?’ she asked. ‘None! — nothing but despair!’ he answered. ‘What else Could I look for, being what I am, and leading Such a life as mine?’... ‘The people reverence thee,’ said Hester. ‘And surely thou workest good among them. Doth this bring thee no comfort?’  ‘More misery, Hester I — only the more misery!’ answered the clergyman, with a bitter smile.... ‘Had I one friend — or were it my worst enemy — to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But, now, it is all falsehood! — all emptiness! all death!’ Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstance in which to interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke. ‘Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for,’ said she, ‘with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!’ — Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort.— ‘Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof!’ The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his heart, as if he would have tom it out of his bosom. ‘Ha! What sayest thou!’ cried he. ‘An enemy! And under my own roof! What mean you?’... ‘O Arthur,’ cried she, ‘forgive me! In all things else I have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good — thy life — thy fame — were put in question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man I — the physician I — he whom they call Roger Chillingworth! — he was my husband!’ The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence of passion which — intermixed, in more shapes than one, with his higher, purer, softer qualities — was, in fact, the portion of him which the Devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character had been so much enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his hands.... ‘O Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame! — the indelicacy! — the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this! I cannot forgive thee!’  ‘Thou shalt forgive me!’ cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him. ‘Let God punish. Thou shalt forgive!’ With sudden and desperate tenderness, she threw her arms around him, and pressed his head against her bosom; little caring though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her — for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman — and still she bore it all, nor even once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of this pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear and live! ‘Wilt thou yet forgive me?’ she repeated, over and over again. ‘Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?’  ‘I do forgive you, Hester?’ replied the minister, at length, with a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but rib anger. ‘I freely forgive you now. May God forgive us both! We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin! He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!’  ‘Never, never!’ whispered she. ‘What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?’  ‘Hush, Hester!’ said Arthur Dimmesdaie, rising from the ground. ‘No; I have not forgotten!’... ‘Thou must dwell no longer with this man,’ said Hester, slowly and firmly. ‘Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!’  ‘It were far worse than death!’ replied the minister. ‘But how to avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall! He down again on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was? Must I sink down there, and die at once?” Alas, what a ruin has befallen thee!’ said Hester, with the tears gushing into her eyes. ‘Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other cause.’  ‘The judgment of God is on me,’ answered the conscience-stricken priest. ‘It is too mighty for me to struggle with!” Heaven would show mercy,’ rejoined Hester, ‘hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.’  ‘Be thou strong for me,’ answered he. ‘Advise me what to do.’  ‘Is the world, then, so narrow?’ exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep eyes on the minister’s, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect. ‘Whither leads yonder forest track?... Deeper it goes, and deeper into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step, until, some few miles hence, the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man’s tread....

Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?’  ‘Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves,’ replied the minister, with a sad smile. ‘Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!’ continued Hester. ‘It brought thee hither. If thou choose, it will bear thee back again. ‘... ‘O Hester!’ cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, ‘thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here! There is not the strength or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world, alone!’... ‘Thou shalt not go alone!’ answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all was spoken.”

There is a greatness in this scene which is unmatched, I think, in the book, and, I was almost ready to say, out of it. At any rate, I believe we can find its parallel only in some of the profoundly impassioned pages of the Russian novelists who, casting aside all the common adjuncts of art, reveal us to ourselves in the appeal from their own naked souls. Hawthorne had another ideal than theirs, and a passing love of style, and the meaning of the music of words. For the most part, he makes us aware of himself, of his melancholy grace and sombre power; we feel his presence in every passage, however deeply, however occultly, dramatic; he overshadows us, so that we touch and see through him. But here he is almost out of it; only a few phrases of comment, so fused in feeling with the dialogue that they are like the voice of a chorus, remind us of him.

It is the most exalted instant of the tragedy, it is the final evolution of Hester Prynne’s personality. In this scene she dominates by virtue of whatever is womanly and typical in her, and no less by what is personal and individual. In what follows, she falls like Dimmesdale and Chillingworth under the law of their common doom, and becomes a figure on the board where for once she seemed to direct the game.

In all fiction one could hardly find a character more boldly, more simply, more quietly imagined. She had done that which in the hands of a feeble or falser talent would have been suffered or made to qualify her out of all proportion and keeping with life. But her transgression does not qualify her, as transgression never does unless it becomes habit. She remains exterior and superior to it, a life of other potentialities, which in her narrow sphere she fulfils. What she did has become a question between her and her Maker, who apparently does not deal with it like a Puritan. The obvious lesson of the contrasted fates of Dimmesdale and herself is that to own sin is to disown it, and that it cannot otherwise be expropriated and annulled. Yet, in Hester’s strong and obstinate endurance of her punishment there is publicity but not confession; and perhaps there is a lesson of no slighter meaning in the inference that ceasing to do evil is, after all, the most that can be asked of human nature. Even that seems to be a good deal, and in “The Scarlet Letter” it is a stroke of mastery to show that it is not always ours to cease to do evil, but that in extremity we need the help of the mystery “not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” and that we may call Chance or that we may call God, but that does not change in essence or puissance whatever name we give it.

HAWTHORNE’S ZENOBIA AND PRISCILLA, AND MIRIAM AND HILDA

HESTER PRYNNE in “The Scarlet Letter” is studied in the round, with an effect of life which is wanting to heroines in the flat, whatever their charm of color and drawing may be; and Zenobia and Priscilla — especially Zenobia — are still more vitalized by the - same method of handling, in “The Blithedale Romance.” That romance, as I have elsewhere expressed, is nearer a novel than any other fiction of the author.

At times we find ourselves confronted there, in spite of the author, with a very palpitant piece of naturalism.

This is not more the fact in the case of the brawny, tobacco-chewing Silas Foster, who instructs the town-bred communists at Blithedale in farming, than in the sumptuous personality of Zenobia, the woman with a mysterious past, who glows upon us in tropical splendor from the first chapters of the romance, and illumines it throughout with the rich ardor of her impassioned presence.

I

Never could a writer have had material more to his mind than Hawthorne found in the conditions at Brook Farm, which he transmuted for his purposes to the imaginary situation at Blithedale, with the restricted scene, sparingly and fitfully contrasted at times with the town life which the visionary reformers, the poets, artists, philanthropists, and mystics, had left behind them in Boston. The small group of characters; the play of interests freed from the sordid alloy of the world; the psychological and emotional possibilities of an ideal action strongly backgrounded by fact hardly less ideal — these are the materials of a story so slight that one marvels at the treasure of motive and event which it is made to hold. The pages are few in which Hollingsworth, the gloomy friend and potential reformer of criminals, has his being with Zenobia, whose strong heart he breaks, and Priscilla, the pale maiden on whose weakness his misery relies, and Miles Coverdale, the minor poet, and self-conscious historian of a tragedy which he observes with a cynical curiosity rather than a human sympathy. Yet no other book in the whole range of Anglo-Saxon fiction says so much to certain important moods in the reader. There is, of course, some such mechanical toy in “ The Blithedale Romance “ as is central in every romance, but in this case the toy has a mainspring of reality, a scientific authority, and the story pulsates from it like a living organism. Zenobia and Priscilla are half-sisters; the one, daughter of the father’s past opulence and luxury; the other, child of his blighted and ruined present; and in their temperaments they consistently express the qualities of his different fortunes. They express them only too consistently, and with too great constancy to their appointed functions. They are lifelike, but if they were alive they would be more convertible; and in this difference exists the essential and eternal inferiority of the ideal to the real in fiction: the one must keep to its parti pris; the other may avail itself of every caprice and vacillation and mutability known to observation and experience, and be only more faithful to nature, its supreme and sole exemplar.

All this is not saying that Hawthorne does not handle his mechanism like the consummate artist he was. There are long times when he makes you or lets you forget it; he never intrudes it; and it is chiefly in the perfunctory appearances of the father upon the scene that one is aware of Zenobia and Priscilla being operated by it. Priscilla, indeed, is operated throughout, but not by the activity of this principle of heredity so much as by the passions of those about her. She is not so merely a spectator as Coverdale, but she is almost more negative, and her elusive personality is ascertained with exquisite delicacy and a succession of shadowy approaches on the part of the author which enlist the tremulous sympathy of the reader rather than reward it. After all, there does not seem to be very much of Priscilla. Objectively she is a pale, sickly little seamstress, whom Hollingsworth brings to the nascent community at Blithedale by her father’s wish, and in unconscious fulfilment of old Fauntleroy’s hope that she may there somehow commend herself to the favor of her half-sister Zenobia. Subjectively, she is a capacity for clinging to any strength about her, and attaching it to herself through compassion. With the rude force of a prepotent philanthropist like Hollingsworth this compassion becomes passion, in compliance with the ironical pleasure of nature, while the proud and beautiful Zenobia is offering him her love in vain.

Zenobia is the great personality in the book, and she is substantiated with the conscience of a realist to the material as well as the spiritual vision. “She was dressed,” when Coverdale first met her on his arrival at Blithedale, “as simply as possible, in an American print (I think the dry-goods people call it so), but with a silken kerchief, between which and her gown there was one glimpse of a white shoulder. It struck me as a great piece of good fortune that there should be just that glimpse. Her hair, which was dark, glossy, and of singular abundance, was put up rather soberly and primly, without curls, or other ornament, except a single flower. It was an exotic, of rare beauty, and as fresh as if the hot-house gardener had just clipped it from the stem. That flower has struck deep root into my memory. I can both see it and smell it, at this moment. So brilliant, so rare, so costly, as it must have been, and yet enduring only for a day, it was more indicative of the pride and pomp which had a luxuriant growth in Zenobia’s character than if a great diamond had sparkled among her hair. Her hand, though very soft, was larger than most women would like to have, or than they could afford to have, though not a whit too large in proportion with the spacious plan of Zenobia’s entire development. It did one good to see a fine intellect (as hers really was, although its natural tendency lay in another direction than toward literature) so fitly cased. She was, indeed, an admirable figure of a woman, just on the hither verge of her richest maturity, with a combination of features which it is safe to call remarkably beautiful, even if some fastidious persons might pronounce them a little deficient in softness and delicacy.”

As we see her here Zenobia is always present to the fancy in a warm reality not affected even by that mechanical device of the exotic in her hair, which the author uses to identify her to our consciousness, and insists upon so constantly. But even of this, the great defect in her characterization, I write my censure with a tremor of remorse, for it was precisely this exotic which once seemed to me the most exquisite, the most precious expression of her personality. Now I know that it was merely a survival of an earlier æsthetical faith than that from which Hawthorne wrote “The Blithedale Romance,” though doubtless he still believed himself fully living in it.

II

Only the art of Hawthorne could impart a perfect sense of the situation of his story, and as I cannot transfer the whole book to my page, I must trust the reader’s remembrance of this art for its effect here. Priscilla grows into health and happiness without growing out of character, in the Arcadian air of the Blithedale community; and Zenobia is more and more compassed about by the tragical shadows which the effulgence of her own passion casts, till her despair ends with the defeat of her last vanity in the ugliness of her self-sought death. The history is always without the concealment of the fact that from first to last her fineness was intellectual, and that emotionally, spiritually, she was of a coarse fibre, with even a strain of vulgarity. A certain kind of New England woman, to specialize a little more than to say American woman, has never been so clearly seen or boldly shown as in Zenobia; and in her phase of tragedy she stands as impressively for the nineteenth century as Hester Prynne for the seventeenth in hers. It is with pity almost to heart-break that one witnesses her sacrifice of her belief in the cause of women to Hollingsworth’s greedy and relentless philanthropy, and her meek abeyance before his savage proclamation of man’s superiority, his brute avowal of contempt for women except as the helpers and comforters of men. When her sacrifice proves vain, and the love which she cannot help betraying to him is without response, we come, in the twilight of the drama, to that great moment where Coverdale meets Hollingsworth and Zenobia and Priscilla together for the last time, in an eddy of the masquerade which has flowed away from them at Blithedale, and left them beside the rock in the forest called Eliot’s Pulpit. Both Coverdale and Zenobia have returned from a brief absence in town, where he has seen her with Priscilla, fulfilling a mysterious part of her destiny which relates her to the malign Westervelt.

“Hollingsworth was in his ordinary working-dress. Priscilla wore a pretty and simple gown, with a kerchief about her neck, and a calash, which she had flung back from her head, leaving it suspended by the strings. But Zenobia (whose part among the maskers, as may be supposed, was no inferior one) appeared in a costume of fanciful magnificence, with her jewelled flower as the central ornament of what resembled a leafy crown, or coronet... Her attitude was free and noble; yet, if a queen’s, it was not that of a queen triumphant.

.... ‘Hollingsworth — Zenobia — I have just returned to Blithedale,’ said I, ‘and had no thought of finding you here. We shall meet again at the house. I will retire.’  ‘This place is free to you,’ answered Hollingsworth. ‘As free as to ourselves,’ added Zenobia. ‘This long while past, you have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark comers of the heart. Had you been here a little sooner, you might have seen them dragged into daylight. I could even wish to have my trial over again, with you standing by to see fair play! Do you know, Mr. Coverdale, I have been on trial for my life?’... ‘You forced this on me,’ replied Hollingsworth, looking her sternly in the face. ‘Did I call you hither from among the masqueraders yonder? Do I assume to be your judge?’... The more I looked at them, and the more I heard, the stronger grew my impression that a crisis had just come and gone.... In Zenobia’s whole person, beholding her more closely, I saw a riotous agitation; the almost delirious disquietude of a great struggle, at the close of which the vanquished one felt her strength and courage still mighty within her, and longed to renew the contest... ‘Ah, do we part so?’ exclaimed she, seeing Hollingsworth about to retire. ‘And why not?’ said he, with almost rude abruptness. ‘What is there further to be said between us?’  ‘Well, perhaps nothing,’ answered Zenobia, looking him in the face, and smiling.... ‘You have put many queries to me at this, which you design to be our last, interview; and being driven, as I must acknowledge, into a comer, I have responded with reasonable frankness. But, now, with your free consent, I desire the privilege of asking a few questions, in my turn.’  ‘I have no concealments,’ said Hollingsworth. ‘We shall see,’ answered Zenobia. ‘I would first inquire whether you have supposed me to be wealthy?’  ‘On that point,’ observed Hollingsworth, ‘I have had the opinion which the world holds.’  ‘And I held it, likewise,’ said Zenobia. ‘Had I not, Heaven is my witness, the knowledge should have been as free to you as me. I fancied myself affluent. You are aware, too, of the disposition which I purposed making of the larger portion of my imaginary opulence; nay, were it all, I had not hesitated. Let me ask you, further, did I ever propose or intimate any terms of compact, on which depended this — as the world would consider it — so important sacrifice?’  ‘You certainly spoke of none,’ said Hollingsworth. ‘Nor meant any,’ she responded. ‘I was willing to realize your dream... though it should prove the ruin of my fortune.... And now, one other question. Do you love this girl?’  ‘Oh, Zenobia!’ exclaimed Priscilla, shrinking back, as if longing for the rock to topple over and hide her. ‘Do you love her?’ repeated Zenobia. ‘Had you asked me that question a short time since,’ replied Hollingsworth, after a pause, during which, it seemed to me, even the birch-trees held their whispering breath, ‘I should have told you — No!’... ‘And what is your answer now?’ persisted Zenobia. ‘I do love her! ‘said Hollingsworth, uttering the words with a deep inward breath, instead of speaking them outright ‘As well declare it thus as in any other way. I do love her!’  ‘Now, God be judge between us,’ cried Zenobia, breaking into sudden passion, ‘which of us two has most mortally offended him! At least, I am a woman, with every fault, it may be, that a woman ever had — weak, vain, unprincipled (like most of my sex; for our virtues, when we have any, are merely impulsive and intuitive), passionate, too, and pursuing my foolish and unattainable ends by indirect and cunning, though absurdly chosen means, as an hereditary bond-slave must; false, moreover, to the whole circle of good, in my reckless truth to the little good I saw before me — but still a woman!... But how is it with you? Are you a man?

No; but a monster! A cold, heartless, self-beginning and self-ending piece of mechanism! Nothing else; nothing but self, self, self l The fiend, I doubt not, has made his choicest mirth of you, these seven years past, and especially in the mad summer which we have spent together.... You have embodied yourself in a project.... The utmost that can be said in your behalf — and because I would not be wholly despicable in my own eyes, but would fain excuse my wasted feelings, nor own it wholly a delusion, therefore I say it — is, that a great and rich heart has been ruined in your breast. Leave me now. You have done with me, and I with you. Farewell! “Priscilla,’ said Hollingsworth, ‘come.’ She rose up, stood shivering like the birch leaves that trembled over her head, and then slowly tottered, rather than walked, toward Zenobia. Arriving at her feet, she sank down there.... ‘Ah, Priscilla!... You kneel to a dethroned princess.

You, the victorious one! But he is waiting for you. Say what you wish, and leave me.’  ‘We are sisters!’ gasped Priscilla.... It meant the offering of herself, and all she had, to be at Zenobia’s disposal. But the latter would not take it thus. ‘True, we are sisters!’ she replied; and, moved by the sweet word, she stooped down and kissed Priscilla; but not lovingly, for a sense of fatal harm received through her seemed to be lurking in Zenobia’s heart.... ‘Poor child!

Methinks you have but a melancholy lot before you, sitting all alone in that wide, cheerless heart, where, for aught you know — and as I, alas! believe — the fire which you have kindled may soon go out....

What will you do, Priscilla, when you find no spark among the ashes?’  ‘Die!’ she answered. ‘That was well said I’ responded Zenobia, with an approving smile. ‘There is all a woman in your little compass, my poor sister. Meanwhile, go with him, and live!’ She waved her away, with a queenly gesture, and turned her own face to the rock. I watched Priscilla.... Hollingsworth drew her arm within his, and soon disappeared with her among the trees. I cannot imagine how Zenobia knew when they were out of sight; she never glanced again toward them. But, retaining a proud attitude so long as they might have thrown back a retiring look, they were no sooner departed — utterly departed — than she began slowly to sink down. It was as if a great, invisible, irresistible weight were pressing her to the earth. Settling upon her knees, she leaned her forehead against the rock, and sobbed convulsively; dry sobs they seemed to be, such as have nothing to do with tears.”

III

In Miriam and Hilda of “The Marble Faun” there are again two heroines in some such proportion as Zenobia and Priscilla are the heroines of “The Blithedale Romance.” But Miriam, though of much the same moral frame and material complexion as Zenobia, is not so great and living a figure; while Hilda, perhaps, is rather more vitalized than Priscilla. I cannot think her of a very ample importance. She represents the implacable morality of ignorant purity; and when she has seen the hapless Donatello do the murder to which Miriam’s glance has bidden him, it is essentially impossible for her to have pity on Miriam’s despair. Relentlessly and unerringly Hilda fixes the blame on her; she casts Miriam off, but the knowledge of Miriam’s guilt obsesses her, and so blackens and burdens her white soul that she cannot get back to the peace by which she lived until, utter Puritan as she is, she has imparted the secret to the confessional.

All this is most truly and delicately felt, most beautifully shown; though, again, the typific white doves of Hilda’s tower affect my elderly sense with something of the mechanical superfluity and inadequacy of Zenobia’s sumptuous exotic, as an expression of character. Miriam, who is not so novel a conception, has no such adventitious aid in realizing herself to us, and in that degree she is truer. Physically, she is of like make with Hester Prynne, as well as Zenobia, and of a type which represented passion in Hawthorne’s imagination; though as to blond women it is by no means clear that “nature made them lighter motions” than the dark complexions, whom he prefers as the exponents of deep and tragic feeling. In any case, however, Miriam is of a tropical beauty, whose splendor is veiled like Zenobia’s by the shadows of a past in which she has been sinned against, to the lurid trouble, if not the contamination, of her soul. Perhaps she has even shared in the sinning, but that question is left in the pale limbo where the beginnings and the endings of the story are obscured. What we know is that she is on the scene, with the demon and the destined victim of her past: the mysterious model who persecutes and menaces her, and with that glad earth-nature, Donatello, who grows into spiritual consciousness through the crime he commits in her behalf.

Shall it be owned that once more Miriam recalls Zenobia in that spice of vulgarity which Hawthorne must have meant us to taste in her character? There is something almost coarse in her light way of repulsing the young Italian’s love; but this is all atoned for by her devotion to him when their joint crime has united them in one black destiny. The deed is his, but the guilt is hers, as they both instantly recognized; and it is their fatal necessity that they must expiate it, so far as it may be expiated, by a common suffering.

It is in a manner impossible not to choose the instant of the homicide as the supreme scene of the story, and as that in which Miriam leaves the shadow of her suffering to enter the shadow of her sinning; and it is evident that Hawthorne has lavished upon it the richest treasures of his art. It is done so deftly indeed that it would be hard to tell in other words how casually, almost unconsciously, Miriam and Donatello are left alone looking over the brink of the Tarpeian Rock, while the companions of their long ramble through the Roman moonlight have wandered as involuntarily away.

‘“It would be a fatal fall, still,’ she said to herself, looking over the parapet, and shuddering as her eye measured the depth.... Donatello, of whose presence she was possibly not aware, now pressed closer to her side; and he, too, like Miriam, bent over the low parapet and trembled violently.... ‘What are you thinking of, Donatello?’ asked Miriam. ‘Who are they,’ said he, looking earnestly in her face, ‘who have been flung over here in days gone by?’  ‘Men that cumbered the world,’ she replied. ‘Men whose lives were the bane of their fellow-creatures. Men who poisoned the air, which is the common breath of all, for their own selfish purposes,’... ‘Was it well done?’ asked the young man. ‘It was well done,’ answered Miriam; ‘innocent persons were saved by the destruction of a guilty one, who deserved his doom,’... Looking round, she perceived that all her company of merry friends had retired, and Hilda, too, in whose soft and quiet presence she had always an indescribable feeling of security. All gone; and only herself and Donatello left hanging over the brow of the ominous precipice. Not so, however; not entirely alone! In the basement wall of the palace, shaded from the moon, there was a deep, empty niche, that had probably once contained a statue; not empty, either; for a figure now came forth from it and approached Miriam. She must have had cause to dread some unspeakable evil from this strange persecutor, and to know that this was the very crisis of her calamity.... Miriam seemed dreamily to remember falling on her knees; but, in her whole recollection of that wild moment, she beheld herself as in a dim show, and could not well distinguish what was done and suffered; no, not even whether she were really an actor and sufferer in the scene. Hilda, meanwhile, had separated herself from the sculptor, and turned back to rejoin her friend. At a distance, she still heard the mirth of her late companions, who were going down the cityward descent of the Capitoline Hill.... The door of the little court-yard had swung upon its hinges, and partly closed itself. Hilda (whose native gentleness pervaded all her movements) was quietly opening it, when she was startled, midway, by the noise of a struggle within, beginning and ending all in one breathless instant. Along with it, or closely succeeding it, was a loud, fearful cry, which quivered upward through the air, and sank quivering downward to the earth. Then, a silence! The door of the court-yard swung slowly, and closed itself of its own accord. Miriam and Donatello were now alone there. She clasped her hands, and looked wildly at the young man, whose form seemed to have dilated, and whose eyes blazed with the fierce energy that had suddenly inspired him. It had kindled him into a man; it had developed within him an intelligence which was no native characteristic of the Donatello whom we have heretofore known. But that simple and joyous creature was gone forever. ‘What have you done?’ said Miriam, in a horror-stricken whisper. The glow of rage was still lurid on Donatello’s face, and now flashed out again from his eyes. ‘I did what ought to be done to a traitor!’ he replied. ‘I did what your eyes bade me do, when I asked them with mine, as I held the wretch over the precipice!’ These last words struck Miriam like a bullet. Could it be so? Had her eyes provoked or assented to this deed? She had not known it But, alas! looking back into the frenzy and turmoil of the scene just acted, she could not deny — she was not sure whether it might be so or no — that a wild joy had flamed up in her heart, when she beheld her persecutor in his mortal peril.... It had blazed up more madly when Donatello flung his victim off the cliff, and more and more while his shriek went quivering downward. With the dead thump upon the stones below had come an unutterable horror. ‘And my eyes bade you do it?’ repeated she. They both leaned over the parapet, and gazed downward as earnestly as if some inestimable treasure had fallen over and were yet recoverable. On the pavement, below, was a dark mass, lying in a heap, with little or nothing human in its appearance, except that the hands were stretched out, as if they might have clutched, for a moment, at the small, square stones. But there was no motion in them, now.... No stir; not a finger moved! ‘You have killed him, Donatello! He is quite dead!’ said she.... She turned to him — the guilty, blood-stained, lonely woman — she turned to her fellow-criminal, the youth, so lately innocent, whom she had drawn into her doom. She pressed him close, close to her bosom, with a clinging embrace that brought their two hearts together, till the horror and agony of each was combined in one emotion, and that a kind of rapture. ‘Yes, Donatello, you speak the truth!” said she; ‘my heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knots us together for time and eternity, like the coil of a serpent!” They threw one other glance at the heap of death below, to assure themselves that it was there; so like a dream was the whole thing. Then they turned from that fatal precipice, and came out of the court-yard, arm in arm, heart in heart.”

IV

Now that I have obeyed a sort of imperious necessity in selecting the passage given as supremely illustrative, I have my misgiving whether I had not better chosen that scene in the Medici Gardens, where shortly after the murder Miriam and Donatello are together. Their terrible exaltation is past, that “freedom of a broken law ‘“ which was briefly theirs has already lapsed into the bondage of remorse; and she realizes that all the love of her blood-stained soul avails nothing to purge his listless spirit of its new-found sense of guilt. This is a great scene; and that again is a great scene where Miriam goes to Hilda in her dove-haunted tower, and the girl’s cruel truth accuses and convicts the unhappy woman, and casts her off and disowns her. Did Hawthorne here, I wonder, mean to let us see something ugly in the angelic Hilda’s effort for self-protection and her ruthless self-pity for her own involuntary privity to Miriam’s guilt? That would be like his subtlety; and it is certain that the effect is to enlist the sympathy of the witness for Miriam, and to render her for the moment less abhorrent than Hilda. In fact, if I must empty the sack altogether, I cannot conceal that at the bottom of it is a dislike for that cold spirit of Hilda and a sense of something selfish in her relation to the whole affair. Perhaps it is not a real relation. The whole action loses vitality after the parting of Hilda and Miriam; and though it is bravely and beautifully managed to the end, it is managed, and does not manage itself. The rest of the story is as intentional, as operated, as the second part of “Faust”; and in this “ The Marble Faun “ must rank below “ The Scarlet Letter “ and “ The Blithedale Romance,” which are of a vitality that carries them strongly to the close. For the same reason Miriam cannot be placed with Hester Prynne and Zenobia, who have no galvanic palingenesis, but live warmly and richly in the memory, while the Miriam of the second volume has to be recalled with a constant effort. It may be said in her defence that the author put upon her a burden to which she was not equal; he was not equal to it himself, as Goethe also was not; and, indeed, no man is. The problem of evil will not be solved.

If we reduce the question which is Hawthorne’s greatest heroine to a choice between Hester Prynne and Zenobia, I must give my voice for Zenobia. Few heroines survive so far beyond their story, and remain in a sort so fully a part of experience as she; I know of no other in Anglo-Saxon fiction, and only three or four outside of it She is not a very great or noble character. She has moments of being rather hard and jealous with Priscilla and rather “nasty” to Coverdale, who doubtless deserves it; but she is largely planned and generously built. She has, as I have owned, a touch of vulgarity, and we are allowed to suspect her of a lawless and sufficiently foolish fancy. She is a half-caste literary talent, and some of her ideals are apparently tawdry; but she is a very woman-soul; what she does and suffers is by the law of her womanhood, which in her death as in her life asserts itself in defeat so cruel as to leave the reader with a lasting pang for her.

THACKERAY’S BAD HEROINES

WITH Hawthorne there was a return, after a whole generation, to a conception of entire womanhood in fiction. His Zenobia and Hester Prynne are really women, and this cannot be unqualifiedly said of Scott’s, or Bulwer’s, or Dickens’s women. At the most it can be said that these novelists caught certain feminine traits and personified them; but femininity never posed for them in the ensemble. If, upon a theory I have before advanced, this fact is to judge them and class them as inferior imaginations, in spite of certain prime powers which cannot be denied them, I am unable to intervene in their behalf. I must still believe that novelists are great in proportion to the accuracy and fulness with which they portray women; but what really embarrasses me is that I have claimed this pre-eminence hitherto for the realists only, and Hawthorne can scarcely be counted a realist. He was at least, however, not a romanticist, but a romancer, pure and simple, standing electly aloof from both the antagonistic schools, and breathing a finer ether than our common air in a region as different as poetry from our every-day world.

In this environment he conceived of two women natures, grandly permanent, and of one subordinate woman nature, who resembles these and certain others who resemble one another. They are all alike in menacing withdrawal into the ideal from moment to moment; and the true restorer of the great age of heroinism is a novelist whose women never threaten thus to abandon the light of open day.

I

Thackeray I take to have been an author whose native bent was towards reality in fiction. But he lived in a literary time when it was all but impossible for one to be directly true; one must somehow bring the truth in circuitously, apologetically, almost shamefacedly. A direct rendering of life was then supposed to be wanting in “imagination,” and though Thackeray despised and mocked the false in fiction as much as any man who ever lived, he could not help being a man of his time. He put on a fine literary air of being above his business; he talked of fiction as fable-land, when he ought to have known it and proclaimed it the very home of truth, where alone we can see men through all their disguises; he formed the vicious habit of spoiling the illusion, or clouding the clear air of his art, by the intrusion of his own personality; and in fine he showed himself in spite of his right instincts a survival of the romanticistic period whose traces in others (especially Bulwer and Disraeli) he knew how so deliciously to burlesque.

I shall affront some of those who like Thackeray most (but not most wisely) by saying that he came short of his great possibilities by his willingness to dawdle (and shall I say twaddle?) over his scene when it was strictly his affair to represent it, and by his preference of caricature to character, and sentimentality to sentiment. All the same he was a great talent, and the Ever-Womanly knew his ultimate truth so well that she revealed herself to him as she had not to any other English novelist since Jane Austen’s time. It is to be distinguished, though, that she did not fully show herself at her best to him. Her best, indeed, she gave him glimpses of, but it was her worst that she fully imparted, trusting him to render it again so that it should not seem so very, very bad, after all.

Thackeray’s bad heroines are truer than his good ones. These he was apt to make a little too good; whereas, with that tenderness which the Ever-Womanly expected of him, he let us like his bad ones almost as much. Some people like them even more; and it cannot be denied that Becky Sharp, and Blanche Amory, and Beatrix Esmond are at least more amusing than Amelia Sedley, and Laura Pendennis, and Lady Castle, wood; in fact, these virtuous ladies show rather factitious in the baleful light of those wicked ones.

II

I suppose the primacy among Thackeray’s women, good, bad, and indifferent, would be awarded to Becky Sharp, by nine-tenths of his critics, and one cannot deny her a high degree of wicked perfection. She had the advantage of coming earliest among his leading heroines, for, though Catharine Hayes preceded Becky Sharp, she was too clearly a satire upon a certain sort of criminal heroines to survive as a personality. But Becky Sharp had just that blend of good and bad which — convinces of reality in a creation; she was selfish and cruel, but she had her moments of generosity when she was willing to do a good action which could not disadvantage her, and she was, with all her wickedness, ostensibly kept within those limits of decency dear to Anglo-Saxon fiction which the franker history of Catharine transcends. She ran her course largely in good society, and bad people in good society are somehow more memorable. She has the help of circumstance, though without adventitious aid Becky Sharp would still be a great figure. She is great almost in spite of her inventor, who had such a boyish delight in having found out a character that he could not forbear nudging the reader, and even shouting his satisfaction into the reader’s ear, lest he should fail of some point of the discovery. In the retrospect, however, this want of taste, which was want of art, ceases to affect the result, and any one who knows his “Vanity Fair” sees Becky Sharp as the author imagined her, and as she shows herself in the drama, and does not see Thackeray at all.

The great moments of her history present themselves in successive tableaux, and Becky flinging Miss Pinkerton’s parting gift back into the garden as she leaves Miss Pinkerton’s school; Becky in her manifold flirtations with Jos. Sedley, and George Osborne, and Rawdon Crawley; Becky making her way into the esteem of Sir Pitt Crawley after her marriage with his brother; Becky’s first appearance in high society, cruelly ignored by the women and at last mercifully recognized by her unwilling hostess, the Marchioness of Steyne; Becky surprised by her husband in the Marquis of Steyne’s company at her own house; Becky in the shabby hotel at Ostend courted as an “Engel Englanderinn” by those raffish German admirers of hers; Becky doing the good angel when she tells the stupid, constant Amelia that George Osborne had made love to her and asked her to fly with him, and so renders it possible for the widow to renounce her allegiance to the memory of her false husband and marry the faithful Major Dobbin: these are scenes which remain from any reading of the book, and have the property of keeping the mind like facts of one’s experience.

In Becky’s admirably naughty presence, Beatrix Esmond shows thin and factitious, and Blanche Amory dwindles to the measure of her literary affectations.

Becky Sharp is indeed of that ideal perfection which we find nowhere outside of nature. If Thackeray had done nothing else, she must have immortalized him; and he did a multitude of figures, all so much better than his method of doing them that one hesitates whether to wonder more at means so false or results so true. This greatest creation of his is first of all so tempered that she cannot even illogically arrive at any other end than she reaches, though she sometimes stands at the parting of the ways, and now and then advances a little in the right way. She is destined to make others her prey, not because she is stronger, but because she is weaker; she might be willing to be good if she thought goodness would avail; and she is at her worst because certain things are left out of her rather than because she has done certain things. She has defects of nature: she is incapable either of passion or affection; she loves neither her husband nor her son; and these defects are imputed to her for evil, but they hardly constitute guilt. Her guilt is in telling and acting lies; but she tells them and acts them because she is weak and has no other means of offence or defence that seem to her so effectual. She is not incapable of gratitude, and when she can with safety do others a good turn she sometimes does it; she would probably always do it rather than an ill turn. Thackeray’s hand is heavy throughout “Vanity Fair,” which is ‘prentice work compared with “Pendennis” and “The Newcomes”; and he exults in Becky’s decline and fall, as perhaps he might not in a maturer work. He is boisterously sarcastic at her expense, as if she were responsible for the defects of her nature, and must be punished for her sins as well as by them. His morality regarding her is the old conventional morality which we are now a little ashamed of, but in his time and place he could scarcely have any other; after all, he was a simple soul, and strictly of his epoch. A later and subtler time must do finer justice to a woman badly born, and reared in dependence and repression; liberated from school to a world where she must fight her own way; taught the evil consciousness of the fascination which she had but which she never felt for men; married to a reprobate aristocrat not her superior in nature, and distinctly her inferior in mind; tempted by ambition and spurred by necessity the greater since she had her husband as well as herself to care for, she was predestined to the course she ran; and she could not have run any other, made as she was, so clever, so pretty, so graceful, so unprincipled.

III

It is difficult to know what may be the lesson of a character so evilly conditioned that its evil was inevitable, but possibly it may be to move the spectator less to “justice “ than to mercy. To this effect Becky Sharp seems to come in spite of her creator, whom we may safely leave to his mistaken severities with her, while we rejoice in the æsthetic side of his performance, so altogether better than the ethical. His art is quite unerring in result, though it is mostly, as I think, so bad in process. There are a hundred proofs of Thackeray’s greatness in the story; whenever he deals with Rebecca Sharp he is great, but at which moment he is greatest I could not well say. The obvious climax, of course, comes when Becky, having made her way into society under the patronage of Lord Steyne, and preyed upon his purse to the common advantage of her husband and herself, has her husband — still in their joint interest — shut up for debt. While she is receiving Lord Steyne at her own house, Rawdon Crawley, getting out of prison, unexpectedly comes home.

“He took out his door-key and let himself into his house. He could hear laughter in the upper rooms. He was in the ball-dress in which he had been captured the night before. He went silently up the stairs, leaning against the banisters at the stair head....

Becky was singing a snatch of the song of the night before; a hoarse voice shouted ‘Brava! Brava!’ — it was Lord Steyne. Rawdon opened the door and went in. A little table with a dinner was laid out — and wine and plate. Steyne was hanging over the sofa on which Becky sat. The wretched woman was in a brilliant full toilette, her arms and all her fingers sparkling with bracelets and rings; and the brilliants on her breast that Steyne had given her. He had her hand in his and was bowing over it to kiss it, when Becky started up with a faint scream as she caught sight of Rawdon’s white face.... There was that in Rawdon’s face which caused Becky to fling herself before him. ‘I am innocent, Rawdon,’ she said, ‘before God I am innocent!’ She clung hold of his coat, of his hands; her own were all covered with serpents, and rings, and baubles. ‘I am innocent. Say I am innocent,’ she said to Lord Steyne. He thought a trap had been laid for him, and was as furious with the wife as with the husband. ‘You innocent! Damn you,’ he screamed out ‘You innocent!.. You’re as innocent as your mother the ballet dancer and your husband the bully. Make way, sir, and let me pass;’ and Lord Steyne seized up his hat, and with flame in his eyes, and looking his enemy fiercely in the face, marched upon him....

But Rawdon Crawley, springing out, seized him by the neckcloth until Steyne, almost strangled, writhed and bent under his arm. ‘You lie, you dog!’ said Rawdon. ‘You lie, you coward and villain,’ And he struck the peer twice over the face with his open hand, and flung him bleeding to the ground. It was all done before Rebecca could interpose. She stood there trembling before him. She admired her husband, strong, brave, victorious. ‘Come here!’ he said. She came up at once. ‘Take off those things.’ She began, trembling, pulling the jewels from her arms, and the rings from her shaking fingers, and held them up, all in a heap, looking at him. ‘Throw them down,’ he said, and she dropped them. He tore the diamond ornament out of her breast, and flung it at Lord Steyne. It cut him on his bald forehead. ‘Come up stairs,’ Rawdon said to his wife. ‘Don’t kill me, Rawdon,’ she said. He laughed savagely. ‘I want to see if that man lies about the money as he has about me. Has he given you any?’  ‘No,’ said Rebecca. ‘That is— “Give me your keys,’ Rawdon answered, and they went out together. Rawdon flung open boxes and wardrobes, throwing the multifarious trumpery of their contents here and there, and at last he found the desk. It... contained a pocket-book with banknotes,... and one was quite a fresh one — a note for a thousand pounds which Lord Steyne had given her. ‘Did he give you this?’ Rawdon said. ‘Yes,’ Rebecca answered. ‘I’ll send it to him to-day, ‘... and he left her without another word.”

Left her; and the reader is left with the impression that this blackguard, who had as literally lived upon his wife as if all that Lord Steyne said were true, is somehow better than she. But he is not; and in this case as in most others of the kind the injured husband, who poses so finely as the defender of marriage and the avenger of his own honor, has had more agency in his own ignominy than the world will ever own. It is a false and wrong touch in the scene, but still it is a very great scene, and managed very quietly, very intensely. It implicates pretty nearly all there is of poor Becky, past, present, and future, without any apparent interference of the author’s. For once, he is not on the stage, and he does not even come in with an epilogue, at least for the time being,  He could not often hold his hand; when he painted a saint, he wanted to paint “Saint” all over the halo; and when he did a devil, he thought it well to tag his forked tail with a label proclaiming his demoniacal quality. But in this great instance, he trusts the meaning of Becky Sharp to the spectator’s intelligence, with scarcely the waste of a word

IV

There are half a dozen passages in Becky’s history almost as good, but not one in the history of Beatrix Esmond which approaches this in power. To be sure she is never directly seen, but always through the eyes of that intolerable prig Henry Esmond, which are fixed mainly upon his own perfections. Even if she had been directly seen, however, I doubt if there would have been much real drama in her, though plenty of theatre. Several coups de théâtre there are in her career, and chiefly that when Esmond and her brother find her at Castlewood with the young Pretender, and prevent her for the time from giving her worthlessness to his worthlessness. If one reads the story in cold blood it is hard to believe in it at all, it is at every moment so palpably and visibly fabricated; and perhaps Beatrix is no more a doll than those other eighteenth-century marionettes; but compared with Becky Sharp a doll she certainly is. It is only in her avatar of Madame Bernstein, in “The Virginians,” that she begins to persuade you she is at best anything more than a nineteenth-century actress made up for her part. She suffers, of course, from the self-parade of Esmond, and has not, poor girl, half a chance to show herself for what she is. Her honest, selfish worldliness is, however, more interesting than her mother’s much-manipulated virtues; but it is to be remembered in behalf of Lady Castlewood that Beatrix has at no turn of her career such a false part to play as that of a woman who falls in love with a boy, and then promotes his passion for her daughter, and at last takes him herself when her daughter will not. Indeed, I do not know why she should be so much blamed for her heartlessness; people cannot go and have heart unless nature has provided them the means; and, after all, the heartlessness of Beatrix is shown chiefly in her not loving Mr. Esmond, who is not an unprejudiced witness. The solemn scolding he gives her when he breaks the Duke of Hamilton’s death to her seems to me quite preposterous; but then he is at all times preposterous. When he interferes in her intrigue with the Stuart whom he is helping put on the English throne, it is no wonder she hates him: mischief for mischief, hers is far the less. Esmond, it will be remembered, scolds the prince in much the same temper that he has scolded Beatrix, for running down into the country after her, when he ought to have been waiting Queen Anne’s death in London. He burns up the patent of Marquis which the Stuarts had given his father, and once more renounces his right to the title of Castlewood — he does it half a dozen times in all — and then the prince gives him and Lord Castlewood the satisfaction of a gentleman for his pursuit of their sister and cousin, by crossing swords with them.

“The talk was scarce over when Beatrix entered the room. What came she there to seek? She started and turned pale at the sight of her brother and kinsman.... ‘Charming Beatrix,’ said the prince with a blush that became him very well, ‘these lords have come a-horseback from London, where my sister lies in a despaired state, and where her successor makes himself desired.... Mademoiselle, may we take your coach for town?” Will it please the king to breakfast before he goes?’ was all Beatrix could say. The roses had shuddered out of her cheeks; her eyes were glaring; she looked quite old. She came up to Esmond, and hissed out a word or two. ‘If I did not love you before, cousin,’ says she, ‘think how I love you now,’ If words could stab, no doubt she would have killed. Esmond. She looked at him as if she could. But her keen words gave no wound to Mr. Esmond; his heart was hard. And as he looked at her he wondered that he could ever have loved her.’

This, I will confess, seems to me great rubbish, of the true historical-romance sort, the mouthing and the posing and all; and of the whole group it is Beatrix alone who seems natural. But doubtless one ought not to praise her, and I will allow that she is preferable only to the good people of the story.

V

I am rather glad, however, to get away from her to Blanche Amory, who is a flirt of as modern make as poor Becky Sharp herself, but of lighter weight, and a lamb that is whity-brown where Becky is blackest. Of course, by modem, I mean modem of the second quarter, not the fourth quarter, of our century; of the time when young ladies of fashion wished to be thought literary, as now they wish to be thought athletic, and a little while ago wished to be thought artistic. Blanche Amory, whose first name was really Betsy, wrote verses in both English and French; she sang and played and drew and danced divinely, and she looked the part. “She had fair hair, with green reflections in it; but she had dark eyebrows. She had long, black eyelashes which veiled beautiful brown eyes. She had such a slim waist that it was a wonder to behold; and such slim little feet that you would have thought the grass would scarcely bend under them.... She was always smiling, and a smile not only showed her teeth wonderfully, but likewise exhibited two lovely little pink dimples, that nestled in either cheek.”

Of course, a young lady so equipped by nature and art to take the hearts of men boxed her brother’s ears in private, and mocked herself of her fat, old, good-natured mother, and made all the trouble she could for her reprobate step-father. Her real father is even more reprobate, being an ex-convict and homicide who lives upon his wife’s second husband, by the threat of turning up and claiming his own. When he finally does so, his daughter has run through her two great flirtations with Pendennis and Harry Foker, and is in a position to be married to a soi-disant French nobleman, and to shine as a salonière in the Paris of the Citizen King. She is a cat and a minx, but not so much of either that the spectator cannot enjoy her gambols; and it may be said in her behalf that she is no worse behaved, however badly natured, than Pendennis. A case might be made out for her, but not by her. The trouble is not so much that she is malevolent as that she is mendacious, but still she is mischievous, and likes to stick pins into people, for the pleasure of seeing them wince.

The worst of it all is that Thackeray cannot let her alone. He must keep satirizing her, and making a parade of her pretty wickedness, instead of allowing it to show itself in what the poor thing does and says; he must wink at the reader, and whisper him the open secret of her affectation and malice. She is by no means a lady-villain such as some lady-novelists acquainted us with later; it is doubtful whether she is very blackhearted, or would have done any very dark deed. She wishes to be amused, and she wishes to be married; to make a figure in the great world where so many love to shine. She is really very clever, and, as we have seen, very pretty. With half the expenditure of force, she might be much more effective, even in the direction of her ambition, if she would be a little honester; but that is not in the flirt-nature, which in her Thackeray recognized first in all the importance it has kept since in fiction.

THACKERAY’S GOOD HEROINES

IT will have been noted by the attentive reader that the bad heroines of Thackeray had all some virtue, which if not quite a saving virtue was still such as to move them to good actions at times, and to keep them from being wholly reprobate. Blanche Amory, who was less direly wicked than either Becky Sharp or Beatrix Esmond, had rather less of this virtue than they, and being vain where they were ambitious, was less moved to occasional kindness. In this she was truly divined, and in her Thackeray marked a great advance in the study of the bad heroine, quite as great as that he made in the study of the good heroine when he learned that she was never altogether good, but was sometimes cruel and jealous and even mean, and was very apt to be capricious. He was once considered a terrible cynic, and I think this notion of him, which now seems so droll, must have come from women unwisely dissatisfied that he did not find the best of their sex altogether angelic. At any rate, he was the discoverer (so far as any man may be the discoverer of anything) of the fallibility of angels; but he had not the courage of his facts, quite, and when he had allowed the defects of their qualities to be seen he felt bound to color these qualities to a yet more heavenly hue, and so was in danger of undoing all the good of his discovery.

I have already supposed that when Thackeray’s good heroines are mentioned, Lady Castlewood, Helen Pendennis, and Laura Bell would come first to mind. It has been pretty well agreed that Amelia Sedley, sweet, and kind, and true as she is, cannot be counted with the others because she is too passive, too insipid; and yet I think a good word might be said for her. Ninetenths of the kindly people in the world are no more positive than she; goodness, in fact, is not a very positive thing, or not nearly so positive as evil; and in the things that lie next to active goodness, as patience, quiet courage, devotion to an ideal, Amelia is very well. Her devotion does not avail her with the lovers of lovers because it is for an unworthy ideal, and it is counter to the devotion of another who is of the highest desert. But the fact that George Osborne was shallow and false does not impeach the wisdom of the woman whom he deceived and who remains constant to his memory so many years; and the fact that Major Dobbin so preeminently merits her love is no just censure of her refusal.

It is a disadvantage of Thackeray’s method that his conception of a situation does not reach his reader clear and simple; it is so darkened with advice about it, that the reader is not able to judge it without prejudice. He must free his mind of all sorts of suggestion from the author before he can fairly judge it; but if he once does this in the case of Amelia Sedley I think he will find her neither so weak nor so silly as he must from the impression given him, as it were, at second hand. The situation left to take its chance with the reader is of a delicate pathos, and not of that serio-comic cast which it otherwise wears.

This is something like saying that Thackeray imagined his things better than he represented them; and I am afraid that this is what I mean. I think that sometimes he changed his mind about them, and “fought” them, as the actors say, to a conclusion different from that which he originally had in view. This appears to me particularly true of the situation in “Henry Esmond,’ where (without knowing the “inside facts”) I believe that when he first imagined Esmond in love with Beatrix, he meant him to be either fortunate or unfortunate in his love of her with no ulterior view for him. His love for Lady Castlewood and hers for him affects me as an afterthought; and though Thackeray achieved a novelty by it, he did not create beauty, as one always does when one follows the line of probability. It is, of course, possible that a man may fall in love with a woman ten years his senior, after he has been in love with her daughter; and of course such a woman may have cherished a passion for him, at first unconscious, and always silent, and, having promoted his love for her daughter by every means in her power, may end by marrying him herself. I say the thing is possible; but it is so ugly, so out of nature, that it is not less than revolting; and therefore I cannot believe that the case was first imagined so.

Having finally imagined it so, Lady Castlewood’s creator begins well back in her duplex personality to prepare the reader for the unhandsome dénouement. The story is told by Esmond, and very early in it he dwells upon the beauty of his “sweet mistress,” his “dear mistress,” and more and more repeats his sense of it, with an increasing emphasis upon the surprising youthfulness which survives in the mother of a married son and grown-up daughter. Apart from this perfunctory admiration of her charms, however, Esmond shows her a most interesting and noble character, with those limitations which best realize her virtues. It is altogether in character that a beautiful and serious girl should fall in love with a dashing young nobleman like Castlewood; that she should be devoted to him, and then with just cause resentfully jealous; that she should turn in her despair of him to the friendless little Esmond who has come to live with them, and should spend her wounded and outraged love in motherly tenderness upon him; that she should rely increasingly upon his truth and courage, and love him as an eldest son; that later, when he has become a man, and has been wounded in her husband’s fatal quarrel, she should come to him, sick and in prison, to upbraid him for her loss. It is a great scene, where she does so, and much admired, though I doubt if it is always admired for what is finest in the subjective drama, namely, her wish to punish herself in him for the fact that she had really ceased to love her husband. She does not really suspect Esmond of failing Castlewood or abetting him in his quarrel; but somehow she must take out her remorse, and woman-like she takes it out of the creature she loves best.

Sometime she must begin to be conscious that she no longer loves Esmond quite as a mother; of a young girl it could be supposed that she might continue ignorant of the nature of her feeling, but Lady Castle-’ wood is a mature woman, with all the experience of a wife. The false note is first sounded when in this necessary consciousness she tries to promote his passion for her daughter, which would be impossible. I know that all sorts of idiotic and detestable self-sacrifice is preached in fiction, but this is a little too repulsive for belief. The imagination of the reader refuses to join with that of the author, who is left henceforth to manage the affair alone; and no greater proofs of his power could be shown than he gives in certain ensuing passages of the story. To humor the conceit, we may suppose that Lady Castlewood is doing penance for her own passion in favoring Esmond with Beatrix, but in such a scene as that with the Duke of Hamilton just before his intended marriage with her daughter, she rises into a nobler function than any mere suffering, and shows herself at her loveliest and best.

Beatrix had just put on a diamond necklace which Esmond had given her for a wedding-gift when the Duke was announced. “He looked very black at Mr. Esmond, to whom he made a very low bow, indeed, and kissed the hand of each lady in his most ceremonious manner. ‘Look, my Lord Duke,’ says Mistress Beatrix, advancing to him and showing the diamonds on her breast. ‘Diamonds,’ says his Grace. ‘H’m! They seem pretty,’... ‘They are a present on my marriage,’ says Beatrix. ‘From her Majesty?’ asks the Duke. ‘From our cousin, Colonel Henry Esmond,’ says Beatrix, taking the colonel’s hand very bravely, ‘who was left guardian to us by our father, and who has a hundred times shown his love and friendship for our family.’  ‘The Duchess of Hamilton receives no diamonds but from her husband, madam,’ says the Duke. ‘May I pray you to restore these to Mr. Esmond?’  ‘Beatrix Esmond may receive a present from our kinsman and benefactor, my Lord Duke,’ says Lady Castlewood, with an air of great dignity....

‘Kinsman and benefactor,’ says the Duke. ‘I know of no kinsman: and I do not choose that my wife should have for a benefactor a—’

‘My lord!’ says Colonel Esmond. ‘I am not here to bandy words,’ says his Grace: ‘frankly I tell you that your visits to this house are too frequent, and that I choose no presents for the Duchess of Hamilton from gentlemen that bear a name they have no right to.’  ‘My lord!’ breaks out Lady Castlewood, ‘Mr. Esmond hath the best right to that name of any man in the world: and ’tis as old and honorable as your Grace’s.’ My Lord Duke smiled and looked as if Lady Castlewood was mad, that was so talking to him. ‘If I called him benefactor,’ said my mistress, ‘it is because he has been so to us — the noblest, the truest, the bravest, the dearest of benefactors. He would have saved my husband’s life from Mohun’s sword. He did save my boy’s, and defend him from that villain.... The title we bear is his if he would claim it. ’Tis we who have no right to our name: not he, that’s too great for it.... His father was Viscount of Castlewood, and Marquis of Esmond before him, and he is his father’s lawful son and true heir, and... if he is content to forego his name that my child may bear it, we love and honor him and bless him under whatever name he bears ‘ — and here the fond and affectionate creature would have knelt to Esmond, but that he prevented her; and Beatrix, running up to her with a pale face and a cry of alarm, embraced her and said, ‘Mother, what is this?” ’Tis a family secret, my Lord Duke,’ says Esmond: ‘poor Beatrix knew nothing of it, nor did my lady till a year ago. ‘ — ... And then in her touching way, and having hold of her daughter’s hand, and speaking to her rather than my Lord Duke, Lady Castlewood told the story which you already know, lauding up to the skies her kinsman’s behavior. On his side Mr. Esmond explained the reasons that seemed sufficiently cogent with him why... he should remain as he was, Colonel Esmond.

‘And Marquis of Esmond, my lord,’ says his Grace, with a low bow. ‘Permit me to ask your lordship’s pardon for words that were uttered in ignorance, and to beg for the favor of your friendship.... I shall esteem it a favor, my lord, if Colonel Esmond will give away the bride.’  ‘And if he will take the usual payment in advance, he is welcome,’ says Beatrix, stepping up to him; and as Esmond kissed her she whispered, ‘Oh, why didn’t I know you before? ‘“

Lady Castlewood, in fine, seems to me a beautiful creation of which too much is asked. If she could have been left quietly a widow, and Esmond been allowed, or required to console himself for Beatrix with some other, or no other, if need be, she would have remained one of the most perfect figures in fiction. But as it is her loveliness is blotted, her perfection is marred, by the part so improbably attributed to her. Women marry a second time, and they are not unapt to marry men younger than themselves in such cases, but Lady Castlewood is apparently the only woman who brought up a boy as her son, and after she had witnessed his unrequited love for her daughter, whom she tries to have marry him, marries him herself. It does not seem either nice or true; if it were true, that would go a great way towards consoling one for its not being nice.

II

Thackeray cannot be called the inventor of the superstition that people who are crossed in love when young keep their thwarted passion tenderly and sacred in mind during a long married life with partners they have never loved; but he preached it much and often. He preached it in the case of Mrs. Pendennis, who is supposed to live in respect and awe for the man she married while keeping green the memory of her lost love in her heart. This may be possible, but it does not seem probable, and it is not to my mind pathetic, but merely sentimental. It does not indeed take so much from Helen Pendennis as the abnormal passion attributed to Lady Castlewood takes from her, but it adds nothing to our sense of her loveliness; and the probability of the situation is not heightened by her having her dead lover’s little daughter (by the second marriage he had made) come to live with her as her own child. That must render it even a little more difficult for her unloved but honored husband. It is supposed to happen, however, and the little girl who is brought up with Arthur Pendennis like a sister is Laura Bell, the heroine jointly with Blanche Amory of the novel named “Pendennis “ after him, and the heroine who finally marries him.

She does so after much misgiving, and after foregoing the love of a nobler man; yet her affection for Pendennis has borne the test not only of familiar association with him from childhood, but also of much wandering and vacillation on his part. He is generally pronounced altogether unworthy of her, but women have a way of knowing who is worthy of them that may be generally trusted, and Laura Bell is not illogically willing to take Arthur Pendennis in the end. She is a girl of character, which is to say of sense, and the book in which she figures so greatly to her credit is the effect of a constant good sense such as has rarely found expression in fiction. It is a work of far greater mastery than “Vanity Fair,” and paints the great world with which Thackeray loved to deal with a touch altogether lighter and finer. Its charm is that presence of youth which warms and illumines it: youth sometimes spoiled and sometimes unspoiled, but still youth with its wide horizons and far perspectives. For the purpose of these inadequate studies I have been going through all Thackeray’s great novels (once so familiar to me) again, and “ Pendennis,” without any such supreme figure as Becky Sharp, seems to me still his supreme effort, especially in respect to its women, the ultimate test of greatness in a novel. Helen Pendennis, Laura Bell, Blanche Amory, Lady Clavering, Fanny Bolton, Miss Fotheringay form a group of extraordinary interest and variety, and the first of them are the first named. in Helen Pendennis I have called a sentimentalist, and so she is, but she is not wholly a sentimentalist; only a man can be that. She wants to spoil her boy, but she knows what is good for him, and she wishes him to marry Laura. She is tolerant of the girl’s contempt for his airs and egotisms; she even borrows her money to pay his debts and give him a start in life; but she finds it hard to forgive her for refusing him. Still she does forgive her, and lives on with her in tender affection and a hope which she loses only when she believes her son guilty of betraying poor little Fanny Bolton, and when she has no thought but of his righting the supposed wrong by marrying the girl.

This is altogether fine, and one of the best parts of the book is that relating to Pendennis’s sickness, where she and Laura come up to London, and in the delusion of a superior virtue spurn poor Fanny from his bedside. The whole episode, down to the son’s quarrel with his mother for her mistaken condemnation of Fanny, is most admirable, but out of it all I believe I prefer that exalted moment when Helen and Laura arrive upon the scene.

“As Fanny saw the two ladies and the anxious countenance of the elder, who regarded her with a look of inscrutable alarm and terror, the poor girl knew at once that Pen’s mother was before her.... Fanny looked wistfully at Mrs. Pendennis and afterwards at Laura; there was no more expression in the latter’s face than if it had been a mass of stone. Hard-heartedness and gloom dwelt in the figures of both of the newcomers; neither showed any the faintest gleam of mercy or sympathy for Fanny. She looked desperately from them to the Major behind them. Old Pendennis dropped his eyelids, looking up ever so stealthily from under them at Arthur’s poor little nurse. ‘I — I wrote to you yesterday, if you please, ma’am,’ Fanny said, trembling in every limb as she spoke; and as pale as Laura, whose sad, menacing face looked over Mrs. Pendennis’s shoulder. ‘Did you, madam?’ Mrs. Pendennis said, ‘I suppose I may now relieve you from nursing my son. I am his mother, you understand.’  ‘Yes, ma’am. I — this is the way to his — oh, wait a minute,’ cried out Fanny. ‘I must prepare you for his—’ The widow, whose face had been hopelessly cruel and ruthless, started back with a little gasp and cry, which she speedily stifled. ‘He’s been so since yesterday,’ Fanny said, trembling very much and with chattering teeth. A horrid shriek of laughter came out of Pen’s room,... and after several shouts the poor wretch began to sing a college drinking-song.... He was quite delirious. ‘He does not know me, ma’am,’ said Fanny. ‘Indeed! Perhaps he will know his mother; let me pass, if you please, and go in to him,’ and the widow hastily pushed by little Fanny, and through the dark passage into Pen’s sitting-room. Laura sailed by Fanny, too, without a word; and Major Pendennis followed them. Fanny sat down on a bench in the passage and cried.’

The story seldom rises into so much of pure drama as this; Thackeray seems rather ashamed of drama, and shrugs it away when he can, or spoils it by too much chorussing; but here we have it almost pure, at least for an instant, and it makes us wish we had it oftener from him.

Of subjective drama there is a constant abundance, and that of Laura’s high and wise soul is always good and genuine, through the whole progress of her love for Pendennis, with its phases and changes, and its total eclipse at one time by her passion for Warrington. She has no other; she owns to Pendennis that she has had this, and that if it had not been for Warrington’s fatal entanglement she would gladly have married him. Out of what she knows of Pendennis she knows comparatively little that is good, and yet somehow she divines his essential goodness, and confides her future to it Laura is, in fact, a most generous as well as most sensible creature. Her relation to money is that of the highest-minded woman; she does not want to waste it, but she will give it without a care, though not without a thought, for herself. Her relation to Helen Pendennis is wholly beautiful, and without idealizing that over-idealizing lady she is utterly devoted to her. She makes her tacit criticisms of her, but they make no difference in her conduct towards her adoptive mother.

She has a girl’s fondness for the pleasures of the world, but she gets only good from it. Even from such a hardened worldling as Blanche Amory she gets only good, both in her illusion and her disillusion concerning her. Towards Pendennis in his long, insincere flirtation with Blanche she has a cool contempt which fires into a single instant of jealousy. Her cruelty to Fanny Bolton is of ignorant purity; it is almost a necessary evil.

IV

To have imagined a creature so just and fine and real is a high effect both of mind and heart in Thackeray, who has a right to be judged as much by Laura Bell as by Becky Sharp; by Ethel Newcome as by Blanche Amory. Between those two “ good” heroines of his, I should be puzzled which to choose as the better, or, more importantly, as the truer study in girlhood. They have both great qualities, and I am not going to decide for Ethel Newcome because she has more the defects of her qualities, and figures on a larger stage, though I like to have the limitations of virtue shown, and incline to believe that those are the best portraits in which I find not only the realization of beauty, but the suggestion of what is unlovely. After all, unless a girl comes outright to folly or evil, even her potentialities of wrong have their charm, and Ethel Newcome is the more interesting because at a certain time she is ready to reverse the old saw and count love well lost for the world. She does not finally change her mind so much as have it changed for her by events and circumstances; and in this she, even more than Laura Bell, is like girls in life, and justifies herself as a work of the author’s highest art

THACKERAY’S ETHEL NEWCOME AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË’S JANE EYRE

THERE are so many of Thackeray’s women that to choose any eight or ten of them must seem like ignoring as many others equally worthy of study. The reader may demand in fit dudgeon why this one or that one, whom he has always thought a significant figure, is left out; and against such censure it is not easy to provide. All one can say is that by universal consent such and such women have been chosen the novelist’s great heroines, and that these must represent him, even if injustice seems done to others. In “The Newcomes,” for instance, there are half a score of women who will come to mind at the mention of the novel: Lady Kew and her daughter Lady Anne Newcome, Mrs. Mackenzie and her daughter Rosie, Miss Honeyman, Madame de Florac, Mrs. Pendennis, Mrs. Hobson Newcome, Lady Clara Pulleyn; these all have claims, nicely differenced and distinguished, and yet it is Ethel Newcome who remains first, and has the largest share of our interest if not our sympathy.

I

It seems to me that in Ethel Newcome the author has done his utmost to imagine a character of noble but not unnatural beauty. He has fancied her of a station of life in which her qualities could best show themselves, with the light of the great world upon them. He has not pretended that she was at once perfect, or ever perfect, but he has wished her to appear capable of learning from her own faults, and from the errors and miseries of others. He is admirably successful in making us feel her growth: she really grows in our knowledge from a young, unformed girl, to a mature woman, who has come to the knowledge of right and wrong by the use of her own sense, and has finally chosen the right through a love of it. Her youthful love-making with Clive Newcome is pretty and winning, though she gives him up at the bidding of the world in the terrible old Lady Kew, her grandmother, and for a while she thinks she cares more for rank and splendor than for love. She might not so unjustly have them with Clive married; but it is of her own motion, from the instruction of the unhappiness she has seen so near her in her brother’s marriage, that she breaks with the Marquis of Farintosh whom she does not love, and prefers a life of such usefulness as she can lead in her family, with her kind, dull, capricious mother and her younger brothers and sisters. She is never an insipid saint; and she fights evil in her wicked brother, as well as eschews it, chiefly employing the powers of sarcasm with which she is gifted. She is rather satirical with most people and is not afraid to measure wits even with her grandmother, who has a very trenchant wit, and wields it so mercilessly that all the rest of her family are in terror of her. In short, Ethel sums up in her character the virtues and defects of the highest type of Thackeray women, and, as women go, the type is not so low as might be, though he used to be accused of such a cynical hatred of women. Her greatest fault as a creation is that she talks too much in the interest of the author for the pleasure of the reader. I am far from implying that a woman in choosing the better part cannot express herself with a breadth and depth worthy of any novelist, but if she is really doing it for herself she will do it in her own way and, as it were, in her own words. This is certainly not the case with Ethel Newcome in her last conversation with the Marquis of Farintosh, where her simple-heartedly selfish lover, not having the author or reader in mind, talks straight from himself, and is perfectly mean and natural. It is not that Ethel says anything out of character; but the critic who reads that scene can hardly help feeling its æsthetic deficiency, in the sort I have suggested.

II

Of course the psychological climax of the story is in the chapter detailing the conversations at Paris between Ethel and Madame de Florae, Ethel and Clive, and finally Clive and Madame de Florae, where the girl definitely refuses her cousin, after long wishing to accept him, and after more or less indecisive love-making between them. The voices are not the very voices of life, nor the words the very words, but the thoughts and feelings are, and at times the voices and the words are. Inevitably the writer who has written much becomes confirmed in his manner, and it is not surprising that there is so much, but that there is so little, of the Thackeray manner in these conversations, which are based upon a familiar Thackeray convention. Here is the make-believe that an old woman like Madame de Florae has kept a love-disappointment alive through a long, loveless marriage, and is promoting, against all the French proprieties, the meeting of her lost lover’s son with the girl he loves, out of a romantic tenderness for her own past; here is the clever aristocratic girl who is better than her aristocracy (as we poor plebeians like to fancy some aristocrats) and who has her dreams, that come and go, of well-losing the world for love; here is the youth, handsome, witty, gifted, who is tempting her to the better part. The girl is letting her heart go, and he is drawing it, and in the background is the old woman with her romantic wishes for his success. The lovers talk it all over with openness on Clive’s part, and on Ethel’s with at least transparent insincerity; and the result is, like the conception, more natural than the representation, as mostly happens with Thackeray, though in this case the representation is unusually good. I have been reading that chapter over again, and I am not sure but that in Ethel’s final speech the author has insinuated a fine satire of her which escaped the unspectacled eyes of my youth. If this is true, he has done it so delicately that it does not audibly clash with the romantic sentiment of the closing passage between Clive and Madame de Florac.

“Ethel. ‘You spoke quite scornfully of palaces, just now, Clive. I won’t say a word about the — the regard which you express for me. I think you have it. Indeed, I do. But it were best not said, Clive; best for me, perhaps, not to own that I know it. In your speeches, my poor boy — and you will please not make any more, or I never can see you or speak to you again, never — you forgot one part of a girl’s duty: obedience to her parents. They would never agree to my marrying any one below — any one whose union would not be advantageous in a worldly point of view. I never would give such pain to the poor father, or to the kind soul who has never said a harsh word to me since I was born. My grandmamma, too, is very kind in her way. I came to her of my own free will. When she said that she would leave me her fortune, do you think it was for myself alone that I was glad? My father’s passion is to make an estate, and all my brothers and sisters will be but slenderly portioned. Lady Kew said she would help them if I came to her — it is the welfare of those little people that depends upon me, Clive. Now do you see, brother, why you must speak to me so no more? There is the carriage. God bless you, dear Clive.’

“(Clive sees the carriage drive away after Miss Newcome has entered it without once looking up to the window where he stands. When it is gone he goes to the opposite windows of the salon, which are open, towards the garden. The chapel music begins to play from the convent, next door. As he hears it he sinks down, his head in his hands.)

“Enter Madame de Florac. (She goes to him with anxious looks.) ‘What hast thou, my child? Hast thou spoken?’

“Clive (very steadily). ‘Yes.’

“Madame de F. ‘And she loves thee? I know she loves thee.’

“Clive. ‘You hear the organ of the convent?’

“Madame de F. ‘Qu’as tu?’

“Clive. ‘I might as well hope to marry one of the sisters of yonder convent, dear lady.’ (He sinks down again and she kisses him.)

“Clive. ‘I never had a mother, but you seem like one.’

“Madame de F. ‘Mon fils! Oh, mon fils!”’

This is not melodrama; but it is the highest mood of the theatre, a supreme moment of genteel comedy that sends the play-goers home fancying they have been profoundly stirred. For the rest, does not Ethel talk a little too like an amateur of eighteenth-century English, who has been doing French exercises? Yet she is a genuine girl of the late forenoon or early afternoon of our century; a living personality; a true character, and a noble spirit in spite of her world. If you compare her with some of the bad characters of the book you may say she is not so good as Mrs. Mackenzie, the mother-in-law of Clive; but then there are very, very few women in fiction as good as that horrible shrew, who afflicts the reader with the same quality of pain that Clive and his father suffer from her. She is wonderfully done; she surpasses in her narrower sphere even Becky Sharp, and no goodness can, aesthetically, hold a candle to her badness. But I incline to think that the goodness of Ethel is artistically better than the badness of Lady Kew; and Ethel’s own touches of badness are extremely good. I am not sure that she is as perfectly done as poor, slight, sick Rosa, Clive’s wife, but she was much harder to do.

III

The heroines of the mid-century English novelists can hardly be considered in a distinct chronological order. The greatest of these novelists were contemporaries and were synchronously writing the books by which they were best known. Bulwer was still thought a prime talent and was producing his most pretentious fiction when Dickens was of world-wide fame, and Thackeray, always of less popularity than Dickens, had taken a higher place. By this time Kingsley had written “Alton Locke” and was soon to write “Hypatia.” George Eliot was beginning to make her way towards the primacy which she finally achieved; Charles Reade was corruscating with all the rockets and pin-wheels and Roman candles of his pseudo-realism; Trollope, a truer artist than any of them, was making himself known by the novels which, until we had Mr. Thomas Hardy’s and Mr. George Moore’s, reflected English life with a fidelity unapproached since that of Jane Austen’s books. Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, and others were coming forward in the second order of talents; the weird genius who gave us “Paul Ferroll “ had already made her vivid impression; from her isolation in the alien keeping of Bavaria, Baroness Tautphoeus had sent out that great and beautiful story, “The Initials,” a product as purely English as if not “made in Germany.” In the retrospect these writers seem simultaneous as well as contemporaneous, and one can as well be taken up first as another; but perhaps it will be generally allowed that the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte and Emily, have a peculiar right to early mention because of the fresh and emphatic character of their contribution to fiction, and I feel it peculiarly fit to speak of Charlotte Brontë after Thackeray because of the malignant error which connected her first novel with his name as a supposed “satire” of the man whom she idolized as a novelist, and because of the noble-minded kindness with which he received the shy girl after she had hurried to London to own “Jane Eyre” to her publisher, and to deny the monstrous imputation. There is somewhere a story of Thackeray sitting by while Charlotte Brontë read with silent tears a cruel review of her book, and ignoring her anguish with silent compassion, which is enough to make one sorry for not finding his fiction always as great as his nature. It makes me feel it in a sort my misfortune that I cannot now give my whole heart and soul in admiration of his work as I used in my younger days; it makes me almost regret the more perfect models of art which I have since known in Jane Austen, in Hawthorne, in George Eliot, in Anthony Trollope, in Thomas Hardy, in George Moore, in Zola and Maupassant and Flaubert, in Tourguénief and Tolstoy, in Galdôs and Valdés. How shall I venture to say, then, that no heroine of Thackeray’s except Becky Sharp seems to me quite so alive as the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Brontë, whom I do not class with him intellectually, any more than I class her artistically with the great novelists I have mentioned? She was the first English novelist to present the impassioned heroine; impassioned not in man’s sense, but woman’s sense, in which love purifies itself of sensuousness without losing fervor.

IV

From the beginning to the ending of her story, Jane Eyre moves a living and consistent soul; from the child we know grow the girl and woman we know, vivid, energic, passionate, as well as good, conscientious, devoted. It was a figure which might have well astonished and alarmed the little fastidious world of fifty years ago, far more smug and complacent than the larger world of to-day, and far more intolerant of any question of religious or social convention; and it is no wonder that the young author should have been attainted of immorality and infidelity, not to name that blacker crime, impropriety. In fact, it must be allowed that “Jane Eyre” does go rather far in a region where women’s imaginations are politely supposed not to wander; and the frank recognition of the rights of love as love, and its claims in Rochester as paramount to those of righteous self-will in St. John, is still a little startling. It is never pretended that Rochester is a good man, or that he is in any accepted sense worthy of the girl who listens so fearlessly to his account of the dubious life he has led. The most that can be said for him is that he truly values and loves her, and this is his best, his sole defence in his attempt to marry her while he still has a wife living under his own roof, a hopeless and horrible maniac. When the attempt is frustrated at the altar, and nothing remains for Jane Eyre but to be his on the only possible terms, or to fly, it is not feigned that she is not for a moment tempted. She loves him and she is tempted, but only for a moment, and then she chooses the right, owning that the wrong has allured her with a courage that was once very novel, but without a suggestion of the pruriency which has often characterized later fiction (especially the fiction of women) in dealing with like situations.

In this as in other essentials “Jane Eyre” is unsparingly human, and when Jane has got away from Rochester, and finds herself unexpectedly among her kindred, and even rich and independént, she does not prefer a loveless marriage, hallowed by the most exalted motives, with her cousin St. John, but elects rather to go back and seek out the man she loves, and when she has found him opportunely widowed by the disaster that has maimed and blinded him, to marry him. She offers no defence, and one must confess that the close of the story is not ideal. No part of the story, in fact, is so good as the beginning, where the hapless little orphan substantiates herself to us in the hard keeping of her cruel aunt and cousins; and in my second reading of the novel I have not been so much moved by the love-making between Jane and Rochester as I must have been when I first read it fifty years ago.

Rochester is of the forceful type of lover, and he seems scarcely so interesting as the plain little governess of his natural daughter thinks him, and as a whole contemporaneous generation of young girls once thought him. He has passed with his kind, and with several successive kinds; but in his time, as I have said, he was a true lover, and he began to be in love with Jane as soon as she with him. He likes her better than the insolent young ladies of his own rank whom he asks to his house, and with the proudest and coldest of whom he has some thoughts of committing bigamy before he attempts it with Jane? But neither at this time nor at that last time when she seeks him out, blind and maimed, is he so satisfactory in his part of hero as she in hers of heroine. Perhaps a hero who has been both punished and martyred is a little difficult to the imagination; and a hero who is condescending in his love is not much easier. But before this there is a signal moment when the lovers are unconsciously trembling towards each other, and are precipitated into consciousness of their passion by one of the grisly catastrophes of the story, which is illustrative of character in each; and I think that at least its older readers will like to see them in this moment again, though some young readers may think them a little old-fashioned, meeting them in it for the first time.

Jane has already heard a wild laugh from that part of the house where the crazy wife is confined, unknown to her, when on a certain night the lunatic makes her escape from her keeper; and the girl has gone to bed with vague, melancholy thoughts of Rochester. “But it was not fated that I should sleep that night. A dream had scarcely approached my ear, when... a demoniac laugh — low, suppressed, and deep — was uttered, as it seemed, at the very key-hole of my chamber door. The head of my bed was near the door, and I thought at first the goblin laugher stood at my bedside — or, rather, crouched by my pillow; but I rose, looked round, and could see nothing; while, as I gazed, the unnatural sound was reiterated, and I knew it came from behind the panels.... Something gurgled and moaned. Ere long, steps retreated up the gallery, toward the third-story staircase:... There was a candle burning just outside, left on the matting of the gallery.... I was amazed to perceive the air quite dim, as if filled with smoke.... Something creaked; it was a door ajar, and that door was Mr. Rochester’s, and the smoke rushed in a cloud from thence.... In an instant I was within the chamber. Tongues of flame darted round the bed: the curtains were on fire. In the midst of the blaze and vapor Mr. Rochester lay stretched motionless, in deep sleep. ‘Wake, wake!’ I cried. I shook him, but he only murmured and turned: the smoke had stupefied him. Not a moment could be lost: the very sheets were kindling. I rushed to his basin and ewer; fortunately the one was wide and the other was deep, and both were filled with water. I heaved them up, and deluged the bed and its occupant.... The hiss of the quenched element,... the splash of the shower bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr. Rochester at last. Though it was now dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water. ‘Is there a flood?’ he cried. ‘No, sir,’ I answered, ‘but there has been a fire.’... ‘In the name of all the elves of Christendom, is that Jane Eyre?... Have you plotted to drown me?’  ‘I will fetch you a candle, sir; and in Heaven’s name get up. Somebody has plotted something: you cannot too soon find out who and what it is.’  ‘There, I am up, now; but at your peril you fetch a candle yet: wait two minutes till I get into some dry garments, if any dry there be — yes, here is my dressing-gown; now run!’ I did run; I brought the candle which still remained in the gallery. He took it from my hand, surveyed the bed, blackened and scorched, the sheets drenched, the carpet round swimming in water. ‘What is it and who did it?’ he asked.... I briefly related to him what had transpired.... He listened very gravely; his face as I went on expressed more concern than astonishment.... ‘You have a shawl on?... Wrap it about you, and sit down in the arm-chair; there — I will put it on.... I am going to leave you a few minutes. I shall take the candle.... I must pay a visit to the second story.

Don’t move, remember, or call any one.’ He went: I watched the light withdraw. He passed up the gallery very softly, unclosed the staircase door with as little noise as possible, shut it after him, and the last ray vanished. I was left in total darkness.... A very long time elapsed.... I was on the point of risking Mr. Rochester’s displeasure by disobeying his orders, when a light once more gleamed dimly on the gallery wall, and I heard his unshod feet tread the matting.... He re-entered, pale and very gloomy. ‘I have found it all out,’ said he, setting his candle down on the wash-stand; ‘it is as I thought.... You are no talking fool; say nothing about it. I will account for this state of affairs ‘(pointing to the bed): ‘and now retire to your own room. I shall do very well on the sofa in the library for the rest of the night.’... ‘Good-night, then, sir,’ said I, departing.... ‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you quitting me already, and in that way? Why, you have saved my life! — and you walk past me as if we were mutual strangers! At least shake hands.’ He held out his hand; I gave him mine: he took it first in one, then in both his. ‘I knew,’ he continued, ‘you would do me good, in some way, at some time; — I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not ‘ — (again he stopped)— ‘did not’ (he proceeded hastily) ‘strike delight to my inmost heart for nothing. People talk of mutual natural sympathies; I have heard of Good Genii: there are grains of truth in the wildest fable. My cherished preserver, good-night.’ Strange energy was in his voice, strange fire was in his look. ‘I am glad I happened to be awake,’ I said, and then I was going. ‘What, will you go!’  ‘I am cold, sir.’  ‘Cold? Yes, and standing in a pool. Go, then, Jane, go! But he still retained my hand, and I could not free it. I bethought myself of an expedient. ‘I think I hear Mrs. Fairfax move, sir,’ said I. ‘Well, leave me,’ He relaxed his fingers and I was gone.”

V

Old-fashioned, I have suggested; but now, after reading this passage, I find that hardly the word. It is oldfashioned only in the sense of being very simple, and of a quaint sincerity. The fact is presented, the tremendous means are used, with almost childlike artlessness; but the result is of high novelty. Few would have had the courage to deal so frankly with the situation, to chance its turning ludicrous, or would have had the skill to unfold its fine implications of tenderness, and keep them undamaged by the matter-of-fact details. But Charlotte Bronte did all this, and did it out of the resources of her own unique experience of life, which never presented itself in the light of common day, but came to her through strange glooms, and in alternations of native solitude and alien multitude, at Haworth and in Brussels. The whole story, so deeply of nature, is steeped in the supernatural; and just as paradoxically the character of Jane Eyre lacks that final projection from the author which is the supreme effect of art, only because she feels it so intensely that she cannot detach it from herself.

THE TWO CATHARINES OF EMILY BRONTÈ

THE heroines of Charlotte Brontë’s other books made no such impression upon her public as Jane Eyre, but perhaps one heroine of the first rank is enough for one author; so many authors have invented no memorable heroine at all. “Jane Eyre “ was an epochal book, assembling in itself the elements of that electrical disturbance which had been gathering in the minds of women for a generation, and discharging them in a type, a character, which expressed their discontent with their helplessness, their protest against their conditions, their longing for equality with men, as from time to time some real or imaginary personality will. It is extremely interesting, viewed in this light, and if it expressed the weakness that is always seeking to be at rest in strength, or to be changed directly or indirectly into strength, then the fact has its own pathos, which every true man must respect.

Rochester is such a man as most women, or most girls, would like to be when they Oh to be men. They would like to be rough if they cannot be strong on other terms; they would even be wicked if they must, and would willingly suffer for their wickedness if only so they could be strong. But failing all this, they would at least like to be the sort of woman or sort of girl who is indispensable and vitally essential to strength, as Jane Eyre is in her relation to Rochester. The pity is that they should not see that Jane is really strong, and Rochester is really weak; but Jane does not see this herself, and it is doubtful whether her author saw it. What she and her lonely sisters worshipped in the dreary vicarage at Haworth was manly strength; but from the father and brother, who were the only men they knew, they could not imagine this apart from wilfulness and caprice and error; and so they gave us Rochester in “Jane Eyre,” and Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights,” with women to suffer for them, and to illustrate or inspire their power. Charlotte Bronte created the impassioned heroine, as I have called Jane Eyre, and Emily Brontë created the lawless heroine, like the two Catharines; but all their heroines measurably shared in the fascination which brutality, the false image of strength, seems to have for weakness. In these characters they changed the ideal of fiction for many a long day, and established the bulked heroine in a supremacy which she held till the sinuous heroine began softly but effectually to displace her.

I

The heroines of Emily Brontë have not the artistic completeness of Charlotte Brontë’s. They are blocked out with hysterical force, and in their character there is something elemental, as if, like the man who beat and browbeat them, they too were close to the savagery of nature. The sort of supernaturalism which appears here and there in their story wants the refinement of the telepathy and presentiment which play a part in Jane Eyre, but it is still more effectual in the ruder clutch which it lays upon the fancy.

In her dealing with the wild passion of Heathcliff for the first Catharine, Emily Brontë does not keep even such slight terms with convention as Charlotte does in the love of Rochester and Jane Eyre; but this fierce longing, stated as it were in its own language, is still farther from anything that corrupts or tempts; it is as wholesome and decent as a thunder-storm, in the consciousness of the witness. The perversities of the mutual attraction of the lovers are rendered without apparent sense on the part of the author that they can seem out of nature, so deeply does she feel them to be in nature, and there is no hint from her that they need any sort of proof. It is vouchsafed us to know that Heathcliff is a foundling of unknown origin, early fixed in his hereditary evils by the cruelty of Hindley Earnshaw, whose father has adopted him; but it is not explained why he should have his malign power upon Catharine. Perhaps it is enough that she is shown a wilful, impetuous, undisciplined girl, whose pity has been moved for the outcast before her fancy is taken. After that we are told what happens and are left to account for it as we may.

We are very badly told, in terms of autobiography thrice involved. First, we have the narrative of Heathcliff’s tenant, then within his the narrative of the tenant’s housekeeper, as she explains the situation she has witnessed at Heathcliff’s house, and then within hers the several narratives of the actors in the tragedy. Seldom has a great romance been worse contrived, both as to generals and particulars, but the essentials are all there, and the book has a tremendous vitality. If it were of the fashion of any other book, it might have passed away, but it is of its own fashion solely, and it endures like a piece of the country in which its scenes are laid, enveloped in a lurid light and tempestuous atmosphere of its own. Its people are all of extreme types, and yet they do not seem unreal, like the extravagant creations of Dickens’s fancy; they have an intense and convincing reality, the weak ones, such as Heathcliff’s wife and son, equally with’ the powerful, such as Heathcliff himself and the Catharines, mother and daughter. A weird malevolence broods over the gloomy drama, and through all plays a force truly demoniacal, with scarcely the relief of a moment’s kindliness. The facts are simply conceived, and stated without shadow of apology or extenuation; and the imagination from which they sprang cannot adequately be called morbid, for it deals with the brute motives employed without a taint of sickly subjectiveness. The author remains throughout superior to her material; her creations have all a distinct projection, and in this Emily Brontë shows herself a greater talent than Charlotte, who is never quite detached from her heroine, but is always trammelled in sympathy with Jane Eyre, with whom she is united by ties of a like vocation and experience, as governess. You feel that she is present in all Jane’s sufferings, small and great, if not in her raptures; but Emily Brontë keeps as sternly aloof from both her Catharines as from Heathcliff himself. She bequeathed the world at her early death a single book of as singular power as any in fiction; and proved herself, in spite of its defective technique, a great artist, of as realistic motive and ideal as any who have followed her.

II

It is not easy to gather up the thread of the story from the several narratives within narratives and find one’s way by the tangled clew to the close. But after Earnshaw brings home from Liverpool the gypsy foundling whom his son hates and misuses he dies, and as this son sinks more and more into drunkenness, it is natural and fated that his wilful sister Catharine should pity the dark, silent boy, who repays her pity with all the passion of his turbulent heart When they are no longer girl and boy, and it is a question of her loving Heathcliff, she marries if she does not love Edgar Linton, of her own rank and kind, and Heathcliff, returning from years of self-exile, marries Isabella Linton, against her brother’s will and without the pretence of love. His brute force fascinates the slight, romantic coquette, and she dies of his cruelty, leaving a son in whose feeble soul her folly centres, with an infusion of the father’s malevolence. Catharine dies, and her daughter Catharine inherits her waywardness without her powerful will, which could bend even Heathcliff’s. He, by his ruthless cleverness, comes to dominate Hindley Earnshaw through Earnshaw’s besetting sin, and gathers the estate into his own control, pushing aside the heir, Hareton Earnshaw, whom he has imbruted, as Hareton’s father imbruted him in his time, and kept ignorant as a peasant and even more savage. After Catharine’s death he schemes to marry her daughter to his son, and so come into the Linton property as well. In spite of Edgar Linton, the broken and dying father, he succeeds in enticing the girl to his house again and again, and he does finally effect the union of the children, while they are yet scarcely more than children. His son dies, and then Cathy lives with Heathcliff, a terrorized torment, till Heathcliff dies too, hated as he has been by all except the hapless Hareton Earnshaw, whom he has abused and defrauded, but who truly laments him. The reader is left to forecast a marriage between Hareton and Cathy, whom he has always loved, but who has outrageously mocked and insulted him.

Within this outline the author makes it not only possible but imperative for the reader to believe that in rural England of the mid-century savageries were of occurrence among people of not ungentle condition, and atrocious wrongs were perpetrated, such as would be incredible without her compelling magic, though things like them are well enough known to science Throughout there is a dumb ache in the witness for help against Heathcliff, whose infernal will fulfils itself in spite of everything, and whose cunning intrenches him so safely that he does not defy so much as boldly ignore the laws under which other men live. Once or twice he is in danger of them, but chance as well as his own hardihood and subtlety befriend him; and when he dies successful in all his purposes, and dominant over all those he has put under him, a thrill of perverse sympathy with him softens the reader’s heart. Heathcliff is a great creation, but the women of the story are imagined with truth as great, and to hardly less tremendous effect. I am not sure indeed that the effect in the case of the first Catharine is less tremendous at all times, or at least I should be puzzled to match with any scene in which he rules certain passages where she is the chief figure. The reader will perhaps have in mind, as I have, their meeting when Catharine has been sick wellnigh to death from the quarrel between Heathcliff and her husband, and Heathcliff, always lurking about Linton’s house, makes his forbidden entrance, and finds his way to her room. It is Mrs. Dean, the housekeeper, who tells the tale in this part.

“He did not hit the right door directly; she motioned to me to admit him, but he found it ere I could reach the door, and in a stride or two he was at her side, and had grasped her in his arms. He neither spoke nor loosed his hold for some five minutes, during which period he bestowed more kisses than ever he gave in his life before, I dare say: but then my mistress had kissed him first, and I plainly saw that he could hardly bear, for downright agony, to look in her face.... ‘Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! How can I bear it?’ was the first sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise his despair.... ‘What now?’ said Catharine, leaning back and returning his look with a suddenly clouded brow: her humor was a mere vane for constantly varying caprices. ‘You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff. And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if were the people to be pitied! I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me, and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?’ Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to support her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair and kept him down. ‘I wish I could hold you,’ she bitterly continued, ‘till we were both dead. I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say, twenty years hence, “That’s the grave of Catharine Earnshaw. I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her, but that’s past I’ve loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and at death I shall not rejoice that I am going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them.” Will you say that, Heathcliff?’  ‘Don’t torture me till I’m as mad as yourself,’ cried he, wrenching his head free and grinding his teeth..... While raising himself with one hand, he had taken her arm with the other; and so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colorless skin. ‘Are you possessed with a devil?’ he pursued savagely, ‘to talk in that manner to me when you are dying? You know you lie When you say that I have killed you; and, Catharine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my own existence! Is it not sufficient for your infernal selfishness that while you are at peace I shall writhe in the torments of hell?” I shall not be at peace,’ moaned Catharine, recalled to a sense of physical weakness by the violent, unequal throbbing of her heart, which beat visibly and audibly under this excess of agitation. She said nothing farther till the paroxysm was over; then she continued more kindly— ‘I’m not wishing you greater torment than I have, Heathcliff. I only wish us never to be parted....

Won’t you come here again? Do!’ Heathcliff went back to her chair and leant over her, but not so far as to let her see his face, which was livid with emotion. She bent round to look at him: he would not permit it: turning abruptly, he walked to the fireplace, where he stood silent with his back towards us.... In her eagerness she rose, and supported herself on the arm of her chair. At that earnest appeal he turned to her.... An instant they held asunder; and then how they met I hardly knew, but Catharine made a spring and he caught her, and they were locked in an embrace from which I thought my mistress would never be released alive.... She put up her hand to clasp his neck, and bring his cheek to her own.... ‘You teach me now how cruel you have been — cruel and false. Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me and cry; and wring out my tears and kisses: they’ll blight you, they’ll damn you. You loved me — then what right had you to leave me? What right — answer me — for the poor fancy you felt for Linton?’... ‘Let me alone. Let me alone,’ sobbed Catharine. ‘If I’ve done wrong, I’m dying for it. It is enough. You left me too, but I won’t upbraid you. I forgive you; forgive me!’  ‘It is hard to forgive, and look at those eyes, and feel these wasted hands,’ he answered. ‘Kiss me again, and don’t let me see your eyes! I can forgive you for what you’ve done to me. I love my murderer — but yours! How can I?’ They were silent — their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other’s tears. ‘Service is over,’ I announced. ‘My master will be here in half an hour.’ Heathcliff groaned a curse, and strained Catharine closer: she never stirred.... ‘Now he is here.’

I exclaimed. ‘For heaven’s sake hurry down. You’ll not meet any one at the front stairs. “ I must go, Cathy,’ said Heathcliff, seeking to extricate himself from his companion’s arms.... ‘You must not go!’ she answered, holding him as firmly as her strength allowed. ‘You shall not, I tell you.’ He would have risen, and unfixed her fingers by the act; she clung fast, gasping. ‘No!’ she shrieked. ‘Oh, don’t, don’t go! It is the last time! Edgar will not hurt us. Heathcliff, I shall die! I shall die!’  ‘Damn the fool! There he is!’ cried Heathcliff, sinking back into his seat. ‘Hush, my darling! Hush, hush, Catharine! I’ll stay. If he shot me so, I’d expire with a blessing on my lips.’... Edgar sprang to his unbidden guest, blanched with astonishment and rage. What he meant to do I cannot tell; however, the other stopped all demonstrations at once by placing the lifeless form in his arms. ‘Look there!’ he said; ‘unless you be a fiend, help her first — then you shall speak to me.’”

III

It might be thought that Catharine Linton was sufficiently involved in her ungoverned impulses; but her daughter Catharine is of a still more labyrinthine lawlessness. She has her father’s violent temperament, as well as his complexion; her malice, if qualities can be assigned a tint, is peculiarly blond, while her mother’s fury was brunette. She lends herself to Heathcliff’s purposes by her disobedience to her father, and first puts herself in his power by a romantic fancy for his weakling son, whom she only despises when Heathcliff has forced their marriage, and her husband willingly and even gladly abandons her to his father’s barbarity. She effectively lives Heathcliff’s prisoner till he dies, but she never yields in spirit to him, though quelled by blows into a literal submission; and from time to time she breaks out into reckless taunts and defiances. It is an exposition of woman’s nature unparalleled in some traits. She has been delicately bred in her father’s house, and educated, if not disciplined; she would be expected to have the instincts of a class; but she seems not to feel the insult of Heathcliff’s blows so much as to dread the mere pain; and you cannot help believing these are the facts of the case. You know it to be also true that he never relents to her out of tenderness for her mother’s memory; and that in the mere wantonness of her power she is quite capable of lacerating the proud, ignorant soul of the only man who could have protected her against his ferocity. Surely that side of a girl’s nature was never so unsparingly studied as in the love-making between Hareton and Catharine, who first rouses all the wild beast in him by laughing at his crude attempts to learn from her teaching, and then tames it to her will by the arts which her growing fancy for him inspires.

“Earnshaw sat, morose as usual, at the chimney comer, and my little mistress was beguiling an idle hour with drawing pictures on the window-panes, varying her amusement by smothered bursts of songs, and whispered ejaculations, and quick looks of annoyance and impatience in the direction of her cousin, who steadfastly smoked and looked into the grate.... Presently I heard her begin, ‘I’ve found out, Hareton, that I want — that I’m glad — that I should like you to be my cousin now, if you had not grown so cross to me and so rough.’ Hareton returned no answer.... ‘Let me take that pipe,’ she said, cautiously advancing her hand and abstracting it from his mouth. Before he could attempt to recover it, it was broken and behind the fire. He swore at her and seized another. ‘Stop,’ she cried; ‘you must listen to me first, and I can’t speak while those clouds are floating in my face.’  ‘Will you go to the devil!’ he exclaimed, ferociously, ‘and let me be!’  ‘No,’ she persisted, ‘I won’t. Come, you shall take notice of me, Hareton: you are my cousin, and you shall own me.’  ‘I shall have nothing to do with you and your mucky pride, and your damned mocking tricks. Side o’ t’ gate, now, this minute!’ Catharine frowned, and retreated to the window-seat, chewing her lip, and endeavoring, by humming an eccentric tune, to conceal a growing tendency to sob.... ‘You hate me, as much as Mr. Heathcliff does, and more.” You’re a damned liar,’ began Earnshaw. ‘Why have I made him angry, by taking your part, a hundred times? And that when you sneered at me and despised me, and—’

‘I didn’t know you took my part,’ she answered, drying her eyes, ‘and I was miserable, and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?’ She returned to the hearth and frankly extended her hand. He blackened and scowled like a thunder-cloud, and kept his fists resolutely clinched, and his gaze fixed on the ground. Catharine, by instinct, must have divined that it was obdurate perversity and not dislike that prompted this dogged conduct, for, after remaining an instant undecided, she stooped and impressed on his cheek a gentle kiss.... ‘Say you forgive me, Hareton, do. You can make me so happy by speaking that little word,’ He muttered something inaudible. ‘And you’ll be my friend?’ added Catharine, interrogatively. ‘Nay, you’ll be ashamed of me every day of your life,’ he answered, ‘and the more ashamed the more you know me, THE TWO CATHARINES OF EMILY BRONTÉ and I cannot bide it.’  ‘So you won’t be my friend?’ she said, smiling as sweet as honey and creeping close up.”

No one can deny the charm of this, the absolute reality, the consummate art, which is still art, however unconscious. Did the dying girl who wrote the strange book, where it is only one of so many scenes of unfaltering truth, know how great it was, with all its defects? In any case criticism must recognize its mastery and rejoice in its courage.

VOLUME II.

CHARLES KINGSLEY’S HYPATIA

THE interest felt in the novels of the Brontë sisters was from the first intensely personal, and it grew more and more personal, as the veil was lifted from their pathetic lives, and the close relation between what they had written and what they had been was seen. In the average unliterary mind the relation between the author and his work is always a thing to be taken for granted. He is identified with this or that person in the fiction, and if the reader of average unliterary mind has the chance of speaking to him about his story, he will say, “There, where the girl comes to you, and you tell her,” or the like Sometimes this is amusing, and sometimes it is dismaying; in any case it is useless for the author to protest; and it is not very good business for him to do so. The average unliterary reader loves him and his work, according as he finds him personally in it, or believes he finds him.

This passion was fed full in the case of the Brontës, and they were taken to the hearts of their readers as few authors have been. Their books were in fact very personal to themselves. Charlotte may be easily and probably associated with the nature if not the character and experience of Jane Eyre; she can hardly be dissociated from it; and if in the more detached and dramatic story of “Wuthering Heights,” Emily cannot be so unfailingly identified with this or that person, yet there is an identity in the animate and inanimate environment of her life and that of the people in “ Withering Heights “ which is quite as satisfying to the average unliterary mind. She had not and could not have the world-wide worship of her sister; but her cult was of a more fervent devotion, with the zeal and the spiritual pride of a small sect in it; and doubtless many a bruised and prisoned spirit wreaked its bitterness in the wild turbulence, the lawless violence, of “ Wuthering Heights” which could not find outlet even in the revolt of “Jane Eyre” against the social and religious formalism of the time. But perhaps because personal merit triumphs in that book over all adverse circumstances it was dearer to more hearts, and the author was dearer; for people like to see virtue rewarded. It is at least certain that it was personal to more hearts, and it stands, better than “ Wuthering Heights,” which is a struggle with fate, for the personal insurrection against convention, which in some sort or other is always active.

The insurrection against society in the larger sense is less pervasive because it is of more alarming implication, but this too is perpetual; and at the same time that “Jane Eyre” was stirring the world’s sympathy for a young girl striving single-handed with unkindness and temptation, there was another book making its powerful appeal for justice in behalf of all those who have not against those who have, for the toilers against the idlers, for famine against surfeit, for mass against class, for manhood against moneyhood.

I

One of the most striking things in Charles Kingsley’s “ Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet” is the modernity of the problems involved, the conditions combated, the terms of the contest, and the very language in which they are stated. The book is on this side palpitantly actual, though the literary attitude is so old-fashioned and outdated. The Chartist agitation of fifty years ago is mirrored in the Socialist aspiration of the present day; its aims are effectively the same, its means the same, its vocabulary the same, and neither the reasons nor the unreasons with which it was then met have since changed. Its quarrel is now less with aristocracy and more with plutocracy; but these were always really convertible if not identical, and now the quarrel is more directly with capital because class without capital is no longer to be feared. The one great matter in which the new industrial rebellion differs from the old is in its attitude towards religion; but this change has taken place less through the hearts of the toilers than through the hearts of the teachers. The church has risen to an ideal of Christianity which was intuitive with the world of work and need; and it was already beginning to imagine its duty in the modem industrial conditions when “Alton Locke” was written. How much that book had to do with clarifying its conception of this duty it would not be easy to say; but we can make sure of the fact that “Alton Locke” has been potent as a twofold protest: first against the cruel exploitation of labor, and second against the misdirected resentment of the sufferers. Its insurrection is on a far broader ground, and with a much wider intention than that of “ Jane Eyre.” It is human and that is personal; but because humanity is still so much weaker than personality, it has probably influenced vastly fewer readers. Then, it has failed of equal influence, undoubtedly, because it is not of equal art. It is a polemic, in which all the characters, of whatever party they apparently are, are always arguing for the author. They stand for this thing or that, but they have not risen of themselves; they are where they are because he put them there. English fiction is for the most part still in the stage of allegory, though there were always masters who could teach it the higher function of drama. Charles Kingsley was not of these masters, at least in “Alton Locke,” and he was too didactic by nature and by culture ever to be simply representative. He is trying to carry a point, to enforce a truth, rather than to show it and let it enforce itself. In “ Alton Locke,” the hero, who speaks for himself in the autobiographical form, is really a character, a person; Kingsley always dealt well with the literary type, its consciousness, its conceit, its self-distrust, its timid selfishness, and its bursts of enthusiasm; but the others are merely frameworks actuated directly from the author, doing the things they are expected to do. This is especially true of the two women who must stand for the heroines. Neither Lillian Winnstay, the shallow-hearted, romantic beauty, who flatters the poor poet by her pleasure in his verse and his picturesque personality, nor Eleanor Staunton, who snubs him for his good, but is really his friend, and the faithful friend of all the poor, is more than an illustration. They have their being, not in a world of law, but a world of special providences (the world of nearly all English fiction), and they do what it happens to them to do, and for the effect upon Alton Locke, whom they are to teach that if the upper classes are sometimes self-absorbed they are also sometimes self-devoted. This was a useful thing enough, and something that not only a burning-hearted orator and agitator like Alton Locke could profitably realize, but that all the struggling and suffering lower classes would do well to understand; yet it was not a thing that could give them dramatic projection, apparently, beyond the will of their creator. Lillian Winnstay was of rather more palpable sub CHARLES KINGSLEY’S HYPATIA stance than Eleanor Staunton, and in her more complex behavior she achieves something like the complexity of a real character. She is at least not exemplary, and so far she is saved from the worst that can befall a type in fiction, or perhaps in life. In a book so largely devoted to making it clear that the church is not the enemy but the true friend if not sole hope of the poor, it is much to have her the daughter of a dean; and it is in the interest of her reality that she is kept from anything worse than an intellectual flirtation with the sweat-shop poet, or from anything but an æsthetical appreciation of his picturesqueness.

II

It is a curious fact that a sort of imagination, like that of a poet, and especially such a poet as Kingsley was, can somehow give its creations greater verisimilitude by putting them back in time, where they may be posed in an arbitrary light, with a setting unquestioned by the familiar experiences and associations of the reader. For this reason Hypatia in the novel of her name is more lifelike than Eleanor Staunton, and her foil Pelagia is more lifelike than Eleanor Staunton’s foil, Lillian Winnstay. Hypatia is really a young lady of the early eighteen-fifties, of the time when young ladies of her type were crudely called strong - minded. She was a sort of Alexandrian Margaret Fuller, with more good looks than our transcendental muse could pretend to; but not of a loftier ideal, a purer soul, a more “orphic utterance.” She was a woman - version of Julian the Apostate, and she was born in Athens and lived and lectured at Alexandria not long after that paganizing reactionary failed to persuade the world that there was something in the old mythology or philosophy. She had a large following of cultured and gilded youth, but the mob, led on by the turbulent monks of the city, under the countenance of the patriarch Cyril, rose in tumult against her, and she was tom to pieces by the Christian zealots. So far history, with whose elements our poet (and Kingsley was a very true if not a very great poet) deals as he may and will, and reconstructs in a figure of at least as much recognizable reality as the heroines of his novels of modem life.

It cannot be said by the unprejudiced reader that his Hypatia is an attractive personality. He has somehow failed to give her charm, though he has given her a beautiful body, perfectly moulded features, with blue eyes and yellow hair, and a glorious intellect. But the truth is his Hypatia remains as cold as the baths of Apollo, and it is not going too far to say that she is rather repellent. Of course she might answer that she did not mean to be otherwise, in her poet’s hands, and that what he had shown her, that she was: rather arrogant in mind, holding matrimony in high scorn, and thinking but little better, if any, of maternity. The passion of the ardent young monk Philammon for this snow-cold divinity is not made altogether credible, and his sister, poor, pretty Pelagia, who has lived the life of a wanton and is presently the paramour of the Gothic chief Amal, is more winning in some things that take the heart. She is passionately faithful to her huge, stupid, honest Goth, and she is kind to every one else, with a willingness to see people happy even if they are not virtuous. She is spiritually modest, and at least unconscious in her other immodesty. When she is awakened through the dim memories of childhood to the fact that she and Philammon are sister and brother, long ago carried captive from Athens and sold into slavery, she tries hard to let the monk bring her to a conviction of sin. But though she is good Christian enough to believe in hell, she also believes in God, and thinks He will take into consideration the peculiar circumstances under which she remains constant to Amal, whom the customs of the Goth’s tribe will not suffer to marry her.

In all this Pelagia is certainly not a better woman than Hypatia; but she is a more lovable nature, and she does not make Hypatia’s fatal mistake of trying to transcend her own nature. Hypatia would have married the faithless prefect Orestes in the hope of restoring the old Greek faith, though in her neoplatonism she is as passionless as he is faithless. Her author deals intelligently with her, but somehow he fails to deal impressively, and, as regards the reader’s sympathy or even interest, he fails to deal successfully. It may be that he suffers himself to be too strictly trammelled by history — the historical romance must not, of all things, be historical — and does not give his imagination free play in her character. In any case she remains a woman without warmth of heart, that supreme mode of motion, without heat even of intellect. She cannot, therefore, impart movement to the figures of the drama around her and centring in her. The Alexandria of the fifth century is a great scene, with its wild monks ‘doing the will of the bigoted Cyril, and wreaking their fanaticism now upon the Jews and now upon the pagans; with its Roman prefect seeking to hold the turbulent population in check alternately by tyranny and flattery; with its belated schools of Greek philosophy; with its church already sunk into superstition and corruption; with its swarming masses of every race and color, the prey of every lawless impulse from within and without, effete and hysterical, violent and cruel, kept from famine by public doles of food, and amused by bloody public shows at once pitiless and shameless; and “Hypatia” is Kingsley’s endeavor and his failure to fuse all these warring elements into a dramatic whole. In spite of his admirable conception of the situation, his learning, his poetic insight, they will not respond to his intention. They remain dispersed, as they might not if they had been grouped about a central figure of more cohesive power. But all the different particles seem to crumble away from the repellent nature of the heroine, whose fate the spectator beholds with compassion certainly, but with more horror than compassion. On a far higher plane than Bulwer’s work in “The Last Days of Pompeii,” Kingsley’s work in “Hypatia” falls below it in artistic effect; for Bulwer, cheap as he was, was at least a melodramatist, while Kingsley was no dramatist at all, but an exalted moralist willing to borrow the theatre for the ends of the church. If we realize this we shall understand why his figures seem to have come out of the property-room by way of the vestry. Orestes, the debauched Roman prefect, believing neither in the gods nor the saints, but willing to propitiate the friends of either as they shall serve the turn of his ambition; Miriam, the haggish slave-dealer, who knows the common paternity of Pelagia and Philammon, and is the mother of Orestes’s boon companion, the brilliant Jewish sceptic and cynic Raphael Aben-Ezra, partner of Orestes’s passion for the snow-cold Hypatia, and destined to a true Christian conversion; Theon, the Heavy Father of Hypatia, who consents for his sake as well as her own ambition to listen to the suit of Orestes; the whole tribe of monkish and prelatic fanatics; the forty Gothic barbarians stalking large and blond through the scene, and casually hewing down enough miscreants of every tradition and persuasion to satisfy the bloodthirstiest reader; the hermits and fathers of the desert; and the various soldiers, students, porters, slaves, and singing and dancing women who thickly people the scene, all affect us like old friends from beyond the foot-lights. The conception is not wanting in originality; it is the performance which seems somehow second-hand in most cases. The affair has many dramatic moments; it often promises to be a drama, but it never quite is so. As a representation of antique life closer to our own than either that of “Quo Vadis “ or “The Last Days of Pompeii,” it lacks as much the brute plethora and intensity of the one as the histrionic knack of the other; and yet the message it conveys is more vital than that of either. It realizes to us that human motives and passions are immutably the same in all times and places; that philosophy perishes in spite of its beauty and truth, and that religion survives in spite of its ugliness and falsehood, because it takes account of the things of the soul and philosophy cares only for the things of the mind. It teaches that the Christianity of the nineteenth century as well as the fifth needs to be saved from itself before it can save the world, but that it alone can save the world.

Kingsley was a poet — I am always saying that — and he passionately loved the artistic presence of the antique world. He was one of those Hellenizing English minds of whom Keats was the first and finest, and he stood in some such relation to the pagan past as one of the earliest Greek Christians might, feeling the beauty of its ideality while abhorring its sensuality. He was very fit indeed to write a much better story of the zealots and sophists of Alexandria than he actually wrote in “Hypatia,” and I still think it was through his heroine that he failed. If I fail to prove this, and any reader recurring to the book after many years, or coming newly to it, shall find it greater than I have found it in my second reading, I shall rejoice, and save myself by making my critic observe that I always said the author was a poet.

III

Kingsley himself recognizes a difficulty in rehabilitating to the fancy the period he has chosen, and this difficulty lies in the impossibility of telling all about paganism. He could tell the worst about Christianity, but without a statement of the unnamable iniquities which the old faith suffered if it did not foster there could be no sufficient contrast of the two. In paganism there could be no conviction of sin; there could be offences against the will or the dignity of the gods, but none against the spirit of righteousness, such as quicken the soul of the offender to repentance; and in like manner there could be no such meekness of heart as attributes its virtue to some source of goodness outside itself. Hypatia’s enthusiasm for the pagan philosophy must ignore the foulness of the pagan life; and her stainless personal purity must rejoice in itself as the effect of her own will. She has but two passions, or rather one, for ambition includes jealousy, and she is envious of the witchery which Pelagia has for the hearts of men, and cannot bear that the dancing-woman should enjoy the triumph which she herself disdains. She has her following of those who can adore beauty that lectures and illumines, but she must have all, or at least she cannot suffer that her rival should have any.

It will have been seen that Hypatia, after all, does not escape being a woman; she is, indeed, the more a woman in failing, and it is in the throes of her self-recognized limitations that the heart warms to her a little. Hypatia angered that Pelagia should be the supreme attraction of the spectacle that the prefect is planning, is at least more tolerable than Hypatia refusing to let Pelagia profit by her teaching, even at the prayer of her beloved pupil Philammon, because she will not have her own purity contaminated by Pelagia’s presence. In her former mood she is at the worst sincere, but in the latter mood she is at the best not credible even if she is sincere. It is hard to see what side of Hypatia is accessible to sympathy, but the terrible spectacle of her death must inspire compassion. This acquires reality rather from the passions of her murderers than from any quality of her own; and it is difficult to conceive of her even as a living impersonation of intellectual pride suffering martyrdom. Is not she rather a statue to a belated ideal, thrown down and broken to pieces by the sanguinary zealots of another faith? It is hard even to believe in Philammon, her pupil and lover, who has turned monk again, but who deserts his brethren to warn her of their hate, and to save her from their fury, as she appears after her lecture, in the street where they are lurking.

“At last a curricle, glittering with silver, rattled round the corner and stopped opposite him.... A slave brought forth an embroidered cushion, and then Hypatia herself came forth, looking more glorious than ever; her lips set in a sad, firm smile; her eyes uplifted, inquiring, eager, and yet gentle, dimmed by some great inward awe, as if her soul were far away aloft, and face to face with God. In a moment he sprang to her, caught her robe convulsively, threw himself on his knees before her. ‘Stop! Stay! You are going to destruction!’ Calmly she looked down upon him. ‘Accomplice of witches! Would you make of Theon’s daughter a traitor like yourself?’ She believed him guilty, then! It was the will of God! The plumes of the horses were waving far down the street before he recovered himself and rushed after her, shouting he knew not what. It was too late. A dark wave of men rushed from the ambuscade, surged round the car — swept forward — she had disappeared; and, as Philammon followed breathless, the horses galloped past him madly homeward with the empty carriage. Whither were they dragging her? To the Cæsareum, to the Church of God himself? Impossible! Why thither, of all places on the earth? Why did the mob, increasing momentarily by hundreds, pour down upon the beach, and return brandishing flints, shells, fragments of pottery? She was upon the church steps before he caught them up, invisible among the crowd, but he could track her by the fragments of her dress....

He would save her! And he struggled in vain to pierce the dense mass of parobolani and monks, who, mingled with fishwives and dock-workers, leaped and yelled around their victim.... Yes! On into the church itself! Into the cool, dim shadow, with its fretted pillars and lowering domes, and candles and incense, and blazing altar, and great pictures looking from the walls across the gorgeous gloom. And right in front, above the altar, the colossal Christ watching unmoved from off the wall, his right hand raised, to give a blessing or a curse? On, up the nave, fresh shreds of her dress strewing the holy pavement, up the chancel steps themselves, up to the altar, right underneath the great still Christ, and there even these hell-hounds paused. She shook herself free from her tormentors, and, springing back, rose for a moment to her full height, naked, snow-white against the dusky mass around, shame and indignation in those wide, clear eyes, but not a stain of fear. With one hand she clasped her golden locks around her; the other long, white arm was stretched upward toward the great still Christ, appealing — and who dare say in vain? — from man to God. Her lips were open to speak, but the words that would have come from them reached God’s ear alone; for in an instant Peter struck her down, the dark mass closed over her again, and then, wail on wail, long, wild, ear-piercing, rung along the vaulted roof.”

But enough of this, as the novelist himself would say. Poor Hypatia, framed of such great elements by the hand of a true poet, how is it she fails of the due effect? Perhaps it is because of the double charge which the poet felt laid upon him as also a priest. He must make her at once the beautiful apostle of a creed outworn, and an example of its insufficiency to the needs at least of woman nature, if not of human nature. Hawthorne could have dealt triumphantly with such a figure, and rapt us with the mystical and thrilling charm of its contrasts; but not Kingsley, too earnest as he always was for the long patience of art, and too perfervid in that zeal for his reader’s soul first of all things. The dramatist can preach and he does preach by Hamlet, by Macbeth, by Othello, who are never freed, either of them, to an absolute and single significance, but if the preacher attempts to dramatize, we forget his lesson in our sense of his failure. The moral of “Hypatia” is, Beware of spiritual pride, and do not evil that good may come; but what is the meaning of Hypatia herself?

THE NATURE OF CHARLES READE’S HEROINES

EACH great novelist invents or discovers a certain type of feminine nature which is his predominant if not his favorite type, although it is by no means his only type. He may wholly depart from it, and easily paint its opposite, or he may vary it, and disguise it, without really departing from it; but this type in its most distinctive form will characterize him in the reader’s general impression. We have only to think of the dominant types of Thackeray, Dickens, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the rest, in order to realize the fact; and they need not be alleged in proof, either themselves or their analogues or their opposites. We know what they are, and still better we know what the predominant type of such a minor novelist — he was very nearly a major novelist — as Charles Reade is: it is with an effort that I refrain from writing he and his works seem so quite of the past. I have lately been rereading them nearly all, with a keen sense of his extraordinary knowledge, and a regret for his knowingness in the region of woman’s nature which I could not so readily qualify. It was the fatal defect of his faculty that he valued himself most upon his knowingness, and that he flourished it in the face of his readers instead of using his knowledge to instruct and delight them. He liked better to release a spring, and let his heroine jump at you out of a box than to have her grow softly upon you through the mystery of womanhood, a tangible and adorable personality.

I

Charles Readers peculiar invention is a species of coquette manquée. All coquettes are coquettes manquées in so far as the flirt is always self-defeated in her triumph, and loses more than she gains by any conquest. But the sort of coquette manquée that Reade invented is the flirt in whom the impulse of mere flirtation is arrested or interrupted by a throe of conscience, or a thrill of passion, and who for peace’ sake or love’s sake is willing to forego the pleasure of winning a heart to no other end than feeling it hers. She has the nature of a coquette, but the heart of a woman, and is capable of sudden and supreme self-sacrifice. She is as sinuous as a serpent in arriving finally at the effects of the dove. Reade perceived that there is something feline in every woman, but he also divined that in many and perhaps in most cases she wishes to use the arts of the cat for no worse purpose than getting a soft place in a man’s soul and sweetly purring there. This discovery appeared to him so extraordinary that he not only embodied its results in nearly all his heroines, but continually shouted over it, and flaunted it as the great discovery of the age, or of every age. It was indeed a very pretty find, and was not spoiled by the temperamental excesses of the discoverer, who was not without the qualities of his defects, and amidst his violences to art and taste, his ground and lofty tumbling, and his antics of all sorts, had the gift of denoting the traits of his peculiar heroines with unerring skill. He fired from the hip as well as the shoulder; he fired lying down and standing on his head; he fired with his back to the target, looking into a mirror; he fired on the quick run; but he rarely failed to strike the centre of the mark, and when he rang the bell one could (at least in one’s youth) forgive him if he leaped into the air and clicked his heels together with a whoop of triumph.

II

He was as apt to give a whoop of triumph upon a small occasion as a great; and he made no unusual noise over so admirable a creature as Lucy Fountain in “Love Me Little, Love Me Long.” He was perhaps rather more boisterous about Mrs. Bazalgette, who is the ultimatum of all Lucy’s worst feminine tendencies. We see in this full-blown flirt what Lucy might have been if she had not resolutely remained a bud, and kept her wiles and lures firmly folded within the green leaves of the calyx out of which they were suffered merely to peep. But this delightful girl is shown us with reticence almost as discreet as her own; and an artist who had a ‘prentice boyishness to the last — his boyishness grew upon him, in fact — shows in her likeness more of the quiet of a master than in any other portraiture. She is most charmingly and originally imagined throughout. Many ladies have loved below them in fiction as well as out, but Lucy is the first girl of her kind to do so; for she is not romantic or passionate, and is of a fancy well guarded by the knowledge and the wisdom of the world. She cannot help seeing that David Dodd is a hero in his unconscious way, but she is perfectly aware that the mate of a merchantman is no mate for a young lady of her wealth and station, to say nothing of her birth and breeding. She is captivated by his career and character, but almost in an aesthetic way at first, and not in any fond fashion of loving him for the dangers he has passed. He surprises her, and then he interests her, and, as it were, convinces her. Her heart slips away from her, while she is in full possession of her reason, and while she can still be shocked at his awkwardness and ashamed of him, even, at times. All the successive and synchronous facts of her consciousness are clearly and subtly, if not delicately, studied; her beauty is vividly painted, and her little tricks and traits — the things in which personality most shows itself, if not resides — are bewitchingly caught. Her serviceable subservience to her Aunt Bazalgette, which always ends at some point where Lucy has made up her mind to have her own way, is of the same texture as her complaisance with her Uncle Fountain, who believes that she is going to marry the man of his choice while she is sweetly meaning to marry the man of her own, or rather to let him marry the woman of his, for that is more exactly the relation of the strenuous David Dodd to the event. Her good sense and sagacity are equal to the demands upon them, even after marriage, when they so often fail with ladies who marry for love; and having let the mate of a merchantman choose her, she chooses his lot in life and forsakes her own. She abdicates her place in society, and accepts her new condition with the grace that distinguishes her in all things, great and small.

In recently reading her history through again, I have found it, because of her, as delightful as it was at the first or the second reading. I have felt the author’s foibles more, but I think I have been also more sensible of his very uncommon cleverness, and I am more than ever grateful to him for such a girl as Lucy Fountain. He does not overdo her; in his most successful moments he does not make such a clamor as usual; she has the ladylike power to put even her creator on his best behavior, and to make almost a master of him; just as she knows how to get the better of her Aunt Bazalgette and her Uncle Fountain, in their respective forms of selfishness, to keep Mr. Talboys from being offensive, and to prevent David Dodd from kicking him when she fails. She is the universal solvent of the story, reconciling and adapting its warring elements, and, when she has done her office, resuming her individuality at the final precipitation of events to lose it then in the absolute self-devotion of love.

III

I do not know in fiction a more pleasing story on the lines along which her story capers so nimbly. The situation is one which has always tempted the novelist and always will till novelists shall be no more. There is a perennial fascination in the notion of love between higher station and lower, but commonly the fascination is too great for the novelist’s sense of proportion, his respect for probability, and his reverence for truth. He is very, very rarely so candid as Reade, who has dealt with it more than once, and always pretty faithfully, resisting fairly well the temptation to blink its implications. Difference of social tradition is effaced in the glow of passion, as we see in the case of young ladies who now and then run away with their fathers’ coachmen; but their experience seems to be that it reasserts itself as passion fades. This is the experience of Lucy Fountain after she becomes Mrs. David Dodd; but that adorable creature philosophically ignores what she practically knows: that is, she makes the best of the inevitable, and as we see in “Very Hard Cash,” where the tale of her life after marriage is continued from “Love Me Little, Love Me Long,” she is not less fond of Dodd because he proves inalienably the simple heroic sailor that she fell in love with him for being. Few heroines are equal to so much, and it is for this reason chiefly that we must respect her.

The author far more easily makes us like her; for it is easier to impart the sense of charm than the sense of character; and we begin to feel her charm from the moment when bored to death helping her Uncle Fountain find himself at the top of his family tree, “ by a gymnastic of courtesy she first crushed, and then so moulded a yawn that it glided into a society smile.” You begin to feel her character still earlier, in that wonderful first chapter where she is shown the triumphant victim of her Aunt Bazalgette’s selfishness, a wily martyr who plans to have her own amidst the flames of sacrifice, and a moralist who keeps her conscience clean from the environing pitch of Mrs. Bazalgette’s lies. This lady once takes possession of the drawing-room to try on a dress she means to make Lucy make over for her:

“Mrs. Bazalgette then rang the bell, and told the servant to say she was out if any one called, no matter who. Meantime Lucy, impressed with the gravity of her office, took the dress carefully down from the pegs; and as it would have been death to crease it, and destruction to let its hem sweep against any of the inferior forms of matter, she came down the stairs holding this female weapon of destruction as high above her head as Judith waves the sword of Holofernes in Etty’s immortal picture. The other had just found time to loosen her dress and lock one of the doors; she now locked the other, and the rites began. Well!!?? ‘It fits you like a glove.’  ‘Really? tell the truth now; it is a sin to tell a story — about a new gown. What a nuisance one can’t see behind one!’  ‘I could fetch another glass, but you may trust my word, aunt. This point behind is very becoming; it gives distinction to the waist.’  ‘Yes, Baldwin cuts these bodies better than Olivier; but the worst of her is, when it comes to the trimming you have to think for yourself; the woman has no mind; she is a pair of hands, and there is an end of her.’  ‘I must confess it is a little plain, for one thing,’ said Lucy. ‘Why, you little goose, you don’t think I am going to wear it like this. No; I thought of having down a wreath and bouquet from Foster’s of violets and heart’s-ease — the bosom and sleeves covered with blonde, you know, and caught up here and there with a small bunch of the flowers. Then, in the centre heart’s-ease of the bosom I meant to have had two of my largest diamonds set — hush!’ The door-handle worked viciously; then came rap! rap! rap! rap! ‘Tic — tic — tic! this is always the way. Who is there? Go away! You can’t come here.’  ‘But I want to speak to you. What the deuce are you doing?’ said, through the key-hole, the wretch that owned the room in a mere legal sense. ‘We are trying a dress. Come again in an hour.’  ‘Confound your dresses! Who is we?’  ‘Lucy has got a new dress.’  ‘Aunt!’ whispered Lucy, in a tone of piteous expostulation. ‘Oh, if it is Lucy. Well, good-by, ladies. I am obliged to go to London at a moment’s notice for a couple of days. You will have done by when I come back, perhaps;’ and off went Bazalgette, whistling, but not best pleased. He had told his wife more than once that the drawing-rooms and dining-rooms of a house are the public rooms, and the bedrooms the private ones.”

Lucy’s Aunt Bazalgette, whose husband is a banker, is determined she shall marry a brilliant financier; her Uncle Fountain, who is cultivating a family tree, has set his mind on her marrying a man of old family, as exemplified in his neighbor Talboys. When she goes to her uncle, he has the long-descended Talboys about the house pretty much all the time, and after a certain evening of him, he rejoices that he never saw her in better spirits.

“‘I am glad you saw that,’ said Lucy, with a languid smile. ‘And how Talboys came out.’  ‘He did,’ sighed Lucy. Here the young lady lighted softly on an ottoman, and sunk gracefully back with a weary-o’- the-world air; and when she had settled down like so much floss silk, fixing her eye on the ceiling, and doling her words out languidly yet thoughtfully — just above a whisper: ‘Uncle, darling,’ inquired she, ‘where are the men we have all heard of?’  ‘How should I know? What men?’  ‘Where are the men of sentiment, that can understand a woman, and win her to reveal her real heart, the best treasure she has, uncle, dear?’ She paused for a reply; none coming, she continued, with decreasing energy: ‘Where are the men of spirit? the men of action? the upright, downright men, that Heaven sends to cure us of our disingenuousness? Where are the heroes and the wits?’ (an infinitesimal yawn); ‘where are the real men? And where are the women to whom such men can do homage without degrading themselves? where are the men who elevate a woman without making her masculine, and the women who can brighten and polish, and yet not soften the steel of manhood — tell me, tell me instantly,’ said she, with still greater languor and want of earnestness, and her eyes remained fixed on the ceiling in deep abstraction.”

Lucy’s aspiration for the heroic aptly prepares the way for David Dodd, who directly appears on the scene with his sister Eve, at one of those teas which replace for them the greater distinction of dinner. He tells stories of his seafaring, and supplies for her the demand she has made of her helpless uncle, and fills the long-felt want of her heart. Of course she knows this before she will own it; and the love-making goes deviously on and on, but never quite halts, though it often seems to halt. Through it all, Lucy is still Lucy, arming herself for final truth by all sorts of provisional feints, and never failing of a just sense of her sailor’s worth in any circumstances. Sometimes her magnanimity is severely tried, as when David, asked to be her aunt’s guest, appears among her fine company one day suddenly with his carpet-bag on his shoulder, the boy whom he had paid to carry it proving too weak for the work. Lucy manages so well that she commands her aunt’s entire admiration and esteem, which Mrs. Bazalgette confesses in a reading of the girl’s nature.

“‘If the gentlemen take you for a pane of glass, why, all the better; meantime, shall I tell you your real character? I have only just discovered it myself.’  ‘Oh, yes aunt, tell me my character. I should so like to hear it from you.’  ‘Should you?’ said the other, a little satirically; ‘well, then, you are an IN-NOCENT FOX!’  ‘Aunt!”An in-no-cent fox; so run and get your work-box. I want you to run up a tear in my flounce.’ Lucy went thoughtfully for her work-box, murmuring ruefully, ‘I am an in-nocent fox — I am an in-nocent fox.’ She did not like her new character at all; it mortified her, and seemed self-contradictory as well as derogatory. On her return she could not help remonstrating: ‘How can that be my character? A fox is cunning, and I despise cunning; and I sure I am not innocent,’ added she, putting up both hands and looking penitent. With all this, a shade of vexation was painted on her lovely cheeks as she appealed against her epigram.”

But the innocence of all the foxes in the world cannot save a girl from the love with which she has filled a true man’s heart, if she happens to have filled it from her own, and the time has to come when after long twisting and turning to escape him Lucy Fountain is forced to listen to David Dodd. It is when she comes back to the garden, where she thinks she has left her glove, and finds Dodd on his knees with his face to the ground. She almost runs over him.

“‘What are you doing, Mr. Dodd?’ David arose from his Oriental position, and, being a young man whose impulse always was to tell the simple truth, replied: ‘I was kissing the place where you stood so long,’ He did not feel that he had done anything extraordinary, so he gave her this information composedly; but her face was scarlet in an instant; and he, seeing that, began to blush too. For once Lucy’s tact was baffled; she did not know what on earth to say, and she stood blushing like a girl of fifteen. Then she tried to turn it off. ‘Mr. Dodd, how can you be so ridiculous?’ said she, affecting humorous disdain. But David was not to be put down now; he was launched ‘I am not ridiculous for loving and worshipping you, for you are worthy of even more love than any human heart can hold.’  ‘Oh, hush, Mr. Dodd! I must not hear this.’  ‘Miss Lucy, I can’t keep it any longer — you must, you shall hear me. You can despise my love if you will, but you shall know it before you reject it.” Mr. Dodd, you have every right to be heard, but let me persuade you not to insist. Oh, why did I come back?’  ‘The first moment I saw you, Miss Lucy, it was a new life to me. I never looked twice at any girl before. It is not your beauty only — oh, no; it is your goodness — goodness such as I never thought was to be found on earth. Don’t turn your head from me; I know my defects; could I look on you and not see them? My manners are blunt and rude — oh, how different from yours! — but you could soon make me a fine gentleman, I love you so. And I am only the first mate of an India-man; but I should be captain next voyage, Miss Lucy, and a sailor like me has no expenses; all he has is his wife’s. The first lady in the land will not be petted as you will, if you will look kindly on me. Listen to me,’ trying to tempt her. ‘No, Miss Lucy, I have nothing to offer you worth your acceptance, only my love. No man ever loved woman as I love you; it is not love, it is worship, it is adoration! Ah! she is going to speak to me at last!’ Lucy presented at this moment a strange contrast of calmness and agitation. Her bosom heaved quickly, and she was pale, but her voice was calm, and, though gentle, decided. ‘I know you love me, Mr. Dodd, and I feared this. I have tried to save you the mortification of being declined by one who, in many things, is your inferior. I have even been rude and unkind to you. Forgive me for it. I meant kindly. I regret it now. Mr. Dodd, I thank you for the honor you do me, but I cannot accept your love.’ There was a pause, but David’s tongue seemed glued to the roof of his mouth. He was not surprised, yet he was stupefied when the blow came. At last he gasped out: ‘You love some other man?’ Lucy was silent. ‘Answer me, for pity’s sake; give me something to help me,’  ‘You have no right to ask me such a question, but — I have no attachment, Mr. Dodd.’  ‘Ah! then one word more; is it because you cannot love me, or because I am poor, and only first mate of an Indiaman?’  ‘That I will not answer. You have no right to question a lady why she — Stay! you wish to despise me. Well, why not, if that will cure you of this unfortunate — Think what you please of me, Mr. Dodd,’ murmured Lucy, sadly. ‘Ah! you know I can’t,’ cried David, despairingly. ‘I know that you esteem me more than I deserve. Well, I esteem you, Mr. Dodd. Why, then, can we not be friends? You have only to promise me you will never return to this subject — come!’  ‘Me promise not to love you! What is the use? Me be your friend, and nothing more, and stand looking on at the heaven that is to be another’s, and never to be mine? It is my turn to decline. Never. Betrothed lovers or strangers, but nothing between!... Shall I go now?’  ‘Yes,’ murmured Lucy, softly, trying to disarm the fatal word. ‘Forget me — and — forgive me!’ and, with this last word scarce audible, she averted her face, and held out her hand with angelic dignity, modesty, and pity. The kind words and the gentle action brought down the stout heart that had looked death in the face so often without flinching. ‘Forgive you, sweet angel! ‘he cried; ‘I pray Heaven to bless you, and to make you as happy as I am desolate for your sake. Oh, you show me more and more what I lose this day. God bless you! God bless—’ and David’s heart filled to choking, and he burst out sobbing despairingly, and the hot tears ran suddenly from his eyes over her hand as he kissed and kissed it. Then, with an almost savage feeling of shame (for these were not eyes that were wont to weep), he uttered one cry of despair and ran away, leaving her pale and panting heavily. She looked at her hand, wet with a hero’s tears, and for the second time her own began to gush.”

No intelligent reader would suppose this was the end, although he had not already been told that the lovers are securely wedded before the tale is done. Their story is subordinate prolonged, as we all know, through “Very Hard Cash,” and I do not think that there is anything Mrs. David Dodd says or does in that rather inferior book to decharacterize Miss Lucy Fountain. That girl is a great invention, and if it is true, as I have several times contended in these papers, that a novelist’s power is to be tested largely by his success in dealing with feminine nature, I do not see why I have called Charles Reade a minor novelist. It must be that the offences of his manner and the impertinences of his method have weighed too heavily with me. It is certain that these are so many and so grievous that a far more lenient critic might find them damnatory.

IV

Lucy Fountain is of the same type of heroine as Helen Rolleston in “Foul Play,” and the heroine of “A Terrible Temptation,” There is another type, the frankly honest, or the almost frankly honest, type which he deals with in Christie Johnstone in the novel of her name, and Katharine Gaunt in “Griffith Gaunt,” and Margaret in “The Cloister and the Hearth,” and Grace Carden in “Put Yourself in His Place but each of these has some little hint or tint of the Lucy Fountain type in her, which is perhaps nothing, after all, but the ultimate and inevitable expression of her femininity. Possibly when women are quite equal in their chances and conditions with men they will cease to be innocent foxes; but in the meantime we must be glad and grateful when they are innocent.

Still another type of heroine in Charles Reade’s fiction is that supremely illustrated by the titulary heroine of “Peg. Woffington.” If such heroines could always be openly or professionally of the theatre, we should have no right to object that they are mechanical. Actresses are and must be so entirely subservient to the exigencies of the stage that they end by exchanging their nature for its artifice, and in the highest effects of character deliver a coup de théâtre. It is not that they stab the potatoes; but that they peel or mash them with one eye on the public; or that they conceive of nothing sublimer than eating a poisoned potato so that their rivals may marry the men they love. It is not their fault, poor things: they have been so warped by their art that they cannot imagine anything finer than the devices with which they have brought down houses; or their inventors cannot imagine it for them, which is quite as bad in effect.

Charles Reade was of a better theatre than Charles Dickens, but he was of the theatre; and you seem to be reading a dramatization of his novels, rather than the novels themselves. Yet they are ingenious, brilliant, witty, and abound in true suggestions of femininity; and their heroines merit much more attention than can be given them in a single paper.

VARIATIONS OF READE’S TYPE OF HEROINES

THE absence of anything like a philosophic criticism in England must account for the antics and aberrations of English novelists who were greatly gifted but wholly undisciplined, and who let themselves go to the bounds of their eccentricities because they were aware of no law that they need stand in fear of. Several of the greatest, like Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope Thomas Hardy, and George Moore, have been so admirably tempered by nature that they could not help being artists, worthy of any Continental school, amidst the prevailing æsthetic anarchy of their native island, where there is no school, where criticism is arbitrary and personal, where there are no ideals, but only standards; no principles, but only preferences. I have to note the lamentable results of these conditions in the case of nearly all the English novelists except those I have named; in the case of such a novelist as Charles Reade, a powerful but most wilful talent, they are comically disastrous; the final complexion of their tragedy is bouffe.

Charles Reade was as nobly intentioned as any novelist who has written; he imagined his vocation to be painting truly from nature; to be, as Mr. James defines the office of fiction, the representation of life. Yet for want of a principled criticism he could never understand that the painter has no business in the picture, the dramatist has no business on the stage. He is forever at your elbow as you read, audibly directing your attention to this and that surprising fact; winking to you, sticking his tongue in his cheek, and clucking to make you notice. He is not as bad as Thackeray, who spoils the illusion by whispering you that the whole thing is make-believe; he is faithful to his own fancy, at least; but he is of a worse literary taste, and in his anxiety to show you how full of drama the real world is, he drags in raw Incident by the hair, and makes a newspaper of his page.

I

Charles Reade was not helplessly a dramatist like Charles Dickens, who brought the theatre into life; but he saw life so dramatically that he was consciously arranging it for the theatre at every moment; and his novels were often confessedly, as eventually they often became, plays, and very good plays. I have seldom seen a better melodrama than “Foul Play,” which is also a most delightful story, with a heroine in Helen Rolleston, who is of the author’s very best sort, and almost fit to match with Margaret in “The Cloister and the Hearth.” Margaret, indeed, is his finest creation, being less mechanically operated, less of a Jill-in-the-Box, more vitalized from within, than the others. She is very sweet and simple and noble, and is found a true woman in that remote mediaeval twilight where she obediently abides, without insubordinately getting over into the glare of modem times, as people in historical novels are apt to do.

Upon the whole, I think that book Charles Reade’s greatest book — at least in a show of the past, which must always be a gymnastic; his ground and lofty tumbling is not so offensive there as it is amidst a representation of actual life. But all his novels bear reading again after many years; they are no more boyish now than they were at first; they were never as deep as wells nor as wide as church doors, but they served: served to surprise, to amuse, almost to convince. “A Terrible Temptation “ is a mighty good book, with a charming heroine; and “Put Yourself in His Place” is another. So is “Griffith Gaunt;” Katharine Gaunt is finely imagined; “It is Never Too Late to Mend” is a good story, but the heroine has not remained with me. I dare say she would come back with a little coaxing.

II

I am not sure whether “Peg Woffington” is to be put among the author’s minor works or not; but as an historical novel, dealing with the nature of an actress, it has every chance of falling very low in the scale of fiction. Perhaps, however, one condition of unreality offsets the other, and the theatricality neutralizes the historicality. At any rate, the result is a story which, if not true, is such a story as every actress could wish to be true. What better could the histrionic heart desire than the case of a country gentleman leaving his young bride behind him, and coming for a few days on business up to London, where he falls in love with the divine Mistress Woffington, and remains wooing and winning her for weeks and months, till the neglected wife follows him to town, and finds him giving a dinner to La Peg (as Reade would call her), and throws herself on Mistress Woffington’s mercy? There is a situation which no woman need be long upon the stage to find exquisitely natural; if you add the fact that Peg has never known her lover was married, it is almost too natural. For the éclaircissement what could be more profitable and feasible than for Mabel Vane to seek her rival in the studio of the scene-painter who is doing her portrait, and there succeed an audience of connoisseurs who have been trapped into criticising Mrs. Woffington’s real face in the hole cut out of the canvas where the painted face was? The connoisseurs have been mocked and driven out by the actress, who has hidden behind her portrait when the hapless wife appears, and who now puts back her face into the hole in the canvas, the better to witness the scene between the painter and her rival. Mrs. Vane pours out her artless tale of grief to the powerless Triplet, and avows her purpose of trying to see Mrs. Woffington, and appeal to her as her sole hope.

“At this moment, in spite of Triplet’s precaution, Mrs. Vane, casting her eye accidentally round, caught sight of the picture, and instantly started up, crying, ‘She is there!’ Triplet was thunderstruck. ‘What a likeness!’ cried she, and moved towards the supposed picture. ‘Don’t go to it!’ cried Triplet, aghast; ‘the color is wet.’ She stopped; but her eye and her very soul dwelt upon the supposed picture; and Triplet stood quaking. ‘How like! It seems to breathe. You are a great painter, sir. A glass is not truer.’ Triplet, hardly knowing what he said, muttered something about ‘critics and lights and shades.’  ‘Then they are blind!’ cried Mabel, never for a moment removing her eye from the object. ‘Tell me not of lights and shades. The pictures I see have a look of paint; but yours looks like life. O that she were here, as this wonderful image of hers is. I would speak to her. I am not wise or learned; but orators never pleaded as I would plead to her for my Ernest’s heart.’ Still her eye glanced upon the picture; and I suppose her heart realized an actual presence, though her judgment did not; for by some irresistible impulse she sank slowly down and stretched her clasped hands towards it, while sobs and words seemed to break direct from her bursting heart. ‘O yes! you are beautiful, you are gifted, and the eyes of thousands wait upon your very word and look. What wonder that he, ardent, refined, and genial, should lay his heart at your feet? And I have nothing but my love to make him love me. I cannot take him from you. O, be generous to the weak! O, give him back to me! What is one heart more to you? You are so rich, and I am so poor, that without his love I have nothing, and can do nothing but sit me down and cry till my heart breaks. Give him back to me, beautiful, terrible woman! for, with all your gifts, you cannot love him as his poor Mabel does; and I will love you longer perhaps than men can love. I will kiss your feet, and Heaven above will bless you; and I will bless you and pray for you to my dying day. Ah! it is alive! I am frightened! I am frightened!’ She ran to Triplet and seized his arm. ‘No!’ cried she, quivering close to him; ‘I’m not frightened, for it was for me she — O  Mrs. Woffington!’ and, hiding her face on Mr. Triplet’s shoulder, she blushed, and wept, and trembled. What was it had betrayed Mrs. Woffington? A tear! During the whole of this interview (which had taken a turn so unlooked for by the listener) she might have said with Beatrice, ‘What fire is in mine ears?’ and what self-reproach and chill misgiving in her heart too. She had passed through a hundred emotions, as the young innocent wife told her sad and simple story. But, anxious now above all things to escape without being recognized, — for she had long repented having listened at all, or placed herself in her present position, — she fiercely mastered her countenance; but, though she ruled her features, she could not rule her heart. And when the young wife, instead of inveighing against her, came to her as a supplicant, with faith in her goodness, and sobbed to her for pity, a big tear rolled down her cheek, and proved her something more than a picture or an actress. Mrs. Vane, as we have related, screamed and ran to Triplet. Mrs. Woffington came instantly from her frame, and stood before them in a despairing attitude, with one hand upon her brow. For a single moment her impulse was to fly from the apartment, sc ashamed was she of having listened, and of meeting her rival in this way; but she conquered this feeling, and, as soon as she saw Mrs. Vane too had recovered some composure, she said to Triplet, in a low but firm voice: ‘Leave us, sir. No living creature must hear what I say to this lady!’”

III

This is quite as an actress would wish things to be; and they fall out in this wise so often on the stage that the great wonder is they have never begun falling out so in life yet. The time must come for that if the stage only keeps on; and in the meanwhile it must be owned that in the less dramatic moments of the story the nature of La Peg (it is impossible to escape the contagion of the author’s example) is studied much more in the light of fact. She is of really a far simpler nature than many women who are actresses merely off the stage. The actress has had her disillusions, but she lives in a world of illusions, and when one is gone she goes and gets more from the vast property-room of fable. Without having been a very good woman, Reade’s Peg Woffington is never so bad as not to wish being better: she has her dream of being purely loved, and is willing to love so again, and in her trust of Vane she has given him her heart. That is the pity of it, and the probability; but there perhaps the fable parts company with fact. Would the actress in real life (if she is ever there) give back the foolish husband to the faithful wife? This may be too much to ask of any one profession; but in the world at large would she do it? This may be too much to ask of any one sex.

Probability was what Reade was always trying to get away from, and he justified himself by the example of reality as recorded in the manifold incidents of the voluminous scrap-books of newspaper cuttings which he kept. His simple philosophy was that the marvelous, the bizarre, the high-heroic, the monstrous, was fit material for art because it was to be found in experience, and that it was preferable to the wonted aspect of life. So his books, put together of characters and events which could every one be matched in contemporaneous history, and wearing the air of lively reality, fail to convince the reader that the things in them happened, or persuade him no longer than a thrilling passage on the stage.

People were very primitive in the early fifties, and author and public both accepted a convention of fiction which no author or public of prime quality would accept now, though it still embodies the creed of those who write and read the novels which sell their halfmillions to-day. In Reade’s books it is a comedy-convention, for except “The Cloister and the Hearth,” the greatest of them all, they all “ end well,” and we are expected to suppose every manner of substantiated facts which would be important if true. The range of his later novels includes many exciting interests, such as deportations and shipwrecks, labor strikes, abuses in private insane asylums, and doings in gold-diggings; but, after all, these have not the charm of such an earlier story as “Christie Johnstone,” which deals with a series of sweet impossibilities among gentlefolk and simple folk in the little Scotch fishing-town of Newhaven. It is such a very early book that I may safely trust the elder reader’s oblivion and the younger reader’s ignorance for my excuse if I briefly sketch the plot. Lord Ipsden, crossed in love with his cousin Lady Barbara, and sick from it, goes down to Newhaven with a famous doctor’s prescription directing him to get well by doing good among the poor, just about the time that Charles Gatty, a youthful artist, full of the new truth that you must paint life from life, has set up his easel in the same port, and has there given his heart for that of Christie Johnstone, the prettiest fishing-lass of the place. Lord Ipsden does good right and left with an unsparing hand in drawing checks; he early makes the acquaintance of Christie, and at a hint from her goes and buys pictures of Gatty, who is on the point of imprisonment for debt, at the same time that Christie herself surprises a school of herring unknown to other fisher-folk, and comes to her lover with the money for them. But before this, Gatty’s mother, who has been a cook and is a cockney, has heard of Christie, and has appeared to prevent his marrying beneath him.. Through Lord Ipsden’s beneficence she is able to thank Christie kindly and tell her that she and her son do not need her herring money, and nothing then remains for Christie to do but to save Gatty’s life, and she promptly manages this by putting out in her boat, and rescuing him from a flood-tide, such as is apt to overtake people in fiction. His mother then naturally gives way, and at the same moment Lady Barbara, who has always wanted to marry an earnest man, convinces herself of Lord Ipsden’s earnestness and marries him.

IV

In order to begin doing good as soon as possible, Lord Ipsden has his valet go out and get him some of the lower orders directly after his arrival in Newhaven; and Saunders returns with Christie Johnstone and her friend Jean Camie.

“On their heads they wore caps of Dutch or Flemish origin, with a broad lace border, stiffened and arched over the forehead, about three inches high, leaving the brow and cheeks unencumbered. They had cotton jackets, bright red and yellow, mixed in patterns, confined at the waist by the apron-strings, but bobtailed below the waist; short woollen petticoats, with broad vertical stripes, red and white, most vivid in color; white worsted stockings, and neat, though high-quartered, shoes. Under their jackets they wore a thick spotted cotton handkerchief, about one inch of which was visible round the lower part of the throat. Of their petticoats, the outer one was kilted, or gathered up towards the front, and the second, of the same color, hung in the usual way. Of these young women, one had an olive complexion, with the red blood mantling under it, and black hair, and glorious black eyebrows. The other was fair, with a massive but shapely throat, as white as milk; glossy brown hair, the loose threads of which glittered like gold, and a blue eye, which, being contrasted with dark eyebrows and lashes, took the luminous effect peculiar to that rare beauty. Their short petticoats revealed a neat ankle, and a leg with a noble swell; for Nature, when she is in earnest, builds beauty on the ideals of ancient sculptors and poets, not of modem poetasters, who, with their airy-like sylphs and their smokelike verses, fight for want of flesh in woman and want of fact in poetry as parallel beauties. — are, my lads. — Continuez! These women had a grand corporeal trait; they had never known a corset! so they were straight as javelins; they could lift their hands above their heads! — actually! Their supple persons moved as Nature intended; every gesture was ease, grace, and freedom. What with their own radiance, and the snowy cleanliness and brightness of their costume, they came like meteors into the apartment. Lord Ipsden, rising gently from his seat, with the same quiet politeness with which he would have received two princes of the blood, said, ‘How do you do?’ and smiled a welcome. ‘Fine! hoow’s yoursel?’ answered the dark lass, whose name was Jean Camie, and whose voice was not so sweet as her face. ‘What ‘n lord are ye?” continued she; ‘are you a juke? I wad like fine to hae a crack wi’ a juke. ‘Saunders who knew himself the cause of this question, replied, sotto, ‘His Lordship is a viscount,’  ‘I didna ken ‘t,’ was Jean’s remark. ‘But it has a bonny soond,’  ‘What mair would ye hae?’ said the fair beauty, whose name was Christie Johnstone. Then, appealing to his Lordship as the likeliest to know, she added, ‘Nobeelity is just a soond itsel, I’m tauld.’ The Viscount, finding himself expected to say something on a topic he had not attended much to, answered dryly: ‘We must ask the republicans; they are the people that give their minds to such subjects.’... The fair lass, who had watched the Viscount all this time as demurely as a cat cream, now approached him. This young woman was the thinker; her voice was also rich, full, and melodious, and her manner very engaging; it was half advancing, half retiring, not easy to resist or to describe. ‘Noo,’ said she, with a very slight blush stealing across her face, ‘ye maun let me catecheeze ye, wull ye?’ The last two words were said in a way that would have induced a bear to reveal his winter residence. He smiled assent. Saunders retired to the door, and, excluding every shade of curiosity from his face, took an attitude, half majesty, half obsequiousness. Christie stood by Lord Ipsden, with one hand on her hip (the knuckles downwards), but graceful as Antinous, and began. ‘Hoo muckle is the Queen greater than y’ are?’ His Lordship was obliged to reflect. ‘Let me see, — as is the moon to a wax taper, so is her Majesty the Queen to you and me, and the rest,’.... ‘Noo,’ said the fair inquisitor, ‘ye shall tell me how ye came to be Lorrds, your faemily... ‘Five hundred years ago—’  ‘Listen, Jean,’ said Christie; ‘we’re gaun to get a boeny story. “Five hundred years ago,” ‘added she, with interest and awe. ‘Was a great battle,’ resumed the narrator, in cheerful tones, as one larking with history, ‘between a King of England and his rebels. He was in the thick of the fight—’  ‘That’s the King, Jean, he was in the thick o’t.’  ‘My ancestor killed a fellow who was sneaking behind him, but the next moment a man-at-arms prepared a thrust at his Majesty, who had his hands full with three assailants.’  ‘Eh! that’s no fair,’ said Christie, ‘as sure as deeth.’  ‘My ancestor dashed forward, and, as the king’s sword passed through one of them, he clove another to the waist with a blow.’  ‘Weel done! weel done!... Aweel, I hae gotten a heap out o’ ye; sae noow I’ll gang, since ye are no for herrin’; come away, Jean.’ At this their host remonstrated, and inquired why bores are at one’s service night and day, and bright people are always in a hurry; he was informed in reply, ‘Labor is the lot o’ man. Div ye no ken that muckle? And abune a’ o’ women.’  ‘Why, what can two such pretty creatures have to do except to be admired?’ This question coming within the dark beauty’s scope, she hastened to reply. ‘To sell our herrin’, — we hae three hundre’ left in the creel.’  ‘What is the price?’ At this question the poetry died out of Christie Johnstone’s face, she gave her companion a rapid look, indiscernible by male eye, and answered: ‘Three a penny, sirr; they are no plenty the day,’ added she, in smooth tones that carried conviction. (Little liar; they were selling six a penny everywhere.)

‘Saunders, buy them all, and be ever so long about it; count them, or some nonsense.’  ‘He’s daft! he’s daft! O, ye ken, Jean, an Englishman and a lorrd, twa daft things thegither, he could na’ miss the road. Coont them, lassie.’  ‘Come away, Sandy, till I count them till ye,’ said Jean. Saunders and Jean disappeared. Business being out of sight, curiosity revived. ‘An’ what brings ye here from London, if ye please?’ recommenced the fair inquisitor. ‘You have a good countenance; there is something in your face. I could find it in my heart to tell you, but I should bore you.’  ‘De’el a fear! Bore me, bore me! whaat’s thaat, I wonder?’  ‘ What is your name, madam? Mine is Ipsden.’  ‘They ca’ me Christie Johnstone.’  ‘Well, Christie Johnstone, I am under the doctor’s hands.’  ‘Puir lad. What’s the trouble?’ (solemnly and tenderly).—’ Ennui! ‘(rather piteously). ‘Yawn-we? I never heerd tell o’t.’  ‘O you lucky girl,’ burst out he; ‘but the doctor has undertaken to cure me; in one thing you could assist me, if I am not presuming too far on our short acquaintance. I am to relieve one poor distressed person every day, but I mustn’t do two: is not that a bore?’  ‘Gie’s your hand, gie’s your hand. I’m vexed for ca’ing you daft. Hech!what a saft hand ye hae. Jean, I’m saying, come here, feel this. ‘Jean, who had run in, took the Viscount’s hand from Christie. ‘It never wroucht any,’ explained Jean. ‘And he has bonny hair,’ said Christie, just touching his locks on the other side. ‘He’s a bonny lad,’ said Jean, inspecting him scientifically and point-blank.”

Of course, this is playing to the gallery openly, but not so very grossly, and although the human nature is as impossible as the wit and caprice in the circumstances, it is still human nature. It represents the heroine in thoughtful repose; but if the reader is of a mind to see her in high dramatic action, here is the scene of her rescuing Gatty from the high tide, to which he has heedlessly committed himself.

“The poor fellow, whom Sandy, by aid of his glass, now discovered to be in a worn-out condition, was about half a mile east of Newhaven pier-head, and unfortunately the wind was nearly due east. Christie was standing north-northeast, her boat-hook jammed against the sail, which stood as flat as a knife. The natives of the Old Town were now seen pouring down to the pier and the beach, and strangers were collecting like bees.... ‘That boat is not going to the poor man,’ said Mrs. Gatty, ‘it is turning its back upon him. ‘ ‘She canna lie in the wind’s eye, for as clever as she is,’ answered a fish-wife. ‘I ken wha it is,’ suddenly squeaked a little fish-wife; ‘it’s Christie Johnstone’s lad; it’s you daft painter fr’ England. Hechl’ cried she suddenly, observing Mrs. Gatty, ‘it’s your son, woman.’ The unfortunate woman gave a fearful scream, and, flying like a tiger on Liston, commanded him to ‘go straight out to sea and save her son.’ Jean Camie seized her arm. ‘Div ye see you boat?’ cried she; ‘and div ye mind Christie, the lass wha’s hairt ye hae broken? aweel, woman, — it’s just a race between deeth and Cirsty Johnstone for your son.’ The poor old woman swooned dead away; they carried her into Christie Johnstone’s house, and laid her down, then hurried back, — the greater terror absorbed the less. Lady Barbara Sinclair was there from Leith; and seeing Lord Ipsden standing in the boat with a fisherman, she asked him to tell her what it was; neither he nor any one answered her. ‘Why doesn’t she come about, Liston?’ cried Lord Ipsden, stamping with anxiety and impatience. ‘She’ll no be lang,’ said Sandy; ‘but they’ll mak a mess o’  ‘t wi’ ne’er a man i’ the boat.’  ‘Ye’re sure o’ thaat?’ put in a woman. ‘Ay, about she comes,’ said Liston, as the sail came down on the first tack. He was mistaken; they dipped the lug as cleverly as any man in the town could. ‘Hech! look at her hauling on the rope like a mon,’ cried a woman. The sail flew up on the other tack....— ‘She’ll no let him dee.

Ah! she’s in the bows, hailing him an’ waving the lad’s bonnet ower her head to gie him coorage. Gude bless ye, lass; Gude bless ye!’ Christie knew it was no use hailing him against the wind, but the moment she got the wind she darted into the bows, and pitched in its highest key her full and brilliant voice; after a moment of suspense she received proof that she must be heard by him, for on the pier now hung men and women, clustered like bees, breathless with anxiety, and the moment after she hailed the drowning man she saw and heard a wild yell of applause burst from the pier, and the pier was more distant than the man. She snatched Flucker’s cap, planted her foot on the gunwale, held on by a rope, hailed the poor fellow again, and waved the cap round and round her head, to give him courage; and in a moment, at the sight of this, thousands of voices thundered back their cheers to her across the water. Blow, wind, — spring, boat, — and you, Christie, still ring life towards those despairing ears, and wave hope to those sinking eyes; cheer the boat on, you thousands that look upon this action; hurrah! from the pier; hurrah! from the town; hurrah! from the shore; hurrah! now, from the very ships in the roads, whose crews are swarming on the yards to look; five minutes ago they laughed at you; three thousand eyes and hearts hang upon you now; ay, these are the moments we live for!... And now dead silence. The boat is within fifty yards, they are all three consulting together round the mast; an error now is death; his forehead only seems above water. ‘If they miss him on that tack?’ said Lord Ipsden, significantly, to Liston. ‘He’ll never see London Brigg again,’ was the whispered reply. They carried on till all on shore thought they would run over him, or past him; but no, at ten yards distant they were all at the sail, and had it down like lightning; and then Flucker sprang to the bows, the other boy to the helm. Unfortunately, there were but two Johnstones in the boat; and this boy, in his hurry, actually put the helm to port, instead of to starboard. Christie, who stood amidships, saw the error; she sprang aft, flung the boy from the helm, and jammed it hard a-starboard with her foot The boat answered the helm, but too late for Flucker; the man was four yards from him as the boat drifted by. ‘He’s a deed mon!’ cried Liston, on shore. The boat’s length gave one more little chance; the after part must drift nearer him, — thanks to Christie. Flucker flew aft; flung himself on his back, and seized his sister’s petticoats. ‘Fling yourself over the gunwale,’ screamed he. ‘Ye’ll no hurt; I’se haud ye. ‘She flung herself boldly over the gunwale; the man was sinking, her nails touched his hair, her fingers entangled themselves in it, she gave him a powerful wrench and brought him alongside; the boys pinned him like wild-cats. Christie darted away forward to the mast, passed a rope round it, threw it the boys, in a moment it was under his shoulders. Christie hauled on it from the fore-thwart, the boys lifted him, and they tumbled him, gasping and gurgling like a dying salmon, into the bottom of the boat, and flung net and jackets and sail over him, to keep the life in him.”

V

Dickens created a new school, or rather he characterized every young writer of his generation; and in a less measure Thackeray did the like. But Reade had no imitators and left none, though in certain things he was cleverer than either of these betters of his. He knew women better than they, and he could paint their manners, if not their minds, better than both his betters put together.

Why should I say his betters? If I do I am again controverting my prime position that the highest type of novelist is he who can most winningly impart the sense of womanhood. Charles Reade could do this beyond Dickens and beyond Thackeray; and so let the fact praise him as it may.

GEORGE ELIOT’S MAGGIE TULLIVER AND HETTY SORREL

IN George Eliot we come to the greatest talent in English fiction after Jane Austen, but a talent of vastly wider and deeper reach than that delicate and delightful artist, and of a far more serious import. It is useless to compare any of her contemporaries with this great woman in the expectation of finding them her equals except in that poorer expression which was from their singularities rather than their qualities. Neither Dickens with his dramatic, or theatric, picturesqueness, nor Thackeray with his moralized mockery, his sentimentalized satire, nor Reade with his self-celebrated discoveries in character and manners, nor Anthony Trollope with his immense, quiet, ruminant reality, ox-like cropping the field of English life and converting its succulent juices into the nourishing beef of his fiction — none of these writers can match with the author of “Adam Bede” and “The Mill on the Floss” and “Romola” and “Middlemarch” in the things which give a novelist the highest claim to the reader’s interest. Hawthorne, arriving at effects of equal seriousness from a quarter so opposite to hers, among her contemporaries can alone rival her in the respect, not to say the reverence, of criticism. It was not till the wide canvases of Thomas Hardy began to glow with the light and color, the mystery and the comedy and tragedy with which he best knows how to paint, and which became the expression of a supreme mastery in his “Jude” — it was not till these appeared that it could be felt George Eliot had a peer in late English fiction. But if there is a power in the Christianity which she disowned but which never disowned her, profounder than the farthest reach of fatalism, even Mr. Hardy cannot stand beside her. She had many and lamentable defects; the very seriousness and sincerity of her motive implied them; her learning over-weighted her knowledge; her conscience clogged her art; her strong grasp of human nature was weakened by foibles of manner; the warmth of her womanly sympathies and the subtlety of her womanly intuitions failed of their due effect because the sympathies were sometimes hysterical and the intuitions were sometimes over-intellectualized. Her immense reading, which freed her from the worst influences of the English example in fiction, cumbered her with pedantic acquisitions, under which her style labored conscious and diffuse; her just sense of her own power fostered a kind of intellectual vanity, fatal to art, in which she first-personally intruded herself into the story, and Thackerayesquely commented upon the facts and persons without the Thackerayesque lightness, or the Thackerayesque convention that it is all a make-believe anyway. This foible becomes positive, offensive, and pernicious in “The Mill on the Floss,” but it is right to add that it has there its worst effect, and that in later stories it gradually disappears.

I

If we choose Maggie Tulliver for the representative,’. woman of George Eliot, as we chose Lucy Fountain in the case of Charles Reade, we shall at least be going no farther wrong, I think. She is at any rate typical of that order of heroine which her author most strongly imagined, not quite upon the Miltonian formula for a poem of “simple, sensuous, passionate,” but upon such a vernation of it as should read complex, sensuous, passionate. She is, of all the kinds of heroines, the most difficult for men justly to appreciate, and in their failure something of the ignoble slight they feel for her attaches also to her creator. They are ashamed for a woman who could give herself with her heart as passionately as they seek women without their hearts. The fact will not be easily put into words, and if it be forced it demands terms too plain for print; but it underlies the vital difference between the grosser make of men and the finer make of women. Above all others Tolstoy has suggested it in the Natasha Rostoff in his “War and Peace “; but most novelists shy off from it, leaving their readers to make what they can of the recorded events; and in English fiction George Eliot has alone recognized it so recognizably as not to leave it to the reader. Her heroines’ souls are incarnate in bodies that glow with passion none the less but all the more pure because it is a flame. Maggie Tulliver, conscientious, intellectual, is compact of it; Dorothea Casaubon in “Middlemarch” loves Ladislaw from it, as Romola loves Tito Melema in the romance of her name; poor little Hetty Sorrel in “Adam Bede” is betrayed as much by it as by her vanity; Dinah Morris herself is not without it; in “Daniel Deronda “ Gwendolen Harleth is redeemed by it, at least in the reader’s pity.

II

It is by her nature, complex, passionate, sensuous, by her sex, intellectualized and spiritualized, that she is most important to the reader. In her relations to her brother, which are apparently the chief interest of the book, she is interestingly and novelly studied; but these, though they involve the catastrophe, do not involve the climax. That is reached, as it seems to me, not when she and Tom are drowned together in the flood of the Floss, but when her reason and her conscience are provisionally overborne by her love for Stephen Guest, and she floats with him down a tide and out upon a sea more perilous than any inundation, and saves herself only by a powerful impulse of her will, which is almost a convulsion. The fruition of her love would have been a double treason, treason to her cousin Lucy, who was Guest’s betrothed, and treason to Philip Waken, to whom she was herself pledged; and the sense of this blackened it with guilt, and turned it to despair, even while she yielded and yielded to the love of being loved. Never has an unhappy passion been more faithfully studied in a character with strength enough finally to forbid it; or more subtly felt from that first moment when Maggie begins to rejoice in her beauty because of her love for the man who loves it, till that last moment when she refuses to marry him, and goes back to suffer shame rather than to merit shame. Every step of the way is accurately and firmly traced up to that passage where Stephen Guest comes to ask her to row with him on the river, and from which there seems no retreat.

“‘Oh, we can’t go,’ said Maggie, sinking into her chair again. ‘Lucy did not expect — she would be hurt. Why is not Philip come?’  ‘He is not well; he asked me to come instead. ‘ ‘Lucy is gone to Lindum,’ said Maggie, taking off her bonnet, with hurried, trembling fingers. ‘We must not go.’  ‘Very well,’ said Stephen, dreamily, looking at her, as he rested his arm on the back of his chair. ‘Then we’ll stay here.’ He was looking into her deep, deep eyes — far off and mysterious as the starlit blackness, and yet very near and timidly loving. Maggie sat perfectly still, perhaps for moments, perhaps for minutes — until the helpless trembling had ceased, and there was a warm glow on her cheek.... ‘Let us go,’ Stephen murmured, entreatingly, rising, and taking her hand to raise her too. ‘We shall not be long together. ‘And they went. Maggie felt that she was being led down the garden among the roses, being helped with firm, tender care into the boat, having the cushion and cloak arranged for her feet, and her parasol opened for her (which she had forgotten) — all by this stronger presence that seemed to bear her along without any act of her own will, like the added self which comes with the sudden exalting influence of a strong tonic — and she felt nothing else. Memory was excluded.... ‘Oh, have we passed Luckreth — where we were to stop?’ she exclaimed, looking back to see if the place were out of sight. No village was to be seen. She turned round again, with a look of distressed questioning at Stephen. He went on watching the water, and said in a strange, dreamy, absent tone, ‘Yes, a long way.’  ‘Oh, what shall I do?’ cried Maggie in an agony. ‘We shall not get home for hours — and Lucy — O God, help me I’ She clasped her hands and broke into a sob, like a frightened child: she thought of nothing but of meeting Lucy, and seeing her look of pained surprise and doubt — perhaps of just upbraiding. Stephen moved and sat near her, and gently drew down the clasped hands. ‘Maggie,’ he said, in a deep tone of slow decision, ‘let us never go home again — till no one can part us — till we are married. ‘The unusual tone, the startling words, arrested Maggie’s sob, and she sat quite still — wondering: as if Stephen might have seen some possibilities that would alter everything, and annul the wretched facts.... ‘Let me go!’ she said, in an agitated tone, flashing an indignant look at him, and trying to get her hands free. ‘You have wanted to deprive me of any choice. You knew we were come too far — you have dared to take advantage of my thoughtlessness. It is unmanly to bring me into such a position. ‘Stung by this reproach, he released her hands, moved back to his former place, and folded his arms, in a sort of desperation at the difficulty Maggie’s words had made present to him. The indignant fire in her eyes was quenched, and she began to look at him with timid distress. She had reproached him for being hurried into irrevocable trespass — she, who had been so weak herself. ‘As if I shouldn’t feel what happened to you — just the same,’ she said, with reproach of another kind — the reproach of love, asking for more trust. This yielding to the idea of Stephen’s suffering was more fatal than the other yielding, because it was less distinguishable from that sense of others’ claims which was the moral basis of her resistance. He felt all the relenting in her look and tone — it was heaven opening again. He moved to her side, and took her hand, leaning his elbow on the back of the boat, and saying nothing. They glided along in this way, both resting in that silence as in a haven, both dreading lest their feelings should be divided again — till they became aware that the clouds had gathered, and that the slightest perceptible freshening of the breeze was growing and growing, so that the whole character of the day was altered. ‘You will be chill, Maggie, in this thin dress. Let me raise the cloak over your shoulders. Get up an instant, dearest.’ Maggie obeyed: there was an unspeakable charm in being told what to do, and having everything decided for her.... Presently Stephen observed a vessel coming after them.... ‘Maggie, dearest,’ he said, at last, ‘if this vessel should be going to Mudport, or to any convenient place on the coast northward, it would be our best plan to get them to take us on board.’ Maggie’s heart began to beat with reawakened alarm at this new proposition; but she was silent; one course seemed as difficult as another. Stephen hailed the vessel. It was a Dutch vessel going to Mudport, the English mate informed him, and, if this wind held out, would be there in less than two days.... Maggie was to sleep all night in the poop; it was better than going below; and she was covered with the warmest wrappings the ship could furnish. It was still early, when the fatigues of the day brought on a drowsy longing for perfect rest, and she laid down her head, looking at the faint dying flush in the west, where the one golden lamp was getting brighter and brighter. Then she looked up at Stephen, who was still seated by her, hanging over her as he leaned against the vessel’s side. Behind all the delicious visions of these last hours, which had flowed over her like a soft stream, and made her entirely passive, there was the dim consciousness that the condition was a transient one, and that the morrow must bring back the old life of struggle — that there were thoughts which would presently avenge themselves for this oblivion.... Daybreak came and the reddening eastern light, while her past life was grasping her in this way, with that tightening clutch which comes in the last moments of possible rescue. She could see Stephen now lying on the deck still fast asleep, and with the sight of him there came a wave of anguish that found its way in a long, suppressed sob....

‘Here we are in sight of Mudport,’ he said, at last. ‘Now dearest,’ he added, turning toward her with a look that was half beseeching, ‘the worst part of your fatigue is over. On the land we can command swiftness. In another hour and a half we shall be in a chaise together — and that will seem rest to you after this.’ Maggie felt it was time to speak; it would only be unkind now to assent by silence. She spoke in the lowest tone, as he had done, but with distinct decision. ‘We shall not be together — we shall have parted.’ The blood rushed to Stephen’s face. ‘We shall not,’ he said. ‘I’ll die first. ‘It was as he had dreamed — there was a struggle coming. But neither of them dared to say another word, till the boat was let down, and they were taken to the landing-place.... A porter guided them to the nearest inn and posting-house, and Stephen gave the order for the chaise as they passed through the yard. Maggie took no notice of this, and only said, ‘Ask them to show us into a room where we can sit down. We must not wait,’ she said, in a low but distinct voice; ‘we must part at once.’  ‘We will not part,’ Stephen burst out, instinctively placing his back against the door — forgetting everything he had said a few moments before; ‘I will not endure it You’ll make me desperate — I sha’n’t know what I do. ‘Maggie trembled....

Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird; but this direct opposition helped her. She felt her determination growing stronger. ‘Maggie! Dearest! If you love me, you are mine. Who can have so great a claim on you as I have? My life is bound up in your love. There is nothing in the past that can annul our right to each other; it is the first time we have either of us loved with our whole heart and soul. ‘Maggie was still silent for a little while — looking down. Stephen was in a flutter of new hope; he was going to triumph. But she raised her eyes and met his with a glance that was filled with the anguish of regret — not with yielding. ‘No — not with my whole heart and soul, Stephen,’ she said, with timid resolution. ‘I have never consented to it with my whole mind. There are memories, and affections, and longings after perfect goodness, that have such a strong hold on me; they would never quit me for long; they would come back and be pain to me — repentance. I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God. I have caused sorrow already — I know — I feel it; but I have never deliberately consented to it; I have never said, “ They shall suffer, that I may have joy. “ It has never been my will to marry you; if you were to win consent from the momentary triumph of my feeling for you, you would not have my whole soul. If I could wake back again into the time before yesterday, I would choose to be true to my calmer affections, and live without the joy of love,’... Again a deep flush came over Maggie’s face, and she was silent. Stephen thought again that he was beginning to prevail — he had never yet believed that he should not prevail; there are possibilities which our minds shrink from too completely for us to fear them. ‘Dearest,’ he said, in his deepest, tenderest tone, leaning toward her, and putting his arm round her, ‘you are mine now — the world believes it — duty must spring out of that now; in a few hours you will be legally mine, and those who had claims on us will submit — they will see that there was a force which declared against their claims,’ Maggie’s eyes opened wide in one terrified look at the face that was close to hers, and she started up — pale again. ‘Oh, I can’t do it,’ she said, in a voice almost of agony; ‘Stephen — don’t ask me — don’t urge me. I can’t argue any longer — I don’t know what is wise; but my heart will not let me do it. I see — I feel their trouble now; it is as if it were branded on my mind. I have suffered, and had no one to pity me; and now I have made others suffer. It would never leave me; it would embitter your love to me.’... ‘Good God, Maggie!’ said Stephen, rising too and grasping her arm, ‘you rave. How can you go back without marrying me? You don’t know what will be said, dearest. You see nothing as it really is.’  ‘Yes, I do. But they will believe me. I will confess everything. Lucy will believe me — she will forgive you, and — and — oh, some good will come by clinging to the right. Dear, dear Stephen, let me go! — don’t drag me into deeper remorse. My whole soul has never consented — it does not consent now,’ Stephen let go her arm, and sank back on the chair, half stunned by despairing rage. He was silent a few moments, not looking at her; while her eyes were turned toward him yearningly, in alarm at this sudden change. At last he said, still without looking at her— ‘Go, then — leave me — don’t torture me any longer — I can’t bear it.’ Involuntarily she leaned toward him and put out her hand to touch his. But he shrank from it as if it had been burning iron, and said again, ‘Leave me!’”

III

It does not seem to me that the true logic of the tale is Maggie’s death with Tom Tulliver, or Stephen’s marriage with Lucy. It is a forced touch where the husband and wife stand together beside the grave of the brother and sister; but in the novels, the best of the novels, fifty years ago, they forced their touches rather? more than they do now. To kill people or to marry them is to beg the question; but into some corner the novelist is commonly driven who deals with a problem. It is only life that can deal masterfully with problems, and life does not solve them by referring them to another life or by stifling them with happiness. How life would have solved the problem of Maggie Tulliver I am not quite prepared to say; but I have my revolt against George Eliot’s solution. All the more I must own that the evolution of the heroine’s character, from the sort of undisciplined, imaginative, fascinating little girl we see her at first, into the impassioned, bewildered, self-disciplined woman we see her at last, is masterly. Having given my opinion that her supreme expression is in her relation to her lover, I have my doubts, or at least my compunctions in behalf of her relation to her brother. Unquestionably the greatest pathos of the story appeals to us from her relation to her brother. The adoring dependence, the grieving indignation, the devotion, the revolt, the submission, and the reunion which make up her love for him is such a study of sisterly affection as I should not know where to match. The very conditions of her intellectual and emotional superiority involve a moral inferiority to the brute simplicity, the narrow integrity, the heroic truth of the more singlynatured man. Maggie saw life more whole than Tom, but that part of it which he saw he discerned with a clearness denied to her large but cloudy vision. It is a great and beautiful story, which one reads with a helpless wonder that such a book should ever be in any wise superseded, or should not constantly keep the attention at least of those fitted to feel its deep and lasting significance.

IV

Through the immeasurably greater importance of its heroine, “The Mill on the Floss” is a greater book than “ Adam Bede,” if we are to take Hetty Sorrel for the heroine of “Adam Bede,” as I suppose we must, and not Dinah Morris. I have no doubt but the author gave her best work to the portrayal of Dinah’s nature, and not in any merely voluntary or mechanical way, but from the highest artistic perception and intention. She has revealed in her character one of the highest types of womanhood and of sainthood; and yet it is poor, shallow, weak, sinful Hetty, with the mind of a child scarcely maturing through the will if not the guilt of a murderess, that takes our interest from this great woman and saint, and holds us heart-wrung and gasping in the presence of that squalid experience. Soul for soul, even the light man who betrays Hetty has through, the anguish of his repentance really a higher claim upon our pity. But it is a law which must be divine, though we find it embodied in human justice nowhere out of fiction, that the weak and slight nature has a paramount right to our sympathy when it suffers. Its suffering moves us like that of some hapless little animal agonizing before our eyes in throes for which we can imagine no compensation elsewhere. For the soul that suffers there is the possibility of an eternity of happiness, but for the thing that has no soul, or to which we attribute none, there is no reparation; its anguish affects the spectator like an injustice, a wrong not less atrocious because indefinable. It does not matter that Hetty Sorrel is a vain, thin, hard little nature, snared through nothing better perhaps than her vulgar fancy, her ignorant and selfish ambition. All the same she is snared, she is deceived, she is blotted out of hope as effectually as if she were, in the scope of the story, blotted out of life.

The author’s hold upon her nature — it can hardly be called her character — is shown in nothing more than in the artistic conscience with which she keeps her from becoming more or other than her moral potentialities imply. There are two great passages in her history, almost as far apart as its beginning and its ending, which give the whole range of her spiritual experience; and one of these will occur to the reader as the passage in which the poor creature triumphs in her beauty with her first definite hopes of Arthur Donnithorne’s love.

It occurs in the chapter called “The Two Bed-Chambers,” where Dinah and Hetty sleep in the farm-house, and while Dinah is dedicating herself in thoughts that are cares and prayers, Hetty is peacocking up and down her little room in worship of her own pretty looks.

“Having taken off her gown and white ‘kerchief, she drew a key from the large pocket that hung outside her petticoat, and, unlocking one of the lower drawers in the chest, reached from it two short bits of wax-candle — secretly bought at Treddleston — and stuck them in the two brass sockets. Then she drew forth a bundle of matches, and lighted the candles; and, last of all, a small red-framed shilling looking-glass, without blotches. It was into this small glass that she chose to look first after seating herself. She looked into it, smiling, and turning her head on one side for a minute, then laid it down and took out her brush and comb from an upper drawer. She was going to let down her hair and make herself look like that picture of a lady in Miss Lydia Donnithorne’s dressing-room. It was soon done, and the dark hyacinthine curves fell on her neck. It was not heavy, massive, merely rippling hair, but soft and silken, running at every opportunity into delicate rings. But she pushed it all backward, to look like the picture, and form a dark curtain, throwing into relief her round, white neck. Then she put down her brush and comb, and looked at herself, folding her arms before her, still like the picture.... Oh, yes! she was very pretty; Captain Donnithorne thought so. Prettier than anybody about Hayslope — prettier than any of the ladies she had ever seen visiting at the Chase — indeed, it seemed fine ladies were rather old and ugly — and prettier than Miss Bacon, the miller’s daughter, who was called the beauty of Treddleston. And Hetty looked at herself to-night with quite a different sensation from what she had ever felt before; there was an invisible spectator whose eye rested on her like morning on the flowers. His soft voice was saying over and over again those pretty things she had heard in the wood; his arm was round her, and the delicate rose-scent of his hair was with her still. The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her own beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return. But Hetty seemed to have made up her mind that something was wanting, for she got up and reached an old black lace scarf out of the linen-press, and a pair of large ear-rings out of the sacred drawer from which she had taken her candles. It was an old, old scarf, full of rents, but it would make a becoming border round her shoulders, and set off the whiteness of her upper arm. And she would take out the little ear-rings she had in her ears — oh, how her aunt had scolded her for having her ears bored! — and put in those large ones; they were but colored glass and gilding; but, if you didn’t know what they were made of, they looked just as well as what the ladies wore. And so she sat down again, with the large ear-rings in her ears, and the black lace scarf adjusted round her shoulders. She looked down at her arms; no arms could be prettier down to a little way below the elbow — they were white and plump, and dimpled to match her cheeks; but towards the wrist she thought with vexation that they were coarsened by butter-making and other work that ladies never did. Captain Donnithorne wouldn’t like her to go on doing work; he would like to see her in nice clothes, and thin shoes and white stockings, perhaps with silk clocks to them; for he must love her very much — no one else had ever put his arm around her and kissed her in that way. He would want to marry her and make a lady of her — she could hardly dare to shape the thought — yet how else could it be?... And nothing could be as it had been again; perhaps some day she should be a grand lady and ride in her coach, and dress for dinner in a brocaded silk, with feathers in her hair and her dress sweeping the ground, like Miss Lydia and Lady Dacey, when she saw them going into the dining-room one evening, as she peeped through the little round window in the lobby; only she should not be old and ugly like Miss Lydia, or all the same thickness like Lady Dacey, but very pretty, with her hair done in a great many different ways, and sometimes in a pink dress, and sometimes in a white one — she didn’t know which she liked best; and Mary Burge and everybody would perhaps see her going out in her carriage — or rather, they would hear of it; it was impossible to imagine these things happening at Hayslope in sight of her aunt. At the thought of all this splendor, Hetty got up from her chair, and in doing so caught the little red-framed glass with the edge of her scarf, so that it fell with a bang on the floor; but she was too eagerly occupied with her vision to care about picking it up, and, after a momentary start, began to pace with a pigeon-like stateliness backward and forward along her room, in her colored stays and colored skirt, and the old black lace scarf round her shoulders, and the great glass ear-rings in her ears.... No eyelashes could be more beautiful than Hetty’s; and now, while she walks with her pigeon-like stateliness along the room, and looks down on her shoulders bordered by the old black lace, the dark fringe shows to perfection on her pink cheek. They are but dim, ill-defined pictures that her narrow bit of an imagination can make of the future; but of every picture she is the central figure, in fine clothes. Captain Donnithorne is very close to her, putting his arm round her, perhaps kissing her, and everybody else is admiring and envying her, especially Mary Burge, whose new print dress looks very contemptible by the side of Hetty’s resplendent toilet. Does any sweet or sad memory mingle with this dream of the future — any loving thought of her second parents — of the children she had helped to tend — of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood even? Not one. There are some plants that have hardly any roots; you may tear them from their native nook of rock or wall, and just lay them over your ornamental flower-pot, and they blossom none the worse.”

V

The whole dark, fateful drama, the drama predestined of the contact of such natures as Hetty Sorrel’s and Arthur Donnithorne’s, passes between this typical scene and the other of which I wish to remind the reader. That has happened which must happen with a spirit so selfish and shallow as hers, and a spirit so selfish and soft as his; and though his guilt is greater because his knowledge is greater, she is guilty to the limit of her lesser knowledge. When the man who loves her with the love of the husband he had hoped to be compels her paramour to break with her, but too late, and when Hetty can no longer hide her shame, she seeks to hide herself from all who know her. She runs away from home, and when her time comes, and her child is born, she is tempted to kill it. It is found dead, though she has not killed it, and its death is traced to her, and she is condemned to die for the deed she has thought to do but has not done. The night before she is appointed to suffer she is in her cell, with Dinah Morris watching and praying beside her.

“‘Dinah,’ Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round Dinah’s neck, ‘I will speak... I will tell...

I won’t hide it any more. ‘But the tears and sobs were too violent Dinah raised her gently from her knees, and seated her on the pallet again, sitting down by her side. It was a long time before the convulsed throat was quiet, and even then they sat some time in stillness and darkness, holding each other’s hands. At last Hetty whispered, ‘I didn’t do it, Dinah.... I buried it in the wood,... and it cried.... I heard it cry,... ever such a way off,... all night,... and I went back because it cried,’...

She paused, and then spoke hurriedly in a louder, pleading tone. ‘But I thought perhaps it wouldn’t die — there might somebody find it I didn’t kill it — I didn’t kill it myself. I put it down there and covered it up, and when I came back it was gone.... It was because I was so very miserable, Dinah.... I didn’t know where to go,... and I tried to kill myself before, and I couldn’t. Oh, I tried so to drown myself in the pool, and I couldn’t. I went to Windsor — I ran away — did you know? I went to find him, as he might take care of me; and he was gone; and then I didn’t know what to do. I dared not go back home again — I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t have borne to look at anybody, for they’d have scorned me. I thought o’ you sometimes, and thought I’d come to you, for I didn’t think you’d be cross with me, and cry shame on me; I thought I could tell you.... And I came to a haystack, where I thought I could lie down and keep myself warm all night. There was a place cut into it, where I could make me a bed; and I lay comfortable, and the baby was warm against me; and I must have gone to sleep for a good while, for when I woke it was morning, but not very light, and the baby was crying. And I saw a wood a little way off.... I thought there’d perhaps be a ditch or a pond there,... and it was so early I thought I could hide the child there, and get a long way off before the folks was up. And then I thought I’d go home — I’d get rides in carts and go home, and tell ’em I’d been to try and see for a place, and couldn’t get one. I longed so for it, Dinah — I longed so to be safe at home. I don’t know how I felt about the baby. I seemed to hate it — it was like a heavy weight hanging round my neck; and yet its crying went through me, and I dared not look at its little hands and face. But I went on to the wood, and I walked about, but there was no water.’... Hetty shuddered.

She was silent for some moments, and when she began again it was in a whisper. ‘I came to a place where there were lots of chips and turf, and I sat down on the trunk of a tree to think what I should do. And all of a sudden I saw a hole under the nut-tree, like a little grave. And it darted into me like lightning — I’d lay the baby there, and cover it with the grass and the chips. I couldn’t kill it any other way. And I’d done it in a minute; and, oh, it cried so, Dinah — I couldn’t cover it quite up — I thought, perhaps, somebody ‘ud come and take care of it, and then it wouldn’t die. And I made haste out of the wood, but I could hear it crying all the while; and when I got out into the fields, it was as if I was held fast — I couldn’t go away, for all I wanted so to go.... But it was morning, for it kept getting lighter; and I turned back the way I’d come. I couldn’t help it, Dinah; it was the baby’s crying made me go; and yet I was frightened to death.... I saw nothing but that place in the wood where I’d buried the baby.... I see it now. Oh, Dinah! shall I always see it?’

“Hetty hung round Dinah, and shuddered again. The silence seemed long before she went on.

“‘I met nobody, for it was very early, and I got into the wood.... I knew the way to the place,... the place against the nut-tree; and I could hear it crying at every step.... I thought it was alive.... I don’t know whether I was frightened or glad.... I don’t know what I felt. I only know I was in the wood and heard the cry. I don’t know what I felt till I saw the baby was gone. And when I’d put it there, I thought I should like somebody to find it, and save it from dying; but when I saw it was gone, I was struck like a stone with fear. I never thought o’ stirring, I felt so weak. I knew I couldn’t run away, and everybody as saw me ‘ud know about the baby. My heart went like a stone; I couldn’t wish or try for anything; it seemed like as if I should stay there forever, and nothing ‘ud ever change. But they came and took me away. ‘Hetty was silent, but she shuddered again, as if there were still something behind; and Dinah waited, for her heart was so full that tears must come before words. At last Hetty burst out, with a sob, ‘Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the wood, now I’ve told everything?’  ‘Let us pray, poor sinner; let us fall on our knees again, and pray to the God of all mercy. ‘“

VI

It is a mark of maturing power in an author to deal more with complex and less with simple character. Acquaintance with life brings an increasing sense of the prevalence of mixed motives in the actions of men, and a keener perception of the fact that personality resides rather in the motives than the actions of men. An action is black or white; a motive is commonly the blend of several if not all the colors. This law of life the ripening talent gladly makes the law of its art. But there is another law, rather of the author’s nature than his art, to which his allegiance is involuntary and insensible, and this is the law of recurrence in the types he treats.

“Adam Bede” was George Eliot’s first great novel, and its characters, imposing and important as they were, were almost primitively simple. Then came “ The Mill on the Floss,” where the characters are mainly simple, but where we have in Maggie Tulliver a personality worthy in its complexity of the maturing power of the author. In “ Romola,” a later book, there is a reversion in the heroine to the singly-motived types of the earlier books; and in “Middlemarch,” which came still later, the characters are so subtly studied that, with the exception of Rosamond Vincy’s plain selfishness, the motives of nearly all, good, bad, and indifferent, are found as mixed as they would be in life. In “ Daniel Deronda “ we see not a recurrence to the original simplicity in the motives of the persons represented, but rather the matured power of showing them complex beginning to fall into decay, to weaken and to fail of the supreme effects achieved in “Middlemarch.”

It may almost be said that in “ Romola” George Eliot, as an artist, came to what Tolstoy, in the moral world, calls “the first consciousness.” In Tito Melema she must have rejoiced with full knowledge as the prime figure in English fiction, since Shakspere’s men, to illustrate the play of mixed motives in character. That consummate scoundrel is indeed a glorious achievement; but Romola, generously as she is imagined, is comparatively a failure. She is not an Italian of the Renaissance, she is not an Italian at all; she is a deeply ethicized intellectual English woman of the nineteenth century, with a Protestant conscience and a middle-class tradition, moved by Puritanic principles, which even if we suppose her a Florentine Piagnone and a follower of Savonarola, would not have actuated a Bardi in the time of the declining republic. She is spiritually a reversion to Dinah Morris, though appointed to such different offices in the story; as Tessa, her husband’s ignorant little paramour, is a reversion to Hetty Sorrel. Tessa, of course, has nothing of Hetty’s ignorant ambition, and there is no tragedy of self-deceit in her case; she has given herself to Tito because she has been asked, and not because she has ever dreamt of marrying him; she is as soft as Hetty is hard, and she is not vain. She is a contadina, as Hetty is a country girl, and Tito in her dim world holds the same high place that Donnithorne holds in Hetty’s; but her fate is not so terrible, because in that old Italy, still pagan under the Christian forms, there is no such tragedy for her as for Hetty in a time and a place where the Christian ideal of womanhood had made the fear of shame stronger than even the fear of crime.

GEORGE ELIOTS ROSAMOND VINCY AND DOROTHEA BROOKE

THE cultivated world was long ago brought to profess its open pleasure in character because it is true rather than in character because it is pleasing or edifying; but whether this pleasure is real or not, or whether it is not underlain by a secret preference for a character because he is good or she is pretty, I am not quite sure.

In the theatres frequented by the simple-hearted sort of people, the actor playing the part of a virtuous person is applauded, and the actor playing the part of a villain is hissed, irrespective of their artistic merits; but this rarely happens in any two-dollar house. Still, I am not satisfied that it would not happen if the two-dollar audience were as sincere as the fifty-cent audience, and I have my misgivings in offering to the admiration of the reader a detestable character merely because it is a masterpiece.

I

I am certain that it would be difficult to find a more detestable character, or a truer, than Rosamond Vincy, who equally with Dorothea Brooke is the heroine of “Middlemarch.” She is a very beautiful girl, and Lydgate who marries her loves her with a tenderness worthy the soul that is not in her. The soul that is in her is small and meanly selfish, but neither she nor he knows how small or meanly selfish at first. Rosamond, indeed, has a very high ideal of herself, which eventuates in an inexorable conceit after marriage, when the early tumult of the emotions subsides, and she has time to take full thought of her merits in contrast to her husband’s demerits. She is of that intensely personal nature which receives whatever happens as of direct intention toward itself; and feels injured or favored by the course of human events as if they were primarily concerned with it. As the course of events is not agreeable to Rosamond after her marriage with Lydgate, she naturally holds him responsible for them, and he falls in her esteem and her affection when he finds that they have been living extravagantly and wishes her to help him retrench. She never could have duly appreciated either his brilliant mind or his tender heart, and she sets herself to thwart and baffle him with a success which the greatness of both his mind and heart render easy for a dull, narrow, pretty egotist.

There can be nothing more tragical than the story of their unhappy married life, in which she harasses him with her paltry ambitions and resentments, and wears him out at last. Such women literally kill men, and the more generous the men the more easily they fall the prey of such women. It is nothing to Rosamond and can be nothing that her husband is recognized as a man of great scientific importance, and has the making of the highest professional fame in him. There is no sort of opinion, public or private, which could convince her that he had not wronged her by falling into money difficulties after he married her, or in failing to make her life as luxurious for her as she had expected. She breaks his heart and then she breaks his spirit, and when he dies she inherits the money that at last comes to her from his life-insurance with a sense of desert which has never once forsaken her.

We all know women like Rosamond Vincy; the type is eternal and ineffaceable, but a woman of her sort will complacently sit before Rosamond’s portrait, and never dream that there is anything like herself in it. The successive scenes in which her unconscious, abominable selfishness is developed can scarcely be said to culminate, but they each deepen and widen a little the sense of her deadly and deadening egotism, and of the hopelessness with which a generous spirit like Lydgate’s must struggle in the clinging and stifling hold of a polyp-nature like hers. In a novel of later date, where the dramatic method is more used, the whole situation would be imparted at once; but it must be seen that the partial suggestions of George Eliot follow one upon another with a deepening impression, till the reader’s pity for Lydgate’s doom in the wretched creature he loves would have excused his surrender to almost any temptation. Lydgate suffers a certain moral decay in his endeavor to please his wife, and even falls under suspicion of complicity with another’s crime; but at the worst he has done no wrong beyond lowering his aspirations, and has only sinned against himself.

Any one of the passages in which the author securely if slowly feels her way to the eventuality would serve to exhibit Rosamond as she always is, and I cannot say that I choose the first scene in which Lydgate tries to make her understand the situation as stronger than the others.

“‘Dear Rosy, lay down your work and come to sit by me,’ he said, gently, pushing away the table, and stretching out his arm to draw a chair near his own. Rosamond obeyed. As she came toward him in her drapery of transparent, faintly tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more graceful; as she sat down by him and laid one hand on the elbow of his chair, at last looking at him and meeting his eyes, her delicate neck and cheek and purely cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty which touches us in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness. It touched Lydgate now, and mingled the early memories of his love for her with all the other memories which were stirred in this crisis of deep trouble. He laid his ample hand softly on hers, saying: ‘Dear!’ with the lingering utterance which affection gives to the word. Rosamond, too, was still under the power of that same past, and her husband was still in part the Lydgate whose approval had stirred delight She put his hair lightly away from his forehead, then laid her other hand on his, and was conscious of forgiving him. ‘I am obliged to tell you what will hurt you, Rosy. But there are things which husband and wife must think of together. I dare say it has occurred to you already that I am short of money.’ Lydgate paused; but Rosamond turned her neck and looked at a vase on the mantel-piece. ‘I was not able to pay for all the things we had to get before we were married, and there have been expenses since which I have been obliged to meet. I took pains to keep it from you while you were not well; now we must think about it together, and you must help me.’  ‘What can I do, Tertius?’ said Rosamond, turning her eyes on him again. That little speech of four words, like so many others in all languages, is capable by varied vocal inflections of expressing all states of mind from helpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative perception, from the completest, self-devoting fellowship to the most neutral aloofness. Rosamond’s thin utterance threw into the words ‘What can I do?’ as much neutrality as they could hold. They fell like a mortal chill on Lydgate’s roused tenderness. He did not storm in indignation — he felt too sad a sinking of the heart. And when he spoke again it was more in the tone of a man who forces himself to fulfil a task. ‘It is necessary for you to know, because I have to give security for a time, and a man must come to make an inventory of the furniture.’ Rosamond colored deeply. ‘Have you not asked papa for money?’ she said, as soon as she could speak.... ‘No, Rosy,’ said Lydgate, decisively. ‘It is too late to do that.... I insist upon it that your father shall not know, unless I choose to tell him,’ added Lydgate, with a more peremptory emphasis. This certainly was unkind, but Rosamond had thrown him back on evil expectation as to what she would do in the way of quiet, steady disobedience. The unkindness seemed unpardonable to her: she was not given to weeping, and disliked it, but now her chin and lips began to tremble and the tears welled up....

He could not speak again immediately; but Rosamond did not go on sobbing; she tried to conquer her agitation and wiped away her tears, continuing to look before her at the mantel-piece.... ‘Your friends would not wish you to be without money. And surely these odious tradesmen might be made to understand that and to wait, if you would make proper representations to them,’  ‘This is idle, Rosamond,’ said Lydgate, angrily. ‘You must learn to take my judgment on questions you don’t understand. I have made necessary arrangements, and they must be carried out.’... Rosamond quietly went out of the room, leaving Lydgate helpless and wondering. Was she not coming back? It seemed that she had no more identified herself with him than if they had been creatures of different species and opposing interests.... ‘This is all the jewelry you ever gave me. You can return what you like of it, and of the plate also. You will not, of course, expect me to stay at home to-morrow. I shall go to papa’s,’ To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more terrible than one of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance of the distance she was placing between them.... ‘I shall not touch these jewels, Rosy. Take them away again. But I will write out a list of plate that we may return, and that can be packed up and sent at once,’... Rosamond went to reach the inkstand, and after setting it on the table was going to turn away, when Lydgate, who was standing close by, put his arm around her and drew her toward him, saying: ‘Come, darling, let us make the best of things. It will only be for a time, I hope, that we shall have to be stingy and particular. Kiss me.’ His native warm-heartedness took a great deal of quenching, and it is a part of manliness for a husband to feel keenly the fact that an inexperienced girl has got into trouble by marrying him. She received his kiss and returned it faintly, and in this way an appearance of accord was recovered for the time.”

II

It may be said that we know Rosamond Vincy from the beginning, and that her character does not reveal itself more fully in the different scenes that follow this. But so do we know the character of Hamlet from the beginning, and it is new light rather than more light that events throw upon it, as the drama proceeds. There is no surprise, but a very great interest and instruction, in Rosamond’s meddling conceit when she interferes with Lydgate’s brave endeavors to get out of debt, and brings shame upon him by her secret appeals to his family; and in the absolute immorality of her willingness to have him so bound by a money favor to Bulstrode that he is helpless to declare his suspicions of Bulstrode’s guilt in an affair very like murder. When the shadow of this affair falls upon Lydgate, too, Rosamond feels herself chiefly aggrieved, and blames her husband for her suffering through him. It is by no means out of keeping with what else we know of her that she should have meantime supposed herself to be loved by Lydgate’s friend Ladislaw, and that she should have suffered his passion, without returning it, as a just tribute to her meritorious beauty.

There is of course the question, which I hope will occur to the reader of these papers, whether in portraying a nature so altogether odious as Rosamond’s the author has not been guilty of leze-complexity. Is not such a character too simply, too singly detestable, to be a true copy? I confess that it comes perilously near incurring some such censure; but perhaps the defence may be that we have not taken due account of mitigating circumstances in Rosamond’s case. If Lydgate had smoothly and splendidly succeeded, as she expected, from the beginning, and there had been no hint of debts or troubles, her conceit would have concerned itself with little, insignificant things; she would have been content chiefly to talk incessantly about herself, and safely flirt well within a devoted admiration of her husband; she would have been a pretty bore, without the power of considerable mischief, as she was certainly always without the wish for it, or the cognizance of it. There is fairly enough the implication of all this in the representation of her character, as we must own when we most suspect the author of having come to hate Rosamond so much that she is just to her with difficulty.

Novelists ought not to have their favorites among their creations, as parents ought not to have their favorites among their children; but no doubt they have them. If the novelists are women, they wish their readers to share their preferences, and it might be true to say the same thing of the novelists even if they are men. At any rate, George Eliot has her preferences most distinctly, and she pursues some of her women with a rancor as perceptible as her fondness for others. I will not deny that I think this a defect of her art; it is so; and I am not going to defend it any more in the case of Dorothea Brooke, whom she loves, than in the case of Rosamond Vincy, whom she hates with a hatred passing her hatred of Hetty Sorrel and Gwendolen Harleth, and all the other anti-heroines of her books. She succeeds in commending these to our dislike rather than she succeeds in commending to our liking her Romolas and Mary Garths and Mirahs, perhaps because in fiction as in life a woman does not know how to praise her friends sparingly enough. But in Dorothea Brooke she has known how to hold her hand, or rather has she known how so to temper Dorothea’s strength with weakness, her wisdom with folly, her good with evil, as to render her entirely credible and entirely lovable.

III

Since I wrote the foregoing paragraph I have been reviewing the whole career, or rather the whole character, of Dorothea in “Middlemarch,” and I think I can now go still farther in praise of her, and keep well within the limits of reason. She is of a most noble make, not merely because she is of a high mind and an eager conscience, but because she has a will to be generously of use to those who need her, and because she is above all pettiness in the cruel disappointment which life brings when it teaches her that sometimes those who need her help most cannot receive it ungrudgingly, or even at all. She once says it herself in talk with Will Ladislaw, ‘“I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.’  ‘What is that?’ said Will, rather jealous of the belief. ‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirt of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.... Please not to call it by any name,’ said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. ‘You will say it is Persian, or something else geographical. It is my life. I have found it out, and cannot part with it.’”

Dorothea is here spiritually outlined almost as strongly as she is physically intimated in this fine bit of portraiture.

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, — or from one of our elder poets, — in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.”

But it would be doing wrong to the human part which is so great a part of Dorothea (as it is with all George Eliot’s real heroines) not to let her be seen in yet another phase, where her beauty is contrasted with the different beauty of Rosamond Vincy, and the very difference of their souls is suggested in the difference of their styles.

“Let those who know tell us exactly what stuff it was that Dorothea wore in those days of mild autumn — that thin, white woollen stuff, soft to the touch and soft to the eye. It always seemed to have been lately washed, and to smell of the sweet hedges — was always in the shape of a pelisse with sleeves hanging all out of the fashion. The grace and dignity were in her limbs and neck; and about her simply parted hair and candid eyes the large round poke which was then in the fate of women, seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold trencher we call a halo... Dorothea put out her hand with her usual simple kindness, and looked admiringly at Lydgate’s lovely bride....

They were both tall, and their eyes were on a level; but imagine Rosamond’s infantile blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion; her small hands duly set off with rings, and that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”

Outlines, I have called these sketches of Dorothea, and perhaps she is never more than outlined. The inferior nature can be fully shown, because it is of a material which can be palpably handled without loss or hurt; but in the superior nature there is something elusive, something sensitive that escapes or perishes under the touch, and leaves the exhaustive study a dumb image and not a speaking likeness. Rosamond Vincy can be decanted to the dregs, and be only more and more Rosamond; but if you pour out all Dorothea her essence flies from you in a vital aroma. She seems hardly to be contained in the story of her life, but to exist mainly somewhere outside of it. That story is indeed very slight, and without the incidents that lend themselves to remembrance as powerful dramatic moments, though it is of such a fatal pathos. It is reportably that of a magnanimous young girl who falls in love with the notion of being the helpmeet of an eminent scholar because she believes in the importance of his work to the world, and in her own fitness to be of use to him in it, and so marries a dull, passionless pedant of mean soul and mistaken mind, who forces her out of his life from first to last because there is no room in it for any but his paltry self. The tragedy of Edward Casaubon is that he has undertaken work inconceivably beyond his powers, and that to a real scholarship his devoted labors are worse than useless: but his wife’s tragedy is that he himself is a greater error, a sadder solecism, than even these. He cannot see her divine good-will any more than he can feel value in the facts with which his learning deals; it is the law of his narrow being that he must forbid almost her sympathy, restrict her help to the merest mechanical effect, and scarcely suffer her the efficiency of a trained nurse, when his health fails. It is to be said in his defence that he cannot admit her to his inner life because he has none, and if on that mere outside which is his whole being, he is cold and jealous and repellent, that he was made so and cannot help it. But Dorothea’s fate is not the less cruel because it is his fate, too; and she is all the greater because she rises above it, not constantly, but finally.

In her case, as in the case of Lydgate, we see a meaner nature making a noble nature its prey, but Dorothea is more enduringly built than Lydgate, or else she is more favored by chance. Perhaps it is scientifically accurate to say this rather than the other thing, for Rosamond outlives Lydgate instead of dying and releasing him to new chances, while Casaubon suddenly, in the most critical moment, dies of heart failure and leaves Dorothea free. He has been on the point of enslaving her forever, of holding her by mortmain from that happiness to which his death must liberate her; for her morbid conscience has sided with him in his jealousy of the man whom she is unconsciously tending to love; and when he has put the crudest pressure upon her to make her promise to be ruled by his wish after his death, she comes out after a sleepless night to consent “When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though from a different cause. Then she had feared lest her effort at fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she shrank. Neither law nor the world’s opinion compelled her to this — only her husband’s nature and her own compassion, only the ideal and not the real yoke of marriage.... When she entered the Yew-tree walk she could not see her husband; but the walk had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment on chill days for the garden. It occurred to her that he might be resting in the summer-house, toward which the path diverged a little. Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, and his brow was bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening the face on each side. ‘He exhausted himself last night,’ Dorothea said to herself, thinking at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a place to rest in.... She went into the summer-house and said, ‘I am come, Edward; I am ready.’ He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep. She laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, T am ready!’ Still he was motionless, and with a sudden, confused fear, she leaned down to him, close to his head, crying, in a distressed tone: ‘Wake, dear, wake! Listen to me. I am come to answer. ‘But Dorothea never gave her answer.”

This end, with whatever skill it is managed, must be confessed a mechanical means of extricating Dorothea from her difficulty. It is to be condemned for that, and it is to be regretted that George Eliot had not had the higher courage of her art, and the clearer vision of her morality, and shown Dorothea capable of breaking a promise extorted from her against her reason and against her heart. It was from Ladislaw and her chance of happiness with him that her husband would have withheld her, and she could not have been more recreant to his will in being recreant to her word.

Her marriage to Ladislaw at last is one of the finest things, and one of the truest things in a book so great that it almost persuades one to call it the greatest in English fiction. It is not because “ Middlemarch” is an immense canvas, thronged with such a multitude of marvellously distinguished and differenced figures, that it so richly represents life. Other huge novels have been of as great scope and greater dramatic effect; but “ Middlemarch” alone seems to me akin in spiritual power to “War and Peace.” It is in its truth to motives as well as results that it is so tremendously convincing. After a lapse of years one comes to it not with a sense of having overmeasured it before, but with the perception that one had not at first realized its grandeur. It is as large as life in those moral dimensions which deepen inwardly and give the real compass of any artistic achievement through the impression received. There are none of its incidents that I find were overestimated in my earlier knowledge of them; and there are some that are far greater than I had remembered. I have had especially to correct my former judgment — I am not sure that it was mine at first hand — of the character of Ladislaw and his fitness to be Dorothea’s lover. I had thought him a slight, if not a light man, a poorish sort of Bohemian, existing by her preference, in the reader’s tolerance, and perhaps, as her husband, half a mistake. But in this renewed acquaintance with him, I must own him a person of weight by those measures which test the value of precious stones or precious metals: an artist through and through, a man of high courage and high honor, and of a certain social detachment which leaves him free to see the more easily and honestly himself. Dorothea made great and sorrowful mistakes through her generous and loyal nature; but Ladislaw was one of her inspirations: a centre of truth in which her love and her duty, otherwise so sadly at odds, could meet and be at peace.

GEORGE ELIOT’S GWENDOLEN HARLETH AND JANET DEMPSTER

THERE was such strength and such promise of strenuous continuance in the work which made Marian Evans’s pseudonym known that her public could await each of her successive novels in reliance upon some fresh evidence of her power. This could scarcely be shown in greater measure than at first, and there are people of sound judgment who consider her “Scenes of Clerical Life” still her best fiction, though it was followed by “Silas Marner,” and “Adam Bede,” and “The Mill on the Floss,” and “Romola “ and “Middlemarch,” and “Daniel Deronda.” The last stands at the other end of the great line, and until we reach “ Theophrastus Such,” there is scarcely, after the first, a sign of failing skill in the cunning hand. It has seemed to me therefore the more interesting, in this concluding study of George Eliot’s heroines, to deal with types drawn from the extremes parted by so many and such splendid performances.

I

Few students of “Daniel Deronda,” if they were readers of the novel when it began to appear, will have forgotten the characteristic terms which form Gwendolen Harleth’s introduction. “Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams?

Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?”

She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda’s mind was occupied in gambling in one of those splendid Continental resorts now mostly closed to their rich and noble patrons; and the talk about her goes on — rather too much for the reader’s ear — among the spectators. “The Nereid in sea-green robes and silver ornaments, with a pale sea-green feather fastened in silver falling backward over her green hat and light brown hair, was Gwendolen Harleth. She was under the wing, or rather soared by the shoulder, of the lady who had sat by her at the roulette-table.... ‘A striking girl — that Miss Harleth — unlike others. ‘ ‘Yes, she has got herself up a sort of serpent now — all green and silver, and winds her neck about a little more than usual.’  ‘Oh, she must always be doing something extraordinary. She is that kind of girl, I fancy. ‘...—’ You like a nez retroussé, then, and long, narrow eyes V ‘When they go with such an ensemble.’  ‘The ensemble du serpent?’  ‘She is certainly very graceful; but she wants a tinge of color in her cheeks. It is a sort of Lamia beauty she has,’  ‘On the contrary, I think her complexion one of her charms. It is a warm paleness; it looks thoroughly healthy. And that delicate nose with its gradual little upward curve is distracting. And then her mouth — there never was a prettier mouth, the lips curled backward so finely, eh?’  ‘Think so? I cannot endure that sort of mouth. It looks so self-complacent, as if it knew its own beauty — the curves are too immovable. I like a mouth that trembles more.’”

It appears, of course, that the girl is gambling, this once, for the distraction of the experience, that she is of good family in good society, and that she is chaperoned at the roulette-table by her elderly cousin, who is a baroness. The impression that she is wilful, conscious, selfish, and spoiled is not corrected by anything in her very ugly history as it ensues, though there is throughout the suggestion of potentialities for good in her nature, eventuating at last in a magnanimous penitence, of which we have at once some hint in the interest which Deronda’s quality inspires in her. A young girl in the first pages of a novel does not betray for nothing the curiosity Gwendolen confesses; it is obvious to the meanest intelligence that she is going to be in love with him; and her passion though unrequited, and not very well justified to the reader by anything shown in the elaborated personality of that fine young Jew, proves the saving factor in her life. It does not keep her from the great error and wickedness of marrying so brutally bad a man as Grandcourt out of sordid ambition and lust of the things that money can buy; but those who like to condone the faults of pretty women will find some excuse for Gwendolen Harleth in her failure to win the love of Deronda. It may be also urged in her behalf that she is poor as well as proud and pretty, and that she is tempted and flattered out of her better self by the sense of inherent power; I hope there are none who go so far as to find merit in her letting her abominable husband come so near drowning before her eyes that when she has made up her mind to save him it is too late.

Even the reader who is not acquainted with Gwendolen Harleth at first hands will perceive from these intimations that she is a person of very mixed qualities, very daringly composed. The ordinary observer who discovers that a woman is a poseuse is apt rashly to decide that she is also a fool, but this by no means follows. She is often a person of a great deal of sense, and perhaps principle, and she may behave wisely up to that point where the brain requires the help of the heart in achieving final wisdom. She may even have a heart, and experience its compunctions at all times except in the deliriums of triumphant will or of gratified vanity. Flirts are by no means wholly wicked, or the world, which is pretty full of them, would be a much worse world than it is; flirts even of the deadly quality of Gwendolen Harleth are tempered to mercy by their womanly weaknesses, and are very rarely quite demoniacal. The histrionic strain in her nature, which makes her a poseuse would, if it had gone a little deeper, have made her an artist, and depersonalized its effects. It is in fact very pitiful when, while hesitating to accept Grandcourt, she turns her thoughts to art with the modest ambition of excelling in opera, for in society she has been admired both for her acting and singing. She determines not to take this step without due authorization, and she asks the advice of Klesmer the musician. That conscientious artist is kindly merciless concerning her gifts, and he leaves her to a mortification and despair after which there is nothing for her worldliness but a loveless marriage with a man of whom she knows nothing but evil. One very black chapter of his past is revealed to her by a woman whom he has wronged and who comes to plead with her not to marry him, bringing Grandcourt’s children with her in proof that he should be her husband and not Gwendolen’s. She promises, and she breaks her promise. She marries Grandcourt, and he takes her home to the splendor and luxury for which she marries him.

“She fell silent in spite of herself as they approached the gates, and when her husband said, ‘Here we are at home!’ and for the first time kissed her on the lips, she hardly knew of it: it was no more than the passive acceptance of a greeting in the midst of an absorbing show.... But there was a brilliant light in the hall — warmth, matting, carpets, full-length portraits, Olympian statues, assiduous servants.... Gwendolen felt herself being led by Grandcourt along a subtly scented corridor, into an anteroom where she saw an open doorway sending out a rich glow of light and color. ‘These are our dens,’ said Grandcourt. ‘You will like to be quiet here till dinner. We shall dine early,’ He pressed her hand to his lips and moved away, more in love than he had ever expected to be. Gwendolen yielded up her hat and mantle, threw herself into a chair by the glowing hearth, and saw herself repeated in glass panels with all her faint-green satin surroundings. The housekeeper had passed into this boudoir from the adjoining dressing-room and seemed disposed to linger.... ‘Here is a packet, madam, which I was ordered to give into nobody’s hands but yours, when you were alone. The person who brought it said it was a present particularly ordered by Mr. Grandcourt; but he was not to know of its arrival till he saw you wear it. Excuse me, madam; I felt it right to obey orders,’ Gwendolen took the packet and let it lie on her lap till she heard the doors close. It came into her mind that the packet might contain the diamonds which Grandcourt had spoken of as being deposited somewhere and to be given to her on her marriage. In this moment of confused feeling and creeping luxurious languor she was glad of this diversion — and glad of such an event as having her own diamonds to try on. Within all the sealed paper coverings was a box, but within the box there was a jewel-case; and now she felt no doubt that she had the diamonds. But on opening the case, in the same instant that she saw them gleam she saw a letter lying above them. It was as if an adder had lain on them. Her heart gave a leap which seemed to have spent all her strength; and as she opened the bit of thin paper, it shook with the trembling of her hands. But it was legible as print, and thrust its words upon her. ‘These diamonds, which were once given with ardent love to Lydia G lasher, she passes on to you. You have broken your word to her, that you might possess what was hers. Perhaps you think of being happy, as she once was, and of having beautiful children such as hers, who will thrust hers aside. God is too just for that The man you have married has a withered heart. His best young love was mine; you could not take that from me when you took the rest... He would have married me at last, if you had not broken your word. You will have your punishment I desire it with all my soul....

You took him with your eyes open. The willing wrong you have done me will be your curse.’ It seemed at first as if Gwendolen’s eyes were spellbound in reading the horrible words of the letter over and over again as a doom of penance; but suddenly a new spasm of terror made her lean forward and stretch out the paper toward the fire, lest accusation and proof at once should meet all eyes. It flew like a feather from her trembling fingers and was caught up in a great draught of flame. In her movement the casket fell to the floor and the diamonds rolled out She took no notice, but fell back in her chair again helpless. She could not see the reflections of herself then; they were like so many women petrified white; but coming near herself you might have seen the tremor in her lips and hands.... After that long while, there was a tap at the door and Grandcourt entered, dressed for dinner. The sight of him brought a new nervous shock, and Gwendolen screamed again and again with hysterical violence. He had expected to see her dressed and smiling, ready to be led down. He saw her pallid, shrieking as it seemed with terror, the jewels scattered around her on the floor.”

In Grandcourt the imperious girl who had dreamed of ruling him finds a master whose will can break her own or bend it to his when he chooses, and their marriage is a long atrocity which begins almost from this awful moment “One evening, shortly before they came to the Abbey, they were going to dine at Brackenshaw Castle. Gwendolen had said to herself that she would never wear those diamonds: they had horrible words clinging and crawling about them, as from some bad dream, whose images lingered on the perturbed sense. She came down dressed in her white, with only a streak of gold and a pendant of emeralds, which Grandcourt had given her, round her neck, and the little emerald stars in her ears. Grandcourt stood with his back to the fire and looked at her as she entered. ‘Am I altogether as you like?’ she said, speaking rather gayly. She was not without enjoyment in this occasion of going to Brackenshaw Castle with her new dignities upon her, as men whose affairs are sadly involved will enjoy dining out among persons likely to be under a pleasant mistake about them. ‘No,’ said Grandcourt. Gwendolen felt suddenly uncomfortable, wondering what was to come.... ‘Oh mercy!’ she exclaimed, the pause lasting till she could bear it no longer. ‘How am I to alter myself?’  ‘ Put on the diamonds,’ said Grandcourt, looking straight at her with his narrow glance. Gwendolen paused in her turn, afraid of showing any emotion, and feeling that nevertheless there was some change in her eyes as they met his. But she was obliged to answer, and said as indifferently as she could, ‘Oh, please not I don’t think diamonds suit me.’  ‘What you think has nothing to do with it,’ said Grandcourt, his sotto voce imperiousness seeming to have an evening quietude and finish, like his toilet. ‘I wish you to wear the diamonds.’  ‘Pray excuse me; I like these emeralds,’ said Gwendolen, frightened in spite of her preparation. That white hand of his which was touching his whisker was capable, she fancied, of clinging round her neck and threatening to throttle her; for her fear of him, mingled with the vague foreboding of some retributive calamity which hung about her life, had reached a superstitious point. ‘Oblige me by telling me your reason for not wearing the diamonds when I desire it,’ said Grandcourt. His eyes were still fixed upon her, and she felt her own eyes narrowing under them as if to shut out an entering pain. Of what use was the rebellion within her? She could say nothing that would not hurt her worse than submission. Turning slowly and covering herself again, she went to her dressing-room. As she reached out the diamonds it occurred to her that her unwillingness to wear them might have already raised a suspicion in Grandcourt that she had some knowledge about them which he had not given her. She fancied that his eyes showed a delight in torturing her. How could she be defiant? She had nothing to say that would touch him — nothing but what would give him a more painful grasp of her consciousness. ‘He delights in making the dogs and horses quail: that is half his pleasure in calling them his,’ she said to herself, as she opened the jewel-case with a shivering sensation. ‘It will be so with me; and I shall quail. What else is there for me? I will not say to the world, “Pity me.”’ She was about to ring for her maid when she heard the door open behind her. It was Grandcourt who came in. ‘You want some one to fasten them,’ he said, coming toward her. She did not answer, but simply stood still, leaving him to take out the ornaments and fasten them as he would....

‘What makes you so cold?’ said Grandcourt, when he had fastened the last ear-ring. ‘Pray put plenty of furs on. I hate to see a woman come into a room looking frozen. If you are to appear as a bride at all, appear decently.’”

II

The tragedy can scarcely be said to culminate in the scene of Grandcourt’s death, which Gwendolen herself describes to Deronda, not knowing whether she has really been willing he should drown, and not seeking to defend herself in telling how she leaped to him with a rope at last, too late. But it ends there, and there is perhaps a supreme effect in this uncertainty of hers Which agonizes as much as it consoles. It sets the seal to a record as true to human nature as it is terrible, and testifies to a power in the writer which is nowhere surpassed in the art which her great conscience exalted heaven-high above its wonted office of amusing.

To revert from her character and its development, to that of Janet Dempster in “Scenes of Clerical Life,” is a curious and valuable experience for the student of George Eliot’s work. We go from an ethicism in Gwendolen Harleth’s case as rootless and flowerless as that of the stoics back to an ideal of conduct sprung from a sense of the power not ourselves that makes for righteousness, and to a faith in the fatherly love of the Judge of all the earth, which promises itself compensation hereafter for whatever is wrong here. In “Daniel Deronda,” George Eliot had reached that moment of her agnosticism when it seemed enough to “join the choir invisible” of those whose personality has indeed perished forever, but whose character remains to help and comfort us who are still wandering through this twilight toward the eternal night. It involved a sublime self-abnegation which we cannot contemplate without a glow of pride in the humanity so self-sufficing, and a thrill of reverent admiration. It was magnificent, and I will not withhold my sense that if it was sincere it transcended the rapture of martyrdom. All the more I feel bound to recognize the meek beauty of the faith which was the spring and inspiration of the author’s art in “Janet’s Repentance.” There right conduct was not self-derived, but was an effect of the universal law of love which remembers and considers every minutest atom of life, and guards the finite human consciousness through its affinity to the infinite and the divine. It is not pertinent to pronounce upon the moral quality of the two creative moods of the author but only to note their difference.

There is socially almost as wide a difference between Gwendolen Harleth and Janet Dempster, who are alike in their unhappiness and its common source in a cruel marriage. But Gwendolen has sought her misery through her ambition, and Janet’s has come to her through her love, and it has had power to drag her down through the refuge she takes from it, but never to spoil her noble nature. Her husband, a shrewd and able lawyer in a provincial town, is himself a drunkard, and when he is in drink, he is of a brutal cruelty to his wife which has at last driven her to try his vice as a means of deadening her misery from it. We have seen how Grandcourt could torture his bride; now let us see how, on another level of life, Dempster could devote a yet more helpless victim to a less guilty rage, when he comes home imbruted by his cups.

“There was a large heavy knocker on the green door, and though Mr. Dempster carried a latch-key, he sometimes chose to use the knocker. He chose to do so now. The thunder resounded through Orchard Street, and, after a single minute, there was a second clap, louder than the first. Another minute, and still the door was not opened; whereupon Mr. Dempster, muttering, took out his latch-key, and, with less difficulty than might have been expected, thrust it into the door. When he opened the door the passage was dark. ‘Janet!’ in the loudest rasping tone, was the next sound that rang through the house. ‘Janet! ‘again — before a slow step was heard on the stairs, and a distant light began to flicker on the wall of the passage. ‘Curse you! you creeping idiot! Come faster, can’t you?’ Yet a few seconds, and the figure of a tall woman, holding aslant a heavy-plated drawing-room candlestick, appeared at the turning of the passage that led to the broader entrance. She had on a light dress which sat loosely about her figure, but did not disguise its liberal, graceful outline. A heavy mass of straight jet-black hair had escaped from its fastening, and hung over her shoulders. Her grandly cut features, pale with the natural paleness of a brunette, had premature lines about them, telling that the years had been lengthened by sorrow, and the delicately curved nostril, which seemed made to quiver with the proud consciousness of power and beauty, must have quivered to the heart-piercing griefs which had given that worn look to the comers of her mouth. Her wide-open black eyes had a strangely fixed, sightless gaze, as she paused at the turning and stood silent before her husband. ‘I’ll teach you to keep me waiting in the dark, you pale staring fool!’ he said, advancing with his slow drunken step. ‘What, you’ve been drinking again, have you? I’ll beat you into your senses.’ He laid his hand with a firm grip on her shoulder, turned her round, and pushed her slowly before him along the passage and through the dining-room door, which stood wide open on their left hand.

“There was a portrait of Janet’s mother, a grayhaired, dark-eyed old woman, in a neatly fluted cap, hanging over the mantel-piece. Surely the aged eyes take on a look of anguish as they see Janet — not trembling, no! it would be better if she trembled — standing stupidly unmoved in her great beauty, while the heavy arm is lifted to strike her. The blow falls — another — and another. Surely the mother hears that cry— ‘O Robert! pity! pity!’ Poor gray-haired woman! Was it for this you suffered a mother’s pangs in your lone widowhood five-and-thirty years ago? Was it for this you kept the little worn morocco shoes Janet had first run in, and kissed them day by day when she was away from you, a tall girl at school? Was it for this you looked so proudly at her when she came back to you in her rich pale beauty, like a tall white arum that had just unfolded its grand pure curves to the sun?”

The author’s recurrence in her latest heroine to the pale-dark beauty of her earliest is an interesting evidence of the persistence of an ideal, and the mind’s unconscious obedience to it; but Janet is of far simpler-stuff than Gwendolen in every way, and one is made to feel her weaker and tenderer through her very largeness of physique. She is indeed of a loving and forgiving sort, and there is something most womanly and most pitiful in her eagerness to forget her husband’s brutality as soon as the moment of it is past. There could be nothing more pathetic than her willingness to lend herself to his wish of burlesquing the young curate who is devotedly preaching and living Christianity in the town, but who has fallen under the drunken lawyer’s condemnation as a hypocrite. She gives all her cleverness to this miserable work with no thought but of pleasing the husband who beats her, and for the time he is pleased. But another time comes when she meets his fury with rebellion and then the end comes.

“About eleven the party dispersed, with the exception of Mr. Budd, who had joined them after dinner, and appeared disposed to stay drinking a little longer. Janet began to hope that he would stay long enough for Dempster to become heavy and stupid, and so fall asleep downstairs, which was a rare but occasional ending of his nights. She told the servants to sit up no longer, and she herself undressed and went to bed, trying to cheat her imagination into the belief that the day was ended for her. But when she lay down, she became more intensely awake than ever. Everything she had taken this evening seemed only to stimulate her senses and her apprehensions to new vividness. Her heart beat violently, and she heard every sound in the house. At last, when it was twelve, she heard Mr. Budd go out; she heard the door slam. Dempster had not moved. Was he asleep? Would he forget? The minutes seemed long, while, with a quickening pulse, she was on the stretch to catch every sound. ‘Janet!’ The loud jarring voice seemed to strike her like a hurled weapon. ‘Janet!’ he called again, moving out of the dining-room to the foot of the stairs. There was a pause of a moment. ‘If you don’t come, I’ll kill you.’ Another pause, and she heard him turn back into the dining-room. Perhaps he would kill her. Let him. Life was as hideous as death. For years she had been rushing on to some unknown but certain horror; and now she was close upon it. She was almost glad. She was in a state of flushed feverish defiance that neutralized her woman’s terrors. She heard his heavy step on the stairs; she saw the slowly advancing light. Then she saw the tall, massive figure and the heavy face, now fierce with drunken rage. He had nothing but the candle in his hand. He set it down on the table and advanced close to the bed. ‘So you think you’ll defy me, do you? We’ll see how long that will last. Get up, madam; out of bed this instant! ‘In the close presence of the dreadful man — of this huge, crushing force, armed with savage will — poor Janet’s desperate defiance all forsook her, and her terrors came back. Trembling she got up, and stood helpless in her night-dress before her husband. He seized her with his heavy grasp by the shoulder and pushed her before him. ‘I’ll cool your hot spirit for you! I’ll teach you to brave me!’ Slowly he pushed her along before him, down stairs and through the passage, where a small oil-lamp was still flickering. What was he going to do to her? She thought every moment he was going to dash her before him on the ground. But she gave no scream — she only trembled. He pushed her on to the entrance, and held her firmly in his grasp while he lifted the latch of the door. Then he opened the door a little way, thrust her out through it and slammed it behind her. For a short space it seemed like a deliverance to Janet. The harsh northeast wind, that blew through her thin night-dress and sent her long, heavy black hair streaming, seemed like the breath of pity after the grasp of that threatening monster. But soon the sense of release from an overpowering terror gave away before the sense of the fate that had really come upon her. This, then, was what she had been travelling toward through her long years of misery! Not yet death. Oh! if she had been brave enough for it, death would have been better.”

III

These are dreadful things, and so squalid that they must shock the refined reader; but who that knows life can deny that they happen? They happen far oftener than is ever known, and if the veil could be lifted from many marriages that show a fair outside, what hideous things should not we see! It is not ill, but it is very well to be confronted with the ugly realities, the surviving savageries, that the smug hypocrisy of civilization denies; for till we recognize them we shall not abate them, or even try to do so. In such a scene as this we have no outlaw beating down the suppliant figure of his paramour, as in the burglar’s butchery of Nancy Sikes, but a man of education and of a certain position, wreaking his frenzy of drink and hate upon a woman not guiltless of his own vice, but utterly devoted to him at her worst. Who can doubt as to the relative value of the pictures? As to the art in them respectively, we almost lose sight of the superiority of George Eliot’s in sense of her superior morality.

This had not yet become the pure ethicism of her final evolution. It was not yet divorced from her strong religious tradition, but was still more vitally related to it; and when she imagined Janet Dempster redeemed and purified, it was through confession and submission to the poor man whom she has helped her wicked husband to deride, and who comes to her help first owning his own frailty and imperfection. There might be something, there might be much, to criticise in the conduct of the story after Janet’s repentance begins. It is difficult to keep the true pathos of the situation free from sentimentality; but it is wrought out mainly with a sincerity both ethical and æsthetical, and where it fails in either effect it is not through the author’s want of faith in her ideal or her method. No one can be held to stricter account than this. It is for others to surpass George Eliot in motive or handling, if they can, in dealing with such a situation, and to bring greater right and clearer reason to it. I will own that I do not see how this could be done.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S LILY DALE

THERE are no two English novelists of the period we call Victorian who are more unlike and yet more characteristically English than George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. It is strange that in their far greater truth to English life, they should not be named together, like Dickens and Thackeray, as the representative English novelists of their time; but they are not, and it is doubtful if time will repair the injustice which long ago became inveterate. They are both far greater artists, far greater intellectual and moral forces, than the masters whose names stand for Victorian fiction. They paint English manners with a fidelity simply inconceivable of Dickens and Thackeray, and the problems they deal with are of an importance and interest surpassingly greater. On the psychological side, George Eliot’s transcendent power has been fully recognized, but the greatness of her “world,” and its wide inclusiveness, has not been as duly certified by criticism; just as in Anthony Trollope’s case, his immense (acquaintance with society in all its ranks and orders has taken the mind of his critics from his profound and even subtle proficiency in the region of motive. No one fails to note the attention given to questions of conscience in George Eliot’s novels; they are seen always present or imminent; but few readers seem to have been aware how very largely these questions enter into the texture and color of Anthony Trollope’s fiction. The difference appears to be that she concerns herself with what we may call the puritanic conscience, and he with what we may call the episcopal conscience. Their characters are equally far from the unmoral region in which, say, Mr. Hardy’s quasi-pagans dwell.

I

In all fiction I doubt if there is a lovelier or sweeter conscience-story than that of “The Warden.” Unhappily for the purpose of these papers, we are barred from that study of “The Warden” which we might make in proof of Trollope’s psychological power by the fact that it is so wholly the story of a gentle and conscientious old man as scarcely to have a heroine. Eleanor Harding, the daughter of the Warden, must stand for the heroine; and though she is his worthy daughter, and is most dramatically circumstanced in her relation to her lover, whose conscience obliges him to make the wardenship untenable to a man of her father’s conscience, she is not of such structural value in the story that one strongly feels or remembers her part in it. The situation is in itself so affecting, so charming, that it might constitute Eleanor Harding a heroine of the first order; but something that may be called want of charm in the girl herself — perhaps a reflex effect from her history as it is prolonged into her second marriage with Dean Arabin, after poor John Bold has sacrificed his conscience to his love of her — may be at fault; but at any rate, the mind after grappling with her idea, relaxes its hold, and turns away to cling to that of Lily Dale in the divers and sundry books where she appears and reappears.

“The Small House at Allington,” where we first meet her, is no such symmetrically proportioned and excellently fashioned work of art as “The Warden,” which stands almost sole among the author’s books for form. It is a very well balanced and compactly built story, however, and strongly held together by uncommon singleness of motive. The love of Lily Dale for Adolphus Crosbie who jilts her, after their engagement, and marries Lady Alexandrina de Courcy, is the interest which the whole life of the book centres about so unremittingly that in the retrospect it seems the only interest; but there is a subsidiary interest in the love of John Eames for Lily Dale vital enough to prolong itself through the wandering ways of “The Last Chronicle of Barset,” and really essential to the full evolution of Lily’s fate. Without this we could not know that her hapless love had become so largely herself that when it was crushed there was not enough of her left together for a second and happier passion. She lived to realize that her false lover had been too basely cruel, not for her forgiveness, but for her endurance. She lived to refuse him when he offered himself again after his wife’s death; she lived to see him, and even in a social exigency to have him speak to her; but though she lived to know that he was nothing to her forever, she lived also to make sure that no man could be anything to her as a lover evermore. This put an end to the long, brave hopes of Johnny Eames, who was not always, as high as his hopes, but always delightfully a human being, such as Lily might well be glad to have for a friend.

It cannot be said that the concluding passages of her story are as effectively managed as those of what is more distinctly her tragedy; and yet her final and decisive refusal of Eames is truly the climax of the whole. Her character triumphs, her nature remains good and kind, but her life, that poor little existence which is all there is of her on earth, is spoiled of that which should have made its supreme happiness. It is a great story, whose absolute fidelity to manners, and whose reliance ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S LILY DALE upon the essential strength of the motive must exalt it in the esteem of those accustomed to think of what they read.

II

If any such reader happens himself to be of that period of the early eighteen-sixties to which Lily Dale’s romantic young girlhood belonged, and in which young girlhood was sweeter than it has ever been since, he will see her as she first appeared to Adolphus Crosbie. He will know that she wore a large hoop, which tilted enough when she played croquet to give a glimpse of her white stockings; that her loose sleeves were confined at the wrists with narrow little linen cuffs matching a little linen collar at her neck; and that everything was very plain and smooth about her. She would have on a pork-pie hat, which was thought very chic in the days before it was known what chic was, the word itself being not yet; and but for the author, I should say that she wore her hair in a net of rather a heavy velvet mesh. The author, however, contends that she wore it in “simple braids,” and that “it was not flaxen hair, and yet it was very light. Nor did it approach auburn; and yet there ran through it a golden tint that gave it a distinct brightness of its own. “ Her eyes were “brightly blue... and seldom kept by any want of courage from fixing themselves where they pleased.” Her face was not “perfectly oval”; her nose was “somewhat broader than it should be; she had a dimple in her decided chin. She was something below the middle height,” the time of the tall heroine not having come yet, and she was “very fair, so that the soft tint of color which relieved her complexion was rather acknowledged than distinctly seen.”

This was the sort of girl who gave her heart in per feet abandon of passion and hero-worship to as selfish a scoundrel as ever was recreant to his plighted troth. The worst of Adolphus Crosbie is that he is no worse in nature than he is. Worse in conduct he could not be; and yet in his way he always loved Lily Dale, and he suffered in betraying her. But he did betray her; he first won her heart in her quiet home at Allington under her mother’s approving eyes, and then when he found that her uncle, Squire Dale, would not meet his hopes as to settlements, went from her with renewed vows of constancy, and offered himself to Lady Alexandrina. His engagement to Lily was already known and she had to bear the public shame as well as the secret anguish of being jilted. The thing was as bad as it could be, but how bad it was for Lily Dale can be known only to those familiar with her history, and these do not need telling. I wish I might send to it those unfamiliar with it, for I do not believe that a story of simple heart-break, as it may happen in good society, without the squalid adjuncts of social perdition or infamy for the victim, has ever been so truly told. Lily Dale was jilted by the man whom she had absolutely trusted; and she had to gather up her broken life and make what she could of it. The mild but strong resistance she opposes to her fate begins with her first knowledge of it. She has never been represented as very beautiful or brilliant, but merely as sweet and good and kind, with an unselfish common-sense which has served her well with every one but the wretch who stole her heart from her. These great qualities — for, oh! dear young ladies, these are the great qualities — avail her in the hour of her disaster, when she must spare herself in order to spare others, and first of all, the poor mother whom her wretched lover has made the messenger of his treason to her.

Crosbie had written to Mrs. Dale from Courcy Castle, where he had just been accepted by Lady Alexandrina, and had asked her to tell Lily, enclosing a brief note for her which her mother was to give her if she thought best. “Now, they [the letters] had been read by her to whom they had been addressed, and the daughter was standing before the mother to hear her doom. ‘Tell me all at once,’ Lily had said; but in what words was her mother to tell her?... ‘Is it from him, mamma? May I read it? He cannot be—”

“It is from Mr. Crosbie,’ “ Is he ill, mamma? Tell me at once. If he is ill I will go to him.’   ‘No, my darling, he is not ill. Not yet; — do not read it yet. Oh, Lily! It brings bad news; very bad news,’... “Mamma,’ said Lily, ‘whatever it is, I must, of course, be made to know it. I begin to guess the truth. It will pain you to say it. Shall I read the letter?” Mrs. Dale was astonished at her calmness. It could not be that she had guessed the truth, or she would not stand like that, with tearless eyes and unquelled courage before her. “You shall read it, but I ought to tell you first. Oh, my child, my own one!” Lily was now leaning against the bed, and her mother was standing over her, caressing her. ‘Then tell me,” said she. “But I know what it is. He has thought it all over while away from me, and he finds that it must not be as we have supposed. Before he went I offered to release him, and now he knows that he had better accept my offer. Is it so, mamma?” In answer to this Mrs. Dale did not speak, but Lily understood from her signs that it was so. “He might have written it to me, myself,’ said Lily, very proudly. “Mamma, we will go down to breakfast. He has sent nothing to me, then?” ‘There is a note. He bids me read it, but I have not opened it. It is here.” ‘Give it me,’ said Lily, almost sternly. ‘Let me have his last words to me,’ and she took the note from her mother’s hands. “Lily,” said the note, “your mother will have told you all. Before you read these few words you will know that you have trusted one who was quite untrustworthy. I know that you will hate me. — I cannot even ask you to forgive me. You will let me pray that you may yet be happy. — A. C.’ She read these few words, still leaning against the bed. Then she got up, and walking to a chair, seated herself with her back to her mother. Mrs. Dale moving silently after her stood over the back of the chair, not daring to speak to her. So she sat for some five minutes, with her eyes fixed upon the open window, and with Crosbie’s note in her hand. ‘I will not hate him, and I do forgive him,’ she said at last, struggling to command her voice, and hardly showing that she could not altogether succeed in her attempt. ‘I may not write to him again, but you shall write and tell him so. Now we will go down to breakfast. ‘And so saying, she got up from her chair Mrs. Dale almost feared to speak to her, her composure was so complete, and her manner so stem and fixed.... ‘You frighten me, Lily,’ she said. ‘Your very calmness frightens me.’  ‘Dear mamma!’ and the poor girl absolutely smiled as she embraced her mother, ‘You need not be frightened by my calmness. I know the truth well. I have been very unfortunate; — very. The brightest hopes of my life are all gone; — and I shall never again see him whom I love beyond all the world!’ Then at last she broke down, and wept in her mother’s arms. There was not a word of anger spoken then against him who had done all this. Mrs. Dale felt that she did not dare to speak in anger against him, and words of anger were not likely to come from poor Lily. She, indeed, hitherto, did not know the whole of his offence, for she had not read his letter. ‘Give it me, mamma,’ she said at last. ‘It has to be done sooner or later.’  ‘Not now, Lily. I have told you all, — all that you need know at present.’  ‘Yes; now, mamma,’ and again that sweet silvery voice became stem. ‘I will read it now, and there shall be an end,’ Whereupon Mrs. Dale gave her the letter and she read it in silence. Her mother, though standing somewhat behind her, watched her narrowly as she did so. She was now lying over upon the bed, and the letter was on the pillow, as she propped herself upon her arm. Her tears were running, and ever and again she would stop to dry her eyes. Her sobs too were very audible, but she went on steadily with her reading till she came to the line on which Crosbie told that he had already engaged himself to another woman. Then her mother could see that she paused suddenly, and that a shudder slightly convulsed all her limbs. ‘He has been very quick,’ she said, almost in a whisper; and then she finished the letter. ‘Tell him, mamma,’ she said ‘that I do forgive him, and I will not hate him. You will tell him that, — from me; will you not?’ And then she raised herself from the bed.... ‘You must, mamma; or, if you do not, I shall do so. Remember that I love him. You know what it is to have loved one single man. He has made me very unhappy; I hardly know yet how unhappy. But I have loved him, and do love him. I believe, in my heart, that he still loves me. Where this has been there must not be hatred and unforgiveness.’  ‘I will pray that I may become able to forgive him,’ said Mrs. Dale. ‘But you must write to him those words. Indeed you must, mamma! “ She bids me tell you that she has forgiven you, and will not hate you.” Promise me that I’  ‘I can make no promise now, Lily. I will think about it, and endeavor to do my duty. Lily was now seated, and was holding the skirt of her mother’s dress. ‘Mamma,’ she said, looking up into her mother’s face, ‘you must be very good to me now; and I must be very good to you. We shall be always together now. I must be your friend and counsellor; and be everything to you, more than ever. I must fall in love with you now;’ and she smiled again, and the tears were almost dry upon her cheeks.”

III

I think the quiet truth of this scene, full of the gentle self-control of a nature superior to the impulses of passion, is worth worlds of “ passion.” It is really so that such a girl as Lily Dale would have spoken and acted, and the readers of latter-day romance are the losers that such types of girlhood are no longer presented to them. In the present default I could not send the girls of this period back to better company than hers, who was the contemporary of their mothers, and often their companion.

It will not be contended by any true friend of hers that she was perfectly wise; but what she tried to do she did. She did forgive the man who had so atrociously wronged her; in a manner she did fall in love with her mother, and lived to console and support her under the blow that had fallen upon her through her own heart. In the lapse of time she achieved a calm that if never gay was often cheerful. After much honest endeavor in behalf of Johnny Eames, she found it was no longer in her to love any man again. When, with incredible meanness, Crosbie offered himself, after his wife’s death, she refused him, not ungently; when later they chanced to meet she found that she no longer cared even for the man he had once seemed. He was no longer her hero, her idol, and the wonder was that he could ever have been. She had survived her illusion, but there could never be any other — for love is always an illusion — in its place. She had ceased to suffer from the hurt he had done her, but not from the memory of her suffering. This had full power upon her when chance — a freak or a duty of fate — brought them together again. There were, in fact, two last meetings of this sort, both treated with a dignity, a repose, worthy of the material, and with a true, strong emotion very uncommon in the author, who had caught from Thackeray the bad habit of twaddling about his women, and could not often leave them so entirely alone, to work themselves out in their own way, as he does Lily Dale in this case. In the first of the meetings Lily was riding with her cousin Bernard and his betrothed in Rotten Row, when “on a sudden, coming slowly towards her along the diverging path and leaning on the arm of another man, she saw, — Adolphus Crosbie. She had never seen him since a day on which she had parted from him with many kisses, — with warm, pressing, eager kisses, — of which she had been nowhat ashamed. He had then been to her almost as her husband. She had trusted him entirely, and had thrown herself into his arms with a full reliance. There is often much of reticence on the part of a woman towards a man to whom she is engaged, something also of shamefacedness occasionally. There exists a shadow of doubt, at least of that hesitation which shows that in spite of vows the woman knows that a change may come, and that provision for such possible steps backward should always be within her reach. But Lily had cast all such caution to the winds. She had given herself to the man entirely, and had determined that she would sink or swim, stand or fall, live or die, by him and by his truth. He had been as false as hell. She had been in his arms, clinging to him, kissing him, swearing that her only pleasure in the world was to be with him, — with him her treasure, her promised husband; and within a month, a week, he had been false to her. There had come upon her crushing tidings, and she had for days wondered at herself that they had not killed her. But she had lived, and had forgiven him. She had still loved him, and had received new offers from him, which had been answered as the reader knows. But she had never seen him since the day on which she had parted from him at Allington, without a doubt as to his faith. Now he was before her, walking on the footpath, almost within reach of her whip.... Then he raised his eyes and saw Lily’s side-face, and recognized her. Had he seen her before he had been stopped on his way I think he would have passed on, endeavoring to escape observation. But as it was, his feet had been arrested before he knew of her close vicinity, and now it would seem that he was afraid of her, and was flying from her, were he at once to walk off, leaving his friend behind him. And he knew that she had seen him, and had recognized him, and was now suffering from his presence. He could not but perceive that it was so from the fixedness of her face, and from the constrained manner in which she gazed before her.... He could not take his eyes from off her. He could see that she was as pretty as ever, that she was but very little altered. She was, in truth, somewhat stouter than in the old days, but of that he took no special notice. Should he speak to her? Should he try to catch her eye, and then raise his hat? Should he go up to her horse’s head boldly and ask her to let bygones be bygones?... Or should he simply ask her after her health. He made one step towards her, and he saw that the face became more rigid and more fixed than before, and then he desisted. He told himself that he was simply hateful to her. He thought that he could perceive that there was no tenderness mixed with her unabated anger. At this moment Bernard Dale and Emily came close upon him, and Bernard saw him at once.... ‘Dunn,’ he said, ‘I think we will ride on,’ and he put his horse into a trot....

‘Is there anything the matter?’ said Emily to her lover.

‘Nothing specially the matter,’ he replied; ‘but you were standing in company with the greatest blackguard that ever lived, and I thought we had better change our ground.’  ‘Bernard!’ said Lily, flashing on him with all the Are which her eyes could command. Then she remembered that she could not reprimand him for the offence of such abuse in such a company; so she reined in her horse and fell a-weeping.”

The second and the last of the two encounters between Lily and Crosbie took place in a great London house, where Lily was looking at the pictures, with her cousin and his friends:

“Mrs. Harold Smith had declared that she would not look at another painting till the exhibition was open; three of the ladies were seated in the drawing-room, and Siph Dunn was standing before them, lecturing about art as though he had been brought up on the ancient masters; Emily and Bernard were lingering behind, and the others were simply delaying their departure till the truant lovers should have caught them. At this moment two gentlemen entered the room from the gallery, and the two gentlemen were Fowler Pratt and Adolphus Crosbie. All the party except Mrs. Thorne knew Crosbie personally, and all of them except Mrs. Harold Smith knew something of the story of what had occurred between Crosbie and Lily. Siph Dunn had learned it all since the meeting in the Park, having nearly learned it all from what he had seen there with his eyes. But Mrs. Thorne, who knew Lily’s story, did not know Crosbie’s appearance.... Crosbie would have gone on, but that in this attempt to do so he passed close by the chair on which Mrs. Harold Smith was sitting, and that he was accosted by her. ‘Mr. Crosbie,’ she said, ‘I haven’t seen you for an age. Has it come to pass that you have buried yourself entirely?’ He did not know how to extricate himself so as to move on at once. He paused, and hesitated, and then stopped, and made an attempt to talk to Mrs. Smith as though he were at his ease. The attempt was anything but successful; but having once stopped, he did not know how to put himself in motion again, so that he might escape. At this moment Bernard Dale and Emily Dunstable came up and joined the group; but neither of them had discovered who Crosbie was till they were close upon him.... Crosbie, in his attempt to talk to Mrs.

Smith, had smiled and simpered, — and had then felt that to smile and simper before Lily Dale, with a pretended indifference to her presence, was false on his part, and would seem to be mean. He would have avoided Lily for both their sakes, had it been possible; but it was no longer possible, and he could not keep his eyes from her face. Hardly knowing what he did, he bowed to her, lifted his hat, and uttered some word of greeting. Lily, from the moment that she had perceived his presence, had looked straight before her, with something almost of fierceness in her eyes.... Now, when he saluted her, she turned her face full upon him, and bowed to him. Then she rose from her seat, and made her way, between Siph Dunn and Pratt, out of the circle. The blood had mounted to her face and suffused it all and her whole manner was such that it could escape the observation of none who stood there. Even Mrs. Harold Smith had seen it, and had read the story. As soon as she was on her feet, Bernard had dropped Emily’s hand, and offered his arm to his cousin. ‘Lily,’ he said out loud, ‘you had better let me take you away. It is a misfortune that you have been subjected to the insult of such a greeting.’ The misfortune of the encounter had become too plain to admit of its being hidden under any of the ordinary veils of society. Crosbie’s salutation had been made before the eyes of them all, and in the midst of absolute silence, and Lily had risen with so queenlike a demeanor, and had moved with so stately a step, that it was impossible that any one concerned should pretend to ignore the facts of the scene that had occurred. Crosbie was still standing close to Mrs. Harold Smith, Mrs. Thorne had risen from her seat, and the words which Bernard Dale had uttered were still sounding in the ears of them all. ‘Shall I see after the carriage?’ said Siph Dunn.”

IV

I call this all extremely good work. I do not call it fine work, as to the mere artistry; it is a little too plain and matter-of-fact for that. A greater artist than Trollope would have had a more sparing touch in his realism: it is not so that Tourguénief, or Bjôrnson, or Flaubert, or Mr. Hardy would have presented these scenes. A greater artist than Trollope psychologically would have had a greater subtlety in his divinations and revelations: it is not so that Hawthorne, or Tolstoy, or Mr. James would have shown us the soul of a girl in such a moment of martyry. They would all, both realists and psychologists, have shown us her naked soul, in such wise that we should have been less abashed than by her soul as we see it here, with its clothes on. But it was strictly Trollope’s business to show us her soul with its clothes on, for in the world he deals with, the soul as well as the body is clothed, and wears its decorums and conventions as constantly. It is when Trollope shows the soul moving in these that he is most a master; it is when he sometimes strips them away, and bluntly exposes the soul, instead of letting it betray itself, that he is least a master.

He is mostly at his worst in “ The Last Chronicle of Barset,” where in his cleaning-up of all the odds and ends of life left over from the other stories relating to the Barchester neighborhood, he leaves few shreds and patches for the reader’s imagination to penetrate. Yet it is from “The Last Chronicle” that the two last scenes of Lily Dale’s suffering are taken, and it is in “The Last Chronicle” that the tremendous psychical tragedy of the perpetual curate of Hogglestock finally slips through the author’s thumb-fingered hold. Lily’s two encounters with Crosbie are of the quality of what is sublimest in the dark agony of Josiah Crawley, and even the somewhat perfunctory drama of the subsequent scenes with Johnny Eames is above the ordinary level of the book.

But it is hard to believe in this part of Lily’s experience. Her entirely credible experience ends with that last encounter with Crosbie; what follows with Eames, who has loved her from childhood, and is left loving her in her resolute old-maidhood, is something that the reader feels it his duty to help the author out with in deference to the original implications of her story. Yet, once in a way, why is it not well to see a thing of this sort through to a natural conclusion? It is certainly of true interest, if not the most poignant interest; and though the love-making of Eames is somewhat tediously prolonged, and his offers somewhat incredibly repeated, still it is all important in rounding out and setting in full relief the story of Lily Dale.

That story, I say it again, is one of the most interesting I know, one of the most sincerely and courageously treated. One feels at every moment its essential and specific veracity. It is a tragedy of the most harrowing sort, and yet it is altogether wholesome and consoling. To be superior to fate one must be the trusting worshipper of omnipotence, and it was in the shelter of this stronghold that such a girl as Lily Dale, with no touch of pietism or word of cant, found shelter and safety.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S LUCY ROBARTS AND GRISELDA GRANTLY

ANTHONY TROLLOPE was the author of thirty-nine or forty novels, relating nearly all of them to the contemporary English society life, which he seems to have known better than any other English novelist. Out of the whole number the novels which will come first to the reader’s mind are those relating to clerical society as it existed during the eighteen fifties and sixties in the imaginary cathedral town of Barchester; and but for the explicit denial in his autobiography, one might next have said that he had made an exhaustive study of the bishops, deans, archdeacons, canons, vicars, and curates, tutti quanti, with their wives, sisters, aunts, and cousins, in the whole variety of their duties and pleasures, joys and sorrows, hopes and fears. He was at the trouble to assure his believers, however, that he did not specifically or scientifically know the types he makes so interesting, and was only their casual and involuntary observer; yet such is the inherent evidence against him that we must regard his pretence as the foible of a writer who would rather be thought inspired than informed, and whose caprice it was to prefer the reputation of having made a lot of lucky guesses to that of having made a series of careful studies.

He had several foibles, that poor Anthony Trollope, who wrote so much better of English life than anyone except Jane Austen and George Eliot, but who wished to write like Thackeray. He copied Thackeray’s most offensive and inartistic confidential attitude, though he knew him, and had the courage to pronounce him, false to certain aspects of English society. He says frankly that he never met any such people among the nobility and gentry as the Marquis of Steyn and Sir Pitt Crawley; he apparently met many others quite as vulgar and wicked, but not these self-evident caricatures and exaggerations; and he is the more to be trusted because he is so honest about their vulgarity and wickedness. He does not mock or scourge his bad aristocrats as Thackeray does; there is nothing of the satirist in him; and he is all the more impressive as a moralist because he contents himself with simply letting us see them as they are. He has no apparent purpose of reforming them; at times you have from him the notion that reform of any sort, among the hierarchy or nobility, might constitute a danger to society, and would be worth less than it would cost. He even imparts a sense of such entire approval of society conditions, such unquestioning fealty to the existing order, that you hardly know whether to admire more the skill with which he portrays it, or the seriousness with which he accepts it and honors it.

I

“Framley Parsonage” is almost a typical novel of the sort which displays Trollope’s distinguishing strength and weakness, and I think myself it is a most delightful story, running its course through a variety of characteristic incident, and prospering finally in the happy marriage of the first heroine, Lucy Robarts, and the brilliant marriage of the second heroine, Griselda Grantly.

As no reader of the story can have forgotten, Lucy is the daughter of a successful country doctor, and the pretty young sister of Rev. Mark Robarts, whom Lady Lufton has given the living of Framley because her son and he have always been friends, and because in her rather high and mighty, but perfectly kind and conscientious way, she has loved him from his boyhood. She is willing to love his pretty young sister, too, in a way, when she comes to the parsonage, after the doctor’s death, but it is no part of her plan that young Lord Lufton, her son, shall love Lucy Robarts rather more than he has ever loved her brother. This is what happens, however, and the facts which Lucy has to face, if she accepts Lord Lufton, are the deep displeasure and disappointment of Lady Lufton, who means her son for Griselda Grantly, or if she rejects him the still deeper displeasure and disappointment of Lord Lufton She will share the displeasure in Lady Lufton’s case, for she does not feel it quite right to come and get her son away; and in Lord Lufton’s case she will share the disappointment, for she is as much in love with him as he is with her. The natural thing for a romantic girl to do is to deny her love, since Lord Lufton will not take any other sort of no for an answer, and the natural thing for a sensible girl to do is to confess it when her lover has sufficiently insisted. Lucy being both romantic and sensible, does both these natural things in the succession indicated; and all ends well. She never ceases to be little and dark, if pretty, and so far inadequate to her rank, and Griselda Grantly never ceases to be tall and fair and cold, and most suitable for the wife and mother of aristocracy; but since Lord Lufton will not have Griselda in spite of her willingness, and will most passionately and perversely have Lucy in spite of her unwillingness, his mother reconciles herself so thoroughly to the inevitable that with the lapse of time she comes almost to fed as if she had promoted the marriage.

II

The pretty story is told in the plainest and openest way, with quite miraculous impartiality concerning the rights and duties of all concerned, and with due consideration for their feelings and opinions. There is a current of tragedy, but not the darkest tragedy, running through it from the financial follies of Mark Robarts, to his just but not desperate moral sufferings, and all the rest is love-comedy, just enough shadowed by passing doubt to keep the reader from relaxing in perpetual sunshine. Lord Lufton is such a lover as any girl, romantic or sensible, or both, might be glad to have. Being satisfied that he is in love with Lucy, he has no other idea than to win her, and he goes as promptly and directly about it as possible, without any of the fine scruples concerning other people which distract the girl. His mother is all very well as the means of bringing a Lord Lufton into the world, and he loves and honors her as a good son should; but a Lord Lufton has duties to himself in the choice of a wife that he cannot let even a mother contravene. He therefore puts her and her purposes of Griselda Grantly kindly but firmly aside, and having noticed that Lucy no longer comes to his mother’s house, and otherwise avoids meeting him, he goes to the parsonage to find out why. He asks her, and it presently comes to her saying:

“‘The world will say that I, the parson’s sister, set my cap at the young lord, and that the young lord had made a fool of me.’  ‘The world shall say no such thing!’ said Lord Lufton, very imperiously. ‘Ah! but it will. You can no more stop it, than King Canute could the waters. Your mother has interfered wisely to spare me from this; and the only favor that I can ask you is, that you will spare me also. ‘And then she got up.... ‘Stop, Lucy!’ he said, putting himself between her and the door. ‘It must not be Lucy any longer, Lord Lufton; I was madly foolish when I first allowed it,’  ‘By heavens! but it shall be Lucy — Lucy before all the world. My Lucy, my own Lucy — my heart’s best friend, and chosen love. Lucy, there is my hand. How long you may have had my heart, it matters not to say now. ‘The game was at her feet now, and no doubt she felt her triumph. Her ready wit and speaking lip, not her beauty, had brought him to her side; and now he was forced to acknowledge that her power over him had been supreme. Sooner than leave her he would risk all. She did feel her triumph; but there was nothing in her face to tell him that she did so. As to what she would now do she did not for a moment doubt. He had been precipitated into the declaration he had made not by his love, but by his embarrassment. She had thrown in his teeth the injury which he had done her, and he had then been moved by his generosity to repair that injury by the noblest sacrifice which he could make. But Lucy Robarts was not the girl to accept a sacrifice. He had stepped forward as though he were going to clasp her round the waist, but she receded, and got beyond the reach of his hand. ‘Lord Lufton!’ she said, ‘when you are more cool you will know that this is wrong. The best thing for both of us now is to part.’... ‘Lucy! do you mean that you cannot learn to love me?’  ‘I mean that I shall not try. Do not persevere in this, or you will have to hate yourself for your own folly. ‘ ‘But I will persevere, till you accept my love, or say, with your hand on your heart, that you cannot and will not love me.’  ‘Then I must beg you to let me go,’ and having so said, she paused while he walked once or twice hurriedly up and down the room. ‘And, Lord Lufton,’ she continued, ‘if you will leave me now, the words that you have spoken shall be as though they had never been uttered,’  ‘I care not who knows that they have been uttered. The sooner that they are known to all the world, the better I shall be pleased, unless indeed—’  ‘Think of your mother, Lord Lufton,’  ‘ What can I do better than give her as a daughter the best and sweetest girl I have ever met? When my mother really knows you, she will love you as I do. Lucy, say one word to me of comfort,’... ‘You have no right to press me any further,’ she said; and sat down upon the sofa, with an angry frown upon her forehead. ‘By heavens,’ he said, ‘I will take no such answer from you till you put your hand upon your heart, and say that you cannot love me,’  ‘Oh, why should you press me so, Lord Lufton?’  ‘Why! because my happiness depends upon it; because it behooves me to know the very truth. It has come to this, that I love you with my whole heart, and I must know how your heart stands towards me,’ She had now again risen from the sofa, and was looking steadily in his face. ‘Lord Lufton,’ she said, ‘I cannot love you,’ and as she spoke she did put her hand, as he had desired, upon her heart. ‘Then God help me! for I am very wretched. Goodbye, Lucy, ‘and he stretched out his hand to her. ‘Goodbye, my lord. Do not be angry with me. ‘ ‘No, no, no,’ and without further speech he left the room and the house and hurried home.... And when he was well gone — absolutely out of sight from the window — Lucy walked steadily up to her room, locked the door, and then threw herself on the bed. Why — oh! why had she told such a falsehood? Could anything justify her in a lie? Was it not a lie — knowing as she did that she loved him with all her loving heart? But, then, his mother! and the sneers of the world, which would have declared that she had set her trap, and caught the foolish young lord!

Her pride would not have submitted to that. Strong as her love was, yet her pride was, perhaps, stronger — stronger at any rate during that interview.”

III

Following the scene with Lord Lufton there is a mighty pretty passage between Lucy Robarts and her sister-in-law, to whom she owns the love that she denied to Lord Lufton. I should like to give it all, but perhaps I had better send my readers to the novel for it: they will thank me for sending them to the novel upon any excuse, when they have read it.

“‘Well, no, it has been all my own fault; though, for the life of me, Fanny, going back and back, I cannot see where I took the first false step. I do not know where I went wrong. One wrong thing I did, and it is the only thing that I do not regret. ‘ ‘What was that, Lucy?’  ‘I told him a lie. ‘... ‘And what has he said to you, Lucy?’  ‘What? Only this, that he asked me to be his wife. ‘ ‘Lord Lufton proposed to you?’...

‘Here, standing here, on this very spot, on that flower of the carpet, he begged me a dozen times to be his wife. I wonder whether you and Mark would let me cut it out and keep it. ‘ ‘And what answer did you make to him?’  ‘I lied to him, and told him that I did not love him.’  ‘ You refused him?’  ‘Yes; I refused a live lord. There is some satisfaction in having that to think of; is there not? Fanny, was I wicked to tell that falsehood?... Had I thought that it was good for him, that he would not have repented, I would have braved anything — for his sake. Even your frown, for you would have frowned. You would have thought it sacrilege for me to marry Lord Lufton! You know you would.’ Mrs. Robarts hardly knew how to say what she thought, or indeed what she ought to think.... What would Lady Lufton say, or think, or feel? What would she say, and think, ‘and feel as to that parsonage from which so deadly a blow would fall upon her? Would she not accuse the vicar and the vicar’s wife of the blackest ingratitude? Would life be endurable at Framley under such circumstances as those? ‘What you tell me so surprises me, that I hardly as yet know how to speak about it,’ said Mrs. Robarts....— ‘And you would not accept his love?’  ‘No; I would have nothing to say to it. Look you, I stood here, and putting my hand upon my heart — for he bade me do that — I said that I could not love him.’  ‘And what then?’  ‘He went away, — with a look as though he were heart-broken. He crept away slowly, saying that he was the most wretched soul alive. For a minute I believed him and could almost have called him back. But, no, Fanny; do not think that I am over-proud, or conceited about my conquest He had not reached the gate before he was thanking God for his escape.’  ‘That I do not believe.’”

This passage develops the character of Lucy Robarts as it remains with the reader, and reveals in her the strain of humor, which still does not render her finally rebellious against the social situation, as the author’s humor does not render him rebellious. Both author and heroine accede to it, though they both fully recognize its absurdity, and are aware of its injustice. In fact, the attitude of the characters in all of Trollope’s books and the attitude of Trollope himself is one of Asiatic submission to the established order of things, mixed with a strictly Anglo-Saxon freedom of speech concerning it; so that the more democratized American is scarcely more amazed at the one than at the other. No people with less than the English good sense could prevent their social conditions from working more harm than they do; no people with so much good sense ever abandoned themselves to a status in which the outsider sees no sense at all.

But the law and the gospel of Trollope, a prophet of as clear vision as need be, is that the thing which is must be, and that every one concerned must conform to it in mind and conscience as wisely and decently as possible. It is an immensely frank race, and what Trollope does is to show it with a frankness equalled by that of no other novelist, with a cold-bloodedness, and absence of disagreeable consciousness which almost command respect.

IV

Nothing could be more respectable than the open understanding, so impossible to two American mothers, between Lady Lufton and Mrs. Archdeacon Grantly that Lord Lufton and Griselda Grantly shall be brought together in such circumstances that the young man shall offer himself and the young girl shall accept him. The intended lovers are themselves in the plot, which miscarries because Lord Lufton, not caring for Griselda to begin with, sees Lucy Robarts at his mother’s house where he is meant to see no one but Griselda, and falls in love with Lucy. Griselda is so purely and entirely of her world that she finds no offence to her personal dignity and maidenly modesty in being put in a young man’s way for him to fall in love with. That is a perfectly right and proper arrangement; when he will not fall in love with her, she merely resents it in a brief, cold anger, and makes haste to accept another nobleman of higher rank and greater wealth than Lord Lufton.

Trollope has shown no greater mastery than in the handling of this girl’s passive egotism and dull, glacial self-sufficiency. It is only such as most abjectly submit themselves to the world that most dominate it at last, and in the different books that record Griseida Grantly progress we see her grow naturally and logically, almost inevitably, from an unimpulsive, unresponsive young girl, into a great lady of fashion, a ruler in society. She is always rather stupid, and she never does or says anything to win her way to social supremacy. It may be said that this supremacy comes to her because she is fit for it, and knows how to keep it without the least pains or inconvenience. She is really, in her cold but perfectly adequate nullity, a wonderful achievement, and she is from first to last the same. But she is so null, so negative, that it is difficult to choose any passage which shall dramatically impart the notion of her; but the conversation which her mother has with her, when Mrs. Grantly comes to see her at Lady Lufton’s London house, and to find out how the land lies with regard to Lord Lufton, may serve at least as well as another. Toward the middle of this conversation the mother had to be frank since the daughter would not be.

“‘What I particularly wanted to say to you was this:

I think you should know what are the ideas which Lady Lufton entertains,’  ‘Her ideas!’ said Griseida, who had never troubled herself much in thinking about other people’s thoughts. ‘Yes, Griseida. While you were staying down at Framley Court, and also, I suppose, since you have been up here in Bruton Street, you must have seen a good deal of — Lord Lufton,’  ‘He doesn’t come very often to Bruton Street, — that is to say, not very often.’... ‘Of course he cannot be at home now as much as he was down in the country, when he was living in the same house,’ said Mrs. Grantly whose business it was to take Lord Lufton’s part at the present moment. ‘He must be at his club, and at the House of Lords, and in twenty places.’  ‘He is very fond of going to parties, and he dances beautifully.’  ‘I am sure he does. I have seen as much as that myself, and I think I know some one with whom he likes to dance,’ And the mother gave her daughter a loving little squeeze. ‘Do you mean me, mamma?’  ‘Yes, I do mean you, my dear. And is it not true? Lady Lufton says that he likes dancing with you better than with any one else in London,’  ‘I don’t know,’ said Griselda, looking down upon the ground.... ‘But young ladies must think of such things, must they not?’ ‘Must they, mamma?’  ‘I suppose they do, don’t they? The truth is, Griselda, that Lady Lufton thinks that if — Can you guess what it is she thinks?’  ‘No, mamma.’ But that was a fib on Griselda’s part.

‘She thinks that my Griselda would make the best possible wife in the world for her son; and I think so too. I think that her son will be a very fortunate man if he can get such a wife. And now what do you think, Griselda?’  ‘I don’t think anything, mamma.’...

‘You don’t think anything! But, my darling, you must think. You must make up your mind what would be your answer if Lord Lufton were to propose to you. That is what Lady Lufton wishes him to do.’  ‘But he never will, mamma.’  ‘And if he did?’  ‘But I’m sure he never will. He doesn’t think of such a thing at all — and — and—’  ‘And what, my dear?’  ‘I don’t know, mamma.... Lord Lufton thinks a great deal more of Lucy Robarts than he does of — of — of any one else, I believe,’ said Griselda, showing now some little animation by her manner, ‘dumpy little black thing that she is.’  ‘Lucy Robarts!... Lord Lufton, of course, is bound to be civil to any young lady in his mother’s house, and I am quite sure that he has no other idea whatever with regard to Miss Robarts. I certainly cannot speak as to her intellect, for I do not think she opened her mouth in my presence; but—’

‘Oh! she has plenty to say for herself, when she pleases. She’s a sly little thing.’”

As the reader will have seen, Griselda was quite right, and indeed the one quality she had in positive measure was a subtle cunning, such as in higher minds serves the purposes of divination. She was equal through this, and through an absence of all tenderness, to most of the exigencies of life. Not through principle, but the want of it, she was able philosophically to endure things that wring the heart and break the spirit of other people. After her engagement to Lord Dumbello, while she was at her father’s house actively superintending the preparation of her trousseau, there came a rumor, which seemed only too well founded, that her betrothed had gone to Paris to break off the engagement, and her father decided on going up to London to see about it.

‘“Susan,’ said the archdeacon to his wife, just as he was starting; — at this moment neither of them was in the happiest spirits,—’ I think I would say a word of caution to Griselda,’  ‘Do you feel so much doubt about it as that?’ said Mrs. Grantly.... On the next morn ing Mrs. Grantly, with much cunning preparation, went about the task which her husband had left her to perform. It took her long to do, for she was very cunning in the doing of it; but at last it dropped from her in words that there was a possibility — a bare possibility — that some disappointment might even yet be in store for them. ‘Do you mean, mamma, that the marriage will be put off?’  ‘I don’t mean to say that I think it will; God forbid I but it is just possible. I dare say that I am very wrong to tell you of this, but I know that you have sense enough to bear it. Papa has gone to London, and we shall hear from him soon.’  ‘Then, mamma, I had better give them orders not to go on with the marking.’”

I should be puzzled to point out a line in which I thought the artist had gone wrong in this extraordinary portrait. If he had done nothing else it would be sufficient to prove him a master; and it is only one of many masterpieces. It must have been one of the most difficult to do because the formula is so very simple. Not to have mixed other ingredients with the component parts of Griselda’s character, or not to have mixed the original ingredients in disproportion, is the highest proof of the artist’s mastery. She is never caricatured, never suffered to transcend the limits of her temperament. She is a disagreeable person, because she is cold and selfish, but she is not unjust, and she deserves at the hands of her creator the justice he does her in a final touch, and without which, perhaps, the picture would have wanted perfect relief. After her marriage Lucy Robarts met Lady Dumbello in London. “Lucy had felt that she had been despised by the rich beauty. She also in her turn had disliked, if she had not despised, her rival. But how would it be now? Lady Dumbello could hardly despise her, and yet it did not seem possible that they should meet as friends. They did meet, and Lucy came forward with a pretty eagerness to give her hand to Lady Lufton’s late favorite. Lady Dumbello smiled slightly — the same old smile which had come across her face when they two had been first introduced in the Framley drawing-room; the same smile without the variation of a line, — took the offered hand, muttered a word or two, and then receded. It was exactly as she had done before. She had never despised Lucy Robarts. She had accorded to the parson’s sister the amount of cordiality with which she usually received her acquaintance; and now she could do no more for the peer’s wife.” So to the end her perfect congruity is defined.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE’S MRS. PROUDIE

IF I have not yet said that I think Anthony Trollope the most English of the English novelists I will do so now. Of course Jane Austen and George Eliot might dispute this primacy with him, but both would fail in the comparison, the one because she was too witty and the other because she was too wise, faithfully to mirror the British spirit.

The perpetual play of delicate sarcasm in Jane Austen’s books is as alien to the heavy sincerity of that simple sold as the deep psychological implications of George Eliot’s; but the make and the manner of Trollope are exactly interpretative of it. All is plain and open in his work; if there is any cutting or thrusting it is not such as leaves the subject to shake itself before it realizes a wound; if there is any philosophizing it is not of the accusing sort which makes the reader feel the fault or the fate of the character as bound with him; and yet Trollope was a true humorist, and as I have already insisted, a profound moralist. He surpassed the only contemporaries worthy to be named with him in very essential things as far as he surpassed those two great women in keeping absolutely the level of the English nature. He was a greater painter of manners than Thackeray because he was neither a sentimentalist nor a caricaturist; and he was of a more convincing imagination than Dickens because he knew and employed the probable facts in the case and kept himself free of all fantastic contrivances.

I

He was the author of more books than Dickens, and many more than Thackeray; but in the number of his creations he fell below either, because of his habit, acquired from Thackeray, of carrying the personages of one book into another. Thackeray did this with some half a dozen prominent people; Major Dobbin of “Vanity Fair” reappears in “Pendennis,” Pendennis reappears in “Philip,” and Beatrix Esmond of “Esmond” reappears in “The Virginians,” and so on; but Trollope’s principal books are all bound together by the continuity of the principal characters. We have again and again the Duke of Omnium and his congeners; Dr. Thorne and his kindred and connections come and go through different novels; and the Barchester series is a warp in which the same pattern of figures and faces is carried through from the beginning to the end: the Grantlys, the Hardings, the Dales, the Eameses, the Omniums, the Robartses, the Luftons, the Crawleys, and, above all, the Proudies.

There is a fascination, which every writer of fiction will own, in recurring to a type once studied; but the novelist indulges this fancy at some risk of tiring his readers. The fact that he had tired his readers with Mrs. Proudie was brought rudely home to Trollope one day at his club, where he overheard the sighs and groans of a man who was sick of her, at finding her again in the novelist’s current story. Trollope says that he then and there resolved to kill her, and in that very story he made an end of her; but it seems to me that his resolution censured both the art and the courage of the novelist, who should have had a faith in himself and his work superior to his sense of any reader’s impatience, and should have been above suffering dictation from it It is certain, however, that he lost heart and put an end to the admirable (she was artistically most admirable) creature of his invention, to the lasting loss of all lovers of the true, if not the beautiful I will not be sure which book one first meets Mrs. Proudie in; one seems, after meeting her, to have known her always; but she pervades the whole Barchester series with her searching and persistent personality. Mrs. Proudie is not merely a shrew and a scold, though she is a shrew, and does scold the bishop dreadfully, and put him to shame before those who should believe him master in his house and office. It is less her ambition than her nature to govern, and she cannot help extending her domain from the bishop to the diocese, and meddling in things which it is mischievous as well as indecorous for her to concern herself ‘with. But in all this she is mainly of a conscientious zeal; she has done so much to forward the fortunes of her husband, and to promote his rise from among the inferior clergy to a spiritual lordship, that she cannot help arrogating power and attributing merit to herself in the management of his affairs. She has her strong likes and dislikes, and with other women she has her spites and jealousies; she wishes sometimes to put these women under her feet, and to trample on them after she has got them there. But though she makes her husband so unhappy and ashamed she does not mean to do so, or rather, she would not do so if she could have her way without doing so. The great thing, however, is to have her way, and whatever hinders her having it is for that sufficient reason wrong and wicked. The bishop himself, poor little, weak, yielding man, is wrong, and at least wickedly led when he opposes her, and in her great struggle with his clergy in the case of Josiah Crawley, the perpetual curate of Hogglestock, she brings the bishop to open shame, and through his shame to open rebellion. His rebellion takes the form of answering to all she says, “You have broken my heart,” and so sending her from him by mere refusal to be actively engaged in controversy, or even to be actively scolded. In this exile she suddenly dies. But I, for one, cannot rejoice in Mrs. Proudie’s untimely taking off, for when you have her at second hand a scold is purely amusing. Besides this, there is a pathos in her death which throws all her character into a softened relief. She dies partly because she does not know what else to do. She has finally and utterly failed, with the man she has always loved, in the method she has always successfully used with him, and she waits, bewildered and anguished, for some break of his intangibility in which she can take hold of him again in the old way. While she waits her spiritual pang translates itself into a physical pang, and she dies of heart-disease. She is no longer needed; she cumbers the man whom she has so valiantly championed even against his own comfort and quiet; she will be missed for a while, but she will not be truly lamented; she will be a mischief taken out of the world. I call this all very touching, and it reflects a light upon her whole story which keeps me from seeing her altogether hateful and harmful.

II

The moral and ecclesiastical struggle in which Mrs. Proudie closes with Josiah Crawley is the beginning of the end with her, as the reader will find somewhat over-duly recorded in “ The Last Chronicle of Barset.” That is a book largely imagined and in places amply realized, which as a whole faffs as distinctly of being a masterpiece as any great novel I know of. Trollope’s secondhand vice of twaddling Thackeraywise over his characters and situations comes to the worst in it, where the fag-ends of the Barchester series are gathered together in a loose and feeble intrigue. The tremendous conception of Crawley’s tragedy is suffered to become part and parcel of the prevailing weakness through the author’s willingness to eke out the interest by delaying the dénouement so long; but if that tragedy alone could have been openly treated and Crawley studied solely in his relation to the other human particles it magnetically attracted, the book would have been one of the great fictions of the world. As it is, second-rate and third-rate though it is, still it has the fascination which that pure, sad, half-mad soul never fails to exercise whenever he appears on the scene. With the dreadful accusation of theft which he falls under, after passing a check which he seems to have come by unlawfully, but which he cannot remember how he came by, he alone gives the story cohesion and unity; and it is his sorrow and his shame which bring Mrs. Proudie in enmity upon him.

When the magistrates, his old friends and fellowclergymen, are constrained to commit him upon the charge to which he has laid himself open, Mrs. Proudie decides that it is high time the bishop should take some action concerning him; and she requires the poor bishop to summon him to the palace and make him show cause why he should not be suspended from his perpetual curacy at Hogglestock until a jury of his countrymen shall have acquitted him of the charge. Then Crawley, being too poor to pay for a carriage, walks the long road from Hogglestock to Barchester in the cold and wet, and presents himself to his spiritual superior. But the superior of his spiritual superior is there also to receive the threadbare, muddy, majestic man, and the scene that follows is the representation of her determination to force herself into an affair which is none of hers, and his determination to keep her out of it.

“‘You are very punctual, Mr. Crawley,’ said the bishop. Mr. Crawley simply bowed his head, still keeping his hands beneath his cloak. ‘Will you not take a chair nearer to the fire?’ Mr. Crawley had not seated himself, but had placed himself in front of a chair at the extreme end of the room, — resolved that he would not use it unless he were duly asked. ‘Thank you, my lord,’ he said, ‘I am warm with walking, and, if you please, will avoid the fire.’... Hitherto Mrs. Proudie had not said a word. She stood back in the room, near the fire, — more backward a good deal than she was accustomed to do when clergymen made their ordinary visits. On such occasions she would come forward and shake hands with them graciously, — graciously even, if proudly; but she had felt that she must do nothing of that kind now; there must be no shaking hands with a man who had stolen a check for twenty pounds I... ‘I hope your wife and children are well, Mr. Crawley.... I have felt for Mrs. Crawley very deeply,’ said Mrs. Proudie. Mr. Crawley had made up his mind that as long as it was possible he would ignore the presence of Mrs. Proudie altogether; and, therefore, he made no sign that he had heard the latter remark. ‘It has been most unfortunate,’ continued the bishop... ‘Far be it from me to express an opinion upon the matter, which will have to come before a jury of your countrymen. It is enough for me to know that the magistrates assembled at Silverbridge, gentlemen to whom no doubt you must be known, as most of them live in your neighborhood, have heard evidence upon the subject—’  ‘Most convincing evidence,’ said Mrs. Proudie, interrupting her husband. Mr. Crawley’s black brow became a little blacker as he heard the word, but still he ignored the woman. He not only did not speak, but did not turn his eye upon her.... ‘You would have been put in prison, Mr. Crawley, because the magistrates were of opinion that you had taken Mr. Soames’s check,’ said Mrs. Proudie. On this occasion he did look at her. He turned one glance upon her from under his eyebrows, but he did not speak. ‘With all that I have nothing to do,’ said the bishop. ‘Nothing whatever, my lord,’ said Mr. Crawley. ‘But, bishop, I think that you have,’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘The judgment formed by the magistrates as to the conduct of one of your clergymen makes it imperative upon you to act in the matter,’  ‘Yes, my dear, yes; I am coming to that. What Mrs. Proudie says is perfectly true.... It is undoubtedly the fact that you must at the next assizes surrender yourself at the court-house yonder, to be tried for this offence against the laws,’  ‘That is true. If I be alive, my lord, and have strength sufficient, I shall be there.’  ‘You must be there,’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘The police will look to that, Mr. Crawley,’ She was becoming very angry in that the man would not answer her a word. On this occasion again he did not even look at her....—’ Under these circumstances,’ continued the bishop, ‘looking to the welfare of your parish, to the welfare of the diocese, and allow me to say, Mr. Crawley, to the welfare of yourself also—’  ‘And especially to the souls of the people,’ said Mrs. Proudie.... The bishop paused, and Mr. Crawley bowed his head. ‘I, therefore, sent over to you a gentleman with whom I am well acquainted, Mr. Thumble, with a letter from myself, in which I endeavored to impress upon you, without the use of any severe language, what my convictions were.... Mr. Thumble brought me back your written reply,’ continued the bishop, ‘by which I was grieved to find that you were not willing to submit yourself to my counsel in the matter.’  ‘I was most unwilling, my lord. Submission to authority is at times a duty; — and at times opposition to authority is a duty also.... Opposition to usurped authority is an imperative duty,’ said Mr. Crawley. ‘And who is to be the judge?’ demanded Mrs. Proudie. Then there was silence for a while; when, as Mr. Crawley made no reply, the lady repeated her question. ‘Will you be pleased to answer my question, sir? Who, in such a case, is to be the judge?’ But Mr. Crawley did not please to answer her question. ‘The man is obstinate,’ said Mrs. Proudie.... ‘I forget where I was,’ said the bishop. ‘Oh! Mr. Thumble came back, and I received your letter; — of course I received it. And I was surprised to learn from that, that in spite of what had occurred at Silverbridge, you were still anxious to continue the usual Sunday ministrations in your church.’... ‘Had I been Mr. Thumble,’ said Mrs. Proudie, ‘I would have read from that desk and I would have preached from that pulpit. ‘Mr. Crawley waited a moment, thinking that the bishop might perhaps speak again; but as he did not, but sat expectant as though he had finished his discourse, and now expected a reply, Mr. Crawley got up from his seat and drew near to the table. ‘My lord,’ he began, ‘it has all been just as you have said. The circumstances are strong against me; and, though your lordship has altogether misunderstood the nature of the duty performed by the magistrates in sending my case for trial, — although, as it seems to me, you have come to conclusions in this matter in ignorance of the very theory of our laws,—’  ‘Sir!’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘Yet I can foresee the probability that a jury may discover me to have been guilty of theft’  ‘Of course the jury will do so,’ said Mrs. Proudie.... ‘But till that time shall come, my lord, I shall hold my own at Hogglestock as you hold your own here at Barchester.’...

‘You defy us, then?’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘My lord, I grant your authority as bishop to be great, but even a bishop can only act as the law allows him.’  ‘God forbid that I should do more,’ said the bishop. ‘Sir, you will find that your wicked threats will fall back upon your own head,’ said Mrs. Proudie. ‘Peace, woman,’ Mr. Crawley said, addressing her at last. The bishop jumped out of his chair at hearing the wife of his bosom called a woman. But he jumped rather in admiration than in anger. He had already begun to perceive that Mr. Crawley was a man who had better be left to take care of the souls at Hogglestock, at any rate till the trial should come on. ‘Woman!’ said Mrs. Proudie, rising to her feet as though she really intended some personal encounter. ‘Madam,’ said Mr. Crawley, ‘you should not interfere in these matters. You simply debase your husband’s high office. The distaff were more fitting for you. My lord, good-morning.’ And before either of them could speak again, he was out of the room, and through the hall, and beyond the gate, and standing beneath the towers of the cathedral.”

III

After all, I find that it is rather the character of Josiah Crawley than of Mrs. Proudie which is developed in the foregoing scene. In another scene she suffers a like defeat at the hands of the topping Dr. Tempest, one of the chief clergy at Barchester, whom she attempts to instruct in his duty respecting Mr. Crawley. He, too, ignores her presence, and if he does so with less majestic dignity than Crawley, he brings the bishop a yet keener sense of his degradation through his wife. “ The bishop did not again speak a word of kindness to her, and he tried not to speak to her at all. ‘You have broken my heart,’ he said again and again. Her own efforts to bring him back to something like life, to some activity of mind if not of body, were made constantly; and when she failed, as she did fail day after day, she would go slowly to her own room, and lock her door, and look back in her solitude at all the days of her life. She had agonies in these minutes of which no one near her knew anything. She would seize with her arm the part of the bed near which she would stand, and hold by it, grasping it, as though she were afraid to fall; and then, when it was at the worst with her, she would go to her closet, — a closet that no eyes ever saw unlocked but her own, — and fill for herself and swallow some draught; and then she would sit down with the Bible before her, and read it sedulously. She spent hours every day with her Bible before her, repeating to herself whole chapters, which she almost knew by heart. It cannot be said that she was a bad woman, though she had in her time done an indescribable amount of evil. She still longed to rule the diocese by means of her husband, — but was made to pause and hesitate by the unwonted mood that had fallen upon him,”

When Crawley at last wrote resigning his perpetual curacy, she determined to rouse the bishop to action. But when she went to speak with him, he would not look at her.

“ ‘Why do you not turn round and speak to me properly?’ she said. ‘I do not want to speak to you at all,’ the bishop answered. This was very bad; — almost anything would be better than this. He was sitting now over the fire, with his elbows on his knees, and his face buried in his hands. She had gone round the room so as to face him, and was now standing almost over him, but still she could not see his countenance. ‘This will not do at all,’ she said. ‘My dear, do you know that you are forgetting yourself altogether?’  ‘I wish I could forget myself.’ ... And now he got up and looked at her. For a moment he stood upon his legs, and then again he sat down with his face turned towards her. ‘It is the truth. You have brought on me such disgrace that I cannot hold up my head. You have ruined me. I wish I were dead; and it is all through you that I am driven to wish it’  Of all that she had suffered in her life this was the worst. She clasped both her hands to her side as she listened to him, and for a minute or two she made no reply.... ‘Bishop,’ she said, ‘the words that you speak are sinful, very sinful.’  ‘You have made them sinful,’  he replied. ‘I will not hear that from you. I will not indeed. I have endeavored to do my duty by you, and I do not deserve it.... All I want of you is that you should arouse yourself, and go to your work.’  ‘I could do my work very well,’  he said, ‘if you were not here.’  ‘I suppose, then, you wish I were dead?’  said Mrs. Proudie. To this he made no reply, nor did he stir himself. How could flesh and blood bear this, — female flesh and blood, — Mrs. Proudie’s flesh and blood? Now, at last, her temper once more got the better of her judgment, probably much to her immediate satisfaction, and she spoke out. ‘I tell you what it is, my lord; if you are imbecile, I must be active. It is very sad that I should have to assume your authority—’  ‘I will not allow you to assume my authority.’ ... ‘What do you mean to say to Mr. Thumble when you see him?’  ‘That is nothing to you.’  She came up to him and put her hand upon his shoulder, and spoke to him very gently. ‘Tom,’ she said, ‘is that the way in which you speak to your wife?’  ‘Yes, it is. You have driven me to it. Why have you taken upon yourself to send that man to Hogglestock?’  ‘Because it was right to do so. I came to you for instructions, and you would give none.’  ‘I should have given what instructions I pleased in proper time. Thumble shall not go to Hogglestock next Sunday.’  ‘Who shall go then?’  ‘Nevermind. Nobody. It does not matter to you. If you will leave me now I shall be obliged to you. There will be an end of all this very soon, — very soon.’ Mrs. Proudie after this stood for a while thinking what she would say; but she left the room without uttering another word. As she looked at him a hundred different thoughts came into her mind. She had loved him dearly, and she loved him still; but she knew now, — at this moment felt absolutely sure, — that by him she was hated! In spite of all her roughness and temper, Mrs. Proudie was in this like other women, — that she would fain have been loved had it been possible. She had always meant to serve him. She was conscious of that; conscious also in a way that, although she had been industrious, although she had been faithful, although she was clever, yet she had failed. At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife!... She was preparing to go up to her chamber, with her hand on the banisters and with her foot on the stairs, when she saw the servant who had answered the bishop’s bell. ‘John,’ she said, ‘when Mr. Thumble comes to the palace, let me see him before he goes to my lord.’ Then Mrs. Proudie went up stairs to her chamber, and locked her door. Mr. Thumble returned to Barchester that day, leading the broken-down cob, and a dreadful walk he had.... John was peremptory with him, insisting that he must wait first upon Mrs. Proudie and then upon the bishop. Mr. Thumble might perhaps have turned a deaf ear to the latter command, but the former was one which he felt himself bound to obey. So he entered the palace, rather cross, very much soiled as to his outer man; and in this condition went up a certain small staircase which was familiar to him, to a small parlor which adjoined Mrs. Proudie’s room, and there awaited the arrival of the lady.... Mrs.

Proudie’s own maid, Mrs. Draper by name, came to him and said that she had knocked twice at Mrs. Proudie’s door and would knock again. Two minutes after that she returned, running into the room with her arms extended, and exclaiming, ‘Oh, heavens, sir; — mistress is dead!’ Mr. Thumble, hardly knowing what he was about, followed the woman into the bed-room, and there he found himself standing awestruck before the corpse of her who had so lately been the presiding spirit of the palace. The body was still resting on its legs, leaning against the end of the side of the bed, while one of the arms was clasped around the bedpost. The mouth was rigidly closed, but the eyes were open as though staring at him. Nevertheless there could be no doubt from the first glance that the woman was dead. He went up close to it, but did not dare to touch it. There was no one as yet there but he and Mrs. Draper; — no one else knew what had happened.’?

IV

The type of mere termagant is not hard to catch; but the woman who is conscientious as well as arrogant, who means well to those she most wrongs and outrages, is one of those mixed characters far more difficult to achieve, and it is such a woman who constitutes the author’s triumph in Mrs. Proudie. One cannot say she is his greatest triumph; a cloud of witnesses would rise in protest if one said that. There would be Lady Glencora Pallisser, Lady Laura Kennedy, Mrs. Phineas Finn, Madalina Demolines, Miss Dunstable, and the various heroines of “Orley Farm,” “The Bertrams,” “Can You Forgive Her?” “Is He Popenjoy?” “He Knew He Was Right,” and many others to gainsay so bold a claim’. Yet, in spite of them is not Mrs. Proudie, after Lily Dale, the woman character who remains most distinct in the memories of Trollope’s readers?

I have been wondering all through my writing of him, whether the readers of Trollope are of that commanding class which they once were, and sadly doubting. Once, there is no question but he had the largest number of authoritative readers, but for how long a time, or just when, it would not be easy to say. I suspect his supremacy was brief, and that it could be ascertained only for that bright moment when Thackeray was editing the “Cornhill Magazine,” and Trollope was writing its serial. But his popularity extended all through the eighteen-sixties, and well into the seventies, from the time fixed by his “Cornhill” story; I forget which of his stories it was. Thackeray had then done all his great novels, and though Dickens had still several of his prodigious fantasies before him, it is doubtful if he was to deepen or even widen the impression he had already made. Charles Reade was synchronously coruscating in his most brilliant pin-wheeling and sky-rocketing, but like Dickens he was confirming rather than forming his public. George Eliot’s greatest work came a little later, and in “ Middlemarch” she pushed Trollope from the throne, which she then held until her declining powers made the accession of Mr. Thomas Hardy easy for his unquestionable mastery.

But during the period covered by our civil war, say, from 1861 till 1865, Trollope reigned; and no one, I think, can say that he was unworthy to reign. Each of the great contemporary English novelists represented an English world, and Thackeray’s English world did not differ more from Dickens’s than from Reade’s or George Eliot’s. But Trollope, without seeking subjects for ironical satire, or surprising transformation, or dazzling discovery, or morbid analysis, represented the English world as it appeared to him in its normal moods of high-and-low mindedness; vicious, virtuous; dull, amusing, respectable and disreputable; vise and foolish; but in all its varieties entirely and for the most part unconsciously English. One need not recur to Carlyle’s saying that Trollope could never lack for characters, so long as there were thirty millions of people in Great Britain, mostly bores; for that is as false and wrong-headed as nearly all Carlyle’s ad captandum criticism; and Hawthorne’s saying that a novel of Trollope’s was like a piece of earth under the microscope, with all the life active upon it, imparts an erring sense of dimensions. If a telescope of prodigious power could be trained from somewhere in space upon the British Isles, so that their people could be seen life-size, that would offer some such effect as we get in Trollope’s fiction. He had not enough, or he had too much, imagination to conceive of representing his fellow-subjects in the mid-years of the Victorian reign, other than as he knew them, and he neither extenuated nor aught set down in malice concerning them.

If this is true of the men, it is still truer of the women. At a time when Thackeray was caricaturing or sentimentalizing them, when Dickens was translating them into pretty or hideous monsters, when Reade was portraying them as impassioned or perfidious pusses, and when George Eliot was idealizing them in her Romolas or persecuting them in her Gwendolens and Rosamonds, Trollope was doing his period the incalculable service of anticipating instantaneous photography in his likenesses of Victorian maids, wives, and widows in endless variety. His work is all so true and artistic that one cannot trace in it the presence of any favorite type of woman. The women are such women as each scheme necessarily involves: good, bad, and indifferent; fair, plain, and middling; wise and foolish; high and low; the camera treats them all alike fairly; and the spectator is the richer by its impartiality.

Upon the whole I should be inclined to place Trollope among the very first of those supreme novelists to whom the ever-womanly has revealed itself. He has not shown the subtlest sense of womanhood; his portraits do not impart the last, the most exquisite joy; it is not the very soul of the sex that shows itself in them; but it is the mind, the heart, the conscience, the manner; and this is for one painter enough. Let Jane Austen catch their ultimate charm, and George Eliot their ultimate truth, and Hawthorne their farthermost meanings and intimations; Trollope has shown them as we mostly see them when we meet them in society and as we know them at home; and if it were any longer his to choose, he might well rest content with his work. For my part I wish I might send my readers to the long line of his wise, just, sane novels, which I have been visiting anew for the purposes of these papers, and finding as delightful as ever, and, thanks to extraordinary gifts for forgetting, almost as fresh as ever.

THE HEROINE OF “THE INITIALS”

SOME time about the middle of the century which has so lately become the last, there appeared a novel which swept the younger novel-reading world almost with the thoroughness of “Jane Eyre” among maturer readers. Those who were once of that younger world still think “The Initials” one of the most captivating love stories ever written; and they feel something of the old pride in it which they felt when it was a mark of taste and refinement to like it.

Not to have read “The Initials” was in their day to have left one’s self out of the range of intellectual conversation and almost of human sympathy. Such a one was not authorized even to speculate about the authorship which, then unknown, added the excitement of mystery to the intrinsic charm of the book. Later it came out that “The Initials” was written by the Baroness Tautphoeus, an Englishwoman married and living in Bavaria, but “Quits,” at least, “by the author of ‘The Initials,’” reached them before her identity penetrated to her worshippers.

Neither “Quits,” however, nor “Cyrilla” nor “At Odds,” ever had half the acceptance of “The Initials,” and in fact they had none of the rounded completeness, the entire and perfect fascination of the first story. It remained her best, as it remains one of the best novels written in the century when fiction won the primacy in polite literature which it seems destined to keep.

I

“The Initials” is first of all a love story, and then it is an international love story, and perhaps the earliest of the modem sort, which Americans rather than the English have cultivated. It relates to the loves of a young Englishman and a young German girl, in whose family he becomes an inmate at Munich. Her father is of “civil condition,” but has married a second wife socially beneath him, and in their rather less than moderate fortunes the Rosenbergs are more than willing to take a lodger. The mother is of good soul if not of good family, and like most women of her nation a devoted housekeeper; the family consists of her young sons, and of her step-daughters, Hildegarde and Crescenz, who are hardly of the age to be heroines in England, but at sixteen and fifteen are quite old enough to be thought of in marriage in Germany. I should be ashamed to give these details to people of my own generation, for everybody who was anybody knew them forty or fifty years ago; but I now address them to the later youth, and I feel myself safe if I have not got them quite straight. I believe Herr Rosenberg had married above him when he espoused the mother of his daughters, who, I remember, had some noble cousins bothering about, and complicating matters. But I do not care; the main fact is that the young Englishman, Hamilton, comes to live with the Rosenbergs for the improvement of his German, and that Crescenz falls in love with him, and he falls in love with Hildegarde.

Hildegarde is one of the first proud and angry heroines who since, rather than before, have flourished a good deal in fiction, and she is frankly beautiful, the concession to human weakness being made in the matter of temper. It will be noted that she is therefore of a type at once earlier than the plain, impassioned heroines of Charlotte Brontë and later; and is of that pretty but tempestuous sort of girls whom Emily Brontë brought in the fashion of, and who antedated and outlived their cousins. She contributed a spice of variety to the family of English heroines by her strangeness, for though of English origin through the author who imagined her, she was of such foreign make and manner as at once to catch the eye among them. She was shown, too, in her native environment, and for the first time we had in her affair with Hamilton that piquancy of internationality which the American novelists, oftener than the English, have since invoked. Before her there had been such heavy affairs as that of Sir Charles Grandison and the lovely Italian Lady Clementina; but in “The Initials” the situation had almost the modernity of a case fancied by Mr. Henry James, the greatest of all the masters in that way.

Neither Hamilton at nineteen, nor Hildegarde at sixteen could be of such confirmed and hardened prejudices in favor of their own nation as to make their national difference an obstacle to their passion. The barriers this had to surmount were social and personal, for the well-born Englishman could not help feeling and showing himself superior to the bourgeois family which had received him, and such a girl as Hildegarde could not help promptly hating him for it. They met almost as enemies, and their wooing throughout had often the alarming effect of warring; at the very end, her capture is something like a hostile triumph. The affair is not the less intoxicating to the spectator; the country fought over, though difficult, is picturesque, and the manners and customs of the neutrals as well as the belligerents, are realized as vital elements of the exciting spectacle.

II

In her first presentation Hildegarde is grouped with her sister, and they are both described as “ perfect personifications of German beauty — blue eyes, blooming cheeks, red lips, and a profusion of brown hair, most classically braided and plaited.... They were both tall and very slightly formed, and their dark cotton dresses were made and put on with an exactness which proved that they were not indifferent to the advantages bestowed on them by nature.” At the table d’hôte where he meets them, “the young ladies, to Hamilton’s infinite astonishment, took the chicken bones in their fingers, and detached the meat from them with their teeth. He felt at once convinced that they were immeasurably vulgar... not aware that the mode of eating is in Germany no such exact criterion of manners as in England.”

It is the good, sweet, stupid Crescenz that Hamilton first becomes acquainted with, and who in her tenderness for him confesses her wretchedness at being obliged to marry the kindly but elderly and bald-headed Major Stultz. “‘Why... before I left Seon, he seemed much more inclined to marry your sister than you,’  ‘Oh, of course, he would rather have married Hildegarde, because she is so much handsomer and cleverer than I am; but she would not listen to him, and called him an old fool.’  ‘I admire her candor,’ said Hamilton. ‘And then she got into a passion when he persevered; and slapped him on the mouth!... Yes, when he attempted to kiss her hand; at least he says so; and Hildegarde thinks it may be true, as she was angry, and struggled very hard to release her hand!’... ‘She seems of rather a passionate temperament.’  ‘Passionate! Yes, she sometimes gets into a passion, but it is soon over, and then she can be so kind to those she loves!... With me she is never in a passion!’”

In due time Hamilton himself experiences her temper, notably, once, just after he has been waltzing with Crescenz, and holding her rather closely embraced. ‘“Your sister’s personal dislike seems to influence her conduct on all occasions,’ said Hamilton, glancing towards Hildegarde.... Hildegarde rose; as she passed Hamilton she said, in a low voice, ‘For personal dislike you may say detestation, when you refer to yourself in future.’  ‘Most willingly, most gladly,’ said Hamilton, laughing. ‘I wish you to hate me with all your heart.’  ‘Then your wish is gratified. I feel the greatest contempt—’  ‘Halt!’ cried Hamilton, laughing, for her anger amused him. ‘I did not give you leave to feel contempt; I only said you might hate.’”

One day Madame Rosenberg bids the girl carry Hamilton his coffee to him in his room.—’”But — but—’ hesitated Hildegarde, ‘Mr. Hamilton is not alone!’  ‘Count Zedwitz is in his room, but he won’t bite you; so go at once.’... Half an hour later Hamilton was out in the corridor. Madame Rosenberg... hoped his coffee was not too cold.

‘Coffee? No — yes! When, where did I drink it?’  ‘In your own room,’ replied Madame Rosenberg, laughing.... ‘I sent it to you by Hildegarde,’ He looked inquiringly at Hildegarde; she raised her eyes slowly from her work, and looking at him steadily and gravely, said, in French, ‘I threw it out of the window rather than take it to you,’  ‘Next time, I advise you to drink it,’ said Hamilton, laughing.”

Hildegarde’s anger towards Hamilton is kindled not only from her unconscious love of him, but from her more generous indignation of what she believes his trifling with poor, pretty Crescenz. At last she can bear it no longer, and she brings him to book for it, and there is a fine scene between them, which the lovers of the lovers will not have forgotten. She reproaches him, and then implores him to leave their house. He temporizes, and teases her till it comes to her saying, “‘Ungenerous, unfeeling Englishman!... I — I see you are trying to put me into a passion — but I am not angry,’ she said, seating herself in the chair he had before placed for her. ‘You said you were able to convince me—’—’ You have convinced me that you are a consummate actress,’ cried Hamilton, contemptuously. ‘I am no actress!’ she exclaimed, starting from her chair with such a violence that it fell to the ground with a loud crash.... ‘You are even more thoroughly selfish than I imagined. This is the last time I shall ever speak to you,’  ‘Don’t make rash vows,’ said Hamilton, coolly. ‘I dare say you will often speak to me in time — perhaps condescend to like me,’  ‘Never! I do not think there exists in the world a more unamiable being than you are!... You are vindictive, too, cruelly vindictive. It is because you dislike me, it is in order to make me unhappy that you trifle with my sister’s feelings.... No matter; I see now that these conferences and quarrels are worse than useless, and—’  ‘I quite agree with you,’ said Hamilton, quickly.... ‘Suppose I promise never by word or deed to disparage Major Stultz in future, and totally to abstain from all further attentions to your sister?’  ‘That — is — better — than — nothing,’ said Hildegarde, slowly. ‘If you promise,’ she added, hesitatingly, ‘I — I think I may trust you.’”

III

It cannot go so far as this without going farther both in warring and wooing, with two young people brought together under the same roof, and meeting daily, almost hourly, almost momently. The love-making and the hate-making between Hildegarde and Hamilton advance equally, and it is only a question of time when the hate-making shall be altogether lost in the lovemaking.

She has to bear a great deal, poor, proud girl, but she proves strong enough for her burden, even to accepting in Hamilton’s presence her step-mother’s rebuke of her pride, and her advice to forget that the Countess Raimund was her mother. She suffers, but she takes it all in good part; and in fact she is a good girl, for all her temper and hauteur, doing her part in the family and the housekeeping, and not forgetting that she is a daughter to her father as well as her mother, and has duties to her step-brothers as well as her sister.

From her mother’s family she has only trouble, and there is one worthless cousin whose unworthy and irreverent love pursues her and persecutes her, and all but effects her separation from Hamilton, who is himself not too considerate of her helplessness. In fact, the Englishman’s best excuse, in certain crises of conduct, is the sincerity of his passion, and not his unselfishness, as will appear to the reader who first acquaints himself with that famous chapter of their lives called “The Struggle.” It is perhaps the climax of the story, and it shows Hildegarde in her limitations as well as her potentialities with respect to both Hamilton and Oscar Raimund; certainly the scene of her warring and wooing with Hamilton is a résumé of all in that kind which characterizes the book, and is one of high novelty and originality as such scenes go. The family have apparently all gone out when Hamilton returns from a Sunday morning ride, after having the night before had an uncommonly amicable talk with Hildegarde, and prevailed with her, as he thought, not to read a certain unfit book, but read only those he had given her a list of.

“He entered the house by the back staircase, visited all the rooms and even the kitchen, but found all deserted. Madame Rosenberg’s room was also unoccupied, but through the partly open door of it he saw Hildegarde sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, reading so intently that she was perfectly unconscious of his presence. The deep folds of her dark blue merino dress, with its closely fitting body, gave a more than usual elegance to her tall, slight figure as she bent in profile over her book, and Hamilton stood in silent admiration, unconsciously twisting his riding-whip round his wrist, until his eyes rested for the second time on the book which she held in her hand. He started, hesitated, then hastily strode forward and stood before her; doubt and uncertainty were still depicted on his countenance as Hildegarde looked up, but her dismay, her deep blush, and the childish action of placing the hand containing the volume behind her, were a confirmation of his fears that she was reading the forbidden work. ‘Excuse me for interrupting you,’ he said, with a forced smile, “but I really cannot believe the evidence of my own eyes, and must request you to let me look at that book for a moment.’  ‘No, you shall not,’ she answered, leaning back on the sofa, and becoming very pale while she added, ‘It is very disagreeable being startled and interrupted in this manner. I thought you told mamma you would meether at Neuberghausen.’  ‘Very true; perhaps I may meet her there; but, before I go, I must and will see that book. On it depends my future opinion of you.’  ‘You shall not see it,’ cried Hildegarde, the color again returning to her face. ‘The book,’ said Hamilton, seizing firmly her disengaged hand. ‘The book, or the name of it!’  ‘Neither; let me go!’ cried Hildegarde, struggling to disengage her hand. Like most usually quiet-tempered persons, Hamilton, when once actually aroused, lost all command of himself: he held one of her hands as in a vise, and, when she brought forward the other to accelerate its release, he bent down to read the title of the book, which was immediately thrown on the ground, and the then free hand descended with such violence on his cheek and ear that for a moment he was perfectly stunned; and, even after he stood upright, he looked at her for a few seconds in unfeigned astonishment. ‘Do you think,’ at length he exclaimed, vehemently— ‘do you think that I will allow you to treat me as you did Major Stultz with impunity?’ And then, catching her in his arms, he kissed her repeatedly and with a violence which seemed to terrify her beyond measure. ‘I gave you fair warning more than once,’ he added, when at length he had released her. ‘I gave you fair warning, and you knew what you had to expect,’ She covered her face with her hands, and burst into a passion of tears. ‘I cannot imagine,’ he continued, impetuously walking up and down the room— ‘I cannot imagine why you did not, with your usual courage, tell me at once the name of the book and prevent this scene,’ Hildegarde shook her head, and wept still more bitterly. ‘After all,’ he said, seating himself with affected calmness opposite to her, leaning his arms on the table, and drumming upon the book, which now lay undisputed between them— ‘after all, you are not better than other people! Not more to be trusted than other girls, and I fancied you such perfection! I could have forgiven anything but the — the untruth!’ he exclaimed, starting up. ‘Anything but that! Pshaw! yesterday, when you told me that the books had been sent back to the library, I believed you without a moment’s hesitation. I thanked you for your deference to my opinion — ha, ha, ha! What a fool you must have thought me!’ Hildegarde looked up. All expression of humility had left her features, her tears ceased to flow, and, as she rose to leave the room, she turned almost haughtily towards him, while saying: ‘I really do not know what right you have to speak to me in this manner. I consider it very great presumption on your part, and desire it may never occur again.’  ‘You may be quite sure I shall never offend you in this way again,’ he said, holding the book towards her. ‘What a mere farce the writing of that list of books was!’  ‘No, for I had intended to have read all you recommended.’  ‘And all I recommended you to avoid, too! This — this, which you tacitly promised not to finish—’ He stopped; for, while she took the book in silence, she blushed so deeply, and seemed so embarrassed, that he added, sorrowfully: ‘Oh, how I regret having come home! How I wish I had not discovered that you could deceive me!’  ‘I have not deceived you,’ said Hildegarde.... ‘Appearances are against me, and yet I repeat I have not deceived you. The books were sent to the library yesterday evening — but too late to be changed. Old Hans brought them back again, and I found them in my room when I went to bed. I did not read them last night.’  ‘But you staid at home for the purpose to-day,’ observed Hamilton, reproachfully. ‘No; my mother gave the servants leave to go out for the whole day, and, as she did not like to leave the house quite unoccupied, she asked me to remain at home. I, of course, agreed to do so; without I assure you, thinking of those hateful books. I do not mean to — I cannot justify what I have done. I can only say in extenuation that the temptation was great I have been alone for more than two hours — my father’s books are locked up. I never enter your room when you are absent, and I wished to know the end of the story, which still interests and haunts me in spite of all my endeavors to forget it The book lay before me; I resisted long, but at last I opened it; and so — and so—’  ‘And so, I suppose, I must acknowledge that I have judged you too harshly,’ said Hamilton. ‘I do not care about your judgment. I have fallen in my own esteem since I find that I cannot resist temptation,’  ‘And is my good opinion of no value to you?’  ‘It was, perhaps; but it has lost all worth within the last half-hour.’  ‘How do you mean?’  ‘I have seen you in the course of that time suspicious, rough, and what you would yourself call ungentlemanlike.... You were the last per son from whom I should have expected such treatment,’ continued Hildegarde, while the tears started to her eyes and her voice faltered, ‘the very last; and though I did get into a passion and give you a blow, it was not until you had hurt my wrist and provoked me beyond endurance,’ She left the room, and walked quickly down the passage. ‘Stay,’ cried Hamilton, following her— ‘stay, and hear my excuses,’  ‘Excuses! You have not even one to offer,’ said Hildegarde, laying her hand on the lock of her door. ‘Hear me at least,’ he said, eagerly. ‘I could not endure the thought of your being one jot less perfect than I had imagined you — that made me suspicious; the wish for proof made me rough; and though I cannot exactly justify my subsequent conduct, I plead in extenuation your own words, “The temptation was great.” Hildegarde’s dimples showed that a smile was with difficulty repressed, and Hamilton, taking courage, whispered hurriedly: ‘But one word more — hear my last and best excuse; it is that I love you, deeply, passionately; but I need not tell you this, for you must have known it long, long ago. Hildegarde, say only that our perpetual quarrels have not made you absolutely hate me!’ Hildegarde, without uttering a word more, impetuously drew back her hand, sprang into her room, and locked the door. He waited for a minute or two, and then knocked, but received no answer. ‘Hildegarde,’ he cried, reproachfully, ‘is this right — is this kind? Even if you dislike me, I have a right to expect an answer,’  ‘Go,’ she said, in a very low voice; ‘go away. You ought not to be here when I am alone,’ “  Why did you not think of that before?’  ‘I don’t know. I had not time. I—’  ‘Nonsense. Open the door, and let me speak to you for a moment’ No answer, but he thought he heard her walking up and down the room. ‘Only one moment,’ he repeated. ‘I cannot, indeed, I cannot. Pray go away. ‘“

IV

The youthfulness of all this is lovely. These people are really at the beginning of life and are immersed in the intoxicating employ of finding themselves out while remaining ignorant of their power upon each other. Neither is an actor; the fascination of both is in their entire sincerity. A worse than either would not have done what they each did; they are still almost children.

I think it is plain that the author learned part of her trade from those weird sisters who wrote “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” Her art is a blend of Charlotte Brontë’s and Emily Brontë’s, with a greater tendency to the greater freedom of Emily’s, and an effect, in the composite result, of a fresh originality. But in her stormiest scenes you have not the sense of outlawry such as you have in those of “Wuthering Heights,” and the casing air is charged with comedy, not tragedy. Oddly enough, these aesthetics do not discord with the metaphysics which the author has learned to indulge from the fiction of Goethe. There are passages in this story of young love which in their psychological, economical, sociological excursiveness might have been studied from “Wilhelm Meister.” The author was in fact operating in a region then so new to the novelist that she had a fair right to divide with the reader the weight of the exegetic duty laid upon her. She had invited him into a world so strange to the English-speaking reader that she must sometimes suspend the lighter pleasures of hospitality in making sure that he understands what is going on. The world is since so much more thoroughly travelled, and thanks to such fiction as hers, the peoples are so much more intimately versed in each other’s peculiarities that the task of the international novelist is now indefinitely lightened.

But fortunately, however well we knew Germany, or Italy, or Spain, or Russia, the Pays du Tendre always remains strange to us, and the highways and byways of the land of love may be mapped out in the closest detail, to the untiring interest of the student. Especially that region of a girl’s heart, explored by so many thousands of travellers who have recorded its surprises in so many hundred thousands of books, continues a perennial mystery, a continent proof against all revelations. We get glimpses of it in the story of such a girl as Hildegarde, but only glimpses, and perhaps if she herself opened it to us, we should be none the wiser in it We cannot be sure that Hamilton will always be happy; at times he will be tempestuously happy; but at least he will never be calmly unhappy. She will be always a surprise and a puzzle to him, and when she is most his own, his sense of possession will be qualified by this inalienable strangeness in her, which will also be her strangeness to herself. She will never be able to reveal her own nature wholly to him; for she will never wholly know it. For other girls the most obvious, though not by any means the most valuable lesson of her experience will be that it is not safe for a girl to box a young man’s ears unless she is willing to marry him. This point seems to be definitely ascertained in “The Initials.”

THE HEROINE OF “KATE BEAUMONT”

IF we put aside the romances of Hawthorne and the romantic novels of Cooper, we can hardly find much fiction of American scope and import before the Civil War, except “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” That was a great novel, marred by defects of art, and fettered to a cause, but still a great novel, and really the earliest American novel. After the war we began to have other novels of material proportions, and first among these were the stories of J. W. De Forest, a brevet major of volunteers, and a veteran of the vast army then fading back, with the weather-beaten blue of its overcoats, into the common color of the popular life. His distinction was thereafter civil and literary, and for the purposes of this paper it will be convenient to call him Mr. De Forest, though there is so much in his books to remind the reader of the big war which the author had passed through, with all his artistic senses alert. The book in which I first made his acquaintance, with a surprise and joy in an American who seemed to write novels with authority, was altogether concerned with the war and its results, and “Miss Ravenel’s Conversion “ was not less valuable to me for the light it cast upon the motives and morals of the recent struggle than for the knowledge of men and women, as such, which it showed. I have not read it since those far-off days, and I have not recurred to his subsequent novels, “Playing the Mischief,”

“The Wetherill Affair,”

“Overland,” and “ Irene the Missionary,” which I have hardly named in the order of their succession; but I have read “Honest John Vane” more than once, with a feeling of its mastery in handling the flabby material of our ordinary political virtue, such as no other American novel has given me. A certain impatience, a certain contempt of his material on the moral side, is what as nearly allies Mr. De Forest’s art, in spite of his Huguenot race, to the New England ethicism so fatal to Action, as anything I have noted in him. It forbids him the artist’s impartial joy in the good, bad, and indifferent motives which his sole affair is to let show themselves what they are, and it leaves him, if not a partisan of the better, a censor of the worse. A certain scornful bluntness in dealing with the disguises in which women natures reveal themselves is perhaps at the root of that dislike which most women have felt for his Action, and which in a nation of women, readers has prevented it from ever winning a merited popularity.

I

I suppose his shapeliest novel is “Kate Beaumont,” which might better have been called “A Family Feud,” so largely is it the history of the hostilities between the Beaumonts and McAlisters in a South Carolina village before the war. Within the framework of this tragedy, which has the comic reliefs visible to so true a humorist as Mr. De Forest, plays the love story of Kate Beaumont and Frank McAlister. They have met on the steamer bringing them home from a long sojourn in Europe, and he has fallen in love with her before she has fallen into the sea and been saved from death by her hereditary enemy. He has the greatest loathing for the hereditary enmity, which he considers a relic of barbarism, and his rescue of Kate Beaumont forms a pretty basis for the reconciliation of their families, when the young people get home. The reconciliation is always just about to effect itself, but is always turning into provisional hostilities, and it does not actually take place till the close of the book, when the lovers are duly married. I confess that it was not with the expectation of finding Kate Beaumont a heroine to my hand that I turned again to the book; and I there found her what I remembered her, a sweet girl, gentle and generous, with a ready-made passion for her lover, and otherwise a prevailing passivity. It was in her sister Nellie, the wife of the drunken Randolph Armitage, that I looked forward to meeting a second time a personality which greatly pleased me the first. Nellie Armitage is a great little creature, quite true to herself and her circumstance: absolute woman, and yet with rather more humor than is vouchsafed to most of her family. She had married Armitage for love of his beauty, and as his vice grew upon him, the proud girl had lived to suffer from him every ignominy, of which blows were almost the least pari When she ceases to love him she cannot leave him because of the public scandal which a woman of the Beaumont race must not expose herself to; and because she cannot do so without confessing to the other Beaumonts things which will make it their duty and pleasure to kill her husband.

All the men in the book have an extraordinary vitality, and Nellie Beaumont has her full share of it, though the other women are rather scanted in behalf of the men. She is pathetically, heroically, whimsically alive from the first moment, and is never more so than when she falls in love with Frank McAlister for her sister’s sake, and putting aside the historic Beaumont hatred, resolves that he shall be Kate’s husband. She comes the more naturally to this pass when she at last abandons her own husband, and takes refuge with her father; for by this time life has taught her that the love of a good man is the best thing in the world, and Frank McAlister is good. With the help of the heavenly powers she has fairly got the feud under her feet, when her husband comes to claim her, and in his drunken jealousy of Frank — not on hers but on Kate’s account — tries to kill the young fellow whom he finds on a mission of peace in Peyton Beaumont’s house. His wild shooting brings down Beaumont’s saintly old father-in-law, Colonel Kershaw; Frank’s brothers, lurking about, imagine that the Beaumonts have attacked him, and open fire upon the Beaumonts, who come running, pistol in hand; and the old feud flames out again in more infernal fury than ever. But Kershaw’s death proves a real peace-offering; Armitage is promptly turned out, and when his initial is found on the fatal bullet, and not the McAlisters’, the way is open to the Beaumonts for that forgiveness of their enemies which the old man has urged upon them from his death-bed. The families are reconciled, and Kate and Frank are married.

II

Now that the prejudices of the war time and the ante-war time have effectively died away, we may rejoice in the virtues which Mr. De Forest shows consistent with so many vices in the Beaumonts. Each of the men of that family is studied with an accuracy which brings him tangibly before us: the father, Peyton Beaumont, a quivering mass of affection for his own flesh and blood, an impersonation of the noblest and stupidest caste and family pride, his hot blood on fire with constant cocktails, and his life always in his hand for the resentment of insult, an impassioned parent and an impenitent homicide; Vincent, the cynical, scientific product of the Paris medical schools, returned to the full acceptance of the South Carolina conditions; his younger brother Poinsett, bred to the law, but practically no more a lawyer than Vincent is a doctor, serenely philosophical, and amiable from premature fat, but as devoted to the feud as the youngest brother, Tom, with whom it is a religion. The Beaumonts are of Huguenot race, and by so much are more picturesque than the Scotch-blooded McAlisters; but these are scarcely less delicately differentiated, though they are not touched with the same artistic affection. The old Judge McAlister, as canny, suave, and slippery as Peyton Beaumont is dense, frank, and truthful, is an admirable portrait, and so is the kind, consumptive, mechanically homicidal eldest son, Bruce. Frank, emancipated from all local tradition by his seven years’ study in Europe, and holding the feud in utter abhorrence, is worthily the lover of Kate Beaumont. But the women of his family are shown in the abeyance of the Southern women in the slave-holding times. It is only some woman liberated by unhappiness to a sort of family leadership who can have the importance of Nellie Beaumont.

But even she, as a character, is less livingly presented than even such a subordinate man as Bentley Armitage. Among the group of powerful men figures, that of the old Colonel Kershaw, who has outlived the sins of his youth and the errors of his civilization, must profoundly interest the student. His patriarchal paramountcy not only with the passionate Beaumont, but all his impassioned descendants is, however, an effect of native goodness which is now become saintly without having degenerated into weakness.

III

Have I been tacitly owning that even my chosen heroine in “Kate Beaumont” is not of the dominant quality which the other heroines of this series may justly claim? She is of scarcely more force, indeed, than the heroines of Dickens, though of indefinitely more vitality. It is not Dickens, however, who in any way characterizes Mr. De Forest, but there are hints and traces of another influence in his novel, which is all the more curious because Charles Reade never minimized woman’s part in fiction. The hints and traces, to be sure, are in the manner, but there is a deeper affinity between the two writers in their divination of women’s nature. Reade turned his seership to flattering account, and so won the favor of a sex which he was apt to symbolize in the innocence of serpents and the wisdom of doves; but it is the defect of Mr. De Forest’s temperament that he could not flatter the foibles of womanhood, or even its faults. I remember in “ Miss Ravend’s Conversion” a very lurid Mrs. Leroy, of whom I cannot think without shuddering. The wife of Honest John Vane is pitilessly ascertained, and there is a widow in “Playing the Mischief” who is not a mirror for widows, to say the least. In “Kate Beaumont,” the old flirt, Mrs. Chester, and the young flirt, Jenny Devine, are treated with a contempt equally open and unsparing. All the more to the honor of such a brave and essentially good woman as Nellie Armitage, who has married to her hurt and kept it hidden, is the praise of an author so chary of flattery for woman.

She has kept her hurt so well hidden that none of the Beaumonts who would have bathed it in blood have ever suspected it; and when she takes Kate home with her for a visit, the girl is simply fascinated with her handsome brother-in-law, and thinks her sister the happiest of wives. The day after her coming to his house Armitage is brought home from a debauch, and with her sister she comes upon him lying senseless.

“‘Oh!’ she exclaimed.... ‘Is he — dying?’  ‘He is dead — dead drunk,’ replied the wife. ‘To think how I have loved him!’ Nellie went on. ‘That man has had all the good, all the best, that was in my heart He has had it and trampled on it, and wasted it till it is gone. I can hate, now, and I hate him.... I have seen the time when I could kneel and kiss the figures of the carpet which his feet had rested upon.... And now see how I hate him and despise him.

I can take a mean and cowardly revenge on him!’ She suddenly advanced upon the senseless man, and slapped his face with her open hand. ‘Oh, you woman, what are you doing?’ exclaimed Kate, seizing her and drawing her away. ‘Nellie, I won’t love you!’  ‘Yes, I am hateful,’ replied Nellie. ‘Do you know why? I can’t tell you half the reasons I have for being hateful. Look at that scar,’ pointing to a mark on her forehead.... ‘He did it. He struck me with his doubled fist, and that gash was cut by the ring which I gave him.’ Kate sat down, covered her face with her hands, and sobbed violently.... ‘He had struck me before, and he has struck me since. And there have been other insults.... Oh, if my father and brothers knew!’... ‘They would kill him, Nellie,’ whispered Kate, looking up piteously, as if pleading for the man’s life. ‘I know it. But that is not all. I have become so savage that it seems to me I would not mind that What I care for is the exposure. If they should shoot him, people would learn why. It would be known that Nellie Beaumont could not live with her husband... that she had failed as a wife and a woman.... I shall stay and fight it out here till I can fight no longer. But I wanted some one’s sympathy. I wanted at least to tell my sister how miserable I am.’ She stopped, fell on her knees, laid her head in the girl’s lap, and broke out in violent crying. After a minute she rose, lifted Kate to her feet, embraced her passionately, and said in a voice which had suddenly become calm, ‘This is my first cry in two years. My heart feels a little less like breaking. Let us go.’  ‘Do you suppose he has heard?’ asked the young woman, glancing at Armitage. ‘Heard?’ answered Nellie, with a hard laugh. ‘He couldn’t hear the last trump, if it should be blown in this room. Isn’t he horrible — and handsome?’”

IV

After a first moment of prejudice, Mrs. Armitage had taken a sudden liking to Frank McAlister. When at last she realized that she must leave her husband, she was not sorry to find Frank on the train that took her and her sister back to their father’s house. He behaved with such discreetness, and in regard to Kate with such slavish submission to Mrs. Armitage’s will, that “‘I am his sworn ally,’ she said to her sister, as they drove home from the Hartland station. ‘If he proposes, do you accept him. Then I will go to papa with the whole story, and if he is naughty, I will appeal to your grandpapa.’”

She lost no time in making her approaches to their father’s heart through the story of her sufferings.

‘“I have had to leave my husband, and I am excusable for telling why.’  ‘Had to leave your husband! ‘echoed the father, his bushy eyebrows bristling and his eyes turning bloodshot ‘The infamous scoundrel! ‘He was so much of a Beaumont that he... asked for no more than the fact that his daughter had felt herself compelled to leave her husband. On that he judged the case at once and forever.... ‘Be perfectly easy. He won’t live the month out’  ‘Have a care what you do,’ replied Nellie. ‘I don’t want the whole world to know what I’ve suffered.’  ‘Who is going to know it?’ interrupted the old fire-eater. ‘By heavens, I will shoot the man that dares to know it I’... ‘You can’t shoot the women,’ said Nellie.”

The skill with which she plays upon the tenderness of her father in behalf of her sister, have their effect in his consenting that if the feud can once be extinguished Kate shall marry Frank McAlister. ‘“But I can’t discuss it, now,’ he protests. ‘Do let me alone. Do you want to break my heart?’  ‘No, nor Kate’s, either,’ said Nellie,” and presently there is a scene between Kate and her father, who sees her unhappy, and must know why.

“‘Is it more than a Beaumont can endure?’ he repeated, gently, though with an appeal to the family pride. ‘No, it is not more,’ answered Kate.... The father was not satisfied, for he did not want his daughter to suffer at all.... ‘I did not seek this new quarrel,’ he said. ‘I can truly declare that Judge McAlister forced it upon me. I could live with the man decently, if he would let me.’  ‘Oh, father, I have nothing to say about these matters. Why do you explain them to me?’  ‘Because I don’t want you to blame me. I can’t bear it. I say I could live with those people. As for the young man, — I mean Mr. Frank McAlister, — I respect him and like him.’ Kate, in spite of her virginal modesty, gave him a glance of gratitude that stung him. He started, and then resigned himself; the girl did love that man....

‘I must speak out,’ he declared. ‘It is my duty as a father. I know that this young man likes you and wishes to marry you. If your happiness is concerned, I must know that. Then I will see what I can do.’ Kate could endure no longer; she was fairly driven into a burst of tears and sobbing; she clutched her father, and buried her face in his neck, all the while kissing him. It was the same as to say, ‘I am very miserable, but do not be unhappy about it, and do not be vexed with me.’  ‘Oh, my poor child,’ he repeated several times, patting her shoulder in a helpless way, the most discomforted of comforters. At last she recovered her self-possession a little, gradually lifting her head until her lips touched his ear. ‘Papa, I will tell you everything,’ she whispered. ‘I did love him, and oh, I do! If you had let him propose to me I should have taken him. But now it is different. Since I have seen how it must always be between our families, I have decided that I will never marry him, not even if you consent. I will not risk being put in hostility with my own family. And now let me go, quick. Let me run,’ The instant he loosed his embrace she rustled out of the room, and away to her own chamber, shutting the door upon herself with a noise of hurry which he could plainly hear,”

V

All this, it must be owned, is very sweet and true; and there is nothing anywhere forced in the note of Kate Beaumont’s character. She is always very naturally and delicately a girl, who suffers into admirable womanhood. But the want of something salient in her appearances unfits her for quotation.

Perhaps that is the worst that can be said of her. The worst that can be said of her author is that he was apt to leave his work in a certain unfinish, and at last he left it altogether. I think it one of the greatest pities of our literary history that about twenty years ago Mr. De Forest ceased to print if he did not cease to write fiction: I suspect that the only book he has recently published— “A Lover’s Revolt” — is of a much earlier invention. It has the virtues and the defects of all his work. It is strongest in the portrayal of men’s characters, though its women cannot be said to be either weakly or falsely done. Their natures are truly but not kindly rendered, and this is a sort of error in the handling. Again, as always before, the artist’s contempt for their duplicity masters his sense of the goodness, the sincerity indeed, which consists with that duplicity. He is distinctly a man’s novelist, and as men do not need novelists so much apparently as women, his usefulness has been limited. When he was writing the novels which, like “Kate Beaumont,” commanded for him the admiration of those among his countrymen best fitted to know good work, it seemed reasonable that he should be lastingly recognized as one of the masters of American fiction; and I for one shall never be willing to own him less, though I cannot read many pages of his without wishing he had done this or that differently. It is not only the master who chooses to leave things in the rough; it is sometimes the ‘prentice who has not yet learned how to shape them perfectly. Still, in spite of all this I remember and I feel his strenuous imaginative gift working with a sort of disdainful honesty to the effects of art Finer, not stronger workmen succeeded him, and a delicate realism, more responsive to the claims and appeals of the feminine over-soul, replaced his inexorable veracity. In the fate of his fiction, whether final or provisional, it is as if this sensitive spirit had avenged the slight it felt, and, as the habit of women is, over-avenged itself. It had revealed itself to him as it does only to the masters of fiction, and he had seemed not to prize the confidence — had mocked at it, or what was worse, had made it the text for dramatic censures far more cutting and insufferable than sermons. In the lapse of time, however, the woman-soul may revise and even reverse its judgments. It is capricious as well as implacable, and it is possible that in some future moment it may fancy seeing itself as a most truthful man-soul saw it; and then Mr. De Forest’s belated turn will have come.

MR. JAMES’S DAISY MILLER

AS I have noted before in these papers, it is the fate of most novelists to be associated in the minds of readers with a certain type of heroine, or with a single heroine. If it is a type that represents the novelist he is not unfairly used; for the type may be varied into distinctive characters; if it is a single character it seems not so just, for every novelist has invented many characters. Mr. Henry James, for instance, has given us more, and more finely, yet strongly, differenced heroines than any novelist of his time, but at the mention of his name a single creation of his will come so prominently to mind that Daisy Miller will for the moment make us forget all her sisters.

I

Mr. James’s time is still ours, and while perfect artistry is prized in literature, it is likely to be prolonged indefinitely beyond our time. But he belongs pre-eminently to that period following the Civil War when our authorship felt the rising tide of national life in an impulse to work of the highest refinement, the most essential truth. The tendency was then toward a subtle beauty, which he more than any other American writer has expressed in his form, and toward a keen, humorous, penetrating self-criticism, which seized with joy upon the expanding national life, and made it the material of fiction as truly national as any yet known. Mr. J. W. De Forest was the pioneer in the path which the American novelists were to take; and hard upon him came Mr. Henry James, as unlike him as one talent could well be unlike another, and yet of the same mission in preparing the way, and planting the seeds of an imaginative literature, native to our soil, but taking the four winds of heaven in its boughs. They were as like in their equipment, through study and sojourn abroad, as they have been unlike in their destiny. Mr. De Forest’s books are a part of our literary history; Mr. James’s books are a part of our literature. Mr. De Forest somehow offended “the finer female sense,” in whose favor the prosperity of our fiction resides, and he is no longer read; Mr. James, who flattered it as little, lastingly piqued it, and to read him if for nothing but to condemn him is the high intellectual experience of the daughters of mothers whose indignant girlhood resented while it adored his portraits of American women. To enjoy his work, to feel its rare excellence, both in conception and expression is a brevet of intellectual good form which the women who have it prize at all its worth. This is not a history of American fiction, and I cannot arrange here for giving Mr. James even a provisional predominance in it; but those who know our short and simple annals, in that sort, will no doubt place him where he belongs. Those who do not know them may at least be told that no American writer has been more the envy and ambition of generous youth trying for distinction as well as sincerity in their work.

II

Mr. James is not quite the inventor of the international novel, as I intimated in my notices of “ The Initials,” but he is the inventor, beyond question, of the international American girl. He recognized and portrayed the innocently adventuring, unconsciously periculant American maiden, who hastened to efface herself almost as soon as she saw herself in that still flattering if a little mocking mirror, so that between two sojourns in Europe, a decade apart, she had time to fade from the vision of the friendly spectator. In 1860 — 70, you saw her and heard her everywhere on the European continent; in 1870-80, you sought her in vain amidst the monuments of art, or on the misty mountain-tops, or at the tables d’hôte. Her passing might have been the effect of a more instructed civilization, or it might have been a spontaneous and voluntary disappearance. In any case she was gone, and it seemed a pity, for she was sweet, and harmless, with a charm derived from our earth and sky, a flavor of new-world conditions imparting its wilding fragrance to that strange environment as freely as to its native air. I could well fancy her discoverer feeling a pang of desolation to find no longer in the living world this lovely creature, who perished as it were of her own impossibility, and whose faded ghost has no habitat but in his faithful page.

It was perhaps in some such divine despair that he left the field of international fiction, which he had made his own, and had kept for so many years, and turned to English life, with only a thin American presence flitting now and then across the scene. He has done better work, because maturer work, in the treatment of this alien material than he did in the earlier fiction before he possessed himself of the international field. His English people have the convincing effect of having been more truly seen than others except Trollope’s, but they are not those absolute contributions to polite learning which his internationals are. No one else could do them; certainly no living Englishman; and yet one resents the author’s late preoccupation with them, and demands his return to the types of that Atlantis, psychologically midway between Europe and America, where his art ripened and perfected itself in the study of character which confided its existence to him earliest if not onlyest. One demands this of him with a strong disposition to implore him, if the demand fails, to comply in the interest of history, which must, without his help, fail of some of the most curious and interesting, not to say significant, phases of modem civilization.

Since he began to note Americo-European manners, we have gone increasingly abroad, and his field has indefinitely broadened, and filled itself with an increasing variety of figures. If these have lost the refreshing sharpness of outline which first tempted his eye, they have gained in a fine differentiation which ought still more sympathetically to invite his subtle fancy. A whole new generation has grown up in the international field, and since he abandoned it, no one else has held it in any such force as to be able to dispute his sovereignty if he should come back to it.

III

It is a curious and interesting fact of Mr. James’s literary fortunes that in his short stories — one is obliged to call them stories for want of a more closely fitting word — rather than his more extended fictions are the heroes and the heroines we know him best by. He has the art of so environing the slightest presentment of female motive that it shows life-size in the narrow space of a sketch or study; and you remember such a picture with a fullness of detail and a particularity wanting to many colossal figures. You seem in the retrospect to have lived a long time with the pictures, looks, attitudes; phrases remain with you; and when you revert to the book you do not lose this sense of rich amplitude. It would be futile to catalogue the personalities which are so real in the recollection of stories so numerous but not half numerous enough; and it is only for the pleasure of naming them over that I mention at random Mrs. Hedway in “ The Siege of London,” the terrible Georgina in “ Georgina’s Reasons,” Madame Mauve in the story called after her, Pandora in “ Pandora,” Lady Barbarina in “Lady Barbarina Lemon,” that pathetic presence in “The Altar of the Dead,” the two wives of the master in “The Lesson of the Master,” both the girls in “The Spoils of Poynton,” the heroine, and Mrs. Dallow, the sub-heroine, in “ The Tragic Muse,” the daughter in “Marriages,” the poor, shabbily defrauded girl in “Paste,” the two “old things,” the old maids, in “ The Third Person,” Lily in “Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie.” The list is inexhaustible, and it is not only futile but dangerous to deal with it, for your forgetfulness of any figure accuses your taste in all the rest, and if you leave out a general favorite you are in peril of falling a prey to the furious resentment of those who adore just that neglected heroine.

No other novelist has approached Mr. James in his appreciation of women, and in his ability to suggest the charm which is never wholly absent from women, whether they are good, bad or indifferent in looks or behavior. Take all the other men that have written novels in English and match their women with his, and they seem not to have written of women at all. A few women may vie with him in the portrayal of a few figures; Jane Austen may, and Fanny Burney, and Miss Edgeworth, and George Eliot, and the Brontës, and Mrs. Humphry Ward; but their heroines are as much outnumbered by his as the novelists are in every other way surpassed. The fact is not affected by the want of general recognition; it is not yet known to the ignorant masses of educated people that Mr. James is one of the greatest masters of fiction who has ever lived. It is because he has worked in a fashion of his own, in regions of inquiry not traversed by the herd of adventurers, and dealt with material not exploited before that he is still to the critical Jews a stumbling-block and to the critical Greeks foolishness. But time will inevitably care for this unrivalled artist, or this unique psychologist who deals artist-wise with his knowledge of human nature; and he will yet take that eminent place for which he has no rival.

I cannot, in thinking of him and his somewhat baffling failure of immediate acceptance, promise myself that his right will be acknowledged soon; his own generation, in its superior refinement, was better fitted to appreciate him than the present period coarsened and vulgarized by the prevalence of puerile romance; and yet if his earliest masterpiece had been offered to this thicker-witted time, I doubt if it would have suffered the same injustice which it met from a more enlightened tribunal, or at least the same kind of injustice. It is pathetic to remember how “ Daisy Miller “ was received, or rather rejected, as an attack on American girlhood, and yet it is perfectly intelligible that it should have been taken so by Americans who had still a country to be so inclusively proud of that they could not bear the shadow of question to fall upon any phase of it. Our political descent to the European level has not only thickened our skins but it has in a manner so broadened, though it has imbruted our minds, that if she could have come again we should see Daisy Miller’s innocent freedom in the face of immemorial convention with the liberal and tolerant pleasure which the English at once felt in it. We should not be blinded to her charm, or to the subtle patriotism which divined and portrayed it, by a patriotism which, if fervent and generous, was not so subtle as the author’s. But as I have said, Daisy Miller cannot come again. The very conditions that would render us patient of her now have rendered her impossibility impossible. It is a melancholy paradox, but we need not be inconsolable, for though she has perished forever from the world, we have her spiritual reflex still vivid in the sensitive mirror which caught with such accuracy her girlish personality while it still walked the earth in the dusty ways of European travel.

IV

The story of Daisy Miller is as slight as Mr. James delights to make the frame of his picture, which depends so very little for its quality upon the frame. She is first seen at Vevey in Switzerland, with her young but terribly mature little brother and their mother, a little, lonely American group in the rather impertinent custody of a courier whom they make their domestic if not social equal; and she is seen last at Rome (where indeed she dies of the fever) the wonder of the international and the opprobrium of the com patriotic society. Such drama as arises from the simple circumstances precipitates itself in a few spare incidents which, in the retrospect, dwindle to nothing before the superior interest of the psychology. A girl of the later eighteen-seventies, sent with such a mother as hers to Europe by a father who remains making money in Schenectady, after no more experience of the world than she had got in her native town, and at a number of New York dinners among people of like tradition; uncultivated but not rude, reckless but not bold, inexpugnably ignorant of the conventionally right, and spiritedly resentful of control by criterions that offend her own sense of things, she goes about Europe doing exactly what she would do at home, from an innocence as guileless as that which shaped her conduct in her native town. She knows no harm and she means none; she loves life, and talking, and singing, and dancing, and “attentions,” but she is no flirt, and she is essentially and infinitely far from worse. Her whole career, as the reader is acquainted with it, is seen through the privity of the young Europeanized American who meets her at Vevey and follows her to Rome in a fascination which they have for each other, but which is never explicitly a passion. This side of the affair is of course managed with the fine adroitness of Mr. James’s mastery; from the first moment the sense of their potential love is a delicate pleasure for the reader, till at the last it is a delicate pang, when the girl has run her wild gantlet and is dead not only of the Roman fever but of the blows dealt her in her course. There is a curious sort of fatality in it all. She is destined by innate and acquired indiscipline to do the things she does; and she is not the less doomed to suffer the things she suffers. In proportion to the offence she gives by her lawless innocence the things she does are slight things, but their consequences break her heart, and leave the reader’s aching, as Winterbourne’s must have ached life-long.

V

The young man is sitting in the garden of the Trois Couronnes, at Vevey, talking with her terrible little brother, when Daisy Miller comes down the walk toward them. “She was dressed in white muslin, with a hundred frills and flounces, and knots of pale-colored ribbon. She was bareheaded, but she balanced in her hand a large parasol, with a deep border of embroidery, and she was strikingly, admirably pretty.... He was ceasing to be embarrassed, for he had begun to perceive that she was not the least embarrassed herself.

... She gradually gave him more of the benefit of her glance; and then he saw that this glance was perfectly direct and unshrinking. It was not, however, what would have been called an immodest glance, for the young girl’s eyes were singularly honest and fresh. They were wonderfully pretty eyes; and, indeed, Winterbourne had not seen for a long time anything prettier than his fair countrywoman’s various features — her complexion, her nose, her ears, her teeth....

As regards this young lady’s face he made several observations. It was not at all insipid, but it was not exactly expressive; and though it was eminently delicate, Winterbourne mentally accused it — very forgivingly — of a want of finish. He thought it very possible that Master Randoph’s sister was a coquette; he was sure she had a spirit of her own; but in her bright, sweet, superficial little visage there was no mockery, no irony. “ Before long it became obvious that she was much disposed to conversation — having first assured herself that he was “a real American.”

“Her lips and her eyes were constantly moving. She had a soft, slender, agreeable voice,... with all her prettiness in her lively eyes, and in her light, slightly monotonous smile.”

Before the end of the day, her mother has evasively appeared and been unwillingly made acquainted with her daughter’s unknown friend, whom the girl has already easily made invite her to go with him to see the castle of Chillon. The mother is not surprised, that evening, in the same garden, when Daisy tells him she wishes he would take her a row on the lake. Mrs. Miller sees no social objection, but suggests, “I should think you had better find out what time it is.” The courier, however, who has arrived to announce that Randolph has gone to bed, ventures to interpose. “‘I suppose you don’t think it’s proper!’ Daisy exclaimed.... ‘Oh, I hoped you would make a fuss. I don’t care to go, now.’  ‘I myself shall make a fuss if you don’t go,’ said Winterbourne. ‘That’s all I want — a fuss,’ and the young girl began to laugh again.... Daisy turned away from Winter bourne, looking at him, smiling, and fanning herself. ‘Good-night,’ she said, ‘I hope you are disappointed, or disgusted, or something!’ He looked at her, taking the hand she offered. ‘I am puzzled,’ he answered. ‘Well, I hope it won’t keep you awake.’”

I should not know where else to find the witless purposelessness — beyond the moment’s excitement and the pleasure of bewildering a young man — in much of a girl’s behavior more sufficiently yet more sparingly suggestive than in these admirable passages. The girl is a little fool, of course, but while her youth lasts she is an angelic, a divine fool, with caprices that have the quality of inspirations. She behaves at Vevey with Winterbourne, “a real American,” as she would have done with a “gentleman friend” at Schenectady, but when he sees her next at Rome he finds her behaving with Italians as if they, too, were “gentlemen friends” at Schenectady. He meets her at the house of a Europeanized American lady who would fain Europeanize Daisy enough at least to save her from scandal. “Daisy was exchanging greetings very prettily with her hostess; but when she heard Winterbourne’s voice she quickly turned her head. ‘Well, I declare!’ she said. ‘I told you I should come,’ Winterbourne rejoined smiling. ‘Well, I didn’t believe it,’ said Miss Daisy.... ‘You might have come to see me!’  ‘I arrived only yesterday.’  ‘I don’t believe that,’ the young girl declared.... ‘Why, you were awfully mean at Vevey. You wouldn’t do anything. You wouldn’t stay there when I asked you.’  ‘My dearest young lady,’ cried Winterbourne with eloquence, ‘have I come all the way to Rome to encounter your reproaches?’  ‘Just hear him say that!’ said Daisy, giving a twist to a bow on Mrs. Walker’s dress. ‘Did you ever hear anything so quaint?’  ‘So quaint, my dear?’ murmured Mrs. Walker, in the tone of a partisan of Winterbourne. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Daisy, fingering Mrs. Walker’s ribbons. ‘Mrs. Walker, I want to tell you something!... You know I’m coming to your party.... But I want your permission to bring a friend.... It’s an intimate friend of mine — Mr. Giovanelli,’ said Daisy, without a tremor in her clear little voice, or a shadow on her brilliant little face.... ‘He’s an Italian;... he’s the handsomest man in the world except Mr. Winterbourne!... He thinks ever so much of Americans. He’s tremendously clever. He’s perfectly lovely! ‘“

The afternoon before the party Mrs. Walker and Winterbourne find Daisy walking on the Pincio, at the supreme hour of the promenade, with Giovanelli, quite as she would have been with a “gentleman friend” at home. Mrs. Walker wants her to leave him and get into her carriage, but Daisy thinks it would disappoint and wound him, and she will not do that. In the evening she comes to the party long after her mother has appeared, and comes alone with Giovanelli, as she might with a “gentleman friend” in Schenectady. When she goes up to take leave of her hostess, Mrs. Walker turns her back on her. It is the beginning of the end, in which all society turns its back on Daisy.

Winterbourne sees her for the last time in the Colosseum at midnight, alone with Giovanelli. “‘How long have you been here?’ he asked almost brutally. Daisy, lovely in the flattering moonlight, looked at him a moment Then, ‘All the evening,’ she answered, gently. ‘I never saw anything so pretty,’  ‘I am afraid that you will not think Roman fever very pretty. This is the way people catch it,’... ‘I never was sick,’ the girl declared. ‘I don’t look like much, but I’m healthy! I was bound to see the Colosseum by moonlight; I shouldn’t have wanted to go home without that; and we’ve had the most beautiful time, haven’t we, Mr. Giovanelli?’... ‘I should advise you,’ said Winterbourne, ‘to drive home as fast as possible.’  ‘What you say is very wise,’ Giovanelli rejoined. ‘I will go and make sure that the carriage is at hand.’...

Daisy followed with Winterbourne. He kept looking at her; she seemed not the least embarrassed....

Then noticing his silence, she asked him why he did not speak.... He only began to laugh. They passed under one of the dark archways; Giovanelli was in front with the carriage. Here Daisy stopped a moment, looking at the young American. ‘you believe, the other day, I was engaged?’... ‘I believe it makes very little difference whether you are engaged or not!’ He felt the young girl’s pretty eyes fixed upon him through the thick gloom of the archway.... ‘I don’t care,’ said Daisy, in a little strange tone, ‘whether I have the Roman fever or not. ‘“ In her delirium she entreats her mother to tell Winterbourne that she never was engaged to Giovanelli. After her death he finds himself alone with the Italian by her grave. “He seemed to wish to say something. At last he said, ‘She was the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable,’ and then he added, ‘and she was the most innocent. ‘“

VI

The perfection of the workmanship in this little book could not be represented without an apparent exaggeration which would wrong its scrupulous but most sufficient expression. If no word could be spared without in some degree spoiling it, none could be added without cumbering its beauty with a vain decoration. To quote from it at all is to wish to quote it all; and one resigns one’s self the more easily to the impossibility of giving a notion of the perfection of the performance in view of the impossibility of imparting a due sense, at second hand, of the loveliness and truth of the conception.

The reader must go to the book for both, and when he has read it I think he will agree with me that never was any civilization offered a more precious tribute than that which a great artist paid ours in the character of Daisy Miller. But our civilization could not imagine the sincerity in which the tribute was offered. It could not realize that Daisy Miller was presented in her divine innocence, her inextinguishable trust in herself and others, as the supreme effect of the American attitude toward womanhood. The American man might have suffered her — perhaps more than suffered her; pitied her; adored her even — but the American woman would none of her. She fancied in the poor girl a libel of her nationality, almost a libel of her sex, and failed to seize her wilding charm, her flowerlike purity. The American woman would none of Daisy Miller, not because the American woman was ungracious or ungrateful, but because she was too jealous of her own perfection to allow that innocence might be reckless, and angels in their ignorance of evil might not behave as discreetly as worse people.

MR. THOMAS HARDY’S HEROINES

IF I restrict myself somewhat in the space given to Mr.

Hardy’s heroines and seem scantly to treat of them in a paper or two, it is not because I value them less than the heroines of some novelists with whom I have allowed myself a wider range. But I am sensible that with all their witchery they are of a sisterhood, or at the most a cousinhood, which may be more typically represented, and that with their strong individual characters there is a strong family likeness among them all which may be suggested in the figures and actions of a few.

I

I recall distinctly the order of my acquaintance with these lovely, if somewhat elusive, somewhat illusive ladies. It began with Elfride Swancourt in “A Pair of Blue Eyes,” who revealed to me a fresh conception of the ever-womanly, and in whose fate passion and caprice, comedy and tragedy were so strangely mingled that one remembers her with a sigh that is half a smile and an adoration that rather slights its idol. She remained somehow exterior both to what she suffered and to what she did; it happened to her, or from her, but she did not seem responsible for it. Fancy Dare in “Under the Greenwood Tree “ was morally more trammelled both in the cause and consequence. Yet she, too, was warped along by the toils of fate rather than moved by her own will; and in fact most of the women of Mr. Hardy could urge that they had to do the things they did, even when they wished to do them. This was not quite so much the case with Bathsheba Everdene, in “ Far from the Madding Crowd,” as with some others. She, for a Hardy heroine, had a degree of control over her destiny which might almost be called freewill; at least she was not so much the prey of determinism as most of the others. It is true that she yields to a sort of fascination in Sargeant Troy, but only as all women in love do; she no more keeps her head than she keeps her heart in the mistaken marriage she makes. She has a powerful will, which does not avail her so much in the great as in the little things, and she has a sturdy common-sense of pretty much the same effect. Yet she is, upon the whole, the least wrought upon by her environment, and the most absolute of her sisterhood. The larger part of these are self-willed rather than strong-willed, as is eminently the case with Paula Power, in “The Laodicean.” That is not nearly so great a novel as “Far from the Madding Crowd,” but it is of a peculiar charm because it is the full expression of the sort of feminine personality which will bewitch men as long as the shifty graces of a weather-vane more take their fancy in women than the steadfast virtues of the sky-pointing steeple. Each worshipper hopes that somehow the vane when it turns in his favor will stand still there, and in fact this is what commonly happens first or last. Paula Power veered with most winds that blew, but while her purposes shifted her fancy was fixed in the young architect who had caught it, and who kept it, in spite of all her turning.

She was more nearly a society person than Mr. Hardy commonly paints, and had less of primitive earthiness than almost any of his heroines. In that terrible “Group of Noble Dames” with whom he makes us acquainted in a series of wonderful histories the tellular quality of their natures is so much more appreciable than even the mundane, that they seem beings emancipated by their potent caprices and propensities from all the social obligations, and are not so much grandes dames as predatory creatures set by their caste above the moral law.

Mr. Hardy’s heroines are good or they are bad, or they are now good and now bad, according to some inner impulse from some agency deeper or more primal than conscience. When they feel the pull of the moral law, they yield it a partial and provisional allegiance, as Fancy Dare does in “Under the Greenwood Tree,” when she finds herself so differently in love with the vicar and with Dick the tranter that she is unable to reconcile the conflicting passions and acquires what merit she can by frankly owning the fact to the vicar and renouncing him; or as the pretty widow in “The Distracted Young Preacher,” who acknowledges the error of smuggling, but sees some excuse for herself and her neighbors in the fact they “ only do it in the winter.” Perhaps we may best define the sort of woman this novelist places before us so livingly that we cannot doubt their reality by a process of exclusion in which we need not go farther than to say that they are wholly unlike American women. They are of the same stock racially, but ours are of a graft upon the parent stem so different that the two varieties of fruit are as little related as plums and apricots. In the Hardy lower-class heroines we see the primitive Englishwoman before she was touched by Puritanism, and in his middle and upper class heroines the same woman as she has grown into modem civilization unaffected by the tremendous force which has permeated and moulded the nature of the American great-great-grandnieces of that original Englishwoman. I have often wondered what character untouched by Puritanism was like, and I have fancied that in the Hardy heroines I have seen; and if I cannot altogether approve of it, I can own its charm, as I can willingly acknowledge the ugliness and error and soul-sickness which Puritanism produced in building up our intensely personalized American conscience. If we take the case even of such a character as Sue Brodhead in “Jude,” with her hysterically exaggerated impulses toward what her conscience bids her do, we have the nervous impressibility of the Puritanized woman, but we are made finely aware that it is the like effect of wholly different causes. It is the ecclesiasticized conscience which works in this English girl, not the personalized conscience which would drive a like American girl to the same frenetic extremes.

Oddly enough, as the reader will perhaps think, I am inclined to regard Ethelberta in “The Hand of Ethelberta” as one of the highest-minded of Mr. Hardy’s women. At least she is one of those least swayed by passion, and of a mind the least darkened by exhalations from those dregs of pagan earthiness which lie at the base of his woman’s natures. She is quite unselfish, and her ambition is for her family and the advancement of its modest fortunes. When the employment of her unique gift as a public story-teller makes it advisable for her to establish herself in London, and she takes a house there, with her brother for a page, one sister for cook and the other for housemaid, and her mother for a sort of upper servant, they all understand that it is for their good and not for her glory, and they acquiesce with the affection for her which she feels for them, and which she never fails to show on proper occasion. Dinner in a nobleman’s house where her father the butler waits behind her chair while she figures as the celebrity of the hour is not a proper occasion, and she reserves the display of her filial love for the meetings with her father behind her own doors. Even in the case of her young lover, whom she gives up for the bad-natured but good-humored old lord whom she marries, she has never been so much in love with him but she was willing to get him for her sister Picotee; and when she finds out how very wicked her amiable old lord is she does her best to escape from him; being prevented, she remains and reforms him.

The scheme is the most fantastic of Mr. Hardy’s plots; but it must be owned it is delightful, and Ethelberta is one of the most delightful as well as one of the most respectable of his heroines. She is not quite candid, but, as I said, she is very unselfish, and I do not know that she has her moral superior in his fiction except Anne Garland, in “ The Trumpet Major,” or a pensive figure like Grace Melbury, in “The Woodlanders.” Anne is the sweetest and freshest of his girls, and is of that level of life on which his muse seems to find herself most at home; she is above the lowest, but not so high as to tempt the author aside from her character to the complications of her social environment, which is, indeed, very simple. She is quite, though rather passively, constant to a lover who is rather actively inconstant but finally true to the young fancy they have had for each other; and she is (I hazard the notion) innately perhaps the most ladylike of Mr. Hardy’s creations.

One heart-breaking presence among these I could not ignore without accusing myself of insensibility, and yet I cannot name Tess, in “ Tess of the D’Urbervilles,” without a feeling of imperfection in the handling of her character which I might not be able to make apparent I do not know that I wish to make it apparent, and I will only say that, profoundly pathetic as she is, Tess seems to me wanting in unity. She seems the effect of two successive impulses of the author’s imagination. In the first part of the story she is one Tess, whom the other Tess in the last part does not so much grow out of as seem, joined to. They are halves of two figurines found in the same soil, and compact of the same clay, not belonging originally together, but joined by voluntary and conscious skill. I have owned that it would be difficult to prove this, and I shall not be hurt if the reader does not agree with me, or throws things at me in defence of one of the most pathetic heroines of fiction.

Yet I am inclined to hold to my opinion, and I will ask any irate differer to compare her evolution with that of Eustacia Vye, for instance, in “The Return of the Native.” Poor Eustacia, with her sordid ambition and her selfish dreams of happiness, her selfish ideals of love, and her essential cold-heartedness in spite of her warm-bloodedness, is one to command the least respect among a generation of ladies who all command one’s amused liking rather than one’s respect — unless, indeed, it be that heroine of “ The Mayor of Casterbridge “ whom I shadowily remember as possibly shadier still, but whom I cannot recall by name.

II

Eustacia Vye is one of those natures whose social evolution interests you so little that you do not care how vaguely it is suggested. We first find her in her grandfather’s house on Egdon Heath, of which she is very fit to be the tutelary spirit, though she alone among the characters is not native to it, and has an ideal of life wholly alien to the wild and simple and solemn place. She longs for excitement, and for worldly triumphs and artificial splendors, and at Egdon she has only a lover whom she cannot marry, and another whom, having married, she wearies of, though he is good and fine, and above her in everything but ambition. It is seldom that an author presents a heroine so palpably as Eustacia is shown in these richly descriptive passages.

“Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and instincts which make a model goddess — that is, those which make not quite a model woman....  She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow. It closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the western glow. Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries. Their light, as it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in reverie without seeming to do so; she might have been believed capable of sleeping without closing them up.... The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl.... One had fancied that such lip-curves were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten marbles. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. This keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which she knew too well for her years.” In this portrait the whole passionately selfish drama of the woman is suggested. Wildeve, a strange, lawless earth-spirit of like generation, trifles with her love, and her fancy wanders from him to Clym Yeobright, who returns from Paris, and settles down on the Heath, after his eyesight is threatened, as a furze-cutter. She does not mean to let him stay there, but to make him take her to Paris, or out into the world somewhere; and from time to time she sees Wildeve, after her marriage to Clym Yeobright, and at last elopes with him, and they are drowned together in the weir.

Mr. Hardy loves to keep close to nature in all his novels, but in none do we feel the breath of the earth as in this. The story keeps to the circuit of the lonely heath, with its few farms and hamlets; and much of it befalls by night, as suits the dusky soul of the heroine. A very significant bit, as regards her, and very characteristic as regards the courageous humor of the author, is that passage in which she keeps her bargain with the simple-hearted country boy who lends her his costume for a masquerading adventure on condition that she will let him hold her hand for a quarter of an hour.

“The next evening Eustacia stood punctually at the fuel-house door, waiting for the dusk which was to bring Charley with the trappings.... He appeared on the dark ridge of heathland.... ‘Here are the things,’ he whispered, placing them upon the threshold. ‘And now, Miss Eustacia—’

‘The payment. It is quite ready. I am as good as my word.’ She leaned against the door-post, and gave him her hand. Charley took it in both his own with a tenderness beyond description, unless it was like that of a child holding a captured sparrow.’ Why, there’s a glove on it!’ he said, in a deprecating way. ‘I have been walking,’ she observed. ‘But, miss!’  ‘Well — it is hardly fair,’ She pulled off the glove, and gave him her bare hand. They stood together without further speech, each looking at the blackening scene, and each thinking his and her own thoughts. ‘I think I won’t use it all up to-night,’ said Charley, when six or eight minutes had been passed by them hand-in-hand. ‘May I have the other few minutes another time?’  ‘As you like,’ said she without the least emotion. ‘But it must be over in a week. Now, there is only one thing I want you to do: to wait while I put on the dress, and then to see if I do my part properly. But let me look first indoors,’ She vanished for a minute or two, and went in. Her grandfather was safely asleep in his chair. ‘Now, then,’ she said, on returning, ‘walk down the garden a little way, and when I am ready I’ll call you,’ Charley walked and waited, and presently heard a soft whistle. He returned to the fuel-house door.... She struck the light, revealing herself to be changed in sex, brilliant in colors, and armed from top to toe. Perhaps she quailed a little under Charley’s vigorous gaze, but whether any shyness appeared upon her countenance could not be seen by reason of the strips of ribbon which used to cover the face in mumming costumes, representing the barred visor of the mediaeval helmet. ‘It fits pretty well,’ she said, looking down at the white overalls, ‘except that the tunic, or whatever you call it, is long in the sleeve. The bottom of the overalls I can turn up inside.... Now you may leave me.’

‘Yes, miss. But I think I’ll have one minute more of what I am owed, if you don’t mind.’ Eustacia gave him her hand as before. ‘One minute,’ she said, and at about the proper interval counted on till she reached seven or eight. Hand and person she then withdrew to a distance of several feet, and recovered some of her old dignity. The contract completed, she raised between them a barrier impenetrable as a wall ‘There, ’tis all gone; and I didn’t mean quite all,’ he said, with a sigh.”

A whimsical comedy in the neighboring heath-dwellers plays round the central tragedy, and gilds with its phosphorescent gayety the gloom of the whelming doom. When it has come to Eustacia’s feigning absence from home and letting her husband’s mother toil back to her own house through the mid-day heat that kills her, the end is already in view, for she has not opened her door because Wildeve is within. In the scene with her husband which follows, Eustacia’s peculiar nature is allowed to make itself felt in terms curiously wanting in dramatic intensity, but somehow adequate to the situation. He comes home early in the morning, and goes straight to her room. “ The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the door she was standing before the looking-glass in her nightdress, the ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette operations. She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting, and she allowed Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her head. He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass. It was ashy, haggard, and terrible. Instead of starting towards him in sorrowful surprise, as even Eustacia, undemonstrative wife as she was, would have done in days before she burdened herself with a secret, she remained motionless, looking at him in the glass. And while she looked, the carmine flush with which warmth and sound sleep had suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from view, and the deathlike pallor in his face flew across into hers. He was close enough to see this, and the sight instigated his tongue. ‘You know what is the matter,’ he said, huskily. ‘I see it in your face.’ Her hand relinquished the rope of hair and dropped to her side, and the pile of tresses, no longer supported, fell from the crown of her head about her shoulders and over the white nightgown in inky streams. She made no reply. ‘Speak to me,’ said Yeobright, peremptorily. The blanching process did not cease in her, and her lips now became as white as her face. One familiar with the stoic philosophy would have fancied that he saw the delicate tissue of her soul extricating itself from her body, and leaving it a simple heap of old clay. She turned to him and said, ‘Yes, Clym, I’ll speak to you. Why do you return so early? Can I do anything for you?’  ‘Yes, you can listen to me. It seems that my wife is not very well.’  ‘Why?’  ‘Your face, my dear; your face. Or perhaps it is the pale morning light which takes your color away? Now I am going to reveal a secret to you. Ha-ha!” Oh, that is ghastly! ‘ ‘What?’  ‘Your laugh.’  ‘There’s reason for ghastliness, Eustacia; you have held my happiness in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down I ‘She started back from her dressing-table, retreated a few steps from him, and looked him in the face. ‘Ah! you think to frighten me,’ she said, with a slight laugh. ‘Is it worthwhile? I am undefended, and alone.’  ‘How extraordinary!’  ‘What do you mean?’  ‘As there is ample time I will tell you, though you know well enough. I mean that it is extraordinary that you should be alone in my absence. Tell me, now, where is he who was with you on the afternoon of the thirty-first of August? Under the bed? Up the chimney?’ A shudder overcame her and shook the light fabric of her night-dress throughout. ‘I do not remember dates so exactly,’ she said. ‘I cannot recollect that anybody was with me besides yourself.’”

Their quarrel ends in her leaving the house, and at last the reader’s heart almost turns to her in her self-pity, cruel and false as she has been.

“‘Oh, oh, oh!’ she cried, breaking down at last; and, shaking with sobs which choked her, she sank upon her knees. ‘Oh, will you have done! Oh, you are too relentless — there’s a limit to the cruelty of savages! I have held out long — but you crush me down. I beg for mercy — I cannot bear this any longer — it is inhuman to go farther with this! If I had — killed your — mother with my own hand — I should not deserve such a scourging to the bone as this. Oh, oh! God have mercy upon a miserable woman!... You have beaten me in this game — I beg you to stay your hand in pity!... I am going from this house. We cannot both stay here.’ She hastily dressed herself, Yeobright moodily walking up and down the room the whole of the time. At last all her things were on. Her poor little hands quivered so violently as she held them to her chin to fasten her bonnet that she could not tie the strings, and after a few moments she relinquished the attempt. Seeing this, he moved forward and said, ‘Let me tie them.’ She assented in silence, and lifted her chin. For once at least in her life she was totally oblivious of the charm of her attitude. But he was not, and he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted to softness.”

III

Elfride Swancourt, as compared with such an earthspirit as Eustacia Vye, is an air-spirit, but she is quite as strictly of this world. One has a greater tenderness for her, and realizes that in her love affairs, so swiftly successive as to be almost simultaneous, she is quite unselfish, or at least she seeks her happiness only in that of the man she loves. She suffers cruel rejection and punishment through Henry Knight, on whom her heart is truly set, because he thinks her a flirt, and is retroactively jealous of the young architect Stephen Smith, and cannot understand how she might have had a fancy for another before she was fixed in her passion for himself. But she recovers from the blow sufficiently to marry Lord Luxellian, and the final pathos of her story is not for her heart-break, but for her early death. The pang of this is such that it is difficult to get back of the fact to that earlier consciousness of her, in which one could laugh when an older woman said of her that Elfride would talk like a philosopher but would behave like a robin in a greenhouse.

This, indeed, was true of her mainly in minor matters of conduct; she was equal to the more heroic demands of life. There is a lovely honesty in her which mainly characterizes her in spite of much folly and heedless risk and downright defection. That is, she gives her fancy to Stephen Smith, and then she gives her heart to Henry Knight, without losing the reader’s respect; for people change, and one preference pushes out another without sin, though not without suffering. It is the hard lot of women that, though they cannot always inspire men with constancy, they so embody men’s highest ideal of it that they cannot change without violence to that ideal. They are therefore obliged to use finesse, when perhaps they would rather not, and try to seem unchanging even while they change.

It was Elfride’s difficult problem to make Knight feel that she had never loved any one but him, while confronted in her own consciousness by the fact that in a different, if somewhat more ignorant way, she had at least very much liked being loved by Stephen Smith, if she had not loved him. She was really engaged to Smith when she met Knight, and she had somehow to get rid of the old love before reconciling herself to happiness in the new. The affair was possible in its subjective implications, but objectively it countered with the devoted and exacting passion of Knight, and ended badly.

Nothing more prettily suggests this charming girl’s complexity of emotion and simplicity of action than a scene which will have remained in every reader’s memory; one of Mr. Hardy’s peculiarly audacious and intimate scenes. With Knight she has got over the face of a lofty seaward cliff, and when he finds it impossible to return to her he helps her to get back and remains clinging to a face of rock where his hold must give way in a few minutes. There is no time to run for help, and there is none at hand except in her own wit. “On a sudden,” we are told, “she vanished over the bank from his sight.” She was gone for what seemed to him an eternity, but when she reappeared he noticed, as he looked up at her, “ that in her arms she bore a bundle of white linen, and that her form was singularly attenuated. So preternaturally thin and flexible was Elfride at this moment that she appeared to bend under the light blows of the rain-shafts, as they struck into her sides and bosom, and splintered into spray on her face.... She sat down and hurriedly began rending the linen into strips. Those she knotted end to end, and afterwards twisted them like the strands of a cord. In a short space of time she had formed a perfect rope by this means, six or seven yards long. ‘Can you wait while I bind it?’ she said, anxiously extending her gaze down to him. Yes, if not very long. Hope has given me a wonderful instalment of strength.’ Elfride wound the lengthy string she had thus formed round and round the linen rope, which... was now firm in every part. ‘When you have let it down,’ said Knight, already resuming his position of ruling power, ‘go back from the edge of the slope, and over the bank as far as the rope will allow you. Then lean down, and hold the end with both hands,’...

‘I have tied it round my waist,’ she cried; ‘and I will lean directly upon the bank, holding with my hands as well,’ It was the arrangement he had thought of, but would not suggest. ‘I will raise and drop it three times when I am behind the bank,’ she continued, ‘to signify that I am ready. Take care, oh, take the greatest care, I beg of you!’... She dropped the rope over him to learn how much of its length it would be necessary to expend on that side of the bank, went back, and disappeared as she had done before. The rope was trailing by Knight’s shoulders. In a few moments it moved three times. He waited yet a second or two, then laid hold.... Half a dozen extensions of the arms, alternating with half a dozen seizures of the rope with his feet, brought him up to the level of the soil. He was saved, and sprang over the bank. At sight of him she leapt to her feet with almost a shriek of joy. Knight’s eyes met hers, and with supreme eloquence the glance of each told a long-concealed tale of emotion in that short half-moment. Moved by an impulse neither could resist, they ran together and into each other’s arms.... An overwhelming rush of exultation at having delivered the man she revered from one of the most terrible forms of death shook the gentle girl to the centre of her soul. It merged in a defiance of duty to Stephen, and a total recklessness as to plighted faith. Every nerve of her will was now in entire subjection to her feeling — volition as a guiding power had forsaken her. To remain passive, as she remained now, encircled by his arms, was a sufficiently complete result — a glorious crown to all the years of her life.... Elfride recovered herself, and gently struggled to be free. He reluctantly relinquished her, and then surveyed her from crown to toe. She seemed as small as an infant He perceived whence she had obtained the rope. ‘Elfride, my Elfride!’ he exclaimed in gratified amazement. ‘I must leave you now,’ she said, her face doubling its red, with an expression between gladness and shame. ‘You follow me, but at some distance,’... Behind the bank, while Knight reclined upon the dizzy slope waiting for death, she had taken off her whole clothing, and replaced only her outer robe and skirt Every thread of the remainder lay upon the ground in the form of a woollen and cotton rope.... She then ran off from him through the pelting rain like a hare; or more like a pheasant when, scampering away with a lowered tail, it has a mind to fly, but does not.”

MR. THOMAS HARDY’S BATHSHEBA EVERDENE AND PAULA POWER

EACH great novelist arrives at, rather than with, his own way of looking at life. When he begins to make himself known to us, he is not himself alone, but the masters also who have gone before him, and who gradually leave him to himself as he shows more and more his ultimate power. All this, which is true of all novelists, is less true of Mr. Hardy than almost any other. He seemed to come from nowhere in literature, to be without preoccupations or affinities: the effect perhaps of his training in an art which is one of the most objective, and the farthest in its immemorial simplicities from the manifold consciousnesses of the literary art. Before he was a novelist, he was an architect, and what clung to him from tradition or association was not some other man’s literary method or manner, but the habit of thinking, as it were in plastic terms, and of using words structurally. To be sure, when he first attracted criticism, people thought him like George Eliot, but it seems to me that this was a mistaken impression from their both dealing so largely with rustic life. The spirit of their respective dealing with it was not at all the same, and I do not think that Mr. Hardy’s way of looking at life of any level is like the way of any novelist before him. As nearly as I can put it to myself it is the vision of humanity, as little as possibly affected by those influences from without — religious and moral — which we anxiously enough mistake for impulses; it is the sense of das ding an sich, which we so rarely have had that we might say we never had it before. This is the first impression we have of life as Mr. Hardy shows it, but then we begin to perceive very gradually, but at last fully, how this primitive material is affected by experience, when the experience is vital, as most experience is not, and how it loses its original simplicity through experience and becomes a living soul. A vast number of the men and women in his novels never reach this development, but remain a part of mere nature like the cattle and poultry, the trees, the soil. They are delightful company just as these animate and inanimate things are. They are souls, and doubtless will live hereafter, but they are not living souls here and now; they are like

— “sheep and goats

That nourish a blind life within the brain,”

Sometimes Mr. Hardy’s people pass through tremendous experiences, and seem very little the more alive for them. A beautiful, perhaps a supreme, effort of his art is that his characters are in the last extreme of discovery impalpably veiled from your knowledge as people are whom you know best in the waking and working world. Something is still kept back — possibly for the final intimacies of another state of being.

I

Do we ever come thoroughly to know Bathsheba Everdene in “Far from the Madding Crowd”? No more, I fancy, than if we were of her most familiar acquaintance. We understand the workings of her mind, and feel their charm, but that ultimate reason of her being, for which imagination aches in vain, is the secret which is kept from the author himself. He is the greater power because of the reservation; if he could and would tell all, he would not be the master he is. And perhaps if he could explain her as exhaustively as we wish she would not be a woman. Our mystification, which continues to the end, begins with the first glimpses of Bathsheba which we share with her lover, Gabriel Oak.

“The sluggish day began to break.... He heard the steps of a horse at the foot of the hill, and soon there appeared in view an auburn pony with a girl on its back, ascending by the path leading past the cattle-shed.... Here he ensconced himself, and peeped through the loophole in the direction of the rider’s approach. She came up and looked around — then on the other side of the hedge.... The path, after passing the cowshed, bisected the plantation. It was not a bridle-path — merely a pedestrian track, and the boughs spread horizontally at a height not greater than seven feet above the ground, which made it impossible to ride erect beneath them. The girl, who wore no riding-habit, looked around for a moment, as if to assure herself that all humanity was out of view, then dexterously dropped backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulder, and her eyes to the sky. The rapidity of her glide into this position was that of a kingfisher — its noiselessness that of a hawk. Gabriel’s eyes had scarcely been able to follow her. The tall, lank pony seemed used to such phenomena, and ambled along unconcerned. Thus she passed under the level boughs.

... She had no side-saddle, and it was very apparent that a firm seat upon the smooth leather beneath her was unattainable sideways. Springing to her accustomed perpendicular like a bowed sapling, she seated herself in the manner demanded by the saddle, though hardly expected of the woman.... An hour passed, the girl returned, properly seated now, with a bag of bran in front of her. On nearing the cattle-shed she was met by a boy bringing a milking-pail, who held the reins of the pony while she slid off. The boy led away the horse, leaving the pail with the young woman. Soon soft spirts alternating with loud spirts came in regular succession from within the shed. They were the sounds of a person milking a cow. Gabriel took the lost hat in his hand, and waited beside the path she would follow in leaving the hill. She came, the pail in one hand, hanging against her knee. The left arm was extended as a balance, enough of it being shown bare to make Oak wish that the event had happened in summer, when the whole would have been revealed.... She seemed tall, but the pail was a small one, and the hedge diminutive; hence, making allowance for error by comparison with these, she could have been not above the height to be chosen by women as best. All features of consequence were severe and regular. From the contours of her figure in its upper part, she must have had a beautiful neck and shoulders; but since her infancy nobody had ever seen them. Had she been put into a low dress she would have run and thrust her head into a bush. Yet she was not a shy girl by any means; it was merely her instinct to draw the line dividing the seen from the unseen higher than they do in towns.”

It is Bathsheba whom we have seen here, and whose story agrees with his. I shall not tell Bathsheba over again, or do more than remind the reader that she does not marry the good Gabriel Oak till after she has married the unworthy Sergeant Troy whom her mad lover Boldwood kills, and so releases her to her right destiny with Oak. She is a girl of great good sense as well as beauty, and of that practical turn of mind which goes with prettiness rather oftener than with plainness. She has inherited a farm from her uncle, and having been cheated by her manager she decides to manage it herself. There is a delightful prospect of this side of Bathsheba’s character in the scene which passes between her and the farm-servants to whom she makes her purpose known.

“Half an hour later Bathsheba, in finished dress, and followed by Liddy, entered the upper end of the old hall to find that her men had all deposited themselves on a long form and a settle at the lower extremity. She sat down at a table and opened the time-book, pen in her hand, with a canvas money-bag beside her. From this she poured a small heap of coin. Liddy took up a position at her elbow and began to sew, sometimes pausing and looking round, or with the air of a privileged person, taking up one of the half-sovereigns lying before her and admiringly surveying it as a work of art merely, strictly preventing her countenance from expressing any wish to possess it as money. ‘Now, before I begin, men,’ said Bathsheba, ‘I have two matters to speak of. The first is that the bailiff is dismissed for thieving, and that I have formed a resolution to have no bailiff at all, but to manage everything with my own head and hands,’ The men breathed an audible breath of amazement.... ‘Yes, sir — ma’am I mane,’ said the person addressed. ‘I am the personal name of Poorgrass — who is nothing in my own eye. In the eye of other people — well, I don’t say it; though public thought will out.” What do you do on the farm?’  ‘ I does carting things all the year, and in seed-time I shoots the rooks and sparrows, and helps at pig-killing, sir.’  ‘How much to you?’  ‘Please nine and ninepence and a good half-penny where ’twas a bad one, sir — ma’am I mane,’  ‘Quite correct. Now here are ten shillings in addition as a small present, as I am a new-comer,’ Bathsheba blushed slightly at the sense of being generous in public, and Henery Fray, who had drawn up towards her chair, lifted his eyebrows and fingers to express amazement on a small scale. ‘How much do I owe you — that man in the corner — what’s your name?’ continued Bathsheba. ‘Matthew Moon, ma’am,’ said a singular framework of clothes with nothing of any consequence inside them, which advanced with the toes in no definite direction forwards, but turned in or out as they chanced to swing. ‘Matthew Mark, did you say? — speak out — I shall not hurt you,’ inquired the young farmer, kindly. ‘Matthew Moon, mem,’ said Henery Fray, correctingly, from behind her chair, to which point he had edged himself. ‘Matthew Moon,’ murmured Bathsheba, turning her bright eyes to the book. ‘Ten and twopence halfpenny is the sum put down to you, I see?’  ‘Yes, mis’ess,’ said Matthew, as the rustle of wind among dead leaves. ‘Here it is, and ten shillings. Now the next — Andrew Randle, you are a new man, I hear. How came you to leave your last farm?’

‘P-p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-l-l-l-ease, ma’am, p-p-p-p-pl-pl-pl-pl-please, ma’am-please ‘m, please ‘m—’...

‘Andrew Randle, here’s yours — finish thanking me in a day or two.... Now the next Laban Tall, you’ll stay on working for me?’  ‘For you or anybody that pays me well, ma’am,’ replied the young married man. ‘True — the man must live!’ said a woman in the back quarter, who had just entered with clicking pattens. ‘What woman is that?’ Bathsheba asked. ‘I be his lawful wife!’ continued the voice with greater prominence of manner and tone....

‘Oh, you are,’ said Bathsheba. ‘Well, Laban, will you stay on?’  ‘Yes, he’ll stay, ma’am!’ said again the shrill tongue of Laban’s lawful wife.... The names remaining were called in the same manner. ‘Now I think I have done with you,’ said Bathsheba, closing the book and shaking back a stray twine of hair.... ‘No, ma’am.’  ‘The new shepherd will want a man under him,’ suggested Henery Fray, trying to make himself official again by a sideway approach towards her chair. ‘Oh — he will. Who can he have?’  ‘Young Cain Ball is a very good lad,’ Henery said, ‘and Shepherd Oak don’t mind his youth?’ he added, turning with an apologetic smile to the shepherd, who had just appeared on the scene, and was now leaning against the door-post with his arms folded.... ‘Oh, I don’t mind that,’ said Gabriel. ‘How did Cain come by such a name?’ asked Bathsheba. ‘Oh, you see, mem, his pore mother, not being a Scripture-read woman, made a mistake at his christening, thinking ’twas Abel killed Cain, and called en Cain, meaning Abel all the time. The parson put it right, but ’twas too late, for the name could never be got rid of in the parish. ’Tis very unfortunate for the boy.’... ‘Very well then, Cainey Ball to be under-shepherd. And you quite understand your duties? — you I mean, Gabriel Oak?’  ‘Quite well, I thank you, Miss Everdene,’ said Shepherd Oak from the door-post. ‘If I don’t, I’ll inquire. ‘Gabriel was rather staggered by the remarkable coolness of her manner. Certainly nobody without previous information would have dreamt that Oak and the handsome woman before whom he stood had ever been other than strangers.... She then rose, but before retiring addressed a few words to them with a pretty dignity, to which her mourning dress added a soberness that was hardly to be found in the words themselves. ‘Now mind, you have a mistress instead of a master. I don’t yet know my powers or my talents in farming; but I shall do my best, and if you serve me well, so shall I serve you. Don’t any unfair ones among you (if there are any such, but I hope not) suppose that because I’m a woman I don’t understand the difference between bad goings-on and good.’...

‘And so good-night.’ (All.) ‘Good-night, ma’am.’ Then this small thesmothete stepped from the table and surged out of the hall, her black silk dress licking up a few straws and dragging them along with a scratching noise upon the floor. Liddy, elevating her feelings to the occasion from a sense of grandeur, floated off behind Bathsheba with a milder dignity not entirely free from travesty, and the door was closed,”

This is Bathsheba when her head is at work, and her common-sense. Another perspective of her when her heart is at work, and her uncommon feeling is not edifying, but it is doubtless as faithful. It is that famous scene of Sergeant Troy showing Bathsheba the broadsword exercise.

“At eight o’clock this midsummer evening, whilst the bristling ball of gold in the west still swept the tips of the ferns with its long, luxuriant rays, a soft brushing-by of garments might have been heard among them, and Bathsheba appeared in their midst, their soft, feathery arms caressing her up to her shoulders.

... ‘Now,’ said Troy, producing the sword, which, as he raised it into the sunlight, gleamed a sort of greeting, like a living thing, ‘first, we have four right and four left cuts; four right and four left thrusts. Infantry cuts and guards are more interesting than ours, to my mind; but they are not so swashing. They have seven cuts and three thrusts.... Now I’ll be more interesting, and let you see some loose play-giving all the cuts and points, infantry and cavalry, quicker than lightning, and as promiscuously — with just enough rule to regulate instinct and yet not to fetter it You are my antagonist, with this difference from real warfare, that I shall miss you every time by one hair’s breadth, or perhaps two. Mind you don’t flinch, whatever you do. “I’ll be sure not to,’ she said, invincibly. He pointed to about a yard in front of him. Bathsheba’s adventurous spirit was beginning to find some grains of relish in these highly novel proceedings. She took up her position as directed, facing Troy. ‘Now just to learn whether you have pluck enough to let me do what I wish, I’ll give you a preliminary test’ He flourished the sword by way of introduction number two, and the next thing of which she was conscious was that the point and blade of the sword were darting with a gleam towards her left side, just above her hip; then of their reappearance on her right side, having apparently passed through her body. The third item of consciousness was that of seeing the same sword, perfectly clean and free from blood, held vertically in Troy’s hand (in the position technically called ‘recover swords’). All was as quick as electricity. ‘Oh!’ she cried out in affright, pressing her hand to her side. ‘Have you run me through? — no, you have not! Whatever have you done!’  ‘I have not touched you,’ said Troy, quietly. ‘It was mere sleight of hand. The sword passed behind you. Now you are not afraid, are you? Because if you are I can’t perform. I give my word that I will not only not hurt you, but not once touch you.’  ‘I don’t think I am afraid. You are quite sure you will not hurt me?’  ‘Oh no, only stand as still as a statue. Now!’ In an instant the atmosphere was transformed to Bathsheba’s eyes. Beams of light caught from the low sun’s rays, above, around, in front of her, wellnigh shut out earth and heaven — all emitted in the marvellous evolutions of Troy’s reflecting blade, which seemed everywhere at once, and yet nowhere specially. These circling gleams were accompanied by a keen rush that was almost a whistling — also springing from all sides of her at once. In short, she was enclosed in a firmament of light, and of sharp hisses,’ resembling a skyful of meteors close at hand.... It may safely be asserted with respect to the closeness of his cuts, that had it been possible for the edge of the sword to leave in the air a permanent substance wherever it flew past, the space left untouched would have been a complete mould of Bathsheba’s figure. The hissing of the sword had ceased, and he stopped entirely. ‘That outer loose lock of hair wants tidying,’ he said, before she had moved or spoken. ‘Wait: I’ll do it for you,’ An arc of silver shone on her right side; the sword had descended. The lock dropped to the ground. ‘Bravely borne!’ said Troy. ‘You didn’t flinch a shade’s thickness. Wonderful in a woman!’  ‘It was because I didn’t expect it Oh, you have spoilt my hair!’  ‘Only once more.’  ‘No — no! I am afraid of you — indeed I am!’ she cried.... ‘But how could you chop off a curl of my hair with a sword that has no edge?” No edge! This sword will shave like a razor. Look here.’ He touched the palm of his hand with the blade, and then, lifting it, showed her a thin shaving of scarf-skin dangling therefrom.”

II

The first glimpse of Paula Power in “ The Laodicean “ suggests a character as vividly as the first glimpse of Bathsheba, and gives us the sense of a heroine as thoroughly Hardyesque, though she is of such a different tradition and position. It is not in the cool, sequestered vale of life that Paula Power keeps the tenor of her way, but in the midst of worldly interests and ambitions which beset her as the heiress of a self-made father, who has made a great deal of money in the process of making himself. He has left her in possession of De Stancy Castle, where she lives with a daughter of the ancient house as her companion and friend, and in charge of a Baptist chapel which he built, and bestowed on the congregation to which he belonged. It is from filial piety, rather than the other sort, that Paula has brought herself to the point of being baptized into this church; for her ecclesiastical affiliations, as a young lady of wealth, culture, and fashion, or potential fashion, would not otherwise have been with this unpicturesque and unworldly sect of dissenters. She is presented to the reader in the moment of attempting to fulfil her pious duty, and I think any reader will agree with me that her introduction is not less spectacular and impressive than that of Bathsheba Everdene, though the circumstances are altogether so different. As in the case of Bathsheba, we share the vision of the heroine with her lover, though now it is no such single nature as the Shepherd Oak, but the complex personality, not less sincere, of the young architect Somerset, that is concerned. Somerset is down from London on a sketching excursion, and has looked into the chapel at the close of a summer’s day because he has happened to hear that there is to be a baptism in that strikingly ugly edifice.

“He gazed into the lighted chapel made what had been an evening scene when he looked away from the landscape night itself on looking back; but he could see enough to discover that a brougham had driven up to the side-door used by the young water-bearers, and that a lady in white-and-black half-mourning was in the act of alighting, followed by what appeared to be a waiting-woman carrying wraps. They entered the vestry-room of the chapel, and the door was shut. The service went on as before till at a certain moment the door between vestry and chapel was opened, when a woman came out clothed in an ample robe of flowing white, which descended to her feet.... She was rather tall than otherwise, and the contour of her head and shoulders denoted a girl in the heyday of youth and activity.... His imagination, stimulated by this beginning, set about filling in the meagre outline with most attractive details.... She stood upon the brink of the pool, and the minister descended the steps at its edge till the soles of his shoes were moistened with the water. He turned to the young candidate, but she did not follow him: instead of doing so she remained rigid as a stone. He stretched out his hand, but she still showed reluctance, till, with some embarrassment, he went back, and spoke softly in her ear, afterwards saying in a voice audible to all who were near, ‘You will descend?’ She approached the edge, looked into the water, and gently turned away. Somerset could for the first time see her face.... The total dissimilarity between the expression of her lineaments and that of the countenances around her was not a little surprising, and was productive of hypotheses without measure as to how she came there. She was, in fact, emphatically a modem type of maidenhood, and she looked ultra-modem by reason of her environment: a presumably sophisticated being among the simple ones — not wickedly so, but one who knew life fairly well for her age.... ‘And you refuse?’ said the astonished minister, as she still stood immovable on the brink of the pool. He added to the force of his pleading by persuasively taking her sleeve between his finger and thumb as if to draw her; but she resented this by a quick movement of displeasure, and he released her, seeing that he had gone too far. ‘But, my dear lady,’ he whispered, ‘you promised. Consider your profession, and that you stand in the eyes of the whole church as an exemplar of your faith,’  ‘I cannot help it,’ she said, trying to get away. ‘You came here with the intention to fulfil the Word?’  ‘But I was mistaken.’  ‘ Then why did you come?’ She tacitly implied that to be a question she did not care to answer. ‘Please say no more to me: I can wait no longer,’ she murmured, and hastened to withdraw. But the minister was not without insight, and he had seen that it would be useless to say more. The crestfallen old man had to turn round upon the congregation and declare officially that the baptism was postponed. She passed through the door into the vestry.... His face had a severe and even denunciatory look as he gave out his text, and Somerset began to understand that this meant mischief to the person who had caused the hitch....

The sermon straightway began, and went on, and it was soon apparent that the commentary was to be no less forcible than the text. It was also apparent that the words were, virtually, not directed forward in the line in which they were uttered, but through the chink of the vestry-door, that had stood slightly ajar since the exit of the young lady.... At this moment there was not in the whole chapel a person whose imagination was not centred on what was invisibly taking place within the vestry-door. The thunder of the minister’s eloquence echoed, of course, through the sister’s cavern of retreat no less than round the public assembly. What she was doing inside there — whether listening contritely, or haughtily hastening to get away from the chapel and all it contained — was obviously the thought of each member.... The sermon ended, the minister wiped his steaming face and turned down his cuffs, and nods and sagacious glances went round.... For Somerset there was but one scene: the imagined scene of the girl herself as she sat alone in the vestry. The fervent congregation rose to sing again, and then Somerset heard a slight noise on his left hand which caused him to turn his head. The brougham, which had retired into the field to wait, was back again at the door: the subject of his rumination came out from the chapel — not in her mystic robe of white, but dressed in ordinary fashionable costume — followed as before by the attendant with other articles of clothing on her arm, including the white gown. Somerset fancied that the younger woman was drying her eyes with her handkerchief, but there was not much time to see: they quickly entered the carriage, and it moved on. Then a cat suddenly mewed, and he saw a white Persian standing forlorn where the carriage had been. The door was opened, the cat taken in, and the carriage rolled away,”

III

I feel a kind of defeat in my efforts to impart a conception of Mr. Hardy’s heroines by the quotation of this or that passage. They live so much more in what they think and feel and say than in what they do, that no scene or incident can do them justice, as a scene or incident might in the case of Charles Readers heroines,  for instance. Many scenes, many incidents in which the Hardy heroines figure remain vivid in the mind, but if taken from the context they do not tell the story as one would think.

This may happen because the psychological texture of the story is as close and strong as the sociological texture is loose and slight. I have already intimated my sense of the unimportance of this in Mr. Hardy’s fiction, as compared with the recognition of the deeper relations of human beings. We scarcely think of his people as of this calling or that station at all, after the first moment, and even in making their acquaintance we do not concern ourselves with the part attributed to them in society; we often wholly forget it, though we never lose the sense of their intense reality. If any one will contrast the sense of life imparted by a novel of Trollope’s, say, with that given by a novel of Mr. Hardy, I believe he will get my meaning. These masters are of the same sincerity and veracity; but Trollope reaches man through society, and Mr. Hardy finds him in nature.

There is a great deal of society in “The Laodicean.” People do things in the forms and customs that constitute the history of every-day life; but through the stream of these little ordinary events pulses the current of poetry and passion, and bears the lovers along in a splendid isolation from the events pressing upon them from all sides. For instance — but like all the other instances this will be imperfect! — Paula has been giving a sort of garden-party at De Stancy Castle, which Somerset as her architect is restoring in parts, and they have been dancing in the marquee with Paula’s guests, just before a shower breaks upon it.

“The dance was over, and he had retired with Paula to the back of the tent, when another faint flash of lightning was visible through an opening. She lifted the canvas, and looked out, Somerset looking out behind her. Another dance was begun, and, being on this account left out of notice, Somerset did not hasten to leave Paula’s side. ‘I think they begin to feel the heat, ‘she said. ‘A little ventilation would do no harm.’ He flung back the tent door where he stood, and the light shone out upon the grass. ‘I must go to the drawingroom soon,’ she added. ‘They will begin to leave shortly.’  ‘It is not late. The thunder-cloud has made it seem dark — see there; a line of pale yellow stretches along the horizon from west to north. That’s evening — not gone yet. Shall we go into the fresh air for a minute?’ She seemed to signify assent, and he stepped off the tent floor upon the ground. She stepped off also. The air out-of-doors had not cooled, and without definitely choosing a direction they found themselves approaching a little wooden tea-house that stood on the lawn a few yards off. Arrived here, they turned, and regarded the tent they had just left, and listened to the strains that came from within it. ‘I feel more at ease now,’ said Paula. ‘So do I,’ said Somerset. ‘I mean,’ she added, in an undeceiving tone, ‘because I saw Mrs. Goodman enter the tent again just as we came out here; so I have no further responsibility,’  ‘I meant something quite different. Try to guess what,’ She teasingly demurred, finally breaking the silence by saying, ‘The rain is come at last,’ as great drops began to fall upon the ground with a smack, like pellets of clay. In a moment the storm poured down with sudden violence, and they drew further back into the summer-house. The side of the tent from which they had emerged still remained open, the rain streaming down between their eyes and the lighted interior of the marquee like a tissue of glass threads, the brilliant forms of the dancers passing and repassing behind the watery screen, as if they were people in an enchanted submarine palace. ‘How happy they are!’ said Paula. ‘They don’t even know that it is raining. I am so glad that my aunt had the tent lined; otherwise such a downpour would have gone clean through it,’ The thunder-storm showed no symptoms of abatement, and the music and dancing went on more merrily than ever. ‘We cannot go in,’ said Somerset. ‘And we cannot shout for umbrellas. We will stay here till it is over, will we not?’  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if you care to. Oh!’  ‘What is it?’  ‘Only a big drop came upon my head.’  ‘Let us stand further, in.’ Her hand was hanging by her side, and Somerset’s was close by. He took it, and she did not draw it away. Thus they stood a long while, the rain hissing down upon the grass-plot, and not a soul being visible outside the dancing-tent save themselves. ‘May I call you Paula?’ asked he. ‘Yes, occasionally,’ she murmured. ‘Dear Paula! May I call you that?’  ‘Oh no — not yet.’  ‘But you know I love you?’ he insisted. ‘I can give a shrewd guess,’ she said, slyly. ‘And shall I love you always?’  ‘If you wish to,’  ‘And will you love me?’ Paula did not reply. ‘Will you, Paula V he repeated. ‘You may love me,’  ‘But don’t you love me in return?’  ‘I love you to love me.’  ‘Won’t you say anything more explicit?’  ‘Not a single word!’ Somerset emitted half a sigh: he wished she had been more demonstrative, yet felt that this passive way of assenting was as much as he could hope for. Had there been anything cold in her passivity he might have felt repressed; but her stillness suggested the stillness of motion imperceptible from its intensity. ‘We must go in,’ said she. ‘The rain is almost over, and there is no longer any excuse for this.’ Somerset bent his lips toward hers. ‘No,’ said the fair Puritan decisively.

‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Nobody ever has.’  ‘But!—’ expostulated Somerset. ‘To everything there is a season, and the season for this is not just now,’ she answered, walking away.”

IV

Yes, this instance, like all the others, is imperfect and inadequate to the message it is meant to bear in my criticism, and I have to blame myself for letting a subordinate book so largely represent the very great and singular artist I have attempted to deal with. He has reached the height of his power, I think, in his tremendous novel, “Jude the Obscure,” where Fate, so humorous and at the worst ironical, in so many of his stories, turns luridly tragical. No greater and truer book has been written in our time or any; and yet “ Jude,” if it were to be quoted from significantly, is not to be quoted from in this company at all, without risk to the critic of sharing the misunderstanding which befell the author. It may be safely said, however — or at any rate it shall be ventured — that in “Jude,” and in the morbid, half-crazed endeavor of the heroine to atone by her own sacrifice for the cursed spite of conditions, the novelist makes an offering at the shrine of the womanly which ought to appease that deity, if ever it has been offended — by a sense of slight or mocking in his adoration. It is not a book which could harm innocence — evil itself cannot harm innocence, but certainly it is not a book for inexperience. For experience, however, it is full of wisdom, and for the heart and mind open to the fearful implications of such a history and temperament as Sue Brodhead’s it has problems of tremendous appeal. It would be worthy the study of experience if for nothing else than as the work of a talent there eventuating in its ultimate seriousness.

WILLIAM BLACK’S GERTRUDE WHITE

IN my sense of at least partial defeat by the heroines of Mr. Hardy, who have suffered me to represent them mainly in some of their lighter moments, I am sufficiently humiliated to make a confession that I would rather not have made. I confess that I never read a novel of Blackmore’s, or a novel of Stevenson’s, or more than one novel of Mr. George Meredith’s; and though I might qualify myself to speak of their heroines by taking a course of their fiction, I am afraid that my appreciation would have a perfunctory look out of keeping with the prevailing complexion of these studies. I might learn what those ladies were like, but I should have no associations with them from the past, no remembered passion; and if it is not now too late with me to form a passion for a new heroine, it would not be, perhaps, becoming.

I

In the case of Stevenson I am hardly a great loser, I fancy, unless I am wrong in supposing his romances are mostly stories of adventure, such as the heroine does not best develop in. As I have before intimated she cannot make her peculiar powers felt in the highest degree by the hero who is saving her life or defending her honor; she requires the safety and quiet of normal conditions for the last effect of her charm, which is the translation of every-day life into a supernal ecstasy. I dare say I could not make so good my defence in the case of Blackmore, for Loma Doone is a heroine whose adorers simply troop at her heels. I can only regret that I have not her acquaintance, and sigh that it seems too late to make it. As for Mr. George Meredith’s heroines, my experience is confined to such of them as may be met in “Beauchamp’s Career,” and from that I have no recollection of them by name; I was barely fifty when I read the book, but one begins to forget names so early. I do, however, have the impression that they talked a great deal as Mr. Meredith writes, though they shared this foible with all the other characters; and I could not greatly blame them since his writing gave me the sense of a singularly powerful mind and generous spirit. I thought “Beauchamp’s Career” a magnificent piece of intellectuation, fused through and through by electrical emotion. But I could not get farther with the author, though I tried one novel of his after another, as one votary of his after another solemnly promised me conversion in the interest of my soul’s salvation. I remained and I still remain unable to reconcile my aesthetics with his, though I uncover to his ethics as I know them in “Beauchamp’s Career.”

He appears to me a powerful, wilful talent, who could have flourished into critical acceptance as a novelist only in an atmosphere of such aesthetic anarchy as wraps the British Isles; but he may some day appear differently to me through my greater knowledge of him. This has happened to me with Mr. George Moore, whom I long shied off from because I fancied him doing over again, from the realistic formula, the work of M. Zola. M. Zola seemed doing it so fully that I thought myself in no need of Mr. George Moore; but his “ Esther Waters” showed me how mistaken I was. That is a great book, and if it had not appeared in an age which has been spoiled by great fictions, it would have been prized as one of the greatest. I know that it won celebrity of even the popular sort, and that it received critical recognition; but it has not achieved the lasting credit which is its due. Its very merits forbid me to study it here, for the sad, plain, naked truth about life is apt to shock, or to make people think they are shocked, and in its facts it is sometimes outside of those decorums of Anglo-Saxon fiction which I have been treating as the decencies. So is the very powerful group of studies which the author calls “The Celibates,” and which the mere name of brings back my strong emotion in reading them. The three differing types of the womanly presented there are of that novelty and reality in which life abounds, but which we suppose exhausted because fiction, like history, so commonly repeats itself. Mr. Moore’s fiction is not like history in this, and it is probably more like memoires pour servir than like history in its way of dealing with the unupholstered human soul. But I am aware that the upholstered soul is more presentable to mixed companies, especially when there are young people present; and so I leave this author’s, heroines out of my series, though I cannot leave them out of my mind, and I wish to make my manners to what I think their prodigious veracity.

II

There is no such embarrassment as I have here hastened to escape in dealing with the heroines of William Black, who are quite of the Anglo-Saxon tradition. They are nice girls even when they are naughty, as some of them are; or at least they do not misbehave beyond the bounds of convention. They flirt, but unless flirtation is a sin, they do not sin, and they are not sinned against very direly. They began rather simply and naturally in the course of a journey in a phaeton, whose “ Strange Adventures “ once pleased so greatly, and they almost ended, and rather insipidly, in the voyage of a house-boat. The two novels indicated will occur to most readers whose novel reading extended from 1870 to 1890; but in the interval there were other novels of Black’s which signalized his deeper knowledge of human and of woman nature, and his growing dramatic power. This power was apt at times to disperse itself in the sobs and tears of hysterical emotion, but there is no doubt that short of such climaxes it was a power. It relaxed rather too often in the description of natural scenery, and killed too many salmon, and quoted too much Gaelic; but still it was power. In such a story as “Madcap Violet” it triumphed in character then new to fiction and of interesting actuality in life; and in “Macleod of Dare” it went deeper, and came up with stronger contrasts to truly tragical purpose.

“Macleod of Dare” seems to have been the highest as well as deepest reach of the author’s art; for after it he continued to repeat himself with varying effect, and returned ultimately to that earlier method and manner which won him his public. It was never the best public, never the most critical, and yet his work had friends of the most critical instincts, and the most fastidious tastes, who accepted him with reservation, but without patronage. A sense of his innate manliness forbade that; and upon the whole he enjoyed while he lived a dignified popularity which, since his death, has not quite become fame. Yet his work is so very much better than that of novelists who in a time of inferior fiction did achieve remembrance that one resents for him the sort of unjust neglect which it has fallen into. It was his fate or his accident to begin writing naturalistic fiction of the old-fashioned English kind, and to establish himself as a lover of real life just before the violent campaign for naturalism began on the Continent, where almost nothing that was nice and almost everything that was nasty was accounted natural. He continued writing in his own way amidst the impassioned struggle against romanticism in France, Spain, and Italy, and remained no more affected by the polemics of M. Zola than by the perfection of Flaubert or Maupassant. The great, the matchless fiction of Russia did not move him from his course, and his constant English public stood by him, while the more fitful favor of his American friends did not always fail him. He saw the fall of the Dickens worship and the rise of the Thackeray doubt. Trollope outlived himself, and George Eliot died after the distinct decline of her too deeply ethicised art; and there was a moment when William Black might have been recognized as the leading writer of English fiction, unless we are to count some novelists of finer skill and greater force in the American condition of English fiction. But unhappily for his supremacy the vaster and deeper and fresher naturalism of Mr. Thomas Hardy began to make itself known, and William Black’s chance was gone. There was no later chance, and he was left to end his career to the strains of the muted second violin, which form the saddest music in the world to the performer’s ear.

III

No writers could be more opposite in their realism than the novelist whom I have just named, and Black. Both are poets, and both are apt to seek in nature the charm they make us feel, but the final sense of the mystery and loveliness imparted by Mr. Hardy is of something which his heroine confers upon her circumstance, and in Black’s fiction it seems something which she derives from it. I am now thinking chiefly of such a girl as Gertrude White in “Macleod of Dare,” who is as dependent upon society for means of self-expression as any heroine I know, and yet is as genuine a personality as may be met in fiction. She was recognized with an art which was perhaps at its best in her portrayal, and she had a freshness which is now gone from her type. She belongs to that social moment, since satirized beyond recall, when aesthetics began to be so generally received into society that society seemed to have become æsthetical. In that instant of fine confusion the stage especially went into society so much that it might well appear that society had gone upon the stage; and a brilliant and beautiful young actress like Gertrude White, meeting Sir Keith Macleod at a fashionable house, would never have suggested the theatre to the young Highlander dropped down in London from his native isles.

“‘But you have seen our elm — our own elm,’ said Mrs. Ross, who was arranging some azaleas that had just been sent her. ‘We are very proud of our elm. Gertrude, will you take Sir Keith to see our noble elm?’ He had almost forgotten who Gertrude was; but the next second he recognized the low and almost timid voice that said: ‘Will you come this way, then, Sir Keith?’ He turned, and found that it was Miss White who spoke. How was it that this girl, who was only a girl, seemed to do things so easily, and gently, and naturally, without any trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness? He followed her, and knew not which to admire the more, the careless simplicity of her manner or the singular symmetry of her tall and slender figure. He had never seen any statue or any picture in any book to be compared with this woman, who was so fine and rare and delicate that she seemed only a beautiful tall flower in this garden of flowers. There was a strange simplicity, too, about her dress — a plain, tight-fitting, tight-sleeved dress of unrelieved black, her only adornment being some bands of big blue beads worn loosely round the neck. The black figure, in this shimmer of rose pink and gold and flowers, was effective enough; but even the finest of pictures or the finest of statues has not the subtle attraction of a graceful carriage. Macleod had never seen any woman walk as this woman walked, in so stately and yet so simple a way. From Mrs. Ross’s chief drawing-room they passed into an ante-drawing-room, which was partly a passage and partly a conservatory. On the window side were some rows of Cape heaths....

‘Look at this beautiful heath. Mrs. Ross is very proud of her heaths. ‘The small white fingers scarcely touched the beautiful blossoms of the plant; but which were the more palely roseate and waxen? If one were to grasp that hand — in some sudden moment of entreaty, in the sharp joy of reconciliation, in the agony of farewell — would it not be crushed like a frail flower? ‘This is our elm,’ said she, lightly. ‘Mrs. Ross and I regard it as our own, we have sketched it so often.’ They had emerged from the conservatory into a small square room, which was practically a continuation of the drawing-room, but which was decorated in pale blue and silver, and filled with a lot of knickknacks that showed it was doubtless Mrs. Ross’s boudoir. And out there, in the clear June sunshine, lay the broad green sward behind Prince’s Gate, with the one splendid elm spreading his broad branches into the blue sky, and throwing a soft shadow on the corner of the gardens next to the house. How sweet and still it was I — as still as the calm clear light in this girl’s eyes. There was no passion there, and no trouble; only the light of a June day, and of blue skies, and a peaceful soul. She rested the tips of her fingers on a small rosewood table that stood by the window: surely if a spirit ever lived in any table, the wood of this table must have thrilled to its core.”

Macleod in his dreaming did not dream her an actress, but because her very life was an art she was not less acting now than she was the night of the same day, when he saw her on the stage, in a comedy which had been a very stupid conventional play till she appeared. “Suddenly his heart seemed to stand still altogether. It was a light, glad laugh — the sound of a voice he knew — that seemed to have pierced him as with a rifle ball; and at the same moment from the green shimmer of foliage in the balcony there stepped into the glare of the hall a young girl with life and laughter and a merry carelessness in her face and eyes. She threw her arm around her mother’s neck and kissed her. She bowed to the legal person. She flung her garden hat on to a couch, and got up on a chair to get fresh seed put in for her canary. It was all done so simply and naturally and gracefully that in an instant a fire of life and reality sprang into the whole of this sham thing. The woman was no longer a marionette, but the anguish-stricken mother of this gay and heedless girl. And when the daughter jumped down from the chair again — her canary on her finger — and when she came forward to pet and caress and remonstrate with her mother, and when the glare of the lights flashed on the merry eyes, and on the white teeth and laughing lips, there was no longer any doubt possible. Macleod’s face was quite pale. He took the programme from Agilvie’s hand, and for a minute or two stared mechanically at the name of Miss Gertrude White, printed on the pink-tinted paper.”

Again she is acting, but neither more nor less consciously, when Macleod comes to luncheon, and she makes the maid give her the salad to dress, while the keen eyes of her young sister divine her and deride her. “‘There is no use making any pretense,’ said she, sharply. ‘You know quite well why you are making that salad dressing.’  ‘Did you never see me make salad dressing before?’ said the other, quite as sharply. ‘You know it is simply because Sir Keith Macleod is coming to lunch. I forgot all about it Oh, and that’s why you had the clean curtains put up yesterday!’...

What else had this precocious brain ferreted out? ‘Yes, and that’s why you bought papa a new necktie,’ continued the tormentor, and then she added, triumphantly, ‘But he hasn’t put it on this morning — ha, Gerty?’ A calm and dignified silence is the best answer to the fiendishness of thirteen. Miss White went on with the making of the salad dressing. She was considered very clever at it. A smart young maid-servant, very trimly dressed, made her appearance. ‘Sir Keith Macleod, miss,’ said she. ‘Oh, Gerty, you’re caught,’ muttered the fiend. But Miss White was equal to the occasion. The small white fingers plied the fork without a tremor. ‘Ask him to step this way, please,’ she said. And then the subtle imagination of this demon of thirteen jumped to another conclusion. ‘Oh, Gerty, you want to show him that you are a good housekeeper — that you can make salad’—”

IV

It will be remembered that Macleod is instantly in love with Gertrude, and has no thought but of marrying her and making her leave the stage. He has found her in society intellectually inferior to her, of course, but rich and refined, and delicately appreciative of such bricabrac as she; and though he is a splendid young fellow with generous possibilities of life-long adoration for the woman he loves, he has no conception of the sacrifice she must make in giving up her career, to be the wife of a Highland chieftain on the wild Scottish shore. She has no conception of it, either, when she promises.

Her selfish old father, the collector of other bricabrac than she, does not like the match, and consents unwillingly that she shall leave the life for which he has had her so carefully trained, and in which her success has so far been so brilliant “ ‘I will beg you to remember, Gerty,’ he remarked with some dignity, ‘that I did not make you an actress, if that is what you imply. If it had not been entirely your own wish, I should never have encouraged you; and I think it shows great ingratitude, not only to me, but to the public also, that when you have succeeded in obtaining a position such as any woman in the country might envy, you treat your good fortune with indifference, and show nothing but discontent. I cannot tell what has come over you of late. You ought certainly to be the last to say anything against a profession that has gained for you such a large share of public favor—’  ‘Public favor!’ she said, with a bitter laugh. ‘Who is the favorite of the public in this very town? Why, the girl that plays in that farce — who smokes a cigarette, and walks round the stage like a man, and dances a break-down. Why wasn’t I taught to dance break-downs?”’

Here once more, doubtless, the girl is unconsciously acting, and it is not till she has seen Macleod on his native heath, and among the clansmen to whom he is a demi-god, in a semi-feudal, almost semi-barbarous environment, that she is fully awakened to the reality. She sees no beauty or grandeur in the life to which his love destines her as remorselessly as if it were hate, and she finds that she cannot give up all that she has made herself in the world that seems to her great and worth winning. She begins to pull at the leash which binds her, and when she gets back to London she breaks with Macleod. Then he ventures upon that wild, that mad scheme of luring her aboard his yacht, and carrying her off to the highlands to make her his wife against her will, but not, as he believes, against her love. “‘ You cannot go ashore, Gertrude,’ he repeated. ‘We have already left Erith. Gerty, Gerty,’ he continued, for she was struck dumb with a sudden terror, ‘don’t you understand now? I have stolen you away from yourself. There was but the one thing left; the one way of saving you. And you will forgive me, Gerty, when you understand it all—’ She was gradually recovering from her terror. She did understand it now. And he was not ill at all ‘Oh, you coward! you coward! you coward!’ she exclaimed, with a blaze of fury in her eyes. ‘And I was to confer a kindness on you — a last kindness! But you dare not do this thing! I tell you, you dare not do it! I demand to be put on shore at once! Do you hear me?’ She turned wildly round as if to seek for some way of escape. The door of the ladies’ cabin stood open; the daylight was streaming down into that cheerful little place; there were some flowers on the dressing-table. But the way by which she had descended was barred over and dark. She faced him again, and her eyes were full of fierce indignation and anger; she drew herself up to her full height; she overwhelmed him with taunts, and reproaches, and scorn. That was a splendid piece of acting seeing that it had never been rehearsed. He stood unmoved before all this theatrical rage. ‘Oh, yes, you were proud of your name,’ she was saying, with bitter emphasis; ‘and I thought you belonged to a race of gentlemen, to whom lying was unknown. And you were no longer murderous and revengeful; but you can take your revenge on a woman, for all that! And you ask me to come and see you because you are ill. And you have laid a trap — like a coward!’  ‘And if I am what you say, Gerty,’ said he, quite gently, ‘it is the love of you that has made me that. Oh, you do not know!’ She saw nothing of the lines that pain had written on this man’s face, she recognized nothing of the very majesty of grief in the hopeless eyes. He was only her jailer, her enemy. ‘Of course — of course,’ said she. ‘It is the woman — it is always the woman who is in fault! That is a manly thing, to put the blame on the woman! And it is a manly thing to take your revenge on a woman! I thought, when a man had a rival, that it was his rival whom he sought out.

But you — you kept out of the way—’ He strode forward and caught her by the wrist. There was a look in his face that for a second terrified her into silence. ‘Gerty,’ said he. ‘I warn you! Do not mention that man to me — now or at any time; or it will be bad for him and you!’ She twisted her hand from his grasp. ‘How dare you come near me!’ she cried.”

As is well known the yacht is wrecked, and they are drowned together; and there is an implication that somehow Macleod is a fine fellow, and that Gertrude White is not a good girl, and has met a merited fate. But I do not know why she is not a good girl. The charge against her, so far as it is made out, is brought by her sister Carry who accuses her of flirting with Macleod. She certainly did nothing to prevent his loving her, no doubt because she was in love with him; but when she found that his love demanded more of her than she could give, she did nothing worse than try to break her engagement. Under the circumstances that was the best thing to do, and if she wished to break it gently and not roughly, that was not proof of a bad heart in her, but a good one. She had the histrionic nature, but that is not necessarily an insincere nature, though it means the dangerous power of self-deception. Imaginably the subjective process of Gertrude White’s tragedy was the capacity of being charmed by what was new and picturesque in Macleod, and of not being sufficiently repelled by his latent race-savagery, which she latently feared. She could figure the world and the mimic-world well lost for love with him on the barren crag to which he invited her at the cost of all she had hitherto held dear; but when she saw the barren crag she would over-realize the immense sacrifice demanded of her, and her recoil would be the imperative mandate of what was the law of her being. She could not change that law, which was not an evil law, though it set the artist instinct against the woman instinct; and the lesson of her experience is not that you must not be an artist if you are a woman, but that if you are a man in love with that kind of woman, you must count upon her duplex instinct, which is by no means duplicity. If you offer her the fulfilment of one instinct, you must leave her to fulfil the other, and to demand its extirpation is stupid as well as cruel.

Macleod of Dare was both stupid and cruel, though he was so fine, and generous, and brave. If we consider the story of his love tragedy as something that simply happened through the war of his temperament with that of the woman he loved, then it is a great tragedy, of the quality of the Greek destiny play; but if we regard it as a morality, it is weak and foolish unless it teaches that Macleod was wrong and Gertrude was right. It is enough for a man to ask that a woman shall merge her woman life in his, and more than most men can fully justify in marriage, but that she shall lose her artist life too is asking something monstrous. Whenever they talk of this sacrifice which Macleod requires the girl tries tenderly to make him understand how vital the sacrifice is, but she cannot He remains the true, simple, masterful soul who thinks he is asking something wholly fit and proper for a husband to ask.

We have no hint of the author’s feeling except so far as it may appear in his obvious fondness for Macleod, and his willingness to depreciate Gertrude White. He does not weaken so far as to use Thackeray’s ironical method with her, though he applies it now and then to her sarcastic little sister; but he loses the greater opportunity in the less when he rejects the subjective for the objective tragedy. It wrings the reader’s heart to have the heroine die with her lover; but it would be better than heart-break for him if he could realize her living with the husband for whom she had given up too much. That would set him thinking, and though a reader does not like to think, it is often the best thing he can do. To feel is comparatively cheap and easy.

MR. BRET HARTE’S MIGGLES, AND MR. T. B. ALDRICH’S MARJORIE DAW

SO far in these explorations of Anglo-Saxon fiction, we have come upon only three American novelists, apparently, whose heroines may match with those of the English novelists. Such a fact may be accounted for upon a theory wounding to our patriotism, if we like the pain, or it may be more gratifyingly explained upon the ground that during the past century the English novelists have probably outnumbered ours quite in the proportion of their representation here. Besides, the heroine is a flower of slow growth, which thrives best in a tempered air, and a soil mellowed by long cultivation. Our heroines, compared with the English, are wilding off-shoots, of a sylvan sweetness and grace and a fresh loveliness, at their best, and at their second-best such as actual women are, much too good for men, no doubt, but not such as are easily gathered in this sort of florist’s window. They are scattered widely in a thousand short stories, all over the north, east, south, and west, and the research that would give a just notion of their quantitative fascination would form a complete study of that branch of our fiction.

I

The difficulty of presenting the short-story heroine will be realized by the faithful reader of Miss Sarah Jewett’s exquisite tales and sketches, to name a single and supreme example. In the case of the more objective heroines of such a writer as Bret Harte, one recalls out of the whole number of his more conventionalized types, his Miggles, who belongs rather with the edifying Magdalenes of the mining communities than with the sinuous and ophidian group of his politer ladies, too recognizably descended from the heroines of Charles Reade. Neither sort forms the forte of a writer who stamped his peculiar literary personality upon the fancy of his generation so vigorously, and who still keeps so large a public faithful to him. He is at his strongest with his men, and of his two kinds of women his Miggles seems, at least in this retrospect, his prime invention.

It will be remembered by my elder readers, at least, how the storm-bound passengers of Yuba Bill’s mountain stage take refuge in her wayside cabin, during her absence, and before her return have a dull quarter of an hour there in the company of the speechless paralytic, to whom Miggles is dedicating the afternoon of her life because he has helped her pass the forenoon more gaily if not so exemplarily, and has, as she says in her brief explanation, “spent a heap of money on her.”

“Bill had scarcely ceased growling before we heard a quick step upon the porch, the trailing of a wet skirt, the door was flung open, and with a flash of white teeth, a sparkle of dark eyes, and an utter absence of ceremony or diffidence, a young woman entered, shut the door, and, panting, leaned back against it. ‘Oh, if you please, I’m Miggles!’ And this was Miggles! this bright-eyed, full-throated young woman, whose wet gown of coarse blue stuff could not hide the beauty of the feminine curves to which it clung; from the chestnut crown of whose head, topped by a man’s oil-skin sou’-wester, to the little feet and ankles, hidden somewhere in the recesses of her boy’s brogans, all was grace; — this was Miggles, laughing at us, too, in the most airy, frank, off-hand manner imaginable. ‘You see, boys,’ said she, quite out of breath, and holding one little hand against her side, quite unheeding the speechless discomfiture of our party, or the complete demoralization of Yuba Bill, whose features had relaxed into an expression of gratuitous and imbecile cheerfulness,— ‘you see, boys, I was mor’n two miles away when you passed down the road. I thought you might pull up here, and so I ran the whole way, knowing nobody was home but Jim, — and — and — I’m out of breath — and — that lets me out,’ And here Miggles caught her dripping oil-skin hat from her head, with a mischievous swirl that scattered a shower of rain-drops over us; attempted to put back her hair; dropped two hair-pins in the attempt; laughed, and sat down beside Yuba Bill, with her hands crossed lightly on her lap. The Judge recovered himself first, and essayed an extravagant compliment. ‘I’ll trouble you for that hairpin,’ said Miggles, gravely. Half a dozen hands were eagerly stretched forward; the missing hair-pin was restored to its fair owner; and Miggles, crossing the room, looked keenly in the face of the invalid. The solemn eyes looked back at hers with an expression we had never seen before. Life and intelligence seemed to struggle back into the rugged face. Miggles laughed again, — it was a singularly eloquent laugh, — and turned her black eyes and white teeth once more towards us. ‘This afflicted person is’ — hesitated the Judge. ‘Jim!’ said Miggles. ‘Your father?’  ‘No,’  ‘Brother?’  ‘No.’  ‘Husband?’ Miggles darted a quick, half-defiant glance at the two lady passengers, who I had noticed did not participate in the general masculine admiration of Miggles, and said, gravely, ‘No; it’s Jim,’ HEROINES OF FICTION

There was an awkward pause. The lady passengers moved closer to each other; the Washoe husband looked abstractedly at the fire; and the tall man apparently turned his eyes inward for self-support at this emergency. But Miggles’s laugh, which was very infectious, broke the silence. ‘Come,’ she said, briskly, ‘you must be hungry. Who’ll bear a hand to help me get tea?’”

The literary epoch of Miggles is early traceable in certain little touches. She is of that romanticistic generation which Mr. Harte himself has never outlived, and which we would hardly have him outlive. In her time good criminals abounded, and ladies with pasts were of a present behavior so self-devoted that they could often put their unerring sisters to the blush. They are rarer, now, and even on the stage their histories seem rather more to characterize them; but one likes to believe that there are Miggleses in the world, and life is often so illogical that it is not impossible.

It is a case which we have to suppose, but we cannot complain of the terms in which Mr. Harte asks us to suppose it. They are amusing and they are touching, and according to the simple ethics of the period, they are even improving. When it comes time for Miggles’s involuntary and unexpected guests to seek such rest as they may find under her roof, she shows the ladies into the one other room, which imaginably their propriety makes too hot for their hostess. At any rate she soon reappears in the midst of an animated debate concerning her history among the men.

“But not, apparently, the same Miggles who a few hours before had flashed upon us. Her eyes were downcast, and as she hesitated for a moment on the threshold with a blanket on her arm, she seemed to have left behind her the frank fearlessness which had charmed us a moment before. Coming into the room, she drew a low stool beside the paralytic’s chair, sat down, drew the blanket over her shoulders, and saying, ‘If it’s all the same to you, boys, as we’re rather crowded, I’ll stop here to-night,’ took the invalid’s withered hand in her own, and turned her eyes upon the dying fire. An instinctive feeling that this was only premonitory to more confidential relations, and perhaps some shame at our previous curiosity, kept us silent. The rain still beat upon the roof, wandering gusts of wind stirred the embers into momentary brightness, until, in a lull of the elements, Miggles suddenly lifted up her head, and, throwing her hair over her shoulder, turned her face upon the group and asked, ‘Is there any of you that knows me?’ There was no reply. ‘Think again! I lived at Marysville in ‘53. Everybody knew me there, and everybody had the right to know me. I kept the Polka Saloon until I came to live with Jim. That’s six years ago. Perhaps I’ve changed some.’ The absence of recognition may have disconcerted her. She turned her head to the fire again, and it was some seconds before she again spoke, and then more rapidly: ‘Well, you see I thought some of you must have known me. There’s no great harm done, any way. What I was going to say was this: Jim here’ — she took his hand in both of hers as she spoke—’ used to know me, if you didn’t, and spent a heap of money upon me. I reckon he spent all he had. And one day — it’s six years ago this winter — Jim came into my back room, sat down on my sofy, like as you see him in that chair, and never moved again without help. He was struck all of a heap, and never seemed to know what ailed him. The doctors came and said as how it was caused all along of his way of life, — for Jim was mighty free and wild like, — and that he would never get better, and couldn’t last long any way. They advised me to send him to Frisco to the hospital, for he was no good to any one and would be a baby all his life. Perhaps it was something in Jim’s eye, perhaps it was that I never had a baby, but I said “No.” I was rich then, for I was popular with everybody, — gentlemen like yourself, sir, came to see me, — and I sold out my business and bought this yer place, because it was sort of out of the way of travel, you see, and I brought my baby here.’ With a woman’s intuitive tact and poetry, she had, as she spoke, slowly shifted her position so as to bring the mute figure of the ruined man between her and her audience, hiding in the shadow behind it, as if she offered it as a tacit apology for her actions.... Hidden in the darkness, but still holding his hand, she went on: — ... ‘The folks about here are very kind,’ said Miggles, after a pause, coming a tittle into the tight again. ‘The men from the fork used to hang around here, until they found they wasn’t wanted, and the women are kind, — and don’t call....

And Jim here,’ said Miggles, with her old laugh again, and coming quite out into the firelight, ‘Jim — why, boys, you would admire to see how much he knows for a man like him. Sometimes I bring him flowers, and he looks at ’em just as natural as if he knew ‘em; and times, when we’re sitting alone, I read him those things on the wall. Why, Lord!’ said Miggles, with her frank laugh, ‘I’ve read him that whole side of the house this winter. There never was such a man for reading as Jim.’  ‘Why,’ asked the Judge, ‘do you not marry this man to whom you have devoted your youthful life?’  ‘Weil, you see,’ said Miggles, ‘it would be playing it rather low down on Jim to take advantage of his being so helpless. And then, too, if we were man and wife, now, we’d both know that I was bound to do what I do now of my own accord.’  ‘But you are young yet and attractive.’  ‘It’s getting late,’ said Miggles, gravely, ‘and you’d better all turn in. Good-night, boys;’ and throwing the blanket over her head, Miggles laid herself down beside Jim’s chair, her head pillowed on the low stool that held his feet, and spoke no more. The fire slowly faded from the hearth; we each sought our blankets in silence; and presently there was no sound in the long room but the pattering of the rain upon the roof, and the heavy breathing of the sleepers.”

II

Of course, in a certain way, no heroine has ever been. The whole entrancing race exists only by an agreement between author and reader; and if the personality imagined is pleasing the author may make his own terms with the reader. But he had better not push the reader too far; the reader’s credulity is great, but it is possible to exhaust it, and for that reason, many heroines of the past, who were impossibly or exorbitantly conditioneid, have ceased to be. They were of a fashion, or of a mood of feeling, and the fashion or the mood has changed. Once we accepted such heroines as Miggles because they were the fashion, but now we can accept them no longer because they are not the fashion. The great matter for the author who will have his heroine last in the reader’s fancy is to condition her so that to any mood she shall be easily imaginable, and one has not to recur to some outworn humor in order to imagine her. Then he may tell us what he will of her; he may say not only that she no longer lives, but that she never lived; still, we rehabilitate her and she lives on.

Mr. T. B. Aldrich went to this length in the case of his Marjorie Daw. She, so far as I know, is the only heroine in the whole range of fiction who perishes under the hand of her creator; yet she does not pass, but continues vividly present in the reader’s consciousness.

The first effect of the brilliant sketch in which she has her being is that of irreparable loss, but this is not the last effect; one has a personal grief in learning that Marjorie Daw never existed save in the fancy of the fancied narrator; she does not survive in that tacit make-believe of author and reader which is the convention of fiction; she is destroyed, yet she persists, and haunts the memory with an immortal loveliness.

“Sometimes in the morning, and oftener in the afternoon, when the sun has withdrawn from that part of the mansion a young woman appears on the piazza with some Penelope web of embroidery in her hand, or a book. There is a hammock over there — of pineapple fibre, it looks from here. A hammock is very becoming when one is eighteen, and has golden hair, and dark eyes, and an emerald-colored illusion dress looped up after the fashion of a Dresden china shepherdess, and is chaussée like a belle of the time of Louis Quatorze. All this splendor goes into that hammock and sways there like a pond-lily in the golden afternoon,”

The girl is invented, it will be remembered, out of the air, to amuse the intolerable leisure of a young fellow laid up with a broken leg, and the friend who invents her becomes gradually so interested in her characterization and the sick man’s infatuation with her that he constructs a personality quite as appreciable to the reader. She swings in the hammock and reads; she plays croquet; she listens sympathetically to her friend’s accounts of the invalid; she surprises herself in a dawning passion for the sufferer; and then she is locked up by her irascible old father. It is at this point that John Fleming, having impatiently reduced the correspondence with Edward Delaney from letters to telegrams, bursts all restraints, and flies to the supposed habitat of the heroine, to find that there is no such heroine, no such house, and no such hammock, as Edward Delaney’s too creative powers have invented.

It is a bewitching little romance, almost of the miniature dimensions of a conceit, but it is as filling to the reader as most long novels, and is of an abiding flavor piquant beyond that of any but a very few. In fact, Marjorie Daw, who, by the remorseful confession of her supposed inventor, has never lived, has outlived myriads of heroines whose reality has never been impeached by their authors.

MR. G. W. CABLE’S AURORA AND CLOTILDE NANCANOU

THE heroines of Mr. Cable’s admirable novel, “ The Grandissimes,” could be proved, at least to the satisfaction of their present elderly adorer, easily first among the imaginary ladies with whose sweetness novelists have enriched and enlarged our acquaintance. But I should feel that I had neglected a prior claim if, before speaking of them, I did not pay my duty to the type of heroine who illumines with her pale, wild-rose beauty the sylvan scenes of Miss Murfree’s mountain stories, and who was fully developed while the pseudonym of Charles Egbert Craddock still veiled the identity of the author. It is a type varied according to circumstance, into this character and that, but primarily a type and not a character, and so no doubt more responsive to the social and personal facts from which it was evolved; a sad, shy, almost elusive presence in the savage rudeness of the environment. Sometimes a daughter, sometimes a young wife, sometimes a sweetheart, this heroine is always the same temperamentally, with a sort of martyr-grace and angelic innocence that touch the heart to pity rather than passion, and keep the memory constant to an ideal of womanhood as true and beautiful as any conceived in fiction. Whatever the fortune of the author’s work shall be, no critic can hereafter recur to the art of her time and not feel the importance of her contribution to it in this type, if in nothing else. After the conditions shall have long passed away it will remain to testify of the conditions, for it could have been possible only in them, and could have evolved its wistful loveliness only among their contrasts.

I

I am not going to urge the right of Mr. Cable to lead the Southern writers who have done such notable work in fiction since the Civil War. There may very well be two opinions as to that, and it is quite sufficient for my purpose here that the reader should agree with me concerning the positive excellence of “The Grandissimes,” That seems to me one of the few American fictions which one can think of without feeling the need of forbearance; or without wishing, in the interest of common honesty, strongly to qualify one’s praises of it. Ample, yet shapely, picturesque in time and place, but essentially faithful to the facts of both, romantic in character but realistic in characterization, it abounds in varieties and contrasts of life mellowed but not blurred in the past to which they are attributed. Without accusing the author of slighting any of the rich possibilities of such an historic moment as that of the cession of Louisiana to the United States by France, and the union of the old province with the new nation against the prejudices of nearly all the native population, one may note that the political situation is subordinated to the social and personal interests, and the dark presence of slavery itself is perceptible not in any studied attitude, but in the casual effects of character among the Creole masters and the Creole slaves.

It is well known that the author’s presentation of this character dissatisfied (to use a word of negative import for the expression of a positive resentment) the descendants of the Creole masters at least, who fancied their race caricatured in the picture. But the fact only testified to the outside spectator of the extreme difficulty, the impossibility, indeed, of satisfying any people with any portraiture by an alien hand. To such a spectator Mr. Cable’s studies of Creole character in his New Orleans of the early nineteenth century seem affectionately, almost fondly, appreciative, and they convince of their justice by that internal evidence which it is as hard to corroborate as to overthrow. No dearer or delightfuller figures have been presented by the observer of an alien race and religion than Mr. Cable has offered in Aurora and Clotilde Nancanou, and in none does the artist seem to have penetrated more sympathetically the civilization, so unlike his own, which animated them with a witchery so diverse yet so equal. Without blaming his Creole critics, one wonders what would have satisfied them if they are not content with the vivid and lawless caprice of Aurora, the demure, conscientious, protesting fascination of Clotilde.

In this mother and daughter the parental and filial relations are inverted with courageous fidelity to life, where we as often see a judicious daughter holding an impulsive mother in check as the reverse. Clotilde is always shocked and troubled by her mother’s wilful rashness, and Aurora, who is not so very much her senior, is always breaking bounds with a girlish impetuosity, which is only aggravated by the attempt to restrain it. These lovely ladies, who are in their way ladies to their finger-tips, and are as gentle in breeding as they are simple in circumstance, shine to each other’s advantage in the situations which contrast them; and it is in such situations that they are mostly seen. One such situation fixed itself in my mind at a first reading, and has remained there unfaded during the twenty years that have since elapsed, though I will not deny that I have several times refreshed my original sense of it. The reader who knows the book will not have forgotten the passage descriptive of Sieur Frowenfeld’s call upon the ladies in their little house, when Clotilde and he try to ignore their unspoken love for each other in a sober discussion of the Creole’s peculiarities, and Aurora, from whom their passion is of course less hidden than from themselves, dashes irrelevantly into the conversation from time to time, and turns the train of Frowenfeld’s ideas topsy-turvy. It is all done with a delicacy, a gracious tenderness, enhanced by the author’s sensitive rendering of the Creole ladies’ accents in the English which they employ with the English-speaking young German pharmacist; but one despairs in quoting it, knowing that the quaint beauty of the characterization can be only suggested in such a fragment.

“The ladies were at home. Aurora herself opened the door, and Clotilde came forward from the bright fire-place with a cordiality never before so unqualified. There was something about these ladies — in their simple but noble grace, in their half-Gallic, half-classic beauty, in a jocund buoyancy mated to an amiable dignity — that made them appear to the scholar as though they had just bounded into life from the garlanded procession of some old fresco. The resemblance was not a little helped on by the costume of the late Revolution (most acceptably chastened and belated by the distance from Paris). Their black hair, somewhat heavier on Clotilde’s head, where it rippled once or twice, was knotted Grecque, and adorned only with the spoils of a nosegay given to Clotilde by a chivalric small boy in the home of her music scholar. ‘We was expectin’ you since several days,’ said Clotilde, as the three sat down before the fire, Frowenfeld in a cushioned chair whose moth-holes had been carefully darned.... And, a few moments later, the apothecary and both ladies (the one as fond of the abstract as the other two were ignorant of the concrete) were engaged in an animated, running discussion on art, society, climate, education.... Frowenfeld had never before spent such an hour. At its expiration he had so well held his own against both the others that the three had settled down to this sort of entertainment: Aurora would make an assertion, or Clotilde would ask a question; and Frowenfeld would present his opinions without the thought of a reservation either in himself or his hearers. On their part, they would sit in deep attention, shielding their faces from the fire, and responding to enunciations directly contrary to their convictions with an occasional ‘yes-seh,’ or ‘ceddenly,’ or ‘of coze,’ or — prettier affirmation still — a solemn drooping of the eyelids, a slight compression of the lips, and a low, slow declination of the head. ‘The bane of all Creole art-effort’ — (we take up the apothecary’s words at a point where Clotilde was leaning forward and slightly frowning in an honest attempt to comprehend his condensed English)— ‘the bane of all Creole art-effort, so far as I have seen it, is amateurism.’  ‘ Amateu—’ murmured Clotilde, a little beclouded on the main word and distracted by a French difference of meaning, but planting an elbow on one knee in the genuineness of her attention, and responding with a bow.... ‘That is to say,’ said Frowenfeld, apologizing for the homeliness of his further explanation by a smile, ‘a kind of ambitious indolence that lays very large eggs, but can neither see the necessity for building a nest beforehand, nor command the patience to hatch the eggs afterward.’  ‘Of coze,’ said Aurora. ‘It is a great pity,’ said the sermonizer, looking at the face of Clotilde, elongated in the brass andiron, and, after a pause: ‘Nothing on earth can take the place of hard and patient labor. But that, in this community, is not esteemed; most sorts of it are contemned; the humbler sorts are despised, and the higher are regarded with mingled patronage and commiseration,’... ‘Doze Creole’ is lezzy,’ said Aurora. ‘That is a hard word to apply to those who do not consciously deserve it,’ said Frowenfeld; ‘but if they could only wake up to the fact — find it out themselves—’  ‘Ceddenly,’ said Clotilde. “Sieur Frowenfel’,’ said Aurora, leaning her hand on her side, ‘some pipple thing it is doze climade; ‘ow you lag doze climade?’  ‘I do not suppose,’ replied the visitor, ‘there is a more delightful climate in the world.’  ‘ Ah-h-h! ‘ — both ladies at once, in a low, gracious tone of acknowledgment. ‘I thing Louisiana is a paradize — me l’ said Aurora. ‘W’ere you gain’ fin’ sudge a h-air?’ She respired a sample of it. ‘W’ere you goin’ fin’ sudge a so ridge groun’? De weed’ in my bag yard is twenny-five feet ‘igh!’  ‘Ah! maman!’  ‘Twenty-six!’said Aurora, correcting herself.... ‘Yes,’ he said, breaking a contemplative pause, ‘the climate is too comfortable and the soil too rich, — though I do not think it is entirely on their account that the people who enjoy them are so sadly in arrears to the civilized world.’ He blushed with the fear that his talk was bookish, and felt grateful to Clotilde for seeming to understand his speech. ‘W’ad you fin’ de rizzon is, ‘Sieur Frowenfel’?’ she asked. ‘I do not wish to philosophize,’ he answered. ‘Mais, go hon.’  ‘Mais, go ahade,’ said both ladies, settling themselves. ‘It is largely owing,’ exclaimed Frowenfeld, with sudden fervor, ‘to a defective organization of society, which keeps this community, and will continue to keep it for an indefinite time to come, entirely unprepared and disinclined to follow the course of modern thought’  ‘Of coze,’ murmured Aurora, who had lost her bearings almost at the first word.”

II

It may very justly be urged that this is not drama; and very often in the illustrative passages I have given in this series of studies I have felt that they did not represent the heroines in those lime-lighted moments in which a heroine is supposed most to live. One has to choose between such moments and some quieter episode in which character softly unfolds itself, and its fascination penetrates like a perfume to the reader’s sympathy while his more tumultuous sensations are left unstirred. Then, one has one’s conscience as to the quality of the whole work in which the character is rooted, and of which it is the consummate flower. One must somehow do justice to that; and in reading Mr. Cable’s novel one is afraid that nothing short of entreating the reader to go to it and do it justice himself will suffice. Not to make this beggarly default, however, one may remind him of the opalescent shimmer in which the story is wrapped, and from which keenly sparkle its facts and traits of comedy and tragedy. For a certain blend of romance and reality, which does no wrong to either component property, I do not know its like in American fiction, and I feel that this is saying far too little; I might say in all fiction, and not accuse myself of extravagance. Short of this I may safely declare it the author’s masterpiece, on which he has lavished his happiest if not his most conscious art; and Aurora Nancanou is its supreme grace. What she is otherwise will not be readily put into words, even her own words. She is always the wild, wilful heart of girlhood, which the experiences of wifehood, motherhood, and widowhood have left unchanged. She is a THE TWO HEROINES OF “THE GRANDISSIMES” woman with a grown-up daughter, but essentially she is her daughter’s junior, and, adorable as Clotilde is in her way, she pales and dulls into commonplace when Aurora is by.

That last chapter, which is so apt to be an anti-climax in a novel, is so good in “ The Grandissimes,” and is so subtly interpretative of Aurora’s personality — the sort of personality which coquettes with itself to the very, end — that I should like to give it entire, though I know that I should have still a haunting fear that without everything that had gone before the portrait of this bewitching creature would want its full effect. Honoré Grandissime, who has loved her through all the involutions of her caprice, has offered himself and been refused, and a scene follows which, among love scenes, has to my knowledge scarcely been surpassed in its delicious naturalness.

“If M. Grandissime had believed that he was prepared for the supreme bitterness of that moment, he had sadly erred. He could not speak. He extended his hand in a dumb farewell, when, all unsanctioned by his will, the voice of despair escaped him in a low groan.

At the same moment, a tinkling sound drew near, and the room, which had grown dark with the fall of night, began to brighten with the softly widening light of an evening lamp, as a servant approached to place it in the front drawing-room. Aurora gave her hand and withdrew it In the act the two somewhat changed position, and the rays of the lamp, as the maid passed the door, falling upon Aurora’s face, betrayed the again upturned eyes. “Sieur Grandissime—’ They fell. The lover paused. ‘You thing I’m crool.’ She was the statue of meekness. ‘Hope has been cruel to me,’ replied M. Grandissime, ‘not you; that I cannot say. Adieu.’ He was turning. “Sieur Grandissime—’ She seemed to tremble. He stood still.

“Sieur Grandissime,’ — her voice was very tender,—’ wad you’ horry?’ There was a great silence. ‘ ‘Sieur Grandissime, you know — teg a chair.’ He hesitated a moment and then both sat down. The servant repassed the door; yet when Aurora broke the silence, she spoke in English — having such hazardous things to say. It would conceal possible stammerings. “Sieur Grandissime — you know dad riz’n I—’ She slightly opened her fan, looking down upon it, and was still. ‘I have no right to ask the reason,’ said M. Grandissime. ‘It is yours — not mine.’ Her head went lower. ‘Well, you know,’ — she drooped it meditatively to one side, with her eyes on the floor,—’  ’tis bickause— ’tis bick-ause I thing in a few days I’m goin’ to die.’ M. Grandissime said never a word. He was not alarmed. She looked up suddenly and took a quick breath, as if to resume, but her eyes fell before his, and she said, in a tone of half-soliloquy: ‘I ‘ave so mudge troub’ wit dad hawt.’ She lifted one little hand feebly to the cardiac region, and sighed softly, with a dying languor. M. Grandissime gave no response. A vehicle rumbled by in the street below, and passed away. At the bottom of the room, where a gilded Mars was driving into battle, a soft note told the half-hour. The lady spoke again. ‘Id mague ‘ — she sighed once more—’ so strange, — sometime’ I thing I’m git’n’ crezzy.’ Still he to whom these fearful disclosures were being made remained as silent and motionless as an Indian captive, and, after another pause, with its painful accompaniment of small sounds, the fair speaker resumed with more energy, as befitting the approach to an incredible climax: ‘Some day, ‘Sieur Grandissime, — id mague me fo’gid my hage! I thing I’m young!’ She lifted her eyes with the evident determination to meet his own squarely, but it was too much; they fell as before; yet she went on speaking: ‘An’ w’en someboddie git’n’ ti’ed livin’ wid ‘imsev an’ big’n’ to fill ole, an’ wan’ someboddie to teg de care of ‘im an’ wan’ me to gid marri’d wid ‘im — I thing ‘e’s in love to me.’ Her fingers kept up a little shuffling with the fan. ‘I thing I’m crezzy. I thing I muz be go’n’ to die torecklie.’ She looked up to the ceiling with large eyes, and then again at the fan in her lap, which continued its spreading and shutting. ‘An’ daz de riz’n, ‘Sieur Grandissime.’ She waited until it was certain he was about to answer, and then interrupted him nervously: ‘You know, ‘Sieur Grandissime, id woon be righd! Id woon be de juztiz to you! An’ you de bez man I ewa know in my life, ‘Sieur Grandissime!’ Her hands shook. ‘A man w’at nevva wan’ to gid marri’d wid noboddie in ‘is life, and now trine to gid marri’d juz only to ripose de soul of ‘is oncl’—’ M. Grandissime uttered an exclamation of protest, and she ceased. ‘I asked you,’ continued he, with low-toned emphasis, ‘for the single and only reason that I want you for my wife.’  ‘Yez,’ she quickly replied; ‘daz all. Daz wad I thing. An’ I thing daz de rad weh to say, ‘Sieur Grandissime. Bick-ause, you know, you an’ me is too hole to talg aboud dad lovin’, you know. An’ you godd dad grade rizpeg fo’ me, an’ me I godd dad ‘ighez rispeg fo’ you; bud—’ she clutched the fan and her face sank lower still—’ bud—’ she swallowed — shook her head—’ bud—’ She bit her lip; she could not go on. ‘Aurora,’ said her lover, bending forward and taking one of her hands. ‘I do love you with all my soul.’ She made a poor attempt to withdraw her hand, abandoned the effort, and looked up savagely through a pair of overflowing eyes, demanding: ‘Mais, fo’ w’y you di’n’ wan’ to sesso?’ M. Grandissime smiled argumentatively. ‘I have said so a hundred times, in every way but in words.’ She lifted her head proudly, and bowed like a queen. ‘Mais, you see, ‘Sieur Grandissime, you bin meg one mizteg.’  ‘But ’tis corrected in time,’ exclaimed he, with suppressed but eager joyousness. “Sieur Grandissime,’ she said with a tremendous solemnity, ‘I’m verrie sawrie, —— you spogue too lade,’  ‘No, no!’ he cried, ‘the correction comes in time. Say that, lady; say that,’ His ardent gaze beat hers once more down; but she shook her head. He ignored the motion. ‘And you will correct your answer; ah! say that, too!’ he insisted, covering the captive hand with both his own, and leaning forward from his seat. ‘Mais, ‘Sieur Grandissime, you know, dad is so verrie unegspeg’.’  ‘Oh!  unexpected!’  ‘Mais, I was thing all dad time id was Clotilde wad you—’ She turned her face away and buried her mouth in her handkerchief. ‘Ah!’ he cried, ‘mock me no more, Aurore Nancanou!’ He rose erect and held the hand firmly which she strove to draw away: ‘Say the word, sweet lady; say the word!’ She turned upon him suddenly, rose to her feet, was speechless an instant while her eyes flashed into his, and crying out: ‘No!’ burst into tears, laughed through them, and let him clasp her to his bosom.”

MR. H. B. FULLER’S JANE MARSHALL AND MISS M. E. WILKINS’S JANE FIELD

IN the fiction of that group of Western novelists whom I think the most representative, I feel the heroines generally so much less important than the heroes that I find myself in a difficulty which I will confess to the reader strictly upon the condition that it shall go no farther. I do this not only because I ought, but also because I must, for if I did not the reader would himself perceive that either I have been wrong in claiming the supremacy of the heroine in a novel as proof of the author’s mastery, or else that these Western novelists whom I like are really not masterly. What is certain is that their heroines are subordinate figures; and there is no way out for me but possibly through the fact that the feminization of our American life, so apparent in and out of literature in the East, has not yet reached the new centres of population between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, and that the Western subordination of the heroine is the instinctive response of fiction to the quantitative if not the qualitative fact. To the casual glance the West would seem, even more than the East, given up socially and intellectually to women; but so far women do not hold the first place in Western fiction. The type of Western womanhood studied in Selma, the heroine of Mr. Robert Grant’s “Unleavened Bread,” is the creation or invention of a Boston novelist, who in obedience to the Eastern tradition gives her supremacy in his story. To be sure Mr. Robert Herrick, in “ The Gospel of Freedom,” made a Western woman the foremost figure in his story; but Mr. Herrick is of Bostonian birth like Mr. Grant, and though recently of Chicagoan adoption, is still imaginably of the earlier allegiance in his deference to the nearly and ever womanly Eastern fiction. In the work of a native Westerner like Mr. Will Paine, the womanly, though so truly portrayed in such a story as “ The Money Captain,” is subordinated in interest to the manly; and Mr. George Ade, whose brilliant divinations of feminine foible form the delightfulness of his “Stories and Fables,” gives his highest energies or inspirations to the study of persons of his own sex, and Doc Horne and Artie and Pink Marsh are his masterpieces in characterization.

Mr. Hamlin Garland also is more memorable for his men than his women, and the critical Trailer (I am writing with the phraseology of his latest story insistently in mind) will find the Float of masculine character more abundant in his gold-bearing mountains than the surface indications of heroinism. In his earlier and shorter stories, and still in his shorter and later stories, you are aware of the manly sympathy which divines this precious metal; and the Rose who is the “ Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley “ is a genuine piece of womanhood, with both the material and the spiritual auras which form its allure. She is imagined with a courage uncommon in our fiction, and portrayed with a conscience unable to spare the suggestions of undraped nature which our tradition blinks. It is no longer, as it is not yet, the time for such courage and conscience; and we still await a due heroine from a novelist whose work otherwise avouches his power in dealing with character.

I

Among Western novelists we must go to the page of Mr. Henry B. Fuller, apparently more sensitive to Eastern influences, or the Western advance of feminization, for a heroine of the fit proportions; and I think we find her in one of the chief figures of the story which is upon the whole the most representative of his native city. “With the Procession” has not the epical motive of “The Cliff-Dwellers”; but the epical motive always incurs the danger of turning mechanical, and “With the Procession” escapes this, while it studies, delicately but penetratingly, the evolution of Chicago from a large town to a great city, in the inner and outer life of a typical family which voluntarily and involuntarily prospers with it The daughter of this family, who determines to make it share her own social consciousness, is a heroine of rare and even new kind. She begins properly to win the heart of the reader from the moment when in view of her evident want of beauty and style she humorously decides to be “quaint” and to work life upon the lines of that decision. Her “quaintness” is not an affectation, but is the frank recognition of her material limitations, and she is powerfully abetted in her resolution by another person of the drama who was a belle of an earlier period, but has become quaint inwardly, while appearing outwardly a figure of great social power and splendor. The management of these two delightful women is of the artistic sort which puts you in full possession of their quality without much advertising you of the process. This makes it difficult to give distinctive passages concerning them; but not impossible, and it is not without the hope of making my reader wish to know them better that I introduce them in the scene where they become fast friends.

Jane Marshall, the younger of the friends, has gone from her father’s old-fashioned house to the new-fashioned palace of Mrs. Granger Bates to ask the social leader for a subscription in behalf of the working-girls’ club she is fostering; and after being snubbed and put down on general principles by the great lady, suddenly finds herself caught to her heart, when Mrs. Bates learns that she is the daughter of David Marshall; for David Marshall, far back in the fifties, was a favorite “beau” of Mrs. Bates’s, and she still has an honest tenderness for him. She takes the odd girl to her heart in every way, and, leading her through the “marble halls” where she receives the world, she welcomes her to the little room where she lives.

“The door closed with a light click, and Jane looked about her with a great and sudden surprise. Poor, stupid, stumbling child! — she understood at last in what spirit she had been received and on what footing she had been placed. She found herself in a small, cramped, low-ceiled room which was filled with worn and antiquated furniture. There was a ponderous old mahogany bureau, with the veneering cracked and peeled, and a bed to correspond. There was a shabby little writing-desk, whose let-down lid was lined with faded and blotted, green baize. On the floor there was an old Brussels carpet, antique as to pattern and wholly threadbare as to surface. The walls were covered with an old-time paper whose plaintive primitiveness ran in slender pink stripes alternating with narrow green vines. In one corner stood a small upright piano whose top was littered with loose sheets of old music, and on one wall hung a set of thin black-walnut shelves strung together with cords and loaded with a variety of well-worn volumes. In the grate was a coal fire. Mrs. Bates sat down on the foot of the bed and motioned Jane to a small rocker that had been re-seated with a bit of old rugging.... Mrs. Bates had stepped to her single little window. ‘Isn’t it a gem?’ she asked. ‘I had it made to order; one of the old-fashioned sort, you see — two sash, with six little panes in each. No weights and cords, but simply catches at the side. It opens to just two widths; if I want anything different, I have to contrive it for myself. Sometimes I use a hair-brush and sometimes a paper-cutter.’... ‘Do you like my posies?’ She nodded towards the window, where, thanks to the hair-brush, a row of flowers in a long, narrow box blew about in the draught. ‘Asters?’  ‘No, no, no! But I hoped you’d guess asters. They’re chrysanthemums — you see, fashion will penetrate even here. But they’re the smallest and simplest I could find. What do I care for orchids and American beauties, and all those other expensive things under glass? How much does it please me to have two great big formal beds of gladiolus and foliage plants in the front yard, one on each side of the steps? Still, with our position, I suppose it can’t be helped. No; what I want is a bed of portulaca, and some cypress vines running up strings to the top of a pole. As soon as I get poor enough to afford it I’m going to have a lot of phlox and London pride and bachelor’s buttons out there in the back-yard, and the girls can run their clothes lines somewhere else.’  ‘It’s hard to keep flowers in a city,’ said Jane. ‘I know it is. At our old house we had such a nice little rose-bush in the front-yard. I hated so to leave it behind — one of those little yellow brier-roses. No, it wasn’t yellow; it was just— “yaller.” And it always scratched my nose when I tried to smell it. But oh, child ‘ — wistfully—’ if I could only smell it now!’  ‘Couldn’t you have transplanted it?’ asked Jane, sympathetically. ‘I went back the very next day after we moved out, with a peach-basket and a fire-shovel. But my poor bush was buried under seven feet of yellow sand. To-day there’s seven stories of brick and mortar. So all I’ve got from the old place is just this furniture of ma’s and the wall-paper.’  ‘The wall-paper?’  ‘Not the identical same, of course. It’s like what I had in my bedroom when I was a girl. I remembered the pattern, and tried everywhere to match it.... And finally— “Well, what — finally?’  ‘Finally, I sent down East and had eight or ten rolls made to order. I chased harder than anybody ever chased for a Raphael, and I spent more than if I had hung the room with Gobelins; but—’ She stroked the narrow strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. ‘Isn’t it just too quaintly ugly for anything?’  ‘It isn’t any such thing,’ cried Jane. ‘It’s just as sweet as it can be! I only wish mine was like it.’... Mrs. Bates began to rummage among the drawers of her old desk. ‘There!’ she said, presently, ‘I knew I could put my hands on it.’ She set a daguerreotype before Jane. Its oval was bordered with a narrow line of gilded metal and its small square back was covered with embossed brown leather. ‘There, now! Do you know who that is?’ Jane looked back and forth doubtfully between the picture and its owner. ‘Is it — is it — pa?’ Mrs. Bates nodded. Jane regarded the daguerreotype with a puzzled fascination. ‘Did my father ever wear his hair all wavy across his forehead that way, and have such a thing tied around his throat, and wear a vest all covered with those little gold sprigs?’  ‘Precisely. That’s just the way he looked the last time we danced together. And what do you suppose the dance was? Guess and guess and guess again! It was this.’ Mrs. Bates whisked herself on to the piano-stool and began to play and to sing. Her touch was heavy and spirited, but her voice was easily audible above the instrument.

“‘Old Dan Tucker, he got drunk;

He jumped in the fire and he kicked up a chunk

Of red-hot charcoal with his shoes.

Lordy!how the ashes flew-hoo!’

“Jane dropped the daguerreotype in time to take up the refrain:

“‘Clear the road for old Dan Tucker!

You’re too late to get your supper.

Clear the road for old Dan—’

‘Aha! you know it!’ cried Mrs. Bates, gayly. ‘Of course,’ responded Jane. ‘My education may be modem, on the whole, but it hasn’t neglected the classics completely! Gentlemen forward!’ she said, with a sudden cry, which sent Mrs. Bates’s fingers back to the keyboard; “gentlemen forward to Mister Tucker!’ Mrs. Bates pounded loudly, and Jane pirouetted up to her from behind. ‘Ladies forward to Mister Tucker!’ cried Jane, and Mrs. Bates left the stool and began dancing towards her. Then she danced back and took her seat again; but with the first chord; ‘ALL forward to Miss Tucker!’ called Jane again; and they met face to face in the middle of the room and burst out laughing.... ‘Sit down; I’m going to play the “Java March” for you.’ She struck out several ponderous and vengeful chords. ‘Why,’ called Jane, ‘is that the “Java March”?’ She spread out her elbows and stalked up and down singing:

“‘Oh, the Dutch compa-nee

Is the best compa-nee!”

‘Right again!’ cried Mrs. Bates. ‘You are one of us — just as I said!’  ‘Well, if that’s the “Java March,’” said Jane, ‘it’s in an old book we used to have about the house years and years ago. Only, if you bring it up as an example of pa’s taste—’  ‘He liked it because I played it, perhaps,’ said Mrs. Bates quietly. ‘Besides, why should you put it to those shocking words? It is in that book,’ she continued, ‘and I’ve got one here just like it.’  ‘Is it the one with “ Roll on, Silver Moon,” and “Wild roved the Indian Maid, Bright What’s-her-name”?’  ‘Bright Alfarata. Same one, exactly. Bring up another chair, and we’ll go through a whole programme of classics — pruggrum, I mean.’  ‘Let’s see, though,’ said Jane, looking at her watch. ‘Mercy me! where has the morning gone? It’s after eleven o’clock.’... Mrs. Bates opened the front door herself. ‘You can take the choo-choo cars at Sixteenth, you know, and get off at Van Buren. Oh, dear; excuse my baby-talk; our little Reginald — two months old, you know.’... She accompanied Jane halfway down the steps, bareheaded as she was, and in her morning-gown. A society reporter who happened to be passing originated the rumor that she had gone insane.”

If, after all, these passages are illustrative of Mrs. Bates rather than of Jane Marshall, it is perhaps because Jane Marshall is less susceptible of illustration by select passages. She is a singularly undramatic heroine, and lives in a sort of subjectivity more perceptible than demonstrable to the sympathetic reader’s knowledge of her faithful and lovable character. In fact, the scene given displays only that surface of her character which is the least significant of her quality. It is her hard fate, through her zeal for her father’s standing and her pride in him, to rend him and her mother from the ugly, old-fashioned keeping in which they were peacefully rusting out their lives, and get them into “the procession,” and when her father falls out of it dying, she feels as if she had killed him. But she really has not; she has been the truest and kindest of all his children to him; and she has her reward when the faithful Theodore Brower, long mute with love for her, takes heart at the funeral to say that he will go as one of the family, and in the same carriage as her, or not go at all. The grotesqueness is not blinked, but the pathos is delicately intimated in it; and, throughout the story, the blunt, angular, outright nature of the girl is studied with constant recognition of her sweetness and unselfish goodness, and her humorous self-depreciation. She is but one of many women in the story whose personalities are all rendered with an unerring touch.

II

To pass from the atmosphere of Mr. Fuller’s “With the Procession” to Miss Mary E. Wilkins’s “Jane Field “ is to make proof at once of the variety and the solidarity of American life. Nothing as to conditions could be farther apart than Chicago and Green River; and yet the vast, loud, lavish metropolis of the West, and the prim, meagre, niggard New England village are animated by the same ideal of conduct, the same Puritanized conscience, the same desire of justice and righteousness. The Chicago family in dealing with the problem of the iniquitous son and brother whose sin has followed him home from Europe is of as simple and direct an impulse as Jane Field in her self-denunciation to those she has deceived in her too ingenious endeavor for justice; and when it appears that money will serve quite as well as marriage, or better, they feel a noble shame in compounding the wrong of a like quality with Lois Field’s sense of dishonor in silently witnessing her mother’s trespass. It is in the Europeanized and modernized black sheep of the Chicago fold that the differentiation of ideal takes place; but his aberration from the home standard is as wide in his Chicago domestic circle as it would be in Green River.

The delight of the higher probability must remain with the Western novelist, who is realistic through and through, whereas the New England novelist is at heart romantic, and realistic mainly in expression. She narrowly escapes the impossible in her plot, and saves herself from point to point in the story by clever devices and agile turns which tax the credulity of the reader rather than raise his admiration. They ask him to grant premises; but the true plot, the situation that reproduces life, compels him to grant them. Nevertheless, it is fairly possible, or if not that, it is unfairly possible, that Jane Field, seeing her frail young daughter dying before her eyes in a pitiless decline, as she believes, for want of rest from work and change of air, should bethink herself of the inheritance left her dead sister, and, cloudily keeping in mind her extraordinary resemblance to her sister, should suffer herself to be mistaken for her, and should try to enter into the enjoyment of her own rights through her sister’s property. The reader of the story, so powerful in spite of its inherent weaknesses, will remember that her sister’s husband has lost all her own little fortune in speculation, and that Jane Field has no purpose but to recover the value of her fifteen hundred dollars. It is with this purpose that she goes to Elliott, a hundred miles away from Green River, to seek her just dues from the estate which must, upon her sister’s death being known, revert to the family of her sister’s husband. The lawyer who has the property in charge greets Mrs. Field as Mrs. Maxwell, and in the sudden, crazy hope of turning his error to her account, without infringing the just rights of the loyal heirs, she does not correct him. It is her dim, unformulated notion that she may collect her dues, to the amount of the fifteen hundred dollars lost, from the income of the property, and then relinquish possession; but when her daughter follows her to Elliott and sets her pitiless young conscience in condemnation over the mother who has taken this desperate chance for her sake, Jane Field finds it impossible to touch a cent of her dues. They put everything by for the legal owners, and cower in the old Maxwell house, keeping themselves from starvation by the little that Lois can earn in sewing, till a visit from some old Green River neighbors deepens the stress of her sin upon Jane Field, and drives her to anticipate detection by denouncing herself to the whole village of Elliott. You can drive a coach through several places in this loose structure, but if you have no wish for such an excursion, you can enjoy the psychology of the tremendous situation, as it is worked out in the characters of the mother and daughter.

Lois first unexpectedly appears at Elliott the morning after her mother’s arrival. They meet at the lawyer’s office, where Jane Field is talking of the property with him, and she is obliged to introduce Lois as her niece, or rather to let the lawyer deceive himself as to their relation; she keeps as far as she can from positive deception; and then the mother and daughter go home to the Maxwell house together.... “Mrs. Field stalked ahead with her resolute stiffness; Lois followed after her, keeping always several paces behind. No matter how often Mrs. Field, sternly conscious of it, slackened her own pace, Lois never gained upon her. When they reached the gate at the entrance of the Maxwell grounds, and Mrs. Field stopped, Lois spoke up. ‘What place is this?’ said she, in a defiantly timorous voice. ‘The Maxwell house,’ replied her mother, shortly, turning up the walk. ‘Are you going in here?’  ‘Of course I am.’  ‘Well, I ain’t going in one step.’ Mrs. Field turned and faced her. ‘Lois,’ said she, ‘if you want to go away and desert the mother that’s showin’ herself willin’ to die for you, you can.’ Lois said not another word. She turned in at the gate, with her eyes fixed upon her mother’s face. ‘I’ll tell you about it when we get up to the house,’ said her mother, with appealing conciliation. Lois slunk mutely behind her again. Her eyes were full of the impulse of flight when she watched her mother unlock the house door, but she followed her in.... ‘Now, Lois,’ said Mrs. Field, ‘I’m goin’ to tell you about this.... You know, I s’pose, that Mr.Tuxbury took me for your aunt Esther. ‘Lois nodded; her dilated eyes never wavered from her mother’s face. ‘I s’pose you heard what he was sayin’ to me when you come in. Lois, I didn’t tell him I was your aunt Esther. The minute I come in, he took me for her, an’ Mis’ Henry Maxwell come into his office, an’ she did, an’ so did Mr. Tuxbury’s sister. I wa’n’t goin’ to tell them I wa’n’t her.... An’ I’ll tell you why. I’m goin’ to have that fifteen hundred dollars of your poor father’s earnin’s that I lent your uncle out of this property, an’ this is all the way to do it, an’ I’m goin’ to do it.’... ‘Couldn’t you have asked the lawyer about the fifteen hundred dollars? Wouldn’t he have given you some? O mother!’  ‘I was goin’ to if he hadn’t took me for her, but it wouldn’t have done any good. They wouldn’t have been obliged to pay it, an’ folks ain’t fond of payin’ over money when they ain’t obliged to. I’d been a fool to have asked him after he took me for her.’  ‘Then — you’d got this — all planned?’ Her mother took her up sharply. ‘No, I hadn’t got it all planned,’ said she. ‘I don’t deny it come into my head. I knew how much folks said I looked like Esther, but I didn’t go so far as to plan it; there needn’t anybody say I did.’  ‘You ain’t going to take the money?’  ‘I’m goin’ to take that fifteen hundred dollars out of it.’  ‘Mother, you ain’t going to stay here, and make folks think you’re Aunt Esther?’  ‘Yes, I am.’ Then all Lois’s horror and terror manifested themselves in one cry— ‘O mother!’”

When the fierce sense of wrong subsides, and the iron purpose of righting herself breaks in Jane Field, her relentless will asserts itself again in the impulse to punish herself for the deceit she has practised, and to take the consequences of her transgression before all the world; and she begins with the three old Green River neighbors who are visiting her.

“When Lois left home that afternoon her mother had been in her bedroom changing her dress. When she came out she had on her best black dress, her black shawl and gloves, and her best bonnet. The three women stared at her. She stood before them a second without speaking. The strange look, for which Lois had watched her face, had appeared. ‘Why, what is the matter, Mis’ Field?’ cried Mrs. Babcock. ‘Where be you goin’?’  ‘I’m goin’ out a little ways,’ replied Mrs. Field. Then she raised her voice suddenly. ‘I’ve got something to say to all of you before I go,’ said she. ‘I’ve been deceivin’ you, and everybody here in Elliott. When I came down here, they all took me for my sister, Esther Maxwell, and I let them think so. They’ve all called me Esther Maxwell here. That’s how I got the money. Old Mr. Maxwell left it to Flora Maxwell if my sister didn’t outlive him. I shouldn’t have had a cent. I stole it I thought my daughter would die if she didn’t have it an’ get away from Green River; but that wa’n’t any excuse. Edward Maxwell had that fifteen hundred dollars of my husband’s, an’ I never had a cent of it; but that wa’n’t any excuse. I thought I’d jest stay here an’ carry it out till I got the money back; but that wa’n’t any excuse. I ain’t spent a cent of the money; it’s all put away just as it was paid in, in a sugar-bowl in the china closet; but that ain’t any excuse. I took it on myself to do justice instead of the Lord, an’ that ain’t for any human bein’ to do. I ain’t Esther Maxwell. I’m brought up short. I ain’t Esther Maxwell!’ Her voice rose to a stem shriek. The three women stared at her, then at each other. Their faces were white. Amanda was catching her breath in faint gasps. Jane Field rushed out of the room. The door closed heavily after her. Three wild, pale faces huddled together in a window watched her out of the yard. Mrs. Babcock called weakly after her to come back, but she kept on. She went out of the yard and down the street At the first house she stopped, went up to the door and rang the bell. When a woman answered her ring, she looked at her and said, ‘I ain’t Esther Maxwell!’ Then she turned and went down the walk between the rows of marigolds and asters, and the woman stood staring after her for a minute, then ran in, and the windows filled with wondering faces. Jane Field stopped at the next house with the same message. After she left a woman pelted across the yard in a panic to compare notes with her neighbors. She kept on down the street, and she stopped at every door and said, ‘I ain’t Esther Maxwell.’ Now and then somebody tried to delay her to question her and obtain an explanation, but she broke away. There was about her a terrible mental impetus which intimidated. People stood instinctively out of her way, as before some rushing force which might overwhelm them.... She went on and on, all the summer afternoon, and canvassed the little village with her remorse and confession of crime. Finally the four words which she said at the doors seemed almost involuntary. They became her one natural note, the expression of her whole life. It was as if she had never said any others.... When she went up the path to the Maxwell house, she said them where the shadow of a pine-tree fell darkly in front of her like the shadow of a man. She said them when she stood before the door of the house whose hospitality she had usurped. There was a little crowd at her heels, but she did not notice them until she was entering the door, Then she said the words over to them: ‘I ain’t Esther Maxwell,’ She entered the sitting-room, the people following. There were her three old friends and neighbors, the minister and his wife, Daniel Tuxbury, his sister and her daughter, Mrs. Jane Maxwell and her daughter, and her own Lois. She faced them all and said it again: ‘I ain’t Esther Maxwell.’... Lois pressed forward and clung to her. ‘Mother!’ she moaned, ‘mother,’ Then for once her mother varied her set speech. ‘Lois wa’n’t to blame,’ she said; ‘I want you to know it, all of you. Lois wa’n’t to blame. She didn’t know until after I’d done it She wanted to tell, but I told her they’d put me in prison. Lois wa’n’t to blame. I ain’t Esther Maxwell.’  ‘O mother, don’t! don’t!’ Lois sobbed. She hung about her mother’s neck, and pressed her lips to that pale, wrinkled face, whose wrinkles seemed now to be laid in stone. Not a muscle of Jane Field’s face changed. She kept repeating at intervals, in precisely the same tone, her terrible under-chord to all the excitement about her: ‘I ain’t Esther Maxwell. ‘“

MRS. HUMPHRY WARD’S HEROINES

IN reading Mrs. Humphry Ward’s last story, “Eleanor,” I felt again, as I had felt before in her work, its general difference from the best American fiction in a particular which may perhaps have caught the notice of others. If it has not, I may be mistaken in my feeling, and shall be unable to persuade others to make it their conviction. But the point is interesting, and if I can make it evident something will have been done toward explaining American novelists to themselves, and reconciling them to their performances as the necessary outcome of their conditions. Possibly, something more will have been done, and they will be satisfied in recognizing that English breadth must always be denied them, and to make the most of the depth which seems to be their characteristic when they are at their best.

I

The deceitfulness of appearances is notorious, and even when they are the effect of reality they are seldom of such a unanimity that the inference from them cannot reasonably be questioned. You have first to get your appearances, and this alone is a thing of no small difficulty. Many appearances are so purely subjective that, when you come to draw the attention of others to them, they turn out to be disappearances; and, in the case in hand, there will probably be some people to deny that English fiction is noticeably broad, or American fiction noticeably deep. They will say that Thomas Hardy and George Eliot have both written things that suggest depth as well as breadth, and that Mrs. Ward, who is alone among English writers worthy to be mentioned with these novelists, is so much of the American spirit in her art that, if her work is broad, it is a proof that breadth is as characteristic of American fiction as depth.

The effect is to dissatisfy you with the words themselves, as saying too much, and if, after trying dramatic and epical, you return to them, you wish to explain that you employ neither invidiously, but only with the single desire to trace certain questionable appearances to certain unquestionable facts, and so render them less questionable. I confess that the effect of the breadth I have felt, or seemed to feel, in Mrs. Ward’s work was such as to make me discontented with the depth that I remembered in the best American work, as if this were comparatively a defect, since it was necessarily narrower. It was only by reflecting that our depth was the inevitable implication of our civic and social conditions that I was consoled, and restored to something like a national self-respect. To put it paradoxically, our life is too large for our art to be broad. In despair at the immense scope and variety of the material offered it by American civilization, American fiction must specialize, and, turning distracted from the superabundance of character, it must burrow far down in a soul or two.

Men may invent almost anything but themselves, and it was not because Hawthorne made himself psychological, but because he was so, that in the American environment he bent his vision inward. His theory was that our life was too level and too open and too sunnily prosperous for his art, but it was an instinct far subtler than this belief that he obeyed in seeking the subliminal drama. Hawthorne was romantic, but our realists who have followed him have been of the same instinct, and have dealt mainly with the subliminal drama, too. In their books, so faithful to the effect of our every-day life, the practical concerns of it are subordinated to the psychical, not consciously, but so constantly that their subordination has not been a matter of any question. The usual incidents of fiction have not, in the best American novelists, been the prime concern, but the subliminal effect of those incidents. Love itself, which is the meat and drink of fiction, is treated less as a passional than as a psychological phenomenon. Long ago the more artistic of our novelists perceived that the important matter was not what the lovers suffered or enjoyed in getting married, or whether they got married, at all or not, but what sort of man and maid their love found them out to be, and how, under its influence, the mutual chemistry of their natures interacted. All the problems, in any case, are incomparably simplified for the English novelist by the definite English conditions. One can no longer call them fixed; but they are still definite, and in a certain way character proceeds from them: the character of a gentleman, a business man, an artisan, a servant, a laborer. Each of these has his being in a way so different from the others’ that he is a definitely different creature; and when through some chance, some perverse mixture of the elements, the conditions are traversed, and the character bred of one shows itself in another, it has a stronger relief from the alien background. But, ordinarily, the Englishman feels, thinks, and acts from his class, and when you name his class you measurably state him; after that you have rather to do with what he does than what he is. The result in fiction is a multiplicity of incident and a multitude of persons; and you have breadth rather than depth.

Even in so psychological a story as Mrs. Ward’s “Marcella,” the definite conditions account for so much that it is, after all, a study of incident more than a study of motive. The conventions of English realism, the county society and the life of the great houses, and interests and opinions of the gentry and their dependants; the hovels and the physical and moral squalor of the poor; the parliamentary election and the agitations of the demagogues and the real reformers; the intervention of the church and the chapel; the poaching and the murder and the hanging — all these things are of the familiar acquaintance of the novel-reader, who knows them from the time of Bulwer down, through the innumerable novelists who have treated of them since. Mrs. Ward treats of them with a fresh mind, but they are in themselves so far from fresh that they seem to stale her thought of them; and the figure that she projects against them, the very novel and very original figure of Marcella, seems to acquire convention from them, and to be as hackneyed as all the rest. The result is a fiction of high order, of a higher order in certain aspects than any since George Eliot’s fictions, and yet having breadth rather than depth. This may be an appearance and not a fact. Marcella is so essentially modem, so perfectly of the day before yesterday, that the inquiry into the soul of the socialistic esthete, the girl of good birth and good tradition, emerging from her shady father’s past, to find herself engaged to the most conscientious and noble-minded of aristocrats, but at war with all his convictions through the impassioned preferences of her earlier associations, necessarily involves psychological research which goes far if it does not go deep. She is, indeed, so interesting that one wishes the author might have had her in the sparsely settled region of an American fiction, so that we could have sat down with her in the long leisure of our social existence and divined her to the ultimate mystery of her being. It may be answered that there is really no more of her than her author shows, but it seems as if, in a different environment, there might have been more.

Possibly we touch here a fundamental variance of the English and American life. In former times we Americans were accused of being curious, over-curious, of being insatiable and impertinent questioners of strangers. It may be, however, that we are not so, but that the most penetrating difference between us and the English is that they are social and we are personal. Their denser life, we will say, satisfies them with superficial contrasts, while in our thinner and more homogeneous society the contrasts that satisfy are subliminal. This theory would account for their breadth and our depth without mortifying the self-love of either, which I should like to spare in our case if not in theirs. To float and to dive may be equally creditable.

Our personality is the consequence of our historic sparsity, and it survives beyond its time because the nature of our contiguity is still such as to fix a man’s mind strongly upon himself, and to render him restless till he has ascertained how far all other men are like him. We are prodigiously homogeneous, though in the absence of classification we seem so chaotic. We shall change, probably, and then the character of our fiction, our art of representing life, will change, too. Very likely it will become more superficial and less subliminal; it will lose in depth as it gains in breadth. As yet, its attempts to be broad, to be society fiction, have resulted in a shallowness which is not suggestive of breadth.

II

The English are less apt than we have been to carry a story abroad, and to find in an alien setting terms more favorable than those of home for the subliminal interests. This may be because they inevitably carry their civilization with them in all possible details down to the emblematic bath-tub, while we find that we can get on abroad fairly well without steam-heat and exposed plumbing, and the American order which they stand for. We are, in fact, far more easily detachable from our native background, and blend far more readily with the alien atmosphere, than the English; so that I think if an American family as nearly as possible corresponding to the Manisties had been set down in the air of Rome, they would have lost their native outline more. The thing is hard to say, and perhaps I shall come as near to suggesting it as may be in noting the impression that the cosmopolitan Englishman gives, of being more English than if he had never left home; whereas, the cosmopolitan American really ceases to be American if he does not become anything else.

Of course, my position can be assailed by saying that there could not be any such American family as the Manisties, who are distinctively and inalienably English, and are of that world which, whether it is really great or not, makes ours look a small world. Manisty has had to do all his life with questions which affect politically, socially, and spiritually the civilization of many races, systems, languages, and religions, as no American public man can have to do with them; and Eleanor Burgoyne, through the English traditions which admit women to the discussion of such questions, is of a range of thinking and feeling possible to no American woman, except some one who has given up society and gone in for a public life through the advocacy of a great interest, like temperance or the suffrage for women. I allow that all this is true, without allowing all its implications; and in the mean time I fall back to my original position, and invite the reader again to consider whether the fact does not make for that breadth in English fiction which I began by imagining. We will suppose that the author for the sake of getting her main group of people face to face with each other, and keeping them to their psychological problem, wishes to isolate them from the alliances and relations of their past, and therefore takes them into an alien environment Almost immediately it proves that she has not isolated the English Manisty and Eleanor, but only the American girl, Lucy Foster. With the others, questions of European policy at once come in, and distract their attention from the psychological problem; to Lucy alone these questions are without vital interest, if not without reality. Priests, diplomats, peasants, artists, citizens, society figures come and go in her consciousness, with the effect of deepening it inward and concentrating it in the great question whether she is doing wrong in letting Manisty love her, or letting herself love him, when she feels or knows that Eleanor loves him.

If the situation had been invented by an American novelist, I think he would have studied it mainly through the consciousness of Lucy, and the prime interest of the story would have been personal, psychological, subliminal. The effect would have been depth; and I do not mean this in any bragging way. Now, the main effect is breadth, which, certainly, I could not mean derogatorily. It is indifferent to me, for the present inquiry, whether the American or the English effect is better; and I wish to note, without disparagement of Mrs. Ward’s work, that Mr. Hardy gets “depth” by dealing with persons who are unconventionally circumstanced, or wholly out of society. For much the same reason, the author of the remarkable “Mark Rutherford” books is able to get it. But these alone among English novelists get it in anything like the American measure.

Is it true, then, that the Americans get it because their characters are unconventionally circumstanced, or are not in society? Something very like this might be true; and American fiction is faithfuller to the average American conditions than if it dealt with people conventionally circumstanced and in society, for most of us are certainly not so, as most equally educated Englishmen certainly are so. We have the forms; the society structure is the same with us; but, having built our house and furnished it, we find it a bother, and would rather lodge at a hotel and dine at a restaurant.

Still better, we like to travel, to journey and sojourn in far countries, and amidst the outer strangeness to get more intimately at our inner selves. If we are novelists, we like to take our characters abroad, as if the home sparsity were not enough, and in the resulting isolation to penetrate the last recesses of their mystery, or at least learn that it is not penetrable. More than one piece of our subtlety in this sort could be alleged, but perhaps it is sufficient to allege two, of which what I am saying seems eminently true, namely, “The Marble Faun” and “Daisy Miller.” If an English novelist does the same thing, the result is not the same; the English environment is inalienable; the characters are continually frittering themselves away in superficial encounter on the native terms, at dinners and luncheons, and teas, and what not, till there is nothing subliminal left in them.

III

One great objection to words is that they are always oversaying things; and I could easily take up the foregoing postulate and show it untenably excessive. Nevertheless, I think it has some truth in it, and I feel concerning Eleanor Burgoyne that she is not enough alone for the evolution of her innermost self. She is always in a clutter of society, which is right enough, since she is of that English world so cluttered, to our elbow-roomy American sense, as we view it afar or anear; even in her withdrawals from it in pain or in passion, the atmosphere of drawing-rooms seems to envelop her. It is her native air, and one cannot complain, though one feels that a final knowledge of what she might otherwise have been to the reader must be postponed to a future life. What she could be in this, hampered by the perpetual coming and going, and meeting and parting, is a most generously imagined personality. In fact, Mrs. Ward is so good at imagining heroines of noble nature that she ought to be the favorite novelist of her sex, which loves to have its magnanimity recognized; I will not say flattered. The wife of David Grieve, in the novel of his name, is one of these great creatures, and worthily the heroine of what I am not going rashly to call the author’s best book, though I should not dispute such a verdict from another. I think it was contrived that the reader should meet her on a more subliminal level than most other English heroines, and this was perhaps so because she was of a social world almost as uncrowded as our own; and perhaps also because there is something much more analogous to the American in the Scotch nature than in the English. I am writing without the book, but after the five years which have passed since I read that powerful story she is still present in a sort of tender sublimity, as the fit impersonation of the sacred love whose flame purifies David Grieve’s soul of all but the record of his profaner passion.

So much may be expected and exacted of the type of heroine which Mrs. Ward imagines, that the noble goodness of Marcella Maxwell, when she reappears in the story of “Sir George Tressady,” can have force not only to regenerate the feeling of Sir George toward herself and transform it to an exalted friendship, but also to turn the jealousy of Lady Tressady to some such complexion. Can such things be? one asks one’s self, and then is ashamed of one’s self for asking, for doubting. Yet Lady Tressady, in her prettiness and pettiness, her vanity and vulgarity, has the superior probability, and is — I am tempted to say it — more profoundly divined than Marcella. In fact, Marcella loses probability in her second avatar, as socialistic wife to a socializing prime-minister. In the scheme of “ Sir George Tressady,” the ideal beauty of soul so courageously imagined for her scarcely recompenses the reader for this loss, though he must honor the courage. Her apparition to Tressady, crushed and dying in the coalmine, is not of the convincing supernaturalism to which Tourguénief and Tolstoy have sometimes carried their naturalism; and her personal beauty, which is so constantly insisted upon, seems at each insistence less impressive. At the risk of being insufferably paradoxical, I should say that Marcella was left less appreciable by being left too little a mystery, and that, in being altogether removed from the vague, she is rendered impalpable to those perceptions which realize personalities. To put it still more perversely, we meet her too often to know her thoroughly. We know little light, hard Letty Tressady far better; we have a sense of her; she is the more convincing because, to the very last, we are no more convinced than she is that she is not still jealous of her husband with respect to Marcella, though she is no longer jealous of Marcella with respect to her husband. She has forgiven but she has not forgotten, and she remains with the reader in the luminous question whether she will like being commended to the care of Marcella and Lord Maxwell by her dying husband.

In suggesting such a question, the author evinces psychological depth, and in questions equally incapable of final answer in the case of both the wife and the mistress in “David Grieve” I find proof of a depth in that novel beyond that of any other of Mrs. Ward’s books. The wife’s relation to David’s past amour remains full of satisfying mystery; and in the feeling of the French girl who forsakes him for her art, and escapes in terror from her love of him, there is something that seems to penetrate the very sources of her nature.

IV

Of course, I am aware of proving too much, but if I am getting at the truth I do not much mind being, inconsistent, or even finding myself wrong. If my thesis is that Mrs. Ward, when her fiction deals with the more crowded scenes of English life, loses depth, and when it deals with a sparser environment gains depth, perhaps I shall not find myself so very wrong, after all. I should still have to ask myself how far she had sought such an environment in laying the scene of her last novel in Italy, and in giving her English heroine the relief of an alien setting; how far such a motive was subconscious with her, and how far she had failed to give it effect.

I have already intimated my sense of her comparative failure, and as for the subconscious motive, that is something that I know of no critical subtlety competent to render evident. The question which remains is, in what degree the inevitable spread of the story has superficialized the heroine’s character, or perhaps the impression of her character.

What one has to do, in any case, is to recognize the courageous originality with which Eleanor Burgoyne is imagined. She has been married to a sufficiently unlovable and unloving husband, whose delirious suicide has involved the death of their little son. She struggles up from her crushing sorrow, and in making herself useful to her cousin Manisty as his secretary and counsellor in his work she finds not respite from her grief so much as the chance of new happiness in the hope of his love. But she loves him too well and unwisely to be his unsparing critic; and when the unformed American girl, Lucy Foster, comes into their family circle, and from the fearlessness of her absolute sincerity censures where Eleanor has not the heart to censure, Eleanor has the anguish of seeing the man’s fancy veer toward the girl as one of greater authority. Lucy is beautiful, and Eleanor, in the first days, has devoted her taste and knowledge to making her more evidently beautiful. The feeling that she has toward her is not jealousy, or else it is a jealousy so sublimed by her noble nature that it is rather a recognition of the facts than a resentment of them. She weakens, indeed, so far as to put the case to Lucy and ask her to give Manisty up to the love which has earned him but not won him; and the girl consents. But both their wills are crushed in Manisty’s when he makes it plain that his love has nothing to do with justice, and that he wants what he wants, not because it is best or impersonally right, but because he wants it. This is the way of true love, which we are always exalting as the finest thing in the world, though there are obviously many things finer. It is, at least, honest and sincere, and that is what Eleanor Burgoyne owns in her acquiescence with fate, when she renders Lucy up to her inevitable happiness, if it is happiness to marry Manisty. That the woman should ask the girl to forego her happiness is a daring supposition in which we must acknowledge the author’s high esthetic courage, and perhaps the frankness which is almost brutal in Eleanor’s despair is truer than any fineness would have been. The contrast of the two lives in that scene, the woman’s experience and the girl’s innocence, is more valuable than the contrast even of their natures; but possibly in this also the author’s work lends itself to my theory of greater breadth and less depth in the English novel as compared with the American. Nothing of subconscious, of subliminal, is left to the reader’s conjecture; but I do not at all mean that character is rendered superficial by bringing everything in it to the surface. I am far too fond of the plain light of day for that; but still it may be so contrived that the plain light of day may strike to the nethermost abysses, and that what is most intricate and most recondite in the soul may be rendered luminously apparent at its proper depth.

V

The personality and the dramatic office of Eleanor are greatly imagined, and they remain essentially unaffected by the handling. You get the meaning of her tragedy and the innermost meaning, which is perhaps less poignant than it might be if it were relieved by comedy. Mrs. Ward is serious, and, no doubt, in this she has her strongest hold upon her vast public, for the average woman, if not the average man, likes her prophets or prophetesses always to seem as much in earnest as they are. Through the absence of humor, Mrs. Ward is a little lower, if one chooses to think so, than that great woman novelist whose level she more nearly reaches than any of her successors. You cannot quite name her in the same breath with George Eliot; but you can name her in the next breath; and it is to be questioned if even George Eliot had a wider and stronger grasp of the important actualities of English life. In “Eleanor,” whether the book tells for or against my theory of greater depth in American fiction and greater breadth in the English, one must acknowledge that increasing mastery of which each of her successive books has given proofs. She has risen to her present eminence so wholly since American fiction began to shape itself from the art of Continental fiction that one might almost claim an American influence in her work; but that might well be claiming too much. Her manner is still marked by the ejaculatory and suspiratory self-indulgence of the minor English novelists, to which George Eliot herself was not superior. She draws her breath in open pathos, and she caresses a situation or a character with a pitying epithet or adjective, as George Eliot does in the case of some heroine she likes very much, notably Maggie Tulliver, or Janet Dempster, and less notably Dorothea Brooke. The foible is characteristic of all but the finest artists in English fiction, and in her greater moments Mrs. Ward does not indulge it. There is nothing of this weak pity of her own creations in such a scene as that where Eleanor reverses her prayer to Lucy Foster, and, baring her wasted neck to show herself a dying woman, makes the girl promise to be true to the love between her and Manisty. The most touching moment of the whole story, that when she asks Manisty to carry her up the stairs, is of an intense pathos, enfeebled by no suggestion of feeling in the author. “Eleanor, with her hand on Marie’s arm, tottered across the court-yard. At the convent door her strength failed her. She turned to Manisty: ‘I can’t walk up those stairs. Do you think you could carry me? I am very light.’ Struck with sudden emotion, he threw his arms round her. She yielded like a tired child. He, who had instinctively prepared himself for a certain weight, was aghast at the ease with which he lifted her. Her head, in its pretty black hat, fell against his breast Her eyes closed. He wondered if she had fainted. He carried her to her own room and laid her on the sofa there.... As he left the room Eleanor settled down happily on her pillow. ‘The first and only time!’ she thought ‘My heart on his — my arms round his neck. There must be impressions that outlast all others. I shall manage to put them all away at the end — but that!’”

Such a passage (and it is by no means the only passage of its kind in the book) is of a fineness so penetrating, so far-reaching, that a critic more enamoured of his thesis than I might own it a proof against him. If he had been arguing that English fiction had breadth but wanted depth, he might urge that it was one of the exceptions which proved the rule. But I prefer to save myself by a little different means, and, referring to a suggestion already made somewhat faint-heartedly, I would leave it to the candid reader to say whether, in such instances, Mrs. Ward was not rather like the American than the English novelists.

THE END

ÉMILE ZOLA

In these times of electrical movement, the sort of construction in the moral world for which ages were once needed, takes place almost simultaneously with the event to be adjusted in history, and as true a perspective forms itself as any in the past. A few weeks after the death of a poet of such great epical imagination, such great ethical force, as Emile Zola, we may see him as clearly and judge him as fairly as posterity alone was formerly supposed able to see and to judge the heroes that antedated it. The present is always holding in solution the elements of the future and the past, in fact; and whilst Zola still lived, in the moments of his highest activity, the love and hate, the intelligence and ignorance, of his motives and his work were as evident, and were as accurately the measure of progressive and retrogressive criticism, as they will be hereafter in any of the literary periods to come. There will never be criticism to appreciate him more justly, to depreciate him more unjustly, than that of his immediate contemporaries. There will never be a day when criticism will be of one mind about him, when he will no longer be a question, and will have become a conclusion. A conclusion is an accomplished fact, something finally ended, something dead; and the extraordinary vitality of Zola, when he was doing the things most characteristic of him, forbids the notion of this in his case. Like every man who embodies an ideal, his individuality partook of what was imperishable in that ideal. Because he believed with his whole soul that fiction should be the representation, and in no measure the misrepresentation, of life, he will live as long as any history of literature survives. He will live as a question, a dispute, an affair of inextinguishable debate; for the two principles of the human mind, the love of the natural and the love of the unnatural, the real and the unreal, the truthful and the fanciful, are inalienable and indestructible.

I

Zola embodied his ideal inadequately, as every man who embodies an ideal must. His realism was his creed, which he tried to make his deed; but, before his fight was ended, and almost before he began to forebode it a losing fight, he began to feel and to say (for to feel, with that most virtuous and voracious spirit, implied saying) that he was too much a romanticist by birth and tradition, to exemplify realism in his work. He could not be all to the cause he honored that other men were — men like Flaubert and Maupassant, and Tourguenieff and Tolstoy, and Galdos and Valdes — because his intellectual youth had been nurtured on the milk of romanticism at the breast of his mother-time. He grew up in the day when the great novelists and poets were romanticists, and what he came to abhor he had first adored. He was that pathetic paradox, a prophet who cannot practise what he preaches, who cannot build his doctrine into the edifice of a living faith. Zola was none the less, but all the more, a poet in this. He conceived of reality poetically and always saw his human documents, as he began early to call them, ranged in the form of an epic poem. He fell below the greatest of the Russians, to whom alone he was inferior, in imagining that the affairs of men group themselves strongly about a central interest to which they constantly refer, and after whatever excursions definitely or definitively return. He was not willingly an epic poet, perhaps, but he was an epic poet, nevertheless; and the imperfection of his realism began with the perfection of his form. Nature is sometimes dramatic, though never on the hard and fast terms of the theatre, but she is almost never epic; and Zola was always epic. One need only think over his books and his subjects to be convinced of this: “L’Assommoir” and drunkenness; “Nana” and harlotry; “Germinale” and strikes; “L’Argent” and money getting and losing in all its branches; “Pot-Bouille” and the cruel squalor of poverty; “La Terre” and the life of the peasant; “Le Debacle” and the decay of imperialism. The largest of these schemes does not extend beyond the periphery described by the centrifugal whirl of its central motive, and the least of the Rougon-Macquart series is of the same epicality as the grandest. Each is bound to a thesis, but reality is bound to no thesis. You cannot say where it begins or where it leaves off; and it will not allow you to say precisely what its meaning or argument is. For this reason, there are no such perfect pieces of realism as the plays of Ibsen, which have all or each a thesis, but do not hold themselves bound to prove it, or even fully to state it; after these, for reality, come the novels of Tolstoy, which are of a direction so profound because so patient of aberration and exception.

We think of beauty as implicated in symmetry, but there are distinctly two kinds of beauty: the symmetrical and the unsymmetrical, the beauty of the temple and the beauty of the tree. Life is not more symmetrical than a tree, and the effort of art to give it balance and proportion is to make it as false in effect as a tree clipped and trained to a certain shape. The Russians and the Scandinavians alone seem to have risen to a consciousness of this in their imaginative literature, though the English have always unconsciously obeyed the law of our being in their generally crude and involuntary formulations of it. In the northern masters there is no appearance of what M. Ernest Dupuy calls the joiner-work of the French fictionalists; and there is, in the process, no joiner-work in Zola, but the final effect is joiner-work. It is a temple he builds, and not a tree he plants and lets grow after he has planted the seed, and here he betrays not only his French school but his Italian instinct.

In his form, Zola is classic, that is regular, symmetrical, seeking the beauty of the temple rather than the beauty of the tree. If the fight in his day had been the earlier fight between classicism and romanticism, instead of romanticism and realism, his nature and tradition would have ranged him on the side of classicism, though, as in the later event, his feeling might have been romantic. I think it has been the error of criticism not to take due account of his Italian origin, or to recognize that he was only half French, and that this half was his superficial half. At the bottom of his soul, though not perhaps at the bottom of his heart, he was Italian, and of the great race which in every science and every art seems to win the primacy when it will. The French, through the rhetoric of Napoleon III., imposed themselves on the imagination of the world as the representatives of the Latin race, but they are the least and the last of the Latins, and the Italians are the first. To his Italian origin Zola owed not only the moralistic scope of his literary ambition, but the depth and strength of his personal conscience, capable of the austere puritanism which underlies the so-called immoralities of his books, and incapable of the peculiar lubricity which we call French, possibly to distinguish it from the lubricity of other people rather than to declare it a thing solely French. In the face of all public and private corruptions, his soul is as Piagnone as Savonarola’s, and the vices of Arrabbiati, small and great, are always his text, upon which he preaches virtue.

II

Zola is to me so vast a theme that I can only hope here to touch his work at a point or two, leaving the proof of my sayings mostly to the honesty of the reader. It will not require so great an effort of his honesty now, as it once would, to own that Zola’s books, though often indecent, are never immoral, but always most terribly, most pitilessly moral. I am not saying now that they ought to be in every family library, or that they could be edifyingly committed to the hands of boys and girls; one of our first publishing houses is about to issue an edition even of the Bible “with those passages omitted which are usually skipped in reading aloud”; and it is always a question how much young people can be profitably allowed to know; how much they do know, they alone can tell. But as to the intention of Zola in his books, I have no doubt of its righteousness. His books may be, and I suppose they often are, indecent, but they are not immoral; they may disgust, but they will not deprave; only those already rotten can scent corruption in them, and these, I think, may be deceived by effluvia from within themselves.

It is to the glory of the French realists that they broke, one and all, with the tradition of the French romanticists that vice was or might be something graceful, something poetic, something gay, brilliant, something superior almost, and at once boldly presented it in its true figure, its spiritual and social and physical squalor. Beginning with Flaubert in his “Madame Bovary,” and passing through the whole line of their studies in morbid anatomy, as the “Germinie Lacerteux” of the Goncourts, as the “Bel-Ami” of Maupassant, and as all the books of Zola, you have portraits as veracious as those of the Russians, or those of Defoe, whom, indeed, more than any other master, Zola has made me think of in his frankness. Through his epicality he is Defoe’s inferior, though much more than his equal in the range and implication of his work.

A whole world seems to stir in each of his books; and, though it is a world altogether bent for the time being upon one thing, as the actual world never is, every individual in it seems alive and true to the fact. M. Brunetiere says Zola’s characters are not true to the French fact; that his peasants, working-men, citizens, soldiers are not French, whatever else they may be; but this is merely M. Brunetiere’s word against Zola’s word, and Zola had as good opportunities of knowing French life as Mr. Brunetiere, whose aesthetics, as he betrays them in his instances, are of a flabbiness which does not impart conviction. Word for word, I should take Zola’s word as to the fact, not because I have the means of affirming him more reliable, but because I have rarely known the observant instinct of poets to fail, and because I believe that every reader will find in himself sufficient witness to the veracity of Zola’s characterizations. These, if they are not true to the French fact, are true to the human fact; and I should say that in these the reality of Zola, unreal or ideal in his larger form, his epicality, vitally resided. His people live in the memory as entirely as any people who have ever lived; and, however devastating one’s experience of them may be, it leaves no doubt of their having been.

III

It is not much to say of a work of literary art that it will survive as a record of the times it treats of, and I would not claim high value for Zola’s fiction because it is such a true picture of the Second Empire in its decline; yet, beyond any other books have the quality that alone makes novels historical. That they include everything, that they do justice to all sides and phases of the period, it would be fatuous to expect, and ridiculous to demand. It is not their epical character alone that forbids this; it is the condition of every work of art, which must choose its point of view, and include only the things that fall within a certain scope. One of Zola’s polemical delusions was to suppose that a fiction ought not to be selective, and that his own fictions were not selective, but portrayed the fact without choice and without limitation. The fact was that he was always choosing, and always limiting. Even a map chooses and limits, far more a picture. Yet this delusion of Zola’s and its affirmation resulted in no end of misunderstanding. People said the noises of the streets, which he supposed himself to have given with graphophonic fulness and variety, were not music; and they were quite right. Zola, as far as his effects were voluntary, was not giving them music; he openly loathed the sort of music they meant just as he openly loathed art, and asked to be regarded as a man of science rather than an artist. Yet, at the end of the ends, he was an artist and not a man of science. His hand was perpetually selecting his facts, and shaping them to one epical result, with an orchestral accompaniment, which, though reporting the rudest noises of the street, the vulgarest, the most offensive, was, in spite of him, so reporting them that the result was harmony.

Zola was an artist, and one of the very greatest, but even before and beyond that he was intensely a moralist, as only the moralists of our true and noble time have been. Not Tolstoy, not Ibsen himself, has more profoundly and indignantly felt the injustice of civilization, or more insistently shown the falsity of its fundamental pretensions. He did not make his books a polemic for one cause or another; he was far too wise and sane for that; but when he began to write them they became alive with his sense of what was wrong and false and bad. His tolerance is less than Tolstoy’s, because his resignation is not so great; it is for the weak sinners and not for the strong, while Tolstoy’s, with that transcendent vision of his race, pierces the bounds where the shows of strength and weakness cease and become of a solidarity of error in which they are one. But the ethics of his work, like Tolstoy’s, were always carrying over into his life. He did not try to live poverty and privation and hard labor, as Tolstoy does; he surrounded himself with the graces and the luxuries which his honestly earned money enabled him to buy; but when an act of public and official atrocity disturbed the working of his mind and revolted his nature, he could not rest again till he had done his best to right it.

IV

The other day Zola died (by a casualty which one fancies he would have liked to employ in a novel, if he had thought of it), and the man whom he had befriended at the risk of all he had in the world, his property, his liberty, his life itself, came to his funeral in disguise, risking again all that Zola had risked, to pay the last honors to his incomparable benefactor.

It was not the first time that a French literary man had devoted himself to the cause of the oppressed, and made it his personal affair, his charge, his inalienable trust. But Voltaire’s championship of the persecuted Protestant had not the measure of Zola’s championship of the persecuted Jew, though in both instances the courage and the persistence of the vindicator forced the reopening of the case and resulted in final justice. It takes nothing from the heroism of Voltaire to recognize that it was not so great as the heroism of Zola, and it takes nothing from the heroism of Zola to recognize that it was effective in the only country of Europe where such a case as that of Dreyfus would have been reopened; where there was a public imagination generous enough to conceive of undoing an act of immense public cruelty. At first this imagination was dormant, and the French people conceived only of punishing the vindicator along with victim, for daring to accuse their processes of injustice. Outrage, violence, and the peril of death greeted Zola from his fellow-citizens, and from the authorities ignominy, fine, and prison. But nothing silenced or deterred him, and, in the swift course of moral adjustment characteristic of our time, an innumerable multitude of those who were ready a few years ago to rend him in pieces joined in paying tribute to the greatness of his soul, at the grave which received his body already buried under an avalanche of flowers. The government has not been so prompt as the mob, but with the history of France in mind, remembering how official action has always responded to the national impulses in behalf of humanity and justice, one cannot believe that the representatives of the French people will long remain behind the French people in offering reparation to the memory of one of the greatest and most heroic of French citizens.

It is a pity for the government that it did not take part in the obsequies of Zola; it would have been well for the army, which he was falsely supposed to have defamed, to have been present to testify of the real service and honor he had done it. But, in good time enough, the reparation will be official as well as popular, and when the monument to Zola, which has already risen in the hearts of his countrymen, shall embody itself in enduring marble or perennial bronze, the army will be there to join in its consecration.

V

There is no reason why criticism should affect an equal hesitation. Criticism no longer assumes to ascertain an author’s place in literature. It is very well satisfied if it can say something suggestive concerning the nature and quality of his work, and it tries to say this with as little of the old air of finality as it can manage to hide its poverty in.

After the words of M. Chaumie at the funeral, “Zola’s life work was dominated by anxiety for sincerity and truth, an anxiety inspired by his great feelings of pity and justice,” there seems nothing left to do but to apply them to the examination of his literary work. They unlock the secret of his performance, if it is any longer a secret, and they afford its justification in all those respects where without them it could not be justified. The question of immorality has been set aside, and the indecency has been admitted, but it remains for us to realize that anxiety for sincerity and truth, springing from the sense of pity and justice, makes indecency a condition of portraying human nature so that it may look upon its image and be ashamed.

The moralist working imaginatively has always had to ask himself how far he might go in illustration of his thesis, and he has not hesitated, or if he has hesitated, he has not failed to go far very far. Defoe went far, Richardson went far, Ibsen has gone far, Tolstoy has gone far, and if Zola went farther than any of these, still he did not go so far as the immoralists have gone in the portrayal of vicious things to allure where he wished to repel. There is really such a thing as high motive and such a thing as low motive, though the processes are often so bewilderingly alike in both cases. The processes may confound us, but there is no reason why we should be mistaken as to motive, and as to Zola’s motive I do not think M. Chaumie was mistaken. As to his methods, they by no means always reflected his intentions. He fancied himself working like a scientist who has collected a vast number of specimens, and is deducing principles from them. But the fact is, he was always working like an artist, seizing every suggestion of experience and observation, turning it to the utmost account, piecing it out by his invention, building it up into a structure of fiction where its origin was lost to all but himself, and often even to himself. He supposed that he was recording and classifying, but he was creating and vivifying. Within the bounds of his epical scheme, which was always factitious, every person was so natural that his characters seemed like the characters of biography rather than of fiction. One does not remember them as one remembers the characters of most novelists. They had their being in a design which was meant to represent a state of things, to enforce an opinion of certain conditions; but they themselves were free agencies, bound by no allegiance to the general frame, and not apparently acting in behalf of the author, but only from their own individuality. At the moment of reading, they make the impression of an intense reality, and they remain real, but one recalls them as one recalls the people read of in last weeks’s or last year’s newspaper. What Zola did was less to import science and its methods into the region of fiction, than journalism and its methods; but in this he had his will only so far as his nature of artist would allow. He was no more a journalist than he was a scientist by nature; and, in spite of his intentions and in spite of his methods, he was essentially imaginative and involuntarily creative.

VI

To me his literary history is very pathetic. He was bred if not born in the worship of the romantic, but his native faith was not proof against his reason, as again his reason was not proof against his native faith. He preached a crusade against romanticism, and fought a long fight with it, only to realize at last that he was himself too romanticistic to succeed against it, and heroically to own his defeat. The hosts of romanticism swarmed back over him and his followers, and prevailed, as we see them still prevailing. It was the error of the realists whom Zola led, to suppose that people like truth in fiction better than falsehood; they do not; they like falsehood best; and if Zola had not been at heart a romanticist, he never would have cherished his long delusion, he never could have deceived with his vain hopes those whom he persuaded to be realistic, as he himself did not succeed in being.

He wished to be a sort of historiographer writing the annals of a family, and painting a period; but he was a poet, doing far more than this, and contributing to creative literature as great works of fiction as have been written in the epic form. He was a paradox on every side but one, and that was the human side, which he would himself have held far worthier than the literary side. On the human side, the civic side, he was what he wished to be, and not what any perversity of his elements made him. He heard one of those calls to supreme duty, which from time to time select one man and not another for the response which they require; and he rose to that duty with a grandeur which had all the simplicity possible to a man of French civilization. We may think that there was something a little too dramatic in the manner of his heroism, his martyry, and we may smile at certain turns of rhetoric in the immortal letter accusing the French nation of intolerable wrong, just as, in our smug Anglo-Saxon conceit, we laughed at the procedure of the emotional courts which he compelled to take cognizance of the immense misdeed other courts had as emotionally committed. But the event, however indirectly and involuntarily, was justice which no other people in Europe would have done, and perhaps not any people of this more enlightened continent.

The success of Zola as a literary man has its imperfections, its phases of defeat, but his success as a humanist is without flaw. He triumphed as wholly and as finally as it has ever been given a man to triumph, and he made France triumph with him. By his hand, she added to the laurels she had won in the war of American Independence, in the wars of the Revolution for liberty and equality, in the campaigns for Italian Unity, the imperishable leaf of a national acknowledgement of national error.

HENRY JAMES, JR.

The events of Mr. James’s life — as we agree to understand events — may be told in a very few words. His race is Irish on his father’s side and Scotch on his mother’s, to which mingled strains the generalizer may attribute, if he likes, that union of vivid expression and dispassionate analysis which has characterized his work from the first. There are none of those early struggles with poverty, which render the lives of so many distinguished Americans monotonous reading, to record in his case: the cabin hearth-fire did not light him to the youthful pursuit of literature; he had from the start all those advantages which, when they go too far, become limitations.

He was born in New York city in the year 1843, and his first lessons in life and letters were the best which the metropolis — so small in the perspective diminishing to that date — could afford. In his twelfth year his family went abroad, and after some stay in England made a long sojourn in France and Switzerland. They returned to America in 1860, placing themselves at Newport, and for a year or two Mr. James was at the Harvard Law School, where, perhaps, he did not study a great deal of law. His father removed from Newport to Cambridge in 1866, and there Mr. James remained till he went abroad, three years later, for the residence in England and Italy which, with infrequent visits home, has continued ever since.

It was during these three years of his Cambridge life that I became acquainted with his work. He had already printed a tale— “The Story of a Year” — in the “Atlantic Monthly,” when I was asked to be Mr. Fields’s assistant in the management, and it was my fortune to read Mr. James’s second contribution in manuscript. “Would you take it?” asked my chief. “Yes, and all the stories you can get from the writer.” One is much securer of one’s judgment at twenty-nine than, say, at forty-five; but if this was a mistake of mine I am not yet old enough to regret it. The story was called “Poor Richard,” and it dealt with the conscience of a man very much in love with a woman who loved his rival. He told this rival a lie, which sent him away to his death on the field, — in that day nearly every fictitious personage had something to do with the war, — but Poor Richard’s lie did not win him his love. It still seems to me that the situation was strongly and finely felt. One’s pity went, as it should, with the liar; but the whole story had a pathos which lingers in my mind equally with a sense of the new literary qualities which gave me such delight in it. I admired, as we must in all that Mr. James has written, the finished workmanship in which there is no loss of vigor; the luminous and uncommon use of words, the originality of phrase, the whole clear and beautiful style, which I confess I weakly liked the better for the occasional gallicisms remaining from an inveterate habit of French. Those who know the writings of Mr. Henry James will recognize the inherited felicity of diction which is so striking in the writings of Mr. Henry James, Jr. The son’s diction is not so racy as the father’s; it lacks its daring, but it is as fortunate and graphic; and I cannot give it greater praise than this, though it has, when he will, a splendor and state which is wholly its own.

Mr. James is now so universally recognized that I shall seem to be making an unwarrantable claim when I express my belief that the popularity of his stories was once largely confined to Mr. Field’s assistant. They had characteristics which forbade any editor to refuse them; and there are no anecdotes of thrice-rejected manuscripts finally printed to tell of him; his work was at once successful with all the magazines. But with the readers of “The Atlantic,” of “Harper’s,” of “Lippincott’s,” of “The Galaxy,” of “The Century,” it was another affair. The flavor was so strange, that, with rare exceptions, they had to “learn to like” it. Probably few writers have in the same degree compelled the liking of their readers. He was reluctantly accepted, partly through a mistake as to his attitude — through the confusion of his point of view with his private opinion — in the reader’s mind. This confusion caused the tears of rage which bedewed our continent in behalf of the “average American girl” supposed to be satirized in Daisy Miller, and prevented the perception of the fact that, so far as the average American girl was studied at all in Daisy Miller, her indestructible innocence, her invulnerable new-worldliness, had never been so delicately appreciated. It was so plain that Mr. James disliked her vulgar conditions, that the very people to whom he revealed her essential sweetness and light were furious that he should have seemed not to see what existed through him. In other words, they would have liked him better if he had been a worse artist — if he had been a little more confidential.

But that artistic impartiality which puzzled so many in the treatment of Daisy Miller is one of the qualities most valuable in the eyes of those who care how things are done, and I am not sure that it is not Mr. James’s most characteristic quality. As “frost performs the effect of fire,” this impartiality comes at last to the same result as sympathy. We may be quite sure that Mr. James does not like the peculiar phase of our civilization typified in Henrietta Stackpole; but he treats her with such exquisite justice that he lets US like her. It is an extreme case, but I confidently allege it in proof.

His impartiality is part of the reserve with which he works in most respects, and which at first glance makes us say that he is wanting in humor. But I feel pretty certain that Mr. James has not been able to disinherit himself to this degree. We Americans are terribly in earnest about making ourselves, individually and collectively; but I fancy that our prevailing mood in the face of all problems is that of an abiding faith which can afford to be funny. He has himself indicated that we have, as a nation, as a people, our joke, and every one of us is in the joke more or less. We may, some of us, dislike it extremely, disapprove it wholly, and even abhor it, but we are in the joke all the same, and no one of us is safe from becoming the great American humorist at any given moment. The danger is not apparent in Mr. James’s case, and I confess that I read him with a relief in the comparative immunity that he affords from the national facetiousness. Many of his people are humorously imagined, or rather humorously SEEN, like Daisy Miller’s mother, but these do not give a dominant color; the business in hand is commonly serious, and the droll people are subordinated. They abound, nevertheless, and many of them are perfectly new finds, like Mr. Tristram in “The American,” the bill-paying father in the “Pension Beaurepas,” the anxiously Europeanizing mother in the same story, the amusing little Madame de Belgarde, Henrietta Stackpole, and even Newman himself. But though Mr. James portrays the humorous in character, he is decidedly not on humorous terms with his reader; he ignores rather than recognizes the fact that they are both in the joke.

If we take him at all we must take him on his own ground, for clearly he will not come to ours. We must make concessions to him, not in this respect only, but in several others, chief among which is the motive for reading fiction. By example, at least, he teaches that it is the pursuit and not the end which should give us pleasure; for he often prefers to leave us to our own conjectures in regard to the fate of the people in whom he has interested us. There is no question, of course, but he could tell the story of Isabel in “The Portrait of a Lady” to the end, yet he does not tell it. We must agree, then, to take what seems a fragment instead of a whole, and to find, when we can, a name for this new kind in fiction. Evidently it is the character, not the fate, of his people which occupies him; when he has fully developed their character he leaves them to what destiny the reader pleases.

The analytic tendency seems to have increased with him as his work has gone on. Some of the earlier tales were very dramatic: “A Passionate Pilgrim,” which I should rank above all his other short stories, and for certain rich poetical qualities, above everything else that he has done, is eminently dramatic. But I do not find much that I should call dramatic in “The Portrait of a Lady,” while I do find in it an amount of analysis which I should call superabundance if it were not all such good literature. The novelist’s main business is to possess his reader with a due conception of his characters and the situations in which they find themselves. If he does more or less than this he equally fails. I have sometimes thought that Mr. James’s danger was to do more, but when I have been ready to declare this excess an error of his method I have hesitated. Could anything be superfluous that had given me so much pleasure as I read? Certainly from only one point of view, and this a rather narrow, technical one. It seems to me that an enlightened criticism will recognize in Mr. James’s fiction a metaphysical genius working to aesthetic results, and will not be disposed to deny it any method it chooses to employ. No other novelist, except George Eliot, has dealt so largely in analysis of motive, has so fully explained and commented upon the springs of action in the persons of the drama, both before and after the facts. These novelists are more alike than any others in their processes, but with George Eliot an ethical purpose is dominant, and with Mr. James an artistic purpose. I do not know just how it should be stated of two such noble and generous types of character as Dorothea and Isabel Archer, but I think that we sympathize with the former in grand aims that chiefly concern others, and with the latter in beautiful dreams that primarily concern herself. Both are unselfish and devoted women, sublimely true to a mistaken ideal in their marriages; but, though they come to this common martyrdom, the original difference in them remains. Isabel has her great weaknesses, as Dorothea had, but these seem to me, on the whole, the most nobly imagined and the most nobly intentioned women in modern fiction; and I think Isabel is the more subtly divined of the two. If we speak of mere characterization, we must not fail to acknowledge the perfection of Gilbert Osmond. It was a profound stroke to make him an American by birth. No European could realize so fully in his own life the ideal of a European dilettante in all the meaning of that cheapened word; as no European could so deeply and tenderly feel the sweetness and loveliness of the English past as the sick American, Searle, in “The Passionate Pilgrim.”

What is called the international novel is popularly dated from the publication of “Daisy Miller,” though “Roderick Hudson” and “The American” had gone before; but it really began in the beautiful story which I have just named. Mr. James, who invented this species in fiction, first contrasted in the “Passionate Pilgrim” the New World and Old World moods, ideals, and prejudices, and he did it there with a richness of poetic effect which he has since never equalled. I own that I regret the loss of the poetry, but you cannot ask a man to keep on being a poet for you; it is hardly for him to choose; yet I compare rather discontentedly in my own mind such impassioned creations as Searle and the painter in “The Madonna of the Future” with “Daisy Miller,” of whose slight, thin personality I also feel the indefinable charm, and of the tragedy of whose innocence I recognize the delicate pathos. Looking back to those early stories, where Mr. James stood at the dividing ways of the novel and the romance, I am sometimes sorry that he declared even superficially for the former. His best efforts seem to me those of romance; his best types have an ideal development, like Isabel and Claire Belgarde and Bessy Alden and poor Daisy and even Newman. But, doubtless, he has chosen wisely; perhaps the romance is an outworn form, and would not lend itself to the reproduction of even the ideality of modern life. I myself waver somewhat in my preference — if it is a preference — when I think of such people as Lord Warburton and the Touchetts, whom I take to be all decidedly of this world. The first of these especially interested me as a probable type of the English nobleman, who amiably accepts the existing situation with all its possibilities of political and social change, and insists not at all upon the surviving feudalities, but means to be a manly and simple gentleman in any event. An American is not able to pronounce as to the verity of the type; I only know that it seems probable and that it is charming. It makes one wish that it were in Mr. James’s way to paint in some story the present phase of change in England. A titled personage is still mainly an inconceivable being to us; he is like a goblin or a fairy in a storybook. How does he comport himself in the face of all the changes and modifications that have taken place and that still impend? We can hardly imagine a lord taking his nobility seriously; it is some hint of the conditional frame of Lord Warburton’s mind that makes him imaginable and delightful to us.

It is not my purpose here to review any of Mr. James’s books; I like better to speak of his people than of the conduct of his novels, and I wish to recognize the fineness with which he has touched-in the pretty primness of Osmond’s daughter and the mild devotedness of Mr. Rosier. A masterly hand is as often manifest in the treatment of such subordinate figures as in that of the principal persons, and Mr. James does them unerringly. This is felt in the more important character of Valentin Belgarde, a fascinating character in spite of its defects, — perhaps on account of them — and a sort of French Lord Warburton, but wittier, and not so good. “These are my ideas,” says his sister-in-law, at the end of a number of inanities. “Ah, you call them ideas!” he returns, which is delicious and makes you love him. He, too, has his moments of misgiving, apparently in regard to his nobility, and his acceptance of Newman on the basis of something like “manhood suffrage” is very charming. It is of course difficult for a remote plebeian to verify the pictures of legitimist society in “The American,” but there is the probable suggestion in them of conditions and principles, and want of principles, of which we get glimpses in our travels abroad; at any rate, they reveal another and not impossible world, and it is fine to have Newman discover that the opinions and criticisms of our world are so absolutely valueless in that sphere that his knowledge of the infamous crime of the mother and brother of his betrothed will have no effect whatever upon them in their own circle if he explodes it there. This seems like aristocracy indeed! and one admires, almost respects, its survival in our day. But I always regretted that Newman’s discovery seemed the precursor of his magnanimous resolution not to avenge himself; it weakened the effect of this, with which it had really nothing to do. Upon the whole, however, Newman is an adequate and satisfying representative of Americanism, with his generous matrimonial ambition, his vast good-nature, and his thorough good sense and right feeling. We must be very hard to please if we are not pleased with him. He is not the “cultivated American” who redeems us from time to time in the eyes of Europe; but he is unquestionably more national, and it is observable that his unaffected fellow-countrymen and women fare very well at Mr. James’s hand always; it is the Europeanizing sort like the critical little Bostonian in the “Bundle of Letters,” the ladies shocked at Daisy Miller, the mother in the “Pension Beaurepas” who goes about trying to be of the “native” world everywhere, Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond, Miss Light and her mother, who have reason to complain, if any one has. Doubtless Mr. James does not mean to satirize such Americans, but it is interesting to note how they strike such a keen observer. We are certainly not allowed to like them, and the other sort find somehow a place in our affections along with his good Europeans. It is a little odd, by the way, that in all the printed talk about Mr. James — and there has been no end of it — his power of engaging your preference for certain of his people has been so little commented on. Perhaps it is because he makes no obvious appeal for them; but one likes such men as Lord Warburton, Newman, Valentin, the artistic brother in “The Europeans,” and Ralph Touchett, and such women as Isabel, Claire Belgarde, Mrs. Tristram, and certain others, with a thoroughness that is one of the best testimonies to their vitality. This comes about through their own qualities, and is not affected by insinuation or by downright petting, such as we find in Dickens nearly always and in Thackeray too often.

The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of Fielding. These great men are of the past — they and their methods and interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present. The new school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others; but it studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not really less vital motives. The moving accident is certainly not its trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes. It is largely influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of Daudet rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it, and it has a soul of its own which is above the business of recording the rather brutish pursuit of a woman by a man, which seems to be the chief end of the French novelist. This school, which is so largely of the future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James; it is he who is shaping and directing American fiction, at least. It is the ambition of the younger contributors to write like him; he has his following more distinctly recognizable than that of any other English-writing novelist. Whether he will so far control this following as to decide the nature of the novel with us remains to be seen. Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story, which is apt to leave him arbiter of the destiny of the author’s creations? Will he find his account in the unflagging interest of their development? Mr. James’s growing popularity seems to suggest that this may be the case; but the work of Mr. James’s imitators will have much to do with the final result.

In the meantime it is not surprising that he has his imitators. Whatever exceptions we take to his methods or his results, we cannot deny him a very great literary genius. To me there is a perpetual delight in his way of saying things, and I cannot wonder that younger men try to catch the trick of it. The disappointing thing for them is that it is not a trick, but an inherent virtue. His style is, upon the whole, better than that of any other novelist I know; it is always easy, without being trivial, and it is often stately, without being stiff; it gives a charm to everything he writes; and he has written so much and in such various directions, that we should be judging him very incompletely if we considered him only as a novelist. His book of European sketches must rank him with the most enlightened and agreeable travelers; and it might be fitly supplemented from his uncollected papers with a volume of American sketches. In his essays on modern French writers he indicates his critical range and grasp; but he scarcely does more, as his criticisms in “The Atlantic” and “The Nation” and elsewhere could abundantly testify.

There are indeed those who insist that criticism is his true vocation, and are impatient of his devotion to fiction; but I suspect that these admirers are mistaken. A novelists he is not, after the old fashion, or after any fashion but his own; yet since he has finally made his public in his own way of story-telling — or call it character-painting if you prefer, — it must be conceded that he has chosen best for himself and his readers in choosing the form of fiction for what he has to say. It is, after all, what a writer has to say rather than what he has to tell that we care for nowadays. In one manner or other the stories were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist thinks about persons and situations. Mr. James gratifies this philosophic desire. If he sometimes forbears to tell us what he thinks of the last state of his people, it is perhaps because that does not interest him, and a large-minded criticism might well insist that it was childish to demand that it must interest him.

I am not sure that any criticism is sufficiently large-minded for this. I own that I like a finished story; but then also I like those which Mr. James seems not to finish. This is probably the position of most of his readers, who cannot very logically account for either preference. We can only make sure that we have here an annalist, or analyst, as we choose, who fascinates us from his first page to his last, whose narrative or whose comment may enter into any minuteness of detail without fatiguing us, and can only truly grieve us when it ceases.

INTRODUCTIONS TO VARIOUS WORKS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION TO ‘QUAINT COURTSHIPS’

FOREWORD TO THE POEMS OF MADISON CAWEIN

INTRODUCTION TO ‘DIFFERENT GIRLS’

INTRODUCTION TO ‘DONA PERFECTA’ by B. Perez Galdos

INTRODUCTION TO ‘THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL’ by Vicente Blasco Ibañez

INTRODUCTION TO ‘THE COMPLETE POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR’

INTRODUCTION TO ‘QUAINT COURTSHIPS’

To the perverse all courtships probably are quaint; but if ever human nature may be allowed the full range of originality, it may very well be in the exciting and very personal moments of making love. Our own peculiar social structure, in which the sexes have so much innocent freedom, and youth is left almost entirely to its own devices in the arrangement of double happiness, is so favorable to the expression of character at these supreme moments, that it is wonderful there is so little which is idiosyncratic in our wooings. They tend rather to a type, very simple, very normal, and most people get married for the reason that they are in love, as if it were the most matter-of-course affair of life. They find the fact of being in love so entirely satisfying to the ideal, that they seek nothing adventitious from circumstance to heighten their tremendous consciousness.

Yet, here and there people, even American people, are so placed that they take from the situation a color of eccentricity, if they impart none to it, and the old, old story, which we all wish to have end well, zigzags to a fortunate close past juts and angles of individuality which the heroes and heroines have not willingly or wittingly thrown out. They would have chosen to arrive smoothly and uneventfully at the goal, as by far the greater majority do; and probably if they are aware of looking quaint to others in their progress, they do not like it. But it is this peculiar difference which renders them interesting and charming to the spectator. If we all love a lover, as Emerson says, it is not because of his selfish happiness, but because of the odd and unexpected chances which for the time exalt him above our experience, and endear him to our eager sympathies. In life one cannot perhaps have too little romance in affairs of the heart, or in literature too much; and in either one may be as quaint as one pleases in such affairs without being ridiculous.

W.D.H.

FOREWORD TO THE POEMS OF MADISON CAWEIN

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

The verses composing this volume have been selected by the author almost entirely from the five-volume edition of his poems published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company in 1907. A number have been included from the three or four volumes which have been published since the appearance of the Collected Poems; namely, three poems from the volume entitled “Nature Notes and Impressions,” E. P. Button & Co., New York; one poem from “The Giant and the Star,” Small, Maynard & Co., Boston; Section VII and part of Section VIII of “An Ode” written in commemoration of the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and published by John P. Morton & Co., Louisville, Ky.; some five or six poems from “New Poems,” published in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 1909; and three or four selections from the volume of selections entitled “Kentucky Poems,” compiled by Mr. Edmund Gosse and published in London by Mr. Grant Richards in 19O2. Acknowledgment and thanks for permission to reprint the various poems included in this volume are herewith made to the different publishers.

The two poems, “in Arcady” and “The Black Knight” are new and are published here for the first time.

In making the selections for the present book Mr. Cawein has endeavored to cover the entire field of his poetical labors, which extends over a quarter of a century. With the exception of his dramatic work, as witnessed by one volume only, “The Shadow Garden,” a book of plays four in number, published in 1910, the selection herewith presented by us is, in our opinion, representative of the author’s poetical work.

THE POETRY OF MADISON CAWEIN

When a poet begins writing, and we begin liking his work, we own willingly enough that we have not, and cannot have, got the compass of his talent. We must wait till he has written more, and we have learned to like him more, and even then we should hesitate his definition, from all that he has done, if we did not very commonly qualify ourselves from the latest thing he has done. Between the earliest thing and the latest thing there may have been a hundred different things, and in his swan-long life of a singer there would probably be a hundred yet, and all different. But we take the latest as if it summed him up in motive and range and tendency. Many parts of his work offer themselves in confirmation of our judgment, while those which might impeach it shrink away and hide themselves, and leave us to our precipitation, our catastrophe.

It was surely nothing less than by a catastrophe that I should have been so betrayed in the volumes of Mr. Cawein’s verse which reached me last before the volume of his collected poems…. I had read his poetry and loved it from the beginning, and in each successive expression of it, I had delighted in its expanding and maturing beauty. I believe I had not failed to own its compass, and when —

“He touched the tender stops of various quills,”

I had responded to every note of the changing music. I did not always respond audibly either in public or in private, for it seemed to me that so old a friend might fairly rest on the laurels he had helped bestow. But when that last volume came, I said to myself, “This applausive silence has gone on long enough. It is time to break it with open appreciation. Still,” I said, “I must guard against too great appreciation; I must mix in a little depreciation, to show that I have read attentively, critically, authoritatively.” So I applied myself to the cheapest and easiest means of depreciation, and asked, “Why do you always write Nature poems? Why not Human Nature poems?” or the like. But in seizing upon an objection so obvious that I ought to have known it was superficial, I had wronged a poet, who had never done me harm, but only good, in the very terms and conditions of his being a poet. I had not stayed to see that his nature poetry was instinct with human poetry, with his human poetry, with mine, with yours. I had made his reproach what ought to have been his finest praise, what is always the praise of poetry when it is not artificial and formal. I ought to have said, as I had seen, that not one of his lovely landscapes in which I could discover no human figure, but thrilled with a human presence penetrating to it from his most sensitive and subtle spirit until it was all but painfully alive with memories, with regrets, with longings, with hopes, with all that from time to time mutably constitutes us men and women, and yet keeps us children. He has the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature, and making it live from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty. His felicities do not seem sought; rather they seem to seek him, and to surprise him with the delight they impart through him. He has the inspiration of the right word, and the courage of it, so that though in the first instant you may be challenged, you may be revolted, by something that you might have thought uncouth, you are presently overcome by the happy bravery of it, and gladly recognize that no other word of those verbal saints or aristocrats, dedicated to the worship or service of beauty, would at all so well have conveyed the sense of it as this or that plebeian.

If I began indulging myself in the pleasure of quotation, or the delight of giving proofs of what I say, I should soon and far transcend the modest bounds which the editor has set my paper. But the reader may take it from me that no other poet, not even of the great Elizabethan range, can outword this poet when it comes to choosing some epithet fresh from the earth or air, and with the morning sun or light upon it, for an emotion or experience in which the race renews its youth from generation to generation. He is of the kind of Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth and Coleridge, in that truth to observance and experience of nature and the joyous expression of it, which are the dominant characteristics of his art. It is imaginable that the thinness of the social life in the Middle West threw the poet upon the communion with the fields and woods, the days and nights, the changing seasons, in which another great nature poet of ours declares they “speak in various language.” But nothing could be farther from the didactic mood in which “communion with the various forms” of nature casts the Puritanic soul of Bryant, than the mood in which this German-blooded, Kentucky-born poet, who keeps throughout his song the sense of a perpetual and inalienable youth, with a spirit as pagan as that which breathes from Greek sculpture — but happily not more pagan. Most modern poets who are antique are rather over-Hellenic, in their wish not to be English or French, but there is nothing voluntary in Mr. Cawein’s naturalization in the older world of myth and fable; he is too sincerely and solely a poet to be a posseur; he has his eyes everywhere except on the spectator, and his affair is to report the beauty that he sees, as if there were no one by to hear.

An interesting and charming trait of his poetry is its constant theme of youth and its limit within the range that the emotions and aspirations of youth take. He might indeed be called the poet of youth if he resented being called the poet of nature; but the poet of youth, be it understood, of vague regrets, of “tears, idle tears,” of “long, long thoughts,” for that is the real youth, and not the youth of the supposed hilarity, the attributive recklessness, the daring hopes. Perhaps there is some such youth as this, but it has not its home in the breast of any young poet, and he rarely utters it; at best he is of a light melancholy, a smiling wistfulness, and upon the whole, October is more to his mind than May.

In Mr. Cawein’s work, therefore, what is not the expression of the world we vainly and rashly call the inanimate world, is the hardly more dramatized, and not more enchantingly imagined story of lovers, rather unhappy lovers. He finds his own in this sort far and near; in classic Greece, in heroic England, in romantic Germany, where the blue flower blows, but not less in beautiful and familiar Kentucky, where the blue grass shows itself equally the emblem of poetry, and the moldering log in the cabin wall or the woodland path is of the same poetic value as the marble of the ruined temple or the stone of the crumbling castle. His singularly creative fancy breathes a soul into every scene; his touch leaves everything that was dull to the sense before glowing in the light of joyful recognition. He classifies his poems by different names, and they are of different themes, but they are after all of that unity which I have been trying, all too shirkingly, to suggest. One, for instance, is the pathetic story which tells itself in the lyrical eclogue “One Day and Another.” It is the conversation, prolonged from meeting to meeting, between two lovers whom death parts; but who recurrently find themselves and each other in the gardens and the woods, and on the waters which they tell each other of and together delight in. The effect is that which is truest to youth and love, for these transmutations of emotion form the disguise of self which makes passion tolerable; but mechanically the result is a series of nature poems. More genuinely dramatic are such pieces as “The Feud,” “Ku Klux,” and “The Lynchers,” three out of many; but one which I value more because it is worthy of Wordsworth, or of Tennyson in a Wordsworthian mood, is “The Old Mill,” where, with all the wonted charm of his landscape art, Mr. Cawein gives us a strongly local and novel piece of character painting.

I deny myself with increasing reluctance the pleasure of quoting the stanzas, the verses, the phrases, the epithets, which lure me by scores and hundreds in his poems. It must suffice me to say that I do not know any poem of his which has not some such a felicity; I do not know any poem of his which is not worth reading, at least the first time, and often the second and the third time, and so on as often as you have the chance of recurring to it. Some disappoint and others delight more than others; but there is none but in greater or less measure has the witchery native to the poet, and his place and his period.

It is only in order of his later time that I would put Mr. Cawein first among those Midwestern poets, of whom he is the youngest. Poetry in the Middle West has had its development in which it was eclipsed by the splendor, transitory if not vain, of the California school. But it is deeply rooted in the life of the region, and is as true to its origins as any faithful portraiture of the Midwestern landscape could be; you could not mistake the source of the poem or the picture. In a certain tenderness of light and coloring, the poems would recall the mellowed masterpieces of the older literatures rather than those of the New England school, where conscience dwells almost rebukingly with beauty….

W. D. HOWELLS.

INTRODUCTION TO ‘DIFFERENT GIRLS’

Introduction

It is many years now since the American Girl began to engage the consciousness of the American novelist. Before the expansive period following the Civil War, in the later eighteen-sixties and the earlier eighteen-seventies, she had of course been his heroine, unless he went abroad for one in court circles, or back for one in the feudal ages. Until the time noted, she had been a heroine and then an American girl. After that she was an American girl, and then a heroine; and she was often studied against foreign backgrounds, in contrast with other international figures, and her value ascertained in comparison with their valuelessness, though sometimes she was portrayed in those poses of flirtation of which she was born mistress. Even in these her superiority to all other kinds of girls was insinuated if not asserted.

The young ladies in the present collection are all American girls but one, if we are to suppose Mr. Le Gallienne’s winning type to be of the same English origin as himself. We can be surer of him than of her, however; but there is no question of the native Americanness of Mrs. Alexander’s girl, who is done so strikingly to the life, with courage to grapple a character and a temperament as uncommon as it is true, which we have rarely found among our fictionists. Having said this, we must hedge in favor of Miss Jordan’s most autochthonic Miss Kittie, so young a girl as to be still almost a little girl, and with a head full of the ideals of little-girlhood concerning young-girlhood. The pendant to her pretty picture is the study of elderly girlhood by Octave Thanet, or that by Miss Alice Brown, the one with its ideality, and the other with its humor. The pathos of “The Perfect Year” is as true as either in its truth to the girlhood which “never knew an earthly close,” and yet had its fill of rapture. Julian Ralph’s strong and free sketch contributes a fresh East Side flower, hollyhock-like in its gaudiness, to the garden of American girls, Irish-American in this case, but destined to be companioned hereafter by blossoms of our Italian-American, Yiddish-American, and Russian-American civilization, as soon as our nascent novelists shall have the eye to see and the art to show them. Meantime, here are some of our Different Girls as far as they or their photographers have got, and their acquaintance is worth having.

W.D.H.

INTRODUCTION TO ‘DONA PERFECTA’ by B. Perez Galdos

The very acute and lively Spanish critic who signs himself Clarin, and is known personally as Don Leopoldo Alas, says the present Spanish novel has no yesterday, but only a day-before-yesterday. It does not derive from the romantic novel which immediately preceded that: the novel, large or little, as it was with Cervantes, Hurtado de Mendoza, Quevedo, and the masters of picaresque fiction.

Clarin dates its renascence from the political revolution of 1868, which gave Spanish literature the freedom necessary to the fiction that studies to reflect modern life, actual ideas, and current aspirations; and though its authors were few at first, “they have never been adventurous spirits, friends of Utopia, revolutionists, or impatient progressists and reformers.” He thinks that the most daring, the most advanced, of the new Spanish novelists, and the best by far, is Don Benito Perez Galdos.

I should myself have made my little exception in favor of Don Armando Palacio Valdes, but Clarin speaks with infinitely more authority, and I am certainly ready to submit when he goes on to say that Galdos is not a social or literary insurgent; that he has no political or religious prejudices; that he shuns extremes, and is charmed with prudence; that his novels do not attack the Catholic dogmas — though they deal so severely with Catholic bigotry — but the customs and ideas cherished by secular fanaticism to the injury of the Church. Because this is so evident, our critic holds, his novels are “found in the bosom of families in every corner of Spain.” Their popularity among all classes in Catholic and prejudiced Spain, and not among free-thinking students merely, bears testimony to the fact that his aim and motive are understood and appreciated, although his stories are apparently so often anti-Catholic.

I

Dona Perfecta is, first of all, a story, and a great story, but it is certainly also a story that must appear at times potently, and even bitterly, anti-Catholic. Yet it would be a pity and an error to read it with the preoccupation that it was an anti-Catholic tract, for really it is not that. If the persons were changed in name and place, and modified in passion to fit a cooler air, it might equally seem an anti-Presbyterian or anti-Baptist tract; for what it shows in the light of their own hatefulness and cruelty are perversions of any religion, any creed. It is not, however, a tract at all; it deals in artistic largeness with the passion of bigotry, as it deals with the passion of love, the passion of ambition, the passion of revenge. But Galdos is Spanish and Catholic, and for him the bigotry wears a Spanish and Catholic face. That is all.

Up to a certain time, I believe, Galdos wrote romantic or idealistic novels, and one of these I have read, and it tired me very much. It was called “Marianela,” and it surprised me the more because I was already acquainted with his later work, which is all realistic. But one does not turn realist in a single night, and although the change in Galdos was rapid it was not quite a lightning change; perhaps because it was not merely an outward change, but artistically a change of heart. His acceptance in his quality of realist was much more instant than his conversion, and vastly wider; for we are told by the critic whom I have been quoting that Galdos’s earlier efforts, which he called Episodios Nacionales, never had the vogue which his realistic novels have enjoyed.

These were, indeed, tendencious, if I may Anglicize a very necessary word from the Spanish tendencioso. That is, they dealt with very obvious problems, and had very distinct and poignant significations, at least in the case of “Dona Perfecta,” “Leon Roch,” and “Gloria.” In still later novels, Emilia Pardo-Bazan thinks, he has comprehended that “the novel of to-day must take note of the ambient truth, and realize the beautiful with freedom and independence.” This valiant lady, in the campaign for realism which she made under the title of “La Cuestion Palpitante” — one of the best and strongest books on the subject — counts him first among Spanish realists, as Clarin counts him first among Spanish novelists. “With a certain fundamental humanity,” she says, “a certain magisterial simplicity in his creations, with the natural tendency of his clear intelligence toward the truth, and with the frankness of his observation, the great novelist was always disposed to pass over to realism with arms and munitions; but his aesthetic inclinations were idealistic, and only in his latest works has he adopted the method of the modern novel, fathomed more and more the human heart, and broken once for all with the picturesque and with the typical personages, to embrace the earth we tread.”

For her, as I confess for me, “Dona Perfecta” is not realistic enough — realistic as it is; for realism at its best is not tendencious. It does not seek to grapple with human problems, but is richly content with portraying human experiences; and I think Senora Pardo-Bazan is right in regarding “Dona Perfecta” as transitional, and of a period when the author had not yet assimilated in its fullest meaning the faith he had imbibed.

II

Yet it is a great novel, as I said; and perhaps because it is transitional it will please the greater number who never really arrive anywhere, and who like to find themselves in good company en route. It is so far like life that it is full of significations which pass beyond the persons and actions involved, and envelop the reader, as if he too were a character of the book, or rather as if its persons were men and women of this thinking, feeling, and breathing world, and he must recognize their experiences as veritable facts. From the first moment to the last it is like some passage of actual events in which you cannot withhold your compassion, your abhorrence, your admiration, any more than if they took place within your personal knowledge. Where they transcend all facts of your personal knowledge, you do not accuse them of improbability, for you feel their potentiality in yourself, and easily account for them in the alien circumstance. I am not saying that the story has no faults; it has several. There are tags of romanticism fluttering about it here and there; and at times the author permits himself certain old-fashioned literary airs and poses and artifices, which you simply wonder at. It is in spite of these, and with all these defects, that it is so great and beautiful a book.

III

What seems to be so very admirable in the management of the story is the author’s success in keeping his own counsel. This may seem a very easy thing; but, if the reader will think over the novelists of his acquaintance, he will find that it is at least very uncommon. They mostly give themselves away almost from the beginning, either by their anxiety to hide what is coming, or their vanity in hinting what great things they have in store for the reader. Galdos does neither the one nor the other. He makes it his business to tell the story as it grows; to let the characters unfold themselves in speech and action; to permit the events to happen unheralded. He does not prophesy their course, he does not forecast the weather even for twenty-four hours; the atmosphere becomes slowly, slowly, but with occasional lifts and reliefs, of such a brooding breathlessness, of such a deepening density, that you feel the wild passion-storm nearer and nearer at hand, till it bursts at last; and then you are astonished that you had not foreseen it yourself from the first moment.

Next to this excellent method, which I count the supreme characteristic of the book merely because it represents the whole, and the other facts are in the nature of parts, is the masterly conception of the characters. They are each typical of a certain side of human nature, as most of our personal friends and enemies are; but not exclusively of this side or that. They are each of mixed motives, mixed qualities; none of them is quite a monster; though those who are badly mixed do such monstrous things.

Pepe Rey, who is such a good fellow — so kind, and brave, and upright, and generous, so fine a mind, and so high a soul — is tactless and imprudent; he even condescends to the thought of intrigue; and though he rejects his plots at last, his nature has once harbored deceit. Don Inocencio, the priest, whose control of Dona Perfecta’s conscience has vitiated the very springs of goodness in her, is by no means bad, aside from his purposes. He loves his sister and her son tenderly, and wishes to provide for them by the marriage which Pepe’s presence threatens to prevent. The nephew, though selfish and little, has moments of almost being a good fellow; the sister, though she is really such a lamb of meekness, becomes a cat, and scratches Don Inocencio dreadfully when he weakens in his design against Pepe.

Rosario, one of the sweetest and purest images of girlhood that I know in fiction, abandons herself with equal passion to the love she feels for her cousin Pepe, and to the love she feels for her mother, Dona Perfecta. She is ready to fly with him, and yet she betrays him to her mother’s pitiless hate.

But it is Dona Perfecta herself who is the transcendent figure, the most powerful creation of the book. In her, bigotry and its fellow-vice, hypocrisy, have done their perfect work, until she comes near to being a devil, and really does some devil’s deeds. Yet even she is not without some extenuating traits. Her bigotry springs from her conscience, and she is truly devoted to her daughter’s eternal welfare; she is of such a native frankness that at a certain point she tears aside her mask of dissimulation and lets Pepe see all the ugliness of her perverted soul. She is wonderfully managed. At what moment does she begin to hate him, and to wish to undo her own work in making a match between him and her daughter? I could defy anyone to say. All one knows is that at one moment she adores her brother’s son, and at another she abhors him, and has already subtly entered upon her efforts to thwart the affection she has invited in him for her daughter.

Caballuco, what shall I say of Caballuco? He seems altogether bad, but the author lets one imagine that this cruel, this ruthless brute must have somewhere about him traits of lovableness, of leniency, though he never lets one see them. His gratitude to Dona Perfecta, even his murderous devotion, is not altogether bad; and he is certainly worse than nature made him, when wrought upon by her fury and the suggestion of Don Inocencio. The scene where they work him up to rebellion and assassination is a compendium of the history of intolerance; as the mean little conceited city of Orbajosas is the microcosm of bigoted and reactionary Spain.

IV

I have called, or half-called, this book tendencious; but in a certain larger view it is not so. It is the eternal interest of passion working upon passion, not the temporary interest of condition antagonizing condition, which renders “Dona Perfecta” so poignantly interesting, and which makes its tragedy immense. But there is hope as well as despair in such a tragedy. There is the strange support of a bereavement in it, the consolation of feeling that for those who have suffered unto death, nothing can harm them more; that even for those who have inflicted their suffering this peace will soon come.

“Is Perez Galdos a pessimist?” asks the critic Clarin. “No, certainly; but if he is not, why does he paint us sorrows that seem inconsolable? Is it from love of paradox? Is it to show that his genius, which can do so much, can paint the shadow lovelier than the light? Nothing of this. Nothing that is not serious, honest, and noble, is to be found in this novelist. Are they pessimistic, those ballads of the North, that always end with vague resonances of woe? Are they pessimists, those singers of our own land, who surprise us with tears in the midst of laughter? Is Nature pessimistic, who is so sad at nightfall that it seems as if day were dying forever? . . . The sadness of art, like that of nature, is a form of hope. Why is Christianity so artistic? Because it is the religion of sadness.”

W. D. HOWELLS.

INTRODUCTION TO ‘THE SHADOW OF THE CATHEDRAL’ by Vicente Blasco Ibañez

INTRODUCTION

There are three cathedrals which I think will remain chief of the Spanish cathedrals in the remembrance of the traveller, namely the Cathedral at Burgos, the Cathedral at Toledo, and the Cathedral at Seville; and first of these for reasons hitherto of history and art, and now of fiction, will be the Cathedral at Toledo, which the most commanding talent among the contemporary Spanish novelists has made the protagonist of the romance following. I do not mean that Vincent Blasco Ibañez is greater than Perez Galdós, or Armando Palacio Valdés or even the Countess Pardo-Bazan; but he belongs to their realistic order of imagination, and he is easily the first of living European novelists outside of Spain, with the advantage of superior youth, freshness of invention and force of characterization. The Russians have ceased to be actively the masters, and there is no Frenchman, Englishman, or Scandinavian who counts with Ibañez, and of course no Italian, American, and, unspeakably, no German.

I scarcely know whether to speak first of this book or the writer of it, but as I know less of him than of it I may more quickly dispatch that part of my introduction. He was born at Valencia in 1866, of Arragonese origin, and of a strictly middle class family. His father kept a shop, a dry-goods store in fact, but Ibañez, after fit preparation, studied law in the University of Valencia and was duly graduated in that science. Apparently he never practiced his profession, but became a journalist almost immediately. He was instinctively a revolutionist, and was imprisoned in Barcelona, the home of revolution, for some political offence, when he was eighteen. It does not appear whether he committed his popular offence in the Republican newspaper which he established in Valencia; but it is certain that he was elected a Republican deputy to the Cortes, where he became a leader of his party, while yet evidently of no great maturity.

He began almost as soon to write fiction of the naturalistic type, and of a Zolaistic coloring which his Spanish critics find rather stronger than I have myself seen it. Every young writer forms himself upon some older writer; nobody begins master; but Ibañez became master while he was yet no doubt practicing a prentice hand; yet I do not feel very strongly the Zolaistic influence in his first novel, La Barraca, or The Cabin, which paints peasant life in the region of Valencia, studied at first hand and probably from personal knowledge. It is not a very spacious scheme, but in its narrow field it is strictly a novela de costumbres, or novel of manners, as we used to call the kind. Ibañez has in fact never written anything but novels of manners, and La Barraca pictures a neighborhood where a stranger takes up a waste tract of land and tries to make a home for himself and family. This makes enemies of all his neighbors who after an interval of pity for the newcomer in the loss of one of his children return to their cruelty and render the place impossible to him. It is a tragedy such as naturalism alone can stage and give the effect of life. I have read few things so touching as this tale of commonest experience which seems as true to the suffering and defeat of the newcomers, as to the stupid inhumanity of the neighbors who join, under the lead of the evillest among them, in driving the strangers away; in fact I know nothing parallel to it, certainly nothing in English; perhaps The House with the Green Shutters breathes as great an anguish.

At just what interval or remove the novel which gave Ibañez worldwide reputation followed this little tale, I cannot say, and it is not important that I should try to say. But it is worth while to note here that he never flatters the vices or even the swoier virtues of his countrymen; and it is much to their honor that they have accepted him in the love of his art for the sincerity of his dealing with their conditions. In Sangre y Arena his affair is with the cherished atrocity which keeps the Spaniards in the era of the gladiator shows of Rome. The hero, as the renowned torrero whose career it celebrates, from his first boyish longing to be a bull-fighter, to his death, weakened by years and wounds, in the arena of Madrid, is something absolute in characterization. The whole book in fact is absolute in its fidelity to the general fact it deals with, and the persons of its powerful drama. Each in his or her place is realized with an art which leaves one in no doubt of their lifelikeness, and keeps each as vital as the torrero himself. There is little of the humor which relieves the pathos of Valdés in the equal fidelity of his Marta y Maria or the unsurpassable tragedy of Galdós in his Doña Perfecta. The torrero’s family who have dreaded his boyish ambition with the anxiety of good common people, and his devotedly gentle and beautiful wife, — even his bullying and then truckling brother-in-law who is ashamed of his profession and then proud of him when it has filled Spain with his fame, — are made to live in the spacious scene. But above all in her lust for him and her contempt for him the unique figure of Doña Sol astounds. She rules him as her brother the marquis would rule a mistress; even in the abandon of her passion she does not admit him to social equality; she will not let him speak to her in thee and thou, he must address her as ladyship; she is monstrous without ceasing to be a woman of her world, when he dies before her in the arena a broken and vanquished man. The torrero is morally better than the aristocrat and he is none the less human though a mere incident of her wicked life, — her insulted and rejected worshipper, who yet deserves his fate.

Sangre y Arena is a book of unexampled force and in that sort must be reckoned the greatest novel of the author, who has neglected no phase of his varied scene. The torrero’s mortal disaster in the arena is no more important than the action behind the scenes where the gored horses have their dangling entrails sewed up by the primitive surgery of the place and are then ridden back into the amphitheatre to suffer a second agony. No color of the dreadful picture is spared; the whole thing passes as in the reader’s presence before his sight and his other senses. The book is a masterpiece far in advance of that study of the common life which Ibañez calls La Horda; dealing with the horde of common poor and those accidents of beauty and talent as native to them as to the classes called the better. It has the attraction of the author’s frank handling, and the power of the Spanish scene in which the action passes; but it could not hold me to the end.

It is only in his latest book that he transcends the Spanish scene and peoples the wider range from South America to Paris, and from Paris to the invaded provinces of France with characters proper to the times and places. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse has not the rough textures and rank dyes of the wholly Spanish stories, but it is the strongest story of the great war known to me, and its loss in the Parisian figures is made more than good in the novelty and veracity of the Argentinos who supply that element of internationality which the North American novelists of a generation ago employed to give a fresh interest to their work. With the coming of the hero to study art and make love in the conventional Paris, and the repatriation of his father, a cattle millionaire of French birth from the pampas, with his wife and daughters, Ibañez achieves effects beyond the art of Henry James, below whom he nevertheless falls so far in subtlety and beauty.

The book has moments of the pathos so rich in the work of Galdós and Valdés, and especially of Emilia Pardo-Bazan in her Morriña or Home Sickness, the story of a peasant girl in Barcelona, but the grief of the Argentine family for the death of the son and brother in battle with the Germans, has the appeal of anguish beyond any moment in La Catedral. I do not know just the order of this last-mentioned novel among the stories of Ibañez, but it has a quality of imagination, of poetic feeling which surpasses the invention of any other that I have read, and makes me think it came before Sangre y Arena, and possibly before La Horda. I cannot recall any other novel of the author which is quite so psychological as this. It is in fact a sort of biography, a personal study, of the mighty fane at Toledo, as if the edifice were of human quality and could have its life expressed in human terms. There is nothing forced in the poetic conception, or mechanical in the execution. The Cathedral is not only a single life, it is a neighborhood, a city, a world in itself; and its complex character appears in the nature of the different souls which collectively animate it. The first of these is the sick and beaten native of it who comes back to the world which he has never loved or trusted, but in which he was born and reared. As a son of its faith, Gabriel Luna was to have been a priest; but before he became a minister of its faith, it meant almost the same that he should become a Carlist soldier, and fight on for that cause till it was hopeless. In his French captivity he loses the faith which was one with the Carlist cause, and in England he reads Darwin and becomes an evolutionist of the ardor which the evolutionists have now lost. He wanders over Europe with the English girl whom he worships with an intellectual rather than passionate ardor, and after her death he ends at Barcelona in time to share one of the habitual revolutions of the province and to spend several years in one of its prisons. When he comes out it is into a world which he is doomed to leave; he is sick to death and in hopeless poverty; he has lost the courage of his revolutionary faith if not his fealty to it; all that he asks of the world is leave to creep out of it and somewhere die in peace. He thinks of an elder brother who like himself was born in the precincts of the Cathedral where generations of their family have lived and died, and his brother does not deny him. In fact the kind, dull gardener welcomes him to a share of his poverty, and Gabriel begins dying where he began living. The kindness between the brothers is as simple in the broken adventurer whose wide world has failed him as in the aging peasant, pent from his birth in the Cathedral close, with no knowledge of anything beyond it. All their kindred who serve in their several sort the stepmother church, down to the gardener’s son whose office is to keep dogs out of the Cathedral and has the title of perrero, are good to the returning exile. They do not well understand what and where he has been; the tradition of his gifted youth when he was dedicated to the church and forsook her service at the altar for her service in the field, remains unquestioned, and he is safe in the refuge of his family who can offer mainly their insignificance for his protection. The logic of the fact is perfect, and Gabriel’s emergence from the quiet of his retreat inevitably follows from the nature of the agitator as the logic of his own past and has the approval at least of the perrero and the allegiance of the rest. What is very important in the affair is that most of the inhabitants of this Cathedral-world, rich and poor, good, bad, and indifferent, mean and generous, are few of them wicked people, as wickedness is commonly understood; they all have their habitual or their occasional moments of good will.

The refugee is tired of his past but he does not deny his faith in humanity; his doctrine only postpones to a time secularly remote the redemption of humanity from its secular suffering. He begins at once to do good; he rescues his kind elder brother from the repudiation of the daughter whom he has cast off because her seduction has condemned her to a life of shame; he wins back the poor prostitute to her home, and forces her father to tolerate her in it.

Most of the Cathedral folk are of course miserably poor, but willing to be better than they are if they can keep from starving; the fierce and prepotent Cardinal who is over them all, has moments of the common good will, when he forgives all his enemies except the recalcitrant canons. He likes to escape from these, and talk with the elderly widow of the gardener whom he has known from his boyhood, and to pity himself in her presence and smoke himself free from, his rancor and trouble. He is such a prelate as we know historically in enough instances; but he is pathetic in that simplicity which survives in him and almost makes good the loss of innocence in Latin souls. He keeps with him the young girl who is the daughter of his youth, and whom it cuts him to the soul to have those opprobrious canons imagine his mistress. He is one out of the many figures that affirm their veracity in the strange world where they have their being; and he is only the more vivid as the head of a hierarchy which he rules rather violently though never ignobly.

But the populace, the underpaid domestics and laborers of the strange ecclesiastical world in their wretched over-worked lives and hopeless deaths are what the author presents most vividly. There is the death of the cobbler’s baby which starves at the starving mother’s breast which the author makes us witness in its insupportable pathos, but his art is not chiefly shown in such extremes: his affair includes the whole tragical drama of the place, both its beauty and its squalor of fact, but he keeps central the character of the refugee, Gabriel Luna, in the allegiance to his past which he cannot throw off. When he begins to teach the simple denizens of the Cathedral, some of them hear him gladly, and some indifferently, and some unwillingly, but none intelligently. He fails with them in that doctrine of patience which was his failure, as an agitator, with the proletariat wherever he has been; they could not wait through geological epochs for the reign of mercy and justice which he could not reasonably promise the over-worked and underfed multitude to-morrow or the day after. His brother, who could not accept his teachings, warns him that the people of the Cathedral will not understand him and cannot accept his scientific gospel, and for a while he desists. In fact he takes service in the ceremonial of the Cathedral; he even plays a mechanical part in the procession of Corpus Christi, and finally he becomes one of the night-watchmen who guard the temple from the burglaries always threatening its treasures.

The story is quite without the love-interest which is the prime attraction of our mostly silly fiction. Gabriel’s association with the English girl who wanders over Europe with him is scarcely passionate if it is not altogether platonic; his affection for the poor girl for whom he has won her father’s tolerance if not forgiveness becomes a tender affection, but not possibly more; and there is as little dramatic incident as love interest in the book. The extraordinary power of it lies in its fealty to the truth and its insight into human nature. The reader of course perceives that it is intensely anti-ecclesiastical, but he could make no greater mistake than to imagine it in any wise Protestant. The author shares this hate or slight of ecclesiasticism with all the Spanish novelists, so far as I know them; most notably with Perez Galdós in Doña Perfecta and Lean Rich, with Pardo-Bazan in several of her stories, with Palacio Valdés in the less measure of Marta y Maria, and La Hermana de San Sulpicio and even with the romanticist Valera in Pepita Jimenez. But it may be said that while Ibañez does not go any farther than Galdós, for instance, he is yet more intensively agnostic. He is the standard bearer of the scientific revolt in the terms of fiction which spares us no hope of relief in the religious notion of human life here or hereafter that the Hebraic or Christian theology has divined.

It is right to say this plainly, but the reader who can suffer it from the author will find his book one of the fullest and richest in modern fiction, worthy to rank with the greatest Russian work and beyond anything yet done in English. It has not the topographical range of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, or Resurrection; but in its climax it is as logically and ruthlessly tragical as anything that the Spanish spirit has yet imagined.

Whoever can hold on to the end of it will find his reward in the full enjoyment of that “noble terror” which high tragedy alone can give. Nothing that happens in the solemn story — in which something significant is almost always happening — is of the supreme effect of the socialist agitator’s death at the hands of the disciples whom he has taught to expect mercy and justice on earth, but forbidden to expect it within the reach of the longest life of any man or race of men. His rebellious followers come at night into the Cathedral where Gabriel is watching, to rob an especially rich Madonna, whom he has taught them to regard as a senseless and wasteful idol, and they will not hear him when he pleads with them against the theft. The inevitable irony of the event is awful, but it is not cruel, rather it is the supreme touch of that pathos which seems the crowning motive of the book.

INTRODUCTION TO ‘THE COMPLETE POEMS OF PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR’

INTRODUCTION

I think I should scarcely trouble the reader with a special appeal in behalf of this book, if it had not specially appealed to me for reasons apart from the author’s race, origin, and condition. The world is too old now, and I find myself too much of its mood, to care for the work of a poet because he is black, because his father and mother were slaves, because he was, before and after he began to write poems, an elevator-boy. These facts would certainly attract me to him as a man, if I knew him to have a literary ambition, but when it came to his literary art, I must judge it irrespective of these facts, and enjoy or endure it for what it was in itself.

It seems to me that this was my experience with the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar when I found it in another form, and in justice to him I cannot wish that it should be otherwise with his readers here. Still, it will legitimately interest those who like to know the causes, or, if these may not be known, the sources, of things, to learn that the father and mother of the first poet of his race in our language were negroes without admixture of white blood. The father escaped from slavery in Kentucky to freedom in Canada, while there was still no hope of freedom otherwise; but the mother was freed by the events of the civil war, and came North to Ohio, where their son was born at Dayton, and grew up with such chances and mischances for mental training as everywhere befall the children of the poor. He has told me that his father picked up the trade of a plasterer, and when he had taught himself to read, loved chiefly to read history. The boy’s mother shared his passion for literature, with a special love of poetry, and after the father died she struggled on in more than the poverty she had shared with him. She could value the faculty which her son showed first in prose sketches and attempts at fiction, and she was proud of the praise and kindness they won him among the people of the town, where he has never been without the warmest and kindest friends.

In fact from every part of Ohio and from several cities of the adjoining States, there came letters in cordial appreciation of the critical recognition which it was my pleasure no less than my duty to offer Paul Dunbar’s work in another place. It seemed to me a happy omen for him that so many people who had known him, or known of him, were glad of a stranger’s good word; and it was gratifying to see that at home he was esteemed for the things he had done rather than because as the son of negro slaves he had done them. If a prophet is often without honor in his own country, it surely is nothing against him when he has it. In this case it deprived me of the glory of a discoverer; but that is sometimes a barren joy, and I am always willing to forego it.

What struck me in reading Mr. Dunbar’s poetry was what had already struck his friends in Ohio and Indiana, in Kentucky and Illinois. They had felt, as I felt, that however gifted his race had proven itself in music, in oratory, in several of the other arts, here was the first instance of an American negro who had evinced innate distinction in literature. In my criticism of his book I had alleged Dumas in France, and I had forgetfully failed to allege the far greater Pushkin in Russia; but these were both mulattoes, who might have been supposed to derive their qualities from white blood vastly more artistic than ours, and who were the creatures of an environment more favorable to their literary development. So far as I could remember, Paul Dunbar was the only man of pure African blood and of American civilization to feel the negro life aesthetically and express it lyrically. It seemed to me that this had come to its most modern consciousness in him, and that his brilliant and unique achievement was to have studied the American negro objectively, and to have represented him as he found him to be, with humor, with sympathy, and yet with what the reader must instinctively feel to be entire truthfulness. I said that a race which had come to this effect in any member of it, had attained civilization in him, and I permitted myself the imaginative prophecy that the hostilities and the prejudices which had so long constrained his race were destined to vanish in the arts; that these were to be the final proof that God had made of one blood all nations of men. I thought his merits positive and not comparative; and I held that if his black poems had been written by a white man, I should not have found them less admirable. I accepted them as an evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel, black in one and white in another, but humanly in all.

Yet it appeared to me then, and it appears to me now, that there is a precious difference of temperament between the races which it would be a great pity ever to lose, and that this is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar in those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his race in its own accent of our English. We call such pieces dialect pieces for want of some closer phrase, but they are really not dialect so much as delightful personal attempts and failures for the written and spoken language. In nothing is his essentially refined and delicate art so well shown as in these pieces, which, as I ventured to say, described the range between appetite and emotion, with certain lifts far beyond and above it, which is the range of the race. He reveals in these a finely ironical perception of the negro’s limitations, with a tenderness for them which I think so very rare as to be almost quite new. I should say, perhaps, that it was this humorous quality which Mr. Dunbar had added to our literature, and it would be this which would most distinguish him, now and hereafter. It is something that one feels in nearly all the dialect pieces; and I hope that in the present collection he has kept all of these in his earlier volume, and added others to them. But the contents of this book are wholly of his own choosing, and I do not know how much or little he may have preferred the poems in literary English. Some of these I thought very good, and even more than very good, but not distinctively his contribution to the body of American poetry. What I mean is that several people might have written them; but I do not know any one else at present who could quite have written the dialect pieces. These are divinations and reports of what passes in the hearts and minds of a lowly people whose poetry had hitherto been inarticulately expressed in music, but now finds, for the first time in our tongue, literary interpretation of a very artistic completeness.

I say the event is interesting, but how important it shall be can be determined only by Mr. Dunbar’s future performance. I cannot undertake to prophesy concerning this; but if he should do nothing more than he has done, I should feel that he had made the strongest claim for the negro in English literature that the negro has yet made. He has at least produced something that, however we may critically disagree about it, we cannot well refuse to enjoy; in more than one piece he has produced a work of art.

W. D. HOWELLS.

The Autobiographies

Howells, 1906

MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN

A BIT OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY

CONTENTS

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

I

IN the fall of the year 1850 my father removed with his family from the city of D — , where we had been living, to a property on the Little Miami River, to take charge of a saw-mill and grist-mill, and superintend their never-accomplished transformation into paper - mills. The property belonged to his brothers — physicians and druggists — who were to follow later, when they had disposed of their business in town. My father left a disastrous newspaper enterprise behind him when he came out to apply his mechanical taste and his knowledge of farming to the care of their place. Early in the century his parents had brought him to Ohio from Wales, and his boyhood was passed in the new country, where pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, and for him it was like renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the life in a log-cabin interrupted by forty years’ sojourn in matter-of-fact dwellings of frame and brick.

He had a passion for nature as tender and genuine and as deeply moralized as that of the English poets, by whom it had been nourished; and he taught us children all that he felt for the woods and fields and open skies; all our walks had led into them and under them. It was the fond dream of his boys to realize the trials and privations which he had painted for them in such rosy hues, and even if the only clap-boarded dwelling on the property had not been occupied by the miller, we should have disdained it for the log-cabin in which we took up our home till we could build a new house.

Our cabin stood close upon the road, but behind it broadened a cornfield of eighty acres. They still built log-cabins for dwellings in that region forty years ago, but ours must have been nearly half a century old when we went into it. It had been recently vacated by an old Virginian couple, who had long occupied it, and we decided that it needed some repairs to make it habitable even for a family inured to hardship by dauntless imaginations, and accustomed to retrospective discomforts of every kind.

So before we all came out of it a deputation of adventurers put it in what rude order they could. They glazed the narrow windows, they relaid the rotten floor, they touched (too sketchily, as it afterwards appeared) the broken roof, and they papered the walls of the ground-floor rooms. Perhaps it was my father’s love of literature which inspired him to choose newspapers for this purpose; at any rate, he did so, and the effect, as I remember it, was not without its decorative qualities.

He had used a barrel of papers bought at the nearest post-office, where they had been refused by the persons to whom they had been experimentally sent by the publisher, and the whole first page was taken up by a story, which broke off in the middle of a sentence at the foot of the last column, and tantalized us forever with fruitless conjecture as to the fate of the hero and heroine. I really suppose that a cheap wall-paper could have been got for the same money, though it might not have seemed so economical.

I am not sure that the use of the newspapers was not a tributary reminiscence of my father’s pioneer life; I cannot remember that it excited any comment in the neighbors, who were frank with their opinions of everything else we did. But it does not greatly matter; the newspapers hid the walls and the stains with which our old Virginian predecessor, who had the habit of chewing tobacco in bed, had ineffaceably streaked the plastering near the head of his couch.

The cabin, rude as it was, was not without its sophistications, its concessions to the spirit of modem luxury. The logs it was built of had not been left rounded, as they grew, but had been squared in a saw-mill, and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed with clay in the true pioneer fashion, but had been neatly plastered with mortar, and the chimney, instead of being a structure of clay-covered sticks, was solidly laid in courses of stone.

Within, however, it was all that could be asked for by the most romantic of pioneer families. It was six feet wide and a yard deep, its cavernous maw would easily swallow a back-log eighteen inches through, and we piled in front the sticks of hickory cord-wood as high as we liked. We made a perfect trial of it when we came out to put the cabin in readiness for the family, and when the hickory had dropped into a mass of tinkling, snapping, bristling embers we laid our rashers of bacon and our slices of steak upon them, and tasted with the appetite of tired youth the flavors of the camp and the wildwood in the captured juices.

I suppose it took a day or two to put the improvements which I have mentioned upon the cabin, but I am not certain. At night we laid our mattresses on the sweet new oak plank of the floor, and slept hard — in every sense. Once I remember waking, and seeing the man who was always the youngest of his boys sitting upright on his bed.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh, resting!” he answered; and that gave us one of the Heaven-blessed laughs with which we could blow away almost any cloud of care or pain.

II

IN due time the whole family took up its abode in the cabin. The household furniture had been brought out and bestowed in its scanty space, the bookcase had been set up, and the unbound books packed in easily accessible barrels.

There yet remained some of our possessions to follow, chief of which was the cow; for in those simple days people kept cows in town, and it fell to me to help my father drive her out to her future home. We got on famously, talking of the way-side things so beautiful in the beautiful autumnal day, all panoplied in the savage splendor of its painted leaves, and of the poems and histories so dear to the boy who limped barefooted by his father’s side, with his eye on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare, on —

“The glory that was Greece,

And the grandeur that was Rome.”

But the cow was very slow — far slower than the boy’s thoughts — and it had fallen night and was already thick dark when we had made the twelve miles, and stood under the white-limbed phantasmal sycamores beside the tail-race of the gristmill, and questioned how we should get across with our charge. We did not know how deep the water was, but we knew it was very cold, and we would rather not wade it.

The only thing to do seemed to be for one of us to run up under those sycamores to the saw-mill, cross the head-race there, and come back to receive the cow on the other side of the tail-race. But the boy could not bring himself either to go or stay. I do not know just how it is with a boy’s world now, but at that time it was a very dangerous world. It was full of ghosts, for one thing, and it abounded in Indians on the war-path, and amateurs of kidnapping and murder of all sorts.

The kind-hearted father urged, but he would not compel. You cannot well use force with a boy with whom you have been talking literature and philosophy for half a day. We could see the lights in the cabin cheerfully twinkling, and we shouted to those within, but no one heard us. We called and called in vain. Nothing but the cold rush of the tail-race, the dry rustle of the sycamore leaves, and the homesick lowing of the cow replied.

We determined to drive her across, and pursue her with sticks and stones through the darkness beyond, and then run at the top of our speed to the saw-mill, and get back to take her in custody again. We carried out our part of the plan perfectly, but the cow had apparently not entered into it with intelligence or sympathy.

When we reached the tail-race again she was nowhere to be found, and no appeals of “ Boss” or “Suky” or “Subose” availed. She must have instantly turned again, and retraced, in the darkness which seemed to have swallowed her up, the weary steps of the day, for she was found in her old home in town the next morning. At any rate, she had abandoned the father to the conversation of his son, for the time being, and the son had nothing to say.

III

I DO not remember now just how it was that we came by the different “animals of the horse kind,” as my father humorously called them, which we housed in an old log-stable not far from our cabin. They must have been a temporary supply until a team worthy our new sky-blue wagon could be found.

One of them was a colossal sorrel, inexorably hide-bound, whose barrel, as I believe the horsemen call the body, showed every hoop upon it. He had a feeble, foolish whimper of a voice, and we nicknamed him “Baby.” His companion was a dun mare, who had what my father at once called an italic foot, in recognition of the emphatic slant at which she carried it when upon her unwilling travels.

Then there was a small, self-opinionated gray pony, which, I think, came from one of the saw-mill hands, and which was of no service conjecturable after this lapse of time. We boys rode him barebacked, and he used to draw a buggy, which he finally ran away with. I suppose we found him useful in the representation of some of the Indian fights which we were always dramatizing, and I dare say he may have served our turn as an Arab charger, when the Moors of Granada made one of their sallies upon the camp of the Spaniards, and discharged their javelins into it — their javelins were the long, admirably straight and slender iron-weeds that grew by the river. This menagerie was constantly breaking bounds and wandering off; and I believe that it was chiefly employed in hunting itself up, its different members taking turns in remaining in the pasture or stable, to be ridden after those that had strayed into the woods.

The origin of a large and eloquent flock of geese is lost in an equal obscurity. I recall their possession simply as an accomplished fact, and I associate their desolate cries with the windy dark of rainy November nights, so that they must at least have come into our hands after the horses. They were fenced into a clayey area next the cabin for safe-keeping, where, perpetually waddling about in a majestic disoccupation, they patted the damp ground down to the hardness and smoothness of a brick yard. Throughout the day they conversed tranquilly together, but by night they woke, goose after goose, to send forth a long clarion alarum, blending in a general concert at last, to assure one another of their safety.

We must have intended to pluck them in the spring, but it never came to that. They stole their nests early in March, and entered upon the nurture of their young before we could prevent it; and it would then have been barbarous to pluck these mothers of families. Some of their nests we found, notably one under the smoke-house, where the adventurous boy who discovered it was attacked in the dark by its owner and bitten in the nose, to the natural gratification of those who had urged him to the enterprise. But he brought away some of the eggs, and we had them fried, and I know nothing that conveys a vivider idea of inexhaustible, abundance than a fried goose-egg.

IV

THE geese were not much profit — they had to be sold, finally, for little or nothing; but their soft and woolly goslings were a great pleasure to all the children, who were plunged in grief when the miller’s sow made a foray among them.

This was a fierce and predatory animal that was in some sort a neighborhood terror. She made her lair in the reeds by the river-side, breaking out a perfect circle, which she kept against all comers, especially boys, till her young were born; then she returned to her sty near the miller’s house, convenient to the young turkeys, chickens, and goslings, leading forth her brood in a savage defiance which no one dared to front, except the miller, who did so with a shot-gun at times, when her depredations became outrageous. Wherever she appeared the children ran screaming, and the boldest boy was glad of the top rail of a fence.

She was, in fact, a wild beast; but our own pigs were very social creatures. We had got some of them, I believe, from the old Virginians whom we had succeeded in the cabin, and these kept, as far as they could, the domestic habits in which that affectionate couple had indulged them. They would willingly have shared our fireside with us, humble as it was, and being repelled, they took up their quarters on cold nights at the warm base of the chimney without, where we could hear them, as long as we kept awake, disputing the places next to the stones.

All this was horrible to my mother, whose housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions of our life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far from barbaric. But children, and more particularly boys, take every natural thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs were other than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed with long cries of “Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!” but ours were taught to come at a whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out of the neighbors’ pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered corn with an intelligence we were proud of.

V

As long as the fall weather lasted, and well through the mild winter of that latitude, our chief recreation, where all our novel duties were delightful, was hunting with the long smooth-bore shotgun which had descended laterally from one of our uncles, and supplied the needs of the whole family of boys in the chase. Never less than two of us went out with it at once, and generally there were three. This enabled us to beat up the game over a wide extent of country, and while the eldest did the shooting, left the other to rush upon him as soon as he fired with tumultuous cries of “Did you hit it? Did you hit it?” Usually he had not hit it, though now and then our murderous young blood was stirred by the death agonies of some of the poor creatures whose destruction boys exult in.

We fell upon the wounded squirrels which we brought down on rare occasions, and put them to death with what I must now call a sickening ferocity. If sometimes the fool dog, the weak-minded Newfoundland pup we were rearing, rushed upon the game first, and the squirrel avenged his death upon the dog’s nose, that was pure gain, and the squirrel had the applause of all his other enemies. Yet we were none of us cruel; we never wantonly killed things that could not be eaten; we should have thought it sacrilege to shoot a robin or a turtle-dove, but we were willing to be amused, and these were the chances of war.

The woods were full of squirrels, which especially abounded in the wood-pastures, as we called the lovely dells where the greater part of the timber was thinned out to let the cattle range and graze. They were of all sorts — gray, and black, and even big red fox-squirrels, a variety I now suppose extinct. When the spring opened we hunted them in the poplar woods, whither they resorted in countless numbers for the sweetness in the cups of the tulip-tree blossoms.

I recall with a thrill one memorable morning in such woods — early, after an overnight rain, when the vistas hung full of a delicate mist that the sun pierced to kindle a million fires in the drops still pendulous from leaf and twig. I can smell the tulip blossoms and the odor of the tree-bark yet, and the fresh, strong fragrance of the leafy mould under my bare feet; and I can hear the rush of the squirrels on the bark of the trunks, or the swish of their long, plunging leaps from bough to bough in the air-tops. I hope we came away without any of them.

The only one I ever killed was a black squirrel, which fell from aloft and lodged near the first crotch of a tall elm. The younger brother, who followed me as I followed my elder, climbed up to get the squirrel, but when he mounted into the crotch he found himself with his back tight against the main branch, and unable either to go up or come down. It was a terrible moment, which we deplored with many tears and vain cries for help.

It was no longer a question of getting the dead squirrel, but the live boy to the ground. It appeared to me that to make a rope fast to the limb, and then have him slip down, hand over hand, was the best way; only, we had no rope, and I could not have got it to him if we had. I proposed going for help, but my brother would not consent to be left alone; and, in fact, I could not bear the thought of leaving him perched up there, however securely, fifty feet from the earth. I might have climbed up and pull him out, but we decided that this would only be swifter destruction.

I really cannot tell how he contrived to free himself, or why he is not in that tree to this day. The squirrel is.

In a region where the cornfields and wheat-fields were often fifty and sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember again but one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without harm to themselves. After they began to mate, and the air was full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched to find their nests, and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found them; and in June, when the pretty little mother strutted across the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we were charmed just the same.

It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the mother snipe and mother wild-duck that haunted our dam, as well as by the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on one of her young — a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange mixture — as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.

I had no such regrets in respect to the young wild-ducks, which, indeed, I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and flutter away as she would, and took to the swamp where her young sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that were often up to my waist, and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under the water.

VI

THE winter, which was so sore a trial for my mother in the log-cabin, and was not, perhaps, such a poetic rapture for my father as he had hoped, was a long delight to their children.

The centre of our life in the cabin was, of course, the fireplace, whose hugeness and whose mighty fires remained a wonder with us. There was a crane in the chimney and dangling pot-hooks, and until the cooking-stove could be set up in an adjoining shed the cooking had to be done on the hearth, and the bread baked in a Dutch-oven in the hot ashes. We had always heard of this operation, which was a necessity of early days; and nothing else, perhaps, realized them so vividly for us as the loaf laid in the iron-lidded skillet, which was then covered with ashes and heaped with coals.

I am not certain that the bread tasted any better for the romantic picturesqueness of its experience, or that the corn-meal, mixed warm from the mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits beyond the hoe-cake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new corn grated to meal when just out of the milk, and then moulded and put in like manner to brown in the glow of such embers, would still have the sweetness that was incomparable then. When the maple sap started in February, we tried the scheme we had cherished all winter of making with it tea which should be in a manner self - sugared. But the scheme was a failure — we spoiled the sap without sweetening the tea.

We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draft that swept in from the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion; but, with the advancement of modern luxury, the ladder had been nailed to the floor.

Once aloft, however, we were in a domain sacred to the past. The rude floor rattled and wavered loosely under our tread, and the window in the gable stood open or shut at its own will. There were cracks in the shingles, through which we could see the stars, when there were stars, and which, when the first snow came, let the flakes sift in upon the floor. I should not like to step out of bed into a snow-wreath in the morning now; but then I was glad to do it, and so far from thinking that or anything in our life a hardship, I counted it all joy.

Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and overhauling them one day I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old grist-mill, whistling and wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the “Spanish Student” there, and the “Copias de Manrique,” and the solemn and ever-beautiful “Voices of the Night.”

There were other books in those barrels which I must have read also, but I remember only these, that spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with Irving, and led me to attack seriously the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.

But neither these nor any other books made me discontented with the small-boy’s world about me. They made it a little more populous with visionary shapes, but that was well, and there was room for them all. It was not darkened with cares, and the duties in it were not many.

We had always worked, and we older boys had our axes now, and believed ourselves to be clearing a piece of woods which covered a hill belonging to the milling property. The timber was black-walnut and oak and hickory, and I cannot think we made much havoc in it; but we must have felled some of the trees, for I remember helping to cut them into saw-logs with the cross-cut saw, and the rapture we had in starting our logs from the brow of the hill and watching their whirling rush to the bottom. We experimented, as boys will, and we felled one large hickory with the saw instead of the axe, and barely escaped with our lives when it suddenly split near the bark, and the butt shot out between us. I preferred buckeye and sycamore trees for my own axe; they were of no use when felled, but they chopped delightfully.

VII

THEY grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had all the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. Yet no atoll in the far Pacific could have been more satisfactory to us. It was low and flat, and was half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall iron-weeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the spears and darts for our Indian fights.

The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called Western Adventure, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. I have wondered often since who wrote or compiled that book; we had printed it ourselves in D — , from the stereotype plates of some temporary publisher whose name is quite lost to me. This book, and Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made our State a battleground for nearly fifty years, and our own life in the log-cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day with undaunted spirits. With our native romance I sometimes mingled with my own reading a strain of old-world poetry, and “Hametel Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio.

VIII

WHEN the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cut-worms which swarmed in the upturned sod. I have no recollection of really enjoying any of the visionary red-cores and white-cores which had furnished us a Barmecide feast when we planted their seed, and so I suppose none of them grew.

But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear their slopes of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length.

Neither could the cornfield beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.

I dare say it was not well cared for, but an inexhaustible wealth of ears came into the milk just at the right moment for our enjoyment. We had then begun to build our new house. The frame had been raised, as the custom of that country still was, in a frolic of the neighbors, to whom unlimited coffee and a boiled ham had been served in requital of their civility, and now we were kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. To do this we had built a long skeleton hut, and had set the boards upright all around it and roofed it with them, and in the middle of it we had set a huge old cast-iron stove, in which we kept a roaring fire.

This fire had to be watched night and day, and it never took less than three or four boys, and often all the boys of the neighborhood, to watch it, and to turn and change the boards. The summer of Southern Ohio is surely no joke, and it must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn, whose ears we spitted on the points of long sticks and roasted in the red-hot stove; we must almost have roasted our own heads at the same time.

But I suppose that if the heat within the kiln or without ever became intolerable, we escaped from it and from our light summer clothing, reduced almost to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the river. In those days one went in swimming (we did not say bathing) four or five times a day with advantage and refreshment; anything more than that was, perhaps, thought unwholesome.

We had our choice of the shallows, where the long ripple was warmed through and through by the sun in which it sparkled, or the swimming-hole, whose depths were almost as tepid, but were here and there interwoven with mysterious cool under-currents.

We believed that there were snapping-turtles and water-snakes in our swimming holes, though we never saw any. There were some fish in the river, chiefly suckers and catfish in the spring, when the water was high and turbid, and in summer the bream that we call sunfish in the West, and there was a superstition, never verified by me, of bass. The truth is, we did not care much for fishing, though of course that had its turn in the pleasures of our rolling year.

There were crawfish, both hard shell and soft, to be had at small risk, and mussels in plenty. Their shells furnished us the material for many rings zealously begun, never finished; we did not see why they did not produce pearls; but perhaps they were all eaten up, before the pearl-disease could attack them, by the muskrats, before whose holes their shells were heaped. Sometimes we saw a muskrat smoothly swimming to or from his hole, and making a long straight line through the water, and lusted for his blood; but he always chose the times for these excursions when we had not our trusty smoothbore with us, and we stoned him in vain.

I have spoken of the freshets which sometimes inundated our island; but these were never very serious. They fertilized it with the loam they brought down from richer lands above, and they strewed its low shores with stranded drift. But there were so many dams on the river that no freshet could gather furious head upon it; at the worst, it could back up upon us the slack water from the mill-dam below us. Once this took place in such degree that our wheels stood still in their flooded tubs. This was a truly tremendous time. The event appears in the retrospect to have covered many days; I dare say it covered a half-day at most.

Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passes in that latitude without making ice enough for that sport, and there could not have been much sledding either. We read, enviously enough, in Peter Parley’s First Book of History, of the coasting on Boston Common, and we made some weak-kneed sleds (whose imbecile runners flattened hopelessly under them) when the light snows began to come; but we never had any real coasting, as our elders never had any real sleighing in the jumpers they made by splitting a hickory sapling for runners, and mounting any sort of rude box upon them. They might often have used sleighs in the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads, and lasted all winter.

There were not many boys in our neighborhood, and we brothers had to make the most of one another’s company. For a little while in the winter some of us went two miles away through the woods to school; but there was not much to be taught a reading family like ours in that log-hut, and I suppose it was not thought worth while to keep us at it. No impression of it remains to me, except the wild, lonesome cooing of the turtle-doves when they began to nest in the neighboring oaks.

IX

WE had a poor fellow, named B — , for our saw-miller, whose sad fortunes are vividly associated with the loveliness of the early summer in my mind. He was a hapless, harmless, kindly creature, and he had passed most of his manhood in a sort of peonage to a rich neighboring farmer whom he was hopelessly in debt to, so that I suppose it was like the gift of freedom to him when he came into, our employ; but his happiness did not last long.

Within a month or two he was seized with a flux that carried him off after a few days, and then began to attack his family. He had half a dozen children, and they all died, except one boy, who was left with his foolish, simple mother. My oldest brother had helped nurse them, and had watched with them, and seen them die; and it fell to me to go to the next village one morning and buy linen to make the last two of their shrouds. I mounted the italic - footed mare, barebacked, as usual, with my legs going to sleep on either side of her, but my brain wildly awake, and set out through the beautiful morning, turned lurid and ghastly by the errand on which I was bent.

When I came back with that linen in my hand it was as if I were accompanied by troops of sheeted dead, from whom that italic-footed nightmare could not be persuaded to escape by any sawing of her mouth, or any thumping of her sides with my bare heels.

I am astonished now that this terror should have been so transient. The little ones were laid with their father and their brothers and sisters in the un fenced graveyard on the top of our hill, where the pigs foraged for acorns above their heads in the fall; and then my sun shone again. So did the sun of the surviving B — s. The mother turned her household goods into ready money, and with this and the wages due her husband bought a changeable silk dress for herself and an oil-cloth cap for her son, and equipped in these splendors the two set off up the road towards the town of X — , gay, light-hearted in their destitution, and consoled after the bereavement of a single week.

X

OUR new house got on slowly. There were various delays and some difficulties, but it was all intensely interesting, and we watched its growth with eyes that hardly left it night or day. Life in the log-cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer; we were all impatient to be out of it. We looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. We were to have a parlor, a dining-room, and a library; there were to be three chambers for the family and a spare room; after six months in the log-cabin we could hardly have imagined it, if we had not seen these divisions actually made by the studding.

In that region there is no soft wood. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. In this neither the carpenter nor any of the neighbors could think with him; the local ideal was brick for a house, and if not that, then white paint and green blinds, and always two front doors; but my father had his way, and our home was fashioned according to his plans.

It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town — from the pitiful little village, namely, where I went to buy those shrouds.

I try to give merely a child’s impressions of our life, which were nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for my mother especially, who could get no help, or only briefly and fitfully, in the work that fell to her. What her pleasures were I can scarcely imagine. She was cut off from church-going because we were Swedenborgians; short of Cincinnati, sixty miles away, there was no worship of our faith, and the local preaching was not edifying, theologically or intellectually.

Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of mental and spiritual refreshment. Otherwise, my father read us a service out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to us — Scott or Moore or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.

In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river. One such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flat boat, which we kept on the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck the swift current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again.

It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam, where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves and the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe; and life was rich unspeakably.

I recollect the complex effect of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights when my brother used to row across the river to the cabin of the B — s, where the poor man and his children lay dying in turn, and I wondered and shuddered at his courage; but there is one night that remains single and peerless in my memory.

My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s — for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter — and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well into the night when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stand in a park-like freedom from underbrush, and the grass grows dense and rich among them.

We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the closely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed not only to liberate me from the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy. Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that whatever perishes there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.

XI

OUR log-cabin stood only a stone’s cast from the gray old weather-tinted gristmill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. A soft sibilance ordinarily prevailed over the dull, hoarse murmur of the machinery; but late at night, when the water gathered that mysterious force which the darkness gives it, the voice of the mill had something weird in it like a human moan.

It was in all ways a place which I did not care to explore alone. It was very well, with a company of boys, to tumble and wrestle in the vast bins full of golden wheat, or to climb the slippery stairs to the cooling-floor in the loft, whither the little pockets of the elevators carried the meal warm from the burrs, and the blades of the wheel up there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution. But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid basement, the angry whirl of the burrs under the hoppers, the high windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a pleasure to the boy’s sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians, of course, made it their ambush.

With the saw-mill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not keep the grist-mill’s unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when the upright-saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet smell of the bruised woody fibres, or then when the circular-saw wailed through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood touched it again, and it broke again into its long lament.

The warm sawdust in the pits below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought up the logs or carried away the lumber. How we should have lived through all these complicated mechanical perils I cannot very well imagine now; but there is a special providence that watches over boys and appoints the greater number of them to grow up in spite of their environment.

Nothing was ever drowned in those swift and sullen races, except our spool-pig, as they call the invalid titman of the herd in that region; though once one of the grist-miller’s children came near giving a touch of tragedy to their waters. He fell into the race just above the sawmill gate, and was eddying round into the rush upon its wheel, when I caught him by his long yellow hair, and pulled him out. His mother came rushing from her door at the outcry we had all set up, and perceiving him safe, immediately fell upon him in merited chastisement. No notice, then or thereafter, was taken of his preserver by either of his parents; but I was not the less a hero in my own eyes.

XII

I CANNOT remember now whether it was in the early spring after our first winter in the log-cabin, or in the early part of the second winter, which found us still there, that it was justly thought fit I should leave these vain delights and go to earn some money in a printing-office in X — . I was, though so young, a good compositor, swift and clean, and when the foreman of the printing-office appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the place of a delinquent hand, there was no question with any one but myself that I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly upon me — a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence, pierced my heart and filled my throat, and blinded me with tears.

The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day’s grace was granted me, and then my older brother took me to X — , where he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky, apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must always be associated for me with the despair that then filled my soul, and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked, and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. All the time I had every fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing, especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing, and how at every moment she was looking; I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about there.

The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gayety, when they came in, added to my desolation.

The man said supper was about ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father came; but in my own mind it was closed.

My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either of us; we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that boardinghouse, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a year’s absence.

Again I was called to suffer this trial, the chief trial of my boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only by the experience of survival from it, but by various circumstances.

This time I went to D — , where one of my uncles was still living, and he somehow learned the misery I was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in D — . I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, who stood to me for all that was at once naturally and conventionally refined, a type of gracious loveliness and worldly splendor.

They had an only child, to whom her cousin’s presence in the house was a constant joy. Over them all hung the shadow of fragile health, and I look back at them through the halo of their early death; but the remembrance can not make them kinder than they really were. With all that, I was homesick still. I fell asleep with the radiant image of our log-cabin before my eyes, and I woke with my heart like lead in my breast.

I did not see how I could get through the day, and I began it with miserable tears. I had found that by drinking a great deal of water at my meals I could keep down the sobs for the time being, and I practised this device to the surprise and alarm of my relatives, who were troubled at the spectacle of my unnatural thirst.

Sometimes I left the table and ran out for a burst of tears behind the house; every night after dark! Cried there alone. But I could not wholly hide my suffering, and I suppose that after a while the sight of it became intolerable. At any rate, a blessed evening came when, returning from work, I found my brother waiting for me at my uncle’s house; and the next morning we set out for home in the keen, silent dark before the November dawn.

We were both mounted on the italicfooted mare, I behind my brother, with my arms round him to keep on better; and so we rode out of the sleeping town, and into the lifting shadow of the woods. They might have swarmed with ghosts or Indians; I should not have cared; I was going home.

By-and-by, as we rode on, the birds began to call one another from their dreams, the quails whistled from the stubble fields, and the crows clamored from the tops of the deadening; (The trees girdled, and left to die and decay, standing.

)  the squirrels raced along the fence-rails, and, in the woods, they stopped half-way up the boles to bark at us; the jays strutted down the shelving branches to offer us a passing insult and defiance.

Presently, at a little clearing, we came to a log-cabin; the blue smoke curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the soft, low hum of a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew dripped round us; and I was profoundly at peace. The homesick will understand how it was that I was as if saved from death.

At last we crossed a tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log-cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was “company.”

It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely-fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through all the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and admired the familiar outside of the house as freshly as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood-fires blazed upon the hearths, and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.

I must have gone through the old log-cabin to see how it looked without us, but I have no recollection of ever entering its door again, so soon had it ceased to be part of my life. We remained in the new house, as we continued to call it, for two or three months, and then the changes of business which had been taking place without the knowledge of us children called us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and the pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode in city streets again. We went to live in the ordinary brick house of our civilization, but we had grown so accustomed, with the quick and facile adaptation of children, to living in a house which was merely lathed, that we distinguished this last dwelling from the new house as a “plastered house.”

Some of our playmates of the neighborhood walked part of the way to X — with us boys, on the snowy morning when we turned our backs on the new house to take the train in that town. A shadow of the gloom in which our spirits were steeped passes over me again, but chiefly I remember our difficulties in getting our young Newfoundland dog away with us; and our subsequent embarrassments with this animal on the train, where he sat up and barked out of the window at the passing objects, and finally became seasick, blot all other memories of that time from my mind.

XIII

I HAD not seen the old place for thirty years, when, four years ago, I found myself in the pretty little town of X — , which had once appeared so lordly and so proud to my poor rustic eyes, with a vacant half-day on my hands. I hired a buggy and a boy, and had him drive me down to that point on the river where our mills at least used to be.

The road was all strange to me, and when I reached my destination that was stranger still. The timber had been cut from the hill and island, and where the stately hickories had once towered and the sycamores drooped there was now a bald knob and a sterile tract of sand, good hardly for the grazing of the few cows that cropped its scanty herbage. They were both very much smaller: the hill was not the mountain it had seemed, the island no longer rivalled the proportions of England.

The grist - mill, whose gray bulk had kept so large a place in my memory, was sadly dwarfed, and in its decrepitude it had canted backwards, and seemed tottering to its fall. I explored it from wheel-pit to cooling-floor; there was not an Indian in it, but, ah! what ghosts! ghosts of the living and the dead; my brothers’, my playmates’, my own! At last, it was really haunted. I think no touch of repair had been put upon it, or upon the old saw-mill, either, on whose roof the shingles had all curled up like the feathers of a frizzly chicken in the rains and suns of those thirty summers past. The head-race, once a type of silent, sullen power, now crept feebly to its work; even the water seemed to have grown old, and anything might have battled successfully with the currents where the spool-pig was drowned and the miller’s boy was carried so near his death.

I had with me for company the boy of the present miller, who silently followed me about, and answered my questions as he could. The epoch of our possession was as remote and as unstoried to him as that of the Mound-Builders. A small frame house, exactly the size and shape of our log-cabin, occupied its site, and he had never even heard that any other house had ever stood there. The “ new house,” shingled and weather-boarded with black-walnut, had bleached to a silvery gray, and had no longer a trace of its rich brown. He let me go into it, and wander about at will. It was very little, and the small rooms were very low. It was plastered now; it was even papered; but it was not half so fine as it used to be.

I asked him if there was a graveyard on top of the hill, and he said, “Yes; an old one;” and we went up together to look at it, with its stones all fallen or sunken away, and no memory of the simple, harmless man and his little children whom I had seen laid there, going down with each into the dust in terror and desolation of spirit. His widow probably no longer wears dresses of changeable silk; and where is the orphan boy in the oil-cloth cap? In Congress, for all I know.

I looked across the bare island to where their cabin had stood, and my eyes might as well have sought the cities of the plain. The boy at my elbow could not make out why the gray-mustached, middle-aged man should care, and when I attempted to tell him that I had once been a boy of his age there, and that this place had been my home, the boy of whom I have here written so freely seemed so much less a part of me than the boy to whom I spoke, that, upon the whole, I had rather a sense of imposing upon my listener.

THE END

YEARS OF MY YOUTH

CONTENTS

PART I

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

PART II

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

PART III

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

PART IV

I

II

III

IV

PART V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

XIII

XIV

PART I

IT is hard to know the child’s own earliest recollections from the things it has been told of itself by those with whom its life began. They remember for it the past which it afterward seems to remember for itself; the wavering outline of its nature is shadowed against the background of family, and from this it imagines an individual existence which has not yet begun. The events then have the quality of things dreamt, not lived, and they remain of that impalpable and elusive quality in all the after years.

I

Of the facts which I must believe from the witness of others, is the fact that I was born on the 1st of March, 1837, at Martin’s Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio. My father’s name was William Cooper Howells, and my mother’s was Mary Dean; they were married six years before my birth, and I was the second child in their family of eight. On my father’s side my people were wholly Welsh, except his English grandmother, and on my mother’s side wholly German, except her Irish father, of whom it is mainly known that he knew how to win my grandmother Elizabeth Dock away from her very loving family, where they dwelt in great Pennsylvania-German comfort and prosperity on their farm near Harrisburg, to share with him the hardships of the wild country over the westward mountains. She was the favorite of her brothers and sisters, and the best-beloved of her mother, perhaps because she was the youngest; there is a shadowy legend that she went one evening to milk the cows, and did not return from following after her husband; but I cannot associate this romantic story with the ageing grandmother whom I tenderly loved when a child, and whom I still fondly remember. She spoke with a strong German accent, and she had her Luther Bible, for she never read English. Sometimes she came to visit my homesick mother after we went to live in southern Ohio; once I went with my mother to visit her in the little town where I was born, and of that visit I have the remembrance of her stopping me on the stairs, one morning when I had been out, and asking me in her German idiom and accent, “What fur a tay is it, child?”

I can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German, and Irish in me that I feel myself so typically American, and that I am of the imaginative temperament which has enabled me all the conscious years of my life to see reality more iridescent and beautiful, or more lurid and terrible than any make-believe about reality. Among my father’s people the first who left Wales was his great-grandfather. He established himself in London as a clock and watch maker, and I like to believe that it is his name which my tall clock, paneled in the lovely chinoiserie of Queen Anne’s time, bears graven on its dial. Two sons followed him, and wrought at the same art, then almost a fine art, and one of them married in London and took his English wife back with him to Wales. His people were, so far as my actual knowledge goes, middle-class Welsh, but the family is of such a remote antiquity as in its present dotage not to know what part of Wales it came from. As to our lineage a Welsh clergyman, a few years ago, noting the identity of name, invited me to the fond conjecture of descent from Hywel Dda, or Howel the Good, who became king of Wales about the time of Alfred the Great. He codified the laws or rather the customs of his realm, and produced one of the most interesting books I have read, and I have finally preferred him as an ancestor because he was the first literary man of our name. There was a time when I leaned toward the delightful James Howell, who wrote the Familiar Letters and many books in verse and prose, and was of several shades of politics in the difficult days of Charles and Oliver; but I was forced to relinquish him because he was never married. My father, for his part, when once questioned as to our origin, answered that so far as he could make out we derived from a blacksmith, whom he considered a good sort of ancestor, but he could not name him, and he must have been, whatever his merit, a person of extreme obscurity.

There is no record of the time when my great-grandfather with his brothers went to London and fixed there as watchmakers. My tall clock, which bears our name on its dial, has no date, and I can only imagine their London epoch to have begun about the middle of the eighteenth century. Being Welsh, they were no doubt musical, and I like to cherish the tradition of singing and playing women in our line, and a somehow cousinship with the famous Parepa. But this is very uncertain; what is certain is that when my great-grandfather went back to Wales he fixed himself in the little town of Hay, where he began the manufacture of Welsh flannels, a fabric still esteemed for its many virtues, and greatly prospered. When I visited Hay in 1883 (my father always call it, after the old fashion, The Hay, which was the right version of its Norman name of La Haye), three of his mills were yet standing, and one of them was working, very modestly, on the sloping bank of the lovely river Wye. Another had sunk to be a stable, but the third, in the spirit of our New World lives, had become a bookstore and printing-office, a well-preserved stone edifice of four or five stories, such as there was not the like of, probably, in the whole of Wales when Hywel Dda was king. My great-grandfather was apparently an excellent business man, but I am afraid I must own (reluctantly, with my Celtic prejudice) that literature, or the love of it, came into our family with the English girl whom he married in London. She was, at least, a reader of the fiction of the day, if I may judge from the high-colored style of the now pathetically faded letter which she wrote to reproach a daughter who had made a runaway match and fled to America. So many people then used to make runaway matches; but when very late in the lives of these eloping lovers I once saw them, an old man and woman, at our house in Columbus, they hardly looked their youthful adventure, even to the fancy of a boy beginning to unrealize life. The reader may care to learn that they were the ancestors of Vaughan Kester, the very gifted young novelist, who came into popular recognition almost in the hour of his most untimely death, and of his brother Paul Kester, the playwright.

II

My great-grandfather became “a Friend by Convincement,” as the Quakers called the Friends not born in their Society; but I do not know whether it was before or after his convincement that he sailed to Philadelphia with a stock of his Welsh flannels, which he sold to such advantage that a dramatic family tradition represents him wheeling the proceeds in a barrel of silver down the street to the vessel which brought him and which took him away. That was in the time of Washington’s second Presidency, and Washington strongly advised his staying in the country and setting up his manufacture here; but he was prospering in Wales, and why should he come to America even at the suggestion of Washington? It is another family tradition that he complied so far as to purchase a vast acreage of land on the Potomac, including the site of our present capital, as some of his descendants in each generation have believed, without the means of expropriating the nation from its unlawful holdings. This would have been the more difficult as he never took a deed of his land, and he certainly never came back to America; yet he seems always to have been haunted by the allurement of it which my grandfather felt so potently that after twice visiting the country he came over a third time and cast his lot here.

He was already married, when with his young wife and my father a year old he sailed from London in 1808. Perhaps because they were chased by a French privateer, they speedily arrived in Boston after a voyage of only twenty-one days. In the memoir which my father wrote for his family, and which was published after his death, he tells that my grandmother formed the highest opinion of Boston, mainly, he surmises, from the very intelligent behavior of the young ladies in making a pet of her baby at the boarding-house where she stayed while her husband began going about wherever people wished his skill in setting up woolen-mills. The young ladies taught her little one to walk; and many years afterward, say fifty, when I saw her for the last time in a village of northwestern Ohio, she said “the Bostonians were very nice people,” so faithfully had she cherished, through a thousand vicissitudes, the kind memory of that first sojourn in America.

I do not think she quite realized the pitch of greatness at which I had arrived in writing for the Atlantic Monthly, the renowned periodical then recently founded in Boston, or the fame of the poets whom I had met there the year before. I suspect that she was never of the literary taste of my English great-grandmother; but her father had been a school-teacher, and she had been carefully educated by the uncle and aunt to whom she was left at her parents’ early death. They were Friends, but she never formally joined the Society, though worshiping with them; she was, like her husband, middle-class Welsh, and as long as they lived they both misplaced their aspirates. If I add that her maiden name was Thomas, and that her father’s name was John Thomas, I think I have sufficiently attested her pure Cymric origin. So far as I know there was no mixture of Saxon blood on her side; but her people, like most of the border Welsh, spoke the languages of both races; and very late in my father’s life, he mentioned casually, as old people will mention interesting things, that he remembered his father and mother speaking Welsh together. Of the two she remained the fonder of their native country, and in that last visit I paid her she said, after half a century of exile, “We do so and so at home, and you do so and so here.” I can see her now, the gentlest of little Quaker ladies, with her white fichu crossed on her breast; and I hesitate attributing to her my immemorial knowledge that the Welsh were never conquered, but were tricked into union with the English by having one of their princes born, as it were surreptitiously, in Wales; it must have been my father who told me this and amused himself with my childish race-pride in the fact. She gave me an illustrated Tour of Wales, having among its steel engravings the picture of a Norman castle where, by favor of a cousin who was the housekeeper, she had slept one night when a girl; but in America she had slept oftener in log cabins, which my grandfather satisfied his devoted unworldliness in making his earthly tabernacles. She herself was not, I think, a devout person; she had her spiritual life in his, and followed his varying fortunes, from richer to poorer, with a tacit adherence to what he believed, whether the mild doctrine of Quakerism or the fervid Methodism for which he never quite relinquished it.

He seems to have come to America with money enough to lose a good deal in his removals from Boston to Poughkeepsie, from Poughkeepsie to New York City, from New York to Virginia, and from Virginia to eastern Ohio, where he ended in such adversity on his farm that he was glad to accept the charge of a woolen-mill in Steubenville. He knew the business thoroughly and he had set up mills for others in his various sojourns, following the line of least resistance among the Quaker settlements opened to him by the letters he had brought from Wales. He even went to the new capital, Washington, in a hope of manufacturing in Virginia held out to him by a nephew of President Madison, but it failed him to his heavy cost; and in Ohio, his farming experiments, which he renewed in a few years on giving up that mill at Steubenville, were alike disastrous. After more than enough of them he rested for a while in Wheeling, West Virginia, where my father met my mother, and they were married.

They then continued the family wanderings in his own search for the chance of earning a living in what seems to have been a very grudging country, even to industry so willing as his. He had now become a printer, and not that only, but a publisher, for he had already begun and ended the issue of a monthly magazine called The Gleaner, made up, as its name implied, chiefly of selections; his sister helped him as editor, and some old bound volumes of its few numbers show their joint work to have been done with good taste in the preferences of their day. He married upon the expectation of affluence from the publication of a work on The Rise, Progress and Downfall of Aristocracy, which almost immediately preceded the ruin of the enthusiastic author and of my father with him, if he indeed could have experienced further loss in his entire want of money. He did not lose heart, and he was presently living contentedly on three hundred dollars a year as foreman of a newspaper office in St. Clairville, Ohio. But his health gave way, and a little later, for the sake of the outdoor employment, he took up the trade of house-painter; and he was working at this in Wheeling when my grandfather Dean suggested his buying a lot and building a house in Martin’s Ferry, just across the Ohio River. The lot must have been bought on credit, and he built mainly with his own capable hands a small brick house of one story and two rooms with a lean-to. In this house I was born, and my father and mother were very happy there; they never owned another house until their children helped them work and pay for it a quarter of a century afterward, though throughout this long time they made us a home inexpressibly dear to me still.

My father now began to read medicine, but during the course of a winter’s lectures at Cincinnati (where he worked as a printer meanwhile), his health again gave way and he returned to Martin’s Ferry. When I was three years old, my grandmother Dean’s eldest brother, William Dock, came to visit her. He was the beloved patriarch of a family which I am glad to claim my kindred and was a best type of his Pennsylvania-German race. He had prospered on through a life of kindness and good deeds; he was so rich that he had driven in his own

The Ohio River at Wheeling, West Virginia. Mr. Howells’s father worked in Wheeling before he moved across the river to Martin’s Ferry

carriage from Harrisburg, over the mountains, and he now asked my father to drive with him across the state of Ohio. When they arrived in Dayton, my father went on by canal to Hamilton, where he found friends to help him buy the Whig newspaper which he had only just paid for when he sold it eight years later.

III

Of the first three years of my life which preceded this removal there is very little that I can honestly claim to remember. The things that I seem to remember are seeing from the window of our little house, when I woke one morning, a peach-tree in bloom; and again seeing from the steamboat which was carrying our family to Cincinnati, a man drowning in the river. But these visions, both of them very distinct, might very well have been the effect of hearing the things spoken of by my elders, though I am surest of the peach-tree in bloom as an authentic memory.

This time, so happy for my father and mother, was scarcely less happy because of its uncertainties. My young aunts lived with their now widowed mother not far from us; as the latest comer, I was in much request among them, of course; and my father was hardly less in favor with the whole family from his acceptable habit of finding a joke in everything. He supplied the place of son to my grandmother in the absence of my young uncles, then away most of their time on the river which they followed from the humblest beginnings on keel-boats to the proudest endings as pilots and captains and owners of steamboats. In those early days when they returned from the river they brought their earnings to their mother in gold coins, which they called Yellow Boys, and which she kept in a bowl in the cupboard, where I seem so vividly to have seen them, that I cannot quite believe I did not. These good sons were all Democrats except the youngest, but they finally became of my father’s anti-slavery Whig faith in politics, and I believe they were as glad to have their home in a free state as my father’s family, who had now left Wheeling, and were settled in southwestern Ohio.

There were not many slaves in Wheeling, but it was a sort of entrepôt where the negroes were collected and embarked for the plantations down the river, in their doom to the death-in-life of the far South. My grandfather Howells had, in the anti-slavery tradition of his motherland, made himself so little desired among his Virginian fellow-citizens that I have heard his removal from Wheeling was distinctly favored by public sentiment; and afterward, on the farm he bought in Ohio, his fences and corn-cribs suffered from the pro-slavery convictions of his neighbors. But he was dwelling in safety and prosperity among the drugs and books which were his merchandise in the store where I began to remember him in my earliest days at Hamilton. He seemed to me a very old man, and I noticed with the keen observance of a child how the muscles sagged at the sides of his chin and how his under lip, which I did not know I had inherited from him, projected. His clothes, which had long ceased to be drab in color, were of a Quaker formality in cut; his black hat followed this world’s fashion in color, but was broad in the brim and very low-crowned, which added somehow in my young sense to the reproving sadness of his presence. He had black Welsh eyes and was of the low stature of his race; my grandmother was blue-eyed; she was little, too; but my aunt, their only surviving daughter, with his black eyes, was among their taller children. She was born several years after their settlement in America, but she loyally misused her aspirates as they did, and, never marrying, was of a life-long devotion to them. They first lived over the drug-store, after the fashion of shopkeepers in England; I am aware of my grandfather soon afterward having a pretty house and a large garden quite away from the store, but he always lived more simply than his means obliged. Amidst the rude experiences of their backwoods years, the family had continued gentle in their thoughts and tastes, though my grandfather shared with poetry his passion for religion, and in my later boyhood when I had begun to print my verses, he wrote me a letter solemnly praising them, but adjuring me to devote my gifts to the service of my Maker, which I had so little notion of doing in a selfish ideal of my own glory.

Most of his father’s fortune had somehow gone to other sons, but, whether rich or poor, their generation seemed to be of a like religiosity. One of them lived in worldly state at Bristol before coming to America, and was probably of a piety not so insupportable as I found him in the memoir which he wrote of his second wife, when I came to read it the other day. Him I never saw, but from time to time there was one or other of his many sons employed in my grandfather’s store, whom I remember blithe spirits, disposed to seize whatever chance of a joke life offered them, such as selling Young’s Night Thoughts to a customer who had whispered his wish for an improper book. Some of my father’s younger brothers were of a like cheerfulness with these lively cousins, and of the same aptness for laughter. One was a physician, another a dentist, another in a neighboring town a druggist, another yet a speculative adventurer in the regions to the southward: he came back from his commercial forays once with so many half-dollars that when spread out they covered the whole surface of our dining-table; but I am quite unable to report what negotiation they were the spoil of. There was a far cousin who was a painter, and left (possibly as a pledge of indebtedness) with my dentist uncle after a sojourn among us a picture which I early prized as a masterpiece, and still remember as the charming head of a girl shadowed by the fan she held over it. I never saw the painter, but I recall, from my father’s singing them, the lines of a “doleful ballad” which he left behind him as well as the picture:

A thief will steal from you all that you havye,
But an unfaithful lovyer will bring you to your grave.

The uncle who was a physician, when he left off the practice of medicine about his eightieth year, took up the art of sculpture; he may have always had a taste for it, and his knowledge of anatomy would have helped qualify him for it. He modeled from photographs a head of my father admirably like and full of character, the really extraordinary witness of a gift latent till then through a long life devoted to other things.

We children had our preference among these Howells uncles, but we did not care for any of them so much as for our Dean uncles, who now and then found their way up to Hamilton from Cincinnati when their steamboats lay there in their trips from Pittsburg. They were all very jovial; and one of the younger among them could play the violin, not less acceptably because he played by ear and not by art. Of the youngest and best-loved I am lastingly aware in his coming late one night and of my creeping down-stairs from my sleep to sit in his lap and hear his talk with my father and mother, while his bursts of laughter agreeably shook my small person. I dare say these uncles used to bring us gifts from that steamboating world of theirs which seemed to us of a splendor not less than what I should now call oriental when we sometimes visited them at Cincinnati, and came away bulging in every pocket with the more portable of the dainties we had been feasting upon. In the most signal of these visits, as I once sat between my father and my Uncle William, for whom I was named, on the hurricane roof of his boat, he took a silver half-dollar from his pocket and put it warm in my hand, with a quizzical look into my eyes. The sight of such unexampled riches stopped my breath for the moment, but I made out to ask, “Is it for me?” and he nodded his head smilingly up and down; then, for my experience had hitherto been of fippenny-bits yielded by my father after long reasoning, I asked, “Is it good?” and remained puzzled to know why they laughed so together; it must have been years before I understood.

These uncles had grown up in a slave state, and they thought, without thinking, that slavery must be right; but once when an abolition lecturer was denied public hearing at Martin’s Ferry, they said he should speak in their mother’s house; and there, much unaware, I heard my first and last abolition lecture, barely escaping with my life, for one of the objections urged by the mob outside was a stone hurled through the window, where my mother sat with me in her arms. At my Uncle William’s house in the years after the Civil War, my father and he began talking of old times, and he told how, when a boy on a keel-boat, tied up to a Mississippi shore, he had seen an overseer steal upon a black girl loitering at her work, and wind his blacksnake-whip round her body, naked except for the one cotton garment she wore. “When I heard that colored female screech,” he said, and the old-fashioned word female, used for compassionate respectfulness, remains with me, “and saw her jump, I knew that there must be something wrong in slavery.” Perhaps the sense of this had been in his mind when he determined with his brothers that the abolition lecturer should be heard in their mother’s house.

She sometimes came to visit us in Hamilton, to break the homesick separations from her which my mother suffered through for so many years, and her visits were times of high holiday for us children. I should be interested now to know what she and my Welsh grandmother made of each other, but I believe they were good friends, though probably not mutually very intelligible. My mother’s young sisters, who also came on welcome visits, were always joking with my father and helping my mother at her work; but I cannot suppose that there was much common ground between them and my grandfather’s family except in their common Methodism. For me, I adored them; and if the truth must be told, though I had every reason to love my Welsh grandmother, I had a peculiar tenderness for my Pennsylvania-Dutch grandmother, with her German accent and her caressing ways. My grandfather, indeed, could have recognized no difference among heirs of equal complicity in Adam’s sin; and in the situation such as it was, I lived blissfully unborn to all things of life outside of my home. I can recur to the time only as a dream of love and loving, and though I came out of it no longer a little child, but a boy struggling tooth and nail for my place among other boys, I must still recur to the ten or eleven years passed in Hamilton as the gladdest of all my years. They may have been even gladder than they now seem, because the incidents which embody happiness had then the novelty which such incidents lose from their recurrence; while the facts of unhappiness, no matter how often they repeat themselves, seem throughout life an unprecedented experience and impress themselves as vividly the last time as the first. I recall some occasions of grief and shame in that far past with unfailing distinctness, but the long spaces

Hamilton, Ohio, the “Boy’s Town” of Mr. Howells’s youth

of blissful living which they interrupted hold few or no records which I can allege in proof of my belief that I was then, above every other when,

Joyful and free from blame.

IV

Throughout those years at Hamilton I think of my father as absorbed in the mechanical and intellectual work of his newspaper. My earliest sense of him relates him as much to the types and the press as to the table where he wrote his editorials amidst the talk of the printers, or of the politicians who came to discuss public affairs with him. From a quaint pride, he did not like his printer’s craft to be called a trade; he contended that it was a profession; he was interested in it, as the expression of his taste, and the exercise of his ingenuity and invention, and he could supply many deficiencies in its means and processes. He cut fonts of large type for job-work out of apple-wood in default of box or olive; he even made the graver’s tools for carving the letters. Nothing pleased him better than to contrive a thing out of something it was not meant for, as making a penknife blade out of an old razor, or the like. He could do almost anything with his ready hand and his ingenious brain, while I have never been able to do anything with mine but write a few score books. But as for the printer’s craft with me, it was simply my joy and pride from the first things I knew of it. I know when I could not read, for I recall supplying the text from my imagination for the pictures I found in books, but I do not know when I could not set type. My first attempt at literature was not written, but put up in type, and printed off by me. My father praised it, and this made me so proud that I showed it to one of those eminent Whig politicians always haunting the office. He made no comment on it, but asked me if I could spell baker. I spelled the word simple-heartedly, and it was years before I realized that he meant a hurt to my poor little childish vanity.

Very soon I could set type very well, and at ten years and onward till journalism became my university, the printing-office was mainly my school. Of course, like every sort of work with a boy, the work became irksome to me, and I would gladly have escaped from it to every sort of play, but it never ceased to have the charm it first had. Every part of the trade became familiar to me, and if I had not been so little I could at once have worked not only at case, but at press, as my brother did. I had my favorites among the printers, who knew me as the Old Man, because of the habitual gravity which was apt to be broken in me by bursts of wild hilarity; but I am not sure whether I liked better the conscience of the young journeyman who wished to hold me in the leash of his moral convictions, or the nature of my companion in laughter which seemed to have selected for him the fit name of Sim Haggett. This merrymaker was married, but so very presently in our acquaintance was widowed, that I can scarcely put any space between his mourning for his loss and his rejoicing in the first joke that followed it. There were three or four of the journeymen, with an apprentice, to do the work now reduced by many facilities to the competence of one or two. Some of them slept in a den opening from the printing-office, where I envied them the wild freedom unhampered by the conventions of sweeping, dusting, or bed-making; it was next to camping out.

The range of that young experience of mine transcends telling, but the bizarre mixture was pure delight to the boy I was, already beginning to take the impress of events and characters. Though I loved the art of printing so much, though my pride even more than my love was taken with it, as something beyond other boys, yet I loved my schools too. In their succession there seem to have been a good many of them, with a variety of teachers, whom I tried to make like me because I liked them. I was gifted in spelling, geography, and reading, but arithmetic was not for me. I could declaim long passages from the speeches of Corwin against the Mexican War, and of Chatham against the American War, and poems from our school readers, or from Campbell or Moore or Byron; but at the blackboard I was dumb. I bore fairly well the mockeries of boys, boldly bad, who played upon a certain simplicity of soul in me, and pretended, for instance, when I came out one night saying I was six years old, that I was a shameless boaster and liar. Swimming, hunting, fishing, foraging at every season, with the skating which the waters of the rivers and canals afforded, were my joy; I took my part in the races and the games, in football and in baseball, then in its feline infancy of Three Corner Cat, and though there was a family rule against fighting, I fought like the rest of the boys and took my defeats as heroically as I knew how; they were mostly defeats.

My world was full of boys, but it was also much haunted by ghosts or the fear of them. Death came early into it, the visible image in a negro babe, with the large red copper cents on its eyelids, which older boys brought me to see, then in the funeral of the dearly loved mate whom we school-fellows followed to his grave. I learned many things in my irregular schooling, and at home I was always reading when I was not playing. I will not pretend that I did not love playing best; life was an experiment which had to be tried in every way that presented itself, but outside of these practical requisitions there was a constant demand upon me from literature. As to the playing I will not speak at large here, for I have already said enough of it in A Boy’s Town; and as to the reading, the curious must go for it to another book of mine called My Literary Passions. Perhaps there was already in my early literary preferences a bent toward the reality which my gift, if I may call it so, has since taken. I did not willingly read poetry, except such pieces as I memorized: little tragedies of the sad fate of orphan children, and the cruelties of large birds to small ones, which brought the lump into my throat, or the moralized song of didactic English writers of the eighteenth century, such as “Pity the sorrows of a poor old man.” That piece I still partly know by heart; but history was what I liked best, and if I finally turned to fiction it seems to have been in the dearth of histories that merited reading after Goldsmith’s Greece and Rome; except Irving’s Conquest of Granada, I found none that I could read; but I had then read Don Quixote and Gulliver’s Travels, and had heard my father reading aloud to my mother the poems of Scott and Moore. Since he seems not to have thought of any histories that would meet my taste, I fancy that I must have been mainly left to my own choice in that sort, though he told me of the other sorts of books which I read.

I should be interested to know now how the notion of authorship first crept into my mind, but I do not in the least know. I made verses, I even wrote plays in rhyme, but until I attempted an historical romance I had no sense of literature as an art. As an art which one might live by, as by a trade or a business, I had not the slightest conception of it. When I began my first and last historical romance, I did not imagine it as something to be read by others; and when the first chapters were shown without my knowing, I was angry and ashamed. If my father thought there was anything uncommon in my small performances, he did nothing to let me guess it unless I must count the instance of declaiming Hallock’s Marco Bozzaris before a Swedenborgian minister who was passing the night at our house. Neither did my mother do anything to make me conscious, if she was herself conscious of anything out of the common in what I was trying. It was her sacred instinct to show no partiality among her children; my father’s notion was of the use that could be combined with the pleasure of life, and perhaps if there had been anything different in my life, it would not have tended more to that union of use and pleasure which was his ideal.

Much in the environment was abhorrent to him, and he fought the local iniquities in his paper, the gambling, the drunkenness that marred the mainly moral and religious complexion of the place. In A Boy’s Town I have studied with a fidelity which I could not emulate here the whole life of it as a boy sees life, and I must leave the reader who cares for such detail to find it there. But I wish again to declare the almost unrivaled fitness of the place to be the home of a boy, with its two branches of the Great Miami River and their freshets in spring, and their witchery at all seasons; with its Hydraulic Channels and Reservoirs, its stretch of the Miami Canal and the Canal Basin so fit for swimming in summer and skating in winter. The mills and factories which harnessed the Hydraulic to their industries were of resistless allure for the boys who frequented them when they could pass the guard of “No Admittance” on their doors, or when they were not foraging among the fields and woods in the endless vacations of the schools. Some boys left school to work in the mills, and when they could show the loss of a finger-joint from the machinery they were prized as heroes. The Fourths of July, the Christmases and Easters and May-Days, which were apparently of greater frequency there and then than they apparently are anywhere now, seemed to alternate with each other through the year, and the Saturdays spread over half the week.

V

The experience of such things was that of the generalized boy, and easy to recall, but the experience of the specialized boy that I was cannot be distinctly recovered and cannot be given in any order of time; the events are like dreams in their achronic simultaneity. I ought to be able to remember when fear first came into my life; but I cannot. I am aware of offering as a belated substitute for far earlier acquaintance with it the awe which I dimly shared with the whole community at a case of hydrophobia occurring there, and which was not lessened by hearing my father tell my mother of the victim’s saying: “I have made my peace with God; you may call in the doctors.” I doubt if she relished the involuntary satire as he did; his humor, which made life easy for him, could not always have been a comfort to her. Safe in the philosophy of Swedenborg, which taught him that even those who ended in hell chose it their portion because they were happiest in it, he viewed with kindly amusement the religious tumults of the frequent revivals about him. The question of salvation was far below that of the annexation of Texas, or the ensuing war against Mexico, in his regard; but these great events have long ago faded into national history from my contemporary consciousness, while a tragical effect from his playfulness remains vivid in my childish memory. I have already used it in fiction, as my wont has been with so many of my experiences, but I will tell again how my mother and he were walking together in the twilight, with me, a very

The Miami Canal at Hamilton

small boy, following, and my father held out to me behind his back a rose which I understood I was to throw at my mother and startle her.

My aim was unfortunately for me all too sure; the rose struck her head, and when she looked round and saw me offering to run away, she whirled on me and made me suffer for her fright in thinking my flower was a bat, while my father gravely entreated, “Mary, Mary!” She could not forgive me at once, and my heart remained sore, for my love of her was as passionate as the temper I had from her, but while it continued aching after I went to bed, she stole up-stairs to me and consoled me and told me how scared she had been, and hardly knew what she was doing; and all was well again between us.

I wish I could say how dear she was to me and to all her children. My eldest brother and she understood each other best, but each of us lived in the intelligence of her which her love created. She was always working for us, and yet, as I so tardily perceived, living for my father anxiously, fearfully, bravely, with absolute trust in his goodness and righteousness. While she listened to his reading at night, she sewed or knitted for us, or darned or mended the day’s ravage in our clothes till, as a great indulgence, we fell asleep on the floor. If it was summer we fell asleep at her knees on the front door-step, where she had sat watching us at our play till we dropped worn out with it; or if it had been a day of wild excess she followed us to our beds early and washed our feet with her dear hands, and soothed them from the bruises of the summer-long shoelessness. She was not only the center of home to me; she was home itself, and in the years before I made a home of my own, absence from her was the homesickness, or the fear of it, which was always haunting me. As for the quick temper (now so slow) I had from her, it showed itself once in a burst of reckless fury which had to be signalized in the family rule, so lenient otherwise, by a circumstantial whipping from my father. Another, from her, for going in swimming (as we always said for bathing) when directly forbidden, seems to complete the list of my formal punishments at their hands in a time when fathers and mothers were much more of Solomon’s mind in such matters than now.

I never was punished in any sort at school where the frequent scourging of other boys, mostly boys whom I loved for something kind and sweet in them, filled me with anguish; and I have come to believe that a blow struck a child is far wickeder than any wickedness a child can do; that it depraves whoever strikes the blow, mother, or father, or teacher, and that it inexpressibly outrages the young life confided to the love of the race. I know that excuses will be found for it, and that the perpetrator of the outrage will try for consolation in thinking that the child quickly forgets, because its pathetic smiles so soon follow its pathetic tears; but the child does not forget; and no callousing from custom can undo the effect in its soul.

From the stress put upon behaving rather than believing in that home of mine we were made to feel that wicked words were of the quality of wicked deeds, and that when they came out of our mouths they depraved us, unless we took them back. I have not forgotten, with any detail of the time and place, a transgression of this sort which I was made to feel in its full significance. My mother had got supper, and my father was, as he often was, late for it, and while we waited impatiently for him, I came out with the shocking wish that he was dead. My mother instantly called me to account for it, and when my father came she felt bound to tell him what I had said. He could then have done no more than gravely give me the just measure of my offense; and his explanation and forgiveness were the sole event. I did not remain with an exaggerated sense of my sin, though in a child’s helplessness I could not urge, if I had imagined urging, that my outburst was merely an aspiration for unbelated suppers, and was of the nature of prayers for rain, which good people sometimes put up regardless of consequences. With his Swedenborgian doctrine of degrees in sin, my father might have thought my wild words prompted by evil spirits, but he would have regarded them as qualitatively rather than quantitatively wicked, and would not have committed the dreadful wrong which elders do a child by giving it a sense of sinning far beyond its worst possible willing. As to conduct his teaching was sometimes of an inherited austerity, but where his own personality prevailed, there was no touch of Puritanism in it.

Our religious instruction at home was not very stated, though it was abundant, and it must have been because we children ourselves felt it unseemly not to go, like other children, to Sunday-school that we were allowed to satisfy our longing for conformity by going for a while to the Sunday-school of the Baptist church, apparently because it was the nearest. We got certain blue tickets and certain red ones for memorizing passages from the New Testament, but I remember much more distinctly the muscular twitching in the close-shaven purplish cheek of the teacher as he nervously listened with set teeth for the children’s answers, than anything in our Scripture lessons. I had been received with three or four brothers and sisters into the Swedenborgian communion by a passing New Church minister, but there were no services of our recondite faith in Hamilton, and we shared in no public worship after my mother followed my father from the Methodist society. Out of curiosity and a solemn joy in its ceremonial, I sometimes went to the Catholic church, where my eyes clung fascinated to the life-large effigy of Christ bleeding on His cross against the eastern wall; but I have more present now the sense of walks in the woods on Sunday, with the whole family, and of the long, sweet afternoons so spent in them.

If we had no Sabbaths in our house, and not very recognizable Sundays, we were strictly forbidden to do anything that would seem to trifle with the scruples of others. We might not treat serious things unseriously; we were to swear not at all; and in the matter of bywords we were allowed very little range, though for the hardness of our hearts we were suffered to say such things as, “Oh, hang it!” or even, “Confound it all!” in extreme cases, such as failing to make the family pony open his mouth for bridling, or being bitten by the family rabbits, or butted over by the family goat. In such points of secular behavior we might be better or worse; but in matters of religious toleration the rule was inflexible; the faith of others was sacred, and it was from this early training, doubtless, that I was able in after life to regard the occasional bigotry of agnostic friends with toleration.

During the years of my later childhood, a few public events touched my consciousness. I was much concerned in the fortunes of the Whig party from the candidacy of Henry Clay in 1844 to the fusion of the anti-slavery Whigs with the Freesoil party after their bolt of the Taylor nomination in 1848, when I followed my father as far as a boy of eleven could go. He himself went so far as to sell his newspaper and take every risk for the future rather than support a slave-holding candidate who had been chosen for his vote-winning qualities as a victorious general in the Mexican War. I did not abhor that aggression so much as my father only because I could not understand how abhorrent it was; but it began to be a trouble to me from the first mention of the Annexation of Texas, a sufficiently dismaying mystery, and it afflicted me in early fixing my lot with the righteous minorities which I may have sometimes since been over-proud to be of. Besides such questions of national interest I was aware of other things, such as the French Revolution of 1848; but this must have been wholly through sympathy with my father’s satisfaction in the flight of Louis Philippe and the election of the poet Lamartine to be the head of the provisional government. The notion of provisional I relegated to lasting baffle in its more familiar association with the stock of corn-meal and bran in the feed-stores, though I need but have asked in order to be told what it meant. The truth is I was pre-occupied about that time with the affairs of High Olympus, as I imagined them from the mythology which I was reading, and with the politics of Rome and Athens, as I conceived them from the ever-dear histories of Goldsmith. The exploits of the Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha had much to do in distracting me from the movement of events in Mexico, and at the same time I was enlarging my knowledge of human events through Gulliver’s Travels and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.

My father had not only explained to me the satire which underlay Gulliver’s Travels; he told me so much too indignantly of De Foe’s appropriation of Selkirk’s narrative, that it long kept me from reading Robinson Crusoe; but he was, as I have divined more and more, my guide in that early reading which widened with the years, though it kept itself preferably for a long time to history and real narratives. He was of such a liberal mind that he scarcely restricted my own forays in literature, and I think that sometimes he erred on that side; he may have thought no harm could come to me from the literary filth which I sometimes took into my mind, since it was in the nature of sewage to purify itself. He gave me very little direct instruction, and he did not insist on my going to school when I preferred the printing-office. All the time, perhaps, I was getting such schooling as came from the love of literature, which was the daily walk and conversation of our very simple home, and somehow protected it from the sense of narrow means and the little hope of larger. My father’s income from his paper was scarcely over a thousand dollars a year, but this sufficed for his family, then of seven children, and he was of such a sensitive pride as to money, that he would hardly ask for debts due him, much less press for their payment; so that when he parted with his paper he parted with the hope of much money owing him for legal and even official advertising and for uncounted delinquent subscriptions. Meanwhile he was earning this money by the work of his head and hand; and though I must always love his memory for his proud delicacy, I cannot forget that this is not a world where people dun themselves for the debts they owe. What is to be said of such a man is that his mind is not on the things that make for prosperity; but if we were in adversity we never knew it by that name. My mother did the whole work of her large household, and gave each of us the same care in health and sickness, in sickness only making the sufferer feel that he was her favorite; in any other case she would have felt such a preference wicked. Sometimes she had a hired girl, as people then and there called the sort of domestic that in New England would have been called a help. But it must have been very seldom, for two girls alone left record of themselves: a Dutch girl amusingly memorable with us children because she called her shoes skoes, and claimed to have come to America in a skip; and a native girl, who took charge of us when our mother was on one of her homesick visits Up-the-River, and became lastingly abhorrent for the sort of insipid milk-gravy she made for the beefsteak, and for the nightmare she seemed to have every night, when she filled the house and made our blood run cold with a sort of wild involuntary yodeling.

Apparently my mother’s homesickness mounted from time to time in an insupportable crisis; but perhaps she did not go Up-the-River so often as it seemed. She always came back more contented with the home which she herself was for us; once, as my perversely eclectic memory records, it was chiefly because one could burn wood in Hamilton, but had to burn coal at Martin’s Ferry, where everything was smutched by it. In my old age, now, I praise Heaven for that home which I could not know apart from her; and I wish I could recall her in the youth which must have been hers when I began to be conscious of her as a personality; I know that she had thick brown Irish hair and blue eyes, and high German cheek-bones, and as a girl she would have had such beauty as often goes with a certain irregularity of feature; but to me before my teens she was, of course, a very mature, if not elderly person, with whom I could not connect any notion of looks except such as shone from her care and love. Though her intellectual and spiritual life was in and from my father, she kept always a certain native quality of speech and a rich sense in words like that which marked her taste in soft stuffs and bright colors. In the hard life of her childhood in the backwoods she was sent to an academy in the nearest town, but in the instant anguish of homesickness she walked ten miles back to the log cabin where at night, as she would tell us, you could hear the wolves howling. She had an innate love of poetry; she could sing some of those songs of Burns and Moore which people sang then. I associate them with her voice in the late summer afternoons; for it was at night that she listened to my father’s reading of poetry or fiction. When they were young, before and after their marriage, he kept a book, as people sometimes did in those days, where he wrote in the scrupulous handwriting destined to the deformity of over-use in later years, such poems of Byron or Cowper or Moore or Burns as seemed appropriate to their case, and such other verse as pleased his fancy. It is inscribed (for it still exists) To Mary, and with my inner sense I can hear him speaking to her by that sweet name, with the careful English enunciation which separated its syllables into Ma-ry.

VI

My mother was an honored guest on one or other of my uncles’ boats whenever she went on her homesick visits Up-the-River, and sometimes we children must have gone with her. Later in my boyhood, when I was nine or ten years old, my father took me to Pittsburg and back, on the boat of the jolliest of those uncles, and it was then that I first fully realized the splendor of the world where their lives were passed. No doubt I have since seen nobler sights than the mile-long rank of the steamboats as they lay at the foot of the landings in the cities at either end of our voyage, but none of these excelling wonders remains like that. All the passenger boats on the Ohio were then side-wheelers, and their lofty chimneys towering on either side of their pilot-houses were often crenelated at the top, with wire ropes between them supporting the effigies of such Indians as they were named for. From time to time one of the majestic craft pulled from the rank with the clangor of its mighty bell, and the mellow roar of its whistle, and stood out in the yellow stream, or arrived in like state to find a place by the shore. The wide slope of the landing was heaped with the merchandise putting off or taking on the boats, amidst the wild and whirling curses of the mates and the insensate rushes of the deck-hands staggering to and fro under their burdens. The swarming drays came and went with freight, and there were huckster carts of every sort; peddlers, especially of oranges, escaped with their lives among the hoofs and wheels, and through the din and turmoil passengers hurried aboard the boats, to repent at leisure their haste in trusting the advertised hour of departure. It was never known that any boat left on time, and I doubt if my uncle’s boat, the famous New England No. 2, was an exception to the rule, as my father perfectly understood while he delayed on the wharf, sampling a book-peddler’s wares, or talking with this bystander or that, while I waited for him on board in an anguish of fear lest he should be left behind.

There was a measure of this suffering for me throughout the voyage wherever the boat stopped, for his insatiable interest in every aspect of nature and human nature urged him ashore and kept him there till the last moment before the gang-plank was drawn in. It was useless for him to argue with me that my uncle would not allow him to be left, even if he should forget himself so far as to be in any danger of that. I could not believe that a disaster so dire should not befall us, and I suffered a mounting misery till one day it mounted to frenzy. I do not know whether there were other children on board, but except for the officers of the boat, I was left mostly to myself, and I spent my time dreamily watching the ever-changing shore, so lost in its wild loveliness that once when I woke from my reverie the boat seemed to have changed her course, and to be going down-stream instead of up. It was in this crisis that I saw my father descending the gang-plank, and while I was urging his return in mute agony, a boat came up outside of us to wait for her chance of landing. I looked and read on her wheel-house the name New England, and then I abandoned hope. By what fell necromancy I had been spirited from my uncle’s boat to another I could not guess, but I had no doubt that the thing had happened, and I was flying down from the hurricane roof to leap aboard that boat from the lowermost deck when I met my uncle coming as quietly up the gangway as if nothing had happened. He asked what was the matter, and I gasped out the fact; he did not laugh; he had pity on me and gravely explained, “That boat is the New England: this is the New England No. 2” and at these words I escaped with what was left of my reason.

I had been the prey of that obsession which every one has experienced when the place where one is disorients itself and west is east and north is south. Sometimes this happens by a sudden trick within the brain, but I lived four years in Columbus and as many in Venice without once being right as to the points of the compass in my nerves, though my wits were perfectly convinced. Once I was months in a place where I suffered from this obsession, when I found myself returning after a journey with the north and south quite where they should be; and, “Now,” I exulted, “I will hold them to their duty.” I kept my eyes firmly fixed upon the station, as the train approached; then, without my lifting my gaze, the north was back again in the place of the south, and the vain struggle was over. Only the other day I got out of a car going north in Fourth Avenue, and then saw it going on south; and it was only by noting which way the house numbers increased that I could right myself.

I suppose my father promised a reform that should appease my unreason, but whether he could deny himself those chances of general information I am not so sure; we may have both expected too much of each other. As I was already imaginably interested in things of the mind beyond my years, he often joined me in my perusal of the drifting landscape and made me look at this or that feature of it, but he afterward reported at home that he never could get anything from me but a brief “Yes, indeed,” in response. That amused him, yet I do not think I should have disappointed him so much if I could have told him I was losing nothing, but that our point of view was different. The soul of a child is a secret to itself, and in its observance of life there is no foretelling what it shall loose or what it shall hold. I do not believe that anything which was of use to me was lost upon me, but what I chiefly remember now is my pleasure in the log cabins in the woods on the shores, with the blue smoke curling on the morning or the evening air from their chimneys. My heart was taken with a yearning for the wilderness such as the coast-born boy feels for the sea; in the older West the woods called to us with a lure which it would have been rapture to obey; the inappeasable passion for their solitude drove the pioneer into the forest, and it was still in the air we breathed. But my lips were sealed, for the generations cannot utter themselves to each other till the strongest need of utterance is past.

I used to sit a good deal on the hurricane-deck or in the pilot-house, where there was often good talk among the pilots or the boat’s officers, and where once I heard with fascination the old Scotch pilot, Tom Lindsay, telling of his own boyhood in the moors, and of the sheep lost in the drifting snows; that also had the charm of the wilderness; but I did not feel the sadness of his saying once, as we drifted past a row of crimson-headed whisky barrels on a wharf-boat, “Many a one of those old Red Eyes I’ve helped to empty,” or imagine the far and deep reach of the words which remained with me. Somewhere in the officers’ quarters I found a sea novel, which I read partly through, but I have not finished The Cruise of the Midge, to this day, though I believe that as sea novels go it merits reading. When I was not listening to the talk in the pilot-house, or looking at the hills drifting by, I was watching the white-jacketed black cabin-boys setting the tables for dinner in the long saloon of the boat. It was built, after a fashion which still holds in the Western boats, with a gradual lift of the stem and stern and a dip midway which somehow enhanced the charm of the perspective even to the eyes of a hungry boy. Dinner was at twelve, and the tables began to be set between ten and eleven, with a rhythmical movement of the negroes as they added each detail of plates and cups and knives and glasses, and placed the set dishes of quivering jelly at discrete intervals under the crystals of the chandeliers softly tinkling with the pulse of the engines. At last some more exalted order of waiters appeared with covered platters and spirit-lamps burning under them, and set them down before the places of the captain and his officers. Then the bell was sounded for the passengers; the waiters leaned forward between these when they were seated; at a signal from their chief they lifted the covers of the platters and vanished in a shining procession up the saloon, while each passenger fell upon the dishes nearest himself.

About the time I had become completely reconciled to the conditions of the voyage, which the unrivaled speed of the New England No. 2 shortened to a three-days’ run up the river, I woke one morning to find her lying at the Pittsburg landing, and when I had called my father to come and share my wonder at a stretch of boats as long as that at Cincinnati, and been mimicked by a cabin-boy for my unsophisticated amazement, nothing remained for me but to visit the houses of the aunts and uncles abounding in cousins. Of the homeward voyage nothing whatever is left in my memory; but I know we came back on the New England No. 2, though we must have left the boat and taken it again on a second trip at Wheeling, after a week spent with my mother’s people at Martin’s Ferry. My father wished me to see the glass-foundries and rolling-mills which interested him so much more than me; he could not get enough of those lurid industries which I was chiefly concerned in saving myself from. I feigned an interest in the processes out of regard for him, but Heaven knows I cared nothing for the drawing of wire or the making of nails, and only a very little for the blowing of the red, vitreous bubbles from the mouths of long steel pipes. With weariness I escaped from these wonders, but with no such misery as I eluded the affection of the poor misshapen, half witted boy who took a fancy to me at the house of some old friends of my father where we had supper after the long day. With uncouth noises of welcome, and with arms and legs flying controllessly about, he followed me through a day that seemed endless. His family of kindly English folk, from the life-long habit of him, seemed unaware of anything strange, and I could not for shame and for fear of my father’s reproach betray my suffering. The evening began unduly to fall, thick with the blackness of the coal smoke poured from the chimneys of those abhorred foundries, and there was a fatal moment when my father’s friends urged him to stay the night and I thought he would consent. The dreams of childhood are oftenest evil, but mine holds record of few such nightmares as this.

VII

After my father sold his paper and was casting about for some other means of livelihood, there were occasional shadows cast by his anxieties in the bright air of my childhood. Again I doubt if any boy ever lived a gladder time than I lived in Hamilton, Butler County, Ohio: words that I write still when I try a new pen, because I learned to write them first, and love them yet. When we went to live in Dayton, where my father managed to make a sort of progressive purchase of a newspaper which he never quite paid for, our skies changed. It was after an interval of experiment in one sort and another, which amused his hopeful ingenuity, but ended in nothing, that he entered upon this long failure. The Dayton Transcript when he began with it was a tri-weekly, but he made it a daily, and this mistake infected the whole enterprise. It made harder work for us all than we had known before; and the printing-office, which had been my delight, became my oppression after the brief moment of public schooling which I somehow knew. But before the change from tri-weekly to daily in our paper, I had the unstinted advantage of a school of morals as it then appeared among us.

The self-sacrificing company of players who suffered for the drama through this first summer of our life in Dayton paid my father for their printing in promises which he willingly took at their face value, and in tickets which were promptly honored at the door. As nearly as I can make out, I was thus enabled to go every night to the theater, in a passion for it which remains with me ardent still. I saw such plays of Shakespeare as “Macbeth” and “Othello,” then the stage favorites, and “Richard III.” and evermore “Richard III.” I saw such other now quite forgotten favorites as Kotzebue’s “Stranger” and Sheridan Knowles’s “Wife,” and such moving actions of unknown origin as “Barbarossa” and “The Miser of Marseilles,” with many screaming farces such as helped fill every evening full with at least three plays. There was also at that time a native drama almost as acceptable to our public everywhere as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” afterward became. It seemed as if our public would never tire of “A Glance at New York,” with its horribly vulgar stage conceptions of local character, Mose the fireman and Lize his girl, and Sikesy and their other companions, which drift up before me now like wraiths from the Pit, and its events of street-fighting and I dare say heroic rescues from burning buildings by the volunteer fire companies of the day. When it appeared that the public might tire of the play, the lively fancy of the theater supplied a fresh attraction in it, and the character of Little Mose was added. How this must have been played by what awful young women eager to shine at any cost in their art, I shudder to think, and it is with “sick and scornful looks averse” that I turn from the remembrance of my own ambition to shine in that drama. My father instantly quenched the histrionic spark in me with loathing; but I cannot say whether this was before or after the failure of a dramatic attempt of his own which I witnessed, much mystified by the sense of some occult relation to it. Certainly I did not know that the melodrama which sacrificed his native to his adoptive patriotism in the action, and brought off the Americans victors over the British in a sea-fight, was his work; and probably it was the adaptation of some tale then much read. Very likely he trusted, in writing it, to the chance which he always expected to favor the amateur in taking up a musical instrument strange to him. He may even have dreamed of fortune from it; but after one performance of it the management seems to have gone back to such old public favorites as Shakespeare and Sheridan Knowles. Nothing was said of it in the family; I think some of the newspapers were not so silent; but I am not sure of this.

My father could, of course, be wiser for others than for himself; the public saved him from becoming a dramatist, but it was he who saved me from any remotest chance of becoming an actor, and later from acquiring the art of the prestidigitator. The only book which I can be sure of his taking from me was a manual professing to teach this art, which I had fallen in with. The days of those years in Dayton were in fact very different from the days in Hamilton when I was reaching out near and far to feed my fancy for fable and my famine for fact. I read no new books which now occur to me by name, though I still kept my interest in Greek mythology and gave something of my scanty leisure to a long poem in the quatrains of Gray’s Elegy based upon some divine event of it. The course of the poem was lastingly arrested by a slight attack of the cholera which was then raging in the town and filling my soul with gloom. My dear mother thought it timely to speak with me of the other world; but so far from reconciling me to the thought of it, I suppose she could not have found a boy in all Dayton more unwilling to go to heaven. She was forced to drop her religious consolations and to assure me that she had not the least fear of my dying.

It was certainly not the fault of the place that we were, first and last, rather unhappy there. For one thing, we were used to the greater ease and simplicity of a small town like Hamilton, and Dayton was a small city with the manners and customs of cities in those days: that is, there was more society and less neighborhood, and neither my father nor my mother could have cared for society. They missed the wont of old friends; there were no such teas as she used to give her neighbors, with a quilting, still dimly visioned, at the vanishing-point of the perspective; our social life was almost wholly in our Sunday-evening visits to the house of my young aunt whose husband was my father’s youngest brother. The pair were already in the shadow of their early death, and in the sorrow of losing their children one after another till one little cousin alone remained. I had not yet begun to make up romances about people in my mind, but this uncle and aunt were my types of worldly splendor in the setting of the lace curtains and hair-cloth chairs of their parlor, with her piano and his flute for other æsthetic grace. He was so much younger that he had a sort of filial relation to my father, and they were both very sweet to my mother, always lonely outside of her large family.

As usual, we lived in more than one house, but the first was very acceptable because of its nearness to the canal; the yard stretched behind it quite to the tow-path, with an unused stable between, which served us boys for circus-rehearsals, and for dressing after a plunge. As in a dream, I can still see my youngest brother rushing through this stable one day and calling out that he was going to jump into the canal, with me running after him and then dimly seeing him as he groped along the bottom, with me diving and saving him from drowning. Already, with the Hamilton facilities, I could hardly help being a good swimmer, and at Dayton I spent much of my leisure in the canal. Within the city limits we had to wear some sort of bathing-dress, and we preferred going with a crowd of other boys beyond the line where no such formality was expected of us. On the way to and fro we had to pass a soap-factory, where the boys employed in it swarmed out at sight of us stealing along under the canal bank, and in the strange outlawry of boyhood murderously stoned us, but somehow did not kill us. I do not know what boys we played with, but after we had paid the immemorial penalty of the stranger, and fought for our standing among them, the boys of our neighborhood were kind enough. One, whose father was a tobacconist, abetted our efforts to learn smoking by making cigars flavored with cinnamon drops; I suppose these would have been of more actual advantage to me if I had learned to like smoking. When we went from his house to another, in what may have been a better quarter, we made no friends that I can remember, and we were never so gay. In fact, a sense of my father’s adversity now began to penetrate to his older children, with the knowledge of our mother’s unhappiness from it.

I am not following any chronological order here, and I should not be able to date my æsthetic devotion to a certain gas-burner in the window of a store under the printing-office. It was in the form of a calla-lily, with the flame forking from the tongue in its white cup; and I could never pass it, by day or night, without stopping to adore it. If I could be perfectly candid, I should still own my preference of it to the great painting of Adam and Eve by Dubuffe, then shown throughout our simple-hearted commonwealth. This had the double attraction of a religious interest and the awful novelty of the nude, for the first time seen by untraveled American eyes; the large canvas was lighted up so as to throw the life-size figures into strong relief, and the spectator strickenly studied them through a sort of pasteboard binocle supplied for the purpose. If that was the way our first parents looked before the Fall, and the Bible said it was, there was nothing to be urged against it; but many kind people must have suffered secret misgivings at a sight from which a boy might well shrink ashamed, with a feeling that the taste of Eden was improved by the Fall. I had no such joy in it as in the dramas which I witnessed in the same hall; as yet there was nothing in Dayton openly declared a theater.

The town had many airs of a city, and there were even some policemen who wore a silver-plated star inside their

The now abandoned canal at Dayton as it appears on the borders of the city.

coats for proof of their profession. There were water-works, and there was gas everywhere for such as would pay the charge for it. My father found the expense of piping the printing-office too great for his means, or else he preferred falling back upon his invention, and instead of the usual iron tubes he had the place fitted with tin tubes, at much less cost. Perhaps the cost was equalized in the end by the leaking of these tubes, which was so constant that we breathed gas by day as well as burned it by night. We burned it a good deal, for our tri-weekly was now changed to a daily, and a morning paper at that. Until eleven o’clock I helped put the telegraphic despatches (then a new and proud thing with us) into type, and between four and five o’clock in the morning I was up and carrying papers to our subscribers. The stress of my father’s affairs must have been very sore for him to allow this, and I dare say it did not last long, but while it lasted it was suffering which must make me forever tender of those who overwork, especially the children who overwork. The suffering was such that when my brother, who had not gone to bed till much later, woke me after my five or six hours’ sleep, I do not now know how I got myself together for going to the printing-office for the papers and making my rounds in the keen morning air. When Sunday came, and I could sleep as late as I liked, it was bliss such as I cannot tell to lie and rest, and rest, and rest! We were duteous children and willing; my brother knew of the heavy trouble hanging over us and I was aware of the hopeless burden of debt which our father was staggering under and my mother was carrying on her heart; and when I think of it, and of the wide-spread, never-ending struggle for life which it was and is the type of, I cannot but abhor the economic conditions which we still suppose an essential of civilization.

Lest these facts should make too vivid a call upon the reader’s compassion, I find it advisable to remember here an instance of hard-heartedness in me which was worthier the adamantine conscience of some full-grown moralist than a boy of my age. There was a poor girl, whose misfortune was known to a number of families where she was employed as a seamstress, and the more carefully treated because of her misfortune. Among others my mother was glad to give her work; and she lived with us like one of ourselves, of course sitting at table with us and sharing in such family pleasures as we knew. She was the more to be pitied because her betrayer was a prominent man who bore none of the blame for their sin; but when her shame became known to me I began a persecution of the poor creature in the cause of social purity. I would not take a dish from her at table, or hand her one; I would not speak to her, if I could help it, or look at her; I left the room when she came into it; and I expressed by every cruelty short of words my righteous condemnation. I was, in fact, society incarnate in the attitude society takes toward such as she. Heaven knows how I came by such a devilish ideal of propriety, and I cannot remember how the matter quite ended, but I seem to remember a crisis, in which she begged my mother with tears to tell her why I treated her so; and I was put to bitter shame for it. It could not be explained to me how tragical her case was; I must have been thought too young for the explanation; but I doubt if any boy of twelve is too young for the right knowledge of such things; he already has the wrong.

My wish at times to learn some other business was indulged by a family council, and my uncle made a place for me in his drug-store, where, as long as the novelty lasted, I was happy in the experiments with chemicals permitted to me and a fellow-apprentice. Mainly we were busied in putting up essence of peppermint and paregoric and certain favorite medicinal herbs; and when the first Saturday evening came, my companion received his weekly wage over the counter, and I expected mine, but the bookkeeper smiled and said he would have to see my uncle about that; in the end, it appeared that by the convention with my father I was somehow not to draw any salary. Both my uncle and he treated the matter with something of the bookkeeper’s smiling slight, and after an interval, now no longer appreciable, I found myself in the printing-office again. I was not sorry, and yet I had liked the drug business so far as I had gone in it, and I liked that old bookkeeper, though he paid me no money. How, after a life of varied experiences, he had lodged at last in the comfortable place he held I no longer know, if I ever knew. He had been at one time what would once have been called a merchant adventurer in various seas; and he had been wrecked on the Galapagos Islands, where he had feasted on the famous native turtle, now extinct, with a relish which he still smacked his lips in remembering.

This episode, which I cannot date, much antedated the period of my father’s business failure, though his struggles against it must have already begun; they began, in fact, from the moment of his arrival in Dayton, and the freest and happiest hours we knew there were when the long strain ended in the inevitable break. Then there was an interval, I do not know how great, but perhaps of months, when there was a casting about for some means of living, and to this interval belongs somehow the employment of my brother and myself in a German printing-office, such as used to be found in every considerable Ohio town. I do not know what we did there, but I remember the kindly German printer-folk, and the merry times we had with them, in the smoke of their pipes and the warmth of their stove heated red against the autumnal cold. I explore my memory in vain for proof that my father had some job-printing interest in this German office, but I remember my interest in the German type and its difference from the English. I was yet far from any interest in the German poetry which afterward became one of my passions, and there is no one now left alive whom I can ask whether the whole incident was fact, or not, rather, the sort of dream which all the past becomes when we try to question it.

What I am distinctly aware of, through a sense of rather sullen autumnal weather, is that a plan for our going into the country evolved itself in full detail between my father and uncle. My uncle was to supply the capital for the venture, and was finally, with two other uncles, to join my father on a milling privilege which they had bought at a point on the Little Miami River, where all the families were to be settled. In the mean time my father was to have charge of a grist-mill and sawmill on the property till they could be turned into a paper-mill and a sort of communal settlement of suitable people could be gathered. He had never run a sawmill or a grist-mill, much less evoked a paper-mill from them; but neither had he ever gathered a community of choice spirits for the enjoyment of a social form which enthusiasts like Robert Owen had dreamed into being, and then non-being, in the Middle West in those or somewhat earlier days. What was definite and palpable in the matter was that he must do something, and that he had the heart and hope for the experiment.

VIII

I have told the story of this venture in a little book called My Year in a Log Cabin, printed twenty-odd years ago, and I cannot do better now than let it rehearse

The Little Miami River at Eureka Mills, twelve miles east of Dayton. Here the ruin of the dam, which served the mills run by Mr. Howells’s father, makes a rapid in the stream.

itself here from those pages, with such slight change or none as insists. For my father, whose boyhood had been passed in the new country, where pioneer customs and traditions were still rife, it was like renewing the wild romance of those days to take up once more the life in a log cabin interrupted by many years sojourn in matter-of-fact dwellings of frame and brick. It was the fond dream of his boys to realize the trials and privations which he had painted for them in rosy hues, and even if the only clapboarded dwelling at the mills had not been occupied by the miller, we should have disdained it for the log cabin which we made our home till we could build a new house.

Our cabin stood close upon the road, but behind it broadened a corn-field of eighty acres. They still built log cabins for dwellings in that region at the time, but ours must have been nearly half a century old when we went into it. It had been recently vacated by an old poor-white Virginian couple, who had long occupied it, and we decided that it needed some repairs to make it habitable even for a family inured to hardship by dauntless imaginations, and accustomed to retrospective discomforts of every kind.

So before the family all came out to it a deputation of adventurers put it in what rude order they could. They glazed the narrow windows, they relaid the rotten floor, they touched (too sketchily, as it afterward appeared) the broken roof, and they papered the walls of the ground-floor rooms. Perhaps it was my father’s love of literature which inspired him to choose newspapers for this purpose; at any rate, he did so, and the effect, as I remember, had its decorative qualities. He had used a barrel of papers from the nearest post-office, where they had been refused by people to whom they had been experimentally sent by the publishers, and the whole first page was taken up by a story, which broke off in the middle of a sentence at the foot of the last column, and tantalized us forever with fruitless conjecture as to the fate of the hero and heroine.

The cabin, rude as it was, was not without its sophistications, its concessions to the spirit of modern luxury. The logs it was built of had not been left rounded, as they grew, but had been squared in a sawmill, and the crevices between them had not been chinked with moss and daubed with clay in true backwoods fashion, but plastered with mortar, and the chimney, instead of being a structure of clay-covered sticks, was laid in courses of stone. Within, however, it was all that could be desired by the most romantic of pioneer families. It was six feet wide and a yard deep, its cavernous maw would easily swallow a back-log eighteen inches through, and we piled in front the sticks of hickory cord-wood as high as we liked. We made a perfect trial of it when we came out to put the cabin in readiness for the family, and when the hickory had dropped into a mass of tinkling, snapping, bristling embers we laid our rashers of bacon and our slices of steak upon them, and tasted the flavors of the wildwood in the captured juices. At night we laid our mattresses on the sweet new oak plank of the floor, and slept hard — in every sense.

In due time the whole family took up its abode in the cabin. The household furniture had been brought out and bestowed in its scanty space, the bookcase had been set up, and the unbound books left easily accessible in barrels. There remained some of our possessions to follow, chief of which was the cow; for in those simple days people kept cows in town, and it fell to me to help my father drive ours out to her future home. We got on famously, talking of the wayside things so beautiful in the autumnal day, panoplied in the savage splendor of its painted leaves, and of the books and authors so dear to the boy who limped barefooted by his father’s side, with his eye on the cow and his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare. But the cow was very slow — far slower than the boy’s thoughts — and it had fallen night and was already thick dark when we had made the twelve miles and stood under the white-limbed phantasmal sycamores beside the tail-race of the grist-mill, and questioned how we should get across with our charge. We did not know how deep the water was, but we knew it was very cold, and we would rather not wade it. The only thing to do seemed to be for one of us to run up to the sawmill, cross the head-race there, and come back to receive the cow on the other side of the tail-race. But the boy could not bring himself either to go or to stay.

The kind-hearted father urged, but he would not compel; you cannot well use force with a boy when you have been talking literature and philosophy for half a day with him. We could see the lights in the cabin cheerfully twinkling, and we shouted to those within, but no one heard us. We called and called in vain. Nothing but the cold rush of the tail-race, the dry rustle of the sycamore-leaves, and the homesick lowing of the cow replied. We determined to drive her across, and pursue her with sticks and stones through the darkness beyond, and then run at the top of our speed to the sawmill, and get back to take her in custody again. We carried out our part of the plan perfectly, but the cow had not entered into it with intelligence or sympathy. When we reached the other side of the tail-race again she was nowhere to be found, and no appeals of “Boss” or “Suky” or “Suboss” availed. She must have instantly turned, and retraced, in the darkness which seemed to have swallowed her up, the weary steps of the day, for she was found in her old home in town the next morning. At any rate, she had abandoned the father to the conversation of his son, for the time being, and the son had nothing to say.

I do not remember now just how it was that we came by the different “animals of the horse kind,” as my father called them, which we housed in an old log stable not far from our cabin. They must have been a temporary supply until a team worthy our new sky-blue wagon could be found. One of them was a colossal sorrel, inexorably hide-bound, whose barrel, as horsemen call the body, showed every hoop upon it. He had a feeble, foolish whimper of a voice, and we nicknamed him “Baby.” His companion was a dun mare, who had what my father at once called an italic foot, in recognition of the emphatic slant at which she carried it when upon her unwilling travels. Then there was a small, self-opinionated gray pony, which was of no service conjecturable after this lapse of time. We boys rode him barebacked, and he used to draw a buggy, which he finally ran away with. I suppose we found him useful in the representation of some of the Indian fights which we were always dramatizing, and I dare say he may have served our turn as an Arab charger, when the Moors of Granada made one of their sallies upon the camp of the Spaniards, and discharged their javelins into it; their javelins were the long, admirably straight and slender ironweeds that grew by the river. This menagerie was constantly breaking bounds and wandering off; and was chiefly employed in hunting itself up, its different members taking turns in remaining in the pasture or stable, to be ridden after those that had strayed into the woods.

The origin of a large and eloquent flock of geese is lost in an equal obscurity. I recall their possession simply as an accomplished fact, and I associate their desolate cries with the windy dark of rainy November nights, so that they must at least have come into our hands after the horses. They were fenced into a clayey area next the cabin for safe-keeping, where, perpetually waddling about in a majestic disoccupation, they patted the damp ground down to the hardness and smoothness of a brick-yard. Throughout the day they conversed tranquilly together, but by night they woke, goose after goose, to send forth a long clarion alarum, blending in a general concert at last, to assure one another of their safety. We must have intended to pluck them in the spring, but they stole their nests early in March, and entered upon the nurture of their young before we could prevent it; and it would then have been barbarous to pluck these mothers of families.

We had got some pigs from our old Virginian predecessors, and these kept, as far as they could, the domestic habits in which that affectionate couple had indulged them. They would willingly have shared our fireside with us, humble as it was, but, being repelled, they took up their quarters on cold nights at the warm base of the chimney without, where we could hear them, as long as we kept awake, disputing the places next to the stones. All this was horrible to my mother, whose housewifely instincts were perpetually offended by the rude conditions of our life, and who justly regarded it as a return to a state which, if poetic, was also not far from barbaric. But boys take every natural thing as naturally as savages, and we never thought our pigs were other than amusing. In that country pigs were called to their feed with long cries of “Pig, pig, pooee, poe-e-e!” but ours were taught to come at a whistle, and, on hearing it, would single themselves out from the neighbors’ pigs, and come rushing from all quarters to the scattered corn with an intelligence we were proud of.

IX

As long as the fall weather lasted, and well through the mild winter of that latitude, our chief recreation, where all our novel duties were delightful, was hunting with the long, smooth-bore shot-gun which had descended laterally from one of our uncles, and supplied the needs of the whole family of boys in the chase. Never less than two of us went out with it at once, and generally there were three. This enabled us to beat up the game over a wide extent of country, and while the eldest did the shooting, left the others to rush upon him as soon as he fired, with tumultuous cries of, “Did you hit it? Did you hit it?” We fell upon the wounded squirrels which we brought down on rare occasions, and put them to death with what I must now call a sickening ferocity. If sometimes the fool dog, the weak-minded Newfoundland pup we were rearing, rushed upon the game first, and the squirrel avenged his death upon the dog’s nose, that was pure gain, and the squirrel had the applause of his other enemies. Yet we were none of us cruel; we never wantonly killed things that could not be eaten; we should have thought it sacrilege to shoot a robin or a turtledove, but we were willing to be amused, and these were the chances of war.

The woods were full of squirrels, which especially abounded in the woods-pastures, as we called the lovely dells where the greater part of the timber was thinned out to let the cattle range and graze. They were of all sorts — gray, and black, and even big red fox squirrels, a variety I now suppose extinct. When the spring opened we hunted them in the poplar woods, whither they resorted in countless numbers for the sweetness in the cups of the tulip-tree blossoms. I recall with a thrill one memorable morning in such woods — early, after an overnight rain, when the vistas hung full of a delicate mist that the sun pierced to kindle a million fires in the drops still pendulous from leaf and twig. I can smell the tulip-blossoms and the odor of the tree-bark yet, and the fresh, strong fragrance of the leafy mold under my bare feet; and I can hear the rush of the squirrels on the bark of the trunks, or the swish of their long, plunging leaps from bough to bough in the air-tops.

In a region where the corn-fields and wheat-fields were often fifty and sixty acres in extent there was a plenty of quail, but I remember only one victim to my gun. We set figure-four traps to catch them; but they were shrewder arithmeticians than we, and solved these problems without harm to themselves. When they began to mate, and the air was full of their soft, amorous whistling, we searched for their nests, and had better luck, though we were forbidden to rob the nests when we found them; and in June, when a pretty little mother strutted across the lanes at the head of her tiny brood, we had to content ourselves with the near spectacle of her cunning counterfeit of disability at sight of us, fluttering and tumbling in the dust till her chicks could hide themselves. We had read of that trick, and were not deceived; but we were charmed the same.

It is a trick that all birds know, and I had it played upon me by the mother snipe and mother wild duck that haunted our dam, as well as by the quail. With the snipe, once, I had a fancy to see how far the mother would carry the ruse, and so ran after her; but in doing this I trod on one of her young — a soft, gray mite, not distinguishable from the gray pebbles where it ran. I took it tenderly up in my hand, and it is a pang to me yet to think how it gasped once and died. A boy is a strange mixture — as the man who comes after him is. I should not have minded knocking over that whole brood of snipes with my gun, if I could; but this poor little death was somehow very personal in its appeal.

I had no such regrets concerning the young wild ducks, which, indeed, I had no such grievous accident with. I left their mother to flounder and flutter away as she would, and took to the swamp where her young sought refuge from me. There I spent half a day wading about in waters that were often up to my waist and full of ugly possibilities of mud-turtles and water-snakes, trying to put my hand on one of the ducklings. They rose everywhere else, and dived again after a breath of air; but at last one of them came up in my very grasp. It did not struggle, but how its wild heart bounded against my hand! I carried it home to show it and boast of my capture, and then I took it back to its native swamp. It dived instantly, and I hope it found its bereaved family somewhere under the water.

The center of our life in the cabin was, of course, the fireplace, whose hugeness and whose mighty fires remained a wonder with us. There was a crane in the chimney and dangling pothooks, and until the cooking stove could be set up in an adjoining shed the cooking had to be done on the hearth, and the bread baked in a Dutch oven in the hot ashes. We had always heard of this operation, which was a necessity of early days; and nothing else, perhaps, realized them so vividly for us as the loaf laid in the iron-lidded skillet, which was then covered with ashes and heaped with coals.

I am not certain that the bread tasted any better for the historical romance of its experience, or that the corn-meal, mixed warm from the mill and baked on an oak plank set up before the fire, had merits beyond the hoecake of art; but I think there can be no doubt that new corn grated from the cob while still in the milk, and then molded and put in like manner to brown in the glow of such embers, would still have the sweetness that was incomparable then. When the maple sap started in February, we tried the scheme we had cherished all winter of making with it tea which should be in a manner self-sugared. But the scheme was a failure — we spoiled the sap without sweetening the tea.

We sat up late before the big fire at night, our faces burning in the glow, and our backs and feet freezing in the draught that swept in from the imperfectly closing door, and then we boys climbed to our bed in the loft. We reached it by a ladder, which we should have been glad to pull up after us as a protection against Indians in the pioneer fashion; but, with the advancement of modern luxury, the ladder had been nailed to the floor. When we were once aloft, however, we were in a domain sacred to the past. The rude floor rattled and wavered loosely under our tread, and the window in the gable stood open or shut at its own will. There were cracks in the shingles, through which we could see the stars, when there were stars, and which, when the first snow came, let the flakes sift in upon the floor.

Our barrels of paper-covered books were stowed away in that loft, and, overhauling them one day, I found a paper copy of the poems of a certain Henry W. Longfellow, then wholly unknown to me; and while the old grist-mill, whistling and wheezing to itself, made a vague music in my ears, my soul was filled with this new, strange sweetness. I read the “Spanish Student” there, and the “Coplas de Manrique,” and the solemn and ever-beautiful “Voices of the Night.” There were other books in those barrels, but these spirited me again to Spain, where I had already been with Irving, and led me to attack fitfully the old Spanish grammar which had been knocking about our house ever since my father bought it from a soldier of the Mexican War.

But neither these nor any other books made me discontented with the boy’s world about me. They made it a little more populous with visionary shapes, but that was well, and there was room for them all. It was not darkened with cares, and the duties of it were not many. By this time we older boys had our axes, and believed ourselves to be clearing a piece of woods which covered a hill belonging to the milling property. The timber was black-walnut and oak and hickory, and I cannot think we made much inroad in it; but we must have felled some of the trees, for I remember helping to cut them into saw-logs with the cross-cut saw, and the rapture we had in starting our logs from the brow of the hill and watching their whirling rush to the bottom. We experimented, as boys will, and we felled one large hickory with the saw instead of the axe, and scarcely escaped with our lives when it suddenly split near the bark, and the butt shot out between us. I preferred buckeye and sycamore trees for my own axe; they were of no use when felled, but they chopped so easily.

They grew abundantly on the island which formed another feature of our oddly distributed property. This island was by far its most fascinating feature, and for us boys it had the charm and mystery which have in every land and age endeared islands to the heart of man. It was not naturally an island, but had been made so by the mill-races bringing the water from the dam, and emptying into the river again below the mills. It was flat, and half under water in every spring freshet, but it had precious areas grown up to tall ironweeds, which, withering and hardening in the frost, supplied us with the darts for our Indian fights. The island was always our battle-ground, and it resounded in the long afternoons with the war-cries of the encountering tribes. We had a book in those days called Western Adventure, which was made up of tales of pioneer and frontier life, and we were constantly reading ourselves back into that life. This book, and Howe’s Collections for the History of Ohio, were full of stories of the backwoodsmen and warriors who had made

Overlooking the island which the Howells family cultivated

our state a battle-ground for nearly fifty years, and our life in the log cabin gave new zest to the tales of “Simon Kenton, the Pioneer,” and “Simon Girty, the Renegade”; of the captivity of Crawford, and his death at the stake; of the massacre of the Moravian Indians at Gnadenhütten; of the defeat of St. Clair and the victory of Wayne; of a hundred other wild and bloody incidents of our annals. We read of them at night till we were afraid to go up the ladder to the ambuscade of savages in our loft, but we fought them over by day with undaunted spirit. With our native romance I sometimes mingled from my own reading a strain of Old World poetry, and “Hamet el Zegri” and the “Unknown Spanish Knight,” encountered in the Vega before Granada on our island, while Adam Poe and the Indian chief Bigfoot were taking breath from their deadly struggle in the waters of the Ohio.

X

When the spring opened we broke up the sod on a more fertile part of the island, and planted a garden there beside our field of corn. We planted long rows of sweet-potatoes, and a splendid profusion of melons, which duly came up with their empty seed-shells fitted like helmets over their heads, and were mostly laid low the next day by the cutworms which swarmed in the upturned sod. But the sweet-potatoes had better luck. Better luck I did not think it then; their rows seemed interminable to a boy set to clear them of purslane with his hoe; though I do not now imagine they were necessarily a day’s journey in length. Neither could the corn-field beside them have been very vast; but again reluctant boyhood has a different scale for the measurement of such things, and perhaps if I were now set to hill it up I might think differently about its size.

I dare say it was not well cared for, but an inexhaustible wealth of ears came into the milk just at the right moment for our enjoyment. We had then begun to build our new house, and for this we were now kiln-drying the green oak flooring-boards. We had built a long skeleton hut, and had set the boards upright all around it and roofed it with them, and in the middle of it we had set a huge old cast-iron stove, in which we kept a roaring fire. The fire had to be watched night and day, and it often took all the boys of the neighborhood to watch it, and to turn the boards. It must have been cruelly hot in that kiln; but I remember nothing of that; I remember only the luxury of the green corn, spitted on the points of long sticks and roasted in the red-hot stove; we must almost have roasted our own heads at the same time. But I suppose that if the heat within the kiln or without ever became intolerable, we escaped from it and from our light summer clothing, reduced to a Greek simplicity, in a delicious plunge in the river. We had our choice of the shallows, where the long ripple was warmed through and through by the sun in which it sparkled, or the swimming-hole, whose depths were almost as tepid, but were here and there interwoven with mysterious cool under-currents.

We believed that there were snapping-turtles and water-snakes in our swimming-holes, though we never saw any. There were some fish in the river, chiefly suckers and catfish in the spring, when the water was high and turbid, and in summer the bream that we call sunfish in the West, and there was a superstition, never verified by us, of bass. We did not care much for fishing, though of course that had its turn in the pleasures of our rolling year. There were crawfish, both hard-shell and soft, to be had at small risk, and mussels in plenty. Their shells furnished us the material for many rings zealously begun and never finished; we did not see why they did not produce pearls; but perhaps they were all eaten up, before the pearl disease could attack them, by the muskrats, before whose holes their shells were heaped.

Of skating on the river I think we had none. The winter often passed in our latitude without making ice enough for that sport, and there could not have been much sledding, either. We read, enviously enough, in Peter Parley’s First Book of History, of the coasting on Boston Common, and we made some weak-kneed sleds (whose imbecile runners flattened helplessly under them) when the light snows began to come; but we never had any real coasting, as our elders never had any real sleighing in the jumpers they made by splitting a hickory sapling for runners, and mounting any sort of rude box upon them. They might have used sleighs in the mud, however; that was a foot deep on most of the roads, and lasted all winter. For a little while some of us went two miles away through the woods to school; but there was not much to be taught a reading family like ours in that log hut, and I suppose it was not thought worth while to keep us at it. No impression of it remains to me, except the wild, lonesome cooing of the turtle-doves when they began to nest in the neighboring oaks.

Our new house got on slowly. The log cabin had not become pleasanter with the advance of the summer, and we looked forward to our occupation of the new house with an eagerness which even in us boys must have had some sense of present discomfort at the bottom of it. The frame was of oak, and my father decided to have the house weather-boarded and shingled with black-walnut, which was so much cheaper than pine, and which, left in its natural state, he thought would be agreeable in color. It appeared to me a palace. I spent all the leisure I had from swimming and Indian-fighting and reading in watching the carpenter work, and hearing him talk; his talk was not the wisest, but he thought very well of it himself, and I had so far lapsed from civilization that I stood in secret awe of him, because he came from town — from the little village, namely, two miles away.

I try to give merely a child’s memories of our life, which were nearly all delightful; but it must have been hard for my elders, and for my mother especially, who could get no help, or only briefly and fitfully, in the work that fell to her. Now and then a New Church minister, of those who used to visit us in town, passed a Sunday with us in the cabin, and that was a rare time of mental and spiritual refreshment for her. Otherwise, my father read us a service out of the Book of Worship, or a chapter from the Heavenly Arcana; and week-day nights, while the long evenings lasted, he read poetry to us — Scott, or Moore, or Thomson, or some of the more didactic poets.

In the summer evenings, after her long hard day’s work was done, my mother sometimes strolled out upon the island with my father, and loitered on the bank to look at her boys in the river; one such evening I recall, and how sad our gay voices were in the dim, dewy air. My father had built a flatboat, which we kept on the smooth waters of our dam, and on Sunday afternoons the whole family went out in it. We rowed far up, till we struck a current from the mill above us, and then let the boat drift slowly down again. It does not now seem very exciting, but then to a boy whose sense was open to every intimation of beauty, the silence that sang in our ears, the stillness of the dam where the low uplands and the fringing sycamores and every rush and grass-blade by the brink perfectly glassed themselves with the vast blue sky overhead, were full of mystery, of divine promise, and holy awe.

I recollect the complex effort of these Sunday afternoons as if they were all one sharp event; I recall in like manner the starry summer nights, and there is one of these nights that remains single and peerless in my memory. My brother and I had been sent on an errand to some neighbor’s — for a bag of potatoes or a joint of meat; it does not matter — and we had been somehow belated, so that it was well after twilight when we started home, and the round moon was high when we stopped to rest in a piece of the lovely open woodland of that region, where the trees stood in a parklike freedom from underbrush, and the grass grew dense and rich among them. We took the pole, on which we had slung the bag, from our shoulders, and sat down on an old long-fallen log, and listened to the densely interwoven monotonies of the innumerable katydids, in which the air seemed clothed as with a mesh of sound. The shadows fell black from the trees upon the smooth sward, but every other place was full of the tender light in which all forms were rounded and softened; the moon hung tranced in the sky. We scarcely spoke in the shining solitude, the solitude which for once had no terrors for the childish fancy, but was only beautiful. This perfect beauty seemed not only to liberate me from the fear which is the prevailing mood of childhood, but to lift my soul nearer and nearer to the soul of all things in an exquisite sympathy. Such moments never pass; they are ineffaceable; their rapture immortalizes; from them we know that, whatever perishes, there is something in us that cannot die, that divinely regrets, divinely hopes.

XI

Our log cabin stood only a stone’s-cast from the gray old weather-tinted grist-mill, whose voice was music for us by night and by day, so that on Sundays, when the water was shut off from the great tub-wheels in its basement, it was as if the world had gone deaf and dumb. A soft sibilance prevailed by day over the dull, hoarse murmur of the machinery; but late at night, when the water gathered that mysterious force which the darkness gives it, the voice of the mill had something weird in it like a human moan.

It was in all ways a place which I did not care to explore alone. It was very well, with a company of boys, to tumble and wrestle in the vast bins full of tawny wheat, or to climb the slippery stairs to the cooling-floor in the loft, whither the little pockets of the elevators carried the meal warm from the burrs, and the blades of the wheel up there, worn smooth by years of use, spread it out in an ever-widening circle, and caressed it with a thousand repetitions of their revolution. But the heavy rush of the water upon the wheels in the dim, humid basement, the angry whirr of the millstones under the hoppers, the high windows, powdered and darkened with the floating meal, the vague corners festooned with flour-laden cobwebs, the jolting and shaking of the bolting-cloths, had all a potentiality of terror in them that was not a pleasure to the boy’s sensitive nerves. Ghosts, against all reason and experience, were but too probably waiting their chance to waylay unwary steps there whenever two feet ventured alone into the mill, and Indians, of course, made it their ambush.

With the sawmill it was another matter. That was always an affair of the broad day. It began work and quitted work like a Christian, and did not keep the grist-mill’s unnatural hours. Yet it had its fine moments, when the upright saw lunged through the heavy oak log and gave out the sweet smell of the bruised woody fibers, or then when the circular saw wailed through the length of the lath we were making for the new house, and freed itself with a sharp cry, and purred softly till the wood

The vicinity where Mr. Howells lived his “Year in a Log Cabin.” The cabin stood near the two pines

touched it again, and it broke again into its shrill lament. The warm sawdust in the pit below was almost as friendly to bare feet as the warm meal; and it was splendid to rush down the ways on the cars that brought up the logs or carried away the lumber.

It was in the early part of the second winter that it was justly thought fit I should leave these delights and go to earn some money in a printing-office in X —— , when the foreman of the printing-office appeared one day at our cabin and asked if I could come to take the place of a delinquent hand. There was no question with any one but myself but I must go. For me, a terrible homesickness fell instantly upon me — a homesickness that already, in the mere prospect of absence, pierced my heart and filled my throat.

The foreman wanted me to go back with him in his buggy, but a day’s grace was granted me, and then my elder brother took me to X —— , where he was to meet my father at the railroad station on his return from Cincinnati. It had been snowing, in the soft Southern Ohio fashion, but the clouds had broken away, and the evening fell in a clear sky, apple-green along the horizon as we drove on. This color of the sky must always be associated for me with the despair which then filled my soul and which I was constantly swallowing down with great gulps. We joked, and got some miserable laughter out of the efforts of the horse to free himself from the snow that balled in his hoofs, but I suffered all the time an anguish of homesickness that now seems incredible. I had every fact of the cabin life before me; what each of the children was doing, especially the younger ones, and what, above all, my mother was doing, and how she was looking; and I saw the wretched little phantasm of myself moving about among them.

The editor to whom my brother delivered me over could not conceive of me as tragedy; he received me as if I were the merest commonplace, and delivered me in turn to the good man with whom I was to board. There were half a dozen school-girls boarding there, too, and their gaiety, when they came in, added to my desolation. The man said supper was about ready, and he reckoned I would get something to eat if I looked out for myself. Upon reflection I answered that I thought I did not want any supper, and that I must go to find my brother, whom I had to tell something. I found him at the station and told him I was going home with him. He tried to reason with me, or rather with my frenzy of homesickness; and I agreed to leave the question open till my father came; but in my own mind it was closed.

My father suggested, however, something that had not occurred to either of us: we should both stay. This seemed possible for me; but not at that boarding-house, not within the sound of the laughter of those girls! We went to the hotel, where we had beefsteak and ham and eggs and hot biscuit every morning for breakfast, and where we paid two dollars apiece for the week we stayed. At the end of this time the editor had found another hand, and we went home, where I was welcomed as from a year’s absence.

Again I was called to suffer a like trial, the chief trial of my boyhood, but it came in a milder form, and was lightened to me not only by the experience of survival from it, but by kindly circumstance. This time I went to Dayton, where my young uncle somehow learned the misery I was in, and bade me come and stay with him while I remained in the town. I was very fond of him, and of the gentle creature, his wife, but for all that, I was homesick still. I fell asleep with the radiant image of our log cabin before my eyes, and I woke with my heart like lead in my breast.

I did not see how I could get through the day, and I began it with miserable tears. I had found that by drinking a great deal of water at my meals I could keep down the sobs for the time being, and I practised this device to the surprise and alarm of my relatives, who were troubled at the spectacle of my unnatural thirst. But I could not wholly hide my suffering, and I suppose that after a while the sight of it became intolerable. At any rate, a blessed evening came when I returned from my work and found my brother waiting for me at my uncle’s house; and the next morning we set out for home in the keen, silent dark before the November dawn.

We were both mounted on the italic-footed mare, I behind my brother, with my arms round him to keep on better; and so we rode out of the sleeping town, and into the lifting shadow of the woods. They might have swarmed with ghosts or Indians; I should not have cared; I was going home. By and by, as we rode on, the birds began to call one another from their dreams, the quails whistled from the stubble fields, and the crows clamored from the decaying tops of the girdled trees in the deadening; the squirrels raced along the fence-rails, and, in the woods, they stopped half-way up the boles to bark at us; the jays strutted down the shelving branches to offer us a passing insult and defiance.

Sometimes, at a little clearing, we came to a log cabin; the blue smoke curled from its chimney, and through the closed door came the low hum of a spinning-wheel. The red and yellow leaves, heavy with the cold dew, dripped round us; I was profoundly at peace, and the homesick will understand how it was that I was as if saved from death. At last we crossed the tail-race from the island, and turned up, not at the old log cabin, but at the front door of the new house. The family had flitted during my absence, and now they all burst out upon me in exultant welcome, and my mother caught me to her heart. Doubtless she knew that it would have been better for me to have conquered myself; but my defeat was dearer to her than my triumph could have been. She made me her honored guest; I had the best place at the table, the tenderest bit of steak, the richest cup of her golden coffee; and all that day I was “company.”

It was a great day, which I must have spent chiefly in admiring the new house. It was so very new yet as not to be plastered; they had not been able to wait for that; but it was beautifully lathed in all its partitions, and the closely fitted floors were a marvel of carpentering. I roamed through the rooms, and up and down the stairs, and freshly admired the familiar outside of the house as if it were as novel as the interior, where open wood fires blazed upon the hearths and threw a pleasant light of home upon the latticed walls.

I must have gone through the old log cabin to see how it looked without us, but I have no recollection of ever entering its door again, so soon had it ceased to be part of my life. We remained in the new house, as we continued to call it, for two or three months, and then the changes of business which had been taking place without the knowledge of us children called us away from that roof, too, and we left the mills and the pleasant country that had grown so dear, to take up our abode in city streets again. We went to live in the ordinary brick house of our civilization, but we had grown so accustomed, with the quick and facile adaptation of children, to living in a house which was merely lathed, that we distinguished this last dwelling from the new house as a “plastered house.”

Some of our playmates of the neighborhood walked part of the way to X —— with us boys, the snowy morning when we turned our backs on the new house to take the train in that town. A shadow of the gloom in which our spirits were steeped passes over me again, but chiefly I remember our difficulties in getting our young Newfoundland dog away with us; and our subsequent embarrassments with him on the train, where he sat up and barked out of the window at the passing objects and finally became seasick, blot all other memories of that journey from my mind.

PART II

IF in a child’s first years the things which it apparently remembers are really the suggestions of its elders, it begins soon to repay the debt, and repays it more and more fully until its memory touches the history of all whom it has known. Through the whole time when a boy is becoming a man his autobiography can scarcely be kept from becoming the record of his family and his world. He finds himself so constantly reflected in the personality of those about him, so blent with it, that any attempt to study himself as a separate personality is impossible. His environment has become his life, and his hope of a recognizable self-portrait must lie in his frank acceptance of the condition that he can make himself truly seen chiefly in what he remembers to have seen of his environment.

I

We were now going from the country to Columbus, where my father, after several vain attempts to find an opening elsewhere as editor or even as practical printer, had found congenial occupation at least for the winter; and the reader who likes to date a small event by a great one may care to know that we arrived in the capital of Ohio about the time that Louis Kossuth arrived in the capital of the United States. In the most impressive exile ever known he came from Hungary, then trampled under foot by the armies of Austria and Russia, and had been greeted with a frenzy of enthusiasm in New York as the prophet and envoy of a free republic in present difficulties, but destined to a glorious future. At Washington he had been received by both Houses of Congress with national honors which might well have seemed to him national promises of help against the despotisms joined in crushing the Magyar revolt; we had just passed a law providing for the arrest of slaves escaping from their owners in the South, and we were feeling free to encourage the cause of liberty throughout the world.

Kossuth easily deceived himself in us, and he went hopefully about the country, trying to float an issue of Hungarian bonds on our sympathetic tears, and in his wonderful English making appeals full of tact and eloquence, which went to the hearts if not the pockets of his hearers. Among the other state capitals he duly came to Columbus, where I heard him from the steps of the unfinished State House. I hung on the words of the picturesque black-bearded, black-haired, black-eyed man, in the braided coat of the Magyars, and the hat with an ostrich plume up the side which set a fashion among us, and I believed with all my soul that in a certain event we might find the despotisms of the Old World banded against us, and “would yet see Cossacks,” as I thrilled to hear Kossuth say. In those days we world-patriots put the traitor Görgy, who surrendered the Hungarian army to the Austrians and Russians, beside our own Benedict Arnold; but what afterward became of him I do not know. I know that Kossuth went disappointed back to Europe and dwelt a more and more peaceful newspaper correspondent in Turin till the turn of fortune’s wheel would have dropped him, somehow politically tolerable to Austria, back in his native country. But he would not return; he died in Turin; and a few years ago in Carlsbad I fancied I had caught sight of his son at a café, but was told that I had seen the wrong man, who was much more revolutionary-looking than Kossuth’s son, and more like Kossuth.

I adopted with his cause the Kossuth hat, as we called it, and wore it with the plume in it till the opinions of boys without plumes in their hats caused me to take the feather out. My father was of their mind about the feather, but otherwise we thought a great deal alike, and he was zealous to have me see the wonders of the capital. I visited the penitentiary and the lunatic, deaf and dumb, and blind asylums with him, though I think rather from his interest than mine; but I was willing enough to realize the consequence of Columbus as the capital of a sovereign American state, and I did what I could to meet his expectations. Together we made as thorough examination of the new State House as the workmen who had not yet finished it would allow, and he told me that it would cost, when done, a million dollars, a sum of such immensity that my young imagination shrank from grappling with it; but I am afraid that before the State House was done it may have cost more; certainly it must have cost much more with the incongruous enlargements which in later years spoiled its classic proportions. My father made me observe that it was built of Ohio limestone without, and later I saw that it was faced with Vermont and Tennessee marble within, where it was not stuccoed and frescoed; but as for the halls of legislation where the laws of Ohio were made and provided, when I first witnessed the process, they were contained in a modest square edifice of brick which could not have cost a million dollars, or the twentieth part of them, by the boldest computation of the contractors. It was entirely modest as to the Hall of the House and the Senate Chamber, and I suppose that so were the state offices, wherever they were, unnoted by me. The State House, as much as I knew of it from a single visit to the Hall of Representatives, was of a very simple interior heated from two vast hearths where fires of cord-wood logs were blazing high. There were rows of legislators sitting at their desks, and probably one of them was on his feet, speaking; I recall dimly a presiding officer, but my main affair was to breathe as softly as I could and get away as soon as possible from my father’s side where he sat reporting the proceedings for the Ohio State Journal, then the Whig and later the Republican organ.

II

Nobody cares now for the details, or even the main incidents of state legislation, but in that day people seemed to care so much that the newspapers at the capital found their account in following them, and as I learned later the papers at Cincinnati and Cleveland had correspondents at Columbus to let them know by letter what went on in the House and Senate. My father could make a very full and faithful report of the legislative proceedings in longhand, and for this he was paid ten dollars a week. As I have told elsewhere, I worked on the same paper and had four dollars as compositor; my eldest brother became very provisionally clerk in a grocery-store where he had three dollars, and read the novels of Captain Maryatt in the intervals of custom. Our joint income enabled us to live comfortably in the little brick house, on a humble new street, which my father hired for ten dollars a month from a Welsh carpenter with a large family. No sense of our own Welsh origin could render this family interesting; I memorized some scraps of their Cymric as I overheard it across the fence, but we American children did not make acquaintance with the small Welsh folk, or with more than these few words of their language, which after several attempts at its grammar still remain my sole knowledge of it. On the other side lived a mild, dull German of some lowly employ, whom I remember for his asking us across the fence, one day, to lend him a leather cover. When by his patient repetition this construed itself as an envelope, we loved him for the pleasure it gave us, and at once made leather-cover the family name for envelope. Across the street dwelt an English family of such amiable intelligence that they admired some verses of mine which my father stole to their notice and which they put me to shame by praising before my face.

In my leisure from the printing-office I was in fact cultivating a sufficiently thankless muse in the imitation of Pope and Goldsmith, for in me, more than his other children, my father had divined and encouraged the love of poetry; but in reproducing his poets, as I constantly did, to his greater admiration than mine, I sometimes had a difficulty which I did not carry to him. There is no harm in now submitting it to the reader, who may have noted in his own case the serious disadvantage of writing about love when he had as yet had no experience of the passion. I did my best, and I suppose I did no worse than other poets of thirteen. But I fell back mostly upon inanimate nature, which I knew very well from the woods where I had hunted and the fields where I had hoed; to be honest, I never hoed so much as I hunted, and I never hunted very successfully. I now went many walks into the woods and fields about the town in my longing for the wider spaces I had known, and helped my sisters dig up the wild flowers which they brought home and planted in our yard. But I recall more distinctly than any other a Sunday walk which I took with my father across the Scioto to the forsaken town on the western bank of the river. Franklinton had been thought of as the capital before Columbus, and it has now been rehabilitated in an indefinitely greater prosperity than it ever enjoyed in its prime, but during my life in the city which so promptly won the capital away from it, Franklinton lay abandoned by nine-tenths of its inhabitants, and stretched over the plain in rows of small, empty brick dwellings. I have the impression of disused county buildings, but I am not sure of them; I heard (but in days when I did not much concern myself with such poor unliterary facts) that the notion of Franklinton as the capital was rejected because it was apt in springtime to be flooded by the Scioto, and was at other seasons infested by malaria which the swarms of mosquitoes bore to every household. The people, mostly sallow women and children who still gaze at me from a few of the doorways and windows, looked as if their agues were of unfailing recurrence every other day of every week; though I suppose that in winter they were somewhat less punctual. I should like to believe that Franklinton was precious to me because of its suggestion of Goldsmith’s Deserted Village, but I cannot claim that it bore any likeness to the hamlet of the poet’s fancy, even in the day when I was hungering to resemble all life to literature; and I never made it the subject of my verse, though I think now it merited as much and more. Since that time I have seen other abandoned cities, notably Pompeii and Herculaneum, but Franklinton remains of a memorable pathos and of a forlornness all the more appreciable because it had become ruin and eld amidst the young, vigorous life of a new country.

In My Literary Passions I have made full mention of the books I was reading that winter of 1851-2; but I was rather surprised to find that in a boyish diary of the time, lately discovered in the chaos of a storage warehouse, none of my favorite authors was specified. I could trace them, indeed, in the varying style of the record, but the diarist seems to have been shy of naming them, for no reason that I can now imagine.

The diary is much more palpable than the emotions of the diarist, and is a large, flat volume of foolscap paper, bound in marbled boards, somewhat worn with use and stained with age. The paper within is ruled, which kept the diarist’s hand from wandering, and the record fills somewhat less than a fourth of the pages; the rest are given to grammatical exercises in Spanish, which the diarist was presently beginning to study, but even these interrupt themselves, falter, and are finally lost in space. The volume looks quite its age of sixty years, for it begins in the closing months of 1851.

The diarist practised a different handwriting every day and wrote a style almost as varied. The script must have been imitated from the handwritings which he successively admired, and the literary manner from that which seemed to him most elegant in the authors he had latest read. He copies not only their style, but their mental poses, and is often sage beyond his years, which are fourteen verging upon fifteen. With all its variety of script, the spelling in the diary is uniformly of the correct sort which printers used to learn as part of their trade, but which is said to be now suffering a general decay through the use of type-setting machines. There are few grammatical errors in the diversified pages and the punctuation is accurate and intelligent.

Though there is little note or none of the diarist’s reading, there is other witness that it had already begun to be of wide range and copious variety. Now and then there are hints of his familiarity with Goldsmith’s Essays, and Dickens’s novels which his father was reading aloud, and one Sunday it appears that when he was so loath to get up that he did not rise until eight o’clock he tells us: “I slipped into my clothes, made the fire in the sitting-room, wrapped father’s cloak about me, and sat down to read the travels of Hommaire de Hell, a Frenchman who traveled in the Russian Empire in the year 1840.” I do not care much now who M. Hommaire de Hell was or what he had to say of the Russian Empire in 1840, but I wish I could see that boy wrapped in his father’s cloak, and losing himself in the Frenchman’s page. Though I have the feeling that we were once familiarly acquainted, I am afraid the diarist would not know me if he looked up across the space of threescore years, though he might divine in me a kindred sense of the heaviness of the long Sunday hours which he confronts when he rises from his reading.

Throughout the yellowing pages there is evident striving, not to say straining, for a literary style, the most literary style possible, and the very first page commemorates a visit to the Lunatic Asylum in terms of a noble participial construction. “Passing up the broad graveled path to the door of the institution, we entered the office, and leaving our hats on the table we proceeded on our way. The first room we entered contained those who were nearly cured. There was in it no one but an old and a young man. The old man I did not notice much, but the young one attracted my attention. He paced the floor all the time, not taking the least notice of us; then we went up-stairs where the most unmanageable ones were kept. Here was a motley crew, some of them lying at full length on the floor, standing up and walking about, while crownless hats and dilapidated shirt-bosoms were the order of the day. In the midst of these terrible men, thoughtless as the brute and ferocious as the tiger, stood a small man (the assistant physician) whom they could have torn limb from limb in a moment. Here was a beautiful instance of the power of mind over brute force. He was reading poetry to them, and the men, totally bereft of reason, listening like little children to the sweet cadence of the verse.” All this and more is in a fine script, so sloping that it is almost lying down, either from the exhausting emotions of the diarist or from a temporary ideal of elegance. But the very next day it braces itself for a new effort and it is not many days before it stands upright in a bold, vertical file.

The writer does not know any boys except in the printing-office, and these he knows only in a shrinking sort, not venturing to take part, except once, in their wild hilarity, and scarcely knowing their names, even the name of the boy whom he is afterward to associate himself with in their first venture with a volume of verse. His chief companionship is with his father, whom he goes long walks and holds long talks with, and it is his father who encourages him in his versifying and who presently steals into the print of the newspaper employing them both a poem on the premature warm weather which has invited the bluebirds and blackbirds into the northern March. At first the boy was in dismay at the sight of the poem, with the introductory editorial note customary in those days, but he hides this from his diary, where he confides his joy in finding his verses “copied into a New York paper, and also in the Cincinnati Commercial. I mean the piece on Winter.”

But the poet kept on and wrote more and more, while the diarist wrote less and less. It is needless to follow him through the pieces which were mostly imitated from some favorite poet of the moment or more originally drawn from the scenes of life known to the author. One of these, painting an emigrant’s farewell to the home he is leaving, tells how he stoops over —

“And pats the good old house dog
Who is lying on the floor.”

The morning after the piece appeared, a fellow printer-boy seems to have quoted the line aloud for all to hear, and dramatized it by patting the author on the head, inwardly raging but helpless to resent the liberty. In fact, the poet did not well know how to manage the publicity now thrust upon him. He behaved indeed with such outrageous resentment at finding his first piece of verse in print that his father, who had smuggled it into the editor’s hands, well-nigh renounced him and all his works. But not quite; he was too fond of both, and the boy and he were presently abetting each other in the endeavor for his poetic repute — so soon does the love of fame go to the strongest head.

As yet neither looked for his recognition in that sort of literature which the boy was ultimately to be best or most known in. He seems not to have read at this time much prose fiction, but he was reading Homer in Pope’s translation, or rather he was reading the Odyssey; the Iliad he found tiresome and noisy; and if the whole truth must be told, as I have understood it, he liked The Battle of the Frogs and Mice best of all the Homeric poems. It was this which he imitated in a burlesque epic of The Cat Fight, studied from nature in the hostilities nightly raging on the back fences; but the only surviving poem of what may be called his classical period, as the poets of it understood Queen Anne’s age, is a pastoral so exactly modeled upon the pastorals of the great Mr. Pope, that but for a faulty line here and there and the intrusion of a few live American birds among the stuffed songsters of those Augustan groves, I do not see how Mr. Pope could deny having written it. He might well have rejoiced in a follower who loved him so devotedly and so exactly reproduced his artificiality in heroic couplets studied from his own, with the same empty motive to the same unreal effect, as the surviving fragments of it will witness.

“When fair Aurora kissed the purple East
And dusky night the struggling day released,
Two swains whom Phœbus waked from sleep’s embrace
Led forth their flocks to crop the dewy grass.
While morning blushed upon the cheek of day
Young Corydon began the rural lay.

Corydon.

“Now ceases Philomel her nightly strain,
And trembling stars forsake the ethereal plain;
Pale Luna fades and down the distant West
Sadly and slowly lowers her rayless crest;
But yellow Phœbus pours his beams along
And linnets sport where Philomela sung.
Here robins chirp and joyful orioles sing
Where late the owlet flapped his noiseless wing;
Here the pale lily spreads its petals wide,
And snowy daisies deck the green hillside;
Here violets’ bloom with waterflowers wreath,
And forest blossoms scent the Zephyr’s breath.
Fit spot for song where Spring in every flower
Rich incense offers to the morning hour.
Then let us sing! The hour is meet for love,
The plain, the vale, the music-breathing grove;
Let gentle Daphnis judge the doubtful song,
And soft Æolus bear the notes along.
I stake my pipe with whose soft notes I while
The tedious hours, and my toil beguile;
Whose mellow voice gives joy serener charms,
And grief of half its bitterness disarms.”

Here should enter some unnamed competitor, but apparently does not.

“And I, my dog, who guards by yonder brook
Two careless truants from his master’s flock;
Who views his timid charge with jealous eyes
And every danger for their sake defies.
In cheerful day my helpmate and my pride,
At night my brave companion and my guide.
The morning flies: no more the song delay,
For morning most delights the Sylvan Muse,
Ere modest twilight yields to flaming day,
And fervid sunbeams drink the cooling dews
And wither half the freshness of the Spring.”

Another nameless person, possibly the “gentle Daphnis,” now speaks:

“Alternate, then, ye swains must answering sing.
By turns the planets circle round the sun
In even turns the changing seasons run;
Smooth-coming night enshrouds the passing day,
And morn returning smiles the night away.”

And doubtless now it is Corydon who resumes:

“Inspire my song, ye tuneful nine, inspire!
And fill the shepherd’s humble lay with fire.
Around your altar verdant bays I twine,
And palms I offer on your sacred shrine.
Since Julia smiles, let Julia fire my strain,
And smooth the language of the lay of love
Till conscious music breathes o’er all the plain,
And joyous echoes wake the silent grove.”

I have no facts to support my conjecture, but I will hazard the belief that the winter of 1851-2 was largely given to producing and polishing this plaster-of-paris masterpiece. I might find it easy to make a mock of the lifeless cast — a “cold pastoral,” indeed! — but it would be with a faint, or perhaps more than faint, heartache for the boy who strove so fervently to realize a false ideal of beauty in his work. It is my consolation that his soul was always in his work and that when he turned to other ideals and truer, because faithfuler to the life he knew, he put his soul into them, too.

III

In the State Journal office I had soon been changed from the newspaper to the book room, and was put to setting up the House bills and Senate bills. I am not ready to say that these potential laws, with their clattering repetitions of, “An Act entitled an Act to amend an Act,” intensified my sense of Columbus as a capital, with the lawmaking machinery always grinding away in it; but the formula had its fascination, and I remained contented with my work, with no apprehension, from the frequent half-holidays offered me by the foreman, that there was ever to be an end of it. All at once, however, the legislature had adjourned and my father’s engagement ended with the session. My employment somehow ceased with both, and though we children were now no longer so homesick for the country, and would have liked well enough to live on in Columbus, we were eager for the new home which he told us he had found for us in the Western Reserve. In his anti-slavery opinions he agreed better with the Ohio New-Englanders there than with the Ohio Virginians and Kentuckians whom we had hitherto lived amongst; we understood that he had got a share in the Freesoil newspaper in Ashtabula; and I can recall no wider interval between the adjournment of the legislature and our taking passage on the newly completed railroad to Cleveland than sufficed me for a hardy experiment in gardening among the obdurate clods and brickbats of our small back yard.

In the news-room of the State Journal office I had seen the first real poet of my personal knowledge in the figure of the young assistant editor who used to come in with proofs or copy for the foreman, but I cannot hope that the reader will recognize him in his true quality under the name of Florus B. Plympton, or will quite withhold the sophisticated smile of these days for the simple-hearted American parents of the past who could so christen an unconsenting infant. I dare say most of his verse was no worthier of his best than this name, but if here and there a reader has known the lovely lines of the poem called In Summer when the Days were Long, he will be glad to have me recall it with him, and do what I can to bring it back from dumb forgetfulness. I myself had not read that poem when I used to see the young editor in the news-room, and he had perhaps not yet written it; I believe I did not think any great things of other pieces which he printed in the State Journal; and it was in the book-room, where I was afterward transferred, that I all unwittingly met the truest poet of our Middle West, and one of the truest poets of any time or place. With the name of John J. Piatt I would gladly relate my own more memorably than in the Poems of Two Friends, long since promptly forgotten, where I joined him in our first literary venture. We are now old men, hard upon our eighties, but we were then boys of thirteen or fourteen, with no dream of our adventure in joint-authorship, and we had our boyish escapades in the long leisure of the spring afternoons of 1850, when we did not yet know each other even by the nature of poets which we shared.

I can see Piatt now, his blue eyes laughing to tears in our romps and scuffles, and I can hear the trickling mirth of his reluctant chuckle, distinct across the days of the years that have brought us so far. He was setting up House Bills and Senate Bills too, with whatever subjective effect, in the intervals of our frolic, but his head must have been involved in the sunny mists that wrapt mine round. My life, then, as always, was full of literature to bursting, the literature I read and the literature I wrote, for my father had already printed some of the verses I could not keep to myself; and it is not strange that I can recover from the time so few and so trivial events of more exoteric interest. My love indeed was primarily for my work at the printer’s case, but that had its hours, as while I was distributing the type, when my fancy roamed the universe in every dramatization of a proud and triumphant future. In these reveries I was a man brilliantly accepted by the great world, but in my waking from them I was a boy, with a boy’s fears and anxieties in conditions which might not have appalled a bolder nature. There was, for instance, the Medical College in State Street, where years later I was to dwell so joyously when it had become a boarding-house in a suspense of its scientific function, but whence now, after the early dark had fallen, ghosts swarmed from the dissecting-room, and pursued me on my way home well round the corner into Oak Street, where they delivered me over to another peril, unfailingly in wait for me. There an abominable cur, which had instinctively known of my approach several houses away, rushed from his gate to meet me. It might have been my wisest course to run from the ghosts, but flight would not avail me with this little beast, and when he sprang out with sudden yelpings and barkings, and meteoric flashings about my legs, I was driven to the folly of trying to beat him off with sticks and stones. After he had once found his way to my terror, which remained to me from having been bitten by a dog years before, and left me without a formula of right behavior with a dog attacking me, nothing could save me from him but my final escape from his fence, his street, his city; and this, more than anything else, consoled me for any sense of loss which I may have felt in leaving the state capital.

IV

My elder brother and I had several ideals in common quite apart from my own literary ideals. One of these was life in a village, as differenced from life in the country, or in any city, large or little; another was the lasting renunciation of the printing-business in every form. The last was an effect from the anxiety which we had shared with our father and mother in the long adversity, ending in the failure of his newspaper, from which we had escaped to the country. Once clear of that disaster, we meant never to see a press or a case of types again; and after our year of release from them in the country my brother had his hopes of learning the river and becoming a steamboat pilot, but failed in these, and so joined us in Columbus, where he had put off the evil day of his return to the printing-business a little longer. Meanwhile I had yielded to my fate and spent the whole winter in a printing-office; and now we were both going to take up our trade, so abhorrent in its memories, but going gladly because of the chances which it held out to my father at a time when there seemed no other chance in the world for him.

Yet we were about to fulfil our other ideal by going to live in a village. The paper which we were to help make my father make his by our work — for he had no money to buy it — was published in Ashtabula, now a rather obstreperous little city, full of industrial noise and grime, with a harbor emulous of the gigantic activities of the Cleveland lake-front, but it must even then have had a thousand people. Our ideal, therefore, was not perfectly realized till our office was transferred some ten miles inland to the county-seat, for whatever business and political reasons of the joint stock company which had now taken over the paper, with my father as editor. With its four hundred inhabitants less Jefferson was so much more than Ashtabula a village; and its young gaieties welcomed us and our little force of printers to a social liberty and equality which I long hoped some day to paint as a phase of American civilization worthy the most literal fidelity of fiction. But I shall now never do that, and I must be content to borrow from an earlier page some passages which uninventively record the real events and conditions of our enterprise.

In politics, the county was always overwhelmingly Freesoil, as the forerunner of the Republican party was then called; the Whigs had hardly gathered themselves together since the defeat of General Scott for the Presidency; the Democrats, though dominant in state and nation, and faithful to slavery at every election, did not greatly outnumber among us the zealots called Comeouters, who would not vote at all under a Constitution recognizing the right of men to own men. Our paper was Freesoil, and its field was large among that vast majority of the people who believed that slavery would finally perish if kept out of the territories and confined to the old Slave States.

The people of the county were mostly farmers, and of these nearly all were dairymen. The few manufactures were on a small scale, except perhaps the making of oars, which were shipped all over the world from the heart of the primeval forests densely wooding the vast levels of the region. The portable steam-sawmills dropped down on the borders of the woods have long since eaten their way through and through them, and devoured every stick of timber in most places, and drunk up the watercourses that the woods once kept full; but at that time half the land was in the shadow of those mighty poplars and hickories, elms and chestnuts, ashes and hemlocks; and the meadows that pastured the herds of red cattle were dotted with stumps as thick as harvest stubble. Now there are not even stumps; the woods are gone, and the watercourses are torrents in spring and beds of dry clay in summer. The meadows themselves have vanished, for it has been found that the strong yellow soil will produce more in grain than in milk. There is more money in the hands of the farmers there now, but half a century ago there was

One of the last log houses to survive in the vicinity of Jefferson. When Mr. Howells lived in the town such dwellings were common in the surrounding farm region

so much less that fifty dollars seldom passed through a farmer’s hands in a year. Payment was made us in kind rather than in coin, and every sort of farm produce was legal tender at the printing-office. Wood was welcome in any quantity, for our huge box-stove consumed it with inappeasable voracity, and even then did not heat the wide, low room which was at once editorial-room, composing-room, and press-room. Perhaps this was not so much the fault of the stove as of the building. In that cold, lake-shore country the people dwelt in wooden structures almost as thin and flimsy as tents; and often in the first winter of our sojourn the type froze solid with the water which the compositor put on it when he wished to distribute his case, placed near the window so as to get all the light there was, but getting all the cold there was, too. From time to time the compositor’s fingers became so stiff that blowing on them would not avail; he made many excursions between his stand and the stove; in severe weather he practised the device of warming his whole case of types by the fire, and, when they lost heat, warming it again.

The first floor of our office-building was used by a sash-and-blind factory; there was a machine-shop somewhere in it, and a mill for sawing out shingles; and it was better fitted to the exercise of these robust industries than to the requirements of our more delicate craft. Later, we had a more comfortable place, in a new wooden “business block,” and for several years before I left it the office was domiciled in an old dwelling-house, which we bought, and which we used without much change. It could never have been a very comfortable dwelling, and my associations with it are of a wintry cold, scarcely less polar than that we were inured to elsewhere. In fact, the climate of that region is rough and fierce; I know that there were lovely summers and lovelier autumns in my time there, full of sunsets of a strange, wild, melancholy splendor, I suppose from some atmospheric influence of the lake; but I think chiefly of the winters, so awful to us after the mild seasons of southern Ohio; the frosts of ten and twenty below; the village streets and the country roads drowned in snow, the consumptives in the thin houses, and the “slippin’,” as the sleighing was called, that lasted from December to April with hardly a break. At first our family was housed on a farm a little way out, because there was no tenement to be had in the village, and my father and I used to walk to and from the office together in the morning and evening. I had taught myself to read Spanish, in my passion for Don Quixote, and I was now, at the age of fifteen, intending to write a life of Cervantes. The scheme occupied me a good deal in those bleak walks, and perhaps it was because my head was so hot with it that my feet were always very cold; but my father assured me that they would get warm as soon as my boots froze. If I have never yet written that life of Cervantes, on the other hand I have never been quite able to make it clear to myself why my feet should have got warm when my boots froze.

V

It may have been only a theory of his; it may have been a joke. He had a great many theories and a great many jokes, and together they always kept life interesting and sunshiny for him. With his serene temperament and his happy doubt of disaster in any form, he was singularly fitted to encounter the hardships of a country editor’s lot. But for the moment, and for what now seems a long time after the removal of our paper to the county-seat, these seem to have vanished. The printing-office was the center of civic and social interest; it was frequented by visitors at all times, and on publication day it was a scene of gaiety that looks a little incredible in the retrospect. The place was as bare and rude as a printing-office seems always to be: the walls were splotched with ink and the floor littered with refuse newspapers; but, lured by the novelty of the affair, and perhaps attracted by a natural curiosity to see what manner of strange men the printers were, the school-girls and young ladies of the village flocked in and made it like a scene of comic opera, with their pretty dresses and faces, their eager chatter and lively energy in folding the papers and addressing them to the subscribers, while our fellow-citizens of the place, like the bassos and barytones and tenors of the chorus, stood about and looked on with faintly sarcastic faces. It would not do to think now of what sorrow life and death have since wrought for all those happy young creatures, but I may recall without too much pathos the sensation when some citizen volunteer relaxed from his gravity far enough to relieve the regular mercenary at the crank of our huge power-press wheel, amid the applause of the whole company.

We were very vain of that press, which replaced the hand-press hitherto employed in printing the paper. This was of the style and make of the hand-press which superseded the Ramage press of Franklin’s time; but it had been decided to signalize our new departure by the purchase of a power-press of modern contrivance and of a speed fitted to meet the demands of a subscription-list which might be indefinitely extended. A deputation of the leading politicians accompanied the editor to New York, where he went to choose the machine, and where he bought a second-hand Adams press of the earliest pattern and patent. I do not know, or at this date I would not undertake to say, just what principle governed his selection of this superannuated veteran; it seems not to have been very cheap; but possibly he had a prescience of the disabilities which were to task his ingenuity to the very last days of that press. Certainly no man of less gift and skill could have coped with its infirmities, and I am sure that he thoroughly enjoyed nursing it into such activity as carried it hysterically through those far-off publication days. It had obscure functional disorders of various kinds, so that it would from time to time cease to act, and would have to be doctored by the hour before it would go on. There was probably some organic trouble, too, for, though it did not really fall to pieces on our hands, it showed itself incapable of profiting by several improvements which he invented, and could, no doubt, have successfully applied to the press if its constitution had not been undermined. It went with a crank set in a prodigious fly-wheel which revolved at a great rate, till it came to the moment of making the impression, when the whole mechanism was seized with such a reluctance as nothing but an heroic effort at the crank could overcome. It finally made so great a draught upon our forces that it was decided to substitute steam for muscle in its operation, and we got a small engine which could fully sympathize with the press in having seen better days. I do not know that there was anything the matter with the engine itself, but the boiler had some peculiarities which might well mystify the casual spectator. He could easily have satisfied himself that there was no danger of its blowing up when he saw my brother feeding bran or corn-meal into its safety-valve in order to fill up certain seams or fissures in it which caused it to give out at the moments of the greatest reluctance in the press. But still he must have had his misgivings of latent danger of some other kind, though nothing ever actually happened of a hurtful character. To this day I do not know just where those seams or fissures were, but I think they were in the boiler-head, and that it was therefore suffering from a kind of chronic fracture of the skull. What is certain is that, somehow, the engine and the press did always get us through publication day, and not only with safety, but often with credit; so that many years after, when I was at home, and my brother and I were looking over an old file of the paper, we found it much better printed than either of us expected; as well printed, in fact, as if it had been done on an old hand-press, instead of the steam-power press which it vaunted the use of. The wonder was that, under all the disadvantages, the paper was ever printed on our steam-power press at all; it was little short of miraculous that it was legibly printed, and altogether unaccountable that such impressions as we found in that file could come from it. Of course, they were not average impressions; they were the very best out of the whole edition, and were as creditable as the editorial make-up of the sheet.

VI

Upon the whole, our paper was an attempt at conscientious and self-respecting journalism; it addressed itself seriously to the minds of its readers; it sought to form their tastes and opinions. I do not know how much it influenced them, if it influenced them at all, and as to any effect beyond the circle of its subscribers, that cannot be imagined, even in a fond retrospect. But since no good effort is altogether lost, I am sure that this endeavor must have had some tacit effect; and I am sure that no one got harm from a sincerity of conviction that devoted itself to the highest interests of the reader, that appealed to nothing base, and flattered nothing foolish in him. It went from our home to the homes of the people in a very literal sense, for my father usually brought his exchanges from the office at the end of his day there, and made his selections or wrote his editorials while the household work went on him, about and his children gathered around the same lamp, with their books or their jokes; there were a good many of both.

Our county was the most characteristic of that remarkable group of counties in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve, and forty years ago the population was almost purely New England in origin, either by direct settlement from Connecticut, or indirectly after the sojourn of a generation in New York State. We were ourselves from southern Ohio, where the life was then strongly tinged by the adjoining life of Kentucky and Virginia, and we found these transplanted Yankees cold and blunt in their manners; but we did not undervalue their virtues. They were very radical in every way, and hospitable to novelty of all kinds. I imagine that they tested more new religions and new patents than have been even heard of in less inquiring communities. When we came among them they had lately been swept by the fires of spiritualism, which left behind a great deal of smoke and ashes where the inherited New England orthodoxy had been. They were temperate, hard-working, hard-thinking folks, who dwelt on their scattered farms, and came up to the county fair once a year, when they were apt to visit the printing-office and pay for their papers. They thought it droll, as people of the simpler occupations are apt to think all the more complex arts; and one of them once went so far in expression of his humorous conception as to say, after a long stare at one of the compositors dodging and pecking at the type in his case, “Like an old hen pickin’ up millet.” This sort of silence, and this sort of comment, both exasperated the printers, who took their revenge as they could. They fed it full, once, when a country subscriber’s horse, hitched before the office, crossed his hind legs and sat down in his harness like a tired man, and they proposed to go out and offer him a chair, to take him a glass of water, and ask him to come inside. Fate did not often give them such innings; they mostly had to create their chances of reprisal, but they did not mind that.

There was always a good deal of talk going on, but, although we were very ardent politicians, our talk was not political. When it was not mere banter, it was mostly literary; we disputed about authors among ourselves and with the village wits who dropped in, and liked to stand with their backs to our stove and challenge opinion concerning Holmes and Poe, Irving and Macaulay, Pope and Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare. But it was Shakespeare who was oftenest on our tongues; indeed, the printing-office of former days had so much affinity with the theater that compositors and comedians were almost convertible. Religion entered a good deal into our discussions, which my father, the most tolerant of men, would not suffer to become irreverent. Part of his duty, as publisher of the paper, was to bear patiently with the type of farmer who thought he wished to discontinue his paper, and really wished to be talked into continuing it. I think he rather enjoyed letting such a subscriber talk himself out, and carrying him from point to point in his argument, always consenting that he knew best what he wanted to do, but skilfully persuading him at last that a home paper was more suited to his needs than any city substitute. Once I could have given the heads of his reasoning, but they are gone from me now.

He was like all country editors then, and I dare say now, in being a printer as well as an editor, and he took a just share in the mechanical labors. These were formerly much more burdensome, for twice or thrice the present type-setting was then done in the country offices. In that time we had three journeymen at work and two or three girl-compositors, and commonly a boy-apprentice besides. The paper was richer in a personal quality, and the printing-office was unquestionably more of a school. After we began to take girl-apprentices it became coeducative, as far as they cared to profit by it; but I think it did not serve to widen their thoughts or quicken their wits as it did those of the boys. They looked to their craft as a living, not as a life, and they had no pride in it. They did not learn the whole trade, as the journeymen had done; but served only such apprenticeship as fitted them to set type; and their earnings were usually as great at the end of a month as at the end of a year.

VII

The printing-office had been my school from childhood so largely that I could almost say I had no other, but the time had come, even before this, when its opportunities did not satisfy the hunger which was always in me for knowledge convertible into such beauty as I imagined and wished to devote my life to. I was willing and glad to do my part in helping my father, but he recognized my right to help myself forward in the line of my own longing, and it was early arranged that I should have a certain measure of work to do, and when it was done I should be free for the day. My task was finished early in the afternoon, and then my consuming pleasures began when I had already done a man’s work. I was studying four or five languages, blindly and blunderingly enough, but with a confidence at which I can even now hardly smile; I was attempting many things in verse and prose which I seldom carried to a definite close, and I was reading, reading, reading, right and left, hither and yon, wherever an author tempted me. I was not meaning to do less than the greatest things, or to know less than the most, but my criticism outran my performance and exacted of me an endeavor for the perfection which I found forever beyond me. Far into the night I clung to my labored failures in rhyme while I listened for the ticking of the death-watch in the walls of my little study; or if I had imagined, in my imitations of others’ fiction, some character that the poet had devoted to an early death, I helplessly identified myself with that character, and expected his fate. It was the day when this world was much more intimate with the other world than it is now, and the spiritualism which had evoked its phenomena through most houses in the village had left them haunted by dread sounds, if not sights; but it was not yet the day when nervous prostration had got its name or was known in its nature. For me this malady came in the hypochondria which was misery not less real because at the end of the ends I knew it to be the exaggeration of an apprehension without ground in reality.

I have hesitated to make any record of this episode, but I think it essential to the study of my very morbid boyhood, and I hope some knowledge of it may be helpful to others in like suffering. Somehow as a child I had always had a terror of hydrophobia, perhaps from hearing talk of that poor man who had died of it in the town where we then lived, and when years afterward I was, as I have told, bitten by a dog, my terror was the greater because I happened to find myself alone in the house when I ran home. I had heard of excising a snake-bite to keep the venom from spreading, and I would now have cut out the place with my knife, if I had known how. In the end I did nothing, and when my father came home he did not have the wound cauterized. He may have believed that anything which tended to fix my mind upon it would be bad, and perhaps I forgot it the sooner for his decision. I have not forgotten the make of the gloomy autumnal afternoon when the thing happened, or the moment when years afterward certain unguarded words awoke the fear in me which as many more years were needed to allay. By some chance there was talk with our village doctor about hydrophobia, and the capricious way the poison of a dog’s bite may work. “Works round in your system,” he said, “for seven years or more, and then it breaks out and kills you.” The words he let heedlessly fall fell into a mind prepared by ill-health for their deadly potency, and when the summer heat came I was helpless under it. Somehow I knew what the symptoms of the malady were, and I began to force it upon myself by watching for them. The splash of water anywhere was a sound I had to set my teeth against, lest the dreaded spasms should seize me; my fancy turned the scent of the forest fires burning round the village into the subjective odor of smoke which stifles the victim. I had no release from my obsession, except in the dreamless sleep which I fell into exhausted at night, or that little instant of waking in the morning, when I had not yet had time to gather my terrors about me, or to begin the frenzied stress of my effort to experience the thing I dreaded. There was no longer question of work for me, with hand or head. I could read, yes, but with the double consciousness in which my fear haunted every line and word without barring the sense from my perception. I read many novels, where the strong plot befriended me and formed a partial refuge, but I did not attempt escape in the poor boyish inventions, verse or prose, which I had fondly trusted might be literature. Instinct taught me that some sort of bodily fatigue was my safety; I spent the horrible days in the woods with a gun, or in the fields gathering wild berries, and walked to and from the distant places that I might tire myself the more. My father reasoned to the same effect for me, and helped me as best he could; of course I was released from my tasks in the printing-office, and he took me with him in driving about the country on political and business errands. We could not have spent many days in this way, when, as it seems, I woke one morning in a sort of crisis, and having put my fear to the test of water suddenly dashed from a doorway beside me and failed of the convulsion which I was always expecting, I began imperceptibly to get the better of my demon. My father’s talk always distracted me somewhat, and that morning especially his disgust with the beefsteak fried in lard which the landlady gave us for breakfast at the country tavern where we had passed the night must even have amused me, as a touch of the comedy blent with the tragedy in the Shakespearian drama of life. But no doubt a more real help was his recurrence, as often as I chose, to his own youthful suffering from hypochondria, and his constantly repeated assurance that I not only would not and could not have hydrophobia from that out-dated dog-bite, but that I must also soon cease to have hypochondria. I understood as well as he that it was not the fear of that malady which I was suffering, but the fear of the fear; that I was in no hallucination, no illusion as to the facts, but was helpless in the nervous prostration which science, or our poor village medicine, was yet many years from knowing or imagining. I have heard and read that sometimes people in their apprehension of the reality can bring on a false hydrophobia and die of it in the agonies their fancy creates. It may be so; but all that fear could do was done in me; and I did not die.

I could not absolutely fix the moment when I began to find my way out of the cloud of misery which lowered on my life, but I think that it was when I had gathered a little strength in my forced respite from work, and from the passing of the summer heat. It was as if the frost which people used to think put an end to the poisonous miasm of the swamps, but really only killed the insect sources of the malaria, had wrought a like sanitation in my fancy. My fear when it once lifted never quite overwhelmed me again, but it was years before I could endure the sight of the word which embodied it; I shut the book or threw from me the paper where I found it in print; and even now, after sixty years, I cannot bring myself to write it or speak it without some such shutting of the heart as I knew at the sight or sound of it in that dreadful time. The effect went deeper than I could say without accusing myself of exaggeration for both good and evil. In self-defense I learnt to practise a psychological juggle; I came to deal with my own state of mind as another would deal with it, and to combat my fears as if they were alien.

I cannot leave this confession without the further confession that though I am always openly afraid of dogs, secretly I am always fond of them; and it is only fair to add that they reciprocate my liking with even exaggerated affection. Dogs, especially of any more ferocious type, make up to me in spite of my diffidence; and at a hotel where we were once passing the summer the landlord’s bulldog, ugliest and dreadest of his tribe, used to divine my intention of a drive and climb into my buggy, where he couched himself on my feet, with a confidence in my reciprocal tenderness which I was anxious not to dispel by the least movement.

VIII

As soon as my nerves regained something of their former tone, I renewed my struggle with those alien languages, using such weapons as I could fit my hand to. Notably there was a most comprehensive manual which, because it proposed instruction in so many languages, I called (from my father’s invention or my own, for I had early learnt the trick of his drolling) a sixteen-bladed grammar. I wish now I could see that book, which did not include Greek or Hebrew or German, but abounded in examples of Latin, Italian, French, Spanish and probably Portuguese, and other tongues of that kinship, with literal versions of the texts. These versions falsified the native order of the words to the end that the English of them might proceed in the wonted way, and when I detected the imposition, I was the more offended because the right order of the words in those idioms was always perplexing me. The sixteen-bladed grammar was superseded by the ordinary school-books, Arnold’s for Latin, and Anthon’s for Greek, but the perplexities of one sort or other persisted. Such a very little instruction would have enlightened me; but who was to give it me? My father, perhaps, but he may not have known how, though in his own youth he had written an English grammar and more or less taught it, or he may have thought I would find it out for myself. He would have temperamentally trusted to that; he was always prouder than I of what I did unaided; he believed I could do everything without help. That was an error, but more than I ever could say do I owe to his taste in literature and the constant guidance up to a certain limit which he gave me. When I came back from the fields and woods with the sense of their beauty, and eager to turn it into literature, he guarded me against translating it in the terms of my English poets, with their larks and nightingales, their daisies and cowslips. He contended that our own birds and flowers were quite as good, besides being genuine; but he taught me to love the earlier English classics; and if I began to love the later classics, both English and American, and to be his guide in turn, this is only saying that each one is born of his generation. The time came early in our companionship when he thought fit to tell me that he regarded me as different from other boys of my age; and I had a very great and sweet happiness without alloy of vanity, from his serious and considered words. He did not say that he expected great things of me; though I had to check his fondness in offering my poor endeavors for the recognition of print, and I soon had the support of editors in this. But he justified himself and convinced me by once bringing to our house a kindly editor from a neighboring city whom he showed some of my things, and who carried away with him one of the minutely realistic sketches in which I had begun to practise such art as I have been able to carry farthest. When week after week the handsomely printed Ohio Farmer came with something in it, verse or prose, which I had done, I am not sure I had greater joy in it than my father, though now he thought it well to hide his joy as I always did mine.

All the while I was doing sketches and studies and poems for our own paper, which I put into type without first writing them, and short stories imitated from some favorite author of the moment with an art which I imagined must conceal itself from the reader. Once I carried Shakespeare beyond himself in a scene transferred from one of the histories, with such comedy characters as Pistol and Bardolph speaking the interchangeable prose and verse of his plays in adapting themselves to some local theme, which met with applause from the group of middle-aged cronies whom I most consorted with at the time. Once, also. I attempted a serial romance which, after a succession of several numbers, faltered and at last would not go on. I have told in another place how I had to force it to a tragic close without mercy for the heroine, hurried to an untimely death as the only means of getting her out of the way, and I will not repeat the miserable details here. It was a thing which could not meet with praise from any one, not even my father, though he did his best to comfort me in the strange disaster.

If my mother was the heart, he was the soul of our family life. In those young days when he did so much of his newspaper work at home he would always turn from it to take part in our evening jollity. He was gladly our equal in the jokes which followed around our table; and when he was stricken in his great age with the paralysis which he rallied from for a time, it was his joy to join his gray-haired children at the board in his wheeled chair and share in their laughing and making laugh. It seems to me that I can render him intelligible by saying that while my very religious-minded grandfather expected and humbly if fervently hoped to reach a heaven beyond this world by means of prayers and hymns and revivals and conversions, my not less religious-minded father lived for a heaven on earth in his beloved and loving home; a heaven of poetry and humor, and good-will and right thinking. He made it that sort of heaven for himself, and as he was the bravest man I have known because he never believed there was any danger, I think he must have felt himself as safe from sorrow in it as if he were in the world beyond this. When one of my younger brothers died, he was as if astonished that such a thing could be; it burst his innocent and beautiful dream; and afterward when I first met him, I was aware of his clinging, a broken man, to what was left of it. Death struck again and again, and he shrank under the bewildering blows; but a sense of that inexpressible pathos of his first bereavement remains with me.

IX

The family scene that passed in that earlier time was not always as idyllic as I have painted it. With five brothers in it there was often the strife which is always openly or covertly between brothers. My elder brother, who was four years my elder, had changed from the whimsical tease and guardian angel of our childhood to the anxious taskmaster of our later boyhood, requiring the same devotion in our common work that his conscience exacted of himself. I must say that for my own part I labored as faithfully as he, and I hotly resented his pressure. Hard words passed between us two, as blows, not very hard, had passed, while we were still children, between me and my younger brothers. But however light the blows were, they had to be disclaimed, and formal regret expressed, at my father’s insistence. He would ascertain who struck the first blow, and when he had pronounced that wrong he would ask, “And you struck him back?” If the fact could not be denied, he went on to the further question, “Well, do two wrongs make a right?” Clearly they did not, and nothing remained but reluctant apology and reconciliation. Reason and civic morality were on his side, but I could not feel that justice was, and it seems to me yet that the primary offender was guiltier than the secondary.

Long ago, long before our youth was passed, utter forgiveness passed between my elder brother and me. The years since were years of such mutual affection as I could not exaggerate the sense of in tenderness and constancy, and the exchange of trust and honor. He came even in our youth to understand my aim in life, and feel what was always leading me on. He could not understand, perhaps, why poetry in literature should be so all in all with me, but he felt it in nature as keenly and deeply as I; and I have present now the experience of driving with him one September afternoon (on some chase of the delinquent subscriber), when he owned by his few spare words the unity of the beautiful in everything as I spoke the melting lines of Tennyson:

“Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.
Tears from the depths of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.”

He had a grotesque humor which vented itself in jokes at the expense of my mother’s implicit faith in everything he said, as when she wondered how the cow got into the garden, and he explained, “She pulled out the peg with her teeth and put it under her fore leg and just walked through the gate,” and my mother answered, “Well, indeed, indeed, I believe she did, child.” She had little humor of her own, but she had a childlike happiness in the humor of us others, though she would not suffer joking from any but him. She relied upon him in everything, but in some things she drew a sharp line between the duties of her boys and girls in the tradition of her Pennsylvania origin. Indoor work was for girls, and outdoor for boys, and we shared her slight for the Yankee men who went by our gate to the pasture with their milk-pails. That was woman’s work though it was outdoor work; and though it was outdoor work to kill chickens for the table, none of us boys had the heart to cut their heads off because we could not bear to witness their post-mortem struggles; but my brother brought out his gun and shot them, and this pursuit of them as game in our barnyard got us over a difficulty otherwise insuperable. The solution of our scruple, which my father shared, must have amused him; but my brother took it seriously. His type of humor was in the praise which long afterward he gave a certain passage of my realistic fiction, when he said it was as natural as the toothache.

Throughout that earlier time my father’s chief concern was first that very practical affair of making his paper pay for the office and the house, and then incidentally preventing the spread of slavery into the territories. He was willing enough, I fancy, to yield his silent partnership in my studies to the young printer who now, for no reason that I can remember, began to take an active share in them. I have told in My Literary Passions how J. W. and I read Cervantes and Shakespeare together; but I could not say just why or when we began to be boon companions in our self-conducted inquiries into Latin and Greek, and then into German, which presently replaced Spanish in my affections through the witchery of Heine. He had the definite purpose of making those languages help him to a professorship in a Western college, but if I had any clear purpose it was to possess myself of their literature. To know them except to read them I do not think I cared; I did not try to speak or write the modern tongues; to this day I could not frame a proper letter in Spanish, German, French, or Italian, but I have a literary sense of them all. I wished to taste the fruit of my study before I had climbed the tree where it grew, and in a manner I did begin to gather the fruit without the interposition of the tree. Without clear knowledge of their grammatical forms, I imitated their literary forms. I cast my poetry, such as it was, into the metres of the Spanish poets I was reading, and without instruction or direction I acquainted myself with much of their literary history. I once even knew from the archaic tragedy of her name who Iñez de Castro was; I do not know now.

My friendship with J. W. early became chief of the many friends of a life rich in friendships. He was like most of his craft in his eccentric comings and goings to and from our employ, when sometimes we had no work to give him, and sometimes he had none to give us. When he left us he always went to Wisconsin, where he had once lived; and when he came back from one of these absences he would bring with him bits of character which he gave for our joy in his quaint observance, such as that of the mother who complained of her daughter because “she didn’t cultivate her featur’s none; she just let ’em hing and wallop,” or the school-mistress who genteelly explained in the blackberry-patch where he found her, that she was “just out picking a few berries for tea-he-he-he,” or the country bachelor who belatedly made up his mind to marry, and in his default of female acquaintance took his place on the top rail of a roadside fence, and called to the first woman who passed, “Say! You a married woman?” and then at the frightened answer, indignantly gasped out, “Yes, sir!” offered a mere “Oh!” for all apology and explanation, and let himself vanish by falling into the corn-field behind him.

J. W. literally made his home with us, for as if the burden of work for our own large family were not enough for my mother, we had always some of the printers, men or maids, to board. He entered into the spirit of our life; but it was recognized that he was peculiarly my friend, and we were left to our special comradeship. In that village nearly everybody played or sang, and in the summer nights the young people went about serenading one another’s houses, under the moon which was then always full; and J. W. shared in every serenade where a tenor voice was welcome. At the printing-office, in the afternoon when the compositors were distributing their cases, he led the apprentice-girls in the songs which once filled the whole young world. The songs were often poverty-stricken enough in sentiment, and I suppose cheap and vulgar in music, but they were better than the silence that I should once have said had followed them. Yet only last winter in a hotel on the New Jersey coast, where there was some repairing in the corridor outside my room, the young painters and carpenters gathered at their lunch near my door, and after they had begun to joke they suddenly began to sing together as if it were still the habit for people of their lot to do so, in a world I had thought so hushed, except for its gramophones; and though I could not make out the words, the gentle music somehow saved them from seeming common. It went to my heart, and made me glad of life where youth still sang as it used to sing when I was young.

Sometimes the village serenaders came to me, and then I left my books and stumbled down to the gate, half dazed, to find the faces I knew before they flashed away with gay shrieking and shouting; and J. W. among them, momentarily estranged from me, jealous in that world where we had our intimacy. My ambition was my barrier from the living world around me; I could not beat my way from it into that; it kept me absent and hampered me in the vain effort to be part of the reality I have always tried to portray. Though J. W. expected to make a more definite use of our studies, he seemed to understand me as well at least as I understood myself in my vaguer striving. I do not now remember reading him the things I was trying to write; or of his speaking to me of them. Perhaps my shyness, my pride, went so far as keeping them from him, though I kept from him so few of my vagaries in that region of hopes and fears where youth chiefly has its being.

The songs he had were as many as the stories, but there was one song, often on the tongues of the village serenaders, which was oftenest on his, and which echoes to me still from those serenades and those choral afternoons in the printing-office, and more distinctly yet from what we felt a midnight of wild adventure, when he sang it alone. We had gone to call together on two of our village girls at school fifteen miles away, and had set out in the flattering temperature of a January thaw; but when we started home, many hours into the dark, the wind had whipped round from the south to the north and had frozen the curdling slush into icy ruts under the runners of our sleigh. Our coats were such as had suited the thaw, but J. W. had a pair of thin cotton gloves for driving, while I had none. We took turns in driving at first, but as the way lengthened the cold strengthened and I cowered definitively under our buffalo robe, then the universal provision against the rigor of winter travel. For a while we shouted together in some drama of the situation, but by and by our fun froze at our lips, and then J. W. began to sing that song he used oftenest to sing:

“Talk not to me of future bliss,
Talk not to me of joys gone by!
The happiest time is this!”

He kept the measure of the tune by beating on the robe above my head, first with one fist and then the other, as he passed the reins from hand to hand, and by pounding with both feet on the floor of the sleigh beside me. We lived through the suffering of that drive partly because he was twenty-two years old and I was eighteen, but partly also because we realized the irony of the song, with all the joke of it. Yet it was a long nightmare of misery, with a moment of supreme anguish, when we stopped at the last toll-gate, two miles from home, and the keeper came shuddering out with his red blot of a lantern. Then the song stopped for an instant, but seems to have begun again, and not ended till we sat with our feet in the oven of the kitchen stove at home, counting our adventure all gain. The memory of it brings before me again the face of my friend, with its beautiful regularity of feature, its pale blue eyes, its smooth, rich, girlish complexion, and its challenging, somewhat mocking smile. But the date when I saw him last in life is lost to me. He went to Wisconsin, as usual, but there was no wonted return; we kept each other present in the long letters which we wrote so long, but they faltered with time and ceased, and I can only make sure now that he got the professorship he aimed at in some seat of learning so modest that it has kept its name from me; and then, years after, that he went into the war for the Union and was killed.

X

I had now begun to be impatient of the village, and when it came to my last parting with J. W., which I did not know was the last, I felt the life very dull and narrow which I had once found so vivid and ample. There had come the radiant revelation of girlhood, and I had dwelt in the incredible paradise where we paired or were paired off each with some girl of his fancy or fancied fancy. There had been the ranging of the woods in autumn for chestnuts and in the spring for wintergreen; there had been the sleigh-rides to the other villages and the neighboring farms where there was young life waiting to welcome us through the drifting snows; there had been the dances at the taverns and the parties at the girls’ houses with the games and the frolics, and the going home each with the chosen one at midnight and the long lingering at the gate: there had been the moonlight walks; there had been the debating societies and the spelling-matches; there had been the days of the County Fair and the Fourths-of-July, and the Christmases rehabilitated from Dickens; and there had been the impassioned interest of the easily guessed anonymous letters of St. Valentine’s day. But these things had passed, and with a certain disappointment suffered and yet prized there had come the sense of spent witchery and a spell outworn, and I chose to revolt from it all and to pine for a wider world and prouder pleasures. Distance in time and space afterward duly set the village I had wearied of in a truer and kinder light, and I came to value it as the potential stuff of such fiction as has never yet been written, and now never will be by me. I came to see that it abounded in characteristics and interests which differenced it from any other village, and I still think the companionship to which I passed in the absences of J. W. such as would make into the setting for as strange a story as we could ask of reality in the days when we wished life to surpass romance in strangeness.

I have told in My Literary Passions of the misanthropical Englishman who led in our Dickens-worship and played the organ in the little Episcopal church, and built the organs for such country churches about as could afford to replace their moaning melodions with them. I have said, I hope without too much attempt to establish the fact, that he was also a house-painter, and that in the long leisures of our summer days and winter nights and in the throes of his perpetual dyspepsia he was the inveterate antagonist in argument of the vivid Yankee who built steam-engines among us, and had taught school, and turned his quick head and hand to any art or trade which making an easy living exacted of him. They both lavishly lent me their books, and admitted me on equal terms to their intellectual enmity and amity, which was shared in some tacit way with a clever New England trader in watches, clocks, and jewelry. He came and went among us on visits more or less prolonged from some Eastern center of his commerce (my memory somehow specifies Springfield, Massachusetts), and he had a shrewd smile and kindly twinkling eye which represent him to me yet. He seldom took part in the disputes nightly held at the drug-and-book store; but not from want of spirit, when he had the boldness to deny some ferocious opinion exploded by the organ-builder in an access of indigestion.

The disputes nearly always involved question of the existence of a God, which was thought improbable by both of the debaters, and the immortality of the soul, which was doubted, in spite of the spiritualism rife in every second house in the village, with manifestations by rappings, table-tippings, and oral and written messages from another world through psychics of either sex, but oftenest the young girls one met in the dances and sleigh-rides. The community was prevalently unreligious; there was an ageing attendance at the Baptist and Methodist churches, but there was no stated service of the Congregationalists, though there was occasional preaching at their house and sometimes a lecture from an anti-slavery apostle, who wasted his doctrine on a community steeped in it already. Among many of the young people of the village the prevalent tone was irreverent to mocking in matters of religion; but their unlimited social freedom was without blame and without scandal, and if our villagers were not religious, they were, in a degree which I still think extraordinary, literary. Old and young they read and talked about books, and better books than people read and talk about now, as it seems to me, possibly because there were not so many bad ones; the English serials pirated into our magazines were followed and discussed, and any American author who made an effect in the East became promptly known in that small village of the Western Reserve. There were lawyers, of those abounding at every county-seat, who were fond of reading, and imparted their taste to the young men studying law in their offices. I might exaggerate the fact, but I do not think I have done so, or that I was much deceived as to a condition which reported itself, especially to me whose whole life was in books, through the sympathy I met in the village houses. I was always reading whatever came to hand, either with an instinct for what was good in my choice of books or with good fortune in my chance of them. Literature was so commonly accepted as a real interest, that I do not think I was accounted altogether queer in my devotion to it. To be sure, at an evening session in one of the dry-goods and grocery stores where question of me came up, it was decided that I would be nowhere in a horse-trade, but this was a rare instance of slight, and I do not believe that my disability would have been generally counted against me.

XI

Somewhere about this time I gave a month to the study of law in the office of the United States Senator dwelling among us. I have never regretted reading a first volume of Blackstone through, or not going on to the second; his frank declaration that the law was a jealous mistress and would brook no divided love, was upon reflection quite enough for one whose heart was given to a different muse. I was usually examined in this author by the Senator’s nephew, my fellow-student, whom I examined in turn; but once, at least, the Senator himself catechized me, though he presently began to talk about the four great English quarterly reviews which I was known in the village for reading, and which it seemed he read too. No doubt he found me more perfect in them than in Blackstone; at least I felt that I did myself more credit in them. I have elsewhere spoken more fully already of this episode of my life; but I speak of it again because I think that the commonly accepted Wade legend scarcely does justice to a man not only of great native power, but of wider cultivation than it recognizes, and I would like to do what I can to repair the injustice. He was famed in contemporary politics as Old Ben Wade before he had passed middle life, and he was supposed to stand up against the fierce pro-slavery leaders in Congress with an intrepidity even with their own. He had a strong, dark face, and a deep, raucous voice, with a defiant laugh, and these lent their support to the popular notion of him as a rude natural force unhelped by teaching, though he had taught himself in the days of his early struggle, as Lincoln and most public men of his time had done, and later had taught others as country schoolmaster. Farm-boy and cattle-drover and canal-digger, more had remained to him from schoolmaster and medical student, than from either of his other callings, and though he became part of our history without the help of great intellectual refinement, he was by no means without intellectual refinement, or without the ability to estimate the value of it in others. Naturally he might also underestimate it, and perhaps it was from an underestimate that he judged the oratory of such a man as Charles Sumner, to whom he told me he had said of a speech of his, “It’s all very well, Sumner, but it has no bones in it.”

Wade was supposed by his more ill-advised admirers to lend especial effect to his righteous convictions by a free flow of profanity, but I have to bear witness that I never heard any profanity from him, though profanity must have been the common parlance of the new country and the rude conditions he grew up in. He was personally a man of silent dignity, as we saw him in the village, going and coming at the post-office, for he seldom seemed to pass the gate of his house yard on any other errand, in the long summer vacations between the sessions of the many Congresses when he sojourned among us. I have the sense of him in a back room of the office which stood apart from his house, after the old-fashioned use of country lawyers’ and doctors’ offices; and I can be sure of his visiting the students in the front room only that once when he catechized me in Blackstone, but I cannot say whether I stood in awe of him as a great lawyer, or quite realized his importance as United States Senator from the State of Ohio for eighteen years. Historically it has been thought his misfortune to outlive the period when the political struggle with slavery passed into the Civil War, and to carry into that the spirit of the earlier time, with his fierce alienation from the patient policy of Lincoln, and his espousal of the exaggerations of the Reconstruction. But it would be easy to do injustice to this part of his valiant career, and not easy to do justice to that part of it where he stood with the very few in his defiance of the pro-slavery aggression.

Probably he would not have understood my forsaking the law, and I evaded the explanation he once sought of me when we met in the street, dreading the contempt which I might well have fancied in him. I wish now that, knowing him a little on his æsthetic side, I might have had the courage to tell him why I could not give my heart to that jealous mistress, being vowed almost from my first days to that other love which will have my fealty to the last. But in the helplessness of youth I could not even imagine doing this, and I had to remain in my dread of his contempt. Yet he may not have despised me, after all. It was known with what single-handed courage I was carrying on my struggle with the alien languages, and their number was naturally over-stated. The general interest in my struggle was reflected in the offer of a farmer from another part of the county to be one of three or four who would see me through Harvard. It was good-will which, if it had ever materialized, my pride would have been fierce to refuse; but now I think of it without shame, and across the gulf which I would fain believe has some thither shore I should like to send that kind man the thanks which I fancy were never adequately expressed to him while he lived. It remains vaguely, from vague personal knowledge, that he was of Scotch birth and breeding; he had a good old Scotch name, and he lived on his prosperous farm in much more than the usual American state, with many books about him.

I went back not without shame, but also not without joy from the Senator’s law-office to my father’s printing-office, and I did not go to Harvard, or to any college or school thereafter. I still think that a pity, for I have never agreed with Lowell, who, when I deplored my want of schooling, generously instanced his own over-weight of learning as an evil I had escaped. It still seems to me lamentable that I should have had to grope my way and so imperfectly find it where a little light from another’s lamp would have instantly shown it. I still remain in depths of incredible ignorance as to some very common things; for at school I never got beyond long division in arithmetic, and after my self-discovery of grammar I should be unable to say, in due piedi, just what a preposition was, though I am aware of frequently using that part of speech, and, I hope, not incorrectly.

I did what I could to repair the defect of instruction, or rather I tried to make myself do it, for I had the nature of a boy to contend with, and did not love my work so much as I loved the effect of it. While I live I must regret that want of instruction, and the discipline which would have come with it, though Fortune, as if she would have flattered my vanity when she could bring her wheel round to it, bore me the offer of professorships in three of our greatest universities. In fact, when I thought of coming home from my consulship in Venice, ten years after my failure to achieve any sort of schooling, it had been my hope that I might get some sort of tutorship in a very modest college, and I wrote to Lowell about it, but he did not encourage me. Yet I was hardly fixed in the place which much better suited me as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, when one of the faculty came to me from Schenectady to offer me the sub-professorship of English in Union College, and no long time after I was sounded by the first educational authority in the country as to whether I would accept a like place in Washington University at St. Louis. It was twice as long after this that those three supreme invitations which I have boasted came to me. But I knew better than any one, unless it was Fortune herself, the ignorance I had hidden so long, and I forbore to risk a middling novelist on the chance of his turning out a poor professor, or none. In every case the offer was such as might well have allured me, but when, after a sleepless night of longing and fearing over that of Harvard which Lowell conveyed me with the promise, “You shall wear the gown that Ticknor wore, and Longfellow wore, and I wore,” I had the strength to refuse it, he wrote me his approval of my decision. It was a decision that I have rejoiced in ever since, with the breathless gratitude, when I think of it, of one who has withheld himself from a step over the brink of a precipice.

The other allurements to a like doom were hardly less gratifying. What indeed could have been more gratifying, except the Harvard offer of the professorship of the languages of the south of Europe (with the privilege of two years’ preparation in the Latin countries, whose tongues I had tampered with), than the offer of the English professorship in Yale? It was Lounsbury, now lately lost forever to these skies, Lounsbury the fine scholar, the charming writer, the delightful wit, the critic unsurpassed in his kind, who came smiling with the kind eyes, dimmed almost to blindness on the field of Gettysburg in the forgotten soldiership of his youth, to do me this incredible honor. Later came the offer of the same chair in Johns Hopkins, twice repeated by the president of that university. When in my longing and my despair I asked, What was the nature of such a professorship, he answered, Whatever I chose to make it; and this still seems to me, however mistaken in my instance, the very measure of the wisest executive large-mindedness. President Gilman had written to me from New York, and had come to see me in London, and again written to me in Boston, and I could not do less than go down to Baltimore and look at the living body of the university and see what part in it I might become. A day sufficed; where so many men were busy with the work which they were so singularly qualified to do, I could not think of bringing my half-heartedness to an attempt for which all the common sense I had protested my unfitness, my entire unlikeness to the kind of man he had so magnanimously misimagined me. I turned from that shining opportunity of failure as I turned from the others, and if the reader thinks I have dwelt too vaingloriously upon them he shall have his revenge in the spectacle of my further endeavors not to be the stuff which professors are made of.

XII

I could have been spared from the printing-office for the study of the law, when I could not be spared from it otherwise, because I might soon begin to make my living by practising before justices of the peace in the pettifogging which was then part of the study in the country offices. My labor, which was worth as much as a journeyman compositor’s, could not have been otherwise spared; much less could my father have afforded the expense of my schooling; and I cannot recall that I thought it an unjust hardship when it was decided after due family counsel, that I could not be sent to an academy in a neighboring village. I had not the means of estimating my loss; but the event seemed to have remained a poignant regret with my brother, and in after years he lamented what he felt to have been an irreparable wrong done me: now he is dead, and it touches me to think he should have felt that, for I never blamed him, and I am glad he gave me the chance to tell him so. I may have shed some tears when first denied; I did shed a few very bitter ones when I once confessed the hope I had that the editor of the Ohio Farmer might give me some sort of literary employment at a sum I named, and he said, “He would never pay you three dollars a week in the world for that,” and I had to own in anguish of soul that he was doubtless right. He worked every day of the week and far into every night to help my father earn the property we were all trying to pay for, and he rightfully came into the eventual ownership of the newspaper. By an irony of fate not wholly unkind he continued for half a century in the printing-business, once so utterly renounced. Then, after a few years of escape to a consular post in the tropics which he used to say was the one post which, if it had been whittled out of the whole universe, would have suited him best, he died, and lies buried in the village, the best-beloved man who ever lived there.

It was the day with us of self-denials which I cannot trust myself to tell in detail lest I should overtell them. I was willing to make a greater figure in dress than nature has ever abetted me in, but I still do not think it was from an excess of vanity that I once showed my father the condition of my hat, and left him to the logic of the fact. He whimsically verified it, and said, “Oh, get it half-soled,” as if it had been a shoe; and we had our laugh together, but I got the new hat, which, after all, did not make me the dashing presence I might have hoped, though the vision of it on the storekeeper’s counter always remained so distinct with me that in Seville, a few years ago, it seemed as if its ghost were haunting me in the Cordovese hats on all the heads I met. Like them it had a wide flat brim, and it narrowed slightly upward to the low flat crown of those hats which I now knew better than to buy.

But if we seem to have spared on dress, our table was of as unstinted abundance as it might be in a place where there was no market, except as the farmers brought us chickens and butter and vegetables and the small fruits of the pastures and clearings, where every sort of wild berries grew. The region had abounded in deer, and after we came to the village in 1852 venison was only three cents a pound. Once a black bear was chased from forest to forest across our land, but he did not wait to fix the market price of his meat; half the sky was often hidden with wild pigeons, and there was a summer when the gray squirrels swarmed through the streets in one of their mystical migrations from west to east. Such chances of game scarcely enriched our larder; and the salt-pork barrel was our constant reliance. This was a hardship, after the varied abundance of the larger places where we had lived, but we shared it with our fellow-villagers, and in this as in other conditions of our life we did not realize as deprivation what was the lot of the whole community. If we denied ourselves it was to meet the debts which would not be denied, and to possess ourselves of the roof over our heads and an ampler future in the ownership of our means of living. But I think we denied ourselves too much, and that we paid far beyond its moral worth for the house we were buying. To own the house she lived in had always been my mother’s dream since her young married days when my father built the first little house where they dwelt together, and where I was born. In all the intervening quarter of a century they had lived in rented houses, and she could not help feeling that the rent they paid ought to have gone toward buying a house of their own. In this she was practically right, but now the house which we all worked so hard to buy belongs to strangers, and unless there is an effect of our self-denial in some other world, the purchase was as much waste as rent paid to a landlord. We were in fact always paying a certain rent in the interest on the notes which we slowly accumulated the money to meet, but my mother could not feel that the same, and I am glad she had her wish long before she died, and her last years were passed under a roof which she owned.

In time, but I do not know how long time, for such things did not interest me, though I was doing my share in helping pay off our debt, the promissory notes which my father had given for the purchase of our newspaper were taken up, and the newspaper was also our property. Nobody could molest us or make us afraid in its possession; and in my hope of other things it did not concern me that the title vested in his partnership with my brother, who had most justly earned his half, and who by an enterprise of his own finally established the family fortunes in undreamed-of prosperity. It was characteristic of my father that as long as their partnership existed there were no accounts between them; after my brother had a family of his own each drew from the common income at his wish or need, and when I came of sufficient worldly wisdom to realize the risks to their peace from this anomalous arrangement, I protested against it in vain. They agreed with me that it was precarious and in a way ridiculous, and that it certainly ought to cease, but as long as they continued together they remained partners on these terms. After my father withdrew, my brother took his own son into partnership, and when he came in his turn to retire, he contritely owned to me that they had not departed from the same old unbusiness-like community of ways and means, though he had promised me very earnestly many times to end it. While I am upon these matters it is a pleasure for me to record that when I came home from Venice with the manuscript of Venetian Life promised publication by a London house if I could find an American house to take half the proposed edition, and I confessed that I had very little hope of getting this taken in New York or Boston, my brother promptly offered to take it himself. He was then in that undreamed-of prosperity which I have mentioned, and though he had no expectation of becoming a book-publisher, he was very willing to incur the risks involved. As all my world knows, the book found an equally courageous friend in New York, and came out with the American imprint of Hurd & Houghton instead of Joseph A. Howells & Co.

It is not surprising to me that I cannot date the time of our acquiring the newspaper, free and clear, as the real-estate phrase is, but I am certainly surprised and more pained that I cannot remember just when the house, endeared to us as home, became our very own. Its possession, as I have said, had been the poetry of my mother’s hard-working, loving life, and no doubt she had watched with hope and fear the maturing of each of the notes for it, with the interest they bore, until the last was paid off. In my father’s buoyant expectation of the best in

The four-story office erected by Mr. Howells’s father. In it the father and his oldest son, Joseph, published the Ashtabula “Sentinel” for many years

everything, I do not think he had any misgiving of the event; my brother must have shared my mother’s anxiety, but we younger children did not, and the great hour arrived without record in my consciousness. Years later, when I came back from long sojourn abroad, I found that the little ground-wren’s nest, as it looks to me in the retrospect, had widened by half a dozen rooms without rising above its original story and a half. All round it the garden space was red and purple with the grapes which my father had induced, by his steady insistence, the neighboring farmers to plant. My mother and he were growing sweetly old in the keeping of the place, and certain wild furred and feathered things had come to share their home with them. Not only the door-yard trees which we boys had brought from the woods had each its colony of birds, but in the eaves a family of flying-squirrels had nested. I do not know whether I can impart the sense of peace and security which seemed to have spread from the gentle household to them, but I am sure that my mother could not have realized a fonder vision of the home she had longed for through so many years.

XIII

I do not think my father so much cared for the ownership of the newspaper. He took our enterprise more easily than my elder brother, but that was temperamental in both, and one was no more devoted than the other. My companionship was far more with my father, but before my intimacy with J. W. interrupted this my studies had already ascertained the limits of his learning in the regions where I was groping my way, and where the light of my friend’s greater knowledge now made him my guide. If J. W. was more definite in his ambition of one day getting some sort of college professorship than I in my plans of literary achievement, he could not have been more intense in his devotion to what we were trying to do. I was studying those languages because I wished to possess myself of their literatures; still groping my way in the dark, where a little light shed from larger learning would have helped me so much. The grammars and the text-books could tell me what I wanted to know, but they did not teach it; and I realize now as I could not then that self-taught is half-taught. Yet I think my endeavor merited reward; if I worked blindly, I worked hard; and in my attempts at fiction or at verse where I could create the light by mere trituration, as it were, I did not satisfy myself with less than final perfection so far as I could imagine it. I loved form, I loved style, I loved diction, and I strove for them all, rejecting my faultier ideals when I discovered them, and cleaving to the truer. In some things, the minor things, I was of wavering preference; I wrote a different hand every other week, and if I have now an established handwriting it is more from disgust of change than from preference. In the spirit of my endeavor there was no variableness; always I strove for grace, for distinctness, for light; and my soul detests obscurity still. That is perhaps why I am beating out my meaning here at the risk of beating it into thin air.

In the final judgment of my father’s help and unhelp in my endeavors, I should say that they were the measure of his possibility. For a man of his conditioning he had a wonderful outlook in many directions on life, but he was without perspective; he could not see how my unaided efforts were driving to the vanishing-point. He had been my instructor in many things beyond my young ken; he had an instinct for beauty and truth; he loved the poetry which was the best in his youth, though he did not deny me the belief that the poetry of mine was better still; his gentle intelligence could follow me where his liking failed, and he modestly accepted my opinions. His interest had once been absorbed mostly, but not wholly, by the faith which he had imbibed from his reading of Swedenborg, but when I began to know him as a boy may know his elder, he was more and more concerned in the national struggle with the pro-slavery aggression. Politics had always been his main worldly interest, and not only as to measures; he passionately favored certain men, because he liked the nature of them, as well as because he believed them right. It seems to me now that he took a personal interest in conventions and nominations, but I am not sure, for I myself took no interest whatever in them; their realities did not concern me so much as the least unrealities of fiction; and I can only make sure of my father’s interest in the elections after the nominations. I suppose that he was not very skilled in practical politics, as log-rolling and wire-pulling have come to be called, though in a village which was the home of a United States Senator, a Congressional Representative, a State Senator, and a Legislative Representative, with the full corps of county office-holders, and a Common Pleas Judge, the science might well have forced itself upon his study. Many years after our coming to the Western Reserve he was sent to the State Senate by a war-majority larger than any majority which had yet returned a candidate, or yet has; but long before that he began to find his way beyond the local favor or disfavor, and was chosen one of the House clerks in the State Legislature. That must have been when I was eighteen years old, but he seems to have left our newspaper to my sole charge without misgiving, and fortunately no trouble came of his trust in me. I was then taking my civic and social opinions from the more Tory of the English quarterlies, but nobody knew what I meant by them; I did not know myself, and I did no harm with them.

In the mean time our Congressman was writing for us every week from Washington a letter full of politics far more intelligible to our readers than mine were to me. He was that Joshua R. Giddings, early one of the paladins of anti-slavery in a series of pro-slavery Congresses, where he represented and distinguished his district for twenty years after his resignation under a vote of censure and his overwhelming re-election. But in a fatal moment of that fatigue which comes to elderly people, he finally let fall an expression of indifference to office. The minor and meaner men of his party who were his enemies promptly seized the chance of defeating him for the nomination which was equivalent to an election in our district, and an inferior good man was named in his place. His friends would have had him contest the decision of the convention, but he would not, and he passed into private life, where he remained till the favor of Lincoln sought him out, and he died Consul-General to Canada after he had lived to write several books and to tell the story of the Civil War up to its penultimate year. Neither he nor Wade was of that Connecticut lineage which almost exclusively peopled the Western Reserve, and especially in Ashtabula County desired power and place to itself. Wade was from western Massachusetts, and Giddings was from western Pennsylvania, but in the new country where they met, they joined their forces as partners in the law, and remained together till politics separated them in the same cause. They still remained fellow-citizens of the little town where they spent the summer leisure of the Congressional adjournments, but without, somehow I imagine, seeing much of each other. Giddings was far more freely about the place, where his youth had been passed in the backwoods, and where he made himself familiarly at home. The very simplicity of the place seemed to comport with his statesman-like presence, his noble head, and his great Johnsonian face, when he came out of his large old-fashioned dwelling, sole rival of the Wade mansion; and he had no need to stoop in being fellow-citizen with the least of his constituents. For myself, I cannot recall any passage of words with him after a forgotten introduction, and I wish it had been otherwise. I wish now I could have known him even as a boy in his middle teens may know a man of his make; though he might not have said anything to me worth remembering, or inspired me to any expression worthier the event than that of a Louisianian whom long later I saw introduced to him in Columbus, at his own request. The Southerner stared at the giant bulk of the man who must have long embodied to his imagination a demoniacal enmity to his section, and could think of nothing better to say than, “Very pretty day, Mr. Giddings,” and when Giddings had assented with, “Yes, sir, a fine day,” the interview ended.

“Giddings, far rougher names than thine have grown
Smoother than honey on the lips of men,”

Lowell wrote in one of those magnanimous sonnets of his, when he bent from his orient height to the brave Westerner, and though it has not yet come quite to that honeyed utterance, the name cannot be forgotten when the story of our Civil War, with its far or near beginnings, is told.

XIV

That winter of my editorship wore away to the adjournment of the legislature and my father’s return home, after J. W.’s withdrawal into the vague of Wisconsin. But now another beloved friend had come to us. He had learned his trade with us in southern Ohio, where he lived with our family like one of ourselves, as brotherly as if he had been of our blood. In those days he and I read the same books and dreamed the same dreams, but he was nearer my eldest brother in age, and was as much his companion as mine. After he left us to live the wander-years of the journeyman printer, we heard from him at different points where he rested, and when the Civil War began in Kansas, five years before it began in South Carolina, we knew of him fighting and writing on the Free State side. In this time, my brother made it his romance to promote a correspondence between H. G. and a young girl of the village, which ended in their engagement. It was taking too great a risk in every way, but they were fitly mated in their tastes, and their marriage was of such lasting attachment that when she survived him and lay suffering in her last sickness, she prayed every night that she might die before she woke and be with him in the everlasting morning. Romance for romance, I think their romance of the greatest pathos of any I have known, and it had phases of the highest tragedy. H. G. was among the first to volunteer for the great war, and quickly rose from the ranks to be captain, but somehow he incurred the enmity of a superior officer who was able to have him cashiered in dishonor from the army. The great war which we look back upon as hallowed by a singleness of patriotic purpose was marked by many private wrongs which were promptly revenged, or kept for ultimate vengeance, sometimes forgone at last through the wearing out of the hate which cherished them. I am glad to think this was so with H. G.; his memory is very dear to me, and our friendship was of a warmth of affection such as I did not know for J. W., though he had so much greater charm for me, and in the communion of our minds I was so much more intimate with him.

Earlier in his absence, I had grown more and more into intellectual companionship with the eldest of my sisters, who was only little more than a year younger than myself. We had gone to the village parties and dances and sleigh-rides together, but she was devoted to my mother and the helper in her work, and gave herself far less than I to the pleasures which had palled upon me; she may never have cared for them much; certainly not so much as for the household life. It is one of those unavailing regrets which gather upon us if we question memory as I am doing now, and try to deal honestly with the unsparing truth of its replies, that I ignored so long her willingness to be my companion in the things of the mind. With my mother it was a simple affair; I was bound to her in an affection which was as devoted throughout my youth as it had been in my childhood; she was herself the home which I suffered such longing for if I ever left it; and I am now, in my old age, humbly grateful for the things I was prompted to do in my love of her. I could not, without an effect of exaggeration unworthy of her dear memory, express my sense of her motherly perfection within the limits of her nature, which I would not now have had different through worldly experience or privilege. She had, like my father, the instinct of poetry; and over what was left of her day’s work for the long evenings which we spent reading or talking or laughing together, while my father selected copy for his paper without losing the fun we all made, she was gay with the gayest of us. Often I had savagely absented myself from the rest, but when I came out of my little study, dazed with my work, after the younger children had gone to bed, I have the vision of her rolling her sewing together in her lap, and questioning me with her fond eyes what I was thinking of or had been trying to do.

I believe she did not ask; that was forbidden by my pride and shame. I did not read to any of them what I had been writing; they would not have been hard enough upon it to satisfy me, though if they had criticized it I should have been furious. In fact, I was not an amiable or at least a reasonable youth; it was laid upon me to try solitarily for the things I had no help in doing, and I seldom admitted any one to the results until that sister of mine somehow passed my ungracious reserves. I do not know just how this happened; but perhaps it was through our confiding to each other, brokenly, almost unspokenly, our discontent with the village limit of our lives. Within our home we had the great world, at least as we knew it in books, with us, but outside of it, our social experience dwindled to the measure of the place. I have tried to say how uncommon the place was intellectually, but we disabled it on that side because it did not realize the impossible dreams of that great world of wealth, of fashion, of haughtily and dazzlingly, blindingly brilliant society, which we did not inconveniently consider we were altogether unfit for. The reader may or may not find a pathos in our looking at the illustration on the front of a piece of tawdry sheet-music, and wondering whether it would ever be our high fortune to mingle with a company of such superbly caparisoned people as we saw pictured there, playing and singing and listening.

Vanity so criminal as ours, might have been for a just punishment lastingly immured in that village which the primeval woods encircled like a prison wall; and yet almost at that moment, when we had so tardily discovered ourselves akin in our tastes, our hopes and despairs, we were nearer the end of our imprisonment than we could have imagined. Whether we were punished in our enlargement which we were both so near, I cannot say; my own life since that time has been such as some know and any may know who care, and of hers I may scarcely speak. After a few happy weeks, a few happy months of our common escape, she went back to those bounds where her duty lay; and when after many years she escaped from them again it was to circumstances where she was so willingly useful as to feel herself very happy. Her last dream, one of being usefuler yet to those dearest to her, ended in a nightmare of disappointment; but that too had wholly passed before she woke to the recompense which we try to believe that death shall bring to all who suffer here to no final good.

Now it was life full beyond our fondest expectations, if not our fancies of its possibilities, which lured us forward. We were making the most of our mutual interest in the books we were reading, and she was giving, as sisters give so far beyond the giving of brothers, her sympathy to me in what I was trying to write. It was some time since I had turned, upon the counsel of J. W., from Greek to German, I forget from just what reasoning, though I think it was because he said I could study Greek any time, and now we could study German together. I had gone so far with it that I was already reading Heine and trying to write like him, instead of reading my Spanish poets and trying to imitate them in their own meters. But there is scarcely any definite memory of my sister’s literary companionship left me. I remember her coming to me once with the praise, which I shame-facedly refused, of the neighbor who had pointed to a row of Washington Irving’s works in her house, and said that some day my books would fill a shelf like that. For the rest, I am dimly aware of our walking summer evenings down a certain westward way from our house, and of her helping me dream a literary future. If she had then a like ambition she kept it from me, and it was not till twenty years later that she sent me a play she had written, with village motives and village realities, treated with a frankness which I still had not the intelligence to value. The play never came to the stage, and in that farther time, it was the fruition of hopes which had not defined themselves, that when my father’s scheme was realized, not only I, but she too, was to return to Columbus with him. It would be easy to pretend, and I can easily believe that we had always, at the bottom of our hearts, thought of Columbus with distinct longing; but I am not sure that there was more in our remembrance of it than a sense of its greatness as the state capital to give direction to our ambition for some experience of the world beyond our village. There was no part for her in our journalistic plan; probably the affair for her was an outing which she had won by her unselfish devotion to the duties of her narrow lot; but what I am sure of, and what I am glad of now, amidst my compunctions for not valuing her loving loyalty at its true worth, is that she did have this outing.

PART III

THROUGHOUT his later boyhood and into his earlier manhood the youth is always striving away from his home and the things of it. With whatever pain he suffers through the longing for them, he must deny them; he must cleave to the world and the things of it; that is his fate, that is the condition of all achievement and advancement for him. He will be many times ridiculous and sometimes contemptible, he will be mean and selfish upon occasion; but he can scarcely otherwise be a man; the great matter for him is to keep some place in his soul where he shall be ashamed. Let him not be afraid of being too unsparing in his memories; the instinct of self-preservation will safeguard him from showing himself quite as he was. No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it. For this reason the only real biographies are the novels, and every novel, if it is honest, will be the autobiography of the author and biography of the reader.

I

It was doubtless a time of intense emotion for our whole family when my sister and I set out for the state capital with my father on his return to his clerical duties at the meeting of the legislature in 1856. If I cannot make sure that Columbus had become with those of us old enough to idealize it, a sort of metropolis of the mind to which we should repair if we were good enough, or, failing that, if fortune were ever kind enough, I am certain that my father’s sojourn there, with his several visits to us during the winter before, had kept the wonder of it warm in my heart. The books that he brought me at each return from the State Library renewed in me the sense of a capital which he had tried to implant in me when we lived there, and my sister could not have dreamt of anything grander or gayer. Perhaps we both still saw ourselves there in scenes like that in the title-page of that piece of sheet-music; but anything so definite as this I cannot be sure of.

What I can be sure of is the substantial nature and occasion of our going, so far as I was concerned. “We were to furnish,” my father and I, as I have told in My Literary Passions, “a daily letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings, which I was mainly to write from material he helped me get together. The letters at once found favor with the editors, who agreed to take them, and my father then withdrew from the work, after telling them who was doing it.” My sister of course had no part in the enterprise, and for her our adventure was pure pleasure, the pleasure we both took in our escape from the village, and the pleasure I did not understand then that she had in witnessing my literary hopes and labors.

In like manner I am belatedly sensible of the interest which our dear H. G. took in our going, and the specific instructions which he gave me for my entry into the great world; as if he would realize in my prosperous future the triumphs which fortune had denied him in his past. He adjured me not to be abashed in any company, but face the proudest down and make audacity do the part of the courage I was lacking in. Especially he would have me not distrust myself in such a social essential as dancing, which was a grace I was confessedly imperfect in, but to exhaust the opportunities of improving it which the Saturday evening hops at our hotel would give me. He advised me not to dress poorly, but go to the full length of Polonius’s precept —

“Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy” —

though what advantages his own experiences in these matters had won him could not have been very signal. He knew my ambition in that way, and how it had been defeated by the friendly zeal of our home-tailor; and we both held that with the clothing-stores of High Street open to my money all I had to do was to fix my mind upon a given suit which would fit me as perfectly as the Jew said, and then wear it away triumphantly appareled for the highest circles. We did not know that the art of dressing well, or fashionably, comes from deep and earnest study, and that the instinct of it might well have been blunted in me by my Quaker descent, with that desire to shine rather in the Other World than in this which had become a passion with my grandfather.

No fact of my leaving home upon the occasion which I must have felt so tremendous remains with me. I cannot even say whether it was through the snow or the mud that we drove ten miles from the county-seat to the railroad station at Ashtabula; whatever the going, it was over the warped and broken boards of the ancient plank-road which made any transit possible in that region of snow and mud, and remained till literally worn away even in the conception of the toll-taker. Without intervening event, so far as my memory testifies, or circumstance, any more than if we had flown through the air, we were there in Columbus together, living in an old-fashioned hotel on the northward stretch of High Street, which was then the principal business street, and for anything I know is so yet. The hotel was important to the eye of our village strangeness, but it was perhaps temperamentally of the sort of comfortable taverns which the hotels had come to displace. My father had gone to live there because he knew it from our brief sojourn when we came to the city from the country five or six years before, and because it was better suited to his means; but one of the vividest impressions of his youth had been the building of the National Road, a work so monumental for the new country it traversed, and he poetically valued the Goodale House for facing upon this road, which in its course from Baltimore to St. Louis became High Street in Columbus.

Not even in this association could it be equaled with the Neil House, then the finest hotel in the West, without a peer even in Cincinnati. Dickens, in his apparently unreasoned wanderings, paused in it over a day, and admired its finish in black-walnut, the wood that came afterward to be so precious for the ugliest furniture ever made. All visitors of distinction sojourned there, and it was the resort of the great politicians who held their conclaves in its gloomy corridors and in its office and bar on the eve of nominating conventions or the approach of general elections. I have a vision, which may be too fond, of their sitting under its porches in tilted arm-chairs as the weather softened, canvassing the civic affairs which might not have been brought to a happy issue without them. But however misled I may be in this I cannot err in my vision of the stately conflagration which went up with the hotel one windless night, a mighty front of flame hooded with somber smoke. I watched it with a vast crowd from the steps of the State House which it was worthier to face than any other edifice of the little city; but this was long after that winter of ours in the Goodale House, which I remember for the boundless abundance of its table and for those society events which on Saturday nights crowned the week.

I dare say they were not so fashionable as H. G. imagined them, or I, with a heart too weak and feet too untutored ever to join in them, but the world was present in other sophistications in our pleasant hotel which I could not so easily shun. Chief of these was the tipping, which there first insisted on my acquaintance by many polite insinuations, and when I would have withdrawn became explicit. The kind colored waiter who used to cumber me with service at table as his anxieties mounted once took courage to whisper in my ear that he thought he would like to go to the theater that evening, and it grieves me yet to think that I resented this freedom, and denied him the quarter he suggested. Since then life has been full of the experiences of tipping, always so odious, though apparently more rapacious than it really is, but I have never again been able to deny a tip, or to give so little as I would often like to give. I know that some better citizens, or wiser, than myself, punish the neglect or ingratitude of service by diminishing or withholding the tip, but I have never been able to perform this public-spirited duty, perhaps because, though I loathe tipping, I do not believe any fellow-creature

“As meek and mere a serving-man,”

as may be, would take a tip if he were paid a just wage, or any wage, without it.

But all these incidents and interests were far in the future of that brave and happy time when I was intending and attempting the conquest of the whole field of polite learning from so many sides, in the studies which as at home now went on far into the night. These even included an Icelandic grammar, for the reason that, as I had read, the meter of Hiawatha was derived from that literature, but I do not know that I got so far as to identify it. My reading, now entirely from the State Library, included all the novels of Bulwer, which I was not ashamed to enjoy after my more distinguished pleasure in Thackeray; the critical authorities would not then have abashed me in it, as they would now. The other day I saw on my shelves the volume of Percy’s Reliques which my sister and I read together that winter; and I was so constantly and devotedly reading Tennyson and Shakespeare that I cannot understand how I had time for an equal constancy and devotion to Heine. I saw how much he had profited by the love of those English ballads which I was proud to share with him; and there were other German poets of his generation whose indebtedness to them I perceived and enjoyed. I was now, in fact, reading German to the entire neglect of Spanish; as for Latin and Greek, I had no more time or relish for them than those cultivated gentlemen who believe they read some Latin or Greek author every day before breakfast.

II

The life and the letters continued on terms which I should not have known how to wish different. I had a desk appointed me on the floor of the Senate as good as any Senator’s, for my convenience as a reporter; and my father gave me notes of the proceedings in the House, so that I could make a fair report of each day’s facts which we so early abandoned the pretense of his making. Every privilege and courtesy was shown the press, which sometimes I am afraid its correspondents accepted ungraciously. Either the first winter or the next one of them was expelled from the floor of the House for his over-bold criticisms of some member, and I espoused his cause with quite outrageous zeal. I had, indeed, such a swollen ideal of the rights and duties of the press that I spared no severity in my censure of Senators I found misguided. I was, perhaps, not wholly fitted by my nineteen years to judge them, though this possibility did not occur to me at the time with its present force; but if I was not impressed with the dignity of the Senate, the dignity of the Senate Chamber was a lasting effect with me, as, in fact, that of the whole Capitol was. I seemed to share personally in it as I mounted the stately marble stairway from the noble rotunda or passed through the ample corridors from the Senate to the House where it needed not even a nod to the sergeant-at-arms to gain me access to the floor; a nonchalant glance was enough. But the grandeur of the interior, which I enjoyed with the whole legislative body, was not more wonderful than its climate, which I found tempered against the winter to a summer warmth by the air rushing from the furnaces in the basement through gratings in the walls and floors. These were for me the earliest word of the comfort that now pervades our whole well-warmed American world, but I had scarcely imagined them even from my father’s report. How could I imagine them or fail to attribute to myself something like merit from them? I enjoyed, in fact, something like moral or civic ownership of the whole place, which I penetrated in every part on my journalistic business: the court-rooms, the agricultural department, the executive offices, and how do I know but the very room of the Governor himself? The library was of course my personal resort; as I have told, I was always getting books from it, and these books had a quality in coming from the State Library which intensified my sense of being of, as well as in, the capital of Ohio.

Whether the city itself shared my sense of its importance in the same measure I am not sure. There were reasons, however, why it might have done so. It was then what would be now a small city, say not above twenty thousand, and though it had already begun to busy itself with manufacturing and had two or three railroads centering in it, the industries and facilities which have now swollen its population to almost a quarter of a million were then in their beginning. Its political consciousness may have been the greater, therefore; it may indeed have been subjectively the sovereign city which I so objectively felt it. In that time, in fact, a state capital was both comparatively and positively of greater reality than it has been since. With the Civil War carried to its close in the reconstituted Union, the theory of State Rights forever vanished, and with this the dignity which once clothed the separate existence of the states. Their shadowy sovereignty had begun to wane in the anti-slavery North because it was the superstition of the pro-slavery South, yet I can remember a moment when there was much talk, though it never came to more than talk, of turning this superstition to a faith and applying it to the defeat of the Fugitive Slave Law. If it was once surmised that the decisions of the Ohio courts might nullify a law of the United States I do not believe that this surmise ever increased the political consciousness of our state capital. It remained a steadily prospering town like other towns, till now perhaps it may not feel itself a capital at all. Perhaps it could be restored to something like the quality I valued in it by becoming the residence of envoys from the other state capitals, and sending a minister to each of these. I have the conviction that public-spirited citizens could be found to take such offices at very moderate salaries, and that their wives would be willing to aid in restoring the shadow of state sovereignty by leaving cards upon one another.

III

The winter of 1856-57 passed without my knowing more of the capital than its official world. Even the next year, when I began to make some acquaintance with the social world, it was with an alien or adoptive phase of it, as I realize with tardy surprise. There were then so many Germans in Ohio that an edition of the laws had to be printed in their language, and there was a common feeling that we ought to know their language, if not their literature, which was really what I cared more to know. I carried my knowledge of it so far as to render a poem of my own into German verse which won the praise of my teacher; and I wish I could remember who he was, gentle, tobacco-smoked shade that he has long since become, or who the German editor of what republikanische Zeitung was that sometimes shared my instruction with him. There were also two blithe German youths who availed with me in the loan of Goethe’s Wahlverwandschaften, and gave me some fencing lessons in their noonings. I forget what employ they were of, but their uncle was a watchmaker and jeweler, and my father got him to gold-plate his silver watch, or dye it, as he preferred to say. When the Civil War came he went into it and was killed; and many years afterward, in my love and honor of him, I turned his ghost into a loved and honored character in A Hazard of New Fortunes. He was a political refugee, of those German revolutionists who came to us after the revolts of 1848, and he still dwells venerable in my memory, with his noble, patriarchally bearded head.

But it all appears very fantastic in the retrospect, that Teutonic period of my self-culture, and I am not sure that one fact of it is more fantastic than another. Such was my zeal for everything German that I once lunched at one of the German beer-saloons which rather abounded in Columbus, on Swiss cheese with French mustard spread over it and a tall glass of lager beer, then much valued as a possible transition from the use of the strong waters more habitual with Americans than now; but it made me very sick, and I was obliged to forego it as an expression of my love for German poetry. To a little earlier period must have belonged the incident of my going to see “Die Räuber” of Schiller, which I endured with iron resolution from the beginning to the end. It was given, I believe, by amateurs, and I tried my best to imagine that I understood it as it went on, but probably I did not, though I would have been loath to own the fact to any of the few German families who then formed my whole acquaintance with society. I never afterward met them at American houses; the cleavage between the two races in everything but politics was absolute; though the Germans were largely anti-slavery, and this formed common ground for them and natives of like thinking who did not know them socially.

In those first winters my knowledge of American society was confined to the generalized hospitality of the large evening receptions which some of the leading citizens used to give the two Houses of the legislature, including the correspondents and reporters attached to them. I cannot say just how or when I began to divine that these occasions were not of the first fashion, though the hosts and hostesses might have been so. There were great suppers, mainly of oysters, to which our distance from the sea lent distinction, and ice-cream, and sometimes, if I may trust a faint reverberation from the past as of blown corks, champagne. There was also dancing, and when some large, old-fashioned house was not large enough, a wooden pavilion was improvised over the garden to give the waltzes and quadrilles verge enough. I recall my share in the suppers, if not in the dancing, but my deficiency was far more than made up by the excess of a friend, who must then have been hard upon sixty years of age, yet was of a charming gaiety and an unimpaired youthfulness. He stood up in every quadrille, and he danced to the end of the evening, with a demure smile on his comely, smooth-shaven, rosy face, and a light, mocking self-consciousness in his kind eyes, as if he would agree as to any incongruity the spectator might find in his performance. He was one of the clerks of the House, an old politician, and the editor of a leading Cleveland newspaper, which he chose to leave for the pleasures of the capital. From his experience of the system which he was part of he whimsically professed to believe that as great legislative wisdom could be assembled by knocking down every other man in a crowd and dragging him into the House or Senate as by the actual method of nomination and election. At times he would support the theory of a benevolent despotism, and advocate the establishment of what he called a one-man power as the ideal form of government. I owed him much in the discharge of duties which my finding the most important in the world must have amused him, and when he went back to his newspaper he left me to write the legislative letters for it.

This gentle reactionary was the antithesis of another very interesting man, known to his fellow-legislators as Citizen Corry, in recognition of his preference for the type of French Red Republicanism acquired in Paris during his stay through the academic republic of 1848-50. Such a residence would alone have given him a distinction which we can hardly realize in our time, but he was, besides, a man of great natural distinction, and of more cultivation than any of his fellow-legislators. He was one of the Representatives from Cincinnati, and when another Cincinnati Representative of his own party struck a member from the Western Reserve, Citizen Corry joined the Republicans in voting his expulsion. But he had already made a greater sensation, and created an expectation of the unexpected in all he did by proposing an amendment to the Constitution abolishing the system of dual chambers in the legislature, and retaining only the House of Representatives. I think that in Greece alone is this the actual parliamentary form, but I believe that it was in that short-lived French republic of 1848 that Corry saw its workings and conceived the notion of its superiority. Under the present system he held that the House was merely a committee at the bar of the Senate, and the Senate a committee at the bar of the House, with a great waste of time and public advantage through the working of a very clumsy machinery. His proposition was not taken seriously by the Ohio House of Representatives, but to my young enthusiasm it seemed convincing by its mere statement, and the arguments on the other side, to the effect that the delays which he censured gave time for useful reflection, appeared to me very fallacious. Citizen Corry was not re-elected to the next legislature, and his somewhat meteoric history did not include any other official apparition. But while he was passing through the orbit of my world I was fully aware of his vivid difference from the controlled and orderly planets, and he dazzled in me an imagination always too fondly seeking the bizarre and strange. I do not think I ever spoke with him, but I tingled to do so; I created him citizen of that fine and great world where I had so much of my own being in reveries that rapt me from the realities of the life about me.

IV

The first winter of my legislative correspondence began with a letter to my Cincinnati newspaper in which I

The Ohio State House at Columbus viewed from High Street

described the public opening of the new State House. I remember the event vividly because I thought it signally important, and partly because, to relieve myself from the stress of the crowd passing through the doorways, I lifted my arms and was near having my breath crushed out. There were a ball and a banquet, but somewhere, somehow, amidst the dancing and the feeding and smoking, I found a corner where I could write out my account of the affair and so escaped with my letter and my life.

Much as I might have wished to share socially, with such small splendor as might be, in this high occasion, the reporter’s instinct was first with me. I was there as the representative of a great Cincinnati newspaper, and I cared more to please its management than to take any such part as I might in the festivity. My part was to look on and tell what I saw, and I must have done this in the manner of my most approved good masters, no doubt with satirically poetic touches from Heine and bits of worldly glitter from Thackeray. I should like to see that letter now, and I should like to know how I contrived to get it, more or less surreptitiously, into the hands of the express agent for delivery to my newspaper. In those days there was a good deal of talk, foolish talk, I am since aware, of having the post-office superseded in its functions by the express companies. Now the talk and the fact are all the other way; but then the mail was slow and uncertain, and if my letter was of the nature of manuscript the express might safely carry it and deliver it in time for the next day’s paper. That was rightful and lawful enough, but there was a show of secrecy in the transaction which was not unpleasing to the enterprise of a young reporter.

My letters, as they went on from day to day, contented the managers of the Gazette so well that when the session of the legislature ended they gave me an invitation which might well have abused my modesty with a sense of merit. This invitation was to come and be their city editor, which then meant the local reporting, at a salary twice as great as that which I had been getting as their legislative correspondent. I do not know whose inspiration the offer was, but I should like to believe it was that of the envoy from the paper who made it in person, after perhaps more fully satisfying himself of my fitness. He is long since dead, but if he were still alive I hope he would not mind my describing him as of less stature than myself even, wearing the large, round glasses which give certain near-sighted persons a staring look, and of speech low almost to whispering, so that I could not quite be sure that the incredible thing he was proposing was really expressed to me. I like to recall the personal fact of him because he was always my friend, and he would have found me another place on the paper if he could when I would not take the one he had offered. He did make room for me in his own department for as long as he could, or as I would stay, when I went down to Cincinnati to look the ground over, and he kept me his guest as far as sharing his room with me in the building where we worked together, and where I used to grope my way toward midnight up a stairway entirely black to his door. There I lighted the candle-end which I found within and did what I could to sleep till he came, hours later, when the paper went to press. I have the belief that the place was never swept or dusted, and that this did not matter to the quiet, scholarly man whose life was so wholly in his work that he did not care how he lived.

He was buoyed up, above all other things, by the interest of journalism, which for those once abandoned to it is indeed a kind of enchantment. As I knew it then and afterward, it has always had far more of my honor and respect than those ignorant of it know how to render. One incident of it at this time so especially moved me that I will give it place in this wayward tale, though it is probably not more to the credit of the press than unnumbered others which others could cite. A miserable man came late one night to ask that a certain report which involved his good name, and with it the good name of a miserable woman, and the peace of their families, might be withheld. He came with legal counsel, and together they threshed the matter out with our editorial force upon the point whether we ought or ought not to spare him, our contention being that as a prominent citizen he was even less to be spared than a more unimportant person. Our professional conscience was apparently in that scruple; how it was overcome I do not remember, but at last we promised mercy and the report was suppressed.

It was one of the ironies of life that after the only suspected avenue to publicity had been successfully guarded, the whole fact should have cruelly come out in another paper the next morning. But I cannot feel even yet that the beauty of our merciful decision was marred by this mockery of fate, or that the cause of virtue was served by it, and I think that if I had been wiser than I was then I would have remained in the employ offered me, and learned in the school of reality the many lessons of human nature which it could have taught me. I did not remain, and perhaps I could not; it might have been the necessity of my morbid nerves to save themselves from abhorrent contacts; in any case, I renounced the opportunity offered me by that university of the streets and police-stations, with its faculty of patrolmen and ward politicians and saloon-keepers. The newspaper office was not the Capitol of Ohio; I was not by the fondest imputation a part of the state government, and I felt the difference keenly. I was always very homesick; I knew nobody in the city, and I had no companionship except that of my constant friend, whom I saw only in our hours of work. I had not even the poor social refuge of a boarding-house; I ate alone at a restaurant, where I used sadly to amuse myself with the waiters’ versions of the orders which they called down a tube into the kitchen below. The one which cheered me most was that of a customer who always ordered a double portion of corn-cakes and was translated as requiring “Indians, six on a plate.”

Nearly all the frequenters of this restaurant were men from their stores and offices, snatching a hasty midday meal, but a few were women, clerks and shop-girls of the sort who now so abound in our towns and cities, but then so little known. I was so altogether ignorant of life that I thought shame of them to be boldly showing themselves in such a public place as a restaurant. I wonder what they would have thought, poor, blameless dears, of the misgivings in the soul of the conscious youth as he sat stealing glances of injurious conjecture at them while he overate himself with the food which was the only thing that could appease for a moment the hunger of his homesick heart. If I could not mercifully imagine them, how could I intelligently endure the ravings of the drunken woman which I heard one night in the police-station where my abhorred duties took me for the detestable news of the place? I suppose it was this adventure, sole of its sort, which clinched my resolve to have no more to do with the money-chance offered to me in journalism. My longing was for the cleanly respectabilities, and I still cannot think that a bad thing, or if experience cannot have more than the goodly outside in life, that this is not well worth having. There was a relief, almost an atonement, or at least a consolation in being sent next day to report a sermon, in fulfilment of my friend’s ideal of journalistic enterprise, and though that sermon has long since gone from me and was perhaps at the time not distinctly with me, still I have a sense of cleansing from the squalor of the station-house in listening to it. If all my work could have been the reporting of sermons, with intervals of sketching the graduating ceremonies of young ladies’ seminaries, such as that where once a girl in garnet silk read an essay of perhaps no surpassing interest, but remained an enchanting vision, and the material of some future study in fiction; if it could have been these things, with nothing of police-stations in it, I might have tried longer to become a city editor. But as it was I decided my destiny in life differently.

V

I must not conceal the disappointment which my father delicately concealed when I returned and took up my old work in the printing-office. He might well have counted on my help in easing him of his load of debt, from the salary I had forgone, but there was no hint of this in the welcome given me in the home where I was again so doubly at home with my books and manuscripts. Now and then my friend of the Gazette management managed to have some sketch of mine accepted for it, and my life went on in my sister’s literary companionship on much the same terms as before our venture into the world the winter before. My father’s clerkship had ended with the adjournment of the legislature in the spring, but in the autumn, when it grew toward winter, I asked again for the correspondence of the Gazette. I got this by favor of my friend, and then I had courage to ask for that of the Cleveland Herald, which the interest of the blithe sexagenarian sufficed to secure me, and I returned to the capital with no pretense that I was not now writing the letters solely and entirely myself. But almost before my labors began my health quite broke under the strain of earlier over-study and later overwork. I gave up my correspondence for both those honored newspapers to my father, who wrote it till the close of the session, and at his suggestion the letters of the Gazette fell the next winter to the fit and eager hands of a young man who had just then sold his country newspaper and had come to try his fortune in the capital. His name was Whitelaw Reid, in the retrospect a tall, graceful youth with an enviable black mustache and imperial, wearing his hair long in the Southern fashion, and carrying himself with the native ease which availed him in a worldly progress uninterrupted to the end. He wrote the legislative letters so acceptably that when the Civil War broke out the Gazette people were glad to make him their correspondent in the field, where he distinguished himself beyond any other war correspondent in the West, or the East for what I knew. The world knows how riches and honors followed him all his days, and how when he died the greatest Empire sent his dust home to the greatest Republic in such a war-ship as the war correspondent of those years could not have dreamed of. From time to time we saw each other, but not often; he was about his business in the State House, and now I was about mine in the office of the Ohio State Journal, the organ of the Republican party, which had been newly financed and placed on a firm footing after rather prolonged pecuniary debility.

I was at home in the autumn, as I had been all the summer, eating my heart out (as I would have said in those days) when the call to a place on the Journal’s editorial staff incredibly, impossibly came, and I forgot my ills, and eagerly responded. I hardly know how to justify my inconsistency when I explain that this place was the same which I had rejected at twice the salary on the Cincinnati Gazette. Perhaps I accepted it now because I could no longer endure the disappointment and inaction of my life. Perhaps I hoped that in the smaller city the duties would not be so odious or so onerous; perhaps it was because I would have been glad to return to Columbus on any terms; in any case it fell out that the duties of the place were undertaken by another who doted on them, and quite different and far more congenial functions were assigned to me.

My chief was Henry D. Cooke, the successful editor and proprietor of a newspaper in northern Ohio, and brother of the banker Jay Cooke, once nationally noted in our finance and himself afterward Governor of the District of Columbia, the easiest of easy gentlemen, formed for prosperity and leisure, with an instinct for the choice of subordinates qualified to do the journalistic work he soon began to relinquish in his preoccupation with the politics of the capital. I have had no sweeter friend in a life abounding in friends, and after fifty years I think of his memory with gratitude for counsels which availed me much when given and would avail me still if I should ever again be a youth of twenty-one, proposing to do and say the things I then proposed. He rarely blamed anything I did in the stirring and distracted period of our relation, but one morning he brought me a too graphic paragraph, about a long-forgotten homicide done by an injured husband, and said, “Never, never write anything you would be ashamed to read to a woman,” and so made me lastingly ashamed of what I had done, and fearful of ever doing the like again, even in writing fiction. It seems not to be so now with our novelists, begun or beginning; they write many things they ought to be ashamed to read to women, or if they are of that sex, things they should be ashamed to read to men. But perhaps they are ashamed and only hold out writing so for art’s sake; I cannot very well speak for them; but I am still very Victorian in my preference of decency.

Mr. Cooke must have been often of a divided mind about his assistants, or about their expression of the opinions which he reticently held in common with them. He was a thorough Republican; he undoubtedly believed that the time had come for calling black black, but his nature would have been to call it dark gray, at least for that day or for the next. He would have oftenest agreed with us in what we said of the pro-slavery party and partisans, North and South, though he held it not honesty to have it thus set down. He would have liked better the milde Macht of a Hahnemannian treatment, while we were blistering and cauterizing, and letting blood wherever we saw the chance, and there were every day chances enough. I had been made news editor, and in the frequent intervals of our chief’s abeyance I made myself the lieutenant of the keen ironical spirit who mostly wrote our leaders, but did not mind my dipping my pen in his ink when I could turn from the paste and scissors which were more strictly my means of expression. My work was to look through the exchange newspapers which flocked to us in every mail, and to choose from them any facts that could be presented to our readers as significant. I called my column or two “News and Humors of the Mail,” and I tried to give it an effect of originality by recasting many of the facts, or, when I could not find a pretext for this, by offering the selected passages with applausive or derisive comment. We had French and Spanish and German exchanges, and I sometimes indulged a boyish vanity by prefacing a paragraph from these with such a sentence as, “We translate from the Courrier des États Unis,” or, “We find in La Cronaca of New York,” or “We learn from the Wachter am Erie,” as the case might be. Why I should have been suffered to do this without admonition from our chief or sarcasm from my senior I do not know; perhaps the one thought it best to let youth have its head when the head was harmlessly turned; and perhaps the other was too much occupied with his own work to trouble himself with mine; but certainly if I had caught a contemporary in such folly I should have tried what unsparing burlesque could do to make him wiser.

The reader who has no follies to own will probably not think me wise in owning mine, but from time to time I must do so; there were so many. It is with no hope of repairing these follies now that I confess the pride I felt in the poor little Spanish, German, and French which it had cost me so much to acquire unaided and unguided, and I was willing that my acquirements should shed luster on the newspaper I loved almost as much as I loved myself. I admired it even more, and I wished to do all that I could to make it admirable, even enviable, with others. I think now that I was not using one of the best means to do it; I only contend that it was one of the best I could think of then. If any contemporary had turned it against us, I hope I should have been willing to suffer personally for it, but I cannot now be sure.

VI

We aspired at least tacitly to a metropolitan character in our journalism; there were no topics of human interest which we counted alien to us anywhere in the range of politics, morals, literature, or religion; and I was suffered my say. The writer who was more habitually and profitably suffered his say was, I still think, a man of very uncommon qualities and abilities. He was a journalist who could rightly be called a publicist, earnest if things came to that, of a faithful conscience and of a mocking skill in the chances pretty constantly furnished us by our contemporaries, especially some of our Southern contemporaries whom it was difficult to take as seriously as they took themselves. When they made some violent proclamation against the North, or wreaked themselves in some frenzy of pro-slavery ethics, we took our pleasure in shredding the text into small passages and tagging each of these with a note of open derision or ironical deprecation. We called it “firing the Southern heart,” in a phrase much used at the time. It was not wise, it was not well, but it was undeniably amusing, and we carried it to any lengths that the very intermittent supervision of our nominal chief would allow. We may have supposed that it would help laugh away the madness of the South which few in the North believed more than a temporary insanity, but the uneasy honesty which always lurks somewhere in my heart to make me own my errors must acquit my fellow-editor of the worst excesses in this sort, so mainly literary with me. He was not only a man of high journalistic quality, of clear insight, shrewd judgment, and sincere convictions, but I do not believe that in the American press of the time he was surpassed as a clear thinker and brilliant writer. All the days of journalism are yesterdays; and the name of Samuel R. Reed will mean nothing to these oblivious morrows, even in Ohio, but all the more I wish to do his memory such honor as I may. We were of course daily together in our work, and often in our walks on the Sundays which were as other days to his steadfast agnosticism. The word was not yet, but the thing has always been, and especially it always was in the older West, where bold surmise of the whence and whither of life often defied the authority of Faith, then much more imperative than now. Reed’s favorite author, whom he read as critically as if he were not his favorite, was Shakespeare; but his far more constant reading was the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I could not say why he read it so much, but he may have felt in it the mystical power which commands the imagination of men and holds them in respectful contemplation of a self-sufficing theory of the universe such as nothing in science or philosophy affords. He quoted it for a peculiar joy in the fitness of its application to every circumstance; he quoted Dickens, as everybody did then; he quoted Shakespeare a great deal more both in his talking and in his writing; and later in his life, long after mine had parted from it, he amused the spare moments of his journalistic leisure by a study of Shakespeare’s women whom he did not take at the generally accepted critical appraisement.

I am tempted out of the order of these confessions to follow him to the end which death put to the long kindness between us, and I recall with tenderness our last meeting near New York where he was hesitating whether to continue on his way to Europe. He had at last given up his work in Cincinnati where he had spent the many years after the few years we spent together in Columbus. He owned that he had worn himself out in that work, toiling incessantly through many homicidal Cincinnati summers, and he blamed himself for the sacrifice. He felt that he had turned from it too late; and in fact he died at sea soon after. He accepted his impending doom with the stoical calm which he always kept, and which I had once seen him keep so wonderfully after the war began, when a Southern Unionist, the formerly famous, now forgotten Parson Brownlow of Tennessee, came to reproach him for the part which he held that such writing as Reed’s had borne in bringing on the strife. Reed suffered the good man’s passion almost with compassion, and when Brownlow was gone he would not let me blame him, but said that he had played a noble part in the struggle to hold his region in the Union. He always kept a countenance of bland calm, lit by pale-blue eyes which gave no hint of the feeling within, and if I had not loved him so much and known him so well I might have thought the habitual smile of his clean-shaven lip sometimes a little cruel. He let his full soft beard grow inordinately long, and he had a way of stroking it as he slightly smiled and crisply spoke; it was the only touch of quaintness in him at a time when beards were self-indulgently worn in many fantastic ways. He was the best-dressed man I knew, in fashions as little aged as possible in their transition from the East to the West, and he was of a carefulness in such minor morals as gloves and boots very uncommon in our somewhat slovenly ways.

After his liking for Shakespeare and Dickens he liked the Ingoldsby Legends, but he did not care for the poetry which I was constantly reading and trying to write. The effect of my endeavor as it appeared in the passionate or pessimistic verse which I contributed to Eastern periodicals must have amused him; but perhaps he tolerated me because, along with this poetical effusiveness in which I was grievously sensitive to any breath of sarcasm, I had a tooth as sharp as his own in our journalism. He was intelligently and I suppose scientifically fond of music, since he failed of no chance to hear the best, a chance rare in our city; and he held that the composition of grand opera was the highest feat of the human intellect, which was to me a stumbling-block and foolishness, though I liked dramatic singing, and indeed singing of all kinds. We came together in our fondness for the theater, and after our evening’s work was done he sometimes turned with me into the barnlike structure on State Street which served the pathetic need of the drama in Columbus at that day. The place was heated in the winter for its twenty or thirty frequenters by two huge cast-iron stoves, one on either side of the orchestra: stoves such as I have since seen in English cathedrals; but when the curtain rose the blast of freezing air that swept out upon us made us shiver for the players in their bare arms and necks and their thin hosiery and drapery. They were often such bad players that they merited their sufferings; the prompter audibly bore a very leading part in the performance as he still does in the Italian theater; yet for all his efforts we one night saw Hamlet in two acts; it was, to be sure, a very cold night, of an air eagerer and nippinger than even that the ghost walked in at Elsinore, and we would not have had the play longer. Yet we often saw very well given some of the old English comedies which are now no longer well or ill given; and between the acts, somewhere, a plain young girl, in a modest modicum of stocking, represented the ballet by dancing the Highland Fling, always the Highland Fling. Such plays as “The Lady of Lyons” happened now and then, and “The Daughter of the Regiment” must have been, at least partly, sung. We did not lack the more darkling melodrama, and there were heroic pieces which gave the leading actor opportunities not lost upon him, however they failed of effect with the rest of the cast. I remember how one night a robustuous periwig-pated fellow ramped and roared up and down the stage, but left quite cold a large group of the dramatis personæ which his magniloquence was intended to convulse with either sympathy or antipathy; and how Reed noted with mock-thoughtful recognition of the situation, “Can’t excite those fellows off to the left, any.” I should not be able to say how killingly droll I found this.

VII

I suppose that every young man presently attempting journalism feels something of the pride and joy I felt when I began it; though pride and joy are weak words for the passion I had for the work. If my soul was more in my verse, I did not know it, and I am sure my heart was as much in my more constant labors. I could find time for poetry only in my brief noonings, and at night after the last proofs had gone to the composing-room, or I had come home from the theater or from an evening party, but the long day was a long delight to me over my desk in the room next my senior. To come upon some inviting fact, or some flattering chance for mischief in an exchange, above all a Northern contemporary with Southern principles, and to take this to him and talk it or laugh it over and leave it with him, or bring it back and exploit it myself, was something that made every day a heyday. We shunned personalities, then the stock in trade of most newspaper wits; we meant to deal only with the public character of men and things. It seems to have been all pleasure as I tell it, but there was a great deal of duty in it, too; though if burlesquing the opposite opinions of our contemporaries happened to be a duty, so much the better. If it were to do again, I should not do it, or not so much; but at the time I cannot deny that I liked doing it. So, too, I liked to write cutting criticisms of the books which it was part of my work to review; and I still hope to be forgiven by the kindness which I sinned against without winning the authority as reviewer which I aimed at.

I had much better been at the theater than writing some of the things I then wrote. But it may as well be owned here as anywhere that whatever might have been its value to me as a school of morals the theater was not good society in Columbus then; and I was now in a way of being good society, and had been so for some time. The rehabilitation of our newspaper was coincident with the rise of the Republican party to the power which it held almost unbroken for fifty years. It had of course lost the Presidential election in 1856, but its defeat left it in better case than an untimely victory might have done. Ohio had, at any rate, a Republican Governor in a man afterward of a prime national importance, and already known as a statesman-like politician well fitted by capacity and experience for that highest office which never ceased to be his aim while he lived. Salmon P. Chase had been a lawyer of the first standing in Cincinnati, where, although a Democrat, he had early distinguished himself by his services in behalf of friendless negroes. The revolt of the whole self-respecting North against the repeal of the Missouri Compromise swept him finally out of the Democracy into that provisional organization which loosely knew itself as the Anti-Nebraska party; but before he was chosen Governor by it he had already served a term in the United States Senate, where with one other Freesoiler he held the balance of power in an otherwise evenly divided body. He was a large, handsome man, of a very senatorial presence, and now in the full possession of his uncommon powers; a man of wealth and breeding, educated perhaps beyond any of the other Presidential aspirants except Seward, versed in the world, and accustomed to ease and state; and he gave more dignity to his office, privately and publicly, than it had yet known among us. He lived in a pretty house of the Gothic make then much affected by our too eclectic architecture, with his brilliant young daughter at the head of it; for the Governor was a widower.

He was naturally much interested in the new control of the Republican organ, and it would not be strange if he had taken some active part in its rehabilitation, but I do not know that he had. At any rate, he promptly made the editorial force welcome to his house, where Reed and I were asked to Thanksgiving dinner; Mr. Cooke had not yet brought his family to Columbus. Thanksgiving was not then observed on the present national terms; it was still the peculiar festival of New England, and in our capital its recognition was confined to families of New England origin; our Kentuckians and Virginians and Marylanders kept Christmas, though the custom of New-Year’s calls was domesticated among us with people of all derivations, and in due time suffered the lapse which it fell into in its native New York. Our Governor was born in New Hampshire, where his family name was already distinguished in public life; and he kept the Thanksgiving which he had probably not officially invited his fellow-citizens to commemorate. I suppose we had turkey for our dinner, but I am surer of the manner than the make of the feast, for it was served with a formality new to my unworldly experience. The turkey was set before the governor who carved it, and then it was brought to the guests by a shining black butler, instead of being passed from hand to hand among them, as I had always seen it done. That was, in fact, my first dinner in society.

The young editors were the only guests; and after dinner the family did not forbid itself the gaieties befitting its young people’s years. We had charades, then much affected in society, and I believe the Governor alone was not pressed into helping dramatize the riddle to be finally guessed as Canterbury Bell. I do not remember how the secret was kept to the end, or guessed from the successive parts. My fear and pride were put to a crucial test in the first dissyllable, which the girlish hostess assigned me, and nothing but the raillery glancing through the deep lashes of her brown eyes which were very beautiful, could have brought me to the self-sacrifice involved. I lived through the delight and anguish of that supreme evening, and found myself, as it were, almost immediately afterward in society. It could not have been quite immediately, for when I called at the Governor’s soon after New-Year’s and he asked me if I had made many New-Year’s calls I answered that I had not made any because I knew no one. Then he said I might have called at his house; and I did not fail, on this kind reproach, to go to Miss Chase’s next reception, where again she laughed at my supposed dignity in refusing to dance; she would not suppose my inability.

But before entering that field so flowery fair which society now seemed to open before me perhaps I had better continue my recollections of a man whose public career has its peculiar pathos. It was his constant, his intense, his very just desire to be President; no man of his long time was fitter to be President, unless his ambition was a foible that unfitted him. He accepted not the first place, but the second place, in the administration of the man whose place as President he had so ardently longed to fill, and after he had resigned his governorship of Ohio and gone to Washington as Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln I saw him there when I went to look after the facts of the consulship which had been offered me. His fellow Ohioans must have swarmed upon him in the eagerness for public service afterward much noted in them, and I do not blame him for imagining that I had called upon him in the hope that he would urge my case upon the President. He said, rather eagerly, that he had no influence with the administration (it likewise became Lincoln’s own humorous complaint) quite before I had asked it, and was sorry that he could not help me; and when I thanked him and remarked that I believed the President’s private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, were interested in my affair, he said, with visible relief, Oh well, then, I was in the best possible hands; as indeed it turned out. I had heard before that he had spoken to the President in my behalf, and he may very well have felt that he had done his best.

Four years later, and ten years after my first acquaintance with Chase, I went to call upon him at his hotel in New York, when I was lately returned from my consular post in Venice, and ventured to offer him my congratulations upon his accession to the chief-justiceship of the Supreme Court. He answered bluntly that it was not the sort of office he had aspired to, and intimated that it was a defeat of his real aspirations. He was not commonly a frank man, I believe, but perhaps he felt that he could be frank with the boy I must still have seemed even at twenty-eight, bringing the devotion he possibly over-imagined in me. Since then those words of his, which were the last I was to hear from him, have been of an increasing appeal with me; and if the Republicans had not had Lincoln I still think it was a pity they could not have had Chase. At the end, the Democrats would not have him.

VIII

Chase was of course our man for the 1860 nomination, and the political relations between him and our chief were close; but somehow I went more to other houses than to his, though I found myself apparently launched from it upon a social tide that bore me through all the doors of the amiable little city. I was often at the evening parties (we called them evening parties then) which his daughter gave, and one day the Governor himself, as we met in the street, invited me to luncheon with him. I duly went and passed the shining butler’s misgiving into the dining-room, where I found the family at table with no vacant place among them. The Governor had forgotten me! That was clear enough, but he was at once repentant, and I lunched with him, outwardly forgiving, but inwardly resolved that it should be the last time I would come at his informal bidding. I have since forgotten much more serious engagements myself; I have not gone to dinners where I have promised over my own signature to go; but at twenty-one men are proud, and I was prouder then than I can yet find any reason for having been.

In our capital at that day we had rather the social facts than the social forms. We were invited to parties ceremoniously enough, but we did not find it necessary to answer whether we would come or not. Our hostess remained in doubt of us till we came or did not come; at least that was the case with young men; we never inquired whether it was so with young girls or not. But sometimes when a certain youth wished to go with a certain maiden he found out as delicately as he could whether she was invited, and if she was he begged her to let him go with her, and arrived with her in one of the lumbering two-horse hacks which supplied our cab-service, and which I see still bulking in the far perspective of the State Street corner of the State House yard. If you had courage so high or purse so full you had sent the young lady a flower which she wore to the party, preferably a white camellia which the German florist, known to our young world only as Joe, grew very successfully, and allowed you to choose from the tree. Why preferably a camellia I could not say after this lapse of time; perhaps because its cold, odorless purity expressed the unimpassioned emotion which oftenest inspired the gift and its acceptance. It was very simple, very pastoral; I do not know when Columbus outgrew this custom, which of course it did long ago.

Bringing a young lady to a party necessarily meant nothing but that you enjoyed the pleasure of bringing her. Very likely she found her mother there when she came with you, unmindful, the one and the other, that there was such a thing as chaperonage in a more fastidious or censorious world. It seems to me, indeed, that parties at the Columbus houses were never wanting in the elders whom our American society of girls and boys used to be accused of ignoring. They superabounded at the legislative receptions, but even at the affairs which my sophistication early distinguished from those perfunctory hospitalities there were mature people enough, both married and unmarried, who, though they had felt no charge concerning their daughters or nieces, found it agreeable to remain till the young ladies were ready to be seen home by their self-chosen escorts. A youth who danced so reluctantly as I, was rather often thrown upon these charitable elders for his entertainment, and I cannot remember ever failing of it. People, and by people I do not mean women only, read a good deal in that idyllic Columbus, and it was my delight to talk with any one who would about the new books or the old. The old books were known mostly to that number of professional men — lawyers, doctors, divines, and scientists — which was disproportionately large in our capital; they were each cultivated in his own way, and in mine, too, or the better part of it, as I found. The young and the younger women

The State House yard on the State Street side

read the current fiction and poetry at least enough to be asked whether they had read this thing or that; and there was a group of young men with whom I could share my sometimes aggressive interest in our favorite authors. I put the scale purposely low; I think that I could truthfully say that there was then no American community west of the Alleghanies which surpassed ours in the taste for such things. At the same time I must confess that it would be easy for such an exclusively literary spirit as I was to deceive himself, and to think that he always found what he may have oftener brought.

For a long time after the advent of our new journalism, the kind of writing which we practised — light, sarcastic, a little cruel, with a preference for the foibles of our political enemies as themes — seemed to be the pleasure of good society, which in that serious yet hopeful time did not object to such conscience as we put into our mocking. Some who possibly trembled at our boldness darklingly comforted themselves for our persiflage by the good cause in which it frisked. When anything very daring came out in the afternoon the young news-editor in his round of calls could hear the praise of it from charming readers in the evening, or he might be stopped in the street next day and told how good it was by the fathers, or brothers, or brothers-in-law, of those charming readers. It was more like the prompt acclaim the drama enjoys than the slow recognition of literature; but I, at least, was always trying to make my writing literature, and after fifty-odd years it may perhaps be safely owned that I had mainly a literary interest in the political aspects and events which I treated. I felt the ethical quality of the slavery question, and I had genuine convictions about it; but for practical politics I did not care; I wished only to understand enough of them to seize any chance for a shot at the other side which they might give. I had been in the midst of practical politics almost from my childhood; through my whole youth the din of meetings, of rallies, of conventions had been in my ears; but I was never at a meeting, a rally, or a convention; I have never yet heard a political speech to the end. For a future novelist, a realist, that was a pity, I think, but so it was.

In that day of lingering intolerance, intolerance which can scarcely be imagined in this day, and which scarcely stopped short of condemning the mild latitudinarianism of the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table as infidelity, every one but a few outright atheists was more or less devout. In Columbus everybody went to church; the different forms of Calvinism drew the most worshipers; our chief was decorously constant with his family at the Episcopal service; but Reed was frankly outside of all ecclesiastical allegiance, and I who, no more than he, attended any religious service, believed myself of my father’s Swedenborgian faith; at any rate. I could make it my excuse for staying away from other churches, since there were none of mine. While I am about these possibly needless confidences I will own that sermons and lectures as well as speeches have mostly been wearisome to me, and that I have heard only as many of them as I must. Of the three, I prefer sermons; they interest me, they seem really to concern me; but I have been apt to get a suggestive thought from them and hide away with it in a corner of my consciousness and lose the rest. My absences under the few sermons which I then heard must have ended chiefly in the construction or the reconstruction of some scene in my fiction, or some turn of phrase in my verse.

Naturally, under these circumstances, the maturer men whom I knew were oftener doctors of medicine than doctors of divinity; in fact, I do not think I knew one clergyman. This was not because I was oftener sick than sorry; I was often sorry enough, and very sensible of my sins, though I took no established means of repenting them; but I have always found the conversation of physicians more interesting than that of most other men, even authors. I have known myself in times past to say that they were the saints of the earth, as far as we then had saints, but that was in the later Victorian period when people allowed themselves to say anything in honor of science. Now it is already different; we have begun to have our doubts of doubt and to believe that there is much more in faith than we once did; and I, within the present year, my seventy-ninth, have begun to go to church and to follow the sermon with much greater, or more unbroken, attention than I once could, perhaps because I no longer think so much in the terms of fiction or meditate the muse as I much more used to do.

In those far days I thought prose fit mainly for every-day use in newspaper work. I was already beginning to print my verses in such of the honored Eastern periodicals as would take them: usually for nothing. I wrote for the Saturday Press of New York, which ambitious youth everywhere were then eager to write for, and I wrote for the Atlantic Monthly oftener than I printed in it. I have told all this and more in My Literary Passions and I will not dwell here upon the whirl of æsthetic emotion in which I eddied round and round at that tumultuous period. In that book I have also sufficiently told the story of my first formal venture in the little volume of verse which I united with my friend John J. Piatt in offering to the world. But I may add here that it appeared just at Christmas-time in 1859 from the press of a hopeful young publisher of Columbus who was making his experiment in the disquieting hour when no good thing was expected to come out of our Western Nazareth. We two were of the only four poets west of the Alleghanies who had yet been accepted by the Atlantic, and our publisher had the courage to make our book very pretty in print and binding. It was so pretty that I am afraid some readers liked it for its looks; one young lady said that I at least could have no trouble in choosing what Christmas presents I should make my friends. She was that very beautiful girl who easily bore the palm for beauty in Columbus, and I do not yet understand how I was able to reject her unprofessional suggestion with as much pride as if she had been plain. I gave my book to no one, in my haughty aversion from even the shadow of advertising, and most of my friends had their revenge, I suppose, in not buying it.

IX

I had begun now to know socially and intrinsically the little capital which I had known only politically and extrinsically during the two winters passed there as a legislative correspondent. I then consorted with the strangers whom their share in the government made sojourners, and who had little or no local quality to distinguish them from one another. I shared the generalized hospitalities offered them with that instinctive misgiving which I have rather more than hinted; and though I distinguished among them, and liked and valued certain of them, yet I had a painful sense of our common exteriorality and impermanence. I cannot say that I ever expected to become part of the proper life of the city, and when suddenly I found myself in that life, if not of it, I was very willing to find it charming. How charming it was compared with the life of other cities I had no means of knowing, but now after the experiences, not too exhaustive, of half a century I still feel it to have been charming, with the wilding grace proper to all the West in those days, and the refinement remembered from the varied culture (such culture as there was) of the East and South it derived from.

Not so many people in our town could have known me for my poetry as for my journalism, and I do not pretend that the sexes were equally divided in their recognition. I have intimated my fancy that with most men, men of affairs, men of the more serious callings, the face of the poet was saved by the audacity of the paragrapher. If I could be so sharp, so hard in my comment on the day’s events, I could not be so soft as I seemed in those rhymes where I studied the manner of Heine, the manner of Tennyson, and posed in this or that dramatized personality. I cannot flatter myself that I did not seem odd sometimes to many of my fellow-citizens, though I hope that with some of the hardest-headed among them I was acceptable for qualities which recommend average men to one another. Some of that sort made friends with me; some even who were of an entirely diverse political thinking tolerated my mockeries of opinions which they supposed their principles. But neither my pleasure nor my pride was in such friendships. What I wished to do always and evermore was to think and dream and talk literature, and literature only, whether in its form of prose or of verse, in fiction, or poetry, or criticism. I held it a higher happiness to stop at a street corner with a congenial young lawyer and enter upon a fond discussion of, say, De Quincey’s essays than to prove myself worthy the respect of any most eminent citizen who knew not or loved not De Quincey. But I held it far the highest happiness to call at some house where there were young girls waiting and willing to be called upon and to join them in asking and saying whether we had read this or that late novel or current serial. It is as if we did nothing then but read late novels and current serials, which it was essential for us to know one another’s minds upon down to the instant; other things might wait, but these things were pressing.

Of course there were some houses where such problems were of more immediate and persistent interest than other houses. Such a house was the ever-dear house of the S. family, which made itself a home any hour of the day up to midnight for such youth as had once been adopted its sons. It was not only a literary house, it was even more a musical house, where there was both singing and playing, with interludes of laughing and joking in all forms of seemly mirth, with the whole family, till the little boys of it stumbled up the stairs half asleep. I could not play, but I was sometimes suffered by that large-hearted hospitality to try singing; and I could talk with the best. So, it was my more than content in the lapses of the music to sit with the young aunt (she seemed so mature in her later twenties to me in my earliest) and exchange impressions of the books new and old that we had been reading. We frequenters of the house held her in that honor which is the best thing in the world for young men to feel for some gentle and cultivated woman; I suppose she was a charming person apart from her literary opinions; but we did not think of her looks; we thought of her wise and just words, her pure and clear mind.

It was the high noon of Tennyson and Thackeray and George Eliot and Dickens and Charles Reade, whose books seemed following one another so rapidly. The Newcomes was passing as a serial through Harper’s Magazine, and we were reading that with perhaps more pleasure than any of the other novels and with the self-satisfaction in our pleasure which I have before this argued was Thackeray’s most insidious effect with youth striving to spurn the world it longed to shine in. We went about trying to think who in the story was like whom in life, and our kind hostess was reading it, too, and trying to think that, too; but it was not well for her to say what she thought in the case of the handsomest, and for several reasons, really, the first among us. It appeared that she thought he was like Clive Newcome and that we others were like those friends of his whom in the tale his nature was shown subordinating. She said something like this to some one, and when her saying came to us others we revolted in a body. No, we would not have that theory of our relation to our friend; and I do not know to what infuriate excess of not calling for a week we carried our resentment. I do not know how after the week, if it was so long, we began calling again; but I surmise it was through something said or done by that dear Miss A. which made it easy for her sister to modify her wounding theory into a recognition of the proud equality which bound us friends together.

We are all dead now, all save me and the youngest daughter of the house, but as I think back we are all living again, and others are living who are also dead. Among these is a young lady visitor from a neighboring city, one of those beautiful creatures who render the Madonna faces of the painters credible, and of a prompt gaiety which shared our wonted mirth in its own spirit. Her beauty might have dedicated her to any mysterious fate; beauty is often of such tragical affinition; but not her gaiety; and yet the glad die, too, and this glad creature within a year had gone to the doom which sent no whisper back to the hearts left lifelong aching. Her father was appointed consul to a Mediterranean port, and she sailed with him in the ship which sailed with them both into eternity, unseen, unsignaled, as messageless as if it had been a mist swept from the face of the sea.

But well a year before this time and a year after our first meeting in Columbus I saw her in Boston, in a house swept as wholly from the face of the earth as that ship from the face of the sea. I suppose the Court House in Boston is an edifice as substantial as it is plain, but for me, when I look at the place where it stands my vision pierces to the row of quiet, dignified mansions which once lined that side of Somerset Street, and in one of which I somehow knew that I should find with her uncle’s family the beautiful creature already so unimaginably devoted to tragedy, to mystery, to the eternal baffle of surmise. It seemed that from often being there she knew the city so enchanted and enchanting to me then, and she went about with me from one wonder of it to another; and it remains in the glimmer of that association, which no after-custom could wholly eclipse. It was a moment of the glad young American life of other days which seems so impossible to after days and generations; and with the Common and its then uncaterpillared elms, with the Public Garden, just beginning in leaf and flower, with the stately dwellings which looked upon those pleasances in the streets long since abandoned to business, with the Public Library, the fine old Hancock House, and the Capitol as Bullfinch designed and left it, and the Athenæum as it used to be, and Faneuil Hall, swarming with memories for my young ardor, and the Old State House, unvisited by its manifold transformations, — the brave little city of the past is all contemporaneous again.

X

As I have said, all they of that Columbus house but one are gone. One of the little boys went before they were men, and then the other; the mother went long afterward; the elder daughter, who had been the widow of our repudiated Clive Newcome, went longer afterward yet; and then still later, finding myself once on a very mistaken lecturing-tour in Kansas, where our beloved Miss A. had lived many married years, I asked for her, hoping to see her, and heard that she had died the year before. But first of all the father died, leaving me the memory of kindness which I hardly know how to touch aright. He was my physician as well as my friend, and saw me through the many maladies, real and unreal, of my ailing adolescence, but he would have no fee for curing me of either my pains or my fears. I had come to him first with my father, who somehow knew him before me, and it was as if he became another father to me. Often in those nights of singing and playing, of talking and joking, he would look in for a moment between patients to befriend our jollity; and when at last it came to my leaving Columbus, and going that far journey to Venice, whither I seemed bound as on a journey to another planet, he asked me one night into his little outside office by the State Street gate, and had me tell him what provision I had made for the chances before me. I told him, and then whether he thought it not enough in that war-time when the personal risks were doubled by the national risks he said, “Well, I am not a rich man, or the son of a rich man, but if you think you need something more, I can let you have it.” I had been keeping my misgivings to myself, but now I owned them and borrowed the two hundred dollars which he seemed to have there with him, as if in expectation of my need.

For a darker tint in the picture I have been painting of my past let me record here a fact which may commend itself for the younger reader’s admonition; the old cannot profit by it, perhaps, though as long as we live we are in danger of forgetting kindness. When my family first came to Columbus we were much beholden to another family, poor like ourselves, which did everything but turn itself out of doors to let us have the little house we were to occupy after them. They shared it with us till they could place themselves elsewhere; and my father and mother remained bound to them in willing gratitude. When I came back to the capital after my five years of exile in our village I, too, remembered our common debt, but when the world began to smile upon me I forgot the friends who had not forgotten me till one day my father wished me to go with him to see them. The mother of the family received me with a sort of ironical surprise, and then her hurt getting the better, or the worse, of her irony, she said some things about my losing sight of humble friends in the perspectives opening so alluringly before me. I could not recall, if I would, just the things she said, but they scorched, and the place burns yet; and if I could go back and repair the neglect which she brought home to me how willingly, after nearly sixty years, would I do it! But at the time I hardened my heart and as I came away I tried to have my father say something in extenuation of the fault which I angrily tried to make a merit of; but with all his tenderness for me he would not or could not.

Perhaps he, too, thought that I had been a snob, a thing that I had not needed the instruction of Thackeray to teach me the nature of; but I hope I was not so bad as that; I hope there was nothing meaner in me than youth flattered out of remembrance of old kindness by the new kindness in which it basked. I will confess here that I have always loved the world and the pleasures which other sages pretend are so vapid. If I could make society over, or make it over a little, so that it would be inclusive rather than exclusive, I believe I would still like to go into it, supposing it always sent a motor to fetch and carry me and did not insist upon any sort of personal exertion from me. But when I was between twenty and twenty-three and lived in Columbus I was willing to be at almost any trouble for it. All up and down the wide shady streets which ran from High eastward, and were called Rich and Town and State and Broad, there were large pleasant houses of brick, with or without limestone facings, standing in lawns more ample or less, and showing through their trees the thrilling light of evening parties that burst with the music of dancing from every window. Or if this was not the case with every house, beautiful girls were waiting in every other to be called upon, beside the grates with their fires of soft coal, which no more discriminated between winter and summer than the door-yard trees which seem to have been full-foliaged the whole year round.

It may be that with the passage of time there began to be shadows in the picture otherwise too bright. It seems to me that in time the calls and balls may have begun to pall and a subtle Weltschmerz, such as we had then, to pierce the heart; but scarcely any sense of that remains. What is certain is that the shadow of incredible disaster which was soon to fill the whole heaven still lurked below the horizon, or if it showed itself there, took the form of retreating clouds which we had but to keep on laughing and singing in order to smile altogether out of sight. The slavery question which was not yet formidably a question of disunion was with most of the older men a question of politics, though with men like Dr. S. it was a question of ethics; with the younger men it was a partisan question, a difference between Democrats and Republicans; with me it was a question of emotions, of impassioned preoccupations, and in my newspaper work a question of copy, of material for joking, for firing the Southern heart. It might be brought home to us in some enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, as in the case of the mother who killed her children in Cincinnati rather than let them be taken back with her to Kentucky; or in the return of an escaping slave seized in our own railroad station; and there was at first the horror of revolted humanity and then the acquiescence of sickened patience. It was the law, it was the law; and the law was constitutional and must be obeyed till it was repealed. Looking back now to that law-abiding submission, I can see that it was fine in its way, and I can see something pathetic in it as well as in the whole attitude of our people, the South and North confronted in that inexorable labyrinth, neither side quite meaning it or realizing it.

That was a very crucial moment indeed, but the crisis had come for us five or six years before when the case of some conscientious citizens, arrested in the Western Reserve for violation of that abominable law, came before Chief-Justice Swann of the Ohio Supreme Court. It was hoped by the great majority of the Republican party and largely expected that Justice Swann’s opinion would in whatever sort justify the offenders, and it was known that the Governor would support the decision with an armed force against the United States, which must logically attempt the execution of the law with their troops. Very probably the state of Ohio would have been beaten in such an event, but Justice Swann defeated the popular hope and expectation before-hand by confirming the judgment against those right-minded but wrong-headed friends of humanity. Ohio was

Old-time dwellings on one of the Columbus streets that Mr. Howells used to frequent

spared the disaster which befell South Carolina five or six years later, and Justice Swann suffered the penalty of men whose judgment is different from the convictions of their contemporaries. From being one of the most honored leaders of his party, with the prospect of any highest place in its gift, he remained one of the most distinguished jurists of his time whose best reward came coldly from those who would not blame where they could not praise. In Ohio the judiciary is elective, and Judge Swann hastened the decision of the court before the meeting of the Republican State Convention in order that his party might not unwittingly renominate him in the expectation of an opinion from him favorable to the good men of Ohio who had broken the bad law of the United States.

There is a legend, cherished more for its dramatic possibility than for any intrinsic probability, that when Lincoln appointed Noah L. Swayne justice of the Supreme Court of the United States he supposed that he was appointing Joseph Swann, and that he was misled by the similarity of the names, not very great either to ear or eye. Swayne was then one of the most eminent members of the Columbus bar, and, though he lacked the judicial experience of Swann, was entirely fit for the place he was called to fill. If such a mistake was made it was one which could well retrieve itself, but it seems a very idle fancy which has toyed with its occurrence. It would be altogether too nice in the face of its unlikelihood to inquire whether Lincoln might have wished to express a certain sympathy for the eminent jurist in the arrest of his public career which followed his decision. One would first have to establish the fact of such a feeling in him and prove that if he had it he would have been so careless of the jurist’s name as to mistake another name for it. These are the things that happen in fiction when the novelist is hard driven by the exigencies of his plot, but cannot easily occur in sober history.

I met both of these prominent men during my Columbus years, as an improminent young fellow-citizen might, Justice Swayne rather often, and Justice Swann once at least, in their own houses. On this sole occasion, which dimly remains with me, I was paying one of those evening calls which we youth were diligent in making at houses where there were young ladies; and after due introduction to the great jurist, I was aware of him, withdrawn and darkling in the next room, not unkindly, but not sensibly contributing to the gaiety of the time in me. That might have been after I was asked to a party at his house, which I was told, by a lady versed in such mysteries, was the greatest distinction which society had to offer in our city, and I suppose from this fact that the popular blame for his momentous decision, even if it was of much force, did not follow him into more rarefied air.

XI

We young men of that time were mostly Republicans, but some of us were Democrats and some of us were Southerners, or derivatively Southern. I have said how little society with us was affected by New England, even in such a custom as Thanksgiving, and I may go a little farther and say how it was characterized for good as well as for evil by the nearer South rather than the farther East, but more for good than for evil. Many people of Southern origin among us had chosen a Northern home because they would rather live in a Free State than a Slave State; they had not cast their sectional patriotism, but when it came to a question of which ideal should prevail, they preferred the Northern ideal. They derived from that South which antedated the invention of the cotton-gin, and which could take a leading part in keeping the Northwestern Territory free, with Ohio the first Free State born of that great mother of Free States. The younger generation of their blood were native Ohioans, and these were not distinguishable from the children of the New-Englanders and the Scotch-Irish Pennsylvanians by anything that I can remember. We had already begun to be Ohioans, with an accent of our own, and I suppose our manners were simpler and freer than those of the East, but the American manners were then everywhere simple and free, and are so yet, I believe, among ninety-nine hundred-thousandths of our ninety-nine millions. It seems to me now that the manners in Columbus were very good then among the young people. No one can say what change the over-muchness of subsequent money may have made in them, but one likes to think the change, if any, is not for the better. There seems to have been greater pecuniary equality then than there is now; there was an evener sky-line, with scarcely a sky-scraping millionaire breaking it anywhere. Within what was recognized as society there was as much social as pecuniary equality; apparently one met the same people everywhere on that easily ascertained level above the people who worked for their living with their hands. These were excluded, as they always have been excluded from society in all times and places; so that if I had still been a compositor at the printer’s case I could not have been received at any of the houses that welcomed me as a journalist, though that did not occur to me then, and only just now occurs to me, as something strange and sad; something that forever belies our democracy, but is so fast and deep-rooted in the conditions which our plutocracy has kept from our ancestral monarchies and oligarchies and must keep as long as men live upon one another in the law of competition.

In one house there was more singing and playing and in another more reading and talking. All the young ladies were beautiful, with the supremacy of that young lady whom it was our poetry to hold so beautiful that no other might contest it. As I believe the use still is in the South, we called them Miss Lilly, Miss Julia, Miss Sally, Miss Fanny, Miss Maggie, whether they were the older or the younger daughters of the family. We were always meeting them at parties or, failing that or including that, we went to call upon them at their houses. We called in the evening and it was no strange thing for a young man to call every evening of the week, not at one house, but at three or four. How, in the swift sequence of the parties, we managed so often to find the young ladies at home remains one of the mysteries which age must leave youth to solve. Possibly in that sharply foreshortened perspective of the past the parties show of closer succession than they really were.

At most of the houses we saw only the young ladies; it was they whom we asked for; but there were other houses where the mothers of the family received with the daughters, and at one of these my welcome was immediately of a kindness and always of a conscience which it touches me to realize. I was taken at the best I meant as well as the best I was by the friend who was the exquisite spirit of the house, and made me at home in it. My world had been very small, and it has never since been the greatest, but I think yet, as I divined then, that she was of a social genius which would have made her in any great-worldlier capital the leader she was in ours, where her supremacy in that sort was no more questioned than the incomparable loveliness of that most beautiful girl whom every one worshiped. Her house expressed her, so that when her home finally changed to another the new house obeyed the magic of her taste and put on the semblance of the first, with a conservatory breathing through it the odor of her flowers and the murmur of the dove that lived among them: herself a flower-like and birdlike presence, delicate, elegant, such as might have been fancied of some fine, old-world condition in a new-world reading of it. She lived to rule socially in a community which attested its gentleness by its allegiance to her until she was past eighty, but when I knew her first she was too young to be titularly accepted as their mother by her stepdaughters and was known to them as their cousin in what must have been her own convention; but I suppose she liked to be not less than sovereign among her equals. With me she was not only the kindest, but the most candid of my friends; my literary journalism and later my literature may have been to her liking, but she never flattered me for them when, as I now know, too much praise had made me hungry for flattery. No young man such as I was then could have had a wiser and faithfuler friend, and I render her memory my tribute after so many years from a gratitude which cannot be spoken. After so many years I cannot make out whether she accepted or merely suffered my extreme opinions in politics; though she was wholly Ohioan, her husband’s family had close affiliations with the South; but hers was certainly a Republican house, as nearly all the houses I frequented were. What may have made her even anticipatively my friend was our common acceptance of the Swedenborgian philosophy, which long, long afterward, the last time I saw her, I spoke of as a philosophy. But then she rejected the notion with scorn; it might be a pleasant fancy, she said, but a philosophy, no; and I perceived that she had come the way of that agnosticism which the whole cultivated world had taken. Now I have heard that in her last years she went back to the faith which was perhaps more inherited than reasoned in both of us. But I am sure that it was at first a bond and that she was conscientiously true to this bond of a common spiritual tradition, when upon some public recognition of my work she reminded me how according to Swedenborg every beautiful thing we said or did was by an influx from the divine. I submitted outwardly, but inwardly I rebelled: not that my conceit of the things I did was so very great; I believe I thought rather modestly of myself for doing them, and I always meant to do much better things; in fact I still have my masterpiece before me; but, poor things as they were, I wished to feel them wholly mine.

For a kindred reason I quite as altogether refused, and more explicitly, the theory of my old friend, Moncure D. Conway, as to the true function of the West in literature. He was then a young Unitarian minister, preaching at Cincinnati an ever-widening liberalism in religion, and publishing a slight monthly magazine named after The Dial of Emerson at Concord, and too carefully studied from it. For this paler avatar of that transcendental messenger he had asked me for contributions, and so a friendship, which lasted throughout our lives, sprang up between us. When he once came to Columbus he came to lunch with me, and quite took my appetite away by propounding his theory that the West was to live its literature, especially its poetry, rather than write it, the East being still in that darkling period when it could not live its literature. I do not remember the arguments by which he supported his thesis; but proofs as of holy writ could not have persuaded me of it as far as I myself was concerned. My affair was to make poetry, let who would live it, and to make myself known by both the quality and quantity of my poetry. It is not clear to me now how I declared my position without immodesty, but somehow I declared it, and so finally that Conway was very willing to carry away with him for his magazine a piece of rhyme which I had last made. He could the more willingly do this because The Dial was one of those periodicals, commoner then than now, that paid rather in glory than in money; in fact it was not expected to pay anything in money, so that I doubly defeated him: I was not only not living my poetry, I was not even living by it.

PART IV

THE days of the years when youth is finding its way into manhood are not those which have the most flattering memories. It is better with the autobiographer both before and after that time, though both the earlier and later times have much to offer that should keep him modest. But that interval is a space of blind struggle, relieved by moments of rest and shot with gleams of light, when the youth, if he is fortunate, gathers some inspiration for a worthier future. His experiences are vivid and so burnt into him that if he comes to speak of them it will require all his art to hide from himself that he has little to remember which he would not much rather forget. In his own behalf, or to his honor and glory, he cannot recall the whole of his past, but if he is honest enough to intimate some of its facts he may be able to serve a later generation. His reminiscences even in that case must be a tissue of egotism, and he will merit nothing from their altruistic effect.

I

Journalism was not my ideal, but it was my passion, and I was passionately a journalist well after I began author. I tried to make my newspaper work literary, to give it form and distinction, and it seems to me that I did not always try in vain, but I had also the instinct of actuality, of trying to make my poetry speak for its time and place. For the most part, I really made it speak for the times and places I had read of; but while Lowell was keeping my Heinesque verses among the Atlantic MSS. until he could make sure that they were not translations from Heine I was working at a piece of realism which when he printed it in the magazine our exchange newspapers lavishly reprinted. In that ingenuous time the copyright law hung loosely upon the journalistic consciousness and it was thought a friendly thing to reproduce whatever pleased the editorial fancy in the periodicals which would now frowningly forbid it, but with less wisdom than they then allowed it, as I think. I know that as its author the currency of The Pilot’s Story in our exchanges gave me a joy which I tried to hide from my senior in the next room; and I bore heroically the hurt I felt when some of the country papers printed my long, overrunning hexameters as prose. I had studied the verse not alone in Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” but in Kingsley’s “Andromeda,” and Goethe’s “Hermann and Dorothea,” while my story I had taken from a potentiality of our own life, and in the tragedy of the slave girl whose master gambles her away at monte on a Mississippi steamboat, and who flings herself into the river, I was at home with circumstance and scenery. I still do not think the thing was ill done, though now when I read it (I do not read it often) I long to bring it closer to the gait and speech of life. The popularity of the piece had its pains as well as pleasures, but the sharpest anguish I suffered was from an elocutionist who was proposing to recite it on the platform, and who came to me with it to have me hear him read it. He did not give it with the music of my inner sense, but I praised him as well as I could till he came to the point where the slave girl accuses her master with the cry of —

“Sold me! Sold me! Sold! And you promised to give me my freedom!”

when he said, “And here I think I will introduce a shriek.” “A shriek?” I faltered. “Yes, don’t you think it would fill the suspense that comes at the last word ‘Sold!’? Something like this,” and he gave a screech that made my blood run cold, not from the sensibility of the auditor, but the agony of the author. “Oh no!” I implored him, and he really seemed to imagine my suffering. He promised to spare me, but whether he had the self-denial to do so I never had the courage to inquire.

In the letters to my sister which I was so often writing in those Columbus years I find record of the constant literary strivings which the reader shall find moving or amusing as he will. “I have sold to Smith of the Odd Fellow’s Monthly at Cincinnati that little story I read to you early last summer. I called it ‘Not a Love Story.’ He gave me six dollars for it; and he says that as soon as I have time to dress up that translation which B. rejected he will buy that. At the rate of two dollars a page it will bring me sixteen or eighteen dollars. ‘Bobby’ ” — I suppose some sketch— “is going the rounds of the country papers. The bookseller here told our local editor that it was enough to make anybody’s reputation — that he and his family laughed prodigiously over it.... I have the assurance that I shall succeed, but at times I tremble lest something should happen to destroy my hopes. I think, though, that my adversity came first, and now it is prosperity lies before me. I am going to try a poem fit to be printed in the Atlantic. They pay Fullerton twenty-five dollars a page. I can sell, now, just as much as I will write.”

It was two years yet before that poem I was trying for the Atlantic was fit, and sold to the magazine for twenty-five dollars, though it was three pages long. I was glad of the pay, but the gain was nothing to the glory; and with the letter which Lowell wrote me about it in the pocket next my heart, and felt for to make sure of its presence every night and morning and throughout the day, I was of the potentiality of immeasurable success. I should have been glad of earning more money, for there were certain things I wished to do for those at home which I could not do on my salary of ten dollars a week, already beginning to be fitfully paid. Once, I find that I had not the money for the white gloves which it seems I expected myself to wear in compliance with usage at a certain party; and there were always questions of clothes. Dress-coats were not requisite then and there; the young men wore frock-coats for the evening, but I had ambitiously provided myself with the other sort upon the example of a friend who wore his all day; I wore mine outdoors once by day, and then presciently dedicated it to evening calls. The women dressed beautifully, to my fond young taste; they floated in airy hoops; they wore Spanish hats with drooping feathers in them, and were as silken balloons walking in the streets where men were apt to go in unblacked boots and sloven coats and trousers. The West has, of course, brushed up since, but in that easy-going day the Western man did not much trouble himself with new fashions or new clothes.

II

Whether the currency of The Pilot’s Story and the Atlantic publication of my Heinesque poems added to my reputation in our city I could not say. It was the belief of my senior on the newspaper that our local recognition was enervating and that it had better go no farther, but naturally I could not agree with a man of his greater age and observation, and it is still a question with me whether recognition hurts when one has done one’s best. I cannot recall that I ever tried to invite it; I hope not; but certainly I worked for it and hoped for it, and I doubt if any like experiment was ever received with more generous favor than ours by a community which I had reasons for knowing was intelligent if not critical. Our paper, if I may say it, was always good society, but after a while and inevitably it became an old story, or at least an older story than at first, though it never quite ceased to be good society. There remained the literary interest, the æsthetic interest for me, after the journalistic interest had waned; there was always the occasion, or the occasion could always be made. Passages in those old letters home remind me that we talked long and late about The Marble Faun one night at a certain house; at another we talked about other books from nine o’clock on, I imagine till midnight. At another the young lady of the house “sang about a hundred songs.” At still another the girl hostess said, “You haven’t asked me to sing to-night, but I will sing,” and then sang divinely half the night away, for all I know. There was a young lady who liked German poetry, and could talk about Goethe’s lyrics; and apparently everywhere there were the talking and the laughing and the singing which fill the world with bliss for youth.

Perhaps I sacrifice myself in vain by my effort to impart the sense of that past which faded so long ago; perhaps some readers will hold me cheap for the fondness which recurs to it and lingers in it. But I believe that I prize its memories because they seem so full of honor and worship for the girlhood and womanhood which consecrate it in my remembrance. Within this gross world of ours as it now is, women are still so conditioned that they can lead the life of another and a better world, and if they shall ever come to take their rightful share of the government of the world as men have made it I believe they will bring that other and better world of theirs with them and indefinitely advance the millennium. I have the feeling of something like treason to the men I knew in that time, when I own that I preferred the society of women to theirs, but I console myself with the reflection that they would probably have said the same as to mine. Our companionship could hardly have chosen itself more to my liking. It was mainly of law students, but there was here and there one engaged in business, who was of a like joking and laughing with the rest. We lived together in a picturesque edifice, Gothic and Tudor, which had been meant for a medical college, and had begun so, and then from some financial infirmity lapsed to a boarding-house for such young men as I knew, though we were not without the presence of a young married pair, now and then, and even a young lady, a teacher or the like, who made us welcome when we ended a round of evening calls outside by calling on them from room to room. In my boyhood days at Columbus I was sometimes hustled off the sidewalk by the medical students coming from the College, then in its first prosperity, and taking up the whole pavement as they swept forward with interlinked arms. This was at noontime, when they were scarcely less formidable than the specters which after dark swarmed from the dissecting-room, and challenged the boy to a trial of speed in escaping them. Now the students had long been gone from the College and I dwelt in its precincts with such other favorites of fortune as could afford to pay three dollars and a half a week for their board. The table was even super-abundant, and the lodging was almost flatteringly comfortable after experience of other places. I can only conjecture that the rooms we inhabited had been meant for the students or professors when the College was still a medical college. They were large, and to my untutored eye, at least, were handsome, and romantically lighted by windows of that blend of Tudor and Gothic which I have mentioned, but their architecture showed more on the outside than on the inside, and of course the pinnacles and towers of the edifice were more accessible to the eye without. It was the distinction of people who wished to be known for a correct taste to laugh at the architecture of the College, and perhaps they do so still, but I was never of these. For me it had, and it has, a charm which I think must have come from something like genius, if not quite genius, in the architect, to whose daring I would like to offer this belated praise. At any rate it was the abode of entire satisfaction to me in those happy years between 1857 and 1860 when I could not have wished other companionship than I had there.

There could have been no gayer table than we kept, where we made the most of one another’s jokes, and were richly personal in them, as youth always is. The management was of the simplest, but not incompatible with dignity, for the landlord waited upon the table himself, and whoever the cook might be, the place was otherwise in the sole charge of an elderly maid, with a curious defect of speech, which kept her from answering, immediately or ultimately, any question or remark addressed to her. We valued her for this impediment because of the pathetic legend attaching to it, and we did not value her the less, but the more, because she was tall and lank and uncouth of face and figure, though of a beauty in her absolute faithfulness to her duties and the kindness beyond them which she always showed. The legend was that in her younger if not fairer time she had been married, and when one day her husband, suddenly killed in an accident, was brought home to her, she tried to speak, but could not speak, and then ever afterward could only speak after great stress, and must often fall dumb, and go away without speaking.

The Medical College at Columbus. Mr. Howells had a room in the third story above the main entrance

I do not know whether we really believed in this or not, but we behaved as if we did, and revered the silent heroine of the tragedy as if it were unquestionably true. What kept me from trying to make it into a poem I cannot say, but I would like to think it was that I felt it above rather than below the verse of even the poet I meant to be. How many rooms she had charge of I could as little say, but I am certain that there were two of us young men in each of them. My own room-mate was a poet, even more actual than myself, though not meaning so much as I to be always a poet; he was reading law, and he meant to practise it, but he had contributed two poems to the Atlantic Monthly before any of mine had been printed there. This might have been a cause of bitterness with me; his work was certainly good enough to be a cause of bitterness, and perhaps I was not jealous because I felt that it would be useless; I should like to believe I was not even jealous of him for being so largely in society before I was. Later, when we came in from our evening calls, we sometimes read to each other, out of what books I could not say now, but probably some poet’s; certainly not our own verse: he was too wise for that and I too shy.

He was then reading law, and sometime in my middle years at Columbus he left us to begin his law practice farther West. In noticing his departure as a friendly journalist should I obeyed his wish not to speak of him as a poet; that, he said, would injure him with his new public; but whether it would or not I am not sure; the Western community is sometimes curiously romantic, and does not undervalue a man for being out of the common in that way. What really happened with him was that, being of a missionary family and of a clerical tradition, he left the law in no great time and studied divinity. It was a whole generation afterward before I saw him again; and now his yellow hair and auburn beard of the early days were all one white, but his gentle eyes were of the old hazel, undimmed by the age that was creeping upon us both. He had followed me with generous remembrance and just criticism in my fiction; and again he made me a sort of professional reproach for dealing in my novels (notably in A Modern Instance) with ethical questions best left to the church, he thought. I thought he was wrong, but I am not sure that I so strenuously think so now; fiction has to tell a tale as well as evolve a moral, and either the character or the principle must suffer in that adjustment which life alone can effectively manage. I do not say ideally manage, for many of the adjustments of life seem to me cruel and mistaken. If it is in these cases that religion can best intervene, I suppose my old friend was right; at any rate, he knows now better than I, for he is where there is no manner of doubt, and I am still where there is every manner of doubt.

I believe, in the clerical foreshadowing of his future, perhaps, he was never of those wilder moments of our young companionship when we roamed the night under the summer moon, or when we forgathered around the table in a booth at the chief restaurant, and over a spirit-lamp stewed the oysters larger and more delicious than any to be found now in the sea; or when, in the quarter-hours of digestion which we allowed ourselves after our one-o’clock dinner we stretched ourselves on the grass, often sunburnt brown, before the College and laughed the time away at anything which pretended itself a joke.

We collegians were mostly Republicans as most of the people we knew were. A few young men in society were not, but they were not of our companionship, though we met them at the houses we frequented, and did not think the worse of them for being Democrats. In fact, there was no political rancor outside of the newspapers, and that was tempered with jocosity. Slavery had been since the beginning of the nation, the heritage of the states from the colonies, and it had been accepted as part of the order of things. We supposed that sometime, somehow, we should be rid of it, but we were not sanguine that it would be soon; and with so many things of pressing interest, the daily cares, the daily pleasures, the new books, the singing and laughing and talking in the pleasant houses, I could leave the question of slavery in abeyance, except as a matter of paragraphing. There had been as many warnings of calamity to come as ever a people had. There had been the breaking of solemn promises from the South to the North; there had been the bloody fights between the sections in Kansas and the treacheries of the national government; there had been the quarrels and insults and violences in Congress; there had been the arrests and rescues of fugitive slaves; there had been the growth of hostile opinion, on one side fierce and on the other hard, maturing on both sides in open hate. There had been all these portents, and yet when the bolt burst from the stormy sky and fell at Harper’s Ferry we were as utterly amazed as if it had fallen from a heaven all blue.

III

Only those who lived in that time can know the feeling which filled the hearts of those who beheld in John Brown the agent of the divine purpose of destroying slavery. Men are no longer so sure of God’s hand in their affairs as they once were, but I think we are surer that He does not authorize evil that good may come, and that we can well believe the murders which Brown did as an act of war in Kansas had not His sanction. In the mad skurry which followed the incident of Harper’s Ferry in 1859 some things were easily shuffled out of sight. Probably very few of those who applauded or palliated Brown’s attempt knew that he had taken men from their wives and children and made his partisans chop them down that their death might strike terror into the pro-slavery invaders, while he forbore from some strange policy to slaughter them with his own hand. His record was not searched to this dreadful fact in my knowledge, either by the Democrats who tried to inculpate the Republicans for his invasion of Virginia or by the Republicans who more or less disowned him. What his best friends could say and what most of them believed, was that he had been maddened by the murder of his sons in Kansas, and that his wild attempt was traceable to the wrongs he had suffered. His own dignity as he lay wounded and captive in the engine-house at Harper’s Ferry, where the volunteer counsel for the prosecution flocked upon him from every quarter, and questioned him and cross-questioned him, did the rest, and a sort of cult grew up which venerated him before his death. I myself was of that cult, as certain fervent verses would testify if I here refused to do so. They were not such very bad verses, as verses, though they were technically faulty in places, but in the light which Mr. Oswald Villard’s history of John Brown has finally cast upon that lurid passage of his life I perceive that they were mistaken. He was not bloodier than most heroes, but he was not a martyr, except as he was willing to sacrifice himself along with others for a holy cause, and he was a saint only of the Old Testament sort of Samuel who hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. But from first to last he was of the inevitable, and the Virginians could no more have saved themselves from putting him to death than he could have saved himself from venturing his life to free their slaves. Out of that business it seems to me now that they came with greater honor than their Northern friends and allies. The South has enough wrongs against the negroes to answer for in the past and in the present, but we cannot lay wholly to its charge the fate of the slave’s champion; he was of the make of its own sons in his appeal to violence, and apparently the South understood him better than the North. There was then no evil too great for us to think or say of the Virginians, and yet after they could free him from the politicians, mainly Northern, who infested him in the first days of his captivity, to make political capital or newspaper copy out of him, the Virginians tried him fairly, as those unfair things called trials go, and they remained with a sort of respect for him which probably puzzled them. Long after, twenty-five years after, when I was in an ancient Virginia capital it was my privilege to meet some of Governor Wise’s family; and I noted in them this sort of retrospective respect for Brown; they were now of Republican politics, and I found that I was not nearly Black Republican enough for them. But in the closing months of the year 1859 there was no man so abhorred and execrated by the so-called Black Republicans as Governor Wise.

Without going to the files of our own newspaper I cannot now say just how we treated the Harper’s Ferry incident from first to last, but I am safe in saying that it was according to the temperament of each writer. Our chief, who wrote very well when he could detach his interest from the practical politics so absorbing in the capital of a state like Ohio, may have struck the key-note of our opinion in an able leader, and then left each of us to follow with such music as responded in us. My vague remembrance of the result is the daily succession of most penetrating, most amusing comments from my senior. The event offered him the opportunity of his life for that cold irony he excelled in and which he knew how to use so effectively in behalf of a good cause; I do not believe it was ever employed in a bad one. The main contribution to the literature of the event from his junior that I can distinctly recall was that ode or that hymn to John Brown, for which I cannot yet be ashamed or sorry, however I must rue the facts that have forever spoilt my rapture in it. I have the sense of a pretty constant passing from the room where I was studying the exchanges for material, and trying to get my senior’s laugh for something I had written, or staying for him to read me the article he had just begun or finished. It was a great time, though it was a dreadful time, so thick with forecast, if we had only known it, of the dreadfuler time to follow.

While I have been saying this I have been trying to think how much or little our community was shaken by an event that shows so tremendous in the retrospect, and it seems to me little rather than much. People knew the event was tremendous, but so had the battles in Kansas been, and so had the attack on Sumner in the Senate Chamber, and so had the arrests and rescues of the fugitive slaves. They were of the same texture, the same web which fate was weaving about us and holding us faster, hour by hour and day by day while we felt ourselves as free as ever. There must have been talk pretty constant at first, but dying away without having really been violent talk, among people who differed most about it. What I think is that most people were perhaps bewildered, and that waiting in their daze they did not say so much as people would now imagine their saying. Or it may be that my memory of the effect is a blur of so many impressions that it is impossible to detach any from the mass; but I do not think this probable. The fact probably is that people did not realize what had happened because they could not, because their long experience of enmity between the South and North had dulled them too much for a true sense of what had happened.

But I wrote home to my father my disappointment that his paper had not had something “violent” about the John Brown raid. My head, which abstractly passionate and concretely descriptive rhymes had once had wholly to themselves, was now filled with John Brown when it could be relieved of a news-editor’s duty; I thought of him and him only, except when I was making those perpetual calls at those pleasant houses where the young ladies were singing or talking every night. I got some consolation from one of the delightful German editors whom I seemed to know in those days. He was a ‘48 man, and he carried in his leg a ball which some soldier of the king had planted there one day when my friend stood behind a barricade in Berlin. He told me, as I read in one of my old letters home, that he had been teaching his children the stories of Schiller, the good poet of freedom, of Robert Blum, the martyr of liberty, and of our John Brown. He says, “My liddle girl, ven I deached dem to her, she veeped.”

But I cannot recall having spoken of Brown with my friend Dr. S., whom I was so apt to speak with of the changing aspects of the slavery question, though I remember very well his coldness to my enthusiasm for the young English poet, Richard Realf, who was so grotesquely Secretary of State in the Republic Brown had dreamed out, but who had passed from Canada with his department before the incident at Harper’s Ferry, and was in Texas at the time of it and of the immediately ensuing events. What affair of state brought him to Columbus after the death of his leader and comrades I did not understand, and I cannot understand yet how he could safely be there within easy reach of any United States marshal, but he was, no doubt, much safer there than in Texas, and he stayed some days, mainly talking with me about himself as a poet rather than as a Secretary of State. He interested me, indeed, much more as a poet, for I already knew him as the author of some Kansas war lyrics, which I am not sure I should admire so much now as I did then. He was a charming youth, perhaps my senior by two years, and so about twenty-four, gentle mannered, sweet voiced, well dressed, and girlishly beautiful. I knew, as he was prompt and willing to tell me again, that he had been a protégé of Lady Byron’s, and that while in her house he had fallen in love with a young kinswoman of hers, and was forced to leave it, for with all his gifts he was the son of an agricultural laborer, and for that reason no desirable match. Yet Lady Byron seemed to have remained fond of him; she had helped him to publish a volume of verse which he had called Guesses at the Beautiful (I envied him the title), and at parting she had given him a watch for a keepsake and money to bring him to America. He showed me the watch, and I dare say the volume of poems, but I am not sure as to this, and I vouch for no particular of his story, which may very well have been wholly true. In the long walks and long talks we had together, when he cared more to speak of his literary than his military life, I cannot make out that he expected to help further in any attack upon the South. Apparently he shared the bewilderment which every one was in, but he did not seem to be afraid or anxious for himself as part of the scheme that had so bloodily failed. He was not keeping himself secret, and he went on to Canada as safely as he had come from Texas, if indeed he went to Canada. While he was briefly with us a hapless girl, of those whom there is no hope for in this life, killed herself, and Realf went to the wicked house where she lay dead, out of some useless pathos, since she was dead. I reported the fact to my friend Dr. S. with a faltering tendency, I am afraid, to admire Realf for it, and the doctor said, coldly, Yes, he had better kept away; his motive had already been scandalously construed. It was this world speaking at its best and wisest, but I am not sure that it altogether persuaded me.

IV

Realf’s stay in Columbus must have been in that time of abeyance between Brown’s capture and his death; but it must have been after the hanging at Charlestown that one night I was a particle of the crowd which seemed to fill the State House yard on its western front, dimly listening to the man whose figure was a blur against the pale stone. I knew that this man was that Abraham Lincoln who had met Stephen A. Douglas in the famous Illinois debates, and who was now on his way home to Illinois from his recognition in the East as a man of national importance. I could not well hear what he said, and I did not stay long; if I had heard perfectly, I might not, with my small pleasure in public speaking, have stayed long; and of that incident, and of the man whom history had already taken into her keeping, and tragedy was waiting to devote to eternal remembrance, I have only the vision of his figure against the pale stone, and the black crowd spread vaguely before him. Later I had a fuller sense of his historic quality, but still so slight, when he stood on the great stairway within the State House and received the never-ending crowd which pushed upward, man and woman after man and woman, and took his hand, and tried to say something as fit as it was fond. That would have been when he was on the journey, which became a flight, to his inauguration as President at Washington. He had been elected President, and the North felt safe in his keeping, though the dangers that threatened the nation had only gathered denser upon it, and the strange anomaly which called itself the government had been constantly betraying itself to the hostility within it and without.

The people who pushed upward to seize the great hand held out to every one looked mostly like the country folk such as he had been of, and the best of him always was, and I could hear their hoarse or cracked voices as they hailed him, oftenest in affectionate joking, sometimes in fervent blessing; but for anything I could make out he answered nothing. He stood passive, submissive, with the harsh lines of his lower face set immovably, and his thick-lashed eyes sad above them, while he took the hands held up to him one after another, and shook them wearily, wearily. It was a warm day such as in late February, or earliest March, brings the summer up to southern Ohio before its time, and brings the birds with it for the delusion of a week or a fortnight; and as we walked out, my companion and I, we left a sweltering crowd within the State House, and, straying slowly homeward, suffered under a sun as hot as June’s.

PART V

I do not say July’s sun or August’s, because I wish my reader to believe me, and any one who has known the July or August, or the September even, of southern Ohio has known something worse than tropical heat, if travelers tell the truth of the tropics; and no one could believe me if I said such heat ever came in February or March. There were whole fortnights of unbroken summer heat in Columbus, when the night scarcely brought relief from the day, and the swarming fly ceded, as Dante says, only to the swarming mosquito. Few people, even of those who might have gone, went away; none went away for the season, as the use is now, though it is still much more the use in the East than in the West. There were excursions to the northern lakes or to Niagara and down the St. Lawrence; there were even brief intervals of resort to Cape May; but the custom was for people to stay at home, to wear the thinnest clothes, and drink cooling drinks, and use fans, and try to sleep under mosquito-bars, after sitting out on the front steps. That was where calls were oftenest paid and received, and as long as one was young the talk did not languish, though how one did when one was old, that is, thirty or forty, or along there, we who were young could not have imagined. There was no sea or any great water to send its cooling breath over the land which stretched from the Ohio River to Lake Erie with scarcely a heave of its vast level. We had not even the satisfaction of knowing that we were suffering from a heat-wave; the notion had not been invented by quarter of a century yet; we suffered ignorantly on and on, and did not intermit our occupations or our pleasures; some of us did not even carry umbrellas against the sun; these we reserved for the rain which could alone save us, for a few hours in a sudden dash, or for a day in the storm that washed the air clean of its heat.

The deluging which our streets got from these tempests was the only cleaning which I can recollect seeing them given. There was indeed a chain-gang which intermittently hoed about in the gutters, but could not be said to clean them, while it remained the opprobrium of our civilization. It was made up mostly of negroes, but there were some drink-sodden whites who dragged a lengthening chain over the dust or hung the heavy ball which each wore over the hollows of their arms when urged to more rapid movement. Once I saw, with a peculiar sense of our common infamy in the sight, a quite well-dressed young man, shackled with the rest and hiding his face as best he could with eyes fastened on the ground as he scraped it. Somehow it was told me that he had been unjustly sentenced to this penalty, and the vision of his tragedy remains with me yet, as if I had acted his part in it. I dare say it was not an uncommon experience by which when I used to see some dreadful thing, or something disgracefully foolish, I became the chief actor in the spectacle; at least I am certain that I suffered with that hapless wretch as cruelly as if I had been in his place. Perhaps we are always meant to put ourselves in the place of those who are put, or who put themselves, to shame.

Municipal hygiene was then in its infantile, if not in its embryonic stage, and if there was any system of drainage in Columbus it must have been surface drainage, such as I saw in Baltimore twenty-five years later. After the rain the sun would begin again its daily round from east to west in a cloudless sky where by night the moon seemed to reflect its heat as well as its light. They must still have such summers in Columbus, and no doubt the greatest part of the people fight or faint through them as they do in our cities everywhere, but in those summers even the good people, people good in the social sense, remained, and not merely the bad people who justly endured hardship because of their poverty. I had become accustomed to the more temperate climate of the Lake Shore, and I felt the heat as something like a personal grievance, but not the less I kept at work and kept at play like the rest. Once only I was offered the chance of escape for a few days (it was in the John Brown year of 1859) when I was commissioned to celebrate the attractions of a summer resort which had been opened a few hours away from the capital. I had heard much talk of the coolness of White Sulphur, as it was called, and I expected much more than I had heard, but I now got much more than I had expected.

There must have been a break in the heat when at some unearthly hour of the July morning I had taken the train which would leave me at White Sulphur, but in the sleep which youth can almost always fall into I was not sensible of it. I say fell into, but I slept upright as one did on the trains in those times, and when my train stopped at the station which as yet made no sign of being a station I stumbled down the car steps to a world white with frost in the July morning. My foot slid over the new planking of the platform as on ice, and on the way up to the new hotel the fences bristled with the glacial particles which bearded the limbs of the wayside trees, and the stubble of the wheat and fields, and the blades of the corn, and sparkled in the red of the early sun which was rising to complete the devastation. I was in those thinnest summer linens, with no provision of change against such an incredible caprice of the weather, and when I reached the hotel there was no fire I could go to from the fresh, clean, thrillingly cold chamber, with its white walls and green lattice door, which I was shown into. No detail of the time remains with me except what now seems to have been my day-long effort to keep warm by playing nine-pins with a Cincinnati journalist, much my senior, but as helpless as myself against the cold. There must have been breakfast and dinner and supper, with their momentary heat, but when I went to bed I found only the lightest summer provision of sheet and coverlet, and I was too meek to ask for blankets.

VI

What account I gave of the experience in print I cannot say after the lapse of fifty-seven years, but no doubt I tried to make merry over it, with endeavor for the picturesque and dramatic. Through the whole of a life which I do not complain of for lasting so long, though I do not like being old, I have found that in my experiences, where everything was novel, some of the worst things were the things I would not have missed. It had not been strictly in the line of my duty as news editor to make that excursion, but I dare say I did it gladly, for the reasons suggested. There were other reasons which were to make themselves apparent during the year: on my salary of ten dollars a week I could not afford to be very punctilious; and if I was suffered to stray into the leading columns of the editorial page I could not stand upon the dignity of the news editor if I was now and then invited to do a reporter’s work. Besides, there were tremors of insecurity in my position, such as came from the bookkeeper’s difficulty in sometimes finding the money for my weekly wage, which might well have alarmed me for the continued working of the economic machine. Like every man who depends upon the will or power of another man to give him work, I served a master, and though I served the kindest master in the world, I could not help sharing his risks. It appeared that our newspaper had not been re-established upon a foundation so firm but that it needed new capital to prop it, after something over a year, and then a business change took place which left me out. I was not altogether sorry, for about the same time my senior resigned and went to Cincinnati to cast in his fortunes as joint owner and editor with another paper. Without him, though I should have fearlessly undertaken the entire conduct of our journal, I should not have felt so much at home in it, for I did not know then, as I have learned and said long since, that a strong writer, when he leaves a newspaper, leaves a subtle force behind him which keeps him indefinitely present in it. But there was no question of my staying, and though my chief’s wish to have me stay almost made it seem as if I were staying, I had to go, and I had to leave him my debtor in two hundred dollars. I hasten to say that the debt was fully paid in no very long time, but it seems to me that the world was managed much less on a cash basis in those days than in these; people did not expect to be paid their money as soon as they had earned it; the economic machine creaked and wabbled oftener, and had to be sprinkled with cool patience when the joints worked dry of oil. This may be my fancy, partly built from the fact that my father in his life of hard work was nearly lifelong in debt, while others lived and died as many dollars in debt to him.

It must have been before this humiliating event, which I cannot exactly date, that I was asked to deliver the poem before the Ohio Editorial Convention which used annually to grace its meeting with some expression in verse. There must have been an opening prayer and an address, but I remember neither of these, and I should not be able to remember my poem, or any part of it, if it had not afterward been printed in our newspaper, from which the kindness of a friend has rescued it for me. I have just read it over, not wholly with contempt, but not without compassion for those other editors who listened to it and could have followed its proud vaticinations but darkly. It appears that I then trusted the promises of a journalistic future which have not all been kept as yet, and that I cast my prophecies in a form and mood which I might have accused Tennyson of imitating if he had not been first with his “In Memoriam.”

The Men that make the vanished past
So brave, the present time so base,
And people, with their glorious race,
The golden future, far and vast! —

All ages have been dark to these,
The true Knights Errant! who have done
Their high achievements not alone
In the remoter centuries;

But ever to their dawn’s dim eye,
Blinded with night-long sorcery,
Warring with Shadows seemed to be, —
In victory, seemed to fall and die!

Noons glowed. The poet held each name
In hushless music to the ear —
Low for the thinking few to hear,
Loud for the noisy world’s acclaim;

And pondering, one that turns the page
Whereon their story hath been writ,
Gathers a purer lore from it,
Than all the wisdom of the sage; —

A simple lore of trust and faith
For Life’s fierce days of dust and heat, —
To keep the heart of boyhood sweet
Through every passion, unto death —

To love and reverence his time,
Not for its surface-growth of weeds,
But for its goodly buried seeds, —
To hope, and weave a hopeful rhyme!

The vision does not seem very clear even to me, now, and I suppose not many of those kind, hard-working country printers and busy city journalists recognized themselves in my forecast of the coming newspaper man. Yet I think there is something in the glowing fancy which is here reflected only in part, and I believe some graduate of our university courses of journalism may possibly do worse than keep my fond dream in mind. In this case, the yawning counting-room may not so soon engulf his high intentions, and, keeping clear of that shining sepulcher of noble ideals for a while, he may thank me for my over-generous faith in him.

No one that I can recall specifically thanked me at the time of that editorial convention, though no doubt the usual resolutions thanking the orator and poet were passed. I should be glad to believe that at the ball which crowned our festival some kind woman-soul may have tried to feign a pleasure in my verse which no man-soul attempted; but I have only the memory of my fearful joy in the dance which I seem to have led. I went back to Columbus with such heart as I could, but in the dense foreshortening of the time’s events I cannot find that of my own unhorsing from the shining procession of journalists figured in my poem. I can only be sure that I was unhorsed, and then suddenly, to my great joy and even greater surprise, was caught up and given a new mount, with even larger pay. That is, I was now invited to become professional reader for the young publisher who had issued the Poems of Two Friends, and who, apparently inspired by the signal failure of that book, imagined establishing a general publishing business in our capital. He followed it with several very creditable books, and he seems to have had the offer of many more manuscripts than he could handle. I have no doubt I dealt faithfully with these, and I know that he confided entirely in my judgment, for I was now twenty-three, without a doubt of my own as to my competence. There was one manuscript, offered by a lady who had lived some years in Chile, which I thought so interesting, though so formless, that I wrote it quite over, and my friend published it in a book which I should like to read again; but I have no hope of ever seeing it. He also published a very good Ohio version of Gautier’s Romance of a Mummy, but our bravest venture was a book which the publisher himself had fancied doing, and which he had fancied my writing. This was the life of Abraham Lincoln, printed with his speeches in the same volume with the life and speeches of Hannibal Hamlin, who was nominated with him on the Presidential ticket at the Republican Convention in 1860. It was the expectation of my friend, the very just and reasonable expectation, that I should go to Springfield, Illinois, and gather the material for the work from Lincoln himself, and from his friends and neighbors. But this part of the project was distasteful to me, was impossible; I felt that there was nothing of the interviewer in me, at a time when the interviewer was not yet known by name even to himself. Not the most prophetic soul of the time, not the wisest observer of events, could have divined my loss; and I was no seer. I would not go, and I missed the greatest chance of my life in its kind, though I am not sure I was wholly wrong, for I might not have been equal to that chance; I might not have seemed to the man whom I would not go to see, the person to report him to the world in a campaign life. What we did was to commission a young law student of those I knew, to go to Springfield and get the material for me. When he brought it back, a sheaf of very admirable notes, but by no means great in quantity, I felt the charm of the material; the wild poetry of its reality was not unknown to me; I was at home with it, for I had known the belated backwoods of a certain region in Ohio; I had almost lived the pioneer life; and I wrote the little book with none of the reluctance I felt from studying its sources. I will not pretend that I had any prescience of the greatness, the tragical immortality, that underlay the few simple, mostly humble, facts brought to my hand. Those who see that unique historic figure in the retrospect will easily blame my youthful blindness, but those who only knew his life before he overtopped all the history of his time will not be so ready to censure me for my want of forecast. As it was, I felt the inadequacy of my work, and I regretted it in the preface which owned its hasty performance.

There were several campaign lives of Lincoln which must have seemed better than mine to him; I cannot care now how it seemed to others; but what he thought of it I never knew. Within a few years I have heard that he annotated a copy of it, and that this copy is still somewhere extant in the West; but I am not certain that I should like to see it, much as my curiosity is concerning it. He might, he must, have said some things which could not console me for missing that great chance of my life when I was too young to know it. I saw him twice in Columbus, as I have told here already, and once in Washington, as I have told elsewhere. That was when I came from the office of his private secretaries at the White House, secure of my appointment as Consul at Venice, and lingered wistfully as he crossed my way through the corridor. Within no very long time past my old friend Piatt (he of the Poems of Two Friends) has told me that Lincoln then meant me to speak to him, as I might very fitly have done, in thanking him for my appointment, and that he had followed me out from the secretaries’ room to let me do so. He might have had some faint promptings of curiosity concerning the queer youth who had written that life of him from material which he would not come to him for in person. But without doubting my friend, I doubt the fact; neither Hay nor Nicolay ever mentioned the matter to me in our many talks of Lincoln; and I cannot flatter myself that I missed another greatest chance of my life. Rather, I imagine that he did not know who I was, or could in the least care, under the burdens which then weighed upon him. He might have suspected me an office-seeker without the courage to approach him instead of the office-seeker whose hopes he had, very likely without vividly realizing it, crowned with joy. I blame myself for not speaking to him, of course, as I blame myself for not having gone to him instead of sending to him for the facts of his past; in any event, with my literary sense, I must have valued those facts; but if Lincoln had not been elected in 1860 he would not have been nominated again; and in that case should I now be reproaching myself so bitterly?

VII

Another fame so akin to Lincoln’s in tragedy, and most worthy of mention in the story of his great time, is that of a state senator of ours in the legislative session of 1860. James A. Garfield, of whose coming to read Tennyson to us one morning in the Journal office I have told in My Literary Passions, was then a very handsome young man of thirty, with a full-bearded handsome face, and a rich voice suited to reading “The Poet” in a way to win even reluctant editors from their work to listen. It is strange that I should have no recollection of meeting Garfield again in Columbus, or anywhere, indeed, until nearly ten years later, when I stopped with my father over a night at his house in Hiram, Ohio, where we found him at home from Congress for the summer. I was then living in Cambridge, in the fullness of my content with my literary circumstance, and as we were sitting with the Garfield family on the veranda that overlooked their lawn I was beginning to speak of the famous poets I knew when Garfield stopped me with “Just a minute!” He ran down into the grassy space, first to one fence and then to the other at the sides, and waved a wild arm of invitation to the neighbors who were also sitting on their back porches. “Come over here!” he shouted. “He’s telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!” and at his bidding dim forms began to mount the fences and follow him up to his veranda. “Now go on!” he called to me, when we were all seated, and I went on, while the whippoorwills whirred and whistled round, and the hours drew toward midnight. The neighbors must have been professors in the Eclectic Institute of Hiram where Garfield himself had once taught the ancient languages and literature; and I do not see how a sweeter homage could have been paid to the great renowns I was chanting so eagerly, and I still think it a pity my poets could not have somehow eavesdropped that beautiful devotion. Under the spell of those inarticulate voices the talk sank away from letters and the men of them and began to be the expression of intimate and mystical experience; and I remember Garfield’s telling how in the cool of a summer evening, such as this night had deepened from, he came with his command into a valley of the Kanawha; for he had quickly turned from laws to arms, and this was in the beginning of the great war. He said that he noticed a number of men lying on the dewy meadow in different shapes of sleep, and for an instant, in the inveterate association of peace, he thought they were resting there after the fatigue of a long day’s march. Suddenly it broke upon him that they were dead, and that they had been killed in the skirmish which had left the Unionist force victors. Then, he said, at the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the sense of the sacredness of life, and the impossibility of destroying it. He let a silence follow on his solemn words, and in the leading of his confession he went on to say how the sense of the sacredness of other things of peace had gone out of some of the soldiers and never come back again. What was not their own could be made their own by the act of taking it; and he said we would all be surprised to know how often the property of others had been treated after the war as if it were the property of public enemies by the simple-hearted fellows who had carried the use of war in the enemy’s country back into their own. “You would be surprised,” he ended, “to know how many of those old soldiers, who fought bravely and lived according to the traditions of military necessity, are now in the penitentiary for horse-stealing.”

Once again I memorably met Garfield in my father’s house in Ashtabula County (the strong heart of his most Republican Congressional district) where he had come to see me about some passages in Lamon’s Life of Lincoln, which was then in the hands of my Boston publishers, withheld in their doubt of the wisdom or propriety of including them. I think Garfield was then somewhat tempted by the dramatic effect these passages would have with the public, but he was not strenuous about it, and he yielded whatever authority he might have had in the matter to the misgiving of the publishers; in fact, I do not believe that if it had been left to him altogether he would have advised their appearance. I met him for the last time in 1879 (when my wife and I were for a week the guests of President Hayes), as he was coming, with Mrs. Garfield on his arm, from calling upon us at the White House. He stopped me and said, “I was thinking how much like your father you carried yourself,” and I knew that he spoke from the affection which had been many years between them. I was yet too young to feel the resemblance, but how often in my later years I have felt and seen it! As we draw nearer to the door between this world and the next it is as if those who went before us returned to us out of it to claim us part of them.

VIII

I never had any report of the book’s sales, but I believe my Life of Lincoln sold very well in the West, though in the East it was forestalled by the books of writers better known. In the quiet which followed with a business which is always tending to quiescence (if the mood of the trade when discouraging authors may be trusted) my young publisher suggested my taking one hundred and seventy-five dollars of my money, and going to Canada and New England and New York on a sort of roving commission for another work he had imagined. It was to be a subscription book reporting the state and describing the operation of the principal manufacturing industries, and he thought it an enterprise peculiarly suited to my powers. I did not think so, but I was eager to see the world, especially the world of Boston, and I gladly took my hundred and seventy-five dollars and started, intending to do my best for the enterprise, though inwardly abhorring it. The best I could do was to try seeing the inner working of an iron foundry in Portland, where I was suspected of designs upon the proprietorial processes and refused admission; and I made no attempt to surprise the secrets of other manufacturers. But I saw Niagara Falls, which did not withhold its glories from me in fear of the publicity which I gave them in my letters to the Cincinnati Gazette; and I saw the St. Lawrence River and Montreal and Quebec, with the habitant villages round about them. I also saw the ocean at Portland (not so jealous of its mysteries as the iron foundry); I saw Boston and Cambridge, and Lowell and Holmes, and their publisher, Fields; I saw New York and Walt Whitman, and the Hudson River. This has been fully told in my Literary Friends and Acquaintance, and need not be told again here; but what may be fittingly set down is that when I arrived home in Columbus I found the publishing business still quieter than I had left it, and my friend with no enterprise in hand which I could help him bring to a successful or even unsuccessful issue. In fact he had nothing for me to do in that hour of mounting political excitement, and this did not surprise me. Neither did it surprise me that my old chief of the State Journal should ask me to rejoin him, though it did greatly rejoice me. He was yet in that kind illusion of his that he was working too hard on the paper; he expressed his fear that in the demand made upon his time by public affairs he should not be able to give it the attention he would like, and he proposed that I should return to a wider field in it, on an increased wage; he also intimated that he should now be able to bring up my arrears of salary, and he quite presently did so.

Again I was at the work which I was always so happy in, and I found myself associated in it on equal terms with a man much nearer my own age than my former associate Reed was. My new fellow-journalist had come to our chief from his own region in northwestern Ohio; I do not know but from his old newspaper there. I cannot write the name of Samuel Price without emotion, so much did I rejoice in our relation to the paper and each other, with its daily incident and bizarre excitement throughout the year we were together. I like to bring his looks before me; his long face with its deep, vertical lines beside the mouth, his black hair and eyes and smoky complexion; his air very grave mostly, but with an eager readiness to break into laughter. It seems to me now that our functions were not very sharply distinguished, though I must have had charge as before of the literary side of the work. We both wrote leading editorials, which our chief supervised and censored for a while and then let go as we wrote them, perhaps finding no great mischief in them. Reed remained the tradition of the office, and if I had formed myself somewhat on his mood and manner, Price now formed himself on mine; and somehow we carried the paper through the year without dishonor or disaster.

It was that year so memorable to me for having five poems published in the Atlantic Monthly, two of them in the same number, and I must have been strongly confirmed in my purpose of being a poet. Of course I knew too much of the world, and the literary world, to imagine that I could at once make a living by poetry, but I probably expected to live by some other work until my volumes of poetry should accumulate in sufficient number and sell in sufficient quantity to support me without the aid of prose. As yet I had no expectation of writing fiction; I had not recovered from the all-but-mortal blow dealt my hopes in the failure of that story which I had begun printing in my father’s newspaper before I had imagined an ending for it, though I must for several years have been working in stolen moments at another story of village life, which I vainly offered to the Atlantic Monthly and the Knickerbocker Magazine, and after that for many years tried to get some publisher to bring out as a book. The manuscript must still somewhere exist, and I should not be surprised, if I ever found it, to find myself respecting it for a certain helpless reality in its dealing with the conditions I knew best when I began writing it. But it was still to be nearly ten years before I tried anything else of the sort, and even in Their Wedding Journey, which was my next attempt, I helped myself out with travel-adventure in carrying forward a slender thread of narrative. Every now and then, however, I wrote some sketch or study, which I printed in our newspaper, where also I printed pieces of verse, too careless or too slight to be hopefully offered for publication in the East.

IX

I was not only again at congenial work, but I was in the place that I loved best in the world, though as well as I can now visualize the town which had so great charm for me then I can find little beauty in it. High Street was the only street of commerce except for a few shops that had strayed down from it into Town Street, and the buildings which housed the commerce were not impressive, and certainly not beautiful. A few hotels, three or four, broke the line of stores; there was the famous restaurant of Ambos, and some Jewish clothiers; but above all, besides a music and picture store, there was an excellent bookstore, where I supplied myself from a good stock of German books, with Heine and Schiller and Uhland, and where one could find all the new publications. The streets of dwellings stretched from High Street to the right, over a practically interminable plain, and shorter streets on the left dropped to the banks of the Scioto where a lower level emulated the inoffensive unpicturesqueness of the other plain. A dusty bridge crossed the river, where in the slack-water ordinarily drowsed a flock of canal-boats which came and went on the Ohio Canal. Some old-fashioned, dignified dwellings stood at the northern end of High Street, with the country close beyond, but the houses which I chiefly knew were on those other streets. I cannot say now whether they added to the beauty of the avenues or not; I suppose that oftenest they did not embellish them architecturally, though they were set in wide grounds among pleasant lawns and gardens. The young caller knew best their parlors in winter and their porches in summer; there was little or no lunching or dining for any one except as a guest of pot-luck; and the provisioning was mainly, if not wholly, from the great public market. Greengrocers’ and butchers’ shops there were none, but that public market was of a sumptuous variety and abundance, as I can testify from a visit paid it with a householding friend who drove to it in his carriage, terribly long before breakfast, and provisioned himself among the other fathers and the mothers who thronged the place with their market-baskets. This was years after my last years in Columbus, when I was a passing guest; while I lived there I was citizen of a world that knew no such household cares or joys.

On my return from my travels, though I was so glad to be again in Columbus, I no longer gave myself up to society with such abandon as before. I kept mostly to those two houses where I was most intimate, and in my greater devotion to literature I omitted to make the calls which were necessary to keep one in society even in a place so unexacting as our capital. Somewhat to my surprise, somewhat more to my pain, I found that society knew how to make reprisals for such neglect; I heard of parties which I was not asked to, and though I might not have gone to them, I suffered from not being asked. Only in one case did I regret my loss very keenly, and that was at a house where Lincoln’s young private secretaries, Hay and Nicolay, passing through to Washington before the inauguration, had asked for me. They knew of me as the author of “The Pilot’s Story” and my other poems in the Atlantic Monthly, as well as that campaign life of Lincoln which I should not have prided myself on so much; but I had been justly ignored by the hostess in her invitations, and they asked in vain. I fully shared after the fact any disappointment they may have felt, but I doubt if I was afterward more constant in my social duties; I was intending more and more to devote myself to poetry, and with a hand freer than ever, if that were possible, in the newspaper, I was again feeling the charm of journalism, and was giving to it the nights which I used to give to calls and parties.

I did not go back to live in the College, but with Price I took a room and furnished it; we went together for our meals to the different restaurants, a sort of life more conformable to my notion of the life of the literary freelance in New York. But let not the reader suppose from this large way of speaking that there were many restaurants in Columbus, or much choice in them. The best, the only really good one, was that of Ambos in High Street, where, as I have said before, we silvern youth resorted sometimes for the midnight oyster, which in handsome half-dozens was brought us on chafing-dishes, to be stewed over spirit-lamps and flavored according to our taste with milk and butter. We cooked them for ourselves, but our rejected, or protested, Clive Newcome was the most skilled in an oyster stew, and we all emulated him as we sat at the marble table in one of the booths at the side of the room. In hot weather a claret punch sometimes crowned the night with a fearful joy, and there was something more than bacchanalian in having it brought with pieces of ice clucking in a pitcher borne by the mystical Antoine from the bar where he had mixed it: that Antoine whom we romanced as of strange experiences and recondite qualities, because he was of such impregnable silence, in his white apron, with his face white above it, damp with a perennial perspiration, which even in the hottest weather did not quite gather into drops. We each attempted stories of him, and somewhere yet I have among my manuscripts of that time a very affected study done in the spirit and manner of the last author I had been reading.

I suppose he was not really of any intrinsic interest, but if he had been of the greatest I could not have afforded, even on my increased salary, to resort to Ambos’s for frequent observation of him. Ambos’s was the luxury of high occasions, and Price and I went rather for our daily fare to the place of an Americanized German near our office, where the cooking was very good, and the food without stint in every variety, but where the management was of such an easy kind that the rats could sometimes be seen clambering over the wall of the storeroom beyond where we sat. There was not then the present feeling against those animals, which were respected as useful scavengers, and we were rather amused than revolted by them, being really still boys with boys’ love of bizarre and ugly things. Once we had for our guest in that place the unique genius destined to so great fame as Artemus Ward; he shared our interest in the rats, and we joked away the time at a lunch of riotous abundance; I should say superabundance if we had found it too much. For a while also we ate at the house of a lady who set a table faultless to our taste, but imagined that the right way to eat pie was with a knife, and never gave a fork with it. Here for a while we had the company of the young Cincinnati Gazette correspondent, Whitelaw Reid, joyful like ourselves under the cloud gathering over our happy world. One day, after the cloud had passed away in the thunder and lightning of the four years’ Civil War, he came radiant to my little house at Cambridge with a piece of news which I found it as difficult to realize for fact in my sympathy with him as he could have wished. “Just think! Horace Greeley has asked me to be managing editor of the Tribune, and he offers me six thousand dollars a year!” A great many years afterward we met in a train coming from Boston to New York, when he brought the talk round to the Spanish War, and, for whatever reason, to his part in the Treaty of Paris and the purchase of the Philippines. “I did that,” he said. But I could not congratulate him upon this as I did upon his coming to the editorship of the Tribune, being of a different mind about the acquisition of the Philippines.

X

Sometime during that winter of 1860-61 Greeley himself paid us a visit in the Journal office and volunteered a lecture on our misconduct of the paper, which he found the cause of its often infirmity. We listened with the inward disrespect which youth feels for the uninvited censure of age, but with the outward patience due the famous journalist (of such dim fame already!) sitting on the corner of a table, with his soft hat and his long white coat on, and his quaint child-face, spectacled and framed in long white hair. He was not the imposing figure which one sees him in history, a man of large, rambling ambitions, but generous ideals, and of a final disappointment so tragical that it must devote him to a reverence which success could never have won him. I do not know what errand he was on in Columbus; very likely it was some political mission; but it was something to us that he had read the Journal, even with disapproval, and we did not dispute his judgments; if we were a little abashed by them we hardened our hearts against them, whatever they were, and kept on as before, for our consciences were as clear as our hearts were light. No one at that time really knew what to think or say, the wisest lived from day to day under the gathering cloud, which somehow they expected to break as other clouds in our history had broken; when the worst threatened we expected the best.

Price was not the companion of my walks so much as Reed had been; he was probably of frailer health than I noticed, for he died a few years later; and I had oftener the company of a young man who interested me more intensely. This was the great sculptor, J. Q. A. Ward, who had come to the capital of his native state in the hope of a legislative commission for a statue of Simon Kenton. It was a hope rather than a scheme, but we were near enough to the pioneer period for the members to be moved by the sight of the old Indian Fighter in his hunting-shirt and squirrel-skin cap, whom every Ohio boy had heard of, and Ward was provisionally given a handsome room with a good light, in the State House, where he modeled I no longer know what figures, and perhaps an enlargement of his “Kenton.” There I used to visit him, trying to imagine something of art, then a world so wholly strange to me, and talking about New York and the æsthetic life of the metropolis. My hopes did not rise so high as Boston, but I thought if I were ever unhorsed again I might find myself on my feet in New York, though I felt keenly the difference between the places, greater then than now, when literary endeavor is diffused and equally commercialized everywhere. Ward seemed to live much to himself in Columbus, as he always did, but I saw a great deal of him, for in the community of youth we had no want of things to talk about; we could always talk about ourselves when there was nothing else. He was in the prime of his vigorous manhood, with a fine red beard, and a close-cropped head of red hair, like Michelangelo, and a flattened nose like the Florentine’s, so that I rejoiced in him as the ideal of a sculptor. I still think him, for certain Greek qualities, the greatest of American sculptors; his “Indian Hunter” in Central Park must bear witness of our historic difference from other peoples as long as bronze shall last, and as no other sculpture can. But the “Kenton” was never to be eternized in bronze or marble for that niche in the rotunda of the capital where Ward may have imagined it finding itself. The cloud thickened over us, and burst at last in the shot fired on Fort Sumter; the legislature appropriated a million dollars as the contribution of the state to the expenses of the war, and Ward’s hopes vanished as utterly as if the bolt had smitten his plaster model into dust.

Before Ward, almost, indeed, with my first coming to Columbus, there had been another sculptor whom I was greatly interested to know. This was Thomas D. Jones, who had returned to Ohio from an attempt upon the jealous East, where he had suffered that want of appreciation which was apt, in a prevalent superstition of the West, to attend any æsthetic endeavor from our section. He frankly stood for the West, though I believe he was a Welshman by birth; but in spite of his pose he was a sculptor of real talent. He modeled a bust of Chase, admirable as a likeness, and of a very dignified simplicity. I do not know whether it was ever put in marble, but it was put in plaster very promptly and sold in many such replicas. The sculptor liked to be seen modeling it, and I can see him yet, stepping back a little from his work, and then advancing upon it with a sensitive twitching of his mustache and a black censorious frown. The Governor must have posed in the pleasant room which Jones had in the Neil House where he lived, how I do not know, for he was threadbare poor; but in those days many good things seemed without price to the debtor class; and very likely the management liked to have him there, where his work attracted people. One day while I was in the room the Governor came in and, not long after, a lady who appeared instinctively to time her arrival when it could be most largely impressive. As she was staying in the hotel, she wore nothing on her dewily disheveled hair, as it insists upon characterizing itself in the retrospect, and she had the effect of moving about on a stage. She had, in fact, just come up on some theatrical wave from her native Tennessee, and she had already sent her album of favorable notices to the Journal office with the appeal inscribed in a massive histrionic hand, “Anything but your silence, gentlemen!” She played a short engagement in Columbus, and then departed for the East and for the far grander capitals of the Old World, where she became universally famous as Ada Isaacs Menken, and finally by a stroke of her fearless imagination figured in print as the bride of the pugilist Heenan, then winning us the laurels of the ring away from English rivalry. I cannot recall, with all my passion for the theater, that I saw her on any stage but that which for a moment she made of the sculptor’s room.

Jones had been a friend from much earlier days, almost my earliest days in Columbus; it was he who took me to that German house, where I could scarcely gasp for the high excitement of finding myself with a lady who had known Heinrich Heine and could talk of him as if he were a human being. I had not become a hopeless drunkard from drinking the glass of eggnog which she gave me while she talked familiarly of him, and when after several years Jones took me to her house again she had the savoir faire quite to ignore the interval of neglect which I had suffered to elapse, and gave me a glass of eggnog again. It must have been in 1859 that Jones vanished from my life, but I must not let him take with him a friend whose thoughtfulness at an important moment I still feel.

This was a man who afterward became known as the author of two curious books, entitled Library Notes, made up somewhat in the discursive fashion of Montaigne’s essays, out of readings from his favorite authors. There was nothing original in them except the taste which guided their selection, but they distinctly gave the sort of pleasure he had in compiling them, and their readers will recall with affection the name of A. P. Russell. He was the Ohio Secretary of State when I knew him first, and he knew me as the stripling who was writing in his nonage the legislative letters of the Cincinnati Gazette; and he alone remembered me distinctly enough to commend me for a place on the staff of the State Journal when Mr. Cooke took control of it. After the war he spent several years in some financial service of the state in New York, vividly interested in the greatness of a city where, as he was fond of saying, a cannon-shot could be heard by eight hundred thousand people; six million people could hear it now if anything could make itself heard above the multitudinous noises that have multiplied themselves since. When his term of office ended he returned to Ohio, where he shunned cities great and small, and retired to the pleasant town where he was born, like an Italian to his patria, and there ended his peaceful, useful days. It was my good fortune in almost the last of these days to write and tell him of my unforgotten gratitude for that essential kindness he had done me so long before, and to have a letter back from him, the more touching because another’s hand had written it; for Russell had become blind.

Probably he had tried to help Ward in his hope, which was hardly a scheme, for that appropriation from the legislature for his “Simon Kenton.” They always remained friends, and during Russell’s stay in New York he probably saw more of Ward, so often sequestered with the horses for his equestrian groups, than most of his other friends. I who lived quarter of a century in the same city with him saw him seldom by that fault of social indolence, rather than indifference, which was always mine, and which grows upon one with the years. Once I went to dine with him in the little room off his great, yawning, equine studio, and to have him tell me of his life for use in a book of “Ohio Stories” I was writing; then some swift years afterward I heard casually from another friend that Ward was sick. “Would he be out soon?” I asked. “I don’t think he’ll be out at all,” I was answered, and I went the next day to see him. He was lying with his fine head on the pillow still like such a head of Michelangelo as the Florentine might have modeled of himself, and he smiled and held out his hand, and had me sit down. We talked long of old times, of old friends and enemies (but not really enemies), and it was sweet to be with him so. He seemed so very like himself that it was hard to think him in danger, but he reminded us who were there that he was seventy-nine years old, and when we spoke about his getting well and soon being out again he smiled in the wisdom which the dying have from the world they are so near, and, tenderly patient of us, expressed his doubt. In a few days, before I could go again, I heard that he was dead.

XI

But in that winter of 1859-60, after Lincoln had been elected, Ward was still hopeful of an order from the state for his “Simon Kenton,” and I was hopeful of the poetic pre-eminence which I am still foregoing. I used such scraps of time as I could filch from the busy days and nights and gave them to the verse which now seemed to come back from editors oftener than it once did. This hurt, but it did not kill, and I kept on at verse for years in the delusion that it was my calling and that I could make it my living. It was not until four or five years later that a more practical muse persuaded me my work belonged to her, and in the measureless leisure of my Venetian consulate I began to do the various things in prose which I have mostly been doing ever since, for fifty years past. Till then I had no real leisure, but was yet far from the days when anything less than a day seems too small a space to attempt anything in. That is the mood of age and of middle age, but youth seizes any handful of minutes and devotes them to some beginning or ending. It had been my habit ever since I took up journalism to use part of the hour I had for midday dinner in writing literature, and such hours of the night as were left me after my many calls or parties; and now I did not change, even under the stress of the tragical events crowding upon us all.

I phrase it so, but really I felt no stress, and I do not believe others felt it so much as the reader might think. As I look back upon it the whole state of affairs seems incredible, and to a generation remote from it must seem impossible. We had an entire section of the Republic openly seeking its dismemberment, and a government which permitted and even abetted the seizure of national property by its enemies and the devotion of its resources to its own destruction. With the worst coming, relentlessly, rapidly, audibly, visibly, no one apparently thought the worst would come; there had been so many threats of disunion before, and the measures now taken to effect it seemed only a more dramatic sort of threats. People’s minds were confused by the facts which they could not accept as portents, and the North remained practically passive, while the South was passionately active; and yet not the whole South, for as yet Secession was not a condition, but merely a principle. There was a doubt with some in the North itself whether the right of disunion was not implied in the very act of union; there had long been a devoted minority who felt that disunion without slavery was better than union with slavery; and on both sides there arose sentimental cries, entreaties from the South that the North would yield its points of right and conscience, appeals from the North that the South would not secede until the nation had time to decide what it would do. The North would not allow itself to consider seriously of coercing the seceding states; and there was a party willing to bid them, with unavailing tears, “Erring sisters, go in peace,” as if the seceding states, being thus delicately entreated, could not have the heart to go, even in peace. There were hysterical conferences of statesmen in and out of office to arrange for mutual concessions which were to be all on the part of the Union, or if not that then to order its decent obsequies.

I cannot make out that our chief had any settled policy for the conduct of our paper; nobody had a settled policy concerning public affairs. If his subordinates had any settled policy, it was to get what fun they could out of the sentimentalists, and if they had any fixed belief it was that if we had a war peace must be made on the basis of disunion when the war was over. In our wisdom we doubted if the sections could ever live together in a union which they had fought for and against. But we did not say this in print, though as matters grew more hopeless Price one day seized the occasion of declaring that the Constitution was a rope of sand. I do not remember what occasion he had for saying this, but it brought our chief actively back to the censorship; Price’s position was somehow explained away, and we went on as much as before, much as everybody else went on. I will not, in the confession of our youthful rashness, pretend that there were any journalists who seemed then or seem wiser now or acted with greater forecast; and I am sure that we always spoke from our consciences, with a settled conviction that the South was wrong. We must have given rather an ironical welcome to a sufficiently muddled overture of the Tennessee legislature which during the winter sent a deputation of its members to visit our own Houses and confer with them as to what might be done. The incident now has it pathos, there was so much that was well meant in the attempt to mend our bad business with kind words and warm feelings, though then I was sensible only of its absurdity. I did not hear any of the speeches, but I remember seeing the Tennessee statesmen about the Capitol for the different conferences held there and noting that some of them spoke with a negroid intonation and not with that Ohio accent which I believed the best in the English-speaking world. No doubt they parted with our own legislators affectionately, and returned home supported by the hope that they had really done something in a case where there was nothing to be done.

Their endeavor was respectable, but there was no change in the civic conditions except from bad to worse. In the social conditions, or the society conditions, everything was for the better, if indeed these could be bettered in Columbus. Of all the winters this was the gayest; society was kind again, after I had paid the penalty it exacted for my neglect, and I began to forget my purpose of living in air more absolutely literary. Again I began going the rounds of the friendly houses, but now, as if to win my fancy more utterly, there began to be a series of dances in a place and on conditions the most alluring. For a while after the functions of the medical school were suspended in the College where I had lodged, the large ward where the lectures were once given was turned into a gymnasium and fitted up with the usual gymnastic apparatus. I do not recall whether this was taken away or not, or was merely looped up and put aside for our dances, and I do not know how we came into possession of the place; in the retrospect, such things happen in youth much as things happen in childhood, without apparent human agency; but at any rate we had this noble circus for our dances. There must have been some means of joining them, but it is now gone from me, and I know only that they were given under the fully sufficing chaperonage of a sole matron. There were two negro fiddlers, and the place was lighted by candles fixed along the wall; but memory does not serve me as to any sort of supper; probably there was none, except such as the young men, after they had seen the young ladies to their homes, went up-town to make on the oysters of Ambos.

It is strange that within the time so dense with incident for us there should have been so few incidents now separately tangible, but there is one that vividly distinguishes itself from the others. In that past I counted any experience precious that seemed to parallel the things of fact with the things of fiction. Afterward, but long afterward, I learned to praise, perhaps too arrogantly praise, the things of fiction as they paralleled the things of fact, but as yet it was not so. I suppose the young are always like us as we of the College dances were then, but romance can rarely offer itself to youth of any time in the sort of reality which one night enriched us amid our mirth with a wild thrill of dismay at the shriek in a girl’s voice of “Dead?” There was an instant halt in the music, and then a rush to the place where the cry had risen. Somebody had fainted, and when the fact could be verified, it was found that one of the blithest of our company had been struck down with word from home that her sister had fallen dead of heart failure. Then when we began to falter away from the poor child’s withdrawal, suddenly another tumult stayed us; a young father, who had left his first-born with its mother in their rooms above while he came down for some turns in the waltz, could not believe that it was not his child that was dead, and he had to be pulled and pushed up-stairs into sight and sound of the little one roused from its sleep to convince him, before he could trust the truth.

Here was mingling of the tragic and the comic to the full admired effect of Shakespearian drama, but the mere circumstance of these esthetic satisfactions would have been emotional wealth enough; and when I got home on such a night to my slumbering room-mate Price I could give myself in glad abandon to the control of the poet whose psychic I then oftenest was, with some such result as I found in a tattered manuscript the other day. I think the poet could hardly have resented my masking in his wonted self-mocking, though I am afraid that he would have shrunk from the antic German which I put on to the beat of his music.

“To-night there is dancing and fiddling
In the high windowed hall
Lighted with dim corpse-candles
In bottles against the wall.

“And the people talk of the weather,
And say they think it will snow;
And, without, the wind in the gables
Moans wearily and low.

The quaint doorway of the Medical College through which Mr. Howells passed daily while he roomed in the building

“ ’Sa! Sa!’ — the dance of the Phantoms!
The dim corpse-candles flare;
On the whirl of the flying spectres
The shuddering windows stare.

“ ’Oh, play us the silent Ghost-Waltz,
Thou fiddling blackamoor!’
He hears the ghostly summons,
He sees the ghosts on the floor.

“He plays the silent Ghost-Waltz
And through the death-mute hall
The voiceless echoes answer,
In time the ghost-feet fall.

“Und immer und immer schneller,
Und wild wie der Winterwind
Die beide College Gespenster
Sie walzen sinnengeschwind.

“They waltz to the open doorway,
They waltz up the winding stair:
‘Oh, gentle ghosts we are sneezing,
We are taking cold in the air.’ ”

XII

Very likely those dances lasted through the winter, but I cannot be sure; I can only be sure that they summed up the raptures of the time, which was the most memorable of my whole life; for now I met her who was to be my wife. We were married the next year, and she became with her unerring artistic taste and conscience my constant impulse toward reality and sincerity in my work. She was the first to blame and the first to praise, as she was the first to read what I wrote. Forty-seven years we were together here, and then she died. But in that gayest time when we met it did not seem as if there could ever be an end of time for us, or any time less radiant. Though the country was drawing nearer and nearer the abyss where it plunged so soon, few thought it would make the plunge; many believed that when it would it could draw back from it, but doubtless that was never possible; there is a doom for nations as there is for men, and looking back upon our history I cannot see how we could have escaped. The slaveholders in the old Union were a few hundred thousand against many millions, but a force in them beyond their own control incessantly sought to control the non-slaveholding majority. They did not brook question of their will from others; they brooked no self-question of it; however little they seemed at moments to demand, they never demanded less than that conscience itself should come to their help in making their evil our good. Having said that black was white, that wrong was right, they were vitally bound to compel the practical consent of humanity. It was what it had been aforetime and must be to aftertime; Lincoln did not deny them in terms different from Franklin’s, but the case had gone farther. The hour had come when they would not be denied at all; slavery could never keep its promises; it could hardly stay even to threaten. Long before there had been dreams of ending it by buying the slaves, but the owners would not have sold their slaves, and now, though the war against slavery tried to believe itself a war for the Union, when it came to full consciousness it knew itself a war for freedom; such freedom, lame and halt, as we have been able to keep for the negroes; a war for democracy, such democracy as we shall not have for ourselves until we have an economic democracy.

The prevision of the young writers on the State Journal was of no such reach as this retrospect. The best that could be said of them was that so far as they knew the right, they served it, and it is no bad thing to say of them that they met insolence with ridicule and hypocrisy with contempt. Still, as always before in those columns, they got their fun out of the opportunities which the situation offered, and they did not believe the worst was coming; that would excuse their levity, and it availed as much as gravity. I do not remember that we took counsel with any one as to what we said or that we consulted much with each other. We did not think that the Union would be dissolved, but if it should be we did not think that its dissolution was the worst thing that could happen; and this was the mind of vastly more at that day than most at this day will believe; some of those who were of that mind then may not like to own it now. People have the habit of saying that only those who have lived through a certain period can realize it, but I doubt if even they can realize it. A civic agitation is like a battle; it covers a surface so large that only a part of it can be seen by any one spectator at any one moment. The fact seems to be that the most of human motives and actions must always remain obscure; history may do its best to record and reveal them, but it will strive in vain to give us a living sense of them, because no one ever had a living sense of them in their entirety.

At the period which I am trying to tell of the hours passed and the days and weeks and months, bringing us forever nearer the catastrophe; but I could not truthfully say that their passing changed the general mood. The College group which I used to consort with had changed, and it was no longer so much to my liking; it had dwindled, and for me it chiefly remained in the companionship of one friend, whom I walked and talked with when I was not walking and talking with Price. This was that protested and rejected Clive Newcome, of ours, who in real life was James M. Comly, law student then, and then soldier, and then journalist. Of all the friends in whose contrast I have been trying to find myself, he was temperamentally the most unlike me, but a common literary bent inclined us to each other. In his room there was not only euchre for those who could not bear to waste in idleness the half-hours before dinner or supper, but there were the latest fashions in such periodicals as the Cornhill Magazine, then so brand new, and the Saturday Review, equally new, with the great Thackeray stooping from his Jovian height in the monthly to blunt against the weekly, with its social and critical offensives, such bolts as calling it the Superfine Review. Comly was of much the same taste as myself in authors, but not so impassioned; he was not so multifarious a reader and not so inclusive of the poets, and in obedience to his legalist instincts he was of more conservative feeling in politics. We had never a moment of misgiving for each other, yet I had one bad moment over an Atlantic poem of mine fabling the author as a bird singing in a tree, and flatteringly but unintelligently listened to by the cattle beneath which the title of the piece typified as “The Poet’s Friends.” The conceit had overtempted me, but when I had realized it in print, with no sense meantime of its possible relevance, I felt the need of bringing myself to book with the friend I valued most, and urging how innocently literary, how most merely and entirely dramatic the situation was. I think my anxiety amused him, as it very well might, but I still draw a long breath of relief when I remember how perfectly he understood.

Our association was mostly in the walks we took in the winter twilights and the summer moonlights, walks long enough in the far-stretching Columbus streets to have encompassed the globe; but our talks were not nearly so long as the walks, walks in which there were reaches of reticence, when apparently it was enough for us to be walking together. Yet we must often have talked about the books we were reading, that is to say the novels, though seldom about public events, which is the stranger, or the less strange, because as a student of law he was of course a potential politician, and I was writing politics every day.

He was the last but one of the friends whom my youth was so rich in, for no reason more, perhaps, than that we were young together, though they were all older than I, and Comly was five or six years my senior. When I knew him first, with his tall, straight figure, his features of Greek fineness, his blue eyes, and his moustache thin and ashen blond, he was of a distinction fitting the soldier he became when the Civil War began, and he fought through the four years’ struggle with such gallantry and efficiency that he came out of it with the rank of brigadier-general. He had broken with the law amid arms, and in due time he succeeded to the control of our newspaper where he kept on terms of his own the tradition of Reed, which Price and I had continued in our fashion, and made the paper an increasing power. But he had never been the vigorous strength he looked, and after certain years of overwork he accepted the appointment of minister to Hawaii. The rest and the mild climate renewed his health, and he came back to journalism under different conditions of place. But the strain was the same; he gave way under it again, and died a few years later.

XIII

I cannot make out why, having the friends and incentives I had in Columbus, I should have wished to go away, but more and more I did wish that. There was no reason for it except my belief that my work would be less acceptable if I remained in the West; that I should get on faster if I wrote in New York than if I wrote in Columbus. Somehow I fancied there would be more intellectual atmosphere for me in the great city, but I do not believe this now, and I cannot see how I could anywhere have had more intelligent sympathy. When I came home from Venice in 1865, and was looking about for some means of livelihood, I found that Lowell had a fancy for my returning to the West, and living my literary life in my own air if not on my own ground. He apparently thought the experiment would be interesting; and if I were again twenty-eight I should like to try it. I would indeed have been glad then of any humble place on a newspaper in the West; but the East more hospitably entreated me, and after a flattering venture in New York journalism I was asked to the place in Boston which of all others in the world was that I could most have desired.

In those Columbus days I was vaguely aware that if I went farther from home I should be homesick, for where I was, in that happy environment, I was sometimes almost intolerably homesick. From my letters home I find that I was vividly concerned in the affairs of those I had left there, striving and saving to pay for the printing-office and the house with so little help from me. I was still sometimes haunted by the hypochondria which had once blackened my waking hours with despair; I dare say I was always overworking, and bringing my fear upon me out of the exhaustion of my nerves. Perhaps I am confiding too much when I speak of this most real, most unreal misery, but if the confession of it will help any who suffer, especially in the solitude of youth which inexperience makes a prison-house, I shall not be ashamed of what some may impute to me for weakness. If one knows there is some one else who is suffering in his kind, then one can bear it better; and in this way, perhaps, men are enabled to go to their death in battle, where they die with thousands of others; in the multitudinous doom of the Last Day its judgments may not be so dreadful to the single culprit. Like every one who lives, I was a congeries of contradictions, willing to play with the fancies that came to me, but afraid of them if they stayed too late. Yet I did not lose much sleep from them; it is after youth is gone that we begin to lose sleep from care; while our years are few we indeed rise up with care, but it does not wake night-long with us, as it does when our years are more.

I had a most cheerful companion in my colleague, Price, who so loved to laugh and to make laugh. If he never made the calls or went to the parties to which I tempted him, apparently he found our own society sufficient, and, in fact, I could not wish for anything better myself than when, the day’s work and the night’s pleasure ended for me, we sat together in the editorial-room, where our chief seldom molested us, and waited for the last telegraphic despatches before sending the paper to press. Sometimes we had the company of officials from the State House who came over to while away the hours, more haggard for them than for us, with the stories they told while we listened. They were often such stories as Lincoln liked, no doubt for the humorous human nature and racy character in them. Very likely he found a relief in them from the tragedy overhanging us all, but not molesting our young souls with the portents which the sad-eyed man of duty and of doom was aware of, or perhaps not yet aware of.

The strangest impression that the time has left with me is a sense of the patient ignorance which seemed to involve the whole North. Doubtless the South, or the more positive part of it, knew what it was about; but the North could only theorize and conjecture and wait while those who were in keeping of the nation were seeking its life. In the glare of the events that followed volcanically enough, it seems as if the North must have been of the single mind which it became when the shot fired on Fort Sumter woke it at last to the fact that the country was really in peril. But throughout the long suspense after Lincoln’s election till his inauguration there was no settled purpose in the North to save the Union, much less to fight for it. People ate and slept for the most part tranquilly throughout; they married and gave in marriage; they followed their dead to the grave with no thought that the dead were well out of the world; they bought and sold, and got gain; what seemed the end could not be the end, because it had never come before.

After the war actually began we could not feel that it had begun; we had the evidence of our senses, but not of our experiences; in most things it was too like peace to be really war. Neither of the great sections believed in the other, but the South, which was solidified by the slaveholding caste, had the advantage of believing in itself, and the North did not believe in itself till the fighting began. Then it believed too much and despised the enemy at its throat. Among the grotesque instances of our self-confidence I recall the consoling assurance of an old friend, a chief citizen and wise in his science, who said, as the hostile forces were approaching each other in Virginia, “Oh, they will run,” and he meant the Southerners, as he lifted his fine head and blew a whiff from his pipe into the air. “As soon as they see we are in earnest they will run,” but it was not from us that they ran; and the North was startled from its fallacy that sixty days would see the end of the rebellion, whose end no prophet had now the courage to forecast. We of the Ohio capital wore a very political community, the most political in the whole state, in virtue of our being the capital, but none of the rumors of war had distracted us from our pleasures or affairs, at least so far as the eyes of youth could see. With our faith in the good ending, as if our national story were a tale that must end well, with whatever suspenses, or thrilling episodes, we had put the day’s anxieties by and hopefully waited for the morrow’s consolations. But when the fateful shot was fired at Fort Sumter, it was as if the echo had not died away when a great public meeting was held in response to the President’s call for volunteers, and the volunteering began with an effect of simultaneity which the foreshortening of past events always puts on to the retrospective eye. It seemed as if it were only the night before that we had listened to the young Patti, now so old, singing her sweetest in that hall where the warlike appeals rang out, with words smiting like blows in that “Anvil Chorus” which between her songs had thrilled us with the belief that we were listening to the noblest as well as the newest music in the world.

I have sometimes thought that I would write a novel, with its scene in our capital at that supreme moment when the volunteering began, but I shall never do it, and without the mask of fiction one cannot give the living complexion of events. Instantly the town was inundated from all the towns of the state and from the farms between as with a tidal wave of youth; for most of those who flooded our streets were boys of eighteen and twenty, and they came in the wild hilarity of their young vision, singing by day and by night, one sad inconsequent song, that filled the whole air, and that fills my sense yet as I think of them:

“Oh, nebber mind the weather, but git ober double trouble,
For we’re bound for the happy land of Canaan.”

They wore red shirts, as if the color of the Garibaldian war for Union in Italy had flashed itself across the sea to be the hue of our own war for Union. With interlinked arms they ranged up and down, and pushed the willing citizens from the pavement, and shouted the day and shouted the night away, with no care but the fear that in the outpour of their death-daring they might not be gathered into the ranks filling up the quota of regiments assigned to Ohio. The time had a sublimity which no other time can know, unless some proportionate event shall again cause the nation to stand up as one man, and the spectacle had a mystery and an awe which I cannot hope to impart. I knew that these boys, bursting from their fields and shops as for a holiday, were just such boys as I had always known, and if I looked at any one of them as they went swaggering and singing up and down I recognized him for what they were, but in their straggling ranks, with their young faces flushed the red of the blouses and their young eyes flaming, I beheld them transfigured. I do not pretend that they were of the make of armies such as I had seen pictured marching in serried ranks to battle, and falling in bloody windrows on the smoke-rolled plain. All that belonged to

“Old, unhappy, far-off days,”

and not to the morrows in which I dwelt. But possibly if I had written that forever-to-be-unwritten novel I might have plucked out the heart of the moment and laid it throbbing before the reader; and yet I might rather have been satisfied with the more subjective riddle of one who looked on, and baffled himself with question of the event.

Only two or three of the friends who had formed our College group went to the war; of these my friend Comly, had been one of the earliest, and when I found him officer of the day at the first camp of the volunteers, he gave me what time he could, but he was helplessly pre-occupied, and the whole world I had known was estranged. One morning I met another friend, coming down the State House steps and smiling radiantly; he also was a law student, and he had just been made adjutant of a newly accepted regiment. Almost immediately afterward he was changed to the line, and at the end of the war, after winning its last important battle, John G. Mitchell came out with the rank of brigadier-general, to which the brevet of major-general could scarcely add distinction. By the chances which play with our relations in life I had not known him so well as some others. He was not of the College group; but after the war we came familiarly together in the friendship of the cousins who had become our wives. In that after-time he once held me rapt with the stories of his soldier life, promising, or half promising, to put them down for print, but never doing it, so that now they are lost to that record of personal experience of battle which forms so vital a part of our history. No stories of that life which I have read have seemed to me so frank, so full, so real, as those he told.

Our first camp was in our pretty Goodale Park, where I used to walk and talk with the sculptor Ward, and try the athletic feats in which he easily beat me. Now the pine sheds covered the long tables, spread with coffee and pork and beans, and the rude bunks filled with straw, and here and there a boy volunteer frowzily drowsing in them. It was one of the many shapeless beginnings which were to end in the review of the hundred thousands of seasoned soldiers marching to their mustering out in Washington after four years of fire and blood. No one could imagine that any of these boys were to pass through that abyss, or that they would not come safely out. Even after the cruel disillusion of Manassas the superstition of quick work remained with the North, and the three years’ quota of Ohio was filled almost as jubilantly as the three months’, but not quite so jubilantly. Sons and brothers came with tears to replace fathers and brothers who had not returned from Manassas, and there was a funeral undertone in the shrilling of the fifes and the throbbing of the drums which was not so before. Life is like Hamlet and will oftentimes “put an antic disposition on,” which I have never been one to refuse recognition, and now I must, with whatever effect from it, own a bit of its mockery. One of our reporters was a father whose son had been among the first to go, and word came that the boy had been killed at Manassas. I liked the father as I had liked the son, and the old man’s grief moved me to such poor offer of consolation as verse could make. He was deeply touched, but the next day another word came that the boy was alive and well, and I could not leave my elegiacs with his father, who was apparently reluctant to renounce the glory of them, although so glad. But he gave them back, and I depersonalized them by removing the name of the young soldier, and finally printed them in the volume of poems which two or three people still buy every year.

XIV

It was a question now whether I could get the appointment of a consulate which I had already applied for, quite as much, I believe, upon the incentive of my fellow-citizens as from a very natural desire of my own. It seemed to be the universal feeling, after the election of Lincoln, that I who had written his life ought to have a consulate, as had happened with Hawthorne, who had written the life of Franklin Pierce. It was thought a very fitting thing, and my fellow-citizens appeared willing I should

Looking into the State House grounds toward the broad flight of steps before the west front of the building

have any consulate, but I, with constitutional unhopefulness, had fixed my mind upon that of Munich, as in the way to further study of the German language and literature, and this was the post I asked for in an application signed by every prominent Republican in the capital, from the Governor down. The Governor was now William Dennison, who afterward became Postmaster-General, and who had always been my friend, rather in the measure of his charming good will than my merit, from my first coming to Columbus; Chase had already entered Lincoln’s Cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury. But in spite of this backing the President, with other things on his mind, did not respond in any way until some months had dragged by, when one day I received without warning an official envelope addressed to me as “Consul at Rome, now at Columbus, Ohio.” Rome was not exactly Munich, and the local language and literature were not German, but I could not have expected the State Department to take cognizance of a tacit ideal of mine, and the consulate was at any rate a consulate, which perhaps most of my friends supposed was what I wanted. It was welcome enough, for I was again to be dropped from the high horse which I had been riding for nearly a year past; one of those changes in the State Journal which Greeley, in his unsolicited lecture, had imputed to it for unworthiness was at hand, and the gentleman who was buying a controlling share in it might or might not wish to write the editorials himself. At any rate the Roman consulship was not to be declined without inquiry, but as there was no salary, and the consul was supposed to live upon the fees taken, I tried to find out how much the fees might annually come to. Meanwhile I was advised by prudence to accept the appointment provisionally; it would be easy to resign it if I could not afford to keep it; and I waited to see what the new proprietor meant to do.

Apparently he meant to be editor as well as proprietor, and Price and I must go, which we made ready to do as soon as the new proprietor came into his own. Three or four times in my life I have suffered some such fate as I suffered then; but I never lost a place except through the misfortune of those who gave it me; then with whatever heart I could I accepted the inevitable. At the worst, I was yet “Consul at Rome now at Columbus,” and I had my determination to work. I was never hopeful, I was never courageous, but somehow I was dogged. I had no overweening belief in myself, and yet I thought, at the bottom of my soul, that I had in me the make of the thing I was bent on doing, the thing literature, the greatest thing in the world.

When our new proprietor arrived Price and I disabled his superiority, probably on no very sufficient grounds, but he had the advantage in not wanting our help, and I decided to go to Washington and look personally into the facts of the Roman consulship. As perhaps some readers of this may know, it ultimately turned into the Venetian consulship, but by just what friendly magic, has been told with sufficient detail in a chapter of Literary Friends and Acquaintance and need not be rehearsed here. As for Price, he had nothing at all before him, but he was by no means uncheerful. We had certainly had a joyous though parlous year together; our jokes could not have been numbered in a season when the only excuse for joking was that it might as well be that as weeping, though probably we had our serious times, especially when we foreboded a fresh dismay in our chief at some escapade in derision or denunciation of the well-meaning patriots’ efforts to hold the Union together with mucilage.

But the time came when all this tragical mirth was to end. We found that we did not dislike the new owner, and he liked us well enough, but he was eager to try his hand at our work, and some time early in August we quitted the familiar place. If there was any form of adieu with our gentle chief I do not remember it, and in fact my mind holds no detail of our parting except the last hour of it, when we found ourselves together at midnight in the long, gloomy barn then known as the Little Miami Depot, where we were to take our separate ways in the dark which hid us from each other forever. We walked up and down a long time, talking, talking, talking, laughing, promising each other to be faithful in letters, and wearing our souls out in the nothings which people say at such times with the vain endeavor to hold themselves together against the fate which is to sunder them in the voluntary death of parting. We heard the whistle of an approaching train, we shook hands, we said good-by, and then in a long wait repeated the nothings again and again. But my train on the Central Ohio was already there; and as Price obeyed the call to board his train for Cleveland, I mounted mine for Washington, and we never saw each other again. It is long since he died, and I who still survive him after fifty years offer his memory this vow of abiding affection. If we somewhere should somewhen meet, perhaps it will be with a fond smile for the time we were young and so glad together, with so little reason.

THE END

Cambridge Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts — Howells’ final resting place

Howells’ grave